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Deep State Bulletin, 2019

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[Sep 29, 2020] This nasty neocon Rachel MadCow

Notable quotes:
"... The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades. Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all. ..."
"... Screw the war mongers and the MIC. ..."
"... If you read the article, it's obvious that [neo]liberals/whores are the apogee of hypocrisy. ..."
"... Perpetual war is about $$$. It knows no party. Never has and never will. ..."
"... Yup. It's always about the money. ..."
Jan 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
True Blue , 1 hour ago link

Feral, yes; rabid, absolutely; smart... not so much. Why is anyone surprised?

The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades. Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all.

AI Agent , 1 hour ago link

She's a good lying propagandist... but she's not brilliant. Smart? maybe. Brilliant? Cow flop has more shine than Madcow.

desertboy , 36 minutes ago link

Maybe he meant "brilliant manipulator" -- sometimes they have meant the same thing.

Throat-warbler Mangrove , 1 hour ago link

Get.Us (a). Out.Now

Screw the war mongers and the MIC.

BlackChicken , 1 hour ago link

If you read the article, it's obvious that [neo]liberals/whores are the apogee of hypocrisy.

richardsimmonsoftrout , 1 hour ago link

"they're likely to emerge from 2020 with not only smeared consciences, but four more years in the opposition."

"Smeared consciences"... that's rich, pretty sure the psychopaths don't have a conscience.

navy62802 , 1 hour ago link

Perpetual war is about $$$. It knows no party. Never has and never will.

holdbuysell , 1 hour ago link

Yup. It's always about the money. As Fitts would say, that screeching you hear is the cash flow drying up for the rentiers. The murdering of women and children be damned. Hillary's demonic cackle is but the grotesque cherry on top: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y

[Aug 09, 2020] The CIA Democrats by Patrick Martin

Notable quotes:
"... The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has designated Slotkin as one of its top candidates, part of the so-called "Red to Blue" program targeting the most vulnerable Republican-held seats -- in this case, the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, which includes Lansing and Brighton. The House seat for the district is now held by two-term Republican Representative Mike Bishop. ..."
"... The 23rd Congressional District in Texas, which includes a vast swathe of the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, features a contest for the Democratic nomination between Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, who subsequently served as an adviser for US interventions in South Sudan and Libya, and Jay Hulings. The latter's website describes him as a former national security aide on Capitol Hill and federal prosecutor, whose father and mother were both career undercover CIA agents. The incumbent Republican congressman, Will Hurd, is himself a former CIA agent, so any voter in that district will have his or her choice of intelligence agency loyalists in both the Democratic primary and the general election. ..."
Apr 30, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Part one

An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.

If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress.

Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently clearing the field for a favored "star" recruit. A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three tours in Iraq, who worked as Iraq director for the National Security Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence. After her deep involvement in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone warfare, "homeland defense" and cyber warfare. Elissa Slotkin

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has designated Slotkin as one of its top candidates, part of the so-called "Red to Blue" program targeting the most vulnerable Republican-held seats -- in this case, the Eighth Congressional District of Michigan, which includes Lansing and Brighton. The House seat for the district is now held by two-term Republican Representative Mike Bishop.

The Democratic leaders are promoting CIA agents and Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. At the same time, such people are choosing the Democratic Party as their preferred political vehicle. There are far more former spies and soldiers seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party than of the Republican Party. There are so many that there is a subset of Democratic primary campaigns that, with a nod to Mad magazine, one might call "spy vs. spy."

The 23rd Congressional District in Texas, which includes a vast swathe of the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, features a contest for the Democratic nomination between Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, who subsequently served as an adviser for US interventions in South Sudan and Libya, and Jay Hulings. The latter's website describes him as a former national security aide on Capitol Hill and federal prosecutor, whose father and mother were both career undercover CIA agents. The incumbent Republican congressman, Will Hurd, is himself a former CIA agent, so any voter in that district will have his or her choice of intelligence agency loyalists in both the Democratic primary and the general election.

CNN's "State of the Union" program on March 4 included a profile of Jones as one of many female candidates seeking nomination as a Democrat in Tuesday's primary in Texas. The network described her discreetly as a "career civil servant." However, the Jones for Congress website positively shouts about her role as a spy, noting that after graduating from college, "Gina entered the US Air Force as an intelligence officer, where she deployed to Iraq and served under the US military's 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' policy" (the last phrase signaling to those interested in such matters that Jones is gay).

According to her campaign biography, Ortiz Jones was subsequently detailed to a position as "senior advisor for trade enforcement," a post President Obama created by executive order in 2012. She would later be invited to serve as a director for investment at the Office of the US Trade Representative, where she led the portfolio that reviewed foreign investments to ensure they did not pose national security risks. With that background, if she fails to win election, she can surely enlist in the trade war efforts of the Trump administration.

[Aug 09, 2020] Do some research and you will find Hilary and her husband worked for Pappy Bush

Apr 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

From comments to Trump Campaign Time To Go After 'Liars' Who Started Witch Hunt Zero Hedge

stephysat28 , 8 hours ago link

Do some research it becomes clear quickly what the real story is. Hillary and her bunch stink to high heaven and have or YEARS. Started with her and husband. They sold this country o or personal gain.Just search a little and make sure to use factual information. It is there for anyone to find.

oddjob , 8 hours ago link

Do some research and you will find Hilary and her husband worked for Pappy Bush

[Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party

Highly recommended!
divide and conquer 1. To gain or maintain power by generating tension among others, especially those less powerful, so that they cannot unite in opposition.
Notable quotes:
"... In its most general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal, but I'm hoping I can say something new. ..."
"... The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy. ..."
"... Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity. ..."
"... If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump. ..."
Dec 28, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

likbez 12.27.19 at 10:21 pm

John,

I've been thinking about the various versions of and critiques of identity politics that are around at the moment. In its most general form, identity politics involves (i) a claim that a particular group is not being treated fairly and (ii) a claim that members of that group should place political priority on the demand for fairer treatment. But "fairer" can mean lots of different things. I'm trying to think about this using contrasts between the set of terms in the post title. A lot of this is unoriginal, but I'm hoping I can say something new.

You missed one important line of critique -- identity politics as a dirty political strategy of soft neoliberals.

See discussion of this issue by Professor Ganesh Sitaraman in his recent article (based on his excellent book The Great Democracy ) https://newrepublic.com/article/155970/collapse-neoliberalism

To be sure, race, gender, culture, and other aspects of social life have always been important to politics. But neoliberalism's radical individualism has increasingly raised two interlocking problems. First, when taken to an extreme, social fracturing into identity groups can be used to divide people and prevent the creation of a shared civic identity. Self-government requires uniting through our commonalities and aspiring to achieve a shared future.

When individuals fall back onto clans, tribes, and us-versus-them identities, the political community gets fragmented. It becomes harder for people to see each other as part of that same shared future.

Demagogues [more correctly neoliberals -- likbez] rely on this fracturing to inflame racial, nationalist, and religious antagonism, which only further fuels the divisions within society. Neoliberalism's war on "society," by pushing toward the privatization and marketization of everything, thus indirectly facilitates a retreat into tribalism that further undermines the preconditions for a free and democratic society.

The second problem is that neoliberals on right and left sometimes use identity as a shield to protect neoliberal policies. As one commentator has argued, "Without the bedrock of class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individuals can be accommodated but addressing structural inequalities cannot." What this means is that some neoliberals hold high the banner of inclusiveness on gender and race and thus claim to be progressive reformers, but they then turn a blind eye to systemic changes in politics and the economy.

Critics argue that this is "neoliberal identity politics," and it gives its proponents the space to perpetuate the policies of deregulation, privatization, liberalization, and austerity.

Of course, the result is to leave in place political and economic structures that harm the very groups that inclusionary neoliberals claim to support. The foreign policy adventures of the neoconservatives and liberal internationalists haven't fared much better than economic policy or cultural politics. The U.S. and its coalition partners have been bogged down in the war in Afghanistan for 18 years and counting. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a liberal democracy, nor did the attempt to establish democracy in Iraq lead to a domino effect that swept the Middle East and reformed its governments for the better. Instead, power in Iraq has shifted from American occupiers to sectarian militias, to the Iraqi government, to Islamic State terrorists, and back to the Iraqi government -- and more than 100,000 Iraqis are dead.

Or take the liberal internationalist 2011 intervention in Libya. The result was not a peaceful transition to stable democracy but instead civil war and instability, with thousands dead as the country splintered and portions were overrun by terrorist groups. On the grounds of democracy promotion, it is hard to say these interventions were a success. And for those motivated to expand human rights around the world, it is hard to justify these wars as humanitarian victories -- on the civilian death count alone.

Indeed, the central anchoring assumptions of the American foreign policy establishment have been proven wrong. Foreign policymakers largely assumed that all good things would go together -- democracy, markets, and human rights -- and so they thought opening China to trade would inexorably lead to it becoming a liberal democracy. They were wrong. They thought Russia would become liberal through swift democratization and privatization. They were wrong.

They thought globalization was inevitable and that ever-expanding trade liberalization was desirable even if the political system never corrected for trade's winners and losers. They were wrong. These aren't minor mistakes. And to be clear, Donald Trump had nothing to do with them. All of these failures were evident prior to the 2016 election.

If we assume that identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ("soft neoliberals") many things became much more clear. Along with Neo-McCarthyism it represents a mechanism to compensate for the loss of their primary voting block: trade union members, who in 2016 "en mass" defected to Trump.

Initially Clinton calculation was that trade union voters has nowhere to go anyways, and it was correct for first decade or so of his betrayal. But gradually trade union members and lower middle class started to leave Dems in droves (Demexit, compare with Brexit) and that where identity politics was invented to compensate for this loss.

So in addition to issues that you mention we also need to view the role of identity politics as the political strategy of the "soft neoliberals " directed at discrediting and the suppression of nationalism.

The resurgence of nationalism is the inevitable byproduct of the dominance of neoliberalism, resurgence which I think is capable to bury neoliberalism as it lost popular support (which now is limited to financial oligarchy and high income professional groups, such as we can find in corporate and military brass, (shrinking) IT sector, upper strata of academy, upper strata of medical professionals, etc)

That means that the structure of the current system isn't just flawed which imply that most problems are relatively minor and can be fixed by making some tweaks. It is unfixable, because the "Identity wars" reflect a deep moral contradictions within neoliberal ideology. And they can't be solved within this framework.

[Jun 03, 2020] The first rule of political hypocrisy: Justify your actions by the need to protect the weak and vulnerable

Highly recommended!
Jun 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

...If you bomb Syria, do not admit you did it to install your puppet regime or to lay a pipeline. Say you did it to save the Aleppo kids gassed by Assad the Butcher. If you occupy Afghanistan, do not admit you make a handsome profit smuggling heroin; say you came to protect the women. If you want to put your people under total surveillance, say you did it to prevent hate groups target the powerless and diverse.

Remember: you do not need to ask children, women or immigrants whether they want your protection. If pushed, you can always find a few suitable profiles to look at the cameras and repeat a short text. With all my dislike for R2P (Responsibility to Protect) hypocrisy, I can't possibly blame the allegedly protected for the disaster caused by the unwanted protectors.

[Jun 03, 2020] And this is a world superpower: There are an estimated 26.5 million of US adults at level 1 or reading proficency according to PIAAC -- those who can read and write at the most basic level but couldn't t read a newspaper, or would have trouble filling out forms at a doctor s office

Highly recommended!
If you can't read a newspaper you still can loot Nike store.
Aug 03, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

someone somewhere , Aug 3 2019 0:49 utc | 38

43 million Americans -- said to include R. Kelly -- struggle to read and write

"The Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, which is cited by the U.S. Department of Education, defines literacy as "the ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential." It divides the population into five levels -- with levels 2 and above being considered literate.

According to PIAAC , one in five U.S. adults has "low literacy" skills, which includes those classified as being either level 1 or below.

There are an estimated 26.5 million adults at level 1 according to PIAAC -- those who can read and write at the most basic level but couldn't read a newspaper or would have trouble filling out forms at a doctor's office. Another estimated 8.4 million people are below level 1 and considered "functionally illiterate." There are also 8.2 million others who were unable to participate in the survey because of either a language barrier or a cognitive or physical inability, and the PIAAC data classifies them as also having low literacy abilities."

[Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Democrats are fielding as candidates a roster of middle-school clowns and unflavored tapioca. Are they secretly in Trump's pay? Like Clinton with her "Deplorables" suicide line? ..."
"... Probably the Russians are behind it. ..."
Jul 25, 2019 | www.unz.com

They're going to do it, I tell you: The whole touchy-feely do-gooding ratpack of Microaggression worriers, reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, race hustlers, bat.-Antifa psychos, and egalitarian enstupidators of universities. They are going to elect Trump. Again.

Washington, where I shortly will be for a bit, is crazy. It has not the slightest, wan, etiolated idea of what is going on in America. The Democrats are fielding as candidates a roster of middle-school clowns and unflavored tapioca. Are they secretly in Trump's pay? Like Clinton with her "Deplorables" suicide line?

Probably the Russians are behind it.

[Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow

Highly recommended!
Jul 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

2016 a Russia-Trump campaign collusion conspiracy was afoot and unfolding right before our eyes, we were told, as during his roll-out foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., then candidate Trump said [ gasp! ]:

" Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries. Some say the Russians won't be reasonable. I intend to find out."

NPR and others had breathlessly reported at the time, "Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the U.S., was sitting in the front row" [ more gasps! ].

This 'suspicious' "coincidence or something more?" event and of course the infamous Steele 'Dodgy Dossier' were followed by over two more years of the following connect-the-dots mere tiny sampling of unrestrained theorizing and avalanche of accusations...

Here's a very brief trip down memory lane:

2017, Politico: The Hidden History of Trump's First Trip to Moscow

2017, NYT: Trump's Russia Motives (where we were told: "President Trump certainly seems to have a strange case of Russophilia.")

2017, Business Insider: James Clapper: Putin is handling Trump like a Russian 'asset'

2017, USA Today: Donald Trump's ties to Russia go back 30 years

2018, NYT: Trump, Treasonous Traitor

2018, AP: Russia had 'Trump over a barrel'

2018, BBC: Russia: The 'cloud' over the Trump White House

2018, NYT: From the Start, Trump Has Muddied a Clear Message: Putin Interfered

2018, USA Today: " From Putin with love"

2019, WaPo: Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset

2019, Vanity Fair: "The President Has Been Acting On Russia's Behalf": U.S. Officials Are Shocked By Trump's Asset-Like Behavior

2019, Wired: Trump Must Be A Russian Agent... (where we were told...ahem: " It would be rather embarrassing ... if Robert Mueller were to declare that the president isn't an agent of Russian intelligence." )

Embarrassing indeed.

"The walls are closing in!" - we were assured just about every 24 hours .

It's especially worth noting that a July 2018 New York Times op-ed argued that President Trump -- dubbed a "treasonous traitor" for meeting with Putin in Helsinki -- should "be directing all resources at his disposal to punish Russia."

Fast-forward to a July 2019 NY Times Editorial Board piece entitled "What's America's Winning Hand if Russia Plays the China Card?" How dizzying fast all of the above has been wiped from America's collective memory! Or at least the Times is engaged in hastily pushing it all down the memory hole Orwell-style in order to cover its own dastardly tracks which contributed in no small measure to non-stop national Russiagate hype and hysteria, with this astounding line:

President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia... -- Editorial Board, New York Times, 7-22-19

That's right, The Times' pundits have already pivoted to the new bogeyman while stating they agree with Trump on Russian relations :

"Given its economic, military and technological trajectory, together with its authoritarian model, China, not Russia , represents by far the greater challenge to American objectives over the long term . That means President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China ."

[... Mueller who? ]

Remember how recently we were told PUTIN IS WEAPONIZING EVERYTHING! from space to deep-sea exploration to extreme climate temperatures to humor to racial tensions to even 'weaponized whales' ?

It's 2019, and we've now come full circle . This is The New York Times editorial board continuing their call for Trump to establish "sounder" ties and "cooperation" with Russia :

"Even during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union often made progress in one facet of their relationship while they remained in conflict over other aspects. The United States and Russia could expand their cooperation in space . They could also continue to work closely in the Arctic And they could revive cooperation on arms control."

Could we imagine if a mere six months ago Trump himself had uttered these same words? Now the mainstream media apparently agrees that peace is better than war with Russia.

With 'Russiagate' now effectively dead, the NY Times' new criticism appears to be that Trump-Kremlin relations are not close enough , as Trump's "approach has been ham-handed " - the 'paper of record' now tells us.

Or imagine if Trump had called for peaceful existence with Russia almost four years ago? Oh wait...

" Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries." -- Then candidate Trump on April 27, 2016

Cue ultra scary red Trump-Kremlin montage.

[Jun 03, 2020] The difference between old and new schools of jounalism: old-school journalism was like being assigned the task of finding out what "1+1 =?" and the task was to report the answer was "1." Now the task would be to report that "Some say it is 1, some say it is 2, some say it is 3."

Highly recommended!
Jun 20, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

A way to capture this change was thinking in terms of the traditional task of journalists to interview or consult a variety of sources to determine was is truth or true. The shift gradually became one of now interviewing or consulting various sources and reporting those opinions.

Old-school journalism was like being assigned the task of finding out what "1+1 =?" and the task was to report the answer was "1."

Now the task would be to report that "Some say it is 1, some say it is 2, some say it is 3."

[Jun 03, 2020] Rule of law in Murrika is kaput

Highly recommended!
Jun 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

freedommusic , 23 minutes ago link

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Agent Smith, you testified that the Russians hacked the DNC computers, is that correct?

FBI AGENT JOHN SMITH: That is correct.

DEF ATT: Upon what information did you base your testimony?

AGENT: Information found in reports analyzing the breach of the computers.

DEF ATT: So, the FBI prepared these reports?

AGENT: (cough) . (shift in seat) No, a cyber security contractor with the FBI.

DEF ATT: Pardon me, why would a contractor be preparing these reports? Do these contractors run the FBI laboratories where the server was examined?

AGENT: No.

DEF ATT: No? No what? These contractors don't run the FBI Laboratories?

AGENT: No. The laboratories are staffed by FBI personnel.

DEF ATT: Well I don't understand. Why would contractors be writing reports about computers that are forensically examined in FBI laboratories?

AGENT: Well, the servers were not examined in the FBI laboratory.

(silence)

DEF ATT: Oh, so the FBI examined the servers on site to determine who had hacked them and what was taken?

AGENT: Uh .. no.

DEF ATT: They didn't examine them on site?

AGENT: No.

DEF ATT: Well, where did they examine them?

AGENT: Well, uh .. the FBI did not examine them.

DEF ATT: What?

AGENT: The FBI did not directly examine the servers.

DEF ATT: Agent Smith, the FBI has presented to the Grand Jury and to this court and SWORN AS FACT that the Russians hacked the DNC computers. You are basing your SWORN testimony on a report given to you by a contractor, while the FBI has NEVER actually examined the computer hardware?

AGENT: That is correct.

DEF ATT: Agent Smith, who prepared the analysis reports that the FBI relied on to give this sworn testimony?

AGENT: Crowdstrike, Inc.

DEF ATT: So, which Crowdstrike employee gave you the report?

AGENT: We didn't receive the report directly from Crowdstrike.

DEF ATT: What?

AGENT: We did not receive the report directly from Crowdstrike.

DEF ATT: Well, where did you find this report?

AGENT: It was given to us by the people who hired Crowdstrike to examine and secure their computer network and hardware.

DEF ATT: Oh, so the report was given to you by the technical employees for the company that hired Crowdstrike to examine their servers?

AGENT: No.

DEF ATT: Well, who gave you the report?

AGENT: Legal counsel for the company that hired Crowdstrike.

DEF ATT: Why would legal counsel be the ones giving you the report?

AGENT: I don't know.

DEF ATT: Well, what company hired Crowdstrike?

AGENT: The Democratic National Committee.

DEF ATT: Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You are giving SWORN testimony to this court that Russia hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee. And you are basing that testimony on a report given to you by the LAWYERS for the Democratic National Committee. And you, the FBI, never actually saw or examined the computer servers?

AGENT: That is correct.

DEF ATT: Well, can you provide a copy of the technical report produced by Crowdstrike for the Democratic National Committee?

AGENT: No, I cannot.

DEF ATT: Well, can you go back to your office and get a copy of the report?

AGENT: No.

DEF ATT: Why? Are you locked out of your office?

AGENT: No.

DEF ATT: I don't understand. Why can you not provide a copy of this report?

AGENT: Because I do not have a copy of the report.

DEF ATT: Did you lose it?

AGENT: No.

DEF ATT: Why do you not have a copy of the report?

AGENT: Because we were never given a final copy of the report.

DEF ATT: Agent Smith, if you didn't get a copy of the report, upon what information are you basing your testimony?

AGENT: On a draft copy of the report.

DEF ATT: A draft copy?

AGENT: Yes.

DEF ATT: Was a final report ever delivered to the FBI?

AGENT: No.

DEF ATT: Agent Smith, did you get to read the entire report?

AGENT: No.

DEF ATT: Why not?

AGENT: Because large portions were redacted.

DEF ATT: Agent Smith, let me get this straight. The FBI is claiming that the Russians hacked the DNC servers. But the FBI never actually saw the computer hardware, nor examined it? Is that correct?

AGENT: That is correct.

DEF ATT: And the FBI never actually examined the log files or computer email or any aspect of the data from the servers? Is that correct?

AGENT: That is correct.

DEF ATT: And you are basing your testimony on the word of Counsel for the Democratic National Committee, the people who provided you with a REDACTED copy of a DRAFT report, not on the actual technical personnel who supposedly examined the servers?

AGENT: That is correct.

DEF ATT: Your honor, I have a few motions I would like to make at this time.

PRESIDING JUDGE: I'm sure you do, Counselor. (as he turns toward the prosecutors) And I feel like I am in a mood to grant them.

( source )

hooligan2009 , 14 minutes ago link

Brilliant! that sums it up nicely. of course, if the servers were not hacked and were instead "thumbnailed" that leads to a whole pile of other questions (including asking wiileaks for their source and about the murder of seth rich).

[Feb 29, 2020] Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who s Really In Charge Of The US Military by Cynthia Chung

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Thus, it should be no surprise to anyone in the world at this point in history, that the CIA holds no allegiance to any country. And it can be hardly expected that a President, who is actively under attack from all sides within his own country, is in a position to hold the CIA accountable for its past and future crimes ..."
Jan 21, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

"There is a kind of character in thy life, That to the observer doth thy history, fully unfold."

– William Shakespeare

Once again we find ourselves in a situation of crisis, where the entire world holds its breath all at once and can only wait to see whether this volatile black cloud floating amongst us will breakout into a thunderstorm of nuclear war or harmlessly pass us by. The majority in the world seem to have the impression that this destructive fate totters back and forth at the whim of one man. It is only normal then, that during such times of crisis, we find ourselves trying to analyze and predict the thoughts and motives of just this one person. The assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, a true hero for his fellow countrymen and undeniably an essential key figure in combating terrorism in Southwest Asia, was a terrible crime, an abhorrently repugnant provocation. It was meant to cause an apoplectic fervour, it was meant to make us who desire peace, lose our minds in indignation. And therefore, that is exactly what we should not do.

In order to assess such situations, we cannot lose sight of the whole picture, and righteous indignation unfortunately causes the opposite to occur. Our focus becomes narrower and narrower to the point where we can only see or react moment to moment with what is right in front of our face. We are reduced to an obsession of twitter feeds, news blips and the doublespeak of 'official government statements'.

Thus, before we may find firm ground to stand on regarding the situation of today, we must first have an understanding as to what caused the United States to enter into an endless campaign of regime-change warfare after WWII, or as former Chief of Special Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Col. Prouty stated, three decades of the Indochina war.

An Internal Shifting of Chess Pieces in the Shadows

It is interesting timing that on Sept 2, 1945, the very day that WWII ended, Ho Chi Minh would announce the independence of Indochina. That on the very day that one of the most destructive wars to ever occur in history ended, another long war was declared at its doorstep. Churchill would announce his "Iron Curtain" against communism on March 5th, 1946, and there was no turning back at that point. The world had a mere 6 months to recover before it would be embroiled in another terrible war, except for the French, who would go to war against the Viet Minh opponents in French Indochina only days after WWII was over.

In a previous paper I wrote titled "On Churchill's Sinews of Peace" , I went over a major re-organisation of the American government and its foreign intelligence bureau on the onset of Truman's de facto presidency. Recall that there was an attempted military coup d'état, which was exposed by General Butler in a public address in 1933, against the Presidency of FDR who was only inaugurated that year. One could say that there was a very marked disapproval from shadowy corners for how Roosevelt would organise the government.

One key element to this reorganisation under Truman was the dismantling of the previously existing foreign intelligence bureau that was formed by FDR, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) on Sept 20, 1945 only two weeks after WWII was officially declared over. The OSS would be replaced by the CIA officially on Sept 18, 1947, with two years of an American intelligence purge and the internal shifting of chess pieces in the shadows. In addition, de-facto President Truman would also found the United States National Security Council on Sept 18, 1947, the same day he founded the CIA. The NSC was a council whose intended function was to serve as the President's principal arm for coordinating national security, foreign policies and policies among various government agencies.

In Col. Prouty's book he states,

" In 1955, I was designated to establish an office of special operations in compliance with National Security Council (NSC) Directive #5412 of March 15, 1954. This NSC Directive for the first time in the history of the United States defined covert operations and assigned that role to the Central Intelligence Agency to perform such missions , provided they had been directed to do so by the NSC, and further ordered active-duty Armed Forces personnel to avoid such operations. At the same time, the Armed Forces were directed to "provide the military support of the clandestine operations of the CIA" as an official function . "

What this meant, was that there was to be an intermarriage of the foreign intelligence bureau with the military, and that the foreign intelligence bureau would act as top dog in the relationship, only taking orders from the NSC. Though the NSC includes the President, as we will see, the President is very far from being in the position of determining the NSC's policies.

An Inheritance of Secret Wars

" There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare. "

– Sun Tzu

On January 20th, 1961, John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President of the United States. Along with inheriting the responsibility of the welfare of the country and its people, he was to also inherit a secret war with communist Cuba run by the CIA.

JFK was disliked from the onset by the CIA and certain corridors of the Pentagon, they knew where he stood on foreign matters and that it would be in direct conflict for what they had been working towards for nearly 15 years. Kennedy would inherit the CIA secret operation against Cuba, which Prouty confirms in his book, was quietly upgraded by the CIA from the Eisenhower administration's March 1960 approval of a modest Cuban-exile support program (which included small air drop and over-the-beach operations) to a 3,000 man invasion brigade just before Kennedy entered office.

This was a massive change in plans that was determined by neither President Eisenhower, who warned at the end of his term of the military industrial complex as a loose cannon, nor President Kennedy, but rather the foreign intelligence bureau who has never been subject to election or judgement by the people. It shows the level of hostility that Kennedy encountered as soon as he entered office, and the limitations of a President's power when he does not hold support from these intelligence and military quarters.

Within three months into JFK's term, Operation Bay of Pigs (April 17th to 20th 1961) was scheduled. As the popular revisionist history goes; JFK refused to provide air cover for the exiled Cuban brigade and the land invasion was a calamitous failure and a decisive victory for Castro's Cuba. It was indeed an embarrassment for President Kennedy who had to take public responsibility for the failure, however, it was not an embarrassment because of his questionable competence as a leader. It was an embarrassment because, had he not taken public responsibility, he would have had to explain the real reason why it failed. That the CIA and military were against him and that he did not have control over them. If Kennedy were to admit such a thing, he would have lost all credibility as a President in his own country and internationally, and would have put the people of the United States in immediate danger amidst a Cold War.

What really occurred was that there was a cancellation of the essential pre-dawn airstrike, by the Cuban Exile Brigade bombers from Nicaragua, to destroy Castro's last three combat jets. This airstrike was ordered by Kennedy himself. Kennedy was always against an American invasion of Cuba, and striking Castro's last jets by the Cuban Exile Brigade would have limited Castro's threat, without the U.S. directly supporting a regime change operation within Cuba. This went fully against the CIA's plan for Cuba.

Kennedy's order for the airstrike on Castro's jets would be cancelled by Special Assistant for National Security Affairs McGeorge Bundy, four hours before the Exile Brigade's B-26s were to take off from Nicaragua, Kennedy was not brought into this decision. In addition, the Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, the man in charge of the Bay of Pigs operation was unbelievably out of the country on the day of the landings.

Col. Prouty, who was Chief of Special Operations during this time, elaborates on this situation:

" Everyone connected with the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion knew that the policy dictated by NSC 5412, positively prohibited the utilization of active-duty military personnel in covert operations. At no time was an "air cover" position written into the official invasion plan The "air cover" story that has been created is incorrect. "

As a result, JFK who well understood the source of this fiasco, set up a Cuban Study Group the day after and charged it with the responsibility of determining the cause for the failure of the operation. The study group, consisting of Allen Dulles, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Adm. Arleigh Burke and Attorney General Robert Kennedy (the only member JFK could trust), concluded that the failure was due to Bundy's telephone call to General Cabell (who was also CIA Deputy Director) that cancelled the President's air strike order.

Kennedy had them.

Humiliatingly, CIA Director Allen Dulles was part of formulating the conclusion that the Bay of Pigs op was a failure because of the CIA's intervention into the President's orders. This allowed for Kennedy to issue the National Security Action Memorandum #55 on June 28th, 1961, which began the process of changing the responsibility from the CIA to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Prouty states,

" When fully implemented, as Kennedy had planned, after his reelection in 1964, it would have taken the CIA out of the covert operation business. This proved to be one of the first nails in John F. Kennedy's coffin. "

If this was not enough of a slap in the face to the CIA, Kennedy forced the resignation of CIA Director Allen Dulles, CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr. and CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell.

In Oct 1962, Kennedy was informed that Cuba had offensive Soviet missiles 90 miles from American shores. Soviet ships with more missiles were on their way towards Cuba but ended up turning around last minute. Rumours started to abound that JFK had cut a secret deal with Russian Premier Khrushchev, which was that the U.S. would not invade Cuba if the Soviets withdrew their missiles. Criticisms of JFK being soft on communism began to stir.

NSAM #263, closely overseen by Kennedy, was released on Oct 11th, 1963, and outlined a policy decision " to withdraw 1,000 military personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1963 " and further stated that " It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel [including the CIA and military] by 1965. " The Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes had the headline U.S. TROOPS SEEN OUT OF VIET BY '65. Kennedy was winning the game and the American people.

This was to be the final nail in Kennedy's coffin.

Kennedy was brutally shot down only one month later, on Nov, 22nd 1963. His death should not just be seen as a tragic loss but, more importantly, it should be recognised for the successful military coup d'état that it was and is . The CIA showed what lengths it was ready to go to if a President stood in its way. (For more information on this coup refer to District Attorney of New Orleans at the time, Jim Garrison's book . And the excellently researched Oliver Stone movie "JFK")

Through the Looking Glass

On Nov. 26th 1963, a full four days after Kennedy's murder, de facto President Johnson signed NSAM #273 to begin the change of Kennedy's policy under #263. And on March 4th, 1964, Johnson signed NSAM #288 that marked the full escalation of the Vietnam War and involved 2,709,918 Americans directly serving in Vietnam, with 9,087,000 serving with the U.S. Armed Forces during this period.

The Vietnam War, or more accurately the Indochina War, would continue for another 12 years after Kennedy's death, lasting a total of 20 years for Americans.

Scattered black ops wars continued, but the next large scale-never ending war that would involve the world would begin full force on Sept 11, 2001 under the laughable title War on Terror, which is basically another Iron Curtain, a continuation of a 74 year Cold War. A war that is not meant to end until the ultimate regime changes are accomplished and the world sees the toppling of Russia and China. Iraq was destined for invasion long before the vague Gulf War of 1990 and even before Saddam Hussein was being backed by the Americans in the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. Iran already suffered a CIA backed regime change in 1979.

It had been understood far in advance by the CIA and US military that the toppling of sovereignty in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran needed to occur before Russia and China could be taken over. Such war tactics were formulaic after 3 decades of counterinsurgency against the CIA fueled "communist-insurgency" of Indochina. This is how today's terrorist-inspired insurgency functions, as a perfect CIA formula for an endless bloodbath.

Former CIA Deputy Director (2010-2013) Michael Morell, who was supporting Hillary Clinton during the presidential election campaign and vehemently against the election of Trump, whom he claimed was being manipulated by Putin, said in a 2016 interview with Charlie Rose that Russians and Iranians in Syria should be killed covertly to 'pay the price' .

Therefore, when a drone stroke occurs assassinating an Iranian Maj. Gen., even if the U.S. President takes onus on it, I would not be so quick as to believe that that is necessarily the case, or the full story. Just as I would not take the statements of President Rouhani accepting responsibility for the Iranian military shooting down 'by accident' the Boeing 737-800 plane which contained 176 civilians, who were mostly Iranian, as something that can be relegated to criminal negligence, but rather that there is very likely something else going on here.

I would also not be quick to dismiss the timely release, or better described as leaked, draft letter from the US Command in Baghdad to the Iraqi government that suggests a removal of American forces from the country. Its timing certainly puts the President in a compromised situation. Though the decision to keep the American forces within Iraq or not is hardly a simple matter that the President alone can determine. In fact there is no reason why, after reviewing the case of JFK, we should think such a thing.

One could speculate that the President was set up, with the official designation of the IRGC as "terrorist" occurring in April 2019 by the US State Department, a decision that was strongly supported by both Bolton and Pompeo, who were both members of the NSC at the time. This made it legal for a US military drone strike to occur against Soleimani under the 2001 AUMF, where the US military can attack any armed group deemed to be a terrorist threat. Both Bolton and Pompeo made no secret that they were overjoyed by Soleimani's assassination and Bolton went so far as to tweet "Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran." Bolton has also made it no secret that he is eager to testify against Trump in his possible impeachment trial.

Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo was recorded at an unknown conference recently, but judging from the gross laughter of the audience it consists of wannabe CIA agents, where he admits that though West Points' cadet motto is "You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.", his training under the CIA was the very opposite, stating " I was the CIA Director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses. (long pause) It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment. "

Thus, it should be no surprise to anyone in the world at this point in history, that the CIA holds no allegiance to any country. And it can be hardly expected that a President, who is actively under attack from all sides within his own country, is in a position to hold the CIA accountable for its past and future crimes .

Tags Politics War Conflict

ThomasChase1776 , 3 minutes ago link

General Smedley Butler had an answer. Read his book.

https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/major-general-smedley-butler

Is-Be , 8 minutes ago link

Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, a true hero for his fellow countrymen

All his countrymen?

Element , 15 minutes ago link

Who's Really In Charge Of The US Military? - Cynthia Chung via The Strategic Culture Foundation

Donald Trump, you stupid time-wasting twat .

ThomasChase1776 , 5 minutes ago link

LOL. That's a good one.

Assuming Trump is doing what he said he would, why isn't our military guarding our border?
Why hasn't our military left the middle east already?

Who really runs our government?

InTheLandOfTheBlind , 1 hour ago link

As much as I hate the CIA, mi6 had more of hand in overthrowing iran than Langley did

ThomasChase1776 , 4 minutes ago link

Is that supposed to be an excuse?

GRDguy , 1 hour ago link

". . . the CIA holds no allegiance to any country." But they sure kiss the *** of the financial sociopaths who write their paychecks and finance the black ops.

ThomasChase1776 , 4 minutes ago link

and Mossad

Slaytheist , 1 hour ago link

Does this bitch not know that the CIA is the currency mafia police....ffs, that's a **** ton of words.

oneno , 1 hour ago link

She knows ...

SRV , 1 hour ago link

Fletcher Prouty's book The Secret Team is a must read... he was on the inside and watched the formation of the permanent team established in the late 50s that assumed the power of the president.

JFK fought that team...

cynicalskeptic , 1 hour ago link

Look at who the OSS recruited - Ivy League Skull and Bones types from rich families that made their fortunes in often questionable ventures.

If you're the patriarch of some super wealthy family wouldn't you be thrilled to have younger family members working for the nation's intelligence agencies? Sort of the ultimate in 'inside information'. Plus these families had experience in things like drug smuggling, human trafficking and anything else you can imagine..... While the Brits started the opium trade with China, Americans jumped right in bringing opium from Turkey.

Didn't take long before the now CIA became owned by the families whose members staffed it.

InTheLandOfTheBlind , 43 minutes ago link

Again ignoring the British influence. The CIA does not have a monopoly on intelligence

Spiritual Anunnaki , 2 hours ago link

One major aspect pertaining American involvment in Veitnam was something like 90% of the rubber produced Globally came from the region.

It is more diverse now, being 3rd, with the association revealing that in 2017, Vietnam earned US$2.3 billion from export of 1.4 million tonnes of natural rubber, up 36% in value and 11.4% in volume year on year.

Haboob , 2 hours ago link

Fighting for rubber monopoly in Vietnam,fighting for oil monopoly in the middle east.

That's life.

Benito_Camela , 1 hour ago link

Gunboat diplomacy is nothing new. War is and always has been a racket.

InTheLandOfTheBlind , 38 minutes ago link

Unfortunately it is a winning racket.

Art_Vandelay , 2 hours ago link

Betrayals, secrets, tyranny? Who's in charge? **** Cheney & Co.

Benito_Camela , 1 hour ago link

Mike Pimpeo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPt-zXn05ac

InTheLandOfTheBlind , 36 minutes ago link

The British crown

Kan , 2 hours ago link

Rockfellers formed the OSS then the CIA which is the brute force for the CFR which they also run and own. The bankers run y our country and bought and blackmailed all your politicians... Only buttplug and pedo's get to be in charge now folks.... and some 9th circle witches of course...

TeethVillage88s , 1 hour ago link

OSS & CIA were formed from Ivy League Schools/Uni's... who turned out to be Traitors to England & USSR... Same today I

[Jan 09, 2020] Covert operations, multilevel lies and empire are inseparable

Dec 22, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

likbez , December 22, 2019 6:40 pm

@Terry,

I know Keynes said "In the long run we are all dead"

It might be not that long. The empire and war go together. And now this means the nuclear war, which will be decided on much lower level that we suspect. Ukraine is a real flashpoint as Russia is incensed with the USA stage coup d'état (aka the "Revolution of Dignity", aka Nulandgate ) and feels greatly endangered by it. As Daniel Ellsberg puts it in his 2018 talk at Google ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7cJG9j0NdY ):

But in terms of American traditions, we thought of ourselves as -- we didn't think -- of having run the first war of national liberation. But it could have been called that, the first war of separation for an empire. And we thought of ourselves as anti-imperial. And we still think of ourselves that way, as not an empire like the others. That's false.

That's very clear from the Pentagon Papers where we're deciding who should run Vietnam this year or next year or how they should stay in power, what criminal acts they're entitled to take, how much we need to support them. And so it's very obviously the documents of an empire. In fact, that's what I said to my wife, when she said, at one point, before they came out, does it really matter to get this history out? And I said, well, among other things, it's the first real history of imperial operations since the Nuremberg documents were discovered, covered after the Second World War. And before that, it probably goes back to Punic times, to the Syrian empire, to Sumerian empire, and so probably all the same, but we don't have the documents for it.

And here they are. And yet, even so, I managed to think of it as an aberration. We had somehow gotten ourselves into acting like an empire. Let me say just very briefly now– I could spend the whole time on this. But I'll just say, I've come recently to see what we are as a covert empire. And covert refers to plausibly denial covert operations.

Covert operations, I should say, are defined as operations that are not just secret, that you're not just keeping it safe, but that you lie about plausibly. And to make it plausible, you provide in advance evidence, false evidence, misleading evidence as to what's really going on and who's running it and why it's happening and who did it and so forth, a false flag in some cases, whatever.

But you provide several layers of cover for what's being done to protect the president from the notion that he is murdering, overthrowing governments, installing coup governments in democracies and so forth, as so often in the third world then and now, up until now. Well, you don't want the US to be associated with that. It's happening over there.

And if somehow a US hand surfaces, he or she wasn't working for any agency. And if you find the agency, it wasn't the CIA. And if it was the CIA, it wasn't the president. So you have layer after layer of cover stories with documents. I didn't know this. It didn't come to my attention. This so-and-so did it and so forth. The Vietnam War was run from beginning to end like that. That's how we run our empire.

We deny that we are an empire. And what is an empire? A country that determines the regime of other countries, decides who the police chief was, who shall live and who shall die, what the basic foreign policies are. We do that throughout Central America and always have, often many other parts of the world as far apart as Indonesia, now the Middle East. In general, we decide: Who do we want? Is this guy OK? We don't decide every detail but any more than you decide every detail of a military commander's operations.

But generally, they work. If they don't do what we want, we replace them with somebody else. We deny that we're an empire. We're against empire. When other people do the same sort of thing, they're empires. They're acting imperially. First level of denial on the American part. And then second, how do they get in power? Who has to be killed? What paramilitary forces have to be paid and go in, as into Nicaragua, for example, and other places? So the efforts are also plausibly denied OK, I could spend time. And I don't know if people have it in mind.

See also his book
https://www.amazon.com/Doomsday-Machine-Confessions-Nuclear-Planner/product-reviews/1608196704 . From one of Amazon reviews:

The author makes clear that the accidental nuclear war scenarios laid out in Dr Strangelove, Fail-Safe, The Bedford Incident et al are, in real life, very much more probable than the authorities would have us believe.

The probability of one or other of these being triggered unofficially is terrifyingly high.

Compare with https://news.yahoo.com/russians-heaven-event-nuclear-war-putin-153648833.html

"We have no concept of a preemptive strike," Putin told a forum of international experts in the southern city of Sochi in response to a question from the audience.

"In such a situation, we expect to be struck by nuclear weapons, but we will not use them" first, he said.

"The aggressor will have to understand that retaliation is inevitable, that it will be destroyed and that we, as victims of aggression, as martyrs, will go to heaven.

"They will simply die because they won't even have time to repent,"

[Dec 31, 2019] Skripals false flag and Russiagate are birds of the feather

Notable quotes:
"... If the CIA/MI6/FBI did attempt to create a sting it need not be as dramatic as the Skripal fakery. What would you dream up if you were tasked by the CIA to propose something? KISS. ..."
Dec 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

librul , Dec 29 2019 22:21 utc | 28

@Posted by: sleepy | Dec 29 2019 17:38 utc | 8

Thanks sleeply,

But underlying your comment is an assumption of *logic* in this world. If it ever existed it certainly does not apply any longer. Look how much mileage the MSM and the anti-Democracy Party got out of the nothingburger Russiagate.

The MSM doesn't even need to smell real blood, they will run with anything to continue the coup.

Anything negative that involves Edward Gallagher between now and election day could be magnified 1 million-fold and
repeated 1000 million times by the MSM and dropped in Trump's lap.

If the CIA/MI6/FBI did attempt to create a sting it need not be as dramatic as the Skripal fakery. What would you dream up if you were tasked by the CIA to propose something? KISS.

[Dec 31, 2019] Turkey's Gunboat Gambit In The Mediterranean by Burak Bekdil

Dec 31, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Burak Bekdil via The Gatestone Institute,

Turkey, since 2011, has been waging a pro-Sunni proxy war in Syria, in the hope of one day establishing in Damascus a pro-Turkey, Islamist regime. This ambition has failed, costing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey violent political turmoil on both sides of Turkey's 911-km border with Syria and billions of dollars spent on more than 4 million Syrian refugees scattered across the Turkish soil.

In Egypt, in 2011-2012, Erdoğan aggressively supported the failed Muslim Brotherhood government and deeply antagonized the incumbent -- then-general but now president -- Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Since Erdoğan's efforts in Syria and Egypt failed, his Sunni Islamist ambitions have found a new proxy-war theater: Libya.

On December 10, Erdoğan said he could deploy troops in Libya if the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli (which Turkey supports) requested it. Erdoğan's talks with GNA's head, Fayez al-Sarraj, who is fighting a war against the Libyan National Army (LNA) of General Khalifa Haftar, produced two ostensibly strategic agreements: a memorandum of understanding on providing the GNA with arms, military training and personnel; and a maritime agreement delineating exclusive economic zones in the Mediterranean waters.

Greece and Egypt protested immediately while the European Council unequivocally condemned the controversial accords. Meanwhile, the deals apparently escalated a proxy competition between Turkey's old (Greece) and new (Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) rivals.

With the al-Sarraj handshake, Erdoğan is apparently aiming to:

All that ambition requires military hardware as well as diplomatic software. Since 2011, a year after the Mavi Marmara incident ruptured relations with Israel, Turkey has been investing billions of dollars in naval technologies, in an apparent effort to build up the hardware it would one day require.

In the eight years since then, Turkey has built four Ada-class corvettes; two Landing Ship Tank (LST) vessels; eight fast Landing Craft Tank (LCT) vessels; 16 military patrol ships; two deep-sea rescue ships; one submarine rescue ship; and four assault boats.

The jewel in the naval treasury box is a $1 billion Landing Platform Dock (LPD), now being built under license from Spain's Navantia shipyards, to be operational in 2021. The TCG Anadolu , Turkey's first amphibious assault ship, will carry a battalion-sized unit of 1,200 troops and personnel, eight utility helicopters and three unmanned aerial vehicles; it also will transport 150 vehicles, including battle tanks. It also may be able to deploy short takeoff and vertical landing STOVL F-35 fighter jets. Turkey will be the third operator in the world of this ship type, after Spain and Australia.

Erdoğan's naval ambitions, however, are not limited just to an emerging fleet of conventional vessels. In 2016, he said that the LPD program would hopefully be the first step toward producing a "most elite" aircraft carrier. He also said he "sees it as a major deficiency that we still do not have a nuclear vessel."

On December 22, Turkey's first Type 214 class submarine, the TCG Piri Reis , hit the seas with a ceremony attended by Erdoğan. "Today," he said , "we gathered here for the docking of Piri Reis . As of 2020, a submarine will go into service each year. By 2027, all six of our submarines will be at our seas for service."

Unsurprisingly the docking ceremony reminded Erdoğan of his Libyan gambit: "We will evaluate every opportunity in land, sea and air. If needed, we will increase military support in Libya."

Erdoğan seems to think that his best defense in the Mediterranean power game is an offense. On December 15, Turkish Naval Forces intercepted an Israeli research ship, the Bat Galim , in Cypriot waters and escorted it away, as tension over natural resource exploration continued to rise in the region.

On December 16, Turkey dispatched a surveillance and reconnaissance drone to the Turkish-controlled north of the divided island of Cyprus. A week before the drone deployment, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that Ankara could use its military forces to halt gas drilling in waters off Cyprus that it claims as its own.

Libya is another risky proxy war theater for Turkey. Its deals with the al-Sarraj government over troop deployment and maritime borders will become null and void if the Libyan civil war, begun in 2014, ends with Gen. Haftar's victory. The chief of staff of the LNA, Farag Al-Mahdawi, announced that his forces would sink any Turkish ship approaching the Libyan coast. "I have an order; as soon as the Turkish research vessels arrive, I will have a solution. I will sink them myself," Al-Mahdawi warned, noting that the order was coming from Haftar. On December 21, Haftar's forces seized a Grenada-flagged ship with Turkish crew aboard, on the suspicion that it was carrying arms. The ship was later released.

The European Union is another factor why Erdoğan, once again, is probably betting on the wrong horse. Technically speaking, Turkey is a candidate for full EU membership, but it is an open secret that accession talks have not moved an inch during the past several years, and with no prospects of progress in sight. Making membership prospects even gloomier, EU foreign ministers in November agreed on economic sanctions for Ankara for violating Cyprus' maritime economic zone by drilling off the island.

The Mediterranean chess game leaves Turkey in alliance with the breakaway Turkish Cypriot statelet and one of the warring factions in Libya, versus a strategic grouping of Greece, Cyprus, Egypt (and the UAE), Israel, and the other warring Libyan group.

One emerging power in Libya, however, is not a Western state actor. After controlling Syria in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and establishing permanent military bases inside and off the coast of the country, Russia has the potential to step into the Libyan theater with a bigger proxy and direct force, to establish its second permanent Mediterranean military presence. As in Syria, where divergent interests did not stop Turkey from becoming a remote-controlled Russian player, Moscow can once again make use of the Turkish card to undermine Western interests in Libya.

Also as in Syria, Turkey's Islamist agenda will probably fail in Libya, but by the time Erdoğan understands that, it might be too late to get out of Moscow's orbit.

[Dec 31, 2019] Iraq attack as another example how spineless Trump is about trying to assert his will over that of the neocon bureaucracies, civilian and military

Dec 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Russ , Dec 30 2019 8:34 utc | 1

Instead of finding the real culprits - ISIS remnants, disgruntled locals, Kurds who want to regain control over Kirkuk - the U.S. decided that Kata'ib Hizbullah was the group guilty of the attack....

Yesterday's attacks guarantee that all U.S. troops will have to leave Iraq and will thereby also lose their supply lines to Syria.

One wonders if that was the real intend of those strikes.

Just like with 9/11 and Iraq where the US government immediately pushed its pre-existing agenda, so the US doesn't care who really launches attacks on US and US-client positions in Iraq and Syria but automatically assigns them to Hezbollah and thus to Iran, in accord with the pre-existing neocon wet dream of provoking a full-scale war with Iran.

If that's the US intent, to escalate against Iran, and if conversely the Iraq government is serious about kicking out the US military, we'll have the confrontation discussed in the open thread.

As for the idea that Trump was briar-patching here, wanting a good legalistic pretext to withdraw troops from Iraq (which would then trigger the practical supply-based pretext to withdraw them from Syria and not "take the oil" after all), well even if he had such confused thoughts, we've already seen how spineless he is about trying to assert his will over that of the neocon bureaucracies, civilian and military. Do we really expect them to agree to vacate Iraq merely because the legally constituted supposedly sovereign government told them to? It seems more likely they'll tell the government they're not going anywhere and demand that the government help them suppress non-governmental resistance to their ongoing presence, or else. (I don't know if there's yet been a formal order to leave from the Iraqi government, or just rhetoric in an attempt to save face.)

[Dec 31, 2019] Another despicable attack on Tulsi

It is reasonably cheap to buy a journalist and turn him into the attack dog on particular, inconvenient or dangerious for the financial oligarchy candidate.
Dec 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kali , Dec 29 2019 19:01 utc | 13

New article about Tulsi Gabbard being viciously attacked over religion during Christmas.

Angry Bernie Sanders supporters whom I guess forgot to take their meds over the holidaze are viciously attacking Tulsi because of Jesus? LOL. This new article is specifically about Mike Figueroa from The Humanist Report, a semi-popular vlogger, and also a fanatic atheist type.

He used to be a Tulsi supporter, but since he is connected to the TYT network which is funded by Hollywood Billionaire and major DNC Clinton funder Katzenberg, he must have recently been told to toe the party line on smearing Tulsi if he wanted to reap the funding benefits of TYT who are hardcore Tulsi haters, following the DNC line.

I guess Tulsi showing the Christmas spirit gave him a reason to look hardcore to his fellow fanatics and appease TYT money folks. Anyways, here is the new article Like, In The Year 2024

[Dec 31, 2019] Skripals false flag and Russiagate are birds of the feather

Dec 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

librul , Dec 29 2019 22:21 utc | 28

@Posted by: sleepy | Dec 29 2019 17:38 utc | 8

Thanks sleeply,
But underlying your comment is an assumption of *logic* in this world. If it ever existed it certainly does not
apply any longer. Look how much mileage the MSM and the anti-Democracy Party got out of the nothingburger Russiagate.
The MSM doesn't even need to smell real blood, they will run with anything to continue the coup.

Anything negative that involves Edward Gallagher between now and election day could be magnified 1 million-fold and
repeated 1000 million times by the MSM and dropped in Trump's lap.

If the CIA/MI6/FBI did attempt to create a sting it need not be as dramatic as the Skripal fakery. What would you dream up if you were tasked by the CIA to propose something? KISS.

[Dec 30, 2019] Looking at Rachel Maddow I miss the days when a man could just accuse a woman of being a witch and trust the fine upstanding townspeople to take care of the rest

Dec 30, 2019 | www.washingtonpost.com

1 day ago Maddow is really a propagandist. She really isn't a journalist. Because her credibility and ratings have gone south because so many of the big stories she has been obliged to push have been fake from the get-go. People start to notice that after a while. You can't fool all of the people all of the time as Abe observed. 1 day ago It has been determined to have been a fabrication. It is not just controversial. Maddow may be spot on in fooling her drooling sycophants, but facts seldom ever interfere with her fairy tales and TDS motivated delusions. 10 hours ago Rational Agent:
The CIA told the FBI that the material in the Steele dossier is merely Internet gossip and bar room talk. This is in the inspector general's report (issued Dec 9) and public testimony under oath before Congress (Dec 11).

There were several agents in the FBI who were disturbed about the unverified nature of this material, and they were overruled by other agents and their supervisors and this material was then presented to the FISA court four times in the knowledge that it was unverified but the court was told it was verified. That is also in the inspector general's Report and public testimony.

The result of this misconduct was that the head judge of the FISA court Rosemary Collyer, issued on Dec 16 an unprecedented and angry public rebuke of the FBI for repeatedly deceiving the court about the veracity of the Steele dossier.

Enough for you? 1 day ago With apologies to Bob Dylan:

"A man (or woman) sees what he (she) wants to see and disregards the rest."

If you're tuned into cable 'news' at 9 p.m. eastern time looking for objective journalism, well, good luck with that. Cuomo is probably the best bet; he offers a little bit. 1 day ago I think the apology should be to Paul Simon?

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=a+man+sees+what+he+wants+to+see+and+disregards+the+rest+lyrics

Not withstanding that, your point is well made. Not much in the way of great thought on the telly at that time on any station. 1 day ago Independents view Rachael Maddow, Chris Cuomo and Sean Hannity as hate peddlers who spin, lie and twist every single issue to fit their fantasy of how the world exists. I cannot imagine how anyone with a brain or any semblance of logic could be a regular viewer of these hate mongers. If one does a cursory analysis of the predictions these people have made over the past couple of years, you will quickly see how ridiculous and wrong they have been. The bigger problem is that they represent their news organizations and only add to the distrust and declining reliance that rational folks have of the Media. 2 days ago [she is] Just another CIA mouthpiece. 2 days ago Maddow is being sued by the One America News Network for stating the latter were 'really, literally' Russian assets.

Maddows is furiously back pedalling, not standing by what she said. This speaks volumes.

Maddows is evil. 2 days ago The Steele dossier is trash. A joke. Comprehensively discredited. Only the wilfully blind or deluded would believe otherwise. Proof that [neo]liberalism is a form of mental illness. 1 day ago If it is all propaganda, then we are truly living in a post-truth world. In this world there are no facts, only competing narratives. This allows us to sink into fact-free thinking and rely only on our prejudices (or our "gut") to determine our preferences. 2 days ago " The case against Maddow is far stronger. When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document."

[Dec 30, 2019] Sanders probably understands the situation but still is pandering to MIC, while Warren sounds like a regular neocon, another Kagan

Notable quotes:
"... "Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win." ..."
"... And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats (Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here in the United States and around the world." ..."
"... The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy." ..."
"... Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context, history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian" nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis. ..."
"... By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies allegedly don't fight wars against one another. ..."
"... George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad policy. ..."
"... Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a mistake. ..."
"... "Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now." ..."
Dec 30, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

You can hear echoes of progressive realism in the statements of leading progressive lawmakers such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Ro Khanna. They have put ending America's support for the Saudi war on Yemen near the top of the progressive foreign policy agenda. On the stump, Sanders now singles out the military-industrial complex and the runaway defense budget for criticism. He promises, among other things, that "we will not continue to spend $700 billion a year on the military." These are welcome developments. Yet since November of 2016, something else has emerged alongside the antiwar component of progressive foreign policy that is not so welcome. Let's call it neoprogressive internationalism, or neoprogressivism for short.

Trump's administration brought with it the Russia scandal. To attack the president and his administration, critics revived Cold War attitudes. This is now part of the neoprogressive foreign policy critique. It places an "authoritarian axis" at its center. Now countries ruled by authoritarians, nationalists, and kleptocrats can and must be checked by an American-led crusade to make the world safe for progressive values. The problem with this neoprogressive narrative of a world divided between an authoritarian axis and the liberal West is what it will lead to: ever spiraling defense budgets, more foreign adventures, more Cold Wars -- and hot ones too.

Unfortunately, Senators Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have adopted elements of the neoprogressive program. At a much remarked upon address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, the site of Churchill's 1946 address, Sanders put forth a vision of a Manichean world. Instead of a world divided by the "Iron Curtain" of Soviet Communism, Sanders sees a world divided between right-wing authoritarians and the forces of progress embodied by American and Western European progressive values.

"Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win."

A year later, Sanders warned that the battle between the West and an "authoritarian axis" which is "committed to tearing down a post-Second World War global order that they see as limiting their access to power and wealth." Sanders calls this "a global struggle of enormous consequence. Nothing less than the future of the -- economically, socially and environmentally -- is at stake."

Sanders's focus on this authoritarian axis is one that is shared with his intraparty rivals at the Center for American Progress (a think-tank long funded by some of the least progressive regimes on the planet), which he has pointedly criticized for smearing progressive Democrats like himself. CAP issued a report last September about "the threat presented by opportunist authoritarian regimes" which "urgently requires a rapid response."

The preoccupation with the authoritarian menace is one Sanders and CAP share with prominent progressive activists who warn about the creeping influence of what some have cynically hyped as an "authoritarian Internationale."

Cold War Calling

Senator Warren spelled out her foreign policy vision in a speech at American University in November 2018. Admirably, she criticized Saudi Arabia's savage war on Yemen, the defense industry, and neoliberal free trade agreements that have beggared the American working and middle classes.

"Foreign policy," Warren has said, "should not be run exclusively by the Pentagon." In the second round of the Democratic primary debates, Warren also called for a nuclear "no first use" policy.

And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats (Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here in the United States and around the world."

Warren also sees a rising tide of corrupt authoritarians "from Hungary to Turkey, from the Philippines to Brazil," where "wealthy elites work together to grow the state's power while the state works to grow the wealth of those who remain loyal to the leader."

The concern with the emerging authoritarian tide has become a central concern of progressive writers and thinkers. "Today, around the world," write progressive foreign policy activists Kate Kinzer and Stephen Miles, "growing authoritarianism and hate are fueled by oligarchies preying on economic, gender, and racial inequality."

Daniel Nexon, a progressive scholar of international relations, believes that "progressives must recognize that we are in a moment of fundamental crisis, featuring coordination among right-wing movements throughout the West and with the Russian government as a sponsor and supporter."

Likewise, The Nation 's Jeet Heer lays the blame for the rise of global authoritarianism at the feet of Vladimir Putin, who "seems to be pushing for an international alt-right, an informal alliance of right-wing parties held together by a shared xenophobia."

Blithely waving away concerns over sparking a new and more dangerous Cold War between the world's two nuclear superpowers, Heer advises that "the dovish left shouldn't let Cold War nightmares prevent them [from] speaking out about it." He concludes: "Leftists have to be ready to battle [Putinism] in all its forms, at home and abroad."

The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy."

Likewise, we are seeing the emergence of an "authoritarian school" which posits that the internal political dynamics of regimes such as Putin's cause them, ineffably, to follow revanchist, expansionist foreign policies.

Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context, history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian" nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis.

By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies allegedly don't fight wars against one another.

Yet as Richard Sakwa, a British scholar of Russia and Eastern Europe, writes, "it is often assumed that Russia is critical of the West because of its authoritarian character, but it cannot be taken for granted that a change of regime would automatically make the country align with the West."

George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad policy.

True, some of the economic trends voters in Europe and South America are reacting to are global, but a diagnosis that links together the rise of Putin and Xi, the elections of Trump in the U.S., Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, and Kaczyński in Poland with the right-wing insurgency movements of the Le Pens in France and Farage in the UK makes little sense.

Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a mistake.

Echoes of Neoconservatism

The progressive foreign policy organization Win Without War includes among its 10 foreign policy goals "ending economic, racial and gender inequality around the world." The U.S., according to WWW, "must safeguard universal human rights to dignity, equality, migration and refuge."

Is it a noble sentiment? Sure. But it's every bit as unrealistic as the crusade envisioned by George W. Bush in his second inaugural address, in which he declared, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

We know full well where appeals to "universal values" have taken us in the past. Such appeals are not reliable guides for progressives if they seek to reverse the tide of unchecked American intervention abroad. But maybe we should consider whether it's a policy of realism and restraint that they actually seek. Some progressive thinkers are at least honest enough to admit as much that it is not. Nexon admits that "abandoning the infrastructure of American international influence because of its many minuses and abuses will hamstring progressives for decades to come." In other words, America's hegemonic ambitions aren't in and of themselves objectionable or self-defeating, as long as we achieve our kind of hegemony. Progressive values crusades bear more than a passing resemblance to the neoconservative crusades to remake the world in the American self-image.

"Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now."

Neoprogressivism, like neoconservatism, risks catering to the U.S. establishment's worst impulses by playing on a belief in American exceptionalism to embark upon yet another global crusade. This raises some questions, including whether a neoprogressive approach to the crises in Ukraine, Syria, or Libya would be substantively different from the liberal interventionist approach of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. Does a neoprogressive foreign policy organized around the concept of an "authoritarian axis" adequately address the concerns of voters in the American heartland who disproportionately suffer from the consequences of our wars and neoliberal economic policies? It was these voters, after all, who won the election for Trump.

Donald Trump's failure to keep his campaign promise to bring the forever wars to a close while fashioning a new foreign policy oriented around core U.S. national security interests provides Democrats with an opportunity. By repeatedly intervening in Syria, keeping troops in Afghanistan, kowtowing to the Israelis and Saudis, ratcheting up tensions with Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and China, Trump has ceded the anti-interventionist ground he occupied when he ran for office. He can no longer claim the mantle of restraint, a position that found support among six-in-ten Americans in 2016.

Yet with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard, for the most part the Democratic field is offering voters a foreign policy that amounts to "Trump minus belligerence." A truly progressive foreign policy must put questions of war and peace front and center. Addressing America's post 9/11 failures, military overextension, grotesquely bloated defense budget, and the ingrained militarism of our political-media establishment are the proper concerns of a progressive U.S. foreign policy.

But it is one that would place the welfare of our own citizens above all. As such, what is urgently required is the long-delayed realization of a peace dividend. The post-Cold War peace dividend that was envisioned in the early 1990s never materialized. Clinton's secretary of defense Les Aspin strangled the peace dividend in its crib by keeping the U.S. military on a footing that would allow it to fight and win two regional wars simultaneously. Unipolar fantasies of "full spectrum dominance" would come later in the decade.

One might have reasonably expected an effort by the Obama administration to realize a post-bin Laden peace dividend, but the forever wars dragged on and on. In a New Yorker profile from earlier this year, Sanders asked the right question: "Do we really need to spend more than the next ten nations combined on the military, when our infrastructure is collapsing and kids can't afford to go to college?"

The answer is obvious. And yet, how likely is it that progressives will be able realize their vision of a more just, more equal American society if we have to mobilize to face a global authoritarian axis led by Russia and China?

FDR's Good Neighbor Policy

The unipolar world of the first post-Cold War decade is well behind us now. As the world becomes more and more multipolar, powers like China, Russia, Iran, India, and the U.S. will find increasing occasion to clash. A peaceful multipolar world requires stability. And stability requires balance.

In the absence of stability, none of the goods progressives see as desirable can take root. This world order would put a premium on stability and security rather than any specific set of values. An ethical, progressive foreign policy is one which understands that great powers have security interests of their own. "Spheres of influence" are not 19th century anachronisms, but essential to regional security: in Europe, the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere.

It is a policy that would reject crusades to spread American values the world over. "The greatest thing America can do for the rest of the world," George Kennan once observed, "is to make a success of what it is doing here on this continent and to bring itself to a point where its own internal life is one of harmony, stability and self-assurance."

Progressive realism doesn't call for global crusades that seek to conquer the hearts and minds of others. It is not bound up in the hoary self-mythology of American Exceptionalism. It is boring. It puts a premium on the value of human life. It foreswears doing harm so that good may come. It is not a clarion call in the manner of John F. Kennedy who pledged to "to pay any price, bear any burden." It does not lend itself to the cheap moralizing of celebrity presidential speechwriters. In ordinary language, a summation of such a policy would go something like: "we will bear a reasonable price as long as identifiable U.S. security interests are at stake."

A policy that seeks to wind down the global war on terror, slash the defense budget, and shrink our global footprint won't inspire. It will, however, save lives. Such a policy has its roots in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address. "In the field of World policy," said Roosevelt, "I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor, the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others, the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a World of neighbors."

What came to be known as the "Good Neighbor" policy was further explicated by FDR's Secretary of State Cordell Hull at the Montevideo Conference in 1933, when he stated that "No country has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another." Historian David C. Hendrickson sees this as an example of FDR's principles of "liberal pluralism," which included "respect for the integrity and importance of other states" and "non-intervention in the domestic affairs of neighboring states."

These ought to serve as the foundations on which to build a truly progressive foreign policy. They represent a return to the best traditions of the Democratic Party and would likely resonate with those very same blocs of voters that made up the New Deal coalition that the neoliberal iteration of the Democratic Party has largely shunned but will sorely need in order to unseat Trump. And yet, proponents of a neoprogressive foreign policy seem intent on running away from a popular policy of realism and restraint on which Trump has failed to deliver.

James W. Carden is contributing writer for foreign affairs at The Nation and a member of the Board of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.

[Dec 30, 2019] Looking at Rachel Maddow I miss the days when a man could just accuse a woman of being a witch and trust the fine upstanding townspeople to take care of the rest

Dec 30, 2019 | www.washingtonpost.com

1 day ago Maddow is really a propagandist. She really isn't a journalist. Because her credibility and ratings have gone south because so many of the big stories she has been obliged to push have been fake from the get-go. People start to notice that after a while. You can't fool all of the people all of the time as Abe observed. 1 day ago It has been determined to have been a fabrication. It is not just controversial. Maddow may be spot on in fooling her drooling sycophants, but facts seldom ever interfere with her fairy tales and TDS motivated delusions. 10 hours ago Rational Agent:
The CIA told the FBI that the material in the Steele dossier is merely Internet gossip and bar room talk. This is in the inspector general's report (issued Dec 9) and public testimony under oath before Congress (Dec 11).

There were several agents in the FBI who were disturbed about the unverified nature of this material, and they were overruled by other agents and their supervisors and this material was then presented to the FISA court four times in the knowledge that it was unverified but the court was told it was verified. That is also in the inspector general's Report and public testimony.

The result of this misconduct was that the head judge of the FISA court Rosemary Collyer, issued on Dec 16 an unprecedented and angry public rebuke of the FBI for repeatedly deceiving the court about the veracity of the Steele dossier.

Enough for you? 1 day ago With apologies to Bob Dylan:

"A man (or woman) sees what he (she) wants to see and disregards the rest."

If you're tuned into cable 'news' at 9 p.m. eastern time looking for objective journalism, well, good luck with that. Cuomo is probably the best bet; he offers a little bit. 1 day ago I think the apology should be to Paul Simon?

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=a+man+sees+what+he+wants+to+see+and+disregards+the+rest+lyrics

Not withstanding that, your point is well made. Not much in the way of great thought on the telly at that time on any station. 1 day ago Independents view Rachael Maddow, Chris Cuomo and Sean Hannity as hate peddlers who spin, lie and twist every single issue to fit their fantasy of how the world exists. I cannot imagine how anyone with a brain or any semblance of logic could be a regular viewer of these hate mongers. If one does a cursory analysis of the predictions these people have made over the past couple of years, you will quickly see how ridiculous and wrong they have been. The bigger problem is that they represent their news organizations and only add to the distrust and declining reliance that rational folks have of the Media. 2 days ago [she is] Just another CIA mouthpiece. 2 days ago Maddow is being sued by the One America News Network for stating the latter were 'really, literally' Russian assets.

Maddows is furiously back pedalling, not standing by what she said. This speaks volumes.

Maddows is evil. 2 days ago The Steele dossier is trash. A joke. Comprehensively discredited. Only the wilfully blind or deluded would believe otherwise. Proof that [neo]liberalism is a form of mental illness. 1 day ago If it is all propaganda, then we are truly living in a post-truth world. In this world there are no facts, only competing narratives. This allows us to sink into fact-free thinking and rely only on our prejudices (or our "gut") to determine our preferences. 2 days ago " The case against Maddow is far stronger. When small bits of news arose in favor of the dossier, the franchise MSNBC host pumped air into them. At least some of her many fans surely came away from her broadcasts thinking the dossier was a serious piece of investigative research, not the flimflam, quick-twitch game of telephone outlined in the Horowitz report. She seemed to be rooting for the document."

[Dec 29, 2019] Maddow Meltdown In Defense To OAN Lawsuit, Host Argues Her Words Are Not Facts

Are We About To Return To The Principle That "Actions Have Consequences"?
Notable quotes:
"... And she has also apparently hired Lionel Hutz as her legal adviser. ..."
"... Oh, it's capable of being proved false, alright. ..."
Dec 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
reported that TV network OAN had filed a lawsuit against Rachel Maddow for the time the host said that OAN "really, literally is paid Russian propaganda."

Now, Maddow finds herself having to come up with a defense for her statement in court. And she has also apparently hired Lionel Hutz as her legal adviser.

According to Culttture , her lawyers argued in a recent motion that " the liberal host was clearly offering up her 'own unique expression' of her views to capture what she saw as the 'ridiculous' nature of the undisputed facts. Her comment, therefore, is a quintessential statement 'of rhetorical hyperbole, incapable of being proved true or false."

Oh, it's capable of being proved false, alright. Maddow had previously claimed, on air, about one of OAN's reporters:

"In this case, the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America is really literally is paid Russian propaganda," and added, "Their on-air politics reporter ( Kristian Rouz) is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government."

The testimony of UC Santa Barbara linguistics professor Stefan Thomas Gries, however, stands at odds with Maddow's defense. Gries said: "It is very unlikely that an average or reasonable/ordinary viewer would consider the sentence in question to be a statement of opinion."

[Dec 29, 2019] We received a wonderful Christmas gift from the Department of Schadenfreude in the form of this story from the Washington Post about MadCow

Dec 29, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

" Rachel Maddow rooted for the Steele dossier to be true. Then it fell apart ":

She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings -- a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.

[Dec 29, 2019] It should be abundantly clear by now that the Democratic Party leadership will be selecting a CIA connected candidate in 2020 in all ways identical to Hillary Clinton but perhaps with a less tawdry past and less of an appetite for Goldman-Sachs speaking fees by Louis Proyect

Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse ..."
"... By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all. ..."
Nov 09, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

Ever since the Democratic Party abandoned its New Deal legacy and adopted the neoliberal centrism associated with the Carter presidency and then cast in stone by the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, each election loss has generated a chorus of remonstrations in the left-liberal press about the need to run "progressive" candidates if the party wants to win. The latest instance of this was a post to the Jacobin FB page that stated: "By running to the right, Democrats insist on losing twice: at the polls and in constructing an inspiring agenda. Bold left-wing politics are our only hope for long-term, substantive victory."

The question of why Democrats are so okay with losing has to be examined closely. In some countries, elections have huge consequences, especially in Latin America where a job as an elected official might be not only a source of income for a socialist parliamentarian but a trigger for a civil war or coup as occurred in Costa Rica in 1948 and in Chile in 1973 respectively.

In the 2010 midterm elections, there was a massive loss of seats in the House of Representatives for the Democrats. In this month's midterm elections, the Democrats hoped that a "Blue Wave" would do for them what the 2010 midterms did for the Republicans -- put them in the driver's seat. It turned out to be more of a "Blue Spray", not to speak of the toothless response of House leader Nancy Pelosi who spoke immediately about how the Democrats can reach across the aisle to the knuckle-dragging racists of the Republican Party.

Out of curiosity, I went to Wikipedia to follow up on what happened to the "losers" in 2010. Did they have to go on unemployment? Like Republicans who got voted out this go-round, Democrats had no trouble lining up jobs as lobbyists. Allen Boyd from Florida sent a letter to Obama after the BP oil spill in 2010 asking him to back up BP's claim that seafood in the Gulf of Mexico was okay to eat. After being voted out of office, he joined the Twenty-First Century Group, a lobbying firm founded by a former Republican Congressman from Texas named Jack Fields. A 1980 article on Fields describes him as a protégé of ultraright leader Paul Weyrich.

Glenn Nye, who lost his job as a Virginia congressman, his considerable CV that included working for the Agency for International Development (AID) and serving in various capacities during the occupation of Iraq to land a nice gig as Senior Political Advisor for the Hanover Investment Group.

John Spratt from South Carolina was described by Dow Jones News as "one of the staunchest fiscal conservatives among House Democrats." That was enough for him to land a job with Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that was supposed to come up with a strategy to reduce the deficit. Just the sort of thing that was calculated to lift the American economy out of the worst slump since the 1930s. Not.

Pennsylvania's Chris Carney was a helluva Democrat. From 2002 to 2004, he was a counterterrorism analyst for the Bush administration. He not only reported to Douglas Feith in the Office of Special Plans and at the Defense Intelligence Agency, researching links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but served as an interrogator in Guantanamo. These qualifications landed him a job as director of homeland security and policy strategy for BAE Systems when the House of Representatives gig ended. A British security and munitions powerhouse, BAE won a contract worth £4.4bn to supply the Saudis with 72 fighter jets – some of which were used to bomb Red Cross and Physician Without Borders hospitals in Yemen.

With such crumb-bums losing in 2010, you'd think that the Democrats would be convinced that their best bet for winning elections would be to disavow candidates that had ties to the national security apparatus and anything that smacked of the DLC's assault on the welfare state. Not exactly. When the candidates are female, that might work in the party's favor like sugar-coating a bitter pill.

In Virginia, former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger and retired Navy Commander Elaine Luria defeated Republican incumbents. Air Force veteran Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey also helped the Democrats regain the House. Sherill calculated that moving to the center would serve her own and the party's interests. She told MSNBC: "As a Navy helicopter pilot I never flew Republican missions or Democratic missions, I would have had a very short career. This is something I do think vets bring to the table, this willingness to work with everyone."

An article titled "' Montclair Mikie' Sherrill recast as 'Moderate Mikie' as Webber attacks in NJ House race " described her Road to Damascus conversion to DLC principles:

For Sherrill, a newcomer to politics, the 11th has proved to be a tricky terrain. She is seen as a progressive, but appears wary of carrying the "Trump resistance" banner into the fray. At Wednesday's debate, Sherrill was determined to show she is more Morris Plains than Montclair.

There were no heated vows to fight Trump, even though being "appalled" by the president was what motivated her to run in the first place. The Nov. 6 midterms loom as a referendum on Trump's presidency, but you would never have guessed that watching Wednesday's contest.

Sherrill repeatedly promised to be bipartisan -- a far cry from the combative, confrontational tone that many in the party's grass roots are demanding.

On tax policy she sounded more centrist Republican than mainstream liberal Democrat, and she refused to endorse issues like free community college tuition, which has become a popular talking point for Democrats and was launched by Gov. Phil Murphy this summer.

"Without understanding how that would be paid for, I haven't supported it because it sounds like it would raise taxes on our families,'" she said.

The moderate tone puzzled some of her ardent "resistance" activists who mobilized around her candidacy.

For Eric Fritsch, 32, a Teamster for the film and television industry from West Orange, it was jarring to hear Sherrill oppose Democratic Party wish-list items like free community college tuition or "Medicare-for-all" coverage out of fear that it may raise taxes. She used the same excuse to sidestep supporting a "carbon tax" to reduce global warming.

"By going on the defensive about taxes she is accepting a Republican framing that we don't want to be responsible with taxes in the first place,'" said Fritsch, who insisted that he remains a "very enthusiastic" Sherrill supporter.

It should be abundantly clear by now that the Democratic Party leadership will be selecting a candidate in 2020 in all ways identical to Hillary Clinton but perhaps with a less tawdry past and less of an appetite for Goldman-Sachs speaking fees. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo, et al have no intention of allowing upstarts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to spoil their plans, even if it means a second term for Donald Trump.

No matter. Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara urges his readers and DSA comrades to plunge ahead trying to consolidate a "socialist" caucus in the Democratic Party. From his perspective, working in the Democratic Party seems to be the "most promising place for advancing left politics, at least in the short term." Keep in mind that Sherrill raised $1.9 million for her campaign and my old boss from Salomon Brothers Michael Bloomberg ponied up another $1.8 million just for her TV ads. Does anybody really think that "socialist" backed candidates will be able to compete with people like Sherrill in the primaries? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to defeat the hack Joe Crowley on a shoestring but that was something of a fluke. Until there is a massive shake-up in American society that finally reveals the Democratic Party to be the capitalist tool it has been since Andrew Jackson's presidency, it is likely that a combination of big money and political inertia will keep the Democratic Party an agent of reaction.

Furthermore, the takeover of the House might turn out to be a hollow victory in the light of how Trump rules. His strategy hasn't been to push through legislation except for the tax cut. Remember the blather about investing in infrastructure? His minions in Congress have no intention of proposing a trillion or so dollars in highway or bridge repair, etc. With Nancy Pelosi fecklessly talking about how the two parties can collaborate on infrastructure, you can only wonder whether she has been asleep for the past two years.

Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse as Malcolm X once put it. Two days ago, the NY Times wrote about how the "Trump Administration Spares Corporate Wrongdoers Billions in Penalties". It did not need legislation to help big banks rip off the public. All it took was naming former head of BankOne Joseph Otting comptroller of the currency. Senator Sherrod Brown, one of the few Democrats with a spine, called Trump out: "The president's choice for watchdog of America's largest banks is someone who signed a consent order -- over shady foreclosure practices -- with the very agency he's been selected to run."

For all of the dozens of articles about how Trump is creating a fascist regime, hardly any deal with the difference between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Hitler created a massive bureaucracy that ran a quasi-planned economy with generous social benefits that put considerable restraints on the bourgeoisie. Like FDR, he was taking measures to save capitalism. Perhaps if the USA had a social and economic crisis as deep as Germany's and left parties as massive as those in Germany, FDR might have embarked on a much more ambitious concentration camp program, one that would have interred trade unionists as well as Japanese-Americans. Maybe even Jews if they complained too much.

By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all.

[Dec 29, 2019] Some still hope that the DOJ will get to the bottom of national-security state malfeasance, beginning with FBI

Dec 29, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Paul Damascene , Dec 28 2019 22:58 utc | 36

FBI unredeemably corrupted...?

I think some my still hold out the hope or expectation that the DOJ will get to the bottom of national-security state malfeasance, beginning with FBI.

Kim Strassel of the WSJ quite pointedly asks why there was so little interest at the FIS court in the Nunez memo, which the IG report now bears out. Covering for malfeasance might just be the FISC's job one.

Now, a similarly gimlet-eyed view of the FBI, as arguably beyond saving ...

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/22/the-fbis-darkest-hour/

[Dec 29, 2019] "THE HAMMER" CIA Contractor-Turned Whistleblower Dennis Montgomery Makes Damming Confession On How Obama Ruthlessly Spied Trump A Zillion Times

Dec 29, 2019 | conservativesdaily.com

"THE HAMMER" CIA Contractor-Turned Whistleblower Dennis Montgomery Makes Damming Confession On How Obama Ruthlessly Spied Trump A Zillion Times

By CD's Team December 26, 2019

President Obama's Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper and his Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan oversaw a secret supercomputer system known as "THE HAMMER," according to former NSA/CIA contractor-turned whistleblower Dennis Montgomery.

Clapper and Brennan were using the supercomputer system to conduct illegal and unconstitutional government data harvesting and wiretapping. THE HAMMER was installed on federal property in Fort Washington, Maryland at a complex which some speculate is a secret CIA and NSA operation operating at a US Naval facility.

President Trump's allegation that the Obama Administration was wiretapping him is not only supported by Montgomery's whistleblower revelations about Brennan's and Clapper's computer system THE HAMMER, but also by statements made this week by William Binney, a former NSA Technical Director of the World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, by former CIA and State Department official Larry Johnson, and by Montgomery's attorney Larry Klayman.

Computer expert Dennis Montgomery developed software programs that could breach secure computer systems and collect massive amounts of data.

That system, THE HAMMER, according to the audio tapes, accessed the phone calls, emails and bank accounts of millions of ordinary Americans.

The tapes also reveal that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court (FISA), Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, 156 other judges, members of Congress, and Donald J. Trump were targeted by the HAMMER.

One of the audio tapes made public by Federal Judge G. Murray Snow revealed that Brennan and Clapper particularly targeted and wiretapped Donald Trump a " zillion times."

Must read: Ben carson breaks silence on impeachment,drop nuke on immature democrats

Montgomery also contends that the government can plant files such as child *********** or state secrets on a target's computer, setting up the owner of that device for blackmail or framed prosecution.

Former CBS Reporter Sharyl Attkisson Alleged In 2013 She Was Under Electronic Surveillance For At Least Two Years And That Three Classified Documents Were Planted On Her "Compromised" Computer.

The audio tapes were released by Federal Judge G. Murray Snow in Maricopa County, Arizona in the Justice Department's civil contempt case against Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio.

Attorney Klayman, founder of Freedom Watch, represented Montgomery before federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth. Klayman, who characterizes his client Montgomery as a "whistleblower," told Fox News that Montgomery "turned over 600 million plus pages of information to the FBI." Judge Lamberth was formerly the presiding judge over the FISA court.

After Montgomery produced his documentation, the FBI gave him two immunity agreements: one in the area of "production" and the other regarding "testimony."

The FBI then took possession of Montgomery's documentation.

Attorney Klayman asserts that this information precipitated James Clapper's resignation.

Clapper had gone before Congress to testify under oath that the NSA, and other intelligence agencies including the CIA," were not collecting massive amounts of telephonic and Internet metadata on hundreds of millions of innocent American citizens" according to Klayman.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations proved otherwise.

Hot now: Nancy Pelosi loses out, Republican controlled senate going ahead to acquit Trump without Article of impeachment

Clapper was subsequently found to be untruthful and resigned on November 17, 2016, effective January 20, 2017, the day Donald Trump was sworn in.

Clapper has not been prosecuted for perjury and we wonder why. 7 minutes ago Thanks Q! I bring up Montgomery all of the time here. The Eff Bee Eye and Dee oh Jay have all of the documents and are sitting on them. This is how the IC controls everything in the Swamp.

[Dec 29, 2019] BOMBSHELL CIA Whistleblower Leaked Proof Trump Under Systematic Illegal Surveillance Over Two Years Ago FBI Sat On It Zer

Dec 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

BOMBSHELL: CIA Whistleblower Leaked Proof Trump Under "Systematic Illegal" Surveillance Over Two Years Ago: FBI Sat On It by ZeroPointNow Wed, 03/22/2017 - 22:37 0 SHARES

The same day House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes gave a press conference disclosing that President Trump had been under " incidental surveillance ," Attorney and FreedomWatch Chairman, Larry Klayman, sent a letter to the House Committee on Intelligence imploring them to pursue the claims and evidence presented under oath at a Washington DC FBI Field Office by his client - CIA / NSA Whistleblower Dennis Montgomery - who Klayman claims "holds the keys to disproving the false claims... ...that there is no evidence that the president and his men were wiretapped"

When Montgomery attempted to deliver this information through the appropriate channels two years ago , the former CIA and NSA contractor wasn't given the time of day:

[W]hen Montgomery came forward as a whistleblower to congressional intelligence committees and various other congressmen and senators, including Senator Charles Grassley , Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, like Comey, once had a reputation for integrity, he was "blown off;" no one wanted to even hear what he had to say.

As a result, Montgomery went to attorney and FreedomWatch founder Larry Klayman - who then approached the FBI:

Under grants of immunity, which I obtained through Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Curtis, Montgomery produced the hard drives and later was interviewed under oath in a secure room at the FBI Field Office in the District of Columbia . There he laid out how persons like then-businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy agencies of the Obama administration.

Montgomery left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of information , much of which is classified, and sought to come forward legally as a whistleblower to appropriate government entities, including congressional intelligence committees, to expose that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump , and even yours truly. Working side by side with Obama's former Director of National Intelligence (DIA), James Clapper, and Obama's former Director of the CIA, John Brennan, Montgomery witnessed "up close and personal" this "Orwellian Big Brother" intrusion on privacy , likely for potential coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.

He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008 presidential election , which illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White House.

Given the fact that the FBI had Montgomery's testimony and evidence for over two years, Klayman traveled to Washington DC last Thursday to meet with Committee Chairman Devin Nunes in the hopes that he would ask FBI Director Comey why the FBI hadn't pursued Montgomery's evidence. When Klayman arrived to speak with Nunes, he was "blown off" and instead shared his information with committee attorney Allen R. Souza - who Klayman requested in turn brief Nunes on the situation.

During my meeting with House Intelligence Committee counsel Allen R. Sousa I politely warned him that if Chairman Nunes, who himself had that same day undercut President Trump by also claiming that there is no evidence of surveillance by the Obama administration, I would go public with what would appear to be the House Intelligence Committee's complicity in keeping the truth from the American people and allowing the FBI to continue its apparent cover-up of the Montgomery "investigation."

And, that is where it stands today. The big question: will House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes do his job and hold FBI Director Comey's feet to the fire about the Montgomery investigation?

Klayman has detailed all of this in a NewsMax article , followed up with an official letter to Chairman Nunes today, requesting that he question Comey on Montgomery's evidence. Perhaps this explains Nunes' impromptu press conference today admitting that Trump's team was under " Incidental Surveillance " before making his way to the White House to discuss with the President.

So - we know that evidence exists from a CIA / NSA contractor turned whistleblower, detailing a massive spy operation on 156 judges, the Supreme Court, and high profile Americans including Donald Trump. See the letter below:

Freedom Watch bombshell letter to Rep. Devin Nunes1/4 https://t.co/CZ4haCVauK pic.twitter.com/NnKogSytSC

-- ZeroPointNow(@ZeroPointNow) March 23, 2017

Freedom Watch bombshell letter to Rep. Devin Nunes2/4 https://t.co/CZ4haCVauK pic.twitter.com/6Ls9a9kXAQ

-- ZeroPointNow(@ZeroPointNow) March 23, 2017

Freedom Watch bombshell letter to Rep. Devin Nunes3/4 https://t.co/CZ4haCVauK pic.twitter.com/90KUdW9eH1

-- ZeroPointNow(@ZeroPointNow) March 23, 2017

Freedom Watch bombshell letter to Rep. Devin Nunes 4/4 https://t.co/CZ4haCVauK pic.twitter.com/l29p9JzBsU

-- ZeroPointNow (@ZeroPointNow) March 23, 2017

[Dec 29, 2019] Interview with Lisa Page. TRANSCRIPT 12-17-19, The Rachel Maddow Show. MSNBC

Looks like Page was Strzok handler within FBI and was intimately involved in suppressing Hillary email investigation. clinton email investigation has signed of CIA pressure on FBI -- that;s why DNS servers were not investigated by FBI directly -- most probably there was nothing to investigate as malware was implanted by CrowdStrike which also create fake Gussifer 2.0 personality.
She was probably No.3 person in both email investigation and Russiagate -- "eyes and earths" of McCabe like she admitted herself.
Looks also that she has a central position in unleashing Russiagate witch hunt and in scapegoating General Flynn. Whether she deliberately changed documents or not to implicate him is sill not completely clear.
Interview crates a picture of her as a dangerous ruthless operative. More so then Strzok deposition. The fact that counter intelligence can be used for the purposes of political witch hunt is deeply disturbing. Of course, MadCow did not ask this female James Bond why they did not brief Trump campaign. And the fact that they did not brief Trump campaign suggest that they all were crooks.
Notable quotes:
"... She had significant roles in the Boston marathon case and in the Edward Snowden case ..."
"... So, I was special counsel to the deputy director. He, of course, runs the FBI. He`s like the COO. And so, with respect to both the Clinton investigation but also the other responsibilities of running the bureau, I tried to serve as his sort of good counsel, his eyes and ears. ..."
"... I was definitely part of the group of people who Director Comey was consulting in terms of what to do, and ultimately, I largely supported his decision. ..."
"... The two investigations couldn`t be less similar. In the Clinton investigation, you`re talking about historical events three years prior, her use of a private e-mail server that was public investigation everybody knew about. With respect to the Russia investigation, we`re talking about trying to investigate what an incredibly hostile foreign government may be doing to interfere in our election. We didn`t know what the answer was, and it would have been deeply prejudicial and incredibly unfair to candidate Trump for us to have said anything before we knew what had had happened. ..."
"... MADDOW: What about the text messages that – in which you and Strzok were talking about, your sort of fear that Trump would be elected and he said, no, we won`t let it happen? ..."
"... PAGE: I mean, by we, he`s talking about the collective we, like-minded, thoughtful, sensible people who were not going to vote this person into office. You know, obviously in retrospect, do I wish he hadn`t sent it? Yes. It`s been mutilated to death and it`s been used to bludgeon an institution I love. And it`s meant that I disappointed countless people. ..."
"... And in terms of the litigation of this issue, the question about whether or not this, as the president and his supporters claimed, reflected some inherent political bias by you and Mr. Strzok and that you had key roles to play in these investigations and therefore the investigations are biased. ..."
Dec 29, 2019 | www.msnbc.com

One person on that list was Peter Strzok who I`m told not long ago was the top counterintelligence agent at the FBI. Peter Strzok had a sterling career at the FBI, including key roles in breaking up high profile Russianintelligence operations inside the United States. He was the leadcounterintelligence agent in the FBI, and he worked on the 2016 Russiainvestigation.

He was fired in 2018 over text messages he had sent which reflected his personal political views about President Trump, critical of PresidentTrump, and frankly critical of other people in politics, too. Now, the president hounds him by name as the FBI`s sick loser, Peter

Strzok, leader of the rigged witch hunt. Investigating this president, specifically investigating the central question of his campaign`s potential involvement with the Russian interference in our 2016 election to try to get him into the White House – I mean, that national security imperative described in passionate terms today in federal court by the judge who was overseeing more of the criminal trials that have derived from that investigation than any other. The people who have actually done that work,the people how have actually talked about it or supported it or criticized it, but actually done the work, they`ve all been lined up at the proverbial firing line by this president, as he and his supporters, both in Congress and in the conservative media, have just tried to pick them up off, destroy them one by one, ending their careers one after the other, deriding them, attacking them.

But the president has reserved particularly and particularly sustained ire for one former FBI lawyer named Lisa Page. Lisa Page had been a federal prosecutor. She`d worked in the criminal division and in the national security division at the justice department. She worked at the FBI. She had significant roles in the Boston marathon case and in the Edward Snowden case . Early in 2016, Lisa Page was working a special counsel to Deputy FBI

Director Andrew McCabe. She worked on the Clinton e-mail investigation. That same year, later in 2016, she would also play a smaller role in the Russia investigation. And when that became the Mueller investigation, she briefly worked on that team as well.

... ... ...

She said, quote: The sum total of findings by I.G. Horowitz that my personal opinions had any bearing on the course of either the Clinton or Russia investigations, zero and zero. And then she concludes, cool, cool. Lisa Page is now suing the FBI and the Justice Department for what she calls a breach of privacy with them distributing her personal text messages to reporters in the middle of an open investigation. She`s also suing them for the suffering that has followed.

... ... ...

MADDOW: First, I want to talk to you about a million different things, butlet me just ask you if I got anything wrong in terms of sketching what Iunderstand is the broad outlines of your career there?

PAGE: No, not particularly. I wasn`t – I wouldn`t want to take credit for Boston or Snowden. I – it`s really how I met Andy McCabe through the Boston bombing and then through the work post-Snowden and assisting the White House in the post-intelligence reforms. But I can`t say that I played an investigative role in any one of those.

MADDOW: So you were involved in the response in those instances (ph) –

PAGE: Exactly right.

... ... ...

PAGE: You know, it`s kind of like all good news stories. It`s part good hard work and part serendipity. Post-Snowden, there were so many reforms coming out of the Obama White House that I became the point person for that effort for the FBI. Andy at the time was head of the national security program, so anything that the White House would be proposing would be different in term of the authorities and how we conducted our business would have affected his work. And so, we started working very closely together. He found me trustworthy and reliable and hopefully smart, and so he asked me to join his staff.

MADDOW: By 2016, by the early months of 2016 in that role in the FBI, you found yourself working on the Clinton e-mail investigation. Can you talk us through what your role was on that and what that work is like?

PAGER: Sure. So, I was special counsel to the deputy director. He, of course, runs the FBI. He`s like the COO. And so, with respect to both the Clinton investigation but also the other responsibilities of running the bureau, I tried to serve as his sort of good counsel, his eyes and ears. So I tried to keep both a macro view of all the various things that were happening at the FBI, but also keep my earto the ground with respect to various investigative steps and what wascoming next.

MADDOW: One of the things that you described in the interview you did this month with "The Daily Beast" was that you were aware in the context of that investigation that everything everybody did that had anything to do with that investigation was going to be very closely scrutinized and was going to be something that was going to be obviously inherently controversial. When it came to the decision to make public disclosures about the status of that investigation, Director Comey criticizing Secretary Clinton even as he was announcing there weren`t going to be prosecutions, did you have any role in that or did you have strong feelings about that at the time?

PAGE: I did. I did. I was definitely part of the group of people who Director Comey was consulting in terms of what to do, and ultimately, I largely supported his decision. This was not a typical investigation. This was not an investigation where the subject was secret and nobody knew this investigation was underway. Everyone knew that she was under investigation. Candidate Trump was ceaselessly, you know, asking to lock her up at his rallies. So, the notion we would say nothing with respect to choosing not to charge her, even though every person on the team uniformly agreed that there was no prosecutable case, that was true at the Justice Department, that was true at the FBI. So, we all agreed that we needed to say something. There may have been varying differences into how much, and how much detail to get into, but there wasn`t largely disagreement with respect to whether to say something at all.

MADDOW: And you ultimately ended up working on the Russia investigation deeper into 2016. Obviously, you were one of the people who was involved in the Justice Department and the FBI in such a way that you knew a lot about both of those cases.

Did you and the other people involved in those two cases struggle at all with this discontinuity that the Clinton investigation, for the reasons that you just described, was very public and various steps of that investigation were disclosed to the public, had a huge political impact, whereas there was a live, very provocative, very disturbing investigation into President Trump and his campaign as well and that was kept from the public? Did you struggle with that discontinuity or the fact that therewasn`t a parallel there?

PAGE: Not at all. Not at all. The two investigations couldn`t be less similar. In the Clinton investigation, you`re talking about historical events three years prior, her use of a private e-mail server that was public investigation everybody knew about. With respect to the Russia investigation, we`re talking about trying to investigate what an incredibly hostile foreign government may be doing to interfere in our election. We didn`t know what the answer was, and it would have been deeply prejudicial and incredibly unfair to candidate Trump for us to have said anything before we knew what had had happened.

MADDOW: In terms of the way this played out ultimately, you become a poster child, along with several of your colleagues, for these claims from the president, and now increasingly from the current attorney general that the Trump-Russia investigation was cooked up on the basis of false allegations or even some conspiracy specifically to hurt his chances of getting elected. Now, of course, the problem there is no one in the country knew about that investigation before people had the chance to vote on him. And I just – I mean, as an observer, I find that flabbergasting. How does that strike you and how does that comport with your understanding of that process given what you just described?

PAGE: There is no one on this set of facts who has any experience in counterintelligence who would not have made the exact same decision. This is a question about whether Russia is working with a United States person to interfere in our election. We were obligated to figure out whether that was true or not, and to figure out who might be in a position to provide that assistance.

MADDOW: In terms of the critique that I just implicitly made that if there had been some sort of conspiracy against candidate Trump, that could have just easily been leaked to the public so people would know about that when they went to the polls, is that a fair critique?

PAGE: It is a fair critique, but we were extraordinarily careful not to do anything that would allow this information to get out before we knew what we had.

... ...

MADDOW: In terms of the text messages and allegations that have been made against you, you`ve sort of explained yourself in putting those text messages in greater context in terms of what they meant and the way they were used against you. Can you explain to us tonight what was meant by, for example, the insurance policy text message? So, this is you and Peter Strzok texting about theprospect that President Trump is going to be elected, the unlikely process.

PAGE: Right. I mean, it`s an analogy. First of all, it`s not my text, so I`m sort of interpreting what I believed he meant back three years ago. But we`re using an analogy. We`re talking about whether or not we should take certain investigative steps or not based on the likelihood that he`sgoing to be president or not, right?

You have to keep in mind, if President Trump doesn`t become president, the national security risks if there is somebody in his campaign associated with Russia plummets. You`re not so worried about what Russia`s doing vis-a-vis a member of his campaign if he`s not president because you`re not going to have access to classified information, you`re not going to have access to sources and methods in our national security apparatus.

So, the insurance policy was an analogy. It`s like an insurance policy when you`re 40. You don`t expect to die when you`re 40, yet you still have an insurance policy.

MADDOW: So don`t just hope that he`s not going be elected and therefore not press forward with the investigation hoping, but rather press forward with the investigation just in case he does get in there.

PAGE: Exactly.

MADDOW: What about the text messages that – in which you and Strzok were talking about, your sort of fear that Trump would be elected and he said, no, we won`t let it happen?

PAGE: I mean, by we, he`s talking about the collective we, like-minded, thoughtful, sensible people who were not going to vote this person into office. You know, obviously in retrospect, do I wish he hadn`t sent it? Yes. It`s been mutilated to death and it`s been used to bludgeon an institution I love. And it`s meant that I disappointed countless people. But this is – this is a snapshot in time carrying on a conversation that had happened earlier in the day that reflected a broad sense of he`s notgoing to be president. We, the democratic people of this country, are notgoing to let it happen.

MADDOW: And in terms of the litigation of this issue, the question about whether or not this, as the president and his supporters claimed, reflected some inherent political bias by you and Mr. Strzok and that you had key roles to play in these investigations and therefore the investigations are biased. I mean, the inspector general has looked at that, been critical of these expressions of strong political views, but also said that there was no indication that political bias affected any decisions in either these investigations, full stop.

You responded to that on Twitter by saying: cool, cool. Like basically good to know but it won`t make a difference?

PAGE: It won`t make a difference and it`s two years too late, right? It`s been three straight years of investigation by the inspector general. Dozens of lawyers and investigators poring over every investigative step that I took, every text and every email, and I realized what I`ve known from the beginning which is that my personal views had no impact on the course of either investigation. But to my "cool, cool" point, two days later, you see Lindsey Graham in the Senate spend 40 minutes reading text messages again. These are three years old. They`re – they`ve been described as immaterial ultimately by the inspector general and yet we`re still talking about them.

... ... ...

[Dec 29, 2019] Tulsi is a very strategic thinker

Dec 29, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

gulfgal98 on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 1:38pm

Tulsi is a very strategc thinker

@earthling1 I honestly do believe that she thinks long term and, for whatever reason, her decision not to run for her own congressional seat is a part of her long term plans. Despite her being smeared over and over by the media, Tulsi has the unique ability to effectively expand the electorate by appealing to rational people, regardless of party affiliation.

The establishment is terrified of her message. Otherwise, why would they be attacking her so viciously despite her reported low polling numbers?

While Tulsi is a practicing Hindu, she was raised in a multi faith family with her father being a still practicing Catholic. And she mentioned that they had attended a Baptist church in South Carolina on Christmas Eve. I noticed that her parents were in attendance at the dinner that her brother in law and his mother prepared.

is detonating.
Someone is gonna have to clean up the debri and make some kind of use of what is left over. Recycle the trash. Make it green. Bernie is past his best by date.
This is what I have suspected all along. To save the Party, we must completely destroy it.
Even if it means four more years of Trump. By then, climate change will be obvious to even the dullest among us.
Tulsi is angling to be there to clean up the mess.
IMHO

Alligator Ed on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 2:11pm
Tulsi gains by not running for Congress in 2020

@gulfgal98 She will not be campaigning as a Dem this cycle, unless perhaps Bernie gets the nomination. The severance from Congress means de facto severance from the Democrat Party. The stink of said party becomes more and more apparent daily as Shiftless, No-Nads, Nervous Nancy et. al. continue their demeaning and angering stupidity. More Dems are getting turned off by the House sham impeachment daily.

#2 I honestly do believe that she thinks long term and, for whatever reason, her decision not to run for her own congressional seat is a part of her long term plans. Despite her being smeared over and over by the media, Tulsi has the unique ability to effectively expand the electorate by appealing to rational people, regardless of party affiliation.

The establishment is terrified of her message. Otherwise, why would they be attacking her so viciously despite her reported low polling numbers?

While Tulsi is a practicing Hindu, she was raised in a multi faith family with her father being a still practicing Catholic. And she mentioned that they had attended a Baptist church in South Carolina on Christmas Eve. I noticed that her parents were in attendance at the dinner that her brother in law and his mother prepared.

Cassiodorus on Fri, 12/27/2019 - 6:42am
Do you have other signs --

@earthling1 that suggest that the Democratic Party is "detonating"?

It looks to me that the Democrats are settling in for a long period of existence as America's Vichy party. The Democrats are that party that exists so that those Americans who are afraid of Republican policymakers can vote for them so that, when elected, they can find clever ways of giving away power to the Republicans.

As for destroying the Democratic Party, we are on the same page.

is detonating.
Someone is gonna have to clean up the debri and make some kind of use of what is left over. Recycle the trash. Make it green. Bernie is past his best by date.
This is what I have suspected all along. To save the Party, we must completely destroy it.
Even if it means four more years of Trump. By then, climate change will be obvious to even the dullest among us.
Tulsi is angling to be there to clean up the mess.
IMHO

earthling1 on Fri, 12/27/2019 - 12:30pm
I still see

@Cassiodorus
friends and family demexiting even today. Many of my union buddies are still pissed that the union bosses supported Her in 2016.
The teacher strikes last year and before showed the leadership out of step with the rack and file.
Now, in France the union leadership is being ignored entirely by the membership and see them as sell-outs to the labor movment.
Ditto in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and numerous other countries around the globe.
It's the same all over the world. Working people are seeing their representation being deminished by union leaders.
IMHO

#2 that suggest that the Democratic Party is "detonating"?

It looks to me that the Democrats are settling in for a long period of existence as America's Vichy party. The Democrats are that party that exists so that those Americans who are afraid of Republican policymakers can vote for them so that, when elected, they can find clever ways of giving away power to the Republicans.

As for destroying the Democratic Party, we are on the same page.

Cassiodorus on Fri, 12/27/2019 - 1:41pm
yeah --

@earthling1 Those French union bosses, btw, really like that lockstep marching. One of the primary reasons for the current general strike is that the union bosses in France finally gave their okay to the whole thing. Or at least this is what my source, who hails from Montpellier, tells me.

As for your friends and family, Demexiting has one really big advantage -- they will no longer be persecuted for not voting for Democrats. Can they still vote for Bernie Sanders?

#2.5
friends and family demexiting even today. Many of my union buddies are still pissed that the union bosses supported Her in 2016.
The teacher strikes last year and before showed the leadership out of step with the rack and file.
Now, in France the union leadership is being ignored entirely by the membership and see them as sell-outs to the labor movment.
Ditto in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and numerous other countries around the globe.
It's the same all over the world. Working people are seeing their representation being deminished by union leaders.
IMHO

doh1304 on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 12:22am
Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway)

her chances will be much better in 2024 if Bernie wins in 2020. She will have a base to lead in place rather than in the wilderness. In short, there will still be an America.

davidgmillsatty on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 11:57am
Benie thinks he is immortal

@doh1304 So maybe not should he win and hangs on for all four. (Two big hypotheticals). And unless he picks her for VP, she will still be in the wilderness in 2024.

her chances will be much better in 2024 if Bernie wins in 2020. She will have a base to lead in place rather than in the wilderness. In short, there will still be an America.

Situational Lefty on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 12:59am
TULSI 2020!

If she pisses off those people, she must be doing something right!

[Dec 29, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Quo Vadis: If the Dem Party is going to be kaput

Dec 29, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Tulsi Gabbard: Quo Vadis?

Alligator Ed on Wed, 12/25/2019 - 11:02pm After bravely contesting a nomination she knows she cannot win, Tulsi Gabbard has and continues to exhibit a tenacious adherence to achievement of purpose. What is that purpose? I believe it is evident if you only let your eyes see and your ears hear. Listen to what she says. Looks at what she does.

//www.youtube.com/embed/F1bVz4nNNnA?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

Humble surroundings. Real people. Good food.

What this does is obvious. However, please forgive me if I proceed to explain the meaning. People see what apparently is her home milieu. I've been to Filipino homes for dinner as many of my nurse friends were Filipino. Tulsi is so human. Despite Hindu belief, she is respectful to the presence and perhaps the essence of Jesus, and does not sound pandering or hypocritical.

Getting to know Tulsi at the beginning of her hoped-for (by me) political ascendancy. Get in on almost the ground floor of what will become an extremely powerful force in future American life.

Why? What's the hurry?

The more support and the earlier Tulsi receives it propel the campaign. That's what momentum means: a self-generating growing strength.

One doesn't have to be a Tulsi supporter to hopefully receive some ideas which may not have occurred to you. This essay does not concern any specific Gabbard policy. What I write here is what I perceive of her character and thus her selected path. Mind-reading, perhaps. Arm-chair speculation, possibly.

Tulsi has completed phase 2A in her career. The little that I know of her early life, especially politically (such as how she voted in HI state legislature) limits a deep understanding which such knowledge would provide. As the tree is bent, etc.

We are in Phase 2B. Tulsi, as I wrote in another essay, is letting the tainted shroud of Democrat corruption fall off her shoulders without any effort of her own. The Democrat party is eating itself alive. It is all things to all people at once. That is a philosophy incapable of satisfaction.

Omni Democraticorundum in tres partes est (pardon the reference to the opening of Caesar's Gallic Wars, with liberal substitution by me).

The Dems trifurcate and the division will be neither pleasant nor reconcilable. Tribalism will be reborn after Trump crushes whomever in 2020.

Tribe one: urban/techno/überkinden.

Tribe two: leftward bound to a place where no politician has ever ventured. Not socialism. Not Communism. We could call it Fantasy Land, although I fear Disney owns that name.

Tribe three: progressive realists. By using such positive wording, you will correctly suspect my bias as to which Tribe I belong to.

Once again, policy will not be discussed. Only strategy and reality. Can't have good strategy without a good grasp of reality. This is why Establidems are bereft of thematic variability. For the past 3.3 years, they have been singing from a hymn book containing but one song. You know the title. Orange Man Bad. Yeah, that's it. If they don't like that title, we establidems have another song for ya. It's called Orange Man Bad. Like that one, huh? Wazzat, ya didn't like the song the first time. Hey, we thought the song would grown on you.

Them Dems, noses up, can't see the sidewalk. Oops. Stepped in something there, huh? Oh, yeah like the Impeachment.

But I digress: The latter part of Phase 2B is not clear. Tulsi will continue to accept small donor contributions, even after not obtaining the nomination next year. Public appearances will be important but should be low key with little press attention. Press attention is something however that won't be available when most desirable. What else Tulsi will do may be to form a nucleus of like-minded activists, thinkers, and other supporters to promote an agenda for a more liberal, tolerant society.

If the Dem Party is going to be kaput . . .

@Alligator Ed

. . . ah, never mind.

Don't be surprised if even Warren will fail to gather the 15% of votes needed in each early primary state to get awarded any delegates.

It's gonna Biden vs Bernie.

Bernie or Dust. Or she who shall not be named in which case even worse (and I don't mean Tulsi).

edit/add: Well, lookee here, hot off the presses as it were:
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/26/can-bernie-sanders-win-2020-ele...

Alligator Ed on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 2:05pm
from your citation: If Sanders' candidacy ....

@Wally @Wally

If Sanders' candidacy continues to be taken seriously, he will eventually be subjected to the scrutiny that Warren and Biden have faced for prolonged stretches. That includes an examination of his electability. "That conversation has never worked well for anyone," Pfeiffer said.

What a bunch of hypocritical horseshit. Bernie not getting scrutiny? In 2016, when not being derided for this, that or the other, Bernie was always scrutinized. There are only two things voters have learned since the DNC 2016 convention:

1. Bernie had a heart attack
2. Bernie supported H. Rodent Clinton in the general election.

Wally on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 3:08pm
The reference was to 2020

@Alligator Ed

. . . and to the much noted "Bernie blackout" up until now this time around.

It's gotten to the point given the polls and the first primary in being held in about a month where TPTB in conjunction with the MSM can no longer afford to turn a blind eye towards Bernie. It's gonna get really nasty.

The most recent tropes on the twitters, probably in response to Brock talking point memos, have been pushing Bernie as an anti-Semite and him purportedly triggering rape survivors. Of course it's horsehit but it's the propagandistic method of the Big Lie.

I'm genuinely curious. How will you react if Tulsi endorses the Dem nominee and it ain't Bernie? Bernie's endorsement of she-who-shall-not-be-named in 2016 seems to have pretty much completely soured him to you. Endorsing Biden better? Or at least acceptable? Not for me. Bernie doing so in 2016 I could understand and forgive. But this is my last go round absent a Bernie miracle.

#2.1.1 #2.1.1

If Sanders' candidacy continues to be taken seriously, he will eventually be subjected to the scrutiny that Warren and Biden have faced for prolonged stretches. That includes an examination of his electability. "That conversation has never worked well for anyone," Pfeiffer said.

What a bunch of hypocritical horseshit. Bernie not getting scrutiny? In 2016, when not being derided for this, that or the other, Bernie was always scrutinized. There are only two things voters have learned since the DNC 2016 convention:

1. Bernie had a heart attack
2. Bernie supported H. Rodent Clinton in the general election.

Alligator Ed on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 3:55pm
Tulsi's support if Bernie's not nominated

@Wally She might back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not campaign otherwise.

#2.1.1.1

. . . and to the much noted "Bernie blackout" up until now this time around.

It's gotten to the point given the polls and the first primary in being held in about a month where TPTB in conjunction with the MSM can no longer afford to turn a blind eye towards Bernie. It's gonna get really nasty.

The most recent tropes on the twitters, probably in response to Brock talking point memos, have been pushing Bernie as an anti-Semite and him purportedly triggering rape survivors. Of course it's horsehit but it's the propagandistic method of the Big Lie.

I'm genuinely curious. How will you react if Tulsi endorses the Dem nominee and it ain't Bernie? Bernie's endorsement of she-who-shall-not-be-named in 2016 seems to have pretty much completely soured him to you. Endorsing Biden better? Or at least acceptable? Not for me. Bernie doing so in 2016 I could understand and forgive. But this is my last go round absent a Bernie miracle.

Wally on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 5:17pm
I don't think anyone other than Bernie or Yang would want Tulsi

@Alligator Ed

. . . to campaign in support of their candidacies.

Maybe Biden will accept her support. I've still never been able to figure why she never and probably still won't take any shots at his warmongering and otherwise cruddy record regarding domestic affairs.

#2.1.1.1.1 She might back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not campaign otherwise.

by Alligator Ed on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 6:28pm
She was working her way up the food chain

@Wally That's what intelligent predators do.

#2.1.1.1.1.1

. . . to campaign in support of their candidacies.

Maybe Biden will accept her support. I've still never been able to figure why she never and probably still won't take any shots at his warmongering and otherwise cruddy record regarding domestic affairs.

wokkamile on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 5:29pm
Well, she wouldn't

@Alligator Ed @Alligator Ed be unfamiliar with the neutral position. Though I wonder if she would feel comfortable dipping into that well again given how much grief she got the last time.

Of course, if she again puts it in Neutral, and doesn't support the D nominee (anyone but Bloomberg), she will be finished as a Dem pol. She might as well go off and start a Neutral Party.

#2.1.1.1.1 She might back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not campaign otherwise.

by Alligator Ed on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 6:30pm
She IS finished as a Dem

@wokkamile Her dismissal papers will be submitted to her after she is barred entry into the DNC convention, regardless of how many delegates she may have won.

#2.1.1.1.1.1 #2.1.1.1.1.1 be unfamiliar with the neutral position. Though I wonder if she would feel comfortable dipping into that well again given how much grief she got the last time.

Of course, if she again puts it in Neutral, and doesn't support the D nominee (anyone but Bloomberg), she will be finished as a Dem pol. She might as well go off and start a Neutral Party.

Wally on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 8:38pm
Will Tulsi win any delegates?

@Alligator Ed

Don't forget that 15% state threshold for eligibility to be awarded delegates.

#2.1.1.1.1.1.2 Her dismissal papers will be submitted to her after she is barred entry into the DNC convention, regardless of how many delegates she may have won.

Alligator Ed on Thu, 12/26/2019 - 9:40pm
My crystal ball has developed cataracts

@Wally Thus my powers of predicting the future have dimmed accordingly. But two things haven't dimmed:

1. It is readily apparent that the DNC won't let Bernie win. They'll rob him of votes in CA (100% probability) and NY (95% probability), etc.

2. The Demonrats will get destroyed in 2020 up and down ballot except in the fiefdoms of Californicate and Ny-no-nah-nah.

What, pray good Sir, do you predict or is that an impossibility at this time?

#2.1.1.1.1.1.2.1

Don't forget that 15% state threshold for eligibility to be awarded delegates.

Wally on Fri, 12/27/2019 - 6:54am
I certainly won't be surprised if Bernie gets cheated or worse

@Alligator Ed

I will be surprised if Tulsi gets so much as one delegate.

More than a few knowledgeable people think he has a very good shot of winning California. I am less optimistic about NYS but I think he will do well enough to get a good number of delegates especially if he does well in the earlier primaries (NYS comes April 28).

I don't feel solidly about making any kind of predictions at this point but given the nature of the Democratic Party, I don't see it as falling into oblivion anytime soon or in our lifetimes.

As far as Bernie goes, I am not optimistic but I still have some hope. I still fervantly believe that his candidacy is the best chance we will have in our lifetimes of bringing about any substantial change -- and if he and his critical mass of supporters can't pull it off this time around, we're all phluckled big time, even alligators, in terms of combating climate change and putting a kabosh on endless wars. I wish you good future luck with Tulsi though. I just don't see it. But I've been wrong on more than one occasion in my life.

[Dec 29, 2019] It should be abundantly clear by now that the Democratic Party leadership will be selecting a CIA connected candidate in 2020 in all ways identical to Hillary Clinton but perhaps with a less tawdry past and less of an appetite for Goldman-Sachs speaking fees by Louis Proyect

Notable quotes:
"... Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse ..."
"... By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all. ..."
Nov 09, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

Ever since the Democratic Party abandoned its New Deal legacy and adopted the neoliberal centrism associated with the Carter presidency and then cast in stone by the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985, each election loss has generated a chorus of remonstrations in the left-liberal press about the need to run "progressive" candidates if the party wants to win. The latest instance of this was a post to the Jacobin FB page that stated: "By running to the right, Democrats insist on losing twice: at the polls and in constructing an inspiring agenda. Bold left-wing politics are our only hope for long-term, substantive victory."

The question of why Democrats are so okay with losing has to be examined closely. In some countries, elections have huge consequences, especially in Latin America where a job as an elected official might be not only a source of income for a socialist parliamentarian but a trigger for a civil war or coup as occurred in Costa Rica in 1948 and in Chile in 1973 respectively.

In the 2010 midterm elections, there was a massive loss of seats in the House of Representatives for the Democrats. In this month's midterm elections, the Democrats hoped that a "Blue Wave" would do for them what the 2010 midterms did for the Republicans -- put them in the driver's seat. It turned out to be more of a "Blue Spray", not to speak of the toothless response of House leader Nancy Pelosi who spoke immediately about how the Democrats can reach across the aisle to the knuckle-dragging racists of the Republican Party.

Out of curiosity, I went to Wikipedia to follow up on what happened to the "losers" in 2010. Did they have to go on unemployment? Like Republicans who got voted out this go-round, Democrats had no trouble lining up jobs as lobbyists. Allen Boyd from Florida sent a letter to Obama after the BP oil spill in 2010 asking him to back up BP's claim that seafood in the Gulf of Mexico was okay to eat. After being voted out of office, he joined the Twenty-First Century Group, a lobbying firm founded by a former Republican Congressman from Texas named Jack Fields. A 1980 article on Fields describes him as a protégé of ultraright leader Paul Weyrich.

Glenn Nye, who lost his job as a Virginia congressman, his considerable CV that included working for the Agency for International Development (AID) and serving in various capacities during the occupation of Iraq to land a nice gig as Senior Political Advisor for the Hanover Investment Group.

John Spratt from South Carolina was described by Dow Jones News as "one of the staunchest fiscal conservatives among House Democrats." That was enough for him to land a job with Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that was supposed to come up with a strategy to reduce the deficit. Just the sort of thing that was calculated to lift the American economy out of the worst slump since the 1930s. Not.

Pennsylvania's Chris Carney was a helluva Democrat. From 2002 to 2004, he was a counterterrorism analyst for the Bush administration. He not only reported to Douglas Feith in the Office of Special Plans and at the Defense Intelligence Agency, researching links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but served as an interrogator in Guantanamo. These qualifications landed him a job as director of homeland security and policy strategy for BAE Systems when the House of Representatives gig ended. A British security and munitions powerhouse, BAE won a contract worth £4.4bn to supply the Saudis with 72 fighter jets – some of which were used to bomb Red Cross and Physician Without Borders hospitals in Yemen.

With such crumb-bums losing in 2010, you'd think that the Democrats would be convinced that their best bet for winning elections would be to disavow candidates that had ties to the national security apparatus and anything that smacked of the DLC's assault on the welfare state. Not exactly. When the candidates are female, that might work in the party's favor like sugar-coating a bitter pill.

In Virginia, former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger and retired Navy Commander Elaine Luria defeated Republican incumbents. Air Force veteran Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and former Navy pilot Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey also helped the Democrats regain the House. Sherill calculated that moving to the center would serve her own and the party's interests. She told MSNBC: "As a Navy helicopter pilot I never flew Republican missions or Democratic missions, I would have had a very short career. This is something I do think vets bring to the table, this willingness to work with everyone."

An article titled "' Montclair Mikie' Sherrill recast as 'Moderate Mikie' as Webber attacks in NJ House race " described her Road to Damascus conversion to DLC principles:

For Sherrill, a newcomer to politics, the 11th has proved to be a tricky terrain. She is seen as a progressive, but appears wary of carrying the "Trump resistance" banner into the fray. At Wednesday's debate, Sherrill was determined to show she is more Morris Plains than Montclair.

There were no heated vows to fight Trump, even though being "appalled" by the president was what motivated her to run in the first place. The Nov. 6 midterms loom as a referendum on Trump's presidency, but you would never have guessed that watching Wednesday's contest.

Sherrill repeatedly promised to be bipartisan -- a far cry from the combative, confrontational tone that many in the party's grass roots are demanding.

On tax policy she sounded more centrist Republican than mainstream liberal Democrat, and she refused to endorse issues like free community college tuition, which has become a popular talking point for Democrats and was launched by Gov. Phil Murphy this summer.

"Without understanding how that would be paid for, I haven't supported it because it sounds like it would raise taxes on our families,'" she said.

The moderate tone puzzled some of her ardent "resistance" activists who mobilized around her candidacy.

For Eric Fritsch, 32, a Teamster for the film and television industry from West Orange, it was jarring to hear Sherrill oppose Democratic Party wish-list items like free community college tuition or "Medicare-for-all" coverage out of fear that it may raise taxes. She used the same excuse to sidestep supporting a "carbon tax" to reduce global warming.

"By going on the defensive about taxes she is accepting a Republican framing that we don't want to be responsible with taxes in the first place,'" said Fritsch, who insisted that he remains a "very enthusiastic" Sherrill supporter.

It should be abundantly clear by now that the Democratic Party leadership will be selecting a candidate in 2020 in all ways identical to Hillary Clinton but perhaps with a less tawdry past and less of an appetite for Goldman-Sachs speaking fees. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo, et al have no intention of allowing upstarts like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to spoil their plans, even if it means a second term for Donald Trump.

No matter. Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara urges his readers and DSA comrades to plunge ahead trying to consolidate a "socialist" caucus in the Democratic Party. From his perspective, working in the Democratic Party seems to be the "most promising place for advancing left politics, at least in the short term." Keep in mind that Sherrill raised $1.9 million for her campaign and my old boss from Salomon Brothers Michael Bloomberg ponied up another $1.8 million just for her TV ads. Does anybody really think that "socialist" backed candidates will be able to compete with people like Sherrill in the primaries? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to defeat the hack Joe Crowley on a shoestring but that was something of a fluke. Until there is a massive shake-up in American society that finally reveals the Democratic Party to be the capitalist tool it has been since Andrew Jackson's presidency, it is likely that a combination of big money and political inertia will keep the Democratic Party an agent of reaction.

Furthermore, the takeover of the House might turn out to be a hollow victory in the light of how Trump rules. His strategy hasn't been to push through legislation except for the tax cut. Remember the blather about investing in infrastructure? His minions in Congress have no intention of proposing a trillion or so dollars in highway or bridge repair, etc. With Nancy Pelosi fecklessly talking about how the two parties can collaborate on infrastructure, you can only wonder whether she has been asleep for the past two years.

Donald Trump has been transforming American society not by legislation but by using his executive powers to put people in charge of government agencies who are inimical to their stated goals. It is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse as Malcolm X once put it. Two days ago, the NY Times wrote about how the "Trump Administration Spares Corporate Wrongdoers Billions in Penalties". It did not need legislation to help big banks rip off the public. All it took was naming former head of BankOne Joseph Otting comptroller of the currency. Senator Sherrod Brown, one of the few Democrats with a spine, called Trump out: "The president's choice for watchdog of America's largest banks is someone who signed a consent order -- over shady foreclosure practices -- with the very agency he's been selected to run."

For all of the dozens of articles about how Trump is creating a fascist regime, hardly any deal with the difference between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Hitler created a massive bureaucracy that ran a quasi-planned economy with generous social benefits that put considerable restraints on the bourgeoisie. Like FDR, he was taking measures to save capitalism. Perhaps if the USA had a social and economic crisis as deep as Germany's and left parties as massive as those in Germany, FDR might have embarked on a much more ambitious concentration camp program, one that would have interred trade unionists as well as Japanese-Americans. Maybe even Jews if they complained too much.

By contrast, Trump is imposing a regime that was incubated long ago by people such as Grover "Starve the Beast" Norquist and every other libertarian think-tank funded by the Koch Brothers et al. The big bourgeoisie might not like the bad taste, racism and thuggish behavior of the Trump administration but they couldn't be happier with the results. This is an elected government that has fulfilled its deepest policy aspirations and that shows a willingness to push the Democrats back on their heels, so much so that someone like Mikie Sherrill lacks the courage to defend policies that might win elections down the road. After all, if she is unseated, she can always go back to a job as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey. What happens to someone working in Walmart's is not her business, after all.

[Dec 29, 2019] People you are voting for actually serve as representatives of MIC, not you: House Dems Unanimously Vote to Condemn Withdrawal From Syria

Dec 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

yaridanjo , 21 minutes ago link

Congress' constitutional duty is putting Israel first!

Reality_checkers , 18 minutes ago link

MIGA!

yaridanjo , 11 minutes ago link

You can find here who the warmongers in congress are:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/116-2019/h560

the warmongers voted 'yea' to get their bribes from the Rothschild Banking Cartel!

[Dec 29, 2019] I can think of a couple of reasons for Erdogan's Libyan adventure. First, he'd rather have those battle tested jihadis in Libya than on his border or in his country.

Dec 29, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Lyttennburgh , 28 December 2019 at 04:10 PM

Re: Idlibian "moderate rebels"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EMynmroXUAYTexQ.jpg
^Judking by the patches, we have a "jihadi bingo" man here!

Off-topic

TTG, any comments about Erdogan's apparent desire to channel part of *his* Idlibian murtads-sahavats to Lybia in support of *his* clients?

The Twisted Genius -> Lyttennburgh... , 28 December 2019 at 07:59 PM
Lyttennburgh, I can think of a couple of reasons for Erdogan's Libyan adventure. First, he'd rather have those battle tested jihadis in Libya than on his border or in his country. Second, he may have his eyes on Mediterranean oil. Lastly, he may see a friendly Libyan government as an ally or province of his Ottoman Empire dream. No matter what the reason, he's setting himself up for another confrontation with Russia.

[Dec 29, 2019] Russian Adventurism in Libya by Stephen Lendman

Dec 29, 2019 | stephenlendman.org

Russian Adventurism in Libya?

by Stephen Lendman ( stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman )

Combating the scourge of US-supported terrorists in Syria at the behest of its government aside, Russia's involvement elsewhere is diplomatic, including in Libya.

Obama regime-led aggression in 2011 transformed Africa's most developed nation into a charnel house, a dystopian failed state, endless war raging with no resolution in prospect.

Wherever wars rage, chances are US dirty hands are involved, clearly the case in multiple countries, including Libya.

Russia is not involved in the country militarily. Claims otherwise are fabricated. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov strongly denied them, saying:

"I categorically refute speculations of this kind. We are acting in the interest of the Libyan settlement," adding:

"We are supporting the existing effort, including through the United Nations. We maintain a dialogue with those who somehow influence the situation."

"We do not think that there is any grounds for such statements, such fiction, but this is not the first time that US media spread different speculations, wicked rumors, falsehoods targeting us."

"We have already gotten used to this, and we take it in stride. However, I have to acknowledge that recurrent hoaxes of this kind exercise a negative influence on the sentiment of the US domestic public, and the general atmosphere in the United States."

"Unfortunately it does not promote normalization of our ties, although we strive for it."

A November NYT propaganda piece falsely accused Russia of involvement militarily in Libya -- instead of focusing on how the Obama regime raped and destroyed the country.

Trump hardliners support warlord Khalifa Haftar, a longtime CIA asset, a former US resident, commander of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) -- waging war on the UN-backed Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA).

Since US-led aggression toppled Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 and sodomized him to death, the US continued to wage secret drone war on the country, conducting hundreds of strikes, continuing since Trump took office.

The Times falsely claimed "Russian mercenaries (and) snipers" are involved in Libya -- no evidence cited proving what's not so, adding:

Hundreds of "Russian fighters (are) part of a broad campaign by the Kremlin to reassert its influence across the Middle East and Africa (sic)."

"It has introduced advanced Sukhoi jets, coordinated missile strikes, and precision-guided artillery, as well as the snipers -- the same playbook that made Moscow a kingmaker in the Syrian civil war (sic)."

There's nothing remotely "civil" about US aggression in Syria. No evidence suggests Russia is involved militarily in Libya with heavy or other weapons.

The Kremlin didn't intervene in the country on behalf of anyone. Its involvement is diplomatic to try resolving the mess US aggression created -- what the Times and other establishment media cheerled.

Days earlier, Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed false claims about Kremlin involvement in Libya militarily, saying:

Moscow officials maintain diplomatic contact "with all current Libyan political forces," adding:

Congressional hardliners drafted the so-called Libya Stabilization Act -- imposing sanctions on Russia for its "imaginary military presence in" the country.

The measure falsely accuses Moscow of "military intervention," blaming what doesn't exist on destabilizing the country, ignoring how US-led NATO smashed Libya, massacring countless thousands, displacing many more, destroying their livelihoods and well-being

"I wonder how US lawmakers describe the illegal US armed forces presence in Syria or the reckless actions of the (Obama regime) in Libya to their voters," Zakharova stressed.

The Times propaganda piece barely acknowledged Trump regime support for Haftar, mentioning it buried well into its article, ignoring its April 2019 piece, headlined:

"Trump Endorses an Aspiring Libyan Strongman, Reversing Policy" -- supporting Haftar.

Endless wars and chaos serve US imperial interests. Peace and stability defeat its aims.

Trump regime hardliners and the Times are likely concerned that Russian diplomatic involvement in Libya might resolve endless war.

Even at peace, it could take a generation to undo the wreckage US-led aggression caused.

For survivors with lost loved ones, there's no way to undo their loss.

VISIT MY WEBSITE: stephenlendman.org ( Home – Stephen Lendman ). Contact at [email protected] .

[Dec 29, 2019] We received a wonderful Christmas gift from the Department of Schadenfreude in the form of this story from the Washington Post about MadCow

Dec 29, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

" Rachel Maddow rooted for the Steele dossier to be true. Then it fell apart ":

She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings -- a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.

[Dec 29, 2019] Maddow Meltdown In Defense To OAN Lawsuit, Host Argues Her Words Are Not Facts

Dec 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

subgen , 57 minutes ago link

This Russian stuff has a longer half life than herpes

Nth Degree , 1 hour ago link

Whiners. They're all whiners. I don't understand why Maddow is worried. Hell, if she goes to the slammer she'll have her pick of all those incarcerated Honeys with which she will reside.

Decimus Lunius Luvenalis , 1 hour ago link

When you realize that Rachel Maddow is actually Joe Scarborough with different makeup....

dlweld , 2 hours ago link

You have to assume that Rachel is a Russian mole - how else can you explain her so effectively working to destroy the credibility of the Western media. She talks to her audience like she thinks she's on Sesame Street - Rachel: folks can pick up when they're being patronized - it's getting tired.

[Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Imagine millions of government employees paid for by America's tax payer class, involved in covert operations undermining nation states for the benefit of war mongering shadow overlords counting on more never ending chaos feeding their hunger for power. ..."
"... This isn't Orwell's 1984, this Team America on opioids. ..."
"... Senior OPCW official had orders from US/ the Donald. Remember that the Donald bombed Syria based on this fake report , after a false flag done by Al Qaeda's artistic branch, the White Helmets. ..."
"... Pray, do tell where are the consequences for these literal demons that engaged in war crimes? It is quite clear: as long as you are a member of the establishment, you can do whatever the f*ck you want. ..."
"... Third rate script, third rate actors and crooked investigators. TPTB seem to have a plan worked out. Their problem now is that we, the hoi-polloi, have seen it all before, many times, and we can now recognise ******** when it's used to try to influence us. ..."
"... If this is not lamentable enough, the OPCW – whose final report came to more than a hundred pages and which even issued an easy-to-read precis version for journalists – now slams shut its steel doors in the hope of preventing even more information reaching the press. ..."
"... Instead of these pieces concentrating on the whistleblower how about putting a little heat on the 50 lying bastards who initiated the coverup? ..."
"... The destruction of the countries of the Middle East for the sake of a dwarf with giant ambitions is the most stupid thing the United States has done over the past 30 years in its foreign policy. And yes, all the wars in the Middle East were grounded in lies. And the Americans paid for it all from start to finish. When Americans realize that they need to defend their national interests, and not other people's national interests, maybe something in the Middle East will change for the better. True, I am afraid that with the hight level of stupidity and shortsightedness that is common among Americans, the United States is more likely to be destroyed faster. No offense. ..."
"... And I propose to remember the Syrian Christians who were destroyed by the Saudi Wahhabis, hired by the CIA with the money of American taxpayers and at the request of Israel. Until the Americans begin to investigate the activities of the CIA (and this activity causes the United States only harm), the responsibility for this genocide (you heard right) will be on the American nation. It turns out that in the Middle East you are primarily destroying Christians. How interesting, why such zeal. ..."
"... According to whistleblower testimony and leaked documents, OPCW officials raised alarm about the suppression of critical findings that undermine the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Haddad's editors at Newsweek rejected his attempts to cover the story. "If I don't find another position in journalism because of this, I'm perfectly happy to accept that consequence," Haddad says. "It's not desirable. But there is no way I could have continued in that job knowing that I couldn't report something like this." ..."
"... New leaks continue to expose a cover-up by the OPCW – the world's top chemical weapons watchdog – over a critical event in Syria. Documents, emails, and testimony from OPCW officials have raised major doubts about the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. The leaked OPCW information has been released in pieces by Wikileaks. The latest documents contain a number of significant revelations – including that that about 20 OPCW officials voiced concerns that their scientific findings and on-the-ground evidence was suppressed and excluded. ..."
Dec 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Senior OPCW Official Busted: Leaked Email Exposes Orders To "Delete All Traces" Of Dissent On Douma by Tyler Durden Sat, 12/28/2019 - 10:30 0 SHARES

Via AlMasdarNews.com,

Wikileaks has released their fourth set of leaks from the OPCW's Douma investigation, revealing new details about the alleged deletion of important information regarding the fact-finding mission.

RELEASE: OPCW-Douma Docs 4. Four leaked documents from the OPCW reveal that toxicologists ruled out deaths from chlorine exposure and a senior official ordered the deletion of the dissenting engineering report from OPCW's internal repository of documents. https://t.co/ndK4sRikNk

-- WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 27, 2019

"One of the documents is an e-mail exchange dated 27 and 28 February between members of the fact finding mission (FFM) deployed to Douma and the senior officials of the OPCW. It includes an e-mail from Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW , where he instructs that an engineering report from Ian Henderson should be removed from the secure registry of the organisation," WikiLeaks writes. Included in the email is the following directive:

" Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive] And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA.'"

According to Wikileaks, the main finding of Henderson, who inspected the sites in Douma, was that two of the cylinders were most likely manually placed at the site, rather than dropped.

"The main finding of Henderson, who inspected the sites in Douma and two cylinders that were found on the site of the alleged attack, was that they were more likely manually placed there than dropped from a plane or helicopter from considerable heights. His findings were omitted from the official final OPCW report on the Douma incident," the Wikileaks report said.

It must be remembered that the U.S. launched an attack on Damascus, Syria on April 14, 2018 over alleged chemical weapons usage by pro-Assad forces at Douma.

AP file image.

Another document released Friday is minutes from a meeting on 6 June 2018 where four staff members of the OPCW had discussions with "three Toxicologists/Clinical pharmacologists, one bioanalytical and toxicological chemist" (all specialists in chemical weapons, according to the minutes).

Minutes from an OPCW meeting with toxicologists specialized in chemical weapons: "the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was
no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure". https://t.co/j5Jgjiz8UY pic.twitter.com/vgPaTtsdQN

-- WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 27, 2019

The purpose of this meeting was two-fold. The first objective was "to solicit expert advice on the value of exhuming suspected victims of the alleged chemical attack in Douma on 7 April 2018". According to the minutes, the OPCW team was advised by the experts that there would be little use in conducting exhumations. The second point was "To elicit expert opinions from the forensic toxicologists regarding the observed and reported symptoms of the alleged victims."

More specifically, " whether the symptoms observed in victims were consistent with exposure to chlorine or other reactive chlorine gas."

According to the minutes leaked Friday: "With respect to the consistency of the observed and reported symptoms of the alleged victims with possible exposure to chlorine gas or similar, the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure ."

The OPCW team members wrote that the key "take-away message" from the meeting was "that the symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified".

* * *

See full details at Wikileaks.org

JohnFrodo , 28 minutes ago link

pity the human pawns at the center of this mess.

africoman , 38 minutes ago link

There has been a Newsweek reporter who quite over editorial block of this OPCW case here also another interview by Grayzone

https://youtu.be/qqK8KgxuCPI

The isisrahell have such long hand to pull the plug any stories implicating their crime in progress otherwise they can put out some bs spins as bombshell reporting about US lies in Afghanistan war on their wapo for public for those who read it was nothing important revealed except being a misdirected na

ponyboy99 , 40 minutes ago link

If you want to pay off that student loan you're going to print what they tell you to print. You're going to inject kids with what they tell you to inject them with. You're going to think what they tell you to think or you're going to spend your days in a Prole bar drinking Blatz.

ponyboy99 , 47 minutes ago link

If you go thru life assuming every single thing is a farce and a lie (Roddy Piper) these events can not only be explained, they can be predicted.

Ace006 , 57 minutes ago link

SOMEbody's got to ensure the intergrity of the Documents Registry Archive

Weihan , 58 minutes ago link

The globalist deep-state's reach is legendary.

Nothing , 1 hour ago link

yes, an attack was launched, 50 missiles I believe, after loud warnings that it was coming, and none of them actually hit anything significant ... this is the way the game is played .... the good news is that the missiles cost $50 million, and now they will have to be replaced, by the Pentagon, first borrowing the money through the US Treasury offerings, and then paying for them from new money printed by the Federal Reserve. capische?

Greed is King , 36 minutes ago link

That`s the way it`s always been, it`s the eternal war of good against evil.

And when one evil enemy is defeated, it`s necessary to create a new evil enemy, how else can the Establishment Elite make money from war, death and destruction.

africoman , 16 minutes ago link

It's really very awkward & telling how ***** these bunch of western nations are looking tough on taking out poor defenceless country like Syria on ******** & at the satried to ease real kickass Russian as you described when they launch the attacks

I kind wish the US & their Zionist clown launch such huge attacks on Iran based on false flag

I really wanted these evil aggressive powers to taste what it is like to get bombed back even one they used to throw on multiple weaker nations freely with nothing to fear as retribution etc

Thordoom , 1 hour ago link

This organisations are all set up in Europe and US run by the filthiest filth on earth who still think they have God given right to imperial rule over the world.

British elite is the worst of all.

DCFusor , 1 hour ago link

Your military-industrial-intelligence complex at work, creating justification for more funding, like always - and who cares if people die as a result? Like Soros said, if they didn't do it, someone else would. (do I need /sarc?).

They don't like to be shown to be in charge, just to be in charge. And if you think this is a function of the current admin, you've been slow in the head and deaf and blind for quite some time.

I've watched since Eisenhower, and "it's always something". Doesn't matter what color the clown in chief's tie is.

St. TwinkleToes , 1 hour ago link

Imagine millions of government employees paid for by America's tax payer class, involved in covert operations undermining nation states for the benefit of war mongering shadow overlords counting on more never ending chaos feeding their hunger for power.

This isn't Orwell's 1984, this Team America on opioids.

veritas semper vinces , 2 hours ago link

Senior OPCW official had orders from US/ the Donald. Remember that the Donald bombed Syria based on this fake report , after a false flag done by Al Qaeda's artistic branch, the White Helmets.

holgerdanske , 1 hour ago link

It was May that insisted on this attack. Remember the "poison" attack and the evil Russians?

lwilland1012 , 3 hours ago link

Pray, do tell where are the consequences for these literal demons that engaged in war crimes? It is quite clear: as long as you are a member of the establishment, you can do whatever the f*ck you want. Why do we even follow the law, then? Given the precedent that is being set, we might as well not have any.

ken , 1 hour ago link

Well, they are looking forward to using all those Israeli weapons, er, uh, products, that local law enforcement has purchased...so watch out for Co-Intel Pro elicitation going forward....?

WorkingClassMan , 3 hours ago link

Everybody knows the Golem (USA) does Isn'treal's bidding in Syria and elsewhere in the Near East. Hopefully they keep hammering in the fact that this "gas attack" was an obvious set-up to use as a pretext (flimsy itself on the face of it) to brutalize Assad and Syria on behalf of Isn'treal.

The whole thing is built on ******* lies. Worst part about it is, nothing will happen.

turkey george palmer , 3 hours ago link

Only official news is to believed. You see it and it is a lie. they tell you to believe it. A lot of people casually believe whatever is spoken on TV. They become teachers and are taught in college what is right and wrong. We only have a few years before all the brain dead are in charge and robotically following the message like zombies with no brain

adonisdemilo , 3 hours ago link

Third rate script, third rate actors and crooked investigators. TPTB seem to have a plan worked out. Their problem now is that we, the hoi-polloi, have seen it all before, many times, and we can now recognise ******** when it's used to try to influence us.

johnnycanuck , 3 hours ago link

It is difficult to underestimate the seriousness of this manipulative act by the OPCW. In a response to the conservative author Peter Hitchens, who also writes for the Mail on Sunday – he is of course the brother of the late Christopher Hitchens – the OPCW admits that its so-called technical secretariat "is conducting an internal investigation about the unauthorised [sic] release of the document".

Then it adds: "At this time, there is no further public information on this matter and the OPCW is unable to accommodate [sic] requests for interviews". It's a tactic that until now seems to have worked: not a single news media which reported the OPCW's official conclusions has followed up the story of the report which the OPCW suppressed.

And you bet the OPCW is not going to "accommodate" interviews. For here is an institution investigating a war crime in a conflict which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives – yet its only response to an enquiry about the engineers' "secret" assessment is to concentrate on its own witch-hunt for the source of the document it wished to keep secret from the world.

If this is not lamentable enough, the OPCW – whose final report came to more than a hundred pages and which even issued an easy-to-read precis version for journalists – now slams shut its steel doors in the hope of preventing even more information reaching the press.

https://johnmenadue.com/robert-fisk-the-evidence-we-were-never-meant-to-see-about-the-douma-gas-attack-counterpunch-27-may-2019/

5fingerdiscount , 3 hours ago link

Instead of these pieces concentrating on the whistleblower how about putting a little heat on the 50 lying bastards who initiated the coverup?

Helg Saracen , 3 hours ago link

The destruction of the countries of the Middle East for the sake of a dwarf with giant ambitions is the most stupid thing the United States has done over the past 30 years in its foreign policy. And yes, all the wars in the Middle East were grounded in lies. And the Americans paid for it all from start to finish. When Americans realize that they need to defend their national interests, and not other people's national interests, maybe something in the Middle East will change for the better. True, I am afraid that with the hight level of stupidity and shortsightedness that is common among Americans, the United States is more likely to be destroyed faster. No offense.

And I propose to remember the Syrian Christians who were destroyed by the Saudi Wahhabis, hired by the CIA with the money of American taxpayers and at the request of Israel. Until the Americans begin to investigate the activities of the CIA (and this activity causes the United States only harm), the responsibility for this genocide (you heard right) will be on the American nation. It turns out that in the Middle East you are primarily destroying Christians. How interesting, why such zeal.

carbonmutant , 4 hours ago link

You gotta wonder how much the deep state has deleted about their interference in Trump's administration...

dogbert8 , 4 hours ago link

Pretty much everyone with a brain realizes this all was a lie; only the M5M and the DC swamp continue to pretend it wasn't.

Joiningupthedots , 4 hours ago link

Who really made the order though?

ClickNLook , 3 hours ago link

Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW needs to be interrogated to find out.

Condor_0000 , 4 hours ago link

Newsweek Reporter Quits After Editors Block Coverage of OPCW Syria Scandal

December 19, 2019

Aaron Mate

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/19/newsweek-reporter-quits-after-editors-block-coverage-of-opcw-syria-scandal/

According to whistleblower testimony and leaked documents, OPCW officials raised alarm about the suppression of critical findings that undermine the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Haddad's editors at Newsweek rejected his attempts to cover the story. "If I don't find another position in journalism because of this, I'm perfectly happy to accept that consequence," Haddad says. "It's not desirable. But there is no way I could have continued in that job knowing that I couldn't report something like this."

New leaks continue to expose a cover-up by the OPCW – the world's top chemical weapons watchdog – over a critical event in Syria. Documents, emails, and testimony from OPCW officials have raised major doubts about the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. The leaked OPCW information has been released in pieces by Wikileaks. The latest documents contain a number of significant revelations – including that that about 20 OPCW officials voiced concerns that their scientific findings and on-the-ground evidence was suppressed and excluded.

This is, without a doubt, a major global scandal: the OPCW, under reported US pressure, suppressing vital evidence about allegations of chemical weapons. But that very fact exposes another global scandal: with the exception of small outlets like The Grayzone, the mass media has widely ignored or whitewashed this story. And this widespread censorship of the OPCW scandal has just led one journalist to resign. Up until recently, Tareq Haddad was a reporter at Newsweek. But in early December, Tareq announced that he had quit his position after Newsweek refused to publish his story about the OPCW cover up over Syria.

[Dec 28, 2019] How Impeachment Is Escalating the New US-Russian Cold War by Stephen F. Cohen

Dec 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

Summary of Broadcast Produced by Yvonne Lorenzo:

As the New Cold War gathers up speed and escalates, we are entering a "fact free world" as allegations are made that are proved not to be true are promoted; for example, the allegation that the DNC was hacked by Russia has been officially debunked -- no one could name the seventeen intelligence agencies, the Coast Guard was one. The notion of the hacking was cooked up by two agencies: by the DNI's head James Clapper and Brennan at the CIA. Nevertheless, recently News Anchor Chuck Todd of NBC (the most pro-Russiagate network, the ones who shamelessly accused presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian asset) took it one step further: ignoring the facts, Todd again stated that seventeen intelligence agencies agreed that the Russians not only interfered in the election but that they swung the election to Trump. While interference is one thing, no one has previously made that allegation. Consequently, we are now in a fact free discourse in America: no evidence is necessary to prove anything, falsehoods are taken up by the legacy media, what Professor Cohen would call a world of tabloid gossip media, except in their favor the tabloids, fearing lawsuits, will do some fact checking, which is conspicuous in its absence in the legacy media. And Professor Cohen noted that it's hard to get traction and you can't have a conversation with someone when you don't agree upon the facts.

In conversation on a cruise with fellow liberals, Professor Cohen noted most take the view that where there is smoke there is fire and there is something to these allegations of Russiagate and Putin's control over Trump; they state the media wouldn't continue to promote these conspiracy theories, these allegations about Trump's nefarious relations with the Kremlin, without reason and so there must be something to them. Yet while facts have become absolutely critical Cohen notes you can't get people to focus on the facts; for that reason, he feels despair and observes that for the first time in his life in his public discussions of Russia there are no basic premises that people accept any more, for if you say "If there's smoke, there's fire," that is just not a logical way of thinking: you either have the facts or you don't.

Batchelor also points out in the impeachment charges there is a great deal of presumption; there are no facts regarding the president as well, and he cites Trump's letter to Nancy Pelosi and poses this question: what does the Kremlin think about the impeachment?

Cohen answers that the Russian high policy class in the 1990s -- the America worship period -- they and not just the youth, strongly believed that Russia's future was with the West and America in particular, and now what strikes Russians most is the role of Russian intelligence services in the Western allegations. Pro-America Russians thought that American intelligence services didn't play the role that the Soviet ones did. In Russian history classes and as a staple of popular culture, the sinister role of the "secret police" goes back to the Czarist era but what distinguished America was that it didn't have anything comparable in abuses by its intelligence services -- or so it was believed. Consequently, for those who looked up to America, it's a source of disillusion and shock to learn that the American special services "went off the reservation" for quite a long time, not unlike Russia's, and so they have become disillusioned while for those who tried to get Russians to be more nationalistic, their perspective is to say with gratification, "We told you so. Now will you please grow up!"

Russians call the American agencies "the organs" perhaps not being clear on the difference between the CIA and the FBI and conflating them. For Russians, the role of such agencies is baked into the culture and this has resulted in rethinking not only about America but about their own special services. An Op-Ed piece in a Russian liberal newspaper the Russian liberal author wrote, after watching what's unfolding in America, we used to beat up on our intelligence services for decades but now maybe we need them. Contrary to a "cult of the intelligence services," Cohen thinks what must be determined is the role of the American intelligence services in creating Russiagate from the very beginning.

Yet what is critical is to know how Russiagate began in America, with the Barr-Durham probe into the origins of Russia and Russiagate will continue to be a major issue in the 2020 election. What struck Cohen about the letter from Trump to Pelosi -- which was so eloquent he doubts Trump wrote it -- was that he understands it will be an issue in the 2020 elections, and it was a campaign document. That aside, Trump is aware that Democrats are campaigning still on Russiagate; nothing has turned up that it factual. Therefore, despite the absence of facts, this will be a major issue. Ukraine has turned into a stand-in for Russia.

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, once a quintessential conservative, published an article titled "Time to Call out and Remove Putin's Propagandist in America." While the article is slightly cagier than that headline, essentially she wants to shutdown and deprive access to media who aren't espousing and promoting the Russiagate/Russophobic narratives. Cohen condemns that kind of behavior is that. On opposite side of Rubin, Cohen stated he himself has never advocated the silencing and removal of those who promote among other falsehoods the provably false Russiagate narrative. He asks where are things drifting and he answers discourse and relations are becoming ugly and awful.

Returning to the past, he notes there was an assumption that Russia under Yeltsin would emerge as a replica and junior partner of America; Cohen believes those who promote the Russiagate narrative and demonize Trump because their "impossible dream" failed -- Russia is too old, too vast to ever be a replica of America. What took Professor Cohen aback in the testimony from Fiona Hill and others was how deep and wide the Russophobia runs in the Washington think tanks. Until she spoke and testified he had no idea how much she -- and the other Russia experts -- hate Russia.

Batchelor noted this is the language of civil war in Trump's letter; Trump uses the term "Star Chamber of partisan persecution" and "coup" which are the language of a country torn in half and he asked the question whether the weakening of the civil contract to be an advantage to Putin and Russia. Cohen notes every newspaper and media source in America say Putin is delighted since it is his goal is to foment disarray in America.

The fact is, however, this chaos and dysfunction and enmity is one of the last things Putin wants. Putin's purpose is to rebuild Russia from the economic and political catastrophes of the 1990s; Putin's role is to reverse the demographic trend -- men died in their fifties in the 1990s -- and spend funds on modernization; that would be his legacy. Four hundred billion dollars has been saved to implement the modernization program. That attempt would be taken with modernizing partnerships with the West. Therefore, the last thing he wants is a new Cold War; the last thing he wants is political turmoil in America or in any Western nation. Cohen points out President Macron of France appears to understand that; he called for a rethinking of relations and said there could be no European security without Russia. Macron has broken with Washington and there will be a hell of fight because Washington is against it. But the notion that Putin wants to disrupt American society is wrong; Putin wants stability and partners.

Cohen still thinks that leadership -- the new President of Ukraine, Trump and Putin --

RJJCDA , says: December 27, 2019 at 9:13 pm GMT

I always listen to the Prof's podcast shows at Batchelor. What bothers me is that so many Trump supporters and public commentators BELIEVE, or at least parrot the idea that Russia INVADED both western Ukraine and Crimea.

As the Prof has pointed out and seconded by many others, Crimea has been a part of Russia since late 18th century. Because Khrushchev "gave' it to Ukraine in 50s when it was all one country does not obviate the fact that Crimeans consider themselves Russians as proved by all polling and a plebiscite. They had permanent bases there and the alleged invasion was nothing more than politely escorting the Ukrainian military off from the peninsula without any injuries to either side. Some invasion.

Surely some Russians (whether incognito military/intelligence forces or private citizens) were part of the Donbass forces that rebelled against Kiev. And they had good reasons to rebel witness the horrors of Odessa when 40 something citizens of Russian ancestry were burned alive trapped in a building by Ultra-Ukrainian nazi-like forces.

Now Senate Foreign Relations committee, chaired by Senator from my state, has called for designating Russia as a "terror supporting state." I emailed him and asked if he was insane. He returned a long letter that is full of obfuscations and lies, and I will compose a detailed response soon. But the question presents: is the Deep State and their globalists' master deliberately trying to force Russia into a military alliance with China? Could we prevail against that combination? Haunting resemblance to conditions that created Ribbentrop/Molotov pact in late 30s. And what that foretell?

Dan Hayes , says: December 27, 2019 at 9:16 pm GMT
Note that this article is the thorough paraphrase of the podcast appearing at the base of the article.
Isabella , says: December 28, 2019 at 1:04 am GMT
Well, I guess when you have such luminaries as members of the Council on Foreign Relations spieling the same level of ignorance, blindness, prejudice, propaganda and plain perverseness, you have to expect it from all levels of "Governance"
For anyone who knows even a small amount about Russia and her leader, go listen to a recent YouTube convention headed Russia's Resurgence: Prospects for stability in Russia-US relationship.
One thing is for sure – as long as these supposed "think tank leaders" can deliberately blind themselves to reality as this trio did, and spout the utterly brain dead stupidity they used to instigate a Q & A, there is no hope whatsoever of any stability in Russia – US relationship.
anonymous [356] Disclaimer , says: December 28, 2019 at 2:32 am GMT
The people of the media lie because they are for sale and are paid to lie. Rather uninspiring but understandable: they do it for the money and to stay in front of the cameras. But what's everyone else's excuse? Putin is a Svengali who mind-controls Trump? I thought people like that wore turbans and robes. How stupid are Americans, anyway? Who'd have thought something like this would have any traction whatsoever? It's simply incredible.
WorkingClass , says: December 28, 2019 at 4:28 am GMT
I was born into the Cold War in 1944. I got my draft notice in 1965. I had been expecting it all my young life. The Berlin wall did not fall until 1989.

This new Cold War will be over soon. It will turn hot and we will all die or the "West" will collapse and will repatriate it's legions. The Anglo/Zio Empire is in steep decline while Russia and her allies are ascendant.

I agree that the truth is no defense against the "left". Their long march is completed and they occupy the high ground whether it's politics or culture. They have taken over the country just in time to preside over its demise.

Russians who thought their future was with the West were not completely wrong. If the U.S. has a future it is probably with Russia.

Vaterland , says: December 28, 2019 at 6:27 am GMT
There is a couple of points I would like to add on a changing European perspective on the dynamics between the USA and Russia, with Europe caught in-between.

1.) After the Second World War the choice between Bolshevism and US liberal democracy seemed blatantly obvious; for Germany especially it was a question of national survival, since Stalin was viewed as a serious threat by the Adenauer government. Germany had actually enjoyed more internal independence from leading US doctrines in this period. US rule of law, the character of its elites and the general morality of the society had not completely degraded yet either. Today institutional erosion of American democracy, the rule of law and a cynical Neocon approach towards "promoting democracy abroad" turned the USA into a non-appealing leader of 'the West'. The increasing "Sovietization" of its state apparatus emphasizes this point: the expansion of the surveillance state, selective access to real political and economic access to a select few of the privileged; often hereditary dynasties of oligarchs, a political-media complex of agitation and propaganda. Thus, the accusations against Russia (or China for that matter) about a lack of transparency, pluralism and the rule of law sound entirely hollow.

2.) Thus secondly NATO has turned from a credible alliance of defense against the Soviet Union into a tool of US imperialism; especially after the USA has declared victory in the Cold War. Wars surrounding Europe and even inside of it – The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and in Ukraine – were the result. Nations were destroyed, heads of state publicly executed or tortured to death like Muammar Gaddafi and millions of people were killed; many more were made homeless and a refugee crisis was created. And concealing wars of aggression as "human rights promotion" opened a can of worms for cynical nihilism as the new norm of US foreign policy – WMD lies, Abu-Ghuraib and NSA scandals included. Just as the established political-media apparatus is guilty of everything populism is accused of: post factual parallel realities, fake news and fake realities, systematic disinformation, social engineering and conditioning into hysteria and the frenzy of the mob. The pathology of the new US ruling class personified by Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright

3.) There is indeed no lasting European stability imaginable without a permanent peaceful agreement between Western- and Eastern-Europe and Russia. Russia's role as the Eurasian land bridge to China is also essential this century. Mutual agreement has to be found to settle old grievances and fears regarding Napoleon and Hitler on the Russian side and Stalinism and the Soviet Union on the European side. A situation which the USA also currently exploits for political destabilization – especially in Poland.

4.) Germany, currently the central country in the EU, owes its unification largely to Russia. Unfortunately it was a mistake on the Russian side when they had unilaterally withdrawn all their troops from German territory, that they did not demand the same from US/NATO forces. In that moment the transformation of NATO was sealed and the New Cold War had begun. Yet while the attitudes of the older generations are shaped by the US-Soviet Union Cold War, for new generations it's a different story. Increasingly the USA is seen as a more credible threat and/or bully with its war policy, real political meddling and especially in my country the fact that Germany was both forced to sanction Russia, which went against its own vital interests, and then be sanctioned as well.

5.) I am leaving out the value and identity politics debate. Fundamentally the general public on both sides of the Atlantic agrees on the theory on foundations of functioning democracy. Although I do think that since the end of the last Cold War the influence of the USA has been more harmful and corrosive than helpful and stabilizing.

Conclusion: In this new Cold War which was, I think, initiated by the US establishment, we could see a future in which Germany and Russia begin to view themselves more in the light of the Prussian-Russian coalition against the new "Napoleon", the United States. Although this arising conflict could rightly be dubbed: The Unnecessary Cold War.

EdNels , says: December 28, 2019 at 6:59 am GMT
@WorkingClass It's funny to hear "

that the truth is no defense against the "left". Their long march is completed and they occupy the high ground whether it's politics or culture.'

'

Left ? Do you believe that the establishment crowd of Democrats (Liberals,) and the managed news (Liberals,) and others Liberals, neoliberals, neocons, or anything else comprising the Russiagate hoax can be describes as Leftist?

It's been determined that the Democrats intentionally jettisoned the Working Class decades ago. It shouldn't be news to working people that they don't have a party!

It was a rational decision to unload the workers, and substitute special interest and identity politics, because of trends of the decline of union membership in age of technology, automation, and YUPPIES! The Democrats are now slick pretenders of social justice, but not left.

animalogic , says: December 28, 2019 at 7:09 am GMT
@RJJCDA " is the Deep State and their globalists' master deliberately trying to force Russia into a military alliance with China? "
Hard to say what their intentions are. (The old ploy of unity at home by means of an external enemy ?) Whatever they are -- US foreign policy (FO) re Russia should go down with Iraq (II) as among the US's greatest FO blunders.
As the Saker has pointed out– Russia & China are in symbiosis, which runs deeper than an alliance.
Russiagate is a kind of "two birds with one stone" deal: you get to bash Trump & Russia using each as a club to beat the other. That this whole base concoction of lies seems to still have legs speaks volumes as to the deep of Trump derangement syndrome & the universality of msm propaganda.
jack daniels , says: December 28, 2019 at 8:11 am GMT
@Dan Hayes Yes but the paraphraser should not go anonymous. Bad form.
GMC , says: December 28, 2019 at 8:28 am GMT
Mr Cohen is so far ahead of Washington , when it comes to Russia and other foreign matters, it just boggles the mind of us normies. The Ukraine Gate is all about the Kyivian Jew Oligarchs, trying to oust the thief Democrats from all the IMF looting , that those Kyivians , had their eyes/hands on. It's like – thanks for doing the Coup but all the money we get is – Ours for the looting. And there are hundreds of millions – missing. Russia Gate will go on, until the American public – " Grows Up " as Mr. Cohen says.
jack daniels , says: December 28, 2019 at 8:28 am GMT
What damns the US media, both anti-Trump and Fox News, is that America has been massively meddling in elections all over the globe since Day One, including Russia, and this is known or should be known to anyone with a basic knowledge of international relations, yet it is almost NEVER mentioned when the subject of Russian meddling comes up.

There is a feeling that it would be unpatriotic (treasonous?) to admit it. This is something new for America. In the old days American foreign policy was sharply debated and America's sins were much discussed by the left. But now, the left is on the CIA's side. This probably has to do with the Jewishness of the left. Jews tend to hate Russia as much as they tended to like the Soviet Union. They see post-Communist Russia as politically incorrect (e.g. anti-gay) and Christian, a potentially nationalistic society that could turn anti-Semitic.

Because of Russia's nuclear capability it is not possible for the US to invade it, so we are relying on internal subversion and economic tactics to bring down Putin, leading to the installation of a US lackey with neocon approval. Even as we speak of Russian meddling the CIA is busy organizing and funding anti-Putin elements in Russia.

"We're just trying to spread democracy. What's wrong with that!?"

SeekerofthePresence , says: December 28, 2019 at 8:58 am GMT
Yes, the nation has gone mad.
Result is measured in rads.
sally , says: December 28, 2019 at 9:13 am GMT
@Back1 Stupidity does not produce the invention and promotion of lie after lie,
Nor is stupidity consistent with the selection of the best lies from those total of lies generated.
Only lies that work on the minds targeted are repeated.

Repeat the lie but hide it, camouflage the lie with some truth, and embedded the lie into the propaganda that establishes the narrative, and then mass produce the lie embedded propaganda that establishes the false or misleading narrative is a complicated process. Repeat and repeat the false narrative is a hat trick that often deceives innocent minds into adopting, embedding and acting on beliefs established in innocent minds by mind control technology. These process are not consistent with stupidity, but instead suggest diabolical genius at work.

When only the lies that work; that is, that control, deceive or influence innocent minds are repeated you are looking process which took intelligence to make work. Inventing lies takes imagination, producing them into propaganda takes skill, and promoting the produced invented lie takes money, power and access.

Selection (of the best or most suitable lie) is an process that requires identification and sufficient intelligence to sort; while repetition requires the selected object be either committed to memory, or to be continuously and precisely regenerated for each promotion(campaign). Promotion is a delicate process; its success so dependant on so many things, that many people have obtained Phds from the subject matter that surround the technology of deceit.

The point is that promoting false narratives is an invented developing technology that takes professionally trained persons to make work. Someone is paying the mind control professionals (MCPs) that are working to embed false narrative into the memory of the minds of the governed masses. MCPs are not stupid people. Not only are they highly trained professionals but also they don't work for free. So who is paying them.

for example look at the rul below. You might need first to visit the url https://duckduckgo.com and when at duckduckgo,com to paste it into the search space and hit go. It seems many browsers and search engines deny or make difficult user access to this website https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/12/28/614755/Russia-Poland-politics-World-war-NATO <in the url you will see the argument between fact and fiction.

Truth3 , says: December 28, 2019 at 10:15 am GMT
Larry King (excuse me I mean Lawrence Harvey Zeiger) on RT is a real oxymoron with RT being the oxy and Zeiger being the moron.

This clown gave NeoCons a free pass for decades. No surprise there, for a Tribal "Kagan" of the Jews.

Robert Magill , says: December 28, 2019 at 10:28 am GMT
Why is Steven Cohen credited with this article when obviously it is written by another? What gives, Unz? It is an example of the same facts twisting it rails against.
gotmituns , says: December 28, 2019 at 10:48 am GMT
I don't give a rat's butt about trump's impeachment or russia.
Tom Welsh , says: December 28, 2019 at 10:59 am GMT
@Antiwar7 "If there's smoke, there's fire" is not so much stupid as devious. You have to understand that many political leaders nowadays have realised that they don't need hard facts and figures or logic to sway opinion.

Increasingly, political divisions are tribal; and the worst condemnation is "you are not one of us". Disagreeing with the party line shows that a person is "not one of us".

That is especially the case when the party line is obviously untrue. Then sticking to it is an absolute proof of devoted, unthinking loyalty. It's more like a pledge of allegiance than a rational statement of fact.

Monotonous Languor , says: December 28, 2019 at 11:19 am GMT
Foreigners have never understood that there are two Americas, nor how to differentiate which one they're dealing with at any point in time.
Realist , says: December 28, 2019 at 11:34 am GMT
@RJJCDA

I always listen to the Prof's podcast shows at Batchelor.

I do as well enjoy them very much.

I agree with your comments.

He returned a long letter that is full of obfuscations and lies, and I will compose a detailed response soon.

You are wasting your time he is paid extremely well to promulgate the dumbass dictates of the Deep State.

Realist , says: December 28, 2019 at 11:43 am GMT
@Dan Hayes The author of this article is listed as Stephen F Cohen, but if that's the case it's written in the third person.

WTF

Realist , says: December 28, 2019 at 11:48 am GMT
@WorkingClass

I agree that the truth is no defense against the "left". Their long march is completed and they occupy the high ground whether it's politics or culture. They have taken over the country just in time to preside over its demise.

It is the right as well on important issue to the Deep State there is no right and left.

Johnny Walker Read , says: December 28, 2019 at 12:29 pm GMT
Does it really matter? America is already a Jewish/Bolshevik occupied nation?

To achieve absolute power, Lenin focused on fomenting a class war, while Hitler set his sights on a race war. Either way, the divide-and-conquer modus operandi of fascist and communist demagogues is pretty much the same, no matter what each side might claim about the other. Their propaganda content may differ, but not so much their divide-and-conquer methods. Attitudes of supremacy come in a virtual rainbow of flavors and colors.

https://thefederalist.com/2017/11/06/bolshevik-revolution-reveals-six-phases-freedom-communist-misery/
Wake up fools, and quit putting your faith in political hacks, red or blue!!

9/11 Inside job , says: December 28, 2019 at 12:39 pm GMT
theamericanconservative.com : "Forget Trump : The Military-Industrial-Complex is still running the show " By Bruce Fein , July 18, 2018
theintercept.com " Defense contractors say Russian threat is great for business "
Sean , says: December 28, 2019 at 1:11 pm GMT
Did Russian believe that any assurances could prevent Nato being drawn right up to the borders of Russia? Did Ukrainians believe the UK and US's security assurances 'against the threat or use of force against Ukraine's territory or political independence' could replace Ukraine's possession of nuclear weapons? Zbigniew Brzezinski did speak of Russia "increasingly passing into de facto western receivership" .

They say the Russians only heard what that wanted to hear, but the record suggests the Americans misrepresented their intentions, and gave assurances that the Russians took at face value. Russia permitted an American campaign to spent vast sums and organise Yeltsin's reelection, which would not have happened without them. The Russian foreign minister at that time, Andrei Kozyrev, now lives in Miami.

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2018-03-16/nato-expansion-what-yeltsin-heardD.C ., March 16, 2018 – Declassified documents from U.S. and Russian archives show that U.S. officials led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to believe in 1993 that the Partnership for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, rather than a precursor to it, while simultaneously planning for expansion after Yeltsin's re-election bid in 1996 and telling the Russians repeatedly that the future European security system would include, not exclude, Russia.

The declassified U.S. account of one key conversation on October 22, 1993, (Document 8) shows Secretary of State Warren Christopher assuring Yeltsin in Moscow that the Partnership for Peace was about including Russia together with all European countries, not creating a new membership list of just some European countries for NATO; and Yeltsin responding, "this is genius!"

Christopher later claimed in his memoir that Yeltsin misunderstood – perhaps from being drunk – the real message that the Partnership for Peace would in fact "lead to gradual expansion of NATO";[1] but the actual American-written cable reporting the conversation supports subsequent Russian complaints about being misled.[2]

After obtaining a succession of huge US-backed IMF loans, being found on Pennsylvania Avenue, drunk, in his underwear and trying to hail a taxi cab in order to find pizza in 1995, Yeltsin chose Putin the teetotal former counterintelligence specialist to succeed him. What a sense of humour Yeltsin must have had.

Dan Hayes , says: December 28, 2019 at 1:28 pm GMT
@jack daniels I agree that the paraphraser should not go anonymous. But more important is to bring to the reader's attention that a broadcast podcast is available at the article's end.
Wizard of Oz , says: December 28, 2019 at 1:30 pm GMT
@Vaterland The American elutes might be forgiven theirvicious follies by Americans if they had not impoverished so many Americans and,at best leaving them struggling.
Patrikios Stetsonis , says: December 28, 2019 at 1:33 pm GMT
@9/11 Inside job We do not call it "the Military-Industrial-Complex".
We do not call it "the Banks".
We do not call it "the FED"
We do not call it "the Wall Street"
We do not call it "the Media"

Once for all, we call it: "the Jews".

WorkingClass , says: December 28, 2019 at 1:39 pm GMT
@Realist Agreed. Truth is no defense against the Deep State which is neither left nor right.. Still, it is the ideological left that denies the existence of objective reality. For them there are no facts. Only subjective experience. Useful idiots and propagandists for the Deep State, they "know" Trump is a Russian agent because they can feel it. They don't need no steenking evidence.

The (left) media promote hatred. Orange Man Bad. The ideological left understands and enjoys hatred. They can feel it. When you hate somebody you are ready and eager to believe the worst about them.

Onebornfree , says: Website December 28, 2019 at 1:57 pm GMT
@WorkingClass "I agree that the truth is no defense against the "left"."

In other words, 2 + 2 = 5 [ to roughly quote Orwell]

Polylogism rules! : https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Polylogism

Regards, onebornfree

journey80 , says: December 28, 2019 at 2:22 pm GMT
@EdNels Thank you. Well said, and not nearly enough.

It's my opinion that the relentless use of "left" to describe the neoliberal half of the Republicrat/Wall Street/war industry party is no accident.

Describing the "Democrats" of the Clinton DNC as "left" is useful to discredit and marginalize any political stance that, fairly and realistically, could be considered "left." It produces chaos and confusion, which is the objective of the neocon/neoliberal grifters who control both halves of the war party.

Dan Hayes , says: December 28, 2019 at 2:25 pm GMT
@Realist I suspect that the paraphraser is our own Ron Unz since he strikes me as a hands-on operator. Secondary suspect is Phil Giraldi, UR's National Security Editor.

In any event it's important to dissimulate Cohen's views since he's literally A Geopolitical Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness! For this both Batchelor and Unz are to be commended!!

Anonymous [645] Disclaimer , says: December 28, 2019 at 2:45 pm GMT
@Realist There's a left alright; there's just no right. Since the 1960's the conservative movement and Republican Party have conserved exactly nothing while the left has completely transformed America, successfully implementing much of the 1930's communist agenda and turning the government into the enemy of the society at large.

In his Myth of Religious Violence William T Cavanaugh points out that before the arrival of Frankfurter on the Supreme Court, religion, meaning chiefly Christianity, was held by the court to be the fundamental source of social cohesion and peace in America, while since the late 1940s and post-Frankfurter, religion, now meaning only Christianity, has been consistently held to be not only divisive, but the fundamental source of violence. The point is, this upending of society was accomplished by legislating from the bench, while the Republicans and Conservatism Inc, as we now learn, were funded to neutralize opposition, blowing smoke in Americans' eyes about legalisms at a time when at least 90% of this country was conservative.

Sites like The American Conservative and American Thinker, for example, are apparently funded to publish fawning material about the Jews and Israel that the latter would be too ashamed to write themselves, which also pretty much sums up the Republican's m.o. in Congress.

It's about time the American electorate saw candidates for national and state office as figureheads for their largest donors, who're presently portrayed as almost incidental by the msm. Instead of saying that Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham said this or that, accuracy requires we say Paul Singer and Sheldon Adelson's spokesman in the Senate, some so-and-so stooge, said this or that. It's the same on both sides of the aisle, obviously, and it turns out that the owners of both parties are kin when it comes to destroying the social fabric of this country for their own hateful reasons.

Christo , says: December 28, 2019 at 2:51 pm GMT
@Patrikios Stetsonis You forgot , an aspect. "We do not call it Z.O.G."
Which commands and guides the US government in both domestic and foreign policy.

On similar note to your closing statement ,
To quote Treitschke 1879 "The Jews are our misfortune"

Bill Jones , says: December 28, 2019 at 3:06 pm GMT
Meanwhile, the barking mad cow Maddow now claims:

""really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.""

Is not meant to be a statement of facts.

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/maddow-meltdown-defense-oan-lawsuit-host-argues-her-words-are-not-facts

Bill Jones , says: December 28, 2019 at 3:09 pm GMT
@jack daniels I see this line, at the beginning

"Summary of Broadcast Produced by Yvonne Lorenzo:"

Not good enough?

Or is it a later (unacknowledged) addition?

Do we now need a correction to the correction?

Antiwar7 , says: December 28, 2019 at 3:20 pm GMT
@Tom Welsh I totally agree with you. I'm just trying to heap public scorn on that approach. Because if you look at it clearly, it's ridiculous.
Desert Fox , says: December 28, 2019 at 3:36 pm GMT
The zionists hate Christians and since Russia is becoming more Christian the zionists hate towards Russia has reached a hysteria that is only matched by their demonic hate of Christians and one of the ways to strike at Russia is through lies and false flags blamed on Russia.

The ZUS is winning the war against Christians here in America with abortions and pedophilia in high places and the worship of satan in Hellywood and elsewhere and the penetration of the Christian churches by zionist elements.

The zionists will not stop until America is destroyed, zionism is the most dangerous element in America.

Read the Protocols of Zion, it is all right there.

Justvisiting , says: December 28, 2019 at 3:59 pm GMT
@Back1

*All* mainstream media is propaganda from clown world. This defines our era in US. Mass psychosis is the new reality.

The Russia nonsense tells me that US establishment people are stupid and self deluded, truly sad sack dummies.

Several commenters around here have claimed the Apollo moon landing hoax "does not matter".

[MORE]
It is old news, not relevant to today, too controversial, etc.

The problem is that once the elites get away with lying, it encourages them to do more of it. This hoax _is_ going to be exposed, and fairly soon–and it may unravel the whole ball of string of intelligence agency and mass media lies.

It is _not_ a left/right issue, so folks of any and all political persuasions will be able to accept it without crushing their ideological dreams.

Check out this article from NASA itself: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/rbsp/news/third-belt.html

This and related new discoveries (on why the Apollo manned moon missions were technically impossible) are discussed in this recent book:

https://read.amazon.com/kp/card?preview=inline&linkCode=kpd&ref_=k4w_oembed_cIFBq8Qs4dgS8X&asin=B07RCCKH1L&tag=kpembed-20

Every space program (national, private) _must_ solve this problem. Lying won't work. They have to deal with it–and the truth is going to get out–soon.

Anonymous [645] Disclaimer , says: December 28, 2019 at 4:06 pm GMT
@Desert Fox Judaic identity is essentially about hating Christians, as the Talmud makes clear, and as most anyone who's worked with Jews on Wall Street will attest. Michael Hoffman proves this in his books on Judaism, pointing out that modern Talmudic Judaism came into being nearly two centuries after the rise of Christianity and in opposition to it.
Ahoy , says: December 28, 2019 at 4:16 pm GMT
Ezra Pound. Is there around a literature professor, that can hold the weight of the title, to talk about him to American youth? Hell noooo!!

Fasten your seat belts then, because the historic American nation is crushing.

Miro23 , says: December 28, 2019 at 5:04 pm GMT
@animalogic

" is the Deep State and their globalists' master deliberately trying to force Russia into a military alliance with China? "

Hard to say what their intentions are. (The old ploy of unity at home by means of an external enemy ?) Whatever they are -- US foreign policy (FO) re Russia should go down with Iraq (II) as among the US's greatest FO blunders.

Agreed that it's a mistake, but when they've successfully pulled off the WMD lies, the 9/11 fakery, the destruction of Iraq, Libya etc., control the US media, and can dictate to Congress, then it's understandable that they get rather arrogant.

They simply want to kick Russia and Putin because he was the one that spoiled their Yeltsin looting party – and worst of all arrested and imprisoned their top guy Khodorkovsky. That it drives Germany and the EU towards Russia and strengthens Russian ties with China is secondary. After all, Hitler (after great military success), likened invading Russia to kicking down a rotten barn door, and he didn't work out the implications of declaring war on the US.

Realist , says: December 28, 2019 at 5:19 pm GMT
@Anonymous I agreed with you, except there is a Deep State and it is not made up of just Jews. But I do concede that Jews are disproportionately represented, as both sponsors and minions, for their demographics.

I believe the Deep State consists of the very wealthy who are greedy for more wealth and power. There are 607 billionaires in the US. There is no reason for the Deep State members to formally collude they all know what needs to be done and how to do it. They use a relatively small amount of their money to place their minions in positions of power heads of the movie industry, the media, the federal government, academia. From then on if the lessers in these groups want to keep their jobs/lives they will toe the line. It becomes self sustaining from tax money and the Deep State glories in more wealth and power. Here is an excellent example of the Deep State in action: The SCOTUS has passed down egregious decisions that abridge the First Amendment and show contempt for the concept of a representative democracy. Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing stupid SCOTUS decisions First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.
These decisions have codified that money is free speech thereby giving entities of wealth and power almost total influence in elections. By gaining control of the SCOTUS the Deep State is able to further their goals.

Another take on the Deep State:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/14/understanding-the-deep-states-propaganda/

Realist , says: December 28, 2019 at 5:30 pm GMT
@Dan Hayes Agreed.
vinteuil , says: December 28, 2019 at 5:33 pm GMT
@Vaterland

NATO has turned from a credible alliance of defense against the Soviet Union into a tool of US imperialism

That's the bottom line, here.

NATO may once have had a reason for being. But now it's just a monstrous golem, lurching uncontrollably towards global catastrophe.

Back1 , says: December 28, 2019 at 5:33 pm GMT
@sally Ok. I'll pass on clarification of my too brief comment. Your elaboration is food for thought.

Note that MCP in Tron was Master Control Program.

Andrei Martyanov , says: Website December 28, 2019 at 5:40 pm GMT
@EdNels

The Democrats are now slick pretenders of social justice, but not left.

Excellent summary. What goes under "left" moniker (Cultural Marxist, "communists", socialists etc.) in the West nowadays is not left. Agree. it is just another iteration of Neo-liberal politics serving as a substitution for dealing with actual problems of Labor.

9/11 Inside job , says: December 28, 2019 at 5:45 pm GMT
@Patrikios Stetsonis politico.com : "The happy-go-lucky Jewish group [Chabad-Lubavitch] that connects Trump and Putin":

"Their respective ambitions led the two men[Trump and Putin] – along with Trump's future son-in-law, Jared Kushner -to build a set of close, over-lapping relationships in a small world that overlaps on Chabad , an international Hasidic movement most people have never heard of ."

sally , says: December 28, 2019 at 6:00 pm GMT
@gotmituns @ gotmituns <=Why then did you read the article?

At the heart of the impeachment process (Article II, Section 2, paragraph 3 and 4) are two questions that should interest most folks: @ paragraph 3 lays out a big part of Trump's defense in my view "Section 3 requires ..that the President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, <=execution requires action so which law did the President not execute faithfully? <= I do not see such a question in the Articles of Impeachment.. @ Sec II, Art. II, paragraph 4 "The President shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.. " < the house found evidence it says, strong enough to indite the president on charges that .. he violated which of these 4 things?

Some think Trump should have been impeached for failure to deliver his tax Return.. but I do not see failure to deliver a tax return as failure to execute a law, or as a high crime, or as treason, or as an act of Bribery, or as a misdemeanor.. so the current impeachment indictment by the House against Trump reveals that the constitution is inadequate. The constitution does not express a government that can protect the Americans such a government governs; from the possibility, or the reality, that a deceitful president will be empowered to that job?

The best governed Americans can hope for from the USA is that the Congress of the USA rather than impeaching will decide to amend the constitution, so that the constitution denies any one that can be shown to be deceitful, to be the President. This one amendment could eliminate making campaign promises and do just the opposite once in office.

Of course such an amendment would mean few in politics today could be the President.
Most likely no matter the outcome of the impeachment, Trump will probably be reappointed President by the electoral college.. (recall that persons who animate the functions allowed to the USA to governed Americans are not elected by those who the USA governs. (Americans c/n vote for their president or their vice president because President and VP are article II persons; and article II persons are appointed to office by processes conducted at the state level, that appoint persons to the electoral college, and it is the electoral college that elects the President and the Vice President). Who has written a book on the electoral college? I have requested information from the government on the electoral college activities since the beginning and to date have received nothing but referrals to others.

WorkingClass , says: December 28, 2019 at 6:13 pm GMT
@EdNels Left ? Do you believe that the establishment crowd of Democrats (Liberals,) and the managed news (Liberals,) and others Liberals, neoliberals, neocons, or anything else comprising the Russiagate hoax can be describes as Leftist?

No. I do not believe that. I agree with you entirely. But common usage has the people you are talking about as LEFT and I am tired of bitching about it.

Exile , says: December 28, 2019 at 7:00 pm GMT
@RJJCDA Russia no more "invaded" Ukraine than the United States "invaded" Texas, Ohio or Florida. Ukraine has been a Russian fiefdom for centuries longer than it has ever been "independent," and its fate is no more the business of the United States or Western Europe than the fate of Hong Kong or Syria should be.
Exile , says: December 28, 2019 at 7:02 pm GMT
@Realist Exactly. Convergent interests are sufficient – no grand cabal or conspiracy is necessary to explain what we observe with our lying eyes.

To the extent one is ever necessary, that's where guys like Epstein come in.

Skeptikal , says: December 28, 2019 at 7:13 pm GMT
@Antiwar7 I agree that someone is making the fake smoke.
A.K.A. lies.
gotmituns , says: December 28, 2019 at 7:25 pm GMT
@sally I never read the articles.
Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: December 28, 2019 at 7:30 pm GMT
Please just let me ask americans some opinions about

if pastor John Hagee and his followers are jews or christians ? , if the thousands of pastors in the USA like Hagee and their millions of followers are jews or christians ? if the US puritan founding fathers were jews of christians ? , if the british angloisraelites are jews or christians ? , if the yankees are jews or christians ? if the wasps are jews or christians ? if the US " deep state " is jew or chistian ? , if the US masses are jew or christian ?

. because blaming the jews all the time of every problem and pretending that that the anglo-yankees are so pure and naive does not seem to be very realistic

Maybe " Jews Я US " ? what do you think ?

anon [232] Disclaimer , says: December 28, 2019 at 8:15 pm GMT
@Antiwar7 Americans should have believed into the existence
of thousands Mayan gods when they first saw the smoke billowing out of the sacrificial pit in front of the menacing idols.
Michael888 , says: December 28, 2019 at 8:16 pm GMT
Some things never change. Russiagate is no aberration. Establishment Authority, police state apparatuses and religious catechisms, are NOT based on reasoning and evidence, but rather fact-free Narratives handed down from above and grounded by Fear of the Other, the bogeymen (be it Russians, White Supremacists, Black men, Assad, Trump, the Devil, etc), without which authority will collapse. As the historian Will Durant noted, Strabo said it best 2000 years ago:

"For in dealing with a crowd of women a philosopher cannot influence them by reason or exhort them to reverence, piety or faith; nay, there is need of religious fear also, and this cannot be aroused without myths and marvels the founders of states gave their sanctions to these things as bugbears wherewith to scare the simple-minded."

Kolya Krassotkin , says: December 28, 2019 at 9:54 pm GMT
@Anon John Hagee, his followers and other Christian Zionists are morons. Happily, they are not nearly as common as you imply. Being a Christian Zionist takes a special kind of stupid

I cannot see Haggee without immediately recalling Christ's warning to beware of obese wolves in sheep's clothing, who take jiggly church secretaries and XXXL Italian silk suits as proof of God's blessing.

steinbergfeldwitzcohen , says: December 28, 2019 at 10:05 pm GMT
Cohen is another Jewish voice in the Jewish Mafia War between factions. I don't consider him that insightful or honest, as he never mentions the glaringly obvious: the attempt to oust Trump is a Jew Coup.
Start telling the truth about the Hostile Elite destroying America Cohen. Until then you are just another lying Jew destroying the country that welcomed your ancestors.
When will the Traitors be routed out and hung?
No country can withstand Treason from Within going unpunished for any length of time. We either destroy these scum or they will destroy America.
Ilyana_Rozumova , says: December 28, 2019 at 10:08 pm GMT
@Anon Do you work for free? It is the payroll stupid,
Z-man , says: December 28, 2019 at 10:16 pm GMT
I gotta hand it to Larry King, even with one foot in the grave he's still doing these interviews and with Professor Cohen no less. Kudos to the old coot. (Grin)
Steven Cohen should be a special advisor to the POTUS. It would be a demotion for Cohen but good for Trump and for America.

[Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Imagine millions of government employees paid for by America's tax payer class, involved in covert operations undermining nation states for the benefit of war mongering shadow overlords counting on more never ending chaos feeding their hunger for power. ..."
"... This isn't Orwell's 1984, this Team America on opioids. ..."
"... Senior OPCW official had orders from US/ the Donald. Remember that the Donald bombed Syria based on this fake report , after a false flag done by Al Qaeda's artistic branch, the White Helmets. ..."
"... Pray, do tell where are the consequences for these literal demons that engaged in war crimes? It is quite clear: as long as you are a member of the establishment, you can do whatever the f*ck you want. ..."
"... Third rate script, third rate actors and crooked investigators. TPTB seem to have a plan worked out. Their problem now is that we, the hoi-polloi, have seen it all before, many times, and we can now recognise ******** when it's used to try to influence us. ..."
"... If this is not lamentable enough, the OPCW – whose final report came to more than a hundred pages and which even issued an easy-to-read precis version for journalists – now slams shut its steel doors in the hope of preventing even more information reaching the press. ..."
"... Instead of these pieces concentrating on the whistleblower how about putting a little heat on the 50 lying bastards who initiated the coverup? ..."
"... The destruction of the countries of the Middle East for the sake of a dwarf with giant ambitions is the most stupid thing the United States has done over the past 30 years in its foreign policy. And yes, all the wars in the Middle East were grounded in lies. And the Americans paid for it all from start to finish. When Americans realize that they need to defend their national interests, and not other people's national interests, maybe something in the Middle East will change for the better. True, I am afraid that with the hight level of stupidity and shortsightedness that is common among Americans, the United States is more likely to be destroyed faster. No offense. ..."
"... And I propose to remember the Syrian Christians who were destroyed by the Saudi Wahhabis, hired by the CIA with the money of American taxpayers and at the request of Israel. Until the Americans begin to investigate the activities of the CIA (and this activity causes the United States only harm), the responsibility for this genocide (you heard right) will be on the American nation. It turns out that in the Middle East you are primarily destroying Christians. How interesting, why such zeal. ..."
"... According to whistleblower testimony and leaked documents, OPCW officials raised alarm about the suppression of critical findings that undermine the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Haddad's editors at Newsweek rejected his attempts to cover the story. "If I don't find another position in journalism because of this, I'm perfectly happy to accept that consequence," Haddad says. "It's not desirable. But there is no way I could have continued in that job knowing that I couldn't report something like this." ..."
"... New leaks continue to expose a cover-up by the OPCW – the world's top chemical weapons watchdog – over a critical event in Syria. Documents, emails, and testimony from OPCW officials have raised major doubts about the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. The leaked OPCW information has been released in pieces by Wikileaks. The latest documents contain a number of significant revelations – including that that about 20 OPCW officials voiced concerns that their scientific findings and on-the-ground evidence was suppressed and excluded. ..."
Dec 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Senior OPCW Official Busted: Leaked Email Exposes Orders To "Delete All Traces" Of Dissent On Douma by Tyler Durden Sat, 12/28/2019 - 10:30 0 SHARES

Via AlMasdarNews.com,

Wikileaks has released their fourth set of leaks from the OPCW's Douma investigation, revealing new details about the alleged deletion of important information regarding the fact-finding mission.

RELEASE: OPCW-Douma Docs 4. Four leaked documents from the OPCW reveal that toxicologists ruled out deaths from chlorine exposure and a senior official ordered the deletion of the dissenting engineering report from OPCW's internal repository of documents. https://t.co/ndK4sRikNk

-- WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 27, 2019

"One of the documents is an e-mail exchange dated 27 and 28 February between members of the fact finding mission (FFM) deployed to Douma and the senior officials of the OPCW. It includes an e-mail from Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW , where he instructs that an engineering report from Ian Henderson should be removed from the secure registry of the organisation," WikiLeaks writes. Included in the email is the following directive:

" Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive] And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA.'"

According to Wikileaks, the main finding of Henderson, who inspected the sites in Douma, was that two of the cylinders were most likely manually placed at the site, rather than dropped.

"The main finding of Henderson, who inspected the sites in Douma and two cylinders that were found on the site of the alleged attack, was that they were more likely manually placed there than dropped from a plane or helicopter from considerable heights. His findings were omitted from the official final OPCW report on the Douma incident," the Wikileaks report said.

It must be remembered that the U.S. launched an attack on Damascus, Syria on April 14, 2018 over alleged chemical weapons usage by pro-Assad forces at Douma.

AP file image.

Another document released Friday is minutes from a meeting on 6 June 2018 where four staff members of the OPCW had discussions with "three Toxicologists/Clinical pharmacologists, one bioanalytical and toxicological chemist" (all specialists in chemical weapons, according to the minutes).

Minutes from an OPCW meeting with toxicologists specialized in chemical weapons: "the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was
no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure". https://t.co/j5Jgjiz8UY pic.twitter.com/vgPaTtsdQN

-- WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 27, 2019

The purpose of this meeting was two-fold. The first objective was "to solicit expert advice on the value of exhuming suspected victims of the alleged chemical attack in Douma on 7 April 2018". According to the minutes, the OPCW team was advised by the experts that there would be little use in conducting exhumations. The second point was "To elicit expert opinions from the forensic toxicologists regarding the observed and reported symptoms of the alleged victims."

More specifically, " whether the symptoms observed in victims were consistent with exposure to chlorine or other reactive chlorine gas."

According to the minutes leaked Friday: "With respect to the consistency of the observed and reported symptoms of the alleged victims with possible exposure to chlorine gas or similar, the experts were conclusive in their statements that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure ."

The OPCW team members wrote that the key "take-away message" from the meeting was "that the symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine and no other obvious candidate chemical causing the symptoms could be identified".

* * *

See full details at Wikileaks.org

JohnFrodo , 28 minutes ago link

pity the human pawns at the center of this mess.

africoman , 38 minutes ago link

There has been a Newsweek reporter who quite over editorial block of this OPCW case here also another interview by Grayzone

https://youtu.be/qqK8KgxuCPI

The isisrahell have such long hand to pull the plug any stories implicating their crime in progress otherwise they can put out some bs spins as bombshell reporting about US lies in Afghanistan war on their wapo for public for those who read it was nothing important revealed except being a misdirected na

ponyboy99 , 40 minutes ago link

If you want to pay off that student loan you're going to print what they tell you to print. You're going to inject kids with what they tell you to inject them with. You're going to think what they tell you to think or you're going to spend your days in a Prole bar drinking Blatz.

ponyboy99 , 47 minutes ago link

If you go thru life assuming every single thing is a farce and a lie (Roddy Piper) these events can not only be explained, they can be predicted.

Ace006 , 57 minutes ago link

SOMEbody's got to ensure the intergrity of the Documents Registry Archive

Weihan , 58 minutes ago link

The globalist deep-state's reach is legendary.

Nothing , 1 hour ago link

yes, an attack was launched, 50 missiles I believe, after loud warnings that it was coming, and none of them actually hit anything significant ... this is the way the game is played .... the good news is that the missiles cost $50 million, and now they will have to be replaced, by the Pentagon, first borrowing the money through the US Treasury offerings, and then paying for them from new money printed by the Federal Reserve. capische?

Greed is King , 36 minutes ago link

That`s the way it`s always been, it`s the eternal war of good against evil.

And when one evil enemy is defeated, it`s necessary to create a new evil enemy, how else can the Establishment Elite make money from war, death and destruction.

africoman , 16 minutes ago link

It's really very awkward & telling how ***** these bunch of western nations are looking tough on taking out poor defenceless country like Syria on ******** & at the satried to ease real kickass Russian as you described when they launch the attacks

I kind wish the US & their Zionist clown launch such huge attacks on Iran based on false flag

I really wanted these evil aggressive powers to taste what it is like to get bombed back even one they used to throw on multiple weaker nations freely with nothing to fear as retribution etc

Thordoom , 1 hour ago link

This organisations are all set up in Europe and US run by the filthiest filth on earth who still think they have God given right to imperial rule over the world.

British elite is the worst of all.

DCFusor , 1 hour ago link

Your military-industrial-intelligence complex at work, creating justification for more funding, like always - and who cares if people die as a result? Like Soros said, if they didn't do it, someone else would. (do I need /sarc?).

They don't like to be shown to be in charge, just to be in charge. And if you think this is a function of the current admin, you've been slow in the head and deaf and blind for quite some time.

I've watched since Eisenhower, and "it's always something". Doesn't matter what color the clown in chief's tie is.

St. TwinkleToes , 1 hour ago link

Imagine millions of government employees paid for by America's tax payer class, involved in covert operations undermining nation states for the benefit of war mongering shadow overlords counting on more never ending chaos feeding their hunger for power.

This isn't Orwell's 1984, this Team America on opioids.

veritas semper vinces , 2 hours ago link

Senior OPCW official had orders from US/ the Donald. Remember that the Donald bombed Syria based on this fake report , after a false flag done by Al Qaeda's artistic branch, the White Helmets.

holgerdanske , 1 hour ago link

It was May that insisted on this attack. Remember the "poison" attack and the evil Russians?

lwilland1012 , 3 hours ago link

Pray, do tell where are the consequences for these literal demons that engaged in war crimes? It is quite clear: as long as you are a member of the establishment, you can do whatever the f*ck you want. Why do we even follow the law, then? Given the precedent that is being set, we might as well not have any.

ken , 1 hour ago link

Well, they are looking forward to using all those Israeli weapons, er, uh, products, that local law enforcement has purchased...so watch out for Co-Intel Pro elicitation going forward....?

WorkingClassMan , 3 hours ago link

Everybody knows the Golem (USA) does Isn'treal's bidding in Syria and elsewhere in the Near East. Hopefully they keep hammering in the fact that this "gas attack" was an obvious set-up to use as a pretext (flimsy itself on the face of it) to brutalize Assad and Syria on behalf of Isn'treal.

The whole thing is built on ******* lies. Worst part about it is, nothing will happen.

turkey george palmer , 3 hours ago link

Only official news is to believed. You see it and it is a lie. they tell you to believe it. A lot of people casually believe whatever is spoken on TV. They become teachers and are taught in college what is right and wrong. We only have a few years before all the brain dead are in charge and robotically following the message like zombies with no brain

adonisdemilo , 3 hours ago link

Third rate script, third rate actors and crooked investigators. TPTB seem to have a plan worked out. Their problem now is that we, the hoi-polloi, have seen it all before, many times, and we can now recognise ******** when it's used to try to influence us.

johnnycanuck , 3 hours ago link

It is difficult to underestimate the seriousness of this manipulative act by the OPCW. In a response to the conservative author Peter Hitchens, who also writes for the Mail on Sunday – he is of course the brother of the late Christopher Hitchens – the OPCW admits that its so-called technical secretariat "is conducting an internal investigation about the unauthorised [sic] release of the document".

Then it adds: "At this time, there is no further public information on this matter and the OPCW is unable to accommodate [sic] requests for interviews". It's a tactic that until now seems to have worked: not a single news media which reported the OPCW's official conclusions has followed up the story of the report which the OPCW suppressed.

And you bet the OPCW is not going to "accommodate" interviews. For here is an institution investigating a war crime in a conflict which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives – yet its only response to an enquiry about the engineers' "secret" assessment is to concentrate on its own witch-hunt for the source of the document it wished to keep secret from the world.

If this is not lamentable enough, the OPCW – whose final report came to more than a hundred pages and which even issued an easy-to-read precis version for journalists – now slams shut its steel doors in the hope of preventing even more information reaching the press.

https://johnmenadue.com/robert-fisk-the-evidence-we-were-never-meant-to-see-about-the-douma-gas-attack-counterpunch-27-may-2019/

5fingerdiscount , 3 hours ago link

Instead of these pieces concentrating on the whistleblower how about putting a little heat on the 50 lying bastards who initiated the coverup?

Helg Saracen , 3 hours ago link

The destruction of the countries of the Middle East for the sake of a dwarf with giant ambitions is the most stupid thing the United States has done over the past 30 years in its foreign policy. And yes, all the wars in the Middle East were grounded in lies. And the Americans paid for it all from start to finish. When Americans realize that they need to defend their national interests, and not other people's national interests, maybe something in the Middle East will change for the better. True, I am afraid that with the hight level of stupidity and shortsightedness that is common among Americans, the United States is more likely to be destroyed faster. No offense.

And I propose to remember the Syrian Christians who were destroyed by the Saudi Wahhabis, hired by the CIA with the money of American taxpayers and at the request of Israel. Until the Americans begin to investigate the activities of the CIA (and this activity causes the United States only harm), the responsibility for this genocide (you heard right) will be on the American nation. It turns out that in the Middle East you are primarily destroying Christians. How interesting, why such zeal.

carbonmutant , 4 hours ago link

You gotta wonder how much the deep state has deleted about their interference in Trump's administration...

dogbert8 , 4 hours ago link

Pretty much everyone with a brain realizes this all was a lie; only the M5M and the DC swamp continue to pretend it wasn't.

Joiningupthedots , 4 hours ago link

Who really made the order though?

ClickNLook , 3 hours ago link

Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW needs to be interrogated to find out.

Condor_0000 , 4 hours ago link

Newsweek Reporter Quits After Editors Block Coverage of OPCW Syria Scandal

December 19, 2019

Aaron Mate

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/19/newsweek-reporter-quits-after-editors-block-coverage-of-opcw-syria-scandal/

According to whistleblower testimony and leaked documents, OPCW officials raised alarm about the suppression of critical findings that undermine the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. Haddad's editors at Newsweek rejected his attempts to cover the story. "If I don't find another position in journalism because of this, I'm perfectly happy to accept that consequence," Haddad says. "It's not desirable. But there is no way I could have continued in that job knowing that I couldn't report something like this."

New leaks continue to expose a cover-up by the OPCW – the world's top chemical weapons watchdog – over a critical event in Syria. Documents, emails, and testimony from OPCW officials have raised major doubts about the allegation that the Syrian government committed a chemical weapons attack in the city of Douma in April 2018. The leaked OPCW information has been released in pieces by Wikileaks. The latest documents contain a number of significant revelations – including that that about 20 OPCW officials voiced concerns that their scientific findings and on-the-ground evidence was suppressed and excluded.

This is, without a doubt, a major global scandal: the OPCW, under reported US pressure, suppressing vital evidence about allegations of chemical weapons. But that very fact exposes another global scandal: with the exception of small outlets like The Grayzone, the mass media has widely ignored or whitewashed this story. And this widespread censorship of the OPCW scandal has just led one journalist to resign. Up until recently, Tareq Haddad was a reporter at Newsweek. But in early December, Tareq announced that he had quit his position after Newsweek refused to publish his story about the OPCW cover up over Syria.

[Dec 28, 2019] Foreign Fighter 'Rat Line' In Reverse Turkey Sends Syrian 'Rebels' To Libya

So Turkey goes against Uncle Sam and Egypt. Interesting...
Notable quotes:
"... Erdogan's eyes set on defeating Benghazi-based General Khalifa Haftar, it appears this arms and jihadist rat line has conveniently been reversed . ..."
"... In a deepening proxy war, Turkey aims to send its Navy to protect Tripoli, while its troops train and coordinate forces of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, according to a senior Turkish official. Turkey recently signed a critical maritime deal with oil-rich Libya that serves energy interests of both countries and aims to salvage billions of dollars of business contracts thrown into limbo by the conflict . ..."
"... Remember when the CIA thought it was a good idea to train and fund jihadists in Syria to topple Assad? ..."
"... The conflict in Syria has become a rallying point for jihadists from around the world. More than 20,000 foreign fighters are fighting or have fought in Syria, and most are part of jihadist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra (JAN) and Islamic State (IS). North Africa has provided a large portion of these foreign fighters, from countries as diverse as Morocco and Libya. ..."
Dec 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Bloomberg has confirmed on Friday the prior rumors that Turkey will be sending mercenaries to Libya -- where it is propping up the UN-backed government in Tripoli (the GNA) -- are true. "Turkey is preparing to deploy troops and naval forces to support the internationally-recognized Libyan government, joining a planned push by Ankara-backed Syrian rebels to defeat strongman Khalifa Haftar," reports Bloomberg .

Though Ankara has yet to confirm or deny the new reports, Erdogan's Turkey has for years overseen a Libya-to-Turkey-to-Syria arms "rat line" which saw both heavy weaponry and jihadists fighters transported for the purpose of toppling Assad. But now with Erdogan's eyes set on defeating Benghazi-based General Khalifa Haftar, it appears this arms and jihadist rat line has conveniently been reversed .

Jihadists of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, via DPA/PA Images.

This also as President Erdogan in a speech on Thursday presented plans to send Turkish national troops bolster Tripoli as well .

Possibly thousands from among the so-called Turkish Free Syrian Army (formerly the FSA), with most of its fighters currently attacking Syrian Kurds in the ongoing 'Operation Peace Spring', will now be sent into Libya.

There are reports suggesting Turkey is ready to pay $2,000 a month for each Syrian 'rebel' willing to go to Libya .

TFSA source told me Turkey will be offering fighters from all TFSA factions $2,000/month to go to Libya.

-- Lindsey Snell (@LindseySnell) December 24, 2019

And akin to the current proxy war which has seen both the US, Kurds, and Sunni Islamists backed by Turkey wrangle over Syria's oil rich eastern region, Libya is heating up to be the latest 'oil and gas prize' -- but with immensely more at stake. As Bloomberg notes:

In a deepening proxy war, Turkey aims to send its Navy to protect Tripoli, while its troops train and coordinate forces of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, according to a senior Turkish official. Turkey recently signed a critical maritime deal with oil-rich Libya that serves energy interests of both countries and aims to salvage billions of dollars of business contracts thrown into limbo by the conflict .

As we predicted earlier , Libya and the southern Mediterranean is on its way to becoming the next big Middle East conflict of 2020 , also with Egypt and even Russia warning of further involvement to block Turkey's increasing role on the ground.

And as the mainstream media finally stops ignoring the looming catastrophe for north Africa and the region (still in denial as to the fruits of US-NATO "liberated" Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown and killed), it must be remembered that in another ironic plot twist, the CIA trained the very FSA 'rebel' fighters now on their way to Libya .

Gee who would have ever predicted? It's the foreign fighter 'rat line' in reverse.

Remember when the CIA thought it was a good idea to train and fund jihadists in Syria to topple Assad? Via a 2015 military study :

The conflict in Syria has become a rallying point for jihadists from around the world. More than 20,000 foreign fighters are fighting or have fought in Syria, and most are part of jihadist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra (JAN) and Islamic State (IS). North Africa has provided a large portion of these foreign fighters, from countries as diverse as Morocco and Libya. Who are these North African fighters, and why are they going to Syria? What do they hope to accomplish there, and do they want to return to their home countries?

Considering the tens of thousands of foreign fighters which poured into Syria starting in 2011 and 2012 in the first place, many of them from Libya, perhaps many are now simply headed "home" -- ready to further the proxy war chaos at Erdogan's bidding.

teolawki , 6 hours ago link

Turkey has no business being part of NATO. None. Expel the wannabe caliphate now!

Whopper Goldberg , 6 hours ago link

NATO should be disbanned its a terrrorist organisation led by the USSA.

Protect racket scam just like the Mafia

ddiduck , 5 hours ago link

NATO IS NOTHING more than an extension of George Soros' arm as it is also an extension of the Rothschild arm! Most should have gleaned this by now, particularly recognizing the radical Wahhabism that was included in this band of merry global thugs (Saudi Arabia) to do the bidding of the globalist satanic cabal. Kind of sad hearing this kind of neive responses from the gallery...sorry Mr. teolawki but you missed the forest for the trees.

teolawki , 5 hours ago link

What is naive is not understanding that Turkey is the current NATO nations gateway for all manner of illicit and illegitimat activity to foment and perpetuate the forever wars in the ME. This has been going on since well before Benghazi and has only gotten worse under Erdogan.

If you have a way to snap your fingers and solve every problem simultaneously, then please do so. Otherwise it must be undertaken one step at a time. Closing that Turkish gateway permanently is an excellent start.

[Dec 25, 2019] The Great Cover Up Of The Biggest Scandal In American History

Dec 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Via The Z-Man blog,

Joe diGenova has been talking about the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election for at least a year, maybe longer. Unlike a lot of the people commenting on this in the mass media, he is not using it to sell books or boost his cable career. He also knows how the FBI and DOJ works from a practical matter. Being knowledgeable makes him a rare guy in the commentariat. Most of the people brought on as experts for the cable chat shows know very little about their alleged areas of expertise.

Regardless, he has been one of the most hawkish people on the Barr investigation, claiming that it is a real investigation with real criminal targets. In this recent radio interview he goes into the details of both the Barr investigation and the ongoing impeachment fiasco. He is a Trump partisan, so his opinions on impeachment are predictable, but his thoughts on the conspiracy are interesting. He probably has access to information from the Trump White House.

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

The interesting thing about all of this is just how widespread the conspiracy was during the 2015-2016 period. In that interview he talks about former NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers, who is allegedly cooperating with Barr and Durham. What makes the Rogers issue interesting is that he was the original whistle-blower. He is not treated as such, because the media hates Trump and anyone associated with him, but Rogers was the guy who blew the whistle on the spying to the Trump people.

What's also interesting about Rogers is he seems to have been a good guy, who decided to put an end to the shenanigans with regards to access to top-secret data by FBI contractors. He closed off their access at some point in 2016, which put him in bad odor with the Obama administration. He was eventually pushed out, which suggests the conspiracy has roots into the Obama inner-circle. That may explain why the easy cases to be made against the FBI conspirators are on hold.

That's the other thing about the Rogers case. As CTH explains in that post , his addition to the story reveals that the use of the NSA database by political contractors working for the Democrats goes back to at least 2012. It is an axiom of white-collar crime that the practice always goes back much further than the evidence initially reveals. Anyone who has done forensic accounting knows this. You find the first evidence of a crime, but it turns out that the pattern goes back much further.

That may be what lies beneath all of this. The great puzzle thus far has been the lack of prosecutions, despite ample evidence. The FBI agents are all guilty of crimes that have been detailed in public documents and the IG reports. There is now proof that Comey perjured himself many times. Just from a public relations perspective alone, rounding up these guys and charging them with corruption seems like a no-brainer. Almost a year into his tenure and Barr has charged no one with a crime.

One obvious explanation is that Barr is running a long con on Trump and the rest of the country, on behalf of the inner party. Robert Mueller was supposed to use his investigation to hoover up all the data so it could not be made public, in addition to harassing the Trump White House. His incompetence meant Barr took over the job and is now hoovering up all the information on the various parties. That way, everyone has an excuse for not doing anything about plot.

One bit of evidence in support of this is the handling of the James Wolfe issue. He was the Senate staffer caught leaking classified information to one of the prostitutes hired by the Washington Post. Big media hires good looking young women to sleep with flunkies like Wolf in order to get access to information. Wolf was caught and charged, but instead of getting a couple years in jail, he got two months . He will come out and land into a six-figure job as a reward for being a good soldier.

An alternative explanation is that what started as a straight forward political corruption case bumped into a long pattern of behavior. In the course of investigating that pattern, the trail went much further back than the 2016 election. If there is evidence of abuse going back to 2012, maybe it goes back further. It was the Bush people, after all, who pushed for the creation of secret courts and secret warrants. Maybe Dick Cheney was listening to your phone calls after all.

It is not just the linear aspect of this. The sheer number of people involved in just the FBI scandal is phenomenal. There are at least 20 FBI people named and dozens of bit players in the media and DOJ. So far, the "contractors" with access to the NSA database have not been revealed, but that could be hundreds of people, given that it seems to have been a free-for-all. The corruption may not only go back a long time, but cover a wide swath of official Washington.

That may be the answer to the great cover up. That's what we are seeing. This is a great cover up of the biggest scandal in American history. To date, no one has been charged with a crime, despite hundreds of crimes being documented. Many of the principals are now enjoying high six figure lives, based on the fact they were part of the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. Instead of the scandal of the century, it is the celebration of the century for the inner party.

One of the signs of ruling class collapse is when they can no longer enforce the rules that maintain them as a ruling class. When the Romans started making exceptions to republican governance, it was a matter of time before someone simply decided the rules no longer applied to them. Perhaps the robot historians will consider Obama our Marius or Sulla. Maybe that person is in the near future. Either way, the rule of law is over and what comes next is the rule of men.

[Dec 25, 2019] America's obsessive bashing of Russia (and now China) is suggestive of a deep psychological disorder.

Dec 25, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

ak74 , Dec 24 2019 4:19 utc | 78

The imperial lie machine sure is disgruntled that the 1990s attempt to economically and biologically crush Russia once and for all was a failure and Russia has since been reasserting itself. It wasn't "the end of history" after all.

That was the source of the underlying current of Russia Derangement among the US elite classes (political, economic, media, academia, professional etc.), the many provocations, and then the total meltdown beginning in late 2016.

Since it really seems to be a collective mental illness (I mean that literally) afflicting a power group which is already psychotic and violent, and since it coincides with the accelerating erosion of the US imperial position, it's looking more and more likely that this must eventually lead to all-out war. I just can't imagine the US stepping back, any more than I could imagine Hitler doing so.

America's obsessive bashing of Russia (and now China) is suggestive of a deep psychological disorder.

Though the Americans and their allied apologists will insist that it is sincerely motivated by a humanitarian concern for Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights(TM), that is quite laughable given America's concentration camps for undocumented immigrants; its incarceration of immigrant children in cages; or the US Prison Industrial Complex in general, which has been called America's new Jim Crow in that it imprisons millions of African Americans and other minorities and relegates them to a new racist caste system.

No, cut through the barrage of American Moral Supremacism and other delusions, the United States is enraged that, despite its attempt to economically rape Russia in the 1990s through American-promoted Free Market reforms and Neoliberal "shock therapy," Russia is still standing and indeed resurgent.

THAT is what enrages the Americans and triggers them in rug-chewing fits of frenzy.

[Dec 24, 2019] Today in Russophrenia

Rachel Maddow is now so crazy that even other crazy people are starting to notice.
Dec 24, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

cartman December 22, 2019 at 9:55 am

Today in Russophrenia:

In other news, @RANDCorporation report firmly establishes that Van Gogh was a Russian Agent. May be, the dastardly Kremlin plot drove him to cut his ear off?.. At any rate, NATO is now on alert. pic.twitter.com/9k9j5K9rx1

-- Constantin Gurdgiev (@GTCost) December 22, 2019

[Dec 24, 2019] I think the Democrat establishment has decided to throw Mayor Pete under the bus. This is why Warren went after him and some donors appear to be stabbing him in the back. A fascinating situation to watch.

Dec 24, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Darius , December 23, 2019 at 9:15 am

I think the Democrat establishment has decided to throw Mayor Pete under the bus. This is why Warren went after him and some donors appear to be stabbing him in the back. A fascinating situation to watch.

jo6pac , December 23, 2019 at 9:36 am

Looks like mayor pete has a following. The 1% have spoken through their puppets.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-218-foreign-policy-endorsements-090003214.html?guccounter=1

Reply ↓

Shonde , December 23, 2019 at 11:04 am

Just read the same article a few minutes ago and thought of what Yves had said today of those hired by Mckinsey, "the firm tries very hard to hire individuals who are very insecure and want badly to do well, including at the firm."

Eureka Springs , December 23, 2019 at 10:12 am

Was driving cross country on debate day listening to NPR as much as I could stand. More than the combined total of the last fifteen years. They played up Pete as if he were a sports star about to wipe every opponent off the playing field. And they never mentioned Sanders by name but included a clip of his voice saying something along the line of "of course taxes will have to go up" at least a hundred times.

And their impeachment Dem/Donald derangement syndrome made me wonder just what kind of drugs have they put in the coffee/water cooler.

Intentional dumbing-down of all who listen without question or nausea.

Joe Well , December 23, 2019 at 11:06 am

Mayor Pete's base is upper-middle-class, middle-aged, moderate-to-liberal-leaning, white people. Which is pretty much NPR's core donor base. Their Buttimania could just be fan service, like the most recent Star Wars movie.

Gotta move them tote bags!

Rod , December 23, 2019 at 11:25 am

It's painful for me to agree that the early efforts of so many journalists of integrity have evolved into what you noticed today. I trusted Noah Adams despite him never pleading to be my trusted news friend or emotional support in hard times.
so much of the bare language–nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and their linking language is replicated by varying 'personalities' that I find it difficult to believe that talking points are not circulated by NPR Editors hourly.
I am also increasingly agitated in my listening by being force fed soooo many stories about Pop Culture 'hooked' to a 'news' item–like Hanukah Shopping events filed under Religion.

Eclair , December 23, 2019 at 11:34 am

Sympathy, Eureka Springs. We listen to NPR on long trips; usually the choices are Religion, Country or NPR. Or Sports Talk Call-Ins. I invariably end up banging my head on the dashboard (not while it is my turn to drive!) and/or screaming into thin air.

turtle , December 23, 2019 at 1:43 pm

Yikes! You could get an old mp3 player and fill it up with your favorite music and podcasts. It would completely transform your car travel experience. If you don't have a hook up for the player to the stereo, you can get great FM transmitters for 20 dollars or so. Good luck!

inode_buddha , December 23, 2019 at 2:35 pm

When going cross-country, I usually just enjoy the scenery, and there is plenty f it.

Amfortas the hippie , December 23, 2019 at 3:28 pm

yeah.
i got out of the habit of listening to the radio a long while ago. we're in an in between major markets place where if the wind is out of the north, we get stations from abilene and san angelo out of the south, san antonio.
none very good reception.
only local stations(2, in different towns) are porter wagoner fans that at least have live coverage of the ball games(for wife,lol. i can't stand it)
so i just got used to having music in my head when on the road, and literally forget that there's a thing called "radio"..

Arizona Slim , December 23, 2019 at 6:04 pm

When I was bicycling around the country, I carried a harmonica. Didn't play it while I was riding, but boy, would I pull that thing out in campgrounds.

Never became a good player, but gawd, that little Hohner was fun!

Goyo Marquez , December 23, 2019 at 7:23 pm

Well when we drive the 2 hours each way to San Diego, usually at least once a week, my wife reads the NC links and commentary. Sometimes she'll save the comments for the trip home and get so excited when she refreshes the page and , "There are 243 comments, that should keep us."

[Dec 24, 2019] Clinton DemoRats are confused about why people in the Democratic pre-primary season aren't flocking to Mayo Pete when he's enthusiastic about maintainjng establishment power and welcoming "former republicans" to the fold. As if "Radical Centrism" hasn't passed its sell by date yet.

Dec 24, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Chris , December 23, 2019 at 10:02 am

A two pack of Buttigieg stories, showing that all the Atlantic should be asking for Christmas is a clue

First, they're confused about why people in the Democratic pre-primary season aren't flocking to Mayo Pete when he's enthusiastic about maintainjng establishment power and welcoming "former republicans" to the fold. As if "Radical Centrism" hasn't passed its sell by date yet.

And then, they're confused about why young people don't like Mayo Pete. Clearly it's jealousy for his success and not his noxious ideas mixed bland centrism.

It's pretty clear Mayor Pete is running for President for two reasons. His own gratification and to receive big payouts from donors after his time in office. He has nothing substantial to offer to anyone. People in Indiana don't even like him enough to support him for a state office. He hasn't done anything worthwhile in little South Bend to show any promise for higher office either. His history and accomplishments vary between meritocratic box checking and crude virtue signaling. He's the political equivalent of a bunch of old rich men trying to create a boy band out of whole cloth. There's nothing there. And the people at the Atlantic can't figure out why voters don't like him???

Joe Well , December 23, 2019 at 11:03 am

My interpretation of Mayo Pete is: identity politics for white, middle-aged, middle-to-upper-class Americans.

NC linked to a poll the other day that showed that 97% of his supporters were white, compared to around 47% for Bernie and around 70% for Klobuchar, the next highest after the Mayor.

jrs , December 23, 2019 at 12:22 pm

Most Democrats hate Republicans (true technically any vote will do when it comes to an election, but it's often more emotional than rational and not going to be much of a selling point to Dems, that you are attracting the other tribe they hate and kumbaya).

There is the problem of him not being qualified of course, and not likely to win. The annoying part is centrists seem to have picked the least promising centrist candidates ever, so if we are stuck with a centrist, it's going to be one that seems to have little shot of winning.

Phacops , December 23, 2019 at 2:04 pm

Democrats hating republicans? Evidently not when they are DINOs, like Senator Peters (MI).

But, seriously, I am tired of those in the grip of Trump derangement who say that they will vote blue no matter who the nominee is. I just wish they would sit out the Democratic primaries and leave the selection to people who actually follow and mull over issues.

Massinissa , December 23, 2019 at 2:13 pm

I hope the people saying that will be ok voting for Bernie Sanders if he wins the primary.

I sort of doubt it though.

Pat , December 23, 2019 at 12:36 pm

I saw where some celebrity was defending him and his donors and described him as "guileless ". I was flummoxed. Guileless? He may be over his head as mayor and as candidate, but there is nothing real there.

I do look at records, but Buttigieg has always struck me as the smart kid B*ll Sh*tting their way through an assignment when ever I hear him speak. Donors buying a Trojan horse I get but I don't know how anyone sees sincerity.

OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL , December 23, 2019 at 7:10 pm

I'd like to see a list of his accomplishments in office. What? There isn't one. Oh, wait, apparently he was really good on fixing the potholes in the roads.

Kind of like Obama, when I encounter the faithful, I pretend to go along, and then ask "what do you think were Obama's best three things he accomplished while in office?"

Squirming in chair, followed by vague platitudes, followed by "he would have done a lot if he wasn't blocked by Republicans

DJG , December 23, 2019 at 1:16 pm

Chris:

Excellent metaphor:
He's the political equivalent of a bunch of old rich men trying to create a boy band out of whole cloth.

But Pete is no Justin Timberlake! C'mon. Let's get serious about boy bands.

[Dec 24, 2019] Deep State endorses Buttigieg. Only half joking. No, maybe not joking at all.

Dec 24, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Donald , December 23, 2019 at 2:03 pm

Deep State endorses Buttigieg. Only half joking. No, maybe not joking at all.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-218-foreign-policy-endorsements-090003214.html

shinola , December 23, 2019 at 2:44 pm

I caught a TV news piece over the weekend that claimed Buttgag had been voted "most likely to become president" (or something to that effect) when he was a senior in high school. That got me thinking "Why does this not surprise me?"

Well because I had encountered exactly this type of person in some advanced placement classes in my HS senior year who claimed that his goal was to one day become president of the US. The word that comes to mind when I recall that guy is "insufferable". I had never encountered anyone before that proudly displayed such naked ambition. I hadn't really thought much about that fellow since then – until Buttgag came on the scene and I was immediately reminded

turtle , December 23, 2019 at 4:31 pm

Yes, the new Netflix series "The Politican" is exactly about one of these types (student at a rich high school who plans to be president). Not sure yet exactly what angle they take since I've only watched the pilot and other random bits, but it's at least interesting. As with any good writing they seem to want to show complexities of the character.

Carl , December 23, 2019 at 4:52 pm

Tracy Flick.

Bugs Bunny , December 23, 2019 at 6:03 pm

That spec screenplay was considered one of the greatest unproduced films for many years before it was finely shot.

Read it sometime, there are plenty of copies in circulation. It's simply brilliant.

The film differs slightly from the script, I suppose it was hard to do it exactly. There are two different endings that I've seen. Neither is the one from the original script.

David R Smith , December 23, 2019 at 9:26 pm

Have we forgotten one William J Clinton?

CoryP , December 24, 2019 at 1:12 am

On my current tangent about proper language. I like that we are able to make fun of his name and turn it into new nicknames. The guy's name has "butt" in it, after all. Let's free our inner 12-year olds.

As a gay man, I call him Butt****, with all the derision normally associated with that term. Theoretically that should be offensive to me.

Anyway interesting. Buttgag works well. ++

lyman alpha blob , December 23, 2019 at 4:34 pm

This was posted here a few days ago in case you missed it. https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/17/national-security-mandarins-groomed-pete-buttigieg/

Booty judge is a spook, Obama the phony pseudo-endorses Warren – the Democrat party is going to nominate a Republican whether the plebes like it or not!

drumlin woodchuckles , December 23, 2019 at 8:48 pm

In which case, the DemParty Convention will have presented the American electorate with a "Truman's Choice".

anon in so cal , December 23, 2019 at 4:52 pm

Here, too:

"The letter is interesting for what it says about Buttigieg's increasingly conventional and hawkish foreign policy and the preferences of many Democratic foreign policy experts."

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-blob-embraces-buttigieg/

pretzelattack , December 23, 2019 at 5:12 pm

i am reeling in shock. the globetrotters and the washington generals were more convincing.

CoryP , December 24, 2019 at 1:07 am

Random. Pretzel, I'm glad to see you here. I've enjoyed your comments at MoA even though the comment section there is a garbage fire.

Craig H. , December 23, 2019

[Dec 24, 2019] Looks like it's Europe's turn in smearing Russia

Notable quotes:
"... "I just want to note that this kind of people, people like the ones who were negotiating with Hitler back then, they now deface monuments to the liberator soldiers, Red Army soldiers who liberated the countries of Europe and the European peoples from Nazism. These are their followers. In this sense, unfortunately, little has changed. And we must keep this in mind, also with regard to the development of our Armed Forces . [My Emphasis] ..."
Dec 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Dec 24 2019 14:40 utc | 101

Looks like it's Europe's turn in smearing Russia:

Putin slams European Parliament resolution on WWII outbreak as 'complete nonsense'

vk , Dec 24 2019 14:53 utc | 102

More on Putin's response to the EP resolution:

Poland wanted to 'erect magnificent monument' to honor Hitler's plan to send Jews to Africa – Putin cites WWII archives

We don't need to guess which member is behind the resolution.

Headache , Dec 24 2019 15:30 utc | 103
Voltairenet has a very interesting article about this subject (also discussed in the last open thread) by prof. Michael Jabara Carley of the University of Montreal: "Justin Trudeau Needs A History Lesson", in which he describes the unsuccessful efforts of Soviet diplomats to create an alliance of European countries against the nazis.

I am afraid to mess up the thread, so no link.

karlof1 , Dec 24 2019 20:16 utc | 111
People may have read that Putin has said a few more things about the documents he reviewed with his CIS peers; and in doing so, Putin revealed an aspect about himself few have seen previously. Putin made his statement at the annual year-end Defense Ministry Board Meeting . IMO, Putin has had more than enough of the extreme Russophobia now in circulation and he sees it as being very similar to that of prior historical periods where Russia was then subjected to attack from the West. I won't post Putin's diatribe here; you'll need to read it for yourself--I've never seen him so angry or speak undiplomatically. What I will post is what he said after, which IMO is even more important, although removed from the overall context:

"I just want to note that this kind of people, people like the ones who were negotiating with Hitler back then, they now deface monuments to the liberator soldiers, Red Army soldiers who liberated the countries of Europe and the European peoples from Nazism. These are their followers. In this sense, unfortunately, little has changed. And we must keep this in mind, also with regard to the development of our Armed Forces . [My Emphasis]

"Here is what I would like to say in this regard, which I think is critically important. Please note: neither the Soviet Union, nor Russia have ever tried to create a threat to other countries. We were always catching up in this regard. The United States created the atomic bomb, and the Soviet Union caught up with it. We did not have nuclear weapon delivery vehicles or carriers. There was no such thing as strategic aviation, and the Soviet Union was catching up in this area, as well. The first intercontinental missiles actually were not built here, and the Soviet Union was trying to catch up.

"Today, we have a unique situation in our new and recent history. They try to catch up with us."

Also note the word Putin chose to describe the Outlaw US Empire's withdraw from the INF Treaty. Clearly, Putin desires to impress upon those charged with Russia's defense that the times are indeed perilous, that the old lies are being spread without any resistance. As with the other three transcripts I linked, this one also demands to be read in full and also in close association with the other three. The Poles will scream along with their sycophants, but Putin is correct about both the past and the present and the danger present within the future.

[Dec 24, 2019] It is trie that Hierarchy class society but the problem (for the lower classes) is that by inequality rises to unacceptable level and becomes evident to all, mechanisms of 'law' and power (plus bread and circuses) have been set in place to prevent or repress the necessary changes from happening from below

Dec 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

William Gruff , Dec 24 2019 14:13 utc | 97

Hierarchy ≠ class society.

There is nothing wrong with hierarchy in and of itself. After all, is seniority to mean nothing? Is demonstrated competence meaningless? Should an individual's efforts to build skill sets be treated as equivalent to the couch potato's efforts to build up an epic Body Mass Index (BMI)? Should notions of winners and losers be banned from athletic competitions and sporting events, along with any associated prizes? Everybody gets a trophy whether they run the race or not?

As I understand it there were plenty of routes through life in the Soviet Union in which people could distinguish themselves, perhaps more than in the West. There were plenty of ways to rise in society's hierarchy. None of those routes resulted in fabulous and opulent wealth, but if some did then the society would necessarily be able to afford fewer such routes.

The only problems with hierarchy in society is if the process of rising in it is corrupt (being born into wealth, for instance) or if the span between the bottom and the top of that hierarchy is larger than what the population considers fair.

juliania , Dec 24 2019 18:35 utc | 108

William Gruff @ 97

"...The only problems with hierarchy in society is if the process of rising in it is corrupt (being born into wealth, for instance) or if the span between the bottom and the top of that hierarchy is larger than what the population considers fair."

That is true, the only problem being (for the lower classes) that by the time the gap becomes evident to all, mechanisms of 'law' and power (plus bread and circuses) have been set in place to prevent or repress the necessary changes from happening from below. This is evident to the US populace as the few who saw it coming and protested could not rouse enough support when it could have mattered. We looked and still look for helpers among the children of the hierarchs because those are the only ones who can work within the current system. So far, such are few, if they exist at all. But we saw with FDR it only takes one or two. (I don't know if you saw my previous post that finance was not the governmental powerhouse it has become in FDR's time. First they came for the legislators!!)

I still have hope that the system in the US will of its own weight become unweildly. There are already signs of that happening in the increasing inability of US powermongers to have their way on the world stage, and in their search for ephemeral 'boltholes'. And while they are still able to inflict harm on others and do so with reckless abandon, I do not believe they are ready to risk their own skins or those of their near and dear - or the fortunes they have staked everything to gain. My hope is that even that damaging ability will peter out as climate change necessities force a refocus on what actually threatens said skins and fortunes.

[Dec 24, 2019] What is the 'deep state' that Trump keeps talking about The Bottom Line - YouTube

Dec 24, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Wen Tai , 2 days ago (edited)

Don't be fooled by these so called experts to dislodge the attention. Deep State is the International Bankers- US Military Industrial- Congressional Complex!!

vincent lattuca , 1 day ago

The deep state killed JFK, RFK,MLK, it's not a bunch of civil servants.

patrella bell , 1 day ago (edited)

Republicans could care less about how big did bureaucracy is as long as they get their tax breaks, loopholes and pay increase. They love to point the finger at big government while ciphering social assistance programs for the poor but increasing Military budget. That gives them power of Macho balls , screw the middle class and build up the army War chest.

Arbjon Shehu , 5 days ago

I like The Bravery of saying that!Deep state=Zionists Masons!

Publick Defendrr , 1 day ago (edited) div tabindex="0" rol

e="article"> Extraterrestrials from the Star System Zeta Reticuli are who Rules us ALL!! Watch everybody, you'll see! Oh, and the US Intelligence Agencies, the MSM , all of the Multi-Billionaires in the world (mostly in Hollywood, owners of Major Media Outlets and the owners of major private corp's with US Military Contracts), George Soros, The Clinton's, the "New" Establishment Demoncrat Party and of course all of the Major Banking Conglomerates!!

Jane Self , 5 days ago

The Federal Reserve run the nations with tentacles into the news media and every corporation. Read Sen Louis McFadden 1934 speech to Congress. He was poisoned.

Zakariye batalaale , 4 days ago

The deep state is the people who control the Dollar.

BVKaronte , 3 days ago

"It is his state of mind in a deep state of delusion" that is what it is.

Abdel Hag , 22 hours ago

Lobbying is the deep state: Pushing an interest of a group against the interest of the general public and the state.

Rischa K Meador , 2 days ago

Every single one of them were rude by talking over one another...

Craig Hart , 3 days ago

WHAT TANGLED WEBS THEY MAKE WHEN THEY LIE TO US...

Abner Rivera , 4 days ago

Hear them all coughing all over each other. Demons.

Scott Ewing , 4 days ago (edited)

Research 'War is a Racket' by Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler. Research '7 Countries 5 Years Gen. wesley clark'. There's your 'deep state'.

TONY Bee , 1 day ago

The REALITY is that they did not resign from the civil service.

Terry Tater , 4 days ago

Would've been a good conversation if anybody knew what they were talking about lol. Reagan made the government weak and then gave elites enough money to buy it..

montydendron1 , 5 days ago

Ha ha, "Came for the beer, stayed for the fight"--- great debate. Always follow the money.

M pua , 2 days ago

US was bankrupt and hijack its financial resources thru their cohorts lawmakers and politicians that was bought during election together with military. The kind of corrupt system america has.

[Dec 24, 2019] Christmas in Flyover Land - Kunstler

Notable quotes:
"... It's a Wonderful Life ..."
"... we have sent the factories to distant lands and eliminated your jobs, and all the meaning and purpose in your lives -- and cheap stuff from Asia is your consolation prize. Enjoy ..."
"... Homelessness in America runs way deeper than just the winos and drug addicts living on the big city sidewalks. ..."
Dec 24, 2019 | kunstler.com

All the people of America, including the flyovers, are responsible for the sad situation we're in: this failure to reestablish a common culture of values most people can subscribe to and use it to rebuild our towns into places worth caring about. Main Street, as it has come to be, is the physical manifestation of that failure. The businesses that used to occupy the storefronts are gone, except for second-hand stores. Nobody in 1952 would have believed this could happen. And yet, there it is: the desolation is stark and heartbreaking.

Even George Bailey's "nightmare" scene in It's a Wonderful Life depicts the supposedly evil Pottersville as a very lively place, only programmed for old-fashioned wickedness: gin mills and streetwalkers. Watch the movie and see for yourself.

Pottersville is way more appealing than 99 percent of America's small towns today, dead as they are.

The dynamics that led to this are not hard to understand. The concentration of retail commerce in a very few gigantic corporations was a swindle that the public fell for.

Enthralled like little children by the dazzle and gigantism of the big boxes, and the free parking, we allowed ourselves to be played.

The excuse was "bargain shopping," which actually meant we have sent the factories to distant lands and eliminated your jobs, and all the meaning and purpose in your lives -- and cheap stuff from Asia is your consolation prize. Enjoy

The "bones" of the village are still standing but the programming for the organism of a community is all gone: gainful employment, social roles in the life of the place, confidence in the future. For a century starting in 1850, there were at least five factories in town. They made textiles and later on, paper products and, in the end, toilet paper, ironically enough. Yes, really.

They also made a lot of the sod-busting steel ploughs that opened up the Midwest, and cotton shirts, and other stuff. The people worked hard for their money, but it was pretty good money by world standards for most of those years.

It allowed them to eat well, sleep in a warm house, and raise children, which is a good start for any society. The village was rich with economic and social niches, and yes, it was hierarchical, but people tended to find the niche appropriate to their abilities and aspirations -- and, believe it or not, it is better to have a place in society than to have no place at all, which is the sad situation for so many today.

Homelessness in America runs way deeper than just the winos and drug addicts living on the big city sidewalks.

BackRowHeckler December 22, 2019 at 10:50 pm #

It seems there's a major political party exactly working against a common American culture. They jeer at the thought of it. It seems to be the main platform, above all else.

Brh

Log in to Reply
Walter B December 23, 2019 at 3:23 pm #

It is a major party alright BRH, but it is no so much political as it is economic and socially stratified. They are opulent, self consumed and greedy as hell (literally). There can only be so many parasites sucking the lifeblood out of any herd of servant beasts, and they can only suck so long on their hosts before the poor beasts fall over and die. And that is the tipping point, where we lose enough life blood that we can no longer stand upright, but drop to the deck and are consumed. It is the classic Goose that laid the Golden Egg fairy tale being acted out in real life and coming to a neighborhood near you soon. Log in to Reply

sunburstsoldier December 22, 2019 at 11:22 pm #

Beautiful, thoughtful post Jim, yet to be honest it fills me with a sense of anxiety, and this is simply because the catastrophic events you forecast, although for the better in the long run (as they will compel a return to a world made by hand, or the recovery of human scale) will nonetheless bring much suffering to a lot of people ( including my own family). I would personally like to believe there is another way a more sustainable civilization could be attained than on the heels of societal collapse. I do believe the world is full of mystery, and that life itself is a series of unfolding miracles we lack the capacity to comprehend due to our limited perspective. Yet perhaps you are right and some type of collapse is inevitable before a new beginning can be made. If such be the case, as individuals we will be compelled to tap into inner potentials that will needed to meet the approaching apocalypse, potentials which currently lie dormant and undeveloped. Maybe in the process of doing so we will recover our wholeness as well.

[Dec 24, 2019] The fact that Obama is willing to put in a good word for Warren on behalf of the wealthy elite should give you a clue as to which side Warren is really on.

"Change we can believe in" the second series ? That's a real warning sign ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and Buttigieg. ..."
"... as the neoliberal corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking ship .. ..."
Dec 24, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Hepativore , December 23, 2019 at 2:37 pm

So, the fact that Obama is willing to put in a good word for Warren on behalf of the wealthy elite should give you a clue as to which side Warren is really on. While many non-political "normies" look upon the Obama years with rose-tinted glasses, I wonder if the disillusionment that many people had in retrospect with Obama has sunk in to mainstream political consciousness yet. If that is the case, an Obama endorsement might actually backfire among progressives, seeing as how it has become evident that Obama was basically a silver-tongued neoliberal in the same mold as Clinton and Pelosi.

I know that Warren is a political careerist at heart, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt when she first launched her 2020 presidential campaign. However, it has become increasingly clear that she has hitched her wagon to the wrong horse as the neoliberal corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking ship. I honestly do not think that she would even be fit to be Sander's vice presidential pick at this point considering how wide the political gulf between Warren and Sanders actually is. A better choice would be Nina Turner as Sander's running mate, with Tulsi Gabbard as his Secretary of State if he gets that far.

shinola , December 23, 2019 at 2:54 pm

" an Obama endorsement might actually backfire among progressives "

It hit me pretty much the same way – that's a strike against her.

Pelham , December 23, 2019 at 4:25 pm

My guess is that this is why he's working behind the scenes, minimizing the chances of a backfire on the left. Of course, how behind-the-scenes is it if it's reported by Politico? Still.

I'm actually undecided on Warren. There was that story last week about her supposedly pushing Hillary in 2016 to name decent people to her cabinet if elected. But then you have to ask why that particular story surfaced at the particular time when Warren was sinking in the polls.

If true, though, and if what the new Politico story says about her clashes with Obama are true, maybe Warren isn't quite as objectionable as we tend to think. Then again, she came right out last week (I believe) and said Medicare for All would be a matter of choice under her plan, emphasizing that "choice" factor.

So I'm confused. But maybe that's what she, her campaign and various surrogates want at this stage.

kimyo , December 23, 2019 at 5:16 pm

I'm actually undecided on Warren.

maybe this will help you decide?
Our military can help lead the fight in combating climate change

It starts with an ambitious goal: consistent with the objectives of the Green New Deal, the Pentagon should achieve net zero carbon emissions for all its non-combat bases and infrastructure by 2030.

having the pentagon 'lead the fight' against climate change is akin to appointing prince andrew as head of the global task force against pedophilia and child trafficking.

anon in so cal , December 23, 2019 at 6:06 pm

Yes, that plus Warren's comments during the Council on Foreign Relations interview, which were frightening (to me, at least).

Jeff W , December 23, 2019 at 7:32 pm

"maybe this will help you decide?"

Or one or both of these two What's Left podcasts:

"The Left Case Against Elizabeth Warren" here

"Warren's Medicare For All 'Plan'" here

Big River Bandido , December 23, 2019 at 3:29 pm

A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and Buttigieg.

Big River Bandido , December 23, 2019 at 3:29 pm

A few weeks ago I read in this spot that while Clinton people hate Sanders and like Warren, Obama was pushing Buttigieg because Warren was such a pain in his ass. Seems he's finally given his signal. Hopefully it's the kiss of death for both Warren and Buttigieg.

Reply ↓

Darius , December 23, 2019 at 5:14 pm

Buttigieg takes no votes from Sanders. While Warren does on the margins. I think Obama's calculation is simple as that. She also has special appeal to the virtue signaling liberals that are Obama's base.

notabanker , December 23, 2019 at 7:53 pm

as the neoliberal corporate Democrats which she is aligning herself with are a sinking ship ..

Bingo. Trump's letter goes right to the heart of it. These clowns are completely exposed and Obama hawking Warren to donors while the blob talks up a gay McKinsey/CIA Indiana Mayor shows just how far they have fallen.

[Dec 24, 2019] Only Tulsi had the sense to see impeachment for what it is, a farce that only helps Trump

Dec 24, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

ggm , December 24, 2019 at 2:06 am

[Dec 24, 2019] Today in Russophrenia

Rachel Maddow is now so crazy that even other crazy people are starting to notice.
Dec 24, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

cartman December 22, 2019 at 9:55 am

Today in Russophrenia:

In other news, @RANDCorporation report firmly establishes that Van Gogh was a Russian Agent. May be, the dastardly Kremlin plot drove him to cut his ear off?.. At any rate, NATO is now on alert. pic.twitter.com/9k9j5K9rx1

-- Constantin Gurdgiev (@GTCost) December 22, 2019

[Dec 23, 2019] Buttigieg is that he worked for the occupation and seems to have bought the imperial cool-aid, which indicates to me that he is not that smart. Some people, like Gabbard, have enlisted in the military, but were able to think independently and critically about the wars.

Dec 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Buttigieg presents himself as having had little to no impact . Buttigieg presents his initial work, on a cost-cutting study for Blue Cross Blue Shield, as being about "rent, travel costs, mail, and printing." Perhaps his little corner of data crunching focused on that, but Buttigieg is being disingenuous in averting voter attention from the fact that the study was almost certainly about cutting headcount.

In my day, McKinsey only reluctantly took on what it called "activity value" or "overhead value" studies, which were its lingo for cost reduction assignments, because there was no way to make much of a dent unless you got rid of bodies. 70% of most firm's costs are employment-related and most costs, like rent, key off headcount. In other words, those "overhead expenditures" that Buttigieg's team was tasked to reduce included employees.

McKinsey didn't like getting people at clients fired because it recognized it might be creating future enemies, via axed professionals who eventually landed well and would likely do what they could to prevent McKinsey from getting hired at their new home. And consultants hated those studies too. They followed a cookbook, which meant they didn't allow the consultants to develop or show off problem-solving skills, plus it was just plain depressing to go to client when the people in the corridors correctly saw you as an executioner. 2

Buttigieg is proud of the monster data-crunching pricing exercise he did on his second study for the Canadian store Loblaw's. There's a bizarre grandiosity in how he presented his role as a still-wet-behind-the-ears consultant in the Atlantic interview: " .brought him in to figure out how to do it in a way that would actually help the bottom line." Structuring the analysis falls to the engagement manager. That isn't to say Buttigieg didn't improve considerably upon the initial ideas, but it seems wildly implausible that someone who presents himself as having to be taught spreadsheeting and doesn't have a degree in math, engineering, hard sciences, or at least a solid knowledge of statistics, would be "brought in" as if he had pre-existing expertise.

And oddly, he never says this big exercise was valuable to the client. There are acceptable in McKinsey-speak ways of taking credit without violating the norm of giving the glory to the client.

This part from the Atlantic interview is also grandiose:

By the time of the Loblaws project, Buttigieg was becoming known within the company for being a particularly good McKinsey consultant..

This is ludicrous. He's merely nine months into the firm and he has yet to demonstrate any client-related or project management skills. At most, Buttigieg might have gotten noticed within the Chicago and/or Toronto offices as being a good number cruncher and quantitative analyst.

Buttigieg also tries to depict his getting a foreign assignment as a badge of honor. In reality, when an office can't staff a project from its own team (and Buttigieg was sent from the Chicago office to work on an Iraq/Afghanistan project staffed out of the Washington office), nearly all of the time, this is the project everyone else in the office turned down. Only once in a great while is an office so busy that it can't even staff the good projects internally. I made this mistake in accepting a London project. I got to the the office in St. James and discovered that the partner to which I was now assigned was widely despised.

Mind you, Buttigieg no doubt learned a lot from this gig, even if it may not be want he wanted to learn. But getting put on it didn't mean he was special.

Buttigieg doesn't adequately explain the anomaly of his bugging out to work on a campaign .

How do we explain this?

I stepped away from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana, returning after the election.

This is sufficiently unusual that I suspect those who have taken notice of it are likely to have drawn the wrong inferences, so indulge me for a bit.

McKinsey, high-power professional firms, and most employers do not take well to employees saying they want to take a disruptive break to pursue personal interests.

McKinsey is even less good about making accommodations for women partners who have children than other top consultants; Bain by contrast has developed a reputation for being enlightened on this front, so there's no reason to think they are habituated to being accommodating in general .particularly for someone who has only been there a bit over a year.

Keep in mind that unlike other types of professional firms, where a young hire might join a particular department, like the bankruptcy practice, and those partners could have the power to run their own business and cut "their" staffers some slack, McKinsey non-partners are in a pool and a assignment specialist (who even when not a partner has a lot of clout) negotiates with partners as to who goes on what study. Even though the partners' interests are important, the assignment specialist also pays attention to the so-called "development needs" of the associates and managers, as well as other issues (like they were just on an out of town study in a terrible location and putting them on another might result in them quitting).

Shorter: for the purpose of keeping peace among the partners, individual partners do not get to act as godfathers with respect to associates or even engagement managers. 3

So how to make sense of this? Look at the timeframe again: Late summer-fall 2008.

The only thing I can fathom is that enough McKinsey clients saw the crisis unfolding and stopped signing up for new work so as to create a lot of underutilization. The firm might have let it quietly or not so quietly be known that it would consider requests for short-term leaves of absence.

McKinsey was badly hit in the dot-bomb era and wound up reducing its staffing in North America by nearly 50% in two years. With the benefit of hindsight, the firm might have come up with other ways to reduce payroll when faced with sudden slack besides cutting hiring and getting more aggressive about pushing weak performers out the door (both of which take time to implement).

Why did Buttigieg leave? Buttigieg strongly suggests he was never serious about McKinsey, that he was there to get his ticket punched. While that may be true, the firm tries very hard to hire individuals who are very insecure and want badly to do well, including at the firm. And if you really aren't that serious about your long-term career at the firm, it is hard to put up with the indignities of being an associate, like insecure managers wanting you to do analysis that is obviously a waste of time or who nag associates thinking that that will motivate them, or alternatively the stereotypical bad consulting gig of being on the road all the time, worse mainly in locations with not-good hotels and restaurants. 4

When I came to McKinsey, I was ambivalent but willing to be persuaded. I wasn't. I saw too little evidence that McKinsey actually added value, to use its pet expression. Most clients didn't seem to get better. Now it is true they might have gotten worse without McKinsey, but that's hard to establish.

One fellow 'Zoid who left around when I did had these observations:

The problem with consulting is you are hired by the problem.

The most profitable clients are the most diseased.

So consulting seemed to me to be a lot like therapy, in a bad way, in that I knew too many people who were in therapy, were convinced therapy was helping, yet there wasn't much objective evidence that their lives were getting better (they didn't seem less anxious, or to be having more success in their relationships or with whatever their presenting problem seemed to be). 5 At my remove, it looked as if in too many cases, the therapist had done a good job of creating patient dependence. And I saw the same phenomenon at McKinsey.

By contrast, Buttigieg is he exhibits no reservations about what McKinsey does generally, just some specific bad acts. From the Atlantic interview :

He said he's disappointed in some of the work the company has done. "Since I've left," he said, "there are at least four cases that I can think of where someone at McKinsey has done something upsetting."

Of course, McKinsey partners have turned out to be important funding sources for Buttigieg, so he has mercenary reasons for avoiding offending members of the firm. Nevertheless, it would seem more genuine to come up with some reason why consulting wasn't a fit for him, even if that reason wasn't the operative truth. But Buttigieg doesn't do genuine.

1 I don't consider Kennedy having worked for one month as a correspondent thanks to his father arm-twisting William Randolph Hearst as "private sector experience." LBJ briefly taught in public schools, again not a private sector position. Clinton decided at age 16 that he wanted to be a public servant. He worked on some political campaigns and was a law professor at the University of Arkansas (public school!) before he won his first race, for governor, at the age of 32.

2 McKinsey got over these touching sentiments when specialist cost cutting firms, including ones started by ex-McKinsey non-tenured partners , started coining money by taking a percentage of the savings.

3 The dynamic can change later when a consultant has worked regularly on a core client team. Then the client might actually start asking for a particular consultant to manage or lead a study. The firm views that positively since consultants that get known at a client will be contenders to take over the account later. But the earliest when clients start asking for a specific person is at the engagement manager level, when Buttigieg was a mere associate.

4 I was exceptionally lucky in getting way less of that than most associates did.

5 Admittedly New York is very competitive and few people have friends that aren't part of their professional circle. So the therapist might have filled an important role by being a safe sounding board/sanity check.

Bugs Bunny , December 23, 2019 at 6:40 am

Thanks Yves. In a few paragraphs you summed up the entire world of the big consulting firm. It can be fun but there's a heck of a lot of misery, especially for the associates and more junior managers. Getting assigned to a bad MD can set a career back for years and I've seen at least a dozen times where it led to illness or leaving the firm. Or both.

The odd thing that I noticed about Buttigieg was that at times he sounds like he's trying to oversell a flimsy resume of consulting experience and at other times sort of clumsily hiding what he really worked on. I agree with you that he was probably told that his part of the firm was "taking a break" before he went off to do campaign work. Otherwise it makes no sense to lose

Edward , December 23, 2019 at 10:22 am

Peter Van Buren has made a similar critique of Buttigieg's military service:

https://wemeantwell.com/blog/2019/06/08/what-mayor-pete-wont-tell-you-the-role-of-military-service-in-the-2020-election/

My basic feeling is that Buttigieg is a creation of the media. Some candidates, like Tulsi Gabbard, Mike Gravel, or Sanders, are diminished by the press. Others, like Buttigieg, are promoted. The hype about Buttigieg reminds me of the hype about George Bush giving Michelle Obama some candy, or about Alito's wife crying during his confirmation hearing.

JohnnyGL , December 23, 2019 at 12:06 pm

https://baselinescenario.com/2010/08/21/management-consulting-myths/

Here's a post on mgt consulting from awhile back that this post reminded me of. James Kwak helped place the proper role of consulting projects into the right frame.

I think it helps compliment Yves' very valid questions.

The larger takeaway I'm getting is that Buttigieg doesn't come across as particularly honest about much of anything on his resume. I know the elites of media and team dem really want to push this guy, but he's really struggling to catch on with voters, not least because he's hopelessly unqualified. There's no scenario where you can say:

"I was a low man on the totem pole at McKinsey" and then say, "I'm qualified to be president" in the next breath.

The same is true with his record as Mayor of South Bend. He's admitted he's not understood the black community and not represented them all that well, and yet, he wants a big promotion.

This kind of resume-based critique seems appropriate to me because he's running as the candidate who's trying to persuade the elite, PMC (prof mgr class) within the democratic party that he's the man for the job (and tell the larger working class base of the democratic party that they should just jump on board because he's electable) and he's not even qualified from their own frame of reference.

Edward , December 23, 2019 at 1:05 pm

What seems to me telling about Buttigieg is that he worked for the occupation and seems to have bought the imperial cool-aid, which indicates to me that he is not that smart. Some people, like Gabbard, have enlisted in the military, but were able to think independently and critically about the wars.

[Dec 23, 2019] Making the World Less Safe

Notable quotes:
"... Currently the United States is assisting Ukraine against Russia by providing some non-lethal military equipment as well as limited training for Kiev's army. It has balked at getting more involved in the conflict, rightly so. ..."
"... The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now. They inevitably produced the Hitler analogy, citing the example of 1938 and Munich as well as the subsequent partition of Poland in 1939 to make their case. When I asked what the United States would gain by intervening they responded that in return for military assistance, Washington will have a good and democratic friend in Ukraine which will serve as a bulwark against further Russian expansion. ..."
"... But Obama chose to stay home as punishment for Putin, which I think was a bad choice suggesting that he is being strongly influenced by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the other neocons who seem to have retained considerable power in his administration. ..."
"... Obama told a crowd gathered outside the Nike footwear company in Oregon that the deal is necessary because "if we don't write the rules, China will " ..."
"... Obama takes as a given that he will be able to "write the rules." This is American hubris writ large and I am certain that many who are thereby designated to follow Washington's lead are as offended by it as I am. Bad move Barack. ..."
"... Asharq al-Awsat ..."
May 21, 2015 | The Unz Review
Currently the United States is assisting Ukraine against Russia by providing some non-lethal military equipment as well as limited training for Kiev's army. It has balked at getting more involved in the conflict, rightly so. With that in mind, I had a meeting with a delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians and government officials a couple of weeks ago. I tried to explain to them why many Americans are wary of helping them by providing lethal, potentially game changing military assistance in what Kiev sees as a struggle to regain control of Crimea and other parts of their country from militias that are clearly linked to Moscow. I argued that while Washington should be sympathetic to Ukraine's aspirations it has no actual horse in the race, that the imperative for bilateral relations with Russia, which is the only nation on earth that can attack and destroy the United States, is that they be stable and that all channels for communication remain open.

I also observed that the negative perception of Washington-driven democracy promotion around the world has been in part shaped by the actual record on interventions since 2001, which has not been positive. Each exercise of the military option has wound up creating new problems, like the mistaken policies in Libya, Iraq and Syria, all of which have produced instability and a surge in terrorism. I noted that the U.S. does not need to bring about a new Cold War by trying to impose democratic norms in Eastern Europe but should instead be doing all in its power to encourage a reasonable rapprochement between Moscow and Kiev. Providing weapons or other military support to Ukraine would only cause the situation to escalate, leading to a new war by proxies in Eastern Europe that could rapidly spread to other regions.

The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now. They inevitably produced the Hitler analogy, citing the example of 1938 and Munich as well as the subsequent partition of Poland in 1939 to make their case. When I asked what the United States would gain by intervening they responded that in return for military assistance, Washington will have a good and democratic friend in Ukraine which will serve as a bulwark against further Russian expansion.

I explained that Russia does not have the economic or military resources to dominate Eastern Europe and its ambitions appear to be limited to establishing a sphere of influence that includes "protection" for some adjacent areas that are traditionally Russian and inhabited by ethnic Russians. Crimea is, unfortunately, one such region that was actually directly governed by Moscow between 1783 and 1954 and it is also militarily vitally important to Moscow as it is the home of the Black Sea Fleet. I did not point that out to excuse Russian behavior but only to suggest that Moscow does have an argument to make, particularly as the United States has been meddling in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine where it has "invested" $5 billion, since the Clinton Administration.

I argued that if resurgent Russian nationalism actually endangered the United States there would be a case to be made for constricting Moscow by creating an alliance of neighbors that would be able to help contain any expansion, but even the hawks in the U.S. Congress are neither prepared nor able to demonstrate a genuine threat. Fear of the expansionistic Soviet Union after 1945 was indeed the original motivation for creating NATO. But the reality is that Russia is only dangerous if the U.S. succeeds in backing it into a corner where it will begin to consider the kind of disruption that was the norm during the Cold War or even some kind of nuclear response or demonstration. If one is focused on U.S. interests globally Russia has actually been a responsible player, helping in the Middle East and also against international terrorism.

So there was little to agree on apart from the fact that the Ukrainians have a right to have a government they choose for themselves and also to defend themselves. And we Americans have in the Ukrainians yet another potential client state that wants our help. In return we would have yet another dependency whose concerns have to be regarded when formulating our foreign policy. One can sympathize with the plight of the Ukrainians but it is not up to Washington to fix the world or to go around promoting democracy as a potential solution to pervasive regional political instability.

Obviously a discussion based on what are essentially conflicting interests will ultimately go nowhere and so it did in this case, but it did raise the issue of why Washington's relationship with Moscow is so troubled, particularly as it need not be so. Regarding Ukraine and associated issues, Washington's approach has been stick-and-carrot with the emphasis on the stick through the imposition of painful sanctions and meaningless though demeaning travel bans. I would think that reversing that formulation to emphasize rewards would actually work better as today's Russia is actually a relatively new nation in terms of its institutions and suffers from insecurity about its place in the world and the respect that it believes it is entitled to receive.

Russia recently celebrated the 70 th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Europe. The celebration was boycotted by the United States and by many Western European nations in protest over Russian interference in Ukraine. I don't know to what extent Obama has any knowledge of recent history, but the Russians were the ones who were most instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany, losing 27 million citizens in the process. It would have been respectful for President Obama or Secretary of State John Kerry to travel to Moscow for the commemoration and it would likely have produced a positive result both for Ukraine and also to mitigate the concern that a new Cold War might be developing. But Obama chose to stay home as punishment for Putin, which I think was a bad choice suggesting that he is being strongly influenced by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the other neocons who seem to have retained considerable power in his administration.

And I also would note a couple of other bad choices made during the past several weeks. The Trans-Pacific multilateral trade agreement that is currently working its way through Congress and is being aggressively promoted by the White House might be great for business though it may or may not be good for the American worker, which, based on previous agreements, is a reasonable concern. But what really disturbs me is the Obama explanation of why the pact is important. Obama told a crowd gathered outside the Nike footwear company in Oregon that the deal is necessary because "if we don't write the rules, China will "

Fear of the Yellow Peril might indeed be legitimate but it would be difficult to make the case that an internally troubled China is seeking to dominate the Pacific. If it attempts to do so, it would face strong resistance from the Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos and Koreans among others. But what is bothersome to me and probably also to many in the Asian audience is that Obama takes as a given that he will be able to "write the rules." This is American hubris writ large and I am certain that many who are thereby designated to follow Washington's lead are as offended by it as I am. Bad move Barack.

And finally there is Iran as an alleged state sponsor of terrorism. President Obama claims that he is working hard to achieve a peaceful settlement of the alleged threat posed by Iran's nuclear program. But if that is so why does he throw obstacles irrelevant to an agreement out to make the Iranian government more uncomfortable and therefore unwilling or unable to compromise? In an interview with Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat Obama called Tehran a terrorism supporter, stating that "it [Iran] props up the Assad regime in Syria. It supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It aids the Houthi rebels in Yemen so countries in the region are rights to be deeply concerned " I understand that the interview was designed to reassure America's friends in the Gulf that the United States shares their concerns and will continue to support them but the timing would appear to be particularly unfortunate.

The handling of Russia, China and Iran all exemplify the essential dysfunction in American foreign policy. The United States should have a mutually respectful relationship with Russia, ought to accept that China is an adversary but not necessarily an enemy unless we make it so and it should also finally realize that an agreement with Iran is within its grasp as long as Washington does not overreach. It is not clear that any of that is well understood and one has to wonder precisely what kind of advice Obama is receiving when fails to understand the importance of Russia, insists on "writing the rules" for Asia, and persists in throwing around the terrorist label. If the past fifteen years have taught us anything it is that the "Washington as the international arbiter model" is not working. Obama should wake up to that reality before Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush arrives on the scene to make everything worse.

Tom Welsh, May 19, 2015 at 7:02 am GMT • 100 Words

All of this misses the point, IMHO. There is really no need to explain that Russia has no plans to conquer Europe, China has no plans to take over the Pacific, etc. Anyone with a little historical knowledge and some common sense can see that plainly. What is happening is that the USA has overweening aspirations to control (and then suck dry) the entire world – and Europe, Russia and China are next on its hit list.

So it naturally accuses those nations of aspiring to what it plans to do. Standard operating procedure.

The Priss Factor, May 19, 2015 at 7:19 am GMT • 100 Words

"The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now."

I can understand Ukrainian animus against Russia due to history and ethnic tensions.

But that is ridiculous. They can't possibly believe it. I think they're repeating Neocon talking points to persuade American that the fate of the world is at stake.
It's really just a local affair.

And Crimea would still belong to Ukraine if the crazies in Ukraine hadn't conspired with Neocons like Nuland to subvert and overthrow the regime.

[Dec 23, 2019] The US goes to foreign nations, destroys millions of people's lives and the American people are as ignorant and dumb as a wall

Dec 23, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Fayez Abedaziz • 5 days ago

The US goes to foreign nations, destroys millions of people's lives and the American people are as ignorant and dumb as a wall.

They don't care and here is what needs to be done:

Wow, the US is now the bum nation of the world and the most hated nation/people in the world. Also, you all can spare me the 'if you don't like it here...' or 'America love it or leave it...;

I've been hearing that since I as a kid in the early 60's. You go back, only the Indians (American) are legally here, anyway. Dig it and have a nice day, buy me coffee when you see me.

Mandrake • 5 days ago
Israel's Janissaries, courtesy of the US taxpayer...

[Dec 23, 2019] The Afghanistan Papers - TTG - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Dec 23, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The President of the USofA has no power to turn this ship around. The seat of power is no longer residing in the hands of civilian/political actors prime ministers or presidents though they may be.

Candidate Trump indicated very early on that he intended to withdraw from Afghanistan. Unfortunately, he soon succumbed to his advisors and generals advice of increasing troop strength in 2017 as part of a surge strategy. This makes him no better or worse than his two predecessors who succumbed to the same kind of advice.

However Trump has recently restarted negotiations with the Taliban and has renewed his pledged to remove several thousand troops. "We're going down to 8,600 [from the 12,000 and 13,000 US troops now there] and then we make a determination from there as to what happens," Trump told Fox last August. "We're bringing it down." Of course the drawdown will be seen by the neocons as a unilateral concession to the Taliban. That shouldn't phase Trump. I think he plans to reannounce this withdrawal next month. DoD officials have said that the smaller US military presence will be largely focused on counterterrorism operations against groups like al Qaeda and IS, and that the military's ability to train and advise local Afghan forces will be reduced considerably. Sounds like they're still looking for a reason to stay.

Trump can break the cycle. He holds no ideological conviction for staying in Afghanistan. If he could get over his BDS (Bezos derangement syndrome), he could seize this Washington Post series, or at least the SIGAR lessons learned reports, and trumpet them through his twitter feed and helicopter talks. I believe he alone can generate a public cry for getting the hell out of Afghanistan and carry through with that action no matter how much his generals scream about it. But without a loud public outcry, especially from his base, Trump has no incentive to break the cycle. So all you deplorables better start hootin' and hollerin'. Hopefully enough SJWs will join you to pump up the volume.

TTG

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/

Mathias Alexander , 23 December 2019 at 04:37 AM

If someone wanted to destabilize China,Russia and Central Asia the parts of Afghanistan America controls might be usefull for that.
JMH , 23 December 2019 at 07:11 AM
Excellent, right up to the last sentence. SJWs are mere tools of people like George Soros and have zero anti-war agenda nor do they care about America's manufacturing base ect.. In fact, many are chomping at the bit to join, what was once termed in the SST comments, the LGBTQ-C4ISR sect. I refer you to mayor Pete's exchange with Tulsi on the matter; he even invoked our sacred honor as a reason to stay the course in Afghanistan.
Eric Newhill -> The Twisted Genius ... , 23 December 2019 at 03:38 PM
TTG,
It's a shrinking cohort. For some of these types, their TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) is actually causing them to side with the CIA and military. Enemy of my enemy.....and since there's no draft, they have no skin in that game.
Serge , 23 December 2019 at 07:35 AM
For the past 2-3 years many generals and politicians have been using the threat of ISKP as the new bogeyman for staying in Afghanistan. This threat is not wholly unfounded, a disproportionately large number of US airstrikes since 2015-2016 have been against ISKP in Nangarhar(remember the MOAB?) rather than against the Taliban. If my memory serves me correctly ISKP was responsible for every single US casualty in 2016-2017. In the past two months however ISKP has been collapsing in its erstwhile stronghold of Nangarhar, surrendering to the ANA rather than fall into the hands of the Taliba,à la Jowzjan in summer 2018. I was very surprised by the number of foreign fighters and their families to come out of there. We have the Taliban to thank for these two collapses.
turcopolier , 23 December 2019 at 11:59 AM
TTG

IMO American "exceptionalism" doomed our effort in Afghanistan Very few of us are set up mentally to accept the notion that other peoples are legitimately different from us and that they don't want to be like us and do things our way. I attribute this deformation on our part to the puritan heritage that you much admire. In your case your recent immigrant past seems to have immunized you from this deformation. As SF men we rightly fear and dread the attitudes of The Big Army, but, truth be told, it is we who are the outlier freaks in the context of American culture with its steamroller approach to just about everything.

The Twisted Genius -> turcopolier ... , 23 December 2019 at 01:40 PM
Ah yes, all that shining city on the hill stuff biting us in the ass once again. Like the Puritans, we seem to believe we alone are His chosen people and are utterly shocked that all others don't see this. In truth, Jesus probably sees our self righteous selves and our pilgrim forefathers much as he saw the Pharisees... a bunch of douche nozzles.

[Dec 23, 2019] NYT neocon propaganda sing in unison with GE's harpy, Rachel Maddow

Dec 23, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

FSD , Dec 23 2019 14:48 utc | 1

The USA desperately need another resource-rich country to loot and can't find suitable candidate other then Russia. So MIC prostitute Madcow is just a dog of war. The USA deperately need another resource-rich country to loot and can't find sutable candiadate othe then Russia

There is no credible analyst not shackled to the MIC trough who ventures such an analysis beyond of course GE's W-2 harpie, Rachel Maddow.

The Western elites have long decided. WW3 is coming. In recent years, the Russians have repeatedly tried to get this message through the western Mediadrome, but to little effect.

The job of the GE spokespeople (Maddow et al) is diversionary/ preparatory spadework i.e. to drill with numbing repetition into the American consciousness who the enemy is. And you can bet the enemy is not who signs their paychecks. Their employers though happen to be OUR enemy.

Thus we find ourselves in the odd position of having Russia's top general attempting to shout through the Maddow racket that our two nations are on a collision course for war. Strange messenger. Or maybe not. They want to live too.

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ /russias-top-general-warns-wor

Russia is in demographic collapse. It lacks the human capital to exploit even its own vast resource trove. The western banking system is over-leveraged. The imaginary numbers have gotten too big. Its 'denominator of the real' badly needs shoring up.

Russian resource wealth, Iran's massive South Pars LNG field are viewed with watering eyes as prolongations of the doomed Ponzi. Europe is energy-poor, geriatric and overrun with Islamic jihadists. With all due respect, who would want it at this late stage? At best, it is a funding source --and a battleground-- for WW3.

Meanwhile the Ponzi is ravenous and never sleeps. No growth - negative interest rates is a bell-ringer for WW3. The alternative is deflationary collapse. Maddow's been mysteriously cranked up again: Rushah Rushah!

So we find ourselves in another Goebellian shift: accuse the opposition of your own ulterior motives. They have no designs on us. Our overlords have designs on them.

Americans are just the People in the middle, hostages in a sense yet seemingly feared enough that our minds are still worth battling over. Trump's affinities are too populist. He's a dodgy helmsman for the massive undertaking of a world war where the people are only to be galvanized, not consulted.

Far from a duteous seat-warmer, he's a leader who squeaked through. The Oval Office is no place for leaders. It was thought to have been neutered of all that leadership malarkey post-JFK. Trump's not enough to hold back the MIC. No POTUS is. He either must depart the job or be compromised into executing the plan. But he's a bad Lieutenant. They'll never be comfortable with him.

Then some evil, diseased mind had an epiphany. Don't just Get Trump! Get a twofer! Get Trump and Russah! Weld them together for one kill-shot. Collusion means no daylight and one bullet. Yes, there's a genius to it, a very sick genius.

Annie , Dec 23 2019 15:29 utc | 4

B, great article as usual but disappointed that you didn't write about the latest sanctions on N2.

Another act of WAR by the US. These sanctions now cover the comoany, Allseas, laying the pipeline to Germany. They ceased operations and will not complete the project and Gazprom does not have the expertise. Would love to see your

analysis on that.
The NYT propaganda, true to form and loyal to Dem Russophobes just one more attempt to manufacture consent

This is maddening. These crazies are looking for war on Russia. Are the American people stupid enough to give that consent?

Piotr Berman , Dec 23 2019 15:30 utc | 5
My NYT site has the title "Russia Is a Mess. Why Is Putin Such a Formidable Enemy?"

Some quotes:
---- 1 ----
Under Mr. Putin, Vladislav Surkov, a longtime Kremlin adviser, wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a Moscow newspaper, earlier this year, Russia "is playing with the West's minds."

Also its own.
---- 2 ----
All the same, said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political scientist who worked for more than a decade as a Kremlin adviser, Russia under Mr. Putin still reminds him of a sci-fi movie exoskeleton: "Inside is sitting a small, weak and perhaps frightened person, but from the outside it looks terrifying."
---- 3 ----
Whatever its problems, Mr. Surkov, the Kremlin adviser, said, Russia has created "the ideology of the future" by dispensing with the "illusion of choice" offered by the West and rooting itself in the will of a single leader capable of swiftly making the choices without constraint.

China, too, has advocated autocracy as the way to get results fast, but even Xi Jinping, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, can't match the lightening speed with which Mr. Putin ordered and executed the seizure of Crimea. The decision to grab the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine was made at a single all-night Kremlin meeting in February 2014 and then carried out just four days later with the dispatch of a few score Russian special forces officers to seize a handful of government buildings in Simferopol, the Crimean capital.
==========
If true, the resources committed to "Crimea takeover" were comparable with what Israel committed to assassinate one person, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, dispatching a team of 33 to Dubai in January 2010. Wasn't the superior productivity the strength of the West?

And this is not a joke. Putin is a maniac for balanced budgets, and compared to the expansive American style, the resources committed by Syria were minuscule. And by all accounts, spend well.

REUTERS. Oct 2, 2015 - U.S. President Barack Obama warned Russia on Friday that its bombing campaign against Syrian rebels will suck Moscow into a "quagmire," after a third straight day of air raids in support of President Bashar al-Assad. <<-- Obama was well aware that Russia committed a very small number of troops, and smallish air force that his military expert were describing as obsolete. Russia could not be many times more effective than USA, could it?

No sign of Obama's predicted 'quagmire' as Russia's ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com › world › 2016/09/30
Sep 30, 2016 - BEIRUT -- In the year since Russia began conducting airstrikes in support of the Syrian government, the intervention has worked to secure two ...

That explains the next quote from today NYT
---- 4 ----
"Maybe he's holding small cards, but he seems unafraid to play them," said Michael McFaul, a former United States ambassador to Moscow and now a scholar at Stanford. "That's what makes Putin so scary."
=========
Seems that Establishment scours most elite universities, Harvard, Yale, Stanford , Princeton etc. for the dumbest possible graduates. I know from private sources that not all graduates are dumb, many are actually brilliant. Does it occur to McFaul that boldness in playing small cards is even worse than playing large card? Russia (and Assad's partisans in Syria) had to do something well that USA (in government supporters in Afghanistan) did not do at all or did badly.

[Dec 23, 2019] Durham Is Scrutinizing Ex-C.I.A. Director's Role in Russian Interference Findings - The New York Times

Please note that NYT was a part of coupe d'état against Trump...
Will Brannan and Comey be arrested for stage coup d'état ?
Dec 23, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

John H. Durham, the United States attorney leading the investigation, has requested Mr. Brennan's emails, call logs and other documents from the C.I.A., according to a person briefed on his inquiry. He wants to learn what Mr. Brennan told other officials, including the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, about his and the C.I.A.'s views of a notorious dossier of assertions about Russia and Trump associates.

... ... ...

Mr. Durham is also examining whether Mr. Brennan privately contradicted his public comments, including May 2017 testimony to Congress , about both the dossier and about any debate among the intelligence agencies over their conclusions on Russia's interference, the people said.

... ... ..

"The president bore the burden of probably one of the greatest conspiracy theories -- baseless conspiracy theories -- in American political history," Mr. Barr told Fox News. He has long expressed skepticism that the F.B.I. had enough information to begin its inquiry in 2016, publicly criticizing an inspector general report released last week that affirmed that the bureau did.

Mr. Barr has long been interested in the conclusion about Mr. Putin ordering intervention on Mr. Trump's behalf, perhaps the intelligence report's most explosive assertion. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. reported high confidence in the conclusion, while the N.S.A., which conducts electronic surveillance, had a moderate degree of confidence.

... ... ...

Critics of the intelligence assessment, like Representative Chris Stewart, Republican of Utah, said the C.I.A.'s sourcing failed to justify the high level of confidence about Moscow's intervention on behalf of Mr. Trump.

"I don't agree with the conclusion, particularly that it's such a high level of confidence," Mr. Stewart said, citing raw intelligence that he said he reviewed.

"I just think there should've been allowances made for some of the ambiguity in that and especially for those who didn't also share in the conclusion that it was a high degree of confidence," he added.

Mr. Durham's investigators also want to know more about the discussions that prompted intelligence community leaders to include Mr. Steele's allegations in the appendix of their assessment.

Mr. Brennan has repeatedly said, including in his 2017 congressional testimony, that the C.I.A. did not rely on the dossier when it helped develop the assessment, and the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has also testified before lawmakers that the same was true for the intelligence agencies more broadly. But Mr. Trump's allies have long asked pointed questions about the dossier, including how it was used in the intelligence agency's assessment.

Some C.I.A. analysts and officials insisted that the dossier be left out of the assessment, while some F.B.I. leaders wanted to include it and bristled at its relegation to the appendix. Their disagreements were captured in the highly anticipated report released last week by Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general, examining aspects of the F.B.I.'s Russia investigation.

Mr. Steele's information "was a topic of significant discussion within the F.B.I. and with the other agencies participating in drafting" the declassified intelligence assessment about Russia interference, Mr. Horowitz wrote. The F.B.I. shared Mr. Steele's information with the team of officials from multiple agencies drafting the assessment.

Mr. Comey also briefed Mr. Brennan and other top Obama administration intelligence officials including the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, and Mr. Clapper about the bureau's efforts to assess the information in the dossier, Mr. Comey told the inspector general. He said that analysts had found it to be "credible on its face."

... ... ...

Andrew G. McCabe, then the deputy director of the F.B.I., pushed back, according to the inspector general report, accusing the intelligence chiefs of trying to minimize Mr. Steele's information.

Ultimately the two sides compromised by placing Mr. Steele's material in the appendix. After BuzzFeed News published the dossier in January 2017, days after the intelligence assessment about Russia's election sabotage was released, Mr. Comey complained to Mr. Clapper about his decision to publicly state that the intelligence community "has not made any judgment" about the document's reliability.

Mr. Comey said that the F.B.I. had concluded that Mr. Steele was reliable, according to the inspector general report. Mr. Clapper ignored Mr. Comey, the report said.

[Dec 23, 2019] Zuesse: Proof That America's Deep State Exists And Controls The Government

Dec 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Saker blog,

Readers at the international-news site South Front tend to be technologically far more knowledgeable about the internet than most people (including myself) are, and so their responses to a news-report that I did on December 17th, titled "Former NSA Tech Chief Says Mueller Report Was Based on CIA-Fabricated 'Evidence'" , explaining some technological details which enable a deeper understanding of how the CIA had perpetrated the 'Russiagate' hoax that Robert Mueller in his report as the U.S. Special Counsel had asserted to be a "Russiagate" fact (i.e., Mueller's allegations that the Russian Government had hacked computers of the Democratic National Committee). Especially informative there was this reader-comment, which comes from one of the world's leading experts on cyber technology, Luke Herbert-Hansen :

Luke Herbert-Hansen Peter Jennings

Well FAT may not [be] a common OS file system anymore, but it is still widely used on various removable media such as a USB sticks.

As everyone knows who has been closely following the most-reliable evidence regarding the question of how DNC emails had been copied and supplied to Wikileaks, there has been much credible, soundly-sourced, speculation that the DNC employee Seth Rich had physically copied the data from a computer there onto a thumb drive (or "USB stick"), which then was picked up in the U.S. by a Wikileaks agent, who physically delivered it to Julian Assange at London's Ecuadorean Embassy .

The great independent investigative journalist (virtually barred since 2007 from being published in the U.S. anymore), Seymour Hersh, personally investigated the records of the murder of Seth Rich , both at the Washington DC police and at the FBI, and this is from the transcript I had made of his statement in a Web-posted phone-call [my boldfaces for emphasis]:

(2:50-) At some time in late spring, which we're talking about in June 21st, I don't know, just late spring early summer, he makes contact with Wikileaks , that's in his computer, and he makes contact. Now, I have to be careful because I met Julian [Assange] in Europe ten twelve years [ago], I stay the fuck away from people like that. He has invited me and when I am in London, I always get a message, 'come see me at the Ecuadorean' [Embassy], and I am fucking not going there. I have enough trouble without getting photographed. He's under total surveillance by everybody.

They found, what he had done, he [Seth Rich] had submitted a series of documents, emails from DNC -- and, by the way, all this shit about the DNC, you know, was it a 'hack' or wasn't it a 'hack' -- whatever happened, it was the Democrats themselves wrote this shit, you know what I mean? All I know is that, he offered a sample , he sends a sample, you know, I am sure dozens of emails, and said ' I want money' . Later Wikileaks did get the password [SETH RICH DID SELL WIKILEAKS ACCESS INTO HIS COMPUTER.] He had a drop-box, a [password-]protected drop-box, which isn't hard to do. I mean you don't have to be a whiz at IT [information technology], he was not a dumb kid. They got access to the drop-box. This is all from the FBI report . He also let people know with whom he was dealing, I don't know how he dealt, I'll tell you all about Wikileaks in a second, with Wikileaks the mechanism, but according to the FBI report, he shared his box with a couple of friends, so 'If anything happens to me, it's not going to solve your problem', okay? I don't know what that means. But, anyway, Wikileaks got access. And, before he was killed, I can tell you right now, [Obama's CIA Director John] Brennan's an asshole. I've known all these people for years, Clapper is sort of a better guy but no rocket-scientist, the NSA guys are fuckin' morons, and the trouble with all those guys is, the only way they'll get hired by SAIC, is if they'll deliver some [government] contracts, it's the only reason they stayed in. With Trump, they're gone, they're going to live on their pension, they're not going to make it [to great wealth]. I've gotta to tell you, guys in that job, they don't want to live on their pension. They want to be on [corporate] boards like their [mumble] thousand bucks [cut].

I have somebody on the inside, you know I've been around a long time, somebody who will go and read a file for me, who, this person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he's a very high-level guy, he'll do a favor, you're just going to have to trust me, I have what they call in my business, long-form journalism, I have a narrative, of how that whole fucking thing began.

(5:50-) It's a Brennan operation. It was an American disinformation, and the fucking President, at one point when they even started telling the press -- they were back[ground]-briefing the press, the head of the NSA was going and telling the press, the fucking cocksucker Rogers, telling the press that we [they] even know who in the Russian military intelligence service leaked it. All bullshit.

In other words, besides the information from Bill Binney, who was an NSA whistleblower who took early retirement so he wouldn't have to continue doing what people such as John Brennan demanded, Seymour Hersh there provided yet additional confirmation to this account from the also-early-retired whistleblowing UK Ambassador Craig Murray -- a close friend of Assange -- who claimed that he had "met" the person in DC who supplied the thumb drive (USB stick), which then was delivered (he didn't say how) to Assange :

Here is from my news-report on 6 January 2017 which confirms and documents that:

Murray received the Hillary-campaign information on September 24th. Little over a week later, on October 7th, Wikileaks published documents from the computer of Hillary's Campaign Chairman John Podesta, and politico announced it headlining " The most revealing Clinton campaign emails in WikiLeaks release" . That same day, Politico also bannered " Podesta: 'I'm not happy about being hacked by the Russians'," and the legend that 'Russia hacked the Clinton campaign' started immediately to compete in the day's 'news' stories, and diminish focus on, the contents of that information which had been 'hacked'.

However, the information from the DNC itself had been published much earlier, on July 22nd , and so this could not have come from the September 24th leak. Whether it came from the same person, or through the same courier (i.e., Murray), isn't yet known. [But it is now, from what Binney has just said , and the answer is "yes."] The Obama Administration has made no distinctions between those two data-dumps, but charges that all of the leaks from the Obama-Clinton-DNC conspiracy -- both the anti-Sanders campaign during the primaries, and the anti-Trump campaign during the general-election contest -- came from 'Russian hacking'. The reason why the emphasis is upon the anti-Trump portion is that the conspirators now are trying to smear Trump, not Sanders, and so to make this a national issue, instead of only an internal Democratic-Party issue. They are trying to de-legitimize Trump's Presidency -- and, at the same time, to advance Obama's aim for the U.S. ultimately to conquer Russia . The mutual hostility between Obama and Trump is intense, but Obama's hatred of Russia gives had Russia in his gunsights well before he, as a cunning politician, made political hay out of Mitt Romney's statement that "Russia, this is, without question America's number one geopolitical foe."added impetus to his post-Presidential campaign here. This Nobel Peace Prize winner

Only a fool trusts the U.S. government (and the U.S. 'news'media) after ' Saddam's WMD' (which despite all the lies to the contrary, didn't exist). Like Craig Murray said , "I used to be the head of the FCO unit that monitored Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and I know for certain, I can tell you, they knew there weren't any."

In my records, the politically progressive Craig Murray was the first individual to post to the Web a clear case that Russiagate was a U.S. Deep-State hoax: He headlined, on 31 December 2016, "Exit Obama in a Cloud of Disillusion, Delusion and Deceit" , and discussed the case which now is commonly called "Russiagate." In fact, I had never found any evidence that anything he has said was false, and -- especially considering the sheer number of his postings at his blog -- this was a remarkable record of truthfulness (100%), which is attained by very few journalists, none of whom are publishable in the United States. These reporters are too honest, and too careful about the quality of the documentation they cite, to be publishable in the United States. They refuse to intentionally deceive their readers; and, to the exact contrary, they take great care never to deceive them. (However, I unfortunately did finally see a posting from him that included some false allegations.)

Incidentally, my December 15th news-report, "Two Huge Suppressed News-Reports in a 3-Day Period Display Corrupt U.S.-&-Allied Mainstream Press" , shows how pervasive and deeply systemic this outright lying by the U.S.-and-allied press is.

As to whom the individuals are who are America's Deep State, that's discussed here . In other words: the operatives (such as mainstream American journalists) are only agents for those individuals -- they are not the Deep State itself. They can easily be replaced, but the Deep State is a far more deep-seated infection, in the American body-politic, and maybe cannot be removed, at all, without replacing the entire system. More-drastic measures than "reform" would therefore be needed, in order to eradicate the Deep State and restore whatever degree of democracy the United States formerly did have. (It's now a dictatorship . In fact, that's even been scientifically proven .) My research indicates that the Deep State took control of America starting on 26 July 1945 .

* * *

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .

[Dec 22, 2019] So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks. That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born -- distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam

Highly recommended!
Looks like Brennan ears are all over this false flag operation...
Dec 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Mark McCarty , 21 December 2019 at 02:34 PM

Here's a key point - on June 12, Assange announces that Wikileaks will soon be releasing info pertinent to Hillary. HE DOES NOT SAY THAT HE WILL BE RELEASING DNC EMAILS.

And yet, on June 14, Crowdstrike reports a Russian hack of the DNC servers - and a day later, Guccifer 2.0 emerges and proclaims himself to be the hacker, takes credit for the upcoming Wikileaks DNC releases, publishes the Trump oppo research which Crowdstrike claimed he had taken, and intentionally adds "Russian footprints" to his metadata.

So how did Crowdstrike and G2.0 know that DNC EMAILS would be released?

Because, as Larry postulates, the US intelligence community had intercepted communications between Seth Rich and Wikileaks in which Seth had offered the DNC emails (consistent with the report of Sy Hersh's source within the FBI).

So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks.

That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born - distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam.

[Dec 22, 2019] The Long, Dark History of Russia's Murder, Inc. Up next: The bright, sunny history of the CIA

Notable quotes:
"... The Long, Dark History of Russia's Murder, Inc. New York Review of Books ..."
Dec 22, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Stormcrow , December 21, 2019 at 11:54 am

The Long, Dark History of Russia's Murder, Inc. New York Review of Books

Up next: The bright, sunny history of the CIA

Carolinian , December 21, 2019 at 1:27 pm

Speaking of that.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/12/20/gladio-the-story-of-a-conspiracy/

Acacia , December 22, 2019 at 12:15 am

No surprise. NYRB has had a b*ner for Muh Russia since the early days of the hysteria.

[Dec 22, 2019] The Insider National Security Mandarins Groomed Pete Buttigieg Managed His Future by Max Blumenthal

Notable quotes:
"... On the trail, he has invoked his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval reserve intelligence officer who now claims to oppose "endless wars". He insists that "there's energy for an outsider like me," promoting himself as "an unconventional candidate." ..."
"... Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint in Iraq than "Mayor Pete." Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime change wars serving as her leitmotif. ..."
"... After ticking off her foreign policy credentials, Gabbard turned to Buttigieg and lit into him for stating his willingness to send U.S. troops to Mexico to crack down on drug cartels. A visibly angry Buttigieg responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has argued for an indefinite deployment of occupying U.S. troops. ..."
"... According to John Kiriakou, a former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower, Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism. "There really is nothing going on in Somaliland," Kiriakou told The Grayzone . "To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It's not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist." ..."
"... Whether or not Buttigieg's trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue. ..."
"... When Pete Buttigieg made his journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic Party. ..."
"... Buttigieg likely earned the fellowship after answering an ad like the one the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010 . Soliciting applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking "exceptionally accomplished and dedicated men and women who share President Truman's belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin." ..."
"... Buttigieg blended a call to "end endless wars" with Cold War bluster directed at designated enemies. ..."
"... Before an auditorium packed with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era, blaming President Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S. He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in Korea, slamming the president for exchanging "love letters" with "a brutal dictator," referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. ..."
"... Trojan Horse cum Wolf in Sheep's Clothing #2. Fooled me twice, Obama; shame on me. ..."
Dec 21, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

An influential D.C. network of military interventionists placed Mayor Pete on an inside track to power, reports Max Blumenthal.


The Grayzone

I n his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as a maverick running against a broken establishment.

On the trail, he has invoked his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval reserve intelligence officer who now claims to oppose "endless wars". He insists that "there's energy for an outsider like me," promoting himself as "an unconventional candidate."

When former Secretary of State John Kerry endorsed Joe Biden this December, Buttigieg went full maverick . "I have never been part of the Washington establishment," he proclaimed, "and I recognize that there are relationships among senators who have been together on Capitol Hill as long as I've been alive and that is what it is."

But a testy exchange between the South Bend mayor and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a Nov. 20 Democratic primary debate had already complicated Buttigieg's branding campaign.

Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint in Iraq than "Mayor Pete." Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime change wars serving as her leitmotif.

After ticking off her foreign policy credentials, Gabbard turned to Buttigieg and lit into him for stating his willingness to send U.S. troops to Mexico to crack down on drug cartels. A visibly angry Buttigieg responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has argued for an indefinite deployment of occupying U.S. troops.

Rehashing well-worn criticism of Gabbard for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a diplomatic visit she took -- her trip was devoted to de-escalating the U.S.-backed proxy war that had ravaged the country's population -- Buttigieg attacked the congresswoman for engaging with a "murderous dictator."

Throughout the exchange, Buttigieg appeared shaken, as though his sense of inviolability had been punctured. Gabbard had clearly struck a vulnerable point by painting the self-styled outsider as a conventional D.C.-style politician unconsciously spouting interventionist bromides.

How could someone who served in the catastrophically wasteful U.S. wars in the Middle East, and who had seen their human toll, be reckless enough to propose sending U.S. troops to fight and possibly die in Mexico? "But Assad!" was the best response he could muster.

The remarkable dust-up highlighted a side of the 37-year-old political upstart that has been scarcely explored in mainstream U.S. media accounts of his rise to prominence. It revealed the real Buttigieg as a neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully managed by the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard University.

After college, the Democratic presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic communications firm founded by a former secretary of defense who raked in contracts with the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an influential D.C. think tank described by its founder as "a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s." Today, Buttigieg sits on that think tank's board of advisors alongside some of the country's most accomplished military interventionists.

Buttigieg has reaped the rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the top recipient of donations from staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Justice Department – key cogs in the national security state's permanent bureaucracy.

His Harvard social network has been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisers and strategists. One of his closest friends from school is today the senior adviser of a specialized unit of the State Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad.

That friend, Nathaniel "Nat" Myers, was Buttigieg's traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two claimed to have been tourists in a July 2008 article they wrote for The New York Times.

Their contribution to the paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed the Somaliland government's call for recognition from the U.S. government. It was Buttigieg's first foreign policy audition before a national audience.

Short, Strange Trip to Somaliland

Under public pressure for more transparency about his work at the notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting firm, the Buttigieg campaign released some background details this December. The disclosures included a timeline of his work for various clients that stated he "stepped away from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana."

How Buttigieg's "full-time" role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland remains unclear.

Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region of Somaliland. In that short time, they interviewed unnamed government officials and faithfully relayed their pro-independence line back to the readers of The New York Times in a July 2008 op-ed .

The column read as though crafted by a public relations firm on behalf of a government client. In one section, the two travelers wrote that "the people we met in Somaliland were welcoming, hopeful and bewildered by the absence of recognition from the West. They were frustrated to still be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty of the failed state to their south."

Since declaring its independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has campaigned for recognition from the U.S., EU, and African Union. It even offered to hand its deep water port over to AFRICOM, the U.S. military command structure on the African continent, in exchange for U.S. acceptance of its sovereignty.

Several months after Buttigieg traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera reported , "The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global recognition."

And just a few weeks before Buttigieg's visit, the would-be republic inked a contract with an international lobbying firm called Independent Diplomat , presumably to help oversee that charm offensive.

Founded by a self-described anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat represents an array of non and para-state entities seeking recognition on the international stage. Ross's client list has included the Syrian Opposition Coalition , which tried and failed to secure power through a Western-backed war against the Syrian government .

Independent Diplomat did not respond to questions from The Grayzone about whether it had any role in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and Myers took to Somaliland.

According to John Kiriakou, a former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower, Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism. "There really is nothing going on in Somaliland," Kiriakou told The Grayzone . "To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It's not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist."

Kiriakou visited Somaliland in 2009 as part of an investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he described as the phenomenon of "blue-eyed" American citizens converting to Islam, traveling to Somalia and Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist groups, then returning home on their U.S. passports.

To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou said he took an arduous seven-hour journey from the neighboring state of Djibouti. His junket was coordinated by the U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, a regional security officer of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service and an embassy attaché.

"It is not the easiest place to reach and there's no business to do there," Kiriakou said.

Whether or not Buttigieg's trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue.

In his bio, Nathaniel Myers identified himself simply as a "financial analyst based in Ethiopia." According to his resume, which is available online at Linkedin, he was working at the time as a World Bank consultant on governance and corruption.

By 2011, Myers had moved on from that neoliberal international financial institution to a specialized government at the center of U.S. regime change operations abroad.

Pete Buttigieg on a pre-graduation trip with his Harvard buddies. Nathaniel "Nat" Myers is to his immediate left.

Imperial Social Network

Nathaniel Myers' relationship with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard University. There, they formed two parts of "The Order of Kong," a close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly for the Chinese restaurant they frequented after intensive discussion sessions at the school's Institute of Politics.

Like most members of the college-era "order," Myers and Buttigieg have remained close. When the mayor married his longtime partner in 2018, Buttigieg chose him as his best man.

Myers currently works as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development's Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in Washington, D.C. The OTI is a specialized division of USAID that routinely works through contractors and local proxies to orchestrate destabilization operations inside countries considered insufficiently compliant to the dictates of Washington.

Wherever the U.S. seeks regime change, it seems that USAID's OTI is involved.

The Linkedin page of Nathaniel Myers, a close friend of Pete Buttigieg's.

In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a loosening of bureaucratic restraints on USAID's participation in counter-terror operations, Myers revealed that he had "specialized in programming in places like Yemen and Libya " – two conflict zones destabilized by U.S.-led regime-change wars. (Myers was working as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, but would return to USAID's OTI the following year.)

USAID's OTI has also fueled Syria's brutal proxy war, coordinating U.S. government assistance to supposed civil society groups like the White Helmets that were attached to the armed extremists who ruled over portions of the country for several years.

In Venezuela, the OTI has spent tens of millions of dollars cultivating and training opponents of the late President Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro . It has done the same in Nicaragua, serving as the linchpin of a U.S. effort to "lay the groundwork for insurrection."

In Cuba, meanwhile, the OTI attempted to stir up civil unrest through a fake, Twitter-style social media site called ZunZuneo, hoping to turn the public against the country's leftist government through coordinated flash mobs. To populate the phony social media platform, the OTI contracted a D.C.-based firm called Creative Associates that had illicitly obtained half a million Cuban cellphone numbers.

USAID and Creative Associates attempted to place ZunZuneo into private hands through a Miami foundation called Roots of Hope, which was founded by students at Harvard University. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was even solicited by the State Department to operate the platform. (Roots of Hope board member Raul Moas, who personally trained ZunZuneo employees, is today the director of the Knight Foundation .)

The devious operation and its eventual exposure revealed the extent to which covert operations historically associated with the CIA had been outsourced to private contractors and NGOs.

And the role of the Harvard-founded "Roots of Hope" in the scheme demonstrated how much USAID and its contractors depended on the same Ivy League talent pool that produced Buttigieg and Myers.

A lengthy paper Myers authored for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2015 indicated that he had special knowledge of the ZunZuneo scheme and had been invested in its success.

Myers took the journalists who exposed the USAID-OTI program to task, claiming that "individual grants were pulled out of context and described as failures without heed to their actual goals," provoking an unfair "Capitol Hill pillorying."

He lamented that the exposure of covert programs like these had forced USAID officials to pursue "the opposite of the programming most likely to produce real impact in a hard aid environment." In other words, fear of public scrutiny had complicated efforts to subvert societies targeted by the U.S. for regime change – and he didn't like it one bit.

To Syracuse University professor of African American studies Horace Campbell, youthful cadres like Myers were a symptom of the American university's transformation into a neoliberal training ground.

"Many idealistic graduates from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University among others had been seduced" into careers with USAID contractors like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey, Campbell lamented in a lengthy 2014 survey of the OTI's sordid record .

"It has been painful," the professor wrote, "to see the ways in which the so called NGO initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to support neoliberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students."

Campbell's comments painted a clear portrait of Myers, who earned his master's degree at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School on his way towards becoming a "hard aid" specialist at USAID.

They also captured the psychology of Buttigieg, who celebrated Bernie Sanders as a hero when he was a high school senior, and spoke out against the Iraq war as a Harvard junior before being absorbed into the culture of McKinsey and D.C. institutions like the Truman Center.

The Truman Show

When Pete Buttigieg made his journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic Party.

Buttigieg likely earned the fellowship after answering an ad like the one the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010 . Soliciting applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking "exceptionally accomplished and dedicated men and women who share President Truman's belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin."

This was not the first time Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washington's national security swamp. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at the Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen that maintained an extensive client list within the arms industry . (As The Grayzone reported , the Cohen Group has been intimately involved in the Trump administration's bungling regime change attempt in Venezuela).

But it was Buttigieg's fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on the casting couch before the Democratic Party's foreign policy mandarins.

A Tablet Magazine profile of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld described her as a "gatekeeper and ringleader" whose network of former fellows spanned Congress and the Obama administration's National Security Council. Her career trajectory mirrored Buttigieg's.

After last night, more proud than ever to support @PeteButtigieg – for those who missed it, a few reasons why: https://t.co/1XreWO5x15

-- Rachel Kleinfeld (@RachelKleinfeld) October 16, 2019

She had earned degrees at elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes scholarship) before accepting a job at a private contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that performed an array of services for the U.S. military and private spying for intelligence agencies.

Kleinfeld's boss at the company was James Woolsey, the neoconservative former CIA director who has lobbied aggressively for U.S. military assaults on Iraq and Iran .

According to Tablet, "Woolsey positioned Kleinfeld to work on sensitive government projects the company was pursuing in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, including one that involved working as a researcher for the military's Defense Science Board, investigating information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies."

When Kleinfeld founded her think tank in 2005, she named it for the president who oversaw the detonation of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, threats of another nuclear assault on North Korea and the killing of 20 percent of that country's population. The Truman doctrine, which called for "containing" the Soviet Union through internal destabilization and relentless pressure on its periphery, was the basis of Washington's Cold War policy. (Following Kleinfeld's lead, Buttigieg named one of his two pet dogs Truman ).

"We decided there really was a need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to really start to think about it, very much as a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s," she told The Forward at the time.

To fill the center's board of advisers , Kleinfeld assembled a cast of Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose accomplishments included the devastation of entire countries through regime change wars.

Among the most notable Truman advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author of NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia and president of an influence-peddling operation known as the Albright Stonebridge Group; the late Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once proposed dividing Iraq into three federal districts along sectarian lines; former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversaw record levels of migrant deportations ; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department policy planning director who conceived the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine deployed by the Obama administration to justify NATO's disastrous intervention in Libya and drum up another one against Syria.

"The Truman Project mobilizes Democrats who serve the conventional interventionist agenda," journalist Kelly Vlahos wrote . "Beyond that, they are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on the other side of the aisle."

Buttigieg listed his fellowship at the Truman Center as one of the credentials that qualified him for Indiana State treasurer when he ran for the position in 2010.

Though he lost in a landslide, Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend the following year. "Mayor Pete" had not only secured his future in the Democratic Party, he had won a place in its foreign policy pantheon with a seat on the Truman Center's advisory board.

Balancing Opposition to Endless Wars

This July 11, Buttigieg rolled out his foreign policy platform in a carefully scripted appearance at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to "end endless wars" with Cold War bluster directed at designated enemies.

Before an auditorium packed with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era, blaming President Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S. He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in Korea, slamming the president for exchanging "love letters" with "a brutal dictator," referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

You will not see me exchanging love letters on White House letterhead with a brutal dictator who starves and murders his own people @PeteButtigieg

-- Rachel Kleinfeld (@RachelKleinfeld) June 11, 2019

More recently, Buttigieg's campaign pledged to "balance our commitment to end endless wars with the recognition that total isolationism is self-defeating in the long run." This was the sort of Beltway doublespeak that defined the legacy of Barack Obama, another youthful, self-styled outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq war, only to sign off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he entered the White House.

On the presidential campaign trail, "Mayor Pete" has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having padded his resume in America's longest and most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to fight.

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling " Republican Gomorrah ," " Goliath ," " The Fifty One Day War " and " The Management of Savagery ." He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including " Killing Gaza " and " Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie ." Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

This article is from The Grayzone .

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Tags: Harvard University Max Blumenthal Neo-liberalism Pete Buttigieg

Post navigation ← 150 Cooks, Servers & Dishwashers Almost Shut Down Thursday Night's Democratic Debate, Showing Unions' Growing Clout in the Party JOHN KIRIAKOU: James Comey's Interview on Fox News Screams Out for Correction → 13 comments for "The Insider: National Security Mandarins Groomed Pete Buttigieg & Managed His Future"

Charlotte Ruse , December 21, 2019 at 17:46

"We decided there really was a need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to really start to think about it, very much as a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s."

Blumenthal, dissected Buttigeg down to the bare bones revealing how the security state targets and harvests willing Ivy League specimens who once sufficiently groomed are launched onto the political stage infiltrating the Democratic Party shilling when commanded for regime change wars.

occupy on! , December 21, 2019 at 13:46

Breathtaking! Thank you, Max Blumenthal, and please watch your back.

Punkyboy , December 21, 2019 at 10:43

Trojan Horse cum Wolf in Sheep's Clothing #2. Fooled me twice, Obama; shame on me. But, then, when given choices between worse and worser or staying home on election day . . . The only candidate with a real chance of beating Trump in 2020 is Sanders, yet the Dims would rather cut their collective throat. Gabbard would be my choice, but she has no chance against The Dim Machine. I am so sick of these bastards and their games – Russiagate, Ukrainegate, now Impeachmentgate – all because they have no platform, and no candidate that gives a damn about this country and We the People. Shame on all you poseurs!

ML , December 21, 2019 at 15:59

Hear, hear, Punkyboy! I concur and applaud your way with words. Google George Carlin's monologue on why he doesn't vote. Even a committed voter may crack a smile and surmise he may have had a point! And you can laugh about this mess in the bargain. Might as well. Too many tears and fears these days and a little levity, especially at the Winter Solstice makes for a lightness of being. Cheers, Punky!

jessika , December 20, 2019 at 22:06

Thanks for this info, MSM never reports truth. And Mayor Pete doesn't exactly have a stellar record as mayor of South Bend, besides!

Piotr Berman , December 20, 2019 at 11:41

From the interview with Military Times that is linked in the article:

Q After one year of your administration, what size will the U.S. troop presence be in Afghanistan? In Syria and Iraq? In Europe?

A [first sentence] The size of troop presence in any theater depends on missions determined by overall strategy and long-term goals, which are well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and intelligence leaders, not by "

-- --

This is somewhat recent. Before Trump became president, the problem of straying from the script "well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and intelligence leaders" did not arise. Perhaps Carter had some weird ideas like pressuring satraps in Latin America to have a lighter hand in deploying death squads, but he was brought to the fold and eliminated from "the mainstream" without such rhetoric.

To make it clear, I also think that Trump is driven by "arbitrary or capricious decisions based on personal or political interests and executed on a whim." But the alternative in the form that is "well-developed by blah blah blah" is not appealing at all.

I guess that I do not need to convince the other readers, but Afghanistan is a good example if you want a talking point. Staying there follows "the well-developed strategy", but what is it?

improving human rights, education of women etc.
fostering honest competent government
fostering economic growth (apart from consuming profits from heroin and foreign donations)
training effective and honest national armed forces and police

One could add a few, but apparently, none of that was accomplished. Yet, "the well-developed strategy" had to deliver something important to the "national interest", otherwise it would be a total waste. It is actually not difficult to figure it out:

Afghanistan may be a total mess, but a mess where we have influence and freedom to operate. If we withdraw, it will be simply a total mess.

It still begs a question why "we" want to have influence and freedom to operate. Perhaps to create a total mess nearby. Whatever it is, an alternative is overdue, preferably not capricious and poorly executed. Tulsi for the head of NSC, DoS or DoD.

Jerry Findlay , December 20, 2019 at 11:37

They are trying to repeat the Obama playbook, escorting a pretend outsider and identity-firster posing as a liberal progressive, who as soon as he gets into office betrays everything he promised in favor of the corporate state. Why not? It fooled a lot of people before, including myself, once or twice. Why not use it again? Because American voters have awakened to the trick and don't have time for being fooled again.

Nathan Mulcahy , December 20, 2019 at 10:42

Great reporting. I have a simple filter. I instinctively put a black mark on and ignore any candidate being promoted by the corporate presstitutes. First it was Kamala Who Harris, then the Beto Who and now Buttigieg Who. Obviously I also do not follow this so called "debate" circus.

Tim Slattery , December 20, 2019 at 09:36

Rare, fascinating expose of how warmongers are made. Well done, Mr Blumenthal!

JOHN CHUCKMAN , December 19, 2019 at 17:10

Pete Buttigieg makes me think of a product, a manufactured product. Everything about him from gestures to words.

His is not an authentic political voice.

Nor does have much to say that's interesting or helpful to anyone.

Such are efforts on the election homefront in the declining days of American empire.

Drew Hunkins , December 19, 2019 at 16:47

Buttiejudge, Obama and others are such professional liars. They remind me of some of my fellow students during my grad school days.

robert e williamson jr , December 19, 2019 at 15:59

Thanks Max, it's great to have you out and about.

A man who looks to the Homeland Security nut cases for money to become president must have decided he was willing t0 give up his freedom for the promise of being safe and secure. He must be a moderate republican at heart. The country don't need another false representation buy someone seeking the highest office in the land.

I want one of these candidate to promise they will move to go back and debate the Patriot Act before extending it again.

Julie , December 21, 2019 at 14:07

All you need to know about Mayor Pete can be found on Youtube: Meet the real Mayor Pete; E. Michael Jones on PatrickCoffinMedia. Dr. Jones is the Mayor's neighbor. Reexaminging Mayor Pete and his years in office on Peter Hellands channel; Black Pastors speak out against Mayor Pete; CCM; Investigating of Pete & SBPD and there's more.

[Dec 22, 2019] The Insider National Security Mandarins Groomed Pete Buttigieg Managed His Future – Consortiumnews

Dec 22, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Consortiumnews Volume 25, Number 354–Saturday, December 21, 2019

Campaign 2020 , Commentary , Politics , Propaganda , U.S. , Until This Day--Historical Perspectives on the News The Insider: National Security Mandarins Groomed Pete Buttigieg & Managed His Future December 19, 2019 • 13 Comments

An influential D.C. network of military interventionists placed Mayor Pete on an inside track to power, reports Max Blumenthal.

By Max Blumenthal
The Grayzone

I n his quest for front-runner status in the 2020 presidential campaign, Pete Buttigieg has crafted an image for himself as a maverick running against a broken establishment.

On the trail, he has invoked his distinction as the openly gay mayor of a de-industrialized Rust Belt town, as well as his experience as a Naval reserve intelligence officer who now claims to oppose "endless wars". He insists that "there's energy for an outsider like me," promoting himself as "an unconventional candidate."

When former Secretary of State John Kerry endorsed Joe Biden this December, Buttigieg went full maverick . "I have never been part of the Washington establishment," he proclaimed, "and I recognize that there are relationships among senators who have been together on Capitol Hill as long as I've been alive and that is what it is."

But a testy exchange between the South Bend mayor and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard during a Nov. 20 Democratic primary debate had already complicated Buttigieg's branding campaign.

Like Buttigieg, Gabbard was a military veteran of the 9/11 generation. But she had taken an entirely different set of lessons from her grueling stint in Iraq than "Mayor Pete." Her campaign had become an anti-war crusade, with opposition to destructive regime change wars serving as her leitmotif.

After ticking off her foreign policy credentials, Gabbard turned to Buttigieg and lit into him for stating his willingness to send U.S. troops to Mexico to crack down on drug cartels.

A visibly angry Buttigieg responded by accusing Gabbard of distorting his record, then quickly deflected to Syria, where he has argued for an indefinite deployment of occupying U.S. troops.

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Rehashing well-worn criticism of Gabbard for meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during a diplomatic visit she took -- her trip was devoted to de-escalating the U.S.-backed proxy war that had ravaged the country's population -- Buttigieg attacked the congresswoman for engaging with a "murderous dictator."

Throughout the exchange, Buttigieg appeared shaken, as though his sense of inviolability had been punctured. Gabbard had clearly struck a vulnerable point by painting the self-styled outsider as a conventional D.C.-style politician unconsciously spouting interventionist bromides.

How could someone who served in the catastrophically wasteful U.S. wars in the Middle East, and who had seen their human toll, be reckless enough to propose sending U.S. troops to fight and possibly die in Mexico? "But Assad!" was the best response he could muster.

The remarkable dust-up highlighted a side of the 37-year-old political upstart that has been scarcely explored in mainstream U.S. media accounts of his rise to prominence. It revealed the real Buttigieg as a neoliberal cadre whose future was carefully managed by the mandarins of the national security state since almost the moment that he graduated from Harvard University.

After college, the Democratic presidential hopeful took a gig with a strategic communications firm founded by a former secretary of defense who raked in contracts with the arms industry. He moved on to a fellowship at an influential D.C. think tank described by its founder as "a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s." Today, Buttigieg sits on that think tank's board of advisors alongside some of the country's most accomplished military interventionists.

Buttigieg has reaped the rewards of his dedication to the Beltway playbook. He recently became the top recipient of donations from staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Justice Department – key cogs in the national security state's permanent bureaucracy.

His Harvard social network has been a critical factor in his rise as well, with college buddies occupying key campaign roles as outside policy advisers and strategists. One of his closest friends from school is today the senior adviser of a specialized unit of the State Department focused on fomenting regime change abroad.

That friend, Nathaniel "Nat" Myers, was Buttigieg's traveling partner on a trip to Somaliland, where the two claimed to have been tourists in a July 2008 article they wrote for The New York Times.

Their contribution to the paper was not any typical travelogue detailing a whimsical safari. Instead, they composed a slick editorial that echoed the Somaliland government's call for recognition from the U.S. government. It was Buttigieg's first foreign policy audition before a national audience.

Short, Strange Trip to Somaliland

Under public pressure for more transparency about his work at the notoriously secretive McKinsey consulting firm, the Buttigieg campaign released some background details this December. The disclosures included a timeline of his work for various clients that stated he "stepped away from the firm during the late summer and fall of 2008 to help full-time with a Democratic campaign for governor in Indiana."

How Buttigieg's "full-time" role on that gubernatorial campaign took him on a nearly 8,000-mile detour to Somaliland remains unclear.

Buttigieg and Nathaniel Myers spent only 24 hours in the autonomous region of Somaliland. In that short time, they interviewed unnamed government officials and faithfully relayed their pro-independence line back to the readers of The New York Times in a July 2008 op-ed .

The column read as though crafted by a public relations firm on behalf of a government client. In one section, the two travelers wrote that "the people we met in Somaliland were welcoming, hopeful and bewildered by the absence of recognition from the West. They were frustrated to still be overlooked out of respect for the sovereignty of the failed state to their south."

Since declaring its independence from Somalia in 1991, Somaliland has campaigned for recognition from the U.S., EU, and African Union. It even offered to hand its deep water port over to AFRICOM, the U.S. military command structure on the African continent, in exchange for U.S. acceptance of its sovereignty.

Several months after Buttigieg traveled to the autonomous region, Al Jazeera reported , "The Somaliland government is trying to charm its way to global recognition."

And just a few weeks before Buttigieg's visit, the would-be republic inked a contract with an international lobbying firm called Independent Diplomat , presumably to help oversee that charm offensive.

Founded by a self-described anarchist named Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat represents an array of non and para-state entities seeking recognition on the international stage. Ross's client list has included the Syrian Opposition Coalition , which tried and failed to secure power through a Western-backed war against the Syrian government .

Independent Diplomat did not respond to questions from The Grayzone about whether it had any role in facilitating the trip Buttigieg and Myers took to Somaliland.

According to John Kiriakou, a former CIA case officer, ex-senior investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and celebrated whistleblower, Somaliland is an unusual destination for tourism.

"There really is nothing going on in Somaliland," Kiriakou told The Grayzone . "To say you go to Somaliland as a tourist is a joke to me. It's not a war-torn area but nobody goes there as a tourist."

Kiriakou visited Somaliland in 2009 as part of an investigation for the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he described as the phenomenon of "blue-eyed" American citizens converting to Islam, traveling to Somalia and Yemen for training with Salafi-jihadist groups, then returning home on their U.S. passports.

To reach Somaliland, Kiriakou said he took an arduous seven-hour journey from the neighboring state of Djibouti. His junket was coordinated by the U.S. ambassador to Djibouti, a regional security officer of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service and an embassy attaché.

"It is not the easiest place to reach and there's no business to do there," Kiriakou said.

Whether or not Buttigieg's trip was coordinated without the assistance of lobbyists, the trip offered him and Myers an opportunity to weigh in on international affairs on the pages of the supposed newspaper of record – and on an absolutely non-controversial issue.

In his bio, Nathaniel Myers identified himself simply as a "financial analyst based in Ethiopia." According to his resume, which is available online at Linkedin, he was working at the time as a World Bank consultant on governance and corruption.

By 2011, Myers had moved on from that neoliberal international financial institution to a specialized government at the center of U.S. regime change operations abroad.

Pete Buttigieg on a pre-graduation trip with his Harvard buddies. Nathaniel "Nat" Myers is to his immediate left.
Imperial Social Network

Nathaniel Myers' relationship with the presidential hopeful began at Harvard University. There, they formed two parts of "The Order of Kong," a close-knit group of political junkies named jokingly for the Chinese restaurant they frequented after intensive discussion sessions at the school's Institute of Politics.

Like most members of the college-era "order," Myers and Buttigieg have remained close. When the mayor married his longtime partner in 2018, Buttigieg chose him as his best man.

Myers currently works as a senior advisor for the United States Agency for International Development's Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID-OTI) in Washington, D.C. The OTI is a specialized division of USAID that routinely works through contractors and local proxies to orchestrate destabilization operations inside countries considered insufficiently compliant to the dictates of Washington.

Wherever the U.S. seeks regime change, it seems that USAID's OTI is involved.

The Linkedin page of Nathaniel Myers, a close friend of Pete Buttigieg's.

In a 2015 op-ed arguing for a loosening of bureaucratic restraints on USAID's participation in counter-terror operations, Myers revealed that he had "specialized in programming in places like Yemen and Libya " – two conflict zones destabilized by U.S.-led regime-change wars. (Myers was working as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations at the time, but would return to USAID's OTI the following year.)

USAID's OTI has also fueled Syria's brutal proxy war, coordinating U.S. government assistance to supposed civil society groups like the White Helmets that were attached to the armed extremists who ruled over portions of the country for several years.

In Venezuela, the OTI has spent tens of millions of dollars cultivating and training opponents of the late President Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro . It has done the same in Nicaragua, serving as the linchpin of a U.S. effort to "lay the groundwork for insurrection."

In Cuba, meanwhile, the OTI attempted to stir up civil unrest through a fake, Twitter-style social media site called ZunZuneo, hoping to turn the public against the country's leftist government through coordinated flash mobs. To populate the phony social media platform, the OTI contracted a D.C.-based firm called Creative Associates that had illicitly obtained half a million Cuban cellphone numbers.

USAID and Creative Associates attempted to place ZunZuneo into private hands through a Miami foundation called Roots of Hope, which was founded by students at Harvard University. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was even solicited by the State Department to operate the platform. (Roots of Hope board member Raul Moas, who personally trained ZunZuneo employees, is today the director of the Knight Foundation .)

The devious operation and its eventual exposure revealed the extent to which covert operations historically associated with the CIA had been outsourced to private contractors and NGOs.

And the role of the Harvard-founded "Roots of Hope" in the scheme demonstrated how much USAID and its contractors depended on the same Ivy League talent pool that produced Buttigieg and Myers.

A lengthy paper Myers authored for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2015 indicated that he had special knowledge of the ZunZuneo scheme and had been invested in its success.

Myers took the journalists who exposed the USAID-OTI program to task, claiming that "individual grants were pulled out of context and described as failures without heed to their actual goals," provoking an unfair "Capitol Hill pillorying."

He lamented that the exposure of covert programs like these had forced USAID officials to pursue "the opposite of the programming most likely to produce real impact in a hard aid environment." In other words, fear of public scrutiny had complicated efforts to subvert societies targeted by the U.S. for regime change – and he didn't like it one bit.

To Syracuse University professor of African American studies Horace Campbell, youthful cadres like Myers were a symptom of the American university's transformation into a neoliberal training ground.

"Many idealistic graduates from elite centers such as the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the Maxwell School of Citizenship of Syracuse University or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University among others had been seduced" into careers with USAID contractors like Creative Associates, Chemonics, and McKinsey, Campbell lamented in a lengthy 2014 survey of the OTI's sordid record .

"It has been painful," the professor wrote, "to see the ways in which the so called NGO initiatives have been refined over the past twenty years to support neoliberalism and to depoliticize idealistic students."

Campbell's comments painted a clear portrait of Myers, who earned his master's degree at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School on his way towards becoming a "hard aid" specialist at USAID.

They also captured the psychology of Buttigieg, who celebrated Bernie Sanders as a hero when he was a high school senior, and spoke out against the Iraq war as a Harvard junior before being absorbed into the culture of McKinsey and D.C. institutions like the Truman Center.

The Truman Show

When Pete Buttigieg made his journey to Somaliland in 2008, he had just earned a fellowship at the Truman Center, a Washington-based think tank that provided a steppingstone for national security-minded whiz kids like him to leadership positions in the Democratic Party.

Buttigieg likely earned the fellowship after answering an ad like the one the Truman Center published on the website of the Harvard Law School Student Government in 2010 . Soliciting applicants for its security fellowship, the center declared that it was seeking "exceptionally accomplished and dedicated men and women who share President Truman's belief in muscular internationalism, and who believe that strong national security and strong liberal values are not antagonistic, but are two sides of the same coin."

This was not the first time Buttigieg had dipped his toes into Washington's national security swamp. After graduating from Harvard, he worked at the Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen that maintained an extensive client list within the arms industry . (As The Grayzone reported , the Cohen Group has been intimately involved in the Trump administration's bungling regime change attempt in Venezuela).

But it was Buttigieg's fellowship at the Truman Center that placed him on the casting couch before the Democratic Party's foreign policy mandarins.

A Tablet Magazine profile of Truman Center founder Rachel Kleinfeld described her as a "gatekeeper and ringleader" whose network of former fellows spanned Congress and the Obama administration's National Security Council. Her career trajectory mirrored Buttigieg's.

After last night, more proud than ever to support @PeteButtigieg – for those who missed it, a few reasons why: https://t.co/1XreWO5x15

-- Rachel Kleinfeld (@RachelKleinfeld) October 16, 2019

She had earned degrees at elite institutions (Yale and Oxford, where Buttigieg pursued his Rhodes scholarship) before accepting a job at a private contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that performed an array of services for the U.S. military and private spying for intelligence agencies.

Kleinfeld's boss at the company was James Woolsey, the neoconservative former CIA director who has lobbied aggressively for U.S. military assaults on Iraq and Iran .

According to Tablet, "Woolsey positioned Kleinfeld to work on sensitive government projects the company was pursuing in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, including one that involved working as a researcher for the military's Defense Science Board, investigating information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies."

When Kleinfeld founded her think tank in 2005, she named it for the president who oversaw the detonation of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, threats of another nuclear assault on North Korea and the killing of 20 percent of that country's population. The Truman doctrine, which called for "containing" the Soviet Union through internal destabilization and relentless pressure on its periphery, was the basis of Washington's Cold War policy. (Following Kleinfeld's lead, Buttigieg named one of his two pet dogs Truman ).

"We decided there really was a need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to really start to think about it, very much as a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s," she told The Forward at the time.

To fill the center's board of advisers , Kleinfeld assembled a cast of Democratic foreign policy heavyweights whose accomplishments included the devastation of entire countries through regime change wars.

Among the most notable Truman advisors were Madeleine Albright, the author of NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia and president of an influence-peddling operation known as the Albright Stonebridge Group; the late Council on Foreign Relations President Les Gelb, who once proposed dividing Iraq into three federal districts along sectarian lines; former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversaw record levels of migrant deportations ; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former State Department policy planning director who conceived the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) doctrine deployed by the Obama administration to justify NATO's disastrous intervention in Libya and drum up another one against Syria.

"The Truman Project mobilizes Democrats who serve the conventional interventionist agenda," journalist Kelly Vlahos wrote . "Beyond that, they are part of a broader orbit of not so dissimilar foot soldiers on the other side of the aisle."

Buttigieg listed his fellowship at the Truman Center as one of the credentials that qualified him for Indiana State treasurer when he ran for the position in 2010.

Though he lost in a landslide, Buttigieg won election as mayor of South Bend the following year. "Mayor Pete" had not only secured his future in the Democratic Party, he had won a place in its foreign policy pantheon with a seat on the Truman Center's advisory board.

Balancing Opposition to Endless Wars

This July 11, Buttigieg rolled out his foreign policy platform in a carefully scripted appearance at Indiana University. Introduced by Lee Hamilton, a former Indiana congressman who was a fixture on the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees, Buttigieg blended a call to "end endless wars" with Cold War bluster directed at designated enemies.

Before an auditorium packed with the national press, he rattled off one of the more paranoid talking points of the Russiagate era, blaming President Vladimir Putin for fueling racism inside the U.S. He then attacked Trump for facilitating peace talks in Korea, slamming the president for exchanging "love letters" with "a brutal dictator," referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

You will not see me exchanging love letters on White House letterhead with a brutal dictator who starves and murders his own people @PeteButtigieg

-- Rachel Kleinfeld (@RachelKleinfeld) June 11, 2019

More recently, Buttigieg's campaign pledged to "balance our commitment to end endless wars with the recognition that total isolationism is self-defeating in the long run." This was the sort of Beltway doublespeak that defined the legacy of Barack Obama, another youthful, self-styled outsider from the Midwest who campaigned on his opposition to the Iraq war, only to sign off on more calamitous wars in the Middle East after he entered the White House.

On the presidential campaign trail, "Mayor Pete" has done his best to paper over the instincts he inherited from his benefactors among the national security state. But as the campaign drags on, his interventionist tendencies are increasingly exposed. Having padded his resume in America's longest and most futile wars, he may be poised to extend them for a new generation to fight.

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling " Republican Gomorrah ," " Goliath ," " The Fifty One Day War " and " The Management of Savagery ." He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including " Killing Gaza " and " Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie ." Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

This article is from The Grayzone .

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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Tags: Harvard University Max Blumenthal Neo-liberalism Pete Buttigieg

Post navigation ← 150 Cooks, Servers & Dishwashers Almost Shut Down Thursday Night's Democratic Debate, Showing Unions' Growing Clout in the Party JOHN KIRIAKOU: James Comey's Interview on Fox News Screams Out for Correction → 13 comments for "The Insider: National Security Mandarins Groomed Pete Buttigieg & Managed His Future"

Charlotte Ruse , December 21, 2019 at 17:46

"We decided there really was a need to create a movement of Democrats to stand up for these ideas and to really start to think about it, very much as a counterpart to the neoconservatives of the 1970s."

Blumenthal, dissected Buttigeg down to the bare bones revealing how the security state targets and harvests willing Ivy League specimens who once sufficiently groomed are launched onto the political stage infiltrating the Democratic Party shilling when commanded for regime change wars.

occupy on! , December 21, 2019 at 13:46

Breathtaking! Thank you, Max Blumenthal, and please watch your back.

Punkyboy , December 21, 2019 at 10:43

Trojan Horse cum Wolf in Sheep's Clothing #2. Fooled me twice, Obama; shame on me. But, then, when given choices between worse and worser or staying home on election day . . . The only candidate with a real chance of beating Trump in 2020 is Sanders, yet the Dims would rather cut their collective throat. Gabbard would be my choice, but she has no chance against The Dim Machine. I am so sick of these bastards and their games – Russiagate, Ukrainegate, now Impeachmentgate – all because they have no platform, and no candidate that gives a damn about this country and We the People. Shame on all you poseurs!

ML , December 21, 2019 at 15:59

Hear, hear, Punkyboy! I concur and applaud your way with words. Google George Carlin's monologue on why he doesn't vote. Even a committed voter may crack a smile and surmise he may have had a point! And you can laugh about this mess in the bargain. Might as well. Too many tears and fears these days and a little levity, especially at the Winter Solstice makes for a lightness of being. Cheers, Punky!

jessika , December 20, 2019 at 22:06

Thanks for this info, MSM never reports truth. And Mayor Pete doesn't exactly have a stellar record as mayor of South Bend, besides!

Piotr Berman , December 20, 2019 at 11:41

From the interview with Military Times that is linked in the article:

Q After one year of your administration, what size will the U.S. troop presence be in Afghanistan? In Syria and Iraq? In Europe?

A [first sentence] The size of troop presence in any theater depends on missions determined by overall strategy and long-term goals, which are well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and intelligence leaders, not by "

-- --

This is somewhat recent. Before Trump became president, the problem of straying from the script "well-developed by our political, military, diplomatic and intelligence leaders" did not arise. Perhaps Carter had some weird ideas like pressuring satraps in Latin America to have a lighter hand in deploying death squads, but he was brought to the fold and eliminated from "the mainstream" without such rhetoric.

To make it clear, I also think that Trump is driven by "arbitrary or capricious decisions based on personal or political interests and executed on a whim." But the alternative in the form that is "well-developed by blah blah blah" is not appealing at all.

I guess that I do not need to convince the other readers, but Afghanistan is a good example if you want a talking point. Staying there follows "the well-developed strategy", but what is it?

improving human rights, education of women etc.
fostering honest competent government
fostering economic growth (apart from consuming profits from heroin and foreign donations)
training effective and honest national armed forces and police

One could add a few, but apparently, none of that was accomplished. Yet, "the well-developed strategy" had to deliver something important to the "national interest", otherwise it would be a total waste. It is actually not difficult to figure it out:

Afghanistan may be a total mess, but a mess where we have influence and freedom to operate. If we withdraw, it will be simply a total mess.

It still begs a question why "we" want to have influence and freedom to operate. Perhaps to create a total mess nearby. Whatever it is, an alternative is overdue, preferably not capricious and poorly executed. Tulsi for the head of NSC, DoS or DoD.

Jerry Findlay , December 20, 2019 at 11:37

They are trying to repeat the Obama playbook, escorting a pretend outsider and identity-firster posing as a liberal progressive, who as soon as he gets into office betrays everything he promised in favor of the corporate state. Why not? It fooled a lot of people before, including myself, once or twice. Why not use it again? Because American voters have awakened to the trick and don't have time for being fooled again.

Nathan Mulcahy , December 20, 2019 at 10:42

Great reporting. I have a simple filter. I instinctively put a black mark on and ignore any candidate being promoted by the corporate presstitutes. First it was Kamala Who Harris, then the Beto Who and now Buttigieg Who. Obviously I also do not follow this so called "debate" circus.

Tim Slattery , December 20, 2019 at 09:36

Rare, fascinating expose of how warmongers are made. Well done, Mr Blumenthal!

JOHN CHUCKMAN , December 19, 2019 at 17:10

Pete Buttigieg makes me think of a product, a manufactured product. Everything about him from gestures to words.

His is not an authentic political voice.

Nor does have much to say that's interesting or helpful to anyone.

Such are efforts on the election homefront in the declining days of American empire.

Drew Hunkins , December 19, 2019 at 16:47

Buttiejudge, Obama and others are such professional liars. They remind me of some of my fellow students during my grad school days.

robert e williamson jr , December 19, 2019 at 15:59

Thanks Max, it's great to have you out and about.

A man who looks to the Homeland Security nut cases for money to become president must have decided he was willing t0 give up his freedom for the promise of being safe and secure. He must be a moderate republican at heart. The country don't need another false representation buy someone seeking the highest office in the land.

I want one of these candidate to promise they will move to go back and debate the Patriot Act before extending it again.

Julie , December 21, 2019 at 14:07

All you need to know about Mayor Pete can be found on Youtube: Meet the real Mayor Pete; E. Michael Jones on PatrickCoffinMedia. Dr. Jones is the Mayor's neighbor. Reexaminging Mayor Pete and his years in office on Peter Hellands channel; Black Pastors speak out against Mayor Pete; CCM; Investigating of Pete & SBPD and there's more. Leave a Reply Cancel reply

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[Dec 22, 2019] From Vietnam To Afghanistan, All US Governments Lie

Dec 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Gordon Evans via The Conversation,

The Washington Post has, after more than two years of investigation, revealed that senior foreign policy officials in the White House, State and Defense departments have known for some time that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was failing .

Interview transcripts from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction , obtained by the Post after many lawsuits, show that for 18 years these same officials have told the public the intervention was succeeding .

In other words, government officials have been lying .

Few people are shocked. That's a stark contrast to 1971, when the Pentagon Papers , a classified study of decision-making about Vietnam, were leaked and published. The explosive Pentagon Papers showed that the U.S. government had systematically lied about the reality that the U.S. was losing the Vietnam War.

The failure of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has been known for years. Virtually none of the U.S. goals have been met . These goals included a strong, democratic, uncorrupt central government; the defeat of the Taliban; eliminating the poppy fields that contribute to the world's heroin problem; an effective military and police and creating a healthy, diversified economy.

The Inspector General has repeatedly documented the reality in its widely available (and widely reported) audits .

Despite this public record of failure, officials continued to trumpet political and military gains on the ground, even that the U.S. could prevail.

Privately, they have been wringing their hands.

Shades of Vietnam.

Public confidence in government was shaken by the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. AP/Jim Wells

Sad history of Vietnam

The Pentagon Papers revealed that senior officials asserted in the 1960s that the Viet Cong were dying in record numbers, enemy leadership was decapitated and there was "light at the end of the tunnel ." Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his commanders, who knew the reality, continuously called for even more force from 1961 to 1969.

H.R. McMaster, in his classic study of Vietnam decision-making , excoriated the military for not bringing the truth to President Lyndon Johnson, for presenting Johnson with the "lies that led to Vietnam."

The U.S. was winning in Vietnam, until it was not. Right up to the moment diplomats in the U.S. embassy turned the lights off and were airlifted off the building's roof.

Are comparisons justified?

Afghanistan is not Vietnam, it is said.

Former Afghanistan Ambassador Ryan Crocker argues that the U.S. must be in Afghanistan for America's security even if reconstruction fails. Brookings analyst Michael O'Hanlon asserts that there were no lies; officials were clear the policy was in trouble. He avoids discussing the voluminous true statements The Washington Post uncovered that were not made publicly.

The U.S. was ignorant about both countries. Serving in the Obama transition in 2008 , for example, I learned that Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the Bush-Obama Afghanistan coordinator, was carrying out a policy review process that led to a military surge .

Now we learn, courtesy of The Washington Post, that, when interviewed in 2015 as part of Special Inspector General's " Lessons Learned " project, Lute said , "We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan we didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."

While Afghanistan is clearly not Vietnam, Washington is still Washington.

Prevarication as policy

After more than 30 years of policy work, government experience, teaching and research, I see no mystery here. Concealment, deception and outright lies have characterized U.S. national security policy for decades – from the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and more.

The U.S. secretly plotted and carried out the overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq, in 1953. Here, an Iranian protests U.S. involvement in the coup. Pahlavi Dynasty, public domain

But Vietnam was the big lie , permanently exposing the gap between myth – the government knows everything better – and reality – that policy is failing.

Since Vietnam, the media and congressional, think-tank and scholarly investigators have suspected something with every intervention. To the public , the truth about Afghanistan has been clear; public opinion has been way ahead of what The Washington Post revealed.

Good reasons for lies

Lies are an integral part of national security operations. They seek credibility for government policy. They mislead adversaries, cover up mistakes and failures.

Above all, they are intended to secure public support for policy and defeat opposition at home. Political scientist John Mearsheimer has noted that governments don't often lie to their allies and adversaries, "but instead seem more inclined to lie to their own people."

In particular, secrecy and deception convey power. As philosopher Sissela Bok says , "Deception can be coercive. When it succeeds, it can give power to the deceiver."

Secrecy allows policies to be tweaked outside public view . Insiders gain influence arguing for new approaches to the same goals. Even the goals can shift as interventions deteriorate. The political consequences of failure may be avoided.

It is rare for an official to acknowledge failure and reverse policy; personal, political and national credibility may be at stake. President Johnson insisted that he was not going to be the "first president to lose a war." Bush, Obama and even Trump did not want to "lose" Afghanistan.

An act of political courage – like the 1960-61 Algeria departure decision of French President Charles de Gaulle , who understood France had lost its fight, is rare.

Trust broken

Why has The Washington Post series not been explosive?

In part, the Pentagon Papers broke the code of secrecy; the bond of trust between the policymakers and the American people was severed forever.

In part, the lies about Afghanistan have been in plain sight for years, courtesy of the media and the Special Inspector General.

And in part, the public is less directly engaged. The warriors are now volunteer professionals , not conscripts drawn from the general public. Casualties are one-twentieth of what they were in Vietnam .

Nonetheless, lying about military interventions carries a serious risk. The Pentagon Papers eroded public faith in the credibility of our democratic government. That erosion was later reinforced by the Watergate scandal. As Bok, the philosopher, wrote , "deception of this kind strikes at the very essence of democratic government."

British leader Winston Churchill said , "In war-time truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Deception aimed at the public and the Axis was an essential part of Churchill's war strategy.

The Afghanistan papers reveal yet again that statesmen still believe the truth should be concealed. But the credibility of statecraft and leadership itself were seriously eroded by the Vietnam lies, weakening the fabric of democracy.

The mild reaction to lying in plain sight about Afghanistan suggests the U.S. may be well down the road to unravelling government's credibility and our democracy altogether.

[Dec 22, 2019] So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks. That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born -- distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam

Highly recommended!
Looks like Brennan ears are all over this false flag operation...
Dec 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Mark McCarty , 21 December 2019 at 02:34 PM

Here's a key point - on June 12, Assange announces that Wikileaks will soon be releasing info pertinent to Hillary. HE DOES NOT SAY THAT HE WILL BE RELEASING DNC EMAILS.

And yet, on June 14, Crowdstrike reports a Russian hack of the DNC servers - and a day later, Guccifer 2.0 emerges and proclaims himself to be the hacker, takes credit for the upcoming Wikileaks DNC releases, publishes the Trump oppo research which Crowdstrike claimed he had taken, and intentionally adds "Russian footprints" to his metadata.

So how did Crowdstrike and G2.0 know that DNC EMAILS would be released?

Because, as Larry postulates, the US intelligence community had intercepted communications between Seth Rich and Wikileaks in which Seth had offered the DNC emails (consistent with the report of Sy Hersh's source within the FBI).

So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks.

That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born - distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam.

[Dec 22, 2019] The Long, Dark History of Russia's Murder, Inc. Up next: The bright, sunny history of the CIA

Notable quotes:
"... The Long, Dark History of Russia's Murder, Inc. New York Review of Books ..."
Dec 22, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Stormcrow , December 21, 2019 at 11:54 am

The Long, Dark History of Russia's Murder, Inc. New York Review of Books

Up next: The bright, sunny history of the CIA

Carolinian , December 21, 2019 at 1:27 pm

Speaking of that.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/12/20/gladio-the-story-of-a-conspiracy/

Acacia , December 22, 2019 at 12:15 am

No surprise. NYRB has had a b*ner for Muh Russia since the early days of the hysteria.

[Dec 22, 2019] The impeachment reflects the level of panic in the part of the establishment reposible for Russiagate, as it is unlear how Barr will play this game and who will be hurt

Impeachment if a counterattack of Russiagater against Barr investigation...
Dec 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

rtb61 , 2 hours ago link

The impeachment, what it means, panic in the establishment, as justice continues to creep ever closer, biting at their heels. They can feel the heat of the reformation is closing in on them, real justice, real trials and real convictions. They have good reason to fear and panic, the deep state is apparently quite shallow at the end of the day, those seeking justice for outweighing the corrupt political appointees and their falsely promoted minions and they will pursue the shadow government for the chaos, loss of life, loss of wealth and for the coming collapse as a result of shallow pathetic insatiable greed.

[Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya. ..."
"... Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed. ..."
"... Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. ..."
"... We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact. ..."
Apr 09, 2019 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

The start of current decade revealed the most ruthless face of a global neo-colonialism. From Syria and Libya to Europe and Latin America, the old colonial powers of the West tried to rebound against an oncoming rival bloc led by Russia and China, which starts to threaten their global domination.

Inside a multi-polar, complex terrain of geopolitical games, the big players start to abandon the old-fashioned, inefficient direct wars. They use today other, various methods like brutal proxy wars , economic wars, financial and constitutional coups, provocative operations, 'color revolutions', etc. In this highly complex and unstable situation, when even traditional allies turn against each other as the global balances change rapidly, the forces unleashed are absolutely destructive. Inevitably, the results are more than evident.

Proxy Wars - Syria/Libya

After the US invasion in Iraq, the gates of hell had opened in the Middle East. Obama continued the Bush legacy of US endless interventions, but he had to change tactics because a direct war would be inefficient, costly and extremely unpopular to the American people and the rest of the world.
The result, however, appeared to be equally (if not more) devastating with the failed US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US had lost total control of the armed groups directly linked with the ISIS terrorists, failed to topple Assad, and, moreover, instead of eliminating the Russian and Iranian influence in the region, actually managed to increase it. As a result, the US and its allies failed to secure their geopolitical interests around the various pipeline games.

In addition, the US sees Turkey, one of its most important ally, changing direction dangerously, away from the Western bloc. Probably the strongest indication for this, is that Turkey, Iran and Russia decided very recently to proceed in an agreement on Syria without the presence of the US.

Yet, the list of US failures does not end here. The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya.

Evidence from WikiLeaks has shown that the old colonial powers have started a new round of ruthless competition on Libya's resources. The usual story propagated by the Western media, about another tyrant who had to be removed, has now completely collapsed. They don't care neither to topple an 'authoritarian' regime, nor to spread Democracy. All they care about is to secure each country's resources for their big companies.
The Gaddafi case is quite interesting because it shows that the Western hypocrites were using him according to their interests .

Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed.

Economic Wars, Financial Coups – Greece/Eurozone

It would be unthinkable for the neo-colonialists to conduct proxy wars inside European soil, especially against countries which belong to Western institutions like NATO, EU, eurozone, etc. The wave of the US-made major economic crisis hit Greece and Europe at the start of the decade, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Arab Spring revolutionary wave and the subsequent disaster in Middle East and Libya.

Greece was the easy victim for the global neoliberal dictatorship to impose catastrophic measures in favor of the plutocracy. The Greek experiment enters its seventh year and the plan is to be used as a model for the whole eurozone. Greece has become also the model for the looting of public property, as happened in the past with the East Germany and the Treuhand Operation after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

While Greece was the major victim of an economic war, Germany used its economic power and control of the European Central Bank to impose unprecedented austerity, sado-monetarism and neoliberal destruction through silent financial coups in Ireland , Italy and Cyprus . The Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in power, and the ECB was forced to proceed in an open financial coup against Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB, IMF and the European Commission, through which the Greek people clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror inside and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing another catastrophic memorandum.

Through similar financial and political pressure, the Brussels bureaufascists and the German sado-monetarists along with the IMF economic hitmen, imposed neoliberal disaster to other eurozone countries like Portugal, Spain etc. It is remarkable that even the second eurozone economy, France, rushed to impose anti-labor measures midst terrorist attacks, succumbing to a - pre-designed by the elites - neo-Feudalism, under the 'Socialist' François Hollande, despite the intense protests in many French cities.

Germany would never let the United States to lead the neo-colonization in Europe, as it tries (again) to become a major power with its own sphere of influence, expanding throughout eurozone and beyond. As the situation in Europe becomes more and more critical with the ongoing economic and refugee crisis and the rise of the Far-Right and the nationalists, the economic war mostly between the US and the German big capital, creates an even more complicated situation.

The decline of the US-German relations has been exposed initially with the NSA interceptions scandal , yet, progressively, the big picture came on surface, revealing a transatlantic economic war between banking and corporate giants. In times of huge multilevel crises, the big capital always intensifies its efforts to eliminate competitors too. As a consequence, the US has seen another key ally, Germany, trying to gain a certain degree of independence in order to form its own agenda, separate from the US interests.

Note that, both Germany and Turkey are medium powers that, historically, always trying to expand and create their own spheres of influence, seeking independence from the traditional big powers.

Economic Wars, Constitutional Coups, Provocative Operations – Argentina/Brazil/Venezuela

A wave of neoliberal onslaught shakes currently Latin America. While in Argentina, Mauricio Macri allegedly took the power normally, the constitutional coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as, the usual actions of the Right opposition in Venezuela against Nicolás Maduro with the help of the US finger, are far more obvious.
The special weight of these three countries in Latin America is extremely important for the US imperialism to regain ground in the global geopolitical arena. Especially the last ten to fifteen years, each of them developed increasingly autonomous policies away from the US close custody, under Leftist governments, and this was something that alarmed the US imperialism components.

Brazil appears to be the most important among the three, not only due to its size, but also as a member of the BRICS, the team of fast growing economies who threaten the US and generally the Western global dominance. The constitutional coup against Rousseff was rather a sloppy action and reveals the anxiety of the US establishment to regain control through puppet regimes. This is a well-known situation from the past through which the establishment attempts to secure absolute dominance in the US backyard.

The importance of Venezuela due to its oil reserves is also significant. When Maduro tried to approach Russia in order to strengthen the economic cooperation between the two countries, he must had set the alarm for the neocons in the US. Venezuela could find an alternative in Russia and BRICS, in order to breathe from the multiple economic war that was set off by the US. It is characteristic that the economic war against Russia by the US and the Saudis, by keeping the oil prices in historically low levels, had significant impact on the Venezuelan economy too. It is also known that the US organizations are funding the opposition since Chávez era, in order to proceed in provocative operations that could overthrow the Leftist governments.

The case of Venezuela is really interesting. The US imperialists were fiercely trying to overthrow the Leftist governments since Chávez administration. They found now a weaker president, Nicolás Maduro - who certainly does not have the strength and personality of Hugo Chávez - to achieve their goal.

The Western media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual. The recipe is known. You present the half truth, with a big overdose of exaggeration. The establishment parrots are demonizing Socialism , but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending, feeding the Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't tell you about the financial war conducted through the oil prices, manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.

Regarding Argentina, former president, Cristina Kirchner, had also made some important moves towards the stronger cooperation with Russia, which was something unacceptable for Washington's hawks. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because Argentina could escape from the vulture funds that sucking its blood since its default. This would give the country an alternative to the neoliberal monopoly of destruction. The US big banks and corporations would never accept such a perspective because the debt-enslaved Argentina is a golden opportunity for a new round of huge profits. It's happening right now in eurozone's debt colony, Greece.

'Color Revolutions' - Ukraine

The events in Ukraine have shown that, the big capital has no hesitation to ally even with the neo-nazis, in order to impose the new world order. This is not something new of course. The connection of Hitler with the German economic oligarchs, but also with other major Western companies, before and during the WWII, is well known.

The most terrifying of all however, is not that the West has silenced in front of the decrees of the new Ukrainian leadership, through which is targeting the minorities, but the fact that the West allied with the neo-nazis, while according to some information has also funded their actions as well as other extreme nationalist groups during the riots in Kiev.

Plenty of indications show that US organizations have 'put their finger' on Ukraine. A video , for example, concerning the situation in Ukraine has been directed by Ben Moses (creator of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who is connected with American government executives and organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress. This video shows a beautiful young female Ukrainian who characterizes the government of the country as "dictatorship" and praise some protesters with the neo-nazi symbols of the fascist Ukranian party Svoboda on them.

The same organizations are behind 'color revolutions' elsewhere, as well as, provocative operations against Leftist governments in Venezuela and other countries.

Ukraine is the perfect place to provoke Putin and tight the noose around Russia. Of course the huge hypocrisy of the West can also be identified in the case of Crimea. While in other cases, the Western officials were 'screaming' for the right of self-determination (like Kosovo, for example), after they destroyed Yugoslavia in a bloodbath, they can't recognize the will of the majority of Crimeans to join Russia.

The war will become wilder

The Western neo-colonial powers are trying to counterattack against the geopolitical upgrade of Russia and the Chinese economic expansionism.

Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. Besides, Trump has already shown his hostile feelings against China, despite his friendly approach to Russia and Putin.

We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact.

[Dec 21, 2019] Is Putin losing his grip? Why did Russian disinformation operations fail so dramatically in the UK election?

Dec 21, 2019 | off-guardian.org

s Putin losing his grip? Why did Russian disinformation operations fail so dramatically in the UK election? Not only did the "rabid socialist" Corbyn fail to seize power from the Russophobic cold-war warriors of Whitehall but Russia's man in the White House is already planning to move in with them!

[Dec 21, 2019] How national security mandarins groomed Pete Buttigieg and managed his future

Dec 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kali , Dec 21 2019 19:13 utc | 8

And talkin bout Greasy Mayo Pete, this came out a few days ago The insider: How national security mandarins groomed Pete Buttigieg and managed his future

[Dec 21, 2019] Government Warmongering Criminals Where Are They Now

Notable quotes:
"... The American people and most of the world bought into the lies and half-truths because they wanted to believe the fiction they were being spoon fed by the White House, but is there a whole lot of difference between what the US government did against Iraq in 2003 and what Hitler's government did in 1939 when it falsely claimed that Polish troops had attacked Germany? Was subsequent torture by the Gestapo any different than torture by a contractor working for Washington? ..."
"... A friend of mine recently commented that honest men who were formerly part of the United States government do not subsequently get hired by lobbying firms or obtain television contracts and "teaching" positions at prestigious universities. ..."
"... If the marketplace is anything to go by Feith and Tenet are running neck-and-neck on secondary book exchanges as George also can be had for $.01. ..."
"... The historian Livy summed up the significance of his act, writing "It is worthwhile for those who disdain all human things for money, and who suppose that there is no room either for great honor or virtue, except where wealth is found, to listen to his story." ..."
"... "Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best." ..."
"... senior government officials and politicians routinely expect to be generously rewarded for their service and never held accountable for their failures and misdeeds ..."
"... One thing for sure about the Washington elite, you never have to say you're sorry. ..."
Jul 08, 2015 | The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

The United States already has by far the per capita largest prison population of any developed country but I am probably one of the few Americans who on this Independence Day would like to see a lot more people in prison, mostly drawn from politicians and senior bureaucrats who have long believed that their status makes them untouchable, giving them license to steal and even to kill. The sad fact is that while whistleblowers have been imprisoned for revealing government criminality, no one in the federal bureaucracy has ever actually been punished for the crimes of torture, kidnapping and assassination committed during the George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama presidencies.

Why is accountability important? After the Second World War, the victorious allies believed it was important to establish responsibility for the crimes that had been committed by officials of the Axis powers. The judges at the Nuremberg Trials called the initiation of a war of aggression the ultimate war crime because it inevitably unleashed so many other evils. Ten leading Nazis were executed at Nuremberg and ninety-three Japanese officials at similar trials staged in Asia, including several guilty of waterboarding. Those who were not executed for being complicit in the actual launching of war were tried for torture of both military personnel and civilians and crimes against humanity, including the mass killing of civilians as well as of soldiers who had surrendered or been captured.

No matter how one tries to avoid making comparisons between 1939 and 2015, the American invasion of Iraq was a war of aggression, precisely the type of conflict that the framework of accountability provided by Nuremberg was supposed to prevent in the years after 1946. High level US government officials knew that Iraq represented no threat to the United States but they nevertheless described an imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein in the most graphic terms, replete with weapons of mass destruction, armed drones flying across the Atlantic, terrorists being unleashed against the homeland, and mushroom clouds on the horizon. The precedent of Iraq, even though it was an abject failure, has led to further military action against Libya and Syria to bring about "regime change" as well as a continuing conflict in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the US has been waging a largely secret "long war" against terrorists employing torture and secret prisons. The American people and most of the world bought into the lies and half-truths because they wanted to believe the fiction they were being spoon fed by the White House, but is there a whole lot of difference between what the US government did against Iraq in 2003 and what Hitler's government did in 1939 when it falsely claimed that Polish troops had attacked Germany? Was subsequent torture by the Gestapo any different than torture by a contractor working for Washington?

Many Americans would now consider the leading figures in the Bush Administration aided and abetted by many enablers in congress from both political parties to be unindicted war criminals. Together they ignited a global conflict that is still running strong fourteen years later with a tally of more than 7,000 dead Americans and a minimum of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, Afghans, Libyans, Somalis and Syrians.

War breeds more war, due largely to the fact that guilty parties in Washington who piggyback on the prevailing narrative move onward and upward, rewarded in this life even if not necessarily so in the hereafter. A friend of mine recently commented that honest men who were formerly part of the United States government do not subsequently get hired by lobbying firms or obtain television contracts and "teaching" positions at prestigious universities. Though not 100% accurate as I know at least a couple of honorable former senior officials who wound up teaching, it would seem to be a generalization that has considerable validity. The implication is that many senior government officials ascend to their positions based on being accommodating and "political" rather than being honest and they continue to do the same when they switch over to corporate America or the equally corrupted world of academia.

I thought of my friend's comment when I turned on the television a week ago to be confronted by the serious, somewhat intense gaze of Michael Morell, warning about the danger that ISIS will strike the US over the Fourth of July weekend. Morell, a former senior CIA official, is in the terror business. He had no evidence whatsoever that terrorists were planning an attack and should have realized that maneuvering the United States into constantly going on alert based on empty threats is precisely what militant groups tend to do.

When not fronting as a handsomely paid national security consultant for the CBS television network Morell is employed by Beacon Global Strategies as a Senior Counselor, presumably warning well-heeled clients to watch out for terrorists. His lifestyle and substantial emoluments depend on people being afraid of terrorism so they will turn to an expert like him and ask serious questions that he will answer in a serious way suggesting that Islamic militants could potentially bring about some kind of global apocalypse.

Morell, a torture apologist, also has a book out that he wants to sell, positing somewhat ridiculously that he and his former employer had been fighting The Great War of Our Time against Islamic terrorists, something comparable to the World Wars of the past century, hence the title. Morell needs to take some valium and relax. He would also benefit from a little introspection regarding the bad guys versus good guys narrative that he is peddling. His credentials as a warrior are somewhat suspect in any event as he never did any military service and his combat in the world of intelligence consisted largely of sitting behind a desk in Washington and providing briefings to George W. Bush and Barack Obama in which he presumably told them what they wanted to hear.

Morell is one of a host of pundits who are successful in selling the military-industrial-lobbyist-congressional-intelligence community line of BS on the war on terror. Throw in the neocons as the in-your-face agents provocateurs who provide instant intellectual and media credibility for developments and you have large groups of engaged individuals with good access who are on the receiving end of the seemingly unending cash pipeline that began with 9/11. Frances Townsend, who was the Bush Homeland Security adviser and who is now a consultant with CNN, is another such creature as is Michael Chertoff, formerly Director of the Department of Homeland Security, who has successfully marketed his defective airport scanners to his former employer.

But the guys and gals who are out feathering their own nests are at least comprehensible given our predatory capitalist system of government. More to the point, the gang that ordered or carried out torture and assassination are the ones who should be doing some hard time in the slammer but instead they too are riding the gravy train and cashing in. To name only a few of those who knew about the torture and ordered it carried out I would cite George Tenet, James Pavitt, Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez from the intelligence community. The assassination program meanwhile is accredited to John Brennan, currently CIA Director, during his tenure as Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor. And then there are Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon together with John Yoo at Justice and Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, and Condi Rice at the White House, all of whom outright lied, dissimulated and conspired their way to bring about a war of aggression against Iraq.

There are plenty of nameless others who were "only carrying out orders" and who should be included in any reckoning of America's crimes over the past fifteen years, particularly if one also considers the illegal NSA spying program headed by Michael Hayden, who defended the practice and has also referred to those who oppose enhanced interrogation torture as "interrogation deniers." And then there are Presidents Bush and Obama who certainly knew what was going on in the name of the American people as well as John Brennan, who was involved in both the torture and renditions programs as well as the more recent assassinations by drone.

So where are they now? Living in obscurity ashamed of what they did? Hardly. Not only have they not been vilified or marginalized, they have, in most cases, been rewarded. George W. Bush lives in Dallas near his Presidential Library and eponymous Think (sic) Tank. Cheney lives in semi-retirement in McLean Virginia with a multi-million dollar waterfront weekend retreat in St. Michaels Maryland, not too far from Donald Rumsfeld's similar digs.

George Tenet, the CIA Director notorious for his "slam-dunk" comment, a man who cooked the intelligence to make the Iraq war possible to curry favor with the White House, has generously remunerated positions on the boards of Allen & Company merchant bank, QinetiQ, and L-1 Identity Solutions. He sold his memoir At the Center of the Storm, which has been described as a "self-justifying apologia," in 2007 for a reported advance of $4 million. His book, ironically, admits that the US invaded Iraq for no good reason.

James Pavitt, who was the point man responsible for the "enhanced interrogation" program as Tenet's Deputy Director for Operations, is currently a principal with The Scowcroft Group and also serves on several boards. Cofer Black, who headed the Counter-Terrorism Center, which actually carried out renditions and "enhanced interrogations," was vice chairman of Blackwater Worldwide (now called Xe) and chairman of Total Intelligence Solutions, a Blackwater spin-off. He is now vice president of Blackbird Technologies, a defense and intelligence contractor. Rodriguez, who succeeded Black and in 2005 illegally destroyed video tapes made of Agency interrogations to avoid possible repercussions, is a senior vice president with Edge Consulting, a defense contractor currently owned by IBM that is located in Virginia.

John Yoo is a Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley while Condoleezza Rice, who spoke of mushroom clouds and is widely regarded as the worst National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in history, has returned to Stanford University. She is a professor at the Graduate School of Business and a director of its Global Center for Business and the Economy as well as a fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is occasionally spoken of as either a possible GOP presidential candidate or as a future Commissioner of the National Football League. Her interaction with students is limited, but when challenged on her record she has responded that it was a difficult situation post 9/11, something that everyone understands, though few would have come to her conclusion that attacking Iraq might be a good way to destroy al-Qaeda.

Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense, is seen by many as the "intellectual" driving force behind the invasion of Iraq. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and advises Jeb Bush on foreign policy. A bid to reward Wolfie for his zeal by giving him a huge golden parachute as President of the World Bank at a salary of $391,000 tax free failed when, after 23 months in the position, he was ousted over promoting a subordinate with whom he was having an affair. His chief deputy at the Pentagon Doug Feith left the Defense Department to take up a visiting professorship at the school of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, which was subsequently not renewed. He is reported to be again practicing law and thinking deep thoughts about his hero Edmund Burke, who no doubt would have been appalled to make Feith's acquaintance. Feith is a senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute and the Director of the Center for National Security Strategies. His memoir War and Decision did not make the best seller list and is now available used on Amazon for $.01 plus shipping. If the marketplace is anything to go by Feith and Tenet are running neck-and-neck on secondary book exchanges as George also can be had for $.01.

The over-rewarding of former officials who have in reality done great harm to the United States and its interests might well seem inexplicable, but it is all part of a style of bureaucracy that cannot admit failure and truly believes that all its actions are ipso facto legitimate because the executive and its minions can do no wrong. It is also a symptom of the classic American character flaw that all things are of necessity measured by money. Does anyone remember the ancient Roman symbol of republican virtue Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who left his farm after being named Dictator in order to defeat Rome's enemies? He then handed power back to the Senate before returning to his plowing after the job was done. The historian Livy summed up the significance of his act, writing "It is worthwhile for those who disdain all human things for money, and who suppose that there is no room either for great honor or virtue, except where wealth is found, to listen to his story." George Washington was America's Cincinnatus and it is not a coincidence that officers of the continental army founded the Cincinnati Society, the nation's oldest patriotic organization, in 1783. It is also reported that Edward Snowden used the alias "Cincinnatus."

Lord Acton once observed that "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." More recently essayist Edward Abbey put it in an American context, noting "Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best." That senior government officials and politicians routinely expect to be generously rewarded for their service and never held accountable for their failures and misdeeds is a fault that is perhaps not unique to the United States but it is nevertheless unacceptable. Handing out a couple of exemplary prison sentences for the caste that believes itself untouchable would be a good place to start. An opportunity was missed with David Petraeus, who was fined and avoided jail time, and it will be interesting to see how the Dennis Hastert case develops. Hastert will no doubt be slapped on the wrist for the crime of moving around his own money while the corruption that was the source of that money, both as a legislator and lobbyist, will be ignored. As will his molestation of at least one and possibly several young boys. One thing for sure about the Washington elite, you never have to say you're sorry.

Reprinted with permission from Unz Review.

[Dec 21, 2019] There have been numerous smears of Tulsi Gabbard that have been repeated over and over the last few years after she went to Syria. She started to give the foreign policy blob a lot of grief for their support of the overthrow of Syria to install a theocratic jihadi government controlled by the usual suspects.

Dec 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kali , Dec 21 2019 22:03 utc | 22

There have been numerous smears of Tulsi Gabbard that have been repeated over and over the last few years after she went to Syria. She started to give the foreign policy blob a lot of grief for their support of the overthrow of Syria to install a theocratic jihadi government controlled by the usual suspects.

One smear they like to use is to call Tulsi an Islamophobe. That began years ago when she criticized Our Savior Obama (pbaj) for claiming ISIS was not a religious extremist organization, that it was a criminal group and the US needed to give Iraqi men more to do and then they wouldn't join those criminal gangs like...ISIS.

Anyways, this article goes into a deeper state (yup, deeper than usual) conspiracy by various actors to smear Tulsi for a variety of reasons subservient to foreign interests, with a surprise intro to another often unspoken of interest with a lot of hidden power in Washington.

Anatomy of A Smear: How Liberals Have Become Willing Dupes of Foreign Political Psy-Ops

[Dec 21, 2019] Operation Gladio the Story Of A Conspiracy

Dec 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.

Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our *** oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.

It is about sovereignty and SMART too

R19 , 16 minutes ago link

How dare anyone question official findings, details, and situations. Official means official and that is official. Furthermore, no representatives should be challenged on their representativiality or leadershipiality. When it is stated and found that various unnamed letter organizations are working diligently on behalf of the people, that is fact and the summation of de factos and prima facia that exists, period FULL STOP. Thank you and have a great day!

Mustafa Kemal , 47 minutes ago link

" It is a mystery that the people know nothing about Operation Gladio ."

Indeed, it seems the sheeple do NOT want to know.

Gladio was responsible for the Bologna railroad massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_massacre

which killed 85. Do you think these people would have a problem with killing a few thousand Americans on 9/11?

Enraged , 1 hour ago link

It seems particular representatives of government and specific corporate interests are responsible for the wars, while the intelligence agencies are involved with the terrorist activities and the drugs/gun trade. I do not understand how souls can be so evil with intentionally murdering and harming innocent civilians for political agendas, control, and profits.

Most of the people are moral and wish for a peaceful, happy life with their family and friends, so we need a society where virtue conquers the demons.

alex kalish , 1 minute ago link

You will never see that with a state system. Virtue wins only when the state is so weak or small, they cannot screw over the people.

Singelguy , 1 hour ago link

Read the book, Operation Gladio. It goes into much greater detail. Great read.

Roger Casement , 2 hours ago link

Godfather 3

https://deskgram.co/explore/tags/nancypelosimemes

Raffie , 2 hours ago link

I remember hearing a talk show a couple years back (forgot the name of the show) about Gladio.

They asked their guest "Operation Gladio is still in operation?", the guest replied,"Yes, it still is in operation today"

host,"It is? WW2 has been long over. Why would it not be shut down?"

Guest,"With something that works that good, why would you shut it down?"

charlie_don't_surf , 2 hours ago link

Get to the point. And "Secret Armies" to fight a Soviet invasion?...as opposed to all the Non Secret Armies all over Europe and the US to fight a Soviet invasion?

The Jackal , 3 hours ago link

The important takeaway here is that most terrorism is state sponsored.

Operation Gladio first came to light in Italy in 1990, after over 40 years of clandestine operations. Members of the project revealed that similar projects existed in most if not all countries of Western Europe. These stay-behind networks were... involved in anti-communist activities including anti-democratic agitation and false flag terrorism. [It was called "stay behind" because their alibi was they were preparing to wage a guerrilla war in case of Communist invasion.]

In his 2004 book NATO's Secret Armies, arguably the most shocking book ever to be ignored by the corporate media, Daniele Ganzer [documented] terrorism directed against the people by secret armies funded and organized by NATO and answerable to deep state elements within NATO, MI6 and the CIA rather than the respective governments.... And yet the claims have been substantiated by juridical inquiries in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium and have been debated (and condemned) in the European Parliament.

The scandal originally came to light in Italy in 1984 when an Italian judge Felice Casson reopened the case of a terrorist car bomb in Peteano in 1972 and uncovered a series of anomalies in the original investigation. The atrocity which had originally been blamed on the communist Red Brigades turned out to be, in fact, the work of a right wing organization called Ordine Nuovo . Following the discovery of an arms cache near Trieste in 1972 containing C4 explosives identical to that used in the Peteano attack, Casson's investigation revealed that the bombing in Peteano was the work of the military secret service SID (Servizio Informazioni Difesa) in conjunction with Ordine Nuovo. The intention had been to blame the bombing on the extreme left wing militant outfit, the Red Brigades. The right wing terrorist, Vincenzo Vinciguerra was arrested and charged and confessed to planting the bomb.

Judge Casson's investigation also revealed that the Peteano bombing was the continuation of a series of bombings begun at Christmas 1969, the most well-known of which, on the Piazza Fontane in Milan, killed 16 and injured 80. The bombing campaign culminated on 2 August 1980 with a massive bomb in the waiting room of Bologna railway station which killed 85 and injured 200. It was one of the largest terrorist outrages on mainland Europe in modern times.

During his trial, Vincenzo Vinciguerra revealed that, in addition to discrediting left wing political groups, there had been a second, even darker aim behind the bombings, namely to inculcate a climate of fear among the general populace. This was known as the 'strategy of tension' which was intended to generate a pervasive sense of fear which would encourage the population to appeal to the state for protection.

Vincenzo Vinciguerra claimed during his trial: 'You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public to turn to the State to ask for greater security.'

Bastiat , 4 hours ago link

You create fear with lies. And the state then suppresses dissent. The state media define Communists as the enemy. Anything is justified to crush them. Communism and terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists and today 'immigrants.'

One of these is not like the others. "Immigrants" (illegal) in their millions are a real problem in the US and a worse one in Europe.

Create fear with lies? He forgot to mention "Climate Change" and the much hyped Turdburn phenomenon.

Totally_Disillusioned , 5 hours ago link

"Gladio" Hoax ? Just like Op Mockingbird, Franklin child prostitution ring? Wake Up!

Operation Gladio is "a secret anti-Communist organization formed during the cold war years," as quoted in the New York Times . Kept secret for 45 years, operatives of government-sponsored Operation Gladio in various European countries staged false flag events which were blamed not just on Communists, but on leftists and other progressive organizations to damage their credibility.

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/16/world/evolution-in-europe-italy-discloses-its-web-of-cold-war-guerrillas.html

Also in case you think false flags are imaginary... "False flag terrorism" occurs when elements within a government stage a secret operation whereby government forces pretend to be a targeted enemy while attacking their own forces or people. The attack is then falsely blamed on the enemy in order to justify going to war against that enemy.

BobEore , 4 hours ago link

Hey fukkup! "Franklin" was real... and yeah... the Repulsivan administrations of 42 and 43 REALLY were ... in the bizness of paying their jobbers to kidnap and program innocent kids for their bent sexual pleasures. How you wanna work that into the "Gladio" thing asshat? Maybe a lil 'Pope a dope' with the choirboys?

I got all the time in the world for punters who wish to challenge my premise on grounds of factual and reasoned argument.

I got no time at all for your ******** straw man attempts to work around your own absence of an argument by going "Franklin"

"Also in case you" don't know... your clown team don't allow quotes from anti-agent Orange rags like the "NYT." Capiche?

Back up your butt and start churning the butt butter a lil better this time button bouy!

GALLGE , 4 hours ago link

You still don't have a clue why Jews hate Putin? It's been a long time pal.

BobEore , 4 hours ago link

"Jews hate Putin"???

Get a grip Guiseppe! Talmudists hate n despise all their lil enablers. Pooties no different from Frimpf in that regard. Their puppet princes are the first ones under the bus... when their usefulness expires.

attah-boy-Luther , 5 hours ago link

Gladio has morphed over the years and presently active with all the FF mass shooting "DRILLS" (sic).......

See the news about Va. for the pending ending results of how it got there.

Another test run for the election rigging from Sore-azz and company.
BOLO for MSM projecting upon the GOP and then the more free **** and 'evil guns' meme to pick up.

So far it's all about Blooming-idiot and Tom Steyer hawking their snake oil in Texas......gonna be a loooooog friggn year listening to these scum shovel bovine excrement.....60 seconds at a time....like digital water boarding for the farm animals....

Totally_Disillusioned , 4 hours ago link

Disinformers try to explain away the nefarious acts of a rogue CIA as "conspiracy" a term coined by William Casey, CIA Director as a disinformation tool... These same disinformers deny the Craigslist cattle call for crisis actors as well as call "coincidence" for FEMA or Homeland Security drills the day before. They also deny postmortems conducted on video footage of the attack to PROVE the fallasies of the event. These disinformers will go to their grave asserting Building 7 collapsed due to the heat of an imaginary fire.

Omega_Man , 5 hours ago link

all cia operatives should be hunted down when in foreign nations... as well as mossad...

Pliskin , 5 hours ago link

China killed a dozen of them a few years ago！

Hilarious！

**** them，I hope their body parts were harvested to a needy person！

Bwahahaha！

Ophiuchus , 3 hours ago link

Exposing those operatives is about the only good thing Shillary ever done.

jm , 5 hours ago link

Meanwhile, at this same time the Russians had very nearly raped every human vagina in Berlin when they rolled into town. They brutally put down revolts in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia each with its own special brand of tortures and purges for decades after.

Mao was literally starving 40 million of its own people. Then he decided to wipe China clean of any cultural "residue" at all. Who knows how many people got killed in that storm.

Pol Pot thought he should finally create a true communist state and killed 2 million out of 5 million of his own people trying to establish it.

As a monument to utter stupidity, Gaither Stewart ignores these facts and shits the bed about Operation Gladio. And to kick it off, he face-plants about the need for Aristotelian moderation!

I know, I know, don't let facts get in the way. Junk away, ignorant and angry tapeworms.

attah-boy-Luther , 5 hours ago link

It was an ugly era....let's not forget Eisenhower starving millions of innocent Germans, in POW camps, and exposure to the elements to their slow agonizing deaths.

Patton defied the order and fed them.

Clearly a human trait the OSS scum and cabal did not like. So Patton was off'd.

Gazooks , 5 hours ago link

..and about how many, say, >20 million Russians, were savaged and slaughtered in their own land by Anglo funded rampaging Huns?

play one population off another, micro, macro, the lot, and watch them run to Uncle Sam for safety

safety as enslavement, riches as in debt, ignorance as strength, and deception for the greater good

attah-boy-Luther , 4 hours ago link

Yup, the cabal play us like a ball of yarn in a room full of cats.

Fat cats that is.

Drop-Hammer , 4 hours ago link

The Russian soldiers who perped those rapes/murders were not Christian white Russians. They were the Far East peoples (Chechnyans, Uzbeks, Mongols, et al) who were conscripts and turned loose to perpetrate that mayhem against the German people and at the behest of Soviet jews who wanted vengeance against Germany.

No-Go zone , 4 hours ago link

...the Soviets had very nearly raped every...

jm , 3 hours ago link

Who were overwhelmingly Russian. Do you really have to be so damn P.C. all the time at the expense of the truth?

Moneycircus , 5 hours ago link

The Italian fascists have belonged to the CIA since WW2.

Source: Peter Tompkins, OSS, Italy 1943-45
https://youtu.be/1YhRBxxyRqs?t=562

Mussolini defeated the mafia.
The communist partisans defeated Mussolini.
The CIA re-imported the mafia to defeat the communists
And armed the remaining fascists for Operation Gladio.

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Operation_Gladio/B

Faustus B. , 5 hours ago link

A romantic time in Old Europe? Hardly. Soldiers in full battle dress patrolling the streets of Rome. Sirens screaming citywide day and night.

I have heard the police in Rome turn the sirens on for various unusual reasons, like going to lunch.

mtumba , 5 hours ago link

Nothing like DC, when the Empire's motorcades thunder through escorting the ******* leader-of-the-moment.

I've always found it an arrogant, sickening display - but it gets worse with each president.

Pliskin , 5 hours ago link

Heads = Trump

Tails = Hillary

Same coin，different sides！

[Dec 21, 2019] Please consider looking at the Wikileaks video linked below? It illustrates a barbaric type of war crime-free unaccountability to "international law," including a lawless US military Rules of Engagement modus operandi

Mar 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

ChuckOrloski says:

March 12, 2019 at 5:25 pm GMT • 200 Words @AnonFromTN Superfluously impossible, AnonfromTN said: "It is simple, really. The US needs a law prohibiting anyone with dual citizenship to hold public office."

Hi AnonfromTN.

Hard to comprehend how you persist to deny how the "US law" is Zionized. (Zigh) Israeli "dual citizenship and holding "Homeland" public office is an irretractable endowment lawlessly given to US Jews by ruling international Jewry.

They barged into our Constitution like a cancer and feast upon The Bill of Rights.

What's worse now is how livin' the "American dream" has reversed, and at present, President t-Rump demands huge increases in war funding.
No one gets informed that future wars converge with Israel's will.

Please consider looking at the Wikileaks video linked below? It illustrates a barbaric type of war crime-free & unaccountability to "international law," including a lawless US military Rules of Engagement modus operandi, which governed the serial killing activity of an Apache attack chopper crew in the Baghdad sky. Look close at the posed threat!

Tell me AnonfromTN? As you likely know, Bradley Chelsea Manning is, and under "Homeland" law, in-the-klink for exposing the war crimes to America. Is their one (1) US Congressman raising objection to the imprisonment? Fyi, you can look at the brave writing of Kathy Kelly on the Manning case, and which appears at Counterpunch.org.

AnonFromTN , says: March 12, 2019 at 6:01 pm GMT

@ChuckOrloski I can only agree. The patient (the US political system) is too far gone to hope for recovery. As comment #69 rightly points out, our political system is based on bribery. Lobbyism and donations to political campaigns and PACs are perfectly legal in the US, while all of these should be criminal offenses punished by jail time, like in most countries. Naturally, desperate Empires losing their dominant position resort to any war crimes imaginable, and severely punish those who expose these crimes.

I can add only one thing: you are right that greedy Jews are evil, but greedy people of any nationality are just as evil as greedy Jews. Not all greedy globalists and MIC thieves are Jews, but they are all scum. I watch with dismay the US Empire heading to its crash. Lemmings running to the cliff are about as rational as our degenerate elites. Israel influence is toxic, but that's not the only poison the Empire will die from.

[Dec 21, 2019] Syria Accuses US Of Stealing Over 40 Tons Of Its Gold by Eric Zuesse

Mar 08, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Fri, 03/08/2019 - 23:55 240 SHARES Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The Syrian National News Agency headlined on February 26th, "Gold deal between United States and Daesh" (Daesh is ISIS) and reported that,

Information from local sources said that US army helicopters have already transported the gold bullions under cover of darkness on Sunday [February 24th], before transporting them to the United States.

The sources said that tens of tons that Daesh had been keeping in their last hotbed in al-Baghouz area in Deir Ezzor countryside have been handed to the Americans, adding up to other tons of gold that Americans have found in other hideouts for Daesh, making the total amount of gold taken by the Americans to the US around 50 tons, leaving only scraps for the SDF [Kurdish] militias that serve them [the US operation].

Recently, sources said that the area where Daesh leaders and members have barricaded themselves in, contains around 40 tons of gold and tens of millions of dollars.

Allegedly, "US occupation forces in the Syrian al-Jazeera area made a deal with Daesh terrorists, by which Washington gets tens of tons of gold that the terror organization had stolen, in exchange for providing safe passage for the terrorists and their leaders from the areas in Deir Ezzor where they are located."

ISIS was financing its operations largely by the theft of oil from the oil wells in the Deir Ezzor area, Syria's oil-producing region, and they transported and sold this stolen oil via their allied forces, through Turkey, which was one of those US allies trying to overthrow Syria's secular Government and install a Sunni fundamentalist regime that would be ruled from Riyadh (i.e., controlled by the Saud family) . This gold is the property of the Syrian Government, which owns all that oil and the oil wells, which ISIS had captured (stolen), and then sold. Thus, this gold is from sale of that stolen black-market oil, which was Syria's property.

The US Government claims to be anti-ISIS, but actually didn't even once bomb ISIS in Syria until Russia started bombing ISIS in Syria on 30 September 2015, and the US had actually been secretly arming ISIS there so as to help ISIS and especially Al Qaeda (and the US was strongly protecting Al Qaeda in Syria ) to overthrow Syria's secular and non-sectarian Government. Thus, whereas Russia started bombing ISIS in Syria on 30 September 2015, America (having become embarrassed) started bombing ISIS in Syria on 16 November 2015 . The US Government's excuse was "This is our first strike against tanker trucks, and to minimize risks to civilians, we conducted a leaflet drop prior to the strike." They pretended it was out of compassion -- not in order to extend for as long as possible ISIS's success in taking over territory in Syria. (And, under Trump, on the night of 2 March 2019, the US rained down upon ISIS in northeast Syria the excruciating and internationally banned white phosphorous to burn ISIS and its hostages alive, which Trump's predecessor Barack Obama had routinely done to burn alive the residents in Donetsk and other parts of eastern former Ukraine where voters had voted more than 90% for the democratically elected Ukrainian President whom Obama's coup in Ukraine had replaced . It was a way to eliminate some of the most-undesired voters -- people who must never again be voting in a Ukrainian national election, not even if that region subsequently does become conquered by the post-coup, US-imposed, regime. The land there is wanted; its residents certainly are not wanted by the Obama-imposed regime.) America's line was: Russia just isn't as 'compassionate' as America. Zero Hedge aptly headlined "'Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away': US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes" . Nobody exceeds the United States Government in sheer hypocrisy.

The US Government evidently thinks that the public are fools, idiots. America's allies seem to be constantly amazed at how successful that approach turns out to be.

Indeed, on 28 November 2012, Syria News headlined "Emir of Qatar & Prime Minister of Turkey Steal Syrian Oil Machinery in Broad Daylight" and presented video allegedly showing it (but unfortunately providing no authentication of the date and locale of that video).

Jihadists were recruited from throughout the world to fight against Syria's secular Government. Whereas ISIS was funded mainly by black-market sales of oil from conquered areas, the Al-Qaeda-led groups were mainly funded by the Sauds and other Arab royal families and their retinues, the rest of their aristocracy. On 13 December 2013, BBC headlined "Guide to the Syrian rebels" and opened "There are believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters." Except in the Kurdish areas in Syria's northeast, almost all of those fighters were being led by Al Qaeda's Syrian Branch, al-Nusra. Britain's Center on Religion & Politics headlined on 21 December 2015, "Ideology and Objectives of the Syrian Rebellion" and reported: "If ISIS is defeated, there are at least 65,000 fighters belonging to other Salafi-jihadi groups ready to take its place." Almost all of those 65,000 were trained and are led by Syria's Al Qaeda (Nusra), which was protected by the US

In September 2016 a UK official "FINAL REPORT OF THE TASK FORCE ON COMBATING TERRORIST AND FOREIGN FIGHTER TRAVEL" asserted that, "Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have also joined." Even just 25,000 (that official lowest estimate) was a sizable US proxy-army of religious fanatics to overthrow Syria's Government.

On 26 November 2015, the first of Russia's videos of Russia's bombing ISIS oil trucks headed into Turkey was bannered at a US military website "Russia Airstrike on ISIS Oil Tankers" , and exactly a month later, on 26 December 2015, Britain's Daily Express headlined "WATCH: Russian fighter jets smash ISIS oil tankers after spotting 12,000 at Turkish border" . This article, reporting around twelve thousand ISIS oil-tanker trucks heading into Turkey, opened: "The latest video, released by the Russian defence ministry, shows the tankers bunched together as they make their way along the road. They are then blasted by the fighter jet." The US military had nothing comparable to offer to its 'news'-media. Britain's Financial Times headlined on 14 October 2015, "Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists" . Only America's allies were involved in this commerce with ISIS -- no nation that supported Syria's Government was participating in this black market of stolen Syrian goods. So, it's now clear that a lot of that stolen oil was sold for gold as Syria's enemy-nations' means of buying that oil from ISIS. They'd purchase it from ISIS, but not from Syria's Government, the actual owner.

On 30 November 2015 Israel's business-news daily Globes News Service bannered "Israel has become the main buyer for oil from ISIS controlled territory, report" , and reported:

An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit for the terrorist organization. The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.

After all, Israel too wants to overthrow Syria's secular, non-sectarian Government, which would be replaced by rulers selected by the Saud family , who are the US Government's main international ally .

On 9 November 2014, when Turkey was still a crucial US ally trying to overthrow Syria's secular Government (and this was before the failed 15 July 2016 US-backed coup-attempt to overthrow and replace Turkey's Government so as to impose an outright US stooge), Turkey was perhaps ISIS's most crucial international backer . Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's leader, had received no diploma beyond k-12, and all of that schooling was in Sunni schools and based on the Quran . (He pretended, however, to have a university diploma.) On 15 July 2015, AWD News headlined "Turkish President's daughter heads a covert medical corps to help ISIS injured members" . On 2 December 2015, a Russian news-site headlined "Defense Ministry: Erdogan and his family are involved in the illegal supply of oil" ; so, the Erdogan family itself was religiously committed to ISIS's fighters against Syria, and they were key to the success of the US operation against Syrians -- theft from Syrians. The great investigative journalist Christof Lehmann, who was personally acquainted with many of the leading political figures in Africa and the Middle East, headlined on 22 June 2014, "US Embassy in Ankara Headquarter for ISIS War on Iraq – Hariri Insider" , and he reported that the NATO-front the Atlantic Council had held a meeting in Turkey during 22-23 of November 2013 at which high officials of the US and allied governments agreed that they were going to take over Syria's oil, and that they even were threatening Iraq's Government for its not complying with their demands to cooperate on overthrowing Syria's Government. So, behind the scenes, this conquest of Syria was the clear aim by the US and all of its allies.

The US had done the same thing when it took over Ukraine by a brutal coup in February 2014 : It grabbed the gold. Iskra News in Russian reported, on 7 March 2014 , that "At 2 a.m. this morning ... an unmarked transport plane was on the runway at Borosipol Airport" near Kiev in the west, and that, "According to airport staff, before the plane came to the airport, four trucks and two Volkswagen minibuses arrived, all the truck license plates missing." This was as translated by Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research headlining on 14 March, "Ukraine's Gold Reserves Secretly Flown Out and Confiscated by the New York Federal Reserve?" in which he noted that, when asked, "A spokesman for the New York Fed said simply, 'Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder.'" The load was said to be "more than 40 heavy boxes." Chossudovsky noted that, "The National Bank of Ukraine (Central Bank) estimated Ukraine's gold reserves in February to be worth $1.8 billion dollars." It was allegedly 36 tons. The US, according to Victoria Nuland ( Obama's detail-person overseeing the coup ) had invested around $5 billion in the coup. Was her installed Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk cleaning out the nation's gold reserves in order to strip the nation so that the nation's steep indebtedness for Russian gas would never be repaid to Russia's oligarchs? Or was he doing it as a payoff for Nuland's having installed him? Or both? In any case: Russia was being squeezed by this fascist Ukrainian-American ploy.

On 14 November 2014, a Russian youtube headlined "In Ukraine, there is no more gold and currency reserves" and reported that there is "virtually no gold. There is a small amount of gold bars, but it's just 1%" of before the coup. Four days later, bannered "Ukraine Admits Its Gold Is Gone: 'There Is Almost No Gold Left In The Central Bank Vault'" . From actually 42.3 tons just before the coup, it was now far less than one ton.

The Syria operation was about oil, gold, and guns. However, most of America's support was to Al-Qaeda-led jihadists, not to ISIS-jihadists. As the great independent investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva reported on 2 July 2017 :

"In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed 9 underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN)."

The US had acquired weapons from around the world, and shipped them (and Gaytandzhieva's report even displayed the transit-documents) through a network of its embassies, into Syria, for Nusra-led forces inside Syria. Almost certainly, the US Government's central command center for the entire arms-smuggling operation was the world's largest embassy, which is America's embassy in Baghdad.

Furthermore, On 8 March 2013, Richard Spenser of Britain's Telegraph reported that Croatia's Jutarnji List newspaper had reported that "3,000 tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via Jordan since November. The airlift of dated but effective Yugoslav-made weapons meets key concerns of the West, and especially Turkey and the United States, who want the rebels to be better armed to drive out the Assad regime."

Also, a September 2014 study by Conflict Armaments Research (CAR), titled "Islamic State Weapons in Iraq and Syria" , reported that not only east-European, but even US-made, weapons were being "captured from Islamic State forces" by Kurds who were working for the Americans, and that this was very puzzling and disturbing to those Kurds, who were risking their lives to fight against those jihadists.

In December 2017, CAR headlined "Weapons of the Islamic State" and reported that "this materiel was rapidly captured by IS forces, only to be deployed by the group against international coalition forces." The assumption made there was that the transfer of weapons to ISIS was all unintentional.

That report ignored contrary evidence, which I summed up on 2 September 2017 headlining "Russian TV Reports US Secretly Backing ISIS in Syria" , and reporting there also from the Turkish Government an admission that the US was working with Turkey to funnel surviving members of Iraq's ISIS into the Deir Ezzor part of Syria to help defeat Syria's Government in that crucial oil-producing region. Moreover, at least one member of the 'rebels' that the US was training at Al Tanf on Syria's Jordanian border had quit because his American trainers were secretly diverting some of their weapons to ISIS. Furthermore: why hadn't the US bombed Syrian ISIS before Russia entered the Syrian war on 30 September 2015? America talked lots about its supposed effort against ISIS, but why did US wait till 16 November 2015 before taking action, "'Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away': US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes" ?

So, regardless of whether the US Government uses jihadists as its proxy-forces, or uses fascists as its proxy-forces, it grabs the gold -- and grabs the oil, and takes whatever else it can.

This is today's form of imperialism.

Grab what you can, and run. And call it 'fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption'. And the imperial regime's allies watch in amazement, as they take their respective cuts of the loot. That's the deal, and they call it 'fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world'. That's the way it works. International gangland. That's the reality, while most of the public think it's instead really "fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world." For example, as RT reported on Sunday , March 3rd, about John Bolton's effort at regime-change in Venezuela, Bolton said: "I'd like to see as broad a coalition as we can put together to replace Maduro, to replace the whole corrupt regime,' Bolton told CNN's Jake Tapper." Trump's regime wants to bring clean and democratic government to the poor Venezuelans, just like Bush's did to the Iraqis, and Obama's did to the Libyans and to the Syrians and to the Ukrainians. And Trump, who pretends to oppose Obama's regime-change policies, alternately expands them and shrinks them. Though he's slightly different from Obama on domestic policies, he never, as the US President, condemns any of his predecessors' many coups and invasions, all of which were disasters for everybody except America's and allies' billionaires. They're all in on the take.

The American public were suckered into destroying Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011-now, and so many other countries, and still haven't learned anything, other than to keep trusting the allegations of this lying and psychopathically vicious and super-aggressive Government and of its stenographic 'news'-media. When is enough finally enough ? Never? If not never, then when ? Or do most people never learn? Or maybe they don't really care. Perhaps that's the problem.

On March 4th, the Jerusalem Post bannered "IRAN AND TURKEY MEDIA PUSH CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT US, ISIS: Claims pushed by Syrian regime media assert that US gave ISIS safe passage out of Baghuz in return for gold, a conspiracy picked up in Tehran and Ankara" , and simply assumed that it's false -- but provided no evidence to back their speculation up -- and they closed by asserting "The conspiracies, which are manufactured in Damascus, are disseminated to Iraq and Turkey, both of whom oppose US policy in eastern Syria." Why do people even subscribe to such 'news'-sources as that? The key facts are hidden, the speculation that's based on their own prejudices replaces whatever facts exist. Do the subscribers, to that, simply want to be deceived? Are most people that stupid?

Back on 21 December 2018, one of the US regime's top 'news'-media, the Washington Post, had headlined "Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria" and reported that "the Islamic State is sitting on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations." So, it's not as if there hadn't been prior reason to believe that some day some of the gold would be found after America's defeat in Syria. Maybe they just hadn't expected this to happen quite so soon. But the regime will find ways to hoodwink its public, in the future, just as it has in the past. Unless the public wises-up (if that's even possible).

[Dec 21, 2019] William Astore on War as Art and Advertising – Antiwar.com Blog

Notable quotes:
"... A lot of art depicts war scenes, and why not? War is incredibly exciting, dynamic, destructive, and otherwise captivating, if often in a horrific way. But I want to consider war and art in a different manner, in an impressionistic one. War, by its nature, is often spectacle; it is also often chaotic; complex; beyond comprehension. Perhaps art theory, and art styles, have something to teach us about war. Ways of representing it and capturing its meaning as well as its horrors. But also ways of misrepresenting it; of fracturing its meaning. Of manipulating it. ..."
"... My point (and I think I have one) is that America's wars are in some sense elaborate productions and representations, at least in the ways in which the government constructs and sells them to the American people. To understand these representations -- the ways in which they are both more than real war and less than it -- art theory, as well as advertising, may have a lot to teach us. ..."
"... Afghanistan as the unfinished masterpiece....most people forget that the government is yet to complete it except when a Marine dies, they think about it for a day and then forget all over again. ..."
Jul 12, 2017 | www.antiwar.com

Consider this article a work of speculation; a jumble of ideas thrown at a blank canvas.

A lot of art depicts war scenes, and why not? War is incredibly exciting, dynamic, destructive, and otherwise captivating, if often in a horrific way. But I want to consider war and art in a different manner, in an impressionistic one. War, by its nature, is often spectacle; it is also often chaotic; complex; beyond comprehension. Perhaps art theory, and art styles, have something to teach us about war. Ways of representing it and capturing its meaning as well as its horrors. But also ways of misrepresenting it; of fracturing its meaning. Of manipulating it.

For example, America's overseas wars today are both abstractions and distractions. They're also somewhat surreal to most Americans, living as we do in comparative safety and material luxury (when compared to most other peoples of the world). Abstraction and surrealism: two art styles that may say something vital about America's wars.

If some aspects of America's wars are surreal and others abstract, if reports of those wars are often impressionistic and often blurred beyond recognition, this points to, I think, the highly stylized representations of war that are submitted for our consideration. What we don't get very often is realism. Recall how the Bush/Cheney administration forbade photos of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Think of all the war reporting you've seen on U.S. TV and Cable networks, and ask how many times you saw severed American limbs and dead bodies on a battlefield. (On occasion, dead bodies of the enemy are shown, usually briefly and abstractly, with no human backstory.)

Of course, there's no "real" way to showcase the brutal reality of war, short of bringing a person to the front and having them face fire in combat -- a level of "participatory" art that sane people would likely seek to avoid. What we get, as spectators (which is what we're told to remain in America), is an impression of combat. Here and there, a surreal report. An abstract news clip. Blown up buildings become exercises in neo-Cubism; melted buildings and weapons become Daliesque displays. Severed limbs (of the enemy) are exercises in the grotesque. For the vast majority of Americans, what's lacking is raw immediacy and gut-wrenching reality.

Again, we are spectators, not participants. And our responses are often as stylized and limited as the representations are. As Rebecca Gordon put it from a different angle at TomDispatch.com , when it comes to America's wars, are we participating in reality or merely watching reality TV? And why are so many so prone to confuse or conflate the two?

Art, of course, isn't the only lens through which we can see and interpret America's wars. Advertising, especially hyperbole, is also quite revealing. Thus the US military has been sold, whether by George W. Bush or Barack Obama, as "the world's finest military in history" or WFMH, an acronym I just made up, and which should perhaps come with a copyright or trademark symbol after it. It's classic advertising hyperbole. It's salesmanship in place of reality.

So, when other peoples beat our WFMH, we should do what Americans do best: sue them for copyright infringement. Our legions of lawyers will most certainly beat their cadres of counsels. After all, under Bush/Cheney, our lawyers tortured logic and the law to support torture itself. Talk about surrealism!

My point (and I think I have one) is that America's wars are in some sense elaborate productions and representations, at least in the ways in which the government constructs and sells them to the American people. To understand these representations -- the ways in which they are both more than real war and less than it -- art theory, as well as advertising, may have a lot to teach us.

As I said, this is me throwing ideas at the canvas of my computer screen. Do they make any sense to you? Feel free to pick up your own brush and compose away in the comments section.

P.S. Danger, Will Robinson. I've never taken an art theory class or studied advertising closely.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools and blogs at Bracing Views . He can be reached at [email protected] . Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author's permission.

Jim Savell , 19 hours ago

Afghanistan as the unfinished masterpiece....most people forget that the government is yet to complete it except when a Marine dies, they think about it for a day and then forget all over again.

[Dec 21, 2019] Is Putin losing his grip? Why did Russian disinformation operations fail so dramatically in the UK election?

Dec 21, 2019 | off-guardian.org

s Putin losing his grip? Why did Russian disinformation operations fail so dramatically in the UK election? Not only did the "rabid socialist" Corbyn fail to seize power from the Russophobic cold-war warriors of Whitehall but Russia's man in the White House is already planning to move in with them!

[Dec 21, 2019] Please consider looking at the Wikileaks video linked below? It illustrates a barbaric type of war crime-free unaccountability to "international law," including a lawless US military Rules of Engagement modus operandi

Mar 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

ChuckOrloski says:

March 12, 2019 at 5:25 pm GMT • 200 Words @AnonFromTN Superfluously impossible, AnonfromTN said: "It is simple, really. The US needs a law prohibiting anyone with dual citizenship to hold public office."

Hi AnonfromTN.

Hard to comprehend how you persist to deny how the "US law" is Zionized. (Zigh) Israeli "dual citizenship and holding "Homeland" public office is an irretractable endowment lawlessly given to US Jews by ruling international Jewry.

They barged into our Constitution like a cancer and feast upon The Bill of Rights.

What's worse now is how livin' the "American dream" has reversed, and at present, President t-Rump demands huge increases in war funding.
No one gets informed that future wars converge with Israel's will.

Please consider looking at the Wikileaks video linked below? It illustrates a barbaric type of war crime-free & unaccountability to "international law," including a lawless US military Rules of Engagement modus operandi, which governed the serial killing activity of an Apache attack chopper crew in the Baghdad sky. Look close at the posed threat!

Tell me AnonfromTN? As you likely know, Bradley Chelsea Manning is, and under "Homeland" law, in-the-klink for exposing the war crimes to America. Is their one (1) US Congressman raising objection to the imprisonment? Fyi, you can look at the brave writing of Kathy Kelly on the Manning case, and which appears at Counterpunch.org.

AnonFromTN , says: March 12, 2019 at 6:01 pm GMT

@ChuckOrloski I can only agree. The patient (the US political system) is too far gone to hope for recovery. As comment #69 rightly points out, our political system is based on bribery. Lobbyism and donations to political campaigns and PACs are perfectly legal in the US, while all of these should be criminal offenses punished by jail time, like in most countries. Naturally, desperate Empires losing their dominant position resort to any war crimes imaginable, and severely punish those who expose these crimes.

I can add only one thing: you are right that greedy Jews are evil, but greedy people of any nationality are just as evil as greedy Jews. Not all greedy globalists and MIC thieves are Jews, but they are all scum. I watch with dismay the US Empire heading to its crash. Lemmings running to the cliff are about as rational as our degenerate elites. Israel influence is toxic, but that's not the only poison the Empire will die from.

[Dec 20, 2019] Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone

Highly recommended!
Dec 20, 2019 | off-guardian.org

J_Garbo ,

I suspected that Deep State has at least two opposing factions. The Realistists want him to break up the empire, turn back into a republic; the Delusionals want to extend the empire, continue to exploit and destroy the world. If so, the contradictions, reversals, incoherence make sense. IMO as I said.

Gary Weglarz ,

I predict that all Western MSM will begin to accurately and vocally cover Mr. Binney's findings about this odious and treasonous U.S. government psyop at just about the exact time that -- "hell freezes over" -- as they say.

Jen ,

They don't need to, they have Tony Blair's fellow Brit psycho Boris Johnson to go on autopilot and blame the Russians the moment something happens and just before London Met start their investigations.

[Dec 20, 2019] The Tragedy of Donald Trump His Presidency Is Marred with Failure by Doug Bandow

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's performance record as president is comprised of an unbroken string of broken promises, opportunities squandered, principles violated, and intentions abandoned. ..."
"... despite another supposedly positive personal relationship, the Trump administration has applied more sanctions on Moscow, provided more anti-Russian aid to Ukraine, further increased funds and troops to NATO Europe, and sent home more Russian diplomats than the Obama administration. ..."
"... Worse, Washington has made no serious effort to resolve the standoff over Ukraine. No one imagines Moscow returning Crimea to Ukraine or giving in on any other issue without meaningful concessions regarding Kiev. Instead of moderating and minimizing bilateral frictions, the administration has made Russia more likely today than before to cooperate with China against Washington and contest American objectives in the Middle East, Africa, and even Latin America. ..."
"... Although Trump promised to stop America's endless wars, as many - if not more - U.S. military personnel are abroad today as when he took office. He increased the number of troops in Afghanistan and is now seeking to negotiate an exit that would force Washington to remain to enforce the agreement. This war has been burning for more than eighteen years. ..."
"... The administration has maintained Washington's illegal deployment in Syria, shifting one contingent away from the Turkish-Kurdish battle while inserting new forces to confiscate Syrian oil fields-a move that lacks domestic authority and violates international law. A few hundred Americans cannot achieve their many other supposed objectives, such as eliminating Russian, Iranian, and other malign influences and forcing Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to resign or inaugurate democracy. However, their presence will ensure America's continued entanglement in a conflict of great complexity but minimal security interest. ..."
"... This is an extraordinarily bad record after almost three years in office. Something good still might happen between now and November 3, 2020. However, more issues are likely to get worse. Imagine North Korean missile and nuclear tests, renewed Russian attempts to influence Western elections, a bloody Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong, increased U.S.-European trade friction, more U.S. pressure on Iran matched by asymmetric responses, and more. At the moment, there is no reason to believe any of the resulting confrontations would turn out well. ..."
Dec 18, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

Trump's performance record as president is comprised of an unbroken string of broken promises, opportunities squandered, principles violated, and intentions abandoned.

North Korea may have been the one issue on which President Donald Trump apparently listened to his predecessor, Barack Obama, when he warned about the serious challenge facing the incoming occupant of the Oval Office. Nevertheless, Trump initially drove tensions between the two countries to a fever pitch, raising fears of war in the midst of proclamations of "fire and fury." Then he played statesman and turned toward diplomacy, meeting North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, in Singapore.

Today that effort looks kaput. The North has declared denuclearization to be off the table. Actually, few people other than the president apparently believed that Kim was prepared to turn over his nuclear weapons to a government predisposed toward intervention and regime change.

Now that this Trump policy is formally dead, and there is no Plan B in sight, Pyongyang has begun deploying choice terms from its fabled thesaurus of insults. Democrats are sure to denounce the administration for incompetent naivete. And the bipartisan war party soon will be beating the drums for more sanctions, more florid rhetoric, additional military deployments, new plans for war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) already has dismissed the risks since any conflict would be "over there," on the distant Korean Peninsula. At which point Trump's heroic summitry, which offered a dramatic opportunity to break decades of deadly stalemate, will be judged a failure.

If the president had racked up several successes-wars ended, peace achieved, disputes settled, relations strengthened-then one disappointment wouldn't matter much. However, his record is an unbroken string of broken promises, opportunities squandered, principles violated, and intentions abandoned.

There is no relationship more important than that between the United States and the People's Republic of China. Despite Trump's supposed friendship with China's Xi Jinping, the trade war rages to the detriment of both countries. Americans have suffered from both the president's tariffs and China's retaliation, with no end in sight. Despite hopes for a resolution, Beijing is hanging tough and obviously doubts the president's toughness, given the rapidly approaching election.

Beyond economics, the relationship is deteriorating sharply. Disagreements and confrontations over everything from geopolitics to human rights have driven the two countries apart, with the administration lacking any effective strategy to positively influence China's behavior. The president's myopic focus on trade has left him without a coherent strategy elsewhere.

Perhaps the president's most pronounced and controversial promise of the 2016 campaign was to improve relations with Russia. However, despite another supposedly positive personal relationship, the Trump administration has applied more sanctions on Moscow, provided more anti-Russian aid to Ukraine, further increased funds and troops to NATO Europe, and sent home more Russian diplomats than the Obama administration.

Worse, Washington has made no serious effort to resolve the standoff over Ukraine. No one imagines Moscow returning Crimea to Ukraine or giving in on any other issue without meaningful concessions regarding Kiev. Instead of moderating and minimizing bilateral frictions, the administration has made Russia more likely today than before to cooperate with China against Washington and contest American objectives in the Middle East, Africa, and even Latin America.

Although Trump promised to stop America's endless wars, as many - if not more - U.S. military personnel are abroad today as when he took office. He increased the number of troops in Afghanistan and is now seeking to negotiate an exit that would force Washington to remain to enforce the agreement. This war has been burning for more than eighteen years.

The administration has maintained Washington's illegal deployment in Syria, shifting one contingent away from the Turkish-Kurdish battle while inserting new forces to confiscate Syrian oil fields-a move that lacks domestic authority and violates international law. A few hundred Americans cannot achieve their many other supposed objectives, such as eliminating Russian, Iranian, and other malign influences and forcing Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to resign or inaugurate democracy. However, their presence will ensure America's continued entanglement in a conflict of great complexity but minimal security interest.

The Saudi government remains corrupt, incompetent, repressive, reckless and dependent on the United States. Only Washington's refusal to retaliate against Iran for its presumed attack on Saudi oil facilities caused Riyadh to turn to diplomacy toward Tehran, yet the president then increased U.S. military deployments, turning American military personnel into bodyguards for the Saudi royals. The recent terrorist attack by the pilot-in-training-presumably to join his colleagues in slaughtering Yemeni civilians-added to the already high cost of the bilateral relationship.

The administration's policy of "maximum pressure" has proved to be a complete bust around the world. As noted earlier, North Korea proved unwilling to disarm despite the increased financial pressure caused by U.S. sanctions. North Koreans are hurting, but their government, like Washington, places security first.

Russia, too, is no more willing to yield Crimea, which was once part of Russia and is the Black Sea naval base of Sebastopol. Several European governments also disagree with the United States, having pressed to lighten or eliminate current sanctions. The West will have to offer more than the status quo to roll back Moscow's military advances.

Before Trump became president, Iran was well contained, despite its malign regional activities. The Islamic regime was hemmed in by Israel and the Gulf States, backed by nations as diverse as Egypt and America. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, sharply curtailed Iran's nuclear activities and placed the country under an intensive oversight regime. Now Tehran has reactivated its nuclear program, expanded its regional interventions, interfered with Gulf shipping, and demonstrated its ability to devastate Saudi oil production. To America's consternation, its Persian Gulf allies now are more willing to deal with Iran than before.

Additionally, the Trump administration has largely destroyed hope for reform in Cuba by reversing the Obama administration's progress toward normalizing relations and discouraging visits by-and trade with-Americans. The entrepreneurs I spoke to when I visited Cuba two years ago made large investments in anticipation of a steadily increasing number of U.S. visitors but were devastated when Washington shut off the flow. What had been a steadily expanding private sector was knocked back and the regime, with Raoul Castro still dominant behind the scenes, again can blame America for its own failings. There is no evidence that extending the original embargo and additional sanctions, which began in 1960, will free anyone.

For a time, Venezuela appeared to be an administration priority. As usual, Trump applied economic sanctions, this time on a people whose economy essentially had collapsed. Washington threatened more sanctions and military invasion but to no avail. Then the president and his top aides breathed fire and fury, insisting that both China and Russia stay out, again without success. Eventually, the president appeared to simply lose interest and drop any mention of the once urgent crisis. The corrupt, repressive Maduro regime remains in power.

So far, the president's criticisms of America's alliances have gone for naught. Until now, his appointees, all well-disposed toward maintaining generous subsidies for America's international fan club, have implemented his policies. More recently, the administration demanded substantial increases in "host nation" support, but in almost every negotiation so far the president has given way, accepting minor, symbolic gains. He is likely to end up like his predecessor, whining a lot but gaining very little from America's security dependents.

Beyond that, there is little positive to say. Trump and India's Narendra Modi are much alike, which is no compliment to either, but institutional relations have changed little. Turkey's incipient dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, receives a free pass from the president for the former's abuses and crimes. But even so Congress is thoroughly arrayed against Ankara for sins both domestic and foreign.

The president's aversion to genuine free trade and the curious belief that buying inexpensive, quality products from abroad is a negative has created problems with many close allies, including Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and multiple European states. Perhaps only with Israel are Washington's relations substantially improved, and that reflects the president's abandonment of any serious attempt to promote a fair and realistic peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

This is an extraordinarily bad record after almost three years in office. Something good still might happen between now and November 3, 2020. However, more issues are likely to get worse. Imagine North Korean missile and nuclear tests, renewed Russian attempts to influence Western elections, a bloody Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong, increased U.S.-European trade friction, more U.S. pressure on Iran matched by asymmetric responses, and more. At the moment, there is no reason to believe any of the resulting confrontations would turn out well.

Most Americans vote on the economy, and the president is currently riding a wave of job creation. If that ends before the November vote, then international issues might matter more. If so, then the president may regret that he failed to follow through on his criticism of endless war and irresponsible allies. Despite his very different persona, his results don't look all that different from those achieved by Barack Obama and other leading Democrats.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.

rshimizu12 • 15 hours ago
Personally I think Trumps foreign policy has had mix results. Part of the problem is that Trump has adopted a ad hoc foreign policy tactics. The US has had limited success with North Korea. While we have not seen any reductions of nuclear weapons. He probably has stopped flight testing of ICBM's. The daily back and forth threats of destroying each other countries have stopped. We should have been making more progress with N Korea, but Trump has not been firm enough. Russia on the other hand is a much tougher country to deal with. As for China we will have to keep up the pressure in trade negotiations.

[Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Gossufer2.0 and CrowdStrike are the weakest links in this sordid story. CrowdStrike was nothing but FBI/CIA contractor.
So the hypothesis that CrowdStrike employees implanted malware to implicate Russians and created fake Gussifer 2.0 personality is pretty logical.
Notable quotes:
"... Not one piece of corroborating intelligence. It is all based on opinion and strong belief. There was no human source report or electronic intercept pointing to a relationship between the GRU and the two alleged creations of the GRU--Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com. Now consider the spin that Robert Mueller put on this opinion in his report on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Mueller bluffs the unsuspecting reader into believing that it is a proven fact that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were Russian assets. But he is relying on a mere opinion from a handpicked group of intel analysts working under the direction of then CIA Director John Brennan ..."
"... In October 2015 John Brennan reorganized the CIA . As part of that reorganization he created a new directorate--DIRECTORATE OF DIGITAL INNOVATION. Its mission was to "manipulate digital footprints." In other words, this was the Directorate that did the work of creating Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. One of their specialties, creating Digital Dust. ..."
"... We also know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the CIA was using software specifically designed to mask CIA activity and make it appear like it was done by a foreign entity. Wikipedia describes the Vault 7 documents : ..."
"... Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name "Феликс Эдмундович." That means the computer was configured to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard. More intriguing still, "Феликс Эдмундович" is the colloquial name that translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the 20th Century Russian statesman who is best known for founding the Soviet secret police. (The metadata also shows that the purported DNC strategy memo was originally created by someone named Warren Flood, which happens to be the name of a LinkedIn user claiming to provide strategy and data analytics services to Democratic candidates.) ..."
"... Why would the CIA do this? The CIA knew that Podesta's emails had been hacked and were circulating on the internet. But they had no evidence about the identity of the culprit. If they had such evidence, they would have cited it in the 2017 ICA. ..."
"... The U.S. intelligence community became aware around May 26, 2016 that someone with access to the DNC network was offering those emails to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Julian Assange and people who spoke to him indicate that the person was Seth Rich. Whether or not it was Seth, the Trump Task Force at CIA was aware that the emails, which would be embarrassing to the Clinton campaign, would be released at some time in the future. Hence the motive to create Guccifer 2.0 and pin the blame on Russia. ..."
"... The only source for the claim that Russia hacked the DNC is a private cyber security firm, CrowdStrike. ..."
"... Time for the common sense standard again. Crowdstrike detected the Russians on the 6th of May, according to CEO Dimitri Alperovitch, but took no steps to shutdown the network, eliminate the malware and clean the computers until 34 days later, i.e., the 10th of June. That is 34 days of inexcusable inaction. ..."
"... The actions attributed to DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 should be priority investigative targets for U.S. Attorney John Durham's team of investigators. This potential use of a known CIA tool, developed under Brennan with the sole purpose to obfuscate the source of intrusions, pointing to another nation, as a false flag operation, is one of the actions and issues that U.S. Attorney John Durham should be looking into as a potential act of "Seditious conspiracy. It needs to be done. To quote the CIA, I strongly assess that the only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU. ..."
"... LJ bottom line: "The only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU." ..."
"... ICA which seemed to have been framed to allow journalists or the unwary to link the ICA with more rigorous standards used by more authentic assessments? ..."
"... With the Russians not having the advantages that the NSA does (back doors in all US-designed network hardware/software and taps all over the internet), would Russia reveal anything unless it involved an immediate major national security threat. I doubt that would cover Trump. ..."
Dec 20, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report insists that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Russia's military intelligence organization, the GRU, as part of a Russian plot to meddle in the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election. But this is a lie. Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Brennan's CIA and this action by the CIA should be a target of U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation. Let me explain why.

Let us start with the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment aka ICA. Only three agencies of the 17 in the U.S. intelligence community contributed to and coordinated on the ICA--the FBI, the CIA and NSA. In the preamble to the ICA, you can read the following explanation about methodology:

When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as "we assess" or "we judge," they are conveying an analytic assessment or judgment

To be clear, the phrase,"We assess", is intel community jargon for "opinion". If there was actual evidence or source material for a judgment the writer of the assessment would state, "According to a reliable source" or "knowledgeable source" or "documentary evidence."

Pay close attention to what the analysts writing the ICA stated about the GRU and Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks:

We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.

We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries.

Not one piece of corroborating intelligence. It is all based on opinion and strong belief. There was no human source report or electronic intercept pointing to a relationship between the GRU and the two alleged creations of the GRU--Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com. Now consider the spin that Robert Mueller put on this opinion in his report on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Mueller bluffs the unsuspecting reader into believing that it is a proven fact that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were Russian assets. But he is relying on a mere opinion from a handpicked group of intel analysts working under the direction of then CIA Director John Brennan.

Here's Mueller's take (I apologize for the lengthy quote but it is important that you read how the Mueller team presents this):

DCLeaks

"The GRU began planning the releases at least as early as April 19, 2016, when Unit 26165 registered the domain dcleaks.com through a service that anonymized the registrant.137 Unit 26165 paid for the registration using a pool of bitcoin that it had mined.138 The dcleaks.com landing page pointed to different tranches of stolen documents, arranged by victim or subject matter. Other dcleaks.com pages contained indexes of the stolen emails that were being released (bearing the sender, recipient, and date of the email). To control access and the timing of releases, pages were sometimes password-protected for a period of time and later made unrestricted to the public.


Starting in June 2016, the GRU posted stolen documents onto the website dcleaks.com, including documents stolen from a number of individuals associated with the Clinton Campaign. These documents appeared to have originated from personal email accounts (in particular, Google and Microsoft accounts), rather than the DNC and DCCC computer networks. DCLeaks victims included an advisor to the Clinton Campaign, a former DNC employee and Clinton Campaign employee, and four other campaign volunteers.139 The GRU released through dcleaks.com thousands of documents, including personal identifying and financial information, internal correspondence related to the"Clinton Campaign and prior political jobs, and fundraising files and information.140


GRU officers operated a Facebook page under the DCLeaks moniker, which they primarily used to promote releases of materials.141 The Facebook page was administered through a small number of preexisting GRU-controlled Facebook accounts.142


GRU officers also used the DCLeaks Facebook account, the Twitter account @dcleaks__, and the email account [email protected] to communicate privately with reporters and other U.S. persons. GRU officers using the DCLeaks persona gave certain reporters early access to archives of leaked files by sending them links and passwords to pages on the dcleaks.com website that had not yet become public. For example, on July 14, 2016, GRU officers operating under the DCLeaks persona sent a link and password for a non-public DCLeaks webpage to a U.S. reporter via the Facebook account.143 Similarly, on September 14, 2016, GRU officers sent reporters Twitter direct messages from @dcleaks_, with a password to another non-public part of the dcleaks.com website.144


The dcleaks.com website remained operational and public until March 2017."

Guccifer 2.0

On June 14, 2016, the DNC and its cyber-response team announced the breach of the DNC network and suspected theft of DNC documents. In the statements, the cyber-response team alleged that Russian state-sponsored actors (which they referred to as "Fancy Bear") were responsible for the breach.145 Apparently in response to that announcement, on June 15, 2016, GRU officers using the persona Guccifer 2.0 created a WordPress blog. In the hours leading up to the launch of that WordPress blog, GRU officers logged into a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455 and searched for a number of specific words and phrases in English, including "some hundred sheets," "illuminati," and "worldwide known." Approximately two hours after the last of those searches, Guccifer 2.0 published its first post, attributing the DNC server hack to a lone Romanian hacker and using several of the unique English words and phrases that the GRU officers had searched for that day.146

That same day, June 15, 2016, the GRU also used the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog to begin releasing to the public documents stolen from the DNC and DCCC computer networks.

The Guccifer 2.0 persona ultimately released thousands of documents stolen from the DNC and DCCC in a series of blog posts between June 15, 2016 and October 18, 2016.147 Released documents included opposition research performed by the DNC (including a memorandum analyzing potential criticisms of candidate Trump), internal policy documents (such as recommendations on how to address politically sensitive issues), analyses of specific congressional races, and fundraising documents. Releases were organized around thematic issues, such as specific states (e.g., Florida and Pennsylvania) that were perceived as competitive in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Beginning in late June 2016, the GRU also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release documents directly to reporters and other interested individuals. Specifically, on June 27, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 sent an email to the news outlet The Smoking Gun offering to provide "exclusive access to some leaked emails linked [to] Hillary Clinton's staff."148 The GRU later sent the reporter a password and link to a locked portion of the dcleaks.com website that contained an archive of emails stolen by Unit 26165 from a Clinton Campaign volunteer in March 2016.149 "That the Guccifer 2.0 persona provided reporters access to a restricted portion of the DCLeaks website tends to indicate that both personas were operated by the same or a closely-related group of people.150

The GRU continued its release efforts through Guccifer 2.0 into August 2016. For example, on August 15, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona sent a candidate for the U.S. Congress documents related to the candidate's opponent.151 On August 22, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of Florida-related data stolen from the DCCC to a U.S. blogger covering Florida politics.152 On August 22, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona sent a U.S. reporter documents stolen from the DCCC pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement.153"

Wow. Sounds pretty convincing. The documents referencing communications by DCLeaks or Guccifer 2.0 with Wikileaks are real. What is not true is that these entities were GRU assets.

In October 2015 John Brennan reorganized the CIA . As part of that reorganization he created a new directorate--DIRECTORATE OF DIGITAL INNOVATION. Its mission was to "manipulate digital footprints." In other words, this was the Directorate that did the work of creating Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. One of their specialties, creating Digital Dust.

We also know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the CIA was using software specifically designed to mask CIA activity and make it appear like it was done by a foreign entity. Wikipedia describes the Vault 7 documents :

Vault 7 is a series of documents that WikiLeaks began to publish on 7 March 2017, that detail activities and capabilities of the United States' Central Intelligence Agency to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dated from 2013–2016, include details on the agency's software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs,[1] web browsers (including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera Software ASA),[2][3][4] and the operating systems of most smartphones (including Apple's iOS and Google's Android), as well as other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux[5][6

One of the tools in Vault 7 carries the innocuous name, MARBLE. Hackernews explains the purpose and function of MARBLE:

Dubbed "Marble," the part 3 of CIA files contains 676 source code files of a secret anti-forensic Marble Framework, which is basically an obfuscator or a packer used to hide the true source of CIA malware.
The CIA's Marble Framework tool includes a variety of different algorithm with foreign language text intentionally inserted into the malware source code to fool security analysts and falsely attribute attacks to the wrong nation.

Marble is used to hamper[ing] forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA," says the whistleblowing site.

"...for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion," WikiLeaks explains.

So guess what gullible techies "discovered" in mid-June 2016? The meta data in the Guccifer 2.0 communications had "Russian fingerprints."

We still don't know who he is or whether he works for the Russian government, but one thing is for sure: Guccifer 2.0 -- the nom de guerre of the person claiming he hacked the Democratic National Committee and published hundreds of pages that appeared to prove it -- left behind fingerprints implicating a Russian-speaking person with a nostalgia for the country's lost Soviet era.

Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name "Феликс Эдмундович." That means the computer was configured to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard. More intriguing still, "Феликс Эдмундович" is the colloquial name that translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the 20th Century Russian statesman who is best known for founding the Soviet secret police. (The metadata also shows that the purported DNC strategy memo was originally created by someone named Warren Flood, which happens to be the name of a LinkedIn user claiming to provide strategy and data analytics services to Democratic candidates.)

Just use your common sense. If the Russians were really trying to carry out a covert cyberattack, do you really think they are so sloppy and incompetent to insert the name of the creator of the Soviet secret police in the metadata? No. The Russians are not clowns. This was a clumsy attempt to frame the Russians.

Why would the CIA do this? The CIA knew that Podesta's emails had been hacked and were circulating on the internet. But they had no evidence about the identity of the culprit. If they had such evidence, they would have cited it in the 2017 ICA.

The U.S. intelligence community became aware around May 26, 2016 that someone with access to the DNC network was offering those emails to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Julian Assange and people who spoke to him indicate that the person was Seth Rich. Whether or not it was Seth, the Trump Task Force at CIA was aware that the emails, which would be embarrassing to the Clinton campaign, would be released at some time in the future. Hence the motive to create Guccifer 2.0 and pin the blame on Russia.

It is essential to recall the timeline of the alleged Russian intrusion into the DNC network. The only source for the claim that Russia hacked the DNC is a private cyber security firm, CrowdStrike. Here is the timeline for the DNC "hack."

Here are the facts on the public record. They are at odds with the claims of the Intelligence Community:

  1. It was 29 April 2016 , when the DNC claims it became aware its servers had been penetrated. No claim yet about who was responsible. And no claim that there had been a prior warning by the FBI of a penetration of the DNC by Russian military intelligence.
  2. According to CrowdStrike founder , Dimitri Alperovitch, his company first supposedly detected the Russians mucking around inside the DNC server on 6 May 2016. A CrowdStrike intelligence analyst reportedly told Alperovitch that:
    • Falcon had identified not one but two Russian intruders: Cozy Bear, a group CrowdStrike's experts believed was affiliated with the FSB, Russia's answer to the CIA; and Fancy Bear, which they had linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence.
  3. The Wikileaks data shows that the last message copied from the DNC network is dated Wed, 25 May 2016 08:48:35.
  4. 10 June 2016 --CrowdStrike waited until 10 June 2016 to take concrete steps to clean up the DNC network. Alperovitch told Esquire's Vicky Ward that: 'Ultimately, the teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC. Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10, all DNC employees were instructed to leave their laptops in the office."
  5. On June 14, 2016 , Ellen Nakamura, a Washington Post reporter who had been briefed by computer security company hired by the DNC -- Crowdstrike--, wrote:
    • Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.
    • The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC's system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
    • The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.
  6. 15 June, 2016 , an internet "personality" self-described as Guccifer 2.0 surfaces and claims to be responsible for the hacks but denies being Russian. The people/entity behind Guccifer 2.0:

The only thing that the Guccifer 2.0 character did not do to declare its Russian heritage was to take out full page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post. But the "forensic" fingerprints that Guccifer 2.0 was leaving behind is not the only inexplicable event.

Time for the common sense standard again. Crowdstrike detected the Russians on the 6th of May, according to CEO Dimitri Alperovitch, but took no steps to shutdown the network, eliminate the malware and clean the computers until 34 days later, i.e., the 10th of June. That is 34 days of inexcusable inaction.

It is only AFTER Julian Assange announces on 12 June 2016 that WikiLeaks has emails relating to Hillary Clinton that DCLeaks or Guccifer 2.0 try to contact Assange.

The actions attributed to DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 should be priority investigative targets for U.S. Attorney John Durham's team of investigators. This potential use of a known CIA tool, developed under Brennan with the sole purpose to obfuscate the source of intrusions, pointing to another nation, as a false flag operation, is one of the actions and issues that U.S. Attorney John Durham should be looking into as a potential act of "Seditious conspiracy. It needs to be done. To quote the CIA, I strongly assess that the only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU.

Posted at 02:13 PM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink

Factotum , 20 December 2019 at 02:45 PM

LJ bottom line: "The only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU."
Paul Damascene , 20 December 2019 at 02:54 PM
Larry, thanks -- vital clarifications and reminders. In your earlier presentation of this material did you not also distinguish between the way actually interagency assessments are titled, and ICA which seemed to have been framed to allow journalists or the unwary to link the ICA with more rigorous standards used by more authentic assessments?
walrus , 20 December 2019 at 03:51 PM
Thank you Larry. You have discovered one more vital key to the conspiracy. We now need the evidence of Julian Assange. He is kept incommunicado and He is being tortured by the British in jail and will be murdered by the American judicial system if he lasts long enough to be extradited.

You can be sure he will be "Epsteined" before he appears in open court because he knows the source of what Wikileaks published. Once he is gone, mother Clinton is in the clear.

Ghost Ship , 20 December 2019 at 04:04 PM
I can understand the GRU or SVR hacking the DNC and other e-mail servers because as intelligence services that is their job, but can anyone think of any examples of Russia (or the Soviet Union) using such information to take overt action?

With the Russians not having the advantages that the NSA does (back doors in all US-designed network hardware/software and taps all over the internet), would Russia reveal anything unless it involved an immediate major national security threat. I doubt that would cover Trump.

[Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse

Highly recommended!
Looks like CrowdStrike was was to plant the evidence of the Russian hack
Notable quotes:
"... All the evidence we're accumulating clearly says and implies, the US government -- namely the FBI, CIA, the DOJ, and of course State Department -- all these people involved in this hack, bought a dossier and all of the information going forward to the FISA court. ..."
"... All of them knew that this was a fake from the very beginning, because this Guccifer 2.0 character was fabricating it. They were using him plus the Internet Research Agency [IRA] as "supposed trolls of the Russian government". ..."
"... Well, when they sent their lawyers over to challenge that in a court of law, the government failed to prove they had any connection with the Russian government. ..."
"... Then the entire Rosenstein indictment is also a fabrication and a fake and a fraud for the same reasons. The judges seem to be involved in trying to keep this information out of the public domain. ..."
Dec 18, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Larry Johnson & Bill Binney Helping the President Dismantle the Empire - YouTube

Streamed live on Dec 12, 2019

On December 12th, the retired NSA whistleblower and former Technical Director of the NS A, Bill Binney asserted (at 39:00-44:00 in the above video):

BILL BINNEY: I basically have always been saying that all of this Russian hack never happened, but we have some more evidence coming out recently.

We haven't published it yet, but what we have seen is that there are at least five items that we've found that were produced by Guccifer 2.0 back on June 15th, where they had the Russian fingerprints in them, suggesting the Russians made the hack. Well, we found the same five items published by Wikileaks in the Podesta emails.

Those items do not have the Russian fingerprints, which directly implies that Guccifer 2.0 was inserting these into the files to make it look like the Russians did this hack. Taking that into account with all the other evidence we have; like the download speeds from Guccifer 2.0 were too fast, and they couldn't be managed by the web.

And that the files he was putting together and saying that he actually hacked, the two files he said he had were really one file, and he was playing with the data; moving it to two different files to claim two hacks.

Taking that into account with the fabrication of the Russian fingerprints, it leads us back to inferring that in fact the marble framework out of the Vault 7 compromise of CIA hacking routines was a possible user in this case.

In other words, it looked like the CIA did this, and that it was a matter of the CIA making it look like the Russians were doing the hack. So, when you look at that and also look at the DNC emails that were published by Wikileaks that have this phat file format in them, all 35,813 of these emails have rounded off times to the nearest even second.

That's a phat file format property; that argues that those files were, in fact, downloaded to a thumb drive or CD-rom and physically transported before Wikileaks posted them. Which again argues that it wasn't a hack.

So, all of the evidence we're finding is clearly evidence that the Russians were not in fact hacking; it was probably our own people. It's very hard for us to get this kind of information out. The mainstream media won't cover it; none of them will. It's very hard. We get some bloggers to do that and some radio shows.

Also, I put all of this into a sworn affidavit in the Roger Stone case. I did that because all of the attack on him was predicated on him being connected with this Russian hack which was false to being with.

All the evidence we're accumulating clearly says and implies, the US government -- namely the FBI, CIA, the DOJ, and of course State Department -- all these people involved in this hack, bought a dossier and all of the information going forward to the FISA court.

All of them knew that this was a fake from the very beginning, because this Guccifer 2.0 character was fabricating it. They were using him plus the Internet Research Agency [IRA] as "supposed trolls of the Russian government".

Well, when they sent their lawyers over to challenge that in a court of law, the government failed to prove they had any connection with the Russian government.

They basically were chastised by the judge for fabricating a charge against this company. So, if you take the IRA and the trolls away from that argument, and Guccifer 2.0, then the entire Mueller report is a provable fabrication; because it's based on Guccifer 2.0 and the IRA.

Then the entire Rosenstein indictment is also a fabrication and a fake and a fraud for the same reasons. The judges seem to be involved in trying to keep this information out of the public domain.

So, we have a really extensive shadow government here at work, trying to keep the understanding and knowledge of what's really happening away from the public of the United States. That's the really bad part. And the mainstream media is a participant in this; they're culpable.

The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia, in its article about Binney , accuses him by saying:

His dissent from the consensus view that Russia interfered with the 2016 US election appears to be based on Russian disinformation."

They provide no footnote or linked-to source for their allegation

Ever since Binney went public criticizing U.S. intelligence agencies, they have been trying to discredit him.

Thus far, however, their efforts have been nothing more than insinuations against his person, without any specific allegation of counter-evidence that discredits any of his actual assertions.

Martin Usher ,

The "Russia" thing was never able to differentiate between "Russians" and "the Russian state". Its a product of a Cold War mindset that can't conceive of that country without it being 150 million puppets all controlled by string from an office in the Kremlin. In reality its just another country, one that offers goods and services to the world just like anywhere else. So while we just assume that a company like SCL (Cambridge Analytica's parent) would have personnel from and offices in many countries and have contracts with various political parties in many countries we just can't seem to get our heads around the idea that a company operating inside -- or even headquartered -- in Russia isn't automatically some kind of Kremlin front. (Well, yes, it could be but the same way that a company in the UK could be a front for the UK government, e.g. the Gateside Mill story in Scotland's Daily Record).

Another factor that might come into play is the idea that 'analytics', the key to business on the Internet, is actually nothing more than a sophisticated form of traffic analysis, a well known espionage tool. Any government worth its salt that's likely to be on the receiving end of a propaganda campaign would be very interested in understanding the reach of such a tool and learning how to manage that reach. So its possible that if we find the Russian government taking out advertisements on Facebook through a front company to 'influence' people its likely that they're more interested in evaluating that reach than the simplistic view that they're 'trying to influence an election' (its not as if foreign interests or even governments ever try to influence elections)(color revolution, anyone?). Allowing unfettered access by these tools to one's nation is a bit like taking down one's defenses -- fine if you're happy with vassal state ("ally") status but not if you're potentially an adversary -- so its important to know how to control it, no less important than having a decent air defense system.

RobG ,

And in a further retort to all this nonsense, Harold Wilson, the last socialist leader of the Labour Party back in the 1970s, won four general elections, a feat that's never been repeated by any party leader.

Here's the Wiki nonsense/propaganda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson

And here's a more historical record

https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/harold-wilson

This does directly relate to this thread, because the Americans overthrew Wilson. Just as they have done now with Corbyn. You really need to take your country back, whether you're a Brit or American.

paul ,

We are fortunate that there are still persons of integrity even in the spook organisations – Binney, Kyriakou, Manning, Snowden. Without them and Assange a lot of this criminality would never have seen the light of day.

Jack_Garbo ,

Diagnosing the disease does not imply the cure has been found. You simply know how much sicker you are. Not helpful. Nothing has changed despite all the revelations of intelligence shenanigans. Apologies do not cure the patient when they're still spreading the disease. In fact, the opposite.

paul ,

Wikipedia holds out the begging bowl to anybody who uses it now. I don't know why – they get plenty of CIA and Soros money.

RobG ,

All they've got to do now is wheel out the psychopath and war criminal, Tony Blair, to say: "it's the Russians wot dunnit".

Oh my God

Jen ,

They don't need to, they have Tony Blair's fellow Brit psycho Boris Johnson to go on autopilot and blame the Russians the moment something happens and just before London Met start their investigations.

ZigZagWanderer ,

@ 1.15.58 "Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone"

Larry Johnson and Bill Binney always worth listening to. Try to find the time.

Antonym ,

True except for Trump. Just look how hard deep state tries to unseat him.
Damaging your own puppet is not normal for a puppeteer.

J_Garbo ,

I suspected that Deep State has at least two opposing factions. The Realistists want him to break up the empire, turn back into a republic; the Delusionals want to extend the empire, continue to exploit and destroy the world. If so, the contradictions, reversals, incoherence make sense. IMO as I said.

Gary Weglarz ,

I predict that all Western MSM will begin to accurately and vocally cover Mr. Binney's findings about this odious and treasonous U.S. government psyop at just about the exact time that – "hell freezes over" – as they say.

Thanks for posting this latest info.

[Dec 20, 2019] Letter from President Donald J. Trump to the Speaker of the House of Representatives

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense -- it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power. ..."
"... You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars. You know this because Biden bragged about it on video. Biden openly stated: "I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars' I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a bitch. He got fired." Even Joe Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it "looked bad." Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did. ..."
"... This is nothing more than an illegal, partisan attempted coup that will, based on recent sentiment, badly fail at the voting booth. You are not just after me, as President, you are after the entire Republican Party. But because of this colossal injustice, our party is more united than it has ever been before. History will judge you harshly as you proceed with this impeachment charade. Your legacy will be that of turning the House of Representatives from a revered legislative body into a Star Chamber of partisan persecution. ..."
Dec 17, 2019 | www.whitehouse.gov

Law & Justice

Issued on: December 17, 2019

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Madam Speaker:

I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.

The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee are not recognizable under any standard of Constitutional theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever. You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!

By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy. You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers in pursuit of this election-nullification scheme -- yet your spiteful actions display unfettered contempt for America's founding and your egregious conduct threatens to destroy that which our Founders pledged their very lives to build. Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying "I pray for the President," when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!

Your first claim, "Abuse of Power," is a completely disingenuous, meritless, and baseless invention of your imagination. You know that I had a totally innocent conversation with the President of Ukraine. I then had a second conversation that has been misquoted, mischaracterized, and fraudulently misrepresented. Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made available) that the paragraph in question was perfect. I said to President Zelensky: "I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it." I said do us a favor, not me , and our country , not a campaign. I then mentioned the Attorney General of the United States. Every time I talk with a foreign leader, I put America's interests first, just as I did with President Zelensky.

You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense -- it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.

You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars. You know this because Biden bragged about it on video. Biden openly stated: "I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars' I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a bitch. He got fired." Even Joe Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it "looked bad." Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did.

President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. He further emphasized that it was a "good phone call," that "I don't feel pressure," and explicitly stressed that "nobody pushed me." The Ukrainian Foreign Minister stated very clearly: "I have never seen a direct link between investigations and security assistance." He also said there was "No Pressure." Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a supporter of Ukraine who met privately with President Zelensky, has said: "At no time during this meeting was there any mention by Zelensky or any Ukrainian that they were feeling pressure to do anything in return for the military aid." Many meetings have been held between representatives of Ukraine and our country. Never once did Ukraine complain about pressure being applied -- not once! Ambassador Sondland testified that I told him: "No quid pro quo. I want nothing. I want nothing. I want President Zelensky to do the right thing, do what he ran on."

The second claim, so-called "Obstruction of Congress," is preposterous and dangerous. House Democrats are trying to impeach the duly elected President of the United States for asserting Constitutionally based privileges that have been asserted on a bipartisan basis by administrations of both political parties throughout our Nation's history. Under that standard, every American president would have been impeached many times over. As liberal law professor Jonathan Turley warned when addressing Congressional Democrats: "I can't emphasize this enough if you impeach a president, if you make a high crime and misdemeanor out of going to the courts, it is an abuse of power. It's your abuse of power. You're doing precisely what you're criticizing the President for doing."

Everyone, you included, knows what is really happening. Your chosen candidate lost the election in 2016, in an Electoral College landslide (306-227), and you and your party have never recovered from this defeat. You have developed a full-fledged case of what many in the media call Trump Derangement Syndrome and sadly, you will never get over it! You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016. So you have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes. You view democracy as your enemy!

Speaker Pelosi, you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party's impeachment effort has been going on for "two and a half years," long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office, the Washington Post published a story headlined, "The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun." Less than three months after my inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters stated, "I'm going to fight every day until he's impeached." House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration, for what will be regarded as one of our country's best decisions, the firing of James Comey (see Inspector General Reports) -- who the world now knows is one of the dirtiest cops our Nation has ever seen. A ranting and raving Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, declared just hours after she was sworn into office, "We're gonna go in there and we're gonna impeach the motherf****r." Representative Al Green said in May, "I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected." Again, you and your allies said, and did, all of these things long before you ever heard of President Zelensky or anything related to Ukraine. As you know very well, this impeachment drive has nothing to do with Ukraine, or the totally appropriate conversation I had with its new president. It only has to do with your attempt to undo the election of 2016 and steal the election of 2020!

Congressman Adam Schiff cheated and lied all the way up to the present day, even going so far as to fraudulently make up, out of thin air, my conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine and read this fantasy language to Congress as though it were said by me. His shameless lies and deceptions, dating all the way back to the Russia Hoax, is one of the main reasons we are here today.

You and your party are desperate to distract from America's extraordinary economy, incredible jobs boom, record stock market, soaring confidence, and flourishing citizens. Your party simply cannot compete with our record: 7 million new jobs; the lowest-ever unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans; a rebuilt military; a completely reformed VA with Choice and Accountability for our great veterans; more than 170 new federal judges and two Supreme Court Justices; historic tax and regulation cuts; the elimination of the individual mandate; the first decline in prescription drug prices in half a century; the first new branch of the United States Military since 1947, the Space Force; strong protection of the Second Amendment; criminal justice reform; a defeated ISIS caliphate and the killing of the world's number one terrorist leader, al-Baghdadi; the replacement of the disastrous NAFTA trade deal with the wonderful USMCA (Mexico and Canada); a breakthrough Phase One trade deal with China; massive new trade deals with Japan and South Korea; withdrawal from the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal; cancellation of the unfair and costly Paris Climate Accord; becoming the world's top energy producer; recognition of Israel's capital, opening the American Embassy in Jerusalem, and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; a colossal reduction in illegal border crossings, the ending of Catch-and-Release, and the building of the Southern Border Wall -- and that is just the beginning, there is so much more. You cannot defend your extreme policies -- open borders, mass migration, high crime, crippling taxes, socialized healthcare, destruction of American energy, late-term taxpayer-funded abortion, elimination of the Second Amendment, radical far-left theories of law and justice, and constant partisan obstruction of both common sense and common good.

There is nothing I would rather do than stop referring to your party as the Do-Nothing Democrats. Unfortunately, I don't know that you will ever give me a chance to do so.

After three years of unfair and unwarranted investigations, 45 million dollars spent, 18 angry Democrat prosecutors, the entire force of the FBI, headed by leadership now proven to be totally incompetent and corrupt, you have found NOTHING! Few people in high position could have endured or passed this test. You do not know, nor do you care, the great damage and hurt you have inflicted upon wonderful and loving members of my family. You conducted a fake investigation upon the democratically elected President of the United States, and you are doing it yet again.

There are not many people who could have taken the punishment inflicted during this period of time, and yet done so much for the success of America and its citizens. But instead of putting our country first, you have decided to disgrace our country still further. You completely failed with the Mueller report because there was nothing to find, so you decided to take the next hoax that came along, the phone call with Ukraine -- even though it was a perfect call. And by the way, when I speak to foreign countries, there are many people, with permission, listening to the call on both sides of the conversation.

You are the ones interfering in America's elections. You are the ones subverting America's Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.

Before the Impeachment Hoax, it was the Russian Witch Hunt. Against all evidence, and regardless of the truth, you and your deputies claimed that my campaign colluded with the Russians -- a grave, malicious, and slanderous lie, a falsehood like no other. You forced our Nation through turmoil and torment over a wholly fabricated story, illegally purchased from a foreign spy by Hillary Clinton and the DNC in order to assault our democracy. Yet, when the monstrous lie was debunked and this Democrat conspiracy dissolved into dust, you did not apologize. You did not recant. You did not ask to be forgiven. You showed no remorse, no capacity for self-reflection. Instead, you pursued your next libelous and vicious crusade -- you engineered an attempt to frame and defame an innocent person. All of this was motivated by personal political calculation. Your Speakership and your party are held hostage by your most deranged and radical representatives of the far left. Each one of your members lives in fear of a socialist primary challenger -- this is what is driving impeachment. Look at Congressman Nadler's challenger. Look at yourself and others. Do not take our country down with your party.

If you truly cared about freedom and liberty for our Nation, then you would be devoting your vast investigative resources to exposing the full truth concerning the FBI's horrifying abuses of power before, during, and after the 2016 election -- including the use of spies against my campaign, the submission of false evidence to a FISA court, and the concealment of exculpatory evidence in order to frame the innocent. The FBI has great and honorable people, but the leadership was inept and corrupt. I would think that you would personally be appalled by these revelations, because in your press conference the day you announced impeachment, you tied the impeachment effort directly to the completely discredited Russia Hoax, declaring twice that "all roads lead to Putin," when you know that is an abject lie. I have been far tougher on Russia than President Obama ever even thought to be.

Any member of Congress who votes in support of impeachment -- against every shred of truth, fact, evidence, and legal principle -- is showing how deeply they revile the voters and how truly they detest America's Constitutional order. Our Founders feared the tribalization of partisan politics, and you are bringing their worst fears to life.

Worse still, I have been deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process from the beginning of this impeachment scam right up until the present. I have been denied the most fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution, including the right to present evidence, to have my own counsel present, to confront accusers, and to call and cross-examine witnesses, like the so-called whistleblower who started this entire hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made. Once I presented the transcribed call, which surprised and shocked the fraudsters (they never thought that such evidence would be presented), the so-called whistleblower, and the second whistleblower, disappeared because they got caught, their report was a fraud, and they were no longer going to be made available to us. In other words, once the phone call was made public, your whole plot blew up, but that didn't stop you from continuing.

More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.

You and others on your committees have long said impeachment must be bipartisan -- it is not. You said it was very divisive -- it certainly is, even far more than you ever thought possible -- and it will only get worse!

This is nothing more than an illegal, partisan attempted coup that will, based on recent sentiment, badly fail at the voting booth. You are not just after me, as President, you are after the entire Republican Party. But because of this colossal injustice, our party is more united than it has ever been before. History will judge you harshly as you proceed with this impeachment charade. Your legacy will be that of turning the House of Representatives from a revered legislative body into a Star Chamber of partisan persecution.

Perhaps most insulting of all is your false display of solemnity. You apparently have so little respect for the American People that you expect them to believe that you are approaching this impeachment somberly, reservedly, and reluctantly. No intelligent person believes what you are saying. Since the moment I won the election, the Democrat Party has been possessed by Impeachment Fever. There is no reticence. This is not a somber affair. You are making a mockery of impeachment and you are scarcely concealing your hatred of me, of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of patriotic Americans. The voters are wise, and they are seeing straight through this empty, hollow, and dangerous game you are playing.

I have no doubt the American people will hold you and the Democrats fully responsible in the upcoming 2020 election. They will not soon forgive your perversion of justice and abuse of power.

There is far too much that needs to be done to improve the lives of our citizens. It is time for you and the highly partisan Democrats in Congress to immediately cease this impeachment fantasy and get back to work for the American People. While I have no expectation that you will do so, I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record.

One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another President again.

Sincerely yours,

DONALD J. TRUMP
President of the United States of America

cc: United States Senate
United States House of Representatives

[Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc

Highly recommended!
Dec 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

Realist , says: December 19, 2019 at 5:17 pm GMT

The Year of Manufactured Hysteria

The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc.

The unimportant internecine squabbles of the 'two parties' strengthens the false perception that there is a choice when voting.

[Dec 20, 2019] The Tragedy of Donald Trump His Presidency Is Marred with Failure by Doug Bandow

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's performance record as president is comprised of an unbroken string of broken promises, opportunities squandered, principles violated, and intentions abandoned. ..."
"... despite another supposedly positive personal relationship, the Trump administration has applied more sanctions on Moscow, provided more anti-Russian aid to Ukraine, further increased funds and troops to NATO Europe, and sent home more Russian diplomats than the Obama administration. ..."
"... Worse, Washington has made no serious effort to resolve the standoff over Ukraine. No one imagines Moscow returning Crimea to Ukraine or giving in on any other issue without meaningful concessions regarding Kiev. Instead of moderating and minimizing bilateral frictions, the administration has made Russia more likely today than before to cooperate with China against Washington and contest American objectives in the Middle East, Africa, and even Latin America. ..."
"... Although Trump promised to stop America's endless wars, as many - if not more - U.S. military personnel are abroad today as when he took office. He increased the number of troops in Afghanistan and is now seeking to negotiate an exit that would force Washington to remain to enforce the agreement. This war has been burning for more than eighteen years. ..."
"... The administration has maintained Washington's illegal deployment in Syria, shifting one contingent away from the Turkish-Kurdish battle while inserting new forces to confiscate Syrian oil fields-a move that lacks domestic authority and violates international law. A few hundred Americans cannot achieve their many other supposed objectives, such as eliminating Russian, Iranian, and other malign influences and forcing Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to resign or inaugurate democracy. However, their presence will ensure America's continued entanglement in a conflict of great complexity but minimal security interest. ..."
"... This is an extraordinarily bad record after almost three years in office. Something good still might happen between now and November 3, 2020. However, more issues are likely to get worse. Imagine North Korean missile and nuclear tests, renewed Russian attempts to influence Western elections, a bloody Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong, increased U.S.-European trade friction, more U.S. pressure on Iran matched by asymmetric responses, and more. At the moment, there is no reason to believe any of the resulting confrontations would turn out well. ..."
Dec 18, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

Trump's performance record as president is comprised of an unbroken string of broken promises, opportunities squandered, principles violated, and intentions abandoned.

North Korea may have been the one issue on which President Donald Trump apparently listened to his predecessor, Barack Obama, when he warned about the serious challenge facing the incoming occupant of the Oval Office. Nevertheless, Trump initially drove tensions between the two countries to a fever pitch, raising fears of war in the midst of proclamations of "fire and fury." Then he played statesman and turned toward diplomacy, meeting North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, in Singapore.

Today that effort looks kaput. The North has declared denuclearization to be off the table. Actually, few people other than the president apparently believed that Kim was prepared to turn over his nuclear weapons to a government predisposed toward intervention and regime change.

Now that this Trump policy is formally dead, and there is no Plan B in sight, Pyongyang has begun deploying choice terms from its fabled thesaurus of insults. Democrats are sure to denounce the administration for incompetent naivete. And the bipartisan war party soon will be beating the drums for more sanctions, more florid rhetoric, additional military deployments, new plans for war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) already has dismissed the risks since any conflict would be "over there," on the distant Korean Peninsula. At which point Trump's heroic summitry, which offered a dramatic opportunity to break decades of deadly stalemate, will be judged a failure.

If the president had racked up several successes-wars ended, peace achieved, disputes settled, relations strengthened-then one disappointment wouldn't matter much. However, his record is an unbroken string of broken promises, opportunities squandered, principles violated, and intentions abandoned.

There is no relationship more important than that between the United States and the People's Republic of China. Despite Trump's supposed friendship with China's Xi Jinping, the trade war rages to the detriment of both countries. Americans have suffered from both the president's tariffs and China's retaliation, with no end in sight. Despite hopes for a resolution, Beijing is hanging tough and obviously doubts the president's toughness, given the rapidly approaching election.

Beyond economics, the relationship is deteriorating sharply. Disagreements and confrontations over everything from geopolitics to human rights have driven the two countries apart, with the administration lacking any effective strategy to positively influence China's behavior. The president's myopic focus on trade has left him without a coherent strategy elsewhere.

Perhaps the president's most pronounced and controversial promise of the 2016 campaign was to improve relations with Russia. However, despite another supposedly positive personal relationship, the Trump administration has applied more sanctions on Moscow, provided more anti-Russian aid to Ukraine, further increased funds and troops to NATO Europe, and sent home more Russian diplomats than the Obama administration.

Worse, Washington has made no serious effort to resolve the standoff over Ukraine. No one imagines Moscow returning Crimea to Ukraine or giving in on any other issue without meaningful concessions regarding Kiev. Instead of moderating and minimizing bilateral frictions, the administration has made Russia more likely today than before to cooperate with China against Washington and contest American objectives in the Middle East, Africa, and even Latin America.

Although Trump promised to stop America's endless wars, as many - if not more - U.S. military personnel are abroad today as when he took office. He increased the number of troops in Afghanistan and is now seeking to negotiate an exit that would force Washington to remain to enforce the agreement. This war has been burning for more than eighteen years.

The administration has maintained Washington's illegal deployment in Syria, shifting one contingent away from the Turkish-Kurdish battle while inserting new forces to confiscate Syrian oil fields-a move that lacks domestic authority and violates international law. A few hundred Americans cannot achieve their many other supposed objectives, such as eliminating Russian, Iranian, and other malign influences and forcing Syria's President Bashar al-Assad to resign or inaugurate democracy. However, their presence will ensure America's continued entanglement in a conflict of great complexity but minimal security interest.

The Saudi government remains corrupt, incompetent, repressive, reckless and dependent on the United States. Only Washington's refusal to retaliate against Iran for its presumed attack on Saudi oil facilities caused Riyadh to turn to diplomacy toward Tehran, yet the president then increased U.S. military deployments, turning American military personnel into bodyguards for the Saudi royals. The recent terrorist attack by the pilot-in-training-presumably to join his colleagues in slaughtering Yemeni civilians-added to the already high cost of the bilateral relationship.

The administration's policy of "maximum pressure" has proved to be a complete bust around the world. As noted earlier, North Korea proved unwilling to disarm despite the increased financial pressure caused by U.S. sanctions. North Koreans are hurting, but their government, like Washington, places security first.

Russia, too, is no more willing to yield Crimea, which was once part of Russia and is the Black Sea naval base of Sebastopol. Several European governments also disagree with the United States, having pressed to lighten or eliminate current sanctions. The West will have to offer more than the status quo to roll back Moscow's military advances.

Before Trump became president, Iran was well contained, despite its malign regional activities. The Islamic regime was hemmed in by Israel and the Gulf States, backed by nations as diverse as Egypt and America. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, sharply curtailed Iran's nuclear activities and placed the country under an intensive oversight regime. Now Tehran has reactivated its nuclear program, expanded its regional interventions, interfered with Gulf shipping, and demonstrated its ability to devastate Saudi oil production. To America's consternation, its Persian Gulf allies now are more willing to deal with Iran than before.

Additionally, the Trump administration has largely destroyed hope for reform in Cuba by reversing the Obama administration's progress toward normalizing relations and discouraging visits by-and trade with-Americans. The entrepreneurs I spoke to when I visited Cuba two years ago made large investments in anticipation of a steadily increasing number of U.S. visitors but were devastated when Washington shut off the flow. What had been a steadily expanding private sector was knocked back and the regime, with Raoul Castro still dominant behind the scenes, again can blame America for its own failings. There is no evidence that extending the original embargo and additional sanctions, which began in 1960, will free anyone.

For a time, Venezuela appeared to be an administration priority. As usual, Trump applied economic sanctions, this time on a people whose economy essentially had collapsed. Washington threatened more sanctions and military invasion but to no avail. Then the president and his top aides breathed fire and fury, insisting that both China and Russia stay out, again without success. Eventually, the president appeared to simply lose interest and drop any mention of the once urgent crisis. The corrupt, repressive Maduro regime remains in power.

So far, the president's criticisms of America's alliances have gone for naught. Until now, his appointees, all well-disposed toward maintaining generous subsidies for America's international fan club, have implemented his policies. More recently, the administration demanded substantial increases in "host nation" support, but in almost every negotiation so far the president has given way, accepting minor, symbolic gains. He is likely to end up like his predecessor, whining a lot but gaining very little from America's security dependents.

Beyond that, there is little positive to say. Trump and India's Narendra Modi are much alike, which is no compliment to either, but institutional relations have changed little. Turkey's incipient dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, receives a free pass from the president for the former's abuses and crimes. But even so Congress is thoroughly arrayed against Ankara for sins both domestic and foreign.

The president's aversion to genuine free trade and the curious belief that buying inexpensive, quality products from abroad is a negative has created problems with many close allies, including Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and multiple European states. Perhaps only with Israel are Washington's relations substantially improved, and that reflects the president's abandonment of any serious attempt to promote a fair and realistic peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

This is an extraordinarily bad record after almost three years in office. Something good still might happen between now and November 3, 2020. However, more issues are likely to get worse. Imagine North Korean missile and nuclear tests, renewed Russian attempts to influence Western elections, a bloody Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong, increased U.S.-European trade friction, more U.S. pressure on Iran matched by asymmetric responses, and more. At the moment, there is no reason to believe any of the resulting confrontations would turn out well.

Most Americans vote on the economy, and the president is currently riding a wave of job creation. If that ends before the November vote, then international issues might matter more. If so, then the president may regret that he failed to follow through on his criticism of endless war and irresponsible allies. Despite his very different persona, his results don't look all that different from those achieved by Barack Obama and other leading Democrats.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and the author of several books, including Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.

rshimizu12 • 15 hours ago
Personally I think Trumps foreign policy has had mix results. Part of the problem is that Trump has adopted a ad hoc foreign policy tactics. The US has had limited success with North Korea. While we have not seen any reductions of nuclear weapons. He probably has stopped flight testing of ICBM's. The daily back and forth threats of destroying each other countries have stopped. We should have been making more progress with N Korea, but Trump has not been firm enough. Russia on the other hand is a much tougher country to deal with. As for China we will have to keep up the pressure in trade negotiations.

[Dec 20, 2019] War Denialism and Endless War by Daniel Larison

Notable quotes:
"... One of the most revealing and absurd responses to rejections of forever war is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn't really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries: ..."
"... The distinction between "real war" and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an "antidote to war," but rather the routinization of warfare. ..."
"... The routinization and normalization of endless, unauthorized war is one of the most harmful legacies of the Obama administration. ..."
"... When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the Libyan government's forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn't engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that gets counted as a "real war" is a major deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something else. ..."
Dec 16, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

One of the most revealing and absurd responses to rejections of forever war is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn't really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries:

Just like @POTUS , who put a limited op of NE #Syria under heading of "endless war," this op-ed has "drone strikes & Special Ops raids" in indictment of US-at-war. In fact, those actions are antidote to war. Their misguided critique is insult to real war. https://t.co/DCLS9IDKSw

-- Robert Satloff (@robsatloff) December 15, 2019

War has become so normalized over the last twenty years that the constant use of military force gets discounted as something other than "real war." We have seen this war denialism on display several times in the last year. As more presidential candidates and analysts have started rejecting endless war, the war's defenders have often chosen to pretend that the U.S. isn't at war at all. The distinction between "real war" and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an "antidote to war," but rather the routinization of warfare.

The routinization and normalization of endless, unauthorized war is one of the most harmful legacies of the Obama administration. I made this point back in the spring of 2016 :

Because Obama is relatively less aggressive and reckless than his hawkish opponents (a very low bar to clear), he is frequently given a pass on these issues, and we are treated to misleading stories about his supposed "realism" and "restraint." Insofar as he has been a president who normalized and routinized open-ended and unnecessary foreign wars, he has shown that neither of those terms should be used to describe his foreign policy. Even though I know all too well that the president that follows him will be even worse, the next president will have a freer hand to conduct a more aggressive and dangerous foreign policy in part because of illegal wars Obama has waged during his time in office.

The attempt to define war so that it never includes what the U.S. military happens to be doing when it uses force abroad has been going on for quite a while. When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the Libyan government's forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn't engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that gets counted as a "real war" is a major deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something else.

chris chuba • 3 days ago

It isn't just physical war that results in active service body bags but our aggression has alreay cost lives on the home front and there is every reason to believe it will do so again.

We were not isolationists prior to 9/11/2001, Al Qaeda had already attacked but we were distracted bombing Serbia, expanding NATO, and trying to connect Al Qaeda attacks to Iran. We were just attacked by a Saudi officer we were training on our soil to use the Saudis against Iran.

It remains to be seen what our economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, and our continued use of Afghanistan as a bombing platform will cost us. We think we are being clever by using our Treasury Dept and low intensity warfare to minimize direct immediate casualties but how long can that last.

SilverSpoon • 3 days ago
"War is the health of the State"

And our state has been very healthy indeed in recent decades.

Ray Joseph Cormier • 3 days ago • edited
This article confirms what the last Real Commander-in-Chief, General/President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about when he retired 58 years ago.
His wise Council based on his Supreme Military-Political experience has been ignored.
The MSM, Propagandists for the Military-Industrial Complex, won't remind the American People.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.
But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.
We recognize the imperative need for this development.
Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military
machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

http://rayjc.com/2011/09/04...

Lee Green • 3 days ago
The psychological contortionism required to deny that we are at war amazes me. US military forces are killing people in other countries – but it's not war? Because we can manufacture comforting euphemisms like "police action" or "preventive action" or "drone strike," it's not war? Because it's smaller scale than a "real" war like WWII?

Cancer is cancer. A small cancer is still a cancer. Arguing that it's not cancer because it's not metastatic stage IV is, well, the most polite term is sophistry. More accurate terms aren't printable.

[Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Gossufer2.0 and CrowdStrike are the weakest links in this sordid story. CrowdStrike was nothing but FBI/CIA contractor.
So the hypothesis that CrowdStrike employees implanted malware to implicate Russians and created fake Gussifer 2.0 personality is pretty logical.
Notable quotes:
"... Not one piece of corroborating intelligence. It is all based on opinion and strong belief. There was no human source report or electronic intercept pointing to a relationship between the GRU and the two alleged creations of the GRU--Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com. Now consider the spin that Robert Mueller put on this opinion in his report on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Mueller bluffs the unsuspecting reader into believing that it is a proven fact that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were Russian assets. But he is relying on a mere opinion from a handpicked group of intel analysts working under the direction of then CIA Director John Brennan ..."
"... In October 2015 John Brennan reorganized the CIA . As part of that reorganization he created a new directorate--DIRECTORATE OF DIGITAL INNOVATION. Its mission was to "manipulate digital footprints." In other words, this was the Directorate that did the work of creating Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. One of their specialties, creating Digital Dust. ..."
"... We also know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the CIA was using software specifically designed to mask CIA activity and make it appear like it was done by a foreign entity. Wikipedia describes the Vault 7 documents : ..."
"... Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name "Феликс Эдмундович." That means the computer was configured to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard. More intriguing still, "Феликс Эдмундович" is the colloquial name that translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the 20th Century Russian statesman who is best known for founding the Soviet secret police. (The metadata also shows that the purported DNC strategy memo was originally created by someone named Warren Flood, which happens to be the name of a LinkedIn user claiming to provide strategy and data analytics services to Democratic candidates.) ..."
"... Why would the CIA do this? The CIA knew that Podesta's emails had been hacked and were circulating on the internet. But they had no evidence about the identity of the culprit. If they had such evidence, they would have cited it in the 2017 ICA. ..."
"... The U.S. intelligence community became aware around May 26, 2016 that someone with access to the DNC network was offering those emails to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Julian Assange and people who spoke to him indicate that the person was Seth Rich. Whether or not it was Seth, the Trump Task Force at CIA was aware that the emails, which would be embarrassing to the Clinton campaign, would be released at some time in the future. Hence the motive to create Guccifer 2.0 and pin the blame on Russia. ..."
"... The only source for the claim that Russia hacked the DNC is a private cyber security firm, CrowdStrike. ..."
"... Time for the common sense standard again. Crowdstrike detected the Russians on the 6th of May, according to CEO Dimitri Alperovitch, but took no steps to shutdown the network, eliminate the malware and clean the computers until 34 days later, i.e., the 10th of June. That is 34 days of inexcusable inaction. ..."
"... The actions attributed to DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 should be priority investigative targets for U.S. Attorney John Durham's team of investigators. This potential use of a known CIA tool, developed under Brennan with the sole purpose to obfuscate the source of intrusions, pointing to another nation, as a false flag operation, is one of the actions and issues that U.S. Attorney John Durham should be looking into as a potential act of "Seditious conspiracy. It needs to be done. To quote the CIA, I strongly assess that the only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU. ..."
"... LJ bottom line: "The only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU." ..."
"... ICA which seemed to have been framed to allow journalists or the unwary to link the ICA with more rigorous standards used by more authentic assessments? ..."
"... With the Russians not having the advantages that the NSA does (back doors in all US-designed network hardware/software and taps all over the internet), would Russia reveal anything unless it involved an immediate major national security threat. I doubt that would cover Trump. ..."
Dec 20, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report insists that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Russia's military intelligence organization, the GRU, as part of a Russian plot to meddle in the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election. But this is a lie. Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were created by Brennan's CIA and this action by the CIA should be a target of U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation. Let me explain why.

Let us start with the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment aka ICA. Only three agencies of the 17 in the U.S. intelligence community contributed to and coordinated on the ICA--the FBI, the CIA and NSA. In the preamble to the ICA, you can read the following explanation about methodology:

When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as "we assess" or "we judge," they are conveying an analytic assessment or judgment

To be clear, the phrase,"We assess", is intel community jargon for "opinion". If there was actual evidence or source material for a judgment the writer of the assessment would state, "According to a reliable source" or "knowledgeable source" or "documentary evidence."

Pay close attention to what the analysts writing the ICA stated about the GRU and Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks:

We assess with high confidence that the GRU used the Guccifer 2.0 persona, DCLeaks.com, and WikiLeaks to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets.

We assess with high confidence that the GRU relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks. Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity. Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries.

Not one piece of corroborating intelligence. It is all based on opinion and strong belief. There was no human source report or electronic intercept pointing to a relationship between the GRU and the two alleged creations of the GRU--Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com. Now consider the spin that Robert Mueller put on this opinion in his report on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Mueller bluffs the unsuspecting reader into believing that it is a proven fact that Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks were Russian assets. But he is relying on a mere opinion from a handpicked group of intel analysts working under the direction of then CIA Director John Brennan.

Here's Mueller's take (I apologize for the lengthy quote but it is important that you read how the Mueller team presents this):

DCLeaks

"The GRU began planning the releases at least as early as April 19, 2016, when Unit 26165 registered the domain dcleaks.com through a service that anonymized the registrant.137 Unit 26165 paid for the registration using a pool of bitcoin that it had mined.138 The dcleaks.com landing page pointed to different tranches of stolen documents, arranged by victim or subject matter. Other dcleaks.com pages contained indexes of the stolen emails that were being released (bearing the sender, recipient, and date of the email). To control access and the timing of releases, pages were sometimes password-protected for a period of time and later made unrestricted to the public.


Starting in June 2016, the GRU posted stolen documents onto the website dcleaks.com, including documents stolen from a number of individuals associated with the Clinton Campaign. These documents appeared to have originated from personal email accounts (in particular, Google and Microsoft accounts), rather than the DNC and DCCC computer networks. DCLeaks victims included an advisor to the Clinton Campaign, a former DNC employee and Clinton Campaign employee, and four other campaign volunteers.139 The GRU released through dcleaks.com thousands of documents, including personal identifying and financial information, internal correspondence related to the"Clinton Campaign and prior political jobs, and fundraising files and information.140


GRU officers operated a Facebook page under the DCLeaks moniker, which they primarily used to promote releases of materials.141 The Facebook page was administered through a small number of preexisting GRU-controlled Facebook accounts.142


GRU officers also used the DCLeaks Facebook account, the Twitter account @dcleaks__, and the email account [email protected] to communicate privately with reporters and other U.S. persons. GRU officers using the DCLeaks persona gave certain reporters early access to archives of leaked files by sending them links and passwords to pages on the dcleaks.com website that had not yet become public. For example, on July 14, 2016, GRU officers operating under the DCLeaks persona sent a link and password for a non-public DCLeaks webpage to a U.S. reporter via the Facebook account.143 Similarly, on September 14, 2016, GRU officers sent reporters Twitter direct messages from @dcleaks_, with a password to another non-public part of the dcleaks.com website.144


The dcleaks.com website remained operational and public until March 2017."

Guccifer 2.0

On June 14, 2016, the DNC and its cyber-response team announced the breach of the DNC network and suspected theft of DNC documents. In the statements, the cyber-response team alleged that Russian state-sponsored actors (which they referred to as "Fancy Bear") were responsible for the breach.145 Apparently in response to that announcement, on June 15, 2016, GRU officers using the persona Guccifer 2.0 created a WordPress blog. In the hours leading up to the launch of that WordPress blog, GRU officers logged into a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455 and searched for a number of specific words and phrases in English, including "some hundred sheets," "illuminati," and "worldwide known." Approximately two hours after the last of those searches, Guccifer 2.0 published its first post, attributing the DNC server hack to a lone Romanian hacker and using several of the unique English words and phrases that the GRU officers had searched for that day.146

That same day, June 15, 2016, the GRU also used the Guccifer 2.0 WordPress blog to begin releasing to the public documents stolen from the DNC and DCCC computer networks.

The Guccifer 2.0 persona ultimately released thousands of documents stolen from the DNC and DCCC in a series of blog posts between June 15, 2016 and October 18, 2016.147 Released documents included opposition research performed by the DNC (including a memorandum analyzing potential criticisms of candidate Trump), internal policy documents (such as recommendations on how to address politically sensitive issues), analyses of specific congressional races, and fundraising documents. Releases were organized around thematic issues, such as specific states (e.g., Florida and Pennsylvania) that were perceived as competitive in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Beginning in late June 2016, the GRU also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release documents directly to reporters and other interested individuals. Specifically, on June 27, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 sent an email to the news outlet The Smoking Gun offering to provide "exclusive access to some leaked emails linked [to] Hillary Clinton's staff."148 The GRU later sent the reporter a password and link to a locked portion of the dcleaks.com website that contained an archive of emails stolen by Unit 26165 from a Clinton Campaign volunteer in March 2016.149 "That the Guccifer 2.0 persona provided reporters access to a restricted portion of the DCLeaks website tends to indicate that both personas were operated by the same or a closely-related group of people.150

The GRU continued its release efforts through Guccifer 2.0 into August 2016. For example, on August 15, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona sent a candidate for the U.S. Congress documents related to the candidate's opponent.151 On August 22, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of Florida-related data stolen from the DCCC to a U.S. blogger covering Florida politics.152 On August 22, 2016, the Guccifer 2.0 persona sent a U.S. reporter documents stolen from the DCCC pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement.153"

Wow. Sounds pretty convincing. The documents referencing communications by DCLeaks or Guccifer 2.0 with Wikileaks are real. What is not true is that these entities were GRU assets.

In October 2015 John Brennan reorganized the CIA . As part of that reorganization he created a new directorate--DIRECTORATE OF DIGITAL INNOVATION. Its mission was to "manipulate digital footprints." In other words, this was the Directorate that did the work of creating Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. One of their specialties, creating Digital Dust.

We also know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the CIA was using software specifically designed to mask CIA activity and make it appear like it was done by a foreign entity. Wikipedia describes the Vault 7 documents :

Vault 7 is a series of documents that WikiLeaks began to publish on 7 March 2017, that detail activities and capabilities of the United States' Central Intelligence Agency to perform electronic surveillance and cyber warfare. The files, dated from 2013–2016, include details on the agency's software capabilities, such as the ability to compromise cars, smart TVs,[1] web browsers (including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera Software ASA),[2][3][4] and the operating systems of most smartphones (including Apple's iOS and Google's Android), as well as other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux[5][6

One of the tools in Vault 7 carries the innocuous name, MARBLE. Hackernews explains the purpose and function of MARBLE:

Dubbed "Marble," the part 3 of CIA files contains 676 source code files of a secret anti-forensic Marble Framework, which is basically an obfuscator or a packer used to hide the true source of CIA malware.
The CIA's Marble Framework tool includes a variety of different algorithm with foreign language text intentionally inserted into the malware source code to fool security analysts and falsely attribute attacks to the wrong nation.

Marble is used to hamper[ing] forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA," says the whistleblowing site.

"...for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion," WikiLeaks explains.

So guess what gullible techies "discovered" in mid-June 2016? The meta data in the Guccifer 2.0 communications had "Russian fingerprints."

We still don't know who he is or whether he works for the Russian government, but one thing is for sure: Guccifer 2.0 -- the nom de guerre of the person claiming he hacked the Democratic National Committee and published hundreds of pages that appeared to prove it -- left behind fingerprints implicating a Russian-speaking person with a nostalgia for the country's lost Soviet era.

Exhibit A in the case is this document created and later edited in the ubiquitous Microsoft Word format. Metadata left inside the file shows it was last edited by someone using the computer name "Феликс Эдмундович." That means the computer was configured to use the Russian language and that it was connected to a Russian-language keyboard. More intriguing still, "Феликс Эдмундович" is the colloquial name that translates to Felix Dzerzhinsky, the 20th Century Russian statesman who is best known for founding the Soviet secret police. (The metadata also shows that the purported DNC strategy memo was originally created by someone named Warren Flood, which happens to be the name of a LinkedIn user claiming to provide strategy and data analytics services to Democratic candidates.)

Just use your common sense. If the Russians were really trying to carry out a covert cyberattack, do you really think they are so sloppy and incompetent to insert the name of the creator of the Soviet secret police in the metadata? No. The Russians are not clowns. This was a clumsy attempt to frame the Russians.

Why would the CIA do this? The CIA knew that Podesta's emails had been hacked and were circulating on the internet. But they had no evidence about the identity of the culprit. If they had such evidence, they would have cited it in the 2017 ICA.

The U.S. intelligence community became aware around May 26, 2016 that someone with access to the DNC network was offering those emails to Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Julian Assange and people who spoke to him indicate that the person was Seth Rich. Whether or not it was Seth, the Trump Task Force at CIA was aware that the emails, which would be embarrassing to the Clinton campaign, would be released at some time in the future. Hence the motive to create Guccifer 2.0 and pin the blame on Russia.

It is essential to recall the timeline of the alleged Russian intrusion into the DNC network. The only source for the claim that Russia hacked the DNC is a private cyber security firm, CrowdStrike. Here is the timeline for the DNC "hack."

Here are the facts on the public record. They are at odds with the claims of the Intelligence Community:

  1. It was 29 April 2016 , when the DNC claims it became aware its servers had been penetrated. No claim yet about who was responsible. And no claim that there had been a prior warning by the FBI of a penetration of the DNC by Russian military intelligence.
  2. According to CrowdStrike founder , Dimitri Alperovitch, his company first supposedly detected the Russians mucking around inside the DNC server on 6 May 2016. A CrowdStrike intelligence analyst reportedly told Alperovitch that:
    • Falcon had identified not one but two Russian intruders: Cozy Bear, a group CrowdStrike's experts believed was affiliated with the FSB, Russia's answer to the CIA; and Fancy Bear, which they had linked to the GRU, Russian military intelligence.
  3. The Wikileaks data shows that the last message copied from the DNC network is dated Wed, 25 May 2016 08:48:35.
  4. 10 June 2016 --CrowdStrike waited until 10 June 2016 to take concrete steps to clean up the DNC network. Alperovitch told Esquire's Vicky Ward that: 'Ultimately, the teams decided it was necessary to replace the software on every computer at the DNC. Until the network was clean, secrecy was vital. On the afternoon of Friday, June 10, all DNC employees were instructed to leave their laptops in the office."
  5. On June 14, 2016 , Ellen Nakamura, a Washington Post reporter who had been briefed by computer security company hired by the DNC -- Crowdstrike--, wrote:
    • Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.
    • The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC's system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
    • The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.
  6. 15 June, 2016 , an internet "personality" self-described as Guccifer 2.0 surfaces and claims to be responsible for the hacks but denies being Russian. The people/entity behind Guccifer 2.0:

The only thing that the Guccifer 2.0 character did not do to declare its Russian heritage was to take out full page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post. But the "forensic" fingerprints that Guccifer 2.0 was leaving behind is not the only inexplicable event.

Time for the common sense standard again. Crowdstrike detected the Russians on the 6th of May, according to CEO Dimitri Alperovitch, but took no steps to shutdown the network, eliminate the malware and clean the computers until 34 days later, i.e., the 10th of June. That is 34 days of inexcusable inaction.

It is only AFTER Julian Assange announces on 12 June 2016 that WikiLeaks has emails relating to Hillary Clinton that DCLeaks or Guccifer 2.0 try to contact Assange.

The actions attributed to DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 should be priority investigative targets for U.S. Attorney John Durham's team of investigators. This potential use of a known CIA tool, developed under Brennan with the sole purpose to obfuscate the source of intrusions, pointing to another nation, as a false flag operation, is one of the actions and issues that U.S. Attorney John Durham should be looking into as a potential act of "Seditious conspiracy. It needs to be done. To quote the CIA, I strongly assess that the only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU.

Posted at 02:13 PM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink

Factotum , 20 December 2019 at 02:45 PM

LJ bottom line: "The only intelligence agency that evidence indicates was meddling via cyber attacks in the 2016 Presidential election was the CIA, not the GRU."
Paul Damascene , 20 December 2019 at 02:54 PM
Larry, thanks -- vital clarifications and reminders. In your earlier presentation of this material did you not also distinguish between the way actually interagency assessments are titled, and ICA which seemed to have been framed to allow journalists or the unwary to link the ICA with more rigorous standards used by more authentic assessments?
walrus , 20 December 2019 at 03:51 PM
Thank you Larry. You have discovered one more vital key to the conspiracy. We now need the evidence of Julian Assange. He is kept incommunicado and He is being tortured by the British in jail and will be murdered by the American judicial system if he lasts long enough to be extradited.

You can be sure he will be "Epsteined" before he appears in open court because he knows the source of what Wikileaks published. Once he is gone, mother Clinton is in the clear.

Ghost Ship , 20 December 2019 at 04:04 PM
I can understand the GRU or SVR hacking the DNC and other e-mail servers because as intelligence services that is their job, but can anyone think of any examples of Russia (or the Soviet Union) using such information to take overt action?

With the Russians not having the advantages that the NSA does (back doors in all US-designed network hardware/software and taps all over the internet), would Russia reveal anything unless it involved an immediate major national security threat. I doubt that would cover Trump.

[Dec 20, 2019] Here is why Tulsi voted as she did

Dec 20, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Tulsi voted present and here is why she did that.

"I could not in good conscience vote against impeachment because I believe President Trump is guilty of wrongdoing," she said. "I also could not in good conscience vote for impeachment because removal of a sitting President must not be the culmination of a partisan process, fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country."

A censure would "send a strong message to this president and future presidents that their abuses of power will not go unchecked, while leaving the question of removing Trump from office to the voters to decide," Gabbard said.

[Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse

Highly recommended!
Looks like CrowdStrike was was to plant the evidence of the Russian hack
Notable quotes:
"... All the evidence we're accumulating clearly says and implies, the US government -- namely the FBI, CIA, the DOJ, and of course State Department -- all these people involved in this hack, bought a dossier and all of the information going forward to the FISA court. ..."
"... All of them knew that this was a fake from the very beginning, because this Guccifer 2.0 character was fabricating it. They were using him plus the Internet Research Agency [IRA] as "supposed trolls of the Russian government". ..."
"... Well, when they sent their lawyers over to challenge that in a court of law, the government failed to prove they had any connection with the Russian government. ..."
"... Then the entire Rosenstein indictment is also a fabrication and a fake and a fraud for the same reasons. The judges seem to be involved in trying to keep this information out of the public domain. ..."
Dec 18, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Larry Johnson & Bill Binney Helping the President Dismantle the Empire - YouTube

Streamed live on Dec 12, 2019

On December 12th, the retired NSA whistleblower and former Technical Director of the NS A, Bill Binney asserted (at 39:00-44:00 in the above video):

BILL BINNEY: I basically have always been saying that all of this Russian hack never happened, but we have some more evidence coming out recently.

We haven't published it yet, but what we have seen is that there are at least five items that we've found that were produced by Guccifer 2.0 back on June 15th, where they had the Russian fingerprints in them, suggesting the Russians made the hack. Well, we found the same five items published by Wikileaks in the Podesta emails.

Those items do not have the Russian fingerprints, which directly implies that Guccifer 2.0 was inserting these into the files to make it look like the Russians did this hack. Taking that into account with all the other evidence we have; like the download speeds from Guccifer 2.0 were too fast, and they couldn't be managed by the web.

And that the files he was putting together and saying that he actually hacked, the two files he said he had were really one file, and he was playing with the data; moving it to two different files to claim two hacks.

Taking that into account with the fabrication of the Russian fingerprints, it leads us back to inferring that in fact the marble framework out of the Vault 7 compromise of CIA hacking routines was a possible user in this case.

In other words, it looked like the CIA did this, and that it was a matter of the CIA making it look like the Russians were doing the hack. So, when you look at that and also look at the DNC emails that were published by Wikileaks that have this phat file format in them, all 35,813 of these emails have rounded off times to the nearest even second.

That's a phat file format property; that argues that those files were, in fact, downloaded to a thumb drive or CD-rom and physically transported before Wikileaks posted them. Which again argues that it wasn't a hack.

So, all of the evidence we're finding is clearly evidence that the Russians were not in fact hacking; it was probably our own people. It's very hard for us to get this kind of information out. The mainstream media won't cover it; none of them will. It's very hard. We get some bloggers to do that and some radio shows.

Also, I put all of this into a sworn affidavit in the Roger Stone case. I did that because all of the attack on him was predicated on him being connected with this Russian hack which was false to being with.

All the evidence we're accumulating clearly says and implies, the US government -- namely the FBI, CIA, the DOJ, and of course State Department -- all these people involved in this hack, bought a dossier and all of the information going forward to the FISA court.

All of them knew that this was a fake from the very beginning, because this Guccifer 2.0 character was fabricating it. They were using him plus the Internet Research Agency [IRA] as "supposed trolls of the Russian government".

Well, when they sent their lawyers over to challenge that in a court of law, the government failed to prove they had any connection with the Russian government.

They basically were chastised by the judge for fabricating a charge against this company. So, if you take the IRA and the trolls away from that argument, and Guccifer 2.0, then the entire Mueller report is a provable fabrication; because it's based on Guccifer 2.0 and the IRA.

Then the entire Rosenstein indictment is also a fabrication and a fake and a fraud for the same reasons. The judges seem to be involved in trying to keep this information out of the public domain.

So, we have a really extensive shadow government here at work, trying to keep the understanding and knowledge of what's really happening away from the public of the United States. That's the really bad part. And the mainstream media is a participant in this; they're culpable.

The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia, in its article about Binney , accuses him by saying:

His dissent from the consensus view that Russia interfered with the 2016 US election appears to be based on Russian disinformation."

They provide no footnote or linked-to source for their allegation

Ever since Binney went public criticizing U.S. intelligence agencies, they have been trying to discredit him.

Thus far, however, their efforts have been nothing more than insinuations against his person, without any specific allegation of counter-evidence that discredits any of his actual assertions.

Martin Usher ,

The "Russia" thing was never able to differentiate between "Russians" and "the Russian state". Its a product of a Cold War mindset that can't conceive of that country without it being 150 million puppets all controlled by string from an office in the Kremlin. In reality its just another country, one that offers goods and services to the world just like anywhere else. So while we just assume that a company like SCL (Cambridge Analytica's parent) would have personnel from and offices in many countries and have contracts with various political parties in many countries we just can't seem to get our heads around the idea that a company operating inside -- or even headquartered -- in Russia isn't automatically some kind of Kremlin front. (Well, yes, it could be but the same way that a company in the UK could be a front for the UK government, e.g. the Gateside Mill story in Scotland's Daily Record).

Another factor that might come into play is the idea that 'analytics', the key to business on the Internet, is actually nothing more than a sophisticated form of traffic analysis, a well known espionage tool. Any government worth its salt that's likely to be on the receiving end of a propaganda campaign would be very interested in understanding the reach of such a tool and learning how to manage that reach. So its possible that if we find the Russian government taking out advertisements on Facebook through a front company to 'influence' people its likely that they're more interested in evaluating that reach than the simplistic view that they're 'trying to influence an election' (its not as if foreign interests or even governments ever try to influence elections)(color revolution, anyone?). Allowing unfettered access by these tools to one's nation is a bit like taking down one's defenses -- fine if you're happy with vassal state ("ally") status but not if you're potentially an adversary -- so its important to know how to control it, no less important than having a decent air defense system.

RobG ,

And in a further retort to all this nonsense, Harold Wilson, the last socialist leader of the Labour Party back in the 1970s, won four general elections, a feat that's never been repeated by any party leader.

Here's the Wiki nonsense/propaganda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson

And here's a more historical record

https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/harold-wilson

This does directly relate to this thread, because the Americans overthrew Wilson. Just as they have done now with Corbyn. You really need to take your country back, whether you're a Brit or American.

paul ,

We are fortunate that there are still persons of integrity even in the spook organisations – Binney, Kyriakou, Manning, Snowden. Without them and Assange a lot of this criminality would never have seen the light of day.

Jack_Garbo ,

Diagnosing the disease does not imply the cure has been found. You simply know how much sicker you are. Not helpful. Nothing has changed despite all the revelations of intelligence shenanigans. Apologies do not cure the patient when they're still spreading the disease. In fact, the opposite.

paul ,

Wikipedia holds out the begging bowl to anybody who uses it now. I don't know why – they get plenty of CIA and Soros money.

RobG ,

All they've got to do now is wheel out the psychopath and war criminal, Tony Blair, to say: "it's the Russians wot dunnit".

Oh my God

Jen ,

They don't need to, they have Tony Blair's fellow Brit psycho Boris Johnson to go on autopilot and blame the Russians the moment something happens and just before London Met start their investigations.

ZigZagWanderer ,

@ 1.15.58 "Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone"

Larry Johnson and Bill Binney always worth listening to. Try to find the time.

Antonym ,

True except for Trump. Just look how hard deep state tries to unseat him.
Damaging your own puppet is not normal for a puppeteer.

J_Garbo ,

I suspected that Deep State has at least two opposing factions. The Realistists want him to break up the empire, turn back into a republic; the Delusionals want to extend the empire, continue to exploit and destroy the world. If so, the contradictions, reversals, incoherence make sense. IMO as I said.

Gary Weglarz ,

I predict that all Western MSM will begin to accurately and vocally cover Mr. Binney's findings about this odious and treasonous U.S. government psyop at just about the exact time that – "hell freezes over" – as they say.

Thanks for posting this latest info.

[Dec 20, 2019] Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone

Highly recommended!
Dec 20, 2019 | off-guardian.org

J_Garbo ,

I suspected that Deep State has at least two opposing factions. The Realistists want him to break up the empire, turn back into a republic; the Delusionals want to extend the empire, continue to exploit and destroy the world. If so, the contradictions, reversals, incoherence make sense. IMO as I said.

Gary Weglarz ,

I predict that all Western MSM will begin to accurately and vocally cover Mr. Binney's findings about this odious and treasonous U.S. government psyop at just about the exact time that -- "hell freezes over" -- as they say.

Jen ,

They don't need to, they have Tony Blair's fellow Brit psycho Boris Johnson to go on autopilot and blame the Russians the moment something happens and just before London Met start their investigations.

[Dec 20, 2019] Letter from President Donald J. Trump to the Speaker of the House of Representatives

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense -- it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power. ..."
"... You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars. You know this because Biden bragged about it on video. Biden openly stated: "I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars' I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a bitch. He got fired." Even Joe Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it "looked bad." Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did. ..."
"... This is nothing more than an illegal, partisan attempted coup that will, based on recent sentiment, badly fail at the voting booth. You are not just after me, as President, you are after the entire Republican Party. But because of this colossal injustice, our party is more united than it has ever been before. History will judge you harshly as you proceed with this impeachment charade. Your legacy will be that of turning the House of Representatives from a revered legislative body into a Star Chamber of partisan persecution. ..."
Dec 17, 2019 | www.whitehouse.gov

Law & Justice

Issued on: December 17, 2019

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Madam Speaker:

I write to express my strongest and most powerful protest against the partisan impeachment crusade being pursued by the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This impeachment represents an unprecedented and unconstitutional abuse of power by Democrat Lawmakers, unequaled in nearly two and a half centuries of American legislative history.

The Articles of Impeachment introduced by the House Judiciary Committee are not recognizable under any standard of Constitutional theory, interpretation, or jurisprudence. They include no crimes, no misdemeanors, and no offenses whatsoever. You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!

By proceeding with your invalid impeachment, you are violating your oaths of office, you are breaking your allegiance to the Constitution, and you are declaring open war on American Democracy. You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers in pursuit of this election-nullification scheme -- yet your spiteful actions display unfettered contempt for America's founding and your egregious conduct threatens to destroy that which our Founders pledged their very lives to build. Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying "I pray for the President," when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!

Your first claim, "Abuse of Power," is a completely disingenuous, meritless, and baseless invention of your imagination. You know that I had a totally innocent conversation with the President of Ukraine. I then had a second conversation that has been misquoted, mischaracterized, and fraudulently misrepresented. Fortunately, there was a transcript of the conversation taken, and you know from the transcript (which was immediately made available) that the paragraph in question was perfect. I said to President Zelensky: "I would like you to do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it." I said do us a favor, not me , and our country , not a campaign. I then mentioned the Attorney General of the United States. Every time I talk with a foreign leader, I put America's interests first, just as I did with President Zelensky.

You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offense -- it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for the lawful exercise of legislative power.

You know full well that Vice President Biden used his office and $1 billion dollars of U.S. aid money to coerce Ukraine into firing the prosecutor who was digging into the company paying his son millions of dollars. You know this because Biden bragged about it on video. Biden openly stated: "I said, 'I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars' I looked at them and said: 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a bitch. He got fired." Even Joe Biden admitted just days ago in an interview with NPR that it "looked bad." Now you are trying to impeach me by falsely accusing me of doing what Joe Biden has admitted he actually did.

President Zelensky has repeatedly declared that I did nothing wrong, and that there was No Pressure. He further emphasized that it was a "good phone call," that "I don't feel pressure," and explicitly stressed that "nobody pushed me." The Ukrainian Foreign Minister stated very clearly: "I have never seen a direct link between investigations and security assistance." He also said there was "No Pressure." Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a supporter of Ukraine who met privately with President Zelensky, has said: "At no time during this meeting was there any mention by Zelensky or any Ukrainian that they were feeling pressure to do anything in return for the military aid." Many meetings have been held between representatives of Ukraine and our country. Never once did Ukraine complain about pressure being applied -- not once! Ambassador Sondland testified that I told him: "No quid pro quo. I want nothing. I want nothing. I want President Zelensky to do the right thing, do what he ran on."

The second claim, so-called "Obstruction of Congress," is preposterous and dangerous. House Democrats are trying to impeach the duly elected President of the United States for asserting Constitutionally based privileges that have been asserted on a bipartisan basis by administrations of both political parties throughout our Nation's history. Under that standard, every American president would have been impeached many times over. As liberal law professor Jonathan Turley warned when addressing Congressional Democrats: "I can't emphasize this enough if you impeach a president, if you make a high crime and misdemeanor out of going to the courts, it is an abuse of power. It's your abuse of power. You're doing precisely what you're criticizing the President for doing."

Everyone, you included, knows what is really happening. Your chosen candidate lost the election in 2016, in an Electoral College landslide (306-227), and you and your party have never recovered from this defeat. You have developed a full-fledged case of what many in the media call Trump Derangement Syndrome and sadly, you will never get over it! You are unwilling and unable to accept the verdict issued at the ballot box during the great Election of 2016. So you have spent three straight years attempting to overturn the will of the American people and nullify their votes. You view democracy as your enemy!

Speaker Pelosi, you admitted just last week at a public forum that your party's impeachment effort has been going on for "two and a half years," long before you ever heard about a phone call with Ukraine. Nineteen minutes after I took the oath of office, the Washington Post published a story headlined, "The Campaign to Impeach President Trump Has Begun." Less than three months after my inauguration, Representative Maxine Waters stated, "I'm going to fight every day until he's impeached." House Democrats introduced the first impeachment resolution against me within months of my inauguration, for what will be regarded as one of our country's best decisions, the firing of James Comey (see Inspector General Reports) -- who the world now knows is one of the dirtiest cops our Nation has ever seen. A ranting and raving Congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, declared just hours after she was sworn into office, "We're gonna go in there and we're gonna impeach the motherf****r." Representative Al Green said in May, "I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected." Again, you and your allies said, and did, all of these things long before you ever heard of President Zelensky or anything related to Ukraine. As you know very well, this impeachment drive has nothing to do with Ukraine, or the totally appropriate conversation I had with its new president. It only has to do with your attempt to undo the election of 2016 and steal the election of 2020!

Congressman Adam Schiff cheated and lied all the way up to the present day, even going so far as to fraudulently make up, out of thin air, my conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine and read this fantasy language to Congress as though it were said by me. His shameless lies and deceptions, dating all the way back to the Russia Hoax, is one of the main reasons we are here today.

You and your party are desperate to distract from America's extraordinary economy, incredible jobs boom, record stock market, soaring confidence, and flourishing citizens. Your party simply cannot compete with our record: 7 million new jobs; the lowest-ever unemployment for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans; a rebuilt military; a completely reformed VA with Choice and Accountability for our great veterans; more than 170 new federal judges and two Supreme Court Justices; historic tax and regulation cuts; the elimination of the individual mandate; the first decline in prescription drug prices in half a century; the first new branch of the United States Military since 1947, the Space Force; strong protection of the Second Amendment; criminal justice reform; a defeated ISIS caliphate and the killing of the world's number one terrorist leader, al-Baghdadi; the replacement of the disastrous NAFTA trade deal with the wonderful USMCA (Mexico and Canada); a breakthrough Phase One trade deal with China; massive new trade deals with Japan and South Korea; withdrawal from the terrible Iran Nuclear Deal; cancellation of the unfair and costly Paris Climate Accord; becoming the world's top energy producer; recognition of Israel's capital, opening the American Embassy in Jerusalem, and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights; a colossal reduction in illegal border crossings, the ending of Catch-and-Release, and the building of the Southern Border Wall -- and that is just the beginning, there is so much more. You cannot defend your extreme policies -- open borders, mass migration, high crime, crippling taxes, socialized healthcare, destruction of American energy, late-term taxpayer-funded abortion, elimination of the Second Amendment, radical far-left theories of law and justice, and constant partisan obstruction of both common sense and common good.

There is nothing I would rather do than stop referring to your party as the Do-Nothing Democrats. Unfortunately, I don't know that you will ever give me a chance to do so.

After three years of unfair and unwarranted investigations, 45 million dollars spent, 18 angry Democrat prosecutors, the entire force of the FBI, headed by leadership now proven to be totally incompetent and corrupt, you have found NOTHING! Few people in high position could have endured or passed this test. You do not know, nor do you care, the great damage and hurt you have inflicted upon wonderful and loving members of my family. You conducted a fake investigation upon the democratically elected President of the United States, and you are doing it yet again.

There are not many people who could have taken the punishment inflicted during this period of time, and yet done so much for the success of America and its citizens. But instead of putting our country first, you have decided to disgrace our country still further. You completely failed with the Mueller report because there was nothing to find, so you decided to take the next hoax that came along, the phone call with Ukraine -- even though it was a perfect call. And by the way, when I speak to foreign countries, there are many people, with permission, listening to the call on both sides of the conversation.

You are the ones interfering in America's elections. You are the ones subverting America's Democracy. You are the ones Obstructing Justice. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our Republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.

Before the Impeachment Hoax, it was the Russian Witch Hunt. Against all evidence, and regardless of the truth, you and your deputies claimed that my campaign colluded with the Russians -- a grave, malicious, and slanderous lie, a falsehood like no other. You forced our Nation through turmoil and torment over a wholly fabricated story, illegally purchased from a foreign spy by Hillary Clinton and the DNC in order to assault our democracy. Yet, when the monstrous lie was debunked and this Democrat conspiracy dissolved into dust, you did not apologize. You did not recant. You did not ask to be forgiven. You showed no remorse, no capacity for self-reflection. Instead, you pursued your next libelous and vicious crusade -- you engineered an attempt to frame and defame an innocent person. All of this was motivated by personal political calculation. Your Speakership and your party are held hostage by your most deranged and radical representatives of the far left. Each one of your members lives in fear of a socialist primary challenger -- this is what is driving impeachment. Look at Congressman Nadler's challenger. Look at yourself and others. Do not take our country down with your party.

If you truly cared about freedom and liberty for our Nation, then you would be devoting your vast investigative resources to exposing the full truth concerning the FBI's horrifying abuses of power before, during, and after the 2016 election -- including the use of spies against my campaign, the submission of false evidence to a FISA court, and the concealment of exculpatory evidence in order to frame the innocent. The FBI has great and honorable people, but the leadership was inept and corrupt. I would think that you would personally be appalled by these revelations, because in your press conference the day you announced impeachment, you tied the impeachment effort directly to the completely discredited Russia Hoax, declaring twice that "all roads lead to Putin," when you know that is an abject lie. I have been far tougher on Russia than President Obama ever even thought to be.

Any member of Congress who votes in support of impeachment -- against every shred of truth, fact, evidence, and legal principle -- is showing how deeply they revile the voters and how truly they detest America's Constitutional order. Our Founders feared the tribalization of partisan politics, and you are bringing their worst fears to life.

Worse still, I have been deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process from the beginning of this impeachment scam right up until the present. I have been denied the most fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution, including the right to present evidence, to have my own counsel present, to confront accusers, and to call and cross-examine witnesses, like the so-called whistleblower who started this entire hoax with a false report of the phone call that bears no relationship to the actual phone call that was made. Once I presented the transcribed call, which surprised and shocked the fraudsters (they never thought that such evidence would be presented), the so-called whistleblower, and the second whistleblower, disappeared because they got caught, their report was a fraud, and they were no longer going to be made available to us. In other words, once the phone call was made public, your whole plot blew up, but that didn't stop you from continuing.

More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.

You and others on your committees have long said impeachment must be bipartisan -- it is not. You said it was very divisive -- it certainly is, even far more than you ever thought possible -- and it will only get worse!

This is nothing more than an illegal, partisan attempted coup that will, based on recent sentiment, badly fail at the voting booth. You are not just after me, as President, you are after the entire Republican Party. But because of this colossal injustice, our party is more united than it has ever been before. History will judge you harshly as you proceed with this impeachment charade. Your legacy will be that of turning the House of Representatives from a revered legislative body into a Star Chamber of partisan persecution.

Perhaps most insulting of all is your false display of solemnity. You apparently have so little respect for the American People that you expect them to believe that you are approaching this impeachment somberly, reservedly, and reluctantly. No intelligent person believes what you are saying. Since the moment I won the election, the Democrat Party has been possessed by Impeachment Fever. There is no reticence. This is not a somber affair. You are making a mockery of impeachment and you are scarcely concealing your hatred of me, of the Republican Party, and tens of millions of patriotic Americans. The voters are wise, and they are seeing straight through this empty, hollow, and dangerous game you are playing.

I have no doubt the American people will hold you and the Democrats fully responsible in the upcoming 2020 election. They will not soon forgive your perversion of justice and abuse of power.

There is far too much that needs to be done to improve the lives of our citizens. It is time for you and the highly partisan Democrats in Congress to immediately cease this impeachment fantasy and get back to work for the American People. While I have no expectation that you will do so, I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record.

One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another President again.

Sincerely yours,

DONALD J. TRUMP
President of the United States of America

cc: United States Senate
United States House of Representatives

[Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc

Highly recommended!
Dec 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

Realist , says: December 19, 2019 at 5:17 pm GMT

The Year of Manufactured Hysteria

The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc.

The unimportant internecine squabbles of the 'two parties' strengthens the false perception that there is a choice when voting.

[Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

Highly recommended!
Dec 19, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

likbez, December 19, 2019 6:58 pm

Afghan war demonstrated that the USA got into the trap, the Catch 22 situation: it can't stop following an expensive and self-destructive positive feedback loop of threat inflation and larger and large expenditures on MIC, because there is no countervailing force for the MIC since WWII ended. Financial oligarchy is aligned with MIC.

This is the same suicidal grip of MIC on the country that was one of the key factors in the collapse of the USSR means that in this key area the USA does not have two party system, It is a Uniparty: a singe War party with two superficially different factions.

Feeding and care MIC is No.1 task for both. Ordinary Americans wellbeing does matter much for either party. New generation of Americans is punished with crushing debt and low paying jobs. They do not care that people over 50 who lost their jobs are essentially thrown out like a garbage.

"41 Million people in the US suffer from hunger and lack of food security"–US Dept. of Agriculture. FDR addressed the needs of this faction of the population when he delivered his One-Third of a Nation speech for his 2nd Inaugural. About four years later, FDR expanded on that issue in his Four Freedoms speech: 1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship; 3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear.

Items 3 and 4 are probably unachievable under neoliberalism. And fear is artificially instilled to unite the nation against the external scapegoat much like in Orwell 1984. Currently this is Russia, later probably will be China. With regular minutes of hate replaced by Rachel Maddow show ;-)

Derailing Tulsi had shown that in the USA any politician, who try to challenge MIC, will be instantly attacked by MIC lapdogs in MSM and neutered in no time.

One interesting tidbit from Fiona Hill testimony is that neocons who dominate the USA foreign policy establishment make their living off threat inflation. They literally are bought by MIC, which indirectly finance Brookings institution, Atlantic Council and similar think tanks. And this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact. Rephrasing Samuel Johnson's famous quote, we can say, "MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels."

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics. ..."
Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lk , Dec 18 2019 22:19 utc | 26

The House impeachment is driven by several factors:
  1. After Russiagate, when Trump began to investigate its fraudulent origins, the Dems feared the exposure of Obama-era corruption if not high crimes. Hence Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics.
  2. The investigation into Russiagate led right to Ukraine, and thus to Biden. In the context of Sanders' campaign, Ukrainegate became an imperative for the factions of the capitalist class that dominates the DNC. If Biden falls on Ukraine issues, then Sanders is inevitable; an anathema to Wall Street and Big Tech DNC donors.
  3. 3. While 1 and 2 dominate DNC machinations, foreign policy is also a factor. The foreign policy establishment is absolutely against any hesitation with respect to confronting Russia as part of a regional and global strategy for primacy. Trump's limited prevarications on Russia might threaten the long established strategy to expand Nato to Ukraine and thereby to encircle Russia and maintain US dominance over Europe. So, even though Trump names great power rivalry as the name of the game today, his inclination for making nice with Putin threatens to weaken the US hold over Europe, which Trump wants to label as an economic competitor.

    It is with these points that the strategic differences become apparent: Trump is raising a realist, neo-mercantalist strategy against ALL potential competitors; the DNC and the deep state hold a strategy of liberal hegemony: globalization and US primacy through dominating regional alliances, and impregnating US hegemony INSIDE the vassal States of the empire.

All of this, however, is bound to fail for the DNC, and down the road for Trump himself.

The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones.

[Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring their power to bear on domestic policy as well. ..."
"... Impeachment, and the pro-bureaucracy anti-democracy campaign related to it, besides its more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems; forestalling Sanders), is the culmination of technocracy's attempted coup against a president who, even though he agrees with this cabal on all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, too damn honest about the evil of the US empire. If they can take him down, they think they can restore the full business-as-usual status quo including the compliance of the rest of the world. ..."
Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Russ , Dec 18 2019 22:00 utc | 19

Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring their power to bear on domestic policy as well.

Although both halves of the One-Party really want the effective tyranny of state and corporate bureaucracies, it's not surprising that it's the Democrats (along with the MSM) taking the lead in openly defending the tyrannical proposition that the CIA should be running its own foreign (and implicitly domestic) policy, and that the president should be just a figurehead which follows orders. That goes with the Democrats' more avowedly technocratic style, and it goes with the ratchet effect whereby it's usually Democrats which push the policy envelope toward ever greater inequality, ecocide and tyranny.

Now is a time of rising irredentism and the decline of all the ideas of globalization and technocracy, though the reality is likely to hang on for awhile. The whole Deep State-Zionist-Russia-Deranged-Trump-Deranged-MSM-social media censorship campaign is globalization trying to maintain its monopoly of ideas by force, since it knows it can never win in a free clash of ideas.

Impeachment, and the pro-bureaucracy anti-democracy campaign related to it, besides its more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems; forestalling Sanders), is the culmination of technocracy's attempted coup against a president who, even though he agrees with this cabal on all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, too damn honest about the evil of the US empire. If they can take him down, they think they can restore the full business-as-usual status quo including the compliance of the rest of the world.

Since impeachment's going to fail, we can expect the system to try other ways.

james , Dec 19 2019 1:51 utc | 57

hey b... i like your title - "How The Deep State Sunk The Democratic Party" ... could change it to" How the Deep State Sunk the USA" could work just as well...

Seven of the 11 security state representatives who had joined the Democrats in 2018 gave the impulse for impeachment.

is this intentional?? it sort of looks like it...

good quote from @ 26 lk - "The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones."

ptb , Dec 19 2019 2:07 utc | 62
@babyl-on 35
yes that is about right. The top power networks are all a tight mix of names from govt, MIC, and private equity (incl. top 2-3 investment banks). With the latter group naturally paying the salaries of the whole policy making ecosystem, and holding the positions that select future generations who will eventually take their place.

They want the security of knowing noone in the world will mess with them. This necessitates that noone in the world *can* mess with them. Pretty straightforward from there.

[Dec 19, 2019] Senate hearings give impression that the whole sordid, nasty conspiracy seems on the verge of being exposed, maybe as high as Obama himself, although he is just a puppet himself

Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

evilempire , Dec 18 2019 22:32 utc | 28

If anyone was watching The Horowitz hearing in the senate today it would be hard to conclude that RussiaGate and Ukrainegate will not have serious consequences going forward.

The whole sordid, nasty conspiracy seems on the verge of being exposed, maybe as high as Obama himself, although he is just a puppet himself, and indictments are sure to follow. I don't see how anyone could think that this will not be catastrophic for the democratic party.

[Dec 19, 2019] Bill Black Lawrence O'Donnell Aims at Buttigieg, But Hits New Democrats

Notable quotes:
"... By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives ..."
Dec 19, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Posted on December 18, 2019 by Yves Smith Yves here. What Black calls the New Democrats have more recently been called Blue Dogs and even (gah) frontliners, but whatever you want to call them, they are corporate stooges loyal to bad economic ideas, most notably deficit hawkery and austerity.

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives

On December 5, 2019, Lawrence O'Donnell made an impassioned attack on Pete Buttigieg on his " The Last Word " program on MSNBC. Buttigieg's statements criticizing the Democratic Party as historically soft on deficits enraged O'Donnell. The context was Buttigieg's effort to signal to New Hampshire voters that he was the most conservative Democratic candidate for the presidential nomination. Nothing signals 'responsible' so well to 'New Democrats' and the media as a candidate screaming 'deficits' in a crowded meeting room in a small New Hampshire town.

O'Donnell correctly pointed out that Buttigieg's claims about Democrats and deficits are 'Republican lies.' The truth is that New Democrats have been the only group in America dedicated to inflicting austerity on our Nation. Republicans only pretend to care about deficits when Democrats have power. Buttigieg knows this, but his political interests in portraying himself as a stalwart emerging leader of the New Democrats caused him to position himself (falsely) as unique among New Democrats in his dedication to inflict austerity.

O'Donnell (largely) correctly pointed out that New Democrats had been fighting federal deficits for Buttigieg's entire life. O'Donnell stressed the New Democrats actions in 1993, when Buttigieg was eleven. O'Donnell lauded the New Democrats for pushing austerity even when they knew doing so was likely to cause Democrats to lose elections.

O'Donnell's dominant message, measured by both length and passion, was the crippling price the Democrats paid for the New Democrats' pushing for austerity in 1993. He made clear it was not a "one-off" – Democrats paid that price again when President Obama, a self-described New Democrat, pushed to inflict austerity on the Nation in 2010.

O'Donnell describes the New Democrats (Bill Clinton and Al Gore) as knowingly taking a "grave political risk" in 1993 in voting in favor of austerity. The risk was that Democrats, not simply New Democrats, would lose scores of seats – and control of the House and Senate. O'Donnell stressed that no Republicans voted for the New Democrat's 1993 austerity program. O'Donnell explained the initial political results of austerity. "The Democrats lost the House because of that vote for the first time in 40 years." He then explained they also lost the Senate.

O'Donnell repeatedly explained that the New Democrats knew that their decision to inflict austerity on Americans would likely produce this political disaster – and "bravely" did so because of their belief that inflicting austerity on Americans was essential. He noted that he "watched with pride" this exercise of political suicide.

O'Donnell then cited President Obama's austerity efforts – during the weak recovery from the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). At a time when the need to provide stimulus, not inflict austerity, was obvious, Obama embraced what again proved the politically suicidal option.

As fate would have it, the death of Paul Volcker days after O'Donnell's takedown of Buttigieg extended O'Donnell's argument further back in time – to before Buttigieg's birth. In 1979, President Carter (a Democrat) appointed Volcker to Chair the Federal Reserve. Volcker soon unleashed powerful monetary austerity, raising interest rates to unprecedented levels for the United States. Volcker's obituary stressed the politically suicidal nature of inflicting austerity – and the Democrats' pride in knowingly losing elections because of their embrace of it.

The harsh Fed policy no doubt contributed to Mr. Carter's re-election defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan; he had to campaign when interest rates were at their peak, and before the inflation fever had begun to break. Mr. Carter, in his memoirs, would offer a typically understated assessment: "Our trepidation about Volcker's appointment was later justified."

***

"Paul was as stubborn as he was tall," Mr. Carter said in a statement on Monday morning, "and although some of his policies as Fed chairman were politically costly, they were the right thing to do.

O'Donnell's denunciation of Buttigieg for adopting dishonest Republican talking points about Democrats and deficits did not discuss several essential points. The first two points emerge from answering this question: what was the cost to the Nation – not the loss of Democratic seats – of the New Democrats' intransigent insistence on inflicting austerity? Shakespeare explained famously that "mercy" was "twice blest," because it blesses both the giver and the receiver. The quality of austerity, however, is typically at least thrice damned. It is not a "gentle rain from heaven," but a sandstorm from hell that batters the public and punishes the politicians who unleash the whirlwind. It is at least thrice damned because it causes three grave forms of harm on the public.

Inflicting austerity on the United States government has three likely consequences for the public. It is likely to cause or extend a recession. It forces Democrats into an unending series of "Sophie's choice[s]s." We cannot adopt any new program of consequence without budget 'scoring' – requiring new taxes or cutting other vital federal programs. Under austerity, Democrats must shrink existing overall federal spending. By extending existing recessions or leading to new ones, austerity causes economic harms that increase social and political breakdowns that can lead to the election of fanatics and corrupt fake-populists. The political parties that refuse to inflict austerity (at least when they are in power) will be the political winners.

Republican fiscal policies combine "wedge" offerings to fire up the worst of their base and massive tax breaks for the elites that fund their campaigns – leading to a recurrent cycle in which the New Democrats champion policies that cause the public to identify Democrats as the party most likely to raise taxes and cut vital federal programs. Republican political power and 'wedge' legislation and policies cause enormous harm, particularly to the poor and minorities. The larger the Republican deficits, the greater the New Democrats' urgency to inflict austerity – and embrace political suicide. It is a self-reinforcing cycle producing recurrent political disaster for Democrats.

O'Donnell does not address two other critical points. First, MSNBC's top commentators endlessly warn Democrats that they must nominate the presidential candidate most likely to defeat President Trump. MSNBC's commentators implore us not to focus on policy differences among the candidates. Their message is relentless realpolitik, particularly, you should never vote for the candidate whose policies you believe are far superior to the candidate the MSNBC commentators think is most electable. MSNBC and the New Democrats claim they share the same prime directive – Democratic Party electoral victories are the only imperative.

O'Donnell's anti-Buttigieg rant reveals the truth about MSNBC and the New Democrats' real prime directive – inflicting austerity even when doing so is economically irrational and politically suicidal is their sole imperative. The obvious questions, which O'Donnell never asked or attempted to answer, are why he and his MSNBC colleagues push the false prime directive (winning must be the sole paramount goal) as gospel while praising the New Democrats for repeatedly causing the Democratic Party to commit political suicide through inflicting austerity on our Nation. Logically, the only possible answer to that question is that O'Donnell and the New Democrats must view inflicting austerity as being of transcendent importance. It outweighs everything. Inflicting austerity is the New Democrats and MSNBC's sole prime directive. They are not simply willing to lose so many contests that they lose control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate – they are "proud" to do so when the reason for those losses is 'we committed political suicide to fight to inflict austerity.' The related questions are whether MSNBC and the New Democrats are actually blind to the contradiction between the real and phony prime directives and why they think viewers and voters will be too dumb to spot the obvious contradiction. Why do New Democrats and MSNBC insist on hiding their real prime directive?

A related question arises from this bizarre prime directive to inflict austerity even when it is politically suicidal. Why did New Democrats and MSNBC choose inflicting austerity as their holy grail? What is it about inflicting austerity that makes New Democrats so "proud" to cause the Democratic Party to commit political suicide and deliver control of the House, Senate, and Presidency to the likes of Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump? Preventing Bush's invasion of Iraq, global climate disruption, and Trump's election would all make sense as overriding priorities. Those are things worthy of losing a House seat or even the entire House.

Inflicting austerity typically harms America and our people. A federal budget deficit is not bad. A federal budget surplus is not good. Clinton and Gore's budget surpluses were not good for America. They were likely harmful, as recessions soon followed our prior budget surpluses throughout our history. In each of the cases O'Donnell lauded, the New Democrats' insistence on inflicting austerity did not simply prove politically suicidal for the Democratic Party – austerity was a terrible economic policy that caused harm. How did inflicting austerity become the overriding priority of New Democrats, swamping all other policies? In 1993, when Clinton and Gore made O'Donnell "proud" by inflicting austerity, the inflation rate was three percent. That rate of inflation was trivially higher than what the Fed would adopt as its inflation target (2%) – the preferred rate of inflation. Even under neoclassical economic nostrums, there was no need, much less a compelling need, to inflict austerity.

In 2010, when Obama first sought to inflict austerity on us, the rate of inflation was 2.3 percent and the unemployment rate was 9.6 percent. The economic illiteracy of his austerity horrified even neoclassical economists. Fortunately, the Tea Party Republicans pushed so aggressively in the "Grand Bargain" negotiations with Obama that the tentative deal he reached with congressional Republicans collapsed. Otherwise, Obama's infliction of austerity would have ended the already weak recovery, plunged the Nation back into a Great Recession, and caused him and scores of congressional Democrats to lose their elections in 2012.

O'Donnell's presentation, implicitly, makes it clear that he thinks austerity is so obviously desirable, and the budget deficits of a fully sovereign nation so obviously the gravest conceivable threat that he need provide neither logic nor evidence to support the New Democrat's politically suicidal and economically illiterate austerity prime directive. O'Donnell's cheerleading for the austerity prime directive was never supported, but it has become facially indefensible over the last quarter-century. Trump's tax reduction scheme for the wealthiest was outrageous on multiple grounds, but O'Donnell can observe the present unemployment and inflation rates. Unemployment is at 3.5% and the inflation rate for 2018 was 1.9% -- less than the Fed's target rate. Inflation is the only logical bugaboo about federal budget deficits, so O'Donnell and Buttigieg's feverish fear that federal deficits are about to cause a catastrophe is beyond bizarre. The bond markets confirm that there is no expectation of material inflation.

The New Democrats remain transfixed by their 'virtue' and 'bravery' in losing control of all three branches of government by insisting on inflicting economically illiterate and politically suicidal austerity assaults on the voters – raising taxes and cutting vital services. They refuse to act on the real emergencies we face such as global climate disruption based on the economically illiterate fantasy that 'we cannot afford' to prevent the worsening catastrophe. The 'New Democrats' and their media enablers demand that we nominate candidates dedicated to enacting politically suicidal deficit hysteria policies and adopting tepid anti-environment policies that are suicidal towards the lives of our children and grandchildren. The most remarkable aspect of this insanity, however, is that the hucksters pitch their embrace of their prime directive as defining the concept of "responsible." Indeed, it is so obviously 'responsible' that O'Donnell and Buttigieg feel neither logic nor facts are necessary to prove the virtues of austerity. They omit the fact that austerity proponents' warnings and promises have repeatedly proved false and outright harmful as well as politically suicidal.

timotheus , December 18, 2019 at 7:52 am

Could it be that the New Democrats are not stupid or irrational at all but know what they are doing and happily play their role in the permanent professional wrestling spectacle as the hapless patsies who keep losing to the real tough guy? After all, they get paid handsomely in any case.

Adam1 , December 18, 2019 at 8:02 am

Not only did President Carter appoint Volcker, but he also vetoed a bill to raise the national debt ceiling. Thankfully Congress, run by a very different set of Democrats at the time, over-rode his veto.

NotTimothyGeithner , December 18, 2019 at 9:58 am

"Austerity" is basically the only policy Team Blue has undertaken without outside pressure. As bad as it is, it's the one thing they can point to over the last 25 years as something they did without mass mobilization or court cases embarrassing them into not being totally heinous.

Then little Mayo Pete is trying to deny Team Blue their only accomplishment.

shinola , December 18, 2019 at 12:25 pm

"New Democrat" = Neoliberal.

If Buttgag et al were really concerned about deficits, how about reverting to Eisenhower era tax rates & cutting back on "defense" spending?

Oh, wait – that would upset their real constituents – the 1% & the MIC.

[Dec 19, 2019] America is a pathetic nation; a fascist state fueled by the greed, malice, and stupidity of her own people. - strife delivery

Dec 19, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

All pretense of our country being a representative democracy @snoopydawg
is gone. Our two party uniparty government has completely turned its back on serving the needs of the vast majority of the people of this country, and of the wider world. Profit sits at the head of our government. The monikers "Fascist" and "Totalitarian" are apt descriptors of the direction of our current trajectory. A dystopian future surely awaits us on this beautiful, fragile and life sustaining planet that we are trashing with such abandon.

Other than that, things are going quite nicely. Nancy is wearing her power pants and fools are applauding.

[Dec 19, 2019] "I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." Robert J. McCloskey, U.S. State Department spokesman. From a press briefing during the Vietnam war.

Dec 19, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

It still amazes me... that people actually think impeachment accomplishes anything other than diverting attention from the Dems giving Trump everything he wants.

Kayfabe.

Impeachment without conviction means next to nothing.

The Senate will not convict. Trumps chances of being re-elected are continuing to improve as Democratic Party insiders work overtime to see to it that Bernie Sanders has to fight the Republican Party, a MSM that either dismisses or ignores his candidacy, AND the Democratic Party which has, once again, stacked the deck against him.

[Dec 19, 2019] The truth is never as interesting as wild speculation

Dec 19, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

WoodsDweller on Wed, 12/18/2019 - 9:30pm

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/12/trump-has-joined-the-losers-of-presiden...

... Never-Trump conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin released a scorching assessment ... "Even Trump knows he will be lumped in with the 'losers' in the presidential history rankings such as Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson," wrote Rubin. "Impeachment will define his presidency, dwarfing any other foreign or domestic action. No wonder he rages against a speaker he is powerless to stop. His worst nightmare is to be humiliated, and if not now, history certainly will regard him as a pitiful, damaged man utterly unfit for the role he won through a series of improbable events ... Just as Watergate figures ... were lionized as defenders of the Constitution, so too will Pelosi and House Democrats ... be among those admired for their lucidity, intellect and character. ... For every clownish, contemptible, screeching and dishonest House Republican, there is a sober, admirable, restrained and honest Democrat.
"No letter, no tweet, no Fox News spin can repair the reputations of Trump enablers," Rubin wrote. The right-wing media that cheered them on will, like outlets that rooted for Jim Crow and demonized Freedom Riders, be shunned by decent, freedom-loving people who reaffirm objective reality. The Republican Party will be known not as the Party of Lincoln but the Party of Trump, a quisling party that lost its bearings and its soul to defend an unhinged narcissist.

[Dec 19, 2019] The Trump Card was and is a masterstroke of scripting live, non-stop, divisive, politically paralytic distraction while the US oligarchy goes all-tard-in for private power.

Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Artful Dodger , Dec 19 2019 8:00 utc | 86

The Trump Card was and is a masterstroke of scripting live, non-stop, divisive, politically paralytic distraction while the US oligarchy goes all-tard-in for private power.

Russ , Dec 19 2019 7:30 utc | 85

Since the whole impeachment farce already has been a political loser for the idiot Democrats, they'd have to be doubly stupid to double down on political stupidity by obstructing the transmission to the Senate, when most Americans just want this crap to be over with.

Meanwhile the Senate Republicans, once they get the charges, would be stupid to do anything but vote them down immediately. Otherwise they'll become complicit in the odious circus and rightly incur their share of the political blame.

[Dec 19, 2019] Tulsi probably is purposely distnce herself from the DNC. That will alow her to run as an independent

But Tulsi running as an independent means reelection of Trump.
Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
psychohistorian , Dec 19 2019 6:20 utc | 82
@ Posted by: jalp | Dec 19 2019 6:00 utc | 80 with the Green Party status....Thanks

If Tulsi is totally left out of the Democratic race, is it possible that she could be a Green candidate? When is the "drop dead" date for that to occur? How is the VP pick handled?

TIA

Bryan Hemming , Dec 19 2019 9:10 utc | 88

I see Tulsi Gabbard managed to distance herself from the affair and rise above it by voting "present" instead of "yes" or "no". I sense she is purposely putting a lot of space between herself and the DNC, and may even be positioning herself to run as an independent come spring, despite saying that was not her objective only a couple of months ago. Given the lack of wisdom and loss of sense of direction being shown by the Democrat leadership it would be a very wise move.

powerandpeople , Dec 19 2019 8:43 utc | 87
The Tuls is unlikely to be the Dem candidate.

Her options are open.

Pres. Trump wants to go down in history for something other than the impeachment charade.

He thinks outside the box, is afraid of nothing, can turn on a dime, and may be the only person who can kick open a door that seems jammed, thereby healing half the nation.

[Dec 19, 2019] Thiessen to Comey: You weren't sloppy, you intentionally falsified evidence

When tectonic plates of US politics shift, they can crash such a miserable puppets of CIA as Comey.
Notable quotes:
"... No no. These are not mistakes but rather deliberate criminal activity ..."
Dec 19, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Ballsdeep Singh , 2 days ago

This guy is neck deep in the attempted coup to overthrow a duly elected president

Nathan Pickrell , 2 days ago

Why continue this interview? He is still lying, he is so full of himself its nuts!

ensign j , 2 days ago

No no. These are not mistakes but rather deliberate criminal activity

Leigh Ann Everett , 1 day ago

Comey knew that everything was wrong and illegal. Once again, he is lying.

Red Oz , 1 day ago

Why is Roger Stone in prison and Comey is a free man?

[Dec 19, 2019] Barr Says Comey Lying Over Attempt To Distance Himself From FBI Quagmire

Dec 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

James Comey's claim that the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation was run "seven layers" below him is a total lie according to Attorney General William Barr, who said that the FBI's probe was actually handled by a " very small group of very high level officials ."

To review, Comey told "Fox News Sunday" that as the director of the FBI, he was "seven layers" above the investigation, and that he left things to the career professionals when '17 serious errors' occurred which were later uncovered by the Inspector General.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1yfXxeJn3Tc?start=488

Au contraire Comey

"The idea that this was seven layers below him is simply not true ," Barr told Fox 's Martha MacCallum in a Wednesday interview, adding "I think that one of the problems with what happened was precisely that they pulled the investigation up to the executive floors, and it was run and birddogged by a very small group of very high level officials ."

Watch:

AG Barr on Comey 'seven layers' above the investigation:

One of the problems that happened is the investigation was pulled up to the executive floors & was run by a very small group of very high level officials.
pic.twitter.com/0jA1eoM0kM

-- Red Nation Rising (@RedNationRising) December 19, 2019

According to the Inspector General's report, the FBI withheld exculpatory information on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page when submitting an application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on him.

And according to the Daily Caller , the report also noted that Comey was directly involved in plans to open operation Crossfire Hurricane after reviewing the initial FISA application on Page.

[Dec 19, 2019] Fitton accuses Comey of 'directly' spying on Trump - YouTube

Notable quotes:
"... The minute Comey granted Hillary immunity from prosecution for destroying her emails, he was done in my book. ..."
Dec 16, 2019 | www.youtube.com

President of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton discusses the 'lies' former FBI director James Comey reportedly said during his interview on Sunday and explains the Democrats' attempt to remove President Trump from office.

Brave Voice , 1 day ago

The minute Comey granted Hillary immunity from prosecution for destroying her emails, he was done in my book.

stanley 7 , 1 day ago

Well said T. Fitton. Comey is a dishonest Fool, lock him up.

EDWARD BROWN , 1 day ago

Comey is a snake and he keeps going on t.v. trying to get the public to believe his lying

[Dec 19, 2019] Poll that do not provide the margin of error can't be taken seriously

Most of them can't be taken seriously in any case as their task is not to report but to influence the public opinion. Look at Biden polls for confirmation.
Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Trailer Trash , Dec 18 2019 21:36 utc | 12
Life is strange. Just as I was reading b's summary of a poll showing increased support for Trump, NPR ran a story of a poll taken of military people showing just the opposite. Neither poll can be taken seriously, since neither bothers to include a margin of error, likely to be about the same amount as the difference between "yes" and "no".

Keith Olbermann is the only media person I have ever heard that talked about polls and margin of error. He actually included the margin of error in every poll-related story he did while on MSNBC. Too bad there aren't more journalists like Mr Olbermann.

I did not know about former admitted spooks being elected to Congress. It is very disturbing that they are operating so openly as to publicly organize and promote the impeachment circus. It suggests to me that the spooks will not accept a Not Guilty verdict from the Senate. Not sure I want to think about what they might try next.

[Dec 19, 2019] I'm starting to think the whole trump presidency is a con by making him look like a target for the deep state and anti establishment, he continues the empire while people who want real change get sunk

It still amazes me that people actually think impeachment accomplishes anything other than diverting attention from the Dems giving Trump everything he wants. Kayfabe.
Dec 19, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

snoopydawg on Wed, 12/18/2019 - 10:12pm @snoopydawg

From the comments:

I'm starting to think the whole trump presidency is a con by making him look like a target for the deep state and anti establishment, he continues the empire while people who want real change get sunk.

I have had this thought more than once since Trump was selected to play president. He makes too many unforced errors that are timely for democrats to jump on. He could have nipped Russia Gate in its tracks by having the NSA show how Russia did not hack into the DNC computers. I'm sure that there were other things he could have done, but never did. But if the Huber investigation has legs and someone actually gets held accountable for taking the country on this 3 year insanity I'll rethink my opinion.

[Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

Highly recommended!
Dec 19, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

likbez, December 19, 2019 6:58 pm

Afghan war demonstrated that the USA got into the trap, the Catch 22 situation: it can't stop following an expensive and self-destructive positive feedback loop of threat inflation and larger and large expenditures on MIC, because there is no countervailing force for the MIC since WWII ended. Financial oligarchy is aligned with MIC.

This is the same suicidal grip of MIC on the country that was one of the key factors in the collapse of the USSR means that in this key area the USA does not have two party system, It is a Uniparty: a singe War party with two superficially different factions.

Feeding and care MIC is No.1 task for both. Ordinary Americans wellbeing does matter much for either party. New generation of Americans is punished with crushing debt and low paying jobs. They do not care that people over 50 who lost their jobs are essentially thrown out like a garbage.

"41 Million people in the US suffer from hunger and lack of food security"–US Dept. of Agriculture. FDR addressed the needs of this faction of the population when he delivered his One-Third of a Nation speech for his 2nd Inaugural. About four years later, FDR expanded on that issue in his Four Freedoms speech: 1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship; 3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear.

Items 3 and 4 are probably unachievable under neoliberalism. And fear is artificially instilled to unite the nation against the external scapegoat much like in Orwell 1984. Currently this is Russia, later probably will be China. With regular minutes of hate replaced by Rachel Maddow show ;-)

Derailing Tulsi had shown that in the USA any politician, who try to challenge MIC, will be instantly attacked by MIC lapdogs in MSM and neutered in no time.

One interesting tidbit from Fiona Hill testimony is that neocons who dominate the USA foreign policy establishment make their living off threat inflation. They literally are bought by MIC, which indirectly finance Brookings institution, Atlantic Council and similar think tanks. And this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact. Rephrasing Samuel Johnson's famous quote, we can say, "MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels."

[Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics. ..."
Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lk , Dec 18 2019 22:19 utc | 26

The House impeachment is driven by several factors:
  1. After Russiagate, when Trump began to investigate its fraudulent origins, the Dems feared the exposure of Obama-era corruption if not high crimes. Hence Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics.
  2. The investigation into Russiagate led right to Ukraine, and thus to Biden. In the context of Sanders' campaign, Ukrainegate became an imperative for the factions of the capitalist class that dominates the DNC. If Biden falls on Ukraine issues, then Sanders is inevitable; an anathema to Wall Street and Big Tech DNC donors.
  3. 3. While 1 and 2 dominate DNC machinations, foreign policy is also a factor. The foreign policy establishment is absolutely against any hesitation with respect to confronting Russia as part of a regional and global strategy for primacy. Trump's limited prevarications on Russia might threaten the long established strategy to expand Nato to Ukraine and thereby to encircle Russia and maintain US dominance over Europe. So, even though Trump names great power rivalry as the name of the game today, his inclination for making nice with Putin threatens to weaken the US hold over Europe, which Trump wants to label as an economic competitor.

    It is with these points that the strategic differences become apparent: Trump is raising a realist, neo-mercantalist strategy against ALL potential competitors; the DNC and the deep state hold a strategy of liberal hegemony: globalization and US primacy through dominating regional alliances, and impregnating US hegemony INSIDE the vassal States of the empire.

All of this, however, is bound to fail for the DNC, and down the road for Trump himself.

The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones.

[Dec 19, 2019] The impeachment farce and most of the battle with Trump is kabuki for the rubes. Business as usual continues in DC, except the swamp realizes more and more that their grip on power is slipping.

Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

NoOneYouKnow , Dec 18 2019 23:16 utc | 34

The Dems have given Trump's insane military budget more than he asked for, they got no bargains in renewing the NDAA (both of which betray the lie they think Trump is compromised), and finalized a huge new trade deal with him.

The impeachment farce and most of the battle with Trump is kabuki for the rubes. Business as usual continues in DC, except the swamp realizes more and more that their grip on power is slipping. They are far more frightened of Bernie Sanders. These are dangerous times.

ben , Dec 19 2019 0:36 utc | 46

"The Democrats did the "right" thing - considering their options.

Option A: Counter Trump with real policy issues; policies that the majority of Americans support: ending unending wars, healthcare, environmental protection, income equality, etc.. But that would cost them money from their BIG DONORS, and as such all privileges of the Dem bosses. Not a good option

Option B: Follow the Russiagate/Ukrainegate/Impeachment path and thereby avoid having to oppose Trump on policy. Their BIG DONORS are happy (because there is no policy change). Even if the Dems lose 2020 election, the party bosses still retain their privileges.

Disclaimer: The Dims and the Repugs are the same party - just two different brands of it. Anyone doubting this assertion should check out who finance them .... big oligarchy, even if there may be slight differences in composition.
Posted by: Nathan Mulcahy | Dec 18 2019 23:07 utc | 31

This IMO is the best synopsis posted to date. Salient, and to the point. Thanks NM!!

[Dec 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard did the smart thing and abstained in the vote from the circus

Notable quotes:
"... But as we know it has become politically incorrect on the left to do anything but to put on your clown makeup and join the circus. ..."
"... But Tulsi Gabbard as usual doesn't play their game. And because of that, like Trump she is also a target of the deep state and not just the deep state of America--it is the deep state of the entire 5-Eyes security apparatus who together work overtime to overthrow Trump and any and all who resist their attempt to rule the world. ..."
"... Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring their power to bear on domestic policy as well. ..."
Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kali , Dec 18 2019 21:59 utc | 18

Tulsi Gabbard did the smart thing and abstained in the vote from the circus. But as we know it has become politically incorrect on the left to do anything but to put on your clown makeup and join the circus.

But Tulsi Gabbard as usual doesn't play their game. And because of that, like Trump she is also a target of the deep state and not just the deep state of America--it is the deep state of the entire 5-Eyes security apparatus who together work overtime to overthrow Trump and any and all who resist their attempt to rule the world.

This is a new article on Tulsi and her battle with the deep state: Tulsi Gabbard: Enemy of Their State

Russ , Dec 18 2019 22:00 utc | 19

Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring their power to bear on domestic policy as well.

Although both halves of the One-Party really want the effective tyranny of state and corporate bureaucracies, it's not surprising that it's the Democrats (along with the MSM) taking the lead in openly defending the tyrannical proposition that the CIA should be running its own foreign (and implicitly domestic) policy, and that the president should be just a figurehead which follows orders. That goes with the Democrats' more avowedly technocratic style, and it goes with the ratchet effect whereby it's usually Democrats which push the policy envelope toward ever greater inequality, ecocide and tyranny.

Now is a time of rising irredentism and the decline of all the ideas of globalization and technocracy, though the reality is likely to hang on for awhile. The whole Deep State-Zionist-Russia-Deranged-Trump-Deranged-MSM-social media censorship campaign is globalization trying to maintain its monopoly of ideas by force, since it knows it can never win in a free clash of ideas.

Impeachment, and the pro-bureaucracy anti-democracy campaign related to it, besides its more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems; forestalling Sanders), is the culmination of technocracy's attempted coup against a president who, even though he agrees with this cabal on all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, too damn honest about the evil of the US empire. If they can take him down, they think they can restore the full business-as-usual status quo including the compliance of the rest of the world.

Since impeachment's going to fail, we can expect the system to try other ways.

Australian lady , Dec 19 2019 3:26 utc | 71

Thank you b, another great post.

But also may I compliment Kali@18 and Russ@19 for their terrific comments. I have just finished reading the link provided by Kali, which is an outstanding essay by Pam Ho- a paradigm shifter if ever there was one! I have been making a determined effort to liberate my thinking from ideological partisanship and reading this essay was like pressing a refresh button in my brain.

Despite the ra ra b. s.,Trump's letter will become an historical document, as it does encapsulate all the manufactured tribulations that have been foisted on his presidency, though I would have liked b to include all those words which were CAPITALIZED. He's quite a personality, your president The best summation of the man is, curiosly enough, provided by Syria's president Assad. There is an honesty about him even when he's uttering a bald-faced lie!

Tulsi has been newsworthy for a number of years now and right from the getgo I said to myself "she's my kind of gal"

Here is a woman of courage and presence. She's young and principled, even if she's a member of a very corrupted party.

May she go far.

psychohistorian , Dec 19 2019 3:53 utc | 73

@ Posted by: Australian lady | Dec 19 2019 3:26 utc | 71 who ended her comment expressing support for Tulsi Gabbard

When the impeachment vote was taken today, there were two Dems that voted against and Tulsi voted Present

She will be ostracized for her non vote but I give her credit for distancing herself from the impeachment circus. Given that she has stated that she won't run again for Congress, I speculate that she may jump to the Green Party if given the chance to run ahead of or with Jill Stein.....any barflies know how the Greens are shaping up for this coming election?

I read in a couple of places today that the strategy of the Dems is to not forward the impeachment to the Senate for an indeterminate amount of time......let the stew, the Senate and Trump simmer a bit.....more kabuki for the masses while the public continues to be screwed economically.

[Dec 19, 2019] Pelosi Digs In Against McConnell Over Impeachment Trial Standoff

Pelosi risk to turn the case into personal vendetta and DemoRats will be burned as the result. McConnell just need to wait a couple on months as time works for him.
This pressure from Pelosi actually helps Trump opening interesting lines of the attack: "McConnell said on the Senate floor that Pelosi and House Democrats "may be too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate." Trump tweeted as Pelosi spoke Thursday morning, saying that "Pelosi feels her phony impeachment HOAX is so pathetic she is afraid to present it to the Senate".
The Deep State Sunk The Democratic Party
Notable quotes:
"... she would delay naming impeachment managers -- who would argue the House case in the Senate -- until the Senate lays out its procedures for the trial. ..."
Dec 19, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

41 Million people in the US suffer from hunger and lack of food security"--US Dept. of Agriculture. That number of people constituted a crisis for FDR when he delivered his One-Third of a Nation speech for his 2nd Inaugural. About four years later, FDR expanded on that issue in his Four Freedoms speech: 1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship; 3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear.

Faced with a similar situation, Trump advances plans to cut more people from the food stamp program thus increasing immiseration. One might say Trump's out of step with traditional American values; but were Obama, Bush, or Clinton any better?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday extended her standoff with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over starting President Donald Trump 's impeachment trial, insisting she's waiting to see whether Republicans will agree to a "fair" process.

Pelosi surprised many House Democrats Wednesday night after the House impeached Trump when she said she would delay naming impeachment managers -- who would argue the House case in the Senate -- until the Senate lays out its procedures for the trial.

"When we see what they have, we'll know who and how many we will send over," she said at a news conference Thursday. Pelosi cast it as a procedural matter and cited the Senate's ability to come up with a bipartisan trial plan after President Bill Clinton was impeached.

... ... ...

McConnell and other GOP senators have been indicating they want a quick trial, with arguments presented by the House managers and Trump's counsel without witnesses. McConnell was giving no ground.

"It's beyond me how the speaker and Democratic leader in the Senate think withholding the articles of impeachment and not sending them over gives them leverage," he told reporters at the Capitol. "Frankly, I'm not anxious to have the trial."

... ... ...

McConnell called the House impeachment process rushed and shoddy.

"If the speaker ever gets her house in order, that mess will be dumped in the Senate's lap," he said on the Senate floor. "If the nation accepts this, presidential impeachments may cease being a once-in-a-generation event."

[Dec 19, 2019] Impeachment should be viewed is the context of a larger effort to initiate the new McCarthyism.

Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Dec 18 2019 21:58 utc | 16

b:
Trump's letter notes that talk about impeachment started as soon as he stepped into office:

IMO the Deep State wanted to initiate a new McCarthyism.

Russiagate was the means to do so and that means that Impeachment was always a possibility (though likely a red-herring, as I explain below).

IMO After the Mueller investigation progressives pressed for Impeachment but establishment Democratics (led by Pelosi and Hillary) wouldn't allow it. People were (rightfully) asking why establishment Democrats were protecting Trump.

With this in mind, Ukrainegate is a convenient diversion from Russiagate while providing the Impeachment satisfaction that progressives had clamored for.

It's difficult NOT to notice that ...

... America First Trump actually furthered Russiagate when he hired Manafort (who was known to have worked for pro-Russian Parties in Ukraine and had NO recent experience in US elections) and called upon Russia to publish Hillary's emails (which were KNOWN to contain top-secret information - making any publication a crime under US law);

... and America First Trump furthered Ukrainegate by the mentioning the name of an announced political opponent when talking about investigating corruption on a call with Zelensky.

One might excuse this in many ways: Trump's ego; his unfamiliarity with politics and statecraft; or just bad luck. But one can also see these actions, in a larger context, as disturbing part of the effort to initiate the new McCarthyism.

[Dec 19, 2019] The New York Times reported tonight that federal prosecutor John Durham is investigating former CIA Director John Brennan's role in the 2016 election. Durham has called for Brennan's emails, call logs and other documents.

Dec 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Teamtc321 , 12 minutes ago link

BREAKING BIG: John Durham Is Investigating Former CIA Director John Brennan's Role in 2016 Election Interference and His LIES TO CONGRESS! (Video)

The New York Times reported tonight that federal prosecutor John Durham is investigating former CIA Director John Brennan's role in the 2016 election. Durham has called for Brennan's emails, call logs and other documents.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/12/breaking-big-john-durham-is-investigating-former-cia-directors-role-in-russia-collusion-hoax-and-his-lies-to-congress-video/

[Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring their power to bear on domestic policy as well. ..."
"... Impeachment, and the pro-bureaucracy anti-democracy campaign related to it, besides its more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems; forestalling Sanders), is the culmination of technocracy's attempted coup against a president who, even though he agrees with this cabal on all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, too damn honest about the evil of the US empire. If they can take him down, they think they can restore the full business-as-usual status quo including the compliance of the rest of the world. ..."
Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Russ , Dec 18 2019 22:00 utc | 19

Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring their power to bear on domestic policy as well.

Although both halves of the One-Party really want the effective tyranny of state and corporate bureaucracies, it's not surprising that it's the Democrats (along with the MSM) taking the lead in openly defending the tyrannical proposition that the CIA should be running its own foreign (and implicitly domestic) policy, and that the president should be just a figurehead which follows orders. That goes with the Democrats' more avowedly technocratic style, and it goes with the ratchet effect whereby it's usually Democrats which push the policy envelope toward ever greater inequality, ecocide and tyranny.

Now is a time of rising irredentism and the decline of all the ideas of globalization and technocracy, though the reality is likely to hang on for awhile. The whole Deep State-Zionist-Russia-Deranged-Trump-Deranged-MSM-social media censorship campaign is globalization trying to maintain its monopoly of ideas by force, since it knows it can never win in a free clash of ideas.

Impeachment, and the pro-bureaucracy anti-democracy campaign related to it, besides its more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems; forestalling Sanders), is the culmination of technocracy's attempted coup against a president who, even though he agrees with this cabal on all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, too damn honest about the evil of the US empire. If they can take him down, they think they can restore the full business-as-usual status quo including the compliance of the rest of the world.

Since impeachment's going to fail, we can expect the system to try other ways.

james , Dec 19 2019 1:51 utc | 57

hey b... i like your title - "How The Deep State Sunk The Democratic Party" ... could change it to" How the Deep State Sunk the USA" could work just as well...

Seven of the 11 security state representatives who had joined the Democrats in 2018 gave the impulse for impeachment.

is this intentional?? it sort of looks like it...

good quote from @ 26 lk - "The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones."

ptb , Dec 19 2019 2:07 utc | 62
@babyl-on 35
yes that is about right. The top power networks are all a tight mix of names from govt, MIC, and private equity (incl. top 2-3 investment banks). With the latter group naturally paying the salaries of the whole policy making ecosystem, and holding the positions that select future generations who will eventually take their place.

They want the security of knowing noone in the world will mess with them. This necessitates that noone in the world *can* mess with them. Pretty straightforward from there.

[Dec 19, 2019] In my view the deep state (the interagency consensus) is the hired help of the oligarchy, which infects the gov and occupies every key position of power(except president for the first time in over 75 years).

Notable quotes:
"... People are constantly saying the deep state wants this or it wants that and that is off the mark. The deep state follows the orders of the oligarchy it does not make policy or make independent decisions. ..."
"... The oligarchy and its empire laugh at all the pledbs caught up in their macabre pantomime covering the non-stop for 75 years slaughter of innocent people. ..."
"... We live in a dictatorship of global private finance ..."
"... The far left, if it exists, know that Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton bears no claim to anything left of fascism. ..."
Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Babyl-on , Dec 18 2019 23:21 utc | 35

I would like to put forward my understanding of the "deep state" and see if I have any company.

In my view the deep state (the interagency consensus) is the hired help of the oligarchy, which infects the gov and occupies every key position of power(except president for the first time in over 75 years).

People are constantly saying the deep state wants this or it wants that and that is off the mark. The deep state follows the orders of the oligarchy it does not make policy or make independent decisions.

In effect, the CIA is nothing more or less than a secret army of the oligarchy.

The dems funded the wall, they gave the treasonous Trump another 100+ billion to do Putin's bidding with, the dems fast tracked 115 Trump judges (Bernie could have stopped it and did not) at least two nuclear treaties were abandoned and a third will be soon. The oligarchy and its empire laugh at all the pledbs caught up in their macabre pantomime covering the non-stop for 75 years slaughter of innocent people.

It should be clear who is in charge - the people who own the world run the world.

psychohistorian , Dec 18 2019 23:36 utc | 37

I am moving my comment from the Open Thread where karlof1 had provided a link to the Trump/Pelosi letter

@ Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 18 2019 17:53 utc | 131 with the Trump letter to Pelosi

Thanks for that.

I just read it and besides what you and others have said I was struck by the blame for the impeachment attempt being put on the "deranged and radical representatives of the far left"."

That sentence was then followed by one saying that the Dems are motivated by and living in fear of socialist primary challengers.

Think about that context in lieu of what many barflies here understand to be reality.

1. We live in a dictatorship of global private finance
2. The far left, if it exists, know that Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton bears no claim to anything left of fascism.
3. America use to have a socialist government, because that is what government is by definition, and still has, to a degree, a mixed economy of socialism and capitalism....(gawd I hate those terms anymore)

Those are just my first thoughts......

psychohistorian , Dec 18 2019 23:53 utc | 42
My 2nd set of thoughts follow my first and those of other barflies comments and b's posting

1. Trump is giving the Dems cover to neuter the "socialist" candidates like Bernie and Tulsi
2. Trump is setting the stage for a new McCarthyism.
3. As Posted by: Babyl-on | Dec 18 2019 23:21 utc | 35 who wrote
"
In effect, the CIA is nothing more or less than a secret army of the oligarchy.
"
This true and goes for all of the Deep State
4. This impeachment shit show will continue to override any social discussion of domestic or foreign issues including the Depression that the US is clearly in....never having recovered from the Recession of 2008
5. This is what control of the narrative looks like......get out in front of the train, make lots of noise and carrying on to obfuscate reality.

And meanwhile the rest of the world is getting on with the evolution of a multi-polar world.....while America and Americans are being thrown under the bus in a managed Shock Doctrine event.

[Dec 18, 2019] Russophobia vs Anti-Semitism: How would it fly if Trump's EO instead forbade criticism of Russia in schools and colleges in USA?

I think if Russians adopt a similar to IHRA definition of thier own and then pursue trangressors through the courts, the Guardian would be shut down within a month or so.
Dec 18, 2019 | www.unz.com

thotmonger , says: December 17, 2019 at 7:02 am GMT

How would it fly if Trump's EO instead forbade criticism of Russia in schools and colleges in USA?

Very strange that something like this could ever be written and signed. A fast budding and explicit "Judeo lese majetse" is unfolding before our eyes. And if it is meant to protect Jews as a race and nation, then that will naturally induce people to see them as exactly that: a separate nation. Will this quell concern about loyalty or raise more doubt?

p.s. In 2018, Israeli army expert snipers made a turkey shoot of Palestinians marching on the 70th anniversary of their people being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homeland. A "shoot to cripple" policy only murdered several score but, with high speed dum dum bullets, they blasted bloody wreckage through the flesh and bones of many thousands of unarmed people. You may not see them on your porno channels and game shows, but a large number will be crippled for the rest of their lives.

This is a good example of a very recent state sponsored atrocity on a large scale. Students in our schools and colleges might want to examine this in a variety of ways. The history, legality, ethics, demographic dilemmas etc. Sure, it might roll over into some criticism and activism, e.g. DBS Israel, but is that to be prohibited by our government? What sort of citizens are our schools and colleges supposed to be cultivating if students are not permitted to exercise their freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of conscience?

https://ahtribune.com/world/north-africa-south-west-asia/palestine/2297-israel-shoot-to-cripple-policy-in-gaza.html

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

Highly recommended!
Dec 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Dec 16 2019 20:51 utc | 22

Neocons lie should properly be called "threat inflation"

The underlying critical point-at-issue is credibility as I noted in my comment on b's 2017 article. I've since linked to tweets and other items by that trio; the one major change seems to have been the epiphany by them that they needed to go to where the action is and report it from there to regain their credibility.

The fact remains that used car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility sans a confession as to why they feel the need to lie to sell cars.

Their actions belie the guilt they feel for their choices, but a confession works much better at assuaging the soul while helping convince the audience that the change in heart's genuine. And that's the point as b notes--genuineness, whose first predicate is credibility.

[Dec 17, 2019] Judge Denies Flynn's Requests For Exculpatory Information, Case Dismissal by Peter Svab

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "The sworn statements of Mr. Flynn and his former counsel belie his new claims of innocence and his new assertions that he was pressured into pleading guilty," Sullivan said in his Dec. 16 opinion ( pdf ). ..."
"... In June, he fired his lawyers and hired former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell , who has since accused the government of misconduct, particularly of withholding exculpatory information or providing it late. ..."
"... Powell has argued that Flynn's previous lawyers had a conflict of interest because they testified in a related case against Flynn's former business partner. Flynn had previously told the court he would keep the lawyers despite the conflict, but Powell said prosecutors should have asked the judge to dismiss the lawyers anyway. Sullivan disagreed, saying Flynn failed to show a precedent that the prosecutors had that obligation. ..."
"... Powell also said the government had no proper reason to investigate Flynn in the first place and that it had set up an "ambush interview" with the intention of making Flynn say something it could allege was false. ..."
"... Sullivan disagreed again and said that previously, with the advice of his former lawyers, Flynn never "challenged the conditions of his FBI interview." ..."
"... Powell said Flynn's answers to the agents weren't "material," meaning relevant to the FBI investigation of election meddling. ..."
"... Sounds like Flynn got bad advice from his previous lawyers, and the judge is requiring Flynn to live with the consequences. In other words, it is as if the judge is prohibiting Flynn from changing legal representation because Flynn cannot do anything different than what his first team of "counselors" advised. ..."
"... Flynn is as deep state as it gets. He would throw the book at any one of you. Make no mistake. Being a general is a political appointment. ..."
"... Flynn was also a ******* lobbyist for foreign governments, including Turkey,...without disclosing his advise was paid for. He sold himself out like a whore. ..."
"... "Michael Flynn reportedly filed paperwork on Tuesday for the $530,000 worth of work he did last year that "could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey." https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2017/03/08/michael-flynn-admits-turkey-lobbying ..."
"... NATO Alliance member Turkey? How about a list of Israel friends with benefits. MIC grifters and aipac. Bloated orange imbecile can not fight only tweet. ..."
"... They say Dems and other psychos always accuse others of what they themselves are doing. Ever heard of the Clinton Foundation? Operating expenses: 95%.Benevolent aid: 5%. Suck on that for awhile. ..."
"... Flynn did nothing wrong. Was framed setup and then blackmailed to plead. Who will pay a price. Brennan Comey Strzok? Those who stood with Trump were ruined under false pretenses. ..."
"... Oh how soon you forget that Flynn commited war crimes in Grenada. ..."
"... Then bring him up on those charges. In court those kinds of leaps are inaddmissable. ..."
"... Hahahaha Grenada. Reagan's signature military victory. Flynn should be a super hero. Grenada and Panama are the only victories the Pentagon clowns have managed. What should we expect they only get $1,000,000,000,000.00 a year ..."
"... Remember that Michael Flynn waived his right to appeal this judge's decision when he plead guilty. This won't be going to a higher court. He's going down and the judge who is sentencing him is PISSED. ..."
"... Flynn is going to prison. Hillary is not. The sooner you jackoffs accept that, the sooner you'll be able to move on with your lives instead of living out your pitiful existence in bitterness and regret. And no, you won't be doing any civil war. You'll just be angry, your anger will turn inward, and you'll poison yourselves with resentment, living out your days alone. Don't say you weren't warned. ..."
"... They threatened his son if he did not plead guilty. Of course, to you Dems the means justifies the end. He will be pardoned, and deservedly so. ..."
"... I don't expect Clinton to go to jail ... committing crimes or not she is untouchable. People may wish it but it will never ever happen she has too much on all the other criminals. ..."
Dec 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Peter Svab via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge has denied requests by Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to prompt the government to give him information he deems exculpatory and to dismiss the case against him .

District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan sided with the government in arguing that Flynn was already given all the information to which he was entitled. The judge also dismissed Flynn's allegations of government misconduct, noting that Flynn already pleaded guilty to his crime and failed to raise his objections earlier when some of the issues he now complains about were brought to his attention.

"The sworn statements of Mr. Flynn and his former counsel belie his new claims of innocence and his new assertions that he was pressured into pleading guilty," Sullivan said in his Dec. 16 opinion ( pdf ).

Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, pleaded guilty on Nov. 30, 2017, to one count of lying to the FBI. He's been expected to receive a light sentence, including no prison time, after extensively cooperating with the government on multiple investigations.

In June, he fired his lawyers and hired former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell , who has since accused the government of misconduct, particularly of withholding exculpatory information or providing it late.

Powell has argued that Flynn's previous lawyers had a conflict of interest because they testified in a related case against Flynn's former business partner. Flynn had previously told the court he would keep the lawyers despite the conflict, but Powell said prosecutors should have asked the judge to dismiss the lawyers anyway. Sullivan disagreed, saying Flynn failed to show a precedent that the prosecutors had that obligation.

Powell also said the government had no proper reason to investigate Flynn in the first place and that it had set up an "ambush interview" with the intention of making Flynn say something it could allege was false.

Sullivan disagreed again and said that previously, with the advice of his former lawyers, Flynn never "challenged the conditions of his FBI interview."

Flynn was interviewed by two FBI agents, Joe Pientka and Peter Strzok, on Jan. 24, 2017, two days after he was sworn in as President Donald Trump's national security adviser.

The prosecutors argued that the FBI had a "sufficient and appropriate basis" for the interview because Flynn days earlier told members of the Trump campaign, including soon-to-be Vice President Mike Pence, that he didn't discuss with the Russian ambassador the expulsion of Russian diplomats in late December 2016 by then-President Barack Obama.

Flynn later admitted in his statement of offense that he asked, via Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak, for Russia to only respond to the sanctions in a reciprocal manner and not escalate the situation.

The FBI was at the time investigating whether Trump campaign aides coordinated with Russian 2016 election meddling. No such coordination was established by the probe, which concluded more than two years later under then-special counsel Robert Mueller.

Powell argued that whatever Flynn told Pence and others in the transition team was none of the FBI's business.

"The Executive Branch has different reasons for saying different things publicly and privately, and not everyone is told the details of every conversation," she said in a previous court filing .

"If the FBI is charged with investigating discrepancies in statements made by government officials to the public, the entirety of its resources would be consumed in a week."

Powell said Flynn's answers to the agents weren't "material," meaning relevant to the FBI investigation of election meddling.

Sullivan, however, thought otherwise, using a broader description of the investigation. The bureau, he said, probed the "nature of any links between individuals associated with the [Trump] Campaign and Russia" and what Flynn said was material to it. The description Sullivan used appears to omit the context of the probe, which focused specifically on the Russian election meddling.

Lord Raglan , 1 minute ago link

Powell was dealt a bad hand by Flynn's previous corrupt and incompetent attorneys. The judge has an obligation to honor the new views of new counsel. He can't assume that Flynn had been well advised by former counsel. There's no evidence or history of that. They sold him out.

thebigunit , 22 minutes ago link

Not sure what's going on.

Sounds like Flynn got bad advice from his previous lawyers, and the judge is requiring Flynn to live with the consequences. In other words, it is as if the judge is prohibiting Flynn from changing legal representation because Flynn cannot do anything different than what his first team of "counselors" advised.

hairlessBalls , 30 minutes ago link

Flynn is as deep state as it gets. He would throw the book at any one of you. Make no mistake. Being a general is a political appointment.

benb , 11 minutes ago link

He's so Deep State that Brennen and Clapper went to Soetoro to get him fired after the election. Flynn was going to rat them out on the treasonous Iran deal. When Obama said no because it was too close to the end of his presidency they then criminally framed Flynn.

You're talking out your butt.

spoonful , 8 minutes ago link

concurrr

https://brassballs.blog/home/four-lies-impeach-flynn-testimony-judges-jessie-liu-mike-flynn-mariia-maria-buina-imran-awan-spygate-in-congress-elijah-cummings-justice-department-doj-fbi-mueller-morrison-foerster-john-carlin-anthony-trenga-emmett-sullivan

VideoEng_NC , 30 minutes ago link

We're witnessing a judge being compromised. His actions & bold off-topic statements in court earlier this year seems to be the sign. DS Strikes Back.

peippe , 46 minutes ago link

never speak to leo without a lawyer representing you.

poor flynn.

socialist chum , 43 minutes ago link

Flynn was lied to. Flynn was a 30 year veteran and General. Flynn couldn't imagine his country turning against him like this. None of us could. But with the cabal running our country, it could and did happen. Now we have to stamp out the cockroaches before it's too late.

AHBL , 41 minutes ago link

Flynn was also a ******* lobbyist for foreign governments, including Turkey,...without disclosing his advise was paid for. He sold himself out like a whore.

peippe , 39 minutes ago link

he had a dinner, at a gala, where foreigners were indeed present. (actually invited & not by Flynn)

Crime? You decide

AHBL , 36 minutes ago link

The **** are you talking about?

"Michael Flynn reportedly filed paperwork on Tuesday for the $530,000 worth of work he did last year that "could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey." https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2017/03/08/michael-flynn-admits-turkey-lobbying

peippe , 33 minutes ago link

thought Turkey was our, umm, friend. Also, I did not know the cash disbursements had to be 15 million + ('Biden Sized')

to be forgiven.....or overlooked.

Interesting.

Anthraxed , 33 minutes ago link

Tony Pedoesta did the same thing. Yet, somehow was not prosecuted for it...

sbin , 24 minutes ago link

NATO Alliance member Turkey? How about a list of Israel friends with benefits. MIC grifters and aipac. Bloated orange imbecile can not fight only tweet.

Impotence on parade

Soloamber , 48 minutes ago link

This ***** judge will give him a mouse sentence to protect his own *** . We don't know the half of it . How close is the judge to Obama ? I think we are going to find out .

leodogma1 , 50 minutes ago link

President Trump should step in now and Pardon Gen.Flynn and Roger Stone both trial were fixed unethical and not based on fact and law. In Stones case a radical jury of Demon Rat-Brains were assembled to hand down a guilty verdict.

dibiase , 41 minutes ago link

Stone was bragging he had dirt on Clinton from Assange and when the government called his bs, he lied to them.

Stone is a piece of ****.

PrideOfMammon , 7 minutes ago link

They say Dems and other psychos always accuse others of what they themselves are doing. Ever heard of the Clinton Foundation? Operating expenses: 95%.Benevolent aid: 5%. Suck on that for awhile.

sbin , 56 minutes ago link

Flynn did nothing wrong. Was framed setup and then blackmailed to plead. Who will pay a price. Brennan Comey Strzok? Those who stood with Trump were ruined under false pretenses.

Those who violated the constitution and rule of law are media pundants and undisturbed.

Orange dotard please divert some of your swamp creatures from destroying Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia.

America needs the secret police smashed and held accountable for sedition and treason.

hairlessBalls , 35 minutes ago link

Oh how soon you forget that Flynn commited war crimes in Grenada.

VideoEng_NC , 28 minutes ago link

Then bring him up on those charges. In court those kinds of leaps are inaddmissable.

sbin , 12 minutes ago link

Hahahaha Grenada. Reagan's signature military victory. Flynn should be a super hero. Grenada and Panama are the only victories the Pentagon clowns have managed. What should we expect they only get $1,000,000,000,000.00 a year

Soloamber , 59 minutes ago link

The minute they let Flynn off he talks and they sure as hell don't want that. They want to drag this out as long as possible and hope for a miracle (Trump gets beat ) or at least time enough for them to bugger off. FISA has known for years they were lied to by the FBI and now it has been confirmed . So why didn't they do anything then or now ? Were they in on it ? How do you draw any other conclusion ?

PopeRatzo , 1 hour ago link

Remember that Michael Flynn waived his right to appeal this judge's decision when he plead guilty. This won't be going to a higher court. He's going down and the judge who is sentencing him is PISSED.

Flynn is going to prison. Hillary is not. The sooner you jackoffs accept that, the sooner you'll be able to move on with your lives instead of living out your pitiful existence in bitterness and regret. And no, you won't be doing any civil war. You'll just be angry, your anger will turn inward, and you'll poison yourselves with resentment, living out your days alone. Don't say you weren't warned.

Spetzco , 28 minutes ago link

They threatened his son if he did not plead guilty. Of course, to you Dems the means justifies the end. He will be pardoned, and deservedly so.

GreatUncle , 15 minutes ago link

I don't expect Clinton to go to jail ... committing crimes or not she is untouchable. People may wish it but it will never ever happen she has too much on all the other criminals.

MurderNeverWasLove , 55 minutes ago link

Flynn can ask to withdraw plea, but he's turned down that opportunity three times, so judge might not allow it. Then everything Powell has been doing becomes relevant. Up to this point it's just a bunch of noise, unfortunately.

sowhat1929 , 55 minutes ago link

The house cleaning this country needs is truly astounding. This ******* judge can be swept out with all the other worthless trash

lwilland1012 , 1 hour ago link

So let me just be sure I understand this: he is being denied evidence that could prove innocence on a trial related to a guilty plea, which was largely the result of persecution by the FBI and we ALLOW this to happen in America? What has happened to this country?

GoldenDonuts , 1 hour ago link

And the same old same old continues. I really hope that all of these people receive the judgement that they so richly deserve.

[Dec 17, 2019] History Doesn t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: Wilson in UK was subjected to the similar attack by rogue elements in MI5 as Trump in the USA

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... an inquiry by cabinet secretary Lord Hunt in 1996 concluded that "a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5" had "spread damaging malicious stories". ..."
"... Well, if a cabinet secretary says that it must be true. MI5, not MI6 - I think MI5's the heavy mob - but I just wondered if our spooks had passed these tricks on to the lads who put the Steele dossier about. ..."
Dec 14, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

English Outsider

Massive win, Colonel, that as far as I know nobody predicted. Not the polls, not the political blogs. But I didn't follow it that closely so that's just a general impression.

My man, Nigel Farage, got squeezed mercilessly. I was looking around the BBC site to find out how mercilessly when I came across a picture of the bete noir of my father's time, Harold Wilson. Wilson was convinced that MI something was out to get him - bugged his office, spread smear stories about him around the press, even a possible coup.

The odd rumour of all this had spread to my corner of the English provinces and I'd always wondered if there was anything in it. So I clicked on the BBC article -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49939123

- and came across this -

" .. A 1987 inquiry concluded the allegations of a security service plot against Wilson were untrue. However, an inquiry by cabinet secretary Lord Hunt in 1996 concluded that "a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5" had "spread damaging malicious stories".

Well, if a cabinet secretary says that it must be true. MI5, not MI6 - I think MI5's the heavy mob - but I just wondered if our spooks had passed these tricks on to the lads who put the Steele dossier about.

On another security matter I note with concern above - "Those are Jacobite tribesmen at the top. Some of my ancestors were such as they." I thought so. '15 and '45 caused us a lot of trouble and just in case the tradition remained in your family I'm opening a file. We're very happy with our present Queen, thank you, and we don't want you replacing her with some Stuart relic you might happen to have dug up.

Though I suppose it would only be poetic justice. We've just had a go at toppling your President so why shouldn't you return the compliment and topple Her Majesty.

14 December 2019 at 07:07 AM

[Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

Highly recommended!
Dec 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Dec 16 2019 20:51 utc | 22

Neocons lie should properly be called "threat inflation"

The underlying critical point-at-issue is credibility as I noted in my comment on b's 2017 article. I've since linked to tweets and other items by that trio; the one major change seems to have been the epiphany by them that they needed to go to where the action is and report it from there to regain their credibility.

The fact remains that used car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility sans a confession as to why they feel the need to lie to sell cars.

Their actions belie the guilt they feel for their choices, but a confession works much better at assuaging the soul while helping convince the audience that the change in heart's genuine. And that's the point as b notes--genuineness, whose first predicate is credibility.

[Dec 17, 2019] Judge Denies Flynn's Requests For Exculpatory Information, Case Dismissal by Peter Svab

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "The sworn statements of Mr. Flynn and his former counsel belie his new claims of innocence and his new assertions that he was pressured into pleading guilty," Sullivan said in his Dec. 16 opinion ( pdf ). ..."
"... In June, he fired his lawyers and hired former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell , who has since accused the government of misconduct, particularly of withholding exculpatory information or providing it late. ..."
"... Powell has argued that Flynn's previous lawyers had a conflict of interest because they testified in a related case against Flynn's former business partner. Flynn had previously told the court he would keep the lawyers despite the conflict, but Powell said prosecutors should have asked the judge to dismiss the lawyers anyway. Sullivan disagreed, saying Flynn failed to show a precedent that the prosecutors had that obligation. ..."
"... Powell also said the government had no proper reason to investigate Flynn in the first place and that it had set up an "ambush interview" with the intention of making Flynn say something it could allege was false. ..."
"... Sullivan disagreed again and said that previously, with the advice of his former lawyers, Flynn never "challenged the conditions of his FBI interview." ..."
"... Powell said Flynn's answers to the agents weren't "material," meaning relevant to the FBI investigation of election meddling. ..."
"... Sounds like Flynn got bad advice from his previous lawyers, and the judge is requiring Flynn to live with the consequences. In other words, it is as if the judge is prohibiting Flynn from changing legal representation because Flynn cannot do anything different than what his first team of "counselors" advised. ..."
"... Flynn is as deep state as it gets. He would throw the book at any one of you. Make no mistake. Being a general is a political appointment. ..."
"... Flynn was also a ******* lobbyist for foreign governments, including Turkey,...without disclosing his advise was paid for. He sold himself out like a whore. ..."
"... "Michael Flynn reportedly filed paperwork on Tuesday for the $530,000 worth of work he did last year that "could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey." https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2017/03/08/michael-flynn-admits-turkey-lobbying ..."
"... NATO Alliance member Turkey? How about a list of Israel friends with benefits. MIC grifters and aipac. Bloated orange imbecile can not fight only tweet. ..."
"... They say Dems and other psychos always accuse others of what they themselves are doing. Ever heard of the Clinton Foundation? Operating expenses: 95%.Benevolent aid: 5%. Suck on that for awhile. ..."
"... Flynn did nothing wrong. Was framed setup and then blackmailed to plead. Who will pay a price. Brennan Comey Strzok? Those who stood with Trump were ruined under false pretenses. ..."
"... Oh how soon you forget that Flynn commited war crimes in Grenada. ..."
"... Then bring him up on those charges. In court those kinds of leaps are inaddmissable. ..."
"... Hahahaha Grenada. Reagan's signature military victory. Flynn should be a super hero. Grenada and Panama are the only victories the Pentagon clowns have managed. What should we expect they only get $1,000,000,000,000.00 a year ..."
"... Remember that Michael Flynn waived his right to appeal this judge's decision when he plead guilty. This won't be going to a higher court. He's going down and the judge who is sentencing him is PISSED. ..."
"... Flynn is going to prison. Hillary is not. The sooner you jackoffs accept that, the sooner you'll be able to move on with your lives instead of living out your pitiful existence in bitterness and regret. And no, you won't be doing any civil war. You'll just be angry, your anger will turn inward, and you'll poison yourselves with resentment, living out your days alone. Don't say you weren't warned. ..."
"... They threatened his son if he did not plead guilty. Of course, to you Dems the means justifies the end. He will be pardoned, and deservedly so. ..."
"... I don't expect Clinton to go to jail ... committing crimes or not she is untouchable. People may wish it but it will never ever happen she has too much on all the other criminals. ..."
Dec 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Peter Svab via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge has denied requests by Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to prompt the government to give him information he deems exculpatory and to dismiss the case against him .

District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan sided with the government in arguing that Flynn was already given all the information to which he was entitled. The judge also dismissed Flynn's allegations of government misconduct, noting that Flynn already pleaded guilty to his crime and failed to raise his objections earlier when some of the issues he now complains about were brought to his attention.

"The sworn statements of Mr. Flynn and his former counsel belie his new claims of innocence and his new assertions that he was pressured into pleading guilty," Sullivan said in his Dec. 16 opinion ( pdf ).

Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, pleaded guilty on Nov. 30, 2017, to one count of lying to the FBI. He's been expected to receive a light sentence, including no prison time, after extensively cooperating with the government on multiple investigations.

In June, he fired his lawyers and hired former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell , who has since accused the government of misconduct, particularly of withholding exculpatory information or providing it late.

Powell has argued that Flynn's previous lawyers had a conflict of interest because they testified in a related case against Flynn's former business partner. Flynn had previously told the court he would keep the lawyers despite the conflict, but Powell said prosecutors should have asked the judge to dismiss the lawyers anyway. Sullivan disagreed, saying Flynn failed to show a precedent that the prosecutors had that obligation.

Powell also said the government had no proper reason to investigate Flynn in the first place and that it had set up an "ambush interview" with the intention of making Flynn say something it could allege was false.

Sullivan disagreed again and said that previously, with the advice of his former lawyers, Flynn never "challenged the conditions of his FBI interview."

Flynn was interviewed by two FBI agents, Joe Pientka and Peter Strzok, on Jan. 24, 2017, two days after he was sworn in as President Donald Trump's national security adviser.

The prosecutors argued that the FBI had a "sufficient and appropriate basis" for the interview because Flynn days earlier told members of the Trump campaign, including soon-to-be Vice President Mike Pence, that he didn't discuss with the Russian ambassador the expulsion of Russian diplomats in late December 2016 by then-President Barack Obama.

Flynn later admitted in his statement of offense that he asked, via Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak, for Russia to only respond to the sanctions in a reciprocal manner and not escalate the situation.

The FBI was at the time investigating whether Trump campaign aides coordinated with Russian 2016 election meddling. No such coordination was established by the probe, which concluded more than two years later under then-special counsel Robert Mueller.

Powell argued that whatever Flynn told Pence and others in the transition team was none of the FBI's business.

"The Executive Branch has different reasons for saying different things publicly and privately, and not everyone is told the details of every conversation," she said in a previous court filing .

"If the FBI is charged with investigating discrepancies in statements made by government officials to the public, the entirety of its resources would be consumed in a week."

Powell said Flynn's answers to the agents weren't "material," meaning relevant to the FBI investigation of election meddling.

Sullivan, however, thought otherwise, using a broader description of the investigation. The bureau, he said, probed the "nature of any links between individuals associated with the [Trump] Campaign and Russia" and what Flynn said was material to it. The description Sullivan used appears to omit the context of the probe, which focused specifically on the Russian election meddling.

Lord Raglan , 1 minute ago link

Powell was dealt a bad hand by Flynn's previous corrupt and incompetent attorneys. The judge has an obligation to honor the new views of new counsel. He can't assume that Flynn had been well advised by former counsel. There's no evidence or history of that. They sold him out.

thebigunit , 22 minutes ago link

Not sure what's going on.

Sounds like Flynn got bad advice from his previous lawyers, and the judge is requiring Flynn to live with the consequences. In other words, it is as if the judge is prohibiting Flynn from changing legal representation because Flynn cannot do anything different than what his first team of "counselors" advised.

hairlessBalls , 30 minutes ago link

Flynn is as deep state as it gets. He would throw the book at any one of you. Make no mistake. Being a general is a political appointment.

benb , 11 minutes ago link

He's so Deep State that Brennen and Clapper went to Soetoro to get him fired after the election. Flynn was going to rat them out on the treasonous Iran deal. When Obama said no because it was too close to the end of his presidency they then criminally framed Flynn.

You're talking out your butt.

spoonful , 8 minutes ago link

concurrr

https://brassballs.blog/home/four-lies-impeach-flynn-testimony-judges-jessie-liu-mike-flynn-mariia-maria-buina-imran-awan-spygate-in-congress-elijah-cummings-justice-department-doj-fbi-mueller-morrison-foerster-john-carlin-anthony-trenga-emmett-sullivan

VideoEng_NC , 30 minutes ago link

We're witnessing a judge being compromised. His actions & bold off-topic statements in court earlier this year seems to be the sign. DS Strikes Back.

peippe , 46 minutes ago link

never speak to leo without a lawyer representing you.

poor flynn.

socialist chum , 43 minutes ago link

Flynn was lied to. Flynn was a 30 year veteran and General. Flynn couldn't imagine his country turning against him like this. None of us could. But with the cabal running our country, it could and did happen. Now we have to stamp out the cockroaches before it's too late.

AHBL , 41 minutes ago link

Flynn was also a ******* lobbyist for foreign governments, including Turkey,...without disclosing his advise was paid for. He sold himself out like a whore.

peippe , 39 minutes ago link

he had a dinner, at a gala, where foreigners were indeed present. (actually invited & not by Flynn)

Crime? You decide

AHBL , 36 minutes ago link

The **** are you talking about?

"Michael Flynn reportedly filed paperwork on Tuesday for the $530,000 worth of work he did last year that "could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey." https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2017/03/08/michael-flynn-admits-turkey-lobbying

peippe , 33 minutes ago link

thought Turkey was our, umm, friend. Also, I did not know the cash disbursements had to be 15 million + ('Biden Sized')

to be forgiven.....or overlooked.

Interesting.

Anthraxed , 33 minutes ago link

Tony Pedoesta did the same thing. Yet, somehow was not prosecuted for it...

sbin , 24 minutes ago link

NATO Alliance member Turkey? How about a list of Israel friends with benefits. MIC grifters and aipac. Bloated orange imbecile can not fight only tweet.

Impotence on parade

Soloamber , 48 minutes ago link

This ***** judge will give him a mouse sentence to protect his own *** . We don't know the half of it . How close is the judge to Obama ? I think we are going to find out .

leodogma1 , 50 minutes ago link

President Trump should step in now and Pardon Gen.Flynn and Roger Stone both trial were fixed unethical and not based on fact and law. In Stones case a radical jury of Demon Rat-Brains were assembled to hand down a guilty verdict.

dibiase , 41 minutes ago link

Stone was bragging he had dirt on Clinton from Assange and when the government called his bs, he lied to them.

Stone is a piece of ****.

PrideOfMammon , 7 minutes ago link

They say Dems and other psychos always accuse others of what they themselves are doing. Ever heard of the Clinton Foundation? Operating expenses: 95%.Benevolent aid: 5%. Suck on that for awhile.

sbin , 56 minutes ago link

Flynn did nothing wrong. Was framed setup and then blackmailed to plead. Who will pay a price. Brennan Comey Strzok? Those who stood with Trump were ruined under false pretenses.

Those who violated the constitution and rule of law are media pundants and undisturbed.

Orange dotard please divert some of your swamp creatures from destroying Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia.

America needs the secret police smashed and held accountable for sedition and treason.

hairlessBalls , 35 minutes ago link

Oh how soon you forget that Flynn commited war crimes in Grenada.

VideoEng_NC , 28 minutes ago link

Then bring him up on those charges. In court those kinds of leaps are inaddmissable.

sbin , 12 minutes ago link

Hahahaha Grenada. Reagan's signature military victory. Flynn should be a super hero. Grenada and Panama are the only victories the Pentagon clowns have managed. What should we expect they only get $1,000,000,000,000.00 a year

Soloamber , 59 minutes ago link

The minute they let Flynn off he talks and they sure as hell don't want that. They want to drag this out as long as possible and hope for a miracle (Trump gets beat ) or at least time enough for them to bugger off. FISA has known for years they were lied to by the FBI and now it has been confirmed . So why didn't they do anything then or now ? Were they in on it ? How do you draw any other conclusion ?

PopeRatzo , 1 hour ago link

Remember that Michael Flynn waived his right to appeal this judge's decision when he plead guilty. This won't be going to a higher court. He's going down and the judge who is sentencing him is PISSED.

Flynn is going to prison. Hillary is not. The sooner you jackoffs accept that, the sooner you'll be able to move on with your lives instead of living out your pitiful existence in bitterness and regret. And no, you won't be doing any civil war. You'll just be angry, your anger will turn inward, and you'll poison yourselves with resentment, living out your days alone. Don't say you weren't warned.

Spetzco , 28 minutes ago link

They threatened his son if he did not plead guilty. Of course, to you Dems the means justifies the end. He will be pardoned, and deservedly so.

GreatUncle , 15 minutes ago link

I don't expect Clinton to go to jail ... committing crimes or not she is untouchable. People may wish it but it will never ever happen she has too much on all the other criminals.

MurderNeverWasLove , 55 minutes ago link

Flynn can ask to withdraw plea, but he's turned down that opportunity three times, so judge might not allow it. Then everything Powell has been doing becomes relevant. Up to this point it's just a bunch of noise, unfortunately.

sowhat1929 , 55 minutes ago link

The house cleaning this country needs is truly astounding. This ******* judge can be swept out with all the other worthless trash

lwilland1012 , 1 hour ago link

So let me just be sure I understand this: he is being denied evidence that could prove innocence on a trial related to a guilty plea, which was largely the result of persecution by the FBI and we ALLOW this to happen in America? What has happened to this country?

GoldenDonuts , 1 hour ago link

And the same old same old continues. I really hope that all of these people receive the judgement that they so richly deserve.

[Dec 17, 2019] EU is bound to fail in three generations

Dec 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Factotum said in reply to walrus... , 14 December 2019 at 06:41 PM

EU is bound to fail in three generations. Just like the Soviet Union and Mao's China. Can't fight family or tribalism.
Seamus Padraig said in reply to Factotum... , 15 December 2019 at 07:07 AM
Maybe sooner, as they lack an army with which to crush popular revolts.
Babak Makkinejad said in reply to Factotum... , 15 December 2019 at 03:13 PM
USSR, Yugoslavia, US, EU, and the Indian Union are predicated on the ideas of the Enlightenment Tradition. So far, USSR and FRY have disintegrated. If EU fails, could US and EU be too far behind. In US, we have the political ascendancy of foolish Protestantism, in India that of Hindu masses.

Can any states, predicated on secularism of the Enlightenment Tradition survive the rise of religious politics?

[Dec 17, 2019] History Doesn t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: Wilson in UK was subjected to the similar attack by rogue elements in MI5 as Trump in the USA

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... an inquiry by cabinet secretary Lord Hunt in 1996 concluded that "a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5" had "spread damaging malicious stories". ..."
"... Well, if a cabinet secretary says that it must be true. MI5, not MI6 - I think MI5's the heavy mob - but I just wondered if our spooks had passed these tricks on to the lads who put the Steele dossier about. ..."
Dec 14, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

English Outsider

Massive win, Colonel, that as far as I know nobody predicted. Not the polls, not the political blogs. But I didn't follow it that closely so that's just a general impression.

My man, Nigel Farage, got squeezed mercilessly. I was looking around the BBC site to find out how mercilessly when I came across a picture of the bete noir of my father's time, Harold Wilson. Wilson was convinced that MI something was out to get him - bugged his office, spread smear stories about him around the press, even a possible coup.

The odd rumour of all this had spread to my corner of the English provinces and I'd always wondered if there was anything in it. So I clicked on the BBC article -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-49939123

- and came across this -

" .. A 1987 inquiry concluded the allegations of a security service plot against Wilson were untrue. However, an inquiry by cabinet secretary Lord Hunt in 1996 concluded that "a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5" had "spread damaging malicious stories".

Well, if a cabinet secretary says that it must be true. MI5, not MI6 - I think MI5's the heavy mob - but I just wondered if our spooks had passed these tricks on to the lads who put the Steele dossier about.

On another security matter I note with concern above - "Those are Jacobite tribesmen at the top. Some of my ancestors were such as they." I thought so. '15 and '45 caused us a lot of trouble and just in case the tradition remained in your family I'm opening a file. We're very happy with our present Queen, thank you, and we don't want you replacing her with some Stuart relic you might happen to have dug up.

Though I suppose it would only be poetic justice. We've just had a go at toppling your President so why shouldn't you return the compliment and topple Her Majesty.

14 December 2019 at 07:07 AM

[Dec 17, 2019] We want to calculate how much money the US could get if we set up bank branches and became the bank for all the criminal capital in the world.

Notable quotes:
"... Nothing could have better prepared me to understand how the global economy works! I had all the statistics, I had the help of the government people explaining to me how the CIA worked with drug dealing and other criminals and kidnappers to raise the money so it would be off the balance sheet funding and Congress didn't have to approve it when they would kill people and sponsor revolutions. ..."
Dec 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

ADKC , Dec 17 2019 0:30 utc | 77

karlof1 @70

In the the linked interview that you provided Michael Hudson describes the inception of the modern day criminal US State:-

In the last few months that I worked for Chase Manhattan in 1967, I was going up to my office on the ninth floor and a man got on the elevator and said, "I was just coming to your office, Michael. Here is a report. I'm from the State Department (I assumed that this meant CIA).

"We want to calculate how much money the US could get if we set up bank branches and became the bank for all the criminal capital in the world."

He said, "We figured out we can finance, (and he said this in an elevator), we can finance the Vietnam War with all the drug money coming into America, all of the criminal money. Can you make a calculation of how much that might be?"

So I spent three months figuring out how much money goes to Switzerland, from drug dealings, what's the dollar volume of drug dealings.

They helped me with all sorts of statistics on that, and said, "We can become the criminal capital of the world and it'll finance the dollar and this will enable us to afford the spending to defeat communism in Vietnam and elsewhere. If we don't do that, the bomb throwers will come to New York."

So I became a specialist in money laundering!

Nothing could have better prepared me to understand how the global economy works! I had all the statistics, I had the help of the government people explaining to me how the CIA worked with drug dealing and other criminals and kidnappers to raise the money so it would be off the balance sheet funding and Congress didn't have to approve it when they would kill people and sponsor revolutions.

They were completely open with me about this.

I realized they'd never done a security check on me.

[Dec 15, 2019] The Washington Post Opinion page: If you don't agree with us, you must be a Russian asset

Dec 15, 2019 | twitter.com

Nathan Brand ‏ 3:00 PM - 8 Dec 2019

The Washington Post Opinion page: If you don't agree with us, you must be a Russian asset

[Dec 15, 2019] For some people Russophobia is a pretty good meal ticket:

Notable quotes:
"... I'm not sure what neo-progressivism is, but I know a farce when I see it. The Mueller investigation failed to interview two central persons of interest in it's investigation: Craig Murray and Julian Assange. The fact that they did not interview them underscores that this was not a good faith investigation but one working backwards from it's conclusion. Hail Putin (JK, I couldn't care less about the Kleptocrat-in-chief). ..."
"... Funny, I would apply your description of "useful idiots" to centrist Democrats for advancing an agenda that severely hamstring the Democrats' political effectiveness and marries them to historically reactionary forces like neoconservatives and the intelligence community. ..."
"... Considering that our political establishment, including both parties, our media system including both ostensibly informational and entertainment content, and our civil society are deeply committed to US military and intelligence endeavors, I would "first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye," as the saying goes. ..."
"... The propaganda system that shapes public opinion around matters of geopolitics is extensive and pervasive. There is a relatively small community of academics, activists, and concerned citizens who are students of history, and more importantly, the history of propaganda and have watched what it can do. I've no doubt you're well-intentioned but I can't help but disagree with your perception. The pro-RTP humanitarian interventionist canard is a great way to get people who consider themselves on the left to back the same military/intelligence apparatus that has been waging war on the third world in pursuit of American political and economic hegemony since the end of WWII. ..."
"... It has occurred to me that their contentions are false, but that's precisely the point- if you're doing a competent, exhaustive investigation, you interview people that claim to have information of central importance, if only to exclude those possibilities from consideration. Not doing so is the hallmark of incompetence or something worse. ..."
Dec 15, 2019 | www.truthdig.com
gustave courbet KurtV • 12 hours ago ,

"There is little point trying to convince someone like Johnstone of what every sane person in the world knows to be almost certainly true, that Russia hacked the DNC and attempted to swing the election in favor of" ~ Donald Trump."

Count me among the insane, but such fact-free assertions are pretty standard examples of what passes for facts in the post-post-modern era of Trump. While this is certainly a minority position, competent journalists like Aaron Mate, Matt Taibbi, Michael Tracey and others have been doing good work in pointing out the deep flaws in the Russiagate narrative.

gustave courbet KurtV • 11 hours ago ,

I'm not sure what neo-progressivism is, but I know a farce when I see it. The Mueller investigation failed to interview two central persons of interest in it's investigation: Craig Murray and Julian Assange. The fact that they did not interview them underscores that this was not a good faith investigation but one working backwards from it's conclusion. Hail Putin (JK, I couldn't care less about the Kleptocrat-in-chief).

corruptclintons gustave courbet • 6 hours ago ,

I call it fake progressivism or the alt-left but neo-progressivism works too. They are easy to identify because they all listen to (and frequently cite) the same social media pundits and their logic is so painfully flawed.

They are useful idiots for the right because they advance the same talking points as the right, with a few variations that are designed to appeal to the left. In short, they are lefties who have been neutralized by clever propaganda and "alt-media" pied pipers.

gustave courbet corruptclintons • 5 hours ago ,

Funny, I would apply your description of "useful idiots" to centrist Democrats for advancing an agenda that severely hamstring the Democrats' political effectiveness and marries them to historically reactionary forces like neoconservatives and the intelligence community.

In the same way that your "neo-progressives" are labeled "Putin puppets" or "Assad apologists" for opposing destructive and bellicose foreign policy positions, this neo-red-scare language was used to tar principled anti-war voices during the Cold War (MLK Jr comes to mind).

Instead of debating policy positions, we must now try to cut through the Orwellian neologism game just to get to a discussion of substance.

corruptclintons gustave courbet • 5 hours ago ,

The anti-war narrative is a great hook with which to reel in some people on the left.

Yes, the level of propaganda being utilized is Orwellian, and until progressives realize they are being propagandized rather than informed, they will be used like pawns on a chess board.

gustave courbet corruptclintons • 3 hours ago ,

Considering that our political establishment, including both parties, our media system including both ostensibly informational and entertainment content, and our civil society are deeply committed to US military and intelligence endeavors, I would "first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye," as the saying goes.

The propaganda system that shapes public opinion around matters of geopolitics is extensive and pervasive. There is a relatively small community of academics, activists, and concerned citizens who are students of history, and more importantly, the history of propaganda and have watched what it can do. I've no doubt you're well-intentioned but I can't help but disagree with your perception. The pro-RTP humanitarian interventionist canard is a great way to get people who consider themselves on the left to back the same military/intelligence apparatus that has been waging war on the third world in pursuit of American political and economic hegemony since the end of WWII.

I'm reminded of the legacy media's reaction after MLK Jr's Beyond Vietnam speech: "Time magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post wrote that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."" The pro-war establishment has had 52 years to come up with new false equivalencies and flawed analyses to disparage the moral and practical clarity of its critics, and they have not.

gustave courbet KurtV • 7 hours ago ,

It has occurred to me that their contentions are false, but that's precisely the point- if you're doing a competent, exhaustive investigation, you interview people that claim to have information of central importance, if only to exclude those possibilities from consideration. Not doing so is the hallmark of incompetence or something worse.

Of course, these aren't the only issues with Russiagate, only the most glaring. I'll mention briefly that perhaps the great sin of Russiagate (even if it turned out to be true) is that is has neatly distracted from election fraud in the US by US actors, both the DNC's rigging of primaries and the GOP's perennial voter suppression that likely gave Trump the election by securing him electoral college votes in key states.

Instead of looking at the damning evidence of GOP crimes (a hallowed tradition among Democrats), they did the thing convenient to DC insiders and national security apparatchiks: blame Russia. Even if Russia had hacked the DNC, their interference pales in comparison to demonstrable GOP manipulation, yet gets 98% of the coverage (and this will likely be repeated in 2020, thanks to this circus). Presuming Russiagate is entirely legit (which I don't), it's the hangnail distracting the body politic from stage 4 cancer.

Lastly, why on earth would one trust BCCI Bob and the intelligence community, on Russiagate or anything else considering their long history of lying to the American people? Maybe they're not in this case but the burden of proof is extremely high when dealing with serial liars.

gustave courbet corruptclintons • 5 hours ago ,

"the conspiracy to fabricate the Mueller report would have involved tens of thousands and all would have had to keep quite."

No it wouldn't. It's clear from this statement alone that you haven't studied many conspiracies involving high-profile reports and political narratives that mislead the public. A small number of people can set the agenda, pick witnesses that will back them up either due to credulity, confirmation bias, or ambition, and use a compliant media as a megaphone to broadcast their perspective, then cite that same media (as Dick Cheney was fond of doing). Beyond that, there is a deep dearth of critical thinking in DC, and incentives not to rock the boat. Why put your career at risk to voice an unpopular opinion? A massive conspiracy isn't required, nor is it plausible. People that work in large bureaucracies can infer what the consensus is and go with it. From the JFK assassination to Vietnam, to Iran Contra, to Iraq, to the MANY minor scandals in between that have faded from the public's memory, this is a sadly common phenomenon.

I'm not dismissing the idea that Russians didn't interfere per se, but rather that this interference had an impact on the election (bombshell after bombshell failed to detonate). The media circus around Russiagate, an incident that, insofar as it happened, didn't impact the election, when compared to voter purges that literally handed Trump the White house, has been nearly entirely absent. Why the overwhelming focus, day after day after day of the former to the scant mention of the latter? I would argue that it's because one fits neatly into a jingoistic narrative held by the MIC while the other reveals bipartisan corruption and dereliction.

[Dec 15, 2019] In their attempt to overthrow Ukraine, the EU armed and trained Nazis. The EU helped start both the Libya and Syria wars

Notable quotes:
"... Andrew O'Hehir personifies the sore loser. The EU is fascism. In their attempt to overthrow Ukraine, the EU armed and trained Nazis. The EU helped start both the Libya and Syria wars. Obama was only their errand boy, trying to give them back two colonies. ..."
"... The EU destroyed Greece for the banks. The EU is a far greater threat to Europe than the Third Reich was. Is Andrew stupid enough to think European powers should give up their power to print money to these corporate fascists? ..."
Dec 15, 2019 | www.truthdig.com
Jamie • 10 hours ago • edited ,

Andrew O'Hehir personifies the sore loser. The EU is fascism. In their attempt to overthrow Ukraine, the EU armed and trained Nazis. The EU helped start both the Libya and Syria wars. Obama was only their errand boy, trying to give them back two colonies.

The EU destroyed Greece for the banks. The EU is a far greater threat to Europe than the Third Reich was. Is Andrew stupid enough to think European powers should give up their power to print money to these corporate fascists?

Fascist EU enablers, like the author, have called the Brits racists for years, simply because they want out of the Nazi-arming EU. Andrew doesn't want any lessons from his crushing defeat -- they relate to the perils of being a fanboy for corporate war-mongering fascists.

Lydia Mpls Jamie • 8 hours ago ,

It's an understatement to say that it's HYPERBOLE to say "the EU is a far greater threat to Europe than the Third Reich was"...

[Dec 15, 2019] Pete Buttigieg's Corporate Heel-Turn

Who will pay for Medicare for all. This is the question. Because 10% of most sick patient consume 80of all funds it is not that simple quetion. Adter all any medical insurance is in essence putting a value of human life. Is human life is invaluable you need infinite amount of money.
So medical system in the USSR for example, where it cane be called Medicare for all in reality was grossly unfair to old and very sick people. They have limited funds for unlimited demand for their services. And they tried to save first those who they consider more valuable for the society.
So while it is clear that Pete Buttigieg is a well spoken corporate tool, his stance on Medicare for all is not completely obnoxious.
Dec 15, 2019 | www.truthdig.com

Pete Buttigieg burst on the national scene early this year as a new sort of presidential candidate. But it turns out he's a very old kind -- a glib ally of corporate America posing as an advocate for working people and their families. That has become apparent this fall as Buttigieg escalates his offensive against Medicare for All.

A not-so-funny thing has happened to Buttigieg on the campaign trail. As he kept collecting big checks from corporate executives and wealthy donors, he went from being " all for " a single-payer Medicare for All system in January to trashing it in the debate last week as a plan that would kick "150 million Americans off of their insurance in four short years." The demagoguery won praise from corporate media outlets.

Those outlets have often lauded Buttigieg for his fundraising totals this year without scrutiny of the funding sources. They skew toward the wealthy -- and toward donors with a vested interest in protecting the status quo.

[Dec 15, 2019] Pete Buttigieg is an actor for the well-connected

Notable quotes:
"... On December 5, while the McKinsey story was gaining steam, Buttigieg's campaign triumphantly announced the endorsement of former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee. When former White House officials make early endorsements like these, they're often overtures toward getting their former jobs back. Especially since Goolsbee isn't backing Joe Biden, Obama's natural heir, he's likely angling for a senior position in the Buttigieg administration. Goolsbee said in his endorsement, "It has been a while since I have seen the kind of excitement on the ground in Iowa that Mayor Pete has generated, and the last time worked out pretty well." ..."
"... Buttigieg wants us to see his lack of national experience as an asset instead of a liability ..."
"... Why is Buttigieg jet-setting between Wall Street and Silicon Valley for funding, instead of talking to the average voters (who hate both finance and tech) he supposedly represents? How can a Harvard and Oxford-educated ex-McKinseyite who has never taken up arms against corporate corruption credibly claim to be anything other than elitist in the first place? ..."
"... And who better understands what a Buttigieg administration would actually do -- MSNBC pundits impressed by Buttigieg's down-to-earth persona, or revolving-door insider Austan Goolsbee? ..."
Dec 13, 2019 | www.truthdig.com

The Wrong People Are Really Excited About Pete Buttigieg's Campaign by Max Moran

Max Moran / Independent Media Institute
A senator from California, a senator from New York, and a nationally known Texan congressman have all clocked out of the 2020 Democratic primary. Yet the little-known mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana is not only staying alive, but thriving.

At least he was, until early December. Pete Buttigieg is currently receiving the media scrutiny expected of a front-runner, and his multilingual Midwestern golden boy routine isn't holding up very well. After a horrific ProPublica-New York Times expose put the spotlight squarely on Buttigieg's old employer McKinsey, he has struggled to justify his silence on what exactly he did for the firm, and squirmed under broader scrutiny of his corporate funders and bundlers. That's also brought his tight-lipped attitude toward his actual record in South Bend -- as well as South Bend's racist policing , and Buttigieg's own dismissive politicking toward African Americans -- back to the spotlight.

My organization, the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, was one of the first to call out this election cycle's broad lack of bundler transparency, but there's another, even simpler data point about the South Bend mayor that we're surprised hasn't penetrated the broader discourse. Just look at the actual figures lining up behind the South Bend mayor, and it becomes clear that he's an actor for the well-connected.

On December 5, while the McKinsey story was gaining steam, Buttigieg's campaign triumphantly announced the endorsement of former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee. When former White House officials make early endorsements like these, they're often overtures toward getting their former jobs back. Especially since Goolsbee isn't backing Joe Biden, Obama's natural heir, he's likely angling for a senior position in the Buttigieg administration. Goolsbee said in his endorsement, "It has been a while since I have seen the kind of excitement on the ground in Iowa that Mayor Pete has generated, and the last time worked out pretty well."

To hear Goolsbee recall Obama's campaign promises should make all voters groan, and the Midwest seethe. On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama harshly criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for hollowing out Rust Belt factories, and even agreed to consider withdrawing the United States in a debate with Hillary Clinton. Yet at the same time, Goolsbee sent a back-channel memo to the Canadian embassy that Obama's criticisms of NAFTA were "more reflective of political maneuvering than policy." Later in office, as the American auto industry crumpled under the recession, Goolsbee favored letting Chrysler fail rather than "siphon market-share from Ford and GM," according to contemporaneous reports.

Goolsbee departed the White House in June 2011 to return to the University of Chicago. In January 2013 -- while Obama was still in office -- he picked up a new job that should raise even louder alarm bells about his priorities and worldview. While ostensibly a full-time professor, Goolsbee now leads the Economic Intelligence practice at 32 Advisors, a firm founded by fellow Obama alum Robert Wolf. What does 32 Advisors do? It does the two things most revolving-door figures do to get rich: influencing and investing.

On influencing, 32 Advisors makes no effort to hide what it's up to. While Obama was still in office, the 32 Advisors website advertised that it "helps companies navigate the intricacies of government regulations and develop strategies to build strong relationships." Goolsbee's Economic Advisory department advertised "unparalleled insights into the future of the economy and its influence on businesses," including "Geo-Political Briefings & Ad-Hoc Email Insights." It's not your average consultant who can offer geopolitical insights from a former Cabinet adviser and longtime confidante of the then-sitting President of the United States. It also says something about a person's character to offer that insider take to the highest bidder. (Goolsbee was unlikely to starve on his salary as a professor at the University of Chicago School of Business.)

Meanwhile, 32 Advisors also runs its own investing arm called 32 Ventures. This has echoes of Bain and Company's relationship with Bain Capital, a former Obama punching bag in the 2012 campaign. 32 Advisors' relationship with 32 Ventures is even closer: instead of separate firms, the consultancy and investment wing are different divisions of the same company.

Nowadays, 32 Advisors' consulting arm is called Strategic Worldviews, which offers -- for the right price -- insights from Goolsbee, Glenn Hubbard (a George W. Bush economic adviser who's now on the board of private equity titan KKR), and others. Here's the twist: Strategic Worldviews is "a joint venture between 32 Ventures and Anthony Scaramucci's SALT Ventures."

Yes, that Anthony Scaramucci.

Other highlights from the 32 Ventures portfolio: Blade, a "digitally powered short-distance aviation company" that puts more recreational planes in the air to gobble up our carbon budget; the cannabis-related companies 14th Round and High Beauty, both of which have white founders, and one of whom is previously wealthy (read about the race and class issues in the legal cannabis industry here ); and Chanticleer Holdings, the parent company of Hooters.

Yes, that Hooters .

So we have a man who wanted to let the Rust Belt collapse, who revolved out to the influence and investment industries, and who literally works with The Mooch, throwing his support behind the Midwestern mayor. And the mayor is proud of this endorsement! The whole thing speaks to a fundamental tension about Buttigieg.

He is an elitist's idea of a small-town Indiana mayor. Buttigieg wants us to see his lack of national experience as an asset instead of a liability . Everyone hates Washington, after all. But if he is truly alien to the Washington way of doing things, why is a swamp figure like Goolsbee throwing support to Buttigieg instead of established moderates like Amy Klobuchar or Cory Booker? If Buttigieg actually is -- to use a meaningless word D.C.-types love -- "electable," what will he say to an Ohio autoworker wondering why he's cozying up to the forces who were ready to leave him out in the cold in the recession?

Why is Buttigieg jet-setting between Wall Street and Silicon Valley for funding, instead of talking to the average voters (who hate both finance and tech) he supposedly represents? How can a Harvard and Oxford-educated ex-McKinseyite who has never taken up arms against corporate corruption credibly claim to be anything other than elitist in the first place?

And who better understands what a Buttigieg administration would actually do -- MSNBC pundits impressed by Buttigieg's down-to-earth persona, or revolving-door insider Austan Goolsbee?

This article was produced in partnership by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Economy for All , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Max Moran is a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which aims to increase scrutiny on executive branch appointments.

[Dec 15, 2019] It is a violation of basic human rights to produce false, deceptive or misleading propaganda

Dec 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

snake , Dec 15 2019 14:03 utc | 2

NATO's fake humanitarian pretext catching up to them very interesting piece that fits into the to jo6pac post @ 1 of the smell of propaganda..
It does not matter who publishes smelly propaganda?

At the moment there is no way for concerned, affected or just plain good humans to either eradicate the stench or to jail and make liable the producers, inventors, distributors, publisher or the liars that deny the wrongful facts often found in smelly propaganda..

It is a violation of basic human rights to produce false, deceptive or misleading propaganda.. Maybe there will someday be a war on wrongful propaganda and those involved will find themselves labeled Terrorist.

[Dec 15, 2019] Haftar's "eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA), backed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, France, Russia and Turkey".

Dec 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

vk , Dec 13 2019 18:31 utc | 83

@ Posted by: Clueless Joe | Dec 13 2019 18:09 utc | 80

I agree.

But that doesn't change the fact that the UK is a degenerating former empire in denial about its condition.

--//--

Now, on a more important subject:

Haftar announces 'decisive battle' to take Libyan capital

The interesting info here is that the article states Haftar's "eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA), backed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, France, Russia and Turkey".

karlof1 , Dec 13 2019 18:11 utc | 81

The NATO rift between Turkey and its other members has escalated with the Evil Outlaw US Empire's Senate voting to recognize the Armenian Genocide and Greece to help the LNA (Bengazi gov't) defend against Turkish shipments of militia/terrorists and weapons to the besieged GNA in Tripoli. This site is very helpful and up-to-date regarding what's occurring. And this PDF Briefing Paper is very good and quite detailed.

All of the above's added to the tense situation around Cyprus, Turkey's threat to close Incirlik, and Greek offers to house those NATO facilities. It increasingly looks like the Turkish S-400s are aimed at Greece and NATO.

/div>

Viking guy at 40
"Today we are not members of the EU, but all the "regulations" are forced upon us anyway. The EU is a non-democratic nightmare that must be demolished."
Absolutely. The EU is the 2nd biggest imperialist asshole on the block, benefitting from the fact that 1st place is taken by the USA, which is far more blatant, in-your-face and universally obnoxious when at it, and doing it even to the EU. The EU not being the ultimate superpower, it can't bully the US or China and only does it when dealing with lesser powers. That's why it's practically impossible for anyone living inside a major EU-member to actually notice and be aware of the typical EU behaviour: to crush any lesser country and to force it to abide by its very own rules, whether independent countries want it or not.
That the EU is that bad should have been clear and obvious to all during the Greek crisis, but most Europhiles prefer to think this was just an accident, due to some bad apples, and that "If only the Czar knew", this wouldn't happen. Well, UK is going to get hit badly with the future deal, because an imperalist neo-liberal power like the EU - just like the US, but most of the time without the military part of it - can only crush any opposition and make an example out of it.
If the EU were a truly democratic endeavour, they would allow at least popular referendum at EU-wide level, and possibly even initiatives, for starter. The way it works, the people have no checks on it. Not a bit surprise though, most of its core members function this un-democratic way.

Viking guy at 40
"Today we are not members of the EU, but all the "regulations" are forced upon us anyway. The EU is a non-democratic nightmare that must be demolished."
Absolutely. The EU is the 2nd biggest imperialist asshole on the block, benefitting from the fact that 1st place is taken by the USA, which is far more blatant, in-your-face and universally obnoxious when at it, and doing it even to the EU. The EU not being the ultimate superpower, it can't bully the US or China and only does it when dealing with lesser powers. That's why it's practically impossible for anyone living inside a major EU-member to actually notice and be aware of the typical EU behaviour: to crush any lesser country and to force it to abide by its very own rules, whether independent countries want it or not.
That the EU is that bad should have been clear and obvious to all during the Greek crisis, but most Europhiles prefer to think this was just an accident, due to some bad apples, and that "If only the Czar knew", this wouldn't happen. Well, UK is going to get hit badly with the future deal, because an imperalist neo-liberal power like the EU - just like the US, but most of the time without the military part of it - can only crush any opposition and make an example out of it.
If the EU were a truly democratic endeavour, they would allow at least popular referendum at EU-wide level, and possibly even initiatives, for starter. The way it works, the people have no checks on it. Not a bit surprise though, most of its core members function this un-democratic way.

[Dec 15, 2019] The Washington Post Opinion page: If you don't agree with us, you must be a Russian asset

Dec 15, 2019 | twitter.com

Nathan Brand ‏ 3:00 PM - 8 Dec 2019

The Washington Post Opinion page: If you don't agree with us, you must be a Russian asset

[Dec 15, 2019] Former CIA Spook Eric Holder Just Revealed That The Deep State Is Running Scared by Greg Hunter

We will see... I am skeptical about idea that Brennan will be indicted.
But this article supports the idea that impeachment was a counterattack of Brannan faction of CIA and Clinton mafia against Barr and Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... Former CIA officer and counter-intelligence expert Kevin Shipp says that former Obama Administration Attorney General (AG) Eric Holder gave a big Deep State panic signal when he wrote in an Op-Ed last week in the Washington Post trashing current AG William Barr and his top prosecutor John Durham ..."
"... We have to understand it was Eric Holder that Barack Obama used to target the heads of corporations that spoke out publicly about Barack Obama. We know Holder was held in 'Contempt of Congress.' He spied on AP reporters, ran guns to drug cartels and blacked out the information. He spied on over a hundred journalists, and on and on we go... ..."
"... when Holder comes out and puts out this bombshell in the Washington Post, which is another indication that indictments are coming. John Brennan, former Obama Administration CIA Director, is going to be at the top of the list. " ..."
"... during the entire Trump Presidency, the mainstream media (MSM) has operated as a propaganda arm of the Deep State and the Democrats ..."
"... Shipp says the hoax of Russia collusion and the impeachment sham of President Trump is distracting us from other very big problems such as the extreme debt the country and the world is facing . Shipp says, ..."
Dec 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Via Greg Hunter's USAWatchdog.com,

Former CIA officer and counter-intelligence expert Kevin Shipp says that former Obama Administration Attorney General (AG) Eric Holder gave a big Deep State panic signal when he wrote in an Op-Ed last week in the Washington Post trashing current AG William Barr and his top prosecutor John Durham. Shipp explains,

"This is very significant. We all remember that Holder was Obama's right hand man. Eric Holder was Barack Obama's enforcer. The fact that Holder comes out this quickly after the Inspector General (IG) Horowitz Report comes out... and makes this veiled threat against Durham's reputation. The fact that Eric Holder came out and made this statement is a clear indication to me they are running scared.

We have to understand it was Eric Holder that Barack Obama used to target the heads of corporations that spoke out publicly about Barack Obama. We know Holder was held in 'Contempt of Congress.' He spied on AP reporters, ran guns to drug cartels and blacked out the information. He spied on over a hundred journalists, and on and on we go...

They (Deep State) are convinced there are going to be indictments. Secondly, there is AG Barr's outrage over (IG) Horowitz's report and what it did not do. He made statements that there was spying and actions by government officials that need to be criminally looked into. Barr's outrage over this shows me that there are going to be indictments, and that he is taking this seriously. Again, when Holder comes out and puts out this bombshell in the Washington Post, which is another indication that indictments are coming. John Brennan, former Obama Administration CIA Director, is going to be at the top of the list. "

Shipp says during the entire Trump Presidency, the mainstream media (MSM) has operated as a propaganda arm of the Deep State and the Democrats . Shipp contends,

"They put these stories out intentionally because they are creating their own story, and that is what the propaganda mainstream media does. It creates its own story...

They want to frame their latest story that there really wasn't any spying on Trump. That's what FISA warrants and applications are all about. They are all about spying ."

Shipp thinks this will be a big nail in the coffin of the MSM. Shipp says, "The mainstream media will never come back from this..."

"...because finally, through shows like this and others, the real information is coming out as to what the mainstream media has done . At the top of that list is the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC...

What they did is they created the Russia collusion story as if it was reality, as if it was real. That is part of the procedure in doing this. Then, they invented the evidence, and that was the Steele Dossier. They portrayed this as evidence to create this false narrative. Then they sent this story out to each outlet, and all repeat the same story over and over and over again knowing the more they repeat it, the more people were going to believe it. Then, the FBI leaked information to the mainstream media. The FBI took that information leaked to the media and used their stories as evidence. Brennan leaked the dossier to the mainstream media as part of this whole machine."

Shipp says the hoax of Russia collusion and the impeachment sham of President Trump is distracting us from other very big problems such as the extreme debt the country and the world is facing . Shipp says,

"Trump inherited a financial monster that was not his doing. When he was sworn into office, it already existed. It is very serious, and I think now or very soon the U.S. government will not be able to afford the interest on the national debt, much less paying off the debt itself."

It is reported that central banks are buying record amounts of gold, and even Goldman Sachs is telling its clients to buy the yellow metal. Shipp says,

" This is a solid indicator that we are headed for the financial rapids with Goldman Sachs especially. Goldman Sachs is a global bank, and it's one of the main banks in the United States. The fact that Sachs and others are building up gold reserves is a clear indication that they expect a financial downturn, to put it mildly, that is coming. "

Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with former CIA Officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bEzLeqnSbf0

To Donate to USAWatchdog.com Click Here

_triplesix_ , 1 minute ago link

Wake me when someone goes to jail.

jm , 2 minutes ago link

I kinda think that everyone is holding off to see if Trump gets re-elected.

If he does then there will be indictments, jail time, and a real cleaning of the house.

The guys in the middle of this investigation depose the "liberal" old guard and offer sacrifices to their own "conservative" god of filth. Same Mammon, just a different order of worship.

If he doesn't get re-elected then the guys that are investigating this can just slink back into the current slime and survive in some basic way.

I have seen this dynamic when companies merge as equals. Everybody is afraid to act because the stakes are so high. It's a chess game played by ruthless cowards.

[Dec 15, 2019] The current system of unlimited domestic spying on population which reminds STASI was built by both parties

Dec 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

In case of Page it was much worse the Glenn Greenwald claims. The most probably scenario that he was directed to join Trump compain and then to contact Russian government so that this false flag operatin can be used for establishing surveillance. Why they need to establish surveillance on CIA/FBI informant? Because he called people they really wanted to survail.

IG Report On FBI Spying Exposes Scandal Of Historic Magnitude For US Media Glenn Greenwald

IG Report On FBI Spying Exposes "Scandal Of Historic Magnitude" For US Media

by Tyler Durden Sat, 12/14/2019 - 13:30 0 SHARES

Authored by Glenn Greenwald via The Intercept,

Just as was true when the Mueller investigation closed without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, Wednesday's issuance of the long-waited report from the Department of Justice's Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds .

Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI's gross abuse of its power – its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.

If you don't consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that's what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.

In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It's brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.

Just a few excerpts from the report should suffice to end any debate for rational persons about how damning it is. The focus of the first part of the IG Report was on the warrants obtained by the DOJ, at the behest of the FBI, to spy on Carter Page on the grounds that there was probable cause to believe he was an agent of the Russian government. That Page was a Kremlin agent was a widely disseminated media claim – typically asserted as fact even though it had no evidence. As a result of this media narrative, the Mueller investigation examined these widespread accusations yet concluded that "the investigation did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."

The IG Report went much further, documenting a multitude of lies and misrepresentations by the FBI to deceive the FISA court into believing that probable cause existed to believe Page was a Kremlin agent. The first FISA warrant to spy on Page was obtained during the 2016 election, after Page had left the Trump campaign but weeks before the election was to be held.

About the warrant application submitted regarding Page, the IG Report, in its own words, "found that FBI personnel fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are 'scrupulously accurate.'" Specifically, "we identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed."

It's vital to reiterate this because of its gravity: we identified multiple instances in which factual assertions relied upon in the first FISA application were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.

The specifics cited by the IG Report are even more damning. Specifically, "based upon the information known to the FBI in October 2016, the first application contained [] seven significant inaccuracies and omissions." Among those "significant inaccuracies and omissions": the FBI concealed that Page had been working with the CIA in connection with his dealings with Russia and had notified CIA case managers of at least some of those contacts after he was "approved as an 'operational contact'" with Russia; the FBI lied about both the timing and substance of Page's relationship with the CIA; vastly overstated the value and corroboration of Steele's prior work for the U.S. Government to make him appear more credible than he was; and concealed from the court serious reasons to doubt the reliability of Steele's key source.

... ... ..

Among the most significant new acts of deceit was that the FBI "omitted the fact that Steele's Primary Subsource, who the FBI found credible, had made statements in January 2017 raising significant questions about the reliability of allegations included in the FISA applications, including, for example, that he/she did not recall any discussion with Person 1 concerning Wikileaks and there was 'nothing bad' about the communications between the Kremlin and the Trump team, and that he/she did not report to Steele in July 2016 that Page had met with Sechin."

In other words, Steele's own key source told the FBI that Steele was lying about what the source said: an obviously critical fact that the FBI simply concealed from the FISA court because it knew how devastating that would be to being able to continue to spy on Page. As the Report put it, "among the most serious of the 10 additional errors we found in the renewal applications was the FBI's failure to advise [DOJ] or the court of the inconsistences, described in detail in Chapter Six, between Steele and his Primary Sub-source on the reporting relied upon in the FISA applications."

The IG Report also found that the FBI hid key information from the court about Steele's motives: for instance, it "omitted information obtained from [Bruce] Ohr about Steele and his election reporting, including that (1) Steele's reporting was going to Clinton's presidential campaign and others, (2) [Fusion GPS's Glenn] Simpson was paying Steele to discuss his reporting with the media, and (3) Steele was "desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President."

If it does not bother you to learn that the FBI repeatedly and deliberately deceived the FISA court into granting it permission to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign, then it is virtually certain that you are either someone with no principles, someone who cares only about partisan advantage and nothing about basic civil liberties and the rule of law, or both. There is simply no way for anyone of good faith to read this IG Report and reach any conclusion other than that this is yet another instance of the FBI abusing its power in severe ways to subvert and undermine U.S. democracy. If you don't care about that, what do you care about?

* * * * *

But the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false.

Ever since Trump's inauguration, a handful of commentators and journalists – I'm included among them – have been sounding the alarm about the highly dangerous trend of news outlets not merely repeating the mistake of the Iraq War by blindly relying on the claims of security state agents but, far worse, now employing them in their newsrooms to shape the news. As Politico's media writer Jack Shafer wrote in 2018, in an article entitled "The Spies Who Came Into the TV Studio" :

In the old days, America's top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote their memoirs . One ran for president . Another died a few months after surrendering his post. But today's national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract. Then, several times a week, waits for a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studios where, after a light dusting of foundation and a spritz of hairspray, he takes a supporting role in the anchors' nighttime shows. . . .

[T]he downside of outsourcing national security coverage to the TV spies is obvious. They aren't in the business of breaking news or uncovering secrets. Their first loyalty -- and this is no slam -- is to the agency from which they hail. Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.

In a perfect television world, the networks would retire the retired spooks from their payrolls and reallocate those sums to the hiring of independent reporters to cover the national security beat. Let the TV spies become unpaid anonymous sources because when you get down to it, TV spies don't want to make news -- they just want to talk about it.

It's long been the case that CIA, FBI and NSA operatives tried to infiltrate and shape domestic news, but they at least had the decency to do it clandestinely. In 2008, the New York Times' David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing a secret Pentagon program in which retired Generals and other security state agents would get hired as commentators and analysts and then – unbeknownst to their networks – coordinate their messaging to ensure that domestic news was being shaped by the propaganda of the military and intelligence communities.

But now it's all out in the open. It's virtually impossible to turn on MSNBC or CNN without being bombarded with former Generals, CIA operatives, FBI agents and NSA officials who now work for those networks as commentators and, increasingly, as reporters.

Congrats to my friend @joshscampbell , CNN's newest national Correspondent. His passion for going where the news is and covering important stories will continue to benefit viewers. pic.twitter.com/j49k0KOzNj

-- Sam Vinograd (@sam_vinograd) November 19, 2019

The past three years of "Russiagate" reporting – for which U.S. journalists have lavished themselves with Pulitzers and other prizes despite a multitude of embarrassing and dangerous errors about the Grave Russian Threat – has relied almost exclusively on anonymous, uncorroborated claims from Deep State operatives (and yes, that's a term that fully applies to the U.S.). The few exceptions are when these networks feature former high-level security state operatives on camera to spread their false propaganda, as in this enduringly humiliating instance:

John Brennan has a lot to answer for -- going before the American public for months, cloaked with CIA authority and openly suggesting he's got secret info, and repeatedly turning in performances like this. pic.twitter.com/EziCxy9FVQ

-- Terry Moran (@TerryMoran) March 25, 2019

All of this has meant that U.S. discourse on these national security questions is shaped almost entirely by the very agencies that are trained to lie: the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the FBI. And their lying has been highly effective.

For years, we were told by the nation's leading national security reporters something that was blatantly false: that the FBI's warrants to spy on Carter Page were not based on the Steele Dossier. GOP Congressman Devin Nunes was widely vilified and mocked by the super-smart DC national security reporters for issuing a report claiming that this was the case. The Nunes memo in essence claimed what the IG Report has corroborated: that embedded within the FBI's efforts to obtain FISA court authorization to spy on Carter Page was a series of misrepresentations, falsehoods and concealment of key evidence:

As the Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi – one of the few left/liberal journalists with the courage and integrity to dissent from the DNC/MSNBC script on these issues – put it in a detailed article :

"Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous ' Nunes memo .'"

That the Page warrant was based on the Steele Dossier was something that the media servants of the FBI and CIA rushed to deny. Did they have any evidence for those denials? That would be hard to believe, given that the FISA warrant applications are highly classified. It seems far more likely that – as usual – they were just repeating what the FBI and CIA (and the pathologically dishonest Rep. Adam Schiff) told them to say, like the good and loyal puppets that they are. But either way, what they kept telling the public – in highly definitive tones – was completely false, as we now know from the IG Report:

Yes. I am telling you the dossier was not used as the basis for a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

-- Shane Harris (@shaneharris) January 12, 2018

New: Two Democratic members of House Intel tell me McCabe did not say dossier was basis of FISA warrant, disputing central claim of #NunesMemo

-- Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) February 2, 2018

Over and over, the IG Report makes clear that, contrary to these denials, the Steele Dossier was indeed crucial to the Page eavesdropping warrant. "We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team's receipt of Steele's election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI's and Department's decision to seek the FISA order," the IG Report explained. A central and essential role .

Just compare the pompous denials from so many U.S. national security reporters at the nation's leading news outlets – that the Page warrant was not based on the Steele Dossier – to the actual truth that we now know :

"in support of the fourth element in the FISA application-Carter Page's alleged coordination with the Russian government on 2016 U.S. presidential election activities, the application relied entirely on the following information from Steele Reports 80, 94, 95, and 102″ (emphasis added).

Indeed, it was the Steele Dossier that led FBI leadership, including Director James Comey and Deputy Diretor Andrew McCabe, to approve the warrant application in the first place despite concerns raised by other agents that the information was unreliable. Explains the IG Report:

FBI leadership supported relying on Steele's reporting to seek a FISA order on Page after being advised of, and giving consideration to, concerns expressed by Stuart Evans, then NSD's Deputy Assistant Attorney General with oversight responsibility over QI, that Steele may have been hired by someone associated with presidential candidate Clinton or the DNC, and that the foreign intelligence to be collected through the FISA order would probably not be worth the 'risk' of being criticized later for collecting communications of someone (Carter Page) who was "politically sensitive."

The narrative manufactured by the security state agencies and laundered by their reliable media servants about these critical matters was a sham, a fraud, a lie. Yet again, U.S. discourse was subsumed by propaganda because the U.S. media and key parts of the security state have decided that subverting the Trump presidency is of such a high priority – that their political judgment outweighs the results of the election – that everything, including outright lying even to courts let alone the public, is justified because the ends are so noble.

As Taibbi put it:

"No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed."

No matter how dangerous you believe the Trump presidency to be, this is a grave threat to the pillars of U.S. democracy, a free press, an informed citizenry and the rule of law.* * * * *

Underlying all of this is another major lie spun over the last three years by the newly-minted media stars and liberal icons from the security state agencies. Ever since the Snowden reporting – indeed, prior to that, when the New York Times' Eric Lichtblau and Jim Risen (now with the Intercept) revealed in 2005 that the Bush-era NSA was illegally spying on U.S. citizens without the warrants required by law – it was widely understood that the FISA process was a rubber-stamping joke, an illusory safeguard that, in reality, offered no real limits on the ability of the U.S. Government to spy on its own citizens. Back in 2013 at the Guardian, I wrote a long article , based on Snowden documents, revealing what an empty sham this process was.

But over the last three years, the strategy of Democrats and liberals – particularly their cable outlets and news sites – has been to venerate and elevate security state agents as the noble truth-tellers of U.S. democracy. Once-reviled-by-liberal sites such as Lawfare – composed of little more than pro-NSA and pro-FBI apparatchiks – gained mainstream visibility for the first time on the strength of a whole new group of liberals who decided that the salvation of U.S. democracy lies not with the political process but with the dark arts of the NSA, the FBI and the CIA.

Sites like Lawfare – led by Comey-friend Benjamin Wittes and ex-NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey – became Twitter and cable news stars and used their platform to resuscitate what had been a long-discredited lie: namely, that the FISA process is highly rigorous and that the potential for abuse is very low. Liberals, eager to believe that the security state agencies opposed to Trump should be trusted despite their decades of violent lawlessness and systemic lying, came to believe in the sanctity of the NSA and the FISA process.

The IG Report obliterates that carefully cultivated delusion. It lays bare what a sham the whole FISA process is, how easy it is for the NSA and the FBI to obtain from the FISA court whatever authorization it wants to spy on any Americans they want regardless of how flimsy is the justification. The ACLU and other civil libertarians had spent years finally getting people to realize this truth, but it was wiped out by the Trump-era veneration of these security state agencies.

In an excellent article on the fallout from the IG Report , the New York Times' Charlie Savage, long one of the leading journalistic experts on these debates, makes clear how devastating these revelations are to this concocted narrative designed to lead Americans to trust the FBI and NSA's eavesdropping authorities :

At more than 400 pages, the study amounted to the most searching look ever at the government's secretive system for carrying out national-security surveillance on American soil. And what the report showed was not pretty.

The Justice Department's independent inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, and his team uncovered a staggeringly dysfunctional and error-ridden process in how the F.B.I. went about obtaining and renewing court permission under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

"The litany of problems with the Carter Page surveillance applications demonstrates how the secrecy shrouding the government's one-sided FISA approval process breeds abuse," said Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project. "The concerns the inspector general identifies apply to intrusive investigations of others, including especially Muslims, and far better safeguards against abuse are necessary."

His exposé left some former officials who generally defend government surveillance practices aghast.

"These errors are bad," said David Kris, an expert in FISA who oversaw the Justice Department's National Security Division in the Obama administration. "If the broader audit of FISA applications reveals a systematic pattern of errors of this sort that plagued this one, then I would expect very serious consequences and reforms" .

Civil libertarians for years have called the surveillance court a rubber stamp because it only rarely rejects wiretap applications. Out of 1,080 requests by the government in 2018, for example, government records showed that the court fully denied only one.

Defenders of the system have argued that the low rejection rate stems in part from how well the Justice Department self-polices and avoids presenting the court with requests that fall short of the legal standard. They have also stressed that officials obey a heightened duty to be candid and provide any mitigating evidence that might undercut their request. . . .

But the inspector general found major errors, material omissions and unsupported statements about Mr. Page in the materials that went to the court. F.B.I. agents cherry-picked the evidence, telling the Justice Department information that made Mr. Page look suspicious and omitting material that cut the other way, and the department passed that misleading portrait onto the court.

This system of unlimited domestic spying was built by both parties, which only rouse themselves to object when the power lies in the other side's hands. Just last year, the vast majority of the GOP caucus joined with a minority of Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff to hand President Trump all-new domestic spying powers while blocking crucial reforms and safeguards to prevent abuse. The spying machinery that Edward Snowden risked his life and liberty to expose always has been, and still is, a bipartisan creation.

Perhaps these revelations will finally lead to a realization about how rogue, and dangerous, these police state agencies have become, and how urgently needed is serious reform. But if nothing else, it must serve as a tonic to the three years of unrelenting media propaganda that has deceived and misled millions of Americans into believing things that are simply untrue.

None of these journalists have acknowledged an iota of error in the wake of this report because they know that lying is not just permitted but encouraged as long as it pleases and vindicates the political beliefs of their audiences . Until that stops, credibility and faith in journalism will never be restored, and – despite how toxic it is to have a media that has no claim on credibility – that despised status will be fully deserved.

... ... ...

Great Deceivah2 , 6 minutes ago link

((((Glenn Greenwald))) via The Intercept,

The former (((Guardian))) "journalist" *** libtard Joo who lives in Brazil with his boyfriend, is going to tell us the truth about the (((FBI))) and the (((Deep State)))????

LOL

The (((Intercept))) has already ratted out at least one whistleblower to the Deep State, so be careful on who do you believe in..

https://www.mintpressnews.com/bad-track-record-gets-worse-new-whistleblower-outed-intercept/239822/

Xena fobe , 7 minutes ago link

MSM news never was trustworthy. At least not in my lifetime.

Soloamber , 10 minutes ago link

Don't wait for an apology from a cult . Simply shut them off .

How many businesses can get away with routinely lying to their customers .

For those die hard cult members you can say anything . Hello CNN , MSNBC , ABC .

Even FOX causes a gag reflex at times . Way too much preachy " info news " .

The format doesn't allow of these stations balanced or complete discussion .

I am sick of these people cutting off panelists . Anyone going on those shows better be able to say what they want in about

20 seconds .

Darracq , 53 minutes ago link

The most important point of the FISA abuse for surveillance authorization of 4 US citizens was for the purpose of collateral surveillance of all of their contacts with the Trump campaign, transition and White House

CashMcCall , 1 hour ago link

This story ain't got any legs at all...

Reality_checkers , 1 hour ago link

It's not a story, it's an insane rant by emotional cripple Glenn Greenwald.

Asoka_The_Great , 56 minutes ago link

Don't be fooled. Glenn Greenwald is one of those US Dark State/Mi6 operative, masquerade as a "journalist".

He here to fool the potential whistleblowers to come to him, so they will be disappeared into the CIA dungeons.

devnickle , 48 minutes ago link

So telling the truth makes you a tool?

I feel sorry for you.

Asoka_The_Great , 32 minutes ago link

He just trying to gain some credibility, not telling the Truth.

vienna_proxy , 1 hour ago link

investigate the 17 intel agencies that unanimously said Russia 'meddled' in the 2016 election. if they lied for political gain, then they are traitors for trying to start a war with Russia that endangers all Americans

Fluff The Cat , 1 hour ago link

I honestly don't care either way. The entire system is corrupt and overrun with Zionists from top to bottom, including of course the MSM. All this theater of a witch hunt against Trump is for show; in reality they're all on the same page, playing the American public for fools. That's why nothing significant ever changes no matter who gets into office. Always more wars for faux-Israel and the MIC, staged coups and proxy wars abroad, more regulatory capture, the national debt skyrocketing into oblivion, no border security, special privileges for a (((chosen few))) which violate Constitutional law, massive bailouts at taxpayers' expense, and on it goes.

CogitoMan , 1 hour ago link

I did not waste my time reading it all. Just skimmed few paragraphs to confirm that all of this was known to everybody long time ago.

To me the basic question is why Trump is a such *****. He should fire long time ago 3/4 of CIA, FBI, Justice Department and many other three letter government employers. He has full right as a president to do this. If he doesn't do that they eventually will destroy him.

Instead he is pussying around those grave issues and nobody gets punished for high crimes they committed. He is just tweeting crap that bear no consequences to anybody.

This is the best chance he's got to drain the swamp. But I am pretty sure swamp will stink for a long time after he is gone. In short, he is sissy unable to do the job he promised to do to the people who voted for him.

Damn loser!

[Dec 15, 2019] Calling Afghanistan a military failure is a bit like calling 9/11 an intelligence failure

Dec 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Paul Damascene , Dec 16 2019 0:29 utc | 17

Shaun @ 2:
Another article by Kit Knightly at the Off-Guardian goes to the heart of the point I see you making:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/12/15/the-afghanistan-papers-deep-state-narrative-management/

It's a bit like calling 9/11 an intelligence failure. First, identify the actual measure of success against which this outcome should really be judged...

An excerpt:

"Here's the real "secret history" of the Afganistan war: It wasn't a failure, it was a success. In every facet, on every front, Afghanistan is exactly what America needed it to be. They dripfeed in the blood of young Americans, they destroy 100,000s of Afghan lives, and they reap the rewards they always intended to reap:
The permanent slow-simmer conflict gives them an excuse to keep thousands of US military personnel in a country which borders Iran, Pakistan AND China. (Not to mention a host of ex-Soviet states).

It keeps military expenditure nice and high, so Congressman, ex-generals and everyone else on the boards of Boeing or Lockheed Martin get great big bonuses every year.

They have sole access to the rare-Earth elements and other vital metals in the Afghan mountains. Lithium, most importantly of all.

They have control of the world's opium industry. A vital cog in the relations of the US intelligence agencies, and organised crime. It's essentially reverse money-laundering – turning tax-payer funds into dark money that can be spent hiring mercenaries, organising assassinations, arranging coups or simply be stolen.

They have access to all the "radicalised" young men they could ever want. A little Jihadi farm, where "terrorists" can be named, trained and sent off to fight proxy wars in Syria, or spread fear and chaos in the West."

[Dec 14, 2019] Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation

Highly recommended!
Clapper and Brennan will be shaking in their boots after watching Barr's interview: done in "bad faith" = SEDITION !!!! Deep State operatives...ie, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Stork, Lisa, McCabe, should be held accountable. Obama should probably be impeached.
The hard fact is, that the top of the FBI knew, in advance, that the "dossier" was just bs invented by Russian liars, for money, to be used as political lies for kilary's campaign. It Wasn't evidence and Comey knew far in advance of crossfire hurricane. I can't see less than 20 years in comey's future. That same includes barak, brennan and clapper, who were all informed, willing accomplices in this crime.
10:30 Whoever in FBI that intentionally misled the court using the Steele dossier knowing that the dossier was "total rubbish" as Barr states, needs to be inditing immediately. Why we are continuing to investigate instead of inditimg while continuing to investigate. Until these people are held accountable I don't think our country will begin to heal and media and others apologize to the country for the damage they have done.
7:49 - "Comey refused to sign back up for his security clearance, and therefore couldn't be questioned about classified matters." Well now, isn't that interesting. Haven't heard that one before.
Dec 14, 2019 | www.youtube.com

In an exclusive interview, Attorney General William Barr spoke to NBC News' Pete Williams about the findings on the Justice Department Inspector General's report on the Russia investigation and his criticisms of the FBI.

grabir01 , 3 days ago

It appears that none of AG Barr's answers were what Pete Williams wanted to hear.

Gary Ellis , 2 days ago

I sincerely hope that the Durham investigation brings people to justice for what they have done to our country.

greg j , 2 days ago

The man just admitted "this may be the biggest conspiracy in U.S Political History." Ouch!

Jeremy Elice , 3 days ago

Shame we didn't get to see Pete William's face during Barr's answer accusing "an irresponsible press of fanning the flames."

JOHN DRUMHELLER , 2 days ago

Here's the adult in the room. Look out children.

Hart , 1 day ago

This is like if Watergate was on steroids and then some. Everyone involved should be prosecuted including the person who bought the dossier

Russell McAfee , 1 day ago (edited)

The FBI never got the actual DNC server. Crowdstrike has it. The FBI got a 'forensic copy'

Richard McLeod , 1 day ago

The FBI has now been proven to be corrupt at its' highest levels.

King Eris , 1 day ago

I could listen to AG Barr talk for hours. He's so calm and professional.

Noble Victory , 1 day ago

Barr is so intelligent and just. He's smoothe like the way he plays the Bagpipes. Pretty amazing! 🇺🇸👍

Nolan Gleason , 3 days ago

Death to the swamp

ctafrance , 1 day ago

The press is hopelessly corrupt. If we didn't know it already, this interview proves it.

Roman King , 1 day ago (edited)

I'm So glade we have a competent attorney General pushing back on the massive disinformation narrative that comes from Giant News outlets of which are used to being unchallenged, unchecked by today's "journalistic standards"

Clarion Call , 2 days ago

I so respect and admire this man's brain and logical thinking. His vocabulary is great as well.

wkcw1 , 2 days ago

NBC realizing they need to take a bath on this whole thing. Probably a bit too late now.

barbandrob1 , 1 day ago

Barr just basically clarified and justified Fox news reporting over the last 2 years.. Thanks NBC

Faris Hamarneh , 3 days ago

I love Barr's nonchalant style. But this is real big and heads are going to roll

Craig Bigelow , 2 days ago

Obama spied on Trump. Obama should have known about the FISA warrant!

Luis Santiago , 1 day ago

so this guy really asked Bahr"why not open an investigation even with little evidence?" because is a violation of civil liberties to invade the privacy of law abiding citizens. You need compelling evidence for something so huge

macfan128 , 1 day ago

17:44 "Why should the Attorney General care that the FBI was spying on a presidential candidate?" LOLOLOLOL Our media is a jooooooooke.

David , 3 days ago

NBC did a straight up interview??? This is shocking. Who told them that they could start doing journalism again?

Bill the Cat , 2 days ago

Clapper and Brennan will be shaking in their boots after watching Barr's interview.

Alan Sullivan , 1 day ago

Horowitz should be instructed to edit or update his Report to discuss The Question of Bias and Evidence of Bias. He has clearly misguided Americans with his choice of words and has omitted important facts underpinning bias.

MegaTrucker65 , 1 day ago

I haven't looked into Ukraine YET.

Gamer John3:18 , 1 day ago

AG Barr is an outstanding role model, a man of integrity and wisdom, calm in a raging political storm. I have full confidence he will make those who fabricated evidence and hid exculpatory evidence finally face justice. AG Barr for President 2024!

Yo Mama , 2 days ago

Barr is a straight shooter and I love it. It sounds like we will get to the real truth eventually through Durhams investigation I just hope it doesnt take another year to get to the prosecutions.

Direbear Coat , 1 day ago

So, I watched the interview... The video is called, "Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation." Not once did I hear him criticize the I.G.'s report. In fact, A.G. Barr clarified that the I.G.'s report was limited in scope because of the limitations put on the I.G. He said that the report was appropriate.

Wolverines Fight , 1 day ago

It's scary to see how powerful the corruption of the Democratic Party has grown. It represents a serious threat to all our personal freedom. The Democratic Party has to be stopped.

Benny .Burmeister Jørgensen , 3 days ago

Ok after watching this interview its quite clear that Barr and Durham is going after these criminals and people are going to jail. Maybe there is hope for US yet becuase this dane consider US atm a banana republic. Spying on political candidates? Forging documents? You FBI behaving like Stalins secret police. Lets see what happen.

Mike Dorsey , 1 day ago

God Bless Bill Barr. I'm glad there's still some adults in government that will speak their mind intelligently, rationally and unabashedly.

protochris , 1 day ago

This guy is brilliant; he's clearly exposing the FBI and the barking dogs on the alphabet networks.

Dan Kuo , 1 day ago

Amazing for the AG to go in deep into enemy territory at the heart of the opposition media to lay out a case for the criminal activities that undermined our country prior to and after the 2016 election. The deep state is trembling at the prospect of being held accountable after all the facts are laid out to the american people that these activities cannot be brushed aside or swept under the carpet if we are to continue as a country.

Jbyrd Texas , 2 days ago

The corrupt media is trying to act like they have not been involved in this treasonous scam since the beginning working directly with the treasonous cabal. The media has been lying and pushing fake news for 3 years calling Trump a Russia agent and called him treasonous. I knew the whole time that they were lying there was evidence from day one that this was all lies and if I can see that from the public then they can definitely see that from the inside they are purposefully lying.

Stephan Coutts , 1 day ago

I dare anyone on here to research Barr's History back to his involvement in the assignation of JFK, the cover up, defending Nixon, Epstein, and many other illegal and immoral activities. After reviewing the evidence, I walked away believing that Barr is trying to cover up his tracks so he does do jail time. No need to reply. Either take my dare or not. God Bless America and ALL her people, Stephan

Worlds Best Metal Detectorist , 2 days ago

The public are sick of waiting . I find myself skipping through a half hour news show in 5 minutes flat looking for arrests ,whereas before I was rivited to every minute of the half hour show but it goes on and on and at the there is Nothiing .The Democrats are the masters , it's obvious . If they break the law they get off scott free . If you are republican wave bye bye , you will be in jail for years . America is not the free and fair country it is all cracked up to be . It is corrupted by the democrats who have peoiple in high places that thwart real justice.

Right Thinking , 3 days ago

Mifsud approached George! Who was Mifsud working for (western asset) and why did he approach George? He’s the one who offered George dirt on Hill. Then invited him to meet the fake “niece”, of Putin, in England! What about this information? Someone set George up to make this happen outside the US, because of EO 12333. It had to happen outside the US so they could go to the fisa court!

dethtrk Jones , 3 days ago

I dont trust Christopher Wrey. He keeps slow-walking all the FBI documents and declassifications. He also fights judicial watch and judges that rule in their favor and continue not giving over what is ordered! This last judge was ready to hold him in contempt for refusing to cooperate with court ordered documents.

Brad Brown , 2 days ago

Why did the FBI continue to investigate Trump after January when the case collapsed? To try and find a way to impeach Trump. Remember the Washington Post headlined article right after the inauguration "The effort to impeach President Donald John Trump is already underway." The FBI "insurance" policy was essential!

[Dec 14, 2019] Warmongeing is the national sport for the neoliberal elite in the USA

As Tony Kevin reported (watch-v=dJiS3nFzsWg) at one small fundraiser Bill Clinton made an interesting remark. He said that the USA should always have enemies. That's absolutely true, this this is a way to unite such a society as we have in the USA. probably the only way. And Russia simply fits the bill. Very convenient bogeyman.
Notable quotes:
"... The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium. ..."
Dec 14, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

Twolfe , 10 Dec 2019 16:30

One aspect of this report in the NYT is very troubling but not a great surprise to those who pay attention to Asian affairs.

The reports that US military leaders had no idea of what to do in Afghanistan and constantly lied to the public should rouse citizens in America to take a different view of military leaders. That view must be to trust nothing coming from the Pentagon or from spokespersons for the military. Included must be any and all secretaries of defence, and all branches of the military.

It is totally unacceptable that 1-2 trillion dollars and several thousand lives were spent by America for some nebulous cause. This does not include many thousands of civilians.

During the Vietnam disaster, it became obvious that American military was lying to the public and taking many causalities in an unwinnable war. Nothing was learned about Asia or Asian culture because America entered Afghanistan without a real plan and no understanding of the country or it's history.

The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium.

[Dec 14, 2019] An Amazon surveillance device in your child's bedroom, what could possibly go wrong?

Dec 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

notabanker , December 13, 2019 at 6:02 pm

An Amazon surveillance device in your child's bedroom, what could possibly go wrong?

I'm past the point of blaming big tech companies. If you are fool enough to pay money to do this, you deserve what you get. American Idiots.

[Dec 14, 2019] We Just Got a Rare Look at National Security Surveillance. It Was Ugly

NYT fails to state that the most plausible scenario was that CIA send Page to join Trump campaign, then to establish contacts with Russians and after that obtain FICA warrants in a typical false flag operation manner. Essentially Trump campaign was entrapped.
Dec 14, 2019 | www.msn.com

First, when agents initially sought permission for the wiretap, F.B.I. officials scoured information from confidential informants and selectively presented portions that supported their suspicions that Mr. Page might be a conduit between Russia and the Trump campaign's onetime chairman, Paul Manafort.

But officials did not disclose information that undercut that allegation -- such as the fact that Mr. Page had told an informant in August 2016 that he "never met" or "said one word" to Mr. Manafort, who had never returned Mr. Page's emails. Even if the investigators did not necessarily believe Mr. Page, the court should have been told what he had said.

Second, as the initial court order was nearing its expiration and law-enforcement officials prepared to ask the surveillance court to renew it, the F.B.I. had uncovered information that cast doubt on some of its original assertions. But law enforcement officials never reported that new information to the court.

Specifically, the application included allegations about Mr. Page contained in a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose research was funded by Democrats. In January 2017, the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Steele's own primary source, and he contradicted what Mr. Steele had written in the dossier.

The source for Mr. Steele may, of course, have been lying. But either way, officials should have flagged the disconnect for the court. Instead, the F.B.I. reported that its agents had met with the source to "further corroborate" the dossier and found him to be "truthful and cooperative," leaving a misleading impression in renewal applications.

Finally, the report stressed Mr. Page's long history of meeting with Russian intelligence officials. But he had also said that he had a relationship with the C.I.A., and it turns out that he had for years told the agency about those meetings -- including one that was cited in the wiretap application as a reason to be suspicious of him.

That relationship could have mitigated some suspicions about his history. But the F.B.I. never got to the bottom of it, and the court filings said nothing about Mr. Page's dealings with the C.I.A.

The inspector general's report contains many more examples of errors and omissions. Mr. Horowitz largely blamed lower-level F.B.I. agents charged with preparing the evidence, but he also faulted high-level supervisors for permitting a culture in which the inaccuracies took place.

[Dec 14, 2019] Who trust preliminary pools? The 2016 polls were being fixed for Clinton to create a bandwagon effect. That's why she was 90% sure to be elected.

Dec 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

EliteCommInc. , says: December 10, 2019 at 11:18 pm GMT

We are operating in a cloud at the moment. And despite the fact that the impeachment is nonsensical and maliscious, i think ie has an impact on people immediate senses.

I agree that we have a long ways to go and that this remains the president's election to lose. It would have been helpful if he had diligently governed. And really pressed the domestic issues forcing the democrats to defend all the positions the country dislikes, but that can still come into play.

In some ways, I think the president likes the drama

laugh.

And campaigning is going to be a very different front. That is the transition that i wish had been faster. From politician to administrator of policy.

Curmudgeon , says: December 11, 2019 at 12:04 am GMT
@Realist Agreed.
What is not shown, is where the polls were taken. Urban USA votes Democrat, rural USA votes Republican. This article from 2016 made the most sense of anything I'd seen
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/
The 2016 polls were being fixed for Clinton to create a bandwagon effect. That's why she was 90% sure to be elected. These polls will be irrelevant because, as Jeff Rense predicted well over a year ago, Clinton will run and be the nominee.
216 , says: • Website December 11, 2019 at 12:33 am GMT
@Anonymous The best scenario for the GOP next year:

1. Economy is doing well, labor participation ticks up 1-2 points. Wage growth continues

2. Divisive Dem primary, brokered convention, unenthusiastic running mate like Deval Patrick

3. Turnout drops

4. No eruptions of "war on women" talk from the GOP, the socon crazy uncle is safely kept in the attic

5. China decides that Trump has a shot of re-election, agrees to a trade deal, this provides a psychological boost in the Midwest

6. Trump moderates on fiscal policy, also moderates on temperment.

Peripatetic Commenter , says: December 11, 2019 at 12:34 am GMT
@Corvinus

He has not built a wall,

He has built more wall than the last three presidents and is on track to have one fully built by November next year. He has also reduced the amount of illegal immigration into the US.

he signed a law that granted tax cuts for the wealthy,

If you want to bring money back into the country where it can do some good, you have to reduce taxes. In any event, he also cut taxes for the not so well off.

he engaged in a quid pro quo

Which QPQ? Ohhh, you mean getting Ukraine to follow up on the terms of the mutual-assistance treaty between the US and Ukraine to investigate corruption instigated by US politicians.

and he lies repeatedly.

Projection. You lie far more than he does.

A123 , says: December 11, 2019 at 12:37 am GMT
@Corvinus We have more wall built under Trump than Obama. We have had more immigration enforcement (ICE activity) under Trump than Obama. We all want more, better, faster .. However, Trump has been limited by the Deep State left.

As a practical matter -- Trump will be infinitely better than the anti-Christian, Globalist, racist, Soros-funded, DNC candidate. Voters understand this, and that will be more clear once the campaign becomes one-on-one.

The anti-Jew, White Nationalist & Muslim voters knew about Trump's family before the last election. And, they voted against him. However, the leftist WN movement is small & the leftist Muslim movement is smaller. They can not move the needle in U.S. elections

John Arthur , says: December 11, 2019 at 1:31 am GMT
@LoutishAngloQuebecker Exactly, I feel like other non whites would support the GOP if they made themselves the party of White Civilization, which is why they are all here in the United States.
Instead the Republican Party is for the Financiers and the Warmongers. Even if Republicans were pro-immigration, why would any working class nonwhite support them?

Republicans need to make the explicit argument that a more White America will be better for nonwhites payroll than a less White America. Even Hispanics, Arabs, and Asians can tell that they will do better in a America with Seattle's demographics than Detroit's, and one that wont send their kids to die fighting some random Neocon fetish.

Michael S , says: December 11, 2019 at 1:33 am GMT
This always happens during every primary season. When it's "generic Democrat candidate vs. incumbent Republican", all of the polls say Democrat, but when there is an actual candidate chosen and no other alternatives, the polls all flip.

If 2020 goes 368-170 against Trump, I will eat my hat. In favor of Trump, I wouldn't even be that surprised.

Lot , says: December 11, 2019 at 2:11 am GMT
@houston 1992 72, 80, 84, 88, 08 and 12 were inevitable landslides.

I don't agree on 1960.

Nixon carried 4 Southern states worth 40+ EVs. Liberal HC Lodge would not have.

Nixon won his home state with 32 EVs by 0.5%. Would Lodge have won Cal after beating the home state fav in the primary? Northern liberal Republicans like Lodge lost badly in 44 and 48.

I don't see why Dole would have been stronger than Bush 41.

76? Maybe, but probably not. The public was still in a liberal mood after Vietnam and Watergate. Ford won 40EVs in the NE, Reagan might have been shut out there, as well as losing MI (21) and IL (26). Reagan would have done better than Ford in the South, but enough to make up for doing worse in the midwest and NE? Carter won TN and NC by 10+ points, many other states by 4+.

Lot , says: December 11, 2019 at 2:17 am GMT
@216 " 5. China decides that Trump has a shot of re-election, agrees to a trade deal, this provides a psychological boost in the Midwest"

That's not good for Trump at all.

There's no possible China deal that's as good for the USA and rustbelt voters as no deal + more and heavier China tariffs.

216 , says: • Website December 11, 2019 at 2:30 am GMT
@Lot It's the prisoners dillema

Where both prisoners cooperate, a deal is signed satisfactory to both

Where China bets Trump loses, and Trump wins again, China must capitulate

Where China bets Trump wins, and makes a deal, but Trump loses, China isn't out much and the Dems pocket the win

Where China bets Trump loses, doesnt make a deal, Dems capitulate

clintwestwood , says: December 11, 2019 at 2:37 am GMT
Fuck this is depressing. The daily slander and hate mongering against white men is now a fixture of popular culture and it will only get worse. More great white defendants, more self-righteous and black womxn rambling incoherently about critical theory and how society is insufficiently appreciative of their hair.
Once the left takes full power, American free speech exceptionalism will fall by the wayside. Hate speech restrictions will emerge and anyone that departs from woke orthodoxy will be threatened with criminal liability.

As a zoomer it is hard to feel optimistic about anything

Justvisiting , says: December 11, 2019 at 2:39 am GMT
@Curmudgeon There were two key pieces of analysis needed to understand the 2016 election.

I have seen _no_ articles that explained both of them.

I know of no political analyst that understands both of them.

If you don't get them _both_ right you cannot predict 2020 correctly.

(1) Black turnout. Blacks turned out for Obama in 2008 and 2012. They did not turn out for Hillary in 2016. The Democrats have no candidate that will get 2008/2012 like black turnout numbers. That is one reason they have to be the underdog in 2020 (regardless of "poll numbers") in states like PA, WI, MI that doomed them in 2016.

(2) You need to look at the counties that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and voted for Trump in 2016.
There were a fair number of them. You need to understand where they were and what issues influenced them.
Many of them were rust belt rural areas. The Democrats have no candidate that has anything to offer them but insults.

I just don't see the Democrats learning _anything_ from 2016, so I have to predict this election will be a rerun of 2016.

Trump is still Trump. The Democrats are still the Democrats.

[Dec 14, 2019] There is a huge discrepancy between polls of likely voters and registered voters . Most polls of likely voters show Trump at parity or ahead of the Democrats in swing states. Most polls of registered voters show Trump getting clobbered

Notable quotes:
"... ...My definition of "bad economy" is when there is no debate and no lying statistics that can hide it. ..."
"... The reality was that half the Republican Party was hoping the Russia hoax was true. ..."
"... Trump has abandoned the European Christian ancestral core of the USA and those White Core American voters will repay the favor by abandoning Trump. Trump is a weak coward who wants to flood the USA with nation-wrecking mass legal immigration "in the largest numbers ever." Trump refuses to deport the upwards of 30 million illegal alien invaders in the USA. ..."
"... What did the state by state polls show before the 2016 election? If I remember correctly a landslide for Clinton. I'm no fan of Trump. I voted for a third party candidate in the last election. But I will be casting my vote for Trump in 2020, and not because my opinion of him has improved. ..."
"... The so-called election is nothing more than a poorly prepared Hollywood fantasy movie. ..."
"... America is not a sovereign nation. The elections are just Theater. Democraps, Republicants, Red States, Blue States, Huh? Not one picture of a Christmas Tree, or of Proud Americans holding good jobs, of our cities prosperous, of our Liberty – intact. ..."
"... In 2016 polls predicted that cackling hyena wins. We know how reliable that prediction was. Is there any reason to believe that these predictions are any better? ..."
Dec 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

Tulip , says: December 11, 2019 at 11:53 am GMT

The problem with polling data is that there is a huge discrepancy between polls of "likely voters" and "registered voters". Most polls of "likely voters" show Trump at parity or ahead of the Democrats in swing states. Most polls of "registered voters" show Trump getting clobbered. It's very hard to interpret what the data actually means, plus there is the whole methodological problem around using landlines for polling purposes.

Second, the race is likely to tighten when an actual Democrat becomes the front-runner and secures the nomination, and there is a race to define the candidate negatively or positively. Trump is an incumbent, the economy and the unemployment numbers continue to hold, while clearly the East German Communist party (or whoever is the Minister of Propaganda in charge of our MSM) is continuing to provide exclusively negative coverage.

I'd like to see Sanders get the nomination, because I imagine that overnight the MSM will turn on a dime for Trump when their billionaire owners face the possibility of having to pay their fair share in taxes.

dc.sunsets , says: December 11, 2019 at 2:27 pm GMT
All this is meaningless.

It's kabuki theater. If the Left (the Deep State) gets fully back into power, the S will HTF.

It's a given. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me in the least that this was already war-gamed, and that the vertical, 10 year market rallies (bonds and stocks), coming after a 9 year bear market (2000-2009) and a stunningly vertical 1974/82-2000 moon-shot, will reverse a year from now (+/-) and that the Ruling Class' behavior (doubling down on crushing "Deplorables' Dissent") will combine with rapidly growing economic hardship to set off a very real, very bloody revolution in the USA.

Damn it, what is anyone looking at?!

Run a graph of the DJIA from 1928 to now. Look at the St. Louis Fed's FRED graph of TCMDO (total credit market debt outstanding.) READ Codevilla's essay "Our Revolution's Logic." https://americanmind.org/essays/our-revolutions-logic/

Then try, just try to tell me that a year from now, if Trump wins reelection and the Ruling Elite goes even more to war, or if the Demoncrat gets elected and near-literally unleashes the Dogs of War on MAGA-hat-wearing foes, that we'll all just be hammering our keyboards while sipping coffee like always.

We're heading for a cataclysm, and the election is borderline irrelevant.

LondonBob , says: December 11, 2019 at 5:41 pm GMT
Unless the polls are by Richard Baris or Trafalgar they are utterly worthless.

Trump picks up NH and MN. Should hold almost all the states he held before.

Justvisiting , says: December 11, 2019 at 5:41 pm GMT
@dc.sunsets

It depends on the economy.

...My definition of "bad economy" is when there is no debate and no lying statistics that can hide it.

Charles Pewitt , says: December 11, 2019 at 7:32 pm GMT

Why did the American Revolution occur? Hint: everything you read in the history books was a lie, a complete and utter fabrication. People were well-off. But the colonists revolted anyway.

The sectionalized colonial ruling classes -- especially in Virginia and Massachusetts -- thought they could get a better and bigger deal by exiting the British Empire than by staying in.

Planter class tired of factors in England ripping them off and Massachusetts book people types -- lawyers, merchants, traders etc. -- thinking they'd be better off without any British Empire bean counter middle men around clam raking loot they thought should rightfully be theirs.

Sam Francis gets more and more right the older I get.

It's always about the current ruling class and the potential ruling class.

White Core America is the new ruling class in waiting that will remove the evil and immoral JEW/WASP ruling class of the American Empire from power.

Remember, the JEW/WASP ruling class of the American Empire owns and controls the private consortium of banks called the Federal Reserve Bank.

If the federal funds rate were to go to the normal level of 6 percent, the asset bubbles in stocks and bonds and real estate would implode in ten minutes.

It's all about the JEW/WASP ruling class and monetary policy and demography.

gman , says: December 12, 2019 at 8:46 am GMT
@Audacious Epigone My gut is that either Sanders will win the nomination or it will be a contested convention.

Here's how it could happen:

1. Other candidates fight each other: Other candidates have no incentive to attack Sanders as his base is dedicated to him. Even Joe Biden says "at least Sanders is honest." Thus right now we have a Buttigieg vs. Warren fight.

2. Billionaire backlash: As Bloomberg and billionaires try to stop Sanders, it could backfire on them. With Kamala's resignation, I was honestly surprised it wasn't all race and gender. (The top highlight on her Medium resignation note is "I am not a billionaire"). Cory Booker said the DNC rules were favoring "millionaires and billionaires" and that there were more "billionaires than black people" on the debate stage. Booker and Harris are neoliberal shills IMO. Booker even defended Romney against Bain attacks, so I was surprised to see him meeting Sanders halfway in rhetoric. Kamala may have decided to pull the plug rather than rebuild in part due to Bloomberg's California ad spending.

3. Differing incentives for individual establishment players vs. the establishment overall (e.g. similar to Rubio and Kasich being unable to team up early to stop a Trump victory). What if Warren/Buttigieg/Bloomberg (all of which are well funded) all do okay but not great. Also the calendar is front-end loaded so long as campaigns are completely broke , they might as well stay in.

4. Better than expected turnout for younger groups : The latest Quinnipiac poll has Sanders at 52% within the 18-34 age group. What if turnout impresses in this group. Sanders is also doing well with Hispanics (a group that historically is lower-turnout). Sanders also has the financial resources to help drive turnout.

5 A weakened Biden may not be the windfall the other candidates think it is: Bernie has a pulse with black voters and some Biden voters may actually gravitate to Sanders. Anecdote: I was in an uber recently driven by a older black gentleman and he said he would vote for Biden though noted he really liked Sanders but was concerned given his heart attack.

Of course the key difference is that rather than the winner-take-most system of the GOP, Democrats award delegates proportionally subject to a 15% minimum)

What if California (today's poll is Biden 21, Sanders 20, Warren 17, Buttigieg 9, Yang 6, Bloomberg 5) turns into the following:

Sanders 35, Biden 23, Warren 10, Buttigieg 10, Yang 10, Bloomberg 10, Other 2. Because of the 15% rule, Sanders could end up with a majority of delegates in the largest state. (Note: If some of the 10%ers get 15% in congressional districts, they could still get delegates
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/15-percent-is-not-a-magic-number-for-primary-delegates/ )

One thing I am watching is the UK election today. If Corbyn does well, that could be a positive sign for Sanders.

anon [100] Disclaimer , says: December 12, 2019 at 12:48 pm GMT
@Corvinus

I suspect you're grasping at straws.

He's not. Reality doesn't conform to your political preferences. The US is in an enormous stock market bubble inflated by low interest rates and corporate stock buybacks, among other things. The rich are frightened by Warren and have repeatedly attacked her in the media. Result: she's lost quite a bit of support in recent polls among democrats, likely upperclass whites. The economy is not fundamentally sound, and it hasn't been since before the 2008 housing crash. I could easily see the bubble bursting should she panic the market / bring them back to reality.

Trump ran as a Republican. That doesn't mean he is one.

Everything you just said about Donald Trump applies to Elizabeth Warren. She was once a republican even though she's now running as a democrat. Try again.

America1st , says: December 12, 2019 at 12:55 pm GMT
Democrats and Republicans decried Russian Interference in our Presidential Election Democrats claimed Trump colluded with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton and demanded an investigation.

The FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016 (6 months before the election)

Andrew McCabe a Senior FBI Director selected 3 teams of 24 people to investigate. All 24 people were senior members of the FBI and DOJ.

8 months later another the Mueller Investigation is formed and it goes for 22 months, what did it find?

No proof of collusion by the Trump campaign, but it did find 10 instances where Trump resisted and objected to the instruction and investigation.

The Bureaucracy demands an investigation of the Mueller Investigation, this Horowitz Investigation finds what?

51 Misconduct violations by these Senior FBI employees.
17 "Serious Misconduct Violations" of these Senior FBI employees
4 Individuals who were considered "Informants"
1 "Unlawful Informant" that folks is a spy.

Let's look at Appendix 1 (Woods Process Review) of the Horowitz Report, it finds:

23 instances of undocumented "fact" stated in the 4 FISA applications
18 outright "lies" stated in the 4 FISA applications.

Folks what in taxpayer funds has this cost you and I?

Crossfire Hurricane – 8 month investigation $16.7 million dollars
Mueller Investigation – 22 month investigation $45 million dollars
Horowitz Investigation -12 months $24.5 million dollars.

The Democrats spend $86.2 million dollars to accomplish what?

1. No proof of collusion of President Trump or his people.
2. 3 people arrested and convicted of Tax Evasion crimes that had NOTHING to do with the Investigation or the election.
3. 3 people prosecuted for process lies of which they never would have been involved had this sham investigation not transpired.
4. 34 Nebulous Russians accused of election interference who can never be prosecuted.
5. 10 Senior FBI and DOJ employees, fired, demoted, resigned, retired or reassigned for misconduct.
6. 51 Violations by Senior FBI employees during the Investigations
7. 17 Serious Misconduct violations by Senior FBI and DOJ employees
8. 4 FBI informants "spying" on American citizens
9. 1 Illegal FBI informant spying on American citizens
10. HOW MANY WILL BE PROSECUTED, that remains to be seen.

All of this because a career bureaucrat Hillary Clinton lost an election to a novice politician.

We the taxpayer and American voter must re-elect President Trump and give him a House and Senate who will help him purge the entrenched bureaucracy otherwise known as the Swamp, Deep State or just garbage in Washington DC.

dc.sunsets , says: December 13, 2019 at 2:47 pm GMT
@dc.sunsets From Polybius' Histories , written around 140 BC.

For this evil grew upon us rapidly [1960-1980], and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted [Grindr and Tinder?] to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life [the cult of Celebrity], and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born [only whites play child support], or at most one or two out of a great number, for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury. For when there are only one or two sons, it is evident that, if war or pestilence carries off one, the houses must be left heirless: and, like swarms of bees, little by little the cities become sparsely inhabited and weak. On this subject there is no need to ask the gods how we are to be relieved from such a curse: for any one in the world will tell you that it is by the men themselves if possible changing their objects of ambition; or, if that cannot be done, by passing laws for the preservation of infants. On this subject there is no need of seers or prodigies. And the same holds good of all similar things.

There's nothing new under the sun. We haven't arrived at the End of History. The Shit-storms of the past are not relegated forever to dusty books.

Idiocracy is a movie; it's not a comedy, it's a tragedy. And anyone with a brain can see that as our world moves inexorably toward Idiocracy (due to demographics alone), it will be accompanied by a depopulation of humanity so epic that no poetic representation is possible.

Rebel0007 , says: December 14, 2019 at 5:55 am GMT
This is in large part, Trumps fault for caving to the DNC by not prosecuting them and the Clintons and Clinton Foundation. Due to his taking terrible advice, Trump is now in a defensive position. He had every reason to go on the offense right off the bat. His voters expected it. People wanted the corruption, Civil Rights abuses, and the wars to end. Trump has made matters worse by placing Israel's interests over America's and antagonizing Iran for no reason other than to please Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iran is not a threat to either country, both of which have had a history of threatenning their neighbors.
Anon [361] Disclaimer , says: December 14, 2019 at 6:03 am GMT
@MBlanc46 http://voxday.blogspot.com/2019/10/trumpslide-2020-cometh.html

Trump still has a shot.

Russ , says: December 14, 2019 at 6:10 am GMT
@Colin Wright

Because at some point Biden's handlers have to let him open his mouth, and when that happens, the saliva will run out and start dripping off his chin, and that'll be that.

No Malarkey is already tipping his dementia with every appearance as it is. With Quid Pro Ho' now gone and Quid Pro Homo and Quid Pro NotANavajo ebbing, it'll soon enough be Quid Pro Joe, and once that happens, the Trump squad with its record minimum $/vote in '16 fixates on the 2020 edition of Walter Mondale '84 and off we go.

MarkinLA , says: December 14, 2019 at 7:14 am GMT
@Rebel0007

Trump was boxed in by Ryan, McCain, and Gramnesty. Remember all the threats to impeach if he fired Mueller. The reality was that half the Republican Party was hoping the Russia hoax was true.

Charles Pewitt , says: December 14, 2019 at 3:15 pm GMT
@Audacious Epigone

If blacks don't turn on Biden after Iowa and New Hampshire, they will be with him through the entire primary season, no matter what he says or does.

Biden has Obama to thank for his position as the candidate most likely to successfully combine the AUNT JEMIMA STRATEGY and the GREEDY WHITE GEEZER STRATEGY and the GOVERNMENT WORKER STRATEGY. Biden will have a formidable bloc of voters with those three blocs, and other voters will be quick to fall in line and go with the guy they think can beat Trump.

Obama will not undercut nor undermine Biden in any way. Obama will eat burgers on his new estate on the water on Martha's Vineyard and he'll read books and maybe eat some delicious potato salad made by the nice Methodist ladies at their lovely island spot.

Warren and Buttigieg will wreck each other and Sanders won't be able to bust through to a new level of support and the beautiful Black church ladies don't much care for Warren nor Buttigieg nor Sanders anyhow.

The big story of the Democrat Party presidential primary will be how quickly Biden wraps it up and how quickly the GREEN PARTY surges with supporters who refuse to vote for Biden or the Democrat Party ruling class. Biden could have the nomination wrapped up by March 3.

The big story of the upcoming general election will be the rise of the new political party called WHITE CORE AMERICA.

Trump has abandoned the European Christian ancestral core of the USA and those White Core American voters will repay the favor by abandoning Trump. Trump is a weak coward who wants to flood the USA with nation-wrecking mass legal immigration "in the largest numbers ever." Trump refuses to deport the upwards of 30 million illegal alien invaders in the USA.

Trump has completely capitulated to the globalizers and the financialiers by crawling into bed with the transnationalist free traders on tariffs. The USA must have a tariff system that is somewhere between revenue raising and prohibitive and Trumpy is selling out on trade for a pile of frigging soybeans!

... ... ...

Truthbetold , says: December 14, 2019 at 3:33 pm GMT
What did the state by state polls show before the 2016 election? If I remember correctly a landslide for Clinton. I'm no fan of Trump. I voted for a third party candidate in the last election. But I will be casting my vote for Trump in 2020, and not because my opinion of him has improved. The last three years have revealed how frightening the Democrats and the media are- far worse than I ever imagined. I don't believe I'm alone in this assessment.
Durruti , says: December 14, 2019 at 3:35 pm GMT
Epigone:

Part of it is that Trump is a known quantity. Barring a market collapse, he's at his floor. Though Biden and Sanders are familiar to low-information voters, they've not been fully scrutinized, so both are likely to come down upon getting the nomination if either does.

You have written an article, followed by numerous commenters who join you in ignoring the History of America and its citizens since November 22, 1963.

The so-called election is nothing more than a poorly prepared Hollywood fantasy movie.

America is not a sovereign nation. The elections are just Theater. Democraps, Republicants, Red States, Blue States, Huh? Not one picture of a Christmas Tree, or of Proud Americans holding good jobs, of our cities prosperous, of our Liberty – intact.

Is this Braindead piece of shit by 'Epigone' a sign of things to come on this so-called 'Alternate Media' website?

Huh? Ms. Pocahontis, vs Biden (who with his son has looted the Ukraine), vs. Sanders, the 'socialist' who votes for all military appropriations, and serves a Foreign Power, vs. Casino Trump; do I need a verb?

This article would fit on MSNBC, CNN, or in The New York Times, Wasshington Post, FOX, etc.

Are there none, who dare Love Their Country , and are willing to at least understand that our Yellow Brick Road to Freedom lies in a Revolutionary Struggle to Restore Our Republic , that was assassinated, along with our Last Constitutional President, John F. Kennedy, in a Zionist MOSSAD/CIA Coup D'etat – hail of bullets on November 22, 1963?

Has 9/11 , and the attack on the Liberty been forgotten? Notice: there was not a mention of unperson Tulsi Gabbard . For some reason they do not trust her. She must have refused an implant.

Epigone (whoever she is?) writes about elections that do not exist, candidates that do not exist, an Independent America that is just a Dream, a Distant memory. This article is standard Mainstream Media Crap. Why is it necessary for the/its author to hide her identity? Ms. Maddow; is this you?

We might as well discuss Professional Wrestling. Epigone, Be Gone!

Conclusion:

America is not a Sovereign Nation. We Americans are not Free. We are slaves. We will throw off our chains and regain our Honor, as soon as we realize:

Freedom is not Free! We must Pay for It!

Durruti – for the Anarchist Collective

Curmudgeon , says: December 14, 2019 at 4:18 pm GMT
@houston 1992 You seem to be ignoring the massive vote fraud in Illinois, particularly Chicago, where more votes were cast than there were voters, including lots of the dead ones showing up to vote for Kennedy. Nixon did the honorable thing, not the right thing, by accepting the fraudulent result that would have given him the election.
Agent76 , says: December 14, 2019 at 4:19 pm GMT
"The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do." Joseph Stalin

Who's Afraid of an Open Debate? The Truth About the Commission on Presidential Debates

The Commission on Presidential Debates is a private corporation headed by the former chairmen of the Republican and Democratic parties. The CPD is a duopoly which allows the major party candidates to draft secret agreements about debate arrangements including moderators, debate format and even participants.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1NXhoP5bQ2M?feature=oembed

The 2012 Debates – Memorandum of Understanding Between the Obama and Romney Campaigns

https://publicintelligence.net/obama-romney-debate-mou/

Audacious Epigone , says: Website December 14, 2019 at 4:41 pm GMT
@dfordoom Polling tends to find between 20%-35% of the population amenable to the idea. It's definitely much higher than 1%. In California, polling showed support for Calexit at around 20%. That was three years ago.

There is a clear generational angle to it–young people are much more open to the idea than older people are.

The idea that support for political dissolution indicates support for a white ethnostate is a non sequitur. The first secessionist movement in the US was in Massachusetts for what are conventionally considered leftwing reasons.

AnonFromTN , says: December 14, 2019 at 4:44 pm GMT
In 2016 polls predicted that cackling hyena wins. We know how reliable that prediction was. Is there any reason to believe that these predictions are any better?

So far Dems do their level best to help Trump reelection. Their impeachment circus, which boils down to "Biden is corrupt, so let's impeach Trump" is doing wonders to bury Dems.

Audacious Epigone , says: Website December 14, 2019 at 4:55 pm GMT
@Daniel Rich You're talking about outcome odds, not polls per se, but the point is well taken.

Polls had Clinton winning Michigan by 6, Wisconsin by 3, and Pennsylvania by 2. The upper Midwest was the difference. The national polls were pretty accurate–they had Clinton winning by 3.5 and she ended up winning by 2.

EliteCommInc. , says: December 14, 2019 at 4:58 pm GMT
I sometimes tire of defending what might be considered 'black positioning". In fact, I have had enough black experiences to become dismayed. But I was taught, two wrongs don't make a right. And as I have a conscience cannot maybe will not bend truth to suit political advantage. Despite the negative consequence to myself.

Blacks band together for rather obvious reasons. I don't think there';s a need to wrangle on about that history, most know it well enough.

This president did not win election because of a spike in crimes by blacks. Though admittedly, the turmoil over the shooting of unarmed blacks by police mattered and the responses that resulted in several officers being killed were high mileage news stories. The truth is that the police while having a very tough job at times, are more than relatively safe from harm.

The key issues

whiteness pressure did play a role as it almost always does but the backdrop of social somersaults on normalcy was a much larger factor in my view

This election as long as there are no major upheavels, I don't think there will be much damage from the democratic ploy of impeachment, most likely it will backfire as it well should, the current president stands in good stead.

I don't think there is anyone to blame for low north rates among whites, aside from whites. No one is forcing whites to stop having children. Speaking of which my condolences to the passing of Danny Aiello.

And anyone who thinks that immigration, isn't a contributor to the demographic shift is simply not paying attention in my view. And worse, that immigration is the diversity that matters to US citizenship as a culture and national ethos not skin color. Skin color is the easy ruse and distraction from the importation of people who arrive and for whom we start catering to their wants:

language, religious practices, cultural ethos and activities, re-imagined histories of the US as theives and marauders -- it is easy to take these issues out on blacks. But blacks did not import millions of Irish, Germans, Italians, Greeks, and now Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese and latinos. And the latino gamesmanship has been going on since before Spain gave up Mexico and excellerated when Pres. Grant's enfranchisement of blacks was stifled, found solace in importing and improving relations with Mexico, afterall, he had been part of that war and knew some Mexicans he was fond of. Some solace. And the Cubans have been playing that latin card under the guise of communist aggression/oppression for all its worth and others have caught on -- and even this president has played right into their hands --

It;s hard to buy the white intelligentsia card when whotes have been importing millions of very low intelligent people from across the planet and most of them have been white. And it simply boggles the mind why if education mattered we as a country would literally refuse to educate some 4 million freed slaves -- and then wonder about why said people seem uneducated

-- it just wreaks of the deepest and worst hypocrisies one can dredge up from our history. Since the record on welfare is clear regarding blacks and one has to reject the canard printed in a recent Atlantic Magazine how blacks were uplifted by New Deal policies when in fact, blacks were shunted to the back of the line and in many cases absolutely denied access to the same.

Litsening to the whites in Congress discuss impeachment was hardly a boon to well thought argument and critical thought, muchless simple legal grasp of the issues -- which given how many are supposed lawyers and business people is a more than surprising. Law makers don't the difference between legal standard and personal taste would be funny if not for what it speaks about the future or the past.

Even now faced with a cold hard reality that blacks have crossed the color line repeatedly, many here continue their diatribe about whites as some holder of ethics, but when facing even recent history, from Vietnam era to this day the list of issues advocated by whites has shredded ethics as an ethos and as practice. I watched Richard Jewel last night and its a devastating commentary about one of the most respected law enforcement organizations we have. But then that commentray isn't new. Most of just pretend that our law enforcement agencies are nothing but clean cut whites with no capabilities hedged in by "truth justice and the american way". When in fact most of law enforcement that is hemmed by those ethics actually coddle and protect those who are not or even make mistakes, unless some extreme event occurs – power – has outweighed ethics, regardless of skin color. We are simply so afraid that if hold the system to account the whole thing ill fall apart.

As i have to face the issues regarding my accident, I am also faced with stark terms with why I simply bail out of this time of year. It's hard to celebrate either the gift of a meal or the birth of Christ knowing that people I labored with and for quite successfully, sought to destroy not only my ability to work, but my very existence as a human being -- - "good will toward men" is just more hypocrisy than I can bare. Laughing And I am certainly not alone in that. I chagrin that blacks are not supportive republicans or conservatives despite having many of the same ethics on key issues. If this president decides as we should have ages ago, to brake with the old tired molds of identity politics, then

"bully for him"

And i going to say this, if in fact whites are the better humans -- their mindset on action and ethics should reflect as much. If the innate character by genes is a better human -- superior than by said truth of the advance that should be in demonstration -- but if one is going to hold as model a practice the constant double standard -- then we shouldn't be at all surprised when the mexican help sleeps with our spouse, has a child and anchor baby's the same, not only to citizenship, but the family's treasure chest as well.

As for me, I will deal with the black or white criminal as of greater value if they are citizens whose parents were citizens and obtained the same legally.

Immigration and the economy should trump the politics of color. And by the way, I think less than 5%, far less, of the black population are criminals. Making that a national call to vote for president Trump may gain votes, but at the end of the day we are still left with the Frank getting an operation so he can compete against Nadia Comaneci – and blacks didn't come up with that.

menter's history–1 comment–it is more than likely a regular on your fine blog trying to get their shot in, rather than discuss topics with style and substance.

MarkinLA , says: December 14, 2019 at 5:27 pm GMT
@By-tor You don't have to get a majority of blacks to do a lot of damage to the Democrats. If Trump got 20% (and I am not predicting) then it would be a Trump blowout in the Electoral College.
Dissenter22 , says: December 14, 2019 at 5:27 pm GMT
Talking about Biden, Biden info Son married Jewish girl, daughter married Jewish man
https://forward.com/schmooze/426918/who-is-joe-bidens-new-jewish-daughter-in-law-melissa-cohen/
Onebornfree , says: Website December 14, 2019 at 5:30 pm GMT
Let me see .should I vote for the red [ Trump] commies, or the blue [anti-Trump] commies?

Hmm, quite choice, I'll admit- too much for me to handle all in one go. I'll need to seriously think on that for quite a while, it makes my brain hurt.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/MrCPIrs90eg?feature=oembed

"If voting made a difference, it would be illegal." Emma Goldman

"Regards" onebornfree

MarkinLA , says: December 14, 2019 at 5:33 pm GMT
@Corvinus Actually, it is a robust set of charges. You haven't been paying attention.

Actually, we have been paying attention. Even more so to your ridiculous posts about the Mueller probe and everything he was going to uncover. Your track record in believing stupid things is well documented.

[Dec 14, 2019] You Backing The Russians, Boy - Illinois Man Charged With Threatening To Murder GOP Congressman

Looks like Professor Karlan operated on the level very close to this man.
Notable quotes:
"... Rodney Lee Davis ..."
"... "I just saw you ... on the TV. You backing the Russians, boy?" ..."
Dec 14, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

It would appear all the escalating rhetoric from a month of impeachment hearings - including one Democratic congressman asking fellow lawmakers to imagine the teenage daughter of Ukraine's president tied up in Trump's basement - have sparked more than just verbal assaults on Republicans ( just as Maxine Waters would had suggested previously ).

The Hill reports that a man in Illinois has been charged after allegedly threatening to shoot Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) and accusing the congressman of "backing the Russians."

Rodney Lee Davis

64-year-old Randall Tar of Rochester, Ill. was charged with communicating threats to injure a person and threatening to assault, kidnap or murder a federal official, according to court documents released this week (full release below).

Contacted at his home Thursday, Tarr said he saw a television ad in which Davis, a Republican from Taylorville, claimed that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections , and it angered him enough to call.

Prosecutors say Tarr called Davis's district office last month and left a profanity-filled voicemail, saying:

"I just saw you ... on the TV. You backing the Russians, boy?"

"Stupid son of a bitch, you're gonna go against our military and back the Russians?" he allegedly added.

"I'm a sharpshooter. ... I'd like to shoot your f---ing head off you stupid motherf---er."

Tarrlater reportedly told The Associated Press :

"I screwed up," Tarr said.

"I don't even have a weapon to do it, is the silliest thing."

"I wish I could just take it all back and just say he's a lousy (expletive) for backing the Russian theory."

Of course, the only problem with all this is that the Democrats' constant spewing of the narrative that Ukraine did not 'meddle' in the 2016 election is entirely false .

Dr Anon , 45 minutes ago link

The bigger story is the number of mentally unstable Americans. When you go driving next, remember that about 20% of them are gorked on prescribed medications. The behavior you will observe makes complete sense in that context.

greek mafia , 46 minutes ago link

Damn...64 and still stupid as hell

Pendolino , 47 minutes ago link

" I'm a sharpshooter "

Well he certainly knows how to shoot his mouth off.

[Dec 14, 2019] Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation

Highly recommended!
Clapper and Brennan will be shaking in their boots after watching Barr's interview: done in "bad faith" = SEDITION !!!! Deep State operatives...ie, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Stork, Lisa, McCabe, should be held accountable. Obama should probably be impeached.
The hard fact is, that the top of the FBI knew, in advance, that the "dossier" was just bs invented by Russian liars, for money, to be used as political lies for kilary's campaign. It Wasn't evidence and Comey knew far in advance of crossfire hurricane. I can't see less than 20 years in comey's future. That same includes barak, brennan and clapper, who were all informed, willing accomplices in this crime.
10:30 Whoever in FBI that intentionally misled the court using the Steele dossier knowing that the dossier was "total rubbish" as Barr states, needs to be inditing immediately. Why we are continuing to investigate instead of inditimg while continuing to investigate. Until these people are held accountable I don't think our country will begin to heal and media and others apologize to the country for the damage they have done.
7:49 - "Comey refused to sign back up for his security clearance, and therefore couldn't be questioned about classified matters." Well now, isn't that interesting. Haven't heard that one before.
Dec 14, 2019 | www.youtube.com

In an exclusive interview, Attorney General William Barr spoke to NBC News' Pete Williams about the findings on the Justice Department Inspector General's report on the Russia investigation and his criticisms of the FBI.

grabir01 , 3 days ago

It appears that none of AG Barr's answers were what Pete Williams wanted to hear.

Gary Ellis , 2 days ago

I sincerely hope that the Durham investigation brings people to justice for what they have done to our country.

greg j , 2 days ago

The man just admitted "this may be the biggest conspiracy in U.S Political History." Ouch!

Jeremy Elice , 3 days ago

Shame we didn't get to see Pete William's face during Barr's answer accusing "an irresponsible press of fanning the flames."

JOHN DRUMHELLER , 2 days ago

Here's the adult in the room. Look out children.

Hart , 1 day ago

This is like if Watergate was on steroids and then some. Everyone involved should be prosecuted including the person who bought the dossier

Russell McAfee , 1 day ago (edited)

The FBI never got the actual DNC server. Crowdstrike has it. The FBI got a 'forensic copy'

Richard McLeod , 1 day ago

The FBI has now been proven to be corrupt at its' highest levels.

King Eris , 1 day ago

I could listen to AG Barr talk for hours. He's so calm and professional.

Noble Victory , 1 day ago

Barr is so intelligent and just. He's smoothe like the way he plays the Bagpipes. Pretty amazing! 🇺🇸👍

Nolan Gleason , 3 days ago

Death to the swamp

ctafrance , 1 day ago

The press is hopelessly corrupt. If we didn't know it already, this interview proves it.

Roman King , 1 day ago (edited)

I'm So glade we have a competent attorney General pushing back on the massive disinformation narrative that comes from Giant News outlets of which are used to being unchallenged, unchecked by today's "journalistic standards"

Clarion Call , 2 days ago

I so respect and admire this man's brain and logical thinking. His vocabulary is great as well.

wkcw1 , 2 days ago

NBC realizing they need to take a bath on this whole thing. Probably a bit too late now.

barbandrob1 , 1 day ago

Barr just basically clarified and justified Fox news reporting over the last 2 years.. Thanks NBC

Faris Hamarneh , 3 days ago

I love Barr's nonchalant style. But this is real big and heads are going to roll

Craig Bigelow , 2 days ago

Obama spied on Trump. Obama should have known about the FISA warrant!

Luis Santiago , 1 day ago

so this guy really asked Bahr"why not open an investigation even with little evidence?" because is a violation of civil liberties to invade the privacy of law abiding citizens. You need compelling evidence for something so huge

macfan128 , 1 day ago

17:44 "Why should the Attorney General care that the FBI was spying on a presidential candidate?" LOLOLOLOL Our media is a jooooooooke.

David , 3 days ago

NBC did a straight up interview??? This is shocking. Who told them that they could start doing journalism again?

Bill the Cat , 2 days ago

Clapper and Brennan will be shaking in their boots after watching Barr's interview.

Alan Sullivan , 1 day ago

Horowitz should be instructed to edit or update his Report to discuss The Question of Bias and Evidence of Bias. He has clearly misguided Americans with his choice of words and has omitted important facts underpinning bias.

MegaTrucker65 , 1 day ago

I haven't looked into Ukraine YET.

Gamer John3:18 , 1 day ago

AG Barr is an outstanding role model, a man of integrity and wisdom, calm in a raging political storm. I have full confidence he will make those who fabricated evidence and hid exculpatory evidence finally face justice. AG Barr for President 2024!

Yo Mama , 2 days ago

Barr is a straight shooter and I love it. It sounds like we will get to the real truth eventually through Durhams investigation I just hope it doesnt take another year to get to the prosecutions.

Direbear Coat , 1 day ago

So, I watched the interview... The video is called, "Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation." Not once did I hear him criticize the I.G.'s report. In fact, A.G. Barr clarified that the I.G.'s report was limited in scope because of the limitations put on the I.G. He said that the report was appropriate.

Wolverines Fight , 1 day ago

It's scary to see how powerful the corruption of the Democratic Party has grown. It represents a serious threat to all our personal freedom. The Democratic Party has to be stopped.

Benny .Burmeister Jørgensen , 3 days ago

Ok after watching this interview its quite clear that Barr and Durham is going after these criminals and people are going to jail. Maybe there is hope for US yet becuase this dane consider US atm a banana republic. Spying on political candidates? Forging documents? You FBI behaving like Stalins secret police. Lets see what happen.

Mike Dorsey , 1 day ago

God Bless Bill Barr. I'm glad there's still some adults in government that will speak their mind intelligently, rationally and unabashedly.

protochris , 1 day ago

This guy is brilliant; he's clearly exposing the FBI and the barking dogs on the alphabet networks.

Dan Kuo , 1 day ago

Amazing for the AG to go in deep into enemy territory at the heart of the opposition media to lay out a case for the criminal activities that undermined our country prior to and after the 2016 election. The deep state is trembling at the prospect of being held accountable after all the facts are laid out to the american people that these activities cannot be brushed aside or swept under the carpet if we are to continue as a country.

Jbyrd Texas , 2 days ago

The corrupt media is trying to act like they have not been involved in this treasonous scam since the beginning working directly with the treasonous cabal. The media has been lying and pushing fake news for 3 years calling Trump a Russia agent and called him treasonous. I knew the whole time that they were lying there was evidence from day one that this was all lies and if I can see that from the public then they can definitely see that from the inside they are purposefully lying.

Stephan Coutts , 1 day ago

I dare anyone on here to research Barr's History back to his involvement in the assignation of JFK, the cover up, defending Nixon, Epstein, and many other illegal and immoral activities. After reviewing the evidence, I walked away believing that Barr is trying to cover up his tracks so he does do jail time. No need to reply. Either take my dare or not. God Bless America and ALL her people, Stephan

Worlds Best Metal Detectorist , 2 days ago

The public are sick of waiting . I find myself skipping through a half hour news show in 5 minutes flat looking for arrests ,whereas before I was rivited to every minute of the half hour show but it goes on and on and at the there is Nothiing .The Democrats are the masters , it's obvious . If they break the law they get off scott free . If you are republican wave bye bye , you will be in jail for years . America is not the free and fair country it is all cracked up to be . It is corrupted by the democrats who have peoiple in high places that thwart real justice.

Right Thinking , 3 days ago

Mifsud approached George! Who was Mifsud working for (western asset) and why did he approach George? He’s the one who offered George dirt on Hill. Then invited him to meet the fake “niece”, of Putin, in England! What about this information? Someone set George up to make this happen outside the US, because of EO 12333. It had to happen outside the US so they could go to the fisa court!

dethtrk Jones , 3 days ago

I dont trust Christopher Wrey. He keeps slow-walking all the FBI documents and declassifications. He also fights judicial watch and judges that rule in their favor and continue not giving over what is ordered! This last judge was ready to hold him in contempt for refusing to cooperate with court ordered documents.

Brad Brown , 2 days ago

Why did the FBI continue to investigate Trump after January when the case collapsed? To try and find a way to impeach Trump. Remember the Washington Post headlined article right after the inauguration "The effort to impeach President Donald John Trump is already underway." The FBI "insurance" policy was essential!

[Dec 14, 2019] In politics there are no accidents by Harry Truman

Notable quotes:
"... While the typical BubisAmericanus will have forgotten all the details by then, me thinks the hard core democrats, I mean nomal'ish people that usually vote blue, simply stay home. ..."
"... Was this whole impeachment thing completely designed for the dems to fall on their sword and put the Donald back in for another 4? Dunno. ..."
Dec 14, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

squid, 7 hours ago link

They want to do it by Christmas in the vain hope that this circus will all blow over by November. I think not.

While the typical BubisAmericanus will have forgotten all the details by then, me thinks the hard core democrats, I mean nomal'ish people that usually vote blue, simply stay home.

Part of me, however, thinks back to something that Harry Truman said, "in politics there are no accidents" .

Was this whole impeachment thing completely designed for the dems to fall on their sword and put the Donald back in for another 4? Dunno.

The Republicans will have both houses when in 2024 the the tax take will barley cover interest.

Meme Iamfurst , 6 hours ago link

designed for the dems to fall on their sword and put the Donald back in for another 4? Dunno.

Been thinking along the same lines. May be the last thing they want is to be "on line" in 2021. I even wonder if CNN and BSNBC, etc, are there to DRIVE the decent Democrat to the Republicians.

I do think that things are not adding up.

[Dec 14, 2019] FISA Court Falls Under Congressional Scrutiny Following IG Report

Notable quotes:
"... And in the case of Carter Page, the FISA judges initially denied a warrant to surveil the former Trump aide until the agency padded the application with the wildly unverified Steele Report , lying about Steele's credibility, and then fabricating evidence to specifically say Page was not an "operational contact" for the CIA , when in fact he was - and had a "positive assessment." ..."
"... Let's not forget that FISA court judge Rudolph Contreras recused himself from overseeing the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn due to his personal friendship with former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok. ..."
"... And the only reason Contreras did so was because his friendship with Strzok was revealed in their anti-Trump text messages found by the Inspector General. ..."
Dec 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

The shadowy Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) and the processes behind obtaining a warrant from it has fallen under harsh scrutiny by lawmakers following the release of the DOJ Inspector General's report which found that the FBI was able to easily mislead the judges to surveil Trump adviser Carter Page.

FISA Judge Rudolph Contreras, who recused himself from the Mike Flynn case after his friendship with former FBI agent Peter Strzok was revealed in text messages.

"The goal is to make sure this doesn't happen again, so you tighten up the system right," said Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC), adding: "Quite frankly, I'm looking at the FISA court itself. ... I'm looking for the court to tell the public, 'Hey, we're upset about this too,' and, you know, take some corrective steps."

Graham said his committee will look into legislation to introduce more "checks and balances" to the FISA process, according to The Hill .

When asked if he thought there would be bipartisan support for FISA reform, Sen. Dick Durban (D-IL) said "I hope so," adding "This was a real wake-up call that three different teams can screw this up at the FBI."

The renewed interest comes after five hours of partisan barb trading during a Judiciary hearing Wednesday with Horowitz that resulted in one clear bipartisan interest: overhauling the FISA court.

"One of the only points I've heard with bipartisan agreement today is a renewed interest in reforming the FISA process," said Sen. Christopher Coons (D-Del.). - The Hill

Created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the FISA court is made up of 11 judges who are chosen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court to serve seven-year terms. They are responsible for approving warrant applications for intelligence gathering purposes and national security operations, which - as The Hill notes, "more often than not, they sign off."

And in the case of Carter Page, the FISA judges initially denied a warrant to surveil the former Trump aide until the agency padded the application with the wildly unverified Steele Report , lying about Steele's credibility, and then fabricating evidence to specifically say Page was not an "operational contact" for the CIA , when in fact he was - and had a "positive assessment."

Last year the government filed 1,117 FISA warrant applications, including 1,081 for electronic monitoring. The court signed off on 1,079 according to a DOJ report.

That said, reform may come slowly.

But the timeline for any legislative reforms is unclear. Congress already faces a mid-March deadline to extend expiring surveillance authorities under the USA Freedom Act.

Durbin suggested the discussions could merge, while Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime privacy advocate, appeared skeptical that Republicans would ultimately get on board with broader changes to surveillance powers.

"Why after YEARS of blocking bipartisan FISA reforms are senior Republicans suddenly interested in it? There is no question that we need to improve transparency, accountability and oversight of the FISA process," Wyden tweeted. - The Hill

Still, the IG report appears to have 'enlightened' some GOP lawmakers who previously resisted the notion of reining in FISA courts . Several GOP senators gave credit to their libertarian-minded colleagues on the hill, who have pushed for surveillance reform after accurately predicting the potential for abuse.

Those who have long-advocated for reform include GOP Sens. Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.), according to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).

"I wish Mike Lee weren't sitting here two people from me right now, because as a national security hawk I've argued with Mike Lee in the 4 1/2 or five years that I've been in the Senate that stuff just like this couldn't possibly happen at the FBI and at the Department of Justice," said Sasse during the Horowitz testimony, who added that the IG's findings marked a "massive crisis of public trust" since we should know about FISA applications that aren ' t as high-profile as Page's.

Horowitz reported a total of 17 "significant inaccuracies and omissions" in the applications to monitor Page , taking particular issue with applications to renew the FISA warrant and chastising the FBI for a lack of satisfactory explanations for those mistakes.

Horowitz stressed that he would not have submitted the follow-up applications as they were drafted by the FBI . Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer, altered an email related to the warrant renewal application, according to Horowitz's report.

" [The] applications made it appear as though the evidence supporting probable cause was stronger than was actually the case ," Horowitz said. " We also found basic, fundamental and serious errors during the completion of the FBl's factual accuracy reviews. "

Horowitz also found that there were errors that "represent serious performance failures by the supervisory and non-supervisory agents with responsibility over the FISA applications." - The Hill

Let's not forget that FISA court judge Rudolph Contreras recused himself from overseeing the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn due to his personal friendship with former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok.

And the only reason Contreras did so was because his friendship with Strzok was revealed in their anti-Trump text messages found by the Inspector General.

[Dec 14, 2019] To date, not a single shred of actual evidence has ever been produced to prove Russian involvement or interference in the 2016 presidential election

Dec 14, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Md4 , 8 hours ago link

No reputable legal authority would fear ensuring due process for an accused, unless it had no evidence of an actual crime to justify prosecution...but DID have ulterior motives and nefarious purposes for doing so.

Let's be clear.

To date, not a single shred of actual evidence has ever been produced to prove Russian involvement or interference in the 2016 presidential election.

***.

Nada.

We have the opinion of domestic intelligence agencies, but we have no physical or direct evidence.

On the contrary, we have as much reason to believe some or all of them interfered in the Trump campaign, to orchestrate and execute a foreign interference hoax against Trump, before and after his election.

Daily, and throughout this sick prog left congressional abuse of power, we have repeatedly heard claims of an "ongoing war with Russia" in Ukraine.

Which war is this? Is this a continuation of the non-invasion of the Donbas in 2014? The specious and false claims of Russian troop concentrations, and tanks rolling, that even spy satellites didn't see? Are we still lying about this? If so, where are the media reports of Russian airstrikes, burning Ukrainian villages, or body bags?

In any "on-going" war with Russia, we would've been treated to near-constant news video of Russian armor all over eastern Ukraine. Have we? Perhaps this war they keep telling us about is like the Russian "invasion" of Crimea that didn't happen either.

We clearly remember the two Crimean-initiated referenda which put them back in their ancestral Russian homelands, but none of that had anything to do with invading Russians, who already had a substantial military presence in Crimea for decades.

No sir, Professor Turley. ​​​​​​

There is no basis whatsoever for Trump's impeachment.

There is mounting evidence of a continued coup against this president, and the substantial number of Americans who actually elected him.

We too are closely monitoring the actual situation...

[Dec 14, 2019] The military-industrial-congressional complex is largely insulated from public accountability

Notable quotes:
"... The Pentagon’s entire budget operates in much the same way: unprecedented amounts in unnecessary appropriations resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse. Yet Congress continues to throw more and more money at the defense department every year without ever requiring it to account for how it spends the money. In fact, the war in Afghanistan is small potatoes by comparison. ..."
Dec 14, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

The easy answer is that there’s a long tradition in Washington, particularly among the foreign policy establishment, that self-reflection, taking responsibility and admitting failure is a big no-no. Heck, you can get convicted of lying to Congress about illegal arms sales, and cover up brutal atrocities and still get a job at the state department. Did you torture anyone? No problem.

While DC’s culture of no culpability certainly plays a role in this case, the more compelling answer lies somewhere near the fact that once the American war machine kicks into gear, no amount of facts undermining its very existence is going to get in the way.

Indeed, the United States has so far doled out nearly one trillion dollars for the war in Afghanistan (the true cost of the war will be trillions more) and everyone’s on the take: from defense industry executives, lobbyists and US political campaign coffers to Afghan government officials and poppy farmers to anyone and anything in between.

What’s more is that this military-industrial-congressional complex is largely insulated from public accountability, so what’s the incentive to change course? The Pentagon’s entire budget operates in much the same way: unprecedented amounts in unnecessary appropriations resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse. Yet Congress continues to throw more and more money at the defense department every year without ever requiring it to account for how it spends the money. In fact, the war in Afghanistan is small potatoes by comparison.

The bottom line is that the Afghanistan Papers clearly show that a lot of people were killed, injured and subject to years, if not lifetimes, of psychological trauma and financial hardship because a bunch of men – yes, mostly men – in Washington didn’t want to admit publicly what they knew privately all along. If we don’t start holding these people to account – and it’s not just about Afghanistan – the DC foreign policy establishment will continue to act with impunity, meaning that it’s probably more likely than not that in 50 years there’ll be another batch of “papers” revealing once again that we’ve failed to learn obvious lessons from the past.

[Dec 14, 2019] An Amazon surveillance device in your child's bedroom, what could possibly go wrong?

Dec 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

notabanker , December 13, 2019 at 6:02 pm

An Amazon surveillance device in your child's bedroom, what could possibly go wrong?

I'm past the point of blaming big tech companies. If you are fool enough to pay money to do this, you deserve what you get. American Idiots.

[Dec 14, 2019] Warmongeing is the national sport for the neoliberal elite in the USA

As Tony Kevin reported (watch-v=dJiS3nFzsWg) at one small fundraiser Bill Clinton made an interesting remark. He said that the USA should always have enemies. That's absolutely true, this this is a way to unite such a society as we have in the USA. probably the only way. And Russia simply fits the bill. Very convenient bogeyman.
Notable quotes:
"... The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium. ..."
Dec 14, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

Twolfe , 10 Dec 2019 16:30

One aspect of this report in the NYT is very troubling but not a great surprise to those who pay attention to Asian affairs.

The reports that US military leaders had no idea of what to do in Afghanistan and constantly lied to the public should rouse citizens in America to take a different view of military leaders. That view must be to trust nothing coming from the Pentagon or from spokespersons for the military. Included must be any and all secretaries of defence, and all branches of the military.

It is totally unacceptable that 1-2 trillion dollars and several thousand lives were spent by America for some nebulous cause. This does not include many thousands of civilians.

During the Vietnam disaster, it became obvious that American military was lying to the public and taking many causalities in an unwinnable war. Nothing was learned about Asia or Asian culture because America entered Afghanistan without a real plan and no understanding of the country or it's history.

The experience of the USSR in that country should have sent up all kinds of red flags to the invading US military but it apparently did not. Both USSR and America lost thousands of military lives -- but nothing has changed in the country. Life in Afghanistan is actually worse now than before the multiple invasions. The only think which has improved is the cultivation of poppies and the export of opium.

[Dec 13, 2019] The Inspector General's Report on 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media by Glenn Greenwald

Notable quotes:
"... a single American ..."
Dec 12, 2019 | theintercept.com
Just as was true when the Mueller investigation closed without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, Wednesday's issuance of the long-waited report from the Department of Justice's Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds .

Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI's gross abuse of its power – its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.

If you don't consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that's what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.

In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It's brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.

[Dec 13, 2019] Review of Michael Rectenwald's book "Google Archipelago"

Notable quotes:
"... In his latest book, Google Archipelago , Rectenwald outlines how this system works, why leftism is synonymous with oppression, and how the Google Archipelago's regime of "simulated reality" "must be countered, not only with real knowledge, but with a metaphysics of truth." ..."
"... Gradually, Rectenwald began to realize that PC was not a philosophy, but the enemy of open inquiry. For this reason, and because Rectenwald is an expert in the so-called digital humanities and the long history of scientific (and pseudo-scientific) thinking that feeds into it, Google Archipelago is not just a dry monograph about a social issue. By turns memoir, Kafkaesque dream sequence, trenchant rebuke of leftist censorship, and intellectual history of woke corporate political correctness, Google Archipelago is a welcoming window into a mind working happily in overdrive. ..."
"... There is much in Google Archipelago addressing the lie that Google, Facebook, and Twitter are neutral platforms for free-ranging debate. This is not so much, because, statistically and empirically, it is irrefutable that Silicon Valley is hostile to non-Beltway-leftist opinions, but because, much more damningly, their woke-capital corporate structures are themselves iterations of massification, propaganda, and deep social control. For Rectenwald, the "Google archipelago" is not PC version 2.0; it is Marxism, version 1,000 (and raised by several orders of magnitude to boot). ..."
Dec 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

It is tempting to see this as a function of political correctness. Americans, and others around the world, who have found themselves on the "wrong side of history" (as determined by the cultural elite in an endless cycle of epistemological door closing) have long been shut out of conversations, their views deemed beyond the pale of acceptable discourse in enlightened modern societies. Google, Facebook, Twitter -- are these corporations, and their uber-woke CEOs, just cranking the PC up to eleven and imposing their schoolmarmish proclivities on the billions of people who want to scrawl messages on their electronic chalkboards?

Not so, says reformed leftist -- and current PC target -- Michael Rectenwald. The truth of Stanford and Harvard alumni's death grip on global discourse is much more complicated than just PC run amok. It is not that the Silicon Valley giants are agents of mass surveillance and censorship (although mass surveillance and censorship are precisely the business they're in). It's that the very system they have designed is, structurally, the same as the systems of oppression that blanketed and smothered free expression in so much of the world during the previous century.

In his latest book, Google Archipelago , Rectenwald outlines how this system works, why leftism is synonymous with oppression, and how the Google Archipelago's regime of "simulated reality" "must be countered, not only with real knowledge, but with a metaphysics of truth."

Google Archipelago is divided into eight chapters and is rooted in both Rectenwald's encyclopedic knowledge of the history of science and corporate control of culture, as well as in his own experiences. Before retiring, Rectenwald had been a professor at New York University, where he was thoroughly entrenched in the PC episteme that squelches real thought at universities across North America and beyond. Gradually, Rectenwald began to realize that PC was not a philosophy, but the enemy of open inquiry. For this reason, and because Rectenwald is an expert in the so-called digital humanities and the long history of scientific (and pseudo-scientific) thinking that feeds into it, Google Archipelago is not just a dry monograph about a social issue. By turns memoir, Kafkaesque dream sequence, trenchant rebuke of leftist censorship, and intellectual history of woke corporate political correctness, Google Archipelago is a welcoming window into a mind working happily in overdrive.

There is much in Google Archipelago addressing the lie that Google, Facebook, and Twitter are neutral platforms for free-ranging debate. This is not so much, because, statistically and empirically, it is irrefutable that Silicon Valley is hostile to non-Beltway-leftist opinions, but because, much more damningly, their woke-capital corporate structures are themselves iterations of massification, propaganda, and deep social control. For Rectenwald, the "Google archipelago" is not PC version 2.0; it is Marxism, version 1,000 (and raised by several orders of magnitude to boot).

For example, in the first and second chapters of Google Archipelago , Rectenwald lays out how the various elements of woke-capitalist ideological repression work together in actual practice. Rectenwald's chief example is the Gillette ad campaign of January 2019, in which a company whose products (razor blades and shaving cream) are purchased, of course, was said to insult the very essence of its customers by belittling manhood as "toxic." Why would a razor blade company go out of its way to alienate the people who buy the majority of razorblades? The answer is surprising. Rectenwald tells us Gillette was not simply responding to a renewed PC craze by running the "toxic masculinity" ad. Gillette, from the beginning, has been a pioneer in designing systems to mold public opinion and shape individuals into easily pliable socialist masses. King Camp Gillette, the founder of what is now the Gillette company, hated competition and sought to make, as he put it, a "world corporation." Through this corporation, the ignorant plebs around the globe could be impelled to do what their social and intellectual superiors -- the leaders of the "world corporation" -- thought was in their best interest. This "singular monopoly," as Rectenwald puts it, would control the material and mental makeup of the entire world. Quoting King Camp Gillette's biographer, Rectenwald adds, "It was almost as if Karl Marx had paused between The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital to develop a dissolving toothbrush or collapsible comb."

Rectenwald outlines a direct line of descent from this earlier corporate socialism of razor blades and "collapsible comb[s]" to the "authoritarian leftism" of the present digital age, authoritarian leftism being "the operational ethos of the Google Archipelago." The Google Archipelago's "wokeforce" practices what Rectenwald calls "avant-garde identity politics extremism," the organizing principle for deciding which parts of society are in revolt against PC and need to be excised from the archipelago of allowed opinion. The internet did create the "information superhighway," as was endlessly exclaimed by politicians and nascent digitalistas during the late 1990s. But it also amplified the structures of woke corporate control that had been in place since the beginning of globalized leftism, Marxian "capitalist" finance, and elite-led collectivism -- precisely the kind of inversion of free enterprise and perversion of the free market practiced by King Camp Gillette and his socialist comrades a hundred and more years before. The Google Archipelago is not a product of the personal computer, but of another kind of political correctness, the PC that is the manifestation of the same old human urge to control others and bring the world under the sway of one's will.

[Dec 13, 2019] Are voted destined to be duped?

Dec 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

,

Kratoklastes , says: December 12, 2019 at 3:42 am GMT

started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins

Good on him – being able to create a thing that rises to such prominence in such a short space of time speaks volumes about this Higgins guy's entrepreneurial ability. And if he wasn't mobbed-up to begin with, he sure as fuck is now – which is a double- mitzvah (for him).

If he did so starting from being unemployed, then anybody who turned down a job application from the guy must be kicking themselves. (' Unemployed ' is obviously used pejoratively in the blockquote; 'Englishman' is purely-descriptive).

.

Also, the entire article accepts Bernays' conclusion, but disagrees as to which objectives should be pursued.

Bernays' conclusions are hardly controversial: most people are gullible imbeciles . It's not clear to me how much more empirical evidence we need before that becomes just a thing that everyone with an IQ above 115 accepts.

So the question then becomes " OK, now what? ".

As usual, the right answer is " Depends " – and not just for those with bladder control problems.

If you want to do things that are just , exploiting gullible imbeciles would appear to violate the playing conditions. It would be hors jeu ; not done; just not cricket .

As the Laconian famously said . " IF ."

For those for whom the 'if' condition returns 'false', it does very little to bleat about how awful they are. You're not going to cause a little switch in their brain to flick on (or off?), whereupon they realise the error of their ways and make a conscious decision to leave the gullible imbeciles unexploited.

It's even unlikely to affect their victims (remember, they're imbeciles) – because otherwise some infra-marginal imbeciles would have to process their way through quite a bit of cognitive dissonance, and they're not wired for introspection (or processing).

So the sole real purpose (apart from κάθαρσις catharsis ) is prophylaxis (προ + φύλαξις – guarding ). Both good enough aims obviously the writer is the one who gets the cathartic benefit, but who is going to be on heightened alert as a result of this Cassandra -ish jeremiad -ing?

Non-imbeciles don't need it; imbeciles won't benefit.

Here's the thing: the gullible imbeciles are going to be exploited by someone .

.

This is something that people of my persuasion struggle with. It boils down to the following:

Let's assume that a reprehensible thing exists already, and is unlikely to be overthrown by my opposition to it. Should I just participate and line my pockets?

The resources used are going to be used whether I participate or not, so it may as well be me who gets them. After all, I will put them to moral uses – and while inside, I can do things that are contrary to the interests of the reprehensible thing.

There is no satisfactory counter-argument to that line of reasoning, and yet I reject it.

Then again: I was dropped on my head as an infant, so YMMV.

HAIL KEK

[Dec 13, 2019] Is there any book in JFK we can trust?

Dec 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

JOHN CHUCKMAN , says: Website December 12, 2019 at 11:58 am GMT

Is there anyone we can trust?

Perhaps not.

Is it just part of the human condition that as any writer or any publication gains a reputation for truth and revelation and dependability, that that reputation is sooner or later leveraged for gain or influence or access?

I can think of a number of examples where I'm almost certain that that is the case, although I'll avoid writing their names.

In the end, we are all of us really quite alone in the universe, enjoying only periods with the illusion of support and fellowship.

On the example of the Kennedys, the assassinations provide perhaps the greatest illustration of how things work.

I should say that I regard them as two chapters in one book. John's killers had to be Bobby's killers also because that intense younger man, once holding the powers of the presidency, would have relentlessly hunted down his brother's killers.

We know that he did not believe the Warren Commission, though he did not go around saying that. He even apparently had some idea of who the killers might be, never telling others any details of his suspicions.

Books have for decades been churned out by either the CIA or friends of the CIA or unwitting assets of the CIA arguing for the truth of the Warren Commission.

On the other hand, as someone with a long interest in the events, I believe that a great many of the books against the Warren Commission were also written by the same interests. Not all of them, but many.

Books especially that either are so preposterous or poorly written and edited that they effectively discredit those who do not accept the (absurd) findings of the Warren Commission.

After all, it was some CIA disinformation officer who came up with the term "conspiracy theorist" in the 1960s to discredit genuine critics of the Warren Commission, a term of such lasting power, it is still widely used, its application having spread to a large number of topics.

Those with power do tend to keep guiding events no matter how hard we struggle to understand and correct the course of affairs.

Power is a very real thing, almost physical in its presence, and it is rarely overturned by truth or justice or fairness.

It's not an inspiring view, but I fear it is reality.

[Dec 13, 2019] Gabbard Takes No Prisoners In DNC Warfare Zero Hedge

Notable quotes:
"... Authored by Sarah Cowgill via LibertyNation.com, ..."
"... not quite reaching ..."
Dec 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Gabbard Takes No Prisoners In DNC Warfare by Tyler Durden Thu, 12/12/2019 - 18:45 0 SHARES

Authored by Sarah Cowgill via LibertyNation.com,

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), the outspoken, independent thinker from Hawaii running for the loftiest perch in the land, has just said "no" to taking the next Democratic presidential primary debate stage. This signals either a surrender or a strategic end-run around the field. Yes, we've been down this road before. It is the same sentiment she expressed prior to the last debate; although she threatened to boycott the circus, she did qualify, show up, and rebuke the other candidates and the Democratic Party.

Gabbard has been Public Enemy #1 in those circles since. Instead of playing into the cemented narrative, Tulsi, who has not so far reached the conditions imposed for participation in the next round, is not wasting her time.

The Most Repetitive Show On Earth

As the sixth platform for national domination looms, Gabbard tweeted a different plan, saying:

"For a number of reasons, I have decided not to attend the December 19th 'debate' -- regardless of whether or not there are qualifying polls. I instead choose to spend that precious time directly meeting with and hearing from the people of New Hampshire and South Carolina."

Whether her bold decision is based on not quite reaching the necessary baseline requirements, or because she has had enough of the game playing, Tulsi seems indifferent to striving for inclusion . And we all know Gabbard is not one to tread water in the shallow end of the pool when a good, strong crawl will cover more territory.

Tulsi Gabbard

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has upped the ante for primetime pandering by requiring candidates to have a minimum of 4% support in selected national polls and 6% in two state polls of the early primary states Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Nevada.

The deadline for polling qualification is Dec. 12 at the witching hour of 11:59 p.m. in the Eastern time zone. How dramatic for what is likely to be a boring rehash of Trump-bashing, held a scant week later.

Although Tulsi has the sheer donor numbers needed – the support of at least 200,000 unique donors – her national polling numbers haven't yet reached the threshold. Those on the survey leaderboard are Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), former Vice President Joe Biden, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, billionaire Tom Steyer, and businessman Andrew Yang.

A Diverse Or One-Note Race?

Tulsi has been tilting at the DNC and its primary prerequisites since the get-go, claiming the surveyors they used weren't "accurate" enough, or that the venues were biased. Gabbard's campaign released a statement in August, which said:

"Many of the uncertified polls, including those conducted by highly reputable organizations such as The Economist and the Boston Globe, are ranked by Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight as more accurate than some DNC 'certified' polls."

The DNC was insistent that its criteria for inclusion have been fair and balanced. Just ask the committee's spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa, who responded:

"This has been the most inclusive debate process with more women and candidates of color participating in more debates than billionaires. We are proud of this historic and diverse field with 20 candidates participating in the first two debates and at least 10 candidates in each debate after that."

What's ironic is that no people of color – because of the strident stipulations imposed – will be at the Dec. 19 debate hosted by PBS NewsHour and Politico at the Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. PBS is set to broadcast the debate, and most likely, fewer people will watch the event than Gabbard can reach by holding town halls or meet and greets. Perhaps she's on to something, after all.

[Dec 13, 2019] Verified Voting, the national advocacy group seeking accountable election results, has been "providing cover" for untrustworthy new voting systems

Dec 13, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

"Why this expert warns that a voting watchdog has 'lost its way' -- and our elections are at risk" [ Alternet ]. "Verified Voting, the national advocacy group seeking accountable election results, has been "providing cover" for untrustworthy new voting systems and the public officials buying them, according to an esteemed academic board member who has resigned in protest

To be accused by the inventor of its "gold-standard" audit solution of selling out while states and counties are buy voting technology that will be used into the 2030s is remarkable .

Stark and other critics say that the cards produced by a so-called ballot-marking device (BMD) may not be accurate because potentially insecure software sits between a voter's fingers and the printout.

Thus, Stark contends that his audit tool cannot assess if the reported result is correct. Also, BMD systems are far more costly than hand-marked ballot systems, he and other critics have said.

They note that the acquisition costs are followed by per-machine service agreements designed to generate millions in annual revenues for vendors." • On BMDs, see NC here .

[Dec 13, 2019] Unprecedented brazenness

Dec 13, 2019 | irrussianality.wordpress.com

Unprecedented brazenness December 11, 2019 PaulR 6 Comments 'Something is rotten with the state of Denmark', or if not Denmark then certainly the United States of America. It's the only conclusion one can draw from the way the absolutely normal is nowadays treated as the most extraordinary drama.

On Monday, US President Donald Trump met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. It's about as normal a diplomatic event as one could possibly imagine, but it caused much of the American commentariat to go into a collective meltdown.

Lavrov-Trump-Dec-10

'Trump welcoming Russia's top diplomat to the Oval Office is one of his most brazen moves yet,' declared the Washington Post , which makes you think that Trump really needs to step up his game on the brazenness front. The Post isn't alone in thinking this way, however. What one might call the 'liberal' TV channels leapt on the story too, dragging in some representatives of the American security apparatus to ram home the point (there was a time when liberals regarded the FBI and CIA with suspicion, but such days are apparently long gone).

And so it was that CNN brought on as a guest former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe to 'explain why the photograph tweeted by President Trump of his meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov is so extraordinary.' As McCabe told CNN :

There's no doubt there's something deeply odd about the way this president interacts with Russia. We've never seen anything like this before. Russia is our most significant enemy on the world stage. I don't think that we've ever seen a photograph out of the Oval Office on the lines of the one we saw today.

Meanwhile, MSNBC had its own star witness, former Under Secretary of State Richard Stengel. 'Why is a head of state meeting with the Russian foreign minister?' Stengel asked , 'Vladimir Putin doesn't meet with Mike Pompeo when he comes to Moscow. So it's very curious and it's very strange.'

Actually Rick, dear boy, Putin does meet with Pompeo, as you can see from this photo here. But when did one ever let little details like factual accuracy get in the way of a good line?

putin pompeo

Stengel wasn't MSNBC's only witness to Trump's suspicious behaviour. Former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul also put in an appearance. 'He's obsessed with the East, like a certain world leader in the 1940s was obsessed with the East. Why is this guy obsessed with meeting with Russians all over the place', the host asked McFaul. The latter let pass the gratuitous Hitler comparison, and gave his learned response: 'It's truly bizarre. I confess I do not have a rational explanation for it,' said McFaul .

Just in case you think it was only the media, FBI, and the State Department, others were on the ball too. The Trump-Lavrov meeting had Twitter abuzz. Anne Applebaum, for instance, had the following to say.

applebaum

It's all simply nuts. Trump is Hitler. A former ambassador can't think of any reason why representatives of two major powers might wish to meet. A former deputy head of the US foreign service thinks that heads of state never meet foreign ministers. And all of them believe that a photograph of the US President and the Russian foreign minister is totally unprecedented and suggestive of something deeply suspicious, though exactly what they can't quite tell us. Which makes you wonder what they'd all make of this picture.

800px-Lavrov_and_Obama

I don't know about you, but that looks a lot like Sergei Lavrov and President Obama to me. So, was Obama a Russian agent? Was he secretly selling out US interests to a foreign power? Should we be investigating him as well? It's all rather suspicious, don't you think?

I'll leave the last word to the excellent Fred Weir of the Christian Science Monitor:

It's pretty clear by now that no normal dialog is going to be possible between Russia and the US. Perhaps ever again. It's not my job to advise the Russians what to do, but if it were I would suggest they just give it up. Spend your time going to Beijing, Delhi, Ankara, even Berlin and Paris, but give Washington a miss.
It's the most peculiar damned thing I have ever seen. Even at the lowest depths of the Cold War, the Washington Post would never have run a headline that described a US president meeting a Soviet leader in the Oval Office as "one of his most brazen moves yet."
Analyzing the official photo of Trump and Lavrov in the Oval Office, the main -- disapproving -- takeaway the WaPo has to offer here is: "Judging by the expressions on their faces, the conversation does not seem to have been particularly acrimonious." Geez.

[Dec 13, 2019] Ellul makes the same point as the author here, that no group is more taken in by propaganda than the educated classes who fancy themselves above propaganda for being constantly immersed in it.

Dec 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

DanFromCT , says: December 12, 2019 at 2:13 pm GMT

Jacques Ellul's 1973 Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Minds is still the antidote to Bernaysian brainwashing. Short of reading it, there are excellent reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. Ellul makes the same point as the author here, that no group is more taken in by propaganda than the educated classes who fancy themselves above propaganda for being constantly immersed in it.
DESERT FOX , says: December 12, 2019 at 2:15 pm GMT
@Rebel0007 Agree, the book The Committee of 300 by ex MI6 officer John Coleman details who is behind these agendas, can be had on amazon.

[Dec 13, 2019] Chris Hedges presence on Bellingcat award: in view of Bellingcat role in MH 17 false flag operation it became clear that Hedges must be either an idiot or deeply embedded.

Dec 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

,

Adrian , says: December 12, 2019 at 6:35 am GMT
@Adrian About Chris Hedges' participation in presenting this award to Bellingcat "News from Underground" came yesterday up with this:

a friend who knows the background of Chris Hedges' involvement writes that "he was duped into presenting the Emmy to Bellingcat -- and, from what I hear, he believes it was done intentionally to smear him."

As this friend is someone I (and many others) quite admire for his integrity and bravery, and as it's wholly plausible that Hedges would have been set up, I am reserving judgementon his action, and urge people on this list to do so, too.

FB , says: Website December 12, 2019 at 6:46 am GMT
@Adrian Hedges would have known who the nominees are just seeing Bellingcat in there and knowing this is the Emmies well, it's hard to believe otherwise than Hedges is a clever fake as I have long suspected

Let's recall that Hedges in his previous life was an NYT war correspondent who covered the Bosnian conflict knowing Yugoslavia quite well from visits there in the 1980s his reports demonizing Serbs stood out like a sore thumb

I quickly pegged him as a complete liar, like the rest of the MSM propagandists that were repeating boilerplate canards meant to demonize the hugely successful nation of Yugoslavia which of course they were trying to tear apart

For instance, 'the Serb-dominated Yugoslavia' was a standard sentence that appeared literally in every single story repeated ad nauseum literallu dozens of times a day and clearly meant to convince the reader that dismantling the progressive and ethnically harmonious nation of Yugoslavia was somehow the right thing to do

But it was pure bullshit anyone who had ever been to Yugoslavia would instantly recognize that as a 'WTF ?'

There is much much more in Hedges' closet

But then, miraculously, he had a 'Road to Damascus' moment a few years later [we are supposed to believe] and somehow became a 'good guy'

Bullshit Mr. Curtin nails the sly method here exactly

[The] bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.

An excellent article

PS Counterpunch is a complete bullshit rag that has been coopted completely Plutocrat Pierre Omidyar and his little 'Intercept' outfit is similarly continuing in the footsteps of prior plutocrat propagandists like the Ford foundation Rockefellers and others

The ultimate goal is controlling YOU they need you to be obedient and believing and not ask any questions

JoannF , says: December 12, 2019 at 1:48 pm GMT
@FB Haven't looked at Bellingcat (not exactly a sophisticated operation if you ever worked in the ad business) since MH 17 and Putin's Syria pacification, but upon reading this article it became clear that Hedges must be either an idiot or deeply embedded.

One doesn't exclude the other, of course. The uneducated public wouldn't need to catch up on so much information, and still get a great head start if they ever found out wtf "cui bono" even means – but that's not gonna happen.
It's just not how the human mind works.

[Dec 13, 2019] The Silicon Valley Gulag

Dec 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

BeeGee , 9 hours ago link

I seem to be missing something here. Isn't Marxism where the proletariat own the means of production? So, doesn't this look more like fascism where the corporations own everything?

hoytmonger , 9 hours ago link

Fascism is private ownership, but state control, of the means of production.

The US has had a fascist economy for quite a while now.

Even Mussolini declared, "He is one of us!" after reading FDR's biography.

cosmic dwarf , 8 hours ago link

"The proletariat" don't make decisions collectively - it's not possible given the nature of man. Every authoritarian system is fascism in practice - where a cabal of chosen ones call the shots. Whether it's corporate execs, billionaire playboys, demagogues, bureaucrats, union bosses, soldiers, intellectuals, or aliens at the top... it really only changes the flavor.

BobPaulson , 7 hours ago link

Ok, so it's not just me. The repeating of the word Marx in that article was getting weird. Can we actually talk about what that guy wrote instead of the symbol that name has become? It seems very boomer-ish to be reviving the talk of communism all the time when that system is essentially dead. Now a bunch of retirees are red-baiting again when Russia isn't communist, China isn't communist, and about the only communist country on earth is Cuba.

Meanwhile, just about every country on earth is becoming an oligarchic bureaucracy. They don't generally give a **** about **** Marx was on about.

[Dec 12, 2019] The FBI - Pushed By John Brennan - Lied To The Court Seven Times To Spy On The Trump Campaign

Highly recommended!
And behind Brennan we can can see the Nobel Peace Price winner.
Notable quotes:
"... A major role in directing the plot has fallen to Obama's consigliere John Brennan, the current director of the CIA. ..."
"... One part of the still ongoing deligitimization campaign was the FBI investigation of alleged Russian connections of four members of the Trump election campaign. ..."
"... The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with. ..."
"... The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors. ..."
"... That the dossier was mere dreck was quite obvious to any sober person who read it when it was first published ..."
"... That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level", face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. ..."
"... (This is a Moon of Alabama fundraiser week. Please consider to support our work .) ..."
"... Occam's razor: CIA-MI6, with approval of US Deep State (Clintons, Bush, McCain, Brennan, Mueller, etc.), meddled to elect Trump and pointed fingers at Russia to initiate a new McCarthyism. ..."
"... "Sergey Lavrov: In my opinion, Congress sounds rather obsessed with destroying our relations. It continues pursuing the policy started by the Obama administration. As I mentioned, we are used to this kind of attack. We know how to respond to them. I assure you that neither Nord Stream-2 nor Turkish Stream will be halted." ..."
"... ... the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by Obama's team and was designed for Clinton to escalate ... ..."
"... It's Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 that provides the answer. In this Op-Ed, Kissinger calls for a restored US Empire that is essentially Trump's MAGA. Kissinger is writing immediately after the Donbas rebels have won. The Russians refused to heed Kissinger's advice (to back down) and it has become apparent that Russia's joining the West is no longer an inevitability as the US elite had assumed. ..."
"... Good chance Steele had little to do with writing the Dossier. "Simpson-Ohr Dossier", anyone? Steele was needed as a credible looking intelligence officer with Russia ties and a past working relationship with US Intel, as cover to sell to FBI, FISA Court, and the public (meeting with Isikoff, Yahoo News story). ..."
"... Glenn Simpson and wife Mary Jacoby had written articles for the WSJ in 2007 and 2008 with a script and language similar to the Dossier. Devin Nunes seems to believe this scenario, and it is discussed in detail in books by Dan Bongino and Lee Smith, among others. ..."
"... physchoh @ 60; The difference, at least in my mind, is that, the "Russia did it" meme, is the weakest of all cases against DJT. Corbyn, on the other hand, may actually be hurt by the bogus charges. IMO, what this shows is coordination between the elites to bring down a progressive in the UK, who fancies public control over major finances instead of private concerns. ..."
"... So Horowitz was technically correct when he did not find bias. What he might have been reluctant to spell out is that he did find malice. ..."
Dec 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

On January 6 2017 this author concluded :

When Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S. presidential election the relevant powers launched a campaign to delegitimize the President elect Donald Trump.

The ultimate aim of the cabal is to kick him out of office and have a reliable replacement, like the Vice-President elect Pence, take over. Should that not be possible it is hoped that the delegitimization will make it impossible for Trump to change major policy trajectories especially in foreign policy. A main issue here is the reorientation of the U.S. military complex and its NATO proxies from the war of terror towards a direct confrontation with main powers like Russia and China.

...

A major role in directing the plot has fallen to Obama's consigliere John Brennan, the current director of the CIA.

One part of the still ongoing deligitimization campaign was the FBI investigation of alleged Russian connections of four members of the Trump election campaign.

The Inspector General of the U.S. Justice Department Michael Horowitz has investigated the FBI operation against the election campaign of Donald Trump. Yesterday he published his report, Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation (pdf). It is 480 pages long and quite thorough but unfortunately very limited in its scope.

Horowitz finds that the FBI was within the law when it opened the investigation but that the FBI's applications to the FISA court, which decides if the FBI can spy on someone's communications, were based on lies and utterly flawed.

Your host unfortunately lacked the time so far to read more than the executive summary. But others have pointed out some essential findings.

Matt Taibbi remarks :

The Guardian headline reads: " DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser ."

If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a "clearing" of the FBI, never clear me of anything. ...

Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz's conclusion that there was no evidence of "political bias or improper motivation" in the FBI's probe of Donald Trump's Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had "authorized purpose" to conduct.

...

However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose "serious" procedural problems and omissions of "significant information" in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).

...

There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:

The so-called "Steele dossier" was, actually, crucial to the FBI's decision to seek secret surveillance of Page. ...

...

The "Steele dossier" was "Internet rumor," and corroboration for the pee tape story was "zero." ...

John Solomon finds :

Appendix 1 identifies the total violations by the FBI of the so-called Woods Procedures, the process by which the bureau verifies information and assures the FISA court its evidence is true.

The Appendix identifies a total of 51 Woods procedure violations from the FISA application the FBI submitted to the court authorizing surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page starting in October 2016.

A whopping nine of those violations fell into the category called: "Supporting document shows that the factual assertion is inaccurate."

For those who don't speak IG parlance, it means the FBI made nine false assertions to the FISA court. In short, what the bureau said was contradicted by the evidence in its official file.

The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with.

The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors.

That the dossier was mere dreck was quite obvious to any sober person who read it when it was first published . Here is what we wrote about it at that time:

The anonymous former British operator hears from an anonymous compatriot that two anonymous sources, asserted to have access to inner Russian circles, claimed to have heard somewhere that something happened in the Kremlin.

They assert that Trump was supported and directed by Putin himself five years ago while even a year ago no one would have bet a penny on Trump gaining any political significant position or even the presidency.

There is a lot more of such nonsense in these new Hitler diaries. It is bonkers from a to z.

Those who thought otherwise should question their judgment.

It is now claimed that the FBI is exculpated because the Horowitz report did not find "political bias or improper motivation". But that omits the fact that at least four high ranking people in the FBI and Justice Department who were involved in the case were found to be politically biased and were removed from their positions.

It also omits that the scope of Horowitz's investigation was limited to the Justice Department. He was not able to investigate the CIA and its former director John Brennan who was alleging Russia-Trump connections months before the FBI investigation started:

Contrary to a general impression that the FBI launched the Trump-Russia conspiracy probe, Brennan pushed it to the bureau – breaking with CIA tradition by intruding into domestic politics: the 2016 presidential election. He also supplied suggestive but ultimately false information to counterintelligence investigators and other U.S. officials.

The current CIA director Gina Haspel was CIA station chief in London during that time and while several of the entrapment attempts of Trump campaign staff by the FBI investigation happened. Horowitz spoke with neither of them.

Peter Van Buren concludes :

The current Horowitz Report, read alongside his previous report on how the FBI played inside the 2016 election vis-a-vis Clinton, should leave no doubt that the Bureau tried to influence the election of a president and then delegitimize him when he won. It wasn't the Russians; it was us.

That is correct, but the whole conspiracy was even deeper. It was not the FBI which initiated the case.

My hunch is still that the FBI investigation was a case of parallel construction which is often used to build a legitimate case after a suspicion was found by illegitimate means. In this case it was John Brennan who in early 2016 contacted the head of the British GCHQ electronic interception service and asked him to spy on the Trump campaign. GHCQ then claimed that something was found that was deemed suspicious :

That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level", face-to-face between the two agency chiefs.

The FBI was tipped off on the issue and on July 31 2016 started an investigation to construct a parallel legal case. It send out British and U.S. agents to entrap Trump campaign members. It used the obviously fake Steele dossier to gain FISA court judgments that allowed it to spy on the campaign. Downing Street was informed throughout the whole affair. A day after Trump's inauguration the UK's then Prime Minister Theresa May fired GHCQ chief Robert Hannigan.

One still open question is to what extend then President Barack Obama was involved in the affair.

There is another ongoing investigation by U.S. Prosecutor John Durham. That investigation is not limited to the Justice Department but will involve all agencies and domestic as well as foreign sources. Durham has the legal rights to declassify whatever is needed and he can indict persons should he find that they committed a crime. His report will hopefully go much deeper than the already horrendous stuff Horowitz delivered.

(This is a Moon of Alabama fundraiser week. Please consider to support our work .)

Posted by b on December 11, 2019 at 16:16 UTC | Permalink

Antoinetta III , Dec 11 2019 16:27 utc | 1

Do we have any idea when the Durham report will be coming out?

Antoinetta III

casey , Dec 11 2019 16:30 utc | 2
Anyone taking bets on Durham/Barr making indictments in this mess? My guess is a whole lot of horse trading is going on behind the scenes now, as in, "I'll trade you a censure for all potential indictments going down the memory hole."
Kabobyak , Dec 11 2019 16:54 utc | 3
Typical dog and pony show which will change nothing relating to interventionist foreign policy and the new cold war with Russia. Too many saw benefits from the corruption in Ukraine to dig deep there; the Bidens were just the most blatant, Lindsey Graham and others from both parties were involved so don't expect much from the Senate hearings. The bipartisan major goals are a fait accompli; universal acceptance that Russia worked to undermine our elections (and to destroy our "Democracy") and are thus an enemy we must fight, and it's universally accepted by all that we MUST provide Ukraine with Javelin missiles and other lethal aid to fight "Russian Aggression" (with little mention that even Obama balked at that reckless option). All of these proceedings are great distractions, but the weapons of war will not be diminished.
c1ue , Dec 11 2019 17:08 utc | 4
@Kabobyak #3

Very possibly, but the Afghanistan papers have made an impact on some people: American Conservative editor is outraged, including militating against his children serving in the military and taxpayers funding it

jayc , Dec 11 2019 17:10 utc | 5
Another candidate for Steele's "primary source" is Stefan Halper. Svetlana Lhokova suggested that this past Sunday.
Jackrabbit , Dec 11 2019 17:12 utc | 6
Unfortuneately, few will question the findings of these investigations or consider the possibility that the investigations themselves are misdirection/cover-up.

Repeating my comment from yesterday on the Open Thread :

IMO the Lavrov-Pompeo presser is notable mostly for Lavrov's discussion of Russiagate (about 6 minutes in).

Lavrov tells us that the Russian's repeatedly sought to clarify their noninterference by publishing correspondence - which the Trump Administration didn't respond to. And he actual mentions McCarthyism!

Wait, wot?

Yeah, during the worst of the Russiagate accusations, Trump wouldn't do things that would've helped to prove that Russiagate was a farce!!

So, during the election, Trump called on Putin to publish Hillary's emails (the very act of making such a request is likely illegal because at the time it was known that her emails contained highly classified info) but he wouldn't accept Russia's publication of exculpatory info about Russiagate?!?!

This would cause cognitive dissonance galore in an Americans that hear it - so one can be sure that it will not be reported.

Occam's razor: CIA-MI6, with approval of US Deep State (Clintons, Bush, McCain, Brennan, Mueller, etc.), meddled to elect Trump and pointed fingers at Russia to initiate a new McCarthyism.

Meanwhile in bizarroland (aka USA), Barr says Russiagate is a fantasy based on FBI "bad faith" - yet Pompeo still presses on with the "Russia meddled" bullshit.

!!

james , Dec 11 2019 17:24 utc | 7
thanks b... i like your example in the comment - ''those who thought otherwise should question their judgment''.. good example!

i am a bit concerned like @ 2 casey, that most of this is going to go down the memory hole and there will be that made in america stamp on it - ''no accountability''... i wish i was wrong, but getting worked up at the idea anyone is going to be held accountable for any actions of the usa, or the insiders playing the usa, is clearly a fools game at this point.. all i mostly see is the needed collapse and waiting for that to happen..

Kabobyak , Dec 11 2019 17:27 utc | 8
@c1ue #4

Thanks for that, there are definitely cracks in the armor and we should promote that narrative as you do in your link. Tulsi Gabbard has also expanded the awareness, hopefully she will make the upcoming debates despite strong efforts to silence her. I'll try more to focus on the positive!

james , Dec 11 2019 17:27 utc | 9
@ 6 jr.. there is a press release on all what was said here for anyone interested..

lavrov quote and etc. etc.. "We suggested to our colleagues that in order to dispel all suspicions that are baseless, let us publish this closed-channel correspondence starting from October 2016 till November 2017 so it would all become very clear to many people. However, regrettably, this administration refused to do so. But I'd like to repeat once again we are prepared to do that, and to publish the correspondence that took place through that channel would clear many matters up, I believe. Nevertheless, we hope that the turbulence that appeared out of thin air will die down, just like in 1950s McCarthyism came to naught, and there'll be an opportunity to go back to a more constructive cooperation."

evilempire , Dec 11 2019 17:44 utc | 10
I continue to believe that the FBI and Horowitz perjured themselves in the FISA report. To correct a mistake in a previous post I made, I believe they lied when the claimed the Steele Dossier was not a predicate for opening crossfire hurricane. How can the Steele dossier not be instrumental in the opening of the investigation when bruce ohr's wife nellie ohr was working at fusion gps when bruce ohr met with steele to discuss the dirty dossier.

In other words, the FBI was concocting Operation Crossfire Hurricane prior to the time they had any knowledge of the phony Papadopoulus predicate that the russians were proferring the clinton emails to the trump campaign.

The FISA report claim that Operation Crossfire Hurricane was predicated solely on the Papadopolous allegations is therefore a lie. There was, in fact, no real predicate for Operation Crossfire Hurricane. The predications cited were all fictions and inventions fabricated in a conspiracy between MI6(the FFC or

friendly foreign country cited in the Horowitz report), the DOJ and the FBI. Operation Crossfire Hurricane was a massive Psyop from its inception.

Jackrabbit , Dec 11 2019 18:19 utc | 12
james @9

What major publications have picked up this info from the State Dept PR? Which of them are questioning why Trump didn't agree to let the Russians publish the exonerating information? And how many of those are linking this strange fact to other strange facts and thus raising troubling questions about the 2016 election?

<> <> <> <> <> <>

It's not just that Trump refused to publish exculpatory material. Anyone that's been reading my comments (and/or my blog) knows that Trump also:

- hired Manafort - whose work for pro-Russian candidates in Ukraine had drawn the ire of CIA - despite Manafort's having no recent experience with US elections;

- helped Pelosi to be elected Speaker of the House by inviting her to attend a White House meeting about his border wall (along with Chuck Schumer) prior to the House vote to elect a Speaker.

- initiated Ukrainegate by talking with Ukraine's President about investigating an announced candidate - he didn't have to do this(!) he could've let subordinates work behind the scenes .

And then there's a set of suspicious activity that is difficult to explain, such as: ...

- Kissinger's having called for MAGA in August 2014 (Trump announced his campaign 10 months later and he was the ONLY MAGA candidate and the ONLY populist in the Republican primary) ;

- London as a nexus for the US 2016 campaign (Cambridge Analytica; GPS Fusion; Halper, etc.) ;

- Hillary's making mistakes in the 2016 campaign that no seasoned politician would make;

- the settling of scores via entrapments of Flynn, Manafort, and Wikileaks/Assange (painted as a hostile intelligence agency and Russian agent).

All of these and more support the conclusion that CIA-MI6 elected MAGA Trump and initiated Russiagate.

!!

Piotr Berman , Dec 11 2019 18:28 utc | 13
The anonymous former British operator hears from an anonymous asserted compatriot what two anonymous sources, asserted to have access to inner Russian circles, claim to have heard somewhere that something happened in the Kremlin. <-- Perhaps it is too much to add that the entire conversation happen in a pub, like an eyewitness account of a trout caught by an angler that was larger than a tiger shark [the trout was so large, not the angler].

Really?? , Dec 11 2019 18:31 utc | 14
James #11

I am a great fan of Dmitri Orlov and have just read a large portion of his linked post.

What I do not see Orlov doing is taking into account--in his takedown of "scientific" models---evidence of global warming/change such as *actual* observations of *actual, current* phenomena that are being measured today, such as the condition of the world's coral reefs; the rate of melting of permafrost and release of methane gas; the melting of Greenland (and other) glaciers and release of fresh water into the oceans; acidification of oceans; and quite a lot of evidence for sea level rise, such as saltwater intrusion into freshwater swamps, aquifers, etc.

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 18:38 utc | 15
More can be gleaned by the manner in which BigLie Media spin the investigation's results. At The Hill , Jonathon Turley makes that clear in the first paragraph:

"The analysis of the report by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz greatly depends, as is often the case, on which cable news channel you watch. Indeed, many people might be excused for concluding that Horowitz spent 476 pages to primarily conclude one thing, which is that the Justice Department acted within its guidelines in starting its investigation into the 2016 campaign of President Trump."

The further he goes the worse it gets for the Ds. And he's 100% correct about the biases present in reporting about the Report. Remarks made by Lavrov at the presser were likely done prior to anyone from Russia's delegation having digested any of the Report. What I found important was the following revelation by Lavrov:

"Let me remind you that at the time of the first statements on this topic, which was on the eve of the 2016 US presidential election, we used the communications channel that linked back then Moscow and the Obama administration in Washington to ask our US partners on numerous occasions whether these allegations that emerged in October 2016 and persisted until Donald Trump's inauguration could be addressed. The reply never came. There was no response whatsoever to all our proposals when we said: look, if you suspect us, let's sit down and talk, just put your facts on the table. All this continued after President Trump's inauguration and the appointment of a new administration. We proposed releasing the correspondence through this closed communications channel for the period from October 2016 until January 2017 in order to dispel all this groundless suspicion. This would have clarified the situation for many. Unfortunately, this time it was the current administration that refused to do so. Let me reiterate that we are ready to disclose to the public the exchanges we had through this channel . I think that this would set many things straight. Nevertheless we expect the turbulence that appeared out of thin air to calm down little by little, just as McCarthyism waned in the 1950s, so that we can place our cooperation on a more constructive footing." [My Emphasis]

Lavrov on Mueller Report: "It contains no confirmation of any collusion." End of story. But we do have all this compiled evidence within our communications we're ready to publish is the USA

agrees.

The Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) organization has yet to publish anything about the report. However, Matt Taibbi often writes for that outlet, so his reporting at Rolling Stone ought to be seen as a proxy FAIR report.

Michael Droy , Dec 11 2019 18:42 utc | 16
Great stuff as ever. How useful is it that Skripal is Unavailable but not Dead? For example does it affect redaction of material linked to him?
Jon Carter , Dec 11 2019 18:59 utc | 17
Now that we know Carter Page was working for the CIA as an informant in 2016, is it reasonable to speculate that Page was planted in the Trump campaign by the CIA?
GeorgeV , Dec 11 2019 19:11 utc | 18
The Inspector General of the Department of Justice, Micheal Horowitz's report on the move to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is clear proof of the massive rot that lies at the heart of the US' political system. If this matter is whitewashed over by the MSM, then one more step will have been taken to a violent and bloody revolution in the US of A.
JR , Dec 11 2019 19:41 utc | 20
By now Steele's credibility is zero. Time to revisit Steele's involvement with the debunked "Russia bought the soccer World Champion games", the Litvinenko polonium poisening and the Skripal novichok poisening. The timing of the Skripal matter deserves some scrutiny in relation to Skripal possibly being Steele's source for the infamous Trump dossier. There might be a motive hidden there.
Jackrabbit , Dec 11 2019 19:44 utc | 21
Jon Carter @17:
... is it reasonable to speculate that Page was planted in the Trump campaign by the CIA?

And then there's Simon Bracey Lane in the Sanders campaign as described here: British Spies Infiltrated Bernie Sanders' Campaign?

Plus we have the strange goings-on of Halper and Mifsud as well as Gina Haspel in London also.

!!

uncle tungsten , Dec 11 2019 20:04 utc | 22
karlof1 #15

Thank you for posting Lavrov's words. Between those words and the IG report the kabuki farce is revealed. Why was Trump ignoring the Russian offer you might ask. Because it suited him to have this nonsense dominate the news cycle, you might conclude. Trump and Comey and Brennan deserve each other.

Lavrov's words condemn the three of them.

S , Dec 11 2019 20:25 utc | 24
Twitter account @Techno_Fog lists MSM shills who assured the public the FISA warrant on Page was not based on Steele dossier (h/t Zero Hedge).
james , Dec 11 2019 20:26 utc | 25
just like 9-11... this is an inside job... does anyone really think the truth is going to come to light in any of it?? i'm still with @ 2 caseys view...
karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 20:48 utc | 27
uncle tungsten @22--

Thanks for your reply! Yes, agreed, and I'd add Obama and Clinton. Lavrov also held another presser at the conclusion of his visit that provides additional info not covered in the first. The following is one I thought important:

"Question: The day before, US Congress agreed on a draft military budget, which includes possible sanctions against Nord Stream-2 and Turkish Stream. Have you covered this topic? The Congress sounds very determined. How seriously will the new restrictions affect the completion of our projects?

"Sergey Lavrov: In my opinion, Congress sounds rather obsessed with destroying our relations. It continues pursuing the policy started by the Obama administration. As I mentioned, we are used to this kind of attack. We know how to respond to them. I assure you that neither Nord Stream-2 nor Turkish Stream will be halted."

I must emphatically agree with Lavrov's opinion and was very pleased he answered forthrightly. What seems quite clear is the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by Obama's team and was designed for Clinton to escalate, with bipartisan Congressional backing. That she lost didn't stop the anti-Russian wheel from being turned. So, logic tells us to discover the reason for Obama to alter policy. Over the years I've written here why I think that was done--to continue the #1 policy goal of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people regardless of its impossibility given the Sino-Russo Alliance made reality by that policy goal. That a supermajority in Congress remain deluded is clearly a huge problem, and those continuing to vote for the War Budget need to be removed.

ben , Dec 11 2019 21:03 utc | 28
b posted, in part;"When Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S. presidential election the relevant powers launched a campaign to delegitimize the President elect Donald Trump."

It doesn't take HRC and her resident scum-bag sycophants to deligitimize DJT, his sorry life-style, and his past record do that quite nicely, IMO.

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 21:07 utc | 29
This tweet sums up things nicely in ways BigLie Media won't:

With only 9% approval, it ought to be easy to toss out most Congresscritters, excepting that part of the Senate not up for reelection.

ben , Dec 11 2019 21:18 utc | 30
Jrabbit @ 12 said; "All of these and more support the conclusion that CIA-MI6 elected MAGA Trump and initiated Russiagate."

YEP!!!!!

Paul Damascene , Dec 11 2019 21:24 utc | 32

Karlof1 @ 29--

Are you aware of any means by which a member of congress or of a congressional committee can be impeached or otherwise censured for the misconduct of official duties? That would at least be Schiff...

Posted by: Paul Damascene | Dec 11 2019 21:24 utc | 32

james , Dec 11 2019 21:25 utc | 33
@ 31 john.. i didn't know i had to read the orlov article to say what i did to you!! your post @11 never make any internet link to orlov... what am i missing? does this mean i can only speak with you after i have read another orlov article? lol...
james , Dec 11 2019 21:27 utc | 34
i see it now.. my comment still stands though... people seem especially pugnacious today..
William Gruff , Dec 11 2019 21:27 utc | 35
"It doesn't take HRC and her resident scum-bag sycophants to deligitimize DJT, his sorry life-style, and his past record do that quite nicely, IMO." --ben @28

Ah, but that would be legitimate deligitimization, like attacking his actual policies. Those are rocks that would break the Democrats' own windows as well as Trump's.

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 21:30 utc | 36
29 Cont'd--

And Congress continues to alienate allies :

"So far on Dec 11:

1. Senate Foreign Relations Comm passed Turkey sanctions bill

2. Pentagon Chief warned Turkey moving away NATO

3. U.S. lawmakers introduce legislation to curb Turkey's nuclear weapon obtainment"

Finally, the pretense of being nice to Turkey has come to an end. It will now intensify its looking East, and pursue its national interests. IMO, the Eastern Med's energy issues will now become a major headache.

ben , Dec 11 2019 21:40 utc | 37
karlof @ 29: The head Dems know their pushing the " Russia did it"meme is weak, but the PTB

insist on it, to keep the MIC funds flowing.

The "no-brainer" charges should be; "Obstruction" and "Emoluments" violations. Charges the public can grasp.

What happens if you, or any average person, ignores a summons to appear? They are arrested.

Funneling govt. funds for personal gain is a violation of law, if you are POTUS.

These are violations average Americans can grasp, not the current circus of he said, she said, going on in D.C. lately.

Guess my point is, this hearings are built to fail, because most of our so-called leaders like things the way they are. The rape of the workings classes will continue.

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 21:41 utc | 38
Paul Damascene @32--

Yes. The impeachment process is the same as for Trump. Censuring is much easier but doubt it will occur as too many are deserving. We're seeing the reason Congressional elections are held every two years--vote 'em out if they're no good!

Jackrabbit , Dec 11 2019 22:01 utc | 40
karlof1 @27:

... the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by Obama's team and was designed for Clinton to escalate ...

I don't agree that the baton would be passed to Clinton. The Deep State uses the two-party system as a device. It's not tied to partisan concerns. If the Deep State and the establishment really wanted Clinton elected, they would've made that happen. Few expected Trump to win and few would've been outraged if he had lost. Yet he won. Against all odds. Furthermore, Clinton wasn't the MAGA candidate as called for by Kissinger - Trump was. And he was from the beginning of his candidacy.

Russiagate was based on suspicions of a populist that was compromised by Russia. Hillary has too much baggage to play populist or nationalist - including Bill's involvement with Epstein.

Also, you're forgetting the set ups of Manafort, Flynn, and Wikileaks/Assange - which were important parts of Russiagate and also a convenient way of settling scores. These set-ups required the Russiagate-tainted candidate (Trump) to win.

And Trump's beating Hillary makes him the classic come-from-behind hero - giving Trump a certain legitimacy that an establishment candidate wouldn't have. That's important when contemplating taking the country to war in the near future.

It's strange to me that people can think that Hillary was the 'chosen candidate', and be OK with that but find a possible selection of a different candidate (Trump, as it turns out) to be outrageous and inconceivable.

=

... with bipartisan Congressional backing . That she lost didn't stop the anti-Russian wheel from being turned.

Since the Deep State and the Establishment desired an effort to restore the Empire, they would turn to whomever could most effectively accomplish that task.

Once again: It didn't have to be Hillary that was selected. In fact, for many reasons (that I've previously expressed) Hillary would have been a poor choice.

=

So, logic tells us to discover the reason for Obama to alter policy. Over the years I've written here why I think that was done--to continue the #1 policy goal of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people ...

FSD is US Mil policy, not a political goal. It states that US Mil will strive to have superiority in weapons and capability in every sphere of combat.

Politically, FSD is just one of several means to an end. IMO that end is the maintenance and expansion of the Anglo-Zionist Empire (aka New World Order).

Also, your dominance theory doesn't answer the question of WHY NOW? (more on that below)

... regardless of its impossibility given the Sino-Russo Alliance ...

Firstly, US Deep State believes that it is possible. And I personally don't buy the notion that Russia and China are fated to prevail. If that were obvious, then the moa bar would have no patrons.

Secondly (and again), WHY NOW? The Sino-Russo Alliance was long in the making. Why did USA suddenly take note?

It's Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 that provides the answer. In this Op-Ed, Kissinger calls for a restored US Empire that is essentially Trump's MAGA. Kissinger is writing immediately after the Donbas rebels have won. The Russians refused to heed Kissinger's advice (to back down) and it has become apparent that Russia's joining the West is no longer an inevitability as the US elite had assumed.

<> <> <> <> <> <>

I've written many times of Kissinger's Op-Ed and of indications that the Deep State selected MAGA Trump to be President while also initiating a new McCarthyism. Why is it STILL so difficult to believe a theory that makes so much sense?

!!

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 22:08 utc | 41
ben @37--

Yes, the status quo is very generous to the Current Oligarchy and its tools, but not so for the vast public majority which is clamoring for change. IMO, much can be learned from the UK election tomorrow, of which there's been very little discussion here despite its importance. I suggest following the very important developments from the past few days at Criag Murray's Twitter and at his website , the linked article being a scoop of sorts.

Also harder to follow but important as well are ballot initiatives within the states. This site has current listing . I just looked over those for California where there are a few good ones, but the threshold for signatures is getting higher, close to one million are now needed in CA.

Cortes , Dec 11 2019 22:34 utc | 43
Lavrov's comments about the offers to open up normally closed communications really only highlight two obvious issues:
AshenLight , Dec 11 2019 22:38 utc | 44
@ Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 11 2019 21:07 utc | 29
With only 9% approval, it ought to be easy to toss out most Congresscritters, excepting that part of the Senate not up for reelection.

You'd think so, but somehow the numbers pretty much reverse when these same people consider their own rep, and the incumbency reelection rate is shockingly high (haven't looked recently but IIRC it has hovered around 90% for decades). Apparently it is amazingly easy to convince the masses that their guy is the one good apple in the bunch.

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 22:39 utc | 45
Jon Schwartz reminds me why I don't stop and peruse magazine stands anymore. Seeing the words and this picture would've sparked lots of unpleasant language:

"The best part of Michelle Obama explaining she shares the same values as George W. Bush is she was being interviewed on network TV by Bush's daughter. There's nothing more American than our ruling class making us watch them discuss how great they all are."

And the escalation wasn't rigged for Clinton to initiate--yeah, sure, whatever the rabbit says.

steven t johnson , Dec 11 2019 22:42 utc | 46
Until there is some comparison of how the FISA court usually works, none of this chatter means a thing. Violations of Woods procedures and assertions not supported by documents are SOP. The FISA court is always a joke.

Delgeitimizing Trump, reversing the election, all simple-minded drviel, as only nitwits see Trump as anything but the loser.

Jackrabbit , Dec 11 2019 23:08 utc | 48
Jen, that's a really interesting post. Thanks.

Skripal knows something that US-UK either 1) don't want the Russians to know OR 2) don't want ANYONE to know.

What could that be? 1) That Steele dossier is bullshit? We know that. 2) That Steele dossier was meant to be bullshit ? Well, that raises a whole host of questions, doesn't it?

!!

Kabobyak , Dec 12 2019 0:45 utc | 51
Good chance Steele had little to do with writing the Dossier. "Simpson-Ohr Dossier", anyone? Steele was needed as a credible looking intelligence officer with Russia ties and a past working relationship with US Intel, as cover to sell to FBI, FISA Court, and the public (meeting with Isikoff, Yahoo News story).

Glenn Simpson and wife Mary Jacoby had written articles for the WSJ in 2007 and 2008 with a script and language similar to the Dossier. Devin Nunes seems to believe this scenario, and it is discussed in detail in books by Dan Bongino and Lee Smith, among others.

daffyDuct , Dec 12 2019 2:26 utc | 56
c1ue @4

The Afghanistan report outlines a *massive fraud*. $14 billion/month, 90% of the world's opium, no "progress", oh, and lying to Congress for two decades.

ben , Dec 12 2019 3:24 utc | 59
OT, but this seems to be going around..Eh?

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/11/jeremy-corbyn-faces-russiagate-smear-campaign-before-uk-vote/#more-17822

ben , Dec 12 2019 4:47 utc | 62
physchoh @ 60; The difference, at least in my mind, is that, the "Russia did it" meme, is the weakest of all cases against DJT. Corbyn, on the other hand, may actually be hurt by the bogus charges. IMO, what this shows is coordination between the elites to bring down a progressive in the UK, who fancies public control over major finances instead of private concerns.
Piotr Berman , Dec 12 2019 5:03 utc | 63
Fox News, now: Biden blames staff, says nobody 'warned' him son's Ukraine job could raise conflict. In a TV comedy Seinfeld, one of the main characters, George, is a compulsive liar with a knack of getting in trouble. Sometimes he has a job. Final scene of one of those jobs:
evilempire , Dec 12 2019 5:34 utc | 64
I have theory about why Horowitz did not bias in the FBI. The definition of bias is to harbor a deeply negative feeling that clouds one's judgement about a person or subject. However, the conspirators' judgement was not clouded in this case. Their negative feelings focused their intent to destroy the object of

their feeling. The precise term for this is malice.

So Horowitz was technically correct when he did not find bias. What he might have been reluctant to spell out is that he did find malice.

Perimetr , Dec 12 2019 6:03 utc | 65
Re Really?? | Dec 11 2019 18:31 utc | 14 and AshenLight | Dec 11 2019 19:36 utc | 19

I agree with you. Orlov is a brilliant, insightful analyst, who is also very funny. But he is off the mark with his dismissal of global warming and also with his endorsement of nuclear power. The immense amounts of waste from uranium mining all the way to hundreds of thousands of tons of high-level waste in spent fuel pools pose a huge threat to current and future generations . . . like the next 3000 generations of humans (and all other forms of life) that will have to deal with this. Mankind has never built anything that has lasted a fraction of the 100,000 years required for the isolation of high-level wastes from the biosphere. Take a look at Into Eternity which is a great documentary on the disposal of nuclear waste in Finland.

Orlov's analysis is superficial, unfortunately, in these areas.

[Dec 12, 2019] The FBI - Pushed By John Brennan - Lied To The Court Seven Times To Spy On The Trump Campaign

Highly recommended!
And behind Brennan we can can see the Nobel Peace Price winner.
Notable quotes:
"... A major role in directing the plot has fallen to Obama's consigliere John Brennan, the current director of the CIA. ..."
"... One part of the still ongoing deligitimization campaign was the FBI investigation of alleged Russian connections of four members of the Trump election campaign. ..."
"... The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with. ..."
"... The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors. ..."
"... That the dossier was mere dreck was quite obvious to any sober person who read it when it was first published ..."
"... That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level", face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. ..."
"... (This is a Moon of Alabama fundraiser week. Please consider to support our work .) ..."
"... Occam's razor: CIA-MI6, with approval of US Deep State (Clintons, Bush, McCain, Brennan, Mueller, etc.), meddled to elect Trump and pointed fingers at Russia to initiate a new McCarthyism. ..."
"... "Sergey Lavrov: In my opinion, Congress sounds rather obsessed with destroying our relations. It continues pursuing the policy started by the Obama administration. As I mentioned, we are used to this kind of attack. We know how to respond to them. I assure you that neither Nord Stream-2 nor Turkish Stream will be halted." ..."
"... ... the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by Obama's team and was designed for Clinton to escalate ... ..."
"... It's Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 that provides the answer. In this Op-Ed, Kissinger calls for a restored US Empire that is essentially Trump's MAGA. Kissinger is writing immediately after the Donbas rebels have won. The Russians refused to heed Kissinger's advice (to back down) and it has become apparent that Russia's joining the West is no longer an inevitability as the US elite had assumed. ..."
"... Good chance Steele had little to do with writing the Dossier. "Simpson-Ohr Dossier", anyone? Steele was needed as a credible looking intelligence officer with Russia ties and a past working relationship with US Intel, as cover to sell to FBI, FISA Court, and the public (meeting with Isikoff, Yahoo News story). ..."
"... Glenn Simpson and wife Mary Jacoby had written articles for the WSJ in 2007 and 2008 with a script and language similar to the Dossier. Devin Nunes seems to believe this scenario, and it is discussed in detail in books by Dan Bongino and Lee Smith, among others. ..."
"... physchoh @ 60; The difference, at least in my mind, is that, the "Russia did it" meme, is the weakest of all cases against DJT. Corbyn, on the other hand, may actually be hurt by the bogus charges. IMO, what this shows is coordination between the elites to bring down a progressive in the UK, who fancies public control over major finances instead of private concerns. ..."
"... So Horowitz was technically correct when he did not find bias. What he might have been reluctant to spell out is that he did find malice. ..."
Dec 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

On January 6 2017 this author concluded :

When Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S. presidential election the relevant powers launched a campaign to delegitimize the President elect Donald Trump.

The ultimate aim of the cabal is to kick him out of office and have a reliable replacement, like the Vice-President elect Pence, take over. Should that not be possible it is hoped that the delegitimization will make it impossible for Trump to change major policy trajectories especially in foreign policy. A main issue here is the reorientation of the U.S. military complex and its NATO proxies from the war of terror towards a direct confrontation with main powers like Russia and China.

...

A major role in directing the plot has fallen to Obama's consigliere John Brennan, the current director of the CIA.

One part of the still ongoing deligitimization campaign was the FBI investigation of alleged Russian connections of four members of the Trump election campaign.

The Inspector General of the U.S. Justice Department Michael Horowitz has investigated the FBI operation against the election campaign of Donald Trump. Yesterday he published his report, Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation (pdf). It is 480 pages long and quite thorough but unfortunately very limited in its scope.

Horowitz finds that the FBI was within the law when it opened the investigation but that the FBI's applications to the FISA court, which decides if the FBI can spy on someone's communications, were based on lies and utterly flawed.

Your host unfortunately lacked the time so far to read more than the executive summary. But others have pointed out some essential findings.

Matt Taibbi remarks :

The Guardian headline reads: " DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser ."

If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a "clearing" of the FBI, never clear me of anything. ...

Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz's conclusion that there was no evidence of "political bias or improper motivation" in the FBI's probe of Donald Trump's Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had "authorized purpose" to conduct.

...

However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose "serious" procedural problems and omissions of "significant information" in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).

...

There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:

The so-called "Steele dossier" was, actually, crucial to the FBI's decision to seek secret surveillance of Page. ...

...

The "Steele dossier" was "Internet rumor," and corroboration for the pee tape story was "zero." ...

John Solomon finds :

Appendix 1 identifies the total violations by the FBI of the so-called Woods Procedures, the process by which the bureau verifies information and assures the FISA court its evidence is true.

The Appendix identifies a total of 51 Woods procedure violations from the FISA application the FBI submitted to the court authorizing surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page starting in October 2016.

A whopping nine of those violations fell into the category called: "Supporting document shows that the factual assertion is inaccurate."

For those who don't speak IG parlance, it means the FBI made nine false assertions to the FISA court. In short, what the bureau said was contradicted by the evidence in its official file.

The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with.

The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors.

That the dossier was mere dreck was quite obvious to any sober person who read it when it was first published . Here is what we wrote about it at that time:

The anonymous former British operator hears from an anonymous compatriot that two anonymous sources, asserted to have access to inner Russian circles, claimed to have heard somewhere that something happened in the Kremlin.

They assert that Trump was supported and directed by Putin himself five years ago while even a year ago no one would have bet a penny on Trump gaining any political significant position or even the presidency.

There is a lot more of such nonsense in these new Hitler diaries. It is bonkers from a to z.

Those who thought otherwise should question their judgment.

It is now claimed that the FBI is exculpated because the Horowitz report did not find "political bias or improper motivation". But that omits the fact that at least four high ranking people in the FBI and Justice Department who were involved in the case were found to be politically biased and were removed from their positions.

It also omits that the scope of Horowitz's investigation was limited to the Justice Department. He was not able to investigate the CIA and its former director John Brennan who was alleging Russia-Trump connections months before the FBI investigation started:

Contrary to a general impression that the FBI launched the Trump-Russia conspiracy probe, Brennan pushed it to the bureau – breaking with CIA tradition by intruding into domestic politics: the 2016 presidential election. He also supplied suggestive but ultimately false information to counterintelligence investigators and other U.S. officials.

The current CIA director Gina Haspel was CIA station chief in London during that time and while several of the entrapment attempts of Trump campaign staff by the FBI investigation happened. Horowitz spoke with neither of them.

Peter Van Buren concludes :

The current Horowitz Report, read alongside his previous report on how the FBI played inside the 2016 election vis-a-vis Clinton, should leave no doubt that the Bureau tried to influence the election of a president and then delegitimize him when he won. It wasn't the Russians; it was us.

That is correct, but the whole conspiracy was even deeper. It was not the FBI which initiated the case.

My hunch is still that the FBI investigation was a case of parallel construction which is often used to build a legitimate case after a suspicion was found by illegitimate means. In this case it was John Brennan who in early 2016 contacted the head of the British GCHQ electronic interception service and asked him to spy on the Trump campaign. GHCQ then claimed that something was found that was deemed suspicious :

That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level", face-to-face between the two agency chiefs.

The FBI was tipped off on the issue and on July 31 2016 started an investigation to construct a parallel legal case. It send out British and U.S. agents to entrap Trump campaign members. It used the obviously fake Steele dossier to gain FISA court judgments that allowed it to spy on the campaign. Downing Street was informed throughout the whole affair. A day after Trump's inauguration the UK's then Prime Minister Theresa May fired GHCQ chief Robert Hannigan.

One still open question is to what extend then President Barack Obama was involved in the affair.

There is another ongoing investigation by U.S. Prosecutor John Durham. That investigation is not limited to the Justice Department but will involve all agencies and domestic as well as foreign sources. Durham has the legal rights to declassify whatever is needed and he can indict persons should he find that they committed a crime. His report will hopefully go much deeper than the already horrendous stuff Horowitz delivered.

(This is a Moon of Alabama fundraiser week. Please consider to support our work .)

Posted by b on December 11, 2019 at 16:16 UTC | Permalink

Antoinetta III , Dec 11 2019 16:27 utc | 1

Do we have any idea when the Durham report will be coming out?

Antoinetta III

casey , Dec 11 2019 16:30 utc | 2
Anyone taking bets on Durham/Barr making indictments in this mess? My guess is a whole lot of horse trading is going on behind the scenes now, as in, "I'll trade you a censure for all potential indictments going down the memory hole."
Kabobyak , Dec 11 2019 16:54 utc | 3
Typical dog and pony show which will change nothing relating to interventionist foreign policy and the new cold war with Russia. Too many saw benefits from the corruption in Ukraine to dig deep there; the Bidens were just the most blatant, Lindsey Graham and others from both parties were involved so don't expect much from the Senate hearings. The bipartisan major goals are a fait accompli; universal acceptance that Russia worked to undermine our elections (and to destroy our "Democracy") and are thus an enemy we must fight, and it's universally accepted by all that we MUST provide Ukraine with Javelin missiles and other lethal aid to fight "Russian Aggression" (with little mention that even Obama balked at that reckless option). All of these proceedings are great distractions, but the weapons of war will not be diminished.
c1ue , Dec 11 2019 17:08 utc | 4
@Kabobyak #3

Very possibly, but the Afghanistan papers have made an impact on some people: American Conservative editor is outraged, including militating against his children serving in the military and taxpayers funding it

jayc , Dec 11 2019 17:10 utc | 5
Another candidate for Steele's "primary source" is Stefan Halper. Svetlana Lhokova suggested that this past Sunday.
Jackrabbit , Dec 11 2019 17:12 utc | 6
Unfortuneately, few will question the findings of these investigations or consider the possibility that the investigations themselves are misdirection/cover-up.

Repeating my comment from yesterday on the Open Thread :

IMO the Lavrov-Pompeo presser is notable mostly for Lavrov's discussion of Russiagate (about 6 minutes in).

Lavrov tells us that the Russian's repeatedly sought to clarify their noninterference by publishing correspondence - which the Trump Administration didn't respond to. And he actual mentions McCarthyism!

Wait, wot?

Yeah, during the worst of the Russiagate accusations, Trump wouldn't do things that would've helped to prove that Russiagate was a farce!!

So, during the election, Trump called on Putin to publish Hillary's emails (the very act of making such a request is likely illegal because at the time it was known that her emails contained highly classified info) but he wouldn't accept Russia's publication of exculpatory info about Russiagate?!?!

This would cause cognitive dissonance galore in an Americans that hear it - so one can be sure that it will not be reported.

Occam's razor: CIA-MI6, with approval of US Deep State (Clintons, Bush, McCain, Brennan, Mueller, etc.), meddled to elect Trump and pointed fingers at Russia to initiate a new McCarthyism.

Meanwhile in bizarroland (aka USA), Barr says Russiagate is a fantasy based on FBI "bad faith" - yet Pompeo still presses on with the "Russia meddled" bullshit.

!!

james , Dec 11 2019 17:24 utc | 7
thanks b... i like your example in the comment - ''those who thought otherwise should question their judgment''.. good example!

i am a bit concerned like @ 2 casey, that most of this is going to go down the memory hole and there will be that made in america stamp on it - ''no accountability''... i wish i was wrong, but getting worked up at the idea anyone is going to be held accountable for any actions of the usa, or the insiders playing the usa, is clearly a fools game at this point.. all i mostly see is the needed collapse and waiting for that to happen..

Kabobyak , Dec 11 2019 17:27 utc | 8
@c1ue #4

Thanks for that, there are definitely cracks in the armor and we should promote that narrative as you do in your link. Tulsi Gabbard has also expanded the awareness, hopefully she will make the upcoming debates despite strong efforts to silence her. I'll try more to focus on the positive!

james , Dec 11 2019 17:27 utc | 9
@ 6 jr.. there is a press release on all what was said here for anyone interested..

lavrov quote and etc. etc.. "We suggested to our colleagues that in order to dispel all suspicions that are baseless, let us publish this closed-channel correspondence starting from October 2016 till November 2017 so it would all become very clear to many people. However, regrettably, this administration refused to do so. But I'd like to repeat once again we are prepared to do that, and to publish the correspondence that took place through that channel would clear many matters up, I believe. Nevertheless, we hope that the turbulence that appeared out of thin air will die down, just like in 1950s McCarthyism came to naught, and there'll be an opportunity to go back to a more constructive cooperation."

evilempire , Dec 11 2019 17:44 utc | 10
I continue to believe that the FBI and Horowitz perjured themselves in the FISA report. To correct a mistake in a previous post I made, I believe they lied when the claimed the Steele Dossier was not a predicate for opening crossfire hurricane. How can the Steele dossier not be instrumental in the opening of the investigation when bruce ohr's wife nellie ohr was working at fusion gps when bruce ohr met with steele to discuss the dirty dossier.

In other words, the FBI was concocting Operation Crossfire Hurricane prior to the time they had any knowledge of the phony Papadopoulus predicate that the russians were proferring the clinton emails to the trump campaign.

The FISA report claim that Operation Crossfire Hurricane was predicated solely on the Papadopolous allegations is therefore a lie. There was, in fact, no real predicate for Operation Crossfire Hurricane. The predications cited were all fictions and inventions fabricated in a conspiracy between MI6(the FFC or

friendly foreign country cited in the Horowitz report), the DOJ and the FBI. Operation Crossfire Hurricane was a massive Psyop from its inception.

Jackrabbit , Dec 11 2019 18:19 utc | 12
james @9

What major publications have picked up this info from the State Dept PR? Which of them are questioning why Trump didn't agree to let the Russians publish the exonerating information? And how many of those are linking this strange fact to other strange facts and thus raising troubling questions about the 2016 election?

<> <> <> <> <> <>

It's not just that Trump refused to publish exculpatory material. Anyone that's been reading my comments (and/or my blog) knows that Trump also:

- hired Manafort - whose work for pro-Russian candidates in Ukraine had drawn the ire of CIA - despite Manafort's having no recent experience with US elections;

- helped Pelosi to be elected Speaker of the House by inviting her to attend a White House meeting about his border wall (along with Chuck Schumer) prior to the House vote to elect a Speaker.

- initiated Ukrainegate by talking with Ukraine's President about investigating an announced candidate - he didn't have to do this(!) he could've let subordinates work behind the scenes .

And then there's a set of suspicious activity that is difficult to explain, such as: ...

- Kissinger's having called for MAGA in August 2014 (Trump announced his campaign 10 months later and he was the ONLY MAGA candidate and the ONLY populist in the Republican primary) ;

- London as a nexus for the US 2016 campaign (Cambridge Analytica; GPS Fusion; Halper, etc.) ;

- Hillary's making mistakes in the 2016 campaign that no seasoned politician would make;

- the settling of scores via entrapments of Flynn, Manafort, and Wikileaks/Assange (painted as a hostile intelligence agency and Russian agent).

All of these and more support the conclusion that CIA-MI6 elected MAGA Trump and initiated Russiagate.

!!

Piotr Berman , Dec 11 2019 18:28 utc | 13
The anonymous former British operator hears from an anonymous asserted compatriot what two anonymous sources, asserted to have access to inner Russian circles, claim to have heard somewhere that something happened in the Kremlin. <-- Perhaps it is too much to add that the entire conversation happen in a pub, like an eyewitness account of a trout caught by an angler that was larger than a tiger shark [the trout was so large, not the angler].

Really?? , Dec 11 2019 18:31 utc | 14
James #11

I am a great fan of Dmitri Orlov and have just read a large portion of his linked post.

What I do not see Orlov doing is taking into account--in his takedown of "scientific" models---evidence of global warming/change such as *actual* observations of *actual, current* phenomena that are being measured today, such as the condition of the world's coral reefs; the rate of melting of permafrost and release of methane gas; the melting of Greenland (and other) glaciers and release of fresh water into the oceans; acidification of oceans; and quite a lot of evidence for sea level rise, such as saltwater intrusion into freshwater swamps, aquifers, etc.

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 18:38 utc | 15
More can be gleaned by the manner in which BigLie Media spin the investigation's results. At The Hill , Jonathon Turley makes that clear in the first paragraph:

"The analysis of the report by Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz greatly depends, as is often the case, on which cable news channel you watch. Indeed, many people might be excused for concluding that Horowitz spent 476 pages to primarily conclude one thing, which is that the Justice Department acted within its guidelines in starting its investigation into the 2016 campaign of President Trump."

The further he goes the worse it gets for the Ds. And he's 100% correct about the biases present in reporting about the Report. Remarks made by Lavrov at the presser were likely done prior to anyone from Russia's delegation having digested any of the Report. What I found important was the following revelation by Lavrov:

"Let me remind you that at the time of the first statements on this topic, which was on the eve of the 2016 US presidential election, we used the communications channel that linked back then Moscow and the Obama administration in Washington to ask our US partners on numerous occasions whether these allegations that emerged in October 2016 and persisted until Donald Trump's inauguration could be addressed. The reply never came. There was no response whatsoever to all our proposals when we said: look, if you suspect us, let's sit down and talk, just put your facts on the table. All this continued after President Trump's inauguration and the appointment of a new administration. We proposed releasing the correspondence through this closed communications channel for the period from October 2016 until January 2017 in order to dispel all this groundless suspicion. This would have clarified the situation for many. Unfortunately, this time it was the current administration that refused to do so. Let me reiterate that we are ready to disclose to the public the exchanges we had through this channel . I think that this would set many things straight. Nevertheless we expect the turbulence that appeared out of thin air to calm down little by little, just as McCarthyism waned in the 1950s, so that we can place our cooperation on a more constructive footing." [My Emphasis]

Lavrov on Mueller Report: "It contains no confirmation of any collusion." End of story. But we do have all this compiled evidence within our communications we're ready to publish is the USA

agrees.

The Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) organization has yet to publish anything about the report. However, Matt Taibbi often writes for that outlet, so his reporting at Rolling Stone ought to be seen as a proxy FAIR report.

Michael Droy , Dec 11 2019 18:42 utc | 16
Great stuff as ever. How useful is it that Skripal is Unavailable but not Dead? For example does it affect redaction of material linked to him?
Jon Carter , Dec 11 2019 18:59 utc | 17
Now that we know Carter Page was working for the CIA as an informant in 2016, is it reasonable to speculate that Page was planted in the Trump campaign by the CIA?
GeorgeV , Dec 11 2019 19:11 utc | 18
The Inspector General of the Department of Justice, Micheal Horowitz's report on the move to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is clear proof of the massive rot that lies at the heart of the US' political system. If this matter is whitewashed over by the MSM, then one more step will have been taken to a violent and bloody revolution in the US of A.
JR , Dec 11 2019 19:41 utc | 20
By now Steele's credibility is zero. Time to revisit Steele's involvement with the debunked "Russia bought the soccer World Champion games", the Litvinenko polonium poisening and the Skripal novichok poisening. The timing of the Skripal matter deserves some scrutiny in relation to Skripal possibly being Steele's source for the infamous Trump dossier. There might be a motive hidden there.
Jackrabbit , Dec 11 2019 19:44 utc | 21
Jon Carter @17:
... is it reasonable to speculate that Page was planted in the Trump campaign by the CIA?

And then there's Simon Bracey Lane in the Sanders campaign as described here: British Spies Infiltrated Bernie Sanders' Campaign?

Plus we have the strange goings-on of Halper and Mifsud as well as Gina Haspel in London also.

!!

uncle tungsten , Dec 11 2019 20:04 utc | 22
karlof1 #15

Thank you for posting Lavrov's words. Between those words and the IG report the kabuki farce is revealed. Why was Trump ignoring the Russian offer you might ask. Because it suited him to have this nonsense dominate the news cycle, you might conclude. Trump and Comey and Brennan deserve each other.

Lavrov's words condemn the three of them.

S , Dec 11 2019 20:25 utc | 24
Twitter account @Techno_Fog lists MSM shills who assured the public the FISA warrant on Page was not based on Steele dossier (h/t Zero Hedge).
james , Dec 11 2019 20:26 utc | 25
just like 9-11... this is an inside job... does anyone really think the truth is going to come to light in any of it?? i'm still with @ 2 caseys view...
karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 20:48 utc | 27
uncle tungsten @22--

Thanks for your reply! Yes, agreed, and I'd add Obama and Clinton. Lavrov also held another presser at the conclusion of his visit that provides additional info not covered in the first. The following is one I thought important:

"Question: The day before, US Congress agreed on a draft military budget, which includes possible sanctions against Nord Stream-2 and Turkish Stream. Have you covered this topic? The Congress sounds very determined. How seriously will the new restrictions affect the completion of our projects?

"Sergey Lavrov: In my opinion, Congress sounds rather obsessed with destroying our relations. It continues pursuing the policy started by the Obama administration. As I mentioned, we are used to this kind of attack. We know how to respond to them. I assure you that neither Nord Stream-2 nor Turkish Stream will be halted."

I must emphatically agree with Lavrov's opinion and was very pleased he answered forthrightly. What seems quite clear is the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by Obama's team and was designed for Clinton to escalate, with bipartisan Congressional backing. That she lost didn't stop the anti-Russian wheel from being turned. So, logic tells us to discover the reason for Obama to alter policy. Over the years I've written here why I think that was done--to continue the #1 policy goal of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people regardless of its impossibility given the Sino-Russo Alliance made reality by that policy goal. That a supermajority in Congress remain deluded is clearly a huge problem, and those continuing to vote for the War Budget need to be removed.

ben , Dec 11 2019 21:03 utc | 28
b posted, in part;"When Hillary Clinton was defeated in the U.S. presidential election the relevant powers launched a campaign to delegitimize the President elect Donald Trump."

It doesn't take HRC and her resident scum-bag sycophants to deligitimize DJT, his sorry life-style, and his past record do that quite nicely, IMO.

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 21:07 utc | 29
This tweet sums up things nicely in ways BigLie Media won't:

With only 9% approval, it ought to be easy to toss out most Congresscritters, excepting that part of the Senate not up for reelection.

ben , Dec 11 2019 21:18 utc | 30
Jrabbit @ 12 said; "All of these and more support the conclusion that CIA-MI6 elected MAGA Trump and initiated Russiagate."

YEP!!!!!

Paul Damascene , Dec 11 2019 21:24 utc | 32

Karlof1 @ 29--

Are you aware of any means by which a member of congress or of a congressional committee can be impeached or otherwise censured for the misconduct of official duties? That would at least be Schiff...

Posted by: Paul Damascene | Dec 11 2019 21:24 utc | 32

james , Dec 11 2019 21:25 utc | 33
@ 31 john.. i didn't know i had to read the orlov article to say what i did to you!! your post @11 never make any internet link to orlov... what am i missing? does this mean i can only speak with you after i have read another orlov article? lol...
james , Dec 11 2019 21:27 utc | 34
i see it now.. my comment still stands though... people seem especially pugnacious today..
William Gruff , Dec 11 2019 21:27 utc | 35
"It doesn't take HRC and her resident scum-bag sycophants to deligitimize DJT, his sorry life-style, and his past record do that quite nicely, IMO." --ben @28

Ah, but that would be legitimate deligitimization, like attacking his actual policies. Those are rocks that would break the Democrats' own windows as well as Trump's.

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 21:30 utc | 36
29 Cont'd--

And Congress continues to alienate allies :

"So far on Dec 11:

1. Senate Foreign Relations Comm passed Turkey sanctions bill

2. Pentagon Chief warned Turkey moving away NATO

3. U.S. lawmakers introduce legislation to curb Turkey's nuclear weapon obtainment"

Finally, the pretense of being nice to Turkey has come to an end. It will now intensify its looking East, and pursue its national interests. IMO, the Eastern Med's energy issues will now become a major headache.

ben , Dec 11 2019 21:40 utc | 37
karlof @ 29: The head Dems know their pushing the " Russia did it"meme is weak, but the PTB

insist on it, to keep the MIC funds flowing.

The "no-brainer" charges should be; "Obstruction" and "Emoluments" violations. Charges the public can grasp.

What happens if you, or any average person, ignores a summons to appear? They are arrested.

Funneling govt. funds for personal gain is a violation of law, if you are POTUS.

These are violations average Americans can grasp, not the current circus of he said, she said, going on in D.C. lately.

Guess my point is, this hearings are built to fail, because most of our so-called leaders like things the way they are. The rape of the workings classes will continue.

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 21:41 utc | 38
Paul Damascene @32--

Yes. The impeachment process is the same as for Trump. Censuring is much easier but doubt it will occur as too many are deserving. We're seeing the reason Congressional elections are held every two years--vote 'em out if they're no good!

Jackrabbit , Dec 11 2019 22:01 utc | 40
karlof1 @27:

... the current anti-Russian idiocy was started by Obama's team and was designed for Clinton to escalate ...

I don't agree that the baton would be passed to Clinton. The Deep State uses the two-party system as a device. It's not tied to partisan concerns. If the Deep State and the establishment really wanted Clinton elected, they would've made that happen. Few expected Trump to win and few would've been outraged if he had lost. Yet he won. Against all odds. Furthermore, Clinton wasn't the MAGA candidate as called for by Kissinger - Trump was. And he was from the beginning of his candidacy.

Russiagate was based on suspicions of a populist that was compromised by Russia. Hillary has too much baggage to play populist or nationalist - including Bill's involvement with Epstein.

Also, you're forgetting the set ups of Manafort, Flynn, and Wikileaks/Assange - which were important parts of Russiagate and also a convenient way of settling scores. These set-ups required the Russiagate-tainted candidate (Trump) to win.

And Trump's beating Hillary makes him the classic come-from-behind hero - giving Trump a certain legitimacy that an establishment candidate wouldn't have. That's important when contemplating taking the country to war in the near future.

It's strange to me that people can think that Hillary was the 'chosen candidate', and be OK with that but find a possible selection of a different candidate (Trump, as it turns out) to be outrageous and inconceivable.

=

... with bipartisan Congressional backing . That she lost didn't stop the anti-Russian wheel from being turned.

Since the Deep State and the Establishment desired an effort to restore the Empire, they would turn to whomever could most effectively accomplish that task.

Once again: It didn't have to be Hillary that was selected. In fact, for many reasons (that I've previously expressed) Hillary would have been a poor choice.

=

So, logic tells us to discover the reason for Obama to alter policy. Over the years I've written here why I think that was done--to continue the #1 policy goal of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people ...

FSD is US Mil policy, not a political goal. It states that US Mil will strive to have superiority in weapons and capability in every sphere of combat.

Politically, FSD is just one of several means to an end. IMO that end is the maintenance and expansion of the Anglo-Zionist Empire (aka New World Order).

Also, your dominance theory doesn't answer the question of WHY NOW? (more on that below)

... regardless of its impossibility given the Sino-Russo Alliance ...

Firstly, US Deep State believes that it is possible. And I personally don't buy the notion that Russia and China are fated to prevail. If that were obvious, then the moa bar would have no patrons.

Secondly (and again), WHY NOW? The Sino-Russo Alliance was long in the making. Why did USA suddenly take note?

It's Kissinger's WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 that provides the answer. In this Op-Ed, Kissinger calls for a restored US Empire that is essentially Trump's MAGA. Kissinger is writing immediately after the Donbas rebels have won. The Russians refused to heed Kissinger's advice (to back down) and it has become apparent that Russia's joining the West is no longer an inevitability as the US elite had assumed.

<> <> <> <> <> <>

I've written many times of Kissinger's Op-Ed and of indications that the Deep State selected MAGA Trump to be President while also initiating a new McCarthyism. Why is it STILL so difficult to believe a theory that makes so much sense?

!!

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 22:08 utc | 41
ben @37--

Yes, the status quo is very generous to the Current Oligarchy and its tools, but not so for the vast public majority which is clamoring for change. IMO, much can be learned from the UK election tomorrow, of which there's been very little discussion here despite its importance. I suggest following the very important developments from the past few days at Criag Murray's Twitter and at his website , the linked article being a scoop of sorts.

Also harder to follow but important as well are ballot initiatives within the states. This site has current listing . I just looked over those for California where there are a few good ones, but the threshold for signatures is getting higher, close to one million are now needed in CA.

Cortes , Dec 11 2019 22:34 utc | 43
Lavrov's comments about the offers to open up normally closed communications really only highlight two obvious issues:
AshenLight , Dec 11 2019 22:38 utc | 44
@ Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 11 2019 21:07 utc | 29
With only 9% approval, it ought to be easy to toss out most Congresscritters, excepting that part of the Senate not up for reelection.

You'd think so, but somehow the numbers pretty much reverse when these same people consider their own rep, and the incumbency reelection rate is shockingly high (haven't looked recently but IIRC it has hovered around 90% for decades). Apparently it is amazingly easy to convince the masses that their guy is the one good apple in the bunch.

karlof1 , Dec 11 2019 22:39 utc | 45
Jon Schwartz reminds me why I don't stop and peruse magazine stands anymore. Seeing the words and this picture would've sparked lots of unpleasant language:

"The best part of Michelle Obama explaining she shares the same values as George W. Bush is she was being interviewed on network TV by Bush's daughter. There's nothing more American than our ruling class making us watch them discuss how great they all are."

And the escalation wasn't rigged for Clinton to initiate--yeah, sure, whatever the rabbit says.

steven t johnson , Dec 11 2019 22:42 utc | 46
Until there is some comparison of how the FISA court usually works, none of this chatter means a thing. Violations of Woods procedures and assertions not supported by documents are SOP. The FISA court is always a joke.

Delgeitimizing Trump, reversing the election, all simple-minded drviel, as only nitwits see Trump as anything but the loser.

Jackrabbit , Dec 11 2019 23:08 utc | 48
Jen, that's a really interesting post. Thanks.

Skripal knows something that US-UK either 1) don't want the Russians to know OR 2) don't want ANYONE to know.

What could that be? 1) That Steele dossier is bullshit? We know that. 2) That Steele dossier was meant to be bullshit ? Well, that raises a whole host of questions, doesn't it?

!!

Kabobyak , Dec 12 2019 0:45 utc | 51
Good chance Steele had little to do with writing the Dossier. "Simpson-Ohr Dossier", anyone? Steele was needed as a credible looking intelligence officer with Russia ties and a past working relationship with US Intel, as cover to sell to FBI, FISA Court, and the public (meeting with Isikoff, Yahoo News story).

Glenn Simpson and wife Mary Jacoby had written articles for the WSJ in 2007 and 2008 with a script and language similar to the Dossier. Devin Nunes seems to believe this scenario, and it is discussed in detail in books by Dan Bongino and Lee Smith, among others.

daffyDuct , Dec 12 2019 2:26 utc | 56
c1ue @4

The Afghanistan report outlines a *massive fraud*. $14 billion/month, 90% of the world's opium, no "progress", oh, and lying to Congress for two decades.

ben , Dec 12 2019 3:24 utc | 59
OT, but this seems to be going around..Eh?

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/11/jeremy-corbyn-faces-russiagate-smear-campaign-before-uk-vote/#more-17822

ben , Dec 12 2019 4:47 utc | 62
physchoh @ 60; The difference, at least in my mind, is that, the "Russia did it" meme, is the weakest of all cases against DJT. Corbyn, on the other hand, may actually be hurt by the bogus charges. IMO, what this shows is coordination between the elites to bring down a progressive in the UK, who fancies public control over major finances instead of private concerns.
Piotr Berman , Dec 12 2019 5:03 utc | 63
Fox News, now: Biden blames staff, says nobody 'warned' him son's Ukraine job could raise conflict. In a TV comedy Seinfeld, one of the main characters, George, is a compulsive liar with a knack of getting in trouble. Sometimes he has a job. Final scene of one of those jobs:
evilempire , Dec 12 2019 5:34 utc | 64
I have theory about why Horowitz did not bias in the FBI. The definition of bias is to harbor a deeply negative feeling that clouds one's judgement about a person or subject. However, the conspirators' judgement was not clouded in this case. Their negative feelings focused their intent to destroy the object of

their feeling. The precise term for this is malice.

So Horowitz was technically correct when he did not find bias. What he might have been reluctant to spell out is that he did find malice.

Perimetr , Dec 12 2019 6:03 utc | 65
Re Really?? | Dec 11 2019 18:31 utc | 14 and AshenLight | Dec 11 2019 19:36 utc | 19

I agree with you. Orlov is a brilliant, insightful analyst, who is also very funny. But he is off the mark with his dismissal of global warming and also with his endorsement of nuclear power. The immense amounts of waste from uranium mining all the way to hundreds of thousands of tons of high-level waste in spent fuel pools pose a huge threat to current and future generations . . . like the next 3000 generations of humans (and all other forms of life) that will have to deal with this. Mankind has never built anything that has lasted a fraction of the 100,000 years required for the isolation of high-level wastes from the biosphere. Take a look at Into Eternity which is a great documentary on the disposal of nuclear waste in Finland.

Orlov's analysis is superficial, unfortunately, in these areas.

[Dec 12, 2019] 'Always better to talk than not': Lavrov Pompeo take on Russia-US problems in Washington, DC (VIDEO)

Dec 12, 2019 | www.rt.com

Russian FM Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have briefed the media after talks in Washington, DC, the first such meeting since 2017. Speaking at the press conference on Tuesday, Pompeo said the US was seeking a "better relationship" with Russia and that the two countries have been working on improving relations since his visit to Sochi in May. He said lines of communication between Moscow and Washington were open and relations were candid.

Lavrov echoed that, saying the two met regularly and also spoke frequently by phone. "It is useful to talk to each other," he said. "Always better than not talking to each other."

//www.youtube.com/embed/bp-uZHwMSWA

In a nod to the ongoing anti-Russia hysteria in the US, Lavrov said their joint work was, however, " hindered by the wave of suspicions that have overcome Washington." Calling allegations of Russian interference in US internal affairs "baseless," Lavrov said Moscow had "many times" asked the Trump administration to publish all correspondence between Trump and Putin from October 2016 and 2017, but that it had received "no response."

Allegations of Russian interference in US internal affairs are 'baseless': 'We have not seen any evidence, because it does not exist' – Lavrov pic.twitter.com/M1Ezgs22kd

-- RT (@RT_com) December 10, 2019

Russia is hoping the current anti-Russia feeling dissipates like the McCarthyism of the 1950s, Lavrov added.

Pompeo said that cooperation on anti-terrorism is one of the main focuses of the relationship, particularly in relation to Syria.

"We want to make sure Syria never again becomes a safe haven for ISIS or other terrorist groups," he said.

On Ukraine, Pompeo said the resolution of conflict in the eastern regions of the country begins "with adherence to the Minsk agreements."

[Dec 12, 2019] The Skripals residing on US territory would definitely indicate that the US has been the senior partner in the "Skripal operation"

Notable quotes:
"... The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with. ..."
"... The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors. ..."
Dec 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with.

The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors.

Michael Droy , Dec 11 2019 18:42 utc | 16
Great stuff as ever. How useful is it that Skripal is Unavailable but not Dead? For example does it affect redaction of material linked to him?
JR , Dec 11 2019 19:41 utc | 20
By now Steele's credibility is zero. Time to revisit Steele's involvement with the debunked "Russia bought the soccer World Champion games", the Litvinenko polonium poisening and the Skripal novichok poisening. The timing of the Skripal matter deserves some scrutiny in relation to Skripal possibly being Steele's source for the infamous Trump dossier. There might be a motive hidden there.
Jen , Dec 11 2019 22:27 utc | 42
I know on a recemt MoA Open Thread comments forum that there was a link to this recent John Helmer / Dances With Bears article mentioning that Sergei and Julia Skripal were being held at an airbase in Gloucestershire being used by the United States Air Force (USAF) at the time that Julia Skripal was interviewed by a Reuters representative in May last year. I consider that link and the news worth mentioning again in this comments thread as some commenters have already mentioned Sergei Skripal in connection with Christopher Steele's dossier.

As early as August 2018 , there had been speculation that the Skripals were being held at USAF Fairford airbase, based on audiovisual evidence in the background garden scene where the interview took place. Helmer's sources (they requested anonymity) spotted a chicken coop in the background which they say is a crow ladder trap. This is one indication that the garden scene was located near a runway. Background noises included the roar of jet engines.

If Helmer's information is correct, then we can now understand why the British government never gave Russian embassy staff access to the Skripals: London was in no position to do so, the Skripals were on US territory.

One implication of this new information is that the Skripals may no longer be in Britain and may now be living in North America somewhere with new identities. Should something happen to them (or have happened to them already), they will not be missed by their new neighbours. The Skripals will never be allowed to return to Russia and Sergei Skripal will never see or be allowed to communicate with his elderly mother again.

It really does look as if Sergei Skripal may have had something to do with that Orbis dossier after all, even if as a minor source or as a reference rather than the primary source of disinformation about Donald Trump's past activities in Moscow. What other work has Skripal done for his American masters?

Jen , Dec 11 2019 22:44 utc | 47
JR @ 20:

It looks as if Sergei Skripal may not be the primary source of the disinformation in Christopher Steele's dossier. Perhaps the person who is the primary source is not a Russian at all.

RJPJR , Dec 11 2019 23:56 utc | 50
JR | Dec 11 2019 19:41 utc | 20 brings up a revisiting of the Litvinenko polonium poisoning.

It is worth mentioning that a tiny but crucial and virtually never mentioned detail of the official inquiry (considered the last word on the matter) is that those conducting the official inquiry were never allowed access to the autopsy report -- which should have been (which would have been, in any honest effort at inquiry) the bedrock starting point. The report has right along been sequestered by Scotland Yard in the interests of... you guessed it: national security. Go figure...

bevin , Dec 12 2019 1:46 utc | 53
It strikes me that the best explanation of the attack on the Skripals is not that he was responsible for the Steele Dossier in any way, but that he could easily prove that it was a fantasy. And was planning to do so.

He knew better, though, than to say so in the UK which suggests that he was on his way home with his daughter when MI6 caught up with him and poisoned them both.

Steele, Pablo Miller and Skripal were old partners in crime.

I'm wondering whether the mistake Sergei made was not to leave the house -- probably worth lotsa rubles -- behind and just go. On the other hand he was almost certainly under constant surveillance.

@50 The Official Report to which you refer was also very careful to enter extensive caveats regarding its conclusions for which there was almost no real evidence.

Cynica , Dec 12 2019 1:48 utc | 54

@Jackrabbit #12, @karlof1 #15

It seems important to note that Mr. Lavrov refers to administrations in his comments, not presidents per se. As there are many staff in presidential administrations, it seems entirely possible that 1) the requests from the Russians never reached Obama or Trump personally, and 2) either or both presidents were therefore not even aware of the requests. In the case of Trump, that would be consistent with the fact that many members of his administration have been revealed to have operated contrary to his wishes.

@Jen #42

The Skripals residing on US territory would definitely indicate that the US has been the senior partner in the "Skripal operation". This seems to be part of a general pattern.

@Jackrabbit #48

For the Steele dossier to be intentional bullshit (meaning its creator(s) knew it was false when they created it) doesn't seem all that surprising. Intelligence agencies promote disinformation all the time. That in no way means that Trump is in on the game.

pretzelattack , Dec 12 2019 2:04 utc | 55
by this point i don't know if either Skripal is still alive. Why keep them alive if they could debunk the oh so precious propaganda?
karlof1 , Dec 12 2019 3:20 utc | 58
Cynica @54--

Both Putin and Lavrov have stated that they talked directly with Obama and Trump about the issues involved with their relations, so there's no excuses or obfuscation possible is this case.

[Dec 11, 2019] Not Steele dossier, but FBI/CIA/MI6 operation of George Papadopoulos entrapment was the real star of Russiagate

This is selective quotes from anti-Trump of neocon author. The general tone of the article is completely different from presented quotes.
Notable quotes:
"... ..."This was an overthrow of government, this was an attempted overthrow -- and a lot of people were in on it," Trump declared , while Barr insisted , in a more lawyerly fashion, "The Inspector General's report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken." ..."
Dec 11, 2019 | www.theatlantic.com

The report confirmed that the Russia investigation originated, as has been previously reported, with the Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos bragging to an Australian diplomat about Russia possessing "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, which the IG determined "was sufficient to predicate the investigation." The widespread conservative belief that the investigation began because of the dubious claims in the Steele dossier was false. "Steele's reports played no role" in the opening of the Russia investigation, the report found, because FBI officials were not "aware of Steele's election reporting until weeks later."

...The IG also "did not find any records" that Joseph Mifsud, the professor who told Papadopoulos the Russians had obtained "dirt" on Clinton, was an FBI informant sent to entrap him.

...Page "did not play a role in the decision to open" the Russia investigation, and that Strzok was "was not the sole, or even the highest-level, decision maker as to any of those matters."

...the IG did determine that the Page FISA application was "inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation," which misled the court as to the credibility of the FBI's evidence when seeking authority to surveil Page.

..."This was an overthrow of government, this was an attempted overthrow -- and a lot of people were in on it," Trump declared , while Barr insisted , in a more lawyerly fashion, "The Inspector General's report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken."

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic , where he covers politics.

[Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

Highly recommended!
The tread is reproduced as is. And out 100 posts available in NYT "all view mode 90% can be classified as plain vanilla Neo-McCarthyism
If they are representative sample of the country, the country is crazy.
This editorial can also be classified as lunatic. But in reality it is much worse: the paper became completely subservant to intelligence agencies. Should probably be renamed the Voice of the CIA. .
Dec 10, 2019 | www.nytimes.com
Opinion With Trump, All Roads Lead to Moscow

Monday's congressional hearing and the inspector general's report tell a similar story.

By Jesse Wegman Mr. Wegman is a member of the editorial board.

When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

That's the most important lesson from the two big events that played out Monday on Capitol Hill -- the House Judiciary Committee's hearings on President Trump's impeachment and the release of the report on the origins of the F.B.I.'s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

One of these involved the 2016 election. The other involves the 2020 election. Both tell versions of the same story: Mr. Trump depends on, and welcomes, Russian interference to help him win the presidency. That was bad enough when he did it in 2016, openly calling for Russia to hack into his opponent's emails -- which Russians tried to do that same day . But he was only a candidate then. Now that Mr. Trump is president, he is wielding the immense powers of his office to achieve the same end.

That is precisely the type of abuse of power that the founders were most concerned about when they created the impeachment power, and it's why Democratic leaders in the House are pressing ahead with such urgency on their inquiry. They are trying to ensure that the 2020 election, now less than a year away, is not corrupted by the president of the United States, acting in league with a foreign power. "The integrity of our next election is at stake," said Representative Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. "Nothing could be more urgent."

On Monday morning, lawyers for the Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees presented the clearest and most comprehensive narrative yet of President Trump's monthslong shakedown of the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for Mr. Trump's personal political benefit. They explained in methodical detail how the president withheld a White House meeting and hundreds of millions of dollars in crucial, congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine, all in an effort to get Mr. Zelensky to announce two investigations -- one into Mr. Trump's political rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter, and another into Ukraine's supposed interference in the 2016 election.

David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news -- and offers reading suggestions from around the web -- with commentary every weekday morning.

Who would benefit from these announcements? Mr. Trump, who believes his re-election prospects are threatened most by Mr. Biden, and Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, who has been working for years to make Ukraine the fall guy for his own interference in the 2016 election. Mr. Putin has not fooled serious people, like those in the American intelligence community who determined that his government alone was responsible for meddling on Mr. Trump's behalf . But he has fooled Republicans in Congress, who have degraded themselves and their offices by faithfully parroting Mr. Putin's propaganda in the mainstream press.

... ... ...

sdavidc9 Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut 12m ago

Republicans are in lawyer mode, advocating for Trump as if he were their client. Lawyers make the best case they can for their clients. It helps if they believe in the case, but it also helps to know the case's weaknesses so they can avoid them. The best lawyers can do both at the same time. Republicans are called on by the Constitution to exit lawyer mode and enter juror mode (which is, or should be, similar to why-did-this-aircraft-crash mode). So far, they are not heeding this call. From all appearances, they are mouthing the words of the Constitution while avoiding or refusing to hear or understand them. They took an oath to support the Constitution, but they are deaf to its call, or have moved to a place beyond understanding it.
Mark Larsen Cambria, CA 26m ago
The issue of whether to impeach was made by the President when he engaged in an abuse of his office for personal gain and then obstructed Congress' oversight function. We all understand the political downside arising from an acquittal in the Senate but that interest needs to be secondary to doing the right thing. On these facts, the decision representatives must make of whether to impeach really is no decision at all. Just do the right thing.
Twg NV 26m ago
When Senator John McCain died, he scripted his own funeral as a full bore defense against Trumpian Nationalism, and as an admonishment against a GOP too willing to sell the soul of our nation out to a cultist repudiation of objective fact, truth, and Constitutional order. McCain was a controversial maverick –a person I both admired and disliked in equal proportion. But there is one thing I will always admire him for: his final letter to the nation. It was a warning! He blew a golden bugle to sound the alarm against those entities both within and without our nation who wish to do our democratic republic harm. McCain, whether you agreed with the premise of the Vietnam war or not, was an American hero who served his country and his fellow soldiers with incontrovertible valor and love. President Donald Trump has no concept of what that dedication and sacrifice entails – and sadly, neither do many of the GOP members who continue to lie and make excuses for a president who is clearly abusing his office for personal gain. McCain characterized Trump's actions in Helsinki as an unfathomable 'abasement of the U.S. presidency.' All I can say is the GOP sure ain't the party of my father who fought in WWII against fascism and autocracy. It aggrieves me to no end to witness what too many members of Congress have become: tyrants toward the very meaning of American democracy. God save us from our own duplicity.
Jagmont Rousel Fresburg, Ca. 12m ago
@Twg Well said, and though I sometimes did not agree with McCain on matters of policy, I wish he were still with us, hopefully to show his fellow republicans what integrity looks like, and what America is supposed to be about. The Republican party I have known and respected is alas, like Senator McCain, no longer with us.
Consiglieri NYC 34m ago
Americans have to realize that the whole world is mocking us, and that doesn't necesarily inspire respect. That cold be dangerous. Many medical professionals have noticed a decay in the mental abilities of the president, and certain abnormalities. It would be wise to suggest to the family that maybe the best way forward, with minimal losses would be to motivate a retirement. That would be face saving for them, and save the country from a bitter impeachment spectacle that would not be positive for the USA.
Jennifer Francois Holland, Michigan 1h ago
I'm waiting for Trump's financial info to be released. There's something in there he doesn't even want his base to know . I think the logical conclusion is that whatever financials DJT has hidden do indeed lead to Moscow. Actually, all of this is very, very alarming. Does Putin have a political asset planted here? Y or N I wish the answer was no and that we had a different President. Can we as a nation hold things together when our leader wants to tear us apart?
AL NY 1h ago
All roads lead to the highest bidder(s). 21st century America in the era of Citizens United. Market pricing and the government is open for transactional business domestic and international. Alternate realities per GRU/FOX/GOP misinformation. Combine foreign money carefully grooming an in-need Trump, and a party worshipping money and you have a perfect storm removing any sense of civic duty. Hundreds of years to build and unwound in a few decades, the breathtaking and tragic fall of greatness and hope in our lifetime. It's not fiction, and every day I have to check if it's really happening, and shockingly it is.
DO5 Minneapolis 1h ago
There was no Russian meddling, only Ukraine who meddled in 2016 and they are still at it. Listening to the Judiciary Committee hearings, it seems that the Russians have hacked into the Republican Party servers and are sending talking points to Republicans who are defending the indefensible president.
We'll always have Paris Sydney, Australia 1h ago
At some point, Republicans have to ask themselves which is better for their party and the country. Slavish devotion to Trump, or losing an election and leaving Democrats a mess to clean up, as in 1932 and 2008?
Mike S. Eugene, OR 2h ago
Block witnesses from testifying, then say that the hearing is incomplete. Romney told America at the Republican Convention in 2012 that Russia was our biggest enemy, DJT wanted them to help Republicans win in 2016, said he believed Putin in 2018, and wants to convince us that it was really the Ukraine in 2019. The House has to impeach, even if politically it may be a bad move, because it is the right thing to do; indeed, the very actions I've seen in the past several weeks has given me glimmers of hope for the country.
Federalist California 2h ago
Trump will be reelected for the reason that the Russian intelligence agencies are still able to hack our election results, because Trump has blocked fixing the weaknesses. That is what happens when a Manchurian candidate is elected and then allowed to obstruct justice. It is not clear the US will survive Trump. One key thing he did was arrange to have the teams at DHS that watch for smuggled nuclear bombs were stood down and disbanded. See the report in the LA Times last July "Trump administration has gutted programs aimed at detecting weapons of mass destruction".
David Rochester 2h ago
I don't suppose a constructed transcript of Trump's meeting with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov tomorrow will be offered up as a token of our leader's transparency.
Markymark San Francisco 2h ago
It's clear now that AG William Barr isn't interested in enforcing the rule of law with fellow republicans, and especially the president. How can there be no recourse when an attorney general completely sells out to a criminal president? Can the employees of the Justice Dept hold a vote of no confidence in the AG? Can 10,000 attorneys nationwide express the same? The prospect of Trump and Barr running roughshod over the rule of law for another year is truly frightening.
Aluetian Contemplation 2h ago
65,845,063 voters knew clearly who this man was from the beginning and voted for what would have been a better now and future. It was never any secret. 62,980,160 voters also knew clearly who this man was and voted for him anyway. If the Democrats can ensure that we have a fair election in 2020. I'm confident they will win the majority in the house and senate and retake the White House and the end game for Trump will be jail. The problem is, he might not be the only one who's crimes come to light and I suspect a good lot of the GOP are threatening and blackmailing each other to hold the line. If there's any good men or women left in the GOP, your country and history are calling you.
Edwin a physician, scientist and realist 2h ago
It has easy to predict Trump's next move for the last 3 years. Just ask, "What would both benefit Trump, and benefit Putin?" Trump supporters = Putin supporters.
Kevin CO 2h ago
Do you know the American people are fed up with the discourse of all politicians. The republicans are fed up with any decency for the republic. The democrats are fed up with the republicans not facing the common sense of a exec not capable of being the President of the United states. I as a person am fed up with a political system that is not working for all people, just a select few. It's time too have term limits for all positions in gov't. That means all people that serve the people whether it be judges, senators or congressmen/women. It's time to find common sense again in our society as a whole society. We on this earth are all HUMAN.
Eben Spinoza 2h ago
Unfortunately their are serious problems with term limits. Just consider yourself in the role of a Congressional Representative limited to 4 terms. You know that in 8 years, you'll be be back on the job market. You can selflessly work for the public and damage your ability to get a job or tend to people who can hire you after you leave office. You're rational. Which future would you pick?
REBCO FORT LAUDERDALE FL 2h ago
Trump needs to keep Putin happy lest he unleash with all the damaging info he has collected on Trump and his financial crooked deals with Russians over decades. THe Russian mob reports to Putin as a former KGB agent he knows how to collect compromat on a politician and how to use it to get Trump to break into a giddy smile when he sees Putin his master it's obvious to most keen observers.
M. Barsoum Philadelphia 2h ago
Folks it is simple. Can we hear what Trump and Putin said to each other a few months ago. It is recored and on a server it should not be on. I am not sure why nobody is talking about these transcripts.
Nelly Half Moon Bay 2h ago
Finally! We get someone stating the obvious fact of Trump/Putin. Why are the Dems not talking about this all the time? Why are Congressmen and women not asking the witnesses about this? This is the ONE thing the Republicans are afraid of, so it is the one thing Democrats should do. I have been disappointed that the Russian asset thing hasn't been brought up....It's as if it is purposely bold. Trump is a Russian asset, either witting or unwitting. I doubt if there is one upper Intelligence Official that wouldn't say this. So find the right one and have them sit as a witness for this inquiry. And now the Russian big wig Diplomat and KGb spy, Lavarov, is visiting tomorrow. Good grief! Everyone is thinking this, so get out and say it Dems! Dr. Fiona Hill tried to lead into this direction but still the Dem Committee would take it up and aske her what she thought. Say it: All of Trump's Roads Lead to Russia.
Ro Laren Santa Monica 2h ago
Any American adult who has made an effort to educate himself or herself about Mr. Mueller's investigation or these impeachment proceedings understands that yes, with Trump all roads lead to Russia. Now if the poll numbers mean anything, Trump's crimes and Russia's involvement only matter to about 60% of us. As Trump's poll numbers remain steady, some 40% of Americans don't care what lawbreaking he is involved with or whether other nations now control our elections. Stop and think about this for a minute. Trump supporters know but literally do not care that Russia is tampering with our elections (2016 and 2020). Their cult-like support for Trump is why the Republican Senate will not remove him. There is no other reason Trump will remain in office. Trump has mesmerized his supporters like a modern day Rasputin. They will do literally anything for him, and Senate Republicans know this. Trump voters do not mind that Putin controls our nation at the highest levels of decision making. Again - think about this - they know he does, and they do not care. So I ask the rest of us. Is this the America we want to live in? To raise our families in? Where a large, rabid minority is in thrall to a lunatic puppet whose strings are firmly in Putin's hands? Because this is very much the America we live in now. The time will come, though, when we, the majority, will no longer tolerate the Trump/Putin regime. But the longer we wait, the harder it will be oust these tyrants.
Tracy Washington DC 2h ago
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. said Russia was an important source of funding for the Trump businesses. American banks wouldn't lend him money. Saudi Arabia likely bailed out Jared's disastrous real estate investment in NYC. Follow. The. Money.
Huge Grizzly Seattle 2h ago
You say that Mr. Putin "has fooled Republicans in Congress, who have degraded themselves and their offices by faithfully parroting Mr. Putin's propaganda in the mainstream press." You are correct on all counts, except that the Republicans have not been fooled by Putin. They have gone along, headlong and absolutely willingly, in a complete sellout of personal and national principle and integrity. They should not be forgiven for this conduct, any more than Mr. Trump should be forgiven for his sellout of America.
Look Ahead WA 2h ago
For Republicans who believe so fervently in their counterfactual narrative, there is an immediate remedy. Bring facts and evidence to the Committees and testify under oath. Without witnesses and evidence presented under oath, all of the GOP antics simply look foolish and very much like they are defending the guilty. It is unfortunate that there is no penalty for elected officials who share unfounded conspiracy theories, engage in innuendo and obstruct process in official Committee hearings. It is also regretable that this President is not held accountable for trying to intimidate witnesses in real time during testimony. And it is a sad reality that one of the most corrupt rulers in the world, who rules a hostile power, has managed to entirely win over one of our major parties.
Gerard PA 2h ago
The strangest defense advanced today was the idea that the alleged state of the economy was reason not to impeach the President: the Republicans assert that America, the Constitution, the principle of our government are for sale to be bought by the rising stock market and a plethora of low-wage jobs. We are Faust, and the smell of sulphur is nauseating.
richard wiesner oregon 2h ago
If the IG's report on the 2016 Russia investigation had found the only problem was that two of the agents involved had horrible hangnails, Barr and Trump would have condemned it.
Asian Philosopher Germany 2h ago
Whatever Trump is doing, he always care about his main benefactors, Putin and MBS. This is the first time I have witnessed in history that an American president became a Russian puppet with all his Republican followers at the Congress and Senate. American constitutional crisis happening right in front of the world. I heard the cries of James Madison, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin from their graves.
trudds sierra madre, CA 2h ago Times Pick
Sir, do you honestly think that House Republicans have been "fooled" by Mr. Putin? On the contrary, it's pretty obvious they understand and believe the conclusions from our Intel community. These are instead willful lies for political gain. And while some Americans may actually be misled by the theater presented as rebuttal to the impeachment, it's hard to imagine for most it's once again, not conviction but convenience that places such "patriots" solidly in Russia's back pocket.
Michele Seattle 2h ago Times Pick
The pattern of behavior is clear and compelling: Trump is selling out this country, its national security, its integrity and sovereignty, in order to keep power and avoid his own prosecution, and protect his financial interests. We must get the truth about his relationships and indebtedness to Putin, the Saudis, and Erdogan. Our country has been hijacked and Trump will continue to corrupt the US and turn it into an autocracy if he is not stopped and held accountable under the law.
Linus Internet 2h ago
The country voted for this President knowing he is a flawed man in many ways. I don't think anything changes here - the Senate will speedily acquit him and the voters in the swing states will have to decide if they want to give Mr. Trump a second chance while the rest of the country impotently watches.
David CT 2h ago
If one looks at all of his actions as "How could this benefit Russia?" most of it makes sense. Why start a trade war with China and Western allies? Why withdraw from Syria? Why try to polarize the American public? Effectively showing this to the public is critical.
Mark New York 2h ago
Excellent piece. We all know Trump, Inc. turned to Russian oligarchs after '08 for condo sales. It just so happened that those same oligarchs (read as kleptocrats) were laundering money through Deutsche Bank, who was the only bank willing to lend to Trump. Trump's loan officer amazingly was SC Justice Anthony Kennedy's son. Trump was and is a desperate man in need of cash/ Putin is a desperate man who knows that the geyser of oil money that funds his national budget, and has done so since the 1920's, is coming to an end. Russia has no large material economic exports other than oil and gas, but it does still have a large military, hence the military incursions into Moldova, Ossetia, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. Desperate men do desperate things, and desperately try to project power with weak hands.
turbot philadelphia 2h ago
The Republicans in Congress were not fooled by the Russians. They believe in Trump no matter what the Russians do. The bottom line is - What does Putin have on Trump
stan continople brooklyn 2h ago
I don't understand why there hasn't been more of a pushback by the military. They went heavily for Trump in 20116, with many bases in the South and many recruits from economically devastated areas, but in the interim, they have seen his reckless, lurching foreign policy, worship of Putin, and clear evidence that somehow everything he does benefits Russia. A commander's first obligation is to their troops, so knowing the man in charge considers their lives subject to both Trump's whims, and Putin's whispers should provoke some reaction. No?
Steven Auckland 3h ago
Unfortunately - to put it mildly - impeachment will have no effect on the conduct of the 2020 election. The wheels are already turning, everyone knows their part, and only a massive commitment by an honest intelligence apparatus (if there is one) can stop it. One can only hope that, in 2020, the American people make a statement so overwhelming that there can be no doubt as to their intent, despite whatever meddling there may have been. It is entirely possible that there will never be a truly credible election again as long as there are bad actors who are power hungry or bent on destabilizing democratic governments. And make no mistake, these threats are coming from right wing autocracies, and they are in the ascendancy all over the world. American centrists and liberals are the only force that can change that. Are those stakes big enough for you?
Michael Kittle Vaison la Romaine, France 3h ago
We may finally have the answer as to why Trump is so accommodating to Putin. Trump has so many investments in Russia dependent on Putin's support. Trump financial reports will reveal this collusion between Trump and Putin. This should not come as a surprise to attentive Americans. Think of the worst an American president can do and that will bring you close to understanding Trump.
Ray Haining Hot Springs, AR 3h ago
Nobody's saying how Trump withholding military aid to Ukraine would benefit Putin and Russia in their WAR against Ukraine. It was, indeed, MILITARY aid he was withholding, was it not? I understand that this is not the impeachable offense of attempting to enlist a foreign government to win an election, but I believe this aspect of the situation should be brought out.
Socrates Downtown Verona. NJ 3h ago
The Republican Party has been officially reduced to a giant miasma of fraud, fiction, fantasy, conspiracy theory, deflection, misdirection and prevarication. After tax cuts for rich people and rich corporations...the GOP has no other public policy ideas (except for bankrupting the government). A civilized country needs little things like infrastructure, education, technology, voting rights, law and order, regulations, fair taxation and facts to move forward. But none of those things are ever mentioned by the Republican Party; conspiracy-mongering and tax cuts are now the official governing planks of the Grand Old Propaganda/Grand One Percent party. This is no way to manage a nation anywhere except into the ground. Americans need to hit the Trump-GOP eject button before these Lord of the Fly Republicans take us over a very steep right-wing cliff of insanity.
Bob Hudson Valley 3h ago
The Republican Party is now Trump's party and the Republicans know it and are acting accordingly. You could call them opportunists following the way the political winds are blowing. The Constitution is based on members of Congress caring about the Constitution and searching for the truth. Since this is now not the case when if comes to the Republicans the Constitution has no remedy for this situation. The only remedy is an election and if Trump can manipulate elections to his advantage using foreign powers then there is no remedy and the system of government set up by the founders will be no more. The new system replacing it will be controlled by Trump. Putin figured out how to control Russian elections so he always wins and it is likely that Trump has a goal of imitating Putin. Ultimately this would mean taking over the press as Putin did. Trump cannot declare total victory as long as the there is a free press which he has labeled the enemy of the people.
DAWGPOUND HAR NYC 3h ago
From an acute perspective ..indeed shocking to say the least of the nature of this peculiar relationship. But looking at the big picture as evidence by all that has occurred in his or during this eye opening period for all the world to see....not so much so...For me, this dynamic is much expected.
James Ricciardi Panama, Panama 3h ago
"The witness has used language which impugns the motives of the president and suggests he's disloyal to his country, and those words should be stricken from the record and taken down," Mr. Johnson said. The Johnson rule effectively reads the impeachment power out of the constitution. How can you impeach a president if no one can say anything bad about him/her?
Bruce Rozenblit Kansas City, MO 3h ago
We have yet to plow the most fertile road yet. What does Trump care about over all else? Trump. How does Trump gauge his progress? His money. Where does his money come from? Good question. We all know he has filed for bankruptcy 6 times. We all know that because of those bankruptcies, American banks will not loan him any money. We all know he has significant financial dealings with Deutsche Bank. Now, who put the money in Deutsche Bank that ended up financing Trump's business.? That is the two billion dollar question. We also know that Russian oligarchs deal in billions of dollars. We also know that Trump has close relations with Russian business interests. We also know that Trump kowtows to Putin like Pence kowtows to him. We also know that Trump is doing everything possible to conceal his financial dealings from everyone and everything. So, we know that one billion plus one billion equals two billion. But does it also equal Trump? This money road is one we should take a ride on. Will it also take us to Putin?
Mark New York 2h ago
@Bruce Rozenblit No, but it will take us to those who are surrogates for him. Those whose wealth only continues because of Vova's "good will."
Gluscabi Dartmouth, MA 3h ago
The first Democratic candidate who labels Trump a "Russian agent" will own the simplest and most effective tag line going into the general election, provided of course that that candidate does his best to channel his inner Trump by never backing down but instead doubling down every chance he or she gets. Is Trump a Russian agent, paid for and accounted for? Not easy to say without some doubt, but that doesn't really matter because he sure as shoottin' acts like one. And when have the facts ever stopped Trump from going on the attack? The more Trump denies the label, the more he'll be digging his own grave. The real crime here is not so much the strong arming of Zelenskyy for a Biden investigation. That's small potatoes compared to Trump's withholding congressionally designated US military aid from a country engaged in a hot war with Russia, the same cast of characters who starved anywhere from one to eleven million Ukrainians during the 1930's. The Russian agent must go.
Alan Columbus OH 3h ago
I would not say Trump's lying "is effective", I would say it "has been effective". At some point, the public and his party may have had it with the thuggery and we do not know when that breaking point is.
abigail49 georgia 3h ago
For the sake of protecting our 2020 elections from Russian hackers and disinformation, the House is justified in moving forward fast, over the process howls of Republicans, with the compelling evidence they have surrounding Ukraine. But they need to continue investigating his business and financial ties to Russia and any other autocratic governments and their oligarchs, e.g. Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Especially if he is not convicted and removed by the Senate and stands for re-election, Americans need to know what conflicts of interest he has in making foreign policy and military decisions because American soldiers' lives are at stake. The Mueller investigation did not go down that road. Any businessman with global interests is automatically compromised, even more than a vice president whose son sits on a foreign corporation's board of director. Trump's own children continue to do business in foreign countries and we have no idea what Ivanka and Jared, sitting in the White House with top security clearances, are doing. In short, Ukraine should not be the only concern of congressional oversight committees. There's a lot more.
Peter Portland OR 3h ago
Trump must believe that Russian help in 2016 did help him to win. He must feel that fake evidence presented by an "independent" investigator such as a foreign government appears to carry more weight that the same fake evidence from a partisan investigator. Otherwise why would he be taking such chances to duplicate via Ukraine what he got from the Russians in 2016. But now that the Russian connection is outed, he can't go back to that well.
NA Wilson Massachusetts 3h ago
I worry it's all for naught. Dems in the House vote to impeach, GOP in the Senate vote to acquit. Trump remains highly competitive in 2020 election, Russia and other adversaries interfere, Trump stays put. Then what?
Rafael SC 3h ago
@NA Wilson Think of this situation differently. To have all possible scope to defeat him, we must support everything we can to undermine him. Lack of impeachment would have been business as usual. At some point his finances will get out and then all bets are off.
Tracy Washington DC 2h ago
@NA Wilson: It's all Hands on deck to save the country. Don't just vote, donate what money you can, work for candidates, knock doors, make calls. It's the only way out of this nightmare.
N. Smith New York City 3h ago
The Impeachment hearings weren't really necessary to prove what most everyone who's been paying attention knows. With Trump, all roads lead to Moscow. In fact, he's already acting very Putin-esque in his own way by forbidding anyone in the White House to respond to subpoena, by installing the fear of God in those who do, by punishing anyone who dares to think or act on their own, and then there's the act of holding a foreign country ransom until they agree to do his bidding -- not to mention inviting outside interference in our presidential elections. All the signs are not only there but they are ominous. By holding himself above the U.S. Constitution, Trump has declared war on this country and all the laws that govern it. And while entertainment-starved Americans laugh and cheer at his rallies, he and the Republicans drain our right to vote, and with it our Democracy. Today wasn't an epiphany. It was a warning.
bl rochester 3h ago
There seems to be no discussion of the financial backing trump received after '08-09 from sources inside Russia and how these actors would have expressed their support (or conditions for their silence) to the trump campaign during '15-16. Did the FBI not identify and investigate the funders behind trump and their interactions with the campaign during 2016? Would this not have been reasonable for an investigation to look into when its entire raison d'etre was to detect sources of Russian influence?
Jim TX 3h ago
I wonder if Mr. Wegman believes that this editorial will change anyone's mind or influence how anyone votes in the upcoming presidential election. Basically, this is classic preaching to the choir and sadly mostly a wasted effort. I would like to read articles with proven ideas that worked to change the minds of Republicans and other like them. Such articles might give me some better ideas to convince my pro-Trump friends and neighbors to Vote for America next November.
Kingfish52 Rocky Mountains 3h ago
"When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected." This! This is the central fact of all the things Trump has done (so far), and yet, the Democrats have failed to make this the central focus of the case against him. Instead, they've focused on one incident, and not even the most egregious one, to justify impeachment and removal from office. This was a terrible miscalculation. No, there is no doubt that Trump attempted to coerce Ukraine into helping with his re-election by announcing a bogus investigation of the Bidens. Nor any doubt that this constituted "high crimes and misdemeanors". But this was not the highest of crimes he's committed, nor have the Dems been able to convince any Republicans, or many independents, that this deserves Trump's removal. Moreover, they failed to produce the "smoking gun" of one witness or document in Trump's own words directing the quid pro quo. They gave plenty of room for the Republican attack machine to cast enough doubt and confusion that all but ensures Trump's acquittal in the Senate. Instead of focusing only on this one incident, the Democrats should have built their case around the theme that "with Trump, all roads lead to Russia". That is a crime that even the most skeptical doubter can grasp, and when linked together, all of his crimes can be shown to be of a pattern of serving Putin, and not the people of the United States. All roads lead to Putin, but the Democrats chose to follow a dead end.
DW Philly 2h ago
@Kingfish52 I completely agree with you and truly don't understand why the Democrats have not been shouting this from the rooftops. For mercy's sake! The problem is not just that the president solicited help from a foreign power for his own personal gain! That's bad enough, but isn't the point that he did this because he is beholden to Russia? Russia. is. not. our. friend. Why aren't the Democrats explaining this clearly to the American people? Trump is Putin's puppet and it could not be more obvious! Don't people understand that it doesn't just happen to be Ukraine that Trump took a notion to squeeze for his "personal gain"? He doesn't just want to win because it is so nice to win elections. He has to do what Putin tells him. Obviously, every last Republican in Congress understands this clearly. Why can't the Democrats explain it to the American people clearly?
Mike Republic Of Texas 4h ago
Obama did not provide lethal aid to Ukraine, after the Russians invaded Crimea. Obama did not Russia prevent the Iranian nuclear deal. Trump cancelled the Iranian nuclear deal, then provided lethal aid to Ukraine. Now I get it. Trump is working for Putin.
Mick Montclair 3h ago
By March 2015, the US had committed more than $120 million in security assistance for Ukraine and had pledged an additional $75 million worth of equipment including UAVs, counter-mortar radars, night vision devices and medical supplies, according to the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency. That assistance also included some 230 armored Humvee vehicles. Trump appears to be echoing a critique leveled at the Obama administration by the late Republican Sen. John McCain. "The Ukrainians are being slaughtered and we're sending blankets and meals," McCain said in 2015. "Blankets don't do well against Russian tanks." While it never provided lethal aid, many of the items that the Obama administration did provide were seen as critical to Ukraine's military. Part of the $250 million assistance package that the Trump administration announced (then froze and later unfroze) included many of the same items that were provided under Obama, including medical equipment, night vision gear and counter-artillery radar. The Trump administration did approve the provision of arms to Ukraine, including sniper rifles, rocket launchers and Javelin anti-tank missiles, something long sought by Kiev.
Ivan Memphis, TN 2h ago
@Mike Trump was not the one providing lethal aid to Ukraine. It was the house and senate that proposed and forced this aid into an appropriation bill - against the wishes of the Trump administration. After Trump realized he could not block this funding he did the second best thing - he used it to blackmail the Ukraine government to provide him with dirt on Biden and support for Putin's favorite narrative (that it was Ukraine not Russia that interfered in the 2016 election).
Mark New York 2h ago
@Mike It also took two acts of Congress to get the aid to Ukraine. Trump had nothing to do with it. Only the Impound Inclusion Act for foreign aid allows the President to time the release of the funds, which Trump did not follow. The Act was created because Nixon, like Trump, was playing fast and loose with our tax dollars. Who was the last President who asked for help from a foreign intelligence agency? Which President favored foregn intelligence agencies over his own? Answer no one other than Trump. If that doesn't show he's in someone's pocket, nothing does.

[Dec 10, 2019] FISA Report Reveals Clinton Meddled In 2016 Election

Notable quotes:
"... If Russia spending $100,000 on Facebook ads constitutes election interference, and Donald Trump asking Ukraine to investigate the Bidens is too - then Hillary Clinton takes the cake when it comes to influence campaigns designed to harm a political opponent. ..."
"... The article suggests that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page "has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials - including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president." ..."
"... Steele told us that in September [of 2016] her and Simpson gave an "off-the-record" briefing to a small number of journalists about his reporting, " reads page 165 of the FISA report, which says that Steele "acknowledged that Yahoo News was identified in one of the court filings in the foreign litigation as being present. " ..."
"... Put another way, Hillary Clinton paid Christopher Steele to feed information to the MSM in order to harm Donald Trump right before the 2016 election . Granted, there were intermediaries; the Clinton campaign paid law firm Perkins Coie, which paid Fusion GPS, which paid Steele. And if asked, we're guessing Clinton would claim she had no idea this happened - which simply isn't plausible given the stakes. Whatever the case - the act of Simpson paying Steele to peddle fiction to the media for the purpose of harming Trump, by itself , constitutes blatant election meddling by every standard set by the left over the past three years. ..."
Dec 10, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

If Russia spending $100,000 on Facebook ads constitutes election interference, and Donald Trump asking Ukraine to investigate the Bidens is too - then Hillary Clinton takes the cake when it comes to influence campaigns designed to harm a political opponent.

Contained within Monday's FISA report by the DOJ Inspector General is the revelation that Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Clinton campaign to produce the Steele dossier, " was paying Steele to discuss his reporting with the media. " ( P. 369 and elsewhere)

(h/t @wakeywakey16 )

And when did Steele talk with the media - which got him fired as an FBI source ? Perhaps most notably was Yahoo News journalist Michael Isikoff , who says he was invited by Fusion GPS to meet a "secret source" at a Washington restaurant . That secret source was none other than Christopher Steele , who fed Isikoff information from his now-discredited dossier - and which appeared in a September 23, 2016 article roughly six weeks before the election - which likely had orders of magnitude greater visibility and impact coming from a widely-read, MSM source vs. $100,000 in Russian Facebook ads.

The article suggests that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page "has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials - including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president."

This claim was found by special counsel Robert Mueller report to be false . Moreover, the FBI knew about it in December, 2016, when DOJ #4 Bruce Ohr told the agency as much.

Steele told us that in September [of 2016] her and Simpson gave an "off-the-record" briefing to a small number of journalists about his reporting, " reads page 165 of the FISA report, which says that Steele "acknowledged that Yahoo News was identified in one of the court filings in the foreign litigation as being present. "

Put another way, Hillary Clinton paid Christopher Steele to feed information to the MSM in order to harm Donald Trump right before the 2016 election . Granted, there were intermediaries; the Clinton campaign paid law firm Perkins Coie, which paid Fusion GPS, which paid Steele. And if asked, we're guessing Clinton would claim she had no idea this happened - which simply isn't plausible given the stakes. Whatever the case - the act of Simpson paying Steele to peddle fiction to the media for the purpose of harming Trump, by itself , constitutes blatant election meddling by every standard set by the left over the past three years.

We're sure Hillary can explain that if and when she jumps into the 2020 race.

[Dec 10, 2019] Those geriatric crazies like Pelosi, or Hillary, or completly corrupt, bought by lobbies politicos like Schumer or Schiff, and their stooges like "linguist" Ciaramella, "politruk", master of arts in Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian studies Vindman, or Soros-connected rabid neocon Fiona Hill do not know what seven minutes on launch means

They poisoned with the USA with Russophobia for decades to come, and that really increases the risk of nuclear confrontation, which would wipe out all this jerks, but also mass of innocent people.
Notable quotes:
"... The only way to prevent it, IMHO, is having a Western public shifting just 5 % of their "breads and circuses" paradigm to that issue. Just 5. Not holding my breath I am afraid. ..."
"... Which proves the main point of mine: access to information means shit in the real world of power play. Sheeple didn't care then; they care even less now (better distractions). ..."
Dec 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

peterAUS , says: December 10, 2019 at 8:07 pm GMT

O.K.

I was, actually, thinking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pershing_II#Protests Or, just follow this trend of "who has a bigger dick" as it is.

Sooner or later you'll have this, IMHO: Reaction time 7 minutes . You know, decision-making time to say "launch" or not. The decision-maker in the White House, Downing Street and Elysees Palace either a geriatric or one of this new multiracial breed. Just think about those people

Add to that the level of overall expertise by the crews manning those systems, its maintenance etc. Add increased automation of some parts of the launch process with hardware/software as it's produced now (you know, quality control etc.).

It will take a miracle not to have that launch sooner or later. Not big, say .80 KT. What happens after that is anybody's guess. Mine, taking the second point from the fourth paragraph .a big bang.

The only way to prevent it, IMHO, is having a Western public shifting just 5 % of their "breads and circuses" paradigm to that issue. Just 5.
Not holding my breath I am afraid.

My 2 cents, anyway.

Anon [138] Disclaimer , says: December 10, 2019 at 9:30 pm GMT
@peterAUS The rational actor false supposition has it that the biologics can't be used because they don't recognize friend from foe.

Rational actors? Where? Anthrax via the US mail.

One rational actor point of view is that you have to be able to respond to anything. Anything. In a measured or escalating response. Of course biologics are being actively pursued to the hilt. Just like you point out about Marburg.

But, the view from above is that general panic in the population cannot be allowed, and so all biologics have to be down played. "of course we would never do anything like that, it would be insane to endanger all of humanity". Just like nukes. So professors pontificate misdirection, and pundits punt.

So don't expect real disclosure, or honest analysis. "We only want the fear that results in more appropriations. Not the fear that sinks programs." Don't generate new Church commissions. Hence the fine line. some fear yes, other fears, no.

peterAUS , says: December 10, 2019 at 10:23 pm GMT
@Anon

Rational actors? Where?

Well Washington D.C.
Hahahahaha sorry, couldn't resist.

So don't expect real disclosure, or honest analysis.

I don't.

But I also probably forgot more about nuclear war than most of readers here will ever know. And chemical, when you think about it; had a kit with atropine on me all the time in all exercises. We didn't practice much that "biologics" stuff, though. We knew why, then. Same reason for today. Call it a "stoic option" to own inevitable demise.

Now, there is a big difference between the age of those protests I mentioned and today. The Internet. The access to information people, then, simply didn't have.

Which proves the main point of mine: access to information means shit in the real world of power play. Sheeple didn't care then; they care even less now (better distractions).

Well, they will care, I am sure. For about ..say in the USA ..several hours, on average.

We here where I am typing from will care for "how to survive the aftermath" .. for two months.Tops.

[Dec 10, 2019] Tucker: Media proclaims FBI is innocent

So CIA agent Carter Page joins Trump campaign and then do several "improper" moves like travel to Moscow and contracts with Russian officials things in order to create a pretext for FBI investigation. Which of course was promptly started. This is called false flag operation.
From comments: "He wasn’t a victim, he was an asset. When actors portray a victim, they are ACTING!!!"
Notable quotes:
"... "The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses". - the esteemed Malcolm X. ..."
"... Seth Rich downloaded the emails on a potable drive. Was he Russian? ..."
"... DNC/ FBI/ CIA/ CNN/ NBC have merged into the 5 headed serpent. ..."
"... Roger Stone got some minor facts wrong and is facing jail time, Brennan and Comey outright lied to Congress, when are they going to jail? ..."
"... "June 2017, CIA told FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith that Carter Page was working for them (the CIA)." Clinesmith then changed that notification so he could submit the last (FISA) renewal. ..."
"... "Lets hope Carter Page spends the rest of his life sueing everyone..." lol Thats the meanest thing ive ever heard you say! O:) ..."
Dec 10, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Greg Wootton , 4 hours ago

John Brennan lied to Congress, why is he not behind bars?

der Jakob 🇺🇸 , 5 hours ago

Falsifying documents is a crime

Robin John , 5 hours ago

I will believe the swamp is draining when the arrests begin.

Electric Eclectic , 5 hours ago

There are so many crooked actors and actresses hired by the MSM it is just pathetic. They are not reporters, they are there only to put on a show for the masses.

Christopher , 5 hours ago

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses". - the esteemed Malcolm X.

Patton Was Right , 5 hours ago

"WE DEFEATED THE WRONG ENEMY!" Now we are paying the price

2legit B , 5 hours ago

Seth Rich downloaded the emails on a potable drive. Was he Russian?

LB Helms , 4 hours ago

DNC/ FBI/ CIA/ CNN/ NBC have merged into the 5 headed serpent.

Mr.762 , 4 hours ago

The FBI and CIA need to be dismantled!

Silly Goose , 5 hours ago

Roger Stone got some minor facts wrong and is facing jail time, Brennan and Comey outright lied to Congress, when are they going to jail?

reminaya , 4 hours ago

"June 2017, CIA told FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith that Carter Page was working for them (the CIA)." Clinesmith then changed that notification so he could submit the last (FISA) renewal.

Theta Kongpancake , 4 hours ago

5:55 - "Lets hope Carter Page spends the rest of his life sueing everyone..." lol Thats the meanest thing ive ever heard you say! O:)

Christopher Wojciechowski , 2 hours ago

The FBI was never innocent. They're guilty as hell and heads need to roll over.

Blue -eyed , 2 hours ago

Allowing ONE person to decide if crimes where done by the most powerful people in america for decades. Horowitz was bought one way or another.

Joe Montano , 4 hours ago

1:52 - This is what a paid shill looks like. If the money is good, they'll read whatever is on the prompter. Years from now when they're demonized by the corrupt media they'll scratch their head and ask... What happened to integrity in our country???

lrm21 , 46 minutes ago

High crimes and misdemeanors. Where is John Brennan?

P MA , 2 hours ago

If you asked me 20 years ago wether I would be watching Fox News to get the most rational point of view in politics, I would have said you were crazy. Another great job Tucker! In my opinion, you’re one of the best news men of our current time; questioning needless wars, and calling out politicians, gvmnt officials and your counterparts at other news desks with rational arguments. Well done sir!

ita-glo jgv , 41 minutes ago

Personally seen these types of things/cases in lower levels, police chiefs and officials, judges, prosecutors, mayor, FBI, and so on. Not surprisingly it happens elsewhere. ...But very disappointed of it all.

cat nerp , 4 hours ago

Politics is like religion. Facts mean very little before the over powering light of belief

TaggsR85 , 1 hour ago

How does Horowitz believe this wasn’t politically motivated? What was the motivation to lie to surveillance to be put on carter page?

VAMPYRE ANGELUS , 4 hours ago

fbi is the mafia with badges..

Bruce Lee , 4 hours ago

The FBI has too much power. It’s not about a few bad apples, it’s what can happen with a few bad apples.

Duncan McCockiner , 33 minutes ago

If I were an American citizen, I'd be very concerned about the utter incompetence of the FBI that the IG report exposed. The dems don't seem to be bothered by this at all. Go figure.

Patrick Ryan , 1 hour ago

The Establishment has played this game many times before .. remember PM Harold Wilson was put up as a Russian Agent .. sure they won that game but NOT this time .. they fear President Trump because the have nothing over him .

Richard Ralph Roehl , 5 hours ago

NOTHING will happen. There will be no indictments of any major deep-$tate players.

tamimerkaz , 2 hours ago

The Democ-rats and the media (I repeat myself) are shamelessly LYING through their teeth to the American People. There was NO Russian collision—it's a HOAX made by LOSERS who can't accept their loss in 2016 so they were up to smear the winner, President Trump, by all means, possible including Illegal surveillance, fraud and manipulation—ABUSE of government power for political prosecution.

Cherrie Dee , 5 hours ago

Steele dossier......fake evidence bought and payed for by the democrats and presented to the FISA court by James Comey...........FELONY FELONY FELONY!......this one can’t be talked away!

Scott Thompson , 4 hours ago

Tucker, thank you for being a constant drumbeat for the criminal activity undertaken by the FBI and CIA to ultimately unseat a duly elected President. No rest until they are held accountable.

Aisha Mohammed , 52 minutes ago

How could the FBI be innocent? We saw the emails. We saw them cover up for Bill Gates, Clinton, Epstein, Brunel, and all the others. We saw how they protected these abusers of children. We saw how they worked to overthrow a sitting president. We saw how they protected the Awan’s and Huma.

BC Stud , 4 hours ago

THE FIX WAS IN - People are saying that Nellie Orr the Russian Expert is best friends with the IG's Horowitz wife - So nice - Bruce your husband is a lap dog and works for the FBI . People should be outraged as the cover up continues . Just like OJ - they have 10 times the evidence that would convict anyone else - have them charged , arrested , tried and jailed . Different rules for corrupt politicians and their friends in law enforcement .

2 Cent , 5 hours ago

Michael Cohen In prison, Papadopulos went to prison, Flynn is going to prison, Roger Stone is going to prison, Manafort is in prison and Devin Nunes and Rudy Giuliani are under investigation.....Lock them up, lock them up!!!!

Jessica Greene , 4 hours ago

CIA tells FBI who in turn uses their corrupt media to spread the lies as truth. The less intelligent among us believe them as gospel and thus we get "Russian Collusion, or Quid Pro Quo, or Iraq has weapons of mass destruction " and on and on.....

Susan Byers , 2 hours ago

Carter Page is scarcely a victim, he was a CIA informant. He was a plant. He was an excuse to do surveillance EVERYONE.

Jennifer Griffin , 2 hours ago

Ukraine and Barisma may be corrupt, but after reading the summary of this report, this country better not be calling any country corrupt. The USA is following Rome. Soon it will die.

kenh2o , 4 hours ago

FBI is totally corrupted by it's unchecked power, these deep states have the guts to repeatedly use FALSE Information again & again to spy on the opposition political party presidential candidate campaign. The Fake News medias continue to cover for them, it is sickening!

Rick Atkins , 5 hours ago

The FBI based on the IG report are either criminally liable for deceiving FISA courts, or the most inept, bumbling criminal investigation agency ever. Looks like both to me. Any FBI agent or employee who knew the FBI was breaking the law, and remained silent needs to be fired immediately and prosecuted along with the principals, for aiding and abetting criminal activity. This sounds like RICO violations.

Daryl Leckt , 34 minutes ago (edited)

if Carter Page didn't run the 2016 "Trump Election Campaign Committee of Moscow" from the ROSNEFT bureau offices inside the Kremlin, where did Carter Page run the "Trump Election Campaign Committee of Moscow" ?

BrianC6234 , 2 hours ago

Horowitz needs to stop being a wuss and tell the whole truth. His report is a big lie. The whole thing was a political attack. It started with John McCain and he handed it off to Obama and Crooked Hillary. There was no reason at all to investigate Trump. Is the IG part of the deep state? Democrats are acting like this report is good news for them.

Pal VB , 1 hour ago (edited)

Steele was not the author of the fake dossier, DNC FusionGPS Glen Simpson was, and Steele used as cover. Coming in the Durham findings. 17 FBI "mistakes" in a row all against Trump? No bias? B S.

Me King , 4 hours ago

How Trump has "conned" the American tax payer: This is just a few of his fraud actions!He set up a foundation to benefit the military, then him and his family pocketed our money.He started a Fake University, then stole the money from the American people.He cheated on his wives, then paid them to keep quiet so it wouldn't damage his chances in the election.He stiffed 100's of worker's he hired and then made up an excuse y they didn't get paid

Maclain Hunter , 2 hours ago

If Donald Trump was a Russian spy it would’ve been the deepest cover of any secret agent ever....he came here after his lgb training as a young man and became a celebrity for 30 years before finally putting his dastardly plan to go from pageant owner to president into action! If that were anywhere close to true the Russians did so much work I think they earned the 4-8 years in the White House! I know that at this point I’d rather have Vladimir Putin as President than any of the top democrats!

The World Through My Mind , 1 hour ago

Folks..All this soap opera is just a smoke screen to hide what is really important and is happening right now at this very minute. The Federal Reserve Banking cartel is pumping 100s of billions of dollars into insolvent banks again like they did in 2008. This time it is more and we taxpayers will again foot the bill. The banks are getting this money called REPO loans. Watch your cash everyone as the Federal Reserve has only 1 product and that is printing money( debt) that they will use to steal your assets and future.

lenchienlon , 3 hours ago

There are many opinions about the Horowitz report. As with a prior report Horowitz lays out damning evidence and then draws exactly the wrong conclusion. Why does he have to draw ANY CONCLUSIONS? His job is to present the facts and the evidence and to let "We the People' draw conclusions. Reminds me of Comey declaring that Hillary's actions were irresponsible but not criminal. Why? She didn't act with intent. She was just incompetent! Tucker is absolutely right! What does it matter what their motive was? Like Clinton, they behaved in a criminal fashion.

[Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

Highly recommended!
The tread is reproduced as is. And out 100 posts available in NYT "all view mode 90% can be classified as plain vanilla Neo-McCarthyism
If they are representative sample of the country, the country is crazy.
This editorial can also be classified as lunatic. But in reality it is much worse: the paper became completely subservant to intelligence agencies. Should probably be renamed the Voice of the CIA. .
Dec 10, 2019 | www.nytimes.com
Opinion With Trump, All Roads Lead to Moscow

Monday's congressional hearing and the inspector general's report tell a similar story.

By Jesse Wegman Mr. Wegman is a member of the editorial board.

When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

That's the most important lesson from the two big events that played out Monday on Capitol Hill -- the House Judiciary Committee's hearings on President Trump's impeachment and the release of the report on the origins of the F.B.I.'s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

One of these involved the 2016 election. The other involves the 2020 election. Both tell versions of the same story: Mr. Trump depends on, and welcomes, Russian interference to help him win the presidency. That was bad enough when he did it in 2016, openly calling for Russia to hack into his opponent's emails -- which Russians tried to do that same day . But he was only a candidate then. Now that Mr. Trump is president, he is wielding the immense powers of his office to achieve the same end.

That is precisely the type of abuse of power that the founders were most concerned about when they created the impeachment power, and it's why Democratic leaders in the House are pressing ahead with such urgency on their inquiry. They are trying to ensure that the 2020 election, now less than a year away, is not corrupted by the president of the United States, acting in league with a foreign power. "The integrity of our next election is at stake," said Representative Jerry Nadler, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. "Nothing could be more urgent."

On Monday morning, lawyers for the Democrats on the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees presented the clearest and most comprehensive narrative yet of President Trump's monthslong shakedown of the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for Mr. Trump's personal political benefit. They explained in methodical detail how the president withheld a White House meeting and hundreds of millions of dollars in crucial, congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine, all in an effort to get Mr. Zelensky to announce two investigations -- one into Mr. Trump's political rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter, and another into Ukraine's supposed interference in the 2016 election.

David Leonhardt helps you make sense of the news -- and offers reading suggestions from around the web -- with commentary every weekday morning.

Who would benefit from these announcements? Mr. Trump, who believes his re-election prospects are threatened most by Mr. Biden, and Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, who has been working for years to make Ukraine the fall guy for his own interference in the 2016 election. Mr. Putin has not fooled serious people, like those in the American intelligence community who determined that his government alone was responsible for meddling on Mr. Trump's behalf . But he has fooled Republicans in Congress, who have degraded themselves and their offices by faithfully parroting Mr. Putin's propaganda in the mainstream press.

... ... ...

sdavidc9 Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut 12m ago

Republicans are in lawyer mode, advocating for Trump as if he were their client. Lawyers make the best case they can for their clients. It helps if they believe in the case, but it also helps to know the case's weaknesses so they can avoid them. The best lawyers can do both at the same time. Republicans are called on by the Constitution to exit lawyer mode and enter juror mode (which is, or should be, similar to why-did-this-aircraft-crash mode). So far, they are not heeding this call. From all appearances, they are mouthing the words of the Constitution while avoiding or refusing to hear or understand them. They took an oath to support the Constitution, but they are deaf to its call, or have moved to a place beyond understanding it.
Mark Larsen Cambria, CA 26m ago
The issue of whether to impeach was made by the President when he engaged in an abuse of his office for personal gain and then obstructed Congress' oversight function. We all understand the political downside arising from an acquittal in the Senate but that interest needs to be secondary to doing the right thing. On these facts, the decision representatives must make of whether to impeach really is no decision at all. Just do the right thing.
Twg NV 26m ago
When Senator John McCain died, he scripted his own funeral as a full bore defense against Trumpian Nationalism, and as an admonishment against a GOP too willing to sell the soul of our nation out to a cultist repudiation of objective fact, truth, and Constitutional order. McCain was a controversial maverick –a person I both admired and disliked in equal proportion. But there is one thing I will always admire him for: his final letter to the nation. It was a warning! He blew a golden bugle to sound the alarm against those entities both within and without our nation who wish to do our democratic republic harm. McCain, whether you agreed with the premise of the Vietnam war or not, was an American hero who served his country and his fellow soldiers with incontrovertible valor and love. President Donald Trump has no concept of what that dedication and sacrifice entails – and sadly, neither do many of the GOP members who continue to lie and make excuses for a president who is clearly abusing his office for personal gain. McCain characterized Trump's actions in Helsinki as an unfathomable 'abasement of the U.S. presidency.' All I can say is the GOP sure ain't the party of my father who fought in WWII against fascism and autocracy. It aggrieves me to no end to witness what too many members of Congress have become: tyrants toward the very meaning of American democracy. God save us from our own duplicity.
Jagmont Rousel Fresburg, Ca. 12m ago
@Twg Well said, and though I sometimes did not agree with McCain on matters of policy, I wish he were still with us, hopefully to show his fellow republicans what integrity looks like, and what America is supposed to be about. The Republican party I have known and respected is alas, like Senator McCain, no longer with us.
Consiglieri NYC 34m ago
Americans have to realize that the whole world is mocking us, and that doesn't necesarily inspire respect. That cold be dangerous. Many medical professionals have noticed a decay in the mental abilities of the president, and certain abnormalities. It would be wise to suggest to the family that maybe the best way forward, with minimal losses would be to motivate a retirement. That would be face saving for them, and save the country from a bitter impeachment spectacle that would not be positive for the USA.
Jennifer Francois Holland, Michigan 1h ago
I'm waiting for Trump's financial info to be released. There's something in there he doesn't even want his base to know . I think the logical conclusion is that whatever financials DJT has hidden do indeed lead to Moscow. Actually, all of this is very, very alarming. Does Putin have a political asset planted here? Y or N I wish the answer was no and that we had a different President. Can we as a nation hold things together when our leader wants to tear us apart?
AL NY 1h ago
All roads lead to the highest bidder(s). 21st century America in the era of Citizens United. Market pricing and the government is open for transactional business domestic and international. Alternate realities per GRU/FOX/GOP misinformation. Combine foreign money carefully grooming an in-need Trump, and a party worshipping money and you have a perfect storm removing any sense of civic duty. Hundreds of years to build and unwound in a few decades, the breathtaking and tragic fall of greatness and hope in our lifetime. It's not fiction, and every day I have to check if it's really happening, and shockingly it is.
DO5 Minneapolis 1h ago
There was no Russian meddling, only Ukraine who meddled in 2016 and they are still at it. Listening to the Judiciary Committee hearings, it seems that the Russians have hacked into the Republican Party servers and are sending talking points to Republicans who are defending the indefensible president.
We'll always have Paris Sydney, Australia 1h ago
At some point, Republicans have to ask themselves which is better for their party and the country. Slavish devotion to Trump, or losing an election and leaving Democrats a mess to clean up, as in 1932 and 2008?
Mike S. Eugene, OR 2h ago
Block witnesses from testifying, then say that the hearing is incomplete. Romney told America at the Republican Convention in 2012 that Russia was our biggest enemy, DJT wanted them to help Republicans win in 2016, said he believed Putin in 2018, and wants to convince us that it was really the Ukraine in 2019. The House has to impeach, even if politically it may be a bad move, because it is the right thing to do; indeed, the very actions I've seen in the past several weeks has given me glimmers of hope for the country.
Federalist California 2h ago
Trump will be reelected for the reason that the Russian intelligence agencies are still able to hack our election results, because Trump has blocked fixing the weaknesses. That is what happens when a Manchurian candidate is elected and then allowed to obstruct justice. It is not clear the US will survive Trump. One key thing he did was arrange to have the teams at DHS that watch for smuggled nuclear bombs were stood down and disbanded. See the report in the LA Times last July "Trump administration has gutted programs aimed at detecting weapons of mass destruction".
David Rochester 2h ago
I don't suppose a constructed transcript of Trump's meeting with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov tomorrow will be offered up as a token of our leader's transparency.
Markymark San Francisco 2h ago
It's clear now that AG William Barr isn't interested in enforcing the rule of law with fellow republicans, and especially the president. How can there be no recourse when an attorney general completely sells out to a criminal president? Can the employees of the Justice Dept hold a vote of no confidence in the AG? Can 10,000 attorneys nationwide express the same? The prospect of Trump and Barr running roughshod over the rule of law for another year is truly frightening.
Aluetian Contemplation 2h ago
65,845,063 voters knew clearly who this man was from the beginning and voted for what would have been a better now and future. It was never any secret. 62,980,160 voters also knew clearly who this man was and voted for him anyway. If the Democrats can ensure that we have a fair election in 2020. I'm confident they will win the majority in the house and senate and retake the White House and the end game for Trump will be jail. The problem is, he might not be the only one who's crimes come to light and I suspect a good lot of the GOP are threatening and blackmailing each other to hold the line. If there's any good men or women left in the GOP, your country and history are calling you.
Edwin a physician, scientist and realist 2h ago
It has easy to predict Trump's next move for the last 3 years. Just ask, "What would both benefit Trump, and benefit Putin?" Trump supporters = Putin supporters.
Kevin CO 2h ago
Do you know the American people are fed up with the discourse of all politicians. The republicans are fed up with any decency for the republic. The democrats are fed up with the republicans not facing the common sense of a exec not capable of being the President of the United states. I as a person am fed up with a political system that is not working for all people, just a select few. It's time too have term limits for all positions in gov't. That means all people that serve the people whether it be judges, senators or congressmen/women. It's time to find common sense again in our society as a whole society. We on this earth are all HUMAN.
Eben Spinoza 2h ago
Unfortunately their are serious problems with term limits. Just consider yourself in the role of a Congressional Representative limited to 4 terms. You know that in 8 years, you'll be be back on the job market. You can selflessly work for the public and damage your ability to get a job or tend to people who can hire you after you leave office. You're rational. Which future would you pick?
REBCO FORT LAUDERDALE FL 2h ago
Trump needs to keep Putin happy lest he unleash with all the damaging info he has collected on Trump and his financial crooked deals with Russians over decades. THe Russian mob reports to Putin as a former KGB agent he knows how to collect compromat on a politician and how to use it to get Trump to break into a giddy smile when he sees Putin his master it's obvious to most keen observers.
M. Barsoum Philadelphia 2h ago
Folks it is simple. Can we hear what Trump and Putin said to each other a few months ago. It is recored and on a server it should not be on. I am not sure why nobody is talking about these transcripts.
Nelly Half Moon Bay 2h ago
Finally! We get someone stating the obvious fact of Trump/Putin. Why are the Dems not talking about this all the time? Why are Congressmen and women not asking the witnesses about this? This is the ONE thing the Republicans are afraid of, so it is the one thing Democrats should do. I have been disappointed that the Russian asset thing hasn't been brought up....It's as if it is purposely bold. Trump is a Russian asset, either witting or unwitting. I doubt if there is one upper Intelligence Official that wouldn't say this. So find the right one and have them sit as a witness for this inquiry. And now the Russian big wig Diplomat and KGb spy, Lavarov, is visiting tomorrow. Good grief! Everyone is thinking this, so get out and say it Dems! Dr. Fiona Hill tried to lead into this direction but still the Dem Committee would take it up and aske her what she thought. Say it: All of Trump's Roads Lead to Russia.
Ro Laren Santa Monica 2h ago
Any American adult who has made an effort to educate himself or herself about Mr. Mueller's investigation or these impeachment proceedings understands that yes, with Trump all roads lead to Russia. Now if the poll numbers mean anything, Trump's crimes and Russia's involvement only matter to about 60% of us. As Trump's poll numbers remain steady, some 40% of Americans don't care what lawbreaking he is involved with or whether other nations now control our elections. Stop and think about this for a minute. Trump supporters know but literally do not care that Russia is tampering with our elections (2016 and 2020). Their cult-like support for Trump is why the Republican Senate will not remove him. There is no other reason Trump will remain in office. Trump has mesmerized his supporters like a modern day Rasputin. They will do literally anything for him, and Senate Republicans know this. Trump voters do not mind that Putin controls our nation at the highest levels of decision making. Again - think about this - they know he does, and they do not care. So I ask the rest of us. Is this the America we want to live in? To raise our families in? Where a large, rabid minority is in thrall to a lunatic puppet whose strings are firmly in Putin's hands? Because this is very much the America we live in now. The time will come, though, when we, the majority, will no longer tolerate the Trump/Putin regime. But the longer we wait, the harder it will be oust these tyrants.
Tracy Washington DC 2h ago
In 2008, Donald Trump Jr. said Russia was an important source of funding for the Trump businesses. American banks wouldn't lend him money. Saudi Arabia likely bailed out Jared's disastrous real estate investment in NYC. Follow. The. Money.
Huge Grizzly Seattle 2h ago
You say that Mr. Putin "has fooled Republicans in Congress, who have degraded themselves and their offices by faithfully parroting Mr. Putin's propaganda in the mainstream press." You are correct on all counts, except that the Republicans have not been fooled by Putin. They have gone along, headlong and absolutely willingly, in a complete sellout of personal and national principle and integrity. They should not be forgiven for this conduct, any more than Mr. Trump should be forgiven for his sellout of America.
Look Ahead WA 2h ago
For Republicans who believe so fervently in their counterfactual narrative, there is an immediate remedy. Bring facts and evidence to the Committees and testify under oath. Without witnesses and evidence presented under oath, all of the GOP antics simply look foolish and very much like they are defending the guilty. It is unfortunate that there is no penalty for elected officials who share unfounded conspiracy theories, engage in innuendo and obstruct process in official Committee hearings. It is also regretable that this President is not held accountable for trying to intimidate witnesses in real time during testimony. And it is a sad reality that one of the most corrupt rulers in the world, who rules a hostile power, has managed to entirely win over one of our major parties.
Gerard PA 2h ago
The strangest defense advanced today was the idea that the alleged state of the economy was reason not to impeach the President: the Republicans assert that America, the Constitution, the principle of our government are for sale to be bought by the rising stock market and a plethora of low-wage jobs. We are Faust, and the smell of sulphur is nauseating.
richard wiesner oregon 2h ago
If the IG's report on the 2016 Russia investigation had found the only problem was that two of the agents involved had horrible hangnails, Barr and Trump would have condemned it.
Asian Philosopher Germany 2h ago
Whatever Trump is doing, he always care about his main benefactors, Putin and MBS. This is the first time I have witnessed in history that an American president became a Russian puppet with all his Republican followers at the Congress and Senate. American constitutional crisis happening right in front of the world. I heard the cries of James Madison, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin from their graves.
trudds sierra madre, CA 2h ago Times Pick
Sir, do you honestly think that House Republicans have been "fooled" by Mr. Putin? On the contrary, it's pretty obvious they understand and believe the conclusions from our Intel community. These are instead willful lies for political gain. And while some Americans may actually be misled by the theater presented as rebuttal to the impeachment, it's hard to imagine for most it's once again, not conviction but convenience that places such "patriots" solidly in Russia's back pocket.
Michele Seattle 2h ago Times Pick
The pattern of behavior is clear and compelling: Trump is selling out this country, its national security, its integrity and sovereignty, in order to keep power and avoid his own prosecution, and protect his financial interests. We must get the truth about his relationships and indebtedness to Putin, the Saudis, and Erdogan. Our country has been hijacked and Trump will continue to corrupt the US and turn it into an autocracy if he is not stopped and held accountable under the law.
Linus Internet 2h ago
The country voted for this President knowing he is a flawed man in many ways. I don't think anything changes here - the Senate will speedily acquit him and the voters in the swing states will have to decide if they want to give Mr. Trump a second chance while the rest of the country impotently watches.
David CT 2h ago
If one looks at all of his actions as "How could this benefit Russia?" most of it makes sense. Why start a trade war with China and Western allies? Why withdraw from Syria? Why try to polarize the American public? Effectively showing this to the public is critical.
Mark New York 2h ago
Excellent piece. We all know Trump, Inc. turned to Russian oligarchs after '08 for condo sales. It just so happened that those same oligarchs (read as kleptocrats) were laundering money through Deutsche Bank, who was the only bank willing to lend to Trump. Trump's loan officer amazingly was SC Justice Anthony Kennedy's son. Trump was and is a desperate man in need of cash/ Putin is a desperate man who knows that the geyser of oil money that funds his national budget, and has done so since the 1920's, is coming to an end. Russia has no large material economic exports other than oil and gas, but it does still have a large military, hence the military incursions into Moldova, Ossetia, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. Desperate men do desperate things, and desperately try to project power with weak hands.
turbot philadelphia 2h ago
The Republicans in Congress were not fooled by the Russians. They believe in Trump no matter what the Russians do. The bottom line is - What does Putin have on Trump
stan continople brooklyn 2h ago
I don't understand why there hasn't been more of a pushback by the military. They went heavily for Trump in 20116, with many bases in the South and many recruits from economically devastated areas, but in the interim, they have seen his reckless, lurching foreign policy, worship of Putin, and clear evidence that somehow everything he does benefits Russia. A commander's first obligation is to their troops, so knowing the man in charge considers their lives subject to both Trump's whims, and Putin's whispers should provoke some reaction. No?
Steven Auckland 3h ago
Unfortunately - to put it mildly - impeachment will have no effect on the conduct of the 2020 election. The wheels are already turning, everyone knows their part, and only a massive commitment by an honest intelligence apparatus (if there is one) can stop it. One can only hope that, in 2020, the American people make a statement so overwhelming that there can be no doubt as to their intent, despite whatever meddling there may have been. It is entirely possible that there will never be a truly credible election again as long as there are bad actors who are power hungry or bent on destabilizing democratic governments. And make no mistake, these threats are coming from right wing autocracies, and they are in the ascendancy all over the world. American centrists and liberals are the only force that can change that. Are those stakes big enough for you?
Michael Kittle Vaison la Romaine, France 3h ago
We may finally have the answer as to why Trump is so accommodating to Putin. Trump has so many investments in Russia dependent on Putin's support. Trump financial reports will reveal this collusion between Trump and Putin. This should not come as a surprise to attentive Americans. Think of the worst an American president can do and that will bring you close to understanding Trump.
Ray Haining Hot Springs, AR 3h ago
Nobody's saying how Trump withholding military aid to Ukraine would benefit Putin and Russia in their WAR against Ukraine. It was, indeed, MILITARY aid he was withholding, was it not? I understand that this is not the impeachable offense of attempting to enlist a foreign government to win an election, but I believe this aspect of the situation should be brought out.
Socrates Downtown Verona. NJ 3h ago
The Republican Party has been officially reduced to a giant miasma of fraud, fiction, fantasy, conspiracy theory, deflection, misdirection and prevarication. After tax cuts for rich people and rich corporations...the GOP has no other public policy ideas (except for bankrupting the government). A civilized country needs little things like infrastructure, education, technology, voting rights, law and order, regulations, fair taxation and facts to move forward. But none of those things are ever mentioned by the Republican Party; conspiracy-mongering and tax cuts are now the official governing planks of the Grand Old Propaganda/Grand One Percent party. This is no way to manage a nation anywhere except into the ground. Americans need to hit the Trump-GOP eject button before these Lord of the Fly Republicans take us over a very steep right-wing cliff of insanity.
Bob Hudson Valley 3h ago
The Republican Party is now Trump's party and the Republicans know it and are acting accordingly. You could call them opportunists following the way the political winds are blowing. The Constitution is based on members of Congress caring about the Constitution and searching for the truth. Since this is now not the case when if comes to the Republicans the Constitution has no remedy for this situation. The only remedy is an election and if Trump can manipulate elections to his advantage using foreign powers then there is no remedy and the system of government set up by the founders will be no more. The new system replacing it will be controlled by Trump. Putin figured out how to control Russian elections so he always wins and it is likely that Trump has a goal of imitating Putin. Ultimately this would mean taking over the press as Putin did. Trump cannot declare total victory as long as the there is a free press which he has labeled the enemy of the people.
DAWGPOUND HAR NYC 3h ago
From an acute perspective ..indeed shocking to say the least of the nature of this peculiar relationship. But looking at the big picture as evidence by all that has occurred in his or during this eye opening period for all the world to see....not so much so...For me, this dynamic is much expected.
James Ricciardi Panama, Panama 3h ago
"The witness has used language which impugns the motives of the president and suggests he's disloyal to his country, and those words should be stricken from the record and taken down," Mr. Johnson said. The Johnson rule effectively reads the impeachment power out of the constitution. How can you impeach a president if no one can say anything bad about him/her?
Bruce Rozenblit Kansas City, MO 3h ago
We have yet to plow the most fertile road yet. What does Trump care about over all else? Trump. How does Trump gauge his progress? His money. Where does his money come from? Good question. We all know he has filed for bankruptcy 6 times. We all know that because of those bankruptcies, American banks will not loan him any money. We all know he has significant financial dealings with Deutsche Bank. Now, who put the money in Deutsche Bank that ended up financing Trump's business.? That is the two billion dollar question. We also know that Russian oligarchs deal in billions of dollars. We also know that Trump has close relations with Russian business interests. We also know that Trump kowtows to Putin like Pence kowtows to him. We also know that Trump is doing everything possible to conceal his financial dealings from everyone and everything. So, we know that one billion plus one billion equals two billion. But does it also equal Trump? This money road is one we should take a ride on. Will it also take us to Putin?
Mark New York 2h ago
@Bruce Rozenblit No, but it will take us to those who are surrogates for him. Those whose wealth only continues because of Vova's "good will."
Gluscabi Dartmouth, MA 3h ago
The first Democratic candidate who labels Trump a "Russian agent" will own the simplest and most effective tag line going into the general election, provided of course that that candidate does his best to channel his inner Trump by never backing down but instead doubling down every chance he or she gets. Is Trump a Russian agent, paid for and accounted for? Not easy to say without some doubt, but that doesn't really matter because he sure as shoottin' acts like one. And when have the facts ever stopped Trump from going on the attack? The more Trump denies the label, the more he'll be digging his own grave. The real crime here is not so much the strong arming of Zelenskyy for a Biden investigation. That's small potatoes compared to Trump's withholding congressionally designated US military aid from a country engaged in a hot war with Russia, the same cast of characters who starved anywhere from one to eleven million Ukrainians during the 1930's. The Russian agent must go.
Alan Columbus OH 3h ago
I would not say Trump's lying "is effective", I would say it "has been effective". At some point, the public and his party may have had it with the thuggery and we do not know when that breaking point is.
abigail49 georgia 3h ago
For the sake of protecting our 2020 elections from Russian hackers and disinformation, the House is justified in moving forward fast, over the process howls of Republicans, with the compelling evidence they have surrounding Ukraine. But they need to continue investigating his business and financial ties to Russia and any other autocratic governments and their oligarchs, e.g. Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Especially if he is not convicted and removed by the Senate and stands for re-election, Americans need to know what conflicts of interest he has in making foreign policy and military decisions because American soldiers' lives are at stake. The Mueller investigation did not go down that road. Any businessman with global interests is automatically compromised, even more than a vice president whose son sits on a foreign corporation's board of director. Trump's own children continue to do business in foreign countries and we have no idea what Ivanka and Jared, sitting in the White House with top security clearances, are doing. In short, Ukraine should not be the only concern of congressional oversight committees. There's a lot more.
Peter Portland OR 3h ago
Trump must believe that Russian help in 2016 did help him to win. He must feel that fake evidence presented by an "independent" investigator such as a foreign government appears to carry more weight that the same fake evidence from a partisan investigator. Otherwise why would he be taking such chances to duplicate via Ukraine what he got from the Russians in 2016. But now that the Russian connection is outed, he can't go back to that well.
NA Wilson Massachusetts 3h ago
I worry it's all for naught. Dems in the House vote to impeach, GOP in the Senate vote to acquit. Trump remains highly competitive in 2020 election, Russia and other adversaries interfere, Trump stays put. Then what?
Rafael SC 3h ago
@NA Wilson Think of this situation differently. To have all possible scope to defeat him, we must support everything we can to undermine him. Lack of impeachment would have been business as usual. At some point his finances will get out and then all bets are off.
Tracy Washington DC 2h ago
@NA Wilson: It's all Hands on deck to save the country. Don't just vote, donate what money you can, work for candidates, knock doors, make calls. It's the only way out of this nightmare.
N. Smith New York City 3h ago
The Impeachment hearings weren't really necessary to prove what most everyone who's been paying attention knows. With Trump, all roads lead to Moscow. In fact, he's already acting very Putin-esque in his own way by forbidding anyone in the White House to respond to subpoena, by installing the fear of God in those who do, by punishing anyone who dares to think or act on their own, and then there's the act of holding a foreign country ransom until they agree to do his bidding -- not to mention inviting outside interference in our presidential elections. All the signs are not only there but they are ominous. By holding himself above the U.S. Constitution, Trump has declared war on this country and all the laws that govern it. And while entertainment-starved Americans laugh and cheer at his rallies, he and the Republicans drain our right to vote, and with it our Democracy. Today wasn't an epiphany. It was a warning.
bl rochester 3h ago
There seems to be no discussion of the financial backing trump received after '08-09 from sources inside Russia and how these actors would have expressed their support (or conditions for their silence) to the trump campaign during '15-16. Did the FBI not identify and investigate the funders behind trump and their interactions with the campaign during 2016? Would this not have been reasonable for an investigation to look into when its entire raison d'etre was to detect sources of Russian influence?
Jim TX 3h ago
I wonder if Mr. Wegman believes that this editorial will change anyone's mind or influence how anyone votes in the upcoming presidential election. Basically, this is classic preaching to the choir and sadly mostly a wasted effort. I would like to read articles with proven ideas that worked to change the minds of Republicans and other like them. Such articles might give me some better ideas to convince my pro-Trump friends and neighbors to Vote for America next November.
Kingfish52 Rocky Mountains 3h ago
"When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected." This! This is the central fact of all the things Trump has done (so far), and yet, the Democrats have failed to make this the central focus of the case against him. Instead, they've focused on one incident, and not even the most egregious one, to justify impeachment and removal from office. This was a terrible miscalculation. No, there is no doubt that Trump attempted to coerce Ukraine into helping with his re-election by announcing a bogus investigation of the Bidens. Nor any doubt that this constituted "high crimes and misdemeanors". But this was not the highest of crimes he's committed, nor have the Dems been able to convince any Republicans, or many independents, that this deserves Trump's removal. Moreover, they failed to produce the "smoking gun" of one witness or document in Trump's own words directing the quid pro quo. They gave plenty of room for the Republican attack machine to cast enough doubt and confusion that all but ensures Trump's acquittal in the Senate. Instead of focusing only on this one incident, the Democrats should have built their case around the theme that "with Trump, all roads lead to Russia". That is a crime that even the most skeptical doubter can grasp, and when linked together, all of his crimes can be shown to be of a pattern of serving Putin, and not the people of the United States. All roads lead to Putin, but the Democrats chose to follow a dead end.
DW Philly 2h ago
@Kingfish52 I completely agree with you and truly don't understand why the Democrats have not been shouting this from the rooftops. For mercy's sake! The problem is not just that the president solicited help from a foreign power for his own personal gain! That's bad enough, but isn't the point that he did this because he is beholden to Russia? Russia. is. not. our. friend. Why aren't the Democrats explaining this clearly to the American people? Trump is Putin's puppet and it could not be more obvious! Don't people understand that it doesn't just happen to be Ukraine that Trump took a notion to squeeze for his "personal gain"? He doesn't just want to win because it is so nice to win elections. He has to do what Putin tells him. Obviously, every last Republican in Congress understands this clearly. Why can't the Democrats explain it to the American people clearly?
Mike Republic Of Texas 4h ago
Obama did not provide lethal aid to Ukraine, after the Russians invaded Crimea. Obama did not Russia prevent the Iranian nuclear deal. Trump cancelled the Iranian nuclear deal, then provided lethal aid to Ukraine. Now I get it. Trump is working for Putin.
Mick Montclair 3h ago
By March 2015, the US had committed more than $120 million in security assistance for Ukraine and had pledged an additional $75 million worth of equipment including UAVs, counter-mortar radars, night vision devices and medical supplies, according to the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency. That assistance also included some 230 armored Humvee vehicles. Trump appears to be echoing a critique leveled at the Obama administration by the late Republican Sen. John McCain. "The Ukrainians are being slaughtered and we're sending blankets and meals," McCain said in 2015. "Blankets don't do well against Russian tanks." While it never provided lethal aid, many of the items that the Obama administration did provide were seen as critical to Ukraine's military. Part of the $250 million assistance package that the Trump administration announced (then froze and later unfroze) included many of the same items that were provided under Obama, including medical equipment, night vision gear and counter-artillery radar. The Trump administration did approve the provision of arms to Ukraine, including sniper rifles, rocket launchers and Javelin anti-tank missiles, something long sought by Kiev.
Ivan Memphis, TN 2h ago
@Mike Trump was not the one providing lethal aid to Ukraine. It was the house and senate that proposed and forced this aid into an appropriation bill - against the wishes of the Trump administration. After Trump realized he could not block this funding he did the second best thing - he used it to blackmail the Ukraine government to provide him with dirt on Biden and support for Putin's favorite narrative (that it was Ukraine not Russia that interfered in the 2016 election).
Mark New York 2h ago
@Mike It also took two acts of Congress to get the aid to Ukraine. Trump had nothing to do with it. Only the Impound Inclusion Act for foreign aid allows the President to time the release of the funds, which Trump did not follow. The Act was created because Nixon, like Trump, was playing fast and loose with our tax dollars. Who was the last President who asked for help from a foreign intelligence agency? Which President favored foregn intelligence agencies over his own? Answer no one other than Trump. If that doesn't show he's in someone's pocket, nothing does.

[Dec 09, 2019] Anti-semitism Is Cover for a Much Deeper Divide in Britain's Labour Party by Jonathan Cook

Anti-Semitism in UK serves the same role as Neo-McCartyism in the USA as demonstrated by RussiaGate.
There is a deep analogy between neo-McCarthyism complain in the USA nad anti-Semitism campaign in the US Parliament.
Notable quotes:
"... Luciana Berger (image on the right), a Jewish MP who has highlighted what she sees as an anti-Semitism problem under Corbyn, led the charge, stating at the Independent Group's launch that she had reached "the sickening conclusion " that Labour was "institutionally racist". ..."
"... She and her allies claim she has been hounded out of the party by "anti-semitic bullying". Berger has suffered online abuse and death threats from a young neo-Nazi who was jailed for two years in 2016. There have been other incidences of abuse and other sentences, including a 27-month jail term for John Nimmo , a right-wing extremist who referred to Berger as "Jewish scum" and signed his messages, "your friend, the Nazi". ..."
"... That is one reason why anti-semitism smears have been so maliciously effective against anti-Zionist Jews in the party and used with barely a murmur of protest – or in most cases, even recognition that Jews are being suspended and expelled for opposing Israel's racist policies towards Palestinians. ..."
"... The Blairites in Labour, joined by the ruling Conservative Party, the mainstream media and pro-Israel lobby groups, have selected anti-semitism as the terrain on which to try to destroy a Corbyn-led Labour Party, because it is a battlefield in which the left stands no hope of getting a fair hearing – or any hearing at all. ..."
Feb 23, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

Breakaway MPs hope that smearing Corbyn will obscure the fact that they are remnants of an old political order bankrupt of ideas

The announcement by seven MPs from the UK Labour Party on Monday that they were breaking away and creating a new parliamentary faction marked the biggest internal upheaval in a British political party in nearly 40 years, when the SDP split from Labour.

On Wednesday, they were joined by an eighth Labour MP, Joan Ryan , and three Conservative MPs. There are predictions more will follow.

With the UK teetering on the brink of crashing out of the European Union with no deal on Brexit, the founders of the so-called Independent Group made reference to their opposition to Brexit.

The chief concern cited for the split by the eight Labour MPs, though, was a supposed "anti-semitism crisis" in the party.

The breakaway faction seemingly agrees that anti-Semitism has become so endemic in the party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader more than three years ago that they were left with no choice but to quit.

Corbyn, it should be noted, is the first leader of a major British party to explicitly prioritize the rights of Palestinians over Israel's continuing belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territories.

'Sickeningly racist'?

Luciana Berger (image on the right), a Jewish MP who has highlighted what she sees as an anti-Semitism problem under Corbyn, led the charge, stating at the Independent Group's launch that she had reached "the sickening conclusion " that Labour was "institutionally racist".

She and her allies claim she has been hounded out of the party by "anti-semitic bullying". Berger has suffered online abuse and death threats from a young neo-Nazi who was jailed for two years in 2016. There have been other incidences of abuse and other sentences, including a 27-month jail term for John Nimmo , a right-wing extremist who referred to Berger as "Jewish scum" and signed his messages, "your friend, the Nazi".

In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, the former Labour MP said the Independent Group would provide the Jewish community with a " political home that they, like much of the rest of the country, are now looking for".

In a plea to keep the party together, deputy leader Tom Watson issued a video in which he criticised his own party for being too slow to tackle anti-Semitism. The situation "poses a test" for Labour, he said, adding: "Do we respond with simple condemnation, or do we try and reach out beyond our comfort zone and prevent others from following?"

Ruth Smeeth , another Jewish Labour MP who may yet join a later wave of departures, was reported to have broken down in tears at a parliamentary party meeting following the split, as she called for tougher action on anti-semitism.

Two days later, as she split from Labour, Ryan accused the party of being "infected with the scourge of anti-Jewish racism".

Hatred claims undercut

The timing of the defections was strange, occurring shortly after the Labour leadership revealed the findings of an investigation into complaints of anti-semitism in the party. These were the very complaints that MPs such as Berger have been citing as proof of the party's "institutional racism".

And yet, the report decisively undercut their claims – not only of endemic anti-semitism in Labour, but of any significant problem at all.

That echoed an earlier report by the Commons home affairs committee, which found there was "no reliable, empirical evidence " that Labour had more of an anti-semitism problem than any other British political party.

Nonetheless, the facts seem to be playing little or no part in influencing the anti-semitism narrative. This latest report was thus almost entirely ignored by Corbyn's opponents and by the mainstream media.

It is, therefore, worth briefly examining what the Labour Party's investigation discovered.

Over the previous 10 months, 673 complaints had been filed against Labour members over alleged anti-semitic behaviour, many based on online comments. In a third of those cases, insufficient evidence had been produced.

The 453 other allegations represented 0.08 percent of the 540,000-strong Labour membership. Hardly "endemic" or "institutional", it seems.

Intemperate language

There is the possibility past outbursts have been part of this investigation. Intemperate language flared especially in 2014 – before Corbyn became leader – when Israel launched a military operation on Gaza that killed large numbers of Palestinian civilians, including many hundreds of children.

Certainly, it is unclear how many of those reportedly anti-semitic comments concern not prejudice towards Jews, but rather outspoken criticism of the state of Israel, which was redefined as anti-semitic last year by Labour, under severe pressure from MPs such as Berger and Ryan and Jewish lobby groups, such as the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement.

Britain's Witchfinders Are Ready to Burn Jeremy Corbyn

Seven of the 11 examples of anti-semitism associated with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition adopted by Labour concern Israel. That includes describing Israel as a "racist endeavour", even though Israel passed a basic law last year stripping the fifth of its population who are not Jewish of any right to self-determination, formally creating two classes of citizen.

Illustrating the problem Labour has created for itself as a result, some of the most high-profile suspensions and expulsions have actually targeted Jewish members of the party who identify as anti-Zionist – that is, they consider Israel a racist state. They include T ony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni, Glyn Secker and Cyril Chilson .

Another Jewish member, Moshe Machover , a professor emeritus at the University of London, had to be reinstated after a huge outcry among members at his treatment by the party.

Unthinking prejudice

Alan Maddison , who has been conducting statistical research on anti-semitism for a pro-Corbyn Jewish group, Jewish Voice for Labour, put the 0.08 percent figure into its wider social and political context this week.

He quoted the findings of a large survey of anti-semitic attitudes published by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in 2017. It found that 30 percent of respondents from various walks of society agreed with one or more of eight anti-semitic views, ranging from stereotypes such as "Jews think they are better than other people" to Holocaust denial.

However, lead researcher Daniel Staetsky concluded that in most cases, this was evidence of unthinking prejudice rather than conscious bigotry. Four-fifths of those who exhibited a degree of anti-semitism also agreed with at least one positive statement about Jewish people.

This appears to be the main problem among the tiny number of Labour Party members identified in complaints, and is reflected in the predominance of warnings about conduct rather than expulsions and suspensions.

Far-right bigotry

Another of the institute's findings poses a particular problem for Corbyn's opponents, who argue that the Labour leader has imported anti-semitism into the party by attracting the "hard left". Since he was elected, Labour membership has rocketed.

Even if it were true that Corbyn and his supporters are on the far-left – a highly questionable assumption, made superficially plausible only because Labour moved to the centre-right under Tony Blair in the late 1990s – the institute's research pulls the rug out from under Corbyn's critics.

It discovered that across the political spectrum, conscious hatred of Jews was very low, and that it was exhibited in equal measure from the "very left-wing" to the "fairly right-wing". The only exception, as one might expect, was on the "very right-wing", where virulent anti-semitism was much more prevalent.

That finding was confirmed last week by surveys that showed a significant rise in violent, anti-semitic attacks across Europe as far-right parties make inroads in many member states. A Guardian report noted that the "figures show an overwhelming majority of violence against Jews is perpetrated by far-right supporters".

Supporters of overseas war

So what is the basis for concerns about the Labour Party being mired in supposed "institutional anti-semitism" since it moved from the centre to the left under Corbyn, when the figures and political trends demonstrate nothing of the sort?

A clue may be found in the wider political worldview of the eight MPs who have broken from Labour.

All but two are listed as supporters of the parliamentary "Labour Friends of Israel" (LFI) faction. Further, Berger is a former director of that staunchly pro-Israel lobby group, and Ryan is its current chair, a position the group says she will hold onto, despite no longer being a Labour MP.

So extreme are the LFI's views on Israel that it sought to exonerate Israel of a massacre last year, in which its snipers shot dead many dozens of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza in a single day. Faced with a social media backlash, it quietly took down the posts .

The eight MPs' voting records – except for Gavin Shuker, for whom the picture is mixed – show them holding consistently hawkish foreign policy positions that are deeply antithetical to Corbyn's approach to international relations.

They either "almost always" or "generally" backed "combat operations overseas"; those who were MPs at the time supported the 2003 Iraq war; and they all opposed subsequent investigations into the Iraq war.

Committed Friends of Israel

In one sense, the breakaway group's support for Labour Friends of Israel may not be surprising, and indicates why Corbyn is facing such widespread trouble from within his own party. Dozens of Labour MPs are members of the group, including Tom Watson and Ruth Smeeth.

Smeeth, one of those at the forefront of accusing Corbyn of fostering anti-semitism in Labour, is also a former public affairs director of BICOM, another stridently pro-Israel lobby group .

None of these MPs were concerned enough with the LFI's continuing vocal support for Israel as it has shifted to the far-right under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have stepped down from the group.

'Wrong kind of Jews'

Anti-semitism has taken centre stage in the manoeuvring against Corbyn, despite there being no evidence of significant hatred against Jews in the party. Increasingly, it seems, tangible abuse of Jews is of little interest unless it can be related to Corbyn.

The markedly selective interest in anti-semitism in the Corbyn context among the breakaway MPs and supposed anti-semitism watchdogs has been starkly on show for some time.

Notably, none expressed concern at the media mauling of a left-wing, satirical Jewish group called Jewdas when Corbyn was widely attacked for meeting "the wrong kind of Jews". In fact, leading Labour figures, including the Jewish Labour Movement, joined in the abuse .

And increasingly in this febrile atmosphere, there has been an ever-greater indulgence of the "right kind of anti-semitism" – when it is directed at Corbyn supporters.

A troubling illustration was provided on the TV show Good Morning Britain this week, when Tom Bower was invited on to discuss his new unauthorised biography of Corbyn, in which he accuses him of anti-semitism. The hosts looked on demurely as Bower, a Jewish journalist, defamed fellow Jewish journalist Michael Segalov as a " self-hating Jew " for defending Corbyn on the show.

Revenge of the Blairites

So what is the significance of the fact that the Labour MPs who have been most outspoken in criticising Corbyn – those who helped organise a 2016 leadership challenge against him, and those who are now rumoured to be considering joining the breakaway faction – are heavily represented on the list of MPs supporting LFI?

For them, it seems, vigorous support for Israel is not only a key foreign policy matter, but a marker of their political priorities and worldview – one that starkly clashes with the views of Corbyn and a majority of the Labour membership.

Anti-semitism has turned out to be the most useful – and damaging – weapon to wield against the Labour leader for a variety of reasons close to the hearts of the holdouts from the Blair era, who still dominate the parliamentary party and parts of the Labour bureaucracy.

Perhaps most obviously, the Blairite wing of the party is still primarily loyal to a notion that Britain should at all costs maintain its transatlantic alliance with the United States in foreign policy matters. Israel is a key issue for those on both sides of the Atlantic who see that state as a projection of Western power into the oil-rich Middle East and romanticise Israel as a guarantor of Western values in a "barbaric" region.

Corbyn's prioritising of Palestinian rights threatens to overturn a core imperial value to which the Blairites cling.

Tarred and feathered

But it goes further. Anti-semitism has become a useful stand-in for the deep differences in a domestic political culture between the Blairites, on one hand, and Corbyn and the wider membership, on the other.

A focus on anti-semitism avoids the right-wing MPs having to admit much wider grievances with Corbyn's Labour that would probably play far less well not only with Labour members, but with the broader British electorate.

As well as their enthusiasm for foreign wars, the Blairites support the enrichment of a narrow neo-liberal elite, are ambivalent about austerity policies, and are reticent at returning key utilities to public ownership. All of this can be neatly evaded and veiled by talking up anti-semitism.

But the utility of anti-semitism as a weapon with which to beat Corbyn and his supporters – however unfairly – runs deeper still.

The Blairites view allegations of anti-Jewish racism as a trump card. Calling someone an anti-semite rapidly closes down all debate and rational thought. It isolates, then tars and feathers its targets. No one wants to be seen to be associated with an anti-semite, let alone defend them.

Weak hand exposed

That is one reason why anti-semitism smears have been so maliciously effective against anti-Zionist Jews in the party and used with barely a murmur of protest – or in most cases, even recognition that Jews are being suspended and expelled for opposing Israel's racist policies towards Palestinians.

This is a revival of the vile "self-hating Jew" trope that Israel and its defenders concocted decades ago to intimidate Jewish critics.

The Blairites in Labour, joined by the ruling Conservative Party, the mainstream media and pro-Israel lobby groups, have selected anti-semitism as the terrain on which to try to destroy a Corbyn-led Labour Party, because it is a battlefield in which the left stands no hope of getting a fair hearing – or any hearing at all.

But paradoxically, the Labour breakaway group may have inadvertently exposed the weakness of its hand. The eight MPs have indicated that they will not run in by-elections, and for good reason: it is highly unlikely they would stand a chance of winning in any of their current constituencies outside the Labour Party.

Their decision will also spur moves to begin deselecting those Labour MPs who are openly trying to sabotage the party – and the members' wishes – from within.

That may finally lead to a clearing out of the parliamentary baggage left behind from the Blair era, and allow Labour to begin rebuilding itself as a party ready to deal with the political, social, economic and environmental challenges of the 21st century.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in Nazareth since 2001, is the the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is a past winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at: www.jonathan-cook.net He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

[Dec 09, 2019] The Untold Facts of John Brennan s Career of Treachery by Richard Galustian

Notable quotes:
"... Hillary Clinton, Her husband Bill and Barak Obama are all deep cover CIA agents in addition to their other positions, as documented in the book "CIA: Crime Incorporated of America". ..."
"... The arms came from more places than simply Libya, although Libya was the central shipping and gathering point to go to Turkey and then on to Syria. Turkey was part of the Obama enablers of ISIS and ISIL big time ! Obama made sure ISIS got all the weapons and munitions and equipment we left behind and did literally nothing to stop them at all. He, Brennan, Hillary as well as Kerry all have massive blood on their hands via the atrocities of ISIS ! ..."
"... Not forgetting William Browder, part of the same gang, whose grandfather was the Leader of the US Communist Party. No doubt with close ties to Allen Dulles and ''peration Paperclip'. ..."
"... Will never forget Brennan, going to Ukraine, with instructions, just prior to 2 May 2014 and the Odessa Trade Union Massacre. Coincidence or what? ..."
"... Brennan may well have already been CIA when he joined the CPUSA. In any case, he's scum. ..."
"... Tucker Carlson and the author of this article asks, How can someone like Brennan be provided security clearance for top secrets in the CIA. A very easy answer: the entire American financial/judicial/military/spy organizations have become highly corrupt. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans could care less. ..."
"... "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you". https://t.co/uKppoDbduj -- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018 ..."
May 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Let's get something clear from the start. In 1976, in his 20s, John Brennan was a card carrying communist who supported the then Soviet Union, at the height some might say of the Cold War, so much so he voted and assisted Gus Hall, the communist candidate for President against a devout Christian, Jimmy Carter who ultimately won the Presidency.

Yet under four years later, just after the then Soviet Union invaded, just weeks before, Afghanistan and months after the tumultuous Iranian revolution of 1979, which at the time many thought the Soviet Union had a hand in, Brennan was accepted into the CIA as a junior analyst.

At that time, John Brennan should have never got into the CIA, or any Western Intelligence agency given his communist background.

Think on that carefully as you continue to read this.

Also reflect on the fact that Brennan, later in his CIA career, was surprisingly elevated from junior analyst to the prestigious position of Station Chief in Saudi Arabia where he spent a few years.

Its said he was appointed purely for 'political' reasons, alleged to have been at the direct request of Bill Clinton and other Democrats not because of a recommendation or merit from within the Agency.

Its further said that the Saudis liked Brennan because he became very quickly 'their man' so to speak. Some reports, unsubstantiated, even allege Brennan became a Muslim while there to ingratiate himself with the Saudis.

Important to read is an NBC news article entitled 'Former Spooks Criticize CIA Director John Brennan for Spying Comments' by Ken Dilanian dated March 2nd, 2016.

The article contains many revealing facts and evidence, while giving a flavour, of the feelings of many in the CIA who felt that Brennan was totally unsuitable and unqualified to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

(This is the link to the above referenced article: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/ us-news/brennan-joking-when- he-says-cia-spies-doesn-t- steal-n529426. )

A final controversy is the little known fact of Brennan's near four year departure from the CIA into the commercial world, having been 'left out in the cold' from the CIA, from November 2005 to January 2009 when he was CEO of a private company called 'The Analysis Corporation'.

So why was he then reinstated into the CIA, to the surprise of CIA's senior management, by newly elected President Obama, to head the CIA? No answer is available as to why he left the CIA in 2005.

(An important link that gives background to his experience in the commercial world can be read here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ cia-slammed-brennans- disingenuous-contract-bid- wikileaks-show)

Lastly let's not forget Brennan's many failures as CIA head in recent years, one most notable is the Benghazi debacle and the death of a US Ambassador and others there. Something else to ponder.

Back to the present an the issue of security clearances.

In early August, on the well known American TV Rachel Maddow Show, Brennan back tracked on his Trump traitor claim by saying "I didn't mean he (Trump) committed treason. I meant what he has done is nothing short of treasonous." Rachel Maddow responded correctly "If we diagram the sentence, 'nothing short of treason' means it's treasonous?"

A simple question follows. Since he is no longer in the CIA, why does he need a security clearance other than to commercially exploit it?

Tucker Carlson explains succinctly here:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kzxf9TcJ_3k

Last month what can be described as 200+ 'friends of Brennan', former CIA officials of varying rank, responded against the removal of former CIA Director Brennan's security clearances, in support of him.

These men and women too most likely will have their clearances revoked.

And why not?

Since the only purpose they retain it is to make money as civilians?

A potentially more serious issue than 'the Brennan controversies' is that the US intelligence community has around 5 million people with security clearances as a whole includes approximately 1.4m people holding top secret clearances. It is patently a ridiculously high number and makes a mockery of the word secret.

Former CIA veteran Sam Faddis is one of the few people brave enough and with the integrity required, that has stood up and told some of the real truths about Brennan in an 'Open Letter', yet this letter's contents have hardly at all been reported in the media.

Generally by nature, CIA Officers sense of service and honour to their Country, their professionalism and humility, and disdain for publicity has dissuaded most of them to enter the current very public Brennan controversy; but for how much longer?

As stated earlier, former CIA professional Sam Faddis explains what's wrong with Brennan in his revealing letter, abbreviated for space below. A link to the complete letter is: http://thepoliticsforums.com/ threads/107849-Scathing-Open- Letter-to-Mr-Brennan-by-Retired-CIA-Case-Officer:

Dear Mr. Brennan,

I implore you to cease and desist from continuing to attempt to portray yourself in the public media as some sort of impartial critic concerned only with the fate of the republic. I beg you to stop attempting to portray yourself as some sort of wise, all-knowing intelligence professional with deep knowledge of national security issues and no political inclinations whatsoever.

None of this is true.

You were never a spy. You were never a case officer. You never ran operations or recruited sources or worked the streets abroad. You have no idea whatsoever of the true nature of the business of human intelligence. You have never been in harm's way. You have never heard a shot fired in anger.

You were for a short while an intelligence analyst. In that capacity, it was your job to produce finished intelligence based on information provided to you by others. The work of intelligence analysts is important, however in truth you never truly mastered this trade either.

In your capacity as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, while still a junior officer, you were designated to brief the President of the United States who was at that time Bill Clinton. As the presidential briefer, it was your job to read to the president each morning finished intelligence written by others based on intelligence collected by yet other individuals. Period.

While serving as presidential briefer you established a personal relationship with then President Bill Clinton. End of story.

Everything that has transpired in your professional career since has been based on your personal relationship with the former president, his wife Hillary and their key associates. Your connection to President Obama was, in fact, based on you having established yourself by the time he came to office as a reliable, highly political Democratic Party functionary.

All of your commentary in the public sphere is on behalf of your political patrons. It is no more impartial analysis then would be the comments of a paid press spokesman or attorney. You are speaking each and every time directly on behalf of political forces hostile to this president. You are, in fact, currently on the payroll of both NBC and MSNBC, two of the networks most vocally opposed to President Trump and his agenda.

There is no impartiality in your comments. Your assessments are not based on some sober judgment of what is best for this nation. They are based exclusively on what you believe to be in the best interests of the politicians with whom you long since allied yourself.

It should be noted that not only are you most decidedly not apolitical but that you have been associated during your career with some of the greatest foreign policy disasters in recent American history.

Ever since this President was elected, there has been a concerted effort to delegitimize him and destabilize him led by you. This has been an unprecedented; to undermine the stability of the republic and the office of the Presidency, for solely partisan political reasons. You and your patrons have been complicit in this effort and at its very heart.

You abandoned any hope of being a true intelligence professional decades ago and became a political hack. Say so.

Sam Faddis

EPILOGUE:

I decided to update this article with this epilogue that summarises events since its first publication, but by not writing more. By simply adding links showing Brennan speaking in March just before Meuller's Report was released, and excerpts of other interviews and commentaries.

In this way, reader's can judge for themselves Brennan's essentially undoubtable despicable character which shines through by watching and reading the below 8 links up to 1st April 2019. There are many more, but in consideration of space, I've selected these links.

These are not in chronological order, date/time wise.

I would add that, for his own 'survival', and that of his co-conspirators, there will, I predict, over the coming days and weeks, be an attempt by Brennan to STILL try and fabricate 'dirt' on President Trump to justify his treacherous behaviour against importantly more than just Trump, but 'the Office of the President', something for which, in my opinion, he and those involved should be prosecuted for, even some jailed for.

Most particularly in addition to Brennan is clearly Obama himself, Clinton, Clapper and Comey et al.

1. Brennan https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04/john-brennan-is-lying-no-way-he-wasnt-involved-with-russia-hoax-from-the-beginning/

2. Brennan's treasonous behaviour. https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/ex-cia-director-john-brennan-admits-he-may-have-had-bad-information-regarding-president-trump-and-russia.amp?__twitter_impression=true

3. John Brennan Now Says His Months of Attacks on Trump "May Be Based on Bad Information"!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bQvY4aD7T9o

4. Ex-CIA Boss Got "Bad Information", Now "Relieved" Trump Not a Criminal. https://www.youtube.com/embed/g5X3MbGShRg

5. Fox News – John Brennan Admits He had 'Bad Information' on Mueller Report.

6. Ex-CIA director Brennan backs down from calling Trump's claims of no collusion 'hogwash'

https://www.youtube.com/embed/wXVLgB6SbsE

7. Deep State former CIA Director John Brennan is unhinged and in deep trouble (Video) – August 2018

Deep State former CIA Director John Brennan is unhinged and in deep trouble (Video)

8. Russian collusion was no more than "conspiracy porn" created by Clinton and Obama.

Herbert Dorsey • 17 days ago ,

The CIA operation in Benghazi was smuggling weapons captured from the Libyan army to Syria via Jordan and Turkey to arm the anti Assad forces. This operation was directed by Brennan, Clinton, Obama and General Petraeus and was in total violation of national and international law.

Ambassador Stevens was aware of this operation and allowed to die by delaying a military rescue operation, as part of a cover up of this illegal operation. Dead men tell no tales.

Herbert Dorsey AM Hants • 17 days ago ,

Hillary Clinton, Her husband Bill and Barak Obama are all deep cover CIA agents in addition to their other positions, as documented in the book "CIA: Crime Incorporated of America".

They don't like Trump because he is the first non CIA President in a long while (George W. Bush was not CIA but under his father's influence) and not part of the secret team. Hopefully, they eventually will be punished for their crimes. Qanon gives hope!

Down to Earth Thinking Herbert Dorsey • 14 hours ago ,

The arms came from more places than simply Libya, although Libya was the central shipping and gathering point to go to Turkey and then on to Syria. Turkey was part of the Obama enablers of ISIS and ISIL big time ! Obama made sure ISIS got all the weapons and munitions and equipment we left behind and did literally nothing to stop them at all. He, Brennan, Hillary as well as Kerry all have massive blood on their hands via the atrocities of ISIS !

AM Hants Garry Compton • 17 days ago ,

Not forgetting William Browder, part of the same gang, whose grandfather was the Leader of the US Communist Party. No doubt with close ties to Allen Dulles and ''peration Paperclip'.

Which provided safe passage and new identities for the Nazi and Bolshevik Elite. Funny how the stench behind the overthrow of he Russian Empire, can still be found, firmly embedded in the swamps of the 21st century.

Will never forget Brennan, going to Ukraine, with instructions, just prior to 2 May 2014 and the Odessa Trade Union Massacre. Coincidence or what?

Wasn't McCain's father also good friends with Allen Dulles? Wonder where Clinton fitted into the work of Dulles?

Taras77 • 17 days ago ,

One of the more murky issues is the murder of Michael Hastings. A lot of information died with his murder but some info indicates that he was working on a major report on Brennan. He reportedly advised his friends that the fbi was working on an investigation on him and he was fearful for his survival

As many will recall, Hastings died in June 2013 in fiery crash of his Mercedes which was speeding at up to 100 mph in a calif neighborhood.

Also, many will recall, the leaking of "Vault 7" by wikileaks indicated that one of the tools revealed was the ability to remotely control a vehicle without any input from the driver, positive or negative. This ability is described in detail in the following:

https://www.wired.com/2015/...

A "conspiracy theory" article summarizes the murkiness of the death of Michael Hastings:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/ne...

Nassim7 Taras77 • 17 days ago ,

How do you think the Royal Family killed princess Diana? If they can control a drone on the other side of the globe, they can certainly control the accelerator, brakes and steering of a motor vehicle.

Billo • 16 days ago ,

Only the most creepy evil people are allowed to be in our government. They have done a terrible job. Our country is like a plane in a death spiral, and the same list of creeps keeps getting into the White House. The same people no matter who we elect. Trump has the same people, or worse than Obama or Hillary or Bush had. It's past time to try and salvage whatever is left of this country.

Bill Rood • 4 hours ago ,

Brennan may well have already been CIA when he joined the CPUSA. In any case, he's scum.

Marv Sannes • 14 hours ago ,

100 Stinger shoulder launch ground-to-air missiles. Stevens tried to block the shipment, the embassy was attacked by a highly skilled, armed, assault team - the story told by "Tonto", one of the military contractors involved in the attempted rescue. All those Americans in Benghazi were sacrificed in the same way the USS Liberty crew was sacrifice.

Greater Israel is the base of all this violence. Incidentally, "Tonto" and his mates had to commandeer a private jet, after the fire-fight, that got them to Germany - the US/CIA/State Dept., etc. left them to their own methods and they got out, to the consternation of the Obama/Clinton Administration.

Chelsea Yorkshire • 15 days ago ,

Tucker Carlson and the author of this article asks, How can someone like Brennan be provided security clearance for top secrets in the CIA. A very easy answer: the entire American financial/judicial/military/spy organizations have become highly corrupt. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans could care less.

Well............Those two contrasts will be intriguing to watch how the grandchildren and great-grandchilren will fare when the US Empire becomes so degraded, that the young will have to forage on their own for housing, water, and food.

Sam Adams Sean Kuyler • 16 days ago ,

It is axiomatic that the Democrats always accuse others of what they themselves are guilty of. Never forget that.

Sean Kuyler • 16 days ago ,

"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you". https://t.co/uKppoDbduj -- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018

luluka • 16 days ago ,

He has to be part of a CIA "cleansing" operation. Better put him in jail with no rights whatsoever . Let that turd rot in some humid dungeon . That's for the rats like this one .

[Dec 09, 2019] There is something to the idea that American political culture is becoming increasingly Sovietized

Notable quotes:
"... there is something to the idea that American political culture is becoming increasingly Sovietized ..."
"... This article below inadvertently illustrates the obsession with malign foreign influences, like that which pervaded Soviet discourse and remains a bad smell in Russia to this day. ..."
"... Another rapidly creeping Soviet trait is the weaponization of politics, turning any disagreement into an existential struggle, opponents into enemies, the way words like "treason" or "Russian asset" have become common coin ..."
"... increasingly they have that "enemy of the people" ring to them. The growing prominence of the intelligence services in political life, and their alumni on cable TV news shows, is another worrisome trend to watch. ..."
Dec 09, 2019 | eastwestaccord.com

There is something to the idea that American political culture is becoming increasingly Sovietized, writes Weir .

This is becoming quite the meme. Upon reflection, I do think there is something in it. Not this idiotic suggestion that Repubicans have somehow morphed into borscht-swilling, shapka-wearing, Putin-loving Russkies. Indeed, there are hardly any actual Russians like that.

But there is something to the idea that American political culture is becoming increasingly Sovietized. Of course it's two separate camps, not a monolith, and the Democrats are at least as guilty as Republicans.

This article below inadvertently illustrates the obsession with malign foreign influences, like that which pervaded Soviet discourse and remains a bad smell in Russia to this day. Russians scoff at the idea that Putin is able to get his own man elected president of the US when he can't even fix the governor in Irkutsk. But the author of this piece implies that Putin is somehow pulling the strings, not only of Trump but all Republicans?

Another rapidly creeping Soviet trait is the weaponization of politics, turning any disagreement into an existential struggle, opponents into enemies, the way words like "treason" or "Russian asset" have become common coin. And they are not just deployed as simple insults: increasingly they have that "enemy of the people" ring to them. The growing prominence of the intelligence services in political life, and their alumni on cable TV news shows, is another worrisome trend to watch.

Also, it looks like big part of the media have become almost Pravda-like, making ideological mission their main priority. I spend some of my down-time perusing shows from Fox News and MSNBC, which an alien from outer space would think were the propaganda organs of two different, mutually-hostile states -- but both very Soviet-like.

... ... ...

THEATLANTIC.COM
The Russification of the Republican Party
GOP lawmakers used to oppose the president's embrace of Putin and the Kremlin. Not anymore.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/12/impeachment-republican-party-russia/603088/?fbclid=IwAR1EC0-CDBEx-3SMS1lJTMT2m0xVjfaguZehK4BIeZ5Bov41Ds1XFi_Cbkg

[Dec 09, 2019] The Interagency Isn t Supposed to Rule in Foreign Policy

Notable quotes:
"... I first heard of the interagency in Baghdad in 2009. I was there as part of a Council on Foreign Relations delegation to Iraq. As a U.S. Army general briefed us on how the war was being fought, he spoke of the interagency as the source of the strategy he was executing. Naively, I asked why he wasn't operating according to orders from his military superiors or the secretary of defense. ..."
"... He explained that American war-fighting was being guided by a "whole of government" philosophy. Incredibly, he explained that the war couldn't be won without, among other agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Justice and Labor. Iraq needed economic expansion, modern farming, business statistics, new hospitals, a working court system and workplace regulations. The strategy framed by the interagency was nothing less than a yearslong engagement in nation building -- precisely what President George W. Bush had rejected in his 2000 campaign. ..."
"... When the war on terror opened, with all the secret activity it required, professional cadres in the diplomatic corps, the military and the nation's many intelligence agencies were able to transform interagency cooperative agreements that had existed since the Cold War into a de facto agency -- a largely informal and virtual bureaucracy -- with the assumed power, if need be, to determine and execute a foreign policy at odds with the intent of the president and Congress. ..."
"... Last month's testimony before the Intelligence Committee shed light on this club whose members are a permanent shadow government credentialed by family histories, elite schools and unique career experiences. This common pedigree informs their perspective of how America should relate to the world. The dogmatists of the interagency seem to share a common discomfort with a president who probably couldn't describe the doctrine of soft power, doesn't desire to be the center of attention at Davos, and wouldn't know that Francis Fukuyama once decided that history was over. ..."
Dec 09, 2019 | www.wsj.com

Enthusiasm over entrepreneurship is now found in every corner of society -- even, apparently, within the federal bureaucracy. Witness after witness in last month's House impeachment inquiry hearings referred to "the interagency," an off-the-books informal government organization that we now know has enormous power to set and execute American foreign policy.

The first to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, State Department official George Kent, seemed to conceive of the interagency as the definitive source of foreign-policy consensus. That Mr. Trump's alleged decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine deviated from that consensus was, for Mr. Kent, prima facie evidence that it was misguided.

Next up, Ambassador William Taylor told the committee that it was the "unanimous opinion of every level of interagency discussion" that the aid should be resumed without delay. Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official, gave the game away by admitting how upset she was that Gordon Sondland, President Trump's ambassador to the European Union, had established an "alternative" approach to helping Kyiv. "We have a robust interagency process that deals with Ukraine," she said.

What is the interagency, and why should its views guide the conduct of American diplomatic and national-security professionals? The Constitution grants the president the power to set defense and diplomatic policy. Where did this interagency come from?

I first heard of the interagency in Baghdad in 2009. I was there as part of a Council on Foreign Relations delegation to Iraq. As a U.S. Army general briefed us on how the war was being fought, he spoke of the interagency as the source of the strategy he was executing. Naively, I asked why he wasn't operating according to orders from his military superiors or the secretary of defense.

How Did Adam Schiff Get Devin Nunes's Phone Records? How did Adam Schiff get Devin Nunes's phone records? bb0282a3-e4cb-42ba-9988-2f3df57fd912@1.00x Created with sketchtool.

He explained that American war-fighting was being guided by a "whole of government" philosophy. Incredibly, he explained that the war couldn't be won without, among other agencies, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Justice and Labor. Iraq needed economic expansion, modern farming, business statistics, new hospitals, a working court system and workplace regulations. The strategy framed by the interagency was nothing less than a yearslong engagement in nation building -- precisely what President George W. Bush had rejected in his 2000 campaign.

Interagency cooperative agreements have been around for decades. The Justice Department, for example, has opioid-interdiction programs that require it to work with the Department of Homeland Security. Today a dictionary of more than 12,500 official terms exists to guide bureaucrats in writing interagency contracts that repurpose federal funds appropriated to various executive departments. Often these interdepartmental initiatives devised by bureaucrats are unknown to Congress. It's hard to imagine that the legislative branch wouldn't object to these arrangements, if only it were aware of them.

When the war on terror opened, with all the secret activity it required, professional cadres in the diplomatic corps, the military and the nation's many intelligence agencies were able to transform interagency cooperative agreements that had existed since the Cold War into a de facto agency -- a largely informal and virtual bureaucracy -- with the assumed power, if need be, to determine and execute a foreign policy at odds with the intent of the president and Congress.

Last month's testimony before the Intelligence Committee shed light on this club whose members are a permanent shadow government credentialed by family histories, elite schools and unique career experiences. This common pedigree informs their perspective of how America should relate to the world. The dogmatists of the interagency seem to share a common discomfort with a president who probably couldn't describe the doctrine of soft power, doesn't desire to be the center of attention at Davos, and wouldn't know that Francis Fukuyama once decided that history was over.

The impeachment hearings will have served a useful purpose if all they do is demonstrate that a cabal of unelected officials are fashioning profound aspects of U.S. foreign policy on their own motion. No statutes anticipate that the president or Congress will delegate such authority to a secret working group formed largely at the initiation of entrepreneurial bureaucrats, notwithstanding that they may be area experts, experienced in diplomatic and military affairs, and motivated by what they see as the best interests of the country.

However the impeachment drama plays out, Congress has cause to enact comprehensive legislation akin to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which created more-efficient structures and transparent processes in the Defense Department. Americans deserve to know who really is responsible for making the nation's foreign policy. The interagency, if it is to exist, should have a chairman appointed by the president, and its decisions, much like the once-secret minutes of the Federal Reserve, should be published, with limited and necessary exceptions, for all to see.

Mr. Schramm is a university professor at Syracuse. His most recent book is "Burn the Business Plan."

[Dec 09, 2019] A Determined Effort to Undermine Russia

Notable quotes:
"... The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating a disinformation" campaign today against Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders and Russiagate. ..."
"... Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States. It is now so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured. ..."
"... It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first. Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then, it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of nuclear deterrence doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation is. ..."
"... Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov (Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the neo-Nazis of western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the Donbass). The Donbass fighters are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile the support for the neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the Ukrainian military, thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency). ..."
"... Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they agreed they were defeated. The US merely assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said any such thing. ..."
"... I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!) ..."
"... "From 1922 onwards the strategic purpose of the Soviet Union was to defend the Soviet Union not global domination, whereas the purpose of the "West" has always been global domination. " ..."
"... "At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause." ..."
Dec 08, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin, in conversation with former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, says the West is unnecessarily determined to undermine Russia. A t an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause.

When Kevin said he returned to Russia after more than 40 years in 2016 he realized he "had to take sides" in the U.S.-Russia standoff when all Nato countries boycotted the Moscow celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

"I had to take a moral position that it is not right for the West to be ganging up on Russia," Kevin says in his conversation with the former Australian foreign minister.

The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating a disinformation" campaign today against Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders and Russiagate.

Watch the hour-long in depth discussion which was filmed and produced by Consortium News' CN Live! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/dJiS3nFzsWg?feature=oembed

ElderD , December 9, 2019 at 15:03

Tony's (especially!) and Bob's sane and sensible view of this dangerous and destructive state of affairs deserve the widest possible distribution and attention.

George McGlynn , December 9, 2019 at 13:27

A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and little has changed. Cold War patterns of thinking about Russia show no sign of weakening in America. The further we distance ourselves from the end of the Cold War, the closer we come to its revival. Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States. It is now so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured.

peter mcloughlin , December 9, 2019 at 10:45

It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first. Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then, it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of nuclear deterrence doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation is.

AnneR , December 9, 2019 at 07:48

The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans).

Then there were allegations – of those "highly likely" (therefore one knows to be untrue and unadulterated propaganda to increase Russophobia) sort – about Russian hackers (always giving the impression that the "Kremlin" is behind itl) being the Labour Party's source of the Tory party's US-UK trade deal which would/will deliberately and finally destroy the NHS and replace it with (of course) US "health" insurance company profiteering.

(Always the Tory intention from the NHS's initiation in May of 1948; only its popularity among many Tory party supporters among the working and lower middle classes prevented them from a full-frontal killing off the NHS; the Snatcher's government began the undermining, via installing a top-heavy bureaucratization, siphoning off a sizable proportion of the funds that would otherwise have gone to medical care, demanding that hospitals not "lose" money – a concept completely beyond the remit of the NHS as originally conceived and constructed and like exactions.)

Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov (Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the neo-Nazis of western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the Donbass). The Donbass fighters are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile the support for the neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the Ukrainian military, thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency).

Someone even suggested that President Putin needed to be diplomatic. Really? From what I've read the man is the most diplomatic and intelligent politician (not just political leader) along with Xi Jinping and the Iranian government that exist on the world stage. None of them are hubristic, solipsistic, eager beaver killers of peoples in other countries. Unlike their western "world" political counterparts.

Jeff Harrison , December 8, 2019 at 18:30

Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they agreed they were defeated. The US merely assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said any such thing.

St. Ronnie's whole thing back in the 80's was to outspend Russia militarily and it worked well. We're trying to do it again but Russia isn't playing the same game this time and now it is the US that has a mountain of debt and Russia that doesn't. SIPIRI tags US military spending at $650B and Russian military spending at $62B. But we know that the $650B number is bogus because it doesn't include our in-violation-of-the-NNPT nuclear program which is in the energy department or our veteran's expenses which are in HHS. I don't know what's missing from Russia's $62B but I'll bet they can sustain that a whole lot better than we can sustain our $650B and rising bill.

Antonio Costa , December 9, 2019 at 13:17

Good point regarding Russia's downsizing the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev to Putin there was NEVER a surrender, intended in any way. The intent has been multilateral partnerships. For Russia the US/West won nothing at all except the opportunity to live and work in peace. (By the way this policy has a long Russian history.)

They gave up the Warsaw Pact and America with our worthless "word" expanded NATO.

The US foreign policy has lost even the semblance of sanity. Our naked aggression is clear as never before, a mad man throwing a global fit armed with megaton nuclear projectiles on trigger first strike alert. What could go wrong?

nondimenticare , December 8, 2019 at 15:56

If, magically, Consortium News/CN Live! were a mass-distribution network/magazine (hence universally consulted), allowing the light in for the mass of the viewing and listening public, it could change the world – both an exalting and despairing thought.

Lily , December 8, 2019 at 09:52

It is a great joy to listen to this conversation!

I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!)

I wish people would have the courage to break away from the group pressure originated by a nation which has been started by killing more than 90% of the indigenous people in their country and since then has turned the worl into a very insecure place.

Chapeau, Tony Kevin! Thanks to Bob Carr and Consortiums News.

Lily , December 9, 2019 at 01:18

It seems that some facts are beginning to be realized in the military department.

www(dot)zerohedge(dot)com/geopolitical/pentagon-alarmed-russia-gaining-sympathy-among-us-troops

Bob Van Noy , December 8, 2019 at 09:22

Simply, wonderful

OlyaPola , December 8, 2019 at 07:43

Words are catalysts of connotations and connotations are functions of expectations/framing..

Some conflate cause with purpose thereby limiting perception of cause and purpose.

Some understand that causation is interactive and in any lateral system the genesis of causation is difficult to determine.

Some understand that evaluation is a function of purpose and that purpose can be evaluated through such portals into wonderlands such as "What is the "United States of America" and how is it facilitated?"

As thumb-nailed in the comments section of the article Capitalism's suicidal trajectory – OlyaPola
December 6, 2019 at 07:46

"From 1922 onwards the strategic purpose of the Soviet Union was to defend the Soviet Union not global domination, whereas the purpose of the "West" has always been global domination. "

From 1922 onwards various tactics have been attempted by the "West" to facilitate their purpose, including attempts at "Orange revolution" in many areas which catalysed many lateral trajectories including the process of transcendence of the "Soviet Union" by the Russian Federation in the period from 1991 to 2005.

Consequently Mr. Suslov's observation re war of "The United States of America" can be extended into present times and hence no "New cold war" exists.

""What is the "United States of America"

An initial step through the portal is that "The United States of America" is – a regime of social relations to facilitate its purpose – the social relations not being restricted to the "nation state" presently self designated "The United States of America" but including classes in other "nation states".

Consequently alternative purposes and social relations pose an existential threat to "The United States of America"; this being perceived of lesser significance in regard to "The Soviet Union" and greater in regard to the Russian Federation.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , December 8, 2019 at 07:30

"At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause."

The American establishment's problem with Russia is simply that Russia is the only country on earth capable of obliterating the United States. Not even China has yet reached that capacity.

"Carthago delenda est"

Skip Scott , December 9, 2019 at 06:13

There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause".

Bruno DP , December 8, 2019 at 02:34

The West is ganging up on Russia? Replace "West" by "United States of America", and I will agree.

Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic.

Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.

But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined.

Martin Schuchert , December 8, 2019 at 17:33

I'm German, living in the US, and I agree with your comment. I especially love the last two sentences:

"Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined."

[Dec 09, 2019] "There are no patriots in Washington " -- So tragically true. Only profiteers.

Dec 09, 2019 | www.unz.com

annamaria , says: December 7, 2019 at 9:54 pm GMT

@Erebus

"There are no patriots in Washington " -- So tragically true. Only profiteers.

anon [113] Disclaimer , says: December 7, 2019 at 11:01 pm GMT
@Erebus TULSI2020

"There are no patriots in Washington "

Don't be so sure. Note that Trump congratulated Tulsi on Kamala's demise. If she isn't the nominee, her mere presence in the campaign is a boon to Trump because she exposes the rot in the DNC and the Empire.

Dem Establishment can't control me and that scares the hell out of them

https://www.youtube.com/embed/IC98dmTAKbM?feature=oembed

[Dec 09, 2019] I have doubts that zionists were central to, or instigators of, the JFK coup, but the Jewish mob sure was in on it, and since they knew and were involved, as was Lyndon, that gave the zionists Mossad the blackmail they needed to put Lyndon in their pocket

Dec 09, 2019 | www.unz.com

Anonymous [627] Disclaimer , says: December 7, 2019 at 1:28 am GMT

@Dave from Oz Dietrich Doerner's Logic of Failure makes clear that decision makers consistently make grotesque errors based on faulty modeling of the world, incomplete feedback assumed to be complete, and so on. Even the data are often mistaken for deductive truths, but if one looks at, for example, the number of actual weather data points used to create those complex surface maps, it becomes obvious why the results are disappointing -- in that case possibly spoiling a picnic, but with the military, destroying a civilization.

You might recall the lessons of Longterm Capital Management's use of predictions based on PDE's, with results that should have been foreseen as being predictably as unreliable as weather forecasting, and for the same reasons -- that beneath all the fancy math lie guesses of all too fallible men.

Regarding a faulty worldview, could there possibly be a more distorted model of reality than America serving as Israel's footstool, the country that with its fifth column is responsible for Lavon, USS Liberty, JFK/RFK, and, not least, 9/11. In the world of probabilities, there is no standard of textual evidence evaluation or mathematical demonstration so low it won't give cover to the Pentagon's costumed bureaucrats and members of Congress to look the other way regarding Israel and its fifth columns' acts of war against the country they're all sworn to protect.

Jim Christian , says: December 7, 2019 at 5:21 am GMT
@Anonymous

JFK/RFK, and, not least, 9/11.

MLK became a problem when he joined RFK against Vietnam in early 1968. When he started counseling his young Black men against Vietnam, he had to go too. I'll never forget that. Hideous.

Why do they always shoot their rivals in the head? Never a miss back then, ever..

Walter , says: Next New Comment December 8, 2019 at 3:08 pm GMT
@Anonymous I have doubts that zionists were central to, or instigators of, the JFK coup, but the Jewish mob sure was in on it, and since they knew and were involved, as was Lyndon, that gave the zionists Mossad the blackmail they needed to put Lyndon in their pocket. They proved this when he covered up the Liberty affair. Since then the zionists have been free to do as they wished. I propose these changes were gradual, and that zionism has been curated as a MI6 intelop since the Balfour Declaration, in part to create the 5th column we have now. Looks like it got out of control, Golem-like. This is a pity, as it may result in the ruin of their own people, just as we see Semitic zionists shooting Semitic natives in a sort of turkeyshoot every Friday is it kosher to kill on Shabbos? I wonder.. . a kind of civil war, so we see a vast schism forming between Jews and nominally Jewish zionists.
ivegotrythm , says: Next New Comment December 8, 2019 at 7:11 pm GMT
@Walter The Zionism Psy-Op began much earlier than the Balfour declaration. It was a result of losing sovereignty when Poland disappeared in 1772 and was partitioned between Prussia, Russia, and Austria. (Poland was a condominium with two governments, a Jewish one and a Polish one. The Jews had their own parliament, and the Poles theirs, plus a king. This evolved out of the original agreements the Khazars of the south made with the Lithuanians to be a mercenary army, police force, and tax collectors.) Having lost control of one country, Poland (through their own misuse of taxes), the High Command in Lithuania decided they needed another country. The propaganda was that the riots -- pogroms -- that began in Russia at the end of the 19th century were anti-Jewish riots; that the Czar was anti-Jewish, etc. And the big Psy-Op was the Dreyfus Affair, which was completely fake. Which is why the original written offer to sell "secrets" -- which were not secrets at all -- mysteriously disappeared before the Germans occupied France in 1940. But the phony Dreyfus Affair immediately led to the first Zionist Congress in Basel. Herzl was only a hired propagandist, and disposed off when he finished the job for which he was recruited as a journalist (as was Wilhelm Marr -- who popularized the term "Antisemitism"). World War I and the Balfour agreement to get America into the war on the British side delivered the goods.

[Dec 09, 2019] Newsweek Reporter Resigns After Accusing Outlet Of Suppressing OPCW Leak Story by Caitlin Johnstone

Notable quotes:
"... Haddad added that he is now seeking legal advice and looking into the possibility of whistleblower protections for himself, and said at the very least he will publish the information he has while omitting anything that could subject him to legal retaliation from his former employer. ..."
"... Newsweek has long been a reliable guard dog and attack dog for the US-centralized empire, with examples of stories that its editors did permit to go to print including an article by an actual, current military intelligence officer explaining why US prosecution of Julian Assange is a good thing, fawning puff pieces on the White Helmets , and despicable smear jobs on Tulsi Gabbard . ..."
"... Newsweek also recently published an article attacking Tucker Carlson for publicizing the OPCW scandal, basing its criticisms on a bogus Bellingcat article I debunked shortly after its publication . ..."
Dec 08, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

A Newsweek journalist has resigned after the publication reportedly suppressed his story about the ever-growing OPCW scandal, the revelation of immensely significant plot holes in the establishment Syria narrative that you can update yourself on by watching this short seven-minute video or this more detailed video here .

"Yesterday I resigned from Newsweek after my attempts to publish newsworthy revelations about the leaked OPCW letter were refused for no valid reason," journalist Tareq Haddad reported today via Twitter .

"I have collected evidence of how they suppressed the story in addition to evidence from another case where info inconvenient to US government was removed, though it was factually correct," Haddad said.

"I plan on publishing these details in full shortly. However, after asking my editors for comment, as is journalistic practice, I received an email reminding me of confidentiality clauses in my contract. I.e. I was threatened with legal action."

Haddad added that he is now seeking legal advice and looking into the possibility of whistleblower protections for himself, and said at the very least he will publish the information he has while omitting anything that could subject him to legal retaliation from his former employer.

"I could have kept silent and kept my job, but I would not have been able to continue with a clean conscience," Haddad said .

"I will have some instability now but the truth is more important."

This is the first direct insider report we're getting on the mass media's conspiracy of silence on the OPCW scandal that I wrote about just the other day . In how many other newsrooms is this exact same sort of suppression happening, including threats of legal action, to journalists who don't have the courage or ability to leave and speak out? There is no logical reason to assume that Haddad is the only one encountering such roadblocks from mass media editors; he's just the only one going public about it.

Newsweek has long been a reliable guard dog and attack dog for the US-centralized empire, with examples of stories that its editors did permit to go to print including an article by an actual, current military intelligence officer explaining why US prosecution of Julian Assange is a good thing, fawning puff pieces on the White Helmets , and despicable smear jobs on Tulsi Gabbard .

The outlet will occasionally print oppositional-looking articles like this one by Ian Wilkie questioning the establishment Syria narrative , but not without immediately turning around and publishing an attack on Wilkie's piece by Eliot Higgins, a former Atlantic Council Senior Fellow who is the cofounder of the NED-funded imperial narrative management firm Bellingcat.

Newsweek also recently published an article attacking Tucker Carlson for publicizing the OPCW scandal, basing its criticisms on a bogus Bellingcat article I debunked shortly after its publication .

The ubiquitous propagandistic tactic of fake news by omission distorts the public's worldview just as much as it would if mass media outlets were publishing bogus stories whole cloth every day, only if they were doing that it would be much easier to pin them down on their lies, hold them accountable, and discredit them.

A recent FAIR article by Alan MacLeod documents how the Hong Kong demonstrations are pushed front and center in mainstream consciousness despite the fact that to this day not one protester has been killed by security forces, while far more deadly violence is being directed at huge protests in empire-aligned nations like Haiti, Chile and Ecuador which have been almost completely ignored by these same outlets.

This deliberate omission causes a distorted worldview in casual and mainstream news media consumers in which protests are only happening in nations that are outside the US-centralized power alliance . We see the same kind of deliberate distortion-by-omission with the way mass media continually pushes the narrative that Donald Trump is "soft on Russia", while remaining completely silent on the overwhelming mountain of evidence to the contrary .

The time is now for everyone with a platform to start banging the drum about the OPCW scandal, because we're seeing more and more signs that the deluge of leaks hemorrhaging from that organisation is only going to increase. Mainstream propagandists aren't going to cover it, so if larger alternative media outlets want to avoid being lumped in with them and discredited in the same sweep it would be wise to start talking about this thing today. It's only going to get more and more awkward for everyone who chose to remain silent, and more and more validating for those who spoke out.

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[Dec 09, 2019] The Untold Facts of John Brennan s Career of Treachery by Richard Galustian

Notable quotes:
"... Hillary Clinton, Her husband Bill and Barak Obama are all deep cover CIA agents in addition to their other positions, as documented in the book "CIA: Crime Incorporated of America". ..."
"... The arms came from more places than simply Libya, although Libya was the central shipping and gathering point to go to Turkey and then on to Syria. Turkey was part of the Obama enablers of ISIS and ISIL big time ! Obama made sure ISIS got all the weapons and munitions and equipment we left behind and did literally nothing to stop them at all. He, Brennan, Hillary as well as Kerry all have massive blood on their hands via the atrocities of ISIS ! ..."
"... Not forgetting William Browder, part of the same gang, whose grandfather was the Leader of the US Communist Party. No doubt with close ties to Allen Dulles and ''peration Paperclip'. ..."
"... Will never forget Brennan, going to Ukraine, with instructions, just prior to 2 May 2014 and the Odessa Trade Union Massacre. Coincidence or what? ..."
"... Brennan may well have already been CIA when he joined the CPUSA. In any case, he's scum. ..."
"... Tucker Carlson and the author of this article asks, How can someone like Brennan be provided security clearance for top secrets in the CIA. A very easy answer: the entire American financial/judicial/military/spy organizations have become highly corrupt. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans could care less. ..."
"... "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you". https://t.co/uKppoDbduj -- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018 ..."
May 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Let's get something clear from the start. In 1976, in his 20s, John Brennan was a card carrying communist who supported the then Soviet Union, at the height some might say of the Cold War, so much so he voted and assisted Gus Hall, the communist candidate for President against a devout Christian, Jimmy Carter who ultimately won the Presidency.

Yet under four years later, just after the then Soviet Union invaded, just weeks before, Afghanistan and months after the tumultuous Iranian revolution of 1979, which at the time many thought the Soviet Union had a hand in, Brennan was accepted into the CIA as a junior analyst.

At that time, John Brennan should have never got into the CIA, or any Western Intelligence agency given his communist background.

Think on that carefully as you continue to read this.

Also reflect on the fact that Brennan, later in his CIA career, was surprisingly elevated from junior analyst to the prestigious position of Station Chief in Saudi Arabia where he spent a few years.

Its said he was appointed purely for 'political' reasons, alleged to have been at the direct request of Bill Clinton and other Democrats not because of a recommendation or merit from within the Agency.

Its further said that the Saudis liked Brennan because he became very quickly 'their man' so to speak. Some reports, unsubstantiated, even allege Brennan became a Muslim while there to ingratiate himself with the Saudis.

Important to read is an NBC news article entitled 'Former Spooks Criticize CIA Director John Brennan for Spying Comments' by Ken Dilanian dated March 2nd, 2016.

The article contains many revealing facts and evidence, while giving a flavour, of the feelings of many in the CIA who felt that Brennan was totally unsuitable and unqualified to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

(This is the link to the above referenced article: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/ us-news/brennan-joking-when- he-says-cia-spies-doesn-t- steal-n529426. )

A final controversy is the little known fact of Brennan's near four year departure from the CIA into the commercial world, having been 'left out in the cold' from the CIA, from November 2005 to January 2009 when he was CEO of a private company called 'The Analysis Corporation'.

So why was he then reinstated into the CIA, to the surprise of CIA's senior management, by newly elected President Obama, to head the CIA? No answer is available as to why he left the CIA in 2005.

(An important link that gives background to his experience in the commercial world can be read here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ cia-slammed-brennans- disingenuous-contract-bid- wikileaks-show)

Lastly let's not forget Brennan's many failures as CIA head in recent years, one most notable is the Benghazi debacle and the death of a US Ambassador and others there. Something else to ponder.

Back to the present an the issue of security clearances.

In early August, on the well known American TV Rachel Maddow Show, Brennan back tracked on his Trump traitor claim by saying "I didn't mean he (Trump) committed treason. I meant what he has done is nothing short of treasonous." Rachel Maddow responded correctly "If we diagram the sentence, 'nothing short of treason' means it's treasonous?"

A simple question follows. Since he is no longer in the CIA, why does he need a security clearance other than to commercially exploit it?

Tucker Carlson explains succinctly here:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kzxf9TcJ_3k

Last month what can be described as 200+ 'friends of Brennan', former CIA officials of varying rank, responded against the removal of former CIA Director Brennan's security clearances, in support of him.

These men and women too most likely will have their clearances revoked.

And why not?

Since the only purpose they retain it is to make money as civilians?

A potentially more serious issue than 'the Brennan controversies' is that the US intelligence community has around 5 million people with security clearances as a whole includes approximately 1.4m people holding top secret clearances. It is patently a ridiculously high number and makes a mockery of the word secret.

Former CIA veteran Sam Faddis is one of the few people brave enough and with the integrity required, that has stood up and told some of the real truths about Brennan in an 'Open Letter', yet this letter's contents have hardly at all been reported in the media.

Generally by nature, CIA Officers sense of service and honour to their Country, their professionalism and humility, and disdain for publicity has dissuaded most of them to enter the current very public Brennan controversy; but for how much longer?

As stated earlier, former CIA professional Sam Faddis explains what's wrong with Brennan in his revealing letter, abbreviated for space below. A link to the complete letter is: http://thepoliticsforums.com/ threads/107849-Scathing-Open- Letter-to-Mr-Brennan-by-Retired-CIA-Case-Officer:

Dear Mr. Brennan,

I implore you to cease and desist from continuing to attempt to portray yourself in the public media as some sort of impartial critic concerned only with the fate of the republic. I beg you to stop attempting to portray yourself as some sort of wise, all-knowing intelligence professional with deep knowledge of national security issues and no political inclinations whatsoever.

None of this is true.

You were never a spy. You were never a case officer. You never ran operations or recruited sources or worked the streets abroad. You have no idea whatsoever of the true nature of the business of human intelligence. You have never been in harm's way. You have never heard a shot fired in anger.

You were for a short while an intelligence analyst. In that capacity, it was your job to produce finished intelligence based on information provided to you by others. The work of intelligence analysts is important, however in truth you never truly mastered this trade either.

In your capacity as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, while still a junior officer, you were designated to brief the President of the United States who was at that time Bill Clinton. As the presidential briefer, it was your job to read to the president each morning finished intelligence written by others based on intelligence collected by yet other individuals. Period.

While serving as presidential briefer you established a personal relationship with then President Bill Clinton. End of story.

Everything that has transpired in your professional career since has been based on your personal relationship with the former president, his wife Hillary and their key associates. Your connection to President Obama was, in fact, based on you having established yourself by the time he came to office as a reliable, highly political Democratic Party functionary.

All of your commentary in the public sphere is on behalf of your political patrons. It is no more impartial analysis then would be the comments of a paid press spokesman or attorney. You are speaking each and every time directly on behalf of political forces hostile to this president. You are, in fact, currently on the payroll of both NBC and MSNBC, two of the networks most vocally opposed to President Trump and his agenda.

There is no impartiality in your comments. Your assessments are not based on some sober judgment of what is best for this nation. They are based exclusively on what you believe to be in the best interests of the politicians with whom you long since allied yourself.

It should be noted that not only are you most decidedly not apolitical but that you have been associated during your career with some of the greatest foreign policy disasters in recent American history.

Ever since this President was elected, there has been a concerted effort to delegitimize him and destabilize him led by you. This has been an unprecedented; to undermine the stability of the republic and the office of the Presidency, for solely partisan political reasons. You and your patrons have been complicit in this effort and at its very heart.

You abandoned any hope of being a true intelligence professional decades ago and became a political hack. Say so.

Sam Faddis

EPILOGUE:

I decided to update this article with this epilogue that summarises events since its first publication, but by not writing more. By simply adding links showing Brennan speaking in March just before Meuller's Report was released, and excerpts of other interviews and commentaries.

In this way, reader's can judge for themselves Brennan's essentially undoubtable despicable character which shines through by watching and reading the below 8 links up to 1st April 2019. There are many more, but in consideration of space, I've selected these links.

These are not in chronological order, date/time wise.

I would add that, for his own 'survival', and that of his co-conspirators, there will, I predict, over the coming days and weeks, be an attempt by Brennan to STILL try and fabricate 'dirt' on President Trump to justify his treacherous behaviour against importantly more than just Trump, but 'the Office of the President', something for which, in my opinion, he and those involved should be prosecuted for, even some jailed for.

Most particularly in addition to Brennan is clearly Obama himself, Clinton, Clapper and Comey et al.

1. Brennan https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04/john-brennan-is-lying-no-way-he-wasnt-involved-with-russia-hoax-from-the-beginning/

2. Brennan's treasonous behaviour. https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/ex-cia-director-john-brennan-admits-he-may-have-had-bad-information-regarding-president-trump-and-russia.amp?__twitter_impression=true

3. John Brennan Now Says His Months of Attacks on Trump "May Be Based on Bad Information"!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/bQvY4aD7T9o

4. Ex-CIA Boss Got "Bad Information", Now "Relieved" Trump Not a Criminal. https://www.youtube.com/embed/g5X3MbGShRg

5. Fox News – John Brennan Admits He had 'Bad Information' on Mueller Report.

6. Ex-CIA director Brennan backs down from calling Trump's claims of no collusion 'hogwash'

https://www.youtube.com/embed/wXVLgB6SbsE

7. Deep State former CIA Director John Brennan is unhinged and in deep trouble (Video) – August 2018

Deep State former CIA Director John Brennan is unhinged and in deep trouble (Video)

8. Russian collusion was no more than "conspiracy porn" created by Clinton and Obama.

Herbert Dorsey • 17 days ago ,

The CIA operation in Benghazi was smuggling weapons captured from the Libyan army to Syria via Jordan and Turkey to arm the anti Assad forces. This operation was directed by Brennan, Clinton, Obama and General Petraeus and was in total violation of national and international law.

Ambassador Stevens was aware of this operation and allowed to die by delaying a military rescue operation, as part of a cover up of this illegal operation. Dead men tell no tales.

Herbert Dorsey AM Hants • 17 days ago ,

Hillary Clinton, Her husband Bill and Barak Obama are all deep cover CIA agents in addition to their other positions, as documented in the book "CIA: Crime Incorporated of America".

They don't like Trump because he is the first non CIA President in a long while (George W. Bush was not CIA but under his father's influence) and not part of the secret team. Hopefully, they eventually will be punished for their crimes. Qanon gives hope!

Down to Earth Thinking Herbert Dorsey • 14 hours ago ,

The arms came from more places than simply Libya, although Libya was the central shipping and gathering point to go to Turkey and then on to Syria. Turkey was part of the Obama enablers of ISIS and ISIL big time ! Obama made sure ISIS got all the weapons and munitions and equipment we left behind and did literally nothing to stop them at all. He, Brennan, Hillary as well as Kerry all have massive blood on their hands via the atrocities of ISIS !

AM Hants Garry Compton • 17 days ago ,

Not forgetting William Browder, part of the same gang, whose grandfather was the Leader of the US Communist Party. No doubt with close ties to Allen Dulles and ''peration Paperclip'.

Which provided safe passage and new identities for the Nazi and Bolshevik Elite. Funny how the stench behind the overthrow of he Russian Empire, can still be found, firmly embedded in the swamps of the 21st century.

Will never forget Brennan, going to Ukraine, with instructions, just prior to 2 May 2014 and the Odessa Trade Union Massacre. Coincidence or what?

Wasn't McCain's father also good friends with Allen Dulles? Wonder where Clinton fitted into the work of Dulles?

Taras77 • 17 days ago ,

One of the more murky issues is the murder of Michael Hastings. A lot of information died with his murder but some info indicates that he was working on a major report on Brennan. He reportedly advised his friends that the fbi was working on an investigation on him and he was fearful for his survival

As many will recall, Hastings died in June 2013 in fiery crash of his Mercedes which was speeding at up to 100 mph in a calif neighborhood.

Also, many will recall, the leaking of "Vault 7" by wikileaks indicated that one of the tools revealed was the ability to remotely control a vehicle without any input from the driver, positive or negative. This ability is described in detail in the following:

https://www.wired.com/2015/...

A "conspiracy theory" article summarizes the murkiness of the death of Michael Hastings:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/ne...

Nassim7 Taras77 • 17 days ago ,

How do you think the Royal Family killed princess Diana? If they can control a drone on the other side of the globe, they can certainly control the accelerator, brakes and steering of a motor vehicle.

Billo • 16 days ago ,

Only the most creepy evil people are allowed to be in our government. They have done a terrible job. Our country is like a plane in a death spiral, and the same list of creeps keeps getting into the White House. The same people no matter who we elect. Trump has the same people, or worse than Obama or Hillary or Bush had. It's past time to try and salvage whatever is left of this country.

Bill Rood • 4 hours ago ,

Brennan may well have already been CIA when he joined the CPUSA. In any case, he's scum.

Marv Sannes • 14 hours ago ,

100 Stinger shoulder launch ground-to-air missiles. Stevens tried to block the shipment, the embassy was attacked by a highly skilled, armed, assault team - the story told by "Tonto", one of the military contractors involved in the attempted rescue. All those Americans in Benghazi were sacrificed in the same way the USS Liberty crew was sacrifice.

Greater Israel is the base of all this violence. Incidentally, "Tonto" and his mates had to commandeer a private jet, after the fire-fight, that got them to Germany - the US/CIA/State Dept., etc. left them to their own methods and they got out, to the consternation of the Obama/Clinton Administration.

Chelsea Yorkshire • 15 days ago ,

Tucker Carlson and the author of this article asks, How can someone like Brennan be provided security clearance for top secrets in the CIA. A very easy answer: the entire American financial/judicial/military/spy organizations have become highly corrupt. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans could care less.

Well............Those two contrasts will be intriguing to watch how the grandchildren and great-grandchilren will fare when the US Empire becomes so degraded, that the young will have to forage on their own for housing, water, and food.

Sam Adams Sean Kuyler • 16 days ago ,

It is axiomatic that the Democrats always accuse others of what they themselves are guilty of. Never forget that.

Sean Kuyler • 16 days ago ,

"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you". https://t.co/uKppoDbduj -- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018

luluka • 16 days ago ,

He has to be part of a CIA "cleansing" operation. Better put him in jail with no rights whatsoever . Let that turd rot in some humid dungeon . That's for the rats like this one .

[Dec 08, 2019] WSJ Article Runs Through The Greatest Hits of a Dysfunctional Foreign Policy Debate

Notable quotes:
"... Primacists use the security threats that are responding to the unnecessary use of U.S. military force to justify why the U.S. shouldn't stop, or in fact increase, the use of force. ..."
"... These stale arguments claim there will be consequences of leaving while conveniently ignoring the consequences of staying, which of course are far from trivial. For example, veteran suicide is an epidemics and military spending to perpetuate U.S. primacy continues at unnecessarily high rates. The presence of U.S. soldiers in these complex conflicts can even draw us into more unnecessary wars. The United States can engage the world in ways that don't induce the security dilemma to undermine our own security; reduce our military presence in the Middle East, engage Iran and other states in the region diplomatically and economically, and don't walk away from already agreed upon diplomatic arraignments that are favorable to all parties involved. ..."
"... September 11th was planned in Germany and the United States, the ability to exist in Afghanistan under the Taliban without persecution didn't enable 9/11, and denying this space wouldn't have prevented it. ..."
"... For those arguing to maintain the ongoing forever wars, American credibility will always be ruined in the aftermath of withdrawal. Here's the WSJ piece on that point: "When America withdraws from the Middle East unilaterally, the Russians internalize this and move into Crimea and Ukraine; the Chinese internalize it and move into the South China Sea and beyond in the Pacific." ..."
"... The exorbitant costs of the U.S.'s numerous military engagements around the world need to be justified by arguing that they secure vital U.S. interests. Without it, Primacists couldn't justify the cost in American lives. Whether the military even has the ability to solve all problems in international relations aside, not all interests are equal in severity and importance. ..."
"... This article originally appeared on LobeLog.com . ..."
Dec 08, 2019 | responsiblestatecraft.org

The unrivaled and unchallenged exertion of American military power around the world, or what's known as "primacy," has been the basis for U.S. Grand Strategy over the past 70 years and has faced few intellectual and political challenges. The result has been stagnant ideas, poor logic, and an ineffective foreign policy. As global security challenges have evolved, our foreign policy debate has remained in favor of primacy, repeatedly relying on a select few, poorly conceived ideas and arguments. Primacy's greatest hits arguments are played on repeat throughout the policy and journalism worlds and its latest presentation is in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, written by its chief foreign policy correspondent, titled, "America Can't Escape the Middle East." The piece provides a case study in how stagnant these ideas have become, and how different actors throughout the system present them without serious thought or contemplation.

Hyping the threat of withdrawal

The WSJ piece trotted out one of the most well-worn cases for unending American military deployments in the region. "The 2003 invasion of Iraq proved to be a debacle," it rightly notes. However, there's always a "but":[B]ut subsequent attempts to pivot away from the region or ignore it altogether have contributed to humanitarian catastrophes, terrorist outrages and geopolitical setbacks, further eroding America's standing in the world."

Primacists often warn of the dire security threats that will result from leaving Middle East conflict zones. The reality is that the threats they cite are actually caused by the unnecessary use of force by the United States in the first place. For example, the U.S. sends military assets to deter Iran, only to have Iran increase attacks or provocations in response. The U.S. then beefs up its military presence to protect the forces that are already there. Primacists use the security threats that are responding to the unnecessary use of U.S. military force to justify why the U.S. shouldn't stop, or in fact increase, the use of force.

These stale arguments claim there will be consequences of leaving while conveniently ignoring the consequences of staying, which of course are far from trivial. For example, veteran suicide is an epidemics and military spending to perpetuate U.S. primacy continues at unnecessarily high rates. The presence of U.S. soldiers in these complex conflicts can even draw us into more unnecessary wars. The United States can engage the world in ways that don't induce the security dilemma to undermine our own security; reduce our military presence in the Middle East, engage Iran and other states in the region diplomatically and economically, and don't walk away from already agreed upon diplomatic arraignments that are favorable to all parties involved.

Terrorism safe havens

And how many times have we heard that we must defend some undefined geographical space to prevent extremists from plotting attacks? "In the past, jihadists used havens in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and Iraq to plot more ambitious and deadly attacks, including 9/11," the WSJ piece says. "Though Islamic State's self-styled 'caliphate' has been dismantled, the extremist movement still hasn't been eliminated -- and can bounce back."

The myth of the terrorism safe havens enabling transnational attacks on the United States has persisted despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and significant scholarly research that contradicts it. The myth persists because it provides a simple and comforting narrative that's easy to understand. September 11th was planned in Germany and the United States, the ability to exist in Afghanistan under the Taliban without persecution didn't enable 9/11, and denying this space wouldn't have prevented it.

Terrorists don't need safe havens to operate, and only gain marginal increases in capabilities by having access to them. Organizations engage in terrorism because they have such weak capabilities in the first place. These movements are designed to operate underground with the constant threat of arrest and execution. The Weatherman Underground in the United States successfully carried out bombings while operating within the United States itself. The Earth Liberation Front did the same by organizing into cells where no cell knew anything about the other cells to prevent the identification of other members if members of one cell were arrested. Organizations that engage in terrorism can operate with or without safe havens.

Although safe havens don't add significantly to a terrorist groups' capabilities, governing your own territory is something completely different. ISIS is a commonly used, and misused, example for why wars should be fought to deny safe havens. A safe haven is a country or region in which a terrorist group is free from harassment or persecution. This is different from what ISIS created in 2014. What ISIS had when it swept across Syria and Iraq in 2014 was a proto-state. This gave them access to a tax base, oil revenues, and governing resources. Safe havens don't provide any of this, at least not at substantial levels. The Islamic State's construction of a proto-state in Syria and Iraq did give them operational capabilities they wouldn't have had otherwise, but this isn't the same as the possible safe havens that would be gained from a military withdrawal from Middle Eastern conflicts. The conditions of ISIS's rise in 2014 don't exist today and the fears of an ISIS resurgence like their initial rise are unfounded .

Credibility doesn't work how you think it works

For those arguing to maintain the ongoing forever wars, American credibility will always be ruined in the aftermath of withdrawal. Here's the WSJ piece on that point: "When America withdraws from the Middle East unilaterally, the Russians internalize this and move into Crimea and Ukraine; the Chinese internalize it and move into the South China Sea and beyond in the Pacific."

Most commentators have made this claim without recognition of their own contradictions that abandoning the Kurds in Syria would damage American credibility. They then list all the other times we've abandoned the Kurds. Each of these betrayals didn't stop them from working with the United States again, and this latest iteration will be the same. People don't work with the United States because they trust or respect us, they do it because we have a common interest and the United States has the capability to get things done. As we were abandoning the Kurds this time to be attacked by the Turks, Kurdish officials were continuing to share intelligence with U.S. officials to facilitate the raid on ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi because both the United States and the Kurds wanted Baghdadi eliminated and only the United States had the capability to get it done.

Similarly, the idea that pulling out militarily in one region results in a direct chain of events where our adversaries move into countries or areas in a completely different region is quite a stretch of the imagination. Russia moved into Crimea because it's a strategic asset and it was taking advantage of what it saw as an opportunity: instability and chaos in Kiev. Even if we left troops in every conflict country we've ever been in, Russia would have correctly assessed that Ukraine just wasn't important enough to spark a U.S. invasion. When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, did the United States invade Cuba? What alliance did the Soviets or Chinese abandon before the United States entered the Korean War? Assessments of credibility , especially in times of crisis (like that in Ukraine), are made based on what leaders think the other country's interests are and the capabilities they have to pursue those interests. There is no evidence to support -- in fact there is a lot of evidence that contradicts -- the idea that withdrawing militarily from one region or ending an alliance has any impact on assessments of a country's reliability or credibility.

Not all interests are created equal

Threat inflation isn't just common from those who promote a primacy-based foreign policy, it's necessary. Indeed, as the WSJ piece claimed, "There is no avoiding the fact that the Middle East still matters a great deal to U.S. interests."

The exorbitant costs of the U.S.'s numerous military engagements around the world need to be justified by arguing that they secure vital U.S. interests. Without it, Primacists couldn't justify the cost in American lives. Whether the military even has the ability to solve all problems in international relations aside, not all interests are equal in severity and importance. Vital interests are those that directly impact the survival of the United States. The only thing that can threaten the survival of the United States is another powerful state consolidating complete control of either Europe or East Asia. This would give them the capabilities and freedom to strike directly at the territorial United States. This is why the United States stayed in Europe after WWII, to prevent the consolidation of Europe by the Soviets. Addressing the rise of China -- which will require some combination of cooperation and competition -- is America's vital interest today and keeping troops in Afghanistan to prevent a terrorism safe haven barely registers as a peripheral interest. There are U.S. interests in the Middle East, but these interests are not important enough to sacrifice American soldiers for and can't easily be secured through military force anyway.

Consequences

Most of these myths and arguments can be summarized by the claim that any disengagement of any kind by the United States from the Middle East comes with consequences. This isn't entirely wrong, but it isn't really relevant either unless compared with the consequences of continuing engagement at current levels. We currently have 67,000 troops in the Middle East and Afghanistan and those troops are targets of adversaries, contribute to instability, empower hardliners in Iran, and provide continuing legitimacy to insurgent and terrorist organizations fighting against a foreign occupation. One article in The Atlantic argued that the problem with a progressive foreign policy is that restraint comes with costs, almost ironically ignoring the fact that the U.S.'s current foreign policy also comes with, arguably greater, costs. A military withdrawal, or even drawdown, from the Middle East does come with consequences, but it's only believable that these costs are higher than staying through the perpetuation of myths and misconceptions that inflate such risks and costs. No wonder then that these myths have become the greatest hits of a foreign policy that's stuck in the past.

This article originally appeared on LobeLog.com .

[Dec 08, 2019] The Delusions Of The Impeachment Witnesses Point To A Larger Problem

Notable quotes:
"... For one the Ukraine is not fighting "the Russians". The Kiev government is fighting against east-Ukrainians who disagree with the Nazi controlled regime which the U.S. installed after it instigated the unconstitutional Maidan coup. Russia supplies the east-Ukrainians and there were a few Russian volunteers fighting on their side but no Russian military units entered the Ukraine. ..."
"... But aside from that how can anyone truly believe that the Ukraine "fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them here"? Is Russia on the verge of invading the United States? Where? How? And most importantly: What for? How would that be in Russia's interest? ..."
"... And how is it in U.S. interest to give the Ukraine U.S. taxpayer money to buy U.S. weapons? The sole motive behind that idea was greed and corruption , not national interest: ..."
"... To claim that it hurt U.S. national interests is nonsense. ..."
"... It is really no wonder that U.S. foreign policy continuously produces chaos when its practitioners get taught by people like Karlan. In the Middle East as well as elsewhere Russian foreign policy runs circles around U.S. attempts to control the outcome. One reason it can do that is the serious lack of knowledge and realism in U.S. foreign policy thinking. It is itself the outcome of an educational crisis. U.S. 'political science' studies implement a mindset that is unable to objectively recognize the facts and fails to respond to them with realistic concepts. ..."
"... In the meantime Trump is eliminating food stamps for some 700,000 recipients and the Democrats are doing nothing about it. Their majority in the House could have used the time it spent on the impeachment circus to prevent that and other obscenities. ..."
"... The same bs argument about "not fighting the Russians here" was used a couple of weeks ago by another witness, Tim Morrison. This shows you that the hysteria is bipartisan... ..."
"... I don't believe that the so called "Professor's View" is normative for the educated class of Americans. It is the normative view of the Ivy League pseudoeducated individuals that have been placed in leadership positions in the US Goverment and Politics but they are not EDUCATED in any way. Karlan is almost certainly a Jew. She is without a doubt a whore who will do anything for her John as directed by her pimp. ..."
"... Being a brain dead feminist helps her with that role in life. I had an ex wife who fought me post divorce for 10 years trying to destroy me in any way she could. She finally stopped with the Breast Cancer she had for 7 of those years finally killed her. I see the same psychotic, sociopathic and off scall narcissitic behavior in every one of these women in politics and academics today. So don't think that something will get better without a terminal solution. ..."
"... Americans are entranced by the kayfabe (mock combat). Just as in wrestling it is designed to look 'real' but just keeps people engrossed in the action, unable to think of what they are NOT being told. ..."
"... Her delusions are a prerequisite for teaching at an academic level. ..."
"... The military industrial complex is in the people of usa's interest.. they think they benefit from the rayatheons, lockheed martins, boeings and etc - as they have relatives working at these places... the usa is one sick puppy, and Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor is just further proof of this... sorry if someone else said what i did, as i didn't read the comments yet.. ..."
"... The fact that the "papers of record" have become mouthpieces for the CIA/deep state has played a huge role in the brainwashing of academia and the rise of neoliberalism. The false narratives these "trusted sources" of information have been serving up create a very real Matrix, a false reality that is ingrained into those who rely upon them for their daily "news". Karlan is merely repeating what she accepts as truth, garnered from the NY Times and Wash Post, CNN, NPR, etc. ..."
"... The US is dysfunctional on purpose to keep the masses under control and dumbed down/brainwashed ..."
"... BTW, it is totally lost on the entirety of Western establishment that you cannot make Ukraine strong (wouldn't we all love to see strong Ukraine?) while wrecking its economy by encouraging policies like spending 5% of GDP on the military, switching to more expensive energy sources, cutting itself from traditional markets and supplies, replacing with rather worthless "cooperation" agreement with a trading block that is neither particularly interested in trading with Ukraine (Ukraine strongest exports are in surplus within EU) nor inclined to subsidize it (budgets are tights and plenty of recent EU members are in dire needs already) ..."
"... Unfortunately this is endemic in the western world. 'Democracy' seems to consist of dumbing down the population as much as possible, and telling them what they have to think so the self-anointed leaders of society can have their way (both those in front, and behind the scenes). I'm far from certain this is a recipe for success. ..."
"... Russians and Chinese in particular, and BRICS/SCO in general, are showing the way. The countries involved have very different political systems, but they understand that co-operation is much more beneficial than constant conflict. ..."
"... This is a typical example of the stupidity and often dementia of most of the highly educated. Especially those in academia, who exist in a funhouse hall of propagandist and ideological mirrors. But it's true of the educated in the general. I personally know plenty of highly educated people who make themselves more stupid and mentally ill by the day by uncritically reading the NYT and watching CNN. ..."
"... So it's no wonder that an elite Stanford law professor is in practice the exact same stupid, ignorant, deranged yahoo as you could easily find in a trailer park, just with better manners and diction. ..."
"... After all, Karlan's Russia comment would receive enthusiastic thumbs up from at least Biden, Obama, W. Clinton, H. Clinton, Rubio, Klobuchar, Pelosi, Warren, Graham, Buttigieg, Romney, the late McCain, Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis...the list goes on and on. ..."
"... It's even worse than that. The economy will never recover while oligarchs have a stranglehold on economic activity and government. And USA's capitalist dementia ensures that will never change. (The West as a whole is headed in the direction of unabashed oligarchic rule.) ..."
"... Many of the dumbest people I met were university students or graduates. They are thought to absorb information as given, reproduce once, forget. They are not trained to question anything, they follow a narrative. Some even denounced everything they ever learned and became a follower of some religion, which is just another narrative. ..."
"... I've seen Jonathan Turley on TV a number of times. He always seemed to be a person of integrity. One needs to add courage to the list after testifying against impeachment on the presented "evidence". I will be very surprised to see him on PBS or CBS ever again. Their news readers are nearly giddy with excitement about impeachment. They never consider what could happen if Trump is convicted but refuses to leave the White House. Then what? ..."
"... Karlan type of academics is scattered all over the US universities. They are the Academia´s gatekeepers, watching over & "spotting" of our future leaders. the majority of them are claptraps selling jingoism to our youth in order to fulfill the Judeo-Zionist agenda. ..."
"... You hit the nail on the head. Karlan's loyalty is to her tribe, not this nation. That's the crux of almost every major problem and injustice we're suffering from in this country, from private prisons to Wall Street looting to endless foreign wars to censorship. There is one group of people behind it with a very bad track record in terms of how they treat their host nations. I wonder when we will finally get our act together and become the 110th country to expel them. ..."
"... IF Trump is removed from office then the war on Lebanon and Iran would be accelerated. Israel will likely go for all the marbles and annex the last remaining Palestinian holdings. Some here believe this couldn't happen but we all live in bizarro world now. ..."
"... it was obvious (on the video) that Karlan really thought she was (wait for it! It's on the way) landing a very clever bon mot! ..."
"... It is a small thing, yet it speaks volumes about the spirit of this clearly clueless human being (and others of her ilk), and her handlers, who must have cleared this little gotcha for prime time. Been up on the podium too long, bleating to students who can't/don't bleat back! No common sense. ..."
"... As the great wise man, Frank Zappa proclaimed about the USA: "Politics/government is the entertainment division of the Military-Industrial Government." American politics makes much greater sense (and is a hell of a lot more entertaining) if you understand this truism. ..."
Dec 05, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

During yesterday's impeachment hearing at the House House Judiciary Committee one of the Democrats' witnesses made some rather crazy statements. Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor, first proved to have bought into neo-conservative delusions about the U.S. role in the world:

America is not just 'the last best hope,' as Mr. Jefferies said, but it's also the shining city on a hill. We can't be the shining city on a hill and promote democracy around the world if we're not promoting it here at home.

As people in Bolivia and elsewhere can attest the United States does not promote democracy. It promotes rightwing regimes and rogue capitalism. The U.S. is itself not a democracy but a functional oligarchy as a major Harvard study found:

Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

But worse than Karlan's pseudo-patriotic propaganda claptrap were her remarks on the Ukraine and Russia:

This is not just about our national interests to protect elections or make sure Ukraine stays strong and fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them here , but it's in our national interest to promote democracy worldwide.

That was not an joke. From the video it certainly seems that the woman believes that nonsense.

For one the Ukraine is not fighting "the Russians". The Kiev government is fighting against east-Ukrainians who disagree with the Nazi controlled regime which the U.S. installed after it instigated the unconstitutional Maidan coup. Russia supplies the east-Ukrainians and there were a few Russian volunteers fighting on their side but no Russian military units entered the Ukraine.

But aside from that how can anyone truly believe that the Ukraine "fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them here"? Is Russia on the verge of invading the United States? Where? How? And most importantly: What for? How would that be in Russia's interest?

One must be seriously disturbed to believe such nonsense. How can it be that Karlan is teaching at an academic level when she has such delusions?

And how is it in U.S. interest to give the Ukraine U.S. taxpayer money to buy U.S. weapons? The sole motive behind that idea was greed and corruption , not national interest:

[U.S. special envoy to Ukraine] Volker started his job at the State Department in 2017 in an unusual part-time arrangement that allowed him to continue consulting at BGR, a powerful lobbying firm that represents Ukraine and the U.S.-based defense firm Raytheon. During his tenure, Volker advocated for the United States to send Raytheon-manufactured antitank Javelin missiles to Ukraine -- a decision that made Raytheon millions of dollars.

The missiles are useless in the conflict . They are kept near the western border of Ukraine under U.S. control. The U.S. fears that Russia would hit back elsewhere should the Javelin reach the frontline in the east and get used against the east-Ukrainians. That Trump shortly held back on some of the money that would have allowed the Ukrainians to buy more of those missiles thus surely made no difference.

To claim that it hurt U.S. national interests is nonsense.

It is really no wonder that U.S. foreign policy continuously produces chaos when its practitioners get taught by people like Karlan. In the Middle East as well as elsewhere Russian foreign policy runs circles around U.S. attempts to control the outcome. One reason it can do that is the serious lack of knowledge and realism in U.S. foreign policy thinking. It is itself the outcome of an educational crisis. U.S. 'political science' studies implement a mindset that is unable to objectively recognize the facts and fails to respond to them with realistic concepts.

The Democrats are doing themselves no favor by producing delusional and partisan witnesses who repeat Reaganesque claptrap. They only prove that the whole affair is just an unserious show trial.

In the meantime Trump is eliminating food stamps for some 700,000 recipients and the Democrats are doing nothing about it. Their majority in the House could have used the time it spent on the impeachment circus to prevent that and other obscenities.

Do the Democrats really believe that their voters will not notice this?

Posted by b on December 5, 2019 at 15:40 UTC | Permalink

Mischi , Dec 5 2019 15:45 utc | 1

next page " never underestimate the stupidity of people. Even professors.
bevin , Dec 5 2019 15:56 utc | 2
This is the woman that Common Dreams describes as a leading legal scholar. And maybe she is, it would certainly help explain the current state of the US Judiciary and the legal system, which reflects internally the utter contempt for law and custom which characterises US behaviour in international affairs.
DG , Dec 5 2019 15:56 utc | 3
The same bs argument about "not fighting the Russians here" was used a couple of weeks ago by another witness, Tim Morrison. This shows you that the hysteria is bipartisan...
Duncan Idaho , Dec 5 2019 16:00 utc | 4
History is not a strong point for the Dims., as it conflicts with ideology. The Repugs just loot and plunder, with little regard for history.
oldhippie , Dec 5 2019 16:00 utc | 5
There is a large cohort of Americans who believe every word the professor spoke. Whatever you and I may think about it the professor's view of the world is normative for the educated class in America.
rednest , Dec 5 2019 16:02 utc | 6
Regarding those food stamps, it is actually just a small rule change lowering the unemployment rate to 6% (from 10%) above which a state can waive the existing work requirement for single, non-disabled recipients aged 18-49. States can still also waive it if they deem that job availability is low.
Likklemore , Dec 5 2019 16:13 utc | 7
Attributed to Mark Twain. Perhaps the learned professor karlan may affirm: "Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."

AND Ukraine wishing to join NATO: well, not so fast for Hungary. Hungary says it will block Ukraine from joining NATO over controversial language law

Budapest has signaled that it will not support Ukraine's bid to join NATO until Kiev reverses a law that places language restrictions on ethnic Hungarians and other minorities living in the country.

Legislation that limits the use of Hungarian, Russian, Romanian, and other minority languages in Ukraine must be repealed before Hungary backs Ukraine's NATO membership, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said on Wednesday.

"We ask for no extra rights to Hungarians in Transcarpathia, only those rights they had before," Szijjarto told Hungarian state media at a NATO summit in London. He alleged that 150,000 ethnic Hungarians living in the region have been "seriously violated" by Ukraine.[.]

In February, Ukraine's parliament ratified amendments to the constitution which made NATO membership a key foreign policy objective. However, a number of hurdles still remain before its membership is likely to be seriously considered. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker predicted in 2016 that it would be 20-25 years before Ukraine would be able to join NATO and the EU.

Tick Tock , Dec 5 2019 16:18 utc | 8
I don't believe that the so called "Professor's View" is normative for the educated class of Americans. It is the normative view of the Ivy League pseudoeducated individuals that have been placed in leadership positions in the US Goverment and Politics but they are not EDUCATED in any way. Karlan is almost certainly a Jew. She is without a doubt a whore who will do anything for her John as directed by her pimp.

Being a brain dead feminist helps her with that role in life. I had an ex wife who fought me post divorce for 10 years trying to destroy me in any way she could. She finally stopped with the Breast Cancer she had for 7 of those years finally killed her. I see the same psychotic, sociopathic and off scall narcissitic behavior in every one of these women in politics and academics today. So don't think that something will get better without a terminal solution.

Jackrabbit , Dec 5 2019 16:18 utc | 9
Americans are entranced by the kayfabe (mock combat). Just as in wrestling it is designed to look 'real' but just keeps people engrossed in the action, unable to think of what they are NOT being told.

People must free themselves of partisan affiliations that are just levers used to manipulate them.

The establishment uses Democracy Works! propaganda to give you a false sense of power and security. But the people are an afterthought in US/Western politics. The politicians and their Parties work for the money. Much of that money comes from AIPAC, MIC, and other EMPIRE FIRST organizations that are leading us to WAR.

Lazy Americans must get off the couch and form protest Movements. Movements that the establishment works hard to prevent. This is what it takes: France Paralyzed By Largest General Strike In Decades .

It's messy and inconvenient but power only responds to power.

The stoopid cult-thinking must stop. This is where it leads: Buffalo Bishop Resigns Over Sex Abuse Cover-Up . Why do people cling to a corrupt Catholic Church? It's NOT just a few bad apples!! The pedophilia and cover-ups have been worldwide and reach into the highest levels of the Church.

This Buffalo Bishop, like dozens of other Bishops in the last decades, lied to cover for pedophiles and then used the power of his position to remain in his position. His wasn't for the children or any higher morality but for himself. He will get a nice, peaceful retirement - paid for by the deluded Catholic flock.

!!

vk , Dec 5 2019 16:19 utc | 10
In the meantime Trump is eliminating food stamps for some 700,000 recipients and the Democrats are doing nothing about it.

The reason for that if very simple: the Democrats agree with Trump on this.It's the same question many ask when studying Roman History for the first time: where were the legions when the Goths invaded? The answer is that the Goths were the legions, there was no invasion.

The same logic applies to the Right-Left political spectrum in modern Western Democracies. "Where are the lefties?" is the modern question the first worlders ask themselves since 2008.

--//--

As for the Pamela Karlan thing, it's an issue I've been commenting on here for some time now, so I won't repeat everything.

I'll just say again that imbecilization is a completely normal historical phenomenon in declining empires: the earlier example we have is the Christianization of the Roman Empire after Marcus Aurelius' death. The rise of Christianity was the messenger of the Crisis of the Third Century, the historic episode which ended the Roman Empire by giving birth to its demented form after the Diocletian Reforms.

Empires tend to have a very plastic conception of truth, that is, they believe they can fabricate reality for the simple reason they are geopolitically dominant.

It's easy to visualize this. The greatest philosopher of the end of the 18th Century and beginning of the 19th Century was a German, not a British. While Hegel wrote his proto-revolutionary works which would pave the way to Karl Marx, in UK we had the likes of Mackinder and Mahan dominating British philosophical thinking. And even then they weren't the dominant intellectual figures: the UK was the land of accountants and economists, not philosophers. The reason for this is that neither Hegel nor Marx had any ships to do gunboat diplomacy in Asia, as the British did.

Empires tend to think and rationalize the world in a much more plastic/practical way than the periphery. As the old saying goes: the stronger side doesn't need to think before it acts.

Bart Hansen , Dec 5 2019 16:21 utc | 11
"...make sure Ukraine stays strong and fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them here"

Is this 2019 or 2003?

Bill H , Dec 5 2019 16:32 utc | 12
"In the meantime Trump is eliminating food stamps for some 700,000 recipients and the Democrats are doing nothing about it."

Bill Clinton took millions off of welfare support and was applauded for it.

Likklemore , Dec 5 2019 16:37 utc | 13
Scroll down the page @ Steven Cheung {VID} on Twitter to watch this exchange where the RATS are told they are the ones who have abused power. Professor Jonathan Turley, a lawyer's go-to-Constitutional Expert:

"The Record does not establish corruption in this case - no bribery, no extortion, no obstruction of justice, no abuse of power."

Trump should include Prof. Turley on his legal team. The RATS have not thought this through to what will unfold in the Senate. A real court trial; No hearsay and no! no! no! "I was made aware" And the Bidens, Schiff, and Pelosi under cross-examination. And the Whistleblower!!!

Year 2025 it is.

Mischi , Dec 5 2019 16:39 utc | 14
I used to think that stupid was a characteristic of the American right. It took Donald Trump getting elected to see that stupid knows no political borders. Seriously. I thought that education and progressive thinking also led to a clarity of thought. Boy, was I wrong. The most pro-war people in the USA seem to be Democrats. Bizarro world.
Vonu , Dec 5 2019 16:40 utc | 15
Her delusions are a prerequisite for teaching at an academic level.
Chevrus , Dec 5 2019 16:47 utc | 16
To "...make sure Ukraine stays strong and fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them here"

This predates 2003 and stems from the red menace days when it was the communist legions would behave like a set of dominoes and eventually we (USA) would be fighting them in the streets of New York etc. Thus it was imperative that they defeat the commies in French Indo-China despite the fact that they could easily have simply bought the nation by supporting Uncle Ho who had been working for the OSS during WW2. But no, they had to win brownie points with the French by bankrolling their effort to retake the nation and when that didn't work a little "false flag" event employed to keep the ball rolling. I use quotations because while being false, the Tonkin Gulf event wasn't much of a flag.....

At any rate the fact that both Demublicans AND Republocrats are falling back on such antiquated rhetoric is bitterly laughable! It can also be seen as an indicator of just how dumbed down the USAn populace has become. As noted above article, how could anyone think that the RF would plan much less attempt an attack on the continental US?! A closer look at recent history has the US and it's poodles surrounding the RF with missile bases, sanctioning and embargoing the fhaak out it, and generally trying to destroy the nation as a whole with whatever clandestine methods are available. But hey, take a page from the book of Cheney: deny everything and make counter accusations.....

james , Dec 5 2019 16:52 utc | 17
thanks b... propaganda is the usa's education... see your breakdown of the nyt articles... most people don't get this...

The military industrial complex is in the people of usa's interest.. they think they benefit from the rayatheons, lockheed martins, boeings and etc - as they have relatives working at these places... the usa is one sick puppy, and Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor is just further proof of this... sorry if someone else said what i did, as i didn't read the comments yet..

james , Dec 5 2019 16:55 utc | 18
wikipedia on pamela karlan.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_S._Karlan

"Throughout her career, Karlan has been an advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court.[10] She was mentioned as a potential candidate to replace Supreme Court Justice David Souter when he retired in 2009.[11]

Personal life

Karlan told Politico in 2009, "It's no secret at all that I'm counted among the LGBT crowd".[12] She has described herself as an example of a "snarky, bisexual, Jewish women".[13] Her partner is writer Viola Canales.[14]

she is not an American women apparently.. she is a Jewish women.. oh well, lol...

Perimetr , Dec 5 2019 16:56 utc | 19
The fact that the "papers of record" have become mouthpieces for the CIA/deep state has played a huge role in the brainwashing of academia and the rise of neoliberalism. The false narratives these "trusted sources" of information have been serving up create a very real Matrix, a false reality that is ingrained into those who rely upon them for their daily "news". Karlan is merely repeating what she accepts as truth, garnered from the NY Times and Wash Post, CNN, NPR, etc.

Believe me, even here in the red states, you won't find a hell of a lot of faculty members at large universities who are Trump supporters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsL6mKxtOlQ

Lorenz , Dec 5 2019 16:56 utc | 20

What I find absent in most discussions about impeachment of Trump is the 800 pound gorilla - what will happen to the US if against all odds, Trump gets impeached. Could the US survive that cataclysmic event or would it rip the empire apart? What contingency plans does everybody make for that unlikely, but not impossible singularity?
Dave , Dec 5 2019 17:00 utc | 21
"In the meantime Trump is eliminating food stamps for some 700,000 recipients and the Democrats are doing nothing about it. Their majority in the House could have used the time it spent on the impeachment circus to prevent that and other obscenities."

That's why it's called bread and circus. The loot and pillage party's two separate funding arms get their funding and privilege from the same sociopath/psychopaths who operate the mass murder for profit economy we now live in.

They will continue the slaughter until the enforcers within society finally understand they work for criminally insane cultists who will never have enough money, power, and prestige.

Piotr Berman , Dec 5 2019 17:02 utc | 22
I see that distrust to everything that is good and decent is extended to law professors. Stanford is a short (if sometimes slow) ride from Berkeley that has a more famous professor in its own law school (Wiki):[you know

John Choon Yoo (born July 10, 1967)[4] is a Korean-American attorney, law professor, former government official, and author. Yoo is currently the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.[1] Previously, he served as the Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) of the Department of Justice, during the George W. Bush administration.

He is best known for his opinions concerning the Geneva Conventions that attempted to legitimize the Bush administration's War on Terror. He also authored the so-called Torture Memos, which provided a legal rationale for so-called [you know what] =====

First, they torture logic... The ignorants who could not tell tollens from a toilet brush would not even know what to twist, hence the need for professors.

psychohistorian , Dec 5 2019 17:15 utc | 23
@ b who wrote

"The U.S. is itself not a democracy but a functional oligarchy as a major Harvard study found:"

My only quibble with another great post is the assertion that the US is functional. Functional would mean it had supportive infrastructure but instead we have homeless shitting in the street because they are driven out of the parks to do so and they must be bad people that don't deserve public toilets.

Functional would mean, as Jackrabbit linked to above, and a I i did a few hours ago in the Weekly Open Thread, that there wouldn't be 117 sexually abusive Catholic priests in the Buffalo NY area doing the same thing as Epstein was doing to his clients.

Functional would mean we would not have the blatant hypocrisy Chervus quoted from the posting above

"To "...make sure Ukraine stays strong and fights the Russians so we don't have to fight them here"

I agree with Chervus that this is same BS that got us the Iron Curtain with Russia after WWII because they wanted Godless communism instead of global private finance. And also, as I ranted recently in the Open Thread, this gave us the 1950's change to the US Motto to In God We Trust which gets back to the control of the obfuscatory/hypocrisy narrative telling us that the private finance cult are doing God's work and that "competition is good/sharing is bad"

The US is dysfunctional on purpose to keep the masses under control and dumbed down/brainwashed

Piotr Berman , Dec 5 2019 17:15 utc | 24
Ha! More connections to Stanford: "Ancient Logic: Forerunners of Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

BTW, it is totally lost on the entirety of Western establishment that you cannot make Ukraine strong (wouldn't we all love to see strong Ukraine?) while wrecking its economy by encouraging policies like spending 5% of GDP on the military, switching to more expensive energy sources, cutting itself from traditional markets and supplies, replacing with rather worthless "cooperation" agreement with a trading block that is neither particularly interested in trading with Ukraine (Ukraine strongest exports are in surplus within EU) nor inclined to subsidize it (budgets are tights and plenty of recent EU members are in dire needs already)

Ant. , Dec 5 2019 17:17 utc | 25
I think it's tragic that that creatures like Karlan are not simply seen as the blatant bigots and Nazi's that they are. You have to be wearing a large set of blinkers not to be able to see that.

Unfortunately this is endemic in the western world. 'Democracy' seems to consist of dumbing down the population as much as possible, and telling them what they have to think so the self-anointed leaders of society can have their way (both those in front, and behind the scenes). I'm far from certain this is a recipe for success.

The biggest tragedy is that Americans seem to think that the only way to succeed is to tear down any other country that isn't essentially a puppet government, necessarily defining them as 'enemies', and therefore someone/thing that must be hated and destroyed, by any means, fair or foul.

Russians and Chinese in particular, and BRICS/SCO in general, are showing the way. The countries involved have very different political systems, but they understand that co-operation is much more beneficial than constant conflict. Unless, of course, a quarter of your government tax income is dedicated to supporting an amazingly corrupt Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex.

steven t johnson , Dec 5 2019 17:27 utc | 26
Trump supporters approve of cutting food stamps. The majority of Democratic Party politicians approve of cutting food stamps. Both parties agree times are good and the future is rosy. The only thing they disagree on is foreign policy. The guy who couldn't even win the election (and merely fluked in on a technicality that undermines all progress since 1788,) refuses to play by the rules on foreign policy. And he is not justified by success, not in any terms, not in making peace, not in winning, not in anything. The only people who are upset about impeaching Trump are Trump lovers and cranks who think being president is like being elected God and no one but sinners can defy Him.

The Trump supporters were going to turn out for him anyway, barring an economic crisis even they couldn't ignore. Impeachment has no downside so long as it is from the right, and doesn't rile up the rich people. Except the rich donors are leaving the Democratic Party anyway. The strategy for a nicey-nice campaign that leaves enough Trump voters soothed enough to sit it out has one enormous defect: Trump was not elected by the people anyhow.

But the Democratic Party politicians are anti-Communist, which means pro-Fascist, so yes, they do see this as (im)moral principles to die for, though they hope to politically kill for it. Their problem is, Trump is also anti-Communist and pro-Fascist, which everyone knows, which means Trump was merely his office for campaigning. That may be hypocritical and a violation of campaign laws. But in the eyes even of the anti-Communist/pro-Fascist population missiles for Ukrainian fascists with strings or without strings is merely a tactical disagreement. Even worse, the president breaking laws is perceived as strong leadership, smashing the machine, getting rid of those awful politicians and their oppressive government.

Russ , Dec 5 2019 17:37 utc | 27
This is a typical example of the stupidity and often dementia of most of the highly educated. Especially those in academia, who exist in a funhouse hall of propagandist and ideological mirrors. But it's true of the educated in the general. I personally know plenty of highly educated people who make themselves more stupid and mentally ill by the day by uncritically reading the NYT and watching CNN.

I don't know why anyone would expect anything different. All system schooling at whatever level boils down to the same two goals:

  1. Instill the basic literacy necessary for a given cog position within the hierarchy.
  2. Instill obedience to authority, including indoctrination into its ideology.

From kindergarten to grad school these are the same; whether one's being trained to pump gas or to assume a high position in the corporate world/government/academia these are the same.

So it's no wonder that an elite Stanford law professor is in practice the exact same stupid, ignorant, deranged yahoo as you could easily find in a trailer park, just with better manners and diction.

That's the American system.

mrr52 , Dec 5 2019 17:42 utc | 28
"One must be seriously disturbed to believe such nonsense. How can it be that Karlan is teaching at an academic level when she has such delusions?"

I assume this question was meant rhetorically. After all, Karlan's Russia comment would receive enthusiastic thumbs up from at least Biden, Obama, W. Clinton, H. Clinton, Rubio, Klobuchar, Pelosi, Warren, Graham, Buttigieg, Romney, the late McCain, Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis...the list goes on and on.

For a related, institutionalized, revolting example packaging multiple instances of such delusional thought, see "russias-dead-end-diplomacy-syria" . Have a pail nearby to catch the spew.

Russ , Dec 5 2019 17:46 utc | 29
steven t johnson 26

"The guy who couldn't even win the election (and merely fluked in on a technicality that undermines all progress since 1788,)"

I don't think you ever answered when I asked you last time: Are you saying you think Hillary was so stupid she didn't know about the electoral college, and that it was electoral votes she had to fight for, not popular ones? Because if you're not saying that, then nothing is changed: Trump beat Hillary in the electoral fight they were both trying to win. It's pure nonsense to babble about "technicalities".

And if any significant Democrat faction was saying throughout 2016, and not just after the election, that the election should NOT be about electoral votes, please direct me to where and when they were saying that, because I don't recall ever hearing it. And I think the reason I never heard it was because the Dems were so smugly sure of electoral college victory. And if Hillary had won, we never would've heard a word from you or anyone else about the electoral college.

Jackrabbit , Dec 5 2019 17:47 utc | 30
Piotr Berman @24:
it is totally lost on the entirety of Western establishment that you cannot make Ukraine strong while wrecking its economy
It's even worse than that. The economy will never recover while oligarchs have a stranglehold on economic activity and government. And USA's capitalist dementia ensures that will never change. (The West as a whole is headed in the direction of unabashed oligarchic rule.)

Why would anyone invest in Ukraine? Sometimes I think Putin was happy for the Western coup to succeed and simply planned to keep the best parts.

!!

casey , Dec 5 2019 17:48 utc | 31
But do they really believe what they (the mid-level elites) say or is it all some kind of theater of the increasingly absurd? I am never clear on who among the narrative managers is sincere and who is simply acting sincere. Are people like this woman or the Bellingcat narrative managers or any of their numerous colleagues in their mid-level narrative management positions occupying their positions simply due to their acting abilities? They seem to be both delusional and ill-informed. When these people get together at their conferences and dinner parties, does the mask come off?
juannie , Dec 5 2019 17:49 utc | 32
Mischi #1
never underestimate the stupidity of people. Even professors.

Or as I think it was Einstein that reportedly said: (I paraphrase from memory)

To truly understand the infinite, just contemplate human stupidity.
vk , Dec 5 2019 18:02 utc | 33
Related news (on the subject of "American delusion"):

NATO Is Full of Freeloaders. But It's How We Defend the Free World. -- Europe without American protection is a continental disaster waiting to happen.

Well, mr. Stephens kind of tells the truth on the headline. But at least he could be more polite.

Jackrabbit , Dec 5 2019 18:03 utc | 34
casey @31: When these people get together ... does the mask come off?

I doubt it. They have convinced themselves that they are right and/or are following the wishes of people who are right-thinking. In USA, most people are brainwashed to assume that people with lots of money are right-thinking (as in: they must be doing something right!).

Upton Sinclair:

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

!!

Really?? , Dec 5 2019 18:25 utc | 36
Wasn't the "so we won't be fighting them here" meme used also to justify the Iraq invasion and the War on Terror?
karlof1 , Dec 5 2019 18:31 utc | 38
Upton Sinclair self-published a book in 1922 about education in America entitled Goose Step . Predating the infamous era of the Nazi/Fascist Goose Stepping thugs then armies, I read a preview and found an inexpensive copy. The subject as might be assumed was about the use of school systems to indoctrinate young Americans at all educational levels and nationwide to conform to the views of the rather few wealthy people who sat on interlocking boards that controlled curriculum--sort of like the oligarchic control over media today.

And as we've seen with the study of political-economy, the ability to erase rather recent developments and personages and inserting false doctrines and their priests was done rather easily and with little noted protest. And so it's gone on down through the decades until today--just look at the War Criminals hired by Stanford and other universities for proof of its being an ongoing problem.

That ideological blinders are omnipresent is easily proven by the various defense planning documents referenced here over the last several years, all of which relate to the unilateral, might makes right mindset that's one of the Evil Outlaw US Empire's longstanding traits that predates the 20th Century. Too many will never learn humility and the reality accompanying it until it's enforced. But there's a wiser group residing within the Empire, some of us present at this bar ready to deal with the mess once humpty-dumpty falls from its perch upon which it's currently tottering.

Beibdnn , Dec 5 2019 18:40 utc | 42
I just looked up Pamala Karlan. Apparently there is a story that when she was a baby she was so ugly her parents had to put shutters on her pram. She claims to have a partner? There's no accounting for taste I suppose but even for a U.S. citizen there must be a red line. Somewhere? someone! As to her intellectual prowess, in my limited understanding, intellect depends on the platform it rests upon. Put a Jaguar engine into a Mobility scooter and see how well that performs. Plenty of power but no means of utilising it. Logical mechanisms such as law require as little emotion as possible. People like her just bring the demise of a great nation into action sooner rather than later. I suppose we should be grateful such fools consider Russia an adversary, it's makes predicting what comes next much more clear and succinct action can be instigated. Professor Pamela Karlan. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
james , Dec 5 2019 18:58 utc | 44
@29 russ...steven is making himself look like a fool regularly with that crap.. oh well..

@36 really? yes, indeed.. same faulty logic one would expect from a stanford law prof.. as @22 piotr rightly notes - john yoo, the freak who could make torture in abu graib okay is another one cut from the very same cloth..

i see one of Pamela Karlans comments got the ire of melania trump.. article here..

"The Constitution states that there can be no titles of nobility. So while the president can name his son Barron, he can't MAKE him a baron." Pamela S. Karlan

"A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it." -- Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) December 4, 2019

Karlan apologized for her remark as the hearing continued late Wednesday. "It was wrong of me to do that,'' she said, according to the Associated Press. "I do regret it."

nwwoods , Dec 5 2019 19:19 utc | 45
Universally accepted fact among the devoted is that "America is fighting Russia in the Ukraine", though there are exactly zero confirmed reports of Russian troops in the region in the past five years.
Joost , Dec 5 2019 19:22 utc | 46
Many of the dumbest people I met were university students or graduates. They are thought to absorb information as given, reproduce once, forget. They are not trained to question anything, they follow a narrative. Some even denounced everything they ever learned and became a follower of some religion, which is just another narrative.

I remember one student dorm in particular. Someone came in and decided it was too warm. Put the central heating thermostat on "arctic winter", opened all doors and windows while it was freezing outside. Then someone else came in and decided it was cold, closed all doors and windows, put the thermostat on "incinerate". Repeat 24/7. The few times I tried to explain how a thermostat works, I felt like being rubbed out of existence. Only one guy understood that you set a room thermostat at a comfortable level and it would regulate to desired temperature. He was an alcoholic, always stoned up to his eyeballs, not a student except for the 3 or 4 studies he briefly tried and failed, and had given up on life in general. He was also the only one there who questioned things.

!!

Yevgeny , Dec 5 2019 19:36 utc | 51
Why assume that democracy was not always a trick? Pax Romana anyone?

Also there are some pretty nasty comments on here about the confused professor that say a whole lot more about the hangups of the poster.

Trailer Trash , Dec 5 2019 19:39 utc | 52
I've seen Jonathan Turley on TV a number of times. He always seemed to be a person of integrity. One needs to add courage to the list after testifying against impeachment on the presented "evidence". I will be very surprised to see him on PBS or CBS ever again. Their news readers are nearly giddy with excitement about impeachment. They never consider what could happen if Trump is convicted but refuses to leave the White House. Then what?

--------- The food stamp program changes will kill people. As intended. One of the most affected groups will be people who are too sick or otherwise too impaired to work, and maybe unable to even leave their home, but still can't get social support. The system says there is no problem because desperate people can get a free meal on Thanksgiving and Christmas. For the other 363 days a year, go find a dumpster to dive in.

Almost all Social Security Disability applicants are denied on the initial application. There are no interim payments or support of any kind. Many give up, as intended. The rest file appeals and wait years for a hearing before an "administrative law judge", who is not a "real" judge, but just some lawyer with fancy title.

ALJ decisions tend to be rather arbitrary, so a favorable decision depends on which ALJ hears a case. Sure there are more levels to appeal, and many more years of no social support, if an applicant can find a way to survive for years on zero income, all the while being sick with probably no medical care.

Social Security and disability lawyers have colluded to keep lawyers in business. Social Security requires the use of a standard contract that gives the lawyer a fixed percentage of the retroactive benefits. "Retroactive benefits" are the regular monthly benefits that accrue from the officially determined "date of disability". So if it takes three years to get benefits, the lawyer gets a nice chunk of change for a few hours work writing a brief and showing up for the hearing.

The lawyer who signed my contract did nothing to help my case, and he even hired someone else to write the brief and attend the hearing. One wonders if ALJs get some benefit from lawyers to encourage long wait times, since long wait times increase lawyer profits at zero cost.

The US system really is that cruel and barbaric. It would be kinder to take us out back and shoot us, but that's too obvious. Much better to let people die slowly in the shadows so the rest of society doesn't have to see us.

And I'm one of the fortunates who managed to hang on, despite bankruptcy, a civil suit, the disability benefits process (only took six years), and state attempts to revoke Medicaid, all at the same time. I know it sounds melodramatic, made up, or at least exaggerated. That's understandable, because it seems that way to me, too!

About 1000 people a week kill themselves in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Does anyone wonder why, or even notice? The reason for many of these deaths is the lack of social supports. In Uncle Sam Land, social apoptosis is a feature, not a bug.

chet380 , Dec 5 2019 20:07 utc | 54
Did anyone really expect the Dems to appoint unbiased legal scholars to advise them on the finer legal points of the Articles of Impeachment?
Kooshy , Dec 5 2019 20:10 utc | 55
This fucking shining city on the hill, is so f*ing shiny that it's flames is burning the world.
steven t johnson , Dec 5 2019 20:11 utc | 56
Russ@29 forgot the comments where I've reviewed exactly how everybody rejected the Electoral College, holding legitimacy came from winning the real election. Until Gore, every time the EC violated the expectation that it was a technical way of recording the popular vote, there was justified outrage. Bush's camp in 2000 had plans to contest an EC loss, until that shoe turned out to be on the other foot. If Trump had won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College, he would no more accept the results. Only liars take refuge in the simplistic legalisms. And only Trump ass-lickers are so contemptible as to pretend Trump was the stable genius who outplayed Clinton in the real game. Trump had no more idea how to win the EC without winning the popular vote than anyone else. Further, by the witless pretended principles of Russ' ilk, a presidential candidate who managed to win faithless electors who ignored even their own states' pluralities* would still be the legitimate president! Every single defender of Trump the one legitimate president is witless and worthless.

But very likely the real objection to the response is the insistence that Trump isn't magically guaranteed re-election because...well, the real reason is slavish devotion to a God named Trump. Even with the advantage of incumbency this time around, with even more support from the wealthy (the people who have really turned away from the Democratic Party to favor political gangsterism,) Trump is likely to lose the election again. If I were in Congress I would offer a compromise, where the Republicans were assured Trump would not be investigated any more, much less impeached, for abolition of the Electoral College. But I think Trump would say no, because he knows deep down he's a loser.

steven t johnson , Dec 5 2019 20:13 utc | 57
*US politicians rarely win majorities of the electorate. Politicians of all stripes have agreed that non-voting is always to be deemed as "Satisfied" with either choice instead of "Alienated, with no choice." Decent people suspect otherwise.
goldhoarder , Dec 5 2019 20:23 utc | 58
@38 Karloff1 You can still Read the late John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education online. He did a great job highlighting the history and purpose of copying the Prussian style of education to replace the one room school houses and instill the "martial spirit" in the American public. I have to hand it to the Oligarchs of old too. They were very effective in their implementation.

[malformed/wrong link deleted - b.]

nietzsche1510 , Dec 5 2019 20:31 utc | 60
Karlan type of academics is scattered all over the US universities. They are the Academia´s gatekeepers, watching over & "spotting" of our future leaders. the majority of them are claptraps selling jingoism to our youth in order to fulfill the Judeo-Zionist agenda.
Trailer Trash , Dec 5 2019 20:39 utc | 61
I knew that name sounded familiar...
John Taylor Gatto, former New York City and New York State teacher of the year, stated:

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders; and John Holt concluded, School is a place where children learn to be stupid . . . Children come to school curious; within a few years most of that curiosity is dead, or at least silent.

http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html

Jen , Dec 5 2019 21:15 utc | 66
I recall when I was a student at the University of Technology, Sydney, way back in the Mesozoic era (1980s), the economics dept there had a lecturer there with a Harvard University background so the staff made him head of the department. Just because he had a Harvard University PhD. He was hardly a great administrator and the subjects he taught (compared with other lecturers' subjects) were much less structured. Of course this meant the courses he taught were easier on students' time and energy, though if you made use of the opportunity a less structured course gave, you could turn in an end-of-term essay with impressive research equivalent to the level required of a post-grad.

The university also had an exchange program with the University of Oregon, and most of the Oregon students who came to UTS (usually in their second or third year) found the UTS coursework very heavy-going and difficult.

In those days, UTS was only supposed to be a second-tier university in Australia.

ac , Dec 5 2019 21:34 utc | 68
This hearing is a theatre performance (kabuki -- hey, I learned a new word, thanks) and PK's lines are an invocation of the official US myth (the shinning city on the hill, the exceptional, indispensible nation). No one in the room took that seriously or literally (especially PK herself) and IMHO these national myths are not really anything to freak out about - every nation has got its myth, and this is an arrogant one, but compared to a few others it's almost likeable.

Of course it is at odds with historical records and the reality, but all of them are, because, frankly, the truth, being descendants of genocidal, religious nutters and slavers, is apparently very motivational -- in the KSA...

The RU/UK lines are slightly more worrisome, but that's just a matching background for her story - the fluff. She doesn't have to belive it - it's just a performance, an elegant one but meaningless in the end.

A lot of the visitors comment about the deep state, most of the time mentioning three letter agencies. Here comes a piece about a four letters one, acting more or less in the plain sight: OIRA, E.O. 12866

A group of virtually anonymous, unaccountable people wields quite considerable power over both legislative and executive. A very interesting construction...

information_agent , Dec 5 2019 22:08 utc | 70
Posted by: nietzsche1510 | Dec 5 2019 21:03 utc | 65

You hit the nail on the head. Karlan's loyalty is to her tribe, not this nation. That's the crux of almost every major problem and injustice we're suffering from in this country, from private prisons to Wall Street looting to endless foreign wars to censorship. There is one group of people behind it with a very bad track record in terms of how they treat their host nations. I wonder when we will finally get our act together and become the 110th country to expel them.

And Goldhoarder, while you may not mind how your posts look, you've managed to damage this comment thread and until b deletes your poorly structured post, we all suffer for it.

psychohistorian , Dec 5 2019 22:31 utc | 71
@ Posted by: Lochearn | Dec 5 2019 21:51 utc | 72 who seems to disagree with my concept "dysfunctional on purpose" and wants to use decadence instead and wrote: " Surely there must be some functionality to be able to keep the masses dumbed down/brainwashed; it implies some sort of thought out strategy. How do we get the same narrative trotted out in media in exactly the same format from LA to Warsaw, from Lima to Bangalore if it's all so dysfunctional? "

I posit that strategy of "dysfunctional on purpose" is control of the narrative and language and it is purposefully used.

Consider the current seeming understanding of the terms, socialism and capitalism by many of your fellow barflies. Many of our fellow barflies would have one believe that China is socialist and the West is capitalist...exclusively. I and a few others keep trying to point out that both China and the West are, to varying degrees mixed economies, including aspects of both socialism and capitalism

Consider the implicit definition of government if you will. Is government, as compared to dictatorships, not explicitly socialistic? Are not the provision of water, sewage treatment and in many case electricity explicitly socialistic by definition? Is it not dumbing down and brainwashing that many don't understand reality but spout the words and concepts they are fed by those in control of the narrative and media pushing it?

And, not to make too fine a point of it, does all of the West not live under the dictatorship of global private finance at this time? So how much more would I get ignored if I beat that drum as part of my comments here?

Ian2 , Dec 5 2019 23:07 utc | 75
Lorenz | Dec 5 2019 16:56 utc | 20:

IF Trump is removed from office then the war on Lebanon and Iran would be accelerated. Israel will likely go for all the marbles and annex the last remaining Palestinian holdings. Some here believe this couldn't happen but we all live in bizarro world now.

Also, don't expect the Electoral College to oust Pence after the general election since he's more pro-war; even the electors from Democrat controlled states would support him. IMHO, the US would continue on; business as usual.

However, if the Democrats are crazy enough to follow through, the Republican dominated Senate would reject it. Basically a repeat of what happened to Clinton. In the end, nothing changed.

Really?? , Dec 5 2019 23:07 utc | 76
James #44

""It was wrong of me to do that,'' she said, according to the Associated Press. "I do regret it.""

Ya but . . .as Tucker Carlson spot-on reacted, that comment sure looked as though it had been rehearsed in front of the bathroom mirror. It was sooooo lame!!! I mean, it was obvious (on the video) that Karlan really thought she was (wait for it! It's on the way) landing a very clever bon mot!

It is a small thing, yet it speaks volumes about the spirit of this clearly clueless human being (and others of her ilk), and her handlers, who must have cleared this little gotcha for prime time. Been up on the podium too long, bleating to students who can't/don't bleat back! No common sense.

Never a connection with a child, I'll bet, or she could never have said such a thing. Painful to look at the pinched little face, decent hairdo missing in action, with the rant coming out of the tight little mouth. A pathetic individual.

Ditto Noah Feldman from the Felix Frankfurter Dept of the Harvard Law School: Pure bloviation with skin like a baby's bottom. Better coiffed, actually, than Karlan. Quels types!!!

Jen , Dec 5 2019 23:21 utc | 80
Jackrabbit @ 68:

My comment @ 67 was actually just to highlight the (most undeserved) reputations that places like Harvard and Stanford have among certain faculties in Australian universities. In those days Stanford, Harvard and MIT were the holiest of holy shrines to do business studies / economics degrees. Years later I read a book by someone who actually did do a Stanford MBA and the scales fell from my eyes then. The work was similar to what I'd done as an undergraduate (albeit collapsed in the space of 18 months; I had the luxury of doing part-time and then going full-time as a student).

I should have added that the Harvard PhD guy who taught me comparative economics was a lousy teacher as well as a lousy administrator. I visited his office once and it looked as if a tornado had just hit it. To be fair though, he really wasn't cut out to be a lecturer, he was much better at research and analysis.

Before he became a lecturer, he worked at the CIA as a researcher. He knew next to no German (he was of Polish background) so he was assigned to the section to read East German newspapers. A fellow he knew who could speak and read German but no Bulgarian was assigned to the ... Bulgarian section. That experience must account for my lecturer's sloppy personal style.

But now that you draw my attention to the link, yes you are right that the study was done at Princeton University.

oldhippie , Dec 6 2019 0:18 utc | 87
@81

Why do you assume a technical illiterate could read those instructions? I can't even begin to do anything with that. It is never simple enough for those who have not been initiated.

HTML works by magic. Your instructions do not convince me otherwise.

Better solution is to forgo links altogether if not competent. Or spell out the link and force the really interested to transcribe. Of course no one is going to go to effort of spelling out a link as long as that one above. Which would be a good thing.

Jen , Dec 6 2019 0:27 utc | 88
She's been gone some time now (she died in April 2018) but Karen Dawisha , a so-called expert on Russian and post-Soviet politics who obtained a higher degree at the London School of Economics, was another deluded academic twat who wrote the book "Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?"

The 1-star, 2-star and 3-star reviews on Amazon.com of the book refer to the tabloid quality of many of the claims in the book, poor sourcing, cherry-picking of facts and the author's inability to write at a level that would attract a readership outside the academic community.

The least we can say for her is that she is no longer in a position to, erm, "advise" the US and UK governments on issues and help formulate policy that would backfire on Washington and London anyway.

ak74 , Dec 6 2019 2:14 utc | 98
As the great wise man, Frank Zappa proclaimed about the USA: "Politics/government is the entertainment division of the Military-Industrial Government." American politics makes much greater sense (and is a hell of a lot more entertaining) if you understand this truism.

US Presidential Debates and impeachment hearings are a swell occasion for drinking games. Every time a political hack, media shill, or academic invokes some variant of American Exceptionalism, take a shot of your favorite alcoholic beverage. You will be drunk within half an hour--guaranteed!

Gal , Dec 6 2019 2:19 utc | 99
I'd say unbelievable but I know that is only wishful thinking on my part. What's scary is that these people populate the "educational" system which explains why we're as screwed as we are.

[Dec 08, 2019] Karlan, US neocons and "The Russians Are Coming!" scare

Notable quotes:
"... When Bush and his allies used this rhetoric, they were trying to spin a war of aggression as an act of self-defense. Now it is part of an even more ludicrous effort to make supplying weapons and other military assistance to Ukraine seem as if it is vitally important to the U.S. Simply put, this is propaganda, and it isn't even very good propaganda at that. ..."
"... Obviously, we aren't going to be fighting the Russians "here" no matter what happens in this conflict. These are the sorts of irrational claims that we get after decades of irresponsible threat inflation and mistakenly assuming that every conflict in the world is somehow our business. ..."
Dec 08, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Here is a congealing conventional wisdom around sending military assistance to Ukraine that is as absurd as can be, and it cropped up again this morning:

"Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" was extremely stupid when applied to terrorism. It is much more stupid when applied to Russia, and shows how impoverished the FP thinking of even bright, engaged Americans is. My goodness.

-- Justin Logan (@JustinTLogan) December 4, 2019

It is discouraging to see that one of the dumbest talking points from the Bush era has returned. "Fight them there" was always a silly justification for waging unnecessary wars in other countries, and now it is being repurposed to justify the questionable policy of throwing weapons at a conflict in Europe. When it was used in the context of Bush-era wars, it was an attempt to make what were clearly wars of choice seem as though they were unavoidable. When a government needs to defend a bad policy, it will usually claim that they have no choice but to do what they are doing.

When Bush and his allies used this rhetoric, they were trying to spin a war of aggression as an act of self-defense. Now it is part of an even more ludicrous effort to make supplying weapons and other military assistance to Ukraine seem as if it is vitally important to the U.S. Simply put, this is propaganda, and it isn't even very good propaganda at that.

I have written many times why I think it is a mistake to arm Ukraine. It just encourages escalation at worst and the prolongation of the conflict at best. Until recently, the arguments in favor of doing this have not been very compelling, but at least they weren't quite so mindless. Needless to say, Russia's conflict with Ukraine is a local one, and the U.S. doesn't have much at stake in that conflict. Ukrainians aren't fighting Russia and its proxies on our behalf or to prevent them from attacking someone else, but for the sake of their own country.

If Russia hawks insist on providing Ukraine with weapons and other assistance, they should at least be able to acknowledge that this is a peripheral interest of the United States. Exaggerating the importance of this policy to U.S. security just calls attention to how little it matters to U.S. security.

Obviously, we aren't going to be fighting the Russians "here" no matter what happens in this conflict. These are the sorts of irrational claims that we get after decades of irresponsible threat inflation and mistakenly assuming that every conflict in the world is somehow our business.

[Dec 08, 2019] About making stratinc decition by chichenhawks like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, none of whom had spent a day serving in cadre officer uniform

Dec 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

JoaoAlfaiate , says: December 6, 2019 at 11:44 am GMT

From page 12 of Martyanov's RRMA, " people such as Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, none of whom had spent a day serving in cadre officer uniform "

Rumsfeld was in fact a Naval Aviator who flew ASW aircraft for a number of years and retired from the Navy Reserve as a full Captain.

Andrei Martyanov , says: Website December 6, 2019 at 1:50 pm GMT
@JoaoAlfaiate

Rumsfeld was in fact a Naval Aviator who flew ASW aircraft for a number of years

A Tracker, in 1950s for a couple of years, while having a degree in Political Science. That sure qualifies him for making strategic decisions, right? Especially in the 21st century. Well, we all saw results, didn't we?

Andrei Martyanov , says: Website December 6, 2019 at 2:19 pm GMT
@Jim Christian Jim, a lot of truth in what you say. But especially this:

As for the military? A reflection of our society. When I went into the Navy in 1975, it was Stars and Stripes and we served in large part for Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet.

Here is a quote from one of Russian undercover intelligence assets which was outed when Anna Chapman was outed. Unlike her, however, this guy was a real deal. Here is what he had to say recently about US:

What is THEIR weakness? As enemies these guys are mediocrities, second rate. They overate. Their previous generation was stronger. They respected us, we respected them. We don't respect these ones,they didn't deserve it. They can bully, as for the real fight–we'll see about that They are enraged that soon they will have to live within their means.They forgot how to do so long time ago. That is why they want to solve a problem with us now, while others are still afraid of them.

here is an original in Russian, just in case.

https://vz.ru/opinions/2018/5/4/920955.html?utm_campaign=transit&utm_source=mirtesen&utm_medium=news&from=mirtesen

I remember 70s and 80s clearly, being myself a Cold Warrior, these were different times. many different people. Today, as you say, I see decay everywhere in everything, the country (the US) was literally robbed, people blinded and all for a reasons of bottom line in "business" and for Israel's, Saudi and corporate interests. The America I encountered in 1990s is gone.

Jim Christian , says: December 6, 2019 at 3:46 pm GMT
@Andrei Martyanov

A Tracker, in 1950s for a couple of years, while having a degree in Political Science.

Rummy flew a Stoof? Git the farg outta here? I thought he only had balls with OTHER people's lives..

[Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

Highly recommended!
Dec 07, 2019 | www.unz.com

Never in the history of America, probably never in the history of any country, had there been such open and direct control of governmental activities by the very rich. So long as a handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country, they will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people. They will not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war. -- John Turner, 1922

[Dec 07, 2019] Impeachment does not require a crime.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... This is just low level Soviet-style propaganda: "Beacon of democracy" and "Hope of all progressive mankind" cliché. My impression is that the train left the station long ago, especially as for democracy. Probably in 1963. The reality is a nasty struggle of corrupt political clans. Which involves intelligence agencies dirty tricks. BTW, how do you like that fact that Corporate Democrats converted themselves in intelligence agencies' cheerleading squad? ..."
"... And both Corporate Dems and opposing them Republican are afraid to discuss the real issues facing the country, such as loss of manufacturing, loss of good middle class jobs (fake labor statistics covers the fact the most new jobs are temps/contractors and McJobs), rampant militarism with Afghan war lasting decades, neocon dominance in foreign policy which led to increase of country debt to level that might soon be unsustainable. ..."
"... Both enjoy impeachment Kabuki theater. With Trump probably enjoying this theatre the most: if they just censure him, he wins, if charges go to Senate, he wins big. ..."
Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , December 06, 2019 at 06:22 AM

Impeach the president
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/12/06/opinion/time-impeachment/?event=event25

Boston Globe - editorial - December 5

From the founding of this country, the power of the president was understood to have limits. Indeed, the Founders would never have written an impeachment clause into the Constitution if they did not foresee scenarios where their descendants might need to remove an elected president before the end of his term in order to protect the American people and the nation.

The question before the country now is whether President Trump's misconduct is severe enough that Congress should exercise that impeachment power, less than a year before the 2020 election. The results of the House Intelligence Committee inquiry, released to the public on Tuesday, make clear that the answer is an urgent yes. Not only has the president abused his power by trying to extort a foreign country to meddle in US politics, but he also has endangered the integrity of the election itself. He has also obstructed the congressional investigation into his conduct, a precedent that will lead to a permanent diminution of congressional power if allowed to stand.

The evidence that Trump is a threat to the constitutional system is more than sufficient, and a slate of legal scholars who testified on Wednesday made clear that Trump's actions are just the sort of presidential behavior the Founders had in mind when they devised the recourse of impeachment. The decision by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to proceed with drafting articles of impeachment is warranted.

Much of the information in the Intelligence Committee report, which was based on witness interviews, documents, telephone records, and public statements by administration officials, was already known to the public. The cohesive narrative that emerges, though, is worse than the sum of its parts. This year, the president and subordinates acting at his behest repeatedly tried to pressure a foreign country, Ukraine, into taking steps to help the president's reelection. That was, by itself, an outrageous betrayal: In his dealings with foreign states, the president has an obligation to represent America's interests, not his own.

But the president also betrayed the US taxpayer to advance that corrupt agenda. In order to pressure Ukraine into acceding to his request, Trump's administration held up $391 million in aid allocated by Congress. In other words, he demanded a bribe in the form of political favors in exchange for an official act -- the textbook definition of corruption. The fact that the money was ultimately paid, after a whistle-blower complained, is immaterial: The act of withholding taxpayer money to support a personal political goal was an impermissible abuse of the president's power.

Withholding the money also sabotaged American foreign policy. The United States provides military aid to Ukraine to protect the country from Russian aggression. Ensuring that fragile young democracy does not fall under Moscow's sway is a key US policy goal, and one that the president put at risk for his personal benefit. He has shown the world that he is willing to corrupt the American policy agenda for purposes of political gain, which will cast suspicion on the motivations of the United States abroad if Congress does not act.

To top off his misconduct, after Congress got wind of the scheme and started the impeachment inquiry, the Trump administration refused to comply with subpoenas, instructed witnesses not to testify, and intimidated witnesses who did. That ought to form the basis of an article of impeachment. When the president obstructs justice and fails to respect the power of Congress, it strikes at the heart of the separation of powers and will hobble future oversight of presidents of all parties.

Impeachment does not require a crime. The Constitution entrusts Congress with the impeachment power in order to protect Americans from a president who is betraying their interests. And it is very much in Americans' interests to maintain checks and balances in the federal government; to have a foreign policy that the world can trust is based on our national interest instead of the president's personal needs; to control federal spending through their elected representatives; to vote in fair elections untainted by foreign interference. For generations, Americans have enjoyed those privileges. What's at stake now is whether we will keep them. The facts show that the president has threatened this country's core values and the integrity of our democracy. Congress now has a duty to future generations to impeach him.

JohnH -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 06, 2019 at 08:34 AM
How can Trump have sabotaged American foreign policy, when he has full responsibility and authority to set it?

IMO this impeachment is partly about Trump personally asking a foreign country for help against a domestic political opponent. But it is mostly about geopolitics and the national security bureaucracy's need for US world domination.

Just listen to the impeachment testimony--most of it is whining about Trump's failure to follow the 'interagency' policies of the deep state.

likbez -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 07, 2019 at 01:27 AM
"Impeachment does not require a crime."

Stalin would approve that. And if so, what is the difference between impeachment and a show trial, Moscow trials style? The majority can eliminate political rivals, if it wishes so, right? This was how Bolsheviks were thinking in 30th. Of course, those backward Soviets used "British spy" charge instead modern, sophisticated "Putin's stooge" charge, but still ;-)

The facts show that the president has threatened this country's core values and the integrity of our democracy.

This is just low level Soviet-style propaganda: "Beacon of democracy" and "Hope of all progressive mankind" cliché. My impression is that the train left the station long ago, especially as for democracy. Probably in 1963. The reality is a nasty struggle of corrupt political clans. Which involves intelligence agencies dirty tricks. BTW, how do you like that fact that Corporate Democrats converted themselves in intelligence agencies' cheerleading squad?

In short Boston Globe editors do not want that their audience understand the situation, in which the county have found itself. They just want to brainwash this audience (with impunity)

And both Corporate Dems and opposing them Republican are afraid to discuss the real issues facing the country, such as loss of manufacturing, loss of good middle class jobs (fake labor statistics covers the fact the most new jobs are temps/contractors and McJobs), rampant militarism with Afghan war lasting decades, neocon dominance in foreign policy which led to increase of country debt to level that might soon be unsustainable.

Both enjoy impeachment Kabuki theater. With Trump probably enjoying this theatre the most: if they just censure him, he wins, if charges go to Senate, he wins big.

Can you imagine result for Corporate Dems of Schiff (with his contacts with Ciaramella ) , or Hunter Biden (who was just a mule to get money to Biden's family for his father illegal lobbing) testifying in Senate under oath.

The truth is that they are all criminals (with many being war criminals.) So Beria statement "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime" is fully applicable. That really is something that has survived the Soviet Union and has arrived in the good old USA.

[Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

Highly recommended!
Dec 07, 2019 | www.unz.com

Never in the history of America, probably never in the history of any country, had there been such open and direct control of governmental activities by the very rich. So long as a handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country, they will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people. They will not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war. -- John Turner, 1922

[Dec 07, 2019] Enough is enough. Viva Tulsi. Down with neocons. List of wars involving the United States

Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to ilsm... , December 01, 2019 at 08:16 AM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

List of wars involving the United States

[Only the listed war names and dates copied without all the references and details.]

  1. American Revolutionary War - (1775–1783)
  2. Cherokee–American wars - (1776–1795)
  3. Northwest Indian War - (1785–1793)
  4. Shays' Rebellion - (1786–1787)
  5. Whiskey Rebellion - (1791–1794)
  6. Quasi-War - (1798–1800)
  7. Fries Rebellion - (1799–1800)
  8. First Barbary War - (1801–1805)
  9. 1811 German Coast Uprising - (1811)
  10. Tecumseh's War - (1811)
  11. War of 1812 - (1812–1815)
  12. Creek War - (1813–1814)
  13. Second Barbary War - (1815)
  14. First Seminole War - (1817–1818)
  15. Texas–Indian Wars - (1820–1875)
  16. Arikara War - (1823)
  17. Aegean Sea Anti-Piracy Operations of the United States - (1825–1828)
  18. Winnebago War - (1827)
  19. First Sumatran expedition - (1832)
  20. Black Hawk War - (1832)
  21. Texas Revolution - (1835–1836)
  22. Second Seminole War - (1835–1842)
  23. Second Sumatran expedition - (1838)
  24. Aroostook War - (1838)
  25. Ivory Coast expedition - (1842)
  26. Mexican–American War - (1846–1848)
  27. Cayuse War - (1847–1855)
  28. Apache Wars - (1851–1900)
  29. Bleeding Kansas - (1854–1861)
  30. Puget Sound War - (1855–1856)
  31. First Fiji expedition - (1855)
  32. Rogue River Wars - (1855–1856)
  33. Third Seminole War - (1855–1858)
  34. Yakima War - (1855–1858)
  35. Second Opium War - (1856–1859)
  36. Utah War - (1857–1858)
  37. Navajo Wars - (1858–1866)
  38. Second Fiji expedition - (1859)
  39. John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry - (1859)
  40. First and Second Cortina War - (1859–1861)
  41. Paiute War - (1860)
  42. American Civil War - (1861–1865)
  43. Yavapai War - (1861–1875)
  44. Dakota War of 1862 - (1862)
  45. Colorado War - (1863–1865)
  46. Shimonoseki War - (1863–1864)
  47. Snake War - (1864–1868)
  48. Powder River War - (1865)
  49. Red Cloud's War - (1866–1868)
  50. Formosa expedition - (1867)
  51. Comanche Campaign - (1867–1875)
  52. Korea expedition - (1871)
  53. Modoc War - (1872–1873)
  54. Red River War - (1874–1875)
  55. Las Cuevas War - (1875)
  56. Great Sioux War of 1876 - (1876–1877)
  57. Buffalo Hunters' War - (1876–1877)
  58. Nez Perce War - (1877)
  59. Bannock War - (1878)
  60. Cheyenne War - (1878–1879)
  61. Sheepeater Indian War - (1879)
  62. White River War - (1879–1880)
  63. Pine Ridge Campaign - (1890–1891)
  64. Garza Revolution - (1891–1893)
  65. Yaqui Wars - (1896–1918)
  66. Second Samoan Civil War - (1898–1899)
  67. Spanish–American War - (1898)
  68. Philippine–American War - (1899–1902)
  69. Moro Rebellion - (1899–1913)
  70. Boxer Rebellion - (1899–1901)
  71. Crazy Snake Rebellion - (1909)
  72. Border War - (1910–1919)
  73. Negro Rebellion - (1912)
  74. Occupation of Nicaragua - (1912–1933)
  75. Bluff War - (1914–1915)
  76. Occupation of Veracruz - (1914)
  77. Occupation of Haiti - (1915–1934)
  78. Occupation of the Dominican Republic - (1916–1924)
  79. World War I - (1914–1918)
  80. Russian Civil War - (1918–1920)
  81. Last Indian Uprising - (1923)
  82. World War II - (1939–1945)
  83. Korean War - (1950–1953)
  84. Laotian Civil War - (1953–1975)
  85. Lebanon Crisis - (1958)
  86. Bay of Pigs Invasion - (1961)
  87. Simba rebellion, Operation Dragon Rouge - (1964)
  88. Vietnam War - (1955–1964[a], 1965–1973[b], 1974–1975[c])
  89. Communist insurgency in Thailand - (1965–1983)
  90. Korean DMZ Conflict - (1966–1969)
  91. Dominican Civil War - (1965–1966)
  92. Insurgency in Bolivia - (1966–1967)
  93. Cambodian Civil War - (1967–1975)
  94. War in South Zaire - (1978)
  95. Gulf of Sidra encounter - (1981)
  96. Multinational Intervention in Lebanon - (1982–1984)
  97. Invasion of Grenada - (1983)
  98. Action in the Gulf of Sidra - (1986)
  99. Bombing of Libya - (1986)
  100. Tanker War - (1987–1988)
  101. Tobruk encounter - (1989)
  102. Invasion of Panama - (1989–1990)
  103. Gulf War - (1990–1991)
  104. Iraqi No-Fly Zone Enforcement Operations - (1991–2003)
  105. First U.S. Intervention in the Somali Civil War - (1992–1995)
  106. Bosnian War - (1992–1995)
  107. Intervention in Haiti - (1994–1995)
  108. Kosovo War - (1998–1999)
  109. Operation Infinite Reach - (1998)
  110. War in Afghanistan - (2001–present)
  111. 2003 invasion of Iraq - (2003)
  112. Iraq War - (2003–2011)
  113. War in North-West Pakistan - (2004–present)
  114. Second U.S. Intervention in the Somali Civil War - (2007–present)
  115. Operation Ocean Shield - (2009–2016)
  116. International intervention in Libya - (2011)
  117. Operation Observant Compass - (2011–2017)
  118. American-led intervention in Iraq - (2014–present)
  119. American-led intervention in Syria - (2014–present)
  120. Yemeni Civil War - (2015–present)
  121. American intervention in Libya - (2015–present)

{ finis }

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 01, 2019 at 08:25 AM
This list tells quite a story. It deserves a name such as "US History Written in Blood," but more ironically and yet sufficient would be "An Inconvenient List." In any case, mass murder for fun and profit has defined war throughout the entire history of humankind. That in the modern era of late that the US has pioneered rentier capitalism as a means of extracting profits from the industrial war machine is a matter of the natural evolution of state sanctioned murder, far better at returning profits to investors than the mere slaughter of stone age natives to steal their land.
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 01, 2019 at 08:45 AM
Neoconservatives in this context are traditionalists rather than some aberration of modern political thought.
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 01, 2019 at 08:50 AM
OTOH, pacifism is indeed an aberration of political thought, not necessarily an unwarranted aberration, yet one that should be subject to close inspection for its bona fides. My Cherokee ancestors inform me to always be suspect of the good intentions of white men claiming that they despise war.
ilsm -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 03, 2019 at 05:14 AM
Rome martyred Christians bc up to Constantine they were all "draft dodgers".
ilsm -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 03, 2019 at 05:20 AM
Pacifism for me is individual. I was a cold warrior (pacifist not!) from '72 to '85 when I went from supporting operating weapons to the "dark side" in weapons development, which a lot was also nuclear related.
JohnH -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 02, 2019 at 07:59 AM
One of the first things that happened after Trump announced his withdrawal [not!] from Syria is that Pelosi hopped on a plane to Jordan:

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a group of American lawmakers on a surprise visit to Jordan to discuss "the deepening crisis" in Syria amid a shaky U.S.-brokered cease-fire."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/20/nancy-pelosi-goes-to-jordan-for-vital-discussions-about-syria-crisis.html

I mean, what's with that?

It's pretty obvious that Team Pelosi is more concerned with the affairs of the Empire, even though she has no constitutional responsibility. than for the welfare of the American people. The focus of the impeachment hearing on American policy in Ukraine is further evidence.

Meanwhile, I have gotten no answer to my basic question: what are the top 5 pieces of progressive legislation that Pelosi has passed--legislation that representations can brag about to their constituents when running in 2020? It's pretty obvious that their have been almost none.

Team Pelosi has gone rogue as has Trump.

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to JohnH... , December 02, 2019 at 12:30 PM
Yet, I have been assured by others here at EV that our two party representative political system is not merely engaging in so much Kabuki theatre in order to appear relevant. Who knew?
kurt -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 02, 2019 at 05:02 PM
Outside of the fact that this fellow is a liar of monumental proportion - for instance, this post alone contains 3 different lies - it is fundamentally untrue that BOTH parties are just engaged in theater. One actually passes legislation to help people and to reduce the influence of $$$. The other - as former Republican party member Norm Orenstein has pointed out - is anti-democracy, pro-despotism and a insurgent danger with a propaganda arm.
ilsm -> kurt... , December 03, 2019 at 05:12 AM
Huh... all team Pelosi/Schumer of is rant against the US constitution, demean the congress, disdain the office of the President and make up things about the Donald.

See the continuing resolution good through 20 Dec because Pelosi who owns the House won't face the responsibility to try and run the US government's purse.

ilsm -> JohnH... , December 03, 2019 at 05:08 AM
Team Pelosi like the faux liberals are sponsored by the same owners of the swamp!

Never attribute to Trump derangement what can be explained by a criminal conspiracy.

JohnH -> EMichael... , December 05, 2019 at 05:13 PM
More selective outrage from EMichael, the partisan hack.

Sure, it's horrendous that Trump pardoned a war criminal. But let's not forget that Obama never even prosecuted torturers ... or closed Guantanamo as promised.

As usual for EMichael and his ilk, what's a horror when their party does something, it's perfectly acceptable when his party does it.

kurt -> EMichael... , December 06, 2019 at 11:18 AM
All these years of being a almost pacifist and now I am seeing the error in my ways. Sometimes - hopefully increasingly less often - good people must rise up and stomp out evil. The pardons were not just condoning war crimes - it was telling the nazi ahs in the ranks that they can do the same domestically. The right has an army within the US. Most of the officers are okay - but that said, they are tolerating nazis, white supremacists, oathkeepers and dominionists in their ranks. These exceptions are to let the other nazis know they can mass murder if the want.

[Dec 07, 2019] Calling Trump 'Putin's boy' brings up coup tactics used by Birchers when Truman fired MacArthur!

Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

ilsm -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 01, 2019 at 02:19 PM

Calling Trump 'Putin's boy' brings up coup tactics used by Birchers when Truman fired MacArthur!

Brookings tools (Mr. Vindman (I have silver leaves Vindman does not fit) , Fiona Hill, Holmes eavesdropping....) pleading to Schiff that Trump ain't their kind of 'Murekan empire builder.

Making up "charges", hearsay evidence, hiding DNC US #resistance corruption, despise the constitution, hide behind it and patriotism...... define democracy and who is 'patriotic'. All the trappings of Mao and Hitler before they took over.

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to ilsm... , December 01, 2019 at 02:54 PM
"...Making up 'charges', hearsay evidence, hiding DNC US #resistance corruption, despise the constitution, hide behind it and patriotism...... define democracy and who is 'patriotic'. All the trappings of Mao and Hitler before they took over."


[Funny (NOT) that they say the same thing about Trump. Your adversaries and yourself would all make better lampshades or bars of soap than you do citizens.

Democracy has never been more than an illusion, sometimes just an allusion, particularly though in modern republican times. Leaders have all too rarely been patriotic aside from maybe George Washington, who largely despised the representative government that he had made. TJ did not exactly fall in love with the US Congress either. In these times the political class and their pet sycophants are more idiotic than patriotic.]

ilsm -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 01, 2019 at 04:47 PM
One bone: the coup #resistance despises the "office of the president" more than they (swamp trolls like Schiff's tool Vindman) disdain deplorables and the US constitution.

It is a constitutional thingie in my view going back to the Henry Luce media and Birchers/McCarthy (the ragings over "who lost Chiang's fiefdom in China?") going after anyone who they described wrongfully in most cases as "subversives".

I believe that Washington was like Ike as to taking up the executive office.

Paine -> Paine ... , December 01, 2019 at 06:37 AM
Eric Finer in an effort to unearth this buried history

Calls congressional reconstruction
A second founding of the republic

Reconstruction like the new deal

Ended by producing its opposite

BUT we progressive spirits
still rightly honor the era

Similarly
Jacksonianism by some of us not poisoned
By identity pol anachronisms

And Jeffersonianism
Despite far greater identity transgressions

Why not radical republicanism ?

anne -> Paine ... , December 01, 2019 at 07:24 AM
"Eric Foner" in an effort to unearth this buried history

Calls Congressional Reconstruction
A second founding of the Republic

Reconstruction like the New Deal

Ended by producing its opposite

[ Please be careful in spelling names, and set down where the specific reference is. This will be important, if a reference is set down. Also, further explanation when possible would be helpful. ]

[Dec 07, 2019] It is obvious that Russia is calling the shots

Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

JohnH -> kurt... , December 04, 2019 at 07:49 AM

What an idiot! "it is obvious that Russia is calling the shots." This lunacy is beyond what even Joe McCarthy could have imagined.
RC (Ron) Weakley -> JohnH... , December 04, 2019 at 09:59 AM
I doubt that it was imagination that characterized Joe McCarthy's behavior, but with friend kurt then imagination appears to be in full blossom. Joe McCarthy was just an opportunistic scoundrel crassly impersonating a concerned patriot as a pure political convenience for attacking the left in general with specific intentions on casting a specter of fear over all New Deal loyalists. He weaponized socialist sympathizers against FDR's legacy. Remember that it was socialist sentiments that gave rise to FDR and his New Deal. It seemed only fair to Joe that those same sentiments be used to cover FDR in his grave.
JohnH -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 04, 2019 at 01:37 PM
A good definition of a politician: "an opportunistic scoundrel crassly impersonating a concerned patriot as a pure political convenience.

"Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel." Mark Twain

JohnH -> kurt... , December 04, 2019 at 02:57 PM
The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!

Incredible paranoia, reminiscent of the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse!

[Dec 07, 2019] This is clearly one of the most dirty tricks played by UK Israel lobby, if we talk about Corbin. Baseless charge of anti-Semitism became a political smear, the way to destroy political opponent.

Zionist McCarthyism?
Notable quotes:
"... Charges of anti-Semitism against Corbyn are highly suspect. From what I can see, they all stem from Corbyn's remarks supporting Palestinian rights in the face of the Israeli government's institutionalized racism and oppression of Palestinians. ..."
"... Yes. This is clearly one of the most dirty tricks played by UK Israel lobby, if we talk about Corbin. Baseless charge of anti-Semitism became a political smear, the way to destroy political opponent. ..."
Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

JohnH -> anne... , December 06, 2019 at 03:53 PM

Charges of anti-Semitism against Corbyn are highly suspect. From what I can see, they all stem from Corbyn's remarks supporting Palestinian rights in the face of the Israeli government's institutionalized racism and oppression of Palestinians.

If Bernie were not Jewish, there would have been an enormous smear campaign against him for exactly the same reasons.

likbez -> JohnH... , December 07, 2019 at 01:53 AM


Charges of anti-Semitism against Corbyn are highly suspect. From what I can see, they all stem from Corbyn's remarks supporting Palestinian rights in the face of the Israeli government's institutionalized racism and oppression of Palestinians.

Yes. This is clearly one of the most dirty tricks played by UK Israel lobby, if we talk about Corbin. Baseless charge of anti-Semitism became a political smear, the way to destroy political opponent.

Much like charge of "Putin stooge" in the USA. And Russophobia is very similar to Anti-Semitism, if you think about it. It serves as a kind of politically correct anti-Semitism.

[Dec 07, 2019] The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic attitudes

Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

JohnH -> anne... , November 28, 2019 at 03:46 PM

Stephen Cohen (one of the few pundits who actually knows something about Russia:)

"Almost daily for three years, Democrats and their media have told us very bad things about Donald Trump's life, character, and presidency. Some of them are true. But in the process, we have also learned some lamentable, even alarming, things about the Democratic Party establishment, including self-professed liberals. Consider the following:

The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. But there was no "attack" in 2016, only, as I have previously explained, ritualistic "meddling" of the kind that both Russia and America have undertaken in the other's elections for decades. Little can be more phobic than the allegation or belief that one has been "attacked by a hostile" entity. And yet this myth and its false narrative persist in the Democratic Party's discourse, campaigning, and fund-raising.

We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies under President Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential candidacy and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. Early on, I termed this operation "Intelgate," and it has since been well documented by other writers, including Lee Smith in his new book. Intel officials did so in tacit alliance with certain leading, and equally Russophobic, members of the Democratic Party, which had once opposed such transgressions. This may be the most alarming revelation of the Trump years: Trump will leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain.
We also learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be fully trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. Indeed, what the mainstream media -- leading national newspapers and two cable news networks, in particular -- chose to cover and report, and chose not to cover and report, made the abuses and consequences of Russiagate allegations possible. Even now, exceedingly influential publications such as The New York Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William Barr and his appointed special investigator John Durham into the origins of Russiagate. Barr's critics accuse him of fabricating a "conspiracy theory" on behalf of Trump. But the real, or grandest, conspiracy theory was the Russiagate allegation of "collusion" between Trump and the Kremlin, an accusation that was -- or should have been -- discredited by the Robert Mueller report.

And we have learned, or should have learned, that for all the talk by Democrats about Trump as a danger to US national security, it is their Russiagate allegations that truly endanger it. Consider two examples. Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can elude US missile-defense systems, make new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and urgent. If only for the sake of his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so.But even if he is able to, will Trump be entrusted enough to conduct negotiations as successfully as did his predecessors in the White House, given the "Putin puppet" and "Kremlin stooge" accusations still being directed at him?"
https://www.thenation.com/article/inconvenient-truths-2/

ilsm -> JohnH... , November 29, 2019 at 09:19 AM
The Russia thingie/falsehoods are part of corrupt demrats assault on the US constitution. They are even now predicting their loss in 2020 due to "interference" and people wanting to know how corrupt the DNC [front running] select has been!

Demrat allies in the shadow revolving door government of neocon humbug factories are denouncing Trump for his ignoring their war mongering imperial objects.

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to ilsm... , November 30, 2019 at 08:31 AM
"...assault on the US constitution..."

[Adding assault to injury? The US Constitution was damning enough on its own. What are they thinking inside the deep state apparatus? Don't they know that power and privilege is reserved for holders of wealth by the US Constitution? Who do they think that they are really working for?]

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to JohnH... , November 30, 2019 at 08:26 AM
Friend ilsm may be less nuts than it appears, but friend ilsm is not less incomprehensible than it appears. Would it be out of place to thank you for ilsm's sake?

Our two-party system was largely useless after FDR, but our two-party system has been largely destructive since 1968. Let me know if anything really changes.

kurt -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 02, 2019 at 04:52 PM
It isn't our two party system - it is one of the two parties contained within. The "both sides" are bad is both demonstrably not accurate (with some exceptions that prove the rule) and requires ignoring the shattered norms of the last 10 years that came from only one side. Mitch McConnell is the most dangerous person in America. Trump and Pence are just useful idiots. But Trump is also corrupt and dangerous because he doesn't believe he is constrained by anything. And Mitch keeps proving him right.
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to kurt... , December 03, 2019 at 07:00 AM
The cause goes back as far as Truman with roots all the way back to our nation's founding on the shoulders of slaves and a trail of tears, but "the shattered norms of the last 10 years that came from only one side" were the inevitable effect of a failed political system. When the US government has no obvious external enemies and imminent threats then it must manufacture them from within to maintain a meaningful commanding presence. Otherwise the government would be tasked with solving our nation's social and economic problems, which would be both costly and far too complicated for simple self-absorbed minds.
kurt -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 04, 2019 at 10:00 AM
I disagree. What the problem is now is that non-whites and women have taken some power - and in fact may be able to displace the white christian patriarchy (actually, I think as long as we can hang onto a free and fair democracy this is inevitable) and the white christian patriarchy is trying to rule from the minority via fascism and authoritarianism.
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to kurt... , December 04, 2019 at 10:31 AM
I could almost understand this obsession had you never left Indiana, presumably Indianapolis or somewhere similar, but unlikely Gary. There is greater diversity in the US than just what you have seen. Every picture tells a story, and it is a different story for each.
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 04, 2019 at 10:34 AM
Overall the common ground that moves everyone everywhere is money, which in some cases is just a proxy for power and in other cases is a means to material satisfaction. If one already has power, then purchase can be had in reverse, money for power instead of power for money.
kurt -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 04, 2019 at 05:01 PM
This is a great explaination of why we need 1. independent regulatory agencies with power, 2. white collar crime enforcement 3. rule of law and most of all 4. an independent judiciary that is not overrun by ideologues and theocrats who ignore the first amendment wholesale.
JohnH -> kurt... , December 06, 2019 at 03:44 PM
It would have been nice if Obama has demonstrated his concern for the rule of law by frog marching banksters to Rikers, closing Guantanamo, and prosecuting CIA torturers.

But kurt is only concerned with the rule of law when his party is not in power typical partisan hack.

kurt -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 04, 2019 at 01:50 PM
I have been to every state except Alaska and have lived in the North East, Southwest, Midwest, South and California. My comment was about power structures - and the patriarchy of white supremacy and christianity. I am well aware of the diversity. Heck - I even lived next to the Great Checkerboard for 3 summers.

[Dec 07, 2019] Impeachment does not require a crime.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... This is just low level Soviet-style propaganda: "Beacon of democracy" and "Hope of all progressive mankind" cliché. My impression is that the train left the station long ago, especially as for democracy. Probably in 1963. The reality is a nasty struggle of corrupt political clans. Which involves intelligence agencies dirty tricks. BTW, how do you like that fact that Corporate Democrats converted themselves in intelligence agencies' cheerleading squad? ..."
"... And both Corporate Dems and opposing them Republican are afraid to discuss the real issues facing the country, such as loss of manufacturing, loss of good middle class jobs (fake labor statistics covers the fact the most new jobs are temps/contractors and McJobs), rampant militarism with Afghan war lasting decades, neocon dominance in foreign policy which led to increase of country debt to level that might soon be unsustainable. ..."
"... Both enjoy impeachment Kabuki theater. With Trump probably enjoying this theatre the most: if they just censure him, he wins, if charges go to Senate, he wins big. ..."
Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , December 06, 2019 at 06:22 AM

Impeach the president
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/12/06/opinion/time-impeachment/?event=event25

Boston Globe - editorial - December 5

From the founding of this country, the power of the president was understood to have limits. Indeed, the Founders would never have written an impeachment clause into the Constitution if they did not foresee scenarios where their descendants might need to remove an elected president before the end of his term in order to protect the American people and the nation.

The question before the country now is whether President Trump's misconduct is severe enough that Congress should exercise that impeachment power, less than a year before the 2020 election. The results of the House Intelligence Committee inquiry, released to the public on Tuesday, make clear that the answer is an urgent yes. Not only has the president abused his power by trying to extort a foreign country to meddle in US politics, but he also has endangered the integrity of the election itself. He has also obstructed the congressional investigation into his conduct, a precedent that will lead to a permanent diminution of congressional power if allowed to stand.

The evidence that Trump is a threat to the constitutional system is more than sufficient, and a slate of legal scholars who testified on Wednesday made clear that Trump's actions are just the sort of presidential behavior the Founders had in mind when they devised the recourse of impeachment. The decision by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to proceed with drafting articles of impeachment is warranted.

Much of the information in the Intelligence Committee report, which was based on witness interviews, documents, telephone records, and public statements by administration officials, was already known to the public. The cohesive narrative that emerges, though, is worse than the sum of its parts. This year, the president and subordinates acting at his behest repeatedly tried to pressure a foreign country, Ukraine, into taking steps to help the president's reelection. That was, by itself, an outrageous betrayal: In his dealings with foreign states, the president has an obligation to represent America's interests, not his own.

But the president also betrayed the US taxpayer to advance that corrupt agenda. In order to pressure Ukraine into acceding to his request, Trump's administration held up $391 million in aid allocated by Congress. In other words, he demanded a bribe in the form of political favors in exchange for an official act -- the textbook definition of corruption. The fact that the money was ultimately paid, after a whistle-blower complained, is immaterial: The act of withholding taxpayer money to support a personal political goal was an impermissible abuse of the president's power.

Withholding the money also sabotaged American foreign policy. The United States provides military aid to Ukraine to protect the country from Russian aggression. Ensuring that fragile young democracy does not fall under Moscow's sway is a key US policy goal, and one that the president put at risk for his personal benefit. He has shown the world that he is willing to corrupt the American policy agenda for purposes of political gain, which will cast suspicion on the motivations of the United States abroad if Congress does not act.

To top off his misconduct, after Congress got wind of the scheme and started the impeachment inquiry, the Trump administration refused to comply with subpoenas, instructed witnesses not to testify, and intimidated witnesses who did. That ought to form the basis of an article of impeachment. When the president obstructs justice and fails to respect the power of Congress, it strikes at the heart of the separation of powers and will hobble future oversight of presidents of all parties.

Impeachment does not require a crime. The Constitution entrusts Congress with the impeachment power in order to protect Americans from a president who is betraying their interests. And it is very much in Americans' interests to maintain checks and balances in the federal government; to have a foreign policy that the world can trust is based on our national interest instead of the president's personal needs; to control federal spending through their elected representatives; to vote in fair elections untainted by foreign interference. For generations, Americans have enjoyed those privileges. What's at stake now is whether we will keep them. The facts show that the president has threatened this country's core values and the integrity of our democracy. Congress now has a duty to future generations to impeach him.

JohnH -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 06, 2019 at 08:34 AM
How can Trump have sabotaged American foreign policy, when he has full responsibility and authority to set it?

IMO this impeachment is partly about Trump personally asking a foreign country for help against a domestic political opponent. But it is mostly about geopolitics and the national security bureaucracy's need for US world domination.

Just listen to the impeachment testimony--most of it is whining about Trump's failure to follow the 'interagency' policies of the deep state.

likbez -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 07, 2019 at 01:27 AM
"Impeachment does not require a crime."

Stalin would approve that. And if so, what is the difference between impeachment and a show trial, Moscow trials style? The majority can eliminate political rivals, if it wishes so, right? This was how Bolsheviks were thinking in 30th. Of course, those backward Soviets used "British spy" charge instead modern, sophisticated "Putin's stooge" charge, but still ;-)

The facts show that the president has threatened this country's core values and the integrity of our democracy.

This is just low level Soviet-style propaganda: "Beacon of democracy" and "Hope of all progressive mankind" cliché. My impression is that the train left the station long ago, especially as for democracy. Probably in 1963. The reality is a nasty struggle of corrupt political clans. Which involves intelligence agencies dirty tricks. BTW, how do you like that fact that Corporate Democrats converted themselves in intelligence agencies' cheerleading squad?

In short Boston Globe editors do not want that their audience understand the situation, in which the county have found itself. They just want to brainwash this audience (with impunity)

And both Corporate Dems and opposing them Republican are afraid to discuss the real issues facing the country, such as loss of manufacturing, loss of good middle class jobs (fake labor statistics covers the fact the most new jobs are temps/contractors and McJobs), rampant militarism with Afghan war lasting decades, neocon dominance in foreign policy which led to increase of country debt to level that might soon be unsustainable.

Both enjoy impeachment Kabuki theater. With Trump probably enjoying this theatre the most: if they just censure him, he wins, if charges go to Senate, he wins big.

Can you imagine result for Corporate Dems of Schiff (with his contacts with Ciaramella ) , or Hunter Biden (who was just a mule to get money to Biden's family for his father illegal lobbing) testifying in Senate under oath.

The truth is that they are all criminals (with many being war criminals.) So Beria statement "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime" is fully applicable. That really is something that has survived the Soviet Union and has arrived in the good old USA.

[Dec 07, 2019] Who needs politics and elections when you have the deep state running everything anyway

Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to ilsm... , December 02, 2019 at 03:32 AM

Yeah, who needs politics when you have the deep state running everything anyway :<)
JohnH -> kurt... , December 02, 2019 at 06:58 PM
Complacency certainly allowed Obama to do virtually nothing during his final seven years. Fortunately the complacency got reduced due to the 2016 election, else Obama would have pushed through TPP.

During the Obama years the mantra was, "Don't worry, be happy." And the elites were happy. The rest of us, not so much, which is why we got Trump.

[Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online. ..."
"... And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger ..."
"... The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq ..."
"... On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S. into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point). ..."
"... Trump will never beat an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably) going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is. ..."
"... No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist neoliberalism. ..."
"... The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else). To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped at any cost. ..."
"... I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $) for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in 2014). ..."
"... NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.). ..."
"... The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the USSR. ..."
Dec 06, 2019 | theamericanconservative.com

In the Year of Our Lord 2019, sixteen years after this nation launched the catastrophic Iraq War, the following words were spoken on Capitol Hill this week:

We have become the shining city on a hill. We have become the nation that leads the world in understanding what democracy is. And one of the things we understand most profoundly is it's not a real democracy, it's not a mature democracy, if the party in power uses the criminal process to go after its enemies. And I think you heard testimony - the Intelligence Committee heard testimony about how it isn't just our national interest in protecting our own elections. It's not just our national interest in making sure that the Ukraine remains strong and on the front line so they fight the Russians there and we don't have to fight them here, but it's also our national interest in promoting democracy worldwide.

This was not the second coming of the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Bolton brigade. This was Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor and Democrat called by her party to testify in this week's House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing.

Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online.

And I'm old enough to remember these lines from President Bush's second inaugural address, in 2005:

There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

That didn't work out too well for us, for Iraq, or for the Middle East.

And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger.

Loetzen • 9 hours ago • edited ,
The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq

On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S. into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point).

The same thing will happen here. Lesson learned.

Fran Macadam Rod Dreher • 8 hours ago ,

There are, as Victoria Nuland put it, 5 billion reasons for backing the CIA-led coup that overthrew an elected government and replaced it with leaders that the she and the rest of the Obama/Clinton State Department chose. It was the Democrats, since the nineties under another Clinton, that decided to move the American military right up to Russia's borders, interfere in the 1996 election to keep the puppet Yeltsin in power, and with Wall Street leaders to pillage the Russian economy with the stated end to break up Russia into smaller satrapies with governments appointed by the IMF.

Did Joe Biden brag about a quid proof not releasing funds to the Ukraine until it ended the probe into Burisma, which was paying son Hunter millions, and dismiss the investigators altogether? Does it turn out Ukrainian power brokers favored under Obama then sought to influence the American elections against Trump, viewed as wanting to make peace with Russia? Yes, and yes.

Augustine • 9 hours ago ,

The US are not a democracy, since the people do not rule. Rather, it's an oligarchy, since a few influential groups do get their way all the time. Pamela is just shilling for one of these groups, the war party.

It does not matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.

GoDawgs912 Rod Dreher • 6 hours ago ,

Agreed, I hope the Republicans agree to impeach him immediately after Election Day if he does win (which I think he will due to the opposition candidates). I'd much prefer Mike Pence to represent us than freaking Trump. I voted third party last time, but even as bad as Trump is, he's not nearly as bad as every democratic front runner.

Why the Democratic Party doesn't back Tulsi Gabard is insane, she's the only candidate who everyone could be somewhat happy with.

Taking a "Unity-Party" angle this election and nominating an anti-war military Veteran who's also a super patriotic minority women would absolutely destroy Trump. She's also a religious conservative while simultaneously being a sane social liberal, she satisfies some of the concerns of literally every part of the electorate. A Tulsi Gabard/ Joe Manchin ticket would be an 84 level blowout. A Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris ticket is literally the best thing that has ever happened to Trump. Trump will never beat an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably) going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is.

ask zippy Rod Dreher • 5 hours ago ,

An article from someone I trust on that evidence which is not hearsay would be useful, any chance you would write one? I ask because impeachment is either political or legal. If it's political then it's just the normal noise from D.C., if it's legal then I want legal standards of evidence. The times I've paid attention the "evidence" has been at the level of someone told me they overhead a phone conversation or we all believed this, but Trump directly told me the opposite of what we all believed.

I'm looking for something like saying "I did not have sex with that woman" under oath as evidence of committing perjury.

TomD Rabiner • 7 hours ago • edited ,

...OTOH, Trump's move against Hunter Biden could possibly be a "high crime and misdemeanor" worthy of impeachment, but given the existence of Acts of Congress against foreign corrupt practices and the New York Times investigation of Hunter Biden, it becomes hard to untangle Trump's motives. It would seem to be difficult to prove that an impeachable "high crime and misdemeanor" occurred if probable cause for a Hunter Biden investigation existed. If we prove (NOT assume, as the Dems currently are doing) that probable cause did not exist then impeachment would be a slam dunk. If we don't prove that then Trump's impeachment will not be seen as legitimate by large segments of the public. We really are teetering on the edge of something deep here.

Mitch Young Rabiner • 6 hours ago ,

You think that finding out what the son of a sitting vice President, a VP who was also 'point man' for Ukraine, was doing getting millions from a corrupt Ukrainian entity is strictly 'personal gain'? You think that looking into Ukrainian influence into our election is 'personal gain'?

Max Rockatansky • 9 hours ago ,

Oh the spreading of democracy worldwide nonsense again! Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and in blood! This sycophant also brought up Pres. Trumps son Baron into the proceedings for no good reason but to score points at tea time back at Stanford. What a demagogue.

Loetzen Max Rockatansky • 7 hours ago • edited ,

It's always such a lie too, because it's never really about spreading "democracy" -- that is, they don't at all like the spread of true democracy when the people genuinely prefer and vote for Putin, Assad, Orban, etc., to say nothing of when democracy demonstrates the true will of the people in cases such as Brexit.

No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist neoliberalism.

Seoulite Max Rockatansky • 6 hours ago ,

Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and in blood!

Yes please give us more democracy, so the uniparty can sell our jobs to global capital and our children's future to foreigners. Nations have survived tyranny, despots, and brutal civil wars. It is not at all clear whether the nations of the West will survive your beloved democracy.

Jerry • 8 hours ago ,

...Of course, anyone with a brain knows it's not about Ukraine, a country having no bearing at all on the vital interests of the United States. Rather, Ukraine is a handy pretext serving the interests of America's military-industrial complex and the enrichment of our Ruling Class.

... ... ...

sb • 8 hours ago ,

If Trump wanted to prove a really great president, he could forge a peace with Russia (which would entail getting a settlement with Ukraine). It is insane, and only to the benefit of woke liberal capitalists to frame Russia as a permanent enemy. Carving developed nations into 'us vs them', so the liberal elite can divide and rule us. They use this strategy on multiple fronts, to ensure success:

Pragmatically, we will need an alliance with Russia (and possibly with a post-communist China) to stave off the invading colonisers looking to grift a free lunch in the 'rich' west (its only the 1% wealthy in the west who are really rich, not the >90% peasant class), not to mention the ideologically/religiously motivated muslims planning to implement the global sharia subjugation of the pseudo-Christian west demanded in the Koran.

Sadly, Trump does seem to be proving he lacks the organisational skills to drain the swamp - a virtually impossible task for any one person. A 'friendship pact' with Russia (perhaps swapping trade access to US for human rights, democratic and media freedoms in Russia) would be a big step forward to building a united free west. Perhaps bring Poland and Hungary in to to reassure Russia, and strengthen the protections for Christians and traditional family life. But for this to happen Trump needs to have a Secretary of State he trusts heavily.

Fun times to look forward to anyway...

Stefan • 8 hours ago ,

... Signify... whatever, anything, but please not too much thinking. Same with Washington's foreign policy blob. What matters is that the world's is forced to take America's opinions into account, no matter how bone-headed they are. If they put the world on fire that's called collateral damage (Ledeen Doctrine).

jeremyjanson • 7 hours ago ,

What I find funniest about this whole "impeachment" shenanigan is how the Democrats honestly think anyone doesn't believe they're guilty of exactly what they're accusing Trump of. All Trump has to do is reveal seven such cases to the American people after this whole shenanigan is over and turn their own words against them and they are THROUGH! This might honestly be the biggest political mistake in the history of our Republic.

Brendan • 7 hours ago ,

The whole thing is nonsense. Democracy is particular to the West, and is frankly innately fragile and dying a proper death -- slowly, mind you, but dying it is, and thankfully so.

The whole Russia situation is hilarious and a thousand percent ideological. I sat next to these same assholes in college in the 1980s as they blithely handwaved "no true Scotsman" type arguments about the Soviet Union, and moral equivalency and so on, and then of course without their precious hearts skipping one single beat, they switched immediately to "Russia is evil and must be stopped at all costs" when Russia emerged with a nationalist/rightist government.

The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else). To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped at any cost.

Disqus10021 • 7 hours ago ,

My guess is that Russia has enough nuclear weapons and the capability to launch them at every major city in the US. Vladimir is no drunkard like Boris Yeltsin was. We should not provoke the Russian bear into lashing out at the US. The old Soviet Union lost some 20 million of its citizens in WWII and did the heavy lifting in defeating the Nazis. Hands up if you want to send your 19 year old son to fight the Russians in Sevastopol. Does the average American even know where Sevastopol is? More than likely, a war with Russia would result in the nuclear bombing of New York, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Houston for starters.

SatirevFlesti • 7 hours ago ,

I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $) for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in 2014).

NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.).

GoDawgs912 • 7 hours ago ,

I'm halfway cheering for Russia in their conflict with Ukraine. That's Russia's sphere of influence, Ukraine has no business in the EU or in NATO. Any sane American government would be courting Russia in the new Cold War that's obviously coming with The Chinese Communist Party. Instead we pulled all of the former European countries in the USSR into our sphere of influence. The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the USSR.

[Dec 06, 2019] He is still covering up whatever evil he did when he worked for McKinsey

Dec 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Matthew G. Saroff , December 5, 2019 at 2:36 pm

On the Democratic side of the Presidential campaign, mayor Pete "Sentient Mayonnaise" Buttigieg is literally this election cycle's Theodore Bilbo.

This is a guy who threw people of color out of their homes to give the property to white developers , demoted a police chief for uncovering racism in the ranks , and said that he was unaware of segregation in South Bend schools despite the school district being under a consent decree for longer than he has been alive .

If you think that black and Hispanic turnout was low for Hillary Clinton, just wait for Buttigieg to be on the ticket in the general.

No nomination for him, no spot as VP, no kidding.

Also, he is still covering up whatever evil he did when he worked for McKinsey , and we know that it was evil because it was McKinsey & Company, and it will come out if he gets the nomination, and you can be sure that whatever it was, it WILL come out in the general election.

allan , December 5, 2019 at 7:57 pm

But the good news is that he's a Very Serious Person when it comes to deficit spending:

Liz Goodwin @lizcgoodwin

"My party's not known for worrying about the deficit or the debt too much but it's time for us to start getting into that," Mayor Pete says in NH town hall in response to voter anxious about debt. Says everything his campaign has proposed is paid for.

Mayor Pete expanded on this in the gaggle: "I believe every Presidency of my lifetime has been an example of deficits growing under Republican government and shrinking under Democratic government, but my party's got to get more comfortable talking about this issue"

"And we shouldn't be afraid to demonstrate that we have the revenue to cover every cost that we incur in the investments that we're proposing."

Looks like MMT is not a McKinsey-approved management tool.

[Dec 06, 2019] 200PM Water Cooler 12-5-2019

Dec 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Buttigieg (D)(2): "The trips to war zones that Pete Buttigieg rarely talks about" [ABC]. Missed this at the time: "But what the 37-year-old South Bend mayor didn't mention, and virtually never discusses in his run for the nation's highest office, were other trips to Afghanistan and Iraq years prior to his military deployment, when he was a 20-something civilian contractor for the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company . Buttigieg worked for McKinsey from 2007 to 2010, after completing post-graduate studies at Oxford. In his memoir, 'Shortest Way Home,' he mentions his involvement in domestic projects for the firm like doing energy efficiency research in the U.S., and goes into particular detail about one that involved analyzing North American grocery prices. But when it comes to his work abroad with McKinsey, he only drops hints about working on 'war zone economic development to help grow private sector employment' in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also refers to a 'safe house' in Baghdad. The book doesn't say exactly when or how long Buttigieg was in either country." • So Mayo Pete was (?) a spook? No reporting on this; the story just disappeared.

[Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online. ..."
"... And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger ..."
"... The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq ..."
"... On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S. into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point). ..."
"... Trump will never beat an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably) going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is. ..."
"... No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist neoliberalism. ..."
"... The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else). To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped at any cost. ..."
"... I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $) for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in 2014). ..."
"... NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.). ..."
"... The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the USSR. ..."
Dec 06, 2019 | theamericanconservative.com

In the Year of Our Lord 2019, sixteen years after this nation launched the catastrophic Iraq War, the following words were spoken on Capitol Hill this week:

We have become the shining city on a hill. We have become the nation that leads the world in understanding what democracy is. And one of the things we understand most profoundly is it's not a real democracy, it's not a mature democracy, if the party in power uses the criminal process to go after its enemies. And I think you heard testimony - the Intelligence Committee heard testimony about how it isn't just our national interest in protecting our own elections. It's not just our national interest in making sure that the Ukraine remains strong and on the front line so they fight the Russians there and we don't have to fight them here, but it's also our national interest in promoting democracy worldwide.

This was not the second coming of the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Bolton brigade. This was Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor and Democrat called by her party to testify in this week's House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing.

Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online.

And I'm old enough to remember these lines from President Bush's second inaugural address, in 2005:

There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

That didn't work out too well for us, for Iraq, or for the Middle East.

And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger.

Loetzen • 9 hours ago • edited ,
The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq

On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S. into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point).

The same thing will happen here. Lesson learned.

Fran Macadam Rod Dreher • 8 hours ago ,

There are, as Victoria Nuland put it, 5 billion reasons for backing the CIA-led coup that overthrew an elected government and replaced it with leaders that the she and the rest of the Obama/Clinton State Department chose. It was the Democrats, since the nineties under another Clinton, that decided to move the American military right up to Russia's borders, interfere in the 1996 election to keep the puppet Yeltsin in power, and with Wall Street leaders to pillage the Russian economy with the stated end to break up Russia into smaller satrapies with governments appointed by the IMF.

Did Joe Biden brag about a quid proof not releasing funds to the Ukraine until it ended the probe into Burisma, which was paying son Hunter millions, and dismiss the investigators altogether? Does it turn out Ukrainian power brokers favored under Obama then sought to influence the American elections against Trump, viewed as wanting to make peace with Russia? Yes, and yes.

Augustine • 9 hours ago ,

The US are not a democracy, since the people do not rule. Rather, it's an oligarchy, since a few influential groups do get their way all the time. Pamela is just shilling for one of these groups, the war party.

It does not matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.

GoDawgs912 Rod Dreher • 6 hours ago ,

Agreed, I hope the Republicans agree to impeach him immediately after Election Day if he does win (which I think he will due to the opposition candidates). I'd much prefer Mike Pence to represent us than freaking Trump. I voted third party last time, but even as bad as Trump is, he's not nearly as bad as every democratic front runner.

Why the Democratic Party doesn't back Tulsi Gabard is insane, she's the only candidate who everyone could be somewhat happy with.

Taking a "Unity-Party" angle this election and nominating an anti-war military Veteran who's also a super patriotic minority women would absolutely destroy Trump. She's also a religious conservative while simultaneously being a sane social liberal, she satisfies some of the concerns of literally every part of the electorate. A Tulsi Gabard/ Joe Manchin ticket would be an 84 level blowout. A Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris ticket is literally the best thing that has ever happened to Trump. Trump will never beat an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably) going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is.

ask zippy Rod Dreher • 5 hours ago ,

An article from someone I trust on that evidence which is not hearsay would be useful, any chance you would write one? I ask because impeachment is either political or legal. If it's political then it's just the normal noise from D.C., if it's legal then I want legal standards of evidence. The times I've paid attention the "evidence" has been at the level of someone told me they overhead a phone conversation or we all believed this, but Trump directly told me the opposite of what we all believed.

I'm looking for something like saying "I did not have sex with that woman" under oath as evidence of committing perjury.

TomD Rabiner • 7 hours ago • edited ,

...OTOH, Trump's move against Hunter Biden could possibly be a "high crime and misdemeanor" worthy of impeachment, but given the existence of Acts of Congress against foreign corrupt practices and the New York Times investigation of Hunter Biden, it becomes hard to untangle Trump's motives. It would seem to be difficult to prove that an impeachable "high crime and misdemeanor" occurred if probable cause for a Hunter Biden investigation existed. If we prove (NOT assume, as the Dems currently are doing) that probable cause did not exist then impeachment would be a slam dunk. If we don't prove that then Trump's impeachment will not be seen as legitimate by large segments of the public. We really are teetering on the edge of something deep here.

Mitch Young Rabiner • 6 hours ago ,

You think that finding out what the son of a sitting vice President, a VP who was also 'point man' for Ukraine, was doing getting millions from a corrupt Ukrainian entity is strictly 'personal gain'? You think that looking into Ukrainian influence into our election is 'personal gain'?

Max Rockatansky • 9 hours ago ,

Oh the spreading of democracy worldwide nonsense again! Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and in blood! This sycophant also brought up Pres. Trumps son Baron into the proceedings for no good reason but to score points at tea time back at Stanford. What a demagogue.

Loetzen Max Rockatansky • 7 hours ago • edited ,

It's always such a lie too, because it's never really about spreading "democracy" -- that is, they don't at all like the spread of true democracy when the people genuinely prefer and vote for Putin, Assad, Orban, etc., to say nothing of when democracy demonstrates the true will of the people in cases such as Brexit.

No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist neoliberalism.

Seoulite Max Rockatansky • 6 hours ago ,

Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and in blood!

Yes please give us more democracy, so the uniparty can sell our jobs to global capital and our children's future to foreigners. Nations have survived tyranny, despots, and brutal civil wars. It is not at all clear whether the nations of the West will survive your beloved democracy.

Jerry • 8 hours ago ,

...Of course, anyone with a brain knows it's not about Ukraine, a country having no bearing at all on the vital interests of the United States. Rather, Ukraine is a handy pretext serving the interests of America's military-industrial complex and the enrichment of our Ruling Class.

... ... ...

sb • 8 hours ago ,

If Trump wanted to prove a really great president, he could forge a peace with Russia (which would entail getting a settlement with Ukraine). It is insane, and only to the benefit of woke liberal capitalists to frame Russia as a permanent enemy. Carving developed nations into 'us vs them', so the liberal elite can divide and rule us. They use this strategy on multiple fronts, to ensure success:

Pragmatically, we will need an alliance with Russia (and possibly with a post-communist China) to stave off the invading colonisers looking to grift a free lunch in the 'rich' west (its only the 1% wealthy in the west who are really rich, not the >90% peasant class), not to mention the ideologically/religiously motivated muslims planning to implement the global sharia subjugation of the pseudo-Christian west demanded in the Koran.

Sadly, Trump does seem to be proving he lacks the organisational skills to drain the swamp - a virtually impossible task for any one person. A 'friendship pact' with Russia (perhaps swapping trade access to US for human rights, democratic and media freedoms in Russia) would be a big step forward to building a united free west. Perhaps bring Poland and Hungary in to to reassure Russia, and strengthen the protections for Christians and traditional family life. But for this to happen Trump needs to have a Secretary of State he trusts heavily.

Fun times to look forward to anyway...

Stefan • 8 hours ago ,

... Signify... whatever, anything, but please not too much thinking. Same with Washington's foreign policy blob. What matters is that the world's is forced to take America's opinions into account, no matter how bone-headed they are. If they put the world on fire that's called collateral damage (Ledeen Doctrine).

jeremyjanson • 7 hours ago ,

What I find funniest about this whole "impeachment" shenanigan is how the Democrats honestly think anyone doesn't believe they're guilty of exactly what they're accusing Trump of. All Trump has to do is reveal seven such cases to the American people after this whole shenanigan is over and turn their own words against them and they are THROUGH! This might honestly be the biggest political mistake in the history of our Republic.

Brendan • 7 hours ago ,

The whole thing is nonsense. Democracy is particular to the West, and is frankly innately fragile and dying a proper death -- slowly, mind you, but dying it is, and thankfully so.

The whole Russia situation is hilarious and a thousand percent ideological. I sat next to these same assholes in college in the 1980s as they blithely handwaved "no true Scotsman" type arguments about the Soviet Union, and moral equivalency and so on, and then of course without their precious hearts skipping one single beat, they switched immediately to "Russia is evil and must be stopped at all costs" when Russia emerged with a nationalist/rightist government.

The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else). To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped at any cost.

Disqus10021 • 7 hours ago ,

My guess is that Russia has enough nuclear weapons and the capability to launch them at every major city in the US. Vladimir is no drunkard like Boris Yeltsin was. We should not provoke the Russian bear into lashing out at the US. The old Soviet Union lost some 20 million of its citizens in WWII and did the heavy lifting in defeating the Nazis. Hands up if you want to send your 19 year old son to fight the Russians in Sevastopol. Does the average American even know where Sevastopol is? More than likely, a war with Russia would result in the nuclear bombing of New York, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Houston for starters.

SatirevFlesti • 7 hours ago ,

I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $) for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in 2014).

NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.).

GoDawgs912 • 7 hours ago ,

I'm halfway cheering for Russia in their conflict with Ukraine. That's Russia's sphere of influence, Ukraine has no business in the EU or in NATO. Any sane American government would be courting Russia in the new Cold War that's obviously coming with The Chinese Communist Party. Instead we pulled all of the former European countries in the USSR into our sphere of influence. The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the USSR.

[Dec 06, 2019] In my opinion, Tucker Carlson represents a very real and very active right-libertarian view that has been consistently present within the Republican Party for decades. Anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-big business/pro-small business, and of course, anti-big union. Robert Taft comes to mind.

Dec 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Fox Blew , December 5, 2019 at 8:19 am

In my opinion, Tucker Carlson represents a very real and very active right-libertarian view that has been consistently present within the Republican Party for decades. Anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-big business/pro-small business, and of course, anti-big union. Robert Taft comes to mind. I don't share their "ideologies" but as a self-described socialist, I am deeply attracted to their criticisms. And criticisms ARE important and necessary, even if the solutions are left wanting. I dearly hope that his popularity is a sign of the realignment of politics, where issues of class and war become commonplace and issues of "to impeach or not to impeach" fall by the wayside. I recognize that my hopes may not turn to realities.

jrs , December 5, 2019 at 11:57 am

But for an employee it makes no difference if they work for a big or small business (only big business on average is LESS exploitative if anything – if for no other reason but they can afford to be – some of the worst exploitation out there is employees working for small business owners).

Carey , December 5, 2019 at 11:33 pm

That has most emphatically *not* been my experience.
With small business there is someone to talk to / point at.

teacup , December 5, 2019 at 4:04 pm

Exactly, right libertarian. Within the libertarian spectrum there are real and then royal libertarians, Tucker is of the latter. http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html
What are his immigration views? Are people motivated to come here because this global vulture octopus thing has ruined their home market?

[Dec 04, 2019] The central question of Ukrainegate is whether CrowdStrike actions on DNC leak were a false flag operation designed to open Russiagate and what was the level of participation of Poroshenko government and Ukrainian Security services in this false flag operation by Factotum

Highly recommended!
Highly recommended !
Republicans are afraid to raise this key question. Democrats are afraid of even mentioning CrowdStrike in Ukrainegate hearings. The Deep State wants to suppress this matter entirely.
Alperovisch connections to Ukraine and his Russophobia are well known. Did Alperovich people played the role of "Fancy Bear"? Or Ukrainian SBU was engaged? George Eliason clams that "I have already clearly shown the Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian Intelligence Operators." ... "Since there is so much crap surrounding the supposed hack such as law enforcement teams never examining the DNC server or maintaining control of it as evidence, could the hacks have been a cover-up?"
Notable quotes:
"... So far at least I cannot rule out the possibility that that this could have involved an actual 'false flag' hack. A possible calculation would have been that this could have made it easier for Alperovitch and 'CrowdStrike', if more people had asked serious questions about the evidence they claimed supported the 'narrative' of GRU responsibility. ..."
"... What she suggested was that the FBI had found evidence, after his death, of a hack of Rich's laptop, designed as part of a 'false flag' operation. ..."
"... On this, see his 8 October, 'Motion for Discovery and Motion to Accept Supplemental Evidence' in Clevenger's own case against the DOJ, document 44 on the relevant 'Courtlistener' pages, and his 'Unopposed Motion for Stay', document 48. Both are short, and available without a 'PACER' subscription, and should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in ascertaining the truth about 'Russiagate.' (See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/ .) ..."
"... And here, is is also material that he may have had more than one laptop, that 'hard drives' can be changed, and that the level of computer skills that can be found throughout the former Soviet Union is very high. Another matter of some importance is that Ed Butowsky's 'Debunking Rod Wheeler's Claims' site is back up online. (See http://debunkingrodwheelersclaims.net ) ..."
"... The question of whether the 'timeline' produced by Hersh's FBI informant was accurate, or a deliberate attempt to disguise the fact that all kinds of people were well aware of Rich's involvement before his murder, and well aware of the fact of a leak before he was identified as its source, is absolutely central to how one interprets 'Russiagate.' ..."
"... Why did Crowdstrike conclude it was a "Russian breach", when other evidence does show it was an internal download. What was Crowdstrike's method and motivation to reach the "Russian" conclusion instead. Why has that methodology been sealed? ..."
"... Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers. ..."
"... What were the relationships between Crowdstrike, DNC, FBI and the Mueller team that conspired to reach this Russian conclusion. ..."
"... Why did the Roger Stone judge, who just sent Stone away for life, refuse Stone's evidentiary demand to ascertain how exactly Crowdstrike reached its Russsian hacking conclusion, that the court then linked to Stone allegedly lying about this Russian link ..."
"... Indeed, let's set out with full transparency the Ukraine -- Crowsdtrike player links and loyalties to see if there are any smoking guns yet undisclosed. Trump was asking for more information about Crowdstrike like a good lawyer - never ask a question when you don't already know the right answer. Crowdstrike is owned by a Ukrainian by birth ..."
"... Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike. ..."
"... In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives. ..."
"... His role in what we may define as "converting DNC leak into DNC hack" (I would agree with you that this probably was a false flag operation), which was supposedly designed to implicated Russians, and possibly involved Ukrainian security services, is very suspicious indeed. ..."
"... Mueller treatment of Crowdstrike with "kid gloves" may suggest that Alperovich actions were part of a larger scheme. After all Crowdstike was a FBI contactor at the time. ..."
Dec 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Originally from: The Intelligence Whistleblower protection Act did not apply to the phone call ... Reposted - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Factotum , 20 November 2019 at 01:02 PM

The favor was for Ukraine to investigate Crowdstrike and the 2016 DNC computer breach.

Reliance on Crowdstrike to investigate the DNC computer, and not an independent FBI investigation, was tied very closely to the years long anti-Trump Russiagate hoax and waste of US taxpayer time and money.

Why is this issue ignored by both the media and the Democrats. The ladies doth protest far too much.

vig -> Factotum... , 21 November 2019 at 11:00 AM
what exactly, to the extend I recall, could the Ukraine contribute the the DNC's server/"fake malware" troubles? Beyond, that I seem to vaguely recall, the supposed malware was distributed via an Ukrainan address.

On the other hand, there seems to be the (consensus here?) argument there was no malware breach at all, simply an insider copying files on a USB stick.

It seems to either or. No?

What basics am I missing?

David Habakkuk -> vig... , 21 November 2019 at 12:53 PM
vig,

There is no reason why it should be 'either/or'.

If people discovered there had been a leak, it would perfectly natural that in order to give 'resilience' to their cover-up strategies, they could have organised a planting of evidence on the servers, in conjunction with elements in Ukraine.

So far at least I cannot rule out the possibility that that this could have involved an actual 'false flag' hack. A possible calculation would have been that this could have made it easier for Alperovitch and 'CrowdStrike', if more people had asked serious questions about the evidence they claimed supported the 'narrative' of GRU responsibility.

The issues involved become all the more important, in the light of the progress of Ty Clevenger's attempts to exploit the clear contradiction between the claims by the FBI, in response to FOIA requests, to have no evidence relating to Seth Rich, and the remarks by Ms. Deborah Sines quoted by Michael Isikoff.

What she suggested was that the FBI had found evidence, after his death, of a hack of Rich's laptop, designed as part of a 'false flag' operation.

On this, see his 8 October, 'Motion for Discovery and Motion to Accept Supplemental Evidence' in Clevenger's own case against the DOJ, document 44 on the relevant 'Courtlistener' pages, and his 'Unopposed Motion for Stay', document 48. Both are short, and available without a 'PACER' subscription, and should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in ascertaining the truth about 'Russiagate.' (See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/ .)

It is eminently possible that Ms. Hines has simply made an 'unforced error.'

However, I do not – yet – feel able totally to discount the possibility that what is actually at issue is a 'ruse', produced as a contingency plan to ensure that if it becomes impossible to maintain the cover-up over Rich's involvement in its original form, his laptop shows 'evidence' compatible with the 'Russiagate' narrative.

And here, is is also material that he may have had more than one laptop, that 'hard drives' can be changed, and that the level of computer skills that can be found throughout the former Soviet Union is very high. Another matter of some importance is that Ed Butowsky's 'Debunking Rod Wheeler's Claims' site is back up online. (See http://debunkingrodwheelersclaims.net )

Looking at it from the perspective of an old television current affairs hack, I do think that, while it is very helpful to have some key material available in a single place, it would useful if more attention was paid to presentation.

In particular, it would be a most helpful 'teaching aid', if a full and accurate transcript was made of the conversation with Seymour Hersh which Ed Butowsky covertly recorded. What seems clear is that both these figures ended up in very difficult positions, and that the latter clearly engaged in 'sleight of hand' in relation to his dealings with the former. That said, the fact that Butowsky's claims about his grounds for believing that Hersh's FBI informant was Andrew McCabe are clearly disingenuous does not justify the conclusion that he is wrong.

It is absolutely clear to me – despite what 'TTG', following that 'Grub Street' hack Folkenflik, claimed – that when Hersh talked to Butowsky, he believed he had been given accurate information. Indeed, I have difficulty seeing how anyone whose eyes were not hopelessly blinded by prejudice, a\nd possibly fear of where a quest for the truth might lead, could not see that, in this conversation, both men were telling the truth, as they saw it.

However, all of us, including the finest and most honourable of journalists can, from time to time, fall for disinformation. (If anyone says they can always spot when they are being played, all I can say is, if you're right, you're clearly Superman, but it is more likely that you are a fool or knave, if not both.)

The question of whether the 'timeline' produced by Hersh's FBI informant was accurate, or a deliberate attempt to disguise the fact that all kinds of people were well aware of Rich's involvement before his murder, and well aware of the fact of a leak before he was identified as its source, is absolutely central to how one interprets 'Russiagate.'

Factotum -> vig... , 21 November 2019 at 01:45 PM
Several loose end issues about Crowdstrike:

1. Why did Crowdstrike conclude it was a "Russian breach", when other evidence does show it was an internal download. What was Crowdstrike's method and motivation to reach the "Russian" conclusion instead. Why has that methodology been sealed?

2. Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers.

3. What were the relationships between Crowdstrike, DNC, FBI and the Mueller team that conspired to reach this Russian conclusion.

4. Why did the Roger Stone judge, who just sent Stone away for life, refuse Stone's evidentiary demand to ascertain how exactly Crowdstrike reached its Russsian hacking conclusion, that the court then linked to Stone allegedly lying about this Russian link .

5. Indeed, let's set out with full transparency the Ukraine -- Crowsdtrike player links and loyalties to see if there are any smoking guns yet undisclosed. Trump was asking for more information about Crowdstrike like a good lawyer - never ask a question when you don't already know the right answer. Crowdstrike is owned by a Ukrainian by birth .

likbez said in reply to Factotum... , 04 December 2019 at 01:29 AM

Hi Factotum,
Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers.

Alperovich is really a very suspicious figure. Rumors are that he was involved in compromising PGP while in MacAfee( June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams - YouTube ):

Investigative Journalist George Webb worked at MacAfee and Network Solutions in 2000 when the CEO Bill Larsen bought a small, Moscow based, hacking and virus writing company to move to Silicon Valley.

MacAfee also purchased PGP, an open source encryption software developed by privacy advocate to reduce NSA spying on the public.
The two simultaneous purchase of PGP and the Moscow hacking team by Metwork Solutions was sponsored by the CIA and FBI in order to crack encrypted communications to write a back door for law enforcement.

Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike.

In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives.

His role in what we may define as "converting DNC leak into DNC hack" (I would agree with you that this probably was a false flag operation), which was supposedly designed to implicated Russians, and possibly involved Ukrainian security services, is very suspicious indeed.

Mueller treatment of Crowdstrike with "kid gloves" may suggest that Alperovich actions were part of a larger scheme. After all Crowdstike was a FBI contactor at the time.

While all this DNC hack saga is completely unclear due to lack of facts and the access to the evidence, there are some stories on Internet that indirectly somewhat strengthen your hypothesis:

Enjoy and Happy Cyber Week shopping :-)

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

Highly recommended!
Pelosi interference in elections might cost democrats a victory. She enraged Trump base and strengthened Trump, who before was floundering. Now election changed into "us vs them" question, which is very unfavorable to neoliberal Dems. as neolibelism as ideology is dead. She also brought back Trump some independents who othersie would stay home or vote for Dem candidate. No action of House of Representatives can changes this. Bringing Vindman and Fiona Hill to testify were huge blunders as they enhance the narrative that the Deep State, unaccountable Security Establishment, controls the government, to which Trump represents very weak, but still a challenge. As such they strengthened Trump
Essentially Dems had driven themselves into a trap. Moreover actions of the Senate can drag democrats in dirt till the elections, diminishing their chances further and firther. Can you image the effect if Schiff would be called testify under oath about his contacts with Ciaramella? Or Biden questioning about his dirty dealing with both Yanukovich administration and Provisional Government after the 2014 coup d'état (aka EuroMaydan, aka "the Revolution of dignity" ?
Notable quotes:
"... It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over "withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one. Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed "isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to criticize a president. ..."
"... Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe, Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S. involvement overseas are reducing it. ..."
"... We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually been adding to them. ..."
Dec 04, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Originally from: The U.S. Has Not Reduced Its 'Global Commitments' The American Conservative by Daniel Larison

Gideon Rachman tries to find similarities between the foreign policies of Trump and Obama:

Both men would detest the thought. But, in crucial respects, the foreign policies of Donald Trump and Barack Obama are looking strikingly similar.

The wildly different styles of the two presidents have disguised the underlying continuities between their approaches to the world. But look at substance, rather than style, and the similarities are impressive.

There is usually considerable continuity in U.S. foreign policy from one president to another, but Rachman is making a stronger and somewhat different claim than that. He is arguing that their foreign policy agendas are very much alike in ways that put both presidents at odds with the foreign policy establishment, and he cites "disengagement from the Middle East" and a "pivot to Asia" as two examples of these similarities. This seems superficially plausible, but it is misleading. Despite talking a lot about disengagement, Obama and Trump chose to keep the U.S. involved in several conflicts, and Trump actually escalated the wars he inherited from Obama. To the extent that there is continuity between Obama and Trump, it has been that both of them have acceded to the conventional wisdom of "the Blob" and refused to disentangle the U.S. from Middle Eastern conflicts. Ongoing support for the war on Yemen is the ugliest and most destructive example of this continuity.

In reality, neither Obama nor Trump "focused" on Asia, and Trump's foray into pseudo-engagement with North Korea has little in common with Obama's would-be "pivot" or "rebalance." U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a major part of Obama's policy in Asia. Trump pulled out of that agreement and waged destructive trade wars instead. Once we get past generalizations and look at details, the two presidents are often diametrically opposed to one another in practice. That is what one would expect when we remember that Trump has made dismantling Obama's foreign policy achievements one of his main priorities.

The significant differences between the two become much more apparent when we look at other issues. On arms control and nonproliferation, the two could not be more different. Obama negotiated a new arms reduction treaty with New START at the start of his presidency, and he wrapped up a major nonproliferation agreement with Iran and the other members of the P5+1 in 2015. Trump reneged on the latter and seems determined to kill the former. Obama touted the benefits of genuine diplomatic engagement, while Trump has made a point of reversing and undoing most of the results of Obama's engagement with Cuba and Iran. Trump's overall hostility to genuine diplomacy makes another one of Rachman claims quite baffling:

The result is that, after his warlike "fire and fury" phase, Mr Trump is now pursuing a diplomacy-first strategy that is strongly reminiscent of Mr Obama.

Calling Trump's clumsy pattern of making threats and ultimatums a "diplomacy-first strategy" is a mistake. This is akin to saying that he is adhering to foreign policy restraint because the U.S. hasn't invaded any new countries on Trump's watch. It takes something true (Trump hasn't started a new war yet) and misrepresents it as proof that the president is serious about diplomacy and that he wants to reduce U.S. military engagement overseas. Trump enjoys the spectacle of meeting with foreign leaders, but he isn't interested in doing the work or taking the risks that successful diplomacy requires. He has shown repeatedly through his own behavior, his policy preferences, and his proposed budgets that he has no use for diplomacy or diplomats, and instead he expects to be able to bully or flatter adversaries into submission.

So Rachman is simply wrong he reaches this conclusion:

Mr Trump's reluctance to attack Iran was significant. It underlines the fact that his tough-guy rhetoric disguises a strong preference for diplomacy over force.

Let's recall that the near-miss of starting a war with Iran came as a result of the downing of an unmanned drone. The fact that the U.S. was seriously considering an attack on another country over the loss of a drone is a worrisome sign that this administration is prepared to go to war at the drop of a hat. Calling off such an insane attack was the right thing to do, but there should never have been an attack to call off. That episode does not show a "strong preference for diplomacy over force." If Trump had a strong preference for diplomacy over force, his policy would not be one of relentless hostility towards Iran. Trump does not believe in diplomatic compromise, but expects the other side to capitulate under pressure. That actually makes conflict more likely and reduces the chances of meaningful negotiations.

It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over "withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one. Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed "isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to criticize a president.

Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe, Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S. involvement overseas are reducing it.

Rachman ends his column with this assertion:

In their very different ways, both Mr Obama and Mr Trump have reduced America's global commitments -- and adjusted the US to a more modest international role.

The problem here is that there has been no meaningful reduction in America's "global commitments." Which commitments have been reduced or eliminated? It would be helpful if someone could be specific about this. The U.S. has more security dependents today than it did when Trump took office. NATO has been expanded to include two new countries in just the last three years. U.S. troops are engaged in hostilities in just as many countries as they were when Trump was elected. There are more troops deployed to the Middle East at the end of this year than there were at the beginning, and that is a direct consequence of Trump's bankrupt Iran policy.

We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually been adding to them.

[Dec 04, 2019] Common Funding Themes Link 'Whistleblower' Complaint and CrowdStrike Firm Certifying DNC Russia 'Hack' by Aaron Klein

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward Russia. The Council in turn is financed by Google Inc. ..."
"... In a perhaps unexpected development, another Atlantic Council funder is Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were the subject of Trump's inquiry with Zelemsky related to Biden. The Biden allegations concern significant questions about Biden's role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period when Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from Burisma. ..."
"... Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower's complaint alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 presidential race. ..."
"... Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. ..."
"... Together with Soros's Open Society, Omidyar also funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are "disputed." ..."
Sep 28, 2019 | www.breitbart.com

There are common threads that run through an organization repeatedly relied upon in the so-called whistleblower's complaint about President Donald Trump and CrowdStrike, the outside firm utilized to conclude that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee's servers since the DNC would not allow the U.S. government to inspect the servers.

One of several themes is financing tied to Google, whose Google Capital led a $100 million funding drive that financed Crowdstrike. Google Capital, which now goes by the name of CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party.

CrowdStrike was mentioned by Trump in his call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign, reportedly helped draft CrowdStrike to aid with the DNC's allegedly hacked server.

On behalf of the DNC and Clinton's campaign, Perkins Coie also paid the controversial Fusion GPS firm to produce the infamous, largely-discredited anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

CrowdStrike is a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch.

Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward Russia. The Council in turn is financed by Google Inc.

In a perhaps unexpected development, another Atlantic Council funder is Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were the subject of Trump's inquiry with Zelemsky related to Biden. The Biden allegations concern significant questions about Biden's role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period when Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from Burisma.

Besides Google and Burisma funding, the Council is also financed by billionaire activist George Soros's Open Society Foundations as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc. and the U.S. State Department.

Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower's complaint alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 presidential race.

The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the whistleblower's document and released by the Google and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower's own claims, as Breitbart News documented .

One key section of the so-called whistleblower's document claims that "multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov."

This was allegedly to follow up on Trump's call with Zelensky in order to discuss the "cases" mentioned in that call, according to the so-called whistleblower's narrative. The complainer was clearly referencing Trump's request for Ukraine to investigate the Biden corruption allegations.

Even though the statement was written in first person – "multiple U.S. officials told me" – it contains a footnote referencing a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

That footnote reads:

In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on 22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.

The so-called whistleblower's account goes on to rely upon that same OCCRP report on three more occasions. It does so to:

Write that Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko "also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these matters." Document that Trump adviser Rudi Giuliani "had spoken in late 2018 to former Prosecutor General Shokin, in a Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani." Bolster the charge that, "I also learned from a U.S. official that 'associates' of Mr. Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team." The so-called whistleblower then relates in another footnote, "I do not know whether these associates of Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced above."

The OCCRP report repeatedly referenced is actually a "joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine."

BuzzFeed infamously also first published the full anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Trump's presidential campaign and Russia. The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee and was produced by the Fusion GPS opposition dirt outfit.

The OCCRP and BuzzFeed "joint investigation" resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed publishing similar lengthy pieces on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump's political rivals.

The so-called whistleblower's document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP and does not reference BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia collusion claims.

Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Together with Soros's Open Society, Omidyar also funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are "disputed."

Like OCCRP, the Poynter Institute's so-called news fact-checking project is openly funded by not only Soros' Open Society Foundations but also Google and the National Endowment for Democracy.

CrowdStrike and DNC servers

CrowdStrike, meanwhile, was brought up by Trump in his phone call with Zelensky. According to the transcript, Trump told Zelensky, "I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike I guess you have one of your wealthy people The server, they say Ukraine has it."

In his extensive report , Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller notes that his investigative team did not "obtain or examine" the servers of the DNC in determining whether those servers were hacked by Russia.

The DNC famously refused to allow the FBI to access its servers to verify the allegation that Russia carried out a hack during the 2016 presidential campaign. Instead, the DNC reached an arrangement with the FBI in which CrowdStrike conducted forensics on the server and shared details with the FBI.

In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the FBI registered "multiple requests at different levels," to review the DNC's hacked servers. Ultimately, the DNC and FBI came to an agreement in which a "highly respected private company" -- a reference to CrowdStrike -- would carry out forensics on the servers and share any information that it discovered with the FBI, Comey testified.

A senior law enforcement official stressed the importance of the FBI gaining direct access to the servers, a request that was denied by the DNC.

"The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated," the official was quoted by the news media as saying.

"This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier," the official continued.

... ... ...

Aaron Klein is Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, " Aaron Klein Investigative Radio ." Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.

[Dec 04, 2019] DNC Russian Hackers Found! You Won't Believe Who They Really Work For by the Anonymous Patriots

Highly recommended!
Jan 01, 2017 | themillenniumreport.com

"If someone steals your keys to encrypt the data, it doesn't matter how secure the algorithms are."

Dmitri Alperovitch, founder of CrowdStrike.

By the Anonymous Patriots
SOTN Exclusive

Russians did not hack the DNC system, a Russian named Dmitri Alperovitch is the hacker and he works for President Obama. In the last five years the Obama administration has turned exclusively to one Russian to solve every major cyber-attack in America, whether the attack was on the U.S. government or a corporation. Only one "super-hero cyber-warrior" seems to "have the codes" to figure out "if" a system was hacked and by "whom."

Dmitri's company, CrowdStrike has been called in by Obama to solve mysterious attacks on many high level government agencies and American corporations, including: German Bundestag, Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the White House, the State Department, SONY, and many others.

CrowdStrike's philosophy is: "You don't have a malware problem; you have an adversary problem."

CrowdStrike has played a critical role in the development of America's cyber-defense policy. Dmitri Alperovitch and George Kurtz, a former head of the FBI cyberwarfare unit founded CrowdStrike. Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director at the FBI is now CrowdStrike's president of services. The company is crawling with former U.S. intelligence agents.

Before Alperovitch founded CrowdStrike in 2011, he was working in Atlanta as the chief threat officer at the antivirus software firm McAfee, owned by Intel (a DARPA company). During that time, he "discovered" the Chinese had compromised at least seventy-one companies and organizations, including thirteen defense contractors, three electronics firms, and the International Olympic Committee. He was the only person to notice the biggest cyberattack in history! Nothing suspicious about that.

Alperovitch and the DNC

After CrowdStrike was hired as an independent "vendor" by the DNC to investigate a possible cyberattack on their system, Alperovitch sent the DNC a proprietary software package called Falcon that monitors the networks of its clients in real time. According to Alperovitch, Falcon "lit up," within ten seconds of being installed at the DNC. Alperovitch had his "proof" in TEN SECONDS that Russia was in the network. This "alleged" evidence of Russian hacking has yet to be shared with anyone.

As Donald Trump has pointed out, the FBI, the agency that should have been immediately involved in hacking that effects "National Security," has yet to even examine the DNC system to begin an investigation. Instead, the FBI and 16 other U.S. "intelligence" agencies simply "agree" with Obama's most trusted "cyberwarfare" expert Dmitri Alperovitch's "TEN SECOND" assessment that produced no evidence to support the claim.

Also remember that it is only Alperovitch and CrowdStrike that claim to have evidence that it was Russian hackers . In fact, only two hackers were found to have been in the system and were both identified by Alperovitch as Russian FSB (CIA) and the Russian GRU (DoD). It is only Alperovitch who claims that he knows that it is Putin behind these two hackers.

Alperovitch failed to mention in his conclusive "TEN SECOND" assessment that Guccifer 2.0 had already hacked the DNC and made available to the public the documents he hacked – before Alperovitch did his ten second assessment. Alperovitch reported that no other hackers were found, ignoring the fact that Guccifer 2.0 had already hacked and released DNC documents to the public. Alperovitch's assessment also goes directly against Julian Assange's repeated statements that the DNC leaks did not come from the Russians.

The ridiculously fake cyber-attack assessment done by Alperovitch and CrowdStrike naïvely flies in the face of the fact that a DNC insider admitted that he had released the DNC documents. Julian Assange implied in an interview that the murdered Democratic National Committee staffer, Seth Rich, was the source of a trove of damaging emails the website posted just days before the party's convention. Seth was on his way to testify about the DNC leaks to the FBI when he was shot dead in the street.

It is also absurd to hear Alperovitch state that the Russian FSB (equivalent to the CIA) had been monitoring the DNC site for over a year and had done nothing. No attack, no theft, and no harm was done to the system by this "false-flag cyber-attack" on the DNC – or at least, Alperovitch "reported" there was an attack. The second hacker, the supposed Russian military (GRU – like the U.S. DoD) hacker, had just entered the system two weeks before and also had done "nothing" but observe.

It is only Alperovitch's word that reports that the Russian FSB was "looking for files on Donald Trump."

It is only this false claim that spuriously ties Trump to the "alleged" attack. It is also only Alperovitch who believes that this hack that was supposedly "looking for Trump files" was an attempt to "influence" the election. No files were found about Trump by the second hacker, as we know from Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0's leaks. To confabulate that "Russian's hacked the DNC to influence the elections" is the claim of one well-known Russian spy. Then, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously confirm that Alperovitch is correct – even though there is no evidence and no investigation was ever conducted .

How does Dmitri Alperovitch have such power? Why did Obama again and again use Alperovitch's company, CrowdStrike, when they have miserably failed to stop further cyber-attacks on the systems they were hired to protect? Why should anyone believe CrowdStrikes false-flag report?

After documents from the DNC continued to leak, and Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks made CrowdStrike's report look foolish, Alperovitch decided the situation was far worse than he had reported. He single-handedly concluded that the Russians were conducting an "influence operation" to help win the election for Trump . This false assertion had absolutely no evidence to back it up.

On July 22, three days before the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped a massive cache of emails that had been "stolen" (not hacked) from the DNC. Reporters soon found emails suggesting that the DNC leadership had favored Hillary Clinton in her primary race against Bernie Sanders, which led Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair, along with three other officials, to resign.

Just days later, it was discovered that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had been hacked. CrowdStrike was called in again and once again, Alperovitch immediately "believed" that Russia was responsible. A lawyer for the DCCC gave Alperovitch permission to confirm the leak and to name Russia as the suspected author. Two weeks later, files from the DCCC began to appear on Guccifer 2.0's website. This time Guccifer released information about Democratic congressional candidates who were running close races in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. On August 12, Guccifer went further, publishing a spreadsheet that included the personal email addresses and phone numbers of nearly two hundred Democratic members of Congress.

Once again, Guccifer 2.0 proved Alperovitch and CrowdStrike's claims to be grossly incorrect about the hack originating from Russia, with Putin masterminding it all. Nancy Pelosi offered members of Congress Alperovitch's suggestion of installing Falcon , the system that failed to stop cyberattacks at the DNC, on all congressional laptops.

Key Point: Once Falcon was installed on the computers of members of the U.S. Congress, CrowdStrike had even further full access into U.S. government accounts.

Alperovitch's "Unbelievable" History

Dmitri was born in 1980 in Moscow where his father, Michael, was a nuclear physicist, (so Dmitri claims). Dmitri's father was supposedly involved at the highest levels of Russian nuclear science. He also claims that his father taught him to write code as a child.

In 1990, his father was sent to Maryland as part of a nuclear-safety training program for scientists. In 1994, Michael Alperovitch was granted a visa to Canada, and a year later the family moved to Chattanooga, where Michael took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

While Dmitri Alperovitch was still in high school, he and his father started an encryption-technology business. Dmitri studied computer science at Georgia Tech and went on to work at an antispam software firm. It was at this time that he realized that cyber-defense was more about psychology than it was about technology. A very odd thing to conclude.

Dmitri Alperovitch posed as a "Russian gangster" on spam discussion forums which brought his illegal activity to the attention of the FBI – as a criminal. In 2005, Dmitri flew to Pittsburgh to meet an FBI agent named Keith Mularski, who had been asked to lead an undercover operation against a vast Russian credit-card-theft syndicate. Alperovitch worked closely with Mularski's sting operation which took two years, but it ultimately brought about fifty-six arrests. Dmitri Alperovitch then became a pawn of the FBI and CIA.

In 2010, while he was at McAfee, the head of cybersecurity at Google told Dmitri that Gmail accounts belonging to human-rights activists in China had been breached. Google suspected the Chinese government. Alperovitch found that the breach was unprecedented in scale; it affected more than a dozen of McAfee's clients and involved the Chinese government. Three days after his supposed discovery, Alperovitch was on a plane to Washington where he had been asked to vet a paragraph in a speech by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

2014, Sony called in CrowdStrike to investigate a breach of its network. Alperovitch needed just "two hours" to identify North Korea as the adversary. Executives at Sony asked Alperovitch to go public with the information immediately, but it took the FBI another three weeks before it confirmed the attribution.

Alperovitch then developed a list of "usual suspects" who were well-known hackers who had identifiable malware that they commonly used. Many people use the same malware and Alperovitch's obsession with believing he has the only accurate list of hackers in the world is plain idiocy exacerbated by the U.S. government's belief in his nonsense. Alperovitch even speaks like a "nut-case" in his personal Twitters, which generally have absolutely no references to the technology he is supposedly the best at in the entire world.

Dmitri – Front Man for His Father's Russian Espionage Mission

After taking a close look at the disinformation around Dmitri and his father, it is clear to see that Michael Alperovitch became a CIA operative during his first visit to America. Upon his return to Russia, he stole the best Russian encryption codes that were used to protect the top-secret work of nuclear physics in which his father is alleged to have been a major player. Upon surrendering the codes to the CIA when he returned to Canada, the CIA made it possible for a Russian nuclear scientist to become an American citizen overnight and gain a top-secret security clearance to work at the Oakridge plant, one of the most secure and protected nuclear facilities in America . Only the CIA can transform a Russian into an American with a top-secret clearance overnight.

We can see on Michael Alperovitch's Linked In page that he went from one fantastically top-secret job to the next without a break from the time he entered America. He seemed to be on a career path to work in every major U.S. agency in America. In every job he was hired as the top expert in the field and the leader of the company. All of these jobs after the first one were in cryptology, not nuclear physics. As a matter of fact, Michael became the top expert in America overnight and has stayed the top expert to this day.

Most of the work of cyber-security is creating secure interactions on a non-secure system like the Internet. The cryptologist who assigns the encryption codes controls the system from that point on .

Key Point: Cryptologists are well known for leaving a "back-door" in the base-code so that they can always have over-riding control.

Michael Alperovitch essentially has the "codes" for all Department of Defense sites, the Treasury, the State Department, cell-phones, satellites, and public media . There is hardly any powerful agency or company that he has not written the "codes" for. One might ask, why do American companies and the U.S. government use his particular codes? What are so special about Michael's codes?

Stolen Russian Codes

In December, Obama ordered the U.S. military to conduct cyberattacks against Russia in retaliation for the alleged DNC hacks. All of the attempts to attack Russia's military and intelligence agencies failed miserably. Russia laughed at Obama's attempts to hack their systems. Even the Russian companies targeted by the attacks were not harmed by Obama's cyber-attacks. Hardly any news of these massive and embarrassing failed cyber-attacks were reported by the Main Stream Media. The internet has been scrubbed clean of the reports that said Russia's cyber-defenses were impenetrable due to the sophistication of their encryption codes.

Michael Alperovitch was in possession of those impenetrable codes when he was a top scientist in Russia. It was these very codes that he shared with the CIA on his first trip to America . These codes got him spirited into America and "turned into" the best cryptologist in the world. Michael is simply using the effective codes of Russia to design his codes for the many systems he has created in America for the CIA .

KEY POINT: It is crucial to understand at this junction that the CIA is not solely working for America . The CIA works for itself and there are three branches to the CIA – two of which are hostile to American national interests and support globalism.

Michael and Dmitri Alperovitch work for the CIA (and international intelligence corporations) who support globalism . They, and the globalists for whom they work, are not friends of America or Russia. It is highly likely that the criminal activities of Dmitri, which were supported and sponsored by the FBI, created the very hackers who he often claims are responsible for cyberattacks. None of these supposed "attackers" have ever been found or arrested; they simply exist in the files of CrowdStrike and are used as the "usual culprits" when the FBI or CIA calls in Dmitri to give the one and only opinion that counts. Only Dmitri's "suspicions" are offered as evidence and yet 17 U.S. intelligence agencies stand behind the CrowdStrike report and Dmitri's suspicions.

Michael Alperovitch – Russian Spy with the Crypto-Keys

Essentially, Michael Alperovitch flies under the false-flag of being a cryptologist who works with PKI. A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for the creation, storage, and distribution of digital certificates which are used to verify that a particular public key belongs to a certain entity. The PKI creates digital certificates which map public keys to entities, securely stores these certificates in a central repository and revokes them if needed. Public key cryptography is a cryptographic technique that enables entities to securely communicate on an insecure public network (the Internet), and reliably verify the identity of an entity via digital signatures . Digital signatures use Certificate Authorities to digitally sign and publish the public key bound to a given user. This is done using the CIA's own private key, so that trust in the user key relies on one's trust in the validity of the CIA's key. Michael Alperovitch is considered to be the number one expert in America on PKI and essentially controls the market .

Michael's past is clouded in confusion and lies. Dmitri states that his father was a nuclear physicist and that he came to America the first time in a nuclear based shared program between America and Russia. But if we look at his current personal Linked In page, Michael claims he has a Master Degree in Applied Mathematics from Gorky State University. From 1932 to 1956, its name was State University of Gorky. Now it is known as Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod – National Research University (UNN), also known as Lobachevsky University. Does Michael not even know the name of the University he graduated from? And when does a person with a Master's Degree become a leading nuclear physicist who comes to "visit" America. In Michael's Linked In page there is a long list of his skills and there is no mention of nuclear physics.

Also on Michael Alperovitch's Linked In page we find some of his illustrious history that paints a picture of either the most brilliant mind in computer security, encryption, and cyberwarfare, or a CIA/FBI backed Russian spy. Imagine that out of all the people in the world to put in charge of the encryption keys for the Department of Defense, the U.S. Treasury, U.S. military satellites, the flow of network news, cell phone encryption, the Pathfire (media control) Program, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Global Information Grid, and TriCipher Armored Credential System among many others, the government hires a Russian spy . Go figure.

Michael Alperovitch's Linked In Page

Education:

Gorky State University, Russia, MS in Applied Mathematics

Work History:

Sr. Security Architect

VT IDirect -2014 – Designing security architecture for satellite communications including cryptographic protocols, authentication.

Principal SME (Contractor)

DISA -Defense Information Systems Agency (Manager of the Global Information Grid) – 2012-2014 – Worked on PKI and identity management projects for DISA utilizing Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Performed application security and penetration testing.

Technical Lead (Contractor)

U.S. Department of the Treasury – 2011 – Designed enterprise validation service architecture for PKI certificate credentials with Single Sign On authentication.

Principal Software Engineer

Comtech Mobile Datacom – 2007-2010 – Subject matter expert on latest information security practices, including authentication, encryption and key management.

Sr. Software Engineer

TriCipher – 2006-2007 – Designed and developed security architecture for TriCipher Armored Credential Authentication System.

Lead Software Engineer

BellSouth – 2003-2006 – Designed and built server-side Jabber-based messaging platform with Single Sign On authentication.

Principal Software Research Engineer

Pathfire – 2001-2002 – Designed and developed Digital Rights Management Server for Video on Demand and content distribution applications. Pathfire provides digital media distribution and management solutions to the television, media, and entertainment industries. The company offers Digital Media Gateway, a digital IP store-and-forward platform, delivering news stories, syndicated programming, advertising spots, and video news releases to broadcasters. It provides solutions for content providers and broadcasters, as well as station solutions.

Obama – No Friend of America

Obama is no friend of America in the war against cyber-attacks. The very agencies and departments being defended by Michael Alperovitch's "singular and most brilliant" ability to write encryption codes have all been successfully attacked and compromised since Michael set up the codes. But we shouldn't worry, because if there is a cyberattack in the Obama administration, Michael's son Dmitri is called in to "prove" that it isn't the fault of his father's codes. It was the "damn Russians", or even "Putin himself" who attacked American networks.

Not one of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies is capable of figuring out a successful cyberattack against America without Michael and Dmitri's help. Those same 17 U.S. intelligence agencies were not able to effectively launch a successful cyberattack against Russia. It seems like the Russian's have strong codes and America has weak codes. We can thank Michael and Dmitri Alperovitch for that.

It is clear that there was no DNC hack beyond Guccifer 2.0. Dmitri Alperovitch is a "frontman" for his father's encryption espionage mission.

Is it any wonder that Trump says that he has "his own people" to deliver his intelligence to him that is outside of the infiltrated U.S. government intelligence agencies and the Obama administration ? Isn't any wonder that citizens have to go anywhere BUT the MSM to find real news or that the new administration has to go to independent news to get good intel?

It is hard to say anything more damnable than to again quote Dmitri on these very issues:
"If someone steals your keys to encrypt the data, it doesn't matter how secure the algorithms are." Dmitri Alperovitch, founder of CrowdStrike

Originally posted at: http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=62536

[Dec 04, 2019] June 4th, 2017 Crowdstrike Was at the DNC Six Weeks by George Webb

Highly recommended!
A short YouTube with the handwritten timeline
Nov 27, 2019 | www.youtube.com
AwanContra - George Webb, Investigative Journalist

[Dec 04, 2019] Cyberanalyst George Eliason Claims that the "Fancy Bear" Who Hacked the DNC Server is Ukrainian Intelligence – In League with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... And RUH8 is allied with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike. ..."
"... Russia was probably not one of the hacking groups. The willful destruction of evidence by the DNC themselves probably points to Russia not being one of the those groups. The DNC wouldn't destroy evidence that supported their position. Also, government spy agencies keep info like that closely held. They might leak out tidbits, but they don't do wholesale dumps, like, ever. ..."
"... That's what the DNC is lying about. Not that hacks happened (they undoubtedly did), but about who did them (probably not Russian gov), and if hacks mattered (they didn't since everything was getting leaked anyway). ..."
"... The DNC/Mueller/etc are lying, but like most practiced liars they're mixing the lies with half-truths and unrelated facts to muddy the waters: ..."
"... An interesting question is, since it's basically guaranteed the DNC got hacked, but probably not by the Russians, is, what groups did hack the DNC, and why did the DNC scramble madly to hide their identities? ..."
"... And while you think about that question, consider the close parallel with the Awan case, where Dems were ostensibly the victims, but they again scrambled to cover up for the people who supposedly harmed them. level 2 ..."
"... DNC wasn't even hacked. Emails were leaked. They didn't even examine the server. Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools that we know about from wikileaks. It's important to know how each new lie is a lie. But man I am just so done with all this Russia shit. level 2 ..."
"... Crowdstrike claims that malware was found on DNC server. I agree that this has nothing to do with the Wikileaks releases. What I am wondering is whether Crowdstrike may have arranged for the DNC to be hacked so that Russia could be blamed. Continue this thread level 1 ..."
"... George Eliason promises additional essays: *The next articles, starting with one about Fancy Bear's hot/cold ongoing relationship with Bellingcat which destroys the JIT investigation, will showcase the following: Fancy Bear worked with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian government providing Information War material as evidence for MH17: ..."
"... Fancy Bear is an inside unit of the Atlantic Council and their Digital Forensics Lab ..."
Dec 04, 2018 | www.reddit.com

Cyberanalyst George Eliason has written some intriguing blogs recently claiming that the "Fancy Bear" which hacked the DNC server in mid-2016 was in fact a branch of Ukrainian intelligence linked to the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike. I invite you to have a go at one of his recent essays:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/06/25/who-is-fancy-bear-and-who-are-they-working-for/

Since I am not very computer savvy and don't know much about the world of hackers - added to the fact that Eliason's writing is too cute and convoluted - I have difficulty navigating Eliason's thought. Nonetheless, here is what I can make of Eliasons' claims, as supported by independent literature:

Russian hacker Konstantin Kozlovsky, in Moscow court filings, has claimed that he did the DNC hack – and can prove it, because he left some specific code on the DNC server.

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/366696-russian-hacker-claims-he-can-prove-he-hacked-dnc

Kozlovsky states that he did so by order of Dimitry Dokuchaev (formerly of the FSB, and currently in prison in Russia on treason charges) who works with the Russian traitor hacker group Shaltai Boltai.

https://www.newsweek.com/russian-hacker-stealing-clintons-emailshacking-dnc-putinsfsb-745555 (Note that Newsweek's title is an overt lie.)

According to Eliason, Shaltai Boltai works in collaboration with the Ukrainian hacker group RUH8, a group of neo-Nazis (Privat Sektor) who are affiliated with Ukrainian intelligence. And RUH8 is allied with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike.

https://off-guardian.org/2018/06/25/who-is-fancy-bear-and-who-are-they-working-for/

Cyberexpert Jeffrey Carr has stated that RUH8 has the X-Agent malware which our intelligence community has erroneously claimed is possessed only by Russian intelligence, and used by "Fancy Bear".

https://medium.com/@jeffreyscarr/the-gru-ukraine-artillery-hack-that-may-never-have-happened-820960bbb02d

Eliason has concluded that RUH8 is Fancy Bear.

This might help explain why Adam Carter has determined that some of the malware found on the DNC server was compiled AFTER Crowdstrike was working on the DNC server – Crowdstrike was in collusion with Fancy Bear (RUH8).

In other words, Crowdstrike likely arranged for a hack by Ukrainian intelligence that they could then attribute to Russia.

As far as I can tell, none of this is pertinent to how Wikileaks obtained their DNC emails, which most likely were leaked.

How curious that our Deep State and the recent Mueller indictment have had nothing to say about Kozlovsky's confession - whom I tend to take seriously because he offers a simple way to confirm his claim. Also interesting that the FBI has shown no interest in looking at the DNC server to check whether Kozlovsky's code is there.

I will ask Adam Carter for his opinion on this. 19 comments 84% Upvoted This thread is archived New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast Sort by View discussions in 1 other community level 1


zer0mas 1 point · 1 year ago

Its worth noting that Dimitri Alperovich's (Crowdstrike) hatred of Putin is second only to Hillary's hatred for taking responsibility for her actions. level 1

veganmark 2 points · 1 year ago

Thanks - I'll continue to follow Eliason's work. The thesis that Ukrainian intelligence is hacking a number of targets so that Russia gets blamed for it has intuitive appeal. level 1

alskdmv-nosleep4u -1 points · 1 year ago

I see things like this:

DNC wasn't even hacked.

and have to cringe. Any hacks weren't related to Wikileaks, who got their info from leakers, but that is not the same thing as no hack. Leaks and hacks aren't mutually exclusive. They actually occur together pretty commonly.

DNC's security was utter shit. Systems with shit security and obviously valuable info usually get hacked by multiple groups. In the case of the DNC, Hillary's email servers, etc., it's basically impossible they weren't hacked by dozens of intruders. A plastic bag of 100s will not sit untouched on a NYC street corner for 4 weeks. Not. fucking. happening.

Interestingly, Russia was probably not one of the hacking groups. The willful destruction of evidence by the DNC themselves probably points to Russia not being one of the those groups. The DNC wouldn't destroy evidence that supported their position. Also, government spy agencies keep info like that closely held. They might leak out tidbits, but they don't do wholesale dumps, like, ever.

That's what the DNC is lying about. Not that hacks happened (they undoubtedly did), but about who did them (probably not Russian gov), and if hacks mattered (they didn't since everything was getting leaked anyway).

The DNC/Mueller/etc are lying, but like most practiced liars they're mixing the lies with half-truths and unrelated facts to muddy the waters:

Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools

Yes, but that spoofed 'evidence' is not the direct opposite of the truth, like I see people assuming. Bad assumption, and the establishment plays on that to make critic look bad. The spoofed evidence is just mud.

An interesting question is, since it's basically guaranteed the DNC got hacked, but probably not by the Russians, is, what groups did hack the DNC, and why did the DNC scramble madly to hide their identities?

And while you think about that question, consider the close parallel with the Awan case, where Dems were ostensibly the victims, but they again scrambled to cover up for the people who supposedly harmed them. level 2

alskdmv-nosleep4u 2 points · 1 year ago

What's hilarious about the 2 down-votes is I can't tell if their from pro-Russiagate trolls, or from people who who can't get past binary thinking. level 1

Honztastic 2 points · 1 year ago

DNC wasn't even hacked. Emails were leaked. They didn't even examine the server. Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools that we know about from wikileaks. It's important to know how each new lie is a lie. But man I am just so done with all this Russia shit. level 2

veganmark 2 points · 1 year ago

Crowdstrike claims that malware was found on DNC server. I agree that this has nothing to do with the Wikileaks releases. What I am wondering is whether Crowdstrike may have arranged for the DNC to be hacked so that Russia could be blamed. Continue this thread level 1

Inuma I take the headspace of idiots 9 points · 1 year ago

So you mean to tell me that WWIII is being prepared by Mueller and it was manufactured consent?

I'd be shocked, but this only proves that the "Deep State" only cares about their power, consequences be damned. level 1

veganmark 8 points · 1 year ago

George Eliason promises additional essays: *The next articles, starting with one about Fancy Bear's hot/cold ongoing relationship with Bellingcat which destroys the JIT investigation, will showcase the following: Fancy Bear worked with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian government providing Information War material as evidence for MH17:

HillaryBrokeTheLaw Long live dead poets 10 points · 1 year ago

Nice.

I'm glad you're still following this. Crowdstrike is shady af. level 1

[Dec 04, 2019] Fancy Bear - Conservapedia

Highly recommended!
Dec 04, 2019 | www.conservapedia.com

Fancy Bear (also know as Strontium Group, or APT28) is a Ukrainian cyber espionage group. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike incorrectly has said with a medium level of confidence that it is associated with the Russian military intelligence agency GRU . CrowdStrike founder, Dmitri Alperovitch , has colluded with Fancy Bear. American journalist George Eliason has written extensively on the subject.

There are a couple of caveats that need to be made when identifying the Fancy Bear hackers. The first is the identifier used by Mueller as Russian FSB and GRU may have been true- 10 years ago. This group was on the run trying to stay a step ahead of Russian law enforcement until October 2016. So we have part of the Fancy bear hacking group identified as Ruskie traitors and possibly former Russian state security. The majority of the group are Ukrainians making up Ukraine's Cyber Warfare groups.

Eliason lives and works in Donbass. He has been interviewed by and provided analysis for RT, the BBC , and Press-TV. His articles have been published in the Security Assistance Monitor, Washingtons Blog, OpedNews, the Saker, RT, Global Research, and RINF, and the Greanville Post among others. He has been cited and republished by various academic blogs including Defending History, Michael Hudson, SWEDHR, Counterpunch, the Justice Integrity Project, among others.

Contents [ hide ] Fancy Bear is Ukrainian Intelligence Shaltai Boltai

The "Fancy Bear hackers" may have been given the passwords to get into the servers at the DNC because they were part of the Team Clinton opposition research team. It was part of their job.

According to Politico ,

"In an interview this month, at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities -- including Ukrainian-Americans -- she said that, when Trump's unlikely presidential campaign. Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While her consulting work began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump's ties to Russia, as well." [1]

The only investigative journalists, government officials, and private intelligence operatives that work together in 2014-2015-2016 Ukraine are Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta, Ukraine Cyber Alliance, and the Ministry of Information.

All of these hacking and information operation groups work for Andrea Chalupa with EuroMaidanPR and Irena Chalupa at the Atlantic Council. Both Chalupa sisters work directly with the Ukrainian government's intelligence and propaganda arms.

Since 2014 in Ukraine, these are the only OSINT, hacking, Intel, espionage , terrorist , counter-terrorism, cyber, propaganda , and info war channels officially recognized and directed by Ukraine's Information Ministry. Along with their American colleagues, they populate the hit-for-hire website Myrotvorets with people who stand against Ukraine's criminal activities.

The hackers, OSINT, Cyber, spies, terrorists, etc. call themselves volunteers to keep safe from State level retaliation, even though a child can follow the money. As volunteers motivated by politics and patriotism they are protected to a degree from retribution.

They don't claim State sponsorship or governance and the level of attack falls below the threshold of military action. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had a lot of latitude for making the attribution Russian, even though the attacks came from Ukrainian Intelligence. Based on how the rules of the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber are written, because the few members of the coalition from Shaltai Boltai are Russian in nationality, Fancy Bear can be attributed as a Russian entity for the purposes of retribution. The caveat is if the attribution is proven wrong, the US will be liable for damages caused to the State which in this case is Russia.

How large is the Fancy Bear unit? According to their propaganda section InformNapalm, they have the ability to research and work in over 30 different languages.

This can be considered an Information Operation against the people of the United States and of course Russia. After 2013, Shaltay Boltay was no longer physically available to work for Russia. The Russian hackers were in Ukraine working for the Ukrainian government's Information Ministry which is in charge of the cyber war. They were in Ukraine until October 2016 when they were tricked to return to Moscow and promptly arrested for treason.

From all this information we know the Russian component of Team Fancy Bear is Shaltai Boltai. We know the Ukrainian Intel component is called CyberHunta and Ukraine Cyber Alliance which includes the hacker group RUH8. We know both groups work/ worked for Ukrainian Intelligence. We know they are grouped with InformNapalm which is Ukraine's OSINT unit. We know their manager is a Ukrainian named Kristina Dobrovolska. And lastly, all of the above work directly with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich.

In short, the Russian-Ukrainian partnership that became Fancy Bear started in late 2013 to very early 2014 and ended in October 2016 in what appears to be a squabble over the alleged data from the Surkov leak.

But during 2014, 2015, and 2016 Shaltai Boltai, the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, and CyberHunta went to work for the DNC as opposition researchers .

The First Time Shaltai Boltai was Handed the Keys to US Gov Servers

The setup to this happened long before the partnership with Ukrainian Intel hackers and Russia's Shaltai Boltai was forged. The hack that gained access to US top-secret servers happened just after the partnership was cemented after Euro-Maidan.

In August 2009 Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department Huma Abedin sent the passwords to her Government laptop to her Yahoo mail account. On August 16, 2010, Abedin received an email titled "Re: Your yahoo account. We can see where this is going, can't we?

"After Abedin sent an unspecified number of sensitive emails to her Yahoo account, half a billion Yahoo accounts were hacked by Russian cybersecurity expert and Russian intelligence agent, Igor Sushchin, in 2014. The hack, one of the largest in history, allowed Sushchin's associates to access email accounts into 2015 and 2016."

Igor Sushchin was part of the Shaltai Boltai hacking group that is charged with the Yahoo hack.

The time frame has to be noted. The hack happened in 2014. Access to the email accounts continued through 2016. The Ukrainian Intel partnership was already blossoming and Shaltai Boltai was working from Kiev, Ukraine.

So when we look at the INFRASTRUCTURE HACKS, WHITE HOUSE HACKS, CONGRESS, start with looking at the time frame. Ukraine had the keys already in hand in 2014.

Chalupa collusion with Ukrainian Intelligence
See also: Ukrainian collusion and Ukrainian collusion timeline

Alexandra Chalupa hired this particular hacking terrorist group, which Dimitry Alperovich and Crowdstrike dubbed "Fancy Bear", in 2015 at the latest. While the Ukrainian hackers worked for the DNC, Fancy Bear had to send in progress reports, turn in research, and communicate on the state of the projects they were working on. Let's face it, once you're in, setting up your Fancy Bear toolkit doesn't get any easier. This is why I said the DNC hack isn't the big crime. It's a big con and all the parties were in on it.

Hillary Clinton exposed secrets to hacking threats by using private email instead of secured servers. Given the information provided she was probably being monitored by our intrepid Ruskie-Ukie union made in hell hackers. Anthony Weiner exposed himself and his wife Huma Abedin using Weiner's computer for top-secret State Department emails. And of course Huma Abedin exposed herself along with her top-secret passwords at Yahoo and it looks like the hackers the DNC hired to do opposition research hacked her.

Here's a question. Did Huma Abedin have Hillary Clinton's passwords for her private email server? It would seem logical given her position with Clinton at the State Department and afterward. This means that Hillary Clinton and the US government top secret servers were most likely compromised by Fancy Bear before the DNC and Team Clinton hired them by using legitimate passwords.

Dobrovolska

Hillary Clinton retained State Dept. top secret clearance passwords for 6 of her former staff from 2013 through prepping for the 2016 election. [2] [3] Alexandra Chalupa was running a research department that is rich in (foreign) Ukrainian Intelligence operatives, hackers, terrorists, and a couple Ruskie traitors.

Kristina Dobrovolska was acting as a handler and translator for the US State Department in 2016. She is the Fancy Bear *opposition researcher handler manager. Kristina goes to Washington to meet with Chalupa.

Alexandra types in her password to show Dobrovolska something she found and her eager to please Ukrainian apprentice finds the keystrokes are seared into her memory. She tells the Fancy Bear crew about it and they immediately get to work looking for Trump material on the US secret servers with legitimate access. I mean, what else could they do with this? Turn over sensitive information to the ever corrupt Ukrainian government?

According to the Politico article, Alexandra Chalupa was meeting with the Ukrainian embassy in June of 2016 to discuss getting more help sticking it to candidate Trump. At the same time she was meeting, the embassy had a reception that highlighted female Ukrainian leaders.

Four Verkhovna Rada [parlaiment] deputies there for the event included: Viktoriia Y. Ptashnyk, Anna A. Romanova, Alyona I. Shkrum, and Taras T. Pastukh. [4]

According to CNN , [5] DNC sources said Chalupa told DNC operatives the Ukrainian government would be willing to deliver damaging information against Trump's campaign. Later, Chalupa would lead the charge to try to unseat president-elect Trump starting on Nov 10, 2016.

Accompanying them Kristina Dobrovolska who was a U.S. Embassy-assigned government liaison and translator who escorted the delegates from Kyiv during their visits to Albany and Washington.

Kristina Dobrovolska is the handler manager working with Ukraine's DNC Fancy Bear Hackers. [6] She took the Rada [parliament] members to dinner to meet Joel Harding who designed Ukraine's infamous Information Policy which opened up their kill-for-hire-website Myrotvorets. Then she took them to meet the Ukrainian Diaspora leader doing the hiring. Nestor Paslawsky is the surviving nephew to the infamous torturer The WWII OUNb leader, Mykola Lebed.

Fancy Bear's Second Chance at Top Secret Passwords From Team Clinton

One very successful method of hacking is called social engineering . You gain access to the office space and any related properties and physically locate the passwords or clues to get you into the hardware you want to hack. This includes something as simple as looking over the shoulder of the person typing in passwords.

The Fancy Bear hackers were hired by Alexandra Chalupa to work for DNC opposition research. On different occasions, Fancy Bear handler Kristina Dobrovolska traveled to the US to meet the Diaspora leaders, her boss Alexandra Chalupa, Irena Chalupa, Andrea Chalupa, US Dept of State personnel, and most likely Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich. Alperovich was working with the hackers in 2015-16. In 2016, the only groups known to have Fancy Bear's signature tools called X-tunnel and X-Agent were Alperovich, Crowdstrike, and Fancy Bear (Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta, Ukraine Cyber Alliance, and RUH8/RUX8. Yes, that does explain a few things.

Alleged DNC hack

There were multiple DNC hacks. There is also clear proof supporting the download to a USB stick and subsequent information exchange (leak) to Wikileaks . All are separate events.

At the same time this story developed, it overshadowed the Hillary Clinton email scandal. It is a matter of public record that Team Clinton provided the DNC hackers with passwords to State Department servers on at least 2 occasions, one wittingly and one not. Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian Intelligence Operators.

If the leak came through Seth Rich , it may have been because he saw foreign Intel operatives given this access from the presumed winners of the 2016 US presidential election . The leaker may have been trying to do something about it. I'm curious what information Wikileaks might have.

Alperovitch and Fancy Bear

George Eliason, Washingtonsblog: Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear. investigated. [7]

  • In the wake of the JAR-16-20296 dated December 29, 2016 about hacking and influencing the 2016 election, the need for real evidence is clear. The joint report adds nothing substantial to the October 7th report. It relies on proofs provided by the cyber security firm Crowdstrike that is clearly not on par with intelligence findings or evidence. At the top of the report is an "as is" statement showing this.
  • The difference bet enough evidence is provided to warrant an investigation of specific parties for the DNC hacks. The real story involves specific anti-American actors that need to be investigated for real crimes. For instance, the malware used was an out-dated version just waiting to be found. The one other interesting point is that the Russian malware called Grizzly Steppe is from Ukraine. How did Crowdstrike miss this when it is their business to know?
  • The bar for identification set by Crowdstrike has never been able to get beyond words like probably, maybe, could be, or should be, in their attribution. The bar Dimitri Alperovitch set for identifying the hackers involved is that low. Other than asking America to trust them, how many solid facts has Alperovitch provided to back his claim of Russian involvement?
  • information from outside intelligence agencies has the value of rumor or unsubstantiated information at best according to policy. Usable intelligence needs to be free from partisan politics and verifiable. Intel agencies noted back in the early 90's that every private actor in the information game was radically political.
  • Alperovitch first gained notice when he was the VP in charge of threat research with McAfee. Asked to comment on Alperovitch's discovery of Russian hacks on Larry King, John McAfee had this to say. "Based on all of his experience, McAfee does not believe that Russians were behind the hacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC), John Podesta's emails, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. As he told RT, "if it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the Russians."
  • How does Crowdstrike's story part with reality? First is the admission that it is probably, maybe, could be Russia hacking the DNC. "Intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin 'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to Wiki Leaks." The public evidence never goes beyond the word possibility. While never going beyond that or using facts, Crowdstrike insists that it's Russia behind both Clinton's and the Ukrainian losses.
  • NBC carried the story because one of the partners in Crowdstrike is also a consultant for NBC. According to NBC the story reads like this."The company, Crowdstrike, was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack and issued a report publicly attributing it to Russian intelligence. One of Crowdstrike's senior executives is Shawn Henry , a former senior FBI official who consults for NBC News.
  • In June, Crowdstrike went public with its findings that two separate Russian intelligence agencies had hacked the DNC. One, which Crowdstrike and other researchers call Cozy Bear, is believed to be linked to Russia's CIA, known as the FSB. The other, known as Fancy Bear, is believed to be tied to the military intelligence agency, called the GRU." The information is so certain the level of proof never rises above "believed to be." According to the December 12th Intercept article "Most importantly, the Post adds that "intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin 'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks."
  • The SBU, Olexander Turchinov, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense all agree that Crowdstrike is dead wrong in this assessment. Although subtitles aren't on it, the former Commandant of Ukrainian Army Headquarters thanks God Russia never invaded or Ukraine would have been in deep trouble. How could Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike be this wrong on easily checked detail and still get this much media attention?
  • Crowdstrike CEO Dmitri Alperovitch story about Russian hacks that cost Hillary Clinton the election was broadsided by the SBU (Ukrainian Intelligence and Security) in Ukraine. If Dimitri Alperovitch is working for Ukrainian Intelligence and is providing intelligence to 17 US Intelligence Agencies is it a conflict of interest?
  • Is giving misleading or false information to 17 US Intelligence Agencies a crime? If it's done by a cyber security industry leader like Crowdstrike should that be investigated? If unwinding the story from the "targeting of Ukrainian volunteers" side isn't enough, we should look at this from the American perspective. How did the Russia influencing the election and DNC hack story evolve? Who's involved? Does this pose conflicts of interest for Dmitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? And let's face it, a hacking story isn't complete until real hackers with the skills, motivation, and reason are exposed.
  • According to journalist and DNC activist Andrea Chalupa on her Facebook page "After Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter to a meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns within the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. "That's when we knew it was the Russians," said a Democratic Party source who has been directly involved in the internal probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, "we told her to stop her research."" July 25, 2016
  • If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her sister Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news. The DNC hacking investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by Russian actors based on the work done by Alexandra Chalupa ? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection.
  • How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he should have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a presidential election in a new direction. According to Esquire.com, Alperovitch has vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the past. Because of his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said the measures taken were directly because of his work.
  • Alperovitch's relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers [show a conflict of interest]. When it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that tried hard to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016.
  • The Chalupas are not Democrat or Republican. They are OUNb. The OUNb worked hard to start a war between the USA and Russia for the last 50 years. According to the Ukrainian Weekly in a rare open statement of their existence in 2011, "Other statements were issued in the Ukrainian language by the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (B) and the International Conference in Support of Ukraine. The OUN (Bandera wing) called for" What is OUNb Bandera? They follow the same political policy and platform that was developed in the 1930's by Stepan Bandera . When these people go to a Holocaust memorial they are celebrating both the dead and the OUNb SS that killed. [8] There is no getting around this fact. The OUNb have no concept of democratic values and want an authoritarian fascism .
  • Alexandra Chalupa- According to the Ukrainian Weekly , [9]
"The effort, known as Digital Miadan, gained momentum following the initial Twitter storms. Leading the effort were: Lara Chelak, Andrea Chalupa, Alexandra Chalupa, Constatin Kostenko and others." The Digital Maidan was also how they raised money for the coup. This was how the Ukrainian emigres bought the bullets that were used on Euromaidan. Ukraine's chubby nazi, Dima Yarosh stated openly he was taking money from the Ukrainian emigres during Euromaidan and Pravy Sektor still fundraises openly in North America. The "Sniper Massacre" on the Maidan in Ukraine by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottowa shows clearly detailed evidence how the massacre happened. It has Pravy Sektor confessions that show who created the "heavenly hundred. Their admitted involvement as leaders of Digital Maidan by both Chalupas is a clear violation of the Neutrality Act and has up to a 25 year prison sentence attached to it because it ended in a coup.
  • Andrea Chalupa-2014, in a Huff Post article Sept. 1 2016, Andrea Chalupa described Sviatoslav Yurash as one of Ukraine's important "dreamers." He is a young activist that founded Euromaidan Press. Beyond the gushing glow what she doesn't say is who he actually is. Sviatoslav Yurash was Dmitri Yarosh's spokesman just after Maidan. He is a hardcore Ukrainian nationalist and was rewarded with the Deputy Director position for the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) in Kiev.
  • In January, 2014 when he showed up at the Maidan protests he was 17 years old. He became the foreign language media representative for Vitali Klitschko, Arseni Yatsenyuk, and Oleh Tyahnybok. All press enquiries went through Yurash. To meet Dimitri Yurash you had to go through Sviatoslav Yurash as a Macleans reporter found out.
  • At 18 years old, Sviatoslav Yurash became the spokesman for Ministry of Defense of Ukraine under Andrei Paruby. He was Dimitri Yarosh's spokesman and can be seen either behind Yarosh on videos at press conferences or speaking ahead of him to reporters. From January 2014 onward, to speak to Dimitri Yarosh, you set up an appointment with Yurash.
  • Andrea Chalupa has worked with Yurash's Euromaidan Press which is associated with Informnapalm.org and supplies the state level hackers for Ukraine.
  • Irene Chalupa- Another involved Chalupa we need to cover to do the story justice is Irene Chalupa. From her bio– Irena Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. She is also a senior correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where she has worked for more than twenty years. Ms. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the Atlantic Council, where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor for Ukraine's propaganda channel org She is also a Ukrainian emigre leader.
  • According to Robert Parry's article [10] At the forefront of people that would have taken senior positions in a Clinton administration and especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council . Their main goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
  • The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with Russia. Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support throughout the campaign.
  • What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite conflict of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground and Clinton needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or Homeland Security?
  • When you put someone that has so much to gain in charge of an investigation that could change an election, that is a conflict of interest. If the think tank is linked heavily to groups that want war with Russia like the Atlantic Council and the CEEC, it opens up criminal conspiracy.
  • If the person in charge of the investigation is a fellow at the think tank that wants a major conflict with Russia it is a definite conflict of interest. Both the Atlantic Council and clients stood to gain Cabinet and Policy positions based on how the result of his work affects the election. It clouds the results of the investigation. In Dmitri Alperovitch's case, he found the perpetrator before he was positive there was a crime.
  • Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence groups is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and Informnapalm.org which is the outlet for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers.
  • When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the CEO of a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm and its hackers individually. There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government. Crowdstrike is also following their hack of a Russian government official after the DNC hack. It closely resembles the same method used with the DNC because it was an email hack.
  • Crowdstrike's product line includes Falcon Host, Falcon Intelligence, Falcon Overwatch and Falcon DNS. Is it possible the hackers in Falcons Flame are another service Crowdstrike offers?
  • In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA. [11] They consider the CIA amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance is a quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity, Falcon Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the Myrotvorets site, Informnapalm analytical agency."
Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This image shows Crowdstrike in their network. Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network. In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The network communication goes through a secondary source. Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence. The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could be on the list.
  • Should someone tell Dimitri Alperovitch that Gerashchenko, who is now in charge of Peacekeeper recently threatened president-elect Donald Trump that he would put him on his "Peacemaker" site as a target? The same has been done with Silvio Berscaloni in the past.
  • Trying not to be obvious, the Head of Ukraine's Information Ministry (UA Intelligence) tweeted something interesting that ties Alperovitch and Crowdstrike to the Ukrainian Intelligence hackers and the Information Ministry even tighter. This single tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him and Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or shared. If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be shared heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it to themselves and not draw unwanted attention.
  • These same hackers are associated with Alexandra, Andrea, and Irene Chalupa through the portals and organizations they work with through their OUNb. The hackers are funded and directed by or through the same OUNb channels that Alperovitch is working for and with to promote the story of Russian hacking.
  • When you look at the image for the hacking group in the euromaidanpress article, one of the hackers identifies themselves as one of Dimitri Yarosh's Pravy Sektor members by the Pravy Sektor sweatshirt they have on. Noted above, Pravy Sektor admitted to killing the people at the Maidan protest and sparked the coup.
  • Going further with the linked Euromaidanpress article the hackers say "Let's understand that Ukrainian hackers and Russian hackers once constituted a single very powerful group. Ukrainian hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of the USA I don't know, why would we need it? We have all the talent and special means for this. And I don't think that the USA or any NATO country would make such sharp movements in international politics."
  • What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it out for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored, Russian language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack they have the tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are also laughing at US intel efforts.
  • The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting a war between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt Russia worst. Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by Alperovitch, both he and these hackers need to be investigated.
  • According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought the government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of the personal in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any other way," he told me. "I have."
  • While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism is not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering a conflict with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine.
  • The evidence presented deserves investigation because it looks like the case for conflict of interest is the least Dimitri Alperovitch should look forward to. If these hackers are the real Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, they really did make sharp movements in international politics. By pawning it off on Russia, they made a worldwide embarrassment of an outgoing President of the United States and made the President Elect the suspect of rumor.
Obama, Brazile, Comey, and CrowdStrike

According to Obama the hacks continued until September 2016. According to ABC, Donna Brazile says the hacks didn't stop until after the elections in 2016. According to Crowdstrike the hacks continued into November.

Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile said Russian hackers persisted in trying to break into the organization's computers "daily, hourly" until after the election -- contradicting President Obama's assertion that the hacking stopped in September after he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin to "cut it out."-ABC

This time frame gives a lot of latitude to both hacks and leaks happening on that server and still agrees with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs). According to Bill Binney , the former Technical Director for the NSA, the only way that data could move off the server that fast was through a download to a USB stick. The transfer rate of the file does not agree with a Guciffer 2.0 hack and the information surrounding Guciffer 2.0 is looking ridiculous and impossible at best.

The DNC fiasco isn't that important of a crime. The reason I say this is the FBI would have taken control over material evidence right away. No law enforcement agency or Intel agency ever did. This means none of them considered it a crime Comey should have any part of investigating. That by itself presents the one question mark which destroys any hope Mueller has proving law enforcement maintained a chain of custody for any evidence he introduces.

It also says the US government under Barrack Obama and the victimized DNC saw this as a purely political event. They didn't want this prosecuted or they didn't think it was prosecutable.

Once proven it shows a degree of criminality that makes treason almost too light a charge in federal court. Rest assured this isn't a partisan accusation. Team Clinton and the DNC gets the spotlight but there are Republicans involved.

Further reading

[Dec 04, 2019] June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams by George Webb

Highly recommended!
Nov 27, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Investigative Jouralist George Webb worked at MacAfee and Network Solutions in 2000 when the CEO Bill Larsen bought a small, Moscow based, hacking and virus writing company to move to Silicon Valley.

MacAfee also purchased PGP, an open source encryption software developed by privacy advocate to reduce NSA spying on the public.

The two simultaneous purchase of PGP and the Moscow hacking team by Metwork Solutions was sponsored by the CIA and FBI in order to crack encrypted communications to write a back door for law enforcement.

Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike.

In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives.

[Dec 04, 2019] Atkinson role in Ukrainegate

Highly recommended!
Is Atkinson linked to Brennan?
Dec 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Will Smith , 21 November 2019 at 12:32 AM

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) is Michael K Atkinson. ICIG Atkinson is the official who accepted the ridiculous premise of a hearsay 'whistle-blower' complaint; an intelligence whistleblower who was "blowing-the-whistle" based on second hand information of a phone call without any direct personal knowledge, ie 'hearsay'.

The center of the Lawfare Alliance influence was/is the Department of Justice National Security Division, DOJ-NSD. It was the DOJ-NSD running the Main Justice side of the 2016 operations to support Operation Crossfire Hurricane and FBI agent Peter Strzok. It was also the DOJ-NSD where the sketchy legal theories around FARA violations (Sec. 901) originated.

Michael K Atkinson was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD) in 2016. That makes Atkinson senior legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who were the former heads of the DOJ-NSD in 2016 when the stop Trump operation was underway.

Michael Atkinson was the lawyer for the same DOJ-NSD players who: (1) lied to the FISA court (Judge Rosemary Collyer) about the 80% non compliant NSA database abuse using FBI contractors; (2) filed the FISA application against Carter Page; and (3) used FARA violations as tools for political surveillance and political targeting.

Yes, that means Michael Atkinson was Senior Counsel for the DOJ-NSD, at the very epicenter of the political weaponization and FISA abuse.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/10/04/sketchy-inspector-general-michael-atkinson-admits-whistle-blower-never-informed-him-of-contact-with-schiff-committee/

[Dec 04, 2019] CIA Covert Operative William Barr Nominated by Trump for Attorney General. His Role in the Iran Contra Affair - Global Research

Notable quotes:
"... Barr was a full-time CIA operative, recruited by Langley out of high school, starting in 1971. Barr's youth career goal was to head the CIA. ..."
"... CIA operative assigned to the China directorate, where he became close to powerful CIA operative George H.W. Bush, whose accomplishments already included the CIA/Cuba Bay of Pigs, Asia CIA operations (Vietnam War, Golden Triangle narcotics), Nixon foreign policy (Henry Kissinger), and the Watergate operation. ..."
"... When George H.W. Bush became CIA Director in 1976, Barr joined the CIA's "legal office" and Bush's inner circle, and worked alongside Bush's longtime CIA enforcers Theodore "Ted" Shackley, Felix Rodriguez, Thomas Clines, and others, several of whom were likely involved with the Bay of Pigs/John F. Kennedy assassination, and numerous southeast Asian operations, from the Phoenix Program to Golden Triangle narco-trafficking. ..."
"... Barr stonewalled and destroyed the Church Committee investigations into CIA abuses ..."
"... Barr stonewalled and stopped inquiries in the CIA bombing assassination of Chilean opposition leader Orlando Letelier. ..."
"... Barr stonewalled and stopped investigations into all Bush/Clinton and CIA crimes, including BCCI and BNL CIA drug banking, the theft of Inslaw/PROMIS software, and all crimes of state committed by Bush ..."
"... Barr provided legal cover for Bush's illegal foreign policy and war crimes ..."
Dec 04, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

Barr: CIA operative

It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone out of their way to hire fixers to be their attorney generals.

Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007), John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno (1993-2001), Dick Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.

Barr, however, is a particularly spectacular and sordid case. As George H.W. Bush's most notorious insider, and as the AG from 1991 to 1993, Barr wreaked havoc, flaunted the rule of law, and proved himself to be one of the CIA/Deep State's greatest and most ruthless champions and protectors :

A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the Bush apparatus as any other, besides Poppy Bush himself.

Iran-Contra

To understand the scope, scale, and gravity of William Barr's central role working for George H.W. Bush , one must grasp the significance of Iran-Contra, the massive criminal operation that was the cornerstone of the Bush era, headed by the Bushes, with the Clintons as partners.

As previously written :

Originally coined "Iran-Contra" (in reference to illegal arms sales to Iran in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon and arms to the Contra "freedom fighters" in Nicaragua), the moniker hides the fact that it became a massive and permanent criminal business and political machine that went far beyond then-current political concerns.

In The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider , Al Martin describes the Iran-Contra Enterprise that a vast operation that included (and was not limited to) drugs, weapons, terrorism, war, money laundering, criminal banking and securities fraud, currency fraud, real estate fraud, insurance fraud, blackmail, extortion, and political corruption that involved countless Washington politicians of both Republican and Democratic parties.

Martin:

"Iran-Contra itself is a euphemism for the outrageous fraud perpetrated by government criminals for profit and control. Offhandedly, this inaccurate term entered history as shorthand for the public scandals of illicit arms sales to Iran coupled with illicit weapons deals for Nicaragua. The real story, however, is much more complex When George Bush, [CIA Director] Bill Casey and Oliver North initiated their plan of government-sanctioned fraud and drug smuggling, they envisioned using 500 men to raise $35 billion .they ended up using about 5,000 operatives and making over $35 billion." In addition, the operation became "a government within a government, comprising some thirty to forty thousand people the American government turns to, when it wishes certain illegal covert operations to be extant pursuant to a political objective" with George [H.W.] Bush "at the top of the pyramid".

The operation's insiders and whistleblowers place George H.W.Bush as one of its top architects, and its commander. It was carried out by CIA operatives close to Bush since his CIA directorship and even stretching back to the Bay of Pigs. These included Oliver North, Ted Shackley, Edwin Wilson, Felix Rodriguez, and others. Iran-Contra was a replication of the CIA's Golden Triangle drug trafficking in Southeast Asia (operations also connected to Bush) but on a larger scale and sophistication, greater complexity, and far-reaching impact that remains palpable to this day.

In George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography , Webster Tarpley wrote that, "many once-classified documents have come to light, which suggest that Bush organized and supervised many, or most, of the criminal aspects of the Iran-Contra adventures."

Tarpley further points out that George H.W. Bush created new structures ("special situation group", "terror incident working group" etc.) within the Reagan administration -- and that

"all of these structures revolved around [creating] the secret command role of the then-Vice President, George Bush The Bush apparatus, within and behind the government, was formed to carry out covert policies: to make war when the constitutional government had decided not to make war; to support enemies of the nation (terrorists and drug runners) who are the friends and agents of the secret government."

This suggests that George H.W.Bush not only ran Iran-Contra, but much of the Reagan presidency. Then-White House press secretary James Baker said in 1981,

"Bush is functioning much like a co-president. George is involved in all the national security stuff because of his special background as CIA director. All the budget working groups, he was there, the economic working groups, the Cabinet meetings. He is included in almost all the meetings."

Hundreds of insiders, witnesses and investigators have blown the lid off of the Iran-Contra Enterprise in exhaustive fashion. These include the investigations of Mike Ruppert ( From The Wilderness , Crossing the Rubicon ), Al Martin ( The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider ), Gary Webb ( Dark Alliance ), Rodney Stich ( Defrauding America , Drugging America ), Terry Reed ( Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA ), Stew Webb (and here ), Dois "Chip" Tatum ( The Tatum Chronicles ) ( summarized here ), Pete Brewton ( The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush ), among others. The accounts of Barry Seal, Edward Cutolo, Albert Carone, Bradley Ayers, Tosh Plumley, Bill Tyree, Gunther Russbacher, Celerino Castillo, Michael Levine, Trenton Parker, Russell Bowen, Richard Brenneke, Larry Nichols , William Duncan, Russell Welch and dozens more implicate the Bushes, the Clintons and the CIA.

As described by Mike Ruppert (image left):

"It stood, and still stands today, isolated and immune from the operating principles of democracy. It is autonomous and it operates through self-funding via narcotics and weapons trafficking. To quote [former CIA director] William Casey it is 'a completely self-funding, off-the-shelf operation.' It, in fact, dictates a substantial portion of this country's foreign, economic and military policy from a place not accessible to the will of a free people properly armed with facts."

CIA deep cover agent pilot Chip Tatum, a key Iran-Contra player who flew drugs into Mena and Little Rock in Arkansas, worked alongside CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal. It is believed that Seal was subsequently murdered by the Medellin Cartel, on order of Oliver North and the Bushes, to prevent him from testifying about his activities. Before he was killed, Seal provided Tatum a list of Iran-Contra "Boss Hogs" who allegedly controlled the drug trade. The Pegasus File summaries Tatum's activities, and features the "Boss Hog" list.

The Iran-Contra apparatus was byzantine, comprised of a network of connected government agencies, subsidiaries, and shell companies and corporations can be seen in the diagram provided by whistleblower Stew Webb:

Bush Crime Family Flow Chart

Progressive Review (1998)

Why is Iran-Contra still relevant today?

The Iran-Contra Enterprise's overseers, criminal associates and beneficiaries, to this day, remain at large [including Barr], with most enjoying massive illegally-obtained wealth, privilege, and highest political and corporate positions. The imperial positions of the Bush and Clinton clans exemplify this.

The operation, in essence, evolved and metastasized into ever-more modern and sophisticated incarnation with even more global reach. New names, new banks, new drugs, new wars, same blueprint. It is not a "deep state" or a "shadow state" but a Criminal State that operates "in broad daylight". It is the playbook of the New World Order. It is globalization at its finest.

All attempts to prosecute were largely unsuccessful -- blocked, stalled, or given a "limited hangout" treatment. As written by Ruppert, one of many Iran-Contra whistleblowers, in Crossing the Rubicon:

"[In Congress] Iran-Contra was effectively 'managed' by Lee Hamilton in the House [of Representatives] and John Kerry (among others) in the Senate throughout the late 1980s to conceal the greatest crimes of the era, crimes committed by a litany of well-known government operatives."

Which brings us to this:

Iran-Contra was also managed on both the operational and all-important judicial "legal" end by none other than William Barr.

Barr: Iran-Contra insider alias "Robert Johnson"

In his books Drugging America: A Trojan Horse and Defrauding America: Dirty Secrets of the CIA and other Government Operations , whistleblower Rodney Stich exposed in exhaustive detail the firsthand accounts of whistleblowers and insiders, who participated in the many criminal operations that stretched across the Bush and Clinton presidencies.

Some of the shocking evidence exposes Barr acting simultaneously as a hands-on covert operative, and as Bush's judicial/political fixer:

In Drugging America , Stich wrote:

[CIA operative] Terry Reed had been in frequent telephone contact with the man he knew as Robert Johnson. Johnson directed the drug trafficking and drug money laundering, the training in Arkansas of Contra pilots and fighters, and authorized Reed to set up the CIA proprietary in Mexico. At a later date, Reed learned that Robert Johnson was really William Barr, appointed by President George Bush to be Attorney General of the United States.

Reed's CIA contact, William Barr, known at that time by his alias Robert Johnson, told Reed that Attorney General Edwin Meese had appointed Michael Fitzhugh to be US Attorney in Western Arkansas, and that he would stonewall any investigation into the Mena, Arkansas drug-related activities. This obstruction of justice by Justice Department officials did occur.

William Barr, who Bush appointed to be the top law enforcement officer in the United States -- US Attorney General -- played a key role in the smuggling of drugs into the United States. [CIA pilot Chip] Tatum's statements about reaching Barr at Southern Air Transport in Miami through the name of Robert Johnson confirmed what [CIA operative] Terry Reed, author of the book Compromised , had told me and had written. Nothing like having members of felony drug operations hold the position of US Attorney General -- in control of the United States Department of Justice -- and a vice president of the United States [Bush]. With this type of influence, no one needs fear being arrested. And don't forget the Mafia groups working with the CIA who also receive Justice Department protection that is not available to US citizens.

According to Stich , Tatum also detailed to him meetings that took place in which he was present for meetings and telephone conversations between Bush, [NSC Colonel] Oliver North and Barr, discussing not only operations but the skimming of drug money by the Clintons.

The purpose of the meeting was to determine who was responsible for stealing over $100 million in drug money on the three routes from Panama to Colorado, Ohio, and Arkansas. This theft was draining the operation known as the "Enterprise" The first call was made by [CIA agent Joseph] Fernandez to Oliver North, informing North that the theft was occurring on the Panama to Arkansas route, and "that means either [CIA pilot Barry] Seal, Clinton, or [Panamanian General Manuel] Noriega" Fifteen minutes later, the portable phone rang, and Vice President George Bush was on the line, talking to William Barr. Barr said at one point, referring to the missing funds, "I would propose that no one source would be bold enough to siphon out that much money, but it is more plausible that each are siphoning a portion, causing a drastic loss."..Barr told Bush that he and Fernandez were staying in Costa Rica until the following day after first visiting [CIA operative] John Hull's ranch. Barr then handed the phone to Tatum, who was instructed by Bush to be sure that Noriega and [Mossad operative Michael] Harari boarded Seal's plane and departed, and for Tatum to get the tail number of Seal's plane .Tatum said that Barr dialed another number, immediately reaching then-governor Bill Clinton. Barr explained the missing money problem to Clinton Barr suggested that Clinton investigate at the Arkansas end of the Panama to Arkansas route, and that he and North would continue investigating the Panama end of the connection, warning that the matter must be resolved or it could lead to "big problems" (This description of missing drug money provided support to a subsequent meeting in Little Rock, described by Terry Reed, during which William Barr accused Clinton of siphoning drug money and that this had to stop.)

Tatum also described to Stich a March 15, 1985 flight, during which "Tatum met with Barr, Harari, and Buddy Young (head of Governor Bill Clinton's security detail). Barr represented himself as an emissary of Vice President George Bush, who would be arriving soon. Tatum would note on his flight book " Bush visit/meet with Barr and had dinner at German restaurant ".

The fact is, William Barr was heavily involved in the Iran-Contra .

Cover-up of BCCI and BNL scandals

As attorney general, obviously still working for CIA/Bush purposes, Barr and Richard Thornburgh (George H.W. Bush's previous attorney general) killed off investigations into BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the notorious CIA drug bank . Barr also stonewalled investigations in the Banca Nationale del Lavoro (BNL), another CIA drug bank.

BCCI was a leading CIA bank used by the Bush/Clinton machine for a vast array of operations, including Iran-Contra drug money laundering.

Barr himself had a personal relationship with BCCI going back to the early 1980s.

William Barr is heading the drive in Virginia to turn prisons into slave labor camps. Here he is shown during a hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee, Nov. 12, 1991, on his nomination as Attorney General in the Bush administration. Left to right: Sen. Strom Thurmond, Sen. Joseph Biden, Barr, Sen. Patrick Leahy. (Source: EIR ) Political Succession and "The Bush-Clinton Nexus": Permanent Criminal State, "A Clinton White House Guarantees War with Russia"

According to Rodney Stich,

"before William Barr came to the Justice Department, he was an attorney with the Washington law firm of Shaw Pittman Potts & Trowbridge. This law firm represented BCCI for several years Barr's former law firm also represented B. Francis Saul II, a director and powerful shareholder in Financial General Bankshares, Inc. Financial later became First American Bankshares, a covert BCCI operation Further, Barr had been legal counsel for the CIA, the same agency that was heavily involved with BCCI corrupt activities. He was CIA counsel during the time that George Bush was Director of the CIA."

When both the CIA and the Justice Department connections and cover-up of BCCI were exposed by the dogged investigations of Congressman Henry Gonzalez, then-FBI Director William Sessions [ note: not related to recent Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions ] promised an investigation. This prompted Attorney General Barr, who himself was engaged in the cover-up and the obstruction of justice, to remove Sessions on trumped-up ethics charges, replacing him with someone more malleable.

Also, as part of the BCCI "negotiation" as well as to maintain control over the Iran-Contra drug operations, Barr allegedly also crafted a legal justification for then-President Bush to invade Panama and kidnap their associate General Manuel Noriega, in order to imprison and silence him before he could expose the operation.

Cover-up of Inslaw and PROMIS software theft

Barr stonewalled investigations and assisted the cover-up of the theft of Inslaw, and PROMIS software by the Department of Justice and the CIA. The otherworldly power of PROMIS software was and still is so coveted that extreme criminal measures have been get it.

Inslaw

PROMIS (Mike Ruppert, From the Wilderness publications)

PROMIS part 2 (Mike Ruppert, From The Wilderness publications)

The Undying Octopus: the FBI and the PROMIS affair

NSA surveillance: PROMIS

According to Rodney Stich in Defrauding America ,

"by misusing the power of their office three US attorney generals in the Reagan-Bush administrations, Edwin Meese, Richard Thornburgh, and William Barr misappropriated, or aided and abetted, the theft of the software called PROMIS."

When the scandal became too noisy, Barr

"appointed a former Justice Department crony to conduct an "investigation" of the Inslaw matter, and then report back to him. The special counsel would be selected by Barr; would be subservient to him; and would report to him. Barr could then ignore the recommendations if, in the remote possibility the special counsel did not cooperate in the expected cover-up."

The Iran-Contra pardons

In the most brazen insult to the American people and the entire world, Barr facilitated George H.W. Bush's infamous 1992 Christmas Eve pardons of six Iran-Contra co-conspirators Caspar Weinberger, Elliott Abrams, Robert McFarlane, Dewey Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George,

With the stroke of a pen, Bush gleefully set free six of his Iran-Contra criminal flunkies, and effectively decapitating Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh's six-year long Iran-Contra probe.

It was Barr who closed the lid on Iran-Contra, freeing virtually the entire Bush/Clinton network, including himself, from punishment.

It was Barr who, with this move, "saved their asses".

The New World Order could not have asked for a better henchman, fixer, and spook than William Barr.

Trump's nomination of Barr: insanity or "part of the plan"?

Trump won the presidency in 2016 on the power of the single mandate to "drain the swamp", and Destroy the Deep State . A vicious global struggle continues to be waged on every front between populist reformers led by Trump and the Deep State/New World Order. This war is taking place in every nation and on every continent. The stakes are deadly. Time is running short.

The Justice Department has been ground zero in this war. Jeff Sessions' tenure as attorney general was opaque and riddled with uncertainties. His interim replacement, Matthew Whittaker, is true Trump loyalist who has the unenviable task of taking immediate action on FISAgate and other investigations into Obama/Clinton administration spying/treason, ending the Robert Mueller's manufactured anti-Trump "Russian Collusion" witch hunt hoax, and do it all before January 2019, when a new Congress full of emboldened Democrats (who will come into office via rampant mid-term election fraud) pursue new avenues to further attack Trump. Numerous critical and potentially explosive congressional testimonies, including investigations into the Clinton Foundation, are all scheduled to take place before January, which could well decide the course of Trump's presidency, and the movement behind him.

Why is William Barr -- the antithesis of a "patriot" and the swampiest of swamp monsters -- now being inserted into the middle of what is supposed to be a "white hat" anti-corruption operation? The move is baffling.

Why did Trump make the pick -- the sole pick -- so immediately, seemingly without thorough vetting?

Who recommended Barr for the job? The "white hats", or the "black hats" that have never stopped planting assassins into Trump's inner circle?

Is it significant or coincidental that the Barr pick came shortly after the death of George H.W. Bush?

Does Trump, who made the pick but claims that he "does not know" Barr (do we believe this?) realize that Barr -- "Robert Johnson" -- is the Deep State swamp's most loyal operators and protectors ? And that Barr is deeply connected and loyal to everyone and everything that Trump opposes?

What role could Trump possibly envision for Barr? Will Barr go after Bill and Hillary Clinton? Jeb and George W. Bush, with whom Barr managed numerous Iran-Contra operations? Will he go after Robert Mueller and James Comey, and dozens of members of Congress, who were also deeply connected to the "Enterprise"?

Why would Barr go against everything he helped create and everything he stood for? Why would he undo his own criminal handiwork by prosecuting his own lifelong criminal colleagues and friends? Barr's career has been about saving the Deep State and the New World Order that he helped make invincible. Why would he do any differently now?

For reasons known only to him, Trump has surrounded himself with bad actors , too many to count. Mike Pence (longtime Bush loyalist), John Bolton, H.R. McMaster, etc. etc. Trump's cabinet has been in constant flux, with many shakeups underway. But William Barr is an entirely different level of criminal. What next? Will Trump invite Dick Cheney to his administration? Bring back Henry Kissinger?

Is Trump being a genius, or is he a dupe and/or a sell-out?

Have Trump and his forces "turned" or leveraged Barr? Is it even possible to control someone like him? "Once CIA, always CIA."

Imagine the spectacle of the pending "confirmation hearings". Will any member of this corrupt Congress grill Barr about Iran-Contra or BCCI? Will anyone stand up and ask "Robert Johnson" to tell the truth? Or will Barr look across at a room full of frightened politicians (many of whom he knows too well) and chortle, knowing that no one in the chamber will dare.

Is this the "draining of the swamp", or is Barr the swamp's ultimate victory, and the end of Trump?

Of limited hangouts and deceptions

In recent interviews , Barr issued noises that seemed supportive of Trump. Barr obviously caught the Trump team's attention based on these comments. (Humorously, the CIA-managed corporate mainstream media has labeled Barr, an actual CIA criminal conspirator, a "conspiracy theorist" for his statements.)

While the mainstream media has latched on to quotes in which Barr said that he supports "some" investigations into the Clintons, he also insists that "throwing Hillary Clinton in jail is inappropriate".

In other words, Barr does not want the swamp to be drained. In other words, Barr only supports limited investigations and limited hangouts.

Barr should be disqualified for the job simply based on this.

Or does the nomination of Barr suggest that President Trump also does not want to fully "drain the swamp"? Is his goal to merely co-opt the New World Order co-opt the New World Order and co-opt the Bush Republican apparatus , in order to take down the Clinton/Obama side of it, while leaving the Bush side intact?

Given that Bush-Clinton/Obama are two sides of the same coin, it is ridiculous and impossible to "go after" one side without "going after" the other, and then claim that any real swamp draining is taking place.

It is also possible that Barr and/or his Bush/CIA colleagues have baited the Trump team with his statements, in order to place him in Trump's administration as a Trojan Horse.

Muted reaction

It is too much to expect the masses, remain uninformed and controlled by propaganda, to understand the significance and danger posed by the reappearance of Barr.

The few who seem aware of Barr's background are alarmed for good reason . But even the more informed observers aren't getting it. Most of those who "trust Trump" and "trust the plan" have not aggressively questioned the move. Even the research-intensive Internet Anon community has been quiet about Barr.

Some Trump optimists are stretching, trying to convince themselves that Trump is using the Barr nomination to "troll", and to point attention back to the Bush history, thus forcing the public to research, recoil and awaken to the truth.

They would like to believe that Trump is continuing to play a game of deception. The "4-D chess player", is merely "keeping enemies close"; manipulating, co-opting, and leveraging compromised figures to his personal bidding; and turn one of the Deep State's own into a weapon against the Deep State. Perhaps they believe that Trump is purposely elevating Barr, in order to fire him later, as he has already done with numerous others in his administration.

Some argue that Barr is useful because he "knows where the bodies are buried". Barr himself helped bury them -- literally in many cases.

If Trump thinks that he can control or leverage someone as dangerous as Barr, then Trump is taking the biggest risk of his presidency, and of his life.

He is also placing the country and the world at risk.

All in the crime family

The atrocities and crimes of the Bushes and Clintons are unspeakable and unimaginable in depravity and scale.

These atrocities were facilitated by William "Robert Johnson" Barr.

Barr, a hands-on participant, is guilty. Furthermore, he poisoned and manipulated the judicial system -- "law enforcement" -- to get himself and his friends off the hook.

Barr must be exposed and condemned, along with the entire Bush/Clinton/Obama network, and all must be denied and removed from all positions of influence and power.

In an unguarded moment in 1992, George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon:

"If people ever knew what we had done, we would be chased down the street and lynched."

*

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[Dec 04, 2019] Trump claims that he escaped GOP mainstream republicans (read hard core neoliebrals) shackles (for now)

Lesson for 2020 -- Trump is a shape and color shifting chameleon. His statement that he "escaped GOP "mainstream republicans" (read hard core neoliberals) shackles" was a blatant lie. He never escaped and did not even have intent to escape... He did their bidding, which was most clearly demonstrated in Trump tax cut
Notable quotes:
"... Trump later tweeted "the shackles have been taken off me". ..."
"... It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to. ..."
"... With the exception of cheating Bernie out of the nom the Dems have always proven to be far more loyal to each other than the Republicans! ..."
"... Disloyal R's are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides. They don't know how to win - I will teach them! ..."
Oct 12, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs : October 11, 2016 at 08:03 AM

'The shackles have been taken off': Trump amps up GOP civil war
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/10/11/donald-trump-blames-paul-ryan-disloyalty-for-hurting-campaign/V5gRA9Xs6MvdU93iUa64cK/story.html?event=event25
via @BostonGlobe - AP - October 11, 2016

Donald Trump is attacking House Speaker Paul Ryan. He's calling him ''very weak and ineffective'' a day after the House speaker said he would not campaign for the Republican nominee.

Ryan told Republican lawmakers on a conference call Monday that he would focus instead on helping the party keep control of the House.

Trump referred to that call in his tweet Tuesday morning. He said Ryan ''had a bad conference call where his members went wild at his disloyalty.''

Trump later tweeted "the shackles have been taken off me".

The real estate mogul also claimed Democrats were more loyal to their party than Republicans.

House Speaker Paul Ryan all but abandoned Donald Trump, obliterating whatever bounce he may have received from Sunday's debate.

It was his second tweet of the morning targeting Ryan. The other said Ryan's ''zero support'' was making it hard for Trump to do well.

Ryan did face some pushback from members upset he was abandoning Trump. The House Speaker continues to endorse the nominee.

Donald J. Trump ✔ ‎@realDonaldTrump

Despite winning the second debate in a landslide (every poll), it is hard to do well when Paul Ryan and others give zero support!

8:16 AM - 11 Oct 2016

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

Our very weak and ineffective leader, Paul Ryan, had a bad conference call where his members went wild at his disloyalty.

9:05 AM - 11 Oct 2016

Donald J. Trump ✔ ‎@realDonaldTrump

It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to.

10:00 AM - 11 Oct 2016

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

With the exception of cheating Bernie out of the nom the Dems have always proven to be far more loyal to each other than the Republicans!

10:15 AM - 11 Oct 2016 · Queens, NY, United States

Donald J. Trump ✔ ‎@realDonaldTrump

Disloyal R's are far more difficult than Crooked Hillary. They come at you from all sides. They don't know how to win - I will teach them!

[Dec 04, 2019] A Warning

Looks like a sequel to Wolff book
Dec 04, 2019 | www.amazon.com

linda galella , November 19, 2019

"This may be our last chance to act to hold the man accountable..."

Well, that was "A Warning", for sure! The anonymous author of this tell all, Trump outter, goes on to proclaim "we must look deeper at the roots of the present disorder, which is why I have written this book."

Based on his/hers opening salvo, I proceeded with an open mind and hoped a first hand accounting of events would give me something more, something new, something unbiased...after reading every single word, I'm not sure what to think any more.

"A Warning", by Anonymous, is a well written political volume that speaks clearly, and authoritatively concerning the events that take place in the White House and with our president, Donald J. Trump. They have avoided all the histrionics that fill the tomes offered by most of the media members. There's plenty of passion and urgency behind what's being said it's just not crazed which for me, lends it an air of veracity. I'm settled for 60% of the discourse.

By chapter 5 my opinion of the author's recanting about the details of the POTUS's daily events has begun to become suspect and I'm starting to get that feeling that something is "off". I read on trying to keep my open mind, feelings at bay. It's not easy because the stories being told are starting to take on a schoolyard tenor such as: listing snippets of twitter tweets (only the "bad"parts), highlighting his inadequacies as a statesman/politician (DJT never claimed to be more than a businessman). It's not wrong to mention these things, it's the spirit in how it's done and the vacuum.

This is about the time that anonymous' logic becomes unfounded, for me; a Venn diagraming dilemma of if-then, WHAT?

Positing that POTUS has such a weakness for strong men that he would make egregious blunders of national security, as well as waffle on business and finance issues just doesn't make sense. Sorry. If for no other reason than his sheer business acumen, I'm rejecting this premise. Yes, he blunders on with lack of finesse in the deportment and statesman columns but...nope.

"A Warning" continues on pretty much in this manner, more and more juvenile until we end up firmly in the land of snark with chapter seven and "The Apologists" where the author in his anonymity proclaims how we can identify the various flavors of apologists, all they think and feel and all they need to do-to get , be and do better; presumptuous, IMHO. I'm sure snark wasn't the intended goal but it's how I arrived, for me.

All things considered, the writing and publishing are excellent. For the first half of the book, I was impressed with the author's ability to detail the story, taking the high road. The road got lonely along the way and anonymous veered to the access road, never joining yellow journalism highway to deliver "A Warning" 📚

Menkaure , November 21, 2019
Half-Hearted Epiphany

A lot of reviewers are saying "It's nothing we didn't already know," and at first, that was my conclusion as well: there's no bombshells here. But upon reflection, there actually is something that we didn't know. It answered a mystery that has perplexed me for the better part of 3 years, albeit I don't think the author knows it themselves. The million dollar question: how could anyone with any morality, dignity, patriotism, or merely a sense of self-preservation work in the Trump administration? 'A Warning' is not any kind of explosive insider expose on the workings of the current White House. It's far too vague and generalized, avoiding specifics on nearly every topic to the point of exasperation. What this book is, is an attempt by the author to justify their bad, and it must be said, weak choices. It's both a sub-conscious excuse and apology for what's clear the author has still not fully come to terms with themselves. Between the lines, you can almost see him/her trying to work it out, never quite grasping his/her own moral weakness in enabling a man they know to be dangerously incompetent. Everybody, anybody, who has ever worked for somebody else has faced this dilemma at some point in their career: when the boss is bad; you either stay for self-serving reasons (like your finances) or you make a stand before the boss damages the whole enterprise. The author is trying to make a stand, and failing at it. The alarming aspect in this instance, is the stakes are so much higher, the highest, in fact. This is a book written by somebody deep in denial, attempting to work it out but not quite willing, yet, to look themselves directly in the mirror. Chapter 7, "Apologists," is the most telling. The author is not just explaining the motivations of his/her co-participants, but is unwittingly addressing their self as well. Perhaps the most important question here, is WHO does Anonymous think they are "Warning?" at this point? For the Never-Trumpers this is all old news. For the Ever-Trumpers, they're never going to read anything unapproved by their Dear Leader. For those on the fence (if there are any) they're comatose and aren't capable of comprehension. This wasn't written for anybody but the author's own conscience, and even at that, it hedges, dances around itself, and avoids mirrors.

Amazon Customer , November 19, 2019
Discusses what is already known about Trump with little in the way of solutions.

The book tells readers what is already known and readily apparent about Donald Trump: his lack of empathy and curiousity, his volatility and impetuousness, his vengeful nature, the long-lasting damage he is doing to the country's institutions and norms.

The book does not delve into much, if any, new territory that has not been previously reported. Mentions of specific administration members and their individual actions are sparing and go little beyond general notions that many intitially thought Trump would turn his behavior around, are continually dumbfounded by him, try behind the scenes to keep the wheels of government on the road and fail due to his ADD, vanity, and pettiness, and that all know they are expendible to him.

The author devotes quite a bit of time discussing historical Greek democratic philosophy and examples to compare to the current situation. While interesting, it only serves to put Trump's personality and failings into yet another historical context which would surprise nobody who has paid any attention to this administration, government, politics, law, or history.

One of the largest problems with the author's arguments and solutions is that it ultimately lack individual courage. The author takes time to discuss the passengers aboard Flight 93 that fought back against the hijackers on 9/11. He/she even ends the book with the famous last words of one of the passengers who fought back: " Let's roll." While we do not know the identity of the author, his or her actions in publishing this book are not the same. The actions of passengers deciding to fight back against hijackers was not anonymous. They did not fail to show their faces. They met the danger head-on and with full knowledge of the consequences of failure. They did not try to leave it to others. The author gives the coda that the general public needs to wake up and do something, but then does not get in the aisle with the rest of the passengers to fight back. While the author's explanation of remaining anonymous is logical (that the message is more important than the messenger), the author ultimately falls prey to one of the flaws of everyone else who serves Trump: that he/she is not willing to speak truth directly to power regardless of the horrific consequences of not doing so. Former Senator Jeff Flake and Representative Justin Amash have made many of the same philosophical and logical points as the author regarding Trump's damaging actions publicly, to their own political demise. The reader cannot help but wonder if the author is still in the administration taking daily part in the passivity of those who know better but will not say it to Trump's face.

The book offers much in the way of problems but little in the way of solutions. The author suggests Americans be engaged in civics and politics at local and state levels. The author suggests that we find the political middle and return to civility. The author does not posit how the reader should, given such a dire warning, convince the many people to change course, who: 1) see what Trump really is and actually like it, 2) have been completely fooled about who Trump really is but will not respond to facts, logic, and/or self-interest, and 3) hold power to do something about Trump (i.e.: 53 Republican Senators) but remain passive due to a variety of personal, social, political, or economic factors.

Ultimately, the book puts forth an important analysis of Trump, the sycophants that surround him, and the damage he continues to do. But it doesn't come with the gravity of someone who is willing to risk his/her own skin in order to try to save the country that he/she seems to hold so dear. The message would mean more if the author was willing to risk all like the passengers of Flight 93.

joel wing , November 22, 2019
Disappointing Repeats major faults w/Trump without adding any new details

A Warning by Anonymous who claims to be a senior Trump administration official comes on the heal of previous tell all books such as Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury and Bob Woodward's Fear. Unfortunately, if one read those books or has paid attention to the news there is nothing really new in A Warning, which outlines the argument against the Trump presidency.

Anonymous' argument is that Trump is unfit for the presidency and most be voted out of office in the next election. The author's complaints are well known. The president knows nothing about how the government, the economy or foreign policy works which leads to endless problems as he makes pronouncements, Tweets, or asks his staff to do things that can't be done, and sometimes might even be illegal. He contemplated telling the National Guard that was deployed to the border with Mexico to shoot people trying to enter illegally as a deterrent. Trump isn't inquisitive, doesn't read, and is an avid consumer of conspiracy theories. Trump for example is so adverse to reading and has such a short attention span that his staff has been reduced to briefing him with just one graphic or one slide that represents one main issue, and to repeat that point over and over in the hopes that it will sink in with the chief executive. Many times that fails. Instead, Trump's main sources of information are cable news and a variety of conspiracy theories he hears or makes up himself. The president's language is divisive. Trump revels in smack talking, and one of his favorite times is to go to rallies where he can unleash a new line against his opponents. He enjoys being a rabble rouser and inciting his followers. The president came into office with a diverse cabinet of generals, politicians, and businessmen, but most of them have left. Not only that, but some of them were willing to stand up to the president and tell him things he didn't want to hear. The author considers himself part of this group. Now Trump is surrounded by people that only tell him what he wants to hear. All together that has led the White House into one crisis after another. Trump Tweets he wanted out of Syria without telling any of his staff beforehand. The White House had outlined a $2 trillion infrastructure bill with the Democrats, but then Trump got mad watching cable TV before a planned meeting and walked away from the deal. The author has one great characterization at an end of a chapter where he says the government is like one of Trump's companies. It's badly managed, a sociopath is at its head, there is infighting, lawsuits, debt, shady deals, and everything is focused upon the owner rather than the customers.

Anonymous does make one new argument you rarely hear, and that is Trump is not a conservative. He starts off with the fact that Trump has changed his party affiliation several times. He also has violated many of the hall marks of conservatism such as free trade, fiscal responsibility, and cutting the size of the federal government. Trump for example, has created a huge budget deficit with his tax cuts while continuing to increase public spending.

Again, the problem with the book isn't the message, it's just that his has all been said before. I was at least expecting some interesting stories to go along with this laundry list of faults, but was disappointed by the lack of them. In the end, if this is the first book you're thinking of reading about Trump you will get the main arguments against his presidency. If you've been following Trump and his faults, then there's little to see here.

E.M. Tennessen , November 21, 2019
Familiar info in a new package

"A Warning" confirms with additional anecdotes what we already know--useful if you don't want to go all over the web for "all the news" about the White House's inner workings and the President's behavior. It's well-written but would have been more compelling if the op-eds, snark and name-calling had been edited out. Clearly, not written (but possibly edited) by someone with a journalism background. The chapter on "character" was the most valuable as it serves as a reminder of what we are looking for in a leader of our country, or any leader, in fact--someone with integrity, honesty, service-minded, respectful of others, clear-thinking, etc. It's clear from what's written here that if the President is re-elected, it says more about our nation than it does about a 73-year-old man who clearly has attention deficit disorder, possibly a reading disability, and absolutely no experience with statecraft. (Nor does he care. I don't know what's worse.) I'm sure this book will become a part of our interesting historical record!

DalkasChris , November 22, 2019
Don't Bother

I purchased this book (against my better judgment) because I thought maybe the insights in this book would be enlightening. But I wish I hadn't spent the money. First, most of what was related in these pages, other than the opinion parts, were already well known through media, especially The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as other other media outlets.

Second, anyone paying attention would have anticipated Trump's actions. What made me want to vomit after finishing this book was the realization that the Republican party doesn't care and will continue to support Trump, regardless of the evidence that he is not fit to serve and the author despite issuing this "warning", doesn't have the guts or the patriotism to come out of the shadows.

I also take issue with the author's portrayal of "never Trumpers" as crazed haters. That's the farthest from the truth. Many of us recognized early on that Trump is agrifter and a liar and an unscrupulous opportunist. We are not crazed; we are sounding the alarm! We are sensible patriots who love our country and our Constitution, who do not want to see our discourse redown into tribal factions and, possibly, into civil war (hopefully, if such does occur it will be cyber rather than armed conflict).

Every single day we are asked to ignore what our eyes can clearly see and what our ears can clearly hear and our brains can easily deduce in order to allow Trump's reality to proceed unquestioned. He doesn't understand he is not a monarch and his children are not heirs to the throne. The lies are non-stop and getting worse and the people surrounding him, including the author, are doing NOTHING to reign him in.

Last, we are in the midst of an impeachment inquiry. I've read every deposition that has been released and watched every minute of direct testimony during the hearings. It is without contest that Trump attempted to extort and bribe Ukraine in order to have the newly inaugurated president of Ukraine announce an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden's involvement with Burisma. Sondland made it abundantly clear that no such actual investigation would be necessary, just the announcement of an investigation to tarnish Joe Biden's reputation and electoral standing. Trump's act was sleazy and wrong and illegal (check the statute about soliciting foreign involvement in domestic elections).

I'm infuriated by the author's insinuation that we who oppose such actions by any president are somehow deranged. The writer seems to think that impeachment and removal from office for such dirty tricks involving a foreign government should be somehow, beyond the pale for a civilized society. NO! Trump has obviously abused his office and put an ally in danger by withholding funding HE WAS NOT AUTHORIZED TO WITHHOLD, according to our Constitution. The author seems to think we should just cover our eyes to these transgressions and wait until the next election to vote Trump out.

What about all of the damage Trump can perpetrate on our democracy and on our foreign policy. He has done so much damage alrready, how can we allow him another year and keep our fingers crossed that it doesn't get worse? Also, since Trump was obviously trying to influence our upcoming elections with his dirty dealings, how can we allow him to remain in office knowing that he will do anything to cheat to win?

We anti-Trumpers (not never-Trumpers) are constantly accused of trying to perpetuate a "coup" by trying to remove Trump from office via either impeachment or through the 25th. That would only be true if Hilllary Clinton was installed in Trump's place. But If Trump leaves office before his first term is up, Mike Pence will assume the duties of president, not HRC. -- certainly not a "coup" to anyone who has half a brain and understands how our system works. It would still be a Republican administration and there would still be a Republican Senate. Certainly NOT a coup, just a Constitutional succession of the next in.line.

With regard to restoring a "climate of truth", that is impossible so long as alternative media (including FOX) exists. We Americans used to share a truth courtesy of the likes of Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley and others. Now, there's "left" media and a "right" media and they both exist in their own realities. We no longer share the same reality. If we no.longer share the same immutable facts and truths, then how can we work out our differences and our needs so we can all come to a consensus?

This book left me feeling angry and afraid for the future of my country, especially because people like the "anomynous" author doesn't take his citizenship and patriotism a step forward and tell what he knows on the record.

Don't waste your money. The author is a coward and should never profit from his lack of courage.

World Traveller , November 22, 2019
Should Have Remained an Op Ed

This is not a very good book . I say this even though I was so looking forward to it , even buying it in pre-publication. On the publication date, I woke up early and started to read it, only to find it repetitious and general in nature.
Trump is described as amoral, indifferent, inattentive and impulsive – repeatedly. But with little background. The author is afraid of being identified as such so he deletes specific information that may later identify him. High ranking officials are identified as "high ranking officials". Important meetings are identified as "important meetings".
I did not read the original article that led to the book but It feels like the author took the article and padded it into a book. Disappointing: a waste of time; a waste of money.

Uh How How How , November 22, 2019
Self-aggrandizing, short on new info, long on whining written by a coward

I am a critic of this Administration.

First off, I really enjoyed the author's listing of every sleazy thing Trump has ever done (none of which are new or even greatly detailed), followed by snarky quips about Democrats taking power with too much zeal to investigate. That's the kind of 'logic' we are looking at here. The argument is that there is a lawless criminal in the White House but it's better to whine about him in print than do anything about it.

Secondly, there is no new information in this book. There is nothing here I have not heard before. There are no damning conversations or dramatic revelations. This book packages up the reporting of every news agency to date and just vomits it out at us. We've heard this all before. We had the author's level of indignation three years ago. We came to these conclusions three years ago. It is insulting that the author presents this material with a 'ta-daaa!' It's a scam.

Thirdly, Trump does what he does because weasels like the author of this 'book' let him. No matter what justifications this guy has for himself, he is still nothing but an enabler, and is complicit in the actions of this Administration. The author spends most of the book whining about the things Trump has done, takes no responsibility for anything, and does a LOT of "CYA." (cover your butt).

This is a 'nothing-burger.'

[Dec 04, 2019] Biden is trending steadily (but very slowly) downward. Sanders and Buttigieg are trending up, Sanders slowly and Buttigieg somewhat faster, while Warren is settling back to her long term average after a bump in October

Fake polls, fake trends, fake candidates
Dec 04, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

ChrisPacific , December 3, 2019 at 3:57 pm

The poll graph without three day averaging is a great visual illustration of the margin of error concept. It's even clear in the averaged version. I guarantee people are NOT changing their minds that fast, and I'm sure all the issues Lambert highlighted are contributing to the inaccuracies.

That said, a few trends are clear. Biden is trending steadily (but very slowly) downward. Sanders and Buttigieg are trending up, Sanders slowly and Buttigieg somewhat faster, while Warren is settling back to her long term average after a bump in October. Harris' decision to withdraw looks like a good one. Undecided numbers are all over the place, and tend to spike up when other lines spike down, so I'm guessing that's down to differing polling methodologies and how hard people are pushed to make a call.

Mo's Bike Shop , December 3, 2019 at 9:04 pm

Are these pollsters reading all twenty names over the telephone? Or is the polled asked to name a candidate? I can't get my head around how to manage a list of this many candidates by voice without 'Name Recognition' being the first choice.

Lambert Strether Post author , December 4, 2019 at 7:17 am

> Are these pollsters reading all twenty names over the telephone?

That's a very good question. Is the list of names so long -- I don't think we've ever had one so long -- that it enables pollsters to game the polls in new ways? Could be such a simple and obvious mode of rigging that we did not see it.

Polling mavens?

dk , December 4, 2019 at 8:34 am

The short answer is yes, the full list of names is read at least once. But the number of candidates can vary between pollsters and polls.

For example in the Dec 1 polls:

HarrisX (C+)
Nov 30 – Dec 1
Sat – Sun
437 Reg'd
National
18 candidate names, plus "Other" and "Unsure" (not present in data source, derived in app)
Details here: https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/472629-bloomberg-overtakes-harris-in-new-poll

Morning Consult (B/C)
Nov 25 – Dec 1
Mon – Sun
15,773 Likely
National
16 candidate names, plus "Someone else" (not present in data source, derived in app)
Details here: https://morningconsult.com/2020-democratic-primary/

The differences are Joe Sestak and Steve Bullock in HarrisX but not MC, going to guess that MC decided not to list them because they dropped, and if they asked the names during the survey their report them in the conveniently names "Someone else" category.

Regarding ChrisPacific's point about Undecideds, yes, this is affected by methodology and whose polls came out on a particular day.

And more generally, we should expect to see noise in this data. These are minuscule samples compared to the actual voting universe of over 65 million. The "Margin of Error" / "Confidence Interval" claims are based on the assumption that all polls are distributed as a uniform bell curve. Arguably useful for getting the noise out of stats for physical observations of mechanical models, but absurd for human polling. Pollsters (who work mostly in marketing) use MoE/CI to convince clients spend money on small polls and then spin out reassuring MoE or CI (which scale to each other, bigger MoE = narrower CI). (Tangentially, on political campaigns, the tactical advantages to be found in population data come from looking into what's happening in the noise, not from smoothing it out and then assessing the distorted surface).

And as in most viscous media, quick changes tend to snap back to origin, slow ones push though. Consider also that a) these candidates are introducing themselves, impressions develop over time, and engagement is still low. Also, the context of US society may be gradually changing, but it would take a sudden shock (like 9/11 at the time) to change the background context and be reflected in a suddenly shift in Dem Primary polls.

anonymous , December 4, 2019 at 9:06 am

I participated in the last Des Moines Register/CNN Iowa poll. The pollster was required to read all of the names, even when I could name one immediately.

The call came on my cell phone from a restricted number. I asked for what company or candidate the poll was being conducted; the interviewer said that she was not given that information, but at the very end I was asked whether I would be willing to talk to a reporter from CNN or the DMR (I declined). She did tell me the research firm for which she worked, which I later saw was the name of the firm that had conducted the poll. When I saw the original release, I wondered whether I was correct that this was the poll, since I remembered a question about my preference for a health care system that wasn't in the original release. That result was released at a later date.
The M4A option for that question was simply M4A, without additional information or qualifiers. I, as is usual for me, couldn't simply answer a multiple choice question, but explained that I supported improved M4A, and that current Medicare is still expensive. The interviewer told me that she herself has trouble affording Medicare, and that she particularly has trouble paying for her medication. (We got a little chatty.)

The research firm was also contacting Republicans. She said that I had been the first Democrat that she had reached that day, and that Republicans got different questions. She did not know whom she was calling and, at the end, asked my first name so that her company could verify that she had reached the right individual.

I'll check back here in case there are any other questions about the poll that I might be able to answer. If anyone is interested in the questions themselves, those are already available online.

Why did I agree to participate? To have my support for Bernie counted, of course!

[Dec 04, 2019] CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller's Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia Meddling Claims

The possibility of CrowdStrike central role in creation of Russiagate might be one reason that Congressional Democrats (and Republicans) were trying to swipe under the carpet the part of Trump conversation where he asked Zelenski to help to recover server images CrowdStrike shipped to Ukraine.
Another question is that now it is possible that one of CrowdStrike employees or Alperovich himself played the role of Gussifer 2.0
Notable quotes:
"... There is strong reason to doubt Mueller's suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange. ..."
"... Mueller's decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions. ..."
"... the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking. ..."
"... John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller's investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate. Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump. ..."
Jul 09, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Which brings me to the newest piece to drop, CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller's Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia Meddling Claims .

Most of the material in this article will be familiar to regular readers of SST because I wrote about it first. Here are the key conclusions:

I encourage you to read the piece. It is well written and provides an excellent overview of critical events in the flawed investigation.

[Dec 04, 2019] There Has Been No Retrenchment Under Trump

Notable quotes:
"... A more compelling explanation for the persistence of a large global U.S. military footprint, and the concomitant creep of oversees commitments, is to be found in domestic politics. Trump's rhetoric can diverge sharply from reality without consequence because few in his party have an incentive to hold him accountable. In this hyper-polarized political moment, most voters will stick with their party regardless of how many campaign pledges are broken or foreign policy initiatives end in failure. With an all-volunteer military, flattening taxes, and deficit financing, the vast majority of Americans are insulated from the costs of American foreign policy. So long as most Americans want to look tough and influential without paying for it, politicians won't be punished for living in the same fantasy world as voters. ..."
"... The main reason why America's military commitments remain unchanged under Trump may simply be that the president doesn't really want to reduce them. ..."
Dec 04, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

aul MacDonald and Joseph Parent explain in detail that Trump hasn't reduced U.S. military commitments overseas:

But after nearly three years in office, Trump's promised retrenchment has yet to materialize. The president hasn't meaningfully altered the U.S. global military footprint he inherited from President Barack Obama. Nor has he shifted the costly burden of defending U.S. allies. To the contrary, he loaded even greater military responsibilities on the United States while either ramping up or maintaining U.S. involvement in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. On practically every other issue, Trump departed radically from the path of his predecessor. But when it came to troop deployments and other overseas defense commitments, he largely preserved the chessboard he inherited -- promises to the contrary be damned.

MacDonald and Parent's article complements my earlier post about U.S. "global commitments" very nicely. When we look at the specifics of Trump's record, we see that he isn't ending U.S. military involvement anywhere. He isn't bringing anyone home. On the contrary, he has been sending even more American troops to the Middle East just this year alone. While he is being excoriated for withdrawals that never happen, he is maintaining or steadily increasing the U.S. military presence in foreign countries. Many Trump detractors and supporters are so invested in the narrative that Trump is presiding over "withdrawal" that they are ignoring what the president has actually done. Trump's approach to U.S. military involvement might be described as "loudly declaring withdrawal while maintaining or increasing troop levels." Almost everyone pays attention only to his rhetoric about leaving this or that country and treats it as if it is really happening. Meanwhile, the number of military personnel deployed overseas never goes down.

The authors offer a possible explanation for why Trump has been able to get away with this:

A more compelling explanation for the persistence of a large global U.S. military footprint, and the concomitant creep of oversees commitments, is to be found in domestic politics. Trump's rhetoric can diverge sharply from reality without consequence because few in his party have an incentive to hold him accountable. In this hyper-polarized political moment, most voters will stick with their party regardless of how many campaign pledges are broken or foreign policy initiatives end in failure. With an all-volunteer military, flattening taxes, and deficit financing, the vast majority of Americans are insulated from the costs of American foreign policy. So long as most Americans want to look tough and influential without paying for it, politicians won't be punished for living in the same fantasy world as voters.

Trump is further insulated from scrutiny and criticism because he is frequently described as presiding over a "retreat" from the world. Most news reports and commentary pieces reinforce this false impression that Trump seeks to get the U.S. out of foreign entanglements. There are relatively few people pointing out the truth that MacDonald and Parent spell out in their article. The main reason why America's military commitments remain unchanged under Trump may simply be that the president doesn't really want to reduce them.

[Dec 04, 2019] The central question of Ukrainegate is whether CrowdStrike actions on DNC leak were a false flag operation designed to open Russiagate and what was the level of participation of Poroshenko government and Ukrainian Security services in this false flag operation by Factotum

Highly recommended!
Highly recommended !
Republicans are afraid to raise this key question. Democrats are afraid of even mentioning CrowdStrike in Ukrainegate hearings. The Deep State wants to suppress this matter entirely.
Alperovisch connections to Ukraine and his Russophobia are well known. Did Alperovich people played the role of "Fancy Bear"? Or Ukrainian SBU was engaged? George Eliason clams that "I have already clearly shown the Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian Intelligence Operators." ... "Since there is so much crap surrounding the supposed hack such as law enforcement teams never examining the DNC server or maintaining control of it as evidence, could the hacks have been a cover-up?"
Notable quotes:
"... So far at least I cannot rule out the possibility that that this could have involved an actual 'false flag' hack. A possible calculation would have been that this could have made it easier for Alperovitch and 'CrowdStrike', if more people had asked serious questions about the evidence they claimed supported the 'narrative' of GRU responsibility. ..."
"... What she suggested was that the FBI had found evidence, after his death, of a hack of Rich's laptop, designed as part of a 'false flag' operation. ..."
"... On this, see his 8 October, 'Motion for Discovery and Motion to Accept Supplemental Evidence' in Clevenger's own case against the DOJ, document 44 on the relevant 'Courtlistener' pages, and his 'Unopposed Motion for Stay', document 48. Both are short, and available without a 'PACER' subscription, and should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in ascertaining the truth about 'Russiagate.' (See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/ .) ..."
"... And here, is is also material that he may have had more than one laptop, that 'hard drives' can be changed, and that the level of computer skills that can be found throughout the former Soviet Union is very high. Another matter of some importance is that Ed Butowsky's 'Debunking Rod Wheeler's Claims' site is back up online. (See http://debunkingrodwheelersclaims.net ) ..."
"... The question of whether the 'timeline' produced by Hersh's FBI informant was accurate, or a deliberate attempt to disguise the fact that all kinds of people were well aware of Rich's involvement before his murder, and well aware of the fact of a leak before he was identified as its source, is absolutely central to how one interprets 'Russiagate.' ..."
"... Why did Crowdstrike conclude it was a "Russian breach", when other evidence does show it was an internal download. What was Crowdstrike's method and motivation to reach the "Russian" conclusion instead. Why has that methodology been sealed? ..."
"... Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers. ..."
"... What were the relationships between Crowdstrike, DNC, FBI and the Mueller team that conspired to reach this Russian conclusion. ..."
"... Why did the Roger Stone judge, who just sent Stone away for life, refuse Stone's evidentiary demand to ascertain how exactly Crowdstrike reached its Russsian hacking conclusion, that the court then linked to Stone allegedly lying about this Russian link ..."
"... Indeed, let's set out with full transparency the Ukraine -- Crowsdtrike player links and loyalties to see if there are any smoking guns yet undisclosed. Trump was asking for more information about Crowdstrike like a good lawyer - never ask a question when you don't already know the right answer. Crowdstrike is owned by a Ukrainian by birth ..."
"... Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike. ..."
"... In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives. ..."
"... His role in what we may define as "converting DNC leak into DNC hack" (I would agree with you that this probably was a false flag operation), which was supposedly designed to implicated Russians, and possibly involved Ukrainian security services, is very suspicious indeed. ..."
"... Mueller treatment of Crowdstrike with "kid gloves" may suggest that Alperovich actions were part of a larger scheme. After all Crowdstike was a FBI contactor at the time. ..."
Dec 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Originally from: The Intelligence Whistleblower protection Act did not apply to the phone call ... Reposted - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Factotum , 20 November 2019 at 01:02 PM

The favor was for Ukraine to investigate Crowdstrike and the 2016 DNC computer breach.

Reliance on Crowdstrike to investigate the DNC computer, and not an independent FBI investigation, was tied very closely to the years long anti-Trump Russiagate hoax and waste of US taxpayer time and money.

Why is this issue ignored by both the media and the Democrats. The ladies doth protest far too much.

vig -> Factotum... , 21 November 2019 at 11:00 AM
what exactly, to the extend I recall, could the Ukraine contribute the the DNC's server/"fake malware" troubles? Beyond, that I seem to vaguely recall, the supposed malware was distributed via an Ukrainan address.

On the other hand, there seems to be the (consensus here?) argument there was no malware breach at all, simply an insider copying files on a USB stick.

It seems to either or. No?

What basics am I missing?

David Habakkuk -> vig... , 21 November 2019 at 12:53 PM
vig,

There is no reason why it should be 'either/or'.

If people discovered there had been a leak, it would perfectly natural that in order to give 'resilience' to their cover-up strategies, they could have organised a planting of evidence on the servers, in conjunction with elements in Ukraine.

So far at least I cannot rule out the possibility that that this could have involved an actual 'false flag' hack. A possible calculation would have been that this could have made it easier for Alperovitch and 'CrowdStrike', if more people had asked serious questions about the evidence they claimed supported the 'narrative' of GRU responsibility.

The issues involved become all the more important, in the light of the progress of Ty Clevenger's attempts to exploit the clear contradiction between the claims by the FBI, in response to FOIA requests, to have no evidence relating to Seth Rich, and the remarks by Ms. Deborah Sines quoted by Michael Isikoff.

What she suggested was that the FBI had found evidence, after his death, of a hack of Rich's laptop, designed as part of a 'false flag' operation.

On this, see his 8 October, 'Motion for Discovery and Motion to Accept Supplemental Evidence' in Clevenger's own case against the DOJ, document 44 on the relevant 'Courtlistener' pages, and his 'Unopposed Motion for Stay', document 48. Both are short, and available without a 'PACER' subscription, and should be compulsory reading for anyone seriously interested in ascertaining the truth about 'Russiagate.' (See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/ .)

It is eminently possible that Ms. Hines has simply made an 'unforced error.'

However, I do not – yet – feel able totally to discount the possibility that what is actually at issue is a 'ruse', produced as a contingency plan to ensure that if it becomes impossible to maintain the cover-up over Rich's involvement in its original form, his laptop shows 'evidence' compatible with the 'Russiagate' narrative.

And here, is is also material that he may have had more than one laptop, that 'hard drives' can be changed, and that the level of computer skills that can be found throughout the former Soviet Union is very high. Another matter of some importance is that Ed Butowsky's 'Debunking Rod Wheeler's Claims' site is back up online. (See http://debunkingrodwheelersclaims.net )

Looking at it from the perspective of an old television current affairs hack, I do think that, while it is very helpful to have some key material available in a single place, it would useful if more attention was paid to presentation.

In particular, it would be a most helpful 'teaching aid', if a full and accurate transcript was made of the conversation with Seymour Hersh which Ed Butowsky covertly recorded. What seems clear is that both these figures ended up in very difficult positions, and that the latter clearly engaged in 'sleight of hand' in relation to his dealings with the former. That said, the fact that Butowsky's claims about his grounds for believing that Hersh's FBI informant was Andrew McCabe are clearly disingenuous does not justify the conclusion that he is wrong.

It is absolutely clear to me – despite what 'TTG', following that 'Grub Street' hack Folkenflik, claimed – that when Hersh talked to Butowsky, he believed he had been given accurate information. Indeed, I have difficulty seeing how anyone whose eyes were not hopelessly blinded by prejudice, a\nd possibly fear of where a quest for the truth might lead, could not see that, in this conversation, both men were telling the truth, as they saw it.

However, all of us, including the finest and most honourable of journalists can, from time to time, fall for disinformation. (If anyone says they can always spot when they are being played, all I can say is, if you're right, you're clearly Superman, but it is more likely that you are a fool or knave, if not both.)

The question of whether the 'timeline' produced by Hersh's FBI informant was accurate, or a deliberate attempt to disguise the fact that all kinds of people were well aware of Rich's involvement before his murder, and well aware of the fact of a leak before he was identified as its source, is absolutely central to how one interprets 'Russiagate.'

Factotum -> vig... , 21 November 2019 at 01:45 PM
Several loose end issues about Crowdstrike:

1. Why did Crowdstrike conclude it was a "Russian breach", when other evidence does show it was an internal download. What was Crowdstrike's method and motivation to reach the "Russian" conclusion instead. Why has that methodology been sealed?

2. Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers.

3. What were the relationships between Crowdstrike, DNC, FBI and the Mueller team that conspired to reach this Russian conclusion.

4. Why did the Roger Stone judge, who just sent Stone away for life, refuse Stone's evidentiary demand to ascertain how exactly Crowdstrike reached its Russsian hacking conclusion, that the court then linked to Stone allegedly lying about this Russian link .

5. Indeed, let's set out with full transparency the Ukraine -- Crowsdtrike player links and loyalties to see if there are any smoking guns yet undisclosed. Trump was asking for more information about Crowdstrike like a good lawyer - never ask a question when you don't already know the right answer. Crowdstrike is owned by a Ukrainian by birth .

likbez said in reply to Factotum... , 04 December 2019 at 01:29 AM

Hi Factotum,
Why did Mueller wholly accept the Crowdstrike Russian conclusion, with no further or independent investigation and prominently put this Crowdstrike generated conclusion in his Russiagate report? Which also included the conclusion the "Russians" wanted to help Trump and harm Clinton. Heavy stuff, based upon a DNC proprietary investigation of their own and unavailable computers.

Alperovich is really a very suspicious figure. Rumors are that he was involved in compromising PGP while in MacAfee( June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams - YouTube ):

Investigative Journalist George Webb worked at MacAfee and Network Solutions in 2000 when the CEO Bill Larsen bought a small, Moscow based, hacking and virus writing company to move to Silicon Valley.

MacAfee also purchased PGP, an open source encryption software developed by privacy advocate to reduce NSA spying on the public.
The two simultaneous purchase of PGP and the Moscow hacking team by Metwork Solutions was sponsored by the CIA and FBI in order to crack encrypted communications to write a back door for law enforcement.

Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike.

In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives.

His role in what we may define as "converting DNC leak into DNC hack" (I would agree with you that this probably was a false flag operation), which was supposedly designed to implicated Russians, and possibly involved Ukrainian security services, is very suspicious indeed.

Mueller treatment of Crowdstrike with "kid gloves" may suggest that Alperovich actions were part of a larger scheme. After all Crowdstike was a FBI contactor at the time.

While all this DNC hack saga is completely unclear due to lack of facts and the access to the evidence, there are some stories on Internet that indirectly somewhat strengthen your hypothesis:

Enjoy and Happy Cyber Week shopping :-)

[Dec 04, 2019] A Warning A manifesto of the pro-war "Resistance" in the American state by Andre Damon

Notable quotes:
"... The anonymous author of the piece revealed that "many of the senior officials in [Trump's] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations." The "adults in the room," he claimed, are leading a "two-track presidency." ..."
"... The author, "Anonymous," has been publicly identified as Guy Snodgrass, the US Navy commander who served as the communications secretary for the Department of Defense under Gen. James Mattis. Posting a report of his alleged authorship on Twitter, Snodgrass cryptically mused, "the swirl continues. ..."
"... If the allegation is true, it would have ominous implications. It would mean that the New York Times gave the military an opportunity to denounce a president as "amoral," "impetuous," "petty" and "ineffective," and to all but advocate his removal via unconstitutional means. ..."
"... We do not know whether Snodgrass is the author of A Warning , but the themes of the National Defense Strategy document are consistent with the emphasis of the book. ..."
"... A Warning makes one thing abundantly clear: the "Resistance" to Trump's policies within the state, which is the basis of the Democrats' opposition to him, centers on claims that Trump is insufficiently aggressive in defending and expanding America's imperial interests against Russia and China. ..."
"... A Warning argues that "America's dominant role on the international stage is at risk today," but Trump is "not positioning us to strengthen our empire of liberty." It continues: "Instead, he's left the empire's flank vulnerable to power-hungry competitors" with his "isolationist, what's-in-it-for-me attitude toward the world." ..."
"... Politically, the author appears to be an anti-Trump Republican. He urges his "fellow Republicans" to vote for a centrist Democrat if one is nominated--as long as the candidate is not a "socialist." ..."
"... The struggle to remove Trump and to hold him to account for his real crimes will have nothing to do with people such as "Anonymous," or the Democratic impeachment campaign that is totally aligned with his pro-war agenda. ..."
Dec 04, 2019 | www.wsws.org

On September 5, 2018, the New York Times published an op-ed by a "senior official" in the White House, entitled "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration."

The anonymous author of the piece revealed that "many of the senior officials in [Trump's] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations." The "adults in the room," he claimed, are leading a "two-track presidency."

In that op-ed, he revealed that "there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president."

In other words, members of the executive branch had discussed a coup to remove a sitting president, which they pulled back from only because "no one wanted" a "constitutional crisis."

One year later, the same unnamed official, whose identity is known to the Times , has published a book elaborating on themes elucidated in the editorial. A Warning is currently #1 on the New York Times ' nonfiction bestseller list.

The author, "Anonymous," has been publicly identified as Guy Snodgrass, the US Navy commander who served as the communications secretary for the Department of Defense under Gen. James Mattis. Posting a report of his alleged authorship on Twitter, Snodgrass cryptically mused, "the swirl continues."

If the allegation is true, it would have ominous implications. It would mean that the New York Times gave the military an opportunity to denounce a president as "amoral," "impetuous," "petty" and "ineffective," and to all but advocate his removal via unconstitutional means.

Notably, Snodgrass claims to be the author of perhaps the most important military document produced under the Trump administration, the unclassified summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which declared that "Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security."

We do not know whether Snodgrass is the author of A Warning , but the themes of the National Defense Strategy document are consistent with the emphasis of the book.

A Warning makes one thing abundantly clear: the "Resistance" to Trump's policies within the state, which is the basis of the Democrats' opposition to him, centers on claims that Trump is insufficiently aggressive in defending and expanding America's imperial interests against Russia and China.

Cmdr. Guy M. Snodgrass is shown in this Defense Department photograph in Japan in 2016. MATTHEW C. DUNCKER/U.S. NAVY

A Warning argues that "America's dominant role on the international stage is at risk today," but Trump is "not positioning us to strengthen our empire of liberty." It continues: "Instead, he's left the empire's flank vulnerable to power-hungry competitors" with his "isolationist, what's-in-it-for-me attitude toward the world."

The allegations continue:

The president lacks a cogent agenda for dealing with these rivals because he doesn't recognize them as long-term threats. He only sees near-term deals. "Russia is a foe in certain respects. China is a foe economically But that doesn't mean they are bad," the president said in one interview

What he doesn't see, especially with China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, is that their governments are programmed to oppose us

The United States is taking its eye off the ball with China, and our national response has been ad hoc and indecisive under President Trump. We have no serious plan to safeguard our "empire of liberty" against China's rise. There is only the ever-changing negotiating positions of a grifter in chief, which will not be enough to win what is fast becoming the next Cold War. President Trump is myopically focused on trade with China, which is only part of the picture

In a July 2018 interview, the president was asked to name America's biggest global adversary. He didn't lead the list with China, which is stealing American innovation at a scale never before seen in history, or Russia, which is working to tear our country apart.

And on and on.

In response to such concerns, the writer makes clear that sections of this staff were contemplating an extra-constitutional coup to replace Trump by declaring the American president mad and therefore "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," in the words of the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, which outlines presidential succession in the case of a presidential disability.

A back-of-the-envelope "whip count" was conducted of officials who were most concerned about the deteriorating situation. Names of cabinet-level officials were placed on a mental list. These were folks who, in the worst case scenario, would be amenable to huddling discreetly in order to assess how bad the situation was getting I froze when I first heard someone suggest that we might be getting into "Twenty-fifth territory."

Among the figures noted in the press as possibly amenable to such an endeavor were former Defense Secretary Mattis, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly and former National Security Adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster.

The writer describes what the removal of the president via the 25th Amendment would look like:

Removal of the president by his own cabinet would be perceived as a coup. The end result would be unrest in the United States the likes of which we haven't seen since maybe the Civil War. Millions would not accept the outcome, perhaps including the president himself, and many would take to the streets on both sides. Violence would be almost inevitable.

If Trump is "removed from office and he refuses to go He will not exit quietly -- or easily It is why at many turns he suggests 'coups' are afoot and a 'civil war' is in the offing."

One does not know whether the author has really had a change of heart about overthrowing the American government in a coup, or, if he is a military person, he fears a court martial for treason. In any event, he concludes, "In a democracy we don't overthrow our leaders when they're underperforming. That's for third-rate banana republics and police states."

How reassuring

After only three paragraphs weighing in on the merits of the impeachment proceeding, the author concludes, "One option -- and one option only -- stands above the rest as the ultimate way to hold Trump accountable" -- to unseat him in the 2020 election.

Politically, the author appears to be an anti-Trump Republican. He urges his "fellow Republicans" to vote for a centrist Democrat if one is nominated--as long as the candidate is not a "socialist."

Two "warnings" are to be drawn from this book:

First is the enormous crisis of democracy in the United States, which has degenerated to the point where cabinet officials, most of whom are or were military officers, abetted by the media, discuss a coup as a legitimate means to resolve policy differences. The president, meanwhile, repeatedly threatens to say in office past the two-term constitutional limit, and effectively asserts unlimited and dictatorial executive powers.

While the threat posed by Trump to democratic rights is immense, no one who opposes war and attacks on democratic rights can have anything to do with the aims and intentions of the author of this book. Behind his pilfered, cobbled-together quotations -- he calls Plato an American historian -- and his ridiculous attempt at gravitas, he is a bloodthirsty advocate of imperialist war.

The Democrats, who have upheld this man and people like him as the "adults in the room" and the antipode to Trump, are infected with the same poison.

The struggle to remove Trump and to hold him to account for his real crimes will have nothing to do with people such as "Anonymous," or the Democratic impeachment campaign that is totally aligned with his pro-war agenda.

[Dec 04, 2019] The author of the book A Warning looks like the same author as the author of the NYT Resistance Manifesto. The books author has been publicly identified as Guy Snodgrass, the US Navy commander who served as the communications secretary for the Department of Defense under Gen. James Mattis.

Dec 04, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

'A Warning: A manifesto of the pro-war "Resistance" in the American state ' Andre Damon, 4 December 2019 , wsws.org

On September 5, 2018 , the New York Times published an op-ed by a "senior official" in the White House, entitled "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration."

The anonymous author of the piece revealed that "many of the senior officials in [Trump's] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations." The "adults in the room," he claimed, are leading a "two-track presidency."

In that op-ed, he revealed that "there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president."

..........................................

One year later , the same unnamed official, whose identity is known to the Times, has published a book elaborating on themes elucidated in the editorial. A Warning is currently #1 on the New York Times ' nonfiction bestseller list.

The author, "Anonymous," has been publicly identified as Guy Snodgrass, the US Navy commander who served as the communications secretary for the Department of Defense under Gen. James Mattis. Posting a report of his alleged authorship on Twitter, Snodgrass cryptically mused, "the swirl continues."

If the allegation is true, it would have ominous implications. It would mean that the New York Times gave the military an opportunity to denounce a president as "amoral," "impetuous," "petty" and "ineffective," and to all but advocate his removal via unconstitutional means.
Notably, Snodgrass claims to be the author of perhaps the most important military document produced under the Trump administration, the unclassified summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which declared that "Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security."

We do not know whether Snodgrass is the author of A Warning, but the themes of the National Defense Strategy document are consistent with the emphasis of the book.
A Warning makes one thing abundantly clear: the "Resistance" to Trump's policies within the state, which is the basis of the Democrats' opposition to him, centers on claims that Trump is insufficiently aggressive in defending and expanding America's imperial interests against Russia and China."
.......................................................
The Democrats, who have upheld this man and people like him as the "adults in the room" and the antipode to Trump, are infected with the same poison.
The struggle to remove Trump and to hold him to account for his real crimes will have nothing to do with people such as "Anonymous," or the Democratic impeachment campaign that is totally aligned with his pro-war agenda."

and another 20 inches of text. you'll also remember that the NYT published a whispered rumor last year that 'military insiders' were saying privately that DT really meant to leave NATO, which was nonsense. that rumor led to the infamous 'defense of NATO act', which every senator vote for, and almost all of the house (3 didn't vote, conveniently.)

[Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

Highly recommended!
Pelosi interference in elections might cost democrats a victory. She enraged Trump base and strengthened Trump, who before was floundering. Now election changed into "us vs them" question, which is very unfavorable to neoliberal Dems. as neolibelism as ideology is dead. She also brought back Trump some independents who othersie would stay home or vote for Dem candidate. No action of House of Representatives can changes this. Bringing Vindman and Fiona Hill to testify were huge blunders as they enhance the narrative that the Deep State, unaccountable Security Establishment, controls the government, to which Trump represents very weak, but still a challenge. As such they strengthened Trump
Essentially Dems had driven themselves into a trap. Moreover actions of the Senate can drag democrats in dirt till the elections, diminishing their chances further and firther. Can you image the effect if Schiff would be called testify under oath about his contacts with Ciaramella? Or Biden questioning about his dirty dealing with both Yanukovich administration and Provisional Government after the 2014 coup d'état (aka EuroMaydan, aka "the Revolution of dignity" ?
Notable quotes:
"... It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over "withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one. Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed "isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to criticize a president. ..."
"... Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe, Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S. involvement overseas are reducing it. ..."
"... We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually been adding to them. ..."
Dec 04, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Originally from: The U.S. Has Not Reduced Its 'Global Commitments' The American Conservative by Daniel Larison

Gideon Rachman tries to find similarities between the foreign policies of Trump and Obama:

Both men would detest the thought. But, in crucial respects, the foreign policies of Donald Trump and Barack Obama are looking strikingly similar.

The wildly different styles of the two presidents have disguised the underlying continuities between their approaches to the world. But look at substance, rather than style, and the similarities are impressive.

There is usually considerable continuity in U.S. foreign policy from one president to another, but Rachman is making a stronger and somewhat different claim than that. He is arguing that their foreign policy agendas are very much alike in ways that put both presidents at odds with the foreign policy establishment, and he cites "disengagement from the Middle East" and a "pivot to Asia" as two examples of these similarities. This seems superficially plausible, but it is misleading. Despite talking a lot about disengagement, Obama and Trump chose to keep the U.S. involved in several conflicts, and Trump actually escalated the wars he inherited from Obama. To the extent that there is continuity between Obama and Trump, it has been that both of them have acceded to the conventional wisdom of "the Blob" and refused to disentangle the U.S. from Middle Eastern conflicts. Ongoing support for the war on Yemen is the ugliest and most destructive example of this continuity.

In reality, neither Obama nor Trump "focused" on Asia, and Trump's foray into pseudo-engagement with North Korea has little in common with Obama's would-be "pivot" or "rebalance." U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a major part of Obama's policy in Asia. Trump pulled out of that agreement and waged destructive trade wars instead. Once we get past generalizations and look at details, the two presidents are often diametrically opposed to one another in practice. That is what one would expect when we remember that Trump has made dismantling Obama's foreign policy achievements one of his main priorities.

The significant differences between the two become much more apparent when we look at other issues. On arms control and nonproliferation, the two could not be more different. Obama negotiated a new arms reduction treaty with New START at the start of his presidency, and he wrapped up a major nonproliferation agreement with Iran and the other members of the P5+1 in 2015. Trump reneged on the latter and seems determined to kill the former. Obama touted the benefits of genuine diplomatic engagement, while Trump has made a point of reversing and undoing most of the results of Obama's engagement with Cuba and Iran. Trump's overall hostility to genuine diplomacy makes another one of Rachman claims quite baffling:

The result is that, after his warlike "fire and fury" phase, Mr Trump is now pursuing a diplomacy-first strategy that is strongly reminiscent of Mr Obama.

Calling Trump's clumsy pattern of making threats and ultimatums a "diplomacy-first strategy" is a mistake. This is akin to saying that he is adhering to foreign policy restraint because the U.S. hasn't invaded any new countries on Trump's watch. It takes something true (Trump hasn't started a new war yet) and misrepresents it as proof that the president is serious about diplomacy and that he wants to reduce U.S. military engagement overseas. Trump enjoys the spectacle of meeting with foreign leaders, but he isn't interested in doing the work or taking the risks that successful diplomacy requires. He has shown repeatedly through his own behavior, his policy preferences, and his proposed budgets that he has no use for diplomacy or diplomats, and instead he expects to be able to bully or flatter adversaries into submission.

So Rachman is simply wrong he reaches this conclusion:

Mr Trump's reluctance to attack Iran was significant. It underlines the fact that his tough-guy rhetoric disguises a strong preference for diplomacy over force.

Let's recall that the near-miss of starting a war with Iran came as a result of the downing of an unmanned drone. The fact that the U.S. was seriously considering an attack on another country over the loss of a drone is a worrisome sign that this administration is prepared to go to war at the drop of a hat. Calling off such an insane attack was the right thing to do, but there should never have been an attack to call off. That episode does not show a "strong preference for diplomacy over force." If Trump had a strong preference for diplomacy over force, his policy would not be one of relentless hostility towards Iran. Trump does not believe in diplomatic compromise, but expects the other side to capitulate under pressure. That actually makes conflict more likely and reduces the chances of meaningful negotiations.

It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over "withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one. Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed "isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to criticize a president.

Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe, Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S. involvement overseas are reducing it.

Rachman ends his column with this assertion:

In their very different ways, both Mr Obama and Mr Trump have reduced America's global commitments -- and adjusted the US to a more modest international role.

The problem here is that there has been no meaningful reduction in America's "global commitments." Which commitments have been reduced or eliminated? It would be helpful if someone could be specific about this. The U.S. has more security dependents today than it did when Trump took office. NATO has been expanded to include two new countries in just the last three years. U.S. troops are engaged in hostilities in just as many countries as they were when Trump was elected. There are more troops deployed to the Middle East at the end of this year than there were at the beginning, and that is a direct consequence of Trump's bankrupt Iran policy.

We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually been adding to them.

[Dec 04, 2019] Common Funding Themes Link 'Whistleblower' Complaint and CrowdStrike Firm Certifying DNC Russia 'Hack' by Aaron Klein

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward Russia. The Council in turn is financed by Google Inc. ..."
"... In a perhaps unexpected development, another Atlantic Council funder is Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were the subject of Trump's inquiry with Zelemsky related to Biden. The Biden allegations concern significant questions about Biden's role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period when Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from Burisma. ..."
"... Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower's complaint alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 presidential race. ..."
"... Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. ..."
"... Together with Soros's Open Society, Omidyar also funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are "disputed." ..."
Sep 28, 2019 | www.breitbart.com

There are common threads that run through an organization repeatedly relied upon in the so-called whistleblower's complaint about President Donald Trump and CrowdStrike, the outside firm utilized to conclude that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee's servers since the DNC would not allow the U.S. government to inspect the servers.

One of several themes is financing tied to Google, whose Google Capital led a $100 million funding drive that financed Crowdstrike. Google Capital, which now goes by the name of CapitalG, is an arm of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party.

CrowdStrike was mentioned by Trump in his call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Perkins Coie, the law firm that represented the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign, reportedly helped draft CrowdStrike to aid with the DNC's allegedly hacked server.

On behalf of the DNC and Clinton's campaign, Perkins Coie also paid the controversial Fusion GPS firm to produce the infamous, largely-discredited anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

CrowdStrike is a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch.

Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, which takes a hawkish approach toward Russia. The Council in turn is financed by Google Inc.

In a perhaps unexpected development, another Atlantic Council funder is Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were the subject of Trump's inquiry with Zelemsky related to Biden. The Biden allegations concern significant questions about Biden's role in Ukraine policy under the Obama administration. This took place during a period when Hunter Biden received $50,000 a month from Burisma.

Besides Google and Burisma funding, the Council is also financed by billionaire activist George Soros's Open Society Foundations as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc. and the U.S. State Department.

Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower's complaint alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country" in the 2020 presidential race.

The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the whistleblower's document and released by the Google and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower's own claims, as Breitbart News documented .

One key section of the so-called whistleblower's document claims that "multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov."

This was allegedly to follow up on Trump's call with Zelensky in order to discuss the "cases" mentioned in that call, according to the so-called whistleblower's narrative. The complainer was clearly referencing Trump's request for Ukraine to investigate the Biden corruption allegations.

Even though the statement was written in first person – "multiple U.S. officials told me" – it contains a footnote referencing a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

That footnote reads:

In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on 22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.

The so-called whistleblower's account goes on to rely upon that same OCCRP report on three more occasions. It does so to:

Write that Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko "also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these matters." Document that Trump adviser Rudi Giuliani "had spoken in late 2018 to former Prosecutor General Shokin, in a Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani." Bolster the charge that, "I also learned from a U.S. official that 'associates' of Mr. Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team." The so-called whistleblower then relates in another footnote, "I do not know whether these associates of Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced above."

The OCCRP report repeatedly referenced is actually a "joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine."

BuzzFeed infamously also first published the full anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Trump's presidential campaign and Russia. The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee and was produced by the Fusion GPS opposition dirt outfit.

The OCCRP and BuzzFeed "joint investigation" resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed publishing similar lengthy pieces on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump's political rivals.

The so-called whistleblower's document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP and does not reference BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia collusion claims.

Another listed OCCRP funder is the Omidyar Network, which is the nonprofit for liberal billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Together with Soros's Open Society, Omidyar also funds the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which hosts the International Fact-Checking Network that partnered with Facebook to help determine whether news stories are "disputed."

Like OCCRP, the Poynter Institute's so-called news fact-checking project is openly funded by not only Soros' Open Society Foundations but also Google and the National Endowment for Democracy.

CrowdStrike and DNC servers

CrowdStrike, meanwhile, was brought up by Trump in his phone call with Zelensky. According to the transcript, Trump told Zelensky, "I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike I guess you have one of your wealthy people The server, they say Ukraine has it."

In his extensive report , Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller notes that his investigative team did not "obtain or examine" the servers of the DNC in determining whether those servers were hacked by Russia.

The DNC famously refused to allow the FBI to access its servers to verify the allegation that Russia carried out a hack during the 2016 presidential campaign. Instead, the DNC reached an arrangement with the FBI in which CrowdStrike conducted forensics on the server and shared details with the FBI.

In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in January 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey confirmed that the FBI registered "multiple requests at different levels," to review the DNC's hacked servers. Ultimately, the DNC and FBI came to an agreement in which a "highly respected private company" -- a reference to CrowdStrike -- would carry out forensics on the servers and share any information that it discovered with the FBI, Comey testified.

A senior law enforcement official stressed the importance of the FBI gaining direct access to the servers, a request that was denied by the DNC.

"The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated," the official was quoted by the news media as saying.

"This left the FBI no choice but to rely upon a third party for information. These actions caused significant delays and inhibited the FBI from addressing the intrusion earlier," the official continued.

... ... ...

Aaron Klein is Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, " Aaron Klein Investigative Radio ." Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.

[Dec 04, 2019] DNC Russian Hackers Found! You Won't Believe Who They Really Work For by the Anonymous Patriots

Highly recommended!
Jan 01, 2017 | themillenniumreport.com

"If someone steals your keys to encrypt the data, it doesn't matter how secure the algorithms are."

Dmitri Alperovitch, founder of CrowdStrike.

By the Anonymous Patriots
SOTN Exclusive

Russians did not hack the DNC system, a Russian named Dmitri Alperovitch is the hacker and he works for President Obama. In the last five years the Obama administration has turned exclusively to one Russian to solve every major cyber-attack in America, whether the attack was on the U.S. government or a corporation. Only one "super-hero cyber-warrior" seems to "have the codes" to figure out "if" a system was hacked and by "whom."

Dmitri's company, CrowdStrike has been called in by Obama to solve mysterious attacks on many high level government agencies and American corporations, including: German Bundestag, Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the White House, the State Department, SONY, and many others.

CrowdStrike's philosophy is: "You don't have a malware problem; you have an adversary problem."

CrowdStrike has played a critical role in the development of America's cyber-defense policy. Dmitri Alperovitch and George Kurtz, a former head of the FBI cyberwarfare unit founded CrowdStrike. Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director at the FBI is now CrowdStrike's president of services. The company is crawling with former U.S. intelligence agents.

Before Alperovitch founded CrowdStrike in 2011, he was working in Atlanta as the chief threat officer at the antivirus software firm McAfee, owned by Intel (a DARPA company). During that time, he "discovered" the Chinese had compromised at least seventy-one companies and organizations, including thirteen defense contractors, three electronics firms, and the International Olympic Committee. He was the only person to notice the biggest cyberattack in history! Nothing suspicious about that.

Alperovitch and the DNC

After CrowdStrike was hired as an independent "vendor" by the DNC to investigate a possible cyberattack on their system, Alperovitch sent the DNC a proprietary software package called Falcon that monitors the networks of its clients in real time. According to Alperovitch, Falcon "lit up," within ten seconds of being installed at the DNC. Alperovitch had his "proof" in TEN SECONDS that Russia was in the network. This "alleged" evidence of Russian hacking has yet to be shared with anyone.

As Donald Trump has pointed out, the FBI, the agency that should have been immediately involved in hacking that effects "National Security," has yet to even examine the DNC system to begin an investigation. Instead, the FBI and 16 other U.S. "intelligence" agencies simply "agree" with Obama's most trusted "cyberwarfare" expert Dmitri Alperovitch's "TEN SECOND" assessment that produced no evidence to support the claim.

Also remember that it is only Alperovitch and CrowdStrike that claim to have evidence that it was Russian hackers . In fact, only two hackers were found to have been in the system and were both identified by Alperovitch as Russian FSB (CIA) and the Russian GRU (DoD). It is only Alperovitch who claims that he knows that it is Putin behind these two hackers.

Alperovitch failed to mention in his conclusive "TEN SECOND" assessment that Guccifer 2.0 had already hacked the DNC and made available to the public the documents he hacked – before Alperovitch did his ten second assessment. Alperovitch reported that no other hackers were found, ignoring the fact that Guccifer 2.0 had already hacked and released DNC documents to the public. Alperovitch's assessment also goes directly against Julian Assange's repeated statements that the DNC leaks did not come from the Russians.

The ridiculously fake cyber-attack assessment done by Alperovitch and CrowdStrike naïvely flies in the face of the fact that a DNC insider admitted that he had released the DNC documents. Julian Assange implied in an interview that the murdered Democratic National Committee staffer, Seth Rich, was the source of a trove of damaging emails the website posted just days before the party's convention. Seth was on his way to testify about the DNC leaks to the FBI when he was shot dead in the street.

It is also absurd to hear Alperovitch state that the Russian FSB (equivalent to the CIA) had been monitoring the DNC site for over a year and had done nothing. No attack, no theft, and no harm was done to the system by this "false-flag cyber-attack" on the DNC – or at least, Alperovitch "reported" there was an attack. The second hacker, the supposed Russian military (GRU – like the U.S. DoD) hacker, had just entered the system two weeks before and also had done "nothing" but observe.

It is only Alperovitch's word that reports that the Russian FSB was "looking for files on Donald Trump."

It is only this false claim that spuriously ties Trump to the "alleged" attack. It is also only Alperovitch who believes that this hack that was supposedly "looking for Trump files" was an attempt to "influence" the election. No files were found about Trump by the second hacker, as we know from Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0's leaks. To confabulate that "Russian's hacked the DNC to influence the elections" is the claim of one well-known Russian spy. Then, 17 U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously confirm that Alperovitch is correct – even though there is no evidence and no investigation was ever conducted .

How does Dmitri Alperovitch have such power? Why did Obama again and again use Alperovitch's company, CrowdStrike, when they have miserably failed to stop further cyber-attacks on the systems they were hired to protect? Why should anyone believe CrowdStrikes false-flag report?

After documents from the DNC continued to leak, and Guccifer 2.0 and Wikileaks made CrowdStrike's report look foolish, Alperovitch decided the situation was far worse than he had reported. He single-handedly concluded that the Russians were conducting an "influence operation" to help win the election for Trump . This false assertion had absolutely no evidence to back it up.

On July 22, three days before the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks dumped a massive cache of emails that had been "stolen" (not hacked) from the DNC. Reporters soon found emails suggesting that the DNC leadership had favored Hillary Clinton in her primary race against Bernie Sanders, which led Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair, along with three other officials, to resign.

Just days later, it was discovered that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) had been hacked. CrowdStrike was called in again and once again, Alperovitch immediately "believed" that Russia was responsible. A lawyer for the DCCC gave Alperovitch permission to confirm the leak and to name Russia as the suspected author. Two weeks later, files from the DCCC began to appear on Guccifer 2.0's website. This time Guccifer released information about Democratic congressional candidates who were running close races in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. On August 12, Guccifer went further, publishing a spreadsheet that included the personal email addresses and phone numbers of nearly two hundred Democratic members of Congress.

Once again, Guccifer 2.0 proved Alperovitch and CrowdStrike's claims to be grossly incorrect about the hack originating from Russia, with Putin masterminding it all. Nancy Pelosi offered members of Congress Alperovitch's suggestion of installing Falcon , the system that failed to stop cyberattacks at the DNC, on all congressional laptops.

Key Point: Once Falcon was installed on the computers of members of the U.S. Congress, CrowdStrike had even further full access into U.S. government accounts.

Alperovitch's "Unbelievable" History

Dmitri was born in 1980 in Moscow where his father, Michael, was a nuclear physicist, (so Dmitri claims). Dmitri's father was supposedly involved at the highest levels of Russian nuclear science. He also claims that his father taught him to write code as a child.

In 1990, his father was sent to Maryland as part of a nuclear-safety training program for scientists. In 1994, Michael Alperovitch was granted a visa to Canada, and a year later the family moved to Chattanooga, where Michael took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

While Dmitri Alperovitch was still in high school, he and his father started an encryption-technology business. Dmitri studied computer science at Georgia Tech and went on to work at an antispam software firm. It was at this time that he realized that cyber-defense was more about psychology than it was about technology. A very odd thing to conclude.

Dmitri Alperovitch posed as a "Russian gangster" on spam discussion forums which brought his illegal activity to the attention of the FBI – as a criminal. In 2005, Dmitri flew to Pittsburgh to meet an FBI agent named Keith Mularski, who had been asked to lead an undercover operation against a vast Russian credit-card-theft syndicate. Alperovitch worked closely with Mularski's sting operation which took two years, but it ultimately brought about fifty-six arrests. Dmitri Alperovitch then became a pawn of the FBI and CIA.

In 2010, while he was at McAfee, the head of cybersecurity at Google told Dmitri that Gmail accounts belonging to human-rights activists in China had been breached. Google suspected the Chinese government. Alperovitch found that the breach was unprecedented in scale; it affected more than a dozen of McAfee's clients and involved the Chinese government. Three days after his supposed discovery, Alperovitch was on a plane to Washington where he had been asked to vet a paragraph in a speech by the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

2014, Sony called in CrowdStrike to investigate a breach of its network. Alperovitch needed just "two hours" to identify North Korea as the adversary. Executives at Sony asked Alperovitch to go public with the information immediately, but it took the FBI another three weeks before it confirmed the attribution.

Alperovitch then developed a list of "usual suspects" who were well-known hackers who had identifiable malware that they commonly used. Many people use the same malware and Alperovitch's obsession with believing he has the only accurate list of hackers in the world is plain idiocy exacerbated by the U.S. government's belief in his nonsense. Alperovitch even speaks like a "nut-case" in his personal Twitters, which generally have absolutely no references to the technology he is supposedly the best at in the entire world.

Dmitri – Front Man for His Father's Russian Espionage Mission

After taking a close look at the disinformation around Dmitri and his father, it is clear to see that Michael Alperovitch became a CIA operative during his first visit to America. Upon his return to Russia, he stole the best Russian encryption codes that were used to protect the top-secret work of nuclear physics in which his father is alleged to have been a major player. Upon surrendering the codes to the CIA when he returned to Canada, the CIA made it possible for a Russian nuclear scientist to become an American citizen overnight and gain a top-secret security clearance to work at the Oakridge plant, one of the most secure and protected nuclear facilities in America . Only the CIA can transform a Russian into an American with a top-secret clearance overnight.

We can see on Michael Alperovitch's Linked In page that he went from one fantastically top-secret job to the next without a break from the time he entered America. He seemed to be on a career path to work in every major U.S. agency in America. In every job he was hired as the top expert in the field and the leader of the company. All of these jobs after the first one were in cryptology, not nuclear physics. As a matter of fact, Michael became the top expert in America overnight and has stayed the top expert to this day.

Most of the work of cyber-security is creating secure interactions on a non-secure system like the Internet. The cryptologist who assigns the encryption codes controls the system from that point on .

Key Point: Cryptologists are well known for leaving a "back-door" in the base-code so that they can always have over-riding control.

Michael Alperovitch essentially has the "codes" for all Department of Defense sites, the Treasury, the State Department, cell-phones, satellites, and public media . There is hardly any powerful agency or company that he has not written the "codes" for. One might ask, why do American companies and the U.S. government use his particular codes? What are so special about Michael's codes?

Stolen Russian Codes

In December, Obama ordered the U.S. military to conduct cyberattacks against Russia in retaliation for the alleged DNC hacks. All of the attempts to attack Russia's military and intelligence agencies failed miserably. Russia laughed at Obama's attempts to hack their systems. Even the Russian companies targeted by the attacks were not harmed by Obama's cyber-attacks. Hardly any news of these massive and embarrassing failed cyber-attacks were reported by the Main Stream Media. The internet has been scrubbed clean of the reports that said Russia's cyber-defenses were impenetrable due to the sophistication of their encryption codes.

Michael Alperovitch was in possession of those impenetrable codes when he was a top scientist in Russia. It was these very codes that he shared with the CIA on his first trip to America . These codes got him spirited into America and "turned into" the best cryptologist in the world. Michael is simply using the effective codes of Russia to design his codes for the many systems he has created in America for the CIA .

KEY POINT: It is crucial to understand at this junction that the CIA is not solely working for America . The CIA works for itself and there are three branches to the CIA – two of which are hostile to American national interests and support globalism.

Michael and Dmitri Alperovitch work for the CIA (and international intelligence corporations) who support globalism . They, and the globalists for whom they work, are not friends of America or Russia. It is highly likely that the criminal activities of Dmitri, which were supported and sponsored by the FBI, created the very hackers who he often claims are responsible for cyberattacks. None of these supposed "attackers" have ever been found or arrested; they simply exist in the files of CrowdStrike and are used as the "usual culprits" when the FBI or CIA calls in Dmitri to give the one and only opinion that counts. Only Dmitri's "suspicions" are offered as evidence and yet 17 U.S. intelligence agencies stand behind the CrowdStrike report and Dmitri's suspicions.

Michael Alperovitch – Russian Spy with the Crypto-Keys

Essentially, Michael Alperovitch flies under the false-flag of being a cryptologist who works with PKI. A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a system for the creation, storage, and distribution of digital certificates which are used to verify that a particular public key belongs to a certain entity. The PKI creates digital certificates which map public keys to entities, securely stores these certificates in a central repository and revokes them if needed. Public key cryptography is a cryptographic technique that enables entities to securely communicate on an insecure public network (the Internet), and reliably verify the identity of an entity via digital signatures . Digital signatures use Certificate Authorities to digitally sign and publish the public key bound to a given user. This is done using the CIA's own private key, so that trust in the user key relies on one's trust in the validity of the CIA's key. Michael Alperovitch is considered to be the number one expert in America on PKI and essentially controls the market .

Michael's past is clouded in confusion and lies. Dmitri states that his father was a nuclear physicist and that he came to America the first time in a nuclear based shared program between America and Russia. But if we look at his current personal Linked In page, Michael claims he has a Master Degree in Applied Mathematics from Gorky State University. From 1932 to 1956, its name was State University of Gorky. Now it is known as Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod – National Research University (UNN), also known as Lobachevsky University. Does Michael not even know the name of the University he graduated from? And when does a person with a Master's Degree become a leading nuclear physicist who comes to "visit" America. In Michael's Linked In page there is a long list of his skills and there is no mention of nuclear physics.

Also on Michael Alperovitch's Linked In page we find some of his illustrious history that paints a picture of either the most brilliant mind in computer security, encryption, and cyberwarfare, or a CIA/FBI backed Russian spy. Imagine that out of all the people in the world to put in charge of the encryption keys for the Department of Defense, the U.S. Treasury, U.S. military satellites, the flow of network news, cell phone encryption, the Pathfire (media control) Program, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Global Information Grid, and TriCipher Armored Credential System among many others, the government hires a Russian spy . Go figure.

Michael Alperovitch's Linked In Page

Education:

Gorky State University, Russia, MS in Applied Mathematics

Work History:

Sr. Security Architect

VT IDirect -2014 – Designing security architecture for satellite communications including cryptographic protocols, authentication.

Principal SME (Contractor)

DISA -Defense Information Systems Agency (Manager of the Global Information Grid) – 2012-2014 – Worked on PKI and identity management projects for DISA utilizing Elliptic Curve Cryptography. Performed application security and penetration testing.

Technical Lead (Contractor)

U.S. Department of the Treasury – 2011 – Designed enterprise validation service architecture for PKI certificate credentials with Single Sign On authentication.

Principal Software Engineer

Comtech Mobile Datacom – 2007-2010 – Subject matter expert on latest information security practices, including authentication, encryption and key management.

Sr. Software Engineer

TriCipher – 2006-2007 – Designed and developed security architecture for TriCipher Armored Credential Authentication System.

Lead Software Engineer

BellSouth – 2003-2006 – Designed and built server-side Jabber-based messaging platform with Single Sign On authentication.

Principal Software Research Engineer

Pathfire – 2001-2002 – Designed and developed Digital Rights Management Server for Video on Demand and content distribution applications. Pathfire provides digital media distribution and management solutions to the television, media, and entertainment industries. The company offers Digital Media Gateway, a digital IP store-and-forward platform, delivering news stories, syndicated programming, advertising spots, and video news releases to broadcasters. It provides solutions for content providers and broadcasters, as well as station solutions.

Obama – No Friend of America

Obama is no friend of America in the war against cyber-attacks. The very agencies and departments being defended by Michael Alperovitch's "singular and most brilliant" ability to write encryption codes have all been successfully attacked and compromised since Michael set up the codes. But we shouldn't worry, because if there is a cyberattack in the Obama administration, Michael's son Dmitri is called in to "prove" that it isn't the fault of his father's codes. It was the "damn Russians", or even "Putin himself" who attacked American networks.

Not one of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies is capable of figuring out a successful cyberattack against America without Michael and Dmitri's help. Those same 17 U.S. intelligence agencies were not able to effectively launch a successful cyberattack against Russia. It seems like the Russian's have strong codes and America has weak codes. We can thank Michael and Dmitri Alperovitch for that.

It is clear that there was no DNC hack beyond Guccifer 2.0. Dmitri Alperovitch is a "frontman" for his father's encryption espionage mission.

Is it any wonder that Trump says that he has "his own people" to deliver his intelligence to him that is outside of the infiltrated U.S. government intelligence agencies and the Obama administration ? Isn't any wonder that citizens have to go anywhere BUT the MSM to find real news or that the new administration has to go to independent news to get good intel?

It is hard to say anything more damnable than to again quote Dmitri on these very issues:
"If someone steals your keys to encrypt the data, it doesn't matter how secure the algorithms are." Dmitri Alperovitch, founder of CrowdStrike

Originally posted at: http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=62536

[Dec 04, 2019] June 4th, 2017 Crowdstrike Was at the DNC Six Weeks by George Webb

Highly recommended!
A short YouTube with the handwritten timeline
Nov 27, 2019 | www.youtube.com
AwanContra - George Webb, Investigative Journalist

[Dec 04, 2019] Cyberanalyst George Eliason Claims that the "Fancy Bear" Who Hacked the DNC Server is Ukrainian Intelligence – In League with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... And RUH8 is allied with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike. ..."
"... Russia was probably not one of the hacking groups. The willful destruction of evidence by the DNC themselves probably points to Russia not being one of the those groups. The DNC wouldn't destroy evidence that supported their position. Also, government spy agencies keep info like that closely held. They might leak out tidbits, but they don't do wholesale dumps, like, ever. ..."
"... That's what the DNC is lying about. Not that hacks happened (they undoubtedly did), but about who did them (probably not Russian gov), and if hacks mattered (they didn't since everything was getting leaked anyway). ..."
"... The DNC/Mueller/etc are lying, but like most practiced liars they're mixing the lies with half-truths and unrelated facts to muddy the waters: ..."
"... An interesting question is, since it's basically guaranteed the DNC got hacked, but probably not by the Russians, is, what groups did hack the DNC, and why did the DNC scramble madly to hide their identities? ..."
"... And while you think about that question, consider the close parallel with the Awan case, where Dems were ostensibly the victims, but they again scrambled to cover up for the people who supposedly harmed them. level 2 ..."
"... DNC wasn't even hacked. Emails were leaked. They didn't even examine the server. Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools that we know about from wikileaks. It's important to know how each new lie is a lie. But man I am just so done with all this Russia shit. level 2 ..."
"... Crowdstrike claims that malware was found on DNC server. I agree that this has nothing to do with the Wikileaks releases. What I am wondering is whether Crowdstrike may have arranged for the DNC to be hacked so that Russia could be blamed. Continue this thread level 1 ..."
"... George Eliason promises additional essays: *The next articles, starting with one about Fancy Bear's hot/cold ongoing relationship with Bellingcat which destroys the JIT investigation, will showcase the following: Fancy Bear worked with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian government providing Information War material as evidence for MH17: ..."
"... Fancy Bear is an inside unit of the Atlantic Council and their Digital Forensics Lab ..."
Dec 04, 2018 | www.reddit.com

Cyberanalyst George Eliason has written some intriguing blogs recently claiming that the "Fancy Bear" which hacked the DNC server in mid-2016 was in fact a branch of Ukrainian intelligence linked to the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike. I invite you to have a go at one of his recent essays:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/06/25/who-is-fancy-bear-and-who-are-they-working-for/

Since I am not very computer savvy and don't know much about the world of hackers - added to the fact that Eliason's writing is too cute and convoluted - I have difficulty navigating Eliason's thought. Nonetheless, here is what I can make of Eliasons' claims, as supported by independent literature:

Russian hacker Konstantin Kozlovsky, in Moscow court filings, has claimed that he did the DNC hack – and can prove it, because he left some specific code on the DNC server.

http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/366696-russian-hacker-claims-he-can-prove-he-hacked-dnc

Kozlovsky states that he did so by order of Dimitry Dokuchaev (formerly of the FSB, and currently in prison in Russia on treason charges) who works with the Russian traitor hacker group Shaltai Boltai.

https://www.newsweek.com/russian-hacker-stealing-clintons-emailshacking-dnc-putinsfsb-745555 (Note that Newsweek's title is an overt lie.)

According to Eliason, Shaltai Boltai works in collaboration with the Ukrainian hacker group RUH8, a group of neo-Nazis (Privat Sektor) who are affiliated with Ukrainian intelligence. And RUH8 is allied with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike.

https://off-guardian.org/2018/06/25/who-is-fancy-bear-and-who-are-they-working-for/

Cyberexpert Jeffrey Carr has stated that RUH8 has the X-Agent malware which our intelligence community has erroneously claimed is possessed only by Russian intelligence, and used by "Fancy Bear".

https://medium.com/@jeffreyscarr/the-gru-ukraine-artillery-hack-that-may-never-have-happened-820960bbb02d

Eliason has concluded that RUH8 is Fancy Bear.

This might help explain why Adam Carter has determined that some of the malware found on the DNC server was compiled AFTER Crowdstrike was working on the DNC server – Crowdstrike was in collusion with Fancy Bear (RUH8).

In other words, Crowdstrike likely arranged for a hack by Ukrainian intelligence that they could then attribute to Russia.

As far as I can tell, none of this is pertinent to how Wikileaks obtained their DNC emails, which most likely were leaked.

How curious that our Deep State and the recent Mueller indictment have had nothing to say about Kozlovsky's confession - whom I tend to take seriously because he offers a simple way to confirm his claim. Also interesting that the FBI has shown no interest in looking at the DNC server to check whether Kozlovsky's code is there.

I will ask Adam Carter for his opinion on this. 19 comments 84% Upvoted This thread is archived New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast Sort by View discussions in 1 other community level 1


zer0mas 1 point · 1 year ago

Its worth noting that Dimitri Alperovich's (Crowdstrike) hatred of Putin is second only to Hillary's hatred for taking responsibility for her actions. level 1

veganmark 2 points · 1 year ago

Thanks - I'll continue to follow Eliason's work. The thesis that Ukrainian intelligence is hacking a number of targets so that Russia gets blamed for it has intuitive appeal. level 1

alskdmv-nosleep4u -1 points · 1 year ago

I see things like this:

DNC wasn't even hacked.

and have to cringe. Any hacks weren't related to Wikileaks, who got their info from leakers, but that is not the same thing as no hack. Leaks and hacks aren't mutually exclusive. They actually occur together pretty commonly.

DNC's security was utter shit. Systems with shit security and obviously valuable info usually get hacked by multiple groups. In the case of the DNC, Hillary's email servers, etc., it's basically impossible they weren't hacked by dozens of intruders. A plastic bag of 100s will not sit untouched on a NYC street corner for 4 weeks. Not. fucking. happening.

Interestingly, Russia was probably not one of the hacking groups. The willful destruction of evidence by the DNC themselves probably points to Russia not being one of the those groups. The DNC wouldn't destroy evidence that supported their position. Also, government spy agencies keep info like that closely held. They might leak out tidbits, but they don't do wholesale dumps, like, ever.

That's what the DNC is lying about. Not that hacks happened (they undoubtedly did), but about who did them (probably not Russian gov), and if hacks mattered (they didn't since everything was getting leaked anyway).

The DNC/Mueller/etc are lying, but like most practiced liars they're mixing the lies with half-truths and unrelated facts to muddy the waters:

Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools

Yes, but that spoofed 'evidence' is not the direct opposite of the truth, like I see people assuming. Bad assumption, and the establishment plays on that to make critic look bad. The spoofed evidence is just mud.

An interesting question is, since it's basically guaranteed the DNC got hacked, but probably not by the Russians, is, what groups did hack the DNC, and why did the DNC scramble madly to hide their identities?

And while you think about that question, consider the close parallel with the Awan case, where Dems were ostensibly the victims, but they again scrambled to cover up for the people who supposedly harmed them. level 2

alskdmv-nosleep4u 2 points · 1 year ago

What's hilarious about the 2 down-votes is I can't tell if their from pro-Russiagate trolls, or from people who who can't get past binary thinking. level 1

Honztastic 2 points · 1 year ago

DNC wasn't even hacked. Emails were leaked. They didn't even examine the server. Any "evidence" produced is spoofable from CIA cybertools that we know about from wikileaks. It's important to know how each new lie is a lie. But man I am just so done with all this Russia shit. level 2

veganmark 2 points · 1 year ago

Crowdstrike claims that malware was found on DNC server. I agree that this has nothing to do with the Wikileaks releases. What I am wondering is whether Crowdstrike may have arranged for the DNC to be hacked so that Russia could be blamed. Continue this thread level 1

Inuma I take the headspace of idiots 9 points · 1 year ago

So you mean to tell me that WWIII is being prepared by Mueller and it was manufactured consent?

I'd be shocked, but this only proves that the "Deep State" only cares about their power, consequences be damned. level 1

veganmark 8 points · 1 year ago

George Eliason promises additional essays: *The next articles, starting with one about Fancy Bear's hot/cold ongoing relationship with Bellingcat which destroys the JIT investigation, will showcase the following: Fancy Bear worked with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian government providing Information War material as evidence for MH17:

HillaryBrokeTheLaw Long live dead poets 10 points · 1 year ago

Nice.

I'm glad you're still following this. Crowdstrike is shady af. level 1

[Dec 04, 2019] Fancy Bear - Conservapedia

Highly recommended!
Dec 04, 2019 | www.conservapedia.com

Fancy Bear (also know as Strontium Group, or APT28) is a Ukrainian cyber espionage group. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike incorrectly has said with a medium level of confidence that it is associated with the Russian military intelligence agency GRU . CrowdStrike founder, Dmitri Alperovitch , has colluded with Fancy Bear. American journalist George Eliason has written extensively on the subject.

There are a couple of caveats that need to be made when identifying the Fancy Bear hackers. The first is the identifier used by Mueller as Russian FSB and GRU may have been true- 10 years ago. This group was on the run trying to stay a step ahead of Russian law enforcement until October 2016. So we have part of the Fancy bear hacking group identified as Ruskie traitors and possibly former Russian state security. The majority of the group are Ukrainians making up Ukraine's Cyber Warfare groups.

Eliason lives and works in Donbass. He has been interviewed by and provided analysis for RT, the BBC , and Press-TV. His articles have been published in the Security Assistance Monitor, Washingtons Blog, OpedNews, the Saker, RT, Global Research, and RINF, and the Greanville Post among others. He has been cited and republished by various academic blogs including Defending History, Michael Hudson, SWEDHR, Counterpunch, the Justice Integrity Project, among others.

Contents [ hide ] Fancy Bear is Ukrainian Intelligence Shaltai Boltai

The "Fancy Bear hackers" may have been given the passwords to get into the servers at the DNC because they were part of the Team Clinton opposition research team. It was part of their job.

According to Politico ,

"In an interview this month, at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities -- including Ukrainian-Americans -- she said that, when Trump's unlikely presidential campaign. Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While her consulting work began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump's ties to Russia, as well." [1]

The only investigative journalists, government officials, and private intelligence operatives that work together in 2014-2015-2016 Ukraine are Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta, Ukraine Cyber Alliance, and the Ministry of Information.

All of these hacking and information operation groups work for Andrea Chalupa with EuroMaidanPR and Irena Chalupa at the Atlantic Council. Both Chalupa sisters work directly with the Ukrainian government's intelligence and propaganda arms.

Since 2014 in Ukraine, these are the only OSINT, hacking, Intel, espionage , terrorist , counter-terrorism, cyber, propaganda , and info war channels officially recognized and directed by Ukraine's Information Ministry. Along with their American colleagues, they populate the hit-for-hire website Myrotvorets with people who stand against Ukraine's criminal activities.

The hackers, OSINT, Cyber, spies, terrorists, etc. call themselves volunteers to keep safe from State level retaliation, even though a child can follow the money. As volunteers motivated by politics and patriotism they are protected to a degree from retribution.

They don't claim State sponsorship or governance and the level of attack falls below the threshold of military action. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had a lot of latitude for making the attribution Russian, even though the attacks came from Ukrainian Intelligence. Based on how the rules of the Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber are written, because the few members of the coalition from Shaltai Boltai are Russian in nationality, Fancy Bear can be attributed as a Russian entity for the purposes of retribution. The caveat is if the attribution is proven wrong, the US will be liable for damages caused to the State which in this case is Russia.

How large is the Fancy Bear unit? According to their propaganda section InformNapalm, they have the ability to research and work in over 30 different languages.

This can be considered an Information Operation against the people of the United States and of course Russia. After 2013, Shaltay Boltay was no longer physically available to work for Russia. The Russian hackers were in Ukraine working for the Ukrainian government's Information Ministry which is in charge of the cyber war. They were in Ukraine until October 2016 when they were tricked to return to Moscow and promptly arrested for treason.

From all this information we know the Russian component of Team Fancy Bear is Shaltai Boltai. We know the Ukrainian Intel component is called CyberHunta and Ukraine Cyber Alliance which includes the hacker group RUH8. We know both groups work/ worked for Ukrainian Intelligence. We know they are grouped with InformNapalm which is Ukraine's OSINT unit. We know their manager is a Ukrainian named Kristina Dobrovolska. And lastly, all of the above work directly with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich.

In short, the Russian-Ukrainian partnership that became Fancy Bear started in late 2013 to very early 2014 and ended in October 2016 in what appears to be a squabble over the alleged data from the Surkov leak.

But during 2014, 2015, and 2016 Shaltai Boltai, the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, and CyberHunta went to work for the DNC as opposition researchers .

The First Time Shaltai Boltai was Handed the Keys to US Gov Servers

The setup to this happened long before the partnership with Ukrainian Intel hackers and Russia's Shaltai Boltai was forged. The hack that gained access to US top-secret servers happened just after the partnership was cemented after Euro-Maidan.

In August 2009 Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff at the State Department Huma Abedin sent the passwords to her Government laptop to her Yahoo mail account. On August 16, 2010, Abedin received an email titled "Re: Your yahoo account. We can see where this is going, can't we?

"After Abedin sent an unspecified number of sensitive emails to her Yahoo account, half a billion Yahoo accounts were hacked by Russian cybersecurity expert and Russian intelligence agent, Igor Sushchin, in 2014. The hack, one of the largest in history, allowed Sushchin's associates to access email accounts into 2015 and 2016."

Igor Sushchin was part of the Shaltai Boltai hacking group that is charged with the Yahoo hack.

The time frame has to be noted. The hack happened in 2014. Access to the email accounts continued through 2016. The Ukrainian Intel partnership was already blossoming and Shaltai Boltai was working from Kiev, Ukraine.

So when we look at the INFRASTRUCTURE HACKS, WHITE HOUSE HACKS, CONGRESS, start with looking at the time frame. Ukraine had the keys already in hand in 2014.

Chalupa collusion with Ukrainian Intelligence
See also: Ukrainian collusion and Ukrainian collusion timeline

Alexandra Chalupa hired this particular hacking terrorist group, which Dimitry Alperovich and Crowdstrike dubbed "Fancy Bear", in 2015 at the latest. While the Ukrainian hackers worked for the DNC, Fancy Bear had to send in progress reports, turn in research, and communicate on the state of the projects they were working on. Let's face it, once you're in, setting up your Fancy Bear toolkit doesn't get any easier. This is why I said the DNC hack isn't the big crime. It's a big con and all the parties were in on it.

Hillary Clinton exposed secrets to hacking threats by using private email instead of secured servers. Given the information provided she was probably being monitored by our intrepid Ruskie-Ukie union made in hell hackers. Anthony Weiner exposed himself and his wife Huma Abedin using Weiner's computer for top-secret State Department emails. And of course Huma Abedin exposed herself along with her top-secret passwords at Yahoo and it looks like the hackers the DNC hired to do opposition research hacked her.

Here's a question. Did Huma Abedin have Hillary Clinton's passwords for her private email server? It would seem logical given her position with Clinton at the State Department and afterward. This means that Hillary Clinton and the US government top secret servers were most likely compromised by Fancy Bear before the DNC and Team Clinton hired them by using legitimate passwords.

Dobrovolska

Hillary Clinton retained State Dept. top secret clearance passwords for 6 of her former staff from 2013 through prepping for the 2016 election. [2] [3] Alexandra Chalupa was running a research department that is rich in (foreign) Ukrainian Intelligence operatives, hackers, terrorists, and a couple Ruskie traitors.

Kristina Dobrovolska was acting as a handler and translator for the US State Department in 2016. She is the Fancy Bear *opposition researcher handler manager. Kristina goes to Washington to meet with Chalupa.

Alexandra types in her password to show Dobrovolska something she found and her eager to please Ukrainian apprentice finds the keystrokes are seared into her memory. She tells the Fancy Bear crew about it and they immediately get to work looking for Trump material on the US secret servers with legitimate access. I mean, what else could they do with this? Turn over sensitive information to the ever corrupt Ukrainian government?

According to the Politico article, Alexandra Chalupa was meeting with the Ukrainian embassy in June of 2016 to discuss getting more help sticking it to candidate Trump. At the same time she was meeting, the embassy had a reception that highlighted female Ukrainian leaders.

Four Verkhovna Rada [parlaiment] deputies there for the event included: Viktoriia Y. Ptashnyk, Anna A. Romanova, Alyona I. Shkrum, and Taras T. Pastukh. [4]

According to CNN , [5] DNC sources said Chalupa told DNC operatives the Ukrainian government would be willing to deliver damaging information against Trump's campaign. Later, Chalupa would lead the charge to try to unseat president-elect Trump starting on Nov 10, 2016.

Accompanying them Kristina Dobrovolska who was a U.S. Embassy-assigned government liaison and translator who escorted the delegates from Kyiv during their visits to Albany and Washington.

Kristina Dobrovolska is the handler manager working with Ukraine's DNC Fancy Bear Hackers. [6] She took the Rada [parliament] members to dinner to meet Joel Harding who designed Ukraine's infamous Information Policy which opened up their kill-for-hire-website Myrotvorets. Then she took them to meet the Ukrainian Diaspora leader doing the hiring. Nestor Paslawsky is the surviving nephew to the infamous torturer The WWII OUNb leader, Mykola Lebed.

Fancy Bear's Second Chance at Top Secret Passwords From Team Clinton

One very successful method of hacking is called social engineering . You gain access to the office space and any related properties and physically locate the passwords or clues to get you into the hardware you want to hack. This includes something as simple as looking over the shoulder of the person typing in passwords.

The Fancy Bear hackers were hired by Alexandra Chalupa to work for DNC opposition research. On different occasions, Fancy Bear handler Kristina Dobrovolska traveled to the US to meet the Diaspora leaders, her boss Alexandra Chalupa, Irena Chalupa, Andrea Chalupa, US Dept of State personnel, and most likely Crowdstrike's Dimitry Alperovich. Alperovich was working with the hackers in 2015-16. In 2016, the only groups known to have Fancy Bear's signature tools called X-tunnel and X-Agent were Alperovich, Crowdstrike, and Fancy Bear (Shaltai Boltai, CyberHunta, Ukraine Cyber Alliance, and RUH8/RUX8. Yes, that does explain a few things.

Alleged DNC hack

There were multiple DNC hacks. There is also clear proof supporting the download to a USB stick and subsequent information exchange (leak) to Wikileaks . All are separate events.

At the same time this story developed, it overshadowed the Hillary Clinton email scandal. It is a matter of public record that Team Clinton provided the DNC hackers with passwords to State Department servers on at least 2 occasions, one wittingly and one not. Fancy Bear hackers are Ukrainian Intelligence Operators.

If the leak came through Seth Rich , it may have been because he saw foreign Intel operatives given this access from the presumed winners of the 2016 US presidential election . The leaker may have been trying to do something about it. I'm curious what information Wikileaks might have.

Alperovitch and Fancy Bear

George Eliason, Washingtonsblog: Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear. investigated. [7]

  • In the wake of the JAR-16-20296 dated December 29, 2016 about hacking and influencing the 2016 election, the need for real evidence is clear. The joint report adds nothing substantial to the October 7th report. It relies on proofs provided by the cyber security firm Crowdstrike that is clearly not on par with intelligence findings or evidence. At the top of the report is an "as is" statement showing this.
  • The difference bet enough evidence is provided to warrant an investigation of specific parties for the DNC hacks. The real story involves specific anti-American actors that need to be investigated for real crimes. For instance, the malware used was an out-dated version just waiting to be found. The one other interesting point is that the Russian malware called Grizzly Steppe is from Ukraine. How did Crowdstrike miss this when it is their business to know?
  • The bar for identification set by Crowdstrike has never been able to get beyond words like probably, maybe, could be, or should be, in their attribution. The bar Dimitri Alperovitch set for identifying the hackers involved is that low. Other than asking America to trust them, how many solid facts has Alperovitch provided to back his claim of Russian involvement?
  • information from outside intelligence agencies has the value of rumor or unsubstantiated information at best according to policy. Usable intelligence needs to be free from partisan politics and verifiable. Intel agencies noted back in the early 90's that every private actor in the information game was radically political.
  • Alperovitch first gained notice when he was the VP in charge of threat research with McAfee. Asked to comment on Alperovitch's discovery of Russian hacks on Larry King, John McAfee had this to say. "Based on all of his experience, McAfee does not believe that Russians were behind the hacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC), John Podesta's emails, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. As he told RT, "if it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the Russians."
  • How does Crowdstrike's story part with reality? First is the admission that it is probably, maybe, could be Russia hacking the DNC. "Intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin 'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to Wiki Leaks." The public evidence never goes beyond the word possibility. While never going beyond that or using facts, Crowdstrike insists that it's Russia behind both Clinton's and the Ukrainian losses.
  • NBC carried the story because one of the partners in Crowdstrike is also a consultant for NBC. According to NBC the story reads like this."The company, Crowdstrike, was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack and issued a report publicly attributing it to Russian intelligence. One of Crowdstrike's senior executives is Shawn Henry , a former senior FBI official who consults for NBC News.
  • In June, Crowdstrike went public with its findings that two separate Russian intelligence agencies had hacked the DNC. One, which Crowdstrike and other researchers call Cozy Bear, is believed to be linked to Russia's CIA, known as the FSB. The other, known as Fancy Bear, is believed to be tied to the military intelligence agency, called the GRU." The information is so certain the level of proof never rises above "believed to be." According to the December 12th Intercept article "Most importantly, the Post adds that "intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin 'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks."
  • The SBU, Olexander Turchinov, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense all agree that Crowdstrike is dead wrong in this assessment. Although subtitles aren't on it, the former Commandant of Ukrainian Army Headquarters thanks God Russia never invaded or Ukraine would have been in deep trouble. How could Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike be this wrong on easily checked detail and still get this much media attention?
  • Crowdstrike CEO Dmitri Alperovitch story about Russian hacks that cost Hillary Clinton the election was broadsided by the SBU (Ukrainian Intelligence and Security) in Ukraine. If Dimitri Alperovitch is working for Ukrainian Intelligence and is providing intelligence to 17 US Intelligence Agencies is it a conflict of interest?
  • Is giving misleading or false information to 17 US Intelligence Agencies a crime? If it's done by a cyber security industry leader like Crowdstrike should that be investigated? If unwinding the story from the "targeting of Ukrainian volunteers" side isn't enough, we should look at this from the American perspective. How did the Russia influencing the election and DNC hack story evolve? Who's involved? Does this pose conflicts of interest for Dmitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? And let's face it, a hacking story isn't complete until real hackers with the skills, motivation, and reason are exposed.
  • According to journalist and DNC activist Andrea Chalupa on her Facebook page "After Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter to a meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns within the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. "That's when we knew it was the Russians," said a Democratic Party source who has been directly involved in the internal probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, "we told her to stop her research."" July 25, 2016
  • If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her sister Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news. The DNC hacking investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by Russian actors based on the work done by Alexandra Chalupa ? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection.
  • How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he should have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a presidential election in a new direction. According to Esquire.com, Alperovitch has vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the past. Because of his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said the measures taken were directly because of his work.
  • Alperovitch's relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers [show a conflict of interest]. When it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that tried hard to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016.
  • The Chalupas are not Democrat or Republican. They are OUNb. The OUNb worked hard to start a war between the USA and Russia for the last 50 years. According to the Ukrainian Weekly in a rare open statement of their existence in 2011, "Other statements were issued in the Ukrainian language by the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (B) and the International Conference in Support of Ukraine. The OUN (Bandera wing) called for" What is OUNb Bandera? They follow the same political policy and platform that was developed in the 1930's by Stepan Bandera . When these people go to a Holocaust memorial they are celebrating both the dead and the OUNb SS that killed. [8] There is no getting around this fact. The OUNb have no concept of democratic values and want an authoritarian fascism .
  • Alexandra Chalupa- According to the Ukrainian Weekly , [9]
"The effort, known as Digital Miadan, gained momentum following the initial Twitter storms. Leading the effort were: Lara Chelak, Andrea Chalupa, Alexandra Chalupa, Constatin Kostenko and others." The Digital Maidan was also how they raised money for the coup. This was how the Ukrainian emigres bought the bullets that were used on Euromaidan. Ukraine's chubby nazi, Dima Yarosh stated openly he was taking money from the Ukrainian emigres during Euromaidan and Pravy Sektor still fundraises openly in North America. The "Sniper Massacre" on the Maidan in Ukraine by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottowa shows clearly detailed evidence how the massacre happened. It has Pravy Sektor confessions that show who created the "heavenly hundred. Their admitted involvement as leaders of Digital Maidan by both Chalupas is a clear violation of the Neutrality Act and has up to a 25 year prison sentence attached to it because it ended in a coup.
  • Andrea Chalupa-2014, in a Huff Post article Sept. 1 2016, Andrea Chalupa described Sviatoslav Yurash as one of Ukraine's important "dreamers." He is a young activist that founded Euromaidan Press. Beyond the gushing glow what she doesn't say is who he actually is. Sviatoslav Yurash was Dmitri Yarosh's spokesman just after Maidan. He is a hardcore Ukrainian nationalist and was rewarded with the Deputy Director position for the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) in Kiev.
  • In January, 2014 when he showed up at the Maidan protests he was 17 years old. He became the foreign language media representative for Vitali Klitschko, Arseni Yatsenyuk, and Oleh Tyahnybok. All press enquiries went through Yurash. To meet Dimitri Yurash you had to go through Sviatoslav Yurash as a Macleans reporter found out.
  • At 18 years old, Sviatoslav Yurash became the spokesman for Ministry of Defense of Ukraine under Andrei Paruby. He was Dimitri Yarosh's spokesman and can be seen either behind Yarosh on videos at press conferences or speaking ahead of him to reporters. From January 2014 onward, to speak to Dimitri Yarosh, you set up an appointment with Yurash.
  • Andrea Chalupa has worked with Yurash's Euromaidan Press which is associated with Informnapalm.org and supplies the state level hackers for Ukraine.
  • Irene Chalupa- Another involved Chalupa we need to cover to do the story justice is Irene Chalupa. From her bio– Irena Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center. She is also a senior correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where she has worked for more than twenty years. Ms. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the Atlantic Council, where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the news anchor for Ukraine's propaganda channel org She is also a Ukrainian emigre leader.
  • According to Robert Parry's article [10] At the forefront of people that would have taken senior positions in a Clinton administration and especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council . Their main goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
  • The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with Russia. Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support throughout the campaign.
  • What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite conflict of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground and Clinton needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or Homeland Security?
  • When you put someone that has so much to gain in charge of an investigation that could change an election, that is a conflict of interest. If the think tank is linked heavily to groups that want war with Russia like the Atlantic Council and the CEEC, it opens up criminal conspiracy.
  • If the person in charge of the investigation is a fellow at the think tank that wants a major conflict with Russia it is a definite conflict of interest. Both the Atlantic Council and clients stood to gain Cabinet and Policy positions based on how the result of his work affects the election. It clouds the results of the investigation. In Dmitri Alperovitch's case, he found the perpetrator before he was positive there was a crime.
  • Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence groups is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and Informnapalm.org which is the outlet for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers.
  • When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the CEO of a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm and its hackers individually. There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government. Crowdstrike is also following their hack of a Russian government official after the DNC hack. It closely resembles the same method used with the DNC because it was an email hack.
  • Crowdstrike's product line includes Falcon Host, Falcon Intelligence, Falcon Overwatch and Falcon DNS. Is it possible the hackers in Falcons Flame are another service Crowdstrike offers?
  • In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA. [11] They consider the CIA amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance is a quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity, Falcon Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the Myrotvorets site, Informnapalm analytical agency."
Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This image shows Crowdstrike in their network. Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network. In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The network communication goes through a secondary source. Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence. The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could be on the list.
  • Should someone tell Dimitri Alperovitch that Gerashchenko, who is now in charge of Peacekeeper recently threatened president-elect Donald Trump that he would put him on his "Peacemaker" site as a target? The same has been done with Silvio Berscaloni in the past.
  • Trying not to be obvious, the Head of Ukraine's Information Ministry (UA Intelligence) tweeted something interesting that ties Alperovitch and Crowdstrike to the Ukrainian Intelligence hackers and the Information Ministry even tighter. This single tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him and Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or shared. If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be shared heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it to themselves and not draw unwanted attention.
  • These same hackers are associated with Alexandra, Andrea, and Irene Chalupa through the portals and organizations they work with through their OUNb. The hackers are funded and directed by or through the same OUNb channels that Alperovitch is working for and with to promote the story of Russian hacking.
  • When you look at the image for the hacking group in the euromaidanpress article, one of the hackers identifies themselves as one of Dimitri Yarosh's Pravy Sektor members by the Pravy Sektor sweatshirt they have on. Noted above, Pravy Sektor admitted to killing the people at the Maidan protest and sparked the coup.
  • Going further with the linked Euromaidanpress article the hackers say "Let's understand that Ukrainian hackers and Russian hackers once constituted a single very powerful group. Ukrainian hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of the USA I don't know, why would we need it? We have all the talent and special means for this. And I don't think that the USA or any NATO country would make such sharp movements in international politics."
  • What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it out for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored, Russian language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack they have the tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are also laughing at US intel efforts.
  • The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting a war between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt Russia worst. Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by Alperovitch, both he and these hackers need to be investigated.
  • According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought the government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of the personal in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any other way," he told me. "I have."
  • While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism is not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering a conflict with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine.
  • The evidence presented deserves investigation because it looks like the case for conflict of interest is the least Dimitri Alperovitch should look forward to. If these hackers are the real Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, they really did make sharp movements in international politics. By pawning it off on Russia, they made a worldwide embarrassment of an outgoing President of the United States and made the President Elect the suspect of rumor.
Obama, Brazile, Comey, and CrowdStrike

According to Obama the hacks continued until September 2016. According to ABC, Donna Brazile says the hacks didn't stop until after the elections in 2016. According to Crowdstrike the hacks continued into November.

Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile said Russian hackers persisted in trying to break into the organization's computers "daily, hourly" until after the election -- contradicting President Obama's assertion that the hacking stopped in September after he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin to "cut it out."-ABC

This time frame gives a lot of latitude to both hacks and leaks happening on that server and still agrees with the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs). According to Bill Binney , the former Technical Director for the NSA, the only way that data could move off the server that fast was through a download to a USB stick. The transfer rate of the file does not agree with a Guciffer 2.0 hack and the information surrounding Guciffer 2.0 is looking ridiculous and impossible at best.

The DNC fiasco isn't that important of a crime. The reason I say this is the FBI would have taken control over material evidence right away. No law enforcement agency or Intel agency ever did. This means none of them considered it a crime Comey should have any part of investigating. That by itself presents the one question mark which destroys any hope Mueller has proving law enforcement maintained a chain of custody for any evidence he introduces.

It also says the US government under Barrack Obama and the victimized DNC saw this as a purely political event. They didn't want this prosecuted or they didn't think it was prosecutable.

Once proven it shows a degree of criminality that makes treason almost too light a charge in federal court. Rest assured this isn't a partisan accusation. Team Clinton and the DNC gets the spotlight but there are Republicans involved.

Further reading

[Dec 04, 2019] June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams by George Webb

Highly recommended!
Nov 27, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Investigative Jouralist George Webb worked at MacAfee and Network Solutions in 2000 when the CEO Bill Larsen bought a small, Moscow based, hacking and virus writing company to move to Silicon Valley.

MacAfee also purchased PGP, an open source encryption software developed by privacy advocate to reduce NSA spying on the public.

The two simultaneous purchase of PGP and the Moscow hacking team by Metwork Solutions was sponsored by the CIA and FBI in order to crack encrypted communications to write a back door for law enforcement.

Among the 12 engineers assigned to writing a PGP backdoor was the son of a KGB officer named Dmitri Alperovich who would go on to be the CTO at a company involved in the DNC Hacking scandal - Crowdstrike.

In addition to writing a back door for PGP, Alperovich also ported PGP to the blackberry platform to provide encrypted communications for covert action operatives.

[Dec 04, 2019] ICIG Whistleblower Form Recently Modified to Permit Complaint "Heard From Others" by sundance

Notable quotes:
"... heard from others ..."
"... blowing-the-whistle ..."
"... Michael K Atkinson was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD) in 2016. That makes Atkinson senior legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who were the former heads of the DOJ-NSD in 2016 when the stop Trump operation was underway. ..."
"... foreign campaign contribution ..."
Sep 27, 2019 | theconservativetreehouse.com
Folks, this "Ukraine Whistleblower" event was a pre-planned event. As we begin to understand the general outline of how the Schiff Dossier was assembled, we are now starting to get into the specifics. First discovered by researcher Stephen McIntyr e, there is now evidence surfacing showing the ICIG recently created an entirely new 'whistleblower complaint form' that specifically allowed for the filing of complaints " heard from others ".

... ... ...

The timing here is far too coincidental. This was a set-up .

Sean Davis from the Federalist is also hot on the trail.

Sean Davis – Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community's behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.

The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump's July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only "heard about [wrongdoing] from others."

The internal properties of the newly revised "Disclosure of Urgent Concern" form , which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed. ( read more )

President Trump announced Joseph Macguire as the Acting ODNI on August 8th, 2019 . ( link ) The CIA operative "whistle-blower" letter to Adam Schiff and Richard Burr was on August 12th ( link ). Immediately following this letter, the ICIG rules and requirements for "whistle-blowers" was modified, allowing hearsay complaints. On August 28th Adam Schiff begins tweeting about the construct of the complaint.

As Stephen McIntyre notes : "it appears almost certain that, subsequent to the CIA operative "WB" complaint, the DNI introduced a brand new Urgent Disclosure Form which offered a previously unavailable alternative to report allegations with no personal knowledge."

The prior IGIC complaint form can be viewed via the Wayback Machine – SEE HERE and the new IGIC complaint form that allows hearsay can be compared HERE .

The CIA whistleblower complaint is likely the VERY FIRST complaint allowed using the new IGIC protocol and standard. Taken in combination with the timeline of the August 12th notification letter to Schiff and Burr and the Schiff tweet of August 28th, there's little room for doubt this Ukraine whistleblower impeachment effort was pre-planned.

Additionally, this coordinated effort ties back-in Intelligence Community Inspector General, Michael K Atkinson .

The center of the Lawfare Alliance influence was/is the Department of Justice National Security Division, DOJ-NSD. It was the DOJ-NSD running the Main Justice side of the 2016 operations to support Operation Crossfire Hurricane and FBI agent Peter Strzok. It was also the DOJ-NSD where the sketchy legal theories around FARA violations (Sec. 901) originated.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) is Michael K Atkinson . ICIG Atkinson is the official who accepted the ridiculous premise of a hearsay ' whistle-blower ' complaint; an intelligence whistleblower who was " blowing-the-whistle " based on second hand information of a phone call without any direct personal knowledge, ie ' hearsay '.

Michael K Atkinson was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD) in 2016. That makes Atkinson senior legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who were the former heads of the DOJ-NSD in 2016 when the stop Trump operation was underway.

... ... ...

Within a heavy propaganda report from the New York Times there are also details about the Intelligence Community Inspector General that show the tell-tale fingerprints of the ICIG supportive intent (emphasis mine):

[ ] Mr. Atkinson, a Trump appointee, nevertheless concluded that the allegations appeared to be credible and identified two layers of concern.

The first involved a possible violation of criminal law. Mr. Trump's comments to Mr. Zelensky " could be viewed as soliciting a foreign campaign contribution in violation of the campaign-finance laws, " Mr. Atkinson wrote , according to the Justice Department memo. ( read more )

Does the " foreign campaign contribution " angle sound familiar? It should, because that argument was used in the narrative around the Trump Tower meeting with the Russian Lobbyist Natalia Veselnitskaya. More specifically, just like FARA violations the overused "campaign contribution" narrative belongs to a specific network of characters, Lawfare.

The "Schiff Dossier", aka "whistle-blower" complaint was a constructed effort of allied members within congress and the intelligence apparatus to renew the impeachment effort. The intelligence team, including the ICIG, changed the whistleblower form to allow the CIA to insert the Schiff Dossier, written by Lawfare.

The Soft-Coup effort continues

Contrarymary , September 30, 2019 at 1:15 am

And the irony is the jstreet/lawfare group along with congress are taking two weeks off for Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur, day of repentance and day of atonement. What do you wanna make a bet they're not atoning or repenting of their evil hearts.
Another Ian , September 28, 2019 at 5:32 pm
"@Phil:

The Bongino video (1076 IIRC) did a nice job of showing that Shiff had it before it was formally filed Schiff references things in the complaint in a tweet prior to the complaint being filed
"

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2019/09/28/would-you-name-your-organization-o-ccrap/#comment-117446

[Dec 04, 2019] Atkinson role in Ukrainegate

Highly recommended!
Is Atkinson linked to Brennan?
Dec 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Will Smith , 21 November 2019 at 12:32 AM

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) is Michael K Atkinson. ICIG Atkinson is the official who accepted the ridiculous premise of a hearsay 'whistle-blower' complaint; an intelligence whistleblower who was "blowing-the-whistle" based on second hand information of a phone call without any direct personal knowledge, ie 'hearsay'.

The center of the Lawfare Alliance influence was/is the Department of Justice National Security Division, DOJ-NSD. It was the DOJ-NSD running the Main Justice side of the 2016 operations to support Operation Crossfire Hurricane and FBI agent Peter Strzok. It was also the DOJ-NSD where the sketchy legal theories around FARA violations (Sec. 901) originated.

Michael K Atkinson was previously the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ-NSD) in 2016. That makes Atkinson senior legal counsel to John Carlin and Mary McCord who were the former heads of the DOJ-NSD in 2016 when the stop Trump operation was underway.

Michael Atkinson was the lawyer for the same DOJ-NSD players who: (1) lied to the FISA court (Judge Rosemary Collyer) about the 80% non compliant NSA database abuse using FBI contractors; (2) filed the FISA application against Carter Page; and (3) used FARA violations as tools for political surveillance and political targeting.

Yes, that means Michael Atkinson was Senior Counsel for the DOJ-NSD, at the very epicenter of the political weaponization and FISA abuse.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/10/04/sketchy-inspector-general-michael-atkinson-admits-whistle-blower-never-informed-him-of-contact-with-schiff-committee/

[Dec 04, 2019] CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller's Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia Meddling Claims

The possibility of CrowdStrike central role in creation of Russiagate might be one reason that Congressional Democrats (and Republicans) were trying to swipe under the carpet the part of Trump conversation where he asked Zelenski to help to recover server images CrowdStrike shipped to Ukraine.
Another question is that now it is possible that one of CrowdStrike employees or Alperovich himself played the role of Gussifer 2.0
Notable quotes:
"... There is strong reason to doubt Mueller's suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange. ..."
"... Mueller's decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions. ..."
"... the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking. ..."
"... John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller's investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate. Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump. ..."
Jul 09, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Which brings me to the newest piece to drop, CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller's Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia Meddling Claims .

Most of the material in this article will be familiar to regular readers of SST because I wrote about it first. Here are the key conclusions:

I encourage you to read the piece. It is well written and provides an excellent overview of critical events in the flawed investigation.

[Dec 03, 2019] Something about Bellingcat credibility

Dec 03, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014, he founded Bellingcat, an open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing video games , which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
...
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.

[Dec 03, 2019] Ukrainegate hysteria in neoliberal MSM repeats in minute details the neoliberal MSM hysteria about Trump meeting with Putin

In his foreign policy Trump looks like a Republican Obama, save Nobel Peace Price. If Obama was/is a CIA-democrat, this guy is a Deep State controlled republican. Why is the Deep State is attacking him is completely unclear. May be they just do not like unpredictable, inpulsive politicians
Despite his surrender "Neocon crazies from the basement" still attack his exactly the same way as they attacked him for pretty mundane meeting with Putin and other fake "misdeeds" like Ukrainegate
And that means that he lost a considerable part of his electorate: the anti-war republicans and former Sanders supporters, who voted for him in 2016 to block Hillary election.
And in no way he is an economic nationalist. He is "national neoliberal" which rejects parts of neoliberal globalization based on treaties and prefer to bully nations to compliance that favor the US interests instead of treaties. And his "fight" with the Deep state resemble so closely to complete and unconditional surrender, that you might have difficulties to distinguish between the two. Most of his appointees are rabid neocons. Just look at Pompeo, Bolton, Fiona Hill. That that extends far beyond those obvious crazies.
Jan 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
Washington Post stating that he "has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details" of his discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin - telling Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in a phone interview that he would be willing to release the details of a private conversation in Helsinki last summer.

"I would. I don't care," Trump told Pirro, adding: "I'm not keeping anything under wraps. I couldn't care less."

"I mean, it's so ridiculous, these people making up," Trump said of the WaPo report.

The president referred to his roughly two-hour dialogue with Putin in Helsinki -- at which only the leaders and their translators were present -- as "a great conversation" that included discussions about "securing Israel and lots of other things."

"I had a conversation like every president does," Trump said Saturday. "You sit with the president of various countries. I do it with all countries." - Politico

In July an attempt by House Democrats to subpoena Trump's Helsinki interpreter was quashed by Republicans. "The Washington Post is almost as bad, or probably as bad, as the New York Times," Trump said. When Pirro asked Trump about a Friday night New York Times report that the FBI had opened an inquiry into whether he was working for Putin, Pirro asked Trump "Are you now or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?" "I think it's the most insulting thing I've ever been asked," Trump responded. "I think it's the most insulting article I've ever had written."

Trump went on an epic tweetstorm Saturday following the Times article, defending his 2017 firing of former FBI Director James Comey, and tweeting that he has been "FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President. At the same time, & as I have often said, getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. I fully expect that someday we will have good relations with Russia again!"

[Dec 03, 2019] Something about Bellingcat credibility

Dec 03, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014, he founded Bellingcat, an open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing video games , which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
...
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.

[Dec 02, 2019] The Clintons And Soros were behind Russiagate and now most probably they are behind Ukraingate by Wayne Madsen

Ukrainegate has definite signs of Soros funded operation
Notable quotes:
"... America's globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme that because so many establishment and entrenched national security and military "experts" opposed Trump's candidacy, Trump is "required" to call on them to join his administration because there are not enough such "experts" among Trump's inner circle of advisers. ..."
"... Discredited neo-conservatives from George W. Bush's White House, such as Iraq war co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being mentioned as someone Trump should have join his National Security Council and other senior positions. George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State James Baker, a die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump's White House team. ..."
"... There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former Secretaries of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of Trump supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic, and Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump's senior- and middle-level positions. ..."
"... Trump must distance himself from sudden well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists and not permit them to infest his administration. ..."
"... PNAC: Project for New American Century. The main neocon lobby, it focused first on invading Iraq. Founded 1997, by William Kristol & Robert Kagan. First action: open letter to Clinton advocating Iraq war. Members in the Iraq-War clique: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle. ..."
"... HE PROMISED he would appoint a special prosecutor, PROMISED... ..."
"... Trump should reverse the McCain Feingold bill. That would take some wind out of Soros' sails, at least temporarily because that was Soros' bill. He wanted campaign finance reform which actually meant that he wanted to control campaign finance through 501C3 groups, or foundations such as Open Society, Moveon.org, Ella Baker society, Center for American progress, etc. He has a massive web of these organizations and they fund smaller ones and all kinds of evil. ..."
"... Tyler, please rerun this! How George Sorros destroys countries, profits from currency trading, convinces the countries to privatize its assets, buys them and then sells them for yet another profit: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-08/how-george-soros-singlehandedly... ..."
"... We know so little about Trump ... he's neoCon friendly to start with (remember he hired neoCon Grandee James Woolsey as an advisor)... and remember too Trump is promising his own war against Iran ... ..."
"... JFK was gunned down in front of the whole world. ..."
"... If Trump really is a nationalist patriot he'll need to innoculate the Population about the Deep State... they in turn will unleash financial disintegration and chaos, a Purple Revolution and then assassinate Trump (or have his own party impeach him) ..."
"... Organizing a means to receive the protestors' complaints may co-opt any organized effort to disrupt good political interaction and it will also separate out the bad elements cited by Madsen. ..."
"... AMERICAN SPRING: She practiced overseas in Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, Jordan, Libya, Egypt... Now it's time to apply the knowledge in her own country! ..."
"... Really good chance these subversive operations will continue. Soros has plenty of money ..."
Nov 12, 2016 | www.zerohedge.com
Submitted by Wayne Madsen via Strategic-Culture.org,

Defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is not about to "go quietly into that good night". On the morning after her surprising and unanticipated defeat at the hands of Republican Party upstart Donald Trump, Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, entered the ball room of the art-deco New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan and were both adorned in purple attire. The press immediately noticed the color and asked what it represented. Clinton spokespeople claimed it was to represent the coming together of Democratic "Blue America" and Republican "Red America" into a united purple blend. This statement was a complete ruse as is known by citizens of countries targeted in the past by the vile political operations of international hedge fund tycoon George Soros.

The Clintons, who both have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions and Clinton Foundation donations from Soros, were, in fact, helping to launch Soros's "Purple Revolution" in America. The Purple Revolution will resist all efforts by the Trump administration to push back against the globalist policies of the Clintons and soon-to-be ex-President Barack Obama. The Purple Revolution will also seek to make the Trump administration a short one through Soros-style street protests and political disruption.

It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton's aide Huma Abedin . President Trump should not allow himself to be distracted by these efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump's most loyal supporters.

America's globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme that because so many establishment and entrenched national security and military "experts" opposed Trump's candidacy, Trump is "required" to call on them to join his administration because there are not enough such "experts" among Trump's inner circle of advisers.

Discredited neo-conservatives from George W. Bush's White House, such as Iraq war co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being mentioned as someone Trump should have join his National Security Council and other senior positions. George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State James Baker, a die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump's White House team.

There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former Secretaries of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of Trump supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic, and Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump's senior- and middle-level positions.

Trump must distance himself from sudden well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists and not permit them to infest his administration. If Mrs. Clinton had won the presidency, an article on the incoming administration would have read as follows:

"Based on the militarism and foreign adventurism of her term as Secretary of State and her husband Bill Clinton's two terms as president, the world is in store for major American military aggression on multiple fronts around the world. President-elect Hillary Clinton has made no secret of her desire to confront Russia militarily, diplomatically, and economically in the Middle East, on Russia's very doorstep in eastern Europe, and even within the borders of the Russian Federation. Mrs. Clinton has dusted off the long-discredited 'containment' policy ushered into effect by Professor George F. Kennan in the aftermath of World War. Mrs. Clinton's administration will likely promote the most strident neo-Cold Warriors of the Barack Obama administration, including Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, a personal favorite of Clinton".

President-elect Trump cannot afford to permit those who are in the same web as Nuland, Hadley, Bolton, and others to join his administration where they would metastasize like an aggressive form of cancer. These individuals would not carry out Trump's policies but seek to continue to damage America's relations with Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and other nations.

Not only must Trump have to deal with Republican neocons trying to worm their way into his administration, but he must deal with the attempt by Soros to disrupt his presidency and the United States with a Purple Revolution

No sooner had Trump been declared the 45th president of the United States, Soros-funded political operations launched their activities to disrupt Trump during Obama's lame-duck period and thereafter. The swiftness of the Purple Revolution is reminiscent of the speed at which protesters hit the streets of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in two Orange Revolutions sponsored by Soros, one in 2004 and the other, ten years later, in 2014.

As the Clintons were embracing purple in New York, street demonstrations, some violent, all coordinated by the Soros-funded Moveon.org and "Black Lives Matter", broke out in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland, Nashville, Cleveland, Washington, Austin, Seattle, Philadelphia, Richmond, St. Paul, Kansas City, Omaha, San Francisco, and some 200 other cities across the United States.

The Soros-financed Russian singing group "Pussy Riot" released on YouTube an anti-Trump music video titled "Make America Great Again". The video went "viral" on the Internet. The video, which is profane and filled with violent acts, portrays a dystopian Trump presidency. Following the George Soros/Gene Sharp script to a tee, Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova called for anti-Trump Americans to turn their anger into art, particularly music and visual art. The use of political graffiti is a popular Sharp tactic. The street protests and anti-Trump music and art were the first phase of Soros's Purple Revolution in America.

President-elect Trump is facing a two-pronged attack by his opponents. One, led by entrenched neo-con bureaucrats, including former Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and Bush family loyalists are seeking to call the shots on who Trump appoints to senior national security, intelligence, foreign policy, and defense positions in his administration. These neo-Cold Warriors are trying to convince Trump that he must maintain the Obama aggressiveness and militancy toward Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries. The second front arrayed against Trump is from Soros-funded political groups and media. This second line of attack is a propaganda war, utilizing hundreds of anti-Trump newspapers, web sites, and broadcasters, that will seek to undermine public confidence in the Trump administration from its outset.

One of Trump's political advertisements, released just prior to Election Day, stated that George Soros, Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein, are all part of "a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities". Soros and his minions immediately and ridiculously attacked the ad as "anti-Semitic". President Trump should be on guard against those who his campaign called out in the ad and their colleagues. Soros's son, Alexander Soros, called on Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, to publicly disavow Trump. Soros's tactics not only seek to split apart nations but also families. Trump must be on guard against the current and future machinations of George Soros, including his Purple Revolution.

Pinto Currency nmb Nov 11, 2016 8:37 PM ,

Purple must be the color of pedophiles.

Soros, Clintons, Podestas, amd apparently Obama are all into it as we are learning from Comet Ping Pong scandal:

https://i.sli.mg/ayI6QF.jpg

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5b1qtf/comet_ping_pong_pizz...

https://dcpizzagate.wordpress.com/

https://i.redd.it/3l20mhvrxtvx.png

http://investmentwatchblog.com/breaking-from-the-anon-who-brought-you-th...

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a1c_1478546206

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/the-strange-case-of-gord...

http://www.newsdailystudio.com/2016/11/05/bill-clinton-wasnt-the-only-on...

Keep your eye on Jared Kushner, who is Trump's son-in-law. He refused to have his newspaper the NY Observer endorse Trump. That is not a good sign.

MalteseFalcon Pinto Currency Nov 11, 2016 8:39 PM ,
"It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care."

None of those "pressing issues" involve the DOJ or the FBI.

Investigate, prosecute and jail Hillary Clinton and her crew.

Trump is going to need a hostage or two to deal with these fucks.

If he doesn't, they will deal with him.

letsit Occident Mortal Nov 11, 2016 8:45 PM ,
Netanyahu, the greatest neocon of all, endorsed Trump. All TRUE neocons love Trump.

https://biblicisminstitute.wordpress.com/views-of-news/#trumpmeans

Husk-Erzulie nmewn Nov 12, 2016 9:48 AM ,
Big series of protests being planned. Recruiting ads in Craigslist nationwide. Purple ties and dresses all over MSM this morning.

This is when the Purple Hats, Flags, Balloons start coming out.

Kill it before it grows.

https://twitter.com/AustinChas/status/797445221122506752

any_mouse californiagirl Nov 12, 2016 2:54 AM ,
Purple and royalty? Purple in Rome?

News for the Clintons, The R's and D's already united to vote against Hillary.

I do not understand why they think street protests will bring down a POTUS? And that would be acceptable in a major nation.

Why isn't the government cracking down the separatists in Oregon, California, and elsewhere? They are not accepting the legal outcome of an election. They are calling for illegal secession. (Funny in 1861 this was a cause for the federal government to attack the joint and seveal states of the union.) If a group of whites had protested Obama's election in 2008?

The people living in Kalispell are reviled and ridiculed for their separatist views. Randy Weaver and family for not accepting politically correct views. And so on.

This is getting out of hand. There will be no walking this back.

Erek any_mouse Nov 12, 2016 7:47 AM ,
Purple is the color of royalty!

Are these fuckers proclaiming themselves as King and Queen of America?

If so, get the executioner and give them a "French Haircut"!

X_in_Sweden Grimaldus Nov 12, 2016 10:58 AM ,
You say
Grimaldus ,

"Yes. And who are the neocons really? Progressives. Neocon is a label successfully used by criminal progressives to shield their brand."

Well let's go a little bit deeper in examing the 'who' thing:

"The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than "conservative") Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary , a media arm of the American Jewish Committee , which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward , the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: " If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it.... "

From the article By Laurent Guyénot ,

*Who Are The Neoconservatives?*

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35106.htm

Are you connecting the dots.......folks......?

. . . _ _ _ . . . Bendromeda Strain Nov 11, 2016 11:04 PM ,

Great avatar!

GROWTH IS THE ULTIMATE PONZI SCHEME

Lavada Chupacabra-322 Nov 12, 2016 10:41 AM ,
The idea of arresting the Clinton Crime, Fraud and Crime Family would be welcomed. BUT, who is going to arrest them? Loretta Lynch, James Comey, WHO? The problem here is that our so called "authorities" are all in the same bed. The tentacles of the Eastern Elite Establishment are everywhere in high office, academia, the media, Big Business, etc. The swamp is thoroughly infested with this elite scum of those in the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Chatham House, Club of Rome, Committee of 300, Jason Society and numerous other private clubs of the rich, powerful and influential. The Illuminati has been exposed, however they aren't going down lightly. They still have massive amounts of money, they own the media and the banking houses. Some have described it as MIMAC, the Military Industrial Media Academic Complex. A few months ago here at Zero Hedge, there was an article which showed a massive flow chart of the elites and their organization

They could IF and WHEN Trump gets to Washington after 20 Jan 2017, simply implode the economy and blame t it on Trump. Sort of what happened to Herbert Hoover in the late 1920's. Unfortunately the situation in the US will continue to deteriorate. George Soros, a major financial backer of Hillary will see to that. Soros is a Globalist and advocate of one world government. People comment that Soros should be arrested. I agree, BUT who is going to do that?

Grimaldus ShortCommonSense Nov 12, 2016 9:12 AM ,
Agree. I think Trump will yank all the "aid" to Israel as well as "aid" to the Islamic murderers of the Palitrashian human garbage infesting the area. This "aid" money is simply a bribe to keep both from killing each other. F**k all of them. None of our business what they do.

We got progressives ( lots and lots of Jews in that group) who are the enemy of mankind and then we got Islam who are also the enemy of mankind. Why help either of them? Makes no sense.

Wile-E-Coyote Bastiat Nov 12, 2016 5:35 AM ,
How come Soros never got picked up by Mossad for war crimes against his own people?

And if he is such a subversive shit why hasn't a government given him a Polonium 210 enema.

Martian Moon Wile-E-Coyote Nov 12, 2016 8:13 AM ,
Always wondered about that

Soros is hated in Israel and has never set foot there but his foundations have done such harm that a bill was recently passed to ban foreign funding of non profit political organizations

Chupacabra-322 RopeADope Nov 11, 2016 9:03 PM ,
The fact that we all have to worry about the CIA killing a President Elect simply because the man puts America first, really says it all.

The Agency is Cancer. Why are we even waiting for them to kill another one of our people to act? There should be no question about the CIA's future in the US.

Dissolved & dishonored. Its members locked away or punished for Treason. Their reputation is so bad and has been for so long, that the fact that you joined them should be enough to justify arrest and Execution for Treason, Crimes Against Humanity & Crimes Against The American People.

King Tut Chupacabra-322 Nov 11, 2016 9:11 PM ,
JFK made the mistake of publicly stating his intention of smashing the CIA instead of just doing it quickly and quietly
Chupacabra-322 King Tut Nov 11, 2016 9:30 PM ,
There are entirely way too many Intelligence Agencies. Plus the Contractors, some of who shouldn't have high level clearance to begin with which the US sub contracts the Intel / work out to.

For Fucks sake, Government is so incompetent it can't even handle it own Intel.

Something along the lines of Eurpoe's Five Eyes would be highly effective.

Fuck those Pure Evil Psychopaths at the CIA They're nothing more than a bunch of Scum Fuck murdering, drug running, money laundering Global Crime Syndicate.

HowdyDoody Chupacabra-322 Nov 11, 2016 10:59 PM ,
Five Eyes isn't European, it is US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel. If you note carefully, the NSA etc think we can't count.
chubbar Pinto Currency Nov 11, 2016 8:46 PM ,
The FBI is still investigating the Clinton Foundation, Trump needs to encourage that through backdoor channels. Soro's needs to be investigated, he has been tied to a conspiracy to incite violence, this needs to be documented and dealt with. Trump can not ignore this guy. If any of these investigations come back with a recommendation to indict then that process needs to be started. Take the fight to them, they are vulnerable!
Chupacabra-322 chubbar Nov 11, 2016 9:12 PM ,
Make a National APB Warrent for the apprehension & arrest of George Sooros for inciting violence, endsrgerimg the public & calling for the murder of our Nations Police through funding of the BLM Group.

Have every Law Informent Agency in the Nation on alert. Also, issue a Bounty in the Sum of $5,000,000 for his immediate apprehension.

kwc chubbar Nov 12, 2016 4:50 AM ,
Trump needs to replace FBI chickenshits & sellouts with loyal people then get the FBI counter-terrorism to investigate and shut down Soros & the various agencies instigating the riots. It's really simple when you quit over-thinking a problem. It's domestic terrorism. It's the FBI's job to stop it.
Laddie nmb Nov 11, 2016 8:43 PM ,
I read what Paul said this morning and thought, despite Paul's hostility to Trump during the primaries most likely due to his son, Rand's loss, that Paul gave good advice to Trump.
Let's face it Donald Trump is a STOP GAP measure. And demographic change over the next 4 years makes his re-election very, very UNLIKELY. If he keeps his campaign promises he will be a GREAT president. However as ZH reported earlier he appears to be balking from repealing Obamacare, I stress the word APPEARS.

Let us give him a chance. This is all speculation. His enemies are DEADLY as they were once they got total control in Russia, they killed according to Solzhenitsyn SIXTY-SIX MILLION Russian Christians. The descendants of those Bolsheviks are VERY powerful in the USSA. They control the Fed, Hollyweird, Wall Street, the universities...

Professor Kevin MacDonald's 'The Culture of Critique' Reviewed

Like the South Africans the Tribe TALKED us out of our nation.

Mechanisms for Cuckservatives and Other Misguided White People by Dr. Kevin MacDonald September 22, 2016

Much of the media and advertising exist by pushing buttons that trigger appropriate financially lucrative reflexes in their audiences, from pornography to romantic movies to team sports. Media profits are driven by competition over how best to push those buttons. But the effort to produce politically and racially cuckolded Whites adds a layer of complexity: What buttons do you push to make Whites complicit in their own racial and cultural demise?

Actually, there are a whole lot of them, which shouldn't be surprising. This is a very sophisticated onslaught, enabled by control over all the moral, intellectual, and political high ground by the left. With all that high ground, there are a lot of buttons you can push.

Our enemies see this as a pathetic last gasp of a moribund civilization and it is quite true for our civilization is dying. Identity Christians describe this phase as Jacob's Troubles and what the secular Guillaume Faye would, I think, describe as the catastrophe required to get people motivated. The future has yet to be written, however I cannot help but think that God's people, the White people, are stirring from their slumber.

King Tut Laddie Nov 11, 2016 8:49 PM ,
See: The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon- Rudyard Kipling
Paul Kersey -> Paul Kersey Nov 11, 2016 8:20 PM ,
"PNAC: Project for New American Century. The main neocon lobby, it focused first on invading Iraq. Founded 1997, by William Kristol & Robert Kagan. First action: open letter to Clinton advocating Iraq war. Members in the Iraq-War clique: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle.

JINSA, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. "explaining the link between U.S. national security and Israel's security" Served on JINSA's Advisory Board: Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Perle."

Mini-Me Nov 11, 2016 8:18 PM ,
If Trump has probable cause on the Soros crimes, have his DoJ request a warrant for all of Soros's communications via the NSA, empanel a grand jury, indict the bastard, and throw his raggedy ass in prison. It would be hard for him to run his retarded purple revolution when he's getting ass-raped by his cell mate.
Hurricane Baby -> Mini-Me Nov 11, 2016 8:41 PM ,
I agree. Thing is, I think as president he can simply order the NSA to cough up whatever they have, just like Obama could have done at any point. The NSA is part of the Defense Department, right? What am I missing here?
Dilluminati Nov 11, 2016 8:26 PM ,
Funny: Clinton swears Comey did her in and the DNC blames arrogant Hillary.

http://www.usnews.com/news/the-run-2016/articles/2016-11-11/dnc-staff-ar...

But in respect to Soro's money and the Dalas shooting or other incited events, there should be a grand jury empanelled and then charges brought against him. I think nothing short of him hiding in an embassy with all his money blocked by Swift is justice for the violence that he funded.

... ... ...

Skiprrrdog Nov 11, 2016 8:57 PM ,
It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton's aide Huma Abedin. President Trump should not allow himself to be distracted by these efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump's most loyal supporters.

And so it begins; I really hope that this is just some misinformation/disinformation, because HE PROMISED he would appoint a special prosecutor, PROMISED...

johnwburns Nov 11, 2016 9:10 PM ,
The likes of Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro and Jonah Goldberg get to catch up on their Torah for the forseeable future but the likes of Lloyd Blankfein will probably get to entertain the court since they have probably crossed paths doing business in NYC. The "real conservative" deeply introspective, examine-my-conscience crowd screwed themselves to the wall, god love them.
Ms No Nov 11, 2016 9:05 PM ,
Trump should reverse the McCain Feingold bill. That would take some wind out of Soros' sails, at least temporarily because that was Soros' bill. He wanted campaign finance reform which actually meant that he wanted to control campaign finance through 501C3 groups, or foundations such as Open Society, Moveon.org, Ella Baker society, Center for American progress, etc. He has a massive web of these organizations and they fund smaller ones and all kinds of evil.
Rebel yell Nov 11, 2016 9:36 PM ,
Tyler, please rerun this! How George Sorros destroys countries, profits from currency trading, convinces the countries to privatize its assets, buys them and then sells them for yet another profit: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-08/how-george-soros-singlehandedly...
Posa Nov 12, 2016 10:25 AM ,
We know so little about Trump ... he's neoCon friendly to start with (remember he hired neoCon Grandee James Woolsey as an advisor)... and remember too Trump is promising his own war against Iran ... (just in case you confused him with Mother Theresa).. But then again JFK took office with a set of initiatives that were far more bellicose and provocative (like putting huge Jupiter missile launchers on the USSR border in Turkey)... once he saw he light and fired the pro Nazi Dulles Gang , JFK was gunned down in front of the whole world.

If Trump really is a nationalist patriot he'll need to innoculate the Population about the Deep State... they in turn will unleash financial disintegration and chaos, a Purple Revolution and then assassinate Trump (or have his own party impeach him)

I'm guessing though that deep down Trump is quite comfortable with a neoCon cabinet... hell he already offered Jamie Diamon the office of Treasry Secretary... no doubt a calculated gesture to signal compliance with the Deep State.

rocknrollinhone... Nov 11, 2016 9:59 PM ,
Soros is heavily invested in the globalist agenda. Wouldn't be surprised if they don't take a shot at assassinating Trump.
bsdetector Nov 11, 2016 11:10 PM ,
The Clintons do not do things by accident. Coordination of colors at the concession speech was meant for something. Perhaps the purple revolution or maybe they want to be seen as royals. It doesn't really matter why they did it; the fact is they are up to something. They will not agree to go away and even if they offered to just disappear with their wealth we know they are dishonest. They will come back... that is what they do.

They must be stripped of power and wealth. This act must be performed publicly.

In order to succeed Mr. Trump I suggest you task a group to accomplish this result. Your efforts to make America great again may disintegrate just like Obamacare if you allow the Clintons and Co. to languish in the background.

bsdetector Nov 12, 2016 12:06 AM ,
The protestors are groups of individuals who may seek association for any number of reasons. One major reason might be the loss of hope for a meaningful and prosperous life. We should seek out and listen to the individuals within these groups. If they are truly desirous of being heard they will communicate what they want without use of violence. Perhaps individuals join these protest groups because they do not have a voice.

Organizing a means to receive the protestors' complaints may co-opt any organized effort to disrupt good political interaction and it will also separate out the bad elements cited by Madsen.

The articles reporting that Mr. Trump has changed his response to the protestors is a good effort to discover the protestors' complaints and channel their energy into beneficial political activity. Something must be done quickly though, before the protests get out of hand, for if that happens the protestors will be criminals and no one will want to work with them.

In order to make America great again we need input from all of America. Mr. Trump you can harness the energy of these protestors and let them know they are a part of your movement.

Batman11 -> Batman11 Nov 12, 2016 3:09 AM ,
Classical economists are experts on today's capitalism, it is 18th and 19th Century capitalism, it's how it all started.

Adam Smith would think we are on the road to ruin.

"But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin."

Exactly the opposite of today's thinking, what does he mean?

When rates of profit are high, capitalism is cannibalizing itself by:

1) Not engaging in long term investment for the future

2) Paying insufficient wages to maintain demand for its products and services.

Got that wrong as well.

Adam Smith wouldn't like today's lobbyists.

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

OH NO, It's ALL WRONG

dogismycopilot Nov 12, 2016 5:39 AM ,
First five minutes of Alex Jones' video today is clips of people saying "Donald Trump will never be president". Full Show - Soros-Funded Goons Deployed to Overthrow America - 11/11/2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPH26ohO_DY

CoCosAB Nov 12, 2016 7:04 AM ,
AMERICAN SPRING: She practiced overseas in Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, Jordan, Libya, Egypt... Now it's time to apply the knowledge in her own country!

lakecity55 -> CoCosAB •Nov 12, 2016 7:53 AM

Really good chance these subversive operations will continue. Soros has plenty of money. Trump will have to do some rough stuff, but he needs to, it's what we hired him for.

[Dec 02, 2019] The Smearing of Tulsi Gabbard by W.J. Astore

Notable quotes:
"... Aha! There you have it. Back in February 2016, Gabbard resigned her position as vice-chair of the DNC to endorse Sanders, and the DNC, controlled by establishment centrists like the Clintons as well as Barack Obama, have never forgiven her. Recently, Hillary Clinton smeared her (as well as Jill Stein, Green Party candidate from 2016) as a Russian asset, and various mainstream networks and news shows, such as "The View" and NBC, have suggested (with no evidence) she's the favored candidate of Russia and Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... Just what we don't need: two bought-and-paid-for political parties in the service of the wealthiest and the corporations. But at least the Republicans are (mostly) honest about their priorities ..."
Dec 02, 2019 | bracingviews.com

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is a compelling choice for president in 2020. She's principled, she's against America's disastrous regimen of regime-change wars, and she's got the guts to criticize her own party for being too closely aligned with rich and powerful interests. She's also a military veteran who enlisted in the Army National Guard in Hawaii after the 9/11 attacks (she currently serves as a major and deployed overseas to Iraq during that war).

What's not to like about a female veteran who oozes intelligence and independence, a woman who represents diversity (she's a practicing Hindu and a Samoan-American), an early supporter of Bernie Sanders who called out the DNC for its favoritism toward Hillary Clinton

Aha! There you have it. Back in February 2016, Gabbard resigned her position as vice-chair of the DNC to endorse Sanders, and the DNC, controlled by establishment centrists like the Clintons as well as Barack Obama, have never forgiven her. Recently, Hillary Clinton smeared her (as well as Jill Stein, Green Party candidate from 2016) as a Russian asset, and various mainstream networks and news shows, such as "The View" and NBC, have suggested (with no evidence) she's the favored candidate of Russia and Vladimir Putin.

Think about that. Hillary Clinton and much of the mainstream media are accusing a serving major in the U.S. military of being an asset to a foreign power. It's an accusation bordering on a charge of treason -- a charge that is libelous and recklessly irresponsible.

A reminder: Tulsi Gabbard enlisted in the military to serve her country in the aftermath of 9/11. What did Hillary Clinton do? Can you imagine Hillary going through basic training as a private, or serving in the military in a war zone? (Hillary did falsely claim that she came under sniper fire in Bosnia , but that's a story for another day.)

Tulsi Gabbard is her own person. She's willing to buck the system and has shown compassion and commitment on the campaign trail. She may be a long shot, but she deserves a long look for the presidency, especially when you consider the (low) quality of the enemies she's made. Reply

wjastore November 26, 2019 at 1:10 PM

Whenever I post anything remotely positive about Tulsi Gabbard on Facebook, the same few people come out to denounce her. My response is below, though I know you can't reason with haters:

That Tulsi has been on Fox News is an argument in her favor, i.e. her crossover appeal and her willingness to engage with the "other side." That Tulsi met with Assad is, in my view, reasonable; true leaders are always willing to meet with "bad" people, even ruthless dictators, in the cause of averting war. My main point is how she's being smeared as some kind of traitor, or at least a useful idiot. She's neither. Also, I've read the piece on Tulsi in Jacobin, and I've heard about alleged cults. Is this really the best the media can do? Guilt by association?

Some of our readers may have concerns about Tulsi, e.g. alleged Islamophobia, alleged cults, etc. The main point is this: Does she deserve to be smeared as a Putin puppet? What does this say about our media? And why are they doing this? I can tell you why. Trillions of dollars are spent on wars and weapons, and Tulsi is calling for an end to regime-change wars and a return to diplomacy. She also, like Bernie, is willing to call out the DNC as being against the interests of ordinary Americans -- and she's right about this. She has a lot in her favor. I'm a Bernie fan myself, but I'll take Tulsi over all those phony "centrists" like Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Harris, and Biden.

rs November 26, 2019 at 1:52 PM
This was published when she was accused of being a Russian asset! https://www.thenation.com/article/tulsi-russia-clinton/

On the other hand, her connection to extreme right RSS and BJP ( of India ) though diaspora are troubling .. https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/russia-accusations-a-distraction-from-tulsi-gabbards-actual-troubling-ties/

wjastore November 26, 2019 at 2:09 PM
I can't speak to the RSS/BJP connection; I've read about it, but I admit to ignorance on the matter. Of course, every candidate has multiple connections, positions, donors, etc. All politicians carry baggage. So far, from what I've read, Tulsi is more principled and more courageous than most of her peers.

I'm still a Bernie fan -- his long record of helping the poor and vulnerable speaks for itself. Of course, he once went to Moscow oh no! Run away! 🙂

Joseph Mirzoeff November 26, 2019 at 3:24 PM
Tulsi has now done four courageous, unusual, and very positive things while merely a candidate:
1) Tulsi effectively took down a leading contender and DNC favorite, by demonstrating that Senator Harris had been a corrupt prosecutor.
2) Tulsi defended democracy as she sued Google for at least $50 million, for playing favorites in search-routing of candidates.
3) Tulsi called out Hillary Clinton for the monster she is.
4) Tulsi supported a process toward 911 truth by supporting 911-victims' families' right to see FBI documents that have been denied to them.

Tulsi is the anti-war candidate. Tulsi Gabbard should be Commander-in-Chief. Yang should be VP and in charge of the economy. Read his book. UBI is the way to go. Tulsi needs someone she can trust as VP.

Michael Murry November 26, 2019 at 4:46 PM
To your list of courageous Tulsi Gabbard positions, I would add the following, Joseph:

Tulsi Gabbard Says She Would Drop Julian Assange Charges and Pardon Edward Snowden , by Jason Murdock, Newsweek (5/15/19 at 5:22 AM EDT).

I consider the vicious persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning -- both languishing in prison for having committed no crime whatsoever -- along with the exile of Edward Snowden, among the greatest travesties of justice ever committed by the U.S. and U.K. (dishonorable mention goes to Sweden and the latest Ecuadorian government, as well). I had hoped for this subject to come up in the "debates," giving Tulsi yet another opportunity to shine relative to her competitors, most of whom would soil their undergarments in panic at the thought of "crossing" the absurdly named "intelligence community" and its entirely co-opted corporate media outlets.

If Tulsi Gabbard had done no other principled thing than this, I would have considered her heads and shoulders above anyone else campaigning for a position in the U.S. government today.

Michael Murry November 26, 2019 at 4:59 PM
I ought to dedicate this one to Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for her principled defense of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden (and no-doubt Chelsea Manning, as well):

Star Chamber, Incorporated

Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning
Jailed as twin examples for the proles:
"Look what happens if you publish secrets:
More totalitarian controls."

In Chinese: "Kill the Chicken scare the Monkey."
Rat-out your colleagues. Do not Power tempt.
Or otherwise the judges and grand juries
Will hold you in what lawyers call "contempt."

A strange word-choice, indeed, by Power's minions
Who spend careers perfecting rank abuse.
For them I'd have to feel respect much greater
Before that is the word that I would use.

I've nothing good to say for prosecutors.
Some say I wish to "damn them with faint praise."
But I reply: "You praise with faint damnation.
So which of us has coined the the better phrase?"

Despicable, the treatment of these heroes.
The US and UK have sunk so low.
Still, Julian and Chelsea have together
More balls than these two governments can grow.

No matter, they have passed into the ages.
Already they have earned a fair renown.
Each day they live defiant, undefeated,
They rise as jailers try to put them down.

As JFK once said of his elite class:
"The ship of state leaks mainly from the top."
But if some lowly, powerless, poor person
Tries that, they'll feel the lash. No truth. Now stop!

To scare a monkey, kill another monkey.
If not, the monkeys learn impunity.
While eating KFC they ask, obtusely:
"What has a chicken got to do with me?"

And so the Corporation-State must silence
Reports of its incompetence and crime.
If citizens knew what it did they'd order
Its dissolution. Now. And just in time.

Historically, they called it the Star Chamber
A secret court designed to thwart the king.
But power then perverted it to serve him.
Grand juries in the US, same damn thing.

They now indict ham sandwiches routinely
With no protection for the innocents.
Presumed as guilty, evidence not needed.
Conviction guaranteed. No court repents.

A judge may do whatever he determines
He can. So levy fines. Coerce. Demand
On penalty of prison, testimony
Against oneself, alone upon the stand.

"Democracy" is just a euphemism
If citizens allow this to proceed.
Orwellian: first Hate then Fear of Goldstein.
Two Minutes, daily. Really, all you need.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2019

Joseph Mirzoeff November 26, 2019 at 4:20 PM
Please don't fall for Bernie. He is neither Presidential nor trustworthy. Consider this: https://www.sentinelsource.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/what-did-bernie-know-about-these-conspiracies-by-joseph-mirzoeff/article_f7b43e69-6639-526a-823d-c4ca3778b5a1.html
Felix_47 November 27, 2019 at 12:21 PM
This is a good commentary. military experience is a good thing especially when we are dealing with the fact that over half of the national budget is devoted to the military.
wjastore November 27, 2019 at 5:19 PM
A good short clip on Tulsi Gabbard and smears against herL https://www.youtube.com/embed/OcCOtOCZ_qY?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
rs November 29, 2019 at 9:34 AM
Tulsi Gabbard KNOWS it i. e. Cost of Wars!
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-is-tulsi-the-only-democrat-who-cares-about-our-wars/
Monotonous Languor November 29, 2019 at 10:03 AM
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has a thoughtful article on playing it safe, running out the clock, prevent defense, etc., on your opponent as it would apply to politics.

Jabbar writes: Almost every poll showed her with a respectable lead over Trump just days before the election. So, the Clinton campaign tried to run out the clock by not campaigning much in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota, all of which turned much redder than in the previous presidential election.

The tactic of trying to pick a "safe" candidate who can beat Trump by appealing to their ideas about Middle America sends the wrong message to all of America. No team devise a game strategy based on fear: they emphasize their strengths and exploit their opponents' weaknesses. The Democratic candidate shouldn't be the least objectionable, but the one who boldly forges ahead with clear and detailed plans for Making America America Again.

Democrats can't pander to voters by denigrating Trump but then promising them Trump-lite with a wink. Promote progressive policies and plans worthy of a party that wants to lead this country without fear of being called "socialists" or "the radical left" or whatever else your opposing team chants.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/oct/15/how-sports-tactics-can-help-the-democrats-beat-donald-trump-in-2020
===================================
Jabbar is correct. The Corporate Democrats among them Biden, Buttigieg and Bloomberg are fighting desperately to preserve a perceived lead aided and abetted by the McMega-Media.

Chicago Alderman, Paddy Bauler (1890-1977) said in 1955 on the election of Daley the Elder, "Chicago ain't ready for reform yet", or "Chicago ain't ready for a reform mayor".

Today, the pundits employed by Corporate America, along with various Democratic Party stooges for Wall Street tell us America ain't ready for Reform.

bmcks November 29, 2019 at 4:21 PM
Yes, ML, so goes American 'Exceptionalism', after WW2 Victory. Today, so goes a Great American City in violence, all so shortsighted. I'm still confused with our never-ending wars overseas, as our cities rot in crime & violence, my main concern. I didn't grow up – or party! -later on in today's disaster areas of Baltimore or Philadelphia, etc.It was GREAT!

But somethings going on I don't know about, when the WORST cities have black Congresspeople (Maxime Waters?) living in 6.5$Mil mansions as their "districts" die.
I have NO PROBLEM with black people! Such a smear an insult. But it's worth investigating why these characters who have ruined their cities are supporters of Dems, & Billary! Oh! They spend & vote lavishly on more money for our wars, but nothing for their own cities!

Finally starting to figure it out: They're traitors to their own race, for their personal benefit. They make Dems "look proud", vs "REP's!" Yes, they too re dreadful maybe that's why I feel: TULCI GO! She's neither dreadful party!

wjastore November 29, 2019 at 5:32 PM
A long but interesting podcast with Tulsi Gabbard on the Joe Rogan show

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PdYud9re7-Q?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Eddie S November 29, 2019 at 7:05 PM
ML: Good citation of KA-J -- - although I've seen the same-sort of criticism of the Dems elsewhere, Kareem's sports analogy is very helpful in understanding the concept.

(I have to say that I got sick of the Dems milquetoast approach to politics. Maybe it was an understandable response to a frustrating right-wing zeitgeist, but DAMN, did they have to be SO passive against the Reps?? Even when they briefly held majorities in Congress under Obama, the wouldn't introduce/push bills that weren't 'filibuster-proof'!?!? I for one might still be voting Dem POTUS IF they had pushed those progressive bills., then let the Reps filibuster for weeks or months, meantime the Dems & Obama could've gone in front of the public daily and said something like "We're trying to help you by passing Bill X, but the Reps are filibustering and stopping Congress from getting any work done!" Let the government shut-down for a few weeks because of it and keep hammering away at the Reps for being the BLOCKERS, etc. Call their bluff, and use it against them during elections. Instead they tried to be overly accommodating & conciliatory BEFORE debate had even begun!)

Michael Murry November 29, 2019 at 7:46 PM
Yes. Eddie. The Democratic Party not only gets its ass kicked for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but it seems to have developed something of a masochistic taste for the Republican abuse. Hence two of my verse compositions essentially agreeing with your observations:

(1) From eight years ago. From "Hope" and "Change" to despair and the status quo. And with a Nobel Peace Prize for Endless War, too.

Congenital Stockholm Syndrome

He started by giving up quickly,
Surrendering early his case.
He offered to kiss their asses.
Replying, they pissed in his face.

Their urine, he thought, tasted strangely;
Yet not at all bad to his taste.
He'd gotten so used to it, plainly.
Why let such a drink go to waste?

The people who voted in favor
Of him and his promise of "change"
Now see in his many betrayals
A poodle afflicted with mange.

Each time that the surly and crazy
Republicans out for his skin
Condemn him for living and breathing,
He graciously helps them to win.

He'll turn on his base in an instant
With threats and disdain and neglect
While bombing some Muslims so Cheney
Might thrill to the lives that he's wrecked.

A black man in love with apartheid
He offers his stalwart support
To Zionists and their extortion
With "More, please!" his only retort.

A masochist begging for beatings
Obama takes joy in abuse
Receiving just what he has asked for
Which makes him of no earthly use

The little brown men that he's murdered
In homes far away from our land
Bring profits obscene to his backers
Who give him the back of their hand.

Obama seeks praise from the vicious
Republicans, no matter what.
He suffers, apparently, nothing
So much as his need to kiss butt.

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2011

(2) From twelve years ago and on the Congressional side of the Surrender Monkey Syndrome:

Nancy the Negotiator

Nancy the Negotiator
Gives up first; surrenders later;
Takes her cards from off the table,
Then recites her loser fable:

"We don't have the votes we need,"
Nancy says, in tones that bleed:
"Mean Republicans will whine
If we do not toe their line."

Nancy bows to George and Dick
While her skinny ass they kick;
Writes them checks both blank and rubber,
Then proceeds to lamely blubber:

"We don't like what Dubya's doing.
Still, we quite enjoy the screwing.
Masochism's what we offer,
Helping crooks to loot the coffer"

"Sure, the squandered blood and treasure
Goes to those we will not measure.
Still, we promise you'll adore us
If you mark your ballot for us."

"Choices you don't have assail you,
Leaving only us who fail you.
Nonetheless, we've gotten fatter.
Why, then, should we think you matter?"

Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2007

After six years in Uncle Sam's Canoe Club (the last eighteen months of that in the now-defunct Republic of South Vietnam) it didn't take me long to realize that the Republicans get paid a lavish salary to do what the fabulously wealthy demand, while the Democrats get a comparatively meager allowance to do what the Republicans tell them to do, also on behalf of the fabulously wealthy: namely, betray their own working-class anti-war base so that the Republicans will not have anything even remotely "leftist" to worry about. In truth, the Democratic party crawled up its own ass and died so many years ago that I think I've lost count.

Like Like

wjastore November 30, 2019 at 9:06 AM
Just what we don't need: two bought-and-paid-for political parties in the service of the wealthiest and the corporations. But at least the Republicans are (mostly) honest about their priorities

[Dec 02, 2019] Cheap, ubiquitous cameras, microphones, and location trackers are the real issue. If the state can track everyone's movements and conversations, then it can build a better Stasi even with crude, simple AI

Notable quotes:
"... Seeing Like a State ..."
"... More generally, I think AI gets far too much of the billing in authoritarian apocalypse forecasts. Cheap, ubiquitous cameras, microphones, and location trackers are the real issue. If the state can track everyone's movements and conversations, then it can build a better Stasi even with crude, simple ai. ..."
Dec 02, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

The theory behind this is one of strength reinforcing strength – the strengths of ubiquitous data gathering and analysis reinforcing the strengths of authoritarian repression to create an unstoppable juggernaut of nearly perfectly efficient oppression. Yet there is another story to be told – of weakness reinforcing weakness. Authoritarian states were always particularly prone to the deficiencies identified in James Scott's Seeing Like a State – the desire to make citizens and their doings legible to the state, by standardizing and categorizing them, and reorganizing collective life in simplified ways, for example by remaking cities so that they were not organic structures that emerged from the doings of their citizens, but instead grand chessboards with ordered squares and boulevards, reducing all complexities to a square of planed wood . The grand state bureaucracies that were built to carry out these operations were responsible for multitudes of horrors, but also for the crumbling of the Stalinist state into a Brezhnevian desuetude, where everyone pretended to be carrying on as normal because everyone else was carrying on too. The deficiencies of state action, and its need to reduce the world into something simpler that it could comprehend and act upon created a kind of feedback loop, in which imperfections of vision and action repeatedly reinforced each other.

So what might a similar analysis say about the marriage of authoritarianism and machine learning? Something like the following, I think. There are two notable problems with machine learning. One – that while it can do many extraordinary things, it is not nearly as universally effective as the mythology suggests. The other is that it can serve as a magnifier for already existing biases in the data. The patterns that it identifies may be the product of the problematic data that goes in, which is (to the extent that it is accurate) often the product of biased social processes. When this data is then used to make decisions that may plausibly reinforce those processes (by singling e.g. particular groups that are regarded as problematic out for particular police attention, leading them to be more liable to be arrested and so on), the bias may feed upon itself.

This is a substantial problem in democratic societies, but it is a problem where there are at least some counteracting tendencies. The great advantage of democracy is its openness to contrary opinions and divergent perspectives . This opens up democracy to a specific set of destabilizing attacks but it also means that there are countervailing tendencies to self-reinforcing biases. When there are groups that are victimized by such biases, they may mobilize against it (although they will find it harder to mobilize against algorithms than overt discrimination). When there are obvious inefficiencies or social, political or economic problems that result from biases, then there will be ways for people to point out these inefficiencies or problems.

These correction tendencies will be weaker in authoritarian societies; in extreme versions of authoritarianism, they may barely even exist. Groups that are discriminated against will have no obvious recourse. Major mistakes may go uncorrected: they may be nearly invisible to a state whose data is polluted both by the means employed to observe and classify it, and the policies implemented on the basis of this data. A plausible feedback loop would see bias leading to error leading to further bias, and no ready ways to correct it. This of course, will be likely to be reinforced by the ordinary politics of authoritarianism, and the typical reluctance to correct leaders, even when their policies are leading to disaster. The flawed ideology of the leader (We must all study Comrade Xi thought to discover the truth!) and of the algorithm (machine learning is magic!) may reinforce each other in highly unfortunate ways.

In short, there is a very plausible set of mechanisms under which machine learning and related techniques may turn out to be a disaster for authoritarianism, reinforcing its weaknesses rather than its strengths, by increasing its tendency to bad decision making, and reducing further the possibility of negative feedback that could help correct against errors. This disaster would unfold in two ways. The first will involve enormous human costs: self-reinforcing bias will likely increase discrimination against out-groups, of the sort that we are seeing against the Uighur today. The second will involve more ordinary self-ramifying errors, that may lead to widespread planning disasters, which will differ from those described in Scott's account of High Modernism in that they are not as immediately visible, but that may also be more pernicious, and more damaging to the political health and viability of the regime for just that reason.

So in short, this conjecture would suggest that the conjunction of AI and authoritarianism (has someone coined the term 'aithoritarianism' yet? I'd really prefer not to take the blame), will have more or less the opposite effects of what people expect. It will not be Singapore writ large, and perhaps more brutal. Instead, it will be both more radically monstrous and more radically unstable.

Like all monotheoretic accounts, you should treat this post with some skepticism – political reality is always more complex and muddier than any abstraction. There are surely other effects (another, particularly interesting one for big countries such as China, is to relax the assumption that the state is a monolith, and to think about the intersection between machine learning and warring bureaucratic factions within the center, and between the center and periphery).Yet I think that it is plausible that it at least maps one significant set of causal relationships, that may push (in combination with, or against, other structural forces) towards very different outcomes than the conventional wisdom imagines. Comments, elaborations, qualifications and disagreements welcome.

Ben 11.25.19 at 6:32 pm (no link)

This seems to equivocate between two meanings of bias. Bias might mean a flaw that leads to empirically incorrect judgements and so to bad decisions, and it's true that that type of bias could destabilize an authoritarian state. But what we usually worry about with machine learning is that the system will find very real, but deeply unjust, patterns in the data, and reinforce those pattern. If there's a particular ethnic group that really does produce a disproportionate number of dissidents, and an algorithm leads to even-more-excessive repression of that group -- I'm not sure why an authoritarian state would see a stability threat in that tendency.

More generally, I think AI gets far too much of the billing in authoritarian apocalypse forecasts. Cheap, ubiquitous cameras, microphones, and location trackers are the real issue. If the state can track everyone's movements and conversations, then it can build a better Stasi even with crude, simple ai.

faustusnotes 11.26.19 at 1:00 am (no link)
I'd just like to point out (re: the tweet in the original post) that the "Uighur face-matching AI" idea is bullshit invented by scaremongers, with no basis in fact and traceable to a shoddy reddit thread. The Chinese government is not using facial recognition to identify Uighur, and the facial recognition fears about the Chinese government are vastly overstated.

Australia's border control facial recognition software is far more advanced than China's, as is the UK's, and facial recognition is actually pretty common in democracies. See e.g. the iPhone.

The main areas in which China uses facial recognition are in verifying ID for some high cost functions (like buying high speed rail tickets), and it's quite easy to avoid these functions by joining a queue and paying a human. The real intrusiveness of the Chinese security state is in its constant bag searches and very human-centric abuses of power in everyday life in connection with "security". Whether you get stopped and searched depends a lot on very arbitrary and error prone judgments by bored security staff at railway stations, in public squares, and on buses, not some evil intrusive state technology.

Conversely, the UK is a world leader in installing and using CCTV cameras, and has been for a long time. Furthermore, these CCTV cameras are a huge boon to law-abiding citizens, since they act as both excellent forms of crime prevention (I have had this experience myself) and for finding serious criminals. The people responsible for the death of those 39 Vietnamese labourers in the ice truck were caught because of CCTV; so was the guy who murdered that woman on the street in Melbourne a few years ago.

Finally to address another point that's already been raised (sadly): China no longer harvests organs, and the 2019 report that says it does is a sham. The social credit system is also largely a myth, and nobody from China even seems to know wtf it is.

If you're going to talk about how state's work, and the relative merits of autocratic vs. democratic states and their interaction with technology, it's a really good idea to get the basic facts right first.

Nathanael 11.26.19 at 6:10 am (no link)
I'll add that John Quiggin's point that Xi has already lost control of the provinces is correct -- but it DOES threaten his position as dictator. Once the provincial governors know they can act with impunity, it is absolutely standard for the next step to be getting rid of that annoying guy who is pretending to be dictator. It may take a few years but Xi now has dozens of powerful insiders who know that he's a weakling. They'll bide their time but when he crosses too many of them they'll take him out. And if China doesn't shut down coal, he's going to look like a weakling internationally too, in a couple of years. This will create a new group of ambitious insiders with a different reason to take him out.

Xi broke the "technocratic consensus" which was present after Deng, of central committee members who strove for competence and fact-based decision-making. That was a surprisingly effective type of junta government which led to lots of thinkpieces about whether authoritarian China would beat the democratic west. But it succumbed to the succession problem, like all authoritarian systems; Xi made himself Premier-for-life and the country is now exhibiting all the usual failures of authoritarian countries.

Hidari 11.26.19 at 9:08 am (no link)
@11 Yes it's strange that allegations of Chinese use of facial recognition software is gaining so much traction at a time when the Trump regime is deliberately ratcheting up tensions with China to pursue nakedly imperial goals, when the objective facts of Israeli use of similar software, which the Israelis boast about ( https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/why-did-microsoft-fund-israeli-firm-surveils-west-bank-palestinians-n1072116 ) doesn't cause so much interest, at a time when the Trump regime has simple decreed that the Israeli invasion/colonisation of Palestine is 'legal under international law'.

One of life's little mysteries I guess.

If we must talk about China could we at least bring it back to areas where we are responsible and where, therefore, we can do something about it?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/01/blackwater-founder-erik-prince-to-build-training-camp-in-chinas-xinjiang

[Dec 01, 2019] Polls are more tools of propaganda the the reflection of voters prefernces

Dec 01, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

psychohistorian , Dec 1 2019 20:37 utc | 7

@ jayc in comment #6 who wrote
"
Craig Murray says that Boris Johnson was notably drunk at the Cenotaph ceremony for Remembrance Sunday in London.

Why do the UK polls appear to show the Conservatives headed to big victory?
"
Polls are more tools of propaganda in this human time frame. Add to that in the US we (s)elected a pussy grabbing misogynist and serial bankruptcy grifter and you might start to understand that Boris Johnson may be an alcoholic tool of the elite that run Western nations....and they will propagandize his mythical wonderfulness in spite of his moral vacuousness....to a degree that enough of the masses believe in him.

I refuse to take polls anymore because the questions are always worded to get the answers whomever is paying for the poll wants.

We hope for structural change to the Western system/social contract but keep our eyes wide open to the obvious perfidy by the elite of today in the West...hence my steady drum beat about those of the cult that own global private finance

[Dec 01, 2019] Bush Doctrine still in play

US Empire's Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell gets irked that more nations are joining the INSTEX mechanism for commerce with Iran as shown by his Tweet:
Dec 01, 2019 | sputniknews.com

"cc: @TreasurySpox @USTreasury sounds to me like all these people and groups should be added to the US Sanctions list. We should ensure that they don't get to work in the US market. Iran or the US -- they decide. But not both ." [My Emphasis]

The nations saying we're not with you are Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden--what might be termed the more enlightened Europeans.

And here we have Germany's CDU acting in a manner reflecting the Bush Doctrine as it debated Germany's 5G rollout :

"The moderates, represented by Merkel, believe that Germany should not rule out any company over political issues, but focus more on objective factors such as whether its technological security and standards meet German requirements. However, some hard-liners make it an ideological issue and believe Huawei should be excluded. The reason they provided is ' no Chinese company is an independent company,' adding that Huawei's involvement is principally "an imminent question of national security .

"After decades of following the US, Germany has somewhat lost the ability to independently decide its development and destiny. But in recent years, the US has been pursuing unilateralism. The export-oriented German economy is affected by not only China-US trade conflicts, but also US threat of imposing tariffs on German products. Thus, it is time for Berlin to stop its fear of threats from Washington and make choices that are in line with its own interests." [My Emphasis]

Every Evil Outlaw US Empire chartered corporation in the tech realm is not an "independent company" since they work hand in glove with CIA, NSA, FBI, other government organizations, and are also funded by the government. The same is likely true of every Western tech company. A double standard excuse in service of continuing the Bush Doctrine.

To paraphrase Grenell, Now is most certainly the time to declare your independence and reclaim your sovereignty and cease acting in the service of another nation.

Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 2 2019 2:10 utc | 28

[Dec 01, 2019] The Short Road Democracy to Fascism - Global ResearchGlobal Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

Dec 01, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism By Larry Romanoff Global Research, November 30, 2019 Region: USA Theme: History

Fascism is a political ideology fundamentally authoritarian in character, with a strong nationalism and an essentially belligerent militaristic outlook. Fascism carries primarily a corporate perspective as opposed to a socialist view, directed to satisfying the needs, values and objectives of finance and corporations, organising both the economy and the political system according to this agenda.

A fascist government actively suppresses any objection to its ideology and typically will crush any movement which opposes it. In keeping with their belligerent nature, fascist governments generally view violence and war as stimulants to national spirit and vitality.

Being politically Right-Wing, they maintain their position through firm control or compliance of the media, and most often engage in a vast array of lies and deception. These governments tend to be bigoted, if not racist, invariably require "enemies" to achieve public solidarity, and are often supremacist or at least 'exceptional' in their self-assessment. They either believe, or pretend to believe, that they have a license on truth. Large military budgets, the creation and demonisation of fictitious enemies to propagate fear and maintain population control, are all typical characteristics of a fascist regime, as is massive public surveillance.

In 1995 the Italian Scholar Umberto Eco produced a paper titled 'Eternal Fascism' (1) in which he examined the characteristics of fascist regimes. In 2003, Laurence W. Britt did an excellent and scholarly work in dissecting and categorising past fascist regimes (2), in which he revealed common threads that linked all of them in "patterns of national behavior and abuse of power". He wrote that "Even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi, (which is) not a revelation but useful to shed needed light on current circumstances." I am including here a composite of edited extracts from these two papers with additional commentary of my own. Significant statements by these two authors are in quotation marks. This is a list of the characteristics of fascist states, taken from Britt's original article:

Early Warning Signs of Fascism

If we examine the US on these categories, we find an almost perfect match. Certainly the US has the most strident nationalism of all nations today, with the hysteria of patriotism and flag-worship unabated and even increasing, with the delusional theory of American Exceptionalism as virulent as ever.

There is no question about military supremacy , with the US spending almost twice as much on its military as the rest of the world combined and being by an order of magnitude the world's largest arms manufacturer and dealer. Obama once stated flatly that for the US to remain 'peaceful and prosperous' it needed the world's largest and most powerful military to maintain an overwhelming military supremacy. Obsession with issues of national security is so common in the US today they have become objects of ridicule. Every manner of information is withheld, every manner of lie is told, every manner of crime is committed, all with the excuse of 'national security'. Britt noted that a national security apparatus was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints, with its actions always justified under the rubric of protecting "national security", and that questioning these oppressive activities is now often portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

All the fascist regimes have an obsession with crime and punishment, Britt stating that most "maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations" – a perfect description of America today, including the 'unchecked power and rampant abuse' by the police. He also noted that in all these fascist states, 'normal' crime and political crime were almost interchangeable, "often merged into trumped-up criminal charges used against political opponents of the regime". These characteristics of crime, punishment and incarceration are all fields in which America leads the world by a wide margin today as we have already seen.

In terms of enemies being needed for solidarity and to maintain "a unifying cause", the US is also the outstanding world leader, creating real and fictitious enemies not only for itself, but doing a rather good job in creating animosities throughout the world. In fact, a signature feature of the US is its worldwide propagation of regional unrest, as we see in Asia today, and with interference in the Ukraine, Russia, China, and dozens of other countries. Creating political chaos and large military risks is a common fascist trait, which is partly why military supremacy is necessary, black and white America attempting to partition the world into ideological factions, often in preparation for war.

For some decades, the US milked the Cold War for all it was worth, casting the Soviet Union as a bitter enemy and creating animosity where none would have existed. With the fall of the USSR, the US turned immediately to other nations, never really forgetting Russia, and then created its 9-11 'Pearl Harbor Moment' that would permit it to have a permanent enemy in the person of 'terrorism', a war that will never be won since the US creates all the terrorist events to prolong it. It has the added advantage of demonising all the world's Muslims while equating all Arabs with terrorists. Enough enemies here for a lifetime of fascism.

A fundamental practice of a fascist or pre-fascist government is demonisation of 'the others', outsiders who are the enemy.

For the people, these (usually imaginary) enemies provide not only an essential cornerstone of the fascist state but an essential adhesive for their fabricated national identity. Being thus united against a common other, fascism becomes deeply racist by definition and in practice. This demonisation of selected enemies is so intense that pacifism or a lack of belligerence equate to treason, due to sympathising with the enemy or, in today's US lexicon, "giving aid and comfort to the enemy". In the world of fascism, disagreement is treason. George Bush and Dick Cheney: "If you aren't with us, you're against us". US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: "There are only two kinds of people in the world: Christians who believe in capitalism, and the other kind."

The Global Rise of Fascism: Capitalism End Game?

In his study of these regimes, Britt wrote that "the most significant common thread" among them was this demonisation of other peoples as enemies of the state, "to divert attention, to shift blame, and to channel frustration into controlled directions". He claimed that their methods of choice – propaganda and misinformation – were usually effective. Britt noted that "Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly", which is precisely what happens today in the US, where increasingly it occurs that challengers of the system are labeled as terrorists, even to the extent of those operating food banks being classified as 'food terrorists'.

No reasonable person can claim today that the US has any concern for human rights, certainly not any outside the continental US, and increasingly less within its borders. Except for Israel, the US has by far the worst record of human rights violations during the past several hundred years, far outstripping anything attributed to people like Stalin or Hitler, or even the Japanese. It is, after all, the US that built and still maintains the largest network of torture prisons and ships in the history of the world, even though the US media have removed this topic from the publishing list.

In terms of media control, the US government covers this not by ownership or direct censorship but by a cabal of closely-interwoven interests working on the same precise agenda, almost totally eliminating any necessity for overt acts.

Corruption and cronyism are as alive and virulent in American government today as they have ever been in any society at any time in recent history. The lobbies alone, working with the secret government, are more than sufficient evidence of this, with corruption increasing noticeably each year. Americans may quarrel with the point of an integration of religion and government but, while religion is theoretically separated from the state, it is joined at the hip in practice.

We have George Bush telling us God told him to invade and destroy Iraq, Obama telling us Christ's redemption of him provides him with solace on a daily basis, and a long list of other nonsense indicating that evangelical hysteria is never far removed from the government, even if only to mislead an ignorant population. Britt noted that religion and the ruling elite were tied together in some way .

"The fact that the ruling elite's behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the 'godless'."

Fraudulent elections are more overtly creeping into the American electoral system every year. We had George Bush's brother removing more than 50,000 persons from the voter lists in Florida, all of whom were legitimate voters, and sufficient to provide an election victory. Even then, when votes were finally counted accurately, Bush was proven to have lost the election, but the consequences could not be reversed. As well, the new digital voting machines have been condemned even by those who designed them, as wide open to electoral fraud and manipulation to the extent of changing the outcome of every vote. Moreover, it is openly admitted that even without manipulation, an accurate count is not physically possible. But the government continues to roll out these systems, one would have to assume for their manipulation potential.

It is widely recognised the US has been dumbing-down education for decades, starving the educational systems of funds, using increasingly unqualified part-time and adjunct teachers and professors, increasing tuition costs to the point where education will soon be unaffordable. We don't need an education to see that the only possible result is an increasingly uneducated and ignorant population. In his study, Britt noted that "intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed." This forms a perfect description of the situation today in the US, certainly on the crushing of dissent. I have no observation to make on the arts, but the US appears to qualify solidly on every point in the above list, and I see no reason for Americans or indeed anyone else to take comfort in this. Is the US a fascist state? How do we avoid answering in the affirmative?

To people of a country like the US, who are deprived of a clear national identity, fascism creates one by stoking the fires of a false nationalism though propagandising the pathologically false conviction that "the world's greatest privilege is to be born or to live in this country", that every citizen "belongs to the best people in the world", all of whom are, by definition, "good". US President Calvin Coolidge:

"To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race".

Michael Hirsh used the same jingoistic nonsense to justify American cannibalisation of the world by stating that American global domination was "the greatest gift the world has received in possibly all of recorded history." Britt noted the powerful propagation and displays of nationalistic expression,

"From the prominent displays of flags and ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism."

To underscore the above, Global Research published an article in March of 2015 titled "The End of Canada in Ten Steps: A Conversation with Naomi Wolf" (3), in which it was noted that she studied "the way open societies were crushed from within by authoritarian elements", such as those existing in all Right-Wing countries today, and claimed there was "a 'blueprint' followed by all dictatorial rulers composed of ten steps" as follows:

Global Research finally noted that "In her 2007 book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Naomi Wolf not only described this formula for fascism, she outlined how these repressive measures are in evidence in modern day America."

There is one other item pertaining to fascism in America that contains elements of all characteristics we've discussed, one which Hollywood and the media have taken great pains to develop though the ground was already very fertile indeed, and this category is heroes and super-heroes. The US has always glorified war and war heroes, describing American cannon-fodder as "sons of freedom giving their lives for democracy", when they were simply massacring impoverished civilians to enrich the bankers. Eco noted that "In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Fascist ideology heroism is the norm", with the fascist hero impatient to die, but who, in his impatience, "more frequently sends other people to death".

This black and white religious proto-fascism which has perhaps always existed in America was the seedbed for the worship of heroes and winners. Americans, in their desperate jingoistic desire to be "good" and to "win", and in a bid to prove their overwhelming moral superiority, turned from reality to fiction and gave us Superman, Batman, Spiderman and Captain America. All are Christian proto-fascists engaged in fictional battles of good against evil, with the Americans living vicariously through these imaginary beings, sharing in their awesome power and moral righteousness, and whose costumes inevitably bear labels saying "Made in America". And indeed we cannot watch an American movie without encountering this irritating white supremacist ideology. Think of movies like Avatar or Independence Day; their entire purpose is to fuel this ideological jingoism and make all viewers "proud to be American". But it's all a fiction. The real American heroes are not Superman or Spiderman but Curtis LeMay, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Madeline Albright, all criminally-insane psychopathic killers.

It is interesting that a fascist government, with its instinctive hatred of socialism, propagates "fascist socialism" which nurtures and feeds corporations while normal socialism nurtures the general population. What we might call "corporate socialism", which is what exists today in the US, is a fairly precise definition of fascism.

Tax benefits that favor the rich either primarily or exclusively, a high income inequality, the dismantling of any social safety net, different laws for the rich and powerful than for the poor, corporate immunity for crimes, a lack of corporate regulation and oversight, are all typical characteristics. Britt noted that "Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The US government and elites, except for one brief historical period, have always strived to destroy labor to protect the profits of big business. In Britt's study, "the poor formed an underclass, (and) being poor was considered akin to a vice." And in which nation today have color and poverty been criminalised? The world's largest fascist state – America.

He also noted rampant cronyism and corruption between the political and corporate elites and stated that "With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population." Corruption and cronyism are as alive and virulent in American government today as they have ever been in any society at any time in recent history. The lobbies alone, working with the secret government, are more than sufficient evidence of this, with corruption increasing noticeably each year. Similarly, no reasonable person can question any longer the suppression of labor and the protection and enhancement of corporate power in America. We have already covered in detail the trashing of the social contract, the destruction of labor protections and the evisceration of the middle class. No further evidence is necessary.

There is another alarming category that evidences even more strongly the threats to civil society from the authoritarian and fascist police-state mentality that is increasingly permeating all of the US, this involving trivial civil disputes that should in no case involve the police. In July of 2014, a Minneapolis man was ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight with his two children for questioning why he was qualified for priority boarding but his two children were not. He posted a Tweet that said, "Wow, rudest agent in Denver. Kimberly S, gate C39, not happy". Southwest Airlines' gate attendants saw the tweet, ejected Watson and his children from the flight, informing him he now qualified as a "safety threat", threatening to have him arrested unless he immediately deleted his post.

In the US today, kindergarten teachers regularly call the police to arrest children who misbehave. A Chinese woman tourist in New Hampshire was tasered and assaulted by police when a clerk at an Apple store complained she wanted to buy two phones. In another case, a father in New Hampshire attended a parent-school meeting to protest the classroom use of sexually-explicit reading material provided to his teen-age daughter. When the man exceeded the arbitrary maximum of two minutes speaking time, the principal called the police and had the man arrested. In each case, no 'law' was violated so the police used generic charges of "causing a public disturbance" or some other such nuisance charge.

These false charges may well be dismissed by a court but still present a serious violation of civil rights and a gross exaggeration of the ability of individuals to create their own laws and of the police to enforce them. In the Southwest Airlines case above, had the man refused to delete his negative post, the agent would certainly have called the police who, cast from the same authoritarian mold, would have automatically arrested and charged him, probably with 'Twitter Terrorism'. The man would likely have escaped in the end, but it would have been a long and expensive climb out from the bottom of that hole. In the case of the Apple store, the female customer was physically knocked to the ground and tasered by police immediately on their arrival. In neither case did the police make even minimal attempts to ascertain the facts. In fact, the only salient "fact" was that of a civilian challenging any kind of authority, even the kind that is so weak as to be invisible. No civilian has any practical defense against an airline agent or shop clerk who testifies that he "caused a public disturbance", nor against police charges for having done so. The only immunity comes from wealth or political power.

There are countless similar cases which all have in common an implicit assumption that anyone, even in a position of minimal authority such as a KFC clerk, has the power to dictate imaginary rules that obtain the force of law with the police and which, if challenged, will result in arrest. Individual private citizens, as least those lacking obvious wealth or power, are increasingly relegated to the social trash bin. Incidents such as these may appear individually trivial and unconnected, but they are not trivial in bulk and are indications of a frightening authoritarianism infecting all of America, part of the widespread rush to fascism occurring in all politically Right-Wing nations, especially in the US. That this should be such a common experience is a frightening and almost terrifying development, where one now fears to enter any dispute with even the most minor employee or clerk, in almost any context, and regardless of the justification.

When common citizens are afraid to challenge the most trivial injustices in civil society, when the people as individuals have been moved to the bottom of the priority list, when even store clerks have effective arrest authority, this is authoritarian fascism – a classic definition of a de facto fascist police state. In the US today there are so many similar examples where this, the most fundamental of civil rights – the right to voice complaint – has been converted to a criminal act. Those instances involved mostly the police badly exceeding their authority, but this category involves mere civilians with no actual invested civil authority of any kind, and yet in each case legal authority being presumed and exercised entirely at the whim of these same persons. While Americans please themselves by accusing China of being authoritarian, it is in fact the US that is both authoritarian and fascist. China is today a very human civil society compared to Transformed America.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He can be contacted at: [email protected]

Notes

(1) Umberto Eco: "Eternal Fascism

(2) The 14 Characteristics of Fascism, by Lawrence Britt

(3) https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-end-of-canada-in-ten-steps-a-conversation-with-naomi-wolf/5438017

The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Larry Romanoff , Global Research, 2019

[Dec 01, 2019] Joe Rogan finally got around to interviewing Tulsi, along with another vet named Jocko Willink.

Dec 01, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

fdr-fan , November 29, 2019 at 2:11 pm

Attn Lambert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdYud9re7-Q

Joe Rogan finally got around to interviewing Tulsi, along with another vet named Jocko Willink.

Tulsi does splendidly but unsurprisingly, finally allowed to complete a sentence without fighting stupid questions.

Around the middle of the clip, Willink has a passionate description of the rebirth of manufacturing in Maine, which is surprising!

Conrad , November 29, 2019 at 3:50 pm

#25 on trending when I clicked through just now. Not bad for a two and a half hour long interview.

And how on earth did an ex comedian and MMA commentator become one of the better political interviewers around?

WheresOurTeddy , November 29, 2019 at 4:19 pm

"And how on earth did an ex comedian and MMA commentator become one of the better political interviewers around?"

Dereliction of duty by the gatekeeper oligarch press, and discontent by the ever-more-discerning consumer to be served cold lies? Baby Boomers and Silent Generation dying off more by the day? People under 40 who have never experienced an economy that doesn't suck for the non-rich?

polecat , November 29, 2019 at 5:07 pm

He got over his fear factor ..

XXYY , November 30, 2019 at 10:44 am

I've started listening to Rogan interviews since Sanders's blockbuster interview a few months ago.

The guy is actually a surprisingly good interviewer, for reasons that are hard to understand. For one thing, he is invariably friendly and respectful, which I think draws the subject out. His format also allows almost unlimited and uninterrupted time, (2-3 hours is typical), which removes time pressure and allows extended and nuanced conversation. He also has no particular agenda, and allows the conversation to go where it will, jumping in with "questions" only when a particular topic seems to be exhausted.

The interesting thing is that anyone, either inside the media or outside it, could be doing a similar program; it's not technically hard. But no one is.

dcrane , November 30, 2019 at 12:58 am

Rogan first interviewed her in May. This was the second time. And another good one. She is ready to be president.

Perpetual war , November 30, 2019 at 4:55 am

If I didn't miss anything, then it is not 100% clear that USA will stop invading and bombing other countries with Gabbard. She is slippery enough to continue the bombings. She still mentions war as a last option. It is highly subjective to judge whether you have used up all diplomatic channels to achieve your goal or not.

The wars and invasions has been about stealing natural resources, oil mainly but now lithium too, feed the MIC-swamp creatures in general and selling out state resources to American interests. In no way does she tackle the causes of the wars, only the symptoms.

When have you tried all diplomatic channels to steal Iraq's, Venezuela's, Syria's and Libya's oil fields? What do the diplomatic tools look like? Economic strangulation? IMF on steroids?

She needs to talk about a society getting off of oil for a starter

Hepativore , November 29, 2019 at 2:46 pm

It is amazing on how so many arguments against progressive policies coming from the Democratic Party all seem to boil down to "Shut up and get back to work, peasants!"

Incrementalists do not even slowly improve things most of the time, as the neoliberal Democratic Party "incrementally" follows the Republicans rightward with every broad shift to the right on the GOP side. Today's deregulators and supply-side economic proponents are just as likely to be Democrats as Republicans and many Democrats are probably cheering on Kavanaugh's attacks on environmental standards as we speak.

Our aristocracy do not even pretend to adhere to any sort of sense of noblisse oblige, unlike the feudal lords of old.

[Nov 30, 2019] CrowdStrike: a Conspiracy Wrapped in a Conspiracy Inside a Conspiracy by Oleg Atbashian

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Only a computer illiterate would think that CrowdStrike needed to take the physical DNC server to Ukraine in order to analyze it. Any computer can be cloned and its digital image can be sent within minutes anywhere on the planet in the form of ones and zeroes. It can also exist in multiple digital copies, carrying not just confidential archives, but also history logs and other content that can reveal to an expert whether the hacking occurred, and if so, by whom. ..."
"... The copies of the DNC server on CrowdStrike computers are likely to hold the key to understanding what really happened during the 2016 election, the origin of the anti-Trump witch hunt, and the toxic cloud of lies that had been hanging over the world and poisoning minds during the last three years. ..."
"... And now the new Ukrainian government might subpoena these copies from CrowdStrike and finally pass them to FBI experts, which should've been done three years ago. The danger of this happening is a much greater incentive for the Democrats to preemptively destroy Trump than all the dirt Joe Biden had been rolling in as Obama's vice president. ..."
"... I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. ..."
"... The fraudulent "CrowdStrike conspiracy" deflection is not a show of the Democrats' strength. Instead, It betrays their desperation and panic, which tells us that Trump is squarely over the target. ..."
"... Yet DOJ Mueller conclusively signed off on the unsubtaniated fact the Russians had hacked the DNC computers in his final Weissman Report. Just one more part of the curious Mueller report that was far more a CYA hit piece against future claims of Obama crimes, than an investigation of past Trump ones. ..."
Nov 29, 2019 | www.frontpagemag.com

The conspiracy theory that exposes the Democrats' desperation and panic.

Fri Nov 29, 2019 Oleg Atbashian 133 In the last few days, media talking heads have been saying the word "CrowdStrike" a lot, defining it as a wild conspiracy theory originating in Moscow. They were joined by Chris Wallace at Fox News, who informed us that president Trump and his ill-informed fans believe in a crazy idea that the DNC wasn't hacked by the Russians but by some Ukrainian group named CrowdStrike that stole the DNC server and brought it to Ukraine , and that it was Ukraine that meddled in our 2016 election and not Russia.

A crazy idea indeed. Except that neither Trump nor his fans had ever heard of it until the Democrat-media complex condescendingly informed them that these are their beliefs.

Let's look at the facts:

None of these facts was ever disputed by anyone. The media largely ignored them except for the part about the Russian hackers, which boosted their own, now debunked, wild conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian agent.

Now that Trump had asked the newly elected Ukrainian president Zelensky to look into CrowdStrike during that fateful July phone call, the media all at once started telling us that "CrowdStrike" is a code word for a conspiracy theory so insane that only Trump could believe in it, which is just more proof of how insane he is.

But if Trump had really said what Mr. Wallace and the media claim, Ukrainians would be the first to call him on it and the impeachment would've been over by now. Instead, Ukrainians back Trump every step of the way.

So where did this pretzel-shaped fake news come from, and why is it being peddled now ?

Note this is a classic case study of propaganda and media manipulation:

  1. Take an idea or a story that you wish to go away and make up an obviously bogus story with the same names and details as the real one.
  2. Start planting it simultaneously on media channels until the fake story supplants the real one, while claiming this is what your opponents really believe.
  3. Have various fact-checking outlets debunk your fake story as an absurd conspiracy theory. Ridicule those who allegedly believe in it. Better yet, have late night comedians do it for you.
  4. Once your opponent is brought down, mercilessly plant your boot on his face and never let up.

This mass manipulation technology had been tested and perfected by the Soviet propaganda machine, both domestically and overseas, where it was successfully deployed by the KGB. The Kremlin still uses it, although it can no longer afford it on the same grandiose scale. In this sense, the Democratic think tanks are the true successors of the KGB in deviousness, scope, and worldwide reach of fake narratives. How they inherited these methods from the KGB is a story for another day.

For a long time this technology was allowing the Democrats to delegitimize opposition by convincing large numbers of Americans that Republicans are

The Soviet communists had aptly named it "disinformation," which a cut above the English word "misinformation." It includes a variety of methods for a variety of needs, from bringing down an opponent to revising history to creating a new historical reality altogether. In this sense, most Hollywood movies on historical subjects today disinform us about history, supplanting it with a bogus "progressive" narrative. The Soviet term for such art was "socialist realism."

Long story short, the Democrat-media complex has successfully convinced one half of the world that Trump is a Russian agent. Now they're acting as if they'd spent the last three years in a coma, unaware of any bombshell stories about collusion. And bombshell stories without any continuation are a telltale sign of fake narratives. The only consequence of these bombshells is mass amnesia among the foot soldiers.

The Trump-Russian outrage is dead, long live the Trump-Ukraine outrage. And when that outrage is dead, the next outrage that will be just outrageous.

The current impeachment narrative alleges that Trump used military aid as leverage in asking Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden (which implies the Democrats know Biden is dirty, otherwise why bother?). What's not in this picture is CrowdStrike. Even though Trump mentioned it in the phone call, it has nothing to do with the Bidens nor the Javelin missiles. CrowdStrike has nothing to do with impeachment. We're told it's just a silly conspiracy theory in Trump's head, that it's a nonissue.

But then why fabricate fake news about it and plant blatant lies simultaneously in all media outlets from Mother Jones to Fox News? Why risk being exposed over such a nonissue? Perhaps because it's more important than the story suggests.

Only a computer illiterate would think that CrowdStrike needed to take the physical DNC server to Ukraine in order to analyze it. Any computer can be cloned and its digital image can be sent within minutes anywhere on the planet in the form of ones and zeroes. It can also exist in multiple digital copies, carrying not just confidential archives, but also history logs and other content that can reveal to an expert whether the hacking occurred, and if so, by whom.

The copies of the DNC server on CrowdStrike computers are likely to hold the key to understanding what really happened during the 2016 election, the origin of the anti-Trump witch hunt, and the toxic cloud of lies that had been hanging over the world and poisoning minds during the last three years.

And now the new Ukrainian government might subpoena these copies from CrowdStrike and finally pass them to FBI experts, which should've been done three years ago. The danger of this happening is a much greater incentive for the Democrats to preemptively destroy Trump than all the dirt Joe Biden had been rolling in as Obama's vice president.

This gives the supposedly innocuous reference to CrowdStrike during Trump's call a lot more gravity and the previously incoherent part of the transcript begins to make sense.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.

If you read the transcript on the day it was released, you probably didn't understand what Trump was even talking about, let alone what had caused such a disproportionate outrage, complete with whistle blowing and calls for impeachment. What in that mild conversation could possibly terrify the Democrats so much? They were terrified because, unlike most Americans, the Democrats knew exactly what Trump was talking about. And now you know, too.

The fraudulent "CrowdStrike conspiracy" deflection is not a show of the Democrats' strength. Instead, It betrays their desperation and panic, which tells us that Trump is squarely over the target.

It also helps us to see who at Fox News can be trusted to tell us the truth. And it ain't Chris Wallace.

NAHALKIDES • a day ago ,

Fine dissection of the CrowdStrike story. Of course if the DNC was serious about finding out who breached their security they would have allowed the FBI to investigate. They didn't - which means they're covering something up.

coolit10 NAHALKIDES • a day ago ,

And who doesn't have at least one backup system running constantly, I have two and am just a home user and the DNC would not have been dumb enough not to have one on the premises and one off site for safety and preservation and the FBI could have gotten to either one if they wanted to. DWS was involved in something very similar and the FBI backed off again. I thought the DNC and the FBI were on the same page and would have liked to find out how the "transfer" happened?

🕊jr🕊 " Deep State Target " coolit10 • 13 hours ago ,

Let's be honest, that FBI made no attempt to investigate it in the first place as they were as culpable in this crime as the DNC.

Herman Young 🕊jr🕊 " Deep State Target " • 12 hours ago ,

Yet DOJ Mueller conclusively signed off on the unsubtaniated fact the Russians had hacked the DNC computers in his final Weissman Report. Just one more part of the curious Mueller report that was far more a CYA hit piece against future claims of Obama crimes, than an investigation of past Trump ones.

SteveTn6b NAHALKIDES • 16 hours ago ,

They know who breached their security. He'd dead!

Herman Young SteveTn6b • 12 hours ago ,

Seth Rich - paper trail to Wikilinks needs to come out in any Senate impeachment trail since Democrats claim the Ukraine phone call was Trump's alleged downfall. CROWDSTRIKE was the only favor Trumps asked for.

Karen Herman Young • 9 hours ago ,

We all know it was Seth Rich

Clasvi SteveTn6b • 13 hours ago ,

you are spot on. it is amazing how they shut down the Seth Rich murder. The media was all to happy to shut it down.

Karen Clasvi • 9 hours ago ,

Fox helped with that cover up

undrprsr Clasvi • 6 hours ago ,

Yep, and Donna Brazile wrote in her book she feared for her life after Seth Rich was murdered, why's that if it was just a random attack?

El Cid NAHALKIDES • 15 hours ago ,

There are two important facts to glean from this article:

1) Crowdstrike, the DNC contractor, is Ukrainian
2) that the famous server may have been backed up in Ukraine and not tampered with.

From the MSM we were given the 'interpretation' that Trump is an idiot who believes that the DNC shipped the server with no changes to the Ukraine. No folks. He 'gets' technology and security. He actual ran a business! (imagine).

I'd love to hear that in Hillary's own voice. :) You know, cleaned with a cloth?

Joe Clear NAHALKIDES • 12 hours ago ,

They sure are, that being the killing of Seth Rich who copied the data to flash drive and gave it to Wikileaks.

stanley castleberry NAHALKIDES • 12 hours ago ,

They found out right away. Hence Rich was assassinated.

Herman Young NAHALKIDES • 12 hours ago • edited ,

That pretty much sums it up. MSM in total cahoots on this too since they put the entire topic of the CROWDSTRIKE part of the phone call into the cone of silence.

No Bread or Circuses • a day ago ,

The Left and media (One and the same within the "Deep State") have been playing "Three Card Monte" with America for a while; it stops now!

The "Impeachment" media show being run by the Lefty tool cretins in the House has NOTHING to do with wrong doing by President Trump. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fear that President Trump will expose the depth of the swamp and bring the criminals on the Left down to Justice!

We are s close to getting to the bottom of the conspiracies that threaten our nation. Time to make the America haters pay for the harm they have done to our nation!

We need open and in depth prosecution of the criminal activities of the Left. There needs to be LONG prison sentences and, yes, even executions for those that seek to undermine our nation.

People need to know that there our GRAVE penalties for betraying our nation!

God Bless President Trump!
God Bless America!

Anacleto Mitraglia • 21 hours ago • edited ,

In fact, when I first heard this story - that is: very recently - I was puzzled: why should a major party in the Country that invented IT and is still at its leading edge, ask an obscure firm of a crumbling, remote foreign State to do their IT security research? I'm not saying that Ukraine is a s++thole Country, but... you get me.

Either they have very much to hide, or they fear some closeted rightwing geek that works in any of the many leftist US technofirms. Or, CrowdStrike were involved from the beginning of the story, from the Steele dossier perhaps?

Herman Young Anacleto Mitraglia • 12 hours ago ,

The whole Crowdstrike fiasco has been around for years - plus became a solid CYA part of the Mueller report too - just in case the Democrats needed to bury it later.

El Cid Anacleto Mitraglia • 15 hours ago • edited ,

don't you get it? The DNC is completely infiltrated by Ukrainian graft. Even Joe Biden was on the take. Why won't they run their IT? (there is no Research in IT here, just office software)

Cynthia Campbell • 19 hours ago ,

If you want to sell and deliver State Secrets and Intel to our enemies, then you (Obama, the Clintons, the DNC) simply make it easier for THEM to access. They have done this for years, and this is why they had to fill the DOJ, the FBI and the State Department with traitors and haters of America and American principles. Barack Hussein Obama, the Clintons, their evil administrations and even two-faced RINOS like McCain, Romney, and Jeff Sessions were actively involved. This is treason pure and simple, and all of the above could be legitimately and justifiably hung or shot without recourse, and rightly so!

doc_who_cuts • 20 hours ago ,

not seizing the DNC and hillary servers is the clearest case of OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE I know of in the last few years.

Herman Young doc_who_cuts • 12 hours ago ,

Isn't it ironic, the Dems accuse Trump of "obstruction of justice".

FRANCES LOUISE • a day ago ,

I have known about "Crowdstrike" since Dec. 2017. Pres. Trump is just subtlety introducing background on what will be the biggest story of treachery, subversion, treason and corruption ever. QAnon that the fakenews tries to vilify as a LARP has been dropping crumbs about "Crowdstrike", Perkins Coir, Fusion GPS, FVEY and so much more! Crowdstrike mentioned 7x in the last 2 years. I can't urge people enough to actually investigate the Q posts for themselves! You will be stunned at what you have been missing. Q which says "future proves past" and "news will unlock" what I see in the media now is old news to those of us following Q. Q told us that "Senate was the prize" "Senate meant more" that the investigations started in the House would now move to the Senate and all this that the Dems and Rinos have been trying to hide is going to be exposed. Fakenews corporate media has litterally written hundreds of hit pieces against Q - me knows "they doth protest to much" - Recent Q post told "Chairman Graham its time. Senate was the target"

Keep up with the Q posts and Pres. Trump's tweets in once place: https://qmap.pub/ - And if you are still having a hard time believing this is legit Pres. Trump himself has confirmed Q posts by "Zero Delta" drops - if you think this is fake - try and tweet within 1 minute of when Pres. Trump does BUT your tweet has to anticipate his! YOU have to tweet first and HE has to follow you within 1 minute. MATHEMATICAL IMPOSSIBILITY UNLESS you are in the same immediate space or communicating at the time of the tweets! To all you doubters that think Q is just a by chance scam - NO WAY. There have been MANY, MANY of these ZERO DELTA PROOFS over the last 2 years. The most recent was Nov. 20th.

Link will show you how much attention has been given to "debunking" Q - gotta wonder why
https://cdn.qmap.pub/images...

elephant4life FRANCES LOUISE • 19 hours ago ,

Perkins-Coie is the real-world Milton, Chadwick & Waters. I'm willing to bet their industrial-sized shredders are working overtime.

Herman Young elephant4life • 12 hours ago ,

Unless Bleach-Bit got there first.

Herman Young FRANCES LOUISE • 12 hours ago ,

Crowdstrike in the dog who did not bark. The Democrat cone of silence they put on even the mention of the word has been the most damning clue this is where the real action is.

Grant Hodges • a day ago ,

The assertion that a digital image of the computer can be transmitted quickly all around the world is not necessarily correct in my experience as a cyber security analyst. I'm not an upper echelon type, but I am aware that it can take up to weeks to transmit such images depending on the hard disk, where it is, and the connections/network to your device creating the image. The FBI should have physically taken the device since there was a suspicion of wrong doing by Hillary Clinton. Had it been Donald Trump's computer I do not doubt the FBI would either have imaged it on the spot or taken the device.

coolit10 Grant Hodges • a day ago ,

Last night I completely removed Catalina-Safari on my older Mac Book Air and re-installed Mohave-Safari from my backup to the day before I installed Catalina including the data and system just like it was before. It took around 5 hours and was cabled and not on Wi-Fi and it was perfect and reset the clock, my old e-mails and the newer ones as well. I can't believe being hooked into real broadband or fiber couldn't do the same in a relatively short period of time, but still significantly longer than a thumb drive or external hard drive.

Grant Hodges coolit10 • a day ago ,

One variable is how big your hard drive is. If it is a big drive at a remote location, say somewhere in California to the Midwest, it can take weeks for a forensic backup. I only say that because . . . well, I'm not allowed to say. But you get it.

El Cid Grant Hodges • 14 hours ago • edited ,

The assertion is a figure of speech. Today's IT infrastructure companies sell the service of maintaining clones in real-time in two or more locations for safety purposes. VMware and other off-the-shelf products makes this kind of setup easy to deploy. Did Crowdstrike offer that service and did the DNC buy it, that is the question? And, if so, did Crowdstrike keep the image on their backups in Ukraine?

(Note: it is not obvious that such a setup would preserve the forensic data the FBI would be looking for, but its a start).

[Nov 30, 2019] We can all agree that humans have had a devastating impact on every corner the environment, every ecosystem. However, it is a leap of manufactured faith (manipulation) to claim that humans are responsible for climate change

Nov 30, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

How about the hysteria that led to the Spanish War? "Remember the Maine," The ship was supposedly sunk in Havana Harbor by Spanish perfidy. In fact the Maine blew up because a coal bunker fire burned through a bulkhead and set off something or other. That was the US Navy's investigative finding after the war. Don't tell me about Hearst. Hearst was just selling newspapers. The American people went into a hysteric rage against Spain and that was the cause of war. Hearst just wanted to find "Rosebud." Figure it out.

And now we have the approaching end of the world through man made climate change. It would be funny if there were not so many who believe it.

Science? Hah! For every study you can produce in support of this fantasy I will find you one to rebut it. All you ecofreaks! Don't send me material about this. I will not help you support the hysteric fantasy. Send money to the Democratic Party. They believe this crap. pl.

Bandit , 29 November 2019 at 10:29 PM

Now this is a post I can get behind. For me it has been the hysteria and the ease with which people are manipulated through propaganda that has astonished me, because that is what the climate change agenda is all about. We can all agree that humans have had a devastating impact on every corner the environment, every ecosystem. However, it is a leap of manufactured faith (manipulation) to claim that humans are responsible for climate change.

To support this bogus hypothesis, scientists strangle and manipulate data in an effort to justify draconian laws and policies that can only line the pockets of the very rich at the expense of the rest of the tax paying population. Carbon tax is the real aim here, a totally bullshit pretext to suck more trillions of dollars from the economies of the world. Self-selecting "experts" join the chorus because of fear of censorship and loss of status while the brave ones are called, as always, climate change denialists, and thus denigrated.

Mr Zarate , 29 November 2019 at 10:41 PM
The hysteria that erupts when anyone questions climate change says pretty much all you need to know about it.
ambrit , 29 November 2019 at 10:41 PM
Oh man! Even most of the lefties I associate with believe it. They are supposed to, through the tenets of their secular 'religion,' use solid evidence as their guides. The evidence is not persuasive. The Earth has gone through fluctuations in climate for ever. The dinosaurs made do in a much hotter earth, if the geologic evidence be true. It took a cosmic strike to do them in.
Humans are the top predators here because they can adapt to change much quicker than any other animal. Modern human civilization may not be recognizable to any of us in two hundred years. That would be true with or without "climate change." We will carry on, one way or another.
Similarly to what Bandit wrote above, I see various 'elites' angling to make book on whatever does happen. The Science Fiction writer William Gibson has proposed in his book "The Peripheral," a near future based on a massive world population die back that he calls "The Jackpot."
Read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral
All in all, we live in 'Interesting Times.'
Thank you for your indulgence.

[Nov 30, 2019] The Transparent Cabal The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel Stephen J. Snie

Notable quotes:
"... Another episode in the sad story of recent American government. It starts with a 1996 paper entitled "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" published by an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The principal idea was to foment war in the Middle East and consequently destabilize Israel's enemies. ..."
"... No informed American can afford to not know the names Oded Yinon, AIPAC, The Clean Break, The NEOCONS. Knowledge is indeed power. > ..."
"... Hersh hoped that future historians would document the fragility of American democracy by explaining how eight or nine neoconservatives were able to overcome easily the bureaucracy, the Congress, and the press. Stephen Sniegoski, in The Transparent Cabal, has provided a detailed history of how the neoconservative cult achieved the takeover. ..."
"... The neoconservatives do not represent the only case in American history of a small group attempting to take over America. The Plot to Seize the White House (Jules Archer) provided a detailed account of General Smedley Butler's testimony to Congress about a secret plot to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. Butler, a Republican, authored War is a Racket. ..."
"... In a recently written best-seller two political scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard (John Meirsheimer and Stephen J. Walt _The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_) broke a long-standing taboo in the United States and risked charges of anti-Semitism by exposing the role of the powerful Israeli Lobby (AIPAC) in the United States and its push for war against Iraq and with its future sights on Iran. This book echoes many of the claims made by Meirsheimer and Walt and further shows the agenda of the small circle of neoconservatives in directing American foreign policy. The author maintains that the neoconservatives are a "transparent cabal", in that they have operated as a tight-knit secret group but their actions remain transparent. ..."
"... That old canard "anti-semitic" is heard again in one of the reviews of this book. Nonsense!!! If one is anti-semitic simply because he is critical of certain policies followed by Likud, then many Jews living in Israel are also Jew haters. ..."
"... Israeli politicians are, undertandably, looking out for the intestests of their nation state. However, many American pols are beholden to the Israeli lobby (of simply feaful of it) and often place American interests second to that of the lobby. ..."
Nov 30, 2019 | www.amazon.com

Although it is generally understood that American neoconservatives pushed hard for the war in Iraq, this book forcefully argues that the neocons' goal was not the spread of democracy, but the protection of Israel's interests in the Middle East. Showing that the neocon movement has always identified closely with the interests of Israel's Likudnik right wing, the discussion contends that neocon advice on Iraq was the exact opposite of conventional United States foreign policy, which has always sought to maintain stability in the region to promote the flow of oil. Various players in the rush to war are assessed according to their motives, including President Bush, Ariel Sharon, members of the foreign-policy establishment, and the American people, who are seen not as having been dragged into war against their will, but as ready after 9/11 for retaliation

Concerned Citizen , July 13, 2014

How and Why Israel Promoted the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

Every American should read this superb book about the intimate connection between the state of Israel and the Americans who planned and promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and who still influence U.S. policy in the Middle East). This very well-researched and well-argued book will enlighten Americans who want to understand how the Jewish State of Israel powerfully shapes U.S. Middle East policy.

Stephen Sniegowski provides a detailed look at the network of die-hard pro-Israel Neoconservatives who have worked in the U.S. government, in think tanks, and in the news media to shape American foreign policy to serve the needs of Israel at the expense of the U.S. From media baron Rupert Murdoch, whose 175 newspapers around the world ALL editorialized in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, to Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and later Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, to Vice President Dick Cheney, to the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle, the neoconservatives successfully persuaded President George W. Bush to invade Iraq to promote Israel's foreign policy interests.

Sniegowski describes how the Neocons promoted lies about Saddam Hussein's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction and his supposed ties to al-Qaeda terrorists from a network of think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Middle East Media Research Institute, Hudson Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Center for Security Policy, and the Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

He also traces the influence of Israeli Zionist Oded Yinon on the American Neoconservatives. Yinon wrote an article in 1982 entitled "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s" that called for Israel to bring about the dissolution of many of the Arab states and their fragmentation into a mosaic of ethnic and sectarian groupings. This is basically what is happening to Iraq and Syria today. He also called for Israelis to accelerate the emigration of Palestinians from Israel, whose border he believed should extend to the Jordan River and beyond it.

Yinon's article influenced a paper written for the Israeli Likud government of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996 by American neoconservatives Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm". This paper stated that Netanyahu should "make a clean break" with the Oslo peace process and reassert Israel's claim to the West Bank and Gaza. Like Yinon's article, it also called for the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the weakening of Syria to promote Israel's interests. It was written five years BEFORE the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. These same three men - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser - who advised Netanyahu's Israeli government on issues of national security would later advise President George W. Bush to pursue virtually the same policies regarding the Middle East.

If you want to understand how and why powerful pro-Israel neoconservatives in the U.S. misled Americans and convinced President George W. Bush to order the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and how they persuaded the U.S. Congress to give Bush the authority to order the invasion, read this outstanding book.

Baraniecki Mark Stuart , March 13, 2010
The Failure of American Government

Another episode in the sad story of recent American government. It starts with a 1996 paper entitled "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" published by an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The principal idea was to foment war in the Middle East and consequently destabilize Israel's enemies.

The policy was adopted by the Israeli pro-settler right wing and Jewish activists in and around the Clinton and Bush administrations such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser (who all helped produce the original document). They identified as targets Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and were handed a golden opportunity after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre. Iraq was falsely presented as an Al Qaeda base and the media planted with stories about an imminent attack on the United States using WMD. Despite the CIA knowing all along that the WMD didn't exist, the US still invaded Iraq and the story was quietly and unbelievably changed to "building democracy".

As Sniegoski points out, the war has exceeded the cost of Vietnam and the same activists, now working through Hillary Clinton are looking for "incidents" in Iraq to trigger the next phase of the plan which is a US attack on Iran.

UPDATE October 2014:

And it gets worse: The 911 story itself keeps morphing. Google "Building 7", YouTube "911 Missing Links" or check the article at http://911speakout.org/7TOCPJ.pdf. >

Severo , May 16, 2016
A cornerstone in the quest for understanding the current Middle East Crisis.

Important book for those trying understand the chaos that is currently reigning in the Middle East. From the lies based NEOCON attack on Iraq trumpeted by the mainstream USA media as a fight to save Western Civilization, to the rise of ISIL.

This books will make those connections clear. No informed American can afford to not know the names Oded Yinon, AIPAC, The Clean Break, The NEOCONS. Knowledge is indeed power. >

Paul Sheldon Foote , January 26, 2010
The Neoconservative Cult and the Fragility of American Democracy

On January 27, 2005, [...] posted the remarks of Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker contributor) at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York that a neoconservative cult had taken over the American government.

Hersh hoped that future historians would document the fragility of American democracy by explaining how eight or nine neoconservatives were able to overcome easily the bureaucracy, the Congress, and the press. Stephen Sniegoski, in The Transparent Cabal, has provided a detailed history of how the neoconservative cult achieved the takeover.

Other books have stressed how the neoconservative ideology is contrary to traditional American values: Reclaiming the American Right (Justin Raimondo), America the Virtuous (Claes Ryn), Where the Right Went Wrong (Patrick Buchanan).

"Memoirs of a Trotskyist" in Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Irving Kristol) provided a neoconservative account of the origins of neo-conservatism. Sniegoski noted correctly that the term neoconservative originated with leftists critical of their former comrades for attempting to infiltrate the Democratic and Republican parties. Thanks to leftists who call neoconservatives the ultra-right and to conservative dupes who think that anyone using a conservative label is a conservative, the neoconservative cancer has spread through the fragile American political body.

The neoconservatives do not represent the only case in American history of a small group attempting to take over America. The Plot to Seize the White House (Jules Archer) provided a detailed account of General Smedley Butler's testimony to Congress about a secret plot to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. Butler, a Republican, authored War is a Racket.

Unlike earlier secret plots to take over the American government, Sniegoski explained how it was possible for the neoconservatives to operate as a relatively transparent cabal. However, he observed that the neoconservatives used a Trojan horse technique to take over the American conservative movement. The goal of the neoconservatives is to promote endless wars regardless of whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power.

The neoconservatives do not represent a popular mass movement in America. Instead, the neoconservatives rely upon the co-operation of other groups. Sniegoski provided extensive documentation of which groups enabled the neoconservatives. For example, the Christian Zionists duped their followers into sacrificing money and soldiers. Zionism originated with the writings of Moses Hess (who helped Karl Marx write The Communist Manifesto, was nicknamed the Communist Rabbi, and who is buried in Israel). In 1862, Moses Hess published Rome and Jerusalem. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (Shlomo Avineri) provided a detailed explanation of the relationship between Communism and Zionism.

The reason for the fragility of American democracy is the failure of many Americans to understand the most basic aspects of the American political system and of their religions.

The Transparent Cabal is an important starting point for understanding how a neoconservative cult opposed to traditional American political and religious values is able to destroy America with endless wars.

New Age of Barbarism , October 14, 2008
A Brilliant Account of the Neoconservative War Agenda.

_The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, And the National Interest of Israel_, published in 2008 by Enigma Editions of IHS Press, by scholar Stephen J. Sniegoski is a thorough examination of the role of the neoconservatives in pushing for war in the Middle East (beginning with the war in Iraq and pushing onwards towards Iran) in order to protect the national interests of Israel. Sniegoski makes the claim that the neoconservatives have been the fundamental force behind the war efforts of the United States and have played a particularly prominent role in the Bush administration. While these claims have now become common knowledge, Sniegoski makes an important contribution by tracing the history of the neoconservative movement and its links to prominent pro-Jewish and pro-Israel groups. In particular, Sniegoski claims that neoconservativism is a tool of Zionism and the Likudniks of Israel. Sniegoski traces out how following the attacks of September 11, the neoconservative war hawks had a profound influence on the thinking of President Bush and offered him a ready made solution to his foreign policy agenda. In this book, Sniegoski also considers and refutes other theories as to the root causes behind America's intervention in Iraq (such as the role of oil and war profiteering) but explains how these theories lack the validity of that which lays the blame on the neoconservatives and their goals for Israeli dominance in the Middle East.

In a recently written best-seller two political scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard (John Meirsheimer and Stephen J. Walt _The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_) broke a long-standing taboo in the United States and risked charges of anti-Semitism by exposing the role of the powerful Israeli Lobby (AIPAC) in the United States and its push for war against Iraq and with its future sights on Iran. This book echoes many of the claims made by Meirsheimer and Walt and further shows the agenda of the small circle of neoconservatives in directing American foreign policy. The author maintains that the neoconservatives are a "transparent cabal", in that they have operated as a tight-knit secret group but their actions remain transparent.

This book begins with a Foreword by Congressman Paul Findley (famous author of _They Dare to Speak Out_ and longtime opponent of the Israeli Lobby) in which he explains the importance of Sniegoski's book and deflects the spurious charge of anti-Semitism. Following this, appears an Introduction by noted paleoconservative Paul Gottfried who explains his admiration for Sniegoski's book, offers some comparisons between Sniegoski's claims and those of other individuals, and contrasts the old non-interventionist limited government form of conservativism with that of the neoconservatives.

The first chapter of Sniegoski's book is entitled "The Transparent Cabal" and notes the disastrous consequences that have followed upon the Iraq war spurred on by the neoconservatives. The author explains what he means in calling the neoconservatives a "transparent cabal" and notes the importance of their Middle East, pro-Israeli agenda. The author explains how following the events of September 11, they came to take on a prominent role in influencing the thinking of the president (who had previously shown little interest in the Middle East).

The second chapter is entitled "The "Neocon-Israel" Claim: Bits and Pieces" and exposes the role of Israel's Likudnik party behind the neoconservatives. The author deflects claims of "anti-Semitism" which are frequently hurled at those who make these charges by showing that even many prominent Jews agree with this. Following this appears a chapter entitled "Who are the Neocons?" which shows how the neocons emigrated from their original home in the Democratic party of the McGovernite left into the Republican party as the New Left began to voice criticisms of Israel. The author shows that many of the neocons are actually socialists and Trotskyites parading under the label of "conservative". Further, the author shows the role of various intellectuals centering around New York City in creating the neoconservative movement.

Next, appears a chapter entitled "The Israeli Origins of the Middle East War Agenda" which shows how the goal of Middle East war to further the interests of Israel has been supported extensively by hawkish groups in Israel. The author explains how these groups came to have such a prominent role in influencing the policy of the United States and in suppressing the native population of Palestinians in Israel. Following, appears a chapter entitled "Stability and the Gulf War of 1991: Prefigurement and Prelude to the 2003 Iraq War" in which the author explains the importance of the first Gulf War of Bush I in prefiguring the Iraq War of Bush II. After this, appears a chapter entitled "During the Clinton Years" in which the author shows the continuing role of the neocons during the Clinton years.

Following this, appears a chapter entitled "Serbian Interlude and the 2000 Elections" in which the author explains how the war in Yugoslavia paved the way for the coming Iraq War of President Bush. This also explains the split that occurred among conservatives between those traditional conservatives who opposed the war and the neocons who firmly supported it. Following this appears a chapter entitled "George W. Bush Administration: The Beginning" in which the author explains the role that the neocons came to take in the Bush administration mentioning in particular the role of such figures as Wolfowitz and Cheney and the role of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Following this appears a chapter entitled "September 11", showing how the events of Sept. 11 allowed the neocon agenda to gain prominence in the mind of President Bush.

Next, appears a chapter entitled "Move to War" explaining how the neocons pushed for war against Sadaam Hussein presenting their case to the American people by claiming that Hussein was in possession of WMDs which could be used against America. Following this appears a chapter entitled "World War IV" explaining how the conflict in the Middle East came to be dubbed World War IV by certain intellectuals among the neocons.

Next, appears a chapter entitled "Democracy for the Middle East" showing the role of the neocons in foisting "democracy" onto various nations and their goal of global democratic revolution. The author also explains the role of the thinking of political philosopher Leo Strauss behind many of the neocons and his profoundly anti-democratic philosophy. Following this, appears a chapter entitled "Neocons' Post-Invasion Difficulties" showing how the invasion of Iraq turned out to be more serious and difficult than originally anticipated by the neocons. Next, appears a chapter entitled "Beginning of the Second Administration" showing the continuing role of the neocons under the second Bush administration.

Then, appears a chapter entitled "Israel, Lebanon, and the 2006 Election" showing the role of Lebanon and Syria in relationship to Israel and that of the 2006 election.

Next, appears a chapter entitled "2007: On to Iran" showing how the neocons continued to press for further wars in particular against Iran by alleging among other things that Ahmedinejad was a mad man with possible access to nuclear weapons. Following, appears a chapter entitled "The Supporting Cast for War" noting the role of Christian Zionists (which includes the beliefs of President Bush, although not his father), former Cold Warriors, and even prominent establishment liberals in supporting the Iraq war. The author notes however that the traditional foreign policy establishment elites and many in the intelligence agencies did not support the war, but were disregarded to further the neocon agenda. The author also contrasts the difference between the liberal elites who frequently were pro-war and the popular anti-war movement which had very little power.

Following this, the author turns to a chapter entitled "Oil and Other Arguments" in which the author considers the claims that the war was fought to obtain access to oil or for the interests of war profiteers and shows that while both groups certainly benefited they are not the real reason for the war. The book ends with a "Conclusion" in which the author expounds upon the continuing role of the neocons in influencing American foreign policy and a "Postscript" in which the author notes that no matter who wins the 2008 election that the neocon agenda will likely continue and is not likely to go away anytime soon.

This book offers a fascinating history and account of the role of the neoconservatives in pushing the United States into war. The author makes clear the influence of the Israeli Likudnik party behind the neocons and their goal of strengthening the position of Israel in the Middle East. It is important to understand the fundamental nature of the foreign policy elites who have been pushing us into war against Iraq and now with eyes towards Iran.

Honest Observer , December 30, 2009
CRITICISM OF ISRAEL IS NOT ANTI-SEMITISM

That old canard "anti-semitic" is heard again in one of the reviews of this book. Nonsense!!! If one is anti-semitic simply because he is critical of certain policies followed by Likud, then many Jews living in Israel are also Jew haters.

Let's put aside these negative and nasty characterizations and look at the facts.

Israeli politicians are, undertandably, looking out for the intestests of their nation state. However, many American pols are beholden to the Israeli lobby (of simply feaful of it) and often place American interests second to that of the lobby.

To suggest that there is such a lobby and that it is powerful is hardly anti-semitic. Nor is the author. He is simply stating verifible facts which any student of politics is free to do. He may be mistaken in his conclusions but that hardly makes him anti-semitic. And he may not be mistaken at all. He is not the first to suggest that our leaders are fearful of the Israeli lobby and do its bidding and often to the detriment of American interests .

Dennis R. Jugan , August 28, 2008
History will always link the Iraq War with the term 'neoconservative'

Stephen Sniegoski, a diplomatic historian, is uniquely qualified to write about the neoconservatives' involvement in the prolonged Iraq War originating in 2003. He accurately predicted their activities and allegiance in this entanglement in 1998, three years before the acts of 9-11 and two additional years before a traumatized nation yielded to a nescient, misdirected President, his Vice President/administration, and an ostensibly compliant bi-partisan House and Senate.

The author presents a tight outline which he cogently expands in intelligible detail, maintaining that the origins of the American war on Iraq revolve around the adoption of a war agenda whose basic structure was conceived in Israel to advance Israel's interests. The pro-Israel neoconservatives and a powerful Israel lobby in the United States fervently pushed its agenda. Ironically, he extracts his most persuasive evidence from an extensive neoconservative paper trail that's been clearly recognized by a discreet cadre of vigilant Americans for years. Thus the title, "The Transparent Cabal."

Dr. Sniegoski asks the appropriate question: "Who are the neoconservatives?" He provides insightful answers on their pertinent activities since 1972, those who shaped and mentored them, their immediate family/interconnected family networks, their prominent periodical publications, their past and present leadership, non-Jewish minority members, their persistent rise to positions of political influence and authority, their embrace of Christian Zionists, and their close ties to the extremely conservative Likud Party in Israel. He reveals their tactical affiliations with key, heavily endowed influential think tanks, and a vast number of powerful Israel-centric lobbying organizations that reactively finance and nurture their continued success.

Many readers will recognize his references to writers of previous books, articles and columns -- many of Jewish heritage -- who bravely fight against well financed, mainstream media-dominant opponents and their psychological surrogates active on the Internet. These opponents perniciously engage in personal attacks and retribution, indiscriminately applying irrelevant anti-semitic labels. They persist at attempting to sway public discourse by spreading misinformation, disinformation, and mostly NO RELEVANT INFORMATION to the public.

In various places throughout the book, the author notes curious relationships with current and former elected and appointed officials. He writes about the ongoing 2008 presidential campaign in a postscript, citing past and existing direct influences on specific candidates by the neoconservatives, the Israel Lobby and its supporters.

The book concludes with a summary of the paucity of benefits compared to the predictable losses of the American people over recent years. These are the real consequences of the Israel-inspired plan to "drain the swamp" (a euphemism for destabilizing perceived enemies then establishing precarious nominal democracies) that began with our misadventure in Iraq and was to proceed with subsequent U.S. military interventions in Iran and Syria. The few meager benefits and the enormous losses to the United States are compared to the strategic advantages that the State of Israel derives directly from our five-year induced military involvement in Iraq and our concomitant departure from past, longstanding policies of diplomacy and stability in the Middle East.

Sniegoski counsels, "it is hardly controversial to propose that elites, rather than the people as a whole, determine government policies, even in democracies."

Yet this war has a supporting cast of middle Americans. Many of them were traumatized by the events of 9-11 and reactively saw an act of patriotism in supporting retaliation against a falsely perceived enemy in Iraq. It's time to reconsider false arguments preceding the Iraq War that have only been cosmetically modified until the present day. It's time to dismiss incongruous ideas formed in the cauldron of confusion after 9-11.

Given today's realities, it DOES take patriotism and courage to insist on formally normalizing an entangled, unreciprocated military alliance with an Israeli government that burdens the taxpayers of the United States, promotes angst among its people, and imperils its military forces worldwide.

Know and embrace Thomas Jefferson's ideal of 'eternal vigilance' as citizens of the United States.
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Facts in this book are reinforced in adjacent paragraphs and referenced in nearly 50 pages of notes. Readers are encouraged to read:

James B. Pate , June 12, 2019
The Transparent Cabal

Stephen J. Sniegoski has a doctorate from the University of Maryland and studied American diplomatic history. My review here will refer to him as "S," for short.

This book is about the American neoconservative movement. S goes from its founding through its influential role in getting the U.S. into the Iraq War, then he discusses the War's aftermath. S's argument is that the neoconservative agenda regarding the Middle East is designed to serve the interests of the state of Israel, as those interests are articulated by the right-wing Likud party there. This agenda supports weakening Arab nations surrounding Israel so that they cannot pose a threat to her. According to S, the neoconservatives supported such an agenda since their beginning as a movement, but 9/11 created an opportunity for this agenda to become the foreign policy of the United States during much of the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Here are some thoughts:

A. Looking broadly at the book itself, it is a standard narration of the events surrounding and including the Iraq War. Like a lot of people, I lived through that, so the sweeping narrative of the book was not particularly new to me. The story is essentially that the U.S. went into Iraq expecting to find weapons of mass destruction after 9/11, bombed the country and found that were no WMDs, and traveled the difficult road of trying to rebuild the country, amidst ethnic division, turmoil, and opposition from Iraqis.

B. That said, there were some things that I learned from this book. First, while neoconservatism is said to believe in spreading democracy in the Middle East, it is not necessarily committed to democracy, per se. Initially, it supported a new government of Iraq that would be led by the traditional, pre-Saddam tribal authorities, who were not democratic. Second, S seems to imply that even the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan was unnecessary, since the Taliban initially appeared cooperative in offering to help the U.S. to bring al-Qaeda to justice. Third, there are neoconservatives who have supported undermining even America's allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia. The different groups in Saudi Arabia was also interesting, for, as S notes, Shiites hold a significant amount of control over Saudi oil, even though the political establishment is Sunni. Fourth, S argues rigorously against the idea that the U.S. launched the Iraq War to get more oil. Saddam was offering U.S. oil companies opportunities to drill in Iraq, plus oil companies did not want the oil infrastructure of the country to be disrupted or shattered by war.

C. There were also things in the book that I was interested to learn more about, even though I had a rudimentary understanding of them before. For one, S chronicles George W. Bush's changing views on foreign policy, as he went from rejecting nation-building, while retaining a tough stance, to embracing nation building. In the early days of the Bush II Administration, long before the Iraq War, Condi Rice even explained on news shows why regime change in Iraq would be a mistake at that point. Second, S discusses the coalition that emerged to support the war in Iraq. The neocons wanted to protect Israel, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embraced the Iraq War as a way to showcase the effectiveness of a lean military. Meanwhile, many Americans, frightened after 9/11, supported the Iraq War as a way to keep the U.S. safe. And Christian conservatives embraced the good vs. evil, pro-Israel stance of neoconservative policy. Third, S strategically evaluates moves that the U.S. made; for S, for example, the surge did not actually work, but more stability emerged in Iraq as different ethnic factions became separated from each other.

D. According to S, the Iraq War was a disaster. It stretched America's military, taking away resources that could have been used to find Osama bin-Laden. Yet, Israel got something that it wanted as a result: disarray among her Arab neighbors. An argument that S did not really engage, as far as I can recall, is that the Iraq War placed Israel even more in peril, since it increased the power of Iran by allowing Iraq to serve as a proxy for Iranian interests.

E. For S, neoconservatism is concerned about the security of Israel. Even its staunch Cold War policy is rooted in that concern, since the U.S.S.R. tended to support Arabs over the Israelis. S acknowledges, though, that there is more to neoconservatism that that. Neoconservatives supported a strong U.S. military intervention in the former Yugoslavia during the Clinton Administration, and neoconservatism also maintains stances on domestic issues, such as welfare.

F. S is sensitive to any charges of anti-Semitism that may be launched against his book. He emphatically denies that he is saying there was a Jewish conspiracy to get the U.S. into Iraq, for he observes that many Jews opposed the Iraq War. Moreover, S does not exactly present the U.S. government as a Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), for the neoconservatives were long on the margins prior to the Presidency of George W. Bush. Even under Bush II, the traditional national security and intelligence apparatus was critical of the Iraq War, preferring more multilateralism and a focus on stability in the Middle East. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), long a bogeyman of right-wing conspiracy theorists, also had reservations about the Iraq War.

G. S largely depicts the Likud party in Israel, and neoconservatives, as supporting Israel's security as a nation, her protection, if you will. At the same time, S argues that Israel in 2006 was acting aggressively rather than defensively in its invasion of Lebanon, for Lebanon had coveted water-supplies.

H. Near the end of the Iraq War, S demonstrates, neoconservatives were calling on the U.S. to take an aggressive stance against Iran, going so far as to bomb the country. That, of course, is an issue that remains relevant today. S probably regards such a move as a mistake. At the same time, he can understand why Israel would be apprehensive about a nuclear-armed Iran. He thinks that Ahmadinejad has been incorrectly understood to say that Israel should be wiped off the map, but S still acknowledges that a powerful Iran could provide more support to the Palestinians, which would trouble Israel. Although S understands this, he seems to scorn the idea that Israel should get everything she wants and have hegemony.

I. S is open to the possibility that neoconservatives believe that their support for Israel is perfectly consistent with America's well-being. As S observes, the U.S. government since its founding has had people who believe that partisanship towards a certain nation -- -Britain or France -- -is not only good for its own sake but serves the interests of the United States. S disputes, however, that neoconservative policy is the only way to help the U.S. Could not one argue, after all, that the U.S. would want to be on the Arabs' good side, with all the oil the Arabs have? This analysis may be a little dated, since the U.S. now has some alternative sources of energy (fracking), but S makes this point in evaluating the historical stance of neoconservatism.

Philip Collier , September 10, 2014
silence is deafening by Philip Collier

I was interested to see the reviews of this book. Usually if any book suggests that Israel is less than perfect a group of Zionist fanatics surface with several reviews telling us that there nothing wrong Israel or American support of it.

Remarkably there is only one negative review of this book which has to be seen to be believed. This reviewer "yoda" from Israel charges in all seriousness that Sniegoski does not provide evidence that the neoconservatives are "predominantly Jewish " and are " strongly aligned with Israel". Asking the author to provide evidence for such
assertions is like asking him to give evidence that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow .

This is I believe the real reason that that there are relatively few attacks on this book.The author does not engage in shrill denunciations of Israel or of the neoconservatives . What he does do is quote at length what neocoservstives say and provide careful documentation for any factual claims. For the most part the reader is allowed to draw his own conclusions. Should the US continue to finance Israeli repression of Palestinians and perhaps go to war against Iran or anyone else who might object to Israeli policie?

Instead of denouncing Sniegoski "Yoda" should consider the sane Israelis in his own country . For example former Mossad chief Meir Dagan who said that a war with Iran was the "stupidest idea he had ever heard of." Also moviemaker Emmanuel Dror who interviewed virtually all the former directors of the Shin Bett ( Israel's internal security service ) who all called for disengaging from the occupied territories .

perhaps we all would be better off listening to these Isaelis rather than follow the neoconservatives into another disastrous war on the other side of the world.

T. Marsh , November 1, 2009
Fantastic Horror story, wait. This is real

This is going to be a very strange review coming from me. You see, I wrote a novel called "Other Nations" and well, people that liked it a lot, liked it, but then those that really disliked it disliked it because my "aliens among humans" were nice people, likeable people, even charismatic people, everyday suburban types even, living that kind of life. Among us. Next door, in the next city over. They wanted instead to see the aliens among us portrayed as well, pick your favorite genocidal maniac or mind-controlling dictator or creature so dementedly alien that no sense can be made of it. Well!

There are many types of true horror. The kind that passes itself off as my aliens among us are portrayed, well, I guess some people GET IT - and they liked it.

But I'm not here to push my book. I'm here to push THIS BOOK - because my god, this is REAL, not fantasy, it's REAL, not science fiction. And yes, they are among us with well -

BUY THIS BOOK. If you are too broke to buy it, get it from the library - and by all means - READ IT.

Just hope to whatever god you choose that neocons are removed from governmental influence and that their Amen corner is ignored. Hope to god, because if they suceed in doing the INSANITY they want to do - America will be FINISHED - if it's not finished already due to what these Fifth Columnists have done during the 8 years of Twilight Zone (GWB Rule).

And for those Jewish critics on here that might want to compare these neocon FACTS and the other FACTS openly available to all (which is WHY the book is called the TRANSPARENT cabal) - compare it to the Protocols - they better think twice about that. Becauase, you see, what's in here is real, real facts, provably real facts - and if Jews themselves compare this to the Procols? Some folks might get the idea that maybe that is real too. Perhaps George Soros (who is Jewish) needs to speak LOUDER against the neocons. They are, indeed, crazies, as Colin Powell called them. Crazies.

junglejuice , July 17, 2017
Israel's interests revealed

If you want to have an eye opener then read and see who were those Jewish players working and influencing everything in the Bush Admin.promoting war with Iraq, then this is your book of truth. The cabal of Jewish players come out of the woodwork in Stephen Sniegoski's great work. When step by step the plan was a clear war map laid out for the U.S. in detail and after you realize just who was working for whom in this criminal cabal of the American government.

When you have Jewish control of the main stream media and Jewish control in Washington, D.C., don't wonder why the facts were omitted to make all the right connections for the public to see in this lead up to a war from lies.

[Nov 30, 2019] CrowdStrike: a Conspiracy Wrapped in a Conspiracy Inside a Conspiracy by Oleg Atbashian

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Only a computer illiterate would think that CrowdStrike needed to take the physical DNC server to Ukraine in order to analyze it. Any computer can be cloned and its digital image can be sent within minutes anywhere on the planet in the form of ones and zeroes. It can also exist in multiple digital copies, carrying not just confidential archives, but also history logs and other content that can reveal to an expert whether the hacking occurred, and if so, by whom. ..."
"... The copies of the DNC server on CrowdStrike computers are likely to hold the key to understanding what really happened during the 2016 election, the origin of the anti-Trump witch hunt, and the toxic cloud of lies that had been hanging over the world and poisoning minds during the last three years. ..."
"... And now the new Ukrainian government might subpoena these copies from CrowdStrike and finally pass them to FBI experts, which should've been done three years ago. The danger of this happening is a much greater incentive for the Democrats to preemptively destroy Trump than all the dirt Joe Biden had been rolling in as Obama's vice president. ..."
"... I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. ..."
"... The fraudulent "CrowdStrike conspiracy" deflection is not a show of the Democrats' strength. Instead, It betrays their desperation and panic, which tells us that Trump is squarely over the target. ..."
"... Yet DOJ Mueller conclusively signed off on the unsubtaniated fact the Russians had hacked the DNC computers in his final Weissman Report. Just one more part of the curious Mueller report that was far more a CYA hit piece against future claims of Obama crimes, than an investigation of past Trump ones. ..."
Nov 29, 2019 | www.frontpagemag.com

The conspiracy theory that exposes the Democrats' desperation and panic.

Fri Nov 29, 2019 Oleg Atbashian 133 In the last few days, media talking heads have been saying the word "CrowdStrike" a lot, defining it as a wild conspiracy theory originating in Moscow. They were joined by Chris Wallace at Fox News, who informed us that president Trump and his ill-informed fans believe in a crazy idea that the DNC wasn't hacked by the Russians but by some Ukrainian group named CrowdStrike that stole the DNC server and brought it to Ukraine , and that it was Ukraine that meddled in our 2016 election and not Russia.

A crazy idea indeed. Except that neither Trump nor his fans had ever heard of it until the Democrat-media complex condescendingly informed them that these are their beliefs.

Let's look at the facts:

None of these facts was ever disputed by anyone. The media largely ignored them except for the part about the Russian hackers, which boosted their own, now debunked, wild conspiracy theory that Trump was a Russian agent.

Now that Trump had asked the newly elected Ukrainian president Zelensky to look into CrowdStrike during that fateful July phone call, the media all at once started telling us that "CrowdStrike" is a code word for a conspiracy theory so insane that only Trump could believe in it, which is just more proof of how insane he is.

But if Trump had really said what Mr. Wallace and the media claim, Ukrainians would be the first to call him on it and the impeachment would've been over by now. Instead, Ukrainians back Trump every step of the way.

So where did this pretzel-shaped fake news come from, and why is it being peddled now ?

Note this is a classic case study of propaganda and media manipulation:

  1. Take an idea or a story that you wish to go away and make up an obviously bogus story with the same names and details as the real one.
  2. Start planting it simultaneously on media channels until the fake story supplants the real one, while claiming this is what your opponents really believe.
  3. Have various fact-checking outlets debunk your fake story as an absurd conspiracy theory. Ridicule those who allegedly believe in it. Better yet, have late night comedians do it for you.
  4. Once your opponent is brought down, mercilessly plant your boot on his face and never let up.

This mass manipulation technology had been tested and perfected by the Soviet propaganda machine, both domestically and overseas, where it was successfully deployed by the KGB. The Kremlin still uses it, although it can no longer afford it on the same grandiose scale. In this sense, the Democratic think tanks are the true successors of the KGB in deviousness, scope, and worldwide reach of fake narratives. How they inherited these methods from the KGB is a story for another day.

For a long time this technology was allowing the Democrats to delegitimize opposition by convincing large numbers of Americans that Republicans are

The Soviet communists had aptly named it "disinformation," which a cut above the English word "misinformation." It includes a variety of methods for a variety of needs, from bringing down an opponent to revising history to creating a new historical reality altogether. In this sense, most Hollywood movies on historical subjects today disinform us about history, supplanting it with a bogus "progressive" narrative. The Soviet term for such art was "socialist realism."

Long story short, the Democrat-media complex has successfully convinced one half of the world that Trump is a Russian agent. Now they're acting as if they'd spent the last three years in a coma, unaware of any bombshell stories about collusion. And bombshell stories without any continuation are a telltale sign of fake narratives. The only consequence of these bombshells is mass amnesia among the foot soldiers.

The Trump-Russian outrage is dead, long live the Trump-Ukraine outrage. And when that outrage is dead, the next outrage that will be just outrageous.

The current impeachment narrative alleges that Trump used military aid as leverage in asking Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden (which implies the Democrats know Biden is dirty, otherwise why bother?). What's not in this picture is CrowdStrike. Even though Trump mentioned it in the phone call, it has nothing to do with the Bidens nor the Javelin missiles. CrowdStrike has nothing to do with impeachment. We're told it's just a silly conspiracy theory in Trump's head, that it's a nonissue.

But then why fabricate fake news about it and plant blatant lies simultaneously in all media outlets from Mother Jones to Fox News? Why risk being exposed over such a nonissue? Perhaps because it's more important than the story suggests.

Only a computer illiterate would think that CrowdStrike needed to take the physical DNC server to Ukraine in order to analyze it. Any computer can be cloned and its digital image can be sent within minutes anywhere on the planet in the form of ones and zeroes. It can also exist in multiple digital copies, carrying not just confidential archives, but also history logs and other content that can reveal to an expert whether the hacking occurred, and if so, by whom.

The copies of the DNC server on CrowdStrike computers are likely to hold the key to understanding what really happened during the 2016 election, the origin of the anti-Trump witch hunt, and the toxic cloud of lies that had been hanging over the world and poisoning minds during the last three years.

And now the new Ukrainian government might subpoena these copies from CrowdStrike and finally pass them to FBI experts, which should've been done three years ago. The danger of this happening is a much greater incentive for the Democrats to preemptively destroy Trump than all the dirt Joe Biden had been rolling in as Obama's vice president.

This gives the supposedly innocuous reference to CrowdStrike during Trump's call a lot more gravity and the previously incoherent part of the transcript begins to make sense.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.

If you read the transcript on the day it was released, you probably didn't understand what Trump was even talking about, let alone what had caused such a disproportionate outrage, complete with whistle blowing and calls for impeachment. What in that mild conversation could possibly terrify the Democrats so much? They were terrified because, unlike most Americans, the Democrats knew exactly what Trump was talking about. And now you know, too.

The fraudulent "CrowdStrike conspiracy" deflection is not a show of the Democrats' strength. Instead, It betrays their desperation and panic, which tells us that Trump is squarely over the target.

It also helps us to see who at Fox News can be trusted to tell us the truth. And it ain't Chris Wallace.

NAHALKIDES • a day ago ,

Fine dissection of the CrowdStrike story. Of course if the DNC was serious about finding out who breached their security they would have allowed the FBI to investigate. They didn't - which means they're covering something up.

coolit10 NAHALKIDES • a day ago ,

And who doesn't have at least one backup system running constantly, I have two and am just a home user and the DNC would not have been dumb enough not to have one on the premises and one off site for safety and preservation and the FBI could have gotten to either one if they wanted to. DWS was involved in something very similar and the FBI backed off again. I thought the DNC and the FBI were on the same page and would have liked to find out how the "transfer" happened?

🕊jr🕊 " Deep State Target " coolit10 • 13 hours ago ,

Let's be honest, that FBI made no attempt to investigate it in the first place as they were as culpable in this crime as the DNC.

Herman Young 🕊jr🕊 " Deep State Target " • 12 hours ago ,

Yet DOJ Mueller conclusively signed off on the unsubtaniated fact the Russians had hacked the DNC computers in his final Weissman Report. Just one more part of the curious Mueller report that was far more a CYA hit piece against future claims of Obama crimes, than an investigation of past Trump ones.

SteveTn6b NAHALKIDES • 16 hours ago ,

They know who breached their security. He'd dead!

Herman Young SteveTn6b • 12 hours ago ,

Seth Rich - paper trail to Wikilinks needs to come out in any Senate impeachment trail since Democrats claim the Ukraine phone call was Trump's alleged downfall. CROWDSTRIKE was the only favor Trumps asked for.

Karen Herman Young • 9 hours ago ,

We all know it was Seth Rich

Clasvi SteveTn6b • 13 hours ago ,

you are spot on. it is amazing how they shut down the Seth Rich murder. The media was all to happy to shut it down.

Karen Clasvi • 9 hours ago ,

Fox helped with that cover up

undrprsr Clasvi • 6 hours ago ,

Yep, and Donna Brazile wrote in her book she feared for her life after Seth Rich was murdered, why's that if it was just a random attack?

El Cid NAHALKIDES • 15 hours ago ,

There are two important facts to glean from this article:

1) Crowdstrike, the DNC contractor, is Ukrainian
2) that the famous server may have been backed up in Ukraine and not tampered with.

From the MSM we were given the 'interpretation' that Trump is an idiot who believes that the DNC shipped the server with no changes to the Ukraine. No folks. He 'gets' technology and security. He actual ran a business! (imagine).

I'd love to hear that in Hillary's own voice. :) You know, cleaned with a cloth?

Joe Clear NAHALKIDES • 12 hours ago ,

They sure are, that being the killing of Seth Rich who copied the data to flash drive and gave it to Wikileaks.

stanley castleberry NAHALKIDES • 12 hours ago ,

They found out right away. Hence Rich was assassinated.

Herman Young NAHALKIDES • 12 hours ago • edited ,

That pretty much sums it up. MSM in total cahoots on this too since they put the entire topic of the CROWDSTRIKE part of the phone call into the cone of silence.

No Bread or Circuses • a day ago ,

The Left and media (One and the same within the "Deep State") have been playing "Three Card Monte" with America for a while; it stops now!

The "Impeachment" media show being run by the Lefty tool cretins in the House has NOTHING to do with wrong doing by President Trump. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fear that President Trump will expose the depth of the swamp and bring the criminals on the Left down to Justice!

We are s close to getting to the bottom of the conspiracies that threaten our nation. Time to make the America haters pay for the harm they have done to our nation!

We need open and in depth prosecution of the criminal activities of the Left. There needs to be LONG prison sentences and, yes, even executions for those that seek to undermine our nation.

People need to know that there our GRAVE penalties for betraying our nation!

God Bless President Trump!
God Bless America!

Anacleto Mitraglia • 21 hours ago • edited ,

In fact, when I first heard this story - that is: very recently - I was puzzled: why should a major party in the Country that invented IT and is still at its leading edge, ask an obscure firm of a crumbling, remote foreign State to do their IT security research? I'm not saying that Ukraine is a s++thole Country, but... you get me.

Either they have very much to hide, or they fear some closeted rightwing geek that works in any of the many leftist US technofirms. Or, CrowdStrike were involved from the beginning of the story, from the Steele dossier perhaps?

Herman Young Anacleto Mitraglia • 12 hours ago ,

The whole Crowdstrike fiasco has been around for years - plus became a solid CYA part of the Mueller report too - just in case the Democrats needed to bury it later.

El Cid Anacleto Mitraglia • 15 hours ago • edited ,

don't you get it? The DNC is completely infiltrated by Ukrainian graft. Even Joe Biden was on the take. Why won't they run their IT? (there is no Research in IT here, just office software)

Cynthia Campbell • 19 hours ago ,

If you want to sell and deliver State Secrets and Intel to our enemies, then you (Obama, the Clintons, the DNC) simply make it easier for THEM to access. They have done this for years, and this is why they had to fill the DOJ, the FBI and the State Department with traitors and haters of America and American principles. Barack Hussein Obama, the Clintons, their evil administrations and even two-faced RINOS like McCain, Romney, and Jeff Sessions were actively involved. This is treason pure and simple, and all of the above could be legitimately and justifiably hung or shot without recourse, and rightly so!

doc_who_cuts • 20 hours ago ,

not seizing the DNC and hillary servers is the clearest case of OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE I know of in the last few years.

Herman Young doc_who_cuts • 12 hours ago ,

Isn't it ironic, the Dems accuse Trump of "obstruction of justice".

FRANCES LOUISE • a day ago ,

I have known about "Crowdstrike" since Dec. 2017. Pres. Trump is just subtlety introducing background on what will be the biggest story of treachery, subversion, treason and corruption ever. QAnon that the fakenews tries to vilify as a LARP has been dropping crumbs about "Crowdstrike", Perkins Coir, Fusion GPS, FVEY and so much more! Crowdstrike mentioned 7x in the last 2 years. I can't urge people enough to actually investigate the Q posts for themselves! You will be stunned at what you have been missing. Q which says "future proves past" and "news will unlock" what I see in the media now is old news to those of us following Q. Q told us that "Senate was the prize" "Senate meant more" that the investigations started in the House would now move to the Senate and all this that the Dems and Rinos have been trying to hide is going to be exposed. Fakenews corporate media has litterally written hundreds of hit pieces against Q - me knows "they doth protest to much" - Recent Q post told "Chairman Graham its time. Senate was the target"

Keep up with the Q posts and Pres. Trump's tweets in once place: https://qmap.pub/ - And if you are still having a hard time believing this is legit Pres. Trump himself has confirmed Q posts by "Zero Delta" drops - if you think this is fake - try and tweet within 1 minute of when Pres. Trump does BUT your tweet has to anticipate his! YOU have to tweet first and HE has to follow you within 1 minute. MATHEMATICAL IMPOSSIBILITY UNLESS you are in the same immediate space or communicating at the time of the tweets! To all you doubters that think Q is just a by chance scam - NO WAY. There have been MANY, MANY of these ZERO DELTA PROOFS over the last 2 years. The most recent was Nov. 20th.

Link will show you how much attention has been given to "debunking" Q - gotta wonder why
https://cdn.qmap.pub/images...

elephant4life FRANCES LOUISE • 19 hours ago ,

Perkins-Coie is the real-world Milton, Chadwick & Waters. I'm willing to bet their industrial-sized shredders are working overtime.

Herman Young elephant4life • 12 hours ago ,

Unless Bleach-Bit got there first.

Herman Young FRANCES LOUISE • 12 hours ago ,

Crowdstrike in the dog who did not bark. The Democrat cone of silence they put on even the mention of the word has been the most damning clue this is where the real action is.

Grant Hodges • a day ago ,

The assertion that a digital image of the computer can be transmitted quickly all around the world is not necessarily correct in my experience as a cyber security analyst. I'm not an upper echelon type, but I am aware that it can take up to weeks to transmit such images depending on the hard disk, where it is, and the connections/network to your device creating the image. The FBI should have physically taken the device since there was a suspicion of wrong doing by Hillary Clinton. Had it been Donald Trump's computer I do not doubt the FBI would either have imaged it on the spot or taken the device.

coolit10 Grant Hodges • a day ago ,

Last night I completely removed Catalina-Safari on my older Mac Book Air and re-installed Mohave-Safari from my backup to the day before I installed Catalina including the data and system just like it was before. It took around 5 hours and was cabled and not on Wi-Fi and it was perfect and reset the clock, my old e-mails and the newer ones as well. I can't believe being hooked into real broadband or fiber couldn't do the same in a relatively short period of time, but still significantly longer than a thumb drive or external hard drive.

Grant Hodges coolit10 • a day ago ,

One variable is how big your hard drive is. If it is a big drive at a remote location, say somewhere in California to the Midwest, it can take weeks for a forensic backup. I only say that because . . . well, I'm not allowed to say. But you get it.

El Cid Grant Hodges • 14 hours ago • edited ,

The assertion is a figure of speech. Today's IT infrastructure companies sell the service of maintaining clones in real-time in two or more locations for safety purposes. VMware and other off-the-shelf products makes this kind of setup easy to deploy. Did Crowdstrike offer that service and did the DNC buy it, that is the question? And, if so, did Crowdstrike keep the image on their backups in Ukraine?

(Note: it is not obvious that such a setup would preserve the forensic data the FBI would be looking for, but its a start).

[Nov 30, 2019] Yes, There Were FBI Informants, But They Were Paid by the CIA by Larry C Johnson

Nov 30, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

plantman , 29 November 2019 at 12:51 PM

You say--"John Brennan convened a secret task force at CIA headquarters composed of several dozen analysts and officers from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI.

The unit functioned as a sealed compartment, its work hidden from the rest of the intelligence community. Those brought in signed new non-disclosure agreements to be granted access to intelligence from all three participating agencies."

Repeat: "Those brought in signed new non-disclosure agreements to be granted access to intelligence from all three participating agencies"!!!

I suppose this means that John Brennan had access to all electronic communications gathered on Trump campaign officials by the NSA. That suggests to me that the intel agencies now have almost absolute power over future elections in the US. All the agency chiefs have to do is concoct some wacky pretext for expanding their surveillance net (Like "collusion") and, presto, they have immediate access to all private conversations between presidential candidates and their lieutenants.

Do the American people really want John Brennan and his crooked spawn to choose our future leaders??

I certainly hope Durham can crack this nut, otherwise this country is headed for the landfill.

akaPatience , 29 November 2019 at 12:51 PM
I've been surprised to learn that it wasn't IG Horowitz that uncovered the Strzok-Page texts but rather Strzok's wife. With all of the so-called investigators involved in the "Russian collusion" matter, turns out it was a scorned wife who unearthed the Rosetta Stone of the hoax.

And now Sundance on the CTH has an item addressing the claims of former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne that he was used in an FBI op that tried to dirty up Trump campaign associates via Maria Butina:

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/11/28/did-u-s-attorney-john-durham-interview-patrick-byrne-if-so-how-does-doj-fbi-reconcile-running-russian-operative-into-trump-campaign-in-2015/

Paul Damascene , 29 November 2019 at 02:21 PM
Larry, thanks for the clarifications (and the reassurance). Your entry so consistently mentions payment that I find myself wondering how to correctly relate payment and spying. That is, one can be an unpaid informant (Sater could be acting simply in exchange for a delay in sentencing, though that might also constitute payment perhaps?).

Others could just be acting as good citizens, patriots or under direct question by the authorities. None of which would necessarily entail payment, but some of which could constitute spying (perhaps??) even if unpaid...

Further, spying here isn't the only thing that might be considered illegal, improper or otherwise censurable. True?

Joe100 , 29 November 2019 at 02:43 PM
Sundance sees these leaks as coming from investigation targets who are allowed to read and comment on and rebut the draft report language addressing them. Thus, this is probably "spinning" by targets and their media pals to try to "set the narrative" before the report is released. Horowitz can rebut these "target" comments in the final report and the "targets" are not provided any rebuttal material prior to the final report release, so it will be quite interesting to see what the report actually says when final....
Factotum , 29 November 2019 at 03:38 PM
Finally, CROWDSTRIKE element in Trump's phone call to Ukraine is coming out of the shadows.

And what very much appears to be a deliberate Democrat disinformation campaign against its very mention: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/crowdstrike-conspiracy-wrapped-conspiracy-inside-oleg-atbashian/

Stephen Richter , 29 November 2019 at 05:59 PM
so we have this IG investigation that takes forever to complete, and when people ask why so long the answer is the scope was increasing and we have to get it right. Now, with the report finally being released, people are told the IG never had the jurisdiction necessary and we have to wait for Durham.
Factotum said in reply to Stephen Richter... , 29 November 2019 at 07:33 PM
How many "average Americans" even knew we had an Inspector Generals" office? Everything ultimately has been a good civics lesson.
turcopolier , 29 November 2019 at 08:34 PM
factotum

You didn't know that every major government agency has an IG? you are American?

RVA , 29 November 2019 at 09:36 PM

1. Sater states that he was trying to do the Moscow deal to make money, on his own. Not prompted by FBI.

2. I don't see in that super long pdf for Steele where there is a payment record. Please give the exact page. There are some pages on the form, that are for payments. But no indication that a payment was made. My recollection is that FBI was PLANNING to pay Steele, but never did. (Correct me if wrong, like to see the actual page number.)

3. The Greenberg thing is the most interesting (and mysterious). Still, it's not 100% proven to me that he was prompted by the government to make the approach. Perhaps likely, but I don't see why you refer to it as a fact.

4. In general, there is a bad habit from our side to state speculation, even likely speculation as fact. See this from Sundance all the time. Really gets in the way of serious sleuthing and discussion though. The problem is one gets confused over what really is fact, versus what is speculation. (An easy one is all the speculation that Mifsud was an intel asset, versus just a networker--who knows for sure.)

P.s. To one of your commenters: My recollection was that the Strozk texts came to light because of Lisa Page being questioned on the McCabe leak. Have seen a lot of our side jumping to conclusions that the Strozk wife was the precipitant (but all the recent document said was that she had access and threatened).

[Nov 30, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard: Wake Up and Smell Our $6.4 Trillion Wars

Nov 30, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

he Democratic establishment is increasingly irritated. Representative Tulsi Gabbard, long-shot candidate for president, is attacking her own party for promoting the "deeply destructive" policy of "regime change wars." Gabbard has even called Hillary Clinton "the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party."

Senator Chris Murphy complained: "It's a little hard to figure out what itch she's trying to scratch in the Democratic Party right now." Some conservatives seem equally confused. The Washington Examiner 's Eddie Scarry asked: "where is Tulsi distinguishing herself when it really matters?"

The answer is that foreign policy "really matters." Gabbard recognizes that George W. Bush is not the only simpleton warmonger who's plunged the nation into conflict, causing enormous harm. In the last Democratic presidential debate, she explained that the issue was "personal to me" since she'd "served in a medical unit where every single day, I saw the terribly high, human costs of war." Compare her perspective to that of the ivory tower warriors of Right and Left, ever ready to send others off to fight not so grand crusades.

The best estimate of the costs of the post-9/11 wars comes from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. The Institute says that $6.4 trillion will be spent through 2020. They estimate that our wars have killed 801,000 directly and resulted in a multiple of that number dead indirectly. More than 335,000 civilians have died -- and that's an extremely conservative guess. Some 21 million people have been forced from their homes. Yet the terrorism risk has only grown, with the U.S. military involved in counter-terrorism in 80 nations.

Obviously, without American involvement there would still be conflicts. Some counter-terrorism activities would be necessary even if the U.S. was not constantly swatting geopolitical wasps' nests. Nevertheless, it was Washington that started or joined these unnecessary wars (e.g., Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen) and expanded necessary wars well beyond their legitimate purposes (Afghanistan). As a result, American policymakers bear responsibility for much of the carnage.

The Department of Defense is responsible for close to half of the estimated expenditures. About $1.4 trillion goes to care for veterans. Homeland security and interest on security expenditures take roughly $1 trillion each. And $131 million goes to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which have overspent on projects that have delivered little.

More than 7,000 American military personnel and nearly 8,000 American contractors have died. About 1,500 Western allied troops and 11,000 Syrians fighting ISIS have been killed. The Watson Institute figures that as many as 336,000 civilians have died, but that uses the very conservative numbers provided by the Iraq Body Count. The IBC counts 207,000 documented civilian deaths but admits that doubling the estimate would probably yield a more accurate figure. Two other respected surveys put the number of deaths in Iraq alone at nearly 700,000 and more than a million, though those figures have been contested.

More than a thousand aid workers and journalists have died, as well as up to 260,000 opposition fighters. Iraq is the costliest conflict overall, with as many as 308,000 dead (or 515,000 from doubling the IBC count). Syria cost 180,000 lives, Afghanistan 157,000, Yemen 90,000, and Pakistan 66,000.

Roughly 32,000 American military personnel have been wounded; some 300,000 suffer from PTSD or significant depression and even more have endured traumatic brain injuries. There are other human costs -- 4.5 million Iraqi refugees and millions more in other nations, as well as the destruction of Iraq's indigenous Christian community and persecution of other religious minorities. There has been widespread rape and other sexual violence. Civilians, including children, suffer from PTSD.

Even stopping the wars won't end the costs. Explained Nita Crawford of Boston University and co-director of Brown's Cost of War Project: "the total budgetary burden of the post-9/11 wars will continue to rise as the U.S. pays the on-going costs of veterans' care and for interest no borrowing to pay for the wars."

People would continue to die. Unexploded shells and bombs still turn up in Europe from World Wars I and II. In Afghanistan, virtually the entire country is a battlefield, filled with landmines, shells, bombs, and improvised explosive devices. Between 2001 and 2018, 5,442 Afghans were killed and 14,693 were wounded from unexploded ordnance. Some of these explosives predate American involvement, but the U.S. has contributed plenty over the last 18 years.

Moreover, the number of indirect deaths often exceeds battle-related casualties. Journalist and activist David Swanson noted an "estimate that to 480,000 direct deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, one must add at least one million deaths in those countries indirectly caused by the recent and ongoing wars. This is because the wars have caused illnesses, injuries, malnutrition, homelessness, poverty, lack of social support, lack of healthcare, trauma, depression, suicide, refugee crises, disease epidemics, the poisoning of the environment, and the spread of small-scale violence." Consider Yemen, ravaged by famine and cholera. Most civilian casualties have resulted not from Saudi and Emirati bombing, but from the consequences of the bombing.

Only a naif would imagine that these wars will disappear absent a dramatic change in national leadership. Wrote Crawford: "The mission of the post-9/11 wars, as originally defined, was to defend the United States against future terrorist threats from al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations. Since 2001, the wars have expanded from the fighting in Afghanistan, to wars and smaller operations elsewhere, in more than 80 countries -- becoming a truly 'global war on terror'."

Yet every expansion of conflict makes the American homeland more, not less, vulnerable. Contrary to the nonsensical claim that if we don't occupy Afghanistan forever and overthrow Syria's Bashar al-Assad, al-Qaeda and ISIS will turn Chicago and Omaha into terrorist abattoirs, intervening in more conflicts and killing more foreigners creates additional terrorists at home and abroad. In this regard, drone campaigns are little better than invasions and occupations.

For instance, when questioned by the presiding judge in his trial, the failed 2010 Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, a U.S. citizen, cited the drone campaign in Pakistan. His colloquy with the judge was striking: "I'm going to plead guilty 100 times forward because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims."

Ajani Marwat, with the New York City Police Department's intelligence division, outlined Shahzad's perspective to The Guardian : "'It's American policies in his country.' 'We don't have to do anything to attract them,' a terrorist organizer in Lahore told me. 'The Americans and the Pakistani government do our work for us. With the drone attacks targeting the innocents who live in Waziristan and the media broadcasting this news all the time, the sympathies of most of the nation are always with us. Then it's simply a case of converting these sentiments into action'."

Washington does make an effort to avoid civilian casualties, but war will never be pristine. Combatting insurgencies inevitably harms innocents. Air and drone strikes rely on often unreliable informants. The U.S. employs "signature" strikes based on supposedly suspicious behavior. And America's allies, most notably the Saudis and Emiratis -- supplied, armed, guided, and until recently refueled by Washington -- make little if any effort to avoid killing noncombatants and destroying civilian infrastructure.

Thus will the cycle of terrorism and war continue. Yet which leading Democrats have expressed concern? Most complain that President Donald Trump is negotiating with North Korea, leaving Syria, and reducing force levels in Afghanistan. Congressional Democrats care about Yemen only because it has become Trump's war; there were few complaints under President Barack Obama.

What has Washington achieved after years of combat? Even the capitals of its client states are unsafe. The State Department warns travelers to Iraq that kidnapping is a risk and urges businessmen to hire private security. In Kabul, embassy officials now travel to the airport via helicopter rather than car.

Tulsi Gabbard is talking about what really matters. The bipartisan War Party has done its best to wreck America and plenty of other nations too. Gabbard is courageously challenging the Democrats in this coalition, who have become complicit in Washington's criminal wars.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.

Alex (the one that likes Ike) • 17 hours ago • edited

And, by the way, it's important to stress that Tulsi ain't picking at Her Majesty all of a sudden. It was the said majesty who has recently started picking at Tulsi first out of no reason, extrapolating that joke of Trump's "Russia's candidate" status on her as well.

Also, this:

People would continue to die. Unexploded shells and bombs still turn up in Europe from World Wars I and II. In Afghanistan, virtually the entire country is a battlefield, filled with
landmines, shells, bombs, and improvised explosive devices.


At least in Europe it is indeed shells and bombs, which are kind of big schmucks thus easily noticed when approached and then disarmed by engineers. While all over the Middle East it is first and foremost IEDs that can look like, virtually, anything starting from a hand grenade's size.

polistra24 Alex (the one that likes Ike) • 5 hours ago
Good point that I hadn't thought about. Hillary is not only the war-starter abroad, she's the fight-starter here.
Kierkegaardian • 16 hours ago
Because every dollar counts, I think that sums should always be written with all digits, like this
$6400000000000
Alex (the one that likes Ike) Kierkegaardian • 5 hours ago
On one hand, you're right. On the other hand, the average neocon/neolib commenter who will come to enlighten us as to Russian agents behind the authorship of the article will be utmostly unable to read the damn thing. For such a feller it ain't gonna be much different from 5D21DBA0000.
Disqus10021 • 16 hours ago
You can read a summary of the Brown University study here: watson.brown.edu/costsofwar...

You can read a summary of a similar study published at Harvard University in 2013 here: www.hks.harvard.edu/publica...

Unfortunately, a lot of Americans in recent years were more concerned about gays getting married and poor women terminating their pregnancies.

At Thanksgiving dinner today, the conversation eventually turned to politics and more specifically, Ukraine. I asked the other diners if they knew who Victoria Nuland was and got blank stares. Most didn't know that Crimea had been part of the Russian Empire going back to 1783, which happens to be the year that the US was formally recognized as a separate country under the Treaty of Paris.

How big is $6.4 trillion? Enough to cover outstanding student loans about 4 times. Or enough to stabilize Social Security and Medicare for decades to come.

Clay Williams • 16 hours ago
Wait...you think it's the DEMOCRATS who "appear abysmally unconcerned about the human and financial toll?" Wow.
Alex (the one that likes Ike) Clay Williams • 5 hours ago
Yes, them. Exactly like their Republican twins.
Mark • 9 hours ago
Mostly a very good article - but - what possible legitimate purpose was there invading Afghanistan ? This was the biggest war crime of the lot and you're still there. Afghanistan had nothing whatsoever to do with the New York plane attacks. It was a failed state and had the misfortune to have bin Laden and co supposedly holed up in the mountains there and unable to do much about it. Dealing with that required a specific police style action. Instead you carpet bombed Kabul to start and unleashed a frenzy of killing across the country. Unfortunately pretty much as a lot of us predicted around the middle of Sept 2001.

And where did you find Osama in the end ? Oh yeah, hiding in luxury in a Pakistan army town.

In response to the plane attacks you murdered countless thousands in an immiserated land and after another brain fart thought Iraq was a good idea because they had nothing to do with it either.

The only civilian plane to fly out of the US on Sept 11 2001 was carrying the Saudi Royal family back home. Almost all the plane terrorists were Saudi and Pakistan conspired against you continually. But you didn't have the guts or brains to take either of them on and instead picked in the weakest of the lot, Afghanistan followed by a nice flat country you'd already half destroyed and without nukes.

Apart from that, good article.

Daniel (not Larrison) Mark • 4 hours ago
I'm not sure if it was a "failed state" at that point. True, we did not like the brutal Taliban to be in charge, but I don't think it had no effective central government. It did.
Frank Valente Mark • 4 hours ago
It is hard not believe that 9/11 was the work of our own deep state and the Saudi Government....Patriot Act anyone????
appleDwight • 7 hours ago
How clueless do you have to be to express antipathy towards Gabbard's stance and question "what really matters"? What do these idiots think is more important than policies that send our children to war?
Rappahannock IV • 6 hours ago
"Senator Chris Murphy complained: "It's a little hard to figure out what itch she's trying to scratch in the Democratic Party right now.""

Couldn't agree more, Senator Chris. Most Democrats really like these pointless, endless, trillion dollar wars. They want to keep them going strong as long as possible, because there's nothing Democrats like better than staggeringly expensive government programs, and when it comes down to a choice
between being more frugal and getting Americans out of the Middle East on the one hand, or a big, juicy budget-busting festival of spending, refugee floods, and death on the other, there's no question where Chris Murphy and the Democratic Party stand.

As for Tulsi Gabbard, who does she think she's kidding? An anti-war Democrat? A fiscal restraint Democrat? A "focus on America not foreign wars" Democrat? Whoever heard of such a thing? She needs a new party, one that isn't run by billionaire elites serving corporate or foreign interests. Call it "the American Party", to distinguish it from the corrupt garbage offered by the globalist elites and foreign interests who run the Democrats and GOP.

Fran Macadam Rappahannock IV • 5 hours ago
One military industrial lobbyist with a million bucks has a million times the influence of a million ordinary voters with one buck each.
Frank Valente Rappahannock IV • 4 hours ago
I appreciate your silly tirade against the Democrats, hate to rain on your biased parade BUT it is BOTH corrupt political parties that perpetuate this senseless crusade! Both of these parties should be dismantled and banned!
Sid Finster • 5 hours ago
The United States merely pays lip service to avoiding civilian casualties. Witness Mosul and Fallujah, to name but two recent examples.
Frank Valente • 4 hours ago
Tulsi would make the best of all presidents but I am afraid the CIA working for the owner Oligarchs of the evil Military Industrial War Crime Complex would do the same thing they did to Kennedy so they could put a stooge in office to do their bidding.
kouroi • 4 hours ago
All these wars weren't against terrorists and such. For a good strategist, that was the best opportunity to get in the Central Asia and plant your bases there under the belly of Iran, Russia, and China and start making mischief and prepare for the next phases. At that point, with the new man at helm in Moscow and China getting lift-off, it was clear that the planned take over of the entire world economy was not happening, so action needed to be taken.

As for the 6.4 trillion dollars and such, what should be clear to any with two brain cells between their ears is that the US has no intention to ever repay those loans, or any, at least not to foreigners. And is the duty of the American cogs to shed their blood for their betters' ever expanding profits.

Go Tulsi Go!

staircaseghost • 3 hours ago
I could remind readers that Hillary Clinton is not now running for president and is not ever going to be president, but I know the TAC target demographic uses snarls about Hillary the way the rest of us use punctuation marks, so I guess I can let the gratuitous first-paragraph sneer slide.

Your representation of the Sen. Murphy quote is upside down, inside out, and completely obviates the rest of the article. He is not bemused that someone is trying to sell steaks to vegetarians. He is asking why she is trying to sell refrigerators to eskimos.

Meanwhile, her fellow Democrats appear abysmally unconcerned about the human and financial toll.

You... couldn't be bothered to spend even 15 seconds typing in a name of one of the Democratic frontrunners and the words "foreign policy" or "endless wars" into google?

I mean, no one was hiding something like this from you :

"From endless wars that strain military families to trade policies that crush our middle class, Washington's foreign policy today serves the wealthy and well-connected at the expense of everyone else... A strong military should act as a deterrent so that most of the time, we won't have to use it. We must continue to be vigilant about the threat of terrorism, but it's time to bring our troops home... That means cutting our bloated defense budget and ending the stranglehold of defense contractors on our military policy."

Mccormick47 • 3 hours ago
I'm well to the left of center, and I donated to Tulsi early in her campaign. So many conservatives have praised her that she's become suspect for people on the left. She's allowed herself to become a one issue candidate, and that's unworkable in a presidential campaign.

Her anti gay activities in the past are problematic, and although she identifies as a Hindu, there are claims she's or was member of a cult like group. It's very clear to me that the Evangelicals would attack her for her religion in any event. Tulsi will never be president, but I hope she continues her battle to end the forever war.

peter mcloughlin • 3 hours ago
There is blindness across the political spectrum about the perilous state of the world. They do not see the similarities with 1914 and 1939. The situations are not identical, no two situations are. But the pattern is clear.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

Highly recommended!
Now after her deposition Aaron should interview Fiona Hill. I would like to see how she would lose all the feathers of her cocky "I am Specialist in Russia" stance. She a regular MIC prostitute (intelligence agencies are a part of MIC) just like Luke Harding. And probably both have the same handlers.
Brilliant interview !
Harding is little more than an intelligence asset himself and his idea of speaking to "Russians" is London circle of Russian emigrants which are not objective source by any means.
He's peddling a his Russophobic line with no substantiation. In fact, the interview constitutes an overdue exposure of this pressitute.
Notable quotes:
"... He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. ..."
"... This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral. ..."
"... Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia. ..."
"... Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil. ..."
"... Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs. ..."
"... Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News. ..."
"... GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked. ..."
"... Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking. ..."
"... NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!! ..."
"... Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here. ..."
"... His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected. ..."
Dec 28, 2017 | www.youtube.com

Our Hidden History , 4 days ago (edited)

That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence (something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.

He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season.

Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument.

Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.

Elizabeth Ferrari , 4 days ago

This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral.

Esen B. , 3 days ago

He is far right, he is calling "cockroaches" Central Asian/ex-USSR workers coming to Moscow and in general his tone is quite ultra-nationalistic.

Lemmy Motorhead , 3 days ago

Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia.

Esen B. , 3 days ago

That is the video about fire arm legalization "cockroaches ", even if you are not Russian speaking it's pretty graphic to understand the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ILxqIEEMg

Esen B. , 3 days ago (edited)

And FYI - Central Asian workers do the low-wage jobs in Moscow, pretty like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in US. Yet, that "future president" is trying to gain some popularity by labeling and demonizing them. Sounds familiar a bit?

trdi , 3 days ago (edited)

"definitelly ddissagree with that assertation about Alexei he's had nationalist views but he's definitely not far right and calling him a tool of US intelligence is pretty bs this is the exact same assertation that the Russian state media says about him."

I disagree that there is any evidence of Navalny being tool of US intelligence, but you are wrong for not recognizing that Navalny is ultranationalist. His public statements are indefensible. He is a Russian ultra nationalist, far right and a racist. Statements about cockroaches, worse than rats, bullets being too good etc - there is no way to misunderstand that.

Sendan , 3 days ago

Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil.

Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs.

MrChibiluffy , 3 days ago

I know he said that i agree he has those views but that was in 2010.

Yarrski , 3 days ago

@trdi I am a Russian. And I remember the early Navalny who made me sick to my stomach with absolutely disgusting, RACIST, anti-immigration commentaries. The guy is basically a NEO-NAZI who has toned down his nationalist diatribes in the past 10 or so years. Has he really reformed? I doubt it.

Mohamed Elmaazi , 2 days ago

This is a solid comment mate. Well thought out, with solid reasoning. How refreshing.

Nikita Gusarov , 2 days ago

MrChibiluffy, Navalny became relatively popular in Russia precisely at that time, especially during the White Ribbon protests in 2011/2012. I remember it very well myself.

I am Russian and I lived in Moscow at that time and he was the darling of the Russian opposition. He publicly defined his views and established himself back then and hasn't altered his position to this day.

What's more important is that around 2015 or so he made an alliance with the far-right and specifically Diomushkin who is a neo-nazi activist. I understand that people change their views, it's just that he hasn't.

MrChibiluffy , 2 days ago

Nikita Gusarov it still feels like the best chance for some form of populist opposition atm. Even though they just rejected him he has a movement. Would you rather vote for Sobchak?

annalivia1308 , 1 day ago

Yes. The US are looking to repeat Ukraine's regime change.

Ind Aus , 1 day ago

Lets not forget that one reason many voted for Trump was his rhetoric about improving the peace-threatening antagonism towards Russia, especially in order to help resolve the situation in Syria. It's not like it was secret he was trying to hide. He only moderated his views somewhat when the Democrat-engineered anti-Russian smear campaign took off and there was a concerted effort to tie him to Russia.

Is it crime surround yourself with people that will help you fullfill your pledges?

artemis12061966 , 1 day ago

Or the death of Gary Webb, prosecution of whistleblowers.....like Private Manning...

RipTheJackR , 9 hours ago

Our Hidden History... beautiful. Very well put mate :)

Gabriel Olsen , 3 hours ago

Yep, when he talked about murdering journalists, I paused the video and told my girlfriend about the murder of Michael Hastings. Oh an PS the USA puts journalists in Guantanamo. We play real baseball.

Luca Clemente , 4 days ago (edited)

Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News.

TheJagjr4450 , 3 days ago

GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked.

dzedo53 , 4 days ago

Putin is a bad guy. Therefore he colluded with Trump back in 1987 to help Trump win the election in 2016. Why is that so hard to see?? LOL.

Noah , 14 hours ago

Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking.

jodi houts , 4 days ago

Thank you Aaron Matè for calling out the bullshit. The dem party is dead until they take care of their own espionage and corruption.

KAREN Nichols , 4 days ago

Thank you for "holding his feet to the fire"...I wish more media was more skeptical as well. Good work!

david ackerman , 4 days ago

NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!!

shadex08 , 4 days ago

Great job Aaron, your work here makes me feel even better about my contribution to the real news.

95percent air , 4 days ago

Wow Aaron Matte NICE JOB. I'm only half through, I hope you don't make him cry. Do u make him cry? Did I hear this guy say he's ultimately a storyteller? Lol.

Mal c.H , 4 days ago

It may seem like Trump has an alarming amount of associations with Russia, because he does.. that's how rich oligarchs work. But it's all just SPECULATION still. Why publish a book on this without a smoking gun to prove anything? Collusion isn't even a legal term, it's vague enough for people to make it mean whatever they want it to mean. People investigating and reporting on this are operating under confirmation bias. Aaron, you're always appropriately critical and you're always asking the right questions. You seem to be one of the few sane people left in media. Trump is a disgrace but there still is no smoking gun.

jodi houts , 4 days ago

As he gets deeper in the weeds of speculation he starts attacking Aaron's credibility.

Fixel Heimer , 4 days ago

Omg a bunch of unproven conspiracy crap.. Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here.. How would anyone in the years before his candidacy have thought Trump would gain any political relevance. I mean even the pro Hillary media thought until the end, their massive trump coverage would only help to get him NOT elected, but the opposite was the case. This guy is a complete joke as are his theses. Actually reminding me of the guardian's so called report about Russian Hacking in the Brexit referendum. Look here if you want to have a laugh http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/how-097-changed-the-fate-of-britain-not.html

Hugh Mungus , 4 days ago

His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected.

Katie B , 4 days ago

Collusion Rejectionist! Ha Ha. Funniest interview ever. Well done Aaron. The Real News taking a stand for truth. So what's in the book if there's no evidence? Guardian journalism? Stop questioning the official narrative, oh and have you heard of Estonia. :)) ps that smiley face was not an admission of my working for the Kremlin.

Antman4656 , 4 days ago

Best interview ever. Aaron held him to his theories and asked what evidence or proof he had and he didn't come up with one spec of evidence only hearsay and disputed theories. What a sad indictment this is on America. 1 year on a sensationalized story and still nothing concrete. What a joke and proof of gullibility to anyone who believes this corporate media Narritive. I guess at least they don't have to cover policies like the tax theft or net neutrality. This is why we need The Real news.

maskedavenger777 , 4 days ago (edited)

I'd rather have American business making business deals with Russia for things like hotels, rather than business deals with the Pentagon to aim more weapons at the Russians. When haven't we been doing business with Russians? We might as well investigate Cargill, Pepsi, McDonald's, John Deere, Ford, and most of our wheat farmers.

[Nov 29, 2019] Manufacturing a pretext for the U.S. missile strike on Syria in April 2018 is nowhere near the biggest of OPCW's crimes. The OPCW is an accessory, both before and after the fact to the crime of mass murder.

Notable quotes:
"... The worst of these massacres happened in Ghouta in August 2013 when 2000 civilian hostages (rebel claim) were gassed to death by rebels and their pre-White Helmets "civil defence". The OPCW was there to cover up the crime and to fabricate evidence to assign blame to Syria. ..."
Nov 29, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Petri Krohn , Nov 29 2019 23:16 utc | 21

TAKE THEM TO THE HAGUE!

Manufacturing a pretext for the U.S. missile strike on Syria in April 2018 is nowhere near the biggest of OPCW's crimes. The OPCW is an accessory , both before and after the fact to the crime of mass murder.

It should now be clear to everyone that Syrian "rebels" gassed thousands of hostages in cellars, most likely with chlorine gas, and then paraded the victims in White Helmets snuff videos. OPCW conspired in this crime in both encouraging the terrorists to more murder and by protecting them afterward by assigning blame to Assad and the Syrian government.

The worst of these massacres happened in Ghouta in August 2013 when 2000 civilian hostages (rebel claim) were gassed to death by rebels and their pre-White Helmets "civil defence". The OPCW was there to cover up the crime and to fabricate evidence to assign blame to Syria.

We have been documenting these crimes and hoaxes at A Closer Look On Syria from December 2012. OPCW was used from the beginning to manufacture consent for war. See for example:

karlof1 , Nov 29 2019 23:52 utc | 24

Petri Krohn @21--

Of course, the OPCW is already there! I highly suggest Caitlin Johnstone's article b linked be read, which can be found here .

We should expand on Petri's number of people involved in this crime to include all the paid disinformation artists noted in Caitlin's essay at minimum. What becomes very clear in all this is the total collusion with OPCW upper level management--those whom the whistleblowers and their allies within OPCW petitioned--in these crimes as Petri contends. Until they are visibly replaced, nothing issued by OPCW has any credence.

Canthama , Nov 30 2019 0:21 utc | 26
OPCW has shown to be a pure political entity, used at will by few regimes in the UN to promote their agenda, b has done a tremendous job to humanity to bring the truth to the public worldwide. Syrians have paid the price for UN leaders support to global terrorism for too long. It must stop now.
iv>

/div

[Nov 29, 2019] Mainstream Policy Expert Reveals How He Was Silenced On Syria Truth Did Not Matter

Nov 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

A mainstream media and academic expert this week issued a rare admission : that pretty much everything the establishment has fed the public on Syria is false or distorted; but it remains that after tragic eight-year long war is slowly coming to a close, new indisputable facts are coming to light. " Truth did not matter at all," he admits after years of providing commentary for mainstream publications.

In a lengthy thread on Twitter, counter-terrorism author and assistant professor of political science and public policy at Northeastern University Max Abrahms exposed how he saw the 'narrative managers' at work from the inside of the establishment think tank world and media. As his own research came to uncover and document the truth of what was happening in Syria, "the media would excise me and the research from their stories" he revealed. His work in the early years of the war appeared in The New York Times and other major outlets, however, he was increasingly censored and pushed out of a number of platforms for speaking inconvenient truths.

Below is his full commentary , written in the wake of the new OPCW leaks which the mainstream is still trying hard to ignore.

Dr. Max Abrahms, screengrab via The Center For Strategic & International Studies.

Every day there are new revelations that the "rebels" were in cahoots not only with Al Qaeda but also ISIS and official reports of Assad using chemical weapons were doctored according to the reports' own authors.

Were you ever skeptical that Assad was authorizing chemical weapons attacks when they were the one thing that put his winning the war at risk?

Authors of the official reports linking him to chemical weapons usage have now supplied evidence that their own reports were doctored .

When I was interviewed about Syria's military using chemical weapons, I expressed skepticism as Assad bucked the political science literature by engaging in the one conduct that would reverse his hard-fought victory.

But the media would excise me and the research from their stories.

The #1 story should be that authors of the official reports linking Assad to WMD usage have supplied evidence that they were doctored in defiance of the scientific evidence and exploited to push regime change in Damascus, which risked creating the Islamic State war with Russia.

Until you get how you were duped into supporting regime change in Syria you'll get duped into supporting other costly ventures to the local population , international stability and our counterterrorism efforts.

Max Abrahms ✔ @MaxAbrahms

The mainstream narrative of the Syria conflict has imploded.

Every day there are new revelations that the "rebels" were in cahoots not only with Al Qaeda but also ISIS & official reports of Assad using chemical weapons were doctored according to the reports' own authors.

The story of doctored WMD reports and Al Qaeda-led rebels must be told.

What happened in Syria is the American political establishment decided that the ends justify the means. Truth did not matter at all. We were told Assad must go based on WMD reports their own authors say were doctored to support "rebels" who were Al-Qaeda-led and helping ISIS.

Watch this interview and determine yourself whether you find trustworthy the official report linking Assad to the chlorine attack which was sold in the

sold in the media as casus belli for toppling Assad and has now been exposed by the fact-finders themselves as doctored.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/SMSyLg1E49M

If you think politicians, think tanks and media got a lot wrong in the Iraq war wait until you hear about the Syria war.

If you cheered for another regime change war then it doesn't matter whether the casus belli lacks evidence. The media is unmoved that multiple scientists who made up the official investigation doubt that the Syrian military was behind the attacks or the use of chlorine at all.

Bernard_2011 , 4 minutes ago link

Apparently Trump is too dumb to question what the Deep State tells him on this matter. Assad did it. End of story.

Justapleb , 29 minutes ago link

This is how they roll out new deep state Mockingbird Media clones.

The older completely discredited clones are replaced with new ones who pretend to have been right there with us all along.

Look at Obama. One solitary vote among so many regarding Iraq and he gained the anti-war vote and a Nobel Prize. Then he went about personally making the kill orders by drone, allowing the wicked witch to overthrow Syria and sodomize their leader with a bayonet. Then on to Syria, various African countries, etc.

I'm sure this *** has written lots on returning the Golan Heights to Syria, returning the West Bank to the Palestinians, renouncing foreign aid to Israel, etc. Right? Not.

uhland62 , 51 minutes ago link

The mendacity of 'the system' can be infuriating when you and your work is targeted.

What I see today is not any different in any way from what my elders told me about the Third Reich and what I heard from East Berlin and the Soviet Union under Stalin and successors. I grew up in West Berlin and we did meet people, heard things.

Heil Hegemon - and Heil to all its lackeys! Heil!!!

truthseeker47 , 57 minutes ago link

Ron Paul was trying to tell everyone right from the git-go that the Syrian gas attacks were a false flag, and the evidence and logic supported a false flag operation. Even more annoying, the 100 or so Tomahawk missiles cost US taxpayers about a $million each. But maybe the missiles were getting old, and the military needed some practice shots.

MrBoompi , 1 hour ago link

We gassed some folks....

cwsuisse , 1 hour ago link

Steele is credible. I believe that the OPCW doctored the reports upon instructions. The narrative management on Syria has totally destroyed the trust in the western governments and has demonstrated that the US, the UK and the EU are not behaving any better than China or Russia.

QABubba , 44 minutes ago link

Someone needs to make an argument as to why we should believe any of these guys. I mean, after you have been proven liars so many times, should we not throw the rotten tomatoes?

strannick , 2 hours ago link

America will tell any lie, commit any atrocity, on behalf of its military industrial complex, bankster, Zionist elite, while manufacturing consent for its evil by its corrupt complicit Mainstream Media. Is that even news?

mailll , 2 hours ago link

It doesn't matter Max, we already knew all this news about Syria was fake. When they were trying to fulfill an agenda, which was to overthrow Syria for the sake of Israel, since Syria is part of this fictitious promised land, their lies help support this agenda. Just like the Zionist attacks on the world trade center and the pentagon with remote controlled airplanes and pre-planted controlled demolition explosives. They were followed up with a bunch of lies to the entire world telling us it was a handful of Muslims who have never flown jumbo jets before. And they performed top gun maneuvers with these jumbo jets and breached perhaps the greatest air defense system in the world with only primitive box cutters. I totally believe the US and Israel covertly created ISIS. And the support funds came from the Zionist controlled printing presses, and from the pentagon budget that was unaccounted for. But unfortunately, most Americans still drink the Kool-aid. They continue to believe their lies. And because of this, they will keep doing what they are doing.

White Nat , 2 hours ago link

Here's Jeffrey Epstein's BFF and Mossad handler Ehud Barak pinning the israeli 9/11 false flag on the Osama bin Laden donkey within hours of the attack.

A chief architect of 9-11, Ehud Barak, interviewed on BBC an hour after attacks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAueLjdKh1s

Married Israeli politician Ehud Barak is seen hiding his face entering Jeffrey Epstein's NYC townhouse

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7250009/Netanyahu-challenger-Ehud-Barak-hides-face-enters-entering-Jeffrey-Epsteins-mansion.html

The Harlequin , 2 hours ago link

...more on AVAAZ and Syria from my own archives, probably already republished here at the time!

http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2014/09/17/syria-avaaz-purpose-the-art-of-selling-hate-for-empire/

https://www.activistpost.com/2016/01/avaaz-the-online-pro-war-propagandist-and-color-revolution-ngo.html

https://www.globalresearch.ca/avaaz-the-lobbyist-that-masquerades-as-online-activism/5314829

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2012/03/avaaz-sponsoring-fake-reporting-from-syria.html

JB Say , 2 hours ago link

That was a sloppy *** false flag too. The "agencies" are getting lazy because they own the press and Americans are incredibly dumbed down on foreign policy. The got away with 2 planes collapsing 3 WTC buildings so maybe they figure why bother even making it look convincing.

monty42 , 2 hours ago link

Since it follows a pattern, it's not even just Syria. The US regime is a state sponsor of terrorism, by their own definition, and go into countries and create chaos and revolution, attempting regime change, creating a crisis they then use as "justification" for escalating into open conflict against the victim. Accuse the victim nation of crimes, blanketing the world in propaganda to delude the masses. Try to focus their attention on a single bad guy in their narrative, a "brutal dictator" or whatnot. Attack by proxy and directly, sanction, bomb, etc until the victim is left unable to produce for their own needs, making them dependent, and then going in to apply the chains of debt to the victim to pay the empire to rebuild what they destroyed. Everyone gets rich, increased resources from theft, testing of weapons systems, dominion over the new vassal nation, etc, while the victim is subjugated.

Soloamber , 2 hours ago link

I would like to know who the "narrative managers " are because you know if they do it with Syria they are doing it on everything .

No wonder there is a growing contemptuous distrust of most of the MSM .

It is as if they act in concert and limit anything that doesn't support their agenda.

... ... ...

White Nat , 2 hours ago link

israel and their US sayanim want all of their enemies destroyed using US blood and treasure aka balkanizing the middle east.

Speeches that still matter: Gen Wesley Clark on US going to war in 7 countries in 5 yrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTbg11pCwOc

The "memo" Wesley Clark refers to came directly from zionist war criminal Paul Wolfowitz who was whispering in the ear of Donald Rumsfeld the whole way.

Wolfowitz is perhaps better known not for writing the Wolfowitz Doctrine but for co-authoring Rebuilding America's Defenses, a report released in September 2000 by Zionist neocon think tank PNAC (The Project for a New American Century). The PNAC membership list is a "Who's Who" of American Zionist New World Order conspirators – in addition to Wolfowitz the list includes **** Cheney Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Kagan, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Richard Perle, Doug Feith and many others.

https://thefreedomarticles.com/wolfowitz-doctrine-us-plan-global-supremacy/

PNAC. Greater Israel Project. Oded Yinon Plan.

Long-term the tribe plans to rule the earth from the third temple in Jerusalem.

That's why they are working so hard to shut the goyim up and flood all white countries with third world sewage.

E Michael Jones and Vincent James Discuss the ADL

https://www.bitchute.com/video/CTSjzm8FYH8y/

Fentonbr , 2 hours ago link

Everyone now knows how corrupt it all is now, Thank God Clinton lost!

White Nat , 2 hours ago link

Hillary Clinton Email: 'Syria Must Be Destroyed For Israel'

https://neonnettle.com/features/1360-hillary-clinton-email-syria-must-be-destroyed-for-israel-

lwilland1012 , 2 hours ago link

Puppets have Masters.

The Harlequin , 2 hours ago link

"The mainstream narrative of the Syria conflict has imploded."

"Every day there are new revelations that the "rebels" were in cahoots not only with Al Qaeda but also ISIS & official reports of Assad using chemical weapons were doctored according to the reports' own authors."

IF YOU HAVE BEEN PAYING ATTENTION...

...you would know that the "narrative" imploded from the moment AVAAZ started handing out satellite phones to the "rebels" and "No-Fly Zone" became Clinton's cackling catch-cry ...in 2011!

UBrexitUPay4it , 2 hours ago link

Bless you for trying, but you would do less damage by quietly withdrawing. You just look silly. USA spent 4+ years fighting ISIS, during which time ISIS spread across the middle East. Russia stepped in with 40 aircraft, funded through their normal air force training program, and destroyed ISIS in 9 months.

Either Russians are superhuman warriors, or the west was lying when it claimed to be fighting ISIS. Which is it?

HRH of Aquitaine 2.0 , 3 hours ago link

The MSM in the US is compromised and is fully state media, at this point. Deep state, straight from the ******* pond scum suckers in DC.

[Nov 29, 2019] McCarthyism Redux by Riva Enteen

Notable quotes:
"... A few days after my article was printed, my nephew, who helped me edit the piece and works for corporate America, told me he's afraid to open certain websites on his work computer -- off the clock -- because he could be flagged as "suspicious" and questioned. McCarthy was limited to phone taps and other dirty tricks. ..."
Nov 13, 2019 | blackagendareport.com

The National Lawyers Guild, born in resistance to political witch-hunts, seems to have neutered itself in the face of the new wave of manufactured hysteria.

"The Guild has 'a sort of hip neoliberal mindset: anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Syria etc.'"

I recently returned from a delegation to Russia, and now smell McCarthyism more clearly.

The delegation was organized by the Center for Citizen Initiatives , an invaluable 32-year old citizen diplomacy organization, but CCI said it would not to print the article I wrote about the delegation because it needed to say something critical of the Soviet period, not just praise. The article is titled Russian Pride and US Exceptionalism. A political decision was made that, in order to have access to some highly placed people, CCI needs to be "balanced" about the Soviet period and acknowledge the gulags. That could be a good strategic decision, but I was surprised. [Two weeks later, after the article was published widely with a very positive response, CCI did publish it.]

A few days after my article was printed, my nephew, who helped me edit the piece and works for corporate America, told me he's afraid to open certain websites on his work computer -- off the clock -- because he could be flagged as "suspicious" and questioned. McCarthy was limited to phone taps and other dirty tricks.

Edward Snowden is in Russia because he told us the state has access to everything. My nephew is pragmatic, not paranoid. When I told members of the delegation about him, several said they weren't surprised about his concern, and one called it tragic. I told them they were all extremely cougeous to go to Russia at this frenzied point in history. One elder, seasoned member, said McCarthyism is certainly here and she's very careful. I am not very careful because I hold on to the belief that since I'm not doing anything illegal, they can't get me. History proves otherwise.

"Edward Snowden is in Russia because he told us the state has access to everything."

I have been a proud member of the National Lawyers Guild for 35 years, but since Trump's election I have repeatedly challenged how it has become a partisan organization for the Democrats. The Guild's Democratic Party loyalty, exposed in a Black Agenda Report article , is reflected in its resistance to support for Julian Assange . A recent article by Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, exposes how Assange is being tortured before our eyes, with no pretense of the rule of law. Assange had support when he went after Bush's war, but is now publicly brutalized because he went after the Democrats , so is apparently a Russian asset responsible for Trump, as Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein are also "Russian assets." MSNBC claimed that because Gabbard didn't deny she was a Russian asset, she clearly is. Does that sound like McCarthy?

After I publicly exposed the partisan liberalism of the Guild in the Black Agenda Report , I was both chastised for airing dirty laundry and told I raised valid, important concerns about the political compass of the 82-year old organization. There was talk of the need for elders to provide political context, to help the current ahistorical political climate, which believes it's all Trump's fault. However, a third annual convention has occurred since Trump's election and none have addressed the new McCarthyism, or Assange, who is the victim of one of the most egregious cases of legal abuse in history and should be of grave concern to a legal organization such as the Guild.

"Assange had support when he went after Bush's war, but is now publicly brutalized because he went after the Democrats."

Recently, a former Guild president posted an article to the International Committee from Forbes with the ominous title: Russia Attempts To Take Over Venezuelan Oil, Creating A Challenge For The U.S. I responded to the committee and asked if I was missing something, but why can't Russia and Venezuela trade? Within minutes, a Guild member since 1974 asked to be taken off the list because of what he saw as "foolish ultra leftism (an infantile disorder to coin a phrase)" that was a "stupid discussion." Another said I was "lacking in ethical grounding."

One who thought my question was valid, said "I personally support any sovereign nation's ability to make alliances. Russia is not my enemy. Russia was invited into Venezuela just as it was invited into Syria. When I started law school in 2002, at the ripe old age of 52, the only thing I cared about was joining my school's Guild chapter. I have found a good deal of disappointment in the Guild ever since." Others added that the Guild has "a sort of hip neoliberal mindset: anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Syria etc.," and that "If it's ultra-left to call out the Democrats, I wear the badge ultra-leftist as a badge of honor." One member cautioned, "as Riva said recently, being aware of source is very important." But the discussion has been shut down, with no plans to discuss the implications of the Guild helping to fan the flames of anti-Russia sentiment, let alone the need to quell them.

"If it's ultra-left to call out the Democrats, I wear the badge ultra-leftist as a badge of honor."

A long-time Guild comrade who is now all about anybody but Trump, and knows my nephew, said his story is just anecdotal. "I don't see an across-the-board 'new McCarthyism.' To rise to that level, what I'd need to see is a major concerted effort by the government to destroy the lives, careers and reputations of people accused of being insufficiently hostile to Russia." Are we waiting for the first obvious suicide of this McCarthy period?

An article about the recent conviction of seven Catholic peace activists for a Plowshares action generated this comment: "The greatest risk of nuclear war today comes from Trump Derangement Syndrome. The fact that the leadership of the Democratic Party would use Russia-gate, a pile of absurd lies, for political advantage, at the risk of initiating a nuclear war with Russia is beyond despicable."

The fear of exposing the depth of the rot is pervasive, counter-revolutionary and jeopardizes life itself. That Trump is the only anti-endless war candidate, other than Tulsi Gabbard, exposes the Democrats as the war party they are. Many hope that Trump is the wrecking ball that will knock it all down. Hopefully before somebody pushes the button.

Riva Enteen edited the book Follow the Money, interviews by Flashpoints producer Dennis J. Bernstein. She can be reached at [email protected] .

[Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

Highly recommended!
Now after her deposition Aaron should interview Fiona Hill. I would like to see how she would lose all the feathers of her cocky "I am Specialist in Russia" stance. She a regular MIC prostitute (intelligence agencies are a part of MIC) just like Luke Harding. And probably both have the same handlers.
Brilliant interview !
Harding is little more than an intelligence asset himself and his idea of speaking to "Russians" is London circle of Russian emigrants which are not objective source by any means.
He's peddling a his Russophobic line with no substantiation. In fact, the interview constitutes an overdue exposure of this pressitute.
Notable quotes:
"... He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. ..."
"... This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral. ..."
"... Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia. ..."
"... Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil. ..."
"... Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs. ..."
"... Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News. ..."
"... GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked. ..."
"... Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking. ..."
"... NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!! ..."
"... Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here. ..."
"... His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected. ..."
Dec 28, 2017 | www.youtube.com

Our Hidden History , 4 days ago (edited)

That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence (something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.

He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season.

Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument.

Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.

Elizabeth Ferrari , 4 days ago

This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral.

Esen B. , 3 days ago

He is far right, he is calling "cockroaches" Central Asian/ex-USSR workers coming to Moscow and in general his tone is quite ultra-nationalistic.

Lemmy Motorhead , 3 days ago

Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia.

Esen B. , 3 days ago

That is the video about fire arm legalization "cockroaches ", even if you are not Russian speaking it's pretty graphic to understand the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ILxqIEEMg

Esen B. , 3 days ago (edited)

And FYI - Central Asian workers do the low-wage jobs in Moscow, pretty like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in US. Yet, that "future president" is trying to gain some popularity by labeling and demonizing them. Sounds familiar a bit?

trdi , 3 days ago (edited)

"definitelly ddissagree with that assertation about Alexei he's had nationalist views but he's definitely not far right and calling him a tool of US intelligence is pretty bs this is the exact same assertation that the Russian state media says about him."

I disagree that there is any evidence of Navalny being tool of US intelligence, but you are wrong for not recognizing that Navalny is ultranationalist. His public statements are indefensible. He is a Russian ultra nationalist, far right and a racist. Statements about cockroaches, worse than rats, bullets being too good etc - there is no way to misunderstand that.

Sendan , 3 days ago

Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil.

Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs.

MrChibiluffy , 3 days ago

I know he said that i agree he has those views but that was in 2010.

Yarrski , 3 days ago

@trdi I am a Russian. And I remember the early Navalny who made me sick to my stomach with absolutely disgusting, RACIST, anti-immigration commentaries. The guy is basically a NEO-NAZI who has toned down his nationalist diatribes in the past 10 or so years. Has he really reformed? I doubt it.

Mohamed Elmaazi , 2 days ago

This is a solid comment mate. Well thought out, with solid reasoning. How refreshing.

Nikita Gusarov , 2 days ago

MrChibiluffy, Navalny became relatively popular in Russia precisely at that time, especially during the White Ribbon protests in 2011/2012. I remember it very well myself.

I am Russian and I lived in Moscow at that time and he was the darling of the Russian opposition. He publicly defined his views and established himself back then and hasn't altered his position to this day.

What's more important is that around 2015 or so he made an alliance with the far-right and specifically Diomushkin who is a neo-nazi activist. I understand that people change their views, it's just that he hasn't.

MrChibiluffy , 2 days ago

Nikita Gusarov it still feels like the best chance for some form of populist opposition atm. Even though they just rejected him he has a movement. Would you rather vote for Sobchak?

annalivia1308 , 1 day ago

Yes. The US are looking to repeat Ukraine's regime change.

Ind Aus , 1 day ago

Lets not forget that one reason many voted for Trump was his rhetoric about improving the peace-threatening antagonism towards Russia, especially in order to help resolve the situation in Syria. It's not like it was secret he was trying to hide. He only moderated his views somewhat when the Democrat-engineered anti-Russian smear campaign took off and there was a concerted effort to tie him to Russia.

Is it crime surround yourself with people that will help you fullfill your pledges?

artemis12061966 , 1 day ago

Or the death of Gary Webb, prosecution of whistleblowers.....like Private Manning...

RipTheJackR , 9 hours ago

Our Hidden History... beautiful. Very well put mate :)

Gabriel Olsen , 3 hours ago

Yep, when he talked about murdering journalists, I paused the video and told my girlfriend about the murder of Michael Hastings. Oh an PS the USA puts journalists in Guantanamo. We play real baseball.

Luca Clemente , 4 days ago (edited)

Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News.

TheJagjr4450 , 3 days ago

GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked.

dzedo53 , 4 days ago

Putin is a bad guy. Therefore he colluded with Trump back in 1987 to help Trump win the election in 2016. Why is that so hard to see?? LOL.

Noah , 14 hours ago

Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking.

jodi houts , 4 days ago

Thank you Aaron Matè for calling out the bullshit. The dem party is dead until they take care of their own espionage and corruption.

KAREN Nichols , 4 days ago

Thank you for "holding his feet to the fire"...I wish more media was more skeptical as well. Good work!

david ackerman , 4 days ago

NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!!

shadex08 , 4 days ago

Great job Aaron, your work here makes me feel even better about my contribution to the real news.

95percent air , 4 days ago

Wow Aaron Matte NICE JOB. I'm only half through, I hope you don't make him cry. Do u make him cry? Did I hear this guy say he's ultimately a storyteller? Lol.

Mal c.H , 4 days ago

It may seem like Trump has an alarming amount of associations with Russia, because he does.. that's how rich oligarchs work. But it's all just SPECULATION still. Why publish a book on this without a smoking gun to prove anything? Collusion isn't even a legal term, it's vague enough for people to make it mean whatever they want it to mean. People investigating and reporting on this are operating under confirmation bias. Aaron, you're always appropriately critical and you're always asking the right questions. You seem to be one of the few sane people left in media. Trump is a disgrace but there still is no smoking gun.

jodi houts , 4 days ago

As he gets deeper in the weeds of speculation he starts attacking Aaron's credibility.

Fixel Heimer , 4 days ago

Omg a bunch of unproven conspiracy crap.. Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here.. How would anyone in the years before his candidacy have thought Trump would gain any political relevance. I mean even the pro Hillary media thought until the end, their massive trump coverage would only help to get him NOT elected, but the opposite was the case. This guy is a complete joke as are his theses. Actually reminding me of the guardian's so called report about Russian Hacking in the Brexit referendum. Look here if you want to have a laugh http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/how-097-changed-the-fate-of-britain-not.html

Hugh Mungus , 4 days ago

His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected.

Katie B , 4 days ago

Collusion Rejectionist! Ha Ha. Funniest interview ever. Well done Aaron. The Real News taking a stand for truth. So what's in the book if there's no evidence? Guardian journalism? Stop questioning the official narrative, oh and have you heard of Estonia. :)) ps that smiley face was not an admission of my working for the Kremlin.

Antman4656 , 4 days ago

Best interview ever. Aaron held him to his theories and asked what evidence or proof he had and he didn't come up with one spec of evidence only hearsay and disputed theories. What a sad indictment this is on America. 1 year on a sensationalized story and still nothing concrete. What a joke and proof of gullibility to anyone who believes this corporate media Narritive. I guess at least they don't have to cover policies like the tax theft or net neutrality. This is why we need The Real news.

maskedavenger777 , 4 days ago (edited)

I'd rather have American business making business deals with Russia for things like hotels, rather than business deals with the Pentagon to aim more weapons at the Russians. When haven't we been doing business with Russians? We might as well investigate Cargill, Pepsi, McDonald's, John Deere, Ford, and most of our wheat farmers.

[Nov 29, 2019] Fascism - The Other F-Word And Trump

Notable quotes:
"... "They all are capitalists." ..."
"... In other words, the ruling class dictatorship can no longer rule by popular democratic ways. The principal contradiction in U.S. society remains in the alienation between labor and capital. Fascism is simply the only way to maintain capitalist rule, according to scientific socialism. ..."
"... Fascist movements are historically composed of their leaders, small capitalists, low-level bureaucrats or petty-bourgeois, farmers, and the declassed lumpenproletariat. Big capital sponsors and funds the movement. Big time capitalists, along with the top-tier leaders they create, then make up Fascism's ruling nobility. ..."
"... Among the characteristics of fascists: They are fiercely nationalistic and patriotic. Criticisms are unpatriotic or treasonous. Fascists are opposed to Marxism and any left politics, from moderate to progressive. Fascism infuses suspicion about foreigners, thuggery, and exudes an adversarial mentality, ..."
"... "Big capital sponsors and funds the movement." ..."
"... Fascism is always on war footing. All levels of government need to be in the line of march. Imprisonment and execution await any person that opposes the new norm. ..."
"... Fascism raises its ugly head without a revolution taking place. Their rule comes from the top of the anointed aristocracy. Corporate power reigns supreme. No workers' rights exist. Wars are made mainly to create markets. Fascism is supposed to liberate survivors of these wars in foreign lands – a justification for imperialism. Art, where it does not conform to Fascist culture, is destroyed. When Fascism does appear, Antifa will not save us. ..."
"... Dr. Ken Morgan is an activist scholar and internationalist. He can be reached at ..."
Nov 29, 2019 | blackagendareport.com

... ... ...

Trump Is a Demagogue, But Not Fascist

Often a demagogic politician such as Trump is called fascist because he won the election through bourgeois-democratic methods and his rightist policies. Trump won the election. He now leads through bourgeois-democratic practices. President Trump continues to exploit the prejudice and ignorance of the white working-class. The Donald overturned political norms; he used double meaning slogans such as "Make America great again," and "lock her up" that sounded like political rhetoric but appealed to racists as well.

Trump's win in 2016 remained predicated on Hillary Clinton's deficits and her asides about the "deplorable," white working-class, and her relationship to Barack Obama, who did nothing for white and black workers. Obama chose to rescue capitalist corporations at the expense of the working class and other lower-middle-income forces – many blacks that lost their houses.

Huey Long was a demagogue. Senator Joseph McCarthy provides an example of a demagogue, as do many of the Dixiecrats that Malcolm X so rightly railed against through his speeches and activism. George Wallace fits the criteria. When all said and done, they all are capitalists. They work on behalf of capitalists to perpetuate capitalism and spread worldwide imperialism.

"They all are capitalists."

Yes, both Mussolini and Hitler were demagogues, but their countries' underlying dire economic conditions made them and their administrations Fascists.

Trump is just another one of the forty-four U.S. presidents that held reign over capitalism and, after the beginning of the twentieth century, the advent of U.S. imperialism – the highest order of capitalism. They presided over state terrorism and genocide against world peoples.

Capitalism in the U.S. produces gross economic deprivations and inequalities, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Look at what Harry Truman did when he nuclear bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan. Like puppeteers, the capitalist ruling classes will, for as long as capitalism still exists, control politicians' strings. Yes, capitalism is in crisis and rotten to the core, but not yet failed.

You will not get rid of any of these things by impeaching Trump.

What Is Fascism?

Yes, Adolph Hitler and Mussolini were both demagogic and fascist. Fascism, according to Marxist precepts, observation and study, stems from a mass movement rooted in the capitalist ruling classes, that not able to survive without it. Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler are two historical examples of such fascists.

In other words, the ruling class dictatorship can no longer rule by popular democratic ways. The principal contradiction in U.S. society remains in the alienation between labor and capital. Fascism is simply the only way to maintain capitalist rule, according to scientific socialism.

Fascist movements are historically composed of their leaders, small capitalists, low-level bureaucrats or petty-bourgeois, farmers, and the declassed lumpenproletariat. Big capital sponsors and funds the movement. Big time capitalists, along with the top-tier leaders they create, then make up Fascism's ruling nobility.

Among the characteristics of fascists: They are fiercely nationalistic and patriotic. Criticisms are unpatriotic or treasonous. Fascists are opposed to Marxism and any left politics, from moderate to progressive. Fascism infuses suspicion about foreigners, thuggery, and exudes an adversarial mentality,

"Big capital sponsors and funds the movement."

Organizationally, there exists an iconic leader and secretive and selective capitalists. They scrutinize your every move at the job, and at schools. Fascism is always on war footing. All levels of government need to be in the line of march. Imprisonment and execution await any person that opposes the new norm.

Economic equality is a no-no. Immigrants obtain lower status than actual citizens. Equality in gender, religion, sex, and minority rights are forbidden. Backward religious beliefs often prevail. If you are not a Christian or an affiliated Catholic, you are out of the circle. Violence creates racial inferiority and the destiny of history.

Fascism raises its ugly head without a revolution taking place. Their rule comes from the top of the anointed aristocracy. Corporate power reigns supreme. No workers' rights exist. Wars are made mainly to create markets. Fascism is supposed to liberate survivors of these wars in foreign lands – a justification for imperialism. Art, where it does not conform to Fascist culture, is destroyed. When Fascism does appear, Antifa will not save us.

Summary

So yes, Trump is a demagogic leader with disdainful characteristics, but capitalism has not reached the point where actual fascism is the only way capitalists can rule. For now, understand that imperialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia are characteristics of capitalism. The rule of capitalist law and the capitalist form of democracy continues to exist. We, as black people, do not want to be disoriented into thinking that the U.S. and Trump are Fascist.

Dr. Ken Morgan is an activist scholar and internationalist. He can be reached at [email protected] .

[Nov 28, 2019] WSJ story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... does the author think this alleged Lynch-Clinton campaign exchange will be part of the upcoming Horowitz report? ..."
Nov 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Factotum , 27 November 2019 at 11:57 AM

WSJ columnist today raises an old obscure issue today about the Clinton emails and Comey's calculated exoneration of Clinton's culpability.

This story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton. Comey claimed when confronted with this memo, Lynch merely smiled like the Cheshire cat and nothing more was done.

This memo was later discredited as an alleged planted Russian hoax. Yet the memo story is again put in lead position on the opinion pages of the WSJ this very morning. Why was that? Not clear, but does the author think this alleged Lynch-Clinton campaign exchange will be part of the upcoming Horowitz report?

(WSJ: 11/27/19 - Holman Jenkins, Jr. - "Who will turn over the 2016 rocks")

[Nov 28, 2019] Times change and we change with them

Nov 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Jack Dee • 21 hours ago

Interesting to note how the phrase "Deep State" has gone mainstream. 3 years ago it was just a conspiracy theory

[Nov 28, 2019] Joe Rogan Experience #1386 - Matt Taibbi

Epstein murder/suicide was probably the most public elimination of critical witness...
Notable quotes:
"... “Biden to me is like having a flashlight with a dying battery and going for a long hike in the woods” - Joe Rogan 😅 1:28:33 ..."
Nov 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

HD , Nov 28 2019 19:45 utc | 38

Apologies if someone already posted this but on Nov 16 Joe Rogan and Matt Taibbi discussed the current state of the MSM in a wide-ranging conversation that I think most Barflies will find very interesting:

Joe Rogan Experience #1386 - Matt Taibbi) , Nov 16, 2019

Jeff phillips , 1 week ago

"Censorship is telling a grown man that he can't eat steak, because the baby can't chew it." - Mark Twain

Savannah Thomas , 1 week ago (edited)

“Biden to me is like having a flashlight with a dying battery and going for a long hike in the woods” - Joe Rogan 😅 1:28:33

T B , 1 week ago (edited)

“When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence.” - Gary Lloyd. We Americans are willingly blind to truth. It'll be the death of us.

Colin Hay , 1 week ago

George Orwell said it best: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever."

John Merlino , 1 week ago

Matt Taibbi: "they’re trying to sound like legitimate news, but they’re also completely selling out at the same time " perfectly sums up news outlets today, on both sides.

Tenzin Nordron , 11 hours ago (edited)

When I was a kid, i heard, on live radio broadcast, Oswald shot to death in Dallas Police Station - still think that's a more blatant murder of Witness.

Ricky Milano , 1 week ago

"There isn't the shame of screwing something up like there used to be." - Welcome to Hell everyone, we have jackets!!!

Adrienne Marini , 1 week ago

1:15:32 "There's also people that are like wolves trying to take out that baby joke wandering through the woods." So many good quotes in this podcast.

Major Bloodnok , 6 days ago

"We don't have any institutional respect anymore".. When even the broadsheets knowingly sow falsehoods or subtly mislead the public on a regular basis, you'd better be prepared for the harvest. You never win back respect from someone who's sussed out your con.

[Nov 28, 2019] What is 'Iron Law of Oligarchy'

Notable quotes:
"... The relative structural fluidity in a small-scale democracy succumbs to "social viscosity" in a large-scale organization. According to the "iron law," democracy and large-scale organization are incompatible ..."
Nov 28, 2019 | www.preservearticles.com

The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German syndicalist sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties.

The "iron law of oligarchy" states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies, thus making true democracy practically and theoretically impossible, especially in large groups and complex organizations.

The relative structural fluidity in a small-scale democracy succumbs to "social viscosity" in a large-scale organization. According to the "iron law," democracy and large-scale organization are incompatible.

[Nov 28, 2019] Civil Service is a self-perpetuating oligarchy

Notable quotes:
"... Iron Law of Oligarchy refers to the inherent tendency of all complex organizations to develop a ruling clique of leaders with interests in the organization itself rather than in its official aims. ..."
"... It became difficult for the mass membership to provide any effective counterweight to this professional, entrenched, leadership, the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Aristotle used the term oligarchy as a synonym for rule by the rich. Oligarchy is not always a rule by wealthy people, for which the term is plutocracy . Oligarchy means "the rule of the few" and monarchy means "the rule of the one" ..."
"... Oligarchy can also be compared with aristocracy . In an aristocracy, a small group of wealthy or socially prominent citizens control the government. Members of this high social class claim to be, or are considered by others to be, superior to the other people because of family ties, social rank, wealth, or religious affiliation. ..."
Nov 28, 2019 | www.sociologyindex.com

IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY

Civil Service is a self-perpetuating oligarchy, the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Many writers believe that any political system eventually evolves into iron law of oligarchy. James Madison, the fourth President of the United States said: "Never fear. The iron law of oligarchy always obtains." In iron law of oligarchy, actual differences between viable political rivals are small, the oligarchic elite impose strict limits on what constitutes an 'acceptable' and 'respectable' political position. Iron Law of Oligarchy was first defined by German sociologists like Robert Michels (1876-1936).

According to writers, Zulma Riley, Keith Riley, and Robert Michels, modern Democracy should be considered as elected Oligarchy . They called this theory the iron law of oligarchy. Michels discovered that in the Iron Law of Oligarchy, even in the most egalatarian movements, elites will call most of the shots.

Iron Law of Oligarchy refers to the inherent tendency of all complex organizations to develop a ruling clique of leaders with interests in the organization itself rather than in its official aims.

It became difficult for the mass membership to provide any effective counterweight to this professional, entrenched, leadership, the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Aristotle used the term oligarchy as a synonym for rule by the rich. Oligarchy is not always a rule by wealthy people, for which the term is plutocracy . Oligarchy means "the rule of the few" and monarchy means "the rule of the one".

Such power-sharing from one person to a larger group of persons happened when English nobles got together in 1215 to force King John of England to sign the Magna Carta, a recognition of failure of oligarchy. Magna Carta guaranteed greater rights to greater numbers of people, thus setting the stage for English constitutional monarchy .

Oligarchy can also be compared with aristocracy . In an aristocracy, a small group of wealthy or socially prominent citizens control the government. Members of this high social class claim to be, or are considered by others to be, superior to the other people because of family ties, social rank, wealth, or religious affiliation.

Breaking the iron law of oligarchy: union revitalization in the American labor movement. Voss, Kim and Sherman, Rachel - The American Journal of Sociology [AJS], 106(2), 303 - 49.

ABSTRACT: This article addresses the question of how social movement organizations are able to break out of bureaucratic conservatism. The article concludes by drawing out the theoretical implications of the finding that bureaucratic conservatism can sometimes be overcome in mature social movements .

[Nov 28, 2019] Ukraine vs Iraq

Nov 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bemildred , Nov 28 2019 17:10 utc | 23

Giraldi brings up again the stupidity of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the predictable and predicted results:

Iran May Be the Only Winner in Iraq

[Nov 28, 2019] One of the observable differences between Republican and Democratic Parties in the USA is the difference in the level of authoritarism of the average member of the party., which has certain social implications as for policies that each of the parties favor most when in power

Notable quotes:
"... it's not that fascism is a personality trait, but rather fascism, or more generally right wing populism, is a social phenomenon where some personality traits are weaponised ..."
"... That's a good analogy. But this only means that the financial oligarchy can be a privileged social group crossing racial lines. The term "Jews" as used by fascists was, at least initially, directly at financial oligarchy, where this ethnic group was overrepresented. In general, anti-Semitism can be viewed as a scapegoating, a primitive and misguided protest against the excesses of capitalism. In this sense, "economic crises happen because banks are run by Jews, who are evil or not part of the community" has the real meaning "economic crises happen because banks are run by the financial oligarchy, which is evil or not part of the community." ..."
"... I see Brexit more of a spontaneous protest against neoliberal globalization, which is not that much connected with "conservative cultural values" but with more prosaic things like displacement of workers by foreigners, disappearance of good job due to relentless outsourcing/offshoring, automation and cost-cutting, reduction of national sovereignty (including inability to regulate labor flows) due to EU neoliberal policies, brazen betrayal by the New Labour of working and lower middle class economic and social interests, growth in inequality and gradual slide of the standard of living of working and lower middle class due to the redistribution of wealth up immanent under neoliberalism etc. ..."
"... The same set of reasons which in the USA led to the election of Trump and decimation of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party (Hillary fiasco). After almost 30 years, US workers managed to understand that Clinton's democrats are essentially "wolfs in sheep's clothing" and decided to show them the middle finger, which as a side effect of the two-party system led to the election of Trump. ..."
"... And this process is irreversible, unless Democratic Party changes, and Clinton democrats brass is excluded from the party and sent to the dustbin of history, where they belong. That's why I am skeptical about Dem Party chances in 2020, unless one of the trio Warren/Sanders/Tulsi (who promote some level of changes) is the nominee. The train of history has left the station for the Corporate Democrats, and they are still standing on the old platform, hoping that it returns. ..."
"... And I view the resurgence of the far-right nationalism as a primitive form of social protest, which of course is hijacked, exploited and misdirected by sleek demagogy from the second branch of oligarchy that does not like the results of globalization, and resent FIRE and Silicon Valley branch, in full accordance with the dialectical view on Oligarchy, where with time neoliberal oligarchy inevitably splits and factions start fighting with each other tooth and nail. ..."
Nov 28, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

likbez 11.27.19 at 6:59 am

MisterMr 11.26.19 at 12:50 pm @69

So in the end the problem is, are "loyalty, authority, sanctity" actually fascist values? In my opinion largely yes,

That's a bridge too far. FYI fascism is an ideology of national socialism, or socialism for one privileged and racially defined group (eclectic, but still an ideology), not a system of badly defined personal traits, or values.

Moreover, loyalty (and a certain level of groupthink and conformism) can be legitimately viewed as a precondition of survival of any organized group. Look at religious group that adopt all those three values. Are all of them (or even most of them) fascist?

But one of the observable differences between Republican and Democratic Parties in the USA is the difference in the level of authoritarism of the average member of the party. That's an interesting difference that has certain social implications as for policies that each of the parties favor most when in power (I abstract here from the sad fact that the USA Corporate Dems recently became the second pro-war militarist party, and learned to love intelligence agencies; two things unimaginable in 60th and 70th. )

MisterMr 11.28.19 at 7:30 am 92

@likbez 83

I disagree. Fascism is not an ideology in the way we understand the term, it's just too muddled, and certainly is not socialism for a single ethnic group : Hitler and Mussolini even more used a lot of socialist buzzwords because at the time socialism polled well, but in reality many if not most of their policies were in direct opposition to that of the socialist parties of the time, and they came to power by beating and literally killing socialists.

At best we could say that fascism is closer to ordoliberalism, as they never put in question the role of property, but they saw some behaviors as a form of excessive capitalism. But even there they put it in moral terms, economic crises happen because banks are run by Jews, who are evil or not part of the community, or because of a Bolshevik Jewish American Masonic conspiracy (Mussolini).

What happens IMO is that currently right leaning parties would lose big time if they fought elections on economics, so they have to fight elections on cultural values. If they fight on cultural values they can get the support of many people of the working class who would otherwise give them the middle finger.

At some point the conservative cultural values may become prevalent even on the economic interests, as we see in the case of brexit, but this happens because conservative parties bet on conservative cultural values early on.

When we get to conservative cultural values, these are not really a specific set of values, or actually every society has its own traditional values. The point is that the right wing populists bet on the values that are perceived as traditional in that point of time, because such values have an appeal that goes beyond social class.

The values of "loyalty, authorithy and sacred" are certainly part of the human psyche, because everyone is loyal to something, respects some authority and holds this or that thing as sacred, but if you take them in the abstract they just mean "I'm part of a group and I will follow it", so in the way Haidt seems to discuss them they refer just to the perception of being part of a community and fighting off the outsiders, that dovetails with the weaponisation of traditional cultural values by the right.

So it's not that fascism is a personality trait, but rather fascism, or more generally right wing populism, is a social phenomenon where some personality traits are weaponised .

likbez 11.28.19 at 11:13 pm ( 95 )

MisterMr 11.28.19 at 7:30 am @92

This is a good comment that clarifies your views considerably. And with this clarification, I believe we are generally on the same page. Thank you.

At best, we could say that fascism is closer to ordoliberalism, as they never put in question the role of property, but they saw some behaviors as a form of excessive capitalism. But even there they put it in moral terms; economic crises happen because banks are run by Jews, who are evil or not part of the community, or because of a Bolshevik Jewish American Masonic conspiracy (Mussolini).

That's a good analogy. But this only means that the financial oligarchy can be a privileged social group crossing racial lines. The term "Jews" as used by fascists was, at least initially, directly at financial oligarchy, where this ethnic group was overrepresented. In general, anti-Semitism can be viewed as a scapegoating, a primitive and misguided protest against the excesses of capitalism. In this sense, "economic crises happen because banks are run by Jews, who are evil or not part of the community" has the real meaning "economic crises happen because banks are run by the financial oligarchy, which is evil or not part of the community."

What happens IMO is that, currently, right-leaning parties would lose big time if they fought elections on economics, so they have to fight elections on cultural values. If they fight on cultural values, they can get the support of many people of the working class who would otherwise give them the middle finger.

Not only right-leaning parties. All neoliberal parties. That's why identity politics is as important under neoliberalism as it was under classic national socialism. That's a classic application of "Divide and Conquer" principle in politics, which, in turn, is the Corollary of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, the way the oligarchic elite weakens threats to its rule by distracting population from actual issues, and imposing strict limits on what constitutes an 'acceptable' and 'respectable' political position. Neo-McCarthyism serves the same purpose.

At some point, the conservative cultural values may become prevalent even on the economic interests, as we see in the case of Brexit, but this happens because conservative parties bet on conservative cultural values early on.

I respectfully disagree. I see Brexit more of a spontaneous protest against neoliberal globalization, which is not that much connected with "conservative cultural values" but with more prosaic things like displacement of workers by foreigners, disappearance of good job due to relentless outsourcing/offshoring, automation and cost-cutting, reduction of national sovereignty (including inability to regulate labor flows) due to EU neoliberal policies, brazen betrayal by the New Labour of working and lower middle class economic and social interests, growth in inequality and gradual slide of the standard of living of working and lower middle class due to the redistribution of wealth up immanent under neoliberalism etc.

The same set of reasons which in the USA led to the election of Trump and decimation of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party (Hillary fiasco). After almost 30 years, US workers managed to understand that Clinton's democrats are essentially "wolfs in sheep's clothing" and decided to show them the middle finger, which as a side effect of the two-party system led to the election of Trump.

And this process is irreversible, unless Democratic Party changes, and Clinton democrats brass is excluded from the party and sent to the dustbin of history, where they belong. That's why I am skeptical about Dem Party chances in 2020, unless one of the trio Warren/Sanders/Tulsi (who promote some level of changes) is the nominee. The train of history has left the station for the Corporate Democrats, and they are still standing on the old platform, hoping that it returns.

And I view the resurgence of the far-right nationalism as a primitive form of social protest, which of course is hijacked, exploited and misdirected by sleek demagogy from the second branch of oligarchy that does not like the results of globalization, and resent FIRE and Silicon Valley branch, in full accordance with the dialectical view on Oligarchy, where with time neoliberal oligarchy inevitably splits and factions start fighting with each other tooth and nail.

Russiagate and Ukrainegate (which is essentially Russiagate 2.0) are just two reflections of this internal political struggle within the USA oligarchy. Struggle that in some forms gradually became closer and closer to the civil war (or, at least, The War between Antony and Octavian) for political dominance as views on the ways to overcome the current crisis of neoliberalism in the USA of those two factions became more and more incompatible. Historically national socialism emerged as a way to overcome the crisis of capitalism at the beginning of the XX century.

it's not that fascism is a personality trait, but rather fascism, or more generally right wing populism, is a social phenomenon where some personality traits are weaponised.

I agree. That's an interesting angle to view the current resurgence of the far right. But it does not explain the fact why in the USA many members of trade unions voted for Trump. Also, please take a look at the phenomenon of Tucker Carson.

Thank you again for your insights into this complex social phenomenon.

[Nov 28, 2019] Tulsi is capable of being a good president the first in decades in my opinion

Notable quotes:
"... Starting to remind me more and more of JFK. She's a natural at public speaking; I don't think I've ever seen her lost for words, and while she must have prepared herself for many of these questions. she launches immediately into her response and does not use recovery pauses like "Ummm " that break up the flow of her speech. She responds instantly and seemingly spontaneously, and delivers the whole message as a seamless package. ..."
Nov 25, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Northern Star November 25, 2019 at 11:52 am

https://www.youtube.com/embed/5ktOunMSzzw?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Like Like

Patient Observer November 25, 2019 at 3:47 pm
Did she say she would not vote for impeachment? Up to recently, I thought that, while she was the best of a bunch of fakers, clowns and idiots, her lack of experience and toughness were fatal flaws..

However, her ongoing performances suggests to me that she is capable of being a good president – the first in decades in my opinion.

Like Like

Mark Chapman November 25, 2019 at 5:18 pm
Starting to remind me more and more of JFK. She's a natural at public speaking; I don't think I've ever seen her lost for words, and while she must have prepared herself for many of these questions. she launches immediately into her response and does not use recovery pauses like "Ummm " that break up the flow of her speech. She responds instantly and seemingly spontaneously, and delivers the whole message as a seamless package.

Hillary did her a huge favour by taking her on.

[Nov 28, 2019] Times change and we change with them

Nov 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Jack Dee • 21 hours ago

Interesting to note how the phrase "Deep State" has gone mainstream. 3 years ago it was just a conspiracy theory

[Nov 28, 2019] WSJ story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... does the author think this alleged Lynch-Clinton campaign exchange will be part of the upcoming Horowitz report? ..."
Nov 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Factotum , 27 November 2019 at 11:57 AM

WSJ columnist today raises an old obscure issue today about the Clinton emails and Comey's calculated exoneration of Clinton's culpability.

This story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton. Comey claimed when confronted with this memo, Lynch merely smiled like the Cheshire cat and nothing more was done.

This memo was later discredited as an alleged planted Russian hoax. Yet the memo story is again put in lead position on the opinion pages of the WSJ this very morning. Why was that? Not clear, but does the author think this alleged Lynch-Clinton campaign exchange will be part of the upcoming Horowitz report?

(WSJ: 11/27/19 - Holman Jenkins, Jr. - "Who will turn over the 2016 rocks")

[Nov 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Takes On Kamala On The Debate Stage

Nov 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Victor , 6 days ago

2:42 I find it funny that Kamala said that because if there is any candidate on that stage that "can speak to all people" it's definitely Tulsi. Conservatives actually appreciate and respect Tulsi Gabbard, even tho we disagree with her with just about everything, she actually does a good job speaking to both sides. She's the only candidate that shows respect to conservatives and isn't afraid to go on Fox News. Unlike Kamala. Conservatives do not like her and we know she doesn't care about us.

[Nov 28, 2019] Sanders Calls Out MSNBC s Corporate Ownership -- In Interview On MSNBC HuffPost

Notable quotes:
"... Sanders went on to argue that "pressure has got to be put on media" to cover policy issues like income inequality and poverty more heavily, instead of devoting attention to sensational campaign moments and the state of political horse races. ..."
"... 'You know what, forget the political gossip. Politics is not a soap opera. Talk about the real damn issues facing this country.'" ..."
Nov 28, 2019 | www.huffpost.com

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has not been shy about his disdain for the mainstream media. But the Democratic presidential hopeful has rarely, if ever, articulated it as bluntly as he did in an interview that aired on MSNBC 's " The Rachel Maddow Show " on Friday night. Sanders called out the network for its corporate character in a novel exchange with host Rachel Maddow .

"The American people are sick and tired of establishment politics and economics, and by the way, a little bit tired of corporate media as well," Sanders told Maddow in an interview taped in Burlington, Vermont.

Maddow pressed Sanders for specifics on how he would change the media if he were president. "What's the solution to corporate media?" she asked.

"We have got to think of ways the Democratic party, for a start, starts funding the equivalent of Fox television," Sanders answered. Of course, MSNBC is a corporate media outlet that is widely seen as a Democratic version of Fox News because of the perceived sympathies of many of its political talk shows.

Sanders went on to argue that "pressure has got to be put on media" to cover policy issues like income inequality and poverty more heavily, instead of devoting attention to sensational campaign moments and the state of political horse races.

He then claimed that bringing that pressure to bear would be difficult, since corporate ownership makes it harder for news outlets to cover issues in a way that conflicts with the interests of top executives. "MSNBC is owned by who?" Sanders asked. "Comcast, our overlords," Maddow responded with a chuckle.

"All right, Comcast is not one of the most popular corporations in America, right?" Sanders said. "And I think the American people are going to have to say to NBC and ABC and CBS and CNN, 'You know what, forget the political gossip. Politics is not a soap opera. Talk about the real damn issues facing this country.'"

[Nov 28, 2019] New Study Russian Trolls Did Not Sow Discord - They Influenced No One

Notable quotes:
"... The IRA also bought advertisement to attract more people to its accounts. But the amount it spent was tiny. The final price tag for the 2016 election was $6.5 billion for the presidential and congressional elections combined. The IRA spend a total of $100,000 to promote its own accounts. But only some $45,000 of that was spend before the election. It was 0.000007 cent for every election dollar that was spend during that time. It is statistically impossible that the mostly apolitical IRA spending had any effect on the election. ..."
"... U.S. intelligence services tried to explain that away by claiming that the Russians wanted to "sow discord". There is zero evidence that this was really the case. It is simply an explanation that was made up because they failed to find a better one. ..."
"... FOX News is not pro-Trump because it wants to sow discord. Nor is CNN anti-Trump to serve that purpose. Both are in the business of attracting viewers to - in the end - sell advertisements. People flock to the TV station that fit to the opinion they already have. Both stations promote by and large similar products. ..."
"... The virtual IRA persona worked in a similar ways. They took political positions to attract people who already had a similar one. One persona did that for the left, another one for the right. Neither changed the opinions of their followers. ..."
"... of course it didn't matter, as when you have ignored 9-11 and everything else, you may as well buy into Russia influencing the election with some commercial enterprise like the ira... it's shocking actually, to see how many otherwise intelligent people can be bamboozled so easily via the cia with swamp media ..."
"... Every single mainstream media organization refers to Russian interference in the 2016 election as though it were a proven fact. When the government makes an unfounded assertion, it is reported one time as "government sources say" but every time thereafter it is referenced as fact. If you find an alternative source that contradicts the government lie and try to post it to social media, you will be tagged with a "Warning" that claims your story is "fake news". Orwellian doesn't begin to describe it. ..."
"... Once MSM propagandists broadcast 'Russian meddling' hundreds of thousands of times, their audience becomes impervious to the simplest of logic and barest of facts. ..."
"... The US media is still trying to breathe some life into a case which should have been declared dead on arrival, beltway politics must carry on its partisan shows, with the corporate media trying to whip audiences into a frenzy, over the most ridiculous plots in order to ignore that the body politic is corrupt beyond redemption and is as dead as US democracy. ..."
"... RT may have the insidious effect of injecting bits of reality-oriented counter news to the ubiquitous lame bought propaganda from American mass media. ..."
"... "One hates to be in the position of rooting for the Russians, but the Mueller Switch Project is so distasteful that it is hard not to enjoy the prospect of Mueller having to deal with an actual adversary in court. Meanwhile, this is probably the first time in the history of litigation that a plaintiff (here, prosecutor) has told a court that it may not have obtained good service of process on a defendant that has appeared to defend the case on the merits. Mueller to Court: We didn't really mean it, Judge! We had no idea they might actually show up!" ..."
"... The real sin of Russia, is not, of course, the nonsense election meddling, but its resistance against the US culture of open free markets, its threat of closing its markets to the US, its national doctrine against the Full Spectrum Dominance and US-led neo-liberal order. Its sin is economic nationalism. ..."
Nov 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

New Study: "Russian Trolls" Did Not "Sow Discord" - They Influenced No One

The U.S. has claimed that the Russia government tried to influence the 2016 election through Facebook and Twitter.

Russia supposedly did this through people who worked the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), Russia. The IRA people ran virtual persona on U.S. social networks which pretended to have certain political opinions. It also spent on advertising supposedly to influence the election. U.S. intelligence claimed that the purpose of the alleged Russian influence campaign was to "sow discord" within the United States.

But the IRA had nothing to do with the Russian government. It had no interests in politics. And a new study confirms that the idea that it was "sowing discord" is blatant nonsense.

The Mueller investigation indicted 13 Russian persons and three Russian legal entities over the alleged influence campaign. But, as we wrote at that time, there was more to it than the media reported:

The published indictment gives support to our long held believe that there was no "Russian influence" campaign during the U.S. election. What is described and denounced as such was instead a commercial marketing scheme which ran click-bait websites to generate advertisement revenue and created online crowds around virtual persona to promote whatever its commercial customers wanted to promote. The size of the operation was tiny when compared to the hundreds of millions in campaign expenditures. It had no influence on the election outcome.

The IRA hired people in Leningrad for little money and asked them to open accounts on U.S. social media. The virtual persona they created and ran were to attract as many persons to those accounts as possible. They did that by posting funny dog pictures or by taking strong political positions. They were 'influencers' who sold their customers' products to the people they attracted.

The sole purpose was the same as in any commercial media. Create content to attract 'eyeballs', then sell those eyeballs to advertisers.

As Point 95 of the Mueller indictment said :

Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the [financial] accounts to receive money from real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements on the ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages . Defendants and their co-conspirators typically charged certain U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content on their popular false U.S. persona accounts , including Being Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist.

The was no Russian government campaign to influence the 2016 election. There was only a Russian commercial media enterprise that used sock-puppet accounts with quirky content to attract viewers and sold advertisement space to U.S. companies.

The IRA also bought advertisement to attract more people to its accounts. But the amount it spent was tiny. The final price tag for the 2016 election was $6.5 billion for the presidential and congressional elections combined. The IRA spend a total of $100,000 to promote its own accounts. But only some $45,000 of that was spend before the election. It was 0.000007 cent for every election dollar that was spend during that time. It is statistically impossible that the mostly apolitical IRA spending had any effect on the election.

That the IRA ran a marketing machine and not a political operation was also obvious when one analyzed the content that those sock puppet accounts posted. Most of it was apolitical. Where it was political it covered both sides. Some IRA accounts posted pro-Trump content, others posted anti-Trump stuff. Some were pro-Clinton others against her.

U.S. intelligence services tried to explain that away by claiming that the Russians wanted to "sow discord". There is zero evidence that this was really the case. It is simply an explanation that was made up because they failed to find a better one.

The real answer to the question why different IRA accounts posted on different sides of the political spectrum is that the IRA wanted to maximize its income. One has to cover both sides if one wants to optimize the number of eyeballs one attracts.

FOX News is not pro-Trump because it wants to sow discord. Nor is CNN anti-Trump to serve that purpose. Both are in the business of attracting viewers to - in the end - sell advertisements. People flock to the TV station that fit to the opinion they already have. Both stations promote by and large similar products.

The virtual IRA persona worked in a similar ways. They took political positions to attract people who already had a similar one. One persona did that for the left, another one for the right. Neither changed the opinions of their followers.

A recently published study which looked at Twitter users who followed IRA sock puppet accounts and their content confirms that. It found that the IRA sock puppets had no influence on the opinions of their followers.

The study by U.S. and Danish researchers is headlined Assessing the Russian Internet Research Agency's impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of American Twitter users in late 2017 . It found:

Using Bayesian regression tree models, we find no evidence that interaction with IRA accounts substantially impacted distinctive measures of political attitudes and behaviors over a 1-mo period. We also find that interaction with IRA accounts were most common among respondents with strong ideological homophily within their Twitter network , high interest in politics, and high frequency of Twitter usage. Together, these findings suggest that Russian trolls might have failed to sow discord because they mostly interacted with those who were already highly polarized.

Most hardcore Republicans watch FOX New, most hardcore Democrats watch CNN. Neither TV station changes the core opinions of their viewers. They reinforce them.

The "Russian trolls" were virtual persona created to cover -in total- a wide spectrum. Some persona played hardcore Republican, other played hardcore Democrats. They created and posted content that fit to the role they played. Each attracted followers with opinions similar to those the virtual persona pretended to have. No opinion was changed through those contacts. No discord was sown.

The IRA then sold advertisement space to vendors to monetize all eyeballs its virtual personas attracted.

The U.S. intelligence agencies pretended that the commercial IRA was a political agency. It helped them to sell animosity against Russia and to pretend that Trump was somehow colluding with Putin.

But it all never made any sense.

Posted by b on November 27, 2019 at 18:33 UTC | Permalink

james , Nov 27 2019 18:52 utc | 1

thanks b... of course it didn't matter, as when you have ignored 9-11 and everything else, you may as well buy into Russia influencing the election with some commercial enterprise like the ira... it's shocking actually, to see how many otherwise intelligent people can be bamboozled so easily via the cia with swamp media in tow... again - emptywheel is a good case in point.. complete drivel about russia stole my sandwich on a 24-7 basis.. they have their heads up their asses so far, there is no light able to shine in...
james , Nov 27 2019 18:54 utc | 2
as for twitter and facebook - two other NSA snoop dog outlets - there may be some value in these two creations, mostly with the intel agencies, but it is slim pickins' for most everyone else... the sooner they go the way of the dodo bird, the better..
plantman , Nov 27 2019 18:58 utc | 3
Excellent report.
Thanks.

Now that you've shown that the IRA was not a "Russian influence campaign", I hope you will refute the claims that were made on last Sunday's 60 Minutes
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-hackers-2016-election-democratic-congressional-campaign-committee-60-minutes-2019-11-24/

Title --How Russian intelligence officers interfered in the 2016 election, CBS

Alot of people still think 60 Minutes is a credible news source, but their wild and unsubstantiated claims in this segment really cast doubt on whether they can trusted or not.

Charles Dunaway , Nov 27 2019 19:18 utc | 4
Every single mainstream media organization refers to Russian interference in the 2016 election as though it were a proven fact. When the government makes an unfounded assertion, it is reported one time as "government sources say" but every time thereafter it is referenced as fact. If you find an alternative source that contradicts the government lie and try to post it to social media, you will be tagged with a "Warning" that claims your story is "fake news". Orwellian doesn't begin to describe it.
jeestun , Nov 27 2019 19:26 utc | 5
Once MSM propagandists broadcast 'Russian meddling' hundreds of thousands of times, their audience becomes impervious to the simplest of logic and barest of facts.

Science.

Jay , Nov 27 2019 19:27 utc | 6
"Most hardcore Republicans watch FOX New, most hardcore Democrats watch CNN."

No, most hard core Democrats are repulsed by CNN. The Democrats who watch CNN, and believe it, this goes for NPP, the NY Times, the New Yorker, and MSNBC, are Democratic Party loyalists. There's a big difference.

The first is set of people largely loyal to the party of FDR, and the other is a group of corporatists--largely loyal to big businesses like JP-Morgan Chase, Amazon, and many military contractors.

Lawrence Magnuson , Nov 27 2019 19:45 utc | 7
I watched a bit belatedly the 60 Minutes affair on the link provided. As the video was unusually very slow to appear, I read the text and then started looking around for when it was posted. Unbelievable. New stuff? I wrongly thought this had to be an old, superannuated piece. @emptywheel the producer or just the muse? This sort of nails down the coffin lid on a free media for me. And for you. We're in a very bad place.
uncle tungsten , Nov 27 2019 20:04 utc | 10
Lawrence Magnuson #7

Did you refer to Marcy Wheeler who scribbles the emptywheel blog. That gal is all rim and no spokes. The entire site is obsessive fantasising, Russia hating, Trump loathing to attract eyeballs and sell patreon donations.

Marcy couldn't fart and chew gum at the same time.

Cliff , Nov 27 2019 20:17 utc | 11
@b: Sorry b, but I don't buy it. Running a commercial scheme by posting *highly* political memes in a *foreign* country, such as promoting secession of Texas and California or inciting race tension, simply isn't a wise idea. Even if it weren't meant political, it still was political. Cat memes would have been a different story.
karlof1 , Nov 27 2019 20:32 utc | 13
Cliff @11 clearly falls off by failing to note b's and the study's major point--the Russian Government in no way meddled in the 2016 election. IRA as the commercial entity that didn't either has zero links to said government.
William Gruff , Nov 27 2019 20:32 utc | 14
It is funny how Cliff @11 apparently believes that commercial exploitation is innocent, but efforts at political influence are sinister.

This disorder is part and parcel of the disease that is destroying western culture. The total loss of perspective is also one of the key symptoms of the hysteria that is clearly still gripping the West.

I wonder if this is something that the West can ever possibly recover from? I figured by now the hysteria would have burned itself out, but here it still seems to be going strong.

pretzelattack , Nov 27 2019 20:33 utc | 15
uh cliff, what "highly political memes". 100k spent on pictures of kermit the frog hand puppets or "buff bernie" is not highly political, and even if they were, they influenced nobody. it's all horseshit.
bevin , Nov 27 2019 20:42 utc | 16
Cliff@11

It might not have been wise but it is obviously what happened.The important point is that there is not the slightest suggestion of there being any evidence that the Russian state was involved.

To put the matter in context: hundreds of other sets of influencers did what the IRA did but because none of them could be associated in any way with Russia their, collectively order of magnitude more important efforts, most of them pushing Clinton who was thought to be a clear favourite, but their work goes unanalysed.
Not that there is any evidence of the IRA's connection with the Kremlin except that it is located not in Moscow but Petrograd, where Putin is from. And that the hustler running the organisation is said to have supplied sandwiches to meetings in the Kremlin -- hence the media's coinage "Putin's Chef!"

b in this post is hammering yet one more nail into the coffin of Russiagate, there can't be much more room on the lid for more. And there isn't much room left in the coffin either-it already contains half of the Democratic Party, several presidential candidates, poor old Marcy wheeler and the entire Mainstream Media. High time it was six feet under.

S.O. , Nov 27 2019 20:54 utc | 18
Oh Noes!

You mean the russian click bait add spam farm, that looks and behaves like an add spam farm, which everyone with a functioning brain in their skulls said is an add spam farm... might just turn out to behave like an actual add spam farm?

Well, colour me amazed. ..it's like no one remembered geocities pop up storms or something.

Allen , Nov 27 2019 20:57 utc | 19
The US media is still trying to breathe some life into a case which should have been declared dead on arrival, beltway politics must carry on its partisan shows, with the corporate media trying to whip audiences into a frenzy, over the most ridiculous plots in order to ignore that the body politic is corrupt beyond redemption and is as dead as US democracy.

Is Trump a Putin stooge? Let's 'investigate' or continually mu(e)ll over this possibility even more! Meanwhile, the stooges in Washington we are instructed to call 'our representatives' remain bipartisan in pursuing the dictatorial goals of class elites, no matter which CEO is temporarily managing affairs for the Fortune 500.

Who needs Russian meddling in an electoral process that means next to nothing when it comes to affecting in the slightest the homegrown depravity of our oligarchy?

We still have plenty of Dem Party hacks telling us in the most convoluted language what to think about a report vomited out by a professional liar (See: Mueller Iraq War Crimes for but one example of Mueller's long and sordid career) and we are suppose to believe any of this? Oh and let's see we are suppose to care that an orange-haired, spray tanned criminal buffoon won the Kabuki (s)election in Potemkin Empire against the insanely corrupted and proven War Criminal Donkey Queen Bee? You just have to wonder how much per word these pundits are paid to pump out their bilge?

The entire "Russiagate" smokescreen is a perfect example of how propaganda works. Accuse your "enemy" of the very thing you have been doing in plain sight so that when accusations are levied against you it will be harder to make them stick- keep that external enemy front and center so that the real enemy within remains hidden.

To believe that the Mueller report ever was anything than a wax show piece in a stale play one must put aside all the obvious items such as- 1) Zero evidence; 2) US elections are already rigged by the US elites before a single vote is cast; 3) The US has been tampering in just about every countries elections for decades overtly and covertly; AND 4) Recent attempts BY THE US to ACTUALLY tamper in Russian elections through the ever-handy NED.

There is no other country that intervenes in the political affairs of foreign states so directly, regularly and shamelessly as the United States. American foreign policy is one massive intervention in the politics of other countries, running the gamut from propaganda, destabilization, financing of opposition parties, electoral fraud and coups to military bombardment and occupation.

Professor Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University assembled a database documenting as many as 81 occasions between 1946 and 2000 when Washington interfered in elections in other countries.

There is zero solid evidence that Russia "meddled" in the US elections. It is all speculation and innuendo. Even if one were to blindly assume that the stories were accurate, whatever Russia may or may not have done pales in comparison to the operations of US intelligence agencies all over the world, including within the United States itself, not to mention the billions of dollars spent by the corporate and financial elite to manipulate US elections and determine their outcome.

The claim, moreover, that Russian Twitter and Facebook posts are responsible for social discontent and "disruptions in the democracy" of the United States -- one of the most unequal countries in the world -- is beyond ludicrous.

Andrea Sutton , Nov 27 2019 21:39 utc | 20
I didn't believe that the Russians interfered with the election anyway, but this exposition of the raw data used by the intell. services as a basis for promulgating the fiction, is fascinating and hilarious if the consequencies hadn't been so dire. The basis is so utterly mundane and so "American" if you forgive my saying so, I mean the IRA was just trying to make money. I suppose the intell. services knew this, knew they were peddling lies as Pompeo says they are taught to do. All for what? Not just to hurt Trump. No, to feed a McCarthyite fear to keep the endless wars going. Evil.
Trailer Trash , Nov 27 2019 21:57 utc | 21
The "Russia Stole Our Election" story is wearing thin? Fortunately a UK stink tank has discovered a "Gun Gap" to scare us with:

British ground forces would be "comprehensively outgunned" in a conflict with Russia in Eastern Europe, according to a defence think-tank.

Research by the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) found that the Army, as well as Nato allies, has a "critical shortage" of artillery and ammunition.

The research comes ahead of a meeting of Nato leaders in London next week to mark the 70th anniversary of the alliance.

I know we are supposed to believe that US is so wonderful and exceptional that Russia, China, Iran, etc. all want to conquer it. But why would they want to? What would they do with a place like Detroit, Camden, and all the rest of the broken down infrastructure?

Trailer Trash , Nov 27 2019 22:00 utc | 22
I meant to add that there is an easy solution to the scary new Gun Gap: don't attack Russia (or anywhere else).
Clueless Joe , Nov 27 2019 22:02 utc | 23
"British ground forces would be "comprehensively outgunned" in a conflict with Russia in Eastern Europe"

So fucking what, if that were actually true? UK is a group of islands in NW Europe, it's not Poland, and UK hasn't any business to have troops in Eastern Europe to begin with; meanwhile, the European part of Russia is very much a big chunk of Eastern Europe; odds are that they'd have their military ready to defend and fight there. These useless hacks should come back only once they can claim that the British forces would be outgunned in a conflict with Russia in Essex; that would be worrying.

Robert Snefjella , Nov 27 2019 22:10 utc | 25
But there is a sense in which Russia may have subtly influenced the election. For any well informed American - and in my opinion finding such is more likely than say spotting a Sasquatch - the varied political presentations of say RT may have the insidious effect of injecting bits of reality-oriented counter news to the ubiquitous lame bought propaganda from American mass media.

And the Putin-effect over the last two decades too may be quite insidious: after all, in the realm dominated by political banality, lies, stupidity and bad acting, an articulate, and in practical terms effective, political leader of a major country is a rather extraordinary phenomenon. Such things are possible, discover wayward Americans! But what explains its near complete absence in our exceptional indispensable nation?

Putin and Russia: the success that haunts us.

karlof1 , Nov 27 2019 22:51 utc | 29
Obama's D-Party set up what the following article describes which I provide as a marker of that party's leadership's immoral mindset. Imagine what BigLie Media would do if this was done in Russia or China! We'd read/hear/see all about it 24/7/365.
Jackrabbit , Nov 27 2019 23:13 utc | 30
b neglected to mention a few things:

1) USA interferes in other countries elections all the time. Recent and very stark examples: Bolivia and Venezuela.

2) USA's broken, money-based electoral system practically invites "interference"/"meddling" by powerful interests and skews the results toward candidates that will serve powerful interests that can afford to support the electoral farce that provides an illusion of democracy.

3) Pro-Israel Zionists and Zionist organizations, like Haim Saban, Sheldon Adelson, and AIPAC, contribute huge sums to the duopoly that controls US politics. Their contribution is vastly greater than a few facebook ads.

4) The vast majority of the "Russian oligarchs" that are supposed to have influenced Trump are Jewish with closer ties to Israel than Russia.

!!

Montreal , Nov 27 2019 23:19 utc | 31
Bevin @ 17
Evgeny Progozhin - supposedly behind IRA - was - and maybe still is - VVP's chef. I think it is probably him who started that joke about his being a "hot-dog salesman" in St P. But he was much more than that.

More importantly he was the man who re-introduced fine restaurants to St Petersburg. In the nineties he opened several very good restaurants in a city which hadn't seen a decent meal since the Revolution - a bit like England before it joined the Common Market. He was a great perfectionist with a tremendous eye for detail. His difficulty was in finding staff in a city which had no history of training staff beyond the very low levels demanded by the Intourist hotels - and as soon as he trained them they were poached by would-be rivals, so often he gave the top places to French and English specialists.

The very best of his restaurants was the Old Customs House on the University Embankment. I haven't been there for a couple of years but in its hey-day it could match any restaurant in Europe.

He would also fly his staff to other Russian cities to lay on banquets for the President. He then went into mass catering and by the sounds of it different fields altogether. An admirable man, one of those who helped Russia into the 21st Century.

DougDiggler , Nov 27 2019 23:52 utc | 34
Let's compare the IRA's lame content to what is being emitted by the thousands of 'bots in Bolivia.
the pessimist , Nov 28 2019 2:06 utc | 36
Fresh Air has an interview with Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch of Fusion GPS posted on their page . There seems to be a full court press on to solidify the 'consensus' narrative, with stories on BBC and other main US news outlets, including many on NPR, 'explaining' various aspects of the Russophobic/Sinophibic view of the world, and attacking as 'conspiracy theories' that are proven false (mainly by way of reciting innuendo and accusations by anonymous sources and professional liars) any counter narratives.

In my experience, even if people retain some skepticism, they assume the main points of the narrative as proven fact to the extent that it is nearly impossible to have a reasoned discussion about the basic assumptions of the narrative.

I see that Chrystia Freeland has been appointed deputy prime minister of Canada.

Dr George W. Oprisko , Nov 28 2019 2:21 utc | 37
I am amazed.......... that one and all haven't noticed the inability of the USG to deal with any.... and I mean any.... issues affecting the people of the USA.

INDY

FSD , Nov 28 2019 2:32 utc | 38
Examining direct state-actor involvement would be one thing. But this 'study' is little more than a sui generis, slow motion ethnic slur. What about Russian-American US citizens in Boston who happen to tweet benign and banal messages about nothing in particular? Can we get cooties from them as well? Does it come thru the WIFI?

The sizable Russian-American population has been absolutely stoic during this whole protracted episode. I can think of many other groups who'd be screaming bloody murder.

As for the IRA indictments, they were a sham from top to bottom. Here's the Powerline blog:

"One hates to be in the position of rooting for the Russians, but the Mueller Switch Project is so distasteful that it is hard not to enjoy the prospect of Mueller having to deal with an actual adversary in court. Meanwhile, this is probably the first time in the history of litigation that a plaintiff (here, prosecutor) has told a court that it may not have obtained good service of process on a defendant that has appeared to defend the case on the merits. Mueller to Court: We didn't really mean it, Judge! We had no idea they might actually show up!"

None other than Michael Moore is another IRA victim. So much for Trump-Russia.

https://fullspectrumdominoes.wordpress.com/2019/06/28/7864/

JW , Nov 28 2019 3:01 utc | 39
#21

"I know we are supposed to believe that US is so wonderful and exceptional that Russia, China, Iran, etc. all want to conquer it. But why would they want to? What would they do with a place like Detroit, Camden, and all the rest of the broken down infrastructure?"

Also, the greatest political system ever conceived in mankind according the Americans somehow can just simply crumble in the face of a tiny bit of alleged foreign money.

bevin , Nov 28 2019 3:12 utc | 40
The proverb " A dog will return to its vomit" obviously applies to New Yorker writers too. Jane Mayer, author of a famously gushing fanmag feature on Christopher Steele is at it again. https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/59965-focus-the-inside-story-of-christopher-steeles-trump-dossier
lysias , Nov 28 2019 3:28 utc | 41
Jane Mayer used to write good journalism. Her book "Dark Money" from a couple of years ago was an eye-opener. What happened to her? I guess the same question could be asked about Marcy Wheeler. And what happened to Democracy Now and Amy Goodman?
Innocent Civilian , Nov 28 2019 3:36 utc | 42
The real sin of Russia, is not, of course, the nonsense election meddling, but its resistance against the US culture of open free markets, its threat of closing its markets to the US, its national doctrine against the Full Spectrum Dominance and US-led neo-liberal order. Its sin is economic nationalism.

Its sin is taking shares of Christopher Steele's in Gazprom by force, who had them by tax fraud in the first place. Its sin is allowing Government of Russia holding more than half of the shares of Gazprom. Its sin is becoming self-reliant in oil and gas (and recently food thanks to sanctions), backed with a substantial military force. A huge country that can industrialize its resources and that can defend itself and deter any aggression on her soil. A recipe for nightmare for neo-liberals.

Since the Americans voted for a president who is against the neo-liberal order and promotes nationalism, they are on fire and afraid they are going to have to take it by four more years.

[Nov 27, 2019] Obama Admits He Would Speak Up Only To Stop Bernie Sanders Nomination

Highly recommended!
The question is who will listed to Obama after his "change we can believe in" betrayal. Also is not he a war criminal? Obama election was probably the most slick false flag operation even conducted by intelligence agencies. Somebody created for him complexly fake but still plausible legend.
That Obama desire to interfere in 2020 election also shows gain that that he a regular completely corrupt Clinton neoliberal. The worst king of neoliberals, wolfs in sheep's clothing.
And the fact that CIA democrats dominates the Democratic Party actually is another reason from "Demexit" from the Democratic party of workers and lower middle class. The sad fact that the USA Corporate Dems recently became the second pro-war militarist party, and learned to love intelligence agencies; two things unimaginable in 60th and 70th.
Notable quotes:
"... Image source: Getty ..."
Nov 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

As we noted earlier, a bombshell admission from Politico today exploring Obama's substantial behind the scenes influence as Democratic kingmaker : included in the lengthy profile on the day-to-day of the former president's personal office in the West End of Washington D.C. and his meeting with the field of Democratic candidates, is the following gem :

"Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him."

Image source: Getty

And crucially, when asked about that prior statement reported in Politico, an Obama spokesperson did not deny that he said it.

The frank admission underscores what many independent analysts, not to mention prior damning WikiLeaks DNC disclosures , have pointed out for years: that the establishment controlling the Democratic party has continuously sought to rig the system against Bernie.

"Since losing 2016, Dem elites have waged a prolonged effort to stop Bernie. Bernie is the obvious answer to the neoliberal Clinton-Obama legacy voters rejected..." journalist Aaron Maté observed of the Politico quote.

Here's the stunning and deeply revealing section in full, which began by outlining Obama's 'advice-giving' throughout meetings with Democrat contenders including Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and others :

Publicly, he has been clear that he won't intervene in the primary for or against a candidate , unless he believed there was some egregious attack. "I can't even imagine with this field how bad it would have to be for him to say something," said a close adviser. Instead, he sees his role as providing guardrails to keep the process from getting too ugly and to unite the party when the nominee is clear.

There is one potential exception: Back when Sanders seemed like more of a threat than he does now, Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him. (Asked about that, a spokesperson for Obama pointed out that Obama recently said he would support and campaign for whoever the Democratic nominee is.)

And a further deeply revealing but more laughable quote comes later as follows: "Obama designed his post-presidency in 2016, at a time when he believed Hillary Clinton would win and Biden would be out of politics." So the reality is... far from the idea that the Dem elites would back the actual nominee the party puts forward, clearly the die has already been cast against Bernie just like the last time around against Hillary in 2016.

Politico author Ryan Lizza later in the story quotes a "close family friend," who described that Obama's "politics are not strong left of center."

"I mean it's left, but he's nowhere near where some of the candidates are currently sitting, at least when he got himself elected," the source claimed.

This means in the mind of Obama and other top party influencers and kingmakers, Bernie and other popular outliers like Tulsi Gabbard have already long been sidelined. Tulsi, it should also be noted, is one of the couple of candidates who did not bother to stop by Obama's D.C. office for a 'blessing' and advice.

[Nov 27, 2019] Could your county use some extra money?

Highly recommended!
Nov 27, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

catherine , 26 November 2019 at 05:16 PM

Could your county use some extra money?

According to the US Census there are 3031 counties in the US.
If we redirected the $3.8 billion plus the 500,000,000 for missile defense that we give Israel to US counties budgets each county would receive about
$ 1.3 million.

If we included the $1.2 billion each we give to Egypt and Jordon for signing the Carter peace treaty with Israel that figure increases to $2.3 million for each county.

While $2.3 million may be a small figure for counties with metro cities, it would be a large amount for the majority of counties across the nation.

Since aid to Israel alone accounts for 50% of US foreign aid who would oppose this re direct of taxpayers money...besides the politicians...and how would the politicians explain their opposition to the districts they supposedly represent?

[Nov 27, 2019] The influence of some Eastern European émigrés on American foreign policy has been uniformly deleterious

Notable quotes:
"... Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins. ..."
"... Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics ..."
"... "The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration. It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks. ..."
"... Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe" to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East -- and in D.C. -- certainly looked like a distant but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy agenda on questions that would require adult supervision." ..."
"... Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the crazy banner. ..."
"... To a great degree American foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions inherited from Old Europe. ..."
Nov 08, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) , 06 November 2019 at 04:07 PM

Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins.

Could it be my Russian paranoia. Nah, I am being unreasonable -- those people never had a bad feeling towards Trump's attempts to boost Russian-American relations with Michael Flynn spearheading this effort.

Jokes aside, however, I can only imagine how SVR and GRU are enjoying the spectacle. I can only imagine how many "free" promotions and awards can be attach to this thing as a free ride.

English Outsider -> Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) ... , 07 November 2019 at 09:19 AM
Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics. I thought it had been an American Admiral. I had no luck finding a reference so I googled it. Still no joy with the American admiral, but the list thrown up had near the top of it this informative quote from Patrick Bahzad.

"The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration. It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe" to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East -- and in D.C. -- certainly looked like a distant but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy agenda on questions that would require adult supervision."

Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the crazy banner. Or, to put it more soberly, form part of the neocon wing of those administrations. Though I, as an outside observer, might be prejudiced here because I happen not to get on very well with Brzezinski and his copious output.

Allowing for that prejudice, which I confess runs very deep, I still think that to an extent American foreign policy has been hijacked by Eastern European emigres who themselves retain some of the prejudices and mindset of another age and place.

Looking at it from afar, the influence of some Eastern European emigres on American foreign policy has been uniformly deleterious. And that from a long way back and no matter whether those emigres are in Washington or Tel Aviv.

It cannot but help be distorting, that influence. It's not merely that unexamined Russophobia is embedded in the DNA of many Eastern Europeans. There's a narrow minded focus on aggressive Machtpolitik, bred from centuries of violent territorial disputes with neighbors.

That, transferred to the world stage as it must be when it infects the foreign policy of the United States - because that is a country that cannot but help be at the centre of the world stage - distorts US foreign policy. To a great degree American foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions inherited from Old Europe.

In the most famous of his speeches Churchill spoke of the time when, as he hoped, "the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

Let the historians dispute as they will, that is what happened. And continued to happen for half a century and more. But there was a price few noticed. The New World might have stepped forward to rescue the old, but it carried back from that old world a most destructive freight.

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> English Outsider ... , 07 November 2019 at 01:04 PM
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
David Habakkuk -> Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) ... , 07 November 2019 at 01:15 PM
Andrei and EO,

I wrote what follows before reading Andrei's response to EO, but do not see much reason to change what I had written.

When in 1988 I ended up working at BBC Radio 'Analysis' programme because it was impossible to interest any of my old television colleagues in the idea that one might go to Moscow and talk to some of the people involved in the Gorbachev 'new thinking', my editor, Caroline Anstey, was an erstwhile aide to Jim Callaghan, the former Labour Prime Minister.

As a result of his involvement with the Trilateral Commission, she had a fascinating anecdote about what one of his fellow members, the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, said about another, Zbigniew Brzezinski: that he could never work out which of his country's two traditional enemies his Polish colleague hated most.

Almost a generation after hearing her say this, in December 2013, I read an article Brzezinski published in the 'Financial Times, headlined 'Russia, like Ukraine, will become a real democracy.'

(See https://www.ft.com/content/5ac2df1e-6103-11e3-b7f1-00144feabdc0 .)

Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription wall, but it clearly expresses its author's fundamental belief that after all those years of giving Russia the 'spinach' treatment -- to use Victoria Nuland's term -- it would finally 'knuckle under', and become a quiescent satellite of the West.

An ironic sidelight on this is provided in a recent article by a lady called Anna Mahjar-Barducci on the 'MEMRI' site -- which actually has some very useful material on matters to do with Russia for those of us with no knowledge of the language -- headlined 'Contemporary Russian Thinkers Series -- Part I -- Renowned Russian Academic Sergey Karaganov On Russia And Democracy.'

Its subject, who I remember well from the days when he was very much one of the 'new thinkers', linked to it on his own website, clearly pleased at what he saw as an accurate and informed discussion of his ideas.

(See http://karaganov.ru/en/news/534 )

There is an obvious risk of succumbing to facetiousness, but sometimes what one thinks are essential features of an argument can be best brought out at the risk of caricaturing it.

It seems to me that some of the central themes of Karaganov's writing over the past few years -- doubly interesting, because his attacks on conventional Western orthodoxies are very far from silly, and because he is a kind of 'panjandrum' of a significant section of the Russian foreign policy élite -- may be illuminated in this way.

So, attempting to link his Russian concerns to British and American ones, some central contentions of his writings might be put as follows:

'"Government of the people, by the people, for the people' looked a lovely idea, back in 1989. But if in practice "by the people" means a choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn, how can it be "for the people?"

'Moreover, it turned out that our "deplorables" were always right, against us 'intellectuals', in grasping that, with "Russophobes" running Western policy, a "real democracy" would simply guarantee that we remained as impotent and humiliated as people like Brzezinski clearly always wanted us to be.

'Our past, and our future, both in terms of alliances and appropriate social and political systems, are actually "Eurasian": a 'hybrid' state, whose potential greatest advantage actually should be seen as successfully synthesising different inheritances.

'As the need for this kind of synthesis is a normal condition, with which most peoples have to reckon, this gives us a very real potential advantage over people in the West, who, like the communists against whom I rebelled, believe that there is one path along which all of humanity must -- and can -- go.'

At the risk of over-interpreting, I might add the following conclusion:

'Of course, precisely what this analysis does not mean is that we are anti-European -- simply that we cannot simply come to Europe, Europe come some way to meet us.

'Given time, Helmut Schmidt's fellow countrymen, as also de Gaulle's, may very well realise that their future does not lie in an alliance with a coalition of people like Brzezinski and traditional "Russophobes" from the "Anglosphere".

'And likewise, it does not lie with the kind of messianic universalist "liberalism" -- and, in relation to some of the SJC and LGBT obsessions, one might say "liberalism gone bonkers" -- which Putin criticized in his interview with the "Financial Times" back in June.

(This is also behind a subscription wall, but is available at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60836 . It is well worth reading in full.)

An obvious possibility implicit in the argument is that, if indeed the continental Europeans see sense, then the coalition of traditional 'Anglophobes' and the 'insulted and injured' or the 'borderlands' may find itself marginalized, and indeed, on the 'dustbin of history' to which Trotsky once referred.

Of course, I have no claims to be a Russianist, and my reading of Karaganov may be quite wrong.

But I do strongly believe that very superficial readings of what was happening when I was working in the 'Analysis' office, back in 1988-9, have done an immense disservice alike to Britain and the United States.

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> English Outsider ... , 07 November 2019 at 01:04 PM
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> David Habakkuk ... , 07 November 2019 at 01:33 PM
David, Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. But the events of two days ago with Putin and Lavrov being personally present at the unveiling of the monument to Evgenii Primakov in a front of Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs speaks, in fact screams, volumes. You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as I type this and it means that the West "lost" (quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose) Russia and it can be "thankful" for that to a so called Russia Studies field in the West which was primarily shaped and then turned into the wasteland, in large part thanks to influx of East European "scholars" and some "Russian" dissidents which achieved their objectives by drawing a caricature. They succeeded and Russia had it with the West.
Vig -> David Habakkuk ... , 08 November 2019 at 08:45 AM
DH, appreciate your comment. Haven't read the MEMRI paper yet. Scanned the first page though.

Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. ... You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as I type this and it means that the West "lost" (quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose)

Well, two things sticked out for me during Tumps reelection campain.
1) on the surface he stated, he wanted closer relations to Russia. Looked at more closely, as should be expected, maybe. They were ambigous. If I may paraphrase it colloguially: I meet them and, believe me, if I don't get that beautiful deal, i'll be out of the door the next second.
2) he promised to be enigmatic, compared to earlier American administrations. In other words, hard to read or to predict. Guess one better is as dealmaker. But in the larger intelligence field? Enigmatic may well be a commonplace. No?

Otherwise, Andrei, I would appreciate your further elaboration on Karaganov as opportunist.

That said, would you please explain why

Petrel -> Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) ... , 07 November 2019 at 11:03 AM
Andrei: Strzok and Pientka come from Galicia -- the westernmost portion of what is now Ukraine -- that was acquired by Empress Maria Theresa in the mid - 18th century.
Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> Petrel... , 07 November 2019 at 01:06 PM
Andrei: Strzok and Pientka come from Galicia

Well, that explains a lot. Not all of it, but a lot.

David Habakkuk -> Petrel... , 07 November 2019 at 01:25 PM
Petrel,

I have been curious about precisely where both Srzok and Pientka came from, but have not had time to do any serious searches.

What is the actual evidence that they have Galician origins?

And, if they do, what are these?

I would of course automatically tend to assume that Polish names mean that their origins are Polish.

But then, if this is so, why are they enthusiastically collaborating with 'Banderista' Ukrainians?

It has long been a belief of mine that one of Stalin's great mistakes was to attempt to incorporate Galicia into the empire he was creating.

Had he returned it to Poland, the architects of the Volhynia massacres of Poles -- as also of the massacres of Jews in Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg -- could have gone back to their old habits of assassinating Polish policemen.

Petrel -> David Habakkuk ... , 07 November 2019 at 05:50 PM
Andrei Martyanov & David Habakuk:

I first picked up the Galician connection in an article by Scott Humor: " North America is a land run by Galician zombies " -- published by The Saker on July 4, 2018. It seems that Galicians, especially those that arrived after WWII, migrate into security positions such as ICE / FBI / NSA etc. It may have to do with a family history of work in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Regrettably, I am not from Eastern Europe and cannot help you further about the Bortnicks, the Gathkes, Buchtas, and so on.

[Nov 27, 2019] Obama Admits He Would Speak Up Only To Stop Bernie Sanders Nomination

Highly recommended!
The question is who will listed to Obama after his "change we can believe in" betrayal. Also is not he a war criminal? Obama election was probably the most slick false flag operation even conducted by intelligence agencies. Somebody created for him complexly fake but still plausible legend.
That Obama desire to interfere in 2020 election also shows gain that that he a regular completely corrupt Clinton neoliberal. The worst king of neoliberals, wolfs in sheep's clothing.
And the fact that CIA democrats dominates the Democratic Party actually is another reason from "Demexit" from the Democratic party of workers and lower middle class. The sad fact that the USA Corporate Dems recently became the second pro-war militarist party, and learned to love intelligence agencies; two things unimaginable in 60th and 70th.
Notable quotes:
"... Image source: Getty ..."
Nov 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

As we noted earlier, a bombshell admission from Politico today exploring Obama's substantial behind the scenes influence as Democratic kingmaker : included in the lengthy profile on the day-to-day of the former president's personal office in the West End of Washington D.C. and his meeting with the field of Democratic candidates, is the following gem :

"Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him."

Image source: Getty

And crucially, when asked about that prior statement reported in Politico, an Obama spokesperson did not deny that he said it.

The frank admission underscores what many independent analysts, not to mention prior damning WikiLeaks DNC disclosures , have pointed out for years: that the establishment controlling the Democratic party has continuously sought to rig the system against Bernie.

"Since losing 2016, Dem elites have waged a prolonged effort to stop Bernie. Bernie is the obvious answer to the neoliberal Clinton-Obama legacy voters rejected..." journalist Aaron Maté observed of the Politico quote.

Here's the stunning and deeply revealing section in full, which began by outlining Obama's 'advice-giving' throughout meetings with Democrat contenders including Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and others :

Publicly, he has been clear that he won't intervene in the primary for or against a candidate , unless he believed there was some egregious attack. "I can't even imagine with this field how bad it would have to be for him to say something," said a close adviser. Instead, he sees his role as providing guardrails to keep the process from getting too ugly and to unite the party when the nominee is clear.

There is one potential exception: Back when Sanders seemed like more of a threat than he does now, Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him. (Asked about that, a spokesperson for Obama pointed out that Obama recently said he would support and campaign for whoever the Democratic nominee is.)

And a further deeply revealing but more laughable quote comes later as follows: "Obama designed his post-presidency in 2016, at a time when he believed Hillary Clinton would win and Biden would be out of politics." So the reality is... far from the idea that the Dem elites would back the actual nominee the party puts forward, clearly the die has already been cast against Bernie just like the last time around against Hillary in 2016.

Politico author Ryan Lizza later in the story quotes a "close family friend," who described that Obama's "politics are not strong left of center."

"I mean it's left, but he's nowhere near where some of the candidates are currently sitting, at least when he got himself elected," the source claimed.

This means in the mind of Obama and other top party influencers and kingmakers, Bernie and other popular outliers like Tulsi Gabbard have already long been sidelined. Tulsi, it should also be noted, is one of the couple of candidates who did not bother to stop by Obama's D.C. office for a 'blessing' and advice.

[Nov 27, 2019] Obama-Holdover Heading Russia-Probe Office Under Investigation For Illegally Leaked Classified Document by Christopher Hull

Notable quotes:
"... According to a Nov. 21 report by independent journalist Sara Carter, U.S. Attorney John Durham is questioning personnel in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA). ONA awarded about $1 million in contracts to FBI informant Stefan Halper, who appears to have played a key role in alleged U.S. intelligence agency spying on 2016 Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. ..."
"... In addition, however, a court filing indicates that ONA's director, James H. Baker, "is believed to be the person who illegally leaked the transcript of Mr. Flynn's calls" to The Washington Post. ..."
"... The filing adds that Baker "was Halper's 'handler'" at ONA. Moreover, according to the court filing, the tasks assigned to "known long-time operative for the CIA/FBI" Halper "seem to have included slandering Mr. Flynn with accusations of having an affair with a young professor (a British national of Russian descent)." ..."
"... The filing notes that Flynn's defense team has requested phone records for then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper , likewise in order to confirm contacts with Ignatius. The filing singles out records for Jan. 10, 2017, when, according to the filing, "Clapper told Ignatius in words to the effect of 'take the kill shot on Flynn.'" ..."
"... The Pentagon's current inspector general has already found that Baker's office "did not maintain documentation of the work performed by Professor Halper or any communication that ONA personnel had with Professor Halper." As a result, according to the inspector general, ONA staff "could not provide sufficient documentation that Professor Halper conducted all of his work in accordance with applicable laws and regulations." ..."
"... Acting Pentagon Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in November 2017 started an investigation into charges that Baker retaliated against a whistleblower who red-flagged "rigged" contracts, including Halper's. Another $11 million in contracts under scrutiny went to the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG), which is run by a schoolmate of Chelsea Clinton, whom she has referred to as her "best friend." ..."
"... The House Judiciary and Oversight committees -- which interviewed almost two dozen witnesses -- concluded in December 2018 that the Obama Justice Department treated Trump and Clinton unequally, affording Clinton and her associates extraordinary accommodations, while potentially abusing surveillance powers to investigate Trump's associates. ..."
Nov 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Christopher Hull via The Epoch Times,

The Obama holdover heading the Pentagon office reportedly under investigation by the U.S. attorney who is conducting the criminal probe of the Trump -- Russia investigation was accused of leaking a classified document, in a recent court filing for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

The connection hasn't been previously reported.

According to a Nov. 21 report by independent journalist Sara Carter, U.S. Attorney John Durham is questioning personnel in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA). ONA awarded about $1 million in contracts to FBI informant Stefan Halper, who appears to have played a key role in alleged U.S. intelligence agency spying on 2016 Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

In addition, however, a court filing indicates that ONA's director, James H. Baker, "is believed to be the person who illegally leaked the transcript of Mr. Flynn's calls" to The Washington Post. Specifically, the filing states, "ONA Director Baker regularly lunched with Washington Post Reporter David Ignatius."

The filing adds that Baker "was Halper's 'handler'" at ONA. Moreover, according to the court filing, the tasks assigned to "known long-time operative for the CIA/FBI" Halper "seem to have included slandering Mr. Flynn with accusations of having an affair with a young professor (a British national of Russian descent)."

Baker didn't respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times as of press time.

The filing notes that Flynn's defense team has requested phone records for then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper , likewise in order to confirm contacts with Ignatius. The filing singles out records for Jan. 10, 2017, when, according to the filing, "Clapper told Ignatius in words to the effect of 'take the kill shot on Flynn.'"

Clapper didn't respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times as of press time.

The Pentagon's current inspector general has already found that Baker's office "did not maintain documentation of the work performed by Professor Halper or any communication that ONA personnel had with Professor Halper." As a result, according to the inspector general, ONA staff "could not provide sufficient documentation that Professor Halper conducted all of his work in accordance with applicable laws and regulations."

Acting Pentagon Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in November 2017 started an investigation into charges that Baker retaliated against a whistleblower who red-flagged "rigged" contracts, including Halper's. Another $11 million in contracts under scrutiny went to the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG), which is run by a schoolmate of Chelsea Clinton, whom she has referred to as her "best friend."

According to the whistleblower's attorney, "Baker's interest was his awareness of the LTSG-Clinton connection; his presumptive desire to exploit that to his advantage in the event of a Clinton election win; and the fact that contractors like LTSG served as a lucrative landing pad for ONA retirees."

The attorney charged that Baker's claims about the whistleblower were "demonstrably false," calling Baker "partisan and highly vindictive."

At the time, Richard Perle, Ronald Reagan's former Assistant Secretary of Defense, called Baker "a shallow and manipulative character that should have gone with the change in administration." Perle further charged that the whistleblower "clearly was the target, for political reasons, of an effort to push him out of government," saying "he's a Trump loyalist, and it was launched and sustained by an Obama holdover."

That inquiry is being carried out by the inspector general's Investigations of Senior Officials Directorate.

Raising additional questions, a 2016 report further revealed that the ONA had failed to produce the top-secret net assessments the office was established to conduct for more than 10 years, even with a yearly budget approaching $20 million.

Baker was named as ONA director on May 14, 2015, during the Obama administration. A contemporaneous report called his appointment "part of a wave of new Pentagon personnel moves in recent days, senior-level officials who will outlast President Obama's final term in office." Baker replaced Andrew W. Marshall, nicknamed "Yoda" for his "wizened appearance, fanatical following in defense circles, and enigmatic nature." Obama Defense Secretary Ash Carter, in selecting Baker, "passed over several of Marshall's acolytes who were in the running for the position."

The House Judiciary and Oversight committees -- which interviewed almost two dozen witnesses -- concluded in December 2018 that the Obama Justice Department treated Trump and Clinton unequally, affording Clinton and her associates extraordinary accommodations, while potentially abusing surveillance powers to investigate Trump's associates.

Jacqueline Deal, president of LTSG, wrote in an email to The Epoch Times: "My colleagues and I began performing work in support of the Office of Net Assessment during the George W. Bush administration, over a decade before the office's current director was appointed. None of the awards received by LTSG from the Department of Defense resulted directly or indirectly from the actions or influence of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton. Any statement or implication otherwise is false."

my new username , 2 minutes ago link

The Bush and Clinton families are joined at their corrupt hips.

The ONA is a CIA slush fund.

KuriousKat , 1 hour ago link

Baker replaced Andrew W. Marshall, nicknamed “Yoda” for his “wizened appearance, fanatical following in defense circles, and enigmatic nature.” Obama Defense Secretary Ash Carter, in selecting Baker, “passed over several of Marshall’s acolytes who were in the running for the position.”

Holy ****...The replacement head of the Highlands Group..he may as well be that white bearded guy in the matrix.. Hes the director of the MIC CIA NSA. ..the whole ball of wax..puts it all together...only he is not Yoda like before him..like putting a restaurant fast food manager in charge of the manhattan project. I know those acolytes must be really pissed..and probably a potential source of leaks.

http://www.clearnfo.com/cia-nsa-google/

steelframe7 , 1 hour ago link

Investigations my eye! This has been going on since Moby **** was a minnow.

McCabe has been out there making money while under criminal referral.. That investigation is DONE and still nothing happens.

The public information available on at least 50 of these double dealers is enough to send them all up the river as of a few YEARS ago...but we have to have more investigations...that's so they can figure out how to cover it all up.

Fire these creeps. Hire Sidney Powell.. They'll be swinging inside of six months.

[Nov 27, 2019] Progressive journalist: MSNBC doesn't try to hide 'contempt' towards Gabbard

Nov 27, 2019 | thehill.com

Progressive journalist Michael Tracey claimed Tuesday that MSNBC is has dropped all pretenses for their "contempt" towards Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).

The political news contributor said the left-leaning network has treated her fellow 2020 Democratic candidates, including businessman Andrew Yang , and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) unfairly, but he argued that with Gabbard it, "crosses a certain threshold."

"Fundamentally they're beholden to whatever the market incentives are and right now it's within their market interests to depict Tulsi as an infiltrator, as a Trojan horse in the Democratic Party and not deal on the substance with what she's saying which is why over and over again they tar her as a Russian plant essentially," Tracey told Hill.TV.

"There's nobody who can really offer any kind countervailing view because it's just not economically advantageous for them at this point," he added.

MSNBC didn't immediately return Hill.TV's request for comment.

Tracey pointed to a fiery exchange between Gabbard and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) during last week's 2020 primary debate as a prime example.

During the debate, Harris accused Gabbard of being a conservative media darling and consistently going on Fox News to bash President Obama during his tenure.

"I think that it's unfortunate that we have someone on this stage who is attempting to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, who, during the Obama administration, spent four years full-time on Fox News criticizing President Obama," Harris said.

Gabbard dismissed the criticism, calling it "ridiculous."

The California senator also hit Gabbard over her meeting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who U.S. officials have accused of being a war criminal. Harris concluded her attack by saying that Democrats need a candidate who can take on President Trump as well as "bring the party and the nation together."

The back-and-forth came after Gabbard criticized the Democratic Party of fashioning outdated foreign policies "represented "by Hillary Clinton and others' foreign policy."

"Our Democratic Party unfortunately is not the party that is of, by and for the people. It is a party that has been and continues to be influenced by the foreign policy establishment in Washington, represented by Hillary Clinton and others' foreign policy, by the military industrial complex and other greedy, corporate interests," she said.

Leading up to the fifth Democratic debate, Gabbard engaged in a weeks-long feud with Clinton after the former Democratic presidential nominee said the Hawaii lawmaker was "the favorite of the Russians."

-- Tess Bonn

[Nov 27, 2019] If Sanders had some character he would run as an independent with Tulsi

Nov 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

james , Nov 26 2019 22:58 utc | 20

'thanks b.. looking at the theatre, it seems dems have backed themselves into a corner... meanwhile obama wants to ca-bosh sanders... You know if Sanders had some character he would run as an independent with Tulsi.. but you all know that stands a snowball chance in hell.. the problem with conformists, is they spend too much time conforming and that doesn't end up serving anyone.. and it is the reason trump got elected - he is not a conformist.. self centered narcissist, yes, but conformist - no.. too bad about american leadership being persona non grata...

what i don't understand is why bernie doesn't run as an independent? if he is so great and would be great for the usa, why can't he figure this basic picture out? this is why i give merit to jackrabbit sometimes - it is all political theatre and they are all in it together raping the common people..

[Nov 27, 2019] Did Pelosi went along with impeachment to block nomination of Bernie Sanders?

Notable quotes:
"... and now Obama weighs in to warn against the real danger to the democrats, Bernie Sanders. that's who they have to beat, and Gabbard. They don't give much of a damn about beating Trump. ..."
"... This pretty much confirms my and many others here hypothesis that the Dems are fighting a "war on two fronts": one against Trump nationalist capitalism and the other against the "democratic socialists" who have been flocking to their party machine since 2014. ..."
"... Clearly, the goal is to prevent the US Polity from clawing back power from the 10% and enacting policies to their benefit. Meanwhile, a new form of Transnational Nationalism continues to take shape that will soon present a serious threat to the Financialized Globalizers and their Cult of Debt. Too many seem to laugh off the entire situation by dismissing it as Kabuki Theatre, which I see as self-serving and shortsighted since there're several very real crises we're in up to our collective armpits. ..."
"... A full blown impeachment trial that exposes the entire Russia-gate/Ukraine-gate/Whatever-gate sham is what this country needs. ..."
"... Bet the MSM sells Ukrainegate this way: Trump is guilty in Ukrainegate and should be impeached, but Democrats are moving on to focus on the election. And besides, Dems will tell us, the dastardly Republicans in the Senate will corruptly block Trump's impeachment. ..."
"... That is what they call a "trial balloon." If there isn't too much of a freakout among the true-believer base, and I don't think there is, it'll be an option they will at least take seriously. Not that I'm encouraging anyone to bet on rational thinking at this point. Anyway I agree it's the best move for congressional Democrats. ..."
"... I am liking all the commenters here that understand that there is only one empire party with two mythical faces. I think this kabuki is necessary if you don't have a major WAR to keep the masses focused on or otherwise distracted from the underlying R2P which I translate to Rape2Protect. ..."
"... If this show should teach people in the US anything (again), it is how both US parties descend like vultures onto countries where they manage to take over the government. Five billion poured into Ukraine with the requisite murder and mayhem, and who knows how many billions come pouring back out. It's a real jackpot for those in the right positions to scoop it into their pockets. ..."
"... The average people in the US don't even have a genuine safety net. Important for all those productive resources to go to pedophile islands and sinecures for coke head sons of politicians, obviously. ..."
"... The GOP is the party of the rich. The Democrats are the party the rich pay to keep the left at bay when the Republicans lose. ..."
"... the deck is stacked even more against independents than it is against actual mildly leftist candidates who run as democrats. there are a substantial number of people who think the only way to change the country is to take over the democratic party. frankly, that isn't going to happen, and nobody is going to win as an independent candidate with all the procedural rules making it so hard to even get on the ballot, while the state government, which is invariably controlled by one of the two parties, throws every roadblock, legal and illegal, in the way. my gut feeling is things are going to have to get quite a bit worse before the citizenry starts to explode, and there's no telling how that process will work out, and no way to control it once it reaches critical mass. ..."
"... the Democrats won't want to censure Trump for matters in which they themselves are equally complicit, as has been discussed here. ..."
"... "The party's true function is thus largely theatrical. It doesn't exist to fight for change, but only to pose as a force which one fine distant day might possibly bestir itself to fight for change. Thus the whole magic of the Dem Party -- the essential service it renders to the US power structure -- lies not in what it does, but in its mere existence: by simply existing, and doing nothing, it pretends to be something it's not; and this is enough to relieve despair & to let the system portray itself as a "democracy." ..."
"... Trump is up against an entrenched powerful bureaucracy and people who buy ink by the 55 gallon barrel. The democrats need to take a hard turn towards Mayor Pete and Tulsi. The rank and file Democrats are tired of the elite political class ..."
"... The real Trump move would be to hit the twitter right before the house impeachment vote and announce that he has instructed the House Republicans to vote for impeachment. ..."
"... He could lay out his story about how the American People never got to hear the full story because of house dems, and how the Senate would fully investigate the 2016 election, Russiagate, Ukraine, and whatever else they want. Maybe even make Hillary testify. Heads would explode and his base would love it. ..."
"... To the people here clamoring for Bernie Sanders to go independent: The American electoral system is very unique. The two parties -- GOP and Dems -- are much more than mere political parties: they are the American electoral machine itself. It is impossible to win the presidency without being the candidate of one of the two, that's why Trump also didn't go as an independent either. ..."
Nov 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Stever , Nov 26 2019 21:01 utc | 9

"An impeachment trial in the Senate would be a disaster for the Democrats.
I can not see why the Democrats would want to fall into such a trap. House leader Nancy Pelosi is experienced enough to not let that happen."

The real reason in my opinion that Pelosi went along with impeachment was that she saw Bernies message getting through, and even though the DNC pushed all the conserva-dem candidates they could into the race, Bernie is still doing well and gaining. An impeachment trial would require Bernie to attend the hearings rather that campaigning. Also Wall Streets best friend Obama has just stated that Bernie is not a Democrat and that would require Obama to get on the speaking circuit to campaign against him - you know for the sake of the corporations - and those 500k speaking thank you gigs. They would rather elect Trump than Bernie - that is why I think Pelosi would go along with an impeachment trial in the Senate - Bernie is the greater threat.

Likklemore , Nov 26 2019 21:01 utc | 10

The idea to censure Trump and move on has been aired since mid 2017. The latest was Forbes.com billwhalen 26 September 2019 Link

I ordered a truckload of pop corn to snack on during the trial in the Senate. Just imagine Joe Biden under cross examination as he flips 'n flops! "Was that me in the Video, I can't recall."

Guess I will have to unpack some popcorn. At this phase in the process an impeachable offence remains undefined!??
House Judiciary Committee Sets Date For Impeachment Hearing, Invites Trump To Testify

With interest (even among Democrats) in the impeachment process sliding, the House Judiciary Committee is set to take over the impeachment probe of President Trump next week, scheduling a Dec. 4 hearing.

As The Hill reports, behind Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the committee will hear from legal scholars as Democrats weigh whether the evidence turned up in their weeks-long impeachment inquiry warrants the drafting of articles aimed at removing the president from office.

The hearing, scheduled for next Wednesday, will focus on the definition of an impeachable offense and the formal application of the impeachment process. The panel will invite White House lawyers to attend and participate.

Ahead of the hearing, Nadler wrote to Trump requesting his participation - or that of White House counsel - as part of ensuring "a fair and informative process."[.]

Trump will take a page from the other president who campaigned on the "do nothing congress"

pretzelattack , Nov 26 2019 21:16 utc | 11
and now Obama weighs in to warn against the real danger to the democrats, Bernie Sanders. that's who they have to beat, and Gabbard. They don't give much of a damn about beating Trump.
Wind Hippo , Nov 26 2019 21:21 utc | 12
b, there seems to be a critical flaw in your analysis--you seem to base it on a premise that the goal of the Democratic establishment is to win elections/gain power/govern. It's not, it's to ensure the continuing enrichment of themselves and their oligarch peers, financial industry, military, pharma, etc.

The question people like Pelosi (worth $100 million or so btw along with her husband whose business she enriches via her position) are pondering isn't "Will doing x, y, z help Trump win?" It's "Will doing x, y, z ensure Bernie Sanders doesn't win?"

vk , Nov 26 2019 21:23 utc | 13
Maybe this is useful to understand the DNC's situation:

Obama 'Privately' Vowed to 'Speak Up to Stop' Bernie Sanders if He Secured Presidential Nomination - Report

This pretty much confirms my and many others here hypothesis that the Dems are fighting a "war on two fronts": one against Trump nationalist capitalism and the other against the "democratic socialists" who have been flocking to their party machine since 2014.

jared , Nov 26 2019 21:25 utc | 14
No group of adults is that stupid. They are doing and will do as they are required to do by their owners.
Jen , Nov 26 2019 21:31 utc | 15
Of all the things that the Democrats could impeach President Trump over, the one thing they seized upon was the issue that had the most potential to blow back on them and destroy Joe Biden's chances of reaching the White House. Whoever had that brilliant idea and put it as the long straw in a cylindrical prawn-chip can along with all the other straws for pulling out, sure didn't think of all the consequences that could have arisen. That speaks for the depth (or lack thereof) of the thinking among senior Democrats and their worker bee analysts, along with a narrow-minded outlook, sheer hatred of a political outsider and a fanatical zeal to match that hatred and outlook.

The folks who hatched that particular impeachment plan and pitched it to Nancy Pelosi must have been the same idiots in the DNC who dreamt up the Russiagate scandal and also pursued Paul Manafort to get him off DJT's election campaign team. Dmitri Alperovich / Crowdstrike, Alexandra Chalupa: we're looking at you.

William Gruff , Nov 26 2019 21:37 utc | 16
Impeachment takes Sanders out of the campaign and that opens things up for the CIA/establishment's "Identity Politics Candidate #3" , Mayor Butt-gig.

That said, since "Everyone who doesn't vote for our candidate is a deplorable misogynist!" didn't work as expected, I wonder what makes them think "Everyone who doesn't vote for our candidate is a deplorable homophobe!" will work any better?

karlof1 , Nov 26 2019 21:52 utc | 17
Lots of agreement here with the overall situation becoming clearer with Bloomberg's entrance and the outing of Obama's plans. I just finished writing my response to Putin's speech before the annual United Russia Party Congress on the Open Thread and suggest barflies take 10 minutes to read it and compare what he espouses a political party's deeds & goals ought to be versus those of the West and its vassals.

Clearly, the goal is to prevent the US Polity from clawing back power from the 10% and enacting policies to their benefit. Meanwhile, a new form of Transnational Nationalism continues to take shape that will soon present a serious threat to the Financialized Globalizers and their Cult of Debt. Too many seem to laugh off the entire situation by dismissing it as Kabuki Theatre, which I see as self-serving and shortsighted since there're several very real crises we're in up to our collective armpits.

James Speaks , Nov 26 2019 22:58 utc | 21
A full blown impeachment trial that exposes the entire Russia-gate/Ukraine-gate/Whatever-gate sham is what this country needs.

Obviously, a sufficient number of secure Republican representatives are needed to vote in favor of impeachment to allow this circus to continue to its bizarrely entertaining, Democratic Party destroying end.

librul , Nov 26 2019 22:59 utc | 22
The MSM will declare Trump guilty - that is, he has earned impeachment for Ukrainegate.

There are Democrats still under the illusion that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election. Dems tell us that Trump *obstructed* the Mueller investigation thus Trump could not be nailed, nonetheless Trump is guilty of collusion until proven innocent.

Back to Ukrainegate. Bet the MSM sells Ukrainegate this way: Trump is guilty in Ukrainegate and should be impeached, but Democrats are moving on to focus on the election. And besides, Dems will tell us, the dastardly Republicans in the Senate will corruptly block Trump's impeachment.

karlof1 , Nov 26 2019 23:28 utc | 25
Tulsi Gabbard Tweet not specifically about impeachment but begs numerous questions:

"My personal commitment is to always treat you and all Americans with respect. Working side-by-side, we can defeat the divisiveness of Donald Trump, and usher in a 21st century of peace, human dignity, & true equality. Working side by side, we can make Dr. King's dream our reality ." [My Emphasis]

Questions: Is Trump divisive, or is it the D-Party and Current Oligarchy that make him so; and which is more important to defeat? Which party "usher[ed] in the 21st century" with several wars and abetted the next two? How did Obama, Slick Willie or his wife advance "human dignity & true equality"? How does her last sentence differ from "Hope you can believe in"? Hasn't her D-Party worked tirelessly for decades to circumvent the goals she espouses? Wouldn't Gabbard have a better chance running as an Enlightened Republican than as a Renegade Democrat if her goal's to defeat Trump?

snake , Nov 26 2019 23:30 utc | 26
American Democracy is political professional wrestling, Kabuki Theater, and mediocre Reality TV all rolled into. by: AK74 @ 4 <= binary divide <=conducted by the USA, is not about America, Americans or making America great again, its about the welfare of [the few<= which most Americans would not call fellow Americans].

Sasha.@ 23 I don't understand where you are coming from.. thank Korlof1 @18 for posting that Putin talk alert. excerpts from the talk.. => The priority [of United Russia has been] the protection of the people's interests, the interests of [the] Motherland, and ..responsible [approach] to ..country, its security, stability and people's lives in the long-term perspective.

The party.. offered a unifying agenda based on freedom and well being, patriotism, ..traditional values, a strong civil society and a strong state. The key issue in the party's work .being together with the people, Karlof1@18 <=this talk suggest change in Russian leadership that are not congruent with your [Sasha] comment @23. I hope you will make more clear what you spent sometime writing ( and for that effort I thank you) but it is not yet clear what you mean.. .

ptb , Nov 26 2019 23:42 utc | 27
Re: Brenda Lawrence talking about censure rather than impeachment:

That is what they call a "trial balloon." If there isn't too much of a freakout among the true-believer base, and I don't think there is, it'll be an option they will at least take seriously. Not that I'm encouraging anyone to bet on rational thinking at this point. Anyway I agree it's the best move for congressional Democrats.

Yet another other option is to continue the investigation indefinitely. I'm going to say it is their default move actually. In that case, the House Judiciary Committee would spend a few weeks putting on their own show, then say they would like more evidence to be really sure, returning matters to the House Intelligence Committee, and we repeat the cycle.

psychohistorian , Nov 27 2019 0:14 utc | 31
I am liking all the commenters here that understand that there is only one empire party with two mythical faces. I think this kabuki is necessary if you don't have a major WAR to keep the masses focused on or otherwise distracted from the underlying R2P which I translate to Rape2Protect.

It is sad to see us all talking about which of the lesser of horrible evils will continue the leadership of American faced empire.....I hope it crashes soon and takes the global elite down with it.....how many barflies are ready to stand up and say NO to the owners of the Super-Priority derivatives that will say they own the world because of their casino (no skin in the game) bets that are currently "legal" in America when the crash comes?

AK74 , Nov 27 2019 0:51 utc | 34
@ snake

American "Democracy" is a mask for the American Empire and its capitalist system--including especially the American Military and its Intelligence apparatus (aka The Deep State). If the American people don't identify with these institutions, you would see much greater hostility to -- if not outright rebellion against--the American military and spooks.

Instead, you see the very opposite: the American people saluting, glorifying, "thanking for their service," and politically fellating the US military and spy agencies every chance they get. That should tell you all you need to know about Americans.

Guest , Nov 27 2019 1:27 utc | 36
If this show should teach people in the US anything (again), it is how both US parties descend like vultures onto countries where they manage to take over the government. Five billion poured into Ukraine with the requisite murder and mayhem, and who knows how many billions come pouring back out. It's a real jackpot for those in the right positions to scoop it into their pockets.

The average people in the US don't even have a genuine safety net. Important for all those productive resources to go to pedophile islands and sinecures for coke head sons of politicians, obviously.

Dave , Nov 27 2019 1:38 utc | 37
Re: #3 Allen – well said. The GOP is the party of the rich. The Democrats are the party the rich pay to keep the left at bay when the Republicans lose.
Yeah, Right , Nov 27 2019 1:38 utc | 38
The problem with this prediction is that the MSM has been breathlessly pronouncing that THIS IS EXPLOSIVE EVIDENCE!!!! pretty much every day and after every witness testimony.

So if you are a member of the public who gets their "information" from the MSM (and, be honest, that is most of the people in the USA) then you have been force-fed is that Trumps defense against these allegations has already been shredded, and that his guilt has already been established beyond any reasonable doubt.

How can those opinion-makers then turn around and say "Nah, it'll be fine" and settle for a mere censure?

Wouldn't the Sheeple respond with a fully-justified "Hey, hang on! What gives?"

The Democrats has leapt on a Tiger. Nobody made them do it, but now they are there I don't think they are going to be able to leap off.

Some of the first-term nobodies, maybe, but not the Schiffs and the Pelopis and the Nadlers.

Hang on for dear life and hope for a miracle is probably their only option now.

And, who knows, that trio may be so incompetent that they actually think they are going to win.

Josh , Nov 27 2019 1:49 utc | 39
Via, perhaps, One who has established Truth, Standing, and Right, Declaring so.... Lawfully.
pretzelattack , Nov 27 2019 1:56 utc | 40
james, the deck is stacked even more against independents than it is against actual mildly leftist candidates who run as democrats. there are a substantial number of people who think the only way to change the country is to take over the democratic party. frankly, that isn't going to happen, and nobody is going to win as an independent candidate with all the procedural rules making it so hard to even get on the ballot, while the state government, which is invariably controlled by one of the two parties, throws every roadblock, legal and illegal, in the way. my gut feeling is things are going to have to get quite a bit worse before the citizenry starts to explode, and there's no telling how that process will work out, and no way to control it once it reaches critical mass.
Duncan Idaho , Nov 27 2019 2:13 utc | 43
The US is a one party State-- Pepsi _Pepsi Lite. Both parties are capitalist. It is rather humorous the attention paid to a Dim vs Repug argument. Small thinking for small minds---
Rob , Nov 27 2019 2:13 utc | 44
As I posted at the beginning of the impeachment process, the Dems would be foolish to hang it all on the arcane shenanigans in Ukraine but rather should impeach Trump on the numerous more serious breaches and crimes that he has committed. I also worried that the Democratic Party leaders would blow the opportunity to demonstrate that Trump and the Republican Party are rotten to the core and harmful to the country. And so they have blown it. What an inept pack of asses.
juliania , Nov 27 2019 2:26 utc | 46
I would think that even censure is still going to be a hot potato for the Democrats. Looking at the procedure as far as wikipedia describes it, it hasn't done anything of significance when it comes to being used against a president, especially as the Democrats won't want to censure Trump for matters in which they themselves are equally complicit, as has been discussed here.

That means they would be censuring on the same shaky grounds that they would have impeached him, which only prolongs attention upon the dubious claims of the indictment. It seems to me Trump will, rather than be shamed by the process, only be saying 'Make my day', and hopefully have his Attorney General come forward with exonerating revelations on that issue in the judicial proceeding that it was my contention the impeachment effort had been a last ditch one to forestall such.

Wishful thinking on that, I know - but at least that probe has merit.

karlof1 , Nov 27 2019 2:29 utc | 47
Grieved @42--

Thanks for your reply! And thanks for linking the Keen video! Made a comment on that thread.

As I wrote when the possibility of Trump's impeachment arose almost as soon as he was inaugurated, the entire charade reminds me of Slick Willie's impeachment, trial and exoneration--the Articles of Impeachment utilized were such that he'd avoid conviction just as they will be for Trump.

ben , Nov 27 2019 2:52 utc | 48
Allen @ 3 said; "The party's true function is thus largely theatrical. It doesn't exist to fight for change, but only to pose as a force which one fine distant day might possibly bestir itself to fight for change. Thus the whole magic of the Dem Party -- the essential service it renders to the US power structure -- lies not in what it does, but in its mere existence: by simply existing, and doing nothing, it pretends to be something it's not; and this is enough to relieve despair & to let the system portray itself as a "democracy."

With very few exceptions, you nailed it..Your description of the Dem. party is sad, but true.....

Trisha , Nov 27 2019 3:07 utc | 49
Oh dear, sadly this was so easy to predict.

Maybe the Dims will creep past the yawning Trump trap and get around to minor policy issues, like crafting and passing a real Green New Deal bill.

Again, sadly, so easy to predict nothing of the sort happening.

dltravers , Nov 27 2019 3:45 utc | 50
Not having much time to watch the show trial it appears to me the Democrats still have a set of very weak candidates. Anyone who knows Biden knows he in not now and never will be able to handle a campaign against Trump.

Trump is up against an entrenched powerful bureaucracy and people who buy ink by the 55 gallon barrel. The democrats need to take a hard turn towards Mayor Pete and Tulsi. The rank and file Democrats are tired of the elite political class in the same fashion that the rank and file Republicans were tired of the political establishment which caused then to turn to Trump.

Is the Democrat political establishment smart enough to take a few steps back and push forward some outsiders? I doubt that but they would not lose much if they did. Any new leaders would have the same stable of bureaucrats to pick from which will still be there long after they are gone.

MT_bill , Nov 27 2019 4:18 utc | 53
The real Trump move would be to hit the twitter right before the house impeachment vote and announce that he has instructed the House Republicans to vote for impeachment.

He could lay out his story about how the American People never got to hear the full story because of house dems, and how the Senate would fully investigate the 2016 election, Russiagate, Ukraine, and whatever else they want. Maybe even make Hillary testify. Heads would explode and his base would love it.

AntiSpin , Nov 27 2019 4:42 utc | 55
j @ dltravers | Nov 27 2019 3:45 utc | 50

"The democrats need to take a hard turn towards Mayor Pete and Tulsi."

Mayor Pete -- are you serious? I urge you to take a look at these two articles before making any other public endorsements.

All About Pete
by Nathan J. Robinson
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/03/all-about-pete

Is Pete Buttigieg A Shill For The Donor Class?
by Miles Mogulescu | November 23, 2019
https://ourfuture.org/20191122/is-pete-buttigieg-a-shill-for-the-donor-class

librul , Nov 27 2019 5:56 utc | 56
The...***The***...core takeaway, the battle at the heart of Russiagate/Ukrainegate, is that it does not matter who the People elect as President and what platform he was elected on the Deep State will decide foreign policy.
A User , Nov 27 2019 9:12 utc | 61
RE: Posted by: Sabine | Nov 27 2019 7:39 utc | 61

democrats republicans makes no difference both teams are managed by self serving scum who refuse to allow "what the people want" to distract them from the big one. "what can I steal?".

People meed to appreciate two things about both the dems and the rethugs. The first is they supply a much-needed insight into: "How low can I go as a worthless hang off the wagon by me fingernails, careerist. The second? That every hack must understand that eventually every talking head is seen for the ugly sellout which they are.

There is no 'honourable way through this mess', one either quietly resigns pulling the pin on the worst of us all, or one accepts the previously unacceptable, that we are most likely both musically n functionally illiterate but it never matters what-u-say, what really counts is what you do.

TJ , Nov 27 2019 10:48 utc | 63
Whoever it was the Democrats should shun that person before it creates more damage to their party.

I would disagree here. If the Democrats continue they will destroy themselves hopefully leading to Mutually Assured Destruction as they would need to do something very drastic to destroy the Republicans in return e.g. expose 9/11, Iraq etc, let the swamp / Deep State go M.A.D. and from the political ashes parties and politicians can rise who are actually working for the betterment of the USA and its people.

vk , Nov 27 2019 11:54 utc | 64

To the people here clamoring for Bernie Sanders to go independent: The American electoral system is very unique. The two parties -- GOP and Dems -- are much more than mere political parties: they are the American electoral machine itself. It is impossible to win the presidency without being the candidate of one of the two, that's why Trump also didn't go as an independent either.

Bernie Sanders is different from all other independent presidential candidates in American History because he was the first to really want to win. That's why he penetrated the Democratic machine, even though he became senator many times as an independent. He read the conjuncture correctly and, you have to agree, he's been more influential over American political-ideological landscape than all the other independents put together (not considering Eugene Debs as an independent).

snake , Nov 27 2019 13:05 utc | 65
@ snake

American "Democracy" is a mask for the American Empire and its capitalist system--including especially the American Military and its Intelligence apparatus (aka The Deep State). If the American people don't identify with these institutions, you would see much greater hostility to--if not outright rebellion against--the American military and spooks.

Instead, you see the very opposite: the American people saluting, glorifying, "thanking for their service," and politically fellating the US military and spy agencies every chance they get.

That should tell you all you need to know about Americans. by: AK74 @ 34

<= No not yet do I agree with you.. The American young people are forced into the military in order to afford to be educated, and in order to have access to health care and good-level workforce entry jobs especially the military is default for children of struggling parents that cannot fund a college education or for the kids who are not yet ready to become serious students.

The USA has not always discounted America or denied Americans. When I grew up, a college education was very affordable, health care was available to even the most needy at whatever they could afford, most of us could work our way through the education and find decent entry level jobs if we were willing to dedicate ourselves to make the opportunity of a job into a success (education, degrees, licenses were not needed, just performance was enough). Unfortunately third party private mind control propaganda was used to extend into fake space, the belief that the USA provides a valuable service to American interest. As time went on, the USA had to hid its activities in top secret closets, it then had to learn to spy on everyone, and it had to prosecute those (whistle blowers) who raised a question. Hence the predicament of the awaken American dealing with friends that still believe the USA is good for America.. Others hope the good times will return but the USA tolerance for descent is dissipating. After the 16th amendment and the federal reserve act in 1913 the USA began to edge America out in favor of international globalization.

Most of the really important parts of what made the USA great for Americans has been sold off [privatized] and the protections and umpiring and refereeing that the USA used to provide to keep the American economic space highly competitive and freely accessible to all competitors has not only ceased, but now operates as a monopoly factory, churning out laws, rules and establishing agencies that make the wealthy and their corporate empires wealthier, richer and more monopolistic at the expense of everyday Americans.

The USA began to drop America from its sights after WWII. The USA moved its efforts and activities from American domestic concerns to global concerns in 1948, neglected its advance and protect American ideology; it imposed the continental shelf act in 1954 and the EPA act in 1972, in order to force American industry out of America (the oil business to Saudi Arabia and OPEC); by 1985-95 most businesses operating in America were either forced to close or forced to move to a cheap third world labor force places.. .<=the purpose is now clear, it was to separate Americans from their industrial and manufacturing know-how and to block American access to evolving technology . At first most Americans did not notice.

Many Americans are only now waking to the possibility that things topside have changed and some are realizing just how vulnerable the US constitution has made the USA to outside influence. .. thanks to the USA very little of good ole America remains. but the humanity first instinct most Americans are born with remains mostly unchanged, even though the globalist have decimated religious organizations, most Americans still believe their maker will not look favorably on those who deny justice, democracy or who abuse mankind. The USA has moved on, it has become a global empire, operating in a global space unknown to most Americans. The USA has created a world of its own, it no longer needs domestic America, it can use the people and resources of anyone anywhere in the world for its conquest.

The last two political campaigns for President were "Change=Obama" and "Make America Great Again=Trump"; neither of these two would have succeeded if Americans did not feel the problem.

[Nov 27, 2019] Could your county use some extra money?

Highly recommended!
Nov 27, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

catherine , 26 November 2019 at 05:16 PM

Could your county use some extra money?

According to the US Census there are 3031 counties in the US.
If we redirected the $3.8 billion plus the 500,000,000 for missile defense that we give Israel to US counties budgets each county would receive about
$ 1.3 million.

If we included the $1.2 billion each we give to Egypt and Jordon for signing the Carter peace treaty with Israel that figure increases to $2.3 million for each county.

While $2.3 million may be a small figure for counties with metro cities, it would be a large amount for the majority of counties across the nation.

Since aid to Israel alone accounts for 50% of US foreign aid who would oppose this re direct of taxpayers money...besides the politicians...and how would the politicians explain their opposition to the districts they supposedly represent?

[Nov 27, 2019] When the Deep State Bullied Reagan's Foreign Policy Chief

Nov 27, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The CIA's sabotage was not confined to policy regarding Mozambique. Later that decade, during delicate negotiations to achieve a ceasefire and subsequent accord between Angola's government and insurgent leader Jonas Savimbi, Shultz fumed that (emphasis added) "right-wing staffers from Congress, fueled by information from the CIA , were meddling -- visiting Savimbi, trying to convince him that [Assistant Secretary of State Chester] Crocker and I would sell him out."

Such behavior should debunk the notion that the CIA and other bureaucratic careerists are merely obedient public servants dedicated to executing policies that elected officials and their high-level political appointees have adopted. Such operatives have their own policy preferences, and they are not shy about pushing them, nor do they hesitate to impede or undermine policies they dislike.

Perhaps even more troubling, deep state personnel in the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department seem to have a distinct bias in favor of highly activist policies. CIA analysts and briefers regarded even the principal architect of the Reagan Doctrine as insufficiently committed in southern Africa. There is a noticeable parallel to the current bureaucratic opposition to Trump's handling of Ukraine and Russia. The allegation that Trump has abandoned Kiev and pursues an appeasement policy toward Russia is absurd . His support for Kiev has actually been far more substantial than the approach the Obama administration adopted. Yet even that harder line is apparently not hard enough for establishment career diplomats and their allies.

Treating such saboteurs as heroic patriots is both obscene and dangerous. The honorable course for subordinates who disagree with a president's policies is to resign and then express criticism.

Adopting a termite strategy while working in a presidential administration is profoundly unethical. For Congress and the media to praise bureaucratic subversion is horridly myopic. The last thing defenders of a democratic republic should do is to encourage unelected -- and in the case of the intelligence agencies, deeply secretive -- bureaucrats to pursue their own rogue policy agendas.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at The American Conservative, is the author of 12 books and more than 850 articles on international affairs. His latest book is NATO: The Dangerous Dinosaur (2019).

[Nov 26, 2019] John Solomon Everything Changes In The Ukraine Scandal If Trump Releases These Documents

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Authored by John Solomon via JohnSolomonReports.com, ..."
"... Daily intelligence reports from March through August 2019 on Ukraine's new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his relationship with oligarchs and other key figures. ..."
"... State Department memos on U.S. funding given to the George Soros-backed group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. ..."
"... The transcripts of Joe Biden's phone calls and meetings with Ukraine's president and prime minister from April 2014 to January 2017 when Hunter Biden served on the board of the natural gas company Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All documents from an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower investigation into unusual energy transactions in Ukraine. ..."
"... All FBI, CIA, Treasury Department and State Department documents concerning possible wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All documents from 2015-16 concerning the decision by the State Department's foreign aid funding arm, USAID, to pursue a joint project with Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All cables, memos and documents showing State Department's dealings with Burisma Holding representatives in 2015 and 2016. ..."
"... All contacts that the Energy Department, Justice Department or State Department had with Vice President Joe Biden's office concerning Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden or business associate Devon Archer. ..."
"... All memos, emails and other documents concerning a possible U.S. embassy's request in spring 2019 to monitor the social media activities and analytics of certain U.S. media personalities considered favorable to President Trump. ..."
"... All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning efforts by individual Ukrainian government officials to exert influence on the 2016 U.S. election, including an anti-Trump Op-Ed written in August 2016 by Ukraine's ambassador to Washington or efforts to publicize allegations against Paul Manafort. ..."
"... All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning contacts with a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa and her dealings with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington or other Ukrainian figures. ..."
Nov 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by John Solomon via JohnSolomonReports.com,

There are still wide swaths of documentation kept under wraps inside government agencies like the State Department that could substantially alter the public's understanding of what has happened in the U.S.-Ukraine relationships now at the heart of the impeachment probe.

As House Democrats mull whether to pursue impeachment articles and the GOP-led Senate braces for a possible trial, here are 12 tranches of government documents that could benefit the public if President Trump ordered them released, and the questions these memos might answer.

  1. Daily intelligence reports from March through August 2019 on Ukraine's new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his relationship with oligarchs and other key figures. What was the CIA, FBI and U.S. Treasury Department telling Trump and other agencies about Zelensky's ties to oligarchs like Igor Kolomoisky, the former head of Privatbank, and any concerns the International Monetary Fund might have? Did any of these concerns reach the president's daily brief (PDB) or come up in the debate around resolving Ukraine corruption and U.S. foreign aid? CNBC , Reuters and The Wall Street Journal all have done recent reporting suggesting there might have been intelligence and IMF concerns that have not been fully considered during the impeachment proceedings.
  2. State Department memos detailing conversations between former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko . He says Yovanovitch raised the names of Ukrainians she did not want to see prosecuted during their first meeting in 2016. She calls Lutsenko's account fiction. But State Department officials admit the U.S. embassy in Kiev did pressure Ukrainian prosecutors not to target certain activists. Are there contemporaneous State Department memos detailing these conversations and might they illuminate the dispute between Lutsenko and Yovanovitch that has become key to the impeachment hearings?
  3. State Department memos on U.S. funding given to the George Soros-backed group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. There is documentary evidence that State provided funding to this group, that Ukrainian prosecutor sought to investigate whether that aid was spent properly and that the U.S. embassy pressured Ukraine to stand down on that investigation. How much total did State give to this group? Why was a federal agency giving money to a Soros-backed group? What did taxpayers get for their money and were they any audits to ensure the money was spent properly? Were any of Ukrainian prosecutors' concerns legitimate?
  4. The transcripts of Joe Biden's phone calls and meetings with Ukraine's president and prime minister from April 2014 to January 2017 when Hunter Biden served on the board of the natural gas company Burisma Holdings. Did Burisma or Hunter Biden ever come up in the calls? What did Biden say when he urged Ukraine to fire the prosecutor overseeing an investigation of Burisma? Did any Ukrainian officials ever comment on Hunter Biden's role at the company? Was any official assessment done by U.S. agencies to justify Biden's threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid if Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin wasn't fired?
  5. All documents from an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower investigation into unusual energy transactions in Ukraine. The U.S. government's main whistleblower office is investigating allegations from a U.S Energy Department worker of possible wrongdoing in U.S.-supported Ukrainian energy business. Who benefited in the United States and Ukraine from this alleged activity? Did Burisma gain any benefits from the conduct described by the whistleblower? OSC has concluded there is a "substantial likelihood of wrongdoing" involved in these activities.
  6. All FBI, CIA, Treasury Department and State Department documents concerning possible wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings. What did the U.S. know about allegations of corruption at the Ukrainian gas company and the efforts by the Ukrainian prosecutors to investigate? Did U.S., Latvian, Cypriot or European financial authorities flag any suspicious transactions involving Burisma or Americans during the time that Hunter Biden served on its board? Were any U.S. agencies monitoring, assisting or blocking the various investigations? When Ukraine reopened the Burisma investigations in March 2019, what did U.S. officials do?
  7. All documents from 2015-16 concerning the decision by the State Department's foreign aid funding arm, USAID, to pursue a joint project with Burisma Holdings. State official George Kent has testified he stopped this joint project because of concerns about Burisma's corruption reputation. Did Hunter Biden or his American business partner Devon Archer have anything to do with seeking the project? What caused its abrupt end? What issues did Kent identify as concerns and who did he alert in the White House, State or other agencies?
  8. All cables, memos and documents showing State Department's dealings with Burisma Holding representatives in 2015 and 2016. We now know that Ukrainian authorities escalated their investigation of Burisma Holdings in February 2016 by raiding the home of the company's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Soon after, Burisma's American representatives were pressing the State Department to help end the corruption allegations against the gas firm, specifically invoking Hunter Biden's name. What did State officials do after being pressured by Burisma? Did the U.S. embassy in Kiev assist Burisma's efforts to settle the corruption case against it? Who else in the U.S. government was being kept apprised?
  9. All contacts that the Energy Department, Justice Department or State Department had with Vice President Joe Biden's office concerning Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden or business associate Devon Archer. We now know that multiple State Department officials believed Hunter Biden's association with Burisma created the appearance of a conflict of interest for the vice president, and at least one official tried to contact Joe Biden's office to raise those concerns. What, if anything, did these Cabinet agencies tell Joe Biden's office about the appearance concerns or the state of the various Ukrainian investigations into Burisma?
  10. All memos, emails and other documents concerning a possible U.S. embassy's request in spring 2019 to monitor the social media activities and analytics of certain U.S. media personalities considered favorable to President Trump. Did any such monitoring occur? Was it requested by the American embassy in Kiev? Who ordered it? Why did it stop? Were any legal concerns raised?
  11. All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning efforts by individual Ukrainian government officials to exert influence on the 2016 U.S. election, including an anti-Trump Op-Ed written in August 2016 by Ukraine's ambassador to Washington or efforts to publicize allegations against Paul Manafort. What did U.S. officials know about these efforts in 2016, and how did they react? What were these federal agencies' reactions to a Ukrainian court decision in December 2018 suggesting some Ukrainian officials had improperly meddled in the 2016 election?
  12. All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning contacts with a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa and her dealings with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington or other Ukrainian figures. Did anyone in these U.S. government agencies interview or have contact with Chalupa during the time the Ukraine embassy in Washington says she was seeking dirt in 2016 on Trump and Manafort?

[Nov 26, 2019] 'Idea Laundering' The American Conservative

Nov 26, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

We tend to think of propaganda as something generated by the state. This is a prime example of it coming from ideologues within universities, and making its way to the public via sympathizers in the mass media. Eventually, these lies become de facto truths, either because people really do believe in them, or the cost of questioning them becomes too great, so people conform. In time, younger people -- those who grew up being socialized into the lie -- don't know any different. In my interviews for my forthcoming book on lessons we must learn from the communist experience, a Ukrainian immigrant named Olga Grigorenko, recalling her Soviet childhood, said "Nobody told me that I was living in a lie. I was just living my life in my country, the Soviet Union. Nobody said it was a lie."

As she grew older, she came to see that in fact she lived within a system of lies. Her husband, Vladimir, spoke about how the ideology corrupted all knowledge. From the transcript:

Vladimir: For example, all history was represented as the fight between capitalism and the workers. It takes a really creative mind to see the system of classes from Marxism-Leninism presenting itself in ancient Egypt. But that's what they did. All history books were filled with that point of view. The Florentine Republic was the equal of the Great October Revolution – things like that. All our history books were like that. Every scientific paper was supposed to have a prefatory chapter describing how Marx and Engels were geniuses in that particular field of science, and how their findings anticipated whatever this scientific article described. Any and all sciences had to show a connection to the decision of the party in a previous convention.

Olga: But nobody believed in it.

Vladimir: But everybody knew that you had to say these things in order to be published.

More:

Olga: In high school and middle school, we had to write essays, like normal school kids do. But you never could write what you think about the subject. Never, ever. The subject could be interesting, but you never could put what do you think. You have to find some way to relate that to the communist view.

Vladimir: The general culture taught you this doublethink.

Olga: I remember when I was eight or nine years old, I came home from school and told my parents a funny anecdote about a famous Red Army hero, one that made him look bad. I just started to tell my parents, and my father looked at me and said, 'Never do that again. Not in our house, not anywhere. Just stop, and forget. You can't tell funny stories about communist leaders.' And I was afraid.

Vladimir: Sooner or later, society would tell you what you shouldn't say. And if you said it, you would end up in the camp.

We are reproducing that system here, in an American way. It begins with the ideological corruption of knowledge in the institutions of higher education, then moves out from there. How difficult do you imagine it would be within the New York Times newsroom, or any major American newsroom, to mount a serious challenge to the concepts of "whiteness," "patriarchy," and the like? In fact, we have an example of it, from this summer: the leaked transcript of the Times 's internal town hall meeting , in which an unnamed staffer told editor-in-chief Dean Baquet that "I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting."

Baquet declined the opportunity to deliver a Journalistic Standards 101 lecture to this person, and instead gave a fuzzy non-answer ( read the transcript ; you'll see) praising the paper's then-upcoming "1619 Project," a massive initiative attempting to "reframe" American history around slavery.

If you'll recall, the 1619 Project was named for the year the first African slave arrived on American shores; the Times said that year, not 1776, ought to be remembered as the founding of America.

[Nov 26, 2019] John Solomon Everything Changes In The Ukraine Scandal If Trump Releases These Documents

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Authored by John Solomon via JohnSolomonReports.com, ..."
"... Daily intelligence reports from March through August 2019 on Ukraine's new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his relationship with oligarchs and other key figures. ..."
"... State Department memos on U.S. funding given to the George Soros-backed group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. ..."
"... The transcripts of Joe Biden's phone calls and meetings with Ukraine's president and prime minister from April 2014 to January 2017 when Hunter Biden served on the board of the natural gas company Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All documents from an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower investigation into unusual energy transactions in Ukraine. ..."
"... All FBI, CIA, Treasury Department and State Department documents concerning possible wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All documents from 2015-16 concerning the decision by the State Department's foreign aid funding arm, USAID, to pursue a joint project with Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... All cables, memos and documents showing State Department's dealings with Burisma Holding representatives in 2015 and 2016. ..."
"... All contacts that the Energy Department, Justice Department or State Department had with Vice President Joe Biden's office concerning Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden or business associate Devon Archer. ..."
"... All memos, emails and other documents concerning a possible U.S. embassy's request in spring 2019 to monitor the social media activities and analytics of certain U.S. media personalities considered favorable to President Trump. ..."
"... All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning efforts by individual Ukrainian government officials to exert influence on the 2016 U.S. election, including an anti-Trump Op-Ed written in August 2016 by Ukraine's ambassador to Washington or efforts to publicize allegations against Paul Manafort. ..."
"... All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning contacts with a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa and her dealings with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington or other Ukrainian figures. ..."
Nov 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by John Solomon via JohnSolomonReports.com,

There are still wide swaths of documentation kept under wraps inside government agencies like the State Department that could substantially alter the public's understanding of what has happened in the U.S.-Ukraine relationships now at the heart of the impeachment probe.

As House Democrats mull whether to pursue impeachment articles and the GOP-led Senate braces for a possible trial, here are 12 tranches of government documents that could benefit the public if President Trump ordered them released, and the questions these memos might answer.

  1. Daily intelligence reports from March through August 2019 on Ukraine's new president Volodymyr Zelensky and his relationship with oligarchs and other key figures. What was the CIA, FBI and U.S. Treasury Department telling Trump and other agencies about Zelensky's ties to oligarchs like Igor Kolomoisky, the former head of Privatbank, and any concerns the International Monetary Fund might have? Did any of these concerns reach the president's daily brief (PDB) or come up in the debate around resolving Ukraine corruption and U.S. foreign aid? CNBC , Reuters and The Wall Street Journal all have done recent reporting suggesting there might have been intelligence and IMF concerns that have not been fully considered during the impeachment proceedings.
  2. State Department memos detailing conversations between former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko . He says Yovanovitch raised the names of Ukrainians she did not want to see prosecuted during their first meeting in 2016. She calls Lutsenko's account fiction. But State Department officials admit the U.S. embassy in Kiev did pressure Ukrainian prosecutors not to target certain activists. Are there contemporaneous State Department memos detailing these conversations and might they illuminate the dispute between Lutsenko and Yovanovitch that has become key to the impeachment hearings?
  3. State Department memos on U.S. funding given to the George Soros-backed group the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. There is documentary evidence that State provided funding to this group, that Ukrainian prosecutor sought to investigate whether that aid was spent properly and that the U.S. embassy pressured Ukraine to stand down on that investigation. How much total did State give to this group? Why was a federal agency giving money to a Soros-backed group? What did taxpayers get for their money and were they any audits to ensure the money was spent properly? Were any of Ukrainian prosecutors' concerns legitimate?
  4. The transcripts of Joe Biden's phone calls and meetings with Ukraine's president and prime minister from April 2014 to January 2017 when Hunter Biden served on the board of the natural gas company Burisma Holdings. Did Burisma or Hunter Biden ever come up in the calls? What did Biden say when he urged Ukraine to fire the prosecutor overseeing an investigation of Burisma? Did any Ukrainian officials ever comment on Hunter Biden's role at the company? Was any official assessment done by U.S. agencies to justify Biden's threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid if Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin wasn't fired?
  5. All documents from an Office of Special Counsel whistleblower investigation into unusual energy transactions in Ukraine. The U.S. government's main whistleblower office is investigating allegations from a U.S Energy Department worker of possible wrongdoing in U.S.-supported Ukrainian energy business. Who benefited in the United States and Ukraine from this alleged activity? Did Burisma gain any benefits from the conduct described by the whistleblower? OSC has concluded there is a "substantial likelihood of wrongdoing" involved in these activities.
  6. All FBI, CIA, Treasury Department and State Department documents concerning possible wrongdoing at Burisma Holdings. What did the U.S. know about allegations of corruption at the Ukrainian gas company and the efforts by the Ukrainian prosecutors to investigate? Did U.S., Latvian, Cypriot or European financial authorities flag any suspicious transactions involving Burisma or Americans during the time that Hunter Biden served on its board? Were any U.S. agencies monitoring, assisting or blocking the various investigations? When Ukraine reopened the Burisma investigations in March 2019, what did U.S. officials do?
  7. All documents from 2015-16 concerning the decision by the State Department's foreign aid funding arm, USAID, to pursue a joint project with Burisma Holdings. State official George Kent has testified he stopped this joint project because of concerns about Burisma's corruption reputation. Did Hunter Biden or his American business partner Devon Archer have anything to do with seeking the project? What caused its abrupt end? What issues did Kent identify as concerns and who did he alert in the White House, State or other agencies?
  8. All cables, memos and documents showing State Department's dealings with Burisma Holding representatives in 2015 and 2016. We now know that Ukrainian authorities escalated their investigation of Burisma Holdings in February 2016 by raiding the home of the company's owner, Mykola Zlochevsky. Soon after, Burisma's American representatives were pressing the State Department to help end the corruption allegations against the gas firm, specifically invoking Hunter Biden's name. What did State officials do after being pressured by Burisma? Did the U.S. embassy in Kiev assist Burisma's efforts to settle the corruption case against it? Who else in the U.S. government was being kept apprised?
  9. All contacts that the Energy Department, Justice Department or State Department had with Vice President Joe Biden's office concerning Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden or business associate Devon Archer. We now know that multiple State Department officials believed Hunter Biden's association with Burisma created the appearance of a conflict of interest for the vice president, and at least one official tried to contact Joe Biden's office to raise those concerns. What, if anything, did these Cabinet agencies tell Joe Biden's office about the appearance concerns or the state of the various Ukrainian investigations into Burisma?
  10. All memos, emails and other documents concerning a possible U.S. embassy's request in spring 2019 to monitor the social media activities and analytics of certain U.S. media personalities considered favorable to President Trump. Did any such monitoring occur? Was it requested by the American embassy in Kiev? Who ordered it? Why did it stop? Were any legal concerns raised?
  11. All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning efforts by individual Ukrainian government officials to exert influence on the 2016 U.S. election, including an anti-Trump Op-Ed written in August 2016 by Ukraine's ambassador to Washington or efforts to publicize allegations against Paul Manafort. What did U.S. officials know about these efforts in 2016, and how did they react? What were these federal agencies' reactions to a Ukrainian court decision in December 2018 suggesting some Ukrainian officials had improperly meddled in the 2016 election?
  12. All State, CIA, FBI and DOJ documents concerning contacts with a Democratic National Committee contractor named Alexandra Chalupa and her dealings with the Ukrainian embassy in Washington or other Ukrainian figures. Did anyone in these U.S. government agencies interview or have contact with Chalupa during the time the Ukraine embassy in Washington says she was seeking dirt in 2016 on Trump and Manafort?

[Nov 26, 2019] Tulsi, warrior princess by Alligator Ed

Notable quotes:
"... She's tough, smart, and amazingly strong psychologically. That's exactly the kind of person you want on point. ..."
"... TLA "have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you" -- Schumer ..."
"... Not out of line to presume the JFK way is one of those six . . . https://duckduckgo.com/?q=schumer+trump+six+ways+sunday ..."
Nov 22, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

This message is brought to you thanks to the efforts of the combined staffs of the History and Sociology Departments of Alligator University.

This year of our Lord, the holy Flying Spaghetti Monster 2019, we have discovered a legend--a living, fire-breathing legend at that. Not since the days of Boudica , a warrior Queen, has the earth seen such a warrior. Not surpassed by Jean d Árc nor Katherine the Great. This warrior of the wireless age has not only exhibited compassion on the battlefield, as befits a person of high honor, but has the uncanny ability to perform as the best of Generals (not just Majors) throughout recorded history have done. Know wherein lies the enemy. Know your own strengths. Know your own weaknesses. When engaging the enemy, do not hold back. Fight to win! Win as big as you can, while sparing needless damage.

Tulsi, our subject (and [bias apparent here] champion), has arisen, almost from the sea. Far to the West across the Great Water, from islands spewed from the mouths of living volcanoes, emerged, almost as an eruption, our Warrior Princess Tulsi. She fought to defend her tribe by joining a council of the advisers, then abandoning such sedentary life and chosing battle instead. Fighting with distinction, Tulsi saved the lives of many fellow soldiers. Her counsel proved both wise and humane. Troops and others recognized Tulsi's emerging greatness, coupled with compassion.

To the delight of her cadre, Tulsi sallied forth to the land known today as The Great Swamp. Chauvinistically however, I believe my south Florida estuary is the true Great Swamp. But we shall leave that debate to a later time.

She joined a regiment called the DNC. At first it seemed to Tulsi this to be a desirable posting, surrounded by fields and rivers with pleasing structures in which to live. Continuing her steady progress up the ranks, our Warrior Princess, as yet untested by actual combat, joined others to high councils of War and of Foreign trysts.

But only a few years had yet to pass during her service, Tulsi sensed some problems in the command chain. Plans seemed to favor neither Nation nor Military, but instead the commanders themselves. Upon thus learning, Tulsi resigned her position, abandoning the ill-disposed regiment, seeking mission achievement over promotion.

A loosely knit Brigade, called the Democratic Party, united by the power of money and of power itself, was to become the default posting of TWP. Unfortunately the chain of command was rent asunder by internal factions, an unholy tug of war resulting. This war is still actively contested--we are in a state of war.

[Injection of unpaid political endorsement, not approved by TWP] Folks, we need this brave general to lead.

Contesting amongst others for the ultimate Brigade command was Tulsi and 21 22 (23?) others. The concept grew either too tiresome or expensive for many contestants, who either became sick or perished from fatigue and/or loneliness. The field of battle was becoming clarified, gaining Tulsi progressively improving evaluation and appropriate planning for future campaigns.

The First Slain Enemy, Olaf the Oaf

From the gentle hills and scattered forests of Ohionia came Olaf. Initially he was known as Olaf the Ogre; until he was slain by sword blows from Warrior Tulsi. Description of her foe is warranted. Her foe was a giant, tall and strong. But Olaf was neither quick of wit nor of foot. Large he was, as said. The ground would rumble beneath his foot steps. Trees were bent aside as he strode unstoppably through the woods. Local dwellers both feared and respected Olaf, the mighty.

The battle: the setting is on a level plain under illumination of many cell phones torches soon after sunset. Other contestants on the field have agreed that only two contestants combat each other. Female referees would enforce rules of combat.

Tulsi and Olaf faced each other. In his ponderous way, Olaf declared his desire to engage. With that, Warrior Tulsi swiftly smote his pate with a mighty broadsword blow. Owing to the thickness of Olaf's cranium, the sound of the resultant impact was heard for miles. Yea, more than a thousand miles some say. Rending Olaf's pulsating brain irreversibly damaged, the Oaf staggered from battleground, only to succumbing to his wounds months later.

Not being particularly fond of Olaf, I did not check the source of the following: it is estimated that 30 people attended his internment, including undertakers.

Yet the Campaign had only just begun. More foes to conquer.

Second Casualty: Klammer the Camel

Venturing forth from the Kingdom of Kalifornication comes (but not for very long) the former Lord High Executioner, Klammer the Camel. Since Klammer is of mixed parentage, it is unsure whether Klammer is a Dromedary (one hump camel) or a two hump Bactrian camel. It is recorded that an expert on Klammer's humping is retired statesman Willie Brown.

It is said said that Klammer's exhalations could kill enemies at 10 paces. Yet Klammer's best weapon was heaving heavy Criminal Code books at her victims. Strangely, Klammer looked reasonably fit in her drab clothing. Foes who faced her in battle have noted how white Klammer's teeth are as she gnashes at them. She had a strange reaction to cannabis. When others utilized the substance, she raged and destroyed them, if she could reach them. Yet when she herself inhaled the aroma of such burning vegetation, she became as if in a trance.

The battlefield: very much like the field upon which brave Tulsi slew the Oaf, at night with many candles burning held by acolytes of various contestants. Once again, only two were allowed combat at a time. Supremely self-confident of victory, flush with self-satisfaction after inflicting a minor wound on former vice-king JoJo the Far Gone. Klammer first engaged other contestants, smirking from her presumed victories. Now brimming with confidence bordering on hubris, Klammer stood her ground. Then, in a well-planned straight ahead frontal attack, delivered with swiftness and ferocity, Tulsi struck her foe. And struck her. While Klammer lay quivering on the ground, TWP demanded an apology of her for her past sins. When none was evinced, Tulsi stuck the tip of her blade into Klammer's seeming impenetrable armor. This wound, though not immediately fatal, nevertheless is proving fatal to the now debilitated Klammer. Klammer attempted a counter-attack at another field before falling slack-jawed after a mere glare from Tulsi. Not yet dead, but soon.

Third Casualty: Boots the Jiggler

Wandering from a land not far from the home of Olaf, proceeds the Stolid Boots. He sets his sights on new lands to conquer. The city he leaves is burning and being plundered by wandering Mnuchkins from the neighboring fiefdom of Illinois. Unconcerned with the plight of the subjects of the Boots' prior management, Boots bravely strides forth, still not battle-tested. He gathers with him followers, some of whom are loyal, while others need financial encouragement to participate in his campaign.

Boots has been gifted with the ability to speak so eloquently and at such length that those auditioners of his monologues are both amazed and yet unable to understand the essence of Boots' message.

The battlefield: interestingly quite similar to those upon which Tulsi administered the blows dispatching the Oaf and crippling the Camel. Once again, remaining combatants aligned to watch two of their number engage upon combat.

Boots, buoyed by the support of his entourage, summoned forth 400 of his Southern Army to aid in his battle. There Boots turned upon Tulsi, promising to not only to vanquish her by his superior generalship but send troops across the Southern border. But, becoming anxious of TWP, he turned to assay his retinue of 400. But lo, none remained, most not having left the barracks.

In face-to-face combat Boots met Tulsi. Mutually acknowledging their military experience, Tulsi struck blows into the Jiggler. This assault froze Boots into place, unable to respond. The above picture of Boots was made immediately after a biting blow from Tulsi's broadsword. He was heard to mumble something like "Et tu, Tulsi?".

. . . . .

Campaigns against larger enemies are soon to come. One looming conflict may be likened to a civil war against Brooklyn Bernie which hopefully be short. A battle against the Hokey Okie is inevitable.

Our AU colleagues assure me that the Feared Medusa will enter the fray after more rivals have fallen. The Snake-head leads a mighty army, most of whom are oddly cyborg-like. Bots I think they call them. Hilbots actually.

A musical coda is appropriate here. A good choice is a warning, an admonition to those contemplating with the Warrior Princess.

www.youtube.com/embed/lK3Oc6HD4xU?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

Centaurea on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 12:41am

Warrior Tulsi

has massive cojones .

She's tough, smart, and amazingly strong psychologically. That's exactly the kind of person you want on point.

lotlizard on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 9:39pm
TLA "have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you" -- Schumer

@The Voice In the Wilderness

TLA = "Three Letter Agencies" = shorthand for the so-called "intelligence community"

Schumer = Senator Charles "Chuck" Schumer (D–NY), Senate Minority Leader

Not out of line to presume the JFK way is one of those six . . . https://duckduckgo.com/?q=schumer+trump+six+ways+sunday

[Nov 26, 2019] Who debunked the Biden conspiracy theories by Colonel Lang

Notable quotes:
"... "US Officials" say the Bidens are pure in heart and deed? Hah! Is it not clear that The Borg (foreign policy establishment) hate Donald Trump and will say anything possible to injure him? ..."
"... "Debunked," "Discredited," "Conspiracy theories?" Trickery in the press is the real truth , trickery intended to protect the only viable candidate in the Democratic Party field. ..."
"... Lutsenko has had a pretty sketchy career, including charges of abuse of power, forgery and embezzlement among other things. https://heavy.com/news/2019/11/yuriy-lutsenko/ It's telling that Democrats and the mainstream media choose to cite such a character as their primary source for evidence that the Bidens did nothing wrong. Reminds me of Mark Twains old adage: "An honest politician is one who, once he's been bought, stays bought." More recently it seems that his loyalties have shifted, accusing Yovanovitch of giving him a list of people who should be protected. ..."
"... It's not really that complicated an inquiry to decide whether there is a need to go further; two questions: what did Hunter Biden do for the money; and Joe, did you get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired as you bragged you did, and why? Maybe throw in a third if the answer is "I did", what or who made you think that you could do that? ..."
Nov 26, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Two quotes:

"Graham's conspiracy theory-based investigation is rooted in the baseless allegation that Biden pressured Ukraine to remove a corrupt prosecutor in 2016 as a way to protect Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, against a corruption probe. Biden's son Hunter was previously a board member with Burisma until April this year.

There is no evidence to support allegations that Biden acted improperly in calling for the prosecutor general in charge of the Burisma probe to be ousted, and both Ukrainian and U.S. officials have said there is no merit to the claim. As many have since noted, the Burisma investigation was in fact dormant when the prosecutor general was forced out on accusations he was slow-walking corruption probes, among other things.

Trump brought up that debunked conspiracy during a July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, asking the Ukrainian government to investigate Biden as well as a baseless conspiracy involving the Democratic National Committee servers."

~American Independent

*******

"Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas:

(1) the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth , belief , and justification , [1] [2]

(2) various problems of skepticism ,

(3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and

(4) the criteria for knowledge and justification.

Epistemology addresses such questions as: "What makes justified beliefs justified?" " What does it mean to say that we know something? ", and fundamentally "How do we know that we know?"

~ wiki on epistemology

-------------

As in the example above from the "American Independent," the MSM and online projects like the American Independent incessantly insist that the simple fact that Hunter Biden and his dear old dad, a "Union Man," solicited money in Ukraine and in China for services not rendered proves nothing, that nothing has been proven against them and that any mention of these occurrences is evidence of harsh partisan rhetoric based on fantasy and equivalent to belief in the Loch Ness Monster.

Well, pilgrims I want to know who and what investigation or investigations cleared the Bidens of anything.

It is obvious that Hunter is qualified for employment as a bag man and not much else. He has a law degree? So what? As in the matter of the qualifications of doctors, not all learn much in medical or law school.

"US Officials" say the Bidens are pure in heart and deed? Hah! Is it not clear that The Borg (foreign policy establishment) hate Donald Trump and will say anything possible to injure him?

"Debunked," "Discredited," "Conspiracy theories?" Trickery in the press is the real truth , trickery intended to protect the only viable candidate in the Democratic Party field.

Posted at 01:13 PM in As The Borg Turns , government , Media , Politics | Permalink

Mark McCarty , 25 November 2019 at 01:44 PM

The article highlighted here, typically, is a lie. As documented in Moon of Alabama's timeline ( https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/11/a-timeline-of-joe-bidens-intervention-against-the-prosecutor-general-of-ukraine.html), Shokin was actively investigating Zlochevsky in February 2016, when Shokin seized his luxury car. Barely two weeks later, Biden was on the phone to Poroshenko demanding Shokin's firing. While this doesn't prove that Biden was motivated primarily by a desire to protect his son's employer, it is certainly consistent with that possibility.
Keith Harbaugh , 25 November 2019 at 01:48 PM
John Solomon has been very much in the lead on reporting from Ukraine which furthers what the MSM calls "conspiracy theories". While he earlier reported, or opined, from The Hill, now he evidently has been bumped (my opinion) from that perch, and now has own blog John Solomon Report : https://johnsolomonreports.com/

He has been roundly attacked in the media for opposing the party line on Ukraine, see especially this Paul Farhi (normally a balanced voice, but not in this case) column: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/how-a-conservative-columnist-helped-push-a-flawed-ukraine-narrative/2019/09/26/1654026e-dee7-11e9-8dc8-498eabc129a0_story.html

In any case, here are some recent columns where Solomon fires back at the MSM and the party line:

2019-11-22 https://johnsolomonreports.com/responding-to-lt-col-vindman-about-my-ukraine-columns-with-the-facts/
2019-11-20 https://johnsolomonreports.com/the-ukraine-scandal-timeline-democrats-and-their-media-allies-dont-want-america-to-see/
2019-11-20 https://johnsolomonreports.com/impeachment-surprise-how-adam-schiff-validated-my-reporting-on-ukraine/
2019-11-15 https://johnsolomonreports.com/the-15-essential-questions-for-marie-yovanovitch-americas-former-ambassador-to-ukraine/
2019-11-13 https://johnsolomonreports.com/the-real-ukraine-controversy-an-activist-u-s-embassy-and-its-adherence-to-the-geneva-convention/

2019-10-31 https://johnsolomonreports.com/debunking-some-of-the-ukraine-scandal-myths-about-biden-and-election-interference/

This last link is especially worthwhile.

It is tragic, IMO, how the MSM ignores the facts that Solomon documents in his columns.
It is possible that JS is a mouthpiece for corrupt elements in Ukraine,
but I think his points deserve more attention than they have been getting.
There are two sides to this story, not only one as Col. Lang pointed out in his root piece.

prawnik , 25 November 2019 at 01:57 PM
I recall that the Russiagate conspiracy theory was "proven" factual as well, and by many of the same people who claim that Biden's corruption has been "debunked". Even though it was absurd on its face and had been debunked numerous times, many people in fact continue to insist otherwise.
catherine , 25 November 2019 at 02:00 PM
Seriously....who would think Biden's son taking a highly paid position with a company in a foreign country that Biden was representing the US in wasn't a conflict of interest? Even the 'appearance' of a conflict of interest should be avoided in such situations.
I find Biden and his political 'career', greased by his 'good old Joe act' disgusting in so many ways it would take too long to describe them here.

It should be investigated but I doubt it will.

plantman , 25 November 2019 at 02:29 PM
The media really seems to be testing the limits of disinformation. More and more, the media wants to convince people that black is white and up is down. Fortunately, I don't think their plan is working all that well.

In the case of Hunter Biden, we are told that "There is no evidence to support allegations that Biden acted improperly".

Okay, that's one way to look at things, but I have found that even among my liberal friends, the fetid smell of corruption emitting from this case, is overpowering. And while most people might have a hard time sinking their teeth into a "quid pro quo", they do have a pretty good grasp of old fashioned influence peddling, which is what we are talking about.

So why has the media chosen to defend the crooked goings-on of public officials who were obviously up to no good? Don't they care about their credibility at all?

Seamus Padraig said in reply to plantman... , 25 November 2019 at 07:09 PM
Quid Pro Joe Biden.
JohnH , 25 November 2019 at 02:41 PM
Was the American Independent quote lifted from The NY Times? It sure sounds like it!

For some time I've been wondering how exactly Biden got cleared. Was there any formal investigation? Who conducted it? And how reliable are the facts when they come from a place like Ukraine, where anything, including the 'truth,' can be laundered?

What's become painfully obvious is how eagerly America's major news outlets, including the journals of record, participate in the laundering of truth.

Of course, that should have been obvious from the yellow journalism preceding the war in Iraq.

What's really scary are reports that "intelligence" services get most of their 'facts' from the very same truth laundering sources.

oldman22 , 25 November 2019 at 03:15 PM
too much to summarize, includes original government documents, read all for yourself please

State Department Releases Detailed Accounts Of Biden-Ukraine Corruption

by Tyler Durden

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/state-department-releases-detailed-accounts-biden-ukraine-corruption

Factotum , 25 November 2019 at 04:08 PM
I always got the impression the "wild, debunked conspiracy theory pushed by right wing nuts" was always referring to the Crowdstrike DNC computer investigation hoax that Trump tried to re-open.

They would never specifically refer to the Crowdstrike favor Trump specifically asked for in the phone call, instead they would substitute Trump asked about some "debunked, wild right wing conspiracy".

So they never explained how the Crowdstrike investigation hoax was debunked either.

To me this is far more interesting missing debunked conspiracy link - since it shows incredible coordination between the DNC, the "leak" of their DNC computer data, Ukrainian Crowdstrike, and finally the Mueller Report who used the DNC Crowdstrike investigation conclusoin hook line and sinker to reach their own official conclusions which is now "proven" operating dogma. Without ever doing an independent investigation themselves. How often does that happen?

To me the Crowdstrike connection begs further investigation - why would a Russian hating Ukrainian who was running Crowdstrike point the finger at the Russians and claim they "hacked" the DNC computers, but not let anyone else touch those same computers to corroborate that conclusion?

And then parlay this into Trump supporting Russian interference in the 2016 election. All too tidy for me. Feels like dark forces are still at work, and subverting language to achieve their ends.

Petrel , 25 November 2019 at 04:17 PM
Whatever happened to Joe Biden's taped boast, at the Council on Foreign Relations, that he gave President Poroshenko 6 hours to fire Prosecutor Shokin -- or else lose $1 Billion of US aid ?

How was this taped confession of QUID-PRO-QUO debunked ?

Factotum said in reply to Petrel... , 25 November 2019 at 07:16 PM
Quid pro quo becomes a fait accompli.
Upstate NY'er , 25 November 2019 at 04:34 PM
The media (approx. 99% of them) have been in the tank for Democrats since at least the Vietnam war.
Roger Ailes said why he didn't read the NY Times:
"You cover the bad news about America. You do. But you don't get up in the morning hating your country."
b , 25 November 2019 at 05:21 PM
The "debunked" is based on the claim the the Ukrainian General Prosecutor Shokin was not investigating Burisma or its owner Mykola Zlochevsky.

That claim is evidently false.

On Feb 2 2016 Shokin confiscated the houses (more like palaces) of Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky.

A news agency reports the seizure two days later (Note: European date format ddmmyy)
https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/322395.html

Eight days later Joe Biden launched an intense pressure campaign to get rid of Shokin. He personally calls Poroshenko on Feb 12, 18 and 19 to press for firing Shokin.

To think that this is unrelated is not reasonable.

The rest of the timeline shows further Biden influence in the case.

(I should update that timeline as a lot of additional evidence of Burisma lobbying State at that time has since come in.)

There are tons of additional dirt. The U.S. has control over the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and uses it to push all such investigations to its favor. NABU has itself been involved in serious corruption.
There is also a USAID/Soros paid NGO that has a similar function and is equally corrupt.

These organizations are used as weapons to put all Ukrainian assets into the hands of those that the U.S. embassy likes.

JohnH said in reply to b ... , 25 November 2019 at 11:25 PM
The debunkers seem to be citing Yuriy Lutsenko, who said that "he had no evidence of wrongdoing by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden or his son."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/23/fact-checking-president-trumps-wild-jabs-joe-biden/

Lutsenko was the guy who was appointed as Prosecutor General after Biden got the previous one fired. IOW Lutsenko owed his job to Biden.

Lutsenko has had a pretty sketchy career, including charges of abuse of power, forgery and embezzlement among other things. https://heavy.com/news/2019/11/yuriy-lutsenko/ It's telling that Democrats and the mainstream media choose to cite such a character as their primary source for evidence that the Bidens did nothing wrong. Reminds me of Mark Twains old adage: "An honest politician is one who, once he's been bought, stays bought." More recently it seems that his loyalties have shifted, accusing Yovanovitch of giving him a list of people who should be protected.

The only thing I can conclude is that Lutsenko is probably just trying to survive the shifting tides in the Ukrainian swamp and will say or do whatever it takes.

Ian56 , 25 November 2019 at 06:27 PM
"American Independent" is David Brock's Clinton / Soros linked Shareblue disinfo and troll brigade rebranded. It will obviously tell every lie going to protect the corrupt Corporate Dem Establishment, the Globalists and the Deep State. https://twitter.com/Ian56789/status/1198338991814250497
Flavius , 25 November 2019 at 09:22 PM
It's not really that complicated an inquiry to decide whether there is a need to go further; two questions: what did Hunter Biden do for the money; and Joe, did you get the Ukrainian prosecutor fired as you bragged you did, and why? Maybe throw in a third if the answer is "I did", what or who made you think that you could do that?

[Nov 26, 2019] JFK: What the CIA Hides by Jefferson Morley

Nov 22, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

When I launched JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in 2012, I was often asked by strangers, "So who killed JFK?" "I don't know," I shrugged. "It's too early to tell." Given that the handsome liberal president had been shot dead a half-century before, my answer was a lame joke based on an apocryphal story . Henry Kissinger once said that when he asked Zhou Enlai, "What was the effect of the French Revolution on world history?" the Chinese statesmen replied, "It's too early to tell."

True to Kissingerian form, the story turns out to be not exactly true. Zhou was actually responding to a question about France's political convulsions in 1968, not 1789. But Kissinger's spin on the anecdote struck me as perceptive. The meaning of a great historical event might take a long time–a very long time–to become apparent. I didn't want to jump to conclusions about the causes of JFK's murder in downtown Dallas on November 22, 1963.

It's still too early to tell. Fifty six years after the fact, historians and JFK researchers do not have access to all of the CIA's files on the subject The 1964 Warren Commission report exonerated the agency with its conclusion that Kennedy was killed by one man alone. But the agency was subsequently the subject of five official JFK investigations, which cast doubt on its findings.

The Senate's Church Committee investigation showed that the Warren Commission knew nothing of CIA assassination operations in 1963. JFK records released in the last 20 years show the Commission's attorneys had no real understanding the extensive counterintelligence monitoring of Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK was killed. We now know that senior operations officers, including counterintelligence chief James Angleton, paid far closer attention to the obscure Oswald as he made his way to Dallas than the investigators were ever told.

To be sure, there is no proof of CIA complicity in JFK's death. And conspiracy theories spouted by the likes of the Alex Jones and James Fetzer deserve no attention. The fact remains some of the most astute power players of 1963–including Lyndon Johnson , Charles DeGaulle, Fidel Castro , and Jackie and Robert Kennedy–concluded that JFK was killed by his enemies, and not by one man alone. Did these statesmen get it wrong, and the under-informed Warren Commission get it right?

The new documentary, Truth is the Only Client, says yes. The film, shown last month in the auditorium of the U.S. Capitol, features interviews with numerous former Warren Commission staffers. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who served as a fact checker for the Commission in 1964, defends the lone gunman conclusion, saying, "You have to look at the new evidence and when you do, I come to the same conclusion."

Justice Breyer, oddly, passes judgment on evidence he has not seen. The record of the CIA's role in the events leading JFK's assassination is far from complete. In 2013 I reported on JFK Facts that Delores Nelson CIA's information coordinator had stated in a sworn affidavit filed in federal court, that the agency retained 1,100 assassination-related records that had never been made public.

A small portion of this material was released in 2017, including new details about the opening of the CIA's first Oswald file in October 1959.

Yet thousands of JFK files remain secret. According to the latest figures from the National Archives, a total of 15,834 JFK files remain fully or partially classified, most of them held by the CIA and FBI. Thanks to an October 2017 order from President Trump, these documents will not be made public until October 2021 , at the earliest.

The assumption of Justice Breyer and many others is that any and all unseen CIA material must exonerate the agency. It's an odd conclusion. If the CIA has nothing to hide, why is it hiding so much? While 95 percent of the still-secret files probably are trivial, the remaining 5 percent -- thousands of pages of material–are historically pregnant. If made public, they could clarify key questions in the long-running controversy about JFK's death.

These questions have been raised most concisely by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a career CIA officer who served in senior positions. Now a senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center, Mowatt-Larssen has implicated his former employer in the Dallas ambush. In a presentation at Harvard last December, Mowatt-Larssen hypothesized that a plot to kill JFK emanated from the CIA's station in Miami where disgruntled Cuban exiles and undercover officers loathed JFK for his failure to overthrow Castro's government in Cuba.

Mowatt-Larssen has yet to publish his presentation and documentation, so I can't say if he's right or wrong. But he asks the right question: "How can intelligence operational and analytical modus operandi help unlock a conspiracy that has remained unsolved for 55 years?" And he focuses on the right place to dig deeper: the CIA's Miami office, known as WAVE station.

My own JFK questions involve George Joannides, a decorated undercover officer who served as branch chief in the Miami station in 1963. He ran psychological warfare operations against Cuba. In 2003, I sued the CIA for Joannides' files. The lawsuit ended 15 years later in July 2018, when Judge Brett Kavanaugh, in his last opinion before ascending to the Supreme Court, tossed my case. Kavanaugh declared the agency deserved "deference upon deference" in its handling of Freedom of Information Act requests about JFK files.

Nonetheless, my lawsuit illuminated the extraordinary sensitivity of the psy-ops Joannides ran out of WAVE station. As reported in the New York Times, Fox News, Associated Press, and Politico , Morley v. CIA forced disclosure of the fact Joannides had received the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal in 1981. The honor came two years after he stonewalled the House Select Committee on Assassination about what he knew of Oswald's contacts with pro-and anti-Castro Cubans in the summer and fall of 1963.

I believe Joannides was honored because he concealed the existence of an authorized covert operation involving Oswald that has never been publicly acknowledged. In CIA lingo, Joannides protected the agency's "sources and methods" concerning Oswald. And he might have done more. His actions may have also shielded other officers who knew of a scheme to kill the liberal president and lay the blame on Cuba.

Never been seen by JFK investigators, they contain details about his Joannides' undercover work in Miami in 1963, when he funded Oswald's antagonists among the anti-Castro Cuban exiles. They also detail his work in 1978, when he duped chief investigator Robert Blakey and the House Select Committee on Assassination. These records, the agency says, cannot be released in 2019 without risk of "irreversible harm" to national security.

It's a bizarre claim, at odds with the law. These ancient documents, all of them more than 40 years old, meet the statutory definition of "assassination-related," according to federal judge John Tunheim. He chaired the Assassination Records Review Board which oversaw the declassification of 4 million pages of JFK files between 1994 and 2017. In an interview, Tunheim told me that, under the terms of the 1992 JFK Records Act, the Joannides files are subject to mandatory review and release. "It's a no-brainer," he said.

Yet the files remain off-limits to the public. Thanks to the legal consensus, articulated by Justices Kavanaugh and Breyer, the CIA enjoys "deference upon deference" when it comes to the JFK assassination story. As a result, the JFK Records Act has been flouted. The public's interest in full disclosure has been thwarted.

Yet legitimate questions persist: Did a plot to kill JFK originate in the agency's Miami station as Mowatt-Larssen suggests? The fact that the CIA won't share the evidence that could answer the CIA man's question is telling.

So these days, when people ask me who killed JFK, I say the Kennedy was probably victimized by enemies in his own government, possibly including CIA officers involved in anti-Castro and counterintelligence operations. I have no smoking gun, no theory. Just look at the suspicious fact pattern, still shrouded in official secrecy, and it's easy to believe that JFK was, as Mowatt-Larssen puts it, "marked for assassination." Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Jefferson Morley

Jefferson Morley is editor of the Deep State blog and author of The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton .

[Nov 26, 2019] The problem with the loyalty of government employees in the state that strive to dominate the world

Notable quotes:
"... America was feared by many intellectuals, both in the United States and Britain of the 1940s and 1950s, and their fears were not unwarranted. ..."
"... Big, brawny America – its power establishment – very much was inclined towards dominating the world after WWII. The whole tone of the American press and speeches of major political figures in the period was actually quite frightening. Any highly intelligent, sensitive type would be concerned by it. ..."
"... America wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons, so that it would be in an unassailable position as it built its imperial apparatus after WWII, the time effectively it "took over" as world imperial power with so many potential competitors flattened. ..."
"... Later, the Pentagon actually planned things like an all-out first strike on the Soviets – it did that more once as well as doing so later for China – so there were indeed plenty of dark intentions in Washington. ..."
"... Spies and ex-spies often put disinformation into their books. Sometimes officials even insist they do so. ..."
Nov 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

Comments below are from Was Robert Oppenheimer a Soviet Agent, by John Wear - The Unz Review

JOHN CHUCKMAN , says: Website November 25, 2019 at 8:59 am GMT

The motives for so many Western spies serving the Soviet Union – and in the 1940s and 1950s the Soviets had the best "humint" on earth – were rather idealistic. This was largely true for the Cambridge Circle in Britain. They were concerned that America was going to "lord it over" the Russians and everyone else.

America was feared by many intellectuals, both in the United States and Britain of the 1940s and 1950s, and their fears were not unwarranted.

Big, brawny America – its power establishment – very much was inclined towards dominating the world after WWII. The whole tone of the American press and speeches of major political figures in the period was actually quite frightening. Any highly intelligent, sensitive type would be concerned by it.

You certainly did not have to be a communist to feel that way, but being one assisted with access to important Soviet contacts. They sought you out.

America wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons, so that it would be in an unassailable position as it built its imperial apparatus after WWII, the time effectively it "took over" as world imperial power with so many potential competitors flattened.

It made little secret of its desire to keep such a monopoly, so brilliant people like Oppenheimer would be well aware of something they might well regard as ominous.

Later, the Pentagon actually planned things like an all-out first strike on the Soviets – it did that more once as well as doing so later for China – so there were indeed plenty of dark intentions in Washington.

A hugely important general like MacArthur was unblinkingly ready in 1950 to use atomic weapons in the Korean War to destroy North Korea's connections with China.

I read several major biographies of Oppenheimer, and there is little to nothing concerning Soviet intelligence work. When I came across the Sudoplatov book with its straightforward declaration of Oppenheimer's assistance, it was difficult to know how to weigh the claim.

Spies and ex-spies often put disinformation into their books. Sometimes officials even insist they do so.

Judging by what is suggested here, if Oppenheimer did help, it was in subtle ways like letting Klaus Fuchs, a fellow scientist and a rather distinguished one (but a Soviet spy), look at certain papers. But the scientific community always has some considerable tendency to share information, a tendency having nothing to do with spying.

In general, it should be understood, that Oppenheimer, despite all his brilliance, was a rather disturbed man all his life. Quite early on, as just one example, he attempted to poison someone he did not like. Only pure luck prevented the man's eating a lethally-laced apple. There were other disturbing behaviors too.

He was subject to severe emotional breakdowns.

SolontoCroesus , says: November 25, 2019 at 12:10 pm GMT

"the[y] . . . saw themselves as a new breed of superstatesmen whose mandate transcended national boundaries"

Like Vindman

another anon , says: November 25, 2019 at 12:20 pm GMT

Later they believed that equality of superpower status for the Soviet Union would contribute to world peace.

How dumb were these "scientists". Everyone knows that once Soviet Union fell, peace and freedom and democracy are flowering all over the world and United States are not waging any wars anymore.

[Nov 25, 2019] Note of a State Deparment neocons giving testimony on Ukrainegate: please do not forget to mention Russia's aggressive training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, as well as contemplating on freezing up a few states,

Nov 25, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Zoran Aleksic bumbershoot • 6 days ago • edited

Agreed. However, an addendum, you seem to have forgotten to mention Russia's aggressive training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, contemplating on freezing up a few states, any many others the mere thought of gets one wound up.
Sid Finster Zoran Aleksic • 6 days ago
Your irony is going to be lost on the average frustrated russiagate conspiracy theorist.

[Nov 25, 2019] Tulsi, warrior princess caucus99percent

Nov 25, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Tulsi, warrior princess

Alligator Ed on Fri, 11/22/2019 - 8:53pm This message is brought to you thanks to the efforts of the combined staffs of the History and Sociology Departments of Alligator University.

This year of our Lord, the holy Flying Spaghetti Monster 2019, we have discovered a legend--a living, fire-breathing legend at that. Not since the days of Boudica , a warrior Queen, has the earth seen such a warrior. Not surpassed by Jean d Árc nor Katherine the Great. This warrior of the wireless age has not only exhibited compassion on the battlefield, as befits a person of high honor, but has the uncanny ability to perform as the best of Generals (not just Majors) throughout recorded history have done. Know wherein lies the enemy. Know your own strengths. Know your own weaknesses. When engaging the enemy, do not hold back. Fight to win! Win as big as you can, while sparing needless damage.

Tulsi, our subject (and [bias apparent here] champion), has arisen, almost from the sea. Far to the West across the Great Water, from islands spewed from the mouths of living volcanoes, emerged, almost as an eruption, our Warrior Princess Tulsi. She fought to defend her tribe by joining a council of the advisers, then abandoning such sedentary life and chosing battle instead. Fighting with distinction, Tulsi saved the lives of many fellow soldiers. Her counsel proved both wise and humane. Troops and others recognized Tulsi's emerging greatness, coupled with compassion.

To the delight of her cadre, Tulsi sallied forth to the land known today as The Great Swamp. Chauvinistically however, I believe my south Florida estuary is the true Great Swamp. But we shall leave that debate to a later time.

She joined a regiment called the DNC. At first it seemed to Tulsi this to be a desirable posting, surrounded by fields and rivers with pleasing structures in which to live. Continuing her steady progress up the ranks, our Warrior Princess, as yet untested by actual combat, joined others to high councils of War and of Foreign trysts.

But only a few years had yet to pass during her service, Tulsi sensed some problems in the command chain. Plans seemed to favor neither Nation nor Military, but instead the commanders themselves. Upon thus learning, Tulsi resigned her position, abandoning the ill-disposed regiment, seeking mission achievement over promotion.

A loosely knit Brigade, called the Democratic Party, united by the power of money and of power itself, was to become the default posting of TWP. Unfortunately the chain of command was rent asunder by internal factions, an unholy tug of war resulting. This war is still actively contested--we are in a state of war.

[Injection of unpaid political endorsement, not approved by TWP] Folks, we need this brave general to lead.

Contesting amongst others for the ultimate Brigade command was Tulsi and 21 22 (23?) others. The concept grew either too tiresome or expensive for many contestants, who either became sick or perished from fatigue and/or loneliness. The field of battle was becoming clarified, gaining Tulsi progressively improving evaluation and appropriate planning for future campaigns.

The First Slain Enemy, Olaf the Oaf

From the gentle hills and scattered forests of Ohionia came Olaf. Initially he was known as Olaf the Ogre; until he was slain by sword blows from Warrior Tulsi. Description of her foe is warranted. Her foe was a giant, tall and strong. But Olaf was neither quick of wit nor of foot. Large he was, as said. The ground would rumble beneath his foot steps. Trees were bent aside as he strode unstoppably through the woods. Local dwellers both feared and respected Olaf, the mighty.

The battle: the setting is on a level plain under illumination of many cell phones torches soon after sunset. Other contestants on the field have agreed that only two contestants combat each other. Female referees would enforce rules of combat.

Tulsi and Olaf faced each other. In his ponderous way, Olaf declared his desire to engage. With that, Warrior Tulsi swiftly smote his pate with a mighty broadsword blow. Owing to the thickness of Olaf's cranium, the sound of the resultant impact was heard for miles. Yea, more than a thousand miles some say. Rending Olaf's pulsating brain irreversibly damaged, the Oaf staggered from battleground, only to succumbing to his wounds months later.

Not being particularly fond of Olaf, I did not check the source of the following: it is estimated that 30 people attended his internment, including undertakers.

Yet the Campaign had only just begun. More foes to conquer.

Second Casualty: Klammer the Camel

Venturing forth from the Kingdom of Kalifornication comes (but not for very long) the former Lord High Executioner, Klammer the Camel. Since Klammer is of mixed parentage, it is unsure whether Klammer is a Dromedary (one hump camel) or a two hump Bactrian camel. It is recorded that an expert on Klammer's humping is retired statesman Willie Brown.

It is said said that Klammer's exhalations could kill enemies at 10 paces. Yet Klammer's best weapon was heaving heavy Criminal Code books at her victims. Strangely, Klammer looked reasonably fit in her drab clothing. Foes who faced her in battle have noted how white Klammer's teeth are as she gnashes at them. She had a strange reaction to cannabis. When others utilized the substance, she raged and destroyed them, if she could reach them. Yet when she herself inhaled the aroma of such burning vegetation, she became as if in a trance.

The battlefield: very much like the field upon which brave Tulsi slew the Oaf, at night with many candles burning held by acolytes of various contestants. Once again, only two were allowed combat at a time. Supremely self-confident of victory, flush with self-satisfaction after inflicting a minor wound on former vice-king JoJo the Far Gone. Klammer first engaged other contestants, smirking from her presumed victories. Now brimming with confidence bordering on hubris, Klammer stood her ground. Then, in a well-planned straight ahead frontal attack, delivered with swiftness and ferocity, Tulsi struck her foe. And struck her. While Klammer lay quivering on the ground, TWP demanded an apology of her for her past sins. When none was evinced, Tulsi stuck the tip of her blade into Klammer's seeming impenetrable armor. This wound, though not immediately fatal, nevertheless is proving fatal to the now debilitated Klammer. Klammer attempted a counter-attack at another field before falling slack-jawed after a mere glare from Tulsi. Not yet dead, but soon.

Third Casualty: Boots the Jiggler

Wandering from a land not far from the home of Olaf, proceeds the Stolid Boots. He sets his sights on new lands to conquer. The city he leaves is burning and being plundered by wandering Mnuchkins from the neighboring fiefdom of Illinois. Unconcerned with the plight of the subjects of the Boots' prior management, Boots bravely strides forth, still not battle-tested. He gathers with him followers, some of whom are loyal, while others need financial encouragement to participate in his campaign.

Boots has been gifted with the ability to speak so eloquently and at such length that those auditioners of his monologues are both amazed and yet unable to understand the essence of Boots' message.

The battlefield: interestingly quite similar to those upon which Tulsi administered the blows dispatching the Oaf and crippling the Camel. Once again, remaining combatants aligned to watch two of their number engage upon combat.

Boots, buoyed by the support of his entourage, summoned forth 400 of his Southern Army to aid in his battle. There Boots turned upon Tulsi, promising to not only to vanquish her by his superior generalship but send troops across the Southern border. But, becoming anxious of TWP, he turned to assay his retinue of 400. But lo, none remained, most not having left the barracks.

In face-to-face combat Boots met Tulsi. Mutually acknowledging their military experience, Tulsi struck blows into the Jiggler. This assault froze Boots into place, unable to respond. The above picture of Boots was made immediately after a biting blow from Tulsi's broadsword. He was heard to mumble something like "Et tu, Tulsi?".

. . . . .

Campaigns against larger enemies are soon to come. One looming conflict may be likened to a civil war against Brooklyn Bernie which hopefully be short. A battle against the Hokey Okie is inevitable.

Our AU colleagues assure me that the Feared Medusa will enter the fray after more rivals have fallen. The Snake-head leads a mighty army, most of whom are oddly cyborg-like. Bots I think they call them. Hilbots actually.

A musical coda is appropriate here. A good choice is a warning, an admonition to those contemplating with the Warrior Princess.

//www.youtube.com/embed/lK3Oc6HD4xU?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

Centaurea on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 12:41am
Warrior Tulsi

has massive cojones .

She's tough, smart, and amazingly strong psychologically. That's exactly the kind of person you want on point.

[Nov 25, 2019] Note of a State Deparment neocons giving testimony on Ukrainegate: please do not forget to mention Russia's aggressive training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, as well as contemplating on freezing up a few states,

Nov 25, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Zoran Aleksic bumbershoot • 6 days ago • edited

Agreed. However, an addendum, you seem to have forgotten to mention Russia's aggressive training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, contemplating on freezing up a few states, any many others the mere thought of gets one wound up.
Sid Finster Zoran Aleksic • 6 days ago
Your irony is going to be lost on the average frustrated russiagate conspiracy theorist.

[Nov 25, 2019] WSWS: This utterly reactionary, pro-imperialist role played by the USA was demonstrated Friday in the tribute that Yovanovitch paid, in the course of her testimony, to Arsen Avakov, the Ukrainian interior minister

This is a replay of Vietnam Communist Domino Theory. May all those neocons rest in Eternal Hell.
Notable quotes:
"... Now is not the time to retreat from our relationship with Ukraine, but rather to double down on it. As we sit here, Ukrainians are fighting a hot war on Ukrainian territory against Russian aggression. ..."
"... I went to the front line approximately 10 times during a hot war sometimes literally as we heard the impact of artillery, and to see how our assistance dollars were being put to use. ..."
"... Ukraine, with an enormous land mass and a large population, has the potential to be a significant force multiplier on the security side And now Ukraine is a battleground for great power competition with a hot war for the control of territory and a hybrid war to control Ukraine's leadership. ..."
"... She explained that the US-funded and fascist-led "Maidan Revolution" of 2014, which she and other State Department officials absurdly called the "Revolution of Dignity," was part of this conflict. "That's why they launched the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, demanding to be a part of Europe," she declared. ..."
"... Diplomat George Kent invoked the same theme in his testimony last Wednesday, saying: ..."
"... Ukraine's popular Revolution of Dignity in 2014 forced a corrupt pro-Russian leadership to flee to Moscow. After that, Russia invaded Ukraine, occupying seven percent of its territory, roughly equivalent to the size of Texas for the United States ..."
"... Since then, more than 13,000 Ukrainians have died on Ukrainian soil defending their territorial integrity and sovereignty from Russian aggression. American support in Ukraine's own de facto war of independence has been critical in this regard. ..."
"... Kent subsequently compared the role of the United States in the Ukrainian civil war to that of Spain and France in the American War of Independence. In that conflict, Spain and France were officially at war with Great Britain, including formal declarations of war in 1778 and 1779. ..."
"... If Kent's analogy is true, then the United States is in an undeclared war with Russia. ..."
"... But when has this war ever been discussed with the American people? Was there ever a congressional vote to authorize it? ..."
"... When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces," she said, threatening the "president, or anyone else, [who] impedes or subverts the national security of the United States. ..."
"... "In an otherwise divided Washington, one of the few issues of bipartisan agreement for the past six years has been countering Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's broad plan of disruption. That effort starts in Ukraine, where there has been a hot war underway in the east for five years " ..."
"... @wendy davis ..."
"... @jim p ..."
"... @lotlizard ..."
"... Mykola Zlochevsky, former employer of Hunter Biden and current partner of the Atlantic Council ..."
"... @lotlizard ..."
"... @Linda Wood ..."
"... @snoopydawg ..."
"... @wendy davis ..."
"... @snoopydawg ..."
"... @snoopydawg ..."
"... @snoopydawg ..."
"... @wendy davis ..."
"... @Pluto's Republic ..."
"... @Pluto's Republic ..."
"... @wendy davis ..."
"... @Pluto's Republic ..."
"... @Linda Wood ..."
Nov 25, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

' Who decided the US should fight a "hot war" with Russia? ', 23 November 2019 . Andre Damon, wsws

"There is a saying attributed to the banker J.P. Morgan: " A man always has two reasons for what he does -- a good one and the real one ."

If the alleged "organized crime shakedown" by Trump was the "good" reason for the impeachment inquiry, the "real" reason has emerged over two weeks of public congressional hearings. The hearings have lifted the lid on a massive US conspiracy to spend billions of dollars to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014 and foment a civil war that has led to the deaths of thousands of people.

The impeachment drive is itself the product of efforts by sections of the intelligence agencies and elements within the State Department to escalate Washington's conflict with Russia, with potentially world-catastrophic consequences.

(the photo)
https://www.wsws.org/asset/b1b0532e-c1c2-4265-851c-7585d61378ab?renditio...

On Thursday, Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell showed a photo of Ukrainian President Zelensky in body armor on the "front lines" of the civil war in eastern Ukraine. He asked the State Department witnesses "why it's so important that our hard-earned tax dollars help President Zelensky and the men standing beside him fight Russia in this hot war?"

David Holmes, political counselor at the US embassy in Kiev, replied:

Now is not the time to retreat from our relationship with Ukraine, but rather to double down on it. As we sit here, Ukrainians are fighting a hot war on Ukrainian territory against Russian aggression.

Later in his testimony, Holmes pointed to the massive sums expended by the United States and its European allies to fight this "hot war," saying the US had provided $5 billion and its European allies $12 billion since 2014.
In her testimony last week, the former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovich recalled that as ambassador:

I went to the front line approximately 10 times during a hot war sometimes literally as we heard the impact of artillery, and to see how our assistance dollars were being put to use.

She added:

Ukraine, with an enormous land mass and a large population, has the potential to be a significant force multiplier on the security side And now Ukraine is a battleground for great power competition with a hot war for the control of territory and a hybrid war to control Ukraine's leadership.

She explained that the US-funded and fascist-led "Maidan Revolution" of 2014, which she and other State Department officials absurdly called the "Revolution of Dignity," was part of this conflict. "That's why they launched the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, demanding to be a part of Europe," she declared.

Diplomat George Kent invoked the same theme in his testimony last Wednesday, saying:

Ukraine's popular Revolution of Dignity in 2014 forced a corrupt pro-Russian leadership to flee to Moscow. After that, Russia invaded Ukraine, occupying seven percent of its territory, roughly equivalent to the size of Texas for the United States

Since then, more than 13,000 Ukrainians have died on Ukrainian soil defending their territorial integrity and sovereignty from Russian aggression. American support in Ukraine's own de facto war of independence has been critical in this regard.

Kent subsequently compared the role of the United States in the Ukrainian civil war to that of Spain and France in the American War of Independence. In that conflict, Spain and France were officially at war with Great Britain, including formal declarations of war in 1778 and 1779.

If Kent's analogy is true, then the United States is in an undeclared war with Russia.

But when has this war ever been discussed with the American people? Was there ever a congressional vote to authorize it? Does anyone believe that if the question, "Do you want to spend billions of dollars to help Ukraine fight a war with Russia," were posed to the American public, the percentage answering yes would be anything more than minuscule? Of course, that question was never asked." [snip]

"But in the congressional hearings this week, government officials declared that any questioning of this aid is virtually treasonous. In her testimony on Thursday, former National Security Council officer Fiona Hill accused anyone who questions that "Ukraine is a valued partner" of the United States of advancing "Russian interests. "

" When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces," she said, threatening the "president, or anyone else, [who] impedes or subverts the national security of the United States. "

In 2017, Hill penned a blog post for the Brookings Institution calling Trump a "Bolshevik," echoing statements made more than 60 years ago by John Birch Society leader Robert W. Welch, who declared that President Eisenhower was a "communist."

Underlying the mad allegations of the Democrats that Trump is functioning as a "Russian asset" is a very real content: The extremely dangerous drive by factions within the state for a military confrontation between the United States and Russia, whose combined nuclear weapons arsenals are capable of destroying all of humanity many times over.

There is no "peace" faction within the American political establishment. No credence can be given to either one of the parties of US imperialism, which have, over the course of decades, presided over the toppling of dozens of governments, the launching of countless wars and the deaths of millions of people."

Patrick Martin from his Oct. 16, 2019 ' The Trump impeachment and US policy in Ukraine '

"This utterly reactionary, pro-imperialist role was demonstrated Friday in the tribute that Yovanovitch paid, in the course of her testimony, to Arsen Avakov, the Ukrainian interior minister (head of the domestic police) under both the current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. Avakov is a principal sponsor of fascist militias such as the Azov Battalion , which glorify the Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II against the Soviet Union. In other words, the State Department officials being celebrated in the media for defending American democracy are actually working with the fascists in Ukraine .

While Yovanovitch hailed Avakov, Kent cited as his heroes among immigrants who have rallied to the defense of the United States Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, two of the biggest war criminals of the second half of the twentieth century ." [snip]
""The connection between the impeachment drive and differences on foreign policy was spelled out Friday on the front page of the New York Times, in an analysis by the newspaper's senior foreign policy specialist, David Sanger, a frequent mouthpiece for the concerns of the CIA, State Department and Pentagon, under the headline, " For President, Case of Policy vs. Obsession." [snip]

But Sanger goes on to spell out, in remarkably blunt terms, the real foreign policy issues at stake in the Trump impeachment. He writes,

"In an otherwise divided Washington, one of the few issues of bipartisan agreement for the past six years has been countering Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's broad plan of disruption. That effort starts in Ukraine, where there has been a hot war underway in the east for five years "

Trump, according to Sanger, has betrayed the anti-Russia policy outlined by his own administration in a Pentagon strategic assessment which declared that the "war on terror" had been superseded as the top US priority by "great-power competition," particularly directed at China and Russia. He sacrificed this policy to his own personal, electoral interests, as expressed in the comment by the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland: "President Trump cares more about the investigation of Biden" than about the military conflict between Ukraine and Russia."

edg on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 12:12pm

Don't mess with the Deep State.

They'll bust both your kneecaps and then fit you with cement overshoes and toss you into the ocean. Trump is finding out the hard way that entrenched interests in the US government wield vast veto power over anything a president wants to do.

edg on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 5:05pm
I wonder if Trump gets anything.

@wendy davis

He's his own worst enemy with his self-sabotaging Twitter rants, endless character assassinations, hastily burnt bridges, and conflicting statements that change based upon the last person he talked to. Trump doesn't inspire loyalty in those who work for him and around him. OTOH, that doesn't excuse the Deep State, an unelected cabal secretly running our government and risking our lives with endless wars and Russia baiting. If impeachment has shown nothing else, it's that the Deep State is real and usually gets its way.

jim p on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 1:59pm
They forget to mention

almost all the casualties are Russian speakers in the East. Back in the early coup days there were 37 claims that Russian troops invaded Ukraine. Which turned out to be none. I still remember when Pravda in New York had a blurred photo they claimed to be a Russ officer (and how do you get blurring in the digital age) which turned out to be a Ukranian officer facebook photo. They never explained how that happened.

wendy davis on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 9:59pm
'failed to mention'...

@jim p

great context. kent's number 13,000, and yes, they were likely all Novoroosians , if he hadn't pulled that figure out of his ass, anyway. photos of 'little green men' in ancient soviet uniforms, old tanks left over from the days of yore.

was kent counting the dead inside the trade unions massacre in odessa petrol-bombed by the neo-nazis?

lotlizard on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 2:03pm
David Stockman probes recent events in the Ukraine,

putting them in the context of the region's deeper past. The first two parts of a series.

Links are also given for the same articles at Antiwar.com (though for me at the moment that website times out without responding):

wendy davis on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 4:39pm
they look like fascinating

@lotlizard

in depth reads for later, and thank you, miz lizard. funny that the Atlantic council (at least one version) had chosen Zelenskiy based on promises to end corruption (read: so ukraine could have the lucre to enter Nato). and yet, he'd kept 9as per the photo caption) Mykola Zlochevsky, former employer of Hunter Biden and current partner of the Atlantic Council in hi cabinet, isn't it?

wendy davis on Sun, 11/24/2019 - 8:36am
so that others might

@lotlizard

be encouraged to read your stockman links to his 'The Ukrainian Influence Peddling Rings – A Microcosm of How Imperial Washington Rolls', David Stockman, November 13, 2019 , i'll offer a few excerpts. i rarely (if ever) call anything a 'must read', but even you, voice, might want to dig into this one (part I of II, if i get his drift).

i'm assumming his historical narrative is correct, as all the pieces i do know about are there are well, but what he writes i hadn't known is key, of course. his language is also colorful as all giddy-up, which i like, and good on him. he's lost me a bit in some sections, as he names names, lobbying firms, and so on, but that's on me, not stockman.

"The latest dispatch from the Wall Street Journal on the stench wafting westward from Kiev reveals more about the rotten foundation of UkraineGate than its authors probably understood.

Burisma Holdings' campaign to clean up its image in the West reached beyond the 2014 hiring of Hunter Biden, son of the then-U.S. vice president, to include other well-connected operatives in Washington, according to officials in both countries and government records.

The Ukrainian company, owned by tycoon Mykola Zlochevsky, also hired a lobbyist with close ties to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, as well as a consulting group founded by top officials in the Clinton administration that specialized in preparing former Soviet-bloc countries to join NATO (Blue Star Strategies).

Soon the efforts bore fruit. With the help of a New York-based lawyer, Mr. Zlochevsky's U.S. consultants argued to Ukrainian prosecutors that criminal cases against the company should be closed because no laws had been broken.

Burisma later became a sponsor of a Washington think tank, the Atlantic Council, whose experts are often cited on energy and security policy in the former Soviet Union.

Simple translation: Zlochevsky was an ally, officeholder (minister of ecology and natural resources) and inner-circle thief in the ousted government of Viktor Yanukovych. He therefore needed to powder the pig fast and thoroughly in order to hold onto his ill-gotten billions.""
[longish snip of a who's who involvement]...................

"Finally, the Clinton wing of the Washington racketeering system had to be covered, too – hence the above mentioned Blue Star Strategies. And the bolded sentence from the WSJ story quoted below tells you all you need to know about its business, which was to " .help former Soviet countries prepare for NATO consideration".

That's right. With the Soviet Union gone, its 50,000 tanks on the central front melted-down for scrap and the Warsaw Pact disbanded, the rational order of the day was to declare "mission accomplished" for NATO and effect its own disbandment.

The great parachuter and then US president, George Bush the Elder, could have actually made a jump right into the giant Ramstein Air Base in Germany to effect its closure. At that point there was no justification for NATO's continued existence whatsoever.

But the Clinton Administration, under the baleful influence of Washington busybodies like Strobe Talbot and Madeleine Albright, went in just the opposite direction. In pursuit of Washington's post-1991 quest for global hegemony as the world's only superpower and putative keeper of the peace, they prepared the way for the entirety of the old Warsaw Pact to join NATO.

So doing, however, they also laid the planking for a revival of the cold war with the Kremlin. As the father of containment and NATO during the late 1940s, Ambassador George Kennan, observed at the time, the Clinton Administration's policy of expanding NATO to the very doorstep of Russia was a colossal mistake." [longish snip]
...............................
"So that's how the Imperial City rolls. People make policies which extend the Empire while in office – as did these Clintonistas with the NATO expansion project – and then cash-in afterwards by peddling influence in the corridors of the beltway on behalf of Washington's newly acquired vassals and supplicants.

In this case, all roads lead to the Atlantic Council, which is the semi-official "think tank" of NATO in Washington and is infested with Russophobes and Clinton/Biden operatives. The latter, of course, make a handsome living peddling anti-Putin propaganda – the better to grease the Washington purse strings for unneeded military spending and foreign aid, security assistance and weapons sales to the "front line" states allegedly in the path of Kremlin aggression."

thank you, miz lizard. love this title of his on the sidebar: ' Democrats Empower a Pack of Paranoid Neocon Morons '. ; )

i'll grab part II and read it greedily when i have more time.

putting them in the context of the region's deeper past. The first two parts of a series.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/david-stockman-exposes-ukrainian-...

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/david-stockman-exposes-ukrainian-...

Links are also given for the same articles at Antiwar.com (though for me at the moment that website times out without responding):

https://original.antiwar.com/david_stockman/2019/11/12/the-ukrainian-inf...

https://original.antiwar.com/david_stockman/2019/11/21/democrats-empower...

Linda Wood on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 2:12pm
Azov Battallion

and U.S. support:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion

The Special Operations Detachment "Azov", often known as Azov Battalion, Azov Regiment, or Azov Detachment, (Ukrainian: Полк Азов) is a Ukrainian National Guard regiment,[1][2][3][4] based in Mariupol in the Azov Sea coastal region.

In 2014, it gained notoriety after allegations emerged of torture and war crimes, as well as neo-Nazi sympathies and usage of associated symbols by the regiment itself, as seen in their logo featuring the Wolfsangel, one of the original symbols used by the German Nazi Party. In 2014, around 10-20% of the unit were neo-Nazis.[9] In 2018, a provision in an appropriations bill passed by the U.S. Congress blocked military aid to Azov on the grounds of its white supremacist ideology. [10] Members of the regiment come from 22 countries and are of various backgrounds.[11]

On 13 April 2014 Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov [nb 1] issued a decree authorizing creating new paramilitary forces from civilians up to 12,000.[22] The Azov Battalion (using "Eastern Corps" as its backbone[20]) was formed on 5 May 2014 in Berdiansk[23] by a white nationalist.[24] Many members of Patriot of Ukraine joined the battalion.[20] Among the early patrons of the battalion were a member of the Verkhovna Rada Oleh Lyashko, and an ultra-nationalist Dmytro Korchynsky and businessman Serhiy Taruta and Avakov.[25][20] The battalion then received training near Kiev by instructors with experience in the Georgian Armed Forces.[

In September 2014, the Azov battalion was expanded from a battalion to a regiment and enrolled into the National Guard of Ukraine.[23][33] At about this time it started receiving increased supplies of heavy arms.[33] The Azov battalion received funding from the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and other sources (believed to be Ukrainian oligarchs).

As of late March 2015, despite a second ceasefire agreement (Minsk II), the Azov Battalion continued to prepare for war, with the group's leader seeing the ceasefire as "appeasement".[33] In March 2015 Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the Azov Regiment would be among the first units to be trained by United States Army troops in their Operation Fearless Guardian training mission.[44][45] US training however was withdrawn on 12 June 2015, as US House of Representatives passed an amendment blocking any aid (including arms and training) to the battalion due to its Neo-Nazi background.[46] After the vote Congressman John Conyers thanked the House saying "I am grateful that the House of Representatives unanimously passed my amendments last night to ensure that our military does not train members of the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, along with my measures to keep the dangerous and easily trafficked MANPADs out of these unstable regions."[45]

Since 2015 Azov is organising summer camps where children and teenagers receive practice in civil defense and military tactics mixed with lectures on Ukrainian nationalism.[48][20]

Since 2015 the Battalion has been upgraded to Regimental status and "Azov" is now officially called "Special Operations Regiment" , with combat duties focused on reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance, EOD disposal, interdiction and special weapons operations.

Foreign membership [edit]
According to The Daily Telegraph, the Azov Battalion's extremist politics and professional English social media pages have attracted foreign fighters,[30] including people from Brazil, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom, France, America, Greece, Scandinavia,[2][30] Spain, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Russia. [2][56][57] About 50 Russian nationals are members of the Azov regiment.[58]

According to Minsk Ceasefire Agreements, foreign fighters are not allowed to serve in Ukraine's military:[66] since "Azov" Regiment was granted full military status, its foreign volunteers were compelled either to take Ukrainian citizenship, or to leave the Regiment.

Human rights violations and war crimes[edit]
Reports published by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) have connected the Azov Battalion to war crimes such as mass looting, unlawful detention, and torture.[68][69] An OHCHR report from March 2016 stated that the organisation had "collected detailed information about the conduct of hostilities by Ukrainian armed forces and the Azov regiment in and around Shyrokyne (31km east of Mariupol), from the summer of 2014 to date. Mass looting of civilian homes was documented, as well as targeting of civilian areas between September 2014 and February 2015".[68] Another OHCHR report documented an instance of rape and torture

Rodnovery, symbolism and neo-Nazism [edit]

Emblem featuring a Wolfsangel and Black Sun
Most soldiers of Azov are followers of a Ukrainian nationalist type of Rodnovery (Slavic Native Faith), wherefrom they derive some of their symbolism (such as a variation of the swastika symbol kolovrat). They have also established Rodnover shrines for their religious rites, including one in Mariupol dedicated to Perun.[70][71][72][unreliable source] German ZDF television showed images of Azov fighters wearing helmets with swastika symbols and "the SS runes of Hitler's infamous black-uniformed elite corps".[73] Due to the use of such symbols, Azov has been considered to have connections with neo-Nazism, with members wearing neo-Nazi and SS symbols and regalia and expressing Neo-Nazi views.

The group's insignia features the Wolfsangel[78][79][80] and the Black Sun,[78][81][82] two Nazi-era symbols adopted by neo-Nazi groups.

In 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a provision blocking any training of Azov members by American forces, citing its neo-Nazi background. In previous years, between 2014 and 2017, the U.S. House of Representatives passed amendments banning support of Azov, but due to pressure from the Pentagon, the amendments were quietly lifted.[87][88][89] This move has been protested by Simon Wiesenthal Center which stated that the move highlights danger of Holocaust distortion in Ukraine.[89] On 26 June 2015, the Canadian defence minister declared as well, that training by Canadian forces or support would not be provided to Azov. [90]
While Azov Battalion troops have denied that the organization has any neo-Nazi or white supremacist beliefs, journalists stated that "numerous swastika tattoos of different members and their tendency to go into battle with swastikas or SS insignias drawn on their helmets make it very difficult for other members of the group to plausibly deny any neo-Nazi affiliations" .[85]

wendy davis on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 5:02pm
great info, amiga.

@Linda Wood

no more US training? dunno what to say to that. but i plugged '2018' into a bing search of azov torchlight parades and found this from 2016 instead (although there were some later, as well):

Ukrainian ultra-nationalist Azov battalion [as well as Right Sector' stages torch-lit march in Kharkov (VIDEOS)], 12 Dec, 2016 , RT.com

really according to Eva Bartlett who'd committed journalism in the donbass independent republics, zelenskiy hasn't been able to control them (as promised) either.

it's a good time to remember all who'd invested in the ukraine who had interest in the Maidan putsch, isn't it?

and U.S. support:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion

The Special Operations Detachment "Azov", often known as Azov Battalion, Azov Regiment, or Azov Detachment, (Ukrainian: Полк Азов) is a Ukrainian National Guard regiment,[1][2][3][4] based in Mariupol in the Azov Sea coastal region.

In 2014, it gained notoriety after allegations emerged of torture and war crimes, as well as neo-Nazi sympathies and usage of associated symbols by the regiment itself, as seen in their logo featuring the Wolfsangel, one of the original symbols used by the German Nazi Party. In 2014, around 10-20% of the unit were neo-Nazis.[9] In 2018, a provision in an appropriations bill passed by the U.S. Congress blocked military aid to Azov on the grounds of its white supremacist ideology. [10] Members of the regiment come from 22 countries and are of various backgrounds.[11]

On 13 April 2014 Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov [nb 1] issued a decree authorizing creating new paramilitary forces from civilians up to 12,000.[22] The Azov Battalion (using "Eastern Corps" as its backbone[20]) was formed on 5 May 2014 in Berdiansk[23] by a white nationalist.[24] Many members of Patriot of Ukraine joined the battalion.[20] Among the early patrons of the battalion were a member of the Verkhovna Rada Oleh Lyashko, and an ultra-nationalist Dmytro Korchynsky and businessman Serhiy Taruta and Avakov.[25][20] The battalion then received training near Kiev by instructors with experience in the Georgian Armed Forces.[

In September 2014, the Azov battalion was expanded from a battalion to a regiment and enrolled into the National Guard of Ukraine.[23][33] At about this time it started receiving increased supplies of heavy arms.[33] The Azov battalion received funding from the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and other sources (believed to be Ukrainian oligarchs).

As of late March 2015, despite a second ceasefire agreement (Minsk II), the Azov Battalion continued to prepare for war, with the group's leader seeing the ceasefire as "appeasement".[33] In March 2015 Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the Azov Regiment would be among the first units to be trained by United States Army troops in their Operation Fearless Guardian training mission.[44][45] US training however was withdrawn on 12 June 2015, as US House of Representatives passed an amendment blocking any aid (including arms and training) to the battalion due to its Neo-Nazi background.[46] After the vote Congressman John Conyers thanked the House saying "I am grateful that the House of Representatives unanimously passed my amendments last night to ensure that our military does not train members of the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, along with my measures to keep the dangerous and easily trafficked MANPADs out of these unstable regions."[45]

Since 2015 Azov is organising summer camps where children and teenagers receive practice in civil defense and military tactics mixed with lectures on Ukrainian nationalism.[48][20]

Since 2015 the Battalion has been upgraded to Regimental status and "Azov" is now officially called "Special Operations Regiment" , with combat duties focused on reconnaissance, counter-reconnaissance, EOD disposal, interdiction and special weapons operations.

Foreign membership [edit]
According to The Daily Telegraph, the Azov Battalion's extremist politics and professional English social media pages have attracted foreign fighters,[30] including people from Brazil, Ireland, Italy, United Kingdom, France, America, Greece, Scandinavia,[2][30] Spain, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Russia. [2][56][57] About 50 Russian nationals are members of the Azov regiment.[58]

According to Minsk Ceasefire Agreements, foreign fighters are not allowed to serve in Ukraine's military:[66] since "Azov" Regiment was granted full military status, its foreign volunteers were compelled either to take Ukrainian citizenship, or to leave the Regiment.

Human rights violations and war crimes[edit]
Reports published by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) have connected the Azov Battalion to war crimes such as mass looting, unlawful detention, and torture.[68][69] An OHCHR report from March 2016 stated that the organisation had "collected detailed information about the conduct of hostilities by Ukrainian armed forces and the Azov regiment in and around Shyrokyne (31km east of Mariupol), from the summer of 2014 to date. Mass looting of civilian homes was documented, as well as targeting of civilian areas between September 2014 and February 2015".[68] Another OHCHR report documented an instance of rape and torture

Rodnovery, symbolism and neo-Nazism [edit]

Emblem featuring a Wolfsangel and Black Sun
Most soldiers of Azov are followers of a Ukrainian nationalist type of Rodnovery (Slavic Native Faith), wherefrom they derive some of their symbolism (such as a variation of the swastika symbol kolovrat). They have also established Rodnover shrines for their religious rites, including one in Mariupol dedicated to Perun.[70][71][72][unreliable source] German ZDF television showed images of Azov fighters wearing helmets with swastika symbols and "the SS runes of Hitler's infamous black-uniformed elite corps".[73] Due to the use of such symbols, Azov has been considered to have connections with neo-Nazism, with members wearing neo-Nazi and SS symbols and regalia and expressing Neo-Nazi views.

The group's insignia features the Wolfsangel[78][79][80] and the Black Sun,[78][81][82] two Nazi-era symbols adopted by neo-Nazi groups.

In 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a provision blocking any training of Azov members by American forces, citing its neo-Nazi background. In previous years, between 2014 and 2017, the U.S. House of Representatives passed amendments banning support of Azov, but due to pressure from the Pentagon, the amendments were quietly lifted.[87][88][89] This move has been protested by Simon Wiesenthal Center which stated that the move highlights danger of Holocaust distortion in Ukraine.[89] On 26 June 2015, the Canadian defence minister declared as well, that training by Canadian forces or support would not be provided to Azov. [90]
While Azov Battalion troops have denied that the organization has any neo-Nazi or white supremacist beliefs, journalists stated that "numerous swastika tattoos of different members and their tendency to go into battle with swastikas or SS insignias drawn on their helmets make it very difficult for other members of the group to plausibly deny any neo-Nazi affiliations" .[85]

snoopydawg on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 3:23pm
CIA honoring the Nazis in Ukraine

Despite a Jewish President, Ukraine keeps honoring Nazi collabos (with a bit of help from America)

It's great that Ukraine's revisionist far-right politics are at least getting some attention in the press. But what you won't read in these reports is that the U.S. government had recently sponsored a "cultural" exhibit that celebrated the Nazi collaborator who is now getting his own street in Kiev. You can't make this stuff up!

But we have to help the Nazis because Putin's Russia is invading and we owe it to them to.... blehh!

wendy davis on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 5:24pm
holy hell and christ

@snoopydawg

in a canoe!

yasha levine commits good journalism, there too! i'd never even heard of Nil Khasevych nor his Kil the Jews wood block prints. zelenskiy is not only jewish, but russian speaking, ukrainian is his second language as i understand it.

imagine now living on Khasevych; wouldn't you be proud? i'd been on yasha's account recently looking for his take (if any) on the intercept/NYT collaboration on the Iranaian leaks. i'd figured his link to the history if U S meddling at the bottom would speak at length about Pierre Omidyar's investments (centre UA, USAID, etc.) and maybe (then) monsanto/billy gates.

thank you; a whoosh -worthy exposé. do you get his newsletter, snoop?

p.s. on edit: i tried to subscribe, but it costs money. oh, well...

Despite a Jewish President, Ukraine keeps honoring Nazi collabos (with a bit of help from America)

It's great that Ukraine's revisionist far-right politics are at least getting some attention in the press. But what you won't read in these reports is that the U.S. government had recently sponsored a "cultural" exhibit that celebrated the Nazi collaborator who is now getting his own street in Kiev. You can't make this stuff up!

But we have to help the Nazis because Putin's Russia is invading and we owe it to them to.... blehh!

snoopydawg on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 5:48pm
Followed a Twitter link

@wendy davis

There is lots of good info on Twitter about the Ukraine system and corruption. Bibi didn't have any problems dealing with the neo Nazis there either which threw me for a loop. But then it was people in our country that made Hitler's war chest. Bush Sr., Ford and lots of others thought Hitler's system should be implemented here. Oh yeah and of course the banks..

Nunes sums it up perfectly.

Must watch: Low rent Ukrainian Sequel pic.twitter.com/URXgy8ush8

-- Devin Nunes (@DevinNunes) November 22, 2019

I don't know how many witnesses have admitted that there is no there there, but people hear what they want to hear Schiff just keeps rolling on.

#6

in a canoe!

Yasha Levine commits good journalism, there too! i'd never even heard of Nil Khasevych nor his Kil the Jews wood block prints. zelenskiy is not only jewish, but russian speaking, ukrainian is his second language as i understand it.

imagine now living on Khasevych; wouldn't you be proud? i'd been on yasha's account recently looking for his take (if any) on the intercept/NYT collaboration on the Iranaian leaks. i'd figured his link to the history if U S meddling at the bottom would speak at length about Pierre Omidyar's investments (centre UA, USAID, etc.) and maybe (then) monsanto/billy gates.

thank you; a whoosh -worthy exposé. do you get his newsletter, snoop?

p.s. on edit: i tried to subscribe, but it costs money. oh, well...

wendy davis on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 8:31pm
lol; great,

@snoopydawg

especially with the editing. but it' like the game of telephone, isn't it? 'he told me he overheard...', and someone told me s he heard..., yada, yada,

but just think if Pelosi hadn't limited the inquiry to One Phone call? 'as trump's puppet, is zelenskiy's claiming 'no quid pro quo worth anything?'

#WhataZoo.

#7

There is lots of good info on Twitter about the Ukraine system and corruption. Bibi didn't have any problems dealing with the neo Nazis there either which threw me for a loop. But then it was people in our country that made Hitler's war chest. Bush Sr., Ford and lots of others thought Hitler's system should be implemented here. Oh yeah and of course the banks..

Nunes sums it up perfectly.

Must watch: Low rent Ukrainian Sequel pic.twitter.com/URXgy8ush8

-- Devin Nunes (@DevinNunes) November 22, 2019

I don't know how many witnesses have admitted that there is no there there, but people hear what they want to hear Schiff just keeps rolling on.

snoopydawg on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 7:48pm
Ukraine tried to get Hillary elected is just CT right?

Nah not so much. Numerous websites wrote about it back when it happened just like they wrote about Hunter Biden and Burisma. But now I'm seeing the main stream media trying to tell us that it didn't happen that way. Well here's one article that hasn't been scrubbed yet.

Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire

01/11/2017 05:05 AM EST

Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.

Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia's alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

Ahh that good ole but. Yes what people in Ukraine did was bad, but.... and here's the but.

Russia's effort was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, involved the country's military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S. intelligence officials. They reportedly briefed Trump last week on the possibility that Russian operatives might have compromising information on the president-elect. And at a Senate hearing last week on the hacking, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said " I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case."

There's little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the country -- not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia -- would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country's election. And President Petro Poroshenko's administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race.

Yet Politico's investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another's elections.

Well there you have it. People in Ukraine were digging up dirt on people in Trump's campaign whilst Vlad only placed a few ads on FB and most of them were placed after the election was over. Badder Russia.

That Ukraine was trying to get Hillary elected was well known in the Ukraine government, but sure let's just say it never happened like that. Then of course there was Hillary hiring people in another country to dig up dirt too, but that doesn't count. Why? Reasons of course and because it was Hillary and the DNC doing it. See? Reasons.

Next paragraph starts with this.

Russia's meddling has sparked outrage from the American body politic. Lots of words about how that outraged people here...and more blah blah blah stuff.

Next paragrap

Ukraine, on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S. administrations. Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about Poroshenko's regime, while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin's regime.

Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month contract with a well-connected GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings with U.S. government officials "to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations."

Hmm hint of a quid pro quo there?

BTW. Lindsay Graham wants to investigate Hunter Biden and Joe says that he will regret doing that for the rest of his life. Stay tuned for the fireworks.

snoopydawg on Sat, 11/23/2019 - 8:06pm
Okay now that we have settled the facts here...

@snoopydawg

there has to be an effort to discredit what happened back then even though it's true.

Charges of Ukrainian Meddling? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says

Ahh yes Russia was the one that started that propaganda. Burisma and Biden was always on the up and up so don't even think that they weren't. I really don't know how people who believe everything about Russia Gate and now Ukraine Gate can keep their beliefs intact when there is so much information showing that what they believe is wrong or didn't happen the way they think it did.

Read more about this on Moon of Alabama

Nah not so much. Numerous websites wrote about it back when it happened just like they wrote about Hunter Biden and Burisma. But now I'm seeing the main stream media trying to tell us that it didn't happen that way. Well here's one article that hasn't been scrubbed yet.

Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire

01/11/2017 05:05 AM EST

Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.

Donald Trump wasn't the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia's alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

Ahh that good ole but. Yes what people in Ukraine did was bad, but.... and here's the but.

Russia's effort was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, involved the country's military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S. intelligence officials. They reportedly briefed Trump last week on the possibility that Russian operatives might have compromising information on the president-elect. And at a Senate hearing last week on the hacking, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said " I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case."

There's little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the country -- not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia -- would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country's election. And President Petro Poroshenko's administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race.

Yet Politico's investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another's elections.

Well there you have it. People in Ukraine were digging up dirt on people in Trump's campaign whilst Vlad only placed a few ads on FB and most of them were placed after the election was over. Badder Russia.

That Ukraine was trying to get Hillary elected was well known in the Ukraine government, but sure let's just say it never happened like that. Then of course there was Hillary hiring people in another country to dig up dirt too, but that doesn't count. Why? Reasons of course and because it was Hillary and the DNC doing it. See? Reasons.

Next paragraph starts with this.

Russia's meddling has sparked outrage from the American body politic. Lots of words about how that outraged people here...and more blah blah blah stuff.

Next paragrap

Ukraine, on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S. administrations. Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about Poroshenko's regime, while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin's regime.

Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month contract with a well-connected GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings with U.S. government officials "to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations."

Hmm hint of a quid pro quo there?

BTW. Lindsay Graham wants to investigate Hunter Biden and Joe says that he will regret doing that for the rest of his life. Stay tuned for the fireworks.

wendy davis on Sun, 11/24/2019 - 10:16am
ha, i'd run into that

@snoopydawg

this morning intending to grab some of his quotes and links here: ' November 20, 2019 , Impeachment Circus - Today's Bombshell Is Another Dud one chris cilizza link i'd given to linda wood to see if she or others might parse for me/us.

"The impeachment circus continued today with a refreshingly candid opening statement from Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the EU. Sondland was involved in diplomatic efforts in Ukraine. Instead of stonewalling Sondland just let it all out:

'Gordon D. Sondland testified that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed off on the pressure campaign, and that he told Vice President Mike Pence about an apparent link between military aid for Ukraine and investigations of Democrats. Mr. Sondland confirmed there was a "clear quid pro quo" for a White House meeting between President Trump and Ukraine's president.'
The anti-Trump media see this as another "bombshell" that will hurt him.

But it is more likely that Sondland's testimony will help President Trump and those involved on his side.

#8

there has to be an effort to discredit what happened back then even though it's true.

Charges of Ukrainian Meddling? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says

Ahh yes Russia was the one that started that propaganda. Burisma and Biden was always on the up and up so don't even think that they weren't. I really don't know how people who believe everything about Russia Gate and now Ukraine Gate can keep their beliefs intact when there is so much information showing that what they believe is wrong or didn't happen the way they think it did.

Read more about this on Moon of Alabama

Pluto's Republic on Sun, 11/24/2019 - 3:38pm
Today, Eric Zuesse dropped the most important document

@wendy davis

...I've ever read about Ukraine.

Ukraine, Trump, & Biden - The Real Story Behind "Ukrainegate"

Almost everything Americans have ever been told about US foreign policy is a lie. Almost everything we think we know is still a lie.

The Democrat's immediate goal is to install Mike Pence as President as soon as possible.

Everything depends on this. Pence is the continuation of Obama's Neocon policies in Ukraine and throughout the world. Biden is the premier Neocon on the 2020 ticket. His job is to lie himself into the nomination and pick-up a Neocon Vice President. If he loses to Pence, it doesn't matter. The CFR wins either way. And we're off to war with Russia.

This is a must read for those who want to know what is happening to them. And happening fast.

It will be hard to see the world the same way again.

#9.1

as with a hella busy 3-day weekend, i hadn't intended to, but what with the smoke coming out of my ears and all...

i'd long claimed that i'd want to go out in a first strike as well, and here we are just east of the shit-head capital of bumfuck, CO (h/t ed abbey).

now there are a number of NORAD sites , but most nations as i understand it still have No First Strike Rules, but the US no longer does, iirc (meaning: don't count on it). our daughter and her family live in el paso county, CO home of one or two, one an alt-site under cheyenne mountain.

i've often been a bit glib as to: 'Who will stop the US Empire? Those who can...and must.'
but i dunno who that might end up being, nor how including with nukes. but at this point, i guess it's all philosophical to me, as we're all living on borrowed time, and Live in the Moment when possible.

i do so wish i could help you ease your fears, my friend.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==

snoopydawg on Sun, 11/24/2019 - 3:59pm
Yep that is a must read

@Pluto's Republic

This video goes back to what was described in the article I posted above. The Nazis in Ukraine have ties to Hitler and we knew it.

//www.youtube.com/embed/fWkfpGCAAuw?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

wendy davis on Sun, 11/24/2019 - 7:15pm
sigh; kill me now.

@Pluto's Republic

there's no way i can read anything that long, especially in the zero-hedge format. but i found it at the duran, and an easier read on my eye-brain configuration at the saker . strategic culture usually carries his columns, but not this one...yet.

even scanning at the zero hedge version, i hadn't spotted pence's name. in which part (I-IV) was it? zuesse has always needed a good editor, imo. but yeah, Pentecostal Pence gives me the shivers.

#9.1.1

...I've ever read about Ukraine.

Ukraine, Trump, & Biden - The Real Story Behind "Ukrainegate"

Almost everything Americans have ever been told about US foreign policy is a lie. Almost everything we think we know is still a lie.

The Democrat's immediate goal is to install Mike Pence as President as soon as possible.

Everything depends on this. Pence is the continuation of Obama's Neocon policies in Ukraine and throughout the world. Biden is the premier Neocon on the 2020 ticket. His job is to lie himself into the nomination and pick-up a Neocon Vice President. If he loses to Pence, it doesn't matter. The CFR wins either way. And we're off to war with Russia.

This is a must read for those who want to know what is happening to them. And happening fast.

It will be hard to see the world the same way again.

wendy davis on Mon, 11/25/2019 - 10:09am
never mind;

@wendy davis

i read the comments on the saker version, what was key was what zuesse hadn't written (i.e. any mention of the CIA), and part IV at the duran,, withut elaborating, much of which i disagreed with.

#9.1.1.1

there's no way i can read anything that long, especially in the zero-hedge format. but i found it at the duran, and an easier read on my eye-brain configuration at the saker . strategic culture usually carries his columns, but not this one...yet.

even scanning at the zero hedge version, i hadn't spotted pence's name. in which part (I-IV) was it? zuesse has always needed a good editor, imo. but yeah, Pentecostal Pence gives me the shivers.

aliasalias on Sun, 11/24/2019 - 8:20pm
If someone wants to get vaporised right away be in DC

@Pluto's Republic or New York for sure. There are a lot of other target rich areas like Langley, the Silicon Valley area and certainly that big base in San Diego in California, the possible list is long because this Country is littered with military installations.

But I'd expect that if Russia had only two nukes to fire Washington DC and NY would be the instant decision. DC is 'evil Central' to most of the world, and NY City's Wall Street is its oxygen supply and without those two cities it's like chopping off the head of the snake. (no offense to snakes intended)

#9

It fills the soul with dread. There is no one left to fight the poisonous empire from the inside. All have succumbed. They will be along soon enough to clean up these fragments and send them down the memory hole. I'm going to dwell in the large-target cities from now on. I intend to be vaporized in the first strike.

Linda Wood on Sun, 11/24/2019 - 5:31pm
David Stockman's articles

are brilliant and vital to understanding the Ukraine situation. I think Part 2 is most important, even though I disagree with him on one point. He establishes how stupid and moronic the Democrats' impeachment witnesses are to suggest we have to fight Russia in Ukraine so we don't have to fight them here. He shows how minuscule Russia's conventional weapons systems are compared to ours, especially with respect to sea and air power, and then he states,

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/david-stockman-exposes-ukrainian-...

... Not surprisingly, Russia's pint-sized economy can not support a military establishment anywhere near to that of Imperial Washington. To wit, its $61 billion of military outlays in 2018 amounted to less than 32 days of Washington's current $750 billion of expenditures for defense.

Indeed, it might well be asked how Russia could remotely threaten homeland security in America short of what would be a suicidal nuclear first strike.

That's because the 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons on each side represent a continuation of mutual deterrence (MAD) – the arrangement by which we we got through 45-years of cold war when the Kremlin was run by a totalitarian oligarchy committed to a hostile ideology; and during which time it had been armed to the teeth via a forced-draft allocation of upwards of 40% of the GDP of the Soviet empire to the military.

By comparison, the Russian defense budget currently amounts to less than 4% of the country's anemic present day economy – one shorn of the vast territories and populations of Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and all the Asian "stans" among others. Yet given those realities we are supposed to believe that the self-evidently calculating and cautious kleptomaniac who runs the Kremlin is going to go mad, defy MAD and trigger a nuclear Armageddon?

Indeed, the idea that Russia presents a national security threat to America is laughable. Not only would Putin never risk nuclear suicide, but even that fantasy is the extent of what he's got. That is, Russia's conventional capacity to project force to the North American continent is nonexistent – or at best, lies somewhere between nichts and nothing.

I agree with Stockman that in a conventional war with the U.S., we win. But that's just exactly the problem. Russia can't have a conventional war with us or with NATO. It's defense from us is ONLY nuclear assured destruction. So the problem is not whether or not he's nuts. The problem is that we are nuts. Our government is nuts. Our government has a first strike policy, meaning our government considers it rational to eliminate a portion of the American people, which in our Nuclear Posture Review would be catastrophic, in order to win a war with Russia.

https://www.armscontrol.org/issue-briefs/2018-02/new-us-nuclear-strategy...

... The NPR argues that additional low-yield options are "not intended to enable" nuclear war-fighting "[n]or will it lower the nuclear threshold" (p. 54). But this assertion ignores the fact that the stated purpose is to make their use "more credible" in the eyes of U.S. adversaries , which means that they are meant to be seen as "more usable."

The belief that a nuclear conflict could be controlled is dangerous thinking. The fog of war is thick, the fog of nuclear war would be even thicker. Such thinking could also have the perverse effect of convincing Russia that it could get away with limited nuclear use without putting its survival at risk.

Many military targets are in or near urban areas. It has been estimated that the use of even a fraction of U.S. and Russian nuclear forces could lead to the death of tens of millions of people in each country. An all-out exchange would kill hundreds of millions and produce catastrophic global consequences with adverse agricultural, economic, health, and environmental consequences for billions of people.

No country should be preparing to wage a "limited nuclear war" that neither side can guarantee would remain "limited." Rather, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev declared in 1985, today's Russian and U.S. leaders should recognize that "a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought."

wendy davis on Sun, 11/24/2019 - 8:55pm
thank you, amiga.

@Linda Wood

and i agree: it's not the defense budget that matters. in this nation, the defense industries are allowed to do 'cost over-runs', and russia's weapons of war and defensive war are clearly superior. see how many are wanting russian man-pads missile defense, for instance.

i'll take part two, but at anti-war.com to the café. commenter juliania loved part I witless! i was sad to read that justin raimondo has already crossed over, may he rest in power. one place i'd blogged for a time were outraged i tell you, Outraged, that a libertarian wrote for antiwar.com. needless to say, i didn't last long at the accursed dagblog.com.

are brilliant and vital to understanding the Ukraine situation. I think Part 2 is most important, even though I disagree with him on one point. He establishes how stupid and moronic the Democrats' impeachment witnesses are to suggest we have to fight Russia in Ukraine so we don't have to fight them here. He shows how minuscule Russia's conventional weapons systems are compared to ours, especially with respect to sea and air power, and then he states,

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/david-stockman-exposes-ukrainian-...

... Not surprisingly, Russia's pint-sized economy can not support a military establishment anywhere near to that of Imperial Washington. To wit, its $61 billion of military outlays in 2018 amounted to less than 32 days of Washington's current $750 billion of expenditures for defense.

Indeed, it might well be asked how Russia could remotely threaten homeland security in America short of what would be a suicidal nuclear first strike.

That's because the 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons on each side represent a continuation of mutual deterrence (MAD) – the arrangement by which we we got through 45-years of cold war when the Kremlin was run by a totalitarian oligarchy committed to a hostile ideology; and during which time it had been armed to the teeth via a forced-draft allocation of upwards of 40% of the GDP of the Soviet empire to the military.

By comparison, the Russian defense budget currently amounts to less than 4% of the country's anemic present day economy – one shorn of the vast territories and populations of Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and all the Asian "stans" among others. Yet given those realities we are supposed to believe that the self-evidently calculating and cautious kleptomaniac who runs the Kremlin is going to go mad, defy MAD and trigger a nuclear Armageddon?

Indeed, the idea that Russia presents a national security threat to America is laughable. Not only would Putin never risk nuclear suicide, but even that fantasy is the extent of what he's got. That is, Russia's conventional capacity to project force to the North American continent is nonexistent – or at best, lies somewhere between nichts and nothing.

I agree with Stockman that in a conventional war with the U.S., we win. But that's just exactly the problem. Russia can't have a conventional war with us or with NATO. It's defense from us is ONLY nuclear assured destruction. So the problem is not whether or not he's nuts. The problem is that we are nuts. Our government is nuts. Our government has a first strike policy, meaning our government considers it rational to eliminate a portion of the American people, which in our Nuclear Posture Review would be catastrophic, in order to win a war with Russia.

https://www.armscontrol.org/issue-briefs/2018-02/new-us-nuclear-strategy...

... The NPR argues that additional low-yield options are "not intended to enable" nuclear war-fighting "[n]or will it lower the nuclear threshold" (p. 54). But this assertion ignores the fact that the stated purpose is to make their use "more credible" in the eyes of U.S. adversaries , which means that they are meant to be seen as "more usable."

The belief that a nuclear conflict could be controlled is dangerous thinking. The fog of war is thick, the fog of nuclear war would be even thicker. Such thinking could also have the perverse effect of convincing Russia that it could get away with limited nuclear use without putting its survival at risk.

Many military targets are in or near urban areas. It has been estimated that the use of even a fraction of U.S. and Russian nuclear forces could lead to the death of tens of millions of people in each country. An all-out exchange would kill hundreds of millions and produce catastrophic global consequences with adverse agricultural, economic, health, and environmental consequences for billions of people.

No country should be preparing to wage a "limited nuclear war" that neither side can guarantee would remain "limited." Rather, as Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev declared in 1985, today's Russian and U.S. leaders should recognize that "a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought."

[Nov 25, 2019] Chris Matthews Asks Gabbard Why Are So Many Democrats War Hawks

Notable quotes:
"... Why were they hawks? ..."
"... "Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount of influence over both parties." ..."
"... She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so serious about what's at stake here." ..."
"... Democratic presidential primary debate, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019, in Atlanta, via the AP. ..."
Nov 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

In a rare moment with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard explained why the leading figures in her party are war hawks. Far from days of the Democrats feigning to have any semblance of an 'anti-war' platform (only convenient for Liberal activism during the Bush years, but fizzling out under Obama), today's party attempts to out-hawk Republicans at every turn.

"I'm looking at the Democratic establishment figures," Matthews introduced, "people I normally like. John Kerry, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton. You go down the list. They all supported the war in Iraq. Why were they hawks? " (Though we might ask, what do you mean, " were ?"). "Why so many Democrats with a party that's not hawkish, why are so many of their leaders hawks?" Matthews reiterated.

In the segment, Matthews heaps rare praise on Tulsi for being "out there all alone tonight fighting against the neocons."

me title=

"Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount of influence over both parties."

She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so serious about what's at stake here."

Democratic presidential primary debate, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019, in Atlanta, via the AP. NEVER MISS THE NEWS THAT MATTERS MOST

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The interview happened immediately after this week's fifth Democratic debate Wednesday night in Atlanta, and after pundits have continued to complain that Gabbard is a 'single issue candidate'.

However, is there any candidate in her party or in the GOP saying these things?

We find ourselves in a rare moment of agreement with MSNBC's Matthews: she is "out there all alone tonight fighting against the neocons." Tags Politics

[Nov 25, 2019] Democrats Can't Isolate Russia and Saudi Arabia without Fracking by Noah Rothman

The guy is not only a neocon, he also s an idiot. But unfortunately his way of thinking is typical for US neocons.
Nov 22, 2019 | www.commentarymagazine.com
On Wednesday night, a new Democratic foreign-policy consensus came together on the debate stage . For Democrats, it has become dogma that Saudi Arabia deserves only to be shamed and isolated by the United States, not treated like a valuable strategic partner.

Sen. Cory Booker accused the president of committing a "human-rights violation" by supporting the Saudi war against Iran-backed militias in Yemen without congressional consent. Former Vice President Joe Biden called the Saudi Kingdom a "pariah" and said its government has "very little social redeeming value." Sen. Bernie Sanders accused the Saudis of operating a "brutal dictatorship" and being an unreliable U.S. ally.

These criticisms are not unfounded. The Saudis were implicated in the murder of a U.S. resident. The Saudis do commit human-rights violations, both in domestic and foreign policy. The Saudis have encouraged the radicalization of their citizens and contributed to geopolitical insecurity in the age of Islamist terror. Democrats are not unjustified in their criticisms of the Kingdom, but it takes a special brazenness to issue these attacks on the Saudis while simultaneously calling for the banning of the technology that has made such displays of American geopolitical independence possible: fracking.

To his credit, Joe Biden has not called for the outright ban of hydraulic fracturing technology, but Sanders and Booker have . That policy, if realized, would relegate the United States to a strategically disadvantageous role vis-à-vis the world's largest energy exporters, including Saudi Arabia. It would also sacrifice one of the most miraculous developments of this decade: the revival of the American domestic energy industry.

Since 2013, domestic U.S. oil production has increased by 60 percent. In 2018, for the first time in 40 years, the United States outpaced Saudi Arabia's oil output and is estimated to have surpassed Russian production. American energy companies have become major exporters of crude oil and natural gas, and the U.S. is poised to become a net energy exporter for the first time since 1953 by the year 2022. This new glut of supply in the fossil-fuel market has substantially reduced the geopolitical clout of OPEC countries, including outcast nations like Nicolas Maduro's Venezuela and Vladimir Putin's Russia. That has enabled the U.S. to pursue precisely the kind of values-based foreign policy Democrats advocate.

It's no exaggeration to stress that this is among Putin's worst nightmares. He's confessed as much, in fact, according to former National Security Council official and Russia expert, Fiona Hill. In testimony before congressional investigators this week, Hill noted that Putin himself warned of the threat to Russian interests represented by fracking as early as 2011. The Russian president was among the first petrol-fueled despots who felt the sting of the American energy sector's technological revolution. In November 2013, just weeks before his ouster in the Maidan revolution, the Russia-friendly president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, signed a $10 billion deal with the U.S.-based multinational Chevron to explore and exploit the country's domestic shale gas deposits.

Leveraging Russian gas exports to Europe and the former Soviet Republics is a means by which Moscow has advanced its interests on the Continent. Breaking its hold on energy exports is in both America's commercial and geostrategic interests. There is no player on the international stage that Democrats would like to see marginalized more than Putin, and fracking creates more opportunities to achieve that objective. But Democrats would rather pander to the party's environmentalist wing and its irrational hostility toward this successful innovation.

Democrats can adopt as hawkish a posture toward Russia and Saudi Arabia as they like, but isolating these illiberal states is possible today only because of the domestic energy revolution they oppose. Democrats can have fracking and the marginalization of Putin and the House of Saud, or they can have neither. So far, they're opting for neither.

[Nov 25, 2019] To those who think Russia is nothing more than a gas station

Nov 25, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU1 , Nov 23 2019 6:43 utc | 59

King Lear 57 "he suffers from extreme naïveté, in that he assumes every new U$ president.."

obviously you have not watched many Putin interviews or speeches. Rather than naive, Putin hopes for the best and prepares for the worst - the reason Russia now has weapon superiority over US. Research into new weapons was begun back in 2002 - the moment US pulled out of ABS treaty. The same distrust carries through to politics, but is more in the line of speak softly and carry a big stick.

I guess you're another of those who think Russia is nothing more than a gas station and should mouth bravado to cover their (imaginary) weakness.

[Nov 25, 2019] Ukrainian inflience on 2016 election is a Russian Operation, US Intelligence Says

Notable quotes:
"... Fiona Hill, a "respected Russia scholar" and former senior White House official, added a harsh critique during testimony on Thursday. She told some of Mr. Trump's fiercest defenders in Congress that they were repeating "a fictional narrative." She said that it likely came from a disinformation campaign by Russian security services, which also propagated it. ..."
"... In a briefing that closely aligned with Dr. Hill's testimony, American intelligence officials informed senators and their aides in recent weeks that Russia had engaged in a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow's own hacking of the 2016 election, according to three American officials. The briefing came as Republicans stepped up their defenses of Mr. Trump in the Ukraine affair. ..."
"... The accusations of a Ukrainian influence campaign center on actions by a handful of Ukrainians who openly criticized or sought to damage Mr. Trump's candidacy in 2016. ..."
"... Just keep in mind that those claims are unfounded. The 'handful' of Ukrainians managed, with help from the Democratic National Council, to push Trump's campaign manager to resign. They even bragged about it. Ukrainians were also the biggest foreign donors to Hillary Clinton's foundation. ..."
"... Those are "unfounded claims about Ukrainian interference". Because Putin pointed them out. However, let me assure you that neither the Times nor the CIA would ever make unfounded claims of a Russian operation. It is Russia that is trying 'to sow discord'. It is not an unfounded Democratic impeachment inquiry that does that. ..."
Nov 25, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Charges of Ukrainian Meddling? A Russian Operation, U.S. Intelligence Says

Fiona Hill, a respected Russia scholar and former senior White House official, added a harsh critique during testimony on Thursday. She told some of Mr. Trump's fiercest defenders in Congress that they were repeating "a fictional narrative." She said that it likely came from a disinformation campaign by Russian security services, which also propagated it.

In a briefing that closely aligned with Dr. Hill's testimony, American intelligence officials informed senators and their aides in recent weeks that Russia had engaged in a yearslong campaign to essentially frame Ukraine as responsible for Moscow's own hacking of the 2016 election, according to three American officials. The briefing came as Republicans stepped up their defenses of Mr. Trump in the Ukraine affair.
...
The revelations demonstrate Russia's persistence in trying to sow discord among its adversaries -- and show that the Kremlin apparently succeeded, as unfounded claims about Ukrainian interference seeped into Republican talking points.

So there was no Ukrainian meddling, no Ukrainian interference. Claims thereof are unfounded! But just a few sentences later the piece curiously says something different:

The accusations of a Ukrainian influence campaign center on actions by a handful of Ukrainians who openly criticized or sought to damage Mr. Trump's candidacy in 2016.

Just keep in mind that those claims are unfounded. The 'handful' of Ukrainians managed, with help from the Democratic National Council, to push Trump's campaign manager to resign. They even bragged about it. Ukrainians were also the biggest foreign donors to Hillary Clinton's foundation.

However, because Putin once pointed that out, those claims must be unfounded. They must be Russian disinformation:

During a news conference in February 2017, Mr. Putin accused the Ukrainian government of supporting Hillary Clinton during the previous American election and funding her candidacy with friendly oligarchs.

It is not clear when American intelligence agencies learned about Moscow's campaign or when precisely it began.
...
One target was the leak of a secret ledger disclosed by a Ukrainian law enforcement agency that appeared to show that Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's onetime campaign chairman, had taken illicit payments from Ukrainian politicians who were close to Moscow. He was forced to step down from the Trump campaign after the ledger became public in August 2016, and the Russians have since been eager to cast doubt on its authenticity, the former official said.

Those are "unfounded claims about Ukrainian interference". Because Putin pointed them out. However, let me assure you that neither the Times nor the CIA would ever make unfounded claims of a Russian operation. It is Russia that is trying 'to sow discord'. It is not an unfounded Democratic impeachment inquiry that does that.

Posted by b on November 23, 2019 at 18:08 UTC | Permalink

Joshua , Nov 23 2019 18:25 utc | 1

Once the hilariously televised collapse of the DC government is complete...
james , Nov 23 2019 18:26 utc | 2
thanks for the laugh b! know i know to trust only the nyt, or Fiona Hill, the brit who was an intel analyst under bush 2 and etc.

those damn ruskies! wake me up when mccarthyism version 2 is over..

b , Nov 23 2019 18:27 utc | 3
More Russian meddling
james , Nov 23 2019 18:31 utc | 4
@3 b.. thats funny.. putin attacking tesla to build up export sales of lada!! i think he is onto something..
psychohistorian , Nov 23 2019 18:43 utc | 5
Maybe the CIA has decided that they need to make the claims more obtuse so that even the mentally competent have trouble explaining the 11 dimensional chess involved.

After all, if Trump singlehanded, as he claims, kept Xi from sending the troops into HK then Putin assuredly can influence American politics.....if Putin only could make it all go away.....what a waste of time, energy and money that could be spent on improving the lot of the poor, living on the streets in the US

When and how will the private finance empire circus end?

At least the US has Bernie and Tulsi calling out the coup in Bolivia for what it is.....maybe there is hope.

Jackrabbit , Nov 23 2019 18:53 utc | 6
Why did America First Trump hire Manafort?

Manafort was managing campaigns of pro-Russian political parties/candidates in Ukraine for 7 years or so before being hired by Trump. My understanding is that Manafort was warned that his work was undermining USA efforts in Ukraine.

Why did America First Trump bring on Flynn?

Flynn was known to be hated by the intelligence community for having told the world that the Obama Administration made a "wilful decision" to support the rise of ISIS.

Why did America First Trump make pleas for Putin to release Hillary's emails via Wikileaks?

It was already known that some of the emails contained top secret information. AFAIK, USA would consider any publication a crime.

These were set-ups.

<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

Why was "independent", "socialist true believer", supposed man-of-integrity Sanders sheepdogging for Hillary ("enough with your damn emails")?

Why did Hillary, a seasoned campaigner with virtually unlimited resources, make so many grievous mistakes in the 2016 election? She snubbed Sanders and his supporters; took the black vote for granted; insulted whites as "deplorables"; chose not to campaign in the THREE STATES that she know would decided the election. Why didn't she pull out all the stops to win? For her beloved establishment? For her own aspirations as first women President? If she failed because she was "over confident" as some have suggested, then why did she pay for the Steele dossier as "insurance"? There was no need for insurance if she knew she would win and if she were unsure of winning she should have done everything possible to win (as any real candidate would have).

Why did America First Trump use British company Cambridge Analytica? We later learned that facebook provided the same info to dozens of other companies (debunking the initial excuse that Cambridge Analytica had special access to facebook info). Was it because the Russiagate disinfo and CIA election meddling campaign was located in UK?

Why did Trump initiate Ukrainegate by talking about investigating Biden on a diplomatic call? He's smart enough to know that such political machinations are handled behind the scenes.

This Reality Show Presidency is all about kayfabe as the Deep State restructures to meet the challenge from China and Russia, and seeks to manufacture consent for a war with Iran.

!!

psychohistorian , Nov 23 2019 18:56 utc | 7
So as I eat my breakfast I skim ZH and come across reporting of non-Russian political influence like the link below shows

Liberal 'dark money' operation behind ads urging Republicans to support impeachment

The take away quote
"
Defend American Democracy has spent six figures on television advertisements pressuring Republican members of Congress to "hold the president accountable for abusing his office and risking national security for his own gain." The group, which primarily targets swing-district Republicans, prominently features military veterans in its ads and presents itself as a veterans group to local media outlets.
........
The 501(c)(4) group is managed by Eric Kessler, a former Clinton administration official who runs the philanthropic firm Arabella Advisors. The anonymously funded nonprofit was behind several groups that ran "issue ads" to benefit Democrats during the 2018 midterms, as well as Demand Justice, a group that spent millions of dollars on ads attacking Brett Kavanaugh during his nomination to the Supreme Court. The Sixteen Thirty Fund and its sister 501(c)(3) nonprofit, New Venture Fund, have fiscally sponsored at least 80 of their own groups, bankrolling those entities in a way that leaves almost no paper trail.
"

The US has the best government Russian influence has not bought.

div> @b #3
I really think the twitter account is satire, judging from other tweets and the profile pic.

Posted by: c1ue , Nov 23 2019 19:00 utc | 8

@b #3
I really think the twitter account is satire, judging from other tweets and the profile pic.

Posted by: c1ue | Nov 23 2019 19:00 utc | 8

smoke , Nov 23 2019 19:14 utc | 9
So Russia hacked and attacked Hillary and DNC as Russia. (I believe that is still the official left-Dem-media meme, despite investigation producing no evidence.) And they attacked Trump disguised as Ukraine.

This sowing discord is a busy undertaking.

And rather unnecessary, considering the pre-existing state of discord in the nation and politics, a duplicitous Dem party lost in the wilderness, as it searches a popular cry that won't actually empower people, a Republican Party that was overwhelmed by a populist tide and candidate not sanctioned by the leadership, and a legacy media that can crank up divisions on command.

Jackrabbit , Nov 23 2019 19:14 utc | 10
Maybe I should've posted my comment @6 on the "Impeachment Circus" thread instead.

It just struck me that neoMcCarthist smearing of Russia (which is ongoing, as proven by b's post) was made possible via the kayfabe of Russiagate, which had it's origins in the 2016 election.

!!

Peter , Nov 23 2019 19:44 utc | 11
Fiona Hill...another bare faced liar whose name is not Hillary Clinton....I am no longer astonished that this crap is actually publishable despite the evidence available to anyone with at least two brain cells. Having followed on the Net the coup in Ukraine in 2014 from 2013 on via live blogs by Western corespondents who are not beholden to the MSM, I know what lies that latter "journaille" gets away with.
Red Ryder , Nov 23 2019 19:53 utc | 12
Fiona Hill is an expert on Russophobic content. Like Condi Rice, a Soviet Scholar, she knows nothing truthful about Russia. Else, why does she lie about Russia?

The think tanks, academia and State Dept. spew out the lies which the Media multiplies. 99% of Russian experts are Russophobes who possess little expertise, some practicing their propaganda for decades. Many of them excrete books on regular schedules.

The first test (since 2014) of any expert's credentials is his/her position on Crimea. The next test is on Russian aggression.
If anyone suggests Crimea does not belong to Russia (most especially the federal district of Sevastopol), then they are ignorant or lying. You either know that in 1954 Crimea was unconstitutionally given to Ukraine by the Ukrainian Khruschev. It was illegal by USSR law. 2014 corrected that injustice. The experts who profess otherwise are lying.

And if anyone suggests that the Russians are aggressors, they are lying. If Russia was an aggressor in Georgia or Ukraine, neither would have governments that are so anti-Russian or militaries that could form a small parade, much less beg for inclusion in NATO.
Russia reacted to Georgian aggression and mass murder. In Ukraine, the Donbass is a Russian assisted self-defense operation against an ethnic cleansing war. Russia's participation has been to save 2.5 million Russian-speaking Ukrainians from slaughter ('filtration' is the Ukie euphemism for killing the Donbass separatists who refuse Kiev's nazi regime).

Russian 'aggression' is a construct of propaganda. Taken in the context of NATO expansion and encroachment right to the borders of Russia, there is nothing but lies tied to the 'aggression' canard.

We have had 28 years of demonization of the Russian Federation. Russophobia is centuries old in some societies. Of late, it focuses on the attempts to separate away from Russia the brother republics of the CIS region of Eurasia. Fed lies, distortion of history, linguistic differences, religious issues and economic disadvantages, a mania against Russia has been cultivated. It all is led by "the experts" like Fiona Hill.

We see the same dynamic used against China with Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Propaganda. Lies. Experts who mouth the Sinophobic fabrications are the talking heads on Media and on Congressional sideshows.

Russophobia and Sinophobia are industries now. Fame, publishing riches, TV appearances, YouTube videos abound with the 'expertise' of these haters.

Judge the output of these expert operatives. The content is always flawed. The truth is always hidden. But lies fly fast and loose.


uncle tungsten , Nov 23 2019 20:28 utc | 13
Booring topic, how is life in any other country. Is Duterte winning his war on dope peddlers?

I am sick of the mendacity of the USA circus. Is there any good news from another star?

RJPJR , Nov 23 2019 20:39 utc | 14
A bit of much needed parody:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaWeYqotUJs&list=PLYx4pXgdCwm4blkJrS5SnFCiGFnV1mByc&index=2

one of many by the same, if one keeps looking.

jayc , Nov 23 2019 20:43 utc | 15
Some people actually do believe this stuff, dependent on their partisan world view.

The IG report, which will outline abuses of the FISA system which appears to have authorized surveillance of Trump campaign by the FBI, is scheduled for release on December 9. The degree to which it will be damaging to the Russian collusion/hacking/sowing discord anti-Trump crowds was anticipated yesterday by the simultaneous publication by CNN and WaPo of assurances by unnamed "officials" that the report will not find anything but minor discrepancies. Getting out ahead of the story so obviously and more than a week in advance likely means the report will be damaging - although that may be just a Russian talking point.

@Lozion , Nov 23 2019 20:45 utc | 16
@12 Well said Red Ryder..
steven t johnson , Nov 23 2019 21:07 utc | 17
This is hilarious and a welcome return to sane!

But much as I enjoyed this, I still have to point out that if Ukrainian meddling was so important and their US consorts so treasonous, then Russian meddling was so important and *their* consorts so treasonous. You can't honestly have it both ways, either the Democrats' excusing Ukrainians or the Trumpists excusing Russia. Actually, you can't even honestly say you know either made any difference. No one sensible thinks either party meant to give aid and comfort to enemies of the US---the constitutional* definition of treason---unless you believe the US is justly in undeclared war with the rest of humanity. The only big difference is that it was Trump who openly asked for foreign assistance in a public speech. The only conclusion to draw from that is Trumpists are whiners who can dish it out but can't take it.

*The legalistic assholes who want to deny majority rule under shelter of the Electoral College on the fraudulent grounds that a technicality matters more really are against majority rule. Of course they also pretend that impeachment reverses elections. The cherry on top of this turd sundae? They would reject the 26th Amendment, which would have been invoked against Reagan as well as Trump (and possibly his original, Nixon, as well.) Pence is not even man enough to do his duty.

Jackrabbit , Nov 23 2019 21:20 utc | 18
RJPJR @14

Excellent!

Antoinetta III , Nov 23 2019 21:21 utc | 19
Jackrabbit @ 6

Why did the Hildabeast get the Steele Dossier as insurance if she was confident of victory?

For the same reason that a healthy person in their 20's or 30's, someone not in the least expecting to die for decades, purchases life insurance covering their family. Just "in case" the wildly improbable does indeed happen.

I can't see anyone who has a realistic chance of being elected president, let alone with the historic feat of being the first female president deliberately throwing all this away.

Antoinetta III

Paul Damascene , Nov 23 2019 21:25 utc | 20
No matter how often I'm brought to consider this, it still seems striking that 2 years and $40 million in US law fare waged by the Special Prosecutor is not enough to see Fiona Hill laughed out of chambers at her RussiaRussia harangue, whereas the NYT is able to establish an equivalent lack of foundation to the Ukraine meddling thesis in a thrice, notwithstanding rather substantial counter-evidence long in the public domain. Indeed the Grey Lady does not even try to debunk these claims, allowing herself instead to refer to them debunked. If you say so, apparently, or if you and your cohort say so often enough.

For any progressives still gaslighted by this, I invite you to consider a similar full-court legal, media, IC / Deep State campaign featuring most of the same actors, engaging next in the hobbling or destruction of a Bernie Sanders presidency.

Paul Damascene , Nov 23 2019 21:31 utc | 21
Psychohistorian @ 7:
"The US has the best government Russian influence has not bought."

Or, in a related formulation: The US has the best government that every source of influence not Russian will already have bought.

Paul , Nov 23 2019 21:40 utc | 22
Jackrabbit @ 6 and Antoinetta III @19:

Or the Steele Dossier was intended so much insurance as a cudgel to beat the fallen Donald, post-election loser, while he was down. This was the man whose most stirring electoral refrain was "lock her up." She and her masters would have had every reason to want to grind him into the dirt after beating him.

oldhippie , Nov 23 2019 21:47 utc | 23
@11&12

Fiona Hill studied Russian history with Richard Pipes, the Evil Empire man. Pipes is and was a laughingstock in academia. No one would study with him who had an actual interest in the supposed field of study. Being his protegé was simply a roll of the dice for a careerist. Hill also studied with a Ukrainian emigré named Szporlak. He was likely closer to awake during class than Pipes, who really was a very old fool while supervising Hill.

Condoleeza Rice notoriously wrote her dissertation about the postwar Czech military while having minimal ability in Russian and less in Czech. More likely it was simply ghostwritten. Full of egregious errors, placing Czech politicians at heart of action while they were actually teaching at University of Chicago.

steven t johnson , Nov 23 2019 22:04 utc | 24
Sorry, oldhippie, Pipes wasn't and is not a laughingstock in academia. He merely should have been. His son Daniel is doing the same in middle east studies and he's not a laughingstock either. It is hard to underestimate how little effect adhering to the basic scholarly standards can have in keeping out motivated reasoning, double standards, agendas, political servitude, etc. It is quite likely that Pipes has a better reputation than Stephen Cohen, J. Arch Getty or Sheila FitzPatrick. He certainly has a better reputation than a Mark Tauger.
oldhippie , Nov 23 2019 22:10 utc | 25
Pipes' classes at Harvard in 70s were a spectator sport. Come and see the Cold War fossil. Lectures routinely interrupted by gales of laughter. Yes, he had a comeback. No, no one has ever taken him or his 'scholarship' seriously. He simply happens to be useful. Daniel is just as bad.
rjp , Nov 23 2019 22:25 utc | 26
Paul @ 22, wrote: "She [Harridan Hillary] and her masters would have had every reason to want to grind him [Tweetie Bird] into the dirt after beating him."

I agree, but there was also the need to demonize Russia and V.V.Putin to lay the ground for the war against Russia. The campaign against Trump began in January 2016, launched by Brennan and the CIA, whose strumpet H.H. had been since back in Arkansas.

Already in July 2016, she was openly campaigning against V.V.P. There was ONE ( 1! ) foreign policy plank in her platform, and it was the no-fly zone over Syria. General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, testified before the United States Congress in mid-September 2016, on which occasion he was asked about the no-fly zone. He responded, promptly and unequivocally, that it would mean war with Russia.

If war with Russia had not been the objective, the Great Grey Whore would have used its position in New York to investigate Tweetie Bird and publish to the world, indeed, hammer to the world, the long grotesque story of his attempt to make a career in real estate, and the fraud he engaged in from the start. His string of bankruptcies was the most spectacular in the history of American business enterprise (this from somebody who has studied United States economic and financial history) instead of letting him constantly blather on about what a great businessman he was etc.

His father had him on the payroll when he was two, to the tune of $200,000, in order to pass wealth on to him without paying the very high gift tax. By the time his father died, he had made over to Tweetie Bird something in the neighborhood of $420 million. And Tweetie Bird squandered it all, plus the fabulous real-estate empire that his father had left him -- all gone...

In 2002, Tweetie Bird was over $3 billion (yes, BILLION) in debt to 72 banks in New York and no New York bank would give him a credit line, which he desperately needed to keep up his incessant refrain that money is no object for Donald Trump. So, he turned to the Russian oligarchs for whom he had been laundering money to generate cash flow. They gave him a credit line through the Cypriot banks that they controlled, and now they own him. They are his Russian connection, not V.V.P., who has been fighting the oligarchs since he first took office -- look at what V.V.P. did to Michail Khodokovski: ten years in the gulag (he's now living in Switzerland reduced to scraping by on the ten or so billion that he had squirreled away in Swiss banks).

Tweetie Bird owns NOTHING. Everything is in the name of the Trump Organization, to protect it from confiscation when the reckoning comes. And, since the T.O. publishes NOTHING about its affairs, it's reasonable to assume that he is in debt to his Cypriot banks, probably to the tune of five or six billion at this point, and that they hold liens on every piece of property he claims as his own.

Tweetie Bird is all about Tweetie Bird, exclusively. His pitch for détente with Russia was a classic case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason, to wit he intended to lift the sanctions if V.V.P. would round up the oligarchs who have Tweetie Bird over the barrel and pack them off to the gulag. However, in August 2017, Congress pulled the rung out from under him by reinforcing the sanctions and thus removing them from executive order purview and placing them under Congressional authority.

John-Albert Eadie , Nov 23 2019 22:28 utc | 27
Hilarious someone said. Really. The Russians would have to be superhuman geniuses to do half of what US 'Intelligence' says about them. It is transparently true, OTOH, that CIA and etc. are true clods and dolts. It's tautological really.
Ghost Ship , Nov 23 2019 22:48 utc | 28
Jackrabbit @ 6
My understanding is that Manafort was warned that his work was undermining USA efforts in Ukraine.

So what? Maybe Trump wanted to undermine the Washington Borg's efforts in Ukraine as they were counter to his principle foreign policy - cordial relations with Russia. Since Trump was very clear about this policy all through the election, he has every right to implement that policy regardless of what anyone opposed to him might think or try to do. It's one of the basic concepts of a democratic system (yeah, I am aware that the U.S. is a republic not a democracy, etc.) that the successful candidate should be able to implement any legal policy that was part of his manifesto.
As for Trump asking the Russians to look for Hillary Clinton's e-mails, it was a joke. Added to which it was a reference to the 30,000 "personal" e-mails that that idiot, Hillary Clinton, had managed to mislay and not the DNC and Podesta e-mails that were leaked by some unknown party to Wikileaks.
Taffyboy , Nov 23 2019 23:33 utc | 29
These low brow knuckle draggers know how to spin lies. Their useless parade of irrelevant nincompoops proves an ongoing campaign to demonize Russian people. We all see it here constantly on other blogs and MSN reports. These people know very well who their match is and cannot compete socially, on certain new military complexes, political maturity, etc. I offer Sergey Lavrov as a person not matched by any other nation. All western parasites in opposition pale in stature, political maturity, and brains. The Russians know what the deal is with these western crybabies, and know they are dealing with premature juveniles. These people show how weak they are by their actions and the Russians show patience. Oh, and that kayfabe word, Trump ..."be fake."... has much experience with it from his wrestling exposure. This farce has that written all over it, fake bullshit.

https://prowrestling.fandom.com/wiki/Kayfabe

GeorgeV , Nov 23 2019 23:43 utc | 30
I have been watching the Trump impeachment hearings farce on television over the past weeks and have heard enough BS by the so-called witnesses to fertilize the Sinai Desert. The real reason behind the hearings is not 'quid pro quo,' but 'cui bono' (who benefits). The parade of over-the-hill Cold War warriors has reinforced my belief that the impeachment hearings are essentially an attempt by the old Cold War guard to retain their privileges and positions of power in Washington. As for Ms. Fiona Hill, she is a prime example of the old dictum that states, "A Brit with an upper class accent reading the phone book sounds smarter to most Americans, than Abe Lincoln reading the Gettysburg Address.
karlof1 , Nov 24 2019 0:15 utc | 31
Macabre Comedy is the only appropriate descriptive term IMO. Russia is a very busy nation, every bit as busy as its leader VV Putin. Who within the Evil Outlaw US Empire's national government is even close to being Putin's equivalent? The vast majority are mere kindergarteners in comparison, Trump included. In case you've been asleep since 2007 or so, Putin and all of Russia are working their tails off to improve their nation and their comrades's wellbeing and in doing so have surpassed The Empire is qualitative military equipment, nuclear engineering, and a host of other areas, along with building several geoeconomic blocs of kindred nations to which the Empire can only answer with idiotic accusations and factless BigLie Media items.

If anything tells us how low the Evil Outlaw US Empire has sunk, it's this attempt to impeach a POTUS using bullshit for evidence. The would be emperor isn't the only one sans clothes--the entire imperial edifice is revealed as a scrawny, emaciated, traumatized waif that the curtain can no longer hide.

vk , Nov 24 2019 0:48 utc | 32
More 007 stuff on this Ukrainegate imbroglio:

Giuliani plays down Parnas link and repeats 'insurance' claim: Soviet-born go-betweens 'weren't James Bond'

Really?? , Nov 24 2019 2:26 utc | 33
Uncle Tungsten, @13

"Is there any good news from another star?"

As a matter of fact, there is, kinda.
Speaking of the fake news from Russia . . .
Spiegelonline has as story questioning the Browder version of the death (and role) of poor old Sergei Magnitsky:
https://www.spiegel.de/plus/russland-der-fall-magnitski-story-ohne-held-a-00000000-0002-0001-0000-000167093479

Headline: "How True Is the Story on Which the US Sanctions against Russia Are Based?"

Very good question!! Glad someone in the MSM is (finally) asking it . . .
"Mit seinen Aussagen zum Tod eines Whistleblowers brachte Bill Browder die Amerikaner gegen Putin auf. Doch seine Darstellung ist voller Widersprüche. Von Benjamin Bidder "

With his statements regarding the death of a whistleblower [Magnitsky was no such thing] Brill Browder [arch scumbag] stirred up the Americans against Putin. But his account is full of contradictions [you don't say].
And at Bidder's website in addition:
"Washington based its sanctions on Browder's account of Magnitsky's death."

Unfortunately the Spiegel story is behind a paywall. Perhaps someone here has a sub.

People here may recall that a very good documentary about the whole affair, "Behind the Scenes," made by Andrei Nekrasov, was buried in the USA but was available online. It is a great explanation of the scurrilous Browder and his role in getting the balling rolling in DC against Putin. Has great footage of Browder running away from cameras, men trying to serve subpoenas, and, in front of the camera, squirming-and-sweating-while-lying.

So it seems to me like good news if questions about Browder and his tale are raised in Der Spiegel---even though I haven't read the article.

Idland , Nov 24 2019 2:52 utc | 34
I have no argument with constitutional executive powers. I do have many arguments against Unitary Executive Theory. You can campaign on a policy and implement it once elected, but you can't use executive power with corrupt intent and claim immunity.
AntiSpin , Nov 24 2019 3:38 utc | 35
@ rjp | Nov 23 2019 22:25 utc | 26

I have been watching closely both the Trump and the Hillary misbehaviors for quite a while. Your post up above is, I think, the first string of assertions about the pair of them that I agree with without exception . As far as the activities that you covered in that post are concerned, you've got each of them nailed to a "T".

I hope we'll see further comments from you, that will exhibit the same degree of accuracy.

Richard , Nov 24 2019 8:11 utc | 36
The degree of dishonesty and blatant manipulation by the MSM has reached ridiculous levels. MSM journalists are not journalists, they are lying, evil peddlers of propaganda shilling for the military industrial complex; they are as blood-stained as the psychopathic elite that they so faithfully serve...they should be held responsible for their lies, up to and including prosecution for war crimes:

https://richardhennerley.com/2018/11/01/are-msm-journalists-war-criminals/

mk , Nov 24 2019 8:44 utc | 37

@Really #33

There is an article on telepolis (no paywall, in German) on the Spiegel piece, demasking the author Benjamin Bidder as someone who belatedly jumps on the bandwagon that others have set in motion, first and foremost the Russian filmmaker Andrej Nekrasov.


Quentin , Nov 24 2019 10:09 utc | 38
Really @ 33 Thanks for the reference to the Der Spiegel article questioning Magnitsky. Hij is absolutely ground zero of the whole Russia paranoia and Ukraine obsession. The US has lost all perspective: an insignificant place like Ukraine dominates its national and foreign policies while its own people have to pay the price.
Quentin , Nov 24 2019 10:19 utc | 39
Thanks mk @ 37. Sure Nekrasov investigated the Magnitsky story but his film was available to no one in the US and the EU in the standard outlets (TV, cinema, etc.). Der Spiegel is MSM as any MSM can be and it is then significant that the publication prints this article, even if Magnitsky and the anti-Russian mania he set in motion with the help of US politicians is still enigmatic. How can one man recruit the whole US political system to protect his personal wealth? Has a contributed to the campaign funds, Clinton Foundation, etc.?
Mina , Nov 24 2019 10:59 utc | 40
OT
The beggars and the saw-prince
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/356493/World/Region/US-and-France-vie-to-bolster-Gulf-security-at-Mana.aspx
uncle tungsten , Nov 24 2019 11:10 utc | 41
RJPJR #14

Thank you it made my day:
collusion blues is good

nietzsche1510 , Nov 24 2019 11:12 utc | 42
Hillary Clinton: "We better get to the White House if most of us do not want to end up at the lamp posts". O America, if you knew what these people are doing to the Americans----- after they got rid of president Kennedy.
uncle tungsten , Nov 24 2019 11:45 utc | 43
Really?? #33

Thanks heaps, always brightened up when I hear of Browder getting a flogging. You might enjoy this little spat:


Lt. Col. Vindman has shat in his shoe.

Even Ciaramella gets his name reproduced in one link.

uncle tungsten , Nov 24 2019 11:58 utc | 44
Ghost Ship #28

Thank you Ghost Ship, a timely reminder.

It is important to remember that Hillary Clinton as Sec of State transacted her entire computer communications operation on an unsecured server in a closet at her home. It was shared with the Clinton Foundation. It was never secured or in any way made available to the US Government IT security team.

Likewise she used unsecured phones.

That is what the problem was as that server would have been accessed by a number of state actors who would suspect some benefit might come their way if they peeked. A cinch for any state actor let alone a clever hacker.

Hillary Clinton is guilty of the single extreme national security breach in US history. And they are killing Assange to cover for her criminal treachery.

Bemildred , Nov 24 2019 12:00 utc | 45
Mina @40: A beggars banquet. A festival of corruption. I wonder when it will dawn on those needy greedheads that the Sauds are running on empty too ...
AnneR , Nov 24 2019 12:08 utc | 46
George @30

A minor point, true enough, but Fiona Hill does most definitely *not* have an ""upper class English" accent. (As a former Brit of English and working class origin, that is as apparent as could be.) Her accent is a much softened after many years away from her working class family origins in North-Eastern England - specifically, County Durham, and as many years trying to rid herself of those working class origins, taints there remains the local lilt to her diction.

Regarding her rank, stinking Russophobia - I would suggest that its origins were *not* from her background (her father was a coal miner) but rather from the fact that she spent her late teens and early adulthood under the Thatcher the Snatcher government and its deliberate ending of public ownership of basic services as it installed TINA - pure rapacious, plundering, mammon and moloch worshipping corporate-capitalism allied to imperialism.

Add to these likely background effects, the desire among some of those of working class origins who, on achieving a tertiary education have every intention of eschewing and disparaging their backgrounds and adopting wholeheartedly the worldview of the ruling elites. Not at all unusual, certainly in the UK.

Definitely totally distorted. Inaccurate (I doubt that she has ever spent much, if any, time in Russia with ordinary, working class Russians - ho no, too far down the ladder) and extremely partisan. Another Dem shill?

An aside: my late husband's friends are all highly educated and all (the American ones, anyway) glued to the impeachment hearings and gung-ho for them.... Education isn't all it's cracked up to be, clearly. (And For the record - I am very much anti-both parties.)

RJPJR , Nov 24 2019 12:09 utc | 47
Really?? @ 33 : thanks for reminding us about Andrei Nekrasov's "Behind the Scenes". The effort to bury it as well as the reaction (including -- especially? -- from among the Congresscritters) was an outstanding example of groupthink -- everybody move in lock-step with the prescribed belief and vilify, demonize those who dare to propose something different that contradicts the groupthink

Antispin @ 35, thanks for the compliment. I keep trying...

Glad some of you appreciated the parody. We need such cleverness. It is at the opposite end of the spectrum from groupthink, and it's a good antidote to the mind-numbing drivel of mendacious mainstream media.

AnneR , Nov 24 2019 12:19 utc | 48
In reply to Karlof1 - absolutely agree about the abilities of V. Putin and his team. If ONLY we had any government (had any akin to them over the past decades) as able, sensible, concerned about their country as Putin and his team clearly are, we'd be a peaceful, non-terroristic, economically more equal place. I would also include with V. Putin and his team, Xi and his government and the Iranian elected government - and Khamenei. Our lot are squealing, uneducated (in the true sense of the term) greedy, amoral children by comparison
RJPJR , Nov 24 2019 12:21 utc | 49
AnneR @ 46 wrote: "Education isn't all it's cracked up to be, clearly."

Education has both a very positive and a very negative dimension.

On the positive side is the socialization that puts one in touch with many people, most of whom, ideally, one would mot meet otherwise (not the least of whom are great teachers at all levels) and teaches one to get along with them. Also, on the positive side is learning: it saves one from constantly reinventing the wheel, so to speak, and gives a personal touch to imparted knowledge.

On the negative side is the lock-step conformity it can -- and more and more does -- impose on social mores. Also there is the transmission of the mindset and beliefs that Andrew Carnegie splendidly called the gospel of wealth (he was gung-ho for it, of course -- God made him rich because God wanted him to be rich...). Both of these are essential underpinnings to groupthink (which, by the way, was studied in depth at Yale University in the 1960s, and where it got it's name).

vk , Nov 24 2019 12:57 utc | 50
@ Posted by: AnneR | Nov 24 2019 12:08 utc | 46

There's a movie called "Billy Elliot", which takes place in the 1980s UK, that tells this story: the boy had a miner father and a miner older brother, with high class consciousness -- there's even a scene where they fight over one of the members who violated the strike and went to work.

But none of that matters of little Billy, as he wants to be a ballet dancer. The riot police, the strikes, all of that appears just as a background, the landscape, over which he and his best friend talk about wanting to do ballet.

The figure of Billy Elliot represents the transition in the UK from an industrial economy to a services one, and the transition of a social-democratic UK to a neoliberal UK.

Walter , Nov 24 2019 13:14 utc | 51
Many assume that "education" involves learning true things. There is reason for this assumption in engineering and math, as these actually involve logical proofs. However many professionals, presumably "educated" are ignorant of the basic science necessary for understanding and proving...pharmacists who are re-leaved of the obligation to, for example, ever take a chemistry class, or chemistry test. Thus the assumption is, well, not always valid. Other examples abound...look for a few. Ask, for example, the X-Ray technician a few questions about the physics of his job...

However the assumption fails entirely when one enters the bizarre realm of canonical myth...such as "history" or "political theory" or the Chicago School of Econ.

It is also often assumed that education involves teachers. I have not noticed that such people are, generally, of any value. Rather, the profession of teaching serves to park people who might upset matters in a place where they are under control and addicted to their paychecks, and serve up propaganda according to the rule.

And it is assumed that it involves a forum dedicated to what they call education, when in reality it is that forum where the process that binds takes place. The Toga, the Bath> "Hence, too, a liking sprang up for our style of dress, and the "toga" became fashionable. Step by step they were led to things which dispose to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude." (Tacitus)

Think jeans and Hollywood, and propaganda.

One particularly egregious difference 'tween education is the exclusion of any formal study of Rhetoric and logic, with developed skill in these, as a basic prerequisite. Such matters are now generally ignored, and have been in the canonical syllabus of US "education" for, more or less, a century.

Now to the point> Why is that?

Piotr Berman , Nov 24 2019 13:35 utc | 52
AnneR @ 46 wrote: "Education isn't all it's cracked up to be, clearly."

Like with food, deprivation is bad, but content, the manner of serving etc. can have a variety of effects. Here we have an example of a narrower phenomenon, meritocracy. Somewhere I read that the imperial government of China had European guest and advisors who informed their host about certain advances in Europe like clock construction and improved cartography, but who also brought back information about the Chinese method of selecting officials on the basis of examinations. Initially, the English adopted civil service selected by examinations to rule India, and that worked so well that the system was extended for the government of England as well. Like in China, the key was to learn the wisdom of the classics. Of course, Confucius was replaced with Plato, Horace etc. Back in China, Confucius seems to be replaced by the study of the History of Chinese Communist Party -- obligatory regardless of the major.

However, what is outright sinister is the coupling of "narrative building" performed for intelligence/national security apparatus in USA and UK with academia. "Properly thinking" luminaries from top institutions of learning were recruited for the purpose, with Fiona Hill mentor being prime example. From what I understand, Richard Pipes left the position of the head of Russian and Slavic Studies at Harvard to be CIA consultant where he lead Team B to assess the intentions and capabilities of USSR. Unlike more realistic team A, Team B strongly exaggerated both sinister plans of USSR, basically suggesting that without heeding the constraints of MAD, they will attempt to subjugate the West, and the capabilities. Almost hiilariously, his team postulated that the symptoms of economic stagnation in USSR were faked to lull the West into complaisance. Recommendations of Team B were enthusiastically adopted by Reagan administration to justify acceleration of defense spending. Check "Team B" in Wikipedia. "I would say that all of it was fantasy. ... if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong." Needless to say, the theory of faked economic decline was absurd.

Lamentably, Pipes did not abandoned his teaching duties, and while he toiled as the head of Team B he was mentoring Ph. D. students including Fiona Hill.

Piotr Berman , Nov 24 2019 13:44 utc | 53
You can campaign on a policy and implement it once elected, but you can't use executive power with corrupt intent and claim immunity.

Posted by: Idland | Nov 24 2019 2:52 utc

You can use executive (and legislative, judiciary) power with corrupt intent and immunity, but you should not.

snake , Nov 24 2019 13:58 utc | 54
*The legalistic assholes who want to deny majority rule under shelter of the Electoral College on the fraudulent grounds that a technicality matters more really are against majority rule. Of course they also pretend that impeachment reverses elections. The cherry on top of this turd sundae? They would reject the 26th Amendment, which would have been invoked against Reagan as well as Trump (and possibly his original, Nixon, as well.) Pence is not even man enough to do his duty. by: steven t johnson @ 17 <=you might also be interested to know that these same types want to take control of all of the resources, all of the departments, all of the labor, and all of whatever else that exist in America so the USA can use them to conduct continuous war and manage the grey zone.. read on..

The white paper "Russian Strategic Intentions"[ https://cryptome.org/2019/07/Pentagon-Russia.pdf], caste its analysis of the future in terms of "competition and conflict" and presents, in its preface, a long list of those associated to the claim that the USA should use "all of its instruments of state power" in a comprehensive fashion, to manage grey area warfare, to promote elite interest in far away places, and to impose aggression (in environment, in economic activity, with influence campaigns, with paramilitary assault, with cyber intrusion, and with political warfare) as a defense to Russian grey zone global activities. What bull shit! no wonder Americans cannot understand Article II Presidents or the USA endangering Americans and their quality of life because the USA is involved in bombing, destructing and aggressing activities. The groups that wrote this report have decided they should decide for the American public, what the USA policy should be? I wonder what Americans would say about that?

Is it true that "Americans need go no further than think tanks and intelligence services supporting USA aggression in foreign lands, to find their enemies and to discover the cause of why their lot has been reduced to forth world peon status? Who in America allowed groups of the type that wrote this paper to decide, or even to think about deciding, for Americans what the USA should be doing? Why is not "war for ever, even when there is no war" the narrative debated by USA politicians competing to govern America? Governed Americans and governed Russians should build a stadium, outfit the personnel in Russian and USA governments, their think tanks and their intelligence services with uniforms, lock the two opposed teams in the stadium, and sell the TV rights to pay off the national debt of all of the nations of the world as these two teams as they fight it out to the last man, woman and paper tiger warrior.

Consider this fascinating assumption or projection => "Russia believes..there is no unacceptable or illegitimate form of deterrence, compellence, or escalation management(Goure).. [<= I cannot find in real life the continuum of conflict this group talks about?]. Like Russia's perception of its competition with the USA, its perception of conflict is dichotomous: one is either at war or not at war." I had no idea Russia could believe anything? Apparently think tanks supporting the USA; think Russia can think, and have concluded, as a result of their thoughts, that war exist, even when: there is no war? My USA cat jumped over the starry moon, while his Russian cow chased earthly rats? The so-called Russian grand (balance of powers) strategy vs whole of USA government liberal order management of the international grey zone => compels and escalates the USA, sez the report, to maintain a continuous state of war?
.. "Countering Russian provocations [<=competition maybe, but not provocation?] requires all instruments of USA national power, they say?" <=note: as long as not on American soil who cares?

Walter , Nov 24 2019 13:59 utc | 55
Piotr seems to agree with Walter. The general principle seems to be "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" (Casey/ Honneger) and of course everyone must recall Clapper complaining about the Russians finding "fissures in our [US/CIA] tapestry" (one never hears the word "tapestry" in US English except, generally,in the phrase "tapestry of lies"...unless one is involved with curtains or one sort, or another...the term "Eiserner Vorhang" popularized by Churchill...that's a tapestry, ain't it?

If their lips move, they lie, friend. And do not look behind the green tapestry at the mighty Wurlitzer...

Walter , Nov 24 2019 14:19 utc | 56
Well, snake, the thalassocratic rule of the Anglosaxon diaspora into forward operating base (former republic) USA has evidently failed, and "they" now follow not the republic's laws, but the ukase of Imperial method. They have no other methods.

This was also the reason for England to start WW1. German industry and Ruski resources would (will/is/has) integrate(d) Heartland and create(d) a tellurocratic reality those Fine fella's down at the shop cannot abide.

Think of this as a loose connecting rod in a chevy motor...you know what's going to happen, but it's the only way to go...so you pretend it's ok...

All war is based on Deception.

Ant. , Nov 24 2019 14:27 utc | 57
@14

That was so beautifully sarcastic. A bit of good bass would have been nice for depth.

BM , Nov 24 2019 14:31 utc | 58
If US intelligence agencies are asserting that Ukraine meddling in the US election was a Russian operation, when in fact Ukraine did indeed heavily meddle in the elections, isn't that treason by the US intelligence agency officials concerned?
Walter , Nov 24 2019 14:55 utc | 59
" deny majority rule under shelter of the Electoral College on the fraudulent grounds that a technicality matters more really are..."

The US, formerly a Republic and remaining approximately Republican in institutional appearances and out-side form, has never been a democracy. It was not intended to be, though it had some democratic forms. ("Democracy" is without semantic value as it is used these days.)

That's not a trivial technical characteristic. It was intentional and basic. It's the lay of the Basic Law of the US since 1789 or so, and perhaps less so in the actual Basic Law c 1776...some claim the 1778 Law was not properly ratified...a sound argument once, eclipsed entirely by long custom, custom being the basis of all Law (and some Ukase).

Of course nowadays it's not even a Republic, more like an animated zombie largely under the incompetent control of several elite clubs, including foreign and also zionist and also financial clubs, which are in constant turmoil...because these clubs are running out of options.

When you are in a conflict set and run out of options, then you almost always lose...since everybody can see what you must do, and they themselves make plans to counter yours.

In this undertaking the Ruskis and the Chinese have preeminence.

It's already over... Soon they will realize that, and make deals.

............

BM, fair question about the Big T. It depends on who writes the History, curtain-makers or... At the present time Big T cannot exist, but...one may assume that the Russian Historians and the Chinese Historians will say "Big-T".

Ant. , Nov 24 2019 14:59 utc | 60
@54

"The legalistic assholes who want to deny majority rule under shelter of the Electoral College on the fraudulent grounds that a technicality matters more really are against majority rule."

You seem to advocating the concept of mob rule. Do you understand that a popular opinion is not necessarily a correct opinion?

Sasha , Nov 24 2019 15:34 utc | 61
Other important aspect of the Ukrainegate, which leads all the way to the Syriagate, of utmost importance for European security, since we are made aware that matters of security are directly in the hands of people strange, or in the way to be strange, to European interests and organzitions, keeping all European institutions hostage of the NATO military alliance´s interests, and which differs from the main point it is given here, that related to the meddling in US elections, as if that were what most matter...when it is the other way around, that the USUK complex meddles in each adn every aspect of Euroepan life, interests, prospects and security, underminig them all...

OSCE MONITOR IN UKRAINE IS BRITISH MILITARY AGENT MARK ETHERINGTON – HIS LAST JOB WAS FIGHTING IN SYRIA AGAINST THE ASSAD GOVERNMENT

Really?? , Nov 24 2019 16:08 utc | 62
Quentin 38
What does "Hij" mean?

Regarding Nekrasov/Film/MSM: Precisely.

I did watch that film when it was linked at an article about the whole affair at the Unz Review (now I think the Bitchute link is once again neutered). Before seeing this article I was virtually ignorant of the Magnitisky affair, scumbag Browder, and the putative affair's influence on American policy. Here is the UNz Review article, by Israel Shamir:
http://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-good-fortune-of-mr-browder/?highlight=Browder

(sorry if not doing link properly)

It's a long story, which Shamir tells pretty clearly.
Kurz um, the American public was denied the chance to evaluate Browder's claims themselves by viewing the film. Truly, censorship at its most naked.

Bidder may be jumping on a bandwagon (and, I don't know what he actually writes!!) but Der Spiegel is 150% MSM, toeing the American line in most respects. So I do think even this headline is worth noting.

However, I have read a large portion of the Telepolis article and it should be read by anyone interested in Browder/Magnitsky. It is really a case study of an incredibly successful disinformation campaign. Which are only possible with active and passive collusion of many state and nonstate actors and of course the MSM media.
(Also, it looks as though Telepolis has been following this story in other articles that call out news organizations and EU entities for their complicity in pushing Browder's narrative and ignoring many counter-signs. Including canceling and otherwise burying Nekrasov's excellent film.)

Actually, the larger topic in light of the Russiagate and impeachment circuses being "clash of the titans' disinformation campaigns."

Here is Google translation of the Telepolis article headlined "Browder and the Magnitsky Narrative: End of a Disinformation Campaign?" by Florian Roetzer and dated today (again, apologies if I am violating a protocol):
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Browder-und-das-Magnitski-Narrativ-Ende-einer-Desinformationskampagne-4595245.html&prev=search ">https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Browder-und-das-Magnitski-Narrativ-Ende-einer-Desinformationskampagne-4595245.html&prev=search">https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Browder-und-das-Magnitski-Narrativ-Ende-einer-Desinformationskampagne-4595245.html&prev=search

steven t johnson , Nov 24 2019 16:14 utc | 63
oldhippie@25 The anecdotes about what the insiders kept secret is instructive. The gales of laughter did nothing to impair Pipes' academic reputation, nor were they meant to, I imagine. Being a respected academic means also being respected in government and in the media, which Pipes was. Team B and all that

Walter's babble about a Republic instead of a democracy is reactionary cant. The Constitution originally read that the electors would be in fact the electors, interposing against a majority to elect a responsible candidate, one determined to preserve the ruling class. In those times, that meant slavers, of course. But, in Washington's elections, Hamilton, concerned to prevent an inadvertent tie, intrigued to make sure John Adams got fewer electoral votes than the popular voting of the time required. Adams was irate. In Adams' own election, Hamilton supposedly tried to get the electors to switch votes so that a Pinckney of South Carolina was elected. (Adams was honest in pecuniary matters and rather intelligent, but he was something of a dingbat, which piety about the "Founding Fathers" refuses to admit.) Adams was even more furious. And Jefferson made political capital, swearing to all that his party's electors would vote the people's will. They did, and promptly created a constitutional crisis when Jefferson and Burr tied, throwing the election into the House. The intrigues aimed at overturning the people's will provoked talk of another revolution or the break up of the union.

The principle that electors are not agents to actually elect the president but mere cogs was established. It was affirmed by the incandescent fury of the Jacksonians at J.Q. Adams. And it was further confirmed when the contested election of 1876 again was loud with talk about uprisings. It was only the obscene withdrawal of troops from the South, protecting the Klan etc., that pacified the uproar. It was not until the political degeneration of the later years which lead the coward Gore to roll over. As mere agents of the popular vote, yes, the EC is a mere technicality. My guess is that Walter personally would sneer at a criminal defendant who relied on a technicality about their rights to get an acquittal. But the other Walters want to use a technicality to take away people's rights. Then they are so shameless as to pretend to virtue and wisdom.

As for the notion that the Electoral College is the enemy of the people's rights, instead of the states' right? In this thread there are idiots ranting about treason because of email server. If you want to see treason, look at the history of the Confederate States of America. That's treason. We have a national government, it's part of the constitution (14th Amendment is otherwise gibberish.) Thus, the Electoral College as a treaty compact between "sovereign" (semi-sovereign is not really a thing!) is also dead. The EC is just a technicality. Walter would implicitly have us believe that if the electors just picked someone else through conspiracy among themselves, then the President chosen would be the President because that's the Constitution, and that's just the way it is. Electors keeping faith with the people instead of their parties would have voted for the person who won the vote. And Walter wouldn't accept the result, no matter how much it followed the Constitution (which it would have!) because reactionary scum like Walter are always liars.

Ant. seems to think the minority of the good people should overrule the common peoples, aka the mob. It is doubtful Ant. would know the good people if they were in the same room. The assumption that Ant. is one of the good people is simply slavish adoration. Also, the only real meaning to "mob" is "collective noun for people rioting." An election is not a riot. This is slander by some whose rancid contempt for humanity at large should be directed first at Ant.

alaff , Nov 24 2019 16:26 utc | 64
V. Putin said that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but... American journalists, of course, are aware that this statement is unfounded, and, of course, is Russian disinformation. Because V. Putin said this.
Circe , Nov 24 2019 16:37 utc | 65
@60 Ant.
You seem to advocating the concept of mob rule. Do you understand that a popular opinion is not necessarily a correct opinion?

Gee! And here I was under the impression that THE MAJORITY of the people equals democracy. But because most Americans are nuts, Amerikkka, would be the exception to that rule.

By the same token, pretending the Electoral College equals democracy is also legitimizing the fact that a few married cousin crazies and evangelized bible thumpers from sparsely populated hicktowns and rednecks, and pretend gentry from the Confederacy have equal representation to the most populated states in the Union.

Let me though make a precise evaluation: Crazytown U.S.A. imposed karma Trump on the majority, because a big part of that majority betrayed liberal anti-war values to neoliberal peace equals war Nobel drone Obama and neoliberal hawk Killary cackling like a shrew at the Al-Qaeda gang slaughter of Gaddafi.

Now, Amerikka has a ZioCon for President that pardons and glorifies war criminals, that arms a proxy war committing starvation genocide, that steals oil resources from Syria, that wields economic tyranny against Venezuela and Iran for the purpose of regime change and control of foreign energy riches, that is meddling in Lebannon, Iraq and Latin American countries usurping the will of people, and who gives away territory in Syria and Palestine to Zionists not to mention his fascist takeover of the Judiciary and and total ignorance of the climate change threat.

So even though you're totally wrong on what democracy is, it doesn't matter, because Amerikkka's majority is getting exactly what it deserves for having betrayed and surrendered liberal values to Neocons like GWBush, Neolibs like Killary and all in service to Zionism and Zionists like Kissinger and billionaires like Saban and Adelson and the corporate sheisters on Wall Street.

Very few Americans have a mind of their own raised on the Zionist corporate media alphabet soup that scrambles the brain. So you're right, the majority, deserve the Trump karma imposed on them by the lowest crazy common denominator in Amerikkkan society promoted by the Electoral College and who are the most useful idiots of Zionist supremacy.

And then everyone wonders about the growing desperation manifested by mass tent cities, mass opiod consumption and mass incarceration. Amerikka is occupied and Trump is the enforcer of the occupier.

Now try and find a more precise observation of the truth.

AK74 , Nov 24 2019 17:11 utc | 66
America is an insane asylum that masquerades as the "world's leading democracy."

This country is truly unhinged and lives in its own Orwellian reality. The Ukraine/impeachment issue is only symptomatic of this broader pathology.

For the USA, it doesn't make a difference what actual reality is. What matters is that America defines what counts as reality itself--not matter how ludicrous or fake it is.

As a former high-level Bush Regime openly admitted in an interview with journalist Ron Suskind:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

This American mentality is most evident in the USA's sociocidal wars of aggression around the world and the lies that America peddles to pimp for its wars--as well as its political balkanization, regime change, or destabilization campaigns that it dresses up as"pro-Democracy"(TM) movements:

Mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq

The fake War on Terrorism

The bogus War on Drugs

Humanitarian Intervention, or the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine

Freedom and Democracy

All-American Lies....

Americans truly are the people of the Big Lie.

There should be a Cordon Sanitaire placed around the United States (and its crime partners/allies) to prevent this American plague from infecting the rest of the word.

I'll be Reeferee , Nov 24 2019 17:14 utc | 67
@54 snake "Governed Americans and governed Russians should build a stadium, outfit the personnel in Russian and USA governments, their think tanks and their intelligence services with uniforms, lock the two opposed teams in the stadium, and sell the TV rights to pay off the national debt of all of the nations of the world as these two teams as they fight it out to the last man, woman and paper tiger warrior."

That's awesome! I was just listening to Devo's 1981 New Traditionalists album the other day, and while I put it on to listen to "Beautiful World" ("It's a beautiful world, for you...not me!"), the following song is "Enough Said" and these are the great lyrics:

"Take all the leaders from around the world
Put them together in a great big ring
Televise it as the lowest show on earth
And let them fight like hell to see who's king

Gather up the pieces when the fight is done
Then you'll find out living really can be fun

Enough said!"

You can find in youtube - too apropos to not share.

Curtis , Nov 24 2019 17:20 utc | 68
Jackrabbit 6
"took the black vote for granted"
So very true. Team HRC must have thought they could flip states like Pennsylvania by taking the cities just like BHO did. Instead the states "deplorables" were dismissed. BHO did the same but he had the cities in his pocket. But in today's PC hypocrisy, you can't point to race as being a major factor.
Schmoe , Nov 24 2019 17:22 utc | 69
Really? @62
That link just leads to a blank German to English Google translator for me (Firefox user). Could you post highlights?
Curtis , Nov 24 2019 17:23 utc | 70
psychohistorian 7
These NGOs and other organizations have an added influence on our politics. For some reason the MSM doesn't mention them much. It's like the White Helmets. Search for their history at YouTube and you get the official obfuscation. But toss in Purpose and AVAAZ and you find more.
Walter , Nov 24 2019 17:27 utc | 71
@ STJ #63> who wrote, inter alia> "reactionary scum like Walter are always liars." et sec

Many thanks, Friend. As no doubt all here are well-aware, the resort to ad hominem occurs when the speaker has no actual argument.

I am obliged. Glad you agree with Walter, and also very glad you do not like that...your inner-conflict may be part of the dialectic. I hope it works out for you, Steve.

see, if you like, McHenry,"The American Historical Review", vol. 11, 1906 p 618

Circe , Nov 24 2019 17:47 utc | 72
Here's another bull's eye observation: it's more efficient and cunning to manipulate through social media tech-savvy means and other localized machinations the really susceptible, dumb, but important groups in swing states made powerful by the Electoral College than to tackle the opinion of the urban majority with a few critical articles and the appearance of a pay-off ledger. Besides, the entirety of Europe was critical of candidate Trump. The criticism of Trump was not specfic to Ukraine alone. So either the meddling was based on a vast conspiracy of criticism or it was based on a campaign of targeted populist propaganda directed at the right and working class together with a perfectly-timed leak that the DNC was sabotaging Sanders cleverly meant to turn part of the left base against the Dem Party. I say the latter.

Now don't try to convince me that Ukraine would meddle to turn the left base of the Democratic side against Hillary when Ukraine preferred her. That logic just don't fly.

The question to ask is. Who had the unlimited financial resources, political connections and tech savvy to pull the meddling off? I'll give you some clues: it's the usual suspect, starts with Z and it's mostly based in Israel, the U.S. AND in the Russian oligarchy.

Trump is the Chosen Zionist President and there's nothing more to look at here. The Ukraine and Russia factors are superfluous and moot to that over-arching FACT.

Really?? , Nov 24 2019 17:48 utc | 73
Piotr 52

The most important thing is to learn to read and write.
Rhetoric and logic are important to follow after.
The basis of my comment is that I am currently reading Frederick Law Olmstead's The Cotton Kingdom.
Fascinating. Unvarnished look at the antebellum South. There was a lot of variation among states and communities. but the basics remain the same (he covers a very wide territory, both geog. and intellectually and makes very detailed observations of all that he encountered).
A huge factor (per FLO) in the mental, psychological, intellectual, economic etc impoverishment of the South was a lack of any cultural institutions, people lived too far apart to hire any kind of teachers, of course the slaves were virtually all of them also uneducated. but in, say, South Caroline 25% of the whites also could not read or write or do elementary sums.

As adults we all have the responsibility to (continue to) educate ourselves. I get nervous when I hear people putting a pox on education per se. There are no guarantees when human beings invent or are given various types of tools. Trying to win the argument by withholding the provision or preventing the acquisition of tools sounds akin to considering people "uppity" for using the intellectual tools they possess.

Walter , Nov 24 2019 17:52 utc | 74
@uncle tungsten | Nov 24 2019 11:58 utc | 44 (the email affair and server)

Assume that the Bruce-Partington Submarine plans (Y'all know yer Holmes?) are under control of Billary Jones, a senior official in an Imperial State. Billary needs money and has guilty secrets. He's being blackmailed by Oberstein, a spy.

Jones then accidentally leaves the plans where Oberstein sees and photographs them.


Hi there Stevie...conflict is debilitating, eh? Find the Franklin quote yet? He was there, and you? But I assume you haven't even realized it wuz Bennie F. Best o' luck.
(apologies to Conan Doyle)

Really?? , Nov 24 2019 18:11 utc | 75
69 Shmoe
Sorry about link not working. Esp since it was so long.
I usually activiate Google translate from a Google hit. But
I think you can also activate Google translate from the original webpage. This link pasted into a new window (the URL space) did get me to the translation:
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Browder-und-das-Magnitski-Narrativ-Ende-einer-Desinformationskampagne-4595245.html&prev=search ">https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Browder-und-das-Magnitski-Narrativ-Ende-einer-Desinformationskampagne-4595245.html&prev=search">https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Browder-und-das-Magnitski-Narrativ-Ende-einer-Desinformationskampagne-4595245.html&prev=search

In case that still does not work, type the title into your browser and then "translate." If you use Google you should get a hit that shows the German title with "translate this page" to the right.

Here is the title:
"Browder und das Magnitski-Narrativ: Ende einer Desinformationskampagne?"

Another way is to type "Google Translate German to English" into your browser. You get a page with a box for German text on the left and English translation on the right.

There are 99 comments so far and a few posters are scratching their heads about what Der Spiegel is up to with this apparent 180. So it might be interesting to paste a few of them into Google translate. Here is one:
"What is going on at the mirror (Spiegel)? Since the well-established narrative has been cultivated about the mean Russians since the founding and has been shown to 100% transatlantic loyalty, now suddenly something like that. Is this just an accidental slip of reason or is there more behind it?"

Google translate does make mistakes, beware. A typo can lead to absurdity.

Circe , Nov 24 2019 18:14 utc | 76
Oh, and one more salient, obvious fact in the form of a question: Why would the biggest and worst Neocon, Zionist shill in Congress, Lindsey Graham risk his dignity to such an extreme to rescue Trump's ass if Trump were not the Chosen Zionist President??? ... I'm waiting...10, 9, 8...

Lindsey is the barometer of who and what Zionists want and because they want Trump over Biden, Lindsey is now at war with his former Dem friend. Lindsey's a loyal subject of Zionism that butters his bread and that's why he'll do anything to protect Trump.

Per , Nov 24 2019 18:37 utc | 77
Posted by: uncle tungsten | Nov 24 2019 11:10 utc | 41

The parody projects best is "Battle Hymn of the Republic - Modified for Relevance imho.

Circe , Nov 24 2019 19:09 utc | 78
I hear crickets in response to my question @76. I'll take that as a sign that you agree Trump is Chosen by Zionists from day one and for 4 more years.

You just can't deny the whole truth. To do so is a fool's errand.

Erelis , Nov 24 2019 19:32 utc | 79
Amazing really. Back some 3-4 years ago, the wiley Russians looked into the future to understand that they needed to blame the Ukrainians for interfering in the election. They predicted that deep state actors would reveal that Trump would in fact strong arm the Ukrainians into revealing dirt on Joe Biden.

As for the teaching of classical Rhetoric and Logic. Absolutely. Give people the tools to understand arguments and their validity. One of the best books I had and which I stupidly lost was a compendium of rhetorical devices as labeled in the original Latin and Greek by drunk monks of the Medieval Europe. It was just amazing how these rhetoricians drew up a taxology of the various techniques and tropes--from honest to dishonest. A great toolkit.

pogohere , Nov 24 2019 20:12 utc | 80
Really @75
"What is going on at the mirror (Spiegel)? Since the well-established narrative has been cultivated about the mean Russians since the founding and has been shown to 100% transatlantic loyalty, now suddenly something like that. Is this just an accidental slip of reason or is there more behind it?"

Something to do with gas? Going east?

Schmoe , Nov 24 2019 20:17 utc | 81
@ Really?
Thanks. It finally worked; perhaps using Chrome helped.
Walter , Nov 24 2019 20:29 utc | 82
@ Erelis | Nov 24 2019 19:32 utc | 79 There was once a defrocked Jesuit (with tenure at a major university) who taught sodomy to the choir and rhetoric to his friends and those whom he thought might be. He also favored snow... But...as you say, the original Latin and Greek. A good man, but a pervert, and not a pederast. I liked the guy, and he knew his subject, ah, the academic subject, to near perfection. He wrote speeches on the side for major political figures, for cash. Thus in part did my own inability to suspend disbelief become cemented. For money? Good thing they caught him...oh yeah, his popness also runs a cash an' carry, don't he? Well, somebody said... (Like Martin Luther?)

Anyway the reason to study rhetoric is that it shall be used against you. Knowing the Science and Art is your only safe defense, your only warning of true intent by rhetorical analysis and logical deduction matching real events and actions. Without Rhetoric you are a chump, a mark, a fool, and like sheep. Ewe! (haha) With it you can form reasoned ideas about the future intention of any speaker. This may be useful.

Piotr Berman , Nov 24 2019 20:38 utc | 83
The first test (since 2014) of any expert's credentials is his/her position on Crimea. The next test is on Russian aggression.
If anyone suggests Crimea does not belong to Russia (most especially the federal district of Sevastopol), then they are ignorant or lying.

Posted by: Red Ryder | Nov 23 2019 19:53 utc

I think that Red Rider is wrong here, starting from assumptions. One assumption is that rather than status quo 1-5 years before the time we are making a judgment, we should look back ca. 200 years etc. That could imply that India should belong to United Kingdom, subsequent treaties notwithstanding.

Even more wrong is the hidden assumption that there should be some general principles that guide "us" as to who owns what (they actually exist but wait) that hold regardless of "Washington consensus". Perhaps using lower case in "us" was misleading. History explains the ethnic and linguistic composition of Crimea etc. but really, everybody agrees the it is not the only determinant. But let us consider some cases:

Annexation of Tuva and Sikkim. Somehow, nobody cares.

De-facto annexation of North Cyprus which now operates as a quasi-independent state fully dependent on Turkey. Locals and Turks are satisfied, the rest of NATO and perhaps UN does not recognize legality, but apart of Greek speaking countries, nobody makes a big deal out of it. Sanctions? Hehe.

Annexation of Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. Universal mild disapproval, except for USA -- wholehearted approval there.

Crimea. Total need to apply severe sanction forever to maintain faith in "our" principles.

karlof1 , Nov 24 2019 21:44 utc | 84
Cynthia Chung invaded my brain and wrote the short essay that's been on the tip of my tongue for some months now, "On Churchill's 'Sinews of Peace'" . Within its body is linked two extremely important items, the first being Elliott Roosevelt's book about his father Franklin As He Saw It (available limited preview at link), and the second being an excerpt from that book of paramount importance .

The more well known name of Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" speech is "The Iron Curtain Speech" given at Fulton, Missouri on 5 March 1946, not quite 11 months after FDR's passing. Here is the opening appetizer from that speech Chung bases the rest of her essay upon:

"This threatening message was not only meant for the Soviets, but was also directed to the Americans and in between the lines Churchill stated ' Things are going to be very different from now on. Your dead president cannot protect you any longer .' Some may be surprised to hear such an aside comment, more likened to the outer ruminations of Shakespeare's Iago." [My Emphasis]

Things did immediately become different. I consistently point out that the Evil Outlaw US Empire immediately began violating the UN Charter and thus its own Constitution and Law of the Land upon its coming into force; however, what I've neglected to point out until now is that the UK also began violating it just as immediately as did France, although neither has anything similar to the US Constitution's Supremacy Clause that might be used to curb illegal behavior. I often point to historical What Ifs? as in this case regarding the coup made against Henry Wallace, FDR, and the wholesale overturning of the reasons given for waging the war and winning the peace. Ms. Chung does an excellent job of highlighting what those were, how they were smashed, and why. I really can't stress the great importance of her essay enough; its educational importance is second to none! Read it, save it, make sure its read by your entire family, take it to your kid's teachers, share it with everyone you know and those you don't. The only people I can conceive of who wouldn't want to know its contents are racists/imperialists--dare I say fascists--like Churchill. Three generations of people were subjected to a geopolitical power play that never should have occurred--the deaths, destruction, and wasted opportunities likely total in the Quadrillions of Dollars. I must admit some admiration for Chung's an optimist as she clearly shows in her conclusion; my adding it here in no way diminishes her essay's power and importance:

"The intended policies by Franklin D. Roosevelt for the post war world are still waiting to be implemented today.

"So what can we the people do about this? We can wake up to the fact that this has occurred and recognise that the mainstream presentation of world dichotomy today is just continuing this sickly narrative. That Russia and China are not some monstrous race and that we should weigh what is currently being offered as an olive branch with great and serious reflection. That is namely the Eurasian Economic Union and the New Silk Road which also applies immensely to the US.

"Let us not continue to remain shackled in despair and inaction but rather realise that there is a great opportunity still for the Century of the Common Man."

Erelis , Nov 24 2019 23:19 utc | 85
@Walter

Anyway the reason to study rhetoric is that it shall be used against you. Great story by the way.


Indeed.

steven t johnson , Nov 25 2019 3:31 utc | 86
Walter confirms being a liar when paragraphs of argument are miscalled "inter alia," then ignored. The snide insult by the way functions as a fallacious ad hominem, doubly confirms thatif Walter knows rhetoric, then Walter is doubly a liar. Last and least citing a 1906 volume of American Historical Review to someone who doesn't have university library access is a snob's rudeness. I'm defeated by the puzzle of what Walter thinks Walter has to be snobby about. A collection of American Historical Review isn't exactly nothing, but to get snobby over it? Really?

[Nov 25, 2019] Waht is the motivation behind the rabid Russophobia of the American neo-liberals and neocons

Notable quotes:
"... "...it is quite possible that the historically well-informed neocons are merely longing for the good old Bolshevik days in Russia." ..."
"... Neocons resurrect tribal memories to fan the flames ..."
"... Imo Vindman's testimony revealed a 'personal' grudge against Russia. Hill also displayed a 'obsession' with Russia imo..... its interesting her Russian instructor at Harvard was Richard Pipes, the supreme Russian hater. ..."
"... Perhaps you should consider the influence of Ukrainian emigre groups/lobbies. They are essentialy an extension of the Galician movement you refer to. ..."
"... Machiavelli warned repeatedly of the baleful results that listening to exiles gets you into (specifically concerning attempts to reinstate some exiles in the place they came from), George Washingtons farewell adress can be read in a similiar way. Here is the thing with exiles: ..."
"... Lets pretend that Atlantis exists, but 98% of Americans do not particularly care about this country. Now something happens there that genereates exiles. If those exiles are at least somewhat savy, they will passionately argue that the current atlantean government is pure evil. Other then that, they will strive to make themselfs usefull to the host nation. Now, lets pretend that you have 5 such atlantean exiles in a group of 100 politicians. The atlantean exiles would care primarily about condeming the atlantean government, and may be in a position to deliver political points in other areas to anyone who is asking. A normal "I dont care about Atlantis" politican will see a fairly simple cost benefit thing, I condemn Atlantis, something about which I do not care at all, and in return the exiles will back something I care about, like my health policy. ..."
"... This is by no means a rapid development, but give it a couple of decades and the exchange of many such small favors will essentially result in a large group of politicians who will underwrite things like "Atlantis delenda est", mostly because they dont actually care about Atlantis. ..."
"... I don't know why this campaign against Russia was launched but at least part of it was domestic political pressure from Clinton Dems towards Trump Reps. What better way to deflect criticism about the foreign influences on the Clinton Dems (massive bribes from the usual suspects, either direct or via the Clinton Fdn.) but by accusing your opponent of being in the pay of foreign powers? ..."
"... Hillary Clinton shrieking about "Russia Wikileaks" seems to me to be pure projection and also rationalising a cause for her defeat other than the incompetence and corruption of her campaign. ..."
"... Also it seems to me that the Russian defeat of the regime change op in Syria (altho the situation seems rather fluid at the moment...) is another motivation where Israel's interests loom large. ..."
"... A grandfather and great grandfather were in a Union regiment but that hardly is proof that I am a Union man. Unusual family demographics to be sure but even then those Ukrainians served in that SS unit over 70 years ago. I doubt they were even then motivated by National Socialist ideology. Hatred of Russians was likely the primary motivation, as now. The German invasion was an opportunity to settle scores. ..."
"... I understand the hatred but not the application of "Nazi" to any Ukrainian thinking. If "Nazi" merely connotes "thuggish" then perhaps that explains the Azov formations but I suspect much more is at work. Additional inquiry is warranted. ..."
"... Many of those in the Ukrainian SS units ended up in Canada after WW2, resulting in the very pro Ukranian actions of the Canadian Government post 2014. Their FM, Christina Freeland, is a descendant. ..."
"... After the fall of the Former Soviet Union in 1991, saw a resurgence of the OUN. ..."
"... The Ukrainian Nazi formations and political factions openly call themselves Nazis. For that matter, everyone else called them Nazis too, at least before they became useful to the neocons. I'll spare everyone an explanation of Ukrainian diaspora culture, but I will say that, before WWII, the principal Ukrainian nationalist folk devil wasn't Russia. It was Poland and the Jews. ..."
"... Could the anti Russia bias be as simple as the need to protect the empires of people in State and Defence etc that would be no longer needed if Russia was a 'good' guy? ..."
"... Then there is the MIC and the lobbying flows of money into Congress.Russia is far too important to too many insiders to be anything but an enemy. ..."
"... As pointed out earlier - the military industrial complex needs a Big Enemy to justify its exorbitant budgets. The Deep State, the Borg, the Blob, whatever you want to call it, needs a Big Enemy to justify its spying and increasingly blatant interference in domestic US politics. ..."
"... the Russian nation is greatly under populated and owns a staggering per cent of the planets natural resources of every description. envy by those look from the outside towards russia is alone sufficient justification for wanting to grab it for themselves as has been unsuccessfully tried for centuries. ..."
"... The irony, of course, is that in Jewish folk memory, the most pig-headed (pun intended) and virulent anti-Semites were the peasants of Galicia (western Ukraine) and Poland. ..."
"... I also share your bafflement and not just with the political positions of the likes of Victoria Nuland. What do US & UK hope to gain? I can't see any benefits. ..."
Nov 25, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

PavewayIV , 25 November 2019 at 12:54 AM

Giraldi suggests, "...it is quite possible that the historically well-informed neocons are merely longing for the good old Bolshevik days in Russia." That aligns more readily with neocons' (and their oligarch supporters') psychopathic obsession with power and control via the state. Giraldi also illustrates another more recent period in history when the neocons were not decidedly anti-Russian:
In fact, the neocons got along quite well with Russia when they and their overwhelmingly Jewish oligarchs and international commodity thieves cum financier friends were looting the resources of the old Soviet Union under the hapless Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. Alarms about the alleged Russian threat only re-emerged in the neocon dominated media and think tanks when old fashioned nationalist Vladimir Putin took office and made it a principal goal of his government to turn off the money tap.

From Giraldi's article on Global Research: Hating Russia Is a Full-Time Job."Who is Driving the Hostility towards Russia?"
Neocons resurrect tribal memories to fan the flames

There was no monolithic 'Jewish Oligarch' club cashing in on Yeltsin's Russia. In the broadest sense, the western neocon-friendly Russian-Jewish oligarch group(s) were booted out by Putin, while rival group(s) stayed in Russia and submitted to Putin's reforms (whatever that means). Saker has written in the past about the various Jewish oligarch factions in Russia. It's complicated and beyond me.

Israel Shamir attempts to untangle the contradictory views on Ukraine from the State of Israel, Ukrainian-Jewish oligarchs, neocons and Jews from the US, Ukraine and Russia:

The Fateful Triangle: Russia, Ukraine and the Jews

Summary: 'Tribal' oversimplifies - no unified opinion. It's complicated. Mr. Shamir's views seem reasonable and go a long way to explaining the contradictions to me.

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> PavewayIV... , 25 November 2019 at 09:11 AM
Giraldi suggests, "...it is quite possible that the historically well-informed neocons are merely longing for the good old Bolshevik days in Russia."

I have a great deal of respect for Phil Giraldi but he is wrong here--it has nothing to do with "Bolshevism", whatever that means in the American context, but with settling accounts with 1930s purges of largely, not exclusively, Jewish Trotskists from the party and a consistent anti-Zionist position of USSR till the every end. Now, with Russia effectively de-fanging Israel, they go apoplectic. Modern neocons have zero relation to Bolshevism and if they dream about anything--it is mostly have Russia gone as such.

catherine , 25 November 2019 at 01:36 AM
''A question for me is the motivation behind the antipathy of the American neo-liberals and neocons toward Russia. There are a lot of Jews scattered among these groups. .... Or, do these people see Russia as a plausible geopolitical rival for the US? Surely it cannot be as simple, or simpleminded as that.''

Jews have next to zero political control in Russia and I do think that the Zionist see Russia, as the only other superpower, as a hindrance to their aims for one thing.
Also any state where Jews 'lost out' is subject to vilification and branded as evil.

Imo Vindman's testimony revealed a 'personal' grudge against Russia. Hill also displayed a 'obsession' with Russia imo..... its interesting her Russian instructor at Harvard was Richard Pipes, the supreme Russian hater.

As for the non Jewish Neos what would they do without a big scary enemy to fight?...they might have to actually concentrate on doing things for America.

If anyone is interested here is a nice tool for following congressional bills and etc.. Mostly good for counting all the money they are giving away and the sanctions on countries they are demanding....they aren't doing much of anything else in congress if you don't count the kangaroo court circus.

https://fmep.org/resources/?rsearch=&rcat%5B%5D=345
Legislative Round-ups
1. Bills, Resolutions, & Letters 2. Hearings 3. On the Record

Factotum , 25 November 2019 at 02:06 AM
How odd on PBS tonight - 'Secrets of Her Majesty's Secret Service" - an inside look at the worlds only defense against Russia -a love letter to M16 and it nearly 100 year "special relationship" with the US and CIA.

What strange timing for such a calculated PR piece for an extremely publicity shy Five Eyes operation. Were they trying to get ahead of the coming Russiagate investigation reports with this engaging documentary - we are in fact the James Bonds of the world and we know you Americans love James Bond.

Anyone else see it or have I gotten aa sinister cabal derangement syndrome behind even PBS "friendly" documentaries?

Paco , 25 November 2019 at 03:15 AM
It is plain to see, sour grapes after losing the great and possibly only opportunity for doing a Yugoslavia on the Russian Federation.
Mathias Alexander , 25 November 2019 at 03:23 AM
"A question for me is the motivation behind the antipathy of the American neo-liberals and neocons toward Russia"
Perhaps you should consider the influence of Ukrainian emigre groups/lobbies. They are essentialy an extension of the Galician movement you refer to.

" Is it Russia's relentless persecution of homosexuals?" What's the evidence for this persecution?

A.I.S. , 25 November 2019 at 04:18 AM
My 2 cents:

Essentially, when both 2 persons as contrary to each other as George Washington and Niccolo Machiavelli agree on something, it behoves one well to listen.

Machiavelli warned repeatedly of the baleful results that listening to exiles gets you into (specifically concerning attempts to reinstate some exiles in the place they came from), George Washingtons farewell adress can be read in a similiar way. Here is the thing with exiles:

Lets pretend that Atlantis exists, but 98% of Americans do not particularly care about this country. Now something happens there that genereates exiles. If those exiles are at least somewhat savy, they will passionately argue that the current atlantean government is pure evil. Other then that, they will strive to make themselfs usefull to the host nation. Now, lets pretend that you have 5 such atlantean exiles in a group of 100 politicians. The atlantean exiles would care primarily about condeming the atlantean government, and may be in a position to deliver political points in other areas to anyone who is asking. A normal "I dont care about Atlantis" politican will see a fairly simple cost benefit thing, I condemn Atlantis, something about which I do not care at all, and in return the exiles will back something I care about, like my health policy.

This is by no means a rapid development, but give it a couple of decades and the exchange of many such small favors will essentially result in a large group of politicians who will underwrite things like "Atlantis delenda est", mostly because they dont actually care about Atlantis.

This is not a specifically US thing at all. My understanding is that Russias WW1 decision to back Serbia was considerably influenced by a group of ethnically serbian/Montenegrin advisors (who, one has to say were otherwise loyal to Russia, and had fought with distinction in the Tsars wars, shedding their blood for Russia).

Babak Makkinejad -> A.I.S.... , 25 November 2019 at 10:56 AM
Affinity for Serbia has older antecedents. I think it was rooted in the common struggle against Muslim powers in earlier centuries.
divadab , 25 November 2019 at 06:12 AM
I don't know why this campaign against Russia was launched but at least part of it was domestic political pressure from Clinton Dems towards Trump Reps. What better way to deflect criticism about the foreign influences on the Clinton Dems (massive bribes from the usual suspects, either direct or via the Clinton Fdn.) but by accusing your opponent of being in the pay of foreign powers?

Hillary Clinton shrieking about "Russia Wikileaks" seems to me to be pure projection and also rationalising a cause for her defeat other than the incompetence and corruption of her campaign.

Also it seems to me that the Russian defeat of the regime change op in Syria (altho the situation seems rather fluid at the moment...) is another motivation where Israel's interests loom large.

It also seems to me to be stunningly stupid to have thrown away any potential alliance with Russia in favor of promoting Wahabist scum. And forcing Russia into the arms of the Chinese instead of recruiting them into the containment cordon.

Anyway, speaking as a denizen of Plato's cave, without direct knowledge of the reality of the thing it's mostly educated guesses on my part...

turcopolier , 25 November 2019 at 08:13 AM
J
A cabinet officer who thinks he can bargain with the president is too stupid to hold office. POTUS is not first among equals. This is not the UK.
Richard Ong , 25 November 2019 at 08:29 AM
A grandfather and great grandfather were in a Union regiment but that hardly is proof that I am a Union man. Unusual family demographics to be sure but even then those Ukrainians served in that SS unit over 70 years ago. I doubt they were even then motivated by National Socialist ideology. Hatred of Russians was likely the primary motivation, as now. The German invasion was an opportunity to settle scores.

I understand the hatred but not the application of "Nazi" to any Ukrainian thinking. If "Nazi" merely connotes "thuggish" then perhaps that explains the Azov formations but I suspect much more is at work. Additional inquiry is warranted.

And I still have no idea what "neoliberal" means.

JohninMK said in reply to Richard Ong... , 25 November 2019 at 10:09 AM
Many of those in the Ukrainian SS units ended up in Canada after WW2, resulting in the very pro Ukranian actions of the Canadian Government post 2014. Their FM, Christina Freeland, is a descendant.
prawnik said in reply to JohninMK... , 25 November 2019 at 10:53 AM
Folks like Freeland openly credit her SS grandfather for her ideology. When speaking in public, she does then to conveniently omit his services to the national Socialist state.
J -> Richard Ong... , 25 November 2019 at 10:40 AM
Try Stephan Bandera, he was as bad of a figure as what the Russians accused him of being. Bandera's legacy was that of a Nazi sympathizer and a real nut case too boot. He was one sick twisted individual.

After the fall of the Former Soviet Union in 1991, saw a resurgence of the OUN. These Russian hating individuals that composed the far-right Nazi resurgence in the Ukraine government, started terrifying the Russian enclaves in the Crimea, and those enclaves in turn called on their fellow Russian brothers in Russia for help, to which Putin and the Russian military came to their aid and the annexation of the Crimea by Russia took place so as to protect the Russian enclaves from further persecution by the Banderites. Bandera posters became more and more prevalent. The Euromaidan protests turned more and more violent, the wolfsangel that was formerly a symbol of the SS but was now taken up by the Azov Battalion and other militias, the old OUN war cry of "Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes" that was now ubiquitous among anti-Yanukovych protesters.

Here's some further reading regarding Stephan Bandera:


https://cup.columbia.edu/book/stepan-bandera-the-life-and-afterlife-of-a-ukrainian-nationalist/9783838206844


prawnik said in reply to Richard Ong... , 25 November 2019 at 10:52 AM
The Ukrainian Nazi formations and political factions openly call themselves Nazis. For that matter, everyone else called them Nazis too, at least before they became useful to the neocons. I'll spare everyone an explanation of Ukrainian diaspora culture, but I will say that, before WWII, the principal Ukrainian nationalist folk devil wasn't Russia. It was Poland and the Jews.
Fred , 25 November 2019 at 09:03 AM
That's a very interesting write up at Zerohedge. I believe we discussed the same conduct, though not the depth of corruption of US politicians, here while that was happening. The borg are starting to panic with the threat of a real investigation.
Diana C , 25 November 2019 at 09:45 AM
Thank you for the posting and thank all for the comments.

Some of us out here in The Middle can't really understand any of the behaviors of those good and not-so-good Swamp dwellers (any more than we can understand the behaviors of the La La Land Californian politicians.

I understand more about the issues involving our relationship with Ukraine by reading this post and comments than I ever would have been able to since I simply don't have time to get large books and many detailed published papers to read.

JohninMK , 25 November 2019 at 10:04 AM
Could the anti Russia bias be as simple as the need to protect the empires of people in State and Defence etc that would be no longer needed if Russia was a 'good' guy?

The US's 'independent' multi-national force NATO would clearly no longer be needed, so many years after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. Whilst the US 'occupation' forces all over the place, but especially in Europe, could return home to the US.

Then there is the MIC and the lobbying flows of money into Congress.Russia is far too important to too many insiders to be anything but an enemy.

Indeed, its boom time as China related structures are expanding in parallel rather than replacing those directed at Russia.

prawnik said in reply to JohninMK... , 25 November 2019 at 10:48 AM
As pointed out earlier - the military industrial complex needs a Big Enemy to justify its exorbitant budgets. The Deep State, the Borg, the Blob, whatever you want to call it, needs a Big Enemy to justify its spying and increasingly blatant interference in domestic US politics.

There are too many business ties with China, and our supply chains reach too deeply into that country, for it to serve as a Big Enemy without causing serious disruption.

So Russia it is.

ted richard , 25 November 2019 at 10:10 AM
the reasons for the agreed upon antipathy towards Russia is imo not the actual reason for the hostilities that have existed for at least the last 100 years and actually much longer.

the Russian nation is greatly under populated and owns a staggering per cent of the planets natural resources of every description. envy by those look from the outside towards russia is alone sufficient justification for wanting to grab it for themselves as has been unsuccessfully tried for centuries.

why complicate matters when simple greed answers so many of the questions asked about WHY the west hates russia.

prawnik , 25 November 2019 at 10:45 AM
The irony, of course, is that in Jewish folk memory, the most pig-headed (pun intended) and virulent anti-Semites were the peasants of Galicia (western Ukraine) and Poland.
Babak Makkinejad , 25 November 2019 at 10:59 AM
Col. Lang:

I also share your bafflement and not just with the political positions of the likes of Victoria Nuland. What do US & UK hope to gain? I can't see any benefits.

[Nov 24, 2019] Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class - YouTube

Highly recommended!
Jan 04, 2011 | www.youtube.com

riccardo estavans , 4 months ago

Colin Shaw , 5 months ago Think Mackay , 5 months ago

Bill Clinton destroyed the USA economy and middle class like no president has ever done. Bush II and Obama exacerbated the destruction by the hundred folds.

Orion's Ghost , 5 months ago

I believe Hedges statement that "the true correctives to society were social movements that never achieved formal political power" is perhaps one of the most important things for each of us to understand.

Fred Slocombe , 3 months ago (edited)
Ali Naderzad , 3 months ago (edited)

16:50 GENIUS. WELL DONE. So true.go Chris !!!

cubismo85 , 4 weeks ago

hauntingly accurate in every aspect, im speehless

Eris123451 , 3 days ago

I watched this with interest and curiosity and growing skepticism although he makes some killer points and cites some extremely disturbing facts; above all he accepts and uncritically so the American narrative of history.

Brian Valero , 4 months ago

The message from democrats is "hey we're not bigots". Most people (repubs+dems) aren't. If they keep calling on that for energy the Dems will forever continue to lose. If they don't come back to the working class they might as well just call themselves conservatives.

jimmyolsenblues , 4 months ago

he did/wrote this in 2011, he really understood then how things are in 2019.

Andy Russ , 3 years ago (edited)

Prescient 'post-mortem' of the 2016 election

2009starlite , 5 months ago (edited)

Those of us who seek the truth can't stop looking under every stone. The truth will set you free but you must share it with those who are ready to hear it and hide it from those who can hurt you for exposing it. MT

Aubrey De Bliquy , 2 days ago (edited)

"A Society that looses the capacity for the sacred cannibalizes itself until it dies because it exploits the natural world as well as human beings to the point of collapse."

Clark WARS News , 1 day ago

I learned something from watching this thank you powerful teacher love you ⭐

Rebel Scum , 5 months ago

I think he meant Washington State University which is in Pullman. The University of Washington is in Seattle. 16:43

phuturephunk , 6 years ago

Damn, he's grim...but he makes a whole lot of sense.

davekiernan1 , 2 weeks ago

Like Mr bon ribentrof said in monty Python. He's right you know...

Rich Keal , 5 months ago

Search YouTube for Dr. Antony Sutton the funding of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Act of 1871 as well. Take the Red Pill and go deeper.

kevin joseph , 5 days ago

loony republicans? did they open the borders, legalize late abortions and outright infanticide?

Michael Maya , 5 months ago

I've listened to this twice both twice it played on accident bcuz I had you tube on autoplay, it woke me up while I was sleeping but I'm glad it did.

Bryce Hallam , 1 week ago

Set the Playback Speed to: 1.25 . Great lecture.

Buddy Aces , 5 months ago

It makes sense and we can smell it! Those varmints must be shown no mercy.

VC YT , 5 months ago

To get in the mood, I watched this lecture from behind some Hedges. :-)

Orion's Ghost , 5 months ago

I believe Hedges statement that "the true correctives to society were social movements that never achieved formal political power" is perhaps one of the most important things for each of us to understand.

Fred Slocombe , 3 months ago (edited)

15:05 The subjugation of Education 21:15 Theatrical Manipulation of Expectations 24:08 U.S. Debt and Borrowing

Ali Naderzad , 3 months ago (edited)

16:50 GENIUS. WELL DONE. So true.go Chris !!!

cubismo85 , 4 weeks ago

hauntingly accurate in every aspect, im speehless

Eris123451 , 3 days ago

I watched this with interest and curiosity and growing skepticism although he makes some killer points and cites some extremely disturbing facts; above all he accepts and uncritically so the American narrative of history. The Progressive movement, for example, (written into American history as being far more important that it ever really was,) unlike Socialism or Communism was primarily just a literary and a trendy intellectually movement that attempted, (unconvincingly,) to persuade poor, exploited and abused Americans that non of those other political movements, (reactive and grass-roots,) were needed here and that capitalism could and might of itself, cure itself; it conceded little, promised much and unlike either Communism or Socialism delivered fuck all. Personally I remain unconvinced also by, "climate science," (which he takes as given,) and which seems to to me to depend far too much on faith and self important repeatedly insisting that it's true backed by lurid and hysterical propaganda and not nearly enough on rational scientific argument, personally I can't make head nor tail of the science behind it ? (it may well be true, or not; I can't tell.) But above all and stripped of it his pretensions his argument is just typical theist, (of any flavor you like,) end of times claptrap all the other systems have failed, (China for example somewhat gives the lie to death of Communism by the way and so on,) the end is neigh and all that is left to do is for people to turn to character out of first century fairly story. I wish him luck with that.

penny kannon , 5 months ago

CHRIS HEDGES YOUR BOOK MUST BE HIGH SCHOOL STUDY!!! wtkjr.!!!

Brian Valero , 4 months ago

The message from democrats is "hey we're not bigots". Most people (repubs+dems) aren't. If they keep calling on that for energy the Dems will forever continue to lose. If they don't come back to the working class they might as well just call themselves conservatives.

jimmyolsenblues , 4 months ago

he did/wrote this in 2011, he really understood then how things are in 2019.

Andy Russ , 3 years ago (edited)

Prescient 'post-mortem' of the 2016 election

Jean Lloyd Bradberry , 5 months ago

Shared! Excellent presentation!

Mike van Wijngaarden , 4 months ago

What if, to fail is the objective? That would mean they planned everything that's happened and will happen.

Michael Hutz , 1 month ago (edited)

Loved Chris in this one. First time I've heard him talking naturally instead of reading verbatim from a text which makes him sound preachy.

Bill Mccloy , 4 months ago (edited)

Chris is our canary in a coal mine! Truly a national treasure and a champion for humanity. And he's more Christian than he thinks he is.

Herr Pooper , 4 months ago

I have always loved Chris Hedges, but ever since becoming fully awake it pains me to see how he will take gigantic detours of imagination to never mention Israel, AIPAC or Zionism, and their complete takeover of the US. What a shame.

ISIS McCain , 4 months ago

Hey Chris, please look up Dr. Wolfe and have a big debate with him!!! I believe you guys would mostly hit it off, but please look him up!

UtopiaMinor666 , 8 years ago

The reality of this is enough to make you want to cry.

Terri Pebsworth , 3 months ago

Excellent! And truer today (2019) than even in 2010.

Russell Olausen , 4 months ago

Notes From the Underground,my favourite book.

John Doe , 3 weeks ago

Gosh I thought it was being broadcasted today. Then I heard it and it was really for today.

George C. May , 2 months ago

Not once did I hear the word corruption which in this speech sums up the bureaucratic control of the country !

L N , 5 months ago

I think Chris Has saved my life! ✊🏼✌️ 👍🏼🌅

Laureano Luna , 4 months ago

43:53 Cicero did not even live the imperial period of Rome...

andrew domenitz , 4 months ago

The continued growth of unproductive debt against the low or nonexistent growth of GDP is the recipe for collapse, for the whole world economic system.

Thomas Simmons , 5 months ago

I agree with Chris about the tragedy of the Liberal Church. Making good through identity politics however, is every bit as heretical and tragic as Evangelical Republican corrupted church think, in my humble, Christian opinion.

Alexandros Aiakides , 2 weeks ago (edited)

The death of the present western hemisphere governments and "democratic" institutions must die right now for humanity to be saved from the zombies that rule it. 'Cannibalization" of oikonomia was my idea, as well as of William Engdahl. l am glad hearing Hedges to adopt the expression of truth. ( November 2019. from Phthia , Hellas ).

Heathcliff Earnshaw , 4 months ago div cl

ass="comment-renderer-text-content expanded"> Gosh , especially that last conclusion ,was terrific so I want to paste the whole of that Auden poem here:- September 1, 1939 W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

... ... ...

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

[Nov 24, 2019] Mark Blyth - Why People Vote for Those Who Work Against Their Best Interests

Nov 24, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Duration: 1:12:11.

Washington Watch

[Nov 24, 2019] Elizabeth Warren Endorses Trump s Economic War on Venezuela, Soft-Pedals Far-Right Bolivia Coup by Ben Norton

Notable quotes:
"... Doesn't Warren claim to have indigenous ancestors herself and was proud of it? She caused Trump to call her "Pocahontas"? She agrees to support the unelected interim president Jeannine Añez, who refers to indigenous inhabitants as satanic? Warren is a very horrible person, inhumane, amoral, and rather stupid overall, who wants to get rich. ..."
"... I personally think that capitalism with "human face" and robust public sector is the way to go. But imperialist imposition and aggression is not the part of "human face" that I imagine. ..."
"... I'm sorry but you all need to come to terms with the farce that is the American political system. Anyone who was supporting Warren or even considering voting for her for ANY reason is apparently either in denial or is being duped. Warren is a Madison Avenue creation packaged for US liberal consumption. ..."
"... She hangs out with Hillary Clinton and Madeline Albright, two evil women if ever there were. Now they make the three witches brewing one coup/regime change after another. She's not smart enough to see that HRC and MA are leading her around by her nose. People should call out this phoney everywhere she goes. BTW, Rachel Maddow completes an odious clique. ..."
"... This is a bit of exaggeration. The three ladies are more like good students, they did not write the textbook but they good grades for answering as written, or like cheerleaders, they jump and shout but they do not play in the field. Mind you, "interagency consensus" was formed without them. ..."
"... The DNC's strategy for this election is to ensure that Bernie doesn't go into the Convention with enough delegates to win the first ballot. (Once voting goes past the first ballot, super-delegates get to weigh in and help anoint a candidate who's friendly to the Party's plutocratic-oligarch principals.) ..."
"... That's the reason the DNC is allowing and encouraging so many candidates to run. Warren's specific assignment is to cannibalize Bernie's base and steal delegates that would otherwise be his, by pretending to espouse most of his platform with only minor tweaks. She's been successful with "better educated," higher-income liberal Democrats who consider themselves well informed because they get their news from "respectable" sources -- sources that, unbeknownst to their target audiences, invariably represent the viewpoint of the aforementioned plutocratic oligarchs. ..."
"... if Warren becomes the nominee, I will support her over Trump. It's a lesser of two evils choice, but we must recognize that no candidate will be perfect–ever. ..."
"... Zionism is typically the gateway drug for Democratic would-be reformers. Once they've swallowed that fundamental poison, the DNC feels secure it's just a matter of time before they Get With the Program 100%. Given that "Harvard" and "phony" are largely synonymous, what else could've been expected? ..."
Nov 24, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

59 Comments

The Democratic contender parroted neocon regime-change myths in an interview on "Pod Save America," writes Ben Norton.

The Grayzone

... ... ...

Reiterates Her Neoconservative Policies Against Venezuela

Elizabeth Warren repeated her support for regime change in Venezuela in an interview in September with the Council on Foreign Relations , a central gear in the machinery of the military-industrial complex. "Maduro is a dictator and a crook who has wrecked his country's economy, dismantled its democratic institutions, and profited while his people suffer," Warren declared. She referred to Maduro's elected government as a "regime" and called for "supporting regional efforts to negotiate a political transition." Echoing the rhetoric of neoconservatives in Washington, Warren called for "contain[ing]" the supposedly "damaging and destabilizing actions" of China, Russia, and Cuba. The only point where Warren diverged with Trump was on her insistence that "there is no U.S. military option in Venezuela."

Soft-Pedals Far-Right Coup in Bolivia

While Warren endorsed Trump's hybrid war on Venezuela, she more recently whitewashed the U.S.-backed coup in Bolivia.

On Nov. 10, the U.S. government backed a far-right military coup against Bolivia's democratically elected President Evo Morales , a leftist from the popular Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party and the first Indigenous head of state in a country where nearly two-thirds of the population is Native.

Warren refused to comment on the putsch for more than a week, even as the far-right military junta massacred dozens of protesters and systematically purged and detained elected left-wing politicians from MAS.

Finally, eight days after the coup, Warren broke her silence. In a short tweet, the putative progressive presidential candidate tepidly requested "free and fair elections" and calling on the "interim leadership" to prepare an "early, legitimate election." What Warren did not mention is that this "interim leadership" she helped legitimize is headed by an extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalist, the unelected "interim president" Jeanine Añez. Añez has referred to Bolivia's majority-Indigenous population as "satanic" and immediately moved to try to overturn the country's progressive constitution, which had established an inclusive, secular, plurinational state after receiving an overwhelming democratic mandate in a 2009 referendum.

Añez's ally in this coup regime's interim leadership is Luis Fernando Camacho , a multi-millionaire who emerged out of neo-fascist groups and courted support from the United States and the far-right governments of Brazil and Colombia. By granting legitimacy to Bolilvia's ultra-conservative, unelected leadership, Warren rubber-stamped the far-right coup and the military junta's attempt to stamp out Bolivia's progressive democracy. In other words, as The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal put it, Liz's Big Structural Bailey compliantly rolled over for Big IMF Structural Adjustment Program .

Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone , and the producer of the " Moderate Rebels " podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com , and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton .

This article is from The Grayzone .

Skip Scott , November 23, 2019 at 07:57

H Beazley-

A vote for evil is never a good choice, and choosing a candidate you perceive as a lesser evil still condones evil. Allowing the Oligarchy to limit your choice gives them the power to continue advancing evil policies. They control both major parties. You may succeed in getting non-gender specific restrooms in your Starbucks, but the murdering war machine will continue unabated.

JoAnn , November 23, 2019 at 01:41

Now, we are seeing the true colors of candidates, who have professed to be progressive. Sanders went on a "tirade" against Maduro during the last "debate" I saw. Tulsi Gabbard has stayed against US Imperialism, but, I'm sure the Democratic policy controllers will never nominate her. I foresee I'll be voting for the Socialist next year.

Raymond M. , November 22, 2019 at 18:09

""""On Nov. 10, the U.S. government backed a far-right military coup against Bolivia's democratically elected President Evo Morales bla blla bla".

And the 3 right wing candidates spent more time slinging mud at at each other than at Morales. Had the CIAs top front man Ortez stepped aside, the vote would not have split and allowed Morales to claim a first round victory and avoid a run-off that he would have lost. And the right wing Christian fundamentalist for sure was a CIA plant who manged to split the vote further.

Under the Trump administration, the CIA can even run a coup right.

Piotr Berman , November 22, 2019 at 15:25

If only those anti-Western rulers seen the light and joined RBWO (rule* based world order, * rules decided in DC, preferably by bipartisan consensus), then the economy would run smoothly and the population would be happy. Every week gives another example:

By The Associated Press, Nov. 21, 2019, BOGOTA, Colombia

Colombians angry with President Iván Duque and hoping to channel Latin America's wave of discontent took the streets by the tens of thousands on Thursday in one of the biggest protests in the nation's recent history. [ ] Police estimated 207,000 people took part. [ ] government deployed 170,000 officers, closed border crossings and deported 24 Venezuelans accused of entering the country to instigate unrest.

So if only Iván did not start unnecessary conflict with Maduro, these 24 scoundrels would stay home and the trouble would be avoided. Oh wait, I got confused

CitizenOne , November 21, 2019 at 22:10

You must imagine that when candidtes suddenly become mind control puppets what is going on. The scariest thing in American Politics is how supposedly independent and liberal progressives somehow swallow the red pill and are transported into the world of make believe. Once inside the bubble of fiction far removed from human suffering which is after all what politicians are supposed to be about fixing they can say crazy things. Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump are the only souls to retain their independent (yet opposite) minds and both of them got the boot for being different.

Hide Behind , November 21, 2019 at 20:44

The puppet masters are experts, on the one hand there is A Republican, and on the other is a Democrat, but even they mess up now and then get the different strings tangled. Some come back on stage on the different hand so to save time they give a puppet two faces.

Watching same puppets gets old so every so often 2-4-6 they restring an old one that was used as props in past, change their makeup a bit to give them new faces. We do not actually elect the puppet, we instead legitimize the Puppeteers who own' s the only stage in town.

Those who choreograph the movements and change the backgrouds, media outlets and permanent bureaucrats know the plays before they are introduced, and they know best how to get adults to leave reality behind and bring back their childhood fantacies. Days of sugar plums, candy canes, socks filled with goodies and not coal, tooth fairys, and kind generous Fairy God Mothers.

Toy Nutcracker soldiers that turn into Angelic heros, Yellow brick roads, Bunnies with pocket watches, and and magic shoes of red, or of glass in hand of handsome Princes and beautiful Princesses, all available if we vote. So who votes, only those who control the voting puppets know that reality does not exist, they twitch we react, and at end of voting counts one of hand's puppets will slump and cry, while others will leap and dance in joy, only for all to end up in one pile until the puppeteers need them for next act.

Frederike , November 21, 2019 at 17:30

"What Warren did not mention is that this "interim leadership" she helped legitimize is headed by an extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalist, the unelected "interim president" Jeanine Añez.

Añez has referred to Bolivia's majority-Indigenous population as "satanic" and immediately moved to try to overturn the country's progressive constitution, which had established an inclusive, secular, plurinational state after receiving an overwhelming democratic mandate in a 2009 referendum."

Doesn't Warren claim to have indigenous ancestors herself and was proud of it? She caused Trump to call her "Pocahontas"? She agrees to support the unelected interim president Jeannine Añez, who refers to indigenous inhabitants as satanic? Warren is a very horrible person, inhumane, amoral, and rather stupid overall, who wants to get rich. Everything she agreed to in the interview listed above is pathetic. I had no idea that she is such a worthless individual.

arggo , November 22, 2019 at 19:57

"neocon" explains this. She seems to have the support of very foundational structures that enabled Hillary Clinton Democrats to attack and destroy Bernie Sanders in 2016.

Cara , November 21, 2019 at 15:40

Warren has not lost my vote for the simple reason she never had it in the first place. None of this, sickening as it is, comes as any surprise. Warren is an unapologetic capitalist. She's like Robert Reich in that regard. They both believe capitalism–if reformed, tweaked a bit here and there–can work. To give her credit, she's always been very honest about that. And of course our doctrine of regime change is all in the service of capitalism. Unless I'm simply confused and mistaken.

Sherwood Forrest , November 22, 2019 at 09:38

Yes, Capitalist First! That makes it so difficult for any aware person to believe she sincerely supports a wealth tax, Universal Healthcare, Green New Deal, College loan forgiveness, family leave or anything else the 1% oppose. Because promising like Santa is part of Capitalist politics, and then saying," Nah, we can't afford it."

Piotr Berman , November 22, 2019 at 16:08

I personally think that capitalism with "human face" and robust public sector is the way to go. But imperialist imposition and aggression is not the part of "human face" that I imagine.

So Warren's imperialist positions are evil and unnecessary to preserve capitalism, how that projects at her as a person it is hard to tell. A Polish poet has those words spoken by a character in his drama "On that, I know only what I heard, but I am afraid to investigate because it poisons my mind about " (Znam to tylko z opowiada?, ale strzeg? si? tych bada?, bo mi truj? my?l o ) As typical of hearsay, her concept of events in Venezuela, Bolivia etc. is quite garbled, she has no time (but perhaps some fear) to investigate herself (easy in the era of internet). A serious politician has to think a lot about electability (and less about the folks under the steam roller of the Empire), so she has to "pick her fights".

It is rather clear that American do not care if people south of the border are governed democratically or competently, which led Hillary Clinton to make this emphatic statement in a debate with Trump "You will not see me singing praises of dictators or strongmen who do not love America". One can deconstruct it "if you do not love America you are a strongman or worse, but if you love America, we will be nice to you". I would love to have the original and deconstructed statement polled, but Warren is not the only one afraid of such investigations. So "electability" connection to green light to Bolivian fascist and red light to Bolivarians of Venezuela is a bit indirect. Part of it is funding, part, bad press.

brett , November 21, 2019 at 15:15

I'm sorry but you all need to come to terms with the farce that is the American political system. Anyone who was supporting Warren or even considering voting for her for ANY reason is apparently either in denial or is being duped. Warren is a Madison Avenue creation packaged for US liberal consumption.

She is a fraud and a liar. One trained in psychology can see, in her every movement and utterance, the operation that is going on behind the facade. Everything Warren says is a lie to someone. She only states truth in order to later dis-inform. Classic deception. She (her billionaires) has latched on to the populism of the DSA etc. in order to sabotage any progressive momentum and drive a stake in it.

Rob Roy , November 22, 2019 at 00:40

She hangs out with Hillary Clinton and Madeline Albright, two evil women if ever there were. Now they make the three witches brewing one coup/regime change after another. She's not smart enough to see that HRC and MA are leading her around by her nose. People should call out this phoney everywhere she goes. BTW, Rachel Maddow completes an odious clique.

Piotr Berman , November 22, 2019 at 16:13

This is a bit of exaggeration. The three ladies are more like good students, they did not write the textbook but they good grades for answering as written, or like cheerleaders, they jump and shout but they do not play in the field. Mind you, "interagency consensus" was formed without them.

Peter in Seattle , November 21, 2019 at 14:53

The DNC's strategy for this election is to ensure that Bernie doesn't go into the Convention with enough delegates to win the first ballot. (Once voting goes past the first ballot, super-delegates get to weigh in and help anoint a candidate who's friendly to the Party's plutocratic-oligarch principals.)

That's the reason the DNC is allowing and encouraging so many candidates to run. Warren's specific assignment is to cannibalize Bernie's base and steal delegates that would otherwise be his, by pretending to espouse most of his platform with only minor tweaks. She's been successful with "better educated," higher-income liberal Democrats who consider themselves well informed because they get their news from "respectable" sources -- sources that, unbeknownst to their target audiences, invariably represent the viewpoint of the aforementioned plutocratic oligarchs.

Absolutely nothing in Warren's background supports her new calculatedly progressive primary persona. She was a Reagan Republican. When the Republican Party moved right to become the party of batshit crazy and the Democratic Party shifted right to become the party of Reagan Republicans, she became a Democrat. She's not a good actress, and it takes willing suspension of disbelief to buy into her performance as a savvier, wonkier alternative to Bernie. And when she's pressed for details (Medicare for All) and responses to crises (Venezuela and Bolivia), the cracks in her progressive façade become patently obvious. She's a sleeper agent for Democratic-leaning plutocrats, like Obama was in 2008, and she would never get my vote.

PS: Impressed by Warren's progressive wealth-tax plan? Don't be. Our country's billionaires know she won't fight for it, and that if she did, Congress would never pass it. (They know who owns Congress.) Besides, do you really think Pocahontas would beat Trump? Do you think Sleepy Joe would? The billionaires wouldn't bet on it. And they're fine with that. Sure, they'd like someone who's more thoroughly corporatist on trade and more committed to hot régime-change wars than Trump is, but they can live just fine with low-tax, low-regulation Trump. It's the prospect of a Bernie presidency that keeps them up at night and their proxies in the Democratic Party and allied media are doing everything they can to neutralize that threat.

mbob , November 21, 2019 at 18:13

@Peter

Thanks for this beautiful post. I agree with it 100%. I've been trying to figure out why Democrats are so consistently unable to see through rhetoric and fall for what candidates pretend to be. Part of it is wishful thinking. A lot of it is, as you wrote, misplaced trust in "respectable" sources. I have no idea how to fix that: how does one engender the proper skepticism of the MSM? I haven't been able to open the eyes of any of my friends. (Fortunately my wife and daughter opened their own eyes.)

Warren is, if you look clearly, driven by her enormous ambition. She's the same as every other candidate in that regard, save Bernie.

Bernie is driven by the same outrage that we feel. We need him.

Dan Kuhn , November 21, 2019 at 14:31

In the last Israeli massacre on Gaza she was all for the IDF killing Palistinians. Americans like to look at the CCP and cry about China being a one party state. Well is the US not a one party state?= Are the views of the Democrats and Republicans not the same when it comes to slaughtering people in the third world? There is not a razor`s edge between them. Biden, Warren, Sanders, Trump, Cruz and Pense they are all war criminals, or if elected will soon become war criminals.

From someone who at the beginning showed promise and humanity, she has turned into Albright and Clinton. How f**king sad is that?

Dan Kuhn , November 21, 2019 at 14:33

Better to see her for what she really is now then after the election if she were to win. She is disgusting in her inhumanity.

Rob , November 21, 2019 at 13:43

This Is, indeed, disturbing and disappointing. Warren seems so genuinely right on domestic economic and social issues, so how could she be so wrong on foreign policy issues? The same principles apply in both–justice, fairness, equity, etc. That said, she is no worse than any of the other Democratic candidates in that regard, with the exceptions of Sanders and Gabbard, so if Warren becomes the nominee, I will support her over Trump. It's a lesser of two evils choice, but we must recognize that no candidate will be perfect–ever.

Dan Kuhn , November 21, 2019 at 14:36

Far better to stick to your principles and write in " None of the above." believe me with this article we can easily see that Trump is no worse nor better than Warren is. They are both pretty poor excuses as human beings.

Peter in Seattle , November 21, 2019 at 16:04

@Rob:

If you'll allow me to fix that for you, "What Warren tactically claims to support, in the primaries, seems so genuinely right on domestic economic and social issues ." I'm convinced Warren is an Obama 2.0 in the making. I don't think anyone can match Obama's near-180° turnabout from his 2008 primary platform and that if Warren is elected, she will try to make Wall Street a little more honest and stable, maybe advocate for a $12 minimum wage, and maybe try to shave a few thousand dollars off student-loan debts. I suppose that technically qualifies as less evil than Trump. But I fully expect her to jettison 90% of her primary platform, including a progressive tax on wealth and Medicare for All. And when you factor in her recently confirmed approval of US military and financial imperialism -- economic subversion and régime-change operations that cost tens of thousands of innocent foreign lives, and other peoples their sovereignty -- at what point does "less evil" become too evil to vote for?

John Drake , November 21, 2019 at 13:13

" presidential candidate tepidly requested "free and fair elections". Such a statement ignores the fact that Evo Morales term was not up; therefore elections are not called for. This means she supports the coup. Restoration of his position which was illegally and violently stolen from him are in order not elections until his term is up.
Her position on Venezuela is nauseating; as the article states classic neo-conservative. Maybe Robert Kagan will welcome her into their club as he did with Hillary.
Warren used to be a Republican, she has not been cured of that disease; and is showing her true colors. Maybe it's best as she is differentiating herself from Bernie. I was concerned before she started down this latest path that she would do an Obama; progressive rhetoric followed by neo-liberal-or worse- behavior once in office. Maybe she is more honest than Obama.

Guy , November 21, 2019 at 12:40

Warren can't be very informed about what democracy actually means .Democracy is not the same as capitalism . Not a US citizen but am very disappointed with her stated platform . Short of divine intervention Tulsi will never make it but Sanders for president and Tulsi as VP would do just fine to re-direct the US foreign policy and maybe ,just maybe make the US more respectable among the rest of the nations of the world.

Piotr Berman , November 22, 2019 at 16:17

It would make a lot of sense from actuarial point of view. The chances that at least one person on the ticket would live healthily for 8 years would be very good, without Tulsi

Punkyboy , November 21, 2019 at 12:02

I was pretty sure Warren was a Hillary clone; now I'm absolutely sure of it. Another election between worse and worser. I may just stay home this time, if the world holds together that long.

Socratic Truth , November 21, 2019 at 11:42

Warren is just another puppet of the NWO.

Ma Laoshi , November 21, 2019 at 11:12

I remember years and years ago, I guess about when Lizzie first entered Congress, that she went on the standard pandering tour to the Motherland and an astute mind commented: Zionism is typically the gateway drug for Democratic would-be reformers. Once they've swallowed that fundamental poison, the DNC feels secure it's just a matter of time before they Get With the Program 100%. Given that "Harvard" and "phony" are largely synonymous, what else could've been expected?

Peter in Seattle , November 21, 2019 at 15:32

@Ma Laoshi:

Speaking of Harvard, having contemplated the abysmal track record compiled by our "best and brightest" -- in Congress, in the White House, and on the federal bench -- I am now almost as suspicious of the Ivy League as I am of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security (WHINSEC, formerly known as the School of the Americas). The mission of both is to train capable, reliable, well-compensated servants to the US plutocracy. (And the only reason I say "almost" is because a non-negligible number of black sheep have come out of the Ivy League and I'm not aware of any that have come out of WHINSEC.)

Sam F , November 23, 2019 at 18:59

Harvard admissions are apparently largely bought, and doubtless those of Yale and others. MIT was strictly militarist warmongers in the 1970s, and one compete with 80% cheaters.

Dfnslblty , November 21, 2019 at 11:12

" The only point where Warren diverged with Trump was on her insistence that "there is no U.S. military option in Venezuela." " Hell, one doesn't need a military option after immoral, illegal and crippling sanctions. This essay is the most disturbing piece all year-2019.

Vote anti-military – vote nonviolence. Don't give these murderers anything but exposure to humane sensibilities.

Freedomlover , November 21, 2019 at 17:43

I didn't think Trump supported a military solution in Venezuela. That was John Bolton's baby and Trump fired him as one would hope he would soon fire Pompeo as has been hinted at. Trump campaigned on ending wars of choice but has given in to the MIC at almost every turn. Maybe he will resign in leiu of being impeached. We might then see a Rand Paul vs. Bernie Sanders. I could live with either one

Skip Scott , November 21, 2019 at 09:12

Once again the Democratic Party is pushing to have our choice for 2020 be between corporate sponsored war monger from column A or B.

I wish Tulsi would "see the light" and run as an Independent in 2020. There is absolutely no way that she gets the nod from the utterly corrupt DNC. She is abandoning her largest base (Independents) by sticking with the Democratic Party. Considering the number of disgruntled non-voters, she could easily win the general election; but she will never win the Democratic primary. The field is purposely flooded to ensure the "superdelegates" get the final say on a second ballot.

AnneR , November 21, 2019 at 08:50

Warren is as inhumane, amoral and imperialist as anyone in the WH and the US Congress, and she is certainly kindred in spirit, thought and would be in deed, as Madeline Albright, the cheerful slaughterer of some 500,000 Iraqi children because the "price was worth it." Of course, these utterly racist, amoral people do not have to pay "that price" nor do any of their families. (And let us not forget that Albright and Killary are good friends – Warren is totally kindred with the pair, totally.)

And clearly Warren – like all of the Demrat contenders – is full on for any kind of warfare that will bring a "recalcitrant" country into line with US demands (on its resources, lands etc.). She is grotesque.

She and those of her ilk – all in Congress, pretty much, and their financial backers – refuse to accept that Maduro and Morales *both* were legally, legitimately and cleanly re-elected to their positions as presidents of their respective countries. But to do that would be to go against her (commonly held) fundamental belief that the US has the right to decide who is and is not the legitimate national leader of any given country. And what policies they institute.

Anyone who supports economic sanctions is supporting siege warfare, is happily supporting the starvation and deprivation of potentially millions of people. And shrugging off the blame for the effects of the sanctions onto the government of the sanctioned country is heinous, is immoral and unethical. WE are the ones who are killing, not the government under extreme pressure. If you can't, won't accept the responsibility – as Warren and the rest of the US government clearly will not – for those deaths you are causing, then stay out of the bloody kitchen: stop committing these crimes against humanity.

Cara , November 21, 2019 at 15:25

Please provide documentation that Sanders is, as you claim, a "full-on zionist supporter of "Israel" and clearly anti-Palestinian." Sanders has been quite consistent in his criticism of Israel and the treatment of Palestinians: timesofisrael.com/bernie-sanders-posts-video-citing-apartheid-like-conditions-for-palestinians; and; jacobinmag.com/2019/07/bernie-sanders-israel-palestine-bds

Piotr Berman , November 21, 2019 at 16:46

"Sanders is less so, but not wholly because he is a full-on zionist supporter of "Israel" and clearly anti-Palestinian"

Sanders is definitely not "full-on zionist supporter", not only he does not deny that "Palestinians exist" (to died-in-the-wool Zionists, Palestinians are a malicious fiction created to smear Israel etc., google "Fakestinians"), but he claims that they have rights, and using Hamas as a pretext for Gaza blockade is inhumane (a recent headline). One can pull his other positions and statements to argue in the other direction, but in my opinion, he is at the extreme humane end of "zionist spectrum" (I mean, so humane that almost not a Zionist).

[Nov 24, 2019] Elizabeth Warren Soft-Pedals Far-Right Bolivia Coup

Nov 24, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Drew Hunkins , November 21, 2019 at 15:32

Hopefully Kamala Harris never sniffs the White House, we'd all die in a nuclear war. Her pathetic and stupid swipes at the courageous and brilliant Tulsi Gabbard last night in the debates were something to cringe at.

[Nov 24, 2019] It Was A Coup. Period -- Tulsi Gabbard Slams US Interference In Bolivia

Nov 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

"It Was A Coup. Period": Tulsi Gabbard Slams US 'Interference' In Bolivia

Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has come out swinging on Bolivia, following an initial period of being silent and reflection on the issue after leftist President Evo Morales was forced to step down on November 10 over growing anger at election irregularities, whereupon he was given political asylum in Mexico.

"What happened in Bolivia is a coup. Period," Gabbard wrote on Twitter in the early hours of Friday while warning against any US interference.

"The United States and other countries should not be interfering in the Bolivian people's pursuit of self-determination and right to choose their own government, " she argued.

Washington had been quick to endorse and recognize opposition senator Jeanine Anez as 'interim president' after she controversially declared herself such without a senatorial quorum or public vote, and as Morales' Movement for Socialism was said to be barred from the senate building when it happened.

Gabbard's statement, which again sets her far apart from a large field of establishment and centrist candidates on foreign policy issues , comes a few days after Bernie Sanders was the first to condemn the events which led to Evo's ouster as a military coup.

"When the military intervened and asked President Evo Morales to leave, in my view, that's called a coup," Sanders tweeted Monday, while linking to a video showing Bolivian security forces dispersing an indigenous pro-Morales protest using a volley of tear gas canisters.

Meanwhile, in a new interview with Russian media this week, Evo Morales said the right-leaning Organization of American States (OAS), which had initially cited "clear manipulations" in the voting surrounding his controversial re-election to a fourth term, played a prime role in deposing him, and that ultimately Bolivia's huge reserves of lithium were being eyed by the United States and its right-wing Latin American allies .

"The OAS made a decision and its report is not based on a technical report, but on a political decision," Evo told RT in the interview from Mexico.

Addressing his country's most valued natural resource, he said, "In Bolivia we could define the price of lithium for the world...Now I have realized that some industrialized countries do not want competition" -- while implying Washington had helped engineer his downfall.

Most estimates put the impoverished country's Lithium supply at about 60% of the world's known reserves .

The White House in the days after Evo's ouster had called it a "significant moment for democracy in the Western Hemisphere"; however, the now exiled former president described it as "the sneakiest, most nefarious coup in history."

* * *

Watch key moments of the translated RT interview below:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZY1fIwFkSvQ

[Nov 24, 2019] Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class - YouTube

Highly recommended!
Jan 04, 2011 | www.youtube.com

riccardo estavans , 4 months ago

Colin Shaw , 5 months ago Think Mackay , 5 months ago

Bill Clinton destroyed the USA economy and middle class like no president has ever done. Bush II and Obama exacerbated the destruction by the hundred folds.

Orion's Ghost , 5 months ago

I believe Hedges statement that "the true correctives to society were social movements that never achieved formal political power" is perhaps one of the most important things for each of us to understand.

Fred Slocombe , 3 months ago (edited)
Ali Naderzad , 3 months ago (edited)

16:50 GENIUS. WELL DONE. So true.go Chris !!!

cubismo85 , 4 weeks ago

hauntingly accurate in every aspect, im speehless

Eris123451 , 3 days ago

I watched this with interest and curiosity and growing skepticism although he makes some killer points and cites some extremely disturbing facts; above all he accepts and uncritically so the American narrative of history.

Brian Valero , 4 months ago

The message from democrats is "hey we're not bigots". Most people (repubs+dems) aren't. If they keep calling on that for energy the Dems will forever continue to lose. If they don't come back to the working class they might as well just call themselves conservatives.

jimmyolsenblues , 4 months ago

he did/wrote this in 2011, he really understood then how things are in 2019.

Andy Russ , 3 years ago (edited)

Prescient 'post-mortem' of the 2016 election

2009starlite , 5 months ago (edited)

Those of us who seek the truth can't stop looking under every stone. The truth will set you free but you must share it with those who are ready to hear it and hide it from those who can hurt you for exposing it. MT

Aubrey De Bliquy , 2 days ago (edited)

"A Society that looses the capacity for the sacred cannibalizes itself until it dies because it exploits the natural world as well as human beings to the point of collapse."

Clark WARS News , 1 day ago

I learned something from watching this thank you powerful teacher love you ⭐

Rebel Scum , 5 months ago

I think he meant Washington State University which is in Pullman. The University of Washington is in Seattle. 16:43

phuturephunk , 6 years ago

Damn, he's grim...but he makes a whole lot of sense.

davekiernan1 , 2 weeks ago

Like Mr bon ribentrof said in monty Python. He's right you know...

Rich Keal , 5 months ago

Search YouTube for Dr. Antony Sutton the funding of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Act of 1871 as well. Take the Red Pill and go deeper.

kevin joseph , 5 days ago

loony republicans? did they open the borders, legalize late abortions and outright infanticide?

Michael Maya , 5 months ago

I've listened to this twice both twice it played on accident bcuz I had you tube on autoplay, it woke me up while I was sleeping but I'm glad it did.

Bryce Hallam , 1 week ago

Set the Playback Speed to: 1.25 . Great lecture.

Buddy Aces , 5 months ago

It makes sense and we can smell it! Those varmints must be shown no mercy.

VC YT , 5 months ago

To get in the mood, I watched this lecture from behind some Hedges. :-)

Orion's Ghost , 5 months ago

I believe Hedges statement that "the true correctives to society were social movements that never achieved formal political power" is perhaps one of the most important things for each of us to understand.

Fred Slocombe , 3 months ago (edited)

15:05 The subjugation of Education 21:15 Theatrical Manipulation of Expectations 24:08 U.S. Debt and Borrowing

Ali Naderzad , 3 months ago (edited)

16:50 GENIUS. WELL DONE. So true.go Chris !!!

cubismo85 , 4 weeks ago

hauntingly accurate in every aspect, im speehless

Eris123451 , 3 days ago

I watched this with interest and curiosity and growing skepticism although he makes some killer points and cites some extremely disturbing facts; above all he accepts and uncritically so the American narrative of history. The Progressive movement, for example, (written into American history as being far more important that it ever really was,) unlike Socialism or Communism was primarily just a literary and a trendy intellectually movement that attempted, (unconvincingly,) to persuade poor, exploited and abused Americans that non of those other political movements, (reactive and grass-roots,) were needed here and that capitalism could and might of itself, cure itself; it conceded little, promised much and unlike either Communism or Socialism delivered fuck all. Personally I remain unconvinced also by, "climate science," (which he takes as given,) and which seems to to me to depend far too much on faith and self important repeatedly insisting that it's true backed by lurid and hysterical propaganda and not nearly enough on rational scientific argument, personally I can't make head nor tail of the science behind it ? (it may well be true, or not; I can't tell.) But above all and stripped of it his pretensions his argument is just typical theist, (of any flavor you like,) end of times claptrap all the other systems have failed, (China for example somewhat gives the lie to death of Communism by the way and so on,) the end is neigh and all that is left to do is for people to turn to character out of first century fairly story. I wish him luck with that.

penny kannon , 5 months ago

CHRIS HEDGES YOUR BOOK MUST BE HIGH SCHOOL STUDY!!! wtkjr.!!!

Brian Valero , 4 months ago

The message from democrats is "hey we're not bigots". Most people (repubs+dems) aren't. If they keep calling on that for energy the Dems will forever continue to lose. If they don't come back to the working class they might as well just call themselves conservatives.

jimmyolsenblues , 4 months ago

he did/wrote this in 2011, he really understood then how things are in 2019.

Andy Russ , 3 years ago (edited)

Prescient 'post-mortem' of the 2016 election

Jean Lloyd Bradberry , 5 months ago

Shared! Excellent presentation!

Mike van Wijngaarden , 4 months ago

What if, to fail is the objective? That would mean they planned everything that's happened and will happen.

Michael Hutz , 1 month ago (edited)

Loved Chris in this one. First time I've heard him talking naturally instead of reading verbatim from a text which makes him sound preachy.

Bill Mccloy , 4 months ago (edited)

Chris is our canary in a coal mine! Truly a national treasure and a champion for humanity. And he's more Christian than he thinks he is.

Herr Pooper , 4 months ago

I have always loved Chris Hedges, but ever since becoming fully awake it pains me to see how he will take gigantic detours of imagination to never mention Israel, AIPAC or Zionism, and their complete takeover of the US. What a shame.

ISIS McCain , 4 months ago

Hey Chris, please look up Dr. Wolfe and have a big debate with him!!! I believe you guys would mostly hit it off, but please look him up!

UtopiaMinor666 , 8 years ago

The reality of this is enough to make you want to cry.

Terri Pebsworth , 3 months ago

Excellent! And truer today (2019) than even in 2010.

Russell Olausen , 4 months ago

Notes From the Underground,my favourite book.

John Doe , 3 weeks ago

Gosh I thought it was being broadcasted today. Then I heard it and it was really for today.

George C. May , 2 months ago

Not once did I hear the word corruption which in this speech sums up the bureaucratic control of the country !

L N , 5 months ago

I think Chris Has saved my life! ✊🏼✌️ 👍🏼🌅

Laureano Luna , 4 months ago

43:53 Cicero did not even live the imperial period of Rome...

andrew domenitz , 4 months ago

The continued growth of unproductive debt against the low or nonexistent growth of GDP is the recipe for collapse, for the whole world economic system.

Thomas Simmons , 5 months ago

I agree with Chris about the tragedy of the Liberal Church. Making good through identity politics however, is every bit as heretical and tragic as Evangelical Republican corrupted church think, in my humble, Christian opinion.

Alexandros Aiakides , 2 weeks ago (edited)

The death of the present western hemisphere governments and "democratic" institutions must die right now for humanity to be saved from the zombies that rule it. 'Cannibalization" of oikonomia was my idea, as well as of William Engdahl. l am glad hearing Hedges to adopt the expression of truth. ( November 2019. from Phthia , Hellas ).

Heathcliff Earnshaw , 4 months ago div cl

ass="comment-renderer-text-content expanded"> Gosh , especially that last conclusion ,was terrific so I want to paste the whole of that Auden poem here:- September 1, 1939 W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

... ... ...

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

[Nov 23, 2019] The Pitfalls of a Pit Bull Russophobe by Ray McGovern

Ray raised interesting question: was Fiona Hill on the list on Brennan experts who created 17 intelligence agencies.
Notable quotes:
"... Fiona Hill's "Russian-expert" testimony Thursday and her deposition on Oct. 14 to the impeachment inquiry showed that her antennae are acutely tuned to what Russian intelligence services may be up to but, sadly, also displayed a striking naiveté about the machinations of U.S. intelligence. ..."
"... Hill's education on Russia came at the knee of the late Professor Richard Pipes, her Harvard mentor and archdeacon of Russophobia. I do not dispute her sincerity in attributing all manner of evil to what President Ronald Reagan called the "Evil Empire." But, like so many other glib "Russia experts" with access to Establishment media, she seems three decades out of date. ..."
"... I have been studying the U.S.S.R. and Russia for twice as long as Hill, was chief of CIA's Soviet Foreign Policy Branch during the 1970s, and watched the "Evil Empire" fall apart. She seems to have missed the falling apart part. ..."
"... Hill has been conditioned to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin and especially his security services are capable of anything, and thus sees a Russian under every rock -- as we used to say of smart know-nothings like former CIA Director William Casey and the malleable "Soviet experts" who bubbled up to the top during his reign (1981 – 1987). Recall that at the very first meeting of Reagan's cabinet, Casey openly told the president and other cabinet officials: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." Were Casey still alive, he would be very pleased and proud of Hill's performance. ..."
"... "The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified." [Emphasis added.] ..."
"... A modicum of intellectual curiosity and rudimentary due diligence would have prompted her to look into who was in charge of preparing the (misnomered) "Intelligence Community Assessment" published on Jan. 6, 2017, which provided the lusted-after fodder for the "mainstream" media and others wanting to blame Hillary Clinton's defeat on the Russians. ..."
"... President Barack Obama gave the task to his National Intelligence Director James Clapper, whom he had allowed to stay in that job for three and a half years after he had to apologize to Congress for what he later admitted was a "clearly erroneous" response, under oath, to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) on NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens. ..."
"... Just eight weeks after she joined the National Security Council staff, Clapper, during an NBC interview on May 28, 2017, recalled "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique." Later he added, "It's in their DNA." Clapper has claimed that "what the Russians did had a profound impact on the outcome of the election." ..."
"... As for the "Intelligence Community Assessment," the banner headline atop The New York Times on Jan. 7, 2017 set the tone for the next couple of years: "Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says." During my career as a CIA analyst, as deputy national intelligence officer chairing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), and working on the Intelligence Production Review Board, I had not seen so shabby a piece of faux analysis as the ICA. The writers themselves seemed to be holding their noses. They saw fit to embed in the ICA itself this derriere-covering note : "High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong ..."
"... "According to several current and former intelligence officers who must remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue," as the Times says when it prints made-up stuff, there were only two "handpicked analysts." Clapper picked Brennan; and Brennan picked Clapper. That would help explain the grossly subpar quality of the ICA. ..."
"... The general problem IMHO, to state obvious, is that there is no truth in the public discourse, only lies which support the narrative. And there is no penalty for the continuous lies, certainly not from what is called the press these days. ..."
"... I remember Phil Giraldi's comment months ago. He had worked for the CIA and now heads the Council for the National interest. He noted his surprise at how many within the CIA still clung to the cold war view of the Russians, ready to accept almost anything bad about the evil Russians. ..."
"... And it does seem the Russian haters still are living in the past and many have a huge impact on public policy and public opinion. It is a very dangerous affliction for the rest of the world. ..."
"... The greatest nation ever's permanent war system requires much deception & permanent enemies to keep the our economy going strong & the people distracted from the real issues. If everyone knew the truth, the world's biggest racket ever would fall apart and world peace would break out. ..."
"... American "intelligence" agencies will do exactly what "intelligence" agencies have done since time immemorial – they will perpetuate their position and power. The fact that that strips you of some of your freedom is a feature, not a bug. ..."
"... Hill's career advancement and access to the MSM depends on her faith in our "intelligence" agencies. And I doubt very much that Durham will be allowed to do his job probing the origins of RussiaGate. The evil ones will stop at nothing to keep control of the narrative. ..."
"... "It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled." Mark Twain ..."
Nov 22, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

• 7 Comments

Like so many other glib "Russia experts" with access to Establishment media, Fiona Hill, who testified Thursday in the impeachment probe, seems three decades out of date.

Special to Consortium News

Fiona Hill's "Russian-expert" testimony Thursday and her deposition on Oct. 14 to the impeachment inquiry showed that her antennae are acutely tuned to what Russian intelligence services may be up to but, sadly, also displayed a striking naiveté about the machinations of U.S. intelligence.

Hill's education on Russia came at the knee of the late Professor Richard Pipes, her Harvard mentor and archdeacon of Russophobia. I do not dispute her sincerity in attributing all manner of evil to what President Ronald Reagan called the "Evil Empire." But, like so many other glib "Russia experts" with access to Establishment media, she seems three decades out of date.

I have been studying the U.S.S.R. and Russia for twice as long as Hill, was chief of CIA's Soviet Foreign Policy Branch during the 1970s, and watched the "Evil Empire" fall apart. She seems to have missed the falling apart part.

Selective Suspicion

Are the Russian intelligence services still very active? Of course. But there is no evidence -- other than Hill's bias -- for her extraordinary claim that they were behind the infamous "Steele Dossier," for example, or that they were the prime mover of Ukraine-gate in an attempt to shift the blame for Russian "meddling" in the 2016 U.S. election onto Ukraine. In recent weeks U.S. intelligence officials were spreading this same tale, lapped up and faithfully reported Friday by The New York Times.

Hill has been conditioned to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin and especially his security services are capable of anything, and thus sees a Russian under every rock -- as we used to say of smart know-nothings like former CIA Director William Casey and the malleable "Soviet experts" who bubbled up to the top during his reign (1981 – 1987). Recall that at the very first meeting of Reagan's cabinet, Casey openly told the president and other cabinet officials: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." Were Casey still alive, he would be very pleased and proud of Hill's performance.

Beyond Dispute?

On Thursday Hill testified:

"The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified." [Emphasis added.]

Ah, yes. "The public conclusion of our intelligence agencies": the same ones who reported that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would never surrender power peaceably; the same ones who told Secretary of State Colin Powell he could assure the UN Security Council that the WMD evidence given him by our intelligence agencies was "irrefutable and undeniable." Only Richard-Pipeline-type Russophobia can account for the blinders on someone as smart as Hill and prompt her to take as gospel "the public conclusions of our intelligence agencies."

A modicum of intellectual curiosity and rudimentary due diligence would have prompted her to look into who was in charge of preparing the (misnomered) "Intelligence Community Assessment" published on Jan. 6, 2017, which provided the lusted-after fodder for the "mainstream" media and others wanting to blame Hillary Clinton's defeat on the Russians.

Jim, Do a Job on the Russians

President Barack Obama with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, 2011. (White House/ Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama gave the task to his National Intelligence Director James Clapper, whom he had allowed to stay in that job for three and a half years after he had to apologize to Congress for what he later admitted was a "clearly erroneous" response, under oath, to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) on NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens.

And when Clapper published his memoir last year, Hill would have learned that, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handpicked appointee to run satellite imagery analysis, Clapper places the blame for the consequential "failure" to find the (non-existent) WMD "where it belongs -- squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn't really there." [Emphasis added.]

But for Hill, Clapper was a kindred soul: Just eight weeks after she joined the National Security Council staff, Clapper, during an NBC interview on May 28, 2017, recalled "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique." Later he added, "It's in their DNA." Clapper has claimed that "what the Russians did had a profound impact on the outcome of the election."

As for the "Intelligence Community Assessment," the banner headline atop The New York Times on Jan. 7, 2017 set the tone for the next couple of years: "Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says." During my career as a CIA analyst, as deputy national intelligence officer chairing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), and working on the Intelligence Production Review Board, I had not seen so shabby a piece of faux analysis as the ICA. The writers themselves seemed to be holding their noses. They saw fit to embed in the ICA itself this derriere-covering note : "High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong."

Not a Problem

With the help of the Establishment media, Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, were able to pretend that the ICA had been approved by "all 17 intelligence agencies" (as first claimed by Clinton, with Rep. Jim Himes, D-CT, repeating that canard Thursday, alas "without objection)." Himes, too should do his homework. The bogus "all 17 intelligence agencies" claim lasted only a few months before Clapper decided to fess up. With striking naiveté, Clapper asserted that ICA preparers were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA and NSA. The criteria Clapper et al. used are not hard to divine. In government as in industry, when you can handpick the analysts, you can handpick the conclusions.

Maybe a Problem After All

"According to several current and former intelligence officers who must remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue," as the Times says when it prints made-up stuff, there were only two "handpicked analysts." Clapper picked Brennan; and Brennan picked Clapper. That would help explain the grossly subpar quality of the ICA.

If U.S. Attorney John Durham is allowed to do his job probing the origins of Russiagate, and succeeds in getting access to the "handpicked analysts" -- whether there were just two, or more -- Hill's faith in "our intelligence agencies," may well be dented if not altogether shattered.

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word , a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. After earning an M.A. in Russian Studies and serving as an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer, he worked as a CIA analyst, then branch chief, of Soviet foreign policy; then as a Deputy National Intelligence Officer, and finally as a morning briefer of the President's Daily Brief .

Tags: Fiona Hill Impeachment Ray McGovern Richard Pipes Russophobia

Tarus 77 , November 23, 2019 at 16:10

The general problem IMHO, to state obvious, is that there is no truth in the public discourse, only lies which support the narrative. And there is no penalty for the continuous lies, certainly not from what is called the press these days.

Susan J Leslie , November 23, 2019 at 10:49

Truth be told – the US is the real "Evil Empire"!

John Lamenzo , November 22, 2019 at 22:24

Great takedown Ray I managed a few minutes listening to her bloviation, even that was too much! Fascists always need an enemy even if they have to fictionalize one.

Herman , November 22, 2019 at 20:47

I remember Phil Giraldi's comment months ago. He had worked for the CIA and now heads the Council for the National interest. He noted his surprise at how many within the CIA still clung to the cold war view of the Russians, ready to accept almost anything bad about the evil Russians. Given the history since the dissolution of the USSR, it surprised Mister Giraldi as I recall. And it does seem the Russian haters still are living in the past and many have a huge impact on public policy and public opinion. It is a very dangerous affliction for the rest of the world.

Hard to forget Mueller (not a spook) when he announced that there was no collusion but vehemently stated that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election and are a threat to do so in the future. That Russian might have interfered is not surprising since others countries do it far more and more effectively. That we do it far, far more often would seem to put a damper on the Russian narrative but it doesn't because the whole thing about Russia is crazy.

Another John , November 22, 2019 at 20:27

The greatest nation ever's permanent war system requires much deception & permanent enemies to keep the our economy going strong & the people distracted from the real issues. If everyone knew the truth, the world's biggest racket ever would fall apart and world peace would break out.

Jeff Harrison , November 22, 2019 at 20:08

American "intelligence" agencies will do exactly what "intelligence" agencies have done since time immemorial – they will perpetuate their position and power. The fact that that strips you of some of your freedom is a feature, not a bug.

Skip Scott , November 22, 2019 at 17:44

Hill's career advancement and access to the MSM depends on her faith in our "intelligence" agencies. And I doubt very much that Durham will be allowed to do his job probing the origins of RussiaGate. The evil ones will stop at nothing to keep control of the narrative.

"It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled." Mark Twain

[Nov 23, 2019] NYTimes Pans Cult Leader Gabbard's White Pant Suit After Praising Hillary For Same Outfit

Notable quotes:
"... Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News, ..."
"... My favorite paragraph from the NYT article depicting Tulsi as a fringe, divisive cult leader because she wears white pants suits - by the same author and paper who heaped praise on how Hillary's white pants suit shows she's ready to carry the nuclear codes. ..."
Nov 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Green Greenwald

My favorite paragraph from the NYT article depicting Tulsi as a fringe, divisive cult leader because she wears white pants suits - by the same author and paper who heaped praise on how Hillary's white pants suit shows she's ready to carry the nuclear codes.

Her white suits are not the white suits of Ms. Clinton, nor even the white of Ms. Williamson, whose early appearances in the shadeoften seemed tied to her wellness gospel and ideas of renewal and rebirth. Rather, they are the white of avenging angels and flaming swords, of somewhat combative righteousness (also cult leaders').

And that kind of association, though it can be weirdly compelling, is also not really community building. It sets someone apart, rather than joining others together. It has connotations of the fringe, rather than the center.

A New York Times writer who praised Hillary Clinton for wearing a white pantsuit called Tulsi Gabbard a "cult leader" for wearing exactly the same thing.

[Nov 23, 2019] The Pitfalls of a Pit Bull Russophobe by Ray McGovern

Ray raised interesting question: was Fiona Hill on the list on Brennan experts who created 17 intelligence agencies.
Notable quotes:
"... Fiona Hill's "Russian-expert" testimony Thursday and her deposition on Oct. 14 to the impeachment inquiry showed that her antennae are acutely tuned to what Russian intelligence services may be up to but, sadly, also displayed a striking naiveté about the machinations of U.S. intelligence. ..."
"... Hill's education on Russia came at the knee of the late Professor Richard Pipes, her Harvard mentor and archdeacon of Russophobia. I do not dispute her sincerity in attributing all manner of evil to what President Ronald Reagan called the "Evil Empire." But, like so many other glib "Russia experts" with access to Establishment media, she seems three decades out of date. ..."
"... I have been studying the U.S.S.R. and Russia for twice as long as Hill, was chief of CIA's Soviet Foreign Policy Branch during the 1970s, and watched the "Evil Empire" fall apart. She seems to have missed the falling apart part. ..."
"... Hill has been conditioned to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin and especially his security services are capable of anything, and thus sees a Russian under every rock -- as we used to say of smart know-nothings like former CIA Director William Casey and the malleable "Soviet experts" who bubbled up to the top during his reign (1981 – 1987). Recall that at the very first meeting of Reagan's cabinet, Casey openly told the president and other cabinet officials: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." Were Casey still alive, he would be very pleased and proud of Hill's performance. ..."
"... "The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified." [Emphasis added.] ..."
"... A modicum of intellectual curiosity and rudimentary due diligence would have prompted her to look into who was in charge of preparing the (misnomered) "Intelligence Community Assessment" published on Jan. 6, 2017, which provided the lusted-after fodder for the "mainstream" media and others wanting to blame Hillary Clinton's defeat on the Russians. ..."
"... President Barack Obama gave the task to his National Intelligence Director James Clapper, whom he had allowed to stay in that job for three and a half years after he had to apologize to Congress for what he later admitted was a "clearly erroneous" response, under oath, to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) on NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens. ..."
"... Just eight weeks after she joined the National Security Council staff, Clapper, during an NBC interview on May 28, 2017, recalled "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique." Later he added, "It's in their DNA." Clapper has claimed that "what the Russians did had a profound impact on the outcome of the election." ..."
"... As for the "Intelligence Community Assessment," the banner headline atop The New York Times on Jan. 7, 2017 set the tone for the next couple of years: "Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says." During my career as a CIA analyst, as deputy national intelligence officer chairing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), and working on the Intelligence Production Review Board, I had not seen so shabby a piece of faux analysis as the ICA. The writers themselves seemed to be holding their noses. They saw fit to embed in the ICA itself this derriere-covering note : "High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong ..."
"... "According to several current and former intelligence officers who must remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue," as the Times says when it prints made-up stuff, there were only two "handpicked analysts." Clapper picked Brennan; and Brennan picked Clapper. That would help explain the grossly subpar quality of the ICA. ..."
"... The general problem IMHO, to state obvious, is that there is no truth in the public discourse, only lies which support the narrative. And there is no penalty for the continuous lies, certainly not from what is called the press these days. ..."
"... I remember Phil Giraldi's comment months ago. He had worked for the CIA and now heads the Council for the National interest. He noted his surprise at how many within the CIA still clung to the cold war view of the Russians, ready to accept almost anything bad about the evil Russians. ..."
"... And it does seem the Russian haters still are living in the past and many have a huge impact on public policy and public opinion. It is a very dangerous affliction for the rest of the world. ..."
"... The greatest nation ever's permanent war system requires much deception & permanent enemies to keep the our economy going strong & the people distracted from the real issues. If everyone knew the truth, the world's biggest racket ever would fall apart and world peace would break out. ..."
"... American "intelligence" agencies will do exactly what "intelligence" agencies have done since time immemorial – they will perpetuate their position and power. The fact that that strips you of some of your freedom is a feature, not a bug. ..."
"... Hill's career advancement and access to the MSM depends on her faith in our "intelligence" agencies. And I doubt very much that Durham will be allowed to do his job probing the origins of RussiaGate. The evil ones will stop at nothing to keep control of the narrative. ..."
"... "It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled." Mark Twain ..."
Nov 22, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

• 7 Comments

Like so many other glib "Russia experts" with access to Establishment media, Fiona Hill, who testified Thursday in the impeachment probe, seems three decades out of date.

Special to Consortium News

Fiona Hill's "Russian-expert" testimony Thursday and her deposition on Oct. 14 to the impeachment inquiry showed that her antennae are acutely tuned to what Russian intelligence services may be up to but, sadly, also displayed a striking naiveté about the machinations of U.S. intelligence.

Hill's education on Russia came at the knee of the late Professor Richard Pipes, her Harvard mentor and archdeacon of Russophobia. I do not dispute her sincerity in attributing all manner of evil to what President Ronald Reagan called the "Evil Empire." But, like so many other glib "Russia experts" with access to Establishment media, she seems three decades out of date.

I have been studying the U.S.S.R. and Russia for twice as long as Hill, was chief of CIA's Soviet Foreign Policy Branch during the 1970s, and watched the "Evil Empire" fall apart. She seems to have missed the falling apart part.

Selective Suspicion

Are the Russian intelligence services still very active? Of course. But there is no evidence -- other than Hill's bias -- for her extraordinary claim that they were behind the infamous "Steele Dossier," for example, or that they were the prime mover of Ukraine-gate in an attempt to shift the blame for Russian "meddling" in the 2016 U.S. election onto Ukraine. In recent weeks U.S. intelligence officials were spreading this same tale, lapped up and faithfully reported Friday by The New York Times.

Hill has been conditioned to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin and especially his security services are capable of anything, and thus sees a Russian under every rock -- as we used to say of smart know-nothings like former CIA Director William Casey and the malleable "Soviet experts" who bubbled up to the top during his reign (1981 – 1987). Recall that at the very first meeting of Reagan's cabinet, Casey openly told the president and other cabinet officials: "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." Were Casey still alive, he would be very pleased and proud of Hill's performance.

Beyond Dispute?

On Thursday Hill testified:

"The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified." [Emphasis added.]

Ah, yes. "The public conclusion of our intelligence agencies": the same ones who reported that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union would never surrender power peaceably; the same ones who told Secretary of State Colin Powell he could assure the UN Security Council that the WMD evidence given him by our intelligence agencies was "irrefutable and undeniable." Only Richard-Pipeline-type Russophobia can account for the blinders on someone as smart as Hill and prompt her to take as gospel "the public conclusions of our intelligence agencies."

A modicum of intellectual curiosity and rudimentary due diligence would have prompted her to look into who was in charge of preparing the (misnomered) "Intelligence Community Assessment" published on Jan. 6, 2017, which provided the lusted-after fodder for the "mainstream" media and others wanting to blame Hillary Clinton's defeat on the Russians.

Jim, Do a Job on the Russians

President Barack Obama with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, 2011. (White House/ Pete Souza)

President Barack Obama gave the task to his National Intelligence Director James Clapper, whom he had allowed to stay in that job for three and a half years after he had to apologize to Congress for what he later admitted was a "clearly erroneous" response, under oath, to a question from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) on NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens.

And when Clapper published his memoir last year, Hill would have learned that, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handpicked appointee to run satellite imagery analysis, Clapper places the blame for the consequential "failure" to find the (non-existent) WMD "where it belongs -- squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn't really there." [Emphasis added.]

But for Hill, Clapper was a kindred soul: Just eight weeks after she joined the National Security Council staff, Clapper, during an NBC interview on May 28, 2017, recalled "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique." Later he added, "It's in their DNA." Clapper has claimed that "what the Russians did had a profound impact on the outcome of the election."

As for the "Intelligence Community Assessment," the banner headline atop The New York Times on Jan. 7, 2017 set the tone for the next couple of years: "Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says." During my career as a CIA analyst, as deputy national intelligence officer chairing National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), and working on the Intelligence Production Review Board, I had not seen so shabby a piece of faux analysis as the ICA. The writers themselves seemed to be holding their noses. They saw fit to embed in the ICA itself this derriere-covering note : "High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong."

Not a Problem

With the help of the Establishment media, Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan, were able to pretend that the ICA had been approved by "all 17 intelligence agencies" (as first claimed by Clinton, with Rep. Jim Himes, D-CT, repeating that canard Thursday, alas "without objection)." Himes, too should do his homework. The bogus "all 17 intelligence agencies" claim lasted only a few months before Clapper decided to fess up. With striking naiveté, Clapper asserted that ICA preparers were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA and NSA. The criteria Clapper et al. used are not hard to divine. In government as in industry, when you can handpick the analysts, you can handpick the conclusions.

Maybe a Problem After All

"According to several current and former intelligence officers who must remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the issue," as the Times says when it prints made-up stuff, there were only two "handpicked analysts." Clapper picked Brennan; and Brennan picked Clapper. That would help explain the grossly subpar quality of the ICA.

If U.S. Attorney John Durham is allowed to do his job probing the origins of Russiagate, and succeeds in getting access to the "handpicked analysts" -- whether there were just two, or more -- Hill's faith in "our intelligence agencies," may well be dented if not altogether shattered.

Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word , a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. After earning an M.A. in Russian Studies and serving as an Army Infantry/Intelligence officer, he worked as a CIA analyst, then branch chief, of Soviet foreign policy; then as a Deputy National Intelligence Officer, and finally as a morning briefer of the President's Daily Brief .

Tags: Fiona Hill Impeachment Ray McGovern Richard Pipes Russophobia

Tarus 77 , November 23, 2019 at 16:10

The general problem IMHO, to state obvious, is that there is no truth in the public discourse, only lies which support the narrative. And there is no penalty for the continuous lies, certainly not from what is called the press these days.

Susan J Leslie , November 23, 2019 at 10:49

Truth be told – the US is the real "Evil Empire"!

John Lamenzo , November 22, 2019 at 22:24

Great takedown Ray I managed a few minutes listening to her bloviation, even that was too much! Fascists always need an enemy even if they have to fictionalize one.

Herman , November 22, 2019 at 20:47

I remember Phil Giraldi's comment months ago. He had worked for the CIA and now heads the Council for the National interest. He noted his surprise at how many within the CIA still clung to the cold war view of the Russians, ready to accept almost anything bad about the evil Russians. Given the history since the dissolution of the USSR, it surprised Mister Giraldi as I recall. And it does seem the Russian haters still are living in the past and many have a huge impact on public policy and public opinion. It is a very dangerous affliction for the rest of the world.

Hard to forget Mueller (not a spook) when he announced that there was no collusion but vehemently stated that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election and are a threat to do so in the future. That Russian might have interfered is not surprising since others countries do it far more and more effectively. That we do it far, far more often would seem to put a damper on the Russian narrative but it doesn't because the whole thing about Russia is crazy.

Another John , November 22, 2019 at 20:27

The greatest nation ever's permanent war system requires much deception & permanent enemies to keep the our economy going strong & the people distracted from the real issues. If everyone knew the truth, the world's biggest racket ever would fall apart and world peace would break out.

Jeff Harrison , November 22, 2019 at 20:08

American "intelligence" agencies will do exactly what "intelligence" agencies have done since time immemorial – they will perpetuate their position and power. The fact that that strips you of some of your freedom is a feature, not a bug.

Skip Scott , November 22, 2019 at 17:44

Hill's career advancement and access to the MSM depends on her faith in our "intelligence" agencies. And I doubt very much that Durham will be allowed to do his job probing the origins of RussiaGate. The evil ones will stop at nothing to keep control of the narrative.

"It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled." Mark Twain

[Nov 23, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard, is being viciously slandered in article after article in neoliberal MSM

Nov 23, 2019 | www.unz.com

Durruti , says: November 22, 2019 at 5:57 pm GMT

Taken together, those twin hasbara refrains evoke a notion of divine punishment. JFK and RFK were punished for the sins of their Jew-hating, Nazi-loving father. Mind you, it was Yahweh who took vengeance, not Israel!

Brilliant article by Guyenot. Thoroughly well written & informative.

I note in passing:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/democratic-establishment-reaches-boiling-point-with-tulsi-gabbard/ar-BBX8P8S?li=BBnb7Kz

A Congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard, is being viciously slandered in article after article in the Mainstream (Zionist) Media. Read the diatribe carefully, and learn some of how the People are misdirected-brainwashed.

Ms. Gabbard is, apparently, leading in the Polls, and the Zionist controller Power Elite are Panicky. They will do to Ms. Gabbard what they did to Ron Paul, and his campaign.

It is a sense of frustration that We-I are not able to Revenge the murder of our last Constitutional President, John F. Kennedy, the Destruction of our Republic, the millions of murders from November 22, 1963, to the present, or to effectively defend & protect this noble lady (Ms. Gabbard).

If we protect her, we protect ourselves and our Country. Freedom is not free. We must Pay for i t!

God Bless America!

Durruti

[Nov 23, 2019] The Umbrella Man, the Sins of the Father, and the Kennedy Curse by Laurent Guyénot

Notable quotes:
"... JFK's assassination made possible the acquisition of nuclear arsenal by Israel and the unhindered growth of the most important foreign lobby such as AIPAC. On the cui bono question Israel is a perfect match. Israel gained everything form the JFK's death ..."
"... Was Johnson having an affair with Israeli agent Mathilde Krim? Did LBJ have reason to fear he was liable to be dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1964 because of the Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes scandals? Why did Richard Nixon lie about his own presence in Dallas when Kennedy was killed? Why was George HW Bush for a long time unable to remember his whereabouts on Nov. 22? ..."
"... All available evidence points to the CIA and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the cooperation of the Secret Service, as the murderers of President Kennedy. ..."
"... It is well documented that JFK wanted to break down the power of the Central Intelligence Agency. Could this have had dire consequences and let to his untimely death? Let's have a look! ..."
"... This "Israel did it" theory doesn't quite answer the question of how physical evidence was destroyed and eyewitnesses intimidated by agents of the US government. This I base on an assertion in Douglass's book JFK and the Unspeakable that men with Secret Service and FBI credentials immediately began the cover up operation. ..."
"... Fullbright who publicly denounced Israel and their control of the US Congress on National TV and the fact that Kennedy wanted him as Secretary of State must have also riled the Jews. Fullbright was also against the Vietnam War. ..."
"... Of course, I know the speculation it was Israelis who were behind it (Dimona), but I don't find it persuasive. There are other means to avoid US inspection, and Kennedy was not adamant about it at all. These are things politicians toy with all the time, and while not a "friend" of Israel, Kennedy was not an enemy -- one could consider Eisenhower, if we judge him by his actions during Suez canal crisis- to be an "enemy" of Israel (of course this too is simplistic, politics is a rough business). ..."
"... The Warren Commission hogwash was almost as ridiculous as the official 911 nonsense, and Mark Lane's 1966 book "Rush to Judgment" helped fuel broad public disbelief in the official story. ..."
"... Talk about quid pro quo to the nth degree, as that hideous snake LBJ gave the MIC and its financiers their wars, etc., in exchange for the Presidency and for keeping his sorry ass out of jail for the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker scandals. Sure, the Israelis benefitted, and were likely a cog in the conspiratorial wheel, but the CIA, Secret Service, and various military agents were the movers and shakers, with LBJ their guarantor. ..."
"... Like any good gumshoe worth his salt, the first question he asks himself after arriving at the crime scene is Cui bono, who benefits? In the case of the JFK assassination, there was clearly one very large beneficiary that stood out above the rest, Israel. By Nov 1963, JFK had two big strikes against him ..."
"... "Mr. Trump has been prevented from releasing the rest of the "top secret" files, in spite of his promise to do so." IIRC, it was Trump doing all of the preventing. ..."
"... This "Israel did it" theory doesn't quite answer the question of how physical evidence was destroyed and eyewitnesses intimidated by agents of the US government. ..."
"... The Mossad and the CIA were part of the same "team"–the CIA handled and continues to handle the ongoing domestic coverup operations as needed (including Mockingbird mass media activities). ..."
"... Connelly is a _very_ interesting figure, and his background prior to the day of the assassination is not very well understood. I was stunned to read that he was a key actor in the Korean War "setup" ..."
"... Remember, Kennedy had just buggered up the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and was threatening to pull out of the CIA's war in Vietnam. With a nod from LBJ the CIA could kill Kennedy and be sure of top-down cover from the moment Kennedy's heart stopped beating, cover which, according to the doctors who attended on Kennedy at Parklands Hospital, was promptly given. ..."
"... Then there's the deathbed confession of CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, which provides a tenuous connection with Richard Nixon, who hired Hunt and Frank Sturgis (both believed to have been among the tramps arrested in Dealey Plaza in the immediate aftermath of the assassination) to. among other things, burglarize the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Building in Washington, DC. ..."
"... I think Oswald the CIA agent who agreed to go to Russia on a fake defector mission for the agency with no way of knowing what would happen to him, would have been an insanely extreme patriot. Such an Oswald might be willing to do anything he was ordered to I suppose. The trouble is Oswald seems to have been anti establishment right back into his teens. He was an immature 17 year old when he joined the Marines, and though he toughened up considerably they evidence of him ever being an anti communist fanatic is just lacking. ..."
"... Be sure and dive into all of the data supporting link's located at the bottom of this web page. November 23, 2019 JFK, MLK, RFK, 50 Years of Suppressed History: New Evidence on Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Failures to Confront the Unspeakable, and The Way Ahead. Part I
"... It is a documented fact that during all past official visits, President Kennedy's motorcade comprised a open-top lorry, driving ahead of the Presidents' limousine, and carrying journalists sat backward on graded tiers, who would film the President and the crowd cheering on him. ..."
"... At Dallas, the journalists' truck got cancelled, and the way paved for the sole Abraham Zapruder to document the circumstances of the JFK assassination. Just another complete coincidence, obviously. ..."
Nov 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

In my view, summarized here , John Kennedy was assassinated by Israel for three major reasons:

Dimona: President Kennedy, who had made nuclear disarmament his grand mission on the international level, and was on the way to achieve it with Khrushchev (as shown by James Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable ), was determined to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb. According to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's interpretation , it was to plunge into the Israeli deep state and supervise Kennedy's assassination that Ben-Gurion resigned in July 1963 before receiving Kennedy's ultimatum letter demanding inspections of Dimona.

American Zionist Council: John Kennedy and his Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright (whom Kennedy had been prevented to name as Secretary of State) aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a "foreign agent" subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would have rendered its lobbying division, the AIPAC, near powerless. On October 11, 1963, the AZC received a formal demand from RFK's office to register within 72 hours (details here ).

Nasser: Kennedy unequivocally supported Arab nationalism in 1957 as a senator, [2] "Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, 'The New Dimensions of American Foreign Policy," University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 1, 1957"; Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (1965), Mariner Books, 2002, p. 554. reversed Eisenhower's foreign polity in a pro-Nasser way (as documented by Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans: John F. Kennedy's Courting of African Nationalist Leaders, Oxford UP, 2012), and committed the U.S. to support U.N. Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. That was a major threat to Zionist interests, who had bet on making Nasser an enemy of the United States.

To these reasons for assassinating Kennedy, we must add the opposite reasons for putting Johnson instead in the Oval Office, for Johnson buried both the Dimona and the AZC proceedings, and cut U.S. support for Nasser's in order to boost support to Israel. In 1967, he would commit high treason against his own country by allowing and covering-up Israel's failed false-flag attack on the USS Liberty. No wonder Israel loved Johnson as much as they hated Kennedy.

In the Zionists' view, JFK's anti-Israel policies (discreet or secret) were part of a more general "Kennedy problem" that went back to his father's attempt to prevent WWII by supporting Chamberlain's appeasement with Hitler rather than Churchill's appeasement with Stalin. According to German documents declassified in 1949, the German Ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, after meeting U.S. ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy in 1938, wrote that he "understood our Jewish policy completely," and was "Germany's best friend" in London. [3] Edward Renehan Jr., "Joseph Kennedy and the Jews", History News Network; Kellen Perry, – "The Dark Side Of Joe Kennedy Sr." allthatsinteresting.com, April 17, 2017. When Roosevelt entered the war, Joseph Kennedy resigned, and later complained privately that, "the Jews have won the war." [4] Quoted in Herbert Druks, John F. Kennedy and Israel, Praeger Security International, 2005, p. 10 According to biographer David Nasaw, Joseph was not an anti-Semite in the racial sense, but rather someone who believed in a Jewish conspiracy to push the United States into an unnecessary war with Germany (Nasaw insists he was mistaken, because "Jewish influence on American foreign influence was negligible, its influence on the State Department nonexistent"). [5] David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, Penguin, 2015, p. 509.

Zionists had reasons to fear that Joseph Kennedy did "inject some poisonous drops of anti-Semitism in the minds of his children, including his son John's" (as printed in September 1960 by the Herut, Menachem Begin's political party). [6] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews , vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2013, p. 252. In 1940, John had published a book titled Why England Slept, adapted from his Harvard thesis which was, as the title alluded, a response to Churchill's 1938 book While England Slept, and a veiled support for his father's pro-appeasement views. In his Pulitzer prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956), Kennedy had declared his admiration for Senator Robert Taft, who by calling the Nuremberg trials a shameful parody of justice had sacrificed his political career, including his chances for the presidency, rather than build it on hypocrisy. Although Zionists probably didn't know it until recently, in 1945, JFK had written the following in his diary, as quoted here by Abigail Abrams:

"You can easily understand how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made." [7] Abigail Abrams, "Auction of Rare Diary Highlights What John F. Kennedy Really Thought About Hitler," Time, March 23, 2017, on https://time.com/4711687/john-f-kennedy-diary-hitler/

Joseph Jr., Joseph Sr., and John Kennedy in 1938

The Kennedys were a family of strong traditions and strong convictions. They had to be destroyed, politically as had Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), and if necessary physically, before they extirpate America from Zionists' clutches.

Dallas was an Israeli coup, ordered from Tel Aviv with Johnson's support, and supervised by the local B'nai B'rith under the cover of the Dallas Citizens Council, who was sponsoring Kennedy's visit, and of whom Abraham Zapruder himself was a member (watch his satisfaction when interviewed two hours after JFK's assassination in the History Channel documentary JFK – 3 Shots That Changed America , at 43:34).

When trying to make sense of Dallas' Umbrella Man, we are faced with a dilemma: should we believe Witt's explanation of his strange behavior (as does Josiah Thompson), or should we consider him an accomplice to the assassination (as does Russ Baker)? Only in the framework of the Israeli theory pioneered by Michael Collins Piper is it possible to surmount the dilemma.

Let's recap what we know for certain. Fact number 1: on the sunny day of November 22, 1963, one man was standing on the President's motorcade route with an open umbrella, at the precise moment and place when JFK was shot. To assume that the Umbrella Man's strange behavior and JFK's assassination are unrelated is unreasonable. The coincidence is just too improbable.

Fact number 2: In 1978, Louie Steven Witt claimed in front of the HSCA that he was the Umbrella Man and explained that he wanted to heckle JFK about his father's policy of appeasement of Hitler in 1938.

Although Thompson and Baker disagree about everything else, they agree that there can be no connection between John Kennedy's assassination and Joseph Kennedy's appeasement policy. That is where they are both wrong.

Was Louie Steven Witt a Zionist agent, a sayan ? Not necessarily. Operations like the JFK assassination are planned on a strict need-to-know basis: no one knows more than he needs to know. Witt declared to the HSCA that he belonged to no organization whatsoever. He summarized his motivation for his "bad joke" in these words:

"In a coffee break conversation someone had mentioned that the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family. Being a conservative-type fellow, I sort of placed him in the liberal camp and I was just going to kind of do a little heckling."

What would be interesting to know is: who inspired Witt during his coffee break? Did the coffee break take place in the office of Witt's Jewish boss, director of the Rio Grande National Life insurance Co. in Dallas? Did Witt have insurmountable debts, like Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby? Russ Baker mentions that the company wrote a lot of insurance for the military and was located in the same building that housed the local office of the highly negligent Secret Service.

Mr Witt, would you kindly come forward again and answer a few questions?

Laurent Guyénot is the author of JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State , Progressive Press, 2014, and From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land Clash of Civilizations , 2018. (or $30 shipping included from Sifting and Winnowing, POB 221, Lone Rock, WI 53556).

Stonehands , says: November 22, 2019 at 8:16 am GMT
I looked at 43:34 of the documentary posted with Zupruder being interviewed shortly after the assassination; and what I see is a man aghast and at a loss for words, not "satisfied" as you supposed.
utu , says: November 22, 2019 at 8:28 am GMT
There is no better theory of JFK assassination than outlined by the author. JFK's assassination made possible the acquisition of nuclear arsenal by Israel and the unhindered growth of the most important foreign lobby such as AIPAC. On the cui bono question Israel is a perfect match. Israel gained everything form the JFK's death
Jack Fortin , says: November 22, 2019 at 10:43 am GMT
I am absolutely certain that the murder of JFK was the work of a group of conspirators rather than an individual. The umbrella man is not new to me. I never gave him much thought though I have read work by others who factor him as a key role in the assassination. The interview of Josiah Thompson was most thought provoking in that it showed how someone on the periphery of a big event can be implicated theoretically yet really it appeared to be nothing more than happenstance.

The takeaway from this is that we should never take for granted the basic tenet of our justice system that presumes innocence. The burden of proof of guilt lies with those making the accusation. Was the umbrella man a participant in that homicide? I don't know and there is really no evidence proving otherwise.

Let's keep our eye on the ball. Sadly no one will ever be held to account for that murder. That is not to say that the truth will never be known. One day we will know exactly what happened and who was responsible. The lesson here is to not get immersed in that which can not be proven but can also detract from those who were really responsible.

RodW , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:42 am GMT
I'm quite happy to believe that Jews killed JFK, but things like this are a very thin reed to hang anything on;

Dallas was an Israeli coup, ordered from Tel Aviv with Johnson's support, and supervised by the local B'nai B'rith under the cover of the Dallas Citizens Council, who was sponsoring Kennedy's visit, and of whom Abraham Zapruder himself was a member (watch his satisfaction when interviewed two hours after JFK's assassination in the History Channel documentary JFK – 3 Shots That Changed America , at 43:34).

Zapruder's expression is totally equivocal. His strange momentary smile could be the natural reaction of someone who is suddenly embarrassed to be on the point of tears. You can't make history out of 'testimony' this weak.

Dimona: President Kennedy, who had made nuclear disarmament his grand mission on the international level, and was on the way to achieve it with Khrushchev (as shown by James Douglass in JFK and the Unspeakable), was determined to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb.

This is the same James Douglass who was incapable of spotting the obvious difference between Oswald's wide head and Billy Nolan Lovelady's narrow head, thereby establishing himself as someone who is unreliable with any evidence.

Laurent Guyenot , says: November 22, 2019 at 12:03 pm GMT
@Germanicus Exactly what I thought when I realized the webpage of Jewish Life that I screenshot was taken away, like the one from the 5 Towns Jewish Times saying "Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson?" (of which I didn't get a screenshot). So I've just save the screenshot of the page of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that you mention, titled: "Lyndon Johnson: no better friend"
the article says:

"Johnson was the most emotionally committed to Israel of any American president -- a fact that is not popularly known but is clear from his background," Dennis Ross, a veteran Middle East negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations, said last year at a symposium of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he is counselor.

Johnson was the first president to invite an Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, on a state visit. They got along so well -- both men were farmers -- that Johnson paid Eshkol the rare compliment of inviting him to his ranch.

LBJ soon abandoned pressure on Israel to come clean about the Dimona reactor. He increased arms sales to Israel and in 1968, after Israel's primary supplier, France, imposed an embargo as a means of cultivating ties in the Arab world, the United States became Israel's main supplier of weapons, notably launching the talks that would lead to the sale of Phantom fighter jets to Israel.

Johnson wanted to commit more forcefully to Israel's cause in the lead-up to the 1967 Six-Day War, but he felt constrained from a dramatic show of military might because of the failures of the war in Vietnam then dogging his presidency. Nonetheless, during the war, he ordered warships to within 50 miles of Syria's coast as a warning to the Soviets not to interfere.

In a speech in the war's immediate aftermath, Johnson effectively nipped in the bud any speculation that the United States would pressure Israel to unilaterally give up the lands it had captured. He laid down not only the "land for peace" formula that would inform subsequent U.N. Security Council resolutions, but made it clear that any formula had to ensure Jewish access to Jerusalem's Old City.

Thanks

Laurent Guyenot , says: November 22, 2019 at 12:23 pm GMT
@utu Thanks utu. I wasn't aware of the Kennedys inviting the Lindberghs. I find it very symbolic and significant (and certainly a cause to worry for the Zionists). Here is a photo of JFK and Lindberg on that day: https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHP/1962/Month%2005/Day%2011/JFKWHP-1962-05-11-D
BTW, I think it was you who commented on the Thompson itw in my Kennedy article, wasn't it?
fnn , says: November 22, 2019 at 12:29 pm GMT
They're telling you you'd better shut up:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ymaWq5yZIYM?feature=oembed

anon [222] Disclaimer , says: November 22, 2019 at 12:38 pm GMT
@Daniel Rich

Zaapruder's daughter is a Holocaust education professional

https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/antisemitism-podcast/alexandra-zapruder

utu , says: November 22, 2019 at 12:40 pm GMT
@Laurent Guyenot BTW, I think it was you who commented on the Thompson itw in my Kennedy article, wasn't it? – I forgot about it but indeed I did:

https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-jfk-assassination-part-i-what-happened/?showcomments#comment-2378252

HorstG , says: November 22, 2019 at 12:46 pm GMT
An endless stream of articles, theories, release of "secret" records. We will never know for sure.
Pheasant , says: November 22, 2019 at 12:51 pm GMT
@Daniel Rich They donated half that money to a police charity on behalf of officers killed/wounded that day to be fair.

And by Kennedy wanting Israel nuke free is more than enough to prompt his assassination even though he was hated by the entire military industrial complex.

Pheasant , says: November 22, 2019 at 12:54 pm GMT
@utu The Kennedy family was hated by a lot of powerful people to be fair.
HoekomSA , says: November 22, 2019 at 1:49 pm GMT
Ther is an interesting clip of film showing the guards to Kennedys limousine being called away from guarding the president
https://whowhatwhy.org/2015/08/20/classic-who-must-watch-video-secret-service-agent-pulled-off-jfk-car-2/
So members of the secret service were in on the assasination and facilitated it.

If this was straight assasination why go to so much trouble. The CIA had at the time developed weapons that could assasinate by giving heart attacks or cancer and were discussed in the church committee investigation into the CIA. It would have been very easy for someone to assasinte kennedy for instance when he was viting Marilyn Monroe or his many mistresses. An affair is a good excuse for a heart attack.

No the murder of kennedy was not just about getting rid of him. It was a highly symbolic , even ritualistic act.

It showed ultimately the power of the conspirators. It showed the impotence of the public. Its about immobilizing effective resistance to the elite. Conspiracy theories become part of the psychological control that they hold over the mass mind. The umbrella man is part of that symbolic control

Sparkon , says: November 22, 2019 at 1:52 pm GMT

"No wonder Israel loved Johnson as much as they hated Kennedy."

Y ou should have written:

No wonder Johnson hated Kennedy as much as he loved Israel.

Was Johnson having an affair with Israeli agent Mathilde Krim? Did LBJ have reason to fear he was liable to be dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1964 because of the Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes scandals? Why did Richard Nixon lie about his own presence in Dallas when Kennedy was killed? Why was George HW Bush for a long time unable to remember his whereabouts on Nov. 22?

With previous assassination plots in Chicago and Tampa, and the JBS handing out these posters in Dallas, it was dereliction of duty for the Secret Service to have failed to clear high rise buildings in Dallas on the motorcade route. Indeed, it was against their own regulations for Kennedy's limousine to have made those sharp, slow-speed turns that took it through Dealey Plaza, and it was nothing short of being an accomplice to murder for Secret Service driver William Greer to have allowed JFK's limousine to slow to a stop in the killing zone when shots rang out.

With all that, I see umbrella man as nothing but a big red herring.

Laurent Guyénot , says: November 22, 2019 at 2:56 pm GMT
@RodW

Zapruder's expression is totally equivocal.

OK, but that was just on the side: I'm not building anything on that. This whole article is just an anecdotic appendix to my main Kennedy article.

This is the same James Douglass who was incapable of

Yes, I am aware of the many shortcomings of Douglass, including his many blind spots (never heard of Dimona, believes Johnson was such a good guy that, having failed to prevent the assassination of his beloved president, he at least prevented the invasion of Cuba that it was meant to trigger, etc.). Nevertheless, his book opened my eyes to Kennedy's determination to disarm the world and end the Cold War.

Tom Walsh , says: November 22, 2019 at 3:40 pm GMT
This video gives a reasonable take on the assassination

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8ObvK4NR_LI?feature=oembed

follyofwar , says: November 22, 2019 at 4:00 pm GMT
@PeterMX It is also amazing that, 56 years after the terrible event that ruined America, Mr. Trump has been prevented from releasing the rest of the "top secret" files, in spite of his promise to do so.
follyofwar , says: November 22, 2019 at 4:45 pm GMT
@Sparkon Per The Daily Beast (7-11-2017):

"Why JFK Wanted to Drop LBJ for Reelection."

"Just days before he was assassinated, JFK confided to his secretary that he wanted to replace his vp when he ran for reelection – he didn't think LBJ was fit for president."

Later in the piece: Looking straight ahead and without hesitating he replied, "At this time I am thinking about Gov. Terry Sanford of NC. But it will not be Lyndon."

Jack didn't want LBJ as his vp in the first place, but thought that the only way he could win was to put that evil SOB on the ticket. He probably was right, as LBJ delivered Texas. Given the decades long national trauma, from which the country has never recovered, it would have been far better if Nixon had won.

lysias , says: November 22, 2019 at 4:49 pm GMT
Oliver Stone's JFK blames the CIA, the military, and LBJ, makes no mention of Israel, and treats Ruby and Zapruder sympathetically. No doubt explained by the fact that the movie was funded and produced by Israeli superagent Arnon Milchan.

The movie is a limited hangout made to ensure that those who cannot swallow the obvious lies of the Warren Commission will direct their anger otherwise than at Israel.

Justvisiting , says: November 22, 2019 at 5:05 pm GMT
@HoekomSA

It showed ultimately the power of the conspirators. It showed the impotence of the public. Its about immobilizing effective resistance to the elite. Conspiracy theories become part of the psychological control that they hold over the mass mind. The umbrella man is part of that symbolic control

You nailed it. Also note this was an "Event", where hit men from all over the world (many of whom worked as contractors for various intelligence agencies) converged in one place to honor their craft. A select few participated in the actual execution, the rest were there to confuse any future investigators with false leads.

This was a modern ritual sacrifice–think of it as alchemy in action.

Agent76 , says: November 22, 2019 at 5:26 pm GMT
September 24, 2019 The Coverup of President John F. Kennedy's Assassination Is Wearing Thin. All available evidence points to the CIA and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the cooperation of the Secret Service, as the murderers of President Kennedy.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/09/24/the-coverup-of-president-john-f-kennedys-assassination-is-wearing-thin/

Jun 13, 2015 Did the CIA Assassinate JFK?

It is well documented that JFK wanted to break down the power of the Central Intelligence Agency. Could this have had dire consequences and let to his untimely death? Let's have a look!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K7HBIhK251A?feature=oembed

Jan 21, 2019 Celebs and relatives of Martin Luther King Jr. call for new probe into his death ahead of his public holiday as they claim his assassination and JFK, RFK and Malcolm X's killing were conspiracies covered up by the government

A group of at least 60 US citizens including journalists, lawyers and historians are calling for new investigations into four history-making assassinations

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6613747/New-probes-demanded-deaths-John-F-Kennedy-Robert-F-Kennedy-Martin-Luther-King-Jr-Malcolm-X.html?ito=email_share_article-top

Agent76 , says: November 22, 2019 at 5:44 pm GMT
Nov 23, 2016 53 YEARS AFTER JFK ASSASSINATION CIA ADMITS THIS CONSPIRACY THEORY IS ACTUALLY FACT

Shortly after noon on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas. It's been 53 years since the assassination. Since that fateful November day, conspiracy theories have abounded. However, when we sift through the disinformation and look at only verifiable facts, we find no need for theories -- as the conspiracy was a fact.

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB493/docs/intell_ebb_026.PDF

Greg Bacon , says: Website November 22, 2019 at 6:00 pm GMT
Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion ordered the murder of JFK, because Kennedy had stood up to that maniac regarding Israel getting nukes.

Mossad And The JFK Assassination

Their motive? Israel's much touted Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who ruled that country from its inception in 1948 until he resigned on June 16, 1963, was so enraged at John F. Kennedy for not allowing Israel to become a nuclear power that, Collins asserts, in his final days in office he commanded the Mossad to become involved in a plot to kill America's president.

Ben-Gurion was so convinced that Israel's very survival was in dire jeopardy that in one of his final letters to JFK he said, "Mr. President, my people have the right to exist, and this existence is in danger."

In the days leading up to Ben-Gurion's resignation from office, he and JFK had been involved in an unpublicized, contentious debate over the possibility of Israel getting nuclear capabilities. Their disagreement eventually escalated into a full-fledged war of words that was virtually ignored in the press. Ethan Bronner wrote about this secret battle between JFK and Ben-Gurion years later in a New York Times article on October 31, 1998, calling it a "fiercely hidden subject." In fact, the Kennedy/Ben-Gurion conversations are still classified by the United States Government. Maybe this is the case because Ben-Gurion's rage and frustration became so intense – and his power so great within Israel – that Piper contends it was at the center of the conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. This stance is supported by New York banker Abe Feinberg, who describes the situation as such: "Ben-Gurion could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man [Joe Kennedy, Sr., JFK's father]." Ben-Gurion despised Joe Kennedy because he felt that not only was he an anti-Semite, but that he had also sided with Hitler during the 1930's and 40's. [We will touch upon this aspect of the story in an upcoming article entitled The CIA and Organized Crime: Two Sides of the Same Coin].

Anyway, Ben-Gurion was convinced that Israel needed nuclear weapons to insure its survival, while Kennedy was dead-set against it. This inability to reach an agreement caused obvious problems. One of them revolved around Kennedy's decision that he would make America his top priority in regard to foreign policy, and not Israel! Kennedy planned to honor the 1950 Tripartite Declaration which said that the United States would retaliate against any nation in the Middle East that attacked any other country. Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, wanted the Kennedy Administration to sell them offensive weapons, particularly Hawk missiles.

https://alethonews.com/2019/11/17/mossad-and-the-jfk-assassination/

Imagine that, a US president that puts America first and not that nation of leeches, land thieves, murderers, assassins and pedophiles.

wiggins , says: November 22, 2019 at 6:13 pm GMT
also: https://alethonews.com/2019/11/22/the-kennedy-autopsy-2/
peterAUS , says: November 22, 2019 at 7:15 pm GMT
@peterAUS As, say, in:
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/35445

.Gerald Posner, in his 1993 book Case Closed, posited that the errant first shot was fired at Z 160, which put the entire shooting sequence at 8.4 seconds. (8) In the 13 years since Posner's book, several highly respected students of the assassination have weighed in with reputable analyses of the first shot's timing. Their estimates lead to total elapsed times of around 8.8, 8.4, and 8.6 seconds .

8.6 seconds doable.

9/11 Inside job , says: November 22, 2019 at 7:23 pm GMT
@ThreeCranes Dr.Charles Crenshaw was one of the surgeons who treated JFK when he was brought into Parkland Hospital stated that he " considered the throat wound to be an entrance wound and the large head wound (at the right rear of JFK's head ) to be an exit wound Along with many of my Parkland colleagues I believed at the time that the President had been hit twice from the front ."

"Every doctor who was in the trauma room had his own reasons for not refuting the official line .whatever was happening was larger than any of us anyone who went as far to eliminate the President of the United States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor ."

Charles Crenshaw , " JFK Conspiracy of Silence " 1992

ChuckOrloski , says: November 22, 2019 at 7:29 pm GMT
@ThreeCranes Hi ThreeCranes!

Fyi, in David Lifton's important & scientific book, "Best Evidence," he turned to a fundamental example as to why JFK's head projected backward & a brain matter fell upon the limo's trunk.

Based upon physics, Mr. Lifton offered the kiddie example at a town carnival, & the act of shooting at plastic ducks. He emphasized that wounded plastic duckies fall backward, not forward.

P.S.: David Lifton concluded unequivocally that a Secret Service role was critical to allow JFK's murder & subsequent cover-up.

Laurent Guyenot , says: November 22, 2019 at 7:34 pm GMT
@LondonBob Maybe so. Perhaps Baker is right: the Umbrella Man was a signal man, and Witt is not the Umbrella Man. But then, fact number 2 become even more significant: why would someone come forward to make a declaration to the HSCA that had the effect of connecting in the public psyche JFK's public assassination to the Kennedys' anti-Semitism, and therefore, implicitly, to Jewish vengeance?
(I should have included that paragraph).
AceDeuce , says: November 22, 2019 at 8:12 pm GMT
@Franz FWIW, J. Edgar was also in Dallas that day. On his own, not as part of JFK's entourage
Jefferson Temple , says: November 22, 2019 at 8:16 pm GMT
This "Israel did it" theory doesn't quite answer the question of how physical evidence was destroyed and eyewitnesses intimidated by agents of the US government. This I base on an assertion in Douglass's book JFK and the Unspeakable that men with Secret Service and FBI credentials immediately began the cover up operation.

Douglass pointed to this as proof that a group of CIA insiders, no doubt loyal to Dulles, were the orchestrators. How else to get real credentials for fake agents? That still makes sense to me though M. Guyenot's writings make it clear that the Israelis would have been happy to lend an assist.

Durruti , says: November 22, 2019 at 8:39 pm GMT
@Laurent Guyenot

JFK's public assassination to the Kennedys' anti-Semitism,

Laurent Guyenot, I have already posted – my agreement with your well written analysis.

However, (please pay attention), John F. Kennedy was not an 'anti-Semite,' he liked Arabs.

Semites are Peoples from the Middle East. The overwhelming majority of Jews are NOT Semites. They hail from Europe, or from America-by route of Europe.

I would recommend Arthur Koestler's Thirteenth Tribe , as the first read – of many to understand & correctly use the term "Semite."

https://www.google.com/search?q=arthur+koestler+the+thirteenth+tribe+amazon&sxsrf=ACYBGNTD82-2bKWLk1nS4Y1-RhiBDiDtww:1574454581606&source=univ&tbm=shop&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi6ybSw1P7lAhWOxFkKHUIoA40Qsxh6BAgLECg

The term Semite is cynically used as a misdirection tool. The Jewish Oligarch claim to be Semites, is a deceitful way of laying claim to land in the Middle East. The worst anti-Semites are Jews, who are busy Ethnically Cleansing Palestinian Arabs, stealing their lands & wealth, and, additionally, attempting to conquer all of the Middle East, and Remove, or Exterminate the indigenous Semites.

Orwell exposed the manipulation of Language, in his 1984 , as the key tool of oppressors to reduce their subjects to slavery.

https://read.amazon.com/kp/card?preview=inline&linkCode=kpd&ref_=k4w_oembed_u0cgZK1Zxzj2Mz&asin=B01KEBZP3G&tag=kpembed-20

Few are willing to expose this key manipulation of Language. Do you know of anyone else?

Durruti

RouterAl , says: November 22, 2019 at 8:41 pm GMT
A couple of years ago I finally fulfilled a promise I made to my self back in November 22nd 1963 as I sat in Edinburgh Scotland on that fateful Friday night,that I would one day visit Dealey plaza Dallas and see for my self.

As I drove into the plaza up W Commerce street what struck me immediately was how small it all felt and as I walked around the compact size of Dealey plaza was reinforced. I had been viewing the unfolding events all these years through the lens of a narrow angle press camera and Zapruders home movie wide angle lens, which to me made the place look far more expansive than it is when you are there in person. I have been unable for some time to come up or read anyone else's theory which explained satisfactorily the shallow back wound in Kennedy the throat wound with just a tiny knick in the tie , the wounding of Connelly, the Teague face hit, the damage to the windscreen and the chrome strip of the car and the shot which hit the grass.

I read sometime ago a book by Richard E. Sprague

http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/conspiracy/The%20Taking%20of%20America%201-2-3%20by%20Richard%20E.Sprague.pdf

who claimed that umbrella man had fired a poison paralysing dart at Kennedy at about z189. I took this with a pinch of salt when I first read it. The plaza looked to big for this to have been likely and the distance from the kerb side to the car would be to large to have a realistic chance of success from an umbrella, but having visited the plaza and seeing how close he actually was, far fetched though it seems, it's a good theory that fits what you see happening in the Z film.

So I think Richard E. Sprague is pretty much right , first Umbrella man opens his umbrella the coloured man stands in front of him with his hand in the air and umbrella man fires his flechette hitting Kennedy in the throat. Then Kennedy's hands go to his throat and he is quickly parallalized. The radio man passes the message to start shooting. The first shot comes in , it misses but hits the street lamp standard or the tree and fragments, one of the fragment hits Kennedy in the back and one fragment hits Teague in the face along with bits hitting the car chrome strip and windscreen. A second shot comes in and hits Connelly in the chest and Connelly starts screaming "they are going to kill us all". The third shot hits Kennedy in the head as Z313 as he sits stiff and ridged slightly angled but upright in the car. There may have been a 4th shot from the grassy knoll which was a head shot also and a possible 5th shot , the one hit the grass in Dealey Plaza. With a sixth and possible second shot hit on Connelly. Since we now have multiple shooters and Umbrella man the timing of shots is no longer a factor not if they are coming in close together can we determine exactly how many.

Ok but here is my justification's for his theory. First you need to read Richard E. Sprague and his appendages . We have confirmation that such a weapon existed from Col Prouty.

We have the appearance at the congressional hearing of the Umbrella man Mr Witt in 1978 himself showing the alleged umbrella he carried that day , which would be rather odd if he had turned up with the real umbrella and said this is the weapon, so he is an unreliable witness with no evidence chain to this or any umbrella, so to me he is CIA disinformation.

e said he was putting the umbrella up and down as a protest against Joe Kennedy and Jack Kennedy as appeasers with some comment about Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement policies in WW2. Sorry Mr Umbrella man , Mr Chamberlain had died of cancer before America entered WW2 replaced by Churchill in May 1940. Secondly Mr Chamberlin was an alleged appeaser of Germany not the Soviet Union who were our supposed allies, while Jack was being accused of Soviet-Cuban appeasement over the Bay of Pigs I assume. It's also safe to say that in the 30's most middle class people in London wore a bowler hat carried an umbrella and a brief case.

The lack of reaction from Mr Kennedy as his hands fall to his side when Connelly is crying out and being pulled into his wife's arms as Jack is frozen in inaction and falling slightly to the side.

The inability of any theory other than the preposterous "magic bullet theory" to explain the lack of penetration observed with the back wound bullet and the small size of the throat wound would , making it difficult to be an entrance wound and impossible to be an exit wound favours the explanation of the dart theory and a bullet fragment causing the back wound. The inexperienced, doctors under great external pressure would have been looking for a wound with the associated damage that would have been caused by a whole bullet and none would have heard of the Flechette weapon .

The back wound bullet travelling downwards if it did suddenly deflect and exit the throat so cleanly , without significantly damaging the tie is unlikely to hit Connelly also, from its upwards trajectory.

As Mr Holmes would say when you have eliminated the impossible , the magic bullet is one impossible, there was only 3 bullets is the second impossible, another solution to the small non exiting back wound , and the small throat wound is another impossible, that Kennedy would have not thrown himself to the floor of the car after the being hit in the back is another impossible, that Kennedy made not a sound on that day is another impossible, when Connelly is yelling blue murder.

Did the Jews and the CIA do it , we will never know but it surely was not Oswald.

Germanicus , says: November 22, 2019 at 8:55 pm GMT
More on Oliver Stone, taken from the excellent "Final Judgment" by Michael Collins Piper.

THE MOSSAD CONNECTION

David Ben-Gurion – Prime Minister of Israel; resigned his post in disgust with JFK's stance toward Israel. in April of 1963; Said JFK's position threatened Israel's very survival.

Yitzhak Shamir – A long-time Mossad officer (based largely at the Mossad's chief European office in Paris), Shamir headed the Mossad's assassination squad at the time of the JFK assassination. A former French intelligence officer has charged that Shamir himself arranged the hiring of JFK's actual assassins through a close ally in French intelligence.

Menachem Begin – In 1963, Begin (later prime minister of Israel) was a roving Israeli diplomat; prior to JFK's assassination he was overheard conspiring with Meyer Lansky's California henchman, Mickey Cohen, in a conversation that suggested hostile intentions by Israel against the American president.
Luis Kutner – Although known largely as a "mob lawyer," (who was long and closely associated with Jack Ruby, a sometime-client) Kutner also doubled as an international intelligence operative and functioned as an advisor to an ad hoc pro-Israel lobby group in the United States.

A. L. Botnick – Head of the New Orleans office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, an intelligence and propaganda arm for Israel's Mossad; a close associate of New Orleans-based CIA contract operative Guy Banister who helped create Lee Harvey Oswald's preassassination profile as a "pro-Castro" agitator. Evidence suggests that Banister's manipulation of Oswald may have been carried out under the guise of an ADL "fact-finding" operation.
Arnon Milchan – Israel's biggest arms dealer, Milchan was "executive producer" (i.e. chief financial angel) of Oliver Stone's Hollywood fantasy about the JFK assassination-a fact which may explain Stone's aversion to exploring the Israeli connection to the affair.

Maurice Tempeisman – The international diamond merchant and Mossad operative who became the lover of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and used his connections to double-perhaps triple-her substantial fortune, thereby co-opting the Kennedy family forever.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Assassinations_page/Israel%27s_Central_Role_FJ.html

Sparkon , says: November 22, 2019 at 8:59 pm GMT
@NoseytheDuke

It makes sense to me that an order was given to the various independent snipers that Kennedy was to be shot at the precise moment when the presidential limousine drew level with the man holding an open umbrella.

W hy not just use the Stemmons freeway sign, or some other physical landmarks in Dealey Plaza to delineate the kill zone, rather than some doofus with an umbrella who might draw the attention of the authorities, and be hauled in for questioning?

Why would the snipers need a signal to begin shooting anyway, when they themselves could see their target entering the predetermined kill zone? Does the hunter need a signal that this the buck, or a matador a signal that this is the bull? Killing JFK within that kill zone ensured that the patsy could be framed, so there was no need for any signal for the assassins to know when to begin firing. If a signal was really needed, the first shot would have done it.

niteranger , says: November 22, 2019 at 9:06 pm GMT
@Laurent Guyenot I also heard of the supposed invitation of Lindbergh but didn't believe it because I thought it was nonsense. Wow! Former ex military that I have known were also partial to the idea that Israel and the Jewish lobby played a role in his assassination.

Supposedly, Kennedy basically insulted someone from one of the Jewish Groups and they didn't take kindly to it because he was adamant that these groups would register as foreign agents. Fullbright who publicly denounced Israel and their control of the US Congress on National TV and the fact that Kennedy wanted him as Secretary of State must have also riled the Jews. Fullbright was also against the Vietnam War.

If you look at what's happening to Trump right now with this Ukraine nonsense all the witnesses are Jews. From Epstein to Trump and so forth this shows that Israel and the Jews will do anything for control of the world and makes their possible input into the Kennedy's death more plausible.

Prester John , says: November 22, 2019 at 9:18 pm GMT
@follyofwar "Given the decades long national trauma, from which the country has never recovered, it would have been far better if Nixon had won."

There is more than anecdotal evidence to suggest that Nixon SHOULD have won. C.f., "Chicago", "Mayor Daley" etc. If Nixon had won then maybe there wouldn't have been a Watergate. Who knows? And, no, this country never recovered. Indeed, 11/22/1963 was the beginning of the slow, steady unraveling of American society which continues apace.

ChuckOrloski , says: November 22, 2019 at 9:35 pm GMT
The Abraham Zapruder heirs did not need an umbrella, when in 1999, the US government rained down $16 million for the film.

Fyi, according to Dishonest Abe's granddaughter's book, instead of forking over the film to either Dallas cops or FBI, he made a copy and gave the Secret Service custody of the original.

Please reference report, linked below?

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-04-mn-62521-story.html

Ron Unz , says: November 22, 2019 at 10:04 pm GMT
Well, I'll admit I've never looked into this "Umbrella Man" issue, nor have more than glanced over this long comment-thread. But frankly, I'm pretty skeptical of this particular "conspiracy analysis."

It's important to remember the public issues of the early 1960s, especially with regard to JFK. A very large one was that rightwingers widely regarded JFK as "soft on Communism," especially after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Put another way, they accused him of "appeasing the Communists" much like Neville Chamberlain and Joseph Kennedy had been vilified by the MSM for "appeasing Hitler."

So it seems perfectly plausible to me that some Texas rightwinger who felt that way might have gone to the scene displaying an umbrella as a symbol of Munich-style appeasement, though this time towards Communism. Maybe a little eccentric, but that seems vastly more plausible than e.g. the Umbrella guy being a shot-signaler for the JFK snipers. Why would professional snipers need a signaler? And for him to have been working with the assassins in providing some mystical/symbolic attack on JFK seems totally ridiculous.

And for those interested in my own analysis of the JFK Assassination itself, here are the links to a couple of articles I published last year:

Gizmo880 , says: November 22, 2019 at 10:39 pm GMT
There might not be a better introduction to the Kennedy Assassination than this documentary, "The Men Who Killed Kennedy'. I would estimate it's accuracy at around 90%.
Fred Baggins , says: November 22, 2019 at 10:41 pm GMT
Joseph Kennedy was right. The "Jews" did win the war, but they did so along with the US and UK Masonic establishments. It likely all came down to their power through money and influence. Kennedy was a Catholic and after the success of the communist revolution in Russia and the spread throughout the 1920's, the RC Church and nations like Germany were besieged by the movement everywhere. It was mostly spawned by the Anglo Masonic and Zionist cabal which went on to "win" WWII.

Fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany was a direct reaction to the threat of communism. Mussolini in the 1920's nipped it in the bud, but it continued to spread and the source was the same. By the time of the 1932 election in Germany, a number of Germany cities had voted in communist governments. The threat to freedom of religion was very real based on what had happened in Russia. Whether the communist ideology was based on Marx, Lenin or Stalin in that nation, Christians in particular were severely persecuted. When the Christian Democrats in Germany in that election failed to win a majority, coming in third behind the communists and the Nazis, then in many places in the following 1933 election, the churches threw their weight behind Hitler in order to keep the communists from taking over. Like in the US today, it was a matter of the lesser of evils.

When the war ended with Germany, the USSR which had been supplied and supported by the US throughout the war, continued to occupy the eastern European nations with the consent of the US and the UK. These were nations with relatively large Catholic and Protestant populations and the people of those religions were severely persecuted by the communists regimes. (You can read about what they did to Jewish convert and Lutheran pastor, Richard Wurmbrand, in order to get an idea of the severity.) When the US army took possession of Rome in June 1944, in effect it was huge victory over the RC Church for the Masons. At least since 1958 the ame cabal has been extremely influential in determining Church polices, and controlling Church finances, and it is from then on that the Vatican has been used to push the so-called "new world order". From my observations over the years, based on of the various deconstruction polices at work in the Church, it is clear that the Vatican is essentially a Masonic/Zionist instrument. The same forces are presently working to deconstruct out nations for their new order.

The deep state in the US is made up of a number of factions, which are always at each other's throats. Oligarchic families have largely made their initial fortunes outside of the law, or if not then in any case they all believe they are above the law. The "made" Italian, Irish, and Jewish crime families and dons, all throughout North America are controlled by establishment oligarchs and government agencies. Vices are legalised mainly for profit and to give more legitimacy to the money flows. Huge power struggles go on behind the scenes where despite the information on the independent internet we know little about. The entire system is rotten to the core.

Iris , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:00 pm GMT
@Laurent Guyenot

a declaration [..] that had the effect of connecting in the public psyche JFK's public assassination [..] to Jewish vengeance?

Thanks for yet another first-class article, and thanks even more for bringing up President Kennedy's memory on the day anniversary of his cruel and untimely passing.

It is very credible that the Chamberlain symbol story was retrospectively deliberately devised to taunt and threaten the Kennedy family and their supporters, and remind them of Jewish vengeance.

But "Umbrella Man" cannot be dissociated from another suspicious character, "Signal Man", also called "Dark Complected Man", who was standing close to him at all times and was filmed raising his arm while the presidential limousine was approaching.

In Frame 226 of the Zapruder Film, the arm of Dark Complected Man can be seen up with its fist closed, which in military hand signs means "hold" or "stop".

There were many testimonies that JFK's limousine came to a total halt for many seconds for the final, murderous headshots; his driver was part of the conspiracy.

What is even more unbelievable and strikingly odd is "Umbrella Man" and "Dark Complected Man" sat next to each other, on the curb, seconds after the shooting, while everybody else is taking shelter from the shooter at the Grassy Knoll.

Of course, these were not gay lovers comforting each other, but two perpetrators probably sharing the same walkie-talkie. A walkie-talkie whose shape could be guessed in the right hand of "Dark Complected Man":

refl , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:09 pm GMT
@Jefferson Temple To the question why US government agents would facilitate the cover up, you find the straight answer in Michael Collins Pipers book. They had themselves organized their own action, likely a fake assassination attempt to be blamed on Cuba (that would have been Oswalds part), and they had seriously let down the defenses of the president when the assassination went real.

Many people had to be afraid of being held to account, so the necessary officials to order the cover up were easily persuaded. Also note, that Johnson was certainly in on the plot. He would order any serious investigation to be derailed.

Daniel Rich , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:21 pm GMT
@Sparkon

Why not just use the Stemmons freeway sign, or some other physical landmarks in Dealey Plaza to delineate the kill zone, rather than some doofus with an umbrella who might draw the attention of the authorities, and be hauled in for questioning?

A marksman doesn't operate alone. He's assisted by a spotter and [when needed, in combat situations. fe] a 3rd man for general protection. So, we have at least two, 2-men teams [at a minimum]. 1 team [of 2 men] was spotted on the Grassy Knoll, behind a picket fence, and at the spot the bullet had to be fired from, to make JFK's head slam back and to the left.

Then triangulate the target and fire.

Am not saying umbrella man did give a signal, but logically, the opening of fire had to be synchronized to have maximum effect.

The driver not hitting the pedal to the metal when the first shot/s rang out remains a mystery to me, because the man actually slows down the limo and then JFK's brain is blown to smithereens.

NoseytheDuke , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:26 pm GMT
@Sparkon Good questions. I would suggest that there were multiple shooters in multiple locations and all were completely unaware of each other.

Why not just use the Stemmons freeway sign, or some other physical landmarks in Dealey Plaza to delineate the kill zone, rather than some doofus with an umbrella who might draw the attention of the authorities, and be hauled in for questioning?

Using the freeway sign or any other fixed and inanimate object would mean that each shooter would have to be contacted separately should the hit need to be called off for any reason. That person would thus know far too much and pose a high risk of exposing the plotters if caught. The stakes were high indeed!

The umbrella man would know nothing more than where to stand and when to open his umbrella so that him being called in for questioning would reveal nothing.

Killing JFK within that kill zone ensured that the patsy could be framed, so there was no need for any signal for the assassins to know when to begin firing.

As I stated, the justification for attempting to synchronise the shots is so that they can all be blamed on just one "crazed" patsy later.

If a signal was really needed, the first shot would have done it.

Snipers need plenty of time and the exact range to take the kill shot.

Iris , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:29 pm GMT
@NoseytheDuke

It makes sense to me that an order was given to the various independent snipers that Kennedy was to be shot at the precise moment when the presidential limousine drew level with the man holding an open umbrella,

Completely agree, dear Nosey, with just a quibble. The men who shot President Kennedy were hired guns, hit men from the Chicago mob. Their job was, always is, to shoot the "target" in the head.

There was at least 3 of them in action, positioned to create a triangulated crossfire.

However, the intention was from the onset to blame it on the patsy Oswald, so it was very important that the headshot to JFK was taken from behind. The best shooter was positioned behind the limousine, in the Dal-Tex building, and was in charge with taking the head shot.

When he failed to hit President Kennedy at the head, Plan B was put in action and a headshot taken from the Grassy Knoll.

So the presence of Umbrella Man and Dark Complected Man next to the limit where a successful headshot from behind becomes unlikely is very easy to understand:

– Umbrella Man is close from the limousine. He sees that the President's head is intact and opens his umbrella to tell the Grassy Knoll sniper to shoot.

– His accomplice , Dark Complected Man, raises his arm with a closed fist, a military sign telling JFK/s driver to stop the limousine to facilitate the execution. This stop of many seconds was recounted by the witnesses present.

It is so simple and logical. People just don't want to accept the idea because it implies that there was a vast conspiracy with a large number of people involved.

refl , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:34 pm GMT
@lysias

The movie is a limited hangout made to ensure that those who cannot swallow the obvious lies of the Warren Commission will direct their anger otherwise than at Israel.

That observation is just as valid for the largest part of the yearly anniversary articles on the Kennedy assasination: Take the time and scan the articles on your favorite sites, how many of them only just mention Voldemort country in that context. If only just to refute the idea or to proclaim that only sickos believe it. It cannot have past by the numerous authors over the years that that theory at least exists.

Instead, you are treated to a steady stream of philosophizing on the deep state, Vietnam, the CIA and the like. Take note and evaluate your reading matter.

PeterMX , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:36 pm GMT
@Ron Unz I remember my father made a comment long after JFK's asssassination in which he felt JFK was soft on communism. He also felt Khruschev was a tougher and smarter negotiator. It was only a few sentences, but not everyone loved JFK. But being German, I think he might have had a soft spot for JFK, if we knew then what we know now, with his diaries published. Of course, today's Germans no longer think like that. I do not recall any discussion of JFK's father's views on WW II. That was kept quiet and the media did not make it a public issue. Those were pre "Holocaust Industry" days in which according to Norman Finkelstein, Jews became bolder and [even] more outspoken with Israel being perceived as a valuable ally after winning the 1967 war. This, according to Finkelstein.

I recall JFK being very popular, well liked and people thought "Jackie" was beautiful and thought they had a beautiful family. I think they were also perceived as having "class", probably because that is what the media said. I think it was after his assassination that the knowledge of his extramarital affairs (and Bobby's too) became public and then Jackie married the Greek multi-millionaire Onassis. For my mother, that took all the class out of Jackie that the media always had said she had. I think they were very popular with the media. By contrast, JFK's opponent in the 1960 election was Richard Nixon, not as good looking as JFK, remembered for his tough stance on communism and that probably made him more popular with the right and less popular with the media and the left.

It would be interesting how this would play out if JFK was still alive and his diaries became public while he was alive. I have a feeling he may have been tougher than people like my father perceived him to be and maybe he just held the views he had, but maybe not out of any weakness.

Jake , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:42 pm GMT
The Kennedys were knocked off with major input from Zionists. I think that almost certainly includes John Jr (if that were an accident and had been avoided, and John John had failed to get 100% behind both Liberal and Neocon Jews, then they would have killed him). But true Blue WASPs on both sides if the Atlantic also wanted the Kennedys destroyed. And the WASP hatred of Irish Catholics has been what has been most used, and used most effectively, in leading non-Catholic white Middle Americans away from recognizing the Kennedys as the most important murder victims in the march of the Deep State to make serfs of us all.

It all goes back to the Judaizing heresy Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, most specifically to archetypal WASP Oliver Cromwell's direct deal with Jews, opening England to be directed, and eventually owned, by Jewish bankers. There has been a Brit WASP Deep State since at least the Restoration of the monarchy, and it revealed its total power no later than the 'Glorious Revolution.' And the Brit WASP Deep State then was tied inextricably to Jewish bankers.

It is almost as if you either must play nice and fair, respectfully and equally, with Celts and white Catholics or else get made a serf by a Jewish-owned WASP Deep State.

Bardon Kaldian , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:43 pm GMT
Not convincing.

Of course, I know the speculation it was Israelis who were behind it (Dimona), but I don't find it persuasive. There are other means to avoid US inspection, and Kennedy was not adamant about it at all. These are things politicians toy with all the time, and while not a "friend" of Israel, Kennedy was not an enemy -- one could consider Eisenhower, if we judge him by his actions during Suez canal crisis- to be an "enemy" of Israel (of course this too is simplistic, politics is a rough business).

To illustrate the "rough" side of politics, let's see the following. Let's see Henry Kissinger, with his publicly suppressed answer to Nixon re Soviet Jews:

Just- they deleted Kissinger's original statement, which can be seen in this leftist guy's clip (comedienne Sarah Silverman reads Kissinger's words, at 2:06):

"The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."

Maybe..maaaybe maaaybe. ..

This remark can be read only in the papers, because "it was taken out of context.

Taken "out of context"? I say:

So, it can be read only in 2-3 places, and not seen in a video

https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/Kissinger-urges-gas-chamber-remark-be-taken-in-context

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/8227173/Henry-Kissinger-apologises-for-gas-chamber-comment.html

What Kissinger has got to do with JFK?

Nothing, I just wanted to point that media manipulations have no limits; that American Jews are not nearly as monolithic; that one should be aware that talk or statements are not something too reliable; that one can construct from scratches a huge conspiracy.

Who says that Witt was actually the "umbrella man"? Why was he identified only 15 years after the event? And even if he was that man- what kind of silly gesture would it be, because who in his right mind would think that JFK would have noticed anyone in this situation & mentally process this like: umbrella > Chamberlain > my dad > huh, I'm guilty .

JFK had, I think, a Jewish mistress whom he intended to marry (prior to his marriage) & was dissuaded by his family; he was not anti-Jewish; Israel, as virtually all American Jews, was horrified by his assassination, which can be seen from Golda Meir's behavior (she seems to have thought that JFK assassination was a right-wing coup):

https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-golda-meir-had-doubts-on-kennedy-death-1.5292291

Anyway, tallying coincidences one can construct incredibly absurd theories:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coincidences_urban_legend

Lincoln–Kennedy coincidences urban legend

These coincidences leave anything Jewish in the JFK case (Witt?; Zapruder, Ruby) in the dust.

Having that in mind, I am not persuaded.

Jake , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:48 pm GMT
@Iris "People just don't want to accept the idea because it implies that there was a vast conspiracy with a large number of people involved."

The primary reason for that is for such a large conspiracy to be tried, much of the WASP establishment had to have been on board, and most of the rest had to have been known to being the type easily coerced afterwards to remain silent.

It took WASPs and Zionists to plan it and execute and cover it up, and then spread endless propaganda, including playing hard on WASP hatreds of Irish Catholics to keep culturally conservative and/or anti-imperialist Protestant Middle Americans from looking at the evidence of cover up.

PeterMX , says: November 22, 2019 at 11:56 pm GMT
@Fred Baggins I suspect that it was Jewish influence which made the capitalists and communists alllies. They played a leading role in the USSR, Great Britain and the USA, and they are the only ones that could see the benefit of these otherwise ideological enemies being allies. Except for the USA (separated from the fighting by two oceans), no one else benefitted from WW II. If Winston Churchill had been more concerned about his beloved empire than his own reputation and had not accepted bribes from wealthy Jews when he was in financial need, Europe and Great Britain would still be great. They would still lead the world. And Jews would have a fraction of the power they have today. Yes, Jews won that war and were its major beneficiaries, despite being told the direct opposite. They made it into a world war and they brought the suffering to all Europe, but particularly to their German enemy, and themselves.
9/11 Inside job , says: November 23, 2019 at 12:15 am GMT
@Emblematic Robert David Steele's Blog review of " Tavistock Institute : Social Engineering the masses " by Daniel Estulin – "The deep state playbook " :
"Although I have read and heard over the years of CIA and KGB Freemasons collaborating in betrayal of their countries and organizations by order of the Freemasons we have to deal with the fact that the President and everyone of consequence in Congress , Justice and the FBI is a high ranking Freemason . "

"Sir Knight Earl Warren " By Sir Knight Dr. Ivan M. Tribe (Knightstemplar.org ):
"In 1938 he( Earl Warren ) served as Master of Rose Croix and in 1945 presiding office of the Lodge of Perfection . By that time he had already been coroneted with the 33rd degree "

Gerald McKnight " Breach of Trust : How the Warren Commission failed the Nation and Why " :
"The records of the Commission disclose that the commission's pre-structured task was to support the FBI's conclusions : Oswald was the assassin and that he acted alone ."

utu , says: November 23, 2019 at 12:15 am GMT
@PeterMX " and then Jackie married the Greek multi-millionaire Onassis " – The then was after RFK's assassination:

"If they're killing Kennedys, then my children are targets I want to get out of this country"

So the deal was to offer some safety but you are correct that her marriage to Onassiss "took all the class out of Jackie that the media always had said she had." But this was the price which the forces that pushed her in this direction wanted her to pay to diminish and tarnish the legend of JFK. The safety was not coming form the wealth of Onassis but from the tarnished image and marginalization by marrying the rich Greek creep.

Iris , says: November 23, 2019 at 12:28 am GMT
@Jake

The primary reason for that is for such a large conspiracy to be tried, much of the WASP establishment had to have been on board

It was much simpler than that: JFK's assassination was a criminal Zionist conspiracy within a more benign WASP conspiracy.

A secret mission was organised by the loyal Security apparatus to abort an assassination attempt against President Kennedy at Dallas.

The abort mission would have resulted in unmasking and arresting criminal elements within the establishment. Oswald the patsy was part of the abort mission, as was Agent Bouck, the head of the WH Secret Service. And Robert Kennedy was involved too.

But more powerful parties within the Zionist Deep State were at play: they took control of the situation and turned it into a real assassination, killing two birds with one stone:

– They executed the independent and principled President who stood up to them.
– They compromised the WASP establishment, including RFK, with the murky and failed abort mission that was turned into a real assassination, making their responsibility undistinguishable.

It is very, very simple. Truth always is.

utu , says: November 23, 2019 at 12:28 am GMT
@Bardon Kaldian " and Kennedy was not adamant about it at all " – No, he was adamant to the point that Ben-Gurion stepped down.

When Ben-Gurion said no to JFK
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/When-Ben-Gurion-said-no-to-JFK

Finally, Kennedy had enough, and in a personal letter dated May 18, 1963, the president warned that unless American inspectors were allowed into Dimona (meaning the end of any military activities), Israel would find itself totally isolated. Rather than answering, Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned.

Ben-Gurion's successor, Levi Eshkol received Kennedy's next letter, which upped the pressure, warning that the American commitment and support of Israel "could be seriously jeopardized."

Read the letters. Some of them are here:

The Battle of the Letters, 1963: John F. Kennedy, David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, and the U.S. Inspections of Dimona
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2019-05-02/battle-letters-1963-john-f-kennedy-david-ben-gurion-levi-eshkol-us-inspections-dimona

And then there was RFK as Attorney General demanding Israel lobbyist to be registered as foreign lobbyist and how it was undone after RFK was forced to resign by LBJ year or so later after JFK assassination.

http://www.israellobby.org/azcdoj/
"Judge Rifkind then made a plea for no registration, stating it was the opinion of most of the persons affiliated with the Council that such registration would be so publicized by the American Council on Judaism that it would eventually destroy the Zionist movement he did not believe his clients would file any papers or sign any papers indicating that the organization was an agent of a foreign principal. I told him that any such information or material that is supplied on that basis would be made part of the Department's public files available for inspection by the public "

In DOJ internal memo on 4/30/1964 before replacing RFK as AG with Nicholas Katzenbach the following was stated: "This is the most blatant stall we have encountered. Do you mind suggesting what we do next because all of us here would call their records before a grand jury." RFK resigns as AG in September 1964. When Katzenbach became acting AG and then AG exchanges between Jewish lobby and DOJ continued but no action was taken by DOJ. Eventually on n 11/27/1967, four years and five days after JFK's death AIPAC applies for a federal tax exemption. The lobby has won.

roonaldo , says: November 23, 2019 at 12:39 am GMT
The Warren Commission hogwash was almost as ridiculous as the official 911 nonsense, and Mark Lane's 1966 book "Rush to Judgment" helped fuel broad public disbelief in the official story.

Talk about quid pro quo to the nth degree, as that hideous snake LBJ gave the MIC and its financiers their wars, etc., in exchange for the Presidency and for keeping his sorry ass out of jail for the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker scandals. Sure, the Israelis benefitted, and were likely a cog in the conspiratorial wheel, but the CIA, Secret Service, and various military agents were the movers and shakers, with LBJ their guarantor.

Much of the conspiratorial framework is exposed in David Lifton's absolutely must-read book "Best Evidence" which clearly shows that the body was altered before autopsy in an attempt to make the physical evidence conform to the Oswald-as-shooter narrative. The conspirators left a wide trail of evidence that only the highest-level actors could suppress, as in the 911 crimes.

refl , says: November 23, 2019 at 12:45 am GMT
@Iris

There were many testimonies that JFK's limousine came to a total halt for many seconds for the final, murderous headshots

There is another film of the assasination, taken from the distance across the Plaza (maybe, someone can link it? It must have been in the comment section of some earlier article). That film clearly shows, how the police motorcycles continue while the limosine falls back and nearly comes to a hold. If the driver had done his job he would have speeded of at the first second of realizing something was going on. These people are trained for nothing else but exactly such situations. The driver and several other people around the president must have been in on the plot to varying degrees.

Comparing that film with the Zapruder film also shows that the Zapruder film was severly tempered with before release – anyone believes that Oliver Stone and his team as Hollywood professionals who based their plot on that film didn't realize that?

supergoy , says: November 23, 2019 at 12:51 am GMT
In Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, he mentions that when LBJ was running against Kennedy for the Democrat nomination in 1960 he attacked Kennedy for his father's appeasement, saying "I was never a Chamberlain umbrella man."
supergoy , says: November 23, 2019 at 12:57 am GMT

Weakness, Johnson had seen in three decades in Washington, was never rewarded. When he said of Vietnam, "We're not going to have any men with any umbrellas," a pointed reference to the hapless Chamberlain, the message was clear: America would stand up to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong in a way that Chamberlain had not stood up to Hitler and the Nazi regime.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/opinion/lyndon-johnsons-vietnam.html

CanSpeccy , says: Website November 23, 2019 at 1:00 am GMT
@Ron Unz

So it seems perfectly plausible to me that some Texas rightwinger who felt that way might have gone to the scene displaying an umbrella as a symbol of Munich-style appeasement, though this time towards Communism.

The whole appeasement thing is bunk. Chamberlain surely didn't give a damn about appeasing Hitler, except as a manipulative stratagem. But for Britain, in the late thirties, going to war with Germany would have been insane. Britain had at most four, and possibly only two, deployable army divisions versus Germany's 40 plus. The threat posed by a rapidly rearming and aggressive Germany was thus best dealt with by bringing Germany into confrontation with Russia.

By sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Germany, Chamberlain greatly added to Hitler's military resources, which were then far smaller than Russia's.

Encouraging Polish obduracy in the matter of Danzig, brought German forces directly to the Russian frontier. Then it was a matter of waiting for these old adversaries to clash in accordance with the plan von Ribbentrop had shown Winston Churchill during a visit to England in 1937. (Asked by Ribbentrop what he thought of the plan for German Eastward expansion, Churchill is said to have replied "We don't like the Russians, but we don't hate them that much.")

Meantime, the British economy had been placed on a war footing, and was turning out more military aircraft than Germany.

Once the struggle between Germany and Russia had begun, Britain's only major concerns were to protect her overseas possession, particularly the ME oil fields, which she did successfully, and to prepare a backstop with massive American participation (Operation Overlord), on the Western front for the time when a greatly weakened victor of the Russso-German conflict was in a position to turn West with a view to crushing Britain and achieving a trans-European empire.

Anonymous [358] Disclaimer , says: November 23, 2019 at 1:22 am GMT
This is the original version. It' s actually 9 plus hours. This is cut to 4hours 33 minutes. Sometime during the past two years this doc has been cut and revised – and loaded back onto YT with unoriginal content.
Iris , says: November 23, 2019 at 1:22 am GMT

I find it hard to explain that this is the same Josiah Thompson who published in 1967 a book titled Six Seconds in Dallas: a micro-study of the Kennedy assassination proving that three gunmen murdered the President, for which he studied the Zapruder film and interviewed eyewitnesses in order to come up with a plausible line of fire, and the conclusion of a conspiracy and government cover-up. What happened to Josiah in between?

This is a great remark within an already so rich article; it introduces the concept of "Controlled Conspiracy Theory".

At the time (1967) Josiah Thompson published his book, much courageous research on the JFK cover-up had been produced, of which the most perilous for the perpetrators was the legal crusade undertaken by New-Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.

Thompson's book concluded that the hit men were at the Texas School Book Depository, Dallas County Record and Grassy Knoll.

Of all possible places, he managed to exonerate the DalTex Building, a building entirely owned and run by the Dallas Zionist community, in which Zapruder had his offices.

The DalTex Building had the best, shortest and most direct line of fire to JFK's limousine; it was the principal "sniper nest" of the conspiracy.

The concept of "Controlled Conspiracy Theory" nicely applies to Mr Josiah Thompson.

lysias , says: November 23, 2019 at 1:23 am GMT
@refl The driver of JFK's limousine was William Greer, a Protestant from Ulster who in his youth in Northern Ireland had been a member of the Orange Order. One of the other two drivers in the presidential detail had died of an untimely heart attack shortly before Dallas.
refl , says: November 23, 2019 at 1:33 am GMT
@Bardon Kaldian

Israel, as virtually all American Jews, was horrified by his assassination, which can be seen from Golda Meir's behavior

Why shouldn't they? I am sure that a significant section of American and Israeli Jews are horrified by the every day action of the IDF. They were horrified by the assassination of Yitzak Rabin. It must be horrifying to be tied to maniacal leadership, who will sacrifice you any time in the name of the fulfillment of their sick plan. So if you are a good Christian or Muslim, Buddhist, Pastafari or whatever, pray for these poor fellows.

geokat62 , says: November 23, 2019 at 1:43 am GMT
Like any good gumshoe worth his salt, the first question he asks himself after arriving at the crime scene is Cui bono, who benefits? In the case of the JFK assassination, there was clearly one very large beneficiary that stood out above the rest, Israel. By Nov 1963, JFK had two big strikes against him:

1. In 1963 President Kennedy demanded that Ben-Gurion end Israel's nuclear deterrent program. Kennedy warned in a letter dated May 18, 1963, that unless American inspectors were allowed into Israel's Dimona facility, Israel would find itself totally isolated. "We are concerned with the disturbing effects on world stability which would accompany the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel It is because of our preoccupation with this problem that my Government has sought to arrange with you for periodic visits to Dimona." As it turned out, his following reassurance fell on deaf ears "As I made clear in my press conference of May 8, we have a deep commitment to the security of Israel."

2. In 1963 President Kennedy demanded that the American Zionist Council register under FARA as a foreign agent. In a letter dated October 17, 1963 (one month before JFK's assassination), Judge Rifkind (a representative of the AZC), responded to the Kennedy Administration's demand: " it was the opinion of most of the persons affiliated with the Council that such registration would be so publicized by the American Council on Judaism that it would eventually destroy the Zionist movement. "

Along with the quote by AZC Representative Judge Rifkind, here is the infamous quote by Jack Ruby's (born Jacob Rubinstein) rabbi, Hillel Silverman:

"I was shocked," said Silverman. "I visited him the next day in jail, and I said, 'Why, Jack, why?' He said, 'I did it for the American people.'"

I interrupted Silverman, pointing out that other reports had Ruby saying he did it "to show that Jews had guts." The rabbi sighed.

"Yes, he mentioned that," Silverman said. "But I don't like to mention it. I think he said, 'I did it for the Jewish people.' But I've tried to wipe that statement from my mind."

https://forward.com/news/187793/lee-harvey-oswalds-killer-jack-ruby-came-from-stro/

utu , says: November 23, 2019 at 2:00 am GMT
@CanSpeccy "If Israel assassinated JFK, who assassinated RFK and John, Jr.?" – That Israel did them would be a very conservative conclusion, don't you think?

Picking Sirhan Sirhan as a Palestinian patsy who was upset with RFK's alleged love for Israel was a master stroke. JFK Jr. who can't stop himself from beating around the bush of the topics of assassinations like picking Woody Harrelson (*) for the December 1996 cover of his magazine or then digging into Yitzach Rabin conspiracy and then rumors that he will run for Senate

(*) Charles Voyde Harrelson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Harrelson ,

Joseph Chagra later testified during Harrelson's trial that Harrelson claimed to have shot Kennedy and drew maps to show where he was hiding during the assassination. Chagra said that he did not believe Harrelson's claim, and the AP reported that the FBI "apparently discounted any involvement by Harrelson in the Kennedy assassination."[25] According to Jim Marrs in 1989's Crossfire, Harrelson is believed to be the youngest and tallest of the "three tramps" by many conspiracy theorists.[22] Marrs stated that Harrelson was involved "with criminals connected to intelligence agencies and the military" and suggested that he was connected to Jack Ruby through Russell Douglas Matthews, a third party with links to organized crime who was known to both Harrelson and Ruby.[23] Lois Gibson, a well-known forensic artist, matched photographs of Harrelson to the photographs of the youngest-looking of the three "tramps".

Twodees Partain , says: November 23, 2019 at 2:25 am GMT
@follyofwar

"Mr. Trump has been prevented from releasing the rest of the "top secret" files, in spite of his promise to do so." IIRC, it was Trump doing all of the preventing.

Justvisiting , says: November 23, 2019 at 2:35 am GMT
@Jefferson Temple

This "Israel did it" theory doesn't quite answer the question of how physical evidence was destroyed and eyewitnesses intimidated by agents of the US government.

This has been discussed in depth here in this case and the 911 case. The Mossad and the CIA were part of the same "team"–the CIA handled and continues to handle the ongoing domestic coverup operations as needed (including Mockingbird mass media activities).

Justvisiting , says: November 23, 2019 at 2:42 am GMT
@RouterAl

Connelly is a _very_ interesting figure, and his background prior to the day of the assassination is not very well understood. I was stunned to read that he was a key actor in the Korean War "setup":

https://read.amazon.com/kp/card?preview=inline&linkCode=kpd&ref_=k4w_oembed_xK4R6hwlAJc7s5&asin=B00N2CLTH6&tag=kpembed-20

He later became a key figure in the Nixon administration. Was Connelly a conspirator or a victim on the day of the assassination?

CanSpeccy , says: Website November 23, 2019 at 3:26 am GMT
@lysias

Isn't it significant that the patsy set up to take the blame for the RFK assassination was a Palestinian?

If the CIA did it, they would naturally have arranged to put the blame elsewhere. Is that not why Sirhan Sirhan remains incarcerated to this day. Given freedom, the fall guy might give the CIA a headache.

Remember, Kennedy had just buggered up the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and was threatening to pull out of the CIA's war in Vietnam. With a nod from LBJ the CIA could kill Kennedy and be sure of top-down cover from the moment Kennedy's heart stopped beating, cover which, according to the doctors who attended on Kennedy at Parklands Hospital, was promptly given.

Then there's the deathbed confession of CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, which provides a tenuous connection with Richard Nixon, who hired Hunt and Frank Sturgis (both believed to have been among the tramps arrested in Dealey Plaza in the immediate aftermath of the assassination) to. among other things, burglarize the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Building in Washington, DC.

Then there's the role of Gerry Ford, Warren Commission re-write man, and immediate successor to Nixon as President, which raises the question: did Gerry Ford blackmailed Nixon into resignation over collusion in the JFK assassination ?

Skeptikal , says: November 23, 2019 at 3:58 am GMT
@ChuckOrloski

That's Mary Pinchot Meyer. Wife of Cord Meyer, of the CIA. Sister-in-law of Ben Bradlee. Lover of JFK, to whom he confided his vision for major peaceful change in the US of A and the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Pinchot_Meyer

renfro , says: November 23, 2019 at 5:45 am GMT
@Bardon Kaldian RE: Kissinger

Kissinger made himself quit clear more than once about Jewish influence in US policy. Kissinger was more German than Jew he had the typical 'Germanic manner ' . German Jews in general were more assimilated than the less educated and more tribal Jews of Poland, Hungary, etc.. If you look up the origins of the Fifth Column Jews in the Us most of them came thru Poland , where militant Zionism had a stronghold way before WWII.

Kissinger .

""If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be anti-Semitic," he once quipped, and "any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong."

Another time, he told a friend, "I was born Jewish, but the truth is that has no significance for me. America has given me everything."

On Israel .

"On the other hand, we can not make our policy hostage to the Israelis, because our interests, while parallel in respect to that I have outlined, are not identical in overall terms. From an Israeli point of view, it is no disaster to have the whole Arab world radicalized and anti-American, because this guarantees our continued support. From an American point of view this is a disaster."

Jewish disloyalty

Kissinger also went as far as accusing American Jews of behaving traitorously for supporting the Jackson-Vanik Amendment that ruined his and Nixon's effort on a détente agreement with Russia.

Duke84 , says: November 23, 2019 at 10:42 am GMT
@AceDeuce J.Edgar Hoover was in Washington D.C. on November 22,1963.
ChuckOrloski , says: November 23, 2019 at 1:16 pm GMT
@Skeptikal Yes, Skeptical, and 'thanks" for the reiteration as to who and what was the murdered Mary Pinchot Meyer.

I trust Laurent Guyenot knows about Mary's intense love affair with President JFK, and after his barbaric & election overturning murder, how she knew about CIA's Counterintelligence & Israel friendly, James Jesus Angleton's, passion for Jack's last nightmatish ride on Elm Street.

P.S.: Mary's remains rest in her great-grandfather, Gifford Pinchot's, Milford, Pa-based estate, which I have visited. Fyi, it's a tourist spot now where her historical relationship with President JFK is unspoken.

Sparkon , says: November 23, 2019 at 1:41 pm GMT
@Lurker

What if it were raining and there were numerous people with umbrellas?

P recisely.

Despite all the special pleading going on here by people who've read too many men's adventure novels, or watched too many episodes of "Charlie's Angels," this Rube Goldbergian umbrella signalling scheme would never get off the ground. It is a unnecessary complication with built-in failure modes.

The go-ahead for the operation was likely given the night before. The die was cast. There was no turning back, and why would they?

If it had kept raining in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, would it have changed history? Several books and articles have pondered this question. President John F Kennedy greeted a crowd on a misty morning rain in Fort Worth at 8:45 a.m. central standard time. The weather in Dallas had been rainy, but the sun came out before the president's plane had landed.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/weather/bs-md-weatherpage-1123-20131122-story.html

gkruz , says: November 23, 2019 at 1:57 pm GMT
@Sean Some liberal simp just had to get a fawning reference to his pets in here no matter how irrelevant. Dey be so much wisers than us dwight folks
gkruz , says: November 23, 2019 at 2:20 pm GMT
@Pheasant The donation could have been sincere, or it could have been a gesture to make them seem concerned patriots, or it could have been money laundering a payoff to certain members of the Dallas PD for their silence in the operation. Who knows? I never take any Jewish action at face value.
Hibernian , says: November 23, 2019 at 2:35 pm GMT
@Stonehands Right. I only bought the official story at the time and for a few years after, as a very young kid, but the idea of Oswald as nothing but a patsy never appealed to me.
Sean , says: November 23, 2019 at 3:04 pm GMT
@Duke84 I try to avoid the self-certainty that seems to be a bias in the reasoning behind the LHO didn't do it because he couldn't crowd. On paper the odds against him succeeding increased with every miss and chance for the agents and cops to fire at him and/or the limo driver to swerve and accelerate. An important point is the chance for him to get away would decline precipitously too. By my way of thinking the most important factor would have been single mindedness. He would have had to have been committed to succeed irrespective of the consequences.

We don't know Oswald had no help of encouragement, he may have been talking to Cubans and Soviets about his intentions and they maybe just listened which he may have interpreted them as having approved. The fact he was talking to the Cubans and KGB was considered worth keeping secret for several decades, and there is supposed to be more along the same lines that has still not been declassified.

Even with a miss or two, hitting a moving head from 265 feet would have been workmanlike marksmanship. In the circumstances that he might have been spotted and shot at any second it was nicely done, but it might have been a fluke. On the other hand the limo was following a straight track, the driver seems to have brought it to a near halt before the head shot, and Kennedy was quite exposed. It would depend on the determination of the shooter not just his skill, but the circumstances and enormity of killing a president are so unique, plus getting out the area would be so uncertain that it would require someone of formidable resolution.

My feeling is a professional would not even try, and he would understand he'd know too much afterwards anyway. A loner would not have that problem. Oswald fits the profile better than any CIA agent I think. For the shooting, you cannot exclude that he may have just got lucky. Whoever did it, they were risking a lot so it would have to be tremendously meaningful to them.

Oswald seemed such a insignificant person to kill the great man that contingency was ruled out. I think Oswald the CIA agent who agreed to go to Russia on a fake defector mission for the agency with no way of knowing what would happen to him, would have been an insanely extreme patriot. Such an Oswald might be willing to do anything he was ordered to I suppose. The trouble is Oswald seems to have been anti establishment right back into his teens. He was an immature 17 year old when he joined the Marines, and though he toughened up considerably they evidence of him ever being an anti communist fanatic is just lacking.

Here is a 60 year old man at 230 yards with a .45 pistol.

... ... ..

Johnny Walker Read , says: November 23, 2019 at 3:08 pm GMT
@Ted Heath Once again, let's try to put the "Kennedy wanted to end the FED" myth to bed.

President Kennedy was not assassinated for being anti-Fed. I don't know how much more clearly that can be said. His death on November 22nd, 1963 was a sad tragedy, but it had nothing to do with any stupid and baseless Executive Order silver certificate conspiracy.

The claim is not borne out by the facts. First, E.O. 11110 had nothing to do with United States Notes, and did not affect any section of law referring to them. Second, E.O. 11110 did not anywhere mention any quantity of money; wherever the $4 billion-plus figure came from, it was not E.O. 11110. Third, The President had no authority to issue such an edict. Even utilizing the provisions of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, the most the President could issue without statutory authorization was $3 billion.

What E.O. 11110 did was to modify previous Executive Order 10289, delegating to the Secretary of the Treasury various powers of the President. To these delegated powers, E.O. 11110 added the power to alter the supply of Silver Certificates in circulation. Executive Order 11110, therefore, did not create any new authority for the Treasury to issue notes; it only affected who could give the order, the Secretary or the President.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jfk-not-killed-in-fed-con_b_4287519?guccounter=1

Agent76 , says: November 23, 2019 at 3:26 pm GMT
Be sure and dive into all of the data supporting link's located at the bottom of this web page. November 23, 2019 JFK, MLK, RFK, 50 Years of Suppressed History: New Evidence on Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Failures to Confront the Unspeakable, and The Way Ahead. Part I

Today November 22, 2019, we commemorate the passing of JFK. November 22, 1963, the assassination of JFK in Dallas, Texas. Fifty-six years ago. January 21, 2019. Martin Luther King Day

https://www.globalresearch.ca/50-years-of-suppressed-history-new-evidence-on-the-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy-martin-luther-king-and-robert-f-kennedy/5329847

Johnny Walker Read , says: November 23, 2019 at 3:26 pm GMT
@Iris

What is even more unbelievable and strikingly odd is "Umbrella Man" and "Dark Complected Man" sat next to each other, on the curb, seconds after the shooting, while everybody else is taking shelter from the shooter at the Grassy Knoll.

Questions concerning 3rd photo from the top: Why are the two camera men in this photo filming the couple on the ground, who themselves are looking directly at the camera men? Why is no one ducking and running for cover, for as many as 8 shots were supposedly just fired? Why is Abraham Zapruder missing from his lofty post, which he was said to be filming from at that precise moment?

9/11 Inside job , says: November 23, 2019 at 4:40 pm GMT
JFK "signed" his death warrant as soon as he selected LBJ as his running mate . LBJ was ruthless and likely murdered his way to his leadership role in Congress . Johnson was determined to become President and it is reported that his fixer , Bobby Baker , at Kennedy's inauguration turned to an associate and stated that Kennedy would never complete his term of office .

LBJ was determined to have Earl Warren (33rd degree Freemason )lead the commission to investigate Kennedy's assassination .

Warren refused LBJ 's requests several times and finally agreed to do so . LBJ recounted to his mentor Senator Richard Russell how he summoned Warren to the Oval Office and informed him of " what Hoover had told him about a little incident in Mexico City " whereupon Warren began to cry and told LBJ " I won't turn you down , I'll just do whatever you say ." Excerpted from History Matters Archive -LBJ-Russell .

What did Hoover have on Earl Warren ?

Jack Fortin , says: November 23, 2019 at 4:44 pm GMT
@Germanicus You are making my point. Taking away the presumption of innocence has resulted in the holocaust narrative and many other crimes against individuals and civilized societies.
Iris , says: November 23, 2019 at 4:55 pm GMT
@NobodyKnowsImADog

If you read Laurent's book "Yahweh to Zion" you'll see he's under no illusions about whether he's real or not. It's likely the most thorough dissection of the sect you'll ever come across.

Indeed. Laurent Guyenot is an outstanding intellectual. It is a immense privilege to read his works, and the UR is doing an equally great favour to its readers by publishing him. Thanks to all, including the commentators, for the fascinating discussion.

Laurent Guyenot , says: November 23, 2019 at 5:23 pm GMT
@ChuckOrloski

I trust Laurent Guyenot knows about Mary's intense love affair with President JFK

I do, a really moving story. I once called her JFK's Mary Madgalene

FauxScienceSlayer , says: Website November 23, 2019 at 5:47 pm GMT
JFK died mysteriously after being hit by four bullets, one in rear cranium, rear shoulder, front throat and fragmentary bullet to right front temple. Connelly was hit by a zigzag magic bullet, three bystanders were hit by Elm Street curb bullet splatter and the limousine front windshield were all hit by a lone gunman. LHO, MLK & RFK were also killed by lone gunmen, and if you do not believe that you will be persecuted.
Iris , says: November 23, 2019 at 6:00 pm GMT
@Skeptikal

I thought it had been rather well established that a sharpshooter had been brought in from the French/Corsican mob.

Lucien Sarti's involvement is possible, but is a red herring. He might have been approached and brought to Dallas to add to the confusion, as the Kennedy assassination was a sophisticated "smoke and mirrors" operation, with many deliberate false leads.

The people who shot President Kenned were hired guns, members of the Chicago mob: Charles "Chuck" Nicoletti, Marshall Caifano, Johnny Roselli and James Sutton Files.

President Kennedy was shot at the head twice, almost instantaneously, first by Charles Nicoletti firing from the Dal-Tex Building, then by James Files taking a shot from the Grassy Knoll.

James Files used a very powerful round, a frangible bullet.

This is why, on the Z film, the President's head is shown first slightly projected forward, then very powerfully projected backwards and to the left, when the more powerful bullet hit his right temple.

S , says: November 23, 2019 at 6:22 pm GMT
Thanks for the link to the remarkable History Channel JFK documentary.

For the so called 'progressive' Anglosphere establishment, in both it's 'right' and 'left' manifestations, the 'Chamberlain umbrella' is most certainly a hated symbol of weakness, appeasement, and ultimate failure. Whether it's prominent presence at Dealey Plaza that day was a deliberately placed symbolic 'pièce de résistance' to top off a carefully choreographed assassination or just a quirk of history is something we may never know.

As for Abraham Zapruder, his family, and their profiting from the famous film he took, there are aspects of it that are remindful of Larry Silverstein and his profiting from 911 and the destruction of the Twin Towers/Building 7.

In addition to Zapruder's making about a million dollars in today's money by selling rights to it in the days following the assassination to Life magazine (the head of which, Charles Douglas Jackson, had extensive experience in psy-ops work for the US government), the Zapruder family in 1999 would win 16 million dollars in arbitration with the United States over it's ownership, the government having seized ownership of the film from them. Time Life had sold the film back to the Zapruders years before for $1.

Arbitration had been decided upon to determine the value of the Zapruder film with the film being compared to Leonardo da Vinci's Codex.

One of the three arbitrators was Kenneth Feinberg, who besides being US senator Ted Kennedy's chief of staff for five years, was also the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. In addition Feinberg headed up the 7 billion dollar 911 victims compensation fund.

Ironically, July 16, 1999, the day the arbitration panel made it's decision that the US government pay 16 million to the Zapruder family for the JFK assassination film, would also be the very day John F Kennedy Jr would die in a plane crash:

Zapruder Film Nets $16 Million

The other expert compared the six-foot strip of film, climaxed by the horrific head shot that killed the president, to the Codex of Leonardo da Vinci, for which billionaire Bill Gates recently paid $30 million.

Adams and Feinberg said that "25 years ago, few if any, could predict the value of the Zapruder film as a unique historical item of unprecedented worth." They also noted that "items associated with President Kennedy and his family have been increasing in value."..

..The arbitration panel actually made its decision on July 16, the same day John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash, but delayed the announcement in the wake of the tragedy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/08/04/zapruder-film-nets-16-million/4f13b1c5-e6ab-45b3-86c6-92e442b5b905/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Douglas_Jackson

Laurent Guyenot , says: November 23, 2019 at 6:44 pm GMT
@Ron Unz That's a possibility, of course. In my mind, it is a matter of probabilities. And I find it very improbable that this guy just happened to do his little protest at this precise spot and seconds. But alos, reading his testimony to the HSCA, he doesn't mention Kennedy being soft on communism at all. Excerp:

Mr. GENZMAN. Could you elaborate further as to the type of symbol you thought you were applying?
Mr. WITT. I just knew it was a sore spot with the Kennedys; I just knew the vague generalities of it. It had something to do with something that happened years ago with the senior Joe Kennedy when he was Ambassador to England.

In fact, when asked if his gesture had anything to do with the Kennedys being soft on communism, he denied:

Mr. Fauntroy. I wonder if you would care to tell us a little more about your understanding of the significance of the umbrella, and why you felt that it would heckle the president to raise the umbrella?

Mr. WITT. I know the generalities of the thing. It had something to do with the–when the senior Mr. Kennedy was Ambassador or England, and the Prime Minister, some activity they had had in appeasing Hitler. The umbrella that the Prime Minister of England came back with got to be a symbol in some manner with the British people. by association, it got transferred to the Kennedy family, and, as I understood, it was a sore spot with the Kennedy family, like I said, in coffee break conversations someone had mentioned, I think it is one of the towns in Arizona, it is Tucson or Phoenix, that someone had been out at the airport or some place where some members of the Kennedy family came through and they were rather irritated by the fact that they were brandishing the umbrellas. This is how the idea sort of got stuck in my mind.

Mr. FAUNTROY. Is it true that what you felt was that Mr. Kennedy would be sensitive because of the appeasement image of the umbrella as related to his father?

Mr. WITT. Not the appeasement thing. It was just–excuse me–I just understood that it was sort of a sore spot, with them and this was just one thing. I personally never thought too much of liberal politics in general. In this case the Kennedy family just happened to be in office.

Mr. FAUNTROY. I see. And it had no relationship in your own thinking between Mr. Kennedy's posture with; say, the Russians?

Mr. WITT. No. No. No. That was not it at all.

ChuckOrloski , says: November 23, 2019 at 6:50 pm GMT
@Laurent Guyenot Yes, Laurent, and I can confess to busting your balls," * and indeed, Mary Pinchot Meyer's is "a really moving story. I once called her JFK's Mary Madgalene."

Nonetheless, for the rather affectionate part of Mary Magdalene's legacy, she got stoned by crazy & self righteous Jews. In contrast, the bright & adulterous peacenik, Mary Pinchot Meyer, got murdered on a Georgetown canal trail, and to date, her's is an Unsolved Case Mystery, which never appeared on the popular American TV series.

* A lyric from Pink Floyd's song, "Mother."

Thanks for another terrific learning experience, Laurent, and fyi, am saddened how Ron Unz rained acid upon the fascinating "Umbrella Man."

anon [838] Disclaimer , says: November 23, 2019 at 7:30 pm GMT
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/11/22/jfk-what-the-cia-hides/

This author blames the CIA for obstruction suppression and distortion of the facts findings and accuses it of misrepresentation with powerful people on board like supreme court justice . Also mentions the suspicions of conspiracy raised by LBG ( out of all people !) de Gaulle , Robert Kennedy and Fidel Castro.

All of them are dead So is Soviet and most of Cuban dissidents are possibly dead as well

So what is preventing the investigation at the manner the previous investigation was carried out with open visible fatal flaws and biases .

gkruz , says: November 23, 2019 at 7:45 pm GMT
@Truth3 I believe that the presidential motorcade's route was changed at the last minute, ostensibly to bypass the huge crowds lined up to see JFK, and hurry him off to the Dallas Trade Mart for his speech. This meant bypassing the TV cameras, so none would be able to film the assassination in live time (just a cohenincidence, I am sure), but if this is so, it begs the question of why Zapruder and the Babushka Lady were there with their home movie cameras to capture what the TV networks would miss.
Ron Unz , says: November 23, 2019 at 7:51 pm GMT
@Skeptikal

Lover of JFK, to whom he confided his vision for major peaceful change in the US of A and the world.

I really think the vast JFK hagiography that occupies the minds of many JFK conspiracy people, including some of the most respectable ones, hardly enhances their credibility. Lots of them seem to believe that JFK was about to establish world peace and was killed by the CIA for that reason. Frankly, I find the whole framework totally ludicrous.

For example, Seymour Hersh's book on JFK certainly provides lots of very negative details of his activities. But JFK conspiracy people always discount Hersh, claiming that he's a JFK hater.

Okay, but what about Michael Collins Piper, whose JFK assassination book has certainly been one of the most important. He provides some reasonable evidence that JFK had been planning to launch an unprovoked "sneak attack" against China just before he died:

http://www.unz.com/book/michael_collins_piper__final-judgment/#jfk-s-plan-to-attack-china

Offhand, it seems to be that an early 1960s American attack against China would have probably had far worse and more significant long-term geopolitical consequences than e.g. Bush's attack against Iraq or a possible Trump attack against Iran.

Iris , says: November 23, 2019 at 7:58 pm GMT
@S

`Ironically, July 16, 1999, the day the arbitration panel made it's decision that the US government pay 16 million to the Zapruder family for the JFK assassination film, would also be the very day John F Kennedy Jr would die in a plane crash.

Thanks, very interesting comment.

Just a quibble: JFK Jr did not die in a plane crash; he most probably got killed when his plane was shot down (by a missile?).

At the time of his death, JFK Jr had acquired a piece of hard evidence that would have allowed him to re-open the investigation into his father's assassination.

This piece of evidence was a Cartier wristwatch that the President was wearing when he was shot. It got covered in brain matter and mercury from the frangible bullet that hit JFK.

It was kept for a while by RFK, and finally ended up in John John's possession, accompanied with sworn affidavits proving its chain of possession.

Iris , says: November 23, 2019 at 8:07 pm GMT
@Ron Unz

Indeed, the fact that he voluntarily came forward 15 years later and revealed his identity would certainly seem to suggest the contrary. Why would he do that if he had been part of the conspiracy?

I think that you misunderstand the nature and purpose of the successive official reviews of JFK assassination records (ARRB, etc..).

These official reviews were not meant at finding the truth, but at finding the evidence that could lead to the truth and then destroy it to perpetuate the cover-up.

Many honest researchers involved in these reviews have quit in disgust; the fact is well documented and should be a conscience call. Best.

Durruti , says: November 23, 2019 at 8:12 pm GMT
@follyofwar

it would have been far better if Nixon had won.

Appreciate your thought, but no!

In politics, one must not play around. John F. Kennedy understood that 1960 was his time. He had to win then, or lose forever. As a loser, he would have had much less of a chance to become President in 1964, or 1968.

I highly recommend a reading of his "Profiles in Courage" – a great series of essays, with a message for all Americans.

Kennedy, a brilliant scholar, and Man of action, had on his agenda important things that had to be done, (or at least begun), in 1960.

JFK as President:

1. 1st President to insist on Legal Equality of all Americans. (Who was his Atty Gen?)?

2. Unravel French & British Empires (arrange independence for 40 African Nations- including South Africa).

3. De Nuclearize the Zionist Land Thieves.

4. Maintain the Sovereignty of the USA.

5. Ensure Prosperity – Employment, stop Inflation, for American workers.

6. Prevent outbreak of Nuclear Conflict with USSR.

7. You continue this list.

Kennedy could not wait, and, therefore, had to choose L B Johnson as his Vice Presidential running mate (even though he was well warned of the risks involved – including the danger to his life, as it would place a Zionist Mafioso only a heartbeat from the Presidency).

Kennedy was on a Mission to save the Republic (our American Republic), which had been weakened and was in great danger. His brother Robert, was with JFK, all the way. They were idealists, and wanted to save the world.

*Yes, Ron Unz, not one of your other writers have made these points. I am available to flesh these points out – no charge.

We Americans lost everything on November 22, 1963. We have not yet begun to fight back!

Dr. Peter J. Antonsen

Sean , says: November 23, 2019 at 8:27 pm GMT
@bluedog Humility means one does not have to choose this truth or that. Anything is possible. There were once very many people who thought a conspiracy likely. In the last 50 years, there has been a shift away from thinking a conspiracy was behind the assassination. While this is only the balance of opinion, it should still carry some weight against 'who benefits' arguments .
Iris , says: November 23, 2019 at 8:35 pm GMT
@gkruz

This meant bypassing the TV cameras, so none would be able to film the assassination in live time (just a coincidence, I am sure).

It is very interesting that you bring this topic.

It is a documented fact that during all past official visits, President Kennedy's motorcade comprised a open-top lorry, driving ahead of the Presidents' limousine, and carrying journalists sat backward on graded tiers, who would film the President and the crowd cheering on him.

At Dallas, the journalists' truck got cancelled, and the way paved for the sole Abraham Zapruder to document the circumstances of the JFK assassination. Just another complete coincidence, obviously.

[Nov 23, 2019] The Kennedy Assassination, November 22, 1963 56 Years Later by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Nov 23, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

This article was first published on November 21, 2013.

Today November 22, 2019 is the 56th anniversary of the assassination of JFK

Why was he assassinated?

He favored peace over war.

The normalization of relations with the Soviet Union.

... ... ...

To briefly review, the facts are conclusive that JFK was on terrible terms with the CIA and the Joint Chiefs. He had refused to support the CIA organized Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He had rejected the Joint Chiefs' "Operation Northwoods," a plan to commit real and faked acts of violence against Americans, blame Castro and use the false flag events to bring regime change to Cuba. He had rejected the Joint Chiefs case that the Soviet Union should be attacked while the US held the advantage and before the Soviets could develop delivery systems for nuclear weapons. He had indicated that after his reelection he was going to pull US troops out of Vietnam and that he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces. He had aroused suspicion by working behind the scenes with Khrushchev to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, leading to claims that he was "soft on communism." The CIA and Joint Chiefs' belief that JFK was an unreliable ally in the war against communism spread into the Secret Service.

November 22,1963: Remembering JFK's State-Sponsored Assassination

It has been established that the original autopsy of JFK's fatal head wound was discarded and a faked one substituted in order to support the official story that Oswald shot JFK from behind. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and President Johnson knew that Oswald was the CIA's patsy, but they also understood, as did members of the Warren Commission, that to let the true story out would cause Americans to lose confidence in their own government at the height of the Cold War.

Robert Kennedy knew what had happened. He was on his way to being elected president and to holding the plotters accountable for the murder of his brother when the CIA assassinated him. A distinguished journalist, who was standing behind Robert Kennedy at the time of his assassination, told me that the killing shots came from behind past his ear. He submitted his report to the FBI and was never contacted.

Acoustic experts have conclusively demonstrated that more shots were fired than can be accounted for by Sirhan Sirhan's pistol and that the sounds indicate two different calibers of firearms.

I never cease to be amazed by the gullibility of Americans, who know nothing about either event, but who confidently dismiss the factual evidence provided by experts and historians on the basis of their naive belief that "the government wouldn't lie about such important events" or "someone would have talked." What good would it do if someone talked when the gullible won't believe hard evidence?

Secret Service pulled from JFK's limo

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/11/james-huang/must-watch-video/

Zapruder film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufvmHYqfdbU ( Preview )

James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, Simon & Schuster, 2008

Operation Northwoods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Dr. Paul Craig Roberts , Global Research, 2019

[Nov 23, 2019] JFK What The CIA Hides

Nov 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

True to Kissingerian form, the story turns out to be not exactly true. Zhou was actually responding to a question about France's political convulsions in 1968, not 1789.

But Kissinger's spin on the anecdote struck me as perceptive.

The meaning of a great historical event might take a long time–a very long time–to become apparent. I didn't want to jump to conclusions about the causes of JFK's murder in downtown Dallas on November 22, 1963.

It's still too early to tell. Fifty six years after the fact, historians and JFK researchers do not have access to all of the CIA's files on the subject The 1964 Warren Commission report exonerated the agency with its conclusion that Kennedy was killed by one man alone. But the agency was subsequently the subject of five official JFK investigations, which cast doubt on its findings.

The Senate's Church Committee investigation showed that the Warren Commission knew nothing of CIA assassination operations in 1963. JFK records released in the last 20 years show the Commission's attorneys had no real understanding the extensive counterintelligence monitoring of Lee Harvey Oswald before JFK was killed. We now know that senior operations officers, including counterintelligence chief James Angleton, paid far closer attention to the obscure Oswald as he made his way to Dallas than the investigators were ever told.

To be sure, there is no proof of CIA complicity in JFK's death. And conspiracy theories spouted by the likes of the Alex Jones and James Fetzer deserve no attention. The fact remains some of the most astute power players of 1963–including Lyndon Johnson , Charles DeGaulle, Fidel Castro , and Jackie and Robert Kennedy–concluded that JFK was killed by his enemies, and not by one man alone. Did these statesmen get it wrong, and the under-informed Warren Commission get it right?

The new documentary, Truth is the Only Client, says yes. The film, shown last month in the auditorium of the U.S. Capitol, features interviews with numerous former Warren Commission staffers. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who served as a fact checker for the Commission in 1964, defends the lone gunman conclusion, saying, "You have to look at the new evidence and when you do, I come to the same conclusion."

Justice Breyer, oddly, passes judgment on evidence he has not seen. The record of the CIA's role in the events leading JFK's assassination is far from complete. In 2013 I reported on JFK Facts that Delores Nelson CIA's information coordinator had stated in a sworn affidavit filed in federal court, that the agency retained 1,100 assassination-related records that had never been made public.

A small portion of this material was released in 2017, including new details about the opening of the CIA's first Oswald file in October 1959.

Yet thousands of JFK files remain secret. According to the latest figures from the National Archives, a total of 15,834 JFK files remain fully or partially classified, most of them held by the CIA and FBI. Thanks to an October 2017 order from President Trump, these documents will not be made public until October 2021 , at the earliest.

The assumption of Justice Breyer and many others is that any and all unseen CIA material must exonerate the agency. It's an odd conclusion. If the CIA has nothing to hide, why is it hiding so much? While 95 percent of the still-secret files probably are trivial, the remaining 5 percent -- thousands of pages of material–are historically pregnant. If made public, they could clarify key questions in the long-running controversy about JFK's death.

These questions have been raised most concisely by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a career CIA officer who served in senior positions. Now a senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center, Mowatt-Larssen has implicated his former employer in the Dallas ambush. In a presentation at Harvard last December, Mowatt-Larssen hypothesized that a plot to kill JFK emanated from the CIA's station in Miami where disgruntled Cuban exiles and undercover officers loathed JFK for his failure to overthrow Castro's government in Cuba.

Mowatt-Larssen has yet to publish his presentation and documentation, so I can't say if he's right or wrong. But he asks the right question: "How can intelligence operational and analytical modus operandi help unlock a conspiracy that has remained unsolved for 55 years?" And he focuses on the right place to dig deeper: the CIA's Miami office, known as WAVE station.

My own JFK questions involve George Joannides, a decorated undercover officer who served as branch chief in the Miami station in 1963. He ran psychological warfare operations against Cuba. In 2003, I sued the CIA for Joannides' files. The lawsuit ended 15 years later in July 2018, when Judge Brett Kavanaugh, in his last opinion before ascending to the Supreme Court, tossed my case. Kavanaugh declared the agency deserved "deference upon deference" in its handling of Freedom of Information Act requests about JFK files.

Nonetheless, my lawsuit illuminated the extraordinary sensitivity of the psy-ops Joannides ran out of WAVE station. As reported in the New York Times, Fox News, Associated Press, and Politico , Morley v. CIA forced disclosure of the fact Joannides had received the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal in 1981. The honor came two years after he stonewalled the House Select Committee on Assassination about what he knew of Oswald's contacts with pro-and anti-Castro Cubans in the summer and fall of 1963.

I believe Joannides was honored because he concealed the existence of an authorized covert operation involving Oswald that has never been publicly acknowledged. In CIA lingo, Joannides protected the agency's "sources and methods" concerning Oswald. And he might have done more. His actions may have also shielded other officers who knew of a scheme to kill the liberal president and lay the blame on Cuba. Never been seen by JFK investigators, they contain details about his Joannides' undercover work in Miami in 1963, when he funded Oswald's antagonists among the anti-Castro Cuban exiles. They also detail his work in 1978, when he duped chief investigator Robert Blakey and the House Select Committee on Assassination. These records, the agency says, cannot be released in 2019 without risk of "irreversible harm" to national security.

It's a bizarre claim, at odds with the law. These ancient documents, all of them more than 40 years old, meet the statutory definition of "assassination-related," according to federal judge John Tunheim. He chaired the Assassination Records Review Board which oversaw the declassification of 4 million pages of JFK files between 1994 and 2017. In an interview, Tunheim told me that, under the terms of the 1992 JFK Records Act, the Joannides files are subject to mandatory review and release. "It's a no-brainer," he said.

Yet the files remain off-limits to the public. Thanks to the legal consensus, articulated by Justices Kavanaugh and Breyer, the CIA enjoys "deference upon deference" when it comes to the JFK assassination story. As a result, the JFK Records Act has been flouted. The public's interest in full disclosure has been thwarted.

Yet legitimate questions persist: Did a plot to kill JFK originate in the agency's Miami station as Mowatt-Larssen suggests? The fact that the CIA won't share the evidence that could answer the CIA man's question is telling.

So these days, when people ask me who killed JFK, I say the Kennedy was probably victimized by enemies in his own government, possibly including CIA officers involved in anti-Castro and counterintelligence operations. I have no smoking gun, no theory. Just look at the suspicious fact pattern, still shrouded in official secrecy, and it's easy to believe that JFK was, as Mowatt-Larssen puts it, "marked for assassination."

* * *

Jefferson Morley is editor of the Deep State blog and author of The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton.

Vince Clortho , 31 minutes ago link

56 years later, thousands of CIA documents still withheld. None of the principals/agents/ players in the assassination are alive. So the excuse that documents are withheld to protect individuals no longer holds water. The documents are being withheld to protect the agency itself (and other organizations) from revealing the roles they played in overthrowing an elected President of the US.

spoonful , 39 minutes ago link

To be sure, there is no proof of CIA complicity in JFK's death . . . er, not quite see Russ Baker, Parrott Memo:

[DATE: November 22, 1963]

At 1:45 p.m. Mr. GEORGE H.W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas, residence 5525 Briar, Houston, telephonically furnished the following information to writer by long distance telephone call from Tyler, Texas.

BUSH stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown. He stated that one JAMES PARROTT has been talking of killing the president when he comes to Houston.

BUSH stated that PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in political matters in this area. He stated that he felt MRS FAWLEY, telephone number SU 2-5239, or ARLENE SMITH, telephone number JA 9-9194 of the Harris County Republican Headquarters would be able to furnish additional information regarding the identity of PARROTT.

BUSH stated that he was proceeding to Dallas, Texas, would remain in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel and return to his residence on 11-23-63. His office telephone Number is CA 2-0395.

https://whowhatwhy.org/2013/10/02/bush-and-the-jfk-hit-part-3-where-was-poppy-november-22-1963/

JustPastPeacefield , 52 minutes ago link

According to Nixon, "Jack Rubenstein is LBJ's boy" and although Nixon damn sure wanted to be President, he "wasn't willing to kill for it."

But LBJ was.

And when a reasonable person wonders why LBJ would twice call back the jets as the Liberty was being destroyed, it's not difficult to see why. Israel knows the blackmail game well.

With all the explainations out there, I'll put my money on Nixon.

Ordinary people don't want to believe the worst about their leaders, even a slime-bucket like LBJ, but Larry didn't really have a dentist appointment on 9-11, and 3000 people were murdered with the consent of some of our dearest leaders.

The facade that the elite hide behind can't fall fast enough, but it's definately falling. You can only be so naive.

Zandalf , 49 minutes ago link

LBJ was actually kind of a "patsy", too, being used by the REAL power brokers... Recall that he DUCKED down in his limo just before the shots rang out because, while he was let in on the plot, he really wasn't sure that "they" might not want to take him out too!.... Tragic as it all was (& still is), it's quite a fascinating story...

JustPastPeacefield , 45 minutes ago link

Definitely fascinating, and whatever the details, he was certainly in on it. Everything he did in Dallas indicated that. Cruel guy. Hillary-like, for lack of a better term.

boooyaaaah , 49 minutes ago link

At least the Trump put a face on the CIA, FBI, NSA ETC..

Rather than just acronyms we have Brennan, Clapper, Comey.

Could they do vile and dastardly acts?

IDK but its no longer left to ones imagination

Geocen Trist , 51 minutes ago link

The Kennedys are an Irish Mob " Family ". The JFK "assassination" was Freemasonic theatrics.

fersur , 36 minutes ago link

Well Mr Kennedy made his Fortune bootlegging thru Prohibition and that relates Mob ties !

Shipping Seagrams across the Great Lakes from Canada by Swift Boats that then was hotshotted across the nation combined with moonshiners that later becoming NASCAR Racers !

You may be correct, I just think to a lesser extent, Joseph P Kennedy Sr. did tell JFK how many Votes do you want to Win Election by !

Geocen Trist , 32 minutes ago link

" The Bronfman Gang " ... https://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/dope9.pdf

VW Nerd , 1 hour ago link

Release of the documents wouldn't pose any threat to the average American. When they claim National security, they actually mean Deep/Dark state shadow government security. Revealing the actions of an invisible and very powerful global force operating inside the US government is their fear.

Zandalf , 1 hour ago link

Mr. Morley does excellent work on this topic on his JFK blog...

After reading "JFK & The Unspeakable", I felt that it should be required reading in every HS in the usa.... I'll hold my breath.

From my extensive "research", no doubt, a bunch of powerful folks were involved, especially Dulles & Angleton.

Mega planning; 3-4 assassin groups who were unknown to each other; kill shot came from storm/road drain.

This event allowed the Deep State to consolidate power and control, which persists to this day. Sad. Really sad for "the people".

WAKE UP FOLKS!

fersur , 1 hour ago link

The Kill shot came from man inside storm drain that Assassin stood inside with Kennedy's driver car slowdown ( edited out of Car slowdown ) Forcing President John Kennedy 's head back and to the Left blowing much of his Skull off !

bunnyswanson , 1 hour ago link

"The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings...

Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe...no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent...

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.

It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published.

Its mistakes are buried, not headlined.

Its dissenters are silenced, not praised.

No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed."

― President John F. Kennedy

tags: 1961 , april-27-1961 , clandestine , covert , future , government , hide , jfk , john-f-kennedy , opposed , opposition , past , present , president , ruthless , secreat-oaths , secrecy , secret-societies , secret-society-speech , shadow-government , speech , u-s-government , u-s-president , usa

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6663748-the-very-word-secrecy-is-repugnant-in-a-free-and

bunnyswanson , 55 minutes ago link

https://youtu.be/Mwy6Q9_cUwc Zapruder film slowed down and enhanced.

Change playback time to 0.25X. Watch the guy with wide girth standing on the curb to the left of the car, watch his right arm rise up, pull back, fall down to his right side and toss a black shiny object to the ground. This is Jack Ruby, The owner and operator of a titty bar. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ruby4.htm

Jackprong , 1 hour ago link

"liberal president"--NOT! In Chris Matthews book, Kennedy and Nixon, it paints a picture of DNC Dem candidates at each others' throats in the DNC smoke filled room. LBJ, Humphrey, JFK, the Usual Suspects were in front of the committee. JFK horrified all of the prospective nominees. He stated,"If I don't get the nomination, my old man is going to back NIXON!" There you have it: was it Oswald or was it LBJ? You choose which it was: Lone Wolf or the VP who wanted to be POTUS. The "liberal president" was actually quite close to Nixon until 1960.

Twox2 , 1 hour ago link

As the deep state relentlessly tries to take Trump down, maybe he should go scorched earth and declassify the files implicating the CIA. Can a former President go into witness protection? Ha.

[Nov 23, 2019] NYTimes Pans Cult Leader Gabbard's White Pant Suit After Praising Hillary For Same Outfit

Notable quotes:
"... Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News, ..."
"... My favorite paragraph from the NYT article depicting Tulsi as a fringe, divisive cult leader because she wears white pants suits - by the same author and paper who heaped praise on how Hillary's white pants suit shows she's ready to carry the nuclear codes. ..."
Nov 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Green Greenwald

My favorite paragraph from the NYT article depicting Tulsi as a fringe, divisive cult leader because she wears white pants suits - by the same author and paper who heaped praise on how Hillary's white pants suit shows she's ready to carry the nuclear codes.

Her white suits are not the white suits of Ms. Clinton, nor even the white of Ms. Williamson, whose early appearances in the shadeoften seemed tied to her wellness gospel and ideas of renewal and rebirth. Rather, they are the white of avenging angels and flaming swords, of somewhat combative righteousness (also cult leaders').

And that kind of association, though it can be weirdly compelling, is also not really community building. It sets someone apart, rather than joining others together. It has connotations of the fringe, rather than the center.

A New York Times writer who praised Hillary Clinton for wearing a white pantsuit called Tulsi Gabbard a "cult leader" for wearing exactly the same thing.

[Nov 23, 2019] Never Believe Anything Until It Is Officially Denied: Now Epstein suicide looks like a a well orchestrated operation that terminated a man who could embarrass many elites

Notable quotes:
"... No, it was not suicide Mr. Barr, it was a well orchestrated operation that terminated a man who could embarrass many elites and other people who did not want to be embarrassed. It strikes at the heart of what the populace expects from government an expectation of "fairness." ..."
"... If anyone was truly interested in investigating Epstein his banking and communication records would have been secured. All of the people who interacted with him on a daily basis would have been interviewed. This did not happen and it will not happen because too many people just want him to be forgotten. ..."
Nov 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

bsdetector , 8 minutes ago link

I thought I liked Mr. Barr but I do not buy his opinion.

The usual investigation and takedown process was not followed in this case and someone should answer: why not?

Big planning had to be made to lure Epstein back to Teterboro and take him into custody immediately on deplaning.

He was immediately kept in isolation but no search and seizure warrants were executed with his takedown. Why would the crime scenes be left unsecured unless there was a plan?

Proper take down plans are prepared in minute detail. Don't tell us this was not well planned.

Well, there was a plan. Delay of the official investigation allowed the scenes to be sanitized before "official" search warrants were requested. No serious law enforcement plan would allow this process. What was the plan Mr. Barr and who was behind it? Can we have names please?

When the official search warrants were executed the most damaging evidence was gone. Everything else was for show.

Then Epstein was kept on ice in that "short of money" jail where cameras malfunctioned and were known to malfunction.

Mix in a few useful idiots for guards and Epstein was finished. He could not relocate his blackmail evidence after his takedown and because he was isolated he could not parlay his information to secure his release. He was done.

No, it was not suicide Mr. Barr, it was a well orchestrated operation that terminated a man who could embarrass many elites and other people who did not want to be embarrassed. It strikes at the heart of what the populace expects from government an expectation of "fairness."

If anyone was truly interested in investigating Epstein his banking and communication records would have been secured. All of the people who interacted with him on a daily basis would have been interviewed. This did not happen and it will not happen because too many people just want him to be forgotten.

Our government caters to the special interest. Unfortunately I hoped for fairness.

[Nov 22, 2019] CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward because, it is not going away.

Highly recommended!
Nov 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Factotum , 17 November 2019 at 05:40 PM

Just as important, where is the proof the Russians hacked the DNC computers (hat tip always to LJ) - since Roger Stone was banned from getting this information by the judge who just sent him away for life.

CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward because, it is not going away. Democrats refusal to even mention it, let alone their obsession trying to relentless label nameless CROWDSTRIKE as a loony, right wing conspiracy theory simply does not pass the smell test.

Particularly since Schiff does his very best to deep six even mention of Trump's requested Ukraine CROWDSTRIKE investigation. https://illicitinfo.com/?p=13576

Deep state CROWDSTRIKE collusion is starting to walk like a duck, quack like a duck and look like a duck.

[Nov 22, 2019] Listening to our "world's best diplomats" convinced me that the deep state is real

The State (War) Department is really the neocons viper nest
Notable quotes:
"... Listening to our "world's best diplomats" convinced me that the deep state is real. These people think they, not elected officials, make policy. Plus, they are sneaky and conniving in trying to establish and protect their own little fiefdoms. They have never seen a foreign aid budget that in their humble yet expert opinion shouldn't be increased tenfold. They are political but pretend otherwise. And, their sanctimony is unbearable. Let's just say that I don't think that Foggy Bottom made a good impression with the general public this week. ..."
"... Oh, please. Every time it looks like we might actually pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, the generals pop up on the TV talk shows and in the Op-Ed pages warning of the dire consequences and pleading for more time. The neo-cons used to pull this "OMG, the military is the most competent part of the federal government" stuff back in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, and TAC is not the only publication that has blown up that myth. ..."
Nov 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

chris_zzz • 19 hours ago

Listening to our "world's best diplomats" convinced me that the deep state is real. These people think they, not elected officials, make policy. Plus, they are sneaky and conniving in trying to establish and protect their own little fiefdoms. They have never seen a foreign aid budget that in their humble yet expert opinion shouldn't be increased tenfold. They are political but pretend otherwise. And, their sanctimony is unbearable. Let's just say that I don't think that Foggy Bottom made a good impression with the general public this week.
EdMan • 15 hours ago
Straight fire out of Peter Van Buren. The State is the "The Blob." They're the ones who want to promote a policy of interventionism and nation-building. The military actually prefers to stay out of wars and don't want to pursue nation-building.
cka2nd EdMan • 5 hours ago
Oh, please. Every time it looks like we might actually pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, the generals pop up on the TV talk shows and in the Op-Ed pages warning of the dire consequences and pleading for more time. The neo-cons used to pull this "OMG, the military is the most competent part of the federal government" stuff back in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, and TAC is not the only publication that has blown up that myth.
James Graham • 11 hours ago • edited
This now-retired former private sector ex-pat had several encounters overseas with State employees.

They all came across as arrogant empty suits/dresses who thought their "service" made them automatically superior to us private sector citizens.

BTW "thank you for your service" should be bestowed only on US military personnel. Never on State employees.

[Nov 22, 2019] Listening to our "world's best diplomats" convinced me that the deep state is real

The State (War) Department is really the neocons viper nest
Notable quotes:
"... Listening to our "world's best diplomats" convinced me that the deep state is real. These people think they, not elected officials, make policy. Plus, they are sneaky and conniving in trying to establish and protect their own little fiefdoms. They have never seen a foreign aid budget that in their humble yet expert opinion shouldn't be increased tenfold. They are political but pretend otherwise. And, their sanctimony is unbearable. Let's just say that I don't think that Foggy Bottom made a good impression with the general public this week. ..."
"... Oh, please. Every time it looks like we might actually pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, the generals pop up on the TV talk shows and in the Op-Ed pages warning of the dire consequences and pleading for more time. The neo-cons used to pull this "OMG, the military is the most competent part of the federal government" stuff back in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, and TAC is not the only publication that has blown up that myth. ..."
Nov 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

chris_zzz • 19 hours ago

Listening to our "world's best diplomats" convinced me that the deep state is real. These people think they, not elected officials, make policy. Plus, they are sneaky and conniving in trying to establish and protect their own little fiefdoms. They have never seen a foreign aid budget that in their humble yet expert opinion shouldn't be increased tenfold. They are political but pretend otherwise. And, their sanctimony is unbearable. Let's just say that I don't think that Foggy Bottom made a good impression with the general public this week.
EdMan • 15 hours ago
Straight fire out of Peter Van Buren. The State is the "The Blob." They're the ones who want to promote a policy of interventionism and nation-building. The military actually prefers to stay out of wars and don't want to pursue nation-building.
cka2nd EdMan • 5 hours ago
Oh, please. Every time it looks like we might actually pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, the generals pop up on the TV talk shows and in the Op-Ed pages warning of the dire consequences and pleading for more time. The neo-cons used to pull this "OMG, the military is the most competent part of the federal government" stuff back in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, and TAC is not the only publication that has blown up that myth.
James Graham • 11 hours ago • edited
This now-retired former private sector ex-pat had several encounters overseas with State employees.

They all came across as arrogant empty suits/dresses who thought their "service" made them automatically superior to us private sector citizens.

BTW "thank you for your service" should be bestowed only on US military personnel. Never on State employees.

[Nov 22, 2019] CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward because, it is not going away.

Highly recommended!
Nov 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Factotum , 17 November 2019 at 05:40 PM

Just as important, where is the proof the Russians hacked the DNC computers (hat tip always to LJ) - since Roger Stone was banned from getting this information by the judge who just sent him away for life.

CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward because, it is not going away. Democrats refusal to even mention it, let alone their obsession trying to relentless label nameless CROWDSTRIKE as a loony, right wing conspiracy theory simply does not pass the smell test.

Particularly since Schiff does his very best to deep six even mention of Trump's requested Ukraine CROWDSTRIKE investigation. https://illicitinfo.com/?p=13576

Deep state CROWDSTRIKE collusion is starting to walk like a duck, quack like a duck and look like a duck.

[Nov 22, 2019] Will IG Horowitz Drop the Hammer on the FBI For FISA Abuse by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Nov 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Will IG Horowitz Drop the Hammer on the FBI For FISA Abuse? by Larry C Johnson Larry Johnson-5x7

There is great impatience, even frustration, over the slow roll out of the results of Inspector General Horowitz's investigation of the FBI's use of FISA. From what we already know from the public record, there was clear abuse and even criminal conduct by former FBI Director Jim Comey and his Deputy, Andy McCabe. They claimed in a filing with the FISA court that the Steele Dossier was verified. Yet, Jim Comey subsequently testified under oath before Congress that the so-called Dossier was "unverified." Okay Jimmy, which is it?

We have some clues that Horowitz is not doing a whitewash. Reports last week, based in part on the whining of people reportedly linked to Comey and McCabe and others at the FBI and DOJ, stated that persons substantively discussed in the report were given the chance to review their portion of the report but they had to do so after signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement and were not permitted to submit written responses.

Then we have Attorney General Barr's speech last Friday to the Federalist Society. You can read the full transcript at The Conservative Treehouse . It is magnificent. Barr understands that there has been an attempted coup against the Presidency of Donald Trump. Here are some key excerpts:

As I have said, the Framers fully expected intense pulling and hauling between the Congress and the President. Unfortunately, just in the past few years, we have seen these conflicts take on an entirely new character.

Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called "The Resistance," and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his Administration. Now, "resistance" is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous – indeed incendiary – notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the "loyal opposition," as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.

A prime example of this is the Senate's unprecedented abuse of the advice-and-consent process. The Senate is free to exercise that power to reject unqualified nominees, but that power was never intended to allow the Senate to systematically oppose and draw out the approval process for every appointee so as to prevent the President from building a functional government.

Yet that is precisely what the Senate minority has done from his very first days in office. As of September of this year, the Senate had been forced to invoke cloture on 236 Trump nominees -- each of those representing its own massive consumption of legislative time meant only to delay an inevitable confirmation. How many times was cloture invoked on nominees during President Obama's first term? 17 times. The Second President Bush's first term? Four times. It is reasonable to wonder whether a future President will actually be able to form a functioning administration if his or her party does not hold the Senate. . . .

The costs of this constant harassment are real. For example, we all understand that confidential communications and a private, internal deliberative process are essential for all of our branches of government to properly function. Congress and the Judiciary know this well, as both have taken great pains to shield their own internal communications from public inspection. There is no FOIA for Congress or the Courts. Yet Congress has happily created a regime that allows the public to seek whatever documents it wants from the Executive Branch at the same time that individual congressional committees spend their days trying to publicize the Executive's internal decisional process. That process cannot function properly if it is public, nor is it productive to have our government devoting enormous resources to squabbling about what becomes public and when, rather than doing the work of the people. . . .

One of the ironies of today is that those who oppose this President constantly accuse this Administration of "shredding" constitutional norms and waging a war on the rule of law. When I ask my friends on the other side, what exactly are you referring to? I get vacuous stares, followed by sputtering about the Travel Ban or some such thing. While the President has certainly thrown out the traditional Beltway playbook, he was upfront about that beforehand, and the people voted for him. What I am talking about today are fundamental constitutional precepts. The fact is that this Administration's policy initiatives and proposed rules, including the Travel Ban, have transgressed neither constitutional, nor traditional, norms, and have been amply supported by the law and patiently litigated through the Court system to vindication.

Indeed, measures undertaken by this Administration seem a bit tame when compared to some of the unprecedented steps taken by the Obama Administration's aggressive exercises of Executive power – such as, under its DACA program, refusing to enforce broad swathes of immigration law.

The fact of the matter is that, in waging a scorched earth, no-holds-barred war of "Resistance" against this Administration, it is the Left that is engaged in the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law. This highlights a basic disadvantage that conservatives have always had in contesting the political issues of the day. It was adverted to by the old, curmudgeonly Federalist, Fisher Ames, in an essay during the early years of the Republic.

Bill Barr's speech is a reminder that we still have men and women of integrity and wisdom battling in the public sphere to uphold the essence of our Republic. Barr's speech laid down a very clear marker of how he sees this battle for the soul of America. He is a man grounded in the law and committed to upholding it. He understands that justice must be blind and applied without bias if the fabric of this country is to remain intact.

We will know in the coming weeks if Barr delivers. I think he will. I have bet a bottle of fine bourbon with a wise hero of our Republic that high level people will be indicted. I hope for the sake of our country I am right. And if I am right, I am still going to buy that hero a bottle of fine bourbon.

Posted at 09:03 AM | Permalink

Reblog (0) Comments

Diana C , 19 November 2019 at 09:28 AM

Barr gives me hope that my grandchildren may grow up in a country that is still founded on the Constitution.
Barbara Ann , 19 November 2019 at 09:56 AM
Heroes of the Republic should drink together, come what may. I pray you are right LJ.
Bill H , 19 November 2019 at 09:56 AM
It was a fine speech, but it was made to a private audience and not reported to any significant degree by the media. I saw nothing in it to give me any hope that actual action will be taken against those who are participating in the coup against the properly elected president of this nation.
Cortes said in reply to Bill H ... , 19 November 2019 at 06:03 PM
The size of the forum seems less important to me than the quality of audience members.

Were the founders of the US Republic many? Were they insignificant people? Were they ignorant of their own faults and the likely faults of their interlocutors?

The reaction to Barr's comments will be telling in real time. Not TV or internet instant demand reaction time. Cattle are not the only creatures which have to ruminate, I think. The implications of Barr's remarks have to be digested by folks accustomed to being surrounded by lackeys.

h , 19 November 2019 at 10:08 AM
AG Barr's speech is definitely worth one's time to watch/listen or read. It's an excellent history lesson not to mention a kick in the radical Left's derriere.

It seems many in the alt news arena are placing bets on the IG's Report as well but I haven't seen a fine bottle of bourbon as the prize...very classy. If I were to place a bet my money would be on the IG fully exposing the entirety of this coup cooked up by Brennan (approved by Obama), simmered by Comey and team then carried out by the Resistance cadre.

It's unimaginable to believe Horowitz, let alone Barr, would whitewash or go half way when detailing such an extremely significant political event in our countries history. It's also impossible to right any of this mess without full disclosure which then must lead to holding accountable those who deliberately intended to harm this country and The President.

Here's to hoping Barr/Horowitz and team adhere to the DOJ/FBI's motto - Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity...

JerseyJeffersonian , 19 November 2019 at 11:04 AM
It was an impressive address. Hard to work up hope when so many parts of government that should ne helping are corrupted, though.
notlurking , 19 November 2019 at 12:38 PM
Hey Larry what fine bourbon do you recommend...
Larry Johnson -> notlurking... , 19 November 2019 at 12:48 PM
Pappy Van Winkle.
Jack said in reply to Larry Johnson ... , 19 November 2019 at 01:35 PM
An excellent choice, if you can get it.
Tidewater said in reply to Larry Johnson ... , 19 November 2019 at 02:25 PM
Pappy Van Winkle 23 year old 2016 750 ml $3,899.99

Wow! You guys are definitely playing hardball.

Barbara Ann said in reply to Tidewater... , 19 November 2019 at 03:43 PM
For what this bet represents - hopefully a first step towards saving the Republic, the stake seems wholly appropriate.
Tidewater said in reply to Barbara Ann... , 20 November 2019 at 04:56 PM
Yes, you are quite right. And very nicely put. I have had a grubby kind of adult life keeping one eye out for cheap, acceptable booze. So I emitted a kind of inadvertent Rorshach. Besides, I think the fiery, precious Kaintuck will be shared among a group of very smart, worldly wise, and hard old spooky guv'mint guys, sometime after Thanksgiving. Like a meeting of the Norwegian Resistance. To be a fly on the wall as to the toasts...
turcopolier -> Tidewater... , 19 November 2019 at 08:57 PM
tidewater
Why do you think the bet is with LJ?
Terry said in reply to turcopolier ... , 20 November 2019 at 06:41 AM
Altho multiple bets are possible, I agree with tidewater -

"I have a side bet with a friend. I no longer believe that the duopoly of parties in the US will indict anyone over the matter of this article.

I hope I lose the bet." pl (Nov 17 2019)

"I have bet a bottle of fine bourbon with a wise hero of our Republic that high level people will be indicted. " - LJ (Nov 19 2019)

I will be 78 on the 31st. I attribute my longevity to; the right genes. a robust outdoor life in youth, and a steady regime of cigars, bourbon and red meat. pl (May 25 2018)

However a commenter named Jack did once mention getting Pappy's for his birthday.


:-)


Jack said in reply to Terry... , 20 November 2019 at 12:20 PM
Terry,

I'm not a party to this bet.

However, your memory is correct, I did receive a bottle of Pappy's for my birthday some moons ago before it went cult. SWMBO paid $95 for it then. As you can see from Tidewater's comment the price has escalated significantly if you can even snag one from a retailer that can get an allocation from the wholesaler. It sure is a fine bourbon. Craft spirits have definitely pushed the envelope on quality and there are now many fine spirits available.

Tidewater said in reply to Terry... , 20 November 2019 at 04:59 PM
You 'multiple' covers you, but not me, and thanks for the comment. But it was a trap. Interesting, too.
Tidewater said in reply to turcopolier ... , 20 November 2019 at 04:32 PM
Sir,

Ah so!, as Mr. Moto would say. I see. "How do you know that?" A question oft asked in one of the past vocations, as I recall. Well, I didn't know, actually. Careless. (Was this a little lesson in close reading?) And there was one glitch in the profile that did puzzle me and should have been a caution. Though I was bedazzled by a lot of surprising insights into the amber which I knew as Rebel Yell or Virginia Gentleman (from A. Smith Bowman who I just found out had the first name of Abram) from the time that I never had hangovers, till the time that I did, when I had to give bourbon up, switch to Scotch, and then had to give that up too, move on to the grape, where I should have been to begin with. (Though it always took me three glasses of jug wine and a little gagging before I got right with it. And then one day the wine in the groceries, like the peanuts, and the cheese, got a lot better.)

It was the Kaintuck angle that I should have noticed. That was not in the profile as developed. Still the glitch could be overlooked as a kind of grunt-ish foible, maybe. Or would have to do with the more er rambunctious LJ than his SST pix indicates, or perhaps the old stomping grounds. Appropriately symbolic, too. Camp on the Watauga, Hannah's Cowpens, King's Mountain, the Presbyterian invention of the pew (to slide out of in a hurry), the origin of the Rangers, the steady Overhill militia at Guilford Court House with homemade rifles lined up on the lowest rail of the split rail fence. And bourbon went there with them, I think that is certain enough.

Still, what the profile suggested to me was that it should have been a bet about something, say, from the Haut Medoc, perhaps a bottle of Chateau Petrus from Pomerol (Bordeux) maybe about 2012, and not the 1945 (a new Mercedes), just something more reasonable I see knocked down at $2499.99 at one loci. Or a Domaine Leroy Chambertin Grand Cru Cote de Nuits (Burgundy) for $1400.00. That could be considered gruntish, too. Napoleon is said to have drunk Chambertin every day. If he wasn't allowed to get it shipped in to him on St. Helena it wasn't the intense humidity of the rainy island climate on the arsenic in the wallpaper that did for him. And that would be really perfidious. Though thinking about it, I can see his jailors finding the steady predictable arrival of the Chambertin by mail packet like from Chewy.com a good thing for one and all...

Maybe I am right about this one, though: Someone here has a bet with Mr. William Binney.

Could it be a bottle of wine?

English Outsider -> Tidewater... , 20 November 2019 at 08:06 PM

Napoleon either did a lot of entertaining on St Helena or he hit the bottle seriously hard. He had hogsheads of Constantia wine delivered from nearby Groot Constantia to the amount of thirty bottles a month. Other sources say two or three bottles a day. "A floral desert wine that, 200 years ago, was one of the most sought after of its day. Crates were shipped to the royal courts of Europe". (Alex Perry, "The Rift".)

They still make it -

https://www.kleinconstantia.com/our-wines/vin-de-constance

The sales pitch quotes Jane Austen as warranting its "healing powers on a disappointed heart" but I reckon those healing powers would have to be quite something to make up for that final cry of "La Garde Recule!"

I liked your alcoholic Odyssey above. May it long continue.

Tidewater said in reply to English Outsider ... , 21 November 2019 at 12:35 AM
For a bit there I thought Groot Constantia was an island near St. Helena that I had never heard of! I looked up Cape Town--Constantia on Wiki and got the picture. So the Dutch were making a good wine in Constantia by the mid-seventeenth century. Nineteen hundred miles seems to me not nearby, though I admit it is a routine passage for a sailing ship. Lot of sugar in a dessert wine. Thank you for your comments.

Did you ever hear the story that the Napoleon at St. Helena out there in the Atlantic off the Namibia coast was a double? The real Napoleon made his escape to the other St. Helena Island, in Beaufort County, South Carolina, according to Gullah legend.

English Outsider -> Tidewater... , 21 November 2019 at 12:36 PM

I doubt that on the grounds that if he'd made it to the States the US would now stretch from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego. A great captain, Napoleon, and had rotten luck at Waterloo. A damn close run thing indeed.

Trouble is he was also a complete bastard and very light on the touchy-feely stuff. You get that sort on the Continent every now and again so we have to go over regularly and sort them out. Gets to be a bore but Noblesse Oblige and all that.

Put that last in in case Vig, who may just possibly be LeaNder though the style's slightly different, wants some English Exceptionalism to knock.

On the drinks front I have to confess to being a complete fraud, from the viewpoint of the average SSTer with his or her well stocked cellar. At present I'm occupied with palming off some decidedly weird home brewed cider on unsuspecting guests. Not always successfully. My home brewed beer's OK though. Compares well with German beer, which is for me the Gold Standard. A decent Single Malt every now and again and that's about it.

So I can admire your Odyssey, and the recollections that go with it, but not emulate it.

JMH said in reply to Tidewater... , 20 November 2019 at 07:04 AM
Buffalo Trace is the poor man's Pappy's.

https://www.buffalotracedistillery.com/
https://www.buffalotracedistillery.com/brands/buffalo-trace
https://www.buffalotracedistillery.com/brands/van-winkle

Jack , 19 November 2019 at 12:41 PM
Larry

The proof will be in the pudding. It seems the IG report will be released after Thanksgiving. Considering the previous report that Horowitz issued where the executive summary said something similar to Comey's exoneration of Hillary, it will be interesting to see the tone of this report.

Barr made a fine speech but talk is cheap. What has he done to clean up his own department? Roger Stone was arrested by a SWAT team in a dramatic made for TV show and has now been convicted of lying. Why hasn't the same standard been applied to all the muckety mucks in DC?

Sbin , 19 November 2019 at 12:57 PM
All useless noise without real action.
Doubt Barr will do anything of substance.
English Outsider , 19 November 2019 at 02:47 PM
I don't think I've ever seen such an impressive overview of the constitutional background before. It applies to both sides of the Atlantic but more chance of it resulting in something concrete on yours. The video contains some interesting asides that are not in the printed transcript, in particular a reference to Trump's style of leadership and a dig at the convoluted legislation that sometimes emerges from Congress.


I was more interested in the constitutional implications of the lecture, but your article above poses the urgent question arising from it. AG Barr has nailed his colours to the mast and cleared the decks for action. Is that all, or will action follow?

Factotum , 19 November 2019 at 06:30 PM
Obama perfected Cloward-Pivens strategies to get what he wanted starting back in 2008.

Obama storm-troopers would over-whelm local elections offices flooding them the voter registration requests they knew included fake registrations, just in order to prevent proper vetting of each registrant which allowed a lot of fraudulent voters to get a free pass.

Cloward-Pivens is intended to overwhelm a system "legally" to render it ineffectual. They are doing the same now with "expanded" voting rights like vote-harvesting and same day registration.

Just one more part of the Democrats use of Saul Alinksy Rules for Radicals. Glad Barr pointed all of this intentionally obstructionist out in such direct and data backed terms. We indeed are a fragile republic - losing a shared ethical common denominator every day - diversity is not our strength - in fact, it exposes our endemic weaknesses the more we move from the Founders values into third world values.

edding , 19 November 2019 at 07:57 PM
Am guessing that win or lose a bottle of Jefferson's bourbon is destined for Col. Lang, correct?
turcopolier -> edding... , 19 November 2019 at 08:56 PM
edding

Why do you think that?

English Outsider -> turcopolier ... , 20 November 2019 at 09:12 AM

Probably. Colonel, that guess results from putting two and two together about a bet you also made a little while ago, the one you are hoping to lose. I wouldn't say that constitutes proof but there's definitely a smoking gun there.
J , 19 November 2019 at 08:39 PM
'If' the 'Establishment' [aka Deep state] decided to prosecute its own, it would have been setting a dangerous precedence for themselves, and I fear that is the reason for the slow, s-l-o-w roll out, instead of prompt arrest, jail, prosecute, and upon conviction they become Bubb'a shower soap.

I hate to say it, but I fear that the Colonel is right, nothing will be done with all this. It's all circus meant to distract us and get our hopes up.

akaPatience , 19 November 2019 at 09:42 PM
I hope you win your bet Larry. Without enforcement, what good are laws?

And I swear, if the malefactors get away with what they've done, at the very least I'll join others to march on Washington in protest. Wars aside, this is THE worst political scandal of my lifetime - a nightmare come true of the US government at its most corrupt and tyrannical.

[Nov 22, 2019] Where are the indictments from Durham and Horowitz? Where?

Nov 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"The ICA's blockbuster finding was presented to the public as the consensus view of the nation's intelligence community. As events have unfolded, however, it now seems apparent that the report was largely the work of one agency, the CIA, and overseen by one man, then-Director John Brennan, who closely directed its drafting and publication with a small group of hand-picked analysts.

Nearly three years later, as the public awaits answers from two Justice Department inquiries into the Trump-Russia probe's origins, and as impeachment hearings catalyzed by a Brennan-hired anti-Trump CIA analyst unfold in Congress, it is clear that Brennan's role in propagating the collusion narrative went far beyond his work on the ICA. A close review of facts that have slowly come to light reveals that he was a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy theory from its inception. The record shows that:

----------------

I know that Horowitz can't indict but he can forward recommendations to a prosecutor with indictment authority. Would a Grand Jury in the Democratic Party stronghold of Washington, DC actually indict Obama era conspirators? I doubt it.

The process should be moved to other venues.

I have a side bet with a friend. I no longer believe that the duopoly of parties in the US will indict anyone over the matter of this article.

I hope I lose the bet. pl

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/11/15/the_brennan_dossier_all_about_a_prime_mover_of_russiagate_121098.html?utm_source=spotim&utm_medium=spotim_recirculation&spotim_referrer=recirculation&spot_im_comment_id=sp_fGGCea9F_121098_c_GxONiu

J , 17 November 2019 at 01:49 PM

Colonel,

Here are transcripts by NSC personal where LTC Vindman 'judgement' is seriously questioned. Was Vindman the NSC unauthorized/illegal leak? Will DoD take appropriate UCMJ action against Vindman?

https://intelligence.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?documentid=849

Look at NSC official Tim Morrison account on Vindman 'judgement ' and serious questions as to Vindman accessing unauthorized items.

Sbin , 17 November 2019 at 03:31 PM
They sure got Flynn Cohen Manifort and Stone quickly.Giuliani associates were indicted to open up another front.
Pity people that desperately need to be held accountable wil not be so.
That is how the rule of law fails.
JerseyJeffersonian , 17 November 2019 at 03:33 PM
"Forget it, Cicero, it's Chinatown." Not with a bang, but a whimper.
casey , 17 November 2019 at 04:03 PM
Sadly, agree you will win that bet, which begs a question: Can the ship be turned around at this very late stage in the game?
casey , 17 November 2019 at 04:09 PM
Sorry to post twice, but, on a related note, George Elliason appears to show that the so-called whistleblower inside information, upon which the impeachment is progressing, is based on not even hearsay, but a Tweet:

https://thesaker.is/adam-schiff-whistleblower-impeachment-based-on-a-tweet-from-poland/

Diana C , 17 November 2019 at 04:20 PM
Well, I am certainly saddened by this state of affairs.

It appears that the barn doors have been left totally opened for a complete free for all for anyone who wants to to and has the money, the un-elected position, and the friends to take over the workings of the U.S. government. Rule of law and rule of reason be damned.

Let's hope that by some miracle this coming election will be such that the people recognize what has happened and will provide a strong message to those who feel they have a right to rule from the offices of their unelected positions.

Seamus Padraig said in reply to Diana C... , 18 November 2019 at 02:37 AM
It'd sure be nice if we could get some MAGA candidates for congress going. Right now, Trump's all alone in Washington; not much hope of getting any part of his agenda passed.
Factotum said in reply to Seamus Padraig... , 18 November 2019 at 01:31 PM
Any GOP candidate facing down the well-honed Democrat mean machine is a daunting prospect.

The well-calculated legacy of the Democrat ginned-up Kavanaugh hearings - we will do and say anything to smear you, taint you and bring you down. Don't even think of going against us because we will do the exact same thing to anyone Trump wants to bring on, or run in support of his administration.

We see the Democrat mean machine in action a lot in California to the point we now have increasingly "bye elections" where there is no opposition so the candidate does not even have to face the voters and risk even a write-in opposition vote.

The system is rigged to quickly become a one-party hegemony. They say trends start in California, so beware of the tricks they pulled out here and got away with it:
(1) term limits;
(2) jungle primaries;
(3) district elections and mandatory protected minority-majority districts;
(4) counting illegals as district resident numbers;
(5) bye election not facing a ballot;
(6) vote by mail lengthening the campaign season beyond all human endurance;
(7) vote- harvesting;
(8) same day voter registration;
(9) outlawing voter ID..

Jack , 17 November 2019 at 04:46 PM
"I no longer believe that the duopoly of parties in the US will indict anyone over the matter of this article."

Sir,

I'm afraid you will be proven correct.

Factotum , 17 November 2019 at 05:15 PM
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
.........

( Is the world now ripe for Kayne West!?!)

[Nov 22, 2019] From "Communists under each bed" to "Russians under each bed" in less then 70 years

Nov 22, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Nov 21 2019 19:53 utc | 88

And the lies just keep on rolling :

"A former top White House Russia expert testified Thursday that the 'fictional narrative' embraced by President Donald Trump that Ukraine meddled in the US elections was fabricated by Russia to wreak havoc in US politics."

So reports one of NATO's BigLie Media outlets. FYI, as I wrote in 2016, no outside nation needs to "wreak havoc in US politics" as there're numerous home grown domestic sources already doing that in an ongoing manner since the 1850s. Isn't it a felony to lie to Congress?

[Nov 22, 2019] NeoMcCarthyism WMDs weapons of mass deceptions more dangerous than anarchy in thier effects on society

Notable quotes:
"... Copeland @ 33 said; "It seems like the primary role of the investigation, so far, is to advance the national security narrative that portrays Russia as the perpetual enemy of the US." Yes, it "seems" like it, because it is. The corporate empire needs enemies to keep the $ flowing. ..."
Nov 22, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

ben , Nov 21 2019 3:05 utc | 40

Copeland @ 33 said; "It seems like the primary role of the investigation, so far, is to advance the national security narrative that portrays Russia as the perpetual enemy of the US." Yes, it "seems" like it, because it is. The corporate empire needs enemies to keep the $ flowing.

Confrontation is much more profitable than peace...

snake , Nov 21 2019 13:02 utc | 62


WMDs weapons of mass deceptions more dangerous than anarchy and weapons

I included the following to make clear what is the above link is about..
@ Circe It would be a fair assumption that nothing on the internet is what it appears. When it matters, it is controlled. Internet like media is source of information and manipulation. One cannot rely on any single source. Everyone is lying much of the time. by: jared @ 55

Weapons of mass deception (WMDs)
Wireless weapons of mind control (WWMC_.

You will know when your government has begun to move in response to those that it governs when it:==>
1. quits spying on you
2. makes infecting UR computer with spyware, malware, and viri not only criminally illegal with 10 years automatic no early time release jail time but also makes actionable as a tort, victim recovery from the perpetrator Jury trials to establish damages.
3. amends the constitution to make it a life time in jail offence to conduct the affairs of government in secret or to classify any document as secret from anyone who is a citizen of America and is also a citizen of the Untied States of America.
4. has a budget for domestic needs at least 4x the size of the armament budget.
5. transitions power generation from grid to place of use and transitions from fossil fuel, nuclear fuel to solar and wind energy
6. gives free education and medical services at the highest level to all comers without regard to prior qualification.
7. recognizes all people of all race and all religion as one in the same person
8. puts news fakers and propagandist under the jail
9. admits pearl harbor, 9/11 and
10. allows the masses to determine not only the candidates for offices in the USA but also allows the masses to determine which candidate will serve the USA
11. allows any member of the governed masses to indite any sitting member of a government at any level, in the independent of the civil government, court of human rights, and allows that court of human rights to immediately remove the accused person from his or her position in government until a verdict can be rendered, and if that verdict is guilty, allows to and assist with enforcing the penalty assessed by the the human rights court for the human rights violation while in office or as a result of the power of the office.
12. makes it illegal to be a member of government at any level if that persons holds any citizenship but American and USA.

ben , Nov 21 2019 16:31 utc | 73
Just watching "the hate Russia circus" on MSM. If DJT wasn't such a greedy MF, this circus wouldn't be going on.

Let's be clear, Russia, and every other nation on earth, has the absolute right to defend itself, and it's people,

from being exploited by the U$A's corporate empire. The empire's record over time is clear, if it wants something you have, they'll take it.

DJT has no problem following the empire's dictates, but when he deviates and pursues his own personal enrichment at the expense of the empire's overall goals, things like the D.C. circus ensues.

I'll say this again, Russia, and all countries on earth have the RIGHT to defend themselves from our latest empires attacks, no matter in what form they appear..

[Nov 22, 2019] New neologism Putophrenia

Nov 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Adding to his useful Russophrenia , Bryan MacDonald has coined " Putophrenia ": "A condition where the sufferer believes Vladimir Putin is a crazed Russian nationalist who wants to destroy the West, and simultaneously, is, together with his cronies, robbing Russia blind & hiding all the dosh in the same West." These two neatly point up the absurdities of the Western propaganda line.

[Nov 22, 2019] The article states: "Intelligence sources in Kyiv have informed CD Media that the 'witness' narrative of LT COL Alexander Vindman was created by corrupt U.S. State Department officials in Kyiv, Ukraine

What I do not understand is what will DemoRats get if Senate starts the trial.
Notable quotes:
"... "The Democrats waited for better timing of blowing the allegations it came when Zelenskiy visited Washington and blew it in UN plus, met Trump. ..."
"... "Danilyuk was present at the Zelinskiy + Trump conversation, he told about the matters of the conversation to Alexander Vindman. Zelinskiy administration fired Danilyuk but is not able to fire Vindman." ..."
"... The article continues with info on Schiff's staffers meeting in Ukraine, it has the agenda, who attended, etc. There are other related articles too, worth review IMO. ..."
"... It was not clear to the negotiators what Trump actually wanted. Sondland said that at one point he called up Trump and asked an open questions: "What do you want from Ukraine?". ..."
"... According to Sondland Trump responded: "I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing." ..."
"... That Gordon Sondland and his fellow negotiators were flabbergasted that Trump did not tie money for military weapons to the Biden revelations, and that Sondland himself made the assumption that Trump would make the aid money conditional on what Ukraine could provide, might tell us more about the huckster mindset that prevails among the Washington political and bureaucratic elite than it does about Trump's own worldview and psycholoical make-up. Trump may be obsessed with making the Deal of the Century but the people surrounding him in the White House are obsessed with extracting as much blood out of a stone as they can. ..."
"... Regarding the possibility of a Senate trail, just look at the two major papers. They are pushing impeachment with all they have, including awarding sainthood to some who do not deserve it, e.g. Vindman. If the Beltway echo chamber has the desired affect, Shiff will keep things going. ..."
"... This is from Saint Marie's statement: ..."
"... "Supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing to do. If Russia prevails and Ukraine falls to Russian dominion, we can expect to see other attempts by Russia to expand its territory and influence." ..."
"... In other words, trotting out the old Dominoes Theory, first it will be Ukraine, then Belarus, Poland, the Baltics. Oh the horror! ..."
"... The impeachment hearings will never touch the basic underlying fact that Obama/Biden Administration restarted the Cold War by supporting the Maidan Coup and greenlighting the seizing of the ethnic Russian Donbass region. The trench warfare there continues to this day. ..."
"... The only conclusion is that the hatred between globalist oligarchs and nationalists is so deep and powerful that the consequences of a World War are ignored. The 2020 election is pointless. The Republic is dead. The Empire shutters from internal conflict. If the Battle of Carrhae replays once again, the war with Iran will force any survivors to retreat from the Middle East. ..."
"... Copeland @ 33 said; "It seems like the primary role of the investigation, so far, is to advance the national security narrative that portrays Russia as the perpetual enemy of the US." Yes, it "seems" like it, because it is. The corporate empire needs enemies to keep the $ flowing. ..."
Nov 22, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
frances , Nov 20 2019 21:02 utc | 6
This article is really helpful.
https://creativedestructionmedia.com/investigations/2019/11/04
Again I have shortened the link, the article states: "Intelligence sources in Kyiv have informed CD Media that the 'witness' narrative of LT COL Alexander Vindman was created by corrupt U.S. State Department officials in Kyiv, Ukraine.

According to our sources, "Alexander Vindman [recent witness in favor of Trump impeachment], Gordon Sondland [US ambassador to the EU and Trump supporter] and Oleksandr Danilyuk [Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine from late May until 30 September 2019 before being fired] had a meeting in July 2019. Sondland asked Danilyuk as head of National Security Bureau of Ukraine to investigate Biden, Burisma, and Manafort related investigations.

Apparently, Sondland didnt know that Danilyuk is Soros' agent and supplies info to Democrats. This was the second leak to the Deep State.

The first leak was made by Danilyuk because he was the only person in the room with fluent English when Zelenskiy and Trump had a phone call conversation. Zelenskiy speaks English on very intermediate level, loses the context and emotional sense also, Yermak Andrei, the 2d Advisor to Zelenskiy is, allegedly, on the hook of FSB. Thus, it was Danilyuk who passed information to the Deep State to attack Trump.

"The Democrats waited for better timing of blowing the allegations it came when Zelenskiy visited Washington and blew it in UN plus, met Trump.

"Danilyuk was present at the Zelinskiy + Trump conversation, he told about the matters of the conversation to Alexander Vindman. Zelinskiy administration fired Danilyuk but is not able to fire Vindman."

The article continues with info on Schiff's staffers meeting in Ukraine, it has the agenda, who attended, etc. There are other related articles too, worth review IMO.

David G , Nov 20 2019 21:07 utc | 7

Two things:

(1) b is not being clear that Sondland drew a definite line between the White House meeting and the stalled military aid, in terms of how he thought they were linked to Zelensky making the desired announcement of investigations: While Sondland said he merely "presumed" the linkage to the military aid, he asserts the linkage to the White House meeting was made explicit to him (albeit via Giuliani).

(2) The "well documented Ukraininan interference" that actually occurred (ostensible dirt on Manafort) bears only a vague relationship to what has lodged in Trump's shriveled lima bean brain (the DNC server spirited away to Kiev). Of course, since neither the Dems nor the Repubs are interested in noting this fact, it will be ignored.

james , Nov 20 2019 21:08 utc | 8
thanks b.... the way i see it, usa and everyone loses in the present set up.. you can't get down and grovel in the swamp with the usa or ukraine, as youre going to get a lot of mud on you and some of it is going to stick.. the info that comes out of the dynamic between these 2 countries is toxic, no matter which way you look... of course dems naively think they are going to use it to get rid of trump, but they are dredging up some toxic stuff with a lot of their own ckeletons in the closet... they are hoping none of it comes out and the focus remains on - as @5 jackrabbit notes - trump mentioning biden and how this is not allowed.. i can't see them gaining from this myself as the whole thing is a political theatre where we mostly know the final outcome... and, it's not just the ammo that trump can throw out here, but the accidental info such as what @1/2 frances points to as well... lots of ugliness can come out of this that is going to stick on everyone...

@3 taffyboy.. that is old footage repackaged in a new link... thanks anyway.. it is fairly clear though and something that the dems think others are going to miss or something.. i don't get that part.. the dems want to keep the focus on how trump was going after a 2020 rival but i think once anyone starts looking at this, they are going to see a lot more then they want to see.. mind you, maybe the usa media will be successful in guiding the narrative for the war party which on some level seem unhappy with trump.. i don't know that it is eroding trumps fan base though.. maybe.. but as b says - trump is a crook.. everyone knew this before he got in power.. however, he has slowed down the military agenda some relative to obama, which is really ironic.. i think it is because trump doesn't profit off the military industrial complex as he does other stuff.. either way they are all first class kleptomaniacs all vying for the front of the trough...

ben , Nov 20 2019 21:18 utc | 9
"Trump-Ukraine Whistleblower's Legal Team Is Getting Death Threats: WSJ"

Banana Republic anyone?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-ukraine-whistleblowers-legal-team-is-getting-death-threats-wsj

I also heard the Lt. Col. who testified is also receiving death threats.

Am looking for links to verify same..

I still believe the rabbit is closest to the actual truth....

The "two party" system is a friggen joke, most work for their donors, and they're not part of the working class.

Jen , Nov 20 2019 21:22 utc | 10
The negotiations around the Ukraine issues were going slow. It was not clear to the negotiators what Trump actually wanted. Sondland said that at one point he called up Trump and asked an open questions: "What do you want from Ukraine?".

According to Sondland Trump responded: "I want nothing. I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. Tell Zelensky to do the right thing."

Trump is a crook. It is fair to presume that he wanted his aides to use all potential pressure points to deliver the desired results from the Ukrainians. But Trump is also a smart enough crook to never say that.

Is it possible that, just for once, Trump really did want nothing from Zelensky other than to find out what Joe Biden stood to gain from pressuring the Ukrainians to sack Viktor Shokin as Prosecutor General and what Hunter Biden's role as Board Director of a shell energy company in Ukraine really amounted to?

That Gordon Sondland and his fellow negotiators were flabbergasted that Trump did not tie money for military weapons to the Biden revelations, and that Sondland himself made the assumption that Trump would make the aid money conditional on what Ukraine could provide, might tell us more about the huckster mindset that prevails among the Washington political and bureaucratic elite than it does about Trump's own worldview and psycholoical make-up. Trump may be obsessed with making the Deal of the Century but the people surrounding him in the White House are obsessed with extracting as much blood out of a stone as they can.

Antoinetta III , Nov 20 2019 21:30 utc | 11
James @ 8

If this ever gets to the Senate, a full trial will result, which will cause who knows how many skeletons fall out of various Democrat/"Resistance" closets.

What do you think the odds are that, just somehow, nothing goes to the Senate in the end?

Antoinetta III

james , Nov 20 2019 21:37 utc | 12
@11 antionetta 111... good question.. i am not following it closely, but my impression is 60/40 odds at this time! maybe less..

a relevant (i think!) article from marach 2019 - US Embassy pressed Ukraine to drop probe of George Soros group during 2016 election

funny how soros name pops up in a number of places.. some have said he was an important person behind crystia freelands rise in power too..

div> Nothing goes to Senate, I bet, but also no indictments from Barr. How's that for a quid pro quo?

Posted by: casey , Nov 20 2019 21:54 utc | 13

Nothing goes to Senate, I bet, but also no indictments from Barr. How's that for a quid pro quo?

Posted by: casey | Nov 20 2019 21:54 utc | 13

Bart Hansen , Nov 20 2019 22:49 utc | 18
>Nothing goes to Senate, I bet, but also no indictments from Barr.
> How's that for a quid pro quo?
> Posted by: casey | Nov 20 2019 21:54 utc | 13

For a kleptocracy, that almost sounds like a reasonable resolution, so no, that can not be allowed. Trump is not being a team player, plus the retreat from northern Syria under fire from potatoes was an unforgivable humiliation. Someone must pay for that, even if it brings down the whole rotten house, a real possibility. Trump has how many millions of Twitter followers? If he ever calls them out to the street, even if only 1% respond, and they show up with guns...

Trump is unpredictable and dangerous. How does one disarm a drunk with a gun at a party? Very, very carefully. But brain-dead big-dick Dear Leaders don't do carefully. It's Obey Or Regarding the possibility of a Senate trail, just look at the two major papers. They are pushing impeachment with all they have, including awarding sainthood to some who do not deserve it, e.g. Vindman. If the Beltway echo chamber has the desired affect, Shiff will keep things going.

This is from Saint Marie's statement:

"Supporting Ukraine is the right thing to do. It is also the smart thing to do. If Russia prevails and Ukraine falls to Russian dominion, we can expect to see other attempts by Russia to expand its territory and influence."

In other words, trotting out the old Dominoes Theory, first it will be Ukraine, then Belarus, Poland, the Baltics. Oh the horror!

bevin , Nov 20 2019 23:51 utc | 25
Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report is always on the money
'https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-ukrainegate-farce

She explains that "The Democrats are hoping that Ukrainegate will succeed where Russiagate failed and they can win the presidency without helping their voters.

"This spectacle is a get out the vote effort that doubles as anti-Russian propaganda."

In other words this is a battle to ensure that the Democratic Party does not do what it has done a couple of times before in history and become aligned with the people against the oligarchs.

The last to manage that were FDR in 1936 (though Huey Long didn't think so) and WJ Bryan in 1896. He came very close to winning in his challenge to the financiers, Wall St and the rich.

There is a real chance this year that Sanders will win the Primaries and in doing so break the hold that the corporate machines have over the Democratic Party.

To win Sanders will have, first of all, to win the support of the black voters who have become the most reliable and malleable vote bank in the party. This would break the hold of the Black Misleadership Class which exists to ensure that class politics do not develop. The great fear of the oligarchy and their paid agents in the black community is that voters will stop thinking in racial terms and start judging politicians by their policies.

If that should happen, and 'Every Man become a King', the Few might as well emigrate to Brazil or Colombia, and take the political class, the media and the 'intelligentsia' with them.

VietnamVet , Nov 21 2019 0:13 utc | 27
The impeachment hearings will never touch the basic underlying fact that Obama/Biden Administration restarted the Cold War by supporting the Maidan Coup and greenlighting the seizing of the ethnic Russian Donbass region. The trench warfare there continues to this day.

The same Corporate Democrats together with the Five-Eyes Intelligence Community have conducted a continuous campaign to defeat and then remove Donald Trump. But they are so incompetent that he is still in the White House but he is under pressure, all alone, frustrated and angry, with only his daughter and Kellyanne Conway for support.

Yesterday, the USS Carrier Abraham Lincoln entered Persian Gulf after 6 months nearby; Carrier Harry Truman is back at sea, ahead of relieving the Lincoln. US National Guard armored units deployed to eastern Syria to keep the oil. The September drone attack shows that Aramco's oil production facilities can be taken out at any time. A bad day and the global economy crashes.

The only conclusion is that the hatred between globalist oligarchs and nationalists is so deep and powerful that the consequences of a World War are ignored. The 2020 election is pointless. The Republic is dead. The Empire shutters from internal conflict. If the Battle of Carrhae replays once again, the war with Iran will force any survivors to retreat from the Middle East.

Renodino , Nov 21 2019 0:19 utc | 28
Pelosi is driving this impeachment bus to a trial in the Senate next year at the height of the primaries. The goal is to keep Warren and Bernie locked up in the Senate chamber, giving Mayor Pete and Biden ( and maybe Bloomberg) a chance to gain ground and win some state races. The Democrats don't care if they lose to Trump. They will do anything to make sure a progressive doesn't win to protect their corporate paymasters.
Michael Droy , Nov 21 2019 1:25 utc | 34
It is beyond me why the Democrats think they can bring Trump down over this.

Of course they don't. The whole thing is a massive cover up. The idea is to bore the world on Ukraine, sacrifice Biden and prevent Giulani from digging deeper. There is so much dirt over Ukraine that just allowing a normal investigation would be suicide for the whole dems, not just Kerry/Biden/Hillary.

The same thing happened with Russia/Mueller. There was never an attempt to get Trump, just to distract from Fisa inquiries and the blatant Trump spying. The Durham investigation could crucify many from Brennan to Hillary to probably Obama.

Bore the world with b/s investigations, hope Trump doesn't have time to do his own homework. It will never work. Giulani has a ton of dirt to reveal if he wants. And in anycase Trump won last time by ignoring the mudfight and concentrating on slogans that showed he had listened to what voters are saying. Working class jobs and pay, and then every time a Dem calls for "protect the immigrants", Transwomen's rights, better universities or attack Trump's climate change record they lose a thousand votes.
Dem outrage at Trump is just the best thing for him to win marginal working class votes.


BTW - there seems to be this thing nowadays where you can't say the facts point one way without claiming to hate the victor. Trump is a crook. Assad is an evil person but. China is a dreadful place but.

Trump didn't go to Washington until 3 years ago. He is probably the most honest man in the state.

snake , Nov 21 2019 1:28 utc | 35
swamp rat auditing is dangerous <=click here
FSD , Nov 21 2019 1:33 utc | 36
"It is beyond me why the Democrats think they can bring Trump down over this."

Really, it's the Blue wing of the Quigley Party which, for obvious reasons, must run the anterior assault with passive assistance from the Red wing. Schiff's role was to do a better job of simulating substance, if the real stuff couldn't be found.

The RINOs need an optical rope-bridge, allowing them to embark on a principled/Constitutional and oh-so-difficult moral traverse that they can be seen reluctantly rising to for the benefit of taking the edge off incensed MAGAs. At this point, the plan of necessity is to weather the civil insurrection because Trump simply has to go.

Alas Schiff is not delivering much. Nonetheless I suspect that after trying everything and the kitchen sink to get Trump, reluctant Senators' own dirty (NSA) dossiers will play key roles. There has never been in the 70-year post WW2 era a more compulsory vote than this. All swan-divers will be well cared for.

Those who focus on MERIT and SUBSTANCE forget that the real kingmaker is PROCESS. Article 1 Section 3 requires only 'present' Senators need vote on conviction. Thus a lot of games can be played in the gap and particularly vulnerable RINOs might be allowed a form of sick-day (e.g. a 20-Senator panel of Dems & Repubs).

It is hard to imagine Trump surviving Mitch's Star Chamber after heaven and earth has been moved for three years to maneuver him to this point. The singular criticality of the Senate well only grows as Trump's re-election appears increasingly assured.

T=Of course the less plausible the Schiff findings, the more 'process gerrymandering' will be relied upon to carry the weight. Again, some level of civil unrest is unavoidable. However five more years of Trump is a nonstarter.

"Trump is a crook."

I'm confounded by the persisting refusal to draw a qualitative distinction between Trump and the system he's so clearly at odds with. Not a panacea of course. This is about power. But distinction enough to rationalize the Herculean efforts being expended to oust him.

Come on b, do the algebra! Something's lop-sided. Trump could save everyone a lot of trouble if he simply fell back into the arms of his confederates. Surely at a minimum there's a material schism in the elites. A schism means daylight in the Panopticon's ceiling. Why isn't this cheered more?

If Trump swims in crookedness, why does the entire impeachment process hinge on two ridiculously banal phone calls after over three years of FISA microscopy? Why, in the course of his 'mock-defense' has he been allowed to turn back the sheets on the existential levels of Ukraine corruption? Has the Deep State become masochistic in its old age?

And why hasn't the system found his price? Every crook has one. $50 billion would be a reasonable opening gambit. Does anyone still think this is some kind of false-dialectic kabuki? If it is, the stage managers deserve the world, or already have it. That, and an Oscar. Bravo!


ben , Nov 21 2019 3:05 utc | 40
Copeland @ 33 said; "It seems like the primary role of the investigation, so far, is to advance the national security narrative that portrays Russia as the perpetual enemy of the US." Yes, it "seems" like it, because it is. The corporate empire needs enemies to keep the $ flowing.

Confrontation is much more profitable than peace...

jadan , Nov 21 2019 3:14 utc | 41
I love the title of Rick Wilson's book "Everything Trump Touches Dies". The man is completely beshitting the presidency and the USA brand. This is not to say it wasn't foul before he laid his tiny hands on it. He is a symptom as another commenter here points out of the failure of the system that produced him.

Impeachment will not solve the problem even though impeachment is fully justified on the basis of his illegal maneuvers in Ukraine. He should be removed from his command for looting Syria's oil, or for simply entering upon Syrian territory without being invited. Bush should be in prison for the Iraq war, for that matter. But he's another symptom.

The clear and present danger is Trump who has thrown a monkey wrench into the global system and disunited the nations. He's wrecked trade relations with China. He's exacerbated problems in the ME and assisted Israel in the further destruction of the Palestinian people. He's attempting to dismantle the lawful regulatory function of government and convert it to a lawless fascist fortress America with only contempt for international law. His ignorance of environmental problems is vast.

If this man is not removed from office this nation will die. Sooner than it would otherwise. It is already very sick. This spectacle of impeachment is a weak remedy. We have no alternative.

tintorelli , Nov 21 2019 3:29 utc | 42
Trump is not a crook. He approached the situation with Z no doubt as he has been approached countless times by the Mob and the Cops in NYC. "Nice country you got here. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it." If you sincerely believe Trump's denial of "quid pro quo" and his handwritten notes, you might be the only one on the planet. That will hardly save him from impeachment but not enough to get him tossed out (which I agree with others, is not the Dems objective). Remember too, this did not start with the Dems. And it's not some murky Deep State. I am surprised you have not focused on the obvious role of Bolton in all this. He's hiding behind Kupperman now, waiting for everybody to testify, then he will come out. He obviously has first hand info on all of this, and it's his cadre who have been leading the charge, and his allies who have been beating the war drums (V, Taylor, Kent, et al) with Russia. Finally, whatever the Biden boys were up to, Trump went full Tony Soprano. Not a good look for an empire in decline. It's a textbook example of the constitutional meaning of bribery.
tintorelli , Nov 21 2019 3:29 utc | 42

Trump is not a crook. He approached the situation with Z no doubt as he has been approached countless times by the Mob and the Cops in NYC. "Nice country you got here. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it." If you sincerely believe Trump's denial of "quid pro quo" and his handwritten notes, you might be the only one on the planet. That will hardly save him from impeachment but not enough to get him tossed out (which I agree with others, is not the Dems objective). Remember too, this did not start with the Dems. And it's not some murky Deep State. I am surprised you have not focused on the obvious role of Bolton in all this. He's hiding behind Kupperman now, waiting for everybody to testify, then he will come out. He obviously has first hand info on all of this, and it's his cadre who have been leading the charge, and his allies who have been beating the war drums (V, Taylor, Kent, et al) with Russia. Finally, whatever the Biden boys were up to, Trump went full Tony Soprano. Not a good look for an empire in decline. It's a textbook example of the constitutional meaning of bribery.

[Nov 22, 2019] Giraldi on Intelligence Community Reform

Nov 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

" Lang cites numerous examples of "incompetence and malfeasance in the leadership of the 17 agencies of the Intelligence Community and the Federal Bureau of Investigation," to include the examples cited above plus the failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the domestic front, he cites his personal observation of efforts by the Department of Justice and the FBI to corruptly "frame" people tried in federal courts on national security issues as well as the intelligence/law enforcement community conspiracy to "get Trump."

Colonel Lang asks "Tell me, pilgrims, why should we put up with such nonsense? Why should we pay the leaders of these agencies for the privilege of having them abuse us? We are free men and women. Let us send these swine to their just deserts in a world where they have to work hard for whatever money they earn." He then recommends stripping CIA of its responsibility for being the lead agency in spying as well as in covert action, which is a legacy of the Cold War and the area in which it has demonstrated a particular incompetence. As for the FBI, it was created by J. Edgar Hoover to maintain dossiers on politicians and it is time that it be replaced by a body that operates in a fashion "more reflective of our collective nation[al] values."" Giraldi

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/21/rethinking-national-security-cia-and-fbi-are-corrupt-but-what-about-congress/?fbclid=IwAR17hoQQec8kYaP3v34J0hRi8zkFHbEj6BkRiopjJf1FUtITCudoUYVjis4

[Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

Highly recommended!
Nov 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Don Wills , Nov 14 2019 15:33 utc | 105

snake @95 argues "the deep state does not exist" with circular logic that is massively off target.

The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests. None of those interests have the ability to make policy and implement regime changes without the deep state. Yes, outside interests drive the actions of the deep state, but no, those outside interests have no ability to accomplish anything without their deep state operatives.

If the US federal government bureaucracy was a) much less powerful, b) much more transparent, and c) more responsive to elected leaders, then none of the bad things would happen. A pipe dream? Yes - but it is erroneous to make a simple declaration "the deep state doesn't exist" without any rational arguments to refute my points in @72.

juliania , Nov 14 2019 16:06 utc | 106

Don Wills @ 72:

Thank you for your post. You say that there is a deep state, but you then go on to tell us it is not as deep as we imagine. So, I posit we should call it "the shallow state". It is the foam on the edge of the sea as it begins to recede from a high tide of corrupt practices, delicate and lacy at the edges and so mesmerizing and attractive to some. But it is receding. And out there as it departs the Deep People are waiting. They are the depths of an ocean that never disappears. At low tide they are still there, and they will feed the incoming tide. At the turn.

And I also say, you may not care what the future brings, but I do. I have a little granson, born on my birthday, gazing at me with twinkling eyes from his photograph across the room. Family is also something we can call Deep and be truthful about that. It runs in both directions, past and future. The Deep People have Deep Families.

And yes, I know, other grandsons have met untimely deaths this century and are counted as 'collateral damage' by the shallow state. Still they are with us as the past is always with us; they deepen our persons in unaccountable but irreversible ways. They strengthen our family commitments. They are always here, in our memories and in our strengths. They are not collateral; they are the fabric of our determinations, our life blood.

The Deep People do care what happens. The twinkle in their grandsons' eyes burns in their hearts. It is a fire, a consuming force. It never dies.

Don Wills , Nov 14 2019 17:06 utc | 108
"deep state", "deep people", "the swamp" .. a rose by any other name would smell just as rancid.

"deep people" implies a small, isolated group. IMO, it's more like an iceberg than seashore foam. 90% of it is hidden from view.

My point was that snake's blame of the oligarchs misses the target. I look at them the way I look at any other predator - if the opportunity exists, they will take it. The deep state is THE necessary ingredient for the evil that the US government does.

I too have grandchildren. I am convinced that their lives will be less free, less prosperous, with less opportunity than what the seven generations of Wills family before me have experienced in the US for the last 275 years. So what can I do about it? Typing on my keyboard certainly won't make one whit of difference...

[Nov 21, 2019] Washington Makes Endless War And Calls It Peace

Nov 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Washington Makes Endless War And Calls It Peace by Tyler Durden Sun, 11/17/2019 - 23:30 0 SHARES

Authored by Daniel Larison via TheAmericanConservative.com,

Andrew Bacevich rightly rejects the idea that there was ever a Pax Americana in the Middle East:

"It took many decades to build a Pax Americana in the Middle East," X writes. Not true: it took only a handful of hours - the time he invested in writing his essay. The Pax Americana is a figment of X's imagination.

Defenders of U.S. hegemony like to make what they think is a flattering comparison between the U.S. and the Roman Empire, but where the Romans made a desert and called it peace the U.S. has gone to war in the desert again and again with no end in sight.

Not only has the U.S. not brought peace, but there is little reason to think that our government is capable of doing so. More to the point, the U.S. has no right to keep meddling in the affairs of these nations. It would also be accurate to say that the more American involvement there has been in the region, the less pax there has been there. There is nowhere else in the world where our foreign policy is as intensely militarized, and it is no accident that it is also where our foreign policy is most destructive. If the U.S. genuinely desired stability and the security of energy supplies, it would not be waging an economic war on Iran, and it wouldn't be fueling a disgraceful war on Yemen. The author of that piece, William Wechsler, notably has nothing to say about either one of those policies.

Opponents of U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East make two major claims: that withdrawal would harm U.S. interests and that it would make the region worse off than it already is.

The second point is wrong but debatable, and the first one depends on an absurdly expansive definition of what U.S. interests are. The piece that Bacevich is answering asserts that "it would be a terrible mistake and deeply harmful to the United States" to withdraw from the region, but the author does not show that current troop levels of more than 50,000 people are necessary or even useful for securing U.S. interests. The U.S. didn't have and didn't need a large military presence in the Middle East for the entire Cold War, and it doesn't need to have one now. Having a military presence in the region has directly contributed to increased threats to U.S. security through terrorism, and it made the Iraq war debacle possible. The greatest harm to U.S. security has come from our ongoing extensive military involvement in this part of the world.

Neither does the author demonstrate that U.S. foreign policy up until now has actually been doing the job he thinks it has. For instance, he mentions "supporting a delicate balance of power that promotes regional stability and protects our allies," but looking back over just the last twenty years of U.S. foreign policy in the region there is no evidence that the U.S. has been supporting a balance of power or promoted regional stability. On the contrary, to the extent that there was a balance of power at the start of this century, the U.S. set about destroying it by overthrowing the Iraqi government, and it has further contributed to the destabilization of at least three other countries through direct or indirect involvement in military interventions. The clients that the U.S. has in the Middle East aren't allies and we aren't obliged to protect them, but the U.S. hasn't done a terribly good job of protecting them, either. The U.S. has managed to indulge its clients in reckless and atrocious behavior that has also made them less secure and undermined our own security interests. Support for the war on Yemen is a good example of that. Enabling the Saudi coalition's war has bolstered Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), devastated and fractured Yemen, and exposed Saudi Arabia to reprisal attacks that it had never suffered before.

The other major flaw with the Wechsler piece is that he is warning against something that isn't happening:

As campaign promises tend to become governing realities for American foreign policy, the prospect of a full U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East now stands before us.

If only that were true. The U.S. has more troops in the region than it did at the start of this year. There is no sign that those numbers will be reduced anytime soon. Support for the war on Yemen continues, and the president has gone out of his way to keep arming the Saudi coalition. Even in Syria, there will still be an illegal U.S. military presence for the foreseeable future. Full withdrawal is nowhere in sight right now. The U.S. is heading in the opposite direction. The author pretends that withdrawal is in the offing and then urges the next president to "reverse this course," but there is nothing for the next president to reverse. So why rail against something that hasn't happened and isn't likely to occur? This is an old tactic of making the option of withdrawing from the region seem so extreme and dangerous that it has to be rejected out of hand, but these scare tactics are less and less effective as we see the mounting costs of open-ended conflict and deep entanglement in the affairs of other countries.

The author wants the next administration "to reestablish American leadership in the Middle East, restore deterrence with our adversaries, and begin renewing trust with our partners and allies," but he has not made a persuasive case that "American leadership" in the region is worth "reestablishing" even if it were possible to get back to the way things were before the Iraq war. Many of the "partners and allies" in question are themselves unreliable and have become liabilities, and many of the adversaries do not really threaten the U.S. Bacevich concludes that there needs to be a radical overhaul of U.S. foreign policy in the region on account of its colossal failures:

Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X's illusory Pax is essentially zero.

There is no going back to an imagined Golden Age of American statecraft in the Middle East. The imperative is to go forward, which requires acknowledging how wrongheaded U.S. policy in region has been ever since FDR had his famous tete-a-tete with King Ibn Saud and Harry Truman rushed to recognize the newborn State of Israel.

Once we acknowledge those errors, the next step is not to fall into the same patterns out of a misguided desire for "leadership" and domination. Instead of chasing after a fantasy of imposing peace in some other part of the world, we need to stop our destabilizing and destructive policies that perpetuate conflict and make new wars more likely.

Miss Informed , 17 minutes ago link

Did the author forget that USA is Netenyahu's little bitch?

khnum , 27 minutes ago link

Lets just be honest the USA is in the business of war,overthrowing governments and creating vassal states with murder and mayhem all the way,sponsoring fascists,dictators,drug lords and Christ knows what else along the way and there is no high moral ground as its average citizen is either watching football or Kim Kardashians *** and couldn't give a ****,no amount of whinging is ever going to change that the author is pissing in the wind.

Jam Akin , 42 minutes ago link

Bacevich's book "America's War for the Greater Middle East" is an excellent read. Highly recommended.

Roger Casement , 57 minutes ago link

https://russianmafiagangster.blogspot.com/2012/08/expose-little-odessas-hidden-world-of.html

https://www.davidicke.com/article/508513/russian-mafia-jewish-groomed-trump

Epstein101 , 1 hour ago link

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_2049

NoMoreWars , 1 hour ago link

Bring the troops home and put them on our southern border. #1 reason why people voted for Trump.

TheLastMan , 1 hour ago link

Time magazine 2003 cover

" Peace is Hell"

Demented time magazine enjoys programming the folks

And so... "War is Heaven"?

Epstein101 , 1 hour ago link

Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel

ibeanbanned , 1 hour ago link

Joo boys want moar war. Always.

dogismycopilot , 1 hour ago link

Instead of replacing and upgrading infrastructure in the US, we have burned that money up in the desert fighting wars so the Chinese and Russian oil companies could waltz in and take all of marbles.

US Middle East policy has been failing since Eisenhower injected us into Iran an in the 1950s.

libtears , 1 hour ago link

It seems to me those people are intent on killing each other at all costs. No need to get in their way and suffer casualties. Seems like a population reduction in that region might improve the world

Nexus789 , 49 minutes ago link

Your ignorance is amazing. Before the US interventions a number of these countries were going down the path of having secular governments. Many had mixed communities from a religious and ethnic perspective. US bastardry has cost the lives of tens of thousands of people.

libtears , 1 hour ago link

Aside from the countless us blunders in the middle east.. The core issues are rooted in the barbaric religious beliefs that have plagued the region since Mohammed rose to power.

Epstein101 , 1 hour ago link

Moses was considerably earlier, Bub.

http://www.unz.com/article/the-holy-hook/

libtears , 1 hour ago link

So what Bub. You believe in Moses? No thanks

Justin Case , 1 hour ago link

Let them figure it out. Why stick yoar hook nose into someone else's problems? Ah there is something in it for the special group, and the tab goes to the tax payers.

The politicians should set the example by sending their kids to woar first. Trillions wasted and what benefit has that been to the tax payers? No money for healthcare or education, pensions, infrastructure etc. Lotsa money available for killing people.

libtears , 1 hour ago link

Agreed. The Jews were a relatively recent reintroduction to the region. It was a **** hole long before this time. Try to blame it all on them but it's a weak point of view. Unless you are looking at the last 70 years. But that **** hole status goes back far beyond this time frame

Roger Casement , 1 hour ago link

Empire of the City - Brief

Empire of the City - Knuth

artistant , 1 hour ago link

ALL MidEast terrorism, shenanigans, and warmongering are for and by APARTHEID Israhell.

Element , 1 hour ago link

Where did this ridiculously unrealistic author get the idea that it was the USA's job to bringing peace to the ME?

Snap out of it fool.

capital101 , 1 hour ago link

With the dollar on it's way out,

when all you have left is a hammer,

everything feels like the last nail in the coffin.

This is what the smart money is doing

Nelbev , 1 hour ago link

Perpetual war was always the plan since Reagan days to break up OPEC or cause in-fighting and destablize region. Iran/Iraq war, first Gulf war, Iraq war, ISIS, Syrian conflict, Yemen, Sunni/Shitte division, feed the fire on unofficial decades old plan still ongoing by CIA and State Dept lifers. Perpetual war in Mid-East was always the plan.

Justin Case , 1 hour ago link

destablize region

That way you keep down the competition. What do you think all the demonizing efforts are against China and Russia now? They are countries murica can't conquer.

Murica is isolating itself and the USD.

Archeofuturist , 42 minutes ago link

Perpetual war is a fact of human existence.

"War is as natural for man as eat or mating"

cforeman44z , 1 hour ago link

https://www.magicalquote.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/WAR-IS-PEACE.png

Elliott Eldrich , 1 hour ago link

War is a racket.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

JailBanksters , 2 hours ago link

Peace through superior firepower

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708783/?ref_=tt_ch

Epstein101 , 2 hours ago link

The author of the referenced article is a prototypical Atlantic Council Zionist *** chickenhawk ******** artist who pisses swampwater - William F. Wechsler.

His concern is Greater Israel, not what is best for Americans.

Justin Case , 1 hour ago link

Just look at congress.

TheVoicesInYourHead , 3 minutes ago link

Why would anybody want to volunteer to join, or stay in, the USA military when they know they are only fighting on behalf of Israel?

Risu , 2 hours ago link

All humanity, including us, have the right to survive and defend ourselves from obliteration. To do this we must hit when hit, and harder to eliminate the attack. beyond that, we need not fight. God will is in charge, not ours.

We are at risk of non-survival when we fail to recognize the difference between what we feel responsibly for, and what we can actually control. That is why we need a border. Defnding it gives us a line behidn which we can produce, and be productive. Once we cross that line, we begin to fall into a morass.

Generation O , 2 hours ago link

How long did it take America to exit Vietnam? You would think America had money and men to burn with these fruitless wars. Who benefits other than the vampires of the military-industrial complex, owners of cemetaries, and those who produce and market the Intel community's distracting and criminally-produced films and television offerings?

JuliaS , 1 hour ago link

Vietnam War started back when dollar debt was redeemable in gold. Back then debts had impact and the war spending was felt almost immediately though its effect on the economy. War was partially responsible for closing of the gold window by Nixon. They couldn't fake sustainability otherwise.

yaridanjo , 2 hours ago link

Justin Case , 1 hour ago link

US power and influence as a "major threat."

I don't blame them. Look at all the invasions and coups since WWII. Theft of gold, resources, death and destruction and poverty follows. No moar competition.

I hate cunton , 2 hours ago link

obama

libtears , 2 hours ago link

Obamao

Roger Casement , 1 hour ago link

Tweaker

OldFuddyDuddy , 1 hour ago link

Error message

Roger Casement , 1 hour ago link

Try this scroll down to Hussein on the right.

SocratesSolves , 2 hours ago link

Washington? We know what our founding father said about the Jews. He was right. Today, and even before the Federal Reserve "Black Magic Act" of 1913: Washington = Israel. There is no America any longer. It was 911'd inside and out by the Joker *** cult. And after they 911'd you they did a Joker dance, didn't they?

Justin Case , 1 hour ago link

Maybe people will better understand Germany's struggles in the 30's

DirtySanchez , 2 hours ago link

Only a matter of time before weaponized foreign sovereign drones are flying above jusa coastal cities.

Shortly after the second and absolutely devastating second civil war in this 3rd world banana republic.

Hang every bush, clinton, and bozo family member, and their entire administrations and staff.

rahrog , 2 hours ago link

America's Ruling Class never intended to bring peace to the ME

TBT or not TBT , 2 hours ago link

To be fair, the Middle East has been Islamic for a solid millennium or more, and Islam...isn't peace.

besnook , 2 hours ago link

it was never paxamericana. it was always paxjudaica, in other words war and chaos called peace the way jewlanders roll with their zionazi cocksuckers in tow.

SocratesSolves , 2 hours ago link

besnook: EXACTLY right.

"They [the Jews] work more effectively against us, than the enemy's armies. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in... It is much to be lamented that each state, long ago, has not hunted them down as pest to society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America." -- George Washington

ed_209 , 2 hours ago link

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism. Karl Marx

Epstein101 , 2 hours ago link

THE BOLSHEVIK TAKEOVER OF THE WEST

Schroedingers Cat , 2 hours ago link

Our new flag.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/comments/5qnu1r/redesigns_the_divided_states_of_america/

2banana , 2 hours ago link

Anyone remember Cindy Sheehan?

She was a nightly fixture on the evening news under Bush.

Entirely disappeared under obama. Along with the daily war dead count.

For now, I will take "not a single new war started" DJT and not care how hard the democrats/fake legacy media scream with a Syrian pullout.

[Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

Highly recommended!
Nov 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Don Wills , Nov 14 2019 15:33 utc | 105

snake @95 argues "the deep state does not exist" with circular logic that is massively off target.

The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests. None of those interests have the ability to make policy and implement regime changes without the deep state. Yes, outside interests drive the actions of the deep state, but no, those outside interests have no ability to accomplish anything without their deep state operatives.

If the US federal government bureaucracy was a) much less powerful, b) much more transparent, and c) more responsive to elected leaders, then none of the bad things would happen. A pipe dream? Yes - but it is erroneous to make a simple declaration "the deep state doesn't exist" without any rational arguments to refute my points in @72.

juliania , Nov 14 2019 16:06 utc | 106

Don Wills @ 72:

Thank you for your post. You say that there is a deep state, but you then go on to tell us it is not as deep as we imagine. So, I posit we should call it "the shallow state". It is the foam on the edge of the sea as it begins to recede from a high tide of corrupt practices, delicate and lacy at the edges and so mesmerizing and attractive to some. But it is receding. And out there as it departs the Deep People are waiting. They are the depths of an ocean that never disappears. At low tide they are still there, and they will feed the incoming tide. At the turn.

And I also say, you may not care what the future brings, but I do. I have a little granson, born on my birthday, gazing at me with twinkling eyes from his photograph across the room. Family is also something we can call Deep and be truthful about that. It runs in both directions, past and future. The Deep People have Deep Families.

And yes, I know, other grandsons have met untimely deaths this century and are counted as 'collateral damage' by the shallow state. Still they are with us as the past is always with us; they deepen our persons in unaccountable but irreversible ways. They strengthen our family commitments. They are always here, in our memories and in our strengths. They are not collateral; they are the fabric of our determinations, our life blood.

The Deep People do care what happens. The twinkle in their grandsons' eyes burns in their hearts. It is a fire, a consuming force. It never dies.

Don Wills , Nov 14 2019 17:06 utc | 108
"deep state", "deep people", "the swamp" .. a rose by any other name would smell just as rancid.

"deep people" implies a small, isolated group. IMO, it's more like an iceberg than seashore foam. 90% of it is hidden from view.

My point was that snake's blame of the oligarchs misses the target. I look at them the way I look at any other predator - if the opportunity exists, they will take it. The deep state is THE necessary ingredient for the evil that the US government does.

I too have grandchildren. I am convinced that their lives will be less free, less prosperous, with less opportunity than what the seven generations of Wills family before me have experienced in the US for the last 275 years. So what can I do about it? Typing on my keyboard certainly won't make one whit of difference...

[Nov 21, 2019] Assad on recent convenient deaths:

Nov 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Nov 14 2019 17:20 utc | 110

Assad on recent convenient deaths :

"The Syrian president said he saw links between the death of Le Mesurier and the deaths of US financier Jeffry Epstein, Al Qaeda chieftain Osama bin Laden and Islamic State (outlawed in Russia) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. 'American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein was killed several weeks ago, they said he had committed suicide in jail. However, he was killed because he knew a lot of vital secrets connected with very important people in the British and American regimes, and possibly in other countries as well,' Assad pointed out....

"'Both of us know that they [representatives of the White Helmets] are naturally part of Al Qaeda. I believe that these people, as well as the previously liquidated bin Laden and al-Baghdadi had been killed chiefly because they knew major secrets. They turned into a burden once they had played out their roles. A dire need to do away with them surfaced after they had fulfilled their roles,' Assad explained.

"According to him, the death of Le Mesurier is the work of the CIA that got rid of the founder of the White Helmets independently or through the intelligence services of other countries. 'Of course, this is the work of the secret services. But which secret service? When we talk about Western secret services in general, about Turkish and some other ones in our region, these are not the secret services of sovereign states, rather these are departments of the main intelligence agency - the CIA,' he stressed."

Many will nod their heads in agreement with Assad's hypothesis. Indeed, one of the more amazing happenings related to taking terrorists prisoners is the resulting lack of information related to the NATO-Terrorist bond we know exists but rarely sees the light of day in the form of documents, radio intercept logs and other items, although we're constantly treated to a massive parade of captured arms and munitions including chemical weapon precursors stamped with their NATO country of origin.

[Nov 16, 2019] The fascists just being the beta dogs serving the elite alpha dogs in the hopes for a pat on the head

Nov 16, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

WGruff, dirtyMarxist , Nov 15 2019 16:29 utc | 165

Of course, fascists are always just trying to do what's best for their tribe. Does anyone imagine that the Japanese and Germans and Italians of almost a century ago just woke up one morning and decided "Hey, let's be evil! Let's commit the most inhuman acts imaginable against our fellow humans because why not? That would be a great way to spend a few years!" ? Of course not. They were just as convinced as our NemesisOfHumanity that they stood for good and were just standing up for their tribe. They were convinced of their own exceptionality, and were horrified by the flapper decadence of prior years, seeking something more divine and purified for their respective exceptional cultures.

It would always be best if people (and whole cultures!) could accept themselves for what they really are rather than building elaborate fantasies in which they play the starring roles. Fascists could achieve peace of mind if they could see themselves for what they truly are, but then with their delusions discarded they couldn't really be fascists anymore, could they? Without their delusions the sinister threats from the scheming Soviets and the inscrutable Chicoms would dissipate from the fascists' minds like the morning fog before the sun. The vast gulf of differences between themselves and those "primitive others" whom the fascists feel obligated to bring enlightenment to, by force if necessary, would dwindle to insignificance without the delusions that the fascists rely upon to view themselves as superheroes.

Finally, without the delusions the fascists would be able to see fascism for the pack psychology that it is, with the fascists just being the beta dogs serving the elite alpha dogs in the hopes for a pat on the head. The "It is also in the best interests of elites to take care of their people" assertion would become apparent to them as a plaintive plea to the alpha dogs of their pack/tribe for security against the imaginary threats their delusions generate.

As an aside, real socialists never say "The elites should take care of the little guy!" On the contrary, real socialists say "The working class should organize itself and seize control of the productive forces of society." The first is begging from one's master, while the second is working towards a society without masters. The first cultivates in the believer's mind the notion that if they better serve their master that they may be rewarded with scraps off that master's dinner table, while the second cultivates the idea that everyone should sit at that dinner table. It is that drive to better serve the elites that powers the viciousness of fascism, while it is the delusion that beta dog status in the exceptional pack is an exalted position that conceals from the fascist their own rabid viciousness.

c1ue , Nov 15 2019 16:39 utc | 166

@WGruff #165

The problem is - the Soviet Union showed that even "working class" socialist governments still can be corrupted by power.

That the power is held by bureaucrats as opposed to oligarchs is a distinction without meaning.

From my view, the main problem isn't that the oligarchs are taking more and more control - it is that the balance has shifted too far. So I actually agree with what you're advocating, but only in the short term.

Ultimately, my personal view is that a government that randomly shifts, en mass, every generation is the only type that would work because this is the only way to ensure that smart, motivated people within any system won't be able to long term game/modify the system to benefit themselves.

[Nov 15, 2019] Tulsi at 6, Kamala at 1. Glorious!

Nov 12, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Krystal Ball describes the boost Tulsi Gabbard's campaign has gained from Clinton's attack on her.

poofendorf , 3 days ago

HRC is a BRILLIANT strategist...first for Trump and now for Tulsi.

XA , 3 days ago

she's right about hillary being a war mongerer

Rob Brown , 2 days ago

I would NOT want to find myself inside of Tulsi's crosshairs. She is dynamic!

Ron Ryan , 3 days ago

Tulsi's the only Dem that's worth a damn.

Dilip Patel , 3 days ago

Behar and her gaggle got owned hard by Tulsi! It was so joyful to watch!

[Nov 15, 2019] Tulsi is in for the next debate

Nov 15, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

"DNC Announces 10 Candidates in Atlanta Democratic Debate" [ Bloomberg ]. Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang. And not Julian Castro, sadly. "The forum will be co-hosted by the Washington Post and MSNBC. Candidates will be questioned by four female moderators: Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell and Kristen Welker from the network, and Ashley Parker from the Post. The two-hour event had a higher bar to qualify than previous debates. Candidates must have contributions from 165,000 donors, up from 135,000. And the donors must be geographically dispersed, with a minimum of 600 per state in at least 20 states. In addition, participants must either show 3% support in four qualifying national or single-state polls, or have at least 5% support in two qualifying single-state polls released between Sept. 13 and Nov. 13 in the early nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina or Nevada."

[Nov 15, 2019] Opus Dei] Neo-cons at it again.

Nov 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Piotr Berman , Nov 15 2019 0:54 utc | 139

[... Opus Dei ...] Neo-cons at it again.
Posted by: Ghost Ship | Nov 14 2019 13:24 utc | 98

Opus Dei was created in 1928 is Spain, where Catholics were opposing emerging hordes of godless Communists, Anarchists and Socialists. Since ca. 1960 Opus Dei is active in Bolivia where they continue Work of God, with fruits that he have just witnessed. Sadly, in Bolivia the error of Marxism is compounded by native superstition and paganism under flags of Pachamama. Perhaps Opus Dei is neo-Saint Inquisition, but as conservatists, they have decently long pedigree.

[Nov 15, 2019] The level of lies Schiff is pushing made the USA not the "Empire of Illusions" but "Superempire of illusions"

Nov 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

bevin , Nov 13 2019 18:12 utc | 7

Inadvertently today I found myself trapped into listening for a couple of minutes to the nonsense that Schiff was spouting in the House of Horrors.
It is almost incredible that what he was doing, in essence, was to draw attention to the two great facts in this case, the first being the gangster Maidan coup, which the US no longer even pretends not to have brought about for its own purposes, and the second, the way in which the Vice President and his family set about profiting, personally, from the looting of every Ukrainian's fortune-every family's healthcare, pension plan, utility bill, home. In this case by saddling the people, dependent on gas heat to see them through the winter, with millions to be paid to Hunter Biden, friends of John Kerry and other assorted profiteers.
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of worms and feeding it to the world.
But then I wonder if, perhaps, these people do not know something that foreigners cannot know, something about the societal stupidity and institutional ignorance for which the only country ever known to have supported "No Nothing" candidates is famous.
Perhaps Schiff and Pelosi know what they are doing and what they are doing is based upon HL Mencken's dictum:
"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

Jackrabbit , Nov 13 2019 18:45 utc | 11

bevin @7:
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of worms and feeding it to the world.

Just don't claim (like I do) that Russiagate and Ukrainegate are kayfabe courtesy of Deep State 'managed democracy' or you're a nutcase that everyone will ignore.

Nah, just sit back and enjoy while the Democratic Party cuts its own throat for over the Ukrainegate nothingburger which will see no one held accountable for anything.

A partisan witch-hunt less than a year before the 2020 Election? Double-plus good for Trump's re-election.

But the possibility of a set-up is INCONCEIVABLE to naval-gazing Kool-Aid drinkers.

It's gotta be real because Bloomberg wants to join the Democratic race!

Just as he wanted to join the race in 2016? His intention to do so also underscored the reality of THAT race. Rinse, repeat. LOL. The dumbf*cks won't notice.

!!

james , Nov 13 2019 18:51 utc | 12
@ 11 jackrabbit.. you can claim that too and i am not ignoring you! i agree with bevin and b how this is insane what the dems are doing, but the whole usa political scenario is insane... at the same time i get cranky with regard to everything being laid at the deep states feet when no one can articulate just what the deep state is.. in fact, i think there are a number of powerful players running at cross purposes to each other, so i don't think it is as easy as you make out laying it all at the feet of this 'deep state'... sure, the political process is mostly a charade and i doubt it matters much who wins at this point...

but, i do think the usa continues to slide into a more precarious place that coincides with a multi polar world that the usa is also very resistant to... as for the people of the usa - maybe many of them are easily manipulated, but not all of them.. it is the same around the world... how does one explain how the protesters in bolivia or honk kong are so easily duped? no.. i think generally people are easily duped, but not all people..

Jackrabbit , Nov 13 2019 19:21 utc | 14
james

I'll make it easy for you.

Deep State: the unusual behavior and strange coincides driven by a small number of very well connected people that make little sense but advance the interests of the establishment.

Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) means controlled opposition everywhere. FSD in practice:

> Political kayfabe
Hillary makes mistakes that help elect Trump. Trump helps to get Pelosi elected as House Speaker.

> Compromising whistle-blowers
The Intercept turns in whistle-blowers.

> Co-opting dissent
Max B. as the new Assange.

karlof1 , Nov 13 2019 20:12 utc | 24
librul @16--

IMO, lumping the D-Party into the same boat doesn't reflect reality. A great many D-Party members were disenfranchised by the DNC during 2016; many know it and know why, and never swallowed Russiagate. Many of those D-Party folk are again backing Sanders and Gabbard because they're the genuine social-democratic faction the DNC abandoned as soon as Reagan won in 1980 since it supposedly was the Reagan Democrats that swung the election--an assumption never proven correct. And the DNC stated during the lawsuit over 2016 that it would repeat its actions again in 2016, 2020, and beyond. Thus there're two main factions: DNC-Corporate D-Party and small d social-democratic D-Party--both of which are clearly incompatible. It's the former of those two that Gabbard wants to purge; Sanders also seems willing but hasn't been as explicit as Gabbard. Thus we have the old House divided against itself cannot stand situation. Either you're with Obama, Clinton, the Banksters, and the further enslavement of citizens via debt-peonage and expansion of the Outlaw US Empire or you're with the Sanders and Gabbard social-democrats and liberation of citizens via the nationalization of education, health care and dignified retirement, and the neutering of the Outlaw US Empire. Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS candidates, which means the Corporate faction will get its candidate on the ballot unless something remarkable occurs--a coup within the DNC that totally purges the Obama/Clinton/Corporate faction.

Sorry, but that last phrase I find to be 100% fantastical--about as probable as Kentucky's #1 ranked basketball team losing at home to Evansville at much greater odds than the 40:1 cited for Evansville. Morrison said it was 5:1 50+ years ago, but I don't think people were as brainwashed then as now.

librul , Nov 13 2019 21:11 utc | 31
@Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 13 2019 20:12 utc | 24

Thanks karlof1,

I am aware not *every single* Democrat bought into Russiagate.

You seem to suggest that the corruption on full display by the DNC during 2016 inoculated
**some** Democrats to Russiagate if they were Bernie supports. Maybe. But we are faced with the puzzling contradiction that Bernie himself did not support the lawsuit brought by the Bernie supporters against the corrupt DNC ... AND ... AND ... Bernie has been a foaming-at-the-mouth supporter of the Russiagate hysteria!

"How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we will be holding?" "How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship with Mr. Putin?"

Who said the above? Rachael Maddow? Hillary Clinton? John Brennan? Why none other than Bernie Sanders!
And did you note that Bernie is being a megaphone for the CIA in this quote?

More and more and more Bernie Russiagate promoting quotes here (and 2018 had only begun!):

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/01/responding-to-bernies-promotion-of-the-new-cold-war/

juliania , Nov 14 2019 1:06 utc | 55
Nemesis@15 -"Trust me when I say" ... never trust anyone who says anything after that phrase! How exactly did the Dems play the right card with Russiagate? Do you mean they hoodwinked their supporters into believing Russia to be the enemy, so that is somehow 'the right card'? I'll stop there. You've completely confused me.
Nemesiscalling , Nov 14 2019 1:42 utc | 58
@55 Juliana

I mean "right" in that allowing Russiagate to seep into the waking consciousness of America took the pressure off the dems and what was going to be their reckoning. In effect, they have now doubled-down in the hope that the Trump phenomenon of nationalism will fade away and their rule will be restored. Whether or not Sanders plays into this I think we are yet to see, but, so far, Sanders has played ball with a lot of dem garbage.

Again, by the "right" play I mean as if a dark sorcerer had banked his continued favor with the king he serves on a magic brew that would muddle the King's brain and keep him from knowing of the Sorcerer's repulsive ambition. Such is the dems plan as well as many if not all of the republicans who secretly detest DJT but who don't speak up because their base believes in Trump.

Lurk , Nov 14 2019 1:52 utc | 59
I don't see the USA fragmenting, not before it has been bankrupted, foreclosed and liquidated.

The federal behemoths like the military, the alphabet agencies, the state department, the whitehouse will all fight for their life.

The giant corporations, including the federal reserve, will also object.

Individual states, even as a majority, are no match to the above.

Lurk , Nov 14 2019 1:52 utc | 59
I don't see the USA fragmenting, not before it has been bankrupted, foreclosed and liquidated.

The federal behemoths like the military, the alphabet agencies, the state department, the whitehouse will all fight for their life.

The giant corporations, including the federal reserve, will also object.

Individual states, even as a majority, are no match to the above.

/div> " Lessons To Learn From The Coup In Bolivia , Main | Trump And Zelensky Want Peace With Russia. The Fascists Oppose That. " November 13, 2019 Open Thread 2019-67 News & views ...

Posted by b on November 13, 2019 at 16:25 UTC | Permalink

" Lessons To Learn From The Coup In Bolivia | Main | Trump And Zelensky Want Peace With Russia. The Fascists Oppose That. " November 13, 2019 Open Thread 2019-67 News & views ...

Posted by b on November 13, 2019 at 16:25 UTC | Permalink

div
Don Bacon , Nov 13 2019 16:35 utc | 1
next page " New Yorker, Nov 18[sic], 2019
The Case Against Boeing . . here
librul , Nov 13 2019 17:07 utc | 2
Is Donald Trump to be the last President of the US of A?
Chevrus , Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3
Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly discontinued...
karlof1 , Nov 13 2019 17:48 utc | 4
Chevrus @3--

5-mile diameter asteroid strike atop the White House without any warning whatsoever ought to do the deed.

Vonu , Nov 13 2019 18:00 utc | 5
Killing the president wouldn't kill the presidency any more efficiently than was done in Bolivia.
flankerbandit , Nov 13 2019 18:12 utc | 6
An excellent read on the MAX saga that Baconator pointed to...

Often I expect these stories in the media to get important technical details wrong...but here we see that this writer did his homework...

I have said this many times before, but the MCAS system is NOT an anti-stall system...it is there solely for the purpose of providing the right kind of stick feel to the pilot...

"On most airplanes, as you approach stall you can feel it," a veteran pilot for a U.S. commercial carrier told me.

Instead of the steadily increasing force on the control column that pilots were used to feeling -- and that F.A.A. guidelines required -- the new engines caused a loosening sensation.

This is exactly it...and this is why I have to wonder how exactly is MCAS going to be cleared to fly again...since the original, much less authoritative version was found inadequate in providing the stick force required...and the rejigged production version proved to be a surefire killer if it kicked in at low altitudes such as takeoff...

We recall that Captain Sullenberger called the MAX a 'death trap'...

So clearly the system's authority has to be dialed back...in which case the airplane handling qualities do not meet established requirements...

The story here tells of the struggle that the family of Ralph Nader's grand-niece, who perished in the Ethiopian flight, is waging to 'axe the max'...

Hopefully they will succeed, but I doubt it..the MAX can never be a good airplane...full stop...

bevin , Nov 13 2019 18:12 utc | 7
Inadvertently today I found myself trapped into listening for a couple of minutes to the nonsense that Schiff was spouting in the House of Horrors.
It is almost incredible that what he was doing, in essence, was to draw attention to the two great facts in this case, the first being the gangster Maidan coup, which the US no longer even pretends not to have brought about for its own purposes, and the second, the way in which the Vice President and his family set about profiting, personally, from the looting of every Ukrainian's fortune-every family's healthcare, pension plan, utility bill, home. In this case by saddling the people, dependent on gas heat to see them through the winter, with millions to be paid to Hunter Biden, friends of John Kerry and other assorted profiteers.
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of worms and feeding it to the world.
But then I wonder if, perhaps, these people do not know something that foreigners cannot know, something about the societal stupidity and institutional ignorance for which the only country ever known to have supported "No Nothing" candidates is famous.
Perhaps Schiff and Pelosi know what they are doing and what they are doing is based upon HL Mencken's dictum:
"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
librul , Nov 13 2019 18:28 utc | 8
@Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly discontinued...

Posted by: Chevrus | Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3

Just found your query. Quick and dead-on response is a major EMP event, but that is not what I had in mind.
Let me see if I can work up another, but necessarily lengthier response.

karlof1 , Nov 13 2019 18:35 utc | 9
As I noted on the Bolivia thread, BRICS is having its Summit today & tomorrow in Brasilia, and will likely be the most important of its brief life. So far, just this report :

"The heads of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will discuss issues related to economic, financial and cultural cooperation as well as arms control and joint efforts to counter terrorism.

"The leaders of the five member-states are to attend the BRICS Business Forum, and meet with the BRICS Business Council and the heads of the New Development Bank.

"In addition, Vladimir Putin will hold a number of bilateral meetings with the heads of state and government taking part in the summit."

I expect the atmosphere to be tense.

Gerhard , Nov 13 2019 18:36 utc | 10
librul @2 ending of the US of A?

No! But there will be a new "civil war" in the US around the mid of the next decade. Split occuring not south to north, but west to east; chaos further increased by immigrants from the middle & south Americas with their own agenda.

Forces (land & air), militia & DHS people of the eastern party may seek secure backing near frontier to Canada (area of Great Lakes therefore save). Some of the 'big capitalists' who feel more international than patriot will flee to outer South America (Argentinia, Chile).

Eventually a dead president (for that and for the civil war please look into cycles of US-history). Peace will come with the first female president. Keep watch on Tulsi Gabbard (but may be also another lady - as I am in Europe I am not familiar with all probable coming female candidates).

Why no permanent split of the States? There are internal benefits (common traffic, markets etc.) but more it is the outside pressure: to be able to compete with China it is a necessity for the States to remain united. Also the coming chaos in Europe and Russia demands unification of the US.

Now a very strange remark: some elites in the US have already accepted, even promote the tendency toward "civil war" to enable a 'reset' of the political, economical and social structure of the country. Furthermore, a seemingly weak US with a split in the military may lead Russia in temptation to make some mistake (towards Ukraine and Europe). And now a very, very strange remark: while some forces in the homeland are caught in civil disorder some other forces in the overseas may be involved in a foreign war. Extremely pointed out: the coming civil war in a very specific manner is a fake (to deceive and trap Russia - of course not Putin but his followers).

Today I had a look into George Friedman's book about the next hundred years. For the first view there is a lot of nonsense (disintegration of China etc.). But I agree that the power of the US will be restored during the century. And if not the same power as it was in the 1990s, then in every case the internal stability of the USA is completely guaranteed.

With greetings from Germany and with thanks to Bernhard for his valuable work, Gerhard

Jackrabbit , Nov 13 2019 18:45 utc | 11
bevin @7:
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of worms and feeding it to the world.

Just don't claim (like I do) that Russiagate and Ukrainegate are kayfabe courtesy of Deep State 'managed democracy' or you're a nutcase that everyone will ignore.

Nah, just sit back and enjoy while the Democratic Party cuts its own throat for over the Ukrainegate nothingburger which will see no one held accountable for anything.

A partisan witch-hunt less than a year before the 2020 Election? Double-plus good for Trump's re-election.

But the possibility of a set-up is INCONCEIVABLE to naval-gazing Kool-Aid drinkers.

It's gotta be real because Bloomberg wants to join the Democratic race!

Just as he wanted to join the race in 2016? His intention to do so also underscored the reality of THAT race. Rinse, repeat. LOL. The dumbf*cks won't notice.

!!

james , Nov 13 2019 18:51 utc | 12
@ 11 jackrabbit.. you can claim that too and i am not ignoring you! i agree with bevin and b how this is insane what the dems are doing, but the whole usa political scenario is insane... at the same time i get cranky with regard to everything being laid at the deep states feet when no one can articulate just what the deep state is.. in fact, i think there are a number of powerful players running at cross purposes to each other, so i don't think it is as easy as you make out laying it all at the feet of this 'deep state'... sure, the political process is mostly a charade and i doubt it matters much who wins at this point...

but, i do think the usa continues to slide into a more precarious place that coincides with a multi polar world that the usa is also very resistant to... as for the people of the usa - maybe many of them are easily manipulated, but not all of them.. it is the same around the world... how does one explain how the protesters in bolivia or honk kong are so easily duped? no.. i think generally people are easily duped, but not all people..

Paul Damascene , Nov 13 2019 19:12 utc | 13
Karlof1 @ 9 --
"I expect the atmosphere to be tense..."

I do, as well. Though I imagine certain leaders might feel a temptation to suspend Brazil's membership, doing so would illustrate a structural weakness to be overcome by any legitimate multipolar body. That is, if the Empire is able to turn just one member (in this case Brazil), it may be used to weaken the organization as a whole.

Having just a limited exposure to Putin's approach to multipolarity, my understanding is that it is to be accepted that sovereign countries evolve along their own trajectories (as opposed to being subjected to "universal" "liberal" principles). If Brazil or Turkey decide that this means playing both sides off each other, it will be interesting to see whether there are any principled (as opposed to realpolitical or pragmatic) objections that Russia might offer.

Jackrabbit , Nov 13 2019 19:21 utc | 14
james

I'll make it easy for you.

Deep State: the unusual behavior and strange coincides driven by a small number of very well connected people that make little sense but advance the interests of the establishment.

Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) means controlled opposition everywhere. FSD in practice:

> Political kayfabe
Hillary makes mistakes that help elect Trump. Trump helps to get Pelosi elected as House Speaker.

> Compromising whistle-blowers
The Intercept turns in whistle-blowers.

> Co-opting dissent
Max B. as the new Assange.

Nemesiscalling , Nov 13 2019 19:22 utc | 15
@11 jackrabbit

Jackrabbit...where do you live in the US?

The reason I ask is because I have heard a load of bull about Russia's plans to Russianize the world and that Trump is his pawn since day -167 of his inauguration. I have heard this from coworkers, from friends, from family, seen it on Reddit, read it on neolib outlets like slate and the like. I'm wondering if you live in Trump country and just don't hear or see the Russophobia being played out in the beltway and on the elitest coastlines.

Trust me when I say that the dems played the right card, albeit a desperate one, when they started with the whole Russiagate nonsense. To you and I, b and others, Russiagate is nonsense. But tell that to the average dem or moron yuppie in their towers along our shining seas.

librul , Nov 13 2019 19:25 utc | 16
Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly discontinued...

Posted by: Chevrus | Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3

An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham has powerful players quaking
in their boots.

9/11 saw Americans willingly surrendering rights;
accepting a pack of lies, a myth, to explain the event;
militarism becoming the refuge for American's safety.

What are the limits of the rights that Americans are next willing to surrender?
**What are those limits?**
The Resistance, Democrats, no longer respects democratic rights -
no thought to the millions of voters that they would disenfranchise if
the nullification of Trump's election were successful via a coup (impeachment).

Five years ago would you have imagined that Democratic voters would be so cavalier
about democratic rights? So willing to accept the vacuous accusation that our
President is a Russian agent. Would resurrect the CIA - the torturing, kidnapping,
assassinating, war promoting, false flag creating, disinformation spewing CIA, - and ravenously swallow endless streams of McCarthyist propaganda.

How fast,how far, can we spiral downwards? Is the seizure of power too far down the spiral
to imagine? Five years ago would you have imagined the current decent of Democrats we have witnessed?

If the pretext, the myth, of the necessity of seizing power, were echoed by the mouthpiece MSM
would Democrats go along? Americans have surrendered rights in our near lifetime. Americans
worship militarism and their military heroes more than ever before. Americans have swallowed
hook-line-and-sinker the new-McCathyism and "Putin is an evil man".

An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham has powerful players quaking
in their boots. To answer your question, I cannot imagine what players like John Brennan
are scheming. But as you know 9/11 was not beyond their criminal limit or capability.

Bemildred , Nov 13 2019 19:27 utc | 17
Paul Damascene @13: I generally share your view, about Putin's view, but I don't think Putin minds Erdogan playing both sides, Bolsonaro, yeah, but not Erdogan, he can play games with us all he wants. Keeps us distracted, and Erdogan doesn't like us "taking the oil", and we can't get in a shooting war with him, he's NATO. He's the military counter-balance to the Pentagon in Syria that Russia cannot be. So I think he will be thrashing around in N. Syria with Putin's consent until we leave (as long as he doesn't pick a fight with Assad.)

Bolsonaro he may see as something to wait for the end of.

It will be interesting and possibly informative to see what comes out of this meeting.

karlof1 , Nov 13 2019 19:33 utc | 18
Paul Damascene @13--

Thanks for your reply! Note that the main event is the Business Forum, which is an arena where genuine national interests usually reign. As you're likely aware, BRICS was formulated as an instrument to facilitate development via commerce and mutual investment and that its first major joint accomplishment was the formulation of the BRICS Development Bank to bypass the IMF, World Bank and the dollar dominated international trade regime. I found it curious that Global Times had zero articles on its main page related to the Summit, while Xinhuanet ran this short commentary overview which amounts to a short recap and cheerleading. We'll need to await the presser this evening to get a better feel.

Jackrabbit , Nov 13 2019 19:41 utc | 19
Nemesiscalling

I live in the 'elite' haven of Northeast USA. LOL.

!!

Chevrus , Nov 13 2019 19:42 utc | 20
You make an interesting point librul... It reminds me of the whole continuity of government scheme. 'In case of _____, break glass an impose martial law or whatever the manufactured disaster calls for. The fact that the north woods 911 bit worked is a testament to just how far the ptb are willing to go. You know, in regard to the USA perspective I can tell you from first hand experience that a steady diet of agitation propaganda as well loads of distraction have rendered a majority of the population easily lead no matter what stripes they might be wearing. Selling Russia as the bad bad guy was easy. Look if a large group of people buy the Bin Laden hit then the sky is the limit.

The 5 mile asteroid would pose a serious problem to most mammals, but given the amount of species self loathing being pedaled about.... My point about the executive branch and the question of 'is he the last' hinges on the fact that the president does nothing which is not somewhat scripted. We know what happens when they go "off the Rez"...

uncle tungsten , Nov 13 2019 19:45 utc | 21
Jackrabbit #14

"the Intercept turns in whistle-blowers"

That is why it was so named and why some journalists departed so promptly after commencing. It is fly paper.

psychohistorian , Nov 13 2019 19:56 utc | 22
Below is a ZH quote about the meeting with Trump and Erdogan today
"
"It's a great honor to be with President Erdogan... the ceasefire is holding very well, we've been speaking to the Kurds and they seem to be very satisfied, as you know we pulled back our troops quite a while ago..."

"I want to thank the President for the job they've [Turkey] done in Syria," Trump said of Erdogan.

And on that note, he already addressed the rationale for continued US troop presence in Syria, saying with Erdogan sitting next to him: "We are keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil."
"

To those Trump supporters, I would appreciate understanding how the keep the oil fits in with you saying Trump wants to get out of Syria?

Paul , Nov 13 2019 20:06 utc | 23
'Deep State' is just a convenient way of labeling something we can also call 'the illuminati', or 'the globalists', or 'the one percent', or 'Big Brother', etc.. We know that there are hidden powers. Some call them reptilians. Who knows? We can tell that they are there, though we cannot say exactly who they are and how they constitute their coherence, how they organize themselves. We can see pieces of the deeper pattern, but we cannot see the whole thing. So we use these vague and sometimes fanciful labels.

Right now a struggle is going on in Bolivia that is the world's struggle. Humanity is maybe in its final throes, there and in so many other places. Or maybe its the birth pains of who we were really meant to be. God help us.

karlof1 , Nov 13 2019 20:12 utc | 24
librul @16--

IMO, lumping the D-Party into the same boat doesn't reflect reality. A great many D-Party members were disenfranchised by the DNC during 2016; many know it and know why, and never swallowed Russiagate. Many of those D-Party folk are again backing Sanders and Gabbard because they're the genuine social-democratic faction the DNC abandoned as soon as Reagan won in 1980 since it supposedly was the Reagan Democrats that swung the election--an assumption never proven correct. And the DNC stated during the lawsuit over 2016 that it would repeat its actions again in 2016, 2020, and beyond. Thus there're two main factions: DNC-Corporate D-Party and small d social-democratic D-Party--both of which are clearly incompatible. It's the former of those two that Gabbard wants to purge; Sanders also seems willing but hasn't been as explicit as Gabbard. Thus we have the old House divided against itself cannot stand situation. Either you're with Obama, Clinton, the Banksters, and the further enslavement of citizens via debt-peonage and expansion of the Outlaw US Empire or you're with the Sanders and Gabbard social-democrats and liberation of citizens via the nationalization of education, health care and dignified retirement, and the neutering of the Outlaw US Empire. Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS candidates, which means the Corporate faction will get its candidate on the ballot unless something remarkable occurs--a coup within the DNC that totally purges the Obama/Clinton/Corporate faction.

Sorry, but that last phrase I find to be 100% fantastical--about as probable as Kentucky's #1 ranked basketball team losing at home to Evansville at much greater odds than the 40:1 cited for Evansville. Morrison said it was 5:1 50+ years ago, but I don't think people were as brainwashed then as now.

paul , Nov 13 2019 20:14 utc | 25
The 'Orwellian Globalists' may have overstepped, hubristically, when they chose an out-and-out racist, an outspoken racist, to be their puppet to head the new government in Bolivia. This may be just what was needed to provoke the MAJORITY indigenous people of Bolivia ...
Walter , Nov 13 2019 20:52 utc | 26
@ librul | Nov 13 2019 19:25 utc | 16 (Executive discon)

ED occurs immediately after last gold bar and last whore is loaded onto last 747 transporters to Patagonia.

...

Seriously, there's a naturally collegial grundnorm tween Ru and US, they simply need to work this out. The PE stand in the path, and act as impedance.

snake , Nov 13 2019 20:58 utc | 27
RT-UK TV Interview Syrian cause and Russian committment team to defeat borderless ideology of terrorism

Librul@16 responds to the statement by start, Chevrus @ 3. "Please
illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA
would be suddenly discontinued..." Chevrus @ 3, end

An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham
has powerful players quaking in their boots.

9/11 saw Americans willingly surrendering rights;
accepting a pack of lies, a myth, to explain the event;
militarism becoming the refuge for American's safety.

What are the limits of the rights that Americans are next
willing to surrender? **What are those limits?**

How fast, how far, can we spiral downwards? Is the seizure of power
too far down the spiral to imagine? Five years ago would you have
imagined the current decent of Democrats we have witnessed?

Is media capable to determine who shall have the power? Can
media make Americans surrender their rights?

An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham
has powerful players quaking in their boots. To answer your
question, I cannot imagine what players like John Brennan
are scheming. But as you know 9/11 was not beyond their
criminal limit or capability. by: librul @ 16


Snake says look at and carefully read the statements by Assad in Syria.. they
are very telling about circumstances here in the states. Assad distinguishes
top down ideology from bottom up cause a very interesting distinguishment.. ..

So to answer your question how far are Americans willing to allow the Oligarchs to
retract human rights in America: are their any limits to the willing surrender?

I think it is as Assad said in the above citation.. outside investors
instigated the unrest in Syria and used it as pretense to get their governments
to invade Syria so that the investors could privatize all of
Syria.. That is exactly what is happening in USA governed America.

Mu , Nov 13 2019 21:05 utc | 28
karlof1 @4
Your scenario doesn't reach its logical conclusion:

1) Asteroid strike is automatically blamed on "those damn rooskies".
2) Nuclear war ensues.
3) Far West, South, TransMissisippi and New England all secede with each claiming to be the rightful 'United State of America'.
4) Voila.

Mu

Formerly T-Bear , Nov 13 2019 21:08 utc | 29
@ karlof1 | Nov 13 2019 20:12 utc | 24

IIRC the Clintons rode into the Whitehouse on the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC). The DLC has quietly morphed into the DNC (or stolen their ID). Proof might be found on identifying the faction controlling the Democratic Party's finance committee under the assumption whoever controls the finance also controls the party. Memory is a perfidious and ephemeral thing and goes down Alice's rabbit hole in nothing flat.

Do not vote for any incumBENT.

james , Nov 13 2019 21:10 utc | 30
@14 jackrabbit.. i am sorry, but it is too simplistic for me... your examples are fine, but as i see it, they random and not some orchestrated plot from up above... that is where we differ here... in fact, your overview is much too simplistic..you can make it simple for me, but the whole concept of deep state orchestrating everything here is much too simplistic..

@ 16 librul... good overview that is kind of how i see the democratic party here, although @ 24 karlof1 disagrees, it looks like that to this outsider / canuck.. here is the line from karlof1 that gives it away for me - "Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS candidates" which begs the question, why? my answer - they are useful shills for this same agenda..

librul , Nov 13 2019 21:11 utc | 31
@Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 13 2019 20:12 utc | 24

Thanks karlof1,

I am aware not *every single* Democrat bought into Russiagate.

You seem to suggest that the corruption on full display by the DNC during 2016 inoculated
**some** Democrats to Russiagate if they were Bernie supports. Maybe. But we are faced with the puzzling contradiction that Bernie himself did not support the lawsuit brought by the Bernie supporters against the corrupt DNC ... AND ... AND ... Bernie has been a foaming-at-the-mouth supporter of the Russiagate hysteria!

"How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we will be holding?" "How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship with Mr. Putin?"

Who said the above? Rachael Maddow? Hillary Clinton? John Brennan? Why none other than Bernie Sanders!
And did you note that Bernie is being a megaphone for the CIA in this quote?

More and more and more Bernie Russiagate promoting quotes here (and 2018 had only begun!):

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/01/responding-to-bernies-promotion-of-the-new-cold-war/

Lurk , Nov 13 2019 21:29 utc | 32
@ Gerhard | Nov 13 2019 18:36 utc | 10

I see a civil war in the USA as highly unlikely. The upper class has too much common interest and purpose. The lower classes are divided and powerless and in the near future only seem to be becoming more so. When the third-worldization reaches a critical point, a staged and managed revolution may be in the cards. Before a real revolution has any chance, the elites will have flooded the USA with immigrants from the south, ensuring further division of the lower classes and postponing any real challenge.

Overall, the societal foundation of the USA looks to have been crumbling for maybe five decades already and for the next few decades an acceleration of that process is more likely than a reversal. Don't be on the lookout for leaders or movements to change any of that. Only when the american people clean up their act, ie. their addiction to numbing drugs, empty consumerism and false jingoisms, will anything there ever change for good. Until that happens, the place will be withering more and more.

Not until the American elites start to fail to safeguard their own priviliges at the cost of the rest of the population will change happen.

I don't see the Russian aggression that you propose to be realistic or likely to happen. Russia does not need to reach abroad for energy, resources or food. Their main challenge is to manage the riches of the huge country with the people they have. Already the resurgence after the post-1990 crash (and the preceding stagnation) is an accomplishment worthy of admiration.

The Russian interest clearly is consolidation and defence, which is exactly what their policies have been showing on the international stage. Suggestions of aggression are pure projection by Atlanticists theselves. Instead of Washington trying to provoke Russian mistakes, the real game is about Moscow trying to contain NATO's erratic trashing and carefully preventing any catastrophic escalation.

To wit, what country did recently "update" its nuclear doctrine, suggesting the possibility of 'limited' use of nuclear weapons? Was it Russia, or ehhm... perhaps the USA?

The only uncertain factor between Russia and the USA is Europe. I expect a lot more American craziness towards Europe, as its effective leverage crumbles. Europe has not yet devolved as badly as the USA and the American implosion is a major risk factor for the Europeans.

h , Nov 13 2019 21:37 utc | 33
psychohistoiran @22 asks "To those Trump supporters, I would appreciate understanding how the keep the oil fits in with you saying Trump wants to get out of Syria?"

As someone who voted for Trump I can tell you I do not agree with this decision nor will I defend it. I hold the same sentiment pre 2016 that I do now - bring these endless wars to an end. Period. Am I disappointed in his walking back the decision to leave Syria entirely? You betcha.

Weeks ago when barflies were discussing Trump's withdrawal, someone corrected my understanding regarding the Kurds who took control of the oil fields, so to speak, and were selling the oil to SAA. My understanding of this newest policy is the Kurds will continue to manage and benefit from the sale of the oil. I could be wrong. Feel free to correct me if I am. But if my understanding of the arrangement is correct, the Kurds maintaining their role, then they are likely still selling the oil to the SAA. Then again, maybe not, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.

So, management or control of the oil fields has changed, but it looks like everything else remains as it was before when the oil fields were managed/controlled by the Kurds.

What I do respect in the President's decision to leave NE Syria is removing troops from theater. The CIA's proxy war appears to have been shutdown. This w/o question I applaud, LOUDLY.

Lurk , Nov 13 2019 21:39 utc | 34
BTW, all this talk about asteroids and false flags makes me remind the brilliant nineties movie "Starship Troopers", in which Paul Verhoeven not only sort of presages 911 and the ensuing war on the bugs, but also smuggled into it the ephemeral phrase "Are you psychic?". I sometimes wonder how many people got that...
Ghost Ship , Nov 13 2019 21:40 utc | 35
paul @ 25
This may be just what was needed to provoke the MAJORITY indigenous people of Bolivia ...

I doubt it, without massive quantities of weapons similar to those received by the Syrian takfiris, the indigenous people don't stand a chance once the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly SOA) trained Washington-supported death squads get to work. It's going to be a massacre that'll be barely reported in MSM, because after the "election" they'll be anti-democratic. Bolivia is not Syria.

jayc , Nov 13 2019 21:45 utc | 36
The issue with the Americans is a hyper-partisan mindset has been instilled, akin to duelling sports teams, so one cheers for their team facts or context be damned. This used to be a Fox News-Republican phenomenon, but now has infected Dem supporters as well.

Break up of US would mean break up of Canada too. Look to the moves made by province of Alberta in response to fed election - a sort of firewall is being proposed where Alberta will take on fed gov responsibilities pension, health care, etc. Alberta is a Koch Bros oil republic, and any N American melt-down will result in formation of private fiefdoms - i.e. Alberta-Montana-Wyoming-South Dakota become Kochland.

Nemesiscalling , Nov 13 2019 21:51 utc | 37
@ jr

Then you must be a shut-in or unemployed to not see the dual-benefit of the deep state in that it stymies trump and resurrects Russia as a boogeyman. Nay! Thrice-benefit in that it also allows for an excuse to be horrifically status quo and gamble on everything returning to normal after the trump phenomenon runs its course and the duopoly reassert its grip.

Sasha , Nov 13 2019 21:55 utc | 38
@Posted by: karlof1 | Nov 13 2019 18:35 utc | 9

I wonder how in the Earth can anyone have cultural cooperation and join efforts against terrorism with a goon like Bolsonaro who has posted Twitters celebrating Bolivia´s coup and is known misses Pinochet ´s "expeditive measures" against communists...How this, so called group BRICS, can continue following its path, as if nothing had happened, especially since the coup in Bolivia...
Just today read the statements by Kremlin spokeman, Peshkov, and what to say, seemed to me quite soft his stance, throwing balons out...Sometimes I feel like to trust John Helmer on his assesment on the existence of two blocks in the Russian Federation, the stavka , and these people of the Kremlin office...

To this you add the Russian ambassador to the US, today visiting Kissinger ( the builder of the Condor Plan...) a man always like begging for better relations to this bully of a country, and this is one of the times when I wonder if i would not be supporting all this time just the people who wants to crush me...( meaning my now almost 6 years long support for the RF and concretely this adminsitration...)

I found quite different the unambiguous and strong statements by the Russian FM and Kremlin itself when Venezuela was about to suffer a coup, and now when the legitimate government of Bolivia has been sent into exile and his indigenous population on the verge of extermination by nazi thugs...

You can not be against nazis in the Ukraine and then support ( or be way too soft in your lack of condemnation...) nazis in Brasil or Bolivia (... or the EU...) or you are for international law and human rights, always, or not, but not only when business opportunities are in prospect....

Yes, today is one of those days when my consideration of the RF and Putin´s administration as a referent in keeping international order in the face of a lawless US just wobbles...

No se puede estar en misa y repicando al mismo tiempo

Waiting for the final statement of the meeting for to possibly take a determination on this issue...

james , Nov 13 2019 21:57 utc | 39
@ 36 jayc... kenney is a divisive politician.. i always think of alberta like the 'texas wannabe' of canada... they think highly of themselves and their oil, even when they can't get it out to the coast due the fact the people on the coast view all this very differently.. and now they are resorting to a type of quebec referendum option to use as leverage over the rest of canada.. it didn't work with quebec, and it definitely won't work with alberta.. at least quebec could legitimately claim itself a different type of culture... as for dividing up canada and the usa - it makes more sense to go along north south lines - cascadia being a good example of this.. koch republic would be a good name for that zone!!
Jen , Nov 13 2019 21:59 utc | 40
Gerhard @ 10:

You'd probably do well to study the history of China after the downfall of the Manchu Qing dynasty up to the 1930s at least (when Japan began invading the country and bringing its own forms of chaos, violence and enslavement) to get an idea of where the US might be heading if and when the Federal government falls. From the 1910s onwards, China was governed by warlords looking out for No 1, with their own armies.

Not so very different from the situation prevailing in Afghanistan and Libya. Talk about the chickens coming home to roost.

The other alternative is if the 50 states decide to be self-governing statelets or form their own federations among themselves or with neighbouring provinces and states in Canada and Mexico, or even abroad. Alaska may petition Moscow to be accepted back into the Russian Federation and Hawaii may seek another large patron to attach itself for security reasons. Washington and Oregon states may finally form a federation with British Columbia and call it Cascadia.

karlof1 , Nov 13 2019 22:07 utc | 41
librul @31--

Yeah, like Formerly T-Bear intoned about memory. I concede, but still note Gabbard hasn't faltered in her zeal. I finally finished my series of thoughts on the Bolivian thread regarding the Big Picture. IMO, Evil's sly enough to get elected even if it campaigned showing its attributes as in this image . If I were 20 years younger, I'd emigrate to Russia or China, but I'm not and doubt I've 20 years remaining on this orb. But I do think I've got the struggle properly diagnosed, although no cure's readily available.

Sasha , Nov 13 2019 22:14 utc | 42
Right now a struggle is going on in Bolivia that is the world's struggle.

@Posted by: Paul | Nov 13 2019 20:06 utc | 23

Indeed ,the same way I see it, and it seems that, in this one, Russian will not be with us...After all there is neither oil, nor weapons to sale in Bolivia, nor to the working poor people.....

Just today I was hearing Trump stating that he would like very much assisting to the next Vicotry Day parade in Moscow...Well, how to say ( wait for me while I go throwing up a bit...) Just here again, a bit back in myself...
Thus, this thug, who just has unleashed those rabid nazi death squads over the poor indigenous people of Bolivia is going to sit along the veterans who really fought the nazis in WWII, the few who still are alive to remember the 25 millions of their own who died in the battle fields, moreover taking into account that Trump´s father really was a nazi himself and supported Nazi Germany as if there was no tomorrow...If you though that of Netanyahu last year was way too much...to see how yo take this...

Seeing these things, no wonder that fascism advance without obstacles...Voting in the UN or passing all day energically protestingthe demolition of monuments to Soviet heros of WWII is not enough...It is neede to eergically protest when today´s nazis are salughterin currently lving people...

As happened during WWII, I fear, it will be us the people who will have to organize ourselves to fight this scourge...Putin, simply, will not be there....May be the Red Army will...

In a documentary about the 9th company of

Breadonwaters , Nov 13 2019 22:19 utc | 43
Gerhard @10;
I agree the US will split up. As a poli sci initiate, i was forced to consider the role of institutions acting in support of the polis. I wasn't impressed at the time. my disdain for the rot of leadership in most if not all institutions in the west, it was mostly for the greed....but i realize the cumulative effect is the fraying of those 'supports' of the nation itself. Consider:
The 16 intelligence agencies each have their own agendas, the regulatory agencies are revolving doors for industry placements, the FBI was crooked since the days of Hoover, the governments agencies are rife with oligarchy quislings .....and in the end the greed of those in power will be not be held back by any moral force. The police are militarized, murdering and robbing their own citizens.
Meanwhile, the MSM are owned by the oligarch, so there is no national forum where the corruption can be addressed on a national level. This leaves the blog sites such as MOA to lead the fight against the PTB. The problem is in the nature of the internet, which has no 'locus' as in a national voice. The internet has no center. As example, i am not a US citizen. When the polis finally hit the point where the Rentier economy has driven them to extreme reaction, they will not be thinking of reclaiming the vast American experiment, rather they will seek to at least control their little part of the world. I believe you will see blocs of similar states rising up to control whet they think is in their own best interests: The mid-west, the west coast and mountain states, the deep south, the eastern states will find common issues to crytalize around.
That's my read.
As a Canadian, my thoughts are how Canada will negotiate with these remainder blocs of former US states.
Paul Damascene , Nov 13 2019 22:21 utc | 44
James @ 39
I general concur with your brief reading of Jayson Kenney and Alberta talk of separatism. But on that score the comparison would not so much be to Texas as perhaps to Boris Johnson / Nigel Farage, in their moves to break away from the EU. I don't know that either of them (or Kenney) is all that passionate about separation itself, but the divisiveness -- and surfing various waves of polarization -- are what this new nihilist political wave seems to be about.
jayc , Nov 13 2019 22:31 utc | 45
I support the Cascadia concept. There's a wonderful work of speculative fiction called Ecotopia that is set in a Cascadia - although it was written before the digital hi-tech era and so could not predict that such an entity, short of a true revolution, would be run by Microsoft - Google - Apple etc.

A high speed rail link from Vancouver to Portland has been proposed, which is a forward-thinking policy initiative, but they are going to take a few years to think about it, and then another fifteen to twenty years to build it, and that itself will only happen if the "no new taxes" retrograde types don't stop it in its "tracks" (which they intend to do).

vk , Nov 13 2019 22:51 utc | 46
For speculation:

'NATO will be soiling its pants': Ukrainian tycoon seen as power behind president calls for 'new Warsaw Pact' with Moscow

Ghost Ship , Nov 13 2019 23:28 utc | 47
"We'll take $100 billion from the Russians.

Putin should be wary of Kolomoysky as Kolomoysky will most likely steal the lot.

Breadonwaters , Nov 13 2019 23:43 utc | 48
off topic: I've just realized how vexing the idea of a non-citizen army.
Imagine: The tax payer funds the majority of tax dollars to a bureau that funds its own production of weapons, recruitment, training personnel, maintenance of 800 or so bases across the world and, finally, deploying these recruits wherever it deems worthy, based on the directions of it's head, potus. its just so sweet: hire mercenaries, and do whatever you want across the planet....there are no draftees ....no one to criticize when the body bags return stateside. Some otherwise brain-dead fuck in the pentagon is enjoying lieutenant generalship, just for figuring out the army didn't need a draft...there were plenty of poor people, who could be had with a few bucks......
ptb , Nov 13 2019 23:46 utc | 49
re: Kolomoisky
Weird. He picked an interesting day to take on the IMF. Its a strange world.

Respect to his hair stylist in any case

Jackrabbit , Nov 13 2019 23:49 utc | 50
Nemesiscalling @37

I know you've bought into the notion of Trump fighting the Deep State.

It's a nice fairy-tale for the sheeple.

lizard , Nov 14 2019 0:07 utc | 51
jayc@45

I'm in Montana and working on a piece of fiction that anticipates the breakup of the States in the not-so-distant future. I did a little research on Cascadia and found that there's elements of white supremacism wanting to co-opt the idea of Cascadia for their own ethno-state fever dreams :

The far right is known to appropriate pop culture imagery, particularly for recruitment and to mitigate their viewpoints. But Alexander Reid Ross, a professor at Portland State University, explained that Cascadia, "a really important movement in the Pacific Northwest," is targeted specifically for its link to bioregionalism. "It implies a territorial imperative but doesn't necessarily involve anti-racism, according to the far right, so fascists appropriate it," he told me of Cascadia.

The appropriation began at least as far back as 2004, when a flag suspiciously similar to the Cascadian flag appeared on the cover of Harold Armstead Covington's book, A Distant Thunder. In 2008, Covington founded the white nationalist group Northwest Front, which calls for an "independent and sovereign White nation in the Pacific Northwest." The group later penned a disturbing rhyme on its website about this flag, the Tricolor flag, using language similar to Baretich's:

The sky is blue, and the land is green. The white is for the people, in between.

Cascadia appropriation has snowballed since then. In 2016, a man adopting the moniker Herrenvolk, a German word for "master race" used by the Nazis, helped form Cascadia, the "foremost" alt-right group in the Pacific Northwest. According to its website, its mission is to "regain our sovereignty and prevent foreign influence on our people." That goal correlates with the narrative of Cascadia as quintessential, and it echoes the groaning around Portland about newcomers spoiling the city.

in the narrative I'm working on, New Cascadia does become a white supremacist stronghold.

juliania , Nov 14 2019 0:47 utc | 52
I was somewhat puzzled by your Good and Evil post in the last thread, karlof1. Were you just being facetious or did I misread you to say that all would depend on the outcome of the 2020 election?.

I followed you on the course of 'the rest of the world' under leadership from Russia and China into multipolarity rather than one hegemon; I'd tend to agree with you on that concept, though maybe we'd have disagreements on the course of history up to that point. I have a literary turn of mind myself, and to me "good" literature (with a small g) always comes out on top - as with goodness in most other aspects of life learning as well.

All the same, it's hard for me to think the coming US election will really decide anything. That is, I don't see any of the candidates preparing his or herself to join 'the rest of the world'. That would be the good outcome for me and I just can't see it happening.

I'll be literary and say that maybe for nations 'the way up is the way down.' And while the disparity and struggle between wealthy and not in the US is starkly apparent, we are nowhere near bottoming out here yet. And I think we have to be; I think we will be - but when? I'll be literary again and say that for Tigger it was when he got all his bounce taken out of him. All of it. Not 'make America great' but rather 'help America survive yadayadayada...'

I'm kinda doubting I'll be around to see it. It's sort of that 'not with a bang but a wimper' sort of scenario - and we're a long way from wimpering yet.

Still, I feel very positive. I think 'the rest of the world' is going to be kinder than we deserve when it all boils down to the dregs. What a day that will be!

Curtis , Nov 14 2019 0:52 utc | 53
Nemesiscalling 15
Right you are. The Anti-Russia hype has been going on for a while but had a bit of a hiatus during King (W) Shrub II. Both parties worked to destroy the Russian economy during the 80s/90s with the Chicago/Harvard boys gutting it completely while enriching themselves. It accelerated under Obama while they presented us with the "Reset" switch. Apparently the Russians didn't play along so they became the bogeyman that gets inflated as time goes on. Trump tried but got dragged down in the process.

As to a US split, I live in the south. So I've wondered if California (for example) tried to leave if a US President would pull a Lincoln and destroy the state ... in order to save it.

juliania , Nov 14 2019 0:55 utc | 54
Sorry - 'whimper' and 'whimpering'. (I used to be such a good speller, truly!)
juliania , Nov 14 2019 1:06 utc | 55
Nemesis@15 -"Trust me when I say" ... never trust anyone who says anything after that phrase! How exactly did the Dems play the right card with Russiagate? Do you mean they hoodwinked their supporters into believing Russia to be the enemy, so that is somehow 'the right card'? I'll stop there. You've completely confused me.
psychohistorian , Nov 14 2019 1:28 utc | 56
Occupied Palestine continues killing people as documented in the report below from Reuters

"
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli missile strike in the Gaza Strip killed six members of a Palestinian family on Thursday, all of them civilians, medical officials and residents said, bringing the death toll in the territory from a 48-hour surge in fighting to 32.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the pre-dawn incident in Deir al-Balah, which came as cross-border shelling exchanges continued despite a ceasefire offer by the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.

Israel killed an Islamic Jihad field commander on Tuesday, sparking cross-border rocket salvoes by the militant group and further Israeli strikes. Medics said 32 Palestinians have been killed, at least a third of them civilians.

Those killed in Thursday's attack on a home in Deir al-Balah included a woman and a child, medical officials said. Another 12 people were wounded, they said.
"

Sad to see this continue to go on and no resolution in sight, only escalation

Ian2 , Nov 14 2019 1:33 utc | 57
Formerly T-Bear | Nov 13 2019 21:08 utc | 29:

Speaking of the Clintons. Hillary Clinton says she's under 'enormous pressure' to enter 2020 race ROFL

Nemesiscalling , Nov 14 2019 1:42 utc | 58
@55 Juliana

I mean "right" in that allowing Russiagate to seep into the waking consciousness of America took the pressure off the dems and what was going to be their reckoning. In effect, they have now doubled-down in the hope that the Trump phenomenon of nationalism will fade away and their rule will be restored. Whether or not Sanders plays into this I think we are yet to see, but, so far, Sanders has played ball with a lot of dem garbage.

Again, by the "right" play I mean as if a dark sorcerer had banked his continued favor with the king he serves on a magic brew that would muddle the King's brain and keep him from knowing of the Sorcerer's repulsive ambition. Such is the dems plan as well as many if not all of the republicans who secretly detest DJT but who don't speak up because their base believes in Trump.

Lurk , Nov 14 2019 1:52 utc | 59
I don't see the USA fragmenting, not before it has been bankrupted, foreclosed and liquidated.

The federal behemoths like the military, the alphabet agencies, the state department, the whitehouse will all fight for their life.

The giant corporations, including the federal reserve, will also object.

Individual states, even as a majority, are no match to the above.

karlof1 , Nov 14 2019 1:55 utc | 60
TASS and Sputnik have both published short reports on events from the BRICS Summit in Brasilia. As I noted earlier, it revolved around the Business Forum, so most everything focused on economics, global trade, and the hindrances in the normal conduct of commerce:

"'Undoubtedly, the global economy was affected by the fact that methods of unfair competition, unilateral sanctions - including politically motivated ones are being used on a wider scale in the global trade, [and] protectionism is flourishing. Under those circumstances, BRICS nations have to take serious effort to ensure the development of their economies, to prevent the deterioration of the social situation and the fall of living standards, of our citizens' welfare,' Putin said at the closing ceremony of the BRICS business forum."

Hopefully, there'll be a full transcript of Putin's remarks and further reporting to digest tomorrow.

NemesisCalling , Nov 14 2019 2:06 utc | 61
@55 juliana

Re: trustworthy people, I meant that my eyes have seen first hand the effects of this whole Russiagate brainwashing. As a result, I don't talk politics with my family, and it is tenuous with my coworkers. Can you imagine a guy working in a west-coast city and actually has something positive to say about DJT?

I still say that DJT deserves an ENORMOURS!...ENORMOUS! amount of credit for awakening such terminology into the public lexicon as "Globalism," "nationalism," "fake news," and the like. How he was able to do this was very simple but absolutely revolutionary for any bonafide presidential candidate that I can remember or know. For myself, I view the issue as globalism as paramount and far more world-shattering than US imperialism.

Here is an interesting Frontline interview with Ann Coulter a week or so ago. It shines a light on how a guy like Trump was able to capture the public imagination. Hint: it wasn't because the Deep State was grooming him.

Lozion , Nov 14 2019 2:20 utc | 62
Looks like Bolivians are getting organized and fighting back. Thousands congregate in El Alto and Cochabamba:

https://twitter.com/maduro_en/status/1194679324986814466?s=21

Lets hope some Army units "defect" to the cause before bloodshed gets serious..

librul , Nov 14 2019 2:22 utc | 63
@Posted by: Ian2 | Nov 14 2019 1:33 utc | 57

"Speaking of the Clintons - 'Hillary Clinton says she's under 'enormous pressure' to enter 2020 race' - ROFL"

Yeah, she is being forced, will it be the 2020 Race or the loony bin she is eventually forced to enter?

https://imgur.com/LnUChXD


Sad Canuck , Nov 14 2019 2:38 utc | 64
For any of you who use protonmail. They seem to be touting their links to clearly compromised media sources such as Bellingcat quite strongly these days, and are pushing the empire's message on MH17, Ukraine, Scripals, Russiagate etc etc. I was an early adopter but they now seem compromised or simply deluded. Too bad, another one bites the dust.
juliania , Nov 14 2019 2:52 utc | 65
Got it, Nemesiscalling, sorry to be obtuse. But I'm afraid I do disagree. This whole phobia against Russia and anti-Trump scenario turned off huge numbers of their voters - some didn't vote but some actually held their noses and voted for Trump. To me (and I sure could be wrong) Dems just dug themselves a deeper hole with all of this. Save some sort of coup, I can't see them winning a year from now. If anything more US voters have wised up than were wised up before - you don't go back once eyes are opened.
sorghum , Nov 14 2019 3:15 utc | 66
@ 11 JR

I agree with your premise about this being kayfabe. From where I sit, there is no other explanation for any political party to make these endless attacks based on absolutely nothing over and over again. Attacks which can only maintain the charade from 2016 of Trump the Victim. Does anyone think that somehow the Dems suddenly stopped being to calculating psycho/sociopaths that they and the other side of the aisle are? Why would such shrewd players not verify what people like Vindeman had to say before putting them on the stand?

They keep undermining their own case over and over again.

I find it impossible that they would continue to stick their hands in the fire after being burned every single time before this, and with easily verifiable information. Especially when the attacks are ALWAYS over stupid shit and never go after anything he actually could be attacked for doing. What I keep seeing is like watching kindergarten kids try to kill a grown man with foam rocks.

We keep seeing this complex, convoluted, evil shit come out of DC and yet we simultaneously think these same players are morons? No freaking way. These attacks are the only thing that keeps Trump's base on his side as he keeps betraying them and the opposition keeps trying to outdo its last performance of stupid. I have seen a LOT of Trump supporters throw in the towel on him for things he has done in the last 3 years, yet they come back to his side after the newest stupid thing the left wing of the uni-party comes up with.
Shit, it isn't like Trump is even really shaking things up to cause such a ruckus!

[Nov 14, 2019] House Releases Transcripts From Recalled US-Ukraine Ambassador Yovanovitch And Michael McKinley

Tandem of CIA and the State Department against Trump ?
Notable quotes:
"... Yovanovitch, who was removed from her post in May, testified that President Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani led a campaign to oust her as ambassador over unsubstantiated allegations that she badmouthed the president and was seeking to stop Ukraine from opening an investigation into Joe Biden and his son. -Axios ..."
"... Last month, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan reportedly told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Trump recalled Yovanovitch after Giuliani singled her out for having an anti-Trump agenda. ..."
"... McKinley testified to impeachment investigators that he resigned over the State Department's unwillingness to support foreign service officers caught up in the Ukraine scandal and the apparent "utilization of our ambassadors overseas to advance domestic political objectives. ..."
Nov 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
On Monday, the House committees conducting impeachment inquiries into President Trump released transcripts of testimony from several witnesses, including former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and career diplomat and former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Michael McKinley.

Yovanovitch, who was removed from her post in May, testified that President Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani led a campaign to oust her as ambassador over unsubstantiated allegations that she badmouthed the president and was seeking to stop Ukraine from opening an investigation into Joe Biden and his son. -Axios

Yovanovitch, who left her position in May, testified that she "assumed" Trump's lack of support for her stemmed from a "partnership" between Giuliani and Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko .

Last month, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan reportedly told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Trump recalled Yovanovitch after Giuliani singled her out for having an anti-Trump agenda.

Read Yovanovitch's testomony below:

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/433409580/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&show_recommendations=false&access_key=key-JW1O5jjytc6cN8EftFrK

McKinley:

McKinley testified to impeachment investigators that he resigned over the State Department's unwillingness to support foreign service officers caught up in the Ukraine scandal and the apparent "utilization of our ambassadors overseas to advance domestic political objectives." -Axios

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/433408331/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&show_recommendations=false&access_key=key-TmEgYTw2yLgo0YEDXYq f

[Nov 14, 2019] Andrew Weissmann.... The dirtiest of Mueller's people

Notable quotes:
"... They say he intimidated witnesses by threatening indictments, created crimes that did not exist and, in one case, withheld evidence that could have aided the accused. At one hearing, an incredulous district court judge looked down at an Enron defendant and told him he was pleading guilty to a wire fraud crime that did not exist. ..."
Oct 30, 2017 | www.washingtontimes.com

Posted by Jjdoc

quote:
Today, Mr. Weissmann stands as special counsel Robert Mueller's top gun in a squadron of nearly 20 prosecutors and scores of FBI agents delving into Trump-Russia. Mr. Weissmann is leading the probe into the biggest target to date, Paul Manafort, President Trump's onetime campaign manager.

How Mr. Weissmann operated over a decade ago offers possible glimpses at how he carries out orders today from his longtime mentor, Mr. Mueller.

He's a dirty "cop"

quote:
The backstory: Defense attorneys say Mr. Weissmann bent or broke the rules. As proof, they point to appeals court decisions, exhibits and witness statements.

They say he intimidated witnesses by threatening indictments, created crimes that did not exist and, in one case, withheld evidence that could have aided the accused. At one hearing, an incredulous district court judge looked down at an Enron defendant and told him he was pleading guilty to a wire fraud crime that did not exist.

This is the man going after Trump.

quote:
Mr. Weissmann's cases against Andersen and Merrill Lynch lay in shambles just a few years later.

The Supreme Court, in a 9-0 vote in 2005, overturned the Andersen conviction. A year later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals erased all the fraud convictions against four Merrill Lynch managers. The jury had acquitted another defendant.

"People went off to prison for a completely phantom of a case," said Mr. Kirkendall.

[Nov 14, 2019] From Russiagate to Ukrainegate An Impeachment Inquiry by Renée Parsons

Notable quotes:
"... Love the Clapper claim (the same Clapper who lied to Congress) says he was just doing his duty in Russiagate. As GBS said, " when a scoundrel is doing something of which he is ashamed, he always says he is doing his duty". ..."
"... There is also a long and inglorious history of interference in domestic politics from the Zinoviev Letter onwards. Plots to stage a military coup against the Wilson government of the 60s and 70s, with Mountbatten as its figurehead. The more recent Skripal Hoax. The contrived Syrian Gas Attack Hoaxes and the White Helmets. They would not hesitate to do the same to Corbyn if they deemed it necessary. ..."
"... The CIA and FBI conspired with the UK and Ukrainian governments to prevent the election of Trump, and then to sabotage and smear his administration once he had been elected. The UK played a major part in this through MI6 and Steele. This is highly dangerous for this country, irrespective of your view of Trump. ..."
"... The Democrats, the Deep State, the MSM, and the Deranged Left were willing to support these conspiracies and hoaxes, and even suspend disbelief, for the greater good. The ends justify the means. All that matters is getting rid of Trump. Anything goes. The corrosive erosion of trust, credibility and integrity in all the institutions of the state is probably irreparable. The legislature and the political process in general. The judiciary. The spooks and police. About 9% of Americans now believe the MSM. ..."
"... No need to even discuss, until Western societies ALL get a grip on the depths of depravity that lie within the actions and "The History of the National Security State" you have to admit, that Julian Assange could not have picked a better book to firmly grip and signal with, than GORE Vidal's, when being manhandled out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, by Spooks who would sell their own mother, let alone nation, in their utter technological ignorance and adherence to anachronistic doctrines & mentality ! ..."
"... The most important thing for us and deliciously so now the election is happening is the BLOWBACK. Our DS lying murdering arses are going to get new ones drilled by Trump and BoBos bromance exploding in full technicolor. ..."
"... By sharing we disrupt the msm messages. Bernard at MoonofAlabama is also worth a daily visitation – priceless analysis on multiple subjects. ..."
"... I'd have thought that events like the spy in the holdall, the spies caught by farmers in Libya, the Skripal's, and the whole over-the-top reaction to the domestic terrorism threat and consequent successful pleas for extra funding, the obvious danger of creating terrorists by security services, the policy of giving asylum to foreign terrorists of countries we don't like and the whole concept of the 5 eyes and GCHQ needs more than ministerial oversight, a committee of yes men/women and an intelligence services commissioner. ..."
Oct 30, 2019 | off-guardian.org

As the Quantum field oversees the disintegration of institutions no longer in service to the public, the Democratic party continues to lose their marbles, perpetuating their own simulated bubble as if they alone are the nation's most trusted purveyors of truth.

Since the Mueller Report failed to deliver on the dubious Russiagate accusations, the party of Thomas Jefferson continues to remain in search of another ethical pretense to justify continued partisan turmoil. In an effort to discredit and/or distract attention from the Barr-Durham and IG investigations, the Dems have come up with an implausible piece of political theatre known as Ukrainegate which has morphed into an impeachment inquiry.

The Inspector General's Report, which may soon be ready for release, will address the presentation of fabricated FBI evidence to the FISA Court for permission to initiate a surveillance campaign on Trump Administration personnel. In addition, the Department of Justice has confirmed that Special Investigator John Durham's probe into the origin of the FBI's counter intelligence investigation during the 2016 election has moved from an administrative review into the criminal prosecution realm. Durham will now be able to actively pursue candidates for possible prosecution.

The defensive assault from the Democrat hierarchy and its corporate media cohorts can be expected to reach a fevered pitch of manic proportions as both investigations threatened not only their political future in 2020 but perhaps their very existence.

NBC s uggests that the Barr investigation is a ' mysterious ' review " amid concerns about whether the probe has any legal or factual basis " while the NY Times continues to cast doubt that the investigation has a legitimate basis implying that AG Barr is attempting to " deliver a political victory for President Trump." The Times misleads its readers with:

Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it."

when in fact, it was the Russiagate collusion allegations that Trump referred to as a hoax, rather than the Mueller investigation per se.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va), minority leader of the Senate Intel Committee suggested that Attorney General William Barr " owes the Committee an explanation " since the committee is completing a " three-year bipartisan investigation " that has " found nothing to justify " Barr's expanded effort.

The Senator's gauntlet will be ever so fascinating as the public reads exactly how the Intel Committee spent three years and came up with " nothing " as compared to what Durham and the IG reports have to say.

On the House side, prime-time whiners Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) commented that news of the Durham investigation moving towards criminal liability " raised profound concerns that Barr has lost his independence and become a vehicle for political revenge " and that " the Rule of Law will suffer irreparable damage ."

Since Barr has issued no determination of blame other than to assure a full, fair and rigorous investigation, it is curious that the Dems are in premature meltdown as if they expect indictments even though the investigations are not yet complete.

There is, however, one small inconvenient glitch that challenges the Democratic version of reality that does not fit their partisan spin. The news that former FBI General Counsel James Baker is actively cooperating with the BD investigation ought to send ripples through the ranks. Baker has already stated that it was a 'small group' within the agency who led the counterintelligence inquiry into the Trump campaign; notably former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

Baker's cooperation was not totally unexpected since he also cooperated with the Inspector General's FISA abuse investigation which is awaiting public release.

As FBI General Counsel, Baker had a role in reviewing the FISA applications before they were submitted to the FISA court and currently remains under criminal investigation for making unauthorized leaks to the media.

As the agency's chief legal officer, Baker had to be a first-hand participant and privy to every strategy discussion and decision (real or contemplated). It was his job to identify potential legal implications that might negatively affect the agency or boomerang back on the FBI. In other words, Baker is in a unique position to know who knew what and when did they know it.

His 'cooperation' can be generally attributed to being more concerned with saving his own butt rather than the Constitution.

In any case, the information he is able to provide will be key for getting to the true origins of Russiagate and the FISA scandal. Baker's collaboration may augur others facing possible prosecution to step up since 'cooperation' usually comes with the gift of a lesser charge.

With a special focus on senior Obama era intel officials Durham has reportedly already interviewed up to two dozen former and current FBI employees as well as officials in the office of the Director of National Intelligence.

From the number of interviews conducted to date it can be surmised that Durham has been accumulating all the necessary facts and evidence as he works his way up the chain of command, prior to concentrating on top officials who may be central to the investigation.

It has also been reported that Durham expects to interview current and former intelligence officials including CIA analysts, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper regarding Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.

In a recent CNN interview , when asked if he was concerned about any wrongdoing on the part of intel officials, Clapper nervously responded:

I don't know. I don't think there was any wrongdoing. It is disconcerting to know that we are being investigated for having done our duty and done what we were told to do by the President."

One wonders if Clapper might be a candidate for 'cooperating' along with Baker.

As CIA Director, Brennan made no secret of his efforts to nail the Trump Administration. In the summer of 2016, he formed an inter-agency taskforce to investigate what was being reported as Russian collusion within the Trump campaign. He boasted to Rachel Maddow that he brought NSA and FBI officials together with the CIA to ' connect the dots ."

With the addition of James Clapper's DNI, three reports were released: October, 2016, December, 2016 and January, 2017 all disseminating the Russian-Trump collusion theory which the Mueller Report later found to be unproven.

Since 1947 when the CIA was first authorized by President Harry Truman who belatedly regretted his approval, the agency has been operating as if they report to no one and that they never owe the public or Congress any explanation of their behaviour or activity or how they spend the money.

Since those days it has been a weak-minded Congress, intimidated and/or compromised Members who have allowed intel to run their own show as if they are immune to the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Since 1947, there has been no functioning Congress willing to provide true accountability or meaningful oversight on the intel community.

Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU's Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31

Martin Usher
I don't think the Democratic leadership wanted a formal impeachment, they would prefer that Trump just faded away quietly before the 2020 election and were in the process of collecting information to reinforce this. They got cornered into formalizing the investigation by Trump's defense team baiting them as part of their overall strategy. It really doesn't change anything.

Whichever way you slice and/or dice it Trump is fundamentally incompetent, he's unable to fulfill the duties of the office of the President. He also refuses to distinguish between private interests and public service. His cabinet, a rag tag body of industry insiders and special interests, are busy trying to ride roughshod over opposition, established policy and even public opinion to grab as much as possible before the whole house of cards collapses. Its a mess, and its a mess that's quite obviously damaging US interests. Many constituency groups will have gone along with the program because they thought they could control things or benefit from them but as its become increasingly obvious Trump's unable to deliver they've been systematically alienated.

The DNC is playing this with a relatively weak field of potential candidates for 2020. Much as I personally like a Sanders or Warren they're just not going to fly in a Presidential contest -- as we found from the Obama presidency the ship of state just doesn't turn on a dime, you're not going to undo decades or generations of entrenched neoconservatism and a politically divided country overnight by some kind of Second Coming pronouncements. My concern is that if we don't get our collective acts together we're going to end up with a President Romney after 2020 -- a much more reasonable choice considering the last four years but also one that's guaranteed to change nothing. We need the journey but its only going to start with a few steps.

( and as for Trump/collusion we've spent the last three years confusing money with nation states. Trump's a businessman in a business that's notorious for laundering money from dubious sources (this doesn't mean he's involved, of course)(legal disclaimer!). I daresay that if Russia really wanted to sink Trump they could easily do so but why would they bother when he's doing such a great job unaided?)

Joerg
Please make sure You see the Interview-Video "MICHAEL FLYNN CASE UNRAVELS. US-UK DEEP STATE ENTRAPMENT PLAN" on https://youtube.com/channel/UCdeMVChrumySxV9N1w0Au-w – it's a must-see!
Jonathan Jarvis
Something much deeper going on?

http://thesaker.is/the-terrorists-among-us11-azov-battalion-and-american-congressional-support/

Latest in series of articles by the author re USA – Ukraine connections

"American Ukrainian nationalists don't like democracy. They don't understand the concept of it and don't care to learn. But they do understand nationalist fascism where only the top of society matters. They are behind the actors of the Intelligence coup going on in the US today .This is the mentality and politics the Diaspora is pushing into American politics today. Hillary Clinton and the DNC is surrounded with this infection which even includes political advisors.

Rest assured they all the related Diasporas are in a fight for their political lives. If Donald Trump wins, their ability to infect American politics might be broken. Many of the leadership will be investigated for attempting to overthrow the government of the United States."

Simon Hodges
"My thoughts on all this are that many of us have become distracted and failed to examine the timeline of events since 9/11. We look at news and conflict in isolation and move on to the next without seeing what is now a clear pattern."

In terms of the Middle East you need to go back further than the fortuitous event of 9/11 – at least to 1997 and the founding of the Project for the New American Century which was essentially the first explicit formalisation of the agenda for an imperialist Neoliberal and Neoconservative globalist new world order deployed through the media constructed conflicts of 'good' and 'evil' around the world and with it the call for the 'democratisation' of the Middle East under the alibi of humanitarian interventionism against broadly socialist governments, which since the fall of communism were constructed by Neoliberal fundamentalists as being patently heretical and ideologically illegitimate forms of government. If it is economically illogical to elect a socialist failed form of government then one can only assume that the election must have been rigged.

I started looking at this all a few years ago when I asked myself the question 14 years after the invasion of Iraq: where was the liberal outrage at what had subsequently taken place in the ME? The answer was that from the Invasion of Iraq onward in addition to fully embracing the economics of Neoliberalism as the end of economic history, the progressive 'left' quietly assimilated and reduplicated the fundamentalist illiberal political philosophy of the Neocons. The progressive 'left' both in the UK and US have subsequently become the far Neocon 'right' in all but name and their party hosts of Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US remain blissfully unaware of all of this. How else can we explain why they would welcome 'Woke' Bill Kristol into their ranks? Once one accepts this hypothesis, then an awful lot falls into place in order to explain the 'Progressive' open support for regime change and the almost total lack of any properly liberal objections to what has taken place ever since.

One key point here is that the Neocons have nothing to do with conservatism or the right. What is striking and most informative about the history of Neo-conservatism is that it does not have its roots in conservatism at all, but grew out of disillusioned US left wing intellectuals who were Marxist, anti-Stalinist Trotskyites. This is important because at the heart of Neo-conservatism is something that appeals strongly to the die hard revolutionaries of the left who hold a strong proclivity for violence, conflict and struggle. If one looks at the type of people in the Labour party who gravitated to the 'progressive' Neoliberal imperialist camp they all exhibit similar personality traits of sociopathic control freaks with sanctimonious Messiah complexes such as Blair. These extremist, illiberal fundamentalists love violence and revolution and the bloodier the better. In Libya or Syria is did not matter that Gadaffi or Assad headed socialist governments, the Neo-colonised progressives would back any form of apparent conflict and bloody revolution in any notional struggle between any identifiable form of 'authority' or 'oppression' with any identifiable form of 'resistance' even if those leading the 'resistance' were head chopping, misogynist, jihadist terrorists. It makes no difference to the fundamentalist revolutionary mindset.

The original left wing who gradually morphed in the Neoconservatives took 30-40 years to make the transition for the 1960s to 1990s. The Labour party Blairites made the same journey from 1990 to 2003. Christopher Hitchens made the same journey in his own personal microcosm.

Gezzah Potts
When is this nausea inducing confected pile of crap going to end? Does anyone else think that Adam Schiff has a screw or three loose, and should be residing in an institution? And imagine if somehow Mike Pence became Prez. Now that would be something to scare the bejesus out of you.
Tim Jenkins
Adam Schiff should be shot for Treason, of the highest order, along with many others, including HRC, Brennan & Clapper ; and it should be a public execution, like in Saudi Arabia. This is war on the minds of the masses, that Schiff for brains cares nothing for.

As for Chuck Schumer, he can have a life sentence, as long as he manages to shut his utterly unfunny dumb vulgar cousin Amy up & keep her out of the public eye, forever

Gezzah, life may seem bad right now: but imagine if, you were Amy Schumer's Husband and father of her child. Talk about obnoxious and utterly nauseating 🙂 , with you Gezzah, all the way.

"When is this nausea inducing confected pile of crap going to end?"

vexarb
Pepe sends more news from the real world:

https://thesaker.is/the-age-of-anger-exploding-in-serial-geysers/

"The presidential election in Argentina was a game-changer and a graphic lesson. It pitted the people versus neoliberalism. The people won – with new President Alberto Fernandez and former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) as his VP.

Neoliberalism was represented by a PR marketing product, Mauricio Macri [a Micron look-alike]: former millionaire playboy, president of football legends Boca Juniors, obsessed with spending cuts, who was unanimously sold by Western MSM as a New Age paradigm.

Well, the paradigm will soon be ejected, leaving behind the usual New Age wasteland: $250 billion in foreign debt, less than $50 billion in reserves; inflation at 55 percent; 35.4 percent of Argentine homes can't make it); and (incredible as it may seem in an agriculturally self-sufficient nation) a food emergency."

vexarb
And from Yemen:

https://southfront.org/10000-sudanese-troops-to-potentially-withdraw-from-yemen-leaving-saudi-arabia-to-dry/

vexarb
Meanwhile, in the real world, the Denmark's Ukronazi-friendly regime has been brought to heel by Germany's common sense:

Some big natural gas news very significant for Russia, Germany and the Ukraine. The Danish pipeline sector has been stalled for a while now by anti-Russia, pro-Ukrainian forces within the Scandiwegian NATZO-friendly regimes. But it appears that Nordstream 2 _will_ get completed and that Ukraine's gas transit chokehold on the EU will come to an end when Russia's Nordstream 2 comes online for Europe.

-- -- -- -

Permit for the Nord Stream 2 project is reluctantly granted by the Danish Energy Agency. Nord Stream 2 AG has been granted a permit to construct natural gas pipelines on the Danish continental shelf.

The permit is granted pursuant to the Continental Shelf Act and in accordance with Denmark's obligations under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Denmark has been put under obligation to allow the construction of transit pipelines with respect to resources and the environment.

https://en-press.ens.dk/pressreleases/permit-for-the-nord-stream-2-project-is-granted-by-the-danish-energy-agency-2937696

Antonym
Gas is the second most firm green energy source after nuclear. Denmark manages only due to their undersea cables to Norway's hydro mountains.

In another field has far more common sense than neighbors Germany or Sweden: immigration / integration.

RobG
In my humble opinion, the Trump stuff is all total nonsense.

Donald Trump was a property speculator in New York (amongst other places) and was heavily involved with the Mafia. Likewise, Trump was heavily involved with Jeffery Epstein.

There's so much dirt on Trump that they could get him with the snap of fingers; but of course that's not what they really want. Trump is pure theatre; a ploy to divert the masses. 'RussiaGate', 'UkraineGate' are all utter rollocks.

Trump and Obama, and all the rest going back to the assassination of Kennedy, are just puppets.

American/ deep state policy doesn't change a jot with any of them.

Wilmers31
America is always presentation over substance, wrapper over content, and shoot the messenger if you don't like the message. In the meantime the adults in this world outside the US have to hold it all together. Why was for instance Hillary Clinton not in the dock for saying 'Assad must go'?? It was meddling in the highest order.
phree

I guess this just goes to show you that a person can be a member of the ACLU, even a leader apparently, and still be highly biased in favor of Trump.

Just because a witness is "cooperating" with an investigation does not entail that the witnesses testimony or evidence will favor any particular side.

And implying that Clapper's comments somehow shows guilt when he clearly says he knows of no wrongdoing is pretty over the top.

I've read a lot of what's out there about the start of the initial Russia investigation, and it does seem that some of the FBI personnel leading it (McCabe particularly) were anti-Trump.

Isn't the bigger question whether the investigation was justified based on the reports from the Australians that Trump was getting political dirt on Hillary from Russia? Is the FBI just supposed to ignore those reports? Really?

George Cornell
Love the Clapper claim (the same Clapper who lied to Congress) says he was just doing his duty in Russiagate. As GBS said, " when a scoundrel is doing something of which he is ashamed, he always says he is doing his duty".
mark
The Spook Organisations and the Dirty Cops are a greater threat to our way of life than any foreign army or terrorist group (most of which they created in the first place and which they directly control.) They are a law unto themselves and completely free of any genuine oversight or control.

This applies equally to the US and UK. "We lie, we cheat, we steal", as Pompeo helpfully explains. They also murder people, at home and abroad. JFK, David Kelly, Diana, Epstein. They plant bombs and blow people up. Many of the "terrorist atrocities" from Northern Ireland to the present day, were false flag spook operations. The same applies with Gladio on the continent and the plethora of recent false flags.

There is also a long and inglorious history of interference in domestic politics from the Zinoviev Letter onwards. Plots to stage a military coup against the Wilson government of the 60s and 70s, with Mountbatten as its figurehead. The more recent Skripal Hoax. The contrived Syrian Gas Attack Hoaxes and the White Helmets. They would not hesitate to do the same to Corbyn if they deemed it necessary.

The CIA and FBI conspired with the UK and Ukrainian governments to prevent the election of Trump, and then to sabotage and smear his administration once he had been elected. The UK played a major part in this through MI6 and Steele. This is highly dangerous for this country, irrespective of your view of Trump.

Trump has repaid the favour by meddling in Brexit and interfering in UK politics. It is not in his nature to turn the other cheek. We have spook organisations claiming for themselves a right of veto over election results and foreign policy. These people are poor servants and terrible masters. We see Schumer warning against crossing the spook organisations, begging the obvious question – who runs this country, you or the spooks?

The Democrats, the Deep State, the MSM, and the Deranged Left were willing to support these conspiracies and hoaxes, and even suspend disbelief, for the greater good. The ends justify the means. All that matters is getting rid of Trump. Anything goes. The corrosive erosion of trust, credibility and integrity in all the institutions of the state is probably irreparable. The legislature and the political process in general. The judiciary. The spooks and police. About 9% of Americans now believe the MSM.

The irony in all this is that it very much serves Trump's interests. He is extremely vulnerable, having failed to keep any of his promises. Building The Wall, Draining The Swamp, Bringing The Troops Home. Sorting out health care. Building "incredible, fantastic" infrastructure.

All the Democrats had to do was highlight these failures, find a suitable candidate, and put forward some sensible policies, and they were home and dry. Instead, they provided an endless series of diversions and distractions from Trump's failures by charging down every rabbit hole they could find, Russiagate, Ukrainegate, Impeachment. It couldn't work out better for Trump if he was paying them.

Expect to see the Orange Man in the White House for another 4 years. And another even more virulent outbreak of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Tim Jenkins
Enigmatic and brilliant synopsis, m8, lol: & surely BigB could only agree. And you never even mentioned HQ.Intel. inside.Israel, today & their illegal trespass of WhatsApp, via corporate 'subsidiaries' with 'plausible' denial of liability of spying on everything-everything & any body, that could possibly threaten corporate fascist computerised dictatorship: distributing backdoors, like Promis & Prism, liberally & worldwide, the Maxwells legacy . . . (yet)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/29/whatsapp-sues-israeli-firm-accusing-it-of-hacking-activists-phones

No need to even discuss, until Western societies ALL get a grip on the depths of depravity that lie within the actions and "The History of the National Security State" you have to admit, that Julian Assange could not have picked a better book to firmly grip and signal with, than GORE Vidal's, when being manhandled out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, by Spooks who would sell their own mother, let alone nation, in their utter technological ignorance and adherence to anachronistic doctrines & mentality !

Glad you mentioned 'good ole' cousin ChuckS.' >>> Lol, just for a laugh and a sense of perspective: yes, he is related to Amy Queen of Vulgarity & hideous societal distraction. What a family of wimps & morons: the 'Schumers' being perfect fodder for ridicule & intelligent humour, naturally . . . on a positive note, mark, think yourself lucky that you are not married to or the father of Amy Schumer's child 🙂

Dungroanin
Catching up Off-G. Excellent.

Larry C Johnson is at the vanguard on the debacle and is miles ahead on it. Check his output at sst. Here is a short speech outlining the conspiracy.
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/10/my-speech-on-the-deep-state-plot-by-larry-c-johnson.html

Two more pieces there – it is moving fast now.

The most important thing for us and deliciously so now the election is happening is the BLOWBACK. Our DS lying murdering arses are going to get new ones drilled by Trump and BoBos bromance exploding in full technicolor.

Think May's dementia tax and Strong and Stable were bad?

Lol. This is going to be a FUN month of early xmases.

Chris Rogers
Dungroanin,

SST is essential reading for anyone concerned with US overseas policy and the corruption of the USA itself in the service of the security state, so, many thanks for posting this link.

Dungroanin
By sharing we disrupt the msm messages. Bernard at MoonofAlabama is also worth a daily visitation – priceless analysis on multiple subjects.
lundiel

Since those days it has been a weak-minded Congress, intimidated and/or compromised Members who have allowed intel to run their own show as if they are immune to the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Since 1947, there has been no functioning Congress willing to provide true accountability or meaningful oversight on the intel community.

Pretty much a carbon copy of our own oversight. We hear even less about our security services than Americans do of theirs. I'd have thought that events like the spy in the holdall, the spies caught by farmers in Libya, the Skripal's, and the whole over-the-top reaction to the domestic terrorism threat and consequent successful pleas for extra funding, the obvious danger of creating terrorists by security services, the policy of giving asylum to foreign terrorists of countries we don't like and the whole concept of the 5 eyes and GCHQ needs more than ministerial oversight, a committee of yes men/women and an intelligence services commissioner.

[Nov 14, 2019] Fake news content seems very close to what a lynch party seeking to get up the never to hang an innocent slave for a criminal act "done by one of their kind" would do.

Oct 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

I am sorry but I c/n remember if was the guy at the far end of the bar down near to the bathroom in the boots, bathing suit, and top hat, or the guy at the seat nearest to the front door, in the grey flannel suit with polished boots, but it was one of them who gave the bar, a few evenings back, much of what it needs to be coherent. It was hierarchy of elements that propagandist use to install and support false narratives in their written and spoken words. It was system of analysis, given to us here at the bar, to establish the gosh awful truth hidden within an intentionally wrong narrative.

That evening I had too much bar juice, so this all I can recall, 8 elements could be applied to the propaganda to diagnose and debunk and discover the false in wrongful, misleading propaganda.. see the following.

1. EN always the propagandist must establish the general narrative God turned the blue sky, red.
2. WR the propagandist must make great wrongs into powerful strong rights.. The devil made him do it.
3. PE profession propagandists cherry pick the facts; include in the narrative only those facts that support the proposition.
The devil was seen talking to God on more than one occasion.
4. IS ignore damning or off point stuff that challenge or defeat the narrative or transform it into a positive
The fact that God had killed the devil two years before is ignored.
5. BV blame the victim.. don't give the victim a chance to speak.. The victim (God) did it..
6. MU make stuff up to support the narrative. A person on Jupitor saw God practising every evening He watched as God turned blue seas red and red seas blue
7. AC Attack all challengers allow no one to intercede in the attack. The Pope said God could not show him that he could turn Blue seas to red, or vice a versa
8. RL Repeat, and repeat and repeat the lie.. until it becomes embedded in the mind of the innocent. We are all tired of hearing this story..

After sobering up and thinking about this list, I realized its content seems very close to what a lynch party seeking to get up the never to hang an innocent slave for a criminal act "done by one of their kind" would do. The party would pretty much go through the 8 things, attempting to convince itself that the slave was guilty, until finally one of the members of the lynching party would swat the horse and the party would watch the victim swing..

We must develop a technology suitable to encoding these things, and to find other such things to add to this debunk the propaganda list of 8 items; so that no one can pass off on us wrongful narrative?

Its ok to be innocently wrong, in fact, we all learn when we discover a wrong, but intentional wrong should be against the rules of the bar.

We should adopt these 8 things and use them in our analysis..

[Nov 14, 2019] Alert! Court Actually Claws Back Post-9-11 Search Creep by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

Notable quotes:
"... "The border has become a rights-free zone for Americans who have to travel," Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said in a statement given to Boland at the time. "The founders never could have imagined that the government would be able to sift through your entire digital life, from pictures to emails and even where you've been, just because you decide to take a vacation or travel for work." ..."
Nov 13, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Alert! Court Actually Claws Back Post-9/11 Search Creep

New ruling puts the brakes on practice of seizing travelers' laptops and cell phones. (Shutterstock/By Carolina K. Smith MD)

At last a victory for citizens. For nearly 20 years, the federal government has used and abused the memory of the 9/11 attacks to expand its law enforcement authorities at the nation's airports, even if that has meant broaching one of our most sacrosanct constitutional freedoms: the right against illegal search and seizure, otherwise known as the 4th Amendment.

On Tuesday, a federal court in Boston ruled that the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can no longer detain Americans coming back over the border to search their laptops, cell phones and other electronic devices, without cause. One would think this is a no-brainer, but the number of these incidents has actually escalated to over 33,000 last year -- nearly four times as many as the previous three years, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The ruling came in a lawsuit, Alasaad v. McAleenan , filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and ACLU of Massachusetts, on behalf of 11 travelers whose smartphones and laptops were searched without individualized suspicion at U.S. ports of entry.

International travelers returning to the United States have reported numerous cases of abusive searches in recent months. While searching through the phone of Zainab Merchant, a plaintiff in the Alasaad case, a border agent knowingly rifled through privileged attorney-client communications. An immigration officer at Boston Logan Airport reportedly searched an incoming Harvard freshman's cell phone and laptop, reprimanded the student for friends' social media postings expressing views critical of the U.S. government, and denied the student entry into the country following the search.

According to EFF, border officers "must now demonstrate individualized suspicion of illegal contraband before they can search a traveler's device."

TAC's Barbara Boland reported on this over the summer . The number of electronic devices accessed in 2018 was six times the number in 2012, suggesting that this is not only a post-9/11 issue, but that somewhere along the line the Trump Administration signaled to these agencies, which are all under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, that it was gloves-off at the border -- even for American citizens. Lest you think this is just an extension of the president's tough illegal immigration policies, be warned, many of the folks targeted were typical international visitors and U.S. citizens -- think students, journalists, academics, doctors -- and not travelers to this country for the first time. And they were treated like they were coming into the Third World. From Boland:

One person detailed to Amnesty International how she was selected for secondary screening at the border, locked in a cramped, narrow concrete cell, and subjected to an invasive body search. Her requests for a lawyer and medical treatment were denied. The supervisor told her she would be held indefinitely.

When she told him that she is an American citizen, he replied: "The Fourth Amendment doesn't apply here. We can hold you for as long as we want to."

She was released after four hours.

Journalist Seth Harp wrote a similarly disturbing story about what happened when he was singled out for a "secondary screening" at the Austin Airport in Texas. CBP agents pried him for information about what he was writing, his sources, his reporting as a war correspondent, and his discussions with his editors.

"The border has become a rights-free zone for Americans who have to travel," Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) said in a statement given to Boland at the time. "The founders never could have imagined that the government would be able to sift through your entire digital life, from pictures to emails and even where you've been, just because you decide to take a vacation or travel for work."

Let's hope that Tuesday's order fixes that -- though it might take a Supreme Court ruling to put an end to it for good.

[Nov 13, 2019] Confirmed - Obama Is Zbigniew Brzezinski Puppet by Webster Tarpley

Nov 13, 2019 | rense.com

Any lingering doubts about Obama's status as an abject puppet of Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Rockefeller Trilateral Commission ended this morning when the withered mummy of imperialism himself appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe* to campaign for Obama, urged on by his own moronic daughter, Mika Brzezinski, an Obama groupie and sycophant.

Zbigniew, a low-level Polish aristocrat whose life has been devoted to hatred for Russia, lauded Obama for his 2002 speech opposing the Iraq war, saying that he himself was the source of Obama's arguments back then - thus confirming Obama's long-term status as his puppet, which probably began in 1981-1983, when Obama was a student at Columbia University, and Zbig was directing the anti-Russian institute.

The aging revanchist showed all the misogynism of his szachta origins with a scurrilous attack on Sen. Clinton as a mere housewife, a Mamie Eisenhower running against charismatic a JFK played by Zbig's own Manchurian candidate, and as a woman whose foreign policy experience was worth as much as that of Zbig's own travel agent.

Zbig, who was kept in the closet for many months during the Carter administration because of his hideous Dr. Strangelove persona, portrayed Obama as a peace candidate who wanted to end the Iraq war and usher in peace in the Middle East. Zbig is an infamous Cold War hawk who has managed to re-invent himself in the eyes of some dupes by opposing the Iraq adventure, mainly because it is bad for imperialism.

Zbig did not mention that the reason he wants to downplay certain aspects of US aggression in the Middle East is to free up resources for use in the much bigger and more dangerous adventures which the Trilateral Commission is now directing.

Zbig is the mastermind of the Kosovo secession under KLA terrorist auspices, a gambit against Serbia and Russia to prepare a coming Operation Barbarossa II against Moscow. With the help of his son Mark Brzezinski, another top foreign policy controller of Obama, Zbig is also behind the new Euromissiles crisis involving US ABM installations in Poland. Zbig is the enforcer for the new CIA policy of killing Pakistanis (as "terrorists") without consulting the government of that country, a nuclear power twice as big as Iran.

Most dangerous of all, Zbig is the obvious mastermind of the massive destabilization of China now ongoing, starting with the CIA/MI-6 Tibet insurrection, which has placed the US on a collision course with China, a superpower with 1.4 billion people and thermonuclear weapons which can strike US cities, a far cry from the helpless and defenseless targets preferred by the neocons. It is an open secret that Zbig intends to attempt a color revolution or CIA people power coup in China under the cover of the Beijing Olympics later this year. He may also make the Taiwan crisis explode. The dangers of these lunatic policies are infinitely worse than anything that could ever come out of the Middle East.

Senator Jay Rockefeller and Trilateral/BIlderberger boss Joseph Nye are also actively campaigning for Obama. Nye is the theoretician of "soft power," a new form of imperialist aggression based on economic warfare, subversion, deception, and people power coups. They want Obama to mobilize soft power to give a face lift to US imnperialism.

Brzezinski's goal is confrontation with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the main world center for resistance to US-UK global domination.

Anti-war activists are still fixated on Iran, but not Brzezinski is not - his target is China, TWENTY times bigger than Iran, with ICBMs ready to launch, followed by Russia, the world's biggest nuclear power. Such confused activists need to focus on stopping the next war - the final global showdown with Pakistan, China, and Russia. That means rejecting Brzezinski's puppet candidate Obama.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/23726367#23726367

[Nov 13, 2019] Zbigniew Brzezinski Death of an anti-Russian terrorist

Notable quotes:
"... The Polish born Brzezinski put the historic blood-feud of his mother country ahead of the interests of the United States. He openly opposed Nixon and Ford's policy of detente and orchestrated the use American power to arm and fund all those who sought to undermine the Soviet Union. ..."
"... This became most apparent when he decided to use US might to fund, arm and train the Arab Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Among the fighters Brzezinski's policy helped to arm was Osama bin-Laden, the founder of the Salafist terrorist group al-Qaeda. The group was later blamed for orchestrating and executing the September 11 terrorist atrocities in the United States. ..."
"... Brzezinski was happy to ally with blood soaked jihadists in order to topple the secular, modern government of Afghanistan, for the simple reason that the government was a Soviet ally. ..."
"... Brzezinski's jihadists took over the country in the 1990s and famously executed and then mutilated the corpse of Afghanistan's pro-Soviet President Dr. Mohammad Najibullah in 1996. Many blame the Brzezinski authored policies in Afghanistan for unleashing the plague of jihadist terrorism throughout the wider world. ..."
"... Brzezinski's time in the White House was limited to the single term of Jimmy Carter, but many of his policies lived long after his formal period in power. ..."
May 27, 2017 | theduran.com

by Adam May 27, 2017 11.9k Views

Richard Nixon had more foreign policy achievements that just about any modern American President. These achievements however, have generally been overshadowed by Nixon's scandal plagued White House.

Among his most important achievements was engaging in detente with the Soviet Union. Nixon's de-escalation of tensions with Moscow penultimately led to the signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, wherein America and its allies and also non-aligned states of Europe agreed to respect the borders and sovereignty of existing states, including that of the Soviet Union and her allies. The Helsinki Accords affirmed a renunciation of violence as a means of settling disputes and forced signatories to respect the right of self-determination among peoples.

This was a rare moment when the US admitted that the Cold War could not be won and that engagement and peaceful dialogue was preferable to threats against the Soviet superpower.

READ MORE: The importance of the Helsinki Accords: The last time the West respected Russia

In 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected the President of the United States after Nixon's former Vice-President Gerald Ford, failed to win an America hungry for change on the domestic front.

While Jimmy Carter is often remembered as a man of peace, his Presidency was anything but peaceful. The reason for this was the power behind the throne, Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The Polish born Brzezinski put the historic blood-feud of his mother country ahead of the interests of the United States. He openly opposed Nixon and Ford's policy of detente and orchestrated the use American power to arm and fund all those who sought to undermine the Soviet Union.

This became most apparent when he decided to use US might to fund, arm and train the Arab Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Among the fighters Brzezinski's policy helped to arm was Osama bin-Laden, the founder of the Salafist terrorist group al-Qaeda. The group was later blamed for orchestrating and executing the September 11 terrorist atrocities in the United States.

Brzezinski was happy to ally with blood soaked jihadists in order to topple the secular, modern government of Afghanistan, for the simple reason that the government was a Soviet ally.

Brzezinski's jihadists took over the country in the 1990s and famously executed and then mutilated the corpse of Afghanistan's pro-Soviet President Dr. Mohammad Najibullah in 1996. Many blame the Brzezinski authored policies in Afghanistan for unleashing the plague of jihadist terrorism throughout the wider world.

Brzezinski's time in the White House was limited to the single term of Jimmy Carter, but many of his policies lived long after his formal period in power.

Throughout the rest of his life, Brzezinski continued to vocally advocate for policies designed to cripple Russia, including the expansion of NATO into eastern Europe.

He was a strong supporter of the 2014 coup against the legitimate Ukrainian government and more recently said that the Russian Federation would break up. Furthermore, he said that the US must help those wanting to break it up, irrespective of who they are. He continued to advocate sanctions against Russia until his dying day, in spite of the fact that the sanctions ended up hurting his native Poland more than the Russian Federation he sought to destroy.

Brzezinski was a deeply violent and hateful man. He was also dishonest, he told the last Shah of Iran that the US would give him America's full backing, knowing well that the White House was divided on the issue.

He was a man who brought ancient hatreds, hatreds which long pre-dated the existence of the United States, into the heart of American policy making.

At the age of 89, Brzezinski is dead. Even if he lived another hundred years, he would never see his dream, the death of Russia. Russia remains alive and well and in this sense, perhaps he died knowing that his entire reason for being was a failure.

[Nov 13, 2019] Trump will leave, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain

This is why the Deep State is called the Deep state. It is permanent
Nov 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

Biff , says: November 7, 2019 at 6:58 am GMT

Trump will leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain.

Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government doesn't give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your property, and most of all – your integrity.
"Fuck you stupid voters – now go elect another moron – we've got governments to overthrow"

anonymous [128] Disclaimer , says: November 7, 2019 at 8:44 am GMT
" The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic attitudes."

As are the Republican establishment and even such faux dissidents as Andrew Napolitano and Patrick Buchanan in columns easily found here on The Unz Review.

Exceptionalia needs enemies to keep the sheep herded when the Red v Blue politics and increasingly absurd culture skirmishes aren't sufficiently distracting.

mark green , says: November 7, 2019 at 9:07 am GMT
Excellent summation of the current predicament involving Trump and his ruthless foes. The greatest and most ridiculous 'conspiracy theory' of all is Russiagate itself–yet this politicized hoax is not being allowed to die a natural death; thus the Demorat impeachment inquiry.

So now we have entered Stage Two of this toxic and unnecessary melodrama. We can thank the partisan, biased and subversive 'mainstream' media for this downward step.

Ironically, the media's rank dishonesty is turning Trump into a heroic figure. This is poetic justice.

Haven't our media overlords heard?–the Soviet Union is dead.

In its place is Christian Russia. So why the enmity?

Might these lingering tensions have more than a little to do with Putin's stubborn alliance with Syria and Iran? It sure looks that way.

It must be noted that Israel remains deeply disturbed over the Russia-Iran-Syria federation. But that's Israel's problem. America is not burdened by those historic antagonisms, regional rivalries, or security concerns. Americans should therefore be relieved. Only we're not allowed to be.

The Zionist state has deviously entwined its security interests with America's. Israel and Zio-America have been artificially conjoined at the political hip. Didn't you hear?

This political union is good for the Jews. The Americans?–less so. Far less.

Unless we can extricate ourselves, this unnatural 'partnership' may end in a cataclysm

Realist , says: November 7, 2019 at 1:55 pm GMT
@Biff

Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government doesn't give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your property, and most of all – your integrity.

The Deep State doesn't care about the unimportant internecine squabbles of the 'two parties' as long as their important issues are maintained. As a matter of fact it strengthens the false perception that there is a choice when voting.

Trump and the Deep State do not care what the American people want. They know that most American people are inane fools and will believe anything. Most Americans would rather watch America's Got Talent or Dancing With The Stars than be informed about important issues.

peter mcloughlin , says: November 7, 2019 at 1:58 pm GMT
I think if President Trump was faced with a Cuban Missile Crisis situation the outcome could be very different to the first time. On that occasion the two superpowers, despite coming close to open war, were able to contain and de-escalate. The conditions are very different today. As Professor Cohen says," The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly dangerous, not only due to reasons cited here -- a new Cold War fraught with the possibility of hot war." In this context it is essential the president is "fully empowered to cope with the multiple possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation."
One problem is that the original Cold War was the peace, a post-world war environment: today we are in pre-world war environment. There is a dangerous misconception that a Cold War sequel will have the same peaceful ending. The world has experienced periods of peace (or relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the two Peloponnesian Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna, to name a few. The Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One. That conflict was followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was followed by the United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are they will not prevent a third world war.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Tsar Bomba 38-56-47 N, 77-9-32 W , says: November 7, 2019 at 2:10 pm GMT
"The New York Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William Barr and his appointed special investigator John Durham."

Ya know, the investigation would be a lot harder to delegitimize if it the guys doing it didn't whitewash Iran/Contra, like Barr, or systematic and widespread CIA torture, like Durham. You put lifelong CIA whores hot on the trail of illegal CIA domestic operations against political enemies? Come on. Nobody with a 3-digit IQ can keep a straight face.

You want this shit to stop? Then do to Langley what the Germans did to their Stasi. CIA investigation of CIA crimes do not pass the laff test anymore.

Wilberweld , says: November 7, 2019 at 2:11 pm GMT
Trump's problem was described in simple terms by John Connelly when talking with Henry Kissinger. "Henry", he said, "In Washington you are judged by the men you've destroyed". Trump has not destroyed anyone, not Comey, not Brennan, not Clapper. So he is viewed as weak, an easy target. So they just keep piling on. Attacking Trump is viewed as a "penalty-free activity
Norm Corin , says: November 7, 2019 at 3:18 pm GMT
@renfro Rand Paul, and possibly Bernie Sanders, are not honorable -- sufficiently honorable -- to propose if not accomplish this?
A123 , says: November 7, 2019 at 3:53 pm GMT

Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can elude US missile-defense systems, make new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and urgent. If only for the sake of his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so

This makes little sense. Russia and the U.S. are not enemies, and are potentially allies. Why would a U.S.-Russia treaty be desirable? The U.S. wants to help Russia defend its South western border against dangerous nations, such as Turkey & Iran.

A U.S.-China treaty would be helpful, but China is unlikely to accept anything that might interfere with their colonial ambitions.
____

Also, the author is likely overestimating Russia's technical prowess. Does anyone remember the recent incident the Russians had with their nuclear powered "Skyfall" cruise missile? (1)

The mysterious explosion on August 8 at the Russian navy's range in Nyonoksa killed seven and spurred fears that Russia was testing its nuclear-powered Burevestnik missile, also known by the NATO codename 'Skyfall.' But U.S. intelligence indicates the fatal explosion occurred as Russia attempted to salvage a downed Skyfall missile from the ocean floor,

Russia has reportedly conducted five unsuccessful tests of Skyfall since November 2017, all resulting in loss of control and crashes. The longest test lasted for two minutes with the missile flying 22 miles, and the shortest lasted four seconds and five miles.

PEACE
_______

(1) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7409607/Russias-Skyfall-nuclear-cruise-missile-explosion-happened-salvage-mission-intel.html

follyofwar , says: November 7, 2019 at 9:40 pm GMT
@Giuseppe I'm a huge fan of Stephen Cohen's, but, with bi-partisanship dead, his calling for a new Church commission is pie-in-the-sky. Nothing good can happen until this impeachment farce is over.

In fact, I'd say that Barr and Durham better hurry up and indict someone. There is less than a year left before the next election, which only leaves a few weeks this year, and the first few months in 2020. Once there's like 3-4 months to go before the election it will be too late. And, BTW, where is the long-awaited IG Horowitz's report? Tick Tock guys.

Hail , says: Website November 7, 2019 at 11:21 pm GMT
@Peter Akuleyev

The fastest growing religion in Russia is Islam.

We've been hearing that for a long time, but one thing to remember is: Islam is a foreign(ers')-identity in Russia. It won't be taking over the political center in Russia anytime soon, nor getting any European-Russian converts.

Stochastic Determinist , says: November 8, 2019 at 6:22 am GMT
@Dan Hayes Russia hadn't seized anything. The Black Sea Fleet had always been stationed there. After the Ukrainian government proposed outlawing the Russian language and ethnic Ukrainians attacked the Crimean parliament, Crimeans, the vast majority of whom are ethnic Russians, moved to hold a referendum.
James N. Kennett , says: November 8, 2019 at 6:42 am GMT
@Giuseppe

As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.

The CIA activities restricted by the Church Committee never stopped. They continued "off the books", financed by drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, and (especially) by kickbacks from legitimate but overpriced arms contracts with Saudi Arabia. The close relationship with the Saudi royal family raises awkward questions about who this part of the CIA is really working for.

A new Church Committee would only be able to investigate the parts of the CIA that it can see. It is probably impossible for the US government to control the "off-books" parts of the CIA.

refl , says: November 8, 2019 at 6:59 am GMT

Here too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer seriously discuss national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly involves vilifying both Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous presidents were free to negotiate with Russia's Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged to do so, whereas the demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)

Maybe, the fallacy is to think that Democrats were ever opposed to communism. As one can learn around here, WWII was the joint venture to destroy european national cultures and force them under globalist domination. The Roosevelt administration did about everything to strengthen communism. The current Russian leadership is as sanely nationalist as it gets. Possibly, that is the problem?

What struck me first, before I woke up, was that the ultimate accusation against Russia – before the Ukraine affair started – was that they were said to be homophopbic. While this can be a fault in the eyes of a dedicated liberal, to anyone who has lived through the Cold War, that accusation was outlandishly irrelevant.
The problem that liberal globalists have with Russia is exactly their sanity. Saying this, I do not want to insinuate that Republicans are sane, just for the record. They are the other side of the coin in the big charade.

GMC , says: November 8, 2019 at 7:09 am GMT
The Bolsheviks in Russia told everyone that they were a Political Party – just like the Communists Party etc. The Democrats and Republicans say the same thing , but they are more Bolshevik than any American wants to admit. The Wars, the Police state, the original European, African, Native American societies being destroyed is not the best example – if you are pushing for a NWO. It has failed but they are taking down as many as they can – along with their evil Order. This should one of the highest priority, of most writers today. Thanks Unz Rev.
Ilya G Poimandres , says: November 8, 2019 at 7:09 am GMT
@Dan Hayes From which entity? The country – existing as a unity upon the foundation of a constitution, known as Ukraine – stopped being that entity when a bunch of people toppled a constitutionally mandated government with an unconstitutional coup.

You demand peoples and regions of the former Ukraine remain united? Under what unifying law? The constitution? But the Maidan people tore it apart to get into power. Why would those that take the other side of the debate agree to be governed by law they know their opposition has already, and will again, trod on?

Practically speaking, Ukraine after Maidan is not the same entity as Ukraine before, as there is no social contract left that everyone is willing to be bound by.

Crimea being autonomous, had more freedom than the rest to jump ship, and so they did. But any region can now go, because anyone saying 'but the Constitution bans secession', forget that the people who speak this within Ukraine are those exact same people who tore the Constitution apart.

But don't think it'a just political entities such as Crimea that migrated to Russia of their own wills (as the UN Charter demands), millions of labourers have left for Russia from the remaining entity too, and there was no Putin there at each of their houses, giving personal pep talks over tea about how Russia is better, and how they should migrate accross the border. People chose with their own feet.

Here's a question – if tomorrow a bunch of gunmen threw out congress, the judiciary, and the executive from Washington DC, and replaced them with their own – would you consider that the individual states were then still bound to the federal government through the Constitution? Would you demand honour from one side, knowing fullwell that the other side is dishonourable?

S , says: November 8, 2019 at 7:59 am GMT

Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor.

What's seemingly bizarre is that these modern day Dems with their 'Russiagate' obsession are the very same people who not so many years back would eat up a 1966 movie like 'The Russians Are Coming, the Russians are Coming', with it's message that the Soviet Union along with its Communism was perfectly innocuous (just a laugh really), and the Cold War itself was all a big joke, and pay to see it multiple times.

It's not so bizarre, though, as there is an underlining continuity in all this, then and now.

They hate the organic Russian people and their culture, then and now. That hasn't changed.

A USSR of the past with the Russian people safely subjugated/crushed under Soviet Communism, they like and are okay with.

A Russian Federation where the Russian people appear to have moved away from Communism they don't like. That's dangerous.

Russians shouldn't necessarily feel too bad though about this as they are not the only people so hated. These sorts hate most peoples which attempt to express their physical and cultural identity, often even their own at times.

There's a hatred for most all of humanity there which stems from an underlying self hatred with these types.

[Nov 13, 2019] CIA emerged as a Political Party

Notable quotes:
"... this impeachment isn't directed at Trump at all, it's about undermining the rising left-wing opposition in the Democratic party. They are plausibly on the verge of seizing the party agenda away from the neo-liberal consensus of the Clinton-Obama decades -- with issues like universal public health-care and equitable taxes. They've even found ways to fund campaigns without bowing to the corporate gods. ..."
"... Political parties are nothing more than gangs. To me, the Dems are like the Gambinos and the Repoops are like the Genovese. And they hate it when someone from outside their domain comes and disrupt their racket, when things are going smooth. ..."
"... To me Trump is like the mobster Joe Gallo, killed at Umberto's clam house in NYC. Gallo was a big shot, talked loud and fast, and wanted to start his own racket. And the other crime families would not let him do that. So they whacked him. The same thing both Dems and Repoops are trying to do with Trump. And yes Repoops don't like Trump, as in the latest from Drudge, that the Repoops are split when it comes to impeachment. ..."
"... Apropòs the articles about the 'deep state' meddling in US domestic politics, here's an oldie but a goodie from the World Socialist Web Site: The CIA Democrats . ..."
"... "The Mueller investigation has thus ultimately ended up prosecuting people for telling the same pack of lies that Mueller himself was pushing. The Clinton media, including CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times, are baffled by this. They follow the Stone trial assiduously from delight in seeing a long term Trump hanger-on brought down, and in the hope something will come out about Wikileaks or Russia. Their reporting, as that of the BBC, has been deliberately vague on why Stone is being charged, contriving to leave their audience with the impression that Stone's trial proves Trump connections to Wikileaks and Russia, when in fact it proves the precise opposite. A fact you will never learn from the mainstream media. Which is why I am doing this at 2am on a very cold Edinburgh night, for the small but vital audience which is interested in the truth." ..."
"... Of course, it stretches back to both parties, but that's what it is about - not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine - plus S, L, Y, and above all I & A!!! Gosh, we might get the entire alphabet included; ahoy all boats! ..."
"... Let me briefly sketch out an alternative narrative that more accurately captures our present predicament. Since the end of World War II, successive administrations have sought to devise a formula for assuring American consumers access to Persian Gulf oil while also satisfying pressing domestic political interests. Over a period of decades, that effort succeeded chiefly in giving birth to new problems. Out of these multiplying difficulties came the 9/11 attacks and their immediate sequel, a "war on terrorism" meant to settle matters once and for all. ..."
"... To state the matter bluntly, 9/11 was an expression of chickens coming home to roost, a massive strategic failure that the ensuing military campaigns beginning in 2001 and continuing to the present moment have affirmed. Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X's illusory Pax is essentially zero. ..."
"... The very fact Bloomberg had to enter the Democratic Party presidential race is the definite proof Biden's corruption and involvement on the destruction of Ukraine is so overwhelming and difficult to hide that it will eventually be impossible to cover it with the NYT and WaPo power alone should he be chosen as the nominee. ..."
Nov 10, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bemildred , Nov 10 2019 15:41 utc | 1

I am amazed how the Impeachment Circus and the mainstream media continue to ignore the facts of this story:

Joe Biden has been a favorite target for Trump-allied lawmakers. Many have adopted Trump's unsubstantiated assertion that Biden pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, because he was investigating Burisma.

Other people get it:

The CIA is emerging as a domestic political party.
...
Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest. "The CIA is not involved in domestic politics," he said. "Period. That's on the record."

This he asserted confidently, at an event where he had just spoken about about influence campaigns on swing voters and implied that Hillary Clinton might be right in calling U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset. Even seasoned analysts, it seems, have their blind spots.

Motivation to impeach Trump is about control of Democratic Party - Rick Salutin, The Star

What shifted [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] now? I'd say the answer is: this impeachment isn't directed at Trump at all, it's about undermining the rising left-wing opposition in the Democratic party. They are plausibly on the verge of seizing the party agenda away from the neo-liberal consensus of the Clinton-Obama decades -- with issues like universal public health-care and equitable taxes. They've even found ways to fund campaigns without bowing to the corporate gods.
I agree with Mr. Salutin, the impeachment is not about impeachment, although if impeachment results, I'm sure they will take it. And I agree it's about protecting the current Democratic Part "elites", both from scandal (Joe Biden, Clinton) and from the challenge on the left. A risky and desperate move .

I tend to think it was Trump going after the Ukraine cesspit that precipitated the impeachment, but other motives seem relevant. I have thought since Obama went all in with Russiagate that the current Dem leadership does not feel it can afford to relinquish control.

Walter , Nov 10 2019 15:54 utc | 2

@ "ince Obama went all in with Russiagate that the current Dem leadership does not feel it can afford to relinquish control."

How about that...geewhiz, one does speculate as to what crimes they fear might become known and public?

Everybody Knows...Brother Leonard Cohen... this they fear.

It's a mighty force. To the mat.

Jose Garcia , Nov 10 2019 16:59 utc | 4
Political parties are nothing more than gangs. To me, the Dems are like the Gambinos and the Repoops are like the Genovese. And they hate it when someone from outside their domain comes and disrupt their racket, when things are going smooth.

To me Trump is like the mobster Joe Gallo, killed at Umberto's clam house in NYC. Gallo was a big shot, talked loud and fast, and wanted to start his own racket. And the other crime families would not let him do that. So they whacked him. The same thing both Dems and Repoops are trying to do with Trump. And yes Repoops don't like Trump, as in the latest from Drudge, that the Repoops are split when it comes to impeachment.

pnyx , Nov 10 2019 17:58 utc | 10
Biden / Ukraine: Others begin to get it: 'Further scratches become visible on the picture of the Bidens in the Ukraine affair' (original in German: 'Am Bild der Bidens in der Ukraine-Affäre werden weitere Kratzer sichtbar' nzz 9.11.19, nzz.ch/international/ukraine-affaere-rolle-der-biden-familie-undurchsichtig-ld.1520759)
Seamus Padraig , Nov 10 2019 18:23 utc | 12
Apropòs the articles about the 'deep state' meddling in US domestic politics, here's an oldie but a goodie from the World Socialist Web Site: The CIA Democrats .
karlof1 , Nov 10 2019 18:24 utc | 13
Craig Murray has an exclusive interview with Randy Credico he prefaces with these remarks:

"The Mueller investigation has thus ultimately ended up prosecuting people for telling the same pack of lies that Mueller himself was pushing. The Clinton media, including CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times, are baffled by this. They follow the Stone trial assiduously from delight in seeing a long term Trump hanger-on brought down, and in the hope something will come out about Wikileaks or Russia. Their reporting, as that of the BBC, has been deliberately vague on why Stone is being charged, contriving to leave their audience with the impression that Stone's trial proves Trump connections to Wikileaks and Russia, when in fact it proves the precise opposite. A fact you will never learn from the mainstream media. Which is why I am doing this at 2am on a very cold Edinburgh night, for the small but vital audience which is interested in the truth."

That would include MoA barflies since we crave Truth. Murray has a bit more to say prior to the excerpt I provide, which I suggest be read, too.

juliania , Nov 10 2019 19:13 utc | 18
What a feast of links! I've only just started, with b's Daniel Lazare piece at Stretegic Culture.org - well done!

" ...This is what impeachment is about, not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine – plus Syria, Libya, Yemen, and other countries that the Obama administration succeeded in destroying – and why Trump should pay the supreme penalty for suggesting that Democrats are in any way to blame..."

Of course, it stretches back to both parties, but that's what it is about - not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine - plus S, L, Y, and above all I & A!!! Gosh, we might get the entire alphabet included; ahoy all boats!

chop stick , Nov 10 2019 19:17 utc | 19
Impeachment is about controlling where the attention is focused. When things get to close to home Pelosi says look over here at the orange head, look over there at the border but whatever you do, do not look over https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1KfU5ifhqE ">here.
b , Nov 11 2019 14:20 utc | 114
@pnyx - Thanks for linking the NZZ piece

"Biden / Ukraine: Others begin to get it: 'Further scratches become visible on the picture of the Bidens in the Ukraine affair' (original in German: 'Am Bild der Bidens in der Ukraine-Affäre werden weitere Kratzer sichtbar' nzz 9.11.19, nzz.ch/international/ukraine-affaere-rolle-der-biden-familie-undurchsichtig-ld.1520759)"

Funny it is mostly a recap of my findings of Biden in Ukraine. The piece links to William Bowles ( https://williambowles.info/2019/10/08/when-ukraines-prosecutor-came-after-his-sons-sponsor-joe-biden-sprang-into-action/) and attributes that the findings to him.

But it is not Bowles but a copy my piece here ( https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/10/biden-timeline.html).

So the Neue Züricher Zeitung, the most prestige Swiss outlet, is practically quoting MoA.

I am honored.

Bemildred , Nov 11 2019 14:35 utc | 115
Andrew J. Bacevich weighs in on US foreign policy:
Let me briefly sketch out an alternative narrative that more accurately captures our present predicament. Since the end of World War II, successive administrations have sought to devise a formula for assuring American consumers access to Persian Gulf oil while also satisfying pressing domestic political interests. Over a period of decades, that effort succeeded chiefly in giving birth to new problems. Out of these multiplying difficulties came the 9/11 attacks and their immediate sequel, a "war on terrorism" meant to settle matters once and for all.

To state the matter bluntly, 9/11 was an expression of chickens coming home to roost, a massive strategic failure that the ensuing military campaigns beginning in 2001 and continuing to the present moment have affirmed. Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X's illusory Pax is essentially zero.

There is no going back to an imagined Golden Age of American statecraft in the Middle East. The imperative is to go forward, which requires acknowledging how wrongheaded U.S. policy in region has been ever since FDR had his famous tete-a-tete with King Ibn Saud and Harry Truman rushed to recognize the newborn State of Israel.t

So succinct.

The Blob: Still Chasing After Pax Americana

vk , Nov 11 2019 14:41 utc | 116
@ Posted by: b | Nov 11 2019 14:20 utc | 114

The very fact Bloomberg had to enter the Democratic Party presidential race is the definite proof Biden's corruption and involvement on the destruction of Ukraine is so overwhelming and difficult to hide that it will eventually be impossible to cover it with the NYT and WaPo power alone should he be chosen as the nominee.

[Nov 13, 2019] The CONCORD MANAGEMENT CONSULTING LLC (Internet Research Agency) trial is getting weird.

Nov 13, 2019 | www.courtlistener.com
The CONCORD MANAGEMENT & CONSULTING LLC (Internet Research Agency) trial is getting weird.

This (one page) Order, dated October 25, was filed on November 8:

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.193580/gov.uscourts.dcd.193580.239.0_1.pdf

The main page for the trial is here:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6386795/united-states-v-internet-research-agency-llc/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order

[Nov 13, 2019] You forget a main characteristic of fascists, that is that they aspire to wipe out their political adversaries from the face of Earth, as the case in Bolivia is so flagrantry illustrating

Nov 13, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Sasha , Nov 11 2019 23:34 utc | 163

@Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 11 2019 21:30 utc | 152

But, with that explanation, it is like you are whithewashing fascism as a merely opposing political view, which is precisley the position and pretension of the Trumpers, when it is not. Fascism is incompatible with democracy and human rights...as the recent ( just overnight the coup...) declarations by The Donald on the events in Bolivia come to confirm...

You forget a main characteristic of fascists, that is that they aspire ( and when the circumstances allow it, always try...) to wipe out their political adversaries from the face of Earth, as the case in Bolivia is so flagrantry illustrating. Along with their political adversaries, who are always those who position themselves in the side or as representives of the people, they always try to wipe out also all those subgroups of human beings they consider utermenschen ...In this cathegory they will include many, slavs, latinos, jews, gypsies, black people...

Then, once in power, they will use terror to keep the citizenry ( who otherwise will rebel once the real "program" of the nazis unveiled ) in control...

Sasha , Nov 11 2019 23:53 utc | 164

That the US system is as a whole fascist falls plainly in the faces of all its deluded and anestesized citizens when you see today that neither Pelosi, nor Schumaker, nor Clinton, nor Biden have said a word agsint what happened yesterday in Bolivia or against the words of the POTUS who "allegedly" they try to overthrow...a representation described by Trump himself, in the heights of stone face, as coup d´etat...
William Gruff , Nov 12 2019 0:08 utc | 165
Sasha @163

I stated that fascism has no ideology. It cannot be a "political view" .

The fascists in Rwanda are Black. The fascists in Israel are Jewish. The fascists in Ukraine are Slavs. The fascists in Colombia are Latinos.

Fascism isn't about one ethnicity or another. Ethnic prejudice is just one (of many) handle that the capitalists elites use to get some parts of society to attack other parts. The people who fall under that control by the capitalist elites are fascists.

[Nov 13, 2019] Trump will leave, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain

This is why the Deep State is called the Deep state. It is permanent
Nov 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

Biff , says: November 7, 2019 at 6:58 am GMT

Trump will leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain.

Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government doesn't give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your property, and most of all – your integrity.
"Fuck you stupid voters – now go elect another moron – we've got governments to overthrow"

anonymous [128] Disclaimer , says: November 7, 2019 at 8:44 am GMT
" The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic attitudes."

As are the Republican establishment and even such faux dissidents as Andrew Napolitano and Patrick Buchanan in columns easily found here on The Unz Review.

Exceptionalia needs enemies to keep the sheep herded when the Red v Blue politics and increasingly absurd culture skirmishes aren't sufficiently distracting.

mark green , says: November 7, 2019 at 9:07 am GMT
Excellent summation of the current predicament involving Trump and his ruthless foes. The greatest and most ridiculous 'conspiracy theory' of all is Russiagate itself–yet this politicized hoax is not being allowed to die a natural death; thus the Demorat impeachment inquiry.

So now we have entered Stage Two of this toxic and unnecessary melodrama. We can thank the partisan, biased and subversive 'mainstream' media for this downward step.

Ironically, the media's rank dishonesty is turning Trump into a heroic figure. This is poetic justice.

Haven't our media overlords heard?–the Soviet Union is dead.

In its place is Christian Russia. So why the enmity?

Might these lingering tensions have more than a little to do with Putin's stubborn alliance with Syria and Iran? It sure looks that way.

It must be noted that Israel remains deeply disturbed over the Russia-Iran-Syria federation. But that's Israel's problem. America is not burdened by those historic antagonisms, regional rivalries, or security concerns. Americans should therefore be relieved. Only we're not allowed to be.

The Zionist state has deviously entwined its security interests with America's. Israel and Zio-America have been artificially conjoined at the political hip. Didn't you hear?

This political union is good for the Jews. The Americans?–less so. Far less.

Unless we can extricate ourselves, this unnatural 'partnership' may end in a cataclysm

Realist , says: November 7, 2019 at 1:55 pm GMT
@Biff

Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government doesn't give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your property, and most of all – your integrity.

The Deep State doesn't care about the unimportant internecine squabbles of the 'two parties' as long as their important issues are maintained. As a matter of fact it strengthens the false perception that there is a choice when voting.

Trump and the Deep State do not care what the American people want. They know that most American people are inane fools and will believe anything. Most Americans would rather watch America's Got Talent or Dancing With The Stars than be informed about important issues.

peter mcloughlin , says: November 7, 2019 at 1:58 pm GMT
I think if President Trump was faced with a Cuban Missile Crisis situation the outcome could be very different to the first time. On that occasion the two superpowers, despite coming close to open war, were able to contain and de-escalate. The conditions are very different today. As Professor Cohen says," The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly dangerous, not only due to reasons cited here -- a new Cold War fraught with the possibility of hot war." In this context it is essential the president is "fully empowered to cope with the multiple possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation."
One problem is that the original Cold War was the peace, a post-world war environment: today we are in pre-world war environment. There is a dangerous misconception that a Cold War sequel will have the same peaceful ending. The world has experienced periods of peace (or relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the two Peloponnesian Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna, to name a few. The Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One. That conflict was followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was followed by the United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are they will not prevent a third world war.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Tsar Bomba 38-56-47 N, 77-9-32 W , says: November 7, 2019 at 2:10 pm GMT
"The New York Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William Barr and his appointed special investigator John Durham."

Ya know, the investigation would be a lot harder to delegitimize if it the guys doing it didn't whitewash Iran/Contra, like Barr, or systematic and widespread CIA torture, like Durham. You put lifelong CIA whores hot on the trail of illegal CIA domestic operations against political enemies? Come on. Nobody with a 3-digit IQ can keep a straight face.

You want this shit to stop? Then do to Langley what the Germans did to their Stasi. CIA investigation of CIA crimes do not pass the laff test anymore.

Wilberweld , says: November 7, 2019 at 2:11 pm GMT
Trump's problem was described in simple terms by John Connelly when talking with Henry Kissinger. "Henry", he said, "In Washington you are judged by the men you've destroyed". Trump has not destroyed anyone, not Comey, not Brennan, not Clapper. So he is viewed as weak, an easy target. So they just keep piling on. Attacking Trump is viewed as a "penalty-free activity
Norm Corin , says: November 7, 2019 at 3:18 pm GMT
@renfro Rand Paul, and possibly Bernie Sanders, are not honorable -- sufficiently honorable -- to propose if not accomplish this?
A123 , says: November 7, 2019 at 3:53 pm GMT

Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can elude US missile-defense systems, make new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and urgent. If only for the sake of his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so

This makes little sense. Russia and the U.S. are not enemies, and are potentially allies. Why would a U.S.-Russia treaty be desirable? The U.S. wants to help Russia defend its South western border against dangerous nations, such as Turkey & Iran.

A U.S.-China treaty would be helpful, but China is unlikely to accept anything that might interfere with their colonial ambitions.
____

Also, the author is likely overestimating Russia's technical prowess. Does anyone remember the recent incident the Russians had with their nuclear powered "Skyfall" cruise missile? (1)

The mysterious explosion on August 8 at the Russian navy's range in Nyonoksa killed seven and spurred fears that Russia was testing its nuclear-powered Burevestnik missile, also known by the NATO codename 'Skyfall.' But U.S. intelligence indicates the fatal explosion occurred as Russia attempted to salvage a downed Skyfall missile from the ocean floor,

Russia has reportedly conducted five unsuccessful tests of Skyfall since November 2017, all resulting in loss of control and crashes. The longest test lasted for two minutes with the missile flying 22 miles, and the shortest lasted four seconds and five miles.

PEACE
_______

(1) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7409607/Russias-Skyfall-nuclear-cruise-missile-explosion-happened-salvage-mission-intel.html

follyofwar , says: November 7, 2019 at 9:40 pm GMT
@Giuseppe I'm a huge fan of Stephen Cohen's, but, with bi-partisanship dead, his calling for a new Church commission is pie-in-the-sky. Nothing good can happen until this impeachment farce is over.

In fact, I'd say that Barr and Durham better hurry up and indict someone. There is less than a year left before the next election, which only leaves a few weeks this year, and the first few months in 2020. Once there's like 3-4 months to go before the election it will be too late. And, BTW, where is the long-awaited IG Horowitz's report? Tick Tock guys.

Hail , says: Website November 7, 2019 at 11:21 pm GMT
@Peter Akuleyev

The fastest growing religion in Russia is Islam.

We've been hearing that for a long time, but one thing to remember is: Islam is a foreign(ers')-identity in Russia. It won't be taking over the political center in Russia anytime soon, nor getting any European-Russian converts.

Stochastic Determinist , says: November 8, 2019 at 6:22 am GMT
@Dan Hayes Russia hadn't seized anything. The Black Sea Fleet had always been stationed there. After the Ukrainian government proposed outlawing the Russian language and ethnic Ukrainians attacked the Crimean parliament, Crimeans, the vast majority of whom are ethnic Russians, moved to hold a referendum.
James N. Kennett , says: November 8, 2019 at 6:42 am GMT
@Giuseppe

As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.

The CIA activities restricted by the Church Committee never stopped. They continued "off the books", financed by drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, and (especially) by kickbacks from legitimate but overpriced arms contracts with Saudi Arabia. The close relationship with the Saudi royal family raises awkward questions about who this part of the CIA is really working for.

A new Church Committee would only be able to investigate the parts of the CIA that it can see. It is probably impossible for the US government to control the "off-books" parts of the CIA.

refl , says: November 8, 2019 at 6:59 am GMT

Here too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer seriously discuss national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly involves vilifying both Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous presidents were free to negotiate with Russia's Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged to do so, whereas the demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)

Maybe, the fallacy is to think that Democrats were ever opposed to communism. As one can learn around here, WWII was the joint venture to destroy european national cultures and force them under globalist domination. The Roosevelt administration did about everything to strengthen communism. The current Russian leadership is as sanely nationalist as it gets. Possibly, that is the problem?

What struck me first, before I woke up, was that the ultimate accusation against Russia – before the Ukraine affair started – was that they were said to be homophopbic. While this can be a fault in the eyes of a dedicated liberal, to anyone who has lived through the Cold War, that accusation was outlandishly irrelevant.
The problem that liberal globalists have with Russia is exactly their sanity. Saying this, I do not want to insinuate that Republicans are sane, just for the record. They are the other side of the coin in the big charade.

GMC , says: November 8, 2019 at 7:09 am GMT
The Bolsheviks in Russia told everyone that they were a Political Party – just like the Communists Party etc. The Democrats and Republicans say the same thing , but they are more Bolshevik than any American wants to admit. The Wars, the Police state, the original European, African, Native American societies being destroyed is not the best example – if you are pushing for a NWO. It has failed but they are taking down as many as they can – along with their evil Order. This should one of the highest priority, of most writers today. Thanks Unz Rev.
Ilya G Poimandres , says: November 8, 2019 at 7:09 am GMT
@Dan Hayes From which entity? The country – existing as a unity upon the foundation of a constitution, known as Ukraine – stopped being that entity when a bunch of people toppled a constitutionally mandated government with an unconstitutional coup.

You demand peoples and regions of the former Ukraine remain united? Under what unifying law? The constitution? But the Maidan people tore it apart to get into power. Why would those that take the other side of the debate agree to be governed by law they know their opposition has already, and will again, trod on?

Practically speaking, Ukraine after Maidan is not the same entity as Ukraine before, as there is no social contract left that everyone is willing to be bound by.

Crimea being autonomous, had more freedom than the rest to jump ship, and so they did. But any region can now go, because anyone saying 'but the Constitution bans secession', forget that the people who speak this within Ukraine are those exact same people who tore the Constitution apart.

But don't think it'a just political entities such as Crimea that migrated to Russia of their own wills (as the UN Charter demands), millions of labourers have left for Russia from the remaining entity too, and there was no Putin there at each of their houses, giving personal pep talks over tea about how Russia is better, and how they should migrate accross the border. People chose with their own feet.

Here's a question – if tomorrow a bunch of gunmen threw out congress, the judiciary, and the executive from Washington DC, and replaced them with their own – would you consider that the individual states were then still bound to the federal government through the Constitution? Would you demand honour from one side, knowing fullwell that the other side is dishonourable?

S , says: November 8, 2019 at 7:59 am GMT

Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor.

What's seemingly bizarre is that these modern day Dems with their 'Russiagate' obsession are the very same people who not so many years back would eat up a 1966 movie like 'The Russians Are Coming, the Russians are Coming', with it's message that the Soviet Union along with its Communism was perfectly innocuous (just a laugh really), and the Cold War itself was all a big joke, and pay to see it multiple times.

It's not so bizarre, though, as there is an underlining continuity in all this, then and now.

They hate the organic Russian people and their culture, then and now. That hasn't changed.

A USSR of the past with the Russian people safely subjugated/crushed under Soviet Communism, they like and are okay with.

A Russian Federation where the Russian people appear to have moved away from Communism they don't like. That's dangerous.

Russians shouldn't necessarily feel too bad though about this as they are not the only people so hated. These sorts hate most peoples which attempt to express their physical and cultural identity, often even their own at times.

There's a hatred for most all of humanity there which stems from an underlying self hatred with these types.

[Nov 12, 2019] The best argument for voting for young beautiful women as POTUS

Nov 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

Mick Jagger gathers no Mosque , says: November 12, 2019 at 4:39 pm GMT

@The Alarmist

The emperor is naked

That is the best argument for voting for young beautiful women as POTUS.

[Nov 12, 2019] John Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... Trump's surprising victory forced a pivot, with Clapper, Brennan and Comey adjusting the narrative to make it appear that Trump the traitor may have captured the White House due to help from the Kremlin, making him a latter-day Manchurian Candidate. The lesser allegations of Russian meddling were quickly elevated to devastating assertions that the Republican had only won with Putin's assistance. ..."
"... The national security team acted to protect their candidate Hillary Clinton, who represented America's Deep State. In spite of considerable naysaying, the Deep State is real, not just a wild conspiracy theory. Many Americans nevertheless do not believe that the Deep State exists, that it is a politically driven media creation much like Russiagate itself was, but if one changes the wording a bit and describes the Deep State as the Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country becomes much more plausible. ..."
"... It is now known that President Barack Obama's CIA Director John Brennan created a Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Brennan fabricated the narrative that "Russia had interfered in the 2016 election." Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the "evidence" produced to support that claim was and still is weak to nonexistent. ..."
"... With the help of the Establishment media, Clapper and Brennan were able to pretend that the ICA had been approved by "all 17 intelligence agencies" (as first claimed by Hillary Clinton). After several months, however Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA." ..."
"... And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task Force with the approval of then Director James Comey. Former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele's FBI handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been one of those detailed to the Trump Task Force. Steele, of course, prepared the notorious dossier that was surfaced shortly before Donald Trump took office. It included considerable material intended to tie Trump to Russia, information that was in many cases fabricated or unsourced. ..."
"... The case officers would work with foreign intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on identifying intelligence collection priorities that would implicate Trump and his associates in illegal activity. And there is evidence that John Brennan himself would contact his counterparts in allied intelligence services to obtain their discreet cooperation, something they would be inclined to do in collegial fashion, ignoring whatever reservations they might have about spying on a possible American presidential candidate. ..."
"... e Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, sometimes using press or social media placements to disseminate fabrications about Trump and his associates. Information operations is a benign-sounding euphemism for propaganda fed through the Agency's friends in the media, and computer network operations can be used to create false linkages and misdirect inquiries. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 may have been a creation of this Task Force. ..."
"... In light of what has been learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower there should be a serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at minimum, reporting to them secretly after he was seconded to the National Security Council. All the CIA and FBI officers involved in the Task Force had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, but nevertheless were involved in a conspiracy to first denigrate and then possibly bring down a legally elected president. That effort continues with repeated assertions regarding Moscow's malevolent intentions for the 2020 national elections. Some might reasonably regard the whole Brennan affair, to include its spear carriers among the current and retired national security state leadership, as a case of institutionalized treason, and it inevitably leads to the question "What did Obama know?" ..."
"... Obama orchestrated the destruction of a political rival and he will get away scott free .because he's an oppressed and downtrodden dindu. ..."
"... But in fact Obama too is CIA nomenklatura, with the same depth of dynastic ties as GW Bush, albeit not at the same lofty level. ..."
"... This past election was CIA office politics, nothing more. Russigate is simply CIA eminence Hillary, the Queen of Mena, ratfucking a bumptious queue-jumper. She outranks Trump, who was merely a junior money-launderer for the CIA agents who looted the Soviet Union. It was her turn to take the figurehead head-of-state sinecure. She and Bill earned it with their lucrative Clinton Foundation covert-ops slush fund. ..."
"... And has been since the early 1950s when the Allen Dulles-Frank Wisner-James Jesus Angleton crew got rolling. They managed to thoroughly penetrate federal and state bureaucracies, the court systems, major corporations, the financial sector, and the mockingbird media. ..."
"... Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA." ..."
Nov 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S. intelligence and national security community. Former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey appear to have played critical leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own. Almost certainly what they may have done would have been explicitly authorized by the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his national security team.

It must have seemed a simple operation for the experienced CIA covert action operatives. To prevent the unreliable and unpredictable political upstart Donald Trump from being nominated as the GOP presidential candidate or even elected it would be necessary to create suspicion that he was the tool of a resurgent Russia, acting under direct orders from Vladimir Putin to empower Trump and damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Even though none of the alleged Kremlin plotters would have expected Trump to actually beat Hillary, it was plausible to maintain that they would have hoped that a weakened Clinton would be less able to implement the anti-Russian agenda that she had been promoting. Many observers in both Russia and the U.S. believed that if she had been elected armed conflict with Moscow would have been inevitable, particularly if she moved to follow her husband's example and push to have both Georgia and Ukraine join NATO, which Russia would have regarded as an existential threat.

Trump's surprising victory forced a pivot, with Clapper, Brennan and Comey adjusting the narrative to make it appear that Trump the traitor may have captured the White House due to help from the Kremlin, making him a latter-day Manchurian Candidate. The lesser allegations of Russian meddling were quickly elevated to devastating assertions that the Republican had only won with Putin's assistance.

No substantive evidence for the claim of serious Russian meddling has ever been produced in spite of years of investigation, but the real objective was to plant the story that would plausibly convince a majority of Americans that the election of Donald Trump was somehow illegitimate.

The national security team acted to protect their candidate Hillary Clinton, who represented America's Deep State. In spite of considerable naysaying, the Deep State is real, not just a wild conspiracy theory. Many Americans nevertheless do not believe that the Deep State exists, that it is a politically driven media creation much like Russiagate itself was, but if one changes the wording a bit and describes the Deep State as the Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country becomes much more plausible.

The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. It also operates through relationships that are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity will be exposed.

Nevertheless, some might even argue that having a Deep State is a healthy part of American democracy, that it serves as a check or corrective element on a political system that has largely been corrupted and which no longer serves national interests. But that assessment surely might have been made before it became clear that many of the leaders of the nation's intelligence and security agencies are no longer the people's honorable servants they pretend to be. They have been heavily politicized since at least the time of Ronald Reagan and have frequently succumbed to the lure of wealth and power while identifying with and promoting the interests of the Deep State.

Indeed, a number of former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directors have implicitly or even directly admitted to the existence of a Deep State that has as one of its roles keeping presidents like Donald Trump in check. Most recently, John McLaughlin, responding to a question about Donald Trump's concern over Deep State involvement in the ongoing impeachment process, said unambiguously "Well, you know, thank God for the 'deep state' With all of the people who knew what was going on here, it took an intelligence officer to step forward and say something about it, which was the trigger that then unleashed everything else. This is the institution within the U.S. government is institutionally committed to objectivity and telling the truth. It is one of the few institutions in Washington that is not in a chain of command that makes or implements policy. Its whole job is to speak the truth -- it's engraved in marble in the lobby."

Well, John's dedication to truth is exemplary but how does he explain his own role in support of the lies being promoted by his boss George "slam dunk" Tenet that led to the war against Iraq, the greatest foreign policy disaster ever experienced by the United States? Or Tenet's sitting in the U.N. directly behind Secretary of State Colin Powell in the debate over Iraq, providing cover and credibility for what everyone inside the system knew to be a bundle of lies? Or his close friend and colleague Michael Morell's description of Trump as a Russian agent , a claim that was supported by zero evidence and which was given credibility only by Morell's boast that "I ran the CIA."

Beyond that, more details have been revealed demonstrating exactly how Deep State associates have attempted, with considerable success, to subvert the actual functioning of American democracy. Words are one thing, but acting to interfere in an electoral process or to undermine a serving president is a rather more serious matter.

It is now known that President Barack Obama's CIA Director John Brennan created a Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Brennan fabricated the narrative that "Russia had interfered in the 2016 election." Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the "evidence" produced to support that claim was and still is weak to nonexistent.

The Russian "election interference" narrative went on steroids on January 6, 2017, shortly before Trump was inaugurated, when an "Intelligence Community Assessment" (ICA) orchestrated by Clapper and Brennan was published. The banner headline atop The New York Times, itself an integral part of the Deep State, on the following day set the tone for what was to follow: "Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says."

With the help of the Establishment media, Clapper and Brennan were able to pretend that the ICA had been approved by "all 17 intelligence agencies" (as first claimed by Hillary Clinton). After several months, however Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA."

Task Force Trump was kept secret within the Agency itself because the CIA is not supposed to spy on Americans. Its staff was pulled together by invitation-only. Specific case officers (i.e., men and women who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and administrative personnel were recruited, presumably based on their political reliability. Not everyone invited accepted the offer. But many did because it came with promises of promotion and other rewards.

And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task Force with the approval of then Director James Comey. Former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele's FBI handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been one of those detailed to the Trump Task Force. Steele, of course, prepared the notorious dossier that was surfaced shortly before Donald Trump took office. It included considerable material intended to tie Trump to Russia, information that was in many cases fabricated or unsourced.

So, what kind of things would this Task Force do? The case officers would work with foreign intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on identifying intelligence collection priorities that would implicate Trump and his associates in illegal activity. And there is evidence that John Brennan himself would contact his counterparts in allied intelligence services to obtain their discreet cooperation, something they would be inclined to do in collegial fashion, ignoring whatever reservations they might have about spying on a possible American presidential candidate.

Trump Task Force members could have also tasked the National Security Agency (NSA) to do targeted collection. They also would have the ability to engage in complicated covert actions that would further set up and entrap Trump and his staff in questionable activity, such as the targeting of associate George Papadopoulos. If he is ever properly interviewed, Maltese citizen Joseph Mifsud may be able to shed light on the CIA officers who met with him, briefed him on operational objectives regarding Papadopoulos and helped arrange monitored meetings. It is highly likely that Azra Turk, the woman who met with George Papadopoulos, was part of the CIA Trump Task Force.

The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, sometimes using press or social media placements to disseminate fabrications about Trump and his associates. Information operations is a benign-sounding euphemism for propaganda fed through the Agency's friends in the media, and computer network operations can be used to create false linkages and misdirect inquiries. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 may have been a creation of this Task Force.

In light of what has been learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower there should be a serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at minimum, reporting to them secretly after he was seconded to the National Security Council. All the CIA and FBI officers involved in the Task Force had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, but nevertheless were involved in a conspiracy to first denigrate and then possibly bring down a legally elected president. That effort continues with repeated assertions regarding Moscow's malevolent intentions for the 2020 national elections. Some might reasonably regard the whole Brennan affair, to include its spear carriers among the current and retired national security state leadership, as a case of institutionalized treason, and it inevitably leads to the question "What did Obama know?"

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] .

Justvisitingsays: November 12, 2019 at 5:09 am GMT 100 Words The magic words are "FISA warrants".

The entire FISA court process has been exposed as an insane sham.

"The Secret Team" just took the absurdity of the process and raised it to the next level–injecting it into a political campaign.

It would be wonderful if they could fill a jail with every empty suit who touched those warrants–but I would be stunned if even one of them gets paraded around in the orange jump-suit they so richly deserve. Read More Replies: @Moi Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All Comments

AWM , says: November 12, 2019 at 5:44 am GMT
It already is "Obamagate."

... ... ...

Alfred , says: November 12, 2019 at 7:09 am GMT
Looking on at this affair from outside the USA, it is clear that the power and influence of the USA is waning a lot faster than most people expected.

The replacement of the US military by mercenaries who are called other names was a first step. The sanctioning and punishing of allies for stepping out of line is the second step. BTW, it is notable how Japan and Australia are very keen to stay in line but the Europeans less so.

I suspect the third step will be to encourage a collapse of the Euro – so as to make wealthy Europeans shift their money to the USA in a panic.

It seems to me that the US public will be the last to learn of what is really happening. Even on this website there are sometimes letters or articles that mention 9/11 as a "terrorist" or "Saudi" act. How can one take anything such a person writes seriously?

The control of media and the internet seems to be the last part of the collapse. They will hang on to that to the very last moment.

Gall , says: November 12, 2019 at 9:37 am GMT
In the old days they used to give traitors the option of being hung or shot. Now they work for the CIA and become TV celebrities.
gotmituns , says: November 12, 2019 at 11:01 am GMT
I campaigned for Trump but was tricked. The die is caste now. There must be civil war and secession.
Realist , says: November 12, 2019 at 11:37 am GMT

John Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force
Could it become Obamagate?

Perhaps, but what is the point? All this bullshit is engineered to make dumbass Americans think justice is being served. Nothing will come of it no one will go to prison.

Realist , says: November 12, 2019 at 11:45 am GMT
@NPleeze

As if Trump weren't part and parcel of the Deep State.

His actions in Syria, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, etc. all prove incontrovertibly that he is (and has always been) a member in fine standing of the Deep State. If he is a Manchurian Candidate, he is the true puppet of the Deep State, not the people or of Russia.

Exactly. I voted for Trump, but, as long ago as mid April 2017, I determined that he was a Deep Stater his actions are just too obvious to ignore.

Robert Dolan , says: November 12, 2019 at 11:47 am GMT
The Magic Negro cannot be touched and that is why nothing will be done about the biggest crime in the history of our nation Obama orchestrated the destruction of a political rival and he will get away scott free .because he's an oppressed and downtrodden dindu.
Realist , says: November 12, 2019 at 11:57 am GMT

There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S.

Which one are you referring to, Iran 1953, Kennedy assassination 1963, Gulf of Tonkin 1964 or the other dozens of examples?

Sbaker , says: November 12, 2019 at 12:25 pm GMT
@Realist

Exactly. I voted for Trump, but, as long ago as mid April 2017, I determined that he was a Deep Stater his actions are just too obvious to ignore.

This certainly explains the incessant attacks on Trump by the deep state.

onebornfree , says: Website November 12, 2019 at 12:38 pm GMT
"And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task Force "

This just in: both the CIA and FBI are unconstitutional, agencies.Get rid of them -and all of the other unconstitutional alphabet-soup agencies[FDA,EPA,SEC etc.etc.etc.]. No downsizing-trash them all- NOW!

This also just in: "Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [via central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed","improved", simply because of their innate, unchangeble criminal nature." onebornfree

"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock

Regards, onebornfree

i

Biff , says: November 12, 2019 at 12:42 pm GMT
@Robert Dolan

The Magic Negro cannot be touched

That's pretty much it in a nutshell – put him on a shelf with the Clintons, and the Bush's.

Hapalong Cassidy , says: November 12, 2019 at 12:53 pm GMT
John Brennan just looks sinister. It would not surprise me if he were in the top 1% of most evil persons alive.
RVBlake , says: November 12, 2019 at 12:53 pm GMT
17 intelligence agencies. Really?
Anonymous [381] Disclaimer , says: November 12, 2019 at 12:57 pm GMT
@Alfred Your point about 9/11 can't be made forcefully enough. We're going straight to hell unless Israel and its American confederates are brought to justice, these wars ended, and order restored. Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Mueller, Chertoff and the whole traitorous bunch are probably guilty as principals but almost certainly they're at least complicit as accessories before and after the fact. So naturally all we hear about is Russiagate.

The evidence overwhelmingly implicates Israel and not Saudi Arabia as you point out. That Building 7 was brought down by explosives has been proved beyond doubt by Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth, and as Dr. Alan Sobrosky put it, if Building 7 was brought down by explosives, so too were the Twin Towers. The official NIST reports and all related government narratives are preposterous. They're fairytales for fools inasmuch as the official mechanisms rely on a suspension of the laws of physics more fanciful than Jack and the Beanstalk. The story of the nineteen Arabs who couldn't handle Cessna 150s magically flying jetliners into precise targets is more absurd than fairytale tropes about flying carpets.

Yet for Conservatism Inc and Fox News, which both claim to oppose the Deep State and its narratives, there's no standard of evidence so low or preposterous that these cucks won't cling to it to cover up what they must now know is Israel's guilt. We can assume it's precisely because they're aware of Israel's guilt that they rule out the overwhelmingly conclusive circumstantial evidence pointing to Israel on the grounds such evidence is "anti-Semitic" and consequently false on apriori grounds. Moreover, any expert investigator qualified in the relevant field who uncovers and presents evidence implicating Israel is cast as the actual terrorist. It should go without saying they've reversed a millennium in the development of Western thought regarding the connection between evidence and conclusion, and they've done so for the basest of reasons. At least Conservatism Inc is being daily exposed for the controlled opposition and worthless club of preppy snots it's always been.

Ilyana_Rozumova , says: November 12, 2019 at 1:15 pm GMT
Brilliant Article.
The question is when deep state will finally admit that Globalism after all that sacrifice and evildoing are just sour grapes. As fox said in Ezops tale.
Phil the Fluter , says: November 12, 2019 at 1:16 pm GMT
Trump isn't so much a Manchurian candidate as a Khazarian candidate, dancing to the merry tune of his Zionist handlers.
Gracchus Babeuf , says: November 12, 2019 at 1:20 pm GMT
@NPleeze Agree. Only proviso, let's stop calling it the "Deep State". I prefer Kiriakou's term, the Federal Bureaucracy.
Gracchus Babeuf , says: November 12, 2019 at 1:22 pm GMT
@Realist Indeed tRump is just the NY street corner mobster being told what to do by the"godfather".
Greg Bacon , says: Website November 12, 2019 at 1:25 pm GMT

"the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA."

Right, along with drinking vodka and eating borscht.

The one nation that did interfere in the 2016 election, and has inserted themselves into other elections to get their candidate elected, Israel remains untouched by this (((Deep State))).
There's plenty of evidence for the Zionists and Israeli-Firsters corrupting the election process for their fav nation, Israel, but the Operation Mockingbird asshats in the MSM won't go near that, not if they want to keep their cushy job, 5th Avenue penthouse and that chauffeured limo.

Anytime AIPAC comes to town, Congress gets into a fight with each other, trying to be the one that shows the most slavish loyalty to the nation that has attacked the USA numerous times, spies constantly on us, stealing our military, business and industrial secrets, had a hand in both murdering JFK, RFK and masterminded the 9/11 FF, and has an overwheling presence on the FED, yet most Americans don't know that, because the MSM keeps reporting lies, distortions and half-truths, and always presenting a boogeyman to hate, sometimes Russia, most times Muslims.

But fear not, that will soon come to an end, for when those TBTF Wall Street banks–in collusion with the FED–again crash the stock market and drag the economy down with their greed, that coming crash will make the one of 1929 seem like a picnic.
When that happens, what's left won't be of any interest to Israel to steal or manipulate.

steinbergfeldwitzcohen , says: November 12, 2019 at 1:31 pm GMT
The Deep State murdered Kennedy.
He planned on destroying the Fed and the CIA.
The Deep State required a president that COLLABORATED, like LBJ.
Then they figured, "why not put our guy in?'
Thus Bush 1.
Then Clinton (Bush 1 was his 'mentor') a pervert stooge.
Then Bush 2, a gaymail stooge.
Then Obomber, the gay Kenyan C_A stooge.
Then America says 'Enough', rejects the Witch and elects Trump.
Now the Deep State wants to kill America.
I think it's time for America to kill its' Deep State.
It is, after all, self-defense. Besides, hasn't this gone on long enough?
The alternative is to end up as the modern parallel of Rome.
Really No Shit , says: November 12, 2019 at 1:47 pm GMT
Clapper, Brennan and Comey " may not have operated on their own." Duh! You just remember, a donkey won't carry a heavy burden unless it's fed regularly. Find out who owns the beast and you will have the culprit!
Z-man , says: November 12, 2019 at 2:09 pm GMT
Phil, you should offer your services to the Trump defense/attack team*. Just stay away from Giuliani (grin). Good article and salvo against Brennan and the rest who deserve all the pain thay can get.

*Hey money is good especially around Christmas time. (Grin)

Realist , says: November 12, 2019 at 2:14 pm GMT
@Sbaker

This certainly explains the incessant attacks on Trump by the deep state.

You have no concept of a charade being perpetrated on the American people. You don't find it a little strange that Trump keeps hiring the Deep State denizens he purports to be fighting? You are incapable of detecting the friend/foe, psychological tactic used to deceive?

Patrikios Stetsonis , says: November 12, 2019 at 2:16 pm GMT
@Ilyana_Rozumova ..Aesop's tail
Sbaker , says: November 12, 2019 at 2:20 pm GMT
@Anonymous That's it. Your hearsay trumps thousands of eyewitnesses and conversations of the victims on flight 93 and in the pentagon.. You must be a first responder too. Talk about easily influenced–you are why the old media gets away with their corruption. Some anonymous source writes, says it on TV, and the lemmings follow.
Really No Shit , says: November 12, 2019 at 2:23 pm GMT
@Biff As we write, Obama probably is banging away some groupie in a DC mansion basement while the gorrila is frying chicken upstairs for Oprah.

And Bubba, most likely, is watching porn in the garage in Westchester and the wicked witch is massaging mrs. Wiener.

But it's Dubya worth looking into because he is out in the cowshed, buck naked save the cowboy boots and the ten-gallon hat, whipping himself silly for the "mission accomplished!"

Dave Sullivan , says: November 12, 2019 at 2:45 pm GMT
Or, Obama and the police agencies investigated a known organized crime stooge when it became apparent the GOP could offer no other candidate. Ironically, this was the original intent of the creation of the FBI. Don't play into the "victim trump" brand, he needs no help with it.
The other other other shoe drops , says: November 12, 2019 at 3:01 pm GMT
Thanks much for the most comprehensive précis yet of this bungled CIA putsch. The articles in sequence teasingly open Gina's kimono, giving us horripilating glimpses of her bushy penetralia. The question of Obama's involvement is the next step. CIA bots have been pushing a partisan perspective for some time. Those darn Democrats!

But in fact Obama too is CIA nomenklatura, with the same depth of dynastic ties as GW Bush, albeit not at the same lofty level. Just look at the oppo research, the best of which comes from sanitized glimpses of the errands candidates run for CIA. Obama's other passport is not Kenyan but Indonesian. It facilitated the youngster's schooling during Mom's year of living dangerously in Indonesia. Obama's dad and stepdad were CIA skins on the wall. Grandma was not in fact a drunk – she laundered the money for forcible overthrow and genocide in Indonesia at her bank job in Hawaii. Grandpa was a "furniture salesman," like Bibi, travelling around Asia under the hoariest old chestnut of NOC cover.

Young Barack was groomed as carefully as Bush minor. His only real job was BIC, a sheepish front perennially stuffed to bursting with NOCs. While he was still wet behind the ears he sported at falconry with a future head of state of Pakistan, for chrissakes, at a time when nobody could get in there. And he got out without getting his head sawed off. How? The youthful promise of this sullen stoner was somewhat obscure at that time. His GF was the Aussie daughter of Mike Barry's opposite number. And the Mockingbird unison of ecstatic acclaim when he rose to public prominence out of nowhere is the proof. His empty suit belings to CIA.

This past election was CIA office politics, nothing more. Russigate is simply CIA eminence Hillary, the Queen of Mena, ratfucking a bumptious queue-jumper. She outranks Trump, who was merely a junior money-launderer for the CIA agents who looted the Soviet Union. It was her turn to take the figurehead head-of-state sinecure. She and Bill earned it with their lucrative Clinton Foundation covert-ops slush fund.

Don't overthink it. Your government is CIA.

Buck Ransom , says: November 12, 2019 at 3:13 pm GMT
@Rabbi Zaius They sense the rumblings of White solidarity among "the forgotten men and women" of Trump's base and they do not cotton to this one little bit. Solidarity is forbidden to Whites. It is only for the coalition of the fringes, all of those groups whose alienation can be stoked to weaponize them against the descendants of those who founded and built the United States.
Justvisiting , says: November 12, 2019 at 3:21 pm GMT
@Dave Sullivan The FISA warrants had nothing to do with organized crime.

On second thought, that is not correct.

They _were_ organized crime.

(It is not necessary to defend Trump to understand this. FISA warrants based on known fake "evidence" are a stunning abuse of power–even within the slime-pit of DC.)

BL , says: November 12, 2019 at 3:27 pm GMT
Anyone at all familiar with Brennan knows that he was and remains the driver of the conspiracy to destroy first candidate, then President -Elect, and then POTUS Trump.

The same cannot be said of Comey and Clapper (especially).

It literally makes me sick to my stomach whenever I think about what it says about this great republic that seditious filth like him rose to such a powerful position. It's rather obvious he was willing to do anything including, I would submit, gift Russia and God Knows Who Else anything they wanted in return for helping him destroy our constitutional republic.

As I'm sure most here know, long before his 2016 election malefactions he had brazenly engaged in spying on Congress and, most despicably, had debased President Obama and the Office of the President through NYT revelations that every week Obama picked from his list of drone assassination targets.

. . . and it inevitably leads to the question "What did Obama know?"

Yes, though more important than that was what Obama was told (by Brennan) and what real options did he have as president given that Brennan had him by the short hairs.

I've long considered anyone's efforts to prematurely direct liability to President Obama as a bald attempt to protect Brennan. That worked for the purposes of a general, earlier on, cover up. It won't at this stage because it isn't even a close call when it comes to Democrats, elected and rank and file, choosing between the first black president and Brennan, the American Beria.

SunBakedSuburb , says: November 12, 2019 at 4:45 pm GMT
@The other other other shoe drops "Your government is CIA."

And has been since the early 1950s when the Allen Dulles-Frank Wisner-James Jesus Angleton crew got rolling. They managed to thoroughly penetrate federal and state bureaucracies, the court systems, major corporations, the financial sector, and the mockingbird media.

anon [113] Disclaimer , says: November 12, 2019 at 4:51 pm GMT
So Phil, was there any cooperation/communication between the Trump Task Force and the DNC dirt-diggers in Ukraine (Ali Chalupa et al), or were they completely independent actions?

... ... ...

Digital Samizdat , says: November 12, 2019 at 4:59 pm GMT

it was plausible to maintain that [the Russians] would have hoped that a weakened Clinton would be less able to implement the anti-Russian agenda that she had been promoting.

Not sure I follow this line of reasoning. If the Russians had tried unsuccessfully to throw the election to Trump and Hellary won anyway, how exactly would that leave her "weakened"? And wouldn't she have that much more reason to go after Russia?

My theory is that Hellary and her deep-swamp creatures only messed with Trump because they were certain he was going lose. And if they could then plausibly claim after the election that the Russians had interfered (albeit unsuccessfull) in the election, Hell-bitch could've used that as a pretext for well, I don't know. War? More sanctions? Inducting Ukraine into NATO? Invading Syria?

Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA."

I had no idea Clapper was into HBD. Damn, he's biased!

PetrOldSack , says: November 12, 2019 at 5:11 pm GMT
@NPleeze There is a theater play going on, unending series, each episode catching some other superficial drift. A-l-l actors in the public view, their dialogues and declamations are scripted. Trump´s also. He is not the major character, just a single, temporary one. All media opinion pieces, what is news, are prompt readings. Rectal extraction is close.

Why is this possible? The public is beyond understanding. The ones who do, at least part of what is going on, being closer to some sectors of society where a whiff of the smell of power is perceived at clouded times, are interested. The middle classes are scraping and grabbing and bickering for the scraps of the table of the powerful. It takes them most of their career to even get to under the table. They are happy dogs, and scraps comparing to scraps makes them a diverse world of nothings.

It is hard work to come up with alternative policies, not rail into historical models proven wrong as to long term interests and goals of society. A path not to venture into, against instinct.

That makes for a fine world, while it lasts, and is upended by another cycle. The empty drum feeling in the head of most is stuffed with images and sound-bites that makes for a life behind a velvet curtain(Apple´s i-phone).

There is very little cognitive difference between the individuals at the top and the glorious bottom undesirables, they both like the sniff of the glue.

Carroll Price , says: November 12, 2019 at 5:12 pm GMT
Donald Trump's election (which was not supposed to be allowed to happen) forced into public view, the existence of a Deep State that's been in existence for more than 75 years. Although not widely recognized as such, JFK'S election accomplished the same thing, but to an even greater extent. Leaving me puzzled as to why Trump has been allowed to remain in office as long as he has without the Deep State subjecting him to a similar fate.

With one logical explanation being that, at this point in time, it would become obvious, even to the brain dead, who's actually in control of the US government.

[Nov 12, 2019] The best argument for voting for young beautiful women as POTUS

Nov 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

Mick Jagger gathers no Mosque , says: November 12, 2019 at 4:39 pm GMT

@The Alarmist

The emperor is naked

That is the best argument for voting for young beautiful women as POTUS.

[Nov 11, 2019] The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are 'deplorable'.

Notable quotes:
"... The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are 'deplorable'. What is fun for them is to play geopolitics – the elite version of corporate travel perks – just look at how shocked they are that Trump is not playing along. ..."
Nov 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

Beckow , says: November 9, 2019 at 12:47 pm GMT

Recent class history of US is quite simple: the elite class first tried to shift the burden of supporting the lower classes on the middle class with taxation. But as the lower class became demographically distinct, partially via mass immigration, the elites decided to ally with the ' underpriviledged ' via identity posturing and squeeze no longer needed middle class out of existence.

What's left are government employees, a few corporate sinecures, NGO parasitic sector, and old people. The rest will be melded into a few mutually antagonistic tribal groups providing ever cheaper service labor. With an occasional lottery winner to showcase mobility. Actually very similar to what happened in Latin America in the past few centuries.

The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are 'deplorable'. What is fun for them is to play geopolitics – the elite version of corporate travel perks – just look at how shocked they are that Trump is not playing along.

alexander , says: November 9, 2019 at 11:38 am GMT
BUILDING OUT vs. BLOWING UP

China 2000-2020 vs. USA 2000-2020

Unlike the USA (under Neocon stewardship) China has not squandered twenty trillion dollars of its national solvency bombing countries which never attacked it post 9-11.

China's leaders (unlike our own) never LIED its people into launching obscenely expensive, illegal wars of aggression across the middle east. (WMD's, Mushroom clouds, Yellow Cake, etc.)

China has used its wealth and resources to build up its infrastructure, build out its capital markets, and turbo charge its high tech sectors. As a consequence, it has lifted nearly half a billion people out of poverty. There has been an explosion in the growth of the "middle class" in China. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are now living comfortable "upwardly mobile" lives.

The USA, on the other hand, having been defrauded by its "ruling elites" into launching and fighting endless illegal wars, is now 23 trillion dollars in catastrophic debt.
NOT ONE PENNY of this heinous "overspending" has been dedicated to building up OUR infrastructure, or BUILDING OUT our middle class.

It has all gone into BLOWING UP countries which never (even) attacked us on 9-11.

As a consequence , the USA is fast becoming a failed nation, a nation where all its wealth is being siphoned into the hands of its one percent "war pilfer-teers".

It is so sad to have grown up in such an amazing country , with such immense resources and possibilities, and having to bear witness to it going down the tubes.

To watch all our sovereign wealth being vaporized by our "lie us into endless illegal war" ruling elites is truly heartbreaking.

It is as shameful as it is tragic.

SafeNow , says: November 9, 2019 at 6:01 pm GMT
That's fascinating about the declining "middle class" usage. A "soft synonym" that has gone in the opposite direction, I think, is "the community."
LoutishAngloQuebecker , says: November 9, 2019 at 6:31 pm GMT
The white middle class is the only group that might effectively resist Globohomo's designs on total power.

Blacks? Too dumb. Will be disposed of once Globohomo is finished the job.
Hispanics? Used to corrupt one party systems. Give them cerveza and Netflix and they're good.
East Asians? Perfectly fine with living like bug people.
South Asians? Cowardly; will go with the flow.

The middle class is almost completely unique to white people.

Racial aliens cannot wrap their minds around being middle class. They think I'm crazy for appreciating my 2009 Honda Accord. They literally cannot understand why somebody would want to live a frugal and mundane life. They are desperate to be like Drake but most end up broke. It will be very easy for GloboHomo to control a bucket of poor brown slop.

Svevlad , says: November 9, 2019 at 6:32 pm GMT
Ah yes, apparatchiks. The worst kind of person
Counterinsurgency , says: November 9, 2019 at 7:36 pm GMT
@Achmed E. Newman

There IS a black middle class, but a big chunk of that works for governments of all shapes and sizes.

Strictly speaking, there is no more "middle class" in the sense of the classical economists: a person with just enough capital to live off the income if he works the capital himself or herself. By this definition professionals (lawyers, dentists, physicians, small store owners, even spinsters [1] and hand loom operators in a sense) were middle class. Upper class had enough property to turn it over to managers, lower class had little or no property and worked for others (servants and farm workers, for example). Paupers didn't earn enough income per year to feed themselves and didn't live all that long, usually.

What we have is "middle income" people, almost all of whom work as an employee of some organization -- people who would be considered "lower class" by the classical economists because they don't have freedom of action and make no independent decisions about how the capital of their organizations is spent. Today they are considered "intelligentsia", educated government workers, or, by analogy, educated corporate workers. IMHO, intelligentsia is a suicide job, and is responsible for the depressed fertility rate, but that's just me.

Back in the AD 1800s and pre-AD 1930 there were many black middle class people. usually concentrating on selling to black clientele. Now there are effectively none outside of criminal activities, usually petty criminal. And so it goes.

Of course, back then there were many white middle class people also, usually concentrating on selling to white clientele. Now there are effectively none, except in some rural areas. And so it goes.

Counterinsurgency

1] Cottagers who made their living spinning wool skeins into wool threads.

Mark G. , says: November 9, 2019 at 8:20 pm GMT
@unit472 A lot of the middle class are Democrats but not particularly liberal. Many of them vote Democrat only when they personally benefit. For example, my parents were suburban public school teachers. They voted for Democrats at the state level because the Democrats supported better pay and benefits for teachers but voted for Republicans like Goldwater and Reagan at the national level because Republicans would keep their federal taxes lower. They had no political philosophy. It was all about what left them financially better off. My parents also got on well with their suburban neighbors. Suburbanites generally like their local school system and its teachers and the suburban school systems are usually careful not to engage in teaching anything controversial. A lot of the government employed white middle class would be like my parents. Except in situations where specific Republicans talk about major cuts to their pay and pensions they are perfectly willing to consider voting Republican. They are generally social moderates, like the status quo, are fairly traditionalist and don't want any radical changes. Since the Democrats seem be trending in a radical direction, this would put off a lot of them. Trump would be more appealing as the status quo candidate. When running the last time, he carefully avoided talking about any major cuts in government spending and he's governed that way too. At the same time, his talk of cutting immigration, his lack of enthusiasm for nonwhite affirmative action, and his more traditional views on social issues is appealing to the white middle class.
anon [201] • Disclaimer , says: November 9, 2019 at 8:33 pm GMT
Wealth held by the top 1% is now close to equal or greater than wealth held by the entire middle class.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-09/one-percenters-close-to-surpassing-wealth-of-u-s-middle-class

Something similar was seen in the 1890's, the "gilded age". This is one reason why Warren's "wealth tax" has traction among likely voters.

WorkingClass , says: November 9, 2019 at 11:55 pm GMT
The term middle class is used in the U.S. to mean middle income. It has nothing to do with class. Why not just say what you mean? Most of the middle class that we say is disappearing is really that rarest of phenomenons. A prosperous working class. The prosperous American working class is no longer prosperous due to the Neoliberal agenda. Free trade, open borders and the financialization of everything.

Americans know nothing of class dynamics. Not even the so called socialists. They don't even see the economy. All they see is people with infinite need and government with infinite wealth. In their world all of Central America can come to the U.S. and the government (if it only wants to) can give them all homes, health care and education.

Lets stop saying class when we mean income. Not using the word class would be better than abusing it.

Anyway. Yes. Middle Class denotes white people. The coalition of the fringes is neither working, middle nor ruling class. They are black or brown. They are perverts or feminists. If the workers among them identified as working class they would find common ground with the Deplorables. We can't have that now can we.

Rosie , says: November 10, 2019 at 2:21 am GMT
@Audacious Epigone

Are we to the point where we've collectively resigned ourselves to the death of the middle class?

In the neoliberal worldview, the middle class is illegitimate, existing only as a consequence of artificial trade and immigration barriers. Anytime Americans are spied out making a good living, there is a "shortage" that must be addressed with more visas. Or else there is an "inefficiency" where other countries could provide said service or produce said product for less because they have a "comparative advantage."

Rosie , says: November 10, 2019 at 2:25 am GMT
@WorkingClass

Anyway. Yes. Middle Class denotes white people. The coalition of the fringes is neither working, middle nor ruling class. They are black or brown. They are perverts or feminists. If the workers among them identified as working class they would find common ground with the Deplorables. We can't have that now can we.

I don't know about that anymore. Increasingly, "middle class" means Asian, with Whiteness being associated with the lower middle class (or perhaps "working class"). Sometimes the media uses the term " noncollege Whites," which I think is actually very apt. They are the ones who identify with Whiteness the most.

[Nov 11, 2019] Fascist ideology is malleable. It morphs to be whatever it needs to be at the moment. So the what is the one common aspect that fascism always possesses? Answer: In the class war between labor and capital, fascists always back capital and oppose labor.

Nov 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

jayc , Nov 11 2019 21:10 utc | 151

William Gruff , Nov 11 2019 21:30 utc | 152

NemesisCalling @127: "I see that you never question the implication of what calling one a fascist really means"

What is fascism? It usually has a religious component, be it Protestant, Catholic, Hindu, Shinto, and yes, Muslim, Buddhist and even Jewish.

OK, so defining fascism by religion isn't going to get you anywhere as it runs the gamut.

There are certainly white fascists, but there are also Black fascists, Japanese fascists, Indian fascists, Chinese fascists, Latino fascists... I guess ethnicity won't get you anywhere with explaining what fascism is either.

Nationalism? No, there are fascists of pretty much every nationality, so that hardly gets us anywhere closer to understanding what it is.

A fetish for crisp uniforms? No, fascists are just as likely to wear filthy rancid goat scented rags.

Fascist ideology is malleable. It morphs to be whatever it needs to be at the moment. So the what is the one common aspect that fascism always possesses? Answer: In the class war between labor and capital, fascists always back capital and oppose labor.

When it comes down to a street fight big business doesn't have the numbers to counter labor from within their own class, and the capitalist elites don't want to get their hands dirty anyway. As a consequence they must recruit goons and societal support for those goons from the small business class, the sub-working-class, and from the working class itself to defeat the working class. To accomplish this recruiting the capitalist elites use their control over mass media to make appeals to every prejudice that exists in society to turn those influenced by those prejudices against the working class. Every form of tribalism is exploited, and since the precise characteristics of the major tribalist divisions in society differ from region to region, and even neighborhood to neighborhood, the composition of the fascist forces recruited to attack the working class tends to vary from place to place.

If fascism is so variable in all of its characteristics, how then can anyone say who is and who isn't a fascist?

The answer to that is actually fairly easy. When the class war breaks out into the open, as is the case in Bolivia right now, the people who are not lords of capital but still throw their lot in with capital are fascists.

In other words, in North America and Europe, fascism is far more prevalent than most people are willing to face.

Doesn't it make you feel better to know that fascism is just the proper name for anti-socialist?

[Nov 09, 2019] The Media's Obsession With Personalities Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... Earlier in Stone's legal process his lawyers filed a motion to try to prove that Russia did not hack the DNC and Podesta emails. The motion revealed that CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign, never completed its report, and only gave a redacted draft to the FBI blaming Russia. The FBI was never allowed to examine the DNC server itself. ..."
"... Faced now with a criminal investigation into how the Russiagate conspiracy theory originated intelligence officers and their accomplices in the media and in the Democratic Party are mounting a defense by launching an offensive in the form of impeachment proceedings against Trump that is based on an allegation of conducting routine, corrupt U.S. foreign policy. ..."
"... Consortium News ..."
Nov 09, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Earlier in Stone's legal process his lawyers filed a motion to try to prove that Russia did not hack the DNC and Podesta emails. The motion revealed that CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC and Clinton campaign, never completed its report, and only gave a redacted draft to the FBI blaming Russia. The FBI was never allowed to examine the DNC server itself.

In the end, though, it doesn't matter if it were a hack or a leak by an insider. That's because the emails WikiLeaks released were accurate. When documents check out it is irrelevant who the source is. That's why WikiLeaks set up an anonymous drop box, copied by big media like The Wall Street Journal and others . Had the emails been counterfeit and disinformation was inserted into a U.S. election by a foreign power that would be sabotage. But that is not what happened.

The attempt to stir up the thoroughly discredited charge of collusion appears to be part of the defense strategy of those whose reputations were thoroughly discredited by maniacally pushing that false charge for more than two years. This includes legions of journalists. But principal among them are intelligence agency officials who laundered this "collusion" disinformation campaign through the mainstream media.

Faced now with a criminal investigation into how the Russiagate conspiracy theory originated intelligence officers and their accomplices in the media and in the Democratic Party are mounting a defense by launching an offensive in the form of impeachment proceedings against Trump that is based on an allegation of conducting routine, corrupt U.S. foreign policy.

Stone may be just a footnote to this historic partisan battle that may scar the nation for a generation. But he has the personality to be the poster boy for the Democrats' lost cause.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe .

[Nov 09, 2019] Are You Calling Me Stupid Gabbard Rips Joy Behar's 'Useful Idiot' Smear On The View

Notable quotes:
"... Journalist Glenn Greenwald summarized the testy exchange as Gabbard "responding with righteous rage but also great dignity to the disgusting smears of Democrats about her patriotism and loyalty." ..."
"... What a woman! Get Trump out and give the POTUS to Tulsi. Wonderful. I will definitely contribute to her campaign. ..."
"... What's funny about the whole thing is that the 'regular viewers' of the view are some of the most programmable 'useless' idiots that this (excuse for a country) has ever seen.... ..."
"... The View -- owned by Disney. Openly misandrist show -- in the shows more than 2 decades, having gone through dozens of hosts, the show has never had a male host. How's that for "inclusivity"? ..."
Nov 08, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Democratic presidential candidate and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard faced the increasingly nasty smears branding her a Russian asset and "traitor" head on during The View on Wednesday, following the recent spat with Hillary Clinton who suggested the Kremlin was "grooming" Gabbard to be a third-party candidate .

"Some of you have accused me of being a traitor to my country, a Russian asset, a Trojan horse, or a useful idiot I think was the term that you used," Gabbard told the panel, after in prior episodes Joy Behar especially had agreed with and aggressively amplified Hillary's baseless claims. The panel had also previously called her a Trojan horse. Gabbard came out swinging in her remarks: "It's offensive to me as a soldier, as an American, as a member of Congress, as a veteran, and frankly as a woman, to be so demeaned in such a way."

"Well, useful," Behar said, referencing her previously labeling the Iraq war veteran Moscow's 'useful idiot'. "But that's a Russian term, they use that," she added. "Are You Calling Me Stupid?" Gabbard at one point angrily shoots back. And demonstrating just how low and idiotic, and without substantive argument the "controversy" around Gabbard has become, Behar at one point even offers as 'evidence' of the presidential candidate's supposed Russian ties that she's appeared on FOX's Tucker Carlson Tonight on multiple occasions.

"I am a strong and intelligent woman of color, who has dedicated almost all of my adult life to protecting the safety, security & liberty of Americans," Gabbard fired back.

She also schooled the panel on her distinguished military career and slammed Behar's likening her to Putin's "useful idiot" -- explaining also that she joined the Army after the 9/11 attacks but that her country lied to her in invading Iraq.

"You are implying that I am too stupid, and too naive, and lack the intelligence to know what I am doing," she further counter-attacked Behar with.

The full segment from Wednesday's The View appearance is below, with the fight over Behar's "useful idiot" remarks beginning at the 1-min mark:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-Y8ayIpjPvY

One astounding moment came when Gabbard reiterated her position that Hillary Clinton is a "warmonger," at which point Behar actually asked, "What's your evidence of that?"

A perplexed Gabbard immediately shot back, "Are you serious?"

Journalist Glenn Greenwald summarized the testy exchange as Gabbard "responding with righteous rage but also great dignity to the disgusting smears of Democrats about her patriotism and loyalty."

haruspicio , 45 minutes ago link

What a woman! Get Trump out and give the POTUS to Tulsi. Wonderful. I will definitely contribute to her campaign.

BTW who is that ******* harridan to her left, the ugly one cutting her off all the time? What a ******* bitch.

Bubba Rum Das , 2 hours ago link

What's funny about the whole thing is that the 'regular viewers' of the view are some of the most programmable 'useless' idiots that this (excuse for a country) has ever seen....

wakeupscreaming , 2 hours ago link

The View -- owned by Disney. Openly misandrist show -- in the shows more than 2 decades, having gone through dozens of hosts, the show has never had a male host. How's that for "inclusivity"?

Next time you take the kids to the movies or to a themepark, think twice about patronizing Disney.

keep the bastards honest , 1 hour ago link

Stay away, they are perverts, keep your kids away from their media and products.

Petkattash , 4 hours ago link

She was clear and confident in her remarks. Still don't care for many of her policies but she is was better that the rest of the D bunch.

iSage , 7 hours ago link

I am fearful the Republic for which We Stand, is falling, right before our eyes. I guess we disengaged at some point, sad. We are all Americans, what happened to the common ground? It is disappearing...

Bobzilla. Do not piss him off , 7 hours ago link

Joy Behar is a so fugly. She's a loudmouth ******, who is even uglier than the fat negress with the stupid looking blonde dregs. ****, what a hideous show. Anyone who watches that POS show is a ******* low IQ moron .

[Nov 09, 2019] We did torture some folks and according to the guy who scanned every page of the torture memos it was much worse than we were led to believe

"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984
“The trouble [with injustice] is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There is no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.” -- Arundhati Roy -- Arundhati Roy
Notable quotes:
"... @irishking ..."
Nov 09, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

irishking on Fri, 11/08/2019 - 8:29am

one more time

@Reverend Jane Ignatowski

god bless Harry Shearer

https://youtu.be/hIeTimus0-s

#5.1.1

people are doing things in banks that they shouldn't be doing

Welcome to the We Tortured Some Folks School of Minimization, where you too can learn to master the deceptive art of manipulative psychological abuse!

I see you, Holder, how you're trying to lie people into believing the bankster crimes are the same kind of petty theft as hungry people stealing food. That's some straight up evil shit, man.

This video is most excellent

@irishking

We did torture some folks and according to the guy who scanned every page of the torture memos it was much worse than we were led to believe. There is a video coming out soon about the torture report and it's findings. I don't remember where I read that and saw the trailer, but if I find it again I will post it.

Remember that the CIA broke into congress' computer files to see what was there and no one was held accountable for it. DiFi made a big deal of looking outraged, but.... yeah, we tortured some folks. The thing is that we still are.

—

America is a pathetic nation; a fascist state fueled by the greed, malice, and stupidity of her own people.
- strife delivery

[Nov 08, 2019] Who has Trump kept his promise to?

Nov 08, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Nov 8 2019 17:31 utc | 8

Who has Trump kept his promise to?

Tea Party foot soldiers?

Repeal and replace Obamacare on day one
Nope. Quietly dropped coverage for prior conditions.

Build a Wall - and Mexico's gonna pay for it!

Not really. Building sections of a wall that USA will pay for.

Drain the swamp

Nope - unless by "swamp" Trump means the Democratic Party.

"Lock her up!"

Nope. He says they're good people who have been thru a lot. Aww . . .
America?
End the "threat" from NK "Rocket man"
Nope. No follow-thru on the (sham) Summit.

End the new Cold War

Nope. Increased military spending; ended treaties; militarized space.

End "forever wars", bring the troops home

Nope.

Bring jobs home

Uncertain: trade War with China doesn't necessarily mean jobs coming back US.

= = = = = = = =

Republican Party?

Cut taxes
YES!

Cut regulations on business

YES!

Israel?

Move Embassy to Jerusalem
YES!

Recognize Golan Heights as part of Israel

YES!

End aid to Palestinians

YES!

Don't give up on Syrian regime-change

YES!

US MIC, Netanyahu, MbS?

End US participation in the JCPOA
YES!

McCain: "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran"

"locked and loaded"
!!

[Nov 08, 2019] Thank you Tulsi Gabbard for speaking out against the war machine

Nov 08, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Hal Duell , Nov 8 2019 19:20 utc | 22

@bevin | Nov 8 2019 18:29 utc | 12
Exactly, and thanks.
Question: Could Bloomberg change the equation, the equation being that neither Sanders nor Warren not Biden have what it takes to defeat Trump?
And thank you Tulsi Gabbard for speaking out against the war machine and the penal gulag.
Nemesiscalling , Nov 8 2019 19:41 utc | 23
With all the vitriol being leveled against Tulsi to paint her as a Russian plant or useful idiot or whatever, whether from Hillary or the worthless females on the view, a daytime television show aimed at influencing the political opinion of stay-at-home middlebrow moms and retirees (Including low energy males), I think my earlier thought that without the Djt phenomenon, there would be no Tulsi, is proven more and more correct with each passing day.

And for those suffering from such a quickening case of tds, unable to point out that before the current potus, the tpp was a thing, fake news was as of yet unexposed, Syria was a powderkeg with the potential of a Russophobic true believer ready to command and chief, and where immigration as a national question had not been brought to bear on a people that had been for decades suffering the effect of the evil of cheap, exploitative labor, your case against the man is extremely misguided and, dare I say, you are the useful idiot here.

karlof1 , Nov 8 2019 23:14 utc | 37
Perhaps one reason Gabbard's political career will continue to be successful:

"I go on Tucker Carlson, I go on Bret Baier, I go on Sean Hannity, I go on MSNBC, I go on CNN -- I am here to speak to every single American in this country about the unifying leadership that I want to bring as president, not just speak to those who agree with me."

IIRC, Sanders is the only other candidate who consistently says we need to do this (Change America) together. IMO, there's only one way Gabbard and Sanders will be nominated next year in Milwaukee: That's because We the People hijack the Convention, driving out the Clintonistas, DNC pukes, and their Super Delegates and nominate them via proclamation. All that's lacking to attain such an outcome is the effort, the will, the realization that nothing good's going to happen for We the People unless We do it Ourselves.

[Nov 08, 2019] Scapegoating as the major neoliberal propaganda tool

Nov 08, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

Orange Watch 11.07.19 at 5:11 pm 71

Donald@63 :

The tendency to scapegoat rather than make the case for one's own merit is very deeply ingrained in our top-down liberal democratic systems; the Democratic establishment is unfortunately just getting back to core principles by shifting almost exclusively to this mode of discourse over the past decade.

From Guy Debord's 1988 Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle :

This perfect democracy creates for itself its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. In effect, it wants to be judged by its enemies moreso than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State; it is therefore instructive.

The spectator populations certainly cannot know everything about terrorism, but they can always know enough to be persuaded that compared to terrorism, anything else must seem to be more or less acceptable, and in any case more rational and democratic.

[Nov 08, 2019] Who has Trump kept his promise to?

Nov 08, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Nov 8 2019 17:31 utc | 8

Who has Trump kept his promise to?

Tea Party foot soldiers?

Repeal and replace Obamacare on day one
Nope. Quietly dropped coverage for prior conditions.

Build a Wall - and Mexico's gonna pay for it!

Not really. Building sections of a wall that USA will pay for.

Drain the swamp

Nope - unless by "swamp" Trump means the Democratic Party.

"Lock her up!"

Nope. He says they're good people who have been thru a lot. Aww . . .
America?
End the "threat" from NK "Rocket man"
Nope. No follow-thru on the (sham) Summit.

End the new Cold War

Nope. Increased military spending; ended treaties; militarized space.

End "forever wars", bring the troops home

Nope.

Bring jobs home

Uncertain: trade War with China doesn't necessarily mean jobs coming back US.

= = = = = = = =

Republican Party?

Cut taxes
YES!

Cut regulations on business

YES!

Israel?

Move Embassy to Jerusalem
YES!

Recognize Golan Heights as part of Israel

YES!

End aid to Palestinians

YES!

Don't give up on Syrian regime-change

YES!

US MIC, Netanyahu, MbS?

End US participation in the JCPOA
YES!

McCain: "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran"

"locked and loaded"
!!

[Nov 08, 2019] Assange lawyers links to US govt and Bill Browder raises questions by Lucy Komisar

Notable quotes:
"... Browder is key in the U.S. demonization of Russia. Assange has exposed U.S. war crimes. For lawyers associated in the British legal system to take both sides on that conflict would appear to be an egregious conflict of interest. But it fits with the U.S.-UK support of the Browder-Magnitsky hoax and their cooperation in the attack on Assange. ..."
"... Bailin is a member of Matrix Chambers, which was founded by the wife of Tony Blair, the former neocon Labor British Prime Minister. He is solidly in the Browder camp. He represented Leonid Nevzlin, a major partner of Browder collaborator Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who according to filings with FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), paid $385,000 for Congress to adopt the Magnitsky Act which has been used by the U.S. as a weapon against the Russian government. ..."
"... In 2017 British legal actions surrounding an inquest into the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy, he represented Browder, who claimed that the Russian, who died of a heart attack, was somehow a victim of Russian President Putin. Perepilichnyy had lost money in investments he was handling for clients and had to get out of town. ..."
"... Needing support, he decamped to London and gave Browder documents relating to his client's questionable bank transfers. He died after a jog, Browder claimed he was poisoned by a rare botanical substance, obviously ordered by Putin, but forensic tests found that untrue. Robertson accused local police of a cover-up. ..."
"... Why did Assange or his advisors choose lawyers associated with the interests of the U.S. government and Browder? Or how could those lawyers be so ignorant about the facts of Browder's massive tax evasion and his Magnitsky story fabrications? ..."
"... What we are seeing now is no different from the Lula case in Brazil or any one of a thousand similar cases in authoritarian regimes. Upset the Deep State and you face selected targeted application of the law and the destruction of your life and future. ..."
"... because of the peculiar quirks of the legal system in Britain that may include a great deal of secrecy about how aspects of it operate, is how Julian Assange came to have such a dubious legal representation with its various connections to Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky ..."
"... who is going to foot these barristers' bills? ..."
Nov 08, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises questions The network of lawyers in conflicting roles in Browder, Assange and US government cases raises questions about Julian Assange's defense. Editor

A US government lawyer in the Assange extradition case just wrote a London Times oped promoting the Browder Magnitsky hoax. Ben Brandon is one of five lawyers in a London network whose spokes link to convicted tax fraudster William Browder, the U.S. government, and to both sides of the extradition case against whistleblower publisher Julian Assange.

Here is how the British legal system works. Lawyers are either solicitors who work with clients or barristers who go to court in cases assigned by the solicitors. To share costs, barristers operate in chambers , which provide office space, including conference rooms and dining halls, clerks who receive and assign cases from solicitors, and other support staff. London has 210 chambers. There are not "partners" sharing profits, but members operate fraternally with each other.

Browder is key in the U.S. demonization of Russia. Assange has exposed U.S. war crimes. For lawyers associated in the British legal system to take both sides on that conflict would appear to be an egregious conflict of interest. But it fits with the U.S.-UK support of the Browder-Magnitsky hoax and their cooperation in the attack on Assange.

The law firm and chambers involved in the Browder-Assange stories are Mishcon de Reya, Matrix Chambers and Doughty Street Chambers.

Ben Brandon of Mishcon de Reya and Alex Bailin of Matrix Chambers co-authored an opinion article in The Times of London October 24, 2019 in which they repeated William Browder's fabrications about the death of his accountant Sergei Magnitsky.

The article aimed to promote the Magnitsky Act which builds a political wall against Russia. It is based on the fake claim that Magnitsky, the accountant who handled Browder's tax evasion in Russia, was really a lawyer who exposed a government scam.

Except that is not true, there is no evidence for it, and the lies are documented here . But the Act has prevented the Russians from collecting about $100 million Browder owes in back taxes and illicit stock buys.

Brandon's and Bailin's connections are notable. Law firms, at least in the U.S., tend to stake out their commitments. Lawyers who represent unions do not represent companies fighting unions. It appears to be different in Britain, where legal chambers have members on either side of some cases.

Bailin is a member of Matrix Chambers, which was founded by the wife of Tony Blair, the former neocon Labor British Prime Minister. He is solidly in the Browder camp. He represented Leonid Nevzlin, a major partner of Browder collaborator Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who according to filings with FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), paid $385,000 for Congress to adopt the Magnitsky Act which has been used by the U.S. as a weapon against the Russian government.

Nevzlin's suit was for $50 billion against Russia for money allegedly lost by the nationalization of Yukos Oil. Yukos was obtained by Khodorkovsky in the mid-90s in one of then Russian President Boris Yeltsin's rigged auctions. Khodorkovsky's bank Menatep ran the auction.

He paid $309 million for a controlling 78 percent of the state company. Months later, Yukos traded on the Russian stock exchange at a market capitalization of $6 billion. Not surprising, after Yeltsin departed, the state wanted the stolen assets back.

To add insult to injury, Khodorkovsky laundered profits from Yukos through transfer-pricing and other scams.

Transfer pricing is when you sell products to a shell company at a fake low price, and the shell sells them on the world market at the real price, giving you the rake-off. It cheats tax authorities and minority shareholders. See how Khodorkovsky and Browder did this with Russian company Avisma, which Khodorkovsky also got through a rigged auction.

The Times oped co-author, Brandon of Mishcon de Reya, has a startling connection. The day after an extradition request targeting Julian Assange was signed by the UK home secretary , Brandon representing the U.S. government, formally opened the extradition case.

Now look at another Assange link. Mark Summers , who is representing Julian Assange is, along with Bailin, a member of Matrix Chambers.

But while he is Assange's lawyer, Summers is acting for Assange's persecutor, the U.S. government, in a major extradition case involving executives of Credit Suisse in 2013 making fake loans and getting kickbacks from Mozambique government officials.

Does Assange, or those who care about his interests, know he is part of chambers working for the U.S. government?

And where do you put this factoid? Alex Bailin is representing Andrew Pearse, one of the Credit Suisse bankers that the U.S. government, represented by Summers, is seeking to extradite!

But there's chambers where two members are each supporting both Browder and Assange.

Geoffrey Robertson is founder of Doughty Street Chambers. He is also a longtime Browder / Magnitsky story promoter. He has pitched implementation of a Magnitsky Act in Australia and has served Browder in UK court.

In 2017 British legal actions surrounding an inquest into the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy, he represented Browder, who claimed that the Russian, who died of a heart attack, was somehow a victim of Russian President Putin. Perepilichnyy had lost money in investments he was handling for clients and had to get out of town.

Needing support, he decamped to London and gave Browder documents relating to his client's questionable bank transfers. He died after a jog, Browder claimed he was poisoned by a rare botanical substance, obviously ordered by Putin, but forensic tests found that untrue. Robertson accused local police of a cover-up.

He is a legal advisor to Assange and is regularly interviewed by international media about the case.

Jennifer Robinson of Doughty Street Chambers also has a Browder connection. She is acting for Paul Radu a journalist and official of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) which is being sued by an Azerbaijan MP. OCCRP is a Browder collaborator.

Browder admits in a deposition that OCCRP prepared documents he would give to the U.S. Justice Department to accuse the son of a Russian railway official of getting $1.9 million of $230 million defrauded from the Russian Treasury. The case was settled when the U.S. couldn't prove the charge, and the target declined to spend more millions of dollars in his defense. OCCRP got the first Magnitsky Human Rights award , set up for Browder's partners and acolytes.

Robinson is also the longest-serving member of Assange's legal team. She acted for Assange in the Swedish extradition proceedings and in relation to Ecuador's request to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights Advisory Opinion proceedings on the right to asylum.

Why did Assange or his advisors choose lawyers associated with the interests of the U.S. government and Browder? Or how could those lawyers be so ignorant about the facts of Browder's massive tax evasion and his Magnitsky story fabrications?

It raises questions about how they are handling the Assange defense.

The individuals cited were asked to respond to points made about them, but none did.

Here is my audio interview on this issue on Fault Lines, "The Avisma Scandal + The Link Between Browder & Assange." The Browder-Assange part starts 13:20 minutes in. Filed under: Assange Arrest , latest , Russia , United States Tagged with: Bill Browder , julian assange , Lucy Komisar , russia , Sergei Magnitsky , Wikileaks

can you spare $1.00 a month to support independent media

Adrian @ J'Accuse

The Telegraph reports on a 2015 private dinner in the home of Doughty Street 's Geoffrey Robertson at which the Magnitsky myth and sanctions against Russia are pitched to then-Labour-Party-leader Ed Miliband, and Doughty Street lawyer Amal Clooney and co.:

Revealed: Ed Miliband's dinner with George and Amal Clooney

Today we find aforementioned Browder/Magnitsky touts Alex Bailin, QC (Matrix lawyer and "legal writer for The Guardian, The Times and The Lawyer – co-writer of the bogus FT Magnitsky column with Ben Brandon), and Geoffrey Robertson, QC (Doughty Street's eminence grise), both on the Advisory Board of Amal Clooney's " TrialWatch " (part of the Clooney " Foundation for Justice "): TrialWatch® Advisory Board

universal
The tentacles of the deep state (no longer secret now) are clamping on our life so tightly that one would honestly wish that one of those extraterrestrial rocks would smash into this planet causing total annhilation –just in order to get rid of these psychopathic mongrels ruling over us.

I am not sure, though, fantasy could solve problems!

mark
We have a corrupt and politicised "justice" system used for the purposes of intimidation and political persecution. Some people still believe in fairy stories like the Rule of Law and an independent judiciary.

What we are seeing now is no different from the Lula case in Brazil or any one of a thousand similar cases in authoritarian regimes. Upset the Deep State and you face selected targeted application of the law and the destruction of your life and future.

Jen
Unfortunately what we don't get in Lucy Komisar's article, perhaps because of the peculiar quirks of the legal system in Britain that may include a great deal of secrecy about how aspects of it operate, is how Julian Assange came to have such a dubious legal representation with its various connections to Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Who recommended Mishcon de Reya and other barristers to Assange and Wikileaks, and who is going to foot these barristers' bills? Are there no other barristers specialising in human rights cases in Britain who can take on Assange's case or was the case awarded to certain chambers in some kind of bidding arrangement or some other competitive arrangement?

BTW it's not unusual for law firms in Britain and Australia to have clients whose interests may be opposed, ie a law firm can represent both a company and a trade union whose members may be employed by that company. What usually happens is that different teams of lawyers work for the two sides and the work of one team is separated from the other team by internal firewalls. The firewalls include physical separations: the teams may even work on different floors so as not to share copiers or other office equipment and lawyers in opposing teams may be discouraged from socialising with each other during lunch and coffee breaks. Sounds bizarre but this does happen.

R Heybroek
With respect, you can't judge British law by US standards. Barristers are briefed by solicitors, not individual clients, and associate primarily in areas of competence, e.g. criminal, corporate or tax law. In their specialization, they generally follow the 'cab rank' principle and accept briefs from prosecution or defence as they arise. It's a strength of the system, not a problem.

Whatever I may think of some of the barristers in Matrix or Doughty, it would be foolish to assume that everyone in a chambers shares the same political views or attitudes. They do not. They argue like cats and dogs, usually with considerable professional respect.

I see nothing dubious about the range of experience of Assange's legal team. If his solicitor thinks a barrister has a conflict of interest, he will withdraw the brief. I'd suggest you direct your enquiries to the instructing solicitor.

RobG
Julian Assange was a dead man walking from the time he was taken (totally illegally) from the Ecuadorian embassy. Just about all the Wikileaks team are now totally corrupted; and as this article points out, most of Assange's legal team are also corrupted. The alleged mental deterioration of Assange, combined with harsh (and totally unnecessary) prison conditions, might account for some of this.
Jen
But surely it's odd that at the same time he is representing Julian Assange against the US government, Mark Summers is also acting for the United States government in another case in which three British-based Credit Suisse bankers are fighting extradition to the US on charges of security fraud and money laundering?
MLS
An important subsidiary question becomes, why aren't any of his high profile champions asking these questions? John Pilger? Craig Murray? They all bang on about stuff like 'torture' but never point out that his lawyers totally fail to address this pretty darn crucial issue. Craig Murray says 'Julian has great lawyers'. Really? If we step back and think for a minute, does it honestly look that way?

They can't even get him out of solitary or into a lower security prison. Shit, they can't even get his mail delivered adequately or uphold his right to get regular legal visitation! And yet no one, not even his parents, are complaining about these failures! And who is running Wikileaks these days? Do we have any way of being sure they aren't just a co-opted shell?

Betrayed planet
To be fair Pilger is one of the few real supporters of Julian along with a handful of musicians. His lone voice is not enough. I saw a clip of Pilger crying after the recent spectacle of a so called hearing. The presiding judge, The Honorary Upyourbottom should have been in the dock for perjury, fraud, lying before a court and crimes against humanity.
LawStudent
I'm a 2nd year law student and I can confirm that questions about the conduct of Assange's defence are legion in my school. MNynpeople talking about the inexplicable lapses. Just s fee usdyes often discussed: Why didn't the defense take up the judge's offer of bail application? To say 'well they would lose' is counter to the basics of jurisprudence.

Why is there no complaint being lodged about his detention in a maximum security facility when he's on remand – not serving a sentence – pending an extradition hearing? Why don't his lawyers lodge an appeal to the ECHR based on the testimony of the UN observers? Why are his lawyers keeping such low media profiles?

It's generally agreed something is very 'off' about this.

L Took
I think his lawyers stated that they were never offered a bail application, even though the judge claimed they had refused one. But I'm not sure; I had heard previous to this event that the lawyers would not ask because if they lost (the appeal?) Assange could be further punished for the loss. Is this accurate?
MaryD
It may be relevant that one of Assange's barristers also represents the corporate psyop Extinction Rebellion!
nottheonly1

Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises questions. The network of lawyers in conflicting roles in Browder, Assange and US government cases raises questions about Julian Assange's defense.

Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises only one question: What the?

I know it's not comedy, because people get seriously hurt and killed as a result of the transformation of a more or less democratic government into a well organized criminal organization. Who better to run the courts, than the mob? Mob 'Law' enforcement included. So, organized crime owns everything. The big club. The biggest profits are made with stuff that was bought to blow up something. Or somebody. One could ask: 'With links like these, who needs enemies?' Anybody interfering into, or compromising the Mob execution of the owners' plan, will be taken care of. Laws are written to owners' demands and are quickly as needed in show trials.

The eloquence in describing what is happening right now – and in all other show trials – is comforting.

As it is more like 'a gang of lawyers in revolving door roles in organized crime by Browder and US regime et al versus Julian Assange, providing Defense for Julian Assange in his case against the same people and the same regime.

I forgot where, but I have heard of such things before.

The World will have to understand that, without the immediate release of Julian Assange, no more rule of law exists on Earth. And to whomever has not connected the Assange affair with 'pre-emptive incarceration', might for a little longer enjoy playing outdoor chess on the deck of a sinking cruise ship.

Oh, and yes, the qualifier "six ways to/from Sunday" should also be mentioned as an exemplary business practice by the Mob regime. Actually, the Mob merged with the regime, with the regime belonging to the owners' club.

Northern
Good to see another article on this, seen several people raising concerns about these associations in independent media over the last few months, though it's no doubt one of those things that will never be 'officially' addressed. Many people with more knowledge than I have questioned the wisdom of certain decisions his legal team have made (or not, as the case may be) in recent proceedings. Craig Murray's account of Julian's recent court appearance reads like something you'd expect from a country with 'the people's democratic republic' in the name.

On a tangentially related note, anybody reading this who has the impetus to write to Julian in support;

The 'writetoJulian' website which appears at to the top of Google's search results for those who google how to go about such a thing, is either accidentally or deliberately (one can probably guess which) mis-advising its readers of the requirements. The website advises several times NOT to include Julian's prisoner number on any correspondence sent to him, but I know from direct knowledge of communicating with the incarcerated that without the prisoner number your correspondence will be destroyed and neither you nor the receiver will be notified. I hate to think how many well meaning messages of support for Julian have been 'legally' destroyed without him seeing them as a result of this.

Northern
Ah, in a limited sliver of good news; The aforementioned website seem to have cottoned on to their mistake after several people bringing it to their attention. They now advise you should include his number on all correspondence.

Mr Julian Assange
Prisoner #: A9379AY
HMP Belmarsh
Western Way
London SE28 0EB
UK

Betrayed planet
I have long suspected that Julian is not getting proper legal council. That his lawyers have not yet been able to get a proper hearing whilst he is left to rot in a maximum security prison is suspect in the extreme. The obvious Nazi style behaviour of the unlawful and fascist U.K. government and its lick spittle judiciary are apparent to all with absolutely no fight back from the excuse of a media nor indeed 99.9 percent of its compliant increasingly dumbed down and wilfully ignorant population.

What is obvious now to anyone with half an eye open is that the U.K. is now a rogue state where law and justice are meaningless, where bribery and corruption are common place. That Julian Assange is slowly dying in front of the whole world, will die without some kind of major intervention is a stain on every single aware English resident. Mind you with a population seemingly set to vote back in the same filthy vermin that have turned the country into the complete shithole it has become, it's hardly surprising.
Does anybody know if Gareth Pierce is still involved in his case?

nottheonly1
For quite some time now, an odd possibility offers itself – theoretically. Julian Assange is not the messenger. He is the message.

As a messenger, he is somewhat ineffective. He has not been able to convince people that the need for an uprising against lawlessness exists. That any form of government cannot work when the judiciary is corrupt and that there is no justice in a society ruled over by a regime.

As a message however, he is in the eyes of masses of people. Probably a majority of humans on Earth know who Julian Assange is. How many know who he is, where he came from and what it was exactly he did, before he published videos showing how well the 'Support our Troops' deserve was used up in the way it was intended, can only be a guess. Or a dedicated team of statisticians to hold polls in every country.

So, the published material, that was also leaked by a whistle blower, was proof of how deserving those soldiers were of our support – showing them killing innocent human beings and 'our Troops' having the greatest times of their lives doing it.

The message is simply: Look, if we can do this to Assange, what do you think we will do to you from Monday to Sunday – if you get any ideas?

No matter where you are. No matter who you are.

The only antidote to this insanity is the Truth and it be given its day(s) in court. 'Justice Mondays'.

Petra Liverani
I wonder if Alexander Perepilichnyy's death happened any which way – if indeed he was even a real person – there's only two photos of him as far as I can tell and the feeling of reality about his is not strong – as the Japan Times says, "What we know of Perepilichnyy is slight." Could he have just conveniently been invented and disappeared somehow? The story of him spending his last night with his 22 year-old mistress (the good old 22) in Paris, complaining about his dinner, vomiting and then having his wife the next day in London prepare his favourite food, sorrel soup, for lunch then going out jogging somehow doesn't ring true and we see a typical anomaly of faked stories, different versions:

The Guardian: "was found outside his Surrey home"
The Atlantic: "He collapsed on Granville Road, within 100 meters of the house he was renting"
Japan Times: "Then, 50 meters from his home, he staggered into the road and died."
Wikipedia: "[he] was found dead on the road by a neighbour" with a reference to a BBC story makes no mention of neighbour
BBC story: "[he] has been found dead near his home in Weybridge. had collapsed on a road early on the evening"

Collapsed on a road? Wouldn't you give the name of the road in a suburban area?

Rhys Jaggar
Same story in UK sports reporting corrupt industries raking in cash for unprincipled wordsmithery
DiggerUK
The defence team around Julian seems to be unfathomable at many levels. My main concern has been over the unproved allegations of chemical torture made during his incarceration in Bellmarsh Prison. Why has his defence team not asked for an independent medical assessment? Why have concerns not been raised with prison visitors who are allowed to investigate independently? https://www.imb.org.uk/independent-monitoring-boards/

Craig Murray who saw Julian on his last court appearance wrote of his condition . https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/10/assange-in-court/ is it as a result of drugs used during interrogations, or is it down to mental trauma after what he has been through. Either way, his defense team and close friends need to up their game.

This article is not the first time that concerns have been raised in a worrying manner about the defence team around Julian _

Rhys Jaggar
It is a standard Uk tactic to have someone try to beat you up then publicly say what a friend of yours they are. Happened to me four times: I called the lot of them out on it, something which gets them on their faux high horses very quickly
Harry Stotle
Amazing isn't it, the way the legal system goes into hyperdrive pursuing those who expose war crimes while nonchantly turning a blind eye to those who commit them (no matter how high the body count). Harder to find a more glaring example of the way hypocrisy defines the elite's relationship with things like morality, fairness or decency, not least because no western politician has ever been held to account for the havoc they have unleashed (in any court prosecuting war crimes).

Ellen DeGeneres hi-fiving with George Bush. British MPs pretending a courageous whistle blower is not being tortured to death just a few miles from parliament.

The one MP who did stand up for Assange has just been kicked out of Labour by the NEC. They should at least have the courage to make public the names of those who voted for Chris Williamson's expulsion. https://labour.org.uk/about/how-we-work/national-executive-committee/whos-on-the-nec/

Needless to say the MSM has fully sided with the criminals: first denigrating Julian Assange, then mocking his plight – this gave way to lies, and now silence.

The importance of Craig Murray's analysis of the way the law has been used to destroy a journalist cannot be overtstated.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/10/assange-in-court/

Put simply can anyone expect justice in Britain if their actions conflict with the ethos of the gangsters who control Britain's economic, media and military interests?

Rhys Jaggar
We are actually approaching apartheid South Africa in that regard, namely contempt for legal due process. Not quite had the Met coppers beating Assange over the head like SA cops did to Steve Biko, but we are slowly getting there

[Nov 08, 2019] More Evidence that The Comey FBI was a Malevolent Clown Show by Larry C Johnson

Notable quotes:
"... "The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration. It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks. ..."
"... Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe" to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East – and in D.C. – certainly looked like a distant but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy agenda on questions that would require adult supervision." ..."
"... Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the crazy banner. ..."
"... To a great degree American foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions inherited from Old Europe. ..."
Nov 08, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Brent , 06 November 2019 at 03:04 PM

From what I have read, I gather that the FBI in the Mueller / Comey era has made extensive use of "perjury traps". They then threaten charges to get someone to "flip" on someone bigger, in this case Trump. Flynn wouldn't flip even when they threatened to go after Flynn's son. So they decided to "F" him, as stated by Andrew McCabe.

The FBI has been thoroughly disgraced, and Wray is incapable of cleaning it up. He just wants to keep the dirt under the rug. It is too late for that, it is all coming out. US citizens deserve to know how dirty our FBI and CIA are - they are criminal organizations.

Factotum said in reply to Brent ... , 06 November 2019 at 05:45 PM
I am reminded of Susan MacDougall in the Clinton Whitewater case, decades ago -she claimed "they' were trying to make her flip too - can't remember who was on which side, but was it also government prosecutors against a vulnerable individual who they had hope to break to get the goods they decided they wanted? If so, I guess we need generational reminders of the awesome and terrifying powers of an overly powerful "government".
confusedponderer -> Factotum... , 07 November 2019 at 06:35 AM
Factorum,
re: I guess we need generational reminders of the awesome and terrifying powers of an overly powerful "government".

I'd put it more precise - "the awesome and terrifying powers of ANY overly powerful "government".

If it's an Obama FBI crew getting after you or a Trump FBI crew - it must be very bad every time, guilty of anything or not. A classic case of how really bad it can get is Brazil's evangelical Bolsonaro. Iirc a Brazilian TV station had reported that his son was likely deeply involved in the murder of a left politician or reporter in Brazil, a deed done by former Brazilian cops who also happened to call Bolsonaro's house.

Bolsonaro simply freaked out and was not interested at all in any investigation. or the question whether the report was accurate. He simply threatened the TV station that, when reelected, he would nullify their media license. He showed no interest in any reality or facts but was just trying to brutally silence and intimidate the media outlet he doesn't like. He also suggested that his son should become Brazil's ambassador to the US. Probably a perfect job since Trump doesn't have any problems with the Saudi murder prince MbS as well.

A crook by the book ...

Anon said in reply to Factotum... , 07 November 2019 at 01:55 PM
K.T. McFarland (whose name comes up every now and then in this matter) has some pertinent thought to on how the government used its power against Flynn:
"KT McFarland speaks for first time about Michael Flynn" , Fox News interview, 2019-11-05
Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) , 06 November 2019 at 04:07 PM
Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins. Could it be my Russian paranoia. Nah, I am being unreasonable--those people never had a bad feeling towards Trump's attempts to boost Russian-American relations with Michael Flynn spearheading this effort. Jokes aside, however, I can only imagine how SVR and GRU are enjoying the spectacle. I can only imagine how many "free" promotions and awards can be attach to this thing as a free ride.
English Outsider -> Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) ... , 07 November 2019 at 09:19 AM
Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics. I thought it had been an American Admiral. I had no luck finding a reference so I googled it. Still no joy with the American admiral, but the list thrown up had near the top of it this informative quote from Patrick Bahzad.

"The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration. It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe" to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East – and in D.C. – certainly looked like a distant but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy agenda on questions that would require adult supervision."

Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the crazy banner. Or, to put it more soberly, form part of the neocon wing of those administrations. Though I, as an outside observer, might be prejudiced here because I happen not to get on very well with Brzezinski and his copious output.

Allowing for that prejudice, which I confess runs very deep, I still think that to an extent American foreign policy has been hijacked by Eastern European emigres who themselves retain some of the prejudices and mindset of another age and place.

Looking at it from afar, the influence of some Eastern European emigres on American foreign policy has been uniformly deleterious. And that from a long way back and no matter whether those emigres are in Washington or Tel Aviv.

It cannot but help be distorting, that influence. It's not merely that unexamined Russophobia is embedded in the DNA of many Eastern Europeans. There's a narrow minded focus on aggressive Machtpolitik, bred from centuries of violent territorial disputes with neighbors.

That, transferred to the world stage as it must be when it infects the foreign policy of the United States - because that is a country that cannot but help be at the centre of the world stage - distorts US foreign policy. To a great degree American foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions inherited from Old Europe.

In the most famous of his speeches Churchill spoke of the time when, as he hoped, "the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

Let the historians dispute as they will, that is what happened. And continued to happen for half a century and more. But there was a price few noticed. The New World might have stepped forward to rescue the old, but it carried back from that old world a most destructive freight.

akaPatience , 07 November 2019 at 03:22 AM
If all of this corruption were carried out to entrap or thwart a liberal Democrat instead of Trump and his associates, we all know the MSM would be banging a drum of utter outrage, 24/7. We'd never hear the end of a story such as this -- that the FBI misidentified the authors of Flynn's interview notes. Unbelievable.

A while back, I recall reading about a sexual discrimination or harassment case involving FBI's Andrew McCabe in which Gen. Flynn intervened on behalf of the female accuser, and it was thought by some that the bogus charge against the general was in part an act of revenge on McCabe's behalf. There are so many dots out there, unconnected, because the MSM is doing its best to suppress the truth.

How long can they continue to hear, see and speak no evil if the you-know-what hits the fan? I guess we're going to find out.

Fred -> akaPatience ... , 07 November 2019 at 09:41 AM
akaPatience,

How do you know the FBI/DOJ and our wonderful allies never did this to a Democratic politician before? Keeping them in office and subject to extortion to get favorable policies in place would be far more effective than removing someone from office. Perhaps we should ask Jeffrey Epstein just what those politicians and businessmen were doing on that island, that manions in NYC or the one in Paris.....

jd hawkins , 07 November 2019 at 04:11 AM
" I can only imagine how SVR and GRU are enjoying the spectacle".

Guess the neo fbi is enjoying it too________ or not so much!!!

JohninMK , 07 November 2019 at 07:49 AM
Is this just a situation where the DoJ are giving the judge an easy way out to throw the case for a technical reason?

This would leave Flynn high and dry without his innocence having been proved having just got off on a technicality. Also the DoJ would not be exposed to having to produce all the damning stuff that the Honey Badger wants out in public.

Very interesting to see which way Judge Sullivan goes now. Wonder if he wants another Powell book.

Fred -> JohninMK... , 07 November 2019 at 09:36 AM
JohninMK,

Which country are you from where people have to prove innocence rather than prosecutors prove guilt? A technicality - do you mean that as a joke since this is obviously criminal misconduct by the FBI/DOJ; or do you really believe they made a mistake that went undiscovered through the entire Mueler probe, congressional testimony and a couple years worth of legal discovery by defense counsel?

Flavius , 07 November 2019 at 10:59 AM
The manner in which Comey and his select team of officials engineered the Flynn 'interview' was contemptible, but not surprising. The group had been steeping in politics from the moment Comey agreed to the Clinton e-mail case under the conditions he did. The special organization he created, an FBI within the FBI operating out of HQ, the administering of 'blood oaths', etc, only made matters worse, or better, depending on one's political point of view. The only thing lacking was secret hand shakes.
In my now outdated experience, the charge of lying to the FBI was viewed as B.S., period; it was never even contemplated as as a stand alone charge. Separated from a substantive charge, it is worse than B.S.
There are several things wrong about the Flynn interview. Among them: if there was indeed a reason for a strategy session to deceive Flynn about his possibly requiring a lawyer, that reason to the fair minded person meant there should have been no need for a strategy session: the interview required telling Flynn that he had the right to a lawyer; he should have been told the purpose of the interview, ie what it was he was suspected of having done wrong and that the import of his answers was sufficiently serious that if he didn't tell the truth he could be charged with lying; if there was uncertainty whether Flynn had told the truth, as apparently there was because the 302 was subjected to editing and reediting, itself highly irregular, the proper way to have resolved any question would have been to reinterview Flynn, not tailor the paperwork to support the charge; if in fact Flynn did lie, what was the harm caused by the lie, or put another way, what would have been the outcome if Flynn had told the truth.
On the subject of recorded interviews, I am of uncertain mind. There is a before interview; there is an after interview. Electronics change the dynamics of the interview itself, and it may be to the advantage of the person interviewed and it may be to his or her disadvantage. If an interview is fairly played, there should be no need to record it; if the interview is intent on something other than fair play, he will find some way to game the electronics. Electronics are no panacea to instilling integrity where integrity is not otherwise to be found.
David Habakkuk , 07 November 2019 at 11:00 AM
Larry,

The 'honey badger' was a species unknown to me, but having looked that animal up, it seems an apt comparison.

Indeed, at the risk of being frivolous, I am tempted to quote the Kipling refrain about the 'female of the species' being 'deadlier than the male.' It seems to me quite likely that people at the FBI, and elsewhere, are still finding it difficult to grasp what has hit them.

Something which interests me greatly is the possible knock-on effects of Ms. Powell's breakthroughs in exposing the conspiracy to frame Michael Flynn on other cases, notably those in which Ty Clevenger and Steven S. Biss are involved.

The pair are representing Ed Butowsky and Devin Nunes, and also, crucially, Svetlana Lokhova, in her case against the 'ratfucker' – the term used in the 'Complaint' – Stefan Halper and some of the MSM organisations who have collaborated in his 'dirty tricks.'

In all of these cases, material freely available on the 'Courtlistener' site is a mine of fascinating information.

Of particular interest at the moment, I think, are the efforts of Clevenger to 'prise open' the cover-up over the role over Seth Rich in leaking the materials from the DNC which the conspirators falsely alleged were hacked by the Russians, and that about the circumstances of his murder.

These efforts have been aided by a remarkable 'hostage to fortune' given by Deborah Sines, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in D.C. who was assigned to the Rich case.

On 8 October, Clevenger produced motions to 'accept supplemental evidence' and 'permit discovery' in the case he has himself brought against the DOJ, FBI and NSA. (His filing is freely available at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/ .)

The 'supplemental evidence' in question appeared back in July in Episode 5 of the podcast 'Conspiracyland' which Michael Isikoff produced for 'Yahoo! News'. In this, Ms. Sines recycled the familiar disinformation from Andrew McCabe to the effect that it had been established that there was no connection between Rich and Wikileaks.

She then suggested that the FBI had indeed examined his computer, but solely because someone had been trying to 'invade his Gmail account and set up a separate account after Seth was murdered.' The supposed purpose of this activity, by a 'foreign hacker', was 'so they could dump false information in there.'

As Clevenger pointed out, this claim is rather hard to reconcile with the FBI's insistence that it has no records pertaining to Rich, and makes the Bureau's refusal to search its Computer Analysis Response Team ("CART") for relevant records, and the Washington Field Office for email records, look even more suspicious than it already did.

From the 'Courtlistener' pages it also appeared that, following a telephone conference, Magistrate Judge Lois Bloom ruled that the statement by Ms. Sines did not rise to the 'level of bad faith' required to justify the 'discovery' that Clevenger sought, on the basis of it.

Also freely available on 'Courtlistener', however, is an 'Unopposed motion for stay' which Clevenger filed on 30 November. From this, we learn that Judge Bloom had 'noted that Ms. Sines' statements were not made under oath, further suggesting that the Plaintiff might try to obtain a sworn statement from Ms. Sines.'

In response, Clevenger made clear that he intended to subpoena that lady for a deposition, in the relation to the defamation cases brought against Michael Gottlieb et al, and also David Folkenflik et al, where he is representing Ed Butowsky.

Accordingly, he asked the Court to stay his own case 'until the deposition of Ms. Sines can be arranged and the transcripts can be produced.' Apparently, there was no objection from the DOJ, FBI, and NSA.

In addition, Clevenger asked the court to take 'judicial notice' of the fact that, in her reply dated 24 October to the lawyers for the USG, 'attorney Sidney Powell laid out damning evidence that high-ranking FBI officials systematically tampered with records and hid exculpatory evidence for the purpose of framing the defendant, retired General Mike Flynn.'

So it looks as though what the 'honey badger' has been digging out in relation to Flynn may help in the burrowing efforts of others in related matters – who may be in a position to return the favour.

Increasingly, it seems not entirely unthinkable that the cumulative effect of of the cases in which Powell, Clevenger and Biss are involved may blow open the whole conspiracy against the Constitution, irrespective of whether or not Horowitz, Barr and Durham are prepared to go substantially beyond a 'limited hangout.'

Another important, and neglected, aspect here relates to the cases still ongoing against Steele and Orbis in London – that brought by Aleksej Gubarev, and that by the Alfa oligarchs. It is material that libel laws on this side are noticeably less favourable to defendants than on yours – not least in that the 'fair report privilege' retains its original narrower construction here.

Unfortunately, we do not have here any equivalent to 'PACER' and 'Courtlistener.' The last I heard about the Gubarev case was in the spring, when his American lawyers suggested that it should come to court before Xmas.

It would not at all surprise me if it was postponed. Ironically, however, I now think that it may be quite likely that his British lawyers see delay as being in Gubarev's interests.

A critical point is that Steele is making no attempt to defend the accuracy of the claims about the involvement of Gubarev and his companies in hacking in the final memorandum in the dossier.

It seems quite likely that what is coming to light as the result of the lawsuits on your side may make it materially more difficult to mount any credible case that these were not very seriously defamatory.

There have been repeated attempts to locate the dossier attributed to Steele in another version of a familiar 'Russophobic' narrative, suggesting that he was deliberately fed disinformation by his Russian contacts as part of an 'active measures' campaign.

In my view, these are largely BS. However, a possible partial exception has to do with the claims about Gubarev, which follow on from the those made in Company Report 2016/086, which is dated 26 July 2015.

My suspicion has long been that the sloppy misdating – 2016 is clearly meant – reflected the fact that the document was part of a panic-stricken response to the murder of Rich, which had taken place on 10 July. What I may well have happened is that FBI cybersecurity people, who had been cultivating sources among their FSB counterparts, put out an urgent request, which generated material that went into the dossier.

If that was the case however, it would have been likely that some of their informants were playing a 'double game.' And my suspicion is that, when a further request was put in, following Trump's election victory, those making it were fed a 'baited hook' about Gubarev, very likely cast in the hope of producing something like the outcome that materialised.

I noted with interest that both Devin Nunes and Lee Smith are now expressing scepticism about the notion that Steele's role was in actually authoring the dossier, rather than taking ownership of a compendium essentially produced within Fusion GPS.

Another ground for believing this was put into sharp focus with the publication by 'Judicial Watch' in September of – heavily redacted – versions of reports from Steele circulated in the State Department prior to the dossier.

(See https://www.judicialwatch.org/tag/christopher-steele/ )

These clarify a matter which has long puzzled me about the memoranda. Normally, one would expect the product of a serious business intelligence company to be properly presented, on headed stationery, without elementary errors. And one would not expect a numbering which suggests that the documents made public are part of a much larger series.

A document dated 13 June 2014, headline 'RUSSIA-UKRAINE CRISIS: Kremlin Emboldened to Challenge USG Sanctions and Anti-Russian Leverage On Financial Markets', which is labelled 'Report ID: 2014/130a', suggests that we are actually dealing with a format used in an information service sent out to a large number of clients. Precisely what this would not contain was material attributed to highly sensitive sources.

So the clumsy imitation of this formatting in the dossier gives further reason to believe that it was produced by people other than Steele, who were trying to attribute authorship to him.

A further implication is that Steele may have ended up left facing libel charges in relation to claims for which he was not actually responsible.

In addition to those about Gubarev, the use of the transliteration 'Alpha' instead of 'Alfa' for the Fridman/Aven/Khan group makes me think that the author of the relevant memorandum was not a native English speaker, but someone used to thinking in Russian and/or Ukrainian.

If so, the memorandum may be part of 'Ukrainegate', which, unlike 'Russiagate', looks like being a real story.

And here, of course, the question of what became of Seth Rich's laptop, and what information the FBI is concealing about it, is again critical.

It would not in the least surprise me if the kind of traces described by Ms. Sines are actually really present on some hard drive.

If however they are, a quite likely explanation is that Alperovitch and his Ukrainian 'partners-in-crime' organised a hack, after the leak was discovered, as part of the more general attempt to obfuscate the truth.

Factotum , 07 November 2019 at 12:56 PM
Why does the media and virtually every pundit commenting on the Ukrainian phone call intentionally avoid any mention of Trump's Crowdstrike "favor" request?

[Nov 08, 2019] More Evidence that The Comey FBI was a Malevolent Clown Show by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Nov 08, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Brent , 06 November 2019 at 03:04 PM

From what I have read, I gather that the FBI in the Mueller / Comey era has made extensive use of "perjury traps". They then threaten charges to get someone to "flip" on someone bigger, in this case Trump. Flynn wouldn't flip even when they threatened to go after Flynn's son. So they decided to "F" him, as stated by Andrew McCabe.

The FBI has been thoroughly disgraced, and Wray is incapable of cleaning it up. He just wants to keep the dirt under the rug. It is too late for that, it is all coming out. US citizens deserve to know how dirty our FBI and CIA are - they are criminal organizations.

Factotum said in reply to Brent ... , 06 November 2019 at 05:45 PM
I am reminded of Susan MacDougall in the Clinton Whitewater case, decades ago -she claimed "they' were trying to make her flip too - can't remember who was on which side, but was it also government prosecutors against a vulnerable individual who they had hope to break to get the goods they decided they wanted? If so, I guess we need generational reminders of the awesome and terrifying powers of an overly powerful "government".
confusedponderer -> Factotum... , 07 November 2019 at 06:35 AM
Factorum,
re: I guess we need generational reminders of the awesome and terrifying powers of an overly powerful "government".

I'd put it more precise - "the awesome and terrifying powers of ANY overly powerful "government".

If it's an Obama FBI crew getting after you or a Trump FBI crew - it must be very bad every time, guilty of anything or not.

A classic case of how really bad it can get is Brazil's evangelical Bolsonaro.

Iirc a brazilian tv station had reported that his son was likely deeply involved in the murder of a left polician or reporter in Brazil, a deed done by former brazilian cops who also happened to call Bolsonaro's house.

Bolsonaro simply freaked out and was not interested at all in any investigation or the question whether the report was accurate. He simply threatened the tv station that, when reelected, he would nullify their media license.

He showed no interrest in any reality or facts but was just trying to brutally silence and intimidate the media outlet he doesn't like.

He also suggested that his son should become Brazil's ambassador to the US. Probably a perfect job since Trump doesn't have any problems with the Saudi murder prince MbS as well.

A crook by the book ...

Fred -> confusedponderer... , 07 November 2019 at 09:37 AM
confusedponderer,

Thank goodness the German government has never done anything like this.

confusedponderer -> Fred ... , 07 November 2019 at 11:47 AM
Fred,
Thank goodness the German government has never done anything like this ?

Please enlighten me, I am curious and must have missed it - and I live in Germany.

If you want to go back to Attila, Genghis Khan, Adolf or Honnecker - please spare me since about all of that happened long before I was born (and two of those are huns or mongols) and is utterly irrelevant here.

Bolsonaro-isms on the other hand "happen right now" and are an example of pretty obvious abuse of power to cover up crimes like political murder and to permanently silence critics and/or inconvenient media.

In context of Factotum's point that is relevant.

Fred -> confusedponderer... , 07 November 2019 at 05:57 PM
Confused,

There has been plenty of abuse of government power and it doesn't all require a bullet in the back or investigators/prosecutors making false claims. I'm on the road but will write something up about that over the weekend.

Anon said in reply to Factotum... , 07 November 2019 at 01:55 PM
K.T. McFarland (whose name comes up every now and then in this matter)
has some pertinent thoughta on how the government used its power against Flynn:
"KT McFarland speaks for first time about Michael Flynn" , Fox News interview, 2019-11-05
Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) , 06 November 2019 at 04:07 PM
Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins. Could it be my Russian paranoia. Nah, I am being unreasonable--those people never had a bad feeling towards Trump's attempts to boost Russian-American relations with Michael Flynn spearheading this effort. Jokes aside, however, I can only imagine how SVR and GRU are enjoying the spectacle. I can only imagine how many "free" promotions and awards can be attach to this thing as a free ride.
English Outsider -> Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) ... , 07 November 2019 at 09:19 AM
Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration.

I couldn't remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics. I thought it had been an American Admiral. I had no luck finding a reference so I googled it. Still no joy with the American admiral, but the list thrown up had near the top of it this informative quote from Patrick Bahzad.

"The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration. It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe" to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humour, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East – and in D.C. – certainly looked like a distant but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy agenda on questions that would require adult supervision."

Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the crazy banner. Or, to put it more soberly, form part of the neocon wing of those administrations. Though I, as an outside observer, might be prejudiced here because I happen not to get on very well with Brzezinski and his copious output.

Allowing for that prejudice, which I confess runs very deep, I still think that to an extent American foreign policy has been hijacked by Eastern European emigres who themselves retain some of the prejudices and mindset of another age and place.


Looking at it from afar, the influence of some Eastern European emigres on American foreign policy has been uniformly deleterious. And that from a long way back and no matter whether those emigres are in Washington or Tel Aviv.

It cannot but help be distorting, that influence. It's not merely that unexamined Russophobia is embedded in the DNA of many Eastern Europeans. There's a narrow minded focus on aggressive Machtpolitik, bred from centuries of violent territorial disputes with neighbours.

That, transferred to the world stage as it must be when it infects the foreign policy of the United States - because that is a country that cannot but help be at the centre of the world stage - distorts US foreign policy. To a great degree American foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions inherited from Old Europe.

In the most famous of his speeches Churchill spoke of the time when, as he hoped, "the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

Let the historians dispute as they will, that is what happened. And continued to happen for half a century and more. But there was a price few noticed. The New World might have stepped forward to rescue the old, but it carried back from that old world a most destructive freight.

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> English Outsider ... , 07 November 2019 at 01:04 PM
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
David Habakkuk -> Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) ... , 07 November 2019 at 01:15 PM
Andrei and EO,

I wrote what follows before reading Andrei's response to EO, but do not see much reason to change what I had written.

When in 1988 I ended up working at BBC Radio 'Analysis' programme because it was impossible to interest any of my old television colleagues in the idea that one might go to Moscow and talk to some of the people involved in the Gorbachev 'new thinking', my editor, Caroline Anstey, was an erstwhile aide to Jim Callaghan, the former Labour Prime Minister.

As a result of his involvement with the Trilateral Commission, she had a fascinating anecdote about what one of his fellow members, the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, said about another, Zbigniew Brzezinski: that he could never work out which of his country's two traditional enemies his Polish colleague hated most.

Almost a generation after hearing her say this, in December 2013, I read an article Brzezinski published in the 'Financial Times, headlined 'Russia, like Ukraine, will become a real democracy.'

(See https://www.ft.com/content/5ac2df1e-6103-11e3-b7f1-00144feabdc0 .)

Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription wall, but it clearly expresses its author's fundamental belief that after all those years of giving Russia the 'spinach' treatment – to use Victoria Nuland's term – it would finally 'knuckle under', and become a quiescent satellite of the West.

An ironic sidelight on this is provided in a recent article by a lady called Anna Mahjar-Barducci on the 'MEMRI' site – which actually has some very useful material on matters to do with Russia for those of us with no knowledge of the language – headlined 'Contemporary Russian Thinkers Series – Part I – Renowned Russian Academic Sergey Karaganov On Russia And Democracy.'

Its subject, who I remember well from the days when he was very much one of the 'new thinkers', linked to it on his own website, clearly pleased at what he saw as an accurate and informed discussion of his ideas.

(See http://karaganov.ru/en/news/534 )

There is an obvious risk of succumbing to facetiousness, but sometimes what one thinks are essential features of an argument can be best brought out at the risk of caricaturing it.

It seems to me that some of the central themes of Karaganov's writing over the past few years – doubly interesting, because his attacks on conventional Western orthodoxies are very far from silly, and because he is a kind of 'panjandrum' of a significant section of the Russian foreign policy élite – may be illuminated in this way.

So, attempting to link his Russian concerns to British and American ones, some central contentions of his writings might be put as follows:

'"Government of the people, by the people, for the people' looked a lovely idea, back in 1989. But if in practice "by the people" means a choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn, how can it be "for the people?"

'Moreover, it turned out that our "deplorables" were always right, against us 'intellectuals', in grasping that, with "Russophobes" running Western policy, a "real democracy" would simply guarantee that we remained as impotent and humiliated as people like Brzezinski clearly always wanted us to be.

'Our past, and our future, both in terms of alliances and appropriate social and political systems, are actually "Eurasian": a 'hybrid' state, whose potential greatest advantage actually should be seen as successfully synthesising different inheritances.

'As the need for this kind of synthesis is a normal condition, with which most peoples have to reckon, this gives us a very real potential advantage over people in the West, who, like the communists against whom I rebelled, believe that there is one path along which all of humanity must – and can – go.'

At the risk of over-interpreting, I might add the following conclusion:

'Of course, precisely what this analysis does not mean is that we are anti-European – simply that we cannot simply come to Europe, Europe come some way to meet us.

'Given time, Helmut Schmidt's fellow countrymen, as also de Gaulle's, may very well realise that their future does not lie in an alliance with a coalition of people like Brzezinski and traditional "Russophobes" from the "Anglosphere".

'And likewise, it does not lie with the kind of messianic universalist "liberalism" – and, in relation to some of the SJC and LGBT obsessions, one might say "liberalism gone bonkers" – which Putin criticised in his interview with the "Financial Times" back in June.

(This is also behind a subscription wall, but is available at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60836 . It is well worth reading in full.)

An obvious possibility implicit in the argument is that, if indeed the continental Europeans see sense, then the coalition of traditional 'Anglophobes' and the 'insulted and injured' or the 'borderlands' may find itself marginalised, and indeed, on the 'dustbin of history' to which Trotsky once referred.

Of course, I have no claims to be a Russianist, and my reading of Karaganov may be quite wrong.

But I do strongly believe that very superficial readings of what was happening when I was working in the 'Analysis' office, back in 1988-9, have done an immense disservice alike to Britain and the United States.

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> David Habakkuk ... , 07 November 2019 at 01:33 PM
David, Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. But the events of two days ago with Putin and Lavrov being personally present at the unveiling of the monument to Evgenii Primakov in a front of Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs speaks, in fact screams, volumes. You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as I type this and it means that the West "lost" (quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose) Russia and it can be "thankful" for that to a so called Russia Studies field in the West which was primarily shaped and then turned into the wasteland, in large part thanks to influx of East European "scholars" and some "Russian" dissidents which achieved their objectives by drawing a caricature. They succeeded and Russia had it with the West.
Vig said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 08 November 2019 at 08:45 AM
DH, appreciate your comment. Haven't read the MEMRI paper yet. Scanned the first page though.

Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. ... You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as I type this and it means that the West "lost" (quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose)

Well, two things sticked out for me during Tumps reelection campain.
1) on the surface he stated, he wanted closer relations to Russia. Looked at more closely, as should be expected, maybe. They were ambigous. If I may paraphrase it colloguially: I meet them and, believe me, if I don't get that beautiful deal, i'll be out of the door the next second.
2) he promised to be enigmatic, compared to earlier American administrations. In other words, hard to read or to predict. Guess one better is as dealmaker. But in the larger intelligence field? Enigmatic may well be a commonplace. No?

Otherwise, Andrei, I would appreciate your further elaboration on Karaganov as opportunist.

That said, would you please explain why

Petrel said in reply to Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) ... , 07 November 2019 at 11:03 AM
Andrei: Strzok and Pientka come from Galicia -- the westernmost portion of what is now Ukraine -- that was acquired by Empress Maria Theresa in the mid - 18th century.
Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> Petrel... , 07 November 2019 at 01:06 PM
Andrei: Strzok and Pientka come from Galicia

Well, that explains a lot. Not all of it, but a lot.

David Habakkuk -> Petrel... , 07 November 2019 at 01:25 PM
Petrel,

I have been curious about precisely where both Srzok and Pientka came from, but have not had time to do any serious searches.

What is the actual evidence that they have Galician origins?

And, if they do, what are these?

I would of course automatically tend to assume that Polish names mean that their origins are Polish.

But then, if this is so, why are they enthusiastically collaborating with 'Banderista' Ukrainians?

It has long been a belief of mine that one of Stalin's great mistakes was to attempt to incorporate Galicia into the empire he was creating.

Had he returned it to Poland, the architects of the Volhynia massacres of Poles – as also of the massacres of Jews in Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg – could have gone back to their old habits of assassinating Polish policemen.

Petrel said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 07 November 2019 at 05:50 PM
Andrei Martyanov & David Habakuk:

I first picked up the Galician connection in an article by Scott Humor: " North America is a land run by Galician zombies " -- published by The Saker on July 4, 2018. It seems that Galicians, especially those that arrived after WWII, migrate into security positions such as ICE / FBI / NSA etc. It may have to do with a family history of work in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Regrettably, I am not from Eastern Europe and cannot help you further about the Bortnicks, the Gathkes, Buchtas, and so on.

akaPatience , 07 November 2019 at 03:22 AM
If all of this corruption were carried out to entrap or thwart a liberal Democrat instead of Trump and his associates, we all know the MSM would be banging a drum of utter outrage, 24/7. We'd never hear the end of a story such as this -- that the FBI misidentified the authors of Flynn's interview notes. Unbelievable.

A while back, I recall reading about a sexual discrimination or harassment case involving FBI's Andrew McCabe in which Gen. Flynn intervened on behalf of the female accuser, and it was thought by some that the bogus charge against the general was in part an act of revenge on McCabe's behalf. There are so many dots out there, unconnected, because the MSM is doing its best to suppress the truth.

How long can they continue to hear, see and speak no evil if the you-know-what hits the fan? I guess we're going to find out.

Fred -> akaPatience ... , 07 November 2019 at 09:41 AM
akaPatience,

How do you know the FBI/DOJ and our wonderful allies never did this to a Democratic politician before? Keeping them in office and subject to extortion to get favorable policies in place would be far more effective than removing someone from office. Perhaps we should ask Jeffrey Epstein just what those politicians and businessmen were doing on that island, that manions in NYC or the one in Paris.....

jd hawkins , 07 November 2019 at 04:11 AM
" I can only imagine how SVR and GRU are enjoying the spectacle".

Guess the neo fbi is enjoying it too________ or not so much!!!

JohninMK , 07 November 2019 at 07:49 AM
Is this just a situation where the DoJ are giving the judge an easy way out to throw the case for a technical reason?

This would leave Flynn high and dry without his innocence having been proved having just got off on a technicality. Also the DoJ would not be exposed to having to produce all the damning stuff that the Honey Badger wants out in public.

Very interesting to see which way Judge Sullivan goes now. Wonder if he wants another Powell book.

Fred -> JohninMK... , 07 November 2019 at 09:36 AM
JohninMK,

Which country are you from where people have to prove innocence rather than prosecutors prove guilt? A technicality - do you mean that as a joke since this is obviously criminal misconduct by the FBI/DOJ; or do you really believe they made a mistake that went undiscovered through the entire Mueler probe, congressional testimony and a couple years worth of legal discovery by defense counsel?

Flavius , 07 November 2019 at 10:59 AM
The manner in which Comey and his select team of officials engineered the Flynn 'interview' was contemptible, but not surprising. The group had been steeping in politics from the moment Comey agreed to the Clinton e-mail case under the conditions he did. The special organization he created, an FBI within the FBI operating out of HQ, the administering of 'blood oaths', etc, only made matters worse, or better, depending on one's political point of view. The only thing lacking was secret hand shakes.
In my now outdated experience, the charge of lying to the FBI was viewed as B.S., period; it was never even contemplated as as a stand alone charge. Separated from a substantive charge, it is worse than B.S.
There are several things wrong about the Flynn interview. Among them: if there was indeed a reason for a strategy session to deceive Flynn about his possibly requiring a lawyer, that reason to the fair minded person meant there should have been no need for a strategy session: the interview required telling Flynn that he had the right to a lawyer; he should have been told the purpose of the interview, ie what it was he was suspected of having done wrong and that the import of his answers was sufficiently serious that if he didn't tell the truth he could be charged with lying; if there was uncertainty whether Flynn had told the truth, as apparently there was because the 302 was subjected to editing and reediting, itself highly irregular, the proper way to have resolved any question would have been to reinterview Flynn, not tailor the paperwork to support the charge; if in fact Flynn did lie, what was the harm caused by the lie, or put another way, what would have been the outcome if Flynn had told the truth.
On the subject of recorded interviews, I am of uncertain mind. There is a before interview; there is an after interview. Electronics change the dynamics of the interview itself, and it may be to the advantage of the person interviewed and it may be to his or her disadvantage. If an interview is fairly played, there should be no need to record it; if the interview is intent on something other than fair play, he will find some way to game the electronics. Electronics are no panacea to instilling integrity where integrity is not otherwise to be found.
David Habakkuk , 07 November 2019 at 11:00 AM
Larry,

The 'honey badger' was a species unknown to me, but having looked that animal up, it seems an apt comparison.

Indeed, at the risk of being frivolous, I am tempted to quote the Kipling refrain about the 'female of the species' being 'deadlier than the male.' It seems to me quite likely that people at the FBI, and elsewhere, are still finding it difficult to grasp what has hit them.

Something which interests me greatly is the possible knock-on effects of Ms. Powell's breakthroughs in exposing the conspiracy to frame Michael Flynn on other cases, notably those in which Ty Clevenger and Steven S. Biss are involved.

The pair are representing Ed Butowsky and Devin Nunes, and also, crucially, Svetlana Lokhova, in her case against the 'ratfucker' – the term used in the 'Complaint' – Stefan Halper and some of the MSM organisations who have collaborated in his 'dirty tricks.'

In all of these cases, material freely available on the 'Courtlistener' site is a mine of fascinating information.

Of particular interest at the moment, I think, are the efforts of Clevenger to 'prise open' the cover-up over the role over Seth Rich in leaking the materials from the DNC which the conspirators falsely alleged were hacked by the Russians, and that about the circumstances of his murder.

These efforts have been aided by a remarkable 'hostage to fortune' given by Deborah Sines, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in D.C. who was assigned to the Rich case.

On 8 October, Clevenger produced motions to 'accept supplemental evidence' and 'permit discovery' in the case he has himself brought against the DOJ, FBI and NSA. (His filing is freely available at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6775665/clevenger-v-us-department-of-justice/ .)

The 'supplemental evidence' in question appeared back in July in Episode 5 of the podcast 'Conspiracyland' which Michael Isikoff produced for 'Yahoo! News'. In this, Ms. Sines recycled the familiar disinformation from Andrew McCabe to the effect that it had been established that there was no connection between Rich and Wikileaks.

She then suggested that the FBI had indeed examined his computer, but solely because someone had been trying to 'invade his Gmail account and set up a separate account after Seth was murdered.' The supposed purpose of this activity, by a 'foreign hacker', was 'so they could dump false information in there.'

As Clevenger pointed out, this claim is rather hard to reconcile with the FBI's insistence that it has no records pertaining to Rich, and makes the Bureau's refusal to search its Computer Analysis Response Team ("CART") for relevant records, and the Washington Field Office for email records, look even more suspicious than it already did.

From the 'Courtlistener' pages it also appeared that, following a telephone conference, Magistrate Judge Lois Bloom ruled that the statement by Ms. Sines did not rise to the 'level of bad faith' required to justify the 'discovery' that Clevenger sought, on the basis of it.

Also freely available on 'Courtlistener', however, is an 'Unopposed motion for stay' which Clevenger filed on 30 November. From this, we learn that Judge Bloom had 'noted that Ms. Sines' statements were not made under oath, further suggesting that the Plaintiff might try to obtain a sworn statement from Ms. Sines.'

In response, Clevenger made clear that he intended to subpoena that lady for a deposition, in the relation to the defamation cases brought against Michael Gottlieb et al, and also David Folkenflik et al, where he is representing Ed Butowsky.

Accordingly, he asked the Court to stay his own case 'until the deposition of Ms. Sines can be arranged and the transcripts can be produced.' Apparently, there was no objection from the DOJ, FBI, and NSA.

In addition, Clevenger asked the court to take 'judicial notice' of the fact that, in her reply dated 24 October to the lawyers for the USG, 'attorney Sidney Powell laid out damning evidence that high-ranking FBI officials systematically tampered with records and hid exculpatory evidence for the purpose of framing the defendant, retired General Mike Flynn.'

So it looks as though what the 'honey badger' has been digging out in relation to Flynn may help in the burrowing efforts of others in related matters – who may be in a position to return the favour.

Increasingly, it seems not entirely unthinkable that the cumulative effect of of the cases in which Powell, Clevenger and Biss are involved may blow open the whole conspiracy against the Constitution, irrespective of whether or not Horowitz, Barr and Durham are prepared to go substantially beyond a 'limited hangout.'

Another important, and neglected, aspect here relates to the cases still ongoing against Steele and Orbis in London – that brought by Aleksej Gubarev, and that by the Alfa oligarchs. It is material that libel laws on this side are noticeably less favourable to defendants than on yours – not least in that the 'fair report privilege' retains its original narrower construction here.

Unfortunately, we do not have here any equivalent to 'PACER' and 'Courtlistener.' The last I heard about the Gubarev case was in the spring, when his American lawyers suggested that it should come to court before Xmas.

It would not at all surprise me if it was postponed. Ironically, however, I now think that it may be quite likely that his British lawyers see delay as being in Gubarev's interests.

A critical point is that Steele is making no attempt to defend the accuracy of the claims about the involvement of Gubarev and his companies in hacking in the final memorandum in the dossier.

It seems quite likely that what is coming to light as the result of the lawsuits on your side may make it materially more difficult to mount any credible case that these were not very seriously defamatory.

There have been repeated attempts to locate the dossier attributed to Steele in another version of a familiar 'Russophobic' narrative, suggesting that he was deliberately fed disinformation by his Russian contacts as part of an 'active measures' campaign.

In my view, these are largely BS. However, a possible partial exception has to do with the claims about Gubarev, which follow on from the those made in Company Report 2016/086, which is dated 26 July 2015.

My suspicion has long been that the sloppy misdating – 2016 is clearly meant – reflected the fact that the document was part of a panic-stricken response to the murder of Rich, which had taken place on 10 July. What I may well have happened is that FBI cybersecurity people, who had been cultivating sources among their FSB counterparts, put out an urgent request, which generated material that went into the dossier.

If that was the case however, it would have been likely that some of their informants were playing a 'double game.' And my suspicion is that, when a further request was put in, following Trump's election victory, those making it were fed a 'baited hook' about Gubarev, very likely cast in the hope of producing something like the outcome that materialised.

I noted with interest that both Devin Nunes and Lee Smith are now expressing scepticism about the notion that Steele's role was in actually authoring the dossier, rather than taking ownership of a compendium essentially produced within Fusion GPS.

Another ground for believing this was put into sharp focus with the publication by 'Judicial Watch' in September of – heavily redacted – versions of reports from Steele circulated in the State Department prior to the dossier.

(See https://www.judicialwatch.org/tag/christopher-steele/ )

These clarify a matter which has long puzzled me about the memoranda. Normally, one would expect the product of a serious business intelligence company to be properly presented, on headed stationery, without elementary errors. And one would not expect a numbering which suggests that the documents made public are part of a much larger series.

A document dated 13 June 2014, headline 'RUSSIA-UKRAINE CRISIS: Kremlin Emboldened to Challenge USG Sanctions and Anti-Russian Leverage On Financial Markets', which is labelled 'Report ID: 2014/130a', suggests that we are actually dealing with a format used in an information service sent out to a large number of clients. Precisely what this would not contain was material attributed to highly sensitive sources.

So the clumsy imitation of this formatting in the dossier gives further reason to believe that it was produced by people other than Steele, who were trying to attribute authorship to him.

A further implication is that Steele may have ended up left facing libel charges in relation to claims for which he was not actually responsible.

In addition to those about Gubarev, the use of the transliteration 'Alpha' instead of 'Alfa' for the Fridman/Aven/Khan group makes me think that the author of the relevant memorandum was not a native English speaker, but someone used to thinking in Russian and/or Ukrainian.

If so, the memorandum may be part of 'Ukrainegate', which, unlike 'Russiagate', looks like being a real story.

And here, of course, the question of what became of Seth Rich's laptop, and what information the FBI is concealing about it, is again critical.

It would not in the least surprise me if the kind of traces described by Ms. Sines are actually really present on some hard drive.

If however they are, a quite likely explanation is that Alperovitch and his Ukrainian 'partners-in-crime' organised a hack, after the leak was discovered, as part of the more general attempt to obfuscate the truth.

Factotum , 07 November 2019 at 12:56 PM
Why does the media and virtually every pundit commenting on the Ukrainian phone call intentionally avoid any mention of Trump's Crowdstrike "favor" request?

[Nov 08, 2019] Inconvenient Truths by Stephen F. Cohen

Notable quotes:
"... The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. ..."
"... We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies under President Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential candidacy and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. ..."
"... We also learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be fully trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. ..."
"... Opponents of Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate say it is impermissible or unprecedented to "investigate the investigators." But the bipartisan Church Committee, based in the US Senate, did so in the mid-1970s. It exposed many abuses by US intelligence agencies, particularly by the CIA, and adopted remedies that it believed would be permanent. Clearly, they have not been. ..."
"... However well-intentioned Barr may be, he is Trump's attorney general and therefore not fully credible. As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty. ..."
Nov 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

Almost daily for three years, Democrats and their media have told us very bad things about Donald Trump's life, character, and presidency. Some of them are true. But in the process, we have also learned some lamentable, even alarming, things about the Democratic Party establishment, including self-professed liberals. Consider the following:

The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. But there was no "attack" in 2016, only, as I have previously explained , ritualistic "meddling" of the kind that both Russia and America have undertaken in the other's elections for decades. Little can be more phobic than the allegation or belief that one has been "attacked by a hostile" entity. And yet this myth and its false narrative persist in the Democratic Party's discourse, campaigning, and fund-raising. We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies under President Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential candidacy and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. Early on, I termed this operation " Intelgate ," and it has since been well documented by other writers, including Lee Smith in his new book . Intel officials did so in tacit alliance with certain leading, and equally Russophobic, members of the Democratic Party, which had once opposed such transgressions. This may be the most alarming revelation of the Trump years: Trump will leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain. We also learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be fully trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. Indeed, what the mainstream media -- leading national newspapers and two cable news networks, in particular -- chose to cover and report, and chose not to cover and report, made the abuses and consequences of Russiagate allegations possible. Even now, exceedingly influential publications such as The New York Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William Barr and his appointed special investigator John Durham into the origins of Russiagate. Barr's critics accuse him of fabricating a "conspiracy theory" on behalf of Trump. But the real, or grandest, conspiracy theory was the Russiagate allegation of "collusion" between Trump and the Kremlin, an accusation that was -- or should have been -- discredited by the Robert Mueller report. And we have learned, or should have learned, that for all the talk by Democrats about Trump as a danger to US national security, it is their Russiagate allegations that truly endanger it. Consider two examples. Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can elude US missile-defense systems, make new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and urgent. If only for the sake of his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so. But even if he is able to, will Trump be entrusted enough to conduct negotiations as successfully as did his predecessors in the White House, given the "Putin puppet" and "Kremlin stooge" accusations still being directed at him? Similarly, as I have asked repeatedly, if confronted with a US-Russian Cuban missile–like crisis -- anywhere Washington and Moscow are currently eyeball-to-eyeball militarily, from the Baltic region and Ukraine to Syria -- will Trump be as free politically as was President John F. Kennedy to resolve it without war? Here too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer seriously discuss national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly involves vilifying both Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous presidents were free to negotiate with Russia's Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged to do so, whereas the demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)

The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly dangerous, not only due to reasons cited here -- a new Cold War fraught with the possibility of hot war. Whether President Trump serves one or two terms, he must be fully empowered to cope with the multiple possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation. That requires ridding him and our nation of Russiagate allegations -- and that in turn requires learning how such allegations originated.

Opponents of Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate say it is impermissible or unprecedented to "investigate the investigators." But the bipartisan Church Committee, based in the US Senate, did so in the mid-1970s. It exposed many abuses by US intelligence agencies, particularly by the CIA, and adopted remedies that it believed would be permanent. Clearly, they have not been.

However well-intentioned Barr may be, he is Trump's attorney general and therefore not fully credible. As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.

[Nov 08, 2019] Scapegoating as the major neoliberal propaganda tool

Nov 08, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

Orange Watch 11.07.19 at 5:11 pm 71

Donald@63 :

The tendency to scapegoat rather than make the case for one's own merit is very deeply ingrained in our top-down liberal democratic systems; the Democratic establishment is unfortunately just getting back to core principles by shifting almost exclusively to this mode of discourse over the past decade.

From Guy Debord's 1988 Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle :

This perfect democracy creates for itself its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. In effect, it wants to be judged by its enemies moreso than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State; it is therefore instructive.

The spectator populations certainly cannot know everything about terrorism, but they can always know enough to be persuaded that compared to terrorism, anything else must seem to be more or less acceptable, and in any case more rational and democratic.

[Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos

Highly recommended!
Images removed.
Notable quotes:
"... The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution for the breach was ever attempted. ..."
"... In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers argued that it was the party's right to select candidates. ..."
"... The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was protected by the First Amendment . ..."
"... The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race, ..."
"... f Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district. Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election in which Canova ran as an independent. ..."
"... Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal ballot destruction , improper transportation of ballots, and generally shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time: ..."
"... Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies. Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments externalize what Gabbard called the "rot" in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet. ..."
"... Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled: " Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," ..."
Nov 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Elizabeth Vos via ConsortiumNews.com,

Establishment Democrats and those who amplify them continue to project blame for the public's doubt in the U.S. election process onto outside influence, despite the clear history of the party's subversion of election integrity. The total inability of the Democratic Party establishment's willingness to address even one of these critical failures does not give reason to hope that the nomination process in 2020 will be any less pre-ordained.

The Democratic Party's bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel doubling down on its right to rig the race during the fraud lawsuit brought against the DNC , as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova, indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also likely impact outcomes in 2020.

The content of the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred " pied-piper candidate ." One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race.

Social Media Meddling

Election meddling via social media did take place in 2016, though in a different guise and for a different cause from that which are best remembered. Twitter would eventually admit to actively suppressing hashtags referencing the DNC and Podesta emails in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Additional reports indicated that tech giant Google also showed measurable "pro-Hillary Clinton bias" in search results during 2016, resulting in the alleged swaying of between 2 and 10 millions voters in favor of Clinton.

On the Republican side, a recent episode of CNLive! featured discussion of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which undecided voters were micro-targeted with tailored advertising narrowed with the combined use of big data and artificial intelligence known collectively as "dark strategy." CNLive! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan noted that SCL, Cambridge Analytica's parent company, provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations "worldwide," specializing in behavior modification. Though Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018, related companies remain.

The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign.

In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution for the breach was ever attempted.

Though the purge was not explicitly found to have benefitted Clinton, the admission falls in line with allegations across the country that the Democratic primary was interfered with to the benefit of the former secretary of state. These claims were further bolstered by reports indicating that voting results from the 2016 Democratic primary showed evidence of fraud.

DNC Fraud Lawsuit

The proceedings of the DNC fraud lawsuit provide the most damning evidence of the failure of the U.S. election process, especially within the Democratic Party. DNC defense lawyers argued in open court for the party's right to appoint candidates at its own discretion, while simultaneously denying any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the impression that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved.

In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers argued that it was the party's right to select candidates.

The Observer noted the sentiments of Jared Beck, the attorney representing the plaintiffs of the lawsuit:

"People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee -- nominating process in 2016 were fair and impartial, and that's not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that's what the Democratic National Committee's own charter says. It says it in black and white."

The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was protected by the First Amendment . The DNC's lawyers wrote:

"To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to selecting the party's nominee for public office ." [Emphasis added]

The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race,

Tim Canova's Allegations

If Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district. Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election in which Canova ran as an independent.

Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal ballot destruction , improper transportation of ballots, and generally shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time:

"[Canova] sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months later when her office hadn't fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending."

Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies. Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms.

Republicans appear no more motivated to protect voting integrity than the Democrats, with The Nation reporting that the GOP-controlled Senate blocked a bill this week that would have "mandated paper-ballot backups in case of election machine malfunctions."

Study of Corporate Power

A 2014 study published by Princeton University found that corporate power had usurped the voting rights of the public: "Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

In reviewing this sordid history, we see that the Democratic Party establishment has done everything in its power to disrespect voters and outright overrule them in the democratic primary process, defending their right to do so in the DNC fraud lawsuit. We've noted that interests transcending the DNC also represent escalating threats to election integrity as demonstrated in 2016.

Despite this, establishment Democrats and those who echo their views in the legacy press continue to deflect from their own wrongdoing and real threats to the election process by suggesting that mere discussion of it represents a campaign by Russia to attempt to malign the perception of the legitimacy of the U.S. democratic process.

Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments externalize what Gabbard called the "rot" in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet.

Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled: " Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," Jamali argued :

"Moscow will use its skillful propaganda machine to prop up Gabbard and use her as a tool to delegitimize the democratic process. " [Emphasis added]

Jamali surmises that Russia intends to "attack" our democracy by undermining the domestic perception of its legitimacy. This thesis is repeated later in the piece when Jamali opines : "They want to see a retreat of American influence. What better way to accomplish that than to attack our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of our elections." [Emphasis added]

The only thing worth protecting, according to Jamali and those who amplify his work (including former Clinton aide and establishment Democrat Neera Tanden), is the perception of the democratic process, not the actual functioning vitality of it. Such deflective tactics ensure that Russia will continue to be used as a convenient international pretext for silencing domestic dissent as we move into 2020.

Given all this, how can one expect the outcome of a 2020 Democratic Primary -- or even the general election – to be any fairer or transparent than 2016?

* * *

Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter, co-host of CN Live! and regular contributor to Consortium News. If you value this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

[Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos

Highly recommended!
Images removed.
Notable quotes:
"... The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution for the breach was ever attempted. ..."
"... In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers argued that it was the party's right to select candidates. ..."
"... The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was protected by the First Amendment . ..."
"... The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race, ..."
"... f Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district. Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election in which Canova ran as an independent. ..."
"... Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal ballot destruction , improper transportation of ballots, and generally shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time: ..."
"... Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies. Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments externalize what Gabbard called the "rot" in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet. ..."
"... Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled: " Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," ..."
Nov 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Elizabeth Vos via ConsortiumNews.com,

Establishment Democrats and those who amplify them continue to project blame for the public's doubt in the U.S. election process onto outside influence, despite the clear history of the party's subversion of election integrity. The total inability of the Democratic Party establishment's willingness to address even one of these critical failures does not give reason to hope that the nomination process in 2020 will be any less pre-ordained.

The Democratic Party's bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel doubling down on its right to rig the race during the fraud lawsuit brought against the DNC , as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova, indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also likely impact outcomes in 2020.

The content of the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred " pied-piper candidate ." One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race.

Social Media Meddling

Election meddling via social media did take place in 2016, though in a different guise and for a different cause from that which are best remembered. Twitter would eventually admit to actively suppressing hashtags referencing the DNC and Podesta emails in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Additional reports indicated that tech giant Google also showed measurable "pro-Hillary Clinton bias" in search results during 2016, resulting in the alleged swaying of between 2 and 10 millions voters in favor of Clinton.

On the Republican side, a recent episode of CNLive! featured discussion of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which undecided voters were micro-targeted with tailored advertising narrowed with the combined use of big data and artificial intelligence known collectively as "dark strategy." CNLive! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan noted that SCL, Cambridge Analytica's parent company, provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations "worldwide," specializing in behavior modification. Though Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018, related companies remain.

The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign.

In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution for the breach was ever attempted.

Though the purge was not explicitly found to have benefitted Clinton, the admission falls in line with allegations across the country that the Democratic primary was interfered with to the benefit of the former secretary of state. These claims were further bolstered by reports indicating that voting results from the 2016 Democratic primary showed evidence of fraud.

DNC Fraud Lawsuit

The proceedings of the DNC fraud lawsuit provide the most damning evidence of the failure of the U.S. election process, especially within the Democratic Party. DNC defense lawyers argued in open court for the party's right to appoint candidates at its own discretion, while simultaneously denying any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the impression that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved.

In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers argued that it was the party's right to select candidates.

The Observer noted the sentiments of Jared Beck, the attorney representing the plaintiffs of the lawsuit:

"People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee -- nominating process in 2016 were fair and impartial, and that's not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that's what the Democratic National Committee's own charter says. It says it in black and white."

The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was protected by the First Amendment . The DNC's lawyers wrote:

"To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to selecting the party's nominee for public office ." [Emphasis added]

The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race,

Tim Canova's Allegations

If Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district. Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election in which Canova ran as an independent.

Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal ballot destruction , improper transportation of ballots, and generally shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time:

"[Canova] sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months later when her office hadn't fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending."

Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies. Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms.

Republicans appear no more motivated to protect voting integrity than the Democrats, with The Nation reporting that the GOP-controlled Senate blocked a bill this week that would have "mandated paper-ballot backups in case of election machine malfunctions."

Study of Corporate Power

A 2014 study published by Princeton University found that corporate power had usurped the voting rights of the public: "Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

In reviewing this sordid history, we see that the Democratic Party establishment has done everything in its power to disrespect voters and outright overrule them in the democratic primary process, defending their right to do so in the DNC fraud lawsuit. We've noted that interests transcending the DNC also represent escalating threats to election integrity as demonstrated in 2016.

Despite this, establishment Democrats and those who echo their views in the legacy press continue to deflect from their own wrongdoing and real threats to the election process by suggesting that mere discussion of it represents a campaign by Russia to attempt to malign the perception of the legitimacy of the U.S. democratic process.

Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments externalize what Gabbard called the "rot" in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet.

Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled: " Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," Jamali argued :

"Moscow will use its skillful propaganda machine to prop up Gabbard and use her as a tool to delegitimize the democratic process. " [Emphasis added]

Jamali surmises that Russia intends to "attack" our democracy by undermining the domestic perception of its legitimacy. This thesis is repeated later in the piece when Jamali opines : "They want to see a retreat of American influence. What better way to accomplish that than to attack our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of our elections." [Emphasis added]

The only thing worth protecting, according to Jamali and those who amplify his work (including former Clinton aide and establishment Democrat Neera Tanden), is the perception of the democratic process, not the actual functioning vitality of it. Such deflective tactics ensure that Russia will continue to be used as a convenient international pretext for silencing domestic dissent as we move into 2020.

Given all this, how can one expect the outcome of a 2020 Democratic Primary -- or even the general election – to be any fairer or transparent than 2016?

* * *

Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter, co-host of CN Live! and regular contributor to Consortium News. If you value this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

[Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos

Images removed.
Notable quotes:
"... In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers argued that it was the party's right to select candidates. ..."
Nov 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Elizabeth Vos via ConsortiumNews.com,

Establishment Democrats and those who amplify them continue to project blame for the public's doubt in the U.S. election process onto outside influence, despite the clear history of the party's subversion of election integrity. The total inability of the Democratic Party establishment's willingness to address even one of these critical failures does not give reason to hope that the nomination process in 2020 will be any less pre-ordained.

The Democratic Party's bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel doubling down on its right to rig the race during the fraud lawsuit brought against the DNC , as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova, indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also likely impact outcomes in 2020.

The content of the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred " pied-piper candidate ." One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race.

Social Media Meddling

Election meddling via social media did take place in 2016, though in a different guise and for a different cause from that which are best remembered. Twitter would eventually admit to actively suppressing hashtags referencing the DNC and Podesta emails in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Additional reports indicated that tech giant Google also showed measurable "pro-Hillary Clinton bias" in search results during 2016, resulting in the alleged swaying of between 2 and 10 millions voters in favor of Clinton.

On the Republican side, a recent episode of CNLive! featured discussion of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which undecided voters were micro-targeted with tailored advertising narrowed with the combined use of big data and artificial intelligence known collectively as "dark strategy." CNLive! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan noted that SCL, Cambridge Analytica's parent company, provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations "worldwide," specializing in behavior modification. Though Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018, related companies remain.

The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign.

In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution for the breach was ever attempted.

Though the purge was not explicitly found to have benefitted Clinton, the admission falls in line with allegations across the country that the Democratic primary was interfered with to the benefit of the former secretary of state. These claims were further bolstered by reports indicating that voting results from the 2016 Democratic primary showed evidence of fraud.

DNC Fraud Lawsuit

The proceedings of the DNC fraud lawsuit provide the most damning evidence of the failure of the U.S. election process, especially within the Democratic Party. DNC defense lawyers argued in open court for the party's right to appoint candidates at its own discretion, while simultaneously denying any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the impression that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved.

In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers argued that it was the party's right to select candidates.

The Observer noted the sentiments of Jared Beck, the attorney representing the plaintiffs of the lawsuit:

"People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee -- nominating process in 2016 were fair and impartial, and that's not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that's what the Democratic National Committee's own charter says. It says it in black and white."

The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was protected by the First Amendment . The DNC's lawyers wrote:

"To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to selecting the party's nominee for public office ." [Emphasis added]

The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race,

Tim Canova's Allegations

If Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district. Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election in which Canova ran as an independent.

Tim Canova with supporters, April 2016. (CanovaForCongress, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal ballot destruction , improper transportation of ballots, and generally shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time:

"[Canova] sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months later when her office hadn't fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending."

Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies. Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms.

Republicans appear no more motivated to protect voting integrity than the Democrats, with The Nation reporting that the GOP-controlled Senate blocked a bill this week that would have "mandated paper-ballot backups in case of election machine malfunctions."

Study of Corporate Power

A 2014 study published by Princeton University found that corporate power had usurped the voting rights of the public: "Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

In reviewing this sordid history, we see that the Democratic Party establishment has done everything in its power to disrespect voters and outright overrule them in the democratic primary process, defending their right to do so in the DNC fraud lawsuit. We've noted that interests transcending the DNC also represent escalating threats to election integrity as demonstrated in 2016.

Despite this, establishment Democrats and those who echo their views in the legacy press continue to deflect from their own wrongdoing and real threats to the election process by suggesting that mere discussion of it represents a campaign by Russia to attempt to malign the perception of the legitimacy of the U.S. democratic process.

Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments externalize what Gabbard called the "rot" in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet.

Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled: " Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," Jamali argued :

"Moscow will use its skillful propaganda machine to prop up Gabbard and use her as a tool to delegitimize the democratic process. " [Emphasis added]

Jamali surmises that Russia intends to "attack" our democracy by undermining the domestic perception of its legitimacy. This thesis is repeated later in the piece when Jamali opines : "They want to see a retreat of American influence. What better way to accomplish that than to attack our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of our elections." [Emphasis added]

The only thing worth protecting, according to Jamali and those who amplify his work (including former Clinton aide and establishment Democrat Neera Tanden), is the perception of the democratic process, not the actual functioning vitality of it. Such deflective tactics ensure that Russia will continue to be used as a convenient international pretext for silencing domestic dissent as we move into 2020.

Given all this, how can one expect the outcome of a 2020 Democratic Primary -- or even the general election – to be any fairer or transparent than 2016?

* * *

Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter, co-host of CN Live! and regular contributor to Consortium News. If you value this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

[Nov 07, 2019] DNC Lawyers Argue Primary Rigging Is Protected by the First Amendment

Notable quotes:
"... They also failed to note the voice-modulated phone calls received by the law offices of the Becks which contained a caller-ID corresponding to the law offices of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a defendant in the case. In light of this context, the Becks hardly appear to be peddlers of conspiracy theory. ..."
Nov 07, 2019 | archive.is

The defense counsel also took issue with Jared Beck for what they termed as: " Repeatedly promoted patently false and deeply offensive conspiracy theories about the deaths of a former DNC staffer and Plaintiffs' process server in an attempt to bolster attention for this lawsuit." This author was shocked to find that despite the characterization of the Becks as peddlers of conspiracy theory, the defense counsel failed to mention the motion for protection filed by the Becks earlier in the litigation process.

They also failed to note the voice-modulated phone calls received by the law offices of the Becks which contained a caller-ID corresponding to the law offices of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a defendant in the case. In light of this context, the Becks hardly appear to be peddlers of conspiracy theory.

The DNC defense lawyers then argued:

" There is no legitimate basis for this litigation, which is, at its most basic, an improper attempt to forge the federal courts into a political weapon to be used by individuals who are unhappy with how a political party selected its candidate in a presidential campaign ."

The brief continued:

" To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege based on their animating theory would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to selecting the party's nominee for public office."

It appears that the defendants in the DNC Fraud Lawsuit are attempting to argue that cheating a candidate in the primary process is protected under the first amendment. If all that weren't enough, DNC representatives argued that the Democratic National Committee had no established fiduciary duty "to the Plaintiffs or the classes of donors and registered voters they seek to represent." It seems here that the DNC is arguing for its right to appoint candidates at its own discretion while simultaneously denying any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the belief that the DNC would act impartially towards the candidates involved.

Adding to the latest news regarding the DNC Fraud Lawsuit was the recent finding by the UK Supreme Court, which stated that Wikileaks Cables were admissible as evidence in legal proceedings.

If Wikileaks' publication of DNC emails are found to be similarly admissible in a United States court of law, then the contents of the leaked emails could be used to argue that, contrary to the defendant's latest brief, the DNC did in favor the campaign of Hillary Clinton over Senator Sanders and that they acted to sabotage Sanders' campaign.

The outcome of the appeal of the DNC Fraud Lawsuit remains to be seen.

Elizabeth Vos is the Co-Founder and Editor in Chief at Disobedient Media .

[Nov 07, 2019] 3 Steps to Reviving the Russian Relationship

Notable quotes:
"... This period is when Clinton IMHO sent NATO in a wrong direction from being strictly defensive/political to getting involved in Yugoslavia which certainly irritated Russia. ..."
"... Then good old Obama and another Clinton deciding to overthrow Gaddafi and his whole Arab Spring foreign policy to include getting involved in Syria. These were disastrous decisions that the current POTUS inherited and is trying to change except the "deep state" is fighting him tooth and nail. ..."
"... Getting out of Ukraine would be a huge trust maker for Russia and it would be followed by sanctions being lifted allowing for a level playing field to begin working on the issues that need fixing. NATO isn't going away however the forward deployed forces in the Baltic's and Poland could over time in an agreed to reciprocal move say removing Iskander missiles from Kaliningrad could be accomplished. ..."
Nov 07, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

J Urie Z'ing Sui • 13 hours ago ,

You are 100% correct that trust is the number one point in coming to any agreement and currently there is very little trust on either side for varying reasons. One important fact that is overlooked by most people is the leadership of President George H. W. Bush and PM Margaret Thatcher during the transition from the Soviet Union/Warsaw pact to independent sovereign nations. The Bush was a WW II pilot and Thatcher earned the name Iron Lady for her decisive action in the Falklands War, both understood the world as it was in 1990. This statement highlights the view that prevailed from Bush at the time: "Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the "not one inch eastward" formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev's statement in response to the assurances that "NATO expansion is unacceptable." Baker assured Gorbachev that "neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place," and that the Americans understood that "not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction." (See Document 6)"

These were complicated issues that involved a multitude of parties being negotiated by just a few i.e. US, UK, France and West Germany a holdover from the WW II model. The Poles, Czechs and others were not consulted and IMHO had they been the situation would have become untenable. It must be remembered that Poland and Czechoslovakia suffered heavily due to "large important nations" giving them away pre and post WW II. There was no written agreement nor official treaty between the west and the Soviet Union soon to be Russian Federation and I believe that was intentional for the reason I give above. George H. W. Bush was not reelected in 1992 and Bill Clinton became POTUS and he pursued a foreign policy that was entirely different. Some of his ideas used Thatchers earlier idea of a more political NATO with less emphasis on the original military mission which brought in the Partnerships for Peace program. That program was IMHO quite good as it stabilized countries that were wobbly in the 1990's after the breakup occurred. The Clinton White House had Madeline Albright an immigrant from Czechoslovakia as secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski a former secretary of State and an academic that influenced his policies which were pro eastern European anti Russian. It was during this time that NATO expanded. The US is a country of immigrants and there is a large Polish population as well as other eastern Europeans and political considerations are always come into play.

This period is when Clinton IMHO sent NATO in a wrong direction from being strictly defensive/political to getting involved in Yugoslavia which certainly irritated Russia.

G.W. Bush basically continued the trend with regard to NATO but was preoccupied with 9/11 more than anything else. Bush thought that he understood Putin and even invited him to his ranch in Crawford, Texas which Putin accepted and they did seem to get along.

However 2008 and the Georgia War began the slide in relations between the two countries. Then good old Obama and another Clinton deciding to overthrow Gaddafi and his whole Arab Spring foreign policy to include getting involved in Syria. These were disastrous decisions that the current POTUS inherited and is trying to change except the "deep state" is fighting him tooth and nail.

Getting out of Ukraine would be a huge trust maker for Russia and it would be followed by sanctions being lifted allowing for a level playing field to begin working on the issues that need fixing. NATO isn't going away however the forward deployed forces in the Baltic's and Poland could over time in an agreed to reciprocal move say removing Iskander missiles from Kaliningrad could be accomplished.

Gaugamela39 • a day ago ,

Carthago delenda est. The policy of Cato the Censor should be applied in an unrelenting manner, leading to 'salting the earth' of Moscow.

dorotea Gaugamela39 • a day ago ,

Many have tried, usually ended up in those infamous endless Russian fields, in long boxes. See Pushkin, for the exact quote. But historical trivialities aside, there should be a way to satisfy Imperial hubris without 'salting the grounds'. Hannibal's elephants did not carry nukes in their trunks. Trying for the sixth time in the last 4 centuries to get Moscow grounds salted might end badly for the entire planet.

The Chosen One dorotea • a day ago ,

So it seems to me that only the advent of a nuclear weapon and the threat of an imminent deadly retaliation prevents a new "drang nach osten".

Z'ing Sui J Urie • 39 minutes ago • edited ,

Trust was not breached by Russia, military buildup, hostile threatening military, NATO expansion and refusal to negotiate on these issues did not originate from Russia. Russia has tried to negotiate, concede and de-escalate before. The West did not respond to those moves. Even US sanctions placed on Soviet Union were not removed from Russia, despite there being no reason for them to remain in place. This and other recent events (libya, iran deal etc) tells Russia and other global players that de-escalating with the West doesn't work.

Even now, West seems to be interested to trade with Russia at least in some areas. And Europe is increasingly frustrated with the United States. There is reportedly a number of EU initiatives aimed at gradually limiting US economic levers created during the Cold War. Rising economies will gradually offer more opportunities outside of the Western world. Multipolar wolrd was a slogan in the 00s, in the 2040es it might be a reality.

We know NATO will not maintain ABM and CFE, and it is apparently not interested in INF and Open Skies, and even START is in question now. NATO will withdraw troops if only Russia does something? Please, you don't really believe that. With INF gone, Iskander is outdated, it was a treaty-limited weapon. Moving it a few hundred klicks will not make NATO concede anything now.

A huge trust maker would be for all NATO members to publically admit on their web page that pledges to Russia were broken and at least some NATO officials feel responsibility for that. They've spent 27 years denying any verbal assurances, now that those assurances are declassified, they build other narratives about how those pledges did not matter. For there to be trust, there needs to be an admission that trust was there, and was broken, and not by Russia. No troop movements necessary even.

J Urie mal • a day ago • edited ,

Biden isn't going to win the next election Trump will be reelected in 2020. The current strain in relations with Russia has been inherited by Trump and even before he was elected the DNC and Hillary Clinton cooked up the "Russia colusion" story which after $46 million and 2 1/2 years no Russia collision. Of course now we have the Dems trying to impeach Trump which will not go anywhere in the Senate more waste of time and money. However there is the Justice Department I.G. report soon to be released and many of the people who brought you the Russia colusion hoax will be named. The Justice Department has an ongoing criminal investigation into the key players and will undoubtedly result in indictments and prosecutions.
The real reason all of this is going on is because the establishment both Dem's & Repub's along with the deep state look at Trump as an outsider who is tipping over their apple cart i.e. he is changing the foreign policy direction and they don't like it one bit so they create fake issues to try and stop him.
After his reelection I predict that more normal relations with Russia will resume.

dorotea Roma Ilto • 14 hours ago ,

Nowadays the actual attacks are manifested as 'hybrid warfare'. Of course Russia took the US intervention and financing of Chechen rebels as an attack back in the 2000 ties. She took fermenting and financing of the Georgian rose revolution as a hybrid attack, same as promises made to pres. Saakashvili to support him militarily and politically after his attack on Tskhinvali were taken as a hybrid attack. Same goes for both of the first color revolution in Ukraine, and then the Revolution of dignity of 2014 that pushed ultra-right government to power in Ukraine. In fact the NATO promise to both Georgia and Ukraine to take them in as members in 2008 right after Putin's warning in 2007 was the first move in the 'hybrid war'. The West had been warned, yet it decided to bulldoze its way across Eurasia and triggered the confrontation. The placings of Aegises ashore in Poland and Romania was the cherry on top. There can be be no meaningful compromise until the West backs off on the NATO enlargement. That 2008 conference was what had reanimated the image of the collective West as adversary for Russia.

What both sides should strive for though is at the very least to diminish the degree of danger to the planet. Russia would not back off because she finds it easy enough to corner individual EU states into minimal economic cooperation - Germany is already in recession and there is no way they are going to continue damaging their economy for the sake of US politics. And then there is China. When the Russians cannot buy goods from Germans they go for made in China, which in turn gets China secure oil and gas from Russia. Which make the repeat of pre-WW II situation with blockade on Japan pretty much impossible. Get realistic, the West is loosing this one and should count her chickens already.

Roma Ilto dorotea • 14 hours ago ,

Well, then the sanctions will continue, as will the policy of keeping Russian in check in the EU gas market.
What's interesting is that NATO never attacked Russia or threatened to attack Russia. Seems to me that Putin is simply using the expansion as a pretext for military aggression against the neighboring states. It's what the USSR did in 1939 against Finland. According the Soviet side, the war started after Finland attacked the Soviet Union...

dorotea Roma Ilto • 14 hours ago ,

Russia *needs* the sanctions for at least another 5 years. Her milk and beef production is still lagging compared to the deceased USSR and the only way her greedy oligarchs will heavily invest in cow herd rearing is to continue to block the Eastern European milk products to enter Russia. Chicken, eggs, pork and veggies are already up to speed, wheat production is exploding, the salmon breeding programme have started so the Norway is not getting her market back, bu the cow herds take longer to rear.
The Power of Siberia pipeline is being certified and filled right now - China would receive her first delivery of piped Russian gas in 2020, so it is good that EU is prepping or the squeeze - they are not going to continue getting unlimited cheap Russian gas, because Power of Siberia II is in the works.

Every individual NATO member had attacked Russia in the past 4 centuries ( including small but meaningful US contingent in the 1918), and some non-member allies had stomped those fields as well. So the Russians are not taking any chances with the buffer zone. All of Russia expansions to the West have always started with West invading first - then being rolled back league by league. But seriously - ? Russians can live with Europe staying where she is - if in turn Europe can learn to respect her civilization borders. The move on Ukraine and Georgia was not a wise one.

[Nov 07, 2019] Note on the the degradation of the elite.

Notable quotes:
"... There is a collection of Democratic and Republican politicians and think tanks funded by various corporations and governments and bureaucrats in the government agencies mostly all devoted to the Empire, but also willing to stab each other in the back to obtain power. They don't necessarily agree on policy details. ..."
"... They don't oppose Trump because Trump is antiwar. Trump isn't antiwar. Or rather, he is antiwar for three minutes here and there and then he advocates for war crimes. ..."
"... He is a fairly major war criminal based on his policies in Yemen. But they don't oppose him for that either or they would have been upset by Obama. They oppose Trump because he is incompetent, unpredictable and easily manipulated. And worst of all, he doesn't play the game right, where we pretend we intervene out of noble humanitarian motives. This idiot actually say he wants to keep Syrian oil fields and Syria's oil fields aren't significant to anyone outside Syria. ..."
"... Our policies are influenced in rather negative ways by various foreign countries, but would be embarrassed to go to the extremes one regularly sees from liberals talking about Russian influence ..."
Nov 07, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

Donald 11.07.19 at 4:37 am 64

" In a sense, the current NeoMcCartyism (Russophobia, Sinophobia) epidemic in the USA can partially be viewed as a yet another sign of the crisis of neoliberalism: a desperate attempt to patch the cracks in the neoliberal façade using scapegoating -- creation of an external enemy to project the problems of the neoliberal society.

I would add another, pretty subjective measure of failure: the degradation of the elite. When you look at Hillary, Trump, Biden, Warren, Harris, etc, you instantly understand what I am talking about. They all look like the second-rate, if not the third rate politicians. Also, the Epstein case was pretty symbolic."

I had decided to stay on the sidelines for the most part after making a few earlier comments, but I liked this summary, except I would give Warren more credit. She is flawed like most politicians, but she has made some of the right enemies within the Democratic Party.

On Trump and " the Deep State", there is no unified Deep State. There is a collection of Democratic and Republican politicians and think tanks funded by various corporations and governments and bureaucrats in the government agencies mostly all devoted to the Empire, but also willing to stab each other in the back to obtain power. They don't necessarily agree on policy details.

They don't oppose Trump because Trump is antiwar. Trump isn't antiwar. Or rather, he is antiwar for three minutes here and there and then he advocates for war crimes.

He is a fairly major war criminal based on his policies in Yemen. But they don't oppose him for that either or they would have been upset by Obama. They oppose Trump because he is incompetent, unpredictable and easily manipulated. And worst of all, he doesn't play the game right, where we pretend we intervene out of noble humanitarian motives. This idiot actually say he wants to keep Syrian oil fields and Syria's oil fields aren't significant to anyone outside Syria.

But yes, scapegoating is a big thing with liberals now. It's pathetic. Our policies are influenced in rather negative ways by various foreign countries, but would be embarrassed to go to the extremes one regularly sees from liberals talking about Russian influence .

For the most part, if we have a horrible political culture nearly all the blame for that is homegrown.

Donald 11.07.19 at 4:40 am (no link)

Sigh. Various typos above. Here is one --

Our policies are influenced in rather negative ways by various foreign countries, but would be embarrassed to go to the extremes one regularly sees from liberals talking about Russian influence.
--

I meant to say I would be embarrassed to go to the extremes one regularly sees from liberals talking about Russian influence.

[Nov 06, 2019] American Conspiracies Cover-ups by Douglas Cirignano

Notable quotes:
"... On a more constructive & positive note, regarding Assange & Flynn, i thought the X22 Report was not bad yesterday: at least he sees how the Deep State specifically operating within GCHQ & the CIA, desperately need Julian Assange entirely 'unavailable' for comment. ..."
OffGuardian
JFK, 9/11, the Fed, rigged elections, suppressed cancer cures and the greatest conspiracies of our time Editor

In today's world, the phrase "conspiracy theory" is pejorative and has a negative connotation. To many people, a conspiracy theory is an irrational, over-imaginative idea endorsed by people looking for attention and not supported by the mainstream media or government.

History shows, though, that there have been many times when governments or individuals have participated in conspiracies. It would be naïve to think that intelligence agencies, militaries, government officials, and politicians don't sometimes cooperate in covert, secretive ways. Following are five instances when it's been proven that the government engaged in a conspiracy.

THE GULF OF TONKIN RESOLUTION

On August 4, 1964, Captain John J. Herrick, the commander of the USS Maddox, a US Navy vessel that was on an intelligence-gathering mission in the Gulf of Tonkin, reported to the White House and Pentagon that North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired torpedoes at his ship, and, so, the Maddox had fired back.

Two days later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified to the Congress that he was certain that the Maddox had been attacked. On August 7, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed, the Congressional act that allowed President Johnson free reign to commence war; Johnson immediately ordered air strikes on North Vietnam and the Vietnam War -- which would eventually kill fifty-eight thousand Americans and two million Asians -- was underway.

Since then, it has been shown and proven that no North Vietnamese boats ever fired on the Maddox, and that McNamara had been untruthful when he testified before Congress. According to the official publication of the Naval Institute,

once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full US involvement in the Vietnam War."

In the weeks prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, South Vietnamese ships had been attacking posts in North Vietnam in conjunction with the CIA's Operation 34A. According to many inside sources, the Johnson administration wanted a full-scale war in Vietnam and through Operation 34A was trying to provoke North Vietnam into an attack that would give Johnson an excuse to go to war. But when McNamara was asked by the Congress on August 7 if these South Vietnam attacks had anything to do with the US military and CIA, McNamara lied and said no.

Within hours after reporting that the Maddox had been attacked, Captain Herrick was retracting his statements and reporting to the White House and Pentagon that "in all likelihood" an over-eager sonar man had been mistaken and that the sonar sounds and images that he originally thought were enemy torpedoes were actually just the beat of the Maddox's own propellers.

Herrick reported that there was a good probability that there had been no attack on the Maddox, and suggested "complete reevaluation before any action is taken."

McNamara saw these new, updated reports and discussed them with President Johnson early in the afternoon of August 4. Even though this was so, on the evening of August 4, President Johnson went on national television and announced to the American public that North Vietnam had engaged in "unprovoked aggression" and, so, the US military was retaliating.

A few days after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson remarked, "Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish."

Recently, new documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident have been declassified and according to Robert Hanyok, a historian for the National Security Agency, these documents show that the NSA deliberately "distorted intelligence" andand "altered documents" to make it appear that an attack had occurred on August 4.

When President Lyndon Johnson misrepresented to the American public and said he knew that North Vietnam had attacked a US ship, and when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lied to the Congress and said he was sure that the Maddox had been attacked and that the CIA had nothing to do with South Vietnam aggression, and when NSA officials falsified information to make it appear that there had been an attack on the Maddox, that was a government conspiracy.

OPERATION NORTHWOODS

In 1962, the most powerful and highest ranking military officials of the US government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt strongly that the communist leader Fidel Castro had to be removed from power and, so, came up with a plan to justify an American invasion of Cuba.

The plan, entitled Operations Northwoods, was presented to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, and was signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer.

Operations Northwoods was a proposal for a false flag operation, a plan in which a military organizes an attack against its own country and then frames and blames the attack on another country for the purpose of the purpose of initiating hostilities and declaring war on that country.

The proposal was originally labeled Top Secret but was made public on November 18, 1997, by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. The complete Operation Northwoods paper was published online by the National Security Archive on April 30, 2001, and this once-secret government document can now be read by anyone.

The actions that General Lemnitzer and the other chiefs wanted to d to take under Operations Northwoods are shocking. According to the plan, CIA and military personnel and hired provocateurs would commit various violent acts and these acts would be blamed on Castro to "create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility" and "put the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances."

One of the most ambitious plans of Operation Northwoods was to blow up a plane in midflight. The strategy was to fill a civilian airplane with CIA and military personnel who were registered under fake ID's; an exact duplicate plane -- an empty military drone aircraft -- would take off at the same exact time.

The plane of fake passengers would land at a military base but the empty drone plane would fly over Cuba and crash in the ocean, supposedly a victim of Cuban missiles. "Casualty lists in US newspapers" and conducting "fake funerals for mock-victims" would cause "a helpful wave of national indignation" in America.

The Operation Northwoods proposal also states: "We could blow up a US ship and blame Cuba." Whether the ship was to be empty or full of US soldiers is unclear. The document also says: "Hijacking attempts against US civil air and surface craft should be encouraged."

Some of the recommendations of Operation Northwoods would have surely led to serious injuries and even deaths of Cuban and American civilians. The plan suggests:

We could sink a boatload of Cubans on route to Florida (real or simulated)."

And:

We could foster attempts on lives of anti-Castro Cubans in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized We could explode a few bombs in carefully chosen spots."

Lemnitzer and the chiefs wanted many of these staged terrorist attacks to be directed at the Guantanamo Bay United States Naval Base in Cuba. The plans were:

"Start riots near the entrance to the base" "lob mortar shells from outside the base to inside the base" "blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires" "burn aircraft on airbase (sabotage)" "sabotage ship in harbor; large fires -- napalm."

When Secretary of Defense McNamara was presented with the Operation Northwoods plan, he either stopped and rejected the plan himself or passed it on to President Kennedy and JFK then rejected it. But if Kennedy and McNamara had agreed with the plan, then the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to begin enacting Operation Northwoods "right away, within a few months."

Even though Operation Northwoods was never initiated, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the other highest-ranking military officials of the United States Government planned to organize violent attacks on Americans and anti-Castro Cuban citizens, knowing those attacks could severely injure and kill those citizens, and when they planned to blame those attacks on Cuba and then use that as an excuse to invade Cuba, that was a government conspiracy.

FBI AND THE MAFIA

In March 1965, the FBI had the house of New England organized crime boss Raymond Patriarca wiretapped and overheard two mobsters, Joseph Barboza and Vincent Flemmi, asking Patriarca for permission to kill another gangster, Edward Deegan. Two days later, Deegan's blood-soaked body was found dead in a Boston alley.

Within days, an official FBI report confirmed that Joseph Barboza and three other mobsters were the murderers. Instead of those men going to prison for murder, though, three years later a man named Joseph Salvati was brought to trial for the murder of Edward Deegan. At that trial Joseph Barboza testified and lied that Salvati was one of the murderers. On the basis of Barboza's testimony, Joseph Salvati was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

At that time, in the mid 1960s, the FBI was being pressured more and more to do something to stop organized crime. The bureau began using members of the mafia -- criminals and murderers -- to inform against fellow mafia members. Joseph Barboza was one of these FBI-protected, paid informants. The FBI didn't want Barboza to go to prison for the murder of Deegan because they wanted him to continue infiltrating the mafia and testifying against other mafia members.

The bureau, apparently, did want a conviction in the Deegan murder case, though, and, so, let Barboza lie under oath and let a man they knew to be innocent, Joseph Salvati, go to prison.

The Witness Protection Program was first created for Joseph Barboza, and Barboza was the first mafia informant to be protected under the program. After helping to convict a number of mobsters, Barboza was sent off to live in California. While under the Witness Protection Program, Barboza committed at least one more murder, and probably more.

On trial for a murder in California, FBI officials showed up for Joseph Barboza's trial and testified on his behalf, helping Barboza to get a light sentence.

Joseph Salvati ended up serving thirty years in prison for a murder that he was innocent of. During that thirty-year period, lawyers for Salvati requested documents from the FBI that would have proved Salvati's innocence, but the bureau refused to release them.

Finally, in 1997, other evidence came forth suggesting Salvati's innocence and the governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, granted Salvati's release. A few years later, the FBI was ordered to release all its reports on the case; hundreds of documents showed the FBI knew that Barboza was a murderer, that he had murdered Edward Deegan, and that Joseph Salvati had had nothing to do with the crime.

Salvati was exonerated in a court of law, and was eventually awarded millions of dollars in a civil lawsuit against the government. (Three other defendants were also exonerated. At the 1968 trial, Joseph Barboza had testified that three other men -- men who were also not guilty -- had participated in Deegan's murder. These three innocent men were, with Salvati, also sent to prison.)

Perhaps the most shocking thing that the FBI documents showed, though, was that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself knew Salvati was innocent and that Barboza had killed Deegan.

Hoover was working closely, almost daily, with the agents handling Joseph Barboza, and it was probably Hoover directing the operation. The congressional committee that investigated the case was the House Committee on Government Reform and Congressman Dan Burton was the chairman.

When asked by CBS's 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace "Did J. Edgar Hoover know all this? " Burton replied:

"Yes . . . It's one of the greatest failures in the history of American justice J. Edgar Hoover knew Salvati was innocent. He knew it and his name should not be emblazoned on the FBI headquarters. We should change the name of that building."

Congressman Burton claimed there was evidence that there were more cases when the FBI did the same sorts of things they did in the Joseph Salvati case; when Burton and his committee requested the files on these cases, the Attorney General and the White House refused to release them.

When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and top FBI officials let a known murderer lie and perjure himself in a courtroom, when they let four men they knew to be innocent suffer in the hell of a prison cell for thirty years, and when they deliberately covered that up for decades, that was a government conspiracy.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

In 1939, Albert Einstein and two other European physicists sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt informing Roosevelt that the German government was working on developing the science that could lead to the creation of a nuclear bomb. FDR immediately formed a committee to look into the idea of the US government making an atomic bomb.

In 1942, the Manhattan Project, the United States program to build a nuclear bomb, headed by General Leslie R. Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers, was formed.

The program existed from 1942–1946, spent two billion dollars, had plants and factories in thirty cities, and employed 130,000 workers. But virtually no one knew about it. The Manhattan Project is considered the "Greatest Secret Ever Kept."

The US government wanted to keep the Project a secret lest Germany or one of America's other enemies found out about it and built -- more quickly -- a larger, better bomb. In the early 1940s, when American scientists began working on splitting atoms and nuclear fission, US government officials asked the scientists to not publish any reports on the work in scientific journals. The work was kept quiet.

In 1943, when newspapers began reporting on the large Manhattan Project construction going on in a few states, the newly formed United States Government Office of Censorship asked newspapers and broadcasters to avoid discussing "atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission . . . the use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials" or anything else that could expose the project. The press kept mum. The government didn't talk about the Manhattan Project, the press didn't report on it, and the public knew nothing about it.

Not even the 130,000 Manhattan Project laborers knew they were building an atom bomb.

In 1945, a Life magazine article wrote that before Japan was attacked with a-bombs, "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved."

The workers were told they were doing an important job for the government, but weren't told what the job was, and didn't understand the full import of the mysterious, daily tasks they were doing. The laborers were warned that disclosing the Project's secrets was punishable by ten years in prison, and a hefty financial fine.

Whole towns and cities were built where thousands of Manhattan Project workers lived and worked but these thousands didn't know they were helping to build nuclear bombs.

The Manhattan Project finally became known to the public on August 6, 1945, when President Harry Truman announced that America had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

Truman, himself, had not been informed of the Manhattan Project until late April 1945.

When the government kept the purpose of the Manhattan Project a secret from the press, from the public, from America's enemies, from Harry Truman, and even from the 130,000 laborers who worked for the Manhattan Project, that was a government conspiracy.

THE CHURCH COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION

In the early 1970s, after the Watergate affair and investigative reports by the New York Times, it became apparent that the CIA and other US intelligence agencies might be engaging in inappropriate and illegal activities. In 1975, the Church Committee, named after the Committee's chairman Senator Frank Church, was formed to investigate abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS.

The Church Committee reports are said to constitute the most extensive investigations of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Many disturbing facts were revealed. According to the final report of the Committee, US intelligence agencies had been engaging in "unlawful or improper conduct" and "intelligence excesses, at home and abroad" since the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt.

The report added that "intelligence agencies have undermined the Constitutional rights of citizens" and "checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied."

One of the most well-known revelations of the Committee was the CIA's so-called "Family Jewels," a report that detailed the CIA's misdeeds dating back to Dwight Eisenhower's presidency. The committee also reported on the NSA's SHAMROCK and MINARET programs; under these programs the NSA had been intercepting, opening, and reading the telegrams and mail of thousands of private citizens.

The Church Committee also discovered and exposed the FBI's COINTELPRO program, the bureau's program to covertly destroy and disrupt any groups or individuals that J. Edgar Hoover felt were bad for America. Some of the movements and groups that the FBI tried to discredit and destroy were the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr.

The most alarming thing that the Church Committee found, though, was that the CIA had an assassination program. It was revealed that the CIA assassinated or had tried to assassinate Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Raphael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, General Rene Schneider of Chile, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and other political leaders throughout the world.

The Committee learned about the different ways the CIA had developed to kill and assassinate people: inflicting cancer, inflicting heart attacks, making murders look like suicides, car accidents, boating accidents, and shootings. At one point, CIA Director William Colby presented to the Committee a special "heart attack gun" that the CIA had created. The gun was able to shoot a small poison-laden dart into its victim. The dart was so small as to be undetectable; the victim's death from the poison would appear to be a heart attack, so no foul play would be suspected.

In response to the Church Committee report, in 1976 President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11,905, which forbade employees of the US government from engaging in or conspiring to engage in political assassinations.

In that same year, the Senate approved Senate Resolution 400, which established the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee responsible for providing vigilant oversight over the intelligence agencies.

Many former CIA employee-whistleblowers and other people, though, claim that US intelligence agencies are still acting in improper ways. In 2008, it was revealed that the CIA had hired Blackwater, a private company made up of ex-Navy Seals, to track down and assassinate suspected terrorists.

Later in the 2000s, when the Congress formed a committee to investigate if CIA waterboarding and other methods of interrogation constituted torture, congressmen complained that they couldn't get to the bottom of the matter because CIA officials and the CIA director were lying to the congressional committee.

Forty-five years after the revelations of the Church Committee, it seems US intelligence agencies are still engaging in covert and improper conduct.

When US intelligence agencies and the CIA plot to influence the affairs of foreign nations, when the CIA plots assassinations and assassinates foreign leaders and political dissidents, when the CIA develops new ways to kill and assassinate and interrogate and torture, and when the CIA keeps all that from Congress, the press, and the public, that's a government conspiracy.

*

If these five instances of government engaging in conspiracies have been proven to be true -- and they have been -- isn't it logical to assume that government agencies may have engaged in other conspiracies? It is the very nature of intelligence agencies and militaries to act in secretive, conspiratorial ways.

The phrase "conspiracy theory" shouldn't have a negative connotation. Politics always plays out with backroom handshakes. It is the suggestion of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups that government agencies and officials and the special interests that influence them are often engaging in conspiratorial actions, and that conspiracies have been behind some of the most iconic and important events of American history.

A conspiracy theorist was regaling a friend with one conspiracy theory after another. Finally, the friend interrupted and said, "I bet I know what would happen if God Himself appeared out of the sky right now, looked down at us, and said, 'There is no conspiracy.' I bet you would look up and say, 'So the conspiracy goes higher than we thought.'"

Perhaps if the Almighty appeared to inform us that politicians and governments and government officials don't act in secretive, covert, conspiratorial ways, then we could accept that.

But when the evidence indicates otherwise .

Theories questioning if multiple people might have shot at JFK, or if interior bombs brought down the World Trade Center, or if somebody was able to rig the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections can make for dramatic, sensational storytelling.

But it is not the purpose of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups to be sensational; the purpose of this book is to talk about "conspiracy realities" that can hopefully give us a deeper and more meaningful understanding of politics.

If elements in the intelligence agencies participated in assassinating President Kennedy, then how can the intelligence agencies be better controlled? If elements in the government allowed or caused 9/11 to happen to give us an excuse to go to war in the Middle East, then how much of the War on Terror is disinformation and propaganda?

If presidential elections can be rigged, then how can we have fairer, uncorrupted elections? If secretive influences behind the scenes, a Deep State, are controlling our social, political, and financial systems for their own selfish purposes, then it would benefit us to expose who and what these secretive influences are.

American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups may give us a glimpse into the way that government and politics work.

Or don't work.

This is an extract from American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups , by Douglas Cirignano published by Simon&Schuster . It can be purchased in hard copy, digital and audio-book form through Amazon and other booksellers.

Dungroanin

It is revelatory how the DS minions work here btl.

You are seen like rabbits in the lights you are.

Tim Jenkins
Yoyoyo, that's why they have names like 'Crispy', before we burn them to a crisp: and they just can't believe what they are seeing & reading: left dumbfounded & speechless,
every darn time 🙂 LouisP. needs back up from NormP. , coz' LouisP. has lost the plot & will to contest anything constructively & factually, simply because the DS suckers are ALL out of Ammo. It's great fun when all yer' ducks are in a row and all you have to do is pull the trigger. 😉

On a more constructive & positive note, regarding Assange & Flynn, i thought the X22 Report was not bad yesterday: at least he sees how the Deep State specifically operating within GCHQ & the CIA, desperately need Julian Assange entirely 'unavailable' for comment.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/2470MpTKzOI?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Now, all we have to do is re-educate Legally, the minds of the masses, who got wholly suckered by the Deep state controlled & censored MSM: because in courts of Law, we cannot lose in the longterm ! Just be patient and always remember to ridicule the sheeple that relied upon the WAPO & NYT, (like LouisP. did) and of course, do have extra good fun ridiculing The Guardian readers, above all else 🙂 We must change Media & Communications Law, more urgently than any thing else, FIRST ! But, High Tide has been and left 'hasbeens' exposed & lying on the beeches, naked, like driftwood, ready to burn 😉

Dungroanin
I posted comment on this on the other DS article
https://www.oscr.org.uk/media/3771/2019-10-31-statecraft-s33-report-pdf.pdf

IoS / II busted as not charities.

TheThinker
Another of interest regarding JE And the MSM sitting on information

https://mobile.twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1191716801178034180

wardropper
' the purpose of this book is to talk about "conspiracy realities" that can hopefully give us a deeper and more meaningful understanding of politics.'

Frankly, I don't want "a deeper and more meaningful understanding of politics".
I want the criminal conspiracy realities to stop and for those guilty of carrying them out to be brought to justice.

US love all around

Hijacking attempts against US civil air and surface craft should be encouraged.

"Encouraged?

Tha's lovely! and more lovely, this "Operations Northwoods" was planned by highest ranking military officials of the US government.

Martin Usher
I recently re-read a biography called "A Man Called Intrepid" about the life and work of a relatively low key Canadian, William Stephenson. This fellow pretty much wrote the book on the use of intelligence and dirty tricks in warfare. He worked closely with Churchill and Roosevelt, acting as a private go-between back before the US was involved in WW2 (and was heavily non-interventionist). He organized a huge black operation, an operation that was initially based in New York. The book is worth reading because once read it takes little interpolation to get from where they were in the 1940s to where we are today.

Stephenson didn't invent dirty tricks, of course, but he understood their value and the role of propaganda. His role is very much like Edison's in invention -- Thomas Edison didn't so much invent machines as invent industrial scale research and development, he industrialized the process and so vastly increased its scope and power.

Antonym
Japan Mil. Inc. was pretty early in the false flag incident business: 1931 with their Mukden incident; their start of their invasion of Manchuria, as North Eastern China was called than (wonder why?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident
Antonym
They didn't even damage their own railway track: more like the real deal compared to 9/11.

They lied about the terrorists, they lied about the planes (including 265 dead in plane crashes), they lied about the building collapses and yet you believe they didn't lie about the 2,735 who allegedly died in the buildings when they could so easily fake it as the evidence shows. Who's more a nutjob – me or you?

George Mc
"So 9/11 is still too recent to call out as an inside conspiracy, is it? Only 18 years old so it can't be called out."

9/11 will never be called out as far as the mainstream media is concerned. Can you imagine the effect if they did? The entire edifice of "The West" would collapse and the Islamic world would explode in deservedly righteous fury. The case is similar, though on a much smaller scale, with that of Tony Blair. He was exposed as a liar and should have been tried as a war criminal. But there was no way that was going to happen since it would necessarily lead to the Western governments throwing up their hands and admitting that they were conscienceless manipulative bastards. In short, the game would be up. On the one hand, 9/11 and Blair's bullshit serve the ruling class interests and, on the other hand – and more importantly – the abandonment of 9/11 and Blair would mean the wrecking of the whole scam. (I am aware that Blair is much more expendable than the official narrative of 9/11 so it is feasible that he will "go down" later but not until sufficient distance is established between him and the powers that be).

mark
When they can't do anything else, they'll offer up Shady Wahabia as a convenient whipping boy, to divert attention from Kosherstan. This is their fall back position. Offer up the Shadies as the Lee Harvey Oswald of the operation.
Hugh O'Neill
BigB. Your naïveté is almost touching: you claim archives as truth, despite all that we know about the CIA deliberately creating false archives. Just as Orwell said: Who controls the present controls the past, controls the future. Watergate burglar Hunt admitted under oath that he had altered records to show that JFK had ordered the assassination of Diem: he did so so as to tarnish his reputation amongst Catholics. I also recall that your beloved scholar Zelikow was taken to task for doing much the same thing in the JFK archives.

Your logic is bizarre: you think Lemnitzer was part of the assassination plot. But if that were so, then how did he get away with it? Might it not require huge swathes of the military, CIA and State departments and the entire MSM to be complicit.

Iy would seem that you are flogging a dead horse on this website where we esteem the principled scholarship of decent men like Douglass, Talbot, Curtin and many many more. Do yourself and the rest of us a favour. Try and think more logically/ Which part of Eisenhower's Valedictory did you not understand?

BigB
I know I am flogging a dead horse: which is why I gave up. The DNSA archive revived my interest. You and I could have sorted this years ago with a comparative reading of Stern and Douglass side by side. The offer is still open.

The CIA did not fabricate the ExComm tapes. Let us make that perfectly clear. That is a non-argument. They probably did not even know about them. They were never meant to be made public. That RKF was the chief hawk for Cuban invasion is clear and negates the narrative construction that they were against the Unspeakable. They were part of it. End of.

This allows me to reach exactly the same conclusion that Lemnitzer and Dulles were involved. Without the whole fabricated 'turning to peace' constructivism and an overlay about the Unspeakable. There is hardly anything that distinguishes the Unspeakable in my eyes. Apart from rhetorical speech-acts and narrative constructivism. The facts posted and Stern's books speak for themselves. You do not even address the fact that Stern is selectively mis-presented. You cannot read about the ExComm version then come up with another alternative version without critical scrutiny. Not without serious criticism of the narrative made. To repeat: if RFK was the chief hawk and not the JCOS – so who were the Unspeakable.

"The [ExComm] tapes, however, contradict the book [Thirteen Days] in several fundamental ways and tell a very different story -- one that is much more complex, interesting, and subtle. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the tapes actually expose Thirteen Days as not just selective or slanted history, which is the common affliction of personal diaries and memoirs, but rather as the capstone of an effort to embellish, if not manipulate, the history of the missile crisis to Robert Kennedy's perceived advantage."

"As noted earlier, Robert Kennedy was one of the most unwaveringly hawkish participants in the ExComm meetings. On October 16, the first day of the meetings, RFK suggested using the American naval base at Guantánamo to stage an incident that would justify military intervention: "You know, sink the Maine again or something."[14] He also suggested that "we should just get into it [attack Cuba] and get it over with and take our losses." On the final day of crisis meetings, October 27, RFK strenuously opposed any linkage between the Soviet missiles in Cuba and the U.S. missiles in Turkey"

" It's not just television "documentaries" that perpetuate this kind of fiction. Just this year, David Talbot, author of Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, declared that President Kennedy's "only key support [for a non-military solution] in the increasingly tense Cabinet Room meetings came from his brother Bobby and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara."[22] Talbot claimed that RFK "matured from a knee-jerk hawk to a wise and restrained diplomat" during the ExComm meetings.[23] In fact, Robert Kennedy, along with McNamara, consistently opposed any terms involving the U.S. missiles in Turkey well into the final hours of "Black Saturday," so-called because if a deal failed to materialize, a superpower clash seemed imminent and unavoidable. Talbot's account attempts to legitimize the myths in Thirteen Days."

"Of course, Kennedy never abandoned his commitment, even after the missile crisis, to undermine the Cuban regime and get rid of Fidel Castro."

That is enough to substantiate my claim that Douglass and Talbot based their accounts on fabrication. Curtin merely repeats these claims. But I am flogging a dead horse if people will not re-appraise their metaphysicla truth-claims in the light of hard evidence. Believe what you want. Don't let facts get in the way.

https://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2007/10/cmc-45th.html

Hugh O'Neill
Your take on events might be accurate but you rather miss the point; the original article simply contends that JFK was murdered by the state in a coup d'etat, which is still denied to this day. Whether he deserved to die (presumably you think so) is immaterial. By my simple logic, he couldn't have been all bad if the really really bad guys murdered him. Furthermore, such logic is also consistent with JFK's political views before his Presidency e.g. his support for post colonial leaders like Lumumba, Sukarno etc. and his views on peace e.g. "war will continue until that distant day when the conscientious objector is revered as the warrior is today. Blessed are the peace makers. May you find some in your tortured illogical mind.
BigB
The original article claims Northwoods was never implemented: which is only partially true. It was rejected because it was overt. Covert operations – Operation Mongoose – where carried out until 1963. They were run by the Kennedy regime as the highest priority. As I have now provided several archives to back up.

We can easily establish the facts without resort to comments about my tortured illogical mind. The actual Kennedy's have nothing to do with this. It is the invented Kennedy's that are constructions of the imagination in comtemporary minds. That is illogical, Hugh. For everything anyone contends about the imaginary Kennedy's – there is a primary historic record – that prevents the invention.

It still needs contextualising: but out and out fabrications – such as Douglass and Talbot put forward are easily refuted. Or not. The legend lives on and the facts do not. Not on this site anyway.

Antonym
Quite an effort to blame the Kennedy brothers over the other power brothers, not even mentioned: John Foster Dulles US secretary of State and Allan Dulles boss and co-creator of the CIA. They had already organized coups in Iran and Guatemala, so the intent and experience were there: no need for newbie JFK. This "Cuban project" was commissioned in March 1960; JFK only became president in January 1961.

[Nov 06, 2019] no president I am familiar with, has done in office what was promised in the campaign.

Notable quotes:
"... First the constitution emerging from Philadelphia in 1787 did not contain the bill of rights, a fact prominently exposed when the states refused to ratify the constitution their own representatives at the Philadephia convention voted for. The states said, no to ratification unless and until, as a minimum, the first ten amendments were added. <= I assert the founders and their then corporations d\n want the governed to have any privileges or rights. ..."
"... One of the ongoing impediments to broad American public understanding of the US Constitution is its elevation to 'sacrosanct' status, thus placing it above critical discussion. ..."
"... And then you have the mantra of mass continual frequent typically hypocritical/false/programmed swearing of allegiance to it, and also, of all things, the linked elevation into 'symbolic deity' of a flag. ..."
Nov 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

snake , Nov 6 2019 9:38 utc | 52

Thanks bin @ 23 for article

it noted =>America's representative appointed by the electoral college into the position of CEO of the USA interpreted the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force==> <=to mean=> executive privilege includes the right to assassinate US Citizens ?

WOW! Does that means person of wealth, corporation or foreign government can pay to get the USA to assassinate whom ever?

The article says: The democratic institutions, including the press, ..have been neutered. It notes that the Wealth and power once attributable to Americans is now consoliated inside and located behind the access controlled walls of privately owned corporate enterprise; where the dark hole of board room policy establishes how the corporation wealth and power will rape its next million or so victims...? the article discusses how America's wealth is eqally divided between 99% (wealth of 350,000,000 Americans) = and 1% (wealth of 35,000 in control of America) .

But I do not subscribe to the idea that it is deep state that is the problem. I think the problem lay in the construction of the constitution of the United States.. the deep state is just using the highly skewed distribution of power [between the governed and the governors placed in the constitution) to accommodate their for profit purposes. The constitution was never intended to protect governed Americans from exploitation by those who govern; its purpose was to protect those with the wealth and power from the Americans its federalism was designed to govern. Its pure propaganda that the constitution is to be interpreted as a democratic win for the governed.

First the constitution emerging from Philadelphia in 1787 did not contain the bill of rights, a fact prominently exposed when the states refused to ratify the constitution their own representatives at the Philadephia convention voted for. The states said, no to ratification unless and until, as a minimum, the first ten amendments were added. <= I assert the founders and their then corporations d\n want the governed to have any privileges or rights.

Secondly, it was not until the 17th amendment(1913) that Americans were empowered to vote for who would fill any of the 100 highly paid, very powerful, US Senate jobs, even today, no American can vote for but 2 senators each. <=to date Americans have no say by vote as to who shall be paid to be the President or VP of the USA [<=the electoral colleges determines the President and the states each appoint whomever they wish to the electoral college]. America is a democracy; the USA is a Republic, the states are trickle down versions of the USA.

Thirdly, ratification was invented and placed in the constitution to avoid offering all Americans the chance to decide for themselves if Americans wanted federalism or states rights, or if the excluded persons (Indians and 3/5 of other persons) wanted to be excluded or governed by federalism (federalism destroys states rights); had a popular vote been taken, I believe federalism w\h\b soundly defeated). Ratification (Article VII)<=regime changed [1788] the Articles of Confederation Government (AOCG: Hanson first President of the USA in Congress) [it was the AOCG that defeated the British Armies in America [1777] and that contributed the 1776 Declaration of Independence to the world, not the USA]. After regime change; USA, old British wealth and corporate cronies were back in charge of governing America. Today they might be called the deep state.

Fourthly, We, the American public, are spectators. An audience by Jackrabbit @ 36..

Fifthly, no president I am familiar with, has done in office what was promised in the campaign.

I think the governed must look to the constitution to see how the governors have made this happen.

My take is that civil liberties never existed in America.. the only civil liberties that Americans have ever enjoyed were those expressed in contractual promises (offered in the first 10 <=amendments of the COUS) and that courts were obliged to affirm because it would defeat the propaganda that such rights actually exist. How enforceable do you think a promise in a contract are that governors will not infringe the human rights promises made therein?

Over 200 years, during war time, the governors have suspended such rights and during normal times the only way to prevent infringement has often been to engage lawyers and costly expensive courts.. to remind the governors that it is important for propaganda purposes to honor the promises made in the amendments to the constitution? Its a joke to assume that a clause in an amended contract would be honored when it is inconvenient to the promissors; ie. Julian Assange?

even in the 'good articles', even in 'noble efforts' its pretty hard not to slip into, what? Let's call it, Empire Speak. Or is that Swamp Speak? by: Robert Snefjella @ 42 <= the mind control weapons that fire bullets made of propaganda are extremely powerful..

Robert Snefjella , Nov 6 2019 11:37 utc | 53
Re posted by: snake | Nov 6 2019 9:38 utc | 52

One of the ongoing impediments to broad American public understanding of the US Constitution is its elevation to 'sacrosanct' status, thus placing it above critical discussion.

Its 'supreme' status renders thoughts of ongoing improvement disabled. And then you have the mantra of mass continual frequent typically hypocritical/false/programmed swearing of allegiance to it, and also, of all things, the linked elevation into 'symbolic deity' of a flag.

This is helped along by a frequent stirring rendition of the national anthem, which has bombs exploding for the land of the "brave and the free".

(As an aside note of some curiosity and immeasurable impact, in Canada there is much swearing of allegiance to the very aged titular head of the dysfunctional 'Royal Family' of the UK.) Sigh.

[Nov 06, 2019] More Evidence that The Comey FBI was a Malevolent Clown Show by Larry C Johnson

Notable quotes:
"... If Flynn actually had lied to Strzok and Pientka that fact would have been reflected in the notes and the original 302. But that did not happen. A normal routine would be to write up the 302 and put it into final within five days. That did not happen. The original 302 still has not been produced. However, Ms. Powell has presented exhibits showing that there were other versions of the 302 generated and that substantive, unsupportable changes were made. The "final" 302 essentially made the case that Flynn lied. ..."
"... But Sidney Powell has produced documentary evidence showing that Strzok stated he did not believe that Flynn lied. And there was more FBI misconduct. General Flynn, for example, was not advised of the need to have a lawyer present nor was he shown the transcript of the call that was illegally recorded by the NSA. At no point was he given a chance to correct the record. It was a total setup and designed to paint Flynn as a liar and a collaborator with the Russians. This is malevolently diabolical conduct by law enforcement officers. ..."
Nov 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

I believe in repentance and redemption. But the FBI remains an unrepentant, vile sinner. Yesterday, Tuesday, the FBI and the Department of Justice made a stunning admission in the Michael Flynn case--they mislabeled evidence. DOJ sheepishly admitted that the notes of the interview of Michael Flynn taken by Agent Pientka actually belonged to Agent Strzok and that the notes attributed to Strzok actually belonged to Pientka. Holy Guacamole, Batman. It is still not clear that the FBI is freely confessing its sin and is committed to turning its bureaucratic life around.

There is no good news in this for the government's case. At a minimum it exposes the FBI as incompetent clowns. At worse, it may be evidence of a deliberate effort to deceive the defense and the judge. It has been exposed because of the insistent demands of the principled Sidney Powell, a relentless Honey Badger. That woman will not quit in demanding that General Flynn be treated fairly. She knows right from wrong. Cannot say the same for the FBI. The Bureau is a disgrace.

Now that we know that the FBI mislabeled the notes taken by the FBI agents during their interview of General Flynn, it would appear the entire case is in jeopardy. The foundation of the charge that Flynn lied about his conversation with the Russian Ambassador is predicated on the notes the FBI agents took and then turned into a 302 report. I asked one of my retired FBI buddies (he served as a Special Agent in Charge of a large US city) if the agents were required to date and sign their notes. He replied: No, we did not sign and date notes. They were placed in a 1-A (evidence) Envelope which had our name and the date collected along with the file number and, I believe, the case title. The 1-As were kept as part of the original case file. They were not entered into evidence like other things we collected.

Those notes should have been placed in an "evidence" envelope with the appropriate name and date on the envelope. How could so-called professionals screw up something this basic?

There was something more nefarious afoot. Let's put this into the broader context. If Flynn actually had lied to Strzok and Pientka that fact would have been reflected in the notes and the original 302. But that did not happen. A normal routine would be to write up the 302 and put it into final within five days. That did not happen. The original 302 still has not been produced. However, Ms. Powell has presented exhibits showing that there were other versions of the 302 generated and that substantive, unsupportable changes were made. The "final" 302 essentially made the case that Flynn lied.

But Sidney Powell has produced documentary evidence showing that Strzok stated he did not believe that Flynn lied. And there was more FBI misconduct. General Flynn, for example, was not advised of the need to have a lawyer present nor was he shown the transcript of the call that was illegally recorded by the NSA. At no point was he given a chance to correct the record. It was a total setup and designed to paint Flynn as a liar and a collaborator with the Russians. This is malevolently diabolical conduct by law enforcement officers.

Honey Badger Powell's terrific lawyering and insistence on getting her hands on the evidence the US Government is withholding has now backed the Mueller team into a corner. Sidney Powell has exposed staggering misconduct and malfeasance. Michael Flynn will be exonerated. The only real question is whether or not the prosecutors will be held in contempt and tried.

Jack , 06 November 2019 at 11:55 AM

Larry

Why doesn't the FBI, just record an interview? It's not that video cameras and tape recorders are a new invention. Is the objective to manipulate using written interpretations of conversations?

Mr Zarate , 06 November 2019 at 12:16 PM
I'm worried there won't be any popcorn left by the time we get to the end of this sorry saga. It would be nice to think that success by Sidney Powell might be the start of the finale in this duplicitous story but I doubt it. The world is upside down and to many this is now a matter of belief not evidence, something that has been largely caused be an entirely partisan mainstream media (interested only in improving its revenue stream) and what can only be described as a totally gullible section of the voting public.
Upstate NY'er , 06 November 2019 at 01:14 PM
One thing, Flynn has one hell of a lawsuit against his prior lawyers - a well known swamp law firm. Egregious malpractice if not outright conspiring with the prosecutors.

LA Sox Fan -> Jack... , 06 November 2019 at 06:16 PM

FBI interviews are not recorded because if they were, then the interview subject could not be falsely charged with the felony of lying to a federal investigator.
Coleen Rowley -> Jack... , 06 November 2019 at 10:32 PM
I need to write about the long history of the FBI honoring J. Edgar Hoover's policy, even countering former Director Louis Freeh, after a meeting in mid 1990's with a federal judge who had same suggestion, ORDERED the FBI to begin tape recording confessions and even after many states like Minnesota, began to find their own constitutions required tape-recording (at least of custodial confessions). After Freeh ordered the FBI to begin tape-recording, a number of SACs argued the advantages for prosecutorial purposes of sticking with the old policy of allowing Agents to write up, from memory and notes, what subjects and witnesses said. The SACs made the point that juries would always tend to believe agents over the word of defendants. So Freeh backed down. Flynn's attorney ought to request these memos documenting how FBI policy was deliberately kept antiquated because it was advantageous.
artemesia said in reply to Upstate NY'er... , 06 November 2019 at 06:12 PM
Perhaps Larry Johnson knows -- Does Michael Flynn have some form of redress agains the government, some established protocol for compensation for the misery and expense he's been put through? Or are lawsuits against former lawyers his only option to try to recoup legal expenses?

Strozk's caree/life is over. An interesting meditation: is he an evil man, or did he get caught up in something larger than he could handle? (He thought he had what it took to swim with the sharks, but he was just a barnacle. Or steelhead trout.)

The "unidentified" supposed whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, is young - early 30s. Age of consent, for sure, but very young, the "age of youthful ambition," a different category from Strozk, the age of damn well should have known better. I would judge Eric -- whom I suspect was at very least put up to carrying out dirty deeds for Biden and careerism -- less harshly than Strozk.

Factotum , 06 November 2019 at 02:58 PM
How did Sidney Powell become involved in this long, on-going case? She can't ethically "solicit" the business, but someone must have put Flynn in touch with her -- at what point. What made Flynn seek legal advice elsewhere.

Flynn seemed so passive about facing these drummed up charges earlier in the case - what exactly was he trying to protect his son about that allegedly caused this legal passivity about his own case.

Love watching this unfold and the lessons in " big government" that come with it. But Flynn having to live out a modern day Greek tragedy is a very high price to pay for our civics lesson.

Factotum said in reply to Factotum... , 06 November 2019 at 07:46 PM
Asked and answered: Powell tussled dramatically in the past with Andrew Weissman over his role in the government's prosecution of Enron steam roller cases. She finally got court vindication for her clients 9 years later.

Why does Andrew Weissman's name keep popping up just about everywhere now, when one is looking in pari delitci (including our now famous Pierre Delecto)?

Brent , 06 November 2019 at 03:04 PM
From what I have read, I gather that the FBI in the Mueller / Comey era has made extensive use of "perjury traps". They then threaten charges to get someone to "flip" on someone bigger, in this case Trump. Flynn wouldn't flip even when they threatened to go after Flynn's son. So they decided to "F" him, as stated by Andrew McCabe.

The FBI has been thoroughly disgraced, and Wray is incapable of cleaning it up. He just wants to keep the dirt under the rug. It is too late for that, it is all coming out. US citizens deserve to know how dirty our FBI and CIA are - they are criminal organizations.

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) , 06 November 2019 at 04:07 PM
Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins. Could it be my Russian paranoia. Nah, I am being unreasonable--those people never had a bad feeling towards Trump's attempts to boost Russian-American relations with Michael Flynn spearheading this effort. Jokes aside, however, I can only imagine how SVR and GRU are enjoying the spectacle. I can only imagine how many "free" promotions and awards can be attach to this thing as a free ride.

[Nov 06, 2019] The demonisation of Russia is all about the long term aim if destabilising, cracking it open and stealing it's resources

Nov 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Richard , Nov 5 2019 8:04 utc | 34

@13 Joost Your comment is spot on. The demonisation of Russia is all about the long term aim if destabilising, cracking it open and stealing it's resources. Russia is, in fact, the woreld's largets and most resource rich nation so its an irresistible target to the insane, greed-driven psychopath's who rule us.

First and foremost amongst those (and the most insane) is Hillary Clinton who it seems maybe preparing for another run at the presidency...a Hillary presidency risks a full out nuclear war.

You see, Hilary and the people who back her (and whom she faithfully serves) genuinely are psychopaths. They lack empathy, care, and humanity. They see only their own need and greed, only their own dysfunctional lust for power and wealth; they don't give a damn what it takes to satisfy their perverse desires and who dies in the process. Psychopaths (blinded by their own perversity) are also bad judges of risk and, in the minds of Hillary and her cabal of psychopaths, they actually do believe that the US could fight a 'limited' nuclear war against Russia, win it and steal all those lovely Russian resources.

The tragic misjudgement here, and why disgusting Hillary and her ilk are so dangerous, is that there is no such thing as a 'limited' nuclear war. A nuclear war would be global. And fatal.

https://richardhennerley.com/2019/10/21/hilary-clinton-is-back-be-afraid-very-afraid/

[Nov 06, 2019] British Government Disinformation Shop Lost Charity Status

Nov 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

The Integrity Initiative, as paid for by the British Foreign Office, Ministry of Defense, NATO and other such entities, will live on as a non-charitable entity with even less transparency. Its website, as well as that of Institute of Statecraft, is down. That it will now have to live in total secrecy will make it more difficult for it to recruit foreign journalists to spread its propaganda.

Since the Integrity Initiative was exposed the British government opened and financed a new secretive shop that will continue to spread anti-Russian disinformation :

On 3rd April, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) minister Alan Duncan revealed his department's 'Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme' - which bankrolls the Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative subsidiary - was funding a new endeavour, Open Information Partnership (OIP).

The announcement, buried in a response to a written parliamentary question, was supremely light on detail - Duncan merely said the effort would "respond to manipulated information in the news, social media and across the public space". Official fanfare was also unforthcoming - there was no accompanying press release, briefing document, or even mention of the launch by any government minister or department via social media channels.

The original proposal for the Open Information Partnership , as released by 'anonymous' , included the Institute of Statecraft , a Media Diversity Institute , Bellingcat , DFR Lab (i.e. the Atlantic Council) and some others in a so called ZINC Network . On the current OIP website the Institute of Statecraft 'charity' is no longer named.

---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the issue:

Tim Hayward provides a list (scroll down) of a large number of articles written here and elsewhere about the Integrity Initiative . Speaking of Bellingcat:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BfLPJpRtyq4RFtHJoNpvWQjmGnyVkfE2HYoICKOGguA/mobilebas

Posted by: NOBTS | Nov 4 2019 18:45 utc | 2

karlof1 , Nov 4 2019 18:49 utc | 3

At Kit Klarenberg's Twitter , there's a long tweet thread further detailing what b has written above. I can't help be wonder how the Monty Python troop would have portrayed the Institute for Statecraft and its parent the Integrity Initiative. It appears that the governments of the English speaking nations became addicted to lying to their citizens @1900 and are unable to kick the habit and instead have actually deepened their addiction. Elsewhere on the planet, it seems that people are learning it's easier to talk straight and transparently with other people and to pool resources and combine efforts to form a community of nations and humanity to better one and all. Seems simple enough to determine which is functional and which isn't.
/div> Oops! Googlehidden. Here's one that might work. An interesting compendium: https://www.comsuregroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Bellingcats-Digital-Toolkit.pdf

Posted by: NOBTS , Nov 4 2019 18:51 utc | 5

Oops! Googlehidden. Here's one that might work. An interesting compendium: https://www.comsuregroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Bellingcats-Digital-Toolkit.pdf

Posted by: NOBTS | Nov 4 2019 18:51 utc | 5

Symen Danziger , Nov 5 2019 11:34 utc | 41
Bellingcat only serves one interest, a propaganda/info laundering shop for NATO, the military industrial complex and some very rich people. The blatant lies about MH17, chemical weapons in Syria, OPCW, Russia, the list goes on and on.

By the time the people in the Netherlands find out how they have been manipulated with the MH17 narrative and the role of Bellingcat in this operation, hopefully they will torch the office of Bellingcat in The Hague and club the survivors to death like the Uktainian Nazi friends of Bellingcat did in Odessa.

The Ukrainian army shot down MH17. It was no accident. The Dutch were also involved with the 2014 coup in the Ukraine. Putting the blame on Russia is a political decision, its not based on facts. Dutch politicians are very dirty people. Burn in hell.

[Nov 06, 2019] Hate Inc. Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another eBook Matt Taibbi Kindle Store

Nov 06, 2019 | www.amazon.com

I thought I understood this and many other things about the journalism business at a young age. I even knew everything that "off the record" entails -- really knew, as if it were a religious tenet -- before I hit junior high. I thought I was an expert.

Then I read Manufacturing Consent .

The book came out in 1988 and I read it a year later, when I was nineteen. It blew my mind.

Along with the documentary Hearts and Minds (about the atrocities of the Vietnam War) and books like Soul on Ice, In the Belly of the Beast, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Manufacturing Consent taught me that some level of deception was baked into almost everything I'd ever been taught about modern American life.

I knew nothing about either of the authors, academics named Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. It seemed odd that a book purporting to say so much about journalism could be written by non-journalists. Who were these people? And how could they claim to know anything about this business?

This was the middle of the George H. W. Bush presidency, still the rah-rah Top Gun eighties. Political earnestness was extremely uncool. America was awesome and hating on America was sad. Noam Chomsky was painted to me as the very definition of uncool, a leaden, hectoring bore.

But this wasn't what I found on the page. Manufacturing Consent is a dazzling book. True, like a lot of co-written books, and especially academic books, it's written in slow, grinding prose. But for its time, it was intellectually flamboyant, wild even.

The ideas in it radiated defiance. Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their famed propaganda model, they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a buzz saw.

The book's central idea was that censorship in the United States was not overt, but covert. The stage-managing of public opinion was "normally not accomplished by crude intervention" but by the keeping of "dissent and inconvenient information" outside permitted mental parameters: "within bounds and at the margins."

The key to this deception is that Americans, every day, see vigorous debate going on in the press. This deceives them into thinking propaganda is absent. Manufacturing Consent explains that the debate you're watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it.

This careful sham is accomplished through the constant, arduous policing of a whole range of internal pressure points within the media business. It's a subtle, highly idiosyncratic process that you can stare at for a lifetime and nonetheless not see.

American news companies at the time didn't (and still don't) forbid the writing of unpatriotic stories. There are no editors who come blundering in, red pen in hand, wiping out politically dangerous reports, in the clumsy manner of Soviet Commissars.

Instead, in a process that is almost 100 percent unconscious, news companies simply avoid promoting dissenting voices. People who are questioners by nature, prodders, pains in the ass -- all good qualities in reporting, incidentally -- get weeded out by bosses, especially in the bigger companies. Advancement is meanwhile strongly encouraged among the credulous, the intellectually unadventurous, and the obedient.

As I would later discover in my own career, there are a lot of C-minus brains in the journalism business. A kind of groupthink is developed that permeates the upper levels of media organizations, and they send unconscious signals down the ranks.

Young reporters learn early on what is and is not permitted behavior. They learn to recognize, almost more by smell than reason, what is and is not a "good story."

Chomsky and Herman described this policing mechanism using the term "flak." Flak was defined as "negative responses to a media statement or program."

They gave examples in which corporate-funded think tanks like The Media Institute or the anti-communist Freedom House would deluge media organizations that ran the wrong kinds of stories with "letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits" and other kinds of pressure.

What was the wrong kind of story? Here we learned of another part of the propaganda model, the concept of worthy and unworthy victims . Herman and Chomsky defined the premise as follows:

A propaganda system will consistently portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy.

Under this theory, a Polish priest murdered by communists in the Reagan years was a "worthy" victim, while rightist death squads in U.S.-backed El Salvador killing whole messes of priests and nuns around the same time was a less "worthy" story.

What Herman and Chomsky described was a system of informal social control, in which the propaganda aims of the state were constantly reinforced among audiences, using a quantity-over-quality approach.

Here and there you might see a dissenting voice, but the overwhelming institutional power of the media (and the infrastructure of think-tanks and politicians behind the private firms) carried audiences along safely down the middle of a surprisingly narrow political and intellectual canal.

One of their examples was Vietnam, where the American media was complicit in a broad self-abnegating effort to blame itself for "losing the war."

An absurd legend that survives today is that CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, after a two-week trip to Vietnam in 1968, was key in undermining the war effort.

Cronkite's famous "Vietnam editorial" derided "the optimists who have been wrong in the past," and villainously imparted that the military's rosy predictions of imminent victory were false. The more noble course, he implied, was to face reality, realize "we did the best we could" to defend democracy, and go home.

The Cronkite editorial sparked a "debate" that continues to the present.

On the right, it is said that we should have kept fighting in Vietnam, in spite of those meddling commies in the media.

The progressive take is that Cronkite was right, and we should have realized the war wasn't "winnable" years earlier. Doing so would have saved countless American lives, this thinking goes.

These two positions still define the edges of what you might call the "fairway" of American thought.

The uglier truth, that we committed genocide on a fairly massive scale across Indochina -- ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three countries -- is pre-excluded from the history of that period.

Instead of painful national reconciliation surrounding episodes like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the CIA-backed anti-communist massacres in places like Indonesia, or even the more recent horrors in Middle Eastern arenas like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, we mostly ignore narrative-ruining news about civilian deaths or other outrages.

A media that currently applauds itself for calling out the lies of Donald Trump (and they are lies) still uses shameful government-concocted euphemisms like "collateral damage." Our new "Democracy Dies in Darkness" churlishness has yet to reach the Pentagon, and probably never will.

In the War on Terror period, the press accepted blame for having lost the most recent big war and agreed to stop showing pictures of the coffins coming home (to say nothing of actual scenes of war deaths).

We also volunteered to reduce or play down stories about torture ("enhanced interrogation"), kidnapping ("rendition"), or assassination ("lethal action," or the "distribution matrix").

Even now, if these stories are covered, they're rarely presented in an alarmist tone. In fact, many "civilian casualties" stories are couched in language that focuses on how the untimely release of news of "collateral damage" may hinder the effort to win whatever war we're in at the time.

"After reports of civilian deaths, U.S. military struggles to defend air operations in war against militants," is a typical American newspaper headline.

Can you guess either the year or the war from that story? It could be 1968, or 2008. Or 2018.

As Manufacturing Consent predicted -- with a nod to Orwell, maybe -- the scripts in societies like ours rarely change. 1

When it came time for me to enter the journalism business myself, I discovered that the Chomsky/Herman diagnosis was mostly right. Moreover, the academics proved prescient about future media deceptions like the Iraq War. Their model predicted that hideous episode in Technicolor.

But neither Herman nor Chomsky could have known, when they published their book in 1988, that the media business was going through profound change.

As it turned out, Manufacturing Consent was published just ahead of three massive revolutions. When I met and interviewed Chomsky for this book (see Appendix 2 ), we discussed these developments. They included:

1. The explosion of conservative talk radio and Fox-style news products. Using point of view rather than "objectivity" as commercial strategies, these stations presaged an atomization of the news landscape under which each consumer had an outlet somewhere to match his or her political beliefs. This was a major departure from the three-network pseudo-monopoly that dominated the Manufacturing Consent period, under which the country debated a commonly held set of facts.

2. The introduction of twenty-four-hour cable news stations, which shifted the emphasis of the news business. Reporters were suddenly trained to value breaking news, immediacy, and visual potential over import. Network "crashes" -- relentless day-night coverage extravaganzas of a single hot story like the Kursk disaster or a baby thrown down a well, a type of journalism one TV producer I knew nicknamed "Shoveling Coal For Satan" -- became the first examples of binge-watching. The relentless now now now grind of the twenty-four-hour cycle created in consumers a new kind of anxiety and addictive dependency, a need to know what was happening not just once or twice a day but every minute. This format would have significant consequences in the 2016 election in particular.

3. The development of the Internet, which was only just getting off the ground in 1988. It was thought it would significantly democratize the press landscape. But print and broadcast media soon began to be distributed by just a handful of digital platforms. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, that distribution system had been massively concentrated. This created the potential for a direct control mechanism over the press that never existed in the Manufacturing Consent era. Moreover the development of social media would amplify the "flak" factor a thousandfold, accelerating conformity and groupthink in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1988.

Maybe the biggest difference involved an obvious historical change: the collapse of the Soviet Union.

One of the pillars of the "propaganda model" in the original Manufacturing Consent was that the media used anti-communism as an organizing religion.

The ongoing Cold War narrative helped the press use anti-communism as a club to batter heretical thinkers, who as luck would have it were often socialists. They even used it as a club to police people who weren't socialists (I would see this years later, when Howard Dean was asked a dozen times a day if he was "too left" to be a viable candidate).

But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet empire took a little wind out of the anti-communist religion. Chomsky and Herman addressed this in their 2002 update of Manufacturing Consent, in which they wrote:

The force of anti-communist ideology has possibly weakened with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the virtual disappearance of socialist movements across the globe, but this is easily offset by the greater ideological force of the belief in the "miracle of the market "

The collapse of the Soviets, and the weakening of anti-communism as an organizing principle, led to other changes in the media. Manufacturing Consent was in significant part a book about how that unseen system of informal controls allowed the press to organize the entire population behind support of particular objectives, many of them foreign policy objectives.

But the collapse of the Wall, coupled with those new commercial strategies being deployed by networks like Fox, created a new dynamic in the press.

Media companies used to seek out the broadest possible audiences. The dull third-person voice used in traditional major daily newspapers is not there for any moral or ethical reason, but because it was once believed that it most ably fulfilled the commercial aim of snatching as many readers/viewers as possible. The press is a business above all, and boring third-person language was once advanced marketing.

But in the years after Manufacturing Consent was published the new behemoths like Fox turned the old business model on its head. What Australian tabloid-merchant Rupert Murdoch did in employing political slant as a commercial strategy had ramifications the American public to this day poorly understands.

The news business for decades emphasized "objective" presentation, which was really less an issue of politics than of tone.

The idea was to make the recitation of news rhetorically watered down and unthreatening enough to rope in the whole spectrum of potential news consumers. The old-school anchorperson was a monotone mannequin designed to look and sound like a safe date for your daughter: Good evening, I'm Dan Rather, and my frontal lobes have been removed . Today in Libya

Murdoch smashed this framework. He gave news consumers broadcasts that were pointed, opinionated, and nasty. He struck gold with The O'Reilly Factor, hosted by a yammering, red-faced repository of white suburban rage named Bill O'Reilly (another Boston TV vet).

The next hit was Hannity & Colmes, a format that played as a parody of old news. In this show, the "liberal" Colmes was the quivering, asexual, "safe date" prototype from the old broadcast era, and Sean Hannity was a thuggish Joey Buttafuoco in makeup whose job was to make Colmes look like the spineless dope he was.

This was theater, not news, and it was not designed to seize the whole audience in the way that other debate shows like CNN's Crossfire were.

The premise of Crossfire was an honest fight, two prominent pundits duking it out over issues, and may the best man (they were usually men) win.

The prototypical Crossfire setup involved a bombastic winger like Pat Buchanan versus an effete liberal like New Republic editor Michael Kinsley. On some days the conservative would be allowed to win, on some days the liberal would score a victory. It looked like a real argument.

But Crossfire was really just a formalized version of the artificial poles of allowable debate that Chomsky and Herman described. As some of its participants (like Jeff Cohen, a pioneering media critic who briefly played the "liberal" on the show, about whom we'll hear more later) came to realize, Crossfire became a propagandistic setup, a stage trick in which the "left" side of the argument was gradually pushed toward the right over the years. It was propaganda, but in slow motion.

Hannity & Colmes dispensed with the pretense. This was the intellectual version of Vince McMahon's pro wrestling spectacles, which were booming at the time. In the Fox debate shows, Sean Hannity was the heel, and Colmes was the good guy, or babyface. As any good wrestling fan knows, most American audiences want to see babyface stomped.

The job of Colmes was to get pinned over and over again, and he did it well. Meanwhile rightist anger merchants like Hannity and O'Reilly (and, on the radio, Rush Limbaugh) were rapidly hoovering up audiences that were frustrated, white, and often elderly. Fox chief Roger Ailes once boasted, "I created a network for people 55 to dead." (Ailes is now dead himself.)

This was a new model for the media. Instead of targeting the broad mean, they were now narrowly hunting demographics. The explosion of cable television meant there were hundreds of channels, each of which had its own mission.

Just as Manufacturing Consent came out, all the major cable channels were setting off on similar whale hunts, sailing into the high demographic seas in search of audiences to capture. Lifetime was "television for women," while the Discovery Channel did well with men. BET went after black viewers. Young people were MTV's target audience.

This all seems obvious now, but this "siloing" effect that spread across other channels soon became a very important new factor in news coverage. Fox for a long time cornered the market on conservative viewers. Almost automatically, competitors like CNN and MSNBC became home to people who viewed themselves as liberals, beginning a sifting process that would later accelerate.

A new dynamic entered the job of reporting. For generations, news directors had only to remember a few ideological imperatives. One, ably and voluminously described by Chomsky and Herman, was, "America rules: pay no attention to those napalmed bodies." We covered the worthy victims, ignored the unworthy ones, and that was most of the job, politically.

The rest of the news? As one TV producer put it to me in the nineties, "The entire effect we're after is, 'Isn't that weird?'"

Did you hear about that guy in Michigan who refused to mow his lawn even when the town ordered him to? Weird! And how about that drive-thru condom store that opened in Cranston, Rhode Island? What a trip! And, hey, what happened in the O.J. trial today? That Kato Kaelin is really a doof! And I love that lawyer who wears a suede jacket! He looks like a cowboy!

TV execs learned Americans would be happy if you just fed them a nonstop succession of National Enquirer –style factoids (this is formalized today in meme culture). The New York Times deciding to cover the O.J. freak show full-time broke the seal on the open commercialization of dumb news that among other things led to a future where Donald Trump could be a viable presidential candidate.

In the old days, the news was a mix of this toothless trivia and cheery dispatches from the front lines of Pax Americana. The whole fam could sit and watch it without getting upset (by necessity: an important principle in pre-Internet broadcasting is that nothing on the air, including the news, could be as intense or as creative as the commercials). The news once designed to be consumed by the whole house, by loving Mom, by your crazy right-wing uncle, by your earnest college-student cousin who just came home wearing a Che T-shirt.

But once we started to be organized into demographic silos, the networks found another way to seduce these audiences: they sold intramural conflict.

The Roger Ailes types captured the attention of the crazy right-wing uncle and got him watching one channel full of news tailored for him, filling the airwaves with stories, for instance, about immigration or minorities committing crimes. Different networks eventually rose to market themselves to the kid in the Che T-shirt. If you got them in different rooms watching different channels, you could get both viewers literally addicted to hating one another.

There was a political element to this, but also not. It was commerce, initially. And reporters stuck in this world soon began to realize that the nature of their jobs had changed.

Whereas once the task was to report the facts as honestly as we could -- down the middle of the "fairway" of acceptable thought, of course -- the new task was mostly about making sure your viewer came back the next day.

We sold anger, and we did it mainly by feeding audiences what they wanted to hear. Mostly, this involved cranking out stories about people our viewers loved to hate.

Selling siloed anger was a more sophisticated take on the WWE programming pioneered in Hannity & Colmes . The modern news consumer tuned into news that confirmed his or her prejudices about whatever or whoever the villain of the day happened to be: foreigners, minorities, terrorists, the Clintons, Republicans, even corporations.

The system was ingeniously designed so that the news dropped down the respective silos didn't interfere with the occasional need to "manufacture" the consent of the whole population. If we needed to, we could still herd the whole country into the pen again and get them backing the flag, as was the case with the Iraq War effort.

But mostly, we sold conflict. We began in the early nineties to systematically pry families apart, set group against group, and more and more make news consumption a bubble-like, "safe space" stimulation of the vitriolic reflex, a consumer version of "Two Minutes Hate."

How did this serve the needs of the elite interests that were once promoting unity? That wasn't easy for me to see, in my first decades in the business. For a long time, I thought it was a flaw in the Chomsky/Herman model. It looked like we were mostly selling pointless division.

But it now seems there was a reason, even for that.

The news media is in crisis. Polls show that a wide majority of the population no longer has confidence in the press. Chomsky himself despairs at this, noting in my discussion with him (at the end of this book) that Manufacturing Consent had the unintended consequence of convincing readers not to trust the media.

There are many ways of mistrusting something, but people who came away from Manufacturing Consent with the idea that the media peddles lies misread the book. Papers like the New York Times, for the most part, do not traffic in outright deceptions.

The overwhelming majority of commercial news reporting is factual (with one conspicuous exception I'll get into later on), and the individual reporters who work in the business tend to be quite stubborn in their adherence to fact as a matter of principle. (Sadly, in the time it's taken to write this book, even this has begun to change some). Still, people should trust most reporters, especially local reporters, who tend to have real beats (like statehouses or courts), have few of the insular prejudices of the national media, and don't deserve the elitist tag. The context in which reporters operate is most often the problem.

Now, more than ever, most journalists work for giant nihilistic corporations whose editorial decisions are skewed by a toxic mix of political and financial considerations. Without understanding how those pressures work, it's very difficult for a casual news consumer to gain an accurate picture of the world.

This book is intended as an insider's guide to those distortions.

The technology underpinning the modern news business is sophisticated and works according to a two-step process. First, it creates content that reinforces your pre-existing opinions, and, after analysis of your consumer habits, sends it to you.

Then it matches you to advertisers who have a product they're trying to sell to your demographic. This is how companies like Facebook and Google make their money: telling advertisers where their likely customers are on the web.

The news, basically, is bait to lure you into a pen where you can be sold sneakers or bath soaps or prostatitis cures or whatever else studies say people of your age, gender, race, class, and political persuasion tend to buy.

Imagine your Internet surfing habit as being like walking down a street. A man shouts: "Did you hear what those damned liberals did today? Come down this alley."

You hate liberals, so you go down the alley. On your way to the story, there's a storefront selling mart carts and gold investments (there's a crash coming -- this billionaire even says so!).

Maybe you buy the gold, maybe you don't. But at the end of the alley, there's a red-faced screamer telling a story that may even be true, about a college in Massachusetts where administrators took down a statue of John Adams because it made a Hispanic immigrant "uncomfortable." Boy, does that make you pissed!

They picked that story just for you to hear. It is like the parable of Kafka's gatekeeper, guarding a door to the truth that was built just for you.

Across the street, down the MSNBC alley, there's an opposite story, and set of storefronts, built specifically for someone else to hear.

People need to start understanding the news not as "the news," but as just such an individualized consumer experience -- anger just for you.

This is not reporting. It's a marketing process designed to create rhetorical addictions and shut any non-consumerist doors in your mind. This creates more than just pockets of political rancor. It creates masses of media consumers who've been trained to see in only one direction, as if they had been pulled through history on a railroad track, with heads fastened in blinders, looking only one way.

As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become.

This is the second stage of the mass media deception originally described in Manufacturing Consent .

First, we're taught to stay within certain bounds, intellectually. Then, we're all herded into separate demographic pens, located along different patches of real estate on the spectrum of permissible thought.

Once safely captured, we're trained to consume the news the way sports fans do. We root for our team, and hate all the rest.

Hatred is the partner of ignorance, and we in the media have become experts in selling both.

I looked back at thirty years of deceptive episodes -- from Iraq to the financial crisis of 2008 to the 2016 election of Donald Trump -- and found that we in the press have increasingly used intramural hatreds to obscure larger, more damning truths. Fake controversies of increasing absurdity have been deployed over and over to keep our audiences from seeing larger problems.

We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent.

[Nov 06, 2019] Manufacturing Fear and Loathing, Maximizing Corporate Profits! A Review of Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc. Why Today's Media Makes Us

Notable quotes:
"... "Manufacturing Consent," Taibbi writes, "explains that the debate you're watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it" (p. 11). ..."
"... Americans were held captive by the boob tube affords us not only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility of their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and therefore of their having been able, at least some of them, to rebel against its dictates. Three decades later, on the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the workings of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most intimate minute-to-minute aspects of our lives that our relationship to them could hardly ever become antagonistic. ..."
"... The massive political revolution was, going all the way back to 1989, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and then of the Soviet Union itself -- and thus of the usefulness of anti-communism as a kind of coercive secular religion (pp. 14-15). ..."
"... our corporate media have devised -- at least for the time being -- highly-profitable marketing processes that manufacture fake dissent in order to smother real dissent (p. 21). ..."
"... And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid. ..."
"... For Maddow, he notes, is "a depressingly exact mirror of Hannity . The two characters do exactly the same work. They make their money using exactly the same commercial formula. And though they emphasize different political ideas, the effect they have on audiences is much the same" (pp. 259-260). ..."
Nov 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc . is the most insightful and revelatory book about American politics to appear since the publication of Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal almost four full years ago, near the beginning of the last presidential election cycle.

While Frank's topic was the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to be democratic and Taibbi's is the abysmal failure of our mainstream news corporations to report news, the prominent villains in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite social circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class. In fact, I would strongly recommend that the reader spend some time with Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal! (2016) as he or she takes up Taibbi's book.

And to really do the book the justice it deserves, I would even more vehemently recommend that the reader immerse him- or herself in Taibbi's favorite book and vade-mecum , Manufacturing Consent (which I found to be a grueling experience: a relentless cataloging of the official lies that hide the brutality of American foreign policy) and, in order to properly appreciate the brilliance of Taibbi's chapter 7, "How the Media Stole from Pro Wrestling," visit some locale in Flyover Country and see some pro wrestling in person (which I found to be unexpectedly uplifting -- more on this soon enough).

Taibbi tells us that he had originally intended for Hate, Inc . to be an updating of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988), which he first read thirty years ago, when he was nineteen. "It blew my mind," Taibbi writes. "[It] taught me that some level of deception was baked into almost everything I'd ever been taught about modern American life .

Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their famed propaganda model [italics mine], they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a buzz saw" (p. 10). For what seemed to be vigorous democratic debate, Taibbi realized, was instead a soul-crushing simulation of debate. The choices voters were given were distinctions without valid differences, and just as hyped, just as trivial, as the choices between a Whopper and a Big Mac, between Froot Loops and Frosted Mini-Wheats, between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, between Marlboro Lites and Camel Filters. It was all profit-making poisonous junk.

"Manufacturing Consent," Taibbi writes, "explains that the debate you're watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it" (p. 11). And there's an indisputable logic at work here, because the reality of hideous American war crimes is and always has been, from the point of view of the big media corporations, a "narrative-ruining" buzz-kill. "The uglier truth [brought to light in Manufacturing Consent ], that we committed genocide of a fairly massive scale across Indochina -- ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three countries -- is pre-excluded from the history of the period" (p. 13).

So what has changed in the last thirty years? A lot! As a starting point let's consider the very useful metaphor found in the title of another great media book of 1988: Mark Crispin Miller's Boxed In: The Culture of TV . To say that Americans were held captive by the boob tube affords us not only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility of their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and therefore of their having been able, at least some of them, to rebel against its dictates. Three decades later, on the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the workings of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most intimate minute-to-minute aspects of our lives that our relationship to them could hardly ever become antagonistic.

Taibbi summarizes the history of these three decades in terms of three "massive revolutions" in the media plus one actual massive political revolution, all of which, we should note, he discussed with his hero Chomsky (who is now ninety! -- Edward Herman passed away in 2017) even as he wrote his book. And so: the media revolutions which Taibbi describes were, first, the coming of FoxNews along with Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio; second, the coming of CNN, i.e., the Cable News Network, along with twenty-four hour infinite-loop news cycles; third, the coming of the Internet along with the mighty social media giants Facebook and Twitter.

The massive political revolution was, going all the way back to 1989, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and then of the Soviet Union itself -- and thus of the usefulness of anti-communism as a kind of coercive secular religion (pp. 14-15).

For all that, however, the most salient difference between the news media of 1989 and the news media of 2019 is the disappearance of the single type of calm and decorous and slightly boring cis-het white anchorman (who somehow successfully appealed to a nationwide audience) and his replacement by a seemingly wide variety of demographically-engineered news personæ who all rage and scream combatively in each other's direction. "In the old days," Taibbi writes, "the news was a mix of this toothless trivia and cheery dispatches from the frontlines of Pax Americana . The news [was] once designed to be consumed by the whole house . But once we started to be organized into demographic silos [italics mine], the networks found another way to seduce these audiences: they sold intramural conflict" (p. 18).

And in this new media environment of constant conflict, how, Taibbi wondered, could public consent , which would seem to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from conflict, still be manufactured ?? "That wasn't easy for me to see in my first decades in the business," Taibbi writes. "For a long time, I thought it was a flaw in the Chomsky/Herman model" (p. 19).

But what Taibbi was at length able to understand, and what he is now able to describe for us with both wit and controlled outrage, is that our corporate media have devised -- at least for the time being -- highly-profitable marketing processes that manufacture fake dissent in order to smother real dissent (p. 21).

And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid.

Or pretty much so. Taibbi is more historically precise. Because of the tweaking of the Herman/Chomsky propaganda model necessitated by the disappearance of the USSR in 1991 ("The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, / As Russians do ," Jackson Browne presciently prophesied on MTV way back in 1983), one might now want to speak of a Propaganda Model 2.0. For, as Taibbi notes, " the biggest change to Chomsky's model is the discovery of a far superior 'common enemy' in modern media: each other. So long as we remain a bitterly-divided two-party state, we'll never want for TV villains" (pp. 207-208).

To rub his great insight right into our uncomprehending faces, Taibbi has almost sadistically chosen to have dark, shadowy images of a yelling Sean Hannity (in lurid FoxNews Red!) and a screaming Rachel Maddow (in glaring MSNBC Blue!) juxtaposed on the cover of his book. For Maddow, he notes, is "a depressingly exact mirror of Hannity . The two characters do exactly the same work. They make their money using exactly the same commercial formula. And though they emphasize different political ideas, the effect they have on audiences is much the same" (pp. 259-260).

And that effect is hate. Impotent hate. For while Rachel's fan demographic is all wrapped up in hating Far-Right Fascists Like Sean, and while Sean's is all wrapped up in despising Libtard Lunatics Like Rachel, the bipartisan consensus in Washington for ever-increasing military budgets, for everlasting wars, for ever-expanding surveillance, for ever-growing bailouts of and tax breaks for and and handouts to the most powerful corporations goes forever unchallenged.

Oh my. And it only gets worse and worse, because the media, in order to make sure that their various siloed demographics stay superglued to their Internet devices, must keep ratcheting up levels of hate: the Fascists Like Sean and the Libtards Like Rachel must be continually presented as more and more deranged, and ultimately as demonic. "There is us and them," Taibbi writes, "and they are Hitler" (p. 64). A vile reductio ad absurdum has come into play: "If all Trump supporters are Hitler, and all liberals are also Hitler," Taibbi writes, " [t]he America vs. America show is now Hitler vs. Hitler! Think of the ratings! " The reader begins to grasp Taibbi's argument that our mainstream corporate media are as bad as -- are worse than -- pro wrestling. It's an ineluctable downward spiral.

Taibbi continues: "The problem is, there's no natural floor to this behavior. Just as cable TV will eventually become seven hundred separate twenty-four-hour porn channels, news and commentary will eventually escalate to boxing-style, expletive-laden, pre-fight tirades, and the open incitement to violence [italics mine]. If the other side is literally Hitler, [w]hat began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor , and the show does not work if those contestants are not eventually offended to the point of wanting to kill one another" (pp. 65-69).

As I read this book, I often wondered about how difficult it was emotionally for Taibbi to write it. I'm just really glad to see that the guy didn't commit suicide along the way. He does describe the "self-loathing" he experienced as he realized his own complicity in the marketing processes which he exposes (p. 2). He also apologizes to the reader for his not being able to follow through on his original aim of writing a continuation of Herman and Chomsky's classic: "[W]hen I sat down to write what I'd hoped would be something with the intellectual gravitas of Manufacturing Consent ," Taibbi confesses, "I found decades of more mundane frustrations pouring out onto the page, obliterating a clinical examination" (p. 2).

I, however, am profoundly grateful to Taibbi for all of his brilliantly observed anecdotes. The subject matter is nauseating enough even in Taibbi's sparkling and darkly tragicomic prose. A more academic treatment of the subject would likely be too depressing to read. So let me conclude with an anecdote of my own -- and an oddly uplifting one at that -- about reading Taibbi's chapter 7, "How the News Media Stole from Pro Wrestling."

On the same day I read this chapter I saw that, on the bulletin board in my gym, a poster had appeared, as if by magic, promoting an upcoming Primal Conflict (!) professional wrestling event. I studied the photos of the wrestlers on the poster carefully, and, as an astute reader of Taibbi, I prided myself on being able to identify which of them seemed be playing the roles of heels , and which of them the roles of babyfaces .

For Taibbi explains that one of the fundamental dynamics of wrestling involves the invention of crowd-pleasing narratives out of the many permutations and combinations of pitting heels against faces . Donald Trump, a natural heel , brings the goofy dynamics of pro wrestling to American politics with real-life professional expertise. (Taibbi points out that in 2007 Trump actually performed before a huge cheering crowd in a Wrestlemania event billed as the "battle of the billionaires." Watch it on YouTube! https://youtu.be/5NsrwH9I9vE -- unbelievable!!)

The mainstream corporate media, on the other hand, their eyes fixed on ever bigger and bigger profits, have drifted into the metaphorical pro wrestling ring in ignorance, and so, when they face off against Trump, they often end up in the role of inept prudish pearl-clutching faces .

Taibbi condemns the mainstream media's failure to understand such a massively popular form of American entertainment as "malpractice" (p. 125), so I felt more than obligated to buy a ticket and see the advertised event in person. To properly educate myself, that is.

... ... ...

Steve Ruis , November 5, 2019 at 8:13 am

I have stopped watching broadcast "news" other than occasional sessions of NPR in the car. I get most of my news from sources such as this and from overseas sources (The Guardian, Reuters, etc.). I used to subscribe to newspapers but have given them up in disgust, even though I was looking forward to leisurely enjoying a morning paper after I retired.

I was brought up in the positive 1950's and, boy, did this turn out poorly.

Dao Gen , November 5, 2019 at 8:59 am

Matt Taibbi is an American treasure, and I love his writing very much, but we also need to ask, Why hasn't another Chomsky (or another Hudson), an analyst with a truly deep and wide-ranging, synthetic mind, appeared on the left to take apart our contemporary media and show us its inner workings? Have all the truly great minds gone to work for Wall Street? I don't have an answer, but to me the pro wrestling metaphor, while intriguing, misses something about the Fourth Estate in America, if it indeed still exists. And that is, except for radio, there is a distinct imbalance between the two sides of the MSM lineup. On the corporate liberal side of the national MSM team you have five wrestlers, but on the conservative/reactionary side you have only the Fox entry. Because of this imbalance, the corruption, laziness, self-indulgence, and generally declining interest in journalistic standards seems greater among the corporate liberal media team, including the NYT and WaPo, than the Fox team.

I'm not a fan of either Maddow (in her current incarnation) or Hannity, but Hannity, perhaps because he thinks he's like David, often hustles to refute the discourse of the corporate liberal Goliath team. Hannity obviously does more research on some topics than Maddow, and, perhaps because he began in radio, he puts more emphasis on semi-rationally structured rants than Maddow, who depends more on primal emotion, body language, and Hollywood-esque fear-inducing atmospherics.

I'd wager that in a single five-minute segment there will often be twice as many rational distinctions made in a Hannity rant than in a Maddow performance. In addition, for the last three years Hannity has simply been demonstrably right about the fake Russiagate propaganda blitz while Maddow has been as demonstrably wrong from the very beginning as propaganda industry trend-setter Adam Schiff. So for at least these last three years, the Maddow-Hannity primal match has been a somewhat misleading metaphor. The Blob and the security state have been decisively supporting (and directing?) the corporate liberal global interventionist media, at least regarding Russia and the permanent war establishment, and because the imbalance between the interventionist and the non-interventionist MSM, Russia and Ukraine are being used as a wedge to steadily break down the firewalls between the Dem party, the intel community, and the interventionist MSM. If we had real public debates with both sides at approximately equal strength as we did during the Vietnam War, then even pro wrestling-type matches would be superior to what we have now, which is truthy truth and thoughtsy thought coming to us from the military industrial complex and monopolistic holding companies. If fascism is defined as the fusion of the state and corporations, then the greatest threat of fascism in America may well be coming from the apparent gradual fusion of the corporate liberal MSM, the Dem party elite, and the intel community. Instead of an MSM wrestling match, we may soon be faced with a Japanese-style 'hitori-zumo' match in which a sumo wrestler wrestles with only himself. Once these sumo wrestlers were believed to be wrestling with invisible spirits, but those days are gone . http://kikuko-nagoya.com/html/hitori-zumo.htm

coboarts , November 5, 2019 at 9:59 am

"If we had real public debates" and if they were even debates where issues entered into contest were addressed point by point with evidence

Generalfeldmarschall von Hindenburg , November 5, 2019 at 10:03 am

Today's Noam Chomksy? Chomsky was part of the machine who broke ranks with it. His MIT research was generously funded by the Military Industrial Complex. Thankfully, enough of his latent humanity and Trotskyite upbringing shone through so he exposed what he was part of. So I guess today that's Chris Hedges, though he's a preacher at heart and not a semiotician.

neighbor7 , November 5, 2019 at 10:04 am

Thank you, Dao Gen. An excellent analysis, and your final image is usefully haunting.

a different chris , November 5, 2019 at 12:11 pm

> In addition, for the last three years Hannity has simply been demonstrably right about the fake Russiagate propaganda blitz while Maddow has been as demonstrably wrong

Eh. Read whats-his-name's (Frankfurter?) book On Bullshit . You are giving Hannity credit for something he doesn't really care about.

jrs , November 5, 2019 at 12:21 pm

I don't believe the media environment as a whole leans corporate Dem/neoliberal.

T.V. maybe, but radio is much more right wing than left (yes there is NPR and Pacifica, the latter with probably only a scattering of listerners but ) and it's still out there and a big influence, radio hasn't gone away. So doesn't the right wing tilt of radio kind of balance out television? (not necessarily in a good way but). And then there is the internet and I have no idea what the overall lean of that is (I mean I prefer left wing sites, but that's purely my own bubble and actually there are much fewer left analysis out there than I'd like)

Self Affine , November 5, 2019 at 9:05 am

Also,

Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism

by Sheldon S. Wolin

Critical deep analysis of not just the media but the whole American political enterprise and
the nature of our "democracy".

DJG , November 5, 2019 at 9:20 am

The whole review is good, but this extract should be quoted extensively:

While Frank's topic was the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to be democratic and Taibbi's is the abysmal failure of our mainstream news corporations to report news, the prominent villains in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite social circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class.

In short, stagnation and self-dealing at the top. What could possibly go wrong?

Yves Smith Post author , November 5, 2019 at 11:51 am

Are you serious? Maddow called Trump a traitor and accused him of betrayal in Russiagate, and was caught out when that fell apart. This was pointed out all over the MSM .

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/27/rachel-maddows-deep-delusion-226266

https://www.salon.com/2018/07/17/rachel-maddow-hits-the-panic-button-after-trump-putin-summit-this-is-the-worst-case-scenario/

Carolinian , November 5, 2019 at 9:52 am

This is great stuff. Thanks.

One quibble: the author says

Three decades later, on the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets

and then goes on to spend most of the article talking about television. I'd say television is still the main propaganda instrument even if many webheads like yours truly ignore it (I've never seen Hannity's show or Maddow's–just hear the rumors). Arguably even newspapers like the NYT have been dumbed down because the reporters long to be on TV and join the shouting. And it's surely no coincidence that our president himself is a TV (and WWE) star. Mass media have always been feeders of hysteria but television gave them faces and voices. Watching TV is also a far more passive experience than surfing the web. They are selling us "narratives," bedtime stories, and we like sleepy children merely listen.

Jerri-Lynn Scofield , November 5, 2019 at 9:54 am

This rave review has inspired me to add this to my to-read non-fiction queue. Currently reading William Dalrymple's The Anarchy, on the rise of the East India Company. Next up: Matt Stoller's Goliath. And then I'll get to Taibbi. Probably worth digging up my original copy of Manufacturing Consent as well, which I read many moons ago; time for a re-read.

Susan the Other , November 5, 2019 at 12:32 pm

almost every page of mine is dog-eared and marked along the edge with exclamation points

urblintz , November 5, 2019 at 1:41 pm

May I suggest Stephen Cohen's "War with Russia?" if it's not already on your list? In focusing on the danger emerging from the new cold war, seeded by the Democrats, propagated by corporate media (which he thinks is more dangerous than the first), Cohen clarifies the importance of diplomacy especially with one's nuclear rivals.

Imagine that

shinola , November 5, 2019 at 9:56 am

Support your local book store!

Off The Street , November 5, 2019 at 9:57 am

Us rubes knew decades ago about pro wrestling. There was a regional circuit and the hero in one town would become the villain in another town. The ones to be surprised were like John Stossel, who got a perforated eardrum from a slap upside the head for his efforts at in-your-face journalism with a wrestler who just wouldn't play along with his grandstanding. Somewhere, kids cheered and life went on.

The Historian , November 5, 2019 at 10:01 am

Ah, Ancient Athens, here we come – running back to repeat your mistakes! Our MSM media has decided that when we are not at our neighbor's throats, we should be at each other's throats!

teacup , November 5, 2019 at 10:11 am

I was watching old clips of the 'Fred Friendly Seminars' on YouTube. IMHO any channel that produced a format such as this would be a ratings bonanza. Imagine a round table with various media figures (corporate) left, (corporate) right, and independent being refereed by a host-moderator discussing topics in 'Hate, Inc.'. In wrestling it's called a Battle Royale. The Fourth Estate in a cage match!

@ape , November 5, 2019 at 10:12 am

And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid.

This is important, if people don't want to be naive about what democracy buys. Democracy in the end is a ritual system to determine which members of an elite would win a war without actually having to hold the war. Like how court functions to replace personal revenge by determining (often) who would win in a fight if there were one, and the feudal system replaced the genocidal wars of the axial age with the gentler warfare of the middle ages which were often ritual wars of the elite that avoided the full risk of the earlier wars.

That, I think, is important -- under a democracy, the winner should be normally the winner of the avoided violent conflict to be sustainable. Thus, it's enough to get most people to consent to the solution, using the traditional meaning of consent being "won't put up a fight to avoid it". If the choices on the table are reduced enough, you can get by with most people simply dropping out of the questions.

Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit

It shouldn't be a surprise that we've moved to "faking dissent" -- it's the natural evolution of a system where a lot of the effective power is in the hands of tech, and not just as in the early 20th century, how many workers you have and how many soldiers you can raise.

If you don't like it, change the technology we use to fight one another. We went from tribes to lords when we switch from sticks to advanced forged weapons, and we went from feudalism to democracy when we had factories dropping guns that any 15 year old could use (oversimplifying a bit). Now that the stuff requires expertise, you'd expect a corresponding shift in how we ritualize our conflict avoidance, and thus the organization of how we control communication and how we organize our rituals of power.

Aka, it's the scientists and the engineers who end up determining how everything is organized, and people never seem to bother with that argument, which is especially surprising that even hard-core Marxists waste their time on short-term politics rather than the tech we're building.

I'd be curious whether Taibbi thought about the issue of the nature of the technology and whether there are technological options on the horizon which drive the conflict in other directions. If we had only kept the laws on copyright and patent weaker, so that the implementation of communicative infrastructure would have stayed decentralized

Susan the Other , November 5, 2019 at 12:41 pm

Tabby's "manufacturing fake consent" was really the whole punchline – the joke's on us. Hunter S. Thompson, another of Taibbi's heroes, is, along with Chomsky, speaking to us through MT. Our media is distracting us from social coherence. Another thing it is doing (just my opinion) is it is overwhelming us to the point of disgust. Nobody likes it. And we protect ourselves by tuning it out. Turning it off. Once the screaming lunatics marginalize themselves by making the whole narrative hysterical, we just act like it's another family fight and we're gonna go do something else. When everyone is screaming, no one is screaming.

Jerry B , November 5, 2019 at 10:26 am

I have tried to read Hate Inc. and Taibbi's Griftopia but one of my main issues with Taibbi's writing is his lack of notes, references, or bibliography, etc. in his books. In skimming Hate Inc. it seems like a book I would enjoy reading, however my personal value system is that any book without footnotes, endnotes, citations, or at minimum a bibliography is just an opinion or a story. At least Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal has a section for End Notes/References at the end of the book. Again just my personal values.

Sbbbd , November 5, 2019 at 10:45 am

Another classic in the genre of manufactured consent through media from the age of radio and Adolf Hitler:

"The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

Joe Well , November 5, 2019 at 11:04 am

I am from Greater Boston, far, far from flyover country (which I imagine begins in Yonkers NY), but I sure grew up with pro wrestling as part of the schoolyard discourse. I certainly knew it was as much of a family affair as Disney on Ice and have trouble believing he thought otherwise though I will not impugn his honesty. I am very grateful to the author for taking the time to write this, but is it possible for a male who grew up in the US to be as deeply embedded in the MSNBC demo as he claims to be?

Seriously, how is it possible for a male raised in the US to not at least have some working familiarity with pro wrestling? My family along with my community was very close to the national median income–do higher income boys really not learn about WWF and WWE?

Seriously, rich kids, what was childhood like? I know you had music lessons and sports camps, what else? Was it really that different?

Carolinian , November 5, 2019 at 11:59 am

And it's not just the US. See the British WWE movie: Fighting With My Family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_with_My_Family

Yves Smith Post author , November 5, 2019 at 12:03 pm

Sorry, my blue collar, lifetime union member brother says your view is horseshit. All the knows about WWE and WWF is that they are big-budget fakery and that's why they are of no interest.

amfortas the hippie , November 5, 2019 at 1:38 pm

aye. in my blue to white collar( and back to blue to no collar) upbringing, wrestling was never a thing. it was for the morons who couldn't read. seen as patently absurd by just about everyone i knew. and this in klanridden east texas exurbia
wife's mexican extended familia oth luche libre is a big thing that all and sundry talked about at thanksgiving. less so these days possibly due to the hyperindiviualisation of media intake mentioned
(and,btw, in my little world , horseshit is a good thing)

BlueStater , November 5, 2019 at 11:11 am

Even allowing for my lefty-liberal bias, I do not see how it is possible to equate Fox Noise and MSNBC, or Hannity and Maddow, as "both-sides" extremists. Fox violates basic professional canons of fairness and equity on a daily basis. MSNBC occasionally does, but is quick to correct errors of fact. Hannity is a thuggish outer-borough New York schmuck without much education or knowledge of the world. Maddow is an Oxford Ph.D. and Rhodes Scholar. It is one of the evil successes of the right-wing news cauldron to have successfully equated these two figures and organizations.

Yves Smith Post author , November 5, 2019 at 12:05 pm

Huh? MSNBC regularly makes errors of omission and commission with respect to Sanders. They are still pushing the Russiagate narrative. That's a massive, two-year, virtually all the time error they have refused to recant.

The blind spots of people on the soi-disant left are truly astonishing.

semiconscious , November 5, 2019 at 1:08 pm

'Hannity is a thuggish outer-borough New York schmuck without much education or knowledge of the world. Maddow is an Oxford Ph.D. and Rhodes Scholar '

oh, well, then – end of conversation! i mean, god knows, it'd be a cold day in hell before a rhodes scholar, or even someone married to one, would ever lead us astray down the rosy neoliberal path to hell, while, at the same time, under the spell of trump derangement syndrome, actually attempt to revive the mccarthy era, eh?

Summer , November 5, 2019 at 12:11 pm

Actual drugs are being used to hinder debate as well as emotional drugs like hate.
They can't trust agency to be removed by words and images alone – the stakes are too high.
Now all of you go take a feel good pill and stop complaining!

McWatt , November 5, 2019 at 1:02 pm

I would like to know if Matt is doing any book signings any where around the states for this new title?

David , November 5, 2019 at 1:15 pm

I've been impressed with Taibbi's work, what I've read of it, but ironically this very article contains a quote from him which exemplifies the problem: his casual assertion that the US committed "genocide" in Indochina. Even the most fervent critics of US policy didn't say this at the time, for the very good reason that there was no evidence that the US tried to destroy a racial, religious, ethnic or nationalist group (the full definition is a lot more complex and demanding than that). He clearly means that the US was responsible for lots of deaths, which is incontestable. But the process of endless escalation of rhetoric, which this book seems to be partly about, means that everything now has to be described in the most extreme, absurd or apocalyptic tones, and at the top of your voice, otherwise nobody takes any notice. So any self-respecting war now has to be qualified as "genocide" or nobody will take any notice.

[Nov 06, 2019] Schlichter Trump Is Derailing The Elite's Gravy Train

Nov 06, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Kurt Schlichter, op-ed via Townhall.com,

Like the garbage French elite of long ago, our American garbage elite of today has learned nothing and forgotten nothing .

For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep-sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure. Instead of focusing on not being terrible at their job of running America's institutions, our elitists have decided that the real problem is us Normals being angry about how they are terrible at their job of running America's institutions .

So, let's imagine that they finally vanquish Trump, though every time they come up against him they end up dragging themselves home like Ned Beatty after a particularly tough canoe trip.

What happens then?

What happens then is that it's back to business as usual, and for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash.

The difference is that in the future they will be much more careful to ensure that no one who is not in on the scam will ever again come anywhere near the levers of power. You can already see it – the demands that we defer to the bureaucrats they own, the attacks on the idea of free expression, and the campaign to disarm us. Their objective is no more Trumps, just an endless line of progressive would-be Maduros with the march toward despair occasionally put on pause for a term by some Fredocon Republican who hates us Normals just as much as the Dems, but won't admit it until after he's out of office.

Our garbage elite talks a good game about its service and moral superiority, but if our betters were actually better than us, we would not be having this national conversation about how awful they are.

The fact is that what they want to do is go back to the way it was before Trump , back to 2015, aka the year 1 BT – Before Trump. Back then, progressive Democrats got their bizarre social pathologies normalized. Moderate Democrats got money, power and an open season on the local talent. Corporate types represented largely by squishy Republicans got globalism and the ability to ship our jobs out and import Third World serfs in. And the fake conservatives of Conservative, Inc., got to cash in without the necessity of actually conserving anything.

The only people that the old system didn't work for were the American people.

It's important to remember and to always remind yourself, that everything our elite says about its motives and morals is a lie and a scam. Take the whole #MeToo thing. This was supposed to be some sort of revolutionary rebellion against the sexual exploitation of the powerless by the powerful. It's not, and never was. Rather, it's simply an internal power struggle among and within the elites to reallocate power among snooty people who don't give a damn about you or me.

The fall of Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lauer or any of the other bigwigs means nothing to the conservative single mom being exploited by the Democrat donors who own Walmart. It was actually striving female members of the elite – actresses, models, media figures, executives – leveraging the monstrosity of the creeps at the top to increase their own power within the elite. Do you see any of these #MeToo heroines, now that they have taken their scalps, helping their non-elite sisters out in Gun-Jesusland? Yeah, right. They are lining up with the rest of their elite pals to shaft us.

What you do see is excuses. They excuse Bill Clinton and his enabler Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit. They excuse Gropey Joe. They are in the process of excusing Katie Hill, whose naked hairbrush photo has ensured that none of us will ever sit on a hotel room chair again. Why no outrage? Why no concern? Because taking out Stumbles McMyturn or Hoover's Dad or Congresswoman Every Man's Lesbian Fantasy Destroyer does not help the faction of the elite that benefited from #MeToo. That would help us , but not the elite. Throuple Gal was exposed by Townhall's peppery sister site Redstate, not the mainstream media, and the mainstream media is horrified – not by her furniture defilement but that word of it got through the gate they yearn to keep.

The simple fact is that they desperately want Trump out so they can return to the good old days of winks, nods, and payoffs.

Look at the Biden Family Crime Syndicate and the antics of the junior capo of the Cosa Nose Candy. In what universe is it A-OK that the crack-fueled Johnny Appleseed of paternity suits that is Joe's snortunate son was cashing in on $50K a month in sweet, sweet Ukrainian gas gold just weeks after Ensign Biden got booted because he tooted? And then there's riding on Air Force Two to the NBA's favorite dictatorship for some commie ducats. Now there are even some Romanian shenanigans too – is there a single country on earth that Totally-Not-Senile Joe didn't shake down for the benefit of his daughter-in-law's second hubby?

But our garbage elite's garbage media seems amazingly uninterested in all this – it's fascinated by the timing of a situation room snap after Trump unleashed the Army's Delta Force on al-Baghdadi and by dog medal memes, but the Veep's boy's bag-mannery is not merely of no interest but is something they close their fussy phalanx ranks around to protect. Keep in mind, the premise underlying the whole star chamber impeachment festival of onanism is that Donald Trump, America's chief law enforcement officer, was somehow wrong and bad and double-plus ungood because he allegedly asked the Ukrainians, "Hey, what's the dealio with the Columbia Kid's pay-offs?"

In a non-bizarro political universe, the proper reaction to the Prezzy demanding, "You best fork over the evidence on these manifestly corrupt antics involving the Vice-President of the United States or we're cutting you off from the American taxpayers' feeding trough," would be, "Hell to the yeah, four more years! Four more years!'

But it's not , because the elite likes its sexual abuse and its foreign cash and its total lack of accountability to us, the Normals, the people who are supposed to be the ones that our elite is working for. The elite has not learned its lesson. It has not admitted that it sucks and resolved to stop sucking.

Instead, it has doubled down. And if it gets power again, it will act to solve what it sees as the most urgent problem facing America – the fact that we the people have the ability to reject the elite's utter incompetence and surpassing greed and elect someone with a mandate to burn down the whole rotten edifice.

If the elitists get power again, they are never letting go of it, not without a fight. And now, doesn't the elite's obsessive fixation on shutting down conservative dissent, eliminating competing institutions (like religious entities), and disarming law-abiding Americans make a lot more sense?

* * *

Our garbage elite is outraged over the success of my action-packed yet hilarious novels of America torn apart by liberal malice, People's Republic , Indian Country and Wildfire . In a few weeks, Number IV, Collapse, will drop. They call these books "appalling." They don't want you to read them. That's better than any blurb!

Whodathunkit , 1 hour ago link

Today's ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

THAT is what TRUMP said. And it ******* freaks THEM out.

Whodathunkit , 1 hour ago link

Today's ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

THAT is what TRUMP said. And it ******* freaks THEM out.

Whodathunkit , 1 hour ago link

Today's ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

THAT is what TRUMP said. And it ******* freaks THEM out.

Whodathunkit , 1 hour ago link

Today's ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

THAT is what TRUMP said. And it ******* freaks THEM out.

Whodathunkit , 1 hour ago link

Today's ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

THAT is what TRUMP said. And it ******* freaks THEM out.

Whodathunkit , 1 hour ago link

Today's ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

THAT is what TRUMP said. And it ******* freaks THEM out.

The Palmetto Cynic , 1 hour ago link

1.1 trillion to the deficit in 2019, record tax receipts, little to show for wage and standard of living increases, so no....**** no.

ZIRPdiggler , 2 hours ago link

He never said the elite are the "super rich". Sorry about your trump derangement syndrome, comrade. Many wealthy in this country are good people. This author is referencing the "ruling elite" Washington-Hollywood-Media complex that comprises the child trafficking lefties in this country: they ARE the fascist elite who run the censorship platforms in silicon valley, the hypocrite millionaire socialists like Warren, or the deep state mouth pieces like Adam Schitt....

12Doberman , 2 hours ago link

Trump is the elite? Trump represents the elite? If that's so why are the elite trying to take him out? I don't think you understand who the elite are that the author is referring to. He's talking about the political elite...the DC power brokers...the political "establishment."

kudocast , 2 hours ago link

"For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep-sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure."

Donald Trump is our savior? Look at all the elite lackeys he put in his Cabinet, the exact type of people Kurt Schlichter claims Trump is removing. Trump passed $1.5 trillion tax cut bill benefiting the rich, expanded military spending $700 billion.

Chief Economic Advisor - Daniel Cohn - Goldman Sachs

Secretary of State - Rex Tillerson - Exxon Mobil

Secretary of Treasury - Steve Mnuchin - Goldman Sachs

Commerce Secretary - Wilbur Ross - Rothschilds and more

Transportation Secretary - Elaine Chao - wife of Mitch McConnell, from Chinese family shipping magnate

Secretary of Labor - Andy Puzder - CEO CKE Restaurants

Education Secretary - Betsy DeVos - husband CEO of Amway

Senior Advisor - Jared Kushner - Trump son in law

motley331 , 2 hours ago link

NAILED IT !!!!

devnickle , 2 hours ago link

He is no savior, but he sure the **** has exposed the enemy.

[Nov 05, 2019] Anti-Russian hysteria and the extensive disinformation campaign probably stems from a 'Five Eyes' strategy ... with the malign Uncle as its director.

Notable quotes:
"... Integrity Initiative. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... 'Where a charity is providing education in respect of a controversial issue it must do so in a way that allows the people being educated to make up their own minds.' ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative, ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft, ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Open Information Partnership ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Media Diversity Institute ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Integrity Initiative. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... 'Where a charity is providing education in respect of a controversial issue it must do so in a way that allows the people being educated to make up their own minds.' ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative, ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft, ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... Open Information Partnership ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Media Diversity Institute ..."
"... Institute of Statecraft ..."
"... Moon of Alabama ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
Nov 05, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

ben , Nov 4 2019 19:46 utc | 8

james @ 4 opined;"
thanks b... i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia... is this due some need to find someone to demonize, an outgrowth of christianity or god knows what? or is it purely to generate more money into the industrial military complex"

I'm with ya' james, this demonization of Russia, and any countries that refuse the empire's beck and call, is around to stay I'm afraid.

And yes, it's all of the above, but, mostly about the $.

semiconscious , Nov 4 2019 20:11 utc | 9

james @ 4;

'i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia... is this due some need to find someone to demonize, an outgrowth of christianity or god knows what? or is it purely to generate more money into the industrial military complex? what is the rationale?...'

They're the nuclear rival that don't import many of the u.s.'s consumer products. otherwise, it'd either be china, or both...

plus, of course, there's all them cold war memes that can be triggered in a sizable portion of the population's heads...

chet380 , Nov 4 2019 20:26 utc | 11
#4 James, #8 Ben --

I suspect the the antipathy to Russia and the extensive disinformation campaign stems from a 'Five Eyes' project and strategy ... with the malign Uncle as its director.

Joost , Nov 4 2019 20:41 utc | 13
@james #4 "i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia..."
Same motivation as all forgotten empires had. Even our cat want some of it, staring down on his employees from his basket high up on the fridge with that evil look on his face. We call it his World Domination Command Centre, WDCC for short. Global domination is what they crave. Kill the competition, loot its resources, more power, more money. America has been looted, devastated. Time for the locusts to move on to greener pastures. Russia is the promised land, the next wild west new world to colonize. Problem is, as always, the natives.
TEP , Nov 4 2019 21:11 utc | 14
I am hopeful that more and more of the population are realising that if an organisation is promoted by any western government as a source of information, then that organisation will provide disinformation by default. There are few, if any, journalists anywhere that are not part of the empirical disinformation program. Those that are not will be independent and, therefore, by alternate default, extremely wary of western government/government-funded/NGO sources. All the hegemon and it's vassals can do now is double-down and hope that the populations will go back to sleep.
Trisha , Nov 4 2019 21:22 utc | 16
As with all things evil, the British oligarchy began in the 1830s targeting Russia as a threat to its autocratic interests, in this case "defending" the Ottoman Empire against Russia.

The Brits were further scared out of their wits when the 1917 Russian Revolution was on the verge of establishing an anti-capitalist system. So they, along with a ragtag bag of co-conspirators including the United States, launched a military invasion of Russia.

That's right, U.S. troops landed at two places in Russia and fought against Russian soldiers. The Brits/U.S/et. al. suffered a humiliating defeat, leaving so quickly that U.S. dead soldiers were left behind buried in Soviet soil, to be repatriated years later.

But it's Russia that is the threat to "us", right?

Ort , Nov 4 2019 22:23 utc | 19
@ Trisha | Nov 4 2019 21:22 utc | 16
___________________________________________

Thanks for your informative comment. I'd started to reply to James that Russia has been a default "boogie-man" and Western scapegoat since the 19th Century, but that sounded unhelpfully circular-- and I didn't have the ambition to refresh my understanding with actual historical facts. ;)

The fact that a sort of Western "coalition of the willing" invaded Russia after the 1917 revolution is still a well-kept secret! It was never mentioned in my (US) school courses, from parochial school through the "Honors Survey of Western Civilization" course I took in college.


/div> " The MoA Week In Review - Open Thread 2019-64 , Main November 04, 2019 British Government Disinformation Shop Lost Charity Status - Continues In New Format

At the end of last year some enterprising 'anonymous' person released papers of the British Integrity Initiative. As we reported at that time:

The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading anti-Russian propaganda and thereby with influencing the public, military and governments of a number of countries. What follows is an contextual analysis of the third batch of the Initiative's internal papers which were dumped by an anonymous yesterday.

Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot Integrity Initiative . The Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".

The Integrity Initiative does this by planting disinformation about alleged Russian influence through journalists 'clusters' throughout Europe and the United States.

Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.

There have been seven releases of Institute of Statecraft documents. They included proposals for large anti-Russian disinformation campaigns . The Institute of Statecraft suggested to impose anti-Russian sanctions as early as January 2015. Its head, the former NATO advisor and military spy Chris Donnelly , also proposed to synchronously expel a large number of Russian diplomats from western countries.

That plans seems to have been the blueprint for the March 2018 mass expulsion of Russian diplomats during the Skripal affair. Several of the other measures Donnelly and his ilk planned have since been implemented.

The Institute of Statecraft was registered as a charity under Scottish law. After the release of its papers the Scottish charity regulator OSCR investigated the status of the Institute . Unsurprisingly the OSCR found (pdf) that its shady behavior and its running of anti-Russian disinformation campaigns did not justify its status:

In the course of our inquiry we found that the charity was not meeting the charity test required for continuing registration as a charity in Scotland because:

The purpose of the charity was purportedly to educate the public. But the regulator found that the Integrity Initiative did not educate but only spread its own version of 'reality' i.e. disinformation. The charity lacked neutrality:

In addition, our Meeting the Charity Test guidance states that:

'Where a charity is providing education in respect of a controversial issue it must do so in a way that allows the people being educated to make up their own minds.'

OSCR's view is that the Integrity Initiative expressed a particular perspective intended to persuade the public to a specific point of view and, given the nature of the subject matter, it was not sufficiently neutral to advance education.

The crocks who were running the charity were filling their own pockets with the public money the 'charity' received:

To pass the charity test any private benefit must be incidental to the organisation's activities that advance its purposes, that is, it must be a necessary result or by-product of the organisation's activities and not an end in itself.

We were concerned at the level of private benefit that a number of the charity's trustees were gaining from the exercise of its functions.

There was no clear explanation as to why the salaries being paid to charity trustees were considered reasonable and necessary, and we had concerns about the charity trustees' decision-making process around these payments. We do not consider that this private benefit was incidental to the organisation's activities that advanced its purposes.

The regulator also noted a lack of record keeping and a lack of documentation of decision making by the Institute's trustees.

Unfortunately the charity regulator will not close down the Institute of Statecraft. It accepted that it rectified its behavior by taking a number of measures:

The Integrity Initiative, as paid for by the British Foreign Office, Ministry of Defense, NATO and other such entities, will live on as a non-charitable entity with even less transparency. Its website, as well as that of Institute of Statecraft, is down. That it will now have to live in total secrecy will make it more difficult for it to recruit foreign journalist to spread its propaganda.

Since the Integrity Initiative was exposed the British government opened and financed a new secretive shop that will continue to spread anti-Russian disinformation :

On 3rd April, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) minister Alan Duncan revealed his department's 'Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme' - which bankrolls the Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative subsidiary - was funding a new endeavour, Open Information Partnership (OIP).

The announcement, buried in a response to a written parliamentary question, was supremely light on detail - Duncan merely said the effort would "respond to manipulated information in the news, social media and across the public space". Official fanfare was also unforthcoming - there was no accompanying press release, briefing document, or even mention of the launch by any government minister or department via social media channels.

The original proposal for the Open Information Partnership , as released by 'anonymous' , included the Institute of Statecraft , a Media Diversity Institute , Bellingcat , DFR Lab (i.e. the Atlantic Council) and some others in a so called ZINC Network . On the current OIP website the Institute of Statecraft 'charity' is no longer named.

---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the issue:

Tim Hayward provides a list (scroll down) of a large number of articles written here and elsewhere about the Integrity Initiative .

Posted by b on November 4, 2019 at 17:57 UTC | Permalink

" The MoA Week In Review - Open Thread 2019-64 | Main November 04, 2019 British Government Disinformation Shop Lost Charity Status - Continues In New Format

At the end of last year some enterprising 'anonymous' person released papers of the British Integrity Initiative. As we reported at that time:

The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading anti-Russian propaganda and thereby with influencing the public, military and governments of a number of countries. What follows is an contextual analysis of the third batch of the Initiative's internal papers which were dumped by an anonymous yesterday.

Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot Integrity Initiative . The Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".

The Integrity Initiative does this by planting disinformation about alleged Russian influence through journalists 'clusters' throughout Europe and the United States.

Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.

There have been seven releases of Institute of Statecraft documents. They included proposals for large anti-Russian disinformation campaigns . The Institute of Statecraft suggested to impose anti-Russian sanctions as early as January 2015. Its head, the former NATO advisor and military spy Chris Donnelly , also proposed to synchronously expel a large number of Russian diplomats from western countries.

That plans seems to have been the blueprint for the March 2018 mass expulsion of Russian diplomats during the Skripal affair. Several of the other measures Donnelly and his ilk planned have since been implemented.

The Institute of Statecraft was registered as a charity under Scottish law. After the release of its papers the Scottish charity regulator OSCR investigated the status of the Institute . Unsurprisingly the OSCR found (pdf) that its shady behavior and its running of anti-Russian disinformation campaigns did not justify its status:

In the course of our inquiry we found that the charity was not meeting the charity test required for continuing registration as a charity in Scotland because:
  • its purposes were not entirely charitable
  • one of its most significant activities, a project known as Integrity Initiative, did not provide public benefit in furtherance of the charity's purposes
  • private benefit to charity trustees was not incidental to the charity's activities that advance its charitable purpose

The purpose of the charity was purportedly to educate the public. But the regulator found that the Integrity Initiative did not educate but only spread its own version of 'reality' i.e. disinformation. The charity lacked neutrality:

In addition, our Meeting the Charity Test guidance states that:

'Where a charity is providing education in respect of a controversial issue it must do so in a way that allows the people being educated to make up their own minds.'

OSCR's view is that the Integrity Initiative expressed a particular perspective intended to persuade the public to a specific point of view and, given the nature of the subject matter, it was not sufficiently neutral to advance education.

The crocks who were running the charity were filling their own pockets with the public money the 'charity' received:

To pass the charity test any private benefit must be incidental to the organisation's activities that advance its purposes, that is, it must be a necessary result or by-product of the organisation's activities and not an end in itself.

We were concerned at the level of private benefit that a number of the charity's trustees were gaining from the exercise of its functions.

There was no clear explanation as to why the salaries being paid to charity trustees were considered reasonable and necessary, and we had concerns about the charity trustees' decision-making process around these payments. We do not consider that this private benefit was incidental to the organisation's activities that advanced its purposes.

The regulator also noted a lack of record keeping and a lack of documentation of decision making by the Institute's trustees.

Unfortunately the charity regulator will not close down the Institute of Statecraft. It accepted that it rectified its behavior by taking a number of measures:

  • the charity has ceased to undertake any activity related to the Integrity initiative, and this is now undertaken by a non-charitable entity having no legal connection to the charity
  • the charity has ceased to remunerate any of its charity trustees
  • the charity is taking external guidance on governance
  • some charity trustees are to stand down as soon as replacement charity trustees can be identified

The Integrity Initiative, as paid for by the British Foreign Office, Ministry of Defense, NATO and other such entities, will live on as a non-charitable entity with even less transparency. Its website, as well as that of Institute of Statecraft, is down. That it will now have to live in total secrecy will make it more difficult for it to recruit foreign journalist to spread its propaganda.

Since the Integrity Initiative was exposed the British government opened and financed a new secretive shop that will continue to spread anti-Russian disinformation :

On 3rd April, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) minister Alan Duncan revealed his department's 'Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme' - which bankrolls the Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative subsidiary - was funding a new endeavour, Open Information Partnership (OIP).

The announcement, buried in a response to a written parliamentary question, was supremely light on detail - Duncan merely said the effort would "respond to manipulated information in the news, social media and across the public space". Official fanfare was also unforthcoming - there was no accompanying press release, briefing document, or even mention of the launch by any government minister or department via social media channels.

The original proposal for the Open Information Partnership , as released by 'anonymous' , included the Institute of Statecraft , a Media Diversity Institute , Bellingcat , DFR Lab (i.e. the Atlantic Council) and some others in a so called ZINC Network . On the current OIP website the Institute of Statecraft 'charity' is no longer named.

---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the issue:

Tim Hayward provides a list (scroll down) of a large number of articles written here and elsewhere about the Integrity Initiative .

Posted by b on November 4, 2019 at 17:57 UTC | Permalink

div
NoOneYouKnow , Nov 4 2019 18:27 utc | 1
Thanks, B. It's a pity the people of the UK have no foreseeable recourse to stop shadow government operations like this that exist to disinform the people of the UK.
div> Speaking of Bellingcat:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BfLPJpRtyq4RFtHJoNpvWQjmGnyVkfE2HYoICKOGguA/mobilebas

Posted by: NOBTS , Nov 4 2019 18:45 utc | 2

Speaking of Bellingcat:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BfLPJpRtyq4RFtHJoNpvWQjmGnyVkfE2HYoICKOGguA/mobilebas

Posted by: NOBTS | Nov 4 2019 18:45 utc | 2

karlof1 , Nov 4 2019 18:49 utc | 3
At Kit Klarenberg's Twitter , there's a long tweet thread further detailing what b has written above. I can't help be wonder how the Monty Python troop would have portrayed the Institute for Statecraft and its parent the Integrity Initiative. It appears that the governments of the English speaking nations became addicted to lying to their citizens @1900 and are unable to kick the habit and instead have actually deepened their addiction. Elsewhere on the planet, it seems that people are learning it's easier to talk straight and transparently with other people and to pool resources and combine efforts to form a community of nations and humanity to better one and all. Seems simple enough to determine which is functional and which isn't.
james , Nov 4 2019 18:50 utc | 4
thanks b... i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia... is this due some need to find someone to demonize, an outgrowth of christianity or god knows what? or is it purely to generate more money into the industrial military complex? what is the rationale? i agree with @ 1 - noyk - it is unfortunate the uk people are used as guinea pigs on such a regular basis.. i suspect a similar exercise is in operation in canada and the west, although it seems the msm fulfills this role here...
NOBTS , Nov 4 2019 18:51 utc | 5
Oops! Googlehidden. Here's one that might work. An interesting compendium: https://www.comsuregroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Bellingcats-Digital-Toolkit.pdf
erik , Nov 4 2019 18:54 utc | 6
It seems that often products or organizations, which contain superlatives or anodyne expressions in their names, are generally sketchy...
karlof1 , Nov 4 2019 19:19 utc | 7
The Federalist declares it's published a scoop :

"CIA, FBI Informant Was Washington Post Source For Russiagate Smears."

The article details a segment of Russiagate's overall unraveling and outs WaPost's David Ignatius as part of Operation Mockingbird. And I see no reason to dispute the item's conclusion:

"These close connections between the Washington Post's Ignatius and individuals connected to the American and British intelligence communities, and the false reporting that has taken place over the last three-plus years, raise grave concerns that the warfare of the soft coup aimed at President Trump includes using the media to push propaganda."

The longer the above conclusion's denied, the wider the polarization becomes between those guided by facts and those following media fantasies.

ben , Nov 4 2019 19:46 utc | 8
james @ 4 opined;"
thanks b... i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia... is this due some need to find someone to demonize, an outgrowth of christianity or god knows what? or is it purely to generate more money into the industrial military complex"

I'm with ya' james, this demonetization of Russia, and any countries that refuse the empire's beck and call, is around to stay I'm afraid.

And yes, it's all of the above, but, mostly about the $.

semiconscious , Nov 4 2019 20:11 utc | 9
james @ 4;

'i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia... is this due some need to find someone to demonize, an outgrowth of christianity or god knows what? or is it purely to generate more money into the industrial military complex? what is the rationale?...'

they're the nuclear rival that don't manufacture many of the u.s.'s consumer products. otherwise, it'd either be china, or both...

plus, of course, there's all them cold war memes that can be triggered in a sizable portion of the population's heads...

David G , Nov 4 2019 20:13 utc | 10
The OSCR report includes the Institute for Statecraft's own description of its purposes, but nothing about its actual operations, other than the ones now being deemed unsatisfactory under the charities law.

So now that the Institute has committed not to run the Integrity Initiative, and not to enrich its trustees, what are its legitimate "charitable" activities that OSCR is kindly allowing it to continue with?

chet380 , Nov 4 2019 20:26 utc | 11
#4 James, #8 Ben --

I suspect the the antipathy to Russia and the extensive disinformation campaign stems from a 'Five Eyes' project and strategy ... with the malign Uncle as its director.

James , Nov 4 2019 20:31 utc | 12
As an Irish citizen, I think the British deep state - the original deep state -have been very successful at demonising the enemies of 'freedom' and 'civilisation', the Irish yes, also the Indians, Africans, Germans, french, Spanish, Muslims and now the Russians. Our enemies are not each other rather the deep state. Let's recognise who our real enemy is
Joost , Nov 4 2019 20:41 utc | 13
@james #4 "i don't understand why so much hate is directed at russia..."
Same motivation as all forgotten empires had. Even our cat want some of it, staring down on his employees from his basket high up on the fridge with that evil look on his face. We call it his World Domination Command Centre, WDCC for short. Global domination is what they crave. Kill the competition, loot its resources, more power, more money. America has been looted, devastated. Time for the locusts to move on to greener pastures. Russia is the promised land, the next wild west new world to colonize. Problem is, as always, the natives.
TEP , Nov 4 2019 21:11 utc | 14
I am hopeful that more and more of the population are realising that if an organisation is promoted by any western government as a source of information, then that organisation will provide disinformation by default. There are few, if any, journalists anywhere that are not part of the empirical disinformation program. Those that are not will be independent and, therefore, by alternate default, extremely wary of western government/government-funded/NGO sources. All the hegemon and it's vassals can do now is double-down and hope that the populations will go back to sleep.
james , Nov 4 2019 21:18 utc | 15
@8 ben / @ 9 semiconscious / @ 11 chet380.. yes, there is that too, but is that it? money as ben says rings true for me mostly... that is mostly how i see this...the agencies seem to be a front for western oligarchs.. the kleptomaniacs want access to all russian resources and have yet to be successful in getting it.. they succeeded in ukraine for the most part in having the kleptos gain control over much of ukraine.. the 2014 coop was meant to solidify more of that and poke russia in the eye too..

@ 13 joost... i would watch out for your cat! alas, we all seem to agree it is about wanting to loot russia... we share a similar viewpoint.. it is really sick how so many are ignorant pawns, or worse in all of this.. no wonder i make next to no money working in the music industry... i am in the wrong game and don't share a lack of ethics on such display with all these losers..

Trisha , Nov 4 2019 21:22 utc | 16
As with all things evil, the British oligarchy began in the 1830s targeting Russia as a threat to its autocratic interests, in this case "defending" the Ottoman Empire against Russia.

The Brits were further scared out of their wits when the 1917 Russian Revolution was on the verge of establishing an anti-capitalist system. So they, along with a ragtag bag of co-conspirators including the United States, launched a military invasion of Russia.

That's right, U.S. troops landed at two places in Russia and fought against Russian soldiers. The Brits/U.S/et. al. suffered a humiliating defeat, leaving so quickly that U.S. dead soldiers were left behind buried in Soviet soil, to be repatriated years later.

But it's Russia that is the threat to "us", right?

Jen , Nov 4 2019 21:34 utc | 17
Reading through the OCSR's document at the PDF link in B's post, I am surprised (should I be?) that during the entire decade-long period when the Institute of Statecraft was registered as a charity, the OCSR did not see fit at any time to remind the organisation of its responsibilities to keep proper records of its activities and decision-making, to provide a proper formal and transparent structure for its activities that could be shown to demonstrate a public benefit, and to have proper formal structures generally for its day-to-day running and governance activities. The Scottish public have every right to hold the OCSR to much higher standards of being a regulatory organisation making sure that charities are run properly as charities and not simply accept those charities' word that they will improve their operations when they have spent 10 long years taking money (some of it taxpayers' money) and misusing it.
Jackrabbit , Nov 4 2019 21:46 utc | 18
james @15:
they succeeded in ukraine for the most part in having the kleptos gain control over much of ukraine..

Ukraine is an economic disaster. Donbas and Crimea were the most valuable parts.

Ort , Nov 4 2019 22:23 utc | 19
@ Trisha | Nov 4 2019 21:22 utc | 16
___________________________________________

Thanks for your informative comment. I'd started to reply to James that Russia has been a default "boogie-man" and Western scapegoat since the 19th Century, but that sounded unhelpfully circular-- and I didn't have the ambition to refresh my understanding with actual historical facts. ;)

The fact that a sort of Western "coalition of the willing" invaded Russia after the 1917 revolution is still a well-kept secret! It was never mentioned in my (US) school courses, from parochial school through the "Honors Survey of Western Civilization" course I took in college.


Jackrabbit , Nov 4 2019 22:31 utc | 20
james @4

You ask too many questions... isn't it clear?

We hate THEM 'cause THEY hate US.

/snarc

Seriously, we've seen the movie and read the book. This is how "Red Scare" McCarthyism works.

!!

james , Nov 5 2019 0:10 utc | 21
@18 jr... disaster capitalism at its finest!!

@ 20..lol.. that is true... can't ver ask too many questions! and, it has been a repeat of mccarthyism.. it's bizarre to see so many otherwise intelligent people swallow this crap.. i think of emptywheel and how i used to think she was smart.. she is so busy looking at the trees, she's incapable of seeing the forest..

james , Nov 5 2019 0:21 utc | 22
@16 trisha... thanks... as i have mentioned here at moa numerous times, the book 'paris 1918' by Margaret Macmillan is an excellent book that gives an overview and discusses exactly what you are talking about.. i can't recommend the book enough..
https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/1135/Paris-1919
Ash Naz , Nov 5 2019 0:55 utc | 23
I ploughed through the Kit Klarenberg piece on Sputnik that b linked to and would have wept at the Orwellian inversions of truth in the OIP's 'mission statment' if I'd had any tears left after enduring the recent decades of lies and projection of the Empire's propaganda machine. The Mighty Wurlitzer at corporate-speak indeed. In fact all I could do was laugh like Group Captain Mandrake in Dr Strangelove when confronted with the madness of General Ripper.

Tragically, the opening paragraph of their statement sounded like something Caitlin Johnstone might pen, urging our side to be wary and vigilant of the propaganda of them .

"Democracy cannot thrive without honest, accurate and freely available information about the world around us We need to know where our information is coming from, we need to know the motives (good, bad or neither) of those providing the information, and be in the habit of thinking critically about everything we read and hear. Every one of us has the right to be properly informed – that knowledge gives us strength. Every one of us shares responsibility for informed engagement and critical thinking, to challenge the powerful and uncover the truth An engaged population, equipped with clarity and the truth, is the foundation for a world where we can all enjoy greater equality and greater peace."

"critical thinking"
"challenge the powerful"
"uncover the truth"

They are taking the tools that we need to deal with their perfidy, and pretending that they need to use them to "challenge the powerful and uncover the truth". I found this Orwellian inversion of the truth so chilling that I could only laugh.

In all seriousness, I can only presume that they actually believe their own lies.

vk , Nov 5 2019 3:10 utc | 26
The Wolfowitz Doctrine (1992) states that Russia should remain America's main enemy for the forseeable future because it inherited the USSR's nuclear arsenal. At least this is the official rationale.

But there may be another reason. Courtesy from Pepe Escobar's facebook page:

Francis Fukuyama interview: "Socialism ought to come back"

Trisha , Nov 5 2019 4:08 utc | 29
@22 James ... thanks for the "Paris 1919" book reference, luckily it's available at my local library. For a detailed history of (sadly) another in a long list of America's criminal acts of aggressive war, I highly recommend Russian Sideshow: America's Undeclared War, 1918-1920 by Robert L. Willett.
nietzsche1510 , Nov 5 2019 7:15 utc | 33
they are attacking Russia because they know that only military force can stop the collapse the fake Dollar & all the Jewish printed wealth which goes with it. "yes, the Dollar is our money, but, it is your problem" sort of imposed doctrine of the last half-century is coming to an end & no naval carriers could stop its fall.

[Nov 05, 2019] American Conspiracies Cover-Ups

Nov 05, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

American Conspiracies & Cover-Ups by Tyler Durden Tue, 11/05/2019 - 00:10 0 SHARES Authored by Douglas Citignano via Off-Guardian.org,

In today's world, the phrase "conspiracy theory" is pejorative and has a negative connotation. To many people, a conspiracy theory is an irrational, over-imaginative idea endorsed by people looking for attention and not supported by the mainstream media or government.

History shows, though, that there have been many times when governments or individuals have participated in conspiracies. It would be naïve to think that intelligence agencies, militaries, government officials, and politicians don't sometimes cooperate in covert, secretive ways.

Following are five instances when it's been proven that the government engaged in a conspiracy.

THE GULF OF TONKIN RESOLUTION

On August 4, 1964, Captain John J. Herrick, the commander of the USS Maddox, a US Navy vessel that was on an intelligence-gathering mission in the Gulf of Tonkin, reported to the White House and Pentagon that North Vietnamese patrol boats had fired torpedoes at his ship, and, so, the Maddox had fired back.

Two days later, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara testified to the Congress that he was certain that the Maddox had been attacked. On August 7, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed, the Congressional act that allowed President Johnson free reign to commence war; Johnson immediately ordered air strikes on North Vietnam and the Vietnam War -- which would eventually kill fifty-eight thousand Americans and two million Asians -- was underway.

Since then, it has been shown and proven that no North Vietnamese boats ever fired on the Maddox, and that McNamara had been untruthful when he testified before Congress. According to the official publication of the Naval Institute,

once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full US involvement in the Vietnam War."

In the weeks prior to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, South Vietnamese ships had been attacking posts in North Vietnam in conjunction with the CIA's Operation 34A. According to many inside sources, the Johnson administration wanted a full-scale war in Vietnam and through Operation 34A was trying to provoke North Vietnam into an attack that would give Johnson an excuse to go to war. But when McNamara was asked by the Congress on August 7 if these South Vietnam attacks had anything to do with the US military and CIA, McNamara lied and said no.

Within hours after reporting that the Maddox had been attacked, Captain Herrick was retracting his statements and reporting to the White House and Pentagon that "in all likelihood" an over-eager sonar man had been mistaken and that the sonar sounds and images that he originally thought were enemy torpedoes were actually just the beat of the Maddox's own propellers.

Herrick reported that there was a good probability that there had been no attack on the Maddox, and suggested "complete reevaluation before any action is taken."

McNamara saw these new, updated reports and discussed them with President Johnson early in the afternoon of August 4. Even though this was so, on the evening of August 4, President Johnson went on national television and announced to the American public that North Vietnam had engaged in "unprovoked aggression" and, so, the US military was retaliating.

A few days after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson remarked, "Hell, those damn stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish."

Recently, new documents related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident have been declassified and according to Robert Hanyok, a historian for the National Security Agency, these documents show that the NSA deliberately "distorted intelligence" andand "altered documents" to make it appear that an attack had occurred on August 4.

When President Lyndon Johnson misrepresented to the American public and said he knew that North Vietnam had attacked a US ship, and when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lied to the Congress and said he was sure that the Maddox had been attacked and that the CIA had nothing to do with South Vietnam aggression, and when NSA officials falsified information to make it appear that there had been an attack on the Maddox, that was a government conspiracy.

OPERATION NORTHWOODS

In 1962, the most powerful and highest ranking military officials of the US government, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, felt strongly that the communist leader Fidel Castro had to be removed from power and, so, came up with a plan to justify an American invasion of Cuba.

The plan, entitled Operations Northwoods, was presented to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, and was signed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L. Lemnitzer.

Operations Northwoods was a proposal for a false flag operation, a plan in which a military organizes an attack against its own country and then frames and blames the attack on another country for the purpose of the purpose of initiating hostilities and declaring war on that country.

The proposal was originally labeled Top Secret but was made public on November 18, 1997, by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board. The complete Operation Northwoods paper was published online by the National Security Archive on April 30, 2001, and this once-secret government document can now be read by anyone.

The actions that General Lemnitzer and the other chiefs wanted to d to take under Operations Northwoods are shocking. According to the plan, CIA and military personnel and hired provocateurs would commit various violent acts and these acts would be blamed on Castro to "create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility" and "put the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances."

One of the most ambitious plans of Operation Northwoods was to blow up a plane in midflight. The strategy was to fill a civilian airplane with CIA and military personnel who were registered under fake ID's; an exact duplicate plane -- an empty military drone aircraft -- would take off at the same exact time.

The plane of fake passengers would land at a military base but the empty drone plane would fly over Cuba and crash in the ocean, supposedly a victim of Cuban missiles. "Casualty lists in US newspapers" and conducting "fake funerals for mock-victims" would cause "a helpful wave of national indignation" in America.

The Operation Northwoods proposal also states: "We could blow up a US ship and blame Cuba." Whether the ship was to be empty or full of US soldiers is unclear. The document also says: "Hijacking attempts against US civil air and surface craft should be encouraged."

Some of the recommendations of Operation Northwoods would have surely led to serious injuries and even deaths of Cuban and American civilians. The plan suggests:

We could sink a boatload of Cubans on route to Florida (real or simulated)."

And:

We could foster attempts on lives of anti-Castro Cubans in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized We could explode a few bombs in carefully chosen spots."

Lemnitzer and the chiefs wanted many of these staged terrorist attacks to be directed at the Guantanamo Bay United States Naval Base in Cuba. The plans were:

When Secretary of Defense McNamara was presented with the Operation Northwoods plan, he either stopped and rejected the plan himself or passed it on to President Kennedy and JFK then rejected it. But if Kennedy and McNamara had agreed with the plan, then the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to begin enacting Operation Northwoods "right away, within a few months."

Even though Operation Northwoods was never initiated, when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the other highest-ranking military officials of the United States Government planned to organize violent attacks on Americans and anti-Castro Cuban citizens, knowing those attacks could severely injure and kill those citizens, and when they planned to blame those attacks on Cuba and then use that as an excuse to invade Cuba, that was a government conspiracy.

FBI AND THE MAFIA

In March 1965, the FBI had the house of New England organized crime boss Raymond Patriarca wiretapped and overheard two mobsters, Joseph Barboza and Vincent Flemmi, asking Patriarca for permission to kill another gangster, Edward Deegan. Two days later, Deegan's blood-soaked body was found dead in a Boston alley.

Within days, an official FBI report confirmed that Joseph Barboza and three other mobsters were the murderers. Instead of those men going to prison for murder, though, three years later a man named Joseph Salvati was brought to trial for the murder of Edward Deegan. At that trial Joseph Barboza testified and lied that Salvati was one of the murderers. On the basis of Barboza's testimony, Joseph Salvati was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

At that time, in the mid 1960s, the FBI was being pressured more and more to do something to stop organized crime. The bureau began using members of the mafia -- criminals and murderers -- to inform against fellow mafia members. Joseph Barboza was one of these FBI-protected, paid informants. The FBI didn't want Barboza to go to prison for the murder of Deegan because they wanted him to continue infiltrating the mafia and testifying against other mafia members.

The bureau, apparently, did want a conviction in the Deegan murder case, though, and, so, let Barboza lie under oath and let a man they knew to be innocent, Joseph Salvati, go to prison.

The Witness Protection Program was first created for Joseph Barboza, and Barboza was the first mafia informant to be protected under the program. After helping to convict a number of mobsters, Barboza was sent off to live in California. While under the Witness Protection Program, Barboza committed at least one more murder, and probably more.

On trial for a murder in California, FBI officials showed up for Joseph Barboza's trial and testified on his behalf, helping Barboza to get a light sentence.

Joseph Salvati ended up serving thirty years in prison for a murder that he was innocent of. During that thirty-year period, lawyers for Salvati requested documents from the FBI that would have proved Salvati's innocence, but the bureau refused to release them.

Finally, in 1997, other evidence came forth suggesting Salvati's innocence and the governor of Massachusetts, William Weld, granted Salvati's release. A few years later, the FBI was ordered to release all its reports on the case; hundreds of documents showed the FBI knew that Barboza was a murderer, that he had murdered Edward Deegan, and that Joseph Salvati had had nothing to do with the crime.

Salvati was exonerated in a court of law, and was eventually awarded millions of dollars in a civil lawsuit against the government. (Three other defendants were also exonerated. At the 1968 trial, Joseph Barboza had testified that three other men -- men who were also not guilty -- had participated in Deegan's murder. These three innocent men were, with Salvati, also sent to prison.)

Perhaps the most shocking thing that the FBI documents showed, though, was that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself knew Salvati was innocent and that Barboza had killed Deegan.

Hoover was working closely, almost daily, with the agents handling Joseph Barboza, and it was probably Hoover directing the operation. The congressional committee that investigated the case was the House Committee on Government Reform and Congressman Dan Burton was the chairman.

When asked by CBS's 60 Minutes journalist Mike Wallace "Did J. Edgar Hoover know all this? " Burton replied:

"Yes . . . It's one of the greatest failures in the history of American justice J. Edgar Hoover knew Salvati was innocent. He knew it and his name should not be emblazoned on the FBI headquarters. We should change the name of that building."

Congressman Burton claimed there was evidence that there were more cases when the FBI did the same sorts of things they did in the Joseph Salvati case; when Burton and his committee requested the files on these cases, the Attorney General and the White House refused to release them.

When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and top FBI officials let a known murderer lie and perjure himself in a courtroom, when they let four men they knew to be innocent suffer in the hell of a prison cell for thirty years, and when they deliberately covered that up for decades, that was a government conspiracy.

THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

In 1939, Albert Einstein and two other European physicists sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt informing Roosevelt that the German government was working on developing the science that could lead to the creation of a nuclear bomb. FDR immediately formed a committee to look into the idea of the US government making an atomic bomb.

In 1942, the Manhattan Project, the United States program to build a nuclear bomb, headed by General Leslie R. Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers, was formed.

The program existed from 1942–1946, spent two billion dollars, had plants and factories in thirty cities, and employed 130,000 workers. But virtually no one knew about it. The Manhattan Project is considered the "Greatest Secret Ever Kept."

The US government wanted to keep the Project a secret lest Germany or one of America's other enemies found out about it and built -- more quickly -- a larger, better bomb. In the early 1940s, when American scientists began working on splitting atoms and nuclear fission, US government officials asked the scientists to not publish any reports on the work in scientific journals. The work was kept quiet.

In 1943, when newspapers began reporting on the large Manhattan Project construction going on in a few states, the newly formed United States Government Office of Censorship asked newspapers and broadcasters to avoid discussing "atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission . . . the use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials" or anything else that could expose the project. The press kept mum. The government didn't talk about the Manhattan Project, the press didn't report on it, and the public knew nothing about it.

Not even the 130,000 Manhattan Project laborers knew they were building an atom bomb.

In 1945, a Life magazine article wrote that before Japan was attacked with a-bombs, "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved."

The workers were told they were doing an important job for the government, but weren't told what the job was, and didn't understand the full import of the mysterious, daily tasks they were doing. The laborers were warned that disclosing the Project's secrets was punishable by ten years in prison, and a hefty financial fine.

Whole towns and cities were built where thousands of Manhattan Project workers lived and worked but these thousands didn't know they were helping to build nuclear bombs.

The Manhattan Project finally became known to the public on August 6, 1945, when President Harry Truman announced that America had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

Truman, himself, had not been informed of the Manhattan Project until late April 1945.

When the government kept the purpose of the Manhattan Project a secret from the press, from the public, from America's enemies, from Harry Truman, and even from the 130,000 laborers who worked for the Manhattan Project, that was a government conspiracy.

THE CHURCH COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION

In the early 1970s, after the Watergate affair and investigative reports by the New York Times, it became apparent that the CIA and other US intelligence agencies might be engaging in inappropriate and illegal activities. In 1975, the Church Committee, named after the Committee's chairman Senator Frank Church, was formed to investigate abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS.

The Church Committee reports are said to constitute the most extensive investigations of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Many disturbing facts were revealed. According to the final report of the Committee, US intelligence agencies had been engaging in "unlawful or improper conduct" and "intelligence excesses, at home and abroad" since the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt.

The report added that "intelligence agencies have undermined the Constitutional rights of citizens" and "checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied."

One of the most well-known revelations of the Committee was the CIA's so-called "Family Jewels," a report that detailed the CIA's misdeeds dating back to Dwight Eisenhower's presidency. The committee also reported on the NSA's SHAMROCK and MINARET programs; under these programs the NSA had been intercepting, opening, and reading the telegrams and mail of thousands of private citizens.

The Church Committee also discovered and exposed the FBI's COINTELPRO program, the bureau's program to covertly destroy and disrupt any groups or individuals that J. Edgar Hoover felt were bad for America. Some of the movements and groups that the FBI tried to discredit and destroy were the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr.

The most alarming thing that the Church Committee found, though, was that the CIA had an assassination program. It was revealed that the CIA assassinated or had tried to assassinate Dinh Diem of Vietnam, Raphael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, General Rene Schneider of Chile, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and other political leaders throughout the world.

The Committee learned about the different ways the CIA had developed to kill and assassinate people: inflicting cancer, inflicting heart attacks, making murders look like suicides, car accidents, boating accidents, and shootings. At one point, CIA Director William Colby presented to the Committee a special "heart attack gun" that the CIA had created. The gun was able to shoot a small poison-laden dart into its victim. The dart was so small as to be undetectable; the victim's death from the poison would appear to be a heart attack, so no foul play would be suspected.

In response to the Church Committee report, in 1976 President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11,905, which forbade employees of the US government from engaging in or conspiring to engage in political assassinations.

In that same year, the Senate approved Senate Resolution 400, which established the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee responsible for providing vigilant oversight over the intelligence agencies.

Many former CIA employee-whistleblowers and other people, though, claim that US intelligence agencies are still acting in improper ways. In 2008, it was revealed that the CIA had hired Blackwater, a private company made up of ex-Navy Seals, to track down and assassinate suspected terrorists.

Later in the 2000s, when the Congress formed a committee to investigate if CIA waterboarding and other methods of interrogation constituted torture, congressmen complained that they couldn't get to the bottom of the matter because CIA officials and the CIA director were lying to the congressional committee.

Forty-five years after the revelations of the Church Committee, it seems US intelligence agencies are still engaging in covert and improper conduct.

When US intelligence agencies and the CIA plot to influence the affairs of foreign nations, when the CIA plots assassinations and assassinates foreign leaders and political dissidents, when the CIA develops new ways to kill and assassinate and interrogate and torture, and when the CIA keeps all that from Congress, the press, and the public, that's a government conspiracy.

* * *

If these five instances of government engaging in conspiracies have been proven to be true -- and they have been -- isn't it logical to assume that government agencies may have engaged in other conspiracies? It is the very nature of intelligence agencies and militaries to act in secretive, conspiratorial ways.

The phrase "conspiracy theory" shouldn't have a negative connotation. Politics always plays out with backroom handshakes. It is the suggestion of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups that government agencies and officials and the special interests that influence them are often engaging in conspiratorial actions, and that conspiracies have been behind some of the most iconic and important events of American history.

A conspiracy theorist was regaling a friend with one conspiracy theory after another. Finally, the friend interrupted and said, "I bet I know what would happen if God Himself appeared out of the sky right now, looked down at us, and said, 'There is no conspiracy.' I bet you would look up and say, 'So the conspiracy goes higher than we thought.'"

Perhaps if the Almighty appeared to inform us that politicians and governments and government officials don't act in secretive, covert, conspiratorial ways, then we could accept that.

But when the evidence indicates otherwise .

Theories questioning if multiple people might have shot at JFK, or if interior bombs brought down the World Trade Center, or if somebody was able to rig the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections can make for dramatic, sensational storytelling.

But it is not the purpose of American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups to be sensational; the purpose of this book is to talk about "conspiracy realities" that can hopefully give us a deeper and more meaningful understanding of politics.

If elements in the intelligence agencies participated in assassinating President Kennedy, then how can the intelligence agencies be better controlled? If elements in the government allowed or caused 9/11 to happen to give us an excuse to go to war in the Middle East, then how much of the War on Terror is disinformation and propaganda?

If presidential elections can be rigged, then how can we have fairer, uncorrupted elections? If secretive influences behind the scenes, a Deep State, are controlling our social, political, and financial systems for their own selfish purposes, then it would benefit us to expose who and what these secretive influences are.

American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups may give us a glimpse into the way that government and politics work.

Or don't work.

* * *

This is an extract from American Conspiracies and Cover-Ups , by Douglas Cirignano published by Simon&Schuster . It can be purchased in hard copy, digital and audio-book form through Amazon and other booksellers.

[Nov 05, 2019] The Empire, Trump and Intra-Ruling Class Conflict Dissident Voice

Notable quotes:
"... On the other hand, as Targ explains, are the Trumpian, "America First" nationalist capitalists. This faction of the ruling class, while also supporting global dominance and a permanent war economy (military-related spending will consume 48 percent of the 2020 federal budget) favors trade restrictions, economic nationalism, building walls and anti-immigrant policies. Although Trump is inconsistent, bumbling and sometimes contradictory, he's departed from the neocon's agenda by making overtures to North Korea and Russia, voicing doubts about NATO as an expensive relic from the past that is being dangerously misused outside of Europe, not being afraid to speak bluntly to EU allies, frequently mentioning ending our "endless, ridiculous and costly wars," asserting that the U.S. is badly overextended and saying "The job of our military is not to police the world." ..."
"... This is a high stakes intra-ruling class struggle and neither side cares a fig about what's best for the American people or those beyond our borders. At this point it's impossible to know how it will play out but grasping the underlying dynamics explains much about current U.S. domestic and foreign policy. This understanding may, in turn, point toward how opponents of America's oligarchic elites can most expeditiously use their time and energy. ..."
"... Foremost is the fact that Trump's intra-elite enemies despise him not for being a neo-fascistic demagogue, a despicable human being devoid of a conscience, or for the brouhaha over Ukraine. Their animus is rooted in the conviction that Trump has been a foot dragging imperialist, an equivocal caretaker of empire, unreliable pull-the-trigger Commander-in-chief (e.g.Iran) and transparent truth-teller about the real motives behind U.S. foreign policy. These are his unforgivable sins and if he's impeached or denied the Oval Office by some other means, they will be real reasons. ..."
"... One of Trump's most traitorous acts is that he's been consistent, at least rhetorically, in being opposed to U.S. troops being killed in "endless wars." One need not agree with his reasons to find merit in this worthy objective. His motives probably include Nativism, racism, foreign investment stability, the wars causing more refugees to come here, his massive ego, appeals to his voting base, or simply because he believes both he and the "real America" would be better off. For him, the latter two are synonymous. ..."
"... For this treachery, those arrayed against Trump include at least, the Pentagon-CIA-armaments lobby, MSM editors like those at CNN, The New York Times ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
Nov 05, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org

Over the past few months President Trump has unilaterally by Tweet and telephone begun to dismantle the U.S. military's involvement in the Middle East. The irony is amazing, because in a general overarching narrative sense, this is what the marginalized antiwar movement has been trying to do for decades. 1

Prof. Harry Targ, in his important piece "United States foreign policy: yesterday, today, and tomorrow," (MR online, October 23, 2919), reminds us of the factional dispute among U.S. foreign policy elites over how to maintain the U.S. empire. On the one hand are the neoliberal global capitalists who favor military intervention, covert operations, regime change, strengthening NATO, thrusting China into the enemy vacuum and re-igniting the Cold War with Russia. All of this is concealed behind lofty rhetoric about humanitarianism, protecting human rights, promoting democracy, fighting terrorism and American exceptionalism. Their mantra is Madeleine Albright's description of the United States as the world's "one indispensable nation."

On the other hand, as Targ explains, are the Trumpian, "America First" nationalist capitalists. This faction of the ruling class, while also supporting global dominance and a permanent war economy (military-related spending will consume 48 percent of the 2020 federal budget) favors trade restrictions, economic nationalism, building walls and anti-immigrant policies. Although Trump is inconsistent, bumbling and sometimes contradictory, he's departed from the neocon's agenda by making overtures to North Korea and Russia, voicing doubts about NATO as an expensive relic from the past that is being dangerously misused outside of Europe, not being afraid to speak bluntly to EU allies, frequently mentioning ending our "endless, ridiculous and costly wars," asserting that the U.S. is badly overextended and saying "The job of our military is not to police the world."

I would add that Trump is also an "American exceptionalist" but ascribes a very different provincial meaning to the term, something closer to a crabbed provincialism, an insular "Shining City on a Hill," surrounded by a moat.

This is a high stakes intra-ruling class struggle and neither side cares a fig about what's best for the American people or those beyond our borders. At this point it's impossible to know how it will play out but grasping the underlying dynamics explains much about current U.S. domestic and foreign policy. This understanding may, in turn, point toward how opponents of America's oligarchic elites can most expeditiously use their time and energy.

Foremost is the fact that Trump's intra-elite enemies despise him not for being a neo-fascistic demagogue, a despicable human being devoid of a conscience, or for the brouhaha over Ukraine. Their animus is rooted in the conviction that Trump has been a foot dragging imperialist, an equivocal caretaker of empire, unreliable pull-the-trigger Commander-in-chief (e.g.Iran) and transparent truth-teller about the real motives behind U.S. foreign policy. These are his unforgivable sins and if he's impeached or denied the Oval Office by some other means, they will be real reasons.

One of Trump's most traitorous acts is that he's been consistent, at least rhetorically, in being opposed to U.S. troops being killed in "endless wars." One need not agree with his reasons to find merit in this worthy objective. His motives probably include Nativism, racism, foreign investment stability, the wars causing more refugees to come here, his massive ego, appeals to his voting base, or simply because he believes both he and the "real America" would be better off. For him, the latter two are synonymous.

For this treachery, those arrayed against Trump include at least, the Pentagon-CIA-armaments lobby, MSM editors like those at CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post , NSA, Zionist neocons, the DNC, establishment Democrats, some hawkish Republican senators, many lifestyle liberals still harboring a sentimental faith in American goodness and even EU and NATO elites who've benefited from being faithful lackeys to Washington's global imperialism.

In a recent interview, Major Danny Sjursen, retired army officer and West Point instructor with tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, notes that "The last bipartisan issue in American politics today is warfare, forever warfare." In terms of the military, that means " even the hint of getting out of the establishment interventionist status quo is terrifying to these generals, terrifying to these former intelligence officers from the Obama administration who seem to live on MSNBC now." Sjursen adds that many of these generals (like Mattis) have already found lucrative work with the military industrial complex. 2

In response to Trump's announcement about removing some U.S. troops from the region, we find an op-ed in The New York Times by Admiral William McRaven where he states that Trump "should be out of office sooner than later. It's time for a new person in the Oval Office, Republican, Democrat or Independent. The fate of the nation depends on it." The unmistakeable whiff of support for a soft coup is chilling. If Trump can't be contained, he must be deposed one way or another.

And this is all entirely consistent with the fact that the national security state was totally caught off guard by Trump's victory in 2016. For them, Trump was a loose cannon, erratic and ultra-confrontational, someone they couldn't control. Their favored candidate was the ever reliable, Wall Street-friendly, war-mongering Hillary Clinton or even Jeb Bush. Today, barring a totally chastised Trump, the favorites include a fading Biden, Pence, a reprise of Clinton or someone in her mold but without the baggage.

For Trump's establishment enemies, another closely related failing is his habit of blurting out inconvenient truths. I'm not the first person to say that Trump is the most honest president in my lifetime. Yes, he lies most of the time but as left analyst Paul Street puts it, "Trump is too clumsily and childishly brazen in laying bare the moral nothingness and selfishness of the real material-historical bourgeois society that lives beneath the veils of 'Western civilization' and 'American democracy.'" 3

All his predecessors took pains or were coached to conceal their imperialist actions behind declarations of humanitarian interventionism but Trump has pulled the curtains back to reveal the ugly truths about U.S. foreign policy. As such, the carefully calibrated propaganda fed to the public in endless reiterations over a lifetime is jeopardized whenever Trump utters a transparent truth. This is intolerable.

Here are a few examples culled from speeches, interviews and press reports:

As noted earlier, the endgame is not in sight. Trump seems without a clear strategy for moving forward and from all reports he can't depend on his current coterie of White House advisors to produce one. Further, he may lack the necessary political in-fight skills or tenacity to see it through. When some of his Republican "allies" savaged his announcement to withdraw troops from Syria, he backtracked and made some, at least cosmetic concessions. However, the fact that Trump's position remains popular with his voter base and especially with veterans of these wars will give pause to Republicans. If some finally join the Democrats in voting for impeachment over Ukraine-gate they may minimize re-election risks by hiding their real motives behind pious claims -- as will most Democrats -- about "protecting the constitution and the rule of law".

Now, lest I be misunderstood, nothing I've written here should be construed as support for Donald Trump or that I believe he's antiwar. Trump is aberration only in that his brand of Western imperialism means that the victims remain foreigners while U.S. soldiers remain out of harm's way. He knows that boots on the ground can quickly descend into bodies in the ground and unlike his opponents, coffins returning to Dover Air Base are not worth risking his personal ambitions. This is clearly something to build upon. We don't know if Trump views drones, cyber warfare and proxies as substitutes but his intra-elite opponents remain extremely dubious. In any event, that's another dimension to expose and challenge.

Finally, we know the ruling class in a capitalist democracy -- an oxymoron -- expends enormous time and resources to obtain a faux "consent of the governed" through misinformation conveyed via massive, lifelong ideological indoctrination. For them, citizen's policing themselves is more efficient than coercion and precludes raising questions that might delegitimize the system. Obviously force and fear are hardly unknown -- witness the mass incarceration and police murder of black citizens -- but one only has to look around to see how successful this method of control has been.

Nevertheless, as social historian Margaret Jacoby wisely reminds us, "No institution is safe if people simply stop believing the assumptions that justify its existence." 4 Put another way, the system simply can't accommodate certain "dangerous ideas."

Today, we see promising political fissures developing, especially within the rising generation, and it's our responsibility to help deepen and widen these openings through whatever means at our disposal.

[Nov 03, 2019] Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, such as information operations. A nice sounding euphemism for propaganda, and computer network operations. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of this Task Force. ..."
Nov 03, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson Larry Johnson-5x7

The average American has no idea how alarming is the news that former CIA Director John Brennan reportedly created and staffed a CIA Task Force in early 2016 that was named, Trump Task Force, and given the mission of spying on and carrying out covert actions against the campaign of candidate Donald Trump.

This was not a simple gathering of a small number of disgruntled Democrats working at the CIA who got together like a book club to grouse and complain about the brash real estate guy from New York. It was a specially designed covert action to try to destroy Donald Trump.

A "Task Force" is a special bureaucratic creation that provides a vehicle for bring case officers and analysts together, along with admin support, for a limited term project. But it also can be expanded to include personnel from other agencies, such as the FBI, DIA and NSA. Task Forces have been used since the inception of the CIA in 1947. Here's a recently declassified memo outlining the considerations in the creation of a task force in 1958. The author, L.K. White, talks about the need for a coordinating Headquarters element and an Operational unit "in the field", i.e. deployed around the world.

A Task Force operates independent of the CIA " Mission Centers " (that's the jargon for the current CIA organization chart).

So what did John Brennan do? I am told by an knowledgeable source that Brennan created a Trump Task Force in early 2016. It was an invitation only Task Force. Specific case officers (i.e., men and women who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and admin personnel were recruited. Not everyone invited accepted the offer. But many did.

This was not a CIA only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task Force. We have some clues that Christopher Steele's FBi handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been detailed to the Trump Task Force ( see here ).

So what kind of things would this Task Force do? The case officers would work with foreign intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on identifying intelligence collection priorities. Task Force members could task NSA to do targeted collection. They also would have the ability to engage in covert action, such as targeting George Papadopoulos. Joseph Mifsud may be able to shed light on the CIA officers who met with him, briefed on operational objectives regarding Papadopoulos and helped arrange monitored meetings. I think it is highly likely that the honey pot that met with George Papadopoulos, a woman named Azra Turk, was part of the CIA Trump Task Force.

The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, such as information operations. A nice sounding euphemism for propaganda, and computer network operations. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of this Task Force.

In light of what we have learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, there should be a serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at minimum, reporting to them.

When I described this to one friend, a retired CIA Chief of Station, his first response was, "My God, that's illegal." We then reminisced about another illegal operation carried out under the auspices of the CIA Central American Task Force back in the 1980s. That became known to Americans as the Iran Contra scandal.

I sure hope that John Durham and his team are looking at this angle. If true it marks a new and damning indictment of the corruption of the CIA. Rather than spying on genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of Putin.

[Nov 03, 2019] Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, such as information operations. A nice sounding euphemism for propaganda, and computer network operations. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of this Task Force. ..."
Nov 03, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson Larry Johnson-5x7

The average American has no idea how alarming is the news that former CIA Director John Brennan reportedly created and staffed a CIA Task Force in early 2016 that was named, Trump Task Force, and given the mission of spying on and carrying out covert actions against the campaign of candidate Donald Trump.

This was not a simple gathering of a small number of disgruntled Democrats working at the CIA who got together like a book club to grouse and complain about the brash real estate guy from New York. It was a specially designed covert action to try to destroy Donald Trump.

A "Task Force" is a special bureaucratic creation that provides a vehicle for bring case officers and analysts together, along with admin support, for a limited term project. But it also can be expanded to include personnel from other agencies, such as the FBI, DIA and NSA. Task Forces have been used since the inception of the CIA in 1947. Here's a recently declassified memo outlining the considerations in the creation of a task force in 1958. The author, L.K. White, talks about the need for a coordinating Headquarters element and an Operational unit "in the field", i.e. deployed around the world.

A Task Force operates independent of the CIA " Mission Centers " (that's the jargon for the current CIA organization chart).

So what did John Brennan do? I am told by an knowledgeable source that Brennan created a Trump Task Force in early 2016. It was an invitation only Task Force. Specific case officers (i.e., men and women who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and admin personnel were recruited. Not everyone invited accepted the offer. But many did.

This was not a CIA only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task Force. We have some clues that Christopher Steele's FBi handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been detailed to the Trump Task Force ( see here ).

So what kind of things would this Task Force do? The case officers would work with foreign intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on identifying intelligence collection priorities. Task Force members could task NSA to do targeted collection. They also would have the ability to engage in covert action, such as targeting George Papadopoulos. Joseph Mifsud may be able to shed light on the CIA officers who met with him, briefed on operational objectives regarding Papadopoulos and helped arrange monitored meetings. I think it is highly likely that the honey pot that met with George Papadopoulos, a woman named Azra Turk, was part of the CIA Trump Task Force.

The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, such as information operations. A nice sounding euphemism for propaganda, and computer network operations. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of this Task Force.

In light of what we have learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, there should be a serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at minimum, reporting to them.

When I described this to one friend, a retired CIA Chief of Station, his first response was, "My God, that's illegal." We then reminisced about another illegal operation carried out under the auspices of the CIA Central American Task Force back in the 1980s. That became known to Americans as the Iran Contra scandal.

I sure hope that John Durham and his team are looking at this angle. If true it marks a new and damning indictment of the corruption of the CIA. Rather than spying on genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of Putin.

[Nov 03, 2019] Little mentioned is the server in Ukraine which was brought up in the phone call. Barr's investigation has become a criminal investigation and interested in a server in Ukraine. The impeachment farce is trying to put the focus on Biden, but the server may be what they are trying to protect

Nov 03, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peter AU 1 , Nov 2 2019 1:00 utc | 82

Petri Krohn's comment @37 "ERIC CIARAMELLA IS NOT A WHISTLEBLOWER - HE IS A SUSPECT"

Little mentioned is the server in Ukraine which was brought up in the phone call. Barr's investigation has become a criminal investigation and interested in a server in Ukraine.

The impeachment farce is trying to put the focus on Biden, but the server may be what they are trying to protect.

This impeachment show looks to be a rearguard or defensive action to try and stop the Barr criminal investigation into russiagate.

[Nov 03, 2019] Imagine Trump vs. Gabbard in the general. Real foreign policy would be debated, and Dems would become antiwar.

Nov 03, 2019 | www.antiwar.com

Tuyzentfloot • 5 days ago ,

The 'they are manipulating Trump' angle is valid I'm sure but it tends to diminish those other aspects of Trump's 'intuition'. It is stated in the article though. Trump is antiwar in the sense that he is against useless wars. Give him a clear goal and he doesn't mind war at all. Looting and pillage is fine. Attacking defenseless enemies is fine. Convince him that endless wars are actually good business and he'll support those as well. He doesn't require manipulating for that. The antiwar elements in his thinking are easily used to paper over his other characteristics as 'being manipulated'.

Tuyzentfloot • 5 days ago ,

Another subject is that of Trump's dishonesty. In fact it is more about out of sync dishonesty: 'normal people' (policy level) use shared schemas for when to lie and when not to lie. Trump uses a different one. He will lie when others consider it a bad idea and will speak the truth when others consider it a bad idea.

Luchorpan • 3 days ago ,

Tulsi Gabbard just won 4% in latest national poll. Maybe Trump is taking the oil in order to make her the Dem nominee.

Imagine Trump vs. Gabbard in the general. Real foreign policy would be debated, and Dems would become antiwar.

[Nov 03, 2019] US House of Representatives votes to back impeachment inquiry by Patrick Martin Some interesting points from Trotskyites site Some interesting points from Trotskyites site

Notable quotes:
"... The main difference is that the right of the president to have his own attorneys attend and participate at sessions of the Judiciary Committee is conditional on Trump dropping his order that executive branch officials refuse to testify before the various House probes or supply documents to them. ..."
"... Already, on Thursday, the Intelligence Committee took hours of testimony from Bolton's top deputy for Russia and Eastern Europe, Timothy Morrison. Morrison was brought on the National Security Council by Bolton with main responsibility for White House policy on weapons of mass destruction. He spearheaded the drive by the Trump administration to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which both he and Bolton vehemently opposed, in order to give the US military the green light to develop nuclear missiles that could target China from US bases like Guam, other US-controlled islands, and ships in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. ..."
"... There are other indications that Bolton is playing a key role behind the scenes in the gathering storm over impeachment. Two Democratic senators have sent a letter to US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer seeking details on the Trump administration's decision not to restore Ukrainian access to the "generalized system of preferences" (GSP), a program that benefits developing countries. The letter follows a Washington Post report October 24 that Bolton had warned Lighthizer not to seek restoration of benefits to Ukraine because Trump would not approve it, as part of his effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens. Given the content of the article, the most likely source for the leak is Bolton or one of his top aides. ..."
"... General Joseph F. Dunford, who retired only a month ago as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a statement to CNN Wednesday defending Colonel Vindman against attacks from Fox News and other ultra-right media, calling him "a professional, competent, patriotic, and loyal officer" who "has made an extraordinary contribution to the security of our nation in both peacetime and combat." ..."
"... Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan defended the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and agreed that she was the victim of a smear campaign by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who helped engineer her recall from her post in Kiev because she was an obstacle to the effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Boot focuses on two decisions that have most provoked the CIA-Pentagon-State Department axis of evil: holding up aid to Ukraine, thus undermining military operations against pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, and Trump's partial pullout of US forces in Syria. ..."
"... Boot is, of course, a fervent supporter of impeachment, because he sees that as a step towards reversing course on foreign policy and adopting a more aggressive and militaristic US role in the Middle East. His ranting only underscores the reality of the political conflict in Washington. ..."
Nov 01, 2019 | www.wsws.org

By a near party-line vote of 232-196, the US House of Representatives voted Thursday for a resolution laying out the procedures for the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump that was begun September 24. The resolution sets the stage for the holding of public, televised hearings and the likely drawing up of articles of impeachment in the course of the next month.

Only two Democrats out of 233 in the House voted against the resolution, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Colin Peterson of Minnesota. Only one member elected as a Republican, Justin Amash of Michigan, voted for the resolution. He left the Republican Party in July because of his support for impeachment, and he now sits as an independent.

The sharp divisions over the resolution were reflected in the hour-long debate, in which Republican defenders of Trump denounced the impeachment inquiry with hysterical anticommunist rhetoric, calling it "Soviet-style" and a "show trial." Democrats wrapped themselves in the American flag -- or displayed it on a large placard as they spoke, in the case of Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- and denounced Trump for endangering US "national security."

The procedure laid down in the eight-page resolution, drafted Wednesday by the House Rules Committee, gives an outsized role to the House Intelligence Committee, which is to begin public hearings sometime in November at which many of the witnesses who have testified behind closed doors will be asked to do so again in front of television cameras.

The Intelligence Committee, along with four other committees conducting investigations into various aspects of President Trump's personal, business and official conduct, will report its findings to the Judiciary Committee, which would actually draw up any articles of impeachment, vote on them, and send them to the full House for final action.

The overall procedures, including provisions for extended questioning of witnesses by representatives of both the majority and minority parties, conform generally to similar measures adopted during the impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon in 1974 and President Bill Clinton in 1998.

The main difference is that the right of the president to have his own attorneys attend and participate at sessions of the Judiciary Committee is conditional on Trump dropping his order that executive branch officials refuse to testify before the various House probes or supply documents to them.

In the event of continued presidential stonewalling of the House committees, the resolution provides that the chair of the Judiciary Committee "shall have the discretion to impose appropriate remedies, including by denying specific requests by the president or his counsel under these procedures to call or question witnesses."

In other words, if Trump continues to block testimony and evidence, his attorneys will not be allowed to cross-examine those witnesses who do appear despite the full-throated opposition of the White House. Given that many officials and former officials of the Trump administration have agreed to testify under subpoena, this could become a significant issue.

The special role of the House Intelligence Committee underscores the reactionary nature of the Democrats' impeachment drive. Trump is being targeted, not for his real crimes as president, attacking immigrants, undermining democratic rights, and asserting quasi-dictatorial powers, but for his foreign policy actions that are opposed by a substantial section of the US military-intelligence apparatus.

The witnesses testifying before the closed-door sessions of the Intelligence Committee are not immigrant mothers, cruelly and in some cases permanently separated from their children, or the victims of Trump-inspired fascist gunmen like the El Paso mass shooter. Instead, they are an array of State Department and military officials at odds with Trump's efforts to browbeat the government of Ukraine into supplying him with political dirt against former vice president Joe Biden, viewed by Trump as a likely opponent in the 2020 election.

Particularly significant in that context is the announcement that the Intelligence Committee has set a November 7 date for the testimony of John Bolton, Trump's former national security advisor. It is not clear whether Bolton will testify, but the potential alignment of the Democrats and one of the most notorious war criminals in the American government is a clear demonstration of the reactionary motives of the Democrats, who are acting as front men for rabid warmongers in the national-security state.

Already, on Thursday, the Intelligence Committee took hours of testimony from Bolton's top deputy for Russia and Eastern Europe, Timothy Morrison. Morrison was brought on the National Security Council by Bolton with main responsibility for White House policy on weapons of mass destruction. He spearheaded the drive by the Trump administration to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which both he and Bolton vehemently opposed, in order to give the US military the green light to develop nuclear missiles that could target China from US bases like Guam, other US-controlled islands, and ships in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Morrison is the highest-ranking Trump aide to provide evidence to the Intelligence Committee, and he announced his impending departure from the White House on Wednesday night, hours before he was sworn in as a witness. According to leaks to the press from the closed-door hearing, Morrison largely confirmed the testimony of other witnesses, particularly Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, that there was a direct quid pro quo involved in US policy towards Ukraine: Trump demanded a public investigation into the Democratic Party and the Bidens, in return for military aid and a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House.

There are other indications that Bolton is playing a key role behind the scenes in the gathering storm over impeachment. Two Democratic senators have sent a letter to US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer seeking details on the Trump administration's decision not to restore Ukrainian access to the "generalized system of preferences" (GSP), a program that benefits developing countries. The letter follows a Washington Post report October 24 that Bolton had warned Lighthizer not to seek restoration of benefits to Ukraine because Trump would not approve it, as part of his effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens. Given the content of the article, the most likely source for the leak is Bolton or one of his top aides.

There were further indications of support for the impeachment drive -- or at least for the national-security officials who have come forward to testify against Trump -- from the top levels of the military and diplomatic establishment. General Joseph F. Dunford, who retired only a month ago as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a statement to CNN Wednesday defending Colonel Vindman against attacks from Fox News and other ultra-right media, calling him "a professional, competent, patriotic, and loyal officer" who "has made an extraordinary contribution to the security of our nation in both peacetime and combat."

And in testimony Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is expected to confirm his nomination to be US Ambassador to Russia, Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan defended the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and agreed that she was the victim of a smear campaign by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who helped engineer her recall from her post in Kiev because she was an obstacle to the effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens.

Asked whether it was "ever appropriate for the president to use his office to solicit investigations into his domestic political opponents," Sullivan replied, "I don't think that would be in accord with our values." Given Trump's frequent declarations that his telephone conversation with Zelensky, in which he made just such a request, was "perfect," Sullivan's statement is extraordinary. It suggests an unprecedented degree of open revolt against Trump within the national-security establishment.

The real motives of the impeachment drive were spelled out with particular frenzy in a column by neoconservative Max Boot, who, like Bolton, has been an all-out supporter of US military aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and throughout the world. Writing in the Washington Post , under the headline, "More Trump gifts to Russia," he declares, "Trump is bringing the United States to its knees and making Russia great again."

Boot focuses on two decisions that have most provoked the CIA-Pentagon-State Department axis of evil: holding up aid to Ukraine, thus undermining military operations against pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, and Trump's partial pullout of US forces in Syria.

He writes: "Russian soldiers are entering U.S. bases and taking up the joint patrolling duties with the Turkish army that U.S. troops had been performing until recently. The fate of Syria was settled not in Washington but in Sochi -- Putin's favorite Black Sea resort. Trump has given Russia what it has sought for decades: a leading role in the Middle East. This is the biggest geopolitical shift in the region since 1972 when Egypt's Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet advisers and aligned with Washington."

Boot is, of course, a fervent supporter of impeachment, because he sees that as a step towards reversing course on foreign policy and adopting a more aggressive and militaristic US role in the Middle East. His ranting only underscores the reality of the political conflict in Washington.

... ... ...

[Nov 03, 2019] The "Deep State" Has Been Redefined as Career Bureaucrats Doing Their Patriotic Duty by Edward Curtin

Notable quotes:
"... It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news. There's something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of "conspiracy theorists" is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor. But with a twisted twist. ..."
"... The Council on Foreign Relations ..."
"... Foreign Affairs, ..."
"... Linguistic mind control is insidious like the slow drip of a water faucet. After a while you don't hear it and just go about your business, even as your mind, like a rotting rubber washer, keeps disintegrating under propaganda's endless reiterations. ..."
"... To think that the deep state is government employees just doing their patriotic duty is plain idiocy and plainer propaganda. ..."
Nov 01, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

By Edward Curtin Global Research, November 01, 2019 Region: USA Theme: Intelligence

It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news. There's something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers. What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of "conspiracy theorists" is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor. But with a twisted twist.

The corporate mass-media has recently discovered a "deep state" that they claim to be not some evil group of assassins who work for the super-rich owners of the country and murder their own president (JFK) and other unpatriotic dissidents (Malcom X, MLK, RK, among others) and undermine democracy home and abroad, but are now said to be just fine upstanding American citizens who work within the government bureaucracies and are patriotic believers in democracy intent on doing the right thing.

This redefinition has been in the works for a few years, and it shouldn't be a surprise that this tricky treat was being prepared for our consumption a few years ago by The Council on Foreign Relations . In its September/October 2017 edition of its journal Foreign Affairs, Jon D. Michaels, in "Trump and the Deep State: The Government Strikes Back," writes:

Furious at what they consider treachery by internal saboteurs, the president and his surrogates have responded by borrowing a bit of political science jargon, claiming to be victims of the " deep state ," a conspiracy of powerful, unelected bureaucrats secretly pursuing their own agenda. The concept of a deep state is valuable in its original context, the study of developing countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where shadowy elites in the military and government ministries have been known to countermand or simply defy democratic directives. Yet it has little relevance to the United States, where governmental power structures are almost entirely transparent, egalitarian, and rule-bound.

The White House is correct to perceive widespread resistance inside the government to many of its endeavors. But the same way the administration's media problems come not from "fake news" but simply from news, so its bureaucratic problems come not from an insidious, undemocratic "deep state" but simply from the state -- the large, complex hive of people and procedures that constitute the U.S. federal government.

Notice how in these comical passages about U.S. government transparency and egalitarianism, Michaels slyly and falsely attributes to Trump the very definition – "unelected bureaucrats" – that in the next paragraph he claims to be the real deep state, which is just the state power structures. Pseudo-innocence conquers all here as there is no mention of the Democratic party, Russiagate, etc., and all the machinations led by the intelligence services and Democratic forces to oust Trump from the day he was elected. State power structures just move so quickly, as anyone knows who has studied the speed with which bureaucracies operate. Ask Max Weber.

The Deep State Goes Shallow. "Reality-TV Coup d'etat in Prime Time"

Drip by drip over the past few years, this "state bureaucracy" meme has been introduced by the mainstream media propagandists as they have gradually revealed that the government deep-staters are just doing their patriotic duty in trying openly to oust an elected president.

Many writers have commented on the recent New York Times article, Trump's War on the 'Deep State' Turns Against Him" asserting that the Times has finally admitted to the existence of the deep state, which is true as far as it goes, which is not too far. But in this game of deceptive revelations – going shallower to go deeper – what is missing is a focus on the linguistic mind control involved in the changed definition.

In a recent article by Robert W. Merry, whose intentions I am not questioning – "New York Times Confirms: It's Trump Versus the Deep State" – originally published at The American Conservative and widely reprinted , the lead-in to the article proper reads: "Even the Gray Lady admits the president is up against a powerful bureaucracy that wants him sunk." So the "powerful bureaucracy" redefinition, this immovable force of government bureaucrats, is slipped into public consciousness as what the deep state supposedly is. Gone are CIA conspirators and evil doers. In their place we find career civil servants doing their patriotic duty.

Then there is The New York Times' columnist James Stewart who, appearing on the Today Show recently, where he was promoting his new book, told Savannah Guthrie that:

Well, you meet these characters in my book, and the fact is, in a sense, he's [Trump] right. There is a deep state there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law. They do not work for the President. They work for the American people. And, as Comey told me in my book, 'thank goodness for that,' because they are protecting the Constitution and the people when individuals – we don't have a monarch, we don't have a dictator – they restrain them from crossing the boundaries of law. What Trump calls the deep state in the United States is protecting the American people and protecting the Constitution. It's a positive thing in this sense.

So again we are told that the deep-state bureaucracy is defending the Constitution and protecting the American people, as James Comey told Stewart, "in my book, 'thank goodness for that,'" as he put it so eloquently. These guys talk in books, of course, not person to person, but that is the level not just of English grammar and general stupidity, but of the brazen bullshit these guys are capable of.

This new and shallow deep state definition has buried the old meaning of the deep state as evil conspirators carrying out coup d'états, assassinations, and massive media propaganda campaigns at home and abroad, and who, by implication and direct declaration, never existed in the good old U.S.A. but only in countries such as Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan where shadowy elites killed and deposed leaders and opponents in an endless series of coup d'états. No mention in Foreign Affairs , of course, of the American support for the ruthless leaders of these countries who have always been our dear allies when they obey our every order and serve as our servile proxies in murder and mayhem.

Even Edward Snowden , the courageous whistleblower in exile in Russia, in a recent interview with Joe Rogan , repeats this nonsense when he says the deep state is just "career government officials" who want to keep their jobs and who outlast presidents. From his own experience, he should know better. Much better. Interestingly, he suggests that he does when he tells Rogan that "every president since Kennedy" has been successfully "feared up" by the intelligence agencies so they will do their bidding. He doesn't need to add that JFK, for fearlessly refusing the bait, was shot in the head in broad daylight to send a message to those who would follow.

Linguistic mind control is insidious like the slow drip of a water faucet. After a while you don't hear it and just go about your business, even as your mind, like a rotting rubber washer, keeps disintegrating under propaganda's endless reiterations.

To think that the deep state is government employees just doing their patriotic duty is plain idiocy and plainer propaganda.

It is a trick, not the treat it is made to seem.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Visit the author's website here .

[Nov 03, 2019] The Washington Post actually ran a very favorable article on Gabbard's campaign in Iowa a couple of days ago. Most unusual for them.

Nov 03, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

lysias | Nov 1 2019 21:28 utc | 41

The Washington Post actually ran a very favorable article on Gabbard's campaign in Iowa a couple of days ago. Most unusual for them. Only explanation I can think of is that they realize she has a good chance of winning the Iowa caucuses and don't want to be caught flatfooted by continuing their noncoverage of her campaign.

David G , Nov 1 2019 23:20 utc | 58

lysias @40:

The explanation is more likely the opposite, I'm afraid. The Iowa caucuses are now close enough, and Gabbard polling low enough, that the WashPost feel they can tidy up their record by publishing something about her, even something favorable. If she were really threatening the front-runners, minimal and/or hostile coverage would be de rigueur.

karlof1 , Nov 1 2019 23:31 utc | 60
wendy davis @48--

Thanks for your reply! IMO, Gabbard was correct to vote Yea for the inquiry as it doesn't specify the crime(s). On her Twitter , Gabbard called out Trump for his continuing criminal actions in Syria which constitute a High Crime and impeachable offense. Furthermore, the orders given were all illegal orders as they're against international and US Law and should've been refused by every soldier issued them as it's their duty to do so . Unfortunately, Gabbard didn't make that very important point.

uncle tungsten , Nov 1 2019 23:33 utc | 61
The whole impeachment show the Democrats launched is a major political mistake.

Right on b, a MAJOR blunder. But they stampeded themselves into that blunder because of their hysteria over Trump gunning for Biden and all the other carpetbaggers in Ukraine. This Demoncrat gang of shysters have as much wisdom as a flat rock. They have now lost Biden, must choose frootloop Warren as they can never have Sanders.

That looks a lot like keeping USA safe for Trump to me.

It is so pathetically obvious and these Demoncrats can't even assemble a package of legislation with their majority to benefit USA citizens even one small bit. The Demoncrats 'leadership' are owned in their entirety by the oligarchs of MIC, big pharma and big insurance. The Greens are incapable of breaking through their glass ceiling. What a total shambles in just about every USA allied country.

karlof1 , Nov 2 2019 0:00 utc | 65
David G @57--

I just posted poll results two days ago from New Hampshire showing Gabbard at 5% while Harris had dropped to 3%. And given the size of the field, 5% is respectable and was clearly a boost provided by Clinton's outburst. Gabbard was just given space for an op/ed in The Wall Street Journal which prompted the WaPost item. Can't read the WSJ item since it's behind a paywall, but The Washington Times ran its own piece about her op/ed that provides some insight as to its content, but that site won't allow copy/paste so I can't provide MoA with the blurb it published. Here's a WaPost item about Gabbard's Iowa campaign, which as I discovered when using google is one of many by the WaPost. Despite all the ads, I liked it, but it won't get me to subscribe.

Don Bacon , Nov 2 2019 0:10 utc | 66
Just got another fundraiser email from Tulsi's campaign. It ends with:
Tulsi is taking this fight directly to the people -- with a packed schedule of townhalls and meet and greets, with big ad spends in the early states, with signs and boots on the ground. The best thing you can do right now to help Tulsi rise above the smear campaigns is to help her keep speaking truth to power. . . .
pretzelattack , Nov 2 2019 0:11 utc | 67
democrats don't care if they shoot themselves in the foot as long as sanders or gabbard doesn't win. that's the real threat to their machine.
Ghost Ship , Nov 2 2019 1:25 utc | 89
Really?? @ 74
From what I read at ZeroHedge, it sounds like it will be "Make my day" time in the Senate, with GOP senators able to subpoena anyone they want.

Yes, but if the GOP senators stick with their usual grandstanding posing then they can subpoena whoever they like and it'll be pointless. Actually, it'll be a complete and utter waste of fucking time because GOP senators have little or no experience of forensic cross-examination and will spend their time dicking around and asking stupid questions in a vain vain attempt to look good.. If they really want to stick it to the Democrats they need a Senate impeachment resolution that allows them to use really experienced outside criminal lawyers to plan and carry out the questioning. Since most experienced U.S. criminal lawyers are experts at making deals with prosecutors for their clients rather than going to trial, I would suggest they should bring in a couple of top-flight British QCs (barristers)with their teams of juniors.

John Merryman , Nov 2 2019 1:25 utc | 90
With Russia and now Ukrainegate, I'm reminded on the Fed dropping interest rates every time the market has a down week. Yet eventually this shot of adrenaline will not work and the market falls through the floor.

So now that Ukrainegate has a huge hole in its chest, do the dems have a plan c, or is this the Big One?

I make this point because there are very many never Trumpers out there, clinging to this spiel, but eventually even they will wake up and where do they go? Do they finally accept the whole system really is rigged?

Eventually the ground under the powers that be will turn to quicksand and this really is a notable earthquake.

Petri Krohn , Nov 2 2019 1:29 utc | 91
THANK GOD FOR THE DEEP STATE

An interesting story and video via Fox News .

Ex-acting CIA boss expresses gratitude for 'deep state' involvement in impeachment inquiry

"Well, you know, thank God for the 'deep state'," McLaughlin responded, provoking laughter and applause.

The former intelligence official was speaking at an event hosted by George Mason University, joined by former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and former CIA Director John Brennan -- both of whom have been critical of the president.

"With all of the people who knew what was going on here, it took an intelligence officer to step forward and say something about it, which was the trigger that then unleashed everything else," McLaughlin said.

He went on to praise the intelligence community. "This is the institution within the U.S. government -- that with all of its flaws, and it makes mistakes -- is institutionally committed to objectivity and telling the truth," he said.

"It is one of the few institutions in Washington that is not in a chain of command that makes or implements policy. Its whole job is to speak the truth -- it's engraved in marble in the lobby."

As b stated in a previous post, it is the Borg who should dictate US foreign policy. It certainly is not one of the three branches of government (the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary) of the trias politica model. The Intelligence Community if the Fourth Estate (Vierte Gewalt) that rules supreme over the three other branches of government.

Peter AU 1 , Nov 2 2019 1:44 utc | 97
US Secretary of State. "We lied, we cheated, we stole." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPt-zXn05ac
lysias , Nov 2 2019 1:56 utc | 99
Since the UN Charter has the same legal status as Acts of Congress under U.S. law, the AUMF can certainly violate the UN Charter, under U.S. law. The AUMF may violate international law, but that is another matter.

A friend of mine attended a government meeting under President G.H.W. Bush. I believe the subject was the kidnapping of General Noriega from Panama. In any case, I was told that at the meeting William Barr said, "F!!! international law!" And it is well known that (according to Richard Clark) George W. Bush said in the White House the evening of 9/11, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we're going to kick some ass!"

We are a lawless nation.

Peter AU1 , Nov 2 2019 2:13 utc | 102
lysias 98 US when it comes to international law has been lawless since 1986.

"The Republic of Nicaragua v. The United States of America (1986) ICJ 1 is a public international law case decided by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ ruled in favor of Nicaragua and against the United States and awarded reparations to Nicaragua. The ICJ held that the U.S. had violated international law by supporting the Contras in their rebellion against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua's harbors. The United States refused to participate in the proceedings after the Court rejected its argument that the ICJ lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. The U.S. also blocked enforcement of the judgment by the United Nations Security Council and thereby prevented Nicaragua from obtaining any compensation.[2]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States

In the last decades, US has used things like R2P and coalitions and so forth, but under Trump, US is dropping most pretenses.

Pompeo at times is as honest as Trump when it comes to US and what it is.

I linked a video in an earlier comment to Pompeo, but then I realised there was a bit more to "We lied, we cheated, we stole." The piece that was cut off in the earlier video I linked " It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE9zczFARuM

lysias , Nov 2 2019 2:31 utc | 104
The Bushes were a CIA family. William Barr's first jobs after college were with the CIA, and his father was OSS. This has been the CIA's attitude towards law from the start. They've largely been running the country since the JFK assassination, and now they're out in the open trying to topple an elected president.
lysias , Nov 2 2019 2:31 utc | 104 Peter AU1 , Nov 2 2019 2:33 utc | 105
The non Trump section of the swamp is not going down without a fight..

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-giuliani/giuliani-associate-charged-in-ukraine-linked-case-denied-release-from-house-arrest-idUSKBN1XB3XQ?il=0
"Federal prosecutors have accused Fruman and Parnas of using a shell company to donate $325,000 to the pro-Trump committee and of raising money for former U.S. Representative Pete Sessions of Texas as part of an effort to have the president remove the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

That effort was carried out at the request of at least one Ukrainian official, prosecutors said. Trump ordered the ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, removed in May."

ben , Nov 2 2019 2:54 utc | 106
b said;" The whole impeachment show the Democrats launched is a major political mistake."

Exactly b, and most Dems know it. That's the whole point, find a way to pretend they want
DJT gone, when in reality, they love what this Admin. is doing. Devolving the Gov. so their corporate masters can rake in more $ thru deregulation.

Big $ has finally achieved it's goal of of complete and total hegemony in the U$A.

Pelosi & Schumer are sycophants for the uber-wealthy, along with the majority of both parties.

Let the theater continue..

Don Bacon , Nov 2 2019 3:17 utc | 107
Known cost of Intel: $80 Billion for 17 Agencies.
Results? No known benefits.
Unknown cost: The damage they do.
Piotr Berman , Nov 2 2019 4:40 utc | 111
Known cost of Intel: $80 Billion for 17 Agencies.
Results? No known benefits.
Unknown cost: The damage they do.

Posted by: Don Bacon | Nov 2 2019 3:17 utc | 106

Since the activity is secret, so are the benefits! Actually, as a place for work, "agencies" offer a number of benefits, especially post-employment opportunities.

james , Nov 2 2019 5:38 utc | 113
smoothie wrote a good overview of this 'whistleblower' and etc... some folks here would enjoy reading it..

Whistle While You Work...

[Nov 03, 2019] On the topic of scholarship and the benefits of war, here's a reminder of what passes for elite leadership. Tulsi Gabbard wants to end endless wars and the knives are now out for her

Nov 03, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

ph 10.19.19 at 6:04 am (no link)

On the topic of scholarship and the benefits of war, here's a reminder of what passes for elite leadership. Tulsi Gabbard wants to end endless wars and the knives are now out for her. Somebody takes Morris's thesis seriously. The world will be better off with the US the permanent military leader of the world.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/10/18/hillary_clinton_calls_jill_stein_a_russian_asset_implies_gabbard_is_being_groomed_by_russians.html

This is blowing up all over Twitter, with Gabbard slapping back, and the HRC loyalists calling Gabbard an Assad apologist and worse.

According to HRC logic, American third party candidates are necessarily Russian stooges placed to help the Kremlin's candidate win. The logic is "inescapable" according to HRC. BUT OF COURSE!!!! Now it ALL MAKES SENSE! 1992 Perot-Clinton, 2000 Nader-Bush, 2016 Jill Stein-Trump, and, 2020 Gabbard-Trump!!!!

It's all so clear now! The KGB wanted to keep HW Bush out of office as the former Soviet Union collapsed! That's how she and Bill entered the WH in 1992! Perot was a KGB stooge, and Bill and Hillary have been lifelong assets of the KGB. Of course!!! That's why Hillary sold all that uranium to the Russians! Lest, anyone believe the charge of dual-loyalty leveled against Gabbard is a fiction, check for yourselves.

The above is an actual argument just made by the 2016 candidate for POTUS. Russia controls US elections by promoting third-party candidates. The best part is that HRC, beneficiary of "obvious" Russian interference may yet end up running in 2020. Something to look forward to! Imagine if HRC had won in 2016. Conspiracy theories out the wazoo!

Kind of puts the Morris "scholarship" in perspective, doesn't it? my mother and sister have. Dipper, probably not)

ph 10.19.19 at 6:46 am ( 65 )
Hi John, do whatever you want with this interview with Tulsi. It looks like it's on – big time. Clinton versus Gabbard for the nomination and the chance to run against orange man bad. On the basis of what I've seen I'd say Tulsi is the only Dem with a message to take Donald down, and she's not scared to reach out to everyone for support.

She scares the crap out of all the right people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtgCC5cZP5Q

I wonder about the Morris book, really. Histories aimed at the popular market are rarely written in a vacuum. As you know, post-9/11 we saw a bumper crop of mostly crap histories of the class of civilizations variety. I won't be buying or reading Morris, simply because I find wide, encompassing arguments generally useless and dull. Anyway, from the sounds of it, I do think Morris has a constituency among the FP elites.

[Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras. ..."
"... So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? ' ..."
"... I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism and war reporting. ..."
"... Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip, the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations, briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported. ..."
"... He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact me later, in my occupation. ..."
"... Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given, but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline. ..."
"... But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times, and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything will be fine. ..."
"... From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany & Austria. ..."
"... Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate interests. ..."
"... Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs, politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order." ..."
"... "The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"." ..."
"... So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free. ..."
"... Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep. ..."
"... Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the get go. ..."
"... This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order). ..."
"... Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the greater fools want. ..."
"... Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management. ..."
"... Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they could get their greedy hands on at the time. ..."
"... Once pond scum always pond scum. ..."
"... It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm – always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society. ..."
"... Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can to get what they want. ..."
"... All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm ..."
Oct 06, 2019 | off-guardian.org

WATCH: Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists Terje Maloy

Subtitled and transcribed by Terje Maloy

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3ZLgW3hgRBY

In 2014, the German journalist and writer Udo Ulfkotte published a book that created a big stir, describing how the journalistic profession is thoroughly corrupt and infiltrated by intelligence services.

Although eagerly anticipated by many, the English translation of the book, Bought Journalists , does not seem to be forthcoming anytime soon.

[We covered that story at the time – Ed.]

So I have made English subtitles and transcribed this still very relevant 2015-lecture for those that are curious about Ulfkotte's work. It covers many of the subjects described in the book.

Udo Ulfkotte died of a heart attack in January 2017, in all likelihood part of the severe medical complications he got from his exposure to German-made chemical weapons supplied to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

Transcription

[Only the first 49 minutes are translated; the second half of the lecture deals mostly with more local issues]

Introducer Oliver: I am very proud to have such a brave man amongst us: Udo Ulfkotte

Udo Ulfkotte: Thanks Thanks for the invitation Thanks to Oliver. I heard to my great surprise from Oliver that he didn't know someone from the intelligence services (VVS) would be present. I wish him a warm welcome. I don't mean that as a joke, I heard this in advance, and got to know that Oliver didn't know. If he wants – if it is a man – he can wave. If not? no? [laughter from the audience]

I'm fine with that. You can write down everything, or record it; no problem.

To the lecture. We are talking about media. we are talking about truth. I don't want to sell you books or such things. Each one of us asks himself: Why do things develop like they do, even though the majority, or a lot of people shake their heads.

The majority of people in Germany don't want nuclear weapons on our territory. But we have nuclear weapons here. The majority don't want foreign interventions by German soldiers. But we do.

What media narrates and the politicians say, and what the majority of the population believes – seems often obviously to be two different things.

I can tell you this myself, from many years experience. I will start with very personal judgments, to tell you what my experiences with 'The Lying Media' were – I mean exactly that with the word 'lying'.

I was born in a fairly poor family. I am a single child. I grew up on the eastern edge of the Ruhr-area. I studied Law, Political Science and Islamic Studies. Already in my student years, I had contact with the German Foreign Intelligence, BND. We will get back to that later.

From 1986 to 2003, I worked for a major German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), amongst other things as a war reporter. I spent a lot of time in Eastern and African countries.

Now to the subject of lying media. When I was sent to the Iran-Iraq war for the first time, the first time was from 1980 to July 1986, I was sent to this war to report for FAZ. The Iraqis were then 'the good guys'.

I was bit afraid. I didn't have any experience as a war reporter. Then I arrived in Baghdad. I was fairly quickly sent along in a bus by the Iraqi army, the bus was full of loud, experienced war reporters, from such prestigious media as the BBC, several foreign TV-stations and newspapers, and me, poor newbie, who was sent to the front for the first time without any kind of preparation. The first thing I saw was that they all carried along cans of petrol. And I at once got bad consciousness, because I thought: "oops, if the bus gets stuck far from a petrol station, then everyone chips in with a bit of diesel'. I decided to in the future also carry a can before I went anywhere, because it obviously was part of it.

We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras.

It was my first experience with media, truth in reporting.

While I was wondering what the hell I was going to report for my newspaper, they all lined up and started: Behind them were flames and plumes of smoke, and all the time the Iraqis were running in front of camera with their machine guns, casually, but with war in their gaze. And the reporters were ducking all the time while talking.

So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? '

'Quite simply because there are machine guns on the audio track, and it looks very good at home.'

That was several decades ago. It was in the beginning of my contact with war. I was thinking, the whole way back:'Young man, you didn't see a war. You were in a place with a campfire. What are you going to tell?'

I returned to Baghdad. There weren't any mobile phones then. We waited in Hotel Rashid and other hotels where foreigners stayed, sometimes for hours for an international telephone line. I first contacted my mother, not my newspaper. I was in despair, didn't know what to do, and wanted to get advice from an elder person.

Then my mother shouted over the phone: 'My boy, you are alive!' I thought: 'How so? Is everything OK?'

'My boy, we thought ' 'What's the matter, mother?' 'We saw on TV what happened around you' TV had already sent lurid stories, and I tried to calm my mother down, it didn't happen like that. She thought I had lost my mind from all the things that had happened in the war – she saw it with her own eyes!

I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism and war reporting.

That is, I was very shocked by the first contact, it was entirely different from what I had experienced. But it wasn't an exceptional case.

In the beginning, I mentioned that I am from a fairly poor family. I had to work hard for everything. I was a single child, my father died when I was young. It didn't matter further on. But, I had a job, I had a degree, a goal in life.

I now had the choice: Should I declare that the whole thing was nonsense, these reports? I was nothing, a newbie straight out of uni, in my first job. Or if I wanted to make money, to continue, look further. I chose the second option. I continued, and that for many years.

Over these years, I gained lots of experience. When one comes from university to a big German newspaper – everything I say doesn't only apply to FAZ, you can take other German or European media. I had contact with other European journalists, from reputable media outlets. I later worked in other media. I can tell you: What I am about to tell you, I really discovered everywhere.

What did I experience? If you, as a reporter, work either in state media financed by forced license fees, or in the big private media companies, then you can't write what you want yourself, what you feel like. There are certain guidelines.

Roughly speaking: everyone knows that you won't, for example in the Springer-newspapers – Bild, die Welt – get published articles extremely critical of Israel. They stand no chance there, because one has to sign a statement that one is pro-Israel, that one won't question the existence of the state of Israel or Israeli points of view, etc.

There are some sort of guidelines in all the big media companies. But that isn't all: I learned very fast that if one doesn't – I don't mean this negatively – want to be stuck in the lower rungs of editors, if one wants to rise; for me this rise was that I was allowed to travel with the Chancellor, ministers, the president and politicians, in planes owned by the state; then one has to keep to certain subjects. I learned that fast.

That is, if one gets to follow a politician – and this hasn't changed to this day – I soon realized that when I followed the president or Chancellor Helmut Kohl etc, one of course isn't invited because your name is Udo Ulfkotte, but because you belong to the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip, the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations, briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported.

All the time you no one tells you to write it this or that way but you know quite exactly that if you DON'T write it this or that way,then you won't get invited next time. Your media outlet will be invited, but they say 'we don't want him along'. Then you are out.

Naturally you want to be invited. Of course it is wonderful to travel abroad and you can behave like a pig, no one cares. You can buy what you want, because you know that when you return, you won't be checked. You can bring what you want. I had colleagues who went along on a trip to the US.

They brought with them – it was an air force plane – a Harley Davidson, in parts. They sold it when they were back in Germany, and of course earned on it. Anyway, just like the carpet-affair with that development minister, this is of course not a single instance. No one talks about it.

You get invited if you have a certain way of seeing things. Which way to see things? Where and how is this view of the world formed? I very often get asked: 'Where are these people behind the curtain who pulls the wires, so that everything gets told in a fairly similar way?'

In the big media in Germany – just look yourself – who sit in the large transatlantic think-tanks and foundations,the foundation The Atlantic Bridge, all these organizations, and how is one influenced there? I can tell from my own experience.

We mustn't talk only theoretically. I was invited by the think-tank The German Marshall Fund of the United States as a fellow. I was to visit the United States for six weeks. It was fully paid. During these six weeks I could this think-tank has very close connections to the CIA to this day, they acquired contacts in the CIA for me and they got me access to American politicians, to everyone I wanted. Above all, they showered me with gifts.

Already before the journey with German Marshall Fund, I experienced plenty of bought journalism. This hasn't to do with a particular media outlet. You see, I was invited and didn't particularly reflect over it, by billionaires, for example sultan Quabboos of Oman on the Arabian peninsula.

When sultan Qabboos invited, and a poor boy like me could travel to a country with few inhabitants but immense wealth, where the head of state had the largest yachts in the world, his own symphony orchestra which plays for him when he wants – by the way he bought a pub close to Garmisch-Patenkirchen, because he is a Muslim believer, and someone might see him if he drank in his own country, so he rather travels there. The place he bought every day fly in fresh lamb from Ireland and Scotland with his private jet. He is also the head of an environmental foundation.

But this is a digression. If such a person, who is so incredibly rich, invites someone like me, then I arrive first class. I had never traveled first class before. We arrive, and a driver is waiting for me. He carries your suitcase or backpack. You have a suite in the hotel. And from the very start, you are showered with gifts. You get a platinum or gold coin. A hand-weaved carpet or whatever.

I interviewed the sultan, several times. He asked me what I wanted. I answered among other things a diving course. I wanted to learn how to dive. He flew in a PADI-approved instructor from Greece. I was there for two weeks and got my first diving certificate. On later occasions, the sultan flew me in several times, and the diving instructor. I got a certificate as rescue diver, all paid for by the sultan. You see, when one is attended to in such a way, then you know that you are bought. For a certain type of journalism. In the sultan's country, there is no freedom of the press.

There are no human rights. It is illegal to import many writings, because the sultan does not wish so. There are reports about human rights violations, but my eyes are blind. I reported, like all German media when they report about the Sultanate of Oman, to this day, only positive things. The great sultan, who is wonderful. The fantastic country of the fairy tale prince, overshadowing everything else – because I was bought.

Apart from Oman, many others have bought me. They also bought colleagues. I got many invitations through the travel section in my big newspaper. 5-star. The reportage never mentioned that I was bought, by country A or B or C. Yemenia, the Yemeni state airline, invited me to such a trip.

I didn't report about the dirt and dilapidation in the country, because I was influenced by this treatment, I only reported positively, because I wanted to come back. The Yemenis asked me when I had returned to Frankfurt what I wished In jest, I said "your large prawns, from the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean, they were spectacular.", from the seaport of Mocha (Mocha-coffee is named after it). Two days later, Yemenia flew in a buffet for the editorial office, with prawns and more.

Of course we were bought. We were bought in several ways. In your situation: when you buy a car or something else, you trust consumer tests. Look closer. How well is the car tested? I know of no colleagues, no journalists, who do testing of cars, that aren't bribed – maybe they do exist.

They get unlimited access to a car from the big car manufacturers, with free petrol and everything else. I had a work car in my newspaper, if not, I might have exploited this. I had a BMW or Mercedes in the newspaper. But there are, outside the paper, many colleagues who only have this kind of vehicle all year round. They are invited to South Africa, Malaysia, USA, to the grandest travels, when a new car is presented.

Why? So that they will write positively about the car. But it doesn't say in these reports "Advertisement from bought journalists".

But that is the reality. You should also know – since we are on the subjects of tests – who owns which test magazines? Who owns the magazine Eco-test? It is owned by the Social Democrats. More than a hundred magazines belong to the Social Democrats. It isn't about only one party, but many editorial rooms have political allegiance. Behind them are party political interests.

I mentioned the sultan of Oman and the diving course, and I have mentioned German Marshall Fund. Back to the US and the German Marshall Fund. There one told me, they knew exactly, 'hello, you were on a diving course in Oman ' The CIA knew very precisely. And the CIA also gave me something: The diving gear. I received the diving gear in the United States, and I received in the US, during my 6-week stay there, an invitation from the state of Oklahoma, from the governor. I went there. It was a small ceremony, and I received an honorary citizenship.

I am now honorary citizen of an American state. And in this certificate, it is written that I will only cover the US positively. I accepted this honorary citizenship and was quite proud of it. I proudly told about it to a colleague who worked in the US. He said 'ha, I already have 31 of these honorary citizenships!'

I don't tell about this to be witty, today I am ashamed, really.

I was greedy. I accepted many advantages that a regular citizen at my age in my occupation doesn't have, and shouldn't have. But I perceived it – and that is no excuse – as entirely normal, because my colleagues around me all did the same. But this isn't normal. When journalists are invited to think-tanks in the US, like German Marshall Fund, Atlantic Bridge, it is to 'bring them in line', for in a friendly way to make them complicit, naturally to buy them, to grease them with money.

This has quite a few aspects that one normally doesn't talk about. When I for the first time was in Southern Africa, in the 80s, Apartheid still existed in South Africa, segregated areas for blacks and whites. We didn't have any problems with this in my newspaper, we received fully paid journeys from the Apartheid regime to do propaganda work.

I was invited by the South-African gold industry, coal industry, tourist board. In the first invitation, this trip was to Namibia – I arrived tired to the hotel room in Windhoek and a dark woman lay in my bed. I at once left the room, went down to the reception and said 'excuse me, but the room is already occupied' [laughter from the audience]

Without any fuss I got another room.

Next day at the breakfast table, this was a journalist trip, my colleagues asked me 'how was yours?' Only then I understood what had happened. Until then, I had believed it was a silly coincidence.

With this I want to describe which methods are used, maybe to film journalists in such situations, buy, make dependent. Quite simply to win them over to your side with the most brutal methods, so that they are 'brought in line'.

This doesn't happen to every journalist. It would be a conspiracy theory if I said that behind every journalist, someone pulls the wires.

No. Not everyone has influence over the masses. When you – I don't mean this negatively – write about folk costume societies or if you work with agriculture or politics, why should anyone from the upper political spheres have an interest in controlling the reporting? As far as I know, this doesn't happen at all.

But if you work in one of the big media, and want up in this world, if you want to travel with politicians, heads of state, with CEOs, who also travel on these planes, then it happens. Then you are regularly bought, you are regularly observed.

I said earlier that I already during my study days had contact with the intelligence services.

I will quickly explain this to you, because it is very important for this lecture.

I studied law, Political Science and Islamology, among other places in Freiburg. At the very beginning of my study, just before end of the term, a professor approached me. Professors were then still authority figures.

He came with a brochure, and asked me: 'Mr. Ulfkotte, what are your plans for this vacation?'

I couldn't very well say that I first planned to work a bit at a building site, for then to grab my backpack and see the ocean for the first time in my life, to Italy, 'la dolce vita', flirting with girls, lie on the beach and be a young person.

I wondered how I would break it to him. He then came with a brochure [Ulfkotte imitating professor]: 'I have something for you a seminar, Introduction to Conflict Studies, two weeks in Bonn I am sure you would want to participate!'

I wondered how I would tell this elderly gentleman that I wanted to flirt with girls on the beach. Then he said 'you will get 20 Marks per day as support, paid train journey, money for books 150 Marks You will naturally get board and lodging.' He didn't stop telling me what I would receive.

It buzzed around in my head that I had to achieve everything myself, work hard. I thought 'You have always wanted to participate in a seminar on Introduction to Conflict Studies!'

So I went to Bonn from Freiburg, and I saw other students who had this urge to participate in this seminar. There were also girls one could flirt with, about twenty people. The whole thing was very strange, because we sat in a room like this one, there were desks and a lectern, and there sat some older men and a woman, they always wrote something down. They asked us about things; What we thought of East Germany, we had to do role play.

The whole thing was a bit strange, but it was well paid. We didn't reflect any further. It was very strange that in this house, in Ubierstraße 88 in Bonn, we weren't allowed to go to the second floor. There was a chain over the stairs, it was taboo.

We were allowed to go to the basement, there were constantly replenished supplies of new books that we were allowed to get for free. Ebay didn't exist then, but we could still sell them used. Anyway, it was curious, but at the end of the fortnight, we were allowed to go up these stairs, where we got an invitation to a continuation course in Conflict Studies.

After four such seminars, that is, after two years, someone asked me 'you have probably wondered what we are doing here'.

He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact me later, in my occupation.

They gave me a lot of money. My mother has always taught me to be polite. So I said 'please do', and they came to me. I was then working in the newspaper FAZ from 1986, straight after my studies.

Then the intelligence services came fairly soon to me. Why am I telling you this? The newspaper knew very soon. It is also written in my reference, therefore I can say it loud and clear. I had very close contact with the intelligence service BND.

Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given, but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline.

I highlight certain things to explain them. But if I had said here: 'There are media that are influenced by BND', you could rightly say that 'these are conspiracy theories, can you document it?'

I CAN document it. I can say, this and that article, with my byline in the paper, is written by the intelligence services, because what is written there, I couldn't have known. I couldn't have known what existed in some cave or other in Libya, what secret thing were there, what was being built there. This was all things that BND wanted published. It wasn't like this only in FAZ.

It was like this also in other media. I told about it. If we had rule of law, there would now be an investigation commission. Because the political parties would stand up, regardless of if they are on the left, in the center or right, and say: What this Ulfkotte fella says and claims he can document, this should be investigated. Did this occur in other places? Or is it still ongoing?'

I can tell you: Yes it still exists. I know colleagues who still have this close contact. One can probably show this fairly well until a few years ago. But I would find it wonderful if this investigation commission existed.

But it will obviously not happen, because no one has an interest in doing so. Because then the public would realize how closely integrated politics, media, and the secret services are in this country.

That is, one often sees in reporting, whether it is from the local paper, regional papers, TV-channels, national tabloids and so-called serious papers.

Put them side by side, and you will discover that more than 90% looks almost identical. A lot of subjects and news, that are not being reported at all, or they are – I claim reported very one-sided. One can only explain this if one knows the structures in the background, how media is surrounded, bought and 'brought onboard' by politics and the intelligence services; Where politics and intelligence services form a single unity. There is an intelligence coordinator by the Chancellor.

I can tell you, that under the former coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer, under Kohl, I walked in and out of the Chancellery and received stacks of secret and confidential documents, which I shouldn't have received.

They were so many that we in the newspaper had own archive cabinets for them. Not only did I receive these documents,but Schmidbauer should have been in jail if we had rule of law. Or there should have been a parliamentary commission or an investigation, because he wasn't allowed

For example if I couldn't bring along the documents if the case was too hot, there was another trick. They locked me in a room. In this room were the documents, which I could look through. I could record it all on tape, photograph them or write them down. When I was done, I could call on the intercom, so they could lock me out. There were thousands of these tricks. Anonymous documents that I and my colleagues needed could be placed in my mail box.

These are of course illegal things. BUT, you ONLY get them if you 'toe the line' with politics.

If I had written that Chancellor Helmut Kohl is stupid, a big idiot, or about what Schmidbauer did, I would of course not have received more. That is, if you today, in newspapers, read about 'soon to be revealed exposures, we will publish a big story based on material based on intelligence', then none of these media have dug a tunnel under the security services and somehow got hold of something secret. It is rather that they work so well with intelligence services, with the military counterespionage, the foreign intelligence, police intelligence etc, that if they have got hold of internal documents, it is because they cooperate so well that they received them as a reward for well performed service.

You see, in this way one is in the end bought. One is bought to such a degree that at one point one can't exit this system anymore.

If I describe how you are supplied with prostitutes, bribed with cars, money; I tried to write down everything I received in gifts, everything I was bribed with. I stopped doing so several years ago, more than a decade ago.

It doesn't make it any better, but today I regret everything. But I know that it goes this way with many journalists.

It would make me very happy if journalists stood up and said they won't participate in this any longer, and that they think this is wrong.

But I see no possibility, because media corporations in any case are doing badly. Where should a journalist find work the next day? It isn't so that tens of thousands of employers are waiting for you. It is the other way round. Tens of thousands of journalists are looking for work or commissions.

That is, from pure desperation one is happy to be bribed. If a newsroom stands behind or not an article that in reality is advertising, doesn't matter, one goes along. I know some, even respected journalists, who want to leave this system.

But imagine if you are working in one of the state channels, that you stand up and tell what you have received. How will that be received by your colleagues? That you have political ulterior motives etc.

September 30 [2015], a few days ago, Chancellor Merkel invited all the directors in the state channels to her in the Chancellery. I will claim that she talked with them about how one should report the Chancellors politics. Who of you [in the audience] heard about this incident? 3-4-5? So a small minority. But this is reality. Merkel started already 6 years ago, at the beginning of the financial crisis, to invite chief editors ..she invited chief editors in the large media corporations, with the express wish that media should embellish reality, in a political way. This could have been only claims, one could believe me or not.

But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times, and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything will be fine.

In such a way it should be reported. Ladies and gentlemen, what I just said can be documented. These are facts, not a conspiracy theory.

I formulated it a bit satirically, but I ask myself when I see how things are in this country: Is this the democracy described in the Constitution? Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press?

Where one has to be afraid if one doesn't agree with the ruling political correctness, if one doesn't want to get in trouble. Is this the republic our parents and grandparents fought for, that they built?

I claim that we more and more – as citizens – are cowards 'toeing the line', who don't open our mouths.

It is so nice to have plurality and diversity of opinions.

But it is at once clamped down on, today fairly openly.

Of my experiences with journalism, I can in general say that I have quit all media I have to pay for, for the reasons mentioned. Then the question arises, 'but which pay-media can I trust?'

Naturally there are ones I support. They are definitely political, I'll add. But they are all fairly small. And they won't be big anytime soon. But I have quit all big media that I used to subscribe to, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine, etc. I would like to not having to pay the TV-license fee, without being arrested because I won't pay fines. But maybe someone here in the audience can tell me how to do so without all these problems?

Either way, I don't want to financially support this kind of journalism. I can only give you the advice to get information from alternative, independent media and all the forums that exist.

I'm not advertising for any of them. Some of you probably know that I write for the publishing house Kopp. But there are so many portals. Every person is different in political viewpoint, culturally etc. The only thing uniting us, whether we are black or white, religious or non-religious, right or left, or whatever; we all want to know the truth. We want to know what really happens out there, and exactly in the burning political questions: asylum seekers, refugees, the financial crisis, bad infrastructure, one doesn't know how it will continue. Precisely with this background, is it even more important that people get to know the truth.

And it is to my great surprise that I conclude that we in media, as well as in politics, have a guiding line.

To throw more and more dust in the citizens' eyes to calm them down. What is the sense in this? One can have totally different opinions on the subject of refugees with good reasoning.

But facts are important for you as citizens to decide the future. That is, how many people will arrive? How will it affect my personal affluence? Or will it affect my affluence at all? Will the pensions shrink? etc. Then you can talk with people about this, quite openly. But to say that we should open all borders, and that this won't have any negative consequences, is very strange. What I now say isn't a plug for my books. I know that some of them are on the table in front.

I'm not saying this so that you will buy books. I am saying this for another reason that soon will be clear. I started to write books on certain subjects 18 years ago. They have sold millions. It is no longer about you buying my books. It is important that you hear the titles, then you will see a certain line throughout the last ten years. One can have different opinions about this line, but I have always tried to describe, based on my subjective experiences, formed over many years in the Middle East and Africa.

That there will be migration flows, from people from culture areas that are like; if one could compare a cultural area with an engine, that one fills petrol in a diesel engine then everyone knows what will happen, the engine is great, diesel is great, but if there too much petrol, then the engine starts to splutter and stop.

I have tried to make you aware of this, with drastic and less drastic words. What we can expect, and ever faster. The book titles are SOS Occident; Warning Civil War; No Black,Red, Yellow [the colors in the German flag], Holy War in Europe; Mecca Germany.

I just want to say, when politicians and media today claim no one could have predicted it, everything is a complete surprise; Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not at all surprising. The migration flows, for years warnings have been coming from international organizations, politicians, experts, exactly about what happened and it is predictable, if we had a map over North Africa and the Middle East..

If the West continues to destabilize countries like Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, country by country, Iraq when we toppled Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan. We as Europeans and Germans have spent tens of billions on a war where we allegedly defend peace and liberty, at the mountain range Hindu Kush [in Afghanistan]. And here, in front of our own door, we soon have Hindu Kush.

We have no stabilization in Afghanistan. Dozens of German soldiers have lost their lives for nothing. We have a more unstable situation than ever.

You can have your own opinions. I am only saying that these refugee flows didn't fall from the sky. It is predicable, that if I bomb and destabilize a country, that people – it is always so in history – it hasn't anything to do with the Middle East or North Africa. I have seen enough wars in Africa. Naturally they created refugee flows.

But all of us didn't want to see this. We haven't prepared. And now one is reacting in full panic, and what is most disconcerting with this, is when media and politicians, allegedly from deepest inner conviction, say: 'this was all a complete surprise!'

Are they drunk? What are they smoking? What sort of pills are they eating? That they behave this way?

End transcription

The transcription has been edited for clarity, and may differ from the spoken word. The subtitles and transcription are for the first 49 minutes of the lecture only. Subtitled and transcribed by Terje Maloy. This article is Creative Commons 4.0 for non-commercial purposes.
Terje Maloy ( Website ) is a Norwegian citizen, with roots north of the Arctic Circle. Nowadays, he spends a lot of time in Australia, working in the family business. He has particular interests in liberty, global justice, imperialism, history, media analysis and what Western governments really are up to. He runs a blog , mostly in Norwegian, but occasionally in English. He likes to write about general geopolitical matters, and Northern Europe in particular, presenting perspectives that otherwise barely are mentioned in the dominant media (i.e. most things that actually matter).
Tim Jenkins
From 1:18 minutes, Ulfkotte reveals without question, that the EU Political 'elite's' combined intelligence services work with & propagate . . .

Terror, Terrorists & Terrorism / a conscious organised Politics of FEAR ! / Freedom of Movement, of fully armed IS Agents Provocateurs & with a Secret Services get out of jail free card, 'Hände Weg Nicht anfassen', it's 'Hammertime', "U Can't Touch this", we're armed state operatives travelling to Germany & Austria, " don't mess with my operation !" & all journalists' hands tied, too.

The suggestions & offers below to translate fully, what Ulfkotte declares publicly, make much sense. It is important to understand that even an 'Orban' must bow occasionally, to deep state Security State Dictators and the pressures they can exert in so many ways. Logic . . . or else one's life is made into hell, alive or an 'accidental' death: – and may I add, it is a curiously depressing feeling when you have so many court cases on the go, that when a Gemeinde/Municipality Clerk is smiling, celebrating and telling you, (representing yourself in court, with only independent translator & recorder), "You Won the Case, a superior judge has over-ruled " and the only reply possible is,

"Which case number ?"

life gets tedious & time consuming, demanding extreme patience. Given his illness, surely Ulfkotte and his wife, deserve/d extra credit & 'hot chocolate'. Makes a change to see & read some real journalism: congrats.@OffG

Excellent Professional Journalism on "Pseudo-Journalist State Actors & Terrorists". If you see a terrorist, guys, at best just reason with him or her :- better than calling

INTERPOL or Secret Services @theguardian, because you wouldn't want a member of the public, grassing you up to your boss, would you now ? ! Just tell the terrorist who he really works for . . . Those he resents ! Rather like Ulfkotte had to conclude, with final resignation. My condolences to his good wife.

Wilmers31
Very good of you to not forget Ulfkotte. If I did not have sickness in the house, I would translate it. Maybe I can do one chapter and someone else can do another one? What's the publisher saying?
jgiam
It's just a long unedited speech.
Tim Jenkins
You wouldn't say that if you could speak German, my friend ! ?

From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany & Austria.

But, don't let that revelation bother you, living under a Deep State 'Politic of Fear' in the West and long unedited speeches gets kinda' boring now, I know a bit like believing in some kinda' dumbfuk new pearl harbour, war on terror &&& all phoney propaganda fairy story telling, just like on the 11/9/2001, when the real target was WTC 7, to hide elitist immoral endeavours, corruption & the missing $$$TRILLIONS$$$ of tax payers money, 'mislaid' by the D.o.D. announced directly the day before by Rumsfeld, forgotten ? Before ramping the Surveillance States abilities in placing & employing "Parallel Platforms" on steroids, so that our secret services can now employ terror & deploy terrorists at will .., against us, see ?

Plus ca change....
I remember on a similar note a 60 Minutes piece just prior to Clinton's humanitarian bombing of Serbian civilian infrastructure (and long ago deleted, I'm sure) on a German free-lancer staging Kosovo atrocities in a Munich suburb, and having the German MSM eating it up and asking for more. (WWII guilt assuagement at work, no doubt).
mark
Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate interests.
That is their job.
That is what they do.
They have long since forfeited all credibility and integrity.
They have lied to us endlessly for decades and generations, from the Bayonetted Belgian Babies and Human Bodies Turned Into Soap of WW1 to the Iraq Incubator Babies and Syrian Gas Attacks of more recent times.

You can no longer take anything at face value.
The default position has to be that every single word they print and every single word that comes out of their lying mouths is untrue.
If they say it's snowing at the North Pole, you can't accept that without first going there and checking it out for yourself.
You can't accept anything that has not been independently verified.

This applies across the board.
All of the accepted historical narrative, including things like the holocaust.
And current Global Warming "science."
We know we have been lied to again and again and again.
So what else have we been lied to without us realising it?

mark
Come to think of it, I need to apologise to sex workers.
I have known quite a few of them who have quite high ethical and moral standards, certainly compared to the MSM.
And they certainly do less damage.
Vert few working girls have blood on their hands like the MSM.
Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.
Seamus Padraig

Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.

I heartily agree. Even if one disapproves morally of prostitution, how can it possibly be worse to sell your body than to sell your soul?

Oliver
Quite. Checking things out for yourself is the way to go. Forget 'Peer Reviews', just as bent as the journalism Ulfkotte described. DIY.
Mortgage
So natural, all it seems

Part II:
Bought Science

Part III:
Bought Health Services

mapquest directions
The video you shared with great info. I really like the information you share. boxnovel
Gary Weglarz
I knew we were in dangerous new territory regarding government censorship when after waiting several years for Ulfkotte's best selling book to finally be available in English – it suddenly, magically, disappeared completely – a vanishing act – and I couldn't get so much as a response from, much less an explanation from, the would be publisher. Udo's book came at a time when it could have made a difference countering the fact-free complete and total "fabrication of reality" by the U.S. and Western powers as they have waged a brutal and ongoing neocolonial war on the world's poor under the guise of "fighting terrorism."

Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs, politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order."

Ramdan
After watching the first 20 min I couldn't help but remembering this tale:

"The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"."

which is also the reason why such a large part of humanity lives in voluntary servitude to power structures, living the dream, the illusion of being free..

Ramdan
"English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalists" Suppressed?" at Global Research 2017!!

https://www.globalresearch.ca/english-translation-of-udo-ulfkottes-bought-journalists-suppressed/5601857

Francis Lee
Just rechecked Amazon. Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News by Udo Ulfkotte PH.D. The tag line reads.

Hard cover – currently unavailable; paperback cover – currently unavailable; Kindle edition – ?

Book burning anyone?

nottheonly1
No translation exists for this interview with Udo Ulfkotte on KenFM, the web site of Ken Jebsen. Ken Jebsen has been in the cross hairs of the CIA and German agencies for his reporting of the truth. He was smeared and defamed by the same people that Dr. Ulfkotte had written extensively about in his book 'Gekaufte Journalisten' ('Bought Journalists').

The reason why I add this link to the interview lies in the fact that Udo Ulfkotte speaks about an important part of Middle Eastern and German history – a history that has been scrubbed from the U.S. and German populations. In the Iraq war against Iran – that the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R. – German chemical weapons were used under the supervision of the U.S. regime. The extend of the chemical weapons campaign was enormous and to the present day, Iranians are born with birth defects stemming from the used of German weapons of mass destruction.

Dr. Ulfkotte rightfully bemoans, that every year German heads of state are kneeling for the Jewish victims of National socialism – but not for the victims of German WMD's that were used against Iran. He stresses that the act of visual asking for forgiveness in the case of the Jewish victims becomes hypocrisy, when 40 years after the Nazis reigned, German WMD's were used against Iran. The German regime was in on the WMD attack on Iran. It was not something that happened because they had lost a couple of thousand containers with WMDs. They delivered the WMD's to Iraq under U.S. supervision.

Ponder that. And there has never been an apology towards Iran, or compensations. Nada. Nothing. Instead, the vile rhetoric and demagogery of every U.S. regime since has continued to paint Iran in the worst possible ways, most notably via incessant psychological projection – accusing Iran of the war crimes and crimes against humanity the U.S. and its Western vassal regimes are guilty of.

Here is the interview that was recorded shortly before Udo Ulfkotte's death:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm_hWenGJKg

If enough people support the effort, I am willing to contact KenFM for the authorization to translate the interview and use it for subtitles to the video. However, I can't do that on my own.

nottheonly1
Correction: the interview was recorded two years before his passing.
Antonym
the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R.

So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free.

nottheonly1
It would help if you would use your brain just once. 'Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep.

But then, with all the assaults by the unintelligence agencies, it does not come as a surprise when facts are twisted.

Antonym
Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the get go. The timing of operation Barbarossa was brilliant though: it shocked Stalin into a temporary limbo as he had his own aggressive plans.
Casandra2
This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order).

This approach has been assiduously applied, across the board, over many years, to the point were they now own and run everything required to subjugate the 'human race' to the horrors of their psychopathic inclinations. They are presently holding the global economy on hold until their AI population (social credit) control system/grid is in place before bringing the house down.

Needless to say, when this happens a disunited and frightened Global Population will be at their mercy.

If you wish to gain a full insight of what the Controlling Elite is about, and capable of, I recommend David Icke's latest publication 'Trigger'. I know he's been tagged a 'nutter' over the past thirty years, but I reckon this book represents the 'gold standard' in terms of generating awareness as a basis for launching a united global population counter-attack (given a great strategy) against forces that can only be defined as pure 'EVIL'.

MASTER OF UNIVE
Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the greater fools want. Engaging in compromise allows both parties to have complicit & explicit understanding that corruption and falsehood are the tools of the trade. To all-of-a-sudden develop a conscience after decades of playing the part of a willing participant is understandable in light of the guilt complex one must develop after screwing everyone in the world out of the critical assessment we all need to obtain in order to make decisions regarding our futures.

Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management.

Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they could get their greedy hands on at the time.

Developing a conscience late in life is too late.

May all that sell their souls to the Intel agencies understand that pond scum never had a conscience to begin with.

Once pond scum always pond scum.

MOU

nottheonly1
What is not addressed in this talk is the addictive nature of this sort of public relation writing. Journalism is something different altogether. I know that, because I consider myself to be a journalist at heart – one that stopped doing it when the chalice was offered to me. The problem is that one is not part of the cabal one day to another.

It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm – always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society.

And I would also write a critique about a great restaurant – never paying a dime for a fantastic dinner. The point though is that I would not write a good critique for a nasty place for money. I have never written anything but the truth – for which I received sometimes as much as a bag full of the best rolls in the country.

Twisting the truth for any form of bribes is disgusting and attests of the lowest of any character.

MASTER OF UNIVE
Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can to get what they want.

All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm.

If the devil offers inducements be sure to up the ante to outsmart the drunken sot.

MOU

[Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras. ..."
"... So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? ' ..."
"... I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism and war reporting. ..."
"... Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip, the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations, briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported. ..."
"... He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact me later, in my occupation. ..."
"... Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given, but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline. ..."
"... But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times, and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything will be fine. ..."
"... From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany & Austria. ..."
"... Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate interests. ..."
"... Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs, politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order." ..."
"... "The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"." ..."
"... So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free. ..."
"... Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep. ..."
"... Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the get go. ..."
"... This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order). ..."
"... Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the greater fools want. ..."
"... Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management. ..."
"... Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they could get their greedy hands on at the time. ..."
"... Once pond scum always pond scum. ..."
"... It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm – always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society. ..."
"... Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can to get what they want. ..."
"... All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm ..."
Oct 06, 2019 | off-guardian.org

WATCH: Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists Terje Maloy

Subtitled and transcribed by Terje Maloy

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3ZLgW3hgRBY

In 2014, the German journalist and writer Udo Ulfkotte published a book that created a big stir, describing how the journalistic profession is thoroughly corrupt and infiltrated by intelligence services.

Although eagerly anticipated by many, the English translation of the book, Bought Journalists , does not seem to be forthcoming anytime soon.

[We covered that story at the time – Ed.]

So I have made English subtitles and transcribed this still very relevant 2015-lecture for those that are curious about Ulfkotte's work. It covers many of the subjects described in the book.

Udo Ulfkotte died of a heart attack in January 2017, in all likelihood part of the severe medical complications he got from his exposure to German-made chemical weapons supplied to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

Transcription

[Only the first 49 minutes are translated; the second half of the lecture deals mostly with more local issues]

Introducer Oliver: I am very proud to have such a brave man amongst us: Udo Ulfkotte

Udo Ulfkotte: Thanks Thanks for the invitation Thanks to Oliver. I heard to my great surprise from Oliver that he didn't know someone from the intelligence services (VVS) would be present. I wish him a warm welcome. I don't mean that as a joke, I heard this in advance, and got to know that Oliver didn't know. If he wants – if it is a man – he can wave. If not? no? [laughter from the audience]

I'm fine with that. You can write down everything, or record it; no problem.

To the lecture. We are talking about media. we are talking about truth. I don't want to sell you books or such things. Each one of us asks himself: Why do things develop like they do, even though the majority, or a lot of people shake their heads.

The majority of people in Germany don't want nuclear weapons on our territory. But we have nuclear weapons here. The majority don't want foreign interventions by German soldiers. But we do.

What media narrates and the politicians say, and what the majority of the population believes – seems often obviously to be two different things.

I can tell you this myself, from many years experience. I will start with very personal judgments, to tell you what my experiences with 'The Lying Media' were – I mean exactly that with the word 'lying'.

I was born in a fairly poor family. I am a single child. I grew up on the eastern edge of the Ruhr-area. I studied Law, Political Science and Islamic Studies. Already in my student years, I had contact with the German Foreign Intelligence, BND. We will get back to that later.

From 1986 to 2003, I worked for a major German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), amongst other things as a war reporter. I spent a lot of time in Eastern and African countries.

Now to the subject of lying media. When I was sent to the Iran-Iraq war for the first time, the first time was from 1980 to July 1986, I was sent to this war to report for FAZ. The Iraqis were then 'the good guys'.

I was bit afraid. I didn't have any experience as a war reporter. Then I arrived in Baghdad. I was fairly quickly sent along in a bus by the Iraqi army, the bus was full of loud, experienced war reporters, from such prestigious media as the BBC, several foreign TV-stations and newspapers, and me, poor newbie, who was sent to the front for the first time without any kind of preparation. The first thing I saw was that they all carried along cans of petrol. And I at once got bad consciousness, because I thought: "oops, if the bus gets stuck far from a petrol station, then everyone chips in with a bit of diesel'. I decided to in the future also carry a can before I went anywhere, because it obviously was part of it.

We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras.

It was my first experience with media, truth in reporting.

While I was wondering what the hell I was going to report for my newspaper, they all lined up and started: Behind them were flames and plumes of smoke, and all the time the Iraqis were running in front of camera with their machine guns, casually, but with war in their gaze. And the reporters were ducking all the time while talking.

So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: 'I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? '

'Quite simply because there are machine guns on the audio track, and it looks very good at home.'

That was several decades ago. It was in the beginning of my contact with war. I was thinking, the whole way back:'Young man, you didn't see a war. You were in a place with a campfire. What are you going to tell?'

I returned to Baghdad. There weren't any mobile phones then. We waited in Hotel Rashid and other hotels where foreigners stayed, sometimes for hours for an international telephone line. I first contacted my mother, not my newspaper. I was in despair, didn't know what to do, and wanted to get advice from an elder person.

Then my mother shouted over the phone: 'My boy, you are alive!' I thought: 'How so? Is everything OK?'

'My boy, we thought ' 'What's the matter, mother?' 'We saw on TV what happened around you' TV had already sent lurid stories, and I tried to calm my mother down, it didn't happen like that. She thought I had lost my mind from all the things that had happened in the war – she saw it with her own eyes!

I'll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism and war reporting.

That is, I was very shocked by the first contact, it was entirely different from what I had experienced. But it wasn't an exceptional case.

In the beginning, I mentioned that I am from a fairly poor family. I had to work hard for everything. I was a single child, my father died when I was young. It didn't matter further on. But, I had a job, I had a degree, a goal in life.

I now had the choice: Should I declare that the whole thing was nonsense, these reports? I was nothing, a newbie straight out of uni, in my first job. Or if I wanted to make money, to continue, look further. I chose the second option. I continued, and that for many years.

Over these years, I gained lots of experience. When one comes from university to a big German newspaper – everything I say doesn't only apply to FAZ, you can take other German or European media. I had contact with other European journalists, from reputable media outlets. I later worked in other media. I can tell you: What I am about to tell you, I really discovered everywhere.

What did I experience? If you, as a reporter, work either in state media financed by forced license fees, or in the big private media companies, then you can't write what you want yourself, what you feel like. There are certain guidelines.

Roughly speaking: everyone knows that you won't, for example in the Springer-newspapers – Bild, die Welt – get published articles extremely critical of Israel. They stand no chance there, because one has to sign a statement that one is pro-Israel, that one won't question the existence of the state of Israel or Israeli points of view, etc.

There are some sort of guidelines in all the big media companies. But that isn't all: I learned very fast that if one doesn't – I don't mean this negatively – want to be stuck in the lower rungs of editors, if one wants to rise; for me this rise was that I was allowed to travel with the Chancellor, ministers, the president and politicians, in planes owned by the state; then one has to keep to certain subjects. I learned that fast.

That is, if one gets to follow a politician – and this hasn't changed to this day – I soon realized that when I followed the president or Chancellor Helmut Kohl etc, one of course isn't invited because your name is Udo Ulfkotte, but because you belong to the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip, the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations, briefings with the politician's press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported.

All the time you no one tells you to write it this or that way but you know quite exactly that if you DON'T write it this or that way,then you won't get invited next time. Your media outlet will be invited, but they say 'we don't want him along'. Then you are out.

Naturally you want to be invited. Of course it is wonderful to travel abroad and you can behave like a pig, no one cares. You can buy what you want, because you know that when you return, you won't be checked. You can bring what you want. I had colleagues who went along on a trip to the US.

They brought with them – it was an air force plane – a Harley Davidson, in parts. They sold it when they were back in Germany, and of course earned on it. Anyway, just like the carpet-affair with that development minister, this is of course not a single instance. No one talks about it.

You get invited if you have a certain way of seeing things. Which way to see things? Where and how is this view of the world formed? I very often get asked: 'Where are these people behind the curtain who pulls the wires, so that everything gets told in a fairly similar way?'

In the big media in Germany – just look yourself – who sit in the large transatlantic think-tanks and foundations,the foundation The Atlantic Bridge, all these organizations, and how is one influenced there? I can tell from my own experience.

We mustn't talk only theoretically. I was invited by the think-tank The German Marshall Fund of the United States as a fellow. I was to visit the United States for six weeks. It was fully paid. During these six weeks I could this think-tank has very close connections to the CIA to this day, they acquired contacts in the CIA for me and they got me access to American politicians, to everyone I wanted. Above all, they showered me with gifts.

Already before the journey with German Marshall Fund, I experienced plenty of bought journalism. This hasn't to do with a particular media outlet. You see, I was invited and didn't particularly reflect over it, by billionaires, for example sultan Quabboos of Oman on the Arabian peninsula.

When sultan Qabboos invited, and a poor boy like me could travel to a country with few inhabitants but immense wealth, where the head of state had the largest yachts in the world, his own symphony orchestra which plays for him when he wants – by the way he bought a pub close to Garmisch-Patenkirchen, because he is a Muslim believer, and someone might see him if he drank in his own country, so he rather travels there. The place he bought every day fly in fresh lamb from Ireland and Scotland with his private jet. He is also the head of an environmental foundation.

But this is a digression. If such a person, who is so incredibly rich, invites someone like me, then I arrive first class. I had never traveled first class before. We arrive, and a driver is waiting for me. He carries your suitcase or backpack. You have a suite in the hotel. And from the very start, you are showered with gifts. You get a platinum or gold coin. A hand-weaved carpet or whatever.

I interviewed the sultan, several times. He asked me what I wanted. I answered among other things a diving course. I wanted to learn how to dive. He flew in a PADI-approved instructor from Greece. I was there for two weeks and got my first diving certificate. On later occasions, the sultan flew me in several times, and the diving instructor. I got a certificate as rescue diver, all paid for by the sultan. You see, when one is attended to in such a way, then you know that you are bought. For a certain type of journalism. In the sultan's country, there is no freedom of the press.

There are no human rights. It is illegal to import many writings, because the sultan does not wish so. There are reports about human rights violations, but my eyes are blind. I reported, like all German media when they report about the Sultanate of Oman, to this day, only positive things. The great sultan, who is wonderful. The fantastic country of the fairy tale prince, overshadowing everything else – because I was bought.

Apart from Oman, many others have bought me. They also bought colleagues. I got many invitations through the travel section in my big newspaper. 5-star. The reportage never mentioned that I was bought, by country A or B or C. Yemenia, the Yemeni state airline, invited me to such a trip.

I didn't report about the dirt and dilapidation in the country, because I was influenced by this treatment, I only reported positively, because I wanted to come back. The Yemenis asked me when I had returned to Frankfurt what I wished In jest, I said "your large prawns, from the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean, they were spectacular.", from the seaport of Mocha (Mocha-coffee is named after it). Two days later, Yemenia flew in a buffet for the editorial office, with prawns and more.

Of course we were bought. We were bought in several ways. In your situation: when you buy a car or something else, you trust consumer tests. Look closer. How well is the car tested? I know of no colleagues, no journalists, who do testing of cars, that aren't bribed – maybe they do exist.

They get unlimited access to a car from the big car manufacturers, with free petrol and everything else. I had a work car in my newspaper, if not, I might have exploited this. I had a BMW or Mercedes in the newspaper. But there are, outside the paper, many colleagues who only have this kind of vehicle all year round. They are invited to South Africa, Malaysia, USA, to the grandest travels, when a new car is presented.

Why? So that they will write positively about the car. But it doesn't say in these reports "Advertisement from bought journalists".

But that is the reality. You should also know – since we are on the subjects of tests – who owns which test magazines? Who owns the magazine Eco-test? It is owned by the Social Democrats. More than a hundred magazines belong to the Social Democrats. It isn't about only one party, but many editorial rooms have political allegiance. Behind them are party political interests.

I mentioned the sultan of Oman and the diving course, and I have mentioned German Marshall Fund. Back to the US and the German Marshall Fund. There one told me, they knew exactly, 'hello, you were on a diving course in Oman ' The CIA knew very precisely. And the CIA also gave me something: The diving gear. I received the diving gear in the United States, and I received in the US, during my 6-week stay there, an invitation from the state of Oklahoma, from the governor. I went there. It was a small ceremony, and I received an honorary citizenship.

I am now honorary citizen of an American state. And in this certificate, it is written that I will only cover the US positively. I accepted this honorary citizenship and was quite proud of it. I proudly told about it to a colleague who worked in the US. He said 'ha, I already have 31 of these honorary citizenships!'

I don't tell about this to be witty, today I am ashamed, really.

I was greedy. I accepted many advantages that a regular citizen at my age in my occupation doesn't have, and shouldn't have. But I perceived it – and that is no excuse – as entirely normal, because my colleagues around me all did the same. But this isn't normal. When journalists are invited to think-tanks in the US, like German Marshall Fund, Atlantic Bridge, it is to 'bring them in line', for in a friendly way to make them complicit, naturally to buy them, to grease them with money.

This has quite a few aspects that one normally doesn't talk about. When I for the first time was in Southern Africa, in the 80s, Apartheid still existed in South Africa, segregated areas for blacks and whites. We didn't have any problems with this in my newspaper, we received fully paid journeys from the Apartheid regime to do propaganda work.

I was invited by the South-African gold industry, coal industry, tourist board. In the first invitation, this trip was to Namibia – I arrived tired to the hotel room in Windhoek and a dark woman lay in my bed. I at once left the room, went down to the reception and said 'excuse me, but the room is already occupied' [laughter from the audience]

Without any fuss I got another room.

Next day at the breakfast table, this was a journalist trip, my colleagues asked me 'how was yours?' Only then I understood what had happened. Until then, I had believed it was a silly coincidence.

With this I want to describe which methods are used, maybe to film journalists in such situations, buy, make dependent. Quite simply to win them over to your side with the most brutal methods, so that they are 'brought in line'.

This doesn't happen to every journalist. It would be a conspiracy theory if I said that behind every journalist, someone pulls the wires.

No. Not everyone has influence over the masses. When you – I don't mean this negatively – write about folk costume societies or if you work with agriculture or politics, why should anyone from the upper political spheres have an interest in controlling the reporting? As far as I know, this doesn't happen at all.

But if you work in one of the big media, and want up in this world, if you want to travel with politicians, heads of state, with CEOs, who also travel on these planes, then it happens. Then you are regularly bought, you are regularly observed.

I said earlier that I already during my study days had contact with the intelligence services.

I will quickly explain this to you, because it is very important for this lecture.

I studied law, Political Science and Islamology, among other places in Freiburg. At the very beginning of my study, just before end of the term, a professor approached me. Professors were then still authority figures.

He came with a brochure, and asked me: 'Mr. Ulfkotte, what are your plans for this vacation?'

I couldn't very well say that I first planned to work a bit at a building site, for then to grab my backpack and see the ocean for the first time in my life, to Italy, 'la dolce vita', flirting with girls, lie on the beach and be a young person.

I wondered how I would break it to him. He then came with a brochure [Ulfkotte imitating professor]: 'I have something for you a seminar, Introduction to Conflict Studies, two weeks in Bonn I am sure you would want to participate!'

I wondered how I would tell this elderly gentleman that I wanted to flirt with girls on the beach. Then he said 'you will get 20 Marks per day as support, paid train journey, money for books 150 Marks You will naturally get board and lodging.' He didn't stop telling me what I would receive.

It buzzed around in my head that I had to achieve everything myself, work hard. I thought 'You have always wanted to participate in a seminar on Introduction to Conflict Studies!'

So I went to Bonn from Freiburg, and I saw other students who had this urge to participate in this seminar. There were also girls one could flirt with, about twenty people. The whole thing was very strange, because we sat in a room like this one, there were desks and a lectern, and there sat some older men and a woman, they always wrote something down. They asked us about things; What we thought of East Germany, we had to do role play.

The whole thing was a bit strange, but it was well paid. We didn't reflect any further. It was very strange that in this house, in Ubierstraße 88 in Bonn, we weren't allowed to go to the second floor. There was a chain over the stairs, it was taboo.

We were allowed to go to the basement, there were constantly replenished supplies of new books that we were allowed to get for free. Ebay didn't exist then, but we could still sell them used. Anyway, it was curious, but at the end of the fortnight, we were allowed to go up these stairs, where we got an invitation to a continuation course in Conflict Studies.

After four such seminars, that is, after two years, someone asked me 'you have probably wondered what we are doing here'.

He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact me later, in my occupation.

They gave me a lot of money. My mother has always taught me to be polite. So I said 'please do', and they came to me. I was then working in the newspaper FAZ from 1986, straight after my studies.

Then the intelligence services came fairly soon to me. Why am I telling you this? The newspaper knew very soon. It is also written in my reference, therefore I can say it loud and clear. I had very close contact with the intelligence service BND.

Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given, but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline.

I highlight certain things to explain them. But if I had said here: 'There are media that are influenced by BND', you could rightly say that 'these are conspiracy theories, can you document it?'

I CAN document it. I can say, this and that article, with my byline in the paper, is written by the intelligence services, because what is written there, I couldn't have known. I couldn't have known what existed in some cave or other in Libya, what secret thing were there, what was being built there. This was all things that BND wanted published. It wasn't like this only in FAZ.

It was like this also in other media. I told about it. If we had rule of law, there would now be an investigation commission. Because the political parties would stand up, regardless of if they are on the left, in the center or right, and say: What this Ulfkotte fella says and claims he can document, this should be investigated. Did this occur in other places? Or is it still ongoing?'

I can tell you: Yes it still exists. I know colleagues who still have this close contact. One can probably show this fairly well until a few years ago. But I would find it wonderful if this investigation commission existed.

But it will obviously not happen, because no one has an interest in doing so. Because then the public would realize how closely integrated politics, media, and the secret services are in this country.

That is, one often sees in reporting, whether it is from the local paper, regional papers, TV-channels, national tabloids and so-called serious papers.

Put them side by side, and you will discover that more than 90% looks almost identical. A lot of subjects and news, that are not being reported at all, or they are – I claim reported very one-sided. One can only explain this if one knows the structures in the background, how media is surrounded, bought and 'brought onboard' by politics and the intelligence services; Where politics and intelligence services form a single unity. There is an intelligence coordinator by the Chancellor.

I can tell you, that under the former coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer, under Kohl, I walked in and out of the Chancellery and received stacks of secret and confidential documents, which I shouldn't have received.

They were so many that we in the newspaper had own archive cabinets for them. Not only did I receive these documents,but Schmidbauer should have been in jail if we had rule of law. Or there should have been a parliamentary commission or an investigation, because he wasn't allowed

For example if I couldn't bring along the documents if the case was too hot, there was another trick. They locked me in a room. In this room were the documents, which I could look through. I could record it all on tape, photograph them or write them down. When I was done, I could call on the intercom, so they could lock me out. There were thousands of these tricks. Anonymous documents that I and my colleagues needed could be placed in my mail box.

These are of course illegal things. BUT, you ONLY get them if you 'toe the line' with politics.

If I had written that Chancellor Helmut Kohl is stupid, a big idiot, or about what Schmidbauer did, I would of course not have received more. That is, if you today, in newspapers, read about 'soon to be revealed exposures, we will publish a big story based on material based on intelligence', then none of these media have dug a tunnel under the security services and somehow got hold of something secret. It is rather that they work so well with intelligence services, with the military counterespionage, the foreign intelligence, police intelligence etc, that if they have got hold of internal documents, it is because they cooperate so well that they received them as a reward for well performed service.

You see, in this way one is in the end bought. One is bought to such a degree that at one point one can't exit this system anymore.

If I describe how you are supplied with prostitutes, bribed with cars, money; I tried to write down everything I received in gifts, everything I was bribed with. I stopped doing so several years ago, more than a decade ago.

It doesn't make it any better, but today I regret everything. But I know that it goes this way with many journalists.

It would make me very happy if journalists stood up and said they won't participate in this any longer, and that they think this is wrong.

But I see no possibility, because media corporations in any case are doing badly. Where should a journalist find work the next day? It isn't so that tens of thousands of employers are waiting for you. It is the other way round. Tens of thousands of journalists are looking for work or commissions.

That is, from pure desperation one is happy to be bribed. If a newsroom stands behind or not an article that in reality is advertising, doesn't matter, one goes along. I know some, even respected journalists, who want to leave this system.

But imagine if you are working in one of the state channels, that you stand up and tell what you have received. How will that be received by your colleagues? That you have political ulterior motives etc.

September 30 [2015], a few days ago, Chancellor Merkel invited all the directors in the state channels to her in the Chancellery. I will claim that she talked with them about how one should report the Chancellors politics. Who of you [in the audience] heard about this incident? 3-4-5? So a small minority. But this is reality. Merkel started already 6 years ago, at the beginning of the financial crisis, to invite chief editors ..she invited chief editors in the large media corporations, with the express wish that media should embellish reality, in a political way. This could have been only claims, one could believe me or not.

But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times, and told them she didn't want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there. For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything will be fine.

In such a way it should be reported. Ladies and gentlemen, what I just said can be documented. These are facts, not a conspiracy theory.

I formulated it a bit satirically, but I ask myself when I see how things are in this country: Is this the democracy described in the Constitution? Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press?

Where one has to be afraid if one doesn't agree with the ruling political correctness, if one doesn't want to get in trouble. Is this the republic our parents and grandparents fought for, that they built?

I claim that we more and more – as citizens – are cowards 'toeing the line', who don't open our mouths.

It is so nice to have plurality and diversity of opinions.

But it is at once clamped down on, today fairly openly.

Of my experiences with journalism, I can in general say that I have quit all media I have to pay for, for the reasons mentioned. Then the question arises, 'but which pay-media can I trust?'

Naturally there are ones I support. They are definitely political, I'll add. But they are all fairly small. And they won't be big anytime soon. But I have quit all big media that I used to subscribe to, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine, etc. I would like to not having to pay the TV-license fee, without being arrested because I won't pay fines. But maybe someone here in the audience can tell me how to do so without all these problems?

Either way, I don't want to financially support this kind of journalism. I can only give you the advice to get information from alternative, independent media and all the forums that exist.

I'm not advertising for any of them. Some of you probably know that I write for the publishing house Kopp. But there are so many portals. Every person is different in political viewpoint, culturally etc. The only thing uniting us, whether we are black or white, religious or non-religious, right or left, or whatever; we all want to know the truth. We want to know what really happens out there, and exactly in the burning political questions: asylum seekers, refugees, the financial crisis, bad infrastructure, one doesn't know how it will continue. Precisely with this background, is it even more important that people get to know the truth.

And it is to my great surprise that I conclude that we in media, as well as in politics, have a guiding line.

To throw more and more dust in the citizens' eyes to calm them down. What is the sense in this? One can have totally different opinions on the subject of refugees with good reasoning.

But facts are important for you as citizens to decide the future. That is, how many people will arrive? How will it affect my personal affluence? Or will it affect my affluence at all? Will the pensions shrink? etc. Then you can talk with people about this, quite openly. But to say that we should open all borders, and that this won't have any negative consequences, is very strange. What I now say isn't a plug for my books. I know that some of them are on the table in front.

I'm not saying this so that you will buy books. I am saying this for another reason that soon will be clear. I started to write books on certain subjects 18 years ago. They have sold millions. It is no longer about you buying my books. It is important that you hear the titles, then you will see a certain line throughout the last ten years. One can have different opinions about this line, but I have always tried to describe, based on my subjective experiences, formed over many years in the Middle East and Africa.

That there will be migration flows, from people from culture areas that are like; if one could compare a cultural area with an engine, that one fills petrol in a diesel engine then everyone knows what will happen, the engine is great, diesel is great, but if there too much petrol, then the engine starts to splutter and stop.

I have tried to make you aware of this, with drastic and less drastic words. What we can expect, and ever faster. The book titles are SOS Occident; Warning Civil War; No Black,Red, Yellow [the colors in the German flag], Holy War in Europe; Mecca Germany.

I just want to say, when politicians and media today claim no one could have predicted it, everything is a complete surprise; Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not at all surprising. The migration flows, for years warnings have been coming from international organizations, politicians, experts, exactly about what happened and it is predictable, if we had a map over North Africa and the Middle East..

If the West continues to destabilize countries like Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, country by country, Iraq when we toppled Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan. We as Europeans and Germans have spent tens of billions on a war where we allegedly defend peace and liberty, at the mountain range Hindu Kush [in Afghanistan]. And here, in front of our own door, we soon have Hindu Kush.

We have no stabilization in Afghanistan. Dozens of German soldiers have lost their lives for nothing. We have a more unstable situation than ever.

You can have your own opinions. I am only saying that these refugee flows didn't fall from the sky. It is predicable, that if I bomb and destabilize a country, that people – it is always so in history – it hasn't anything to do with the Middle East or North Africa. I have seen enough wars in Africa. Naturally they created refugee flows.

But all of us didn't want to see this. We haven't prepared. And now one is reacting in full panic, and what is most disconcerting with this, is when media and politicians, allegedly from deepest inner conviction, say: 'this was all a complete surprise!'

Are they drunk? What are they smoking? What sort of pills are they eating? That they behave this way?

End transcription

The transcription has been edited for clarity, and may differ from the spoken word. The subtitles and transcription are for the first 49 minutes of the lecture only. Subtitled and transcribed by Terje Maloy. This article is Creative Commons 4.0 for non-commercial purposes.
Terje Maloy ( Website ) is a Norwegian citizen, with roots north of the Arctic Circle. Nowadays, he spends a lot of time in Australia, working in the family business. He has particular interests in liberty, global justice, imperialism, history, media analysis and what Western governments really are up to. He runs a blog , mostly in Norwegian, but occasionally in English. He likes to write about general geopolitical matters, and Northern Europe in particular, presenting perspectives that otherwise barely are mentioned in the dominant media (i.e. most things that actually matter).
Tim Jenkins
From 1:18 minutes, Ulfkotte reveals without question, that the EU Political 'elite's' combined intelligence services work with & propagate . . .

Terror, Terrorists & Terrorism / a conscious organised Politics of FEAR ! / Freedom of Movement, of fully armed IS Agents Provocateurs & with a Secret Services get out of jail free card, 'Hände Weg Nicht anfassen', it's 'Hammertime', "U Can't Touch this", we're armed state operatives travelling to Germany & Austria, " don't mess with my operation !" & all journalists' hands tied, too.

The suggestions & offers below to translate fully, what Ulfkotte declares publicly, make much sense. It is important to understand that even an 'Orban' must bow occasionally, to deep state Security State Dictators and the pressures they can exert in so many ways. Logic . . . or else one's life is made into hell, alive or an 'accidental' death: – and may I add, it is a curiously depressing feeling when you have so many court cases on the go, that when a Gemeinde/Municipality Clerk is smiling, celebrating and telling you, (representing yourself in court, with only independent translator & recorder), "You Won the Case, a superior judge has over-ruled " and the only reply possible is,

"Which case number ?"

life gets tedious & time consuming, demanding extreme patience. Given his illness, surely Ulfkotte and his wife, deserve/d extra credit & 'hot chocolate'. Makes a change to see & read some real journalism: congrats.@OffG

Excellent Professional Journalism on "Pseudo-Journalist State Actors & Terrorists". If you see a terrorist, guys, at best just reason with him or her :- better than calling

INTERPOL or Secret Services @theguardian, because you wouldn't want a member of the public, grassing you up to your boss, would you now ? ! Just tell the terrorist who he really works for . . . Those he resents ! Rather like Ulfkotte had to conclude, with final resignation. My condolences to his good wife.

Wilmers31
Very good of you to not forget Ulfkotte. If I did not have sickness in the house, I would translate it. Maybe I can do one chapter and someone else can do another one? What's the publisher saying?
jgiam
It's just a long unedited speech.
Tim Jenkins
You wouldn't say that if you could speak German, my friend ! ?

From one hour 18 minutes onwards, Ulfkotte details EU-Inter-State Terror Co-operation, with returning IS Operatives on a Free Pass, fully armed and even Viktor Orban had to give in to the commands of letting Terrorists through Hungary into Germany & Austria.

But, don't let that revelation bother you, living under a Deep State 'Politic of Fear' in the West and long unedited speeches gets kinda' boring now, I know a bit like believing in some kinda' dumbfuk new pearl harbour, war on terror &&& all phoney propaganda fairy story telling, just like on the 11/9/2001, when the real target was WTC 7, to hide elitist immoral endeavours, corruption & the missing $$$TRILLIONS$$$ of tax payers money, 'mislaid' by the D.o.D. announced directly the day before by Rumsfeld, forgotten ? Before ramping the Surveillance States abilities in placing & employing "Parallel Platforms" on steroids, so that our secret services can now employ terror & deploy terrorists at will .., against us, see ?

Plus ca change....
I remember on a similar note a 60 Minutes piece just prior to Clinton's humanitarian bombing of Serbian civilian infrastructure (and long ago deleted, I'm sure) on a German free-lancer staging Kosovo atrocities in a Munich suburb, and having the German MSM eating it up and asking for more. (WWII guilt assuagement at work, no doubt).
mark
Everybody who works in the MSM, without exception, are bought and paid for whores peddling lies on behalf of globalist corporate interests.
That is their job.
That is what they do.
They have long since forfeited all credibility and integrity.
They have lied to us endlessly for decades and generations, from the Bayonetted Belgian Babies and Human Bodies Turned Into Soap of WW1 to the Iraq Incubator Babies and Syrian Gas Attacks of more recent times.

You can no longer take anything at face value.
The default position has to be that every single word they print and every single word that comes out of their lying mouths is untrue.
If they say it's snowing at the North Pole, you can't accept that without first going there and checking it out for yourself.
You can't accept anything that has not been independently verified.

This applies across the board.
All of the accepted historical narrative, including things like the holocaust.
And current Global Warming "science."
We know we have been lied to again and again and again.
So what else have we been lied to without us realising it?

mark
Come to think of it, I need to apologise to sex workers.
I have known quite a few of them who have quite high ethical and moral standards, certainly compared to the MSM.
And they certainly do less damage.
Vert few working girls have blood on their hands like the MSM.
Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.
Seamus Padraig

Compared to them, working girls are the salt of the earth and pillars of the community.

I heartily agree. Even if one disapproves morally of prostitution, how can it possibly be worse to sell your body than to sell your soul?

Oliver
Quite. Checking things out for yourself is the way to go. Forget 'Peer Reviews', just as bent as the journalism Ulfkotte described. DIY.
Mortgage
So natural, all it seems

Part II:
Bought Science

Part III:
Bought Health Services

mapquest directions
The video you shared with great info. I really like the information you share. boxnovel
Gary Weglarz
I knew we were in dangerous new territory regarding government censorship when after waiting several years for Ulfkotte's best selling book to finally be available in English – it suddenly, magically, disappeared completely – a vanishing act – and I couldn't get so much as a response from, much less an explanation from, the would be publisher. Udo's book came at a time when it could have made a difference countering the fact-free complete and total "fabrication of reality" by the U.S. and Western powers as they have waged a brutal and ongoing neocolonial war on the world's poor under the guise of "fighting terrorism."

Udo's voice (in the form of his book) was silenced for a reason – that being that he spoke the truth about our utterly and completely corrupt Western fantasy world in which we in the West proclaim our – "respect international law" and "respect for human rights." His work, such as this interview and others he has done, pulled the curtain back on the big lie and exposed our oligarchs, politicians and the "journalists" they hire as simply a cadre of professional criminals whose carefully crafted lies are used to soak up the blood and to cover the bodies of the dead, all in order to hide all that mayhem from our eyes, to insure justice is an impossibility and to make sure we Western citizens sleep well at night, oblivious to our connection to the actual realities that are this daily regime of pillage and plunder that is our vaunted "neoliberal order."

Ramdan
After watching the first 20 min I couldn't help but remembering this tale:

"The philosopher Diogenes (of Sinope) was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, 'If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.' To which Diogenes replied, 'Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king"."

which is also the reason why such a large part of humanity lives in voluntary servitude to power structures, living the dream, the illusion of being free..

Ramdan
"English Translation of Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalists" Suppressed?" at Global Research 2017!!

https://www.globalresearch.ca/english-translation-of-udo-ulfkottes-bought-journalists-suppressed/5601857

Francis Lee
Just rechecked Amazon. Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News by Udo Ulfkotte PH.D. The tag line reads.

Hard cover – currently unavailable; paperback cover – currently unavailable; Kindle edition – ?

Book burning anyone?

nottheonly1
No translation exists for this interview with Udo Ulfkotte on KenFM, the web site of Ken Jebsen. Ken Jebsen has been in the cross hairs of the CIA and German agencies for his reporting of the truth. He was smeared and defamed by the same people that Dr. Ulfkotte had written extensively about in his book 'Gekaufte Journalisten' ('Bought Journalists').

The reason why I add this link to the interview lies in the fact that Udo Ulfkotte speaks about an important part of Middle Eastern and German history – a history that has been scrubbed from the U.S. and German populations. In the Iraq war against Iran – that the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R. – German chemical weapons were used under the supervision of the U.S. regime. The extend of the chemical weapons campaign was enormous and to the present day, Iranians are born with birth defects stemming from the used of German weapons of mass destruction.

Dr. Ulfkotte rightfully bemoans, that every year German heads of state are kneeling for the Jewish victims of National socialism – but not for the victims of German WMD's that were used against Iran. He stresses that the act of visual asking for forgiveness in the case of the Jewish victims becomes hypocrisy, when 40 years after the Nazis reigned, German WMD's were used against Iran. The German regime was in on the WMD attack on Iran. It was not something that happened because they had lost a couple of thousand containers with WMDs. They delivered the WMD's to Iraq under U.S. supervision.

Ponder that. And there has never been an apology towards Iran, or compensations. Nada. Nothing. Instead, the vile rhetoric and demagogery of every U.S. regime since has continued to paint Iran in the worst possible ways, most notably via incessant psychological projection – accusing Iran of the war crimes and crimes against humanity the U.S. and its Western vassal regimes are guilty of.

Here is the interview that was recorded shortly before Udo Ulfkotte's death:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm_hWenGJKg

If enough people support the effort, I am willing to contact KenFM for the authorization to translate the interview and use it for subtitles to the video. However, I can't do that on my own.

nottheonly1
Correction: the interview was recorded two years before his passing.
Antonym
the U.S. regime had pushed for in the same fashion the way they had pushed Nazi Germany to invade the U.S.S.R.

So Roosevelt pushed Hitler to attack Stalin? Hitler didn't want to go East? Revisionism at it most motive free.

nottheonly1
It would help if you would use your brain just once. 'Pushing' is synonymous for a variety of ways to instigate a desired outcome. Financing is just one way. And Roosevelt was in no way the benevolent knight history twisters like to present him. You are outing yourself again as an easliy duped sheep.

But then, with all the assaults by the unintelligence agencies, it does not come as a surprise when facts are twisted.

Antonym
Lebensraum was first popularized in 1901 in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum Hitler's "Mein Kampf" ( 1925) build on that: he had no need for any American or other push, it was intended from the get go. The timing of operation Barbarossa was brilliant though: it shocked Stalin into a temporary limbo as he had his own aggressive plans.
Casandra2
This excellent article demonstrates how the Controlling Elite manipulates the Media and the Message for purposes of misdirecting attention and perception of their true intentions and objective of securing Global Ownership (aka New World Order).

This approach has been assiduously applied, across the board, over many years, to the point were they now own and run everything required to subjugate the 'human race' to the horrors of their psychopathic inclinations. They are presently holding the global economy on hold until their AI population (social credit) control system/grid is in place before bringing the house down.

Needless to say, when this happens a disunited and frightened Global Population will be at their mercy.

If you wish to gain a full insight of what the Controlling Elite is about, and capable of, I recommend David Icke's latest publication 'Trigger'. I know he's been tagged a 'nutter' over the past thirty years, but I reckon this book represents the 'gold standard' in terms of generating awareness as a basis for launching a united global population counter-attack (given a great strategy) against forces that can only be defined as pure 'EVIL'.

MASTER OF UNIVE
Corporate Journalism is all about corporatism and the continuation of it. If the Intelligence Community needs greater fools for staffing purposes in the corporate hierarchy they look for anyone that can be compromised via inducements of whatever the greater fools want. Engaging in compromise allows both parties to have complicit & explicit understanding that corruption and falsehood are the tools of the trade. To all-of-a-sudden develop a conscience after decades of playing the part of a willing participant is understandable in light of the guilt complex one must develop after screwing everyone in the world out of the critical assessment we all need to obtain in order to make decisions regarding our futures.

Bought & paid for corporate Journalists are controlled by the Intelligence Agencies and always have been since at least the Second World War. The CIA typically runs bribery & blackmail at the state & federal level so that when necessary they have instant useless eaters to offer up as political sacrifice when required via state run propaganda, & impression management.

Assuming that journalism is an ethical occupation is naïve and a fools' game even in the alternative news domain as all writers write from bias & a lack of real knowledge. Few writers are intellectually honest or even aware of their own limits as writers. The writer is a failure and not a hero borne in myth. Writers struggle to write & publish. Bought and paid for writers don't have a struggle in terms of writing because they are told what to write before they write as automatons for the Intelligence Community knowing that they sold their collective souls to the Prince of Darkness for whatever trinkets, bobbles, or bling they could get their greedy hands on at the time.

Developing a conscience late in life is too late.

May all that sell their souls to the Intel agencies understand that pond scum never had a conscience to begin with.

Once pond scum always pond scum.

MOU

nottheonly1
What is not addressed in this talk is the addictive nature of this sort of public relation writing. Journalism is something different altogether. I know that, because I consider myself to be a journalist at heart – one that stopped doing it when the chalice was offered to me. The problem is that one is not part of the cabal one day to another.

It is a longer process in which one is gradually introduced to ever more expensive rewards/bribes. Never too big to overwhelm – always just about what one would accept as 'motivation' to omit aspects of any issue. Of course, omission is a lie by any other name, but I can attest to the life style of a journalist that socializes with the leaders of all segments of society.

And I would also write a critique about a great restaurant – never paying a dime for a fantastic dinner. The point though is that I would not write a good critique for a nasty place for money. I have never written anything but the truth – for which I received sometimes as much as a bag full of the best rolls in the country.

Twisting the truth for any form of bribes is disgusting and attests of the lowest of any character.

MASTER OF UNIVE
Professional whoring is as old as the hills and twice as dusty. Being ethical is difficult stuff especially when money is involved. Money is always a prime motivator but vanity works wonders too. Corporatists will offer whatever inducements they can to get what they want.

All mainstream media voices are selling a media package that is a corporatist lie in and of itself. Truth is less marketable than lies. Embellished news & journalistic hype is the norm.

If the devil offers inducements be sure to up the ante to outsmart the drunken sot.

MOU

[Nov 02, 2019] Assad Calls Trump Best US President Ever For Transparency Of Real US Motives

Nov 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Arguably some of the most significant events since the eight-year long war's start have played out in Syria with rapid pace over just the last month alone, including Turkey's military incursion in the north, the US pullback from the border and into Syria's oil fields, the Kurdish-led SDF&# deal making with Damascus, and the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. All of this is why a televised interview with Presiden39;st Bashar Assad was highly anticipated at the end of this week.

Assad's commentary on the latest White House policy to "secure the oil" in Syria, for which US troops have already been redeployed to some of the largest oil fields in the Deir Ezzor region, was the biggest pressing question. The Syrian president's response was unexpected and is now driving headlines, given what he said directly about Trump, calling him the "best American president" ever – because he's the "most transparent."

"When it comes to Trump you may ask me a question and I'll give you an answer which might seem strange. I tell you he's the best American president," Assad said, according to a translation provided by NBC.

"Why? Not because his policies are good, but because he is the most transparent president," Assad continued.

"All American presidents commit crimes and end up taking the Nobel Prize and appear as a defender of human rights and the 'unique' and 'brilliant' American or Western principles. But all they are is a group of criminals who only represent the interests of the American lobbies of large corporations in weapons, oil and others," he added.

"Trump speaks with the transparency to say 'We want the oil'." Assad's unique approach to an 'enemy' head of state which has just ordered the seizure of Syrian national resources also comes after in prior years the US president called Assad "our enemy" and an "animal."

Trump tweeted in April 2018 after a new chemical attack allegation had surfaced: "If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!"

A number of mainstream outlets commenting on Assad's interview falsely presented it as "praise" of Trump or that Assad thinks "highly" of him; however, it appears the Syrian leader was merely presenting Trump's policy statements from a 'realist' perspective , contrasting them from the misleading 'humanitarian' motives typical of Washington's rhetoric about itself.

That is, Damascus sees US actions in the Middle East as motivated fundamentally by naked imperial ambition, a constant prior theme of Assad's speeches , across administrations, whether US leadership dresses it up as 'democracy promotion' or in humanitarian terms characteristic of liberal interventionism. As Assad described, Trump seems to skip dressing up his rhetoric in moralistic idealism altogether, content to just unapologetically admit the ugly reality of US foreign policy.

indaknow , 4 minutes ago link

Most President's thought you had to plot coups. Regime changes, color revolutions. Long convoluted wars with many deaths and collateral damage.

Trump says **** that. We're just taking the oil. Brilliant

Chupacabra-322 , 18 minutes ago link

To fund their Black Ops to destabilize Sovereign Countries & rape, murder, pillage & steal their natural resources. And, install their Puppet leaders.

Wash, rinse & repeat.

ExPat2018 , 22 minutes ago link

I see Americans keep calling Assad and Putin a ''dictator'' Hey, jackasses, they were ELECTED in elections far less corrupt than what you have in the USSA

Guentzburgh , 54 minutes ago link

Transparently Assad is a moron, the oil belongs to the kurds snake.

beemasters , 52 minutes ago link

Not anymore... Russian Military Releases Satellite Images Confirming US Smuggling of Syrian Oil
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201910261077154752-russian-military-releases-satellite-images-confirming-us-smuggling-of-syrian-oil/

yerfej , 1 hour ago link

Securing oil from those you don't want to have it is different than "stealing" the oil. Face it the oil means nothing to any large western economy.

Dzerzhhinsky , 33 minutes ago link

Face it the oil means nothing to any large western economy.

The one thing all capitalists have in common is they all want more money, it's never enough.

You commies will never understand the deep in your gut need to take every penny from every child.

Fiscal Reality , 1 hour ago link

Pelosi, Schiff, Cankels, Schumer, The MSM all sriek in unison "TRUMP IS ASSAD'S PAWN. IMPEACH HIM!!!"

beemasters , 1 hour ago link

the "best American president" ever – because he's the "most transparent."

Very much so. When he says something, it's definitely the opposite that he would be doing. You can't get more transparent than that.

NorwegianPawn , 1 hour ago link

Assad is a very eloquent speaker. Witty, sharp and always calm when speaking with decadent press. Of course the MSM understood what he DID mean, but they cannot help themselves, but parse anything to try hurting Trump.

Just don't believe a word the media says.

Son of Captain Nemo , 1 hour ago link

Mr. Assad's got that pitch correctly...

As a matter of fact he used "real motives" when he should have used the words "maniacal" and "desperate"...

Case in point... https://southfront.org/western-europe-archdiocese-officially-reunited-with-russian-orthodox-church/

If true. It means the Vatican (the oldest most important money there is) like Saudi Arabia and the UAE sure do seem to care about stuff like purchasing power in their "portfolios" and a "store of value"?...

I see lots of EU participants taking their money to Moscow as well with that Arctic bonanza that says "come hither" if you want your money to be worth something!!!

To Hell In A Handbasket , 1 hour ago link

It's always been about oil. Spreading Freedumb, Dumbocracy and Western values, is PR spiel. The reality is, the West are scammers, plunderers and outright thieves. Forget the billions Shell Oil, is holding for the Biafran people/region in Nigeria, which it won't give to either the Bianfran states in the east, nor the Nigerian government, dating back to the secessionist state of Biafra/Nigerian civil war 1967-70. The west are nothing more than gang-bangers, but on the world stage.

If people think its just oil we steal, then you are mad. What the UK did in reneging on 1500 Chieftain tanks and armoured personnel vehicles, with Iran which they paid for up-front and fucked Iran over in the UK courts over interest payments over 40 years. Are stories that simply do not make the news.

Yet the department for trade and industry is scratching its head, wondering why their are so few takers for a post-Brexit trade deal with the UK, where the honest UK courts have the final say? lol

truthseeker47 , 1 hour ago link

Too bad it is political suicide for an American president to try to establish communication with Assad. He seems like a pretty practical guy and who knows, it might be possible to work out a peaceful settlement with him.

TheLastMan , 1 hour ago link

economic warfare on the syrian civlian population through illegal confiscation of vital civilian economic assets, and as conducted in venezeula, is called ________________

Meximus , 1 hour ago link

That is not a compliment for Trompas .

Assad is saying where before the UKK was a masked thief, with Trompas and his egotism alias exceptionalism, has not bothered withthe mask. He is still a murderer and thief.

Obi-jonKenobi , 2 hours ago link

Now Assad has some idea why Trump is so popular with his base, they love him for not being politically correct, for "telling it like it is". He's like the wolf looking at the sheep and telling them he's going to eat them and the sheep cheering because he's not being a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Unfortunately in the case of Trump's sheeple, they don't even have a clue they're going to be eaten, the Trumptards all think he's going to eat someone else like the "deep state" or the "dumbocrats". Meanwhile he's chewing away at their health care, their export markets, piling up record deficits, handing the tax gold to the rich and corporations while they get the shaft, taking away program after program that aided students, the poor, and the elderly, appointing lobbyists to dismantle or corrupt departments they used to lobby against, and in general destroying the international good will that it's taken decades to build.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

[Nov 02, 2019] Russian Assets and Realignment as the Dems Morph into Neocons by Renée Parsons

Notable quotes:
"... Believing herself untouchable and immune from any genuine criticism or objective analysis after having successfully evaded prosecution from the nation's top law enforcement agencies, HRC went off the deep end dragging the Democratic party further into the ditch. ..."
"... She is a favorite of the Russians. That's assuming that Jill Stein will give it up which she might not because she is also a Russian asset." ..."
"... Gabbard's message is relatively simple -that is: Instead of the US destroying countries it should be spending the Military Budget on rebuilding the US. Yes that sounds like an America First type of stance but it has a decent logic about it. ..."
"... The US needs an enemy to justify its massive defence bill and 800 bases worldwide. ..."
"... Stoltenberg would happily stop all social services in order to buy more missiles and gain a few brownie points from Trump. Stoltenberg along with the US Neocons are are sick SOB's. ..."
"... Both Trump and Jabbard are opponents of the CIA – Wall street complex. Nationalists vs Globalists, but some people still believe the former are more dangerous than the latter. ..."
"... The Dems morphed into neocons when her willy-waving husband sold out and destroyed the Democratic Party of LBJ's Great Society. ..."
"... Tulsi has shown a lot of class, truth to the darkest Power, and long may she have this platform.. ..."
Nov 01, 2019 | off-guardian.org

As you may have figured out by now, Hillary Clinton, warped by her own self aggrandizement of entitlement, did Tulsi Gabbard and her Presidential campaign against interventionist wars a huge incidental favor.

While the Democrats continue to splinter and spiral out of control on the eve of what promises to be a transformative national election, the Grand Inquisitor seized an opportunity to allege that Gabbard (and Jill Stein) are " Russian assets " and " Putin puppets ".

Since Tulsi is a Major in the US Army Reserves and holds the highest security clearance available, the term 'asset,' which is associated with being an agent of a foreign power, carries a level of national security significance.

Believing herself untouchable and immune from any genuine criticism or objective analysis after having successfully evaded prosecution from the nation's top law enforcement agencies, HRC went off the deep end dragging the Democratic party further into the ditch.

She is a favorite of the Russians. That's assuming that Jill Stein will give it up which she might not because she is also a Russian asset."

Clinton's historic pronouncement came in the mistaken belief that publicly humiliating Gabbard would intimidate the Aloha Girl to silence and seek refuge on her surfboard – but that is not how it has played out.

An unexpected bonus proved once again that political strategy has never been Clinton's strong suit as her malicious comments have brought the anti-war alt left with the libertarian alt-right together in Gabbard's defense. With HRC's injudicious taunts, the glimmer of an emerging political realignment , one that has been at odds with both the Dem and Republican establishments, has surfaced – probably not exactly what HRC intended.

In response to having received a burst of unprecedented support, Gabbard is about to assure her place on the November debate stage and continues to solidify her credibility as a critic of a corrupt bipartisan political establishment and its endless wars.

If they falsely portray me as a traitor, they can do it to anyone. Don't be afraid. Join me in speaking truth to power to take back the Democrat Party and country from the corrupt elite."

It is noteworthy that HRCs accusation was to the only candidate who stands in direct opposition to the Queen Bee's history for the war machine and all of its bells and whistles. As if to call attention to the contradiction, the entire fiasco has acknowledged what was never meant to be acknowledged: that one little known Congresswoman from Hawaii would dare to publicly confront the omnipotent HRC with her own demons and malfeasance; thereby elevating the one candidacy that represents a threat to the military industrial complex and its globalist order.

It is no coincidence that the corporate media operates in lockstep as an offensive October 12th NY Times article was immediately followed by a CNN commentary as well as other media sycophants, all tagging Gabbard as a Russian asset.

Contrary to Journalism 101 on how professional media should conduct themselves, there has been no evidence, no facts, no supporting documentation as they characteristically rely on innuendo and disinformation.

At the last Dem debate and during the kerfuffle with Clinton, Tulsi has stepped up and showed herself to be a candidate the country has been waiting for. With a powerful inner grit, she did not hesitate to take the Times and CNN publicly to task and then in response called HRC out as a warmonger and dared her to enter the 2020 fray.

There lies a deep truth within Gabbard's response especially identifying Clinton as the " personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party. "

During Clinton's term as Secretary of State which is little more than a Glorified Global Hustler for the US military industrial complex, the Democratic Party lost its soul, morphing as nefarious neocons in pursuit of raw political and economic power that emanates from a policy of unfettered regime change and interventionist wars.

As Democrats embraced the neocons with no objection to the unrestrained violence, increased military budgets, indiscriminate selling of weapons to bomb a civilian population, then why should the party's grassroots object to the Tuesday morning assassination list or drone attacks on civilians or creating war in four countries living in peace in 2008?

As the party faithful allow themselves to dismiss all the suffering, the death and destruction wrought by US-made weapons as if Amazon and Google toys were an acceptable trade, they lost their conscience and their connection to the basic essence of humanity's need for peace, love and compassion.

The latest example of the Party's devotion to war is their opposition to the withdrawal of US troops from Syria as they created the phony debate that the Kurds were worth more American blood or resources. The Dems have always been more pro-war than they have been given credit for with WWI, WWII, the Korean War and Vietnam all initiated and/or expanded under Democrat Presidents.

With no substantiation from the mindless meanderings of a seriously disoriented woman, it is now clear that Clinton's derangement syndrome of unresolved guilt and denial led the Democratic party to its irrational embrace of Russiagate as the justification for her 2016 loss.

In other words, it was Russiagate that protected HRC's fragile self-esteem from the necessary introspection as Americans were pitted against one another, dividing the nation in a deliberate disruption of civil society in a more acrimonious manner than any time since the 1860's. The country has paid a bitter, unnecessary price for a divisive strategy due to Clinton's refusal to personally accept responsibility for her own failings.

HRC's most egregious war crimes as Secretary of State include assigning Victoria Nuland to conduct the overthrow of a democratically elected President in Ukraine in 2014 and the ensuing violence and civil war in the Donbass as well as her joyous rapture cackling at the death of Libyan President Qaddafi in 2011. The now infamous video " We came, we saw, he died " showed her to be more than just your average war criminal but a Monster who experiences an aberrant thrill at death and destruction.

Since June, TPTB have done their darnedest to deny Tulsi a spot on the debate stage rigging the qualifying requirements as best they could. Making it near impossible for the polling firms, which rely on campaign season and their economic connection with the DNC to call the shots in a fair and equitable manner.

As the early primary states loom ahead, the last thing TPTB need is a powerful pro-peace voice resonating with the American public. The message seems clear: talk of peace is verboten and equates with being a Russia asset and anyone with pacifist tendencies will be publicly chastised and condemned for being a tool of the Kremlin.

None of that has stopped Tulsi Gabbard.

Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU's Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31

Ken Kenn

I am very impressed by Tulsi Gabbard. She's a bit too patriotic for me – but I'm a Brit so for a serving American it's understandable. It isn't the person that is dangerous- it is the insertion of the idea that Regime Change wars are counterproductive.

Gabbard's message is relatively simple -that is: Instead of the US destroying countries it should be spending the Military Budget on rebuilding the US. Yes that sounds like an America First type of stance but it has a decent logic about it.

Wasteful wars and the idea that the US should install its version of Democracy across the Middle East has always been a doomed project and co-operation and an attempt at rebuilding these nations in order to attempt some kind of democracy and future prosperity is required – not bombing and bullying.

You could be outraged by Clinton's nasty rhetoric but let's face it. Clinton lost to someone she considered to be a Clown.

In actuality the DNC almost promoted Trump as person they could beat hands down.

It bit them on the arse as did the Brexit result in the UK.

Clinton has never got over losing to a chump and she is just covering her backside as to why she lost.

Hell hath no fury like a self appointed Candidate scorned. Like Johnson in the UK Clinton thought she had the right to rule. She didn't and doesn't. To quote some US Senator; " The people have spoken. The bastards!"

Igor
The objective is not to install American "democracy". Which does not exist anywhere, USA is officially a republic. Unofficially, it is an oligarchy. Elite super wealthy families and their corporations run the USA. All 45 Presidents have been related to those families. The President is actually elected by the Electoral College, not the popular vote. This was designed into the Constitution of USA, Inc.

The aim of regime change is to create chaos in MENA, by which a small ME state can profit without doing any visible dirty work.

Ramdan
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/they_live_we_sleep_beware_the_growing_evil_in_our_midst
falcemartello
The Democrats(oxymoron for il Partito Fascista Americano) are doing this for the simple reason knowing full well that most traditional old school democrats identify with Bernie Sanders. The whole notion of the WASP notion of left right paradigm is oxymoron in itself.

Any political science follower or student would have to agree. What is the political left mean in the west????????? Has anyone ever read Marx and Engles ???????????? Social democrat WTF does that mean. Historical revisionist get labelled Nazi sympathisers. The constant lies and obfuscation with real facts. Like population stats death births . The Classic method being used at the moment is they no longer due c0up d'etats the good old fascistic way. The popular vote gets discredited by the judicial system. IE the recent elections of Argentina and Bolivia does not suit the IMF( the International Mafia Fund) henc e the European Union Funded election monitoring organisations are all openly stating that both elections were not KOSHER.

Look at the people in Venezuela and Bolivia that are demonstrating against the popular elected and voted for Governments. White upper middle class figli di putane. Plain and simple the western paradigm of fake democrazia and fake economy is dying the plutocratic and oligarchical class are just creating storms and fires just do deviate from good old fashion bread and butter issues.

Conclusion:

The pax-americana Democrats(RATS) know full well that Bernie will not lead the party Gabbard will not lead the party so here is there strategy and good old Chuckie Schuemer the anglo-zionist par excellance laid it out in 2015. They are hoping that old fashion conservative Republicans that are disgusted with the Orange one will vote for them and further reduce the number of voters. Just think of this. In this day and age with the largest wealth gap exceeding the Gilded age which individual would take a day off to line up to vote on a bitter grey November day. So these remarkable establishment shills in their great wisdom are running as Eisenhower Republican and hoping to steal votes from the Republicans and not win any votes from the new ever growing lower so called middle class.

POST SCRIPTUM: The irony and the complete paradox more war will give us peace and the rich getting richer will give us the sheeple wealth. Black is white and grey does not exist and left vs right. What a sad state of affairs.

Docius in fundem: The sad reality in our dying western paradigm of pax-americana is never in the history of the modern and post modern era we have more people graduating from tertiary education but we have created the most ignorant and pliant class of individuals ever.

Jon
She came, we saw, she lied.
Hugh O'Neill
Russian asset and Putin puppet, Jesus of Nazareth reportedly said: "Blessed are the Peace Makers". As we know, Trump receives maximum MSM contempt for anything approaching diplomacy and peace, and highest MSM approval when advocating war and destruction. Likewise, when a Presidential candidate dare breathe the word "Peace" then she is either ignored, ridiculed or accused of treachery – and that greatest of all crimes, being pro-Russian (ergo anti-American). It is timely perhaps to re-read President Kennedy's (largely unreported) Commencement Address to American University, 10th June 1963:

" What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time".

"I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn."

Lest we forget: Lee Harvey Oswald was sheep-dipped as a Russian-loving commie precisely so as to blame Russia for killing that commie/socialist/pacifist/drug-addled/free-lovin' Jack Kennedy. Somehow, their script didn't really make any sense. Script-writer Allen Dulles had written a turkey, but the show must go on, and on .

Igor
It won't be allowed. The People have no say in the matter. Politics is pure spectacle, to distract and entertain the masses, and to make them think that they have a voice. All 45 US Presidents have been interrelated through 200+ super wealth elite intertwined families. If Tulsi Gabbard is not related, then she is not getting into the White House. If she is related, she will get in and do nothing different from what the previous actors have always done.

#Resist45 and Trump, Mr. #45, work for the same people. Keeping the nation dazed and confused, since January 2017. Congress does nothing useful, by design, concentrating on impeachment. The Media has plenty of Trump social media coverage to prevent ever having space to report on actual events (as if they would).

Chinese Asset?
Please don't make the Republicans look better than they are. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Ms. Hua Chunying said at a press briefing that

Pence's speech made Thursday revealed his "sheer arrogance and hypocrisy, and was packed with political prejudice and lies"

So refreshing to hear it from a high level official! Ms Hua also accused Pence of using China as a prop to distract from the United States' failings. Now we know, the 'Russian asset' accusation is used to distract from the continuous and never-ending murderous operation of the US regime.

Seamus Padraig

Since Tulsi is a Major in the US Army Reserves and holds the highest security clearance available, the term 'asset,' which is associated with being an agent of a foreign power, carries a level of national security significance.

Alt-journalist Caity Johnstone has recently remarked upon how the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have started to give the word 'asset' their own little proprietary meaning:

"Russian 'assets' are not formal relationships in the USIC [US Intelligence Community] sense of the word," CNN analyst and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa explained via Twitter. "If you are parroting Russian talking points and furthering their interests, you're a source who is too dumb to know you're being played to ask for money."

"It's important to point out here that a Russian 'asset' is not the same thing as a Russian 'agent'," tweeted virulent establishment narrative manager Caroline Orr. "An asset can be witting or unwitting; it's any person or org who can be used to advance Russia's interests. It's pretty clear that Tulsi satisfies that criteria."

"One doesn't have to be on the Kremlin's payroll to be a Russian asset. One doesn't even have to know they are a Russian asset to be a Russian asset. Have you not heard the term 'useful idiot' before?" tweeted writer Kara Calavera.

At this rate, pretty soon, we'll all have to check with RT first before we open our mouths in public, just to make sure we're not accidentally agreeing with the Russians!

The Dems have always been more pro-war than they have been given credit for with WWI, WWII, the Korean War and Vietnam all initiated and/or expanded under Democrat Presidents.

Ha, ha! That takes me back–all the way to 1976, to be exact–to when Bob Dole (then a candidate for Vice-President) described all the wars of the 20th century as " Democrat wars ".

Igor
"CNN analyst and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa explained via Twitter. "

Says the CNN paid asset.

Hugh O'Neill
Thanks once again to Renee for championing Tulsi. Yesterday my local paper here in NZ (The Otago Daily Times) in its "This Day in History" column, briefly referred to JFK and the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I wrote to the editor my appreciation:

"Although I am old enough to remember both the 1960 election and the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I was blissfully unaware of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 (when I was almost 7 years old). My thanks to the ODT for marking this date which is the day in History when the world stepped back from the abyss of nuclear war and ended all life on Earth. Sadly, too many today live in blissful ignorance of the most dangerous moment in the History of Mankind.

As the old saying goes, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Next time around, there may no longer be the politicians with the courage and intelligence of Kennedy and Khrushchev: both men had to out-manoeuvre their own military hawks, and each man knew the personal risks he faced in doing so. Khrushchev was replaced within a year and died in ignominy.

JFK's lived another year before his own untimely end. Though we may lament the execution of John F. Kennedy, he had not lived and died in vain, because we are still here despite the military. I cannot recommend highly enough two books: firstly, Bobby Kennedy's "13 Days> A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis" and James Doulglass "JFK & The Unspeakable. Why he died & Why it Matters".

Tulsi has been the only candidate in a very long time to speak the unspeakable truth. Do not condemn her for whatever flaws some commenters below perceive. No-one is absolutely perfect in every way – not even Mary Poppins. But Tulsi is a breath of fresh air and has immense courage, eloquence, passion, integrity and charisma to bring out the best in people. The real enemy is within – in every sense.

Gwyn
I'm sure this link will be of interest to you, Hugh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral)
Hugh O'Neill
Thanks, Gwyn. I knew this story already but it is worth rereading. The fact that some dimwitted USN ship started dropping depth charges without top authority shows that JFKs grip on his own military was tenuous. He had recently read Barbara Tuchman's "The guns of August" which showed how stupid acts by subordinates could have massive consequences. Once again, this demonstrates the treachery of the military. Recently, some British General stated publicly that if Corbyn were elected, there would be a coup. The military mind cannot cope with the concept of Democracy.
Harry Law
The US needs an enemy to justify its massive defence bill and 800 bases worldwide. Who better to shill for the US than that fool Jens Stoltenberg [Sec General NATO] "NATO General Secretary Says $100 Billion in Additional Alliance Spending Not Enough for Defence". The US spent $649 billion in 2018, other members of NATO spent an additional $314 billion, whereas Russia who do not want to be an enemy spent just $61.4 billion". https://sputniknews.com/military/201910251077152221-nato-general-secretary-says-100-billion-in-additional-alliance-spending-not-enough-for-defence/

Stoltenberg would happily stop all social services in order to buy more missiles and gain a few brownie points from Trump. Stoltenberg along with the US Neocons are are sick SOB's.

Antonym
Trump doesn't want US taxpayers to fund US mil in Europe, not unreasonable. Both Trump and Jabbard are opponents of the CIA – Wall street complex. Nationalists vs Globalists, but some people still believe the former are more dangerous than the latter.

Amazon, Google or Apple have more power than North Korea, Iran or Xyz. China cannot be the CIA-Wall street bogey now as they make too much profit of it: Russia is much smaller fish margin wise (the Clinton's only managed a few dozen million$) so that makes the perfect fake enemy. On top Russia actually competes with oil and gas, which China can't.

Wilmers31
Someone with more knowledge to the timeline needs to correlate the punishments for Russia (sanctions) to the oil price. I think they started sanctions when Russian oil and gas deliveries were getting cheaper but US needed 75$+ for the frackers. It was just eliminating a competitor, especially after they could not purchase the monopoly on Russian gas and oil through the monopoly company Yukos.
Gary Weglarz
This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and this seems like a good post to share it on.

Watching trolls emerge to discredit and attack the lone U.S. candidate who publicly and vocally opposes America's regime change wars and even dares tell the American people that "we are supporting the terrorists – not fighting them" – is bad enough in MSM, but a sad and interesting comment on how completely engaged the State has become with attempting to "control" and "shape" discourse on progressive sites such as this.

My favorite of course is when one State troll debates another State troll in completely "fake" discourse, attempting to amplify their troll message. The other technique that is endlessly amusing is when a single troll posts something a well informed person with progressive values can quite agree with one day, followed the next by complete gibberish posing as "sophistication," followed the next day by talking points right out of the CIA & Pentagon, and then follows all that up with posting something sensible again. Just a bit "crazy-making" no?

It pays to remember ("The 4 D's: Deny / Disrupt / Degrade / Deceive") that come right out of the trolling manual. It should be a red-flag if these descriptors characterize someone's posts.

The saying that if it ("looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, well, it just might be a duck") – is one that is worth applying to our comment's sections discourse. Because if it "posts like a troll"- in the end it doesn't really matter if it "is" a troll (something we will never know), or is simply an uniformed but opinionated idiot – as that person is "doing the work of" the State sponsored trolls in either case.

I find it is always worth periodically reviewing what we know about these operations (thank you Edward Snowden) – as it helps us to better understand and prepares us to better deal with the State sponsored troll operations we now see routinely in all of our truly progressive comments sections on alternative media sites. What we now deal with here at OffG and elsewhere are daily routine attempts to take over, shape and control otherwise rational informed sincere discussion by readers. Sadly this is how some people make their living – existing in a continual state of existential "bad faith."

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

BigB
Gary:

Anyone who stands for a perception managed 'business as usual' candidacy is authentic: anyone who tries to expose the vicious hypocrisy is an 'asset' or a 'troll'? Welcome to the postmodern anti-debate.

I'm trying to think of where I have come across a more cynical attempt to distort the truth and apologetically cover ethnic cleansing and cultural anti-Muslim genocide? And I cannot think of a better example. Anyone who attempts to expose Gabbard for her cultural links to actual Hindutva supremacism and real live fascism must be a paid state troll? What can I say: I am a peace troll exposing the Politics of Lies you appear to support. Tulsi Gabbard is a traitor to humanity.

What I laid out below is not trolling: it exposes just how much you have to invert the true values of liberation and freedom to get a 'peace candidate' from a Zionist fascist supporter. In brief synopsis: Modi tore up the Indian constitution; flooded Jammu and Kashmir with troops; invoked the 'Riot Act' to eject all journalists and TV crews; in order that his ethnic cleansing of the valley goes unseen. This is a crime against humanity: which also carries no small risk of nuclear war. Making this apparent is trolling?

In the perversion of the narrative script you propose: this is called "vocally opposing America's regime change wars". How; by apologising for not being able to attend the 'Howdy, Modi' because she was pre-commited to be lying somewhere else?

In contrast: Arundhati Roy stands accused as a traitor and having her rights and citizenship stripped for bringing attention to Modi's war crimes. What does Gabbard do? Pass the caviar and offer more lucrative trade deals for Modi's murderers? That is the difference between a real world candidate and a fake. Will Gabbard call out Modi; el-Sisi; Netanyahu or Adelson for that matter?

You know the scene that Milosevic likes to post: of Netanyahu being feted by Congress – which looks exactly like the Nuremberg Rallies Gabbard was there to listen to the ally and friend of the United States – that is the only democracy in the Middle East – denounce Iran. Afterward, she went on Fox News and glibly agreed Greta Van Susteren that the deal was akin to the infamous Munich Pact. Blithely nodding her head before engaging in some fantasy talking points about North Korean nukes hitting Hawaii: and the three month acquisition of the Iranian bomb which comes straight off of one of Nuttyyahoo's empty CD-roms. So can we drop the pretense please?

https://video.foxnews.com/v/4091784052001/#sp=show-clips

Adelson's 'Champion of Freedom' nails her real colours to the mast?

Then you invoke Sartre: did you know he was a communist? Who staid loyal to Stalin's Soviet Union for much longer than he really should have? What do you think he would have made of a candidate who dines with Hindutva fascist racist supremacists and offers them more trade on a pro rata basis of carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity? Bad faith and authenticity: where do yo think they lie? Gabbard is an authentic candidate only in such a highly perception managed world as we have. Which is why we have such a highly perception managed world – because we highly perception manage it ourselves. No paid state trolls required: except in the imagination perhaps? Perhaps only those not suffering the illusion can see who she really is?

The only way to make this real is by censoring the right to criticism the illegitimate candidacy of those who are silent on Modi's open fascism and very probable silent, unseen ethnic cleansing. If it is silent and unseen then it is not happening. Then we have our perfect 'peace candidate'. Do you see how it works?

Let us shut down any chance of any open debate on that. Well done Gary. You and all the fawning sycophants on this page have the perfect peace candidate you deserve. By ignoring valid and authentic critical consciousness and suppressing the voice of freedom.

Gabbard needs to be exposed as a modified war candidate: and friend of the Gods of Money and their pet dictators. It is a cynical ploy to try and close down such real world exposure as 'trolling'. Trolling for peace maybe? Peace we may never now know.

Gary Weglarz
My comments were not intended to be a defense of Gabbard. Though she is the only candidate I can remember in many years that is speaking some truth, any truth, about the amoral U.S. war machine, she of course has no chance whatsoever of winning and no one in their right mind would suggest otherwise. Yet I and others who are quite aware of this obvious reality find the undeniable fact she is "publicly speaking some truth" about that war machine a rather important addition to the theatre of the absurd political debate here in the U.S. So strange that support and recognition of this simple fact is so controversial to some.

No, my comments were not some defense of Gabbard as an impure savior, but rather about the trolls and those who perhaps in their boundless narcissism simply do the work of the government trolls because they routinely "post like trolls." You know, ("The 4 D's: Deny / Disrupt / Degrade / Deceive"). Perhaps you missed that somehow?

I tire of so much smug narcissistic idiocy, and predictable attacks on any who might disagree, posing as – "commentary" or "discourse." Of course neither you nor Big B have commented a word on that topic- the actual topic of my post. Instead simply strawman attacks related to Tulsi. How strange. But then again: "You've obviously got it all sewn up :(" – eh Frank?

RobG
I really don't give a shit about what the totally corrupt US political system is doing.

They are all scum and vermin, who, in a sane world, would all be swept down the gutter.

In the Middle East we are on the verge of WW3. The Russians and the Chinese are not going to put up with the American Frankenstein any more. Do Americans realise what this will mean?

I doubt it, because many Americans don't have a brain cell between them (Clue: America will be totally destroyed in a WW3).

nonameforsure
8 elements appeared on a website recently which the author suggested could be used to identify fake, false, or self agenda propaganda.. learn them.. apply them.
Develop an international way to report in some standard way on the elements that appear in articles. Maybe date, time, place presented, element identified, together with a comment that fits each expression. In my opinion it is important to build the case that the same false narrative appears in your favorite fake media as well as everyone else's favorite fake media.

You will be able to detect how these 8 elements develop fact that identify processes and activities of those in charge and how these elements will allow those seeking the truth to build a collaborative means to debunk fake. Example refer to paragraph 7 in a subject article by indicating "place" on "date" @ "time" "time" "title" and element number and then make a comment to explain why you marked the expression with a element number.

This kind of reference system allows to detect and compare both intra article fake news with inter publication fake news.. so maybe it will be discovered the news outlets and publishers and authors that hawk the same false or misleading propaganda in time to inform the public, moreover, if you can get the public to understand and to apply the element method of debunking propaganda; article by article, paragraph by paragraph, just the act of doing it, might wake them up.

1) EN establish the narrative :fake always try to establish the tuth
2) WR They wrong, we right : inconvenient facts are transformed to support the narrative
3) PF Cherry Pick the Facts : only report the facts that support the narrative
4) IS Ignore stuff : never include something that is contrary to the narrative
5) VB Blame the Victim : keep the victim on the defensive
6) MU Make up Stuff: false or non fact claims can be made up to fit the narrative
7) AC Attack and deny any form to all challengers: Persons who ask ?s are conspiracy terrorist.
8) RL Repeat the lies, repeat the lies, repeat the lies. People need help to remember the lie

Capricornia Man
Your eight methods for creating fake news aptly describe the way the 'systemic anti-Semitism in the UK Labour Party' myth was promoted. Particularly methods 3,4 and 8.

When I complained to a broadcaster about its incompetent and biased 'coverage' of this non-issue, one of its chief defences was: 'that's what all the other news outlets are saying'.

The MSM wonder why they are regarded as mendacious and contemptible by thinking people who take the trouble to separate the facts from the spin.

mark
A Brief Summary Of The War In Syria.

2011. The Neocons activate a long standing plan that has been around for 20 years to destroy Syria. Syria is to be destroyed, like Iraq and Libya before it. Assad will be toppled within a few months and Syria smashed into a thousand pieces.

The Axis of Evil, the US and its NATO satraps, Shady Wahabia, Kosherstan and Sultan Erdogan, flood Syria with the necessary cannon fodder, hundreds of thousands of head choppers and throat slitters from a hundred countries, with a licence to murder, burn, rape, loot, steal and enslave to their hearts content. An alphabet soup of takfiri groups is created out of thin air, armed, trained, paid, transported and orchestrated with tens of billions of western taxpayers money. ISIS is just one of many.

The Syrian state, armed forces and people resist with unexpected courage and determination, and fight the proxy head choppers to a standstill. But they are under extreme pressure and have to concentrate their forces in the main battles in the west of the country. This leaves a vacuum that is filled by the phantom ISIS caliphate. This suits the Axis of Evil just fine. There is no problem with ISIS black flags flying over Damascus provided Syria is destroyed.

By 2015, the outcome is in the balance. Clinton and Sultan Erdogan have agreed to impose a no fly zone to turn the tide in favor of the head choppers. A series of Gas Attack Hoaxes and false flag atrocity claims are staged over a protracted period of time to justify Libya style intervention.

All bets are off as Putin overrides his advisors and dispatches Russian forces to intervene and prevent the destruction of the Syrian state. With the support of Iran and Hezbollah, the situation is transformed. Though the worst of the fighting is yet to come, the Neocon plot to destroy Syria is a busted flush. Syria is steadily liberated from terrorist occupation.

The main terrorist sponsors try to salvage something from this failure. Sultan Erdogan switches sides and takes the opportunity to attack the Kurds. Trump seizes the opportunity to scale back US involvement, generating much hysteria from all the Zionist shills in Washington. The Kurds seek some kind of accommodation with Damascus.

The war is now winding down. It will take some time before all the terrorist areas are liberated and occupying US and Turkish forces have to withdraw. But the outcome is now inevitable.

Chalk up another failure for the Neocons.

Gezzah Potts
Funny you mentioned Arundhati Roy as I almost bought her book today: Capitalism A Ghost Story, in a Left bookshop here, however ended up getting Culture & Imperialism by Edward Said and a second hand copy of Pedadogy Of The Oppressed which I've, um, never read. Time to broaden the mind, as have hardly read any books for years except articles on the Internet. Will pick up Arundhati's book next time. Have a good day
eddie
The Dems morphed into neocons when her willy-waving husband sold out and destroyed the Democratic Party of LBJ's Great Society.

Tulsi being a member of the establishment which she lambasts is quite a paradox, but can be seen from one's own moral perspective. During the VietNam war era, '63-75, many who opposed the fiasco took a stronger stance: prison as a conscientious objector, moving to Canada, undesirable discharges, very vocal public protests & arrests. Many lives and futures ruined, my own included, to actively stop the illegal & profit driven Invasion ..

Tulsi has shown a lot of class, truth to the darkest Power, and long may she have this platform..

Rhys Jaggar
Next they will try saying that because she is not a mother she has no place being President. If I had a vote in the US, I would vote for any man, woman, black/white/Hisoanic/Asian/any other ethnicity, straight/gay/indeterminate who:

1. Pledged to cut the US military budget in half, sign up to existing OPCW conventions on chemical+biological weapons and demanded that Israel did likewise.
2. Removed the right for dual citizen US-Israeli zionists to hold public US office (tell em to decide whether they are primarily aligned to Israel or not) and neutered the election-rigging AIPAC monstrosity at source.
3. Called out the global warming hoax as the biggest scam of the 21st century.
4. Enforced the concept that polluters pay to clean up their polluting, particularly in extractive industries, agriculture, mining and packaging.
5. Promoted the restoration of mutually owned local finance, particularly in providing mortgages.
6. Confronted the self-serving victim gravy train, in particular making the terms 'man' and 'woman' beyond the rights of anyone to take legal action.
7. vowed to shut down 25% of US overseas military bases in a first term and a further tranche in a second term.

Just for starters.

[Nov 02, 2019] Time to Extricate From Ukraine by Doug Bandow

Notable quotes:
"... In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged Russia's weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted. ..."
"... Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad to escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor. ..."
"... I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil - they didn't. ..."
"... I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique. ..."
"... And as is the case in developing countries, what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot. ..."
"... How the civil unrest spun out of control the second time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement. ..."
Oct 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Capt. Matthew McCoy, commander of Company A, 1st Battalion, 179th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team during international weapons training near Yavoriv, Ukraine, in 2017. (Photo by Sgt. Anthony Jones, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team)/U.S. Army

Recently Ukraine has been thrown into the spotlight as Democrats gear up to impeach President Donald Trump. More important, though, is its role in damaging America's relations with Russia, which has resulted in a mini-Cold War that the U.S. needs to end.

Ukraine is in a bad neighborhood. During the 17th century, the country was divided between Poland and Russia, and eventually ended up as part of the Russian Empire. Kiev then enjoyed only the briefest of liberations after the 1917 Russian Revolution, before being reabsorbed by the Soviet Union. It later suffered from a devastating famine as Moscow confiscated food and collectivized agriculture. Ukraine was ravaged during Germany's World War II invasion, and guerrilla resistance to renewed Soviet control continued for years afterwards.

In 1991, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. gave Ukraine another, more enduring chance for independence. However, the new nation's development was fraught: GDP dropped by 60 percent and corruption burgeoned. Ukraine suffered under a succession of corrupt, self-serving, and ineffective leaders, as the U.S., Europe, and Russia battled for influence.

In 2014, Washington and European governments backed a street putsch against the elected, though highly corrupt, pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. The Putin government responded by annexing Crimea and backing separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine's Donbass region. Washington and Brussels imposed economic sanctions on Russia and provided military aid to Kiev.

The West versus Russia quickly became a "frozen" conflict. Moscow reincorporated Crimea into Russia, from which it had been detached in 1954 as part of internal Soviet politics. In the Donbass, more than a score of ceasefires came and went. Both Ukraine and Russia failed to fulfill the 2016 Minsk agreements, which sought to end the conflict.

In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged Russia's weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted.

The most important geopolitical impact has been to poison Russia's relations with the West. Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine cannot be justified, but the U.S. and Europe did much to create the underlying suspicion and hostility. Recently declassified documents reveal the degree to which Western officials misled Moscow about their intention to expand NATO. Allied support for adding Georgia and Ukraine, which would have greatly expanded Russian vulnerability, generated a particularly strong reaction in Moscow. The dismemberment of Serbia with no consideration of Russia's interests was another irritant, along with Western support for "color revolutions" elsewhere, including in Tbilisi. The ouster of Yanukovych finally triggered Putin's brutal response.

Washington and Brussels apparently did not view their policies as threatening to Russia. However, had Moscow ousted an elected Mexican president friendly to America, while inviting the new government to join the Warsaw Pact, and worked with a coalition of Central American states to divert Mexican trade from the U.S., officials in Washington would not have been pleased. They certainly wouldn't have been overly concerned about juridical niceties in responding.

This explains (though does not justify) Russia's hostile response. Subsequent allied policies then turned the breach in relations into a gulf. The U.S. and European Union imposed a series of economic sanctions. Moreover, Washington edged closer to military confrontation with its provision of security assistance to Kiev. Moscow responded by challenging America from Syria to Venezuela.

It also began moving towards China. The two nations' differences are many and their relationship is unstable. However, as long as their antagonism towards Washington exceeds their discomfort with each other, they will cooperate to block what they see as America's pursuit of global hegemony.

Why is the U.S. entangled in the Ukrainian imbroglio? During the Cold War, Ukraine was one of the fabled "captive nations," backed by vigorous advocacy from Ukrainian Americans. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they joined other groups lobbying on behalf of ethnic brethren to speed NATO's expansion eastward. Security policy turned into a matter of ethnic solidarity, to be pursued irrespective of cost and risk.

To more traditional hawks who are always seeking an enemy, the issue is less pro-Ukraine than anti-Russia. Mitt Romney, the Republican Party's 2012 presidential nominee, improbably attacked Russia as America's most dangerous adversary. Hence the GOP's counterproductive determination to bring Kiev into NATO. Originally Washington saw the transatlantic alliance as a means to confront the Soviet menace; now it views the pact as a form of charity.

After the Soviet collapse, the U.S. pushed NATO eastward into nations that neither mattered strategically nor could be easily protected, most notably in the Balkans and Baltics. Even worse were Georgia and Ukraine, security black holes that would bring with them ongoing conflicts with Russia, possibly triggering a larger war between NATO and Moscow.

Ukraine never had been a matter of U.S. security. For most of America's history, the territory was controlled by either the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Washington's Cold War sympathies represented fraternal concerns, not security essentials. Today, without Kiev's aid, the U.S. and Europe would still have overwhelming conventional forces to be brought into any conflict with Moscow. However, adding Ukraine to NATO would increase the risk of a confrontation with a nuclear armed power. Russia's limitations when it comes to its conventional military would make a resort to nuclear weapons more likely in any conflict.

Nevertheless, George W. Bush's aggressively neoconservative administration won backing for Georgian and Ukrainian membership in NATO and considered intervening militarily in the Russo-Georgian war. However, European nations that feared conflict with Moscow blocked plans for NATO expansion, which went into cold storage. Although alliance officials still officially backed membership for Ukraine, it remains unattainable so long as conflict burns hot with Russia.

In the meantime, Washington has treated Ukraine as a de facto military ally, offering economic and security assistance. The U.S. has provided $1.5 billion for Ukrainian training and weapons, including anti-tank Javelin missiles. Explained Obama administration defense secretary Ashton Carter: "Ukraine would never be where it is without that support from the United States."

Equally important, the perception of U.S. backing made the Kiev government, headed by President Petro Poroshenko, less willing to pursue a diplomatic settlement with Russia. Thus did Ukraine, no less than Russia, almost immediately violate the internationally backed Minsk accord.

Kiev's role as a political football highlights the need for Washington to pursue an enduring political settlement with Russia. European governments are growing restless; France has taken the lead in seeking better relations with Moscow. Germany is unhappy with U.S. attempts to block the planned Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has campaigned to end the conflict.

Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recently met in Minsk to revive the agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage of Ukrainian legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong opposition from nationalists, passage is likely since Zelensky's party holds a solid legislative majority.

Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security concerns. The U.S. and its allies should formally foreclose Ukraine's membership in the transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances, Moscow would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine protects local autonomy while Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted. Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation, since the country would likely be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia's control of Crimea while refusing to formally recognize the conquest -- absent a genuinely independent referendum with independent monitors.

Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington's permanent war lobby would object. Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would certainly be better than endless conflict.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.

cka2nd • 12 hours ago

I credit Mr. Bandow for his largely fair and accurate description of the events in Ukraine of five years ago, and for his ultimate policy proposal for the US to extricate itself from its close involvement in the area. However, I'm a little confused by what exactly the author means by "Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine" and "Putin's brutal response" (aside from the treatment of dissidents and journalists as he specifically mentioned) to the Maidan Revolution.

Was it aggressive and brutal for Russia to support separatists in the Donbass who were facing the prospect of legal discrimination and violence by a criminal, neo-fascist government in Kiev, not to mention de-industrialization, the gutting of the agriculture sector and the forced economic migration of an enormous number of its young workers (assuming that Ukraine's economic deal with the EU followed the script of every other Easter European's country's deal with the EU)? If Yanukovych had fled to the Donbass and proclaimed himself still the freely elected (though certainly corrupt) President of the nation, Russia's support for the region would have even had a shiny brass legal fig leaf, wouldn't it?

As for the supposed "conquest" of Crimea, that's a rather strong word to use considering that all of two members of the Ukrainian military were killed, and 60-80 of them detained, while 15,000 defected to Russia. Compared to the violence in Kiev and Odessa, what happened in Crimea almost qualifies as a bloodless coup. But then Mr. Bandow shies away from using the word "hegemony" to describe the foreign policy of the United States, figuratively putting the word in the mouths of those bad men (which they are) in Moscow and Beijing. It's a pity that Mr. Bandow felt the need to make linguistic concessions to the foreign policy establishment in what was otherwise a useful and balanced piece.

minsredmash • 9 hours ago
Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad to escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor.
EliteCommInc. • 8 hours ago
I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil - they didn't.

I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique.

And as is the case in developing countries, what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot.

How the civil unrest spun out of control the second time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement.

https://washingtonsblog.com...

https://thewashingtonstanda...

It is a deeply held belief that democracy is a system that by definition a generally acceptable path forward. That belief is false as democracy is still comprised of human beings. And democracy in their hands is no "cure all". It can be a turbulent and jerky bureaucratic maze process that pleases no one and works over time.

The US didn't accomplish it without violence until after more than 130 years, when the native populations were finally subdued. And as for a system that embodied equal treatment to similar circumstance -- we are still at it. But a violent revolution every ten years certainly isn't the most effective road to take.
-----------------

Why we insistent on restarting the cold war is unclear to me save that it served to create a kind of strategic global clarity Though what that means would troublesome because Russia's ole would now be as a developing democratic state as opposed to a communist monolith. And that means unfettered from her satellites and empowered by more capital markets her role as adversary would be more adroit. As time after time, Ores Putin has appeared the premier diplomat for peace and stability in situations in which the US was engaged or encouraging violence.(the Ukraine). I certainly don't think that our relations with Russia or China are a to be kumbaya love fests, there is still global competition and there's no reason to pretend it would be without tensions. But seriously, as a democratic/capital market player -- there really was no way to contain Russia.
----------------------

Given what we experienced during 2007 --- corruption comes in a mryiad of guises.

timoth3y • 7 hours ago • edited
The Ukraine situation is complex to be certain, but ending military aid and letting Russia clean up seems like a bad idea.

This week we saw Russian forces occupy US bases abandoned when Trump ordered our troops to withdraw from the Turkish border. And now the author is arguing we should do something similar in the Ukraine.

When did Russian appeasement become so important to conservative foreign policy?

kouroi timoth3y • 3 hours ago
Mate, Russians were in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government. US troops are there illegally (no Congress mandate, no international mandate, no invitation). US is an occupying, destabilizing, terrorist protecting force in Syria and Americans should look beyond their self esteem before commenting on this "shameful" retreat. US does not have the right to put its troops wherever it fancies.

This win or loose mentality will be the death of you. Who do you think is threatening the US, when it has the biggest moats protecting its shores? The only thing that is happening is that the hegemonic role, that of controlling everyone's economy for its own elites benefit is being denied.

This is what you are complaining mate, the the rich Americans cannot get richer? Do you think they will share with you, or that, like the good English boys of the past, you will not be able to land a job with East India Co. and despoil the natives for a while?

Doug Wallis • 6 hours ago
If the US were smart then they would lead some sort of negotiation where eastern Europe and Ukraine and Russia were allowed only mutually agreed defensive weapons systems. A demilitarization of say 200 miles on each side of the Russia border. The strategy should be to encourage trade between Eastern Europe and Russia where Russia has influence but is not threatening. It may be slow to build that trust but the real question is whether the US and Europe and NATO want peace with Russia or whether they are using fear of Russia to keep eastern Europe united with the US and Europe. This may be the case but the future will have China as a greater threat than Russia (China will even be a threat to Russia). Any shift in Russian relations will take decades of building trust on both sides.
tweets21 • 6 hours ago
Good article and excellent history of facts. If I recall during the last Bush administration W hosted a Putin and his then spouse, at a visit at his ranch. Putin informed W," the Ukraine belongs to Russia. end of sentence.
Disqus10021 • 5 hours ago
The author forgot the critical role of Sevastopol in the Crimea. It is Russia's only warm water port and there was no way that it was going to allow this area to become a NATO naval base. Secretary of State Clinton and her sidekick for Ukraine, Victoria Nuland should have known this before they started supporting the overthrow of the pro-Russia government in Kiev.

If you look at a historical atlas, you won't find an independent country called Ukraine before 1991. When my parents were born, near what is now called Lviv, the area was called Galicia and Lemberg was its provincial capital. A gold medal issued in 1916 in honor of Franz Josef's 85th birthday noted that he was the Kaiser of Austria, Hungary, Galicia and Lodomeria.

When the old Soviet Union agreed to allow East and West Germany to reunify, it was with the understanding that NATO would not extend membership to former Soviet block countries and that there would be no NATO bases in these areas either. NATO and the US broke their oral commitment to Russia a few years later.

The US should get out of the business of trying to spread democracy in third world countries and interfering in the affairs of foreign governments. We can't afford to be the policeman of the world. We don't even have the ability to make many of our own central cities safe for Americans. Think Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans and Detroit, all four of which appear on Wikipedia's list of the 50 murder capitals of the world (per thousand population).

kouroi Disqus10021 • 3 hours ago
It is not for the sake of spreading democracy mate, but to control those economies for the benefit of US economic elite.
Sid Finster • 4 hours ago
"This explains (though does not justify) Russia's hostile response."

For the love of Pete, will TAC quit with offering limited concessions to the neocon position in an attempt to appear "serious" and "reasonable".

The United States formented an armed coup in Ukraine spearheaded by Nazis.

[Nov 02, 2019] The Sudden Martyrdom of the Government Whistleblower by Maj. Danny Sjursen

While true whistleblowers pay the heavy price for their courage, neoliberal Democrats and corrupt to the core neoliberal MSM lionize a CIA leaker because he justifies their impeachment crusade.
Why couldn't this CIA asset not simply report through regular channels? He wasn't blowing whistle on the CIA itself so no risk there.
Notable quotes:
"... The whole impeachment charade, and that's what it is, rests on the paradoxical and ahistorical assertions that 1) the president's phone call with Ukraine's leader is Trump's worst crime, and 2) the "liberal" press has always supported government whistleblowers. Both are absurd claims, though fitting for this partisan political moment. ..."
"... The inconvenient reality is that Trump and both his predecessors have committed far worse crimes against the Constitution by engaging in illegal wars. ..."
"... The only reason the Left -- which historically has distrusted U.S. intelligence activities -- has canonized this anonymous CIA whistleblower is that he or she, and the entire clandestine apparatus, has implicated Trump, the reflexive archenemy of the liberal elite. Trump's actual crime, contrary to the prevailing yarn, was not his overriding of Congress on war policies (which he largely copied from Obama and Bush II), but that he dared to attack a longtime Democratic insider: Joe Biden. ..."
"... Notice that the Democratic leadership in Congress has declined to investigate the fact that this president, and others before him, overrode congressional authority to wage all sorts of military operations outside the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed after 9/11, including the current assistance we are giving Saudi Arabia in its attacks on Yemen. ..."
"... President Obama, for example, dropped 26,171 bombs on at least seven countries using an AUMF that has been extended well beyond those who attacked America on 9/11. He even executed American citizens overseas without due process . ..."
"... Meanwhile, Trump abets legitimate war crimes in Yemen to the tune of 100,000-plus dead -- without evident remorse. But Obama started that war , providing U.S. aerial refueling, targeting support, and deadly munitions to the Saudis back in 2015. So the Democratic leadership stands down on the issue of Yemen, not wanting to implicate their hero in the process of impeaching The Donald. ..."
"... Mainstream liberal hypocrisy runs even deeper, unfortunately. I'm just old enough to remember when the Left railed against the CIA, NSA, and spooks in general. ..."
"... Suddenly every Obama- and Bush-era national security staffer and intelligence super-sleuth -- John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, etc. -- was regularly appearing on CNN and MSNBC to attack Trump and pine for the status quo of U.S. military hyper-interventionism. ..."
"... Even the language is instructive. They aren't "leakers," "traitors," or "criminals," but whistleblowers , surging with moral courage and exposing ostensibly unthinkable presidential wrongdoing. That's funny: where were these folks when other, far more profound whistleblowers uncovered criminality during the Bush and Obama years? Either crickets or pejorative attacks were all they proffered back then. ..."
"... Meanwhile, Obama utilized the archaic 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. The liberal press and most Democratic legislators barely made a peep. Barack was their guy , one of their own -- the "leakers" must have been in the wrong, enemies, so to speak, of the people. ..."
"... So while Trump is by no means without serious flaws, the Beltway elites and media personalities stuffing impeachment down our throats are hypocritical and dishonest enough to make one believe in a "deep state." ..."
"... Trump's crime is he's an outsider and the CIA did not expect him to win. His very existence is a threat to them. ..."
"... Can he clean up the mess? I doubt it. Imagine what would happen, the screams and agony, were he to eliminate all government secrecy. Imagine what the CIA would claim if the Black Budget became transparent. If Trump tried to eliminate the CIA it would simply reconstitute and shape-shift within other agencies or outside government. ..."
Oct 24, 2019 | www.truthdig.com

This piece originally appeared on The American Conservative

Few see the irony in the corporate mainstream media's love affair with the anonymous whistleblower in President Trump's alleged Ukraine-gate affair. Yet everyone should. Few see the irony in the corporate mainstream media's love affair with the anonymous whistleblower in President Trump's alleged Ukraine-gate affair. Yet everyone should.

The whole impeachment charade, and that's what it is, rests on the paradoxical and ahistorical assertions that 1) the president's phone call with Ukraine's leader is Trump's worst crime, and 2) the "liberal" press has always supported government whistleblowers. Both are absurd claims, though fitting for this partisan political moment.

The inconvenient reality is that Trump and both his predecessors have committed far worse crimes against the Constitution by engaging in illegal wars. Certainly this is more serious than the shady Ukraine/Biden incident. And the mainstream media has a rather poor track record when it comes to whistleblowers, often demonizing leakers who expose nefarious government actions. The only reason the Left -- which historically has distrusted U.S. intelligence activities -- has canonized this anonymous CIA whistleblower is that he or she, and the entire clandestine apparatus, has implicated Trump, the reflexive archenemy of the liberal elite. Trump's actual crime, contrary to the prevailing yarn, was not his overriding of Congress on war policies (which he largely copied from Obama and Bush II), but that he dared to attack a longtime Democratic insider: Joe Biden.

Sure, Trump's apparent threat to use aid as a cudgel to pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden, and his son Hunter, is a serious matter. Far be it for me, or anyone else, to dispute that. Whether that meets the threshold for impeachment is debatable -- and by the way, Hunter Biden's $50,000 a month, unqualified position on a foreign corporate gas company's board while his father was vice president doesn't exactly pass the smell test either. But I'll table that for now.

Notice that the Democratic leadership in Congress has declined to investigate the fact that this president, and others before him, overrode congressional authority to wage all sorts of military operations outside the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed after 9/11, including the current assistance we are giving Saudi Arabia in its attacks on Yemen.

President Obama, for example, dropped 26,171 bombs on at least seven countries using an AUMF that has been extended well beyond those who attacked America on 9/11. He even executed American citizens overseas without due process .

Meanwhile, Trump abets legitimate war crimes in Yemen to the tune of 100,000-plus dead -- without evident remorse. But Obama started that war , providing U.S. aerial refueling, targeting support, and deadly munitions to the Saudis back in 2015. So the Democratic leadership stands down on the issue of Yemen, not wanting to implicate their hero in the process of impeaching The Donald.

Mainstream liberal hypocrisy runs even deeper, unfortunately. I'm just old enough to remember when the Left railed against the CIA, NSA, and spooks in general. And rightfully so . That, however, was before Mr. Trump shocked coastal elites and got himself elected president of their America. It was impressive watching media and Democratic insiders immediately turn on a dime.

Suddenly every Obama- and Bush-era national security staffer and intelligence super-sleuth -- John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, etc. -- was regularly appearing on CNN and MSNBC to attack Trump and pine for the status quo of U.S. military hyper-interventionism. It was as though all their sins -- mass surveillance, drone assassination, illegal rendition, torture -- had been collectively pushed down the memory hole, the entire intel apparatus born again as agents of truth and honor. The whole masquerade was bizarre, and beyond duplicitous.

The final insult was the recent canonization of the anonymous Ukraine-gate whistleblower(s). Even the language is instructive. They aren't "leakers," "traitors," or "criminals," but whistleblowers , surging with moral courage and exposing ostensibly unthinkable presidential wrongdoing. That's funny: where were these folks when other, far more profound whistleblowers uncovered criminality during the Bush and Obama years? Either crickets or pejorative attacks were all they proffered back then.

... ... ...

Meanwhile, Obama utilized the archaic 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. The liberal press and most Democratic legislators barely made a peep. Barack was their guy , one of their own -- the "leakers" must have been in the wrong, enemies, so to speak, of the people. So while Trump is by no means without serious flaws, the Beltway elites and media personalities stuffing impeachment down our throats are hypocritical and dishonest enough to make one believe in a "deep state." Ultimately it will amount to nothing. Each side remains entrenched.

Either the Dem elites will hand Trump a second term with this impeachment charade, or, maybe just as likely, President Biden will take the helm. When he does, whistleblowers will revert, once again, to being traitors.

So while Trump is by no means without serious flaws, the Beltway elites and media personalities stuffing impeachment down our throats are hypocritical and dishonest enough to make one believe in a "deep state."

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major whose writing has appeared in The American Conservative, Harper's, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation and Tom Dispatch. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq war, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet .

Barlaam of Weimerica • 6 days ago ,

The problem with designating this CIA officer a whistleblower, while denigrating the actual whistleblowers as something other, as criminals, is obvious enough, or should be: in the cases of the latter, they were exposing the crimes of the intel establishment, and punished for it, the 'protections' of the law notwithstanding; in other words, the intel establishment got its way; in the case of the former, the intel establishment is getting its way in its campaign to undermine the administration, notwithstanding Trump's incompetence and corruption, for which he deserves censure, impeachment, whatever.

Heads, they won; tails, we lose.

The problem, in other words, is that we - collectively, as a nation - get to choose only the modality of how our institutions and norms are degraded, not whether they will be degraded. Pick your poison.

Trump=Obama • 6 days ago ,

Trump has been President for 33 months. He is the boss of the CIA. When does he become responsible for his own employees ?

If Trump thought that there was a "Deep State" out to get him, why didn't he hire people to clean it up ?

Liberals think of themselves as "victims". Conservatives believe that we are masters of our own fate. Which is Trump and his supporters ?

FreeOregon Trump=Obama • 4 days ago • edited ,

Wake up!

The CIA and the intelligence services operate black budgets. They kill, steal, run drugs, bribe leaders at home as well as abroad, arrange accidents like the airplane crashes that have killed several Democrats who danced out of tune, have operatives placed in government including state governments, the courts and Congress. Who owns your favorite candidate? The CIA. Who controls the media including the New York Times? The CIA. Bribery, threats, blackmail, control files, setups. The chicanery we tolerate and celebrate in the name of National Security abroad has come home. Secrecy works wonders for control.

Trump's crime is he's an outsider and the CIA did not expect him to win. His very existence is a threat to them.

Can he clean up the mess? I doubt it. Imagine what would happen, the screams and agony, were he to eliminate all government secrecy. Imagine what the CIA would claim if the Black Budget became transparent. If Trump tried to eliminate the CIA it would simply reconstitute and shape-shift within other agencies or outside government.

TISO_Commo • 6 days ago • edited ,
That, however, was before Mr. Trump shocked coastal elites and got himself elected president of their America.

That, for the elitist Left (and Right), is Donald Trump's real and only crime. He got himself elected president of their America. But to get right to the heart of it, he didn't get himself elected as much as the American people got him elected. This is about us..all about us..not about him. Any subsequent attacks on him are in fact attacks on the American electorate.

[Nov 02, 2019] Bernie defends Tulsi, so naturally Russia loves Bernie again

Nov 02, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

gjohnsit on Wed, 10/30/2019 - 3:11pm The Clinton Dead-Enders aren't very clever or original, but they can stick to a script.
First Bernie defends Tulsi from baseless smears.

Tulsi Gabbard has put her life on the line to defend this country. People can disagree on issues, but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset.

[Nov 02, 2019] CIA Circles Wagons Dispatches Media Narrative Engineers to Defend Interests

Nov 02, 2019 | theconservativetreehouse.com

October 22, 2019 by sundance

After the DOJ/FBI advanced their defensive efforts last weekend via the New York Times and NBC, now the CIA/ODNI faction step forth with the same intents and purposes.

CIA defending journalist Natasha Bertrand has been participating in the multi-year PR effort which helped frame the CIA/ODNI talking points against President Trump, and she is deployed again in the latest effort within Politico . The timing here is predictable.

( Via Politico ) President Donald Trump's obsession with former CIA director John Brennan could be on a collision course with an ongoing Justice Department probe as Attorney General Bill Barr takes a more hands-on approach to examining the intelligence community's actions in 2016.

[ ] Durham's report is likely to land well after the results of an inquiry by the Justice Department's Inspector General, who is examining the FBI's applications to a secret court in 2016 and 2017 to obtain surveillance warrants on a Trump campaign aide.

[ ] "Is the IG report going to say we made mistakes? Yes," said one of the former officials. "But it won't say we did so for some nefarious purpose. So the report will be a dry hole for Trump and his supporters. Which is why [Barr and Durham] have now gone to this other theory, positing that the CIA was engaged in some rogue operation to overthrow Trump and therefore feeding the FBI bullshit," he said. "It's complete nonsense."

"Haven't you heard?" said another former FBI official, sarcastically. "Brennan was a puppet-master and we were just his puppets."

Unfortunately, Ms. Bertrand gets too far over her defensive skis when she scribes defense and obfuscation that is laughable to anyone who followed the activity of CIA Director John Brennan when she writes:

[ ] Asked for comment, White House deputy press Secretary Hogan Gidley said: " John Brennan lied before Congress when he got caught spying on American citizens and lied about having Russian collusion evidence that never existed. The only way I've ever heard anyone in the White House mention him is as a punchline."

It's not clear what Gidley was referring to -- Brennan has not been accused of lying to Congress. ( read full article )

Obviously Ms. Bertrand is counting on people not knowing that John Brennan was caught lying about his instructions to CIA operatives to spy on the networks of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Brennan later apologized to the Senate for that effort; but hey, what's a little forgetfulness amid professional narrative engineering.

Additionally, in directly related matters; while remembering the 'gossip-blower' stems from the same CIA institution headed by Brennan while a member of the National Security Council; and while remembering the Washington Post is the primary outlet for the PR efforts of the CIA resistance du jour; the mysterious "white house insider" who penned an op-ed in the New York Times last year has now signed an anonymous book deal expand on the anti-Trump intelligence community narrative.

( WaPo ) The author of an anonymous column in the New York Times in 2018, who was identified as a senior Trump administration official acting as part of the "resistance" inside the government, has written a tell-all book to be published next month.

The book, titled "A Warning," is being promoted as "an unprecedented behind-the-scenes portrait of the Trump presidency" that expands upon the Times column, which ricocheted around the world and stoked the president's rage because of its devastating portrayal of Trump in office. ( read more )

When CTH originally penned the term "The Big Ugly" we were directly describing a looming confrontation that would happen between President Donald Trump and the aligned interests of the deepest part of the Deep State. Those interests are not along party lines, they are ideological interests directly related to the construct of the institutions of government and how those interests tied financially back to the Administrative State.

The DOJ, FBI, CIA, ODNI and State Department do not oppose the deconstruction efforts of Donald Trump as an outcome of bland institutional opposition. Rather the institutions themselves are subsidiaries of a larger network that exists for the purposes of Washington DC as a business and financial enterprise.

The reason the DC system -writ large- is going bananas is because selling the influence of political office for financial gain is the custom and currency of DC affluence.

Selling influence and manipulating government action – both foreign and domestic – to enhance the financial interests of other participants, is a purposeful part of DC as a way to gain financial affluence. In essence the U.S. government is used as a tool to accumulate wealth. This process is at the heart of all Trump's opposition.

Confronting this process is "The Big Ugly".

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[Nov 02, 2019] The Last Refuge

Nov 02, 2019 | theconservativetreehouse.com

Durham Looking At Brennan – A Reminder of "The Crown Material" Conflict Posted on October 22, 2019 by sundance

The Christopher Steele dossier was called " Crown Material " by FBI agents within the small group during their 2016 political surveillance operation. The "Crown" description reflects the unofficial British intelligence aspect to the dossier as provided by Steele.

In May 2019 former House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy stated there are emails from former FBI Director James Comey that outline instructions from CIA Director John Brennan to include the "Crown Material" within the highly political Intelligence Community Assessment .

Specifically outlined by Gowdy, the wording of the Comey email is reported to say :

"Brennan is insisting the Crown Material be included in the intel assessment."

However, on May 23rd, 2017, in testimony -under oath- to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) John Brennan stated [ @01:54:28 ]:

GOWDY: Director Brennan, do you know who commissioned the Steele dossier?

BRENNAN: I don't.

GOWDY: Do you know if the bureau [FBI] ever relied on the Steele dossier as part of any court filing, applications?

BRENNAN: I have no awareness.

GOWDY: Did the CIA rely on it?

BRENNAN: No.

GOWDY: Why not?

BRENNAN: Because we didn't. It wasn't part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done. Uh it was not.

.

Video of the exchange [ prompted 01:54:28 just hit play ]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/sGg8gpGqr-w?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&start=6868&wmode=transparent

.

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote at the time :

[ ] James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey are now all accusing one another of being culpable for inserting the unverified dossier, the font of the effort to destroy Trump, into a presidential intelligence assessment -- as if suddenly and mysteriously the prior seeding of the Steele dossier is now seen as a bad thing. And how did the dossier transmogrify from being passed around the Obama Administration as a supposedly top-secret and devastating condemnation of candidate and then president-elect Trump to a rank embarrassment of ridiculous stories and fibs?

Given the narratives of the last three years, and the protestations that the dossier was accurate or at least was not proven to be unproven, why are these former officials arguing at all? Did not implanting the dossier into the presidential briefing give it the necessary imprimatur that allowed the serial leaks to the press at least to be passed on to the public and thereby apprise the people of the existential danger that they faced? ( read more )

Fox News Maria Bartiromo has more knowledge of the details within the 2016 political surveillance scandal than any other MSM host. Bartiromo has followed the events very closely and now she is the go-to person for those who are trying to bring the truth behind the scandal to light.

On the morning of May 20th, 2019, on her Fox Business Network show Ms. Bartiromo outlined the current issues between Comey and Brennan. WATCH:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PQLweblVdoo?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

.

It certainly looks like former CIA Director John Brennan has exposed himself to perjury. However, beyond that and even more disturbing, what does this say about the political intents of a weaponized intelligence apparatus?

CTH has previously outlined how the December 29th, 2016, Joint Analysis Report (JAR) on Russia Cyber Activity was a quickly compiled bunch of nonsense about Russian hacking.

The JAR was followed a week later by the January 7th, 2017, Intelligence Community Assessment . The ICA took the ridiculous construct of the JAR and then overlaid a political narrative that Russia was trying to help Donald Trump.

The ICA was the brain-trust of John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey. While the majority of content was from the CIA, some of the content within the ICA was written by FBI Agent Peter Strzok who held a unique "insurance policy" interest in how the report could be utilized in 2017. NSA Director Mike Rogers would not sign up to the "high confidence" claims, likely because he saw through the political motives of the report.

( JUNE 2019 – New York Times ) [ ] Mr. Barr wants to know more about the C.I.A. sources who helped inform its understanding of the details of the Russian interference campaign, an official has said. He also wants to better understand the intelligence that flowed from the C.I.A. to the F.B.I. in the summer of 2016.

During the final weeks of the Obama administration, the intelligence community released a declassified assessment that concluded that Mr. Putin ordered an influence campaign that "aspired to help" Mr. Trump's electoral chances by damaging Mrs. Clinton's. The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. reported they had high confidence in the conclusion. The National Security Agency, which conducts electronic surveillance, had a moderate degree of confidence. ( read more )

Questioning the construct of the ICA is a smart direction to take for a review or investigation. By looking at the intelligence community work-product, it's likely Durham will cut through a lot of the chatter and get to the heart of the intelligence motives.

Apparently John Durham is looking into just this aspect: Was the ICA document a politically engineered report stemming from within a corrupt intelligence network?

The importance of that question is rather large. All of the downstream claims about Russian activity, including the Russian indictments promoted by Rosenstein and the Mueller team, are centered around origination claims of illicit Russian activity outlined in the ICA .

If the ICA is a false political document . then guess what?

Yep, the entire narrative from the JAR and ICA is part of a big fraud. [Which it is]

[Nov 02, 2019] Maria Bartiromo Outlines The Architect of "Spygate" and "Crossfire Hurricane", CIA Director John Brennan

Nov 02, 2019 | theconservativetreehouse.com

August 18, 2019 by sundance

Among all media personalities Maria Bartiromo easily has the most comprehensive grasp of the 2016 operation against President Trump. During two interviews today Bartiromo outlines the evidence that leads directly to the person at the origination point, former CIA Director John Brennan.

First, here's a mash-up of the two interviews (Senator Graham and John Solomon) where Bartiromo asks the same question. [ hat tip Michael Sheridan for the video]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/A2woaIAGZ4s?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

.

Former CIA Director John Brennan lies at the heart of the intelligence community decision to weaponize against Donald Trump. In this outline I will provide supporting evidence for Bartiromo's assertion, which I suspect has already led to a criminal referral to U.S. Attorney John Durham by HPSCI Ranking Member Devin Nunes.

Suspicious Cat ate canary

The FBI's formal origination of the counterintelligence investigation into candidate Donald Trump known as "Operation Crossfire Hurricane", begins with a two-page memo submitted by former CIA Director John Brennan to former FBI Director James Comey.

The two page origination memo is known as an "EC" or "electronic communication". This classified origination memo is one of the key documents requested by congress for declassification by President Trump, to be shared with the American people.

According to House Intelligence Committee member Devin Nunes; who is also a member of the intelligence oversight 'Gang-of-Eight'; that EC contains intelligence material that did not come through "official intelligence channels" into the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

On April 22nd, 2018, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes appeared on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo to discuss the origin of the July 2016 counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign.

WATCH the first two minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/W54KbYPfkcw?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

.

The origin of the 2016 counterintelligence operation was the Electronic Communication document, a 'raw intelligence product' delivered by CIA Director John Brennan to the FBI.

The EC was not an official product of the U.S. intelligence community. Additionally, Brennan was NOT using official partnerships with intelligence agencies of our Five-Eyes partner nations; and he did not provide raw intelligence – as an outcome of those relationships – to the FBI.

When we first watched this interview the initial questions were: if the EC is not based on official intelligence from U.S. intelligence apparatus or any of the 'five-eyes' partners, then what is the origin, source and purpose therein, of the unofficial raw intelligence? Who created it? And why?

Now we know many of the answers to those questions.

All research indicates CIA Director John Brennan enlisted the help of U.S. and foreign intelligence assets to run operations against the Trump campaign early in 2016. The objective was to give the false and manufactured appearance of compromise. Once the CIA established the possibility of compromise, that activity created the EC which opened the door for an FBI investigation.

The operation run by Brennan targeting Papadopoulos is at the center of the two-page "EC" ( electronic communication ); given to FBI Director James Comey to start the counterintelligence operation (Crossfire Hurricane) against the Trump campaign.

Two of the intelligence assets Brennan organized were Joseph Mifsud and Stefan Halper .

Yes, the primary intelligence sources of John Brennan's "EC" is were operations run by FBI and CIA operative Stefan Halper, and western intelligence asset Joseph Mifsud. A great background on Halper is HERE .

In March 2018 Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller took a deep dive on how Stefan Halper interacted with George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. Halper is sketchy, and he was trying to initiate contacts with low-level Trump campaign aides. [ SEE HERE ]

DAILY CALLER – Two months before the 2016 election, George Papadopoulos received a strange request for a meeting in London, one of several the young Trump adviser would be offered -- and he would accept -- during the presidential campaign.

The meeting request, which has not been reported until now, came from Stefan Halper, a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.

Halper's September 2016 outreach to Papadopoulos wasn't his only contact with Trump campaign members. The 73-year-old professor, a veteran of three Republican administrations, met with two other campaign advisers, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned. ( Please Keep Reading )

We now know Brennan's originating structure involved Stefan Halper the foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor deeply connected to the CIA and willing to run the operation to benefit the political objective for CIA Director Brennan. This is how John Brennan originates the "EC" through non-traditional intelligence channels. The EC is then given to James Comey, who starts Operation Crossfire Hurricane on July 31st, 2016.

[ NOTE : •On July 31st, 2016 the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign. They did not inform congress until March 2017. •At the beginning of August (1st-3rd) 2016 FBI Agent Peter Strzok traveled to London, England for interviews with UK intelligence officials. •On August 15th , 2016 Peter Strzok sends a text message to DOJ Lawyer Lisa Page describing the " insurance policy ", needed in case Hillary Clinton were to lose the election. That's where Carter Page comes in.]

However, CIA Director John Brennan didn't stop with simply originating the FBI investigation, he went on to promote additional material from his knowledge of the Christopher Steele Dossier.

This is the part that John Brennan has denied ; however, the evidence proving his lies is overwhelming.

We start by remembering the sworn testimony of John Brennan to congress on May 23rd, 2017. Listen carefully to the opening statement from former CIA Director John Brennan and pay close attention to the segment at 13:35 of this video [transcribed below]:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fdJ3OZS928Q?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Brennan: [13:35] "Third, through the so-called Gang-of-Eight process we kept congress apprised of these issues as we identified them."

"Again, in consultation with the White House , I PERSONALLY briefed the full details of our understanding of Russian attempts to interfere in the election to congressional leadership; specifically: Senators Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr; and to representatives Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Devin Nunes and Adam Schiff between 11th August and 6th September [2016], I provided the same briefing to each of the gang of eight members."

"Given the highly sensitive nature of what was an active counter-intelligence case [that means the FBI], involving an ongoing Russian effort, to interfere in our presidential election, the full details of what we knew at the time were shared only with those members of congress; each of whom was accompanied by one senior staff member."

Notice a few things from this testimony. First, where Brennan says " in consultation with the White House ". This is a direct connection between Brennan's activity and President Obama, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Chief-of-Staff Denis McDonough, each of whom would have held knowledge of what Brennan was briefing to the Go8.

Secondly, Brennan is describing raw intelligence (obviously gathered prior to the Carter Page FISA Application/Warrant – October 21st, 2016) that he went on to brief the Gang-of-Eight (pictured below). Notice Brennan said he did briefings "individually".

Brennan also says in his testimony that he began the briefings on August 11th, 2016. This is a key point because former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sent a letter to James Comey on August 27th, 2016, as an outcome of his briefing by John Brennan. But it is the content of Reid's letter that really matters.

In the last paragraph of Reid's letter to Comey he notes something that is only cited within the Christopher Steele Dossier [ full letter pdf here ]:

This letter is August 27th, 2016. The Trump advisor in the letter is Carter Page. The source of the information is Christopher Steele in his dossier. Two months later (October 21st, 2016) the FBI filed a FISA application against Carter Page using the Steele Dossier.

So what we are seeing here is CIA Director John Brennan briefing Harry Reid on the Steele dossier in August 2016, even before the dossier reached the FBI. However, John Brennan has denied seeing the dossier until December of 2016. A transparent lie.

Brennan goes on to testify the main substance of those 2016 Go8 briefings was the same as the main judgements of the January 2017 classified and unclassified intelligence assessments published by the CIA, FBI, DNI and NSA, ie. "The Intelligence Community Assessment" (ICA).

However, we know Brennan put material from the Dossier into the ICA.

We also know from Paul Sperry: "[ ] A source close to the House investigation said Brennan himself selected the CIA and FBI analysts who worked on the ICA, and that they included former FBI counterespionage chief Peter Strzok . "Strzok was the intermediary between Brennan and [former FBI Director James] Comey, and he was one of the authors of the ICA," according to the source." (link)

♦ Summary so far : During a period early in 2016 CIA Director John Brennan manufactured the material needed to start the FBI investigation on July 31st, 2016. John Brennan also received information from within the Steele Dossier which he put into President Obama's Daily Briefing and shared with the Gang of Eight.

Here's where it gets even more interesting .

On December 15, 2016, Strzok and Page texted each other about a sister organization leaking to the mainstream media . The next day, December 16, Strzok texted Page again , this time to discuss an article in The Washington Post : "FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump win White House" , where Strzok argued that the Central Intelligence Agency is more capable of manipulating the press and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had the initial position, not the Central Intelligence Agency

So it would seem that Brennan was leaking to the media and pushing hard on this same Russia narrative during the transition period. It's almost bizarre to see Brennan now saying "perhaps he had bad information" BRENNAN IS THE INFORMATION !!

Fucking Brennan.

Additionally, if you want to throw on an even more stunning layer upon this manipulation matrix, consider that Nellie Ohr was likely working for the CIA.

"I read an article in the paper that mentioned Glenn Simpson. And I remembered because he had been a Wall Street Journal reporter working on things like Russian crime and corruption, so I recognized the name. I was underemployed at that time and I was looking for opportunities. "

~ Nellie Ohr via congressional testimony

If Nellie Ohr, a known CIA open source contractor, sought out Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS for the job in 2015, not vice-versa, then it would appear a sting operation from within the CIA (John Brennan) was underway and long planned. The evidence of this likelihood surfaces later from Brennan's knowledge of the specific intelligence within the Steele Dossier as shared with Obama and briefed to Harry Reid in August 2016.

So let us recap:

♦In the first phase of this operation the CIA, likely Brennan, seeded Fusion GPS with information via Nellie Ohr. After it became clear that Donald Trump would be the 2016 GOP candidate, that information was then piped-into another Fusion GPS contractor and former FBI Source, Chris Steele. Steele then "laundered", and returned the Ohr research material into an official intelligence product to the FBI. [The tool was Carter Page.]

♦Concurrently timed with the start of this first phase, Brennan was running an operation using Stephan Halper and Joseph Mifsud to generate the "EC" and initiate the FBI to begin a counterintelligence operation named Crossfire Hurricane. [The tool was George Papadopoulos]

This is why the media got/get somewhat confused with the origins of everything: Papadopoulous (Crossfire Hurricane) -vs- Carter Page (dossier into FISA); an origination confusion which still exists through today.

In essence we can see that John Brennan was the initiator manipulating everything, somewhat behind the scenes, for all of the activity (tangentially noted by Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in their text messages about the CIA leaks). After the 2016 election, Brennan continued pushing the Steele Dossier into the media bloodstream as it carried the Russian Conspiracy virus he created.

During the time James Comey's FBI was running operation Crossfire Hurricane, Comey admitted he intentionally never informed congressional oversight: " because of the sensitivity of the matter ". I suspect he knew there was manipulation behind the events that initiated the construct; he was, however, willfully blind to it.

When Brennan now says in hindsight he might have received " bad information ", it's laughable – because the information is his creation.

Now with all of that hindsight in mind, watch the first four minutes of this interview and pay attention to the duping delight:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/45IEzp2uTCo?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

.

Lastly, unlike other DOJ and FBI officials connected to the fraudulent exploitation of the FISA court, John Brennan is not attached to the ongoing DOJ Inspector General investigation being conducted by IG Horowitz.

Presumably Inspector General Michael Horowitz is only looking at the process, procedures and people who were involved in submitting an unverified and likely fraudulent FISA application. Though his investigation would mean reviewing the underlying evidence for the FISA warrant, ie. the Steele Dossier, the list of IG targets does not necessarily include anyone outside the DOJ and FBI process.

This could mean former CIA Director John Brennan, or any other Obama-era official outside the DOJ and FBI, could be referred for criminal investigation to John Durham; and investigation or review of that referral should not impede any ongoing investigation by IG Michael Horowitz.

That's why it is possible for Devin Nunes to have submitted a ¹criminal referral for John Brennan; which would be one of the primary aspects of review by Durham (noted by Solomon), and only tangentially connected to the IG Horowitz investigation.

¹Or, NSA Advisor Susan Rice, ODNI James Clapper, or former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power (unmasking); or any other administration official who may have engaged in leaking and/or disseminating classified intelligence information.

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[Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Note this key excerpt from the letter of transmittal: ..."
"... " Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state. " ..."
"... The Treaty was reported favourable by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on September 27, 2000, consented to ratification by the Senate on October 18, 2000 and ratified by the President of the United States on January 5, 2001. The Treaty was entered into force on February 27, 2001. Here are the title page of the Treaty and the signature page: ..."
"... With this background and while I don't want to appear to be pro- or anti-Trump, it is very, very clear that the current POTUS was within the law under the Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters between the United States and Ukraine when it comes to asking Ukraine to investigate a potential criminal matter. ..."
October 15, 2019 | viableopposition.blogspot.com

With the Trump impeachment procedures ongoing and the connection to his conversation about the Biden family with Ukraine President Zelenskyy, there has been very little coverage of an important aspect of the relationship between Washington and Kiev. While none of us can speak to the actual intent of Donald Trump's remarks be it for personal gain or for other reasons, there is background information that may help illuminate the context of the discussion between the two world leaders.

In case you haven't read the pertinent section of the transcript of the conversation, here it is:

" President Zelenskyy : Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.. That I can assure you.

President Trump : Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.

President Zelenskyy : I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all, I understand and I'm knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate, who will be approved, by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue. The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President well enough.

President Trump : Well, she's going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I'm sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly and he was a very fair prosecutor so good luck with everything. Your economy is going to get better and better I predict. You have a lot of assets. It's a great country. I have many Ukrainian friends, their incredible people." (my bolds)

Now, let's look back in time to 1998. On July 22, 1998, a treaty was signed between Ukraine and Washington.

The Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters was signed in Kiev on the aforementioned date. Here is an excerpt from the The original letter of submittal from the Department of State to the President's office dated October 19, 1999 which states the following:

"I have the honor to submit to you the Treaty between the United States of America and Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters with Annex (``the Treaty''), signed at Kiev on July 22, 1998. I recommend that the Treaty be transmitted to the Senate for its advice and consent to ratification.
Also enclosed, for the information of the Senate, is an exchange of notes under which the Treaty is being provisionally applied to the extent possible under our respective domestic laws, in order to provide a basis for immediate mutual assistance in criminal matters. Provisional application would cease upon entry into force of the Treaty.

The Treaty covers mutual legal assistance in criminal matters. In recent years, similar bilateral treaties have entered into force with a number of other countries. The Treaty with Ukraine contains all essential provisions sought by the United States. It will enhance our ability to investigate and prosecute a range of offenses. The Treaty is designed to be self-executing and will not require new legislation." (my bold)

The Treaty was then transmitted by the President of the United States (Bill Clinton) to the Senate on November 10, 1999 (Treaty Document 106-16 -106th Congress - First Session) as shown on this letter of transmittal from Bill Clinton's office:

Note this key excerpt from the letter of transmittal:

" Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state. "

The Treaty was reported favourable by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on September 27, 2000, consented to ratification by the Senate on October 18, 2000 and ratified by the President of the United States on January 5, 2001. The Treaty was entered into force on February 27, 2001. Here are the title page of the Treaty and the signature page:

Here are the first two pages of the Treaty which outline the scope of assistance that is to be offered by both nations as well as the limitations on assistance:

... ... ...

If you wish to read the Treaty in its entirety, please click here .

With this background and while I don't want to appear to be pro- or anti-Trump, it is very, very clear that the current POTUS was within the law under the Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters between the United States and Ukraine when it comes to asking Ukraine to investigate a potential criminal matter.

[Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... And there is the real definition, which is using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for undefined democracy, which movement leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform lest they organize, in favor of a secret coterie. ..."
"... No matter how you view Trump, it is undeniable that several signs of a color revolution were present in Russiagate (and Ukrainegate, which is, in essence, Russiagate 2.0 -- a counterattack on the attempt by Trump to investigate the origins of Russiagate). ..."
Nov 01, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

steven t johnson 10.31.19 at 8:35 pm 46

Faustusnotes@43 continues the meltdown, notably forgetting his own list of non-rigid class societies (nations, ) retreating to the UK and Australia. Reminding everyone of the widely accepted definition for color revolution would have been useful. There is the propaganda notion, a vague image of the outraged people rising en masse to throw out the Communists/Communist-adjacent corrupt (unlike all others of course,) government. Inasmuch as likbez specifically denied a mass movement, this is still as much a red herring as it was when first brandished.

And there is the real definition, which is using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for undefined democracy, which movement leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform lest they organize, in favor of a secret coterie. Thus when the Astroturf does drive out the current administration, mirabile dictu! nothing changes except its receptivity to international capital. The fundamental color revolution mechanism it seems to me is the hiding of the real program, the true commitment to capital, behind a facade.

Lastly, the idea that likbez just made stuff up is remarkable. If anything, it seems to me that likbez has been heavily influenced by the thesis of Quinn Slobodian's The Globalists. But that book may be touted largely as (unread) proof somebody disreputable isn't acceptable in polite company, not really useful otherwise.

Surprisingly, nastywoman confirms my general impression is really seeing the EU as the inspiration for a better society, without radicalism, much less revolution. I agree there's nothing worse than revolution except not having a revolution, which I guess takes us back to square one. The EU of course is really the Maastricht treaty, the Lisbon treaty, the announcement that elections can't change policy, technocrats as PM in Italy, Greece, etc. In short, nastywoman confesses to incoherence. But nastywoman can take joy in correctly spotting that I'm a disgusting old person too vile to understand rap and can hope I'll be dead soon, and blight humanity no more.

likbez 10.31.19 at 11:22 pm (no link)

Faustusnotes 10.30.19 at 2:38 pm @43

'Color revolution ' has a specific meaning and what happened to Lula and Trump ain't it

You probably never read Gene Sharp, who passed in Feb 2018. Claims of "corruption" and "unfair" election results (which includes foreign influence on elections) are classic color revolution methods described in detail in his books.

Participation of intelligence agencies and controlled by them MSM is a distinctive feature of any color revolution: is it, in essence, a modern, very sophisticated variant of a false flag operation. Controlled/influenced (often indirectly) by intelligence agencies MSM essentially serve the role similar to airforce in modern neocolonial wars (and the level of control is staggering starting from the operation Mockingbird; see Journalists for Hire How the CIA Buys the News by Dr. Udo Ulfkotte).

No matter how you view Trump, it is undeniable that several signs of a color revolution were present in Russiagate (and Ukrainegate, which is, in essence, Russiagate 2.0 -- a counterattack on the attempt by Trump to investigate the origins of Russiagate).

Here is the list adapted from the writings on the topic by former CIA analyst Larry C Johnson and Colonel Lang (DIA). The latter led intelligence analysis of the Middle East and South Asia for the Defense Department and world-wide HUMINT activities in a high-level equivalent to the rank of a lieutenant general. He runs well respected
Sic Semper Tyrannis blog.

Both think that the CIA pulled the main strings. They noted the following:

  1. -- Obama officials efforts in establishing surveillance on Trump campaign on a false pretext (FICA memo scandal, etc.) ;
  2. -- CrowdStrike false flag operation with DNC -- converting the internal leak into Russian break-in;
  3. -- MI6 fabrication of Steele dossier using materials from the USA obtained via Fusion GPS and Brennan and rehashing them as an original British intelligence.
  4. -- Brennan use of Steele dossier to produce "17 intelligence agencies assessment," which served as the signal of unleashing of Russiagate hysteria in neoliberal MSM and the official start of Russiagate.
  5. -- Rosenstein gambit with using firing of Comey as a convenient pretext for appointment Mueller (appointment of the Special Prosecutor was in the cards anyway and was inescapable for Trump as it was a preplanned action by the plotters, and they controlled all the necessary strings; this probably was the meaning of the word "insurance" in Strzok-Page text messages).
  6. -- McCabe's opening of FBI investigation of Trump links to Russia.
  7. -- Alexandra Chalupa machination with getting dirt on Trump and his associates (Manafort) from Poroshenko government (which was a client state anyway so it is funny that Schiff now tries to claim that Ukraine can exercise foreign influence; it is a USA controlled entity; the country in a debt trap ).
  8. -- Systematic attempts to entrap Trump associates with connection to the Russian government by CIA, MI6 and Italian intelligence (Misfud entrapment operation, Felix Sater entrapment operation with idea of building of Trump hotel in Moscow, Halper entrapment attempt, MI6 entrapment operation with Natalia Veselnitskaya visit to Trump tower, etc.).

I think that under the weight of those facts, the picture is more or less clear -- this was a color revolution.

[Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Note this key excerpt from the letter of transmittal: ..."
"... " Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state. " ..."
"... The Treaty was reported favourable by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on September 27, 2000, consented to ratification by the Senate on October 18, 2000 and ratified by the President of the United States on January 5, 2001. The Treaty was entered into force on February 27, 2001. Here are the title page of the Treaty and the signature page: ..."
"... With this background and while I don't want to appear to be pro- or anti-Trump, it is very, very clear that the current POTUS was within the law under the Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters between the United States and Ukraine when it comes to asking Ukraine to investigate a potential criminal matter. ..."
October 15, 2019 | viableopposition.blogspot.com

With the Trump impeachment procedures ongoing and the connection to his conversation about the Biden family with Ukraine President Zelenskyy, there has been very little coverage of an important aspect of the relationship between Washington and Kiev. While none of us can speak to the actual intent of Donald Trump's remarks be it for personal gain or for other reasons, there is background information that may help illuminate the context of the discussion between the two world leaders.

In case you haven't read the pertinent section of the transcript of the conversation, here it is:

" President Zelenskyy : Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.. That I can assure you.

President Trump : Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.

President Zelenskyy : I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all, I understand and I'm knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate, who will be approved, by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue. The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President well enough.

President Trump : Well, she's going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I'm sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly and he was a very fair prosecutor so good luck with everything. Your economy is going to get better and better I predict. You have a lot of assets. It's a great country. I have many Ukrainian friends, their incredible people." (my bolds)

Now, let's look back in time to 1998. On July 22, 1998, a treaty was signed between Ukraine and Washington.

The Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters was signed in Kiev on the aforementioned date. Here is an excerpt from the The original letter of submittal from the Department of State to the President's office dated October 19, 1999 which states the following:

"I have the honor to submit to you the Treaty between the United States of America and Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters with Annex (``the Treaty''), signed at Kiev on July 22, 1998. I recommend that the Treaty be transmitted to the Senate for its advice and consent to ratification.
Also enclosed, for the information of the Senate, is an exchange of notes under which the Treaty is being provisionally applied to the extent possible under our respective domestic laws, in order to provide a basis for immediate mutual assistance in criminal matters. Provisional application would cease upon entry into force of the Treaty.

The Treaty covers mutual legal assistance in criminal matters. In recent years, similar bilateral treaties have entered into force with a number of other countries. The Treaty with Ukraine contains all essential provisions sought by the United States. It will enhance our ability to investigate and prosecute a range of offenses. The Treaty is designed to be self-executing and will not require new legislation." (my bold)

The Treaty was then transmitted by the President of the United States (Bill Clinton) to the Senate on November 10, 1999 (Treaty Document 106-16 -106th Congress - First Session) as shown on this letter of transmittal from Bill Clinton's office:

Note this key excerpt from the letter of transmittal:

" Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state. "

The Treaty was reported favourable by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on September 27, 2000, consented to ratification by the Senate on October 18, 2000 and ratified by the President of the United States on January 5, 2001. The Treaty was entered into force on February 27, 2001. Here are the title page of the Treaty and the signature page:

Here are the first two pages of the Treaty which outline the scope of assistance that is to be offered by both nations as well as the limitations on assistance:

... ... ...

If you wish to read the Treaty in its entirety, please click here .

With this background and while I don't want to appear to be pro- or anti-Trump, it is very, very clear that the current POTUS was within the law under the Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters between the United States and Ukraine when it comes to asking Ukraine to investigate a potential criminal matter.

[Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... And there is the real definition, which is using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for undefined democracy, which movement leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform lest they organize, in favor of a secret coterie. ..."
"... No matter how you view Trump, it is undeniable that several signs of a color revolution were present in Russiagate (and Ukrainegate, which is, in essence, Russiagate 2.0 -- a counterattack on the attempt by Trump to investigate the origins of Russiagate). ..."
Nov 01, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

steven t johnson 10.31.19 at 8:35 pm 46

Faustusnotes@43 continues the meltdown, notably forgetting his own list of non-rigid class societies (nations, ) retreating to the UK and Australia. Reminding everyone of the widely accepted definition for color revolution would have been useful. There is the propaganda notion, a vague image of the outraged people rising en masse to throw out the Communists/Communist-adjacent corrupt (unlike all others of course,) government. Inasmuch as likbez specifically denied a mass movement, this is still as much a red herring as it was when first brandished.

And there is the real definition, which is using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for undefined democracy, which movement leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform lest they organize, in favor of a secret coterie. Thus when the Astroturf does drive out the current administration, mirabile dictu! nothing changes except its receptivity to international capital. The fundamental color revolution mechanism it seems to me is the hiding of the real program, the true commitment to capital, behind a facade.

Lastly, the idea that likbez just made stuff up is remarkable. If anything, it seems to me that likbez has been heavily influenced by the thesis of Quinn Slobodian's The Globalists. But that book may be touted largely as (unread) proof somebody disreputable isn't acceptable in polite company, not really useful otherwise.

Surprisingly, nastywoman confirms my general impression is really seeing the EU as the inspiration for a better society, without radicalism, much less revolution. I agree there's nothing worse than revolution except not having a revolution, which I guess takes us back to square one. The EU of course is really the Maastricht treaty, the Lisbon treaty, the announcement that elections can't change policy, technocrats as PM in Italy, Greece, etc. In short, nastywoman confesses to incoherence. But nastywoman can take joy in correctly spotting that I'm a disgusting old person too vile to understand rap and can hope I'll be dead soon, and blight humanity no more.

likbez 10.31.19 at 11:22 pm (no link)

Faustusnotes 10.30.19 at 2:38 pm @43

'Color revolution ' has a specific meaning and what happened to Lula and Trump ain't it

You probably never read Gene Sharp, who passed in Feb 2018. Claims of "corruption" and "unfair" election results (which includes foreign influence on elections) are classic color revolution methods described in detail in his books.

Participation of intelligence agencies and controlled by them MSM is a distinctive feature of any color revolution: is it, in essence, a modern, very sophisticated variant of a false flag operation. Controlled/influenced (often indirectly) by intelligence agencies MSM essentially serve the role similar to airforce in modern neocolonial wars (and the level of control is staggering starting from the operation Mockingbird; see Journalists for Hire How the CIA Buys the News by Dr. Udo Ulfkotte).

No matter how you view Trump, it is undeniable that several signs of a color revolution were present in Russiagate (and Ukrainegate, which is, in essence, Russiagate 2.0 -- a counterattack on the attempt by Trump to investigate the origins of Russiagate).

Here is the list adapted from the writings on the topic by former CIA analyst Larry C Johnson and Colonel Lang (DIA). The latter led intelligence analysis of the Middle East and South Asia for the Defense Department and world-wide HUMINT activities in a high-level equivalent to the rank of a lieutenant general. He runs well respected
Sic Semper Tyrannis blog.

Both think that the CIA pulled the main strings. They noted the following:

  1. -- Obama officials efforts in establishing surveillance on Trump campaign on a false pretext (FICA memo scandal, etc.) ;
  2. -- CrowdStrike false flag operation with DNC -- converting the internal leak into Russian break-in;
  3. -- MI6 fabrication of Steele dossier using materials from the USA obtained via Fusion GPS and Brennan and rehashing them as an original British intelligence.
  4. -- Brennan use of Steele dossier to produce "17 intelligence agencies assessment," which served as the signal of unleashing of Russiagate hysteria in neoliberal MSM and the official start of Russiagate.
  5. -- Rosenstein gambit with using firing of Comey as a convenient pretext for appointment Mueller (appointment of the Special Prosecutor was in the cards anyway and was inescapable for Trump as it was a preplanned action by the plotters, and they controlled all the necessary strings; this probably was the meaning of the word "insurance" in Strzok-Page text messages).
  6. -- McCabe's opening of FBI investigation of Trump links to Russia.
  7. -- Alexandra Chalupa machination with getting dirt on Trump and his associates (Manafort) from Poroshenko government (which was a client state anyway so it is funny that Schiff now tries to claim that Ukraine can exercise foreign influence; it is a USA controlled entity; the country in a debt trap ).
  8. -- Systematic attempts to entrap Trump associates with connection to the Russian government by CIA, MI6 and Italian intelligence (Misfud entrapment operation, Felix Sater entrapment operation with idea of building of Trump hotel in Moscow, Halper entrapment attempt, MI6 entrapment operation with Natalia Veselnitskaya visit to Trump tower, etc.).

I think that under the weight of those facts, the picture is more or less clear -- this was a color revolution.

[Nov 01, 2019] How The Obama Administration Set In Motion Its Coup Against Trump by Lee Smith

Notable quotes:
"... "To any rational person," says Nunes, "it looks like they were scheming to produce a get-out-of-jail-free card -- for the president and anyone else in the White House. They were playing Monopoly while the others were playing with fire. Now the Obama White House was in the clear -- sure, they had no idea what Comey and Brennan and McCabe and Strzok and the rest were up to." ..."
"... Meanwhile, Obama added his voice to the Trump-Russia echo chamber as news stories alleging Trump's illicit relationship with the Kremlin multiplied in the transition period. He said he hoped "that the president-elect also is willing to stand up to Russia." ..."
"... After refusing to act while the Russian election meddling was actually occurring, Obama responded in December. He ordered the closing of Russian diplomatic facilities and the expulsion of thirty- five Russian diplomats. The response was tepid. The Russians had hacked the State Department in 2014 and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2015. And now Obama was responding only on his way out. ..."
"... Even Obama partisans thought it was weak. "The punishment did not fit the crime," said Michael McFaul, Obama's former ambassador to Russia. "The Kremlin should have paid a much higher price for that attack." ..."
"... But the administration wasn't retaliating against Russia for interfering in a US election; the action was directed at Trump. Obama was leaving the president-elect with a minor foreign policy crisis in order to box him in. Any criticism of Obama's response, never mind an attempt to reverse it, would only further fuel press reports that Trump was collaborating with the Russians. ..."
"... Obama's biggest move against Trump was to order CIA director John Brennan to conduct a full review of all intelligence relating to Russia and the 2016 elections. He requested it on December 6 and wanted it ready by the time he left office on January 20. But the sitting president already knew what the intelligence community assessment (ICA) was going to say, because Brennan had told him months before. ..."
"... Brennan's handpicked team of CIA, FBI, and NSA analysts had started analyzing Russian election interference in late July. In August, Brennan had briefed Harry Reid on the dossier and may have briefed Obama on it, too. Earlier in August, Brennan sent a "bombshell" report to Obama's desk. ..."
Nov 01, 2019 | thefederalist.com

The following is an excerpt from Lee Smith's book out October 29, " The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History ."

AFTER DONALD TRUMP was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the operation designed to undermine his campaign transformed. It became an instrument to bring down the commander in chief. The coup started almost immediately after the polls closed.

Hillary Clinton's communications team decided within twenty-four hours of her concession speech to message that the election was illegitimate, that Russia had interfered to help Trump.

Obama was working against Trump until the hour he left office. His national security advisor, Susan Rice, commemorated it with an email to herself on January 20, moments before Trump's inauguration. She wrote to memorialize a meeting in the White House two weeks before.

On January 5, following a briefing by IC leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election, President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office. Vice President Biden and I were also present.

President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities "by the book." The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.

From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia. . . .

The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.

The repetition of "by the book" gave away the game -- for there was nothing normal about any of it.

Rice wrote an email to herself. It commemorated a conversation from two weeks before. The conversation was about the FBI's investigation of the man who was about to move into the White House -- an investigation from which Obama was careful to distance himself. During the conversation, the outgoing president instructed his top aides to collect information ("ascertain") regarding the incoming administration's relationship with Russia.

"To any rational person," says Nunes, "it looks like they were scheming to produce a get-out-of-jail-free card -- for the president and anyone else in the White House. They were playing Monopoly while the others were playing with fire. Now the Obama White House was in the clear -- sure, they had no idea what Comey and Brennan and McCabe and Strzok and the rest were up to."

Boxing Trump in on Russia

Meanwhile, Obama added his voice to the Trump-Russia echo chamber as news stories alleging Trump's illicit relationship with the Kremlin multiplied in the transition period. He said he hoped "that the president-elect also is willing to stand up to Russia."

The outgoing president was in Germany with Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss everything from NATO to Vladimir Putin. Obama said that he'd "delivered a clear and forceful message" to the Russian president about "meddling with elections . . . and we will respond appropriately if and when we see this happening."

After refusing to act while the Russian election meddling was actually occurring, Obama responded in December. He ordered the closing of Russian diplomatic facilities and the expulsion of thirty- five Russian diplomats. The response was tepid. The Russians had hacked the State Department in 2014 and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2015. And now Obama was responding only on his way out.

Even Obama partisans thought it was weak. "The punishment did not fit the crime," said Michael McFaul, Obama's former ambassador to Russia. "The Kremlin should have paid a much higher price for that attack."

But the administration wasn't retaliating against Russia for interfering in a US election; the action was directed at Trump. Obama was leaving the president-elect with a minor foreign policy crisis in order to box him in. Any criticism of Obama's response, never mind an attempt to reverse it, would only further fuel press reports that Trump was collaborating with the Russians.

Spreading Intelligence to Spring Leaks

In the administration's last days, it disseminated intelligence throughout the government, including the White House, Capitol Hill, and the intelligence community (IC). Intelligence was classified at the lowest possible levels to ensure a wide readership. The White House was paving the way for a campaign of leaks to disorient the incoming Trump team.

The effort, including the intended result of leaks, was publicly acknowledged in March 2017 by Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration.

Obama's biggest move against Trump was to order CIA director John Brennan to conduct a full review of all intelligence relating to Russia and the 2016 elections. He requested it on December 6 and wanted it ready by the time he left office on January 20. But the sitting president already knew what the intelligence community assessment (ICA) was going to say, because Brennan had told him months before.

Brennan's handpicked team of CIA, FBI, and NSA analysts had started analyzing Russian election interference in late July. In August, Brennan had briefed Harry Reid on the dossier and may have briefed Obama on it, too. Earlier in August, Brennan sent a "bombshell" report to Obama's desk.

When Brennan reassembled his select team in December, it was to have them reproduce their August findings: Putin, according to Brennan, was boosting the GOP candidate. And that's why only three days after Obama ordered the assessment in December, the Washington Post could already reveal what the intelligence community had found.

"The CIA," reported the December 9 edition of the Post , "has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system."

The story was the first of many apparently sourced to leaks of classified information that were given to the Post team of Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller. The reporters' sources weren't whistle-blowers shedding light on government corruption -- rather, they were senior US officials abusing government resources to prosecute a campaign against the newly elected commander in chief. The article was the earliest public evidence that the coup was under way. The floodgates were open, as the IC pushed more stories through the press to delegitimize the president-elect.

A Wave of Leak-Sourced Stories All Saying the Same Thing

The same day, a New York Times article by David E. Sanger and Scott Shane echoed the Post 's piece. According to senior administration officials, "American intelligence agencies have concluded with 'high confidence' that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton's chances and promote Donald J. Trump."

A December 14 NBC News story by William M. Arkin, Ken Dilanian, and Cynthia McFadden reported that "Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News."

The ICA that Obama ordered gave political operatives, the press, and his intelligence chiefs a second shot at Trump. They'd used the Steele Dossier to feed the echo chamber and obtain surveillance powers to spy on the Trump campaign. The dossier, however, had come up short. Trump had won.

But now, on his way out of the White House, Obama instructed Brennan to stamp the CIA's imprimatur on the anti-Trump operation. As Fusion GPS's smear campaign had been the source of the preelection press campaign, the ICA was the basis of the postelection media frenzy. It was tailored to disrupt the peaceful transition of power and throw the United States into chaos.

Because Trump hadn't been elected by the US public, according to the ICA, but had been tapped by Putin, he was illegitimate. Therefore, the extraconstitutional and illegal tactics employed by anti-Trump officials were legitimate. The ultimate goal was to remove Trump from office.

"If it weren't for President Obama," said James Clapper, "we might not have done the intelligence community assessment . . . that set off a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today."

Nunes agrees. "The ICA," he says, "was Obama's dossier."

Changing the Intelligence Assessment

Nunes is sitting in his office in the Longworth House Office Building along with his communications director, Jack Langer, a forty-six-year-old former book editor and historian with a PhD from Duke University.

"The social media attacks on Devin began shortly after the election," Langer remembers. "They're all hinting at some vast conspiracy involving Russia that the chairman of the Intelligence Committee is part of. And we have no idea what they're talking about."

Nunes points out that his warnings about Russia fell on deaf ears for years. "And all of a sudden I'm a Russian agent," says the congressman.

Now Langer and Nunes see that the attacks were first launched because the congressman had been named to Trump's transition team. "I put forward [Mike] Pompeo for CIA director," says Nunes. "He came from our committee."

The attacks on Nunes picked up after the December 9 Washington Post article. The assessment provided there was not what the HPSCI chairman had been told. The assessment had been altered, and Nunes asked for an explanation. "We got briefed about the election around Thanksgiving," he says. "And it's just the usual stuff, nothing abnormal. They told us what everyone already knew: 'Hey, the Russians are bad actors, and they're always playing games, and here's what they did.'"

By providing that briefing, the IC had made a mistake. When it later changed the assessment, the November briefing was evidence that Obama's spy chiefs were up to no good. "I bet they'd like to have that back," says Nunes. "They briefed us before they could get their new story straight."

'They Kept Everyone Else Away from It'

Nunes acknowledges that he was caught off guard by many things back then. "We still thought these guys were on the up and up," he says. "But if we knew, we'd have nailed them by mid-December, when they changed their assessment. 'Wait, you guys are saying this now, but you said something else just a few weeks ago. What's going on?'"

After the Post story, Nunes wanted an explanation. "We expressed deep concern, both publicly and privately," says Langer. "We demanded our own briefing to try to determine whether that Post story was true or false. They refused to brief us. They said, 'We're not going to be doing that until we finish the ICA.'"

Nunes says the fact that the IC conducted an assessment like that was itself unusual. "I don't know how many times they'd done that in the past, if ever," he says. "But if the IC is operating properly, when someone says what can you tell me on X or Y or Z, they have it ready to pull up quickly. The tradecraft is reliable, and the intelligence products are reliable." That was not the case with the ICA. There were problems with how the assessment had been put together.

"If you really were going to do something like an assessment from the intelligence community, then you'd get input from all our seventeen agencies," says Nunes. "They did the opposite. It was only FBI, CIA, NSA, and DNI. They siloed it, just like they had with Crossfire Hurricane. They kept everyone else away from it so they didn't have to read them in."

'Manipulation of Intelligence for Political Purposes'

Nunes released several statements in the middle of December. The HPSCI majority, read a December 14 statement, wanted senior Obama intelligence officials "to clarify press reports that the CIA has a new assessment that it has not shared with us. The Committee is deeply concerned that intransigence in sharing intelligence with Congress can enable the manipulation of intelligence for political purposes."

After the statements warned of political foul play in the IC's assessments, the social media attacks on Nunes became more regular. "They were constant," says Langer.

Anti-Trump operatives recognized that Nunes was going to be a problem. The HPSCI chair had previously called out the IC for politicizing intelligence. "They said that we had defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria," says Nunes, "and I knew that wasn't true. Then they withheld the Osama bin Laden documents to conceal that Al Qaeda worked with Iran, because the administration was protecting the Iran deal. So when I saw them changing this assessment of the 2016 election in midstream, I knew it was the same old trick: they were politicizing intelligence."

The speed with which Brennan's handpicked analysts produced the ICA and then got a version of it declassified for public consumption was another sign that something wasn't right. "All throughout Obama's two terms, his IC chiefs aren't paying attention to Russian actions," says Nunes. "We give them more money for Russia, which they don't use. But now they know so much about Putin that they manage to produce a comprehensive assessment of Russian intentions and actions regarding election interference in a month -- at Christmastime, when everything slows down. And then they produce a declassified version in a manner of weeks. None of this is believable."

Three different versions of the ICA were produced: an unclassified version, a top secret one, and another highly compartmentalized version. According to a January 11, 2017, Washington Post story by Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Karen DeYoung, an annex summarizing the dossier was attached to the versions that were not declassified.

'Designed to Have a Political Effect'

The FBI had been working from Steele's reports for more than half a year. Including the dossier along with the ICA would provide Comey with ammunition to take on the president-elect. Both he and Brennan were manipulating intelligence for political purposes.

"A lot of the ICA is reasonable," says Nunes. "But those parts become irrelevant due to the problematic parts, which undermine the entire document. It was designed to have a political effect; that was the ICA's sole purpose."

The assessment's methodological flaws are not difficult to spot. Manufacturing the politicized findings that Obama sought meant not only abandoning protocol but also subverting basic logic. Two of the ICA's central findings are that:

To know preferences and intentions would require sources targeting Putin's inner circles -- either human sources or electronic surveillance. As Nunes had previously noted, however, US intelligence on Putin's decision-making process was inadequate.

But even if there had been extensive collection on precisely that issue, it would be difficult to know what was true. For instance, the closest you can get to Putin's inner circle is Putin himself. But even capturing him on an intercept saying he wanted to elect Trump might prove inconclusive. It is difficult to judge intentions because it is not possible to see into the minds of other people. How would you know that Putin was speaking truthfully? How would you know that the Russian president didn't know his communications were under US surveillance and wasn't trying to deceive his audience?

Quality control of information is one of the tasks of counterintelligence -- to discern how you know what you know and whether that information is trustworthy. There was no quality control for the Trump-Russia intelligence. For instance, Crossfire Hurricane lead agent Peter Strzok was the FBI's deputy assistant director of counterintelligence. Instead of weeding out flawed intelligence on Russia, the Crossfire Hurricane team was feeding Steele's reports into intelligence products. Yet the ICA claimed to have "high confidence" in its assessment that "Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President- elect Trump." What was the basis of that judgment?

According to the ICA:

Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.

"Most likely" and "almost certainly" are rhetorical hedges that show the assessment could not have been made in "high confidence." Putin may have held a grudge against Clinton, but there is no way of knowing it.

The supporting evidence deteriorates more the farther the ICA purports to reach into Putin's mind.

Beginning in June, Putin's public comments about the US presidential race avoided directly praising President-elect Trump, probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States.

This is absurd. Part of the evidence that Putin supported Trump is that he avoided praising Trump. It is difficult enough to determine intentions by what someone says. Yet the ICA claims to have discerned Putin's intentions by what he did not say.

There is no introductory philosophy class in logic where reasoning like that would pass muster. Yet Brennan's handpicked group used it as the basis of its assessment that Putin had helped Trump.

Moscow also saw the election of President-elect Trump as a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

This may be an accurate description of how Putin saw Trump. But Trump's predecessor also wanted to coordinate anti- ISIS operations with Moscow. On this view, Trump would have represented a continuation of Obama's ISIS policy. Why would this make Trump's victory suspicious to Obama's intelligence chiefs?

Curious Inaccuracies about Russia's RT Network

The ICA also pointed to documentary evidence of Putin's intentions: English-language media owned by the Russian government, the news site Sputnik, and the RT network, were critical of Clinton.

State-owned Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton.

Curiously, just days before the election, the informant the US government sent after the Trump campaign praised the Democratic candidate in an interview with Sputnik. "Clinton would be best for US-UK relations and for relations with the European Union," Stefan Halper told the Kremlin-directed media outlet. "Clinton is well-known, deeply experienced, and predictable. US-UK relations will remain steady regardless of the winner although Clinton will be less disruptive over time."

The ICA includes a seven-page appendix devoted to RT, the central node, according to the document, of the Kremlin's effort to "influence politics, fuel discontent in [ sic ] US."

Adam Schiff appeared on RT in July 2013. He argued for "making the FISA court much more transparent, so the American people can understand what's being done in their name in the name of national security, so that we can have a more informed debate over the balance between privacy and security."

RT's editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, is a master propagandist, according to the ICA. The document fails to mention that Simonyan heads another Moscow-owned media initiative, Russia Beyond the Headlines , a news supplement inserted into dozens of the West's leading newspapers, including the New York Times . Russia Beyond the Headlines has been delivered to millions of American homes over the last decade. By contrast, RT's US market share is so small that it doesn't qualify for the Nielsen ratings. Virtually no one in the United States watches it.

Taking the logic of Brennan's handpicked team seriously would mean that the publishers of the New York Times played a major role in a coordinated Russian effort to elect Donald Trump.

'It Was an Operation to Bring Down Trump'

Nunes realized even then the purpose of Obama's dossier. "Devin figured out in December what was going on," says Langer. "It was an operation to bring down Trump."

There was no evidence that any Trump associate had done anything improper regarding the Russians, and Nunes was losing patience. "We had serious things the committee wanted to do," he says. "With Trump elected, we could do some big stuff, like with China."

Still, it was important for HPSCI to maintain control of the Russia investigation. Otherwise, Democrats and Never Trump Republicans were likely to get their wish to convene a bipartisan commission to investigate Russian interference -- with the purpose of turning it on Trump.

"Before they started floating the idea of a special counsel, the big idea was a special commission like the 9/11 Commission," says Langer. It was outgoing secretary of state John Kerry who first came forward with the proposal.

The point was to change the power dynamic. "In a normal committee," says Langer, "the majority has the power, and that happened to be us. They wanted to strip our power and make it fifty-fifty."

"Bipartisan" was a euphemism for "anti-Trump." "It would have been a complete joke," says Nunes. "A combination of partisan hacks from the left and people who hated Trump on the right."

Democrats led by Schiff and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer were joined by the late John McCain, the most active of the Never Trump Republicans. After the election, the Arizona senator had instructed his aide David Kramer to deliver a copy of the Steele Dossier to Comey.

"God only knows who they'd have populated that committee with," says Nunes. "Anyone they could control. It would have been a freak show."

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan defended HPSCI's independence. On the Senate side, Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr had only one move. To deflect demands for an independent commission, he effectively ceded control of the Senate investigation to his vice chair, Democrat Mark Warner.

No Evidence of Collusion Years Later

Still, Nunes believed that all the talk of Trump and Russia was a waste of time. "They kept promising us evidence of collusion, week after week, and they came up with nothing."

Nunes's disdain for the ICA forced the Crossfire Hurricane team's hand. "Right around the time that they came out with the ICA, they kept saying that we were waiting on something to show us, something important that was coming in," he says. "They said it was some significant figure who they couldn't quite track down yet."

But the FBI knew exactly where its missing link was, the piece of evidence that they thought would convince hardened skeptics like Nunes that collusion was real. They didn't have to chase him down, because he was sitting at home in Chicago. He submitted to a voluntary interview January 27 and without a lawyer because he had no idea what the FBI had in store for him.

The Crossfire Hurricane team was figuring how they were going to set up the Trump adviser they'd used to open up the investigation in July 2016: George Papadopoulos. Lee Smith is the media columnist at Tablet.

[Nov 01, 2019] Thank God For The Deep State Intel Agents Admit They Want To Take Out Trump

Nov 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Fri, 11/01/2019 - 08:05 0 SHARES

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

"These are people who are doing their duty or responding to a higher call."

Two former intelligence heads bragged about how the deep state is engaged in a coup to remove President Trump Thursday, with one even praising God for the existence of the deep state.

During an interview with Margaret Brennan of CSPAN, former CIA head John McLaughlin along with his successor John Brennan both basically admitted that there is a secretive cabal of people within US intelligence who are trying to 'take Trump out'.

"Thank God for the 'Deep State,'" McLaughlin crowed as liberals in the crowd cheered.

Tom Elliott ‏ @ tomselliott 15h 15 hours ago Follow Follow @ tomselliott Following Following @ tomselliott Unfollow Unfollow @ tomselliott Blocked Blocked @ tomselliott Unblock Unblock @ tomselliott Pending Pending follow request from @ tomselliott Cancel Cancel your follow request to @ tomselliott More

Former CIA director John McLaughlin on Trump's impeachment: "Thank God for the deep state"

Wakeup Bud ‏ @ spank419 13h 13 hours ago Replying to @ tomselliott

Mr. President it's time to completely clean out all of the Intel agencies from top to bottom. This is 40 years in the making if not more. It took a complete outsider to create this and thank God you'll be there for another five years @ realDonaldTrump

"I mean I think everyone has seen this progression of diplomats and intelligence officers and White House people trooping up to Capitol Hill right now and saying these are people who are doing their duty or responding to a higher call." he added.

"With all of the people who knew what was going on here, it took an intelligence officer to step forward and say something about it, which was the trigger that then unleashed everything else," McLaughlin said, referring to the unnamed 'whistleblower', who it seems worked for Obama, Biden And Brennan .

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BREAKING The White House "whistleblower" is Eric Ciaramella. - Registered Democrat - Worked for Obama - Worked with Joe Biden - Worked for CIA Director John Brennan - Vocal critic of Trump - Helped initiate the Russia "collusion" investigation hoax

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      Replying to @ bennyjohnson

      "Ciaramella worked on Ukrainian policy issues for Biden in 2015 and 2016, when the vice president was President Obama's "point man" for Ukraine. A Yale graduate, Ciaramella is said to speak Russian and Ukrainian, as well as Arabic. He had been assigned to the NSC by Brennan."

"This is the institution within the U.S. government -- that with all of its flaws, and it makes mistakes -- is institutionally committed to objectivity and telling the truth," McLaughlin claimed.

"It is one of the few institutions in Washington that is not in a chain of command that makes or implements policy. Its whole job is to speak the truth -- it's engraved in marble in the lobby." he continued to blather.

Brennan also expressed praise for the deep state and admitted that the goal is to remove the President.

"Thank goodness for the women and men who are in the intelligence community and the law enforcement community who are standing up and carrying out their responsibilities for their fellow citizens." he said.

Tom Elliott ‏ @ tomselliott 15h 15 hours ago Follow Follow @ tomselliott Following Following @ tomselliott Unfollow Unfollow @ tomselliott Blocked Blocked @ tomselliott Unblock Unblock @ tomselliott Pending Pending follow request from @ tomselliott Cancel Cancel your follow request to @ tomselliott More
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. @ JohnBrennan on the whistleblower coming from the intel community: They're "ighting in the trenches here and overseas I'm just pleased every day that my former colleagues in the intelligence community continue to do their duties."

There you have it. Two former CIA heads admitting that there is a plot to take out a duly-elected President.

Brennan lecturing anyone about telling the truth is also a complete joke, given that he publicly lied to Congress without any repercussions.

Americans reacted in droves to these intel slugs laughing about trying to remove Trump:

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Replying to @ tomselliott

I'm old enough to remember being told the Deep State was just a "right-wing conspiracy theory". Funny, because that's exactly what they call what's about to be reported by the IG and prosecuted by the DOJ.....

Omega_Man , 33 seconds ago link

CIA's largest mission is to protect their own corruption... enriching themselves and their dem friends... just close the CIA and start a new agency without all the ********...but get your own army to protect you first!! marines

Chupacabra-322 , 2 minutes ago link

No one in the Criminal government is following the law as everyone can see, new horror stories everyday and every second of the day emerge. The American government system is criminal, an organized crime syndicate of liars, thieves and murders. The lowest trailer park trash most people would try to avoid. That's the quality of the people working in the US government.

The Social Climate only reflects that Evil.

Whatever Trust, Loyalty & Respect you thought the American People had for you has been completely Squandered.

And, you Sick, Twisted, Treasonous, Seditious, Murdering ***** have absolutely NO ONE to Blame but yourselves.

The time to Eliminate & Defund these Criminal Treasonous Seditious Intelligence Agencies which have morphed into Crime Syndicate's has arrived.

**** THIS ****!!!

Until I see the Clintons rotting in jail along with the Bush family & the Obama's, Until I witness 3/4 of congress & the senate being purged & prosecuted, Until I witness the complete dismantle of the FED, Until I witness ALL military bases around the globe being closed & folks coming back home, Until I witness the MIC's budget cut down to 1/4 only for national protection, Until I witness the purge of all the CIA/FBI cartel, Until I witness manufacturing being restored in the Country, Until I witness the USA cutting all special interests & lobbying on behalf of Israel/Zionists & SA, Until I Witness the break of Wall Street & the Banks monopoly on the Economy & PM, Until I witness the full restoration of the rule of Law......................... Until then, to me.

It's absolute, complete, open, in your Faces Tyrannical Lawlessness.

Manthong , 2 minutes ago link

They don't care about the law, ethics and decency

THEY are morally superior

Interested_Observer , 3 minutes ago link

That moment when they are so confident that they admit the truth.

Is also the exact same moment when

conspiracy theory becomes

F A C T

Oldwood , 7 minutes ago link

Evidently "The Truth" is whatever is left after the rest has been silenced.

The intelligence community's (inclusive of the MSM) mission is to control information. They are the arbiters of what we see and hear while also monitoring it as a closed loop. CONTROL. Rather than call themselves "intelligence" they should instead adopt a more accurate title of "Information Control" given their intelligence is doubtful.

Given they are an outgrowth of what has kindly been called the fundamental transformation of America, we can only assume that they also are agents of change. Their control is designed to SHAPE America into the country or gulag they wish it to become. They are preserving nothing of the founder's intentions or even the constitution beyond what powers they can extrude from painful manipulation of language. This is about maintaining a course designed to specifically change America forever.

And many anticipate the change as something for the better. They bemoan the difficulty in existing opportunities convinced that this new improved America will finally reward them for their meager efforts. What they will discover in the end is that all opportunities will evaporate except for the few reserved for those most highly connected, an iron door closing to all others.

Trader-Scholar , 9 minutes ago link

Slightly off topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Trump . President Trumps uncle was a world class electrical engineer, inventor, and physicist. Together with Robert J. Van de Graaff , he developed one of the first million-volt X-ray generators. When Tesla died in 1943 his papers were taken by military intelligence and given to John Trump for review and development. Trump also debriefed top German scientists after the war. Donald may be an "outsider" but his uncle had the highest military clearance.

CAPT DRAKE , 17 minutes ago link

I knew these CIA assholes when I was working in Africa. If they worked 4 hours a day it was a lot. It was basically a no-show job. Push papers, reports written by a specialist that did this for them. Useless work. Their contribution is worth maybe $10.00/hr. This is why they guard and fight so hard to maintain this lifestyle.

[Nov 01, 2019] Just for starters: a real election platform for Tulsi

Nov 01, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Rhys Jaggar

Next they will try saying that because she is not a mother she has no place being President. If I had a vote in the US, I would vote for any man, woman, black/white/Hisoanic/Asian/any other ethnicity, straight/gay/indeterminate who:

1. Pledged to cut the US military budget in half, sign up to existing OPCW conventions on chemical+biological weapons and demanded that Israel did likewise.
2. Removed the right for dual citizen US-Israeli zionists to hold public US office (tell em to decide whether they are primarily aligned to Israel or not) and neutered the election-rigging AIPAC monstrosity at source.
3. Called out the global warming hoax as the biggest scam of the 21st century.
4. Enforced the concept that polluters pay to clean up their polluting, particularly in extractive industries, agriculture, mining and packaging.
5. Promoted the restoration of mutually owned local finance, particularly in providing mortgages.
6. Confronted the self-serving victim gravy train, in particular making the terms 'man' and 'woman' beyond the rights of anyone to take legal action.
7. vowed to shut down 25% of US overseas military bases in a first term and a further tranche in a second term.

Just for starters.

[Nov 01, 2019] Watching trolls emerge to discredit and attack the lone U.S. candidate who publicly and vocally opposes America's regime change wars and even dares tell the American people that "we are supporting the terrorists not fighting them" is bad enough in MSM, but a sad and interesting comment on how completely engaged the State has become with attempting to "control" and "shape" discourse on progressive sites such as this.

Nov 01, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Gary Weglarz

This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and this seems like a good post to share it on.

Watching trolls emerge to discredit and attack the lone U.S. candidate who publicly and vocally opposes America's regime change wars and even dares tell the American people that "we are supporting the terrorists – not fighting them" – is bad enough in MSM, but a sad and interesting comment on how completely engaged the State has become with attempting to "control" and "shape" discourse on progressive sites such as this.

My favorite of course is when one State troll debates another State troll in completely "fake" discourse, attempting to amplify their troll message. The other technique that is endlessly amusing is when a single troll posts something a well informed person with progressive values can quite agree with one day, followed the next by complete gibberish posing as "sophistication," followed the next day by talking points right out of the CIA & Pentagon, and then follows all that up with posting something sensible again. Just a bit "crazy-making" no?

It pays to remember ("The 4 D's: Deny / Disrupt / Degrade / Deceive") that come right out of the trolling manual. It should be a red-flag if these descriptors characterize someone's posts.

The saying that if it ("looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, well, it just might be a duck") – is one that is worth applying to our comment's sections discourse. Because if it "posts like a troll"- in the end it doesn't really matter if it "is" a troll (something we will never know), or is simply an uniformed but opinionated idiot – as that person is "doing the work of" the State sponsored trolls in either case.

I find it is always worth periodically reviewing what we know about these operations (thank you Edward Snowden) – as it helps us to better understand and prepares us to better deal with the State sponsored troll operations we now see routinely in all of our truly progressive comments sections on alternative media sites. What we now deal with here at OffG and elsewhere are daily routine attempts to take over, shape and control otherwise rational informed sincere discussion by readers. Sadly this is how some people make their living – existing in a continual state of existential "bad faith."

https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

[Nov 01, 2019] The Piece of Presstitute Excrement known as the NYTimes Has Had to Admit that Yes there Is a Deep State at War with President Trump by Paul Craig Roberts

Nov 01, 2019 | www.unz.com

This is a surprisingly good report from Robert Merry. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52461.htm

The only mistake Merry makes is his erroneous statement that Trump held up aid to Ukraine to pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate the Ukrainian firm that made $1,750,000 payments to the corrupt Biden and his corrupt son. The transcript of the telephone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president shows no Quid Pro Quo, and the Ukrainian president says there was none. The Quid Pro Quo was entirely on Biden's part when he told the president of Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating the firm that was paying him and his son seven figures in protection money or forfeit $1 billion in US aid. You can watch it here: https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-joe-biden-forced-ukraine-to-fire-prosecutor-for-aid-money/C1C51BB8-3988-4070-869F-CAD3CA0E81D8.html

Moreover, even it Trump did threaten to withhold aid from a country that was covering up corruption by a US vice president and his son, that is the US president's right. There is no reason whatsoever that a president should permit US taxpayers' money to be given to a government that covers up corruption by a vice president of the United States.

We know for a fact that there was corruption by Vice President Biden. He bragged about it before the Council on Foreign Relations. You can watch him doing so here: https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-joe-biden-forced-ukraine-to-fire-prosecutor-for-aid-money/C1C51BB8-3988-4070-869F-CAD3CA0E81D8.html

Biden's son has admitted that he used poor judgment taking money from a firm in order to protect it from prosecution.

Even if Trump did what the Democrats allege, which he did not, there is nothing illegal or unethical about it whatsoever. Compared to the tactics US prosecutors use to convict the innocent, Trump's conversation with the president of Ukraine is far above the highest ethics known to US prosecutors.

Why aren't the Democrats complaining about the criminally illegal treatment of Julian Assange and Manning? The reason is that the Democrats, the most utterly corrupt political organization on the face of the Earth, are bought and paid for by the Deep State. The Democrats are dog excrement to the core. They are traitors to America and to our Constitutional order. The entire party should be arrested and put on trial for sedition to overthrow the government of the United States.

[Nov 01, 2019] Corporatism does not know any party by Saagar Enjeti Saagar Enjeti

Notable quotes:
"... Monday, that same company which was saved by the United States government was thrown a birthday party in the halls of the United States Congress committee which dispersed those funds? It literally doesn't get more corrupt than that. These people are so shameless they bragged about this party. They allowed it to be reported in Politico because that's just business as usual in our capital city ..."
"... So many on the right lecture the millennial generation and the working class as lazy. They give no credence to why exactly these people are angry. They watched the middle class get decimated, money get sent to Wall Street while our student debt exploded and any surplus cash that happened to be laying around was spent trying to turn the Middle East into a democratic paradise. America voted twice for change-agent Barack Obama to try and clean up the system, but he mostly just lectured corporations with an upturned chin and wagging finger, while letting them continue shipping jobs to China and Mexico. ..."
"... Institutionalized corruption has yielded disastrous results. ..."
Nov 01, 2019 | thehill.com

The House Ways and Means Committee threw a bipartisan "birthday bash" for insurance company AIG, that was widely attended by staffers across the aisle. The chairman of the committee, Richard Neal , who is a Democrat, gave remarks at the party. It included snacks, and an open bar serving a "centennial smash" signature cocktail, all while an acapella group serenaded the group to the tune of Pharrell's "Happy."

This is Versailles 1790's level stuff. It is a repulsive illustration of the bipartisan corruption that has seeped into our system. Don't forget this is the company received 190 billion dollars in bailout funds while the rest of the American middle class plummeted to destruction. It's also the same company which paid out $165 million in bonuses to its executives after receiving bailout money and facing zero repercussions from the Obama administration.

Monday, that same company which was saved by the United States government was thrown a birthday party in the halls of the United States Congress committee which dispersed those funds? It literally doesn't get more corrupt than that. These people are so shameless they bragged about this party. They allowed it to be reported in Politico because that's just business as usual in our capital city

Corporatism does not know any party. It has wormed its way into the highest levels of the United States government. It has ruled us to our detriment now for almost 40 years now. The left has responded to this moment with democratic socialism. The right looking at this movement is learning all of the wrong reasons; they're flying socialism sucks banners all across America without responding to the underlying structure of the American system as extraordinarily flawed

So many on the right lecture the millennial generation and the working class as lazy. They give no credence to why exactly these people are angry. They watched the middle class get decimated, money get sent to Wall Street while our student debt exploded and any surplus cash that happened to be laying around was spent trying to turn the Middle East into a democratic paradise. America voted twice for change-agent Barack Obama to try and clean up the system, but he mostly just lectured corporations with an upturned chin and wagging finger, while letting them continue shipping jobs to China and Mexico.

Institutionalized corruption has yielded disastrous results. A new survey from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation finds that more than 70% of millennials say they are likely to vote socialist, and that 1 in 5 think that America would be better off if private property was abolished. This makes perfect sense to me, because this generation sees the AIG bailout and the party 10 years later and goes, well if that's capitalism, then this crap is not for me

I know some of the people watching this probably are actual socialists. I don't think most of you are though. You're just fed up and you've been told that if you're against our current system then you're a socialist. So you shrug and go, sure, I guess. It is incumbent upon the right to restore and equitable and fair playing field within our system if we, correctly in my view, believe that capitalism is intrinsic to the strength of the United States

The libertarian streak of the Republican Party will be the electoral and moral death of it. Libertarianism was founded upon the idea that the greatest threat to you and your life is institutionalized power in the form of the government. It's time they understood that the government isn't the only institution which can hold power in our society. It's time to reign in that power wherever it reigns.

[Oct 31, 2019] WhistleBlower Ciaramella - IPOT

Eric Ciaramella is connected to Victoria Nuland. IIf this information is true, the entire Impeachment thing is a another phase of Russiagate. It's the Democrats attempt at a coup d'etat
Ciaramella, who was a Susan Rice protégé and was brought into the White House by H. R. McMaster. Looks like McMaster was a neocon zealot.
Oct 23, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Cajun Jim , 1 week ago

Great piece! I love that the reporter called the "whistle blower" the "whistle leaker" , much more accurate.

Diane Smith , 1 week ago

I'm so sick of this these snakes need there heads of there has to be justice

Ellen Jackson , 1 week ago

And Adam Schiff's sister is married to George Soros's son!

[Oct 31, 2019] Uncovering Russiagate's Origins Could Prevent Future Scandals

This is not a scandal, this is color revolution, a putsch supported by a large part of the USA intelligence agencies and Clinton wing of the Democratic Party.
Notable quotes:
"... And given the intrusion of the nation's intelligence's services into domestic politics, a failure to learn lessons and enact safeguards could leave future candidates, especially on the left, vulnerable to similar investigations . ..."
Oct 31, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

[Aaron Maté, The Nation ].

"There is no doubt that Donald Trump would like to exact political revenge on those behind the Russia probe, and it is fair to be skeptical of his Department of Justice. But it would be a mistake to reflexively dismiss the inquiry, which is led by US Attorney John Durham and overseen by Attorney General William Barr. The public deserves an accounting of what occurred.

And given the intrusion of the nation's intelligence's services into domestic politics, a failure to learn lessons and enact safeguards could leave future candidates, especially on the left, vulnerable to similar investigations .

And even with this all-consuming investigation now over, we still do not have a firm understanding of how it began." • A lonely voice of reason.

[Oct 30, 2019] Karma Three Months After Kamala Harris Made Fun of Her Polling Numbers, Tulsi Gabbard Edges Ahead of Her

Graphics deleted...
Oct 30, 2019 | www.redstate.com

You know what they say about karma being a (word that rhymes with "witch"), right?

At the second Democratic presidential primary debate back in July, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI) absolutely torched Sen. Kamala Harris' (CA) criminal justice reform record during her time as California's attorney general. It was the political shot heard round the world.

In case you missed it, watch it below:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/o1-CRrMDSLs

Understandably, Harris was none too pleased about it and let it be known in a post-debate interview in what Brandon Morse described at the time as a "childish and elitist" response :

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: Did you expect that from Tulsi Gabbard? Had you had interaction about that in the past? And how do you think it went?

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: Well, I mean, listen, I -- this is going to sound immodest, but I'm obviously a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I would be on the stage and take hits tonight because there are a lot of people that are trying to make the stage for the next debate.

COOPER: For a lot of them it's do or die.

HARRIS: Especially when some people are at zero or 1%, whatever she might be at. So I did expect that I might take hits tonight.

Watch:

Embedded video

It was a particularly cheap shot from someone who'd had such a disastrously poor debate performance. She actually stooped even lower during the same interview with Cooper, calling Gabbard an "apologist" for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Well, here we are three months later, and the tables have dramatically turned. Not only has Kamala Harris' campaign cratered , but in some national and state polls Gabbard is now ahead of her, in spite of vicious attacks on the Hawaii congresswoman earlier this month from failed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

First up, the CNN/UH state poll out of New Hampshire:

... ... ...

Here's how things have trended in that poll since July:

... ... ...

Next, a national poll from Suffolk University and USA Today:

... ... ...

The trend on that one looks like this:

... ... ...

To be fair, there are other polls taken recently that show Harris ahead of Gabbard by a few percentage points, but it's still gotta sting Harris to know that the woman whose numbers she made fun of back in July is polling ahead of her in select polls now.

Daily Caller's James Hasson calls it for what it is:

... ... ...

To make matters worse for Harris, Gabbard is just one poll away from qualifying for the November Democratic debate (which is scheduled for Nov. 20th in Georgia ).

Assuming Gabbard ends up qualifying, one has to wonder if she'll be prepared to use a rhetorical finishing maneuver on her political foe this time around (assuming the mods don't run interference ).

-- Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 16+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here . Connect with her on Twitter . –

[Oct 30, 2019] It's Not All About the Bidens Why Trump Has Ukraine on the Brain by Lee Smith

Oct 07, 2019 | www.realclearinvestigations.com

The impeachment inquiry Democrats launched last month may ultimately hinge on a simple question: Did President Trump try to force a foreign power (or powers) to help him take down a political opponent, Joe Biden?

But the backdrop of their effort is far more complex and convoluted, connected not just to Trump's phone call with the president of Ukraine and related evidence but the three-year war of attrition the Democrats have waged against the president. Their main instrument was the Trump-Russia collusion story that roiled the capital until Special Counsel Robert Mueller pronounced it unfounded. Now they have moved on to one or more "whistleblower" complaints from within the intelligence community .

Given all the focus on nefarious Russia, you could be forgiven for missing the fact that Ukraine was always at the center of the Trump-Russia affair.

Viewed in this light, the Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo bribery narrative must compete with another explanation: Trump's determination to get to the bottom of an underhanded years-long campaign arrayed against him. One of the first things he did after the Mueller report debunked the collusion narrative was to call the Ukranian president and ask him to help do just that.

The impeachment battle is not just about congressional probes and alleged presidential strong-arming, but about the Russiagate narrative. Anti-Trump forces in the government and media are working to vindicate their previous efforts and discredit a forthcoming Justice Department inquiry into the origins of Russiagate by again connecting Trump and a foreign power to a U.S. election.

I've covered the Trump-Russia story for three years. Even before these operations emerged publicly after Trump's 2016 victory, I doubted the pre-election whisper campaign circulating throughout the Washington press corps that held Trump was clandestinely cooperating with Moscow.

First, the idea that Trump had for many years been a Russian ally, even an agent, was hard to believe given that there had been no mention of this during a long career lived entirely in the spotlight. I was especially skeptical of this claim because Trump's business concerns were based largely in the most media-saturated city in the world, and because they involved industries – especially real estate and casinos – that attract the attention of legal authorities.

Family matters: Joe Biden, right, and his son Hunter at a commemoraton for the Vice President's late son late Beau. AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu

Second, candidate Trump's proposed policies toward Russia were similar to those of the Obama administration – and would prove tougher after he was elected – making it hard to see how he was secretly beholden to Moscow.

I was not surprised when the special counsel concluded the story was false. Neither was it surprising, given the amount of money, time, and prestige spent on pushing collusion, to see Russiagate rebooted two weeks ago in the form of a whistleblower's complaint.

So far the basic facts are these: An active, and unnamed, CIA officer alleged that Trump had sought information from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky regarding Biden's involvement in a Ukrainian prosecution possibly involving his son Hunter. In exchange for information that, according to the CIA officer, would assist Trump's 2020 re-election, the president would release military aid to Ukraine.

Although the details are different – no mention this time of hookers and golden showers – the whistleblower's central claim closely resembles the thesis laid out in the anti-Trump dossier compiled by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, which the FBI used as its roadmap to collusion: That Trump took or solicited dirt on his Democratic opponent from a foreign power in exchange for favors to that country's government.

Once again, much of the media seem to be treating every allegation against Trump as probable fact, while dismissing any questions and concerns as conspiracy theories.

Attorney General William Barr and President Trump: "Our country has been through a lot," Trump told President Zelensky. "They say a lot of it started with Ukraine." AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Although the whistleblower complaint seems to have emerged quickly, it must be viewed in context of the long war against Trump and its numerous elements tied to Ukraine.

Recent interviews with senior sources on Capitol Hill and newly acquired documents show that Ukraine was and continues to be central to the effort to take down Trump.

That's why Trump's most urgent request of the Ukrainian president was to assist Attorney General William Barr in his investigation of the origins of the FBI's Trump-Russia probe.

"Our country has been through a lot," Trump told President Zelensky. "They say a lot of it started with Ukraine."

This assertion was not wrong. And yet for all of the foreigners, including Ukrainians, who played roles in Russiagate, this is a story about Americans with the sort of scruples, ambitions, and labyrinthine connections found in a Dostoevsky novel.

Origins of Clinton-Tied Ukraine Dirt-Digging

It is significant, in this time of separate left and right media echo chambers, that an early account of Hillary Clinton campaign efforts to dig up dirt on Team Trump using Ukraine didn't originate on the right: It was a Politico report by Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern. (A repeat seems unlikely now: Vogel's current employer, the New York Times, has dismissed Trump's claims about Ukraine's role in Russiagate as part of a right-wing conspiracy theory.)

The Ukraine story starts no later than March 2016, when Democratic Party operative and Ukrainian-American activist Alexandra Chalupa approached the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington for information on the Trump campaign.

As John Solomon of The Hill newspaper wrote in May, Chalupa asked Ukrainian diplomats for "evidence that Trump, his organization and [campaign manager Paul] Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with Putin against the U.S. interests."

Chalupa emailed Democratic National Committee officials that she was briefing U.S. media on Manafort's work in Ukraine. One of the journalists was Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, who would later publish one of the key stories advancing the collusion narrative.

Ukraine's ambassador to Washington told Solomon that Chalupa wanted to approach a member of Congress to initiate hearings on Manafort or arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort's alleged Kremlin ties during a visit to Washington.

Keep that in mind when Democrats and their media allies routinely suggest it is treasonous to seek foreign aid during an election.

As Chalupa was pursuing these channels, the Clinton campaign stepped up its efforts to find foreign dirt on Trump by hiring the Washington, D.C., firm Fusion GPS that March to compile and distribute opposition research on Trump. One of the company's co-founders, Glenn Simpson, was a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had written several articles about Manafort's work for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

In a 2007 article, Simpson wrote that Yanukovych "favors closer ties with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's administration."

That view would inform much of the operation to come. It would use Manafort's close ties to Yanukovych as the kernel of truth from which grew the vast Russiagate conspiracy.

Fusion GPS's most infamous work product was the Steele dossier. But, as I report in my forthcoming book, "The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History," Simpson's organization compiled at least two separate opposition research documents on Manafort and his Ukraine business, which it shared with journalists starting in spring 2016.

From one of at least two dossiers on Paul Manafort and Ukraine circulated by Fusion GPS.

One is an eight-page document titled "Paul Manafort – Ukraine and Lichtenstein," the other is nine pages, titled "UPDATE – Paul Manafort." Links to Ukrainian- and Russian-language Internet portals show that the research was compiled by someone who knew the languages. In October 2015, Fusion GPS had brought on former Russian history professor Nellie Ohr for Trump-Russia research. Ohr's husband, top Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, would later help spread Clinton-financed opposition research to the federal government, helping prompt the Trump/Russia collusion probe.

The documents reference flight records, travel documents, and business agreements while noting Manafort's relationships with several Ukrainian officials, including Yanukovych's chief of staff, and oligarchs such as Clinton Foundation donor Victor Pinchuk, described as a "Yanukovych booster."

Without evidence, one of the dossiers alleges that "the Russian government played a leading role in promoting the Yanukovych presidency and Manafort worked closely with several Russians during his time in Ukraine."

The other makes the speculative, if ominious-sounding, claim that "Manafort's newfound role as campaign manager to Trump could offer Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin a new way to exert influence on Trump."

Driving the Manafort-Yanukovych Narrative

Even as Clinton operatives sought the help of Ukrainian officials, they and their allies in the press routinely mischaracterized Yanukovych as pro-Putin, advancing the Russia collusion narrative.

Biden at a Kyiv memorial to protesters, 2014: Later his son Hunter was hired by an ally of the just-exiled President, questionably tarred by Clinton operatives as a Putin stooge.

Ukraine is a buffer state, caught between European neighbors to the west and Russia to the east. Its challenge is to balance the two against each other. Failure to do so is apt to lead to conflict, such as the present war between the Kyiv government and Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

After Yanukovych became president in 2010, Manafort recommended that he draw closer to the European Union with a trade deal. Putin saw that as a threat, and gave Yanukovych a choice between crippling economic measures and a $15 billion aid package.

Ultimately, Yanukovych rejected Manafort's advice, bowing to Putin in late 2013, touching off protests in the Ukrainian capital that led to deadly violence.

That turmoil started a new chapter in U.S.-Ukraine relations as the Obama White House made then Vice President Joe Biden the point man on the issue.

Biden had known Yanukovych since 2009 and spoke with him frequently during the crisis.

The Obama administration, however, had little confidence in Yanukovych. State Department officials on the ground the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, including Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland scrambled to piece together a coalition government. Yanukovych fled his country for sanctuary in Russia in February 2014, just days after his final phone call with Biden, when government snipers killed at least 88 protesters in the capital.

In April 2014, Biden traveled to Kyiv with a small economic aid package, and warned the Ukrainians to rein in corruption. A month later, his son Hunter was named to the board of Burisma, one of Ukraine's largest independent energy companies. Although he had no experience in the energy sector, Hunter was paid as much as $50,000 a month for his services.

Here's where the politics get even more interesting. Burisma's owner was not a reformer, but an ally of the just-exiled Yanukovych, having served as his minister of natural resources. Despite the Biden family's financial relationship with the Yanukovych circle, Clinton operatives painted Manafort's association with Yanukovych as evidence of the Trump campaign's pro-Putin sentiments.

In a three-day period at the end of April 2016, for instance, Slate, the Washington Post and Guardian all published articles alleging that Manafort's work for Yanukovych showed the Trump team was close to Russia.

This is another reminder of the double-standard that has driven so much media coverage: the eagerness to buy Clinton's spin on Manafort and then connect Trump to it all while dismissing Biden's clear conflicts.

Clinton Operative Alleges a Ukrainian-Related Quid Pro Quo

Indeed, Manafort's relationship with Yanukovych became a keystone of the Trump-Russia narrative. A July 18, 2016 Washington Post article , for example, cited it before reporting new "evidence" that the campaign was cozying up to Putin.

Paul Manafort, right, behind Ivanka Trump during a rehearsal at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Next to the future President is Manafort's chief deputy, Rick Gates, later indicted along with his boss.

Trump staffers, according to the article, "stripped out" the Republican National Convention platform's call for giving Ukraine "lethal defensive weapons."

That was inaccurate . One GOP delegate proposed an amendment calling for giving lethal aid to Ukraine. The amendment was toned down by a Trump adviser, changing it to "appropriate assistance." The result was that the amendment was softened but the platform's position on Ukraine was strengthened. In office, the Trump administration, unlike Obama's, sent weapons to Kyiv.

That Post story illustrates the success of the Clinton operation in convincing many media outlets and government agencies to interpret – and misinterpret – the Trump campaign through the lens of Russian collusion. This, in turn, erased skepticism they should have had in assessing the charges leveled for Clinton through Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS.

In a July memo written after the DNC emails had been leaked during the Democrats' convention, Steele alleged that the operation – the hack and the release of the emails – had been orchestrated by the Russians. Then he claimed Moscow had done it with the full knowledge of the Trump campaign. Manafort, Steele falsely claimed, was managing the "well-developed conspiracy" for the Trump side.

Further, Steele claimed, in exchange for the DNC hack and subsequent publication of the emails by WikiLeaks, the Trump team had agreed to sideline Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a campaign issue. This was the Clinton campaign's first allegation of a Ukraine-related quid pro quo. This was also false.

New York Times, Aug. 19, 2016

As Clinton operatives used Ukraine to falsely smear Trump, Manafort's ties to that country threw the Trump campaign into disarray. On Aug. 19, 2016, Manafort resigned as campaign manager following what the New York Times and others described as a wave of stories about his "dealings with Russia-aligned leaders." The Times pushed the larger collusion narrative being spun by Clinton, reporting that the Manafort dismissal "threw a spotlight on a glaring vulnerability for Mr. Trump: his admiration for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia."

The Times story also referenced its earlier article reporting that Manafort received illegal cash payments for his Ukraine work. Manafort denied it.

One source for the Times story was former Ukrainian parliamentarian Serhiy Leshchenko, also referred to in the whistleblower complaint. According to former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr , Leshchenko was a source for Fusion GPS as well.

Two years later, in August 2018, Manafort pleaded guilty to tax and bank fraud connected to his work in the Ukraine undertaken years before he joined the Trump campaign.

The Steele-Isikoff Nexus

With Manafort driven from the campaign just two months before the election, Clinton operatives and the FBI zeroed in on another Trump adviser, Carter Page. Once again an alleged Ukraine quid pro quo was at the center of it.

In July, Steele had alleged that Page was one of Manafort's "intermediaries" in the "well-developed conspiracy" between Trump and Russia. The former British spy's second-hand sources claimed that Page had met secretly with a Russian energy executive.

The executive, according to Steele, raised with Page the prospect of U.S.-Russia energy cooperation in exchange for dropping sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014 for invading Ukraine.

Yahoo News

This second Ukraine-related quid pro quo was the subject of Michael Isikoff's Sept. 23 Yahoo News article, based on information from Steele, whom Isikoff describes as an anonymous "Western intelligence source."

A few weeks later, Steele revised his reporting on Page's meeting for a memo dated Oct. 18. The British spy's unnamed sources changed their story, contending that the Trump adviser had been offered a bribe if he convinced Trump to drop Ukraine-related sanctions. In a sign of how deeply the media and FBI had accepted the Russiagate hoax, no one seemed to question that laughably large amount of this alleged bribe – a brokerage fee on a sale of 19% of the Russian oil giant Rosneft, which would have been worth at least tens of millions of dollars.

On Oct. 21, the FBI obtained a warrant to spy on Page. The still heavily redacted warrant shows that Steele's account of Page's meeting with the Russian energy executive to discuss Ukraine sanctions was a key piece of evidence.

As supporting evidence, the bureau used Isikoff's article and two other Ukraine-related news reports. One was the July Washington Post story alleging that the Trump campaign had weakened the party's convention platform. The second article claimed that Trump had softened his support for Ukraine after Page and Manafort joined the campaign.

This is one reason many consider the Steele dossier to be one of the least credible and most successful pieces of opposition research in U.S. history.

Allegations Tie Up Incoming Trump Team

John Brennan: "High confidence" Putin had developed a preference for Trump because of his "Russia-friendly positions" on Ukraine. AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Even as Clinton tied Trump to Russia and blamed both for hacks of the DNC servers, the Obama administration downplayed Russian interference in the 2016 election so as not to taint Clinton's widely expected victory. After Trump won, Obama retaliated. In late December, he expelled Russian diplomats, closed their diplomatic facilities, and sanctioned Russia's military intelligence service (GRU) and four of its senior officers.

A document released the following week showed why the administration had targeted the GRU. According to the January 2017 intelligence community assessment of Russia's interference in the 2016 elections, the GRU was behind the DNC hack.

Further, then-CIA director John Brennan's handpicked teams of analysts assessed with "high confidence" that Putin had developed a preference for Trump because of his "Russia-friendly positions" on Ukraine.

Days later, Steele's reports were made public. According to his sources, the DNC hack was part of a quid pro quo regarding Ukraine.

Now the connections between Trump and the Russians were lit up like a string of holiday lights -- Obama had sanctioned the GRU because of the DNC hack, which the Russians engineered on behalf of the Trump campaign in exchange for sidelining Ukraine as a campaign issue.

Robert Mueller, testifying. His report made no mention of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, or Alexandra Chalupa. It discussed Ukraine only in relation to Manafort and Gates.

The operation continued to unfold as the FBI and DoJ pursued their counterintelligence probe of Trump and associates, eventually leading to Mueller's appointment as special counsel.

Mueller's probe focused almost entirely on Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 election and its possible connections to Trump. He and his team displayed no interest in exploring how Clinton operatives had worked with foreign interests to sway the same election.

Still, Mueller's report found no evidence of collusion between the Trump circle and Russian officials. The report makes no mention of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, or Alexandra Chalupa. Leshschenko appears only in a footnote. The report discusses Ukraine only in relation to Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates.

Now, the Ukraine Chapter

But Ukraine's new starring role was still to come. The Intelligence Community's Inspector General relayed the newly disclosed "whistleblower" complaint from the CIA analyst to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during a transitional period. Both DNI Dan Coats and Deputy Director Sue Gordon had just resigned when the whistleblower's complaint reached Acting DNI Joseph Maguire on Aug. 16, his first day on the job.

Previously, the ICIG's whistleblower's form required first-hand knowledge of the reported concern to file a complaint. The updated form , which was "revised after press inquiries" regarding the whistleblower's complaint, eliminated the requirement of first-hand knowledge. The CIA officer's complaint appears to provide only hearsay.

Adam Schiff: Apparently knew of whistleblower complaint before he subpoenaed it.

In September, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff issued a subpoena to Maguire to produce the complaint. Yet Schiff apparently already knew its contents. More than two weeks earlier, he'd written on Twitter , "Trump is withholding vital military aid to Ukraine, while his personal lawyer seeks help from the Ukraine government to investigate his political opponent." A New York Times story last week reported that Schiff was briefed by an aide on the substance of the whistleblower's complaint before it was filed with the ICIG.

In driving the whistleblower chapter of the Russiagate operation, Schiff reprised the part he played in its earlier chapters. For nearly two years the California congressman filled the media with claims there was more than circumstantial evidence of collusion that would bring down the president.

On Sept. 13, ODNI's general counsel wrote Schiff and other leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees that since the whistleblower's complaint did not deal with intelligence activities or the conduct a member of the intelligence community (i.e., the president is not a member of the IC), it did not find it a matter of urgent concern.

Greg Miller, Washington Post: Whistleblower news was leaked to him and other journalists who earlier shared a Pulitzer Prize
relying on similar leaks against Trump about a Russia conspiracy, which proved unfounded.

Regardless, the subject matter, Trump's "promise" to a foreign official, was leaked for a Sept. 18 Washington Post story including the bylines of Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima, two of the reporters who in February 2017 received a seminal leak in the Trump-Russia case, regarding a conversation between Trump's erstwhile national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

The same political operatives and journalists appear throughout the anti-Trump operation, as do the same themes and even the same language.

The main charge in the whistleblower's complaint – that Trump solicited "interference from a foreign country in the 2020 election" – echoes the title of the Mueller report, "Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election . " The whistleblower's thesis is identical to the dossier's: Trump sought dirt on a political rival regarding Ukraine-related issues on a quid pro quo basis.

The nature of the call to Zelensky so alarmed Trump officials seeking to protect the president, according to the unnamed CIA officer, that they stored the transcript in a secure system usually reserved for programs like covert action. It was a detail contrived to further smear Trump as deceptive, but Trump deputies had begun using the system after his conversations with world leaders were leaked to the press early during the administration.

In February 2017, the Washington Post's Miller had the lead byline on a story based on leaks of Trump's conversations with Australia's prime minister and Mexico's president. Six months later, the Post published the entire transcripts of both conversations in another Miller story.

It was through such national security correspondents that anti-Trump sources -- intelligence officials -- pushed leaks of classified information and other tidbits intended to damage Trump into the media. There it merged with other anti-Trump currents in nearly every corner of the press, where it blossomed into Russiagate.

After a nearly two-year investigation, the special counsel found no evidence of collusion. But given the scale of the damage done to the public sphere, clearly something had happened. Among other things, the FBI had put a presidential campaign under surveillance.

It was logical that Trump, and millions of other Americans, wanted to know the origins of the Russia probe and that the investigative work would be taken up by the Department of Justice. Since DoJ and FBI officials at the highest levels were implicated, it was natural that the attorney general himself would have a hand in the investigation.

Thus the panicked clamor coursing through the press at present is not about Joe Biden or his son or Trump's alleged commerce with foreign powers. Rather, it is the fear that the Russiagate bubble is likely to burst. And the fear that none of the reporters, intelligence officials, and political operatives responsible for pushing the largest and most destructive conspiracy theory in American history will escape the ruin.

[Oct 30, 2019] Mittens, the Deep State, and the Ongoing Coup Against POTUS

Oct 30, 2019 | www.redstate.com

Recently, one of my email pals sent me an incredible opinion piece from Howell Woltz at The International Centre for Justice, in Warsaw, Poland. He is the author of " Justice Denied: The United States vs. the People," a very interesting book about the US justice system and federal prisons and the need for some serious reform. Occasionally, an opinion piece is so profound that it simply MUST be disseminated to a much wider audience than a simple blog post. This is one of such article. In this commentary, he opines on the DoJ/FBI cabal's ongoing coup against POTUS while explaining some key connections among John Brennan , Mitt Romney, Cofer Black, Burisma Holdings (Ukraine), Bararck Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the rest. It fills in a lot of gaps and explains much about what is going on with respect to the Ukraine kerfuffle.

While I can't vouch for the veracity of all the claims here, this just rings true to me and connects a lot of very interesting dots. As usual, I caution you to "trust but verify." If nothing else, it serves as a departure point for your own dot-connecting activities. The more independent analysis is conducted by all, the clearer picture becomes over time. These are some extended excerpts from Woltz's opinion piece. More than a few light bulbs may be turned on for you after reading this. Note: this article was published on 8 October, so keep this in mind as you read it.

Donald J. Trump is not a RINO or DC insider. He's a tough-guy billionaire from Queens, New York and a street-fighter. When the Democrats realised last week that Trump was actually heading up his own investigation rather than leaving it to their Deep State apparatchiks -- and doing so directly with the leaders of Ukraine, Australia, and Italy (and perhaps the U.K.) -- they did the political equivalent of starting a fire in a theatre. House of Representatives Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced impeachment proceedings against the president just three hours after stating in a speech that she would not. Speaker Pelosi had zero evidence, cause, stated reason and lacked the required vote of the House of Representatives to do so, but announced it anyway.

Strangely enough and what caught my attention Mitt Romney jumped on the "Impeach Trump" train that same day. How did Nancy go from "There will be no impeachment proceedings," that morning in New York to announcing impeachment proceedings that afternoon when she got back to Washington, DC? Meet the Grand Master of the Deep State in America. Admitted Communist, John Brennan, who has some serious explaining to do now that his attempted coup of U.S. President Donald Trump has been exposed and continues! So why did Romney want to shut down any investigation of Ukraine's role as well? That's the question that got this investigation started and it's shocking.

Romney's National Security Advisor, Joseph Cofer Black, sits on the Board of the same Burisma Holdings that was being investigated for corruption back in 2014, and the Vice President and Obama Administration demanded be shut down. Why? Because Burisma was/is their vehicle for corrupt practices in Eastern Europe. And CIA Director, John Brennan's 9/11 Deep State partner, Cofer Black, is still the link to all that goes on there. In fact, I can state unequivocally that Burisma is the centre of Ukraine corruption and the Democrats' shadow organisation for corrupt activities. I live in Eastern Europe (Poland) and my sources are first-hand. And I know this matters greatly to Mitt Romney as he is not yet done with politics. If Black is busted, it will reflect on Romney, and it only makes sense that Cofer Black is the Deep State 'plant' in case Romney ever rises above polishing knobs in the U.S. Senate. Romney wants to run for President again in 2024 and if he wins, Cofer Black will be back with his fingers on the strings either as DNI or CIA Chief of Corruption. Burisma Holdings is the hub of U.S. Democrat activities to corrupt both Ukraine and American politics and there is proof. Ukraine President Zelenskyy's win surprised both Brennan and Black's Deep State ops as much as Trump's did in 2016 in America.

So who is this Cofer Black guy? Joseph Cofer Black, joined the CIA in 1974 and rose to be Director of The National Counterterrorism Center, before joining Mitt Romney. If it were not for researching this article, I admit, he was unknown to me as well. What a revelation. Black was also the Head of Counterintelligence who somehow missed the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, though according to The Economist , 16 foreign leaders and heads of intelligence agencies warned him it was not only going to happen but when. Oh well. And nothing was done about Cofer Black for this, indicating this is what the Deep State wanted. But it goes deeper. John Brennan and this guy, Cofer Black, are how 19 terrorists got into the U.S.A. to attack the U.S. on 9/11.

Editor Harry will jump on me or make Nurse Ratched give me a dose of Castor Oil if I say something I can't prove, so I'm just going to quote the CIA whistleblower at the Jeddah, Saudi Arabia CIA staff hearing, who is the source: "According to Freedom Outpost, Brennan was the CIA station chief in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when the 9/11 hijackers were given visas to travel to the United States. In September 2014, a whistleblower named Greg Ford, a former military intelligence officer, told Ground Zero Radio's Clyde Lewis that the CIA had objections to the approval of those visas but Brennan actually overrode them."

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The second in command of the CIA station was directly quoted by the whistleblower as saying, 'No way, absolutely we are not going to stamp those visas.' But CIA Saudi station chief, John Brennan, overrode the officer in charge and ordered the visas to be stamped and issued. They came, they learned to 'take off' an airplane but said they were not interested in 'how to land.' Cofer Black ignored the reports about this strange behaviour, though it was made, I know as a fact, from the people who made it. I was also a Florida-based pilot in 2001.

You know the rest of the story. America lost over 3,000 citizens that day, and I sat for an hour trying to get past the terrorist pilots' apartment in Coral Springs, Florida. Freedom Outpost concluded, "If it weren't for John Brennan, 9/11 may never have happened." I'd add to that, if Cofer Black weren't the head of Counterterrorism, Brennan could not have gotten his men in to do the job. It took (these) two to tango. That's an opinion, not news, but I'll bet money I don't have, that I'm right as it's a no risk bet. These are partners in crime.

"Joseph Cofer Black – the former Director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center (1999-2002) and Ambassador at Large for counter-terrorism (2002-2004)."

"Mr. Black is an internationally recognized authority on counterterrorism, cyber security, national security, and foreign affairs." (these are quotes from Burisma's website)

Brennan definitely had help in this. These terrorists had to have someone at the highest level in U.S. Counterintelligence to let their mission come to pass and succeed by ignoring all the warnings. They even took their flight training near my home, and I remember being locked down in Coral Springs, FL after 9/11 where they lived for three days while the FBI went through their apartment just a few blocks away. And this is where Romney's man, Joseph Cofer Black, comes in. He was the partner in crime of John Brennan, (the Deep State Master), as well as being Mitt Romney's National Security Advisor. Bad news for Mittens. And Cofer Black is the reason Romney is desperate to have President Trump's real investigation shut down. As Obama's CIA Director, John Brennan was also in charge of the dirty tricks campaign against then-candidate, Donald Trump. All of that has now been uncovered by investigative reporters Gregg Jarrett ( The Russia Hoax) and Peter Schweizer ( Secret Empires) with enough references to satisfy Editor Harry and Nurse Ratched.

Amazingly, the plot was actually laid by the Deep State in 2014 before they even knew Trump would be Hillary's foil in 2016. I found that part pretty amazing. The Ukraine/Russia story was created for whomever was the candidate to run against Hillary Clinton.

For John Brennan, it really didn't matter to him who ran on the Republican side. He just cared that whomever it was, lost to the Deep State's choice – Hillary Clinton. Brennan, Black, James Clapper, James Comey and a host of others were prepared to make sure of it. It was exposed just last week that Brennan flew under a fake passport to avoid detection on his trip to set this up in Eastern Europe as early as 2015. There is no explanation for a CIA Director to do this unless what he was doing was illegal.

Now let's go back to Joseph Cofer Black. He is Romney's Ukraine man, and Brennan's long-time associate who is still covering here in Eastern Europe (from where I am reporting) for the Deep State in America. Brennan came back Stateside from the Saudi Arabian CIA office the year after arranging for the 9/11 attackers to get into America. So what did he do? He took over CIA Counterintelligence from his partner, Cofer Black. Convenient, eh? The Counterintelligence guy who 'missed' the 16 warnings on 9/11, and the guy who granted the attackers visas to get into the U.S. to take pilot training and do it, swap jobs, perhaps to prevent detection? Well it worked until now.

And history repeats. The tag team is back at it. Barack Obama chose (or was told) to make John Brennan his CIA Director. Brennan then sets up the Russian hoax through the Ukraine government and intel operatives covertly in 2015 to target any candidate who might face Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Once Trump became the Republican candidate, President Obama authorised illegal spying on Trump's campaign, we now know, because it was labeled a 'counterintelligence operation' which can only be authorised by a President.

The script for the Ukraine/Russia hoax was actually written back in 2007 to use against Republican candidate, John McCain. It was temporarily deployed but then shut down and recycled when it was clear RINO McCain would get his ass handed to him by Obama in 2008 without CIA involvement.. So, Brennan decided to use the script in 2016. The Republican's candidate would be targeted using the same plan, according to one of Obama's own secret service agents, now author, Dan Bongino, in his new book, Exonerated (just out last week).

The original script was written by Fusion GPS owner, Glenn Simpson. That's the same man and company who would be paid $12 million by the Clinton Campaign, The Democrat National Committee and the FBI in 2016 for "the Steele dossier" that caused the Russia Hoax against Trump -- though actually written years earlier. Glenn Simpson simply changed the names.

Unfortunately, there was a problem. Socialist Bernie Sanders was leading the Democrats side over the Chosen, Hillary, and had to be eliminated. To achieve this, the Clintons literally did a forced takeover of The Democrat National Committee and its funds. They immediately cut off Hillary's rival, Bernie Sander's campaign (as admitted by former DNC Director, Donna Brazille, on television) eliminating Bernie from the race.

John Brennan then began leaking the 'dossier' to Congressional Democrats, including then-[Senate Minority Leader], Harry Reid and their media co-conspirators to begin the take down of the Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump. Ironically, Brennan also leaked the fake dossier to Sen. John McCain, it's original target, and McCain leaked it back to its original source -- the FBI -- to apply for warrants to spy on Trump using their own laundered information. The FBI literally paid for the fabricated information, leaked it to the media and politicians who hated Trump, then used their reports and that dossier when fed back to them, to get warrants to spy on Trump. But then the kimchee hits the fan for real. Trump gets elected! So, who jumps over to Ukraine to protect the conspiracy from being found out? Brennan's 9/11 partner, Joseph Cofer Black

Within days of Trump's inauguration was immediately put in place in Ukraine to prevent anyone from talking. The Board of Burisma Holdings -- the same centre of Ukraine corruption used by Joe Biden in 2014 to enrich his kid -- was the base from which to shield the Democrat origins of the Russia Hoax and its intel roots from any real investigation.

By February of 2017, Cofer Black was a voting member of the Board of Burisma. You'll hear the screams around the world this week as the democrats realise that Trump has taken this investigation on personally rather than leaving it to the deep state vermin. It's all starting to fit together now, isn't it? So, here's what to expect.

Yes. There will be wailing a-plenty and gnashing of teeth over coming days, and this is the point where the president's security needs to be at an all-time high, cause The Deep State is spinning out of control and desperate. If the new leaders of the nations that aided Brennan, Black and the Dems -- all of whom are admirers of POTUS -- have investigated the crimes of their predecessors as Trump asked, he likely has the evidence on his desk rather than having it hidden by the Deep State criminals.

This past Friday, it became known that President Trump had not only launched his own investigation with foreign leaders into the 2016 Election tampering, but that it was almost complete. As soon as that happened, the freak-out began. At 65 years of age, I've not seen one quite like it. The Deep State was and is in paroxysms of unmitigated fear and psychosis. They ramped up an immediate media assault using the usual outlets -- CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and Washington Post -- and the same exact leak specialists who put America through The Russia Hoax.

The media spectacle on Friday past was immediately followed with a sua sponte announcement by Speaker Pelosi that she was impeaching the President -- a power she does not possess no matter how many cocktails she's had. A completely false narrative was spun of what was said in President Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, knowing Trump would never allow them to have a copy of the classified transcript to disprove their lies. But guess what? Within 24 hours, in another act of unprecedented transparency The Donald did just that. He released the full, unredacted transcript of the call, publicly proving them all to be Pinocchios. And I just watched his Attorney, Rudy Giuliani, announce that he is drafting a lawsuit to file against those who lied about his client, Donald Trump -- another unprecedented event to my knowledge.

[Oct 30, 2019] Democrats are Afraid of Tulsi Gabbard's Shadow

Oct 30, 2019 | www.redstate.com

Democrats haven't been too kind to Hawaii Rep. Tusli Gabbard. Ever since she took down California's Sen. Kamala Harris, she's had a target on her back, with wild accusations being thrown her way such as being a "Russian asset."

Recently, as my colleague Thomas LaDuke covered , Gabbard announced that she won't be seeking reelection for her seat in congress, and instead, putting all her efforts into running for President.

It's pretty clear, however, that Gabbard isn't going to win the 2020 nomination from the Democrats, but some Democrats fear that in light of this obvious fact, Gabbard may continue her campaign under a different banner, and go for a third party run. Despite Gabbard not being anywhere near the front of the pack, she is somewhat popular, and Democrats fear that her third-party run would subtract from the total number of Democrat voters.

According to The Hill , strategists are expressing their worries:

Some party strategists and operatives fear that a third-party bid by the Hawaii congresswoman could fracture parts of the electorate and stir chaos in the 2020 contest, ultimately setting the stage for President Trump 's reelection.

The criticisms are particularly pointed from people in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton 's orbit.

"She has absolutely zero path to becoming the Democratic nominee, so what is she doing?" said Adam Parkhomenko, a Democratic strategist and former aide to Clinton, the party's 2016 presidential nominee. "To say that she's going to take her campaign all the way to the convention just suggests that she's trying to create chaos."

Other Democrats have expressed their worries as well according to The Hill:

"I think the possibility of [Gabbard] running as a third party is very, very real and it should concern all of us," one DNC member said. "Look what Jill Stein did to Hillary Clinton. She was the difference in three states."

Despite Gabbard's insistence that she has ruled out a third-party campaign, some Democrats remain skeptical. Sellers said there was still plenty of time for the congresswoman to change her mind.

"I don't trust anything she says in that regard," Sellers said. "I think we've seen that before, but I think many of the concerns that Hillary Clinton and myself had about congresswoman Gabbard are proving to be true and I think that's unfortunate."

This is an echo of things Clinton herself has said previously. The failed 2016 candidate once indirectly made the wild accusation that Gabbard was being groomed for a third party run. A spokesperson later confirmed that Clinton was speaking about Gabbard.

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"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate," said Clinton to the Campaign HQ podcast.

Despite their fears, Gabbard herself has made it very clear that she has no intention of seeking a third-party run, but in the event that she did, Democrats would definitely have a problem on their hands.

As of right now, Gabbard is polling with an approval average of 12.5 according to Real Clear Politics . Miniscule in terms of the big picture, but between Gabbard, the Green Party's Jill Stein, and possibly others who may jump into the race, such as Dick's Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack , leftist figures could nickel and dime the Democrats into another election loss.

As of right now, it's already not looking good for Democrats as is. One more pebble in their shoe would spell doom, and Gabbard has proven to be a pretty big pebble.

[Oct 30, 2019] Karma Three Months After Kamala Harris Made Fun of Her Polling Numbers, Tulsi Gabbard Edges Ahead of Her

Graphics deleted...
Oct 30, 2019 | www.redstate.com

You know what they say about karma being a (word that rhymes with "witch"), right?

At the second Democratic presidential primary debate back in July, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI) absolutely torched Sen. Kamala Harris' (CA) criminal justice reform record during her time as California's attorney general. It was the political shot heard round the world.

In case you missed it, watch it below:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/o1-CRrMDSLs

Understandably, Harris was none too pleased about it and let it be known in a post-debate interview in what Brandon Morse described at the time as a "childish and elitist" response :

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: Did you expect that from Tulsi Gabbard? Had you had interaction about that in the past? And how do you think it went?

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: Well, I mean, listen, I -- this is going to sound immodest, but I'm obviously a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I would be on the stage and take hits tonight because there are a lot of people that are trying to make the stage for the next debate.

COOPER: For a lot of them it's do or die.

HARRIS: Especially when some people are at zero or 1%, whatever she might be at. So I did expect that I might take hits tonight.

Watch:

Embedded video

It was a particularly cheap shot from someone who'd had such a disastrously poor debate performance. She actually stooped even lower during the same interview with Cooper, calling Gabbard an "apologist" for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Well, here we are three months later, and the tables have dramatically turned. Not only has Kamala Harris' campaign cratered , but in some national and state polls Gabbard is now ahead of her, in spite of vicious attacks on the Hawaii congresswoman earlier this month from failed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

First up, the CNN/UH state poll out of New Hampshire:

... ... ...

Here's how things have trended in that poll since July:

... ... ...

Next, a national poll from Suffolk University and USA Today:

... ... ...

The trend on that one looks like this:

... ... ...

To be fair, there are other polls taken recently that show Harris ahead of Gabbard by a few percentage points, but it's still gotta sting Harris to know that the woman whose numbers she made fun of back in July is polling ahead of her in select polls now.

Daily Caller's James Hasson calls it for what it is:

... ... ...

To make matters worse for Harris, Gabbard is just one poll away from qualifying for the November Democratic debate (which is scheduled for Nov. 20th in Georgia ).

Assuming Gabbard ends up qualifying, one has to wonder if she'll be prepared to use a rhetorical finishing maneuver on her political foe this time around (assuming the mods don't run interference ).

-- Based in North Carolina, Sister Toldjah is a former liberal and a 16+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here . Connect with her on Twitter . –

[Oct 29, 2019] Deplorables, 'Human Scum,' and a party without a future

Oct 29, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , October 26, 2019 at 06:05 AM

(It's great to have you back!)

Deplorables, 'Human Scum,' and a party without a future https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/10/25/deplorables-human-scum-and-party-without-future/ntpdTYnvwABCmYYiTvVlmO/story.html?event=event25 via @BostonGlobe

Nestor Ramos - October 25

For the Furrowed Brow Society, things are finally looking up. Small in number and feeble in influence, so-called "Never Trumper" Republicans have spent three years now peeking out from behind the congressional drapes to express dismay over President Trump's antics.

Your John Kasiches, your Mitt Romneys, your Bens Sasse: They are among a handful of national Republican figures who all reliably emerge to criticize Trump on the occasion of his latest embarrassment. After every new indignity, the informal society assembles like an ineffectual version of the Avengers. Picture Captain America and Iron Man just sort of grunting ruefully and shaking their heads while they watch Fox News.

Has this resulted in any noticeable change in the president's policy or demeanor? Of course not. Will the Republican Party finally come to its senses and turn to this crew to lead it into the future? Also no.

. . . But!

The air of desperation surrounding the president these days has to be heartening. Even some Frequent Trumpers are starting to wonder whether it might be time to get off the train. Suddenly, the Never Trumpers are so ascendant that Trump is lashing out at them, pleading with his administration officials to stop giving them jobs (this would seem to be within his control, but whatever).

And so we've reached a remarkable moment in the discourse: Some of these people seem positively delighted to be called -- this is almost unbelievable, but I promise it's true -- "human scum."

"The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats," Trump tweeted on Wednesday afternoon, amid a fairly standard-issue tirade and blizzard of bonkers retweets. "Watch out for them, they are human scum!"

Hey, at least he called them "human," which is more grace than he usually affords immigrants. But even in today's uniquely debased political culture, the phrase "human scum" would seem to rise below our very low bar. And yet . . .

"Apparently, I'm human scum," the conservative cybersecurity expert and former homeland security official Paul Rosenzweig wrote in The Atlantic, in a column headlined "I'm Proud to Be Called Human Scum."

(Proud to Be Called Human Scum - Paul Rosenzweig.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/trumps-tweet-makes-me-proud-be-human-scum/600685/ )

If you're keeping score at home, the Republican Party is now overwhelmingly composed of people gleefully calling themselves "deplorable," and a separate, opposed group proudly self-identifying as "human scum."

Extremely normal, healthy stuff.

So I reached out to one of the few Republicans I could think of who does not seem to be in a hurry to brand himself as some sort of nightmare person -- who seems to genuinely want to rise above all this: America's Most Popular Governor™ Charlie Baker. Baker doesn't spend a lot of time firing back at the president's daily dumpster fire, which is probably wise.

"Governor Baker and Lt. Governor Polito did not support President Trump because he doesn't have the right temperament for the office," Baker's press secretary, Sarah Finlaw, said in an e-mail, "and the administration doesn't respond to sophomoric name-calling and will stay focused on working for the residents of Massachusetts. Washington, DC would be well served to follow suit."

So if he wasn't on the human scum list before, he probably is now. Sorry about that, Governor.

It's tempting to think that people like Baker, Bill Weld, and Romney (who must have thought everyone was telling him to "grow a Pierre" these last few years) will one day soon restore the Republican Party to some semblance of sanity. Even if you don't have much use for the small government/fiscal conservatism that supposedly drove the Republican Party before it abandoned even the pretense of responsibility, that ethos would be a lot less damaging than what we've got now.

(In praise of Pierre Delecto -- er, Mitt Romney
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/10/23/praise-pierre/t2S0xe8ais1STWhoTDaaJO/story.html?event=event25 via @BostonGlobe)

But I'm not sure that kind of reversal is even possible anymore. Nobody who abetted this nonsense should be taken seriously ever again, but that category includes the vast majority of elected Republicans in Washington. ...

Plp -> Fred C. Dobbs... , October 26, 2019 at 06:38 AM
Reviewing the recent episodes of our continuing story " two party soap opera " with sardonic mirth

Like its just pretend boob tube stuff. Reflects a comfortable perch above the dismal job world 150 million of us revolve thru week by week

Oh well better then high school, or prison, or a tour in Afghanistan, or retirement on social security

[Oct 29, 2019] Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard appeared on Fox News' "Hannity" Thursday evening to criticize the House's impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump.

Tulsi is a great politician, who somehow feels that mode of the majority of the electorate...
Oct 29, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

EMichael -> Fred C. Dobbs... , October 26, 2019 at 07:04 AM

... ... ...

"Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard appeared on Fox News' "Hannity" Thursday evening to criticize the House's impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump.

"I don't know what's going on in those closed doors," Gabbard said. "We as members of Congress do not have access to the information that's being shared. I think the American people deserve to know exactly what the facts are, what the evidence is being presented as this inquiry goes on."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tulsi-gabbard-fox-news_n_5db3231ce4b006d4916e0147

JohnH -> EMichael... , October 26, 2019 at 01:21 PM
Imagine that! Republicans as the anti-war party. Could happen ... and Democrats have only themselves to blame for stiffing the large percentage of the population that opposes fighting pointless and futile wars forever. But hey, if 'defense' contractors got big bucks, you can bet Democrats will be sniffing up their crotches...
Mr. Bill -> Fred C. Dobbs... , October 27, 2019 at 09:44 PM
Mitt Romney is a vicious private equity animal whose fortune was stolen from the savings of the working people.

F the morons.

[Oct 29, 2019] The New York Times itself is part of the Deep State it initially denied and now wholeheartedly supports

Notable quotes:
"... Not that this should surprise anyone who is familiar with Operation Mockingbird and The New York Times' part in co-operating with the CIA to plant CIA-origin reports with reporters who were either willing volunteers or unaware innocents or to practise self-censorship to appease the CIA. ..."
"... The Deep State has little to nothing to do with "rule of law." It is simply the law of the jungle: might makes right, exercised behind the scenes by the true power brokers and their minions. It is not partisan. It does use both parties to put on a show to distract the people while owning and using major parts of both ..."
"... It is they who have us in Syria now to steal Syria's oil. It is they who were enraged that Trump, an outsider, won the election contrary to all expectations and predictions. It is they who control most of the media. They are not the friends of the American people; in fact, they are our mortal enemies. ..."
"... They have hijacked our government and our foreign policy, which they operate largely for their own interests and not in the true interests of the American people. ..."
"... They use the media to sell us on what they are doing, appealing to our pride, our patriotism, the project of spreading peace, prosperity, democracy, and freedom to the world, the project of promoting human rights, the project of prosperity--whatever works to convince us that we should be in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Syria, and Kosovo, and in hundreds of military bases around the world. They equally exploit left and right; thus dividing us, they conquer. ..."
Oct 29, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Oct 28 2019 21:51 utc | 75

I'm sure I'm not the only person here who sees the headlines B has linked to and other NYT headlines (and some of the actual articles themselves, if I have the time and patience to read them) and realised that The New York Times itself is part of the Deep State it initially denied and now wholeheartedly supports. Not that this should surprise anyone who is familiar with Operation Mockingbird and The New York Times' part in co-operating with the CIA to plant CIA-origin reports with reporters who were either willing volunteers or unaware innocents or to practise self-censorship to appease the CIA.
Arthur , Oct 28 2019 17:22 utc | 14
The Deep State has little to nothing to do with "rule of law." It is simply the law of the jungle: might makes right, exercised behind the scenes by the true power brokers and their minions. It is not partisan. It does use both parties to put on a show to distract the people while owning and using major parts of both.

It is they who have us in Syria now to steal Syria's oil. It is they who were enraged that Trump, an outsider, won the election contrary to all expectations and predictions. It is they who control most of the media. They are not the friends of the American people; in fact, they are our mortal enemies.

They have hijacked our government and our foreign policy, which they operate largely for their own interests and not in the true interests of the American people.

They use the media to sell us on what they are doing, appealing to our pride, our patriotism, the project of spreading peace, prosperity, democracy, and freedom to the world, the project of promoting human rights, the project of prosperity--whatever works to convince us that we should be in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Syria, and Kosovo, and in hundreds of military bases around the world. They equally exploit left and right; thus dividing us, they conquer.

[Oct 29, 2019] Do the Public and 'the Blob' Want the Same Things

Oct 29, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Dan Drezner jumps to a shaky conclusion on public opinion and foreign policy:

What is striking about arguments like these is the near-complete absence of any discussion of public opinion polling to buttress their argument. If the Blob's policy preferences are truly disconnected from those of the American public, that would be a powerful populist talking point. This has been made in the past with a heavy reliance on polling data. Both Trumpists and progressives should be trumpeting public opinion surveys from the rooftops that highlight the disconnect with the Blob.

They are not doing that, however, and I think I know why. It turns out that what the American people want in foreign policy looks an awful lot like what the Blob wants.

I am neither a Trumpist nor a progressive, but I do advocate for foreign policy restraint, so it may be worth noting that I have called attention to public opinion surveys that show that most Americans want a more restrained foreign policy. These surveys do not show that most Americans want "what the Blob wants." Quite the contrary. The disconnect with "the Blob" is hard to miss.

The findings of the Eurasia Group Foundation's survey point to the very "chasm" between the public and foreign policy experts that Drezner says doesn't really exist:

A new, national survey commissioned by the Eurasia Group Foundation (EGF) reveals the American public supports a more restrained approach to international relations and military interventions. However, this desire for a more focused foreign policy is at odds with the more expansive role generally favored by foreign policy experts.

A separate study commissioned by the Center for American Progress found a similar preference for what they call "restrained engagement":

The findings in this survey suggest that American voters are not isolationist. Rather, voters are more accurately described as supporting "restrained engagement" in international affairs -- a strategy that favors diplomatic, political, and economic actions over military action when advancing U.S. interests in the world. American voters want their political leaders to make more public investments in the American people in order to compete in the world and to strike the right balance abroad after more than a decade of what they see as military overextension.

In contrast to much of the debate among political leaders and foreign policy experts today, voters in this survey express little interest in the processes and tactics of foreign policy or the workings of international alliances and institutions. They generally support cooperation and engagement with allies, but these are not top-tier objectives on their own.

One example of the "chasm" between foreign policy experts and the public from the EGF survey concerned the appropriate response to atrocities committed by foreign governments:

While there is some support among the surveyed experts for a restrained approach or a U.N.-led response, a large majority of them favors U.S.-led intervention (61%). The public leans heavily in the opposite direction with 43% in favor of restraint and 34% that prefer a U.N.-led response. When it comes to deciding when to initiate interventions and attack other states, there clearly is a yawning gap between the public and the foreign policy establishment. The latter is much more open to unilateral or U.S.-led military action in this instance.

The EGF survey found a similar gap when they asked about the prospect of retaliation in the event of an attack on a NATO ally:

While there is a slight majority in favor of retaliation, the public is much more evenly divided. The foreign policy experts are almost unanimously in favor. The gap is real and it is huge. Using Bremmer's categories, we see that expressed again in preferences for the U.S. role in the world:

Roughly half of the experts prefer America as the "indispensable nation" compared with less than 10% of the public. The "independent" America that is most closely identified with foreign policy restraint has the backing of 44% of the public and just 9% of the experts. One can argue that the experts are right and the public is wrong, or vice versa, but one cannot say that they all want the same thing.

Drezner cites public opinion on Syria as evidence in favor of the proposition that the public and "the Blob" are much more closely aligned than critics of "the Blob" allow, but this is not as compelling as he thinks it is. He finds that opinion at the start of this year was evenly split between pro- and anti-withdrawal blocs. The Pew poll he cites breaks down the responses by political affiliation, and there is a clear partisan split with far more Republicans in favor of withdrawal and most Democrats opposed. Most of the respondents are reacting to the proposed withdrawal in a partisan fashion: Democrats opposed it because Trump supposedly wanted it, and Republicans supported it for the same reason. There is now apparently more opposition to withdrawal, but that is presumably informed by the arbitrary and incompetent way in which the quasi-withdrawal has been executed. It may also be influenced by the fact that Trump's so-called withdrawal isn't really a withdrawal, but just a chaotic redeployment that may end up leaving more U.S. troops in Syria than before . That is not surprising. The public tends to turn against policies that are being carried out ineptly, no matter what their other policy preferences might be. The association with the increasingly unpopular Trump is probably also causing more people to reject whatever it is they think the president favors.

To understand the gap between foreign policy establishment and the public on Syria, we need to look at Americans' views over many years. Most Americans have been strongly against U.S. involvement in Syria over the years. The popular backlash against the proposed attack on the Syrian government in 2013 was strong enough that it blocked the intervention from happening. Many people in the foreign policy establishment have been calling for a more activist and interventionist Syria policy from the earliest days of the war in Syria, and there has been tremendous resistance from the public for almost all of this time. Obama caught ten kinds of hell from "the Blob" for his entire second term because he would not commit the U.S. to the larger role in the Syrian war that so many of them were demanding. Support for fighting ISIS from the air is the only thing that has consistently commanded broad support . When it comes on whether to send U.S. forces into a conflict, the public has consistently been much more reluctant to support this than the foreign policy establishment, and that is especially true when there don't appear to be any vital U.S. interests at stake.

Drezner concludes:

None of this is to say that the Blob or the American people are right about any particular foreign policy issue. I am all for serious debates about the future of American foreign policy. But advocates of restraint need to stop claiming that the Blob is acting in an undemocratic manner. Because it just ain't so.

Our objection to Syria policy isn't so much that "the Blob" is behaving in an undemocratic way as it is that the U.S. government has illegally involved itself in a war in Syria for the last five years without Congressional authorization or any legal justification whatsoever . U.S. forces were sent into Syria without the consent of the American people and our representatives, and they have been kept there all this time without that consent. If that doesn't demonstrate that our foreign policy today has become far too undemocratic, I don't know what would. If most Americans now disapprove of the Trump administration's haphazard, clownish management of Syria policy, that does not mean that they agree with "the Blob" about the larger policy questions. The divide between the public and "the Blob" is quite large on some of the most important questions, and if there is occasional agreement on a specific issue that shouldn't cause us to forget how wide that divide is.

Sid Finster • 4 days ago

Since when did the public or voters start to have any discernable influence on policy?

As befits an oligarchic republic, they have none.

ThaomasH • 4 days ago
Trump's problem is that his "restraint" is quit selective -- Not Iran, Not Saudi Arabia, Not Israel -- and where exercised, exaggerated. One need not withhold military aid from Ukraine in order to avoid a shooting war with Russia over Crimea, or abandon the Kurds to draw down the commitment in Syria.

[Oct 29, 2019] Endorsing The Deep State Endangers Democracy

Notable quotes:
"... The concept of a "deep state" -- a shadowy network of agency or military officials who secretly conspire to influence government policy -- is more often used to describe countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where authoritarian elements band together to undercut democratically elected leaders. But inside the West Wing, Mr. Trump and his inner circle, particularly his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, see the influence of such forces at work within the United States, essentially arguing that their own government is being undermined from within. ..."
"... Though Mr. Trump has not publicly used the phrase , allies and sympathetic news media outlets have repurposed "deep state" from its formal meaning -- a network of civilian and military officials who control or undermine democratically elected governments -- to a pejorative meant to accuse civil servants of illegitimacy and political animus. ..."
"... Rather than look at it purely from a partisan point of view, one has to look at the deep state as a set range of priorities that are agreed or non-negotiable throughout a large part of the unelected civil service. ..."
"... Unfortunately I believe that in the US, the penchant for war, the worldview which has the US as a moral missionary, and the antipathy to socialist policies are central to this, no matter what the color of the ruling party is at the time. ..."
"... The Deep State has little to nothing to do with "rule of law." It is simply the law of the jungle: might makes right, exercised behind the scenes by the true power brokers and their minions. It is not partisan. It does use both parties to put on a show to distract the people while owning and using major parts of both ..."
"... It is they who have us in Syria now to steal Syria's oil. It is they who were enraged that Trump, an outsider, won the election contrary to all expectations and predictions. It is they who control most of the media. They are not the friends of the American people; in fact, they are our mortal enemies. ..."
"... They have hijacked our government and our foreign policy, which they operate largely for their own interests and not in the true interests of the American people. ..."
"... They use the media to sell us on what they are doing, appealing to our pride, our patriotism, the project of spreading peace, prosperity, democracy, and freedom to the world, the project of promoting human rights, the project of prosperity--whatever works to convince us that we should be in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Syria, and Kosovo, and in hundreds of military bases around the world. They equally exploit left and right; thus dividing us, they conquer. ..."
"... "We" don't hold elections. The elections are required to buy the deep state legitimacy to do its thing. ..."
"... Yes, indeed, the 'Deep State' is there and of course the NYT is happy to write nice things about it, because it exists to support the same thing the NYT exists to support - 'government of the millionaires, by the millionaires, for the millionaires'!... ..."
"... The history of candidates is that they have not keep any of the campaign promises and there is little the electorate can do about it. Voting by Americans to fill jobs in the USA is a useless exercise in false excitement. . ..."
"... There are those who post here who would have you believe that the deep state installed Trump, then attacked Trump, then all as part of some elaborate scheme had Trump attack them back. That brings us directly to this point where the deep state is now at least partially exposed. ..."
"... This was to achieve what? Increased military spending? How does that logic work? They could have arranged such spending increases with Clinton instead of Trump. It isn't like Clinton ever even hinted that military spending should be curtailed. ..."
"... The deep state has gained nothing since the 2016 elections other than more of the public's eyeballs turned in their direction and a further erosion of the public's confidence in the corporate mass media upon which the deep state /establishment depends. ..."
"... The truth is that the deep state is staggering from failure to failure. You can celebrate that this is a symptom of the empire dying, but it is a dangerous period. ..."
"... The new term I would propose is Deep World to define the elite that are transnational/trans-state and have been behind/owning organizations like the BIS (Bureau of International Settlements - the central bank of Western central banks) that has been around since 1930 ..."
"... Examine closely the growth of the National Security edifice since WWII.(Importance of 9/11 as leverage for unrestrained expansion). Examine the expanding power of the Federal Reserve since the Great Recession of 2007-2008. ..."
"... Is it a fact that State structures are, indeed, no longer controlled by constitutionally controlled democratic institutions and elected representatives? ..."
"... Throughout the 19th century in the UK and the beginning of the same century in the US, elites worried about extending suffrage to the masses, initially just universal male suffrage, later on universal suffrage to all adults, male and female. They finally realized at the beginning of the 20th century that to continue to control political institutions they only needed to control the discourse through the media (initially just newspapers, magazines and broadsides, later extended to radio, movies/cinema and TV) and motivate people's choices through fear of anarchy (by creating/tolerating incidents, controlled chaos and criminality), the enemy/other and the unknown, through the use of falsified consensus (especially effective with women) and, as a last resort, through patriotism. They would then be able to channel popular opinion in the direction they wanted. ..."
"... The elite in the so-called democracies realized early on that there is actually no need to control everyone in a country. Since the elite's control is activated chiefly through political institutions and the media, it suffices to control key influencers, i.e., politicians and media players (journalists and TV and radio news reporters and presenters), who are subject to the same severe control as all the people living under dictatorial, communist and fascist regimes. ..."
"... Politicians and journalists deviating from the Consensus (also known as the Deep State) - whatever the elite wants at a particular time - would be initially mocked as proponents of some conspiracy theory if the steps they had taken were known by the public, and if they persist in their deviance from the Consensus and are respected by the public, they are silenced. ..."
"... The deep state /establishment is not all-powerful. They can influence, not control, and they can influence only so long as the public is unaware of that influence. This is why the so-called deep state blowing its cover is a huge deal. ..."
"... But as expensive and unwieldy as the "Democracy Show" might seem to be, it is still cheaper than that option. Cheaper = more profits and more wealth and more power for the elites. They don't want to pay for a full blown police state if they don't have to. ..."
"... Because of this when the plans of the deep state /establishment fall apart they must deal with it and try to patch things up on the fly, at least so long as the cost-benefit analysis still favors the "Democracy Show" . ..."
"... But why Clinton? Because the empire has many plates spinning at the moment. Many regime change operations around the world at different levels of maturity. Many delicate moves in the works that have been planned for literally decades. The Pivot to Asia , fracturing Russia, fleecing the remains of public wealth from the former Soviet states, gaining control of China, breaking up the BRICS, reversing the move to socialism in Latin America, etc.. The Clintons have been in the thick of all of that and are fully up to speed on all of the dirty deeds being done in the dark to build the empire. At this delicate stage, more than anything else, the empire needs internal stability (chaos outside is OK, though). One wrong tweet can wreck years of work. ..."
"... Trump, on the other hand, has no clue about any of that. He still even thinks that ISIS is America's enemy rather than a mercenary army for the empire. ..."
"... If Clinton had won as expected, on the other hand, the operations in Syria and Ukraine and Venezuela and so on could have proceeded without missing a beat. While the efforts of the Syrian military, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah have been truly remarkable in containing the head choppers, a fair portion of the credit for the demise of ISIS lies with severe disruption of their logistics and command structures due to Clinton not getting installed in the White House. ..."
"... In 2016 the deep state was "conspiracy theory" ... crazy talk. That is entirely the point of the article b composed above. Everybody didn't already know about it. It was the conflict between the deep state and the President that stripped the cover from the deep state and forced the New York Langley Times to partially admit that it exists. This conflict between the deep state and the President would not have occurred had Clinton won the election as planned. ..."
"... The neoconservatives originally were a small American Trotskyites who developed an overall anti-government stance and an elitist disgust for NCL "pluralism" (vital center). It is from the neoconservatives that came the designation of the term "liberal" as anyone left-wing in the USA. They later spread to dominate the common sense of American society after the 1970s and, after the oil crisis of 1974-5 and the rise of neoliberalism as a practical political doctrine, definitely became the dominant political stance in the USA - a position it enjoys until the present times. ..."
"... But when it comes to say the CIA's attempt to control global communications, long ago testified to by John Stockwell, and more recently disclosed and broadened by Udo Ulfkotte, there are definite linkages between CIA and Intelligence Agencies and high finance, but who is in control? And how effective is the attempt? ..."
"... Is the Central Intelligence Agency a state within a state? ..."
"... Evidently the elite slowly accepted the fact and stopped complaining. They learned to stop worrying and love the bomb! ..."
"... By pure coincidence, I found out this article today which perfectly exemplifies the degeneration of the "vital center" ( American Dream is Sunk ): ..."
"... Deep State is a loose term but it always had 2 halves that are now clearly coming together as one. ..."
"... The bipartisan-pro-business (i.e. neoliberal) wing. They won their total victory under Reagan, and have simply been maintaining it. ..."
"... The US national power wing - hawks / MIC / team-usa world-police. They experienced confusion after the cold war suddenly ended, but under Bush II they had a final victory of sorts, upon 9/11. The total unconditional surrender of the Dem party to the neocon principles made this wing also clearly bipartisan ..."
"... Trump does 95% exactly what the militarists and the big business guys want, yet manages to be pretty darn convincing in playing the victim, since the outrage against him is genuine. He is also in his personality a grotesquely cartoonish distillation of exactly these qualities - greed, corruption, bellegligence. ..."
"... Not that this should surprise anyone who is familiar with Operation Mockingbird and The New York Times' part in co-operating with the CIA to plant CIA-origin reports with reporters who were either willing volunteers or unaware innocents or to practise self-censorship to appease the CIA. ..."
"... Carl Bernstein "The CIA and the Media" http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php ..."
"... The British term for the "Deep State", coined I believe by the historian AJP Taylor, is The Establishment. It includes but goes far beyond the Civil Service and military hierarchy. Haute Finance is central to it, so are the educational system and the media. Its role is to act as a gyroscope ensuring, through whatever means are necessary, that the course pursued by society is that determined by the ruling class. ..."
"... Indeed, but there is another side to my point as well. The New York Times and Washington Post must simply love the fact that Trump and his supporters (of which I can be said to be one on a very limited number of issues) have re-defined "deep state" as a much shallower and easy to root out (in theory) subset of unelected government functionaries who have allegiances to Obama and his political opponents in general. ..."
"... The over-simplification allows them to treat it as just another Trumpist conspiracy gambit designed to discredit legitimate media outlets, which themselves are all owned - to some degree - by the very interests that constitute the non-governmental elements/persons of the deep state which can and do re-enter government via the revolving door. ..."
"... You're spot-on with respect to The Donald, but I think one of the intended goals of the NYT etc. finally admitting the reality of the deep state was to discredit the notion in the minds of most "liberals" by playing it off as only a small number of "patriotic public servants" instead of the deeply rooted rot and control mechanism that it really is. ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard is in effect saying: we have repeatedly been conned into killing and being killed. That's crazy and evil. Let's get real and get good. She's reminiscent of the truth telling child in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale: that drooling wacko empress is butt naked! ..."
Oct 29, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Endorsing The Deep State Endangers Democracy

Since Donald Trump was elected president the New York Times' understanding of the 'Deep State' evolved from a total denial of its existence towards a full endorsement of its anti-democratic operations.

February 16, 2017 - As Leaks Multiply, Fears of a 'Deep State' in America

A wave of leaks from government officials has hobbled the Trump administration, leading some to draw comparisons to countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where shadowy networks within government bureaucracies, often referred to as "deep states," undermine and coerce elected governments.

So is the United States seeing the rise of its own deep state?

Not quite, experts say, but the echoes are real -- and disturbing.

March 6, 2017 - Rumblings of a 'Deep State' Undermining Trump? It Was Once a Foreign Concept

The concept of a "deep state" -- a shadowy network of agency or military officials who secretly conspire to influence government policy -- is more often used to describe countries like Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, where authoritarian elements band together to undercut democratically elected leaders. But inside the West Wing, Mr. Trump and his inner circle, particularly his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, see the influence of such forces at work within the United States, essentially arguing that their own government is being undermined from within.

It is an extraordinary contention for a sitting president to make.

March 10, 2017 - What Happens When You Fight a 'Deep State' That Doesn't Exist

American institutions do not resemble the powerful deep states of countries like Egypt or Pakistan, experts say. Nor do individual leaks, a number of which have come from President Trump's own team, amount to a conspiracy.

The diagnosis of a "deep state," those experts say, has the problem backward. ... Though Mr. Trump has not publicly used the phrase , allies and sympathetic news media outlets have repurposed "deep state" from its formal meaning -- a network of civilian and military officials who control or undermine democratically elected governments -- to a pejorative meant to accuse civil servants of illegitimacy and political animus.

September 5, 2018 - I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin's spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better -- such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.

This isn't the work of the so-called deep state. It's the work of the steady state.

December 18, 2018 - Blaming the Deep State: Officials Accused of Wrongdoing Adopt Trump's Response

President Trump has long tried to explain away his legal troubles as the work of a "deep state" of Obama supporters entrenched in the law-enforcement and national-security bureaucracies who are just out to get him. Now junior officials and others accused of wrongdoing are making the case that the same purported forces are illegitimately targeting them, too.

October 6, 2019 - Italy's Connection to the Russia Investigation, Explained

President Trump and some of his allies have asserted without evidence that a cabal of American officials -- the so-called deep state -- embarked on a broad operation to thwart Mr. Trump's campaign. The conspiracy theory remains unsubstantiated , ...

October 20, 2019 - They Are Not the Resistance. They Are Not a Cabal. They Are Public Servants.

President Trump is right: The deep state is alive and well. But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of his fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants -- career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others -- who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.

October 23, 2019 - Trump's War on the 'Deep State' Turns Against Him

[O]ver the last three weeks, the deep state has emerged from the shadows in the form of real live government officials, past and present, who have defied a White House attempt to block cooperation with House impeachment investigators and provided evidence that largely backs up the still-anonymous whistle-blower.

October 26, 2019 - The 'Deep State' Exists to Battle People Like Trump

The president and his allies have responded with fury. Those damning testimonials are part of a political vendetta by "Never Trumper" bureaucrats, members of a "deep state" bent on undermining the will of the people, they assert.

But what is this "deep state"? Far from being a tool of political corruption, the Civil Service was created to be an antidote to the very kind of corruption and self-dealing that seems to plague this administration.

This development is disconcerting. If the deep state is allowed to make its own policies against the will of the elected officials why should we bother with holding elections?

The Democrats are stupid to applaud this and to even further these schemes. They are likely to regain the presidency in 2024. What will they do when all the Civil Service functionaries Trump will have installed by then will organize to ruin their policies? This post assumes that the Deep State is partisan. IMO they are not. They use the duopoly and media to effect a "managed democracy". I also believe that the Deep State is remarkably united on promoting commercial interests (their version of "progressive") and the empire (slyly referred to as "world order" or "stability").

Jackrabbit , Oct 28 2019 16:13 utc | 1

This post is also accepting of what Caitlin Johnstone calls the "establishment narrative matrix" which divides us (along partisan political lines) while promoting acceptance/support for the national security state.

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

Jackrabbit !!

Josh , Oct 28 2019 16:40 utc | 4
We shouldn't forget that also during the Kerry years, there were times when he or the President was countered publicly by 'the deep state'. I believe there was such a time during the initial adoption of the Iran accord.

Rather than look at it purely from a partisan point of view, one has to look at the deep state as a set range of priorities that are agreed or non-negotiable throughout a large part of the unelected civil service.

Unfortunately I believe that in the US, the penchant for war, the worldview which has the US as a moral missionary, and the antipathy to socialist policies are central to this, no matter what the color of the ruling party is at the time.

Brendan , Oct 28 2019 16:43 utc | 5
The reason the NYT is acknowledging it now is that the Deep State's existence is being exposed and proven by the investigations into Russiagate. Because it's gradually becoming undeniable, the NYT feels it has no choice but to put out the message: 'Well, the Deep State isn't that bad anyway, even when it plots to overthrow the President of the USA'.
Sally Snyder , Oct 28 2019 16:48 utc | 6
Here are some fascinating comments about the state of democracy in the United States from an interview with Vladimir Putin in July 2019:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/07/vladimir-putins-observations-on.html

American democracy is pretty much a non-entity but Washington is perfectly content with the way that things exist because it works in their favor.

Lorenz , Oct 28 2019 16:52 utc | 7
Jackrabbit - I don't know where you are from, but you seem to be lacking a fundamental understanding how democracy works. b' summed it up brilliantly in one sentence: 'If the deep state is allowed to make its own policies against the will of the elected officials, why should we bother with holding elections?'

Whether we like it or not, Trump was elected as president. The American election system has established that beyond any doubt.

His policies are not uniformly accepted, but he is within his legal rights to make policy decisions. Do I like what he does? Mostly not. But I do accept that's the way democracy works, and if the majority of US voters does not like it either, January 2021 we will have a new US president.

That is how the US democracy works. That is the law of the land - or constitution as its often referred to. The deep state is an abomination and needs to be castrated.

bolasete , Oct 28 2019 16:58 utc | 8
kudos for your cogent, compelling presentation to pin blame where it belongs. It's hard to like Trump but his enemies are so wacky and dishonest, he may survive these death throes of empire.
james , Oct 28 2019 16:59 utc | 9
thanks b... it seems that the nyt would like to define what the deep state is = civil service.. talking about this is helpful as i see it, although the nyt is trying to cover its ass as i see it..

I mostly think of the deep state as the cia.. If members within the cia become partisan it is no longer fulfilling the role of the civil service... If the nyt wants to claim it is just doing it's job, how do they explain the Mueller investigation then? they can't have it both ways...

GMJ , Oct 28 2019 17:03 utc | 10
Since the 1990s the US Intelligence Services (NATO also) went liberal in outlook and recruitment drives. They opened their doors wide for those considered undesirable in the past. The best men and women left, the mediocre gained command and this is the result. However, they are not to be underestimated. At smearing an elected president they are quite good. Sadly so, GMJ
Likklemore , Oct 28 2019 17:09 utc | 11
Thanks b.

You asked:[.] "why should we bother holding elections?"

In "western democracies" SElections are the great pretend events held every 4-5 years. Take the day off and forget the trip to the 'Voting' Booth.

See the EU-UK Brexit saga. In 2014 GEAB.eu had forecast that in 2016 the U.S. would become ungovernable.

Russiagate, Ukrainegate are distractions as the USD$ is by-passed added to the imploding debt.

Jackrabbit , Oct 28 2019 17:10 utc | 12
Lorenz @9

I'm not a political partisan. I'm interested in democracy/governance, history, international affairs.

I agree with b's comment: "... why should we bother with holding elections?" But IMO the rot is deeper than he believes.

Jackrabbit !!

Joshua , Oct 28 2019 17:22 utc | 13
To the money people and the power people behind the institution that we refer to as our government, the entire govermental structure is a bit like a piece of property. They let it slip out when they say things like, 'our democracy', or 'our society'. They say it like they would say 'our chevy', or 'our ford'.
Arthur , Oct 28 2019 17:22 utc | 14
The Deep State has little to nothing to do with "rule of law." It is simply the law of the jungle: might makes right, exercised behind the scenes by the true power brokers and their minions. It is not partisan. It does use both parties to put on a show to distract the people while owning and using major parts of both.

It is they who have us in Syria now to steal Syria's oil. It is they who were enraged that Trump, an outsider, won the election contrary to all expectations and predictions. It is they who control most of the media. They are not the friends of the American people; in fact, they are our mortal enemies.

They have hijacked our government and our foreign policy, which they operate largely for their own interests and not in the true interests of the American people.

They use the media to sell us on what they are doing, appealing to our pride, our patriotism, the project of spreading peace, prosperity, democracy, and freedom to the world, the project of promoting human rights, the project of prosperity--whatever works to convince us that we should be in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Syria, and Kosovo, and in hundreds of military bases around the world. They equally exploit left and right; thus dividing us, they conquer.

Norwegian , Oct 28 2019 17:23 utc | 15
If the deep state is allowed to make its own policies against the will of the elected officials why should we bother with holding elections?
"We" don't hold elections. The elections are required to buy the deep state legitimacy to do its thing.
dan of steele , Oct 28 2019 17:24 utc | 16
not sure why I still watch Bill Maher's show but this last weekend's Real Time had an absolutely jaw dropping moment for me. It started out with him having a former CIA agent as one of his guests (he even gushed over Brennan a few months back) and he then made a few stupid remarks about the Russians done it but the cherry on the whipped cream was when he referred to "the deep state heroes".

WTF?

foolisholdman , Oct 28 2019 17:25 utc | 17
Richard | Oct 28 2019 16:30 utc | 4
Yes, indeed, the 'Deep State' is there and of course the NYT is happy to write nice things about it, because it exists to support the same thing the NYT exists to support - 'government of the millionaires, by the millionaires, for the millionaires'!...

https://richardhennerley.com/2019/10/27/a-government-of-the-millionaires-by-the-millionaires-for-the-millionaires/

I think you are undoubtedly right!

My understanding for the last 70 years has been (more or less) that the Privy Council in the UK and a similar shadowy body in the US, for which I had no name until recently, was running the country's affairs practically independently of any elected representatives or bodies. Yes, PMs and Presidents had some influence, but not anything like as much as we, the hoi poloi, were led to believe.

snake , Oct 28 2019 17:43 utc | 18

https://friendsforsyria.com/2019/10/28/u-s-is-looting-syrian-oil-fields-to-fund-mercenaries-and-intelligence-operations

'If the deep state is allowed to make its own policies against the will of the elected officials, why should we bother with holding elections?'

Whether we like it or not, Trump was elected as president. .., and if the majority of US voters does not like it either, January 2021 we will have a new US president. That is how the US democracy works. That is the law of the land - or constitution as its often referred to. The deep state is an abomination and needs to be castrated. by: Lorenz @ 9

Lorenz suggest you read Article II of the Constitution you quote.. American voters c/n vote for the President or the Vice President. Americans qualified to vote in general elections cannot vote for the persons to occupy either of the two Article II places in the USA (President and VP).

The P and VP areappointed not elected by the ordinary governed qualified to vote Americans (those Americans are allowed each only three votes: 2 votes out of 100 jobs for a Senator from their state, and 1 vote for 1 job about 425 jobs in the House? Read it. The two persons are elected by the electoral college, so there is no voice of the governed people in the presidential election, now, last year, or ever.

More over even if there were, the people have no reasonable input because of road blocks the republic has established as to who is allowed to be a candidate for such an election, and because of the mass amount of money the establishment charges for the ticket to be a viable candidate so as far as the non able to vote for President-voters are concerned, its select the candidate in the top coat or the one with blue suede shoes.. might as well be select Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck.

The history of candidates is that they have not keep any of the campaign promises and there is little the electorate can do about it. Voting by Americans to fill jobs in the USA is a useless exercise in false excitement. .

America is a democracy, but the USA is a republic.

vk , Oct 28 2019 17:53 utc | 20
NYT's position over the deep state is perfectly in tune with the doctrine of the "vital center". Published in 1947, Schlesinger Jr.'s magnus opus is valid until our times, and serves as essentially the centrist/moderate manifesto.

The theory of the "vital center" states that what differentiates liberal democracy from "totalitarianism" is the fact that it enjoys a pulsating political core, made of many different ideologies that go from Left to Right (the "political spectrum") and which dispute the power of the government through periodical elections in a peaceful manner. This way, the ideology that is not in vogue today can emerge victorious tomorrow, given that it brings the answers to new problems the incumbent ideology couldn't solve. This "non-extermination" pact, where the victorious ideology spares the defeated ideologies, would give the liberal democracies - Schlesinger assumed - an internal dynamism the USSR didn't have.

The existence of a society with a political spectrum characterized the existence of "freedom". Indeed, that's the practical definition of freedom most people in the First World countries use nowadays. Other times, the old French Revolution (bourgeois) mean of "freedom to do business" (freedom of enterprise) is used - but that's more of a neoconservative usage.

The "vital center" doctrine is also the root of what we nowadays call "pluralism", and what the "far-right" defines today, perjoratively, as "multiculturalism" and/or "Cultural Marxism". The conservatives, it's good to note, never lost sight of the origins of the Western modern "center-left": most of them were ex-communists. They never accepted the people who commanded the CIA in the cultural front as legitimate liberals and always considered even the center-left another form of communism.

But there's a catch to Schlesinger Jr.'s doctrine. He stated the political spectrum should never be representative of all the ideologies possible, but of all the ideologies acceptable . And what was "acceptable"? Only the non-totalitarian ideologies. What are those "non-totalitarian ideologies"? The ideologies that promote/respect freedom. But "freedom" is the existence of the political spectrum, it's a circular argument: in practice, he's using a rhetoric that promotes the liberal ideologies as natural and the "totalitarian" ideologies as "unnatural". Indeed, that's the terminology he uses: "totalitarianism" is a "disease".

Here's the part that is related to this blog's post : what if the people, democratically (i.e. under a free society), elects (freely), a "totalitarian" government?

Schlesinger Jr. doesn't answer this question, although he raises it in his book. The only thing he states is that economic prosperity is key: as long as there's good economy, an society of abundance, the people will "naturally" vote for pro-freedom governments. If that didn't happen, then he stated the elite should feel free to use whatever means necessary to crush the elected "totalitarian" government and all the popular uprising that appeared.

According to him, this was legitimate, since the elite was enlightened and knew better what was the best for the people; and/or that it was fruit of Soviet covert operations . This is where the sophistication of his argument becomes apparent: liberal democracies are not perfect, they are not 100% free (but they are free to some extent), they are fragile -- but they were better than Soviet communism (where there was 0% freedom) and thus should be protected at any cost. If we think about it, this is literally the concept of deep state.

If we analyze Schlesinger Jr.'s doctrine, we can clearly see that the newer generations which succeeded his are perfectly following the guidelines as established in the post-war. The millenials are not degenerate, as the remaining boomers and gen. X people are stating: they are carrying the post-war torch with care and zeal. The deep state has always existed in liberal democracies: they were just hidden in plain sight, in the form of a collection of powerful public servants, experts, rich people, and parallel institutions that have always influenced whoever was the POTUS. They influence the POTUS one way or the other, since the USG is simply too big and too complex for just one person to manage.

Let's just remember: there was a plan to assassinate FDR in 1934 (botched because one of the general who was supposed to lead the militia invasion refused to be coopted and blew the whistle) and Kennedy was assassinated under Lyndon B. Johnson's orders. It's not a matter of the existence or not of a deep state, but at what degree the POTUS will obey it, and what price he is willing to pay.

William Gruff , Oct 28 2019 18:03 utc | 22
There are those who post here who would have you believe that the deep state installed Trump, then attacked Trump, then all as part of some elaborate scheme had Trump attack them back. That brings us directly to this point where the deep state is now at least partially exposed.

This was to achieve what? Increased military spending? How does that logic work? They could have arranged such spending increases with Clinton instead of Trump. It isn't like Clinton ever even hinted that military spending should be curtailed.

But no, the imperial FUDster wants you to believe that deep state /establishment/CIA deliberately blew a big chunk of their cover for what boils down to no reason whatsoever. The deep state has gained nothing since the 2016 elections other than more of the public's eyeballs turned in their direction and a further erosion of the public's confidence in the corporate mass media upon which the deep state /establishment depends.

Nonsense.

The truth is that the deep state is staggering from failure to failure. You can celebrate that this is a symptom of the empire dying, but it is a dangerous period.

psychohistorian , Oct 28 2019 18:05 utc | 23
If Deep State is defined as the career bureaucrats/military of a specific nation then let me define a new term that maybe Trump represents (because it sure as hell is not the masses/global commons).

The new term I would propose is Deep World to define the elite that are transnational/trans-state and have been behind/owning organizations like the BIS (Bureau of International Settlements - the central bank of Western central banks) that has been around since 1930

And I would agree with Richard | Oct 28 2019 16:30 utc | 4 and foolisholdman | Oct 28 2019 17:25 utc | 17 about this but would say that instead of millionaires, the Deep World folks are trillionaires....and they are in the process of culling the rabble millionaires.

I would conclude by noting that to the extent the Deep World have the masses focusing on the Deep State, they continue to succeed in maintaining their control of the levers of Western governments behind the curtain.

Robert Snefjella , Oct 28 2019 18:10 utc | 24
The word democracy means the sovereignty of the many; a fairly common historical circumstance when it comes to small matters and small places, but rare on the larger level. Classical Athens came close for a while; occasional national referendums that are retrospectively actually respected are occasional forays into democratic political procedure. Also on occasion, people rebel en masse, with popular support, and overthrow the regime in power, and thus in effect exercise an active temporary democratic procedure. People can also en masse refuse to cooperate - passive resistance. This too if effective and broadly supported is a democratic procedure.

In general terms the democratic idea rests largely on the belief that the broad public interest is best served by broad public sovereignty. And the constant references to democracy by oligarchic or narrow political power are indications that such power seeks to gain the appearance of legitimacy by cloaking themselves in the terminology of democracy.

A voting procedure in which honest and full discourse based on good information underlies the political choosing, and with fair play broadly predominating, can be described as a democratic process. But this is a rare accomplishment. But even in such a case, the result has for long typically been a so-called representative government which will be contaminated by, a secret servant to, or overtly predominantly representative of, oligarchic interests, corporate interests, transnational financial power, military related interests, and secretive networks and organizations.

The 'deep state' meme has been of benefit in serving as shorthand for and drawing more public attention to the fact of hidden sovereign or decisive power, or hidden power that attempts to exercise in effect sovereign power.

But it also becomes a 'lazy man's load', by loading up two words with too much baggage.

So, for example, pertaining to the United States, there is the Bilderberger and associated transnational power and influence wielding network; there is the military complex and empire and its associated corporate network; there is the federal bureaucracy; there are the many secret 'police' agencies; there is the propaganda/mind control system complex; there is the private internationally influential financial system; there are the bought or blackmailed/compromised politicians. This is a partial list and all these systems intersect, with stresses and strains, and together form a System of of in effect sovereign power.

It is the case that in every direction in the incomplete list just given, there is at best illegitimate power being wielded, and at worst the most horrific of crimes: wars of aggression. Somewhere in between are indigenous outrages like 9/11 or Oklahoma City or the JFK coup d'etat.

One hallmark of the hidden power is its 'above the law' status; its basic impulse is totalitarian.

Trump to some extent represents a hail Mary impulse in the American people to throw a monkey wrench into this deeply pathological trajectory that the United States has gone on. When he speaks at the UN about the future as belonging to patriots not globalists, or when he refers to draining the swamp, whatever level of sincerity or insincerity his words represent, they more or less represent the wishes of millions of Americans who know they've lost their country and want it back.

James Kulk , Oct 28 2019 18:13 utc | 25
A few important things to consider when discussing and doing an analysis of Deep State politics:

(1) The State is never a single actor with a unitary interest, rationale or capacity (factions must be identified as well as the policy stance of these same factions).

(2) All State functions have evolved historically (analyze closely the evolution of Central Banks, Intelligence Agencies and their relationships with private sector power-for example linkages between Silicon Valley and intelligence, the Federal Reserve and private banking and finance).

(3)Look closely at the supposed oversight capacities of elected officials. Are there really checks and balances presently in place? (Select committees of intelligence etc.)

(4) Study in detail how the different factions of the State structure are actually financed. Does the present National Security State have any funding constraints? Do elements of the bureaucracy in co-ordination with Congress simply budget expenditures and then go ahead and spend the money?

(5) Examine closely the growth of the National Security edifice since WWII.(Importance of 9/11 as leverage for unrestrained expansion). Examine the expanding power of the Federal Reserve since the Great Recession of 2007-2008.

(6) Is it a fact that State structures are, indeed, no longer controlled by constitutionally controlled democratic institutions and elected representatives?

arby , Oct 28 2019 18:17 utc | 26
Frank Zappa around 1986-- "Government is the Entertainment Division of the military-industrial complex."

Elections fit right into that entertainment division./

vk , Oct 28 2019 18:19 utc | 27
@ Posted by: Robert Snefjella | Oct 28 2019 18:10 utc | 24

Athens wasn't democratic in the sense we have today. In Athens, only the people could vote, but the people were only the adult men citizens (the rest were slaves, women and non-citizen residents).

And, according to the post-war liberal doctrine, the deep state isn't "totalitarian", because "totalitarianism" presupposes the acceptance of only one ideology. According to the fathers of the post-war West, the deep state is there to protect a confederation of ideologies, which make the entire "political spectrum" of a liberal society. It would be legitimate for the deep state to try to topple Trump because they deem him as outside this political spectrum - in this case, the "far-right" (i.e. he went so far to the right end of the spectrum he "fell out" of it). But it wouldn't be legitimate for them to topple, e.g. Obama and W. Bush.

That's why censorship in the Western Democracies happen under the form of the "politically correct culture" ("PC Culture"). Western democracy is still authoritarian, the only difference being they are, allegedly (they propagandize as such), more flexible and tolerant with the exercise of their authority.

Tannenhouser , Oct 28 2019 18:22 utc | 28
@Gruff. So the 'deep state' just ignored the reality of the Electoral College? Seems to me the best way to install the candidate of choice would be to control this. IMO Trump is not from outside of the deep state but their preferred candidate, otherwise the EC would not have installed him. The rest is just smoke and mirrors and matters not as you either see it for what it is or hate Trump because......Trump. Anything that gets accomplished these days benefits they anyways. It matters not if the Deep state is being exposed as you say because Everybody knows already and because Polarisation. TDS is real. There are the most social minded caring people who would murder thousands just to see him burn......because..... Trump. It's a truly VIRAL MEME.
ADKC , Oct 28 2019 18:23 utc | 29
A few months ago Trump talked about 're-opening the old mental health institutions. Now Barr introduces
ben , Oct 28 2019 18:27 utc | 30
This isn't rocket science folks. The so-called "deep state" is nothing more than it ever was, a cabal of very wealthy individuals with enough $ to purchase enough "elected" individuals to change the rules of the game in their favor.

This has been going on throughout human history, and the goal is to subvert democracy so the wealthy can control the game of life, which we're all involved in.

In this day and age, here in America, it is reaching it's Zenith, behind a new corporate capitalism, fostered by monopolies, and moving around the globe.

Buy enough politicians, change the rules, win the game.

BM , Oct 28 2019 18:34 utc | 32
I'm not a political partisan. I'm interested in democracy/governance, history, international affairs. Posted by: jrabbit-troll/donkey-troll | Oct 28 2019 17:10 utc | 14

So claims an operator who is clearly paid by Deep State interests to confuse and obfuscate and waste precious MoA space with their repetitive and verbose idiocy. Is this the best you can find, Deep State? Pay is too stingy, probably.

ben , Oct 28 2019 18:37 utc | 33
P.S. IMO, these "deep staters" aren't undermining DJT they're assisting him. They've never had a more willing servant than DJT, by him devolving govt., it takes away the only force powerful enough to challenge the anti-democratic forces at work today in the U$A.

DJT is all theater, all the time. "Distracter in Chief", is his real title.

PavewayIV , Oct 28 2019 18:41 utc | 34
Since Donald Trump was elected president the New York Times' understanding of the 'Deep State' evolved from a total denial of its existence towards a full endorsement of its anti-democratic operations.

NYT discovers Deep State. Precious...

If your treasonous machinations against the will of the people are exposed, then 1) point the finger at someone (or something) else, 2) demonize that 'common' enemy, 3) proclaim your honorable and heroic fight against this threat, and 4) recruit the little people - they work for YOU. That's why they exist.

Once the little people identify with your side, they are unlikely to reconsider the enemy you pointed out. You're off the hook no matter how damning the evidence against you or preposterous the evidence is against the enemy.

It's also necessary to keep it simple for the little people's tiny simian brains. Make sure you shout the loudest and repeat the most frequently about your preferred 'enemy' to overcome the voice of anyone pointing back at you (especially) or pointing at some other enemy (dilutes your intended narrative). Remember, all the other psychopaths will be doing the same thing at the same time. Amplification through the MSM is most helpful.

Anyone that tells you there is one common identifiable US Deep State is your real enemy.

Robert Snefjella , Oct 28 2019 19:05 utc | 41
@ vk | Oct 28 2019 18:19 utc | 27

The word totalitarian can be quibbled over; I used it with in mind not just the global ambitions/impulses that lie behind say "full spectrum domination" as American military policy, or Professor Quigley's disclosure of international private banking's ambition to set up an in effect system of hidden global control above politics, or the extreme effort that has been made to set up a global surveillance capacity that seems to have the ambition of capturing say the private moments of 'dignataries' and dissidents around the planet, or Google's ambitions/reach, or the the Rockefeller 'competition is a sin' approach.

I'm also thinking of phenomenon such as say the 'deep state' murder of Sweden's Prime Minister Olaf Palme in 1986, or the killing of RFK by not Sirhan Sirhan, and the capacity and staying power of "the System' to maintain a public facade/false 'official' narrative pertaining to those and countless other criminal 'events' over generations.

If not precisely totalitarian, maybe 'extremely arrogant control freaks'?

Bobzibub , Oct 28 2019 19:09 utc | 42
Deep state or ordinary bureaucratic sclerosis, aka rule by committee?

For example, the awkward outcome wrt troops hijacking Syrian oil. It is not a practical solution for any US party--if there's a deep state, they're unhappy about it too. But there are also a slew of other vested interests to take into account with any decision process. Too many cooks does not imply a common unified entity. It is typically a lack of a clearly elucidated and fleshed out vision/agenda allowing wiggle room for all sorts of things. I could imagine that "getting out of Syria" or "getting out of Iraq" would fit.

Perhaps we need to simply lower our expectations.

Don Bacon , Oct 28 2019 19:23 utc | 44
Deep state derives from a natural human tendency. Those that have it (assets) believe that they have a right to keep it and get more of it, and so they do whatever is in their power (which is a lot) to exercise that "right." The US government is a good model for it, with its world "rules-based" malignancy, so people can draw from that example. And then add to that that the US has its caste system which is seldom mentioned, sort of like India.
Albertde , Oct 28 2019 19:43 utc | 46
The Elite and the Consensus

Throughout the 19th century in the UK and the beginning of the same century in the US, elites worried about extending suffrage to the masses, initially just universal male suffrage, later on universal suffrage to all adults, male and female. They finally realized at the beginning of the 20th century that to continue to control political institutions they only needed to control the discourse through the media (initially just newspapers, magazines and broadsides, later extended to radio, movies/cinema and TV) and motivate people's choices through fear of anarchy (by creating/tolerating incidents, controlled chaos and criminality), the enemy/other and the unknown, through the use of falsified consensus (especially effective with women) and, as a last resort, through patriotism. They would then be able to channel popular opinion in the direction they wanted.

Under dictatorial, communist and fascist regimes, the opinion of all residents is tightly controlled and no deviations are tolerated, either publicly or in a family setting (children being encouraged to report on parents). People expressing deviant opinions are silenced by imprisonment or if they are considered dangerous enough, accused of some "crime" and killed ("executed"). The result is that when the disparity between the reality people witness and the reports they see in the controlled media becomes too great, these regimes would weaken since the only tool for control would be visible fear and people would be prone to apathy.

The elite in the so-called democracies realized early on that there is actually no need to control everyone in a country. Since the elite's control is activated chiefly through political institutions and the media, it suffices to control key influencers, i.e., politicians and media players (journalists and TV and radio news reporters and presenters), who are subject to the same severe control as all the people living under dictatorial, communist and fascist regimes.

Politicians and journalists deviating from the Consensus (also known as the Deep State) - whatever the elite wants at a particular time - would be initially mocked as proponents of some conspiracy theory if the steps they had taken were known by the public, and if they persist in their deviance from the Consensus and are respected by the public, they are silenced.

The means of silencing depends on what the elite need in a given situation. If they feel the need to convey a message ("don't deviate"), the target is publicly assassinated. If they want to eliminate someone who appears to be lovable such as a famous woman, then a discrete plane accident or poison administered after some otherwise non-lethal accident does the trick.

If the influencer appears to be someone of questionable health, a fatal heart attack or cancer could be induced. In some situations, especially after a number of assassinations, "accidents", cancers or heart attacks had already occurred to remove deviant influencers, the elite may decide it might be too dangerous and too suspicious to continue to physically eliminate deviant influencers so, as a last resort, they only place these deviant influencers in situations where they are forced to resign/abandon the position that bestowed influence and thus removed from the public eye.

William Gruff , Oct 28 2019 19:48 utc | 47
Tannenhouser @28

The deep state /establishment is not all-powerful. They can influence, not control, and they can influence only so long as the public is unaware of that influence. This is why the so-called deep state blowing its cover is a huge deal.

The so-called deep state exists to protect and represent the interests of big business and the rich and powerful. It makes sure that the rest of the state continues to look out for the wealthy. This layer of society can most certainly just dispense with the whole "Democracy Show" and install a CEO for the country instead of going through the election motions. But as expensive and unwieldy as the "Democracy Show" might seem to be, it is still cheaper than that option. Cheaper = more profits and more wealth and more power for the elites. They don't want to pay for a full blown police state if they don't have to.

Because of this when the plans of the deep state /establishment fall apart they must deal with it and try to patch things up on the fly, at least so long as the cost-benefit analysis still favors the "Democracy Show" .

Trump was certainly part of the plans of the deep state /establishment, but only as a foil to help make Clinton look good in comparison. Unfortunately for them, the deep state /establishment is so far out of touch with the concerns of common Americans that they don't know how to make Clinton look good to them.

But why Clinton? Because the empire has many plates spinning at the moment. Many regime change operations around the world at different levels of maturity. Many delicate moves in the works that have been planned for literally decades. The Pivot to Asia , fracturing Russia, fleecing the remains of public wealth from the former Soviet states, gaining control of China, breaking up the BRICS, reversing the move to socialism in Latin America, etc.. The Clintons have been in the thick of all of that and are fully up to speed on all of the dirty deeds being done in the dark to build the empire. At this delicate stage, more than anything else, the empire needs internal stability (chaos outside is OK, though). One wrong tweet can wreck years of work.

Trump, on the other hand, has no clue about any of that. He still even thinks that ISIS is America's enemy rather than a mercenary army for the empire. This means that the CIA has not, even to this day, bothered to brief Trump on what they are really up to. That appears to be the consequence of some organizational pettiness and petulance within the CIA, blaming Trump personally for their plan's failure.

If Clinton had won as expected, on the other hand, the operations in Syria and Ukraine and Venezuela and so on could have proceeded without missing a beat. While the efforts of the Syrian military, Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah have been truly remarkable in containing the head choppers, a fair portion of the credit for the demise of ISIS lies with severe disruption of their logistics and command structures due to Clinton not getting installed in the White House.

In 2016 the deep state was "conspiracy theory" ... crazy talk. That is entirely the point of the article b composed above. Everybody didn't already know about it. It was the conflict between the deep state and the President that stripped the cover from the deep state and forced the New York Langley Times to partially admit that it exists. This conflict between the deep state and the President would not have occurred had Clinton won the election as planned.

jayc , Oct 28 2019 19:50 utc | 48
A few weeks ago one of the regular CounterPunch scribes posted a direct plea to the US alphabet agencies to use any method, fair or foul, to ensure the rapid removal of Trump as President. The author went on to claim that anyone who does not support this effort, or who might depict Trump's administration as anything less than a full blown crisis demanding immediate measures, was deserving complete excommunication from American civil life.

The author did note the alphabet agencies had a pockmarked record when it came to respecting democratic institutions, but claimed that "the left" would keep them in check following Trump's removal and that there would be no long-term consequence to such a approved precedence.

That is bat-shit crazy talk, but the left/liberal wing has become so completely unhinged by Trump's victory that they will endorse anything should it mean his immediate exit from their consciousness. That their absolutist logic - Trump is a national emergency which requires immediate measures - doesn't hold up, and is fanned by emotive exaggeration, cannot be explained to them. They insist on their position.

psychohistorian , Oct 28 2019 19:54 utc | 49
Why all this focus on Deep State?

Let me pose a question. Do any of the Deep State folks own organizations like the BIS (Bureau of International Settlements - the central bank of Western central banks) that has been around since 1930?

If not, then why all the hysteria?

If so, then who are they?

lysias , Oct 28 2019 20:01 utc | 50
The people who own the Bank of International Settlements also own the Deep State.
uncle tungsten , Oct 28 2019 20:04 utc | 51
lysius #37

Thank you, Alexander Daniluk is the man. Standing over the Ukranian Presidents shoulder dripping poison in his ear. I will be interested to see his future career unfold.

Now Daniluk is a true deep stater and has now been Gulianied if I can use that term. Schiff has worked so hard to exploit him and now hide him from the Trump juggernaught and failed again.

Don Bacon #44

Your reference to the broken caste system is perfect.

lysias , Oct 28 2019 20:05 utc | 52
Who are they? Lord Rothschild is one obvious candidate.
psychohistorian , Oct 28 2019 20:07 utc | 53
@ lysias who wrote " The people who own the Bank of International Settlements also own the Deep State. " I agree and continue to be frustrated by the misdirected energy and ongoing obfuscation of the structural problem of the Western social contract.....those that control finance, control the social narrative.

Left and Right are Pluto's Cave Display creations....there is only Top and Bottom.

lysias , Oct 28 2019 20:11 utc | 55
The Cold War Western so-called democracies allowed a much broader range of thought then than they do now. If they weren't totalitarian then, they are well on the road to becoming it now.
vk , Oct 28 2019 20:15 utc | 56
@ Posted by: Robert Snefjella | Oct 28 2019 19:05 utc | 41

The origin of the term "totalitarianism" (adjective: "totalitarian") is uncertain, but it is almost certain it was popularized through a magazine called "The New Leader", which begun circulating in the USA (East Coast, mainly New York) in the 1920s and continued to be so until the 1950s. This magazine was created mainly by Menshevik refugees (the losers of the 1917 Revolution). It was edited, at its apex, by the infamous Sol Levitas (a OSS/CIA asset).

The magazine claimed to publish articles portraying the cruel realities of the Soviet Union and it is now known that its contents are pure propaganda. Those refugees told incredible stories a la those told nowadays by those North Korean refugees (see the posts in this blog about North Korea's famous "ressurections").

But this, in itself, is irrelevant, because the definition of the term people use nowadays is the one publicized by the CIA crew, that is, Hannah Arendt and co.

According to their definition, totalitarianism is a society which accepts only one ideology. In their minds, that's what the USSR was. But, in reality, what they did was to refurbish the term to try to create a narrative where - in the context of the bipolarity globe of the Cold War - the Western elites could paint the picture not as "red vs blue" or "the pot calling the kettle black", but as good vs evil, natural vs unnatural, freedom vs slavery.

Keep in mind that this operation happened essentially in a time span of three years (1947-1951), and that they were operating in a context of creation of a center-left (Non-Communist Left, NCL in the CIA designation). They were not conservatives, but identified themselves as moderates, some even as socialists (democratic socialists, from where Bernie Sanders borrowed the definition). They lived in a world without the threat of the far-right, in the world of the "keynesian consensus".

But the problem the NCL immediately faced with their "anti-totalitarian" propaganda was that Stalin unexpectedly died in 1953. After his death, Krushchev begun the process of "De-stalinization": well, if the USSR really was "totalitarian", that shouldn't happen. To make things even worse, Krushchev made a speech at the UN calling for "peaceful competition" and, some years later (1969), broke ties with another communist nation, China. Those events eroded the NCL's totalitarism thesis, since there was clearly a "vital center" in the USSR.

Not by coincidence, the end of the 1950s and, specially, the second half of the 1960s, marked the era of the rise of the so-called "neoconservatives" and the decline of the NCL. The neoconservatives originally were a small American Trotskyites who developed an overall anti-government stance and an elitist disgust for NCL "pluralism" (vital center). It is from the neoconservatives that came the designation of the term "liberal" as anyone left-wing in the USA. They later spread to dominate the common sense of American society after the 1970s and, after the oil crisis of 1974-5 and the rise of neoliberalism as a practical political doctrine, definitely became the dominant political stance in the USA - a position it enjoys until the present times.

winston2 , Oct 28 2019 20:19 utc | 57
The deep state is much more than the civil service, and was inherited from the British along with common law. It has its own schools and colleges, not quite as obvious as in Britain, but there anyway. We were taught the real history of events, not the pablum fed to the serfs at my school, a perfect example of that system,in the UK.

Prime ministers, ministers, MPs.Bankers, Lord Mayors of London,Judges and the top echelon of the civil service graduated its doors over the last seven centuries, nine really but with a century off while the Black Death ravaged the population. In the words of George Carlin:Its a big club and you are not in it.

You gravely underestimate its power, it is the Establishment, not part, all of it. It has factions, but it is united in keeping control, and its damn good at that.

uncle tungsten , Oct 28 2019 20:27 utc | 58
ADKC #31

That is seriously bad news from Whitney Webb. With the CLOUD Act the USA 'law enforcement' will exercise global circumvention of all civil rights in any court. I would like to see all State Department staff tested to see if their support for regime change is potentially a violent intention.

karlof1 , Oct 28 2019 20:28 utc | 59
All regular barflies know I term the "Deep State" as the Current Oligarchy, and I've presented my reasoning why that's so; and I don't intend to reiterate. Instead, I'll provide some links to previous actions taken by the contemporaneous Current Oligarchy. First and most recent is Escobar's sarcastic pessimism over what he describes as a Netflix coming attraction and--as I nod my head in agreement--concludes:

"The 'died as a dog' movie can also be interpreted as the liquidation of a formerly useful asset that was a valued component of the gift that keeps on giving, the never-ending Global War on Terror. Other scarecrows, and other movies, await."

Next the overall scope of the situation must be enlarged to the entire planet, which has provided the actual stage for Current Oligarchy action since its rise to modern prominence during WW2 and significantly at its end as it worked hard to define the post-war world and mold it to its benefit. The next two pieces are by the same writer, the first describing the great importance of what I pointed to last week--the initial Russia-Africa Summit--and providing the following essential background:

"It is no secret that just as China began outpacing the Americans in African investment in 2007. Rather than acting intelligently to increase genuine infrastructure funding as the Chinese had done, the US Deep State not only continued its outdated debt-slavery practices, but created AFRICOM as a military arm across the continent. Ironically AFRICOM's presence coincided with a doubling of militant Islamist activities since 2010 with 24 groups now identified (up from only 5 in 2010) and a 960% increase in violent attacks from 2009-2018. Just as western lending has caused a pandemic of slavery, so too has western security forces only spread mass insecurity.

"The fact is that the neo cons infesting the Military Industrial Complex have openly identified both countries as co-equal enemies to the USA and understand that this alliance represents an existential threat to their hegemony. Speaking at the Heritage Foundation last year, former National Security Advisor John Bolton said (without blushing): ' The predatory practices pursued by China and Russia stunt economic growth in Africa; threaten the financial independence of African Nations; inhibit opportunities for US investment and pose a threat to US national security interests .'" [Emphasis Original]

Two paragraphs prior, the author referenced a previous essay of his to provide the background to why events have gone in a particular direction since 1945. To do so, most readers would get their first introduction to FDR's Veep, Henry Wallace whose role during much of WW2 was to continually enunciate on FDR's 4 Freedoms and how they'd produce the Century of the Common Man at the war's conclusion, which was diametrically opposed to the Current Oligarchy's vision embodied in Henry Luce's Amercian Century :

"While some commentators are trying to spin this emerging re-orientation in global affairs as a mere 'trick to get re-elected', the reality goes much deeper than many realize, as Trump is merely tapping into an American strategy which was firmly established during the 1941-1944 presidential term of America's President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his loyal collaborator Henry A. Wallace who had planned a grand design for a US-Russia-China New world order founded upon principles enshrined in the Atlantic Charter and enunciated in his 1942 'Century of the Common Man' speech [Link at Original]."

I could cite much more from that essay, but I encourage barflies to read it. I often allude to the path not taken and cite the internal coup that denied Wallace becoming FDR's Veep in the 1944 election, which would have made him POTUS in late April 1945, and have made that turn one of history's most important What Ifs? For those following closely, there are many parallels of today's events with those of 70-75 years ago that demonstrate the circular and linear nature of history. That brings us to our fourth item wherein we see a member of the Current Oligarchy revive those long hidden skeletons that now form the major focal point of its attempt to remain relevant:

"This bipartisan Russophobia can be traced back decades to the Red Scare paranoia of the Cold War and McCarthyite persecution during the 1950s of suspected Soviet sympathizers in Washington and Hollywood. But for the past three years, since the 2016 election, the Cold War has been crazily enlivened with the 'Russiagate scandal' of alleged interference in American political affairs by Moscow. It was the Clinton campaign, establishment media and her intelligence agency supporters that launched that canard against Trump."

Current holistic thinking and observing combined with enough prior knowledge not only proves the past and present existence of the Current Oligarchy; it shows us how it's relying on its previous success to bail itself out of its present predicament--Trump's policies have destabilized it thanks to its own internal factionalism while it's again threaten by the specter of what I'll call the Revenge of the Common Man, having been deprived of the fruits of its labors and sacrifices that began 80+ years ago through the vehicle of Sanders humanism and Gabbard's patriotic revelations of truth.

lysias , Oct 28 2019 20:29 utc | 60
Wasn't neoliberalism thoroughly discredited by the economic crisis of 2007-9?
DannyC , Oct 28 2019 20:33 utc | 61
you'd be assuming that they're partisan. The Deep State couldn't care less what party is in power, as long as the business of never ending wars, resource plundering and insane budgets stay in place.
Robert Snefjella , Oct 28 2019 20:35 utc | 62
Posted by: psychohistorian | Oct 28 2019 20:07 utc | 53.

"those that control finance, control the social narrative."

Zero Hedge recently featured a piece in which a 'luminary' declared "These central bankers are clueless..." Maybe it's now more like riding a whale, rather than controlling it?

And the control of the social narrative has certainly been attempted. And until the Internet, considerable influence and some extremely effective taboos were in place for generations. But not long ago the 'faith' of the US public in their mass media was shown to have plummeted from roughly half a generation ago to roughly a quarter now. Now whether the collapse of US adoration of mass media is a global phenomenon I don't know. But "control" of the social narrative by financial controllers is more problematic today.

But when it comes to say the CIA's attempt to control global communications, long ago testified to by John Stockwell, and more recently disclosed and broadened by Udo Ulfkotte, there are definite linkages between CIA and Intelligence Agencies and high finance, but who is in control? And how effective is the attempt?

Or when the US military and British Military for example devote large resources to 'the right message', or when massive corporations hire professional slick liars - Public Relations - to spin their message, is this high finance in control? To some extent there is interlinkage, but again: is there a financial supreme Wizard of Oz or is it much more complex?

Seth_Rich , Oct 28 2019 20:40 utc | 63
Surprised nobody has mentioned this. The Trump crowd has skewed the original meaning of "deep state" to their advantage. The functionaries described by "b" in today's post don't really scratch the surface of the deep state.

At the same time, the NYT and establishment media are taking advantage of this re-definition to hide the real one, as b's article should state.

Seth_Rich , Oct 28 2019 20:45 utc | 64
The money-shot from the above linked article:
For Lofgren, "Deep State" was an apt phrase to describe what he wrote was "the big story of our time": a largely open confluence of entrenched interests that helped explain everything from the war on terror to income inequality.

The essay resonated, so much so that Lofgren turned it into the 2016 book.

Naturally, a book proposing a unified theory of overreach by the military, intelligence, government contractors, big banks, and big tech received a warm reception in left-wing outlets like Salon and CounterPunch. So too, though, did The Deep State get positive notice in the far-right finance blog Zero Hedge, and in the far-right Taki's Magazine from Steve Sailer, an influential and highly controversial writer who New York magazine called "The Man Who Invented Identity Politics for the New Right."

Indeed, in the months after Lofgren wrote his original deep state essay, Cambridge Analytica and its then–vice president Steve Bannon were busy discovering -- at least according to the whistleblower Christopher Wylie -- that the phrase was catnip to conservative voters.

Lofgren began to realize that the idea had become something else in the popular imagination when right-wing commentators blamed the deep state for leaks that led to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's resignation. And as a flood of similar leaks threatened to sink the Trump administration in its early months, reports emerged that the president himself blamed them on the deep state, and allies from Steve King to Newt Gingrich said so publicly.

Of course, Trump's supporters blamed only one group within the network of interests described by Lofgren's deep state -- career bureaucrats or Obama-era holdovers who were appalled by the anti–administrative state president and wanted to damage him to preserve the status quo. These were an entrenched interest to be sure, but, Lofgren said, not as important as the revolving door between industry, Wall Street, and government that made sure special interests dictated a consistent policy from administration to administration.

Today, posts about the deep state appear multiple times a day in pro-Trump communities like Reddit's /r/The_Donald, where its hidden hand is seen manipulating events as disparate as the death of child star Corey Haim and a DDoS attack against conservative conspiracy site the Gateway Pundit. Wednesday morning, a Daily Caller explainer video about the deep state was the top post on /r/The_Donald.

In response to what he saw as abuse of the term, Lofgren last year wrote a column for LobeLog, "Yes, There Is a Deep State -- But Not the Right Wing's Caricature."

ben , Oct 28 2019 20:57 utc | 65
WG @ 47; Excellent synopsis WG, absolutely right on point.
karlof1 , Oct 28 2019 20:59 utc | 66
lysias @60--

Yes, but it wasn't destroyed as its main players were rescued by Obama and saved from life in prison. That enabled the Current Oligarchy to double-down, take even greater risks and blow an even bigger financial bubble depicted by figure 3 here . Trump's related to the Current Oligarchy by the fact that he's riding/ridden the same bubble(s) and thus has connections to one of its factions as Pepe Escobar revealed during his coverage of the 2016 election. Since he's tangentially related, Trump's policies have fed them as they've also fed Trump, which has acted as a form of insurance for him. Trump shares a portion of Luce's American Century vision but not its entirety, which has exacerbated a longstanding disagreement between Current Oligarchy factions that goes back to the 1960s of which Senator Fulbright was the leading example.

Albertde , Oct 28 2019 21:02 utc | 67
Rest of Comment @46

This only works in so-called democracies as long as the reality people witness corresponds to the reports in the media. Once a disparity arises and the economic situation degenerates, the same apathy that arises in dictatorial, communist and fascist regimes, arises in so-called democracies.

Today, after the assassinations of JFK and RFK and the forced resignation of Nixon, every president since then until Trump has towed the line. (In fact, Obama enjoyed it.) Trump, being the narcistic fool he is and having the bloated ego he has, is taking on the Consensus, the chief enforcers being the CIA and FBI. That's why he was elected. If he doesn't continue to take on the Consensus, he won't be re-elected.

Zedd , Oct 28 2019 21:02 utc | 68
@Psychohistorian #49

Who are they? [the Deep State]

I suggest you follow the link below. To this day certain British parliamentarians refer to themselves as 'Venetians.' The tradition of the Globalizing elite and the Intelligence networks which guide it harken back to Venice.

There are no individual trillionaires per se, for example the 'Rothschilds' are merely one of many families who together participate and own shares in a grounp 'Fondo,' or Fund. When an individual from within this group dies without an heir his shares are returned to the Family. One group of individuals has been demonstrated to hold or otherwise control between 40 and 80% of all assets in existence - that's right, roughly half of everything - by a Swiss study tracing cross ownership of Corporate entities worldwide. It is sometimes refered to as the Octopus of Global Control. It is very real, controlling not just finance, but much more importantly controls English speaking Global culture, and therefore what people think and believe is reality, via a sophisticated and secretive elite based mainly in the UK.

This is the Deep State and it is very real. It's core ideology is Supremacist and Mathusian. Zionism is it's most obvious manifestation. As with everything else the Octopus manages the choices we lower caste individuals can make by managing dialectics. It matters not who you vote for since all your choices are predetermined by this group, to keep the hyper elite entrenched in their positions and the rest of us chasing our tails.

https://www.academia.edu/34954495/The_Spy_Chiefs_of_Renaissance_Venice_Intelligence_Leadership_in_the_Early_Modern_World

Petri Krohn , Oct 28 2019 21:09 utc | 69
The United States is a National Security State, where the institutions of imperial and state security override any elected government.

Warnings of a deep state filled the pages of The New York Times before and after the Kennedy assassination. People understood that the extraordinary powers given to the CIA and the US intelligence community as a result of the Cold War were incompatible with the ideals of a democratic republic that had exited previously.

State Within a State? - The New York Times , October 6, 1963 ( archive )

Is the Central Intelligence Agency a state within a state?

Evidently the elite slowly accepted the fact and stopped complaining. They learned to stop worrying and love the bomb!

***

I spent several years slowly collecting sources for a Wikipedia article on the US deep state. There was a general article on a state within a state , listing several countries where the phrase (or the equivalent Deep State ) was used. The United States was not listed before I added the entry.

After Trump's election someone finally started the article on the US Deep State . I moved my reliable sources over to that article. But in a few months the article degraded into an article about some "Trumpist" conspiracy theory.

vk , Oct 28 2019 21:26 utc | 70
By pure coincidence, I found out this article today which perfectly exemplifies the degeneration of the "vital center" (American Dream is Sunk ):
The dynamic, far-left versus far-right will end up ripping the U.S.A. to shreds. And the problem is not what either side gets wrong – it's what they get right.

[...]

Like everything else Washington and Wall Street churn out, it's all meant to calm the Titanic's passengers. The ship's orchestra is still playing soothing classics, as the chilly waters of the North Atlantic sting at the ladies Victorian dress hems. Our Captain has long since drowned down under at his station on Titanic's bridge, even as the boilers still turn the screws of our once mighty ship.

A few of us are looking on from the few lifeboats or life preservers. America, like R.M.S. Titanic, still illuminates the night sky. But for how long? For this writer, it is all just that sad. We sped across the waves of history like Titanic, unsinkable, unshakeable, and beautiful – only to hit the iceberg of reality. America, given the course and speed she took, was doomed from the moment the rudder turning in this direction. And the Russians were not steering or stoking the fires.

ptb , Oct 28 2019 21:36 utc | 72
@seth-r 63 ... good link to the 2014 bill moyers article.

Deep State is a loose term but it always had 2 halves that are now clearly coming together as one.

1. The bipartisan-pro-business (i.e. neoliberal) wing. They won their total victory under Reagan, and have simply been maintaining it.

2. The US national power wing - hawks / MIC / team-usa world-police. They experienced confusion after the cold war suddenly ended, but under Bush II they had a final victory of sorts, upon 9/11. The total unconditional surrender of the Dem party to the neocon principles made this wing also clearly bipartisan.

2016 was messy because both wings found their core beliefs discredited, and simultaneously they had to support an uninspiring figurehead in Clinton.

Trump, being the reality-show magician he is, not only benefited from this, but also reunited his allies/enemies with the electorates who were about to leave them. We again have strong partisan loyalty in the US. Trump does 95% exactly what the militarists and the big business guys want, yet manages to be pretty darn convincing in playing the victim, since the outrage against him is genuine. He is also in his personality a grotesquely cartoonish distillation of exactly these qualities - greed, corruption, bellegligence.

his best and most threatening quality is that it finally forces some honesty on observers of the system.

Jen , Oct 28 2019 21:51 utc | 75
I'm sure I'm not the only person here who sees the headlines B has linked to and other NYT headlines (and some of the actual articles themselves, if I have the time and patience to read them) and realised that The New York Times itself is part of the Deep State it initially denied and now wholeheartedly supports. Not that this should surprise anyone who is familiar with Operation Mockingbird and The New York Times' part in co-operating with the CIA to plant CIA-origin reports with reporters who were either willing volunteers or unaware innocents or to practise self-censorship to appease the CIA.

Carl Bernstein "The CIA and the Media" http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php

Spartacus Educational "Operation Mockingbird" https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmockingbird.htm

paul , Oct 28 2019 21:51 utc | 76
the deep state is basically the one per cent, so called, which has many levers, within 'the state', but also within the private economy, the world of media and culture, the academic world, etc..
Theophrastus , Oct 28 2019 22:09 utc | 77
There is no democracy anywhere on earth. Elections are not democratic; sortition is.

Here, for instance, is Aristotle on the subject:

"It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election." -- Aristotle, Politics

It was Cleisthenes who in 508 BC had the genius insight that it is elections themselves that are the problem, because those who are elected are always the ones most eager to seize a position of power, and they always use it for their own benefit and not for the common good. More than a century later, Plato would agree, stating that the worst that can happen to a society is that its offices are held by those who crave them most.

This deserves repeating: only those with an ambition for power seek election to public office.

The French philosopher Alain (original name: Emile Chartier) famously said that what characterises an honest man is not wanting to rule over others, which implies that it will be the least generous among us who will take advantage.

Elections are thus not at all democratic, and in agreement ---besides Cleisthenes himself, Plato, Aristotle, and Alain--- are also Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, Thucydides, Herodotus, and many others.

Thus, in this discussion about the Deep State (which was officially birthed in 1947, but had been gestating since the very beginning of the USA), we forget that all democracies for the last 250 years have used the term "democracy" as a smokescreen to hide the fact that they are, in fact, oligarchies, and the Deep State is their muscle.

As George Carlin said so well: "There's an Owners' Club folks, and you and I are not in it. They want more for themselves and less for all the rest of us, and they don't give a f**k about you, at all."

uncle tungsten , Oct 28 2019 22:10 utc | 78
Albertde #46
Under dictatorial, communist and fascist regimes, the opinion of all residents is tightly controlled and no deviations are tolerated, either publicly or in a family setting (children being encouraged to report on parents). People expressing deviant opinions are silenced by imprisonment or if they are considered dangerous enough, accused of some "crime" and killed ("executed"). The result is that when the disparity between the reality people witness and the reports they see in the controlled media becomes too great, these regimes would weaken since the only tool for control would be visible fear and people would be prone to apathy.
So the USA is in the early or late stage of fascism? ADKC at 31 references the Whitney Webb article here .

The deep state will have arrived on your doorstep and across the globe through the CLOUD Act in the USA and with the collaboration of the Five Eyes.

pogohere , Oct 28 2019 22:19 utc | 79
I suggest the following will take inquiring minds much deeper into the subject:

THE DEEP STATE: A Brief Bibliographical Sketch

In his book The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , Col. Fletcher Prouty, who was the briefing officer to the President of the US from 1955-1963, writes about "an inner sanctum of a new religious order." By the phrase Secret Team he means a group of "security-cleared individuals in and out of government who receive secret intelligence data gathered by the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) and who react to those data." He states: "The power of the Team derives from its vast intra-governmental undercover infrastructure and its direct relationship with great private industries, mutual funds and investment houses, universities, and the news media, including foreign and domestic publishing houses." He further adds: "All true members of the Team remain in the power centre whether in office with the incumbent administration or out of office with the hard-core set. They simply rotate to and from official jobs and the business world or the pleasant haven of academe."

I have adopted the view outlined by Joseph Farrell in his Nazi International, The Reich of the Black Sun and The Third Way, by Alfred W. McCoy in his The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade and by William Engdahl in A Century of War, Anglo-American Oil Politics And The New World Order. See also Peter Dale Scott´s writings. Essentially I am referring to a consortium of intelligence agencies, their bankers and the drug cartels who finance themselves off money laundering and resource expropriation.

Post WW2 theft of Axis booty was used to finance intelligence agencies (see Seagrave: Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold" and the transfer of control over the Asian heroin trade (see: McCoy: "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade") has been used to finance off-budget operations of intelligence agencies worldwide. The western deep state's object is to capture the resources of eurasia and prevent a geopolitical alignment of Russia and Germany, formulated by MacKinder: The Geographical Pivot of History" and the modern exponents of western hegemony, such as George Friedman and Brzezinski, of course. With regard to Russia , didn't we seen a version of this movie in 1918?

In pertinent point:

London is now the global money-laundering centre for the drug trade, says crime expert

Gomorrah author Roberto Saviano says 'the British treat it as not their problem'

"The City of London is the money-laundering centre of the world's drug trade, according to an internationally acclaimed crime expert."

In my view, any attempt to analyse geopolitical machinations that doesn't recognize the everyday efforts of the multiple entities alluded to above will lack depth. I'm not referring to the holdover, identifiable bureaucrats who survive from one political administration to the next. I'm referring to those who administer the funds laundered by the too-big-to-fail-too-big-to jail banks as well as the funds disappearing into the black holes of the defense department: see:

Pentagon Claims That It Has "Lost" Over $18 Trillion, Which Probably Paid Foreign Army Payrolls

Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon

9/10/2001:

Cynthia Mckinney questions Rumsfeld and Myers about 9/11 War Games [and accounting]

MSU SCHOLARS FIND $21 TRILLION IN UNAUTHORIZED GOVERNMENT SPENDING; DEFENSE DEPARTMENT TO CONDUCT FIRST-EVER AUDIT

12-11-17

Earlier this year, a Michigan State University economist, working with graduate students and a former government official, found $21 trillion in unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.

The work of Mark Skidmore and his team, which included digging into government websites and repeated queries to U.S. agencies that went unanswered, coincided with the Office of Inspector General, at one point, disabling the links to all key documents showing the unsupported spending. (Luckily, the researchers downloaded and stored the documents.)

Now, the Department of Defense has announced it will conduct the first department-wide, independent financial audit in its history (read the Dec. 7 announcement here).

The Defense Department did not say specifically what led to the audit. But the announcement came four days after Skidmore discussed his team's findings on USAWatchdog, a news outlet run by former CNN and ABC News correspondent Greg Hunter.

"While we can't know for sure what role our efforts to compile original government documents and share them with the public has played, we believe it may have made a difference," said Skidmore, the Morris Chair in State and Local Government Finance and Policy at MSU.

Skidmore got involved last spring when he heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, refer to a report which indicated the Army had $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments, or spending, in fiscal 2015. Given the Army's $122 billion budget, that meant unsupported adjustments were 54 times spending authorized by Congress. Typically, such adjustments in public budgets are only a small fraction of authorized spending. Skidmore thought Fitts had made a mistake. "Maybe she meant $6.5 billion and not $6.5 trillion," he said. "So I found the report myself and sure enough it was $6.5 trillion."

Skidmore and Fitts agreed to work together to investigate the issue further. Over the summer, two MSU graduate students searched government websites, especially the website of the Office of Inspector General, looking for similar documents dating to 1998. They found documents indicating a total $21 trillion in undocumented adjustments over the 1998-2015 period. (The original government documents and a report describing the issue can be found here.)

In a Dec. 8 Forbes column he co-authored with Laurence Kotlikoff, Skidmore said the "gargantuan nature" of the undocumented federal spending "should be a great concern to all taxpayers."

"Taken together these reports point to a failure to comply with basic constitutional and legislative requirements for spending and disclosure," the column concludes. "We urge the House and Senate Budget Committee to initiate immediate investigations of unaccounted federal expenditures as well as the source of their payment."

As they say, follow the money.

Paul Damascene , Oct 28 2019 22:27 utc | 80
Insofar as my fellow barflies might accept a bridge from Deep State to MIC as not taking us too far off topic, I was struck by the belligerence of US SecDef (for Raytheon) Mark Esper's tweet to the effect that "we will respond with overwhelming military force against any group that threatens the safety of our forces" controlling the Syrian oil fields. Apparently, when specifically asked, if this included Russia, he apparently said yes, without equivocation or hesitation.

Does this new policy then, to deny Syria of 200,000 bbl / day, entail a commitment to an full out attack on the forces of a nuclear armed country?

Is this intended to be a warning? (The US / Russkie generals have a deconfliction hotline for that.) Is this representative of not caring sufficiently to think through a position, or an inability to imagine its consequences? is this the product of a delusion that, barring an effort, surely manifold greater than that during the run up to the Iraq, the US is able to respond to Russia with overwhelming force, quite near Russia's borders, after all.

Is this bluster, or are the exponents of US military violence so accustomed to bullying small and medium countries that they are simply unable to process what even a regional, conventional conflict with Russia might entail? Even taking Saker's point that if Russia limits itself to playing defence, its forces in Syria can eventually be overwhelmed, given what Martyanov refers to as the 900-lb gorilla of Russia's stand off capacity, Russia has escalation dominance. All of America's bases in the ME and all of its carrier groups could be destroyed within hours.

What on earth possesses these characters?

james , Oct 28 2019 22:29 utc | 81
@47 wg.. i maintain the reason it is happening now, is the usa empire is in an accelerating state of decline..

@59 karlof1 quote - "But for the past three years, since the 2016 election, the Cold War has been crazily enlivened with the 'Russiagate scandal' of alleged interference in American political affairs by Moscow. It was the Clinton campaign, establishment media and her intelligence agency supporters that launched that canard against Trump." i agree with this viewpoint, alongside the one i just made to william g..

james , Oct 28 2019 22:31 utc | 82
@80 paul d... maybe it has to do with mark espers gig as joe boy for rayatheon prior to accepting the usa sec of defense position? maybe he uses the lingo of a tough talking capitalist more readily then a diplomat - something in real short supply in the usa at present... it fits the tough guy john wayne persona the usa likes to project...
bevin , Oct 28 2019 22:31 utc | 83
The British term for the "Deep State", coined I believe by the historian AJP Taylor, is The Establishment. It includes but goes far beyond the Civil Service and military hierarchy. Haute Finance is central to it, so are the educational system and the media. Its role is to act as a gyroscope ensuring, through whatever means are necessary, that the course pursued by society is that determined by the ruling class.

That course, neoliberalism, requires the subordination of 'democratic' mechanisms to the imperatives of the market. The Monthly Review has a very good article this month, of which this is a small sample.

"... Today there is once again a structural crisis of capital, most evident in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008–10, but actually going much deeper and extending back to the 1970s, which marked the beginning of the long slowdown of the advanced capitalist economies. Stagnation, characterized by the overaccumulation of capital, is all the more significant in our time since it has been accompanied by the greatest inequality in history. The world has also seen the emergence of a new phase of imperialism, best characterized as late imperialism, in which international exploitation/expropriation has been intensified in the context of the globalization of production and the prevalence of global value chains. International conflicts and racism are on the rise. Both the United States and Europe are experiencing declines in their respective positions within the international economic hierarchy, symbolized by the rise of China. On top of all this is a planetary ecological crisis on a scale that has no precedent in history, and which threatens the very future of humanity, not in some distant period, but already in the present century.

"Neoliberalism, which seeks to subordinate the state to the market while also using the state apparatus to enforce market relations, is systematically dissolving all bases of community relations, transforming them into mere commodity relations. This has served to delegitimize the state, the unintended effect of which has been to encourage the development of radical right or neofascist movements opposed to liberal/neoliberal political elites along with the working poor. Xenophobic racism is being directed at immigrants and populations emanating from the Global South. At the same time, perpetual war and imperialist-based coups have generated millions of refugees. Overall, the conditions of our time are those of epochal economic, social, and ecological crises, accompanied by intensified imperialism and war...." https://monthlyreview.org/2019/10/01/the-rise-of-the-right/

The interesting question is why The Establishment feels so threatened that, as Gruff points out above, it has torn off its mask and discredited itself over what is nothing more than a minor spat within the ruling class. Trump is not a threat to the system in any way. And yet large parts of the CIA and the classes that support the ruling class have gone mad in their determination to rid themselves of him. It seems to me that this is simply a symptom of an hierarchy collapsing- as they tend to do- from the accumulated weight of its hubris. It long ago lost any sense of proportion and moderation-hence the decades of stupid wars pursued without discernible political cost, and the neglect of the social base, in the slow but steady immiseration of the working (aka 'Middle') class. This process continues as we speak, notably in the auto-discrediting of the UAW in the GM strike just (shockingly) called off. The Establishment worked because it was grounded in broad social acceptance, a contract which included some social mobility, rising living standards for the majority and all the accoutrements of an ideology of progress. For a variety of reasons that is all over now and the only real barrier between the capitalist class and the unsatisfied appetites of the masses is force, the sort of force being employed in Chile, which is, after all, neo-liberalism's Show House. All of which is making the Deep State's directors very nervous, and unbalanced. Which is why they are acting so irrationally that they seem to have convinced themselves that Trump(almost indistinguishable though he is from themselves) is a threat. A threat that they no longer dare to assassinate, which is what they would normally do. Thanks pogo for the link...!!!!

Seth_Rich , Oct 28 2019 22:32 utc | 84
ptb@72 -

Indeed, but there is another side to my point as well. The New York Times and Washington Post must simply love the fact that Trump and his supporters (of which I can be said to be one on a very limited number of issues) have re-defined "deep state" as a much shallower and easy to root out (in theory) subset of unelected government functionaries who have allegiances to Obama and his political opponents in general.

This gives cover to the actual deep state for which the NYT and WaPo (MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, etc.) are the PR arm, or at least mouthpieces.

The over-simplification allows them to treat it as just another Trumpist conspiracy gambit designed to discredit legitimate media outlets, which themselves are all owned - to some degree - by the very interests that constitute the non-governmental elements/persons of the deep state which can and do re-enter government via the revolving door.

You're spot-on with respect to The Donald, but I think one of the intended goals of the NYT etc. finally admitting the reality of the deep state was to discredit the notion in the minds of most "liberals" by playing it off as only a small number of "patriotic public servants" instead of the deeply rooted rot and control mechanism that it really is.

It's really quite insidious reverse psychology propaganda they've got going with it, and I was hoping b would have gone into a little more depth, but I suppose that is the purpose of linking the Moyers re-post of Lofgren, and the second article I linked does a decent job of exposing one side of the issue - and Lofgren's dissatisfaction with it - without totally playing NYT's game of "damning by faint praise" the idea that there is actually such a thing.

Cheers.

uncle tungsten , Oct 28 2019 22:34 utc | 85
pogohere #79

Great post and many thanks. That explains why the air is thick with absurd red herrings and has been so since the Skidmore/MSU report was made public.

Paul Damascene , Oct 28 2019 22:36 utc | 86
Re post #80, Apologies for the solecisms: I meant a military effort many times greater than that leading up the Iraq war ... and obviously with much greater consequences, given the ability of this adversary to punch back. Hard.
h , Oct 28 2019 22:39 utc | 87
In the not so distant past folks used the term 'puppet masters' to describe the unseen hands influencing elections and policies here in the U.S. This term has evolved under Trump's WH to a 'cabal' of 'entrenched interests' or a 'deep state.' Whatever the term of the day may be, people intuitively know a hidden power greater than the electorate is controlling all things in DC.

When reading several articles and watching interviews a couple of weeks ago related to Ukraine, the coup and the current Burisma sunlight, I was struck by how similar their color revolution is paralleling with what we are bearing witness to here in the United States.

Whatever this hidden hand is the U.S. is ground zero for regime change.

And Lefties and Righties and all of those in the middle would be wise to inform themselves of what is heading our way. The sooner the better b/c Party identity won't matter one iota. You're either an American who wants the country to remain governed under the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution OR you're not. Remaining neutral will not be an option.

I'd also add that this regime change is being driven by the fact that those behind the mechanics of nurturing the Liberal World Order (LWO) along are in Trump's crosshairs. Many here write about the death of the American empire but I take issue with the global sense of such a suggestion. What is dying is the Liberal World Order NOT American empire. If folks here write about the death of the American empire also encompasses the body politic of the LWO then I fully agree. But words have meaning. The body politic that birthed the likes of BIS, the Tri-Lateral Commission and the IMF are by those whose family business, generation-after-generation, gave us what is known as the Liberal World Order most of the West has lived under since the early 1900's.

Someone mentioned up thread the Rothschild clan as being a silent partner, which I fully concur, but there are many more I'd add including Soros himself. Digging in and learning the mechanics behind the money laundering scheme at Burisma pretty much tells one all they need to know about how this LWO "deep state" secures the funds to pay off their enablers/useful idiots and to invest the remaining funds into keeping their morbid theater chugging along.

Whatever happens here in the U.S. in the coming years, beware to ALL who live elsewhere. This LWO is parasitic and those who are adherents will move onto another country and start all over again. Havoc is how they make their money. It's a family business.

psychohistorian , Oct 28 2019 22:51 utc | 88
Thanks to all commenters for raising the level of discussion as go off to read the link that Zedd and others provided

All this brings me back to my structural change drum that I continue to beat here. Humanity needs to change the social contract to exclude private finance of any kind. I say this because I believe that killing all the Jews won't work, nor putting in prison Clinton, Obama, Trump, Pelosi, etc. We simply need to focus on pushing forward sovereign public finance and collaboration between civilization states to replace the BIS and other inter-state coordination.......it is the structure (private finance/property and ongoing inheritance), not the individuals at any one time that needs to be changed

Off to read some of all the links provided by great commenters here.

Zedd , Oct 28 2019 22:52 utc | 89
@lysias

A lot of the people posting comments at unz.com may be racists...

The content at UNZ provokes the response. Some say this is accidental but I doubt this is true. I'm afraid all websites are directly or indirectly controlled by Intelligence, no different from Facebook. Keep that always at the top of your mind and you will possess the key to understanding the nature of the informational matrix in which we live.

Guilt by association is a practiced tradition. In the case of Unz it used to associate important ideas and debates with incoherent racism, thus causing dissonance with those possessing an excessive normalcy bias.

When you are accused of engaging in ad hominem it is often because you have pointed to an important connection an opponent may have. The term works both ways as any thoughtful person needs to acknowledge. I think the term was invented to discourage thinking and encourage confusion about broader issues, the same way pejorative use of the word 'conspiracy' was created to hide uncomfortable facts - but also highlight less relevant details - about those who rule over us and how they accomplish their goals.

As ever things are more complicated so I take no strictly ideological view of highlighting associations. Ad hominem attacks can be used to distract an audience or it can be used to highlight the contradictions of an opponents position, for example, I seriously wonder what the word 'McCarthyite' would mean today if the politician in question had claimed not a communist but a Jewish plot against the USA. I suspect the term would never be used had McCarthy been more specific about who he was targetting. I also suspect if he was sincere about outing genuinely dangerous people there would have been no Soviet style show trials of America's most beloved Menschen.

Paul Damascene , Oct 28 2019 23:16 utc | 90
Although there are different formulations for the deep state, I'm not sure my understanding of oligarchy is sufficiently broad that it can stand in as a synonym, as I believe Karlof1 proposes. In its international dimension, psychohistorian's coinage of "Deep World" is appealing.

According to one theory of the Deep State, there are 2 wings in the US. The East-coast globalist financial elites, Jewish and Anglo-Brahmin, and the CIA; and the more southern-based, Christian, military wing. It would appear that this might run parallel to the Trump era split between patriots and globalists if projected internationally, but I'm not sure that split holds outside of the US.

VietnamVet , Oct 28 2019 23:30 utc | 91
The handy handles for the West's actual rulers are "The 0.1%", "Neo-aristocracy", or "The Elite". Larry Summers's "Insiders" are the top 1%. Technocrats like Elizabeth Warren are the top 10% which includes the Spooks, Officers and Executives climbing through the revolving doors of the Deep State.

The remaining 90% are riffraff. Western governments are purposefully non-functional with remnants of democracy that the Plutocrat Donald Trump used to befuddle incompetent Democrat Insiders and won a Presidency that he never expected. True to form, he's seized Syria's Oil which is a war crime. Corporate Democrats to keep the donor's money coming continue to scapegoat Russia. The current conflict in the West is between nationalist and globalist oligarchs and their paid servants, the 10%.

Tulsi Gabbard is the only presidential candidate mentioning the unmentionable - End the forever wars and restore government by and for the people.

evilempire , Oct 28 2019 23:49 utc | 92

I am not as erudite or eloquent as Zedd or RS but I can attempt to give my take on some of the excellent insights they have. I see the deep state as those most enthralled(imps) or those who are the direct paid agents or minions in the mind control matrix of a demonic empire of "reality creators". The matrix they have created is not true reality but a viciously malign, malignantly evil, satanically deceptive simulation that is totally divorced from objective truth and therefore totally in thrall to satan and divorced from god. In other words, the imps are the fanatical believers in the cult of Lucifer-reality while the paid agents know the simulation is false but are conscienceless psychopaths, what I term the soulless machines or material automatons of the Luciferian Imperium. So the deep state in essence is a violent, deranged cult of true believers in a false reality and therefore psychotic and extremely dangerous. It is not recognized as a cult because it is mainstream and counts among it followers the majority of the population. Look at the rabidly deranged beliefs they fanatically hold: the skripal hoax, the russia collusion hoax, the ukraine hoax, and all the other hoaxes not mentioned like the syria chemical and barrel bomb hoax, the mh17 hoax, the isis hoax. There are so many hoaxes one can't even keep track of them any longer. Any countervailing narrative is denounced as the blashemy of conspiracy theory which is a hallmark of a cult.

Posted by: evilempire | Oct 28 2019 23:49 utc | 92

juliania , Oct 29 2019 0:26 utc | 93
I haven't yet read all the comments here (must be a Deep State stretcher at work) but I would like to bring a partial comment initiated by one of b's extra links on the weekend thread that I don't think got comments there - the Atlantic piece about the Nixon/Kissinger attempts to elect someone other than Allende, and then to do an 'Allende must go' on said elected President after he had been democratically elected.

I have only read this long article partway but it strikes me the contrast is stark. There, the US government, or its executive at least, was the Deep State in the sense of being the power hidden behind its own democratic coming to be, performing illegal acts of subversion against another sovereign state. Was this what Nixon was elected to do?

It seems a horrible thing for an elected President to be engaged in, and yet do we have something even more horrible when the State itself is conspiring with media help to overturn its own elected head? Where do we go from here? It's as if the United States is now bound and determined that this country experience what it has inflicted on so many other countries north and south - a color revolution, coup d'etat of major proportions.

Well, they've been practising long and hard, but always the people fight back; and the people seem to be good at having the last say. And why not? Leaders come and go, even corporations come and go. The people are always here.

Jackrabbit , Oct 29 2019 0:36 utc | 94
Some definitions of "Deep State" given above are essentially a collection of power centers (defense department, financial industry, etc.) or a large network(s) of personal connections ("oligarchs", the "one percent", etc.). Others give great weight to state bureaucracy.

These conceptions of the Deep State are amorphous and imply collections that too unwieldy to operate effectively.

IMO the Deep State is a SMALL collection of powerful, smart people that are highly respected and virtually untouchable. They work across party lines but behind closed doors. People like McCain (while he was alive), Hillary, Bush Sr. (while he was alive), Brennan, Mueller.

Jackrabbit !!

Robert Snefjella , Oct 29 2019 0:46 utc | 95
There is no reason that I can see why the Athenian political system would not work with a less restricted citizen body.

Posted by: lysias | Oct 28 2019 19:39 utc | 45

Notice that the Yellow Vests in France emphasized direct democracy. The subject of Classical Athens regarding its 'amazing adventures' with democracy is a big one, and in my many discussions over the years on this subject, it is not unusual to be faced with the knee jerk condemnation and thus dismissal - clinching argument I win! - of Athenian democracy as irrelevant because well there were all those slaves and women who couldn't vote. Sigh.

But I would transmute your comment a bit to say that we could both learn from them, and, experiment and perhaps make some improvements. Some aspects of modern technology combined with the good old paper ballot anchor could be quite the team on behalf of direct democracy.

One aspect of their approach has been mentioned: drawing of lots to pick people for certain positions. One of the effects would be say to basically shut down contemporary lawyerly machinations re jury selection; it also dignifies the average person. Hey, anyone with any common sense can take on this task. There's lots more. Their mass juries were pretty well immune from being bought or intimidated. So, roughly speaking, I endorse your comment.

Posted by: evilempire | Oct 28 2019 23:49 utc | 92

I'm largely in sympathy with the thrust of your comments, apart from having some reservations about the comment - 'erudite and eloquent' re some RS character. Many of these very powerful people are really really sick and dangerous.

When liars and con artists successfully fool someone, the victim is taken 'out of touch with reality'; can be conned into acting on the basis of a false reality.

The layman's definition of insanity: being so out of touch with reality, and so invested in hallucination say, that one acts on the basis of that hallucination: the non-existent tiger scares the hell out of you, etc.

The average decent person can be conned into doing crazy monstrous things. It can become like you indicate group madness.

Truth is the great disinfectant.

Tulsi Gabbard is in effect saying: we have repeatedly been conned into killing and being killed. That's crazy and evil. Let's get real and get good. She's reminiscent of the truth telling child in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale: that drooling wacko empress is butt naked!

Walter , Oct 29 2019 0:52 utc | 97
"Conversations With History - Peter Dale Scott"

Peter defined deep state and so forth.

lookit youtube

psychohistorian , Oct 29 2019 1:07 utc | 99
I got a lot out of the link from Zedd in comment #68 about the early Venice methods of social control "for the common good".

It reads like it was very effective and had aspects that are probably still in use today by the cabal that is at the top of the Western social order that use the BIS, IMF and World Bank as their payolla mechanism when needed.

It details how secrecy was a state virtue and how it used the "professional" or government folks, the "mercantile" or business folks and the "amateur" or public to feed information to the controlling top of the organization effectively....just like now, only contextually evolved.

I keep calling what we have today the God of Mammon religion and that is probably not too far off in description of the belief system at the core of today's version of the controlling order. The issue that is so stark today is that "for the common good" is no longer the center point of the religion. From what I read and understand, the system that China has evolved comes closest to what makes sense if humanity is to continue and prosper as a viably structured society.

Paul Damascene , Oct 29 2019 1:11 utc | 100
Juliana @ 93 -- Perceptive post. You seem to be getting a lot from your reading. Bonne lecture.

[Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
This implicates State Department in the attempt to run a false flag operation. If we add that the State Department is the key organization behind for color revolution against Trump that picture becomes even more disturbing. This is really a neocon vipers nest.
Notable quotes:
"... This was because the public had already been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal of standing US Syria policy, as I noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun. ..."
"... "I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017," Cox told me on Twitter earlier today. ..."
"... And, like clockwork, on April 7 2018 dozens of civilians in Douma were killed in an incident which was quickly reported as a Syrian government chemical attack by all the usual establishment narrative managers on Syria , with everyone from the White Helmets to Charles Lister to Eliot Higgins to Julian Röpcke loudly flagging it on social media to draw the attention of mainstream news outlets who were slower to pick up the story. ..."
"... Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed, the US State Department declared it to have been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests. ..."
"... On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France launched an airstrike on the Syrian government as punishment for using chemical weapons, citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation could take place. ..."
"... The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018 published an interim report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits like Charles Lister who claimed that sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population." ..."
"... In May of this year, a leaked internal document from the OPCW investigation was published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government. ..."
"... The OPCW indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by clicking here . Establishment narrative managers had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work. ..."
"... "Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion ." ..."
"... "The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. " ..."
"... "The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact, acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported." ..."
"... "One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics were noted in the leaked study ." ..."
"... "Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to, or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma investigation." ..."
Oct 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The Courage Foundation , an international protection and advocacy group for whistleblowers, has published the findings of a panel it convened last week on the extremely suspicious behavior of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in its investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria last year. After hearing an extensive presentation from a member of the OPCW's Douma investigation team, the panel's members (including a world-renowned former OPCW Director General) report that they are "unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018."

I'll get to the panel and its findings in a moment, but first I should provide some historical background so that readers who aren't intimately familiar with this ongoing scandal can fully appreciate the significance of this new development.

In late March of last year, President Trump publicly stated that the US military would soon be withdrawing troops from Syria, causing some with an ear to the ground like independent US congressional candidate Steve Cox to predict that there would shortly be a false flag chemical weapons attack in that nation. This was because the public had already been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal of standing US Syria policy, as I noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun.

"I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017," Cox told me on Twitter earlier today.

"Khan Shaykhun also occurred within days of the Trump Admin saying we're leaving Syria."

And, like clockwork, on April 7 2018 dozens of civilians in Douma were killed in an incident which was quickly reported as a Syrian government chemical attack by all the usual establishment narrative managers on Syria , with everyone from the White Helmets to Charles Lister to Eliot Higgins to Julian Röpcke loudly flagging it on social media to draw the attention of mainstream news outlets who were slower to pick up the story.

There was immediate skepticism, partly because acclaimed journalists like Sy Hersh have been highlighting plot holes in the official story about chemical weapons in Syria since 2013, partly because Assad would stand nothing to gain and everything to lose by using a banned yet highly ineffective weapon in a battle he'd already essentially won in that region, and partly because the people controlling things on the ground in Douma were the Al Qaeda-linked extremist group Jaysh-al Islam and the incredibly shady narrative management operation known as the White Helmets. Those groups, unlike the Assad government, most certainly would stand everything to gain by staging a chemical attack in the desperate hope that it would draw NATO powers into attacking the Syrian government and perhaps saving their necks.

Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed, the US State Department declared it to have been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests.

On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France launched an airstrike on the Syrian government as punishment for using chemical weapons, citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation could take place.

The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018 published an interim report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits like Charles Lister who claimed that sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population."

In May of this year, a leaked internal document from the OPCW investigation was published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government.

The OPCW indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by clicking here . Establishment narrative managers had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work.

Throughout this time, critical thinkers like myself have been aggressively smeared as deranged conspiracy theorists, war crimes deniers and genocide deniers for expressing skepticism of the establishment-authorized narrative on Douma. Which takes us to today.

The Courage Foundation panel who met with the OPCW whistleblower consists of former OPCW Director General José Bustani (whose highly successful peacemongering once saw the lives of his children threatened by John Bolton during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in an attempt to remove him from his position), WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson , Professor of International Law Richard Falk , former British Army Major General John Holmes , Dr Helmut Lohrer of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, German professor Dr Guenter Meyer of the Centre for Research on the Arab World, and former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East Elizabeth Murray of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

So these are not scrubs. These are not "conspiracy theorists" or "Russian propagandists". These are highly qualified and reputable professionals expressing deep concerns in the opaque and manipulative way the OPCW appears to have conducted its investigation into the Douma incident. Some highlights from their joint statement and analytical points are quoted below, with my own emphasis added in bold:

"Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion ."

"The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. "
~ Bustani

"A critical analysis of the final report of the Douma investigation left the panel in little doubt that conclusions drawn from each of the key evidentiary pillars of the investigation (chemical analysis, toxicology, ballistics and witness testimonies,) are flawed and bear little relation to the facts. "

From the section on Chemical Analysis:

"The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact, acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported."

"Although the report stresses the 'levels' of the chlorinated organic chemicals as a basis for its conclusions (para 2.6), it never mentions what those levels were -- high, low, trace, sub-trace? Without providing data on the levels of these so-called 'smoking-gun' chemicals either for background or test samples, it is impossible to know if they were not simply due to background presence . In this regard, the panel is disturbed to learn that quantitative results for the levels of 'smoking gun' chemicals in specific samples were available to the investigators but this decisive information was withheld from the report ."

"The final report also acknowledges that the tell-tale chemicals supposedly indicating chlorine use, can also be generated by contact of samples with sodium hypochlorite, the principal ingredient of household bleaching agent (para 8.15). This game-changing hypothesis is, however, dismissed (and as it transpires, incorrectly) by stating no bleaching was observed at the site of investigation. (' At both locations, there were no visible signs of a bleach agent or discoloration due to contact with a bleach agent' ). The panel has been informed that no such observation was recorded during the on-site inspection and in any case dismissing the hypothesis simply by claiming the non -observation of discoloration in an already dusty and scorched environment seems tenuous and unscientific ."

From the section on Toxicology:

"The toxicological studies also reveal inconsistencies, incoherence and possible scientific irregularities. Consultations with toxicologists are reported to have taken place in September and October 2018 (para 8.87 and Annex 3), but no mention is made of what those same experts opined or concluded. Whilst the final toxicological assessment of the authors states ' it is not possible to precisely link the cause of the signs and symptoms to a specific chemical ' (para 9.6) the report nonetheless concludes there were reasonable grounds to believe chlorine gas was the chemical (used as a weapon)."

"More worrying is the fact that the panel viewed documented evidence that showed other toxicologists had been consulted in June 2018 prior to the release of the interim report. Expert opinions on that occasion were that the signs and symptoms observed in videos and from witness accounts were not consistent with exposure to molecular chlorine or any reactive-chlorine-containing chemical. Why no mention of this critical assessment, which contradicts that implied in the final report, was made is unclear and of concern. "

From the section on Ballistic Studies:

"One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics were noted in the leaked study ."

From the section titled "Exclusion of inspectors and attempts to obfuscate":

"Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to, or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma investigation."

I'll leave it there for now.

* * *

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[Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
This implicates State Department in the attempt to run a false flag operation. If we add that the State Department is the key organization behind for color revolution against Trump that picture becomes even more disturbing. This is really a neocon vipers nest.
Notable quotes:
"... This was because the public had already been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal of standing US Syria policy, as I noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun. ..."
"... "I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017," Cox told me on Twitter earlier today. ..."
"... And, like clockwork, on April 7 2018 dozens of civilians in Douma were killed in an incident which was quickly reported as a Syrian government chemical attack by all the usual establishment narrative managers on Syria , with everyone from the White Helmets to Charles Lister to Eliot Higgins to Julian Röpcke loudly flagging it on social media to draw the attention of mainstream news outlets who were slower to pick up the story. ..."
"... Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed, the US State Department declared it to have been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests. ..."
"... On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France launched an airstrike on the Syrian government as punishment for using chemical weapons, citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation could take place. ..."
"... The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018 published an interim report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits like Charles Lister who claimed that sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population." ..."
"... In May of this year, a leaked internal document from the OPCW investigation was published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government. ..."
"... The OPCW indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by clicking here . Establishment narrative managers had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work. ..."
"... "Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion ." ..."
"... "The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. " ..."
"... "The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact, acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported." ..."
"... "One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics were noted in the leaked study ." ..."
"... "Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to, or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma investigation." ..."
Oct 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The Courage Foundation , an international protection and advocacy group for whistleblowers, has published the findings of a panel it convened last week on the extremely suspicious behavior of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in its investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria last year. After hearing an extensive presentation from a member of the OPCW's Douma investigation team, the panel's members (including a world-renowned former OPCW Director General) report that they are "unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018."

I'll get to the panel and its findings in a moment, but first I should provide some historical background so that readers who aren't intimately familiar with this ongoing scandal can fully appreciate the significance of this new development.

In late March of last year, President Trump publicly stated that the US military would soon be withdrawing troops from Syria, causing some with an ear to the ground like independent US congressional candidate Steve Cox to predict that there would shortly be a false flag chemical weapons attack in that nation. This was because the public had already been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal of standing US Syria policy, as I noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun.

"I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017," Cox told me on Twitter earlier today.

"Khan Shaykhun also occurred within days of the Trump Admin saying we're leaving Syria."

And, like clockwork, on April 7 2018 dozens of civilians in Douma were killed in an incident which was quickly reported as a Syrian government chemical attack by all the usual establishment narrative managers on Syria , with everyone from the White Helmets to Charles Lister to Eliot Higgins to Julian Röpcke loudly flagging it on social media to draw the attention of mainstream news outlets who were slower to pick up the story.

There was immediate skepticism, partly because acclaimed journalists like Sy Hersh have been highlighting plot holes in the official story about chemical weapons in Syria since 2013, partly because Assad would stand nothing to gain and everything to lose by using a banned yet highly ineffective weapon in a battle he'd already essentially won in that region, and partly because the people controlling things on the ground in Douma were the Al Qaeda-linked extremist group Jaysh-al Islam and the incredibly shady narrative management operation known as the White Helmets. Those groups, unlike the Assad government, most certainly would stand everything to gain by staging a chemical attack in the desperate hope that it would draw NATO powers into attacking the Syrian government and perhaps saving their necks.

Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed, the US State Department declared it to have been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests.

On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France launched an airstrike on the Syrian government as punishment for using chemical weapons, citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation could take place.

The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018 published an interim report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits like Charles Lister who claimed that sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population."

In May of this year, a leaked internal document from the OPCW investigation was published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government.

The OPCW indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by clicking here . Establishment narrative managers had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work.

Throughout this time, critical thinkers like myself have been aggressively smeared as deranged conspiracy theorists, war crimes deniers and genocide deniers for expressing skepticism of the establishment-authorized narrative on Douma. Which takes us to today.

The Courage Foundation panel who met with the OPCW whistleblower consists of former OPCW Director General José Bustani (whose highly successful peacemongering once saw the lives of his children threatened by John Bolton during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in an attempt to remove him from his position), WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson , Professor of International Law Richard Falk , former British Army Major General John Holmes , Dr Helmut Lohrer of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, German professor Dr Guenter Meyer of the Centre for Research on the Arab World, and former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East Elizabeth Murray of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

So these are not scrubs. These are not "conspiracy theorists" or "Russian propagandists". These are highly qualified and reputable professionals expressing deep concerns in the opaque and manipulative way the OPCW appears to have conducted its investigation into the Douma incident. Some highlights from their joint statement and analytical points are quoted below, with my own emphasis added in bold:

"Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion ."

"The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. "
~ Bustani

"A critical analysis of the final report of the Douma investigation left the panel in little doubt that conclusions drawn from each of the key evidentiary pillars of the investigation (chemical analysis, toxicology, ballistics and witness testimonies,) are flawed and bear little relation to the facts. "

From the section on Chemical Analysis:

"The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact, acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported."

"Although the report stresses the 'levels' of the chlorinated organic chemicals as a basis for its conclusions (para 2.6), it never mentions what those levels were -- high, low, trace, sub-trace? Without providing data on the levels of these so-called 'smoking-gun' chemicals either for background or test samples, it is impossible to know if they were not simply due to background presence . In this regard, the panel is disturbed to learn that quantitative results for the levels of 'smoking gun' chemicals in specific samples were available to the investigators but this decisive information was withheld from the report ."

"The final report also acknowledges that the tell-tale chemicals supposedly indicating chlorine use, can also be generated by contact of samples with sodium hypochlorite, the principal ingredient of household bleaching agent (para 8.15). This game-changing hypothesis is, however, dismissed (and as it transpires, incorrectly) by stating no bleaching was observed at the site of investigation. (' At both locations, there were no visible signs of a bleach agent or discoloration due to contact with a bleach agent' ). The panel has been informed that no such observation was recorded during the on-site inspection and in any case dismissing the hypothesis simply by claiming the non -observation of discoloration in an already dusty and scorched environment seems tenuous and unscientific ."

From the section on Toxicology:

"The toxicological studies also reveal inconsistencies, incoherence and possible scientific irregularities. Consultations with toxicologists are reported to have taken place in September and October 2018 (para 8.87 and Annex 3), but no mention is made of what those same experts opined or concluded. Whilst the final toxicological assessment of the authors states ' it is not possible to precisely link the cause of the signs and symptoms to a specific chemical ' (para 9.6) the report nonetheless concludes there were reasonable grounds to believe chlorine gas was the chemical (used as a weapon)."

"More worrying is the fact that the panel viewed documented evidence that showed other toxicologists had been consulted in June 2018 prior to the release of the interim report. Expert opinions on that occasion were that the signs and symptoms observed in videos and from witness accounts were not consistent with exposure to molecular chlorine or any reactive-chlorine-containing chemical. Why no mention of this critical assessment, which contradicts that implied in the final report, was made is unclear and of concern. "

From the section on Ballistic Studies:

"One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics were noted in the leaked study ."

From the section titled "Exclusion of inspectors and attempts to obfuscate":

"Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to, or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma investigation."

I'll leave it there for now.

* * *

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[Oct 28, 2019] My Speech on the Deep State Plot by Larry C Johnson

Regardless of what do you think about Donald Trump, what intelligence community did was a plain vanilla coup d'état approved by Obama and coordinated by run by Brennan faction in CIA. With active participation of factions of FBI (Counterintelligence department), Department of Justice (several highly placed officials) and State Department (which is a real neocon vipers nest so the majority of high level officials, especially connected with the Ukrainian color revolution participated) eagerly participated in the coup.
They left too many fingerprints in this and now Barr hopefully will brings some individuals to justice for this coup.
Notable quotes:
"... I was fortunate to participate in a forum in August sponsored by the Ron Paul Institute. Here is my presentation on the attempted coup by US Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community. ..."
Oct 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

I was fortunate to participate in a forum in August sponsored by the Ron Paul Institute. Here is my presentation on the attempted coup by US Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/GgRJ6UuPWM0

Posted at 12:00 PM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink

Turcopolier , 28 October 2019 at 01:00 PM

All

I was invited to this meeting and regret now that I did not attend.

[Oct 28, 2019] Putin Derangement Syndrome Craziester And More Craziester

Notable quotes:
"... Libs and neocons are too stupid to see the Russia situation with any clarity. They think it's still 1951 and they're battling the commies hither and yon. ..."
"... Oh, and Putin is still here. Despite the sanctions and despite the Soros funded color revolution against him. Don't get me wrong, I don't trust him much (neither do I trust any politician in the world) but he is the result of the US policy of the 90s to push Russia further into the ground. ..."
"... That color revolution might get stepped up a bit now since Rosneft decided to trade oil and gas only in Euro. ..."
"... US diplomacy and foreign policy has become amateur hour and who can steal the most the fastest, real fuckups. ..."
"... I just watched CNN's 1-hour prime-time special on "Russian spying" on State Department in 1999 (which was, like, 20 years ago. I guess the Russians also colluded in the 2000 presidential elections with the aim of electing George W. Bush) I kid you not. These guys are about as subtle as a gigantic iron mace. ..."
"... Fortunately this is not 1938 ! Now its easy for people to look behind the curtain using the internet and see this is all BS . It only takes one voiciferous truth teller , to get all the 'believing' sheeple to also have a look behind the curtain . I suspect this hysteria is designed to keep Gov slaves in line : toe the line or get the boot . ..."
"... Is it just coincidental, the Deep State and minion (dupe) based "Resistance" from day one of (actually before) Trumps inauguration - which more recently looks distinctly like a coup attempt? ..."
Oct 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

10/27/2019

Authored by Patrick Armstrong via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

... Somebody leaked e-mails from the DNC showing that it was rigging the nomination for Clinton and she lost a 99% certain election. Immediately, her campaign settled on blaming Russia for both.

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. [9 November 2016] Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument. (From Shattered , quoted here .)

The bogus – bogus because most of the people on his team were part of the conspiracy and knew there was no collusion – Mueller investigation dragged on until – despite the endless " bombshells " – it finally stopped. But the crazies insist not guilty but not exonerated ! And Trumputin's principal conspiracist rants on .

Wikipedia tells us that " A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful actors, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable. " The CIA, referring to the Kennedy assassination, is said to have coined the expression in 1967 . The "trusted source" media (an description it likes to award itself) is dead set against "conspiracy theories" and quick to denounce them as crazy , prejudiced and criminal . For example, Trump's statement that Mueller was a hitman, is a "conspiracy theory" as are Trump's ideas about the Bidens and Ukraine .

Everything I mention below comes from "trusted sources". Therefore we must assume that all of them – Putin wants Trump to buy Greenland, Russians want to get Americans arguing about pizza, Russians have no moral sense and all the rest – are not "conspiracy theories" but honestly "more probable".

Mere evidence – for example that the DOJ Admits FBI Never Saw Crowdstrike Report on DNC Russian Hacking Claim or No Evidence – Blame Russia: Top 5 Cases Moscow Was Unreasonably Accused of Election Meddling or U.S. States: We Weren't Hacked by Russians in 2016 or The Myth of Russian Media Influence by Larry C Johnson .. or Biden admitting to doing what USA Today insists is nothing but a conspiracy theory invented by Trump – makes no difference . The dial is turned up one more and we are solemnly and (incoherently – Paul Robinson again ) warned that Russia might/could meddle in Canada's forthcoming election.

Anti-Russia prejudice can have unhappy consequences. We have just learned that Putin phoned Bush a couple of days before 911 to warn him that something long-prepared and big was coming out of Afghanistan. Other Russian warnings had been dismissed by Condoleezza Rice – supposedly a Russia "expert" – as "Russian bitterness toward Pakistan for supporting the Afghan mujahideen". One is reminded of Chamberlain's dismissal of Stalin's attempts to form an anti-Hitler alliance because of his "most profound distrust of Russia" ( see Habakkuk comment ). In some alternate universe they listened to Moscow in the 1930s and in the 2000s, but, in the one we live in, they didn't. And they don't.

Or maybe (foolish optimism!) this is starting to end: after all, it's been a complete failure. I especially enjoyed the NYT, that bastion of the Russian-conspiracy/Putin-superpowers/Trump-treason meme, solemnly opining : "That means President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China. But his approach has been ham-handed and at times even counter to American interests and values." Ham-handed! – here's the NYT's view of the Trump-Putin " love affair " again if you missed it the first time. And now it's Trump's fault that relations with Russia aren't better! French President Macron has recently said that " I believe we should rebuild and revise the architecture of trust between Russia and the European Union ." And Trump rather brutally delivered the message to Ukraine's new president that he ought to talk to Putin .

Well, we'll see. Russophobia runs deep and the Russians have probably got the message. As long as we're stuck in a mindset of " Nine Things Russia Must Do Before Being Allowed to Rejoin the G7 " it's not going to change. An arrogant invitation is not an invitation.

Jazzman , 46 minutes ago link

The ossified club of the imperialist G7 has served its time and the times they are a changin'. Without China as the 2nd (and soon) largest economy, nothing goes in this world and ever since 2014 Russia was forced to look to the East for not bowing down to the imperial US and its minions in the G7, ousted from the G8.

Thus only the broader spectrum of the G20 makes any sense in the context of the world economy.

Footprint , 1 hour ago link

Paperclips carried the last message from the Wolf's lair: "The western world must unite against the slavic hordes".

.

They are still peddling the same mantra. Kind of sad, really. The world is going through a phase change. All the symptoms are there:

Global cooling; Failing crops; African Swine Fever; huge asymmetric response from the world population over energy price increases... Other signs are more subtle but the dying culture of the shopping mall must be noted; Amazon; Alexa.

The US is following the lead of the ghosts of WWII to its own detriment. Brzezinsky's Grand Chessboard is no more, all its objectives have been defeated. The "World order" nightmare is fading away fast.

Baron Samedi , 2 hours ago link

One has to be amazed that these desperate MSM & political idiots get so much mileage out of this dead horse. Worse yet is that anyone - catching the first whiff of a Russiadiddit narrative - doesn't reflexively just pass on and ignore it.

presterjohn1198 , 2 hours ago link

Libs and neocons are too stupid to see the Russia situation with any clarity. They think it's still 1951 and they're battling the commies hither and yon.

What those two aforementioned groups of dumb asses represent is mr global in their corner and, in the other corner, national culture and sovereignty.

Joe A , 2 hours ago link

Back then, I remember you saying (I remember because I have a brain the size of a planet) that Putin was finished and that you would be out of here. You indeed disappeared for a while to come back some time ago. Back then, your postings were more elaborate and eloquent. Now, not so much. Makes me wonder what happened to you in the meanwhile...

Oh, and Putin is still here. Despite the sanctions and despite the Soros funded color revolution against him. Don't get me wrong, I don't trust him much (neither do I trust any politician in the world) but he is the result of the US policy of the 90s to push Russia further into the ground.

That color revolution might get stepped up a bit now since Rosneft decided to trade oil and gas only in Euro.

jeff montanye , 7 minutes ago link

imo the operative date is 2001 not 2014. and all the yinon wars that followed (including ukraine).

francis scott falseflag , 3 hours ago link

A Brief Compendium of Nonsense About Putin\

Excellent piece.

BTW, do you remember that the US bombed the ISIS tanker trucks before Putin did on November 19, 2015? In a campaign called Tidal Wave II?

https://impeachobamatoday.blogspot.com/2015/11/us-finally-takes-trumps-suggestion-to.html

https://www.bing.com/search?q=us+bombs+isis+tanker+trucks+nov15%2C+16+2015&PC=U316&FORM=CHROMN

According to Google and Michael R. Gordon of the NYT, there was a bombing of 116 ISIS tanker trucks on Monday November 16, 2015, three days before the Russian attack. And then again on Monday November 23, 2015, four days after the Russian bombing, when the US destroyed 295 ISIS tankers.

I remember nothing about "Tidal Wave II", and the US attack 3 days before the renown Russian attack. But hey, I'm an oldtimer and my memory is dim. Do you? Or is this an example of the Pentagon's 'Memory Hole' and Winston Smith's day job?

francis scott falseflag , 2 hours ago link

Why don't you STFU? Like there are more honest politicians in the leadership of the House, Senate or in the Oval office?

How the **** did George W Bush get to be the owner a baseball team? His father.

And how did your pal Hunter Biden get $50,000 a month in Ukraine after the Maidan Coup? His father.

If you don't know what you're saying, SHUT THE **** UP.

heretickle , 53 minutes ago link

(1) after all Geroge Herbert Walker Bush was a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political opposition.

(2) after all William Jefferson Clinton is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political opposition.

(3) after all George W Bush is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political opposition.

(4) after all **** Cheney is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political opposition.

(5) after all Barak Hussein Obama is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political opposition.

(6) after all Joe Biden is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political opposition.

(7) after all Hillary Clinton is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political opposition.

(8) after all Victoria Nuland is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political opposition.

We could go on for days

jeff montanye , 1 minute ago link

upvote for including chameleon victoria nuland. she works for democrats, republicans, the private sector. she's likud mossad 24/7.

dogfish , 1 hour ago link

If anybody cares to notice look who Trump attended that game with, all of his war monger friends.

Hadenough1000 , 3 hours ago link

Read in their own words as the DNC went insane election night -- - Read the new book for sale on amazon the night 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' began the democrats are insane with LOSER hate

the whole russia deal was a con

their deranged hate for our President is why we must remove them all from office

rtb61 , 3 hours ago link

I like Putin as the alien love child reincarnation of Rasputin, see, it is all in the name ;DDD.

The more US and EU media attacked Putin in that PR=B$ way, the more popular Putin became.

Here's an attack. Putin is doing deals with Saudi Arabia, this after Saudi Arabia funded terrorism in Chechnya killing thousands of Russians, I mean it is really bad, the optics would be quite damaging, in fact I challenged them on it via Vesti and was immediately censored, no bad language just pointing out reality.

The funny thing is, the US B$=PR machine can not use it because it would mean attacking Saudi Arabia. So there they have a great opportunity to really stick it to Putin, taking Saudi Arabia money after Saudi Arabia funded the murder of thousands of Russians, really bad political optics (to be clear my beef is with Saudi Arabia and their murdering Australians with the terrorist funding the House of Saud did all over the globe and not with the Russian government, apart from them letting the House of Saud get away with it, just like the slimey American government).

Passed it onto Voice of America, to stick it to Vesti with a damned if you do and damned if you don't message and as you can guess, silence from the US government, bwa hah hah. Their chance to attack and silence because they would also have to attack the House of Saud.

Now the reason Russia media was uptight and hence the government, well, after all the US **** ups all over the place, they stand to gain diplomatic alliances with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and then add in Russian Oil and well, the US just clumsily and stupidly handed over control of oil to Russia, if they can tie up the deal with Saudi Arabia and so US sent more troops to Saudi Arabia during the negotiation process, what a pack of clowns.

Oil is yesterdays tech, nuclear energy is where the focus should be and there are much better designs available including a low output reactor, quite a smart design, it is all changing and the US really has to push nuclear, abandon oil and make deals with Australia and Japan, one for uranium and the other for manufacturing including rebuilding US manufacturing.

US diplomacy and foreign policy has become amateur hour and who can steal the most the fastest, real fuckups.

Justin Case , 3 hours ago link

One only needs to review the JFK, Saddam, Milosevic, Augusto Pinochet, Mark David Chapman and Manuel Noriega stories as examples.

Justin Case , 3 hours ago link

I think the label first became widely used to slander people who questioned the details surrounding the JFK assassination, and forty years later, there aren't too many thinking people who still believe the Warren Commission's "lone gunman" explanation. That explanation is doubted by everyone who has taken the time to look into the details, and believed only by people who refuse to.

Which is "theory" and which is fact? In the absence of a full confession, this can only be decided by a preponderance of evidence, and it would be silly to come to a conclusion on any matter without looking at all the evidence available. This is only common sense, just as it is safe to assume some degree of guilt or complicity on the part of anyone who lies about an event, or tries to hide, plant, or destroy any type of evidence.

Conspiracy theories arise from evidence. After the government releases an explanation of a particular event, a conspiracy theory is only born because evidence exists to disprove their explanation, or at least call it into question. There's nothing insane about it, unless you define sanity as believing whatever the government tells you. In light of the fact that our government lies to us regularly, I would define believing everything they tell you as utter stupidity.

The orthodox, for their part, dismiss the unorthodox as conspiracy theorists (by which term they mean: people whose opinions are based in something other than objective reality – if it were objectively real, the sources which provide the orthodox with their opinions would have told them about it).

In July of 1996, flight 800 exploded over Long Island. Shortly after their terrorist explanation failed scrutiny, our government then explained the event by claiming that a faulty electrical system caused a spark that ignited a fuel tank, and the people who doubted this explanation were quickly labeled "conspiracy theorists." More than a hundred witnesses saw a missile travel from the ground up to the plane just prior to its explosion, but rather than being treated as eyewitnesses to an event, they were labeled "conspiracy theorists," which label allowed all subsequent investigation to ignore the strongest evidence in the matter.

Our "investigative" news agencies decided to accept and disseminate the official story, and they helped us forget the U.S. naval station nearby, the fact that missiles were regularly test fired there, and naturally, they paid no heed to more than a hundred "conspiracy theorists" who saw the plane get blown out of the sky by a missile. I believe that the U.S. Navy accidentally shot down flight 800, and that's my belief because it's the most sensible explanation that can be drawn from the available evidence. I'm not theorizing about conspiracies, but there are conflicting explanations of the event, and if the Navy did accidentally blow a passenger plane out of the sky, who would have a motive to lie about it? The U.S. government, or a hundred witnesses?

phillyla , 3 hours ago link

The one thing that always puzzled me about flight 800 was why a gas tank explosion lead to no more waiting in your cars outside the terminals and additional gate security?

"Responding to repeated criticisms of the security at Kennedy International Airport after the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, Port Authority officials announced a series of changes yesterday intended to make it more difficult for anyone to plant a bomb on a plane."

But it was the jet fuel fumes from sitting on the hot tarmac and a frayed wire. So how in the world did someone think about the B word?

fireant , 3 hours ago link

Putin is a breath of fresh air compared to the insane American left

Hadenough1000 , 3 hours ago link

All day long the left knows we should be friends with Russia INSTEAD of CHINA. Thats what the killers don't want

DEDA CVETKO , 4 hours ago link

I just watched CNN's 1-hour prime-time special on "Russian spying" on State Department in 1999 (which was, like, 20 years ago. I guess the Russians also colluded in the 2000 presidential elections with the aim of electing George W. Bush) I kid you not. These guys are about as subtle as a gigantic iron mace.

I practically had to be hospitalized for acute lobotomy. An hour later, I still feel like 3/4s of my brain were surgically sucked out by Jeff Zucker. Will have to have me some Russian sex soon to regain some of my missing IQ.

heretickle , 4 hours ago link

..........Wikipedia tells us that " A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful actors, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable. " The CIA, referring to the Kennedy assassination, is said to have coined the expression in 1967 ............

Interesting.

Within the first few years after the Kennedy Assassination, the American people were collecting evidence and pointing fingers at the CIA, the Military Industrial Complex, the Mossad and Israel. The late Michael Collins Piper provides all the evidence necessary in his book FINAL JUDGEMENT to realize that Israel had Kennedy killed.

1967 is the same year Israel murdered 34 US Servicemen and injured over 200 others during its cowardly attack on the USS Liberty.

In the mid-sixties, the world was first introduced in full baloney mode to the Holocaust.

Intersting coincidence.

Maybe the deep state (Central Banks and Israel) desparately needed a BAIT and SWITCH to hide their tracks.

Today, our kids must bow before the Holocaust g_d and yet few realize that JFK wanted to eliminate Israel's nuclear weapons and was instead sacrificed for GREATER ISRAEL

Hadenough1000 , 3 hours ago link

The same bastard HO. LBJ killed JFK like he killed 60,000 of my fellow Vietnam soldiers

youshallnotkill , 4 hours ago link

For Bibi, being against him, equates to Antisemitism, for Trump being critical of him is Anti-American, for ZH being opposed to Putin is a Anti-Russian.

Anti-Russia prejudice can have unhappy consequences.

Let't nobody tell you that ZH didn't warn you!

DelusionsCrowded , 4 hours ago link

Fortunately this is not 1938 ! Now its easy for people to look behind the curtain using the internet and see this is all BS . It only takes one voiciferous truth teller , to get all the 'believing' sheeple to also have a look behind the curtain . I suspect this hysteria is designed to keep Gov slaves in line : toe the line or get the boot .

TrustbutVerify , 4 hours ago link

So, is the anti-Russia/anti-Putin a head fake? By looking to be oh-so over the top freaked out about anything Russian, and taking on the mantle of looking freaked out (though in actuality are not), Democrats are perhaps intentionally making him look less harmful and dangerous by comparison.

After all, the Russian communist form of government, a dictatorship run by a small percentage of elites, is exactly the road down which Democrats want to take the U.S. Similar comparisons of this fashion can be made with the Chinese communist government, too.

The Democratic primary was obviously rigged. Democrats thought, with insider help from the FBI, CIA, IRS and others, that the actual election was rigged, too.

Is it just coincidental, the Deep State and minion (dupe) based "Resistance" from day one of (actually before) Trumps inauguration - which more recently looks distinctly like a coup attempt? With, of course, the vast majority of news outlets (virtually all Left leaning) in the US pushing and covering the obvious subversion. Hence, the astoundingly intense looks of deep shock on TV when it was realized an "outsider," Trump, would win?

[Oct 27, 2019] What can we conclude about Trump?

Notable quotes:
"... If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge. ..."
"... There is a third possibility. What if Trump wasn't supposed to become President, according to the CIA's plans? This seems plausible to me, because during the 2016 election, it seemed to me at least that almost nobody in the US political and media establishments took Trump's candidacy seriously. Clinton was so sure she could easily beat Trump that she used her influence with the media to get Trump media coverage, in order to weaken the "serious" Republicans, one of whom everyone thought would get the nomination, like Jeb Bush. ..."
Oct 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Oct 26 2019 23:51 utc | 41

jadan @32:
As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe.
If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge.
Glenn Brown , Oct 27 2019 0:32 utc | 46
Jackabbit @ 41

There is a third possibility. What if Trump wasn't supposed to become President, according to the CIA's plans? This seems plausible to me, because during the 2016 election, it seemed to me at least that almost nobody in the US political and media establishments took Trump's candidacy seriously. Clinton was so sure she could easily beat Trump that she used her influence with the media to get Trump media coverage, in order to weaken the "serious" Republicans, one of whom everyone thought would get the nomination, like Jeb Bush.

I know you believe that Trump was somehow exactly what the US deep state needed. I don't agree, but even if you are right, are you really sure that the CIA and the rest of the deep state were smart enough to understand and agree that they needed someone like Trump?

[Oct 27, 2019] Frat Boy Thermopylae The American Conservative

Notable quotes:
"... The Democrats are the ones who are twisting the "protocols" regarding private hearings to protect the seditious liars and their lies... To paraphrase the Washington Post : "Democracy Dies In The Darkness"... The Darkness created by the shadowy deep state and those who dwell in it ! ..."
"... Without expressing any opinion on the truth or falsity of Taylor's testimony or any of it, the idea that being a West Point graduate and Vietnam vet is some kind of assurance of probity is a joke. ..."
"... Have you learned nothing from RussiaGate, from the various imperial wars on Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Serbia, etc.? All these were based on flat out lies promoted by cleancut, well dressed, well spoken, impeccably credentialed monsters. Many of them veterans themselves. All of them lying without shame, and lauded for telling lies. ..."
"... You realize that we are an empire, and our institutions act the way that imperial institutions do? Imperial institutions cannot be hindered by things like honesty and "rule of law", because the empire cannot survive if its freedom of action is restrained. ..."
"... Is your anti Russian phobia a product of Slavic racism or of disliking orthodox countries or what? Why do you pro war liberals obsess over Russia so much? I think it is empire envy. ..."
"... I Keep reading about this "aid to ukraine" improperly tied to an investigation of a rival. But this "aid" to Ukraine is really just weapons isn't it? Weapons meant to stoke conflict with a nuclear power. The deep state and the pro war liberals will never let This country move past militarism ..."
Oct 27, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Amadeus Mozart • 2 days ago

I'd like to commend Rep. Gaetz for this very well justified act of 'civil disobedience' to draw attention to this farce of a travesty of a sham of a mockery of a witchhunt. This so-called "impeachment" is totally consistent with the manufacturing of "evidence" to justify an "investigation" of Trump's campaign to keep him from being elected as well.

I'm glad we have someone standing up to these corrupt lying leaking Democrat bullies. It would be nice if we could have an investigation of the actual and documented illegal campaign contributions of Hillary to her attorney to Chris Steele, but that water has passed under the bridge by now.

But if we're going to go down the rabbit hole of campaign finance law violations, I'd like to propose that the quite obvious main and only real (non-manufactured) reason for these so-called "impeachment" hearings is to prevent Trump from being re-elected (as opposed to investigating "corruption").

Thus the Democrats' activities are quite obviously a misappropriation of taxpayer funds and an illegal donation to the political campaigns of the Democratic party. I demand an investigation. In secret of course.

As you rightfully said, the rule of law is a pain in the butt, after all. The double standard is infuriating.

We are coming to a point in American society where the only meaningful "truth" belongs to whoever wins. If that is true, under those circumstances, you've got to decide whom you trust more to protect your interests. Is it Adam Schiff or Donald Trump? If you choose not to decide, you've still made a choice. Or are elections only supposed to have consequences if Democrats win them?

CoyoteTheClever • 2 days ago
Matt Gaetz is one of those few Republicans in on the fundamental truth of our country: We are an empire in decline and politics is 100% theatre. And so he puts on one of the best shows on television.

Yeah, he is likely a nihilist, but I can't really call him a grifter any more than you could call Milo or Jacob Wohl grifters. They are performance artists, dressing up in conservative drag and giving everyone the show of their lifetime, and they are so dedicated to it they don't break character. In wrestling it is called kayfebe.

If you are in on the joke, these people are amazing, true heroes of late capitalism, exposing the absurdities of our commodified democracy and news cycle.

The Other Sands CoyoteTheClever • 2 days ago
The standards for a sitting Congressman representing 800,000 Americans should probably be a bit higher than the standards for alt-right YouTube dancing bears.
CoyoteTheClever The Other Sands • 2 days ago
As our country winds down and enters the end of its natural lifespan, and every country has a lifespan, don't fool yourself, because no human creations last forever, some of the dancing bears we get aren't going to be quite as funny as Matt Gaetz, and there are only going to be more and more of them coming out of the woodwork.

So I think we should appreciate people like him while we can, who at least elevate the art to something legitimately entertaining, and are generally pretty harmless. "I love the president so much I may never love another president again." is an amazing line, for instance, and I'll never understand anyone who doesn't appreciate it. That's something he put care and thought into.

People like entertainment. They elected an entertainer as president for a reason, and he is representing a lot more than 800,000 Americans. But I'm sure those 800,000 Americans are pretty happy with the entertainment they are getting from Gaetz too, even if they might not appreciate the nuances of his performance and only like that he is "triggering the libs" or somesuch. And maybe some of them do see how his performance implicates them too and they just don't care because it is such a fun show. I know if Matt Gaetz were running for president (Against some neo-liberal like Buttigieg, not against someone I like) I'd be tempted to vote for him just to add fuel to the fire.

Amirite CoyoteTheClever • 11 hours ago
You wouldn't think it was so funny if that fuel they were adding was to your burning house.

But you think you'll be long gone before the house burns down, so you don't care.

Dale McNamee • 2 days ago
The Democrats are the ones who are twisting the "protocols" regarding private hearings to protect the seditious liars and their lies... To paraphrase the Washington Post : "Democracy Dies In The Darkness"... The Darkness created by the shadowy deep state and those who dwell in it !
Rod Dreher Moderator Dale McNamee • 2 days ago
"The seditions liars and their lies"? Bill Taylor is a West Point graduate, decorated Vietnam vet, and was G.W. Bush's appointee to be Ukraine ambassador. The smears aren't going to stick to him.
CoyoteTheClever Rod Dreher • 2 days ago
Like they didn't stick to Mueller, Comey, Mattis, McCain, Romney, and whoever else is the white knight of the week who will save liberal decadence from Trump. As if!

He will be down in the mud with the rest of them, loathed by Trump's base and forgotten by the Democrats once the next savior conservative messiah comes along. Eventually there won't be enough Never Trump zombies in the Bush establishment morgue left to revive, and what then?

They certainly aren't going to work with the left to concentrate on substance and policy rather than the Trump news cycle, so I imagine liberals will just all collectively die from despair

Sid Finster CoyoteTheClever • 2 days ago
Remember how John Bolton became the Savior of The Republic once he resigned (or was fired) from the Trump Maladministration?

If that were not enough, witness the Team D rehabilitation of Dubya and Dick Cheney, who were Team D folk devils not so long ago.

Sid Finster Rod Dreher • 2 days ago
Without expressing any opinion on the truth or falsity of Taylor's testimony or any of it, the idea that being a West Point graduate and Vietnam vet is some kind of assurance of probity is a joke.

Have you learned nothing from RussiaGate, from the various imperial wars on Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Serbia, etc.? All these were based on flat out lies promoted by cleancut, well dressed, well spoken, impeccably credentialed monsters. Many of them veterans themselves. All of them lying without shame, and lauded for telling lies.

Not "misspeaking", as if they were merely overenthusiastic in defense of the Freedom, but lying. And their lies killed innocent people on a hitlerian scale.

You only don't recognize this, because you are fortunate enough to live in America, where you don't have to see your children droned and your country destroyed because some monster claims to be bringing you the freedom.

You realize that we are an empire, and our institutions act the way that imperial institutions do? Imperial institutions cannot be hindered by things like honesty and "rule of law", because the empire cannot survive if its freedom of action is restrained.

Amirite Sid Finster • a day ago
So "Russiagate" was based on lies?

... ... ..

Sid Finster Amirite • a day ago
Meeting a Russian person now is a crime, unpatriotic to boot is it?
Patrick Constantine Amirite • 10 hours ago
Is your anti Russian phobia a product of Slavic racism or of disliking orthodox countries or what? Why do you pro war liberals obsess over Russia so much? I think it is empire envy.
sawbuck57 • 2 days ago
If the Democrats are so concerned with confidentiality then why are the anti-Trump snippets of testimony the only things getting leaked?

Bill Taylor's testimony was shredded in 90 seconds of cross-examination by a Republican member of the Committee. Funny, that didn't make the time breathless coverage of the umpteenth bombshell. (Or is it "The Walls Are Closing In!" this week?

By any standard of fairness, Schiff should have recused himself due to a monumental conflict of interest. He had contact with the main complainant prior to the filing of the complaint. A Dem Senator visited Taylor in the Ukraine several weeks ago. Nothing to see here.

As Ben Franklin was noted as saying: "Well, Doctor, what have we got -- a Republic or a Monarchy?"

"A Republic, if you can keep it."

Well, we didn't keep it. This is purely Political Kabuki Theater. Both sides deserve to lose. At this point, with the Dems tilting so hard left, and the Rockefeller Wing (Re-branded as NeoCons for some silly reason) of the Republicans ever-waiting for their ascendance it remains for most of the country wish both sides could lose - if for nothing else than to just stop the noise.

"A nation is born a stoic and dies an epicurean" Will Durant

cestusdei • 2 days ago
I do not trust our "betters" to hold closed door trials. After 2 years of Russia Russia Russia I don't believe a word they say. Shiff told us he had ironclad evidence of Russian collusion, I saw him say it at the interview. He lied. When a politician says "trust me" the last thing we should do is trust him. Open hearings, transparency, due process...we should demand
temp anon cestusdei • 2 days ago
There is no trial yet. If there is one, that will be in the Senate, presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in full view of everyone.
JonF311 temp anon • 2 days ago
That's what they're afraid of: a veritable conga line of skeletons, loosed from the Trumpian closet, cha-chaing across the Senate chamber in front of the whole world.
cestusdei temp anon • 2 days ago
Oh this is a trial. A show trial. Our Stalinist Dems do miss the old USSR.
Amirite cestusdei • 2 days ago
But you loved all the closed door meetings in the Benghazi hearings, that was totally fine.

Now it's your turn.

cestusdei Amirite • 2 days ago
Actually that did involve intelligence NOT an impeachment. Apples and oranges. But thanks for reminding us of the lies and ineptitude that got American's killed by Obama and Clinton in Libya. They lied and people died.
Deoxy • 2 days ago
If Schiff weren't selectively leaking like a sieve, your argument might have some merit.

As it is, easily the best reason to believe they are doing as they are doing is FOR the purpose of only leaking the parts they want.

And it goes far beyond simply "closed door" - the controls enacted are extreme, at least for the Republicans, yet somehow, certain *very convenient* bits find their way to the press, time after time. After time. After TIME.

The whole thing is a farce, designed to allow control of the narrative, facts be hanged.

janicefahy • 2 days ago
Brilliant comparison to that Animal House scene - thanks for that! The facts on the ground are so devastating to Trump than even his most lickspittle toadies can't properly defend them, and so they scheme up weak stunts like this. The mind boggles.
L617 • 2 days ago
This stunt just proves why the deposition phase of the inquiry should not happen in front of the cameras. What a bunch of tools.
HarryTruman2016 • 2 days ago
I suppose all the Trump supporters would be on this very page defending Barack Obama if he called the Saudi Crown Prince in 2011 and told him that any military aid is contingent on investigating the Bush family and any business ties they have with Saudi Arabia because Jeb Bush might run in 2012. Totally legal. No problem and nothing to see.
Tony D. HarryTruman2016 • a day ago
Well, you're forgetting that the typical Trump supporter despises the Bushes and everything they stand for...
HarryTruman2016 Tony D. • 19 hours ago
That is not the point. What you write is simply deflection. If any President other than Trump did this, Republicans would be (correctly) moving to impeach and remove. So I ask again: would it have been OK if Obama called the Saudis and held up military aid until they provided him information damaging to the Bush family?
Ted • 2 days ago • edited
The picture is funny, but you're on the wrong side of this, Dreher. I've finally realized why Schiff and his merry men, but especially Schiff, give me such agita.

Let's pick a date, or an incident: Bork. Since then, long before then, but let's pick a date, the Democrats have stood for moral anarchy . The only chance they had to show they retained a shred of principle was the Gulf War (both Gulf Wars, actually, but let's take the second), and there their response was, at least legislatively, muted to say the least (considering their Senatorial champion was the Lion of Chappaquiddick...) Since then it's been what? Feminism, abortion, and that more abundantly, all LGBTQ all the time, micro regulation of speech and behavior, race hustling, and--ha ha--more unjust unnecessary wars and the destruction of the white middle class. The soft totalitarianism we talk about in these boxes--no need to go on. The usual menu of "liberal" horror.

And this guy is to be impeached because he cusses in public? It's not adding up for me. Schiff's behavior is outrageous (read Kim Strassel today) but he's getting the job done. You might want to call it soft Leninism.

Amirite Ted • a day ago
Not sure why so many conservatives hang their hat on Bork. This man was the guy who committed the Saturday Night Massacre, this is who you stake your moral ground on?

Conservatives are so angry Dems stopped the guy who tried to shield Nixon from accountability? It's moral anarchy for Congress to refuse to confirm a president's nomination for the Supreme Court? Congress is supposed to give a president's nominee a hearing and a vote, not a rubber stamp. Congress if fully within it's constitutional rights to not confirm a president's nominee, and it's hard to find a less fit man for the Supreme Court than Bork was.

Meanwhile your guys refused to even grant a hearing to President Obama's nominee. I guess that's OK because you don't acknowledge the rights of Democrats under the Constitution.

Ted Amirite • 19 hours ago
You don't really think the Democrats got together to destroy Bork professionally and personally because he signed off on Nixon's firings, do you? You can't be that dumb. If you'd like to know why, it was keeping Roe v. Wade alive. And that is moral anarchy, pal.
Amirite Ted • 12 hours ago • edited
So you offer a conspiracy theory, a belief.

You know what's moral anarchy? Supporting an immoral character like Bork because you think he's going to help you get rid of Roe vs Wade. Kind of reminds of the deal you RWers have struck with Trump. You support a man you know is morally debased because you think he will help you restore a white Christian conservative America.

It just boggles my mind you RWers are mad Democrats refused to confirm a man who help cover up one of the most egregious acts an American president has ever committed. A person who would commit such an unethical act was not fit for a seat on the Supreme Court, I shouldn't even have to say this.

Ted Amirite • 9 hours ago
And you offer an unsupported calumny. Bork was "morally debased"? By what standard? By whose standard? John Dean's? Elliot Richardson's? Remember when they rifled through his borrowing habits at Blockbuster and it turned out he was a Fred Astaire fan? They were expecting maybe Leni Riefenstahl. Or hoping for it. And a conspiracy is usually thought of as somewhat secret. The Lion of Chappaquiddick was pretty up front about what he didn't like about Bork.

And I think Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was far worse than anything Nixon did. Have fun with that one, pal.

Ro Si • 2 days ago
"The Democrats have offered no plausible and persuasive rationale for holding these proceedings in secret and keeping the evidence and testimony behind closed doors."
Other than that they're simply following the rules established by a previous Republican congress.
ADCWonk • 2 days ago
Below, someone wrote: "By any standard of fairness, Schiff should have recused himself due to a
monumental conflict of interest. He had contact with the main
complainant prior to the filing of the complaint."

Using that standard, Barr should have recused himself a thousand times over, no?

Franklin_Evans • 2 days ago
Coined by a Randian objectivist fantasy author. It is absolute truth, but knowing the source will become the utmost irony because for some, it will be personal proof of it.

People will believe a lie because they're afraid it might be true, or because they want it to be true.

The Trump candidacy and tenure in office is a non-stop series of examples proving this.

The author is Terry Goodkind.

sb • 2 days ago
Yet again, I note Rod, that there is more than one explanation over this hysterical impeach Trump nonsense.

This 'aid' is actually 'US military assistance'. Did it ever occur to you 'impeachers' that Trump may have deliberately been avoiding such a meeting with his top 4 warmongers precisely so as to avoid US 'aid' escalating the military tension betwen Ukraine and Russia? (and getting the US firmly tied into that fight?)

Trump was elected in part on a platform of no more foreign wars, and he seems genuinely committed to that (at least when he thinks he can). Maybe the withheld 'aid' was all just leverage for a Biden investigation, but it may also be Trump trying not to get pressured and bullied into more conflicts (which all prior Presidents were happy to go along with) in the face of a deep state totally committed to a condition of forever war.

As an anti-war activist who campaigned against the Afghan and Iraq wars, in Trump's shoes I would also have tried to avoid fueling an existing dangerous conflict that brings no benefit to my nation (other than a few arms sales) but may drag us into a war with major nations. Same situation repeating right now in Syria - no major benefit to US in staying, and staying may drag US into conflict between Turks and Kurds and Syria & Russia.

Not saying Trump has acted lawfully always - just that he may have been trying to avoid military escalation (at the same time as getting dirt on Biden). Lets not jump to obvious conclusions when they may not be so obvious.

Thomas Kaempfen • 2 days ago
Thugs disrupting a Constitutional and legal proceeding doing the people's business in order to protect their Dear Leader -- that's not frat-boy stuff. There's a much better "f" word to label that.
KevinS • a day ago
If these people were testifying in public, I'm sure the Trumpists would find a reason to oppose that as well. But I hope they are ready for the public phase when they will need to defend Trump on the substance rather than voice procedural complaints. And calling people like Taylor never-Trumpist "human scum" (what a classy president we have) is not going to cut it.
TISO_AX2 • a day ago
Democrats say these House Intelligence Committee procedures
aren't official hearings, but rather the equivalent of depositions,
meant to gather facts that will later be examined and argued over in
public hearings.

If that's the case they shouldn't be characterizing themselves as having an "impeachment inquiry." This is not in any legal sense an impeachment. It's an inquiry without a cause...political games. The abberant activities of Dems trying to remove the US President where there are no crimes justifies abberant reactions from the opposition. Since they are going to abuse the House of Representatives and pursue unprincipled and unprecedented antagonism of a co-equal branch of government, why should the GOP be idealistic and proper under such circumstances? I find Schiff to be a lot more of a problem than Gaetz.

Rod Dreher Moderator TISO_AX2 • a day ago
No, it's the first stage of an inquiry. They're gathering evidence -- and Republican reps are there to question too -- that will be used in open impeachment hearings.
TISO_AX2 Rod Dreher • a day ago • edited
Concerning Republican reps on the committee...apparently they're not getting all the evidence. If they're not it's not bi-partisan, and it's irregular. Also, Schiff did not notify Republicans on the committee of an intelligence official who came to one of his aides with concerns about President Trump before filing a whistleblower complaint. If that's true he's withholding evidence. I'm sure he has a good reason for that...if you know what I mean.
October 18, 2019 By Chrissy Clark

All nine GOP members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence penned a letter to Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., lambasting him for hiding documents related to Democrats' impeachment inquiry.

"We are concerned that the Majority is knowingly withholding Committee documents related to your so-called 'impeachment inquiry' from the Minority," the letter reads. " it has come to our attention that the Majority is not uploading (or providing physical copies of) certain
Committee documents related to your 'impeachment inquiry' to its document repository, thus withholding the existence of such documents from the Minority."

Skiddle DeDe • a day ago
I think you don't like the Republicans playing by the same rules and tricks Democrats do. Looks different when the shoe is on the other foot, huh? Think KFC eating and setting all night on the senate floor.
Ro Si Skiddle DeDe • 10 hours ago
If you think that freshly squeezed orange juice you have every morning tastes odd, it's because those are apples you're using.
Shakes_McQueen • a day ago
"The Democrats have offered no plausible and persuasive rationale for holding these proceedings in secret and keeping the evidence and testimony behind closed doors. Given the character of the people in question, it is safe to assume that their reasons for doing so are corrupt and motivated by narrowly calculated political self-interest. "

That's a heck of a leap in logic there, Kevin. And kind of incredible in light of Kevin McCarthy previously admitting on national television that the Benghazi Select Committee's purpose was to tank Clinton's poll numbers. Would Kevin agree that committee was corrupt then, I guess?

These are depositions, not hearings. Public hearings come later, once depositions are complete, and there's no more opportunity for deposed subjects to coordinate details. Then a Senate trial after that, where Trump gets all the "due process" he has been disingenuously complaining about.

It's amusing to me how it seems to be lost in all of this, that half of the people sitting in on these depositions are REPUBLICANS.

Patrick Constantine • 15 hours ago
I Keep reading about this "aid to ukraine" improperly tied to an investigation of a rival. But this "aid" to Ukraine is really just weapons isn't it? Weapons meant to stoke conflict with a nuclear power. The deep state and the pro war liberals will never let This country move past militarism
anon • 14 hours ago
If you supported the Schiff parody-as-truth from the other week but this bothers you, then you are an anti-Trump partisan. Conversely, if you support this but had a problem with Schiff, you are a pro-Trump partisan. And that is okay because impeachment is a political act. Just don't dress it up and pretend your side follows the rule of law and the other side doesn't. Both sides are engaging in politics to convince the public. And we'll be just fine as long as both sides stick with that, and obey the constitutional rules for impeachment. We'll only get in serious trouble if folks decide to go extra constitutional:

Tlaib: Democrats looking into how to arrest Trump officials
https://www.foxnews.com/pol...

Or if someone from the military tries to intervene:
https://www.nytimes.com/201...

Chris Mallory • 4 hours ago
Nothing done by the US government should be done behind closed doors. Every thing should be done in the open with full disclosure to the citizens.
Ted • 2 days ago • edited
The picture is funny, but you're on the wrong side of this, Dreher. I've finally realized why Schiff and his merry men, but especially Schiff, give me such agita.

Let's pick a date, or an incident: Bork. Since then, long before then, but let's pick a date, the Democrats have stood for moral anarchy . The only chance they had to show they retained a shred of principle was the Gulf War (both Gulf Wars, actually, but let's take the second), and there their response was, at least legislatively, muted to say the least (considering their Senatorial champion was the Lion of Chappaquiddick...) Since then it's been what? Feminism, abortion, and that more abundantly, all LGBTQ all the time, micro regulation of speech and behavior, race hustling, and--ha ha--more unjust unnecessary wars and the destruction of the white middle class. The soft totalitarianism we talk about in these boxes--no need to go on. The usual menu of "liberal" horror.

And this guy is to be impeached because he cusses in public? It's not adding up for me. Schiff's behavior is outrageous (read Kim Strassel today) but he's getting the job done. You might want to call it soft Leninism.

sb • 2 days ago
Yet again, I note Rod, that there is more than one explanation over this hysterical impeach Trump nonsense.

This 'aid' is actually 'US military assistance'. Did it ever occur to you 'impeachers' that Trump may have deliberately been avoiding such a meeting with his top 4 warmongers precisely so as to avoid US 'aid' escalating the military tension betwen Ukraine and Russia? (and getting the US firmly tied into that fight?)

Trump was elected in part on a platform of no more foreign wars, and he seems genuinely committed to that (at least when he thinks he can). Maybe the withheld 'aid' was all just leverage for a Biden investigation, but it may also be Trump trying not to get pressured and bullied into more conflicts (which all prior Presidents were happy to go along with) in the face of a deep state totally committed to a condition of forever war.

As an anti-war activist who campaigned against the Afghan and Iraq wars, in Trump's shoes I would also have tried to avoid fueling an existing dangerous conflict that brings no benefit to my nation (other than a few arms sales) but may drag us into a war with major nations. Same situation repeating right now in Syria - no major benefit to US in staying, and staying may drag US into conflict between Turks and Kurds and Syria & Russia.

Not saying Trump has acted lawfully always - just that he may have been trying to avoid military escalation (at the same time as getting dirt on Biden). Lets not jump to obvious conclusions when they may not be so obvious.

Shakes_McQueen • a day ago
"The Democrats have offered no plausible and persuasive rationale for holding these proceedings in secret and keeping the evidence and testimony behind closed doors. Given the character of the people in question, it is safe to assume that their reasons for doing so are corrupt and motivated by narrowly calculated political self-interest. "

That's a heck of a leap in logic there, Kevin. And kind of incredible in light of Kevin McCarthy previously admitting on national television that the Benghazi Select Committee's purpose was to tank Clinton's poll numbers. Would Kevin agree that committee was corrupt then, I guess?

These are depositions, not hearings. Public hearings come later, once depositions are complete, and there's no more opportunity for deposed subjects to coordinate details. Then a Senate trial after that, where Trump gets all the "due process" he has been disingenuously complaining about.

It's amusing to me how it seems to be lost in all of this, that half of the people sitting in on these depositions are REPUBLICANS.

Patrick Constantine • 15 hours ago
I Keep reading about this "aid to ukraine" improperly tied to an investigation of a rival. But this "aid" to Ukraine is really just weapons isn't it? Weapons meant to stoke conflict with a nuclear power. The deep state and the pro war liberals will never let This country move past militarism
anon • 14 hours ago
If you supported the Schiff parody-as-truth from the other week but this bothers you, then you are an anti-Trump partisan. Conversely, if you support this but had a problem with Schiff, you are a pro-Trump partisan. And that is okay because impeachment is a political act. Just don't dress it up and pretend your side follows the rule of law and the other side doesn't. Both sides are engaging in politics to convince the public. And we'll be just fine as long as both sides stick with that, and obey the constitutional rules for impeachment. We'll only get in serious trouble if folks decide to go extra constitutional:

Tlaib: Democrats looking into how to arrest Trump officials
https://www.foxnews.com/pol...

Or if someone from the military tries to intervene:
https://www.nytimes.com/201...

[Oct 27, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Needs To Be Stopped... She's Telling People The Truth About US Wars

Oct 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

No wonder Democratic Party bosses and mainstream media are trying to bury presidential contender Tulsi Gabbard. She is the only candidate, perhaps the only politician in the US, who is telling the American public exactly what they need to know about what their government and military are really up to: fighting illegal regime-change wars, and to boot, sponsoring terrorists for that purpose.

It didn't come much clearer nor more explicit than when Gabbard fired up the Democratic TV debate this week. It was billed as the biggest televised presidential debate ever, and the Hawaii Representative told some prime-time home-truths to the nation:

"Donald Trump has blood of the Kurds on his hands, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011 along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing and cheer-leading this regime-change war."

The 38-year-old military veteran went on to denounce how the US has sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists for its objective of overthrowing the government in Damascus.

It was a remarkably damning assessment of US policy in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. And it was by no means the first time that Gabbard has leveled with the American people on the brutality and criminality of Washington's so-called "interventions".

The other 11 Democratic candidates on the stage during the TV debate looked agog after Gabbard's devastating and calmly delivered statement. All the others have proffered the false narrative that US forces are in Syria to "fight terrorism". They deplore Trump's announcement last week to pull back US troops from northeast Syria because, they say, it will undermine the fight against Islamic State (IS or ISIS) and other Al Qaeda affiliates. They also condemn Trump for "betraying Kurdish allies" by his partial troop withdrawal.

President Donald Trump talks about "ending endless wars" and "bringing our troops home". But he still premises his views on a credulous belief that the US under his watch "defeated ISIS 100 per cent". In that way, he essentially shares the same corny view as the Democrats and media that America is a force for good, that it is the "good guys wearing white hats riding into the sunset".

On the other hand, Gabbard stands alone in telling the American people the plain and awful truth. US policy is the fundamental problem. Ending its regime-change war in Syria and elsewhere and ending its diabolical collusion with terror groups is the way to bring peace to the Middle East and to spare ordinary Americans from the economic disaster of spiraling war debts. American citizens need to know the truth about the horror their government, military, media and politicians have inflicted not just on countries in the Middle East, but also from the horrendous boomerang consequences of this criminal policy on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans, including millions of veterans destroyed by injuries, trauma, suicide, and drug abuse.

Following the TV debate this week, it seems that Gabbard won the popular vote with her truth-telling. A major online poll by the Drudge Report found that she stole a march on all the other candidates, winning approval from nearly 40 per cent of voters. Top ticket candidates Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden were trailing behind with 7 per cent or less.

Gabbard has clearly struck a deep chord with the US public in her honest depiction of American wars.

Despite her shattering exposé and seeming appreciation by the public, most mainstream media tried to bury her after the TV debate. Outlets like Vox and CNN declared that Warren was the winner of the debate, whose talking points were mainly about domestic policy issues. Like the other candidates, Warren plies the propaganda narrative of US forces "fighting terrorism". Vox even slated Gabbard as "a loser" in the debate and claimed she had made "blatantly false" statements about the US' role in Syria.

Other mainstream news outlets chose to ignore reporting on Gabbard's demolishing of the official propaganda about American wars. Earlier this week, CNN and the New York Times smeared her as a "Russian asset" and an "apologist for Assad", referencing a visit she made to Syria in 2017 when she held talks with President Assad.

The Democratic National Committee is claiming that Gabbard does not have sufficient support in polls it deems worthy for her to qualify for appearing in the next TV debate in November.

International events, however, are proving the Hawaii Representative right. US troops, as with other NATO forces, have been occupying Syrian territory illegally. They have no mandate from the United Nations Security Council. The pullback of US troops by Trump has created a vacuum in northeast Syria into which the Syrian Arab Army is quickly moving to reclaim the territory which US-backed Kurdish fighters had de facto annexed for the past five years. Several reports show the local people are joyfully welcoming the arrival of the Syrian army. The scenes are reminiscent of when Syrian and Russian forces liberated Aleppo and other cities previously besieged by terror groups.

America's war machine must get out of Syria for the sake of restoring peace to that war-torn country. Not because "they have defeated ISIS 100 per cent", as Trump would conceitedly claim, nor because "we are betraying Kurds in the fight against terrorism", as most Democrats and US media preposterously claim.

Peace will come to Syria and the Middle East when Washington finally ends its criminal regime-change wars and its support for terrorist proxies. Tulsi Gabbard seems to be the only politician with the intelligence and integrity to tell Americans the truth.

wick7 , 25 minutes ago link

Unlike Trump she's against the patriot act and foreign intervention. Trump hired Bolton, attempted a coup in Venezuela, has been dropping more bombs on Syria than Obama did, is escalating a new war with Iran, has sent more troops to Saudi Arabia and Yeman. He's also for red flag laws to take away guns.

Got The Wrong No , 13 minutes ago link

Troll ****.

She abstained from voting when the issue of bringing home the troops from Syria came up recently. She isn't walking the talk already.

mtndds , 33 minutes ago link

If she wins I am sure she will get a visit by Kissinger to tell her how things are really run. Remember Kissinger visiting Trump?

NorwegianPawn , 37 minutes ago link

I cannot see her have a shot as DNC candidate. Either she will end up like a young and liberal version of Ron Paul; get angry and become a RossPerot-like spoiler type or (least likely) become another Bernie sellout for a beachhouse.

The way she is being demonized by the Democrat party, it is clear that she cannot win this battle.

Cluster_Frak , 57 minutes ago link

Hey Tulsi you got my vote, if you do what's right.

[Oct 27, 2019] There is a probably valid school of thought that the deep establishment has a faction that is pro-Trump and behind the general idea of disengaging from wasteful overseas adventures, since it is becoming clear that this is a ruinous path that the US cannot really afford anymore...

Oct 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

juliania , Oct 26 2019 15:24 utc | 105

My thought about Barr holding fire on Epstein is that he may have known that was a red herring, false flag, or whatever you want to call it. That whole Epstein affair sounded like a juicy distraction to me, in the manner of "if it bleeds it leads". When someone actually dies who is the center of contraversial activity, you may be sure, unfortunately, that someone, he or another, is getting close to truths that ought not see the light of day. Somewhat in the nature of the baiting of Putin as Ukraine was beginning its time of troubles. The old revolutionary dictum "Hold your fire until you see the whites of their eyes" may have been in Barr's mind at the time of Epstein's demise.

Certainly such investigations as the one he is involved in take much time to sort out the who-what-where in terms sufficiently damaging to become a credible enterprise. We have seen such attempts fail in the past. I hope he takes his time and gets all his ducks in a row before the hammer falls as fall it must. It is so vital to this country that this attempt succeed; for if it fails only the shambles of Kiev style fisticuffs in Congress can be the result. Not pretty.

In b's post we are reminded of the power of the press to misinform. I would suggest we badly need divestiture of our media from the huge corporations now more wealthy than some countries. The latter are too powerful in this country now, and they do need to be whittled down to size. We not only need fact finders, we need eloquent voices to present those facts to the public. We need free speech!

flankerbandit , Oct 26 2019 17:12 utc | 111

Juliania...about Barr...

He is a deep state creature...his father Donald Barr was an OSS guy and original CIA [which morphed from the wartime OSS]...

Barr senior was also Epstein's mentor and got him his start at the deeply establishment Dalton School [and probably Epstein's handler as an asset or 'agent' as they are called]...

So things go a bit deeper than the surface when it comes to Barr junior...and what he is doing here...

There is a probably valid school of thought that the deep establishment has a faction that is pro-Trump and behind the general idea of disengaging from wasteful overseas adventures, since it is becoming clear that this is a ruinous path that the US cannot really afford anymore...

I would also agree with the theory that says that these two 'deep' factions ['nationalist' vs 'globalist'] are at war...with the 'DNC-Hillary-MSM-interventionist faction' possibly on the decline, but still powerful enough to blow up a lot of the plans that Trump and his deep backers would like to get done...

Epstein is a whole 'nuther can of worms here and I would not be surprised if he was not actually dead...Trump himself is deeply entangled with many of the prime players in the Epstein web...it all depends if he is more useful alive than dead...

Btw...pulling off a deception like a fake death is kindergarten level for these kinds of operators and the unlimited resources they possess to shape so-called 'reality' as brought to us on our little screens...

So really I find it kind of silly that the right wingers are looking at Barr as some kind of White Knight...there really are none of those in these circles...as much as the sheeple would like to believe that...

chu teh , Oct 26 2019 19:08 utc | 112
karlof1 | Oct 25 2019 22:15 utc | 54

re: source of "God has an infinite sense of humor"...

Was told that in 1994[?] conversation w Jerry, a fellow worker, abt the baffling condition of Mankind. Never heard it before or since. At the time it was one of most incisive and impinging viewpoints; it still is.

It was said to me dryly, not coy and no smile, almost plaintively as tho it would be ignored and pass thru unrecognized. I never met a more rational or sharper mind.

Once, I remarked I was looking for an obscure book that was mentioned in another book, as "1 of the 3 best autobios ever written in English" by someone I never heard of. J:"Who and what?" Me:"Kropotkin and Revolutionist".
J:"Oh, sure! I think my wife still has a copy" and he brought it in next day.[An awesome read, too!]

karlof1 , Oct 26 2019 19:56 utc | 113
chu the @112--

Thanks for your reply! I was also thinking that perhaps it was a cynical observation made by a stoic son of a Baptist or Methodist Minister, like the retort in M*A*S*H about how someone like that (Hawkeye, IIRC) got into the Army--"He got drafted," which caused the audience to erupt in laughter (definitely a context-dependent joke).

Peter AU 1 , Oct 26 2019 20:43 utc | 114
flankerbandit 111
"There is a probably valid school of thought that the deep establishment has a faction that is pro-Trump and behind the general idea of disengaging from wasteful overseas adventures, since it is becoming clear that this is a ruinous path that the US cannot really afford anymore..."

I think this what is occuring. And when Trump says swamp, I think it is the section of the swamp that this faction believe set the US on a ruinous path.

pogohere , Oct 26 2019 20:46 utc | 115
chu teh @44 & 112

God is a comedian whose audience refuses to laugh.

uncle tungsten , Oct 26 2019 20:52 utc | 116
Bemildred #66

Good post my friend, no wonder the demoncrazies went berserk over Trump dipping in to their honeypot. I could never definitively find a reason for those spectacular ammunition storage bonfires in Ukraine. I figured it was either to disable their sale or cover up theft.

ERing46Z , Oct 26 2019 22:55 utc | 117
W. Gruff, thanks for the process insight.
I was long-aware the removal of the Smith-Mundt Act was loaded into the 2012 NDAA. No attempt on Trump's watch has been made to bring a needed, modern form of it back. I didn't vote for Trump, and until the damn looney media is reeled back into factual, in-context reporting, it will remain obvious Trump is only expanding a variety of nefarious things on the absence of legislation such as the S-M Act.

[Oct 27, 2019] Edward Snowden And Turnkey Tyranny

Oct 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

My intent here is not to summarize Snowden's entire interview. I want to focus on some points he made that I found especially revealing, pertinent, and insightful.

Without further ado, here are 12 points I took from this interview:

1. People who reach the highest levels of government do so by being risk-averse. Their goal is never to screw-up in a major way. This mentality breeds cautiousness, mediocrity, and buck-passing. (I saw the same in my 20 years in the U.S. military.)

2. The American people are no longer partners of government. We are subjects. Our rights are routinely violated even as we become accustomed (or largely oblivious) to a form of turnkey tyranny.

3. Intelligence agencies in the U.S. used 9/11 to enlarge their power. They argued that 9/11 happened because there were "too many restrictions" on them. This led to the PATRIOT Act and unconstitutional global mass surveillance, disguised as the price of being kept "safe" from terrorism. Simultaneously, America's 17 intelligence agencies wanted most of all not to be blamed for 9/11. They wanted to ensure the buck stopped nowhere. This was a goal they achieved.

4. Every persuasive lie has a kernel of truth. Terrorism does exist - that's the kernel of truth. Illegal mass surveillance, facilitated by nearly unlimited government power, in the cause of "keeping us safe" is the persuasive lie.

5. The government uses classification ("Top Secret" and so on) primarily to hide things from the American people, who have no "need to know" in the view of government officials. Secrecy becomes a cloak for illegality. Government becomes unaccountable; the people don't know, therefore we are powerless to rein in government excesses or to prosecute for abuses of power.

6. Fear is the mind-killer (my expression here, quoting Frank Herbert's Dune ). Snowden spoke much about the use of fear by the government, using expressions like "they'll be blood on your hands" and "think of the children." Fear is the way to cloud people's minds. As Snowden put it, you lose the ability to act because you are afraid.

7. What is true patriotism? For Snowden, it's about a constant effort to do good for the people. It's not loyalty to government. Loyalty, Snowden notes, is only good in the service of something good.

8. National security and public safety are not synonymous. In fact, in the name of national security, our rights are being violated. We are "sweeping up the broken glass of our lost rights" in today's world of global mass surveillance, Snowden noted.

9. We live naked before power. Companies like Facebook and Google, together with the U.S. government, know everything about us; we know little about them. It's supposed to be the reverse (at least in a democracy).

10. "The system is built on lies." James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, lies under oath before Congress. And there are no consequences. He goes unpunished.

11. We own less and less of our own data. Data increasingly belongs to corporations and the government. It's become a commodity. Which means we are the commodity. We are being exploited and manipulated, we are being sold, and it's all legal, because the powerful make the policies and the laws, and they are unaccountable to the people.

12. Don't wait for a hero to save you. What matters is heroic decisions. You are never more than one decision away from making the world a better place.

In 2013, Edward Snowden made a heroic decision to reveal illegal mass surveillance by the U.S. government, among other governmental crimes. He has made the world a better place, but as he himself knows, the fight has only just begun against turnkey tyranny.

ohm , 14 minutes ago link

Governments using fear for control is nothing new.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H. L. Mencken

Ruler , 2 minutes ago link

People under stress spend money. Mostly on low cost frivolous things that have no return.

That's why doom **** and yellow journalism exist.

Gobble D. Goop , 14 minutes ago link

Sorry folks. In time you will see that Snowden was, is, and always will be CIA (black hat). The whistle blowing was a CIA attempt to shut down the NSA (white hat) leaving no one to watch over the black hats whilst they conduct thier drug running and regime changing, and MK ultra operations. Ask Kennedy. Oh wait CIA and daddy Bush blew his head off.

Youri Carma , 47 minutes ago link

Joe Rogan Experience – Edward Snowden
Oct 23, 2019 PowerfulJRE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efs3QRr8LWw

Wild Bill Steamcock , 56 minutes ago link

Snowden, in my opinion, is a limited hangout. Not necessarily aware of it, he could just be a convenient dupe.

If there's this much surveillance, how in the Hell did he exfiltrate that much data AND be able to leave the country? Why did it take so long to track him down and revoke his passport? It makes no sense. Why didn't he go to Wikileaks, who has a proven and reliable track record but instead went to MSM?

I think he is probably genuine in his beliefs, but still see him as a limited hangout.

He has made the world a better place

How? Uncle Scam still has all it's capabilities. That big *** data center in Utah. Nothing's changed except we were told about it- again. Remember Drake, Wiebe and Binney spilled the beans in 2004.

Wild Bill Steamcock , 51 minutes ago link

And even then it wasn't new or surprising. ECHELON and the five eyes was talked about in the '70s

Wild Bill Steamcock , 49 minutes ago link

And how does a guy go from CIA janitor to effectively an NSA systems admin? Seriously, not to **** on janitors, but how in the actual **** does that happen?

freedogger , 36 minutes ago link

All your questions are answered in his book. Wkileaks wasn't an option because they release en masse without any vetting. He didn't want people to die from release of some of the docs he had.

AlexanderHistoryX , 24 minutes ago link

They are just now getting to the point where they have the tech to effectively sort and search through all that data. Plus. He tapped it from the source.

The real shame is how little resulted from the exposure. Nothing changed, no one was held to account, and we the people did nothing. We are a nation of contented slaves, for now.

Sam Spayed , 1 hour ago link

"Intelligence agencies in the U.S. used 9/11 to enlarge their power. "

And their power was supposed to be limited to foreign actors. The skinny, jug-eared, gay guy and his acolytes thought up sinister illegal ways to extend that power to private US citizens and the gay guy's political enemies.

One-Hung-Lo , 1 hour ago link

Most of these problems were predicted centuries ago when the founders feared a standing army that could be turned against the people. Now we have standing armies, and civilian paramilitaries in every county and big city, local cops, city cops, state police. We have ATF, FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and dozens of other armed alphabet soup agencies.

With We THE People are gonna regain our country again and many people will die again, and with luck all the traitors will hang by the neck until dead.

The elites who think it is their birthright to lord over us need to be reminded that they serve us. All the communist democrats are in need of reminders and quick drop at the end of a rope.

ToSoft4Truth , 56 minutes ago link

You mention a lot of people. Some of them must be sitting across from us at Thanksgiving dinner.

Scipio Africanuz , 1 hour ago link

It's heartening to know Snowden is a martial alumni..

And speaking of tyranny, we came across a gem, a most enlightening gem thus..

"If you take me down, I'll come after you with everything I've got It will become my life's mission."

"These are the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to newspaper publisher Arnon Mozes in a recording that has become central evidence in a corruption case against Netanyahu, as revealed Saturday by Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker.."

So why have we brought this to your attention?

So you may understand that Liberty is not for the lily livered. If Jefferson and Co had been squeamish, Americans would still be serfs..

If MLK had been squeamish, negros would not be free today, to be in position to advocate for rights..

And if Cesar Chavez had adopted cowardice, then Latinos would have no mojo to advocate..

And if Hugo Chavez had not given his life to Venezuela, it's doubtful that Maduro would have had a leg to stand on..

And yet, Lula is imprisoned..just like Nelson Mandela, for the best years of his life..

My friends, mortality eventually ends, that's a certainty..what you do with yours, is consequential, for good or ill..

When the depraved hurl threats, it means they're afraid, and in that event, increase the artillery barrage of truth..cheers...

Edited:

Here's the link to the quote..

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-netanyahu-recordings-revealed-i-ll-come-after-you-with-everything-i-ve-got-1.8029010

abgary1 , 1 hour ago link

The digital world has become disturbingly invasive and the source of the data the governments uses against us.

Abstain.

Get off of social media, limit net time, encrypt communications, leave our mobile devices at home and use cash.

Anything that leaves a digital footprint is being tracked.

The loss of our privacy is the loss of our freedom.

To return democracy to the people we need to do the following:

-Term limits of 8 years at any one level of government for the politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats and senior civil servants. If our legislators know they will spend the majority of their working lives in the private sector they will not pass laws that solely benefit the public sector.

-Recall legislation to hold our legislators accountable.

-Balance budget laws that require referendums to amend or repeal.

-Zero tax increase laws that require referendums to amend or repeal.

We need to return democracy to the people and we do that by demanding change at the grassroots levels.

elitist99percenter , 1 hour ago link

These days , The Shang Dynasty's moral decay quickly comes to mind, as outlined in The Art of War : lies, deceit and diffusion were the norm; unaccountable leaders immersed themselves in debauchery, orgies and lavish self-profiting (today's Epsteinism in full-swing); brutally-enforced high taxes & wage thefts levied on citizens; government's increased violence against state residents, particularly those brave enough to resist widespread tyranny; escalated harmful interference in the country's agricultural operations; and knee-jerked, violent responses with heavy-handed, inhuman punishments (like SWAT teams blowing away innocents -- women & children -- over minor, inconsequential infractions), especially violation of peoples' guaranteed civil liberties, as well as their sovereign dignities and property rights, under the guise of ridiculously concocted "boogeymen" nonsense.

Hmm, sounds familiar.

Lumberjack , 1 hour ago link

During the Rogan interview, Snowden said that all the corrupt creatures live in the suburbs within a 200 mile radius of DC. Just sayin...

Wolfbay , 37 minutes ago link

It's also interesting that this area has more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America. It's not a high tech area, no manufacturing, and no big agriculture. Sucking the tit of our taxes.

Arising , 1 hour ago link

Snowden must be a ZHer.

All his points are pretty basic stuff for me and a large portion of the people here.

I learned very early in life, and I teach my kids today that Govt, Banks and Media are not, have never and will never be your friends.

If you understand this at an early age everything else becomes much less cloudy in life.

[Oct 27, 2019] What distinguishes Obama from other presidents is the degree to which he was manufactured. He made it to the WH without much of a political base. Control of the political context, media and process, launched Obama to the top. It was fulfillment of the liberal American dream. It was a great coup. Talk about the "deep state"!

Oct 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

jadan , Oct 27 2019 2:44 utc | 56

@41 Jackrabbit

If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge

Trump at first threw down the gauntlet to the spies and proclaimed his autocratic prerogative when God held off the rain for his inauguration (!) but now he would gladly get on his knees between Gina Haspel's legs if the CIA would only help him stay in power.

What distinguishes Obama from other presidents is the degree to which he was manufactured. He made it to the WH without much of a political base. Control of the political context, media and process, launched Obama to the top. It was fulfillment of the liberal American dream. It was a great coup. Talk about the "deep state"! It's staring us all in the face.

[Oct 27, 2019] What can we conclude about Trump?

Notable quotes:
"... If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge. ..."
"... There is a third possibility. What if Trump wasn't supposed to become President, according to the CIA's plans? This seems plausible to me, because during the 2016 election, it seemed to me at least that almost nobody in the US political and media establishments took Trump's candidacy seriously. Clinton was so sure she could easily beat Trump that she used her influence with the media to get Trump media coverage, in order to weaken the "serious" Republicans, one of whom everyone thought would get the nomination, like Jeb Bush. ..."
Oct 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Oct 26 2019 23:51 utc | 41

jadan @32:
As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe.
If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge.
Glenn Brown , Oct 27 2019 0:32 utc | 46
Jackabbit @ 41

There is a third possibility. What if Trump wasn't supposed to become President, according to the CIA's plans? This seems plausible to me, because during the 2016 election, it seemed to me at least that almost nobody in the US political and media establishments took Trump's candidacy seriously. Clinton was so sure she could easily beat Trump that she used her influence with the media to get Trump media coverage, in order to weaken the "serious" Republicans, one of whom everyone thought would get the nomination, like Jeb Bush.

I know you believe that Trump was somehow exactly what the US deep state needed. I don't agree, but even if you are right, are you really sure that the CIA and the rest of the deep state were smart enough to understand and agree that they needed someone like Trump?

[Oct 27, 2019] Biden's Intervention In Ukraine And Ukraine's 2016 Election Meddling Are Matters of Fact

Notable quotes:
"... On February 2 Shokin confiscated four large houses Zlochevsky owned plus a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a "Knott 924-5014 trainer". (Anyone know what that is?) Ten days later Biden goes into overdrive to get him fired. Within one week he personally calls Poroshenko three times with only one major aim: to get Shokin fired. ..."
"... Zlochevsky had hired Joe Biden's son Hunter for at least $50,000 per month. In 2015 Shokin started to investigate him in two cases. During the fall of 2015 Joe Biden's team begins to lobby against him. On February 2 Shokin seizes Zlochevsky's houses. Shortly afterwards the Biden camp goes berserk with Biden himself making nearly daily phonecalls. Shokin goes on vacation while Poroshenko (falsely) claims that he resigned. When Shokin comes back into office Biden again takes to the phone. A week later Shokin is out. ..."
"... Biden got the new prosecutor general he wanted. The new guy made a bit of show and then closed the case against Zlochevsky. ..."
"... Is the "conspiracy theory" about Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election really "debunked"? It is, of course, not. The facts show that the interference happened. It was requested by the Democratic National Committee and was willingly provided by Ukrainian officials. ..."
"... Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found. ..."
"... A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia , according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. ..."
"... In March 2016 Chalupa went to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC and requested help from the Ukrainian ambassador to go after Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort. In August 2016 the Ukrainians delivered a secret "black ledger" that allegedly showed that Manafort had illegally received money for his previous work for the campaign of the former Ukrainian president Yanukovych. ..."
"... Serhin A. Leshchenko, the member of the Ukrainian parliament who published the dubious ledger, was rabidly anti-Trump. Shortly after providing the "secret ledger" he talked with the Financial Times and promised to continue to meddle in the U.S. election. The FT headline emphasized the fact: ..."
"... insisting on innocence of Biden will have a political cost. ..."
"... That term "conspiracy theory" has been so widely abused that, to me at least, it now means something that the author wishes were not true but almost certainly is. ..."
"... Joe Biden needs to STFU, and go away. He and his ilk are part of the problem, not the solution. The rulers of America insist on pushing this sycophant for the empire down our throats. And, he can take HRC and her crowd with him. It's high time for some new blood, IF, TPTB, will even allow that to happen, which I very much doubt.... ..."
"... If you were referring to Trump's convo with Zelensky specifically, reasonable people might disagree over whether that was an abuse of power or sleazy and dumb (in being unnecessary)--which of course shouldn't mean the Bidens get a pass here, which none of these young journalists are suggesting. ..."
"... Well, there you have it--proof that BigLie Media indeed specializes in publishing Big Lies that ought to reduce such outlets to the status of Tabloids. Of course, the media is free to lie all it wants within the limits of slander and libel, but most people don't like being lied to particularly over matters of importance. ..."
"... Larry Johnson has a piece at SST on a CIA task force set up to compromise Trump and prevent him becoming president. That Trump avoided all the traps set for him (even the Mueller investigation could pin nothing on Trump) and won the election says a bit for Trump ..."
"... Alexandra Chalupa's connection to the thinktank The Atlantic Council should be borne in mind in the developing discussion in the comments forum. Her sister Irena is or has been a non-resident Senior Fellow there. Irena Chalupa has also been a senior editor at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. ..."
"... Also the founder and CEO of the Crowdstrike company in charge of cybersecurity for the DNC during the 2016 presidential election campaign was Dmitri Alperovich who is a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council. It was Crowdstrike who came up with the idea that Trump had to be under the Kremlin's thumb and from there the hysterical witch-hunt and associated actions known as Russiagate began. ..."
"... I'm surprised that at this point in time, Bellingcat has not been included in digging up "dirt" on Trump ..."
"... Lee Stranahan of Radio Sputnik has been reporting on Alexandra Chalupa's role for a number of years now. I hope he gets proper credit as this story comes out. ..."
"... It seems some corners are coming unglued if the ZH link below is any indication: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-entrapped-flynn-manipulated-evidence-clapper-allegedly-issued-kill-shot-order ..."
"... The take away quote from a Matt Taibbi twit "LOL. Barack Obama is going to love this interview his former DIA James Clapper just gave to CNN about the Durham probe: "It's frankly disconcerting to be investigated for having done... what we were told to do by the president of the United States." ..."
"... Prescient observation by Aaron Mate : "When CNN & MSNBC now cover the criminal inquiry into conduct of intel officials in Russia probe, they are literally covering their employees -- John Brennan (MSNBC); James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, James Baker (CNN). I avoid the term, but it's appropriate here: Deep State TV." ..."
"... The take away quote: "Joe Biden intervened at least two times on matters his son Hunter's firms was being paid to lobby on, according to government records reviewed by the Washington Examiner." ..."
"... Indeed, the guilty are hiding in plain sight. It appears sinister, and is, but I think its a positive development of late, as it would suggest that big media are scrambling to preserve the status quo by legitimising these deep state actors. ..."
"... Obama orchestrated the regime change operation in Ukraine. As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe. To promote containment of the Russian menace, the US got in bed with Ukrainian fascists and successfully exploited political tensions in that country resulting in the removal of the duly elected Yanukovitch. A right wing billionaire then took the reigns and Putin orchestrated a referendum in Crimea in retaliation that resulted in its return to Russia. The Crimeans were and continue to be happy, happier than the rest of Ukrainians under Kiev neo-fascist free market exploitation. ..."
"... It is natural that neo-fascist Ukrainians would express their disapproval of Trump, who was making nice with Putin. No matter what his motives were, he was bucking US anti-Russian policy. I liked Trump at that time for this willingness to end a Cold War policy sponsored by the US military industrial complex. You can cal it "deep state" if you like. It's not deep and it's not a shadow government. It's the war party. It's the elite profiting from weapons manufacture. Trump has no principles except expedience and his pro-Russian stance is likely owing to the money laundering he's been doing for Russian criminals since he is such a lousy business man. ..."
"... The general charge against Trump is that he was "digging up dirt" on opponents. Well laddy-dah. So what. Welcome to Politics 101. ..."
"... Empires don't act on facts: they are all-powerful, so they sculpt reality as they see fit. What determines this is class struggle: the inner contradictions of a society that results in a given consensus, thus forming a hegemony. ..."
"... Again, not surprised at all. Pro-democratic/anti-Trump media write articles (obviously made-to-order) to whitewash already badly discredited Biden, and present all the arguments in favor of his dark connections with Ukraine as a kind of "conspiracy theory". This is a common practice. Not having sufficient competence to reasonably refute the arguments of opponents, MSM (as well as all sorts of "experts") immediately mark the position of opponents with "conspiracy theory" (there are also other options to choose from: "Putin's agent", "Putin's useful idiot", "Kremlin's agent", "pro-Russian propaganda", etc.). It is assumed that this makes unnecessary/optional (and even "toxic") all further conversations with the opponent (that is, there is no need to answer him, to prove something with facts, etc.), because his position is a "conspiracy theory". ..."
"... Western MSM are actively using this simplest propaganda technique of information warfare. For example, this was the case when reporting on events in Syria - those journalists, the media, experts who did not agree with the lie of MSM about Assad's use of the chemical weapons were declared "conspiracy theorists" (and also "Assad apologists"). This method was also used to cover "the Skripal case" - those who questioned the British authorities' version of the "Novichok poisoning" were declared "conspiracy theorists". ..."
"... This is the way the controlled media works. They provide half a story, half truths, straw-man facts, selective quotes and 'expert' comment, opinion and unwarranted assumption presented as fact that all together cover the spectrum from black to white, spread across the many titles. ..."
"... They also disseminate a fine dusting of lies and actual truth here and there. The result is the public have a dozen 'truths' to pick from, none of which are real, while the outright lies and actual truths get dismissed as not credible and the half-truths and straw-man truths appear to carry some validity. ..."
"... If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge. ..."
"... as Caitlin Johnstone lets to say - who gets to decide what the narrative is here? i don't have an answer for this, but those who appear to be taking a side in all of this - including you with the quote i make - seem to think that it has to be the issue of trumps extortion of Ukraine, verses what appears to me the CIA - Dem party extortion of the ordinary USA persons mind... ..."
"... Has mccarthyism version 2 come to life since the advent of what happened in the Ukraine from 2014 onward?? is the issue of a new cold war with Russia been on the burner for at least 5 or more years here and began before trump was even considered a potential candidate for the republican party? did Russia take back Crimea, which wasn't supposed to happen? is this good for military industrial complex sales? and etc. etc. ..."
"... i am sure biden is small potatoes in the bigger picture here, but if taking a closer examination of what took place in ukraine leading into 2014, with the victoria nulands and geoffrey pyatts and etc. etc. of usa diplomatic corps, usa dept of state and etc. could lead to a better understanding of how the usa has went down the road it has for the past 60 years of foreign policy on the world stage, it would be a good start... so, to me - it ain't about trump.. it is about usa foreign policy and how it has sucked the big one on the world stage for at least since the time of vietnam when i was a teenager.. ..."
Oct 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Several mainstream media have made claims that Joe Biden's intervention in the Ukraine and the Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election are "conspiracy theories" and "debunked". The public record proves them wrong. By ignoring or even contradicting the facts the media create an opening for Trump to rightfully accuse them of providing "fake news".

On October 04 a New Yorker piece, headlined The Invention of the Conspiracy Theory on Biden and Ukraine , asserted:

[In late 2018], Giuliani began speaking to current and former Ukrainian officials about the Biden conspiracy theory, and meeting with them repeatedly in New York and Europe. Among those officials was Viktor Shokin, a former top Ukrainian prosecutor who was sacked in March, 2016, after European and U.S. officials, including Joe Biden, complained that he was lax in curbing corruption. Shokin claimed that he had lost his powerful post not because of his poor performance but rather because Biden wanted to stop his investigation of Burisma, in order to protect his son. The facts didn't back this up. The Burisma investigation had been dormant under Shokin.

Several other media outlets also made the highlighted claim to debunk the "conspiracy theory". But is it correct?

We have looked into the claim that Shorkin's investigation against Burisma owner Zlochevsky was dormant, as the New Yorker says, and found it to be false :

The above accounts are incorrect. Shokin did go after Zlochevsky. He opened two cases against him in 2015. After he did that Biden and his crew started to lobby for his firing. Shokin was aggressively pursuing the case. He did so just before Biden's campaign against him went into a frenzy.
...
On February 2 Shokin confiscated four large houses Zlochevsky owned plus a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a "Knott 924-5014 trainer". (Anyone know what that is?) Ten days later Biden goes into overdrive to get him fired. Within one week he personally calls Poroshenko three times with only one major aim: to get Shokin fired.
...
Zlochevsky had hired Joe Biden's son Hunter for at least $50,000 per month. In 2015 Shokin started to investigate him in two cases. During the fall of 2015 Joe Biden's team begins to lobby against him. On February 2 Shokin seizes Zlochevsky's houses. Shortly afterwards the Biden camp goes berserk with Biden himself making nearly daily phonecalls. Shokin goes on vacation while Poroshenko (falsely) claims that he resigned. When Shokin comes back into office Biden again takes to the phone. A week later Shokin is out.

Biden got the new prosecutor general he wanted. The new guy made a bit of show and then closed the case against Zlochevsky.

It is quite astonishing that the false claims, that Shokin did not go after Burisma owner Zlochevsky, is repeated again and again despite the fact that the public record , in form of a report by Interfax-Ukraine , contradicts it.


bigger


On Thursday Buzzfeed News wrote about a different Ukrainian prosecutor who in early 2019 was approached to set up meetings with President Donald Trump's private lawyer Rudy Giuliani:

[Gyunduz] Mamedov's role was key. He was an intermediary in Giuliani's efforts to press Ukraine to open investigations into former vice president Joe Biden and the debunked conspiracy theory about the country's interference in the 2016 presidential election , a collaboration between BuzzFeed News, NBC News, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) can reveal.

The OCCRP is funded by the UK Foreign Office, the US State Dept, USAID, Omidyar Network, Soros' Open Society, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and others. Most of these entities were involved in the 2014 coup against the elected government of the Ukraine.

Is the "conspiracy theory" about Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election really "debunked"? It is, of course, not. The facts show that the interference happened. It was requested by the Democratic National Committee and was willingly provided by Ukrainian officials.

As Politico reported shortly after Trump had won the election, it was the Democratic Party organization, the DNC, which had asked the Ukrainians for dirt that could be used against the campaign on Donald Trump:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia , according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort's resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump's campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine's foe to the east, Russia.

The Ukrainian-American who was the go between the DNC and the government of Ukraine had earlier worked for the Clinton administration:

Manafort's work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC's arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.

In March 2016 Chalupa went to the Ukrainian embassy in Washington DC and requested help from the Ukrainian ambassador to go after Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort. In August 2016 the Ukrainians delivered a secret "black ledger" that allegedly showed that Manafort had illegally received money for his previous work for the campaign of the former Ukrainian president Yanukovych.

Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych's pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine's newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.

"Paul Manafort is among those names on the list of so-called 'black accounts of the Party of Regions,' which the detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are investigating," the statement said. "We emphasize that the presence of P. Manafort's name in the list does not mean that he actually got the money, because the signatures that appear in the column of recipients could belong to other people."

The provenance of the ledger is highly dubious. It was allegedly found in a burned out office of Yanukovych's old party:

The papers, known in Ukraine as the "black ledger," are a chicken-scratch of Cyrillic covering about 400 pages taken from books once kept in a third-floor room in the former Party of Regions headquarters on Lipskaya Street in Kiev.
...
The accounting records surfaced this year, when Serhiy A. Leshchenko, a member of Parliament who said he had received a partial copy from a source he did not identify, published line items covering six months of outlays in 2012 totaling $66 million. In an interview, Mr. Leshchenko said another source had provided the entire multiyear ledger to Viktor M. Trepak, a former deputy director of the domestic intelligence agency of Ukraine, the S.B.U., who passed it to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau.

Anti-corruption groups in Ukraine said the black ledger detailing payments was probably seized when protesters ransacked the Party of Regions headquarters in February 2014.

The pages from the ledger, which had come from anonymous sources probably supported by John Brennan's CIA , were never proven to be genuine. But the claims were strong enough to get Manafort fired as campaign manager for Donald Trump. He was later sentenced for unrelated cases of tax evasion.

Serhin A. Leshchenko, the member of the Ukrainian parliament who published the dubious ledger, was rabidly anti-Trump. Shortly after providing the "secret ledger" he talked with the Financial Times and promised to continue to meddle in the U.S. election. The FT headline emphasized the fact:

Ukraine's leaders campaign against 'pro-Putin' Trump ( screenshots ):

The prospect of Mr Trump, who has praised Ukraine's arch-enemy Vladimir Putin, becoming leader of the country's biggest ally has spurred not just Mr Leshchenko but Kiev's wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election.
...
Mr. Leshchenko and other political actors in Kiev say they will continue with their efforts to prevent a candidate - who recently suggested Russia might keep Crimea, which it annexed two years ago - from reaching the summit of American political power.

"A Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy," Mr Leshchenko, an investigative journalist turned MP, told the Financial Times. "For me it was important to show not only the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world."
...
If the Republican candidate loses in November, some observers suggest Kiev's action may have played at least a small role.

A Democratic Party operative asked the Ukrainian ambassador to find dirt on Trump's campaign manger Paul Manafort. A few month later a secret "black ledger" emerges from nowhere into the hands of dubious Ukrainian actors including a 'former' domestic intelligence director.

The ledger may or may not show that Manafort received money from Yanukovych's party. It was never verified. But it left Trump no choice but to fire Manafort. Ukrainian figures who were involved in the stunt openly admitted that they had meddled in the U.S. election, promised to do more of it and probably did.

The Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election is well documented. How the Buzzfeed News author can claim that it is a "debunked conspiracy theory" is beyond me.

In 1998 the U.S. and the Ukraine signed a Treaty on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters (pdf). I came into force in February 2001. Article I defines the wide scope of assistance:

1. The Contracting States shall provide mutual assistance, in accordance with the provisions of this Treaty, in connection with the investigation, prosecution, and prevention of offenses, and in proceedings related to criminal matters.

2. Assistance shall include: (a) taking the testimony or statements of persons; (b) providing documents, records, and other items; (c) locating or identifying persons or items; (d) serving documents; (e) transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; (f) executing searches and seizures; (g) assisting in proceedings related to immobilization and forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and (h) any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the Requested State.

3. Assistance shall be provided without regard to whether the conduct that is the subject of the investigation, prosecution, or proceeding in the Requesting State would constitute an offense under the laws of the Requested State.

When Trump asked the current Ukrainian President Zelensky to help with an investigation into the above matters he acted well within the law and within the framework of the treaty. It was certainly not illegitimate to do that.

But when mainstream media deny that Biden's interference in Ukraine's prosecutor office is suspect, or claim that the Ukraine did not interfere in the U.S. elections, they make it look as if Trump did something crazy or illegal. He does plenty of that but not in this case. To use it a basis of an 'impeachment inquiry' is political bullshit.

Making these false claims will come back to haunt those media outlets. Sooner or later the public will recognize that those claims are false. It will lessen the already low trust in the media even more.

Posted by b on October 26, 2019 at 17:51 UTC | Permalink

Piotr Berman , Oct 26 2019 18:16 utc | 1

"Sooner or later the public will recognize that those claims are false. It will lessen the already low trust in the media even more."

More precisely, there exit Trump-friendly media with millions of followers, so insisting on innocence of Biden will have a political cost. Not to mention leftist media reminiscing how Senator Biden championed the cause of MBNA (credit cart giant) when it was also a generous employer of his dear son. Of course, given the size of Delaware, it could be just a coincidence.

corkie , Oct 26 2019 18:27 utc | 3
Thanks b for providing the nitty gritty details of this sorry saga. That term "conspiracy theory" has been so widely abused that, to me at least, it now means something that the author wishes were not true but almost certainly is.
Maracatu , Oct 26 2019 18:30 utc | 4
What is certain is that if Biden is selected as the Dem candidate and ends up as President, the GOP (if it retains influence in Congress) will open an investigation into his actions on behalf of his son. Russia-gate is the gift that keeps on giving!
ben , Oct 26 2019 18:34 utc | 5
Thanks b, for the reality check. Joe Biden needs to STFU, and go away. He and his ilk are part of the problem, not the solution. The rulers of America insist on pushing this sycophant for the empire down our throats. And, he can take HRC and her crowd with him. It's high time for some new blood, IF, TPTB, will even allow that to happen, which I very much doubt....
ben , Oct 26 2019 18:39 utc | 6
P. S. DJT, IMO, is ALSO in the same category with Biden, HRC and other scum-bags that need to "go away", if not imprisoned..
Ort , Oct 26 2019 18:56 utc | 8
Thanks for another informative and insightful commentary, B. It's like a drink of cool, clean water after staggering through a volcanic landscape full of fumaroles belching sulfurous plumes of superheated gas.

Sometimes my hobby horses merrily hop along under me without any effort on my part. I just hang onto the reins and howl. So: it's bad enough that the US mass-media consent-manufacturers, aka the CIA/Deep State's "Mighty Wurlitzer", gin up endless propaganda to discredit the facts you mention; their mission is to fool enough of the public that there's no "there" there, and prop up Biden's presidential campaign in the bargain.

But what increasingly bugs me is so-called "alternative" news outlets and independent journalists buying into the spin that Trump and his associates are using the pretext of investigating corruption as a means to illegally and illicitly "dig up dirt on political rivals". Put the other way around, they concede that Biden and other Team Obama honchos are indeed "dirty", and that their Ukraine adventure was reprehensibly illicit or illegal and self-serving-- but they return to faulting Trump for impermissibly exploiting these circumstances in order to gain political advantage.

It doesn't surprise me that talented but co-opted journalists like Matt Taibbi are careful to affirm that Trump et al 's conduct is manifestly an abuse of power. But, sadly, even journalists like Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Michael Tracey have echoed this rote condemnation.

My guess is that this arises from two acronyms: incipient TDS, which compels even "alternative" US journalists to regard Trump as the "heel" in the staged "professional"-wrestling scam of US electoral politics. Also, CYA; I suspect that these relatively young, professionally vulnerable journalists are terrified of coming off as "defending" or "excusing" Trump, lest they trigger wrathful excoriation from their peers and the hordes of social-media users whose custom they cultivate.

This is why I appreciate your clarity and forthrightness on this fraught topic.

Paul Damascene , Oct 26 2019 19:26 utc | 10
Ort @ 8 --

Rereading your post, and agreeing with some it, I find I disagree less with its conclusions than on first reading.

If you were referring to Trump's convo with Zelensky specifically, reasonable people might disagree over whether that was an abuse of power or sleazy and dumb (in being unnecessary)--which of course shouldn't mean the Bidens get a pass here, which none of these young journalists are suggesting.

But where I would disagree is if you were suggesting that Taibbi, Mate and Blumenthal are making obligatory objections to Trump more generally, in order to curry favour with their peers. I think each of them would readily reel off lists of things (more substantive than Ukrainegate -- and probably not including Russia collusion) that they think Trump should be castigated, impeached and perhaps prosecuted for.

karlof1 , Oct 26 2019 19:32 utc | 11
Well, there you have it--proof that BigLie Media indeed specializes in publishing Big Lies that ought to reduce such outlets to the status of Tabloids. Of course, the media is free to lie all it wants within the limits of slander and libel, but most people don't like being lied to particularly over matters of importance.
Peter AU 1 , Oct 26 2019 19:39 utc | 12
Larry Johnson has a piece at SST on a CIA task force set up to compromise Trump and prevent him becoming president. That Trump avoided all the traps set for him (even the Mueller investigation could pin nothing on Trump) and won the election says a bit for Trump. He definitely is more than the twitter reality TV persona that he puts up as a public face.

With the Barr investigation, it looks like the non Trump section of the swamp will be drained in the near future.

jasmin , Oct 26 2019 19:43 utc | 13
Possibly an irrelevant point, but Shokin's replacement Lutsenko was the prosecutor who resurrected the "deceased", self declared journalist, Arkady Babchenko. The story was full of plot twists, involving a Boris German/Herman, who was Russian. B kept Us regaled with events. I'd post a link, but have witnessed too many thread expansions too risk it.
dh , Oct 26 2019 19:45 utc | 14
I think a lot of people give the MSM too much credit. Of course editorials etc. can influence people's thinking but the media, and journalists in general, are loathed by the people who voted for Trump. It's a big reason he was elected.
ben , Oct 26 2019 19:45 utc | 15
Ort @ 8 said;"It doesn't surprise me that talented but co-opted journalists like Matt Taibbi are careful to affirm that Trump et al's conduct is manifestly an abuse of power."

Co-Opted, or truthful, depending on what you believe. You, have every right to your opinion, but, when push comes to shove, think I'll give my opinion being swayed or not, by giving more credibility to the five names you've decided to "shade".

DJT has a record of behavior, and so do the five you've mentioned. My choice is clear, I'll believe the five..

Jen , Oct 26 2019 19:56 utc | 16
Alexandra Chalupa's connection to the thinktank The Atlantic Council should be borne in mind in the developing discussion in the comments forum. Her sister Irena is or has been a non-resident Senior Fellow there. Irena Chalupa has also been a senior editor at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Also the founder and CEO of the Crowdstrike company in charge of cybersecurity for the DNC during the 2016 presidential election campaign was Dmitri Alperovich who is a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council. It was Crowdstrike who came up with the idea that Trump had to be under the Kremlin's thumb and from there the hysterical witch-hunt and associated actions known as Russiagate began.

I'm surprised that at this point in time, Bellingcat has not been included in digging up "dirt" on Trump, Manafort or anyone Manafort supposedly had connections with who is also mentioned in the "black ledger" but maybe that's because with the garbage that Bellingcat has so delivered, Eliot Higgins and company can't be trusted any more. Their masters should have known though, that when you give your subordinates base material to work with, they can only come up with base results: garbage in, garbage out.

psychohistorian , Oct 26 2019 19:57 utc | 17
Thanks for your ongoing documentation of the political criminality in the US b. The recent events are playing out like a two-bit soap opera rerun in a nursing home for America's brainwashed. Maybe Trump could start a new TV game show called Apprentice Corruption and instead of saying "Your Fired!" it could be "Your Guilty!"

As an American it is difficult to watch the country that I was taught such good things about in school be exposed as a criminal enterprise running cover for the elite cult that owns global private finance and manipulates Western not-so-civilized culture.

I hope all this BS we are going through wakes up enough of the semi-literate public to overthrow the criminal sect and restore the Founding Fathers motto and concept of E Pluribus Unum.

lysias , Oct 26 2019 20:09 utc | 18
Lee Stranahan of Radio Sputnik has been reporting on Alexandra Chalupa's role for a number of years now. I hope he gets proper credit as this story comes out.
karlof1 , Oct 26 2019 20:35 utc | 19
Given the fact that she got a first hand look at the Outlaw US Empire's injustice system and its tie-in with BigLie Media, the comments by the now back in Russia Maria Butina carry some legitimate weight that're worth reading: "'I believe that the Americans are wonderful people, but they have lost their legal system,' Butina said. 'What is more, they are routinely losing their country. They will lose it unless they do something'.... "'I am very proud of my country, of my origin,' Butina stressed. 'And I come to realize it more and more.'"

Should I bold the following, maybe make the lettering red, and put it in all caps:

"They are routinely losing their country."

I know this is an international bar, but the general focus has long been on the Outlaw US Empire. IMO, Maria Butina is 100% correct. The topic of this thread is just further proof of that fact. As I tirelessly point out, the federal government has routinely violated its own fundamental law daily since October 1945. The media goes along with it robotically. And aside from myself, I know of no other US citizen that's raised the issue--not Chomsky, not Zinn, not anyone with more credentials and public accessibility than I. I sorta feel like Winston Smith: Am I the only one who sees and understands what's actually happening?! Well, I've shared what I know, so I'm no longer alone. But that's not very satisfying, nor is it satisfactory.

psychohistorian , Oct 26 2019 21:00 utc | 22
It seems some corners are coming unglued if the ZH link below is any indication: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-entrapped-flynn-manipulated-evidence-clapper-allegedly-issued-kill-shot-order

The take away quote from a Matt Taibbi twit "LOL. Barack Obama is going to love this interview his former DIA James Clapper just gave to CNN about the Durham probe: "It's frankly disconcerting to be investigated for having done... what we were told to do by the president of the United States."
"

karlof1 , Oct 26 2019 21:00 utc | 23
Prescient observation by Aaron Mate : "When CNN & MSNBC now cover the criminal inquiry into conduct of intel officials in Russia probe, they are literally covering their employees -- John Brennan (MSNBC); James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, James Baker (CNN). I avoid the term, but it's appropriate here: Deep State TV."

Sure, he sees it, many of us barflies see it, but it's the public within the Outlaw US Empire that must see and understand this dynamic. If they don't or won't, then Butina's words are even more correct--They are losing their country.

Brian_J , Oct 26 2019 21:07 utc | 24
Here are some more Biden & Biden lobbying revelations going back to 2008 from the Washington Examiner from before Biden became VP: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/biden-outreach-to-dhs-and-doj-overlapped-with-work-by-son-hunters-lobbying-firm
psychohistorian , Oct 26 2019 21:08 utc | 25
Below is another ZH link (still can't do HTML....sigh) about more Biden perfidy re his son Hunter: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/busted-joe-biden-intervened-help-hunters-lobbying-efforts-multiple-occasions

The take away quote: "Joe Biden intervened at least two times on matters his son Hunter's firms was being paid to lobby on, according to government records reviewed by the Washington Examiner."

uncle tungsten , Oct 26 2019 21:10 utc | 26
steven t johnson #20

Excuses from the Trump lovers should be dismissed out of hand.

They usually are dismissed around this bar stj. As are the excuses from the Dem lovers.

How do you excuse this ?

MadMax2 , Oct 26 2019 21:27 utc | 28
maracatu 4

The merry-go-round scenario you post would indicate a broken state. Biden's been in office for 43 years, Trump 3 yrs... the potential for dirt is large, mix it with even larger GOP vengeance should that scenario arise and this will drag on through the decades.

'A republic, if you can keep it.' ~Franklin

paul , Oct 26 2019 21:35 utc | 29
What Trump did was corrupt. Normal corruption. What Biden did was corrupt. A lot more corrupt. And rather brazen.
Peter AU 1 , Oct 26 2019 21:46 utc | 30
"They are routinely losing their country."

Part and parcel of democracy. Western style democracy at least. Perhaps others can set theirs up better, though allways, the achilles heel of democracy is information, or media. Who oversees ensuring voters recieve accurate information.

The oz state of NSW had something that broke through this for a bit. ICAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Commission_Against_Corruption_(New_South_Wales)

It took complaints from the public and investigated them. They did not have power to bring charges, but for a time findings were made public. Once it got onto a money trail it would keep following and that would lead to other money trails. It was a state agency and had to stop at state borders but most money trails led to federal politics. It was defanged when they came too close to federal politics.

Something like this in a countries constitution could work though it could be corrupted the same as anything else.

MadMax2 , Oct 26 2019 21:49 utc | 31
@karlof 23

Indeed, the guilty are hiding in plain sight. It appears sinister, and is, but I think its a positive development of late, as it would suggest that big media are scrambling to preserve the status quo by legitimising these deep state actors.

It wasn't so long ago these deep state types would rather steer clear of the media. Now they are out there earning bread driving the narrative. Are these deep state media faces a tactical last resort...?

jadan , Oct 26 2019 22:13 utc | 32
Obama orchestrated the regime change operation in Ukraine. As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe. To promote containment of the Russian menace, the US got in bed with Ukrainian fascists and successfully exploited political tensions in that country resulting in the removal of the duly elected Yanukovitch. A right wing billionaire then took the reigns and Putin orchestrated a referendum in Crimea in retaliation that resulted in its return to Russia. The Crimeans were and continue to be happy, happier than the rest of Ukrainians under Kiev neo-fascist free market exploitation.

It is natural that neo-fascist Ukrainians would express their disapproval of Trump, who was making nice with Putin. No matter what his motives were, he was bucking US anti-Russian policy. I liked Trump at that time for this willingness to end a Cold War policy sponsored by the US military industrial complex. You can cal it "deep state" if you like. It's not deep and it's not a shadow government. It's the war party. It's the elite profiting from weapons manufacture. Trump has no principles except expedience and his pro-Russian stance is likely owing to the money laundering he's been doing for Russian criminals since he is such a lousy business man. Putin and other Russian kleptocrats saved Trump boy's bacon. So it's very confusing when bed actors do good things.

Biden is no doubt quite corrupt. But that's got little to do with Trumps quid pro quo with Ukraine. You say that Ukrainian interference in US elections is well documented. You don't offer any documents, b. Anti-Putin Ukrainians were naturally anti-Trump. So what? Where's the beef? Show me how that little piss ant country that can't even pay its fuel bills and gave the world Chernobyl, interfered in US elections.

Your defense of Trump is getting tiresome. He's a criminal with no respect for the US Constitution and he deserves to be impeached. This is not to say that Joe Biden or his drug addict son are not also shit stains. I am just dismayed that you, an ostensibly intelligent independent commentator would go to bat for an ignoramus like Trump.

Don Bacon , Oct 26 2019 22:16 utc | 33
The general charge against Trump is that he was "digging up dirt" on opponents. Well laddy-dah. So what. Welcome to Politics 101.

President Harry Truman probably received as much flak as any politician ever did, especially after he canned war-hero General MacArthur. But Truman wasn't a candy-ass current politician complaining about dirt-digging. No, he gave back more than he got, in spades.

What was "give-em-hell" Harry Truman's attitude? Some Truman quotes:
--"I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell."
--"It's the fellows who go to West Point and are trained to think they're gods in uniform that I plan to take apart"
--"I didn't fire him [General MacArthur] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three quarters of them would be in jail."
-- "I'll stand by [you] but if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen ."

That's what Trump is doing and will probably continue to do with fake news. (And he coined the phrase.)

vk , Oct 26 2019 22:19 utc | 34
I'll repeat what I posted here some days ago: this is not a battle between truth vs lies, but between which is the truth that will guide the USA for the forseeable future.

Empires don't act on facts: they are all-powerful, so they sculpt reality as they see fit. What determines this is class struggle: the inner contradictions of a society that results in a given consensus, thus forming a hegemony.

It's not that the liberals deny Biden did what he did, but that they disagree with Trump's interpretation over what he did. This is what the doctrine of the vital center is all about: some facts are more facts than others, prevailing the one which maintains the cohesion of the empire.

There's a battle for America's soul; the American elite is in flux: Russia or China?

vk , Oct 26 2019 22:25 utc | 35
It seems Jeff Bezos is angry he didn't get that USD 10 billion cloud contract from the Pentagon: Company with ties to Trump's brother Robert awarded $33 million government contract
karlof1 , Oct 26 2019 22:26 utc | 36
MadMax2 @31--

In 1984 , the narrative was now 100% in your face and everything had to be manipulated to match it, which apparently hadn't been needed previously. But we aren't told if that was done as a "last resort." I would think not given continuing polls showing ongoing distrust of media, thus the difficulty of manufacturing consent. Look at the great popularity enjoyed by Sanders amongst 18-30 year-olds who get most of their information online or via social media and the measures being taken to try and manipulate those realms. Then there're efforts to counter the misinformation and manipulation by numerous activists, many of which get cited here.

Another thought: They're out front now because the Establishment's deemed the fight to control the narrative's being lost, and they've been drafted to rectify the situation. If correct, they ought to keep failing.

uncle tungsten , Oct 26 2019 22:27 utc | 37
karlof1 #19

The international nature of this bar and its many flies is that mostly (from what I read) they have an immense respect for the rule of law. It is this singular concept that we trust will transcend religion and the quasi religiosity of political allegiances.

The rule of law is a deity-like singularity that embraces all beings equally, or should. Assaulting that legitimate expectation of the law applying equally is what confronts us daily in so many ways and when it is observed being assaulted by the highest office bearers in political and corporate life that we barflies get mighty annoyed. The gross vista of assumed immunity demonstrated by Nixon is equaled by the antics of the Clinton foundation and its Directors. Each and every one of them.

But it is far worse than that as the assault on the rule of law is daily carried out by the mafias that infest our societies, the corrupt and violent police that cant/wont protect our citizens, the international warmongering criminal classes that propagandise us to accept warring as a legitimate exercise of power even though we recognise it as a crime against humanity.

So when we see the deplorable state of media and jurisprudence and fairness we can only think as Maria Butina does "that we are routinely losing our countries" and I would add our civil societies. The latter is vastly more concerning than the former IMO.

alaff , Oct 26 2019 22:47 utc | 38
Again, not surprised at all. Pro-democratic/anti-Trump media write articles (obviously made-to-order) to whitewash already badly discredited Biden, and present all the arguments in favor of his dark connections with Ukraine as a kind of "conspiracy theory". This is a common practice. Not having sufficient competence to reasonably refute the arguments of opponents, MSM (as well as all sorts of "experts") immediately mark the position of opponents with "conspiracy theory" (there are also other options to choose from: "Putin's agent", "Putin's useful idiot", "Kremlin's agent", "pro-Russian propaganda", etc.). It is assumed that this makes unnecessary/optional (and even "toxic") all further conversations with the opponent (that is, there is no need to answer him, to prove something with facts, etc.), because his position is a "conspiracy theory".

Western MSM are actively using this simplest propaganda technique of information warfare. For example, this was the case when reporting on events in Syria - those journalists, the media, experts who did not agree with the lie of MSM about Assad's use of the chemical weapons were declared "conspiracy theorists" (and also "Assad apologists"). This method was also used to cover "the Skripal case" - those who questioned the British authorities' version of the "Novichok poisoning" were declared "conspiracy theorists".

When I see words like "conspiracy theory" in the headlines and see what media use them, then, you know, it's all clear. No chance for such articles/media to be taken seriously.

james , Oct 26 2019 22:59 utc | 39
@32 jadan quote "Show me how that little piss ant country that can't even pay its fuel bills...." are you familiar with the name porkoshenko, or any other one of the numbers of kleptomaniacs in positions of power in the ukraine? how do you think they got their, if ''that little piss ant country' can't even pay it's bills? i am sure you are capable of adding 2 + 2...

b isn't defending trump here.. he's highlighting how corrupt the msm is! it looks like you missed that.. check the headline..

Peter Charles , Oct 26 2019 23:02 utc | 40
This is the way the controlled media works. They provide half a story, half truths, straw-man facts, selective quotes and 'expert' comment, opinion and unwarranted assumption presented as fact that all together cover the spectrum from black to white, spread across the many titles.

They also disseminate a fine dusting of lies and actual truth here and there. The result is the public have a dozen 'truths' to pick from, none of which are real, while the outright lies and actual truths get dismissed as not credible and the half-truths and straw-man truths appear to carry some validity. If you look for it you can find it applying in almost every bit of 'news', if it is in any way controversial, whether it is partisan politics, Climate Change or Brexit to give examples.

Jackrabbit , Oct 26 2019 23:51 utc | 41
jadan @32:
As we know from Wayne Madsen's little book, "The Manufacturing of a President", Obama has been a CIA asset since he was a suckling babe.
If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge.
Jackrabbit , Oct 26 2019 23:51 utc | 42
uncle tungsten @37: rule of law

If the people get the government they deserve then they also get the laws/order they deserve. Voting alone is unlikely to fix that. We need Movements.

Michael Droyd , Oct 27 2019 0:12 utc | 43
Ukraine was just one hell of a honey pot that too many couldn't resist visiting. Kind of like Russia (Uranium One and HRC) or China (Biden for a start). Giulani is going to be very busy - he still hasn't produced anything that wasn't already published, but I bet he has much more.

And then there is this: https://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-plundering-of-ukraine/

ben , Oct 27 2019 0:47 utc | 48
DB @ 33 said; Trump coined the phrase "fake news".

Horse puckey DB, check this out: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/head-in-the-cloud/201611/brief-history-fake-news

ben , Oct 27 2019 0:54 utc | 49
And this; https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/rewind/the-true-history-of-fake-news
evilempire , Oct 27 2019 0:56 utc | 50
Burisma investigated by SFO for money laundering: https://therearenosunglasses.wordpress.com/2019/04/07/the-hunt-for-burisma-pt-1/
Jackrabbit , Oct 27 2019 1:12 utc | 51
Glenn Brown @46:
... smart enough to understand and agree that they needed someone like Trump?
Yes, I do think they are smart enough and agreed to act in their collective best interest. Kissinger first wrote of MAGA in a WSJ Op-Ed in August 2014. Trump entered the race in June 2015, IIRC.

Do you think that Trump - who failed at multiple businesses - just woke up one day and became a political and geopolitical genius? As a candidate he said he'd "take the oil" and now, more than 3 years later, he has! LOL.

And JUST AFTER the Mueller investigation formally ends, Trump ONCE AGAIN solicits a foreign power to interfere in a US election. The biggest beneficiary? Deep State BIDEN! Who now gets all the media attention.

FYI Wm Gruff makes your same point often: that Deep State mistakes demonstrate that they couldn't possible pull of a Trump win (if that's what they wanted). I disagree.

<> <> <> <> <> <>

I very much doubt that anyone will go to jail - or serve any meaningful jail time if they do - over the Deep State shenanigans. Nor will people 'wake up' and see how they've been played anytime soon. Even the smarter, more savvy denizens of the moa bar have much difficulty connecting dots. Dots that they don't want to see.

Jackrabbit !!

Jackrabbit , Oct 27 2019 2:14 utc | 55
The Deep State at work:

But they would NEVER interfere in a Presidential election.

LOL

Jackrabbit !!

jadan , Oct 27 2019 2:44 utc | 56
@41 Jackrabbit

If Obama was CIA, and GW Bush was CIA (via daddy Bush), and Clinton was CIA (via Arkansas drug-running and the Presidency), and Bush Sr was CIA ... then what can we conclude about Trump? 1) he's also CIA, or 2) he's a willing stooge

Trump at first threw down the gauntlet to the spies and proclaimed his autocratic prerogative when God held off the rain for his inauguration (!) but now he would gladly get on his knees between Gina Haspel's legs if the CIA would only help him stay in power.

What distinguishes Obama from other presidents is the degree to which he was manufactured. He made it to the WH without much of a political base. Control of the political context, media and process, launched Obama to the top. It was fulfillment of the liberal American dream. It was a great coup. Talk about the "deep state"! It's staring us all in the face.

Jackrabbit , Oct 27 2019 2:45 utc | 57
Oh, but Deep State DID interfere. FACT: Deep Stater Hillary colluded with DNC against Sanders. ( But she would NEVER participate in collusion that caused her to lose an election./sarc LOL)

And now pro-Trump people say Clapper, Brennan, and Comey interfered in the 2016 election OR committed treason by trying to unseat the President!

So we can talk about Deep State interference . . . as long as it follows the partisan narrative that's been established for us.

Jackrabbit !!

uncle tungsten , Oct 27 2019 3:26 utc | 58
jadan #54

I have news for you. USA Presidents use strong coercive persuasive arguments or means of speech ALL THE TIME. And always have. Sometimes they can be subtle and allude to an action that might make them happy and sometimes they can be blunt. Its a presidential thing. It is what statespeople do when they 'negotiate' for their desired outcome.

It is not illegal or corrupt. It is power nakedly exercised. Just because Biden is a candidate for the same presidential role does not confer immunity for Biden's graft in favor of his son a few years back. You make a mockery of your position.

One USA President visited Australia once and when confronted with a roadblock of demonstrators seeking peace in Vietnam demanded of the Australian Premier to "drive over the bastards". That didn't happen but the President continued to drive all over the Vietnamese innocents.

Trump may be a grifter and a scumbag but there are warmongers well ahead of him in the cue for justice. Take Hillary Clinton for example. She is a ruthless killer and the greatest breach of USA national Security ever with her Secretary of State emails held on an unsecured server in her closet.

ben , Oct 27 2019 3:30 utc | 59
The same powers some call "deep state," are the same powers that have given us ALL modern day presidents, probably from FDR on. IMO, they are nothing more, nothing less than the "captains of commerce", who, through the vast accumulation of wealth by monopoly, buy our "representatives" to legislate rules and regulations to benefit themselves.

Our so-called "leaders" work for them, with very few exceptions, and transcends all political parties, and now also the Supreme Court.

$ has been ruled speech, unlimited $ is allowed to be given to politicians for elections. How could anything but massive corruption take place under this kind of system?

restlelss94110 , Oct 27 2019 3:34 utc | 60
they make it look as if Trump did something crazy or illegal. He does plenty of that but not in this case. You suffer from TDS. What on Earth are you talking about here? Plenty of that? Say what? Why do you undercut your entire point in your article with this little piece of utter nonsense?

Name one thing that Trump that has done that is illegal. Name one thing that is crazy. Stop apologizing to the crazies by denigrating Trump. Your entire article was all about how none of the bs is true. And then you put your own brand of bs in there at the end. Cut it out.

james , Oct 27 2019 3:44 utc | 61
@ 54 jadan... thanks for your comments... i am feeling more philosophical tonight, as i don't have a gig and have some time to express myself a bit more here.. first off, i don't like any of these characters - trump, biden, and etc. etc.. i have no horse in the game here, and it sounds like you don't either.. your comment- "The issue is Trump's extortion of Ukraine, not Biden's extortion of Ukraine." i can go along with that until i reflect back onto what increasingly looks like an agenda to get trump even prior to when he was elected, at which point i want to say why are we only examining trump in all of this? who gets to decide what the issue is, or as Caitlin Johnstone lets to say - who gets to decide what the narrative is here? i don't have an answer for this, but those who appear to be taking a side in all of this - including you with the quote i make - seem to think that it has to be the issue of trumps extortion of Ukraine, verses what appears to me the CIA - Dem party extortion of the ordinary USA persons mind...

let me back up... Has mccarthyism version 2 come to life since the advent of what happened in the Ukraine from 2014 onward?? is the issue of a new cold war with Russia been on the burner for at least 5 or more years here and began before trump was even considered a potential candidate for the republican party? did Russia take back Crimea, which wasn't supposed to happen? is this good for military industrial complex sales? and etc. etc..

so, i don't think it is fair to only consider the latest boneheaded thing trump did when i consider the bigger picture unfolding here.. now, maybe you think i am a trump apologist... i am just saying what the backdrop looks like to me here.. i am sure biden is small potatoes in the bigger picture here, but if taking a closer examination of what took place in ukraine leading into 2014, with the victoria nulands and geoffrey pyatts and etc. etc. of usa diplomatic corps, usa dept of state and etc. could lead to a better understanding of how the usa has went down the road it has for the past 60 years of foreign policy on the world stage, it would be a good start... so, to me - it ain't about trump.. it is about usa foreign policy and how it has sucked the big one on the world stage for at least since the time of vietnam when i was a teenager..

i suppose it depends on the time frame one wants to take.. my time frame will be considered an evasion of the moment to some, but it is how i see it.. sure, trump is scum, but the bigger issue to me is the usa's foreign policy agenda.. anything that can pull back the covers on that would be an extremely good thing... now, perhaps this is the straw that broke trumps back and the deep state will not tolerate being scrutinized.. that i could understand, but i am not going to be putting it all on trump as the reason the covers have to remain on all the shit the usa has been responsible for on the world stage to date and especially the past 10 years.. i am not able to blame trump for all of that.. and as you can see, i would prefer to get down to the nitty gritty of who is zooming who here... the msm for all intensive purposes is complicit in duping the american public.. that to me is the gist of b's comment here, not that he is cheer-leading for trump.. i just don't see it that way...i'm definitely not!

[Oct 26, 2019] The Blob Strikes Back by Hunter DeRensis

The State Department is a neoliberal Trojan horse in the USA government, with strong globalist ethos. They will sabotage any change of foreign policy. and they intend to kick the neoliberal can down the road as long as possible. They are the same type of neoliberals as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Probably less corrupt them those two, but still.
They are imperial soldiers par excellence; these whole life concentrated on serving the imperial interests, and strive for the strengthening and expansion of neoliberal empire via opening new markets for the expansions of US based multinationals, staging wars and color revolutions to overthrows the governments which resists Washington Consensus, etc.
They probably can't be reformed, only fired, or forced into retirement. 72 years old neocon stooge Taylor is just the tip of the iceberg.
From Wikipedia: He directed a Defense Department think tank at Fort Lesley J. McNair . Following that assignment, he went to Brussels for a five year assignment as the Special Deputy Defense Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to NATO From 1992 until 2002 Taylor served with the rank of ambassador coordinating assistance to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union , followed by an assignment in Kabul coordinating U.S. and international assistance to Afghanistan . In 2004 he was transferred to Baghdad as Director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office
Taylor was nominated by President George W. Bush to be United States ambassador to Ukraine while he was serving as Senior Consultant to the Coordinator of Reconstruction and Stabilization at the Department of State. [10] He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 26, 2006, and was sworn in on June 5, 2006. At the time Taylor assumed responsibilities at the embassy it was, with over 650 employees from nine U.S. government departments and agencies, the fifth-largest bilateral mission in Europe
Notable quotes:
"... As William Taylor's testimony about Ukraine creates shock waves in Washington, a self-anointed mandarin class or, if you prefer, deep state, that has largely operated unmolested until the advent of Trump now appears to believe that it can foil, or even subvert, the policies of a president it deems unfit for office, a development that should worry Democrats and Republicans alike. ..."
"... One reason is that those who seek to repair the damage caused by a thirty-year deterioration in trust and cooperation face an uphill battle against what recently has been given the colloquial name, "the Blob." The term, coined by Obama White House staffer Ben Rhodes, refers to the foreign-policy establishment, mostly located in Washington, DC and constantly focused on the putative decline of American influence abroad. It has been distinguished by its unwillingness, or inability, to reconsider or reprioritize national interests that were first defined after World War II, and then continued, by and large, on auto-pilot after the end of the Cold War. ..."
"... Another reason is that Trump himself has been largely indifferent to who assumes positions in his administration, calculating that by sheer force of will he, and he alone, can be the decider. In September, Trump referred to his search for a fresh national security adviser in the following terms: "It's great because it's a lot of fun to work with Donald Trump, and it's very easy, actually, to work with me. You know why it's easy? Because I make all the decisions. They don't have to work." This insouciant approach has now boomeranged on Trump. ..."
"... Taylor, as his testimony made clear, was able to observe first-hand many of the Trump administration's ham-fisted moves to extract, in one form another, concessions from Ukraine. But however clumsy and counterproductive Trump's moves may have been, Taylor offered an overly simplistic survey of events in the region. Indeed, his Manichean introductory and concluding remarks suggested that he views Russia as an inveterate enemy of America and Ukraine as a white knight. ..."
"... Foreign policy is rarely a morality play and the fairy-tale that Taylor presented was more redolent of a post–Cold War cold warrior who, like too many of his colleagues at the foreign desk, are committed to retrograde thinking, than of an official offering an incisive look at a complex and troubled region. It is not as though Ukraine, where Taylor served as ambassador during the George W. Bush administration, has ever been free from the plague of corruption or murky machinations by local competing factions. Reflexively taking the side of Ukraine does not serve American interests any more than trying to pummel it for political favors. The testimony of Taylor and other State Department witnesses before the House Intelligence Committee is a case in point. ..."
"... ow that the fight between Trump and the permanent bureaucracy is now in the open? ..."
"... Vice President Mike Pence told Laura Ingraham , host of Fox's The Ingraham Angle , "There is no question when President Trump said we were going to drain the swamp, but an awful lot of the swamp has been caught up in the State Department bureaucracy and we're just going to keep fighting it. And we are going to fight it with the truth." For his part, Evans thinks that there is a modicum of hope for improved relations with Moscow. "Taylor will have to resign now," he says. "We might even see a moderation of the uncritical support for Ukraine, as some of the ugly underside starts to emerge, although anti-Russian sentiment is the mother's milk of Congress." ..."
Oct 23, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

As William Taylor's testimony about Ukraine creates shock waves in Washington, a self-anointed mandarin class or, if you prefer, deep state, that has largely operated unmolested until the advent of Trump now appears to believe that it can foil, or even subvert, the policies of a president it deems unfit for office, a development that should worry Democrats and Republicans alike.

President Donald Trump campaigned and was elected on a platform of improved relations with Russia. Yet, three years after his election, no real improvement has materialized and, if anything, they have deteriorated. Why?

One reason is that those who seek to repair the damage caused by a thirty-year deterioration in trust and cooperation face an uphill battle against what recently has been given the colloquial name, "the Blob." The term, coined by Obama White House staffer Ben Rhodes, refers to the foreign-policy establishment, mostly located in Washington, DC and constantly focused on the putative decline of American influence abroad. It has been distinguished by its unwillingness, or inability, to reconsider or reprioritize national interests that were first defined after World War II, and then continued, by and large, on auto-pilot after the end of the Cold War. Now Trump is taking a wrecking ball to this world order. But a self-anointed mandarin class or, if you prefer, deep state, that has largely operated unmolested until the advent of Trump now appears to believe that it can foil, or even subvert, the policies of a president it deems unfit for office, a development that should worry Democrats and Republicans alike.

Another reason is that Trump himself has been largely indifferent to who assumes positions in his administration, calculating that by sheer force of will he, and he alone, can be the decider. In September, Trump referred to his search for a fresh national security adviser in the following terms: "It's great because it's a lot of fun to work with Donald Trump, and it's very easy, actually, to work with me. You know why it's easy? Because I make all the decisions. They don't have to work." This insouciant approach has now boomeranged on Trump.

Enter William B. Taylor, Jr. Taylor has been the U.S. Chargé d 'Affaires Ukraine since June of this year (having previously held the position of ambassador 2006–2009), and yesterday he testified behind-closed-doors as part of the House impeachment inquiry into Trump. Taylor, as his testimony made clear, was able to observe first-hand many of the Trump administration's ham-fisted moves to extract, in one form another, concessions from Ukraine. But however clumsy and counterproductive Trump's moves may have been, Taylor offered an overly simplistic survey of events in the region. Indeed, his Manichean introductory and concluding remarks suggested that he views Russia as an inveterate enemy of America and Ukraine as a white knight.

In his opening statement, Taylor emphasized that Ukraine is a strategic partner of the United States that is "important for the security of our country as well as Europe," as well as a country that is "under armed attack from Russia." Well, yes. But this sweeping description occludes more than it reveals. Foreign policy is rarely a morality play and the fairy-tale that Taylor presented was more redolent of a post–Cold War cold warrior who, like too many of his colleagues at the foreign desk, are committed to retrograde thinking, than of an official offering an incisive look at a complex and troubled region. It is not as though Ukraine, where Taylor served as ambassador during the George W. Bush administration, has ever been free from the plague of corruption or murky machinations by local competing factions. Reflexively taking the side of Ukraine does not serve American interests any more than trying to pummel it for political favors. The testimony of Taylor and other State Department witnesses before the House Intelligence Committee is a case in point.

Will anything change n ow that the fight between Trump and the permanent bureaucracy is now in the open? On Tuesday night, Vice President Mike Pence told Laura Ingraham , host of Fox's The Ingraham Angle , "There is no question when President Trump said we were going to drain the swamp, but an awful lot of the swamp has been caught up in the State Department bureaucracy and we're just going to keep fighting it. And we are going to fight it with the truth." For his part, Evans thinks that there is a modicum of hope for improved relations with Moscow. "Taylor will have to resign now," he says. "We might even see a moderation of the uncritical support for Ukraine, as some of the ugly underside starts to emerge, although anti-Russian sentiment is the mother's milk of Congress."

Hunter DeRensis is a reporter at the National Interest .

[Oct 26, 2019] Trump Accuses Obama Of Treason by Paul Bedard

Notable quotes:
"... "What they did was treasonous, OK? It was treasonous," he told author Doug Wead for his upcoming book, " Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency." ..."
"... "Obama." ..."
Oct 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Paul Bedard via WashingtonExaminer.com,

President Trump has ratcheted up his claim that the Obama White House spied on his 2016 campaign, charging in a new book that it was a "treasonous" act by the former Democratic president.

"What they did was treasonous, OK? It was treasonous," he told author Doug Wead for his upcoming book, " Inside Trump's White House: The Real Story of His Presidency."

"The interesting thing out of all of this is that we caught them spying on the election. They were spying on my campaign. So you know? What is that all about?" said Trump.

"I have never ever said this, but truth is, they got caught spying. They were spying," said Trump who then added, "Obama."

In 2017, Trump tweeted that he felt the Obama White House "had my wires tapped" in Trump Tower. He later said he didn't mean it literally but that he felt his campaign was being spied on.

Attorney General William Barr earlier this year said he was looking into whether "improper surveillance" may have occurred in 2016.

" I think spying did occur, " he said.

He has tasked a prosecutor to look into Obama officials and other officials who sparked the Russia collusion investigation into Trump after a report showed no collusion. New reports on that investigation described it as "criminal" in nature.

"It turned out I was right. By the way," Trump told Wead in excerpts provided to Secrets.

"In fact, what I said was peanuts compared to what they did. They were spying on my campaign. They got caught and they said, 'Oh we were not spying. It was actually an investigation.' Can you imagine an administration investigating its political opponents?" said the president.

In the book, Trump said that the Russia investigation undercut his presidency.

" Anybody else would be unable to function under the kind of pressure and distraction I had. They couldn't get anything done. No other president should ever have to go through this. But understand, there was no collusion. They would have had to make something up," he said.

Demeter55 , 11 minutes ago link

Technically, it was sedition, unless Trump can show that Obama was acting for a foreign power. There definitely were foreign powers involved, the question is who was in charge?

dibiase , 9 minutes ago link

Is the CIA a foreign power? Sure seems like an occupying force to me.

TheSharpenedPen , 24 minutes ago link

The attempt to circumvent democracy and ensure Hillary's victory in the elections with falsified Russian collusion allegations along with a constant communist media bombardment to discredit Trump, absolutely constitutes treason. What you need to understand is that socialist progressives serve a different god - lucifer - and a different nation - Israel; that they do not have your best interests at heart is a given.

Everything they do is to undermine traditional morality and the moral fabric that holds civilization together. Ordo Ab Cao.

punchasocialist , 23 minutes ago link

This is treason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQgDgMGuDI0

and nothing to see here either: https://www.exposetheenemy.com/israel-russia

[Oct 26, 2019] FBI Entrapped Flynn With Manipulated Evidence As Clapper Allegedly Issued Kill Shot Order Court Docs

Flynn's story became a classic story of FBI entrapment...
Notable quotes:
"... The Federalist ..."
"... According to the 37-page motion , a team of " high-ranking FBI officials orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president's National Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of criminal activity -- they already had tapes of all the relevant conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn -- but for the purpose of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false ." ..."
"... Notably, Lisa Page lied to the DOJ, saying that she didn't recall whether she took part in editing Flynn's 302 form . ..."
"... Then, quoting from a sealed statement by Strzok, Powell reveals that over next two weeks, there were "many meetings" between Strzok and [FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe to discuss "whether to interview [] National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and if so, what interview strategies to use." ..."
"... Another startling claim in Powell's filing references a purported conversation between former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Washington Post reporter David Ignatius, which claims Clapper told the reporter "words to the effect of 'take the kill shot on Flynn,' after Ignatius reportedly obtained the transcript of Flynn's phone calls. ..."
"... Lastly, Powell's filing also notes that US District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who recused himself after accepting Flynn's guilty plea, had a personal relationship with Peter Strzok , according to text messages. ..."
Oct 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

FBI Entrapped Flynn With Manipulated Evidence As Clapper Allegedly Issued 'Kill Shot' Order: Court Docs by Tyler Durden Sat, 10/26/2019 - 11:30 0 SHARES

A bombshell court filing from Michael Flynn's new legal team alleges that FBI agents altered a '302' form - the official record of the former national security adviser's interview - that resulted in the DOJ charging him with lying to investigators.

Early last week Flynn attorney Sidney Powell filed a sealed reply to federal prosecutors' claims that they have satisfied their requirements for turning over evidence in the case. A minimally redacted copy of the reply brief was made public late last week, revealing the plot to destroy Flynn , as reported by The Federalist 's Margot Cleveland.

According to the 37-page motion , a team of " high-ranking FBI officials orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president's National Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of criminal activity -- they already had tapes of all the relevant conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn -- but for the purpose of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false ."

At the heart of the matter is the 302 form 'documenting' an FBI interview in which Flynn was asked about his conversations with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Powell alleges that FBI lawyer Lisa Page edited her lover Peter Strzok's account of the interview - texting him, "I made your edits."

The edits explained via The Federalist :

"On February 10, 2017, the news broke -- attributed to 'senior intelligence officials' -- that Mr. Flynn had discussed sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak, contrary to what Vice President Pence had said on television previously." Following this leak, "overnight," Flynn's 302 was changed -- and substantively so. " Those changes added an unequivocal statement that 'FLYNN stated he did not' -- in response to whether Mr. Flynn had asked Kislyak to vote in a certain manner or slow down the UN vote."

" This is a deceptive manipulation " Powell highlighted, " because, as the notes of the agents show, Mr. Flynn was not even sure he had spoken to Russia/Kislyak on this issue . He had talked to dozens of countries." The overnight changes to the 302 also included the addition of a line, indicating Flynn had been question on whether "KISLYAK described any Russian response to a request by FLYNN."

But the agent's notes do not include that question or answer, Powell stressed, yet it was later made into the criminal offense charges against Flynn . And "the draft also shows that the agents moved a sentence to make it seem to be an answer to a question it was not ," Powell added.

Here's Powell describing how they know the 302 form was altered:

Notably, Lisa Page lied to the DOJ, saying that she didn't recall whether she took part in editing Flynn's 302 form .

Laying the groundwork

Leading up to the interview with Flynn, the text messages reveal that the FBI wanted to capitalize on news of the 'salacious and unverified' Steele dossier - and whether they "can use it as a pretext to go interview some people," Strzok texted Page.

Then, quoting from a sealed statement by Strzok, Powell reveals that over next two weeks, there were "many meetings" between Strzok and [FBI Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe to discuss "whether to interview [] National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and if so, what interview strategies to use." And "on January 23, the day before the interview, the upper echelon of the FBI met to orchestrate it all . Deputy Director McCabe, General Counsel James Baker, Lisa Page, Strzok, David Bowdich, Trish Anderson, and Jen Boone strategized to talk with Mr. Flynn in such a way as to keep from alerting him from understanding that he was being interviewed in a criminal investigation of which he was the target."

Next came "Comey's direction to 'screw it' in contravention of longstanding DOJ protocols," leading McCabe to personally call Flynn to schedule the interview . Yet none of Comey's notes on the decision to interview Flynn were turned over to defense. Even Obama-holdover "Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates candidly opined that the interview 'was problematic' and ' it was not always clear what the FBI was doing to investigate Flynn ," Powell stressed. Yet again, the prosecution did not turn over Yates' notes, but only "disclosed a seven-line summary of Ms. Yates statement six months after Mr. Flynn's plea." -The Federalist

'Kill Shot'

Another startling claim in Powell's filing references a purported conversation between former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Washington Post reporter David Ignatius, which claims Clapper told the reporter "words to the effect of 'take the kill shot on Flynn,' after Ignatius reportedly obtained the transcript of Flynn's phone calls.

Clapper's spokesman told Fox News that he "absolutely did not say those words to David Ignatius," adding "It's absolutely false" and "absurd."

Powell claims that Ignatius was given the Flynn-Kislyak call transcripts by a Pentagon official who was also Stefan Halper's "handler." Halper - who was paid over $1 million by the Obama administration - was one of many spies the FBI sent to infiltrate the Trump campaign.

Halper, in 2016, contacted several members of the Trump campaign including former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and former aides Carter Page and Sam Clovis.

"The evidence the defense requests will eviscerate any factual basis for the plea and reveal the conduct so outrageous -- if there is not enough already -- to mandate dismissal of this prosecution for egregious government misconduct ," Powell wrote. - Fox News

Lastly, Powell's filing also notes that US District Judge Rudolph Contreras, who recused himself after accepting Flynn's guilty plea, had a personal relationship with Peter Strzok , according to text messages.

"The government knew that well in advance of Mr. Flynn's plea that Judge Contreras was a friend of Peter Strzok and his recusal was even discussed in an exchange of multiple texts," writes Powell, referencing Strzok-Page texts discussing Strzok and Contreras speaking "in detail" about anything "meaningful enough to warrant recusal."

"The government knew that well in advance of Mr. Flynn's plea that Judge Contreras was a friend of Peter Strzok and his recusal was even discussed in an exchange of multiple texts."

Meanwhile, Clapper - who is now under criminal investigation - is getting nervous...

Perhaps Obama should be too? Law Crime

[Oct 26, 2019] The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich

Oct 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

Exile , says: October 25, 2019 at 6:42 pm GMT

The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich.

The cozy proximity of recently-murdered Epstein himself to crypto-converso AG Barr's family only makes me more certain that they will get away with this heist like they've done with dozens of other billion-dollar swindles.

If they were only stealing money it would be bad enough, but the fact that these same grifters are our "diplomats" and warmakers is positively Orwellian. Watching these petty hoodlums play nuclear chicken with Russia so they can squeeze more shekels from the supine Ukraine would be laughable if I could get the first-strike nightmares of my Cold War childhood out of my head long enough to laugh.

[Oct 26, 2019] The most dangerous aspect of Western logic of hegemony in general, and the American logic of hegemony in particular, is their basic belief that they own the world, and have the right to hegemony due to their supremacy in several fields

The USA is a real leader in technology and arm production. This is the country that created PC, Internet and smartphones, which changed the world. So technical supremacy paves the way to imperial behaviour.
CIA is one of the most powerful tools of the empire, the force that is instrumental in peeking the USA on globalist path now (looks at Russiagate) .
Oct 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

redmudhooch , says: October 26, 2019 at 1:37 am GMT

The CIA! http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30605.htm The CIA: 70 Years of Organized Crime: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47873.htm Regime Change and Capitalism: https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/07/regime-change-and-capitalism/

Hassan Nasrallah should know:

The path of U.S.-Israeli arrogance and domination, with its various dimensions, and with its direct and indirect extensions and alliances, which is witnessing military defeats and political failures, reflected successive defeats for the American strategies and plans, one after the other. All this has led [the U.S.] to a state of indecision, retreat, and inability to control the progress of events in our Arab and Islamic world. There is a broader international context for this – a context that, in its turn, helps to expose the American crisis, and the decline of the [U.S.] unipolar hegemony, in the face of pluralism, the characteristics of which are yet to be stabilized.

"The crisis of the arrogant world order is deepened by the collapse of U.S. and international stock markets, and by the confusion and powerlessness of the American economy. This reflects the height of the structural crisis of the model of capitalist arrogance. Therefore, it can be said that we are in the midst of historic transformations that foretell the retreat of the USA as a hegemonic power, the disintegration of the unipolar hegemonic order, and the beginning of the accelerated historic decline of the Zionist entity.

After World War II, the U.S. has adopted the leading, central hegemonic project. At its hands, this project has witnessed great development of the means of control and unprecedented subjugation. It has benefited from an accumulation of multi-faceted accomplishments in science, culture, technology, knowledge, economy, and the military, which was supported by an economic political plan that views the world as nothing but open markets subject to the laws of [the U.S.].

"The most dangerous aspect of Western logic of hegemony in general, and the American logic of hegemony in particular, is their basic belief that they own the world, and have the right to hegemony due to their supremacy in several fields. Thus, the Western, and especially American, expansionist strategy, when coupled with the enterprise of capitalist economy, has become a strategy of a global nature, whose covetous desires and appetite know no bounds.

The barbaric capitalism has turned globalism into a means to spread disintegration, to sow discord, to destroy identities, and to impose the most dangerous form of cultural, economic, and social plunder. Globalization reached its most dangerous phase, when it was transformed into military globalization by the owners of the Western hegemony enterprise, the greatest manifestation of which was evident in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq, to Palestine, and to Lebanon.

There is no doubt that American terrorism is the source of all terrorism in the world. The Bush administration has turned the U.S. into a danger threatening the whole world, on all levels. If a global opinion poll were held today, the United States would emerge as the most hated country in the world.

The most important goal of American arrogance is to take control of the peoples politically, economically, and culturally, and to plunder their resources.

– Hassan Nasrallah December 8, 2009

... ... ...

[Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "I've always felt that the media leaned left. That wasn't a surprise to anyone. "But what we've seen over the past three years is something entirely different. This is the media actively engaging on one side of a partisan warfare. It's overt." ..."
"... "We had a media cheerleading the FBI for meddling in American politics. Can you ever imagine a time in American history where the media would have played such a role? ..."
"... "I keep warning my friends on the other side of the aisle: Think about the precedent you are setting here," Strassel said. ..."
Oct 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America's Institutions, WSJ's Strassel Says by Tyler Durden Thu, 10/24/2019 - 17:15 0 SHARES

Authored by Irene Luo and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

The anti- Trump "Resistance" has devastated core American institutions and broken longstanding political norms in seeking to defeat and now oust from office President Donald Trump, said Kimberley Strassel, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and member of the Journal's editorial board.

"And this, to me, is the irony, right? We've been told for three years that Donald Trump is wrecking institutions," Strassel said in an interview with The Epoch Times for the "American Thought Leaders" program.

" But in terms of real wreckage to institutions, it's not on Donald Trump that public faith in the FBI and the Department of Justice has precipitously fallen. That's because of Jim Comey and Andy McCabe. It's not on Donald Trump that the Senate confirmation process for the Supreme Court is in ashes after what happened to Brett Kavanaugh. It's not on Donald Trump that we are turning impeachment into a partisan political tool."

The damage inflicted by the anti-Trump Resistance is the subject of Strassel's new book, "Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America."

Strassel uses the term "haters" deliberately, to differentiate this demographic from Trump's "critics."

In Strassel's view, all thoughtful critics of Trump - and she counts herself among them - would look at Trump the same way that they have examined past presidents - namely, to call him out when he does something wrong, but also laud him when he does something right.

" The 'haters' can't abide nuance. To the Resistance, any praise - no matter how qualified - of Trump is tantamount to American betrayal, " Strassel writes in "Resistance (At All Costs)."

She told The Epoch Times: "Up until the point at which Donald Trump was elected, what happened when political parties lost is that they would retreat, regroup, lick their wounds, talk about what they did wrong.

"That's not what happened this time around. Instead, you had people who essentially said we should have won."

From the moment Trump was elected, this group believed Trump to be an illegitimate president and therefore felt they could use whatever means necessary to remove him from office , Strassel said.

'Unprecedented Acts'

"One thing I try really hard to do in this book is enunciate what rules and regulations and standards were broken, what political boundaries were crossed, because I think that that's where we're seeing the damage," Strassel said.

The "unprecedented acts" of the Resistance have caused the public to lose trust in longstanding institutions such as the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice, and cheapened important political processes like impeachment, she said.

The Resistance fabricated and pushed the theory that it was Trump's collusion with Russia that won him the presidency, not the support of the American people, and lied about the origins of the so-called evidence -- the Steele dossier -- that was used by the FBI to justify a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, Strassel said.

"We have never, in the history of this country, had a counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign," she said.

In an anecdote that Strassel recounts in her book, she asked former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) if there was anything in America's laws that could have prohibited this situation.

Nunes, who had helped write or update many laws concerning the powers of the intelligence community, replied, "I would never have conceived of the FBI using our counterintelligence capabilities to target a political campaign.

"If it had crossed any of our minds, I can guarantee we'd have specifically written: 'Don't do that.'"

In Strassel's view, the Resistance is partially fueled by deep-seated anger, or what others have termed "Trump derangement syndrome" -- an inability to look rationally at a man so far outside of Washington norms.

But at the same time, in Strassel's view, much of the Resistance is motivated by a desire to amass political power using whatever means necessary.

"That involves removing the president who won. That involves some of these other things that you hear them talking about now: packing the Supreme Court, getting rid of the electoral college, letting 16-year-olds vote," she said.

"These are not reforms. Reforms are things that the country broadly agrees are going to help improve stuff. This is changing the rules so that you get power, and you stay in power."

The impeachment inquiry into the president, based on his phone call with Ukraine's president, is just another example of how the Resistance is violating political norms and relying on flimsy evidence to try to remove him from office, she said.

Testimony in the inquiry has taken place behind closed doors, led by three House committees, and Democrats have so far refused to release transcripts from the depositions of former and current State Department employees.

"[Impeachment] is one of the most serious and huge powers in the Constitution. It was meant always by the founders to be reserved for truly unusual circumstances. They debated not even putting it in because they were concerned that this is what would happen," Strassel said.

In the impeachment inquiries against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, Strassel said, American leaders "understood the great importance of convincing the American public that their decision to use this tool was just and legitimate.

"So if you look back at Watergate, they had hundreds of hours of testimony broadcast over TV that people tuned into and watched. It's one of the reasons that Richard Nixon resigned before the House ever held a final impeachment vote on him, because the public had been convinced. He knew he had to go," she said.

But now, instead of access to the testimonies, the public is receiving only leaked snippets and dueling narratives.

"You have Democrats saying, 'Oh, this is very bad.' And Republicans saying, 'Oh, it's not so bad at all.' What are Americans supposed to think?" Strassel said.

Bureaucratic Resistance

Within the federal bureaucracy, there is a "vast swath of unelected officials" who have "a great deal of power to slow things down, mess things up, file the whistleblower complaints, leak information, actively engage against the president's policies," Strassel said.

"It's their job to implement his agenda. And yet a lot of them are part of the Resistance, too," she said.

Data shows that in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, government bureaucrats overwhelmingly contributed toward the Clinton campaign over the Trump campaign.

Ninety-five percent, or about $1.9 million, of bureaucrats' donations went to Clinton, according to The Hill's analysis of donations from federal workers up until September 2016. In particular, employees at the Department of Justice gave 97 percent of their donations to Clinton. For the State Department, it was even higher -- 99 percent.

"Imagine being a CEO and showing up and knowing that 95 percent of your workforce despises you and doesn't want you to be there," Strassel said.

Strassel pointed to when former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, publicly questioned the constitutionality of Trump's immigration ban and directed Justice Department employees to disobey the order.

"It was basically a call to arms," Strassel said. "What she should've done is honorably resigned if she felt that she could not in any way enforce this duly issued executive order.

"It really kicked off what we have seen ever since then: The nearly daily leaks from the administration, the whistleblower complaints," as well as "all kind of internal foot-dragging and outright obstruction to the president's agenda."

According to a report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, in Trump's first 126 days in office, his administration "faced 125 leaked stories -- one leak a day -- containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama."

Activist Media

Strassel says the media has played a critical role in bolstering the anti-Trump Resistance.

"I've been a reporter for 25 years," Strassel said.

"I've always felt that the media leaned left. That wasn't a surprise to anyone. "But what we've seen over the past three years is something entirely different. This is the media actively engaging on one side of a partisan warfare. It's overt."

Along the way, the media have largely abandoned journalistic standards, "whether it be the use of anonymous sources, whether it be putting uncorroborated accusations into the paper, whether it's using biased sources for information and cloaking them as neutral observers," she said.

Among the many examples of media misinformation cited in Strassel's book is a December 2017 CNN piece that claimed to have evidence that then-candidate Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. had been offered early access to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. But it turned out the date was wrong . Trump Jr. had received an email about the WikiLeaks release one day after WikiLeaks had made the documents public.

"If it hurts Donald Trump, they're on board," Strassel said. And in many cases, the attacks on Trump have been contradictory.

"He's either the dunce you claim he is every day or he's the most sophisticated Manchurian candidate that the world has ever seen. You can't have it both ways.

"He's either a dictator and an autocrat who is consolidating power around himself to rule with an iron fist, or he's the evil conservative who's cutting regulations."

Contrary to claims of authoritarianism, Trump has significantly decreased the size of the federal government. Notably, he reduced the Federal Register, a collection of all the national government's rules and regulations, to the lowest it's been since Bill Clinton's first year in office.

"You can't be a libertarian dictator," Strassel said.

In addition to the barrage of attacks on Trump, the media has actively sought to "de-legitimize anybody who has a different viewpoint than they do, or who is reporting the facts and the story in a way other than they would like them to be presented."

"They would love to make it sound as though none of us are worthy of writing about this story," she said.

"The media is supposed to be our guardrails, right? When a political party transgresses a political boundary, they're supposed to say 'No, that's beyond the pale.'"

Instead, "they indulged this behavior," Strassel said.

"We had a media cheerleading the FBI for meddling in American politics. Can you ever imagine a time in American history where the media would have played such a role?

"In a way, I blame that for so much else that has gone wrong."

Long-Term Consequences

Strassel says the actions taken by the Resistance will have long-term consequences for America.

"I keep warning my friends on the other side of the aisle: Think about the precedent you are setting here," Strassel said.

For example, if Joe Biden wins the presidency in 2020 but Republicans take back the House, would the Republican-dominated House immediately launch impeachment proceedings against Biden for alleged corruption in Ukraine?

"I wouldn't necessarily use the word [corruption], but there's a lot of Republicans who happily would. And if they thought they'd get another shot at the White House, why not?" Strassel said.

It's short-term thinking, she said, just like Sen. Harry Reid's decision in 2013 to drop the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster for lower-court judges.

"Did he really stop to think about the fact that it paved the way for Republicans to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court judges?" Strassel said.

If there's any rule in Washington, "it's that when you set the bar low, it just keeps going lower," Strassel said.

"Donald Trump is going to be president for at most another five years. But the actions and the destruction that's coming with some of this could be with us for a very long time," she said.

"Should anyone allow their deep disregard for one particular man to so change the structure and the fabric of the country?"

[Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "I've always felt that the media leaned left. That wasn't a surprise to anyone. "But what we've seen over the past three years is something entirely different. This is the media actively engaging on one side of a partisan warfare. It's overt." ..."
"... "We had a media cheerleading the FBI for meddling in American politics. Can you ever imagine a time in American history where the media would have played such a role? ..."
"... "I keep warning my friends on the other side of the aisle: Think about the precedent you are setting here," Strassel said. ..."
Oct 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America's Institutions, WSJ's Strassel Says by Tyler Durden Thu, 10/24/2019 - 17:15 0 SHARES

Authored by Irene Luo and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

The anti- Trump "Resistance" has devastated core American institutions and broken longstanding political norms in seeking to defeat and now oust from office President Donald Trump, said Kimberley Strassel, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and member of the Journal's editorial board.

"And this, to me, is the irony, right? We've been told for three years that Donald Trump is wrecking institutions," Strassel said in an interview with The Epoch Times for the "American Thought Leaders" program.

" But in terms of real wreckage to institutions, it's not on Donald Trump that public faith in the FBI and the Department of Justice has precipitously fallen. That's because of Jim Comey and Andy McCabe. It's not on Donald Trump that the Senate confirmation process for the Supreme Court is in ashes after what happened to Brett Kavanaugh. It's not on Donald Trump that we are turning impeachment into a partisan political tool."

The damage inflicted by the anti-Trump Resistance is the subject of Strassel's new book, "Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America."

Strassel uses the term "haters" deliberately, to differentiate this demographic from Trump's "critics."

In Strassel's view, all thoughtful critics of Trump - and she counts herself among them - would look at Trump the same way that they have examined past presidents - namely, to call him out when he does something wrong, but also laud him when he does something right.

" The 'haters' can't abide nuance. To the Resistance, any praise - no matter how qualified - of Trump is tantamount to American betrayal, " Strassel writes in "Resistance (At All Costs)."

She told The Epoch Times: "Up until the point at which Donald Trump was elected, what happened when political parties lost is that they would retreat, regroup, lick their wounds, talk about what they did wrong.

"That's not what happened this time around. Instead, you had people who essentially said we should have won."

From the moment Trump was elected, this group believed Trump to be an illegitimate president and therefore felt they could use whatever means necessary to remove him from office , Strassel said.

'Unprecedented Acts'

"One thing I try really hard to do in this book is enunciate what rules and regulations and standards were broken, what political boundaries were crossed, because I think that that's where we're seeing the damage," Strassel said.

The "unprecedented acts" of the Resistance have caused the public to lose trust in longstanding institutions such as the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice, and cheapened important political processes like impeachment, she said.

The Resistance fabricated and pushed the theory that it was Trump's collusion with Russia that won him the presidency, not the support of the American people, and lied about the origins of the so-called evidence -- the Steele dossier -- that was used by the FBI to justify a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, Strassel said.

"We have never, in the history of this country, had a counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign," she said.

In an anecdote that Strassel recounts in her book, she asked former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) if there was anything in America's laws that could have prohibited this situation.

Nunes, who had helped write or update many laws concerning the powers of the intelligence community, replied, "I would never have conceived of the FBI using our counterintelligence capabilities to target a political campaign.

"If it had crossed any of our minds, I can guarantee we'd have specifically written: 'Don't do that.'"

In Strassel's view, the Resistance is partially fueled by deep-seated anger, or what others have termed "Trump derangement syndrome" -- an inability to look rationally at a man so far outside of Washington norms.

But at the same time, in Strassel's view, much of the Resistance is motivated by a desire to amass political power using whatever means necessary.

"That involves removing the president who won. That involves some of these other things that you hear them talking about now: packing the Supreme Court, getting rid of the electoral college, letting 16-year-olds vote," she said.

"These are not reforms. Reforms are things that the country broadly agrees are going to help improve stuff. This is changing the rules so that you get power, and you stay in power."

The impeachment inquiry into the president, based on his phone call with Ukraine's president, is just another example of how the Resistance is violating political norms and relying on flimsy evidence to try to remove him from office, she said.

Testimony in the inquiry has taken place behind closed doors, led by three House committees, and Democrats have so far refused to release transcripts from the depositions of former and current State Department employees.

"[Impeachment] is one of the most serious and huge powers in the Constitution. It was meant always by the founders to be reserved for truly unusual circumstances. They debated not even putting it in because they were concerned that this is what would happen," Strassel said.

In the impeachment inquiries against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, Strassel said, American leaders "understood the great importance of convincing the American public that their decision to use this tool was just and legitimate.

"So if you look back at Watergate, they had hundreds of hours of testimony broadcast over TV that people tuned into and watched. It's one of the reasons that Richard Nixon resigned before the House ever held a final impeachment vote on him, because the public had been convinced. He knew he had to go," she said.

But now, instead of access to the testimonies, the public is receiving only leaked snippets and dueling narratives.

"You have Democrats saying, 'Oh, this is very bad.' And Republicans saying, 'Oh, it's not so bad at all.' What are Americans supposed to think?" Strassel said.

Bureaucratic Resistance

Within the federal bureaucracy, there is a "vast swath of unelected officials" who have "a great deal of power to slow things down, mess things up, file the whistleblower complaints, leak information, actively engage against the president's policies," Strassel said.

"It's their job to implement his agenda. And yet a lot of them are part of the Resistance, too," she said.

Data shows that in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, government bureaucrats overwhelmingly contributed toward the Clinton campaign over the Trump campaign.

Ninety-five percent, or about $1.9 million, of bureaucrats' donations went to Clinton, according to The Hill's analysis of donations from federal workers up until September 2016. In particular, employees at the Department of Justice gave 97 percent of their donations to Clinton. For the State Department, it was even higher -- 99 percent.

"Imagine being a CEO and showing up and knowing that 95 percent of your workforce despises you and doesn't want you to be there," Strassel said.

Strassel pointed to when former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, publicly questioned the constitutionality of Trump's immigration ban and directed Justice Department employees to disobey the order.

"It was basically a call to arms," Strassel said. "What she should've done is honorably resigned if she felt that she could not in any way enforce this duly issued executive order.

"It really kicked off what we have seen ever since then: The nearly daily leaks from the administration, the whistleblower complaints," as well as "all kind of internal foot-dragging and outright obstruction to the president's agenda."

According to a report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, in Trump's first 126 days in office, his administration "faced 125 leaked stories -- one leak a day -- containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama."

Activist Media

Strassel says the media has played a critical role in bolstering the anti-Trump Resistance.

"I've been a reporter for 25 years," Strassel said.

"I've always felt that the media leaned left. That wasn't a surprise to anyone. "But what we've seen over the past three years is something entirely different. This is the media actively engaging on one side of a partisan warfare. It's overt."

Along the way, the media have largely abandoned journalistic standards, "whether it be the use of anonymous sources, whether it be putting uncorroborated accusations into the paper, whether it's using biased sources for information and cloaking them as neutral observers," she said.

Among the many examples of media misinformation cited in Strassel's book is a December 2017 CNN piece that claimed to have evidence that then-candidate Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. had been offered early access to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. But it turned out the date was wrong . Trump Jr. had received an email about the WikiLeaks release one day after WikiLeaks had made the documents public.

"If it hurts Donald Trump, they're on board," Strassel said. And in many cases, the attacks on Trump have been contradictory.

"He's either the dunce you claim he is every day or he's the most sophisticated Manchurian candidate that the world has ever seen. You can't have it both ways.

"He's either a dictator and an autocrat who is consolidating power around himself to rule with an iron fist, or he's the evil conservative who's cutting regulations."

Contrary to claims of authoritarianism, Trump has significantly decreased the size of the federal government. Notably, he reduced the Federal Register, a collection of all the national government's rules and regulations, to the lowest it's been since Bill Clinton's first year in office.

"You can't be a libertarian dictator," Strassel said.

In addition to the barrage of attacks on Trump, the media has actively sought to "de-legitimize anybody who has a different viewpoint than they do, or who is reporting the facts and the story in a way other than they would like them to be presented."

"They would love to make it sound as though none of us are worthy of writing about this story," she said.

"The media is supposed to be our guardrails, right? When a political party transgresses a political boundary, they're supposed to say 'No, that's beyond the pale.'"

Instead, "they indulged this behavior," Strassel said.

"We had a media cheerleading the FBI for meddling in American politics. Can you ever imagine a time in American history where the media would have played such a role?

"In a way, I blame that for so much else that has gone wrong."

Long-Term Consequences

Strassel says the actions taken by the Resistance will have long-term consequences for America.

"I keep warning my friends on the other side of the aisle: Think about the precedent you are setting here," Strassel said.

For example, if Joe Biden wins the presidency in 2020 but Republicans take back the House, would the Republican-dominated House immediately launch impeachment proceedings against Biden for alleged corruption in Ukraine?

"I wouldn't necessarily use the word [corruption], but there's a lot of Republicans who happily would. And if they thought they'd get another shot at the White House, why not?" Strassel said.

It's short-term thinking, she said, just like Sen. Harry Reid's decision in 2013 to drop the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster for lower-court judges.

"Did he really stop to think about the fact that it paved the way for Republicans to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court judges?" Strassel said.

If there's any rule in Washington, "it's that when you set the bar low, it just keeps going lower," Strassel said.

"Donald Trump is going to be president for at most another five years. But the actions and the destruction that's coming with some of this could be with us for a very long time," she said.

"Should anyone allow their deep disregard for one particular man to so change the structure and the fabric of the country?"

[Oct 25, 2019] Just in time for Halloween! : MadCow is crying agian -- now she is afraid of the sound of shoes dropping in the night

Oct 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Rachel Maddow's trademark pouty-face got a workout as she strained to imagine " what the thing is that Durham might be looking into." Yes, that's a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, all right with a sputtering fuse sticking out of it.

... ... ...

Over in the locked ward of CNN, Andy Cooper and Jeff Toobin attempted to digest the criminal investigation news as if someone had ordered in a platter of shit sandwiches for the green room just before air-time. Toobin pretended to not know exactly who the mysterious Joseph Misfud was, and struggled to even pronounce his name

... ... ...

As for impeachment, ringmaster Rep. Adam Schiff is surely steaming straight into his own historic Joe McCarthy moment when somebody of incontestable standing denounces him as a fraud and a scoundrel and the mysterious workings of nonlinear behavior tips the political mob past a criticality threshold, shifting the weight of consensus out of darkness and madness. It has happened before in history.

5fingerdiscount , 1 hour ago link

Out of 300,000,000 Americans how many watch cable news?

3,000,000 tops?

Rick Madcow averaged 432,000 this month.

[Oct 25, 2019] MSNBC Democrats = CIA Democrats

https://caucus99percent.com/content/msnbc-democrats

Matt Taibbi recently coined the term MSNBC Democrats to describe those who primarily get their news from MSNBC instead of other sources. They are more likely to believe Russiagate is a fact. According to new polling data, they are also far more likely to believe the economy is bad.

The online poll, by data firm Morning Consult, asks the same five core questions as the University of Michigan's well-known consumer sentiment survey, and for nearly two years has been collecting about 210,000 responses a month, compared to 500 or so each month for the Michigan survey.

American voters face the same set of economic facts, from low unemployment to the risks from a trade war, but the survey's index of overall sentiment - at 108 just above the 100 line that separates positive from negative impressions of the economic outlook - masked the huge divide between those who approve of Trump, whose views measured a far rosier 136, and those who disapprove of the president, with a reading of 88 .

The results, weighted by factors like age, race and sex, to be nationally representative, were similarly skewed based on media consumption. Viewers of conservative-leaning Fox News registered 139 for current sentiment about the economy; viewers of MSNBC, an outlet often critical of Trump, registered 89 . Readers of the New York Times sat in the middle at 107, near those who get their news from Facebook (110) and Twitter (112).

Source: Watch Fox News? You likely think the U.S. economy is great. MSNBC viewers not so much -- Reuters, 10/24/2019

This chart from the article shows respondents' view of the economy by news source:

The results shouldn't be surprising to anyone paying attention. MSNBC is in the liberal fake news business while Fox is in the conservative fake news business. Interestingly, the New York Times falls in the middle. This sort of makes sense. While I don't trust their political reporting, especially anything Russiagate related, their coverage of the economy does seem to be fair and balanced.

Ummm ... edg, the Economy IS Bad

I think the economy is shit, personally, and professionally. It's pretty expensive to live these days.

Negative interest rates are not what I would expect in a functioning economy... And say nothing of corporate balance sheets, gold repatriation and denials of repatriation, Q4, and a shit ton of big banksters just dying to have a bail-in.

But, I think that the MSNBC Democrat would simply blame Drumpf.

Just found it an interesting angle to essay. Stopped clocks and whatnot.

[Oct 25, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard is right, and Nancy Pelosi wrong. It was US Democrats who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis by Jonathan Cook

Notable quotes:
"... Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. ..."
"... No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn't care. ..."
"... The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest public health services. ..."
"... After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered. ..."
"... The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria. ..."
"... This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria. ..."
"... We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements. ..."
"... Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally better than Hitlery Clinton. ..."
"... The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.). ..."
"... Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless. ..."
"... Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination, but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and later senators who become lobbyists are doing. ..."
"... Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to happen to Israel since 9/11. ..."
"... I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis. Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests ..."
"... It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East. ..."
"... Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ..."
"... They've re-started the Cold War. Keeps all the warmongers in business. Surely they're not stupid enough to want a hot one are they? ..."
"... It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold. ..."
"... "Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them." ..."
Oct 25, 2019 | www.unz.com

There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria.

One does not need to defend Trump's actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.

The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the paper writes that "it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East".

Hang on a minute! Let's pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to – that the last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.

Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. And I'm not even referring to the mountains of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington, in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.

No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn't care.

Overthrow, not regime change

You don't have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don't even have to be concerned that these so-called "humanitarian" wars violated each state's integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined in international law as "the supreme war crime".

The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations , these haven't so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.

The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called "Washington consensus" since 9/11.

The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they could export to non-compliant states in the region.

The second was the Chicago school's Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein's book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction, the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable population that would be ripe for a US-controlled "colour revolution".

The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.

Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted – from Pinochet's Chile to Yeltsin's Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning from past errors. As Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the "reality-based community": "We're an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality."

The birth of Islamic State

The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest public health services.

Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside too. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture I want to address.

The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be found and that served as the pretext for Bush's campaign of Shock and Awe.

The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing, flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.

A dark US vanity project

After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered.

The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.

This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria.

Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.

The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.

From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.

A giant red herring

Trump now appears to be ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly only temporarily – he is seeking to close a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East, one intimately tied to Islamic State.

What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should have no credibility on the matter to begin with.

But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.

First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.

Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.

With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. The jihadists' state-building project is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. Islamic State will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.

Doomed Great Game

The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With a US departure, and the Kurds too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time has risked sucking in the Turkish army, which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.

The Syrian Kurds' predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad's protection to foil Turkish ambitions. The best hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army's return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.

That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.

Nancy Pelosi's purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump's Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against the head-chopping extremists?

Pelosi and the Democratic leadership's bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party's only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.

Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .

A123 , says: October 21, 2019 at 1:05 pm GMT

The problem largely traces back to simple mistakes by prior Saudi administrations.

The Wahhabi were a threat to the royal family. So, the royal family funded them to go elsewhere. Given the craziness of Wahhabism that made sense at the time. Crazy usually dies out. However, in this case the Crazy came with enough money in hand to establish credibility. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood is a direct result of these exported extremism.

ISIS is the result of a schism inside the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. A "direct action" group wanted an even more extreme and immediate solution and broke away.

-- Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability. Violent, ultra-extreme ISIS fanatics would not follow the commands of infidel heretics. The Saudi royal family by this point realized that the Muslim Brotherhood was a threat to them just like the original Wahhabi, but they had no good way to undo their prior mistake.

-- Did Turkey attempt to use ISIS to weaken Syria and Iraq? This is far more probable. Turkey's AK party is also a schismatic offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, there is a great deal of opportunity for the two troops to find common cause. The New Ottoman Empire needs to absorb Syrian and Iraqi land, so undermining those governments would be step #1.

One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution. If the problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside forces driving the Craziness. There is no "plug to pull".

PEACE

NegroPantera , says: October 21, 2019 at 2:59 pm GMT
The wild savage dogs of ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of Islamic fundamentalism and their rise and violence should be attributed to the liberal interventionism that has proven to be a disaster not only for the region but those who carried out the intervention.
Oscar Peterson , says: October 21, 2019 at 4:14 pm GMT
@A123

"One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution. If the problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside forces driving the Craziness. There is no 'plug to pull'".

Absolute nonsense. And what do you mean by "outside forces." The US and Israel count as outside forces but Turkey does not? Forces outside of what?

ISIS emerged out of ISI, Zarqawi's Islamic State in Iraq, an affiliate, for a while, of AQ. The US invasion of Iraq created the political and military space in Iraq for transnational terror groups.

Meanwhile, the US, at Israel's instigation, had been working to weaken Assad in Syria. After the rebellion against him in 2011, the US, along with Turkey, Saudi, Qatar, Israel and others, began to support various jihadi groups inside Syria with the goal of eliminating the Assad government, each for his own reasons. Syria began lost control of its border with Iraq and much of eastern Syria and the Euphrates valley as well. This process allowed ISIS to emerge from an ISI under stress during the so-called "surge" in 2007-10 and establish itself in Syria. In 2014, ISIS, now a powerful well-armed group went back into Iraq to defeat the incompetent and unmotivated Iraq Security Forces that the US had established.

While the US moved against ISIS in Iraq after 2014, it left ISIS in Syria alone since it was depriving Assad of control over most of Syria's oil and much of its arable land.

And yes, of course the US, instigated by Israel, didn't "deploy" ISIS in the sense of directing its operations. But they left ISIS largely unimpeded to play a role in the overthrow of Assad which was always the primary goal. ISIS, it was thought, could be dealt with later after Assad was gone.

That plan would probably have worked eventually, but the Russians entered the picture in the second half of 2015 and changed the situation.

The US had been nominally supporting the usual "freedom fighters" but in effect supplying the more competent and vicious jihadis who could take the TOW missiles and other weapons the US was providing to the approved sad-sacks and make more effective use of them. Finally, with Russia and Iran facilitating the roll-back of all the jihadis, and the US threatened with being relegated to the sidelines, Obama jumped on the SDF (Kurdish) bandwagon and actually started doing what the US had not done previously: Taking serious action against ISIS so that a Russian/Iranian-backed Syrian reconquest of eastern Syria could be pre-empted.

And of course, the biggest supporter of the Kurds has consistently been Israel, who sees the possibility of creating pro-Israel statelets or at least enclaves in the midst of a Turkish, Iranian and Arab region that detests the Judenreich.

So in order to eliminate another of Israel's enemies, reduce a unified Syrian state to a handful of even more impotent emirates and ensure that Bibi would not be pestered with legal questions over the seizure and retention of the Golan, Syria was laid waste under the guise of "promoting democracy" and then further devastated under the guise of combatting ISIS.

We have done more than enough damage at the behest of Israel and its fifth column in the US. ISIS might well have emerged regardless of US actions, but it was the Jew-induced insanity of US regime-change/COIN policies that created the geographical, political and military space in Iraq and Syria for the jihadists and the ensuing physical destruction of so much of those countries.

The best solution would be to facilitate the re-establishment of Syrian sovereignty over all of Syria. But instead of doing that, Trump has instead facilitated the entry of Turkish forces and allied jihadis in an attempt to mend fences with a thoroughly alienated Erdogan. We'll see if Putin can mitigate the brutal incompetence of Israel-infected US policy.

Anon [322] Disclaimer , says: October 21, 2019 at 4:41 pm GMT
@A123 For fuck's sake. Is there any way to stop Hasbara agents from effectively using software to get consistent first posts on this site?

Their mere presence is annoying. Whatever they have to say, on any topic and no matter what it is, no one here wants to read it because they are not beginning with any credibility whatsoever. As they are are religiously-avowed enemies of the West (who they hold to be the continuation of Rome) and the demonstrated fervent enemies of non-Jewish Whites.

Given the craziness of Wahhabism

There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.

MarathonMan , says: October 21, 2019 at 4:43 pm GMT
A very real but completely unadvertised reality of these regime changes was that the publicly owned central bank of the country – Iraq and Libya – was eliminated and changed to a private central bank. Iraq and Libya both succumbed and Ron Paul related that the smoke had barely cleared in Libya before the private central bank charter was drafted and implemented. Syria and Iran are the last two countries that do not have a private central banks. Hence the drive by the neo-cons to destroy those countries and fully implement the New World (banking) Order.

Not widely discussed but (I think) vitally important to understanding foreign policy.

Rev. Spooner , says: October 21, 2019 at 4:44 pm GMT
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should have no credibility on the matter to begin with.

But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
I love the second para. Getting slapped with a red herring with hope that the salt water blinds us .

My only gripe with Jonathan Cook is that this and all mid-eastern conflicts are engineered by the dual citizens and Israel isn't called out by him as the chief instigator. The saudis are slave of the west and amount to nothing.

Paul , says: October 21, 2019 at 6:29 pm GMT
Hillary Clinton (wife of draft dodger Bill) and the New York Times are Zionist assets. Hillary is a stooge!
donald j tingle , says: October 21, 2019 at 6:50 pm GMT
Why blame Bush, Rove etc. for the mess created by Clinton/Obama in Syria? Are they still out of bounds?
joe2.5 , says: October 21, 2019 at 7:32 pm GMT
@A123 " Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability"
Perhaps. Except that it did happen in plain daylight, before our eyes, but we should, of course, trust your "reasonability" -- instead of our own lying eyes.
anon [117] Disclaimer , says: October 21, 2019 at 7:48 pm GMT
@A123 US President Donald Trump said Monday that a small number of US troops remain in Syria at the request of Israel and Jordan, with some positioned near the borders with Jordan and Israel and others deployed to secure oil fields.

"The other region where we've been asked by Israel and Jordan to leave a small number of troops is a totally different section of Syria, near Jordan, and close to Israel," Trump said when asked whether he would leave soldiers in Syria. "So we have a small group there, and we secured the oil. Other than that, there's no reason for it, in our opinion."

Times of Israel
and J Post 21st oct

It 's all about Israel and for its "royal patsy when not for royal patsy it's for the cannon fodder/ foot solder of Israel.

This mayhem from 2003 hasn't seen the full effects of the blow-back yet .Just starting . Tulsi Gabbard and Trump have knowingly and sometime unknowingly have told the master that the king never had any clothes even when the king was talking about the decency of having clothes on .

anon [117] Disclaimer , says: October 21, 2019 at 8:06 pm GMT

"The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they could export to non-compliant states in the region."-

This sums up everything one want to know about certain human clones and the impact of the clones on the humanity.

Who will ever blame the victims for creating a future Hitler among them ?

Andrei Martyanov , says: Website October 21, 2019 at 9:13 pm GMT
We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements.
Stop Bush and Clinton , says: Website October 21, 2019 at 10:48 pm GMT
Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally better than Hitlery Clinton.

Lock them all up, regardless of party affiliation.

TG , says: October 22, 2019 at 12:00 am GMT
Many interesting points here, and I agree with a lot of them. But:
[MORE]
"Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate change led to repeated crop failures?"

Syria did run out of water, and it's hard not to see that as a major driver of the chaos that unfolded. But Syria didn't run out of water because of "climate change," that's false.

The explanation is that the Syrian government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion. Seriously, they made the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See "Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba'thist Syria (Demographic Developments and Socioeconomics)", by Onn Winkler).

The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.).

Now as far as weather goes, there were a couple of dry years before the collapse, but weather is always like that. Last year there were record rainfalls. If Syria's population had been stable at 5 or even 10 million, they could have coasted on water stored in the aquifers until the rains came back. But when the population increases so much that you drain the aquifers even when there is plenty of rain, then when a temporary drought hits you have no reserve and it all falls apart.

Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless.

... ... ...

barr , says: October 22, 2019 at 2:01 am GMT
LONDON: Hundreds of Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists were smu ..
Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/61703015.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
Toxik , says: October 22, 2019 at 2:21 am GMT
simple and straightforward journalism that cuts through the "corporate veil." Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination, but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and later senators who become lobbyists are doing.

I also feel for our veterans who are indoctrinated to protect freedom, but in the end, when they come home injured and disabled, or even dead, it was all for naught.

Colin Wright , says: Website October 22, 2019 at 6:46 am GMT
I find some of the rhetoric in this piece irritating and repetitive -- but the analysis is essentially correct.

We created a power vacuum that was almost certain to give rise to something like ISIS.

Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to happen to Israel since 9/11.

Twodees Partain , says: October 22, 2019 at 11:00 am GMT
"The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". "

That's a poorly written statement. It reads as though Trump was the one having a meltdown. How about: "House Speaker Pelosi's meltdown during a meeting with Trump." ?

Twodees Partain , says: October 22, 2019 at 12:01 pm GMT
@MarathonMan That is a fact that should be kept foremost in the discussions of "why regime change is necessary". It is the most basic and obvious reason for all this war in the ME.
Twodees Partain , says: October 22, 2019 at 12:13 pm GMT
"First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was inevitably going to fill."

Not quite accurate. The US Government "sowed the seeds of" ISIS by giving them material support before the vacuum was created. IS is mainly a creature of empire, including the US and older remnants of empire in the UK and Europe which survives mainly in the existence of (international) banks.

Michael888 , says: October 23, 2019 at 2:02 pm GMT
@Christian truth Project "Tulsi is/was a member of the CFR". Aren't all Congressmen members? Doesn't that come with signing the AIPAC form, getting the secret decoder ring from Adam Schiff, and the free trip to Israel? (maybe Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib "don't measure up?")

I believe CFR was the organization Biden was regaling with his story of holding up $one billion in Ukrainian aid unless the Ukrainians fired the investigator of his son Hunter "who did nothing wrong". Can you imagine if Biden had been President rather than VP? This would have been a scandal!

Ilya G Poimandres , says: October 25, 2019 at 4:18 am GMT
@A123 One does not need outside actors, but then there would be a lot of 'dark matter' in the history of the ME over the last 100 years. Personally it's plain state terrorism to me, and the Brits have a good definition! http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/part/I
Alfred , says: October 25, 2019 at 8:53 am GMT
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power

Correction: They only care about the maintenance and expansion of Israeli power.

Franklin Ryckaert , says: October 25, 2019 at 11:01 am GMT
@Colin Wright

I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis. Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests, and when it once did so by accident, it apologized to Israel. The destruction of Syria is part of Israel's notorious Oded Yinon plan, according to which all states in Israel's neighborhood need to be fragmentized. In Iraq and Libya that was a success, in Syria, thanks to Iran, Hizbollah and Russia, it failed. The US is simply a puppet for Israel's foreign policy, but nobody in the US, not even Tulsi Gabbard, dares to say so.

TellTheTruth-2 , says: October 25, 2019 at 12:42 pm GMT
Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam. (right click) https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/18/pepe-escobar-the-road-to-damascus-how-the-syria-war-was-won/ . The CIA will be after Trump's scalp till Kingdom Come.
Greg Bacon , says: Website October 25, 2019 at 1:11 pm GMT
@A123 Sorry Bibi, but your beloved Israel played a BIG part in establishing ISIS, then supporting it with shekels, medical care for their wounded, training and weapons.

WikiLeaks: US, Israel, And Saudi Arabia Planned Overthrow Of Syrian Govt. In 2006

Cables reveal that before the beginning of the Syrian revolt and civil war, the United States hoped to overthrow Assad and create strife between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/wikileaks-us-israel-and-saudi-arabia-planned-overthrow-of-syrian-govt-in-2006/221784/

The one time their hired ISIS thugs accidentally attacked IDF forces, ISIS leaders made a profuse apology to Israel.

Isis fighters 'attacked Israel Defense Forces unit, then apologised' claims former commander

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-israel-defence-force-apology-attack-unit-golan-heights-defense-minister-moshe-ya-alon-a7700616.html

Let's not forget that when the term ISIS first came out, the Tel Aviv war mongers realized it stood for Israeli Secret Intelligence Services and changed that to ISIL, which their adoring MSM gladly obliged by parroting that change.

From the Israeli masterminded 9/11 False Flag to the destruction of Syria, there's one common factor, Israel and her American Jew sayanim who keep pushing America into forever wars so Israel can finish off the Palestinians and steal more land.

anon [113] Disclaimer , says: October 25, 2019 at 1:28 pm GMT
Panel Criticizes 'Unacceptable Practices' in the OPCW's investigation of the Alleged Chemical Attack in Douma, Syria on April 7th 2018
https://www.couragefound.org/2019/10/opcw-panel-statement

Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion.

We have learned of disquieting efforts to exclude some inspectors from the investigation whilst thwarting their attempts to raise legitimate concerns, highlight irregular practices or even to express their differing observations and assessments -- a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention, evidently with the intention of ensuring the independence and authoritativeness of inspection reports.

Fixed "report" of OPCW was necessary to maintain anti-Assad narrative which is now unchallenged even by Gabbard (not to mention the weak sheep-dog Sanders).

ivan , says: October 25, 2019 at 1:39 pm GMT
@Ilyana_Rozumova

The US does not have to directly support the jihadists. It just has to manage the chaos, for whatever be the action on the ground and whoever is killed or not killed, as long as there is chaos within their chosen sandbox, the chaos masters in Israel wins and that is all that counts with all too many Americans. It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East.

But fortunately the Russians have turned things around.

Arnieus , says: October 25, 2019 at 2:09 pm GMT
@MarathonMan

Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ME is also about "fragmenting" neighboring countries so Israel can expand. Yinon Plan.

Agent76 , says: October 25, 2019 at 2:51 pm GMT
Oct 18, 2019 Tulsi Gabbard responds to Hillary Clinton: Clinton "knows she can't control me"

Hillary Clinton implied Russians are "grooming" Tulsi Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate to disrupt the election, a charge which Gabbard denies. In a live interview with CBSN, Gabbard responds to Clinton's claims and says she will not run as a third-party candidate.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/JNjzBJWUyWI?feature=oembed

Oct 19, 2019 This Is The Final Nail For Hillary Clinton! Tulsi Gabbard Moves On Up!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jqChZzFrvxE?feature=oembed

Herald , says: October 25, 2019 at 2:54 pm GMT
@Ilyana_Rozumova

The explanation is quite simple, supporting terrorism is what the US does, and it has done so for decades.

cassandra , says: October 25, 2019 at 5:59 pm GMT
@TG Excellent post. You bring up 2 very important but rarely discussed issues.

Demographics: Population is one of the most easily predictable developments within a country, and you'd think it might be one of the most publically-discussed, and therefore, best-managed. Au contraire. Assad wasn't the only one who stood on the tracks watching the headlights approach:

1. The EU is having problems with an aging native population because it earlier encouraged low birth rates, and is now promoting mass immigration of rapidly-breeding immigrants who threaten to at least overwhelm if not overrun European society. Yet, as Douglas Murray points out in his book The Strange Death of Europe, openly talking about this problem has been, and still is, verboten.

2. China is now wondering to do with its preponderance of young men, caused very predictably by the Communist Party's one-child policy.

Climate:

If the rains had been good every single year – which is impossible – it would only have pushed the point of collapse back a few years, at most.

The Syrian case you cite shows how even relatively minor climate changes can carry events past a tipping point. I do agree with you that effects of APGW on climactic conditions are greatly exaggerated, yet changes in climate, for good or ill, have often triggered much larger historical events. The cooling that caused a famine and that preceded the Justinian Plague weakened European and Sassanian civilizations. These misfortunes paved the way for the Islamic takeover that followed. Contrariwise, Norse exploration and the Renaissance, to give 2 examples of increasing activity, both occurred during the Medieval Warming Period.

I enjoyed your comment.

Fool's Paradise , says: October 25, 2019 at 6:20 pm GMT
@DESERT FOX

They've re-started the Cold War. Keeps all the warmongers in business. Surely they're not stupid enough to want a hot one are they?

Bill Jones , says: October 25, 2019 at 7:35 pm GMT
@MarathonMan

It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-18/ukraine-admits-its-gold-gone

Jeff Davis , says: October 25, 2019 at 7:41 pm GMT
"Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them."

FTFY

Just as the GOP is precisely and thoroughly corrupt in exactly the same way, focused exclusively on their own craven self-interest, the country be damned.

Kolya Krassotkin , says: October 26, 2019 at 12:43 am GMT
@Agent76 The end of Hill-dog? In your dreams. She rises from the grave with the regularity of an obese vampire.
ivan , says: October 26, 2019 at 1:36 am GMT
@Anonymous Jimmah was the last honest man in American politics. But since he told Americans that gas was going to cost more, that perhaps they needed to drive a wee bit less, the Americans hated him. They didn't like the "malaise" of having to pay for their lifestyle.

As for the Israelis, what did Jimmah not to do for them : Got Egypt out of the Arab alliance, arranged the annual tribute to Israel, started the ball rolling on the Holocaust religion, paid off Egypt and Jordan to stay away from any alliance against the Israelis. But what did he get in return; branded as anti-Semite merely for mentioning that the Palestinians had rights, were human beings too. With the Zionist Jews, one is always on probation. No point playing their silly games.

[Oct 25, 2019] Just in time for Halloween! : MadCow is crying agian -- now she is afraid of the sound of shoes dropping in the night

Oct 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Rachel Maddow's trademark pouty-face got a workout as she strained to imagine " what the thing is that Durham might be looking into." Yes, that's a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, all right with a sputtering fuse sticking out of it.

... ... ...

Over in the locked ward of CNN, Andy Cooper and Jeff Toobin attempted to digest the criminal investigation news as if someone had ordered in a platter of shit sandwiches for the green room just before air-time. Toobin pretended to not know exactly who the mysterious Joseph Misfud was, and struggled to even pronounce his name

... ... ...

As for impeachment, ringmaster Rep. Adam Schiff is surely steaming straight into his own historic Joe McCarthy moment when somebody of incontestable standing denounces him as a fraud and a scoundrel and the mysterious workings of nonlinear behavior tips the political mob past a criticality threshold, shifting the weight of consensus out of darkness and madness. It has happened before in history.

5fingerdiscount , 1 hour ago link

Out of 300,000,000 Americans how many watch cable news?

3,000,000 tops?

Rick Madcow averaged 432,000 this month.

[Oct 25, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard is right, and Nancy Pelosi wrong. It was US Democrats who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis by Jonathan Coo

Notable quotes:
"... Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. ..."
"... No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn't care. ..."
"... The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest public health services. ..."
"... After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered. ..."
"... The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria. ..."
"... This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria. ..."
"... We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements. ..."
"... Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally better than Hitlery Clinton. ..."
"... The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.). ..."
"... Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless. ..."
"... Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination, but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and later senators who become lobbyists are doing. ..."
"... Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to happen to Israel since 9/11. ..."
"... I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis. Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests ..."
Oct 25, 2019 | www.unz.com

There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria.

One does not need to defend Trump's actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.

The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the paper writes that "it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East".

Hang on a minute! Let's pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to – that the last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.

Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. And I'm not even referring to the mountains of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington, in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.

No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn't care.

Overthrow, not regime change

You don't have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don't even have to be concerned that these so-called "humanitarian" wars violated each state's integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined in international law as "the supreme war crime".

The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations , these haven't so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.

The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called "Washington consensus" since 9/11.

The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they could export to non-compliant states in the region.

The second was the Chicago school's Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein's book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction, the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable population that would be ripe for a US-controlled "colour revolution".

The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.

Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted – from Pinochet's Chile to Yeltsin's Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning from past errors. As Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the "reality-based community": "We're an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality."

The birth of Islamic State

The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest public health services.

Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside too. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture I want to address.

The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be found and that served as the pretext for Bush's campaign of Shock and Awe.

The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing, flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.

A dark US vanity project

After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered.

The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.

This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria.

Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.

The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.

From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.

A giant red herring

Trump now appears to be ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly only temporarily – he is seeking to close a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East, one intimately tied to Islamic State.

What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should have no credibility on the matter to begin with.

But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.

First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.

Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.

With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. The jihadists' state-building project is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. Islamic State will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.

Doomed Great Game

The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With a US departure, and the Kurds too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time has risked sucking in the Turkish army, which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.

The Syrian Kurds' predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad's protection to foil Turkish ambitions. The best hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army's return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.

That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.

Nancy Pelosi's purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump's Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against the head-chopping extremists?

Pelosi and the Democratic leadership's bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party's only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.

Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .

A123 , says: October 21, 2019 at 1:05 pm GMT

The problem largely traces back to simple mistakes by prior Saudi administrations.

The Wahhabi were a threat to the royal family. So, the royal family funded them to go elsewhere. Given the craziness of Wahhabism that made sense at the time. Crazy usually dies out. However, in this case the Crazy came with enough money in hand to establish credibility. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood is a direct result of these exported extremism.

ISIS is the result of a schism inside the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. A "direct action" group wanted an even more extreme and immediate solution and broke away.

-- Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability. Violent, ultra-extreme ISIS fanatics would not follow the commands of infidel heretics. The Saudi royal family by this point realized that the Muslim Brotherhood was a threat to them just like the original Wahhabi, but they had no good way to undo their prior mistake.

-- Did Turkey attempt to use ISIS to weaken Syria and Iraq? This is far more probable. Turkey's AK party is also a schismatic offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, there is a great deal of opportunity for the two troops to find common cause. The New Ottoman Empire needs to absorb Syrian and Iraqi land, so undermining those governments would be step #1.

One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution. If the problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside forces driving the Craziness. There is no "plug to pull".

PEACE

NegroPantera , says: October 21, 2019 at 2:59 pm GMT
The wild savage dogs of ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of Islamic fundamentalism and their rise and violence should be attributed to the liberal interventionism that has proven to be a disaster not only for the region but those who carried out the intervention.
Oscar Peterson , says: October 21, 2019 at 4:14 pm GMT
@A123

"One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution. If the problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside forces driving the Craziness. There is no 'plug to pull'".

Absolute nonsense. And what do you mean by "outside forces." The US and Israel count as outside forces but Turkey does not? Forces outside of what?

ISIS emerged out of ISI, Zarqawi's Islamic State in Iraq, an affiliate, for a while, of AQ. The US invasion of Iraq created the political and military space in Iraq for transnational terror groups.

Meanwhile, the US, at Israel's instigation, had been working to weaken Assad in Syria. After the rebellion against him in 2011, the US, along with Turkey, Saudi, Qatar, Israel and others, began to support various jihadi groups inside Syria with the goal of eliminating the Assad government, each for his own reasons. Syria began lost control of its border with Iraq and much of eastern Syria and the Euphrates valley as well. This process allowed ISIS to emerge from an ISI under stress during the so-called "surge" in 2007-10 and establish itself in Syria. In 2014, ISIS, now a powerful well-armed group went back into Iraq to defeat the incompetent and unmotivated Iraq Security Forces that the US had established.

While the US moved against ISIS in Iraq after 2014, it left ISIS in Syria alone since it was depriving Assad of control over most of Syria's oil and much of its arable land.

And yes, of course the US, instigated by Israel, didn't "deploy" ISIS in the sense of directing its operations. But they left ISIS largely unimpeded to play a role in the overthrow of Assad which was always the primary goal. ISIS, it was thought, could be dealt with later after Assad was gone.

That plan would probably have worked eventually, but the Russians entered the picture in the second half of 2015 and changed the situation.

The US had been nominally supporting the usual "freedom fighters" but in effect supplying the more competent and vicious jihadis who could take the TOW missiles and other weapons the US was providing to the approved sad-sacks and make more effective use of them. Finally, with Russia and Iran facilitating the roll-back of all the jihadis, and the US threatened with being relegated to the sidelines, Obama jumped on the SDF (Kurdish) bandwagon and actually started doing what the US had not done previously: Taking serious action against ISIS so that a Russian/Iranian-backed Syrian reconquest of eastern Syria could be pre-empted.

And of course, the biggest supporter of the Kurds has consistently been Israel, who sees the possibility of creating pro-Israel statelets or at least enclaves in the midst of a Turkish, Iranian and Arab region that detests the Judenreich.

So in order to eliminate another of Israel's enemies, reduce a unified Syrian state to a handful of even more impotent emirates and ensure that Bibi would not be pestered with legal questions over the seizure and retention of the Golan, Syria was laid waste under the guise of "promoting democracy" and then further devastated under the guise of combatting ISIS.

We have done more than enough damage at the behest of Israel and its fifth column in the US. ISIS might well have emerged regardless of US actions, but it was the Jew-induced insanity of US regime-change/COIN policies that created the geographical, political and military space in Iraq and Syria for the jihadists and the ensuing physical destruction of so much of those countries.

The best solution would be to facilitate the re-establishment of Syrian sovereignty over all of Syria. But instead of doing that, Trump has instead facilitated the entry of Turkish forces and allied jihadis in an attempt to mend fences with a thoroughly alienated Erdogan. We'll see if Putin can mitigate the brutal incompetence of Israel-infected US policy.

Anon [322] Disclaimer , says: October 21, 2019 at 4:41 pm GMT
@A123 For fuck's sake. Is there any way to stop Hasbara agents from effectively using software to get consistent first posts on this site?

Their mere presence is annoying. Whatever they have to say, on any topic and no matter what it is, no one here wants to read it because they are not beginning with any credibility whatsoever. As they are are religiously-avowed enemies of the West (who they hold to be the continuation of Rome) and the demonstrated fervent enemies of non-Jewish Whites.

Given the craziness of Wahhabism

There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.

MarathonMan , says: October 21, 2019 at 4:43 pm GMT
A very real but completely unadvertised reality of these regime changes was that the publicly owned central bank of the country – Iraq and Libya – was eliminated and changed to a private central bank. Iraq and Libya both succumbed and Ron Paul related that the smoke had barely cleared in Libya before the private central bank charter was drafted and implemented. Syria and Iran are the last two countries that do not have a private central banks. Hence the drive by the neo-cons to destroy those countries and fully implement the New World (banking) Order.

Not widely discussed but (I think) vitally important to understanding foreign policy.

Rev. Spooner , says: October 21, 2019 at 4:44 pm GMT
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should have no credibility on the matter to begin with.

But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
I love the second para. Getting slapped with a red herring with hope that the salt water blinds us .

My only gripe with Jonathan Cook is that this and all mid-eastern conflicts are engineered by the dual citizens and Israel isn't called out by him as the chief instigator. The saudis are slave of the west and amount to nothing.

Paul , says: October 21, 2019 at 6:29 pm GMT
Hillary Clinton (wife of draft dodger Bill) and the New York Times are Zionist assets. Hillary is a stooge!
donald j tingle , says: October 21, 2019 at 6:50 pm GMT
Why blame Bush, Rove etc. for the mess created by Clinton/Obama in Syria? Are they still out of bounds?
joe2.5 , says: October 21, 2019 at 7:32 pm GMT
@A123 " Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability"
Perhaps. Except that it did happen in plain daylight, before our eyes, but we should, of course, trust your "reasonability" -- instead of our own lying eyes.
anon [117] Disclaimer , says: October 21, 2019 at 7:48 pm GMT
@A123 US President Donald Trump said Monday that a small number of US troops remain in Syria at the request of Israel and Jordan, with some positioned near the borders with Jordan and Israel and others deployed to secure oil fields.

"The other region where we've been asked by Israel and Jordan to leave a small number of troops is a totally different section of Syria, near Jordan, and close to Israel," Trump said when asked whether he would leave soldiers in Syria. "So we have a small group there, and we secured the oil. Other than that, there's no reason for it, in our opinion."

Times of Israel
and J Post 21st oct

It 's all about Israel and for its "royal patsy when not for royal patsy it's for the cannon fodder/ foot solder of Israel.

This mayhem from 2003 hasn't seen the full effects of the blow-back yet .Just starting . Tulsi Gabbard and Trump have knowingly and sometime unknowingly have told the master that the king never had any clothes even when the king was talking about the decency of having clothes on .

anon [117] Disclaimer , says: October 21, 2019 at 8:06 pm GMT

"The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they could export to non-compliant states in the region."-

This sums up everything one want to know about certain human clones and the impact of the clones on the humanity.

Who will ever blame the victims for creating a future Hitler among them ?

Andrei Martyanov , says: Website October 21, 2019 at 9:13 pm GMT
We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements.
Stop Bush and Clinton , says: Website October 21, 2019 at 10:48 pm GMT
Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally better than Hitlery Clinton.

Lock them all up, regardless of party affiliation.

TG , says: October 22, 2019 at 12:00 am GMT
Many interesting points here, and I agree with a lot of them. But:
[MORE]
"Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate change led to repeated crop failures?"

Syria did run out of water, and it's hard not to see that as a major driver of the chaos that unfolded. But Syria didn't run out of water because of "climate change," that's false.

The explanation is that the Syrian government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion. Seriously, they made the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See "Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba'thist Syria (Demographic Developments and Socioeconomics)", by Onn Winkler).

The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.).

Now as far as weather goes, there were a couple of dry years before the collapse, but weather is always like that. Last year there were record rainfalls. If Syria's population had been stable at 5 or even 10 million, they could have coasted on water stored in the aquifers until the rains came back. But when the population increases so much that you drain the aquifers even when there is plenty of rain, then when a temporary drought hits you have no reserve and it all falls apart.

Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless.

... ... ...

barr , says: October 22, 2019 at 2:01 am GMT
LONDON: Hundreds of Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists were smu ..
Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/61703015.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
Toxik , says: October 22, 2019 at 2:21 am GMT
simple and straightforward journalism that cuts through the "corporate veil." Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination, but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and later senators who become lobbyists are doing.

I also feel for our veterans who are indoctrinated to protect freedom, but in the end, when they come home injured and disabled, or even dead, it was all for naught.

Colin Wright , says: Website October 22, 2019 at 6:46 am GMT
I find some of the rhetoric in this piece irritating and repetitive -- but the analysis is essentially correct.

We created a power vacuum that was almost certain to give rise to something like ISIS.

Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to happen to Israel since 9/11.

Twodees Partain , says: October 22, 2019 at 11:00 am GMT
"The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". "

That's a poorly written statement. It reads as though Trump was the one having a meltdown. How about: "House Speaker Pelosi's meltdown during a meeting with Trump." ?

Twodees Partain , says: October 22, 2019 at 12:01 pm GMT
@MarathonMan That is a fact that should be kept foremost in the discussions of "why regime change is necessary". It is the most basic and obvious reason for all this war in the ME.
Twodees Partain , says: October 22, 2019 at 12:13 pm GMT
"First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was inevitably going to fill."

Not quite accurate. The US Government "sowed the seeds of" ISIS by giving them material support before the vacuum was created. IS is mainly a creature of empire, including the US and older remnants of empire in the UK and Europe which survives mainly in the existence of (international) banks.

Michael888 , says: October 23, 2019 at 2:02 pm GMT
@Christian truth Project "Tulsi is/was a member of the CFR". Aren't all Congressmen members? Doesn't that come with signing the AIPAC form, getting the secret decoder ring from Adam Schiff, and the free trip to Israel? (maybe Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib "don't measure up?")

I believe CFR was the organization Biden was regaling with his story of holding up $one billion in Ukrainian aid unless the Ukrainians fired the investigator of his son Hunter "who did nothing wrong". Can you imagine if Biden had been President rather than VP? This would have been a scandal!

Ilya G Poimandres , says: October 25, 2019 at 4:18 am GMT
@A123 One does not need outside actors, but then there would be a lot of 'dark matter' in the history of the ME over the last 100 years. Personally it's plain state terrorism to me, and the Brits have a good definition! http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/part/I
Alfred , says: October 25, 2019 at 8:53 am GMT
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power

Correction: They only care about the maintenance and expansion of Israeli power.

Franklin Ryckaert , says: October 25, 2019 at 11:01 am GMT
@Colin Wright

I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis. Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests, and when it once did so by accident, it apologized to Israel. The destruction of Syria is part of Israel's notorious Oded Yinon plan, according to which all states in Israel's neighborhood need to be fragmentized. In Iraq and Libya that was a success, in Syria, thanks to Iran, Hizbollah and Russia, it failed. The US is simply a puppet for Israel's foreign policy, but nobody in the US, not even Tulsi Gabbard, dares to say so.

TellTheTruth-2 , says: October 25, 2019 at 12:42 pm GMT
Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam. (right click) https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/18/pepe-escobar-the-road-to-damascus-how-the-syria-war-was-won/ . The CIA will be after Trump's scalp till Kingdom Come.
Greg Bacon , says: Website October 25, 2019 at 1:11 pm GMT
@A123 Sorry Bibi, but your beloved Israel played a BIG part in establishing ISIS, then supporting it with shekels, medical care for their wounded, training and weapons.

WikiLeaks: US, Israel, And Saudi Arabia Planned Overthrow Of Syrian Govt. In 2006

Cables reveal that before the beginning of the Syrian revolt and civil war, the United States hoped to overthrow Assad and create strife between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/wikileaks-us-israel-and-saudi-arabia-planned-overthrow-of-syrian-govt-in-2006/221784/

The one time their hired ISIS thugs accidentally attacked IDF forces, ISIS leaders made a profuse apology to Israel.

Isis fighters 'attacked Israel Defense Forces unit, then apologised' claims former commander

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-israel-defence-force-apology-attack-unit-golan-heights-defense-minister-moshe-ya-alon-a7700616.html

Let's not forget that when the term ISIS first came out, the Tel Aviv war mongers realized it stood for Israeli Secret Intelligence Services and changed that to ISIL, which their adoring MSM gladly obliged by parroting that change.

From the Israeli masterminded 9/11 False Flag to the destruction of Syria, there's one common factor, Israel and her American Jew sayanim who keep pushing America into forever wars so Israel can finish off the Palestinians and steal more land.

Ghan-buri-Ghan , says: October 25, 2019 at 1:18 pm GMT
@Digital Samizdat Absolutely. Gabbard is the "Democrat" Trump. A Jew puppet presented as an outsider. They're exactly the same. Even Obama was presented that way to an extent.

Yet the dumb goyim will fall for it for the third time in a row.

anon [113] Disclaimer , says: October 25, 2019 at 1:28 pm GMT
Panel Criticizes 'Unacceptable Practices' in the OPCW's investigation of the Alleged Chemical Attack in Douma, Syria on April 7th 2018
https://www.couragefound.org/2019/10/opcw-panel-statement

Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion.

We have learned of disquieting efforts to exclude some inspectors from the investigation whilst thwarting their attempts to raise legitimate concerns, highlight irregular practices or even to express their differing observations and assessments -- a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention, evidently with the intention of ensuring the independence and authoritativeness of inspection reports.

Fixed "report" of OPCW was necessary to maintain anti-Assad narrative which is now unchallenged even by Gabbard (not to mention the weak sheep-dog Sanders).

ivan , says: October 25, 2019 at 1:39 pm GMT
@Ilyana_Rozumova The US does not have to directly support the jihadists. It just has to manage the chaos, for whatever be the action on the ground and whoever is killed or not killed, as long as there is chaos within their chosen sandbox, the chaos masters in Israel wins and that is all that counts with all too many Americans. It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East.

But fortunately the Russians have turned things around.

Arnieus , says: October 25, 2019 at 2:09 pm GMT
@MarathonMan Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ME is also about "fragmenting" neighboring countries so Israel can expand. Yinon Plan.
Herald , says: October 25, 2019 at 2:50 pm GMT
@TellTheTruth-2 As promised by themselves for themselves. Amazing that anyone can take the chosen ones even remotely seriously.
Agent76 , says: October 25, 2019 at 2:51 pm GMT
Oct 18, 2019 Tulsi Gabbard responds to Hillary Clinton: Clinton "knows she can't control me"

Hillary Clinton implied Russians are "grooming" Tulsi Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate to disrupt the election, a charge which Gabbard denies. In a live interview with CBSN, Gabbard responds to Clinton's claims and says she will not run as a third-party candidate.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/JNjzBJWUyWI?feature=oembed

Oct 19, 2019 This Is The Final Nail For Hillary Clinton! Tulsi Gabbard Moves On Up!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jqChZzFrvxE?feature=oembed

Herald , says: October 25, 2019 at 2:54 pm GMT
@Ilyana_Rozumova The explanation is quite simple, supporting terrorism is what the US does, and it has done so for decades.
Fool's Paradise , says: October 25, 2019 at 3:11 pm GMT
And now, according to the latest news, Trump will send tanks into Syria to help the Kurds secure the oil for Israel. It's hard to understand why the Elders of the Deep State want to impeach Trump. He has done everything they wanted, moved the embassy, gave Syria's Golan Heights to Israel, never criticizes the illegal settlements in Palestine. What else do they want from him?
DESERT FOX , says: October 25, 2019 at 3:39 pm GMT
@Fool's Paradise They want a war with Russia.
really no shit , says: October 25, 2019 at 5:49 pm GMT
What do you mean Pelosi has no credibility? Have you checked her bank balance lately? Nancy, had she not waded into politics, would have been a pole dancer she had the goods for it.
KA , says: October 25, 2019 at 5:58 pm GMT
@Greg Bacon Interesting
cassandra , says: October 25, 2019 at 5:59 pm GMT
@TG Excellent post. You bring up 2 very important but rarely discussed issues.

Demographics: Population is one of the most easily predictable developments within a country, and you'd think it might be one of the most publically-discussed, and therefore, best-managed. Au contraire. Assad wasn't the only one who stood on the tracks watching the headlights approach:

1. The EU is having problems with an aging native population because it earlier encouraged low birth rates, and is now promoting mass immigration of rapidly-breeding immigrants who threaten to at least overwhelm if not overrun European society. Yet, as Douglas Murray points out in his book The Strange Death of Europe, openly talking about this problem has been, and still is, verboten.

2. China is now wondering to do with its preponderance of young men, caused very predictably by the Communist Party's one-child policy.

Climate:

If the rains had been good every single year – which is impossible – it would only have pushed the point of collapse back a few years, at most.

The Syrian case you cite shows how even relatively minor climate changes can carry events past a tipping point. I do agree with you that effects of APGW on climactic conditions are greatly exaggerated, yet changes in climate, for good or ill, have often triggered much larger historical events. The cooling that caused a famine and that preceded the Justinian Plague weakened European and Sassanian civilizations. These misfortunes paved the way for the Islamic takeover that followed. Contrariwise, Norse exploration and the Renaissance, to give 2 examples of increasing activity, both occurred during the Medieval Warming Period.

I enjoyed your comment.

Fool's Paradise , says: October 25, 2019 at 6:20 pm GMT
@DESERT FOX They've re-started the Cold War. Keeps all the warmongers in business. Surely they're not stupid enough to want a hot one are they?
anonymous [348] Disclaimer , says: October 25, 2019 at 6:35 pm GMT
When it comes to senior American politihoes, no one is ever right. Pelosi may be cultivating the ISIS, but Gabbard is busy blowing assorted dictators and more closer to the heart, the hindoo nationalist queers, as impotent (I mean that in a literal sexual context, as their elites don't marry) as they might be.
SafeNow , says: October 25, 2019 at 7:12 pm GMT
Tulsi needs to conduct herself with gravitas, because of her age. However, she is helped by the fact that the leader of the progressive wing is a former bartender, and the leader of the environmental resistance is a high-school sophomore.
anonymous [348] Disclaimer , says: October 25, 2019 at 7:16 pm GMT
@A123

Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability.

A hasbara style attempt to obfuscate and/or absolve the 2 greatest evils on earth. Joo/whitrash nationalist lowlife spotted.

DESERT FOX , says: October 25, 2019 at 7:26 pm GMT
@Fool's Paradise They are demonic warmongering hounds from hell and will destroy the world for their zionist NWO!
Bill Jones , says: October 25, 2019 at 7:35 pm GMT
@MarathonMan It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-18/ukraine-admits-its-gold-gone

Jeff Davis , says: October 25, 2019 at 7:41 pm GMT
"Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them."

FTFY

Just as the GOP is precisely and thoroughly corrupt in exactly the same way, focused exclusively on their own craven self-interest, the country be damned.

anonymous [348] Disclaimer , says: October 25, 2019 at 7:41 pm GMT
@Anon

There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.

Lol! Deceitful lies from some godless/pagan whitrash.

If you are referring to some self-perceived notions of barbarity/deception/etc., within Islam, then you are a deceitful !@# who is trying to cover up the sheer savagery/psychopathy/deception/hypocrisy/etc., of the Christoo whitrash race.

Again, as far as the roots of Islam being in Judaism, that is laughable. It is Christooism which is clearly having roots in Judaism (there have been so many here who have quoted from your pagan scriptures about the haloed position of the Jooscum) and Hindooism .

In-his-image mangods/womangods, Trinity/Trimurthi, the human body is the temple of god the list is long where you all share your pagan theologies.

Islam utterly rejects all such pagan abominations. The following verses of the Holy Quran amply proves the simplest and purest form of monotheism, that is Islam;

Say, "He is Allah, [who is] One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born , Nor is there to Him any equivalent ."

You are the Liar!!

Jeff Davis , says: October 25, 2019 at 7:54 pm GMT
@A123 "Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability."

Wrong.

The Oded Yinon Plan employs exactly this strategy, and along with the Neocon dominated State Dept with its Regime Change program (Oded Yinon plan in stealth mode) is the predicate. Meanwhile, once it emerged, Obama & Kerry sought to preserve ISIS as a means to pressure Assad. Neocon Zionist fifth column in the US, & Israel-behind-the-scenes are the dual agency-behind-the-curtain of US regime-change wars ***EVERYWHERE*** (because they hate Russia, too.).

Fool's Paradise , says: October 25, 2019 at 8:42 pm GMT
@DESERT FOX And rule, finally, over a smoldering wreck of a planet? They already rule most of it, they're at the Endgame of their long match with the world. Not that they eschew violence and mass murder. Indeed, they got their start thousands years ago by worshiping a god who told them to genocide all their neighbors and steal all their goods.
Anonymous [124] Disclaimer , says: October 25, 2019 at 8:49 pm GMT
@really no shit I'm in the same age cohort as most of these shameless grifters, so I know the end of this run on earth is drawing near. I know that no one can take whatever they accumulate in this life with them into oblivion or whatever their imagined version of paradise might be. The loot stays here in this vale of tears.

ALL of these players busy ruining and ending lives, like Pelosi, the Clintons and the Bush family, are multi-millionaires at the least–and all on the taxpayers' dime. Why do they desperately seek to add ever more cash to their bank accounts by bringing yet more misery into the world? It won't be very long and either the collection of psychopaths known as the government of the United States and its ruthless war machine will end up with the proceeds or they will pass down to further generations of these congenital parasites and deadbeats.

Does Joe ask himself whether it was worthy to spend his wretched life accumulating ill-gotten wealth to pass on to Hunter and his ilk? Or for Hillary to set up Chelsea and the next generation of Rodham Clinton lampreys? Jimmy Carter seems to have been the only American president who didn't constantly grasp for money once out of office and the world never heard a peep about Amy ever again.

CharlieSeattle , says: October 25, 2019 at 9:33 pm GMT
WND EXCLUSIVE
BLOWBACK! U.S. TRAINED ISLAMISTS WHO JOINED ISIS

Secret Jordan base was site of covert aid to insurgents targeting Assad
Published: 06/17/2014 – By Aaron Klein

http://www.wnd.com/2014/06/officials-u-s-trained-isis-at-secret-base-in-jordan/

[MORE]
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publication, this story has been corrected to clarify that the fighters trained in Jordan became members of the ISIS after their training.]

JERUSALEM – Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials.

The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future campaign in Iraq.
The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received U.S. training to fight in Syria were first vetted for any links to extremist groups like al-Qaida.

In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country's northern desert region.
That report has since been corroborated by numerous other media accounts.
Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in Jordan.

Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it was not clear whether the Americans worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but the magazine said some organizers wore uniforms. The training in Jordan reportedly focused on use of anti-tank weaponry.

The German magazine reported some 200 men received the training over the previous three months amid U.S. plans to train a total of 1,200 members of the Free Syrian Army in two camps in the south and the east of Jordan.

Britain's Guardian newspaper also reported last March that U.S. trainers were aiding Syrian rebels in Jordan along with British and French instructors.

Reuters reported a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department declined immediate comment on the German magazine's report. The French foreign ministry and Britain's foreign and defense ministries also would not comment to Reuters.

CharlieSeattle , says: October 25, 2019 at 9:35 pm GMT
2012 Classified U.S. Report: ISIS Must Rise To Power
Posted on May 23, 2015 by Sean Adl-Tabatabai

http://yournewswire.com/2012-classified-u-s-report-isis-must-rise-to-power/

Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch have published formerly classified documents from the U.S. Department of Defence which reveals the agencies earlier views on ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.

Levantreport.com reports:
Astoundingly, the newly declassified report states that for "THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME ".
The DIA report, formerly classified "SECRET//NOFORN" and dated August 12, 2012, was circulated widely among various government agencies, including CENTCOM, the CIA, FBI, DHS, NGA, State Dept., and many others.

The document shows that as early as 2012, U.S. intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a U.S. strategic asset.

CharlieSeattle , says: October 25, 2019 at 9:36 pm GMT
Declassified Documents: Obama Ordered CIA To Train ISIS
Posted on May 28, 2015 by Carol Adl

http://yournewswire.com/declassified-documents-obama-ordered-cia-to-train-isis/

Government watchdog Judicial Watch published more than 100 pages of formerly classified documents from the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department.

The documents obtained through a federal lawsuit, revealed the agencies earlier views on ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.

The U.S. intelligence documents not only confirms suspicions that the United States and some of its coalition allies had actually facilitated the rise of the ISIS in Syria – as a counterweight to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad- but also that ISIS members were initially trained by members and contractors of the Central Intelligence Agency at facilities in Jordan in 2012.

HEREDOT , says: October 25, 2019 at 9:55 pm GMT
When I say Isis, I immediately think of Obama, Hillary, Mc Cain. These are the most despicable psychopaths who have resigned from humanity.
Kolya Krassotkin , says: October 26, 2019 at 12:43 am GMT
@Agent76 The end of Hill-dog? In your dreams. She rises from the grave with the regularity of an obese vampire.
ivan , says: October 26, 2019 at 1:36 am GMT
@Anonymous Jimmah was the last honest man in American politics. But since he told Americans that gas was going to cost more, that perhaps they needed to drive a wee bit less, the Americans hated him. They didn't like the "malaise" of having to pay for their lifestyle.

As for the Israelis, what did Jimmah not to do for them : Got Egypt out of the Arab alliance, arranged the annual tribute to Israel, started the ball rolling on the Holocaust religion, paid off Egypt and Jordan to stay away from any alliance against the Israelis. But what did he get in return; branded as anti-Semite merely for mentioning that the Palestinians had rights, were human beings too. With the Zionist Jews, one is always on probation. No point playing their silly games.

redmudhooch , says: October 26, 2019 at 1:37 am GMT
The CIA!

Rise of the National Security State The CIA's links to Wall Street
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30605.htm

The CIA: 70 Years of Organized Crime
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47873.htm

Regime Change and Capitalism
https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/07/regime-change-and-capitalism/

Hassan Nasrallah should know:

The path of U.S.-Israeli arrogance and domination, with its various dimensions, and with its direct and indirect extensions and alliances, which is witnessing military defeats and political failures, reflected successive defeats for the American strategies and plans, one after the other. All this has led [the U.S.] to a state of indecision, retreat, and inability to control the progress of events in our Arab and Islamic world. There is a broader international context for this – a context that, in its turn, helps to expose the American crisis, and the decline of the [U.S.] unipolar hegemony, in the face of pluralism, the characteristics of which are yet to be stabilized.

"The crisis of the arrogant world order is deepened by the collapse of U.S. and international stock markets, and by the confusion and powerlessness of the American economy. This reflects the height of the structural crisis of the model of capitalist arrogance. Therefore, it can be said that we are in the midst of historic transformations that foretell the retreat of the USA as a hegemonic power, the disintegration of the unipolar hegemonic order, and the beginning of the accelerated historic decline of the Zionist entity.

After World War II, the U.S. has adopted the leading, central hegemonic project. At its hands, this project has witnessed great development of the means of control and unprecedented subjugation. It has benefited from an accumulation of multi-faceted accomplishments in science, culture, technology, knowledge, economy, and the military, which was supported by an economic political plan that views the world as nothing but open markets subject to the laws of [the U.S.].

"The most dangerous aspect of Western logic of hegemony in general, and the American logic of hegemony in particular, is their basic belief that they own the world, and have the right to hegemony due to their supremacy in several fields. Thus, the Western, and especially American, expansionist strategy, when coupled with the enterprise of capitalist economy, has become a strategy of a global nature, whose covetous desires and appetite know no bounds.

The barbaric capitalism has turned globalism into a means to spread disintegration, to sow discord, to destroy identities, and to impose the most dangerous form of cultural, economic, and social plunder. Globalization reached its most dangerous phase, when it was transformed into military globalization by the owners of the Western hegemony enterprise, the greatest manifestation of which was evident in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq, to Palestine, and to Lebanon.

There is no doubt that American terrorism is the source of all terrorism in the world. The Bush administration has turned the U.S. into a danger threatening the whole world, on all levels. If a global opinion poll were held today, the United States would emerge as the most hated country in the world.

The most important goal of American arrogance is to take control of the peoples politically, economically, and culturally, and to plunder their resources.

– Hassan Nasrallah December 8, 2009

and Trump IS NOT "pulling out" Will Tulsi? One way to find out. Doesn't look good though, unless shes willing to splinter the C.I.A. into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds, as they say..

Where's the proof that she is CFR member, I see sock puppets parrot this line all the time but offer no proof. Her serving on the armed & financial services committees and doing a speech for them doesn't make her a member. I'd take her over Trump any day.

[Oct 24, 2019] Empire Interventionism Versus Republic Noninterventionism by Jacob Hornberger

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world. ..."
"... That's when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became "allies," "partners," and "friends." Others became "opponents," "rivals," or "enemies." Events thousands of miles away became threats to "national security." ..."
"... The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans. That's how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap. ..."
"... There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem -- the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism. A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy to our land. ..."
Oct 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

The chaos arising from U.S. interventionism in Syria provides an excellent opportunity to explore the interventionist mind.

Consider the terminology being employed by interventionists: President Trump's actions in Syria have left a "power vacuum," one that Russia and Iran are now filling. The United States will no longer have "influence" in the region. "Allies" will no longer be able to trust the U.S. to come to their assistance. Trump's actions have threatened "national security." It is now possible that ISIS will reformulate and threaten to take over lands and even regimes in the Middle East.

This verbiage is classic empire-speak. It is the language of the interventionist and the imperialist.

Amidst all the interventionist chaos in the Middle East, it is important to keep in mind one critically important fact: None of it will mean a violent takeover of the U.S. government or an invasion and conquest of the United States. The federal government will go on. American life will go on. There will be no army of Muslims, terrorists, Syrians, ISISians, Russians, Chinese, drug dealers, or illegal immigrants coming to get us and take over the reins of the IRS.

Why is that an important point? Because it shows that no matter what happens in Syria or the rest of the Middle East, life will continue here in the United States. Even if Russia gets to continue controlling Syria, that's not going to result in a conquest of the United States. The same holds true if ISIS, say, takes over Iraq. Or if Turkey ends up killing lots of Kurds. Or if Syria ends up protecting the Kurds. Or if Iran continues to be controlled by a theocratic state. Or if the Russians retake control over Ukraine.

It was no different than when North Vietnam ended up winning the Vietnamese civil war. The dominoes did not fall onto the United States and make America Red. It also makes no difference if Egypt continues to be controlled by a brutal military dictatorship. Or that Cuba, North Korea, and China are controlled by communist regimes. Or that Russia is controlled by an authoritarian regime. Or that Myanmar (Burma) is controlled by a totalitarian military regime. America and the federal government will continue standing.

America was founded as a limited government republic, one that did not send its military forces around the world to slay monsters. That's not to say that bad things didn't happen around the world. Bad things have always happened around the world. Dictatorships. Famines. Wars. Civil wars. Revolutions. Empires. Torture. Extra-judicial executions. Tyranny. Oppression. The policy of the United States was that it would not go abroad to fix or clear up those types of things.

All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world.

That's when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became "allies," "partners," and "friends." Others became "opponents," "rivals," or "enemies." Events thousands of miles away became threats to "national security."

That's when U.S. forces began invading and occupying other countries, waging wars of aggression against them, intervening in foreign wars, revolutions, and civil wars, initiating coups, destroying democratic regimes, establishing an empire of domestic and foreign military bases, and bombing, shooting, killing, assassinating, spying on, maiming, torturing, kidnapping, injuring, and destroying people in countries all over the world.

The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans. That's how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap.

The shift toward empire and interventionism has brought about the destruction of American liberty and privacy here at home. That's what the assassinations, secret surveillance, torture, and indefinite detentions of American citizens are all about -- to supposedly protect us from the dangers produced by U.S. imperialism and interventionism abroad. One might call it waging perpetual war for freedom and peace, both here and abroad.

There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem -- the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism. A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy to our land.

[Oct 24, 2019] Empire Interventionism Versus Republic Noninterventionism by Jacob Hornberger

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world. ..."
"... That's when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became "allies," "partners," and "friends." Others became "opponents," "rivals," or "enemies." Events thousands of miles away became threats to "national security." ..."
"... The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans. That's how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap. ..."
"... There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem -- the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism. A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy to our land. ..."
Oct 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

The chaos arising from U.S. interventionism in Syria provides an excellent opportunity to explore the interventionist mind.

Consider the terminology being employed by interventionists: President Trump's actions in Syria have left a "power vacuum," one that Russia and Iran are now filling. The United States will no longer have "influence" in the region. "Allies" will no longer be able to trust the U.S. to come to their assistance. Trump's actions have threatened "national security." It is now possible that ISIS will reformulate and threaten to take over lands and even regimes in the Middle East.

This verbiage is classic empire-speak. It is the language of the interventionist and the imperialist.

Amidst all the interventionist chaos in the Middle East, it is important to keep in mind one critically important fact: None of it will mean a violent takeover of the U.S. government or an invasion and conquest of the United States. The federal government will go on. American life will go on. There will be no army of Muslims, terrorists, Syrians, ISISians, Russians, Chinese, drug dealers, or illegal immigrants coming to get us and take over the reins of the IRS.

Why is that an important point? Because it shows that no matter what happens in Syria or the rest of the Middle East, life will continue here in the United States. Even if Russia gets to continue controlling Syria, that's not going to result in a conquest of the United States. The same holds true if ISIS, say, takes over Iraq. Or if Turkey ends up killing lots of Kurds. Or if Syria ends up protecting the Kurds. Or if Iran continues to be controlled by a theocratic state. Or if the Russians retake control over Ukraine.

It was no different than when North Vietnam ended up winning the Vietnamese civil war. The dominoes did not fall onto the United States and make America Red. It also makes no difference if Egypt continues to be controlled by a brutal military dictatorship. Or that Cuba, North Korea, and China are controlled by communist regimes. Or that Russia is controlled by an authoritarian regime. Or that Myanmar (Burma) is controlled by a totalitarian military regime. America and the federal government will continue standing.

America was founded as a limited government republic, one that did not send its military forces around the world to slay monsters. That's not to say that bad things didn't happen around the world. Bad things have always happened around the world. Dictatorships. Famines. Wars. Civil wars. Revolutions. Empires. Torture. Extra-judicial executions. Tyranny. Oppression. The policy of the United States was that it would not go abroad to fix or clear up those types of things.

All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world.

That's when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became "allies," "partners," and "friends." Others became "opponents," "rivals," or "enemies." Events thousands of miles away became threats to "national security."

That's when U.S. forces began invading and occupying other countries, waging wars of aggression against them, intervening in foreign wars, revolutions, and civil wars, initiating coups, destroying democratic regimes, establishing an empire of domestic and foreign military bases, and bombing, shooting, killing, assassinating, spying on, maiming, torturing, kidnapping, injuring, and destroying people in countries all over the world.

The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans. That's how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap.

The shift toward empire and interventionism has brought about the destruction of American liberty and privacy here at home. That's what the assassinations, secret surveillance, torture, and indefinite detentions of American citizens are all about -- to supposedly protect us from the dangers produced by U.S. imperialism and interventionism abroad. One might call it waging perpetual war for freedom and peace, both here and abroad.

There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem -- the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism. A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy to our land.

[Oct 24, 2019] Skeptical view of Hillary demarche against Tulsi: Class is everything, which is why both Globalizing tiers have agreed to, amongst other things, pretend we don't exist. Clinton threw Tulsi a bone so that Tulsi could throw us another, but it all counts for nothing when the bill for elite criminality comes due.

Oct 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Zedd , Oct 23 2019 22:06 utc | 14

Factions of World War III

1. CIA, Hillary Clinton, 'Rothschild-Octopus' money power. Altogether, British Israel (Zionism).

2. Pentagon-NSA, Donald Trump, second tier elites including, for example, Sheldon Adelson. Altogether, Israel (and the USA) First.

If these are the primary factions vying for control of the New World Order, why did HRC throw Tulsi such a honkin' big bone by calling her a Russian asset?

Clinton has endorsed Gabbard in the same way Catholicism endorses sin: ergo, there is a working agreement between all Globalist factions for a final settlement of WW3.

Or is there a better explanation for HRC's non endorsement endorsement of TG?

Should we also mention both are card carrying members of the Council on Foreign Relations?

Understanding we are ruled by a duopoly of 1st and 2nd tier elites is essential piecing together who represents whom - and what it means for the vast majority of humanity, which remains generally ignorant and utterly voiceless.

Class is everything, which is why both Globalizing tiers have agreed to, amongst other things, pretend we don't exist. Clinton threw Tulsi a bone so that Tulsi could throw us another, but it all counts for nothing when the bill for elite criminality comes due. Both factions agree that We the People, the unrepresented Third Estate, will be paying for everything.

Nathan Mulcahy , Oct 24 2019 0:26 utc | 22

Aaron Mate does an excellent interview with Jill Stein discussing Witchery Clinton's recent diatribe against Tulsi and Jill...

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/23/jill-stein-hillary-clinton-is-still-sabotaging-progressives/

[Oct 24, 2019] The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media is so stark the it reminds people about the USSR before the collapse

Notable quotes:
"... The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking points without understanding any of it. ..."
Oct 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

ancientarcher , 24 October 2019 at 11:19 AM

Colonel, thanks for spelling it out so clearly.

The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking points without understanding any of it.

While it will always be mystifying to me why so many people on the street blindly support America fighting and dying in the middle east, the support of the MSM and the paid hacks for eternal war is no surprise. I hope they get to send their children and grandchildren to these wars. More than that, I hope we get out of these wars. Trump might be able to put an end to it, and not just in Syria, if he wins a second term, which he will if he is allowed to contest the next election. There is however a chance that the borg will pull the rug from under him and bar him from the elections. Hope that doesn't come to pass.

[Oct 24, 2019] Snowden behaviour toward Russia is highly suspecious: The Russian government has saved his bacon and has given him refuge with great freedoms he would not have in the USA -- or Airstrip One ... or, HK, or any South American backyard colony. And yet he makes no attempt to thank them and even virtually panders to the American anti-Russian meme

Is/was he a plant like Oswald in the past?
Notable quotes:
"... The main take away for me came towards the end where Snowden outlines the special legal conditions and laws that the US government enforces to control presentation of evidence in these cases. These same 'servant' thugs who are stepping into the now 3rd-world UK court system and pulling the strings on Australia's Assange. The same crew that Snowden worked with and blew the whistle on (apparently). ..."
"... Snowden makes great bravado about being willing to go back to the USA and face the music -- if only he could say in court why he did it (something the legal Act prohibits apparently). In this, and a few other matters of history, I find him less than genuine. Is/was he a plant? .... I'm still out with the jury on that. ..."
Oct 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

imo , Oct 24 2019 2:42 utc | 43

@8 Trailer Trash

Indeed Orwell's "1984" referred to the UK as "Airstrip One" and this Brexit fiasco surely proves that Outside Influences not only run the Judiciary when necessary, but also plant poison on doorknobs when it suits them.

The ever servile Australian government to the empire du jour does nothing to honor their passport pledge. We would have to assume it qualifies as Orwell's "Airstrip Two"

In contrast to Assange's predicament (and Manning I assume), the main point of this post is to mention the recent Joe Rogan interview of Edward Snowden (touting his book) -- http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/edward-snowden

Nearly three hours of mostly Snowden rambling on. I stayed with it to the end. A few items of interest but mostly just noise. I found him initially somewhat suspicious -- by the end I was more neutral. However, what a display of American arrogance and ingratitude. The Russian government has saved his bacon and has given him refuge with great freedoms he would not have in the USA -- or Airstrip One ... or, HK, or any South American backyard colony. And yet he makes no attempt to thank them and even virtually panders to the American anti-Russian meme. He has even dabbled in Russian opposition politics via local newspaper comments. What an ungrateful guest! (Or still an agent @ work?) I would entirely understand the Russians putting him on a plane back to the USA tomorrow. Ungrateful little character, imo. And says a lot about the way Americans treat the external world from inside their little fishbowl. Simply a doormat for convenience.

The main take away for me came towards the end where Snowden outlines the special legal conditions and laws that the US government enforces to control presentation of evidence in these cases. These same 'servant' thugs who are stepping into the now 3rd-world UK court system and pulling the strings on Australia's Assange. The same crew that Snowden worked with and blew the whistle on (apparently).

Snowden makes great bravado about being willing to go back to the USA and face the music -- if only he could say in court why he did it (something the legal Act prohibits apparently). In this, and a few other matters of history, I find him less than genuine. Is/was he a plant? .... I'm still out with the jury on that.

[Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Neocons are lobbyists for MIC, the it is MIC that is the center of this this cult. People like Kriston, Kagan and Max Boot are just well paid prostituttes on MIC, which includes intelligence agencies as a very important part -- the bridge to Wall Street so to speak.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us. ..."
Jul 18, 2017 | medium.com

Glenn Greenwald has just published a very important article in The Intercept that I would have everyone in America read if I could. Titled "With New D.C. Policy Group, Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons", Greenwald's excellent piece details the frustratingly under-reported way that the leaders of the neoconservative death cult have been realigning with the Democratic party.

This pivot back to the party of neoconservatism's origin is one of the most significant political events of the new millennium, but aside from a handful of sharp political analysts like Greenwald it's been going largely undiscussed. This is weird, and we need to start talking about it. A lot. Their willful alignment with neoconservatism should be the very first thing anyone ever talks about when discussing the Democratic party.

When you hear someone complaining that the Democratic party has no platform besides being anti-Trump, your response should be, "Yeah it does. Their platform is the omnicidal death cult of neoconservatism."

It's absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly calls "the most dangerous ideology that has ever existed," neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies.

This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives. Check out leading neoconservative Bill Kristol's response to the aforementioned Intercept article:

... ... ...

Okay, leaving aside the fact that this bloodthirsty psychopath is saying neocons "won" a Cold War that neocons have deliberately reignited by fanning the flames of the Russia hysteria and pushing for more escalations , how insane is it that we live in a society where a public figure can just be like, "Yeah, I'm a neocon, I advocate for using military aggression to maintain US hegemony and I think it's great," and have that be okay? These people kill children. Neoconservatism means piles upon piles of child corpses. It means devoting the resources of a nation that won't even provide its citizens with a real healthcare system to widespread warfare and all the death, destruction, chaos, terrorism, rape and suffering that necessarily comes with war. The only way that you can possibly regard neoconservatism as just one more set of political opinions is if you completely compartmentalize away from the reality of everything that it is.

This should not happen. The tensions with Russia that these monsters have worked so hard to escalate could blow up at any moment; there are too many moving parts, too many things that could go wrong. The last Cold War brought our species within a hair's breadth of total annihilation due to our inability to foresee all possible complications which can arise from such a contest, and these depraved death cultists are trying to drag us back into another one. Nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth risking the life of every organism on earth, but they're risking it all for geopolitical influence.

... ... ...

I've had a very interesting last 24 hours. My article about Senator John McCain (which I titled "Please Just Fucking Die Already" because the title I really wanted to use seemed a bit crass) has received an amount of attention that I'm not accustomed to, from CNN to USA Today to the Washington Post . I watched Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar talking about me on The View . They called me a "Bernie Sanders person." It was a trip. Apparently some very low-level Republican with a few hundred Twitter followers went and retweeted my article with an approving caption, and that sort of thing is worthy of coast-to-coast mainstream coverage in today's America.

This has of course brought in a deluge of angry comments, mostly from people whose social media pages are full of Russiagate nonsense , showing where McCain's current support base comes from. Some call him a war hero, some talk about him like he's a perfectly fine politician, some defend him as just a normal person whose politics I happen to disagree with.

This is insane. This man has actively and enthusiastically pushed for every single act of military aggression that America has engaged in, and some that it hasn't , throughout his entire career. He makes Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton look like a dove. When you look at John McCain, the very first thing you see should not be a former presidential candidate, a former POW or an Arizona Senator; the first thing you see should be the piles of human corpses that he has helped to create. This is not a normal kind of person, and I still do sincerely hope that he dies of natural causes before he can do any more harm.

Can we change this about ourselves, please? None of us should have to live in a world where pushing for more bombing campaigns at every opportunity is an acceptable agenda for a public figure to have. Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us.

-- -- --

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[Oct 23, 2019] The Pathocracy Of The Deep State Tyranny At The Hands Of A Psychopathic Government

Highly recommended!
If we assume that most politicians are latent psychopaths, they need to be more tightly controlled by the people. which means no re-election of Senators after two terms.
Notable quotes:
"... " Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths . I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this... That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow -- but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one." ..."
Oct 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

" Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths . I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this... That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow -- but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one."

- Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School

Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: " What's the difference between a politician and a psychopath? "

The answer, then and now, remains the same: None . There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians. Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents , trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars , glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.

Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions , have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyles, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds . Such leaders eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. "At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups," author James G. Long notes. "We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems , and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed."

In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

Incredibly, despite clear evidence of the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government, voters continue to elect psychopaths to positions of power and influence.

According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp , "In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using 'psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.' They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath's characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels -- traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people's lives."

The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.

When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse -- all the while refusing to own up to its failings -- we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.

Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which " operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups ."

Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded , "[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous."

People don't simply line up and salute. It is through one's own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.

Much depends on how leaders " cultivate a sense of identification with their followers ," says Professor Alex Haslam. "I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about 'we' rather than 'I,' and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about 'we-ness' and then getting people to want to act in terms of that 'we-ness,' to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is 'America.'"

The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, "we the people" have become "we the police state."

We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.

Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.

Writing for ThinkProgress , Beauchamp suggests that " one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy ."

But what does this really mean in practical terms?

It means holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff using every available means at our disposal: through investigative journalism (what used to be referred to as the Fourth Estate) that enlightens and informs, through whistleblower complaints that expose corruption, through lawsuits that challenge misconduct, and through protests and mass political action that remind the powers-that-be that "we the people" are the ones that call the shots.

Remember, education precedes action. Citizens need to the do the hard work of educating themselves about what the government is doing and how to hold it accountable. Don't allow yourselves to exist exclusively in an echo chamber that is restricted to views with which you agree. Expose yourself to multiple media sources, independent and mainstream, and think for yourself.

For that matter, no matter what your political leanings might be, don't allow your partisan bias to trump the principles that serve as the basis for our constitutional republic. As Beauchamp notes, "A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check."

That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.

Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.

Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , if you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.

This much I know: we are not faceless numbers. We are not cogs in the machine. We are not slaves.

We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free -- that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.

The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government's appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.

Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be free , and until we can stand firm in the face of threats to our freedoms, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.

fudly , 4 minutes ago link

"There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians."

Could have just left it at that.

Is-Be , 13 minutes ago link

The solution, dear Zerohedge, is to pass a law demanding any official's psychological profile for public scrutiny. (By humans and by our superiors, Artificial Intelligence.)

(I think Is-Be just cracked a funny.)

BiloxiMarxKelly , 18 minutes ago link

http://www.ponerology.com/

Max.Power , 27 minutes ago link

The problem of democracy is that too many are unbelievably naive, and even more are poorly educated.

That's why propaganda always works, regardless of how absurd the narrative is.

herbivore , 29 minutes ago link

"Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars , glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow".

And the people who elect them are colloquially known as dumbasses.

IntercoursetheEU , 29 minutes ago link

The countries with the best psychopaths win ... they call it history.

Manthong , 32 minutes ago link

Gimme a break.

Just because they do not care about hurting people, are irritable, narcissistic, avaricious and lascivious does not mean they are psychopaths.

They are morally superior.

SocratesSolves , 22 minutes ago link

Bravo! The inner workings of psychopathy. All is justified. Included the Joker cults 911 mass murder with dancing after the fact. I want to see real dancing Israelis now. Dancing like hell to try to save their own murderous lives now. That's what we do with murderers out here in the west. We line them up and watch them DANCE for their lives.

Four chan , 22 minutes ago link

one could say gods chosen, or is this lie where the false sence of entitlement began?

Manthong , 21 minutes ago link

They are doing "God's work".

Don't worry about the slave trading, usury or death count thing.

PrintCash , 32 minutes ago link

What I find hilarious is the psychopathic politicians/bureaucrats/cia-fbi types/all matter of deep staters getting upset at Trumps words/tweets/style.

Pilfering the country for profit perfectly ok. Unseemly (by their standards) speech or tweets are not.

See, while they are pilfering Uncle Sam, ie you, they do it with charm (one of the strongest signs of a psychopath) and manners. What a narcissist/psychopath fears most is being outed as a fraud. And unfortunately, as long as Washington DC plays nice, throws in some lines about American values, helping the less fortunate, helping the kids, the majority fall in line with their pilfering, and whatever they want goes.

What they fear most about Trump is he hurts their Big Government brand. Either by his rhetoric, his logic, his investigative actions, or his brassness. This also includes Republicans, who only fell in line when the base forced them to fall in line.

Epstein101 , 35 minutes ago link

Big Tech Oligarchs' Best Tool for Censoring the Internet: The ADL

SocratesSolves , 18 minutes ago link

Just another *** shell game

Omni Consumer Product , 37 minutes ago link

Ahh, now we're talking about topics of substance:

There is no form of government, no perfect "ism" that can withstand the real-world effects of psycopaths at the top.

Until that problem is solved, history will continue to repeat.

http://pathocracy.net/

[Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Neocons are lobbyists for MIC, the it is MIC that is the center of this this cult. People like Kriston, Kagan and Max Boot are just well paid prostituttes on MIC, which includes intelligence agencies as a very important part -- the bridge to Wall Street so to speak.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us. ..."
Jul 18, 2017 | medium.com

Glenn Greenwald has just published a very important article in The Intercept that I would have everyone in America read if I could. Titled "With New D.C. Policy Group, Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons", Greenwald's excellent piece details the frustratingly under-reported way that the leaders of the neoconservative death cult have been realigning with the Democratic party.

This pivot back to the party of neoconservatism's origin is one of the most significant political events of the new millennium, but aside from a handful of sharp political analysts like Greenwald it's been going largely undiscussed. This is weird, and we need to start talking about it. A lot. Their willful alignment with neoconservatism should be the very first thing anyone ever talks about when discussing the Democratic party.

When you hear someone complaining that the Democratic party has no platform besides being anti-Trump, your response should be, "Yeah it does. Their platform is the omnicidal death cult of neoconservatism."

It's absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly calls "the most dangerous ideology that has ever existed," neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies.

This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives. Check out leading neoconservative Bill Kristol's response to the aforementioned Intercept article:

... ... ...

Okay, leaving aside the fact that this bloodthirsty psychopath is saying neocons "won" a Cold War that neocons have deliberately reignited by fanning the flames of the Russia hysteria and pushing for more escalations , how insane is it that we live in a society where a public figure can just be like, "Yeah, I'm a neocon, I advocate for using military aggression to maintain US hegemony and I think it's great," and have that be okay? These people kill children. Neoconservatism means piles upon piles of child corpses. It means devoting the resources of a nation that won't even provide its citizens with a real healthcare system to widespread warfare and all the death, destruction, chaos, terrorism, rape and suffering that necessarily comes with war. The only way that you can possibly regard neoconservatism as just one more set of political opinions is if you completely compartmentalize away from the reality of everything that it is.

This should not happen. The tensions with Russia that these monsters have worked so hard to escalate could blow up at any moment; there are too many moving parts, too many things that could go wrong. The last Cold War brought our species within a hair's breadth of total annihilation due to our inability to foresee all possible complications which can arise from such a contest, and these depraved death cultists are trying to drag us back into another one. Nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth risking the life of every organism on earth, but they're risking it all for geopolitical influence.

... ... ...

I've had a very interesting last 24 hours. My article about Senator John McCain (which I titled "Please Just Fucking Die Already" because the title I really wanted to use seemed a bit crass) has received an amount of attention that I'm not accustomed to, from CNN to USA Today to the Washington Post . I watched Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar talking about me on The View . They called me a "Bernie Sanders person." It was a trip. Apparently some very low-level Republican with a few hundred Twitter followers went and retweeted my article with an approving caption, and that sort of thing is worthy of coast-to-coast mainstream coverage in today's America.

This has of course brought in a deluge of angry comments, mostly from people whose social media pages are full of Russiagate nonsense , showing where McCain's current support base comes from. Some call him a war hero, some talk about him like he's a perfectly fine politician, some defend him as just a normal person whose politics I happen to disagree with.

This is insane. This man has actively and enthusiastically pushed for every single act of military aggression that America has engaged in, and some that it hasn't , throughout his entire career. He makes Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton look like a dove. When you look at John McCain, the very first thing you see should not be a former presidential candidate, a former POW or an Arizona Senator; the first thing you see should be the piles of human corpses that he has helped to create. This is not a normal kind of person, and I still do sincerely hope that he dies of natural causes before he can do any more harm.

Can we change this about ourselves, please? None of us should have to live in a world where pushing for more bombing campaigns at every opportunity is an acceptable agenda for a public figure to have. Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us.

-- -- --

I'm a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following me on Twitter , or throwing some money into my hat on Patreon .

[Oct 23, 2019] The Pathocracy Of The Deep State Tyranny At The Hands Of A Psychopathic Government

Highly recommended!
If we assume that most politicians are latent psychopaths, they need to be more tightly controlled by the people. which means no re-election of Senators after two terms.
Notable quotes:
"... " Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths . I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this... That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow -- but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one." ..."
Oct 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

" Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths . I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this... That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow -- but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one."

- Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School

Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: " What's the difference between a politician and a psychopath? "

The answer, then and now, remains the same: None . There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians. Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents , trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars , glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.

Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions , have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyles, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds . Such leaders eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. "At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups," author James G. Long notes. "We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems , and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed."

In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

Incredibly, despite clear evidence of the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government, voters continue to elect psychopaths to positions of power and influence.

According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp , "In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using 'psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.' They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath's characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels -- traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people's lives."

The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.

When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse -- all the while refusing to own up to its failings -- we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.

Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which " operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups ."

Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded , "[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous."

People don't simply line up and salute. It is through one's own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.

Much depends on how leaders " cultivate a sense of identification with their followers ," says Professor Alex Haslam. "I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about 'we' rather than 'I,' and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about 'we-ness' and then getting people to want to act in terms of that 'we-ness,' to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is 'America.'"

The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, "we the people" have become "we the police state."

We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.

Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.

Writing for ThinkProgress , Beauchamp suggests that " one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy ."

But what does this really mean in practical terms?

It means holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff using every available means at our disposal: through investigative journalism (what used to be referred to as the Fourth Estate) that enlightens and informs, through whistleblower complaints that expose corruption, through lawsuits that challenge misconduct, and through protests and mass political action that remind the powers-that-be that "we the people" are the ones that call the shots.

Remember, education precedes action. Citizens need to the do the hard work of educating themselves about what the government is doing and how to hold it accountable. Don't allow yourselves to exist exclusively in an echo chamber that is restricted to views with which you agree. Expose yourself to multiple media sources, independent and mainstream, and think for yourself.

For that matter, no matter what your political leanings might be, don't allow your partisan bias to trump the principles that serve as the basis for our constitutional republic. As Beauchamp notes, "A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check."

That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.

Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.

Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , if you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.

This much I know: we are not faceless numbers. We are not cogs in the machine. We are not slaves.

We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free -- that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.

The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government's appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.

Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be free , and until we can stand firm in the face of threats to our freedoms, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.

fudly , 4 minutes ago link

"There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians."

Could have just left it at that.

Is-Be , 13 minutes ago link

The solution, dear Zerohedge, is to pass a law demanding any official's psychological profile for public scrutiny. (By humans and by our superiors, Artificial Intelligence.)

(I think Is-Be just cracked a funny.)

BiloxiMarxKelly , 18 minutes ago link

http://www.ponerology.com/

Max.Power , 27 minutes ago link

The problem of democracy is that too many are unbelievably naive, and even more are poorly educated.

That's why propaganda always works, regardless of how absurd the narrative is.

herbivore , 29 minutes ago link

"Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars , glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow".

And the people who elect them are colloquially known as dumbasses.

IntercoursetheEU , 29 minutes ago link

The countries with the best psychopaths win ... they call it history.

Manthong , 32 minutes ago link

Gimme a break.

Just because they do not care about hurting people, are irritable, narcissistic, avaricious and lascivious does not mean they are psychopaths.

They are morally superior.

SocratesSolves , 22 minutes ago link

Bravo! The inner workings of psychopathy. All is justified. Included the Joker cults 911 mass murder with dancing after the fact. I want to see real dancing Israelis now. Dancing like hell to try to save their own murderous lives now. That's what we do with murderers out here in the west. We line them up and watch them DANCE for their lives.

Four chan , 22 minutes ago link

one could say gods chosen, or is this lie where the false sence of entitlement began?

Manthong , 21 minutes ago link

They are doing "God's work".

Don't worry about the slave trading, usury or death count thing.

PrintCash , 32 minutes ago link

What I find hilarious is the psychopathic politicians/bureaucrats/cia-fbi types/all matter of deep staters getting upset at Trumps words/tweets/style.

Pilfering the country for profit perfectly ok. Unseemly (by their standards) speech or tweets are not.

See, while they are pilfering Uncle Sam, ie you, they do it with charm (one of the strongest signs of a psychopath) and manners. What a narcissist/psychopath fears most is being outed as a fraud. And unfortunately, as long as Washington DC plays nice, throws in some lines about American values, helping the less fortunate, helping the kids, the majority fall in line with their pilfering, and whatever they want goes.

What they fear most about Trump is he hurts their Big Government brand. Either by his rhetoric, his logic, his investigative actions, or his brassness. This also includes Republicans, who only fell in line when the base forced them to fall in line.

Epstein101 , 35 minutes ago link

Big Tech Oligarchs' Best Tool for Censoring the Internet: The ADL

SocratesSolves , 18 minutes ago link

Just another *** shell game

Omni Consumer Product , 37 minutes ago link

Ahh, now we're talking about topics of substance:

There is no form of government, no perfect "ism" that can withstand the real-world effects of psycopaths at the top.

Until that problem is solved, history will continue to repeat.

http://pathocracy.net/

[Oct 23, 2019] Tulsi Versus Clinton World: The Fight Democrats Need to Have by Matt Purple

Notable quotes:
"... It was this curious arrangement that Tulsi Gabbard ran smack into earlier this week. Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii and Democratic presidential candidate, was attacked seemingly out of nowhere by Hillary, who implied that the Russians might somehow be controlling her. "I'm not making any predictions," Clinton intoned on a podcast, "but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate." ..."
"... It was a base (and baseless) smear, and it drew a furious response. Gabbard tweeted that Clinton was "queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long." She also dared Clinton to jump into the race, declaring that the primary was now effectively between the two of them. ..."
"... in a more macro sense, she's correct. Of all the dividing lines vivisecting the Democratic Party right now, there's an important and understated one that runs between Clinton World and everything that Gabbard has come to represent. At issue is whether or not one family ought to be able to run the Democratic National Committee like its own LLC, installing loyalists as its leaders, freezing its foreign policy in the past, embarrassing it with self-serving fabrications. ..."
"... Preserve the brand even at the expense of the party : that's what the Clintons have always done. ..."
"... The common denominator in Clinton World is always personal short-term gain; all else, including political reality, is subordinated to that. And even when they lose, they still linger, their business more like a monopoly, having accumulated so much personnel power as to immunize it from market forces. ..."
"... Gabbard, then, isn't Clinton World's most formidable opponent, but right now she looks like its clearest antithesis. Her knight's move has been to take the Clintons off the grounds of personal accomplishment and put them on the harsher terrain of policy accomplishment ..."
"... Hillary is less eager, meanwhile, to discuss her and her husband's writ large policy records, given the current revolt against the liberal internationalism and Third Way centrism they've long regarded as de rigueur . Gabbard not only brings this up, her entire candidacy is a homing missile aimed at the establishment's failed foreign policy, one of its most gaping vulnerabilities. While Clinton World thrashes on the floor screeching at the Russian nanobots in their nose hairs, Gabbard offers up informed critiques of actual events. ..."
"... THANK YOU TULSI GABBARD for opening this debate on the direction our national diplomacy should take in the future, for demanding a reassessment of the old Cold War approach that abandoned the Constitutional requirement that wars be declared by Congress. ..."
"... It doesn't look like she has much of a chance, but I admire Ms. Gabbard's integrity and forthrightness. ..."
"... Well spoken. Indeed, one doesn't have to buy all her policy positions or support her nomination campaign. But Gabbard is worthy of the kind of genuine respect ..."
Oct 23, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Is there anything sadder in the year 2019 than to be a hanger-on of the Clintons? It's the one form of communitarianism even we here at TAC can oppose. Five years back, the New York Times pointed its telescope at what it called Clinton World, the seemingly endless ecosystem of staffers, clients, strategists, old friends, wonks, flatterers, henchmen, consiglieres, and hired dog walkers who have latched on to the Clintons over the years. The takeaway for the Times was that such a vast coterie is difficult to control, a big rig that can only turn so quickly -- but one quote in particular stands out. Said a Clinton friend of Clinton World: "Some people get eaten up by the charisma and forget that, in the end, it is a business."

And that's just it right there. Has anyone ever fine-tuned the business-ification of politics as have the Clintons? Their conquering of the Democratic Party over the past 25 years has often felt like a corporate takeover, the absorption of a nationwide political apparatus into a family syndicate that exists to build and burnish the brand of a single couple.

It was this curious arrangement that Tulsi Gabbard ran smack into earlier this week. Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii and Democratic presidential candidate, was attacked seemingly out of nowhere by Hillary, who implied that the Russians might somehow be controlling her. "I'm not making any predictions," Clinton intoned on a podcast, "but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate."

It was a base (and baseless) smear, and it drew a furious response. Gabbard tweeted that Clinton was "queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long." She also dared Clinton to jump into the race, declaring that the primary was now effectively between the two of them.

She's wrong about that, of course, at least in the literal sense. Gabbard, who rarely clears 2 percent in the polls, has little chance of winning the Democratic nomination. But in a more macro sense, she's correct. Of all the dividing lines vivisecting the Democratic Party right now, there's an important and understated one that runs between Clinton World and everything that Gabbard has come to represent. At issue is whether or not one family ought to be able to run the Democratic National Committee like its own LLC, installing loyalists as its leaders, freezing its foreign policy in the past, embarrassing it with self-serving fabrications.

The reason Clinton slimed Tulsi as a Russian patsy is because Clinton herself is obsessed with Russia. Over and over again, she's blamed her own loss on their supposed meddling in the 2016 election, even going so far as to call Donald Trump's presidency "illegitimate." This is partly understandable -- no one wants to accept fault for difficult failures, least of all when the entire country is watching -- and partly egotistical. But the belief that maybe Hillary really won, which extends well beyond the candidate herself and throughout Clinton World, is also good business. However scant the evidence might be that the Russians heave-hoed votes in Wisconsin, the Clintonian goal is always to guard their own -- "protect the shield," in the nonsensical words of the NFL. Better, then, to hang around Democrats' neck a nutty conspiracy theory then to admit, even all these years later, that the Clinton product might not be what it once was.

Preserve the brand even at the expense of the party : that's what the Clintons have always done. It's why Bill dragged the Democrats into the realm of adolescent word parsing ("the definition of sex") rather than admit to his affair with Monica Lewinsky from the start. It's why he was willing to triangulate during his presidency, chucking half the party platform off the wagon in order to ensure he could net legislative victories. It's why Hillary obtusely insisted on running in 2008 and 2016, even though anyone paying attention knew these would be populist years with her cast in role of Dickens' Monseigneur. The common denominator in Clinton World is always personal short-term gain; all else, including political reality, is subordinated to that. And even when they lose, they still linger, their business more like a monopoly, having accumulated so much personnel power as to immunize it from market forces.

Still, all the bumps and losses have at least somewhat diminished the Clintons. There is little enthusiasm for another Hillary rev of the engine, no matter how badly she seems to want one. As for Bill, when people say they're nostalgic for the 1990s, they generally mean boy bands and Legends of the Hidden Temple , not blue dresses. Now enter Tulsi Gabbard. She is both a walking repudiation of Clinton World and a product of its failures. A former vice chair at the DNC, she resigned after it became clear the organization intended to slight Bernie Sanders' presidential candidacy in favor of Hillary's. A political neophyte, she's running a barebones campaign, in contrast to Clinton World's legions. She remains unsullied by the corrupt Democratic influencers of yore, from Goldman Sachs to Jeffrey Epstein, all of whom the Clintons have rubbed elbows with. And most importantly, she served as a National Guard medic in Iraq and came away jaded by the very wars Hillary keeps endorsing.

Gabbard, then, isn't Clinton World's most formidable opponent, but right now she looks like its clearest antithesis. Her knight's move has been to take the Clintons off the grounds of personal accomplishment and put them on the harsher terrain of policy accomplishment. Hillary loves to tout her (substantial) record of public service as a woman, but Gabbard, a war veteran, can claim that too. Hillary is less eager, meanwhile, to discuss her and her husband's writ large policy records, given the current revolt against the liberal internationalism and Third Way centrism they've long regarded as de rigueur . Gabbard not only brings this up, her entire candidacy is a homing missile aimed at the establishment's failed foreign policy, one of its most gaping vulnerabilities. While Clinton World thrashes on the floor screeching at the Russian nanobots in their nose hairs, Gabbard offers up informed critiques of actual events.

The contrast is unavoidable, and it's made Clinton World look one slice short of a (faux New York-style) pizza. (It's always wrong to say that conspiracy theories are the sole province of "the fringes"; they can afflict the center, too, and they're all the more embarrassing when they do.) Sure enough, fade to Iowa, where voters are expressing renewed interest in Gabbard. One told the Associated Press that Hillary's smear was "divisive and despicable" and said he likes Tulsi's "anti-regime-change message," while another accused Clinton of "sowing division in the primary." As it turns out, protecting the brand of a couple that hasn't won a nationwide election in 23 years is not a priority in flyover country.

It may be that this is the year the Democrats are finally ready to cast out the Clintons for good, along with all their attendant wars and machinations and courtiers. If so, the strongest tonic they could swallow would be the campaign of Tulsi Gabbard. You don't have to support her candidacy (I don't) to appreciate what she's trying to do here.

Matt Purple is the managing editor of The American Conservative.

Will Wilkin • 9 hours ago • edited

Tulsi Gabbard has volunteered twice to serve active duty in the US military, and continues today as a Major in the Army National Guard...definitely NOT a "Russian asset" but rather a very patriotic American. The worst thing about HRC's slander against Ms. Gabbard (and the repeats of that slander by other Dem party operatives and even major media publishers of HRC-echoing op-eds) is that the endless-undeclared-multiple-wars party won't debate the merits of their approach but rather only accuse opponents of treason.

THANK YOU TULSI GABBARD for opening this debate on the direction our national diplomacy should take in the future, for demanding a reassessment of the old Cold War approach that abandoned the Constitutional requirement that wars be declared by Congress. THANK YOU TULSI GABBARD for your military service to our country, for your public service in various elected offices, and now for your campaign that forces these issues back into the national debate.

Ronald C.Williams • 8 hours ago
It doesn't look like she has much of a chance, but I admire Ms. Gabbard's integrity and forthrightness. She ought to at least rate a cabinet position if a Democrat becomes president. (SecDef, or State or National Security Advisor, perhaps?). I hope she keeps hammering away on the foreign policy issue.
Tim • 7 hours ago
Well spoken. Indeed, one doesn't have to buy all her policy positions or support her nomination campaign. But Gabbard is worthy of the kind of genuine respect that will elude HRC's legacy.

What she coerced in life will be denied her for eternity, methinks. But Gabbard, however she may fare this time around, has upside. Because she's the real deal.

There is such a hole where our leadership should be, an enormous surfeit of vacuity in the leadership ranks on both sides of the ball that looks to be the curse of our time. It wouldn't bother me a bit if she helped fill the void.

Alex (the one that likes Ike) • 7 hours ago
Protecting the faded brand indeed. Because it's the sole explanation of a situation when someone starts dividing a party a year before the election and after an impeachment debacle, aside from idiocy in both colloquial, clinical and ancient Greek meaning.

Russian agents behind Gabbard, Russian agents behind Stein, Russian agents behind Trump, Russian agents behind Clinton's fridge. And it's not said by a 5-year-old girl. It keeps on being said by a grown-up woman who, basically, rules one of America's two biggest parties. It starts feeling like some tragifarce already.

[Oct 23, 2019] The Atlantic Council Strikes Back! caucus99percent

Notable quotes:
"... NATO has become an end run around the UN in legitimizing our dirty little wars. No wonder they are going after Tulsi. ..."
"... War and spooks. It makes it me absolutely disgusted to see intelligent, left-leaning people following obvious traps into xenophobia and fascism. People I love talking about Russian conspiracies, foreign "assets", etc. ..."
Oct 23, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

konondrum on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 12:57pm

What was Hillary Clinton thinking? The 2016 Democratic nominee, for some reason, felt the need to insert herself into the 2020 race with an attack on Tulsi Gabbard, an oddball Democratic presidential contender who barely registered in polls. The congresswoman from Hawaii is a completely discreditable candidate -- more on that in a moment -- but Clinton's accusation that Gabbard is a tool of the Russians was so blunt and clumsy that it has added new life to a primary bid that should never have existed in the first place. Within a day, Gabbard was already fundraising off of it, a development as predictable as a sunrise.

Oh no! The great neo-liberal hope proves herself inept again, and the rest of the spooks get antsy. Damn it Hillary, you're not supposed to directly say that. You're supposed to imply it from unverifiable sources. Geez, you're making us all look like amateurs over here.

Here we are again, watching the people that foiseted Her onto us in the first place, gnashing their teeth because she can't play even the most elementary of politics.

Moreover, Clinton is also right that both Stein and Gabbard are favorites of the Russian government, which has rushed social-media bots and state-controlled media to their defense at various times. Stein even got a seat at a dinner with Vladimir Putin, an honor one might think is a bit out of the weight class of a super-minor American candidate. The fact that Stein was sitting at the same table as Putin, along with the retired general, future Donald Trump appointee, and current felon Michael Flynn, should have raised alarm bells because Putin never wastes a minute of his day on people who cannot be of use to him. But once Trump was in the race, Russia focused its efforts on getting him elected, and Stein was left to do what damage she could as a third-party spoiler.

And this is great! We're just going to repeat everything she said, embellish it, and pretend like it's common knowledge! Brilliant!

Makes Kamala's answer the other day look especially telling. Well, of course , everyone knows that... But god, don't say that out loud!

Minor edits for spelling and clarity

Atlantic Council = NATO

The Atlantic Council of the United States was established in 1961 by former Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter to bolster support for NATO. The name is derivative of North Atlantic Council, the highest governing body of NATO.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-insiduous-role-of-the-atlantic-council...

NATO creates war...

+ On April 23, 1999, NATO rocketed the central studio of Radio Televisija Srbije (RTS), the state-owned broadcasting corporation in Belgrade, destroying the building. Sixteen civilian employees of RTS were killed and 16 wounded. Amnesty International concluded the attack was a war crime.

+ In a Feb. 12, 2010 atrocity that was kept secret until March 13, US Special Forces killed a teenage girl, a pregnant mother of 10, a pregnant mother of 6, a police officer and his brother, and were accused of then trying to cover-up the killings by digging bullets out of the victims' bodies, washing the wounds with alcohol and lying to superior officers.

+ While bombing Libya in March 2011, NATO refused to aid a group of 72 migrants adrift in the Mediterranean Sea. Only nine people on board survived. The refusal was condemned as criminal by the Council of Europe.

+ On Nov. 26, 2011, NATO jets bombed and rocketed an allied Pakistani military base for two hours, killing 26 Pakistani soldiers and wounding dozens more. NATO refuses to apologize

.
https://theduran.com/worse-than-obsolete-nato-creates-enemies/

And now they are including Columbia and Brazil...how convenient that they both border Venezuela
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-brazil-latam-interview-idUSKCN1R...

NATO has become an end run around the UN in legitimizing our dirty little wars. No wonder they are going after Tulsi.

konondrum on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 1:23pm
NATO is in the business of war, hot or cold

War and spooks. It makes it me absolutely disgusted to see intelligent, left-leaning people following obvious traps into xenophobia and fascism. People I love talking about Russian conspiracies, foreign "assets", etc.

My wife is from Hawaii, and she used to respect Tulsi a great deal. It's heartbreaking for me to watch her fall for this shit.

Lookout on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 1:26pm
What is she falling over?

@konondrum

They are coming after her because she is calling out their dirty little wars. You think she is a NATO supporter?

konondrum on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 1:37pm
To be honest

@Lookout I think it's because she actually went to school for Political Science. She was in fact, an intern in the Clinton administration.

Now, she left politics because she was disgusted by it.... I can only imagine how gross it is up close and personal. But, I think like many women of her time, and a true feminist, she's fallen for Hillary's victimization game.

When I told her I made my first political donation yesterday, she was excited. When I told her it was to Tusi, for what Clinton had said, she became immediately combative. But when, I in exasperation, yelled "I'M DOING IT TO DEFEND A WOMAN!" I think it finally clicked. I'm hoping that maybe she can finally see that she is just a nasty, vindictive woman.

#2

They are coming after her because she is calling out their dirty little wars. You think she is a NATO supporter?

Lookout on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 1:54pm
Didn't realize who "her" was, sorry.

@konondrum

Thought you meant Tulsi had fallen for some BS.

#2.1 I think it's because she actually went to school for Political Science. She was in fact, an intern in the Clinton administration.

Now, she left politics because she was disgusted by it.... I can only imagine how gross it is up close and personal. But, I think like many women of her time, and a true feminist, she's fallen for Hillary's victimization game.

When I told her I made my first political donation yesterday, she was excited. When I told her it was to Tusi, for what Clinton had said, she became immediately combative. But when, I in exasperation, yelled "I'M DOING IT TO DEFEND A WOMAN!" I think it finally clicked. I'm hoping that maybe she can finally see that she is just a nasty, vindictive woman.

edg on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 4:18pm
Great comment.

@lizzyh7

Feminism isn't about saying women are better than men but saying women are as capable as men.

Exactly right. My wife and I own a company. She's better at sales and customer service than I am, so she does that. I'm better at marketing and technology issues, so I do that. We each have strengths and weaknesses. The best policy for us, and I posit for society in general, is to base decisions on quantifiable facts, not on gender.

#2.1.1 may consider herself a true feminist, her unrelenting support of women as THE answer to our problems says to me, in my own opinion, she's really no feminist. Feminism isn't about saying women are better than men but saying women are as capable as men. To me, the uttering of women who say, like some twit in the media a couple weeks ago, that "women aren't corrupt" is actually a highly sexist thing to say. Women with real power in our corrupt system are indeed as corrupt as any man is and seem fully capable of using their corruption to get ahead. And there have been many women historically who proved that capability rather well.

I have a couple of friends who are on the same wavelength in too many ways for me. Both are younger than I am so some of that might be generational differences in perception, but I think a lot of it is also the media hype of MeToo, Trump, etc. I get extremely frustrated with them at times but I have learned lately not to even respond to the latest outrage and keep reminding them, which both do not really like, that woman or man, in this world, that choice matters about as much as the one between R and D...

Hillary and her disgusting minions sicken me with their sexism talk. They make an open mockery of real sexism and they feel absolutely no shame doing it. Anything to get ahead after all, they do not care how many real women they step on, bomb, and kill to get there either.

Snode on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 5:31pm
I think

@edg generally, women just think a little different. It was a woman, accountant, that confronted Ken Lay and brought down Enron. She had nothing to gain. It was a woman FBI agent that noticed foreign nationals were taking flying lessons that didn't include landing an aircraft. Her observations were dismissed. Men say, do this, you will prosper, women say do this, it's the right thing to do. Because that's what they teach their kids. Yes, women can emulate men, the glass ceiling omits that those standing on the top rung are standing on the fingers of those below them. But damn it, we need a different way of thinking.

#2.1.1.2

Feminism isn't about saying women are better than men but saying women are as capable as men.

Exactly right. My wife and I own a company. She's better at sales and customer service than I am, so she does that. I'm better at marketing and technology issues, so I do that. We each have strengths and weaknesses. The best policy for us, and I posit for society in general, is to base decisions on quantifiable facts, not on gender.

Cant Stop the M... on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 6:03pm
Feminism is about creating a world in which

@lizzyh7

women are not shamed, objectified, exploited, deprived of choice, deprived of freedom, deprived of opportunity, abused, or killed for being women.

#2.1.1 may consider herself a true feminist, her unrelenting support of women as THE answer to our problems says to me, in my own opinion, she's really no feminist. Feminism isn't about saying women are better than men but saying women are as capable as men. To me, the uttering of women who say, like some twit in the media a couple weeks ago, that "women aren't corrupt" is actually a highly sexist thing to say. Women with real power in our corrupt system are indeed as corrupt as any man is and seem fully capable of using their corruption to get ahead. And there have been many women historically who proved that capability rather well.

I have a couple of friends who are on the same wavelength in too many ways for me. Both are younger than I am so some of that might be generational differences in perception, but I think a lot of it is also the media hype of MeToo, Trump, etc. I get extremely frustrated with them at times but I have learned lately not to even respond to the latest outrage and keep reminding them, which both do not really like, that woman or man, in this world, that choice matters about as much as the one between R and D...

Hillary and her disgusting minions sicken me with their sexism talk. They make an open mockery of real sexism and they feel absolutely no shame doing it. Anything to get ahead after all, they do not care how many real women they step on, bomb, and kill to get there either.

FutureNow on Mon, 10/21/2019 - 7:31am
Like any other faith-based ideology,

@lizzyh7
feminism is as feminism does.

#2.1.1 may consider herself a true feminist, her unrelenting support of women as THE answer to our problems says to me, in my own opinion, she's really no feminist. Feminism isn't about saying women are better than men but saying women are as capable as men. To me, the uttering of women who say, like some twit in the media a couple weeks ago, that "women aren't corrupt" is actually a highly sexist thing to say. Women with real power in our corrupt system are indeed as corrupt as any man is and seem fully capable of using their corruption to get ahead. And there have been many women historically who proved that capability rather well.

I have a couple of friends who are on the same wavelength in too many ways for me. Both are younger than I am so some of that might be generational differences in perception, but I think a lot of it is also the media hype of MeToo, Trump, etc. I get extremely frustrated with them at times but I have learned lately not to even respond to the latest outrage and keep reminding them, which both do not really like, that woman or man, in this world, that choice matters about as much as the one between R and D...

Hillary and her disgusting minions sicken me with their sexism talk. They make an open mockery of real sexism and they feel absolutely no shame doing it. Anything to get ahead after all, they do not care how many real women they step on, bomb, and kill to get there either.

OzoneTom on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 1:41pm
It seemed out of place until I re-read

@Lookout
"..watch her fall for this shit."
Reading the "her" as being the wife made more sense.

#2

They are coming after her because she is calling out their dirty little wars. You think she is a NATO supporter?

konondrum on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 1:28pm
I love this too...

Gabbard herself has already ruled out such a challenge, but that is beside the point. Gabbard has now vowed to take her fight to the convention, where she might argue that the nominee, whom Clinton will applaud and support, is just another tool of the Democratic, neoconservative, neoliberal, warmongering, globalist establishment.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Le Frog on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 1:29pm
We can say with certainty that Omnishambles Clinton

is a Donald Trump asset.

I sure hope that Tulsi gets a boost out of this nonsense. No matter what one may think of her as a candidate, I am all for a bigger group of voices, and I am definitely on my feet applauding Tulsi's response.

Correct me if this is wrong, but I saw a graphic on Twitter or Reddit last night that may very well explain why Tulsi Gabbard was targeted by the Great White Failure: every one of the major candidates were either Clinton state delegates or Clinton superdelegates - with the exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Also floating around was the Wikileaks email from the Clinton Cabal to Tulsi, chastising her for resigning. Suddenly, the vicious and vindictive swipe makes sense.

There was also lot of speculation online too about whether the Ghoul of Politics Past was testing the smear job waters to see what would knock Tulsi, with the plan to debut the same hits against Bernie Sanders. I can believe it.

Just to throw the question out there too: do you think other candidates should be asked about this? I'm now of two minds. On one hand, I believe it's a fair question, and I especially want to hear all of them demanding that Clinton provide proof of her pretty serious allegations. Seems to me that no one has asked for the receipts yet. On the other, the press shouldn't have time to be asking candidates what they think; they should all be swarming Hillary Clinton, demanding to see her alleged evidence. A third part of me wonders why we are still giving this human herpes any attention whatsoever. She should be relegated to the same heap that Glenn Beck currently occupies, where no one gives a rat's ass about her or her "opinions."

OzoneTom on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 1:59pm
I believe that Jill Stein might be able to press a case

@Le Frog
Based on Fmr. Sec. Clinton's libelous statement. The language was more direct and absolute.

Rep. Gabbard should get a bump but she, and certainly Sen. Sanders, have bigger fish to fry than jumping up and down every time Her rattles the car keys.

is a Donald Trump asset.

I sure hope that Tulsi gets a boost out of this nonsense. No matter what one may think of her as a candidate, I am all for a bigger group of voices, and I am definitely on my feet applauding Tulsi's response.

Correct me if this is wrong, but I saw a graphic on Twitter or Reddit last night that may very well explain why Tulsi Gabbard was targeted by the Great White Failure: every one of the major candidates were either Clinton state delegates or Clinton superdelegates - with the exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Also floating around was the Wikileaks email from the Clinton Cabal to Tulsi, chastising her for resigning. Suddenly, the vicious and vindictive swipe makes sense.

There was also lot of speculation online too about whether the Ghoul of Politics Past was testing the smear job waters to see what would knock Tulsi, with the plan to debut the same hits against Bernie Sanders. I can believe it.

Just to throw the question out there too: do you think other candidates should be asked about this? I'm now of two minds. On one hand, I believe it's a fair question, and I especially want to hear all of them demanding that Clinton provide proof of her pretty serious allegations. Seems to me that no one has asked for the receipts yet. On the other, the press shouldn't have time to be asking candidates what they think; they should all be swarming Hillary Clinton, demanding to see her alleged evidence. A third part of me wonders why we are still giving this human herpes any attention whatsoever. She should be relegated to the same heap that Glenn Beck currently occupies, where no one gives a rat's ass about her or her "opinions."

Le Frog on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 2:05pm
The smear on Jill Stein was unbelievable

@OzoneTom I would love to see a lawsuit from Jill Stein.

#4
Based on Fmr. Sec. Clinton's libelous statement. The language was more direct and absolute.

Rep. Gabbard should get a bump but she, and certainly Sen. Sanders, have bigger fish to fry than jumping up and down every time Her rattles the car keys.

Lookout on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 1:52pm
Posted this discussion in another essay....

@Le Frog

...but it fits this conversation too
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/20/max-blumenthal-on-why-hillary-clinton... (22 min)
Max Blumenthal says that Clinton's comments reflect a continued effort by Democratic neo-liberals to deflect responsibility for their loss to Trump in 2016; marginalize voices like Gabbard and Stein's who challenge their pro-war, corporatist agenda; and preview their potential future attacks on Bernie Sanders.

is a Donald Trump asset.

I sure hope that Tulsi gets a boost out of this nonsense. No matter what one may think of her as a candidate, I am all for a bigger group of voices, and I am definitely on my feet applauding Tulsi's response.

Correct me if this is wrong, but I saw a graphic on Twitter or Reddit last night that may very well explain why Tulsi Gabbard was targeted by the Great White Failure: every one of the major candidates were either Clinton state delegates or Clinton superdelegates - with the exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Also floating around was the Wikileaks email from the Clinton Cabal to Tulsi, chastising her for resigning. Suddenly, the vicious and vindictive swipe makes sense.

There was also lot of speculation online too about whether the Ghoul of Politics Past was testing the smear job waters to see what would knock Tulsi, with the plan to debut the same hits against Bernie Sanders. I can believe it.

Just to throw the question out there too: do you think other candidates should be asked about this? I'm now of two minds. On one hand, I believe it's a fair question, and I especially want to hear all of them demanding that Clinton provide proof of her pretty serious allegations. Seems to me that no one has asked for the receipts yet. On the other, the press shouldn't have time to be asking candidates what they think; they should all be swarming Hillary Clinton, demanding to see her alleged evidence. A third part of me wonders why we are still giving this human herpes any attention whatsoever. She should be relegated to the same heap that Glenn Beck currently occupies, where no one gives a rat's ass about her or her "opinions."

snoopydawg on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 7:02pm
Wikileaks on Tulsi's 'betrayal'

@Le Frog

Representative Gabbard, We were very disappointed to hear that you would resign your position with the DNC so you could endorse Bernie Sanders, a man who has never been a Democrat before. When we met over dinner a couple of years ago I was so impressed by your intellect, your passion, and commitment to getting things done on behalf of the American people. For you to endorse a man who has spent almost 40 years in public office with very few accomplishments, doesn't fall in line with what we previously thought of you. Hillary Clinton will be our party's nominee and you standing on ceremony to support the sinking Bernie Sanders ship is disrespectful to Hillary Clinton. A woman who has spent the vast majority of her life in public service and working on behalf of women, families, and the underserved. You have called both myself and Michael Kives before about helping your campaign raise money, we no longer trust your judgement so will not be raising money for your campaign.

Darnell Strom & Michael Kives

Ooh..bet that hurt.

These are the guys who represent lots of powerful people in government, the media and Hollywood. If you want to go anywhere then you need them on your side.

is a Donald Trump asset.

I sure hope that Tulsi gets a boost out of this nonsense. No matter what one may think of her as a candidate, I am all for a bigger group of voices, and I am definitely on my feet applauding Tulsi's response.

Correct me if this is wrong, but I saw a graphic on Twitter or Reddit last night that may very well explain why Tulsi Gabbard was targeted by the Great White Failure: every one of the major candidates were either Clinton state delegates or Clinton superdelegates - with the exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Also floating around was the Wikileaks email from the Clinton Cabal to Tulsi, chastising her for resigning. Suddenly, the vicious and vindictive swipe makes sense.

There was also lot of speculation online too about whether the Ghoul of Politics Past was testing the smear job waters to see what would knock Tulsi, with the plan to debut the same hits against Bernie Sanders. I can believe it.

Just to throw the question out there too: do you think other candidates should be asked about this? I'm now of two minds. On one hand, I believe it's a fair question, and I especially want to hear all of them demanding that Clinton provide proof of her pretty serious allegations. Seems to me that no one has asked for the receipts yet. On the other, the press shouldn't have time to be asking candidates what they think; they should all be swarming Hillary Clinton, demanding to see her alleged evidence. A third part of me wonders why we are still giving this human herpes any attention whatsoever. She should be relegated to the same heap that Glenn Beck currently occupies, where no one gives a rat's ass about her or her "opinions."

konondrum on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 2:04pm
Check out the author of this piece too.... Looks like a fun guy!

Thomas M. Nichols
He closes the article with this tidbit -

As a former Republican who will vote for the Democratic nominee again in 2020, I hope that I never have to talk about Tulsi Gabbard again. I can only hope that enough Democratic Party leaders can convince Hillary Clinton to feel the same way.

Check out his book! -

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters (!!!!)

Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer service model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both.

doh1304 on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 4:12pm
Someone famous said the same thing in like 1850

@konondrum @konondrum
But I can't remember who. The big quote was something like, "In America every shopkeeper is an expert."

Thomas M. Nichols
He closes the article with this tidbit -

As a former Republican who will vote for the Democratic nominee again in 2020, I hope that I never have to talk about Tulsi Gabbard again. I can only hope that enough Democratic Party leaders can convince Hillary Clinton to feel the same way.

Check out his book! -

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters (!!!!)

Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer service model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both.

The Liberal Moonbat on Mon, 10/21/2019 - 6:31am
I HATE being right

@konondrum This is just what I need: My worst of all fears confirmed.

It wasn't so long ago that "standing up to experts" was just something crank Texas dentists got skewered by Stephen Colbert for...but now?

Thomas M. Nichols
He closes the article with this tidbit -

As a former Republican who will vote for the Democratic nominee again in 2020, I hope that I never have to talk about Tulsi Gabbard again. I can only hope that enough Democratic Party leaders can convince Hillary Clinton to feel the same way.

Check out his book! -

The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters (!!!!)

Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer service model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both.

konondrum on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 2:52pm
"misguided intellectual egalitarianism"

Ohhhhh.... it's poetry!

Alright, I'm just going to leave it here, and soak in a nice warm bath of irony.

Dr. John Carpenter on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 5:13pm
One thing I'm real curious about

Will any of HER buddies address anything in Tulsi's tweet aside from Russia? I think not. HER is going to have to take the "rot" comment on the chin because I'm sure they really really don't want to have that conversation.

So, I am glad Tulsi opened that door and I hope she doesn't let up on it. Russiagate is, after all, a symptom of the corruption in the party, just like Trump is.

Shahryar on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 5:16pm
Hillary Rot-ham Clinton

I really do think the woman is insane.

Lookout on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 5:56pm
Another fun piece... and Tulsi's latest

from Tim Black...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ja8tpElxlo (35 min - the first 20 or so should do you)
2 min

//www.youtube.com/embed/NJ9ofm5y-pQ?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

gulfgal98 on Mon, 10/21/2019 - 5:21am
Glad to see Tim Black's latest piece posted here

@Lookout I watched it yesterday and was amazed by his take on it, especially after he had harsh words for Tulsi regarding her version of Medicare for All. To be sure, Time Black is a big Bernie supporter, but his latest on Tulsi is excellent.

from Tim Black...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ja8tpElxlo (35 min - the first 20 or so should do you)
2 min

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==

MrWebster on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 6:57pm
Just as Bernie made m4a a thing Tulsi made regime change a thing

I was sorta confused about why Hillary did it. Mostly I thought to open door to attack Bernie. In many ways that door is closed now given the reaction of the masses. I now think Hillary's comments were meant to sideline not so much the candidate Tulsi but her messages of anti-war and anti-regime change. I think her constant iteration just like Bernie's constant iteration of m4a, was reaching people way beyond her poll numbers.

It boils down to this:

Atlantic Council (war mongers) = regime change and war is good. Losing ground.
Tulsi: regime change and war is bad. Winning ground.

Tulsi's influence goes beyond her poll numbers. She is thee most dangerous candidate to the establishment because she is winning the ideological battle over foreign policy and war.

OzoneTom on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 8:15pm
Her was trying to draw Bernie in to resuscitate the Russia line

@MrWebster
Nothing today should be about Her. It is straight from the Trump playbook. Allowing this absurd slander to distract us from keeping our eyes on the prize is a win for Her.

Senator Sanders and Representative Gabbard are moving ahead on the front. They are depending on the rest of us to resist on the flanks.

"Not me, Us!" is not just a slogan...

I was sorta confused about why Hillary did it. Mostly I thought to open door to attack Bernie. In many ways that door is closed now given the reaction of the masses. I now think Hillary's comments were meant to sideline not so much the candidate Tulsi but her messages of anti-war and anti-regime change. I think her constant iteration just like Bernie's constant iteration of m4a, was reaching people way beyond her poll numbers.

It boils down to this:

Atlantic Council (war mongers) = regime change and war is good. Losing ground.
Tulsi: regime change and war is bad. Winning ground.

Tulsi's influence goes beyond her poll numbers. She is thee most dangerous candidate to the establishment because she is winning the ideological battle over foreign policy and war.

gulfgal98 on Mon, 10/21/2019 - 5:29am
^^^This!!!^^^

@MrWebster Excellent comment that reflects my own view of what is going on here.

Just as Bernie's 2016 Presidential campaign has greatly changed the dommestic policy landscape, the oligarchy and the MIC are seeing that Tulsi Gabbard's 2020 Presidential campaign is beginning to take hold in changing the political landscape foreign policy wise. The empire is coming apart and they are lashing back.

I was sorta confused about why Hillary did it. Mostly I thought to open door to attack Bernie. In many ways that door is closed now given the reaction of the masses. I now think Hillary's comments were meant to sideline not so much the candidate Tulsi but her messages of anti-war and anti-regime change. I think her constant iteration just like Bernie's constant iteration of m4a, was reaching people way beyond her poll numbers.

It boils down to this:

Atlantic Council (war mongers) = regime change and war is good. Losing ground.
Tulsi: regime change and war is bad. Winning ground.

Tulsi's influence goes beyond her poll numbers. She is thee most dangerous candidate to the establishment because she is winning the ideological battle over foreign policy and war.

Fionnsboy on Sun, 10/20/2019 - 8:44pm
It could be a distraction....

...something to do with HER server, wasn't it? But what I REALLY think is going on, and I could be totally wrong, is that Bernie is considering Tulsi as his VP pick, when and if, and this is to sow enough doubt and deceit about Tulsi that it wounds Bernie. But one thing I know for sure: that Clinton hag is one evil bitch!

Hawkfish on Mon, 10/21/2019 - 9:10am
Love your .sig! n/t

@Fionnsboy

...something to do with HER server, wasn't it? But what I REALLY think is going on, and I could be totally wrong, is that Bernie is considering Tulsi as his VP pick, when and if, and this is to sow enough doubt and deceit about Tulsi that it wounds Bernie. But one thing I know for sure: that Clinton hag is one evil bitch!

[Oct 23, 2019] New York Times Fakes The Record About Arming The Syrian Rebels

Notable quotes:
"... Clearly, the US hopes wrench Turkey from the Russian embrace. Moscow's studied indifference toward the US-Turkish cogitations betrays its uneasiness. Conceivably, Erdogan will expect Putin to take a holistic view, considering Russia's flourishing and high lucrative economic and military ties with Turkey and the imperative to preserve the momentum of Russia-Turkey relationship. ..."
"... If the US policy in Syria in recent years promoted the Kurdish identity, it has now swung to the other extreme of stoking the fires of Turkish revanchism. This is potentially catastrophic for regional stability. ..."
"... the main outcome will be that Turkey feels it has western support for its long-term occupation of Syrian territory. ..."
"... Arguably, US expects Turkey's cooperation to strengthen its strategy in Syria (and Iraq) where it seeks to contain Iran's influence. From Ankara, Pompeo travelled to Jerusalem to brief Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. " ..."
Oct 23, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

New York Times Fakes The Record About Arming The Syrian Rebels

History as faked by the New York Times :

Kurds' Sense of Betrayal Compounded by Empowerment of Unsavory Rivals
Ben Hubbard, David D. Kirkpatrick, NYT 18. Oct 2019

Now, [..] the sense of betrayal among the Kurds [..] is matched only by their outrage at who will move in: Turkish soldiers supported by Syrian fighters the United States had long rejected as extremists, criminals and thugs .
...
The deadly battles [..] have also given new leeway to Syrian fighters once considered too extreme or unruly to receive American military support.
...
Grandly misnamed the Syrian National Army, this coalition of Turkish-backed militias is in fact largely composed of the dregs of the eight-year-old conflict's failed rebel movement.

Early in the war [..] the military and the C.I.A. sought to train and equip moderate, trustworthy rebels to fight the government and the Islamic State.

A few of those now fighting in the northeast took part in those failed programs, but most were rejected as too extreme or too criminal . Some have expressed extremist sensibilities or allied with jihadist groups.

The reality is the opposite of what the NYT claims. The majority of the groups now fighting with the Turkish army had earlier received support from the U.S. Even their nominal leader is the same one who the U.S. earlier paid, armed and promoted.

COMPONENTS OF THE NATIONAL ARMY AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE UNIFICATION
Ömer Özkizilcik, SETA, October 2019

On August 31, the Syrian National Coalition came together and elected the president and the cabinet of the Syrian Interim Government in which Abdurrahman Mustafa was elected president and Salim Idriss was elected defense minister . With the new cabinet, the Syrian Interim Government became more active on the ground, started visiting each faction of the National Army, and accelerated the stalled negotiations to unite the National Army and the NLF under one command.
Salim Idriss with U.S. Senator John McCain

bigger
Salim Idriss with Guy Verhofstadt, then leader of the ALDE group in the European Parliament

bigger
Among the 41 factions that joined the merger, 15 are from the NLF and 26 from the National Army. Thirteen of these factions were formed after the United States cut its support to the armed Syrian opposition. Out of the 28 factions, 21 were previously supported by the United States , three of them via the Pentagon's program to combat DAESH. Eighteen of these factions were supplied by the CIA via the MOM Operations Room in Turkey, a joint intelligence operation room of the 'Friends of Syria' to support the armed opposition. Fourteen factions of the 28 were also recipients of the U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank guided missiles.

The SETA study provides a detailed list of the groups involved in the current Turkish invasion of Syria. Not only is their commander Salim Idriss a former U.S. stooge but the majority of these groups did receive U.S. support and weapons.


bigger

The New York Times claim that only "a few of those" who now fight the YPG Kurds took part in the U.S. programs is a blatant lie.

The NYT piece quotes three 'experts' who testify that the 'rebels' the U.S. had armed are really, really bad:

"These are the misfits of the conflict, the worst of the worst," said Hassan Hassan, a Syrian-born scholar tracking the fighting. "They have been notorious for extortion, theft and banditry, more like thugs than rebels -- essentially mercenaries."

It was Hassan Hassan who since the start of the conflict lobbied for arming the rebels from his perch at the UAE's media flagship The National .

Another 'expert' quoted is the Israeli propagandist Elizabeth Tsurkov:

"They are basically gangsters, but they are also racist toward Kurds and other minorities," said Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. "No human should be subjected to their rule."

Tsurkov earlier lauded the Israeli hiring and arming of the very same 'Syrian rebels'.

Another 'expert' quoted by the Times is a co-chair of the 'congressionally sponsored bipartisan Syrian Study Group':

"We are turning areas that had been controlled by our allies over to the control of criminals or thugs, or that in some cases groups were associated or fighting alongside Al Qaeda," said Ms. Stroul, of the Syrian Study Group. "It is a profound and epic strategic blunder."

The 'Syrian Study Group' wants to prolong the war on Syria. Ms. Stroul and her co-chair Michael Singh reside at the Washington Institute which is a part of the Zionist lobby and has long argued for 'arming the Syrian rebels'.

The Times report does not mention that the 'experts' it quotes all once lobbied for arming the very same groups they are now lamenting about. When these groups ran rampant in the areas they took from the Syrian government the Times and its 'experts' were lauding them all the way. No effort to support them was big enough. All crimes they committed were covered up or excused.

Now, as the very same rebels attack the Kurds, they are suddenly called out for being what they always have been.

Posted by b on October 20, 2019 at 11:19 UTC | Permalink

Richard , Oct 20 2019 11:46 utc | 1

Hah! More lies from the NYT....mainstream media in the west has deteriorated into a propaganda channel for the Military Industrial Complex and the oligarchy, pumping out a never ending tide of lying filth aimed at more and more war (more and more weapon sales) and promoting and preserving predatory capitalism (more money for the Billionaire class, less for you).

In my own reading of MSM press and my own watching of the MSM Talking Heads I believe I've indentified 8 techniques that amoral, dangerous, barely competent idiots that have the cheek to call themselves journalists use to lie to you, the reader/viewer/listener. Here's my list...

https://richardhennerley.com/2018/10/16/8-techniques-journalists-use-to-lie-to-you/

DontBelieveEitherPr. , Oct 20 2019 12:12 utc | 2
Okay how practical.
Now only is the NYT trying to whitewash themselves by faking, they are also kind enough to do the same for their Jihadi lovin partners in crime.
How empathic! How sensible! Like a true moral authority.

BTW: It seems my previous claims were right. The Turks made a 180 and allied with the US again, reviving the NATO allaince. Now that the Kurds are out of the way in Turk-US relations, US and NATO has much more to offer than Russia, and noe Erdogan has support from NATO and will not be deterred by Putin.
B, i respect you immensly, but your belief the Turkish invasion was Erdogan doing some secret Putin plan was unproven at the time, and now, AT LEAST since the US-Turk deal, is obsolte.

Read M. K. BHADRAKUMARs blog, he thought like you, but after the US-Turk deal, EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED:

https://indianpunchline.com/us-stokes-the-fires-of-turkish-revanchism/

"The extraordinary US overture to Turkey regarding northern Syria resulted in a joint statement on Thursday, whose ramifications can be rated only in the fulness of time , as several intersecting tracks are running.

The US objectives range from Trump's compulsions in domestic politics to the future trajectory of the US policies toward Syria and the impact of any US-Turkish rapprochement on the geopolitics of the Syrian conflict.

Meanwhile, the US-Turkish joint statement creates new uncertainties. The two countries have agreed on a set of principles -- Turkey's crucial status as a NATO power ; security of Christian minorities in Syria; prevention of an ISIS surge; creation of a "safe zone" on Turkish-Syrian border; a 120-hour ceasefire ("pause") in Turkish military operations leading to a permanent halt, hopefully.

The devil lies in the details. Principally, there is no transparency regarding the future US role in Syria . The Kurds and the US military will withdraw from the 30-kilometre broad buffer zone. What thereafter? In the words of the US Vice-President Mike Pence at the press conference in Ankara on Thursday,

"Kurdish population in Syria, with which we have a strong relationship, will continue to endure. The United States will always be grateful for our partnership with SDF in defeating ISIS, but we recognise the importance and the value of a safe zone to create a buffer between Syria proper and the Kurdish population and -- and the Turkish border. And we're going to be working very closely ."

To be sure, everything devolves upon the creation of the safe zone. Turkey envisages a zone stretching across the entire 440 kilometre border with Syria upto Iraqi border, while the US special envoy James Jeffrey remains non-committal, saying it is up to the "Russians and the Syrians in other areas of the northeast and in Manbij to the west of the Euphrates" to agree to Turkey's maximalist stance.

Herein lies the rub. Jeffrey would know Ankara will never get its way with Moscow and Damascus. In fact, President Bashar al-Assad told in unequivocal terms to a high-level Russian delegation visiting Damascus on Friday, "At the current phase it is necessary to focus on putting an end to aggression and on the pullout of all Turkish, US and other forces illegally present in Syrian territories."

Is there daylight between Moscow and Damascus on this highly sensitive issue? Turkish President Recep Erdogan's forthcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi on October 22 may provide an answer.

Clearly, the US hopes wrench Turkey from the Russian embrace. Moscow's studied indifference toward the US-Turkish cogitations betrays its uneasiness. Conceivably, Erdogan will expect Putin to take a holistic view, considering Russia's flourishing and high lucrative economic and military ties with Turkey and the imperative to preserve the momentum of Russia-Turkey relationship.

If the US policy in Syria in recent years promoted the Kurdish identity, it has now swung to the other extreme of stoking the fires of Turkish revanchism. This is potentially catastrophic for regional stability. The heart of the matter is that while Turkey's concerns over terrorism and the refugee problem are legitimate, Operation Peace Spring has deeper moorings: Turkey's ambitions as regional power and its will to correct the perceived injustice of territorial losses incurred during the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The ultra-nationalistic Turkish commentator (and staunch supporter of Erdogan) wrote this week in the pro-government daily Yeni Safak:

"Turkey once again revived the millennium-old political history on Anatolian territory. It took action with a mission that will carry the legacy of the Seljuks, the Ottomans, the Republic of Turkey to the next stage It is not possible to set an equation in this region by excluding Turkey – it will not happen. A map cannot be drawn that excludes Turkey – it will not happen. A power cannot be established without Turkey – it will not happen. Throughout history, both the rise and fall of this country has altered the region the mind in Turkey is now a regional mind, a regional conscience, a regional identity. President Erdoğan is the pioneer, the bearer of that political legacy from the Seljuks, the Ottomans, and the Turkish Republic to the future."

Trump is unlikely to pay attention to the irredentist instincts in Turkish regional policies. Trump's immediate concerns are to please the evangelical Christian constituency in the US and silence his critics who allege that he threw the Kurds under the bus or that a ISIS resurgence is imminent. But there is no way the US can deliver on the tall promises made in the joint statement. The Kurds have influential friends in the Pentagon. (See the article by Gen. Joseph Votel, former chief of the US Central Command, titled The Danger of Abandoning our Partners.) Nonetheless, the main outcome will be that Turkey feels it has western support for its long-term occupation of Syrian territory.

All in all, it's a "win-win" for Erdogan insofar as he got what he wanted -- US' political and diplomatic support for "the kind of long-term buffer zone that will ensure peace and stability in the region", to borrow the words of Vice President Pence. A Turkish withdrawal from Syrian territory can now be virtually ruled out. State secretary Mike Pompeo added at the press conference in Ankara on Thursday that there is "a great deal of work to do in the region. There's lots of challenges that remain."

Pompeo said Erdogan's "decision to work alongside President Trump will be one that I think will benefit Turkey a great deal." Arguably, US expects Turkey's cooperation to strengthen its strategy in Syria (and Iraq) where it seeks to contain Iran's influence. From Ankara, Pompeo travelled to Jerusalem to brief Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. "

DontBelieveEitherPr. , Oct 20 2019 12:16 utc | 3
Add to that, that the Turks now threaten SAA with "full out war".

John Helmers latest post sheds light on the fact, that the Russian military leadership and the Stavka in general has warned Putin since the Idlib deal again and again to no avail that the Turks would do this.

Which seems now to have been proven true since the US-Turk deal, which in essence changed everything overnight.

http://johnhelmer.net/in-the-war-for-syrias-highway-m4-the-kremlin-turks-have-been-beaten-to-the-punch-by-the-russian-general-staff-foreign-ministry-for-the-moment/

oldhippie , Oct 20 2019 12:21 utc | 4
As the extremity of propaganda in mainstream news becomes more obvious a few American consumers of news do begin to have doubts. Most continue to be entirely uncritical. The barflies here are in the habit of being critical, analytic, skeptical when reading any news from any source. That is not the American way.

The cohort of educated prosperous middle class readers of the NYT has total faith in NYT. Having the paper edition on the doorstep in the morning is a badge of membership. A totem that gives them status. Questioning any word or phrase or clause that appears in print is wrong. Asking questions means something is wrong with you. The Times is never wrong. Those who doubt the Times have mental health issues. Or they are alt-right. Or they are deplorable. For the intended audience the propaganda feed is always completely effective. Readers of the Times will never untie the knot.

oldhippie , Oct 20 2019 12:21 utc | 4
As the extremity of propaganda in mainstream news becomes more obvious a few American consumers of news do begin to have doubts. Most continue to be entirely uncritical. The barflies here are in the habit of being critical, analytic, skeptical when reading any news from any source. That is not the American way.

The cohort of educated prosperous middle class readers of the NYT has total faith in NYT. Having the paper edition on the doorstep in the morning is a badge of membership. A totem that gives them status. Questioning any word or phrase or clause that appears in print is wrong. Asking questions means something is wrong with you. The Times is never wrong. Those who doubt the Times have mental health issues. Or they are alt-right. Or they are deplorable. For the intended audience the propaganda feed is always completely effective. Readers of the Times will never untie the knot.

Walter , Oct 20 2019 12:29 utc | 5
"Why" always seem like a good question, eh? The NYT lies...why?

This quote caught my attention> " The powerful and historical walls to study today are those of the Kremlin." (Fisk, information clearing house)

As it was for Winston's "Ministry of Truth" (Orwell) the NYT article is necessary. That's the significance - not the lies but the necessity of lies...

And under what situations are lies required? Think about that when (if) you read Fisk's analysis. (I am not a fan of Fisk, but his views in this instance align with my own rather well)

Fisk article title> "Trump's disgrace in the Middle East is the death of an empire. Vladimir Putin is Caesar now"

Some may recall that the monks on Mt Athos quietly elected VVP as the Byzantine Emperor (about 2 years ago) - the Eastern branch of Christianity continues whilst nominally christian(western) branch is fake and perverse ritual and worse...while his Popeness in Rome has as Luther saw... I think Luther said it was a vast brothel...

Does this need Daniel to read the writing...


which is?

mene mene tekel upharsin (well somebody said..)

By the way my vote for the clown-man was cast because I reasoned the best esthetic feature in the freak parade at the end of empire would be a clown act. I am indebted to the late George Carlin for the symbolism.

I am proved right? I think so. Dogs bark and caravan continue...and many expect dollars to go weimarish. then?

Red Corvair , Oct 20 2019 12:57 utc | 7
Ahh.. "experts"... Hassan Hassan is not a Syrian-born scholar, but a Syrian "born-scholar"... Nuance. Or is it "a natural-born-scholar"? ...
As for Israeli propagandist Elizabeth Tsurkov, those very same "bad extremists" she now repudiates on Twitter she once excused for mutilating children "because they were deeply traumatised"... A very coherent "expert"!!
From The Grayzone, Ben Norton and Aaron Maté (and Dan Cohen) about Tsurkov: Western pundits who lobbied for Syrian rebels now admit they are jihadist extremists, Oct. 16 (about Tsurkov, go about 1:45 and the rest):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tkg4wJFpc_E
Now Tsurkov seems rather busy rooting for some "color revolution" to take place in Lebanon. Where is Israel?...
As for the picture of Guy Verhofstadt next to Salim Idriss, it seems very aptly to epitomize the EU "politics" about the Syrian conflict: "How tasty those American boots are!! Wanna lick more American boots, please!!"
BM , Oct 20 2019 13:11 utc | 8
Ahh.. "experts"... Hassan Hassan is not a Syrian-born scholar, but a Syrian "born-scholar"... Nuance. Or is it "a natural-born-scholar"? ...

If he is writing nothing but lies he is not any kind of scholar at all except a fake scholar. Nor is he a journalist. He is a propagandist, nothing else. Call a spade a spade.


-----


Ahhh, I've just posted to the Media and Pundits thread, but it should have come here much more sensibly. Anyway the post is top a new page over there, on Trump and Syria's oil fields.

Sunny Runny Burger , Oct 20 2019 13:18 utc | 9
The new narrative seems to me to have everything to do with Turkey and nothing to do with Russia. A comment in the last Syria-related thread.

Then again there are so many loose ends concerning Turkey that almost anything could happen (coup attempt and "cleansing", dead ambassadors, Cyprus, Greece, Armenia, Syria, ISIS and others, Kurds, weapon deals, shooting down a Russian plane, annoying Europe and the EU as well as the US and just about everybody, some only politically but many militarily as well (at least the US, Germany, and France), the list surely goes on).

As I commented I'm not convinced Turkey will survive this, are they able to stop and reverse if they find they've set themselves up?

Clueless Joe , Oct 20 2019 14:19 utc | 10
Turkey might be playing a double-game, or plan to betray one side - whether it'll be US or Russia remains to be seen. But that this is all a clever NATO plot conflicts a bit with the fact that the US is systematically destroying its bases in NE Syria. Sure, that might be because they don't want the SAA to use them and to plunder them for techs and scraps, but that would also make things more complicated for a Turkish take-over - it will surely considerably slow the process if the Turkish army and its lackeys have to do everything back from scratches.
Besides, odds are that Putin has taken that into consideration and has some contingency measures ready, just in case - not that they could fully stop Turkish aggression in its tracks in a couple of hours, but still.
Stever , Oct 20 2019 14:46 utc | 11
Meanwhile Nicholas Kristof at the NYTimes also is whitewashing Obama's Syrian policy. He conveniently forgets Timber Sycamore (the CIA's second largest operation, over $1 billion) to overthrow Assad - 2013-2017, that allowed ISIS to get a firm foothold.

Trump Takes Incoherence and Inhumanity and Calls It Foreign Policy

"It was just five years ago that an American president, faced with a crisis on Syria's border, acted decisively and honorably."

"Barack Obama responded with airstrikes and a rescue operation in 2014 when the Islamic State started a genocide against members of the Yazidi sect, slaughtering men and forcing women and girls into sexual slavery. Obama's action, along with a heroic intervention by Kurdish fighters, saved tens of thousands of Yazidi lives."

"Contrast Obama's move, successfully working with allies to avert a genocide, with President Trump's betrayal this month of those same Kurdish partners in a way that handed a victory to the Islamic State, Turkey, Syria, Iran -- and, of course, Russia, ."

Nathan Mulcahy , Oct 20 2019 14:53 utc | 12

@ Walter 5: "I reasoned the best esthetic feature in the freak parade at the end of empire would be a clown act"

Just love it!!

On a side note. Last night met with a new friend couple for dinner. Both are highly educated and work in technical professions. Accordingly they pride themselves in logical thinking ability. I wanted to check out their political leanings and asked about Trump's troop pullback in Syria. Not surprisingly, both were outraged. When asked about their rationale the expected answer was Trump's betrayal of the Kurds. I politely pointed out that our troops' presence in Syria violates both domestic and international laws. That was news to them!!! One of them did lamely point out that Assad is a brutal dictator. Being new "friends", we refrained from further in depth political discussions. That incidence further convinced me of the impending total collapse of the empire.

Don Bacon , Oct 20 2019 15:25 utc | 13
There has been some discussion regarding Syrian oilfields, here's some more on that.

The Syrian Democratic Council is the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, including sites of Syrian oilfields. The SDC's stated mission is working towards the implementation of a "secular, democratic and decentralized system for all of Syria. The Syrian Democratic Council was established on 10 December 2015 in Al-Malikiyah.

Here is a letter dated Jan 21, 2019 from the SDC to the CEO of Global Development Corporation (GDC) Inc. in New Jersey, "a formal acceptance of your company, GDC, to represent the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) in all matters related to the sale of oil owned by SDC . .the estimate off production of crude oil to be 400,000 barrels per day. . .current daily production is 125,000 barrels. ."

The CEO of New Jersey's GDC (no mention on the web) is Mordechai (Moti) Kahana (Hebrew: מוטי כהנא‎; born February 28, 1968, Jerusalem, Israel) is an Israeli-American businessman and philanthropist. He is most notable for his work for the civil war refugees in Syria. . .Since 2011 he heads a group of Israeli businessmen and American Jews who travel to the Syrian refugee camps to provide humanitarian aid to Syrian Civil War refugees.. . He paid for Senator John McCain's trip to war-torn Syria. . . here .

The GDC mailing address is the Roxbury Mall, 275 Route 10 E, Succasunna, NJ.

Hausmeister , Oct 20 2019 15:27 utc | 14

Southfront reports that Turkish mercenaries have taken over Ras Al-Ayn. Did I overlook something? Why didn't the SAA take over after the SDF left?
Don Bacon , Oct 20 2019 15:54 utc | 15
re: Salim Idriss a former U.S. stooge
WSJ, Jun 12, 2013
Rebels Plead for Weapons in Face of Syrian Onslaught
A top Syrian rebel commander has issued a desperate plea for weapons from Western governments to prevent the fall of his forces in Aleppo, pushing the Obama administration to decide quickly whether to agree to arm rebels for the first time or risk the loss of another rebel stronghold just days after the regime's biggest victory.

Gen. Salim Idris, the top Syrian rebel commander backed by the West, issued a detailed request in recent days to the U.S., France and Britain for antitank missiles, antiaircraft weapons and hundreds of thousands of ammunition rounds, according to U.S. and European officials and Mr. Idris's request to the Americans, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Gen. Idris's call comes at a pivotal moment in Syria's war, following rapid-fire gains by Bashar al-Assad forces, including last week's recapture of Qusayr, a strategic town near the Lebanon border. Fighters from Hezbollah, which were crucial in helping the Assad regime to take Qusayr, are now massing around Aleppo, say rebels and Western officials. . . here


This was after H. Clinton (SecState) and D. Petraeus (CIA) wanted to fully arm the US-supported rebels but President Obama declined. Clinton had resigned Feb 1, 2013.
worldblee , Oct 20 2019 16:57 utc | 16
I am shocked, shocked, shocked, to find out that lying is going on in the establishment of the NYT.
james , Oct 20 2019 17:24 utc | 17
thanks b... stellar writing and comments throughout... i especially liked your last line :
"Now, as the very same rebels attack the Kurds, they are suddenly called out for being what they always have been."

@13 don bacon - the address says it all.. The GDC mailing address is the Roxbury Mall, 275 Route 10 E, Succasunna, NJ.

james , Oct 20 2019 17:27 utc | 18
regarding the nyt, larry johnson has a post up on sst here.. i quote from it :
"Let us start with a reminder of how damn corrupt the NY Times and its reporters are. Consider this paragraph penned by Adam Goldman and William Rashbaum:

Closely overseen by Mr. Barr, Mr. Durham and his investigators have sought help from governments in countries that figure into right-wing attacks and unfounded conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation, stirring criticism that they are trying to deliver Mr. Trump a political victory rather than conducting an independent review.

"Unfounded conspiracy theories?" What a damn joke."

karlof1 , Oct 20 2019 17:31 utc | 19
Wow! Quite a knee jerk reaction by the NY Times to Max Blumenthal's 16 Oct article in The Grayzone , "The US has backed 21 of the 28 'crazy' militias leading Turkey's brutal invasion of northern Syria," which I linked to Friday. It's great to see such a reaction to what for most people's an obscure online publication.

Notice of MoA website change: I must now type in my name and email every time I want to comment after years of never needing to do so. My issue might be related to the one ben encountered in thinking he couldn't comment, which you can't if those two fields aren't filled.

Tom Ratliff , Oct 20 2019 17:47 utc | 20
@snake #6

See the growing collection of related techniques by David Martin (aka dcdave): Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression

"Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government. When the government lacks an effective, fact-based defense, other techniques must be employed. The success of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press and a mere token opposition party..."

Cloak And Dagger , Oct 20 2019 18:12 utc | 21
Trump should not have sent Pence and Pompeo to Turkey. They will do everything possible to derail the rollback of the US in Syria. They are both more subtle than Bolton, but they are both neocons. If you want anything done, you have to do it yourself.

[Oct 23, 2019] The idea of tribunes a a check on ruling financial oligarchy can probably be reinstituted under late neoliberalism

That creates somewhat artificial division with the ruling elite, which might help to prevent stagnation and degradation.
Oct 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

hemeantwell , October 22, 2019 at 12:50 pm

In trying to make up for my ignorance on Rome's history I came across P. A. Brunt's "Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic." His account of the innovation of the office of the tribune gave me a good sense of the intensity of those conflicts:

"In 494 a great body of the plebs sat down en masse outside Rome and refused to serve in the army. Such a 'secession' or strike undoubtedly occurred in 287, and similar revolutionary action must have been taken now, to account for the concession the patricians were forced to make: the creation of the tribunate of the plebs. The ten tribunes were plebeians annually elected by an assembly organized in voting units calle tribes; these were local divisions of the state, originally four within the city and seventeen in the adjoining countryside. This assembly was truly democratic at the start, when the tribes were probably more or less equal in numbers; the rich had no superior voting power.

The original function of the tribunes was to protect humble Romans against oppression by the magistrates; they did so by literally stepping between them and their intended victims (intercessio). The magistrates did not dare touch their persons, which were 'sacrosanct'; that meant that the whole plebs were sworn to avenge them by lynching whoever laid hands on them. But their power was confined to the city; outside the walls, Roman territory was still too insecure for any restriction to be allowable on the discretion of the magistrates to act as they thought best for the public safety. This limitation on tribunician power subsisted throughout the Republic, long after its rationale had disappeared." p.52

In this light, it seems that the obstructionist quality of tribunician power that Yves' refers to stemmed from the original need to allow plebs to put the kabosh on patrician power to avoid revolution. Another instance of when peace brought about by a veto power eventually makes the veto power appear unnecessary.

The limitation on the power of the tribunes in rural areas was relevant to a factor in Rome's development Brunt places a lot of weight on: the breakdown of plebian farmholding, in part through loss of land through absence brought about by conscription, but also by patrician gang violence. In his telling this alienation by dispossession was ongoing to varying degrees during the Republic.

MyLessThanPrimeBeef , October 22, 2019 at 1:50 pm

Tribunes.

Do we have something similar today, anywhere in the world?

likbez , October 23, 2019 at 12:29 am

Yes, I think so.

During the New Deal, the union leaders were effectively tribunes without veto power, but still considerable influence as they controlled a large number of voters belonging to respective unions.

Similar short story was with Russian "Soviets" -- worker and peasant consuls until Stalin centralization of governance. They were kind of power check on Bolshevik party Politburo (a kind of Senate, the Bolsheviks party nobility )

[Oct 23, 2019] The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic Part 1 of 4 Structure and Background naked capitalism

Oct 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic: Part 1 of 4: Structure and Background Posted on October 22, 2019 by Yves Smith Yves here. Historical lessons for the present are a favorite topic here, and particularly from the Roman Republic and the later empire. So enjoy! I'm sure some of you will qualify or add to these views.

By Newdealdemocrat. Originally published at Angry Bear

"Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny," by Edward J. Watts
"The Storm Before the Storm,: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic" by Mike Duncan
"Ten Emperors: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine," by Barry Strauss

I've recently mentioned that lately I've been unable to read most American history books, with their currently unwarranted chipper optimism. Instead my recent reading has focused on other periods of crisis.

One question I've been considering is, just how rare, and how stable have Republics historically been? There are few antecedents for the experience of the US, because it has aspires to both be a Republic under the rule of law and simultaneously a superpower. In fact I believe there are only four, in reverse historical order:

The British Empire (yes, I know, it's technically a monarchy, but it has been a parliamentary democracy really ever since the Glorious Revolution 400 years ago). The Dutch Republic (I'm not sure if this really qualifies, since it was more a confederation of principalities, but it was styled a Republic, and it did have global interests.) The Republic of Venice (this is a dark horse contender, but this Republic lasted almost 1200 years, from roughly 600 A.D. until it was conquered by that other "republican," Napoleon, in 1797). The Roman Republic.

In these four posts, I'm going to summarize what I've learned about the Roman Republic from the three books that lead this post.

While we're all familiar with Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and probably all had to read Shakespeare's Tragedy of that name (but really about Brutus and Cassius) in high school, I don't think much attention has been paid in modern education to the Roman Republic, which lasted 450 years – almost as long as the subsequent western Roman Empire – and was avowedly the model that inspired the Framers of the American Constitution. None of the books that have come out in the past few years, to my knowledge, have discussed either the Roman Republic or other historical antecedents to the US. I believe studying the rise and demise of the Roman Republic, which during its existence was extremely – probably too – successful, is well worth the effort.

Without intending so, I read the above three books in reverse chronological order above. "Ten Emperors" was first, followed by "The Storm Before the Storm." Unfortunately this latter book (in my opinion) wound up being a chronological blow-by-blow vomiting of not well organized facts. It desperately needed a list of "dramatic personae" with at least a couple of lines describing the most prominent 20 or 30 individual's role, so that when they re-appeared after a 30 or 80 page hiatus, I could recollect who they were. It also needed an initial chapter setting forth the basic governing details of the Republic, and most importantly the roles of the Senate and the Assemblies. In the end it left me so unsatisfied I went back and found "Mortal Republic," which was a much more orderly and understandable if less detailed treatment.

If you are interested in the material, I recommend you read "Mortal Republic" in segments, and then read so much of "The Storm Before the Storm" to fill in the details until you reach the same chronological point. Once you do that, when you start the final book, you will see that the process of Imperial succession in the Empire was very much like the power struggles in the last 60 years of the Republic, and in particular sets forth Augustus's programme and genius in more detail.

To cut to the chase , the Roman Republic, which was previously quite stable (as Republics, once they last a generation or more, tend to be), was toppled by a series of hammer-blows that fell over roughly a 100 year period. The shortest version is that the type of factional political violence that brought down the Weimar Republic in 10 years took 100 years to infect and ultimately destroy the Roman one.

There were three levels of causes for this fall, in order of importance:

The de facto requirement that all senior magistrates and in particular the consuls (analogous to Presidents) be military commanders, who frequently raised, and increasingly paid for, their own armies. The increasing breaches of "mas maiorem," or the customs and norms by which the Republic had operated, on all sides. The split between the oligarchical "optimates" who dominated the Senate on the one side vs. the "populares" or ordinary Roman plebeians who dominated the Assemblies, and also the Italian allies who were not Roman citizens, on the other.

More basically put, #3 was the substantive source of disagreement over which all parties were willing to go to extremes; #2 was the procedural unraveling of the manner of government; and #1 over time ensured the rise of what we would now call "caudillos," or political generals, who had the force to overthrow it.

Both histories I have read suggest that the "turning point" where the stresses started to undermine the Republic was after its greatest triumph: the defeat and obliteration of Carthage after the third Punic War.

The Structure of the Roman Republic

From its founding as a trading point on the Tiber River until roughly 600 B.C., Rome was ruled by Etruscan kings, who were then overthrown and the Republic was founded. On a broader historical scale, it seems that Republics are actually pretty sturdy forms of government once their institutions take root after a generation or two. That's good news at the present, where at very least, for example, Russians and Iranians are getting used to the concepts of having elections and courts.

The Roman Republic was a system by which "Assemblies" of the tribes of Romans directly elected the executive officers of the Republic for one year terms. Meanwhile the Senate, essentially a council of notables, gave direction to those executive officers in the carrying out of their duties. The lowest level official was a "quaestor," basically an aide de camp and accountant for a legion; followed by aedile, in charge of religious observances and festivals. The next rung higher was "praetor," similar to a colonel or brigadier general in an army, who also acted as a "president pro tempore" when the highest officials were absent. Finally, the highest office was "consul," of which two were chosen every year, as co-chief executives, lead prosecutors, and commanders-in-chief of the legions. Upon completion of their terms, consuls joined the Senate.

Another important office was that of the 10 Tribunes. These were explicitly open only to plebeians, and were designed to protect their interests. Each of the 10 Tribunes could propose legislation before the Assemblies, and veto legislation proposed by others. Further, none of the other Tribunes could override the veto of any single one. As we'l see, this chokepoint proved a weakness in the structure of the Republic. Additionally, there were also "military tribunes" in the legions, who represented the interests of the soldiers.

Finally, in case of emergency the Republic allowed for the office of "dictator." Most importantly, for the first 400 years of its use, this office had a strict 6 month time limit, which was faithfully respected. At the conclusion of the 6 months, the dictator was required to hand back power to the normal offices, and the status quo ante structure of government was to resume. The most famous of these was Cincannatus, who returned to his farm after his six month office expired.

So powerful was the civic pride in the Republic that, when the Macedonian Pyrrhus (of "Pyrrhic victory" fame) tried to bribe a relatively poor Roman general, Fabricius, Fabricius refused by rejoining that the Roman Republic provided those who went into public service with higher honors than mere wealth could supply. In any event, by 300 B.C. Rome had brought all of Italy except for the far north under its domination. The other Italian city-states were called "allies," but really they were tributaries, their form of tribute being the provision of soldiers to fight in Rome's legions. Upon reaching adulthood, Roman males owed 10 years service in the legions. Importantly, the pattern was the planting of crops in the early spring, then going off to fight in the legions' campaigns during the summers, and returning to harvest the crops in late autumn.

In any event, the accounts agree that matters began to change after 146 BC , when Rome simultaneously was victorious over Carthage and also Corinth in Greece. Both treatments of the Republic pick up at that historical turning point. Little known fact: Carthage was also a democracy, in fact the Romans considered it "too" democratic. Someone go tell Tom Friedman that two countries having democratic institutions does not mean that they all go happily ever after to McDonald's.

But it was with the conquest of Carthage, that by happenstance coincided with the sacking of Corinth in Greece, also by Rome, that the scrappy little Roman Republic, which was founded roughly in 500 B.C., and had grown to the dominant power in Italy such that the other city states on the peninsula were its inferior "allies," simultaneously turned into an empire, dominating the Mediterranean from Spain to Greece on the European side and present day Algeria and Tunisia on the African side.

The inhabitants of those unfortunate cities who weren't slaughtered were sold into slavery, and the treasuries of each were sacked, the riches transported to Rome. Rome also thereby came into possession of extensive silver mines located in Carthage's lands of present-day Spain. In short, overnight Rome became filthy rich as well as controlling an empire in the central and western Mediterranean.

But this very wealth permanently upset the balance between the landowning oligarchs in the Senate vs. the ordinary urban plebeians and rural farmers. For it was the Senate that had the power of the purse, and thus the power to distribute the land, gold, silver, jewels, slaves, and other loot plundered from the vanquished states, as well as the new precious ores mined in Spain. And, unsurprisingly, they allocated it to themselves. Even worse, because the wars in North Africa, Greece, and Spain lasted years, the legionnaire farmers spent multiple years away from their fields. When they returned home, they were victors, but their farms had fallen into ruinous disrepair. For all intents and purposes, they had to sell -- and the buyers who had money were frequently none other than the wealthy Senators.

A second form of gross inequality was between Roman citizens and their Italian allies. Because while the allies were vital to Rome's military success, the allies could be treated as slaves if the Romans wished to do so.

A final form of inequality affected the affluent or wealthy merchant class, called variously Knights or Equestrians, because they could afford to own horses, and thus serve as cavalrymen during military campaigns, depending on the account. But because they were not "old money," their path to the top rungs of power was blocked by the oligarchs who controlled the Senate.

The huge inequalities just described gave rise to seething resentment by both the urban and rural plebeians as well as the Italian allies and the Equestrian class as well. The essential story of the Roman Republic between 146 BC and its fall a century later was the refusal of the oligarchs who usually controlled the Senate to make any significant compromises to this state of affairs, and the increasing violence used both by the opposing classes to wrench change, and the oligarchs to resist it.

(Continued in part 2)

michael hudson , October 22, 2019 at 6:37 am

Me: Oh, dear. This isn't "wrong" factually, but it misses the essence of Rome, inborn class war of creditors vs debtors.

The Republic was never remotely a democracy. It was always run by the autocratic Senate. The wealthiest 10% controlled the majority of votes which – like the DNC today – was weighted by wealth categories. 90% of the population's votes counted for just 10%. Leaders proposing more democratic economic policies were murdered, century after century. Assassination was a normal tool of the oligarchy.

Rome under the kings was stable. It was the America of its day, attracting immigrants with their wealth, followers and slaves. They were traditionally non-Roman – Sabine (Numa), Latin, or from Veii (probably Servius), and although chosen by the Senate, they kept the oligarchy from waging the class war that ensued under the Republic. In 504 Appius Claudius brought his wealth and 5,000 men from Sabine territory and was admitted to the Senate. His namesakes throughout Roman history were intransigent opponents of democracy, triggering Secession of the Plebs (494 and 450) and subsequent confrontations. They were sort of like the post-Batista Cubans fleeing to Florida and becoming ultra right-wingers.

Fast forward to the Punic Wars. Toynbee wrote a book saying that the aftermath in 201 was Hannibal's Revenge. The oligarchy gave the rich campagna lands to itself instead of settling war veterans. Greek and Macedonian slaves stocked the great plantations being assembled. This led Tiberius Gracchus and his brother to press for limits on public land grabbing. They and their followers were killed, as were those of Marius (by the prescriptions of Sulla) and of Catiline.

I'm writing the 2nd volume of my history of debt to review the collapse of antiquity. The social struggles were all about debt and land redistribution.When Yves finishes posting this series, I may provide a sample chapter.

vlade , October 22, 2019 at 9:25 am

republic != democracy

The UK doesn't claim to be a republic, but does claim to be a democracy (although technically since the UK's executive is elected and not inherited, it'd be a republic. Sort of republican monarchy).

The US claims to be a republic ah well.

Titus , October 22, 2019 at 11:10 am

Vlade – there is how one is 'organized' and then how one seems to function as to how one actually functions. Definitions matter at least in knowing A from B.

UK wise if in Commons MPs are going to say as they having being lately that they must 'act' in the best interest of blah, blah – note not represent, but 'act in', then I don't know why people even bother to vote.

With Parliament being Sovereign, they do as they like. As to the US well Lincoln did what he had to be win the war but that and changes to how Senators got elected, and the ever present electoral college, if we have a republic I don't know who is being represented (I do but it's depressing).

Rome, all I have to say is, to me it's amazing how many emperors got whacked or killed in battle. Not a place I would have wanted to live in. Yes, I use 'titus' as in Titus.Andronicus.

Synoia , October 22, 2019 at 1:19 pm

The UK is a "Parliamentary Monarchy," In no way does it describe itself as a republic.

"Parliamentary Monarchy" is a typical British ambiguity.

SufferinSuccotash , October 22, 2019 at 10:05 am

Assassination only became a common weapon in Roman politics towards the end of the second century (the murder of Tiberius Gracchus is considered a major turning point). Up to that point the nobility favored co-optation instead.

Starting in 367 the consulship was open to plebeian candidates and within a few decades plebeians were able to gain access to every high office in the Republic. Wealthy plebeians, that is. You needed money and aristocratic connections to get elected (nobles had extensive followings of clients whose votes they could deliver).

Plebeians who served in high office were then eligible for membership in the Senate. Welcome to the club. The newly-ennobled senators could bring their wealth into play, marrying into old (and sometimes not too wealthy) patrician families.

A familiar story. And of course our shake-and-bake aristocrats would "forget where they came from" and become lifelong supporters of the oligarchy.

Colonel Smithers , October 22, 2019 at 11:33 am

Thank you.

"And of course our shake-and-bake aristocrats would "forget where they came from" and become lifelong supporters of the oligarchy." Not just in the US, but the mother country, too.

The deracinated elite known as the Chipping Norton Set, which also includes its Notting Hill and Primrose Hill outposts in London, is a mix of aristocracy, vide David Cameron, and new money (or "nouves" as old money calls them, as per what Alan Clark said about Michael Heseltine and other Tory MPs), vide Michael Gove and his wife Sarah Vine, currently gunning for Meghan Markle.

Synoia and I went to schools with both types. At my alma mater, it was interesting to observe the "nouves" trying so hard to fit in. The (now) peers I knew, four earls, a viscount, a baron and two baronets, were easy going and had a sense of paternalism, quite different from Thatcher's children.

Joe Costello , October 22, 2019 at 12:02 pm

Rome wasn't a democracy has been a constant meaningless statement, starting with many of the US founders, even to the point more recently in Symes book "The Roman Revolution" where many argue Rome wasn't a "republic"!

Both words, one Greek, one Latin simply define systems that may best be described as some sort of self-government, where the general populous – the citizenry – had some sort of direct role in politics and governance, leadership changed by elections as opposed to monarchies, "oligarchies" and "dictatorships," once again mixing Greek and Roman terms.

Democracy in Athens wasn't even democracy as defined by notions in many academics' heads. After all they had slaves, how could it be a democracy? The Greek assembly wasn't the only institution of government in Greek democracies, the "demes" were numerous local structures connected horizontally as much as vertically and more fundamental, along with various hierarchical tribe elements, wealth factors etc., similarities the Romans shared.

The Senate in Rome ran foreign affairs, the assemblies, whether organized by tribe or military unit were composed of every citizen and passed legislation and elected officials and yes the votes were weighted, but that doesn't discount them. The Senate certainly didn't have authoritarian control. And yes, the history of Rome was constant struggle between the plebs and patricians, for example the plebs sitting out of battle till the office of Tribune was instituted, the simplistic claim Rome wasn't "democracy" is to miss the whole 450 year plot of the republic.

In fact, Machiavelli in his "Discourses on Livy" states this struggle was at the heart of the dynamism of the Roman republic.

It can also be noted for all our neo-socialists, it was this "class" struggle that formed the foundation of Marx's thought and where he got the idea of the "proletariat" as a revolutionary class, though how one could look at the Roman proletariat in the republic's last half-century as revolutionary is more than a mystery.

In short, to simply throw away the Roman republic as not being democratic is both wrong and removes from Western history one of the few examples of self-government we have, as opposed I suppose to some sort of Platonic notion of "democracy" which never existed.

hemeantwell , October 22, 2019 at 12:50 pm

In trying to make up for my ignorance on Rome's history I came across P. A. Brunt's "Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic." His account of the innovation of the office of the tribune gave me a good sense of the intensity of those conflicts:

"In 494 a great body of the plebs sat down en masse outside Rome and refused to serve in the army. Such a 'secession' or strike undoubtedly occurred in 287, and similar revolutionary action must have been taken now, to account for the concession the patricians were forced to make: the creation of the tribunate of the plebs. The ten tribunes were plebeians annually elected by an assembly organized in voting units calle tribes; these were local divisions of the state, originally four within the city and seventeen in the adjoining countryside. This assembly was truly democratic at the start, when the tribes were probably more or less equal in numbers; the rich had no superior voting power.

The original function of the tribunes was to protect humble Romans against oppression by the magistrates; they did so by literally stepping between them and their intended victims (intercessio). The magistrates did not dare touch their persons, which were 'sacrosanct'; that meant that the whole plebs were sworn to avenge them by lynching whoever laid hands on them. But their power was confined to the city; outside the walls, Roman territory was still too insecure for any restriction to be allowable on the discretion of the magistrates to act as they thought best for the public safety. This limitation on tribunician power subsisted throughout the Republic, long after its rationale had disappeared." p.52

In this light, it seems that the obstructionist quality of tribunician power that Yves' refers to stemmed from the original need to allow plebs to put the kabosh on patrician power to avoid revolution. Another instance of when peace brought about by a veto power eventually makes the veto power appear unnecessary.

The limitation on the power of the tribunes in rural areas was relevant to a factor in Rome's development Brunt places a lot of weight on: the breakdown of plebian farmholding, in part through loss of land through absence brought about by conscription, but also by patrician gang violence. In his telling this alienation by dispossession was ongoing to varying degrees during the Republic.

MyLessThanPrimeBeef , October 22, 2019 at 1:50 pm

Tribunes.

Do we have something similar today, anywhere in the world?

run75441 , October 22, 2019 at 10:09 pm

lambert:

I would like to read it also. Let me know when it is up.

RBHoughton , October 22, 2019 at 10:09 pm

Same here but for the meantime ..

Carthaginian silver from Spain poisoned Rome as assuredly as South American silver poisoned Spain. There is a rule operating there which our men of commerce probably don't like much.

Amfortas the hippie , October 22, 2019 at 6:50 am

my favorite part of that story happened before what's laid out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_the_Orders

makes one feel a little Wobbly.

"we are many, they are few"

Lee , October 22, 2019 at 8:51 am

Also of interest is the Social War, 91-88 BC, in which tributary Italian tribes fought, not for independence but for Roman citizenship. Somewhat analogous to modern civil rights movements. Interestingly, the Romans won the war but in order to avoid further costly conflict, acceded to the tribes' demands.

And then of course there's this: What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?

pretzelattack , October 22, 2019 at 6:56 am

a very interesting series. i hope to hear about the gracchi brothers.

Joe Well , October 22, 2019 at 7:01 am

I've been unable to read most American history books, with their currently unwarranted chipper optimism.

Only true for mass market history, particularly by non professional historians, who have to be chipper to sell books and/or get MSM attention.

Academic historians (I am tempted to say "real" historians) such as Eric Foner, to pick one example among 10000s, are quite damning in their analyses.

Seriously, people. You need to step away from the mass media to get a clear view of anything, even the past.

Titus , October 22, 2019 at 11:19 am

Who are you talking about? Having read, "A. Lincoln: A Biography", by White Jr., Ronald C, I can tell you it is not a 'chipper' book, assuming I know what that is. It is one of the most intense books I've ever read – you get to be Lincoln the whole time he was President, it is white hot painful.

Joe Well , October 22, 2019 at 3:59 pm

Maybe instead of "chipper" they meant "hagiographic." I am not familiar with that work by Ronald C. White, but the blurb includes the phrase, "offers a fresh and compelling definition of Lincoln as a man of integrity."

Many people would say that Lincoln's greatest contribution was getting assassinated, paving the way for Radical Reconstruction, which he was against. I do not expect a book making that case to appear in any airport magazine rack.

JBird4049 , October 22, 2019 at 4:55 pm

Maybe a book could be found titled the greatest tragedy, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His death just added anger to the North's desire for payback. There was simultaneously too harsh and too lenient treatment of the Southern Slaveocracy. Followed by the abandonment of the Southern governments then under the control of the black leadership in 1877 with the withdrawal of the army. The country then ignored the very violent takeover of the South by the waiting white elites causing the undoing much of the conflict and death of the previous thirty years. A worse of all outcomes except the continuation of slavery you could say. Although with the new forms of slavery created in the South after Reconstruction were not technically slavery, they were damn close at times.

Colonel Smithers , October 22, 2019 at 11:39 am

Thank you, Joe.

"Only true for mass market history, particularly by non professional historians, who have to be chipper to sell books and/or get MSM attention." As above, we have the same problem in the mother country. Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Jeremy Paxman write for a certain audience and are often serialised in the Daily Mail and given air time on state broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 4. The trio have been joined by once serious historians Simon Schama and David Cannadine. It would be difficult for an EP Thompson or Eric Hobsbawm, whose daughter is a staunch Blairite, just like the children and grandchildren of Wedgie Benn, to get published or air time now.

Joe Well , October 22, 2019 at 4:09 pm

The gap between academic British history and the propaganda peddled by the likes of British state media organ bbc.com (let alone Boris Johnson) is astounding. Just one example: I once forced myself to read a bbc.com article that explained how Britain's primary role in the history of slavery was to end it, and have encountered that unique version of history in a few other British mass-media productions.

And did you know that in London there is an actual place called the Imperial War Museum, and it is not some kind of collection of Marxist diatribes and Global South protests, it is a state-funded temple of reverence for Britain's wars (and admittedly some solid academic history)?

It is as if an entire country were naked and they were the only ones who didn't know it or else thought they were hiding it.

Janie , October 22, 2019 at 2:09 pm

Echoing recommendation of Eric Foner.

RBHoughton , October 22, 2019 at 10:17 pm

We have had that problem in UK all my life. State historians have conspired to create a clean and uplifting version of British history, over the last 200-300 years, and it is only now that we Poms are beginning to get our real history, courtesy of Andrew Roberts (on Napoleon) and David Starkey (on most everything else).

One hopes that academics are respectable people. Can they look in the mirror and recognise the problem?

Harry , October 22, 2019 at 7:14 am

You know, Machiavelli wrote quite a thorough treatise on this subject. Discourses on the first decade of Titus Livius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy

Amfortas the hippie , October 22, 2019 at 1:05 pm

and Livy what we have of him is very readable and engaging, too.

The Rev Kev , October 22, 2019 at 7:26 am

I am afraid that Newdealdemocrat's views on Republican Rome do have to be heavily qualified. And I won't mention that the British Empire and the Republic of Venice were actually oligarchies. Wait – I just did!
Anyway, when he gets to the part about the Punic Wars he tends to mash the events of the different wars together. The Romans were not the same people that they were at the beginning of these wars. The social conditions and mores had changed too much. A serious use of a timeline is needed so a bit of context here. The three Punic wars were epic on scale and amounted to world wars at the time. In the second war, Rome went right to the brink and was nearly snuffed out but managed to hold the line. When the British were fighting the French during the Napoleonic wars, a lot of British were equating their struggles to the 2nd Punic War. Here is how it went.
During the first Rome and Carthage went at it for over twenty years until it finally ended. After a break of twenty years, the went at it again for another seventeen years. After that war was over, you had peace for about fifty years until the last war which only lasted three years and after hard fighting, Carthage was no more. And no, it was not really a Republic at all. So all in all these three wars were spread over nearly 120 years. So lets equate that with a history of the United States.
Suppose that the US were fighting a country going from the Spanish-American war until the end of WW1. Then they fought this enemy again from WW2 to near the beginning of the Vietnam war. The final war would have broken out a few years ago and just finished. So using this idea, would Newdealdemocrat argue that the Americans of the 1890s were like the Americans of the 1940s & 1950s who would be like modern Americans? Too much water has passed under the bridge and so it was with the Romans. And certainly you cannot mix up events from these different American eras without a serious misrepresentation of history.

vlade , October 22, 2019 at 8:38 am

Re Venice – a republic can be an oligarchy – the point is that the executive is elected (from some body), not inherited.

From that point, Venice wasn't a republic until about 1000AD, when the Concia started to form (of all free men). Before that it was appointment from Byzantium. The democratic attempt changed to oligarchic in about 1300. As a republic it was still pretty stable due to the extremely convoluted (on purpose) sortition election mechanism, which was making it pretty hard to impossible to rig future Doges w/o very large consensus in the electorate.

The Rev Kev , October 22, 2019 at 8:57 am

Granted that a republic can be an oligarchy and a good example was East Germany which was called the German Democratic Republic. I am here to say though that I spent a few hours in that place and it definitely did not feel like a democratic republic. A few months ago I read a history of the Republic of Venice and from what I read, it had the same feel as East Germany once did with its strict controls and ruthlessness.

vlade , October 22, 2019 at 9:30 am

Indeed (and most of the Soviet-block countries were republics and 'people's republic' and 'democratic', when they were none of these. DPRK is a prime example none. Not democratic, not peoples' not republic, and partially Korea).

I just want to be reasonably precise, as lots of people assume that democracy and republic are equal. I don't know whether the author was making that assumption too, or was looking at republic in the wider sense.

The US can be a republic and not being democratic at all .

DJG , October 22, 2019 at 9:24 am

vlade and Rev Kev: The Serenissima is fascinating, and it is hard to draw lessons because it was a highly contradictory place. Venetian justice was supposed to have been relentless and severe–yet histories tend to clump the repression. Over the long span of time, Venice wasn't such a bad place to live, and the Republic had a reputation for being more just than any of the surrounding states. (Although I just peeked at the list of doges, and it was hard to be a doge in the 900s or so.)

The Republic was highly skeptical of the Inquisition and kept it under control. Compared other Catholic–and Protestant–states, the Venetians didn't allow the mass panic and miscarriages of justice that the Inquisition was famous for.

What the Venetians were good at was a kind of civic esprit de corps–all Venetians seem to have been committeed to the city. There was considerable openness–Venice was a center for book publishing for centuries. Of course, those in charge of the Republic kept the university in Padua. On the other hand, Galileo taught at Padua, without incident. Marin Falier and his attempted coup were a notable exception, which is why history books dwell on those events.

Venetians loved minutiae, which may be their odd distinguishing characteristic. They saved everything, in their enormous archives–every record, every blunder, every victory. They made officials obtain a countersignature–that skepticism, slight lack of trust, was everywhere.

And what may make them the most exceptional was their island empire: They rule the Ionian islands in Greece pretty much to the end of the Serenissima. Yet they weren't insular. There was a reluctant tolerance–the Ghetto in the city itself, the Armenian monasteries in the lagoon, the large populations of Greek Orthodox on Crete and Cyprus whom they did not bother much.

Much to contemplate here: But most USonians consider Venice these days to be a shopping mall. It is hard to find decent books in English on the complicated history of Venice.

vlade , October 22, 2019 at 9:33 am

John Julius Norwich, History of Venice.

Synoia , October 22, 2019 at 1:12 pm

Gibbon Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, although I find Gibbon biased

John Julius Norwich, Byzantium, as one cannot focus on Rome and not Byzantium, and their adoption of Christianity

And reflect and the stunning success of the Roman Catholic Church which converted Western Europe to its Spiritual Leadership.

Conrad , October 22, 2019 at 1:59 pm

Gibbon covers the history of Byzantium right up to the fall of Constantinople.

MyLessThanPrimeBeef , October 22, 2019 at 3:02 pm

Their naval shipyard was quite impressive in turning out warships efficently.

Titus , October 22, 2019 at 11:24 am

Rev, excellent. I would only add the Romans really hated Carthage and today was the first time I ever heard they were a republic.

Synoia , October 22, 2019 at 1:23 pm

Carthage delenda est!

Something about elephants and a surprise from the North.

MyLessThanPrimeBeef , October 22, 2019 at 3:00 pm

A Roman politician could go far with "Remember Cannae."

lyman alpha blob , October 22, 2019 at 2:13 pm

I'm not sure it's exactly clear how their government compares to modern types. The best place to look is Polybius, who was alive during the final Punic war. Here's what he has to say –

51 1 The constitution of Carthage seems to me to have been originally well contrived as regards its most distinctive points. 2 For there were kings, and the house of Elders was an aristocratical force, and the people were supreme in matters proper to them, the entire frame of the state much resembling that of Rome and Sparta. 3 But at the time when they entered on the Hannibalic War, the Carthaginian constitution had degenerated, and that of Rome was better. 4 For as every body or state or action has its natural periods first of growth, then of prime, and finally of decay, and as everything in them is at its best when they are in their prime, it was for this reason that the difference between the two states manifested itself at this time. 5 For by as much as the power and prosperity of Carthage had been earlier than that of Rome, by so much had Carthage already begun to decline; while Rome was exactly at her prime, as far as at least as her system of government was concerned. 6 Consequently the multitude at Carthage had already acquired the chief voice in deliberations; while at Rome the senate still retained this; 7 and hence, as in one case the masses deliberated and in the other the most eminent men, the Roman decisions on public affairs were superior, 8 so that although they met with complete disaster, they were finally by the wisdom of their counsels victorious over the Carthaginians in the war.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/6*.html

Worth reading the beginning of book 6 too where he compares the different types of governments and how they evolve, or more likely, devolve. Here he seems to be making that case that whatever form of republic or democracy the Carthiginians once had, it had devolved to mob rule by the time of the Punic wars.

lyman alpha blob , October 22, 2019 at 4:24 pm

I had a comment that skynet seems to have eaten. Anyway, check out what Polybius has to say about it – section 51 is the relevant part.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/6*.html

Another Scott , October 22, 2019 at 7:28 am

I'd like to wait for the entire series before commenting too much, but based upon my readings on the subject, the connection between oversees military operations and the disposition of the farmers is incredibly important. It seems to underlie many of the subsequent problems that contributed to the Fall of the Republic. Without the farmers being forced off their lands after fighting wars in Africa, Greece, and Spain, they would not have become reliant upon generals for patronage nor joined the poor masses in Rome itself.

SufferinSuccotash , October 22, 2019 at 8:54 am

Describing Britain as a "parliamentary democracy" for the past 400 years seems a little far-fetched. "Constitutional monarchy" would be more accurate, with the monarch sharing power with Parliament. Parliament itself was a highly elitist affair, dominated by the "landed classes" (aristocracy & gentry) and chosen by a tiny and well-managed electorate. In addition, monarchs retained a great deal of power over the choice of ministers. This state of affairs lasted well into the 19th century. The young Queen Victoria was the very last monarch to attempt (unsuccessfully) to keep a Prime Minister in office without parliamentary approval. And democracy (defined as universal suffrage or something close to it) had to wait until the Reform Bills of 1867 and 1884. By the time a parliamentary democracy exists the Empire has become a well-established fact.

RBHoughton , October 22, 2019 at 10:25 pm

I believe it was the Irishman Castlereagh who almost single-handedly brought down the monarchy because of the unparliamentary George III, specifically the attempted seizure of South America. Once that powerful and knowledgeable King was pushed aside, the next couple of clowns were dog's meat to politicians determined to center power on the Commons. The MO was to give a bit and take a lot and thus whittle down the Civil List to a point no future British monarch had independent power.

DJG , October 22, 2019 at 9:27 am

I think that the writer misunderstands Roman offices. An aedile was more of an inspector of public works. The word edile / edilizia is still used in Italian for building / construction.

The college of pontifexes were the ones in charge of festivals and religious events. And there were complicated qualifications for membership (involving social class) as well as complicated rules of behavior expected of these priesthoods.

Janie , October 22, 2019 at 2:07 pm

Related to edifice, although a quick look-up did not show aedile as a root?

shinola , October 22, 2019 at 10:08 am

Thanks for this post – very interesting. Looking forward to the next 3 parts.

MyLessThanPrimeBeef , October 22, 2019 at 12:14 pm

The de facto requirement that all senior magistrates and in particular the consuls (analogous to Presidents) be military commanders, who frequently raised, and increasingly paid for, their own armies.

-- -

We can look to Marius for that.

From Wikipedia*:

Marius and his contemporaries' need for soldiers cemented a paradigmatic shift away from the levy-based armies of the middle Republic towards open recruitment. Thereafter, Rome's legions would largely consist of poor citizens (the "capite censi" or "head count") whose future after service could only be assured if their general could bring about land distribution and pay on their behalf. In the broad sweep of history, this reliance on poor men would make soldiers strongly loyal not to the Senate and people of Rome, but to their generals whom would be perceived as friends, comrades, benefactors, and patrons of soldiers.[57]

*We can find this subject, Marius military reform, covered in many places, some not as readily quotable as Wikipedia, which is cited here as an introduction to those who are not already familiar with. People who want more details can do further research, and those who object to part or parts of the above can raise them here for readers to discuss/debate or to correct/update.

Susan the Other , October 22, 2019 at 12:18 pm

Well even the billionaires are panicked now. Whereas traditional oligarchs have sewn their diamonds in their petticoats and still been massacred. That's very symbolic. Talk about blood diamonds. It's possible that we are facing the end of an era. To go forward now we can no longer take from the environment frivolously, beyond our needs. And we will be required by Nature to leave the world better than we found it. In my mind that leaves all dysfunctional governments looking pretty stupid.

Kingfish , October 22, 2019 at 1:54 pm

I recommend Colleen McCullough's First Man in Rome and the subsequent books. It's historical fiction but is heavily based upon the original sources and provides an entertaining way to study the fall of the Roman Republic.

The post briefly touches upon it but the rise of the commercial class played directly into Plato's cycle of governments. The landed aristocracy (Senate) became threatened by the commercial class (Assembly). This will explode when Marius and Sulla go to war with each other as the Assembly took away Sulla's rightful command and gave it to Marius.

Of course, back then, losing in politics increasingly became a case of losing your head, citizenship, or all property. A strong motivation to stay in power regardless of the cost.

The Historian , October 22, 2019 at 2:01 pm

This ought to be an interesting series! I am hoping Newdealdemocrat doesn't just regurgitate the books he/she mentions but gives us some critical insight of his/her own.

Obviously the Roman Republic is important to Americans since the Founding Fathers were enamored of Polybius's writings, but it sad they weren't equally interested in understanding the reasons the Roman Republic collapsed; they might have put more protections into our Constitution. But in fairness to them, perhaps there just wasn't that much literature on the subject of the Roman Republic's collapse at that time since it seem that writers previous to 1776 were more interested in the collapse of the Roman Empire than in the Roman Republic.

The collapse of the Roman Republic was very complex and cannot be simplified down into just one thing or one set of things so I tend to discount those writers who do that. And every historian that has written about the Roman Republic/Empire's collapses is ethnocentric and weights history based on what is important to him/her and I don't expect this writer to be any different. Since I don't know how a writer can avoid understanding history in terms of his/her own culture instead of the culture that existed at the time, I usually try to find out who the writer is and what is important to him/her and then I read his/her history within that context. Since I don't know anything about this writer, I am inclined to withhold judgement on the validity for now. But even those writers on the Roman Republic who were obviously biased have provided valuable insights. I am hoping for at least that and maybe more from this writer.

Jeremy Grimm , October 22, 2019 at 2:03 pm

As the 2nd millennium passes into the 3rd I believe it grows plain our Empire is crumbling and I fear its last days will come in my lifetime. Empires have ended before – but this time is different. This end will be far more complete, further reaching, and perhaps more final than any collapse which occurred in the past. This collapse will signal the end of Empire but also the end of the Age of Fossil Fuels. And the scale of our collapse will dwarf the scale of all the collapses of the past. It is strange and eerie to live through last days – strange days watching the emergence of signs of collapse.

Our civilization is built on the power we obtain from burning fossil fuels. But fossil fuels are finite. We extracted and burned them at such a rate as now seems unimaginable. They were a legacy of energy and chemicals such as might have nurtured Humankind for many millennia. We wastefully burned-up this legacy in less than a century. And now our bright candle's wick burns close to the pan as we burn what remains of our fossil fuel legacy. If Humankind's capacity to replace fossil fuels relies upon the use of fossil fuels to discover and build that replacement – our bridge to the future – I fear we have so completely burned that bridge and all the bridges behind us. Our collapse will come before we see full scope of the wonders Climate Chaos holds in promise. Not only have we burned our bridges, we have so changed our world that our survivors will face constantly changing and difficult adaptations for many millennia to come.

If only the collapse of our Empire were more like the collapse of Rome or the other Empires mentioned.

Janie , October 22, 2019 at 2:14 pm

Many thanks to Yves for this post and to the commentariat for their excellent contributions. Another trip to the library is in order; as often happens, I am made aware of huge gaps in my knowledge.

Lambert Strether , October 22, 2019 at 2:15 pm

It's too bad that Duncan's book seems to have had structural issues, because I like the podcast so much. Oh well!

Summer , October 22, 2019 at 5:35 pm

At what point can one come to the conclusion that modelling after fallen Republics is a design for an eventual fall?
Conveniently or not .

RubyDog , October 22, 2019 at 7:12 pm

I think he is a little harsh on Mike Duncan's "The Storm Before the Storm."

"Unfortunately this latter book (in my opinion) wound up being a chronological blow-by-blow vomiting of not well organized facts."

There are many ways to tell the story of history, and there is not such thing as an unbiased, factual account, given the intellectual and ideological biases of any given author, and the necessary basis in available sources that are in themselves biased to begin with. That being said, Mike Duncan's book (which I just finished) tries to give a chronological account of "what happened", and (in my opinion) does so in a clear and coherent fashion, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions and interpretation. I wouldn't want people to avoid the book due to one person's opinion. I agree though that it's helpful to read as many different takes on a given historical topic as one has the time and inclination for, as there is no one "correct" or "best" interpretation.

If you like podcasts, "Death Throes of the Republic", by Dan Carlin, covers the same territory in Carlin's highly engaging and addictive style.

Jack Parsons , October 22, 2019 at 10:07 pm

Duncan's book is derived from his podcast of the same name. I haven't listened (I'm an "I, Claudius" guy) but his "Revolutions" podcast is very very good.

It might be that his Rome podcast works better than his book.

Michael Meo , October 22, 2019 at 8:57 pm

As my mite to the discussion I'd like to recommend as a valuable contribution to the history of the fall of the Republic Gareth Sampson's The Collapse of Rome. Marius, Sulla, and the First Civil War (91-70 BC) , Barnsley, South Yorkshire, Pen & Sword Military, 2013, 284 pp. Sampson's thesis is, as has been already pointed out, that the Republic was inalterably changed by the Social War and Sulla's assault on Rome when he returned from the East.

[Oct 22, 2019] It's four more years of the Trumpian Reich folks, with Russian Spetsnaz patrolling the streets, gigantic banners with the faces of Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, babushkas, the whole nine yards by CJ Hopkins

Notable quotes:
"... Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins vis The Unz Review, ..."
Oct 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins vis The Unz Review,

So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked," or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy.

Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up a last-minute military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools, National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.

[Oct 22, 2019] Russia Is All They ve Got - Exposing The Agents Of Empire by Mike Krieger

Notable quotes:
"... This is when it became clear it wasn't just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that "respected" mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. ..."
"... Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can't help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard, they aren't easing up. ..."
"... Comey was a senior vice president for Lockheed Martin before returning to Washington ..."
"... Excuse me, the voting going on up there for sanctions on Russia for various bogus things has been pretty much unanimous and bipartisan. ..."
Oct 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

– Arundhati Roy

Last week, Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard (and Jill Stein) Russian agents on a podcast. More specifically :

"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on someone who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians," said Clinton, apparently referring to Rep. Gabbard, who's been accused of receiving support from Russian bots and the Russian news media. "They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far." She added: "That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset. Yeah, she's a Russian asset -- I mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate. So I don't know who it's going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed."

Tulsi subsequently responded to this slanderous accusation with a series of devastating blows.

Her tweets set off a firestorm, and even if you're as disillusioned by presidential politics as myself, you couldn't help but cheer wildly that someone with a major political platform finally stated without any hint of fear or hesitation exactly what so many Americans across the ideological spectrum feel.

Of course, this has far wider implications than a high profile feud between these two. The "let's blame Russia for Hillary's loss" epidemic of calculated stupidity driven by Ellen-Democrats and their mouthpieces across corporate mass media began immediately after the election. I know about it on a personal level because this website was an early target of the neoliberal-led new McCarthyism courtesy of a ridiculous and libelous smear in the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend 2016 (see: Liberty Blitzkrieg Included on Washington Post Highlighted Hit List of "Russian Propaganda" Websites) .

This is when it became clear it wasn't just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that "respected" mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. The whole charade seems more akin to an intelligence operation than journalism, which shouldn't be surprising given the proliferation of former intelligence agents throughout mass media in the Trump era.

Here's a small sampling via Politico's 2018 article: The Spies Who Came in to the TV Studio

Former CIA Director John Brennan (2013-17) is the latest superspook to be reborn as a TV newsie. He just cashed in at NBC News as a "senior national security and intelligence analyst" and served his first expert views on last Sunday's edition of Meet the Press .

The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN, which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity.

Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV's grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg , former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Frank Figliuzzi , former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate , deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC; and Fran Townsend , homeland security adviser under Bush, at CBS News.

CNN's bulging roster also includes former FBI agent Asha Rangappa ; former FBI agent James Gagliano ; Obama's former deputy national security adviser Tony Blinken ; former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers ; senior adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama administration Samantha Vinograd ; retired CIA operations officer Steven L. Hall; and Philip Mudd , also retired from the CIA.

Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can't help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard, they aren't easing up.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue. Why are they doing this? Why is Clinton, with zero evidence whatsoever, falsely calling a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, a veteran with two tours in Iraq, and someone polling at only 2% in the Democratic primary a "Russian asset." Why are they so afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?

It's partly personal. Tulsi was one of only a handful of congressional Democrats to set aside fears of the Clintons and their mafia-like network to endorse Bernie Sanders early in 2016. In fact, she stepped down from her position as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee to do so. This is the sort of thing a petty narcissist like Hillary Clinton could never forgive, but it goes further.

Tulsi's mere presence on stage during recent debates has proven devastating for the Ellen Degeneres wing of the Democratic party. She effectively ended neoliberal darling Kamala Harris' chances by simply telling the truth about her horrible record, something no one else in the race had the guts to do.

Embedded video

In other words, Tulsi demolished Kamala Harris and put an end to her primary chances by simply telling the truth about her on national television. This is how powerful the truth can be when somebody's actually willing to stand up and say it. It's why the agents of empire -- in charge of virtually all major institutions -- go out of their way to ensure the American public is exposed to as little truth as possible. It's also why they lie and scream "Russia" instead of debating the actual issues.

But this goes well beyond Tulsi Gabbard. Empire requires constant meddling abroad as well as periodic regime change wars to ensure compliant puppets are firmly in control of any country with any geopolitical significance. The 21st century has been littered with a series of disastrous U.S. interventions abroad, while the country back home continues to descend deeper into a neo-feudal oligarchy with a hunger games style economy. As such, an increasing number of Americans have begun to question the entire premise of imperial foreign policy.

To the agents of empire, dominant throughout mainstream politics, mega corporations, think-tanks and of course mass media, this sort of thought crime is entirely unacceptable. In case you haven't noticed, empire is a third-rail of U.S. politics. If you dare touch the issue, you'll be ruthlessly smeared, without any evidence, as a Russian agent or asset. There's nothing logical about this, but then again there typically isn't much logic when it comes to psychological operations. They depend on manipulation and triggering specific emotional responses.

There's a reason people like Hillary Clinton and her minions just yell "Russia" whenever an individual with a platform criticizes empire and endless war. They know they can't win an argument if they debate the actual issues, so a conscious choice was made to simply avoid debate entirely. As such, they've decided to craft and spread a disingenuous narrative in which anyone critical of establishment neocon/neoliberal foreign policy is a Russia asset/agent/bot. This is literally all they've got. These people are telling you 2+2=5 and if you don't accept it, you're a traitorous, Putin-loving nazi with a pee pee tape. And these same people call themselves "liberal."

Importantly, it isn't just a few trollish kooks doing this. It's being spread by some of the most powerful people and institutions in the country, including of course mass media.

For example:

Embedded video

This inane verbal vomit is considered "liberal" news in modern America, a word which has now lost all meaning. Above, we witness a collection of television mannequins questioning the loyalty of a U.S. veteran who continues to serve in both Congress and the national guard simply because she dared call out America's perpetually failing foreign policy establishment.

To conclude, it's now clear dissent is only permitted so long as it doesn't become too popular. By polling at 2% in the primary, it appears Gabbard became too popular, but the truth is she's just a vessel. What's really got the agents of empire concerned is we may be on the verge of a tipping point within the broader U.S. population regarding regime change wars and empire. This is why debate needs to be shut down and shut down now. A critical mass of citizens openly questioning establishment foreign policy cannot be permitted. Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor. The national security state doesn't want the public to even think about such topics, let alone debate them.

Ultimately, if you give up your capacity for reason, for free-thought and for the courage to say what you think about issues of national significance, you've lost everything. This is what these manipulators want you to do. They want you to shut-up, to listen to the "experts" who destroy everything they touch, and to be a compliant subject as opposed to an active, empowered citizen. The answer to such a tactic is to be more bold, more informed and more ethical. They fear truth and empowered individuals more than anything else. Stand up tall and speak your mind. Pandering to bullies never works.

* * *

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Manipuflation , 52 seconds ago link

For those of us who grew up during the Cold War going to Russia is intense. I have never been so scared in my life as when that plane touched down at Pulkovo 2. And I though Dulles was a shithole.

Russians love art and they have fantastic museums and fantastic architecture. Food is a bit sketchy but you can make do. No fat women there that I saw. In fact, you will see some of the most beautiful women in the world there. Trust me on that.

I loved my first trip there. I can't hate Russia.

francis scott falseflag , 38 minutes ago link

Why are they doing this?

Because they're ******* losing and they know it.

Pelosi is smart enough to know that all roads lead to Putin. But is she smart enough to know that're not just American and its 'allied' Western 'roads', but now its all the roads in the world.

Because the world finally understands that Putin is the only peacemaker on the scene. And that most of the disputes the international community is saddled with are a direct result of American foreign policy and the excesses of its economy.

The world is tired of being dragged through Hell at the whim of a handful of American neocon devotees of Paul Wolfowitz and the fallacious Wolfowitz Doctrine which was credited with having won the Cold War for the West and has been in effect ever since.

Except there seems to be some doubt now who actually won the Cold War with America scrambling to get out of Syria, leaving behind a symbolic force of a couple of thousand troops.

That's the reason for everything that's going on America today. Russia, under Putin, has turned the tables on Congress, the neocons, the warmongers, and those politicians and elite who want the Middle East and its vast reserves of oil to continue to be destabilized by intranational, neighborly hatreds, by terrorism and by America's closest ally, Israel to continue to expand its borders with its policy of settlements. This problematic situation is scrupulously avoided in America and the West's MSM, and can only be seen in foreign media. Which brings us back to Putin.

Is he following the strategies of Sun Tzu, who advises you to

'victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first then try to win.'

swmnguy , 15 minutes ago link

Hillary Clinton is obviously testing the waters for a last-minute, swoop-in candidacy. She sees Biden deflating and realizes there's nobody to keep the Democratic nomination firmly in corporate hands. She wants them to beg her, though.

gold_silver_as_money , 36 minutes ago link

So..."Tulsi Gabbard didn't deny being a Russian asset," you say?

Sounds like a page out of the Dems -- now Trump's -- playbook. Dance around the smear indirectly. Then fire back mercilessly

Manipuflation , 54 minutes ago link

If you go to Russia, you will not come back as you were when you departed. You will never look at things the same way ever again in your life.

artistant , 16 minutes ago link

Russia is an IMPEDIMENT to Apartheid Israhell's design for the MidEast .

Without Russia, ASSAD would be long gone and IRAN would have been bombed to oblivion, and Greater Israhell would have been fulfilled and ruling over the MidEast.

In other words, Russia bashing by Jewish-controlled politicians and in Jewish-controlled Western media is simply PAYBACK .

PoopFilled , 21 minutes ago link

in russia, trump is a bad guy

Vuke , 22 minutes ago link

I am a Russian Agent. Well, not formally but act as one. Only in elections though as Russia forbids (after losing 30 million dead in WW2) any military or violent interference. Agent may be too strong a word as my actions reflect the beauty of Russian literature, music and philosophy. (qv Kropotkin, Rimsky Korsakoff etc. etc.) Maybe a spokesman?

In this coming election vote for the agent of your choice. Gabbard, Trump, (Cackles, hang on and wait for this one) or Biden ( on whom we await a conversion). This agency stuff is fun. Can't wait.

DanausPlex , 47 minutes ago link

The quid pro quo for many Deep State bureaucrats comes after they are no longer in office as typified by jobs as "experts" with the corrupt news networks. Comey was a senior vice president for Lockheed Martin before returning to Washington. Trump is outing them all and they are out to destroy him.

If the Russians are so bad, why did we give them our Uranium? Hillary and corrupt Washington Swamp dwellers in action. How many in Congress opposed the deal? We need Trump to be reelected to Make America Great Again.

Salsa Verde , 32 minutes ago link

I remember in the 80's Democrats would mercilessly lampoon and make fun of Conservatives for their (at the time) hard-line stance against the Soviet Union and how we should just get over it: peace, love and b*llsh*t. My how times have changed.

Nunny , 40 seconds ago link

You need a scorecard to keep track these days. Barry lampooned Mitt for speaking against the Russians, like they were the 'good guys' (ahem, 'tell Vlad' and Kills power reset button) Make up your ******* minds people.

Maxamillia , 32 minutes ago link

If Russia wants to Destroy America.. Why Not.. America is Working to Destroy Her

Just Get it Over With... Were Tired Of Waiting...

We All Want To Go Somewhere... Truth is Is Not What Ur All All Waiting For Tis Where Were Going...

Let Those Missiles Fly....Come On Boys..

Show Us Your Might...

ebear , 44 minutes ago link

Dear Hillary and Co.,

Thank you for bringing my attention to Russia. Had it not been for your constant denunciations, I probably would never have investigated that nation to the extent that I have, and that would have been my loss. Allow me to explain.

As a permanent student of human history and culture, I've traveled to, and studied many different nations, from Japan, China and Thailand, to Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, but somehow I managed to completely miss Russia. Of course I was familiar with the Western narrative concerning communism and the USSR - I grew up with that - but I never fully understood Russian culture until, by your actions, you forced me to look into it.

I've since studied their history intently, and have studied their language to the point where I can at least make myself understood. I've spoken to Russian expats, read numerous books, watched their TV shows, listened to their music, and have kept a close eye on current events, including the coup in Ukraine and Russia's response to that event. At this point I feel well enough prepared to travel to Russia and I'm looking forward to my upcoming trip with great anticipation.

I operate on the basic premise that I'm nobody special - that there are thousands of people just like me with a deep interest in human affairs, who, like myself, have been prompted to investigate a culture that, for various reasons, has been largely overlooked in the West. So, on my own and their behalf I thank you for providing the impetus to focus our attention in that regard. It's probably not what you intended, but it is what it is. Thanks to you, many hundreds, if not thousands of people have now undertaken a study of Russia and her people, and that can only be a good thing, as the more we know about each other, the less we have to fear, and the less likely we are to come into conflict with one another.

condotdo , 39 minutes ago link

it is just another attack on a WHITE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC NATION, it is as simple as that , "THEY" must destroy the white race

DesertRat1958 , 53 minutes ago link

We are all Russians now.

hispanicLoser , 47 minutes ago link

Yeah you definitely want to trot out the niggers when youre catapulting the crazy talk. They'll swallow anything.

slicktroutman , 55 minutes ago link

Bravo well written and right on the mark. If Tulsi wasn't a gun grabber and openly supported the 2nd Amendment she would be a front runner, only a few steps behind Trump. And by the way, don't trust those 2% Polls. We all know the polls are pure ********.

Joiningupthedots , 49 minutes ago link

When one Colonel Gary Powers was shot down in his USAF U2 spy plane in 1960 and captured alive he was asked by his then KGB interrogators what the difference was between the Republican and Democratic parties.......and he admitted to being at a loss to explain that there was any fundamental difference at all.

Therein lies the root problem with the American political system. All through the process it arrives at the same outcomes and it doesnt matter who you vote for.

It could be argued that it is in effect a one party system as both are indistinguishable from each other ultimately as they push the America PLC agenda.

The entire system is held captive by secretive and "invisible" unelected groups who call the shots and if you push too hard they have you killed one way or another.....all the esoteric secret societies of any significance are represented.

The question therefore is this; Is America any different to China other than the wallpaper coverings?

To paraphrase Mark Twain; If voting really mattered they wouldn't let you do it.

SolidGold , 1 hour ago link

Tulsi Gabbard is the Dems Donald Trump and they don't like that. That simple.

Epstein101 , 1 hour ago link

Jews control the DNC

Jews control the news media

Jews hate a white, Christian Russia they can not exploit as they once (twice!) did.

Jews want Syria smashed for Greater Israel.

Everything else is commentary.

https://russia-insider.com/en/big-tech-oligarchs-best-tool-censoring-internet-jewish-adl/ri27797

Manipuflation , 1 hour ago link

Russia is an interesting place to visit. There is no good way to describe Russia because you have to go there and see it for yourself.

SolidGold , 59 minutes ago link

Russia is the "bad" one because they literally have no debt

and a ****-load of resources.

Seek Shelter , 1 hour ago link

In a real poll, involving all possible voters, Tulsi Gabbard would be a hell of a lot higher than 2%.

Arising , 1 hour ago link

Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor

This is true with Trumptards on this comments board. They unquestionably follow lies, manipulative, and hollow Trump doctrine without thinking.

Just yesterday there was and idiot spewing out that 'Assange was treasonous' before engaging his cerebral matter to realise you cannot be a traitor against a country that's not yours.

pwall70 , 54 minutes ago link

The same can be said for leftards and CNN. Goes both ways, just like you.

chunga , 1 hour ago link

Excuse me, the voting going on up there for sanctions on Russia for various bogus things has been pretty much unanimous and bipartisan.

[Oct 22, 2019] US foreign policy is now based on virtual facts

Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Some of the "virtual facts:" ..."
"... The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist and an inevitable and indeed indispensable enemy of the US. Anyone who challenges that certitude is an obvious agent of the Russian government. ..."
"... Iran is the "greatest supporter of terrorism" in the world." ..."
"... The Syrian Arab Government is an abomination on the scale of Nazi Germany and must be destroyed and replaced by God knows what . ..."
"... Saudi Arabia is a deeply friendly state and ally of the US. ..."
"... It is beyond scary to see just how entrenched and powerful Deep State is and how it involves/controls both political parties ..."
"... I doubt there is any magic bullet website or other source of information that would turn people over night. A good start would be encouraging them to read transcripts of various Putin and Lavrov speeches and pressers, also Valdai Club, economic forum ect. ..."
"... The colonel's complaint implicitly assumes that things were not always thus. My adult experience since I saw a war up close has been that the "facts" of our public discourse are always simplified and usually grossly distorted. ..."
"... Not only are the MSM married to a narrative but they feel compelled to attack the few who ever challenge the orthodoxy. For example, 'Tulsi Gabbard met with the war criminal Assad'. ..."
"... It is certainly true that Russia is being demonized in all the MSM I have sampled. A frequent criticism is that Putin, like Assad, and earlier Saddam and Quadaffi, is essentially an illegitimate ruler of his country, ruling through brute force and without the consent of his countrymen. (Thus the WaPo editorials routinely call Putin a "thug", just as they call Assad a "butcher".) ..."
"... Not to defend Trump and his balance sheet mindset with respect to the Saudis, the reality is that both parties and presidents from George H.W to Bill Clinton to W and Obama have treated the Saudi monarchy as our "friend", even when they sponsored the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11. ..."
"... Tony Blair became a wealthy man after his prime ministership on the back of money thrown his way by the Arab sheikhs ..."
Oct 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Mika B remarked a couple of years ago on the show that she and her sex slave stage in the early morning that the social media were out of control because it is the job of the MSM to tell people what to think. The Hillary stated recently that life was better when there were only three TeeVee news outlets because it was easier to keep things under control. Now? My God! Any damned fool can propagate unauthorized "facts." What? Who?

Well, pilgrims, the US government (along with our British and Israeli helpmates and masters) are the preeminent creators and purveyors of the manufactured virtual facts on which we base our policy. These "facts" are "ginned up" in the well moneyed hidden staff groups of "hidden" candidates that are devoted to the seizure of power made possible by a deluded electorate. These "facts" are then propagated and reinforced through relentless IO campaigns run by executive "bots" in the MSM and in such remarkable and imaginative efforts as the "White Helmets" film company manned by jihadis and managed by clubby Brits left over from the Days of The Raj (sob). These "facts" are now so entrenched in the general mind that they can be used to denounce people like Rep. (major ) Gabbard as traitors because they challenge them.

Some of the "virtual facts:"

Harper , 21 October 2019 at 07:50 PM

Yes I fully concur. We have gone from fact-based news to faith-based fake news led by the MSM. I recall at the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, the line was out that British PM Tony Blair was George W. Bush's "poodle," forgetting entirely that it was the first of the British "dodgy dossiers" that made the totally discredited claim that Saddam had gotten tons of yellow cake from Niger. So the British have no military resources but they continue to maintain the idea that they can manipulate the U.S. and make up for the demise of the old British empire.

The Steele dossier was the second British "dodgy dossier" that got the ball rolling on Trump the Russian mole and Putin's "poodle."

So much fraud. But now social media must be patrolled and anyone daring to challenge the voice of the MSM must be purged by Google, Facebook, Twitter et al.

My question is: When will the machinations of the Big Lie MSM Wurlitzer cross the line and trigger the backlash that they secretly fear so much? MSM has to destroy Trump by 2020 or else his "fake news" polemic will stick... because there is no much truth to it. The messenger may be crude, but he has the bully pulpit to have a real impact.

I await the release, as Larry Johnson pointed out, of the Horowitz IG report on the origins of the fake Trump-Russia collusion line. Also the pending Barr-Durham larger report which is zeroing in on John Brennan.

Fred -> Harper... , 22 October 2019 at 08:28 AM
Harper,

"MSM has to destroy Trump by 2020 or else..."
The MSM are joined by all those folks who were wined, dined, and degraded by Jeffrey Epstein and Hollywood hero Harvey Weinstein. Nobody seems to care about who Jeffrey abused, or who enjoyed his island paradise. Harvey, he's about to buy a free ride out of jail. Meanwhile we jail idiots who "bribe" there kids way into that "elite" institution - UCLA.

Vig said in reply to Harper... , 22 October 2019 at 11:31 AM
Great response Harper,

an ideal study would no doubt want to look into the Italy-GB-US angle already concerning the "first dossier", or whatevers. Didn*t that have mediawise an intermediate French angle?

But is that what is looked at? At present?

VietnamVet , 21 October 2019 at 08:03 PM
Colonel,

This is what happens when the deciders believe their own propaganda. The media now says that a residual force of American troops and contractors will stay behind at the Deir ez-Zor oil fields and Al-Tanf base near the Jordon border. The media moguls dare not mention that the real intention is to prevent the Syrian Arab Army from retaking its own territory or that Turkey is seizing thousands of square miles of Syria. Syrians with Russia, Chinese and Iranian aid won't quit until Syria is whole again and rebuilt. This means that America continues its uninvited unwinnable war in the middle of nowhere with no allies for no reason at all except to do Israel's bidding and to make money for military contractors. The swamp's regime change campaign failed. The Houthis' Aramco attack shows that the gulf oil supply is at risk and can be shut down at will. Continuing these endless wars that are clearly against the best interests of the American people is insane.

CK said in reply to VietnamVet... , 22 October 2019 at 10:05 AM
It strikes me, as a matter of observable fact, that the Houthi attack had almost no long run affect on oil production. Everything was back to normal within 10 days. I think that the attack was allowed to occur for exactly one reason and that was to start a shooting war between the USA as KSA's great defender and Iran as the horrible nation that has a mild dislike for Israel.
It failed. So far.
To believe that the 24/7/52 AWACS, Ground radar, Israeli radar, and the overlapping close in radar coverage of the Saudi oil fields all failed to detect the drones and cruise missiles is to believe in more miracles than I can handle on a good day. It also means that assets in other parts of this world covered by these same type of radars are just as vulnerable to local disaffected groups.
j , 21 October 2019 at 08:22 PM
The FUKUS thinks we are all a bunch of brainless sheep to be led by a ring in our noses. The 'Muktar' is clueless regarding our Saudi brethren, he's supposed to administer how the overlords say he's to administer, nothing more. The CIA administration still has a hard-on because they blew it regarding Iran and they're still embarrassed about it.

In two days, counting closer to a day and a half will be the sad anniversary (October 23) where the Israeli government willfully with forethought let our Marines and other service personnel bunked with them at the barracks in Beirut die needlessly, because Nahum Admoni wanted U.S. to get our noses bloodied.

Never mind that the Russians lost close to 30 million to the brotherhood of the Operation Paper Clip, and the Bormann Group that today controls from behind the scenes most of the World's money thanks to Martin creating over 750 corporations initially to start with, that has expanded like a Hydra. Any time that truth (Russia is no longer Communist) rears its ugly head, the Bormann group goes into overdrive to ensure that the big lie perpetuates.

The FUKUS think we're all a bunch of sheep to be led off a cliff, and the propaganda mills have created the trail right up to the edge of the precipice that the sheep are trotting.

Heaven help our children and grandchildren.

Larry Johnson , 21 October 2019 at 08:29 PM
Amen. The landslide of disinformation and bullshit disseminated on a daily basis by a pliant media is happily lapped up by ignorant, uninformed Americans. I've had quite an exchange with a liberal friend of mine who was shrieking MSNBC talking points on Syria and the Kurds. Mind you, this fellow never served a day in the military. Never held a clearance in his life. Didn't know a thing about JOPES and how Special Ops forces use a series of written orders signed off on by the CJCS. Yet, he was qualified to criticize Trump. At the same time not one of his kids or grandkids are signed up to fight on that frontline. I told him politely to STFU and get educated before trying to comment on something he knows nothing about.
Thanks Colonel.
JJackson said in reply to Larry Johnson ... , 22 October 2019 at 06:41 AM
I am British and did consider the military in my youth but if I were that age now I would not. Having seen what my political master, and yours, have asked the military to do the danger of being sent on some counter product regime change mission or to prop-up someone I would rather fight is just too great. I would only end up refusing to follow orders which I understand the military takes a rather dim view of.
Vig said in reply to JJackson... , 22 October 2019 at 12:03 PM
... regime change mission or to prop-up someone I would rather fight is just too great.

once upon a time, and strictly I had opted not to believe either side before that, but yes, at one point I wondered fully aware they may be legitimate complaints, how would the UCK, or the Kosovo Liberation Army become the "Western" partner in war.

In hindsight I was made aware of this one grandiose British officer ... once upon a time.

Fred -> JJackson... , 22 October 2019 at 12:04 PM
JJackson,

"if I were that age now..." That is the same line used by the American left since the '60s.
"I would only end up refusing to follow orders..."
Samantha Power at the UN and James Comey at the FBI both had a "higher loyalty" than to the elected government or the Constitution on which it is based. That's why they are busy trying to subvert it.

The Twisted Genius , 21 October 2019 at 10:01 PM
There's a lot of truth there, Colonel. Life would be better with just three TV new outlets, huh. Which three? Can you imagine being limited to three cable new outlets? Actually most people probably limit themselves to three news outlets or less. They find an echo chamber and stick with it. I thank God I don't have cable or satellite TV and I have too many interests to engage with talk radio.

I couldn't agree more with your characterization of "virtual facts" about Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. I also agree that those who continue to view Russia as an implacable enemy bent on our destruction and world domination are liars and/or fools. The Soviet Union was just a phase, a phase now past. Russia never ended. Conversely, those who insist that Russia is a newly minted nation of glitter farting unicorns incapable of nefarious behavior are also fools and/or liars. Russia is a formidable competitor, fully capable and willing to take prudent actions in pursuit of her interests. We should respect her and seek cooperation where we can and tolerance where we must.

How the never-Trumpers treat Tulsi Gabbard is shameful. What Clinton recently said is mild compared to what others have been saying for quite some time. Calling Tulsi a Russian asset is foolishly wrong. That Russia may prefer Tulsi over other potential Presidential candidates should be seen as a positive thing. A policy of mutual respect, cooperation and tolerance between our two countries would benefit the entire world.

Sbin , 21 October 2019 at 10:21 PM
The nonsense is endless.

America needed to restore the Kuwait monarchy for freedom and democracy. Remember defense Secretary Dick Cheney sending captured Iraq arms to the Taliban.

Same play book was used to run Libyan arms through Bengazi to Wahhabism freedom fighter "ISIS" and the al Lindsey McCain head choppers.

Babak Makkinejad -> Sbin... , 21 October 2019 at 11:25 PM
The nonsense will end since not even the United States can endure these costs. Did you hear Trump? 8 trillion yankee dollars and nothing to show for it.
Fred -> Babak Makkinejad... , 22 October 2019 at 08:23 AM
Babak,

He left out thousands dead and injured and not a single one of them a politician, banker, professor or news anchor.

walrus , 21 October 2019 at 11:43 PM
What is highly alarming, almost terrifying, is that really well educated people who have achieved great things in their careers and are pillars of society believe this crap.

I had dinner guests last week; a former Chairman of a bank and his wife who is a highly acclaimed Professor of public Health and Epidemiology who told me how awful Trump and Putin are neither of these friends are what you could remotely classify as Social Justice leftists.

My problem is that I don't know where to start to try and put them right without them thinking I'm a tinfoil hatted conspiracy nut. I wish there was a website dedicated solely to purveying basic truthful information that is not perhaps as esoteric as SST. Should I try and start one or are there already good examples to point to?

Voatboy -> walrus... , 22 October 2019 at 05:10 AM
https://www.wanttoknow.info/ is a useful resource for educating citizens.
John B said in reply to walrus... , 22 October 2019 at 09:21 AM
I'm thinking this is so far and so deep there is nothing that can or will be done. Trump's election and presidency has lifted the curtain on the puppet show. This recent Syria troop removal is Trump's second attempt at openly declaring troops will be pulled out of Syria only to have the military has said, "Um, no, we will stay and simply relocate."

Trump openly called for FISA warrants to be declassified only to have the DOJ and FBI either ignore and defy him. Groups like Judicial Watch and others go into court to get the requested information through FOIA and DOJ and FBI lawyers and the courts block them.

It is beyond scary to see just how entrenched and powerful Deep State is and how it involves/controls both political parties. Trump has faced hurricane winds of opposition from day one and has been constantly subverted by his own party and his own people. I don't know how he can get up every day and continue to fight the obvious and concerted Deep State coup against him. I pray for him. I pray the rosary for him.

There are members within Trump's own party who have agreed that there should be an investigation into the impeachment of Trump for running a yellow light (at most). Again, members of his own party. Renowned Constitutional lawyers John Yoo and Alan Dershowitz, from Cal-Berkeley and Harvard laws schools respectively, have said that not only has Trump done nothing, even remotely, which could trigger an impeachment inquiry but if Congress were to do so it would be unconstitutional and illegal. But alas, who would enforce this? Deep State snakes like John Roberts at the Supreme Court? Robert has already signed off on the coup ( https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/john-roberts-mitch-mcconnell-trump-impeachment-trial.amp).

The only thing that separates America from falling into the abyss is Trump, a handful of people in Washington, a few conservative talk show hosts, and about 40% of America. Many people have talked a good game at points but I think in the end are just double agents of the dark side/Deep State (Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, ... IG Horowitz, etc.). And some, such as Chris Wray, are unabashed dark side/Deep State agents in good standing.

As St. Thomas More said, "The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them." I have faith in Barr. I have faith in Durham. Two men whose Catholic faith is integral to every aspect of their lives and work. But with as pervasive, entrenched, and powerful as the Deep State is I'm skeptical they have the power to do anything. Btw, here's U.S. Attorney John Durham's lecture before the Thomistic Institute at Yale (hosted by the Dominican Order): https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/perspective-of-a-catholic-prosecutor-honorable-john-durham

One thing that really amuses me is that the marionettes of Deep State in the media and politics actually believe that once Trump is gone their puppet show theatre can resume like nothing happened. Sorry, but there is no coming back from this. They will be lucky if the worst thing that happens is a sizable part of of the American populace protests by throwing sand in the gears. I'm afraid it will end much worse.

Peter AU 1 said in reply to walrus... , 22 October 2019 at 01:12 PM
I doubt there is any magic bullet website or other source of information that would turn people over night. A good start would be encouraging them to read transcripts of various Putin and Lavrov speeches and pressers, also Valdai Club, economic forum ect.

Most only get to see the odd sentence or paragragh in western MSM with an entirely fictional story built around it, so perhaps and MSM piece like that and the transcript of the relevant presser or speech alongside it.

I suspect the fine detail in Putin and Lavrov's replies to press questions rather than cliches would surprise many people.

Glorious Bach said in reply to walrus... , 22 October 2019 at 02:29 PM
Walrus--100% my experience as well. Many dinners with "liberal" even "progressive" friends, mostly of the retired kind require great psychic energy. Their Overton Window is 1"-square, making exchanges very difficult to squeeze even minimal bits of political reality.

My daily blog tour, like MW's above, takes me through: Moon of Alabama, Naked Capitalism, SST, Caitlin Johnstone, Grayzone and a few others. I'm intel gathering -- but I need to figure out how to convey broader perspectives even to my 40-45 year-old children and their friends. Inside the Beltway assumptions are hard to de-program.

Vegetius , 22 October 2019 at 12:13 AM
The CIA is a clear and present danger.
b , 22 October 2019 at 01:31 AM
While I agree with the essence of the post I disagree with the characterization of SOHR. It tends to get its stuff right. I have listed several significant events where SOHR disagreed with the official narrative: On Sources And Information - The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights . Those are exactly the moments where SOHR is disregarded by the pressitude.

It is the selective quoting of such sources that paint them as partisan even as they try to stay somewhat neutral.

---
@Pat - Any comment to the Gen. McRaven op-ed in the NYT?
Our Republic Is Under Attack From the President
If President Trump doesn't demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office.

Isn't it a call to mutiny? It seems to me to be far beyond the allowed political comment from a retired General.

Anonymous , 22 October 2019 at 01:34 AM
Those that look up the pole, all they see is assholes. Those that look down all they see is assholes, but those that look straight ahead, they see which path to take.
fredw , 22 October 2019 at 08:13 AM
The colonel's complaint implicitly assumes that things were not always thus. My adult experience since I saw a war up close has been that the "facts" of our public discourse are always simplified and usually grossly distorted.

Is the Iranian regime terrible? Well, yes, but it is also a regime that holds real elections and often loses them. Not in the same league of awful with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

Similarly with the other examples. The "facts" have in each case a basis in truth but do not by themselves give a true picture. Is our discourse more unfair to Russia than it was to Nasser's Egypt? Is our promotion of Saudi Arabia any worse than our adulation of Chiang Kai-shek?

Christian J Chuba , 22 October 2019 at 08:30 AM
Not only are the MSM married to a narrative but they feel compelled to attack the few who ever challenge the orthodoxy. For example, 'Tulsi Gabbard met with the war criminal Assad'.

It would do our vaunted free press wonders if they traveled to Damascus instead of repeating the same tired talking points about Syria. I'll never forget the look on Gabbard's face when she talked about the Syrians came up to her and said, 'why are you attacking us, what did we do to you'. Meeting real people can undo a lifetime of blather and must be stopped at all cost.

turcopolier , 22 October 2019 at 08:56 AM
b Perhaps memory fails me but I think SOHR propagated the SAG gas attacks mythology. I have stated that McRaven should be recalled to active duty and court-martialed. I could find several punitice articles in UCMJ under which he could be charged.
CK said in reply to turcopolier ... , 22 October 2019 at 10:21 AM
When McCain returned from the Hanoi Hilton he could have been prosecuted for treason he was not because "peace with honour" overrode UCMJ and honour. McRaven is being offered up as a distraction. Call him back to active duty yes, and assign him somewhere dreary, unimportant and far from CONUS. Ignore the stuff he is blathering while he is retired, if he repeats blather while on active duty then the navy might be able to recover some honour.
Elora Danan said in reply to turcopolier ... , 22 October 2019 at 12:50 PM
No...your memory does not fail you, Colonel, the SOHR was the main source cited at MSM level on the alleged protests which gave place to the destruction of Syria and the legitimation and labelling of alleged "moderate rebels" which then resulted being but terrorist jihadi groups brought mainly from abroad under financing and mtrainning of non Syrian actors...

The source on the alleged atrocities commited by Assad was SOHR at the first years of the war on Syria, along with Doctors Without Borders and "special envoys" by British and French main papers reporting from the former, and first, "Baba Amr" caliphate in Homs....I am meaning the times of Sunday Times´ Marie Colvin and the other woman from Le Figaro , who then resulted or KIA or caught amongst the jihadists ranks along with other foreign "special envoys" who then were released in a truce with Assad through a safe corridor, especially made for that end, to Lebanon.

I fear SOHR was the source of the super-trolling consisting on inundating the MSM comments sections, like that of El País , with dozens of vertical doctored photographs every time any of us aware entered commenting to debunk their fake news.
I remember this since that was the starting point of Elora as net activist...( till then, just a baby, peacefully growing up...unaware....but had no election, felt it was a duty, since, as you comment here, so few people aware...Having known Syria few years before she could not believe what they were telling about Assad, who, eventhough not being perfect, as it has been long ago proved any other leader in the world is, had managed to show the visitant a flourishing Syria where misery present at other ME countries was almost absent...

It is only lately, when the Syrian war was obviously lost for the US coalition, that the SOHR started contradicting some fake claims by the White Helmets, especially last two alleged chemical attacks, if Elora´s not wrong.

Why this, why now, why in this form? Probably those powers behind SOHR trying to secure a part in the cake of reconstruction and future of Syria...since, it got obvious, love for Syria is not amongst one of their mottos...

Dave P. said in reply to Elora Danan... , 22 October 2019 at 04:04 PM
This news just broke:
Trump approves $4.5 million in aid for Syria's White Helmets

WASHINGTON -- US President Donald Trump has authorized $4.5 million in aid for Syria's White Helmets group, famed for rescuing wounded civilians from the frontlines in the civil war, the White House says today...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-approves-4-5-million-in-aid-for-syrias-white-helmets/

Steve , 22 October 2019 at 09:41 AM
Col Lang,
I'm an extremely grateful for you and your blog. We are all very fortunate to have you.
PeterVE , 22 October 2019 at 09:58 AM
Thank you for this refuge from the noise. How long before the strangling of information makes its way here, and to Craig Murray, Naked Capitalism, and others who look on with clear eyes?
Terry , 22 October 2019 at 10:13 AM
Humans are copy/paste artists and generally not very good at creative thinking. When shown a series of steps to achieve a reward people will repeat all the steps including clearly unnecessary ones. Monkeys will drop unnecessary steps and frequently show more creativity by using a different method to achieve the reward instead of copying.

The old story goes how a woman always cut the ends off a roast before putting it in a pan. When her daughter asks why she doesn't know, asks her mother who doesn't know and asks the great grandmother who laughs and says her pan was too small.

I suspect it is a functional tradeoff that lets us transfer great amounts of cultural information and maintain a civilization of sorts. It creates a tough environment for innovators and allows for easy manipulation of the majority.

Nature of course always has a sprinkling of minority traits in the gene pool to allow for sudden changes in the environment. Most likely those of us that are more critical thinkers and like in depth, multi-dimensional viewpoints and historical knowledge are always going to be standing by watching the crowd do their copy/paste thing.

The rise of the internet giving easy access to more "sources" means more fragmentation in worldviews than ever before depending on where people copy/paste from.

prawnik , 22 October 2019 at 10:56 AM
To be fair, Russia is portrayed as a sort of resurrected Soviet Union intent on world conquest when the audience are conservatives.

Russia portrayed as a fascist theocracy when the audience are liberals.

prawnik , 22 October 2019 at 11:05 AM
Re: only three TV channels and they all said the same thing!

Once Upon a Time, not so long ago, publishing news was hard. For one thing, you needed a printing press, which was big, expensive and required housing and specialized technicians to operate it. Not only that, but a printing press cost money for every sheet of paper printed, and you had to spend more money to distribute what he printed.

They say that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" but there's more! Unless you were already rich and planned to publish as an expensive and time-consuming hobby, you needed an income stream. You would get some money from subscriptions, but subscriptions are really a means to sell advertising. Dependence on advertising meant that there were some people the publisher had to keep happy, and others he could not afford to annoy.

Anyone who knows anything about local news knows this. At best, it's a tightrope walk between giving subscribers the news they want to know, and not infuriating your advertisers. The result was a sort of natural censorship. Publishers had to think long and hard before they published anything that would tork the bigwigs off. The fact that a publisher was tied to a physical location and physical assets also made libel suits much easier.

The same thing applied to broadcast TV, only more so. It took orders of magnitude more money, and you were restricted to a limited amount of bandwidth.

The internet changed all that. Now, any anonymous toolio with a laptop ($299 cheap at WallyWorld) and WiFi (free at many businesses) can go into the news publishing business by nightfall, and with worldwide distribution and an advertising revenue stream, to boot. Marginal cost of readership is zero.

Needless to say, this development has The People That Matter very concerned, and they are working hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle.

casey , 22 October 2019 at 11:32 AM
For what it's worth, I found the late Udo Ulfkotte's personal-experience book "Bought Jounalism" to be quite interesting on this topic, as it details the kind of nuts-and-bolts of print-media prostitution. But I would really like to see an org-chart sometime of the overlapping, possibly competing, mission control centers (if that's the right phrase) that control the various "Wurlitzer" messaging and who, ultimately, is on charge of these. It has been intriguing to watch, since Kerry uttered his "the Internet makes it very hard to govern" line years ago, the blurry outline of a vast operation to shut down any non-approved media messages, now including all social media. To give credit where credit is due, "they" sure have done a bang-up job in feeding bullshit across all platforms down the throats of a Western people, like a goose being fattened up for foie gras.
Jack , 22 October 2019 at 12:04 PM
"...the US government (along with our British and Israeli helpmates and masters) are the preeminent creators and purveyors of the manufactured virtual facts on which we base our policy."

Sir

I've been perplexed for some time what the objectives are of these virtual fact creators? When one digs into who the movers & shakers are in the virtual fact creation apparatus then it seems very much analogous to the Jeffrey Epstein orbit. Folks bound together through the carrot of extraordinary personal gain and the stick of personal destruction. Your Drinking the Koolaid, is a seminal work in exploring how these virtual facts are created and how those who challenge the creation are marginalized and even destroyed personally.

IMO, policy making on the basis of virtual facts extends beyond foreign policy to economic and financial policy as well as healthcare policy in the US. The symptoms are seen in growing wealth inequality and increased market concentration globally and financial policy completely unmoored from common sense and sophistry an important element in virtual fact creation.

We're seeing signs of the early breakdown in social cohesion with social unrest in France, Spain, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Ecuador. Brexit and the election of Trump despite the intensity and vitriolic nature of how the media was used against them. The impeachment of Trump another tool in the desperate attempt to retain and consolidate power. Maybe we're in the Fourth Turning as Howe & Strauss label it.

Keith Harbaugh , 22 October 2019 at 12:43 PM
"The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist ..."
In the interest of specificity and accountability, where/who in the MSM are asserting that?
You (PL) are making a serious charge.
Just who is guilty of perpetrating such a blatant falsehood?
Terry said in reply to Keith Harbaugh... , 22 October 2019 at 04:19 PM
Google "Russia like USSR". It has to be google tho, not Qwant or Duckduckgo. The bias is thick on google.

Back in the U.S.S.R.? How Today's Russia Is Like the Soviet Era
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/back-u-s-s-r-how-todays-russia-soviet-era-n453536

Russia vs. Ukraine: More Russians Want the Soviet Union and Communism Back Amid Continued Tensions

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-vs-ukraine-soviet-union-communism-1264875

Putin's Russia is becoming more Soviet by the day

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/02/26/putins-russia-is-becoming-more-soviet-by-the-day/

Joseph Stalin: Why so many Russians like the Soviet dictator

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47975704

Putin says he wishes the Soviet Union had not collapsed and many Russians agree.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/03/putin-says-he-wishes-he-could-change-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union-many-russians-agree/&usg=AOvVaw22Q9M8lhhTo8IYh6rl-FCi

oldman22 , 22 October 2019 at 01:04 PM
John Helmer has today published a comprehensive piece on Syria.
The details of history and current affairs are comprehensive.
Highly recommended, a reference work.
His cartoon is good too!
http://johnhelmer.net/oil-and-water-dont-mix-the-solution-to-the-war-in-syria/print/
oldman22 , 22 October 2019 at 01:13 PM
pardon me, should have said the article that John Helmer published
was written by Gary Busch
divadab , 22 October 2019 at 01:15 PM
well it seems to me that the groundwork is being laid for an authoritarian state - and it already has sophisticated tools that are unprecedented in their scope and depth and ability to store data. And the whole enterprise is based on three rules:
1) secrecy - data is restricted to "insiders";
2) deception - the "outsiders" (you know, the citizens) are regarded as a herd of cattle to be managed - with lies and disinformation so we don't get any ideas;
3) ruthless enforcement to dehumanize and destroy dissent. Just consider the torture and destruction of Journalist Julian Assange: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/

Not sure what the appropriate response is but I spend a lot of time at my camp working in the woods. Thanks, Colonel Lang, for maintaining this site.

turcopolier , 22 October 2019 at 01:24 PM
Elora Danan

You are more and more interesting.

turcopolier , 22 October 2019 at 01:28 PM
Keith Harbaugh
This is my opinion. I am uninterested in proving anything to you. If you listen to what is said on the MSM (including Fox) it is evident that in the "minds" of the media squirrels Russia is just the USSR in disguise. Try listening to what they are saying as sub-text.
Jackrabbit , 22 October 2019 at 02:21 PM
Thank you pl!
Keith Harbaugh , 22 October 2019 at 02:25 PM
The request was not just for my benefit, but with the thought that it would be useful to document the occurrences of such clearly false statements in the media.

It is certainly true that Russia is being demonized in all the MSM I have sampled. A frequent criticism is that Putin, like Assad, and earlier Saddam and Quadaffi, is essentially an illegitimate ruler of his country, ruling through brute force and without the consent of his countrymen. (Thus the WaPo editorials routinely call Putin a "thug", just as they call Assad a "butcher".)

I am certainly not endorsing that view, just reporting what I hear and read. When I hear that, I harken back to my graduate school days, when the same sort of charges were leveled against America, which was usually spelled "Amerika", or sometimes "AmeriKKKa", and described as a racist, imperialist, fascist country whose establishment must be "Smashed". I believe the core group of people who so wanted a revolution in America in 1970 (which they essentially got, as we have seen over the last 50 years) are much the same as those now demonizing Russia.

Here is some specificity on their complaints against Russia back then: They were not opposed to the USSR, or communism. Many of them were in effect communists. The cry among many was : "Marx, Mao, and Marcuse" (Herbert Marcuse was a former Brandeis professor who extolled cultural Marxism). What they did have, in spades, was a feeling that their ancestors had been victimized by the Czarist regime in Russia, which, among other supposed sins, had not done enough to prevent pogroms against them. They seemed to have a deep fear of the Russian people, based on their long experience with them.

My suspicion (actually, belief) is that the opposition to Putin is based on the fact that he is sometimes viewed as a throwback to the the Czars, and that is definitely not something looked upon favorably by many Jews.

arze , 22 October 2019 at 02:33 PM
This is SOHR, Tweet, Dec. 6, 2014

"Regime forces use Chlorine gas to stop ISIS advances in Der-Ezzor military airport http://fb.me/4qb09QhnH
3:01 AM - 6 Dec 2014"

https://twitter.com/syriahr/status/541185710443995136?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dw.com%2Fen%2Fsyrian-observatory-reports-assad-gas-attack-on-is%2Fa-18113807

blue peacock , 22 October 2019 at 03:33 PM
Col. Lang,

"Trump has a balance sheet where a soul should be and that is the basis for the belief that MBS and/or his "country" are our friends."

Not to defend Trump and his balance sheet mindset with respect to the Saudis, the reality is that both parties and presidents from George H.W to Bill Clinton to W and Obama have treated the Saudi monarchy as our "friend", even when they sponsored the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11.

Tony Blair became a wealthy man after his prime ministership on the back of money thrown his way by the Arab sheikhs.

[Oct 22, 2019] A Call For A Coup Clinton, McRaven, Pelosi, Gabbard

Oct 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Unz Review,

There was what might be described as an extraordinary amount of nonsense being promoted by last week's media. Unfortunately, some of it was quite dangerous.

Admiral William McRaven, who commanded the Navy Seals when Osama bin Laden was captured and killed and who has been riding that horse ever since, announced that if Donald Trump continues to fail to provide the type of leadership the country needs, he should be replaced by whatever means are necessary. The op-ed entitled "Our Republic is Under Attack by the President" with the subtitle "If President Trump doesn't demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office" was featured in the New York Times, suggesting that the Gray Lady was providing its newspaper of record seal of approval for what might well be regarded as a call for a military coup.

McRaven's exact words, after some ringing praise for the military and all its glorious deeds in past wars, were that the soldiers, sailors and marines now must respond because "The America that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within."

McRaven then elaborated that "These men and women, of all political persuasions, have seen the assaults on our institutions: on the intelligence and law enforcement community, the State Department and the press. They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen, preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield. As I stood on the parade field at Fort Bragg, one retired four-star general, grabbed my arm, shook me and shouted, 'I don't like the Democrats, but Trump is destroying the Republic!'"

It is a call to arms if there ever was one. Too bad Trump can't strip McRaven of his pension and generous health care benefits for starters and McRaven might also consider that he could be recalled to active duty by Trump and court martialed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And the good admiral, who up until 2018 headed the state university system in Texas, might also receive well merited pushback for his assessment of America's role in the world over the past two decades, in which he was a major player, at least in terms of dealing out punishment. He wrote ""We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate."

Utter bullshit, of course. The United States has been acting as the embodiment of a rogue nation, lashing out pointlessly and delivering death and destruction. If McRaven truly believes what he says he is not only violating his oath to defend the constitution while also toying with treason, he is an idiot and should never have been allowed to run anything more demanding than a hot dog stand. Washington has been systematically blowing people up worldwide for no good reasons, killing possibly as many as 4 million mostly Muslims, while systematically stripping Americans of their Bill of Rights at home. "Good guys" and "champions of justice" indeed!

And then there is the Great Hillary Clinton caper. In an interview last week Hillary claimed predictably that Donald Trump is "Vladimir Putin's dream," and then went on to assert that there would be other Russian assets emerging, including nestled in the bosom of her own beloved Democratic Party. She said, clearly suggesting that it would be Tulsi Gabbard, that "They're also going to do third-party again. I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on someone who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far."

Clinton explained how the third-party designation would work, saying of Jill Stein, who ran for president in 2016 as a Green Party candidate, "And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset. Yeah, she's a Russian asset -- I mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate. So I don't know who it's going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed."

Tulsi responded courageously and accurately "Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton . You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly."

Tulsi has in fact been attacked relentless by the Establishment since she announced that she would be running for the Democratic nomination. Shortly before last Tuesday's Democratic candidate debate the New York Times ran an article suggesting that Gabbard was an isolationist, was being promoted by Russia and was an apologist for Syria's Bashar al-Assad. In reality, Gabbard is the only candidate willing to confront America's warfare-national security state.

The Hillary Clinton attack on Gabbard and on the completely respectable Jill Stein is to a certain extent incomprehensible unless one lives in the gutter that she and Bill have wallowed in ever since they rose to prominence in Arkansas. Hillary, the creator of the private home server for classified information as well as author of the catastrophic war against Libya and the Benghazi debacle has a lot to answer for but will never be held accountable, any more than her husband Bill for his rapes and molestations. And when it comes to foreign interference, Gabbard is being pilloried because the Russian media regards her favorably while the Clinton Foundation has taken tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and billionaires seeking quid pro quos , much of which has gone to line the pockets of Hillary, Bill and Chelsea.

Finally, one comment about the Democratic Party obsession with the Russians. The media was enthusing last Friday over a photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing up across a table from President Trump and pointing at him before walking out of the room. The gushing regarding how a powerful, strong woman was defying the horrible chief executive was both predictable and ridiculous. By her own admission Pelosi's last words before departing were "All roads lead to Putin." I will leave it up to the reader to interpret what that was supposed to mean.

Push , 2 minutes ago link

McRaven didn't command anything that 'captured' British asset Osama bin Laden (living in London until 2 months before 9/11) because he was already dead. My sources from within special forces and intelligence verified that he was dead long before he was alleged to have been captured. McRaven is merely a shill who sold his soul to the highest bidder. Another globalist scumbag who is willing to tote the company line for a few crumbs. And now, once again, he's screaming from the rooftops what the company has told him to repeat.

All of the globalists are standing there, pumping lies. This is their endgame in the US. Total destruction of the institution of the presidency, the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution to leave the US in a state that resembles something like Nazi Germany; with the hope that the US will launch an assault on the arch enemy of those who wish to control Mackinder's Inner Crescent, Russia, just as they did with Hitler.

So let's try to put things into perspective. The United States broke free from the chains of imperialism. The imperial forces fought to take it back, first by a second invasion, then by staging a color revolution known as the Civil War, then politically with the assassination of McKinley and installation of their puppet - Teddy Roosevelt.

Afterwards, subsequent globalist shills begin to infiltrate our system of politics. Swallowing control of the banking system and creating Wall Street. Then further tightening the noose by controlling mass-media, de-industrializing our nation, creating a backwards "feel-good" counter culture, and making people fear technological progress. Along the way murdering any leader that posed a threat to their system.

Today, after creating the public perception that snow is actually black in a dumbed-down, ill-equipped populace, they're ready to tighten that noose. McRaven, Clinton, Pelosi and the rest of the globalist shills, who believe that you and I are animals, are attempting to bring about that end.

It's happening right here, right now. What are you gonna do about it?

Element , 2 minutes ago link

Too bad Trump can't strip McRaven of his pension and generous health care benefits for starters and McRaven might also consider that he could be recalled to active duty by Trump and court martialed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

I suppose Mattis is too old for that though, he seems to think he can nominate and also define what a US 'ally' is (I thought that was a function of elected chambers and the Dept of State), and to concoct his own personal version of 'US foreign policy' in the ME! What a foolish thing to do at the end of his career, unfortunately he's stayed well beyond his shelf-life.

Arising , 2 minutes ago link

They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen, preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield...

All this was promised by Trump at the last elections and half of Americans still voted for him.

So what is this Admiral trying to say? That Trump is destroying the Republic ( as he claims) or he's not a warmongering POTUS and puts the Admiral's violence-based livelihood at risk?

_triplesix_ , 5 minutes ago link

McRaven is just playing his part as commanded by his deep state masters.

They know Trump has the goods on them and destroying him is the only way to preserve their corruption.

And let's make one thing clear--the vast majority of the military is behind Trump. If it gets bloody, good guys will be on Trump's side.

Clashfan , 8 minutes ago link

Very good piece, TY for sharing, Tylerz.

This admiral, wow. Like anyone believes the bogus OBL story anyway. Sounds like some kind of satanic flag-waver to me.

Oh and the *** York Times ran his coup piece? I'm no huge fan of Rump--very suspicious--but this stuff is simply overboard warmongering and sedition. One of the big reasons Rump won is his anti-war posturing. Calling that "Russian" is kind of like the Johnson and Nixon toadies calling the war protesters communists or traitors. Same stuff, different millennia.

WorldView , 15 minutes ago link

So, this General is stating that Trump is attacking the FBI, The DOJ, The State Department, and the Press.

Let's see, here.

And this, my friends, is NOT OBVIOUS to the General, who thinks these outfits were/are perfectly fine.

This is another reason why Democrats ( Socialists ) and Republicans ( Patriots ) cannot live side by side.

The Democrats ( I bet the General is one ) are completely goofy and dangerous.

[Oct 22, 2019] In keeping with professional journalistic ethics, The Times also reached out to experts on fascism, fascist terrorism, terrorist fascism, fascist-adjacent Assad-apologism, Hitlerism, horrorism, Russia, and so on, to confirm Gabbard's guilt-by-association with the people The Times had just associated her with.

Oct 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

by Tyler Durden Mon, 10/21/2019 - 22:25 0 SHARES

Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins vis The Unz Review,

In keeping with professional journalistic ethics, The Times also reached out to experts on fascism, fascist terrorism, terrorist fascism, fascist-adjacent Assad-apologism, Hitlerism, horrorism, Russia, and so on, to confirm Gabbard's guilt-by-association with the people The Times had just associated her with. Brian Levin, Director of the CSU Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, confirmed that Gabbard has "the seal of approval" within goose-stepping, Hitler-loving, neo-Nazi circles. The Alliance for Securing Democracy (yes, the one from the previous paragraph) conducted an "independent analysis" which confirmed that RT ("the Kremlin-backed news agency") had mentioned Gabbard far more often than the Western corporate media (which isn't backed by anyone, and is totally unbiased and independent, despite the fact that most of it is owned by a handful of powerful global corporations, and at least one CIA-affiliated oligarch). Oh, and Hawaii State Senator Kai Kahele, who is challenging Gabbard for her seat in Congress, agreed with The Times that Gabbard's support from Jew-hating, racist Putin-Nazis might be a potential liability.

"Clearly there's something about her and her policies that attracts and appeals to these type of people who are white nationalists, anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers."

But it's not just The New York Times , of course. No sooner had Clinton finished cackling than the corporate media launched into their familiar Goebbelsian piano routine, banging out story after television segment repeating the words "Gabbard" and "Russian asset." I've singled out The Times because the smear piece in question was clearly a warm-up for Hillary Clinton's calculated smear job on Friday night. No, the old gal hasn't lost her mind. She knew exactly what she was doing, as did the editors of The New York Times , as did every other establishment news source that breathlessly "reported" her neo-McCarthyite smears.

As I noted in my previous essay , 2020 is for all the marbles, and it's not just about who wins the election. No, it's mostly about crushing the "populist" backlash against the hegemony of global capitalism and its happy, smiley-faced, conformist ideology. To do that, the neoliberal establishment has to delegitimize, and lethally stigmatize, not just Trump, but also people like Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and any other popular political figure (left, right, it makes no difference) deviating from that ideology.

Ask yourself, what do Trump, Sanders, Corbyn, and Gabbard have in common? No, it's not their Putin-Nazism it's the challenge they represent to global capitalism. Each, in his or her own way, is a symbol of the growing populist resistance to the privatization and globalization of everything. And thus, they must be delegitimized, stigmatized, and relentlessly smeared as "Russian assets," "anti-Semites," "traitors," "white supremacists," "fascists," "communists," or some other type of "extremists."

Gabbard, to her credit, understands this, and is focusing attention on the motives and tactics of the neoliberal establishment and their smear machine. As I noted in an essay last year , "the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale) is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible ." This will not save her, but it is the best she can do, and I applaud her for having the guts to do it. I hope she continues to give them hell as they finish off her candidacy and drive her out of office.

... ... ...

Ask them whether their smear machine is working... if you can get them off the phone with their brokers, or whoever is decorating their summer places in the Hamptons or out on Martha's Vineyard .

Or ask the millions of well-off liberals who are still, even after Russiagate was exposed as an enormous hoax based on absolutely nothing , parroting this paranoid official narrative and calling people "Russian assets" on Twitter. Or never mind, just pay attention to what happens over the next twelve months. In terms of ridiculous official propaganda , spittle-flecked McCarthyite smears, and full-blown psychotic mass Putin-Nazi hysteria, it's going to make the last three years look like the Propaganda Special Olympics.

* * *

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

[Oct 22, 2019] Tulsi is absolutely in the best position to talk about foreign policy having been there in the trenches and personally knowing horrors or war

Oct 22, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

Luka Lazovic -> Haigin88 , 31 Jul 2019 07:31

She is absolutely in the best position to talk about foreign policy having been there in the trenches and personally knowing horrors or war. I've seen bits of those Fox videos and she was admirable there. Being a veteran probably counts for something in small towns where most Americans live.

I wasn't following her on social media so not sure how she fares there.

Bernie, on the other hand, knows how to campaign and has very good domestic policy and he used to be popular in swing states, certainly better than Clinton.

So two of them would be my dream ticket. I feel Warren and Biden would be a loss of another four years or even longer.

[Oct 22, 2019] Bernie Blasts Hillary s Outrageous Gabbard Russian Asset Smear

Oct 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

While the mainstream liberal media remains firmly in the pocket of the Clintons' propaganda machine, spewing russophobic accusations at any and every one who dares question the establishment and military-industrial complex line, there are some - on the left - that are willing to step up and defend Tulsi Gabbard against the latest delusional suggestion from Hillary that she is a 'Russian asset'.

President Trump was quick to blast Hillary's accusation :

So now Crooked Hillary is at it again! She is calling Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard "a Russian favorite," and Jill Stein "a Russian asset." As you may have heard, I was called a big Russia lover also (actually, I do like Russian people. I like all people!). Hillary's gone Crazy!

... ... ...

The Vermont senator (and runner-up to Hillary for the 2016 Democratic nomination) called such accusations "outrageous," pointing to Gabbard's background as a military veteran: "Tulsi Gabbard has put her life on the line to defend this country. People can disagree on issues, but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset."

However, Hillary's attack dogs will be quick to point out that Sanders himself is a "Russian asset." Tags

Qanon , 44 minutes ago link

Careful Bernie. You almost died once this year already, you don't need any help.

Anunnaki , 1 hour ago link

Sanders. Too little late. Just die and spare us your sheep dogging ********.

Just enjoy the house Hillary gave you for spreading your cheeks for this evil woman

TeraByte , 2 hours ago link

What the circular firing squad left undone, will be accomplished by infighting between Clintonites and "moderates" ( a too positive concept). May the Deluge drown you all in 2020.

Petkattash , 2 hours ago link

Bernie should have kicked HRC in the nuts 4 years ago when he had the chance...

Someone Else , 2 hours ago link

...Tulsi served two tours of duty in the Middle East, and she continues her service as a Major in the Army National Guard. Tulsi's 2005 deployment was a 12-month tour at Logistical Support Area Anaconda in Iraq, where she served in a field medical unit as a specialist with a 29th Support Battalion medical company. She was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal at the end of this tour.

NA X-15 , 2 hours ago link

Has anybody heard Elizabeth Warren condemn Hillary Clinton? No? Hmmmm:

https://dailycaller.com/2019/09/07/report-clinton-working-behind-scenes-elizabeth-warren/

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren are reportedly developing a close political friendship that might prove pivotal to deciding the Democratic presidential nomination.

Both have kept in touch since Warren announced her decision to seek the Democratic nomination last February, NBC News reported Saturday.

"Hillary Clinton would absolutely have influence over a number of delegates to this convention," Deb Kozikowski, the vice-chairwoman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, told NBC, referring to the possibility that Clinton could help Warren secure delegates if there is no clear nominee heading into the Democratic National Convention next summer .

One Democratic strategist told NBC that Clinton has been watching and approving of Warren's campaign as the senator has unveiled a series of increasingly progressive policy proposals.

Anunnaki , 1 hour ago link

Fakeajewea is too clever by half. If she ties herself to Hillary in any significant way, she will lose bigly

[Oct 22, 2019] A Call for a Coup Plus a Week Like No Other for Tulsi Gabbard by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... And then there is the Great Hillary Clinton caper. In an interview last week Hillary claimed predictably that Donald Trump is "Vladimir Putin's dream," and then went on to assert that there would be other Russian assets emerging, including nestled in the bosom of her own beloved Democratic Party ..."
"... Tulsi responded courageously and accurately "Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton . ..."
"... Tulsi has in fact been attacked relentless by the Establishment since she announced that she would be running for the Democratic nomination. Shortly before last Tuesday's Democratic candidate debate the New York Times ..."
"... quid pro quos ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
Oct 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

There was what might be described as an extraordinary amount of nonsense being promoted by last week's media. Unfortunately, some of it was quite dangerous. Admiral William McRaven, who commanded the Navy Seals when Osama bin Laden was captured and killed and who has been riding that horse ever since, announced that if Donald Trump continues to fail to provide the type of leadership the country needs, he should be replaced by whatever means are necessary. The op-ed entitled "Our Republic is Under Attack by the President" with the subtitle "If President Trump doesn't demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a new person in the Oval Office" was featured in the New York Times, suggesting that the Gray Lady was providing its newspaper of record seal of approval for what might well be regarded as a call for a military coup.

McRaven's exact words, after some ringing praise for the military and all its glorious deeds in past wars, were that the soldiers, sailors and marines now must respond because "The America that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within."

McRaven then elaborated that "These men and women, of all political persuasions, have seen the assaults on our institutions: on the intelligence and law enforcement community, the State Department and the press. They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen, preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield. As I stood on the parade field at Fort Bragg, one retired four-star general, grabbed my arm, shook me and shouted, 'I don't like the Democrats, but Trump is destroying the Republic!'"

It is a call to arms if there ever was one. Too bad Trump can't strip McRaven of his pension and generous health care benefits for starters and McRaven might also consider that he could be recalled to active duty by Trump and court martialed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And the good admiral, who up until 2018 headed the state university system in Texas, might also receive well merited pushback for his assessment of America's role in the world over the past two decades, in which he was a major player, at least in terms of dealing out punishment. He wrote ""We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate."

Utter bullshit, of course. The United States has been acting as the embodiment of a rogue nation, lashing out pointlessly and delivering death and destruction. If McRaven truly believes what he says he is not only violating his oath to defend the constitution while also toying with treason, he is an idiot and should never have been allowed to run anything more demanding than a hot dog stand. Washington has been systematically blowing people up worldwide for no good reasons, killing possibly as many as 4 million mostly Muslims, while systematically stripping Americans of their Bill of Rights at home. "Good guys" and "champions of justice" indeed!

And then there is the Great Hillary Clinton caper. In an interview last week Hillary claimed predictably that Donald Trump is "Vladimir Putin's dream," and then went on to assert that there would be other Russian assets emerging, including nestled in the bosom of her own beloved Democratic Party . She said, clearly suggesting that it would be Tulsi Gabbard, that "They're also going to do third-party again. I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on someone who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far."

Clinton explained how the third-party designation would work, saying of Jill Stein, who ran for president in 2016 as a Green Party candidate, "And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset. Yeah, she's a Russian asset -- I mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate. So I don't know who it's going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed."

Tulsi responded courageously and accurately "Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton . You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly."

Tulsi has in fact been attacked relentless by the Establishment since she announced that she would be running for the Democratic nomination. Shortly before last Tuesday's Democratic candidate debate the New York Times ran an article suggesting that Gabbard was an isolationist, was being promoted by Russia and was an apologist for Syria's Bashar al-Assad. In reality, Gabbard is the only candidate willing to confront America's warfare-national security state.

The Hillary Clinton attack on Gabbard and on the completely respectable Jill Stein is to a certain extent incomprehensible unless one lives in the gutter that she and Bill have wallowed in ever since they rose to prominence in Arkansas. Hillary, the creator of the private home server for classified information as well as author of the catastrophic war against Libya and the Benghazi debacle has a lot to answer for but will never be held accountable, any more than her husband Bill for his rapes and molestations. And when it comes to foreign interference, Gabbard is being pilloried because the Russian media regards her favorably while the Clinton Foundation has taken tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and billionaires seeking quid pro quos , much of which has gone to line the pockets of Hillary, Bill and Chelsea.

Finally, one comment about the Democratic Party obsession with the Russians. The media was enthusing last Friday over a photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing up across a table from President Trump and pointing at him before walking out of the room. The gushing regarding how a powerful, strong woman was defying the horrible chief executive was both predictable and ridiculous. By her own admission Pelosi's last words before departing were "All roads lead to Putin." I will leave it up to the reader to interpret what that was supposed to mean.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

[Oct 22, 2019] Few Democrats dared to step up against the "queen of warmongers."

Oct 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

While Mayor Pete was a little evasive on actually talking down the "Russian asset" accusation, he did question it, saying that "statements like that ought to be backed by evidence."

"I don't know what the basis is for that," he said.

"But I consider her to be a competitor. I respect her service. I also have very different views than she does, especially on foreign policy, and I would prefer to have that argument in terms of policy which is what we do at debates and what we're doing as we go forward."

Another 2020 presidential hopeful, former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke, also dismissed the Gabbard claim , insisting the focus of the presidential campaign should be on the economy, climate change and other issues affecting Americans.

"That's not correct. Tulsi is not being groomed by anyone. She is her own person," he told reporters after delivering a keynote address Saturday at the Alabama Democratic Conference Semi-Annual Convention in Birmingham.

"Obviously (she) has served this country, continues to serve this country in uniform, in Congress, as a candidate for presidency so I think those facts speak for themselves."

Andrew Yang also defended Gabbard :

" Tulsi Gabbard deserves much more respect and thanks than this. She literally just got back from serving our country abroad."

And now, having been cheated of his chance against Hillary in 2016 - running to her side like a loyal party comrade after the DNC practically ran him out of the party - a post-heartattack Bernie Sanders - perhaps with little left to lose - has finally come out swinging at Clinton.

The Vermont senator (and runner-up to Hillary for the 2016 Democratic nomination) called such accusations "outrageous," pointing to Gabbard's background as a military veteran: "Tulsi Gabbard has put her life on the line to defend this country. People can disagree on issues, but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset."

NA X-15 , 2 hours ago link

Has anybody heard Elizabeth Warren condemn Hillary Clinton? No? Hmmmm:

https://dailycaller.com/2019/09/07/report-clinton-working-behind-scenes-elizabeth-warren/

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren are reportedly developing a close political friendship that might prove pivotal to deciding the Democratic presidential nomination.

Both have kept in touch since Warren announced her decision to seek the Democratic nomination last February, NBC News reported Saturday.

"Hillary Clinton would absolutely have influence over a number of delegates to this convention," Deb Kozikowski, the vice-chairwoman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, told NBC, referring to the possibility that Clinton could help Warren secure delegates if there is no clear nominee heading into the Democratic National Convention next summer .

One Democratic strategist told NBC that Clinton has been watching and approving of Warren's campaign as the senator has unveiled a series of increasingly progressive policy proposals.

Anunnaki , 1 hour ago link

Fakeajewea is too clever by half. If she ties herself to Hillary in any significant way, she will lose bigly

[Oct 22, 2019] Hillary claims that Gabbard is being groomed to run as a third-party spoiler candidate, stealing votes from Warren or Biden, exactly as Jill Stein (who, according to Clinton, is also totally a Russian asset )

Notable quotes:
"... "I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate." ..."
"... The Times piece goes on to list an assortment of unsavory, extremist, white supremacist, horrible, neo-Nazi-type persons that Tulsi Gabbard has nothing to do with, but which Hillary Clinton, the Intelligence Community, The Times , and the rest of the corporate media would like you to mentally associate her with. ..."
Oct 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Mon, 10/21/2019 - 22:25 0 SHARES

Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins vis The Unz Review,

So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked," or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy. Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up a last-minute military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools, National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.

We probably should have seen this coming.

That's right, as I'm sure you are aware by now, president-in-exile Hillary Clinton has discovered Putin's diabolical plot to steal the presidency from Elizabeth Warren, or Biden, or whichever establishment puppet makes it out of the Democratic primaries. Speaking to former Obama adviser and erstwhile partner at AKPD Message and Media David Plouffe, Clinton revealed how the godless Rooskies intend to subvert democracy this time:

"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate."

She was referring, of course, to Tulsi Gabbard, sitting Democratic Member of Congress, decorated Major in the Army National Guard, and long shot 2020 presidential candidate. Apparently, Gabbard (who reliable anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community have confirmed is a member of some kind of treasonous, Samoan-Hindu, Assad-worshipping cult that wants to force everyone to practice yoga) has been undergoing Russian "grooming" at a compound in an undisclosed location that is probably in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, or on Sublevel 168 of Trump Tower.

In any event, wherever Gabbard is being surreptitiously "groomed" (presumably by someone resembling Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love ), the plan (i.e., Putin's plan) is to have her lose in the Democratic primaries, then run as a third-party "spoiler" candidate, stealing votes from Warren or Biden, exactly as Jill Stein (who, according to Clinton, is also "totally a Russian asset") stole them from Clinton back in 2016, allowing Putin to install Donald Trump (who, according to Clinton, is still being blackmailed by the FSB with that "kompromat" pee-tape) in the White House, where she so clearly belongs.

Clinton's comments came on the heels of a preparatory smear-piece in The New York Times , What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To? , which reported at length on how Gabbard has been "injecting chaos" into the Democratic primaries . Professional "disinformation experts" supplied The Times with convincing evidence (i.e., unfounded hearsay and innuendo) of "suspicious activity" surrounding Gabbard's campaign. Former Clinton-aide Laura Rosenberger (who also just happens to be the Director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy , "a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group" comprised of former Intelligence Community and U.S. State Department officials, and publisher of the Hamilton 68 dashboard) "sees Gabbard as a potentially useful vector for Russian efforts to sow division."

The Times piece goes on to list an assortment of unsavory, extremist, white supremacist, horrible, neo-Nazi-type persons that Tulsi Gabbard has nothing to do with, but which Hillary Clinton, the Intelligence Community, The Times , and the rest of the corporate media would like you to mentally associate her with.

Richard Spencer, David Duke, Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Tucker Carlson, and so on. Neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer . 4chan, where, according to The New York Times , neo-Nazis like to "call her Mommy."

In keeping with professional journalistic ethics, The Times also reached out to experts on fascism, fascist terrorism, terrorist fascism, fascist-adjacent Assad-apologism, Hitlerism, horrorism, Russia, and so on, to confirm Gabbard's guilt-by-association with the people The Times had just associated her with. Brian Levin, Director of the CSU Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, confirmed that Gabbard has "the seal of approval" within goose-stepping, Hitler-loving, neo-Nazi circles. The Alliance for Securing Democracy (yes, the one from the previous paragraph) conducted an "independent analysis" which confirmed that RT ("the Kremlin-backed news agency") had mentioned Gabbard far more often than the Western corporate media (which isn't backed by anyone, and is totally unbiased and independent, despite the fact that most of it is owned by a handful of powerful global corporations, and at least one CIA-affiliated oligarch). Oh, and Hawaii State Senator Kai Kahele, who is challenging Gabbard for her seat in Congress, agreed with The Times that Gabbard's support from Jew-hating, racist Putin-Nazis might be a potential liability.

"Clearly there's something about her and her policies that attracts and appeals to these type of people who are white nationalists, anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers."

But it's not just The New York Times , of course. No sooner had Clinton finished cackling than the corporate media launched into their familiar Goebbelsian piano routine, banging out story after television segment repeating the words "Gabbard" and "Russian asset." I've singled out The Times because the smear piece in question was clearly a warm-up for Hillary Clinton's calculated smear job on Friday night. No, the old gal hasn't lost her mind. She knew exactly what she was doing, as did the editors of The New York Times , as did every other establishment news source that breathlessly "reported" her neo-McCarthyite smears.

As I noted in my previous essay , 2020 is for all the marbles, and it's not just about who wins the election. No, it's mostly about crushing the "populist" backlash against the hegemony of global capitalism and its happy, smiley-faced, conformist ideology. To do that, the neoliberal establishment has to delegitimize, and lethally stigmatize, not just Trump, but also people like Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and any other popular political figure (left, right, it makes no difference) deviating from that ideology.

Ask yourself, what do Trump, Sanders, Corbyn, and Gabbard have in common? No, it's not their Putin-Nazism it's the challenge they represent to global capitalism. Each, in his or her own way, is a symbol of the growing populist resistance to the privatization and globalization of everything. And thus, they must be delegitimized, stigmatized, and relentlessly smeared as "Russian assets," "anti-Semites," "traitors," "white supremacists," "fascists," "communists," or some other type of "extremists."

Gabbard, to her credit, understands this, and is focusing attention on the motives and tactics of the neoliberal establishment and their smear machine. As I noted in an essay last year , "the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale) is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible ." This will not save her, but it is the best she can do, and I applaud her for having the guts to do it. I hope she continues to give them hell as they finish off her candidacy and drive her out of office.

Oh, and if you're contemplating sending me an email explaining how these smear campaigns don't work (or you spent the weekend laughing about how Hillary Clinton lost her mind and made an utter jackass of herself), maybe check in with Julian Assange, who is about to be extradited to America, tried for exposing U.S. war crimes, and then imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life.

If you can't get through to Julian at Belmarsh, you could ring up Katharine Viner at The Guardian, which has ruthlessly smeared Assange for years, and published outright lies about him , and is apparently doing very well financially.

And, if Katharine is on holiday in Antigua or somewhere, or having tea with Hillary in the rooftop bar of the Hay-Adams Hotel , you could try Luke Harding (who not only writes and publishes propaganda for The Guardian , but who wrote a whole New York Times best-seller based on nothing but lies and smears). Or try Marty Baron, Dean Baquet, Paul Krugman, or even Rachel Maddow, or any of the other editors and journalists who have been covering the Putin-Nazi " Attack on America ," and keeping us apprised of who is and isn't a Hitler-loving "Russian asset."

Ask them whether their smear machine is working... if you can get them off the phone with their brokers, or whoever is decorating their summer places in the Hamptons or out on Martha's Vineyard .

Or ask the millions of well-off liberals who are still, even after Russiagate was exposed as an enormous hoax based on absolutely nothing , parroting this paranoid official narrative and calling people "Russian assets" on Twitter. Or never mind, just pay attention to what happens over the next twelve months. In terms of ridiculous official propaganda , spittle-flecked McCarthyite smears, and full-blown psychotic mass Putin-Nazi hysteria, it's going to make the last three years look like the Propaganda Special Olympics.

* * *

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

[Oct 22, 2019] It's four more years of the Trumpian Reich folks, with Russian Spetsnaz patrolling the streets, gigantic banners with the faces of Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, babushkas, the whole nine yards by CJ Hopkins

Notable quotes:
"... Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins vis The Unz Review, ..."
Oct 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins vis The Unz Review,

So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked," or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy.

Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up a last-minute military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools, National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.

[Oct 21, 2019] Toe The Line Or Be Destroyed Tulsi Gabbard Dismantles Establishment Hit-Job In Viral Video

This post generated over 2K comment on zero hedge...
Looks like Tulsi masterfully capitalized on Hillary mistake. after Russiagate the change of being Russian agent does not have the same byte as before and now can even be played to one's advantage as a sign of anti neoliberal establishment orientation. Which is what Tulsi did.
Tulsi would be a powerful Secretary of State I think, if she did not win the nomination...
Notable quotes:
"... "If you stand up to the rich and powerful elite and the war machine, they will destroy you and discredit your message... ," says Gabbard, who said she's suffered smears " from day one of this campaign. " ..."
"... Great! Thank you Hillary Clinton," Gabbard tweeted late on Friday afternoon. " You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain ." ..."
"... "From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose." Gabbard added. ..."
"... And now, Gabbard has capitalized on Hillary's hubris and unchallenged conspiracy theory to fundraise and increase her visibility. ..."
"... For comparison, a real protest looks like Gilet Jaunes. Some people started protesting because they are being disenfranchised by their own government. They were already in real pain long before Macron went backward on all his campaign promises. ..."
Oct 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

"Toe The Line Or Be Destroyed": Tulsi Gabbard Dismantles Establishment 'Hit-Job' In Viral Video by Tyler Durden Sun, 10/20/2019 - 16:57 0 SHARES

Tulsi Gabbard unleashed her latest counterattack to the establishment hit-job against her, after Hillary Clinton suggested she's an Russian asset.

"If you stand up to the rich and powerful elite and the war machine, they will destroy you and discredit your message... ," says Gabbard, who said she's suffered smears " from day one of this campaign. "

In a Sunday tweet accompanied by a video which has nearly 450,000 views on Twitter (and 18,000 on YouTube) as of this writing, Gabbard writes "Hillary & her gang of rich, powerful elite are going after me to send a msg to YOU: "Shut up, toe the line, or be destroyed." But we, the people, will NOT be silenced."

Tulsi Gabbard ✔ @TulsiGabbard

Hillary & her gang of rich, powerful elite are going after me to send a msg to YOU: "Shut up, toe the line, or be destroyed." But we, the people, will NOT be silenced. Join me in taking our Democratic Party back & leading a govt of, by & for the people! http:// tulsi.to/take-it-back

Last week, Clinton told Democratic operative and podcast host David Plouffe that "Russians" were "grooming" a female Democratic candidate - clearly referring to Gabbard.

"I'm not making any predictions but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate," Clinton said, in apparent reference to Gabbard, a Hawaii Army National Guard major who served in Iraq. " She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. "

https://www.youtube.com/embed/mNLJ3i2oRyg

Tulsi hit back, tweeting to Hillary:

Great! Thank you Hillary Clinton," Gabbard tweeted late on Friday afternoon. " You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain ."

"From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose." Gabbard added.

And now, Gabbard has capitalized on Hillary's hubris and unchallenged conspiracy theory to fundraise and increase her visibility.

LEEPERMAX , 17 minutes ago link

Hillary has Bait & Switched everyone into talking about Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia

Because her real TREASONOUS ACTS occurred in Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine.

rtb61 , 31 minutes ago link

People are seeing entirely too much into this. Seriously this is nothing but some crazy old crone, extremely jealous of someone else and wanting revenge, honestly all I see is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrUEjpHbUMM . No political scam, not grand strategy, just a really jealous vengeful old crone, HRC can see Tulsi Gabbard winning and in infuriates her, fills her with jealousy fueled rage, Tulsi in every way better than Hillary, smarter, more popular, prettier (never forget this can really freak out women) and younger (ohh the rage) and HRC blames Tulsi and Jill for HRC's arrogant public failure.

History will think extremely poorly of Hillary Rodham Clinton, extremely poorly.

ChaoKrungThep , 20 minutes ago link

Oh dear, you really don't understand US politics, do you? "They" could get a dead horse elected with the right connections.

Roger Casement , 37 minutes ago link

Consider what is occurring here. Citizen Hillary has started a media circus with 1 of the 12 - or is it 16? - "candidates" the spy infested DNC is fielding. The C_A MSM mouthpieces are shilling this white noise, blocking out any more important, more difficult reporting if not analysis of world events they don't want in the news.

World Events like the Clinton, Obama, Biden, Kerry, Pelosi, Feinstein and Schiff scandals in Ukraine and China, how well things are going in Syria and who the real villains there have been, how well negotiations are going with China, how the Syrian refugee crisis is being settled in the best way for all concerned and how the C_A plan to start WW3 has been exposed.

The C_A can repeat this op another 11 Times. This is good because they are lazy and stupid, but even so you can expect them to **** it up in some way every time. Evil has recruiting problems. Remember Hillary laughing about obliterating civilization in Libya. Remember the corpse of Gadafi being dragged through the street by her mercs. Remember who stole Libya's gold, and Ukraine's gold.

Consider all these "best" pictures of Gabbard. The method is obvious: Don't listen to the pettiness and low news value of this PR stunt, just look at the cutie. This fits the media op signature of the Tavistock faggots on loan to Soros. Here are a few more:

BLM: Look at us. We all black! Don't listen to our demands, we still working on them, but whoever you are we coming for your stuff.

Antifa: Look at us. We all revolutionaries! We like to rumble! Don't listen to our message. We don't have one. We're really a lot of fun. Come to us, children, or we'll mess you up.

Naked woman protests: We are women! Every day we pretend to be smart but we're really emotionally unbalanced fools! REEEEEE... Our message is, we need to be taken care of like babies. When you take off your clothes to protest, you've already lost.

For comparison, a real protest looks like Gilet Jaunes. Some people started protesting because they are being disenfranchised by their own government. They were already in real pain long before Macron went backward on all his campaign promises. The government of France has been bought and paid for from top to bottom by a few rich Jews and they are destroying civilization just like Hillary did Libya, only they are in the subversion stage. The bombing is still to come. If you doubt me, dig for stories about who Macron is meeting with, who he takes orders from. This is a peek into the real criminals behind the current form of the EU. Thousands of people in the street. A few big protests got the imagination of the world, giving Macron ulcers. Good. They got solidarity. Then Macron started sending in the thugs and gestapo. Then he sent in EU troops suited up for urban warfare. Both the optics and the message of this are devastating to the cabal, worldwide.

IMO the best thing to do is to follow this circus and all that follow loosely. If you can't turn it around on them, for instance pointing out that Gabbard is CFR and her positions are folly, do not give it the clicks (((they))) expect. At least screw up their stats, make their psychological warfare "experts" lose their jobs or at least work day and night to keep up, until they melt down in pools of their own saliva.

What this stunt is, is "opening a second media front". They created this meaningless drivel to hide the news that is favorable to Trump and good for everybody in the world, and bad for the cabal. This is all they got. This is the best they can do. They have nothing to offer but lies, threats and tyranny. As Hillary said, her policy is to keep them dumb, keep them poor and keep them hungry. They are all gangsters.

Consider how cheap it is to do an op like this. That is the signature of the DS. They like cheap ops because they can do so many.

The best we can do is open second fronts right back at them. Expose errors, omissions and lies in their fake news, as well as what their lies are meant to conceal. It is fun to watch when the first slavos of their campaigns immediately fall apart and get thrown back at them. Sometime real news gets out.

Tomorrow is the Canadian election. It will be a good message to them if Trudeau gets destroyed.

Brexit deadline is coming up. Pelosi swore that if they Brexit she will do all the crimes she can to obstruct US-UK trade. Pretty sure she used up whatever stolen credibility she had with that admission of lawless tyranny.

Point is, Brexit will have a significant meaning to Americans and gangsters like her will be in the spotlight. We want good will and trade with the UK. If this is obstructed, Pelosi has already said she's responsible and obstructing trade will have criminal consequences on the US side. Learn all you can, keep track and if you get the chance, share any damning facts you find.

[Oct 20, 2019] Adam Schiff now the face of the neoliberal Dems for 2020.

Highly recommended!
Oct 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Only a few months ago, the Democrats' drive to the White House began with the loftiest of ideals, albeit a hodgepodge from trans toilet "rights" to a 100 percent makeover of the health care system. It is now all about vengeance, clumsy and grossly partisan at that, gussied up as "saving democracy." Our media is dominated by angry Hillary refighting 2016 and "joking" about running again, with Adam Schiff now the face of the party for 2020. The war of noble intentions has devolved into Pelosi's March to the Sea. Any chance for a Democratic candidate to reach into the dark waters and pull America to where she can draw breath again and heal has been lost.

Okay, deep breath myself. A couple of times a week, I walk past the café where Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet, often wrote. His most famous poem, Howl , begins, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." The walk is a good leveler, a reminder that madness (Trump Derangement in modern terminology) is not new in politics.

But Ginsberg wrote in a time when one could joke about coded messages -- before the Internet came into being to push tailored ticklers straight into people's brains. I'll take my relief in knowing that almost everything Trump and others write, on Twitter and in the Times , is designed simply to get attention and getting our attention today requires ever louder and crazier stuff. What will get us to look up anymore? Is that worth playing with fire over?

It is easy to lose one's sense of humor over all this. It is easy to end up like Ginsberg at the end of his poem, muttering to strangers at what a mess this had all become: "Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! To solitude!" But me, I don't think it's funny at all.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People , Hooper's War: A Novel of WWII Japan , and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent .

[Oct 20, 2019] Finding a Vaccine for the Impeachment Derangement Virus by Peter Van Buren

Easy ;-) Weaken the Deep State (aka drain the swamp). Remove three factors driving impeachment: Obama mafia, Clintons mafia and Brennan mafia. Neutralizing them probably mean (imperfect but workable) vaccine against impeachment derangement.
The author does not understand that neoliberal coup d'état against Trump is driven by the burning desire to kick the can down the road and ignore the crisi of neoliberalism that led to Trump election (as well as Brexit and Orban in Europe)
Notable quotes:
"... The idea that Americans are steps away from squaring off across the field at Gettysburg is something that should only exist in satire. It would be hilarious, except that such fantasizing is influencing the actual future of our country. We have crossed a line where rationality is in the rearview mirror. Most of us have lost track of the constitutional crises that have never actually happened since the first one was declared, over the non-issue of Trump losing the popular vote in 2016. ..."
"... What was it last week? Sharpiegate? Or the hotel in Scotland? Or an impeding war with Iran/North Korea/China? Or treason? Or something about security clearances? The Kurds were a thing in 2017 and again now. Paul Krugman of the New York Times first declared that Trump was going to destroy the economy in 2016 , and has written the same article regularly ever since, most recently just last week . It doesn't seem to matter that none of these things have actually proven to be true. Learned people are saying them again and again. ..."
"... It wasn't supposed to be this way. The fantasy was to use Robert Mueller's summer testimony about Trump being a literal Russian asset to stir up the masses -- Mueller Time, Baby! Congress would go home for August recess to be bombarded by cries for impeachment, and then autumn would feature hearings and revelations amplified by the Blue Check harpies leading up to, well, something big. ..."
"... Desperation makes for poor strategy. Think back just two weeks and no one had heard of any of this. Yet Dems and the media took America from zero to 100 nearly overnight as if this was another 9/11. With the winter caucuses approaching, Dems in search of a crime groped at something half slipped under the door and half bundled up by clever lawyers to be slipped under the door. Mueller was a lousy patsy so a better one needed to be found in the shallow end of the Deep State pool. It wasn't much but it was going to have to be made good enough. ..."
"... The details will come out and they will stink. The first whistleblower had some sort of prior working relationship with a current 2020 Democrat. Given that he is a CIA analyst, that suggests a member of Vice President Biden's White House team, Cory Booker's Committee on Foreign Relations, or maybe Kamala Harris's Select Committee on Intelligence. ..."
"... The so-called second whistleblower appears to actually be one of the sources for the first whistleblower. That's a feedback loop , an old CIA trick where you create the appearance of a credible source by providing your own confirming source. It was tried with the Steele Dossier where the original text given to the FBI appeared to be backed up by leaks filtered through the media and John McCain's office. ..."
"... It is easy to lose one's sense of humor over all this. It is easy to end up like Ginsberg at the end of his poem, muttering to strangers at what a mess this had all become: "Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! To solitude!" But me, I don't think it's funny at all. ..."
"... And of course MSNBC hires Brennan whose CIA spied on Congress when it was investigating torture. No principles here at all. ..."
"... When they put State power brokers over the will of the people and love of country, it equals Ideology. What they really worship is the ideology itself. All of the various actors are just tools in service of that cause. ..."
"... a lot of the call was about Crowd Strike, not that anyone noticed ..."
"... The Democrats are doing the impossible by making Trump look good by comparison. ..."
"... As I think we all have come to understand, the Swamp is disconnected from mainstreet, [it is] a world all its own. Point being, neither side realizes most Americans have tuned this whole issue out. Two years of Russia gate led to exhaustion. My bigger concern going forward after Americans get a chance to vote in 2020, is, is this how we are destined to be governed ? ..."
"... Bush, Obama, and Trump have all committed vastly larger crimes and in our twisted political culture these don’t matter. Remember when centrist liberals claimed to care about torture and war under false pretenses? ..."
"... And all these former intelligence goons like Brennan are embraced on the liberal cable networks, even if the now beloved intelligence community tortured prisoners, lied about it, and spied on Congress. ..."
"... Had DT used withheld military aid to strong-arm Ukraine to do something in the national interest, then it would have been business as usual. Everyone expects a President to wheel, deal, lie and cheat for the nation. ..."
"... The public knew what Trump was about from the very beginning. That he was bumptious, impetuous, always shooting from the hip and often saying stupid things. And yet he was nominated by one of the two major parties, then turned around and beat the candidate of the other major party. What does that say about this country, other than its citizens elected a real estate businessman turned TV star with no political experience whatsover as president ..."
"... It's all a diversion (among many others) from what we should all be talking and doing something about anyway. It's all part of a sick game the global elites entertain and enrich themselves with. ..."
"... 'Once intelligent people are talking about actual civil war in America' - Peter van Buren, Oct 14, 2019 'We should have a revolution in this country!' - Donald Trump, Nov 6th, 2012 ..."
Oct 14, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Can any of the Democratic candidates pull America back from this madness?

Once intelligent people are talking about actual civil war in America. This began after Trump retweeted a pastor saying impeachment would cause a "civil war-like fracture in this Nation." Never mind that it was a retweet, and never mind that the original statement used "like" to make a comparison. The next headline was set: Trump Threatens Civil War If He's Impeached. Newsweek quoted a Harvard Law professor saying that the "threat" alone made Trump impeachable. Another headline asked: "If Trump's Rage Brings Civil War, Where Will the Military Stand?"

Blowing up some online nonsense into a declaration of war tracks with the meme that Trump will refuse to leave office if defeated in 2020, or will declare himself the winner even if he loses, sending coded messages to armed minions. "Trump Is Going to Burn Down Everything and Everyone," reads the headline from a NASDAQ-listed media outlet . "Before Trump will allow himself to be chased from the temple, he'll bring it down," wrote The New York Times.

That's just what the MSM is saying; it gets worse the further off the road you drive . "Trump is going to try everything, Fox is going to try everything, and they're going to both further the injuring of societal reality and inspire dangerous individuals to kill and maim," Jared Yates Sexton, a well-known academic, tweeted on September 28 . "There's a vast number of people in this, people who have been taught their whole lives that they might need to kill in case of a coup or corrupt takeover," he continued. "Trump and Republicans signal to them constantly. They're more than ready to see this as the occasion."

The idea that Americans are steps away from squaring off across the field at Gettysburg is something that should only exist in satire. It would be hilarious, except that such fantasizing is influencing the actual future of our country. We have crossed a line where rationality is in the rearview mirror. Most of us have lost track of the constitutional crises that have never actually happened since the first one was declared, over the non-issue of Trump losing the popular vote in 2016.

What was it last week? Sharpiegate? Or the hotel in Scotland? Or an impeding war with Iran/North Korea/China? Or treason? Or something about security clearances? The Kurds were a thing in 2017 and again now. Paul Krugman of the New York Times first declared that Trump was going to destroy the economy in 2016 , and has written the same article regularly ever since, most recently just last week . It doesn't seem to matter that none of these things have actually proven to be true. Learned people are saying them again and again.

Those who oppose Trump have convinced themselves they must impeach for something , and if all of Russiagate (remember that? It's like Aunt Edna's brief failed marriage, only not mentioned at the dinner table) wasn't enough, then Democrats will impeach over a phone call to a minor world leader.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. The fantasy was to use Robert Mueller's summer testimony about Trump being a literal Russian asset to stir up the masses -- Mueller Time, Baby! Congress would go home for August recess to be bombarded by cries for impeachment, and then autumn would feature hearings and revelations amplified by the Blue Check harpies leading up to, well, something big.

Were rationality still in vogue, it would be hard to imagine that Democrats would consider the Ukraine call impeachable. But they closed out Russiagate like the OJ Simpson murder trial, certain Trump had gotten away with so much that they had to catch him at something else to make it even.

Op-Ed-O-Matic: Write Doomsday Screeds Like the Pros All Aboard! Impeachment Train Finally Makes Stop For Democrats

Desperation makes for poor strategy. Think back just two weeks and no one had heard of any of this. Yet Dems and the media took America from zero to 100 nearly overnight as if this was another 9/11. With the winter caucuses approaching, Dems in search of a crime groped at something half slipped under the door and half bundled up by clever lawyers to be slipped under the door. Mueller was a lousy patsy so a better one needed to be found in the shallow end of the Deep State pool. It wasn't much but it was going to have to be made good enough.

The details will come out and they will stink. The first whistleblower had some sort of prior working relationship with a current 2020 Democrat. Given that he is a CIA analyst, that suggests a member of Vice President Biden's White House team, Cory Booker's Committee on Foreign Relations, or maybe Kamala Harris's Select Committee on Intelligence.

The so-called second whistleblower appears to actually be one of the sources for the first whistleblower. That's a feedback loop , an old CIA trick where you create the appearance of a credible source by providing your own confirming source. It was tried with the Steele Dossier where the original text given to the FBI appeared to be backed up by leaks filtered through the media and John McCain's office.

So forget everything about this cooked-to-order crisis except the actual thing impeachment would turn on: the transcript of Trump's call. It does not matter what one, two, or 200 whistleblowers, former Obama officials, or talking heads " think " about the call. There it is, the actual words, all pink and naked on the Internet for everyone to read. Ukraine did not investigate Biden. Trump did not withhold aid. The attorney general was not involved. DOJ ruled there was no violation of the law. It has little to do with Pompeo or Pence (though Pompeo was on the call ). You and the Congress pretty much have it all in the transcript. It's bathroom reading, five pages .

Only a few months ago, the Democrats' drive to the White House began with the loftiest of ideals, albeit a hodgepodge from trans toilet "rights" to a 100 percent makeover of the health care system. It is now all about vengeance, clumsy and grossly partisan at that, gussied up as "saving democracy." Our media is dominated by angry Hillary refighting 2016 and "joking" about running again, with Adam Schiff now the face of the party for 2020. The war of noble intentions has devolved into Pelosi's March to the Sea. Any chance for a Democratic candidate to reach into the dark waters and pull America to where she can draw breath again and heal has been lost.

Okay, deep breath myself. A couple of times a week, I walk past the café where Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet, often wrote. His most famous poem, Howl , begins, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked." The walk is a good leveler, a reminder that madness (Trump Derangement in modern terminology) is not new in politics.

But Ginsberg wrote in a time when one could joke about coded messages -- before the Internet came into being to push tailored ticklers straight into people's brains. I'll take my relief in knowing that almost everything Trump and others write, on Twitter and in the Times , is designed simply to get attention and getting our attention today requires ever louder and crazier stuff. What will get us to look up anymore? Is that worth playing with fire over?

It is easy to lose one's sense of humor over all this. It is easy to end up like Ginsberg at the end of his poem, muttering to strangers at what a mess this had all become: "Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! To solitude!" But me, I don't think it's funny at all.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People , Hooper's War: A Novel of WWII Japan , and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent .

boxofvapor MacCheerful • 6 days ago
You are the idiot if you think Peter doesn't know what the Mem-Con was. He was one of the first to explain exactly how the process works. It's as close to an actual recording as it gets and all parties sign off on the "Memo Of Communication" stating it's accurate before it's saved.The idiots are the ones who think it's not accurate, grasping at straws doesn't help you. But it does serve to make a point, YOU like bobbleheaded Shift realize that the Transcript, as it stands, does not point to anything illegal so you like Shift make stuff up.

Each and every time you guys make the claim that it's not a real transcript it's a admission that even YOU don't think what's in the call is illegal. Think about that one for a second.

OH and you can claim that he did it to "punish his political opponents" all you like, that's just spin, just as anyone can much more easily spin this as Trump's duty to find out. Anything that requires mindreading isn't actual evidence and the "spin" in this case is exactly that. Unless you crawl into his head you don't know if he did it to hurt Biden or Help America, so either way we are left with his call as the only real evidence, the one you yourself think was altered to the point where it no longer shows wrongdoing.

Jr. MacCheerful • 6 days ago
It’s clear that you are suffering from the Impeachment Derangement Virus as mentioned in the article.

The President’s calls to world leaders were being leaked all throughout the beginning of his presidency. That is a national security issue and so they added an extra layer of security using a password protected system that had been used by previous administrations. Your fantasy about the contents “alarming staffers” is absolute nonsense because even in the “whistleblower” statement it states that other calls to world leaders were also being put into this secured system. The fact that other calls are being put into this system shows just how delusional your fantasy about this call being special in some way, truly is.

As for the texts, as the author stated the opinion of what a diplomat THINKS is the motivation is proof of absolutely nothing especially when that diplomat is told point blank in the next text that his opinion is not factual.

Rational people understand all this. Those with Impeachment Derangement Virus do not.

LostForWords • 6 days ago
DT is a populist, in an age where politics is all about withholding from the people what they most want, because the people's instincts are deemed by the liberal consensus to be too "deplorable" to follow.
stevek9 LostForWords • 6 days ago
Another great example is Brexit. The elite made the foolish mistake of asking the people of the country what they wanted, and have spent 3 years tying things in ridiculous knots to avoid the outcome the people voted to have.
Shakes_McQueen LostForWords • 6 days ago
Trump won the game according to the game's rules, but if you're gonna start opining about what "The People" want, it kinda seems like you need to at least start by addressing the part where millions more of The People voted for Trump's opponent.
=marco01= LostForWords • 6 days ago
Trump is not a populist, he is an opportunist and a nationalist who wants everyone to recognize his greatness. He is using the rubes to that end, he doesn’t care what happens to you.
paradoctor LostForWords • 6 days ago
DT ran as a populist and is unpopular. HC ran as a technocrat and her political machine broke. Therefore both lost in 2016, in ways most personally humiliating to each.

That kind of "deplorable"?

NotYouNotSure • 6 days ago • edited
This cloak and dagger nonsense is all about trying to give an air of authority to this ridiculous plot to impeach Trump. This issue does however show just how disturbingly far left the USA has become, when leftists worship spy chiefs as the ultimate authority figures.

To all the leftists here that think that people like Clapper or Brennan are in any way respected or in any way seen as legitimate, think again.

Don Quijote NotYouNotSure • 6 days ago
Broadly speaking the Left doesn't trust the intelligence community or the police any further it can throw them. It says something about the sad state of affairs we are in that the Left is now supporting its traditional enemy in order to save the Republic from the traitorous ra*ist the Right has put in the White House.
Osse Don Quijote • 6 days ago • edited
Sorry, but no. Trump is a terrible human being, but that broad left you speak of is composed of mainstream centrist liberals and various people further left. Centrist liberals have demonstrated no moral consistency on the crimes committed by the intelligence community or the interventionist state in general.

They claimed to be outraged by such things during the Bush era, then forgot about them or even switched sides when Obama came in. They wouldn’t dream of impeaching Bush for war crimes ( and become furious when Obama’s are pointed out) but they think Trump’s use of the office to obtain dirt on Biden is a matter of principle. Think about that. War crimes are trivial. Look forward, not back. The use of Trump’s powers to obtain dirt against Biden— not acceptable.

And of course MSNBC hires Brennan whose CIA spied on Congress when it was investigating torture. No principles here at all.

Sid Finster Don Quijote • 6 days ago
How many times did you hear "seventeen intelligence agencies proven it! ZOMG!" while the RussiaGate conspiracy theory was au courant?

For that matter, I was frequently treated to the spectacle of Team D partisans insisting that any questioning of "our intelligence community" was ipso facto "treason".

As if it were our patriotic duty to unquestioningly accept anonymous statements from perjurers (NSA), torturers (CIA) and entrapment artists (FBI) all with a long track record of lying and talking about supposed evidence that we are not allowed to see.

TISO_Commo NotYouNotSure • 6 days ago • edited
When they put State power brokers over the will of the people and love of country, it equals Ideology. What they really worship is the ideology itself. All of the various actors are just tools in service of that cause.
EliteCommInc. Kyle Stirkenburg • 5 days ago
Laughing Well, you might want to actually read those messages . . . seeing them is one thing reading them is another. If i were a democratic supporter --- you bet i would be alarmed.

The cat is getting of the bag and the cat is covered in unsavory behavior by the state department and the supporters of the Ukrainian revolution against a democratic state and ally of the US.

A cabal that nearly sent the Ukraine into a complete civil war ----- encourage and participated in by the previous admin. under the direct leadership of the Sec of State, Madam Hillary Clinton.

Its very damning but who is damned was not in office at the time.

dbriz Kyle Stirkenburg • 5 days ago • edited
Quiz for the day: Does this “whistleblower” even exist? Or is it a composite creation of the CIA, Schiff and Co?

Did Schiff and friends turn ghostly white when Trump called their bluff by releasing the transcript?

Is Pelosi’s new found reticence a result of her self annoyance that she let herself get talked into this new debacle and payback is to let Schiff shift in the wind dangling over the thought that no one in the CIA wants to walk the plank for him?

Do the Democrats and their allies in the deep state increasingly look like the Keystone Kops?

Peter Van Buren • 6 days ago
What is referred to commonly as the “transcript” is a U.S. government memorandum of conversation. Over the course of my 24 years at the State Department I saw and wrote many of them as the official record of conversations. At the White House level, voice recognition software is used to help transcribe what is being said, even as one or more trained note takers are at work. Afterwards the people who listened to the call have to sign off on the accuracy and completeness of the document. It is the final word on what was said in that call.
Jr. plains dealer • 6 days ago
No. Trump wants to investestigate the corruption of the previous administration and get to the bottom of why OBAMA was targeting political opponents.

Nice try at deflection though.

EliteCommInc. plains dealer • 5 days ago
Ohhhh stop,

though in a less forward manner the policies of candidates, including foreign policies and their implications are always at issue regarding selection.

It may be unseemly to have it brazenly broadcast, but illegal -- not. The real question here is whether members of the democratic and republican party solicit, incite, encourage a violent revolution in the Ukraine against a democratic ally of the US and in so doing, encourage and engage in graft, theft or illegal influence, such as demanding the removal of a prosecutor attempting to regain some stability and investigative power into how that incitement corrupted and disrupted Ukrainian politics. In otherwords, have member of the US colluded with certain forces in the Ukraine to over throw a democratically elected government, that the international community and the Ukrainians indicated was fair. This activity goes well beyond supplying weapons and post posters, but involved bribing, and removing government officials. Unlike the consideration in Iran, which was an inside coupe, the Ukrainnian affair seems to have been led and run by the US and Europeans, political, economic and intelligence members. And it seems to include a company that used similar tactics in the US to incite suspcion by using falsified computer data, accuasations of hacking in an attempt to falsey accuse the US candidate of colluding with the Russians because part of his agenda was to reduce tensions in between, the Ukraine, Russia and the US.

And peaceful negotiations threatened to uncover those violations of international law by members of the US and Eurpoean communities in which US citizens used the unstable environment in the Ukraine which they fostered to engage in graft.

stevek9 • 6 days ago • edited
Could not have said it better myself. We are truly in bizzaro-World.

The Bidens are scooping up as much IMF (read American) cash as they can in Ukraine with some more on the side in China, and all the shrieking is about Trump who asked the leader of a country, to cooperate in investigating an ongoing criminal investigation (a lot of the call was about Crowd Strike, not that anyone noticed).

We have a treaty with Ukraine which obligates exactly that. The Biden's activity is about as bald a case of corruption and bribe-taking as one could imagine. Barr is investigating the nauseating deep-state origins of Russia-gate, but in today's World I'm not that confident that the truth will ever come out. Trump is stupid, but his enemies are far, far worse.

Jerry • 6 days ago
The rabid drivel dripping from the mouths of the lib-Dem-media regarding Trump's supposed existential threat to the universe -- complete with idiotic hysteria about refusing to leave office and so forth -- is yet another example of their habit of projection, namely accusing others of tactics and threats that they themselves routinely employ.

They're the ones who refused to accept the results of the 2016 election, after their criminal attempt to subvert the campaign of one of the candidates, and they've put us through three years of what Peter Van Buren correctly calls "madness" ever since -- like 3-year olds rolling on the floor kicking and screaming because they didn't get their way.

They've got the media, the Ruling Class, the Deep State, and most of the power brokers on their side, and yet laughably portray themselves as victims and targets of oppression. They are doing serious damage to this country and they are worthy of contempt, which is what I feel for them.

Salt Lick • 6 days ago
The Democrats are doing the impossible by making Trump look good by comparison. When Trump finally wakes up to the fact that his opponents will never relent until he is in jail, along with his family, he will respond in ways that will abrogate what little remains of this constitutional democracy. Many will support him because of the opposition's overreach. Will it rise to the level of a civil war? Will millions take to the streets if Adam Schiff is jailed for treason? I doubt it. That's the hole the Democrats are digging for themselves and the country.
tweets21 • 6 days ago
As I think we all have come to understand, the Swamp is disconnected from mainstreet, [it is] a world all its own. Point being, neither side realizes most Americans have tuned this whole issue out. Two years of Russia gate led to exhaustion. My bigger concern going forward after Americans get a chance to vote in 2020, is, is this how we are destined to be governed ?
Osse • 6 days ago • edited
I think that in the desire to attack this column about Ukrainegate, people ignored the earlier point, which is that some liberals are unhinged. Go back and read it. I think that part is right.

I also think Trump tried to use his office to obtain dirt on a political foe, which is impeachable imo. But here is my problem.

Bush, Obama, and Trump have all committed vastly larger crimes and in our twisted political culture these don’t matter. Remember when centrist liberals claimed to care about torture and war under false pretenses? That is long gone. Bush is a lovable figure now. Centrist liberals never did care about Obama’s crimes—drone strikes, Yemen, arming terrorists in Syria. They are more likely to despise whistleblowers like Snowden than care about mass surveillance. Trump’s war in Yemen was ignored by most liberals until Khashoggi’s murder and then many of them seriously seem to think Trump started it. It still doesn’t interest them that much. You can’t impeach Trump for complicity in genocide without looking at what other Presidents have done, so best focus on Ukrainegate.

And all these former intelligence goons like Brennan are embraced on the liberal cable networks, even if the now beloved intelligence community tortured prisoners, lied about it, and spied on Congress.

Oh, I forgot one thing. As shoddy as Trump’s behavior is, notice how we just accept that we should be arming yet another side in what is in part a civil war in the Ukraine. That’s just what we do.

I am not defending conservatives. Most conservatives, with some honorable exceptions, are worse. But the whole political system is run by competing morally repugnant factions.

EliteCommInc. Osse • 5 days ago
Excuse me, a little integrity is in order here ----- The current president inherited these wars, and while he must take responsibility for them during his tenure, they aren't his.

And oddly enough as much as I opposed the previous executive, They weren't a part of his agenda until he chose interventionists as part his admin. He owns them lock stock and barrel -- he should have declined to add Sec Clinton and her interventionists.

The issue with outsiders is that in attempts to placate insiders derails their agenda.

Shakes_McQueen • 6 days ago • edited
"Ukraine did not investigate Biden."

Which, if it's even true, is germane to a blatant attempt to leverage and extort them into doing so... why?

"Trump did not withhold aid."

Trump absolutely did withhold aid, until conspicuously releasing that hold for unstated reasons a couple of days after learning of the whistleblower communicating with Congress. I guess his concerns about "corruption" just suddenly evaporated, said the ostrich to the hole.

"The attorney general was not involved."

That remains to be seen, though...

"DOJ ruled there was no violation of the law."

...he still has plenty of ways to try and shield his client. I like how you offer this, like Bill Barr's DOJ has a shred of credibility for objective application of the law right now.

"It has little to do with Pompeo or Pence (though Pompeo was on the call)."

How on Earth do you know this? There's growing evidence that Pence absolutely WAS in-the-know to some extent, and Pompeo is actively assisting with the WH attempts to stonewall the unambiguous, Constitutionally granted impeachment powers of the House, by telling his employees not to respect lawful subpoenas for testimony and documents.

It must give TAC writers like Larison heartburn to see Peter's terrible arguments so prominently displayed on the website every week.

Parrhesia • 6 days ago
Finally, some sensible comment on the issue. Thanks for that.
Tomonthebeach • 6 days ago
What this article fails to appreciate is that the majority of Americans are suffering from Trumpzaustion. We are tired of the daily barrage of tweets, corruption, graft, patronage, incompetence, incivility, lies, emoluments, edicts by Tweet, destruction of alliances, lies, racism, sexism, obstinacy, impulsive executive decisions that turn sour, disregard for science and expertise generally, lies, nepotism, narcissism, vulgarity, hypocrisy, and did I mention lies?

This administration is annoying, costing many of us time and treasure, and like a migraine headache, we just want it to go away.

Trump=Obama • 6 days ago • edited
Yes, the media and Democrats want to degrade any Republican Politician's powers by any means necessary. They have done that to all past Republican Presidents going back to Nixon.

On the other hand, Trump gives them all of the ammo that they need to promote their narrative. He is a caricature of the narcissistic, corrupt, crony capitalist Republican that the media loves to sell to the public.

For crying out loud, the very next day after the Mueller probe ended, Trump appeared to try to pressure a foreign nation to help him get reelected. If you don't recognize that Trump gives his enemies ammo by his own reckless behaviour, then you may be in denial.

Martin Ranger • 6 days ago
You mean this impeachment derangement virus: http://nymag.com/intelligen... ?
paradoctor • 6 days ago • edited
Had DT used withheld military aid to strong-arm Ukraine to do something in the national interest, then it would have been business as usual. Everyone expects a President to wheel, deal, lie and cheat for the nation. But the favors he extorted from Ukraine were personal . That's not in the unwritten rules.

Trump is being impeached for doing the wrong quid pro quo. This is the world we live in.

Connecticut Farmer • 6 days ago • edited
The public knew what Trump was about from the very beginning. That he was bumptious, impetuous, always shooting from the hip and often saying stupid things. And yet he was nominated by one of the two major parties, then turned around and beat the candidate of the other major party. What does that say about this country, other than its citizens elected a real estate businessman turned TV star with no political experience whatsover as president.

A "cri de coeur?" Perhaps. This thing of ours doesn't work anymore . There are a lot of things wrong with this country but one thing seems increasingly and disturbingly clear: our system of government, which was put into place via a document written in the late 18th century is not responsive to the needs of the 21st. So much needs to be changed, starting with:

1.) De-emphasizing the office of Presidency, which has increasingly become more a source of entertainment rather than enlightenment (to the extent that ANY president has ever been "enlightened"). There was a very good reason why the first article of the US Constitution refers to the legislature and not to the executive (or, for that matter, to the judiciary).

2.) Instituting a multi-party system rather than the current farce--which has long since become archaic.

Perhaps the time has at last come for a second Constitutional Convention, because the rules no longer fit the game. A constitution prepared in 1787 when the US was still an agrarian society consisting of 13 states from Maine to Florida and from the Atlantic seaboard to the Alleghenies with a total population of less than 4 million may simply not be responsive to the US of 2019, an advanced, information based, society consisting of 330 million (and counting) situated on a land mass of nearly 3.8 million square miles. Either we may have to re-think what it means to govern ourselves in the 21st century or--and I shudder at the thought-- perhaps the concept of what we call "the United States of America" may no longer be tenable.

It was, after all is said and done, only meant to be an experiment.

EliteCommInc. • 5 days ago
"So forget everything about this cooked-to-order crisis except the actual thing impeachment would turn on: the transcript of Trump’s call. It does not matter what one, two, or 200 whistleblowers, former Obama officials, or talking heads “think” about the call.

There it is, the actual words, all pink and naked on the Internet for everyone to read. Ukraine did not investigate Biden. Trump did not withhold aid. The attorney general was not involved. DOJ ruled there was no violation of the law. It has little to do with Pompeo or Pence (though Pompeo was on the call). You and the Congress pretty much have it all in the transcript. It’s bathroom reading, five pages."

How dare you suggest reality be considered on this matter. And it may be more ironic than what went on before --- but there are plenty of places and reasons to find humor --

even if the humor is the result of tragedy.

"“Before Trump will allow himself to be chased from the temple, he’ll bring it down,” wrote The New York Times."

Laughing.

Now there's an interesting reference --- Samson in the Temple ---

I am sure that was unintentional

Kelly Storme • 5 days ago
I couldn't give a bucket of methane emitting cow dung whether Trump is impeached or not. It's all a diversion (among many others) from what we should all be talking and doing something about anyway. It's all part of a sick game the global elites entertain and enrich themselves with.

Have a gander at this recent interview by Greg Hunter and Dr. Paul Craig Roberts - https://usawatchdog.com/oli... - I may not agree with all of the conclusions the good Dr. has drawn but a lot of what he says does have a ring of truth to it based on my own independent research into a various aspects of our so-called civilization.

LostForWords • 5 days ago • edited
Unfortunately for the Dems, not one of them has one tenth of Trump's charisma and ability to campaign. He doesn't need to be right all the time, his personality will carry him through, and the more the Dems plot, the smaller they look. Is there anyone in world to put him in the shade?
marqueemoons • 4 days ago
'Once intelligent people are talking about actual civil war in America' - Peter van Buren, Oct 14, 2019 'We should have a revolution in this country!' - Donald Trump, Nov 6th, 2012

[Oct 20, 2019] Was Adam Schiff running a spy operation against the White House by Monica Showalter

If this is true, then "Schiff spy scandal" might became a serious liability for neoliberal Dems in 2020 elections. Schiff is scion of a very un[leasent character who was reposible for Russo-Japanese war: Russo-Japanese War – financed by Jacob Schiff The Strange Side of Jewish History
Notable quotes:
"... Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018, was hired in February, while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff's committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted his complaint . ..."
"... The whistleblower was an NSC official who worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and who has expertise in Ukraine, the Washington Examiner has reported . ..."
"... later emerged that a member of his staff had spoken to the whistleblower before his complaint was submitted on Aug. 12. The Washington Post concluded that Schiff "clearly made a statement that was false. ..."
"... Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House, recruiting his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing the rules so they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the lunatic efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding their own business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a coincidence. ..."
"... Trump's been having a bad time with public opinion in the wake of the Schiff operation orchestrating the media coverage as well. But the facts on the ground suggest it was all an illegal spying operation on the president. ..."
"... It's an abuse of his office, for sure, given that Schiff is supposed to be focused on intelligence ..."
"... Image credit: Caricature by Donkey Hotey via Flickr , CC BY-SA 2.0 . ..."
"... Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House, recruiting his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing the rules so they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the lunatic efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding their own business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a coincidence. ..."
"... The Lives of Others ..."
Oct 12, 2019 | www.americanthinker.com

Seems every day brings a new revelation about Democratic efforts to rig an impeachment of the president. The false claims and astonishing conflicts of interest being thrown out there are piling up fast.

The latest, from the San Francisco Examiner, exposes House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff's choice of staffers, who it turns out were two disgruntled Deep-Staters from the White House who had actually worked with the so-called "whistleblower":

Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018, was hired in February, while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff's committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted his complaint .

The whistleblower was an NSC official who worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and who has expertise in Ukraine, the Washington Examiner has reported .

A career CIA analyst with Ukraine expertise, the whistleblower aired his concerns about a phone conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to a House Intelligence Committee aide on Schiff's staff. He had previously informed the CIA's legal counsel's office.

Schiff initially denied he knew anything about the complaint before it was filed, stating on Sep. 17: "We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to."

But it later emerged that a member of his staff had spoken to the whistleblower before his complaint was submitted on Aug. 12. The Washington Post concluded that Schiff "clearly made a statement that was false. "

Grace, 36, was hired to help Schiff's committee investigate the Trump White House. That month, Trump accused Schiff of "stealing people who work at White House." Grace worked at the NSC from 2016 to 2018 in U.S.-China relations and then briefly at the Center for a New American Security think tank, which was founded by two former senior Obama administration officials.

So these people were all buddies beforehand, and this would explain why the so-called whistleblower had been sneaking around with Schiff's staff before he made his whistleblower complaint.

And that came only after someone with influence was able to get the inspector general of the Intelligence Community (IGIC) to change the rules about whistleblowers needing no firsthand knowledge about the wrongdoing they were supposedly reporting. Once that rules change was put into place, the whistleblower got going.

More and more, this sounds like a pre-planned setup. One Trump operative has a very good summary of what seems to have been really going on as these anything but exculpatory stories mount:

Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House, recruiting his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing the rules so they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the lunatic efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding their own business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a coincidence.

Experienced intelligence operatives, and apparently this Trump operative has this sort of background, like to say there are no coincidences.

As facts continue to roll out, it's getting more and more obvious that Schiff's operation was to orchestrate this impeachment scenario all along, going into high gear with the flame-out of the Mueller investigation.

Trump's been having a bad time with public opinion in the wake of the Schiff operation orchestrating the media coverage as well. But the facts on the ground suggest it was all an illegal spying operation on the president.

signed on to GOP rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona's call to condemn and censure Schiff for this sick little illegal freelance operation to spy on Trump.

It's an abuse of his office, for sure, given that Schiff is supposed to be focused on intelligence , not on being one of those creepy secret police characters in The Lives of Others . It's also an outrageous misuse of taxpayer dollars. In light of this Schiff spy operation, and if Democrats don't want some backatcha next time there's a Dem in office with a Republican House, it really ought to be every last one of them signed up to that Biggs list.

Image credit: Caricature by Donkey Hotey via Flickr , CC BY-SA 2.0 . Seems every day brings a new revelation about Democratic efforts to rig an impeachment of the president. The false claims and astonishing conflicts of interest being thrown out there are piling up fast.

The latest, from the San Francisco Examiner, exposes House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff's choice of staffers, who it turns out were two disgruntled Deep-Staters from the White House who had actually worked with the so-called "whistleblower":

Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018, was hired in February, while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff's committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted his complaint .

The whistleblower was an NSC official who worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and who has expertise in Ukraine, the Washington Examiner has reported .

A career CIA analyst with Ukraine expertise, the whistleblower aired his concerns about a phone conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to a House Intelligence Committee aide on Schiff's staff. He had previously informed the CIA's legal counsel's office.

https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=aim4truth.org&width=500

Schiff initially denied he knew anything about the complaint before it was filed, stating on Sep. 17: "We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to."

But it later emerged that a member of his staff had spoken to the whistleblower before his complaint was submitted on Aug. 12. The Washington Post concluded that Schiff "clearly made a statement that was false."

Grace, 36, was hired to help Schiff's committee investigate the Trump White House. That month, Trump accused Schiff of "stealing people who work at White House." Grace worked at the NSC from 2016 to 2018 in U.S.-China relations and then briefly at the Center for a New American Security think tank, which was founded by two former senior Obama administration officials.

So these people were all buddies beforehand, and this would explain why the so-called whistleblower had been sneaking around with Schiff's staff before he made his whistleblower complaint.

And that came only after someone with influence was able to get the inspector general of the Intelligence Community (IGIC) to change the rules about whistleblowers needing no firsthand knowledge about the wrongdoing they were supposedly reporting. Once that rules change was put into place, the whistleblower got going.

More and more, this sounds like a pre-planned setup. One Trump operative has a very good summary of what seems to have been really going on as these anything but exculpatory stories mount:

me title=

Schiff was essentially running an illegal spy operation against the White House, recruiting his staffers, having them recruit their whistleblowers, grooming them up, changing the rules so they could file their complaints, and then lying that they knew anything about the lunatic efforts to get President Trump impeached. See, they were just standing there, minding their own business when all this stuff happened. Everything that did happen was just...a coincidence.

Experienced intelligence operatives, and apparently this Trump operative has this sort of background, like to say there are no coincidences.

As facts continue to roll out, it's getting more and more obvious that Schiff's operation was to orchestrate this impeachment scenario all along, going into high gear with the flame-out of the Mueller investigation.

Trump's been having a bad time with public opinion in the wake of the Schiff operation orchestrating the media coverage as well. But the facts on the ground suggest it was all an illegal spying operation on the president.

And that's a far more concrete crime than anything Trump is accused of committing. Right now, Schiff has 109 congressional representatives signed on to GOP rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona's call to condemn and censure Schiff for this sick little illegal freelance operation to spy on Trump.

It's an abuse of his office, for sure, given that Schiff is supposed to be focused on intelligence, not on being one of those creepy secret police characters in The Lives of Others . It's also an outrageous misuse of taxpayer dollars. In light of this Schiff spy operation, and if Democrats don't want some backatcha next time there's a Dem in office with a Republican House, it really ought to be every last one of them signed up to that Biggs list.

Veritas Aequitas 6d

"... inspector general of the Intelligence Community (IGIC) to change the rules about whistleblowers needing no firsthand knowledge about the wrongdoing they were supposedly reporting. Once that rules change was put into place, the whistleblower got going." Doesn't that beg the question IF Atkinson had any past relationships with any of these people in his former position? I believe I read somewhere that Atkinson somehow was involved in the Steele Dossier from his former job.

walterbyrd ElBaron 6d

> So someone changes the rules. So why can't the rules be changed back?


I suspect the ICIG rules about accepting hearsay "evidence" will be changed back - if they haven't already been.

mondo_cane Follow Full Profile mondo_cane ElBaron 6d

Our government has always operated this way. Nothing new here. It only seems "run worse" because the results are out in the open for all to see. Whereas, the same thing could be done in secret and you'd never know about it (the changes in the rules).


Which do you prefer? The sloppy American way, or the secretive Chinese way?

I'm sorry to say we have only these two choices. The sloppy American way is preferable to me because it's the better part of our openly democratic republic and our Constitution.


The current problems and distractions we are dealing with are the result of Biden, Schiff, and the Democrat's attempts to be secretive about what they're doing. So, we have to wonder why these people don't want their actions to be known.


We should delight in seeing such illegitimate secrets exposed.

Divi_Julius_Augustus mondo_cane 6d

"...The sloppy American way, or the secretive Chinese way?" What difference does it make if the criminals are never indicted? The fact that I know of don't know makes no difference. We know politicians are dirty scum, anyway..

ElBaron mondo_cane 6d

Good post.

But I think it's not good enough to just accept rampant corruption, surely things could be better than this?

Also, it's not so much the Dems in question but the entire system.

And I see little evidence that the system is changing.

Though as you point out, one big shift is that more of us have become aware of how bad it is.

And as you point out, it's always been that way, going back at least to 1913... but more like forever and with all systems.


And if it is forever and all systems, then maybe it's better we DON'T get to see all the dirty laundry all the time, including that nothing is done about it. Maybe better not to know! Maybe that's the only way to make the country 'great' again!?

[Oct 20, 2019] Executive order 12333, 1981, prohibits the CIA from spying on American citizens on domestic soil, or internationally, except as incidental to terrorist investigations outside the US of A

Oct 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

Bracket , says: Website October 5, 2019 at 4:50 am GMT

Executive order 12333, 1981, prohibits the CIA from spying on American citizens on domestic soil, or internationally, except as incidental to terrorist investigations outside the US of A.

The POTUS is the first citizen.

Why has no one in any part of the press, right, left, or center pointed out this simple fact?

Also, there is no "transcript" of any conversation between Trump and any other head of state. Because there is no recording or verbatim typed record (such as a court reporter would make) due to diplomatic protocols agreed by all parties.

There are only informal notes taken by witnesses at the time of the call. (Unless Snowden is correct about the private contractors working for the NSA).

As for anti Russian propaganda, look first to the UK, who have been at it for several hundred years, and who are in the habit of knighting American Republican presidents who take orders from the square mile and Downing street, or whitehall and Balmoral castle.

The new cold war is an international project aimed at demonising Putin, who god knows is no saint, but who is also no dummy. Unlike the image Trump likes to cultivate. Has anyone noticed how clumsy the CIA has gotten lately? Or, how hysterical the press has become on their behalf?

AnonFromTN , says: October 5, 2019 at 3:07 pm GMT
@Bracket

Executive order 12333, 1981, prohibits the CIA from spying on American citizens on domestic soil, or internationally, except as incidental to terrorist investigations outside the US of A.
The POTUS is the first citizen.
Why has no one in any part of the press, right, left, or center pointed out this simple fact?

Has anyone noticed how clumsy the CIA has gotten lately? Or, how hysterical the press has become on their behalf?

You answered your own questions. The law is for sheeple, Deep State does not give a hoot about the laws, constitution, and the rest of the niceties.

Bracket , says: October 5, 2019 at 5:06 pm GMT
@AnonFromTN Limpet bombs on Japanese tanker, in the arabian sea, failed coup in Vn, Skripal case, etc. Are the clumsy examples i was thinking of. They behave as if there is no internet. Not sure if they are even aware that everything they do is being watched and evaluated from 100 different points of view.
But yeah, i know, most questions do contain an intrinsic answer.

[Oct 20, 2019] The Deep State Goes Shallow 2.0 by Edward Curtin

Notable quotes:
"... It was the Obama administration who engineered the 2014 right-wing, Neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine as part of its agenda to undermine Russia. A neo-liberal/neo-conservative agenda. This is, or should be, common knowledge. Obama put it in his typically slick way in a 2015 interview with CNN's Fareed Zakiria, saying that the United States "had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine." ..."
"... This is Orwellian language at its finest, from a warmonger who received the Nobel Prize for Peace while declaring he was in support of war. That the forces that have initiated a new and highly dangerous Cold War, a nuclear confrontation with Russia, demonized Vladimir Putin, and have overthrown the elected leader of a country allied with Russia on its western border, dares from the day he was elected in 2016 to remove its own president in the most obvious ways imaginable seems like bad fiction. But it is fact, and the fact that so many Americans approve of it is even more fantastic. ..."
"... It is well known that the United States is infamous for engineering coups against democratically elected governments worldwide. Voters' preferences are considered beside the point. Iran and Mosaddegh in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia and Sukarno in 1965-7, Allende in Chile in 1973, to name a few from the relatively distant past. ..."
"... Recently the Obama administration worked their handiwork in Honduras and Ukraine. It would not be hyperbolic to say that overthrowing democratic governments is as American as apple pie. It's our "democratic" tradition – like waging war. ..."
"... What is less well known is that elements within the U.S. ruling power elites have also overthrown democratically elected governments in the United States. One U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated because he had turned toward peace and opposed the forces of war within his own government. He is the lone example of a president who therefore was opposed by all the forces of imperial conquest within the ruling elites. ..."
"... Others, despite their backing for the elite deep state's imperial wars, were taken out for various reasons by competing factions within the shadow government. Nixon waged the war against Vietnam for so long on behalf of the military-industrial complex, but he was still taken down by the CIA, contrary to popular mythology about Watergate. ..."
"... Jimmy Carter was front man for the Tri-Lateral Commission's deep-state faction, but was removed by the group represented by George H. Bush, William Casey, and Reagan through their traitorous actions involving the Iran hostages. ..."
"... Obama, CIA groomed, was smoothly moved into power by the faction that felt Bush needed to be succeeded by a slick smiling assassin who symbolized "diversity," could speak well, and played hoops. ..."
"... Take your pick – heads or tails. Hillary Clinton was expected to complete the trinity. ..."
"... The day after his surprise election, the interlocking circles of power that run the show in sun and shadows – what C. Wright Mills long ago termed the Power Elite – met to overthrow him, or at least to render him more controllable. ..."
"... Trump, probably never having expected to win and as shocked as most people when he did, made some crucial mistakes before the election and before taking office. Some of those mistakes have continued since his inauguration ..."
"... Trump's fatal mistake was saying that he wanted to get along with Russia, that Putin was a good leader, and that he wanted to end the war against Syria and pull the U.S. back from foreign wars ..."
"... This was verboten. And when he said nuclear war was absurd and would only result in nuclear conflagration, he had crossed the Rubicon. That sealed his fate ..."
"... "Only the shallow know themselves," said Oscar Wilde. ..."
"... ...The first step in dealing with this is to combat ignorance and misinformation. There may not be one undeniable truth but we can certainly squash blatant mis-truths. ..."
"... If you read Professor Antony C Sutton's books about Wall Street, the Bolshevik Revolution and Hitlers rise to power, it is possible, as Sutton did, to examine the methodology, ideology and psychology of the string pullers in depth. For exposing them, Hutton was as he said " persecuted but not prosecuted ". ..."
Oct 20, 2019 | off-guardian.org

This article was first published on February 21, 2017, one month after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, more than two-and-a half years ago. What was true then is even truer now, and so I am reprinting it with this brief introduction since I think it describes what is happening in plain sight today.

Now that years of Russia-gate accusations have finally fallen apart, those forces intent on driving Trump from office have had to find another pretext. Now it is Ukraine-gate, an issue similar in many ways to Russia-gate in that both were set into motion by the same forces aligned with the Democratic Party and the CIA-led Obama administration.

It was the Obama administration who engineered the 2014 right-wing, Neo-Nazi coup in Ukraine as part of its agenda to undermine Russia. A neo-liberal/neo-conservative agenda. This is, or should be, common knowledge. Obama put it in his typically slick way in a 2015 interview with CNN's Fareed Zakiria, saying that the United States "had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine."

This is Orwellian language at its finest, from a warmonger who received the Nobel Prize for Peace while declaring he was in support of war. That the forces that have initiated a new and highly dangerous Cold War, a nuclear confrontation with Russia, demonized Vladimir Putin, and have overthrown the elected leader of a country allied with Russia on its western border, dares from the day he was elected in 2016 to remove its own president in the most obvious ways imaginable seems like bad fiction. But it is fact, and the fact that so many Americans approve of it is even more fantastic.

Over the past few years the public has heard even more about the so-called "deep state," only to see its methods of propaganda become even more perversely cynical in their shallowness.

No one needs to support the vile Trump to understand that the United States is undergoing a fundamental shift wherein tens of millions of Americans who say they believe in democracy support the activities of gangsters who operate out in the open with their efforts to oust an elected president.

We have crossed the Rubicon and there will be no going back.

In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness."
Jean-Paul Sartre

It is well known that the United States is infamous for engineering coups against democratically elected governments worldwide. Voters' preferences are considered beside the point. Iran and Mosaddegh in 1953, Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Indonesia and Sukarno in 1965-7, Allende in Chile in 1973, to name a few from the relatively distant past.

Recently the Obama administration worked their handiwork in Honduras and Ukraine. It would not be hyperbolic to say that overthrowing democratic governments is as American as apple pie. It's our "democratic" tradition – like waging war.

What is less well known is that elements within the U.S. ruling power elites have also overthrown democratically elected governments in the United States. One U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated because he had turned toward peace and opposed the forces of war within his own government. He is the lone example of a president who therefore was opposed by all the forces of imperial conquest within the ruling elites.

Others, despite their backing for the elite deep state's imperial wars, were taken out for various reasons by competing factions within the shadow government. Nixon waged the war against Vietnam for so long on behalf of the military-industrial complex, but he was still taken down by the CIA, contrary to popular mythology about Watergate.

Jimmy Carter was front man for the Tri-Lateral Commission's deep-state faction, but was removed by the group represented by George H. Bush, William Casey, and Reagan through their traitorous actions involving the Iran hostages.

The emcee for the neo-liberal agenda, Bill Clinton, was rendered politically impotent via the Lewinsky affair, a matter never fully investigated by any media.

Obama, CIA groomed, was smoothly moved into power by the faction that felt Bush needed to be succeeded by a slick smiling assassin who symbolized "diversity," could speak well, and played hoops. Hit them with the right hand; hit them with the left. Same coin: Take your pick – heads or tails. Hillary Clinton was expected to complete the trinity.

But surprises happen, and now we have Trump, who is suffering the same fate – albeit at an exponentially faster rate – as his predecessors that failed to follow the complete script. The day after his surprise election, the interlocking circles of power that run the show in sun and shadows – what C. Wright Mills long ago termed the Power Elite – met to overthrow him, or at least to render him more controllable.

These efforts, run out of interconnected power centers, including the liberal corporate legal boardrooms that were the backers of Obama and Hillary Clinton, had no compunction in planning the overthrow of a legally elected president.

Soon they were joined by their conservative conspirators in doing the necessary work of "democracy" – making certain that only one of their hand-picked and anointed henchmen was at the helm of state. Of course, the intelligence agencies coordinated their efforts and their media scribes wrote the cover stories. The pink Pussyhats took to the streets. The deep state was working overtime.

Trump, probably never having expected to win and as shocked as most people when he did, made some crucial mistakes before the election and before taking office. Some of those mistakes have continued since his inauguration.

Not his derogatory remarks about minorities, immigrants, or women. Not his promise to cut corporate taxes, support energy companies, oppose strict environmental standards. Not his slogan to "make America great again." Not his promise to build a "wall" along the Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it. Not his vow to deport immigrants. Not his anti-Muslim pledges. Not his insistence that NATO countries contribute more to NATO's "defense" of their own countries. Not even his crude rantings and Tweets and his hypersensitive defensiveness. Not his reality-TV celebrity status, his eponymous golden tower and palatial hotels and sundry real estate holdings. Not his orange hair and often comical and disturbing demeanor, accentuated by his off the cuff speaking style.

Surely not his massive wealth.

While much of this was viewed with dismay, it was generally acceptable to the power elites who transcend party lines and run the country. Offensive to hysterical liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans, all this about Trump could be tolerated, if only he would cooperate on the key issue.

Trump's fatal mistake was saying that he wanted to get along with Russia, that Putin was a good leader, and that he wanted to end the war against Syria and pull the U.S. back from foreign wars.

This was verboten. And when he said nuclear war was absurd and would only result in nuclear conflagration, he had crossed the Rubicon. That sealed his fate.

Misogyny, racism, support for Republican conservative positions on a host of issues – all fine. Opposing foreign wars, especially with Russia – not fine.

Now we have a reality-TV president and a reality-TV coup d'etat in prime time. Hidden in plain sight, the deep-state has gone shallow. What was once covert is now overt. Once it was necessary to blame a coup on a secretive "crazy lone assassin," Lee Harvey Oswald. But in this "post-modern" society of the spectacle, the manifest is latent; the obvious, non-obvious; what you see you don't see. Everyone knows those reality-TV shows aren't real, right?

It may seem like it is a coup against Trump in plain sight, but these shows are tricky, aren't they? He's the TV guy. He runs the show. He's the sorcerer's apprentice. He wants you to believe in the illusion of the obvious. He's the master media manipulator. You see it but don't believe it because you are so astute, while he is so blatant. He's brought it upon himself. He's bringing himself down. Everyone who knows, knows that.

I am reminded of being in a movie theatre in 1998, watching The Truman Show, about a guy who slowly "discovers" that he has been living in the bubble of a television show his whole life. At the end of the film he makes his "escape" through a door in the constructed dome that is the studio set.

The liberal audience in a very liberal town stood up and applauded Truman's dash to freedom. I was startled since I had never before heard an audience applaud in a movie theatre – and a standing ovation at that. I wondered what they were applauding. I quickly realized they were applauding themselves, their knowingness, their insider astuteness that Truman had finally caught on to what they already thought they knew. Now he would be free like they were. They couldn't be taken in; now he couldn't.

Except, of course, they were applauding an illusion, a film about being trapped in a reality-TV world, a world in which they stood in that theatre – their world, their frame. Frames within frames. Truman escapes from one fake frame into another – the movie. The joke was on them. The film had done its magic as its obvious content concealed its deeper truth: the spectator and the spectacle were wed. McLuhan was here right: the medium was the message.

This is what George Trow in 1980 called "the context of no context."

Candor as concealment, truth as lies, knowingness as stupidity. Making reality unreal in the service of an agenda that is so obvious it isn't, even as the cognoscenti applaud themselves for being so smart and in the know.

The more we hear about "the deep state" and begin to grasp its definition, the more we will have descended down the rabbit hole. Soon this "deep state" will be offering courses on what it is, how it operates, and why it must stay hidden while it "exposes" itself. Right-wing pundit Bill Kristol tweets:

Liberal CIA critic and JFK assassination researcher, Jefferson Morley, after defining the deep state, writes:

With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most – perhaps the only – credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump's "wrecking ball presidency."

These are men who ostensibly share different ideologies, yet agree, and state it publically, that the "deep state" should take out Trump. Both believe, without evidence, that the Russians intervened to try to get Trump elected. Therefore, both no doubt feel justified in openly espousing a coup d'etat. They match Trump's blatancy with their own. Nothing deep about this.

Liberals and conservatives are now publically allied in demonizing Putin and Russia, and supporting a very dangerous military confrontation initiated by Obama and championed by the defeated Hillary Clinton. In the past these opposed political factions accepted that they would rotate their titular leaders into and out of the White House, and whenever the need arose to depose one or the other, that business would be left to deep state forces to effect in secret and everyone would play dumb.

Now the game has changed. It's all "obvious." The deep state has seemingly gone shallow. Its supporters say so. All the smart people can see what's happening. Even when what's happening isn't really happening.

"Only the shallow know themselves," said Oscar Wilde.

Edward Curtin Edward Curtin writes, and his writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He writes as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. He believes a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore sees all his work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding. His website is edwardcurtin.com

Frank Speaker

I remember this excellent piece the first time around. It's indeed even more pertinent today,
Martin Usher

...The first step in dealing with this is to combat ignorance and misinformation. There may not be one undeniable truth but we can certainly squash blatant mis-truths. This arena isn't just political -- our culture has a habit of reworking our past in a contemporary image and so subtly warping the lessons of history. Hollywood is a prime offender but then its no surprise to discover that the original master of propaganda, Goebbels, recognized that entertainment that pushed cultural values was a far more powerful tool for propaganda than the media that was, and still is, traditionally associated with propaganda.

John Deehan
If you read Professor Antony C Sutton's books about Wall Street, the Bolshevik Revolution and Hitlers rise to power, it is possible, as Sutton did, to examine the methodology, ideology and psychology of the string pullers in depth. For exposing them, Hutton was as he said " persecuted but not prosecuted ".
nottheonly1
Sadly though, an old wisdom brings itself into this ludicrous scenery. It also makes the comparison with the Truman show so apt. You can't fix stupid.

[Oct 20, 2019] Unasked Questions About US-Ukrainian Relations by Stephen F. Cohen

Notable quotes:
"... Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that away and the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia (and China) supposedly justifies all their crimes. ..."
Oct 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

The transcript of President Trump's July 25 telephone conversation with Ukraine's recently elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has ignited the usual anti-Trump bashing in American political-media circles, even more calls for impeachment, with little, if any, regard for the national security issues involved. Leave aside that Trump should not have been compelled to make the transcript public and ask: Which, if any, foreign leaders will now feel free to conduct personal telephone diplomacy with an American president directly or indirectly, of the kind that helped end the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, knowing that his or her comments might become known to domestic political opponents? Consider instead only the following undiscussed issues:

§ Even if former vice president Joseph Biden, who figured prominently in the Trump-Zelensky conversation, is not the Democratic nominee, Ukraine is now likely to be a contested, and poisonous, issue in the 2020 US presidential election. How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion, as some of us who opposed that folly back in the 1990s warned would be the case, and not only in Ukraine. The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013 -- 14 resulted in the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass. All those fateful events infused the Trump-Zelensky talk, if only between the lines.

§ Russia shares centuries of substantial civilizational values, language, culture, geography, and intimate family relations with Ukraine. America does not. Why, then, is it routinely asserted in the US political-media establishment that Ukraine is a "vital US national interest" and not a vital zone of Russian national security, as by all geopolitical reckoning it would seem to be? The standard American establishment answer is: because of "Russian aggression against Ukraine." But the "aggression" cited is Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for anti-Kiev fighters in the Donbass civil war, both of which came after, not before, the Maidan crisis, and indeed were a direct result of it. That is, in Moscow's eyes, it was reacting, not unreasonably, to US-led "aggression." In any event, as opponents of eastward expansion also warned in the 1990s, NATO has increased no one's security, only diminished security throughout the region bordering Russia.

§ Which brings us back to the Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation. President Zelensky ran and won overwhelmingly as a peace-with-Moscow candidate, which is why the roughly $400 million in US military aid to Ukraine, authorized by Congress, figured anomalously in the conversation. Trump is being sharply criticized for withholding that aid or threatening to do so, including by Obama partisans. Forgotten, it seems, is that President Obama, despite considerable bipartisan pressure, steadfastly refused to authorize such military assistance to Kiev, presumably because it might escalate the Russian-Ukrainian conflict (and Russia, with its long border with Ukraine, had every escalatory advantage). Instead of baiting Trump on this issue, we should hope he encourages the new peace talks that Zelensky has undertaken in recent days with Moscow, which could end the killing in Donbass. (For this, Zelensky is being threatened by well-armed extreme Ukrainian nationalists, even quasi-fascists. Strong American support for his negotiations with Moscow may not deter them, but it might.)

§ Finally, but not surprisingly, the shadow of Russiagate is now morphing into Ukrainegate. Trump is also being sharply criticized for asking Zelensky to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate, even though the role of Ukrainian-Americans and Ukraine itself in Russiagate allegations against Trump on behalf of Hillary Clinton in 2016 is now well-documented .

We need to know fully the origins of Russiagate, arguably the worst presidential scandal in American history, and if Ukrainian authorities can contribute to that understanding, they should be encouraged to do so. As I've argued repeatedly, fervent anti-Trumpers must decide whether they loathe him more than they care about American and international security. Imaging, for example, a Cuban missile -- like crisis somewhere in the world today where Washington and Moscow are militarily eyeball-to-eyeball, directly or through proxies, from the Baltic and the Black Seas to Syria and Ukraine. Will Trump's presidential legitimacy be sufficient for him to resolve such an existential crisis peacefully, as President John F. Kennedy did in 1962?

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now in their sixth year, are available at www.thenation.com.

Realist , says: October 4, 2019 at 12:06 am GMT

Trump is an agent of the Deep State, playing good cop to the bad cop Deep State. I have been saying this since mid April 2017. His multitude of actions belie his promises. Trump is a quisling to his supporters.

Here is an excellent article that comports with my view of Trump.

http://www.alt-market.com/index.php/articles/3949-trump-cannot-be-anti-globalist-while-working-with-global-elites

Ron Unz , says: October 4, 2019 at 3:35 am GMT
@Dan Hayes

I am puzzled why Cohen is permitted to publish in the Nation. Is it due to his marriage to its publisher or to the magazine's remnant infatuation with the Soviet state? Just asking.

The whole situation is a rather ironic

Prof. Cohen is certainly one of America's most eminent Russia scholars, and I think that for decades he was regarded as one of the most left-leaning ones, regularly denounced for his leftism by all the Neocons and other rightwingers. I remember I used to see him on the PBS Newshour, sometimes paired with a conservative critic of the Soviets. I'd guess that past history plus being married to the publisher of The Nation is what gives him his residual foothold there.

I'd suspect that if someone had told him a couple of decades ago that by the late 2010s he'd be blacklisted from the MSM and denounced as a "Russian agent," he probably would have been greatly saddened at the disheartening turn in American society, but not totally shocked. He probably would have regarded such a scenario as having a 10% possibility.

But if someone would have told him that the people denouncing and blacklisting him would have been the *liberal Democrats* and some of their most "excitable" elements would be accusing him of being a "Neo-Nazi White Supremacist Russian Agent" he would have thought the entire country had gone on LSD.

It's sad that our entire country has gone on LSD

The whole situation is actually a perfect parallel to the various past American purges I've often covered in my articles:

http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-our-great-purge-of-the-1940s/

renfro , says: October 4, 2019 at 4:31 am GMT

Russia is the excuse for US actions in the Ukraine as it was in the ME.
What is America without a big bad boogeyman like Russia?.
Certainly not a “Superpower’ defending the world.
Without enemies like Russia we would be nothing but big rich country.
And all the Neos and Zios and politicians would have to use Viagra instead of war to squirt out their poison.

A lot of countries like the Ukraine have gotten a lot of US taxpayer money by ‘standing up to a Russian takeover’….and are laughing all the way to their bank.

sally , says: October 4, 2019 at 4:47 am GMT
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine’s torturous and famously corrupt politics?

The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the target area.

Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt, Yemen etc.

Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials.
Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to mind.

I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.

A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?

mark green , says: October 4, 2019 at 6:06 am GMT
It is more than ironic that the Dems (and their like-minded cronies in Big Media) are up in arms over Trump’s attempt in find ‘dirt’ about Joe Biden when the ‘dirt’ looks and smells like actual corruption. Have laws been broken? Was Biden selling influence through his son? Stranger things have happened. At the very least, it looks as though Joe Biden crossed an ethical line. This will likely cost him the nomination.

Similarly, the news media should–if it was doing its job–pursue leads that would help find the source behind the missing server and the Fake News that helped justify the toxic and duplicitous ‘Russiagate’ investigation. But they’d rather pursue Trump instead. I have never witnessed a more partisan and bloodthirsty Fourth Estate.

Why is the media so utterly uninterested in finding out who/how the fake Putin-Trump ‘conspiracy’ was cooked up in the first place? Doesn’t it make sense the Trump would want to find out more? Justice demands it. False intelligence can sow chaos and start wars.

Consider, for instance, the manufactured lies (Saddam’s phantom WMD, links to 911, etc) that were used to justify Zio-America’s annihilation of Iraq. What intelligence agency cooked up these falsehoods? Who spoon-fed these fairy tales to G.W. Bush and Colin Powell?

Not only have these questions never been answered, they are seldom even asked! The Deep State has gone rogue. And Big Media is covering it up.

animalogic , says: October 4, 2019 at 7:29 am GMT
This whole ridiculous drama may profit the Dem’s in the longer term — that is, by removing that corrupt, dementia ridden nit-wit Biden from the presidential competition.
As president, Biden would be a greater sock puppet than even GWB…of course, “sock puppet” maybe just what the Dem’s want….
Patric , says: October 4, 2019 at 8:13 am GMT
@renfro renfro said “And all the Neos and Zios and politicians would have to use Viagra instead of war to squirt out their poison.”

Very well said indeed!

Beckow , says: October 4, 2019 at 8:16 am GMT
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO, and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?

There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?

Mikhail , says: • Website October 4, 2019 at 8:33 am GMT
@Ron Unz Thanks to Tucker Carlson’s show, some folks on the left like Cohen, Mate and Greenwald, are more likely to get air time on Fox News than MSNBC and CNN.
Observator , says: October 4, 2019 at 11:15 am GMT
The current CIA talking point is that it is illegal for the President to seek foreign assistance for his campaign. One might also slant it that the President of the United States has an obligation to the people who elected him to require an allied, friendly government to reopen the investigation of Biden because there is adequate reason to suspect that the Democrats are running yet another corrupt criminal for President. Incidentally, this puts Zelensky in a very awkward position, as one of the backers of his transition from sitcom star to President of Ukraine was a principal in Burisma

It is not the threat of impeachment that will energize Trump’s base; it is the grotesque, constant character assassination in the (largely CIA manipulated) media that will return him to the White House. The American people have a sense of fairness. They have always been of better character than the reprobates we are allowed to vote for. Whatever happened to trusting the democratic process, instead of using intelligence assets to engineer domestic regime change?

History is not made by nice guys. Trump has torn a big hole in the tissue of lies about what this country is and what it stands for, and that is too much for those who make their living deceiving us.

mike k , says: October 4, 2019 at 11:53 am GMT
Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that away and the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia (and China) supposedly justifies all their crimes.
eah , says: October 4, 2019 at 11:55 am GMT
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country’s constitutionally elected president Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.

Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American military/industrial/political Establishment — none of that had anything to do with US national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) — how fucking hypocritical is it to presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? — none of it would have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.

[Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed

Highly recommended!
Oct 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

S , Oct 19 2019 15:33 utc | 24

Okay, let's recap:

1) Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset (Clinton).
2) Jill Stein is a Russian asset (Clinton).
3) Donald Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987 ( Intelligencer ).
4) Rand Paul is "working for Vladimir Putin" ( McCain , Greg Olear ).
5) Bernie Sanders is "just a tool" to the Russians ( The Washington Post ).

I'm sure Bernie will turn from "just a tool" into "an asset" in no time if his poll numbers become too high. After all, nobody forgot his fraternizing with the enemy in a sauna in USSR !

[Oct 19, 2019] Kunstler One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It's a major unanticipated consequence of the digital "revolution." It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we'd only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field. ..."
"... The stupendous failure of the Mueller Investigation only revealed what can happen when extraordinary bad faith, dishonesty, and incompetence are brought to this project of reinventing "truth" -- of who did what and why -- while it provoked a counter-industry of detecting its gross falsifications. ..."
"... Perhaps you can see why unleashing the CIA, NSA, and the FBI on political enemies by Mr. Obama and his cohorts has become such a disaster. When that scheme blew up, the intel community went to the mattresses, as the saying goes in Mafia legend and lore. The "company" found itself at existential risk. Of course, the CIA has long been accused of following an agenda of its own simply because it had the means to do it. It had the manpower, the money, and the equipment to run whatever operations it felt like running, and a history of going its own way out of sheer institutional arrogance, of knowing better than the crackers and clowns elected by the hoi-polloi. The secrecy inherent in its charter was a green light for limitless mischief and some of the agency's directors showed open contempt for the occupants of the White House. Think: Allen Dulles and William Casey. And lately, Mr. Brennan. ..."
Oct 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Here's one big reason that America is driving itself batshit crazy : the explosion of computerized records, emails, inter-office memos, Twitter trails, Facebook memorabilia, iPhone videos, YouTubes, recorded conversations, and the vast alternative universe of storage capacity for all this stuff makes it seem possible to constantly go back and reconstruct reality. All it has really done is amplified the potential for political mischief to suicide level.

It's a major unanticipated consequence of the digital "revolution." It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we'd only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field.

Before all this, history was left largely to historians, who curated it from a range of views for carefully considered introduction to the stream of human culture, and managed this process at a pace that allowed a polity to get on with its business at hand in the here-and-now -- instead of incessantly and recursively reviewing events that have already happened 24/7. The more electronic media has evolved, the more it lends itself to manipulation, propaganda, and falsification of whatever happened five minutes, or five hours, or five weeks ago.

This is exactly why and how the losing team in the 2016 election has worked so hard to change that bit of history. The stupendous failure of the Mueller Investigation only revealed what can happen when extraordinary bad faith, dishonesty, and incompetence are brought to this project of reinventing "truth" -- of who did what and why -- while it provoked a counter-industry of detecting its gross falsifications.

This dynamic has long been systematically studied and applied by institutions like the so-called "intelligence community," and has gotten so out-of-hand that its main mission these days appears to be the maximum gaslighting of the nation -- for the purpose of its own desperate self-defense. The "Whistleblower" episode is the latest turn in dishonestly manipulated records, but the most interesting feature of it is that the release of the actual transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call did not affect the "narrative" precooked between the CIA and Adam Schiff's House Intel Committee. They just blundered on with the story and when major parts of the replay didn't add up, they retreated to secret sessions in the basement of the US capitol.

Perhaps you can see why unleashing the CIA, NSA, and the FBI on political enemies by Mr. Obama and his cohorts has become such a disaster. When that scheme blew up, the intel community went to the mattresses, as the saying goes in Mafia legend and lore. The "company" found itself at existential risk. Of course, the CIA has long been accused of following an agenda of its own simply because it had the means to do it. It had the manpower, the money, and the equipment to run whatever operations it felt like running, and a history of going its own way out of sheer institutional arrogance, of knowing better than the crackers and clowns elected by the hoi-polloi. The secrecy inherent in its charter was a green light for limitless mischief and some of the agency's directors showed open contempt for the occupants of the White House. Think: Allen Dulles and William Casey. And lately, Mr. Brennan.

The recently-spawned NSA has mainly added the capacity to turn everything that happens into replay material, since it is suspected of recording every phone call, every email, every financial transaction, every closed-circuit screen capture, and anything else its computers can snare for storage in its Utah Data Storage Center. Now you know why the actions of Edward Snowden were so significant. He did what he did because he was moral enough to know the face of malevolence when he saw it. That he survives in exile is a miracle.

As for the FBI, only an exceptional species of ineptitude explains the trouble they got themselves into with the RussiaGate fiasco. The unbelievable election loss of Mrs. Clinton screwed the pooch for them, and the desperate acts that followed only made things worse. The incompetence and mendacity on display was only matched by Mr. Mueller and his lawyers, who were supposed to be the FBI's cleanup crew and only left a bigger mess -- all of it cataloged in digital records.

Now, persons throughout all these agencies are waiting for the hammer to fall. If they are prosecuted, the process will entail yet another monumental excursion into the replaying of those digital records. It could go on for years. So, the final act in the collapse of the USA will be the government choking itself to death on replayed narratives from its own server farms.

In the meantime, events are actually tending in a direction that will eventually deprive the nation of the means to continue most of its accustomed activities including credible elections, food distribution, a reliable electric grid, and perhaps even self-defense.

[Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed

Highly recommended!
Oct 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

S , Oct 19 2019 15:33 utc | 24

Okay, let's recap:

1) Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset (Clinton).
2) Jill Stein is a Russian asset (Clinton).
3) Donald Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987 ( Intelligencer ).
4) Rand Paul is "working for Vladimir Putin" ( McCain , Greg Olear ).
5) Bernie Sanders is "just a tool" to the Russians ( The Washington Post ).

I'm sure Bernie will turn from "just a tool" into "an asset" in no time if his poll numbers become too high. After all, nobody forgot his fraternizing with the enemy in a sauna in USSR !

[Oct 19, 2019] Kunstler One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It's a major unanticipated consequence of the digital "revolution." It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we'd only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field. ..."
"... The stupendous failure of the Mueller Investigation only revealed what can happen when extraordinary bad faith, dishonesty, and incompetence are brought to this project of reinventing "truth" -- of who did what and why -- while it provoked a counter-industry of detecting its gross falsifications. ..."
"... Perhaps you can see why unleashing the CIA, NSA, and the FBI on political enemies by Mr. Obama and his cohorts has become such a disaster. When that scheme blew up, the intel community went to the mattresses, as the saying goes in Mafia legend and lore. The "company" found itself at existential risk. Of course, the CIA has long been accused of following an agenda of its own simply because it had the means to do it. It had the manpower, the money, and the equipment to run whatever operations it felt like running, and a history of going its own way out of sheer institutional arrogance, of knowing better than the crackers and clowns elected by the hoi-polloi. The secrecy inherent in its charter was a green light for limitless mischief and some of the agency's directors showed open contempt for the occupants of the White House. Think: Allen Dulles and William Casey. And lately, Mr. Brennan. ..."
Oct 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Here's one big reason that America is driving itself batshit crazy : the explosion of computerized records, emails, inter-office memos, Twitter trails, Facebook memorabilia, iPhone videos, YouTubes, recorded conversations, and the vast alternative universe of storage capacity for all this stuff makes it seem possible to constantly go back and reconstruct reality. All it has really done is amplified the potential for political mischief to suicide level.

It's a major unanticipated consequence of the digital "revolution." It has gotten us stuck looking backward at events, obsessively replaying them, while working overtime to spin them favorably for one team or the other, at the expense of actually living in real time and dealing with reality as it unspools with us. If life were a ballgame, we'd only be watching jumbotron replays while failing to pay attention to the action on the field.

Before all this, history was left largely to historians, who curated it from a range of views for carefully considered introduction to the stream of human culture, and managed this process at a pace that allowed a polity to get on with its business at hand in the here-and-now -- instead of incessantly and recursively reviewing events that have already happened 24/7. The more electronic media has evolved, the more it lends itself to manipulation, propaganda, and falsification of whatever happened five minutes, or five hours, or five weeks ago.

This is exactly why and how the losing team in the 2016 election has worked so hard to change that bit of history. The stupendous failure of the Mueller Investigation only revealed what can happen when extraordinary bad faith, dishonesty, and incompetence are brought to this project of reinventing "truth" -- of who did what and why -- while it provoked a counter-industry of detecting its gross falsifications.

This dynamic has long been systematically studied and applied by institutions like the so-called "intelligence community," and has gotten so out-of-hand that its main mission these days appears to be the maximum gaslighting of the nation -- for the purpose of its own desperate self-defense. The "Whistleblower" episode is the latest turn in dishonestly manipulated records, but the most interesting feature of it is that the release of the actual transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call did not affect the "narrative" precooked between the CIA and Adam Schiff's House Intel Committee. They just blundered on with the story and when major parts of the replay didn't add up, they retreated to secret sessions in the basement of the US capitol.

Perhaps you can see why unleashing the CIA, NSA, and the FBI on political enemies by Mr. Obama and his cohorts has become such a disaster. When that scheme blew up, the intel community went to the mattresses, as the saying goes in Mafia legend and lore. The "company" found itself at existential risk. Of course, the CIA has long been accused of following an agenda of its own simply because it had the means to do it. It had the manpower, the money, and the equipment to run whatever operations it felt like running, and a history of going its own way out of sheer institutional arrogance, of knowing better than the crackers and clowns elected by the hoi-polloi. The secrecy inherent in its charter was a green light for limitless mischief and some of the agency's directors showed open contempt for the occupants of the White House. Think: Allen Dulles and William Casey. And lately, Mr. Brennan.

The recently-spawned NSA has mainly added the capacity to turn everything that happens into replay material, since it is suspected of recording every phone call, every email, every financial transaction, every closed-circuit screen capture, and anything else its computers can snare for storage in its Utah Data Storage Center. Now you know why the actions of Edward Snowden were so significant. He did what he did because he was moral enough to know the face of malevolence when he saw it. That he survives in exile is a miracle.

As for the FBI, only an exceptional species of ineptitude explains the trouble they got themselves into with the RussiaGate fiasco. The unbelievable election loss of Mrs. Clinton screwed the pooch for them, and the desperate acts that followed only made things worse. The incompetence and mendacity on display was only matched by Mr. Mueller and his lawyers, who were supposed to be the FBI's cleanup crew and only left a bigger mess -- all of it cataloged in digital records.

Now, persons throughout all these agencies are waiting for the hammer to fall. If they are prosecuted, the process will entail yet another monumental excursion into the replaying of those digital records. It could go on for years. So, the final act in the collapse of the USA will be the government choking itself to death on replayed narratives from its own server farms.

In the meantime, events are actually tending in a direction that will eventually deprive the nation of the means to continue most of its accustomed activities including credible elections, food distribution, a reliable electric grid, and perhaps even self-defense.

[Oct 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard on Twitter Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and person

Oct 19, 2019 |

Tulsi Gabbard ‏ 1:20 PM - 18 Oct 2019

Great! Thank you @ HillaryClinton . You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...

Tulsi Gabbard ‏ 1:20 PM - 18 Oct 2019

... concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and ...

Tulsi Gabbard ‏ 1:20 PM - 18 Oct 2019

... powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.

[Oct 19, 2019] The current CIA talking point is that it is illegal for the President to seek foreign assistance for his campaign. One might also slant it that the President of the United States has an obligation to the people who elected him to require an allied, friendly government to reopen the investigation of Biden because there is adequate reason to suspect that the Democrats are running yet another corrupt criminal for President.

Oct 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

Observator , says: October 4, 2019 at 11:15 am GMT

The current CIA talking point is that it is illegal for the President to seek foreign assistance for his campaign. One might also slant it that the President of the United States has an obligation to the people who elected him to require an allied, friendly government to reopen the investigation of Biden because there is adequate reason to suspect that the Democrats are running yet another corrupt criminal for President. Incidentally, this puts Zelensky in a very awkward position, as one of the backers of his transition from sitcom star to President of Ukraine was a principal in Burisma

It is not the threat of impeachment that will energize Trump's base; it is the grotesque, constant character assassination in the (largely CIA manipulated) media that will return him to the White House. The American people have a sense of fairness. They have always been of better character than the reprobates we are allowed to vote for. Whatever happened to trusting the democratic process, instead of using intelligence assets to engineer domestic regime change?

History is not made by nice guys. Trump has torn a big hole in the tissue of lies about what this country is and what it stands for, and that is too much for those who make their living deceiving us.

[Oct 19, 2019] The Democratic Party Should Suspend Hillary Clinton

Notable quotes:
"... I suspect that Gabbard has very little chance of beating Trump because he is also campaigning - quite successfully - against 'endless wars', and Gabbard is too radical for most Americans. ..."
"... This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a good description ..."
"... The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely two branches of the Business Party. ..."
"... Good for Tulsi. I love the way she punches. She not only decked Clinton in one, but she got a lot of other important points across at the same time. ..."
"... Whenever she tries to curve her stance close to the establishment, she comes off as someone who is running for Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense; as someone with her eyes on a high status job in the establishement. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton can't be thrown out of the Dem party because she in a sense IS the Dem party as it stands now, a long way from its roots. The Dem party now has been fully integrated into the bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the corporate media similar to how Tony Blair in the UK took the Labour Party to be deeply embedded in the UK establishment. ..."
"... Hillary is still around because she literally owns the Democrat party. Follow the funding: in 2016, almost all of it flowed through HRC. Not just the presidential, but the state and significant part of the local. ..."
Oct 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Hillary Clinton has gone mad :

Hillary Clinton appeared to suggest that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is the "favorite of the Russians" to win the 2020 presidential election and is being groomed by Moscow to run as a third-party candidate against the eventual Democratic nominee.
...
The Russians already have their "eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate," she said, in an apparent reference to Gabbard.

"She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her, so far," Clinton told David Plouffe, the podcast's host and the campaign manager for former President Obama's 2008 campaign.

"And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset," Clinton added, referring to the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate.

The responses were appropriate:

Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard - 22:20 UTC · Oct 18, 2019
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...
... concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and ...
... powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.

It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.

The Streisand effect of Clinton's shoddy remark will help Tulsi Gabbard with regards to name recognition. It will increase her poll results. With Joe Biden faltering and Elizabeth Warren increasingly exposed as a phony Clinton copy, Bernie Sanders could become the Democrats leading candidate. Then the “favorite of the Russians” smear will be applied to him.

Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party for damaging it's chances to regain the White House. But the Democratic establishment would rather sabotage the election than to let one of the more progressive candidates take the lead.

Voters do not like such internal squabble and shenanigans. The phony Ukrainegate 'impeachment inquiry' is already a gift for Trump. Messing with the candidate field on top of that will inevitably end with another Trump presidency.

Brendan , Oct 19 2019 14:14 utc | 6

and Suspend her from what? a lamp post? That's a little bit harsh.

Hillary is actually doing something constructive for the first time in her career - by giving a boost to Tulsi Gabbard who is the only candidate who challenges the military industrial complex, which has probably caused more death and destruction than anyone else in history.

I suspect that Gabbard has very little chance of beating Trump because he is also campaigning - quite successfully - against 'endless wars', and Gabbard is too radical for most Americans.

But none of the other Democratic candidates stand a chance of beating Trump either. The two front-runners are medically unfit for any important challenging job - Biden (senility) and Sanders (recent heart attack/stroke?).

librul , Oct 19 2019 14:29 utc | 9

Tulsi is urging Hillary to "enter the race" !! Hillary is foaming at the mouth with desire to enter the 2020 race. Is Tulsi working for Hillary?

Behind the scenes it was decided to make HunterBidenGate the pretext for a Trump impeachment. This, it was thought, would damage Trump AND Biden and make way for the resurrection of Hillary Clinton. There were so many other pretexts available but they chose this one.

Gambits everywhere !

Trailer Trash , Oct 19 2019 14:42 utc | 11
"Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party"

This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a good description. Even a quick review of the Wikipedia entry reveals little.

As best I can tell, a person is a party member by checking the box on the voter registration form. The few times I have registered, I did not check a box for any party. It is none of the state's business who I associate with or vote for.

It is also not the state's business to supervise and fund the selection of party candidates. But that is what happens in the US. The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely two branches of the Business Party.

Peter AU 1 , Oct 19 2019 14:48 utc | 13
The Clinton delusional ranting probably needs to be looked at in the light of this.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/10/18/tulsi-nails-national-tv-us-regime-change-wars/

"It didn't come much clearer nor more explicit than when Gabbard fired up the Democratic TV debate this week. It was billed as the biggest televised presidential debate ever, and the Hawaii Representative told some prime-time home-truths to the nation:

"Donald Trump has blood of the Kurds on his hands, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011 along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing and cheer-leading this regime-change war."

The 38-year-old military veteran went on to denounce how the US has sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists for its objective of overthrowing the government in Damascus."

paul , Oct 19 2019 14:58 utc | 16
Good for Tulsi. I love the way she punches. She not only decked Clinton in one, but she got a lot of other important points across at the same time. The way she tries to finesse her stances on Iran, India and Israel is disturbing though.

Whenever she tries to curve her stance close to the establishment, she comes off as someone who is running for Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense; as someone with her eyes on a high status job in the establishement.

When she's forthright, punches hard and says the things that many people are thinking but few dare say - as she did in her statement on Syria, but didn't in her statement on Iran - she comes off as the first real candidate for President that I've seen in my lifetime (I don't count the likes of Dennis Kucinich, who never seemed to actually want to win).

If Tulsi is serious about doing the world good, this is the path she needs to take. Speak the truths no one else is willing to say; punch hard; stick with it. Yeah and be willing to die for it. If they can't stop you, which I don't think they can, they'll come gunning for you...

Don Bacon , Oct 19 2019 15:04 utc | 17
Finally, at last, foreign affairs (i.e wars) has made it into a presidential campaign, and by a veteran, with veterans currently being sanctified in the U.S. The women (Tulsi, Jill and Hillary) are getting down and dirty, too, which is always a good thing and a feature of politics in time past, as in the Truman era. President Harry Truman: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you cannot handle the pressure, you should not remain in a position where you have to deal with it."

Let's hope that they get into the details of Hillary's failures, including Libya, Somalia, and especially Syria. Let's get it on! In the last election she never was forced to answer for her specific failures. Now's the time.

Ludwig , Oct 19 2019 15:19 utc | 20
Hillary Clinton can't be thrown out of the Dem party because she in a sense IS the Dem party as it stands now, a long way from its roots. The Dem party now has been fully integrated into the bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the corporate media similar to how Tony Blair in the UK took the Labour Party to be deeply embedded in the UK establishment.

What Trump has successfully done from the right that Sanders/Gabbard (like Corbyn in the UK) are struggling to do from the left is to attack the establishment that's in a permanent state of warfare abroad and at home against its "enemies" and unfettered capitalism at home For a brief moment it was hoped by progressives that Obama - who defeated the faces of the establishment, Clinton and McCain in 2008 - would really fight the establishment but he ended up becoming more of a celebrity politician like Trudeau who talked a good game but was unable to effect real change on the ground which of course led to a large number or African Americans not voting in 2016 and a lot of white blue collar Obama 2008 voters going for Trump.

The corporate media which has been totally corrupted and infiltrated by intelligence agencies - quote openly versus covertly as in the past - is going to make every effort to shut down not just Gabbard but Sanders and ensure that Warren - a wannabe feel-gooder like Obama - be completely neutered to effect real change.

c1ue , Oct 19 2019 16:08 utc | 30
Hillary is still around because she literally owns the Democrat party. Follow the funding: in 2016, almost all of it flowed through HRC. Not just the presidential, but the state and significant part of the local.

[Oct 19, 2019] Hillary Clinton slanders Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Green Party candidate Jill Stein as Russian spies by Andre Damon

Notable quotes:
"... Clinton's claims, made without the slightest effort at factual substantiation, are an attempt to criminalize the anti-war statements of the two candidates as treasonous. ..."
"... Clinton's attacks on Gabbard and Stein make clear once again that the Democrats' assertions of "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election were primarily aimed not at Trump, but at the anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiments that led millions of people to refuse to vote for her in 2016. They underscore how the Democrats have appropriated the McCarthyite tactics historically associated primarily with the Republican right. ..."
"... As a central part of their anti-Russia campaign, Clinton and the Democrats promoted the media effort to poison public opinion against journalist Julian Assange by slandering him as a "Russian agent," preparing the way for the Trump administration to indict him on bogus sedition charges and secure his imprisonment in London under conditions that threaten his life. ..."
"... "That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a Russian asset," Clinton said. "Yes, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate." ..."
"... Gabbard replied to Clinton's slander on Twitter by declaring, "Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain." Gabbard's performance in this week's Democratic presidential debate no doubt put her in Clinton's crosshairs. Gabbard vowed, "As president, I will end these regime-change wars," and "would make sure that we stop supporting terrorists like Al Qaeda in Syria, who have been the ground force in this ongoing regime-change war." ..."
"... Gabbard's true statement that the United States -- with Clinton as secretary of state under Obama -- had allied with forces linked to Al Qaeda in the drive to overthrow the Syrian government was passed over in total silence by the rest of the candidates and the CNN and New York Times moderators. It was then blacked out in the post-debate media coverage of the event. ..."
"... In an earlier debate, Gabbard said the greatest geopolitical danger facing the United States was the threat of nuclear war -- another taboo in the broadcast media, which routinely demands that the United States "stand up" to Russia without mentioning what a military confrontation with the nuclear-armed country would look like. ..."
Oct 19, 2019 | www.wsws.org

Hillary Clinton, the widely despised former Democratic Party presidential candidate, has slandered two of her political opponents -- Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and 2016 Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein -- as traitors and Russian spies.

The World Socialist Web Site has fundamental political differences with both Ms. Gabbard and Dr. Stein. But Clinton's claims, made without the slightest effort at factual substantiation, are an attempt to criminalize the anti-war statements of the two candidates as treasonous.

Clinton's attacks on Gabbard and Stein make clear once again that the Democrats' assertions of "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election were primarily aimed not at Trump, but at the anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiments that led millions of people to refuse to vote for her in 2016. They underscore how the Democrats have appropriated the McCarthyite tactics historically associated primarily with the Republican right.

As a central part of their anti-Russia campaign, Clinton and the Democrats promoted the media effort to poison public opinion against journalist Julian Assange by slandering him as a "Russian agent," preparing the way for the Trump administration to indict him on bogus sedition charges and secure his imprisonment in London under conditions that threaten his life.

At the same time, in the name of countering the supposed menace of Russian "fake news," the Democrats pressured Google to slash search traffic to left-wing political websites and insisted that Facebook and Twitter delete left-wing accounts with millions of followers.

In a podcast interview published Thursday, Clinton told former Obama adviser David Plouffe, "I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate." Implicitly but clearly referring to Gabbard, Clinton continued, "She's the favorite of the Russians."

"They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her," Clinton added.

Asked later if the former secretary of state was referring to Gabbard in her comment, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told CNN, "If the nesting doll fits "

Clinton then went on to make her strongest assertion yet that Jill Stein was a "Russian asset."

"That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a Russian asset," Clinton said. "Yes, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate."

Gabbard replied to Clinton's slander on Twitter by declaring, "Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain." Gabbard's performance in this week's Democratic presidential debate no doubt put her in Clinton's crosshairs. Gabbard vowed, "As president, I will end these regime-change wars," and "would make sure that we stop supporting terrorists like Al Qaeda in Syria, who have been the ground force in this ongoing regime-change war."

Gabbard's true statement that the United States -- with Clinton as secretary of state under Obama -- had allied with forces linked to Al Qaeda in the drive to overthrow the Syrian government was passed over in total silence by the rest of the candidates and the CNN and New York Times moderators. It was then blacked out in the post-debate media coverage of the event.

In an earlier debate, Gabbard said the greatest geopolitical danger facing the United States was the threat of nuclear war -- another taboo in the broadcast media, which routinely demands that the United States "stand up" to Russia without mentioning what a military confrontation with the nuclear-armed country would look like.

Toward the end of Thursday's interview, Clinton implicitly called for censorship. She condemned the growth of internet news outlets, which have broadened the number and range of sources of information available to the population.

"I think it's a lot harder for Americans to know what they're supposed to believe," she said. In the 1970s, with only three major national newspapers, "It was a much more controllable environment."

Jill Stein advocates the reform of capitalism and is an opponent of Marxism. She has stated that she is opposed to "state socialism." Tulsi Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war and major in the Hawaii National Guard, describes herself as a "hawk" in many aspects of US foreign policy.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the statements they have made in opposition to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria correspond to the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of the American people, who see these wars of aggression launched on the basis of lies, which have killed and maimed millions, as a criminal squandering of lives and resources.

Clinton, speaking for a rabidly pro-war faction of the American financial oligarchy and the military-intelligence establishment, sees these sentiments as treasonous and argues for their criminalization.

Her statements make clear once again that the working class has no stake in the struggle between the Trump faction and his opponents in the Democratic Party and intelligence apparatus. Trump, relying on fascistic appeals to his right-wing base, is seeking to turn the United States into a personalist dictatorship. But Clinton's faction does not oppose his concentration camps for immigrants or his pro-corporate agenda. Rather, it opposes Trump on the grounds that he is "soft" on Russia and insufficiently aggressive in waging America's wars.

Eve • 43 minutes ago

Isn't it funny that the Clinton trolls were weaponizing her gender in the last election, screaming "sexist!" at anyone who criticized her for her actual policies and corrupt practices, slandering Sanders supporters as "Bernie Bros", and to the point of Albright claiming there was a special place in hell for women who didn't support her, while the Queen of Warmongering, who was besties with Trump, married to Bill, took cash from Weinstein, and flew with Epstein (all serial rapists) gets to baselessly smear women as treasonous spies without a peep from the liberal feminists, metoo-ers, and media mouthpieces? And, for a cherry on top, she's on tour for a book called "Gutsy Women"!
Barbar • an hour ago
Gabbard, after deftly doing a front-stabbing number on Bad Cop Harris, torpedoing Saint Obomber's "legacy" with his bungled attempt to surf AQ to regime-change in Syria and rightly ripping the agitprop rags NYT and CNN some fresh axeholes, has indeed now flushed out the deranged Alien Queen, wildly spitting globs of steaming molecular acid at the one who dared wound her drones.

She raises some ugly home truths rarely heard from bourgeois politicians at this level and, having busted the media blackout to get back in the debates, for her troubles is now receiving what amount to transparent public death threats from a top Mafiosa desperate to evade any proper scrutiny of her own and the Party's many warcrimes.

Regardless of the rest of her politics, one has to recognise Gabbard's personal bravery in tackling dangerous predators like this and hope she has an extremely dedicated 24/7 armed personal protection detail, to ward off the elevated risk of Arkancide.

лидия • 2 hours ago
""I think it's a lot harder for Americans to know what they're supposed to believe," she said. In the 1970s, with only three major national newspapers, "It was a much more controllable environment.""

This is a true voice of bourgeois democracy, of course.

jet1685 • 2 hours ago
" 'That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a Russian asset,' Clinton said. 'Yes, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate.' "

"We came, we saw, he died." -- Clinton on Khaddafy

But can you guess who uttered the following quote(hint: it is not the "white nationalist" Donald Trump, who unlike some public figures is politically apt enough not to say "white people" aloud):
"Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and whites in both states who had not completed college are supporting me." *

The capitalist Democratic Party is a loudmouthed, racist buffoon.

* working hard when not hardly working--but maybe it's not just whites

Ol' Hippy • 2 hours ago
The vile, vindictive nature of Mrs Clinton has reached new lows as her seeming unaccepting the loss of the '16 election to shift the blame to anyone but her. She is why we have Trump. She really needs to fade away and quit meddling in our elections.
Eric Sommer • 2 hours ago • edited
"Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain." - An Interview with Tulsi Gabbard regarding the role of HIllary Clinton, the military-industrial complex, and her anti-war stance here. To my surprise, she makes the clear connection that Clintons claim that she is a 'russian asset' is aimed also at demonizing all Americans who oppose the war-regime.
https://www.youtube.com/wat...

[Oct 19, 2019] Welcome To The USSR The United States Of Suppression And Repression by Charles Hugh Smith

Notable quotes:
"... When propaganda is cleverly engineered, people don't even recognize it as propaganda: welcome to the USSR, the United States of Suppression and Repression. The propaganda in the U.S. has reached such a high state that the majority of people accept it as "Pravda" (truth), even as their limbic system's BS detector is sensing there is a great disturbance in the Force. ..."
"... To give some examples: healthcare is over 18% of the nation's GDP, yet it makes up only 8.7% of the Consumer price Index. Hundreds of thousands of families have to declare bankruptcy as a result of crushing healthcare bills, but on the CPI components chart, it's a tiny little sliver just a bit more than recreation (5.7%). ..."
"... "Facts" are a funny thing when the data sources and massaging of that data are all purposefully opaque. Again, inflation is a lived-world example of how "official facts" are clearly massaged to support an essential narrative -- that inflation is so low it's basically signal noise, while in the real world it has impoverished the bottom 95% to a startling (but unmentionable) degree. ..."
"... This is what happened to this site in the bogus PropOrNot propaganda campaign of 2016, in which every alternative-media website that questioned the "approved narratives" was labeled "fake news" in a classic propaganda trick of labeling dissenters as propagandists to misdirect the citizenry from the actual propaganda (PropOrNot), which by the way was heavily promoted on page one by Jeff Bezos' propaganda mouthpiece, The Washington Post . (Who's your daddy, WP "journalists"?) ..."
"... Fake news, indeed. Those individuals who support the "approved narratives" and orthodoxies win gold stars, and so virtue-signaling is now the nation's most passionate hobby. (Shades of the Stasi...) ..."
"... In the wake of the 1976 Church Committee revelations on the institutional lawlessness and corruption of the FBI and CIA, the idea that former CIA propagandists and spy masters would be on TV as "commentators" would have been laughed off as a bad joke. Yet here are Clapper, Brennan et al, the "most likely to lie, obfuscate, rendition and propagandize" individuals in the nation welcomed as "experts" who we should all accept as trustworthy Big Brother. (Ahem) ..."
"... Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression , where your views are welcome as long as they parrot "approved narratives" and the corporate-state's orthodoxies. "Facts" are only welcome if they lend credence to the "approved narratives" and orthodoxies. ..."
Oct 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

We're all against "fake news," right? Until your content is deemed "fake news" in a "fake news" indictment without any evidence, trial or recourse.

When propaganda is cleverly engineered, people don't even recognize it as propaganda: welcome to the USSR, the United States of Suppression and Repression. The propaganda in the U.S. has reached such a high state that the majority of people accept it as "Pravda" (truth), even as their limbic system's BS detector is sensing there is a great disturbance in the Force.

Inflation is a good example. The official (i.e. propaganda) inflation rate is increasingly detached from the real-world declines in the purchasing power of the bottom 80%, yet the jabbering talking heads on TV repeat the "low inflation" story with such conviction that the dissonance between the "official narrative" and the real world must be "our fault"--a classic technique of brainwashing.

To give some examples: healthcare is over 18% of the nation's GDP, yet it makes up only 8.7% of the Consumer price Index. Hundreds of thousands of families have to declare bankruptcy as a result of crushing healthcare bills, but on the CPI components chart, it's a tiny little sliver just a bit more than recreation (5.7%).

Then there's education, which includes the $1.4 trillion borrowed by student debt-serfs--which is only part of the tsunami of cash gushing into the coffers of the higher-education cartel. Yet education & communication (which presumably includes the Internet / mobile telephone service cartel's soaring prices) is another tiny sliver of the CPI, just 6.6%, a bit more than fun-and-games recreation.

As for housing costs, former Soviet apparatchiks must be high-fiving the Federal agencies for their inventive confusion of reality with magical made-up "statistics." To estimate housing costs, the federal agency in charge of ginning up a low inflation number asks homeowners to guess what their house would rent for, were it being rented--what's known as equivalent rent.

Wait a minute--don't we have actual sales data for houses, and actual rent data? Yes we do, but those are verboten because they reflect skyrocketing inflation in housing costs, which is not allowed. So we use some fake guessing-game numbers, and the corporate media dutifully delivers the "pravda" that inflation is 1.6% annually--basically signal noise, while in the real world (as measured by the Chapwood Index) is running between 9% and 13% annually. How the Chapwood Index is calculated )

As the dissonance between the real world experienced by the citizenry and what they're told is "pravda" by the media reaches extremes, the media is forced to double-down on the propaganda , shouting down, marginalizing, discrediting, demonetizing and suppressing dissenters via character assassination, following the old Soviet script to a tee.

(Clearly, the CIA's agitprop sector mastered the Soviet templates and has been applying what they learned to the domestic populace. By all means, start by brainwashing the home audience so they don't catch on that the "news" is a Truman Show simulation.)

In 2014, Peter Pomerantsev, a British journalist born in the Soviet Union, published Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia which drew on his years working in Russian television to describe a society in giddy, hysterical flight from enlightenment empiricism. He wrote of how state-controlled Russian broadcasting "became ever more twisted, the need to incite panic and fear ever more urgent; rationality was tuned out, and Kremlin-friendly cults and hatemongers were put on prime time."

Now, he's written a penetrating follow-up, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality that is partly an effort to make sense of how the disorienting phenomena he observed in Russia went global. The child of exiled Soviet dissidents, Pomerantsev juxtaposes his family's story -- unfolding at a time when ideas, art and information seemed to challenge tyranny -- with a present in which truth scarcely appears to matter.

"During glasnost, it seemed that the truth would set everybody free," he writes. "Facts seemed possessed of power; dictators seemed so afraid of facts that they suppressed them. But something has gone drastically wrong: We have access to more information and evidence than ever, but facts seem to have lost their power."

(source)

"Facts" are a funny thing when the data sources and massaging of that data are all purposefully opaque. Again, inflation is a lived-world example of how "official facts" are clearly massaged to support an essential narrative -- that inflation is so low it's basically signal noise, while in the real world it has impoverished the bottom 95% to a startling (but unmentionable) degree.

This is the reality as inflation has eaten up wages' purchasing power: Families Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class Wages stalled but costs haven't, so people increasingly rent or finance what their parents might have owned outright Median household income in the U.S. was $61,372 at the end of 2017, according to the Census Bureau. When inflation is taken into account, that is just above the 1999 level.

We're all against "fake news," right? Until your content is deemed "fake news" in a "fake news" indictment without any evidence, trial or recourse. This is what happened to this site in the bogus PropOrNot propaganda campaign of 2016, in which every alternative-media website that questioned the "approved narratives" was labeled "fake news" in a classic propaganda trick of labeling dissenters as propagandists to misdirect the citizenry from the actual propaganda (PropOrNot), which by the way was heavily promoted on page one by Jeff Bezos' propaganda mouthpiece, The Washington Post . (Who's your daddy, WP "journalists"?)

Meanwhile, back in reality, the primary source of data here on oftwominds.com is 1) the Federal Reserve data base (FRED) 2) IRS data and 3) content and charts posted by the cream of the U.S. corporate media Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Fake news, indeed. Those individuals who support the "approved narratives" and orthodoxies win gold stars, and so virtue-signaling is now the nation's most passionate hobby. (Shades of the Stasi...)

In the wake of the 1976 Church Committee revelations on the institutional lawlessness and corruption of the FBI and CIA, the idea that former CIA propagandists and spy masters would be on TV as "commentators" would have been laughed off as a bad joke. Yet here are Clapper, Brennan et al, the "most likely to lie, obfuscate, rendition and propagandize" individuals in the nation welcomed as "experts" who we should all accept as trustworthy Big Brother. (Ahem)

What if every employee in the corporate media who was paid (or coerced) by the FBI, NSA, CIA etc. had to wear a large colorful badge that read, "owned by the FBI/CIA"? Would that change our view of the validity of the "approved narratives"?

Welcome to the USSR: the United States of Suppression and Repression , where your views are welcome as long as they parrot "approved narratives" and the corporate-state's orthodoxies. "Facts" are only welcome if they lend credence to the "approved narratives" and orthodoxies.

For example, corporate earnings are rising. Never mind estimates were slashed, that was buried in footnotes a month ago. What matters is Corporate America will once again "beat estimates" by a penny, or a nickel, or gasp, oh the wonderment, by a dime, on earnings that were slashed by a dollar when "nobody was looking." Meanwhile, back in reality, the bottom 95% have been losing ground for two decades. But don't say anything, you'll be guilty of "fake news."

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[Oct 19, 2019] I Stand Against Everything She Represents - Gabbard Hammers Tired, Sick, Fragile Hillary

Notable quotes:
"... Clearly, Gabbard may have real problems with Donald Trump as president but she's learned very quickly from him that the best way to deal with Hillary and her media quislings is to attack them without mercy. ..."
"... Gabbard throws down the gauntlet here outing Hillary as the mastermind behind the DNC strategy of allowing the current crop of future losers to fall all over themselves to alienate as many centrist voters as possible. ..."
"... She emerged from that debate as the only candidate with any moral compass capable of pointing in a single direction. Warren made a fool of herself responding with bromides about leaving in the 'rightt way' indistinguishable from any other presidential puppet of the last twenty years. ..."
"... The people Gabbard is up against are even more ruthless since Hillary intends to win, whereas the Republicans in 2008 were fighting for the right to lose to her at the time. ..."
"... Gabbard's rise in popularity among Trump voters and centrists is born of the same exhaustion the American people have with endless wars for globalism. She is Trump's Kryptonite. ..."
"... The party she represents is irrelevant. By wrapping herself in the mantle of the front-runner for the nomination is not delusional, it's the most strategic thing she's done to date. ..."
"... Join my Patreon to assist me in helping you expose the frauds and liars whose perversions of truth threaten the fabric of civil society. Install the Brave Browser to make it harder for them to track you and marginalize similar voices. ..."
Oct 19, 2019 | tomluongo.me

Clearly, Gabbard may have real problems with Donald Trump as president but she's learned very quickly from him that the best way to deal with Hillary and her media quislings is to attack them without mercy.

Gabbard throws down the gauntlet here outing Hillary as the mastermind behind the DNC strategy of allowing the current crop of future losers to fall all over themselves to alienate as many centrist voters as possible.

This paves the way for Hillary to swoop in on her broom, pointed hat in hand, and declare herself the savior of the Democratic Party's chances to defeat Donald Trump next November.

Remember that leading up to the debate Gabbard was going to boycott the event because it was such a corrupted event and stage-managed to showcase the chosen 'front-runners' -- Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.

It makes sense to me that she decided at the last minute to join the debate after the Times piece just to ensure she got the national platform to openly call out the corruption in the same breath as attacking Trump for his, to this point, disastrous foreign policy mistakes.

She emerged from that debate as the only candidate with any moral compass capable of pointing in a single direction. Warren made a fool of herself responding with bromides about leaving in the 'rightt way' indistinguishable from any other presidential puppet of the last twenty years.

This is two debates in a row where Gabbard came out blazing at the front-runner, claiming a moral and ethical high ground on foreign policy that, at just over half the age of her rivals, that shows a maturity well beyond her years.

Her calling Hillary the "Queen of Warmongers" is so self-evidently true that it will reverberate far beyond Twitter into votes.

And it tells Hillary that Gabbard has zero fear of her and her political machine.

You can't cow a person without fear who has nothing to lose.

Bullies like Hillary never learn that lesson until they are humiliated beyond recognition.

Moreover, when you look at this sequence of events it's clear that the DNC, Hillary and everyone else close to the corridors of power fear Gabbard's rise. If they weren't they wouldn't be putting out smears in the New York Times.

They wouldn't be spending millions on social media trolls to discredit her in the public fora.

The first rule of politics is "You never attack down."

Well, Hillary attacked down. The Times attacked down. The DNC, by gaming the debate rules, attacked down. And that spells disaster for anyone who does it.

Just ask Rudy Guiliani.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cQrwKr_b4Lg

This was the exchange that ended Rudy's political career. 150 seconds of truth-telling that ignited a movement which culminated in the election of Donald Trump.

Gabbard is following that same course. The difference between her and Dr. Paul is that she's less polite. But as to their moral clarity there is little difference. And she shouldn't be polite. The stakes are higher today than they were in 2008.

The people Gabbard is up against are even more ruthless since Hillary intends to win, whereas the Republicans in 2008 were fighting for the right to lose to her at the time.

Gabbard's rise in popularity among Trump voters and centrists is born of the same exhaustion the American people have with endless wars for globalism. She is Trump's Kryptonite.

The party she represents is irrelevant. By wrapping herself in the mantle of the front-runner for the nomination is not delusional, it's the most strategic thing she's done to date.

It's also becoming more and more realistic as the days go on.

Because by responding to Hillary's ham-fisted attempts to position herself as the voice of reason, Gabbard clarifies for everyone just how sick and bile-filled Hillary is by outing her as the delusional one.

And reminding everyone that Hillary is the architect of the very policies in the Middle East that Trump is now taking heat for trying to unwind.

Gabbard knows what the plan is. She was there in 2016 when Hillary stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders and quit her position in the DNC because of it.

Even Trump knows that foreign policy and foreign entanglements will be the big ticket issue for this election cycle.

Why?

Because Gabbard has single-handedly made it so.

Trump is already running against her by pulling back from Syria, looking for peace options in Afghanistan, firing John Bolton while using proxies and, yes, Vladimir Putin to assist him in fixing his myriad mistakes of the first thirty months of his presidency.

Hillary trying to position herself as the one who can save the Middle East from Trump's bumbling is laughable and Gabbard just laughed in Hillary's face.

Calling everyone who voices any dissent from foreign or domestic policy orthodoxy a Russian agent is a losing proposition. It belies reality and what people see with their own eyes.

Americans want better relations with Russia now World War III. Trump's popularity has risen since he backed off on starting a war with Iran.

The media spent four years marginalizing Dr. Paul. The RNC stole the nomination from him just as surely as the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie. As the people in the U.K. are finding out, their votes don't matter.

Democracy doesn't matter, only the fever dreams of the soulless and the power mad who think they run the world. Look at what Hillary has become, not what you remember her to be.

She's a tired, sick, fragile woman whose bitterness and evil is literally eating her up from the inside out. Have you noticed that she hasn't been photographed standing up for months?

She's the epitome of everything wrong with America and, in fact, the world and Tulsi Gabbard just stood up and laughed at her for still thinking she was the Emperor when in reality she's The Joker.

Join my Patreon to assist me in helping you expose the frauds and liars whose perversions of truth threaten the fabric of civil society.

Install the Brave Browser to make it harder for them to track you and marginalize similar voices.

[Oct 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing. I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming the Ukies is good for our security.

Oct 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

anon [113] Disclaimer , says: October 6, 2019 at 7:03 am GMT

@AnonFromTN

By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.

Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important to those hawks.

Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing. I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct, what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of better relations impossible.)

[Oct 19, 2019] The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely two branches of the Business Party.

Oct 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Trailer Trash , Oct 19 2019 14:42 utc | 11

"Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party"

This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a good description. Even a quick review of the Wikipedia entry reveals little.

As best I can tell, a person is a party member by checking the box on the voter registration form. The few times I have registered, I did not check a box for any party. It is none of the state's business who I associate with or vote for.

It is also not the state's business to supervise and fund the selection of party candidates. But that is what happens in the US. The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely two branches of the Business Party.

nemo , Oct 19 2019 15:11 utc | 19

The electoral college is neither archaic nor unfair. We were and are a union of States. The electoral college prevented the Executive office from being dominated by voters from heavily populated urban centers at the expense of the rural population. It is more relevant today than ever as the country is even more divided in disposition and ideology. If it were abolished, most of America would be effectively disenfranchised in Presidential elections as California, New York and a handful of other highly urbanized and ultra-liberal population centers would always carry the day. There would be no need to vote anymore. Maybe that is the idea......

[Oct 19, 2019] Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that away and the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia (and China) supposedly justifies all their crimes.

Oct 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

mike k , says: October 4, 2019 at 11:53 am GMT

Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that away and the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia (and China) supposedly justifies all their crimes.

[Oct 19, 2019] Our pentagon should be producing best and first technologies ACROSS THE BOARD, not spending all its time trying to hide from the taxpayer how many billions the neocons pilfered last quarter

Instead something has to be found to justify 12 Carrier Strike Force fleets for the U.S. Navy, so we've discovered Russia as the perfect scapegoat.
Oct 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

alexander , says: October 5, 2019 at 1:10 am GMT

@Alta It has already started.

Our neocon policies have proven to be an existential threat to the solvency , well being, and future of the United States.

We have squandered tens of trillions of dollars on stupid wasteful wars when we could have been using those exact same resources to build out our infrastructure, education and technological advantages.

Our pentagon should be producing best and first technologies ACROSS THE BOARD, not spending all its time trying to hide from the taxpayer how many billions the neocons pilfered last quarter.

We need to replace our policy of "perpetual war fraud" with a policy of empowering and igniting creativity and human excellence.

[Oct 19, 2019] Trump's insight, and in no small part it explains his continued survival, is his refusal to accept the appearance of his fully possessing his Article II powers. Most especially in the context of the National Security State.

Oct 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

MLK , says: October 4, 2019 at 1:08 pm GMT

Leave aside that Trump should not have been compelled to make the transcript public . . . .

It's tempting to view Trump's presidency as sui generis. With norms and seemingly well-settled historical precedents broken, with the liability casually laid at his feet by most observers, even if not wholly out to destroy him.

Knowing its intent was remove him from office, Trump nevertheless ordered unprecedented cooperation with the Mueller investigation. A brilliant move in hindsight. I don't recall very much handwringing about the bad precedent this set for presidential power.

Trump's insight, and in no small part it explains his continued survival, is his refusal to accept the appearance of his fully possessing his Article II powers. Most especially in the context of the National Security State.

Utz has written how even Eisenhower was foiled from negotiating to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union/Krushchev. If they could derail the POTUS then doing so with those that followed him should have been easy by comparison and, I think, was. The trend since, as the USG's global power grew, was for president's to ever quickly give way upon after office to the role of what I call Figurehead/Pitchman. It's a Safe Space, as was palpably obvious through Obama's two terms.

While Figurehead/Pitchman versus Real POTUS is, of course, a spectrum not a dichotomy, Trump for reasons I don't need to belabor has effectively constituted a sharp break.

So, decisions of his like the following, facially a diminution of his authority, which passed without a great deal of notice, struck me as him protecting himself from his authorizing military actions designed to end his presidency:

https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/trumps-total-authorization-military-gives-deep-concerns

The longer Trump survives the further these highest order threats of nuclear war and to our Constitutional Republic recede. Even if it doesn't seem that way at moments like this.

It's childish nonsense the idea that any foreign state, including Russia, thought Trump would win, much less wanted him to do so. It's equally juvenile, especially close to three years hence, to not understand that foreign adversaries and allies alike awaited a resolution of this factional war internally within the US, avoiding catastrophe in the meantime.

Thankfully, at least so far, since Trump took the oath, the foreign powers for which a Hillary presidency would have been a geopolitical gift of historic proportions (e.g. China; Iran), have largely made their peace with that lost opportunity.

[Oct 15, 2019] The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior Senator from Wisconsin (in this case the media DNC house of representatives monkey cage) has stepped over it repeatedly

Oct 15, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

ilsm , October 13, 2019 at 08:11 AM

When does the monkey cage's screeching become a "seditious conspiracy"?

Treason, insurrection, sedition etc come under 18 USC Ch 115. As I learned this AM the statute the Rosenbergs were tried and executed under.

I suggest the media, Comey, Schiff, Pelosi cabal (their rumorblower tools) are running a Seditious Conspiracy (not protected in 5 USC 2302 on whistleblower protection.

I suspect Durham and Barr look in to 18 USC Ch. 115 for the indictments they will deliver soon.

The running sedition to oust Trump demands prosecution.

ilsm , October 13, 2019 at 08:25 AM
In regard to the kerfuffle to unseat Trump these past three years, I quote Murrow from a TV documentary on Joseph McCarthy:

"the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior Senator from Wisconsin (in this case the media DNC house of representatives monkey cage) has stepped over it repeatedly."

[Oct 15, 2019] What we know is, that Russia-gate was a scam perpetrated from the highest levels of government and enabled by the media. Ukrainegate is Russiagate 2.0

Notable quotes:
"... We also know that Ukraine played heavily in this conspiracy and still does and ANY legitimate investigation into the origins of this criminal adventure MUST involve the Ukraine. ..."
"... We also know that those implicated in this unholy adventure are and have been dragging their feet on any investigation and have actually worked to deter it. ..."
Oct 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Oldwood , 31 minutes ago link

I have no problem with criticism, but what we see mostly here is name calling and disparagement as a substitute for reasoned debate. Let us simply COMPARE Trump's actions with any other president on a level field. Now few want to do that. They say Obama, Bush or Clinton are irrelevant, but they are NOT if we are talking of impeachment, of FAILURE to uphold the responsibilities of office. Progressives want Trump IMPEACHED and removed from office for supposedly investigating a political rival and are going so far as to say it is illegitimate because it wasn't an official state action, WHEREAS Obama used ALL of the powers of government to investigate and KNOWINGLY, FALSELY and PUBLICLY ACCUSE Trump of heinous crimes.

Further, Trump is accused of withholding money from Ukraine to pressure them to come up with FALSE evidence against Biden, when there is NO proof that he either pressured them or that ANY FALSE evidence was generated. AS with the leaked democrat emails, somehow the content was deemed irrelevant due to the supposed means of acquisition.

What we know is, that Russia-gate was a scam perpetrated from the highest levels of government and enabled by the media.

We also know that Ukraine played heavily in this conspiracy and still does and ANY legitimate investigation into the origins of this criminal adventure MUST involve the Ukraine.

We also know that those implicated in this unholy adventure are and have been dragging their feet on any investigation and have actually worked to deter it.

What is transparent is that Trump is trying to uncover what really happened in the last election and there are considerable forces trying to stop him. Clear for anyone to see. and many see it clearly, and with great fear in their hearts.

[Oct 15, 2019] This New York Times article about @TulsiGabbard is perfect. It belongs in a museum to show how the NYT DNC smear anyone who expresses any dissenting views: accuse them of serving RUSSIA white nationalists, quote Neera Tanden Laura McCarthy Rosenberg, etc.

Oct 15, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , October 12, 2019 at 07:46 AM

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1183018481354248192

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

This New York Times article about @TulsiGabbard is perfect. It belongs in a museum to show how the NYT & DNC smear anyone who expresses any dissenting views: accuse them of serving RUSSIA & white nationalists, quote Neera Tanden & Laura McCarthy Rosenberg, etc.

What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To? - The New York Times

6:56 AM - 12 Oct 2019

[ Radical, unethical Democratic National Committee folks are determined to defame and destroy an heroic Democratic member of congress, a combat veteran and still serving member of the armed forces, reelected with a 70% majority in 2018. ]

anne -> anne... , October 12, 2019 at 07:58 AM
Astonishing the Democratic leadership calumny of a Democratic member of Congress, a woman, of Indian and Samoan heritage, a combat veteran and serving member of the armed forces. Such is self-styled supposed Democratic leadership, steeped in the terrible terrifying tradition of Joseph McCarthy.
Fred C. Dobbs , October 12, 2019 at 09:11 AM
(The price of admission, so as to be
able to read the posts of others, is
for now, posting something, anything.)

What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?
https://nyti.ms/33s1Aj8
NYT - Lisa Lerer - October 12

WASHINGTON -- Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, is impressed with her political talent. Richard B. Spencer, the white nationalist leader, says he could vote for her. Former Representative Ron Paul praises her "libertarian instincts," while Franklin Graham, the influential evangelist, finds her "refreshing."

And far-right conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich see a certain MAGA sais quoi.

"She's got a good energy, a good vibe. You feel like this is just a serious person," Mr. Cernovich said. "She seems very Trumpian." ...

Fred C. Dobbs , October 12, 2019 at 09:13 AM
(The price of admission, so as to be
able to read the posts of others, is
for now, posting something, anything.)

What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?
https://nyti.ms/33s1Aj8
NYT - Lisa Lerer - October 12

WASHINGTON -- Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, is impressed with her political talent. Richard B. Spencer, the white nationalist leader, says he could vote for her. Former Representative Ron Paul praises her "libertarian instincts," while Franklin Graham, the influential evangelist, finds her "refreshing."

And far-right conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich see a certain MAGA sais quoi.

"She's got a good energy, a good vibe. You feel like this is just a serious person," Mr. Cernovich said. "She seems very Trumpian." ...

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , October 12, 2019 at 09:25 AM
Among her fellow Democrats, Representative Tulsi Gabbard has struggled to make headway as a presidential candidate, barely cracking the 2 percent mark in the polls needed to qualify for Tuesday night's debate. She is now injecting a bit of chaos into her own party's primary race, threatening to boycott that debate to protest what she sees as a "rigging" of the 2020 election. That's left some Democrats wondering what, exactly, she is up to in the race, while others worry about supportive signs from online bot activity and the Russian news media. ...

On podcasts and online videos, in interviews and Twitter feeds, alt-right internet stars, white nationalists, libertarian activists and some of the biggest boosters of Mr. Trump heap praise on Ms. Gabbard. They like the Hawaiian congresswoman's isolationist foreign policy views. They like her support for drug decriminalization. They like what she sees as censorship by big technology platforms. ...

Ms. Gabbard has disavowed some of her most hateful supporters, castigating the news media for giving "any oxygen at all" to the endorsement she won from the white nationalist leader David Duke. But her frequent appearances on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show have buoyed her support in right-wing circles.

Both Ms. Gabbard and her campaign refused requests for comment about her support in right-wing circles or threat to boycott the debate. Even some political strategists who have worked with her are at a loss to explain her approach to politics.

"She's a very talented person but I'm not sure, I just don't know what to say about the campaign exactly," said Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic strategist who worked with Ms. Gabbard when she was campaigning for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in 2016. ...

anne -> Fred C. Dobbs... , October 12, 2019 at 09:50 AM
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, is impressed with her political talent....

-- Lisa Lerer

[ This is a vile article, contemptible for the New York Times to have printed. An heroic member of congress, a woman, a person of color, a combat veteran, a serving member of the armed forces, a person who serves others to seek peace, is being contemptibly slandered.

Shame, shame, shame for writing and printing such an article. ]

kurt -> anne... , October 15, 2019 at 04:15 PM
You and a number of the posters here are horribly naive about the Nixon Rat(bad word omitted)s. Tulsi has been working with them. This should be automatically disqualifying.
anne -> Fred C. Dobbs... , October 12, 2019 at 09:55 AM
What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?

-- Lisa Lerer

[ The opening paragraph of this article alone is beyond all decency. This is an article that is actually destructive of democracy. ]

ilsm -> anne... , October 12, 2019 at 04:40 PM
Gabbard is a veteran, very much younger than I, she also is the most opposed to the neocon permanent war (strong in securing the US' post WW II world order)agenda which seems to be standard democrat stance.

[Oct 15, 2019] Gabbard said she's not sure she'll take the debate stage because she believes the Democratic National Committee and corporate media rigged the 2016 primary election against Bernie Sanders and are trying to do it again with the 2020 primary.

That's an interesting, shrewd political move by Tulsi !
Oct 15, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

EMichael -> Fred C. Dobbs... , October 13, 2019 at 07:44 AM

... ... ...

"
By Dillon Ancheta | October 10, 2019 at 10:13 AM HST - Updated October 10 at 5:54 PM

HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) - Claiming a "rigged" primary process, presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard says she's seriously considering boycotting the next Democratic presidential debate.

Twelve contenders, including Gabbard, have qualified for the Oct. 15 debate in Ohio.

But in a video posted on social media Thursday, Gabbard said she's not sure she'll take the debate stage because she believes the Democratic National Committee and corporate media rigged the 2016 primary election against Bernie Sanders and are trying to do it again with the 2020 primary.

She said the election is being rigged against early voting states.

"There are so many of you who I've met in Iowa and New Hampshire who have expressed to me how frustrated you are that the DNC and corporate media are essentially trying to usurp your role as voters in choosing who our Democratic nominee will be," Gabbard said, in the video.

"In short, the DNC and corporate media are trying to hijack the entire election process," she added."

https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2019/10/10/gabbard-considers-boycotting-upcoming-debate-claims-dnc-corporate-media-rigged-election/

This of course is sheer nonsense, and so hurtful to Dems that she has drawn the admiration of right wing crazies for her efforts to help trump.

Nonsense in 2016 just like this hurt Dems; ruined the Supreme Court; and damaged the country. And she is trying to do it again in the midst of a primary in which she never, ever had a ghost of a chance. And that was because of her total inexperience and a number of highly questionable actions in the last decade.

At this point, she has managed to remove herself from higher office for the rest of her life. And deservedly so.

EMichael -> EMichael... , October 13, 2019 at 07:58 AM
She is facing a real, if longshot, primary race for the house.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kai-kahele-tulsi-gabbard-hawaii-2020_n_5d9503dbe4b0f5bf796ea5c8

In Hawaii you cannot run for two public offices at once, so this is her plan to run for the House. Trash the DNC and media for defeating her, despite the fact she never had any chance to even be a serious player in the primary.

Combine that with her gay conversion stance of a decade ago and her meddling withe asaad and Modi, and I am starting to question her sanity.

If she loses the House primary, I would fully expect her to be the Rep candidate.

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to EMichael... , October 13, 2019 at 05:52 PM
TG is setting herself up
to be a spoiler in 2020.
This will no doubt threaten
the Dem nominee, whoever it
may be - other than Tulsi.
anne , October 12, 2019 at 10:00 AM
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, is impressed with her political talent....

-- Lisa Lerer

[ Discrediting writing in the New York Times, that must be retracted and contritely apologized for repeatedly. ]

[Oct 15, 2019] The incredible luck of Comey is he was not arraigned after the IG report.

Oct 15, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , October 12, 2019 at 03:49 AM

James Comey Would Like to Help
https://nyti.ms/3298iut
NYT - Matt Flegenheimer - October 12

James Comey slumps strategically in restaurants -- all 6-foot-8 of him, drooping faux-furtively with his back to the room -- and daydreams about deleting the civic-minded Twitter feed where a bipartisan coalition pronounces him a national disgrace.

He sleeps soundly -- nine hours a night, he ballparks -- and organizes the self-described "unemployed celebrity" chapter of his life around a series of workaday goals. "One of my goals has been to get to 10 consecutive pull-ups," Mr. Comey said in an interview, legs crossed on the back porch of his stately Virginia home. "I'm at nine now. So, I've been doing a lot of pull-ups."

He writes and thinks and reads and worries from a tidy downstairs office surrounded by the trinkets of his past: the White House place card from the night President Trump asked for his "loyalty" as F.B.I. director; a book by Nate Silver, the political data whiz who believes Mr. Comey's explosively ambiguous letter in October 2016 about the Hillary Clinton email investigation probably handed Mr. Trump the election; a page from a quote-of-the-day calendar, saved for its resonance: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

"It reminds me so much of the F.B.I.," Mr. Comey said.

But then, a lot of things have lately. Another Trump-branded election interference scandal is upon us. Institutions are wobbling. And Mr. Comey, as ever, cannot fight a nagging conviction about it all: James Comey can help. He must help.

"I feel stuck," he said. "Like I can't do something else. And I couldn't look myself in the mirror if I went and did something easy."

What he is doing, exactly, is not entirely clear even to him. Rather than proceed with the standard arc of an erstwhile intelligence leader -- think tanks, corporate boards, studied political silence -- Mr. Comey has pledged to spend the next 13 months working to drive Mr. Trump from power.

The former F.B.I. director, a lover of order, sees little of it in a norm-smashing president spiraling toward impeachment, riffing on "sick and deranged" Democrats at a recent rally and playacting the dialogue of F.B.I. officials like an insult comic. In this concern, Mr. Comey has ample company. In this company, he carries a kind of customized psychic baggage.

Who can know how it feels to wonder, to have everyone you meet wonder, if the president is standing behind that seal because of you?

"Thanks for giving us Donald Trump," an older woman heckled recently, adding an expletive as Mr. Comey strolled through a Yale Law School building, where he had come for a talk that focused largely on his fateful 2016 decisions and attendant personal anguish.

"Thank you for the feedback," he told her.

Divorced from its singular context, Mr. Comey's condition is somewhat typical of the wandering urgency with which many presidential critics are approaching the 2020 election. Last year's season of midterm activism has given way to a long electoral winter of Democratic primary skirmishes and an emphasis on just a few early-voting states, leaving Trump opponents to wrestle with how to contribute amid a gush of executive outrages they feel powerless to counteract.

Lawmakers can impeach. Whistle-blowers whistle-blow. What of the private citizen, determined to live publicly?

"It's hard for people who've had a lot of power to come to terms with the fact that there's actually very little you can do when you're not a candidate," said Jennifer Palmieri, a former top aide to Mrs. Clinton. "Or the F.B.I. director."

While short on formal authority, Mr. Comey has suffered no deficiency of platforms. He says he has signed a contract to write opinion pieces for The Washington Post. He is the subject of an upcoming mini-series, starring Jeff Daniels as Mr. Comey, based on his best-selling memoir. He travels the country giving speeches on ethical leadership, mixing pro bono appearances on college campuses with paid bookings that command a six-figure fee. ("It's a lot!" Mr. Comey enthused, while declining to name his precise rate. "Seriously, it's crazy.")

Over nearly two hours last month at his Northern Virginia home, whose coordinates he prefers not to publicize given the president's affection for lathering up supporters with tales of "Leakin' Lyin' James Comey," the former F.B.I. director could register as a spindly contradiction. He is at once a just-the-facts lawman and a prodigious feeler of feelings, introspective about the size of his ego and incapable of suppressing it entirely.

He says he is "not that important in the great sweep of American history" but believes his firsthand view into the president's psyche can offer uncommon value to the anti-Trump movement. He can hold forth in one breath on the humbling task of bird-feeder maintenance and in another invoke the teachings of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He says "dude" a lot.

At times, Mr. Comey can sound as if he is suggesting that the Twitter account from which he slings grave warnings and measured hope ("This country is so much better than this president") is yoked to the health of the nation.

"I have a fantasy about on January 21, 2021, deleting my Twitter and moving on to something else," he said. "But until then, I can't."

Closure has eluded some of his audiences, too. They lard Mr. Comey's public events with skeptical questions about his choices in 2016. The Justice Department's inspector general has lashed Mr. Comey for "insubordinate" conduct during that period, accusing him of breaking with longstanding policy by publicly discussing an investigation into Mrs. Clinton's use of a private email server, including in a letter to Congress less than two weeks before the election.

Mr. Comey has conceded that he may have allowed himself to be influenced subconsciously by the political consensus that Mrs. Clinton would win. But he has betrayed no major regrets, defending his chosen course as the best among bad options. "I wish like hell we hadn't been involved," he said. He predicted that history would judge him kindly for prizing disclosure over concealment (not, as some Clinton allies see it, opting for spectacle over discretion).

Asked if he cared about how he would be remembered for the ages, Mr. Comey, 58, said, "I was going to say I don't care. I'm sure I care a little," adding, "It frustrates me in general that millions of people have a false impression of me. I wish they knew I was funnier." ...

ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , October 12, 2019 at 07:01 AM
The incredible feature of Comey is he was not arraigned after the IG report.

Maybe he goes down with the Mueller fish Durham fries!

How does Comey not go all in with the next phase of the coup?

[Oct 13, 2019] The CIA Versus Donald J. Trump

Notable quotes:
"... I have no sympathy for Trump anymore. He hasn't had Sessions or Barr induct one single ******* person guilty of treason or sedition in a 3 years. Prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich if they want to. ..."
"... It was Fraud Trump, who helped re-fill the swamp, by putting Torturer Gina Haspel in as CIA head wasn't he? ..."
"... CIA vs Trump is a false dichotomy dilemma. They both work hand-in-glove in a production made to deceive the masses. What the masses are really unaware of is the propaganda lies echoed out at them without a single shred of doubt against these claims. Why are we so gullible as to not ask "why" for the many presentations en posed upon us?! ..."
Oct 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

The CIA Versus Donald J. Trump by Tyler Durden Sat, 10/12/2019 - 22:50 0 SHARES

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

It's both pathetic and laughable that Democrats, the mainstream press, and Trump critics are referring to the CIA agent who turned in Trump for his telephone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky as a "whistleblower."

It's pathetic because it denigrates real whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, and William Binney. Those people are the courageous ones. They risked their careers, their liberty, and even their lives to expose criminal wrongdoing within the national-security state agencies they were working for.

That's not what that supposed CIA agent did when he filed his complaint against Trump. He didn't blow the whistle on his agency, the CIA, by exposing some secret dark-side practices, such as MK-Ultra drug experimentation on unsuspecting Americans, secret assassinations of Americans, secret assets within the mainstream press, or secret destruction of torture videotapes of incarcerated inmates at a top-secret CIA prison center in some former Soviet-bloc country.

If he had done that, the CIA would have come after him with all guns blaring, just as the national-security establishment has gone after Snowden and those other genuine whistleblowers. In fact, that's how one can usually identify a genuine whistleblower. That's obviously not happening here. Instead, the national-security establishment is hailing this "whistleblower" as being a brave and courageous hero for disclosing supposed wrongdoing by Trump, not by the CIA.

That anti-Trump CIA agent isn't a whistleblower at all. Instead, he's nothing more than a spy and a snitch. He is obviously a spy. After all, he works for the CIA, the premier spy agency in the world. And by turning in Trump in an obvious attempt to get him into trouble, he's also obviously a snitch.

A "gotcha" moment

In fact, the entire episode has a "gotcha" feeling to it. For almost three years, Americans have been made to suffer under a constant stream of speeches, commentaries, op-eds, and editorials about what Trump rightly called the "collusion delusion" theory. Democrats, the mainstream press, and Trump critics were 100 percent certain that their real-life hero Robert Mueller, the special counsel, was going to find evidence that Trump conspired with Russian officials to deny Hillary Clinton her rightful place as president of the United States. They had impeachment plans set in place, ready to go.

And then Mueller dashed their hopes. His report disclosed that the collusion delusion was the biggest conspiracy theory in U.S. history, one openly promoted by Democrats, the mainstream press, and Trump critics on a daily basis for almost three years.

All they needed and wanted was an opportunity -- any opportunity -- to apply their impeachment process to another set of a facts. Fortunately for them, Trump himself gave them that opportunity. That supposed CIA agent was ready with a "gotcha!" and proceeded to snitch on Trump with his "whistleblower" complaint.

Trump is obviously a smart man, both businesswise and politically. But to make that telephone call to Zelensky and request him to investigate Joe Biden, while holding up a foreign aid package to Ukraine, immediately after being exonerated by Mueller of the collusion delusion allegation, was about the dumbest thing he could do. How could he not realize that his enemies would be looking for any opportunity to set their impeachment process into motion against him?

The likely explanation lies with arrogance and hubris. After Trump got his exoneration on the collusion delusion accusation, he figured that he was now all-powerful and could do whatever he wanted. The fact that he was, at the same time, exercising such dictatorial powers as raising tariffs, starting trade wars, building his Berlin Wall along the border, and imposing sanctions and embargoes, all without the consent of Congress, was also making him feel omnipotent and untouchable. His admiration for foreign dictators no doubt filled his mind with the same sense of totalitarian, untouchable power.

That's what likely caused Trump to give his enemies the "gotcha" episode for which they were clearly thirsting. Trump turned out to be his own very worst enemy.

National security enmity toward Trump

Despite his campaign rhetoric against "endless wars," Trump has kept U.S. troops in Afghanistan and the Middle East, where they have continued to kill, die, and wreak massive destruction. He has also authorized the continuation of the Pentagon's and CIA's assassination program. He has also continued the Pentagon's and CIA's indefinite detention and torture center at Guantanamo Bay. He has done nothing to rein in the NSA and its secret surveillance schemes. The fact is that Trump's term in office, despite his "America First" rhetoric, has proven to be nothing more than a continuation of the Bush-Obama administrations.

That's what he should be impeached for, but unfortunately his critics feel that those high crimes don't rise to the level of impeachable offenses.

But it's also true that Trump has failed to demonstrate the complete deference to authority of the national-security establishment that Hillary Clinton and other Washington, D.C., political elites have. Trump's failure to bend the knee to the national-security establishment made him suspect from the very beginning, especially since the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI were certain that their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, was going to be the new president.

Thus, there has been a war between Trump and the national-security establishment from even before he was elected and especially after he was elected. In a remarkable moment of candor and honesty, Congressman Charles Schumer, commenting on the war between Trump and the national-security establishment, stated, "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community -- they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."

One way of getting back at Trump is, of course, through assassination, a power that the Supreme Court has confirmed that the national-security state wields against American citizens, so long it is necessary to protect "national security."

Another way of getting back at Trump is smear tactics through the use of assets within the mainstream press. The CIA's Operation Mockingbird comes to mind.

Coup through impeachment

And other option to get back at Trump is through impeachment and conviction, especially through assets within Congress. But before any collusion-delusion proponent cries "conspiracy theory," recall that President Eisenhower warned Americans in his 1961 Farewell Address about the threat that the "military-industrial complex" poses to the liberties and democratic processes of the American people. Actually, Ike planned to use the term "military-industrial-congressional complex" but changed his mind at the last minute. He was referring to the intimate, integrated relationship between members of Congress and the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, Eisenhower is not perceived to be a "conspiracy theorist," the term that the CIA popularized to keep people from examining the Kennedy assassination too closely.

Speaking of the Kennedy assassination, early in his administration Trump announced that he intended to comply with the deadline for releasing the CIA's long-secret records relating to the assassination. At the very last minute, Trump folded and granted the CIA's request for continued secrecy.

Why did Trump do that?

One possibility is that he became convinced that "national security" would be jeopardized if the American people were to see the CIA's long-secret JFK assassination records.

Another possibility is that he struck some sort of secret negotiated deal with the CIA.

A third possibility is that he figured that if he would ingratiate himself with the CIA in the hope that they would leave him alone. If that was the case, Trump might well go down as one of the most naïve presidents in history.

I am Groot , 34 minutes ago link

I have no sympathy for Trump anymore. He hasn't had Sessions or Barr induct one single ******* person guilty of treason or sedition in a 3 years. Prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich if they want to.

If we have no rule of law anymore, then **** it. It's time to abolish our entire government and start from scratch under the Declaration of Independence.

iuyyyyui , 45 minutes ago link

Maybe Trump was naive not to realize how much the entrenched elites were against him and what he represented.

And maybe the entrenched elites don't realize how deeply so many of us deplorables hate them . Let's see how D.C. -- the Senate and the Supreme Court -- defuse the coming Civil War. Because the House and the Executive have already staked out their positions ... AND SO HAVE WE.

Mimir , 54 minutes ago link

"That anti-Trump CIA agent isn't a whistleblower at all. Instead, he's nothing more than a spy and a snitch..." !!!!

That promised well for the The Future of Freedom ....., and the protection of whistleblowers.

America is is entering a cul de sac in clear daylight for all to see. The World is laughing.

mark1955 , 58 minutes ago link

Next Joke...LOL!

Fraud Trump ( President "Gun Control" ) and the CIA are best buddy's!!!

It was Fraud Trump, who helped re-fill the swamp, by putting Torturer Gina Haspel in as CIA head wasn't he?

They ( Along with their democrat/republican Comrades ), are working together for their Rothschild Israeli/NWO masters, to Try and undermine the American people and Enslave the world!

Please don't fall for this phony Good Cop/Bad Cop "Theatre"...Fraud Trump and the CIA are one and the same!

peggysue1 , 1 hour ago link

I think that the CIA will rue the day they took on Trump. They have a tiger by the tail. Just ask Mueller. We all re member how that turned out.

CTacitus , 1 hour ago link

CIA vs Trump is a false dichotomy dilemma. They both work hand-in-glove in a production made to deceive the masses. What the masses are really unaware of is the propaganda lies echoed out at them without a single shred of doubt against these claims. Why are we so gullible as to not ask "why" for the many presentations en posed upon us?!

Here is as awkward question: why are we not allowed to simply ask what is truly ailing us and why in many countries the mere doubt or questioning will lend one in prison. What kinds of "truths" demand prison time for simply asking questions?!

We've lost WWII. Western societies are no longer exceptional, if they were so to begin with (the traitors made sure of that). We must reform and address the one true problem at our midst: Jewish tyranny!

A man, unlike ANY politician since dared to put the interests of his people ahead of anything else. Whether you agree or disagree, have an open mind to revisit this case; perhaps you will now see what you missed previously.

... ... ...

perikleous , 51 minutes ago link

Left and Right is nothing but Reality TV for the masses. They are two sides of a coin, in the end its still one coin!

They are funded on both sides from the same people, one side is funded openly the other is through NGOs to hide the "investment" donation.

To believe they are truly after Trump is BS, the "left" wants in, by getting him "out" but the people funding it all are just using the "left" as muscle to keep Trump "inline" doing their bidding! If it was a Democrat they couldn't keep inline they would do the same thing, in the end its all just another way to keep society divided so they can further control us and strip away more freedom,power and money/assets and we agree to give it away when asked under the BS lie of protecting us from some made up enemy/threat, and we fall for it every time like a mouse to glue paper!

If Snowden and Assange showing us how bad we have been betrayed didn't wake us up to rebel, nothing will!

It would be a whole different story if the info they released was being debated for truth, but they have been openly confirmed on everything they released and we still go along with this DeepState monster that has basically imprisoned us all, some with bars/cells some without but all imprisoned and lacking Free will/freedom we as a nation are suppose to have!

The fact that we still surrender more and more of this freedom daily without any outcry from the population is mindboggling. How bad does it have to get to get some fight out of the populas? It is even more worrying that there is no MSM that will independently report what we know as fact so we can unite.

[Oct 13, 2019] Rep. Jim Jordan Asks 17 Awkward Questions About Pelosi's Impeachment Inquiry

This is coup d'état, no question about it. What is the level of connection of Adam Schiff and the CIA?
Notable quotes:
"... Why did the "whistleblower" write an 800+ word memo describing President Trump and President Zelensky's call based on second-hand information gleaned from a conversation that lasted just a few minutes? ..."
"... Why didn't the "whistleblower" just give his memo to the Inspector General, instead of a seven page complaint dressed up with extraneous citations and media references? ..."
"... What work did the “whistleblower” do with a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate? ..."
Oct 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

1. Why did the "whistleblower" write an 800+ word memo describing President Trump and President Zelensky's call based on second-hand information gleaned from a conversation that lasted just a few minutes?

2. Why did the "whistleblower" wait 18 days to file the complaint after describing the call as "frightening" in their memo?

3. Why and when did the "whistleblower" communicate with Rep Adam Schiff's staff before filing the complaint?

4. Why did the "whistleblower" hide from the ICIG that they met with Rep Adam Schiff's staff by not checking the box on the whistleblower form indicating they had spoken to Congress?

5. Why didn't Rep Adam Schiff tell us his staff had met with the "whistleblower?"

6. Why didn't the "whistleblower" just give his memo to the Inspector General, instead of a seven page complaint dressed up with extraneous citations and media references?

7. Why is Rep Adam Schiff holding hearings, depositions, and interviews behind closed doors?

8. Why won't Rep Adam Schiff release the transcripts of these interviews, instead of leaking cherry-picked information that fits his narrative?

9. Why won't Rep Adam Schiff take questions from the press after these interviews, like Republicans have done?

10. Why does Speaker Pelosi think we need to “strike while the iron is hot,” instead of taking time for serious and thorough investigative fact-finding?

11. Why is Speaker Pelosi scared to have a vote to open an official impeachment inquiry like it’s been done every other time?

12. Why do Democrats keep making up the rules as they go along, instead of following a fair process?

13. What work did the “whistleblower” do with a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate?

14. Why do Democrats and the media keep falsely claiming President Trump pressured Ukraine? President Zelensky has repeatedly said that he wasn't pushed.

15. Why don't Democrats trust the American people to choose the President? The election is less than 13 months away.

16. Why won't Democrats focus on helping the country, instead of attacking the President with this unfair and partisan process?

17. Why won't the media ask these questions to Rep Adam Schiff or Speaker Pelosi?

punjabiraj , 1 minute ago link

Dems not troubled by truth. Their mind control media believes in itself as the new God that the morons bow down to and will abandon their children for. Their brainwashed radical left will trample their own mothers to get into a fight to the death for their demonic cause of grabbing power for the furtherance of their selfish sponsors.

This is the train of darkness that unwittingly delivered the first people POTUS reaction. The train drivers are very powerful and are long established as the puppet masters. They are scheming 24/7 on multiple fronts to distract their enemy called democracy and further embed themselves within every internal organ and nerve fiber. But they are not immutable.

The capture of democracy is a goal that they must achieve. The attack is obviously coordinated and multi-faceted. The tool of brainwashing will target the children, like the Nazi program called "Hitler Youth" but with a neolibic dogma.

One man stands alone against the deep state and its swamp and media and mind control and infiltration. Can he trust anyone to watch his back?

Someone Else , 9 minutes ago link

This is really a travesty. Every day we hear about this. The President is being tried by the press - with only one side being heard. How the hell is this fair?

Sick Monkey , 13 minutes ago link

The impeachment calls were to serve as a distraction till 2020.

Seems to have backfired.

Again

hooligan2009 , 1 hour ago link

disturbing thread to you maybe.

to most on this thread democrats want to take all they can via taxes, then borrow what they can't raise in taxes, democrats will cause widespread poverty, sickness and will sponsor **** educational standards, encourage perversion and pay minorities taxpayer dollars to buy their votes - even though minorities are no more special than any social grouping (other than the perverts in the lbGTQ++ community who are special in a mentally retarded way) democrats sponsor criminal behavior by refusing to punish it and so on and so forth,

trump at least promotes reward for effort, by giving back some taxes to individuals and makes American corporate tax rates consistent with global corporate tax rates, has shitcanned the stealth taxes on healthy people via Obamacare, and inspires people left behind by the constant march to socialism that the US has endured for the last fifty years (via welfare benefits, scholastic indoctrination, social housing programs, medicare/medicaid programs that taxpayers could have got for half the price they paid - and half the debt liabilities run up in trust funds.

so..has trump got the federal government completely out of peoples lives? no, but he at least wants taxes on the country to 18% of GDP and not the 40% targeted by the howler monkeys on the left.

it is not a choice of two equal evils. it is the choice between YOU paying 18% of your income or 40%.

tough choice right?

[Oct 13, 2019] The Foreign Office Must Be Challenged Over Sacoolas' Immunity

Oct 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Craig Murray,

... ... ...

Finally, if RAF Croughton were an annex to the US Embassy and if Mr Sacoolas were a diplomat, the cars of both he and his wife would have diplomatic CD plates. Mrs Sacoolas was not driving a diplomatic car – an obviously vital fact in this case, again omitted from all mainstream media reporting.

... ... ...

This fake "diplomatic immunity" needs to be challenged in court, but I am not sure anyone except Harry Dunn's family has the locus to do this. Their son was killed by the wife of a spy and to avoid political embarrassment about his activities, the government has falsely connived at a status of diplomatic immunity and then pretended to be trying to get Mrs Sacoolas back. That is an awful lot to take in for people in a terrible state of grief. After losing a son, the cognitive dissonance involved in uncovering state secrets, and learning that the state is malevolent and senior ministerial office holders are liars, is a huge hurdle to surmount. The Dunn family have first to summon the will to fight it, and then to avoid the attempts to hug them in the suffocating embrace of an establishment lawyer – believe me the powers that be will be covertly thrusting one at them – who will advise them they are most likely to make progress if they rock no boats.

The only people I know of who effectively enjoy secret diplomatic immunity are spies from CIA/NSA like Jonathon Sacoolas or from Mossad like Shai Masot . There are not any other categories of pretend diplomats having immunity, and the elaborate charade to pretend that there are is a nonsense. It must not distract from the fact that the claim that the government can grant US and Israeli intelligence agencies diplomatic immunity at will is a lie. The government is acting illegally here. There is no legislation that covers Raab in allowing Mrs Sacoolas to kill – albeit accidentally – with impunity.

I pray both the government and Mrs Sacoolas will be brought to account. I hope Mr and Mrs Dunn find what peace they can with their loss, and are able to remember with due warmth the eighteen wonderful years that I am sure they had with their son.

* * *

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, Craig's blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate. Subscriptions to keep Craig's blog going are gratefully received .

[Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game: ..."
"... This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days. ..."
"... DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power." ..."
"... There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect. ..."
Oct 09, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

EMichael , October 09, 2019 at 04:05 PM

Despicable. She is actually saying Bush's actions were just a difference of opinion, as opposed to causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I have never watched anything she has ever done without thinking about it. Now I will never watch anything she does because of her imbecility.

Nobody Should Be Friends With George W. Bush by Sarah Jones

"Comedian Ellen DeGeneres loves to tell everyone to be kind. It's a loose word, kindness; on her show, DeGeneres customarily uses it to mean a generic sort of niceness. Don't bully. Befriend people! It's a charming thought, though it has its limits as a moral ethic. There are people in the world, after all, whom it is better not to befriend. Consider, for example, the person of George W. Bush. Tens of thousands of people are dead because his administration lied to the American public about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then, based on that lie, launched a war that's now in its 16th year. After Hurricane Katrina struck and hundreds of people drowned in New Orleans, Bush twiddled his thumbs for days. Rather than fire the officials responsible for the government's life-threateningly lackluster response to the crisis, he praised them, before flying over the scene in Air Force One. He opposed basic human rights for LGBT people, and reproductive rights for women, and did more to empower the American Christian right than any president since Reagan.

George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game:

And here is Ellen DeGeneres explaining why it's good and normal to share laughs, small talk, and nachos with a man who has many deaths on his conscience:

Here's the money quote from her apologia:

"We're all different. And I think that we've forgotten that that's okay that we're all different," she told her studio audience. "When I say be kind to one another, I don't mean be kind to the people who think the same way you do. I mean be kind to everyone."

This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days.

Nevertheless, many celebrities and politicians have hailed DeGeneres for her radical civility:

There's almost no point to rebutting anything that Chris Cillizza writes. Whatever he says is inevitably dumb and wrong, and then I get angry while I think about how much money he gets to be dumb and wrong on a professional basis. But on this occasion, I'll make an exception. The notion that DeGeneres's friendship with Bush is antithetical to Trumpism fundamentally misconstrues the force that makes Trump possible. Trump isn't a simple playground bully, he's the president. Americans grant our commanders-in-chief extraordinary deference once they leave office. They become celebrities, members of an apolitical royal class. This tendency to separate former presidents from the actions of their office, as if they were merely actors in a stage play, or retired athletes from a rival team, contributes to the atmosphere of impunity that enabled Trump. If Trump's critics want to make sure that his cruelties are sins the public and political class alike never tolerate again, our reflexive reverence for the presidency has to die.

DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power."

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/ellen-degeneres-is-wrong-about-george-w-bush.html

... ... ...

...I am all in favor of Tulsi Gabbard's anti-war stance, but this comment shows me she is too childish to hold any power.

Tulsi Gabbard
‏Verified account @TulsiGabbard
22h22 hours ago

.@TheEllenShow msg of being kind to ALL is so needed right now. Enough with the divisiveness. We can't let politics tear us apart. There are things we will disagree on strongly, and things we agree on -- let's treat each other with respect, aloha, & work together for the people.

There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect.

[Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game: ..."
"... This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days. ..."
"... DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power." ..."
"... There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect. ..."
Oct 09, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

EMichael , October 09, 2019 at 04:05 PM

Despicable. She is actually saying Bush's actions were just a difference of opinion, as opposed to causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.

I have never watched anything she has ever done without thinking about it. Now I will never watch anything she does because of her imbecility.

Nobody Should Be Friends With George W. Bush by Sarah Jones

"Comedian Ellen DeGeneres loves to tell everyone to be kind. It's a loose word, kindness; on her show, DeGeneres customarily uses it to mean a generic sort of niceness. Don't bully. Befriend people! It's a charming thought, though it has its limits as a moral ethic. There are people in the world, after all, whom it is better not to befriend. Consider, for example, the person of George W. Bush. Tens of thousands of people are dead because his administration lied to the American public about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then, based on that lie, launched a war that's now in its 16th year. After Hurricane Katrina struck and hundreds of people drowned in New Orleans, Bush twiddled his thumbs for days. Rather than fire the officials responsible for the government's life-threateningly lackluster response to the crisis, he praised them, before flying over the scene in Air Force One. He opposed basic human rights for LGBT people, and reproductive rights for women, and did more to empower the American Christian right than any president since Reagan.

George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game:

And here is Ellen DeGeneres explaining why it's good and normal to share laughs, small talk, and nachos with a man who has many deaths on his conscience:

Here's the money quote from her apologia:

"We're all different. And I think that we've forgotten that that's okay that we're all different," she told her studio audience. "When I say be kind to one another, I don't mean be kind to the people who think the same way you do. I mean be kind to everyone."

This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days.

Nevertheless, many celebrities and politicians have hailed DeGeneres for her radical civility:

There's almost no point to rebutting anything that Chris Cillizza writes. Whatever he says is inevitably dumb and wrong, and then I get angry while I think about how much money he gets to be dumb and wrong on a professional basis. But on this occasion, I'll make an exception. The notion that DeGeneres's friendship with Bush is antithetical to Trumpism fundamentally misconstrues the force that makes Trump possible. Trump isn't a simple playground bully, he's the president. Americans grant our commanders-in-chief extraordinary deference once they leave office. They become celebrities, members of an apolitical royal class. This tendency to separate former presidents from the actions of their office, as if they were merely actors in a stage play, or retired athletes from a rival team, contributes to the atmosphere of impunity that enabled Trump. If Trump's critics want to make sure that his cruelties are sins the public and political class alike never tolerate again, our reflexive reverence for the presidency has to die.

DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power."

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/ellen-degeneres-is-wrong-about-george-w-bush.html

... ... ...

...I am all in favor of Tulsi Gabbard's anti-war stance, but this comment shows me she is too childish to hold any power.

Tulsi Gabbard
‏Verified account @TulsiGabbard
22h22 hours ago

.@TheEllenShow msg of being kind to ALL is so needed right now. Enough with the divisiveness. We can't let politics tear us apart. There are things we will disagree on strongly, and things we agree on -- let's treat each other with respect, aloha, & work together for the people.

There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect.

[Oct 09, 2019] Honest people may differ on whether to attribute the Iraq War to outright lies or monumental hubris. When it comes to tallying up the consequences, however, the intentions of those who sold the war don t particularly matter.

Oct 09, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

oldman22 , 08 October 2019 at 07:15 PM

I did not vote for Trump, or for Hillary, but I firmly agree with analysis of Bacevich here:


> Honest people may differ on whether to attribute the Iraq War to outright lies or monumental hubris. When it comes to tallying up the consequences, however, the intentions of those who sold the war don't particularly matter. The results include thousands of Americans killed; tens of thousands wounded, many grievously, or left to struggle with the effects of PTSD; hundreds of thousands of non-Americans killed or injured; millions displaced; trillions of dollars expended; radical groups like ISIS empowered (and in its case even formed inside a US prison in Iraq); and the Persian Gulf region plunged into turmoil from which it has yet to recover. How do Trump's crimes stack up against these?
> The Great Recession stemmed directly from economic policies implemented during the administration of President Bill Clinton and continued by his successor. Deregulating the banking sector was projected to produce a bonanza in which all would share. Yet, as a direct result of the ensuing chicanery, nearly 9 million Americans lost their jobs, while overall unemployment shot up to 10 percent. Roughly 4 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. The stock market cratered and millions saw their life savings evaporate. Again, the question must be asked: How do these results compare to Trump's dubious dealings with Ukraine?


https://outline.com/x8vgFL

[Oct 09, 2019] Does it bother anybody that it is the CIA that is interfering in US elections?

Oct 09, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

JohnH -> kurt... , October 01, 2019 at 01:47 PM

Yeah, the whole Biden corruption stuff has been debunked just like the Trump-Putin conspiracy. But lots of people still believe one debunking or the other. It all depends on which side of the infowars you find yourself. The facts themselves are too obscure and byzantine.

Personally, I'd love to know the origins of the Trump-Putin conspiracy and why a former head of the CIA officer was on the front lines.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/opinion/campaign-stops/i-ran-the-cia-now-im-endorsing-hillary-clinton.html

And while we're at it, get a handle on what Hunter Biden, Biden's bundler, and the CIA friendly former president of Poland were all doing on Burisma's board ostensibly with no knowledge of it all from Obama's point man on Ukraine--Joe Biden.

BTW. Here's a blast from the past exploring Hunter Biden's suspicious dealings in Ukraine. Read it and wonder
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/from-2014-r-hunter-biden-should-declare-who-really-owns-his-new-ukrainian-employer-burisma-holdings.html

Doesn't it bother anybody that the CIA seems to be interfering in US elections?

ilsm -> JohnH... , October 01, 2019 at 02:17 PM
For democrats "conspiracy theory" only applies to anyone looking askance at the swamp.

It is national security, DUDE. You cannot investigate what the swamp things do or did in 2016!

Dude, for democrats the swamp must abide, the republic cannot survive if the CIA/FBI spooks cannot practice on GOP campaigns!

Sadly, the Obama swamp is no better than the French Ministry of Defense in May 1940.

Drain the swamp. DoJ IG still working and US Attorney Durham is building cases!

Tired of having to listen to Howie Carr to get anything about the dodgy dossier, paid by DNC and who cannot find what!

[Oct 09, 2019] CIA palace coup against Trump

Oct 09, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

wendy davis on Wed, 10/09/2019 - 10:47am Warning : Absurdist Irony Abounds:

From Patrick Martin at wsws.org , Oct. 9, 2019 :

'Why do the CIA assassins and coup-plotters love this "whistleblower"?'

" Ninety former national security officials under the Obama and Bush administrations -- and three who served for a period under Donald Trump -- have signed an "Open Letter to the American People" defending the CIA officer, as yet unidentified, whose whistleblower complaint has become the basis for the House of Representatives opening an impeachment inquiry into the president.

The signers "applaud the whistleblower not only for living up to that responsibility but also for using precisely the channels made available by federal law for raising such concerns."

They further claim, "A responsible whistleblower makes all Americans safer by ensuring that serious wrongdoing can be investigated and addressed What's more, being a responsible whistleblower means that, by law, one is protected from certain egregious forms of retaliation."

They draw the conclusion that the anti-Trump whistleblower's identity must be protected at all costs, writing that "he or she has done what our law demands; now he or she deserves our protection."

This professed defense of whistleblowing as a critical function of democracy would be more convincing if it did not come from high officials in the administration that prosecuted more leakers and whistleblowers than all previous US administrations combined.

The signers include former CIA directors John Brennan, Michael Hayden and Michael Morell, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel , former Defense Undersecretary Michele Flournoy, former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman (Obama's point-woman on Ukraine). Bush administration officials who signed the letter include Matthew G. Olsen, former head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, and Paul Rosenzweig, former deputy assistant secretary for policy, Department of Homeland Security. Among the former Trump aides who signed is Andrea Kendall-Taylor, former deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Security Council.

These officials had a much different attitude toward genuine American whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and John Kiriakou, who exposed crimes of US imperialism. Manning supplied WikiLeaks with Pentagon files documenting US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as State Department cables showing US conspiracies against governments around the world. Snowden brought to light NSA spying on the entire world. Kiriakou exposed CIA torture in secret overseas prisons during the "war on terror."

None of these genuine whistleblowers received any form of protection. On the contrary, they were rebuffed in their efforts to expose atrocities by the US military-intelligence apparatus and felt compelled to release the information to the public. For their courageous actions, they have been brutally persecuted." [snip]

"In a recent commentary in Consortium News , Kiriakou noted the contrast between his own treatment and that accorded the "whistleblower" in the Ukraine case. He wrote, "If he's a whistleblower, and not a CIA plant whose task it is to take down the president, then his career is probably over. Intelligence agencies only pay lip service to whistleblowing." [snip]

"In other words, the former CIA agent suggests, the entire "whistleblower" complaint against Trump is likely an operation directed by higher-level officials at the agency.

Similar questions are raised in a remarkable article posted Monday on the website of Rolling Stone magazine, written by its main political writer Matt Taibbi."

And if you haven't seen it already:

"Meet the Press" anchor Chuck Todd grills senator: "You don't trust the FBI and CIA?", Barry Grey, wsws.org

And of course Grey speaks to the irony and hypocrisy afoot with Senators Ron Johnson and Chris Murphy as well:

"When Johnson evaded Todd's questions concerning Trump's bullying of Ukraine to advance his personal electoral chances, and instead repeatedly raised the Clinton campaign's collaboration with Ukrainian officials against Trump, Todd exclaimed as though in exasperated disbelief:

" Do you not trust the FBI? You don't trust the CIA? "

Johnson replied, "Absolutely not," to which Todd responded incredulously, "You don't trust any of those agencies?" [snip]

"The Democrats and their media chorus present what was rightly known as America's "Murder, Incorporated," along with its domestic counterpart, the FBI, as pillars of "democracy," improbable as this would seem to anyone familiar with the criminal history of these organizations. They evidently believe that the public is infinitely gullible and suffering from collective memory loss.

These, after all, are the organizations that justified the war in Iraq on the basis of the Big Lie of "weapons of mass destruction." They created the fraudulent narrative of the "war on terror" to justify aggressive wars in Afghanistan, the Middle East and North Africa that killed millions and destroyed entire societies . Meanwhile, in Libya and Syria, they funded and collaborated with Al Qaeda-linked terrorist militias in wars for regime-change.

The CIA has engineered coups and installed military dictatorships and far-right regimes all over the world. It would take many volumes to detail all of the lies and crimes of these pillars of the "deep state" against the people of the United States and the entire world." [snip]

"Todd's next guest was Senator Chris Murphy (Democrat from Connecticut), who co-sponsored with Johnson the bill to provide more arms to Kiev. Murphy repeatedly attacked Johnson for a lack of "patriotism."

The final guest was John Brennan -- now a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC -- whom Todd presented as a national hero unjustly slandered and victimized by Trump and his political allies. Introducing the 25-year veteran of the CIA, who served as deputy executive director under George W. Bush and director under Barack Obama, Todd asked: "And how would you explain to somebody, you have been completely character assassinated and eviscerated Do you understand how you got here?"

Brennan replied that he has indeed been "pilloried as an example of the deep state." To which Todd exclaimed indignantly: "Well, at this point, it's a campaign to destroy the credibility of the intelligence community. Even now, Senator Johnson would not affirm that he trusted the CIA and FBI right now. What does that say about those two agencies right now and their ability to conduct the work of protecting America?"

Brennan took the opportunity provided by Todd to denounce the "disinformation" that is "inundating the airwaves," singling out "social media platforms," with the implication that media sources that do not disseminate the CIA line should be shut down or censored. "

Grey finishes with a brief resumé of Brennan's fascistic Imperial crimes.

From MTP on Twitter:

WATCH: In an exclusive interview with Meet the Press, @SenRonJohnson (R-Wis.) turns questions about President Trump's conversation with the Ukrainian president into unfounded attacks on Democrats. #MTP https://t.co/tjLwXg1o8H pic.twitter.com/xf8UdbiN0m

-- Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 6, 2019

WATCH: Former CIA Director @JohnBrennan : GOP senators are "running scared."

"[Donald Trump] is the typical bully. ...Now, I have become the ... example of the deep state." #MTP #IfItsSunday pic.twitter.com/tFXLDPh0Lo

-- Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 6, 2019

WATCH: @ChrisMurphyCT responds to @senronjohnson 's comments earlier on Meet the Press. #MTP

"This entire country should be scared that at a moment when we need patriots, what we are getting is blind partisan loyalty." pic.twitter.com/Fvq2OAriKo

-- Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 6, 2019

WATCH: Another whistleblower seems ready to come forward in Trump-Ukraine scandal #MTP .

"There seems to be a second whistleblower who's poised to come forward. Does this whistleblower change the conversation?" pic.twitter.com/Z87c5zoS02

-- Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) October 6, 2019

(cross-posted from Café Babylon )

[Oct 09, 2019] The only 'Russian bots' to meddle in US elections belonged to Democrat-linked 'experts'

Another day, another false flag operation...
Notable quotes:
"... New Knowledge's victory lap was short-lived. On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate. ..."
"... Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead. ..."
"... In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet. ..."
Oct 09, 2019 | www.rt.com

US cyber-security experts have blamed Russia for meddling in American elections since 2016. Now it has emerged that authors of a Senate report on 'Russian' meddling actually ran a "false flag" meddling operation themselves. A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.

Described by the New York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies. Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agency. His partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone. Morgan and Fox have struck gold in the "Russiagate" racket, which sprung into being after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan, for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. The dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by NATO and USAID.

It is worth noting that the 600 "Russia-linked" Twitter accounts monitored by the dashboard are not disclosed to the public, making it impossible to verify its claims. This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry journalists, however.

From the way it was formed to the secrecy of its "methods" to the blatantly false assumptions on which its claims rest, "Hamilton68" is probably the single most successful media fraud & US propaganda campaign I've seen since I've been writing about politics. It's truly shocking.

-- Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 22, 2018
Troll hunters or bot farm?

New Knowledge's victory lap was short-lived. On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate.

Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead.

In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."

It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones , which based its story on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious creation, Hamilton 68.

Russian trolls tracked by #Hamilton68 are taking an interest in the AL Senate race. What a surprise. pic.twitter.com/Nz1PNmuT2R

-- Jonathon Morgan (@jonathonmorgan) November 10, 2017

Ultimately, Moore ended up losing the race by a miniscule 1.5 percentage points – making his opponent Doug Jones the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the US Senate in over 25 years.

Money trail and weak apologies

Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Times piece, had known about the meddling for months, because he spoke at an event where the organizers boasted about it!

Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hurt Moore. He dubbed it "Project Birmingham."

This gets even weirder: NYT reporter @ScottShaneNYT , who broke the Alabama disinfo op story, learned of it in early September when he spoke at an off-the-record event organized by one of the firms that perpetrated the deception https://t.co/gIAytOh2yy

-- Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) December 28, 2018

The money for the venture came from a $750,000 contribution to AET by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a big Democrat donor. Once that emerged, Hoffman offered a public apology for his connection to the shady operation, but insisted that he didn't know what his money was going towards.

" I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing ," Hoffman said in a statement.

"For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET -- the organization I did support -- more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would reject."

As for Shane, he told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, but had signed a nondisclosure agreement at the request of AET, so he could not talk about it further.

Spin and denial

Shane's spin on the tale was that New Knowledge "imitated Russian tactics" as part of an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 and had no effect on the election. Yet these tactics are only considered "Russian" because New Knowledge and similar outfits said so! Moreover, New Knowledge's budget in Alabama was greater than the reported amount spent by "Russians" on the 2016 US presidential election, yet Moscow's alleged meddling was supposed to be decisive, while New Knowledge's failed?

New Knowledge responded to the Times story by insisting that the "false flag" operation was actually a benign research project. In a statement posted on Twitter, the company's CEO claimed that its activities during the Alabama Senate race were conducted in order to "better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation."

My statement on this evening's NYT article. pic.twitter.com/lsJuRqiffL

-- Jonathon Morgan (@jonathonmorgan) December 20, 2018

Morgan emphasized that he in no way took part in an influence campaign, and warned people not to mischaracterize his "research."

While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard to give his "false flag" more credibility – misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was fake.

New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which announced last week that five accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."

Meddlers unmasked

The final nail in the coffin of Morgan's story came on Thursday, when the leaked secret after-action report from "Project Birmingham" was published online, showing that those behind the Alabama campaign knew perfectly well what they were doing and why.

BREAKING: Here's the after-action report from the AL Senate disinfo campaign.

**an exclusive release by @JeffGiesea https://t.co/VXrCeb8LAD

-- Jeff Giesea🌿 (@jeffgiesea) December 28, 2018

So, it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy by "Russian bots." Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection.

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

[Oct 09, 2019] Here they go again Senate reheats 'Russian meddling' claims, using assertions as evidence -- RT USA News

Notable quotes:
"... "much of this Volume's analysis is derived from" ..."
"... "Russian troll farm" ..."
"... "Intelligence Community Assessment," ..."
"... "Strategic Communications Center of Excellence." ..."
"... "a cybersecurity company dedicated to protecting the public sphere from disinformation attacks." ..."
"... "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet." ..."
"... "Russian" ..."
"... "significantly informed the Committee's understanding of Russia's social media-predicated attack against our democracy," ..."
"... Ever since Hillary Clinton blamed "Russian hackers" ..."
Oct 09, 2019 | www.rt.com

Here they go again: Senate reheats 'Russian meddling' claims, using assertions as evidence 9 Oct, 2019 00:05 Get short URL Here they go again: Senate reheats 'Russian meddling' claims, using assertions as evidence Here they go again: Senate reheats 'Russian meddling' claims, using assertions as evidence Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee look at a placard showing 'Russian social media manipulation' at a November 1, 2017 hearing. © REUTERS/Joshua Roberts Follow RT on RT The Senate Intelligence Committee's final report on 'Russian interference' in the 2016 US presidential election is short on evidence and long on reheated assertions and innuendo from 'experts' exposed as actual election meddlers. There is little new in the 85-page , partially redacted document released on Tuesday, that has not been made public by the committee previously – including the accusations that "Russia" focused on stoking anger and resentment among African-Americans, for example .

There is a reason for that. By the committee's own admission, "much of this Volume's analysis is derived from" the work of two Technical Advisory Groups (TAG), which produced two public reports back in December 2018, to the same kind of fawning press coverage the report is receiving now.

NEW: The Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. elections involved using social media content to mostly target African-Americans, a new Senate committee report concludes. https://t.co/7BRUmiG18T

-- NPR (@NPR) October 8, 2019

Not surprisingly, the report's "findings" are being cited as conclusive proof that Democrats were right and President Donald Trump was wrong about 2016, Russia, Ukraine and the US presidential election.

The Senate Intelligence Committee unveiled a sweeping new bipartisan report showing Russian efforts to boost Trump's White House bid on social media during the 2016 U.S. election https://t.co/TUjUhBdMnc

-- POLITICO (@politico) October 8, 2019

The only trouble with that is that the committee provides no actual evidence for any of its claims – only assertions. For example, their description of the Internet Research Agency – the "Russian troll farm" – is basically copied over from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of a dozen of its alleged members. Yet a federal judge presiding over the case ruled back in May that allegations cannot be treated as established evidence or conclusion, coming close to finding Mueller's prosecutors in contempt.

Another nail in Russiagate coffin? Federal judge destroys key Mueller report claim READ MORE: Another nail in Russiagate coffin? Federal judge destroys key Mueller report claim

Another document presented as evidence is the January 2017 "Intelligence Community Assessment," the disingenuously named work of a small group of people, hand-picked by the Obama administration's DNI and chiefs of the CIA, FBI and NSA – all of whom, except for the NSA, have since been implicated in what seems to be a campaign to spy on Trump, delegitimize his presidency, and have him impeached.

The Senate report also quotes testimonies from Obama aides such as Ben Rhodes – helpfully redacted of course – Gen. Philip Breedlove, the NATO commander who tried to set off a war with Russia; professional "Russian bot" hunters like Clint Watts and Thomas Rid; and NATO's "Strategic Communications Center of Excellence."

The best part, however, has to be the reliance on New Knowledge, presented as "a cybersecurity company dedicated to protecting the public sphere from disinformation attacks." In reality, New Knowledge was exposed by the New York Times as the outfit that actually ran bots and disinformation operations during the 2017 Alabama special election for the US Senate, targeting Republican candidate Roy Moore on behalf of Democrats – while blaming Russia! In an internal memo, New Knowledge executives boasted how they "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."

The other TAG, led by British academics and researchers, found that the activity of 'Russian trolls' increased after the election – by 238 percent on Instagram, 59 percent on Facebook, 52 percent on Twitter, and 84 percent on YouTube. So it was influencing elections retroactively?

Left unsaid was that the absolute quantity of "Russian" posts was minuscule, a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the billions of social media posts generated and consumed by the US electorate during the campaign.

Also on rt.com Worst meddler ever? 'Russian' Facebook ads 'trolling US election' went completely unseen

These are the people who "significantly informed the Committee's understanding of Russia's social media-predicated attack against our democracy," as this week's report puts it.

Ever since Hillary Clinton blamed "Russian hackers" for the revelations of corruption within the DNC in July 2016, the Washington establishment has been eager to blame Moscow for all the ills of the US political system, real or imagined. The Senate Intelligence Committee's report seems to be nothing more than an attempt to reheat the long-cold corpse of a conspiracy that should have been buried with the Mueller Report and allowed to rest in peace.

[Oct 08, 2019] To [Samantha Power] applies Scott Fitzgerald's often cited comment. Once Biden is back in power, all these people will come back from the cold rain the bombs on the globally deplorables.

Notable quotes:
"... "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ." ..."
"... I have not always been a pacifist, but my view is "liberal internationalism" can never excuse war. ..."
"... Particularly, as US pushed "liberal internationalism" is maintaining a post WW II world order to add to its Degeneracy. ..."
"... They conflate PNAC strategy with US security and anyone not in to military intervention for the PNAC is a traitor. ..."
Oct 08, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , October 03, 2019 at 01:54 PM

https://twitter.com/lilyslynch/status/1179714507406544896

Lily Lynch‏ @lilyslynch

This is what institutional, "humanitarian" power looks like: Fluff pieces in liberal media with zero input from people on the receiving end of your bombs; unchecked power to decide who lives and who dies; and (most of all) never having to answer for it.

https://www.1843magazine.com/upfront/the-1843-interview/running-with-samantha-power

Running with Samantha Power

On a jog through a battlefield, James Astill discusses war and peace with the conscience of the Obama administration

4:07 AM - 3 Oct 2019

anne -> anne... , October 03, 2019 at 01:58 PM

https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1179715126724907010

Branko Milanovic‏ @BrankoMilan

To [Samantha Power] applies Scott Fitzgerald's often cited comment. Once Biden is back in power, all these people will come back from the cold & rain the bombs on the globally deplorables.

Lily Lynch @lilyslynch

This is what institutional, "humanitarian" power looks like: Fluff pieces in liberal media with zero input from people on the receiving end of your bombs; unchecked power to decide who lives and who dies; and (most of all) never having to answer for it.

https://www.1843magazine.com/upfront/the-1843-interview/running-with-samantha-power

4:09 AM - 3 Oct 2019

anne -> anne... , October 03, 2019 at 02:01 PM

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

kurt -> anne... , October 03, 2019 at 02:24 PM

Love this quote.

ilsm -> kurt... , October 03, 2019 at 02:40 PM

Yeah, it is how I view post modern liberals!

anne -> anne... , October 03, 2019 at 02:03 PM

https://www.1843magazine.com/upfront/the-1843-interview/running-with-samantha-power

Running with Samantha Power

On a jog through a battlefield, James Astill discusses war and peace with the conscience of the Obama administration

[ Degeneracy. ]

ilsm -> anne... , October 03, 2019 at 02:38 PM

"liberal internationalism in Obama's cabinet. That made her [Powers] a target for his critics. Her openness to military intervention – she was against [W Bush?] it in Iraq but for it in Libya – drew flak from the left."

How can a supposed liberal [Obama was not a liberal in a traditional sense, maybe post modern?] favor military intervention?

Does it involve ignoring "state run industrial age mass murder"?

Does it see a rationalized outcome to justify state mass murder?

I think post modern morality goes more towards the means don't matter much less the end--- see Libya!

I have not always been a pacifist, but my view is "liberal internationalism" can never excuse war.

Particularly, as US pushed "liberal internationalism" is maintaining a post WW II world order to add to its Degeneracy.

ilsm -> ilsm... , October 03, 2019 at 04:25 PM

I can answer this:

"How can a supposed liberal [Obama was not a liberal in a traditional sense, maybe post modern?] favor military intervention?"

Democrats who "worry" about "national security" are Clinton/Kerry project for a new American century (PNAC) accolades!

They conflate PNAC strategy with US security and anyone not in to military intervention for the PNAC is a traitor.

The cover for PNAC expanding spheres is "liberal internationalism"!

A great confidence game!

Why democrats call Trump a "traitor" he is not loyal to the neocon agenda.

im1dc -> anne... , October 03, 2019 at 04:43 PM

Updating F. Scott Fitzgerald

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLiOVmzYNGA

"Life in the Fast Lane" Eagles

(2013 Remaster)

[Oct 07, 2019] When it comes to US foreign policy, the unchallenged world record holders for 'second chances' and 'failing upward' are America's neoconservatives.

Oct 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Replying to @BrankoMilan

"When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the unchallenged world record holders for 'second chances' and 'failing upward' are America's neoconservatives.", Stephen Walt

Actually, many of them should have been considered candidates for war criminals. "Waging the war of agression" was part of the Nuremberg trials. This was the media called euphemistically "the war of choice"!

"When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the unchallenged world record holders for 'second chances' and 'failing upward' are America's neoconservatives. Beginning in the mid-1990s, this influential network of hard-line pundits, journalists, think tank analysts, and government officials developed, purveyed, and promoted an expansive vision of American power as a positive force in world affairs.

They conceived and sold the idea of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein and insisted that this bold move would enable the United States to transform much of the Middle East into a sea of pro-American democracies.

What has become of the brilliant strategists who led the nation into such a disastrous debacle? None of their rosy visions have come to pass, and if holding people to account were a guiding principle inside the foreign policy community, these individuals would now be marginal figures commanding roughly the same influence that Charles Lindbergh enjoyed after making naive and somewhat sympathetic statements about Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.",

Walt, S. (2018). The Hell of good intentions: America's foreign policy elite and the decline of US primacy. Straus and Giroux, p. 190.

anne , October 06, 2019 at 07:20 PM

https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1180792968598474752

Branko Milanovic‏ @BrankoMilan

You would have thought that these cheerleaders of invasion of Iraq and violation of the UN charter would have run far, far away so that we never hear from them again--but no, they are back explaining the world for us and making money doing that.

[ Milanovic was referring to a new column in Project Syndicate that I was confused by before I noticed this reference to the column. Among the points of Milanovic, we find the same self-defeating foreign policy being pushed by the same elite opinion-makers who hurt us so much by taking us to war in Iraq and beyond.

I am thinking this through. ]

[Oct 06, 2019] Polarization of lawmakers and the US electorate

Oct 06, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , October 05, 2019 at 07:38 PM

Polarization is not necessarily the problem.

'Altogether, there are 31 states (plus the District of Columbia) with party registration; in the others, such as Virginia, voters register without reference to party. Among the party registration states are some of the nation's most populous: California, New York, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Arizona, and Massachusetts.

The basic facts: In 19 states and the District, there are more registered Democrats than Republicans. In 12 states, there are more registered Republicans than Democrats. In aggregate, 40% of all voters in party registration states are Democrats, 29% are Republicans, and 28% are independents. Nationally, the Democratic advantage in the party registration states approaches 12 million.' ...

Registering by Party: Where the
Democrats and Republicans Are Ahead http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_rhodes_cook/registering_by_party_where_the_democrats_and_republicans_are_ahead

The most populous dozen states have enough electoral votes
to decide presidential elections. Most are in Dem hands,
but a few are not. However, many of the remaining
less populous states have electoral vote advantages
(2 more votes than they would have if electoral vote
distribution were strictly based on population) and
they are dominated by GOP voters.

It strikes me that the electorate is really dominated
by independent voters, not party-affiliated, and this
makes the process potentially much less polarized in
reality than some make it out to be. (yes, independent
voters are said to vote along party lines *anyway*, but
this is because there are effectively only two parties
to vote for, given that 'splinter' parties are practically
useless & ultimately disruptive.)

But it remains an interesting strategy to continue to
insist that polarization is on-going, increasing, and
will ultimately destroy US politics. It had better not.

likbez -> Fred C. Dobbs... , October 05, 2019 at 11:15 PM
"But it remains an interesting strategy to continue to insist that polarization is on-going, increasing, and will ultimately destroy US politics. It had better not."

You can deny that polarization is increasing.

Opposite sides now do not listen to each other and resort to war propaganda methods. This is visible on this blog too. Each side sing their own song, paying little or no attention to the arguments of the other side.

Another interesting sign of polarization is that on most important cases Congress votes now strictly along the party lines.

And in Congressional committees Demorats abuse their dominance to the extent previously impossible: Obsessed with Russiagate sad clown Schiff is a typical example here. Example of both polarization and degradation at the same time.

[Oct 05, 2019] Ukrainegate is another stage of the intelligence agencies color revolution against Trump -- Russiagate 2.0.

Oct 05, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs

, October 04, 2019 at 04:33 PM
Trump Is in Trouble https://nyti.ms/33428f3
NYT - David Leonhardt - October 4

For now, he's losing the battle for public opinion.

... ... ...

A 41 percent approval rating is obviously not good. Morning Consult released a state-by-state poll yesterday showing Trump with net negative approval in Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, all of which he won in 2016. He is hovering around the break-even point in Florida and Georgia.

This story has a long way to go, and much of it will depend on how well Democrats conduct their impeachment inquiry. Currently, though, things are going quite poorly for Donald Trump.

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , October 04, 2019 at 09:42 PM
'impeachment is an inherently political process'

Indeed. Among presidents, several indicted (which is what the House does, essentially), NONE convicted by the Senate. The only prez who resigned might have been convicted, but then received a pardon. It's an inherently political process. And this time around, it's as if GOPsters are fighting for the very existence of their party.

History tells us not to expect too much.

likbez -> Fred C. Dobbs... , October 05, 2019 at 05:42 PM
The US society is too polarized for David Leonhardt's arguments to hold any value. He just regurgitated a typical neoliberal camp propaganda.

Which, of course, resonates with True Believers in this camp. But it is not enough. Biden's criminal extortion can't be denied. He boasted of this racket on a public occasion. You would ask, why Biden admitted to the crime? First, he is prone to gaffe; second, he probably considered himself untouchable like Mrs Clinton and other people of her circle.

In 2014 Obamoids removed the legitimate president by using the full spectre of illegal operations, and Joe Biden became Obama viceroy in the Ukraine. Biden's involvement in the coup d'état was a "crime against peace", but nobody speaks of that

Ukraine is the second home for CrowdStrike, the cyber-security company that was instrumental in creating fake Russiagate accusations. People in Kiev say that CrowStrike honcho Alperovich had built the case against Russia on the strength of a single server allegedly used for hacking the DNC. The server is located in Ukraine, not in Russia.

President Trump asked for its whereabouts in his conversation with the Ukrainian President Mr. Zelensky.

BTW Alperovich, obsessed with his hatred of Russia, could cook the case of Russian meddling, but it had to be ordered and utilized by somebody up the feeding chain. It might well be Joe Biden, or Brennan.

IMHO Ukrainegate is viewed by the majority of people, who try to understand the situation and not blindly follow MSM propaganda, as another stage of the intelligence agencies' color revolution against Trump, as Russiagate 2.0.

[Oct 05, 2019] The Department of Homeland Security extends the definition of terrorist to political opponents of neoliberalism (nationalists are often maligned as white supremasists)

Notable quotes:
"... The Department of Homeland Security is beginning to address white supremacist terrorism as a primary security threat, ..."
Oct 05, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , October 01, 2019 at 12:24 PM

"In our modern age, the continuation of racially based violent extremism, particularly violent white supremacy, is an abhorrent affront to the nation," said Kevin McAleenan, the acting director of homeland security.

Homeland Security Dept. Affirms Threat of White Supremacy
After Years of Prodding https://nyti.ms/2oTNJmQ
NYT - Zolan Kanno-Youngs - October 1

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Homeland Security is beginning to address white supremacist terrorism as a primary security threat, breaking with a decade of flagging attention after bigoted mass shooters from New Zealand to Texas took the lives of nearly 100 people in the last six months.

In a little-noticed strategy document (*) published last month to guide law enforcement on emerging threats and in recent public appearances by Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, the department is trying to project a new vigilance about violent white nationalism, beating back criticism that the agency has spent a decade playing down the issue.

"I would like to take this opportunity to be direct and unambiguous in addressing a major issue of our time. In our modern age, the continuation of racially based violent extremism, particularly violent white supremacy, is an abhorrent affront to the nation," Mr. McAleenan said during an address last month, describing white nationalism as one of the most dangerous threats to the United States.

The department's new stance contrasts that of President Trump, who has repeatedly dismissed white supremacy as an insignificant fringe movement. But beyond words and documents, many officials trying to combat the threat throughout the country remain skeptical that the full weight of federal law enforcement is finally being used to give bigoted domestic terrorism the attention it deserves. ...

* (Could be this.)

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK
FOR COUNTERING TERRORISM AND TARGETED VIOLENCE

September 2019

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/19_0920_plcy_strategic-framework-countering-terrorism-targeted-violence.pdf

ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , October 01, 2019 at 01:42 PM
Pull out the racist cards!

[Oct 05, 2019] CIA or FBI 'careerists" are suspect! Is Trump surrounded by 'agents of the Deep State'?

Oct 05, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , September 26, 2019 at 10:13 PM

(Is Trump surrounded by 'agents
of the Deep State'? It seems so.)

In Ukraine Phone Call, Alarmed Aides
Saw Trouble https://nyti.ms/2mbHjym
NYT - Peter Baker - September 26

WASHINGTON -- No one bothered to put special limits on the number of people allowed to sit in the "listening room" in the White House to monitor the phone call because it was expected to be routine. By the time the call was over 30 minutes later, it quickly became clear that it was anything but.

Soon after President Trump put the phone down that summer day, the red flags began to go up. Rather than just one head of state offering another pro forma congratulations for recent elections, the call turned into a bid by Mr. Trump to press a Ukrainian leader in need of additional American aid to "do us a favor" and investigate Democrats.

The alarm among officials who heard the exchange led to an extraordinary effort to keep too many more people from learning about it. In the days to come, according to a whistle-blower complaint released on Thursday, White House officials embarked on a campaign to "lock down" the record of the call, removing it from the usual electronic file and hiding it away in a separate system normally used for classified information.

But word began to spread anyway, kicking off a succession of events that would eventually reveal details of the call to the public and has now put Mr. Trump at risk of being impeached by a Democrat-led House for abusing his power and betraying his office. The story of the past two months is one of a White House scrambling to keep secrets to protect a president willing to cross lines others would not, only to find the very government he frequently disparages expose him.

"The White House officials who told me this information were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the phone call," the whistle-blower, a C.I.A. official who once worked at the White House, wrote in his complaint, which was declassified and made public by the House Intelligence Committee.

"They told me," he added, "that there was already a 'discussion ongoing' with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials' retelling, that they had witnessed the president abuse his office for personal gain."

The president and his Republican allies rejected that characterization, saying he made no quid pro quo demands of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who himself told reporters in New York on Wednesday that he did not feel like he was being pushed.

Mr. Trump dismissed the complaint as part of "another Witch Hunt" against him and suggested the whistle-blower was "close to a spy."

But while the White House disparaged the whistle-blower's complaint as full of secondhand information and media-reported events, it did not directly deny the sequence of events as outlined. ...

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , September 26, 2019 at 10:18 PM
Moreover, other officials amplified the narrative on Thursday with details that were not in the complaint. For instance, they said, at one point an order was given to not distribute the reconstructed transcript of Mr. Trump's call electronically, as would be typical. Instead, copies were printed out and hand delivered to a select group.

During the call on the morning of July 25, Mr. Zelensky talked about how much Ukraine had come to depend on the United States to help in its grinding, five-year war with Russian-sponsored separatists in the eastern part of the country. Without missing a beat, Mr. Trump then segued directly to his request for help in his own domestic politics.

"I would like you to do us a favor, though," he said. Ukraine, he said, should look into conspiracy theories about Democratic emails hacked during the 2016 election as well as the actions of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his younger son Hunter Biden, who was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

"Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible," Mr. Trump said.

While the president saw nothing wrong with his request, officials who heard it quickly worried that it would be problematic at best and set about finding ways to keep the conversation hidden.

The electronic version of the reconstructed transcript produced from notes and voice recognition software was removed from the computer system where such documents are typically stored for distribution to cabinet-level officers, according to the complaint. Instead, it went into a classified system even though the call did not contain anything especially delicate in terms of national security information.

The actions were unusual in a normal national security process but not unheard-of in Mr. Trump's administration. Since early in his tenure, when transcripts of his telephone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia leaked, Mr. Trump has been sensitive to preventing such records from getting out.

He has proved particularly attuned to guarding the confidentiality of other conversations involving the former Soviet Union. After his first meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia after taking office, Mr. Trump took his interpreter's notes and ordered him not to disclose what he heard to anyone. ...

likbez -> Fred C. Dobbs... , September 26, 2019 at 10:38 PM
From May 7, 2019

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pelosi-trump-is-goading-us-to-impeach-him

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday she believes President Trump is "goading" House Democrats to impeach him because he thinks it could help him politically.

"Don't tell anybody I told you this: Trump is goading us to impeach him," Pelosi said during an event sponsored by Cornell University in New York City. "That's what he's doing. Every single day, he's just like, taunting and taunting and taunting."

Pelosi argued Trump is daring them to impeach him because he believes it would help him "solidify his base" ahead of his 2020 re-election. Pelosi said that puts Democrats in a dilemma.

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , September 27, 2019 at 07:45 AM
Is Trump surrounded by
'agents of the Deep State'?

Of course, they are the 'Good Guys'
however. And I mean that, quite seriously.

ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , September 27, 2019 at 04:32 PM
"good guys" like Assange and Snowden......

it matters who likes the damaging allegations passed around.

CIA or FBI 'careerists" are suspect!

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to ilsm... , September 28, 2019 at 07:13 AM
They would not make my list.
ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , September 28, 2019 at 09:03 AM
They revealed truth you should have known.....

like Ellsberg.

[Oct 03, 2019] 'Heartbroken' Pelosi Fast-Tracks Impeachment, by Pat Buchanan

Ukrainegate is all about power of deep state to control the narrative
Notable quotes:
"... That is what this is all about. It always is. Then-editor Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post, when it looked like the Iran-Contra matter might break Ronald Reagan's presidency, after his 49-state landslide, chortled, "We haven't had this much fun since Watergate." ..."
"... This is what the deep state does to outsiders Middle America sends to Washington to challenge or dispossess it. ..."
Oct 03, 2019 | www.unz.com

To ensure the investigation was done swiftly, she took the franchise from Nadler and his judiciary committee and handed it to Adam Schiff and the intelligence committee. Now she is urging a narrowing of the articles of impeachment to just one -- Trump's request of Ukraine's president to look into the Bidens.

Pelosi's hope: Have one House vote on a single article of impeachment by year end; then send it on to the Senate for trial and be done with it. This is Nancy Pelosi's fast track to impeachment of Trump and ruination of his presidency. But, to be sure, she is "heartbroken" about all this.

For three years, the media-deep state axis has sought to overturn the election of 2016 and bring down Trump, starting with Russia-gate. Now it appears to have tailored and weaponized the impeachment process.

That is what this is all about. It always is. Then-editor Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post, when it looked like the Iran-Contra matter might break Ronald Reagan's presidency, after his 49-state landslide, chortled, "We haven't had this much fun since Watergate."

This is what the deep state does to outsiders Middle America sends to Washington to challenge or dispossess it.

How should the Republican Party and Trump's base respond?

Recognize reality. Whether or not Trump was ill-advised to suggest to the president of Ukraine that passing on the fruits of the investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden, the end game is bringing down Trump, democracy's equivalent of regicide.

While the "whistleblower," whose memo is the basis of these impeachment hearings, is well on his way to Beltway beatification, no campaign to depose the president can be allowed to cloak itself in anonymity indefinitely, for one man's whistleblower is another man's seditionist.

Whom did the whistleblower collaborate with to produce his memo? What is his background? What are his biases? The people have a right to know. And democracy dies in darkness, does it not?

Not until 30 years after Watergate did we learn the "whistleblower" known as "Deep Throat" was a corrupt FBI veteran agent who leaked grand jury secrets to The Washington Post to discredit acting Director Pat Gray and thereby become FBI director himself.

His identity was sheltered for three decades. For whose benefit?

Republicans should not allow Democrats to fast-track this process but should give their troops time to recognize the stakes involved, organize a defense and repel this latest establishment attempt to overthrow a president elected to come to the capital to corral that establishment.

Force all the Democratic candidates for president to take a stand on removing Trump for high crimes -- over a nebulous phone call to Kiev.

And the U.S. Senate should refuse to take up and should return to the House any bill of impeachment done in a short-circuited and savagely partisan manner, as this one is being done. There should be no rush to judgment.

If the election of 2020 is going to be about President Trump, tell the nation that the people will decide his political fate in November 2020, and that of Joe Biden if Democrats believe he is as pure as the driven snow and choose to nominate him.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."

Realist , says: September 30, 2019 at 10:30 pm GMT

Pelosi is speaker in name only she runs nothing. She is old and addled , a real dumbass. In fact most of Congress is that way. The Deep State is the real power anyway.
Rurik , says: September 30, 2019 at 11:47 pm GMT
Perhaps this farce is all about Trump's recalcitrance over Iran.

Trump was supposed to do a 'Libya' to Iran by now. There is grumbling that he's too worried about his own re-election, to follow through with the quid pro quo.

He was ousted from his role amid disputes over foreign policy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/us/politics/bolton-trump-north-korea.html

Dubya made good on his deal, now what about Trump?

A123 , says: September 30, 2019 at 11:54 pm GMT

Pelosi's hope: Have one House vote on a single article of impeachment by year end; then send it on to the Senate for trial and be done with it. This is Nancy Pelosi's fast track to impeachment of Trump and ruination of his presidency.

Pelosi has been in the DC swamp long enough to know that a Republican controlled Senate is going to use any Senate Trial to their own ends.

So what does Senate Trial actually mean? Short answer, whatever Mitch Connell wants it to mean.

Given how badly Adam Schiff is comprimised, there can be little doubt he will be subpoenaed and forced give testimony under oath with the penalty of Justice Department investigation for perjury if he lies. Will he:
-- Take the 5th to avoid perjury?
-- Refuse to testify?
Pelosi has to know that this will be bad for the Democrat party. So, "Why is she doing it?"

Fortunately the author has already provided the correct answer:

But to Pelosi this was looking like a loser, a dead end, a formula for failure followed by a backlash against House Democrats and her own removal as speaker in January 2021, if not before.

After advising against this, and only reluctantly going along, she has laid the trail of blame directly "The Squad" including AOC. Who is the greatest threat to Pelosi? Could it be AOC?

Pelosi's first priority is Pelosi. She is acting to minimize harm and maximize gain to Pelosi. Is anyone surprised?

To be honest, this makes her like most other politicians (1).

PEACE

Justvisiting , says: October 1, 2019 at 12:58 am GMT
@Robert Dolan What should make your head hurt is that the powers that be can make false allegations against anyone, can provide fake witnesses and documents to back up their allegations, can slander their name all over the mass media, can get them removed from their job, and may be able to get them sent to prison.

Anyone.

This may appear to be about Trump, but it is not.

This is about every single living breathing person.

If you are not afraid you are not paying attention.

The Alarmist , says: October 1, 2019 at 2:26 am GMT

Republicans should not allow Democrats to fast-track this process but should give their troops time to recognize the stakes involved, organize a defense and repel this latest establishment attempt to overthrow a president elected to come to the capital to corral that establishment.

I'm sure there is no shortage of Repubes who think letting Trump get the heave-ho will allow them to get back to serious government; if Trump gets the heave-ho, they will find themselves wandering in the desert longer than the last go-round following the Dems' capture of the government in 1933. The thing about importing millions of new voters from south of the border is that you get an electorate already accustomed to a century of one-party rule.

Twodees Partain , says: October 1, 2019 at 8:47 am GMT
"Republicans should not allow Democrats to fast-track this process "

Oh, no doubt. Republicans should also slap down one of their own, Mitch McConnell, for fast tracking Chuckie Schumer's Senate resolution to turn the whistleblower's complaint over to Schiff's Star Chamber without debate from republicans in the Senate.

Did you miss that one, Pat? It was reported in NYmag's Intelligencer:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/senate-demands-trump-stop-blocking-whistleblower-complaint.html

Here's a snip from the article:

"One of the most pressing questions of the hectic Tuesday involved why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell chose to counter his block-everything legacy and fast-track the resolution. (McConnell chose to "hotline" the motion, meaning he bypassed normal Senate procedures to move Schumer's request to a vote without floor debate.) "

This surpasses the GOP's reputation of being the stupid party and shows them as the ally of their "loyal opposition", doesn't it? Shouldn't republicans also try to keep their own team members from handing the democrats whatever they want for their impeachment scam?

TTSSYF , says: October 1, 2019 at 11:00 am GMT
Pat,

Thank you for this article. I hope to God the Senate does exactly as you say they should, which is to quickly and unceremoniously toss any such single-issue impeachment article back over the fence to the House. And I hope to God Trump wins re-election decisively and the House crazies are tossed out on their ears. Is it too much to hope and pray that there are still enough sane voters in the country? You don't have to love Trump to see that putting him back in office and flipping the House to Republican would be a well-deserved rebuke to the likes of Schiff, Pelosi, the Squabs, Never-Trumpers, and the Deep State intent on deposing the duly-elected President against the will of the people.

follyofwar , says: October 1, 2019 at 11:38 am GMT
@Realist "Old and addled, a real dumbass?" That perfectly describes the focus of Trump's infamous phone call – Joe Biden. I can't believe that that senile old man is still in the race, or was allowed to run in the first place.

[Oct 03, 2019] Why we see another CIA coup detat against Trump ?

Oct 03, 2019 | thecommonsenseshow.com

Let's begin with ISIS. In many different ways, I documented, on the CSS, beyond a a shadow of a doubt that Hillary and McCain started ISIS. Hillary made the first move, as I previously documented, by paying "blood money" to a small band of terrorists when she was on the board at LaFarge. This gave birth to the financial backing that ISIS needed to get started. Their money was used to entice other impoverished Muslims to join ISIS just like how American teens join street gangs. This is not a secret and has been widely reported. McCain, while he was the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, blocked the destruction of American military equipment left behind in Iraq. This was deliberate and illegal, as by law, when the American military abandons a theater of war, the weapons are destroyed so our enemies, or potential enemies cannot procure needed muscle. McCain's actions led to the small ISIS remnant suddenly appearing out of seemingly nowhere, to become armed to the teeth. Previously and with the help of former PSYOPS officer, Scott Bennett, I was able to piece together this scenario. However, many other outlets reached the same conclusion.

Why was ISIS created? ISIS was a transportation arm and a protection arm of drug trafficking coming out of Afghanistan. They protected some of the distribution points while carrying out terrorist activities which serves as an effect cover for their drug operation which is their main duty. They have also evolved into an effective and well-armed militia, thanks to the CIA, John McCain and Hillary Clinton.

The only thing that has changed since the war in Afghanistan began is that the heroin traffic has grown to the world's biggest supply. Our US troops serve the purpose of protecting various drug lords drug distribution centers. How does this operation escape the scrutiny of Congress? It doesn't, to be perfectly blunt. The reason that we are still in Afghanistan is because the Epstein/CIA/Mossad operation has compromised key American politicians. In a sense, Epstein's Island was the center of the new (1984 style) Ministry of Truth. Entice key politicians like Adam Schiff, photograph him with underage girls, and you have a powerful ally in Congress. Multiple this strategy several times over and there is no danger that the war in Afghanistan will ever end. For George W. Bush, his complicity covered up his cocaine habit. For "Bathhouse Barry" as he was called, his seedy underworld Chicago lifestyle remains hidden as long as he leaves the war alone. At the center of all of this complicity is Jeffrey Epstein and spin off operations which exist to exact compliance through the blackmailing process. Hillary's connection to ISIS and ultimately the Epstein empire keeps her out of prison. These forces extracted Epstein from prison and this explains why the guards were not in position when the extraction occurred. It is explains why the video footage, which was required in a suicide watch situation, are "not available". It explains why Hillary has never stood trial.

Now, here comes Donald Trump. In two recent occasions he has threatened to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The infighting that would occur between the existing Afghan drug lords would collapse the system and cut into the might profits of the heroin empire. Hence, we have yet another attempt to remove Trump from power because he is not fully on board with these types of CIA led operations. And make no mistake about it, according to long-term sources, when we are talking Afghanistan, we are talking about world domination with many key politicians. This is a Deep State operation.

Why not just kill Trump? The answer is simple. In 1963, there was no Independent Media (IM) except for the likes of people like Josiah Thompson and the late Jim Marrs. These men never let go of the assassination. Jim taught the first class on JFK assassination of the University of Texas. It took 30 years and a major movie to fully awaken the American people, that on behalf of David Rockefeller, Alan Dulles, LBJ, J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon orchestrated the plot to kill JFK because of the threat he posed to the Federal Reserve, the nuclear arms race and of course JFK was opposed to the heroin cash cow known as Vietnam. The South Vietnamese President was assassinated three weeks before JFK because both men were not on board with sending troops into Southeast Asia to protect the drug trafficking of the Golden Triangle run by covert operations of the CIA. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was Afghanistan, before the Afghan war. If there was an IM in 1963, this crime would have been solved by Christmas of the same year (30 days after the assassination). If Trump were to be assassinated, the IM would be all over this and the American people would more than likely rise up and the Deep State cannot afford this. So, covert operations must be employed by the CIA. This President must go before the election. This was the same exact thinking when JFK was assassinated. If JFK were to get a second term, he could irreparable harm to the Deep State of the day. The same is true for Trump. His border policies alone, could cost the globalists drug-trafficking trade, run by the CIA and the Mossad, billions of dollars. Since the Russian collusion did not result in impeachment, the Ukraine plot was hatched. The plot is being led by Adam Schiff. Why Schiff? Because he is compromised, deeply compromised as in Deep State compromised. He is implicated in Epstein Island according to my best source. Because Trump is not fully on board and never has been with the Afghan War, he has faced the Russian collusion and now the nothing burger of Ukraine-gate and Schiff is leading the charge. The complicity of every American politician is being brought to bear. If you have noticed that until the past few days, Pelosi was dragging her feet on impeachment because she knows if it fails, her party is dead. Pelosi is implicated in border drug trafficking and stealing water out of Northern California and sending it to Communist China. Even Bill Maher is opposed to this course of action by the Democrats with regard to impeachment. He sees the end of the Democratic Party if impeachment fails. Clearly, Maher did not get the memo. It is impeachment at all costs. The Deep State is reeling, and this is their Kamikaze attack. It is all or nothing.

These facts, listed above, have been fully communicated. However, what follows is not as well-known and is serving to fuel the Ukrainian frame up of Trump. I have information that comes out of the intel community that has shed light on this situation. In fact, this information is reverberating in the intel community. It is suppressed as I write these words and CNN and the rest of the MSM are scrambling to create a diversion that will take eyes off of what you are going to read right here.

My insider source, and the info was partially confirmed by another source, implicates Congressman Adam Schiff in a plot to overthrow the US government beginning with Donald Trump. Schiff is part of group, fronting for CIA/Mossad interests in drug trafficking.

Schiff is a compromised man. He is deeply implicated in the shenanigans of the Epstein child-sex-trafficking empire according to the source. As many world-wide politicians are, Schiff is being blackmailed by Epstein-related interests with a political agenda.

Schiff has another issue that he needs to cover up and it has to do with Ukraine. I have been told by this inside source that Adam Schiff was in league with Hunter Biden and corrupt Ukrainian officials and that Schiff received hundreds of thousands of dollars to steer Congressional oversight away from Ukraine. Why? Because the Ukrainian revolution was CIA inspired. Why? Because the CIA and the Mossad wanted their drug trafficking to extend to the Silk Road and Putin told the CIA where to go and what to do when they got there. Subsequently, the CIA initiated a coup in Ukraine and installed wholly corrupt EU figures in the power base of the country. This was something that the CSS reported on extensively when this was occurring. Ukraine is one of Russia's main source for natural gas and the loss of Russian revenue related to this revolution in Ukraine. And what did Putin do, he retaliated and occupied Crimea. The previously identified Democrats moved into the vacuum and began to profit from the criminal enterprises that sprang up as a result of what was happening in Ukraine. Some of these figures includes Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake and Hunter/Joe Biden.

The readers may have noticed that Mitt Romney has seemingly come out of nowhere to enter this controversy and go after Trump. If that seemed out of place to you, as it did to me, there was a very good reason for this. Mitt Romney has been after Trump since day one. Additionally, Jeff Flake who mysteriously resigned from the Senate and did not seek re-election has periodically surfaced to attack Trump and he has done so again over the Ukrainian issue. Why? Why are Flake, Romney and Schiff all on the attack? Why were 500 words deleted from the transcript of the call between Trump and Zelensky in order to create the illusion that Trump was obstructing justice? The answer is that Flake and Romney were involved in Hunter Biden's criminal enterprise in Ukraine. They are all at risk. That is why these people are taking front and center against Trump.

My insider source did not give me the following information, but it must be related. It was announced, or should I say, purposely leaked, that Barr and Trump are looking for an international conspiracy with regard to American Deep State interests. This goes back to an Epstein international blackmailing operation. Trump is playing chicken with the Deep State. I recently scoffed when it was suggested to me that the Deep State was in a near-collapsed state. I am no longer skeptical. I am certain that Joe Biden, former President Obama, the late John McCain, Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation and many others are deeply compromised and it is on the verge of coming out and the Epstein blackmail enterprise may not be able to stop the disclosures.

And what about Schiff? Why is he leading the charge? Because he is willing to commit treason than risk going to jail for the rest of his life.

I will conclude these revelations with tweets from Trump that clearly shows he is in agreement with what is reported here.

"Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?" tweeted Trump.

Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?

114K

5:12 AM - Sep 30, 2019

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66K people are talking about this

Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

The Fake Whistleblower complaint is not holding up. It is mostly about the call to the Ukrainian President which, in the name of transparency, I immediately released to Congress & the public. The Whistleblower knew almost nothing, its 2ND HAND description of the call is a fraud!

72.5K

5:03 AM - Sep 30, 2019

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33.9K people are talking about this

Twice, the President mentioned arresting Schiff for treason. He knows of what I have written about in this report.

Also, Joe Biden is done. As these facts surface and his complicity in covering up for his son, Hunter, further surfaces, Elizabeth Warren will emerge as the candidate for the Democratic Party. What a joke! She cannot win! That is why Hillary, as I have said 22 prior times in print and in podcasts, will emerge as the candidate. If she cannot win, civil war will follow. We are in the middle of a Bolshevik Revolution.

Oh, and one more thing. The CIA changed its whistleblower forms in late August to allow so-called whistleblowers to use hearsay statements. Wouldn't we all agree that this is a little bit too coincidental? And in the musical words of the late Tom Petty, which fully applies to the CIA's complicity here "Let's get to the point and roll another joint". These CIA demons are killing our children with their drug operations.

[Oct 03, 2019] Yes, Tulsi Gabbard is wonderful.

Oct 03, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , October 01, 2019 at 06:20 PM

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1178751950524829696

Tulsi Gabbard‏ @TulsiGabbard

Candidates for POTUS who are fundraising off "impeachment" are undermining credibility of inquiry in eyes of American people, further dividing our already fractured country. Please stop. We need responsible, patriotic leaders who put the interests of our country before their own.

12:22 PM - 30 Sep 2019

anne , October 01, 2019 at 06:21 PM
Yes, Tulsi Gabbard is wonderful.
anne -> anne... , October 01, 2019 at 06:23 PM
https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1178610436721332224

Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard

On day one of my presidency, I will call a summit between the United States, China, and Russia to work to end the new Cold War, stop the arms race, and reduce tensions and increase cooperation going forward.

Cold War Getting Hotter Every Day

3:00 AM - 30 Sep 2019

likbez -> anne... , October 02, 2019 at 03:58 PM
Hi Anne,

Not simply wonderful, but "wonderful & courageous."

Her move to help Sanders in 2016 and her stance against MIC both clearly demonstrate that.

[Oct 03, 2019] Judicial Watch: DOJ Docs Show Rosenstein Advising Mueller 'the Boss' Doesn't Know About Their Communications.

Oct 03, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

milo_hoffman , 1 hour ago link

BREAKING: Judicial Watch: DOJ Docs Show Rosenstein Advising Mueller 'the Boss' Doesn't Know About Their Communications. Shows massive collusion and plotting by Rosenstein and Muller, behind administrations back, and collusion with democrats and press.

"These astonishing emails further confirm the dishonest corruption behind Rosenstein's appointment of Robert Mueller," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "The emails also show a shockingly cozy relationship between Mr. Rosenstein and anti-Trump media reporters."

https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-doj-docs-show-rosenstein-advising-mueller-the-boss-doesnt-know-about-their-communications/

[Oct 02, 2019] MSM tri to swipe under the rad facts of Ukranine interfernce in 2016 elections

Oct 02, 2019 | abcnews.go.com

me name=

Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal attorney, defended himself Sunday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" from accusations lodged by the president's former homeland security adviser that he has trafficked unfounded theories about foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Interested in Donald Trump? Add Donald Trump as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Donald Trump news, video, and analysis from ABC News. Donald Trump Add Interest

Tom Bossert, the former White House official, took aim at Giuliani earlier on "This Week," calling it a mistake for the president to have hired him in the first place. He also called out Giuliani for repeating a "completely false" theory that Ukraine – not Russia – was responsible for interference in the 2016 election.

me name=

"At this point I am deeply frustrated with what [Giuliani] and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president," Bossert, who is now an ABC contributor, said. "It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again."

Giuliani fired back later in the show, telling Stephanopoulos, "Tom Bossert doesn't know what he's talking about I'm not peddling anything."

me name=

The president's personal attorney also sought to defend his role in pressing Ukrainians to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, the fallout from which has led to an impeachment inquiry in Congress.

"Everything I did was to defend my client and I am proud of having uncovered what will turn out to be a massive pay-for-play scheme," Giuliani told Stephanopoulos.

The "pay-for-play scheme" Giuliani has accused Biden of perpetrating in Ukraine dates back to 2016 and the dismissal of the country's former prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin. At the time, Biden was leading U.S. policy toward Ukraine with an emphasis on cracking down on corruption.

He called for Shokin to be fired.

At one point, Giuliani waved what he said were several affidavits, including one by Shokin defending himself, which he said verified his claims that Shokin was dismissed as a result of his investigation of Burisma and Hunter Biden.

It was not immediately clear how the documents verified those claims.

Trump and Giuliani have accused Biden of calling for Shokin's dismissal because his office was investigating Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Biden's son, Hunter, had a seat on the board of directors.

"This is not about getting Joe Biden in trouble," Giuliani said. "This is about proving that Donald Trump was framed by the Democrats."

PHOTO: President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speak during a meeting in New York on September 25, 2019, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speak during a meeting in New York on September 25, 2019, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. more +

But the assertion that Biden acted to help his son has been undercut by widespread criticism of Shokin from several high-profile international leaders, including members of the European Union and International Monetary Fund, who said Biden's recommendation was well justified.

(MORE: Trump administration changed foreign-leader call-storage methods after leaks)

The IMF threatened to withhold aid to Kiev in early 2016, citing "Ukraine's slow progress in improving governance and fighting corruption," according to Christine Lagard, the IMF's managing director.

Giuliani also sought to undermine a whistleblower complaint, which was filed in August and released publicly last week, that describes the nature of the president's phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and an apparent effort within the White House to "lock down" records of the conversation.

"The whistleblower says, 'I don't have any direct knowledge, I just heard things,'" Giuliani said. "I'm not saying [the whistleblower] was false, I'm saying he could have heard it wrong."

(MORE: President Trump will be held 'accountable' in wake of whistleblower complaint: Adam Schiff)

Stephanopoulos cited several examples from the complaint in which the whistleblower accurately described the content of Trump's conversation with Zelenskiy as compared to the transcript.

The whistleblower, who has not been identified, claimed that at least a half dozen administration officials had raised concerns that Trump had used "the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election."

PHOTO: The annual Free Iran Conference for the first time at Ashraf 3, the headquarters of the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran on July 13, 2019, near Duress in Albania. Siavosh Hosseini/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The annual Free Iran Conference for the first time at Ashraf 3, the headquarters of the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran on July 13, 2019, near Duress in Albania. more +

Democrats have accused the president of using his desire for an investigation into the Bidens as leverage with Zelenskiy, particularly in light of the fact that the White House had, at the time, withheld nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine.

It was later released.

Giuliani's name is invoked more than 30 times in the whistleblower's complaint.

When Stephanopoulos asked Giuliani whether he will cooperate with the House Intelligence Committee, for which Rep. Adam Schiff is the chair, Giuliani said he wouldn't cooperate with Schiff. But when pressed said he would "consider it" if his client, the president, signed off.

"I'm a lawyer. It's his privilege, not mine," he responded. "If he decides that he wants me to testify, of course I'll testify, even though I think Adam Schiff is an illegitimate chairman. He has already prejudged the case."

(MORE: From a controversial phone call to impeachment calls: A Trump whistleblower timeline)

In his interview on "This Week," Giuliani sought to clarify the timeline of his conversations with Ukrainians and insisted he did not instigate communications.

"November of 2016, they first came to me," Giuliani said of the alleged outreach from Ukrainians through the State Department. "The Ukrainians came to me. I didn't go to them."

The State Department and its chief, Mike Pompeo, have faced scrutiny for their handling of Giuliani's overtures to the Ukrainians. The former U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker, helped coordinate at least one interaction Giuliani had with an aide to Zelenskiy in Madrid in May, Volker confirmed.

(MORE: Only 17% of Americans surprised by Trump's actions tied to Ukraine: POLL)

Giuliani has claimed the State Department directed him to act and has said he briefed Volker and the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, after his meetings with Ukrainians.

On Friday, ABC News reported that Volker had resigned from his post with the State Department. House Democrats still plan to interview him next week as part of their impeachment inquiry, according to a congressional aide.

Giuliani planned to speak at a conference in Armenia next week, according to a schedule. But he cancelled after news outlets reported that several Kremlin officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin would also be in attendance.

[Oct 02, 2019] The alliance of neoliberals and neocons tries to ostracize Putin and has some level of success

Notable quotes:
"... Giuliani planned to speak at a conference in Armenia next week, according to a schedule. But he cancelled after news outlets reported that several Kremlin officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin would also be in attendance. ..."
Oct 02, 2019 | abcnews.go.com

Giuliani has claimed the State Department directed him to act and has said he briefed Volker and the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, after his meetings with Ukrainians.

On Friday, ABC News reported that Volker had resigned from his post with the State Department. House Democrats still plan to interview him next week as part of their impeachment inquiry, according to a congressional aide.

Giuliani planned to speak at a conference in Armenia next week, according to a schedule. But he cancelled after news outlets reported that several Kremlin officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin would also be in attendance.

[Oct 01, 2019] Ron Paul Asks Impeachment... Or CIA Coup by Ron Paul

Notable quotes:
"... CIA coup. Next. ..."
"... With so much deceit and shenanigans, it is best politicians let the voters decide in the next election rather than continue this circus. The article below argues the average American doesn't care if Trump isn't perfect and if the Democrats want him out they should offer up a better alternative. ..."
"... Globalist SES Infiltration, Subversion, De Facto Police State Coup D'Etat https://aim4truth.org/2018/01/03/deep-state-shadow-government-revealed-senior-executive-service/ ..."
"... I would call it a coup except I think it happened several decades ago. What is left is a shell. ..."
"... If that feels rotten, then you may start to understand why the world does like the USA not so much. ..."
"... This is clearly an attempted coup, i.e., removal of a duly elected President by force instead of by any legitimate political process. The leftists and RINOs have been trying by the most subversive of means to get rid of Trump even before he took office. ..."
"... Isn't it a matter of record who created and ordered the implementation of the revised whistleblower form? I know it was secretly uploaded two days before the blower blew (9/24), but why now and who said to? ..."
Sep 30, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

You don't need to be a supporter of President Trump to be concerned about the efforts to remove him from office. Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced impeachment proceedings against the President over a phone call made to the President of Ukraine. According to the White House record of the call, the President asked his Ukrainian counterpart to look into whether there is any evidence of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election and then mentioned that a lot of people were talking about how former US Vice President Joe Biden stopped the prosecution of his son who was under investigation for corruption in Ukraine.

Democrats, who spent more than two years convinced that "Russiagate" would enable them to remove Trump from office only to have their hopes dashed by the Mueller Report, now believe they have their smoking gun in this phone call.

It this about politics? Yes. But there may be more to it than that.

It may appear that the Democratic Party, furious over Hillary Clinton's 2016 loss, is the driving force behind this ongoing attempt to remove Donald Trump from office, but at every turn we see the fingerprints of the CIA and its allies in the US deep state.

In August 2016, a former acting director of the CIA, Mike Morell, wrote an extraordinary article in the New York Times accusing Donald Trump of being an "agent of the Russian Federation." Morell was clearly using his intelligence career as a way of bolstering his claim that Trump was a Russian spy – after all, the CIA should know such a thing! But the claim was a lie.

Former CIA director John Brennan accused President Trump of "treason" and of "being in the pocket of Putin" for meeting with the Russian president in Helsinki and accepting his word that Russia did not meddle in the US election. To this day there has yet to be any evidence presented that the Russian government did interfere. Brennan openly called on "patriotic" Republicans to act against this "traitor."

Brennan and his deep state counterparts James Comey at the FBI and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper launched an operation, using what we now know is the fake Steele dossier, to spy on the Trump presidential campaign and even attempt to entrap Trump campaign employees.

Notice a pattern here?

Now we hear that the latest trigger for impeachment is a CIA officer assigned to the White House who filed a "whistleblower" complaint against the president over something he heard from someone else that the president said in the Ukraine phone call.

Shockingly, according to multiple press reports the rules for CIA whistleblowing were recently changed, dropping the requirement that the whistleblower have direct, first-hand knowledge of the wrongdoing. Just before this complaint was filed, the rule-change allowed hearsay or second-hand information to be accepted. That seems strange.

As it turns out, the CIA "whistleblower" lurking around the White House got the important things wrong, as there was no quid pro quo discussed and there was no actual request to investigate Biden or his son.

The Democrats have suddenly come out in praise of whistleblowers – well not exactly. Pelosi still wants to prosecute actual whistleblower Ed Snowden. But she's singing the praises of this fake CIA "whistleblower."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer once warned Trump that if "you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you." It's hard not to ask whether this is a genuine impeachment effort or a CIA coup!

ReflectoMatic , 8 minutes ago link

The WhatDoesItMean has earned a bad reputation over the years and I've avoided it as dis-info. But in recent months it seems to had done a turn around and is providing good info.

A sharply worded new Ministry of Foreign Affairs ( MoFA ) report circulating in the Kremlin today noting that the release of the Trump-Zelensky phone transcript reveals the risks of anyone talking with the United States , states that it can't be ruled out that this call transcript scandal may be linked to the failed Mueller probe -- a failed probe that has now exploded into an impeachment scandal that sees Hillary Clinton calling for President Donald Trump to be thrown from office and declaring that " he's an illegitimate president "

To which Trump immediately responded to by re-Tweeting the ominous warning issued by the powerful Pastor Robert Jeffress that says " I HAVE NEVER Seen Evangelicals More Angry Than They Are Today – If Democrats Are Successful It Will Cause Civil War Like Fracture in America " -- a warning followed by Russia and China vowing to continue protecting the world order

both of whom are becoming increasingly alarmed over the grave military implications of what is now occurring -- the evidence of which is being kept hidden from the American people by their socialist Democrat Party leaders and their leftist mainstream media lapdogs

most particularly their not being allowed to know the fact that top Trump impeachment driver US House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff has long been supported by the George Soros funded feared Ukrainian international arms dealer Igor Pasternak who held numerous money raising events to get Schiff elected -- and whom Schiff traveled to meet in Ukraine last month before igniting the impeachment bomb against Trump

All of which is known about by Trump , and is why he has just declared that he wants Schiff " Questioned At The Highest Level Tor Fraud And Treason ".

Read the full article

Dan The Man , 10 minutes ago link

If the CIA is this brazen on so many attempts...and with no accountability yet, you could argue the coup already happened. This is what a country run by a bunch of intelligence ppl looks like.

artistant , 18 minutes ago link

TRUMP threw whistleblower Assange under the bus for going vs the establishment, and now another whistleblower threw Trump under the bus.

Karma? Hey Trump, forget Biden, why don't you have an investigation on

Epstein = Mossad = Israhell = Pedophilia + Sexual Slavery

bobsmith5 , 6 minutes ago link

Epstein is not the top. Above Epstein are Soros, the Queen of England, and the Rockefeller/Rothschild's crime families. They are the head of the Satanic (NOT JEWISH) "New World Order". Hey artisant when in hell are you going to actually get way down in the rabbit hole and find out who is really behind globalism? You spout off the most stupid crap that takes you into mindless racism. We as a corporate fascist socialist nation are much higher than Israel on the globalist hierarchy. They own our monetary system, our corporate government with 22 trillion national debt, the military, and the intelligence alphabet agencies who are their right enforcement arm.

romanmoment , 32 minutes ago link

"Impeachment... Or CIA Coup?"

CIA coup. Next. Dear CIA, nobody will ever trust you again, and why should they?

Let it Go , 33 minutes ago link

Currently, a full-scale propaganda war rages with many Americans hell-bent on convincing the rest of us what is really going on. I think it is clear we have reached the point where people are either outraged, simply concerned or take the attitude this is all a big nothing burger or much ado about nothing.

With so much deceit and shenanigans, it is best politicians let the voters decide in the next election rather than continue this circus. The article below argues the average American doesn't care if Trump isn't perfect and if the Democrats want him out they should offer up a better alternative.

https://Do Average Americans Care If Trump "Dunn It?".html

Roger Casement , 37 minutes ago link

Globalist SES Infiltration, Subversion, De Facto Police State Coup D'Etat https://aim4truth.org/2018/01/03/deep-state-shadow-government-revealed-senior-executive-service/

Dexter Morgan , 38 minutes ago link

I would call it a coup except I think it happened several decades ago. What is left is a shell.

JPHR , 42 minutes ago link

CIA finally coming home to roost. Never known to respect law or human rights outside the US now CIA applying "regime change" inside the US. If that feels rotten, then you may start to understand why the world does like the USA not so much.

Little Saigon Report , 52 minutes ago link

Kyle Bass and the China bet ... https://soundcloud.com/daniel-sullivan-505714723/little-saigon-report-190-kyle-bass-and-china

Bricker , 1 hour ago link

This is why the CIA is going to die under Haspel. I just read 3 dozen tweets on Sebastian Gorka's trip to Italy with Barr...None of these liberals have a clue on what is going on in Italy...Which means they haven't a clue about the real Russia hoax and the setup with Papadopolous. This says everything about our division in America.

The media has kept these people in the dark and this is why I keep saying the media companies need to be investigated and charged with crimes.

bobsmith5 , 39 minutes ago link

The CIA and NSA are rogue foreign invaded and occupied) enemies of the State and should be surrounded by the military and seized as a national security threat and a dangerous enemy. Everyone should be thrown out of the buildings controlled and occupied by them and filled with military police until those who are true traitors can be identified and and arrested, including former employees who still have highest level security access.

Sid Davis , 1 hour ago link

This is clearly an attempted coup, i.e., removal of a duly elected President by force instead of by any legitimate political process. The leftists and RINOs have been trying by the most subversive of means to get rid of Trump even before he took office.

They have abandoned the peaceful political process and that leaves only force as a means to settle differences of opinion.

My hope is that the impeachment effort will backfire on the leftists in the House. Not only will they energize Trump's base, but they will look bad to the rest of the non-communist public. And a bonus will be that Trump will be able to blame any pre-election decline in the stock market and/or economy on the uncertainty created by their reckless and unjustified impeachment actions. (My take is that the stock market is teetering on the edge of a cliff.)

This should be an interesting year between now and the elections with this impeachment **** show and what might come out of the Justice Department relating to spygate and who was involved in it.

I almost fell like I am watching a new Game of Thrones episode.

Worst case is that Trump is actually removed from office and Civil War II breaks out. Best case is Trump wins by a landslide in 2020 and Trump supporters take the House and improve their position in the Senate followed by a huge swamp drain during Trump's second term.

Sly2U , 1 hour ago link

Understood and appreciated Ron. I wish everyone realized the consequences.

†FreeThought† , 1 hour ago link

judeo-bolsheviki are back like it's 1917

bobsmith5 , 33 minutes ago link

They are not Judeo. They hide behind that term but have absolutely no bloodline connection to the Tribe of Judah from the Middle East, they do not worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or Moses. They worship Satan.

That you use that term shows your vast ignorance of the real enemies behind the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. It was funded and orchestrated by the Rothschild/Rockefeller Satanic bankers. The Rothschild's are Khazarian Satanist who funded Marx and Engels communist socialist creators!

JACK WAFFLE , 1 hour ago link

dr. pieczenik on top of it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3naToXWe1JU

DeadLikeMe , 1 hour ago link

It wouldn't surprise me if the same CIA who murdered Kennedy now want another coup.

TeraByte , 1 hour ago link

This is how CIA toppled a duly elected Iranian government in 1953 and now we refuse to understand, why Iranians don´t like us and don´t want our "democracy".

He–Mene Mox Mox , 2 hours ago link

Sometimes you have to wonder if the CIA learned its lessons from the Kennedy Assassination, and decided this would be a more humane way. As much as John Brennan hates Trump, I am sure he would disagree with me on that. Brennan is out for blood.

OccamsCrazor , 2 hours ago link

Time for Trump to declare martial law and have the military arrest all these treasonous cowards and pussies in the CIA, FBI, and Demoncratic party. We'll just see how 'deep' their state is. Btw, Soros and Obama will be part of those arrests along with Shillary and Billy Bob Clinton.

Its easy to find the guilty individuals as they protest the loudest.

99% of all Americans already recognize this as a coup. You just have to know which half is rooting for the coup to be successful, and the ones who are rooting for failure.

'Impeachment Inquiry' is just a fancy schmancy label for it all, that third world countries can't be bothered with, when they overthrow their President or dictator. At least those banana republics are honest about what they are actually doing when performing their version of the overthrow.

iAmerican10 , 1 hour ago link

The entire US Beast of Gog&Babylon Roman Catholic Church/Synagogue of Satan Vatican FedScam Rothschild/Rockefeller Pyramid's Satanic Fifth Column must, with precision, be 'tagged and bagged,' fully expropriated, its principals hanged for Treason, the remainder banished from Our Holy Land.

CIA/FBI/NSA is just an 'action branch' of mechanics and operatives, who too must hang.

fucking truth , 47 minutes ago link

Need to cut the head off the snake,ie the deep deep state, the ones who's names are not even uttered in fear of reprisal, the rest are just actors in this theater of the absurd.

Boydist , 1 hour ago link

Damn good point. Trump praised Wikileaks all through his campaign. A great investigation into Epstein and his connections to Clinton, Mossad, Orwellian crime detection software and 9/11.

https://t.co/4IAzVRRV3y

JPHR , 37 minutes ago link

No, this CIA operator was a gossip-blower. Insulting to Assange to be compared with a malicious CIA plant.

You are right that Trump failed to acknowledge Assange as a true Whistleblower.

2hangmen , 2 hours ago link

More than half of the country realizes this is a Deep State coup, led by Brennan's CIA traitors. If they get away with this, our country is all but finished, we have to bring all hands on deck to defeat these treasonous scum. We will support President Trump 110% and pray that the white hats in Washington will have the goods on all the traitors.

Ruler , 2 hours ago link

Been saying this for how long?

SybilDefense , 2 hours ago link

Isn't it a matter of record who created and ordered the implementation of the revised whistleblower form? I know it was secretly uploaded two days before the blower blew (9/24), but why now and who said to? That name should be at least on Fox from 8:00-11:00 for the next 3 weeks, while Lindsey is sending out subpoenas like barf at a sat night frat party. Let em flow Senator.

[Oct 01, 2019] Daniel McAdams: The US Has Ceased Being A Republic And Has Become A National Security State

Notable quotes:
"... After the Cold War and the defeat of Soviet Communism, where one would expect a reduction if not elimination of such a global secret warfare organization, the CIA only ramped up its operations overseas. Today the CIA is merely one arm in a multi-faceted US "regime change" apparatus that includes the US State Department, USAID, and, very importantly, US government-funded "non-governmental" organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and its sub-grantees. This "regime change apparatus" uses CIA methods developed during the Cold War (by "experts" like Gene Sharp and others) such as mobilization, training, subterfuge, agitation, and propaganda. We saw this apparatus at work in events like the "Arab Spring" and before it in the overthrow of the Milosevic government in Yugoslavia. We saw it in the Ukraine coup of 2014 and we see it in Venezuela and in Hong Kong today. ..."
"... There is plenty of evidence of US government involvement in the Hong Kong protests. That does not mean that every single body out in the street is in the pay of the CIA. That is the red herring argument of those who are determined that we never see the US government hand in unrest overseas. Or to ridicule as "conspiracy theorists" those who point out obvious US government involvement. ..."
"... It is undeniable that the US government has been involved in grooming, training, and funding the anti-Beijing movement in Hong Kong for years. ..."
"... Imagine a movement dedicated to overthrowing the US political order that was funded by the Chinese, whose activists regularly went to Beijing for training in organization and mobilization, and whose leaders met with leading members of the Chinese Communist Party. How would such a movement in the United States be viewed by the US government? How would it be portrayed by the US mainstream media? ..."
"... The US has ceased being a republic and has become a national security state. The US national security state enriches its elites – be they in the military-industrial complex, the think tanks, or the media – at the expense of middle class and working-class America. It does this by promoting an "enemy scenario" whereby the American people are made to believe that if they ever challenge the US military budget – larger than the next seven military budgets combined – they are not only putting themselves and their families at risk, but they are deeply unpatriotic and anti-American. The US national security state fought an 18-year "war on terror" which only seemed to generate more terrorists! Intervention in Iraq and Libya and Syria to "fight terrorism" resulted in more, not less, al-Qaeda and ISIS. It was not until Russia and Iran stood up in 2015 and began fighting these US-backed groups that there was a reduction in their power. ..."
"... The Trump Presidency thus far has been an enormous disappointment. The president had the opportunity to name a top-notch foreign policy and national security team that would reflect and carry out his stated policies as a candidate – getting along with Russia, NATO skepticism, opposition to endless war, etc – but once in power he has again and again drawn from that same neoconservative cesspool that no matter who is elected always find its way to positions of power and influence. ..."
Oct 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Daniel McAdams: "The US Has Ceased Being A Republic And Has Become A National Security State" by Tyler Durden Mon, 09/30/2019 - 23:45 0 SHARES

Authored by Mohsen Abdelmoumen via American Herald Tribune,

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your Twitter account has just been closed. Why?

Daniel McAdams: In August I was watching a segment of the Sean Hannity program while at a friend's house and noticed that despite an hour of Hannity ranting against the "deep state" in the US, he was wearing a lapel pin bearing the seal of the US Central Intelligence agency, which most would agree is either the center or at least an important hub of the US "deep state" itself. I tweeted about this strange anomaly and as a comment to my own Tweet on it I happened to say that Hannity is "retarded." Twitter informed me that I had committed "hateful conduct" for "promoting violence against or directly attacking or threatening other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease." It is clear on its face that I did none of these. I used a non-politically correct term to ridicule Hannity for attacking the "deep state" while wearing the symbols of the deep state on his very lapel.

It is clear that Twitter is deeply biased against any voices outside the mainstream, pro-empire perspective. As a leading Tweeter in opposition to interventionist US foreign policy, I had long been targeted by those who enable and enforce Twitter's political biases. Look at who Twitter partners with and you will understand why I was banned for a transparently false reason: the US government-funded Atlantic Council and other similar organizations are working with Twitter to eliminate any voices challenging US global military empire.

In your opinion, what exactly is the role of the CIA in the regime changes of some countries around the world?

From its creation by the National Security Act of 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency carried the dual role of analyzing intelligence for its customers in the Executive Branch of the US government and conducting covert actions and operations in pursuit of (claimed) US foreign policy goals. The history of CIA action in post-war Europe is extensive and includes founding front organizations to prop up socialist and far-left publications and institutions as a challenge to Soviet communism as well as backing far-right groups and political parties and even violent terror organizations to directly confront communism and overturn elections where communists made gains.

After the Cold War and the defeat of Soviet Communism, where one would expect a reduction if not elimination of such a global secret warfare organization, the CIA only ramped up its operations overseas. Today the CIA is merely one arm in a multi-faceted US "regime change" apparatus that includes the US State Department, USAID, and, very importantly, US government-funded "non-governmental" organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy and its sub-grantees. This "regime change apparatus" uses CIA methods developed during the Cold War (by "experts" like Gene Sharp and others) such as mobilization, training, subterfuge, agitation, and propaganda. We saw this apparatus at work in events like the "Arab Spring" and before it in the overthrow of the Milosevic government in Yugoslavia. We saw it in the Ukraine coup of 2014 and we see it in Venezuela and in Hong Kong today.

The practical value to the United States of such operations is less than zero, the costs to the American taxpayer are enormous, and the immorality of manipulating the globe toward an outcome preferred by Washington's elites is self-evident.

When we see the generalized NSA surveillance, do you think we live in a democracy or a tenebrous fascist regime?

Americans have been manipulated by the elites in government and its allies in state propaganda (otherwise known as the "mainstream media") to accept, particularly post-9/11, the deeply anti-American proposition that we must yield our privacy and Constitutionally-guaranteed civil liberties to a government that promises it will not abuse its increased power over us but will only use it to keep us safe. These promises have been over and over again proven to be lies. Government is not targeting terrorism or terrorists: they are targeting average American citizens.

Americans were told that only terrorists' phone calls would be intercepted, but then Edward Snowden revealed that all of our phone calls are intercepted. Americans were mad for a few weeks but then Washington promised "reform" of the PATRIOT Act in the form of the FREEDOM Act and everybody calmed down. Even though the FREEDOM Act is actually worse than the PATRIOT Act because it legalized all of the illegal activities that were taking place under the PATRIOT Act. "Reform" in Washington means obfuscation and perception manipulation.

Likewise, Americans seeking to travel within their own country have been forced to allow strangers to invade and touch the most private areas of their bodies – and their children's bodies! American sheep just bow to the authorities and keep watching their freedoms stolen from them, murmuring to themselves as they are raped by the authorities, "well I have nothing to hide "

You mentioned one time Operation Mockingbird, where the CIA manipulated journalists in the 1950s. In your opinion, does the CIA continue to use these same practices today?

I have no doubt that the CIA continues to maintain a close relationship with both mainstream and independent journalists. This is critical to establishing and controlling the narrative in each foreign "crisis." It is no accident that each mainstream media outlet – regardless whether left-wing or right-wing or any wing - has the exact same perspective on events like the Ukraine coup or the Venezuela attempted coup, or Hong Kong protests. Part of this is the US "deep state" or "national security state" and part of it is the increasing integration of US corporate entities into the US government. Major media outlets are owned by US corporations that also own weapons manufacturing companies and cannot be trusted to report on events objectively. Similarly, virtually every US mainstream media outlet employs "former" members of the US intelligence community to "explain" foreign events to their viewers.

When is the last time a credible non-interventionist or pro-peace analyst has been featured in any mainstream media outlet? As in Soviet times, any view at odds with Washington's "party line" is simply disappeared. When independent media outlets begin gaining traction and challenging the narrative, they are "de-platformed" on social media and even from their Internet service providers under the recommendations of US government-funded NGOs like the Atlantic Council or the German Marshal Fund.

Is not what is currently happening in Hong Kong a CIA manipulation targeting China in the context of the Trump administration's economic war?

There is plenty of evidence of US government involvement in the Hong Kong protests. That does not mean that every single body out in the street is in the pay of the CIA. That is the red herring argument of those who are determined that we never see the US government hand in unrest overseas. Or to ridicule as "conspiracy theorists" those who point out obvious US government involvement.

It is undeniable that the US government has been involved in grooming, training, and funding the anti-Beijing movement in Hong Kong for years. They don't even hide it: you can easily find on USAID and National Endowment for Democracy website the level of funding the US government provides these organizations and political parties. And when these party leaders come to Washington, they are received by the US Vice President, Secretary of State, Speaker of the House, and other high-ranking US government officials. Which foreign opposition movements that Washington does not support are given such treatment?

Imagine a movement dedicated to overthrowing the US political order that was funded by the Chinese, whose activists regularly went to Beijing for training in organization and mobilization, and whose leaders met with leading members of the Chinese Communist Party. How would such a movement in the United States be viewed by the US government? How would it be portrayed by the US mainstream media?

You mentioned a US-supported coup when you talked about Venezuela. In your opinion, does the US administration continue the same interventionist policy to destabilize Latin American countries?

Any Latin American government not in Washington's constellation has been and is targeted for destabilization and overthrow. We saw this with the 2009 coup in Honduras, whose architect was then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. We see it in Cuba. We see it in Venezuela. We saw it with Ecuador, where a government wary of US persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was "changed" in favor of a regime that handed Assange over to the authorities in exchange for a few billion dollars from the IMF. Do what Washington says and get paid; oppose Washington and get overthrown. That is the foreign policy of the US empire. And like the Soviet empire that preceded it, it is a policy doomed to failure.

Why in your opinion does the United States always need an enemy? Is not there a danger of world war when we see the multitude of US imperialist interventions around the world?
The US has ceased being a republic and has become a national security state. The US national security state enriches its elites – be they in the military-industrial complex, the think tanks, or the media – at the expense of middle class and working-class America. It does this by promoting an "enemy scenario" whereby the American people are made to believe that if they ever challenge the US military budget – larger than the next seven military budgets combined – they are not only putting themselves and their families at risk, but they are deeply unpatriotic and anti-American. The US national security state fought an 18-year "war on terror" which only seemed to generate more terrorists! Intervention in Iraq and Libya and Syria to "fight terrorism" resulted in more, not less, al-Qaeda and ISIS. It was not until Russia and Iran stood up in 2015 and began fighting these US-backed groups that there was a reduction in their power.

After the Russian and Iranian success in beating back the jihadist threat in Syria, the 2017 US national security strategy did an Orwellian about-face and abandoned the "war on terror" in favor of a declaration that our new enemies were again our old enemies: China and Russia. It is literally Orwell's 1984: "we are at war with Eastasia. We had always been at war with Eastasia."

What do you think about the North Korean and Iranian case, where the Trump administration lacks a clear vision and where some neoconservatives are pushing for a war?

There are few consistencies in President Trump's foreign policy. One emerging consistency, however, is that he seems genuinely reluctant to take the country into a bona fide war. He's happy with sending a few dozen Tomahawk missiles into the Syrian countryside, but when faced with an actual robust response to any US strike, he to this point has chosen de-escalation. This may be a function of his keen eye for politics rather than any philosophical or moral concerns, but it to this point seems thematic. The problem is that by surrounding himself with neoconservatives – and make no mistake his replacement for Bolton is at least as much a neocon as the Mustached One himself – the president is isolating himself from any inputs advising military constraint when facing crises overseas. That is why many of us were so much hoping that Bolton would be replaced with a Realist like Col. Douglas Macgregor. There is a big danger that the president will be cornered by a lack of non-war options to the next crisis simply because he gives no quarter to non-war voices in his administration.

When we consider the plight of activists and whistleblowers, such as Assange, Snowden, etc. can we still talk about freedom of speech and human rights? Shouldn't we mobilize more to support these activists and others around the world?

The plight of Snowden and Assange and all of the persecuted whistleblowers and truth-tellers is the plight of what is life of our liberty, freedom, and even Western civilization. When all dissent is quashed, imprisoned, tortured, we are left with only the Total State. The Total State, as we know from history, brooks no dissent because it can only maintain power by continuing the illusion that it alone is the source of truth. Thus any voice challenging the Total State, as the embodiment of truth, must on its face be a lie. Why would truth allow lies to undermine it? Why would any sane person oppose "the people" as represented in their Soviet government? Surely such a person would be insane and need of treatment rather than a citizen raising a legitimate question or differing opinion.

This is what we are facing in the US today. A Total State, where opposing views are de-platformed and disappeared. Where truth-tellers are jailed and tortured – pour servir d'avertissement aux autres (to serve as a warning to others).

What is your assessment of the Trump Presidency and what do you think of its foreign policy?

The Trump Presidency thus far has been an enormous disappointment. The president had the opportunity to name a top-notch foreign policy and national security team that would reflect and carry out his stated policies as a candidate – getting along with Russia, NATO skepticism, opposition to endless war, etc – but once in power he has again and again drawn from that same neoconservative cesspool that no matter who is elected always find its way to positions of power and influence. He did not chart a wise course in building a solid administration of professionals who agree with him – and there are plenty to choose from – and instead he actually hired an entire team of people who not only disagree with his stated positions, but they actually publicly ridicule them and work against them. It is unprecedented in my memory to see those who serve the president publicly undermining his stated positions, yet Bolton and Pompeo never hesitated or hesitate to do just that. This is an enormous missed opportunity for President Trump and for the United States.

You have been an advisor to Congressman Ron Paul and you are doing an excellent job as Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Can you explain to our readers what the missions of this institute are?

Our mission as a non-profit educational institution is to make the case for a non-interventionist foreign policy and the restoration of our civil liberties at home. We are the continuation of the Ron Paul liberty movement. To that end, we publish thousands of articles making the case for non-interventionism on our website, we broadcast a daily Ron Paul Liberty Report, and we hold conferences throughout the country bringing together a broad coalition of Americans – and non-Americans – to learn and promote peace and prosperity!

* * *

Daniel McAdams is executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-host of the "Ron Paul Liberty Report," a daily live broadcast. He served for 12 years on Capitol Hill as foreign affairs and national security advisor to former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. From 1993-1999 he worked as a journalist based in Budapest, Hungary, and traveled through the former communist bloc as a human rights monitor and election observer.

[Sep 30, 2019] Stephen Miller calls whistleblower a 'partisan hit job' in fiery interview

Highly recommended!
This is deep state operation, Russiagate II, pure and simple
Stephen Miller proved to be formidable debater. His jeremiad against the Deep State at 12:55 was brilliant. Former South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy says people have stopped sharing information with the House Intelligence Committee because Chair Adam Schiff is the most deeply partisan member who is "leaking like a sieve"
The problem with Pelosi bold move is that she does not have votes for impeachment, but the dirt uncovered might sink any Democrat changes for 2020
Notable quotes:
"... Stephen Miller is amazing at wrestling and smacking down this Democratic Operative Chris Wallace ..."
"... Wallace is a minion of the globalists. ..."
"... Stephen Miller is CORRECT -- there is no more integrity and confidence in government affairs when it can be turned into ammunition against the President of the United States. Chris Wallace really ought to work for CNN. ..."
"... Chris Wallace Incorrect. We have the Docs that expose the corruption on the part of the Biden. We have his legal team basically threatening the new prosectutor saying in lawyer speak "Hey you saw how we got the last prosecutor fired? I'd suggest you cooperate with us or you will get fired next" .450 pages from Biden's son legal team at Burisma, Ukrainian Embassy Official Docs and State Department Docs. ..."
"... Also last time I checked Donald Trump is the head of the executive branch he can direct anyone to go find anything, and I haven't seen one person show me where he can't. ..."
Sep 30, 2019 | www.youtube.com

john scott , 3 hours ago

This hit job is George Soros and Son and his Lawyers

We2 , 21 minutes ago

Wallace is one of the Deep State swamp creature plants that he is talking about!

YahshuaLovesMe , 8 seconds ago

this interviewer Chris Wallace is a subversive. so it seems to me. he is a saboteur.

Salvador , 46 seconds ago

Stephen Miller is amazing at wrestling and smacking down this Democratic Operative Chris Wallace

vermeea1 , 17 minutes ago

FOX is a part of the Oligarch Deep State.

Reverend Fry , 7 minutes ago

Wallace is a minion of the globalists.

YahshuaLovesMe , 14 seconds ago

Stephen Miller is a genius.

Flash , 5 minutes ago

Stephen Miller is CORRECT -- there is no more integrity and confidence in government affairs when it can be turned into ammunition against the President of the United States. Chris Wallace really ought to work for CNN.

Russ Hansen , 1 minute ago

Biden and the whistle blower hahaha they need to go to jail

Lloyd Noland , 6 minutes ago

Chris Wallace Incorrect. We have the Docs that expose the corruption on the part of the Biden. We have his legal team basically threatening the new prosectutor saying in lawyer speak "Hey you saw how we got the last prosecutor fired? I'd suggest you cooperate with us or you will get fired next" .450 pages from Biden's son legal team at Burisma, Ukrainian Embassy Official Docs and State Department Docs.

Wallace you sir you are a paritsan hack. Anyone can read the docs too thats whats sad. I'm only 70 pages in and its bad for the Biden's jailtime bad.

Also last time I checked Donald Trump is the head of the executive branch he can direct anyone to go find anything, and I haven't seen one person show me where he can't.

[Sep 30, 2019] Stephen Miller calls whistleblower a 'partisan hit job' in fiery interview

Highly recommended!
This is deep state operation, Russiagate II, pure and simple
Stephen Miller proved to be formidable debater. His jeremiad against the Deep State at 12:55 was brilliant. Former South Carolina Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy says people have stopped sharing information with the House Intelligence Committee because Chair Adam Schiff is the most deeply partisan member who is "leaking like a sieve"
The problem with Pelosi bold move is that she does not have votes for impeachment, but the dirt uncovered might sink any Democrat changes for 2020
Notable quotes:
"... Stephen Miller is amazing at wrestling and smacking down this Democratic Operative Chris Wallace ..."
"... Wallace is a minion of the globalists. ..."
"... Stephen Miller is CORRECT -- there is no more integrity and confidence in government affairs when it can be turned into ammunition against the President of the United States. Chris Wallace really ought to work for CNN. ..."
"... Chris Wallace Incorrect. We have the Docs that expose the corruption on the part of the Biden. We have his legal team basically threatening the new prosectutor saying in lawyer speak "Hey you saw how we got the last prosecutor fired? I'd suggest you cooperate with us or you will get fired next" .450 pages from Biden's son legal team at Burisma, Ukrainian Embassy Official Docs and State Department Docs. ..."
"... Also last time I checked Donald Trump is the head of the executive branch he can direct anyone to go find anything, and I haven't seen one person show me where he can't. ..."
Sep 30, 2019 | www.youtube.com

john scott , 3 hours ago

This hit job is George Soros and Son and his Lawyers

We2 , 21 minutes ago

Wallace is one of the Deep State swamp creature plants that he is talking about!

YahshuaLovesMe , 8 seconds ago

this interviewer Chris Wallace is a subversive. so it seems to me. he is a saboteur.

Salvador , 46 seconds ago

Stephen Miller is amazing at wrestling and smacking down this Democratic Operative Chris Wallace

vermeea1 , 17 minutes ago

FOX is a part of the Oligarch Deep State.

Reverend Fry , 7 minutes ago

Wallace is a minion of the globalists.

YahshuaLovesMe , 14 seconds ago

Stephen Miller is a genius.

Flash , 5 minutes ago

Stephen Miller is CORRECT -- there is no more integrity and confidence in government affairs when it can be turned into ammunition against the President of the United States. Chris Wallace really ought to work for CNN.

Russ Hansen , 1 minute ago

Biden and the whistle blower hahaha they need to go to jail

Lloyd Noland , 6 minutes ago

Chris Wallace Incorrect. We have the Docs that expose the corruption on the part of the Biden. We have his legal team basically threatening the new prosectutor saying in lawyer speak "Hey you saw how we got the last prosecutor fired? I'd suggest you cooperate with us or you will get fired next" .450 pages from Biden's son legal team at Burisma, Ukrainian Embassy Official Docs and State Department Docs.

Wallace you sir you are a paritsan hack. Anyone can read the docs too thats whats sad. I'm only 70 pages in and its bad for the Biden's jailtime bad.

Also last time I checked Donald Trump is the head of the executive branch he can direct anyone to go find anything, and I haven't seen one person show me where he can't.

[Sep 29, 2019] Want To Save The Environment De-Fund The Pentagon by Caitlin Johnstone

Sep 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Millions of people are uniting in demonstrations worldwide against our civilization's ecocidal march toward extinction, which makes me so happy to see. It's really encouraging to see so many young people burning with love for their planet and a hunger to reverse the damage that has been done to our ecosystem by the refusal of previous generations to turn away from our path of devastation. This must continue if we are to survive as a species.

The challenge now is the same perennial challenge which comes up every single time there is a massive and enthusiastic push from the public in a direction that is healthy: such movements always, without exception, become targeted for manipulation by establishment interests. I write all the time about how this has happened with the intrinsically healthy impulse of feminism; I just finished watching an MSNBC pundit proclaim that anyone who still supports Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren is a sexist. This corralling of healthy energy into the advancement of corrupt establishment interests happens with feminism, it happens with the healthy fight against racism and antisemitism, and of course it happens with environmentalism.

Of course it does. People get very emotional when you say this, even if you fully support environmentalism and don't have any objections to the overall scientific consensus about what's happening to our environment, but environmentalism is not destined to be the one and only popular movement which establishment interests don't move mountains to co-opt.

We know that our oligarchic empire will do literally anything, up to and including murdering a million Iraqis, to secure control over energy resources. We know this with absolute certainty. Therefore we can also know with certainty that they are working to ensure that when new energy systems are put in place, they are put in place in a way which allows the oligarchs to retain their power, and ideally to expand it, without losing their thrones to rival plutocrats, to governments, or (worst case scenario) to the rank-and-file public gaining control over their own energy. This agenda is on the table. It is happening.

The ruling elites have many advantages over us, but one of the greatest is the fact that they know exactly what they want and exactly where they're trying to push things, whereas we the general public, on average, do not. If we only had one positive anti-establishment direction to push in there'd be no stopping us, and as soon as we find one the oligarchs will be done. But in general and on average what we have is a few clear ideas about what we don't want and a great many vague, frequently contradictory ideas about what we do want. This lack of clarity in direction always leaves us highly susceptible to the influence of any well-funded narrative manager who steps forward to say "Oh yeah I know exactly where we're going! It's this way, follow me!"

Luckily for us, there's a very clear demand we can add into the mix in this new push for environmentalist reforms which runs directly counter to the interests of the empire that is trying to manipulate our healthy impulses: de-fund the Pentagon.

There is no single, unified entity that is a larger polluter than America's dishonestly labeled "Department of Defense". Its yearly carbon output alone dwarfs that of entire first-world nations like Sweden and Portugal ; if the US military were its own country it would rank 47th among emitters of greenhouse gasses, meaning it's a worse polluter than over 140 entire nations. That's completely separate from the pollution already produced by the US itself. None of the sociopathic corporations whose environmental impact is being rightly criticized today come anywhere remotely close to that of the Pentagon. They are going under the radar.

And that's just greenhouse gas emissions, which the Pentagon's poisonous effects on our environment are in no way limited to. As journalist Whitney Webb highlighted in an excellent article for Mintpress News about the wildly neglected subject of the US military's ecological toxicity:

"Producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined, the US Department of Defense has left its toxic legacy throughout the world in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuel, pesticides, defoliants like Agent Orange and lead, among others."

Webb documents how the US "has conducted more nuclear weapons tests than all other nations combined", how US military interventionism in Iraq "has resulted in the desertification of 90 percent of Iraqi territory , crippling the country's agricultural industry and forcing it to import more than 80 percent of its food," and how "US military bases, both domestic and foreign, consistently rank among some of the most polluted places in the world."

"While the US military's past environmental record suggests that its current policies are not sustainable, this has by no means dissuaded the US military from openly planning future contamination of the environment through misguided waste disposal efforts," Webb writes.

"Last November, the US Navy announced its plan to release 20,000 tons of environmental 'stressors,' including heavy metals and explosives, into the coastal waters of the US Pacific Northwest over the course of this year."

This is all a massive environmental burden to take on for a branch of the government which provides no other service to anyone beyond bullying the rest of the world into obedience , wouldn't you agree? So get rid of it.

Surely with all this talk about the huge, sweeping changes that are required to avert climate catastrophe we're not going to overlook the world's single worst polluter just because a few think tankers and their plutocratic sponsors believe it's important for the US-centralized power alliance to retain total global hegemony? If we're making huge, sweeping changes, the completely needless globe-spanning US war machine would be the obvious place to start.

That's something we can inject into the mainstream dialogue as this environmental movement grows, and the cool thing about it is that the establishment manipulators can't reject it or they'll expose themselves. It's something we can demand that they can't legitimately say no to. We can surf this clear, concrete, exciting and utterly indisputable idea on the surging momentum of these climate demonstrations, and the same healthy impulse to save our planet that these budding activists are now embodying will lift it right up and carry it to the top of mainstream awareness. No sane person will reject this, so if anyone pushes back against it to say "No, not that," they'll immediately spotlight the insane agendas they serve.

The US does not need any more military power than what other normal nations have: enough to defend its own easily defended shores from unprovoked attack. Anything beyond that, and certainly the hundreds of environmentally toxic military bases circling our planet, exists solely for the benefit of murderous dominating imperialists and sociopathic war profiteers. Demanding a reversal of US military expansionism as a part of the environmental movement is sane on its face and will benefit everyone, and it will also help highlight all unwholesome elements of empire loyalism.

* * *

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[Sep 28, 2019] Intel Community Quietly Scrapped Requirement For First-Hand Knowledge Before CIA 'Rumorblower' Relied On Hearsay

Notable quotes:
"... "The [Intelligence Community Inspector General] cannot transmit information via the ICPWA based on an employee's second-hand knowledge of wrongdoing," reads the prior version of the form, which contains the bolded heading: "FIRST-HAND INFORMATION REQUIRED," and "This includes information received from another person, such as when an employee informs you that he/she witnessed some type of wrongdoing." ..."
"... 15/ bottom line: it appears almost certain that, subsequent to the CIA operative "WB" complaint, the DNI introduced a brand new Urgent Disclosure Form which offered a previously unavailable alternative to report allegations with no personal knowledge https://t.co/l8foAAj2sC pic.twitter.com/WXcNdJn84u ..."
"... "The Ukraine call complaint against Trump is riddled not with evidence directly witnessed by the complainant, but with repeated references to what anonymous officials allegedly told the complainant ." ..."
"... Meanwhile, the complaint contains several false claims noted by Davis: ..."
"... While the complaint alleged that Trump demanded that Ukraine physically return multiple servers potentially related to ongoing investigations of foreign interference in the 2016 elections, the transcript of the call between Trump and Zelensky shows that such a request was never made . ..."
"... The complainant also falsely alleged that Trump told Zelensky that he should keep the current prosecutor general at the time, Yuriy Lutsenko, in his current position in the country. The transcript showed that exchange also did not happen . ..."
"... "I was told that a State Department official, Mr. T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, also listened in on the call," the complaint alleged. Shortly after the complaint was released, CBS News reported that Brechbuhl was not on the phone call . - The Federalist ..."
"... Let's understand what we are up against. The illusion of control has been sold to the public and a significant portion of the population has swallowed the hype. Back up and look at this from a distance for a moment. The only nation that the United States has defeated by itself in the last 100 years is Japan. And we did that with nukes. ..."
"... The illusion of control is fading fast. The best thing we can do as a people is come to the realization that most of the government promises will not be kept. We must prepare ourselves and our local communities for the chaos that is unfolding. If nothing else, start a victory garden program in your home town. ..."
"... The CIA has had a domestic agenda for decades. They wrapped up the Clinton crime syndicate in Mena Arkansas when it became the center for drug smuggling in Latin America. Not long after CIA captured the Clintons, the first assault weapon's ban was signed into law. ..."
"... The controlled political class and the controlled media have been on board with this agenda for years. We will get a ban either through an executive order or a bill passed by the politcal class. ..."
"... Don't forget the Bushes and 'Poppy' Bush being the CIA head. The Bushes and the Clintons were besties... Bush sent no one less than Bob Barr to Mena to straighten some **** out. ..."
"... Chairman Schiff can now, unilaterally, demand and instruct depositions from anyone, at any time, for any reason; and the HPSCI does not need to consider any possible scheduling conflicts for any of the targets, or have any republican members present therein. ..."
"... The intellegence community of the former administration runs this country. They are the deep state ..."
Sep 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

In the months leading up to a CIA whistleblower's hearsay complaint about President Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the US intelligence community quietly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers must provide first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings , according to The Federalist 's Sean Davis.

Then, on September 24 - days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public - a new version of the whistleblower complaint form revised in August, 2019 - the Disclosure of Urgent Concern" form - was uploaded and used by the CIA employee to file the complaint.

And while the public just learned about this a week ago, the whistleblower letter to House and Senate Intelligence Committee chairs Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Richard Burr (R-NC) was dated August 12 , the same month the form was updated .

The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump's July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only "heard about [wrongdoing] from others ."

The internal properties of the newly revised "Disclosure of Urgent Concern" form , which the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) requires to be submitted under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act (ICWPA), show that the document was uploaded on September 24, 2019, at 4:25 p.m., just days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public. The markings on the document state that it was revised in August 2019, but no specific date of revision is disclosed. - The Federalist

A previous version of the document provided by the ICIG and DNI until recently declared that whistleblower complaints must only contain first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoing - and made clear that hearsay, gossip or rumor would be rejected .

"The [Intelligence Community Inspector General] cannot transmit information via the ICPWA based on an employee's second-hand knowledge of wrongdoing," reads the prior version of the form, which contains the bolded heading: "FIRST-HAND INFORMATION REQUIRED," and "This includes information received from another person, such as when an employee informs you that he/she witnessed some type of wrongdoing."

" If you think that wrongdoing took place, but can provide nothing more than second-hand or unsubstantiated assertions, [the Intelligence Community Inspector General] will not be able to process the complaint or information for submission as an ICWPA," the form concludes.

Old form:

Via The Federalist

New form:

Via The Federalist

15/ bottom line: it appears almost certain that, subsequent to the CIA operative "WB" complaint, the DNI introduced a brand new Urgent Disclosure Form which offered a previously unavailable alternative to report allegations with no personal knowledge https://t.co/l8foAAj2sC pic.twitter.com/WXcNdJn84u

-- Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) September 27, 2019

And as The Federalist breaks down - "The Ukraine call complaint against Trump is riddled not with evidence directly witnessed by the complainant, but with repeated references to what anonymous officials allegedly told the complainant ."

For example:

"I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials," "officials have informed me," "officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me," "the White House officials who told me this information," "I was told by White House officials," "the officials I spoke with," "I was told that a State Department official," "I learned from multiple U.S. officials," "One White House official described this act," "Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me," "I also learned from multiple U.S. officials," "The U.S. officials characterized this meeting," "multiple U.S. officials told me," "I learned from U.S. officials," "I also learned from a U.S. official," "several U.S. officials told me," "I heard from multiple U.S. officials," and "multiple U.S. officials told me." - The Federalist

And if any doubt remains, the CIA employee told Schiff Burr (R-NC) in their August 12 letter; " I was not a direct witness to most of the events ," which is repeated in the actual complaint as: " I was not a witness to most of the events described... "

Meanwhile, the complaint contains several false claims noted by Davis:

While the complaint alleged that Trump demanded that Ukraine physically return multiple servers potentially related to ongoing investigations of foreign interference in the 2016 elections, the transcript of the call between Trump and Zelensky shows that such a request was never made .

The complainant also falsely alleged that Trump told Zelensky that he should keep the current prosecutor general at the time, Yuriy Lutsenko, in his current position in the country. The transcript showed that exchange also did not happen .

Additionally, the complaint falsely alleged that T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, a U.S. State Department official, was a party to the phone call between Trump and Zelensky.

"I was told that a State Department official, Mr. T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, also listened in on the call," the complaint alleged. Shortly after the complaint was released, CBS News reported that Brechbuhl was not on the phone call . - The Federalist

Following the complaint, the Justice Department (DOJ) and Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) deemed the submission to be statutorily deficient and therefore free from reporting requirements to Congress. Under mounting pressure, however, the White House declassified and released the complaint to Congress on Wednesday evening, hours after they released transcript of the underlying Trump-Zelensky phone call in question which refuted grandiose claims made in mainstream publications such as Trump pressuring Zelensky " about eight times ."

Read the rest of the report here .

Heartfully , 2 minutes ago link

its long past time to burn the intel community in an auto de fe and start over.

Cloud9.5 , 2 minutes ago link

Let's understand what we are up against. The illusion of control has been sold to the public and a significant portion of the population has swallowed the hype. Back up and look at this from a distance for a moment. The only nation that the United States has defeated by itself in the last 100 years is Japan. And we did that with nukes. Nukes detonated on American soil will be the end of the American government. The grid would go down and absolute chaos would unfold.

In both WW I and WW II our allies did most of the fighting. Korea was a stalemate. Vietnam was a loss. The Middle Eastern wars are a shambles. We have been fighting in Afghanistan for 18 years and still it cannot be conquered. Chicago cannot be controlled. Bloated pension plans are collapsing the big government strong holds in our mega cities. The preliminary efforts to disarm the public through registration have been dismal failures. The financial system is unsustainable. The media has been discredited. The government is perceived by millions to be illegitimate. The urban and rural populations have been pitted against each other and the country is devolving into irreconcilable factions.

The illusion of control is fading fast. The best thing we can do as a people is come to the realization that most of the government promises will not be kept. We must prepare ourselves and our local communities for the chaos that is unfolding. If nothing else, start a victory garden program in your home town.

GoldenDebt , 2 minutes ago link

Look at how much time and how many resources are sent scurrying about to investigate FAKE claims and LIES

So called 'whistleblowers' should be JAILED for lying or putting in fake claims - PERIOD.

Only honest whistle blowers need protection.

Insurrector , 21 minutes ago link

Endless investigations. The biggest scandal since Watergate. Coverups. An inability to govern. A possible constitutional crisis. That is what Humpty Drumpfy said about Hillary in the 2016 campaign election. Apparently Humpty looked in the mirror and saw Hillary:

Karma is a bitch Donniboi.

November 2 in Miami, FL

"If Hillary Clinton were to be elected, it would create an unprecedented and protracted constitutional crisis. Haven't we just been through a lot with the Clintons, right?"

November 2 in Orlando, FL

"Hillary is likely to be under investigation for many years, probably concluding in a criminal trial."

November 4 in Atkinson, NH

"She'll be under investigation for years. She'll be with trials. Our country, we have to get back to work."

November 4 in Wilmington, OH

"Hillary has engaged in a criminal massive enterprise and cover-ups like probably nobody ever seen before."
J J Pettigrew , 13 minutes ago link

One thing is certain.

There are people who know ALL...

and it is more to their benefit to be the keepers of that information and accrue the power from that knowledge than to reveal it and bring people to justice.

Carolynn55 , 16 seconds ago link

You do not get it. There is NO WAY HRC was ever going to win. First, the bible belt. They wouldn't vote for a lesbian husband beater who took an intern, married, that made 9k a year and promoted her to first consort at 6 figures. And she dissed them. Then she didn't even BOTHER to visit, NOT EVEN VISIT michigan who might have turned on denial regarding her lesbian affair with a married woman/ mother but couldn't get over being completely DISSED by those who pushed nafta and took their jobs..THIRD...she left men to be murdered, she and obama et al, biden, TURNED HELP TO THEM AROUND and left t hem after 600 emails from the ambassador, a democrat btw, begging for help...left them to be murdered... AFTER the seals recovered the weapons she sold to al queda. Where are the weapons btw? Then she tried to BLAME an innocent videographer, american for it all and then put gag orders like some two bit criminal on those who survived ..and w hy? because as all american now knows but for YOU she is the criminal. There is NO WAY she was ever going to win and you all better figure that out because it trickles down. Bill and his intern. She and hers. SICKENING.

Include in that her donors, that buck guy who murders black gay men, and others. Add to it the head of Bangladesh announcing to the world that HRC was trying to shake her down for money. Add to that the ukraine and russian oil. Add to the emails and server destruction.

And so much more. Bill no doubt voted for Trump.

His black eyes say it all.

Jackprong , 22 minutes ago link

The CIA just told the world how they gather INTEL: hearsay evidence! Now all the conspiracy theories about CIA crimes are laid out for the world. It was NOT Trump's fault. He was following the rules. Instead, the Democrat Congress was filled with TDS and had to set up POTUS for a take out that it couldn't accomplish with the Lapdog Socialist Media. Pick your conspiracy. JFK assassination: CIA TOTALLY RESPONSIBLE! Murder One: BOOK AGENCY, DANNO!

Government needs you to pay taxes , 19 minutes ago link

Not only is the CIA corrupt and partisan, it also is **** at its intended agenda. Which calls their usefulness (per legit tasks) into serious question. Honestly, I would disband the intelligence agencies, reduce intel headcount by 90%, and hire fresh people. Anyone above a middle rank in the new agency gets time-limited in their role.

American2 , 24 minutes ago link

The Senate should subpoena John Brennan, and ask him if he willfully undermined or orchestrated actions against President-elect Trump. Then subpoena John Clapper and ask him that too. If they lie, they're screwed. If they tell the truth they're fvcked.

BRlAN the PUNTER , 37 minutes ago link

Hillary used the deep state once again to not only get Biden rapped up in this Ukraine business but also make the president look like he did something improper which he didn't and has the legal authority to investigate Biden's cronyism. This is all for a reason, she is hitting the media circus next week to announce she is back in the running for the White House.

Lucky Guesst , 38 minutes ago link

It's a coup and they need put to death.

Cloud9.5 , 41 minutes ago link

The CIA has had a domestic agenda for decades. They wrapped up the Clinton crime syndicate in Mena Arkansas when it became the center for drug smuggling in Latin America. Not long after CIA captured the Clintons, the first assault weapon's ban was signed into law. Now that the coup has gone public again and captured the public discourse, Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) have launched another assault weapons ban that will ban all semi automatic fire arms in the United States.

The communists always disarm the public before they collapse the system. They must have a monopoly of force so that they can be sure their cohorts continue to eat while the rest of the population starves.

The controlled political class and the controlled media have been on board with this agenda for years. We will get a ban either through an executive order or a bill passed by the politcal class.

I hope you got your iconic Colt M-4 before they disappeared.

phillyla , 8 minutes ago link

Don't forget the Bushes and 'Poppy' Bush being the CIA head. The Bushes and the Clintons were besties... Bush sent no one less than Bob Barr to Mena to straighten some **** out.

Cloud9.5 , 26 seconds ago link

I haven't forgotten the Bush clan. The new world order was part of their plan.

iAmerican10 , 40 minutes ago link

The CIA's kids all go to the Roman Catholic schools around Langley, and Langley H.S.

you_do , 45 minutes ago link

Ah, so the IC has a process for scrapping those requirements outside of a democratic way of doing things? Or does a democratic process exist for these occasions?

So who voted for, who against? Who is clearly the opponent here and who understands the importance of the constitution that they took an oath on.....

chubbar , 34 minutes ago link

HPSCI Chairman Schiff can now, unilaterally, demand and instruct depositions from anyone, at any time, for any reason; and the HPSCI does not need to consider any possible scheduling conflicts for any of the targets, or have any republican members present therein.

The purpose for the rule changes was to position a new, and never before seen, impeachment process.

The House can investigate impeachment without any involvement whatsoever by the minority.

That's why no vote.

That's why the new phrase: "official impeachment inquiry".

IMPORTANT: Keep in mind that Speaker Pelosi selected former insider DOJ official Douglas Letter to be the Chief Legal Counsel for the House. That becomes important when we get to the actual impeachment part.

Pelosi Names Corrupt Former Deep State DOJ Embed as House General Counsel To Lead Resistance Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has selected corrupt former DOJ career embed, Douglas N Letter, as Chief Legal Counsel for the House of Representatives. Mr. Letter has agreed to come ou https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/12/28/pelosi-names-corrupt-former-deep-state-doj-embed-as-house-general-counsel-to-lead-resistance/

Everybody thinking that the House is on a two-week vacation is naive. This break, while doing depositions, is part of the impeachment schedule.

It has been planned that way going all the way back to the organization of the 116th congressional calendar.

The new whistleblower complaint form is part of this schedule. Nothing is accidental.

Intel Community Secretly Nixed Whistleblower Demand Of First-Hand Info Federal records show the intel community secretly revised a whistleblower complaint form to eliminate the requirement of first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/27/intel-community-secretly-gutted-requirement-of-first-hand-whistleblower-knowledge/

Pelosi has been working in the background carrying out this agenda for 10 months.... Republicans have been brutally naive to what has been going on. When Republicans return from their 2 week vacation, maybe they'll realize what's been going on while they were not watching. Everything was/is designed to keep events hidden from republicans in congress. And don't think Chuck Schumer has not been quietly working behind the scenes in the senate.

Meanwhile this today from AG Bill Barr: assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6432

So knowing now that Pelosi (and entire team) have had this impeachment plan in place since December 2018 (per rules). What is the likelihood of a Senate plan since a same/similar timeframe? Now, all that said, there is an optimistic possibility also present. Assume Trump and/or Barr are aware of this Pelosi impeachment scheme. Perhaps that explains their delays in leveraging the declassification material.

ie. Saving biggest weapon(s) for defense of office.

If that ain't it.... well, FUBAR !

/END

KarlGDenninger , 46 minutes ago link

If trump is impeached and they try to remove him from office over this ******** while the democrats pillage foreign nations using taxpayer dollars than trump should tell his supporters to head to Washington...loaded. This is a coup and nothing more

KarlGDenninger , 49 minutes ago link

The media is completely complacent in this...probably under blackmail or bribery. The intellegence community of the former administration runs this country. They are the deep state

Cloud9.5 , 36 minutes ago link

The media is complicit in the coup. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

phillyla , 8 minutes ago link

Operation Mockingbird

Thom Paine , 51 minutes ago link

The game is now known. The House will vote if and when they have been advised enough GOP Senators have been 'persuaded' to vote for Impeachment.

Deep State operatives have been active in 'securing' targeted Republican Senators.

Beware - get your house in order to move quickly when the real **** hits the fan.

sgorem , 49 minutes ago link

"there will be blood in the streets".................

Moe Howard , 12 minutes ago link

"as I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'."

chubbar , 50 minutes ago link

Anyone who doesn't think this is a well planned COUP on the president of the US should read the new rule changes that Nancy Pelosi has put into effect in the house!!!!!

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1177758757612339200.html

This is unfucking real! Why doesn't the public know about this ********???

HPSCI Chairman Schiff can now, unilaterally, demand and instruct depositions from anyone, at any time, for any reason; and the HPSCI does not need to consider any possible scheduling conflicts for any of the targets, or have any republican members present therein.

The purpose for the rule changes was to position a new, and never before seen, impeachment process.

The House can investigate impeachment without any involvement whatsoever by the minority.

That's why no vote.

That's why the new phrase: "official impeachment inquiry".

IMPORTANT: Keep in mind that Speaker Pelosi selected former insider DOJ official Douglas Letter to be the Chief Legal Counsel for the House. That becomes important when we get to the actual impeachment part.

Pelosi Names Corrupt Former Deep State DOJ Embed as House General Counsel To Lead Resistance Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has selected corrupt former DOJ career embed, Douglas N Letter, as Chief Legal Counsel for the House of Representatives. Mr. Letter has agreed to come ou https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/12/28/pelosi-names-corrupt-former-deep-state-doj-embed-as-house-general-counsel-to-lead-resistance/

Everybody thinking that the House is on a two-week vacation is naive. This break, while doing depositions, is part of the impeachment schedule.

It has been planned that way going all the way back to the organization of the 116th congressional calendar.

The new whistleblower complaint form is part of this schedule. Nothing is accidental.

Intel Community Secretly Nixed Whistleblower Demand Of First-Hand Info Federal records show the intel community secretly revised a whistleblower complaint form to eliminate the requirement of first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/27/intel-community-secretly-gutted-requirement-of-first-hand-whistleblower-knowledge/

Pelosi has been working in the background carrying out this agenda for 10 months.... Republicans have been brutally naive to what has been going on.

When Republicans return from their 2 week vacation, maybe they'll realize what's been going on while they were not watching.

Everything was/is designed to keep events hidden from republicans in congress.

And don't think Chuck Schumer has not been quietly working behind the scenes in the senate.

Meanwhile this today from AG Bill Barr:

assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6432

So knowing now that Pelosi (and entire team) have had this impeachment plan in place since December 2018 (per rules).

What is the likelihood of a Senate plan since a same/similar timeframe?

Now, all that said, there is an optimistic possibility also present. Assume Trump and/or Barr are aware of this Pelosi impeachment scheme. Perhaps that explains their delays in leveraging the declassification material.

ie. Saving biggest weapon(s) for defense of office.

If that ain't it.... well, FUBAR !

/END

dark pools of soros , 15 minutes ago link

great post - deep state never sleeps

[Sep 28, 2019] Brennan fingerprints in this coup attempt

Notable quotes:
"... While I have no opinion on whether or not a complaint could be based on hearsay, I can say that this "intelligence activity whistleblower" complaint is completely improper and should have been rejected by the IG. ..."
"... Any unbiased reading of the statute shows that the whistleblowing must concern either a person or activity that is under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence. One cannot use this statute to whistleblow to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, a subordinate official of the DNI, on anything that the DNI has no authority over. ..."
"... Simply put, there is nothing in the statute that allows an "intelligence activity whistleblower" complaint to be made concerning the president or his phone calls. Such matters are not supervised by the DNI and are outside the jurisdiction of this statute. ..."
"... Taking off my lawyer hat, my personal opinion is that this improper whistleblower complaint was crafted by one or more NatSec employees, in coordination with allies in Congress, for the sole purpose of starting impeachment proceedings. I look at this as nothing less that NatSec coup attempt. ..."
Sep 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

LA Sox Fan , 27 September 2019 at 11:17 AM

I have been an attorney for over 20-years. So when I first read of the alleged whistleblower complaint, I immediately looked at the statute allowing such complaints, 50 USC sec. 3033. Read it for yourself if interested.

While I have no opinion on whether or not a complaint could be based on hearsay, I can say that this "intelligence activity whistleblower" complaint is completely improper and should have been rejected by the IG.

Any unbiased reading of the statute shows that the whistleblowing must concern either a person or activity that is under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence. One cannot use this statute to whistleblow to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, a subordinate official of the DNI, on anything that the DNI has no authority over.

Simply put, there is nothing in the statute that allows an "intelligence activity whistleblower" complaint to be made concerning the president or his phone calls. Such matters are not supervised by the DNI and are outside the jurisdiction of this statute.

Same as a "whistleblower" complaint that the US Postal Service is slow delivering my mail or that there is no toilet tissue in the Yellowstone National Park men's room is not an activity supervised supervised by the DNI and is not the proper subject of an "intelligence activity whistleblower" complaint, for these same reasons a complaint about the president or his phone calls is also not the proper subject of such a complaint. This complaint should have been rejected by an honest and competent IG.

Taking off my lawyer hat, my personal opinion is that this improper whistleblower complaint was crafted by one or more NatSec employees, in coordination with allies in Congress, for the sole purpose of starting impeachment proceedings. I look at this as nothing less that NatSec coup attempt.

[Sep 28, 2019] Breennan faction stikes Trump again: It appears that the whole impeachment has been orchestrated by the CIA. The whistleblower is CIA.

Notable quotes:
"... Now, when it appears that Trump has not been sufficiently humbled by Russiagate, and actually has the gall to pursue the source of the debunked allegations, the CIA is apparently NOT happy. ..."
"... And when the CIA says to Pelosi, "Jump!", Pelosi says, "How high?" ..."
"... What will be interesting is to see how much influence the CIA has over Republican Senators, who, in an impeachment vote, could be caught between the wishes of their base, and the wishes of the intelligence community. Will this be the first color revolution on US soil? ..."
"... The president of Ukraine and Ukraine overall are just playing cards in the US politics in the case of the impeachment process. The Democratic Party started playing this card after its hopes to impeach Donald Trump using the Russiagate scandal failed after the Mueller investigation did not prove Trump collusion with the Russian government and a conspiracy theory that Trump is a Russian agent was also debunked. The whistleblower report about the call between Volydmyr Zelensky and Trump was used to initiate impeachment proceedings even before the transcript of this call was made public. ..."
"... The declassified transcript of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky demonstrates that Ukraine is still a US client state, like it became after the Maidan under Obama presidency when Biden was in charge or relations with Ukraine. Trump suggests Zelensky what to do, in particular, concerning the investigation of his opponent in the US presidential elections. Zelensky tries to please and flatter Trump numerous times and accepts Trump's suggestion to reopen the investigation involving Biden's son company in Ukraine. Like Bill Clinton, Trump can be impeached in the House of Representatives but unlikely in the Senate. ..."
Sep 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

JohnH , Sep 27 2019 2:39 utc | 117

It appears that the whole impeachment has been orchestrated by the CIA. The whistleblower is CIA.

Meanwhile, Pelosi served many years on the House Intelligence Committee, an appointment that certainly could not have hurt her ascent to Speaker. Indeed, I don't recall Pelosi ever questioning anything the CIA did not even torture. Her only complaint ever was that they didn't keep her sufficiently informed about torture.

Now, when it appears that Trump has not been sufficiently humbled by Russiagate, and actually has the gall to pursue the source of the debunked allegations, the CIA is apparently NOT happy.

And when the CIA says to Pelosi, "Jump!", Pelosi says, "How high?"

What will be interesting is to see how much influence the CIA has over Republican Senators, who, in an impeachment vote, could be caught between the wishes of their base, and the wishes of the intelligence community. Will this be the first color revolution on US soil?

Don Bacon , Sep 27 2019 4:12 utc | 120

It looks like we will get to meet the whistleblower.
from The Hill:
The House Intelligence Committee is working with the whistleblower's lawyers and Maguire to allow the whistleblower to speak before the committee. [DNI] Maguire assured lawmakers during the lengthy hearing that the individual would be able to testify "fully and freely."
"I was pleased that the director committed to having the whistleblower come in as soon as the clearance issues are resolved for the whistleblower's counsel," Schiff told reporters after the hearing. . . here
jayc , Sep 27 2019 4:18 utc | 121
If the "whistleblower" was simply reporting hearsay, how can he/she be described as a whistleblower?

I can't believe how, after Russiagate, this story has managed to gain any traction whatsoever. The college educated public in America is probably the least sophisticated on the planet.

Peter AU 1 , Sep 26 2019 20:20 utc | 66
karlof1

Another interesting aspect is this. Whistle blower gives evidence to Trump appointed intel honcho, who forwards evidence to higher Trump appointed intel honcho, who then takes evidence to Trump appointed presidential legal advisor for clearance.

Higher Trump intel honcho then waits until phone call transcript is made public before sending whistle blower evidence to senate intel circus.

So either massive conspiracy by those around Trump to take him down with very week ammo, or option b - those involved in RussiaGate being set up for massive fall.

Peter AU 1 , Sep 27 2019 7:22 utc | 131
Looks like the current drama from the land of drama queens has been set up with an open ending.

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/463274-five-takeaways-from-trump-whistleblower-hearing
"Democrats seized on the declassified whistleblower complaint released right before the hearing
as further evidence of what they see as an impeachable offense by Trump.
They highlighted how the complaint alleges that White House officials tried to restrict access
to records of Trump's call with Zelensky, including an allegation that officials removed the
transcript from the computer system where it would typically be stored to conceal its existence."

So they gotta prove Trump trump possibly removed a possibly non existent possibly 'truthful'
record of the call.

I guess they will drag this out as long as Russiagate.

Better add a few more zzz's A User.

Procopius , Sep 27 2019 7:39 utc | 132

I think the point the centrist Dems are going to stumble over is the assertion that Trump "tried to manipulate
the president of a foreign country" to investigate a possible political opponent "in order to fabricate material
to be used against him in the 2020 election." If Zelensky says the call was "normal," then the alleged manipula-
tion was normal diplomatic usage. More interesting is the problem of Trump's motivation. This is reading minds.
Many criminal charges require proving mens rea, the state of mind or intention of the accused. If you can't prove
beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused intended to do wrong, then the verdict must be "not guilty." The summary
of the call does not show Trump saying anything like that. He was requesting an investigation because we have heard
things that suggest Hunter Biden did wrong. Former Prosecutor Shokin suspended the investigation into Burisma, but
that doesn't mean there was no wrongdoing there. It may just mean he knew Burisma was protected.

Posted by: Procopius | Sep 27 2019 7:39 utc | 132

Arioch , Sep 27 2019 7:59 utc | 135
The president of Ukraine and Ukraine overall are just playing cards in the US politics in the case of the impeachment process. The Democratic Party started playing this card after its hopes to impeach Donald Trump using the Russiagate scandal failed after the Mueller investigation did not prove Trump collusion with the Russian government and a conspiracy theory that Trump is a Russian agent was also debunked. The whistleblower report about the call between Volydmyr Zelensky and Trump was used to initiate impeachment proceedings even before the transcript of this call was made public.

The declassified transcript of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky demonstrates that Ukraine is still a US client state, like it became after the Maidan under Obama presidency when Biden was in charge or relations with Ukraine. Trump suggests Zelensky what to do, in particular, concerning the investigation of his opponent in the US presidential elections. Zelensky tries to please and flatter Trump numerous times and accepts Trump's suggestion to reopen the investigation involving Biden's son company in Ukraine. Like Bill Clinton, Trump can be impeached in the House of Representatives but unlikely in the Senate.

Link

[fixed malformed link - b]

james , Sep 27 2019 8:10 utc | 139
@151 joe... the usa is in perpetual war.. finally it looks it brought the permanent state of war onto itself... when they aren't murdering innocents with their NRA mindset in the next god forsaken usa place, they are murdering others in faraway countries.. now, it looks like the usa is ready to murder there own in a bigger way... it couldn't happen to a more depraved group of people based on their actions on the world stage the past 70 odd years beginning in korea... i hope the wheels come right off the usa and that they reep what they have sown on the world stage..

[Sep 28, 2019] Impeachment is a essentially Russiagate-II. the second coup attempt. Russiagate-I did not work.

Notable quotes:
"... As Andrew Higgins writes today: "Ukraine's allure for American carpetbaggers, political consultants and adventurers has put it at the center of not just one but now two presidential elections in the United States and a host of second-tier scandals... ..."
"... For Democrats and Republicans alike, Ukraine is a place where dirt on opponents can be fabricated and distributed, free from the prying eyes of fact checkers. Biden swears that any corruption on his part has been firmly debunked by Ukrainians who are part of a regime he brought into existence and whose careers he helps determine. Right! ..."
"... Trump is trying to get to the bottom of that story by making it clear that the success of the regime now depends on him. He wants reliable source information to create a narrative about how Democrats tried to delegitimize him. Good Luck! ..."
"... Meanwhile, Democrats and top figures in the intelligence services are pushing back, trying to preserve their original, Trump-Putin conspiracy narrative, created in part from dubious Ukrainian sources. ..."
"... So now the world is going to be subjected to these dueling narratives, neither of which can ever be verified or confirmed because they originated in the shadowy world of the Ukraine. ..."
"... Ulimately, it will be up to Congress and the American people to decide which narrative they prefer: Trump's or the one pushed by Biden, Team Pelosi and their allies in the intelligence services. ..."
"... Imagine a US president [running the world hegemon with zero moral power] attempting to see just how crooked the thugs in Ukraine are since the DNC cabal wants to war on Russia in Donbass. ..."
"... The truth is that establishment democrats re-opened a tremendous can of worms starting from Nulandgate (after Victoria Nuland famous "F*ck EU" phone call https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL_GShyGv3o ). ..."
"... And there is not a single doubt that actions of Obama administration in Nulandgate (including Biden's and Brennan's) and later were simply criminal. As in Nuremberg definition of war crimes. ..."
"... Crime-wise Trump in Ukraine looks like a clueless amateur pocket picker. Previous members of Obama administration were real Mafiosi with a lot of blood on their hands. ..."
"... The democrats are painting a picture aimed at handcuffing any attempt to determine if the regime in Kyiv [Saudi ARAMCO, UAE,....]is worth tilting world war over. ..."
"... The Biden oligarch links go back to before the Obama neocon [Nuland] coup in 2014 when Biden was VP. ..."
Sep 28, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , September 28, 2019 at 03:44 PM

NYT: ... the United States Embassy in Kiev (Ukraine) is still without an ambassador after the administration yanked home Marie L. Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who was targeted by the president and Mr. Giuliani for ostensibly being insufficiently loyal, a charge heatedly disputed by her colleagues. ...
ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , September 28, 2019 at 07:03 PM
She probably wanted more arms so Kyiv can do Donbass. Look for her connection to Nuland and the Kagan's.
JohnH -> Fred C. Dobbs... , September 28, 2019 at 06:17 PM
Ukraine is the place where US politicians, like the bear in Winne the Pooh, get their heads caught in the honey jar.

As Andrew Higgins writes today: "Ukraine's allure for American carpetbaggers, political consultants and adventurers has put it at the center of not just one but now two presidential elections in the United States and a host of second-tier scandals...

Caught between the clashing geopolitical ambitions of Russia and the West, Ukraine has for years had to balance competing outside interests and worked hard to cultivate all sides, and also rival groups on the same side -- no matter how incompatible their agendas -- with offers of money, favors and prospects for career advancement."

For Democrats and Republicans alike, Ukraine is a place where dirt on opponents can be fabricated and distributed, free from the prying eyes of fact checkers. Biden swears that any corruption on his part has been firmly debunked by Ukrainians who are part of a regime he brought into existence and whose careers he helps determine. Right!

All we know for certain is, like Mark Twain once said, "An honest politician is somebody who, when he is bought, stays bought." IMO, this is how we need to interpret any story that is sourced from the Ukraine.

Trump is trying to get to the bottom of that story by making it clear that the success of the regime now depends on him. He wants reliable source information to create a narrative about how Democrats tried to delegitimize him. Good Luck!

Meanwhile, Democrats and top figures in the intelligence services are pushing back, trying to preserve their original, Trump-Putin conspiracy narrative, created in part from dubious Ukrainian sources.

So now the world is going to be subjected to these dueling narratives, neither of which can ever be verified or confirmed because they originated in the shadowy world of the Ukraine.

Ulimately, it will be up to Congress and the American people to decide which narrative they prefer: Trump's or the one pushed by Biden, Team Pelosi and their allies in the intelligence services.

Personally, I hope they both embarrass themselves to the point where we can finally be rid of both sides.

ilsm -> JohnH... , September 28, 2019 at 07:01 PM
Impeachment is a tactic of the [DNC cabal] coup attempt. Russia gate did not work.

The "intelligence" community [the swamp] is at odds with Trump, the phony CIA "whistleblower" is a deep swamp tool.

Imagine a US president [running the world hegemon with zero moral power] attempting to see just how crooked the thugs in Ukraine are since the DNC cabal wants to war on Russia in Donbass.

Suppose someone said "supporting Zelenskiy's/Thieu's corrupt regime would drag the US through the mud"+. There would not be a Vietnam wall on the Mall.

+Like Marshall observed when he advised the US Chiang should not be imposed on China any longer.

likbez -> JohnH... , September 28, 2019 at 07:26 PM
"Ukraine is the place where US politicians, like the bear in Winne the Pooh, get their heads caught in the honey jar. "

Of course, one would only welcome that Pelosi just dived head on into Ukrainian mud (Michelle Obama might not happy, though).

Trump is serious opponent in mud wrestling for Pelosi (5'5, 131 pound) and not only because he is 6'2, 236 pounds.

The truth is that establishment democrats re-opened a tremendous can of worms starting from Nulandgate (after Victoria Nuland famous "F*ck EU" phone call https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL_GShyGv3o ).

And there is not a single doubt that actions of Obama administration in Nulandgate (including Biden's and Brennan's) and later were simply criminal. As in Nuremberg definition of war crimes.

If Trump wants, not a single member of Obama administration can emerge unscathed from this. He can tarnish Obama legacy forever in a way Iraq war and Abu Ghraib tarnished forever Bush II administration.

He also can sink Brennan by asking Zelensky to open archives with protocols of talks with Ukrainian officials during Brennan's visits to Kiev.

Crime-wise Trump in Ukraine looks like a clueless amateur pocket picker. Previous members of Obama administration were real Mafiosi with a lot of blood on their hands.

ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , September 28, 2019 at 07:20 PM
Outraged, I tell you. Outraged!!

Seems that the opposition press wants us mob outrage to make Trump foreign policy for him.

The democrats are painting a picture aimed at handcuffing any attempt to determine if the regime in Kyiv [Saudi ARAMCO, UAE,....]is worth tilting world war over.

A novel approach while Trump at odds with the neocon currents in State, CIA and FBI.

It takes a lot more than some good at grammar NYTimes writer to substantiate claims that allegations against the former VP and his son's cushy Ukraine oligarch job are unsubstantiated. That is work for prosecutors and defense attorneys.

The Biden oligarch links go back to before the Obama neocon [Nuland] coup in 2014 when Biden was VP.

Out of context is no reason to make a conclusion

Why I support impeachment. The evidence will be put out and the solicitors will argue on complete evidentiary lines. It is getting to be anything Trump wants to do they find some phony reason to be outraged.

I did a 20 minute telephone poll today. They called me! You can count on one respondent "strongly opposed" to impeachment for trying to get to the bottom of Biden family corruption.

likbez -> ilsm... , September 28, 2019 at 07:38 PM
ilsm,

Good points.

"A novel approach while Trump at odds with the neocon currents in State, CIA and FBI."

No. Nothing new here. This is just Russiagate II. Same actors, same methods. But it is unclear to me why they even bothered? Trump folded long ago, In April 2017 to be exact. And before impeachment, his chances in 2020 were far from certain. Especially against Warren.

Also Biden should not even be discussed anymore. At this point he is history.

Warren now is the official frontrunner. Which is probably the only good thing emerging out of this CIA-inspired mess.

[Sep 28, 2019] When one digs deeper into the forces Gabbard's attacking, she's the most patriotic one of the entire bunch, including the Rs

Sep 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Sep 26 2019 19:23 utc | 50

bevin @41--

As I reported on the previous thread, Sanders endorsed the impeachment proceedings in a tweet I linked to and cited. Gabbard is apparently the only D-Party candidate that said this decision is a mistake. This article about her stance is actually balanced. Citing her recent interview by FOXNews :

"'I have been consistent in saying that I believe that impeachment in this juncture would be terribly divisive for our country at a time when we are already extremely divided,' Gabbard explained. 'Hyper-partisanship is one of the things that's driving our country apart.'

"'I think it's important to defeat Donald Trump. That's why I'm running for president, but I think it's the American people who need to make their voices heard, making that decision,' she said.

"Regardless of how you feel about Gabbard, you have to give her credit on this front. America is extremely divided today and politicians in Washington play into that. The impeachment saga is a prime example of their role in this division ." [My Emphasis]

When one digs deeper into the forces Gabbard's attacking, she's the most patriotic one of the entire bunch, including the Rs. I haven't looked at her election websites recently, but from what I see of her campaign appearances, her and Sanders seem to be sharing each other's policy proposals, although they both choose to place more emphasis on some than others. For Gabbard, its the wonton waste and corruption of the Empire that keeps good things from being done for all citizens at home, whereas Sanders basically inverts the two.

[Sep 28, 2019] Pretending that Russia is some default source of evil inventions is the true intellectual dishonesty

Sep 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

james , Sep 26 2019 20:04 utc | 59

@48 piotr.. "Pretending that Russia is some source of evil inventions is the true intellectual dishonesty." exactly... i'm thinking the amount of ignorance that the western MSM has happily shed on this has won over a number of otherwise intelligent people... it is friggin' shocking... many folks like Kool-Aid it seems, including otherwise intelligent people...

[Sep 27, 2019] Christopher Steele's connection to Ukraine

Notable quotes:
"... "During the Ukraine cries in 2014-15, Chris Steele had a number of commercial clients who were asking him for reports on what was going on in Russia, what was going on in Ukraine, what was going on between them." --Victoria Nuland. ..."
"... More information on Hunter Biden. He served on the President's Advisory Council of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up after Congress banned the CIA from pursuing regime change. A lot of the coordination and assistance for the Ukraine coup probably passed through that 'non-profit.' Joe Biden was Obama's point person, and Hunter Biden was probably Joe's eyes, ears, and gopher at NDI. ..."
"... As a side benefit, Hunter Biden would have been in an excellent position, both from his work at NDI and at Burisma, to meet the movers and shakers in post-coup Ukraine and coordinate disinformation campaigns as needed. The Ukrainians would have been eager to help as the solvency of the country depended on US loans. ..."
Sep 27, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

JohnH -> JohnH... , September 26, 2019 at 01:02 PM

Christopher Steele's connection to Ukraine:

"During the Ukraine cries in 2014-15, Chris Steele had a number of commercial clients who were asking him for reports on what was going on in Russia, what was going on in Ukraine, what was going on between them." --Victoria Nuland.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/02/04/former_assistant_secretary_of_state_victoria_nuland_christopher_steele_also_shared_information_with_state_department.html

By commercial clients, you should read oligarchs who were still in business because they had sworn fealty to the US owned regime.

JohnH -> JohnH... , September 26, 2019 at 07:09 PM
More information on Hunter Biden. He served on the President's Advisory Council of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up after Congress banned the CIA from pursuing regime change. A lot of the coordination and assistance for the Ukraine coup probably passed through that 'non-profit.' Joe Biden was Obama's point person, and Hunter Biden was probably Joe's eyes, ears, and gopher at NDI.

Immediately after the coup, Hunter was appointed to the board of the strategically critical Burisma energy company, Ukraine's largest producer of natural gas. From what I have seen, the US likes to have its assets sit on the Board of strategically critically energy companies.

And is Ukraine ever strategically important!!! Apart from the fact the Russian pipelines pass through the country, "Ukraine has an estimated 42 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of technically recoverable shale gas reserves, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), ranking its deposits as the fourth largest in Europe."
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ukraine_and_fracking

Again, Hunter Biden's appointment would not have been by chance. He would have been put there to once again to be Joe Biden's eyes, ears, and gopher.

As a side benefit, Hunter Biden would have been in an excellent position, both from his work at NDI and at Burisma, to meet the movers and shakers in post-coup Ukraine and coordinate disinformation campaigns as needed. The Ukrainians would have been eager to help as the solvency of the country depended on US loans.

So are we about to witness the first color revolution on US soil? Could be

[Sep 27, 2019] Sanders endorsed the impeachment proceedings

Sanders is spend force in any case. His endorsement does not matter much. But for Warren this is a blunder. Tulsi is the only one out of this troika who proved to be capable politician.
Sep 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
karlof1 , Sep 26 2019 19:23 utc | 51
bevin @41--

As I reported on the previous thread, Sanders endorsed the impeachment proceedings in a tweet I linked to and cited. Gabbard is apparently the only D-Party candidate that said this decision is a mistake. This article about her stance is actually balanced. Citing her recent interview by FOXNews :

"'I have been consistent in saying that I believe that impeachment in this juncture would be terribly divisive for our country at a time when we are already extremely divided,' Gabbard explained. 'Hyper-partisanship is one of the things that's driving our country apart.'

"'I think it's important to defeat Donald Trump. That's why I'm running for president, but I think it's the American people who need to make their voices heard, making that decision,' she said.

"Regardless of how you feel about Gabbard, you have to give her credit on this front. America is extremely divided today and politicians in Washington play into that. The impeachment saga is a prime example of their role in this division ." [My Emphasis]

When one digs deeper into the forces Gabbard's attacking, she's the most patriotic one of the entire bunch, including the Rs. I haven't looked at her election websites recently, but from what I see of her campaign appearances, her and Sanders seem to be sharing each other's policy proposals, although they both choose to place more emphasis on some than others. For Gabbard, its the wonton waste and corruption of the Empire that keeps good things from being done for all citizens at home, whereas Sanders basically inverts the two.

[Sep 26, 2019] Did Nancy Pelosi Just Make One Of The Biggest Political Mistakes In History

Highly recommended!
The key question here is: Is Nancy Pelosi a CIA controlled politician who followed Breenan instruction to open the second stage of the color revolution against Trump. Her long service in House Intelligence Committee suggest that this is a possibility.
Sep 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Nancy Pelosi just took the biggest gamble of her entire political career. If she is ultimately successful, she will be remembered as the woman that removed Donald Trump from the White House, and Democrats will treat her like a hero for the rest of her life. But if she fails and Trump wins in 2020, the backlash that she created when she tried to impeach Trump is likely to be blamed, and she could potentially lose her leadership role in the House. Of course at that point she probably wouldn't want to remain in the House much longer, and she would be hated by many Democrats for the rest of her life for subjecting them to four more years of Trump. So it really is all on the line for Nancy Pelosi, and she never should have gone down this road if she wasn't absolutely certain that she could deliver.

And at this point, most Americans don't want impeachment proceedings to happen. For example, just check out what a Politico/Morning Consult poll just found

In the poll -- conducted Friday through Sunday, as stories circled about Trump allegedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the Democratic candidates hoping to oust him -- 36 percent of respondents said they believe Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Other surveys have come up with similar results , but there is one survey out there that indicates that most Americans would actually support impeachment proceedings if the evidence shows that "Trump did use his presidential power to force a foreign leader to help take down a political rival"

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday the opening of a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump in response to the Ukraine controversy. If it's found that Trump did use his presidential power to force a foreign leader to help take down a political rival, 55 percent of U.S. adults said they would support removing him from office, according to a recent YouGov survey.

Forty-four percent of those polled said they'd "strongly support" removing Trump if the allegations are true, while another 11 percent said they'd "somewhat support" it.

But as it stands right now, on the national level this is a very unpopular decision by Pelosi, and it could potentially hurt Democrats among key blocs of voters

Worse yet, impeachment isn't selling where Democrats made their best gains in the midterms. A majority of suburban respondents oppose starting the impeachment process (35 percent/50 percent), with a wider gap among rural respondents (27/59), while urban voters are more ambivalent than one might guess (47/35). Impeachment trails by double digits in the South (33/53), Midwest, (36/48), and even in the Democrat-friendly Northeast (37/48).

Another reason why this is potentially a giant mistake by Nancy Pelosi is the fact that all of this focus on Ukraine is almost certainly going to damage one of the frontrunners for the Democratic nomination.

All of a sudden, everyone is talking about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and Ukraine. A lot of voters are going to look into what happened, and they are not going to be pleased. And this comes at a time when Elizabeth Warren is surging in the polls, and real votes will start to be cast in just a few months.

Up until recently, the Biden campaign had successfully kept the focus off Hunter Biden and Ukraine , and Joe was widely considered to be the heavy favorite to win the nomination.

But now everything could change thanks to Nancy Pelosi.

And what if this push toward impeachment is not successful? Trump's base is going to be extremely fired up by all of the political drama over the next several months, and if Trump survives it is going to be a huge boost for his campaign.

All of the recent polls indicated that a Democrat was likely to win in 2020, and there was a very good chance that the Democrats were going to take the Senate too, but now this could dramatically shift public opinion and change everything.

Nancy Pelosi is rolling the dice, and if she fails it is going to be absolutely disastrous for the Democratic Party. The following is how Matthew Walther summarized the situation that she is facing

Pelosi knows this will not be popular. She knows more than that. She knows that it will be a disaster for the Democratic Party, that it will inflame the president's base and inspire even his most lukewarm supporters with a sense of outrage. She knows that in states like Michigan, upon which her party's chances in 2020 will depend, the question of impeachment does not poll well. She knows, further, that Joe Biden will not be able to spend the next 14 or so months refusing to answer questions about the activities of his son, Hunter, in Ukraine, and that increased scrutiny of the vice president's record in office will not rebound to his credit. She and her fellow Democratic leaders had better hope that someone like Elizabeth Warren manages to steal the nomination away from him before this defines his candidacy the way that Hillary Clinton's emails and paid speechmaking did during and after the 2016 primaries.

And it isn't going to be easy for Pelosi to be successful, because she is going to need 67 votes in the Senate to convict Trump, and right now Democrats only hold 47 seats.

In the end, this is yet another example that proves that America's political system is deeply broken, and we desperately need a seismic change .

Because no matter what the end result is, this entire episode is going to be a giant stain in the history books.

If future generations of Americans get the chance, they will look back on this entire saga with disgust.

And if our founders could see us today, they would be rolling over in their graves, because this is not what they intended.

[Sep 26, 2019] Did Nancy Pelosi Just Make One Of The Biggest Political Mistakes In History

Highly recommended!
The key question here is: Is Nancy Pelosi a CIA controlled politician who followed Breenan instruction to open the second stage of the color revolution against Trump. Her long service in House Intelligence Committee suggest that this is a possibility.
Sep 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Nancy Pelosi just took the biggest gamble of her entire political career. If she is ultimately successful, she will be remembered as the woman that removed Donald Trump from the White House, and Democrats will treat her like a hero for the rest of her life. But if she fails and Trump wins in 2020, the backlash that she created when she tried to impeach Trump is likely to be blamed, and she could potentially lose her leadership role in the House. Of course at that point she probably wouldn't want to remain in the House much longer, and she would be hated by many Democrats for the rest of her life for subjecting them to four more years of Trump. So it really is all on the line for Nancy Pelosi, and she never should have gone down this road if she wasn't absolutely certain that she could deliver.

And at this point, most Americans don't want impeachment proceedings to happen. For example, just check out what a Politico/Morning Consult poll just found

In the poll -- conducted Friday through Sunday, as stories circled about Trump allegedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the Democratic candidates hoping to oust him -- 36 percent of respondents said they believe Congress should begin impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Other surveys have come up with similar results , but there is one survey out there that indicates that most Americans would actually support impeachment proceedings if the evidence shows that "Trump did use his presidential power to force a foreign leader to help take down a political rival"

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday the opening of a formal impeachment inquiry against Trump in response to the Ukraine controversy. If it's found that Trump did use his presidential power to force a foreign leader to help take down a political rival, 55 percent of U.S. adults said they would support removing him from office, according to a recent YouGov survey.

Forty-four percent of those polled said they'd "strongly support" removing Trump if the allegations are true, while another 11 percent said they'd "somewhat support" it.

But as it stands right now, on the national level this is a very unpopular decision by Pelosi, and it could potentially hurt Democrats among key blocs of voters

Worse yet, impeachment isn't selling where Democrats made their best gains in the midterms. A majority of suburban respondents oppose starting the impeachment process (35 percent/50 percent), with a wider gap among rural respondents (27/59), while urban voters are more ambivalent than one might guess (47/35). Impeachment trails by double digits in the South (33/53), Midwest, (36/48), and even in the Democrat-friendly Northeast (37/48).

Another reason why this is potentially a giant mistake by Nancy Pelosi is the fact that all of this focus on Ukraine is almost certainly going to damage one of the frontrunners for the Democratic nomination.

All of a sudden, everyone is talking about Joe Biden, Hunter Biden and Ukraine. A lot of voters are going to look into what happened, and they are not going to be pleased. And this comes at a time when Elizabeth Warren is surging in the polls, and real votes will start to be cast in just a few months.

Up until recently, the Biden campaign had successfully kept the focus off Hunter Biden and Ukraine , and Joe was widely considered to be the heavy favorite to win the nomination.

But now everything could change thanks to Nancy Pelosi.

And what if this push toward impeachment is not successful? Trump's base is going to be extremely fired up by all of the political drama over the next several months, and if Trump survives it is going to be a huge boost for his campaign.

All of the recent polls indicated that a Democrat was likely to win in 2020, and there was a very good chance that the Democrats were going to take the Senate too, but now this could dramatically shift public opinion and change everything.

Nancy Pelosi is rolling the dice, and if she fails it is going to be absolutely disastrous for the Democratic Party. The following is how Matthew Walther summarized the situation that she is facing

Pelosi knows this will not be popular. She knows more than that. She knows that it will be a disaster for the Democratic Party, that it will inflame the president's base and inspire even his most lukewarm supporters with a sense of outrage. She knows that in states like Michigan, upon which her party's chances in 2020 will depend, the question of impeachment does not poll well. She knows, further, that Joe Biden will not be able to spend the next 14 or so months refusing to answer questions about the activities of his son, Hunter, in Ukraine, and that increased scrutiny of the vice president's record in office will not rebound to his credit. She and her fellow Democratic leaders had better hope that someone like Elizabeth Warren manages to steal the nomination away from him before this defines his candidacy the way that Hillary Clinton's emails and paid speechmaking did during and after the 2016 primaries.

And it isn't going to be easy for Pelosi to be successful, because she is going to need 67 votes in the Senate to convict Trump, and right now Democrats only hold 47 seats.

In the end, this is yet another example that proves that America's political system is deeply broken, and we desperately need a seismic change .

Because no matter what the end result is, this entire episode is going to be a giant stain in the history books.

If future generations of Americans get the chance, they will look back on this entire saga with disgust.

And if our founders could see us today, they would be rolling over in their graves, because this is not what they intended.

[Sep 26, 2019] I agree with Tulsi Gabbard - an impeachment at this time serves no point. It also discounts the value of voting Democrat. This act may hand the White House to Trump for another 4 years.

Notable quotes:
"... Tulsi is the only Democrat who has her head screwed tight on her shoulders. As for the rest of that clown show---God help us!! ..."
"... Russia Gate 2.0 ..."
"... The Ukrainian gas HoldCo gave Hunter Biden a no-show job that paid $600K a year. They could have hired dozen of Yale Law grads for less. ..."
"... Kind of sad we Americans after two years of Russia gate will be dragged through a new political ploy. Our intelligence community and the DOJ need come clean and quick. ..."
"... The transcript of Trump's call to the Ukrainian president is out. There is absolutely no mention of anything close to a quid pro quo. ..."
"... "Repeat after me: the President should not demand foreign powers investigate his political rivals." How about Senate Democrats, Hillary Clinton, the DNC? Do you have a problem with them soliciting, even paying cash, to foreigners to investigate Trump? How about spying? Do you have a problem with one party using U.S. intelligence to spy on another party's nominee? ..."
"... This time - played into showing an utter electoral weakness by demanding an impeachment with no grounds for such a year before an election they, according to their screams on every corner, are "poised to win". Uncool, bros and sises, uncooool... ..."
"... The only mildly critical observation as to how exactly Trump played the said fiddle is that it would have been a tad better had he taken his time and waited for some days. ..."
"... The Democrats have hitched their train to the impeachment star not with impeachment per se as the goal. ..."
"... Just dragging us through this execrable process will achieve what they want nicely, i.e., disrupting possible Trump progress on his policy initiatives ( such as they are ), and weakening his electoral chances amongst the incorrigibly indecisive segment of American voters at the margin. Fighting corruption with corruption has now become the norm in Washington, D.C. ..."
Sep 26, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

PEACEINOURTIME • a day ago

I agree with Tulsi Gabbard - an impeachment at this time serves no point. It also discounts the value of voting Democrat. This act may hand the White House to Trump for another 4 years. One can only hope that a Tusi G can arise and become our next president. The rest of the team are basically knee jerk politicians waiting for the lobbies to instruct.

lex (the one that likes Ike) Brian J. • 15 hours ago

That's your party's chances to win the election without someone like her are as dead as vaudeville.
Alex (the one that likes Ike) PEACEINOURTIME • 15 hours ago
If Democrats weren't fanatically determined to prevent her from arising at all costs, she could become the president already in a year. She can realiably beat any Republican aside from Rand Paul, who isn't much more loved within his party than she within hers. One can only wonder why the Democratic establishment hates her so much. Not a member of the Cult? Better losing on and on and on than allowing an anti-war candidate to get the nomination? Collective political manifestation of Freudian death wish?
Connecticut Farmer PEACEINOURTIME • 15 hours ago
Tulsi is the only Democrat who has her head screwed tight on her shoulders. As for the rest of that clown show---God help us!!
Clyde Schechter • a day ago
"I hope with all of my soul, and with respect for those like Ellsberg, Manning, and Snowden, that this whistleblower proves worthy to stand next to them. And God help him and our country if not."

Amen.

Alex (the one that likes Ike) • a day ago • edited
So, Democrats have done just what he wanted them to do - started a miserable (and a doomed, given that the Senate is in Republican hands) circus instead of actually campaigning with their voters, while also riling his ones. But thanks, team D, for showing what your candidates' chances to get elected really are. Has been no secret to me that those chances are illusory, but thanks for making the thing official anyways. Starting a stillborn attempt to depose a president, against whom you, in your fantasy world, are "poised to win" in a year, is the best testimony of how toast you are in the said fantasy world's real counterpart. Attacongressboys and attacongressgirls. Take some metaphorical cookies from the metaphorical jar.

The only sad thing is that you're sullying the notion of whistleblower with a clown, who, most probably, doesn't even exist. The whole thing is actually your petty revenge against Snowden, who has just released his new book, ain't it? Low.

JPH • 21 hours ago
"Remember, he knows what was said and the Dems demanding impeachment do not."

Exactly and the Dems are setting themselves up for another public disaster thus handing Trump his reelection. Anyway Biden is history and he should withdraw immediately. Fighting this losing battle will only invoke the well deserved wrath of justice.

Looks to me that Trump is turning the tables on the democrats and they are in for a world of hurt when the investigations and indictments start rolling now.

Ramon Zarate • 20 hours ago
Russia Gate 2.0
Sid Finster Someone who doesn't post often • 14 hours ago
The Ukrainian gas HoldCo gave Hunter Biden a no-show job that paid $600K a year. They could have hired dozen of Yale Law grads for less.

Hunter was hired for the political cover he provided.

tweets21 • 17 hours ago
Kind of sad we Americans after two years of Russia gate will be dragged through a new political ploy. Our intelligence community and the DOJ need come clean and quick.
Peter Van Buren • 13 hours ago
The transcript of Trump's call to the Ukrainian president is out. There is absolutely no mention of anything close to a quid pro quo. Trump asks the president to take calls from Bill Barr and Giuliani to talk about corruption broadly. Biden's son is also included in what they'll talk about. It is all very high-level, general, surface talk. If Dems want to try and impeach on this, it is a long shot at best. https://fm.cnbc.com/applica...
MM TOS • 8 hours ago
"Repeat after me: the President should not demand foreign powers investigate his political rivals." How about Senate Democrats, Hillary Clinton, the DNC? Do you have a problem with them soliciting, even paying cash, to foreigners to investigate Trump? How about spying? Do you have a problem with one party using U.S. intelligence to spy on another party's nominee?

I'll repeat after you once you clarify your position on those things. But if you're not consistent, why should I?

Zgler • 12 hours ago
The transcript released has Trump asking for an investigation of Biden and Biden's son explicitly. Then it emphasizes how "very good" to the Ukraine the U.S. has been and how the relationship "has not always been reciprocal". At the time of the call the president was holding back hundreds of millions of dollars in Ukranian aid. How dumb do you have to be to not interpret this as a gangsta time of quid-pro-quo attempt?

The whole whistle blower report should be released. The Demos have no real choice but to start an impeachment query as their voters will interpret not doing this as clear cowardice and moral spinelessness. They know the impeachment won't succeed.

Alex (the one that likes Ike) • 12 hours ago • edited
So, looks like "some" folks have been played like a fiddle all over again. This time - played into showing an utter electoral weakness by demanding an impeachment with no grounds for such a year before an election they, according to their screams on every corner, are "poised to win". Uncool, bros and sises, uncooool...

The only mildly critical observation as to how exactly Trump played the said fiddle is that it would have been a tad better had he taken his time and waited for some days. Nothing practical - the situation served its purpose fairly and squarely - but it would be such a cute circus, and wailings would be so much louder if everything fell apart just a little bit later. But maybe he just doesn't like the circus. De gustibus non est disputandum , though.

Gerald Arcuri • 11 hours ago
Whoa, there cowboys and indigenous peoples! The Democrats have hitched their train to the impeachment star not with impeachment per se as the goal.

Just dragging us through this execrable process will achieve what they want nicely, i.e., disrupting possible Trump progress on his policy initiatives ( such as they are ), and weakening his electoral chances amongst the incorrigibly indecisive segment of American voters at the margin. Fighting corruption with corruption has now become the norm in Washington, D.C.

It's sort of the long game, with a hint of the "Hail Mary" pass thrown in for good measure. They know what they're up to. But, as the author says, it just might backfire. They may overplay their hand. Or make one of the two classic blunders.

Vizzini: "Ha-ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line!'"

The Princess Bride

[Sep 25, 2019] The Democrats Impeachment Attempt Against Trump Is A Huge Mistake

Notable quotes:
"... U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. ..."
"... Biden used his power as vice-president to ask the Ukraine to fire a prosecutor he didn't like and who (by chance?) was going after the company which enriched his son. He openly withheld money to achieve his aim. ..."
"... Trump should be impeached for his crimes against Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. ..."
"... But the Democrats will surely not touch on those issues. They are committing themselves to political theater that will end without any result. Instead of attacking Trump's policies and proposing better legislation they will pollute the airwaves with noise about 'crimes' that do not exist. ..."
"... The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him. ..."
"... It is likely Biden and son are being investigated in Ukraine and dirt or charges will come from it. Dems blowing smoke about impeachment to take attention away from what may come out of Ukraine. ..."
"... What seems even more idiotic, is that Pelosi made this announcement BEFORE the transcript was published. Is everyone senile in the Democratic leadership? ..."
"... Now that Trump has effectively betrayed his base, and - tweets aside - is governing like Hilary Clinton would have, the only way for him to hold on to his base is for them to think that he's being treated unfairly. Make it all about fake impeachment, and nothing about real issues. ..."
"... Remember, the corporate Democrats and the corporate Republicans are all paid by the same masters, they all read form the same script. This is just theater to distract the proles. It's like professional wrestling without the muscles. ..."
"... I would like to suggest another reason for this impeachment malstorm at this point. Trump is acting presidential at the UN. He made a very nationalistic speech that I'm sure the MSM would like to erase. See The future does not belong to globalists. ..."
"... With Gabbard now making it to the next debate the CORPORATE Dems are running scared. Gabbard will be taking someone out, perhaps it'll be either Warren or Biden: maybe "Beto" or "Pete" just to put a stake in the hearts of these clowns (Harris is already fatally wounded -- just waiting for her to finally drop). ..."
"... The Dems cannot attack Trump's policies. They are bound to sing the same song as Trump, just to a different melody. They have the very same masters, and those who pay the bill dictate the music. It is that simple. ..."
"... The Current Oligarchy is behind the strings controlling Pelosi's mouth and teleprompter as Biden won't be nominated, and it can't totally count on Warren's allegiance. Gabbard has already voiced her opposition to Trump's impeachment, arguing that it's better to beat him at the polls. ..."
"... Trump re-election chances just shot up. Not just the Biden collateral damage, but this is a clear reprise of the Russiagate nonsense. This will re-energize the Trump base - and Trump is going to cry all the way back to the White House saying he's being unfairly prosecuted. Saker is saying this is a literal reprise, but it is irrelevant if that is true or not. ..."
"... A bit off topic, but, DJT's speech at the UN was a eff'en joke. Everything he said about Iran, Venezuela, and other countries negatively, was the most blatant use of "projection" I've ever heard. ..."
"... If during that phone call, Trump would have said in Biden's style "I expect an indictment of Hunter Biden until next week, otherwise Ukraine won't receive any money any more." the push towards indictment would be understandable. But just mentioning Biden's corruption, for which there are strong indications, can be no basis can hardly be a basis for impeachment. ..."
"... A second reason that may be plausible is that Joe Biden is quite influential within the Democratic party, he may have been enraged that someone dared to speak about his corruption and therefore have demanded impeachment. ..."
"... Perhaps impeachment is also meant to distract from the findings about the origins of Russiagate and FISA abuse that will probably soon come out. But it may still be a bit unwise to choose something that is so closely connected with Biden's corruption (and probably also with the fabrication of Russiagate for which the DNC's Ukraine connections were also used). ..."
"... But Michael Tracey said this before the contents of the phone call was known, and I think it is fair to say it is rather underwhelming, and impeachment could end in an embarrassment for Democrats. ..."
"... I think Tulsi Gabbard who so far seems to be the only Democrat who clearly spoke out against impeachment proceedings could profit from this - even though a majority of Democrats currently seems to be in favor of impeachment, the percentage of Democrats who oppose impeachment on such dubious grounds and prefer campaigning on real political issues is probably much higher than Gabbard's current rating, and some of those could be motivated to support her. ..."
"... If a corporate Democrat who is fully behind impeachment is nominated, the chances in the general election are probably not that great, anyway. Even though polls now show the opposite, I hardly think Biden could win against Trump - not only because of the profiteering of the Biden family from his vice presidency, but mainly because of the clear signs of mental decline. ..."
"... Of all the various misdeeds committed by the Trump government over the last few years within US borders and without, the one crime Nancy Pelosi decides to go after Trump over turns out not only a non-crime but it is not even a pale shadow of a more egregious incident in which Joe Biden, while US Vice-President, pressured the Ukrainian government under Porky Pig Poroshenko to sack Viktor Shokin as Prosecutor General for launching an investigation into possibly corrupt activities of Burisma Holdings and in particular of one of its directors who happens to be Joe Biden's son, Hunter. ..."
"... Incidentally wasn't a major shareholder of Burisma Holdings at one time (if not currently) the notorious Ihor Kolomoisky, governor of Dnepropetrovsk region in mid-2014, about the time that the Malaysia Airlines Boeing passenger jet fell from the sky in a region where Burisma Holdings had been granted a license to explore and prospect for shale oil? ..."
"... Incidentally Dmitri Alperovich, CEO of Crowdstrike, the cyber-security company that worked for the DNC during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensics Research Lab where Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat is a non-resident advisor. ..."
"... I feel that the Democrats' real problem with Trump is that he ended their corruption financing plan for the future. I would like to add Trump just replaced the Democrats corruption plan with his own, but OOPS, the Democrats haven't provided any evidence of that, instead they spent 3 years trying to prove something that never happened. ..."
"... Instead the Democrats chased a ghost for 3 years and now the Democrats have just signalled that they will spend the next 6 months trying to impeach Trump for investigating Joe Biden's corruption. The American people have, in effect, been defrauded of their political leadership time, how do the Democrats think this will go over with the American voters in 2020. ..."
"... impeachment provides another topic to help avoid discussion of the Empire, its wars, ..."
"... Yes, the congress-critters get to enjoy a well-paying job with an annual salary of $174,000 and increase their already high likelihood of getting re-elected if they don't do anything notable that people might not like, but only play politics and sound important on presidential betrayals like (quoting Pelosi) "betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections." ..."
Sep 25, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday announced to open an impeachment process against President Donald Trump:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that the House would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump, charging him with betraying his oath of office and the nation's security by seeking to enlist a foreign power to tarnish a rival for his own political gain.

Instead of running on policy issues the Democrats will (again) try to find vague dirt with which they can tarnish Trump. This is a huge political mistake. It will help Trump to win his reelection.

After two years of falsely accusing Trump to have colluded with Russia they now allege that he colludes with Ukraine. That will make it much more difficult for the Democrats to hide the dirty hands they had in creating Russiagate. Their currently preferred candidate Joe Biden will get damaged:

For the past two years, talk of impeachment had centered around the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who investigated Russia's interference in the 2016 elections and Mr. Trump's attempts to derail that inquiry. On Tuesday, Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, told her caucus and then the country that new revelations about Mr. Trump's dealings with Ukraine, and his administration's stonewalling of Congress about them, had finally left the House no choice but to proceed toward a rarely used remedy. ... At issue are allegations that Mr. Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and his son. The conversation is said to be part of a whistle-blower complaint that the Trump administration has withheld from Congress. And it occurred just a few days after Mr. Trump had ordered his staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine.

Trump indeed withheld money from the Ukraine. But the Ukrainian president did not know that when Trump spoke with him:

Mr. Trump did not discuss the delay in the military assistance on the July 25 call with Mr. Zelensky, according to people familiar with the conversation. A Ukrainian official said Mr. Zelensky's government did not learn of the delay until about one month after the call.

At that time Trump was withholding money from several countries. The money for the Ukraine was released in early September without any known conditions.

The immediate impulse to start an impeachment investigation came from some whistle blower in the intelligence community who claimed that Trump did something nefarious during a phone call with the newly elected President of Ukraine Zelensky.

The White House published a memorandum of the phone call . The call was made on July 25 2019, a day after the final Robert Mueller testimony in Congress. There are two passages which the Democrats will claim are damaging:

President Zelenskyy: [...] I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.

The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike ... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation.. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible.

President Zelenskyy: Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page of cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. [...]

Trump wanted Zelensky to look into the Ukrainian influence on the whole Russiagate campaign. There certainly was a lot of it. The three Ukrainian-American Chalupa sisters, Alexandra , Irena and Andrea , worked with the DNC and Ukrainian officials in Washington and Kiev to sabotage the Trump campaign . They are, together with other Ukraine affiliated persons like the Dimitry Alperovich, the CEO of the hacks at Crowd Strike, at the core of Russiagate.

The Mueller investigation closed a day before the phone call. It found that Trump had not colluded with Russia or the alleged Russian influence on the 2016 election. That Trump wants the new Ukrainian leader to investigate what Ukrainian officials did in support of a debunked campaign against him may be a wrong thing to do but it is certainly not criminal.

In another passage Zelensky says that he will soon meet Trump's lawyer Rudi Guiliani who wanted to revive an investigation into the Ukrainian company that hired Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden while vice-president Biden himself was running U.S. foreign policy with regards to Ukraine. Trump then asks for support for Giuliani:

President Zelenskyy: [...] I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr.Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Guliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. [...] We are great friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly. That I can assure you.

The President: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that The other thing, There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me.

Zelensky then again assures Trump that the incoming prosecutor general will look into the issue.

Trump asks for investigations and Zelensky assures him that those will happen. Trump applied no open pressure. There is of course always implicit pressure any time a U.S. president utters a wish to the president of a country that needs U.S. good will and money to survive.

As for the Biden case it was Joe's Biden big mouth that brought the issues back into light. In January 2018 he gave a talk at the Council of Foreign Relations and explained how he directly threatened ( video ) to withhold money to blackmail the Ukraine into firing a prosecutor general who was seen as corrupt:

And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn't.

So they said they had -- they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I'm not going to -- or, we're not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You're not the president. The president said -- I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars. I said, you're not getting the billion. I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.

Biden did that at a time when his son lobbied for the Ukrainian company Burisma who the prosecutor he wanted fired investigated (or maybe blackmailed):

U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.

The general prosecutor's official file for the Burisma probe -- shared with me by senior Ukrainian officials -- shows prosecutors identified Hunter Biden, business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.

There is no direct evidence that Joe Biden told the Ukrainians to stop the investigation into Burisma. But it was not difficult for the Ukrainians to figure out that ending the investigation into the company that Joe Biden's son worked for would help them with further requests to him.

How the Democrats want to construct an impeachment out of this is beyond me.

Trump is the president. Foreign policy is his constitutional prerogative. He used his power to ask the Ukraine to open investigations into two issues. He withheld money but not to achieve that. The Ukrainians did not even know at that time that the money was blocked.

Biden used his power as vice-president to ask the Ukraine to fire a prosecutor he didn't like and who (by chance?) was going after the company which enriched his son. He openly withheld money to achieve his aim.

How will the Democrats explain that what Trump did was wrong or even criminal while insisting that what Joe Biden did was normal business?

They can't. Pelosi knows that there is no case to impeach Trump. That's why she does not have a plan how to do proceed with it:

Although Ms. Pelosi's announcement was a crucial turning point, it left many unanswered questions about exactly when and how Democrats planned to push forward on impeachment. ... And Ms. Pelosi said she had directed the chairmen of the six committees that have been investigating Mr. Trump to "proceed under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry." In a closed-door meeting earlier in the day, she said the panels should put together their best cases on potentially impeachable offenses by the president and send them to the Judiciary Committee, according to two officials familiar with the conversation. That could potentially lay the groundwork for articles of impeachment based on the findings.

Pelosi has nothing. Six committees have investigated Trump issues but so far found nothing to charge him with. Neither did the Mueller investigation find anything damaging. How will combining all those nothing-burgers make an impeachment meal?

Trump should be impeached for his crimes against Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.

But the Democrats will surely not touch on those issues. They are committing themselves to political theater that will end without any result. Instead of attacking Trump's policies and proposing better legislation they will pollute the airwaves with noise about 'crimes' that do not exist.

There is no case for impeachment. Even if the House would vote for one the Senate would never act on it. No one wants to see a President Pence.

The Democrats are giving Trump the best campaign aid he could have wished for. Trump will again present himself as the victim of a witch hunt. He will again argue that he is the only one on the side of the people. That he alone stands with them against the bad politicians in Washington DC. Millions will believe him and support him on this. It will motivate them to vote for him.

Why is it so hard for Democrats to understand this?

Posted by b on September 25, 2019 at 18:03 UTC | Permalink

DG , Sep 25 2019 18:08 utc | 1

Just another HUGE mistake... democrats will do anything to get him re-elected ...

Peter AU 1 , Sep 25 2019 18:18 utc | 2

It is likely Biden and son are being investigated in Ukraine and dirt or charges will come from it. Dems blowing smoke about impeachment to take attention away from what may come out of Ukraine.
SteveK9 , Sep 25 2019 18:27 utc | 3
What seems even more idiotic, is that Pelosi made this announcement BEFORE the transcript was published. Is everyone senile in the Democratic leadership?
TG , Sep 25 2019 18:31 utc | 4
Missing the point. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

Now that Trump has effectively betrayed his base, and - tweets aside - is governing like Hilary Clinton would have, the only way for him to hold on to his base is for them to think that he's being treated unfairly. Make it all about fake impeachment, and nothing about real issues.

Remember, the corporate Democrats and the corporate Republicans are all paid by the same masters, they all read form the same script. This is just theater to distract the proles. It's like professional wrestling without the muscles.

so , Sep 25 2019 18:34 utc | 5
Just continued self destruction of my government. Federal State and Local all corrupt. Play On! We'll Clean up the mess later.
TheBAG , Sep 25 2019 18:35 utc | 6
I would like to suggest another reason for this impeachment malstorm at this point. Trump is acting presidential at the UN. He made a very nationalistic speech that I'm sure the MSM would like to erase. See The future does not belong to globalists.

In a continuation of the anti-globalist, sovereign-nations theme, Trump warned against totalitarianism and the erosion of democracy and individual freedoms. "We must always be skeptical of those who want conformity and control," he told the assembly. "Even in free nations, we see alarming signs and new challenges to liberty."

Obviously, the MSM needs some very negative news about Trump to breathlessly report instead.

Seer , Sep 25 2019 18:37 utc | 7
"Projecting"...

Keep in mind that when when we're talking Biden, Pelosi et al we're talking CORPORATE Dems. CORPORATE Dems will do anything, even lose an election, to ensure that there is the least disruption to their corporate funders -- they would rather have Trump in office than say Sanders. The Dem's campaign is showing a lot of weakness in their CORPORATE Dem puppets in which case they're afraid of allowing Sanders to rise (working really hard to push up the CORPORATE Wishy-Washy-Warren).

With Gabbard now making it to the next debate the CORPORATE Dems are running scared. Gabbard will be taking someone out, perhaps it'll be either Warren or Biden: maybe "Beto" or "Pete" just to put a stake in the hearts of these clowns (Harris is already fatally wounded -- just waiting for her to finally drop).

james , Sep 25 2019 18:45 utc | 8
fully agree with you b... thanks... the dems are more insane then the repubs and that is saying something..
Cemi , Sep 25 2019 18:45 utc | 9
Instead of attacking Trump's policies and proposing better legislation

This is exactly the point. They can't! They are paid by the same 0.1 % as the Republicans. They can only propose to secure the Mexican border by other means (drones! lol), they would continue to deport small children just as Obama did, continue all illegal wars, and try to enrich the ruling class even further. Just like Trump. That's why they got rid of candidates like Gabbard that fast and instead install an old man suffering from dementia.

The Dems cannot attack Trump's policies. They are bound to sing the same song as Trump, just to a different melody. They have the very same masters, and those who pay the bill dictate the music. It is that simple.

karlof1 , Sep 25 2019 18:48 utc | 10
Yep, b's 100% correct that there're plenty of grounds on which to impeach the entire upper echelon of TrumpCo that won't ever make it into whatever Articles of Impeachment are generated. The Ukrainian stuff is all political with absolutely no impeachable offense incurred.

The Current Oligarchy is behind the strings controlling Pelosi's mouth and teleprompter as Biden won't be nominated, and it can't totally count on Warren's allegiance. Gabbard has already voiced her opposition to Trump's impeachment, arguing that it's better to beat him at the polls.

Sanders in contrast, has endorsed impeachment . IMO, Gabbard's approach is best. However, IMO, both Sanders and Gabbard must plan on what to do when the DNC again throws the nomination to someone other than the best candidate to beat Trump as the DNC is wholly owned by the Current Oligarchy.

james , Sep 25 2019 18:50 utc | 13
karlof1 - if sanders had any character he would have left the dem party and ran as an independent... at this point the dem party is completely insane..
c1ue , Sep 25 2019 18:56 utc | 14
Trump re-election chances just shot up. Not just the Biden collateral damage, but this is a clear reprise of the Russiagate nonsense. This will re-energize the Trump base - and Trump is going to cry all the way back to the White House saying he's being unfairly prosecuted. Saker is saying this is a literal reprise, but it is irrelevant if that is true or not.
Peter AU 1 , Sep 25 2019 19:04 utc | 15
snake "USA and Israel cannot compete with the Chinese?"

China leads in 5G, but US is also gearing up for a long war with China, which is perhaps the main reason for banning Huawei comms.

casey , Sep 25 2019 19:05 utc | 16
"Why is it so hard for Democrats to understand this?"

I think they understand that they need a big distraction, even if it later swirls down the toilet like the previous turd, because Brennan's tit is in the wringer. If Brennan is indicted, then the whole corrupt Russia-hoax starts unraveling. I think the DNC gerontocracy are playing for time with this fiasco out of desperation on several fronts.

Bemildred , Sep 25 2019 19:14 utc | 17
Anything is better than trying to run on the real past record here of failure, mediocrity, decay, and decline.
karlof1 , Sep 25 2019 19:16 utc | 18
james @13--

I don't think the issue is Sanders's "character;" if you follow his Twitter , you'll quickly discover he has a fine character, as with this proposal:

"We are going to end homelessness and build millions of new affordable housing units -- paid for with a tax on the billionaire class."

Sometimes, I don't think he wants to become POTUS, which has allowed him to get rather radical by US political norms. I also wonder how closely those promoting him pay attention to the DC Circus. Given Pelosi and Co's opposition to a host of Bernie's proposals--particularly Medicare For All--it seems wise to put them into the oppositional camp too, as I have.

ben , Sep 25 2019 19:19 utc | 19
Mistake or not, I'll enjoy the theater, IF, it's on MSM. Personally, I'd like to know if the "whistle blowers" accusations can hold water. It needs to be released.

If this regime has nothing to hide, let your people respect lawful summons to testify. If DJT continues to advise them to ignore 'em, that's obstruction..

P.S. This coming circus will be a massive distraction, and keep relevant issues from the public a little longer, which, the corporatists will love.

Pass the popcorn please....

Miss Lacy , Sep 25 2019 19:21 utc | 20
The Dims seem to be setting new records in Stupid, and, as we all know - you can't fix Stupid. Surely they see that while Trump is an appalling scoundrel elected almost by accident due to the Stupid factor in the Dims prior campaign - Pense is a certifiable Lunatic. Too scary for words.

I think maybe casey # 18 is right. The Dims are running scared because they think something Really wicked this way comes.

On the other hand, it is a nice distraction from the Greta Pet Rock Whinging Society - itself a distraction from, well, reality....

Martin , Sep 25 2019 19:31 utc | 21
The future does not belong to globalists, the future belongs to patriots – #Trump to #UNGA

https://twitter.com/RT_com/status/1176539289355603968

ben , Sep 25 2019 19:33 utc | 22
A bit off topic, but, DJT's speech at the UN was a eff'en joke. Everything he said about Iran, Venezuela, and other countries negatively, was the most blatant use of "projection" I've ever heard.
ben , Sep 25 2019 19:35 utc | 23
For the edification of whomever;

https://psychologydictionary.org/projection/

nil , Sep 25 2019 19:37 utc | 24
I think what's going in the brain trust of the DNC is something like this:

i. Biden is a non-starter with the public. He'll be devoured alive by the Republicans, who only need to bring up his career to expose his mendacity. ii. Warren might be co-opted, having been a Republican and fiscal conservative up to the mid-90s, but what if she isn't? iii. Sanders is a non-starter, but with the "people who matter".

Rather than having to threaten him with the suspicions around his wife, or go for the JFK solution, they'd rather he didn't even get past the primaries, much less elected. iv. As a CNN talking head said weeks ago, it's better for the wealthy people the DNC is beholden to that their own candidate loses to Trump if that candidate is Sanders.

So better to hedge their bets. Start impeachment hearings, give Trump ammunition to destroy Sanders or Warren. That way, the rich win in all scenarios:

a. If Biden wins the nomination, the campaign will be essentially mudslinging from both sides about who is more corrupt. The rich are fine with whoever wins. b. If Warren gets the nomination and is co-opted, the media will let the impeachment hearings die out, or the House themselves will quickly bury it. c. If Warren gets the nomination and is not co-opted, or if Sanders get it, the impeachment will suck up all the air of the room, Trump will play the witchhunt card and be re-elected.

Martin , Sep 25 2019 19:58 utc | 30
"Love your nation, wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country first."

Trump gives an anti-globalist speech in defense of nationalism during his #UNGA address. https://twitter.com/tictoc/status/1176505390818836481

Adrian E. , Sep 25 2019 20:00 utc | 31
If during that phone call, Trump would have said in Biden's style "I expect an indictment of Hunter Biden until next week, otherwise Ukraine won't receive any money any more." the push towards indictment would be understandable. But just mentioning Biden's corruption, for which there are strong indications, can be no basis can hardly be a basis for impeachment.

If the new rule was that any contact with foreign governments relating to information that can be relevant in elections, Hillary Clinton should have been disqualified before the election because her team and the DNC worked with Ukraine to get dirt on Manaford (and anything they could find about people around Trump, let alone the Steele dossier for which rumors were also collected abroad).

The behavior of Democrats seems a bit odd. They start impeachment procedures although a majority of Americans is against this (so, despite the polarization, a sizable percentage is against Trump, but wants him to be defeated in elections rather than be impeached, which hardly won't happen anyway when it is tried). I think there are probably mainly two possible reasons.

One is that, although a majority of Americans overall is against impeachment, a majority of Democratic voters is currently in favor of impeachment. Obviously, as to many issues, Democrats don't do what a majority of their voters want (they generally don't when their voters want something different from what their donors want), but sometimes, they do what a majority of their voters wants, even if it is rather stupid strategically.

A second reason that may be plausible is that Joe Biden is quite influential within the Democratic party, he may have been enraged that someone dared to speak about his corruption and therefore have demanded impeachment.

Perhaps impeachment is also meant to distract from the findings about the origins of Russiagate and FISA abuse that will probably soon come out. But it may still be a bit unwise to choose something that is so closely connected with Biden's corruption (and probably also with the fabrication of Russiagate for which the DNC's Ukraine connections were also used).

An interesting question is what the influence on the primaries will be. Obviously, it will be rather inconvenient for those candidates who are senators (Sanders, Warren, and others that may or may not be in the race at that time) if there are impeachment hearings in the Senate at the same time as primaries. Michael Tracey thinks the impeachment procedure would rather help Elizabeth Warren (who had been demanding impeachment for some time) and Joe Biden, while it would be quite inconvenient for Bernie Sanders because he would primarily want to talk about things like economic inequality and healthcare, and constant headlines about impeachment only hinder this.

But Michael Tracey said this before the contents of the phone call was known, and I think it is fair to say it is rather underwhelming, and impeachment could end in an embarrassment for Democrats. The suspicious profiteering of the Biden family will inevitable constantly be an ubiquitous subject, and even if the media who support the Democrats attempt to frame this in a way that protects Biden, in the end, it can hardly be good for him. Of course, a significant part of the Democratic basis is now completely consumed by conspiratorial thinking (in some online forums, we can see constant claims that Trump has been found guilty of conspiring with Russia and that the Mueller report confirmed this because it did not "exonerate" him) - they will support impeachment without caring on what basis is done. But if they continue with such a weak case, support for impeachment could weaken even among Democratic primary voters, and then fervent impeachment proponents like Elizabeth Warren may not profit from this.

I think Tulsi Gabbard who so far seems to be the only Democrat who clearly spoke out against impeachment proceedings could profit from this - even though a majority of Democrats currently seems to be in favor of impeachment, the percentage of Democrats who oppose impeachment on such dubious grounds and prefer campaigning on real political issues is probably much higher than Gabbard's current rating, and some of those could be motivated to support her. That way, she might move up. At the moment, it seems unlikely that she could win outright, but if she has good results and Sanders is elected, there might be a chance that she is appointed to an important position (e.g. Secretary of State) where she has influence on foreign policy.

If a corporate Democrat who is fully behind impeachment is nominated, the chances in the general election are probably not that great, anyway. Even though polls now show the opposite, I hardly think Biden could win against Trump - not only because of the profiteering of the Biden family from his vice presidency, but mainly because of the clear signs of mental decline. Maybe Sanders can, like with the Russiagate conspiracy theory, nod to the establishment enough that he does not get in trouble, but not invest himself too much in that partisan bickering that he is not damaged too much when it fails.

t r u t h , Sep 25 2019 20:05 utc | 32
Posted by: snake | Sep 25 2019 18:50 utc | 12

Huawei Chairman Liang Hua told China-Germany-USA Media Forum that the US putting Huawei on entity list has had no substantial impact on Huawei's business. All of the company's flagship products are shipped normally. Ecosystem of Huawei's end products will be built in 2-3 years.

https://twitter.com/HuXijin_GT/status/1176465008974123008

GeorgeV , Sep 25 2019 20:09 utc | 33
B is once again a sane voice that is being drowned out by a chorus of screaming DC morons. The stupidity of those cretins that run the US of A has no limits. It is indeed infinite! Get ready America, the orange haired jackass (with my apologies to that durable, noble beast of burden) will get another four years in the White House thanks to the Democratic Party's leadership. Reason and logic roll-off what passes for their brains like water on a duck's back. The late journalist, critic and cynic H.L. Mencken was once asked why if he so disliked America why then did he remain in it? He replied, "why do men go to zoos?"
Piotr Berman , Sep 25 2019 20:15 utc | 34
The only way this will help Democrats is that perhaps Biden will vanish from the political scene more expeditiously. I theorize that his current "support" is not related to any particular position but nostalgia and a certain amiability -- that vanishes when you try to understand what (the hell) is he saying. That said, Trump is a master of assorted serious facial expression, can spontaneously coin an insult, for him Biden is a lamb waiting to be roasted.
Fixer , Sep 25 2019 20:17 utc | 35
The Democratic impeachment process isn't a mistake it's a strategy. As with Bojo's Brexit or the Canadian election centrally planned to result in a weak minority, the UK-centred financiers of the Leviathan Soviet needs weak governments to enact their derivative flushing and fiat takedown exercise + the inevitable Financial Patriot Act that follows, as Mark Carney essentially promised several weeks ago.

Sever the head of the beast. Arrest and prosecute the gangsters and financiers when they make their only possible move. The Lubavitcher mob will be used as scapegoats but we can't stop there. Those directing this centuries long crime spree against humanity must be held accountable for their perfidy and their every pilfered asset must be returned to the people from which they stole.

vk , Sep 25 2019 20:18 utc | 36
There's probably an internal struggle in the Democratic Party between the "democratic socialists" (Sanders, Warren?, Gabbard, AOC etc.) and the liberals (the "establishment": Pelosi, Biden, DNC etc. etc.).

The term "democratic socialism" comes from the early Cold War in the UK, more precisely, in the right-wing of the Labour party at the time (also called "Gaitskellites"). It proposes general welfare state policies in order to best manage the capitalist boom of post-war Britain while, at the same time, embracing the idea of capitalism. Democratic socialists are not really socialists -- but they still represent a radical leftwards turn for the political spectrum of the USA, hence are seen as an existential threat to the American electoral machine.

My guess is the liberal faction of the Democratic Party sees Biden as its last hope of aborting the historical process that brought Trump to power thus reconnecting American recent history with Obama's legacy. It's either that or a permanent transformation of American political landscape for the forseeable future.

The problem is that Biden is probably extremely corrupt and has a lot of skeletons in Ukraine. If said investigation proceeds honestly and quickly in Ukraine, my hypothesis is that Biden will go down and even be arrested (alongside his son). That would permanently damage the liberal faction.

The American people still is rabidly anti-socialist (or "anti-communist", in Cold War terminology that they still use nowadays). However, American capitalism has reached its structural limits and even mild socialistic reforms such as universal healthcare free at the point of use is too much for the country to handle without collapsing. For practical purposes, the American elite must consider democratic socialism (Gaitskellism) as full-fledged socialism simply because they are very fragile -- that's also why dumbed down leftists such as Elizabeth Warren and AOC are disferring such devastating blows to the liberals and are so popular.

At the same time, Trump's reelection would still be bad for the American capitalist class as whole because he is eroding America's image to its allies. This is specially true to its First World allies (Western Europe and Japan). The special case here is Atlanticism, i.e. the ideology that posits the existence of a unified Western Civilization in the North Atlantic that strikes envy to the rest of the world (in Asia and India in particular). Besides, a lot of very powerful American billionaires owe their social status to outsourcing to China, so they prefer a Russophobe in the White House instead of a Sinophobe. The American elite is divided.

Peter AU 1 , Sep 25 2019 20:20 utc | 37
james karlof1

That Sanders and Gabbard work within the duopoly is all that needs to be known. One person can only make a difference if there is a party that is independent of the duopoly behind them. We had one here for a bit. Took the combined efforts of the duopoly and media plus splitting her electorate and then jailing her to bring her down. I didn't agree with some of the policies, but that was the first time in my life I voted as they were not part of the system.

Paul Bogdanich , Sep 25 2019 20:20 utc | 38
While it's true that there is nothing impeachable here (replace the name "Biden" with "Assange" or "Snowden" and imagine if anyone would have even batted an eyelash at this). That said Trump talks too much. I only hope that this was a rookie mistake as it was done a long time ago but he just talks too much. People make too much of too many unguaraded comments. Anyway, as to why the democrats need this instead of talking policy, that's easy. All their large campaign contributors are very much against the ideas of the progressive wing in their party and without the progressive wing their policies are the same as the republicans on every major issue. They think it helps them in the election. Kinda stupid but Schumer, Pelosi, Leahey, Grassley and the rest of the gang will drive the party straight into the ground rather than upset their large campaign contributors because that's the seat of their power and why all their policies are identical to republican policies.
Piotr Berman , Sep 25 2019 20:23 utc | 39
OMG! Trump and Zelensky talk again, now on TV. The recording snap I have seen shows Trump saying thoughtfully "I hope that you and Putin will get together and sort out your problems. I know that this is what you were planning to do, and it would be a tremendous achievement. Zelensky looks as if he just learned about the death of his beloved babushka.
sad canuck , Sep 25 2019 20:25 utc | 40
The Democratic Party position is only incomprehensible if you assume they actually want to win and govern in the people's interest. They clearly do not. Late empire circumstances dictate that the pseudo-left choice on the ballot cannot actually adopt any positions opposing the elite, so all that is left is identity politics and orange man bad to veil this increasingly obvious and embarrassing scam. Trump will prevail against any non-progressive Democratic candidate running an orange man bad campaign. Book it.
jt , Sep 25 2019 20:27 utc | 41
News that an impeachment inquiry is being initiated instantly sent stock prices tumbling on Tuesday, but that small jolt is nothing compared to what we will experience if Donald Trump is actually impeached. Over the past couple of years we have seen a tremendous boom in stock prices, and one of the big reasons for that boom is the fact that the folks on Wall Street know that Trump is always going to be looking out for their best interests. Trump understands that his chances of winning again in 2020 will be greatly enhanced if stock prices are rising and most Americans believe that we have a "booming economy", and so he wants to do everything in his power to try to make those things happen. That means that Trump's short-term interests are perfectly aligned with Wall Street's short-term interests, but things will shift dramatically if someone like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders ends up in the White House. Wall Street knows that they have a friend in Donald Trump, and losing that friend would potentially be absolutely devastating.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/if-donald-trump-is-impeached-you-should-expect-the-mother-of-all-stock-market-crashes-to-happen

Ort , Sep 25 2019 20:29 utc | 42
B.'s post and the comments (so far) are a refreshing change of pace from the US mass-media coverage, which as usual treats this as another "bombshell" event to be taken at face value.

Since I try to avoid corporate mass-media infoganda, I can only assume that the Biden video referenced in the post has not gotten much mainstream airplay. As the quoted bit shows, Biden is openly and smugly bragging to an enthusiastic audience about how he successfully gave Ukraine's leaders an ultimatum: either fire the prosecutor who was investigating his crooked son, or lose "a billion dollars" in aid.

Sounds like an, er, quid pro quo , no? Unlike the accusation against Trump, Biden's motives and actions don't have to be hyped, massaged, and spun to create the "impression" of misconduct-- the video speaks for itself.

I've seen alternative-media speculation that the DNC, or some faction within the Democratic Party leadership, actually want this "bombshell" to boomerang back upon Biden and force him to withdraw his candidacy. There are indications that Elizabeth Warren has been moved to the on-deck circle.

I lack expertise and interest in electoral-politics handicapping, but it may be that since the odious Kamala Harris isn't exactly a "hit" with the public, and the charade of Sanders being an "independent" may exclude him from the position of the Democratic Party's 2020 "standard-bearer", Warren is considered "electable".

Warren has issues too, but if Biden drops out for one reason on another, the Dem strategists probably see her as a New! Improved! version of Hillary: a "historic" candidate by identity-politics standards, a reassuringly "safe pair of hands" in contrast to Wild 'n Crazy Trump, and though hardly "charismatic", more personable than Hillary and with less baggage.

Given the Democratic Party leadership's TDS-saturated hysteria and groupthink, it's plausible that the Dems hope that their ongoing assault on Trump's character will prime the public to enthusiastically turn to a reformist "clean as a hound's tooth" schoolmarm type for political salvation.

EtTuBrute , Sep 25 2019 20:30 utc | 43
"No one wants to see a President Pence."

Theory 1) Perhaps given Trump will not agree to a launch a war with Iran, there are those who do, assuming Pence is the idiot who will agree to starting such a war?

"Biden used his power as vice-president to ask the Ukraine to fire a prosecutor he didn't like.... Pelosi has nothing"

Theory 2) Perhaps the Dems have faced reality after all and know Biden who will lose to Trump. Is this a backhanded way to smear Biden, forcing him to pull out of the race once this inevitably blows up in his face?

juliania , Sep 25 2019 20:33 utc | 44
This is puzzling. I can't see why the thread has been stymied into overshoot but it has. Never mind, the issue was so important that it is worth doing our best to scroll sideways on the comments.

I also cannot see why Sanders has shot himself in the foot. Perhaps he thinks, with all the pressures of the office, it is better left to Trump.

Thank you b, for analyzing the phone call. How can this be seen as an impeachable issue? It is all very strange indeed, since calling attention to the situation with Biden's son cannot be in the best interests of the Democratic party, and yet that is what Pelosi has done.

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain..." Is that it?

Piotr Berman , Sep 25 2019 20:39 utc | 45
stupidity of those cretins that run the US of A has no limits. It is indeed infinite! Get ready America, the orange haired jackass (with my apologies to that durable, noble beast of burden) <-- GeorgeV | Sep 25 2019 20:09 utc | 33

As anyone with some contact with computing knows (using a laptop should be sufficient), information processing power comes from small size of processing units and their number. In a living mammal, the but has some trillions of bacteria in the gut, and this is the source of ideas for some (they pull them out of their anus), used sparingly it yields a few megacretins, but we use most of them, we can reach teracretins and more. But if we assemble more than 1000 experts, politicians, commentators, bloggers etc., we can get petacrektins. I would need to check calculations, I think that we will not see exacretins.

Also, noble or not, which beasts of burden have sparse orange manes? Baltimore orioles do not count.

d dan , Sep 25 2019 20:39 utc | 46
I am not sure I agree with the author. The Ukraine call is definitely a bigger scandal than the Mueller's fishing trip, and it may sway some independents. Much depends on what Trump actually said, how he said it, etc, i.e. the actual phone recording will decide whether Democrats make the right decision to impeach this time.
Sasha , Sep 25 2019 20:42 utc | 47
@Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 25 2019 19:16 utc | 18
which has allowed him to get rather radical by US political norms

If pointing out the crucial problems the US society faces and adding solutions vis "getting radical by Us political norms", what is radical is not Bernie Sanders discourse, but "US political norms"

Painting him as radical contributes to avoid discussion of those crucial issues by US society.

https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1176915518290182146

According with Ivan Redondo ( in an interview with Pablo Iglesias for the program "Otra Vuelta de Tuerka" ) current chief of staff of President ( in functions ) of Spain, Sánchez, and "spin doctor" ( a la Surkov...) in fashion in Spain now, who so advices the right of the Popular Party, as advices the fake left of PSOE, the past Sanders campaign was the best designed and he points at the merit of having placed many issues on national debate that were long abscent from it and strongly due to do it...

On Ivan Redondo, Basque, formed at private jesuit Deusto University, and then at the US in political communication, presents himself as "respectful of all ideologies", amongst which he thinks "we must reach an agreement"...He assures, at his parents home there is of almost all ideologies ( although I very doubt that there is anyone of the left in his home...but I may be wrong...) and recommends reading the "suspicious", Freud, Nietzsche, Marx..if not for to learn....An interesting guy, no doubt...

Jackrabbit , Sep 25 2019 20:43 utc | 48
Sturm und Drangk the Kool-Aid

Elite malfeasance is not a crime if it's bi-partisan or part of covert ops .

But the 'gotcha!' shell game makes for great public entertainment.

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

Jay , Sep 25 2019 20:44 utc | 49
"Trump should be impeached for his crimes against Syria, Venezuela and Yemen" and the Muslim ban, and separating kids from parents at the US-Mexico border, the denial of asylum too.

Impeachment hearings will give Biden cover for his racism, jingoism, and his flailing memory.

Right Biden and son should be prosecuted for corruption by the USA, but that's true of Trump and his adult children too.

Trump stepped over line and invited Ukraine to work against the candidacy of Biden, doesn't matter what Biden foolishly said about the prosector in Ukraine.

Sasha , Sep 25 2019 20:59 utc | 50
@Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Sep 25 2019 20:20 utc | 37
One person can only make a difference if there is a party that is independent of the duopoly behind them.

But, is it at all possible in the US, with its current electoral system, present yourself as "independent" for presidential elections, out of the "duopoly"?

The system in Spain ( although not only of Spain...the "system"...) managed to thwart the popular support of even new third political force born out of the "15M Movement" ( kinda Occupy...) Podemos, by using a it of kabuki and political machinations amongst oligarchic powers and monarchy ( and I do not discard also US Embassy, as happened during the NATO referendum... )....Sánchez flew to have dinner with Macron as soon as he won the past presidential elections...the same night!

DontBelieveEitherPr. , Sep 25 2019 21:00 utc | 51
DNC just got scared that their front man Biden's dirt is being on the front page. ANYTHING to deflect the attention NOW. They dont think about long term fallout anyway.

Beautiful. Now that Trump after some years more and more realizes he is indeed president, we may finally see some of his promises full filled in the coming years. Only question is at what cost. But with Bibi and Bolton out, MBS shaky after Aramco attack, the neocons influence my finally decrease. Though it may all end out much worse we can imagine. We will see.

JohnH , Sep 25 2019 21:00 utc | 52
News reports are saying that Pelosi changed her position on impeachment because Democrats representing Trump districts suddenly changed to a pro-impeachment position. Pelosi and Schumer bend over backwards to accommodate these Republicans posing as Democrats, using them as their excuse for not getting anything meaningful done.

When it became obvious to them that Trump was going all out for Biden, their savior, I believed they got spooked, seeing their reelection chances plummet if anyone but Biden got the nomination. So of course Pelosi stepped in, as she always does for corrupt, corporate Democrats, and tried to preempt the Ukraine investigation. It may well backfire.

Democrats will spend the next six months trying to make Trump the issue. Republicans will spend the next six months making Biden's corruption the issue. Because Ukraine is such a swamp of corruption, the facts of the matter will remain murky. Ukrainian politicians are likely to say whatever the person controlling the purse strings wants them to say. Back then, it was Obama/Biden. Now it's Trump until it becomes obvious that Trump won't control the money.

In the process let's hope that a lot of dirty laundry about how the US conducts foreign policy gets aired. One of the major goals of US foreign policy is to promote US business abroad and any politician would prefer that his supporters and donors get helped the most which means that tacit, corrupt quid pro quos are the norm.

james , Sep 25 2019 21:13 utc | 53
@37 peter au... thanks.. how is it working out in australia since you voted? has the system reverted to another duopoly?

@46 d dan... did you watch the 1 1/2 minute video on biden speaking that b shared up above and i am again sharing in this link here? check it out and let us know what you think..

@49 jay.. i agree it was a mistake on trumps part, but biden is caught in a much more serious bind as i see it.. ultimately this impeachment idea of pelosi's is very dead in the water and will sink biden too.. maybe that is the point?

Sasha , Sep 25 2019 21:20 utc | 54
@Posted by: Sasha | Sep 25 2019 20:42 utc | 47

According to Ivan Redondo at that interview, the Sanders campaign in 2016 was the one really counterposed to that of Trump.... Thus, attacking Sanders now could equate campaigning for The Donald...hwen who must be attacked is Biden...

Peter AU 1 , Sep 25 2019 21:22 utc | 55
Sasha I do not know enough about the system in Spain to make any comment in that direction.

Re US and an independent president. The two party system or duopoly would take an independent down immediately using impeachment. Impeachment is somewhat different to criminal investigation and trial. A claim can be made and is voted on first by congress. If enough votes it then goes to the senate who vote as to guilty or not. For any president to survive, they must have backers in either the congress or senate.

https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/09/open-thread-on-the-effort-to-expel-trump-from-office-through-impeachment.html "It takes a simple majority (218) for the House of Representatives to pass a bill of impeachment against any federal official. The Democrats have 232 seats in the present congress. The Bill (equivalent to an indictment) then is transferred to the US Senate where the impeached person is tried before the US Senate with the Chief Justice of the United State presiding.. 2/3 of the senators must vote for conviction for that to occur. Two presidents have been impeached. None has been convicted."

Jackrabbit , Sep 25 2019 21:29 utc | 56
james

Biden is in no trouble. He is/will make the case that the removal of the Ukrainian prosecutor was supported by many people and allies that saw the prosecutor as slow/unwilling to tackle corruption in Ukraine.

This is whole thing is truly a nothing-burger distraction from the fact that we are on the cusp of war.

Brendan , Sep 25 2019 21:33 utc | 57
When Joe Biden's son, Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma, the Vice-President's spokesperson described Hunter as just "a private citizen".

In case anyone believes that the Ukrainian company appointed Hunter Biden purely on merit (and not because of who his father is), there are a few things that should be considered:

- Hunter had no previous experience either in eastern Europe or in the gas industry.

- His appointement was made just a few days before his Dad visited Ukraine:

"Company documents in Cyprus show that Joe Biden's son, R. Hunter Biden, became a member of the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, which describes itself as Ukraine's largest private natural gas producer, on April 18." https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/maxseddon/bidens-son-polish-ex-president-quietly-sign-on-to-ukrainian

- Joe Biden gave a speech during his visit, in which he encouraged Ukraine's 'energy security'( to Ukrainian Legislators in Kiev on April 22, 2014).

- The day before that speech (three days after Hunter's appointment), the White House announced that the USA would help with Ukraine's 'energy security' by sending expert teams in the following weeks. The aim was "to help Ukraine meet immediate and longer term energy needs" and "to increase conventional gas production from existing fields to boost domestic energy supply". https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/21/fact-sheet-us-crisis-support-package-ukraine

The Democrats have made a big mistake by drawing attention to the Bidens' interests in Ukraine.

guest , Sep 25 2019 21:35 utc | 58
Ukraine is right next to Russia. it's easy to get them confused.
Brendan , Sep 25 2019 21:36 utc | 59
When Joe Biden's son, Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma, the Vice-President's spokesperson described Hunter as just "a private citizen".

In case anyone believes that the Ukrainian company appointed Hunter Biden purely on merit (and not because of who his father is), there are a few things that should be considered:

- Hunter had no previous experience either in eastern Europe or in the gas industry.

- His appointement was made just a few days before his Dad visited Ukraine:

"Company documents in Cyprus show that Joe Biden's son, R. Hunter Biden, became a member of the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, which describes itself as Ukraine's largest private natural gas producer, on April 18." https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/maxseddon/bidens-son-polish-ex-president-quietly-sign-on-to-ukrainian

- Joe Biden gave a speech during his visit, in which he encouraged Ukraine's 'energy security'( to Ukrainian Legislators in Kiev on April 22, 2014).

- The day before that speech (three days after Hunter's appointment), the White House announced that the USA would help with Ukraine's 'energy security' by sending expert teams in the following weeks. The aim was "to help Ukraine meet immediate and longer term energy needs" and "to increase conventional gas production from existing fields to boost domestic energy supply". https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/21/fact-sheet-us-crisis-support-package-ukraine

The Democratics have made a big mistake by drawing attention to the Bidens' interests in Ukraine.

pretzelattack , Sep 25 2019 21:42 utc | 60
the people at the dnc don't really care about winning, they just have to make sure the dollars keep rolling in, and that people like gabbard and sanders lose. to that end, they try political grandstanding like talking about impeaching trump and keeping russiagate alive.
Peter AU 1 , Sep 25 2019 21:43 utc | 61
Yeah, straight back to the duopoly. Greens always get a few votes but they're no different. Put a vote on a long shot one time. He had a falling out with his side of the duopoly and set up a new party. Gained the ballance of power and all roads from both sides of the duopoly led to his door. Literally he sat back in his chair, big obese clown shirt half unbuttoned and held court there. In the end the duopoly caved in and gave him the required permits for to run a rail line from a new coal mine he was kicking of to the coast. Straight away he was one of the boys again, and those of his party that had been elected left him and become independents. Entertaining while it lasted though.
Don Bacon , Sep 25 2019 21:46 utc | 62
from Pelosi statement : "The president has admitted to asking the president of Ukraine to take actions which would benefit him politically. The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable facts of betrayal of his oath of office and betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections.'

presidential oath of office: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." It comes from Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.

So: > It's not clear why a US president asking a foreign president to investigate the actions of an American to cause the firing of a prosecutor is wrong. > The only way such an investigation could benefit Trump politically is if that American (Biden) had done something wrong. > So obviously Biden did do something wrong. > Therefore we must conclude that wrongdoing by Americans in other countries must not be publicized because that might affect elections. > Americans voters should not be allowed access to information about US politicians acting badly in foreign countries, and any president who requests such information should be impeached. > The integrity of our elections requires the withholding of some information from voters, when it impacts badly on Democrats.

CD Waller , Sep 25 2019 21:47 utc | 63
Oh the irony of the Democrats building their impeachment case on information from a whistleblower. After the record shattering prosecutions of the Obama Presidency, I didn't think there were any left. This instance of Biden's oral incontinence is just one reason he's a poor choice. Besides being on the wrong side of history on every issue of importance, according to another whistleblower Edward Snowden, Biden was responsible for EU nations denying him asylum and was the primary reason he ended up in Russia.
sorghum , Sep 25 2019 21:52 utc | 65
I find it impossible to believe the narrative we are being fed that politicians with decades of experience with shrewdness and the swamp of DC under their belts could possibly step on their own dicks this many times in a row by accident. This has the feel of being orchestrated reality TV playing to the Trump victim narrative that barely pushed him over the hump in 2016.
karlof1 , Sep 25 2019 21:53 utc | 66
And impeachment provides another topic to help avoid discussion of the Empire, its wars, and the financial burden it places on everything. The very sour state of the Empire's economy was mentioned above; in that light, I suggest this excellent if somewhat technical essay , as a multitude at the bar have voiced their approval of the topic: "Are We Approaching the End of Super Imperialism?"
Peter AU 1 , Sep 25 2019 21:56 utc | 68
Jackrabbit I reckon we are going to see Netanyahu but with Lieberman who is worse (more homicidal lunacy) even than nutty, calling some of the shots. I think it was Lieberman behind the downing of the Russian plane.
John Sanguinetti , Sep 25 2019 22:02 utc | 71
This is my go to site now for real news and evaluation, thanks b. The overall thread here fits my perceptions in many ways except for the elephant in the room and that is the tremendous influence (power) that the Zionist/Neocon/Israeli Fifth column has over US government, political parties, media and foreign governments. Why is this so lightly touched on here or dismissed as "corporate interests"? Is this site vulnerable to those special interests or $$? Or are there so many shills here ready to destroy anyone mentioning it? I guess I will see?
karlof1 , Sep 25 2019 22:06 utc | 72
Don Bacon @62--

Bravo!! Your next pint's on me! I merely stated no impeachable offense was committed while you laid out the illogic of it all!

As with Bill Clinton's impeachment, none of the Articles focused on the genuine crimes he committed, and the same will prove true with Trump. Lots of Jonesing for Pence as POTUS, a desire by many D-Partyites since Trump's win. My guess is the election will occur before the trial's resolved in the Senate if it even gets that far.

Kadath , Sep 25 2019 22:11 utc | 73
After 3 years of the Democrates being totally up their own asses, I've come to the sad conclusion that they must be paid to lose, there's simply no rational explanation for how insane they've behaving, 3 or 4 crazy Democrates shouting at trees is one thing, but there's not one Democrat pointing out how deranged they've been behaving. I can only imagine that their campaign contributors are laughing into their sleeves as they wright one check to the Republicans and then a slightly smaller one for the Democrates.
Peter AU 1 , Sep 25 2019 22:17 utc | 74
John Sanguinetti Israel does have strong influence on the US. I have noticed that many who would like to concentrate on just that aspect in anything that happens, Try to place all blame on Israel and depict the US as an innocent baby led astray. It was a conscious choice for the US to side with Israel and unless the yanks can clean up their act, there will always be an Israel. In fact there are many Israels behind anything political in the US. To name them all is just a matter of looking up who puts money into politics, be it sponsorship or lobbying or has in any way a hold over one or more elected politicians. You will find that virtually nobody can run for a public office in the US and hope to win without having a sugar daddy.
Joerg , Sep 25 2019 22:27 utc | 75
Please, see this excellent interview of The Duran: "BIDEN SCANDAL EXPLODES: UKRAINE FRACKING, MONEY LAUNDERING, BANK OF CHINA PAYOFFS" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qxk9Pnw4tbM
Piotr Berman , Sep 25 2019 22:43 utc | 77
With Gabbard now making it to the next debate the CORPORATE Dems are running scared. Gabbard will be taking someone out, perhaps it'll be either Warren or Biden: maybe "Beto" or "Pete" just to put a stake in the hearts of these clowns (Harris is already fatally wounded- just waiting for her to finally drop).

Posted by: Seer | Sep 25 2019 18:37

Tulsi is making up for all those years wasted in the medical unit and shines in her new job: bomb throwing. One bomb hit Kamala the hanging prosecutor, the most recent "we are not Saudi prostitutes" is even better. I would most sincerely ask people here to contribute to her campaign and see your pennies at work. Of course, if you would rather see debates full of establishment collegiality then you should not do it.

JohnH , Sep 25 2019 22:48 utc | 78
One of the reasons that I doubt Biden's version of the story stems from my experience in Venezuela. After Chavez took power, Venezuelans told me that he had found that a critical subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA was basically a CIA shop. The names of CIA on the Board of Directors were not just ordinary CIA, but were recognizable figures at the very top. To me this is entirely plausible. Control of oil is critical to US global hegemony. And what better way to control foreign oil than to have trusted American asset sit on the BOD? This brings us to Hunter Biden's appointment to Ukrainian energy giant Burisma. After the coup in 2014, why wouldn't Biden want a trusted asset on the board of the biggest natural gas producer in Ukraine? IOW it was unpublicized standard operating procedure.
Duncan Idaho , Sep 25 2019 22:57 utc | 79
"For decades there has been a "catch me if you can" quality about Donald Trump, skipping from casino bankruptcies to fraudulent universities to porn actor payoffs." True--- But that may be coming to a end.
uncle tungsten , Sep 25 2019 23:05 utc | 80
Thank you Piotr Berman #77, I share that view with you. Tulsi Gabbard is changing the debate and corporate Dems AND Repugs are terrified of a wave.

I see that Bernie's moment is coming where he will have to choose to either step in line as a sheepdog or take a truly independent path. He is unlikely to run again in 4 years and given the vice grip that these corporate Democrat party thugs have on the machine it may well be time for a leader to go on strike against the machine and run as a people's president.

Tulsi is running hard and I dont expect her to break ranks but I do not see her capitulating as a sheep dog either given her profound focus on messages that the USA working and middle class support. They both need to consider their power and risk in taking direct action in this campaign when the watershed moment arises.

Michael Droy , Sep 25 2019 23:09 utc | 81
It is funny, The Dems spent 4 years trying to find the stain on the dress for Trump and impeach him for lying about it - and it seems that they have absolutely no other idea how to get into power. There is an election next year, and still they prefer to shoot themselves in the foot rather than appeal to voters. Step one of course would be to listen to voters - the ones telling them to shut up about impeachment and find a candidate under 65 with electable policies. In that sense the inevitable departure of Biden is good for the Dems.
Why is it so hard for Democrats to understand this?

Is the key question. Psychiatrists would call it projection. The Dems seem to take everything bad that they get accused of and accuse the oppo early. Thus The Russia smears on Trump came right after internal research told Hillary that she was vulnerable to corruption charges over Uranium One. (it is to the Trump campaign's great credit that they did not respond to the silly Russia gate charges by Hillary by pointing to the far more serious and credible corruption charges against HRC and the $145 million payment to the Clinton foundation by the guy that was permitted by HRC to sell his Uranium stake to Russia's Rosatom. Rather Trump ignored media chat and stuck to his message to voters - essentially that the Dems had abandoned the working man and that Trump at least listened to them.)

And clear criminal behaviour by Biden with Ukraine is the model to accuse Trump in the Biden coverup (though surely he gets ditched now - the Chinese $1 billion to the hedge fund run by Biden's son + Kerry Step-son + big drugs criminal and murder, Whitey Bulger's nephew is just dynamite - just wait till we get to discussing why Obama never faced down China over trade!!).

Has to be said that with all this media power but no policies the Dems are doing appallingly badly, with much of the blowback from the Mueller inquiry yet to hit them.

Josh , Sep 25 2019 23:16 utc | 82
That's a rather macabre balancing act that the creatures in DC are performing. They are certainly a strange lot. I wonder just how badly the faction being represented by the DNC and Democratic Party actually screwed up (on a global/cosmic scale that is). Because, they sure do seem to be stuck in freak out mode. I mean, it is a known fact that Obama, and Biden, were directly responsible for the Kiev coup (I'm sorry, but anyone who believes otherwise really needs a little cognitive adjustment therapy), so that's not really a bombshell. Everyone already knows that Clinton was on point for the Arab Spring and the Libya debacle (to include bumping off a US diplomat), not to mention in on the ground floor of the entire aggression against Syria (and possibly had a finger in the aggression against Yemen). So, these things are in no way able to be considered secrets (even if they do ammount to Nuremberg style war crimes). What else could these ridiculous creatures possibly be afraid of people finding out about, which would prompt them to behave so aggressively towards someone who merely mentions 'maybe looking into somebody's something'?
Jen , Sep 25 2019 23:20 utc | 83
Of all the various misdeeds committed by the Trump government over the last few years within US borders and without, the one crime Nancy Pelosi decides to go after Trump over turns out not only a non-crime but it is not even a pale shadow of a more egregious incident in which Joe Biden, while US Vice-President, pressured the Ukrainian government under Porky Pig Poroshenko to sack Viktor Shokin as Prosecutor General for launching an investigation into possibly corrupt activities of Burisma Holdings and in particular of one of its directors who happens to be Joe Biden's son, Hunter.

Incidentally wasn't a major shareholder of Burisma Holdings at one time (if not currently) the notorious Ihor Kolomoisky, governor of Dnepropetrovsk region in mid-2014, about the time that the Malaysia Airlines Boeing passenger jet fell from the sky in a region where Burisma Holdings had been granted a license to explore and prospect for shale oil?

Incidentally Dmitri Alperovich, CEO of Crowdstrike, the cyber-security company that worked for the DNC during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and its Digital Forensics Research Lab where Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat is a non-resident advisor.

Kadath , Sep 25 2019 23:32 utc | 85
God, even the real news network is descending into madness over this Trump impeachment, they just interviewed Elie Mystal & Alexandra Flores-Quilty and they have drunk the cool-aid so hard they are basically convulsing on the floor. According to them investigating Joe Biden's video confession of extortion is a crime but Joe Biden's extortion is perfectly fine.

I feel that the Democrats' real problem with Trump is that he ended their corruption financing plan for the future. I would like to add Trump just replaced the Democrats corruption plan with his own, but OOPS, the Democrats haven't provided any evidence of that, instead they spent 3 years trying to prove something that never happened.

Millions of dollars, millions of manhours of political discourse and newsmedia coverage, all of it wasted. Those hours could have been used discussing foreign policy, economic policy, healthcare policy, industrial policy, environment policy but nope. Instead the Democrats chased a ghost for 3 years and now the Democrats have just signalled that they will spend the next 6 months trying to impeach Trump for investigating Joe Biden's corruption. The American people have, in effect, been defrauded of their political leadership time, how do the Democrats think this will go over with the American voters in 2020.

Don Bacon , Sep 25 2019 23:41 utc | 86
@ karlof1 66

impeachment provides another topic to help avoid discussion of the Empire, its wars,

Yes, the congress-critters get to enjoy a well-paying job with an annual salary of $174,000 and increase their already high likelihood of getting re-elected if they don't do anything notable that people might not like, but only play politics and sound important on presidential betrayals like (quoting Pelosi) "betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections."

Dems don't take the A Train, they take the B Trail! . . .sorry, I couldn't resist a corny joke (again)

[Sep 25, 2019] After Chavez took power, Venezuelans told me that he had found that a critical subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA was basically a CIA shop.

Notable quotes:
"... One of the reasons that I doubt Biden's version of the story stems from my experience in Venezuela. After Chavez took power, Venezuelans told me that he had found that a critical subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA was basically a CIA shop. The names of CIA on the Board of Directors were not just ordinary CIA, but were recognizable figures at the very top. ..."
"... To me this is entirely plausible. Control of oil is critical to US global hegemony. And what better way to control foreign oil than to have trusted American asset sit on the BOD? ..."
Sep 25, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

JohnH -> JohnH... , September 25, 2019 at 03:45 PM

One of the reasons that I doubt Biden's version of the story stems from my experience in Venezuela. After Chavez took power, Venezuelans told me that he had found that a critical subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA was basically a CIA shop. The names of CIA on the Board of Directors were not just ordinary CIA, but were recognizable figures at the very top.

To me this is entirely plausible. Control of oil is critical to US global hegemony. And what better way to control foreign oil than to have trusted American asset sit on the BOD?

This brings us to Hunter Biden's appointment to Ukrainian energy giant Burisma. After the coup in 2014, why wouldn't Biden want a trusted asset on the board of the biggest natural gas producer in Ukraine? IOW it was unpublicized standard operating procedure.

[Sep 25, 2019] Tulsi: The ratcheting up of retaliatory actions between the US and Iran will lead to a war that will be devastating to the people of both countries. As president I will re-enter the Iran Nuclear Agreement and end the sanctions against Iran to move us back from the precipice of war.

Sep 25, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , September 23, 2019 at 06:09 AM

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1176102410541907968

Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard

The ratcheting up of retaliatory actions between the US and Iran will lead to a war that will be devastating to the people of both countries. As president I will re-enter the Iran Nuclear Agreement and end the sanctions against Iran to move us back from the precipice of war.

Reckless Retaliation Has Us One Spark Away From War

4:54 AM - 23 Sep 2019

[Sep 24, 2019] Terribly Divisive Tulsi Gabbard Refuses To Join Fellow Democrats' Calls For Impeachment

Notable quotes:
"... Aaron Maté warned, "They're doubling down on failure: a failure to transform after losing 2016; & a failure to bring Trump down w/ the failed Russiagate conspiracy theory." ..."
Sep 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

We've long commented that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is certainly the most interesting and 'outside-the-establishment-box' candidate on the Democrat side running for president -- a "Ron Paul of the Left" of sorts given her outspoken criticism of US regime change wars and standing against foreign policy adventurism as her central message.

She even once met in 2016 with then President-elect Trump to discuss Syria policy and non-interventionism at a private meeting at Trump Tower just ahead of his being sworn into office, after which she said both agreed to resist "the drumbeats of war [on Syria] that neocons have been beating to drag us into an escalation...".

And now she's resisting calls for Trump to be impeached, saying it would be "terribly divisive" . She told "Fox & Friends" on Tuesday that she'll remain consistent to her message that the road to 2020 can only be found in a clear victory and mandate, saying it's for "the American people... making that decision" of who is in the White House, not impeachment .

Via Reuters

"I believe that impeachment at this juncture would be terribly divisive for the country at a time when we are already extremely divided. The hyperpartisanship is one of the main things driving our country apart," Gabbard told host Brian Kilmeade.

Once again showing herself outside of the establishment and its blindly loyal partisan narrative, and perhaps more in-tune with the American public, she's further setting herself apart from her main Democratic rivals and the presidential nominee front-runners on this one.

"I think it's important to beat Donald Trump, that's why I'm running for president," she said. "But I think it's the American people who need to make their voices heard making that decision."

Top contender Elizabeth Warren, for example, tweeted early Tuesday , "The House must impeach. It must start today."

A number of commentators pointed out this would likely end in failure as the Democrats double down on impeachment even after Trump agreed to release the full, unredacted transcript of the Ukraine call in question.

One progressive journalist and political commentator, Aaron Maté warned, "They're doubling down on failure: a failure to transform after losing 2016; & a failure to bring Trump down w/ the failed Russiagate conspiracy theory."

As we noted earlier, Democrats are now scrambling as it seems President Trump's decision to release the transcript has spoiled their narrative.

Like the failed Mueller investigation, should this blow up in Democrats' faces it will practically guarantee the reelection of Donald Trump .

And likely for this very reason, Pelosi herself had for months resisted calls to start the impeachment process, and yet here we are , with Pelosi leading the charge.

[Sep 24, 2019] Nate Silver (538) is saying that Gabbard appears to have made the October debate.

Sep 24, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

russell1200 , September 24, 2019 at 2:46 pm

Nate Silver (538) is saying that Gabbard appears to have made the October debate.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/tulsi-gabbard-is-the-12th-candidate-to-make-octobers-democratic-debate/

There used to be some Tulsi fans here if the only Bernie is pure enough crowd hasn't chased them off.

nippersmom , September 24, 2019 at 3:07 pm

When the other candidates prove reliably progressive, I'll consider them. So far, Sanders is the only one to reach that threshold. You may call that "purism"; I call it not supporting candidates who don't support me.

I contributed to Tulsi Gabbard's campaign (and supported her as a potential VP candidate) despite having reservations about her, specifically because I wanted her to be on the debate stage to promote her anti-imperialist foreign policy views. She lost a lot of ground with me on her vote on the anti-BDS referendum.

Jonathan Holland Becnel , September 24, 2019 at 4:14 pm

Sanders/Gabbard!

John , September 24, 2019 at 6:13 pm

Sanders/Gabbard indeed The DNC crowd has tried so hard to squeeze Tulsi out with the able assistance of the MSM. Perhaps this will cause agita.

Plenue , September 24, 2019 at 6:39 pm

Not a Gabbard 'fan', despite donating to her. She was never a serious candidate; her usefulness was in bringing a genuine anti-war platform into the debate. Now that the 'democratic' Party has cut her out, she doesn't have much point. She's still a drone loving Zionist, and her continued supporting of literal fascist (or the next closest thing) Modi is just gross.

Darius , September 24, 2019 at 6:45 pm

Purity suggests politics is about morality. It isn't. It's about who's going to get you stuff. Only Bernie talks in those terms. And he isn't pure but barely acceptable.

Purity is posturing for those who think politics is about public performance and self expression. Upper middle class liberals can afford to approach things this way, but most people are too busy trying to keep their horse out of the ditch. They need stuff.

[Sep 24, 2019] The Plan to Trip Up Trump Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about," Papadopoulos replied according to his recent book , "Deep State Target." But what if he had instead chuckled or said something stupid in order to puff himself up? Based on previous FBI entrapment cases , the answer seems clear: after threatening him with prosecution, the bureau would have outfitted him with a wire so that he could bring down other campaign officials. It wouldn't have stopped until it snared the ultimate prize –Trump himself. ..."
"... Trump told reporters in May he wanted Australia's role to be investigated by the Justice Department. Comey's Trump Tower meeting was important because it led directly to the publication of the notorious dossier that would generate endless headlines and cripple the incoming Trump administration even though it was full of baloney. ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Instead of electing presidents, Americans would merely submit them to the FBI for review. ..."
"... With the Electoral College and the Supreme Court already overturning the popular vote in two of the last five presidential elections, voters would have a fourth branch to contend with – the intelligence community. ..."
"... As Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer told MSNBC'S Rachel Maddow at the height of the Russiagate madness: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community – they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you." Had Comey succeeded in bringing down Trump, they may have had a seventh. ..."
"... Le Monde Diplomatique ..."
Sep 24, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Before the Trump Tower visit, Comey sat down with top FBI brass – Chief of Staff James Rybicki, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, General Counsel James Baker, and others involved with the Russiagate investigation – to strategize about the upcoming meeting.

Page 17 of the OIG report tells of what they were up to:

"Baker and McCabe said that they agreed that the briefing needed to be one-on-one, so that Comey could present the 'salacious' information in the most discreet and least embarrassing way. At the same time, we were told, they did not want the President-elect to perceive the one-on-one briefing as an effort to hold information over him like a 'Hoover-esque type of plot.' Witnesses interviewed by the OIG also said that they discussed Trump's potential responses to being told about the 'salacious' information, including that Trump might make statements about, or provide information of value to, the pending Russian interference investigation."

As the final sentence shows, Comey's job was to confront Trump about the alleged 2013 Moscow incident and see whether he would give the FBI reason to advance its Russiagate investigation to a whole new level, that of the presidency itself.

This was the same approach the FBI would employ a couple of weeks later after listening in on a telephone conversation between Mike Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and not liking what it heard about plans to bolster U.S.-Russian relations. The solution was to send a couple of agents to quiz the newly-appointed national security adviser and see how he would respond. After telling Flynn not to bother bringing along a lawyer because it was just a friendly chat and "they wanted Flynn to be relaxed, and they were concerned that giving the warnings might adversely affect the rapport" – as a follow-up memo noted – the agents caught the ever-voluble Flynn fudging various details. Three weeks later, he found himself out of office and in disgrace. Ten months after that, he was in federal court pleading guilty to making false and misleading statements.

Another Set-Up

Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department's inspector general. (Wikimedia Commons)

Now we know from the OIG report that this was apparently the goal with regard to Trump.

Russiagate began nine months earlier with a smallarmy of intelligence agents buzzing around a naïve young Trump adviser named George Papadopoulos. [See " Spooks Spooking Themselves ," May 31, 2018.] An Anglo-Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud, an individual with strong Anglo-American intelligence connections, wined and dined him and told him that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails."

An Australian diplomat, former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer , who was similarly connected, invited him out for drinks and then passed along the fruits of the conversation to Canberra, which related them to Washington. A Belorussian-American businessman who worked for Steele offered Papadopoulos $30,000 a month under the table. A U.S. intelligence asset named Charles Tawil presented him with $10,000 in cash. A long-time CIA informant named Stefan Halper flew Papadopoulos to London and barraged him with questions:

"It's great that Russia is helping you and the campaign, right, George? George, you and your campaign are involved in hacking and working with Russia, right? It seems like you are a middleman for Trump and Russia, right? I know you know about the emails."

"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about," Papadopoulos replied according to his recent book , "Deep State Target." But what if he had instead chuckled or said something stupid in order to puff himself up? Based on previous FBI entrapment cases , the answer seems clear: after threatening him with prosecution, the bureau would have outfitted him with a wire so that he could bring down other campaign officials. It wouldn't have stopped until it snared the ultimate prize –Trump himself.

Trump told reporters in May he wanted Australia's role to be investigated by the Justice Department. Comey's Trump Tower meeting was important because it led directly to the publication of the notorious dossier that would generate endless headlines and cripple the incoming Trump administration even though it was full of baloney.

Most of what we know about that meeting in the early days of the Trump administration comes from a memo that Comeydashed off minutes later and then lightly revised the next morning.

According to his memo, Comey met one-on-one with Trump to tell him about the Steele dossier because

"the content [was] known at IC [intelligence community] senior level and I didn't want him caught cold by some of the detail . I said I wasn't saying this was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material and that we were keeping it very close-hold."

But Comey's memo was disingenuous, starting with his line about not wanting to give the media "the excuse to write that the FBI has the material." Leaks are an integral part of Washington, as an insider and a leaker like Comey knows.

As Comey must have also known, his very decision to brief Trump on the dossier wound up triggering press attention to it.

Four days later, Buzzfeed posted the dossier on its website. The source remains anonymous but it's easy to imagine that either Director of National Intelligence James Clapper or CIA Director John Brennan spilled the beans. They both accompanied Comey to the meeting and were appalled by Trump's call for a rapprochement with Russia.

Comey's memo also rings false where it says he "wasn't saying this was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands."

Glenn Simpson, the ex- Wall Street Journal reporter whose private Washington intelligence firm, Fusion GPS, commissioned the dossier on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC, told the House intelligence committee that Steele began sharing his findings with the FBI "in July or late June" of 2016. (See p. 60 of testimony transcript ).

That means that the bureau had the Moscow Ritz-Carlton report in hand six months prior to the Trump Tower meeting. Surely, this is enough time to reach some conclusion as to its veracity.

'Might Make Statements'

Had Trump fallen into Comey's trap, millions of Americans would no doubt have cheered – and given Trump's dismal record in office, who can blame them? But the implications are chilling, and not just for rightwing dissidents. Instead of electing presidents, Americans would merely submit them to the FBI for review.

With the Electoral College and the Supreme Court already overturning the popular vote in two of the last five presidential elections, voters would have a fourth branch to contend with – the intelligence community.

As Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer told MSNBC'S Rachel Maddow at the height of the Russiagate madness: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community – they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you." Had Comey succeeded in bringing down Trump, they may have had a seventh.

Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com .

Richard A. , September 24, 2019 at 15:13

I think Russiagate is more than just smearing Trump, it's also about smearing Russia. The war lobby here in the US and the UK are trying to manipulate public opinion in to hating Russia.

R Zarate , September 24, 2019 at 05:02

And now there are calls to impeach Trump for asking for an investigation into Biden! It speaks volumes about the MSM that there was no uproar when H.B. took the job at Bursima, I remember the White House putting out a release at the time saying they could see no conflict of interest, I guess the lack of conflict was it was par for the course to enrich family members.

By the bye. So Trump gets impeached, then what? Didn't do Clinton any harm.

CitizenOne , September 23, 2019 at 23:26

It is an interesting history filled with plots within plots to destroy Trump for the audacity to win the presidential election. True he won the election with a lot of help from Cambridge Analytica and his election team which included Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos (the nube) Paul Manafort (the former partner in the Black, Stone, Manafort and Kelly lobby firm) , Rick Gates and Michael Flynn.

All these people were indicted under the Mueller probe but yet Trump escaped without a scratch on his record. To pull this off Trump abandoned all of them in turn claiming he hardly knew them and had no involvement. How Trump escaped from the Mueller investigation has nothing to do with his innocence and everything to do with the lack of evidence tying him to the crimes his associates admitted to under intense scrutiny by the Mueller Special Council Investigation into the alleged Russian Hacks which supposedly threw the election toward Trump. Michael Cohen, Trump's long time lawyer was also convicted of paying off two women that alleged Trump arranged for sex with the women and later paid them off handsomely allegedly by orders from Trump.

It is like Trump won his freedom because there was no evidence to convict him despite the many people who were closely associated with himwho fell as victims to the special prosecutors zeal for indictments of Trump's inner guard.

In the end the Mueller report all but exonerated Trump with Mueller claiming Trump had committed impeachable evidence but that Mueller could do nothing about that leaving his conclusions up to the court of popular appeal as to whether or not Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice in the entire Russia Gate story.

Trump accurately called out the testimony of Comey before Congress into what he knew about the Russian attempt to hack the election as fake news. Trump banked on what the intelligence community would share about the election result and he won big time when the Mueller investigation into Russian hacking of the election produced no tangible connection between Trump and the alleged hackers. The Steel dossier was also l shown to be just more fake news paid for by the democrats.

The longer Trump remains in charge the less likely that he will be implicated in a scandal although the new allegations that he attempted to get the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden has the potential to raise a new round of fake news decrying that the president has engaged in yet more impeachable offenses.

robert e williamson jr , September 23, 2019 at 21:23

Beware of the Department of Justice, mad dogs and dogs of war.

Appears to be FBI disruption of the domestic governmental tranquility for the unique purpose of disrupting a duly elected president.

I mean the FBI bill themselves as the domestic counter intelligence apparatus and CIA apparently agrees. Maybe CIA is actually running another of their counter intelligence covert mission that involves the undoing of Ole Donny J. .

No I didn't say it, no mention of the dreaded "executive action" my me.

My assumption is that this may be simply collateral damage from the investigation into the Russia meddling in the 2016 elec . . . . .

. . . and the beat goes on, la da da dee . . . !

That far away look in the eyes of the old democratic leaders is the look of "the fear" (H.S.T.). They watch as the repugs, their partners in crime get skewered , by the same DOJ that will skewer them in a New York second given a chance.

DOJ and the USAG leading the shock troops of the National Socialists take over.

Sandra Thompson , September 23, 2019 at 20:58

One of your best lines: "Instead of electing presidents, Americans would merely submit them to the FBI for review." Liked last couple of paragraphs too. Thank you

Abby , September 23, 2019 at 19:43

So Comey knowingly and blatantly lied to the incoming president and it was that incoming president that got investigated? How the hell does that make sense to the Russia Gaters? And then they elevated Comey after he got fired? This makes as much sense as people thinking that Robert Mueller was going to save the country.

After reading Parry's essay on Joe ByeDone from 2014 after the Obama coup in Ukraine that showed how corrupt the powerful people in our government are I don't even know why people bother to vote anymore. The country is run by people behind the scenes who use congress critters to do their dirty work and give them cover. And with our corrupt military industrial complex setting the world on fire I think it's time for the empire to burn.

Ray McGovern , September 23, 2019 at 18:46

VERY GOOD PIECE, DAN. THANKS. Ray McGovern

Martin , September 23, 2019 at 15:27

I read somewhere early on that someone was peddling the steele-dossier to many different outlets weeks or even months before trump's briefing, but they wouldn't bite (too fantastic) until the feds legitimized it. The people should be informed about these mechanics.

Dan Anderson , September 23, 2019 at 15:09

Here's the warning before being sworn in:
January 3, 2017 – Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you. So, even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he is being really dumb to do this."
Rachel Maddow: "What do you think the intelligence community would do if they were motivated to?"
Schumer: "I don't know, but from what I am told, they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them," -- The Rachel Maddow Show Jan 3, 2017

[Sep 24, 2019] Have some fun with this imperialist Raguram Rajan: "The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to those acting in bad faith"

Sep 24, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Paine , September 14, 2019 at 04:38 PM

Have some fun with raguram

"The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to those acting in bad faith"

". Meanwhile, the system's multilateral institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund, helped countries in dire need of funds, provided they followed the rules."

anne -> Paine ... , September 14, 2019 at 04:43 PM
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-trade-war-damage-by-raghuram-rajan-2019-09

September 5, 2019

The True Toll of the Trade War

Behind the escalating global conflict over trade and technology is a larger breakdown of the postwar rules-based order, which was based on a belief that any country's growth benefits all. Now that China is threatening to compete directly with the United States, support for the system that made that possible has disappeared.
By RAGHURAM G. RAJAN

CHICAGO – Another day, another attack on trade. Why is it that every dispute – whether over intellectual property (IP), immigration, environmental damage, or war reparations – now produces new threats to trade?

For much of the last century, the United States managed and protected the rules-based trading system it created at the end of World War II. That system required a fundamental break from the pre-war environment of mutual suspicion between competing powers. The US urged everyone to see that growth and development for one country could benefit all countries through increased trade and investment.

Under the new dispensation, rules were enacted to constrain selfish behavior and coercive threats by the economically powerful. The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to those acting in bad faith. Meanwhile, the system's multilateral institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund, helped countries in dire need of funds, provided they followed the rules....

likbez -> anne... , September 14, 2019 at 08:30 PM
"The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to those acting in bad faith"

USA foreign policy since 70th was controlled by neocons who as a typical Trotskyites (neoliberalism is actually Trotskyism for the rich) were/are hell-bent of world domination and practice gangster capitalism in foreign policy. Bolton attitude to UN is very symptomatic for the neocons as a whole.

Madeline "not so bright" Allbright was the first swan. As well as Clinton attempts to bankrupt and subdue Russia and criminal (in a sense of no permission from the UN) attack on Yugoslavia. Both backfired: Russia became permanently hostile. The fact he and his coterie were not yet tried by something like Nuremberg tribunal is only due to the USA dominance at this stage of history.

The truth is that the dissolution of the USSR the USA foreign policy became completely unhinged. And inside the country the elite became cannibalistic, as there was no external threat to its dominance in the form of the USSR.

The USA stated to behave like a typical Imperial state (New Rome, or, more correctly, London) accepting no rules/laws that are not written by themselves (and when it is convenient to obey them) with the only difference from the classic imperial states that the hegemony it not based on the military presence/occupation ( like was the case with British empire)

Although this is not completely true as there are 761 US Military Bases across the planet and only 46 Countries with no US military presence. Of them, seven countries with 13 New Military Bases were added since 09/11/2001. In 2001 the US had a quarter million troops posted abroad.

Still as an imperial state that is the center of neoliberal empire the USA relies more on financial instruments and neoliberal comprador elite inside the country.

I recently learned from https://akarlin.com/2010/04/on-liberasts-and-liberasty/ that the derogatory term for the neoliberal part of the Russian elite is "liberasts" and this term gradually slipping into English language ( http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/liberast ;-)

With the collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 the USA centered neoliberal empire experiences first cracks. Brexit and election of Trump widened the cracks in a sense of further legitimizing the ruling neoliberal elite (big middle finger for Hillary was addressed to the elite as whole)

If oil price exceed $100 per barrel there will yet another crack or even repetition of the 2008 Great Recession on a new level (although we may argue that the Great Recession never ended and just entered in Summers terms "permanent stagnation" phase)

Although currently with unhinged Trump at the helm the USA empire still going strong in forcing vassals and competitors to reconsider their desire to challenge the USA. Trump currently is trying to neutralize the treat from China by rejecting classic neoliberal globalization mechanism as well as signed treaties like WTO. He might be successful in the short run.

In the long run the future does not look too bright as crimes committed by the USA during triumphal period of neoliberalism hangs like albatross around the USA neck.

EU now definitely wants to play its own game as Macron recently stated and which Merkel tacitly supports. If EU allies with Russia it will became No.1 force in the world with the USA No. 2. With severe consequences for the USA.

If Russia allied with China the USA No.1 position will hinge of keeping EU vassals in check and NATO in place. Without them it will became No.2 with fatal consequences for the dollar as world reserve currency and sudden change of the USA financial position due to the level of external debt and required devaluation of the dollar.

Looks like 75 year after WWII the world started to self-organize a countervailing force trying to tame the USA with some interest expressed by such players as EU, Russia, China, India, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia. As well as ( in the past; and possibly in the future as neoliberal counterrevolutions in both countries probably will end badly) by Brazil and Argentina.

Only Canada, Australia and probably UK can be counted as the reliable parts of the USA empire. That's not much.

ilsm -> likbez... , September 15, 2019 at 07:21 AM
"If Russia allied with China the USA No.1 position "........

Think Italy moving into the Axis in 1937? Or the Soviet German Non Aggression Pact. Nuclear weapons removes the incentive for large "rearmaments" or not?

Would the Britain to France 1938 relationship describe the US to EU? Thinking in 1939 (1914?) terms Europe is less stitched together than in 1936.

ilsm -> Paine ... , September 14, 2019 at 06:43 PM
"Beliefs" must be sustained by trust and justice... Which are clearly missing in the US' sacred cold war and post history "postwar rules-based order".

[Sep 24, 2019] CIA decided under Dulles that they were the only ones capable of leading this country

Notable quotes:
"... CIA decided under Dulles that they were the only ones capable of leading this country, mainly because they wanted it ran their way and no other. Don't take my word for it though, read Arthur B. Darling's "THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, AN INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT TO 1950 copy right 1990 Penn State Press. (This work was classified for quite a long while.) ..."
"... So the first thing that works in CIA et al's favor is politicians who have been in DC long enough to be worn down and thoroughly compromised by blackmail of one sort or another and there fore vulnerable. ..."
Sep 24, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

SusanR , September 20, 2019 at 20:22

It has been my contention that Biden's powerful backers from the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex are fully aware of his mental state, and that is precisely why they want him to be president. Why? He would only be a figure-head president. He would be given a suggested running mate as well as a list of candidates for cabinet and other appointed positions (as Obama was given) and Biden would follow that in making appointments. Policies of his administration would be consistent with the interests of the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex.

robert e williamson jr , September 20, 2019 at 15:19

Kids this is exactly what the intelligence community wants, someone who they can claim needs to be told what to do or be kept discreetly out of the loop, so currently Joe maybe the chosen one just as Bill Barr is reported to have told Slick Willy.

We end up where we are at the moment because our security state apparatus is ran by the intelligence community who do not really want a strong intelligent, clear minded president who can actually think for himself. Ask Barrack Obama!

For years I've used this analogy, crude as it maybe, that when the newly elected president is called on for his national security briefing it is always a tense encounter because this "Newby" is about to have a come to Jesus meeting with this most abusive of all government entities. The intelligence community. He is "shown the way"he will act because if he doesn't this community who has relieved him of one his go -- -s will come and relieve him of the other.

This started as a joke on my part, I'm now convinced it reflects reality.

At some point many here will understand that since around the time of the murder of JFK , CIA has framed things in this manner.

CIA decided under Dulles that they were the only ones capable of leading this country, mainly because they wanted it ran their way and no other. Don't take my word for it though, read Arthur B. Darling's "THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, AN INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT TO 1950 copy right 1990 Penn State Press. (This work was classified for quite a long while.)

Doing so will help make your mind more flexible , jeesh what a slog to get through it.

So the first thing that works in CIA et al's favor is politicians who have been in DC long enough to be worn down and thoroughly compromised by blackmail of one sort or another and there fore vulnerable.

I figured if Caitlin could say "dog balls " which I think was a great analogy I could say gonads.

Time to sit down Joe.

Thanks again to Consortium News for their great efforts at informing the masses.

[Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact

Highly recommended!
This is a apt demonstration of the raw power of the US neoliberal MSM propaganda.
Notable quotes:
"... This is a very interesting process: no matter how absurd is the particular notion and how many contravening facts exist, the power of neoliberal MSM is such that soon enough it is viewed as an established and indisputable fact. As you aptly call it "an article of faith". ..."
"... So we can state that neoliberal MSM are performing part of functions that in Medieval Europe was performed by the Church. Kind of giant televangelism pulpit in the mega church of neoliberalism ..."
Sep 23, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Mark Chapman September 21, 2019 at 3:52 pm

Interesting – apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact, it is safe to advance on that a little. Now Donald Trump actually asked Vladimir Putin to hack the emails of his democratic rival.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ukraine-if-youre-listening–how-trump-tries-to-quell-controversies-by-saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud/2019/09/20/8e68aad0-dbc1-11e9-adff-79254db7f766_story.html

Curiously, the Washington Post's recently-adopted new slogan is "Democracy dies in darkness". So telling the readers any old shit that you made up and can offer no proof whatsoever is true is infinitely better than darkness. And they wonder why academic standards are slipping, and why Americans faithfully believe things that few other countries accept as true. All the while they are cultivating a nation of dunces which believes anything it is told by its government.

likbez

"apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact,"

Mark, you are a very astute political observer!

This is a very interesting process: no matter how absurd is the particular notion and how many contravening facts exist, the power of neoliberal MSM is such that soon enough it is viewed as an established and indisputable fact. As you aptly call it "an article of faith".

So we can state that neoliberal MSM are performing part of functions that in Medieval Europe was performed by the Church. Kind of giant televangelism pulpit in the mega church of neoliberalism

[Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact

Highly recommended!
This is a apt demonstration of the raw power of the US neoliberal MSM propaganda.
Notable quotes:
"... This is a very interesting process: no matter how absurd is the particular notion and how many contravening facts exist, the power of neoliberal MSM is such that soon enough it is viewed as an established and indisputable fact. As you aptly call it "an article of faith". ..."
"... So we can state that neoliberal MSM are performing part of functions that in Medieval Europe was performed by the Church. Kind of giant televangelism pulpit in the mega church of neoliberalism ..."
Sep 23, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Mark Chapman September 21, 2019 at 3:52 pm

Interesting – apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact, it is safe to advance on that a little. Now Donald Trump actually asked Vladimir Putin to hack the emails of his democratic rival.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ukraine-if-youre-listening–how-trump-tries-to-quell-controversies-by-saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud/2019/09/20/8e68aad0-dbc1-11e9-adff-79254db7f766_story.html

Curiously, the Washington Post's recently-adopted new slogan is "Democracy dies in darkness". So telling the readers any old shit that you made up and can offer no proof whatsoever is true is infinitely better than darkness. And they wonder why academic standards are slipping, and why Americans faithfully believe things that few other countries accept as true. All the while they are cultivating a nation of dunces which believes anything it is told by its government.

likbez

"apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact,"

Mark, you are a very astute political observer!

This is a very interesting process: no matter how absurd is the particular notion and how many contravening facts exist, the power of neoliberal MSM is such that soon enough it is viewed as an established and indisputable fact. As you aptly call it "an article of faith".

So we can state that neoliberal MSM are performing part of functions that in Medieval Europe was performed by the Church. Kind of giant televangelism pulpit in the mega church of neoliberalism

[Sep 23, 2019] Political Journalism is Dead The American Conservative

Sep 23, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Columnist Max Boot in The Washington Post put into writing what we have all known for some time: real journalism, Jefferson's informed citizenry and all that, is dead. The job has shifted to aspirational writing, using manipulated droplets of facts and just plain made-up stuff to drive events.

Boot writes to drive Trump from office and overturn the 2016 election. Max : "Much of my journalism for the past four years has been devoted to critiquing President Trump and opposing the spread of Trumpism. But no matter how many columns or sound bites I produce, he remains in office . I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference."

Boot has spent the last several years creating and circle-supporting others who create false narratives. They manufacture reasons for Trump to resign, press Democrats to impeach, and try to persuade voters they otherwise hold in contempt that they don't know what's good enough for them. We kind of figured this out after senior staff at the New York Times had to remind reporters that they were "not part of the f*cking resistance," but it is helpful to see it in daylight. After all, democracy dies in darkness.

The uber-false narrative Max and others Frankensteined into existence was Russiagate. Trump wasn't the Manchurian Candidate and there was no quid pro quo for Russian election help. Yet the media literally accused the president of treason by melding together otherwise unrelated truthlets -- Trump wanted a hotel in Moscow, some ads were run on Facebook -- that could be spun into a narrative to bring him down. Correlation was made into causation in a purposeful freshman Logic 101 fail. What was true was of little consequence; what mattered was whether the media could collectively create a story that the rubes would believe and then pile on.

Advertisement

The critical flaw in Russiagate (other than that it didn't happen) was that the media created an end-point they could not control. Robert Mueller was magic-wanded into the Last Honest Man, the Savior of Democracy, as the narrative first unfolded and then fell apart like a cardboard box in the rain. After his dismal testimony, there was nowhere for the story to go.

Was it only a week ago Law and Order: Scotland SVU was the locus of the Next Big Thing following Greenland? Because even as we race to catch up (debunking takes longer than making up accusations,) a whole new Big Thing popped up over the Ukraine. Details are vague, based all on leaks and persons familiar with some of it, but are as dire as they are lacking.

But as with every other outrage, leaks in the new phone call-gate instantly became certainties, certainties became foreign influence in our elections, and demands to impeach were recycled until Twitter voted for the death penalty. And all before a single piece of hard data is public. See the pattern yet?

If the latest "gate" doesn't pan out, Democrats have already jumpstarted an old favorite, upgraded for the 2020 election: Trump is now manipulating domestic and foreign policy for personal gain via hotel fees.

5 Questions the Media Won't Ask Biden in the Debate With Mueller Time a Flop, Dems Run to Plans B and C

At first glance, it seems like a non-starter. Trump's hotels are as much a part of him as the extra pounds he carries. He campaigned as a CEO and announced early on that he was not going to divest . But with the first cold slap of his election victory, a narrative was being shaped: he could not become president because of his business conflicts of interest; it was danged unconstitutional .

Early proponents of this dreck dug around in the Constitution's closet and found the Emoluments Clause , a handful of lines intended to bar officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign sovereigns, kings, and princes to prevent influence buying. Pre-Trump, the last time the issue was in actual contention was with President Martin Van Buren (no relation) over gifts from the Imam of Muscat.

The media ran with it. They imagined out of whole cloth that any foreign government official getting a room at any Trump hotel had been given a "gift." Then they imagined that any tiny percentage of that room profit that actually went to Trump himself represented a bribe. Then they imagined that despite the vast complexity of U.S. relations, Trump would alter course because some guy rented a room. It was Joker -like in its diabolicalness, the presidency itself merely a prank to hide an international crime spree. Pow!

It was ridiculous on its face, but they made it happen. The now-defunct leftist site Think Progress ran what might be Story Zero before Trump even took office. An anonymous source claimed that, under pressure, the Kuwaiti ambassador had canceled a major event at one hotel to switch to Trump's own D.C. hotel. It turned out to be untrue. "Do you think a reception of two hours in the Trump hotel is going to curry favors with the administration when we host thousands of U.S. troops in Kuwait? When we have in the past and still do support American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?" the Kuwait ambassador asked when someone got around to his side of the story. But no matter: the narrative was set.

Then it grew. Though the Emoluments Clause is quite specific, the media decided that every time anyone stayed at a Trump property, it was corruption. Even when Trump visited one of his own homes, it was corruption, because the Secret Service paid Trump for the privilege. Of course, the Secret Service has always paid for the facilities used in their work because the government cannot commandeer private property or accept free rooms (which, ironically, could be seen as a bribe), not from Marriott and not from the Trump Organization. Even Joe Biden still has to charge the Secret Service rent on a cottage he owns so they can protect him when he's home in Delaware.

More? T-Mobile booked nine rooms at a Trump hotel, in media hive minds ostensibly to influence federal approval of a $26 billion merger. Those rooms were worth about $2,700. Of course, the president, who can influence the Dow with a tweet, prefers to make his illegal money off jacked up hotel bills. Think small has always been a Trump trademark.

Reuters headlined how foreigners were buying condos from third-party owners (i.e., not Trump or his company), but they were in a Trump-managed building and maybe the monthly maintenance fees would qualify as mini-emoluments? Trump was accused of " hiding " foreign government income at his hotels when servers at the bar failed to ask cash customers if they were potentates or princes (the headline : "Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments Clause").

And of course, there was the Air Force crew staying at a Trump place in Scotland. No matter that the hotel had forged its relationship with a nearby airport long before Trump became president, or that the Air Force had used the airport and hotel hundreds of times before Trump became president (going back to World War II), or that a decision by the Pentagon to have flights stop more frequently there was made under the Obama administration. None of that stopped the media from proclaiming corruption. One piece speculated that the $166 per night the Air Force pays for rooms was always part of Trump's cornerstone financial plan for the floundering multi-million golf course.

But to see how much the corruption narrative really is a media creation, you have only to compare it to how the mainstream media covered what might have been a similar question in the past. Imagine if journalists had treated every appearance by Obama as a book promotion. What if his every speech had been slandered across the channels as corruption, Obama just out there pimping his books? Should he have been impeached for commercializing the office of president?

Follow the money, as Rachel Maddow likes to say. The Trump Organization pays to the Treasury all profits from foreign governments. In 2018, that was $191,000 . The year before, the amount was $151,470. So Trump's in-pocket profit is zero.

Meanwhile, Obama's profit as an author during his time in office was $15.6 million (he's made multiples more since, including a $65 million book advance). In the two weeks before he was inaugurated, Obama reworked his book deals to take advantage of his new status. He agreed not to publish another non-fiction book during his time in office to keep anticipation high, while signing a $500,000 advance for a young adult version of Dreams From My Father .

Obama's books were huge sellers in China, where publishing is largely government controlled, meaning he likely received Chicom money in the Oval Office. His own State Department bought $79,000 worth of his books to distribute as gifts.

As with Trump, nothing Obama did was illegal. There are no laws per se against a president making money. Yet no one bothered to raise ethical questions. No one claimed he sought the presidency as a bully ATM machine. No one claimed his frequent messaging about his father was designed to move books. No one held TV hearings on his profits or how taxpayer funds were used to buy his books. It's not "everybody does it" or "whataboutism"; it's why does the media treat two very similar situations so very differently?

Max Boot confessed why. The media has created a pitch-and-toss game with Democrats, running false, exaggerated, and shallowly reported stories to generate calls for hearings , which in turn breathe life into the corruption stories they live off. We will soon see how far last week's breathless drama -- unnamed "whistleblower" leaks supposedly charging Trump with pressuring the Ukrainian president to investigate his rival Joe Biden -- will go.

Boot and his ilk are doing a new job. Journalism to them is for resistance, condemnation, arousal, and regime change. And that's one way democracy does die.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper's War: A Novel of WWII Japan , and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent.

[Sep 23, 2019] Political Journalism is Dead The American Conservative

Sep 23, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Columnist Max Boot in The Washington Post put into writing what we have all known for some time: real journalism, Jefferson's informed citizenry and all that, is dead. The job has shifted to aspirational writing, using manipulated droplets of facts and just plain made-up stuff to drive events.

Boot writes to drive Trump from office and overturn the 2016 election. Max : "Much of my journalism for the past four years has been devoted to critiquing President Trump and opposing the spread of Trumpism. But no matter how many columns or sound bites I produce, he remains in office . I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference."

Boot has spent the last several years creating and circle-supporting others who create false narratives. They manufacture reasons for Trump to resign, press Democrats to impeach, and try to persuade voters they otherwise hold in contempt that they don't know what's good enough for them. We kind of figured this out after senior staff at the New York Times had to remind reporters that they were "not part of the f*cking resistance," but it is helpful to see it in daylight. After all, democracy dies in darkness.

The uber-false narrative Max and others Frankensteined into existence was Russiagate. Trump wasn't the Manchurian Candidate and there was no quid pro quo for Russian election help. Yet the media literally accused the president of treason by melding together otherwise unrelated truthlets -- Trump wanted a hotel in Moscow, some ads were run on Facebook -- that could be spun into a narrative to bring him down. Correlation was made into causation in a purposeful freshman Logic 101 fail. What was true was of little consequence; what mattered was whether the media could collectively create a story that the rubes would believe and then pile on.

Advertisement

The critical flaw in Russiagate (other than that it didn't happen) was that the media created an end-point they could not control. Robert Mueller was magic-wanded into the Last Honest Man, the Savior of Democracy, as the narrative first unfolded and then fell apart like a cardboard box in the rain. After his dismal testimony, there was nowhere for the story to go.

Was it only a week ago Law and Order: Scotland SVU was the locus of the Next Big Thing following Greenland? Because even as we race to catch up (debunking takes longer than making up accusations,) a whole new Big Thing popped up over the Ukraine. Details are vague, based all on leaks and persons familiar with some of it, but are as dire as they are lacking.

But as with every other outrage, leaks in the new phone call-gate instantly became certainties, certainties became foreign influence in our elections, and demands to impeach were recycled until Twitter voted for the death penalty. And all before a single piece of hard data is public. See the pattern yet?

If the latest "gate" doesn't pan out, Democrats have already jumpstarted an old favorite, upgraded for the 2020 election: Trump is now manipulating domestic and foreign policy for personal gain via hotel fees.

5 Questions the Media Won't Ask Biden in the Debate With Mueller Time a Flop, Dems Run to Plans B and C

At first glance, it seems like a non-starter. Trump's hotels are as much a part of him as the extra pounds he carries. He campaigned as a CEO and announced early on that he was not going to divest . But with the first cold slap of his election victory, a narrative was being shaped: he could not become president because of his business conflicts of interest; it was danged unconstitutional .

Early proponents of this dreck dug around in the Constitution's closet and found the Emoluments Clause , a handful of lines intended to bar officeholders from accepting gifts from foreign sovereigns, kings, and princes to prevent influence buying. Pre-Trump, the last time the issue was in actual contention was with President Martin Van Buren (no relation) over gifts from the Imam of Muscat.

The media ran with it. They imagined out of whole cloth that any foreign government official getting a room at any Trump hotel had been given a "gift." Then they imagined that any tiny percentage of that room profit that actually went to Trump himself represented a bribe. Then they imagined that despite the vast complexity of U.S. relations, Trump would alter course because some guy rented a room. It was Joker -like in its diabolicalness, the presidency itself merely a prank to hide an international crime spree. Pow!

It was ridiculous on its face, but they made it happen. The now-defunct leftist site Think Progress ran what might be Story Zero before Trump even took office. An anonymous source claimed that, under pressure, the Kuwaiti ambassador had canceled a major event at one hotel to switch to Trump's own D.C. hotel. It turned out to be untrue. "Do you think a reception of two hours in the Trump hotel is going to curry favors with the administration when we host thousands of U.S. troops in Kuwait? When we have in the past and still do support American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?" the Kuwait ambassador asked when someone got around to his side of the story. But no matter: the narrative was set.

Then it grew. Though the Emoluments Clause is quite specific, the media decided that every time anyone stayed at a Trump property, it was corruption. Even when Trump visited one of his own homes, it was corruption, because the Secret Service paid Trump for the privilege. Of course, the Secret Service has always paid for the facilities used in their work because the government cannot commandeer private property or accept free rooms (which, ironically, could be seen as a bribe), not from Marriott and not from the Trump Organization. Even Joe Biden still has to charge the Secret Service rent on a cottage he owns so they can protect him when he's home in Delaware.

More? T-Mobile booked nine rooms at a Trump hotel, in media hive minds ostensibly to influence federal approval of a $26 billion merger. Those rooms were worth about $2,700. Of course, the president, who can influence the Dow with a tweet, prefers to make his illegal money off jacked up hotel bills. Think small has always been a Trump trademark.

Reuters headlined how foreigners were buying condos from third-party owners (i.e., not Trump or his company), but they were in a Trump-managed building and maybe the monthly maintenance fees would qualify as mini-emoluments? Trump was accused of " hiding " foreign government income at his hotels when servers at the bar failed to ask cash customers if they were potentates or princes (the headline : "Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments Clause").

And of course, there was the Air Force crew staying at a Trump place in Scotland. No matter that the hotel had forged its relationship with a nearby airport long before Trump became president, or that the Air Force had used the airport and hotel hundreds of times before Trump became president (going back to World War II), or that a decision by the Pentagon to have flights stop more frequently there was made under the Obama administration. None of that stopped the media from proclaiming corruption. One piece speculated that the $166 per night the Air Force pays for rooms was always part of Trump's cornerstone financial plan for the floundering multi-million golf course.

But to see how much the corruption narrative really is a media creation, you have only to compare it to how the mainstream media covered what might have been a similar question in the past. Imagine if journalists had treated every appearance by Obama as a book promotion. What if his every speech had been slandered across the channels as corruption, Obama just out there pimping his books? Should he have been impeached for commercializing the office of president?

Follow the money, as Rachel Maddow likes to say. The Trump Organization pays to the Treasury all profits from foreign governments. In 2018, that was $191,000 . The year before, the amount was $151,470. So Trump's in-pocket profit is zero.

Meanwhile, Obama's profit as an author during his time in office was $15.6 million (he's made multiples more since, including a $65 million book advance). In the two weeks before he was inaugurated, Obama reworked his book deals to take advantage of his new status. He agreed not to publish another non-fiction book during his time in office to keep anticipation high, while signing a $500,000 advance for a young adult version of Dreams From My Father .

Obama's books were huge sellers in China, where publishing is largely government controlled, meaning he likely received Chicom money in the Oval Office. His own State Department bought $79,000 worth of his books to distribute as gifts.

As with Trump, nothing Obama did was illegal. There are no laws per se against a president making money. Yet no one bothered to raise ethical questions. No one claimed he sought the presidency as a bully ATM machine. No one claimed his frequent messaging about his father was designed to move books. No one held TV hearings on his profits or how taxpayer funds were used to buy his books. It's not "everybody does it" or "whataboutism"; it's why does the media treat two very similar situations so very differently?

Max Boot confessed why. The media has created a pitch-and-toss game with Democrats, running false, exaggerated, and shallowly reported stories to generate calls for hearings , which in turn breathe life into the corruption stories they live off. We will soon see how far last week's breathless drama -- unnamed "whistleblower" leaks supposedly charging Trump with pressuring the Ukrainian president to investigate his rival Joe Biden -- will go.

Boot and his ilk are doing a new job. Journalism to them is for resistance, condemnation, arousal, and regime change. And that's one way democracy does die.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper's War: A Novel of WWII Japan , and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent.

[Sep 23, 2019] You may like this Tulsi interview. I did. The interviewer is a moron but Tulsi handled him quite well

Sep 23, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Northern Star September 16, 2019 at 2:15 pm

Once Again.. She is Spot the Fuck on..

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tulsi-gabbard-donald-trump-saudi-arabia-oil-attack_n_5d7fc275e4b077dcbd622d5b

Like Like

Patient Observer September 20, 2019 at 3:34 pm
You may like this Tulsi interview. I did. The interviewer is a moron but Tulsi handled him quite well>
https://theduran.com/tulsi-gabbard-shoots-straight-on-the-middle-east-like-a-soldier-should/
Mark Chapman September 20, 2019 at 6:37 pm
She did make him look stupid – all he had was a handful of talking points. Occasionally he did try to talk over her to hammer home his points, but often he sat quietly and let her finish. When your interviewer lets you speak, he's interested in what you have to say, or if opposed to you, in letting you hang yourself.

When he talks over you, he's simply trying to do all the talking while offering the pretense of an interview.

[Sep 23, 2019] It's Twenty-Fifth Amendment time. Americans need to get this dangerous clown out of office NOW.

Sep 23, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Northern Star September 16, 2019 at 2:29 pm

Fuck Impeachment. It's Twenty -Fifth Amendment time. Americans need to get this dangerous clown out of office NOW.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Jo8QU2s_5I?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

[Sep 23, 2019] Snowden: "I would like to return to the US"

Sep 23, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Northern Star September 16, 2019 at 1:32 pm

Snowden on CBS this morning worth watching .

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/edward-snowden-wants-to-come-home-but-says-u-s-wont-give-him-a-fair-trial/

Like Like

Jen September 16, 2019 at 5:57 pm
Taco Bell, please open an outlet in Moscow or near where Ed Snowden lives to keep him happy and stop him from getting homesick!

Like Like

Moscow Exile September 16, 2019 at 10:57 pm
Snowden: "I would like to return to the US"
Mark Chapman September 16, 2019 at 11:06 pm
I don't see how he could have handled it better. He was polite and well-spoken, never flustered or defensive, and the talking heads tumbled over one another in their eagerness to be properly judgmental, to talk over him and recite their own talking points, and ended up looking like buffoons. He will be a tough nut to crack, and so far the American regime has done nothing to convince ordinary people that he is a cowardly traitor. Putting him on television only makes him look more heroic.

Like Like

Moscow Exile September 17, 2019 at 1:29 am
Typical Yankee judgementalism:

Snowdon: "Russia has, shall we say, a problematic human rights record -- at a minimum "

Never had no negro slavery, though, did it, Edward?

Like Like

Moscow Exile September 17, 2019 at 1:31 am
"That's if we're being generous" ???

Who?

The USA????

Like Like

Moscow Exile September 17, 2019 at 1:43 am
And a US "talking" head, in reply to Snowdon's belief that he would not get a fair trial in the USA (a US human rights issue, is that not, Mr.Snowdon?) says that criminals and alleged criminals do not customarily get to determine the terms of their trial: they broke the law and they face the consequences "

Guilty before proven innocent?

Presumption of innocence: an international human right under the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 11.

Like Like

Mark Chapman September 17, 2019 at 6:59 am
An excellent point I wish he had immediately made.

Like Like

Mark Chapman September 17, 2019 at 7:06 am
Nor, to the best of my recollection, did it have an Abu Ghraib. The United States actually has a pretty shitty human-rights record if you consider it from the viewpoint of how it treas others than Americans, and – going further back – only white Americans. The west always tries to factor in the Holodomor, too, how Russia deliberately starved the Ukrainians to death, as an example of their horrible human rights record.

Like Like

yalensis September 17, 2019 at 1:10 pm
I cringed at that one too. But I forgive Edward, because I think he was trying to make a tactical debating point, namely:

I am not a Russia stooge, I have my criticisms of the Russian regime yada yada, and I agree with you talking heads that their human rights record is not well received in the West. And yet they scored a human-rights trifecta when they let me in, when not one single "democracy" would defend me or give me asylum.

In other words, he would concede, for argumentation purposes, that Russia is bad, only to stick it to them that Russia did well by him and scored propaganda points against the West. It's a particular debating tactic, whose Latin name I cannot recall.

Unfortunately, Edward never got to finish his point, because those bitches cut him off before he could even get to the punchline.

Like Like

Northern Star September 17, 2019 at 3:18 pm
Ahhh I see you will need more intense beatings at the cultural reeducation camp in consideration of your continued use of the 'negro' word.

However one should ignore Gayle she's a black moron, one of the TV progeny of the uber fat whale 'O'.

Like Like

Moscow Exile September 19, 2019 at 8:20 pm
Is it "wrong" to say "negro" now?

Like Like

[Sep 22, 2019] More Americans Questioning Official 9-11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative by Whitney Webb

Highly recommended!
If commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks called for a new investigation into the events of September 11 then official story is officially dead.
Notable quotes:
"... Evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative of September 11, and it becomes ever more clear that the media remains committed to preventing legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve. ..."
"... For instance, in late July, commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks and lost one of their own that day, called for a new investigation into the events of September 11. On July 24, the board of commissioners for the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which serves a population of around 30,000 near Queens, voted unanimously in their call for a new investigation into the attacks. ..."
"... Commissioner Christopher Gioia, who drafted and introduced the resolution, told those present at the meeting's conclusion that getting all of the New York fire districts onboard was their plan anyway. ..."
"... "We're a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an unstoppable force," Gioia said. "We were the first fire district to pass this resolution. We won't be the last," he added. ..."
"... While questioning the official conclusions of the first federal investigation into 9/11 has been treated as taboo in the American media landscape for years, it is worth noting that even those who led the commission have said that the investigation was "set up to fail" from the start and that they were repeatedly misled and lied to by federal officials in relation to the events of that day. ..."
"... For instance, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote in their book Without Precedent that not only was the commission starved of funds and its powers of investigation oddly limited, but that they were obstructed and outright lied to by top Pentagon officials and officials with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). ..."
"... Though the official story regarding the collapse of WTC 7 cites "uncontrolled building fires" as leading to the building's destruction, a majority of Americans who have seen the footage of the 47-story tower come down from four different angles overwhelmingly reject the official story, based on a new YouGov poll released on Monday. ..."
"... That poll found that 52 percent of those who saw the footage were either sure or suspected that the building's fall was due to explosives and was a controlled demolition, with 27 percent saying they didn't know what to make of the footage. Only 21 percent of those polled agreed with the official story that the building collapsed due to fires alone. Prior to seeing the footage, 36 percent of respondents said that they were unaware that a third building collapsed on September 11 and more than 67 percent were unable to name the building that had collapsed. ..."
"... Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, told MintPress that the lack of awareness about WTC 7 among the general public "goes to show that the mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people about even the most basic facts related to 9/11. On any other day in history, if a 47-story skyscraper fell into its footprint due to 'office fires,' everyone in the country would have heard about it." ..."
"... The Americans who felt that the video footage of WTC 7's collapse did not fit with the official narrative and appeared to show a controlled demolition now have more scientific evidence to fall back on after the release of a new university study found that the building came down not due to fire but from "the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building." The extensive four-year study was conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska and used complex computer models to determine if the building really was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely due to office fires. ..."
"... The only reason it remains taboo to ask questions about the official narrative, whose own authors admit that it is both flawed and incomplete, is that the dominant forces in the American media and the U.S. government have successfully convinced many Americans that doing so is not only dangerous but irrational and un-American. ..."
Sep 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

Evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative of September 11, and it becomes ever more clear that the media remains committed to preventing legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve.

Today the event that defined the United States' foreign policy in the 21st century, and heralded the destruction of whole countries, turns 18. The events of September 11, 2001 remains etched into the memories of Americans and many others, as a collective tragedy that brought Americans together and brought as well a general resolve among them that those responsible be brought to justice.

While the events of that day did unite Americans in these ways for a time, the different trajectories of the official relative to the independent investigations into the September 11 attacks have often led to division in the years since 2001, with vicious attacks or outright dismissal being levied against the latter.

Yet, with 18 years having come and gone -- and with the tireless efforts from victims' families, first responders, scientists and engineers -- the tide appears to be turning, as new evidence continues to emerge and calls for new investigations are made. However, American corporate media has remained largely silent, preferring to ignore new developments that could derail the "official story" of one of the most iconic and devastating attacks to ever occur on American soil.

For instance, in late July, commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks and lost one of their own that day, called for a new investigation into the events of September 11. On July 24, the board of commissioners for the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which serves a population of around 30,000 near Queens, voted unanimously in their call for a new investigation into the attacks.

While the call for a new investigation from a NY Fire Department involved in the rescue effort would normally seem newsworthy to the media outlets who often rally Americans to "never forget," the commissioners' call for a new investigation was met with total silence from the mainstream media. The likely reason for the dearth of coverage on an otherwise newsworthy vote was likely due to the fact that the resolution that called for the new investigation contained the following clause:

Whereas, the overwhelming evidence presented in said petition demonstrates beyond any doubt that pre-planted explosives and/or incendiaries -- not just airplanes and the ensuing fires -- caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings, killing the vast majority of the victims who perished that day;"

In the post-9/11 world, those who have made such claims, no matter how well-grounded their claims may be, have often been derided and attacked as "conspiracy theorists" for questioning the official claims that the three World Trade Center buildings that collapsed on September 11 did so for any reason other than being struck by planes and from the resulting fires. Yet, it is much more difficult to launch these same attacks against members of a fire department that lost a fireman on September 11 and many of whose members were involved with the rescue efforts of that day, some of whom still suffer from chronic illnesses as a result.

Rescue workers climb on piles of rubble at the World Trade Center in New York, Sept. 13, 2001. Beth A. Keiser | AP

Another likely reason that the media monolithically avoided coverage of the vote was out of concern that it would lead more fire departments to pass similar resolutions, which would make it more difficult for such news to avoid gaining national coverage. Yet, Commissioner Christopher Gioia, who drafted and introduced the resolution, told those present at the meeting's conclusion that getting all of the New York fire districts onboard was their plan anyway.

"We're a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an unstoppable force," Gioia said. "We were the first fire district to pass this resolution. We won't be the last," he added.

While questioning the official conclusions of the first federal investigation into 9/11 has been treated as taboo in the American media landscape for years, it is worth noting that even those who led the commission have said that the investigation was "set up to fail" from the start and that they were repeatedly misled and lied to by federal officials in relation to the events of that day.

For instance, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote in their book Without Precedent that not only was the commission starved of funds and its powers of investigation oddly limited, but that they were obstructed and outright lied to by top Pentagon officials and officials with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). They and other commissioners have outright said that the "official" report on the attacks is incomplete, flawed and unable to answer key questions about the terror attacks.

Despite the failure of American corporate media to report these facts, local legislative bodies in New York, beginning with the fire districts that lost loved ones and friends that day, are leading the way in the search for real answers that even those that wrote the "official story" say were deliberately kept from them.

Persuasive scientific evidence continues to roll in

Not long after the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District called for a new 9/11 investigation, a groundbreaking university study added even more weight to the commissioners' call for a new look at the evidence regarding the collapse of three buildings at the World Trade Center complex. While most Americans know full well that the twin towers collapsed on September 11, fewer are aware that a third building -- World Trade Center Building 7 -- also collapsed. That collapse occurred seven hours after the twin towers came down, even though WTC 7, or "Building 7," was never struck by a plane.

It was not until nearly two months after its collapse that reports revealed that the CIA had a "secret office" in WTC 7 and that, after the building's destruction, "a special CIA team scoured the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports stored in the station, either on paper or in computers." WTC 7 also housed offices for the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, the New York Mayor's Office of Emergency Management and the bank Salomon Brothers.

Though the official story regarding the collapse of WTC 7 cites "uncontrolled building fires" as leading to the building's destruction, a majority of Americans who have seen the footage of the 47-story tower come down from four different angles overwhelmingly reject the official story, based on a new YouGov poll released on Monday.

Source | Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

That poll found that 52 percent of those who saw the footage were either sure or suspected that the building's fall was due to explosives and was a controlled demolition, with 27 percent saying they didn't know what to make of the footage. Only 21 percent of those polled agreed with the official story that the building collapsed due to fires alone. Prior to seeing the footage, 36 percent of respondents said that they were unaware that a third building collapsed on September 11 and more than 67 percent were unable to name the building that had collapsed.

Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, told MintPress that the lack of awareness about WTC 7 among the general public "goes to show that the mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people about even the most basic facts related to 9/11. On any other day in history, if a 47-story skyscraper fell into its footprint due to 'office fires,' everyone in the country would have heard about it."

The fact that the media chose not to cover this, Walter asserted, shows that "the mainstream media and the political establishment live in an alternative universe and the rest of the American public is living in a different universe and responding to what they see in front of them," as reflected by the results of the recent YouGov poll.

Another significant finding of the YouGov poll was that 48 percent of respondents supported, while only 15 percent opposed, a new investigation into the events of September 11. This shows that not only was the Franklin Square Fire District's recent call for a new investigation in line with American public opinion, but that viewing the footage of WTC 7's collapse raises more questions than answers for many Americans, questions that were not adequately addressed by the official investigation of the 9/11 Commission.

The Americans who felt that the video footage of WTC 7's collapse did not fit with the official narrative and appeared to show a controlled demolition now have more scientific evidence to fall back on after the release of a new university study found that the building came down not due to fire but from "the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building." The extensive four-year study was conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska and used complex computer models to determine if the building really was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely due to office fires.

The study, currently available as a draft , concluded that "uncontrolled building fires" did not lead the building to fall into its footprint -- tumbling more than 100 feet at the rate of gravity free-fall for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second collapse -- as has officially been claimed. Instead, the study -- authored by Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Feng Xiao and Dr. Zhili Quan -- found that "fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] and private engineering firms that studied the collapse," while also concluding "that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global [i.e., comprehensive] failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building."

This "near-simultaneous failure of every column" in WTC 7 strongly suggests that explosives were involved in its collapse, which is further supported by the statements made by Barry Jennings, the then-Deputy Director of Emergency Services Department for the New York City Housing Authority. Jennings told a reporter the day of the attack that he and Michael Hess, then-Corporation Counsel for New York City, had heard and seen explosions in WTC 7 several hours prior to its collapse and later repeated those claims to filmmaker Dylan Avery. The first responders who helped rescue Jennings and Hess also claimed to have heard explosions in WTC 7. Jennings died in 2008, two days prior the release of the official NIST report blaming WTC 7's collapse on fires. To date, no official cause of death for Jennings has been given.

Still "crazy" after all these years?

Eighteen years after the September 11 attacks, questioning the official government narrative of the events of those days still remains taboo for many, as merely asking questions or calling for a new investigation into one of the most important events in recent American history frequently results in derision and dismissal.

Yet, this 9/11 anniversary -- with a new study demolishing the official narrative on WTC 7, with a new poll showing that more than half of Americans doubt the government narrative on WTC 7, and with firefighters who responded to 9/11 calling for a new investigation -- is it still "crazy" to be skeptical of the official story?

Firefighters hose down the smoldering remains of 7 World Trade Center Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2001, in New York. Ryan Remiorz | AP

Even in years past, when asking difficult questions about September 11 was even more "off limits," it was often first responders, survivors and victims' families who had asked the most questions about what had really transpired that day and who have led the search for truth for nearly two decades -- not wild-eyed "conspiracy theorists," as many have claimed.

The only reason it remains taboo to ask questions about the official narrative, whose own authors admit that it is both flawed and incomplete, is that the dominant forces in the American media and the U.S. government have successfully convinced many Americans that doing so is not only dangerous but irrational and un-American.

However, as evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative, it becomes ever more clear that the reason for this media campaign is to prevent legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve, even smearing victims' families and ailing first responders to do so. For too long, "Never Forget" has been nearly synonymous with "Never Question."

Yet, failing to ask those questions -- even when more Americans than ever now favor a new investigation and discount the official explanation for WTC 7's collapse -- is the ultimate injustice, not only to those who died in New York City on September 11, but those who have been killed in their names in the years that have followed.

Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

tanabear , says: September 11, 2019 at 7:45 pm GMT

Leroy Hulsey et al. of the University of Alaska Fairbanks released their draft report on WTC7 on September 3rd. These are the major findings and conclusions:

" The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on
9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.

This conclusion is based primarily upon the finding that the simultaneous failure of all
core columns over 8 stories followed 1.3 seconds later by the simultaneous failure of all exterior columns over 8 stories produces almost exactly the behavior observed in videos of the collapse, whereas no other sequence of failures that we simulated produced the observed behavior."

So World Trade Tower 7 was an engineered demolition. This is something that the 9/11 "conspiracy theorists" believed all along. Now a major engineering study confirms it.

Osama Bin SEE I A , says: September 12, 2019 at 1:12 am GMT
...The infuriating thing about 9/11 and the multitude of lesser false flags which both preceded and followed it is that, although most Americans know it was as phoney as a three and a half dollar fed reserve note, everyone seems content to put up with the extremely phoney "war on terror" it was designed to create and which has already destroyed a hand full of countries in the world, caused the murder of upwards of two million people, mostly using U.S. military, and turned the U.S. into a ruthlessly insane police state wherein everyone is made to obey patently unlawful statutes in the name of "emergency" while the ruling elite has quit obeying any laws at all while gathering a massive military presence to cow the now restless and resentful public. – See more at:Christopher Bollyn: The Man Who Solved 9/11

https://www.youtube.com/embed/pLWIV0TTcbI?feature=oembed

davidgmillsatty , says: September 12, 2019 at 6:58 pm GMT
@The Alarmist An aerospace engineer. Good for you. Maybe you need a refresher course with some architects and building engineers. Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth is a good place to start.

As for steel losing 90% of its strength at half its melting temperature -- that does not imply that heat not will stack on steel. The whole building was a steel radiator. And the fires in building 7 were very small so just how do small fires get to half the melting temperature of steel when the radiator effect is bleeding what little heat these fires have from a certain spot.

Lets see the steel buildings you claim were demolished by fires, because I have heard many architects and engineers say the number is zero. We are talking a total collapse of the buildings not just a partial collapse. Let's see them.

Adam Smith , says: September 19, 2019 at 3:56 am GMT

Eighteen years after the September 11 attacks, questioning the official government narrative of the events of those days still remains taboo for many

This topic illustrates a few things about humans and their societies that many of us do not realize, or are too afraid to realize. It's bigger than just the cognitive dissonance, though this is part of it. Admittedly it is uncomfortable for most people to think about such things Ignorance is bliss, and it is much easier to follow the herd.

But

Humans have been selectively bred and conditioned for obedience to authority for at least the last 10,000 years. Stanley Milgram made the ramifications of this clear when he showed us some of the dangers this fact presents for our world. Couple Milgram's findings with those of Solomon Asch's conformity experiments and it starts becoming clear why a large part, about 30%, of the population will never be able to question the official orthodoxy regarding this "New Pearl Harbor".

Many people simply do not have the mental ability to question those in a perceived position of authority. These people are used to following orders. They are trained very well. These are the people who will electrocute a stranger just because a man in a white coat says to. These are the people who will throw a grenade into your babies crib while storming your home in the middle of the night because some junkie informant told them they bought drugs there in exchange for cash or a lighter sentence. These are the people who will not believe their lying eyes when it contradicts the words of their masters or if it risks going against the apparent consensus of a group of strangers.

I call them authoritarian followers. They love punishing members of the outgroup. They love following rules no matter how arbitrary, nonsensical or detrimental. They expect others to follow too.

We all know September 11, 2001, was an inside/outside job. Cui bono? The axis of kindness. The U.S./Nato, Saudi Arabia and Israel committed the events of September 11, 2001 so they could escalate their wars in the middle east to redraw the map for Greater Israel while securing the oil in the middle east and the trillions in minerals in Afghanistan. The military industrial complex needs endless wars to justify their one trillion plus dollar annual budget and all the power that comes with it. Some people, like lucky Larry Silverstein, made billions off the transaction. There is plenty of profiteering and graft that comes with waging forever war.

The same people who profited from the event are the same people who planned and executed the event. They are also the people who had the tools to make it happen. Fortunately for the criminals who committed the crimes of that day a large part of the population will line up to ridicule anyone who has the audacity to question the official narrative.

So buy police brutality bonds and pay your victory tax. Your work will set you free.

Anonymous [973] • Disclaimer , says: September 19, 2019 at 11:24 pm GMT
@Adam Smith It's so unbelievably rare to run into a sincere description of the average fellow. Because one cam't lie to himself about the others less than he does about himself (he can't know the others more than he can know himself), so usually evident features of people (thus of mainstream culture, history, journalistic narratives, ) must he denied because evident features of the self must be denied.

It's co-operation.

And then, aren't they a social species? You have surely observed that a group of them functions in ways very close to the ant colony, the bee hive, and so on. So many more billion neurons but what rules the mind is still so close to what rules it in the other social species.

The thing to consider is that for God knows how many thousands of years in mankind's history, whenever two differently sized came to a confrontation, belonging in the largest equated survival, in the smallest death.
Then there is the intragroup confrontations and dangers: here flattering the pack leaders best equated to better chances of survival + a more comfortable life. On the other hand, injuring their sense of power had the same outcome that it has for the ordinary bee or ant to do the same to the colony's or hive's leader.

This has embedded a couple of instincts, which truth and fairness can't be where they are, at the deepest level of the regular human mind.
Some minds are different, but they don't matter, first of all they don't matter numerically.

So official accounts of historic events are no more and no less truth-free of the accounts people make-up of their own lives' essential events.
If you assess the average divorce-asking woman's narrative on her marriage and why she wants to break it up and the average account of, say, World War 2 in the average school book, the % of untruth will be circa the same.

What happens at the higher levels follows from the nature of the majority.

Anonymous [973] • Disclaimer , says: September 19, 2019 at 11:32 pm GMT
@Adam Smith

They love following rules no matter how arbitrary, nonsensical or detrimental. They expect others to follow too.

Following rules as long as nobody above them tells them to make an exception.
They expect not all others, but only those below them in the power pole, to follow rules.
If they see/realize/know someone above them has broken a rule, they are awesomely good at, wbile they have seen/realized/learned the fact, not having seen/realized/learned it.

This kind of mind can't afford unity and individuality, of course. There are always inconsistencies, and even contradictory things believed at the same time.
And boy, how do the other authorities/authoritarian followers (depending whom they are dealingwith) who make up the psych professions praise that kind of person! How do they master selective blindness/forgetfulness/ignorance.

Paul Vonharnish , says: • Website September 20, 2019 at 3:45 pm GMT
It's obvious from most reader comments that the educational systems in America (and elsewhere) have completely decayed. "Cognitive dissonance" is just another cowardly way of accepting lies as truths Most of you are lying to yourselves and expecting others to buy into hype and bullshit.

Anyone who's worked with cutting steel plate knows that 5 inch thick steel plating (as used in most lower columns of the towers) requires a perfect mixture of acetylene and oxygen just to get the cutting area hot enough to apply the oxygen burst that cuts along the line. Any cooling of the plate and it's no cigar. There is no way air craft fuel (kerosene) and normal building materials can get anywhere near the melting point of steel, much less cause complete structural failure of a perfectly engineered steel beamed structure.

Christopher Bollyn and many other dedicated journalists have connected all the relevant dots, yet the unwashed continue to hide behind their collage degrees and talk complete nonsense.

The first and second laws of thermodynamics should be mastered before graduating from eighth grade People need to quit lying about the efficacy of truth

D-FENS , says: September 21, 2019 at 7:09 pm GMT
I am an agnostic on whether the twin towers were brought down by supplemental explosives. My question is, what is gained by actually bringing the buildings down? If the attacks were to serve as a pretext for war in the middle east, wouldn't the acts of hijacking the planes and crashing them have been sufficient without the risks involved in planting explosives and being being detected?

The only reasons I can offer are financial, such as the insurance payments, voided contracts, shorting stocks etc. and perhaps destruction of evidence in criminal or civil cases.

What is interesting is the 9/11 Commission's conclusion regarding the financing of 9/11: " the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance."

Then why do we have all the financial transaction laws?

[Sep 22, 2019] The Snowden Conundrum by Yvonne Lorenzo

Highly recommended!
This article raises serious questions about Snowden's authenticity. Although the level of damage he has done make suggestion that he is apart of CIA operation against NSA much less plausible. He did some damage by publicizing operations like Prism. No question about it.
And it is diffuclt to treat Snowden like another variation of Lee Harvey Oswald defection to the USSR.
But it is true that several steps that he took after supposed exfiltration of the documents were highly suspicious: As author pointed out WaPo and Guardian are essentially intelligence agencies controlled outlets, so there is no chance that publication can't be completely blocked.
Another good point is that in any large corporation there is system of logs and they suppoedly are analysed, althout the level of qualification in doing so varies greatly.
And if reports are created automatically that not not mean that they are ver read. Another valid point is that even if you are system administrator, you have great powers over all your users. But at the same time your power is compartmentalized: you have access only to few selected computer that constitute the set of servers you manage. And you usually access then via special jumpserver, which logs everything you do. In no way you have access to any server and any database in the organization; you might not even know that some servers exist. Actually access to critical databases is very tightly controlled.
The author also pointed to an interesting question about difficulties of exfiltration of data on encrypted Windows computers. I think that copy to the UCB drive from encrypted drive to SD or USB drive might still be permitted for sysadmins, as it might be required for some operations. But SD accepted might be special, issued by NSA, not retai and they should be accounted for. Still the point that Yvonne Lorenzo raised is very interesting: how you bypass existing protections on you computer to copy information of SD card ?
On another issue, why did Snowden provide his files to known house organs of Intelligence Agencies, specifically the Washington Post and The Guardian, and not give them to Wikileaks?
Notable quotes:
"... How many reading my words work at a large entity, not necessarily government, let us say a Fortune 1000 or higher? Do you have the ability to copy data unimpeded onto any external device? Can you surf the Internet at will? Or is everything you do on the computer network under constant, real-time scrutiny? ..."
"... Edward Snowden would have us believe that the Eye of Sauron didn't notice he was looking at gigabytes of data unrelated to his job function and using his computer to copy the data to external devices over a lengthy period of time. Are his supporters alleging he is so clever he could disappear from the "Eye of Sauron's" view and be unnoticed? If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you in Crimea. ZeroHedge reported " IRS Agent Charged In Leak Of Michael Cohen Transactions To Michael Avenatti ." ..."
"... However, don't believe it takes nine months to identify such an unauthorized intrusion. Don't think every keystroke isn't monitored in real-time. So my question is: would the NSA, which has much more sensitive data (especially compromising information on the governing class) than tax returns and financial transactions have inferior capabilities than the IRS as to maintaining data security? Are we to believe the NSA lacks a "digital trail" when it comes to classified documents? ..."
"... On another issue, why did Snowden provide his files to known house organs of Intelligence Agencies, specifically the Washington Post and The Guardian, and not give them to Wikileaks to allow a publicly available searchable database? ..."
"... While other outlets -- such as the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post and the New York Times -- also possess much (though not all) of the archive, the Intercept was the only outlet with the (full) archive that had continued to publish documents, albeit at a remarkably slow pace, in recent years. In total, fewer than 10 percent of the Snowden documents have been published since 2013. Thus, the closing of the publication's Snowden archive will likely mean the end of any future publications, unless Greenwald's promise of finding "the right partner that has the funds to robustly publish" is fulfilled ..."
"... Do you believe Putin's intelligence agencies don't communicate to him how Washington "organized crime" really operates, as Whitney Webb has disclosed, now on the pages of Unz.com ? What difference does any compromised President make to the policies and goals of the occupational government of the United States (obvious to any reader of this and similar websites)? ..."
"... Why is an alleged humanitarian such a Russophobe? ..."
"... Has Snowden ever challenged the September 11 narrative, ludicrous as it is, and him being an "engineer?" ..."
"... STO equals Special Technical Operations It's highly unlikely Mr. Snowden had any access to these. ..."
"... ECI = Exceptionally Controlled Information. I do not believe Mr. Snowden had any access to these ECI controlled networks). VRK = Very Restricted Knowledge. I do not believe Mr. Snowden had any access to these VRK controlled networks. ..."
"... So what they did, is they took a few documents and they downgraded [he classification level of the documents] – just a few – and gave them to them to placate this basic whitewash investigation. ..."
"... Journalist Margie Burns asked some good questions back in June that have not yet been answered. She wondered about the 29-year old Snowden who had been a U.S. Army Special Forces recruit, a covert CIA operative, and an NSA employee in various capacities, all in just a few, short years. Burns asked "How, exactly, did Snowden get his series of NSA jobs? Did he apply through regular channels? Was it through someone he knew? Who recommended him? Who were his references for a string of six-figure, high-level security jobs? Are there any safeguards in place so that red flags go up when a subcontractor jumps from job to job, especially in high-level clearance positions?" ..."
"... In December, whistleblower Sibel Edmonds broke the news that Omidyar's Paypal Corporation was implicated in the as-yet-unreleased NSA documents from Snowden. Moreover, Edmonds had allegedly been contacted by an NSA official who alleged that "a deal was made in early June, 2013 between the journalists involved in this recent NSA scandal and U.S. government officials, which was then sealed by secrecy and nondisclosure agreements by all parties involved." ..."
"... No, no one is accusing Wikileaks of conspiring with Russia, just Robert Mueller. I really appreciate Snowden calling Julian Assange a liar, for he has consistently denied there was a "state actor." ..."
"... "Terrorism is a real problem" Snowden said. Is it credible that Snowden, who presented himself as donating funds to Ron Paul, has never read any alternative news sites? Is it credible that Snowden believes that terrorists and this would include the good "moderate terrorists" in Syria are armed and act on their own initiative, and is ignorant of the role of the governments of America, Israel, and Saudi Arabia in using them to achieve their ends as proxy armies? ..."
"... Does Snowden then think this report, " America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group" is false? Does that mindset make Snowden a champion for liberty or a tool for more control of the American population? For example, is it credible that this alleged genius supports the narrative of the September 11 attacks World Trade Center attacks? ..."
"... Tor lists on its own website sponsors that include Google, the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, ONR via Naval Research Laboratory (past sponsor) and DARPA. ..."
"... Perhaps Snowden is only a Soros and Hillary Clinton supporting liberal -- but then why would he have done what he did? His character is of any government employee of the "surface state" who swallows false narratives whole. ..."
"... The logging of user and information accessed is sure added to the file. But real time supervision? No. A eye of sauron? Please. The system isnt there to prevent crime, its to track down the criminal and deeds later. And yes everything takes a very long time on the public side. ..."
"... 'Edward Snowden' who first 'leaked' to the CIA's Washington Post, in fact to Bush VP Dick Cheney's biographer Bart Gellman then the Deep State realised that was too stupid, so they switched to Rothschild employee & ex-gay-pornography-seller Glenn Greenwald, former proprietor of 'hairystuds', at the Guardian, an intel-agency rag which lies about nearly everything ..."
"... NeonRevolt once floated the theory that Snowden was an FBI or CIA plant who whistleblew solely because he had the mission to undermine NSA operations by exposing their equipment/techniques and turning public opinion against them. ..."
"... inter-service rivalry and sabotage between spy agencies is absolutely a thing, and reviewing the inconsistencies of Snowden's stunt, its aftermath, and his personal views with that potential background in mind suddenly makes things make much more sense, in my mind at least. ..."
"... If we accept the later, that he's a plant, then it raises a further question: was the short term loss, associated with his revelations, ie highlighting the utterly disturbing degree of Gov surveillance over US citizens (etc) worth the long term profit of having an established, authoritive psy-op's agent able to influence/distort etc any debate or narrative concerning the US State /elites. On this side the author notes Snowmen's views on Tor, 9/11, Russia etc which clearly advantage the US State's own views on these subjects. ..."
"... Consider that nothing Snowden revealed was news. It was all old hat for anyone who'd been paying attention, and for up to ten years. Sure Snowden made it mainstream for what good it did but nothing he said was a secret anymore. In fact, I thought even at the time his actions were nothing less than a 'threat and warning' from the intel services that they had this much on everyone. Just imagine all those national leaders, politicians from all states being pout on notice. All your secrets are ours! What a powerful global message to deliver and in such a loud and clear fashion. ..."
"... The lack of deviation from official bullshit on 9/11 is on its own however reason enough to toss this guy out. ..."
"... To my mind "9/11, attitude to", is a sort of touch-stone for telling genuine dissidents from fake and both Snowden and Assange fail on that test ..."
"... Snowden is not a classic defector so it makes sense for him to keep his distance from Russian society so as not to be inadvertently compromised or used by their intelligence services. He's obviously under surveillance there, I know we all are but he's much more aware of it, so that doesn't make it easy for him but he's definitely safer there than he'd be in France or Germany. I just don't think he planned well ahead when he became a whistle-blower or was clear about what he was trying to achieve. He's not the top level type of spy we're accustomed to reading about who betray their country for money or to serve another they believe in more than their own. If he has been on active duty as a CIA asset all along I can't see that he has achieved much of use to them other than in some inter-agency rivalry game. But it's natural for Russians to be suspicious of him – they're suspicious by nature – and rightly so, but it doesn't make his life easy there. ..."
"... 9/11 is the "litmus test" and it appears that both Assange and Snowden have failed it. ..."
"... Snowden keeping "distance" to Russia, and not openly defending them seems reasonable to me. You can imagine the smear campaign back home if he would side with Russia against the U.S. on almost anything. "The Russians got to him" or "He was always their man". ..."
"... He is trying to keep his neutrality and credibility and his target audience isn't the average Unz reader, but rather some mainstream educated middle/upper class blokes. Easily scared away from his views if they become too controversial and too far from the established narrative. ..."
"... If I had been in the position like 'Snowden', after first having been granted asylum, my priority would have been to study the language. I would gtuess that he can order food or drink, do basic greetings, and not much else. ..."
"... I agree. Shilling for the Israelis regarding 911 is a deal breaker for me. They had me going about these 2 guys for a while, but when I heard that they had ridiculed 911 truthers I smelled a rat. And after this article I agree they are shills for the status quo. Reasonable people can not doubt that 911 was a false flag operation. There's just too much bullshit there. ..."
"... I think the idea Snowden is a "plant" is a bit far out there. If he is; the real purpose of the exercise is what exactly? ..."
"... I also don't get why some commenters think Julian Assange isn't who he claims to be. His Wikileaks has published great volume of highly embarrassing material for the U.S. The embassy cables come to mind – bringing to light evidence contrary to Washington narrative on many events. ..."
"... There is another thing; Just after he established Wikileaks he came to Iceland and met with journalists and few politicians. The result from that visit was he met one Kristinn Hrafnsson, long time journalist in Iceland with excellent track record and credibility. Since Assange got in trouble, accused of sexual harassment from Swedish woman and finally escaped into the Ecuador embassy in London, Hrafnsson has been spokesman for Wikileaks. ..."
"... "It all comes down to 9/11.Everything that has happened has happened based on a lie . Everyone in Government ; everyone in the media , in entertainment , in organized religion , in the public ,in the public eye who accepts and promotes the official story is either a traitor or a tool . Everyone who does not stand forth and speak truth to power is a coward , a liar and complicit in mass-murder . Everyone everywhere can be measured by this Litmus Test ." ..."
Sep 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

Have you ever had the pleasure of dealing with an agent of the Federal government? For example, have you been audited by the IRS? Did you notice what the "Agent" does to gain access to his (or her) computer -- by inserting a "Smart ID" into a slot? Did you ask how your personal information is protected from disclosure or theft? What is to prevent the Agent from copying files to a thumb drive and taking them home?

Regarding the Smart ID, the "HSPD-12" is discussed in this publicly available article ; please note the following:

HSPD-12, FIPS 201 and the PIV Card

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12), issued by President George W. Bush on August 27, 2004, mandated the establishment of a standard for identification of Federal government employees and contractors. HSPD-12 requires the use of a common identification credential for both logical and physical access to federally controlled facilities and information systems. The Department of Commerce and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) were tasked with producing a standard for secure and reliable forms of identification. In response, NIST published Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 201 (FIPS 201), Personal Identity Verification (PIV) of Federal Employees and Contractors, issued on February 25, 2005, and a number of special publications that provide more detail on the implementation of the standard.

Both Federal agencies and enterprises have implemented FIPS 201-compliant ID programs and have issued PIV cards. The FIPS 201 PIV card is a smart card with both contact and contactless interfaces that is now being issued to all Federal employees and contractors

Additional information about FIPS 201 can be found on the Government Identity/Credentialing Resources page, from NIST, and from the Secure Technology Alliance Access Control Council.

If you engage the IRS employee in conversation, remembering the adage you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, you'll learn the computer cannot be compromised -- all data on the device are encrypted; the only access to it is via the Smart ID. Data can be copied to an external "thumb drive" but everything copied will be encrypted; any file on that thumb drive is only readable by that specific device. Wouldn't this be true of NSA devices as well? Why does Snowden never discuss dealing with such encryption: how would it be possible?

In the Oliver Stone movie Snowden , as well as in any of Snowden's descriptions of how he accessed the NSA computers, did you note either the depiction or reference to this universal Smart ID? How could Snowden be exempt from its requirement? Why wasn't its use, which is public knowledge, shown or discussed? Per the above, the Smart ID is deployed in all government agencies: there are no exceptions. And while the financial portion (think of all those Goldman Sachs alumni at the U.S. Department of the Treasury) is likely the most powerful part of the financial-military-industrial-media-congressional complex that is the central power of the federal government, do you think that IRS systems are different and superior in security to what was employed by a contractor working for Booze-Allen Hamilton at the NSA?

How many reading my words work at a large entity, not necessarily government, let us say a Fortune 1000 or higher? Do you have the ability to copy data unimpeded onto any external device? Can you surf the Internet at will? Or is everything you do on the computer network under constant, real-time scrutiny?

Did Edward Snowden, who has publicly criticized Google, mention Google is deployed as a search engine throughout the federal "intranet"? And can he catch a link to the Washington Post on the NSA homepage too? Or would he testify and can it be verified that NSA does not use Google (for example to obtain the PowerPoint he revealed) for searching for internal documents and procedures? Can anyone reading my words answer the questions I've posed so far and answer accurately and honestly with confirmatory evidence?

Edward Snowden would have us believe that the Eye of Sauron didn't notice he was looking at gigabytes of data unrelated to his job function and using his computer to copy the data to external devices over a lengthy period of time. Are his supporters alleging he is so clever he could disappear from the "Eye of Sauron's" view and be unnoticed? If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you in Crimea. ZeroHedge reported " IRS Agent Charged In Leak Of Michael Cohen Transactions To Michael Avenatti ." From the article:

John C. Fry, an analyst in the San Francisco IRS office who had worked for the agency since 2008, was charged with disclosing Cohen's Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) – nine months after we reported that it wouldn't be difficult to track down the leaker due to a digital trail left behind from accessing the system.

However, don't believe it takes nine months to identify such an unauthorized intrusion. Don't think every keystroke isn't monitored in real-time. So my question is: would the NSA, which has much more sensitive data (especially compromising information on the governing class) than tax returns and financial transactions have inferior capabilities than the IRS as to maintaining data security? Are we to believe the NSA lacks a "digital trail" when it comes to classified documents?

On another issue, why did Snowden provide his files to known house organs of Intelligence Agencies, specifically the Washington Post and The Guardian, and not give them to Wikileaks to allow a publicly available searchable database? As Roger Stone has noted, the odious Nixon was taken down principally by the CIA media front The Washington Post because he sought detente with Russia and another presidential assassination would have been too obvious. Notice the situation regarding the Snowden treasure trove as investigative journalist Whitney Webb writes about it here: " Silencing the Whistle: The Intercept Shutters Snowden Archive, Citing Cost ."

According to a timeline of events written by Poitras that was shared and published by journalist and former Intercept columnist Barrett Brown, both Scahill and Greenwald were intimately involved in the decision to close the Snowden archive.

While other outlets -- such as the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post and the New York Times -- also possess much (though not all) of the archive, the Intercept was the only outlet with the (full) archive that had continued to publish documents, albeit at a remarkably slow pace, in recent years. In total, fewer than 10 percent of the Snowden documents have been published since 2013. Thus, the closing of the publication's Snowden archive will likely mean the end of any future publications, unless Greenwald's promise of finding "the right partner that has the funds to robustly publish" is fulfilled

Yet, as Poitras pointed out, the research department accounted for a minuscule 1.5 percent of First Look Media's budget. Greenwald's claim that the archive was shuttered owing to its high cost to the company is also greatly undermined by the fact that he, along with several other Intercept employees -- Reed and Scahill among them -- receive massive salaries that dwarf those of journalists working for similar nonprofit publications.

Greenwald, for instance, received $1.6 million from First Look Media, of which Omidyar is the sole shareholder, from 2014 to 2017. His yearly salary peaked in 2015, when he made over $518,000. Reed and Scahill both earn well over $300,000 annually from First Look. According to journalist Mark Ames, Scahill made over $43,000 per article at the Intercept in 2014. Other writers at the site, by comparison, have a base salary of $50,000, which itself is higher than the national average for journalists.

And what about Snowden himself, the pontificator, the man who can speak on television or to the media with evidence of training? Practice yourself -- see how well you can answer questions and speak publicly to a TV camera. How did he get his training? Who trained him? Why? How is it that the legacy media, which applauds the slow, painful execution of Julian Assange , be in rapture over Snowden's new book tour and provide ample coverage? Is Assange being murdered in part to prevent his providing exculpatory evidence that Russia never hacked the DNC and it was a leak?

I have provided two videos below for the reader to consider and compare.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/F7J2DdiXM9Q?feature=oembed

https://www.youtube.com/embed/O4nFGOEeSP0?feature=oembed

Look at how Bill Binney, a true techno-nerd speaks and compare the difference between him with the polished interviews given by Snowden who borders on pomposity. Also, to his favor Binney is doing his best to debunk the Russia hacking narrative of the DNC; Snowden makes his thoughts about Russia and Russians clear in his latest interview with Der Spiegel promoting his new book about himself:

DER SPIEGEL: Do you have Russian friends?

Snowden: I try to keep a distance between myself and Russian society, and this is completely intentional. I live my life with basically the English-speaking community. I'm the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. And, you know, I'm an indoor cat. It doesn't matter where I am -- Moscow, Berlin, New York -- as long as I have a screen to look into.

DER SPIEGEL: Western authorities accuse the Russian government on a regular basis of being one of the biggest disrupters in the digital world. Are they right?

Snowden: Russia is responsible for a lot of negative activity in the world, you can say that right and fairly. Did Russia interfere with elections? Almost certainly. But do the United States interfere in elections? Of course. They've been doing it for the last 50 years. Any country bigger than Iceland is going to interfere in every crucial election, and they're going to deny it every time, because this is what intelligence services do. This is explicitly why covert operations and influence divisions are created, and their purpose as an instrument of national power is to ask: How can we influence the world in a direction that improves our standing relative to all the other countries?

I am pleased to have played a small role in getting Stephen F. Cohen's work published on Unz.com. He and others have effectively debunked Russian involvement in the manipulation of America elections and the conclusions of the Mueller report. To paraphrase a point Professor Cohen made in his most recent article posted here, which is simply common sense: We are to believe Trump is Putin's puppet yet Putin simultaneously encouraged the preparation of a dossier to destroy him. Does that make sense to any one with half a brain? Do you believe Putin's intelligence agencies don't communicate to him how Washington "organized crime" really operates, as Whitney Webb has disclosed, now on the pages of Unz.com ? What difference does any compromised President make to the policies and goals of the occupational government of the United States (obvious to any reader of this and similar websites)?

Do you notice how Snowden never challenges any government narrative, whether it's on Russia as a villain, and not as a victim of war initiated by Washington? Why is an alleged humanitarian such a Russophobe? Is this how he repays the nation that granted him asylum? Has he only compassion in the abstract, and is a genius but too stupid to consider the consequences of America going to war with Russia and in fact exacerbating the tension by his false and inflammatory statements about Russian conduct in the 2016 elections, for which there are no facts and evidence?

And then there's the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings. Of course Snowden at NSA had no access to information on how and why it was done, but as Dmitri Orlov has written:

I suppose I am a "conspiracy theorist" too. Whenever I write something that questions the veracity of some official narrative, someone (probably a troll) pops up and asks me what I think of 9/11. Here is what I typically reply:

I totally believe that it was possible to knock down three steel-framed buildings using two flying aluminum cans loaded with kerosene, luggage and meat. I have proven that this is possible by throwing two beer cans at three chain-link fences. All three fences were instantly swallowed up by holes in the ground that mysteriously opened up right under them and in which they were instantaneously incinerated into fine oxide powder that coated the entire neighborhood. Anybody who does not believe my experimental results is obviously a tin-foil-hat crackpot conspiracy theorist.

Lots of people read this and ran away bleating; a few people bust a gut laughing because this is (trust me on this!) actually quite funny. Some people took offense at someone ridiculing an event in which thousands of people died. (To protect their tender sensibilities they should consider emigrating to a country that isn't run by a bunch of war criminals.)

But if you do see the humor in this, then you may be up to the challenge, which is to pull out a useful signal (a typical experimentalist's task) out of a mess of unreliable and contradictory data. Only then would you be in a position to persuasively argue -- not prove, mind you! -- that the official story is complete and utter bullshit.

Note that everything beyond that point, such as arguing what "the real story" is, is strictly off-limits. If you move beyond that point you open yourself up to well-organized, well-funded debunking. But if all you produce is a very large and imposing question mark, then the only way to attack it is by producing certainty -- a very tall order! In conspiracy theory, as in guerrilla warfare, you don't have to win. You just have to not lose long enough for the enemy to give up.

Has Snowden ever challenged the September 11 narrative, ludicrous as it is, and him being an "engineer?" And this last point is the reason I'm writing these words: I don't have to come up with the "real story" on who Edward Snowden is and what his true motives are. I am asking questions that point out the discrepancies in Snowden's statements and conduct and his alleged sanctity. In this article, " EXCLUSIVE REPORT: NSA Whistleblower: Snowden Never Had Access to the JUICIEST Documents Far More Damning "

WASHINGTON'S BLOG: Glenn Greenwald – supposedly, in the next couple of days or weeks – is going to disclose, based on NSA documents leaked by Snowden, that the NSA is spying on all sorts of normal Americans and that the spying is really to crush dissent. [Background here, here and here.]

Does Snowden even have documents which contain the information which you've seen?

RUSSELL TICE: The answer is no.

WASHINGTON'S BLOG: So you saw handwritten notes. And what Snowden was seeing were electronic files ?

RUSSELL TICE: Think of it this way. Remember I told you about the NSA doing everything they could to make sure that the information from 40 years ago – from spying on Frank Church and Lord knows how many other Congressman that they were spying on – was hidden?

Now do you think they're going to put that information into PowerPoint slides that are easy to explain to everybody what they're doing?

They would not even put their own NSA designators on the reports [so that no one would know that] it came from the NSA. They made the reports look like they were Humint (human intelligence) reports. They did it to hide the fact that they were NSA and they were doing the collection. That's 40 years ago. [The NSA and other agencies are still doing "parallel construction", "laundering" information to hide the fact that the information is actually from mass NSA surveillance.]

Now, what NSA is doing right now is that they're taking the information and they're putting it in a much higher security level. It's called "ECI" – Exceptionally Controlled Information – and it's called the black program which I was a specialist in, by the way.

I specialized in black world – DOD and IC (Intelligence Community) – programs, operations and missions in "VRKs", "ECIs", and "SAPs", "STOs". SAP equals Special Access Program. It's highly unlikely Mr. Snowden had any access to these. STO equals Special Technical Operations It's highly unlikely Mr. Snowden had any access to these.

Now in that world – the ECI/VRK world – everything in that system is classified at a higher level and it has its own computer systems that house it. It's totally separate than the system which Mr. Snowden was privy to, which was called the "JWICS": Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. The JWICS system is what everybody at NSA has access to. Mr Snowden had Sys Admin [systems administrator] authority for the JWICS.

And you still have to have TS/SCI clearance [i.e. Top Secret/ Sensitive Compartmented Information – also known as "code word" – clearance] to get on the JWICS. But the ECI/VRK systems are much higher [levels of special compartmentalized clearance] than the JWICS. And you have to be in the black world to get that [clearance].

ECI = Exceptionally Controlled Information. I do not believe Mr. Snowden had any access to these ECI controlled networks). VRK = Very Restricted Knowledge. I do not believe Mr. Snowden had any access to these VRK controlled networks.

These programs typically have, at the least, a requirement of 100 year or until death, 'till the person first being "read in" [i.e. sworn to secrecy as part of access to the higher classification program] can talk about them. [As an interesting sidenote, the Washington Times reported in 2006 that – when Tice offered to testify to Congress about this illegal spying – he was informed by the NSA that the Senate and House intelligence committees were not cleared to hear such information.]

It's very compartmentalized and – even with stuff that they had – you might have something at NSA, that there's literally 40 people at NSA that know that it's going on in the entire agency.

When the stuff came out in the New York Times [the first big spying story, which broke in 2005] – and I was a source of information for the New York Times – that's when President Bush made up that nonsense about the "terrorist surveillance program." By the way, that never existed. That was made up.

There was no such thing beforehand. It was made up to try to placate the American people.

The NSA IG (Inspector General) – who was not cleared for this – all of a sudden is told he has to do an investigation on this; something he has no information or knowledge of.

So what they did, is they took a few documents and they downgraded [he classification level of the documents] – just a few – and gave them to them to placate this basic whitewash investigation.

Snowden's Failure To Understand the Most Important Documents

RUSSELL TICE: Now, if Mr. Snowden were to find the crossover, it would be those documents that were downgraded to the NSA's IG.

The stuff that I saw looked like a bunch of alphanumeric gobbledygook. Unless you have an analyst to know what to look for – and believe me, I think that what Snowden's done is great – he's not an intelligence analyst. So he would see something like that, and he wouldn't know what he's looking at.

But that would be "the jewels". And the key is, you wouldn't know it's the jewels unless you were a diamond miner and you knew what to look for. Because otherwise, there's a big lump of rock and you don't know there's a diamond in there.

I worked special programs. And the way I found out is that I was working on a special operation, and I needed information from NSA from another unit. And when I went to that unit and I said "I need this information", and I dealt with [satellite spy operations], and I did that in the black world. I was a special operations officer. I would literally go do special missions that were in the black world where I would travel overseas and do spooky stuff.

Did we really need Snowden to have told us that the Internet, federally controlled, does not allow anyone a modicum of privacy and the government after implementing the Patriot Act considers ordinary Americans the enemy?

In " Inconsistencies and Unanswered Questions: The Risks of Trusting the Snowden Story " Kevin Ryan wrote:

Journalist Margie Burns asked some good questions back in June that have not yet been answered. She wondered about the 29-year old Snowden who had been a U.S. Army Special Forces recruit, a covert CIA operative, and an NSA employee in various capacities, all in just a few, short years. Burns asked "How, exactly, did Snowden get his series of NSA jobs? Did he apply through regular channels? Was it through someone he knew? Who recommended him? Who were his references for a string of six-figure, high-level security jobs? Are there any safeguards in place so that red flags go up when a subcontractor jumps from job to job, especially in high-level clearance positions?"

Five months later, journalists Mark Ames and Yasha Levine investigated some of the businesses in which Greenwald's benefactor Omidyar had invested. They found that the actual practices of those businesses were considerably less humanitarian than the outward appearance of Omidyar's ventures often portray. The result was that Omidyar took down references to at least one of those businesses from his website.

In December, whistleblower Sibel Edmonds broke the news that Omidyar's Paypal Corporation was implicated in the as-yet-unreleased NSA documents from Snowden. Moreover, Edmonds had allegedly been contacted by an NSA official who alleged that "a deal was made in early June, 2013 between the journalists involved in this recent NSA scandal and U.S. government officials, which was then sealed by secrecy and nondisclosure agreements by all parties involved."

It would appear that Snowden's whistleblowing has been co-opted by private corporate interests. Are those involved with privatization of the stolen documents also colluding with government agencies to frame and direct national discussions on domestic spying and other serious matters?

The possibilities are endless, it seems. Presenting documents at a measured rate could be a way to acclimate citizens to painful realities without stirring the public into a panic or a unified response that might actually threaten the status quo. And considering that the number of documents has somehow grown from only thousands to nearly two million, it seems possible that those in control could release practically anything, thereby controlling national dialogue on many topics.

Please read the final paragraph above twice and think about the points raised about acclimating citizens and controlling national dialog. Is Snowden as much of a "Pied Piper" as QAnon? How did Snowden describe the nature of the CIA and NSA in this earlier interview with Der Spiegel ?

DER SPIEGEL: But those people see you as their biggest enemy today.

Snowden: My personal battle was not to burn down the NSA or the CIA. I even think they actually do have a useful role in society when they limit themselves to the truly important threats that we face and when they use their least intrusive means.

**

Snowden: It wasn't that difficult. Everybody is currently pointing at the Russians.

DER SPIEGEL: Rightfully?

Snowden: I don't know. They probably did hack the systems of Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party, but we should have proof of that. In the case of the hacking attack on Sony, the FBI presented evidence that North Korea was behind it. In this case they didn't, although I am convinced that they do have evidence. The question is why?

DER SPIEGEL: Mike Pompeo, the new head of the CIA, has accused WikiLeaks, whose lawyers helped you, of being a mouthpiece for the Russians. Is that not harmful to your image as well?

Snowden: First, we should be fair about what the accusations are. I don't believe the U.S. government or anybody in the intelligence community is directly accusing Julian Assange or WikiLeaks of working directly for the Russian government. The allegations I understand are that they were used as a tool basically to wash documents that had been stolen by the Russian government. And, of course, that's a concern. I don't see that as directly affecting me because I'm not WikiLeaks and there is no question about the provenance of the documents that I dealt with.

DER SPIEGEL: Currently, there's another American guy out there who is accused of being too close to Putin.

Snowden: Oh (laughs).

DER SPIEGEL: Your president. Is he your president?

Snowden: The idea that half of American voters thought that Donald Trump was the best among us, is something that I struggle with. And I think we will all be struggling with it for decades to come.

DER SPIEGEL: But isn't there reason to fear terrorism?

Snowden: Sure there is. Terrorism is a real problem. But when we look at how many lives it has claimed in basically any country that is outside of war zones like Iraq or Afghanistan, it is so much less than, say, car accidents or heart attacks. Even if Sept. 11 were to happen every single year in the U.S., terrorism would be a much lower threat than so many other things.

No, no one is accusing Wikileaks of conspiring with Russia, just Robert Mueller. I really appreciate Snowden calling Julian Assange a liar, for he has consistently denied there was a "state actor."

"Terrorism is a real problem" Snowden said. Is it credible that Snowden, who presented himself as donating funds to Ron Paul, has never read any alternative news sites? Is it credible that Snowden believes that terrorists and this would include the good "moderate terrorists" in Syria are armed and act on their own initiative, and is ignorant of the role of the governments of America, Israel, and Saudi Arabia in using them to achieve their ends as proxy armies?

Does Snowden then think this report, " America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group" is false? Does that mindset make Snowden a champion for liberty or a tool for more control of the American population? For example, is it credible that this alleged genius supports the narrative of the September 11 attacks World Trade Center attacks? Whom do you trust, the contributors to these very pages or Edward Snowden?

Snowden has promoted the use of the Tor Browser. ZeroHedge posted this article, " Tor Project 'Almost 100% Funded By The US Government': FOIA" which noted:

The Tor Project – a private nonprofit known as the "NSA-proof" gateway to the "dark web," turns out to be almost "100% funded by the US government" according to documents obtained by investigative journalist and author Yasha Levine.

In a recent blog post, Levine details how he was able to obtain roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence via FOIA requests while performing research for a book. The documents include strategy, contract, budgets and status updates between the Tor project and its primary source of funding; a CIA spinoff known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which "oversees America's foreign broadcasting operations like Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe."

By following the money, I discovered that Tor was not a grassroots. I was able to show that despite its indie radical cred and claims to help its users protect themselves from government surveillance online, Tor was almost 100% funded by three U.S. National Security agencies: the Navy, the State Department and the BBG. Following the money revealed that Tor was not a grassroots outfit, but a military contractor with its own government contractor number. In other words: it was a privatized extension of the very same government that it claimed to be fighting.

The documents conclusively showed that Tor is not independent at all. The organization did not have free reign to do whatever it wanted, but was kept on a very short leash and bound by contracts with strict contractual obligations. It was also required to file detailed monthly status reports that gave the U.S. government a clear picture of what Tor employees were developing, where they went and who they saw. -Yasha Levine

The FOIA documents also suggest that Tor's ability to shield users from government spying may be nothing more than hot air. While no evidence of a "backdoor" exists, the documents obtained by Levine reveal that Tor has "no qualms with privately tipping off the federal government to security vulnerabilities before alerting the public, a move that would give the feds an opportunity to exploit the security weakness long before informing Tor users."

Interestingly, Edward Snowden is a big fan of Tor – even throwing a "cryptoparty" while he was still an NSA contractor where he set up a Tor exit node to show off how cool they are.

In a 2015 interview with The Intercept's (Wikileaks hating) Micah Lee, Snowden said:

LEE: What do you think about Tor? Do you think that everyone should be familiar with it, or do you think that it's only a use-it-if-you-need-it thing?

SNOWDEN: I think Tor is the most important privacy-enhancing technology project being used today.

"Tor Browser is a great way to selectively use Tor to look something up and not leave a trace that you did it. It can also help bypass censorship when you're on a network where certain sites are blocked. If you want to get more involved, you can volunteer to run your own Tor node, as I do, and support the diversity of the Tor network."

Tor lists on its own website sponsors that include Google, the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, ONR via Naval Research Laboratory (past sponsor) and DARPA.

When Julian Assange was taken from the Ecuadoran embassy, he was carrying a copy of Gore Vidal: History of the National Security State & Vidal on America. As an older article on Vidal in The Guardian noted, " Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11 ."

Isn't it odd by doing what he did with Vidal's book Assange makes the point the legitimacy of Washington must be challenged, but Snowden never does, other than offering suggestions for tinkering at the margins, perhaps advising we use DuckDuckGo instead of Google to give us the illusion of privacy? Did Snowden, for someone who is in front of a computer screen for most of the day, make public the facts obtained by Whitney Webb in her piece " How the CIA, Mossad and 'the Epstein Network' Are Exploiting Mass Shootings to Create an Orwellian Nightmare " posted on Unz.com which goes in depth into the Orwellian hell we are facing, for as Webb concludes:

With companies like Carbyne -- with its ties to both the Trump administration and to Israeli intelligence -- and the Mossad-linked Gabriel also marketing themselves as "technological" solutions to mass shootings while also doubling as covert tools for mass data collection and extraction, the end result is a massive surveillance system so complete and so dystopian that even George Orwell himself could not have predicted it.

Following another catastrophic mass shooting or crisis event, aggressive efforts will likely follow to foist these "solutions" on a frightened American public by the very network connected, not only to Jeffrey Epstein, but to a litany of crimes and a frightening history of plans to crush internal dissent and would-be dissenters in the United States.

There is the concept of willful blindness that I think applies to much of what Snowden has done, if not something altogether more nefarious -- distorations, misrepresenations, and outright lies, in addition to hubris. What is the point I'm making? Perhaps Snowden is only a Soros and Hillary Clinton supporting liberal -- but then why would he have done what he did? His character is of any government employee of the "surface state" who swallows false narratives whole.

I only wish the reader fairly and intelligently consider the questions I have raised. For I am encouraging you to think very carefully before you trust the statements, purpose, motives, and truthfulness of the secular saint, Edward Snowden.

Yvonne Lorenzo makes her home in New England in a house full to bursting with books, including works on classical Greece. Her interests include gardening, mythology, ancient history, The Electric Universe, and classical music, especially the compositions of Handel, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and the Bel Canto repertoire. She is the author of the novels the Son of Thunder and The Cloak of Freya and has contributed to LewRockwell.com and TheSaker.IS.

Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 4:27 am GMT

Edward Snowden is a typical American fachidiot who, despite their protestations is a striver and bootlick for the Empire. I genuinely believe that he is puzzled as to why it has turned against him. He deserves his destiny of forever languishing in political purgatory.

Several years later, practically nobody remembers him here in the US, and possible elsewhere (save for when it is convenient for the media). Julian Assange was a far more daring, more insightful figure.

(As an aside, I am curious about the author's liking of bel canto . Lot of birdbrain music to my ears; I prefer Wagner, Strauss, Schreker, and Berg. Also, the older I get, the more I realize that Schoenberg was by far the greater genius than Mahler.)

ikki , says: September 20, 2019 at 4:56 am GMT
The logging of user and information accessed is sure added to the file. But real time supervision? No. A eye of sauron? Please. The system isnt there to prevent crime, its to track down the criminal and deeds later. And yes everything takes a very long time on the public side.

You know, 16:00 hours the mouse just drops dead from the hand. Public servants don't give a damn if a job is made fast or efficient, only that procedure if followed and that it is eventually done. Unless priorities are reassigned, stuff left halfway undone in disarray is no problem when reassigned.

Just as keeping secret private archives of more or less job related data is all standard procedure. That is keep a load of data in your personal folders and move those into whatever form desired. Security is not very tight. Only in the sense that eventually every person with hours and access point etc data can be recovered if so ordered to.

So stealing data out of that system shouldn't be terribly hard. Just email it to a private email. Or store on something else and transport out. For one Hillary was doing the same thing for ages. In that case though "what difference does it make"

Jonathan Revusky , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 5:26 am GMT
Why does the author distrust the Snowden story while taking the Assange saga at face value?
Horst G , says: September 20, 2019 at 6:41 am GMT
There was an interview with Edward in the German magazine Der Spiegel this month, Nr. 18. In it, we get the tale, he copied material on SD cards, and smugeled them in his mouth, or inside a "magic cube" out of the base on Hawaii, passing "guards". A cube, the occult symbol, how blatant, just mocking the profane.

On the technical side, I got a story from a German BMW factory. A bunch of guys on nightshift plugged a USB Harddisk into a PC to watch a movie. Minutes later they received a call from the IT, it had been recognized remotely. What a charade. It has the taste of Jewish tales, smuggling stuff, tricking guards of an evil system.

Tusk , says: September 20, 2019 at 6:49 am GMT
Great article, thanks Ron for publishing.
der einzige , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 7:00 am GMT
I recommend these articles from Jon Rappaport, unfortunately, wordpress deleted his blog.

and this

Russia gov report Snowden Greenwald are CIA frauds https://www.radios.cz/en/articles/russia-gov-report-snowden-greenwald-are-cia-frauds/

Brabantian , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:00 am GMT
Nice to have a piece helping point to the truth, that Glenn Greenwald & Edward Snowden are CIA frauds, as every major government knows

'Edward Snowden' who first 'leaked' to the CIA's Washington Post, in fact to Bush VP Dick Cheney's biographer Bart Gellman then the Deep State realised that was too stupid, so they switched to Rothschild employee & ex-gay-pornography-seller Glenn Greenwald, former proprietor of 'hairystuds', at the Guardian, an intel-agency rag which lies about nearly everything

Vladmir Putin himself hinting out loud he knows Snowden is fake, and 'Snowden asylum' is a game of back-door favours between Russia & the USA, few in the West pick up on it http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/09/21/russia-govt-report-snowden-greenwald-are-cia-frauds/

Despite the Snowden-Assange mutual sniping in their media-star rivalry, Julian Assange is also a CIA-Mossad asset, as Bibi Netanyahu himself has boasted to Israeli media, regarding aggressively pro-Zionist, anti-Palestinian Julian, equally anti-9-11-truth along with Eddie Snowden

As loyal CIA assets, neither Assange and Snowden dare to mention USA Virginia fed judge bribery files that have blocked other extraditions, tho these files would make their own extraditions impossible, if these CIA fakers really cared about their own 'defence'

Zbigniew Brzezinski on 29 Nov 2010, on the US public television PBS News Hour, also admitted Assange was intel, his Wikileaks 'selected'

People trusting Assange are dead, Peter W Smith, Seth Rich; others jailed

Very darkly, it is unknown how many dissidents Snowden and also Julian Assange helped silence or even kill, both of them a 'rat trap' for trusting whistle-blowers
https://www.henrymakow.com/2018/11/assange-snowden-rat-traps.html

You will notice that Assange & Snowden both got famous via CIA – MI6 media, NY Times, UK Guardian, who are never interested in real dissidents

Assange shared lawyer with Rothschilds, Rothschild sister-in-law posted Assange bail, Assange has ties to George Soros too

Early on, Assange helped Rothschilds destroy rival bank Julius Baer that is 'progressive Wiki-leaking' for you

Assange had a weird childhood with Aussie mind-control cult 'the Family'

Things like 'Assange living at Ecuador Embassy' – 'now in Belmarsh prison' – easily faked, Assange moved in & out for photos by MI5 MI6, police under national security orders 'Snowden' is not necessarily in Russia either

Assange & Snowden de-legitimise real dissidents, because people say, 'Wikileaks – NY Times – UK Guardian would cover it if it was true'

Tree Watcher , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:10 am GMT
NeonRevolt once floated the theory that Snowden was an FBI or CIA plant who whistleblew solely because he had the mission to undermine NSA operations by exposing their equipment/techniques and turning public opinion against them.

I completely understand if people are leery of the theorycrafting of a Q tracker, but I do believe that this suggestion is plausible. Setting aside attempts at placing it in context of a Deep State war, inter-service rivalry and sabotage between spy agencies is absolutely a thing, and reviewing the inconsistencies of Snowden's stunt, its aftermath, and his personal views with that potential background in mind suddenly makes things make much more sense, in my mind at least.

animalogic , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:10 am GMT
Interesting, thought-provoking article. It asks us to balance up competing interests & advantages.

On the one hand we can assume Snowden is "real" or not. That is, he's a genuine whistle blower, or he's a government psy-op's plant.

If we accept the later, that he's a plant, then it raises a further question: was the short term loss, associated with his revelations, ie highlighting the utterly disturbing degree of Gov surveillance over US citizens (etc) worth the long term profit of having an established, authoritive psy-op's agent able to influence/distort etc any debate or narrative concerning the US State /elites. On this side the author notes Snowmen's views on Tor, 9/11, Russia etc which clearly advantage the US State's own views on these subjects.

I don't know the answer -- except that this article raises serious questions, suspicions , about Snowden's authenticity.

Franz , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:15 am GMT
Never for a moment considered Snowden any sort of secular saint.

Snowden for the most part only confirmed the downward trajectory of the formerly at least interesting filmmaker, Oliver Stone. If JFK was worth a laugh (and evidently did get a few people thinking about the phoniness of Dallas '63 for the first time), Snowden was total chloroform on screen. Sad to see Ollie hit such lows.

This bit is interesting:

When Julian Assange was taken from the Ecuadoran embassy, he was carrying a copy of Gore Vidal: History of the National Security State & Vidal on America. As an older article on Vidal in The Guardian noted, "Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11."

As batty as Vidal may have been, it is a fact he was the first American with any sort of national recognition to speak out against the National Security State, starting in the Eisenhower years. His fury was partly stoked by their meddling in Central America, but he stayed at it. Even gave it a mention in a movie he had a gag role in, Bob Roberts , 1992.

His favorite line (variously rendered) was "Harry Truman signed the United States of America into oblivion in February, 1949" which was when the NSA papers were drawn up, giving us the security state, the CIA and the whole shebang. Anytime before, any US citizen could demand accounting of any government project, no matter what. Afterward, the rule by secrecy applied.

Vidal had been a WWII veteran and deplored all that came about after. Credit is due for that.

wayfarer , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:30 am GMT

Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you are being watched and recorded. The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone calls, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. – Edward Snowden

https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/edward-snowden-quotes

https://www.youtube.com/embed/e9yK1QndJSM?feature=oembed

Nik , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:05 am GMT
Both Assuange and Snowden are agent patsys
Oscar Peterson , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:14 am GMT
Who is this dizzy chick?

Snowden, exiled and isolated in Russia, is some sort of USG crypto-agent or something?

I suppose that if you're going to look for outside-the-box commentary and analysis, you're going to get some of this sort of nonsense. I guess you can't expect to hit a home run every time.

Oscar Peterson , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:20 am GMT
@Nicolás Palacios Navarro

"Edward Snowden is a typical American fachidiot who, despite their protestations is a striver and bootlick for the Empire. I genuinely believe that he is puzzled as to why it has turned against him. He deserves his destiny of forever languishing in political purgatory."

And yet this "striver and bootlick for the Empire" is exiled in Russia. So some guy sacrifices an enjoyable and secure life to go live in Russia and all you can say is that "he deserves his destiny?"

"Several years later, practically nobody remembers him here in the US"

And this is a reflection on him or on the rest of us?

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:42 am GMT
@Oscar Peterson She starts off with a falsehood:

> Edward Snowden would have us believe that the Eye of Sauron didn't notice

He states exactly the opposite. I quit reading her garbage after that.

AmRusDebate , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 10:18 am GMT
Comfortable living in Moscow, vs. Belmarsh, makes all the difference in the world.

You might be right about Snowden, you might not be, but were Assange living in a Russian city, far out of reach of NeoconiaDC, Bill Blaney would show him greater respect believe me.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 10:21 am GMT
@Horst G Boy howdy, a Rubik's Cube is now magical, profane, occult, and eerily symbolic, because it's cubical! And geometry class is a satanic false flag op of oppressive propaganda taught by crypto-Jews! Who else could be interested in IRRATIONAL numbers like π? PYTHAGORAS WAS A MOSSAD AGENT!
Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 10:57 am GMT
@Oscar Peterson

And yet this "striver and bootlick for the Empire" is exiled in Russia. So some guy sacrifices an enjoyable and secure life to go live in Russia and all you can say is that "he deserves his destiny?"

His "sacrifice" was inadvertent and involuntary. The fact that he seems not to appreciate the sanctuary offered to him by Russia -- has he not repeatedly expressed the desire to go elsewhere? -- says a lot. From everything I have read about him, it would appear that he regards his exile not as something to be borne with dignity, but as something to pout over as does a child who unexpectedly did not get his way.

Julian Assange, on the other hand, sacrificed much more and did so willingly and courageously. He had no illusions about the consequences that he would face for his beliefs and actions.

And this is a reflection on him or on the rest of us?

Both. Nobody remembers anything here in the US anyway, least of all people and events which do not flatter the national mythos. In the case of this would-be patriot -- the scion of a family that grew fat at the government teat, and who himself has made a tidy profit from his exile -- his unofficial damnatio memoriæ is deserved.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:07 am GMT
@Franz > veteran Credit is due for that.

Maybe you ought to give Snowden some credit for his military service too. Fair is fair.

Snowden enlisted in the United States Army Reserve on May 7, 2004, and became a Special Forces candidate through its 18X enlistment option.[39] He did not complete the training.[12] After breaking both legs in a training accident,[40] he was discharged on September 28, 2004.[41]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Career

9/11 Inside job , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:11 am GMT
@Brabantian Is Seth Rich dead ? OpDeepState.com : "The 'murder' of Seth Rich – Everything we thought we knew is wrong !" by Lisa Phillips . "The MOSSAD infiltrated Clinton's campaign with a Sayanim contractor – Seth Rich – this OP took Hillary right out of the race ."
anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:19 am GMT
Tor is a great tool, if you know how to use it correctly. The US gov't know people don't know how to use it correctly, and sets up exit nodes to spy on idiots, like this:

In 2007 Egerstad set up just five Tor exit nodes and used them to intercept thousands of private emails, instant messages and email account credentials.

Amongst his unwitting victims were the Australia, Japanese, Iranian, India and Russia embassies, .

Dan Egerstad proved then that exit nodes were a fine place to spy on people and his research convinced him in 2007, long before Snowden, that governments were funding expensive, high bandwidth exit nodes for exactly that purpose.

Tor is a fine security project and an excellent component in a strategy of defence in depth but it isn't (sadly) a cloak of invisibility.

Exit nodes, just like fake Wi-Fi hotspots, are an easy and tempting way for attackers to silently insert themselves into a network.

By running an exit node they can sit there as an invisible man-in-the-middle on a system that people choose when they want extra privacy and security.

Can you trust Tor's exit nodes?
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/06/25/can-you-trust-tors-exit-nodes/

So just assume the US gov't is your exit node, thank them silently for paying for you to use it free, and keep your info encrypted.

Svevlad , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:30 am GMT
Both him and Assange are spooks
Rabbitnexus , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:50 am GMT
Well, this is refreshing. I agree wholeheartedly about Snowden and have the same reservations. My feelings about Assange, however, aren't much different. Julian has not challenged the 9/11 narrative either to be fair. I am inclined to see them both as limited hangouts. Snowden's 'revelations' were all old news to anyone who'd been paying attention for 10 years before his appearance. Even other whistleblowers, none of whom got any media coverage, had spoken of much of it previously. I see them both as pied pipers and nothing more. I think Russian intelligence services are perfectly well aware of what Snowden is and have kept him at arms length themselves. Not much they could do but play along but nothing suggests they ever saw him as any sort of 'coup'

Anyone who still plays along with the 9/11 bullshit narrative isn't worth a damn anyway.

Rabbitnexus , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:58 am GMT
@animalogic Consider that nothing Snowden revealed was news. It was all old hat for anyone who'd been paying attention, and for up to ten years. Sure Snowden made it mainstream for what good it did but nothing he said was a secret anymore. In fact, I thought even at the time his actions were nothing less than a 'threat and warning' from the intel services that they had this much on everyone. Just imagine all those national leaders, politicians from all states being pout on notice. All your secrets are ours! What a powerful global message to deliver and in such a loud and clear fashion.

The lack of deviation from official bullshit on 9/11 is on its own however reason enough to toss this guy out. Snowden NEVER impressed me for a moment and honestly, nor has Assange. I believe they're both working for the other side still. By the way, Julian Assange has actually denigrated 9/11 truthers a number of times.

Horst G , says: September 20, 2019 at 12:08 pm GMT
@anon It's in the magazine, page 82, quote "Zauberwürfel". Presented by me, for you to get the picture. Maybe you haven't seen enough cubes around, to get that humor. In real life, copying material on devices will be followed by arrest, no interview, no journey to some exile. This whole tale is not funny, it's evil on many levels. Your sarcasm is disturbing.
Realist , says: September 20, 2019 at 12:09 pm GMT
@Nicolás Palacios Navarro

Several years later, practically nobody remembers him here in the US, and possible elsewhere (save for when it is convenient for the media). Julian Assange was a far more daring, more insightful figure.

I disagree, there are plenty of people who remember him. The problem is they don't care, most Americans would rather watch America's Got Talent or Dancing With The Stars than do something about our corrupt political system.

Johnny Walker Read , says: September 20, 2019 at 12:16 pm GMT
Assange and Snowden are both shill's..

https://aanirfan.blogspot.com/search?q=assange

Johnny Walker Read , says: September 20, 2019 at 12:20 pm GMT
@Johnny Walker Read And

2013 Edward Snowden 'leaked stolen documents' (1) 'Leaked' to Dick Cheney friend at CIA WashPost, Rothschild employee Greenwald (2) Anti-9-11-truth (3) Nothing really new beyond more than 5+ previous NSA whistleblowers (4) Has CIA lawyers, worked with Brzezinski son, promoted by Brzezinski daughter, fake CV history (5) Known as fake to all major gov intel agencies

https://aanirfan.blogspot.com/search?q=snowden

Johnny Walker Read , says: September 20, 2019 at 12:31 pm GMT
@Johnny Walker Read This is absolutely dynamite material, it blows to smithereens any notion that Edward Snowden is anything other than a fraud, a CIA disinfo op.

So now we can place him alongside Julian Assange and Wikileaks in the rogue's gallery of professional liars. This report also exposes several other media outlets as being under CIA control, something we have known for some time

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/09/21/russia-govt-report-snowden-greenwald-are-cia-frauds/

foolisholdman , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:04 pm GMT
@animalogic

I don't know the answer -- except that this article raises serious questions, suspicions , about Snowden's authenticity.

To my mind "9/11, attitude to", is a sort of touch-stone for telling genuine dissidents from fake and both Snowden and Assange fail on that test. I don't have a reference for it, but I saw it in correspondence on this site. There was a video of a lecture given by Assange, where someone asked him about 9/11. He looked extremely embarrassed and then replied that he thought that it was "not very important" (Sic!) and changed the subject.

I am less sure of this but I think I saw something similar in an interview with Snowden. Perhaps someone else can remind me of exact references?

Amon , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:23 pm GMT
This is the same government whose leaders secure their laptops with the secret code "pas$word" and require the producers of computers to give them full access via day one exploits along with tailor fitted programs that are easier to hack.

That Snowden got away with what he did is not that shocking.

Justvisiting , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:23 pm GMT
These days Snowden has become a generic term for whistleblowing on the Deep State tech spying, like xerox for copying. I suppose someone here wants to remind us that this was _really_ the first copier, patented in 1879:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestetner

The truth or falsity of the original "myth" becames moot at some point.

The Deep State is spying. They do have hardware and software and monkey in the middle hacks. They do trade intelligence with other spy agencies, domestic and foreign. They lie about it through the Mockingbird media.

_That_ is what is important.

Snowden's bona fides are "inside baseball", and minor league baseball at that.

.gov IT security is a joke–millions of pages of regulations, proclamations, millions of hours of management meetings, goals, powerpoint slides–ultimately easily outmatched by any determined hackers (whether in mom's basement or an intelligence agency's basement).

Multiple Fronts , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:32 pm GMT
CIA Edward Snowden? ...
Antiwar7 , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:34 pm GMT
If he was a sys admin, that probably meant he had the rights to install, remove, enable, and disable the various safety guards and security checks discussed in this article.
sally , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:48 pm GMT
@Jonathan Revusky Yvonne Lorenzo paper suggest suspect issues exist to support Snowden's story but finds Assange's saga to be based in epic, consistent, continued resistance to the organized forces at work in governments and high profile international corporations and agencies to keep secret things which expose officials as criminals.

<=the difference is consistency, scope and finger points. Assange has been consistent.. always seeking to make available as much as he could, always with as much clarity as possible; making the point where he could, that much of what he exposed seems to be in the domain of organized crime. Assange often exposes high profile persons and tags them with evidence to connect them to prior and current organized crime or obviously corrupt activities. Assange shows these persons or governments or agencies are involved in secret diplomatic activities, the secrecy of which seem always to be protected by judicial and legal processes

The Assange story paints a picture that suggest globally organized crime has come into possession and now manages and controls many well armed domestic governments and that selected agencies of government have been enabling selected private enterprises. Assange exposes intelligence services of many different nations to be a bank, corporation, and agency inter connects that coordinate infrastructure destruction, invasion, regime change, and war, and that these events are often followed by opportunistic privatization.

Snowden merely says a few things are wrong and should be corrected. in time the government will fix its own mistakes. I do not know if Snowden is a Trojan, but nothing Assange has done suggest he is and governments have treated Assange as anything but one of them. My opinion.

der einzige , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 2:04 pm GMT
@foolisholdman I think you meant that

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zG23AyiIObk?feature=oembed

Oscar Peterson , says: September 20, 2019 at 2:35 pm GMT
@Nicolás Palacios Navarro I agree that Assange has suffered much more than Snowden, but why hold that against the latter?

Snowden took a risk to publicize what he thought was important information indicating a dangerous trend in US policy. He wasn't willing to offer himself up as a lamb to the slaughter, so it's true that his sacrifice is not perhaps the ultimate one. He seems to have thought he could remain in Hong Kong but didn't realize that China was never going to compromise relations with the US to protect him. Putin wouldn't have either except that the US was so imperious in demanding his return that Putin really couldn't save face and give him up, and no doubt he was rankled by US hypocrisy, knowing that had Snowden been a Russian, the US would never have considered sending him back.

But Snowden DID take action which is more than most of us do. I find your complete lack of empathy kind of weird, to be honest. Even if Assange is the more virtuous or if one disagrees with Snowden's actions, he has paid a price for principle.

What does his family background have to do with anything?

I'm not inclined to sneer at him, and I don't see how you get to "he deserves what he gets."

Commentator Mike , says: September 20, 2019 at 2:44 pm GMT
@Brabantian Brabantian,

So Pamela Anderson lied about visiting Assange in the embassy? If they're faking it, wherever he is he isn't in the public eye walking down the street or sitting in a Starbucks, so he's leading a prison life anyway behind closed doors somewhere. I suppose a dedicated agent would do something like that for Queen and country or whatever, but I doubt he's the type. I gather veterans today are trying to cast Assange as a Mossad agent but then they're the Journal of the Clandestine Community, whatever that is.

Snowden is not a classic defector so it makes sense for him to keep his distance from Russian society so as not to be inadvertently compromised or used by their intelligence services. He's obviously under surveillance there, I know we all are but he's much more aware of it, so that doesn't make it easy for him but he's definitely safer there than he'd be in France or Germany. I just don't think he planned well ahead when he became a whistle-blower or was clear about what he was trying to achieve. He's not the top level type of spy we're accustomed to reading about who betray their country for money or to serve another they believe in more than their own. If he has been on active duty as a CIA asset all along I can't see that he has achieved much of use to them other than in some inter-agency rivalry game. But it's natural for Russians to be suspicious of him – they're suspicious by nature – and rightly so, but it doesn't make his life easy there.

Justvisiting , says: September 20, 2019 at 2:46 pm GMT
@der einzige Thanks for posting–Assange looked dazed and confused by the question itself.

It could be "rogue agents". A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 2:48 pm GMT
@Anonymous Snanonymous > Snowden, unlike Assange, largely suffered from pussy deprivation

You're projecting your own lack of success with females. Meanwhile, Snowden's squeeze Lindsay Mills lives with him in Moscow.

Snowden's lawyer Anatoly Kucherena confirmed the lovebirds' reunion and said they've been taking in Russian theaters and cultural sights together. "Love is love," he told AFP. "She lives with him when she comes here. Moral support is very important for Edward."
https://nypost.com/2014/10/11/snowdens-girlfriend-lives-with-him-in-moscow-documentary-reveals/

There's no way an envious gamma like you could tap this:

Anonymous [893] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 2:51 pm GMT
Good stuff. Snowden was outed by Gordon Duff years ago. Although I'll have to come back to finish this article, it generally appears to agree with Duff's analysis that none of it adds up. If I may paraphrase Edward Bernays, To read the Washington Post and Guardian or watch TV news is to see America and Western Civilization through the eyes of its enemy.

The owners of the media own the public forum in America and through it the formation of men's attitudes and the outcome of elections. The left vs right, CNN vs Fox News, MAGA vs socialism and other contrived theater serves the interests of the media owners and no other.

TheJester , says: September 20, 2019 at 3:02 pm GMT
@Jonathan Revusky Try this:

Assange tried to destroy the "system", which would have furthered the conditions for completing the ongoing, global Cultural Marxist Revolution Mao Zedong on steroids.

Snowden, on the other hand, wanted something much less extreme. He wanted to fix and save the "system" by exposing its excesses in order to bring it back within a quasi-legal, democratic framework.

In response, the "system" was satisfied to teach Snowden a lesson. They were willing to slap Snowden's hand by exiling him to Western Russia, which is better than rotting in a Siberian labor camp or "max" prison in the United States.

Assange, on the other hand, is a reincarnated, digital version of Che Guevara. They want his scalp, recognizing that Assange (like Che Guevara) will brook no compromise in his revolutionary agitation.

Anonymous Snanonymous , says: September 20, 2019 at 3:22 pm GMT
@anon Thank you for the update I remain celibate out of consideration for those who are truly hard up.
Sparkon , says: September 20, 2019 at 3:29 pm GMT
Good article. Snowden and Assange are agents of disinformation

"I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud."

-- Julian Assange

http://911blogger.com/news/2010-07-22/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-annoyed-911-truth

Assange's damming statement about 9/11 at the Belfast Telegraph is now behind a sign-up gatepost, which was not there in the fairly recent past.

9/11 Inside job , says: September 20, 2019 at 4:36 pm GMT
9/11 is the "litmus test" and it appears that both Assange and Snowden have failed it.
anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 5:06 pm GMT
@9/11 Inside job Well, the Real Litmus Test ™ is eternal security vs. conditional salvation. Don't fail, or everything else you've ever said must be summarily dismissed. Answer well, friendo .

Splitting (also called black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking) is the failure in a person's thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 6:09 pm GMT
@Realist

The problem is they don't care, most Americans would rather watch America's Got Talent or Dancing With The Stars than do something about our corrupt political system.

Also very true.

Outrage Beyond , says: September 20, 2019 at 6:43 pm GMT
It appears the author of this piece has not read Snowden's book, Permanent Record . If she had, she would not have asked questions which are answered, in detail, in Snowden's book. Here are some of the most obvious points.

1. "Why does Snowden never discuss dealing with such encryption: how would it be possible?"

Answer: In his book, Snowden describes the layers of encryption that he used when copying the files from NSA. He also describes the extraordinary level of access he had as a systems engineer. Further, he mentions his surprise at finding that the NSA did not practice widespread encryption, in contrast to his experience at CIA, where the hard drives were not only encrypted, but removed from the computers and placed in a safe each night.

2. "In the Oliver Stone movie Snowden, as well as in any of Snowden's descriptions of how he accessed the NSA computers, did you note either the depiction or reference to this universal Smart ID? How could Snowden be exempt from its requirement?"

Answer: Movies omit details. In his book, Snowden describes working in the one-person Information Sharing department. As part of that work, he brought an older, "obsolete" system to his office under the cover story of "compatibility testing" and used this older system to copy the data.

3. "Did Edward Snowden, who has publicly criticized Google, mention Google is deployed as a search engine throughout the federal "intranet"?"

Answer: Yes, as a matter of fact, in his book, Snowden does mention that Google provides a custom internal version of their search engine to the intelligence community.

4. "Edward Snowden would have us believe that the Eye of Sauron didn't notice he was looking at gigabytes of data unrelated to his job function and using his computer to copy the data to external devices over a lengthy period of time."

Answer: In his book, Snowden describes how he created a "readboard" that collected the documents as part of his work in the Information Sharing department. He also describes how another systems administrator did notice, and how he addressed this attention by providing access to his "readboard" to the other administrator, and explained its purpose and value to users. In other words, the "gigabytes of data" he was looking at were directly related to his job function.

5. "On another issue, why did Snowden provide his files to known house organs of Intelligence Agencies, specifically the Washington Post and The Guardian, and not give them to Wikileaks to allow a publicly available searchable database?"

Answer: Snowden also discusses this topic in his book. According to Snowden, he did not want to simply release the information, he wanted the media to remove anything that might cause harm.

6. "And what about Snowden himself, the pontificator, the man who can speak on television or to the media with evidence of training? Practice yourself -- see how well you can answer questions and speak publicly to a TV camera. How did he get his training? Who trained him? Why?"

Answer: After 6 years of media attention, it seems reasonable he would gain some expertise in dealing with the media.

My purpose in providing the answers above is not to defend or attack Snowden. Rather, these examples just show that the author of this piece is a sloppy amateur who did not do her homework. I suspect the author is also woefully ignorant of computer technology. Anyone curious about these topics should read Permanent Record and decide for themselves.

PetrOldSack , says: September 20, 2019 at 6:49 pm GMT
@sally

My opinion.

Your opinion stands. Snowden has de facto been compromised. Being in Russia, and not in control of his environment. Whether he was from the start, could be. The Tor browser bull- *** t speaks against him all the way. His conventional career start, and youth also. He is more Macron then a Galloway.

Assange was in for the long term, had thorough knowledge of affairs digital, his youth, his physical courage(there must be a point where selling out was a possibility) were exemplary all along the (long) and still ongoing slug.

Even his ego, fronting Wikileaks seems to be proportionate as compared to the conventional Jerks &, as Pompeo, Hillary, Trump, Obama. If one sees how many personnel is dedicated to steer elections and governance public opinion, he certainly looks like a lonely giant on the civil disobedience, organizational, knowledgeable, energy spent and resilience side. A true example of what White, and Western European descend stands for. Enlightenment, in system, style, and function. Relevancy, long term goals, dare, does not come better then that.

PetrOldSack , says: September 20, 2019 at 6:53 pm GMT
@Justvisiting Very to the point. True over the whole stretch digital communication is in existence.
Mark Hunter , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 6:59 pm GMT
@Oscar Peterson I don't have "Agree/Disagree/Etc" privileges so I say here that I agree with you.

Some of the pompous ingrates trashing Snowden for the flimsiest of reasons still seem to have a high opinion of Thomas Drake, William Binney, or Kirk Wiebe. They might read this: Three NSA Veterans Speak Out on Whistleblower

peterAUS , says: September 20, 2019 at 7:06 pm GMT
@ikki Pretty much.

The author, interestingly enough, isn't I.T. professional, but, has very definite opinions about IT security. Dumb.

Just email it to a private email.

Well, firewall logs could reveal your connection to some email server outside ..

Or store on something else and transport out.

Yep. Hehe the girl doesn't actually get how that "encryption" thing works. OSI layers etc.

And, what people really don't get: all security is as good as an average person using it. As hehe you pointed out:

Hillary was doing the same thing for ages.

Insider doesn't need to tackle technology. All he/she needs is to tackle is a dumb employee. Anyway .

I could make my home systems quite secure, even against Five Eyes. That would create another set of even worse problems, but let's leave it out for now.
The problem is my wife and her browsing/computer use habits. Hehe makes sense?

peterAUS , says: September 20, 2019 at 7:09 pm GMT
@Outrage Beyond A very good comment.

Especially

.a systems engineer .. the one-person Information Sharing department . .providing access to his "readboard" to the other administrator .

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 7:26 pm GMT
@Realist Snowden did "do something about our corrupt political system," not that anybody here cares.

And God Bless America.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8kssysjyPl0?feature=oembed

niceland , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:46 pm GMT
Snowden keeping "distance" to Russia, and not openly defending them seems reasonable to me. You can imagine the smear campaign back home if he would side with Russia against the U.S. on almost anything. "The Russians got to him" or "He was always their man".

He is trying to keep his neutrality and credibility and his target audience isn't the average Unz reader, but rather some mainstream educated middle/upper class blokes. Easily scared away from his views if they become too controversial and too far from the established narrative.

Last but not least, he is playing very dangerous game, probably without much security from his host country. This probably limits what he can do, TPTB could probably get to him if they wanted it badly enough.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:49 pm GMT
@Horst G Everybody with the slight familiarity about the story knows of Snowden's use of the Ernő Rubik's Cube to hide the SD card.

> In real life, copying material on devices will be followed by arrest, no interview, no journey to some exile.

Snowden proved you wrong, by the skin of his teeth.

> Your sarcasm is disturbing.

Yeah? How do you think folks feel about your black cape and a fiberglass helmet?

Republic , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:54 pm GMT
@anon Wasn't Ross William Ulbricht compromised by using Tor ?
anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:12 pm GMT
@PetrOldSack > The Tor browser bull- *** t speaks against him all the way

No, your stupid bull- *** t lack of understanding about Tor speaks against you all the way. It's not encryption, like you probably think it is. It's simply a way to use another IP address without having to drive to the nearest Starbucks to use their wifi. You treat Tor just like any "free" wifi, assuming that your data is being sniffed and collected. If you're going to message, use Signal (or Telegram.) Always force HTTPS. Use encryption. All Tor does is obfuscate your IP location, which is exactly what Snowden states, "All Tor does is obfuscate your IP location .

"[Tor] allows you to disassociate your physical location ."

EDWARD SNOWDEN EXPLAINS HOW TO RECLAIM YOUR PRIVACY
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/12/edward-snowden-explains-how-to-reclaim-your-privacy/

And now Brave Browser has it built in! So easy. Try it. Just don't do anything on Tor that you wouldn't do with a Starbuck's free wifi in Foggy Bottom.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:29 pm GMT
@Republic How he got taken down is here , and it started with the name-fag using his Real Name while e-begging for help to run illegal websites, and ended up with a half-dozen FBI agents tailing him at his arrest. Even then, Tor made it harder for the FBI to track him, just not impossible.

Tor only does one thing, obfuscate your physical location. That's it. It's not magic. It's a virtual way to sit at the Starbucks cafe and use their free wifi. Just assume the exit node is owned by the Feds, looking for criminal morons who don't understand it and think it's "secure" or "encrypted." It's not. Use encryption too.

Gg , says: September 20, 2019 at 10:09 pm GMT
Stuff like this just confirms Qanon. He said years ago Snowden was a CIA plant in the NSA to reveal this information about their mass surveillance on purpose. Why ? Maybe it relates to what Michael Hoffman describes as revelation of the method – a process of revealing the crimes being committed against us by "they" so it breeds apathy and despair in the population when nothing comes from
The revelation of the crimes
The Company , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:06 pm GMT
The Russian authorities are capable of asking the same perceptive questions – – and yet they continue to be gracious hosts.
Sean , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:10 pm GMT
An allegedly very high iq high school from a family with drop out Snowden's tried to join special forces and failed jump school, he failed a polygraph, got accepted to the CIA though not as a field agent despite his lack of a degree, and was bounced from the CIA and then got a job with Dell as an outside contractor on the basis of his still intact security clearance, the contractors were not compartmentalised in the way government employees were.

Then he went to work for defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, at an NSA facility in Hawaii. In subsequent interview with journalists, Snowden lied about his doing undercover work for the CIA, salary and seniority at Booz Allen, being able to spy on the the emails and phone calls of President Obama. Oh, and suffering broken bones in special forces jump school, he just had shin splints It is very clear how he got access, and why most of the people who gave him it did not own up.

https://nypost.com/2013/11/08/snowden-duped-coworkers-to-get-passwords/ Snowden duped co-workers to get passwords A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden were identified, questioned and removed from their assignments, said a source close to several U.S. government investigations into the damage caused by the leaks.

Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said.

Are we to believe the NSA lacks a "digital trail" when it comes to classified documents?

It's only difficult to believe if you think NASA (like the CIA and FBI once were) are only guarded in relation to external rather than internal security breaches

[A] frightening history of plans to crush internal dissent and would-be dissenters in the United States.

Why would they bother? Those dissenters cannot change anything, while they are whiling away their free time on the internet. Such activity cannot change anything at all, and so it is to be encouraged from the point of view of any establishment as open dissent on the net wards off the allegation of totalitarian state. Talk is cheap.

Johnny Walker Read , says: September 21, 2019 at 2:19 am GMT
Learn to recognize government dis-info. http://mileswmathis.com/glenn.pdf
ShermanFan , says: September 21, 2019 at 2:28 am GMT
I'm not going to comment on the person or their agenda, rather the process-broadly.

Can you copy encrypted files without knowledge and smuggle them out? Short answer: Yes, with a second device and some standard hardware stuff. They can see the second device if it is plugged in, but they have to look for it. There is no need to try and copy from the source, copy the output to a second machine that can interpret.

Franz , says: September 21, 2019 at 6:25 am GMT
@anon

ought to give Snowden some credit for his military service too.

Hell, I'd give the guy credit for his quick sprinting at the NSA. But we haven't established if he was a wiz kid or a plant.

Vidal went into the US Army after Pearl Harbor, at age 17. Even though he'd been his high school representative for the America First Committee, trying to keep the US out of the war. Due to hypothermia working on army transport ships in the Aleutians, he was initially misdiagnosed as arthritic and, not being caught in time, ended up first with a titanium leg replacement years later, then in a wheelchair.

I remain sort of impressed when a young man opposes a fight, then for patriotic reasons, serves anyway (and pays a steep price).

I'm sure we'll get the full story on Snowden sooner or later.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 21, 2019 at 12:58 pm GMT
@Saggy A stupid girl who is completely unfamiliar with the Snowden history. For example, she asks this, "why did Snowden provide his files to The Guardian?"

Because he needed immediate press coverage. He didn't have weeks or even days, he had at most a few hours. His story had to be in the press the next morning. Both Greenwald and the Guardian reporter were with him at the hotel, worried that Snowden might even be assassinated if caught by US forces, and worked to get immediate press coverage of his plight to save his life. Plus, he was in constant contact with Wikileaks'Julian Assange, which she conveniently ignores to promote her lie-based conspiritard theory.

Without his story getting into the press within a few hours, and without Wikileaks' Julian Assange helping Snowden, he'd be in prison now, at best, possibly dead.

I say, give the guy a fair trial. He has asked for a fair trial. But the US Gov't has refused to allow his motive to be considered in the trial. Amazing, isn't it? Since when is motive to not be considered in a criminal trial?

For Snowden, a fair trial means allowing the jury to consider his motivations rather than simply deciding the case on whether a law was broken.

"They want the jury strictly to consider whether these actions were lawful or unlawful, not whether they were right or wrong," Snowden said. "And I'm sorry, but that defeats the purpose of a jury trial."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/09/17/edward-snowden-releases-book-russia-wants-fair-trial-us/2349586001/

Che Guava , says: September 21, 2019 at 3:26 pm GMT
Tor may still be a good tool, it certainly was, I had great fun using it to troll and set off edit wars on English Wikipedia for a year or two mid-last decade. One of those edit wars lasted for about three days. I just watched after starting it (but I meant what I said in the comment that set it off, but not always in the trolling(^-^)v).

In any case, the English-language WP has been madly tracking Tor exit nodes and banning them since about early '07.

Fun while it lasted.

As for the wrong way to use it, that basically means making a connection to any other site, without Tor, while using Tor. I slipped up on that once or twice when slightly drunk.

I don't even know if using Tor is even legal in Japan now. I do love, however, how Wikipedia is aggressively supressing it.

Some politicians in ruling party were moving to make it illegal a couple of years ago, our polity is so nonsensical that I have to checck Japanese wiki to see the result.

Any fule knows that Tor original is a U.S.N. programme,

Yvonne Lorenzo , says: September 21, 2019 at 6:42 pm GMT
@der einzige

I recommend these articles from Jon Rappaport, unfortunately, wordpress deleted his blog.

Rappaport started my thinking and I bookmarked his pages long ago and to my horror found the site was taken down. I wonder why? Glad for this archive. Thank you.

Yvonne Lorenzo , says: September 21, 2019 at 6:57 pm GMT
@Outrage Beyond

It appears the author of this piece has not read Snowden's book, Permanent Record. If she had, she would not have asked questions which are answered, in detail, in Snowden's book. Here are some of the most obvious points.

1. "Why does Snowden never discuss dealing with such encryption: how would it be possible?"

Answer: In his book, Snowden describes the layers of encryption that he used when copying the files from NSA. He also describes the extraordinary level of access he had as a systems engineer. Further, he mentions his surprise at finding that the NSA did not practice widespread encryption, in contrast to his experience at CIA, where the hard drives were not only encrypted, but removed from the computers and placed in a safe each night.

2. "In the Oliver Stone movie Snowden, as well as in any of Snowden's descriptions of how he accessed the NSA computers, did you note either the depiction or reference to this universal Smart ID? How could Snowden be exempt from its requirement?"

Answer: Movies omit details. In his book, Snowden describes working in the one-person Information Sharing department. As part of that work, he brought an older, "obsolete" system to his office under the cover story of "compatibility testing" and used this older system to copy the data.

No, I haven't read the book–yet.

As part of a forensic analysis, which none of you were observant enough to understand, the subject is interviewed without knowledge of the questions in advance. His answers would be evaluated based on facts, for which a forensic IT team with no connections to government contractors would be part of and gain access to NSA systems. Thus, testimony is considered but it must be verified. Rand Paul might be one to open an investigation into the inadequacy of NSA security but government investigating itself is suspect. No such investigation will ever take place.

Note there has been no calls, that I am aware of, for any GAO study of NSA vulnerabilities.

Second, the critics miss the point: providing files to CIA-Five Eye fronts like Guardian and CIA Washington Post is suspect. As per what I wrote, no one now has access to this data.

I suspect Snowden leaked legitimate information to con the Russians to be on their soil and conduct malfeasance. Prior to Putin providing S-300s to Syria, Israel had better relations with Russia. I suspect Q is also coordinated by Intel agency friendly to Likud. Note his mention of John Perry Barlow before his death. He warned of Snowden being sent deliberately to Russia and hence my concern for CIA doing something stupid.

As to his comments on not supporting Russia, no support is necessary. If he were a decent human being he could simply have stated, "Election interference notwithstanding the U.S. should pursue non-aggressive posture against Russia. There was no 'Second Pearl Harbor.' The risk of nuclear war is great and I agree with President Trump to reduce tensions, although I disagree with his politics."

Instead, see his Tweets supporting the Pussy Hats and "We came, we saw, he died" Hillary Clinton.

In the event, Snowden is irrelevant. The end of Empire is imminent.

Read Martyanov's post on the recent threats America made to Russia here.

https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2019/09/why-would-you-ask.html

I have compassion for Snowden. His end will likely be as Skripals was: disappearance by Western IC which he supports and blame placed on Russia.

We are free to disagree with one another. I trust nothing a supporter of Empire says.

As to September 11 I wasn't aware of Assange's remarks. This is the touchstone as others have said. Snowden enlisted because of September 11 false flag. Yeah, right, he is an idiot savant.

Even Ed Asner who no longer wins Emmy awards and is blackballed had the courage to do this video. Trust Snowden? I think not.

Y. Lorenzo (this site will not allow me to post under my name)

p.s. Ron uses Gmail. The nearest military base is a long, long way from my location. A helicopter outfitted with surveillance bubbles overflew after I submitted this piece.. Coincidence, right?

I will fight for the truth. I receive no compensation for my work and expect none. I support the cause of peace and not Empire. Thanks for the intelligent supportive comments. Ad hominem attacks mean nothing. Thanks to Ron for posting though he disagrees.

Che Guava , says: September 21, 2019 at 7:17 pm GMT
...re. 'Smowden"when he was constantly whining about Russia, getting hhs pole-dancing gf to join him there must have been a major effort, but he has no gratitude for it.

Really strange. At the time, I thought that Putin's comment 'he is a strange young man' had to do only with questions of loyalty and betrayal, of course, it was lilekely deeper and more suspicious than that. If I had been in the position like 'Snowden', after first having been granted asylum, my priority would have been to study the language. I would gtuess that he can order food or drink, do basic greetings, and not much else.

Sean , says: September 21, 2019 at 7:22 pm GMT
@Republic Snowden's wife is a former pole dancer, those are for good for something, but its not marrying. Everything about him suggests immaturity, from his toying with the idea of being a model to his trying to go from frail civilian with a youth spent 24/7 gaming to passing jumps school. He stole vastly more than he could ever have read, much of it having no bearing on privacy so he has no idea what he might have compromised. Quoth he:

There is a secrecy agreement, but there is also an oath of service. An oath of service is to support and defend, not an agency, not even the president, it is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies – direct quote – foreign and domestic. And this begs the question, what happens when our obligations come into conflict.

If you have meaningful values (ie those that do not charge to suit your personal aggrandisement) you resign, I but instead of doing that he deliberately got another job contracting with the NSA all the better to steal data.

peterAUS , says: September 21, 2019 at 7:56 pm GMT
@Yvonne Lorenzo

.In the event, Snowden is irrelevant. The end of Empire is imminent. Read Martyanov's post on the recent threats America made to Russia here .

That was fast, even for this pub.

Ad hominem attacks mean nothing.

You mean being positive about you UNABLE to visualize a byte from a "keypress" moving all the way to the LAN cable with each timer "click"? You know, buffers, busses, microcode/firmware, interrupts, stack/heap, closed source, encryption/decryption layer of the OSI stack etc. That's for technology. As for people, unaware of an average idiot user in any environment using IT, Governments in particular, and the role and power of sysadmins in such environments? But confident to write articles what can and can not be done re IT security? Yeah .

AB_Anonymous , says: September 21, 2019 at 8:05 pm GMT
@anon Not sure about Pythagoras, but there are (very unfortunately) people who might have fun from combining "Rubik's Cube and highly classified information". And not necessarily in reality.
Yvonne Lorenzo , says: September 21, 2019 at 8:08 pm GMT
@peterAUS

You mean being positive about you UNABLE to visualize a byte from a "keypress" moving all the way to the LAN cable with each timer "click"? You know, buffers, busses, microcode/firmware, interrupts, stack/heap, closed source, encryption/decryption layer of the OSI stack etc. That's for technology.

Butthurt you are, yes? Tell me how he defeats this, be specific. https://www.symantec.com/products/endpoint-encryption

White paper here. https://www.symantec.com/content/dam/symantec/docs/white-papers/keeping-your-private-data-secure-en.pdf

Y. Lorenzo

And I don't care; fine, he was a clever op, he hacked the NSA, whoo-hoo. My other comments still stand. Go wave your flag, you're done.

Sean , says: September 21, 2019 at 8:22 pm GMT
@Yvonne Lorenzo

Rand Paul might be one to open an investigation into the inadequacy of NSA security but government investigating itself is suspect. No such investigation will ever take place.

Yes, Rand Paul who while cutting his lawn provoked his own retired doctor neighbor in a gated community into a maddened vicious rib dislocating attack that cost Paul part of his lung What a brilliant choice to annoy the government.

His end will likely be as Skripals was: disappearance by Western IC which he supports and blame placed on Russia

Skirpal is in America. The British got Skirpal out of Russia, but Russia could have killed him any time because he was homesick and meeting people from the Russian Embassy. In my opinion the Russians were trying to kill Skirpal's daughter along with him. They knew she was coming and timed the nerve agent attack so as to 'accidentally' kill her along with the traitor. The knowledge that you will go after their families is the ultimate deterrent. Unless you are a narcissistic dick like Snowden, who hardly mentions anything his family did for him except getting a second phone line so he could play some stupid internet game. Snowden actually says in his book that the internet raised him. It did not get him a job in the CIA despite him having no degree, that was his mom's NSA and her father's Pentagon connections. Aldrich Ames's father worked for the CIA .

Art , says: September 21, 2019 at 9:12 pm GMT
Edward Snowden is a great man – a great American. (Will a Dem president pardon him?) I recently viewed a video on how a poor immigrant family hid Snowden before he secured a flight out of Hong Kong. (He is working to get them out of Hong Kong, to Canada.) I am curious as to how he got the flight out to Russia?????
Yvonne Lorenzo , says: September 21, 2019 at 9:14 pm GMT
This will be my final comment. My issue is one regarding Snowden's character and integrity, especially as the collapsing Empire under FUBAR Trump is waging war on the world. Come on, none of the CIA trolls here have read The Saker with Orlov on the fate of the mass murdering Empire?

http://www.unz.com/tsaker/placing-the-usa-on-a-collapse-continuum-with-dmitry-orlov/

At this point it is important to explain what exactly a "final collapse" looks like. Some people are under the very mistaken assumption that a collapsed society or country looks like a Mad Max world. This is not so. The Ukraine has been a failed state for several years already, but it still exists on the map. People live there, work, most people still have electricity (albeit not 24/7), a government exists, and, at least officially, law and order is maintained. This kind of collapsed society can go on for years, maybe decades, but it is in a state of collapse nonetheless, as it has reached all the 5 Stages of Collapse as defined by Dmitry Orlov in his seminal book "The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit" where he mentions the following 5 stages of collapse:

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in "the goodness of humanity" is lost.

Sound familiar? Read it and weep. Your pensions are toast.

Or read Chris Hedges America The Farewell Tour.

Snowden's character is proven by his interview with Brian Roberts.

Now, although only 14% of U.S. TLAMs got past Syrian air defenses, hear him was rhapsodic on the "beautiful missiles."

And Snowden is happy to talk to this creep? And asks Rothschild-Kravis puppet Macron to ex-filtrate him to France?

https://www.voltairenet.org/article204303.html

It was in this milieu that he met Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, in their residence on Park Avenue in New York [1]. The Kravis couple, unfailing supporters of the US Republican Party, are among the great world fortunes who play politics out of sight of the Press. Their company, KKR, like Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, is one of the world's major investment funds.

" Emmanuel's curiosity for the 'can-do attitude' was fascinating – the capacity to tell yourself that you can do anything you set your mind to. He had a thirst for knowledge and a desire to understand how things work, but without imitating or copying anyone. In this, he remained entirely French ", declares Marie-Josée Drouin (Mrs. Kravis) today [2].

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201909141076804460-go-west-edward-snowden-hopes-frances-emmanuel-macron-will-approve-his-asylum-application/

Snowden's revelations about his aspirations for asylum outside of Russia come just days ahead of the upcoming release of his new memoir which is expected to hit the shelves on US Constitution Day.

Famous American whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the man responsible for exposing a number of global surveillance programs run by the US agency, has recently revealed that he would like to obtain asylum in France.

Call it female intuition, Snowden creeps me out.

Those who want to bow before his altar, be my guest. You have free will.

peterAUS , says: September 21, 2019 at 11:21 pm GMT
@Yvonne Lorenzo

Butthurt

whoo-hoo..

Go wave your flag

.CIA trolls here

Read it and weep. Your pensions are toast.

From an author here?!

Whoah ..

My God, Unz .. really ? Coming to this?

Hahaha oh man.

peterAUS , says: September 21, 2019 at 11:48 pm GMT
Just realized, isn't this creature the only female author here? A female creature is writing, as an author, on alt-whatever site, about things she has never been professionally involved in. With certain hahaha style.

Hahaha ..oh my.

So, what have we got:
1. Unz finally collapsed under "diversity" pressure?
2. There is, sort of a hidden, message here.

I really hope it's the second.

Sean , says: September 22, 2019 at 12:35 am GMT peterAUS , says: September 22, 2019 at 2:31 am GMT
@Sean True true .mea culpa. Female stuff, that is, in general.

Style, though, is unique for the creature here.

Butthurt

whoo-hoo..

Go wave your flag

.CIA trolls here

Read it and weep. Your pensions are toast .

.creep .creeps me out

I mean hahaha .when reading those things it's, almost, as written by a certain type of commentators here. Almost as one of them, actually. Same "footprint". Especially the first two.

I mean, having that from an author here is, really, a new low for sure.

This is the first time I've seen something like that, and my attitude was mild in this thread compared to some in other threads. I mean, I was quite hard on some authors here, and never, so far that. "Butthurt" ."whoo-hoo"

I've quite offended a couple of authors here and they never replied with any rude word. And ..my God "whoo-hoo". Haha crazy.

New "quality" seeping here, apparently. Hehe getting with times, I guess. And program.
Understandable.

peterAUS , says: September 22, 2019 at 2:54 am GMT
@peterAUS O.K. I could be wrong.

I've been on this site for quite some time. Read, on average, 20 % of articles and similar number of comments in those articles.

I can't, really, recollect ONE case when an AUTHOR, here, in a comments exchange with a commentator, used the words "butthurt" and "whoo-hoo". Not once from the, say, authors from the West. Born and raised there, that is. Cultural thing, I guess.

Anyone could prove me senile/wrong? Please.

2stateshmustate , says: September 22, 2019 at 3:27 am GMT
@foolisholdman I agree. Shilling for the Israelis regarding 911 is a deal breaker for me. They had me going about these 2 guys for a while, but when I heard that they had ridiculed 911 truthers I smelled a rat. And after this article I agree they are shills for the status quo. Reasonable people can not doubt that 911 was a false flag operation. There's just too much bullshit there.
Commentator Mike , says: September 22, 2019 at 3:43 am GMT
@peterAUS

isn't this creature the only female author here?

Ilana Mercer is a woman who writes on UR.

niceland , says: September 22, 2019 at 4:55 am GMT
I think the idea Snowden is a "plant" is a bit far out there. If he is; the real purpose of the exercise is what exactly?

I also don't get why some commenters think Julian Assange isn't who he claims to be. His Wikileaks has published great volume of highly embarrassing material for the U.S. The embassy cables come to mind – bringing to light evidence contrary to Washington narrative on many events.

There is another thing; Just after he established Wikileaks he came to Iceland and met with journalists and few politicians. The result from that visit was he met one Kristinn Hrafnsson, long time journalist in Iceland with excellent track record and credibility. Since Assange got in trouble, accused of sexual harassment from Swedish woman and finally escaped into the Ecuador embassy in London, Hrafnsson has been spokesman for Wikileaks.

Since I am familiar with Hrafnsson work for decades, I would be very surprised if he worked with Assagne all this time, and even took over his job, so to speak, as head of Wikileaks if Assagne wasn't genuine. Hrafnsson has struck me as smart guy and honest and it's extremely unlikely he would continue if something didn't smell right at Wikileaks. I also want to point out Wikileaks has been working with, what I consider the few remaining NEWS outlets in Europe. (Including The Guardian before it was bought few years ago and became worthless).

To Assagne credit he booted Icelandic polititian, one Birgitta Jónsdóttir; who tried to visit him in U.K. prison – and wanted nothing to do with her. She has been trying to make international name for herself as fighter for human rights and peacemaker and against corruption and so forth. Unfortunately she is a bag full of hot air and thinks SHE is the center of the universe. It's all about her and therefore she is of no use for any cause. Julian was right to send her packing.

I can't imagine what the CIA or NSA or other tentacles of the Empire would gain by running Wikileaks. It makes absolutely no sense to me.

niceland , says: September 22, 2019 at 5:07 am GMT
@niceland Here you can view interview by Chris Hedges with Hrafnsson on RT. You decide if this guy is genuine or not. It seems he has basically been running Wikileaks for past several years. https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/461987-kristinn-hrafnsson-extradition-wikileaks/
Digital Samizdat , says: September 22, 2019 at 6:43 am GMT
@der einzige Wow. Thank you for posting that. Doesn't look too good for Assange.
anon [310] Disclaimer , says: September 22, 2019 at 8:52 am GMT
@Yvonne Lorenzo > Call it female intuition, Snowden creeps me out.

Can't refute that! #BelieveWomen

anon [310] Disclaimer , says: September 22, 2019 at 9:56 am GMT
@Yvonne Lorenzo > A helicopter outfitted with surveillance bubbles overflew after I submitted this piece.. Coincidence, right?

No coincidence, they're distributing corn sharks in a contract with ADM. Stay indoors and cover your head with tin foil.

9/11 Inside job , says: September 22, 2019 at 10:19 am GMT
@2stateshmustate "9/11 is the Litmus Test " By Smoking – Mirrors.Com :

"It all comes down to 9/11.Everything that has happened has happened based on a lie . Everyone in Government ; everyone in the media , in entertainment , in organized religion , in the public ,in the public eye who accepts and promotes the official story is either a traitor or a tool . Everyone who does not stand forth and speak truth to power is a coward , a liar and complicit in mass-murder . Everyone everywhere can be measured by this Litmus Test ."

[Sep 22, 2019] More Americans Questioning Official 9-11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative by Whitney Webb

Highly recommended!
If commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks called for a new investigation into the events of September 11 then official story is officially dead.
Notable quotes:
"... Evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative of September 11, and it becomes ever more clear that the media remains committed to preventing legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve. ..."
"... For instance, in late July, commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks and lost one of their own that day, called for a new investigation into the events of September 11. On July 24, the board of commissioners for the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which serves a population of around 30,000 near Queens, voted unanimously in their call for a new investigation into the attacks. ..."
"... Commissioner Christopher Gioia, who drafted and introduced the resolution, told those present at the meeting's conclusion that getting all of the New York fire districts onboard was their plan anyway. ..."
"... "We're a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an unstoppable force," Gioia said. "We were the first fire district to pass this resolution. We won't be the last," he added. ..."
"... While questioning the official conclusions of the first federal investigation into 9/11 has been treated as taboo in the American media landscape for years, it is worth noting that even those who led the commission have said that the investigation was "set up to fail" from the start and that they were repeatedly misled and lied to by federal officials in relation to the events of that day. ..."
"... For instance, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote in their book Without Precedent that not only was the commission starved of funds and its powers of investigation oddly limited, but that they were obstructed and outright lied to by top Pentagon officials and officials with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). ..."
"... Though the official story regarding the collapse of WTC 7 cites "uncontrolled building fires" as leading to the building's destruction, a majority of Americans who have seen the footage of the 47-story tower come down from four different angles overwhelmingly reject the official story, based on a new YouGov poll released on Monday. ..."
"... That poll found that 52 percent of those who saw the footage were either sure or suspected that the building's fall was due to explosives and was a controlled demolition, with 27 percent saying they didn't know what to make of the footage. Only 21 percent of those polled agreed with the official story that the building collapsed due to fires alone. Prior to seeing the footage, 36 percent of respondents said that they were unaware that a third building collapsed on September 11 and more than 67 percent were unable to name the building that had collapsed. ..."
"... Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, told MintPress that the lack of awareness about WTC 7 among the general public "goes to show that the mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people about even the most basic facts related to 9/11. On any other day in history, if a 47-story skyscraper fell into its footprint due to 'office fires,' everyone in the country would have heard about it." ..."
"... The Americans who felt that the video footage of WTC 7's collapse did not fit with the official narrative and appeared to show a controlled demolition now have more scientific evidence to fall back on after the release of a new university study found that the building came down not due to fire but from "the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building." The extensive four-year study was conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska and used complex computer models to determine if the building really was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely due to office fires. ..."
"... The only reason it remains taboo to ask questions about the official narrative, whose own authors admit that it is both flawed and incomplete, is that the dominant forces in the American media and the U.S. government have successfully convinced many Americans that doing so is not only dangerous but irrational and un-American. ..."
Sep 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

Evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative of September 11, and it becomes ever more clear that the media remains committed to preventing legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve.

Today the event that defined the United States' foreign policy in the 21st century, and heralded the destruction of whole countries, turns 18. The events of September 11, 2001 remains etched into the memories of Americans and many others, as a collective tragedy that brought Americans together and brought as well a general resolve among them that those responsible be brought to justice.

While the events of that day did unite Americans in these ways for a time, the different trajectories of the official relative to the independent investigations into the September 11 attacks have often led to division in the years since 2001, with vicious attacks or outright dismissal being levied against the latter.

Yet, with 18 years having come and gone -- and with the tireless efforts from victims' families, first responders, scientists and engineers -- the tide appears to be turning, as new evidence continues to emerge and calls for new investigations are made. However, American corporate media has remained largely silent, preferring to ignore new developments that could derail the "official story" of one of the most iconic and devastating attacks to ever occur on American soil.

For instance, in late July, commissioners for a New York-area Fire Department, which responded to the attacks and lost one of their own that day, called for a new investigation into the events of September 11. On July 24, the board of commissioners for the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which serves a population of around 30,000 near Queens, voted unanimously in their call for a new investigation into the attacks.

While the call for a new investigation from a NY Fire Department involved in the rescue effort would normally seem newsworthy to the media outlets who often rally Americans to "never forget," the commissioners' call for a new investigation was met with total silence from the mainstream media. The likely reason for the dearth of coverage on an otherwise newsworthy vote was likely due to the fact that the resolution that called for the new investigation contained the following clause:

Whereas, the overwhelming evidence presented in said petition demonstrates beyond any doubt that pre-planted explosives and/or incendiaries -- not just airplanes and the ensuing fires -- caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings, killing the vast majority of the victims who perished that day;"

In the post-9/11 world, those who have made such claims, no matter how well-grounded their claims may be, have often been derided and attacked as "conspiracy theorists" for questioning the official claims that the three World Trade Center buildings that collapsed on September 11 did so for any reason other than being struck by planes and from the resulting fires. Yet, it is much more difficult to launch these same attacks against members of a fire department that lost a fireman on September 11 and many of whose members were involved with the rescue efforts of that day, some of whom still suffer from chronic illnesses as a result.

Rescue workers climb on piles of rubble at the World Trade Center in New York, Sept. 13, 2001. Beth A. Keiser | AP

Another likely reason that the media monolithically avoided coverage of the vote was out of concern that it would lead more fire departments to pass similar resolutions, which would make it more difficult for such news to avoid gaining national coverage. Yet, Commissioner Christopher Gioia, who drafted and introduced the resolution, told those present at the meeting's conclusion that getting all of the New York fire districts onboard was their plan anyway.

"We're a tight-knit community and we never forget our fallen brothers and sisters. You better believe that when the entire fire service of New York State is on board, we will be an unstoppable force," Gioia said. "We were the first fire district to pass this resolution. We won't be the last," he added.

While questioning the official conclusions of the first federal investigation into 9/11 has been treated as taboo in the American media landscape for years, it is worth noting that even those who led the commission have said that the investigation was "set up to fail" from the start and that they were repeatedly misled and lied to by federal officials in relation to the events of that day.

For instance, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, wrote in their book Without Precedent that not only was the commission starved of funds and its powers of investigation oddly limited, but that they were obstructed and outright lied to by top Pentagon officials and officials with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA). They and other commissioners have outright said that the "official" report on the attacks is incomplete, flawed and unable to answer key questions about the terror attacks.

Despite the failure of American corporate media to report these facts, local legislative bodies in New York, beginning with the fire districts that lost loved ones and friends that day, are leading the way in the search for real answers that even those that wrote the "official story" say were deliberately kept from them.

Persuasive scientific evidence continues to roll in

Not long after the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District called for a new 9/11 investigation, a groundbreaking university study added even more weight to the commissioners' call for a new look at the evidence regarding the collapse of three buildings at the World Trade Center complex. While most Americans know full well that the twin towers collapsed on September 11, fewer are aware that a third building -- World Trade Center Building 7 -- also collapsed. That collapse occurred seven hours after the twin towers came down, even though WTC 7, or "Building 7," was never struck by a plane.

It was not until nearly two months after its collapse that reports revealed that the CIA had a "secret office" in WTC 7 and that, after the building's destruction, "a special CIA team scoured the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports stored in the station, either on paper or in computers." WTC 7 also housed offices for the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, the New York Mayor's Office of Emergency Management and the bank Salomon Brothers.

Though the official story regarding the collapse of WTC 7 cites "uncontrolled building fires" as leading to the building's destruction, a majority of Americans who have seen the footage of the 47-story tower come down from four different angles overwhelmingly reject the official story, based on a new YouGov poll released on Monday.

Source | Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth

That poll found that 52 percent of those who saw the footage were either sure or suspected that the building's fall was due to explosives and was a controlled demolition, with 27 percent saying they didn't know what to make of the footage. Only 21 percent of those polled agreed with the official story that the building collapsed due to fires alone. Prior to seeing the footage, 36 percent of respondents said that they were unaware that a third building collapsed on September 11 and more than 67 percent were unable to name the building that had collapsed.

Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development for Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, told MintPress that the lack of awareness about WTC 7 among the general public "goes to show that the mainstream media has completely failed to inform the American people about even the most basic facts related to 9/11. On any other day in history, if a 47-story skyscraper fell into its footprint due to 'office fires,' everyone in the country would have heard about it."

The fact that the media chose not to cover this, Walter asserted, shows that "the mainstream media and the political establishment live in an alternative universe and the rest of the American public is living in a different universe and responding to what they see in front of them," as reflected by the results of the recent YouGov poll.

Another significant finding of the YouGov poll was that 48 percent of respondents supported, while only 15 percent opposed, a new investigation into the events of September 11. This shows that not only was the Franklin Square Fire District's recent call for a new investigation in line with American public opinion, but that viewing the footage of WTC 7's collapse raises more questions than answers for many Americans, questions that were not adequately addressed by the official investigation of the 9/11 Commission.

The Americans who felt that the video footage of WTC 7's collapse did not fit with the official narrative and appeared to show a controlled demolition now have more scientific evidence to fall back on after the release of a new university study found that the building came down not due to fire but from "the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building." The extensive four-year study was conducted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska and used complex computer models to determine if the building really was the first steel-framed high-rise ever to have collapsed solely due to office fires.

The study, currently available as a draft , concluded that "uncontrolled building fires" did not lead the building to fall into its footprint -- tumbling more than 100 feet at the rate of gravity free-fall for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second collapse -- as has officially been claimed. Instead, the study -- authored by Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Feng Xiao and Dr. Zhili Quan -- found that "fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] and private engineering firms that studied the collapse," while also concluding "that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global [i.e., comprehensive] failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building."

This "near-simultaneous failure of every column" in WTC 7 strongly suggests that explosives were involved in its collapse, which is further supported by the statements made by Barry Jennings, the then-Deputy Director of Emergency Services Department for the New York City Housing Authority. Jennings told a reporter the day of the attack that he and Michael Hess, then-Corporation Counsel for New York City, had heard and seen explosions in WTC 7 several hours prior to its collapse and later repeated those claims to filmmaker Dylan Avery. The first responders who helped rescue Jennings and Hess also claimed to have heard explosions in WTC 7. Jennings died in 2008, two days prior the release of the official NIST report blaming WTC 7's collapse on fires. To date, no official cause of death for Jennings has been given.

Still "crazy" after all these years?

Eighteen years after the September 11 attacks, questioning the official government narrative of the events of those days still remains taboo for many, as merely asking questions or calling for a new investigation into one of the most important events in recent American history frequently results in derision and dismissal.

Yet, this 9/11 anniversary -- with a new study demolishing the official narrative on WTC 7, with a new poll showing that more than half of Americans doubt the government narrative on WTC 7, and with firefighters who responded to 9/11 calling for a new investigation -- is it still "crazy" to be skeptical of the official story?

Firefighters hose down the smoldering remains of 7 World Trade Center Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2001, in New York. Ryan Remiorz | AP

Even in years past, when asking difficult questions about September 11 was even more "off limits," it was often first responders, survivors and victims' families who had asked the most questions about what had really transpired that day and who have led the search for truth for nearly two decades -- not wild-eyed "conspiracy theorists," as many have claimed.

The only reason it remains taboo to ask questions about the official narrative, whose own authors admit that it is both flawed and incomplete, is that the dominant forces in the American media and the U.S. government have successfully convinced many Americans that doing so is not only dangerous but irrational and un-American.

However, as evidence continues to mount that the official narrative itself is the irrational narrative, it becomes ever more clear that the reason for this media campaign is to prevent legitimate questions about that day from receiving the scrutiny they deserve, even smearing victims' families and ailing first responders to do so. For too long, "Never Forget" has been nearly synonymous with "Never Question."

Yet, failing to ask those questions -- even when more Americans than ever now favor a new investigation and discount the official explanation for WTC 7's collapse -- is the ultimate injustice, not only to those who died in New York City on September 11, but those who have been killed in their names in the years that have followed.

Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

tanabear , says: September 11, 2019 at 7:45 pm GMT

Leroy Hulsey et al. of the University of Alaska Fairbanks released their draft report on WTC7 on September 3rd. These are the major findings and conclusions:

" The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on
9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.

This conclusion is based primarily upon the finding that the simultaneous failure of all
core columns over 8 stories followed 1.3 seconds later by the simultaneous failure of all exterior columns over 8 stories produces almost exactly the behavior observed in videos of the collapse, whereas no other sequence of failures that we simulated produced the observed behavior."

So World Trade Tower 7 was an engineered demolition. This is something that the 9/11 "conspiracy theorists" believed all along. Now a major engineering study confirms it.

Osama Bin SEE I A , says: September 12, 2019 at 1:12 am GMT
...The infuriating thing about 9/11 and the multitude of lesser false flags which both preceded and followed it is that, although most Americans know it was as phoney as a three and a half dollar fed reserve note, everyone seems content to put up with the extremely phoney "war on terror" it was designed to create and which has already destroyed a hand full of countries in the world, caused the murder of upwards of two million people, mostly using U.S. military, and turned the U.S. into a ruthlessly insane police state wherein everyone is made to obey patently unlawful statutes in the name of "emergency" while the ruling elite has quit obeying any laws at all while gathering a massive military presence to cow the now restless and resentful public. – See more at:Christopher Bollyn: The Man Who Solved 9/11

https://www.youtube.com/embed/pLWIV0TTcbI?feature=oembed

davidgmillsatty , says: September 12, 2019 at 6:58 pm GMT
@The Alarmist An aerospace engineer. Good for you. Maybe you need a refresher course with some architects and building engineers. Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth is a good place to start.

As for steel losing 90% of its strength at half its melting temperature -- that does not imply that heat not will stack on steel. The whole building was a steel radiator. And the fires in building 7 were very small so just how do small fires get to half the melting temperature of steel when the radiator effect is bleeding what little heat these fires have from a certain spot.

Lets see the steel buildings you claim were demolished by fires, because I have heard many architects and engineers say the number is zero. We are talking a total collapse of the buildings not just a partial collapse. Let's see them.

Adam Smith , says: September 19, 2019 at 3:56 am GMT

Eighteen years after the September 11 attacks, questioning the official government narrative of the events of those days still remains taboo for many

This topic illustrates a few things about humans and their societies that many of us do not realize, or are too afraid to realize. It's bigger than just the cognitive dissonance, though this is part of it. Admittedly it is uncomfortable for most people to think about such things Ignorance is bliss, and it is much easier to follow the herd.

But

Humans have been selectively bred and conditioned for obedience to authority for at least the last 10,000 years. Stanley Milgram made the ramifications of this clear when he showed us some of the dangers this fact presents for our world. Couple Milgram's findings with those of Solomon Asch's conformity experiments and it starts becoming clear why a large part, about 30%, of the population will never be able to question the official orthodoxy regarding this "New Pearl Harbor".

Many people simply do not have the mental ability to question those in a perceived position of authority. These people are used to following orders. They are trained very well. These are the people who will electrocute a stranger just because a man in a white coat says to. These are the people who will throw a grenade into your babies crib while storming your home in the middle of the night because some junkie informant told them they bought drugs there in exchange for cash or a lighter sentence. These are the people who will not believe their lying eyes when it contradicts the words of their masters or if it risks going against the apparent consensus of a group of strangers.

I call them authoritarian followers. They love punishing members of the outgroup. They love following rules no matter how arbitrary, nonsensical or detrimental. They expect others to follow too.

We all know September 11, 2001, was an inside/outside job. Cui bono? The axis of kindness. The U.S./Nato, Saudi Arabia and Israel committed the events of September 11, 2001 so they could escalate their wars in the middle east to redraw the map for Greater Israel while securing the oil in the middle east and the trillions in minerals in Afghanistan. The military industrial complex needs endless wars to justify their one trillion plus dollar annual budget and all the power that comes with it. Some people, like lucky Larry Silverstein, made billions off the transaction. There is plenty of profiteering and graft that comes with waging forever war.

The same people who profited from the event are the same people who planned and executed the event. They are also the people who had the tools to make it happen. Fortunately for the criminals who committed the crimes of that day a large part of the population will line up to ridicule anyone who has the audacity to question the official narrative.

So buy police brutality bonds and pay your victory tax. Your work will set you free.

Anonymous [973] • Disclaimer , says: September 19, 2019 at 11:24 pm GMT
@Adam Smith It's so unbelievably rare to run into a sincere description of the average fellow. Because one cam't lie to himself about the others less than he does about himself (he can't know the others more than he can know himself), so usually evident features of people (thus of mainstream culture, history, journalistic narratives, ) must he denied because evident features of the self must be denied.

It's co-operation.

And then, aren't they a social species? You have surely observed that a group of them functions in ways very close to the ant colony, the bee hive, and so on. So many more billion neurons but what rules the mind is still so close to what rules it in the other social species.

The thing to consider is that for God knows how many thousands of years in mankind's history, whenever two differently sized came to a confrontation, belonging in the largest equated survival, in the smallest death.
Then there is the intragroup confrontations and dangers: here flattering the pack leaders best equated to better chances of survival + a more comfortable life. On the other hand, injuring their sense of power had the same outcome that it has for the ordinary bee or ant to do the same to the colony's or hive's leader.

This has embedded a couple of instincts, which truth and fairness can't be where they are, at the deepest level of the regular human mind.
Some minds are different, but they don't matter, first of all they don't matter numerically.

So official accounts of historic events are no more and no less truth-free of the accounts people make-up of their own lives' essential events.
If you assess the average divorce-asking woman's narrative on her marriage and why she wants to break it up and the average account of, say, World War 2 in the average school book, the % of untruth will be circa the same.

What happens at the higher levels follows from the nature of the majority.

Anonymous [973] • Disclaimer , says: September 19, 2019 at 11:32 pm GMT
@Adam Smith

They love following rules no matter how arbitrary, nonsensical or detrimental. They expect others to follow too.

Following rules as long as nobody above them tells them to make an exception.
They expect not all others, but only those below them in the power pole, to follow rules.
If they see/realize/know someone above them has broken a rule, they are awesomely good at, wbile they have seen/realized/learned the fact, not having seen/realized/learned it.

This kind of mind can't afford unity and individuality, of course. There are always inconsistencies, and even contradictory things believed at the same time.
And boy, how do the other authorities/authoritarian followers (depending whom they are dealingwith) who make up the psych professions praise that kind of person! How do they master selective blindness/forgetfulness/ignorance.

Paul Vonharnish , says: • Website September 20, 2019 at 3:45 pm GMT
It's obvious from most reader comments that the educational systems in America (and elsewhere) have completely decayed. "Cognitive dissonance" is just another cowardly way of accepting lies as truths Most of you are lying to yourselves and expecting others to buy into hype and bullshit.

Anyone who's worked with cutting steel plate knows that 5 inch thick steel plating (as used in most lower columns of the towers) requires a perfect mixture of acetylene and oxygen just to get the cutting area hot enough to apply the oxygen burst that cuts along the line. Any cooling of the plate and it's no cigar. There is no way air craft fuel (kerosene) and normal building materials can get anywhere near the melting point of steel, much less cause complete structural failure of a perfectly engineered steel beamed structure.

Christopher Bollyn and many other dedicated journalists have connected all the relevant dots, yet the unwashed continue to hide behind their collage degrees and talk complete nonsense.

The first and second laws of thermodynamics should be mastered before graduating from eighth grade People need to quit lying about the efficacy of truth

D-FENS , says: September 21, 2019 at 7:09 pm GMT
I am an agnostic on whether the twin towers were brought down by supplemental explosives. My question is, what is gained by actually bringing the buildings down? If the attacks were to serve as a pretext for war in the middle east, wouldn't the acts of hijacking the planes and crashing them have been sufficient without the risks involved in planting explosives and being being detected?

The only reasons I can offer are financial, such as the insurance payments, voided contracts, shorting stocks etc. and perhaps destruction of evidence in criminal or civil cases.

What is interesting is the 9/11 Commission's conclusion regarding the financing of 9/11: " the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance."

Then why do we have all the financial transaction laws?

[Sep 22, 2019] The Snowden Conundrum by Yvonne Lorenzo

Highly recommended!
This article raises serious questions about Snowden's authenticity. Although the level of damage he has done make suggestion that he is apart of CIA operation against NSA much less plausible. He did some damage by publicizing operations like Prism. No question about it.
And it is diffuclt to treat Snowden like another variation of Lee Harvey Oswald defection to the USSR.
But it is true that several steps that he took after supposed exfiltration of the documents were highly suspicious: As author pointed out WaPo and Guardian are essentially intelligence agencies controlled outlets, so there is no chance that publication can't be completely blocked.
Another good point is that in any large corporation there is system of logs and they suppoedly are analysed, althout the level of qualification in doing so varies greatly.
And if reports are created automatically that not not mean that they are ver read. Another valid point is that even if you are system administrator, you have great powers over all your users. But at the same time your power is compartmentalized: you have access only to few selected computer that constitute the set of servers you manage. And you usually access then via special jumpserver, which logs everything you do. In no way you have access to any server and any database in the organization; you might not even know that some servers exist. Actually access to critical databases is very tightly controlled.
The author also pointed to an interesting question about difficulties of exfiltration of data on encrypted Windows computers. I think that copy to the UCB drive from encrypted drive to SD or USB drive might still be permitted for sysadmins, as it might be required for some operations. But SD accepted might be special, issued by NSA, not retai and they should be accounted for. Still the point that Yvonne Lorenzo raised is very interesting: how you bypass existing protections on you computer to copy information of SD card ?
On another issue, why did Snowden provide his files to known house organs of Intelligence Agencies, specifically the Washington Post and The Guardian, and not give them to Wikileaks?
Notable quotes:
"... How many reading my words work at a large entity, not necessarily government, let us say a Fortune 1000 or higher? Do you have the ability to copy data unimpeded onto any external device? Can you surf the Internet at will? Or is everything you do on the computer network under constant, real-time scrutiny? ..."
"... Edward Snowden would have us believe that the Eye of Sauron didn't notice he was looking at gigabytes of data unrelated to his job function and using his computer to copy the data to external devices over a lengthy period of time. Are his supporters alleging he is so clever he could disappear from the "Eye of Sauron's" view and be unnoticed? If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you in Crimea. ZeroHedge reported " IRS Agent Charged In Leak Of Michael Cohen Transactions To Michael Avenatti ." ..."
"... However, don't believe it takes nine months to identify such an unauthorized intrusion. Don't think every keystroke isn't monitored in real-time. So my question is: would the NSA, which has much more sensitive data (especially compromising information on the governing class) than tax returns and financial transactions have inferior capabilities than the IRS as to maintaining data security? Are we to believe the NSA lacks a "digital trail" when it comes to classified documents? ..."
"... On another issue, why did Snowden provide his files to known house organs of Intelligence Agencies, specifically the Washington Post and The Guardian, and not give them to Wikileaks to allow a publicly available searchable database? ..."
"... While other outlets -- such as the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post and the New York Times -- also possess much (though not all) of the archive, the Intercept was the only outlet with the (full) archive that had continued to publish documents, albeit at a remarkably slow pace, in recent years. In total, fewer than 10 percent of the Snowden documents have been published since 2013. Thus, the closing of the publication's Snowden archive will likely mean the end of any future publications, unless Greenwald's promise of finding "the right partner that has the funds to robustly publish" is fulfilled ..."
"... Do you believe Putin's intelligence agencies don't communicate to him how Washington "organized crime" really operates, as Whitney Webb has disclosed, now on the pages of Unz.com ? What difference does any compromised President make to the policies and goals of the occupational government of the United States (obvious to any reader of this and similar websites)? ..."
"... Why is an alleged humanitarian such a Russophobe? ..."
"... Has Snowden ever challenged the September 11 narrative, ludicrous as it is, and him being an "engineer?" ..."
"... STO equals Special Technical Operations It's highly unlikely Mr. Snowden had any access to these. ..."
"... ECI = Exceptionally Controlled Information. I do not believe Mr. Snowden had any access to these ECI controlled networks). VRK = Very Restricted Knowledge. I do not believe Mr. Snowden had any access to these VRK controlled networks. ..."
"... So what they did, is they took a few documents and they downgraded [he classification level of the documents] – just a few – and gave them to them to placate this basic whitewash investigation. ..."
"... Journalist Margie Burns asked some good questions back in June that have not yet been answered. She wondered about the 29-year old Snowden who had been a U.S. Army Special Forces recruit, a covert CIA operative, and an NSA employee in various capacities, all in just a few, short years. Burns asked "How, exactly, did Snowden get his series of NSA jobs? Did he apply through regular channels? Was it through someone he knew? Who recommended him? Who were his references for a string of six-figure, high-level security jobs? Are there any safeguards in place so that red flags go up when a subcontractor jumps from job to job, especially in high-level clearance positions?" ..."
"... In December, whistleblower Sibel Edmonds broke the news that Omidyar's Paypal Corporation was implicated in the as-yet-unreleased NSA documents from Snowden. Moreover, Edmonds had allegedly been contacted by an NSA official who alleged that "a deal was made in early June, 2013 between the journalists involved in this recent NSA scandal and U.S. government officials, which was then sealed by secrecy and nondisclosure agreements by all parties involved." ..."
"... No, no one is accusing Wikileaks of conspiring with Russia, just Robert Mueller. I really appreciate Snowden calling Julian Assange a liar, for he has consistently denied there was a "state actor." ..."
"... "Terrorism is a real problem" Snowden said. Is it credible that Snowden, who presented himself as donating funds to Ron Paul, has never read any alternative news sites? Is it credible that Snowden believes that terrorists and this would include the good "moderate terrorists" in Syria are armed and act on their own initiative, and is ignorant of the role of the governments of America, Israel, and Saudi Arabia in using them to achieve their ends as proxy armies? ..."
"... Does Snowden then think this report, " America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group" is false? Does that mindset make Snowden a champion for liberty or a tool for more control of the American population? For example, is it credible that this alleged genius supports the narrative of the September 11 attacks World Trade Center attacks? ..."
"... Tor lists on its own website sponsors that include Google, the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, ONR via Naval Research Laboratory (past sponsor) and DARPA. ..."
"... Perhaps Snowden is only a Soros and Hillary Clinton supporting liberal -- but then why would he have done what he did? His character is of any government employee of the "surface state" who swallows false narratives whole. ..."
"... The logging of user and information accessed is sure added to the file. But real time supervision? No. A eye of sauron? Please. The system isnt there to prevent crime, its to track down the criminal and deeds later. And yes everything takes a very long time on the public side. ..."
"... 'Edward Snowden' who first 'leaked' to the CIA's Washington Post, in fact to Bush VP Dick Cheney's biographer Bart Gellman then the Deep State realised that was too stupid, so they switched to Rothschild employee & ex-gay-pornography-seller Glenn Greenwald, former proprietor of 'hairystuds', at the Guardian, an intel-agency rag which lies about nearly everything ..."
"... NeonRevolt once floated the theory that Snowden was an FBI or CIA plant who whistleblew solely because he had the mission to undermine NSA operations by exposing their equipment/techniques and turning public opinion against them. ..."
"... inter-service rivalry and sabotage between spy agencies is absolutely a thing, and reviewing the inconsistencies of Snowden's stunt, its aftermath, and his personal views with that potential background in mind suddenly makes things make much more sense, in my mind at least. ..."
"... If we accept the later, that he's a plant, then it raises a further question: was the short term loss, associated with his revelations, ie highlighting the utterly disturbing degree of Gov surveillance over US citizens (etc) worth the long term profit of having an established, authoritive psy-op's agent able to influence/distort etc any debate or narrative concerning the US State /elites. On this side the author notes Snowmen's views on Tor, 9/11, Russia etc which clearly advantage the US State's own views on these subjects. ..."
"... Consider that nothing Snowden revealed was news. It was all old hat for anyone who'd been paying attention, and for up to ten years. Sure Snowden made it mainstream for what good it did but nothing he said was a secret anymore. In fact, I thought even at the time his actions were nothing less than a 'threat and warning' from the intel services that they had this much on everyone. Just imagine all those national leaders, politicians from all states being pout on notice. All your secrets are ours! What a powerful global message to deliver and in such a loud and clear fashion. ..."
"... The lack of deviation from official bullshit on 9/11 is on its own however reason enough to toss this guy out. ..."
"... To my mind "9/11, attitude to", is a sort of touch-stone for telling genuine dissidents from fake and both Snowden and Assange fail on that test ..."
"... Snowden is not a classic defector so it makes sense for him to keep his distance from Russian society so as not to be inadvertently compromised or used by their intelligence services. He's obviously under surveillance there, I know we all are but he's much more aware of it, so that doesn't make it easy for him but he's definitely safer there than he'd be in France or Germany. I just don't think he planned well ahead when he became a whistle-blower or was clear about what he was trying to achieve. He's not the top level type of spy we're accustomed to reading about who betray their country for money or to serve another they believe in more than their own. If he has been on active duty as a CIA asset all along I can't see that he has achieved much of use to them other than in some inter-agency rivalry game. But it's natural for Russians to be suspicious of him – they're suspicious by nature – and rightly so, but it doesn't make his life easy there. ..."
"... 9/11 is the "litmus test" and it appears that both Assange and Snowden have failed it. ..."
"... Snowden keeping "distance" to Russia, and not openly defending them seems reasonable to me. You can imagine the smear campaign back home if he would side with Russia against the U.S. on almost anything. "The Russians got to him" or "He was always their man". ..."
"... He is trying to keep his neutrality and credibility and his target audience isn't the average Unz reader, but rather some mainstream educated middle/upper class blokes. Easily scared away from his views if they become too controversial and too far from the established narrative. ..."
"... If I had been in the position like 'Snowden', after first having been granted asylum, my priority would have been to study the language. I would gtuess that he can order food or drink, do basic greetings, and not much else. ..."
"... I agree. Shilling for the Israelis regarding 911 is a deal breaker for me. They had me going about these 2 guys for a while, but when I heard that they had ridiculed 911 truthers I smelled a rat. And after this article I agree they are shills for the status quo. Reasonable people can not doubt that 911 was a false flag operation. There's just too much bullshit there. ..."
"... I think the idea Snowden is a "plant" is a bit far out there. If he is; the real purpose of the exercise is what exactly? ..."
"... I also don't get why some commenters think Julian Assange isn't who he claims to be. His Wikileaks has published great volume of highly embarrassing material for the U.S. The embassy cables come to mind – bringing to light evidence contrary to Washington narrative on many events. ..."
"... There is another thing; Just after he established Wikileaks he came to Iceland and met with journalists and few politicians. The result from that visit was he met one Kristinn Hrafnsson, long time journalist in Iceland with excellent track record and credibility. Since Assange got in trouble, accused of sexual harassment from Swedish woman and finally escaped into the Ecuador embassy in London, Hrafnsson has been spokesman for Wikileaks. ..."
"... "It all comes down to 9/11.Everything that has happened has happened based on a lie . Everyone in Government ; everyone in the media , in entertainment , in organized religion , in the public ,in the public eye who accepts and promotes the official story is either a traitor or a tool . Everyone who does not stand forth and speak truth to power is a coward , a liar and complicit in mass-murder . Everyone everywhere can be measured by this Litmus Test ." ..."
Sep 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

Have you ever had the pleasure of dealing with an agent of the Federal government? For example, have you been audited by the IRS? Did you notice what the "Agent" does to gain access to his (or her) computer -- by inserting a "Smart ID" into a slot? Did you ask how your personal information is protected from disclosure or theft? What is to prevent the Agent from copying files to a thumb drive and taking them home?

Regarding the Smart ID, the "HSPD-12" is discussed in this publicly available article ; please note the following:

HSPD-12, FIPS 201 and the PIV Card

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12), issued by President George W. Bush on August 27, 2004, mandated the establishment of a standard for identification of Federal government employees and contractors. HSPD-12 requires the use of a common identification credential for both logical and physical access to federally controlled facilities and information systems. The Department of Commerce and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) were tasked with producing a standard for secure and reliable forms of identification. In response, NIST published Federal Information Processing Standard Publication 201 (FIPS 201), Personal Identity Verification (PIV) of Federal Employees and Contractors, issued on February 25, 2005, and a number of special publications that provide more detail on the implementation of the standard.

Both Federal agencies and enterprises have implemented FIPS 201-compliant ID programs and have issued PIV cards. The FIPS 201 PIV card is a smart card with both contact and contactless interfaces that is now being issued to all Federal employees and contractors

Additional information about FIPS 201 can be found on the Government Identity/Credentialing Resources page, from NIST, and from the Secure Technology Alliance Access Control Council.

If you engage the IRS employee in conversation, remembering the adage you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, you'll learn the computer cannot be compromised -- all data on the device are encrypted; the only access to it is via the Smart ID. Data can be copied to an external "thumb drive" but everything copied will be encrypted; any file on that thumb drive is only readable by that specific device. Wouldn't this be true of NSA devices as well? Why does Snowden never discuss dealing with such encryption: how would it be possible?

In the Oliver Stone movie Snowden , as well as in any of Snowden's descriptions of how he accessed the NSA computers, did you note either the depiction or reference to this universal Smart ID? How could Snowden be exempt from its requirement? Why wasn't its use, which is public knowledge, shown or discussed? Per the above, the Smart ID is deployed in all government agencies: there are no exceptions. And while the financial portion (think of all those Goldman Sachs alumni at the U.S. Department of the Treasury) is likely the most powerful part of the financial-military-industrial-media-congressional complex that is the central power of the federal government, do you think that IRS systems are different and superior in security to what was employed by a contractor working for Booze-Allen Hamilton at the NSA?

How many reading my words work at a large entity, not necessarily government, let us say a Fortune 1000 or higher? Do you have the ability to copy data unimpeded onto any external device? Can you surf the Internet at will? Or is everything you do on the computer network under constant, real-time scrutiny?

Did Edward Snowden, who has publicly criticized Google, mention Google is deployed as a search engine throughout the federal "intranet"? And can he catch a link to the Washington Post on the NSA homepage too? Or would he testify and can it be verified that NSA does not use Google (for example to obtain the PowerPoint he revealed) for searching for internal documents and procedures? Can anyone reading my words answer the questions I've posed so far and answer accurately and honestly with confirmatory evidence?

Edward Snowden would have us believe that the Eye of Sauron didn't notice he was looking at gigabytes of data unrelated to his job function and using his computer to copy the data to external devices over a lengthy period of time. Are his supporters alleging he is so clever he could disappear from the "Eye of Sauron's" view and be unnoticed? If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you in Crimea. ZeroHedge reported " IRS Agent Charged In Leak Of Michael Cohen Transactions To Michael Avenatti ." From the article:

John C. Fry, an analyst in the San Francisco IRS office who had worked for the agency since 2008, was charged with disclosing Cohen's Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) – nine months after we reported that it wouldn't be difficult to track down the leaker due to a digital trail left behind from accessing the system.

However, don't believe it takes nine months to identify such an unauthorized intrusion. Don't think every keystroke isn't monitored in real-time. So my question is: would the NSA, which has much more sensitive data (especially compromising information on the governing class) than tax returns and financial transactions have inferior capabilities than the IRS as to maintaining data security? Are we to believe the NSA lacks a "digital trail" when it comes to classified documents?

On another issue, why did Snowden provide his files to known house organs of Intelligence Agencies, specifically the Washington Post and The Guardian, and not give them to Wikileaks to allow a publicly available searchable database? As Roger Stone has noted, the odious Nixon was taken down principally by the CIA media front The Washington Post because he sought detente with Russia and another presidential assassination would have been too obvious. Notice the situation regarding the Snowden treasure trove as investigative journalist Whitney Webb writes about it here: " Silencing the Whistle: The Intercept Shutters Snowden Archive, Citing Cost ."

According to a timeline of events written by Poitras that was shared and published by journalist and former Intercept columnist Barrett Brown, both Scahill and Greenwald were intimately involved in the decision to close the Snowden archive.

While other outlets -- such as the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post and the New York Times -- also possess much (though not all) of the archive, the Intercept was the only outlet with the (full) archive that had continued to publish documents, albeit at a remarkably slow pace, in recent years. In total, fewer than 10 percent of the Snowden documents have been published since 2013. Thus, the closing of the publication's Snowden archive will likely mean the end of any future publications, unless Greenwald's promise of finding "the right partner that has the funds to robustly publish" is fulfilled

Yet, as Poitras pointed out, the research department accounted for a minuscule 1.5 percent of First Look Media's budget. Greenwald's claim that the archive was shuttered owing to its high cost to the company is also greatly undermined by the fact that he, along with several other Intercept employees -- Reed and Scahill among them -- receive massive salaries that dwarf those of journalists working for similar nonprofit publications.

Greenwald, for instance, received $1.6 million from First Look Media, of which Omidyar is the sole shareholder, from 2014 to 2017. His yearly salary peaked in 2015, when he made over $518,000. Reed and Scahill both earn well over $300,000 annually from First Look. According to journalist Mark Ames, Scahill made over $43,000 per article at the Intercept in 2014. Other writers at the site, by comparison, have a base salary of $50,000, which itself is higher than the national average for journalists.

And what about Snowden himself, the pontificator, the man who can speak on television or to the media with evidence of training? Practice yourself -- see how well you can answer questions and speak publicly to a TV camera. How did he get his training? Who trained him? Why? How is it that the legacy media, which applauds the slow, painful execution of Julian Assange , be in rapture over Snowden's new book tour and provide ample coverage? Is Assange being murdered in part to prevent his providing exculpatory evidence that Russia never hacked the DNC and it was a leak?

I have provided two videos below for the reader to consider and compare.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/F7J2DdiXM9Q?feature=oembed

https://www.youtube.com/embed/O4nFGOEeSP0?feature=oembed

Look at how Bill Binney, a true techno-nerd speaks and compare the difference between him with the polished interviews given by Snowden who borders on pomposity. Also, to his favor Binney is doing his best to debunk the Russia hacking narrative of the DNC; Snowden makes his thoughts about Russia and Russians clear in his latest interview with Der Spiegel promoting his new book about himself:

DER SPIEGEL: Do you have Russian friends?

Snowden: I try to keep a distance between myself and Russian society, and this is completely intentional. I live my life with basically the English-speaking community. I'm the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. And, you know, I'm an indoor cat. It doesn't matter where I am -- Moscow, Berlin, New York -- as long as I have a screen to look into.

DER SPIEGEL: Western authorities accuse the Russian government on a regular basis of being one of the biggest disrupters in the digital world. Are they right?

Snowden: Russia is responsible for a lot of negative activity in the world, you can say that right and fairly. Did Russia interfere with elections? Almost certainly. But do the United States interfere in elections? Of course. They've been doing it for the last 50 years. Any country bigger than Iceland is going to interfere in every crucial election, and they're going to deny it every time, because this is what intelligence services do. This is explicitly why covert operations and influence divisions are created, and their purpose as an instrument of national power is to ask: How can we influence the world in a direction that improves our standing relative to all the other countries?

I am pleased to have played a small role in getting Stephen F. Cohen's work published on Unz.com. He and others have effectively debunked Russian involvement in the manipulation of America elections and the conclusions of the Mueller report. To paraphrase a point Professor Cohen made in his most recent article posted here, which is simply common sense: We are to believe Trump is Putin's puppet yet Putin simultaneously encouraged the preparation of a dossier to destroy him. Does that make sense to any one with half a brain? Do you believe Putin's intelligence agencies don't communicate to him how Washington "organized crime" really operates, as Whitney Webb has disclosed, now on the pages of Unz.com ? What difference does any compromised President make to the policies and goals of the occupational government of the United States (obvious to any reader of this and similar websites)?

Do you notice how Snowden never challenges any government narrative, whether it's on Russia as a villain, and not as a victim of war initiated by Washington? Why is an alleged humanitarian such a Russophobe? Is this how he repays the nation that granted him asylum? Has he only compassion in the abstract, and is a genius but too stupid to consider the consequences of America going to war with Russia and in fact exacerbating the tension by his false and inflammatory statements about Russian conduct in the 2016 elections, for which there are no facts and evidence?

And then there's the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings. Of course Snowden at NSA had no access to information on how and why it was done, but as Dmitri Orlov has written:

I suppose I am a "conspiracy theorist" too. Whenever I write something that questions the veracity of some official narrative, someone (probably a troll) pops up and asks me what I think of 9/11. Here is what I typically reply:

I totally believe that it was possible to knock down three steel-framed buildings using two flying aluminum cans loaded with kerosene, luggage and meat. I have proven that this is possible by throwing two beer cans at three chain-link fences. All three fences were instantly swallowed up by holes in the ground that mysteriously opened up right under them and in which they were instantaneously incinerated into fine oxide powder that coated the entire neighborhood. Anybody who does not believe my experimental results is obviously a tin-foil-hat crackpot conspiracy theorist.

Lots of people read this and ran away bleating; a few people bust a gut laughing because this is (trust me on this!) actually quite funny. Some people took offense at someone ridiculing an event in which thousands of people died. (To protect their tender sensibilities they should consider emigrating to a country that isn't run by a bunch of war criminals.)

But if you do see the humor in this, then you may be up to the challenge, which is to pull out a useful signal (a typical experimentalist's task) out of a mess of unreliable and contradictory data. Only then would you be in a position to persuasively argue -- not prove, mind you! -- that the official story is complete and utter bullshit.

Note that everything beyond that point, such as arguing what "the real story" is, is strictly off-limits. If you move beyond that point you open yourself up to well-organized, well-funded debunking. But if all you produce is a very large and imposing question mark, then the only way to attack it is by producing certainty -- a very tall order! In conspiracy theory, as in guerrilla warfare, you don't have to win. You just have to not lose long enough for the enemy to give up.

Has Snowden ever challenged the September 11 narrative, ludicrous as it is, and him being an "engineer?" And this last point is the reason I'm writing these words: I don't have to come up with the "real story" on who Edward Snowden is and what his true motives are. I am asking questions that point out the discrepancies in Snowden's statements and conduct and his alleged sanctity. In this article, " EXCLUSIVE REPORT: NSA Whistleblower: Snowden Never Had Access to the JUICIEST Documents Far More Damning "

WASHINGTON'S BLOG: Glenn Greenwald – supposedly, in the next couple of days or weeks – is going to disclose, based on NSA documents leaked by Snowden, that the NSA is spying on all sorts of normal Americans and that the spying is really to crush dissent. [Background here, here and here.]

Does Snowden even have documents which contain the information which you've seen?

RUSSELL TICE: The answer is no.

WASHINGTON'S BLOG: So you saw handwritten notes. And what Snowden was seeing were electronic files ?

RUSSELL TICE: Think of it this way. Remember I told you about the NSA doing everything they could to make sure that the information from 40 years ago – from spying on Frank Church and Lord knows how many other Congressman that they were spying on – was hidden?

Now do you think they're going to put that information into PowerPoint slides that are easy to explain to everybody what they're doing?

They would not even put their own NSA designators on the reports [so that no one would know that] it came from the NSA. They made the reports look like they were Humint (human intelligence) reports. They did it to hide the fact that they were NSA and they were doing the collection. That's 40 years ago. [The NSA and other agencies are still doing "parallel construction", "laundering" information to hide the fact that the information is actually from mass NSA surveillance.]

Now, what NSA is doing right now is that they're taking the information and they're putting it in a much higher security level. It's called "ECI" – Exceptionally Controlled Information – and it's called the black program which I was a specialist in, by the way.

I specialized in black world – DOD and IC (Intelligence Community) – programs, operations and missions in "VRKs", "ECIs", and "SAPs", "STOs". SAP equals Special Access Program. It's highly unlikely Mr. Snowden had any access to these. STO equals Special Technical Operations It's highly unlikely Mr. Snowden had any access to these.

Now in that world – the ECI/VRK world – everything in that system is classified at a higher level and it has its own computer systems that house it. It's totally separate than the system which Mr. Snowden was privy to, which was called the "JWICS": Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. The JWICS system is what everybody at NSA has access to. Mr Snowden had Sys Admin [systems administrator] authority for the JWICS.

And you still have to have TS/SCI clearance [i.e. Top Secret/ Sensitive Compartmented Information – also known as "code word" – clearance] to get on the JWICS. But the ECI/VRK systems are much higher [levels of special compartmentalized clearance] than the JWICS. And you have to be in the black world to get that [clearance].

ECI = Exceptionally Controlled Information. I do not believe Mr. Snowden had any access to these ECI controlled networks). VRK = Very Restricted Knowledge. I do not believe Mr. Snowden had any access to these VRK controlled networks.

These programs typically have, at the least, a requirement of 100 year or until death, 'till the person first being "read in" [i.e. sworn to secrecy as part of access to the higher classification program] can talk about them. [As an interesting sidenote, the Washington Times reported in 2006 that – when Tice offered to testify to Congress about this illegal spying – he was informed by the NSA that the Senate and House intelligence committees were not cleared to hear such information.]

It's very compartmentalized and – even with stuff that they had – you might have something at NSA, that there's literally 40 people at NSA that know that it's going on in the entire agency.

When the stuff came out in the New York Times [the first big spying story, which broke in 2005] – and I was a source of information for the New York Times – that's when President Bush made up that nonsense about the "terrorist surveillance program." By the way, that never existed. That was made up.

There was no such thing beforehand. It was made up to try to placate the American people.

The NSA IG (Inspector General) – who was not cleared for this – all of a sudden is told he has to do an investigation on this; something he has no information or knowledge of.

So what they did, is they took a few documents and they downgraded [he classification level of the documents] – just a few – and gave them to them to placate this basic whitewash investigation.

Snowden's Failure To Understand the Most Important Documents

RUSSELL TICE: Now, if Mr. Snowden were to find the crossover, it would be those documents that were downgraded to the NSA's IG.

The stuff that I saw looked like a bunch of alphanumeric gobbledygook. Unless you have an analyst to know what to look for – and believe me, I think that what Snowden's done is great – he's not an intelligence analyst. So he would see something like that, and he wouldn't know what he's looking at.

But that would be "the jewels". And the key is, you wouldn't know it's the jewels unless you were a diamond miner and you knew what to look for. Because otherwise, there's a big lump of rock and you don't know there's a diamond in there.

I worked special programs. And the way I found out is that I was working on a special operation, and I needed information from NSA from another unit. And when I went to that unit and I said "I need this information", and I dealt with [satellite spy operations], and I did that in the black world. I was a special operations officer. I would literally go do special missions that were in the black world where I would travel overseas and do spooky stuff.

Did we really need Snowden to have told us that the Internet, federally controlled, does not allow anyone a modicum of privacy and the government after implementing the Patriot Act considers ordinary Americans the enemy?

In " Inconsistencies and Unanswered Questions: The Risks of Trusting the Snowden Story " Kevin Ryan wrote:

Journalist Margie Burns asked some good questions back in June that have not yet been answered. She wondered about the 29-year old Snowden who had been a U.S. Army Special Forces recruit, a covert CIA operative, and an NSA employee in various capacities, all in just a few, short years. Burns asked "How, exactly, did Snowden get his series of NSA jobs? Did he apply through regular channels? Was it through someone he knew? Who recommended him? Who were his references for a string of six-figure, high-level security jobs? Are there any safeguards in place so that red flags go up when a subcontractor jumps from job to job, especially in high-level clearance positions?"

Five months later, journalists Mark Ames and Yasha Levine investigated some of the businesses in which Greenwald's benefactor Omidyar had invested. They found that the actual practices of those businesses were considerably less humanitarian than the outward appearance of Omidyar's ventures often portray. The result was that Omidyar took down references to at least one of those businesses from his website.

In December, whistleblower Sibel Edmonds broke the news that Omidyar's Paypal Corporation was implicated in the as-yet-unreleased NSA documents from Snowden. Moreover, Edmonds had allegedly been contacted by an NSA official who alleged that "a deal was made in early June, 2013 between the journalists involved in this recent NSA scandal and U.S. government officials, which was then sealed by secrecy and nondisclosure agreements by all parties involved."

It would appear that Snowden's whistleblowing has been co-opted by private corporate interests. Are those involved with privatization of the stolen documents also colluding with government agencies to frame and direct national discussions on domestic spying and other serious matters?

The possibilities are endless, it seems. Presenting documents at a measured rate could be a way to acclimate citizens to painful realities without stirring the public into a panic or a unified response that might actually threaten the status quo. And considering that the number of documents has somehow grown from only thousands to nearly two million, it seems possible that those in control could release practically anything, thereby controlling national dialogue on many topics.

Please read the final paragraph above twice and think about the points raised about acclimating citizens and controlling national dialog. Is Snowden as much of a "Pied Piper" as QAnon? How did Snowden describe the nature of the CIA and NSA in this earlier interview with Der Spiegel ?

DER SPIEGEL: But those people see you as their biggest enemy today.

Snowden: My personal battle was not to burn down the NSA or the CIA. I even think they actually do have a useful role in society when they limit themselves to the truly important threats that we face and when they use their least intrusive means.

**

Snowden: It wasn't that difficult. Everybody is currently pointing at the Russians.

DER SPIEGEL: Rightfully?

Snowden: I don't know. They probably did hack the systems of Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party, but we should have proof of that. In the case of the hacking attack on Sony, the FBI presented evidence that North Korea was behind it. In this case they didn't, although I am convinced that they do have evidence. The question is why?

DER SPIEGEL: Mike Pompeo, the new head of the CIA, has accused WikiLeaks, whose lawyers helped you, of being a mouthpiece for the Russians. Is that not harmful to your image as well?

Snowden: First, we should be fair about what the accusations are. I don't believe the U.S. government or anybody in the intelligence community is directly accusing Julian Assange or WikiLeaks of working directly for the Russian government. The allegations I understand are that they were used as a tool basically to wash documents that had been stolen by the Russian government. And, of course, that's a concern. I don't see that as directly affecting me because I'm not WikiLeaks and there is no question about the provenance of the documents that I dealt with.

DER SPIEGEL: Currently, there's another American guy out there who is accused of being too close to Putin.

Snowden: Oh (laughs).

DER SPIEGEL: Your president. Is he your president?

Snowden: The idea that half of American voters thought that Donald Trump was the best among us, is something that I struggle with. And I think we will all be struggling with it for decades to come.

DER SPIEGEL: But isn't there reason to fear terrorism?

Snowden: Sure there is. Terrorism is a real problem. But when we look at how many lives it has claimed in basically any country that is outside of war zones like Iraq or Afghanistan, it is so much less than, say, car accidents or heart attacks. Even if Sept. 11 were to happen every single year in the U.S., terrorism would be a much lower threat than so many other things.

No, no one is accusing Wikileaks of conspiring with Russia, just Robert Mueller. I really appreciate Snowden calling Julian Assange a liar, for he has consistently denied there was a "state actor."

"Terrorism is a real problem" Snowden said. Is it credible that Snowden, who presented himself as donating funds to Ron Paul, has never read any alternative news sites? Is it credible that Snowden believes that terrorists and this would include the good "moderate terrorists" in Syria are armed and act on their own initiative, and is ignorant of the role of the governments of America, Israel, and Saudi Arabia in using them to achieve their ends as proxy armies?

Does Snowden then think this report, " America Created Al-Qaeda and the ISIS Terror Group" is false? Does that mindset make Snowden a champion for liberty or a tool for more control of the American population? For example, is it credible that this alleged genius supports the narrative of the September 11 attacks World Trade Center attacks? Whom do you trust, the contributors to these very pages or Edward Snowden?

Snowden has promoted the use of the Tor Browser. ZeroHedge posted this article, " Tor Project 'Almost 100% Funded By The US Government': FOIA" which noted:

The Tor Project – a private nonprofit known as the "NSA-proof" gateway to the "dark web," turns out to be almost "100% funded by the US government" according to documents obtained by investigative journalist and author Yasha Levine.

In a recent blog post, Levine details how he was able to obtain roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence via FOIA requests while performing research for a book. The documents include strategy, contract, budgets and status updates between the Tor project and its primary source of funding; a CIA spinoff known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which "oversees America's foreign broadcasting operations like Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe."

By following the money, I discovered that Tor was not a grassroots. I was able to show that despite its indie radical cred and claims to help its users protect themselves from government surveillance online, Tor was almost 100% funded by three U.S. National Security agencies: the Navy, the State Department and the BBG. Following the money revealed that Tor was not a grassroots outfit, but a military contractor with its own government contractor number. In other words: it was a privatized extension of the very same government that it claimed to be fighting.

The documents conclusively showed that Tor is not independent at all. The organization did not have free reign to do whatever it wanted, but was kept on a very short leash and bound by contracts with strict contractual obligations. It was also required to file detailed monthly status reports that gave the U.S. government a clear picture of what Tor employees were developing, where they went and who they saw. -Yasha Levine

The FOIA documents also suggest that Tor's ability to shield users from government spying may be nothing more than hot air. While no evidence of a "backdoor" exists, the documents obtained by Levine reveal that Tor has "no qualms with privately tipping off the federal government to security vulnerabilities before alerting the public, a move that would give the feds an opportunity to exploit the security weakness long before informing Tor users."

Interestingly, Edward Snowden is a big fan of Tor – even throwing a "cryptoparty" while he was still an NSA contractor where he set up a Tor exit node to show off how cool they are.

In a 2015 interview with The Intercept's (Wikileaks hating) Micah Lee, Snowden said:

LEE: What do you think about Tor? Do you think that everyone should be familiar with it, or do you think that it's only a use-it-if-you-need-it thing?

SNOWDEN: I think Tor is the most important privacy-enhancing technology project being used today.

"Tor Browser is a great way to selectively use Tor to look something up and not leave a trace that you did it. It can also help bypass censorship when you're on a network where certain sites are blocked. If you want to get more involved, you can volunteer to run your own Tor node, as I do, and support the diversity of the Tor network."

Tor lists on its own website sponsors that include Google, the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, ONR via Naval Research Laboratory (past sponsor) and DARPA.

When Julian Assange was taken from the Ecuadoran embassy, he was carrying a copy of Gore Vidal: History of the National Security State & Vidal on America. As an older article on Vidal in The Guardian noted, " Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11 ."

Isn't it odd by doing what he did with Vidal's book Assange makes the point the legitimacy of Washington must be challenged, but Snowden never does, other than offering suggestions for tinkering at the margins, perhaps advising we use DuckDuckGo instead of Google to give us the illusion of privacy? Did Snowden, for someone who is in front of a computer screen for most of the day, make public the facts obtained by Whitney Webb in her piece " How the CIA, Mossad and 'the Epstein Network' Are Exploiting Mass Shootings to Create an Orwellian Nightmare " posted on Unz.com which goes in depth into the Orwellian hell we are facing, for as Webb concludes:

With companies like Carbyne -- with its ties to both the Trump administration and to Israeli intelligence -- and the Mossad-linked Gabriel also marketing themselves as "technological" solutions to mass shootings while also doubling as covert tools for mass data collection and extraction, the end result is a massive surveillance system so complete and so dystopian that even George Orwell himself could not have predicted it.

Following another catastrophic mass shooting or crisis event, aggressive efforts will likely follow to foist these "solutions" on a frightened American public by the very network connected, not only to Jeffrey Epstein, but to a litany of crimes and a frightening history of plans to crush internal dissent and would-be dissenters in the United States.

There is the concept of willful blindness that I think applies to much of what Snowden has done, if not something altogether more nefarious -- distorations, misrepresenations, and outright lies, in addition to hubris. What is the point I'm making? Perhaps Snowden is only a Soros and Hillary Clinton supporting liberal -- but then why would he have done what he did? His character is of any government employee of the "surface state" who swallows false narratives whole.

I only wish the reader fairly and intelligently consider the questions I have raised. For I am encouraging you to think very carefully before you trust the statements, purpose, motives, and truthfulness of the secular saint, Edward Snowden.

Yvonne Lorenzo makes her home in New England in a house full to bursting with books, including works on classical Greece. Her interests include gardening, mythology, ancient history, The Electric Universe, and classical music, especially the compositions of Handel, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and the Bel Canto repertoire. She is the author of the novels the Son of Thunder and The Cloak of Freya and has contributed to LewRockwell.com and TheSaker.IS.

Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 4:27 am GMT

Edward Snowden is a typical American fachidiot who, despite their protestations is a striver and bootlick for the Empire. I genuinely believe that he is puzzled as to why it has turned against him. He deserves his destiny of forever languishing in political purgatory.

Several years later, practically nobody remembers him here in the US, and possible elsewhere (save for when it is convenient for the media). Julian Assange was a far more daring, more insightful figure.

(As an aside, I am curious about the author's liking of bel canto . Lot of birdbrain music to my ears; I prefer Wagner, Strauss, Schreker, and Berg. Also, the older I get, the more I realize that Schoenberg was by far the greater genius than Mahler.)

ikki , says: September 20, 2019 at 4:56 am GMT
The logging of user and information accessed is sure added to the file. But real time supervision? No. A eye of sauron? Please. The system isnt there to prevent crime, its to track down the criminal and deeds later. And yes everything takes a very long time on the public side.

You know, 16:00 hours the mouse just drops dead from the hand. Public servants don't give a damn if a job is made fast or efficient, only that procedure if followed and that it is eventually done. Unless priorities are reassigned, stuff left halfway undone in disarray is no problem when reassigned.

Just as keeping secret private archives of more or less job related data is all standard procedure. That is keep a load of data in your personal folders and move those into whatever form desired. Security is not very tight. Only in the sense that eventually every person with hours and access point etc data can be recovered if so ordered to.

So stealing data out of that system shouldn't be terribly hard. Just email it to a private email. Or store on something else and transport out. For one Hillary was doing the same thing for ages. In that case though "what difference does it make"

Jonathan Revusky , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 5:26 am GMT
Why does the author distrust the Snowden story while taking the Assange saga at face value?
Horst G , says: September 20, 2019 at 6:41 am GMT
There was an interview with Edward in the German magazine Der Spiegel this month, Nr. 18. In it, we get the tale, he copied material on SD cards, and smugeled them in his mouth, or inside a "magic cube" out of the base on Hawaii, passing "guards". A cube, the occult symbol, how blatant, just mocking the profane.

On the technical side, I got a story from a German BMW factory. A bunch of guys on nightshift plugged a USB Harddisk into a PC to watch a movie. Minutes later they received a call from the IT, it had been recognized remotely. What a charade. It has the taste of Jewish tales, smuggling stuff, tricking guards of an evil system.

Tusk , says: September 20, 2019 at 6:49 am GMT
Great article, thanks Ron for publishing.
der einzige , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 7:00 am GMT
I recommend these articles from Jon Rappaport, unfortunately, wordpress deleted his blog.

and this

Russia gov report Snowden Greenwald are CIA frauds https://www.radios.cz/en/articles/russia-gov-report-snowden-greenwald-are-cia-frauds/

Brabantian , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:00 am GMT
Nice to have a piece helping point to the truth, that Glenn Greenwald & Edward Snowden are CIA frauds, as every major government knows

'Edward Snowden' who first 'leaked' to the CIA's Washington Post, in fact to Bush VP Dick Cheney's biographer Bart Gellman then the Deep State realised that was too stupid, so they switched to Rothschild employee & ex-gay-pornography-seller Glenn Greenwald, former proprietor of 'hairystuds', at the Guardian, an intel-agency rag which lies about nearly everything

Vladmir Putin himself hinting out loud he knows Snowden is fake, and 'Snowden asylum' is a game of back-door favours between Russia & the USA, few in the West pick up on it http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/09/21/russia-govt-report-snowden-greenwald-are-cia-frauds/

Despite the Snowden-Assange mutual sniping in their media-star rivalry, Julian Assange is also a CIA-Mossad asset, as Bibi Netanyahu himself has boasted to Israeli media, regarding aggressively pro-Zionist, anti-Palestinian Julian, equally anti-9-11-truth along with Eddie Snowden

As loyal CIA assets, neither Assange and Snowden dare to mention USA Virginia fed judge bribery files that have blocked other extraditions, tho these files would make their own extraditions impossible, if these CIA fakers really cared about their own 'defence'

Zbigniew Brzezinski on 29 Nov 2010, on the US public television PBS News Hour, also admitted Assange was intel, his Wikileaks 'selected'

People trusting Assange are dead, Peter W Smith, Seth Rich; others jailed

Very darkly, it is unknown how many dissidents Snowden and also Julian Assange helped silence or even kill, both of them a 'rat trap' for trusting whistle-blowers
https://www.henrymakow.com/2018/11/assange-snowden-rat-traps.html

You will notice that Assange & Snowden both got famous via CIA – MI6 media, NY Times, UK Guardian, who are never interested in real dissidents

Assange shared lawyer with Rothschilds, Rothschild sister-in-law posted Assange bail, Assange has ties to George Soros too

Early on, Assange helped Rothschilds destroy rival bank Julius Baer that is 'progressive Wiki-leaking' for you

Assange had a weird childhood with Aussie mind-control cult 'the Family'

Things like 'Assange living at Ecuador Embassy' – 'now in Belmarsh prison' – easily faked, Assange moved in & out for photos by MI5 MI6, police under national security orders 'Snowden' is not necessarily in Russia either

Assange & Snowden de-legitimise real dissidents, because people say, 'Wikileaks – NY Times – UK Guardian would cover it if it was true'

Tree Watcher , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:10 am GMT
NeonRevolt once floated the theory that Snowden was an FBI or CIA plant who whistleblew solely because he had the mission to undermine NSA operations by exposing their equipment/techniques and turning public opinion against them.

I completely understand if people are leery of the theorycrafting of a Q tracker, but I do believe that this suggestion is plausible. Setting aside attempts at placing it in context of a Deep State war, inter-service rivalry and sabotage between spy agencies is absolutely a thing, and reviewing the inconsistencies of Snowden's stunt, its aftermath, and his personal views with that potential background in mind suddenly makes things make much more sense, in my mind at least.

animalogic , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:10 am GMT
Interesting, thought-provoking article. It asks us to balance up competing interests & advantages.

On the one hand we can assume Snowden is "real" or not. That is, he's a genuine whistle blower, or he's a government psy-op's plant.

If we accept the later, that he's a plant, then it raises a further question: was the short term loss, associated with his revelations, ie highlighting the utterly disturbing degree of Gov surveillance over US citizens (etc) worth the long term profit of having an established, authoritive psy-op's agent able to influence/distort etc any debate or narrative concerning the US State /elites. On this side the author notes Snowmen's views on Tor, 9/11, Russia etc which clearly advantage the US State's own views on these subjects.

I don't know the answer -- except that this article raises serious questions, suspicions , about Snowden's authenticity.

Franz , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:15 am GMT
Never for a moment considered Snowden any sort of secular saint.

Snowden for the most part only confirmed the downward trajectory of the formerly at least interesting filmmaker, Oliver Stone. If JFK was worth a laugh (and evidently did get a few people thinking about the phoniness of Dallas '63 for the first time), Snowden was total chloroform on screen. Sad to see Ollie hit such lows.

This bit is interesting:

When Julian Assange was taken from the Ecuadoran embassy, he was carrying a copy of Gore Vidal: History of the National Security State & Vidal on America. As an older article on Vidal in The Guardian noted, "Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11."

As batty as Vidal may have been, it is a fact he was the first American with any sort of national recognition to speak out against the National Security State, starting in the Eisenhower years. His fury was partly stoked by their meddling in Central America, but he stayed at it. Even gave it a mention in a movie he had a gag role in, Bob Roberts , 1992.

His favorite line (variously rendered) was "Harry Truman signed the United States of America into oblivion in February, 1949" which was when the NSA papers were drawn up, giving us the security state, the CIA and the whole shebang. Anytime before, any US citizen could demand accounting of any government project, no matter what. Afterward, the rule by secrecy applied.

Vidal had been a WWII veteran and deplored all that came about after. Credit is due for that.

wayfarer , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:30 am GMT

Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you are being watched and recorded. The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone calls, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. – Edward Snowden

https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/edward-snowden-quotes

https://www.youtube.com/embed/e9yK1QndJSM?feature=oembed

Nik , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:05 am GMT
Both Assuange and Snowden are agent patsys
Oscar Peterson , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:14 am GMT
Who is this dizzy chick?

Snowden, exiled and isolated in Russia, is some sort of USG crypto-agent or something?

I suppose that if you're going to look for outside-the-box commentary and analysis, you're going to get some of this sort of nonsense. I guess you can't expect to hit a home run every time.

Oscar Peterson , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:20 am GMT
@Nicolás Palacios Navarro

"Edward Snowden is a typical American fachidiot who, despite their protestations is a striver and bootlick for the Empire. I genuinely believe that he is puzzled as to why it has turned against him. He deserves his destiny of forever languishing in political purgatory."

And yet this "striver and bootlick for the Empire" is exiled in Russia. So some guy sacrifices an enjoyable and secure life to go live in Russia and all you can say is that "he deserves his destiny?"

"Several years later, practically nobody remembers him here in the US"

And this is a reflection on him or on the rest of us?

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:42 am GMT
@Oscar Peterson She starts off with a falsehood:

> Edward Snowden would have us believe that the Eye of Sauron didn't notice

He states exactly the opposite. I quit reading her garbage after that.

AmRusDebate , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 10:18 am GMT
Comfortable living in Moscow, vs. Belmarsh, makes all the difference in the world.

You might be right about Snowden, you might not be, but were Assange living in a Russian city, far out of reach of NeoconiaDC, Bill Blaney would show him greater respect believe me.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 10:21 am GMT
@Horst G Boy howdy, a Rubik's Cube is now magical, profane, occult, and eerily symbolic, because it's cubical! And geometry class is a satanic false flag op of oppressive propaganda taught by crypto-Jews! Who else could be interested in IRRATIONAL numbers like π? PYTHAGORAS WAS A MOSSAD AGENT!
Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 10:57 am GMT
@Oscar Peterson

And yet this "striver and bootlick for the Empire" is exiled in Russia. So some guy sacrifices an enjoyable and secure life to go live in Russia and all you can say is that "he deserves his destiny?"

His "sacrifice" was inadvertent and involuntary. The fact that he seems not to appreciate the sanctuary offered to him by Russia -- has he not repeatedly expressed the desire to go elsewhere? -- says a lot. From everything I have read about him, it would appear that he regards his exile not as something to be borne with dignity, but as something to pout over as does a child who unexpectedly did not get his way.

Julian Assange, on the other hand, sacrificed much more and did so willingly and courageously. He had no illusions about the consequences that he would face for his beliefs and actions.

And this is a reflection on him or on the rest of us?

Both. Nobody remembers anything here in the US anyway, least of all people and events which do not flatter the national mythos. In the case of this would-be patriot -- the scion of a family that grew fat at the government teat, and who himself has made a tidy profit from his exile -- his unofficial damnatio memoriæ is deserved.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:07 am GMT
@Franz > veteran Credit is due for that.

Maybe you ought to give Snowden some credit for his military service too. Fair is fair.

Snowden enlisted in the United States Army Reserve on May 7, 2004, and became a Special Forces candidate through its 18X enlistment option.[39] He did not complete the training.[12] After breaking both legs in a training accident,[40] he was discharged on September 28, 2004.[41]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Career

9/11 Inside job , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:11 am GMT
@Brabantian Is Seth Rich dead ? OpDeepState.com : "The 'murder' of Seth Rich – Everything we thought we knew is wrong !" by Lisa Phillips . "The MOSSAD infiltrated Clinton's campaign with a Sayanim contractor – Seth Rich – this OP took Hillary right out of the race ."
anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:19 am GMT
Tor is a great tool, if you know how to use it correctly. The US gov't know people don't know how to use it correctly, and sets up exit nodes to spy on idiots, like this:

In 2007 Egerstad set up just five Tor exit nodes and used them to intercept thousands of private emails, instant messages and email account credentials.

Amongst his unwitting victims were the Australia, Japanese, Iranian, India and Russia embassies, .

Dan Egerstad proved then that exit nodes were a fine place to spy on people and his research convinced him in 2007, long before Snowden, that governments were funding expensive, high bandwidth exit nodes for exactly that purpose.

Tor is a fine security project and an excellent component in a strategy of defence in depth but it isn't (sadly) a cloak of invisibility.

Exit nodes, just like fake Wi-Fi hotspots, are an easy and tempting way for attackers to silently insert themselves into a network.

By running an exit node they can sit there as an invisible man-in-the-middle on a system that people choose when they want extra privacy and security.

Can you trust Tor's exit nodes?
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/06/25/can-you-trust-tors-exit-nodes/

So just assume the US gov't is your exit node, thank them silently for paying for you to use it free, and keep your info encrypted.

Svevlad , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:30 am GMT
Both him and Assange are spooks
Rabbitnexus , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:50 am GMT
Well, this is refreshing. I agree wholeheartedly about Snowden and have the same reservations. My feelings about Assange, however, aren't much different. Julian has not challenged the 9/11 narrative either to be fair. I am inclined to see them both as limited hangouts. Snowden's 'revelations' were all old news to anyone who'd been paying attention for 10 years before his appearance. Even other whistleblowers, none of whom got any media coverage, had spoken of much of it previously. I see them both as pied pipers and nothing more. I think Russian intelligence services are perfectly well aware of what Snowden is and have kept him at arms length themselves. Not much they could do but play along but nothing suggests they ever saw him as any sort of 'coup'

Anyone who still plays along with the 9/11 bullshit narrative isn't worth a damn anyway.

Rabbitnexus , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:58 am GMT
@animalogic Consider that nothing Snowden revealed was news. It was all old hat for anyone who'd been paying attention, and for up to ten years. Sure Snowden made it mainstream for what good it did but nothing he said was a secret anymore. In fact, I thought even at the time his actions were nothing less than a 'threat and warning' from the intel services that they had this much on everyone. Just imagine all those national leaders, politicians from all states being pout on notice. All your secrets are ours! What a powerful global message to deliver and in such a loud and clear fashion.

The lack of deviation from official bullshit on 9/11 is on its own however reason enough to toss this guy out. Snowden NEVER impressed me for a moment and honestly, nor has Assange. I believe they're both working for the other side still. By the way, Julian Assange has actually denigrated 9/11 truthers a number of times.

Horst G , says: September 20, 2019 at 12:08 pm GMT
@anon It's in the magazine, page 82, quote "Zauberwürfel". Presented by me, for you to get the picture. Maybe you haven't seen enough cubes around, to get that humor. In real life, copying material on devices will be followed by arrest, no interview, no journey to some exile. This whole tale is not funny, it's evil on many levels. Your sarcasm is disturbing.
Realist , says: September 20, 2019 at 12:09 pm GMT
@Nicolás Palacios Navarro

Several years later, practically nobody remembers him here in the US, and possible elsewhere (save for when it is convenient for the media). Julian Assange was a far more daring, more insightful figure.

I disagree, there are plenty of people who remember him. The problem is they don't care, most Americans would rather watch America's Got Talent or Dancing With The Stars than do something about our corrupt political system.

Johnny Walker Read , says: September 20, 2019 at 12:16 pm GMT
Assange and Snowden are both shill's..

https://aanirfan.blogspot.com/search?q=assange

Johnny Walker Read , says: September 20, 2019 at 12:20 pm GMT
@Johnny Walker Read And

2013 Edward Snowden 'leaked stolen documents' (1) 'Leaked' to Dick Cheney friend at CIA WashPost, Rothschild employee Greenwald (2) Anti-9-11-truth (3) Nothing really new beyond more than 5+ previous NSA whistleblowers (4) Has CIA lawyers, worked with Brzezinski son, promoted by Brzezinski daughter, fake CV history (5) Known as fake to all major gov intel agencies

https://aanirfan.blogspot.com/search?q=snowden

Johnny Walker Read , says: September 20, 2019 at 12:31 pm GMT
@Johnny Walker Read This is absolutely dynamite material, it blows to smithereens any notion that Edward Snowden is anything other than a fraud, a CIA disinfo op.

So now we can place him alongside Julian Assange and Wikileaks in the rogue's gallery of professional liars. This report also exposes several other media outlets as being under CIA control, something we have known for some time

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/09/21/russia-govt-report-snowden-greenwald-are-cia-frauds/

foolisholdman , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:04 pm GMT
@animalogic

I don't know the answer -- except that this article raises serious questions, suspicions , about Snowden's authenticity.

To my mind "9/11, attitude to", is a sort of touch-stone for telling genuine dissidents from fake and both Snowden and Assange fail on that test. I don't have a reference for it, but I saw it in correspondence on this site. There was a video of a lecture given by Assange, where someone asked him about 9/11. He looked extremely embarrassed and then replied that he thought that it was "not very important" (Sic!) and changed the subject.

I am less sure of this but I think I saw something similar in an interview with Snowden. Perhaps someone else can remind me of exact references?

Amon , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:23 pm GMT
This is the same government whose leaders secure their laptops with the secret code "pas$word" and require the producers of computers to give them full access via day one exploits along with tailor fitted programs that are easier to hack.

That Snowden got away with what he did is not that shocking.

Justvisiting , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:23 pm GMT
These days Snowden has become a generic term for whistleblowing on the Deep State tech spying, like xerox for copying. I suppose someone here wants to remind us that this was _really_ the first copier, patented in 1879:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestetner

The truth or falsity of the original "myth" becames moot at some point.

The Deep State is spying. They do have hardware and software and monkey in the middle hacks. They do trade intelligence with other spy agencies, domestic and foreign. They lie about it through the Mockingbird media.

_That_ is what is important.

Snowden's bona fides are "inside baseball", and minor league baseball at that.

.gov IT security is a joke–millions of pages of regulations, proclamations, millions of hours of management meetings, goals, powerpoint slides–ultimately easily outmatched by any determined hackers (whether in mom's basement or an intelligence agency's basement).

Multiple Fronts , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:32 pm GMT
CIA Edward Snowden? ...
Antiwar7 , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:34 pm GMT
If he was a sys admin, that probably meant he had the rights to install, remove, enable, and disable the various safety guards and security checks discussed in this article.
sally , says: September 20, 2019 at 1:48 pm GMT
@Jonathan Revusky Yvonne Lorenzo paper suggest suspect issues exist to support Snowden's story but finds Assange's saga to be based in epic, consistent, continued resistance to the organized forces at work in governments and high profile international corporations and agencies to keep secret things which expose officials as criminals.

<=the difference is consistency, scope and finger points. Assange has been consistent.. always seeking to make available as much as he could, always with as much clarity as possible; making the point where he could, that much of what he exposed seems to be in the domain of organized crime. Assange often exposes high profile persons and tags them with evidence to connect them to prior and current organized crime or obviously corrupt activities. Assange shows these persons or governments or agencies are involved in secret diplomatic activities, the secrecy of which seem always to be protected by judicial and legal processes

The Assange story paints a picture that suggest globally organized crime has come into possession and now manages and controls many well armed domestic governments and that selected agencies of government have been enabling selected private enterprises. Assange exposes intelligence services of many different nations to be a bank, corporation, and agency inter connects that coordinate infrastructure destruction, invasion, regime change, and war, and that these events are often followed by opportunistic privatization.

Snowden merely says a few things are wrong and should be corrected. in time the government will fix its own mistakes. I do not know if Snowden is a Trojan, but nothing Assange has done suggest he is and governments have treated Assange as anything but one of them. My opinion.

der einzige , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 2:04 pm GMT
@foolisholdman I think you meant that

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zG23AyiIObk?feature=oembed

Oscar Peterson , says: September 20, 2019 at 2:35 pm GMT
@Nicolás Palacios Navarro I agree that Assange has suffered much more than Snowden, but why hold that against the latter?

Snowden took a risk to publicize what he thought was important information indicating a dangerous trend in US policy. He wasn't willing to offer himself up as a lamb to the slaughter, so it's true that his sacrifice is not perhaps the ultimate one. He seems to have thought he could remain in Hong Kong but didn't realize that China was never going to compromise relations with the US to protect him. Putin wouldn't have either except that the US was so imperious in demanding his return that Putin really couldn't save face and give him up, and no doubt he was rankled by US hypocrisy, knowing that had Snowden been a Russian, the US would never have considered sending him back.

But Snowden DID take action which is more than most of us do. I find your complete lack of empathy kind of weird, to be honest. Even if Assange is the more virtuous or if one disagrees with Snowden's actions, he has paid a price for principle.

What does his family background have to do with anything?

I'm not inclined to sneer at him, and I don't see how you get to "he deserves what he gets."

Commentator Mike , says: September 20, 2019 at 2:44 pm GMT
@Brabantian Brabantian,

So Pamela Anderson lied about visiting Assange in the embassy? If they're faking it, wherever he is he isn't in the public eye walking down the street or sitting in a Starbucks, so he's leading a prison life anyway behind closed doors somewhere. I suppose a dedicated agent would do something like that for Queen and country or whatever, but I doubt he's the type. I gather veterans today are trying to cast Assange as a Mossad agent but then they're the Journal of the Clandestine Community, whatever that is.

Snowden is not a classic defector so it makes sense for him to keep his distance from Russian society so as not to be inadvertently compromised or used by their intelligence services. He's obviously under surveillance there, I know we all are but he's much more aware of it, so that doesn't make it easy for him but he's definitely safer there than he'd be in France or Germany. I just don't think he planned well ahead when he became a whistle-blower or was clear about what he was trying to achieve. He's not the top level type of spy we're accustomed to reading about who betray their country for money or to serve another they believe in more than their own. If he has been on active duty as a CIA asset all along I can't see that he has achieved much of use to them other than in some inter-agency rivalry game. But it's natural for Russians to be suspicious of him – they're suspicious by nature – and rightly so, but it doesn't make his life easy there.

Justvisiting , says: September 20, 2019 at 2:46 pm GMT
@der einzige Thanks for posting–Assange looked dazed and confused by the question itself.

It could be "rogue agents". A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 2:48 pm GMT
@Anonymous Snanonymous > Snowden, unlike Assange, largely suffered from pussy deprivation

You're projecting your own lack of success with females. Meanwhile, Snowden's squeeze Lindsay Mills lives with him in Moscow.

Snowden's lawyer Anatoly Kucherena confirmed the lovebirds' reunion and said they've been taking in Russian theaters and cultural sights together. "Love is love," he told AFP. "She lives with him when she comes here. Moral support is very important for Edward."
https://nypost.com/2014/10/11/snowdens-girlfriend-lives-with-him-in-moscow-documentary-reveals/

There's no way an envious gamma like you could tap this:

Anonymous [893] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 2:51 pm GMT
Good stuff. Snowden was outed by Gordon Duff years ago. Although I'll have to come back to finish this article, it generally appears to agree with Duff's analysis that none of it adds up. If I may paraphrase Edward Bernays, To read the Washington Post and Guardian or watch TV news is to see America and Western Civilization through the eyes of its enemy.

The owners of the media own the public forum in America and through it the formation of men's attitudes and the outcome of elections. The left vs right, CNN vs Fox News, MAGA vs socialism and other contrived theater serves the interests of the media owners and no other.

TheJester , says: September 20, 2019 at 3:02 pm GMT
@Jonathan Revusky Try this:

Assange tried to destroy the "system", which would have furthered the conditions for completing the ongoing, global Cultural Marxist Revolution Mao Zedong on steroids.

Snowden, on the other hand, wanted something much less extreme. He wanted to fix and save the "system" by exposing its excesses in order to bring it back within a quasi-legal, democratic framework.

In response, the "system" was satisfied to teach Snowden a lesson. They were willing to slap Snowden's hand by exiling him to Western Russia, which is better than rotting in a Siberian labor camp or "max" prison in the United States.

Assange, on the other hand, is a reincarnated, digital version of Che Guevara. They want his scalp, recognizing that Assange (like Che Guevara) will brook no compromise in his revolutionary agitation.

Anonymous Snanonymous , says: September 20, 2019 at 3:22 pm GMT
@anon Thank you for the update I remain celibate out of consideration for those who are truly hard up.
Sparkon , says: September 20, 2019 at 3:29 pm GMT
Good article. Snowden and Assange are agents of disinformation

"I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud."

-- Julian Assange

http://911blogger.com/news/2010-07-22/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-annoyed-911-truth

Assange's damming statement about 9/11 at the Belfast Telegraph is now behind a sign-up gatepost, which was not there in the fairly recent past.

9/11 Inside job , says: September 20, 2019 at 4:36 pm GMT
9/11 is the "litmus test" and it appears that both Assange and Snowden have failed it.
anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 5:06 pm GMT
@9/11 Inside job Well, the Real Litmus Test ™ is eternal security vs. conditional salvation. Don't fail, or everything else you've ever said must be summarily dismissed. Answer well, friendo .

Splitting (also called black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking) is the failure in a person's thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 6:09 pm GMT
@Realist

The problem is they don't care, most Americans would rather watch America's Got Talent or Dancing With The Stars than do something about our corrupt political system.

Also very true.

Outrage Beyond , says: September 20, 2019 at 6:43 pm GMT
It appears the author of this piece has not read Snowden's book, Permanent Record . If she had, she would not have asked questions which are answered, in detail, in Snowden's book. Here are some of the most obvious points.

1. "Why does Snowden never discuss dealing with such encryption: how would it be possible?"

Answer: In his book, Snowden describes the layers of encryption that he used when copying the files from NSA. He also describes the extraordinary level of access he had as a systems engineer. Further, he mentions his surprise at finding that the NSA did not practice widespread encryption, in contrast to his experience at CIA, where the hard drives were not only encrypted, but removed from the computers and placed in a safe each night.

2. "In the Oliver Stone movie Snowden, as well as in any of Snowden's descriptions of how he accessed the NSA computers, did you note either the depiction or reference to this universal Smart ID? How could Snowden be exempt from its requirement?"

Answer: Movies omit details. In his book, Snowden describes working in the one-person Information Sharing department. As part of that work, he brought an older, "obsolete" system to his office under the cover story of "compatibility testing" and used this older system to copy the data.

3. "Did Edward Snowden, who has publicly criticized Google, mention Google is deployed as a search engine throughout the federal "intranet"?"

Answer: Yes, as a matter of fact, in his book, Snowden does mention that Google provides a custom internal version of their search engine to the intelligence community.

4. "Edward Snowden would have us believe that the Eye of Sauron didn't notice he was looking at gigabytes of data unrelated to his job function and using his computer to copy the data to external devices over a lengthy period of time."

Answer: In his book, Snowden describes how he created a "readboard" that collected the documents as part of his work in the Information Sharing department. He also describes how another systems administrator did notice, and how he addressed this attention by providing access to his "readboard" to the other administrator, and explained its purpose and value to users. In other words, the "gigabytes of data" he was looking at were directly related to his job function.

5. "On another issue, why did Snowden provide his files to known house organs of Intelligence Agencies, specifically the Washington Post and The Guardian, and not give them to Wikileaks to allow a publicly available searchable database?"

Answer: Snowden also discusses this topic in his book. According to Snowden, he did not want to simply release the information, he wanted the media to remove anything that might cause harm.

6. "And what about Snowden himself, the pontificator, the man who can speak on television or to the media with evidence of training? Practice yourself -- see how well you can answer questions and speak publicly to a TV camera. How did he get his training? Who trained him? Why?"

Answer: After 6 years of media attention, it seems reasonable he would gain some expertise in dealing with the media.

My purpose in providing the answers above is not to defend or attack Snowden. Rather, these examples just show that the author of this piece is a sloppy amateur who did not do her homework. I suspect the author is also woefully ignorant of computer technology. Anyone curious about these topics should read Permanent Record and decide for themselves.

PetrOldSack , says: September 20, 2019 at 6:49 pm GMT
@sally

My opinion.

Your opinion stands. Snowden has de facto been compromised. Being in Russia, and not in control of his environment. Whether he was from the start, could be. The Tor browser bull- *** t speaks against him all the way. His conventional career start, and youth also. He is more Macron then a Galloway.

Assange was in for the long term, had thorough knowledge of affairs digital, his youth, his physical courage(there must be a point where selling out was a possibility) were exemplary all along the (long) and still ongoing slug.

Even his ego, fronting Wikileaks seems to be proportionate as compared to the conventional Jerks &, as Pompeo, Hillary, Trump, Obama. If one sees how many personnel is dedicated to steer elections and governance public opinion, he certainly looks like a lonely giant on the civil disobedience, organizational, knowledgeable, energy spent and resilience side. A true example of what White, and Western European descend stands for. Enlightenment, in system, style, and function. Relevancy, long term goals, dare, does not come better then that.

PetrOldSack , says: September 20, 2019 at 6:53 pm GMT
@Justvisiting Very to the point. True over the whole stretch digital communication is in existence.
Mark Hunter , says: Website September 20, 2019 at 6:59 pm GMT
@Oscar Peterson I don't have "Agree/Disagree/Etc" privileges so I say here that I agree with you.

Some of the pompous ingrates trashing Snowden for the flimsiest of reasons still seem to have a high opinion of Thomas Drake, William Binney, or Kirk Wiebe. They might read this: Three NSA Veterans Speak Out on Whistleblower

peterAUS , says: September 20, 2019 at 7:06 pm GMT
@ikki Pretty much.

The author, interestingly enough, isn't I.T. professional, but, has very definite opinions about IT security. Dumb.

Just email it to a private email.

Well, firewall logs could reveal your connection to some email server outside ..

Or store on something else and transport out.

Yep. Hehe the girl doesn't actually get how that "encryption" thing works. OSI layers etc.

And, what people really don't get: all security is as good as an average person using it. As hehe you pointed out:

Hillary was doing the same thing for ages.

Insider doesn't need to tackle technology. All he/she needs is to tackle is a dumb employee. Anyway .

I could make my home systems quite secure, even against Five Eyes. That would create another set of even worse problems, but let's leave it out for now.
The problem is my wife and her browsing/computer use habits. Hehe makes sense?

peterAUS , says: September 20, 2019 at 7:09 pm GMT
@Outrage Beyond A very good comment.

Especially

.a systems engineer .. the one-person Information Sharing department . .providing access to his "readboard" to the other administrator .

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 7:26 pm GMT
@Realist Snowden did "do something about our corrupt political system," not that anybody here cares.

And God Bless America.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8kssysjyPl0?feature=oembed

niceland , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:46 pm GMT
Snowden keeping "distance" to Russia, and not openly defending them seems reasonable to me. You can imagine the smear campaign back home if he would side with Russia against the U.S. on almost anything. "The Russians got to him" or "He was always their man".

He is trying to keep his neutrality and credibility and his target audience isn't the average Unz reader, but rather some mainstream educated middle/upper class blokes. Easily scared away from his views if they become too controversial and too far from the established narrative.

Last but not least, he is playing very dangerous game, probably without much security from his host country. This probably limits what he can do, TPTB could probably get to him if they wanted it badly enough.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:49 pm GMT
@Horst G Everybody with the slight familiarity about the story knows of Snowden's use of the Ernő Rubik's Cube to hide the SD card.

> In real life, copying material on devices will be followed by arrest, no interview, no journey to some exile.

Snowden proved you wrong, by the skin of his teeth.

> Your sarcasm is disturbing.

Yeah? How do you think folks feel about your black cape and a fiberglass helmet?

Republic , says: September 20, 2019 at 8:54 pm GMT
@anon Wasn't Ross William Ulbricht compromised by using Tor ?
anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:12 pm GMT
@PetrOldSack > The Tor browser bull- *** t speaks against him all the way

No, your stupid bull- *** t lack of understanding about Tor speaks against you all the way. It's not encryption, like you probably think it is. It's simply a way to use another IP address without having to drive to the nearest Starbucks to use their wifi. You treat Tor just like any "free" wifi, assuming that your data is being sniffed and collected. If you're going to message, use Signal (or Telegram.) Always force HTTPS. Use encryption. All Tor does is obfuscate your IP location, which is exactly what Snowden states, "All Tor does is obfuscate your IP location .

"[Tor] allows you to disassociate your physical location ."

EDWARD SNOWDEN EXPLAINS HOW TO RECLAIM YOUR PRIVACY
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/12/edward-snowden-explains-how-to-reclaim-your-privacy/

And now Brave Browser has it built in! So easy. Try it. Just don't do anything on Tor that you wouldn't do with a Starbuck's free wifi in Foggy Bottom.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 20, 2019 at 9:29 pm GMT
@Republic How he got taken down is here , and it started with the name-fag using his Real Name while e-begging for help to run illegal websites, and ended up with a half-dozen FBI agents tailing him at his arrest. Even then, Tor made it harder for the FBI to track him, just not impossible.

Tor only does one thing, obfuscate your physical location. That's it. It's not magic. It's a virtual way to sit at the Starbucks cafe and use their free wifi. Just assume the exit node is owned by the Feds, looking for criminal morons who don't understand it and think it's "secure" or "encrypted." It's not. Use encryption too.

Gg , says: September 20, 2019 at 10:09 pm GMT
Stuff like this just confirms Qanon. He said years ago Snowden was a CIA plant in the NSA to reveal this information about their mass surveillance on purpose. Why ? Maybe it relates to what Michael Hoffman describes as revelation of the method – a process of revealing the crimes being committed against us by "they" so it breeds apathy and despair in the population when nothing comes from
The revelation of the crimes
The Company , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:06 pm GMT
The Russian authorities are capable of asking the same perceptive questions – – and yet they continue to be gracious hosts.
Sean , says: September 20, 2019 at 11:10 pm GMT
An allegedly very high iq high school from a family with drop out Snowden's tried to join special forces and failed jump school, he failed a polygraph, got accepted to the CIA though not as a field agent despite his lack of a degree, and was bounced from the CIA and then got a job with Dell as an outside contractor on the basis of his still intact security clearance, the contractors were not compartmentalised in the way government employees were.

Then he went to work for defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, at an NSA facility in Hawaii. In subsequent interview with journalists, Snowden lied about his doing undercover work for the CIA, salary and seniority at Booz Allen, being able to spy on the the emails and phone calls of President Obama. Oh, and suffering broken bones in special forces jump school, he just had shin splints It is very clear how he got access, and why most of the people who gave him it did not own up.

https://nypost.com/2013/11/08/snowden-duped-coworkers-to-get-passwords/ Snowden duped co-workers to get passwords A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden were identified, questioned and removed from their assignments, said a source close to several U.S. government investigations into the damage caused by the leaks.

Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said.

Are we to believe the NSA lacks a "digital trail" when it comes to classified documents?

It's only difficult to believe if you think NASA (like the CIA and FBI once were) are only guarded in relation to external rather than internal security breaches

[A] frightening history of plans to crush internal dissent and would-be dissenters in the United States.

Why would they bother? Those dissenters cannot change anything, while they are whiling away their free time on the internet. Such activity cannot change anything at all, and so it is to be encouraged from the point of view of any establishment as open dissent on the net wards off the allegation of totalitarian state. Talk is cheap.

Johnny Walker Read , says: September 21, 2019 at 2:19 am GMT
Learn to recognize government dis-info. http://mileswmathis.com/glenn.pdf
ShermanFan , says: September 21, 2019 at 2:28 am GMT
I'm not going to comment on the person or their agenda, rather the process-broadly.

Can you copy encrypted files without knowledge and smuggle them out? Short answer: Yes, with a second device and some standard hardware stuff. They can see the second device if it is plugged in, but they have to look for it. There is no need to try and copy from the source, copy the output to a second machine that can interpret.

Franz , says: September 21, 2019 at 6:25 am GMT
@anon

ought to give Snowden some credit for his military service too.

Hell, I'd give the guy credit for his quick sprinting at the NSA. But we haven't established if he was a wiz kid or a plant.

Vidal went into the US Army after Pearl Harbor, at age 17. Even though he'd been his high school representative for the America First Committee, trying to keep the US out of the war. Due to hypothermia working on army transport ships in the Aleutians, he was initially misdiagnosed as arthritic and, not being caught in time, ended up first with a titanium leg replacement years later, then in a wheelchair.

I remain sort of impressed when a young man opposes a fight, then for patriotic reasons, serves anyway (and pays a steep price).

I'm sure we'll get the full story on Snowden sooner or later.

anon [260] Disclaimer , says: September 21, 2019 at 12:58 pm GMT
@Saggy A stupid girl who is completely unfamiliar with the Snowden history. For example, she asks this, "why did Snowden provide his files to The Guardian?"

Because he needed immediate press coverage. He didn't have weeks or even days, he had at most a few hours. His story had to be in the press the next morning. Both Greenwald and the Guardian reporter were with him at the hotel, worried that Snowden might even be assassinated if caught by US forces, and worked to get immediate press coverage of his plight to save his life. Plus, he was in constant contact with Wikileaks'Julian Assange, which she conveniently ignores to promote her lie-based conspiritard theory.

Without his story getting into the press within a few hours, and without Wikileaks' Julian Assange helping Snowden, he'd be in prison now, at best, possibly dead.

I say, give the guy a fair trial. He has asked for a fair trial. But the US Gov't has refused to allow his motive to be considered in the trial. Amazing, isn't it? Since when is motive to not be considered in a criminal trial?

For Snowden, a fair trial means allowing the jury to consider his motivations rather than simply deciding the case on whether a law was broken.

"They want the jury strictly to consider whether these actions were lawful or unlawful, not whether they were right or wrong," Snowden said. "And I'm sorry, but that defeats the purpose of a jury trial."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/09/17/edward-snowden-releases-book-russia-wants-fair-trial-us/2349586001/

Che Guava , says: September 21, 2019 at 3:26 pm GMT
Tor may still be a good tool, it certainly was, I had great fun using it to troll and set off edit wars on English Wikipedia for a year or two mid-last decade. One of those edit wars lasted for about three days. I just watched after starting it (but I meant what I said in the comment that set it off, but not always in the trolling(^-^)v).

In any case, the English-language WP has been madly tracking Tor exit nodes and banning them since about early '07.

Fun while it lasted.

As for the wrong way to use it, that basically means making a connection to any other site, without Tor, while using Tor. I slipped up on that once or twice when slightly drunk.

I don't even know if using Tor is even legal in Japan now. I do love, however, how Wikipedia is aggressively supressing it.

Some politicians in ruling party were moving to make it illegal a couple of years ago, our polity is so nonsensical that I have to checck Japanese wiki to see the result.

Any fule knows that Tor original is a U.S.N. programme,

Yvonne Lorenzo , says: September 21, 2019 at 6:42 pm GMT
@der einzige

I recommend these articles from Jon Rappaport, unfortunately, wordpress deleted his blog.

Rappaport started my thinking and I bookmarked his pages long ago and to my horror found the site was taken down. I wonder why? Glad for this archive. Thank you.

Yvonne Lorenzo , says: September 21, 2019 at 6:57 pm GMT
@Outrage Beyond

It appears the author of this piece has not read Snowden's book, Permanent Record. If she had, she would not have asked questions which are answered, in detail, in Snowden's book. Here are some of the most obvious points.

1. "Why does Snowden never discuss dealing with such encryption: how would it be possible?"

Answer: In his book, Snowden describes the layers of encryption that he used when copying the files from NSA. He also describes the extraordinary level of access he had as a systems engineer. Further, he mentions his surprise at finding that the NSA did not practice widespread encryption, in contrast to his experience at CIA, where the hard drives were not only encrypted, but removed from the computers and placed in a safe each night.

2. "In the Oliver Stone movie Snowden, as well as in any of Snowden's descriptions of how he accessed the NSA computers, did you note either the depiction or reference to this universal Smart ID? How could Snowden be exempt from its requirement?"

Answer: Movies omit details. In his book, Snowden describes working in the one-person Information Sharing department. As part of that work, he brought an older, "obsolete" system to his office under the cover story of "compatibility testing" and used this older system to copy the data.

No, I haven't read the book–yet.

As part of a forensic analysis, which none of you were observant enough to understand, the subject is interviewed without knowledge of the questions in advance. His answers would be evaluated based on facts, for which a forensic IT team with no connections to government contractors would be part of and gain access to NSA systems. Thus, testimony is considered but it must be verified. Rand Paul might be one to open an investigation into the inadequacy of NSA security but government investigating itself is suspect. No such investigation will ever take place.

Note there has been no calls, that I am aware of, for any GAO study of NSA vulnerabilities.

Second, the critics miss the point: providing files to CIA-Five Eye fronts like Guardian and CIA Washington Post is suspect. As per what I wrote, no one now has access to this data.

I suspect Snowden leaked legitimate information to con the Russians to be on their soil and conduct malfeasance. Prior to Putin providing S-300s to Syria, Israel had better relations with Russia. I suspect Q is also coordinated by Intel agency friendly to Likud. Note his mention of John Perry Barlow before his death. He warned of Snowden being sent deliberately to Russia and hence my concern for CIA doing something stupid.

As to his comments on not supporting Russia, no support is necessary. If he were a decent human being he could simply have stated, "Election interference notwithstanding the U.S. should pursue non-aggressive posture against Russia. There was no 'Second Pearl Harbor.' The risk of nuclear war is great and I agree with President Trump to reduce tensions, although I disagree with his politics."

Instead, see his Tweets supporting the Pussy Hats and "We came, we saw, he died" Hillary Clinton.

In the event, Snowden is irrelevant. The end of Empire is imminent.

Read Martyanov's post on the recent threats America made to Russia here.

https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2019/09/why-would-you-ask.html

I have compassion for Snowden. His end will likely be as Skripals was: disappearance by Western IC which he supports and blame placed on Russia.

We are free to disagree with one another. I trust nothing a supporter of Empire says.

As to September 11 I wasn't aware of Assange's remarks. This is the touchstone as others have said. Snowden enlisted because of September 11 false flag. Yeah, right, he is an idiot savant.

Even Ed Asner who no longer wins Emmy awards and is blackballed had the courage to do this video. Trust Snowden? I think not.

Y. Lorenzo (this site will not allow me to post under my name)

p.s. Ron uses Gmail. The nearest military base is a long, long way from my location. A helicopter outfitted with surveillance bubbles overflew after I submitted this piece.. Coincidence, right?

I will fight for the truth. I receive no compensation for my work and expect none. I support the cause of peace and not Empire. Thanks for the intelligent supportive comments. Ad hominem attacks mean nothing. Thanks to Ron for posting though he disagrees.

Che Guava , says: September 21, 2019 at 7:17 pm GMT
...re. 'Smowden"when he was constantly whining about Russia, getting hhs pole-dancing gf to join him there must have been a major effort, but he has no gratitude for it.

Really strange. At the time, I thought that Putin's comment 'he is a strange young man' had to do only with questions of loyalty and betrayal, of course, it was lilekely deeper and more suspicious than that. If I had been in the position like 'Snowden', after first having been granted asylum, my priority would have been to study the language. I would gtuess that he can order food or drink, do basic greetings, and not much else.

Sean , says: September 21, 2019 at 7:22 pm GMT
@Republic Snowden's wife is a former pole dancer, those are for good for something, but its not marrying. Everything about him suggests immaturity, from his toying with the idea of being a model to his trying to go from frail civilian with a youth spent 24/7 gaming to passing jumps school. He stole vastly more than he could ever have read, much of it having no bearing on privacy so he has no idea what he might have compromised. Quoth he:

There is a secrecy agreement, but there is also an oath of service. An oath of service is to support and defend, not an agency, not even the president, it is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies – direct quote – foreign and domestic. And this begs the question, what happens when our obligations come into conflict.

If you have meaningful values (ie those that do not charge to suit your personal aggrandisement) you resign, I but instead of doing that he deliberately got another job contracting with the NSA all the better to steal data.

peterAUS , says: September 21, 2019 at 7:56 pm GMT
@Yvonne Lorenzo

.In the event, Snowden is irrelevant. The end of Empire is imminent. Read Martyanov's post on the recent threats America made to Russia here .

That was fast, even for this pub.

Ad hominem attacks mean nothing.

You mean being positive about you UNABLE to visualize a byte from a "keypress" moving all the way to the LAN cable with each timer "click"? You know, buffers, busses, microcode/firmware, interrupts, stack/heap, closed source, encryption/decryption layer of the OSI stack etc. That's for technology. As for people, unaware of an average idiot user in any environment using IT, Governments in particular, and the role and power of sysadmins in such environments? But confident to write articles what can and can not be done re IT security? Yeah .

AB_Anonymous , says: September 21, 2019 at 8:05 pm GMT
@anon Not sure about Pythagoras, but there are (very unfortunately) people who might have fun from combining "Rubik's Cube and highly classified information". And not necessarily in reality.
Yvonne Lorenzo , says: September 21, 2019 at 8:08 pm GMT
@peterAUS

You mean being positive about you UNABLE to visualize a byte from a "keypress" moving all the way to the LAN cable with each timer "click"? You know, buffers, busses, microcode/firmware, interrupts, stack/heap, closed source, encryption/decryption layer of the OSI stack etc. That's for technology.

Butthurt you are, yes? Tell me how he defeats this, be specific. https://www.symantec.com/products/endpoint-encryption

White paper here. https://www.symantec.com/content/dam/symantec/docs/white-papers/keeping-your-private-data-secure-en.pdf

Y. Lorenzo

And I don't care; fine, he was a clever op, he hacked the NSA, whoo-hoo. My other comments still stand. Go wave your flag, you're done.

Sean , says: September 21, 2019 at 8:22 pm GMT
@Yvonne Lorenzo

Rand Paul might be one to open an investigation into the inadequacy of NSA security but government investigating itself is suspect. No such investigation will ever take place.

Yes, Rand Paul who while cutting his lawn provoked his own retired doctor neighbor in a gated community into a maddened vicious rib dislocating attack that cost Paul part of his lung What a brilliant choice to annoy the government.

His end will likely be as Skripals was: disappearance by Western IC which he supports and blame placed on Russia

Skirpal is in America. The British got Skirpal out of Russia, but Russia could have killed him any time because he was homesick and meeting people from the Russian Embassy. In my opinion the Russians were trying to kill Skirpal's daughter along with him. They knew she was coming and timed the nerve agent attack so as to 'accidentally' kill her along with the traitor. The knowledge that you will go after their families is the ultimate deterrent. Unless you are a narcissistic dick like Snowden, who hardly mentions anything his family did for him except getting a second phone line so he could play some stupid internet game. Snowden actually says in his book that the internet raised him. It did not get him a job in the CIA despite him having no degree, that was his mom's NSA and her father's Pentagon connections. Aldrich Ames's father worked for the CIA .

Art , says: September 21, 2019 at 9:12 pm GMT
Edward Snowden is a great man – a great American. (Will a Dem president pardon him?) I recently viewed a video on how a poor immigrant family hid Snowden before he secured a flight out of Hong Kong. (He is working to get them out of Hong Kong, to Canada.) I am curious as to how he got the flight out to Russia?????
Yvonne Lorenzo , says: September 21, 2019 at 9:14 pm GMT
This will be my final comment. My issue is one regarding Snowden's character and integrity, especially as the collapsing Empire under FUBAR Trump is waging war on the world. Come on, none of the CIA trolls here have read The Saker with Orlov on the fate of the mass murdering Empire?

http://www.unz.com/tsaker/placing-the-usa-on-a-collapse-continuum-with-dmitry-orlov/

At this point it is important to explain what exactly a "final collapse" looks like. Some people are under the very mistaken assumption that a collapsed society or country looks like a Mad Max world. This is not so. The Ukraine has been a failed state for several years already, but it still exists on the map. People live there, work, most people still have electricity (albeit not 24/7), a government exists, and, at least officially, law and order is maintained. This kind of collapsed society can go on for years, maybe decades, but it is in a state of collapse nonetheless, as it has reached all the 5 Stages of Collapse as defined by Dmitry Orlov in his seminal book "The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit" where he mentions the following 5 stages of collapse:

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in "the goodness of humanity" is lost.

Sound familiar? Read it and weep. Your pensions are toast.

Or read Chris Hedges America The Farewell Tour.

Snowden's character is proven by his interview with Brian Roberts.

Now, although only 14% of U.S. TLAMs got past Syrian air defenses, hear him was rhapsodic on the "beautiful missiles."

And Snowden is happy to talk to this creep? And asks Rothschild-Kravis puppet Macron to ex-filtrate him to France?

https://www.voltairenet.org/article204303.html

It was in this milieu that he met Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis, in their residence on Park Avenue in New York [1]. The Kravis couple, unfailing supporters of the US Republican Party, are among the great world fortunes who play politics out of sight of the Press. Their company, KKR, like Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, is one of the world's major investment funds.

" Emmanuel's curiosity for the 'can-do attitude' was fascinating – the capacity to tell yourself that you can do anything you set your mind to. He had a thirst for knowledge and a desire to understand how things work, but without imitating or copying anyone. In this, he remained entirely French ", declares Marie-Josée Drouin (Mrs. Kravis) today [2].

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201909141076804460-go-west-edward-snowden-hopes-frances-emmanuel-macron-will-approve-his-asylum-application/

Snowden's revelations about his aspirations for asylum outside of Russia come just days ahead of the upcoming release of his new memoir which is expected to hit the shelves on US Constitution Day.

Famous American whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the man responsible for exposing a number of global surveillance programs run by the US agency, has recently revealed that he would like to obtain asylum in France.

Call it female intuition, Snowden creeps me out.

Those who want to bow before his altar, be my guest. You have free will.

peterAUS , says: September 21, 2019 at 11:21 pm GMT
@Yvonne Lorenzo

Butthurt

whoo-hoo..

Go wave your flag

.CIA trolls here

Read it and weep. Your pensions are toast.

From an author here?!

Whoah ..

My God, Unz .. really ? Coming to this?

Hahaha oh man.

peterAUS , says: September 21, 2019 at 11:48 pm GMT
Just realized, isn't this creature the only female author here? A female creature is writing, as an author, on alt-whatever site, about things she has never been professionally involved in. With certain hahaha style.

Hahaha ..oh my.

So, what have we got:
1. Unz finally collapsed under "diversity" pressure?
2. There is, sort of a hidden, message here.

I really hope it's the second.

Sean , says: September 22, 2019 at 12:35 am GMT peterAUS , says: September 22, 2019 at 2:31 am GMT
@Sean True true .mea culpa. Female stuff, that is, in general.

Style, though, is unique for the creature here.

Butthurt

whoo-hoo..

Go wave your flag

.CIA trolls here

Read it and weep. Your pensions are toast .

.creep .creeps me out

I mean hahaha .when reading those things it's, almost, as written by a certain type of commentators here. Almost as one of them, actually. Same "footprint". Especially the first two.

I mean, having that from an author here is, really, a new low for sure.

This is the first time I've seen something like that, and my attitude was mild in this thread compared to some in other threads. I mean, I was quite hard on some authors here, and never, so far that. "Butthurt" ."whoo-hoo"

I've quite offended a couple of authors here and they never replied with any rude word. And ..my God "whoo-hoo". Haha crazy.

New "quality" seeping here, apparently. Hehe getting with times, I guess. And program.
Understandable.

peterAUS , says: September 22, 2019 at 2:54 am GMT
@peterAUS O.K. I could be wrong.

I've been on this site for quite some time. Read, on average, 20 % of articles and similar number of comments in those articles.

I can't, really, recollect ONE case when an AUTHOR, here, in a comments exchange with a commentator, used the words "butthurt" and "whoo-hoo". Not once from the, say, authors from the West. Born and raised there, that is. Cultural thing, I guess.

Anyone could prove me senile/wrong? Please.

2stateshmustate , says: September 22, 2019 at 3:27 am GMT
@foolisholdman I agree. Shilling for the Israelis regarding 911 is a deal breaker for me. They had me going about these 2 guys for a while, but when I heard that they had ridiculed 911 truthers I smelled a rat. And after this article I agree they are shills for the status quo. Reasonable people can not doubt that 911 was a false flag operation. There's just too much bullshit there.
Commentator Mike , says: September 22, 2019 at 3:43 am GMT
@peterAUS

isn't this creature the only female author here?

Ilana Mercer is a woman who writes on UR.

niceland , says: September 22, 2019 at 4:55 am GMT
I think the idea Snowden is a "plant" is a bit far out there. If he is; the real purpose of the exercise is what exactly?

I also don't get why some commenters think Julian Assange isn't who he claims to be. His Wikileaks has published great volume of highly embarrassing material for the U.S. The embassy cables come to mind – bringing to light evidence contrary to Washington narrative on many events.

There is another thing; Just after he established Wikileaks he came to Iceland and met with journalists and few politicians. The result from that visit was he met one Kristinn Hrafnsson, long time journalist in Iceland with excellent track record and credibility. Since Assange got in trouble, accused of sexual harassment from Swedish woman and finally escaped into the Ecuador embassy in London, Hrafnsson has been spokesman for Wikileaks.

Since I am familiar with Hrafnsson work for decades, I would be very surprised if he worked with Assagne all this time, and even took over his job, so to speak, as head of Wikileaks if Assagne wasn't genuine. Hrafnsson has struck me as smart guy and honest and it's extremely unlikely he would continue if something didn't smell right at Wikileaks. I also want to point out Wikileaks has been working with, what I consider the few remaining NEWS outlets in Europe. (Including The Guardian before it was bought few years ago and became worthless).

To Assagne credit he booted Icelandic polititian, one Birgitta Jónsdóttir; who tried to visit him in U.K. prison – and wanted nothing to do with her. She has been trying to make international name for herself as fighter for human rights and peacemaker and against corruption and so forth. Unfortunately she is a bag full of hot air and thinks SHE is the center of the universe. It's all about her and therefore she is of no use for any cause. Julian was right to send her packing.

I can't imagine what the CIA or NSA or other tentacles of the Empire would gain by running Wikileaks. It makes absolutely no sense to me.

niceland , says: September 22, 2019 at 5:07 am GMT
@niceland Here you can view interview by Chris Hedges with Hrafnsson on RT. You decide if this guy is genuine or not. It seems he has basically been running Wikileaks for past several years. https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/461987-kristinn-hrafnsson-extradition-wikileaks/
Digital Samizdat , says: September 22, 2019 at 6:43 am GMT
@der einzige Wow. Thank you for posting that. Doesn't look too good for Assange.
anon [310] Disclaimer , says: September 22, 2019 at 8:52 am GMT
@Yvonne Lorenzo > Call it female intuition, Snowden creeps me out.

Can't refute that! #BelieveWomen

anon [310] Disclaimer , says: September 22, 2019 at 9:56 am GMT
@Yvonne Lorenzo > A helicopter outfitted with surveillance bubbles overflew after I submitted this piece.. Coincidence, right?

No coincidence, they're distributing corn sharks in a contract with ADM. Stay indoors and cover your head with tin foil.

9/11 Inside job , says: September 22, 2019 at 10:19 am GMT
@2stateshmustate "9/11 is the Litmus Test " By Smoking – Mirrors.Com :

"It all comes down to 9/11.Everything that has happened has happened based on a lie . Everyone in Government ; everyone in the media , in entertainment , in organized religion , in the public ,in the public eye who accepts and promotes the official story is either a traitor or a tool . Everyone who does not stand forth and speak truth to power is a coward , a liar and complicit in mass-murder . Everyone everywhere can be measured by this Litmus Test ."

[Sep 22, 2019] The Beeb continues to blather on about Smolenkov being an absolutely top-hole high-level aide to Vladimir Putin, practically running the place, Darling, probably called each other 'Vladdy' and 'Smoky' when the peasants weren't around.

Sep 22, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

J.T. September 21, 2019 at 5:32 pm

How contrived.

What will they claim next? That Putin and Smolenkov were lovers?

[Sep 22, 2019] The US media has become a cesspool of bottom-feeders all looking for the 'gotcha' moment, while the business and profession of journalism in general has morphed to uncritical relay of government propaganda.

Sep 22, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Mark Chapman September 16, 2019 at 9:05 am

Young people in the west, generally speaking, are know-it-alls convinced of their own absolute currency of knowledge, and most of what they believe they know comes from reading newspapers and watching television. I say this from experience as, like all of us, I was young once and thought I knew it all, and I got almost all my information from newspapers and television news, although some came from professional journals like the US Naval Institute Proceedings. I grew up believing Russia was a grey and colourless place where hopeless people in shabby, ill-fitting clothes trudged dispiritedly from one line-up to another, then home to their tenth-floor walk-up concrete box shared with from eight to a dozen other family members and relatives.

Of course, it WAS like that for some people. Just as it likely was for the poor in the west, although they were all but invisible then save for occasional charity drives to 'help the less fortunate'. I was a huge fan of the United States, loving pretty much everything about it, as my first foreign trips with the Navy were to places like New London, Connecticut (right across the river from Groton, the headquarters of submarine builders Electric Boat) and Boston. I was a big fan of the U.S. Navy, and in many respects I still am – it was and is mostly a professional service with capable leaders and sound ethics common to seagoing services the world over.

It was in the area of the USA's political system that gradual and then total disillusionment took place. Any respect I might once have had for the media vanished at about the same time.

The media has become a cesspool of bottom-feeders all looking for the 'gotcha' moment, while the business and profession of journalism in general has morphed to uncritical relay of government propaganda.

From that same link, a very interesting dissection of the Salisbury poisonings. We've become used to mocking or horrified refutations of the UK government's line that it could only have been Russia, but this source does it with considerable detail; for instance, the formula originally devised by Vil Marzayanov and his compatriots in the Soviet Union was later patented by a US Chemical lab.

https://timhayward.wordpress.com/2018/05/10/briefing-note-update-on-the-salisbury-poisonings-2/

[Sep 22, 2019] The Beeb continues to blather on about Smolenkov being an absolutely top-hole high-level aide to Vladimir Putin, practically running the place, Darling, probably called each other 'Vladdy' and 'Smoky' when the peasants weren't around.

Sep 22, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

J.T. September 21, 2019 at 5:32 pm

How contrived.

What will they claim next? That Putin and Smolenkov were lovers?

[Sep 22, 2019] Snowden says he married his girlfriend Lindsay Mills in Russia -- Guardian

US authorities usually do not allow such staff for people why really want to hurt. They couple easily put his girlfriend on "nofly" list, if they wanted.
Sep 22, 2019 | tass.com

In the interview, timed to coincide with the release of his book titled Permanent Record, Snowden said he and Mills, who later moved to him in Russia, married two years ago at a private ceremony ... ... ... One of world's most beautiful countries

According to Snowden, people in the West often have no information about the beauty of Russian nature and hospitality of Russians.

"I've been to St. Petersburg, I've been to Sochi. I love travelling and I still do, even though I can't cross borders now," he said.

"One of the things that is lost in all the problematic politics of the Russian government is the fact this is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The people are friendly. The people are warm," he continued. "And when I came here I did not understand any of this. I was terrified of this place because, of course, they were the great fortress of the enemy, which is the way a CIA agent looks at Russia."

According to Snowden, "What people don't realize about Russia is that basically you can get all the same things you can get in the United States." "The only thing they don't have in Russia is Taco Bell," he added.

He said it was never his plan to reside in Russia, but, "with time, with open eyes you can see that our presumptions of a place are almost always different from the reality."

Noble cause

According to Snowden, his book was intended not only to inform reader of his life in the US and Russia, but also to draw attention to serious challenges the modern society is now facing.

"We have moved into a time where people care much more deeply about feelings than they do about facts. And this is a dangerous moment for democracy, because people believe that once we have achieved and established a free and open society it will remain that way, it will always be there. But the reality is: things can backslide very quickly," Snowden said when asked how dangerous, in his opinion, Trump's rise to power was.

The whistleblower believes that people should be informed of infringements on their freedom and of acute problems, such as climate change or advanced mass surveillance technologies used by various governments.

"We need people to recognize these problems, to understand these problems and then to be willing to give something up to change that problem," he said. "But it's not enough to believe in something. You have to be ready to stand for something if you want it to change. And so that is what I hope this book will help people come to decide for themselves: are you ready to this change."

Snowden's case

In June 2013, Snowden leaked classified information to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, which revealed global surveillance programs run by US and British intelligence agencies. He explained the move by saying that he wanted to tell the world the truth because he believed such large-scale surveillance on innocent citizens was unacceptable and the public needed to know about it.

The Guardian and The Washington Post published the first documents concerning the US intelligence agencies' spying on Internet users on June 6, 2013. According to the documents, major phone companies, including Verizon, AT&T and Sprint Nextel, handed records of their customers' phone conversations over to the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who also had direct access to the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, Paltalk, AOL and Apple. In addition, Snowden's revelations showed that a secret program named PRISM was aimed at collecting audio and video recordings, photos, emails and information about users' connections to various websites.

After leaking classified information, Snowden flew to Hong Kong and then to Moscow, arriving in Russia on June 23, 2013. He applied for political asylum to more than 20 countries while staying in the transit zone at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. On July 16, he applied for a temporary asylum in Russia, accepting Moscow's condition to refrain from activities aimed against the US.

The NSA and the Pentagon claim that Snowden stole about 1.7 mln classified documents concerning the activities of US intelligence services and US military operations. He is charged with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person. He is facing up to ten years in prison on each charge.

[Sep 21, 2019] Edward Snowden On The NSA, His Book 'Permanent Record' And Life In Russia NPR

Sep 21, 2019 | www.npr.org

In 2013, Edward Snowden was an IT systems expert working under contract for the National Security Agency when he traveled to Hong Kong to provide three journalists with thousands of top-secret documents about U.S. intelligence agencies' surveillance of American citizens.

To Snowden, the classified information he shared with the journalists exposed privacy abuses by government intelligence agencies. He saw himself as a whistleblower. But the U.S. government considered him a traitor in violation of the Espionage Act .

After meeting with the journalists, Snowden intended to leave Hong Kong and travel -- via Russia -- to Ecuador, where he would seek asylum. But when his plane landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, things didn't go according to plan.

"What I wasn't expecting was that the United States government itself ... would cancel my passport," he says.

Snowden was directed to a room where Russian intelligence agents offered to assist him -- in return for access to any secrets he harbored. Snowden says he refused.

"I didn't cooperate with the Russian intelligence services -- I haven't and I won't," he says. "I destroyed my access to the archive. ... I had no material with me before I left Hong Kong, because I knew I was going to have to go through this complex multi-jurisdictional route."

Snowden spent 40 days in the Moscow airport, trying to negotiate asylum in various countries. After being denied asylum by 27 nations, he settled in Russia, where he remains today.

"People look at me now and they think I'm this crazy guy, I'm this extremist or whatever. Some people have a misconception that [I] set out to burn down the NSA," he says. "But that's not what this was about. In many ways, 2013 wasn't about surveillance at all. What it was about was a violation of the Constitution."

Snowden's 2013 revelations led to changes in the laws and standards governing American intelligence agencies and the practices of U.S. technology companies, which now encrypt much of their Web traffic for security. He reflects on his life and his experience in the intelligence community in the memoir Permanent Record.

On Sept. 17, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit to recover all proceeds from the book, alleging that Snowden violated nondisclosure agreements by not letting the government review the manuscript before publication; Snowden's attorney, Ben Wizner, said in a statement that the book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news organizations, and that the government's prepublication review system is under court challenge.

[Sep 21, 2019] Poisoner In Chief Details The CIA s Secret Quest For Mind Control

Notable quotes:
"... Kinzer notes that the top-secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments. "We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed," he says. Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. After MK-ULTRA shut down, he went on to lead a CIA program that created poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use. Kinzer writes about Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA in his new book, Poisoner in Chief. ..."
"... Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture. ..."
"... In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control. ..."
"... Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was. Essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period? ..."
"... Bulger wrote afterward about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. He thought he was going insane. He wrote, "I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me." ..."
"... And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him. ..."
"... The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research. ..."
"... For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them. ..."
"... CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called "expendable." They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation -- all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. And that made Gottlieb, although in some ways a very compassionate person, certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation. ..."
"... [Gottlieb] operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. This guy had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal -- yet nobody looked over his shoulder. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. I think the mentality must have been [that] this project is so important -- mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power. ..."
"... The end of Gottlieb's career came in 1972, when his patron, Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by [President Richard] Nixon. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MK-ULTRA ..."
"... Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and ordered the archives to destroy boxes full of MK-ULTRA records. ... However, it turns out that there were some [records] found in other places; there was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remain. So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful. ..."
Sep 09, 2019 | npr.org
Heard on Fresh Air Terry Gross

CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb headed up the agency's secret MK-ULTRA program, which was charged with developing a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.

Courtesy of the CIA

During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.

MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early '60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the "most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control."

Some of Gottlieb's experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer's research.

"Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process," Kinzer says. "First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one."

The Picture Show Found In The Archives: Military LSD Testing

Kinzer notes that the top-secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments. "We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed," he says. Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible.

Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. After MK-ULTRA shut down, he went on to lead a CIA program that created poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use.

Kinzer writes about Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA in his new book, Poisoner in Chief.

Interview highlights Poisoner in Chief

Poisoner in Chief

Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

by Stephen Kinzer

Hardcover, 354 pages |

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On how the CIA brought LSD to America

As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MK-ULTRA. Actually, the MK-ULTRA director, Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.

In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control.

Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told their friends about it. Who were those people? Ken Kesey , the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA by MK-ULTRA, by Sidney Gottlieb. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. Allen Ginsberg , the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. Although, of course, he never knew that name.

So the CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly, and actually it's a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that the CIA held dear and defended.

On how MK-ULTRA experimented on prisoners, including crime boss Whitey Bulger

Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was. Essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period?

Meet 'The Brothers' Who Shaped U.S. Policy, Inside And Out

Author Interviews Meet 'The Brothers' Who Shaped U.S. Policy, Inside And Out

Bulger wrote afterward about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. He thought he was going insane. He wrote, "I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me."

And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him.

On the CIA hiring Nazi doctors and Japanese torturers to learn methods

The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps.

Stephen Kinzer, author of 'Poisoner in Chief'

The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.

For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them.

Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Nazi doctors came to America to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took for people to die from sarin.

On the more extreme experiments Gottlieb conducted overseas

Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s, and therefore Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places. ...

CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called "expendable." They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation -- all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. And that made Gottlieb, although in some ways a very compassionate person, certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation.

On how these experiments were unsupervised

This guy [Sidney Gottlieb] had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal -- yet nobody looked over his shoulder.

Stephen Kinzer

[Gottlieb] operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. This guy had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal -- yet nobody looked over his shoulder. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. I think the mentality must have been [that] this project is so important -- mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power.

On how Gottlieb destroyed evidence about his experiments when he left the CIA

The end of Gottlieb's career came in 1972, when his patron, Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by [President Richard] Nixon. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MK-ULTRA.

Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and ordered the archives to destroy boxes full of MK-ULTRA records. ... However, it turns out that there were some [records] found in other places; there was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remain. So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful.

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

Correction Sept. 9, 2019

A previous photo caption incorrectly referred to the CIA's MK-ULTRA program as MS-ULTRA.

[Sep 21, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Slams Trump Over Saudi Policy -- Strategic Culture

Sep 21, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

Gabbard's uncompromising honesty and principles on these important foreign policy positions give her the moral high ground.

Trump can't respond to that without betraying his entire Presidential aura.

She is correct that US citizens who sign up for the military take an oath to protect and defend the constitution and the people of the United States. They did not take an oath to protect foreign dictators incapable of basic defense of their most precious and valuable real estate.

This is especially true when said dictators are the aggressors in a war of conquest against their neighbors. After more than four years of fighting, using weapons produced by the United States, with assistance by US military advisers, the Saudi Arabians have completely botched their war in Yemen, committing dozens, if not hundreds, of despicable attacks on civilian targets without anything to show for it but animosity and, now, wholly insecure infrastructure.

That this infrastructure is vital to the global economy should be irrelevant to Trump's calculus as to where to send US troops and war materiel. That was something Saudi Arabia's Clown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman should have considered before starting this war back in 2015.

The Houthi rebels in Northern Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on the Abqaiq gas processing facility as a direct consequence of Saudi aggression. Of course, they are backed by Iran and Iranian technology.

It's nearly a week after the event and we still don't know for sure what happened. We have vague assurances from anonymous sources with the US and Saudi governments but no concrete details other than what was hit and how.

More questions abound, still, than answers.

That Trump ultimately decided against going to war with Iran over this incident doesn't negate Gabbard's attack on him. It was cogent given the moment and is principled in how US troops should be used.

In all of this discussion about a potential war with Iran no one in the Trump administration or anywhere else have made a credible argument as to what actual threat Iran poses to the people of the United States.

Vague proclamations by Iranian politicians of "death to America" are, ultimately far less threatening or interesting than the parade of US Senators and Congresscritters saying that Iran is a "rogue regime" and it should be wiped off the face of the earth.

Are our sensibilities so fragile that we can't handle a little criticism from people we have waged war by proxy with for over 70 years?

How is this any different than the average tweet by Lindsay Graham (R-AIPAC)?

We have senior officials, like the Secretary of State and the erstwhile National Security Adviser calling Iran 'evil' and we have officially lumped their army in with the same lot of terrorists as Al-Qaeda and ISIS. We have sanctioned their government and individuals within it.

Never forget that you reap what you sow in this life. And any animosity Iran and Iranians bear towards the US and Americans is richly deserved. The reverse, however, is difficult to make a case for.

Because, little factoid, Iran hasn't attacked anyone in a span of time that is longer than the US has been a country.

Iran threatens Israel in the same way that Israel threatens it. Saudi Arabia threatens Iran as an oil competitor and religious one.

And the idea that the President of the United States should entertain even a mere thought of going to war with Iran over an attack on Saudi oil production should be anathema to anyone with two brain cells to rub together and make a spark.

Because at the end of the day this is not our fight. This is a fight between enemies made rich by oil in some cases (Saudi, Iran), political clout in high places in the US and U.K. in others (Israel) and friends in other high places and cultural integrity (Iran).

This is a cultural and religious conflict we barely understand and cannot change the dynamics of by blundering in with weapons of mass destruction. It is precisely because we take sides in this conflict that this conflict never ends.

And it is a conflict that dovetails with prevailing 'wisdom' in the West about how to maintain control over the planet that dates back more than 150 years. And that is why we do what we do. But it is time for that worldview to end.

It's time bury Mackinder's ideas alongside his corpse.

To Trump's credit he seems to have realized that this incident was another like the events which led up to the US Global Hawk drone getting shot down in June. It was designed to get him to over-commit to a policy which would engulf the world in a war that only a very few powerful and highly placed want.

Even the tweet that Gabbard called him out on was carefully worded to cool things down and hint that he wasn't prepared to respond militarily to this incident. As Gabbard climbs in the polls and is treated worse than Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Ron Paul by the Republicans in 2008 and 2012, she will hold Trump to account on foreign policy with an ever-growing clout and moral clarity which bodes well for the future of US involvement overseas.

And, like Nigel Farage in the U.K. offering the Tories a non-aggression pact to get a real Brexit over the finish line, Gabbard should put country before career and applaud Trump when he doesn't act like Saudi Arabia's "Bitch." That will win her even more votes and more respect among the silent majority who are not in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome on both the Left and the Right.

Along with this, the likely end of Netanyahu's political career should mark a sea change in US policy. While AIPAC's pull is still very strong in the US, Israel's commitment to an aggressive foreign policy with an uncommitted President should falter under a new government without its Agitator-in-Chief.

And without that animus propelling events along eventually cooler heads will prevail, and the present dynamic will change.

Trump made an enormous mistake pulling out of the JCPOA. That genie cannot be put back in the bottle. The question now is does he have the sense and the humility to realize his board position has materially weakened to the point where the probability of a rout is rising?

2020 for him has to be about making good on his promises to end the Empire building and improving relations with Russia. With Putin openly trolling him and the Saudis recently over weapon sales the odds of the latter happening are low.

But he can still make good on the former. Trump has lost so much of his goodwill with the people he's 'negotiating with' that there is little to no wiggle room left. He has no leverage and he's got no goodwill.

I saw this coming the day he bombed the Al-Shairat airbase in April 2017. I said then that it was one of the biggest geopolitical mistakes ever. It set the stage for all the others because it showed us just how out of his depth Trump was on foreign affairs. It set him back with both Putin and Chinese Premier Xi and it also showed how easily he could be manipulated by his staff and their rotten information.

It's a deep hole he's dug for himself. But there are still people who want to help him climb out of it. Gabbard's 'bitch slap' is an example of the kind of tough love he needs to right his Presidency's ship.

His base needs to do that a little more often and then maybe, just maybe, we'd get somewhere


[Sep 20, 2019] The Narcissism of the West

The USA clearly overextended itself with all those neocon global neoliberal empire games. So for Canada, to think of it as an independent country is somewhat naive. It is vassal of Washington at best, a colony at worst.
But RussiaGate is not about Russia and its attitude to the West. Russiagate is about crisis of neoliberalism and cracks in the facade of the neoliberal society, the cracks that the ruling elite tried to patch by redirecting anger to the external enemy.
This is the point that the author seems do not understand. all russigate stupidity is just at attempt to use the image of expernal enemy to rally the nation and produce at this some kind of artificial unity. Unity that now is severely lacking in the USA.
Sep 20, 2019 | irrussianality.wordpress.com
West. Boosted by victory in the Cold War, believing that our systems represent the 'end of history', we in the West have come to see ourselves as 'masters of the universe'. We are all that matters.

And so it follows that we must be at the top of everybody else's agenda, and that whatever anybody else in the world does, it must somehow be about us.

Take the paranoid stories I've been covering on this blog about how the Russians are bound to 'meddle' in Canada's upcoming general election. Why on earth do people here think that this is so likely, given that the choice is between a governing party whose foreign minister is banned from entering Russia and an opposition party whose leader is banned from entering Russia? The answer lies in our strange belief that we're actually really important. Canada is a G7 country after all. Of course the Russians will target us. We matter! Except that in reality we don't.

As was mentioned in the report by Sergey Sukhankin which I critiqued a week or so ago, Russians who study international affairs don't look at Canada as a truly independent country. To most of them, we're just an appendage of the United States. Our belief that the opposite is true – that we're a big player, that our elections really matter to foreign countries, that they're bound to try to undermine us because 'WE'RE IMPORTANT!' – is narcissism pure and simple.

Canadians aren't the only one guilty of this. Americans have a similar problem. It's why they had such a huge problem understanding what Saddam Hussein was up to after his defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. Faced with apparent Iraqi obstruction of US demands, they assumed that this meant that Saddam was plotting some sort of evil revenge against the United States. In fact, it turned out that he wasn't thinking of the Americans at all; his real concerns were to do with Iran. You can find lots of examples like that. Americans are told that they must fight the Taliban because of the danger that terrorists might again use Afghanistan to strike the United States. But is the average Talibani really thinking about America? Or is he thinking about his home, his family, his village – all things local? If the Iranians are helping the Syrian government, is it because they view the war in Syria as part of a global struggle against the United States, or is it because Syria is next door to Iran and what happens there is of direct importance to Iran's own security? The answers, I think, are pretty clear.

To put it another way, states (and non-state actors) have their own interests unconnected to us. The fact that their pursuit of their interests sometimes makes them clash with Western states who are pursuing different interests doesn't mean that they're doing what they doing because of us. Moreover, as the balance of power in the world shifts, it's likely that more and more often the West will become less and less of a factor in non-Western states' calculations. As Derek Averre says with reference to Russia in another part of the LSE report:

We are in danger of missing the fact that European norms are becoming less important as a reference point against which Russia's political elite measures its policy. Indeed, Ted Hopf's argument – that Russia constructs its identity in relation to the US/Europe as 'significant others' – should be subject to appraisal at this time of far-reaching change in Russian foreign policy.

In short, it's not all about us, and becoming less and less about us with every passing day. But arrogance and narcissism prevent us from seeing this. As a result we stumble from foreign policy blunder to foreign policy blunder . Unless and until we are able to come off our high horses and recognize that we're not the centre of the universe, we're going to keep getting things horribly wrong.

[Sep 19, 2019] Pelosi Unloads On Nadler; Tells Him To Drop 'Moby Dick' Like Impeachment Obsession

Notable quotes:
"... "Sadly, the country spent over three years and 40 million taxpayer dollars on these investigations," said Lewandowski. "It is now clear the investigation was populated by many Trump haters who had their own agenda -- to try and take down a duly elected president of the United States," Lewandowski said in his opening statement - later adding "We, as a Nation, would be better served if elected officials like you concentrated your efforts to combat the true crises facing our country, as opposed to going down rabbit holes like this hearing." ..."
"... Nadler and Schiff and those in their camp have a single-minded purpose: Never, ever , again allow the unwashed to get away with a successful rebellion. ..."
Sep 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blasted House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler last week over his 'Moby Dick'-like obsession with impeaching President Trump - days before Trump's 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski wiped the floor with Congressional Democrats during a contentious five-hour hearing on Tuesday in front of Nadler's panel.

Pelosi's comments came during a closed-door Capitol Hill meeting of Democrats last week, where she complained that Judiciary Committee aides have advanced the impeachment push "far beyond where the House Democratic Caucus stands," according to Politico .

" And you can feel free to leak this ," Pelosi added, according to several people who were there.

It was the latest sign of the widening schism between Pelosi and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, two longtime allies who are increasingly in conflict over where to guide the party at one of its most critical moments.

Both Pelosi and Nadler, who have served in the House together for more than 25 years, insist their relationship remains strong. But their rift over impeachment is getting harder and harder to paper over amid Democrats' flailing messaging on the topic and a growing divide in the caucus. - Politico

And while Pelosi aides told Politico that Nadler has coordinated with her office on investigations, legal strategy and messaging - and Pelosi has signed off on all the Judiciary Committee's court filings against Trump, the House Speaker has been expressing skepticism for months that a successful impeachment in the House would only lead to "exonerating" Trump on the campaign trail after the effort dies in the GOP-led Senate.

Pelosi has privately clashed with Nadler over his aggressive impeachment agenda, arguing the public does not support it and it does not have the 218 votes to pass on the House floor. So far, about 137 Democrats say they would vote to open an official impeachment inquiry.

...

The relationship between the two veteran lawmakers has become strained . While Pelosi has blocked the House from formally voting to open an impeachment inquiry, Nadler declared he is authorized to begin one even without a House vote. - Washington Examiner

"Am I concerned? The answer is yes!," Florida Democratic Rep. Donna Shalala told the Washington Examiner . "In my district, I'm not getting asked about impeachment. I'm being asked about healthcare, I'm being asked about the environment, and about infrastructure. It's not like around the country they are thinking about impeachment. It's a Washington phenomenon as far as I can tell."

... ... ...

During Tuesday's 'impeachment' hearing, Corey Lewandowski beat Congressional Democrats like a red-headed stepchild - starting with his opening statement:

"Sadly, the country spent over three years and 40 million taxpayer dollars on these investigations," said Lewandowski. "It is now clear the investigation was populated by many Trump haters who had their own agenda -- to try and take down a duly elected president of the United States," Lewandowski said in his opening statement - later adding "We, as a Nation, would be better served if elected officials like you concentrated your efforts to combat the true crises facing our country, as opposed to going down rabbit holes like this hearing."

" As for actual 'collusion,' or 'conspiracy,' there was none. What there has been, however, is harassment of the president from the day he won the election ."

"Corey Lewandowski was very precise," Rep. Matt Gaetz, a member of the House panel, told Fox News ' Sean Hannity. "And House Democrats looked like a dog that had chased a car and then caught it and then did not know what to do about it ."

Norm Corin , 8 minutes ago link

Nadler and Schiff and those in their camp have a single-minded purpose: Never, ever , again allow the unwashed to get away with a successful rebellion.

That's the reason a now 90% controlled Trump can't be allowed to escape unscathed, no matter how otherwise useless the exercise -- even by the standards of their own (apparent) issue agendas.

[Sep 18, 2019] Jerry Nadler is aiming to become the Rachael Maddow of Adam Schiffs

Humor aside Corey Lewandowski Opening statement deserves to be listened. Just 5 min.
This was obviously a Dog & Pony show by Nadler and his gang who can't shoot strait
Sep 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Seminole Nation , 5 hours ago

"Jerry Nadler is aiming to become the Rachael Maddow of Adam Schiffs" – Dan Bongino (3-24-19)

Gilbert Perea , 9 hours ago

You have to laugh , I wonder if Mr. Cowen has a chicken wing in his jacket pocket.

RIC shady , 7 hours ago

"The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all." - Valery Legasov, Soviet chemist

ZENIGMATV , 3 hours ago

Nadler:Corey what time is it? Corey :It's 2pm. Nadler: The clock shows 1:59 . Charge Corey for lying to Congress! All a gotcha game by a group of angry haters.

ZENIGMATV , 3 hours ago

Nadler:Corey what time is it? Corey :It's 2pm. Nadler: The clock shows 1:59 . Charge Corey for lying to Congress! All a gotcha game by a group of angry haters.

Jim Carpenter , 6 hours ago

Nadler provides so much comic relief!!!! He is definitely one of my all time favorite oafs.

Forever Joy , 9 hours ago

40 million tax payer dollars wasted...boom! Pathetic, thanks Democrats!

Bobwehada Babyitzaboy , 3 hours ago

3rd time. If that were good for the left they wouldn't shut up about it. This is another witch hunt with attempt to deceive

Dr.Roberto Rodriguez Jr. , 5 hours ago

What a joke. Democratic live in a fantasy world

Ricky Alfaro , 5 hours ago

Corey is toast!

Teresa Upchurch , 8 hours ago

This is obviously a Dog & Pony show by the Nadler nerd group of Demonrats! Can't even follow the House rules. Sickening !!!

[Sep 18, 2019] F-35 Fighter as the ritual construction similar to Egyptian pyramids, the Cathedral for MIC.

Sep 18, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

The Egyptians had pyramids. The Romans had roads, aqueducts, and coliseums. The medieval Europeans had castles and cathedrals. These days, America's pyramids, aqueducts, and cathedrals are those warplanes, among other deadly weapons programs , including a $1.7 trillion one to "modernize" the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

... ... ...

As ephemeral as the F-35 stealth fighter may prove in historical terms, it's already a classic symbol of America's ever more fruitless forever wars . Like them , the F-35 program has proven staggeringly expensive, incredibly wasteful, and impossible to stop, no matter the woeful results . It has come to symbolize the too-big-to-fail, too-sacrosanct-to-reject part of America's militarized culture of technological violence.

... ... ...

Harper's Andrew Cockburn recently used it to illustrate what he termed "the Pentagon Syndrome ," the practice of expending enormous sums on weapons of marginal utility.

[Sep 18, 2019] The Obama Administration Destroyed Libya. Could Trump Make It Worse? by Ted Galen Carpenter

Notable quotes:
"... The United States also cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials seemingly can't even decide which faction it wants to back. Washington's official policy continues to support the GNA, which the United Nations recognizes as the country's legitimate government -- even though its writ extends to little territory beyond the Tripoli metropolitan area. President Donald Trump, however, had an extremely cordial, lengthy telephone conversation in April with Haftar and appeared impressed with Haftar's professed determination to combat terrorist groups and bring order and unity to Libya. Neither Libyan faction now seems certain about Washington's stance. ..."
"... One poster child for such continuing arrogance is Samantha Power, an influential national security council staffer in 2011 and later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In her new book, The Education of an Idealist , Power takes no responsibility whatever for the Libya debacle. Indeed, flippant might be too generous a term for her treatment of the episode. "We could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own," she contends. American Conservative analyst Daniel Larison correctly excoriates her argument as "a pathetic attempt by Power to deny responsibility for the effects of a war she backed by shrugging her shoulders and pleading ignorance. If Libyan culture was so opaque and hard for the Obama administration to understand, they should never have taken sides in an internal conflict there. If the 'culture was not our own' and they couldn't anticipate what was going to happen because of that, then how arrogant must the policymakers who argued in favor of intervention have been?" ..."
"... Obama and company not only destroyed Libya, they also helped to unleash a wave of jihadis who are terrorizing vast swaths of west Africa, especially Mali and Burkina Faso. Their stupidity and lack of foresight is mind-boggling! ..."
"... I understand the role which the Obama administration played in getting the Libyan intervention started. However the major destruction of Libya's fragile structure of governance under Qaddafi was done by the French, Brits, and Italians. ..."
Sep 16, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

The United States cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials can't seem to decide which faction they want to back.

The Western-created disaster in Libya continues to grow worse. Fighting between Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar's so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) and the even more misnamed Government of National Accord (GNA) has intensified in and around Tripoli. The LNA boasted on September 11 that its forces had routed troops of the Sarraj militia, a GNA ally, killing about two hundred of them. That total may be exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the situation has become increasingly violent and chaotic in Tripoli and other portions of Libya, with innocent civilians bearing the brunt of the suffering.

An article in Bloomberg News provides a succinct account of the poisonous fruits of the U.S.-led "humanitarian" military intervention in 2011. "Libya is enduring its worst violence since the 2011 NATO-backed ouster of Muammar el-Qaddafi, which ushered in years of instability that allowed Islamist radicals to thrive and turned the country into a hub for migrants destined to Europe. Haftar had launched the war as the United Nations was laying the ground for a political conference to unite the country. It is now more divided than ever." The country has become the plaything not only of rival domestic factions but major Middle East powers , including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Those regimes are waging a ruthless geopolitical competition, providing arms and in some cases even launching airstrikes on behalf of their preferred clients.

The United States also cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials seemingly can't even decide which faction it wants to back. Washington's official policy continues to support the GNA, which the United Nations recognizes as the country's legitimate government -- even though its writ extends to little territory beyond the Tripoli metropolitan area. President Donald Trump, however, had an extremely cordial, lengthy telephone conversation in April with Haftar and appeared impressed with Haftar's professed determination to combat terrorist groups and bring order and unity to Libya. Neither Libyan faction now seems certain about Washington's stance.

Given the appalling aftermath of the original U.S.-led intervention, one might hope that advocates of an activist policy would be chastened and back away from further meddling in that unfortunate country. Yet, that is not the case. Neither the Trump administration nor the humanitarian crusaders in Barack Obama's administration who caused the calamity in the first place seem inclined to advocate a more cautious, restrained U.S. policy.

One poster child for such continuing arrogance is Samantha Power, an influential national security council staffer in 2011 and later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In her new book, The Education of an Idealist , Power takes no responsibility whatever for the Libya debacle. Indeed, flippant might be too generous a term for her treatment of the episode. "We could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own," she contends. American Conservative analyst Daniel Larison correctly excoriates her argument as "a pathetic attempt by Power to deny responsibility for the effects of a war she backed by shrugging her shoulders and pleading ignorance. If Libyan culture was so opaque and hard for the Obama administration to understand, they should never have taken sides in an internal conflict there. If the 'culture was not our own' and they couldn't anticipate what was going to happen because of that, then how arrogant must the policymakers who argued in favor of intervention have been?"

The answer to Larison's rhetorical question is "extraordinarily arrogant." It is not as though prudent foreign-policy experts didn't warn Power and her colleagues about the probable consequences of intervening in a volatile, fragile country like Libya. Indeed, as Robert Gates, Obama's secretary of defense, confirms in his memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War , the Obama administration itself was deeply divided about the advisability of intervention. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Vice President Joe Biden, and Gates were opposed. Among the most outspoken proponents of action were Power and her mentor, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Gates notes further that Obama was deeply torn, later telling his secretary of defense that the decision was a "51 to 49" call.

The existence of a sharp internal division is sufficient evidence by itself that Power's attempt to absolve herself and other humanitarian crusaders of responsibility for the subsequent tragedy is without merit. Indeed, it has even less credibility than Pontius Pilate's infamous effort to evade guilt. They were warned of the probable outcome, yet they chose to disregard those warnings.

Power, Clinton, Obama and other proponents of ousting Qaddafi turned Libya into a chaotic Somalia on the Mediterranean, and the blood of innocents shed since 2011 is on their hands. Given the stark split within the president's national security team, the Libya intervention was especially reckless and unjustified. The default option in such a case should have been against intervention, not plunging ahead.

The Trump administration should learn from the blunders of its predecessor and resist any temptation to meddle further. America does not have a dog in the ongoing fight between Haftar and the GNA, and we should simply accept whatever outcome emerges. Washington's arrogant interference has caused enough suffering in Libya already.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the National Interest , is the author of thirteen books and more than eight hundred articles on international affairs. His latest book is NATO: The Dangerous Dinosaur .

Druid • 7 hours ago ,

The outcome in Libya is what the intent was - chaos, per the Yinon plan. The side effect of mass immigration to Europe was warned by Gaddafi! All was known, yet the destabilization war continued.

npbinni • 8 hours ago ,

Obama and company not only destroyed Libya, they also helped to unleash a wave of jihadis who are terrorizing vast swaths of west Africa, especially Mali and Burkina Faso. Their stupidity and lack of foresight is mind-boggling!

dieter heymann • 13 hours ago ,

Libya was and still is the case of a civil war into which foreign powers have intervened. The major parties of that war have always been the Tripolitanian West and the Cyrenaican East. Whoever is on top considers the others to be the rebels. That is how the demise of Qaddafi began. For him Benghazi was the rebel's nest which needed some cleaning. Nothing has changed. Haftar is the new Qaddafi.

I understand the role which the Obama administration played in getting the Libyan intervention started. However the major destruction of Libya's fragile structure of governance under Qaddafi was done by the French, Brits, and Italians.

Mark Thomason • a day ago ,

You can always make things worse. It is one thing that Trump and friends are good at.

They don't consider that a criticism either, since they want what the rest of us consider worse -- more war, more enemies, more inequality in outcomes at home, more desperation at home giving more power to the haves over the have-nots.

redeemed626 • 2 days ago • edited ,

Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" is a timeless classic that still applies to articles produced for electronic consumption. One of Adler's primary admonitions was to consider the author's expertise, credibility, and potential biases. With regard to this article, scrolling down to the end reveals the author's association with the Koch Brother financed Cato Institute. The Koch Brothers and their money have done more to destroy American democracy than any foreign tyrant or Presidential folly.

And oh, by the way, what did the Neocons and the Vulcans of the W Administration do to the entire Middle East other than create a contiguous geographic belt of Iranian Shiite influence from Tehran to Beirut?

[Sep 18, 2019] "Why do Dems continue this charade?" Trump ally Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) asked. Lewandowski replied: "I think they hate this president more than they love their country."

Dems still beat a dead horse, This is so stupid that there are chances that they will lose electins to Trump again.
Corey Lewandowski Opening statement - YouTube
Notable quotes:
"... "If instead of focusing on petty and personal politics, the committee focused on solving the challenges of this generation, imagine how many people we could help." ..."
"... He also took a swipe at Trump's 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and her handling of emails, and criticized the "Obama-Biden administration" for its inability to stop Russia election interference -- dropping the name of the former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate. ..."
"... Nadler is an incompetent idiot with a Napoleon complex. Why did this hearing ever happen and televised when it was certain it was going to be a bust. ..."
"... More of our vicious, counterproductive political duopoly. This was just one example of what is happening in general with our current political processes - a lot of stagnation. ..."
Sep 17, 2019 | www.washingtonpost.com

He set the tone in his opening statement, mocking Democrats and ridiculing what he called the "fake Russia collusion narrative."

"We as a nation would be better served if elected officials like you concentrated your efforts to combat the true crises facing our country as opposed to going down rabbit holes like this hearing," Lewandowski said. "If instead of focusing on petty and personal politics, the committee focused on solving the challenges of this generation, imagine how many people we could help."

... ... ...

He also took a swipe at Trump's 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and her handling of emails, and criticized the "Obama-Biden administration" for its inability to stop Russia election interference -- dropping the name of the former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate.

"Donald Trump was a private citizen and had no more responsibility than I did to protect the 2016 election," he said. "That fell to the Obama-Biden administration and they failed. "

... ... ...

At times the hearing was almost comical. When Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) asked Lewandowski, "Are you the hit man, bag man, the lookout or all of the above?" Lewandowski replied: "I think I'm the good-looking man, actually."

Lewandowski also scolded Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) for saying the tooth fairy was not real: "My children are watching, so thank you for that."

Republicans, meanwhile, used their time to praise the president and sympathize with Lewandowski because Democrats asked him to testify.

"Why do Dems continue this charade?" Trump ally Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) asked. Lewandowski replied: "I think they hate this president more than they love their country."

=== 5 minutes ago Lewandowski made everyone including himself look foolish and today’s circus proved nothing except Nadler is an incompetent idiot with a Napoleon complex. Why did this hearing ever happen and televised when it was certain it was going to be a bust. 1 minute ago One of the commentators said this was exactly to be expected … He said the Dems requested this hearing because their constituents wanted it. I think plenty of us knew what was gonna happen -- as it often does in these situations, regardless of party. More of our vicious, counterproductive political duopoly. This was just one example of what is happening in general with our current political processes - a lot of stagnation.

I think we need to get away from parties, they naturally lead to antagonism, and an "us vs them" mentality, and fighting. I have some ideas (humble and basic) on doing away with parties at ourconstitution.info , Outreach, Other Comments.

We must do something; take back Washington's lead -- he couldn't stand parties. Much scarier stuff as well -- rise of the Medical-Military Industrial, " a lot of killers" (Trump to O'Reilly, video on my LInks page), in and out of hospitals. Some are concerned also that the military and CIA are running the Country -- I see a big problem with these career positions vs desires of an oncoming president. Apparently, these orgs, if they don't like a president or policy, just wait them out (or kill them), "contributing" to this current disgrace of a Constitutional Republic. What to do about that? Something needs to be done... Maybe those personnel should be changed out, they can be as much or more dangerous than a president for life...

It is Our Republic, Of, By, and For The People, as long as we can keep it. Protest with me in Miami, or wherever you are, before it is too late.

[Sep 18, 2019] Middle East Mystery Theater: Who Attacked Saudi Arabia's Oil Supply?

Notable quotes:
"... Committee members Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Vir.) explicitly announced their opposition to war with Iran. And prominent war powers critic Sen. Jeff Markley (D-Ore.) quipped that, "[b]ack when Presidents used to follow the Constitution, they sought consent for military action from Congress, not foreign governments that murder reporters," referring to the assassination of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi. ..."
"... "Diplomacy by Twitter has not worked so far and it surely is not working with Iran. The president needs to stop threatening military strikes via social media," said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Mary.) in response to a question from the National Interest . "The attack on Saudi Arabia is troubling whether it was perpetrated by Houthi rebels or Iran. The U.S. should regain its leadership by working with our allies to isolate Iran for its belligerent actions in the region." ..."
"... "The U.S. should not be looking for any opportunity to start a dangerous and costly war with Iran. Congress has not authorized war against Iran and we've made it crystal clear that Saudi Arabia needs to withdraw from Yemen," he continued. ..."
"... Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has long been a critic of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, proposing a successful bill to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort. (He did not have enough votes to override the veto.) After the attacks, he wrote a long Twitter thread explaining how "the Saudis sowed the seeds of this mess" in Yemen. ..."
"... "It's simply amazing how the Saudis call all our shots these days. We don't have a mutual defense alliance with KSA, for good reason. We shouldn't pretend we do," Murphy added. "And frankly, no matter where this latest drone strike was launched from, there is no short or long term upside to the U.S. military getting more deeply involved in the growing regional contest between the Saudis and Iranians." ..."
"... "Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First,'" said Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, invoking a popular Trump slogan. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.), who had invoked Trump's antiwar message in a public feud with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) over the weekend, took to CNN to warn against striking Iran. ..."
"... "This is a regional conflict, that there's no reason the superpower of the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran. It would be a needless escalation of this," he told journalist Jake Tapper. "Those who loved the Iraq War, the Cheneys, the Boltons, the Kristols, they all are clamoring and champing at the bit for another war in Iran. But it's not a walk in the park." ..."
"... "In order to have clean ships by the first of January next year, all the world's shipping fleet from about now until the end of the year are busy emptying their tanks of heavy sulphur fuel oil and filling their tanks with low sulphur fuel oil, which is the new standard," Latham explained, claiming that the attack could have taken up to 20 percent of the world's desulphurization capacity out of commission. ..."
"... "This little accident was designed to be maximally disruptive to the world's oil market. It could not have happened at a worse time." "But what is really interesting is in Amsterdam this morning, I saw that for fuel oil -- the sulphurous stuff -- the price went down," Latham continued, speculating that international powers might delay the new environmental regulations by months and inadvertently drive down the price of oil in the long run. ..."
"... On Sunday, Trump tapped into emergency U.S. oil reserves, in order to stabilize prices. It's not clear, however, that the United States has enough oil to cope with wider attacks on energy infrastructure. "If the Iranians did this, they have shown they have pretty immense capabilities clearly," Parsi told the National Interest . "In the case of a full-scale war, imagine what this will do for the global economy. It's not that difficult to imagine what that will do to Trump's re-election prospects. I think that is something Trump understands." ..."
Sep 18, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

Retired Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis pointed out that the puncture marks do not actually show the origin of the attack. "Missiles can fly from almost anywhere. They have the ability to maneuver! And certainly drones can, too," the Defense Priorities senior fellow told the National Interest . "There hasn't been the time to do an actual analysis on the ground, so let's wait and see."

Mark Latham, managing partner at the London-based analysis firm Commodities Intelligence, told the National Interest that the puncture marks pointed to a cruise missile with no explosive warhead. Removing the payload would allow the missile to carry more fuel and launch from farther away from its target.

... ... ...

"Mr. X is a sophisticated fellow. He's sourced some Iranian cruise missiles. He's removed the explosive payload. He's replaced the explosive payload with fuel," he said. "So this isn't your twenty dollar Amazon drone. This is a sophisticated military operation."

"The culprit behind the Abqaiq attack is most definitely the Islamic Republic, either directly or through one of its proxies," argued Varsha Koduvayur, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

"The attack fits the pattern of Iran signaling to the Gulf states that if it can't get its oil out, it will cause their oil exports to become collateral damage," Koduvayur told the National Interest . "It's because of how strong our coercive financial tools are that Iran is resorting to attacks like this: it's lashing out."

Violating an Obama-era agreement to regulate Iran's nuclear research program, the Trump administration imposed massive sanctions on Iran's oil industry beginning in May 2018. The goal of this "maximum pressure" campaign was to force Iran to accept a "better" deal. Since then, Iranian forces have captured a British oil tanker and allegedly sabotaged tankers from other countries.

There were some signals that Trump was planning to use the ongoing United Nations General Assembly in New York to open a new diplomatic channel with Iran, especially after the firing of hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton. But the weekend attack sent Trump into reverse.

"Remember when Iran shot down a drone, saying knowingly that it was in their 'airspace' when, in fact, it was nowhere close. They stuck strongly to that story knowing that it was a very big lie," he said in a Monday morning Twitter post, referring to a June incident when Iranian and American forces almost went to war. "Now they say that they had nothing to do with the attack on Saudi Arabia. We'll see?"

He also hinted at a violent U.S. response.

"There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!" Trump wrote on Sunday.

"Saudi Arabia is not a formal treaty ally of ours, so there are no international agreements that obligate us to come to their defense," John Glaser, director of foreign-policy studies at the CATO Institute, stated. "This does not amount to a clear and present danger to the United States, so no self-defense justification is relevant. He would therefore need authorization from Congress."

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had mixed reactions to the attack.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) proposed putting "on the table an attack on Iranian oil refineries" in order to "break the regime's back." His press office did not respond to a follow-up question from the National Interest asking whether the president would have the authority to do so.

Amy Grappone, spokeswoman for Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), told the National Interest that the Senator "will support an appropriate and proportionate response" after "studying the latest intelligence pertaining to Iran's malign activities, including these recent attacks in Saudi Arabia."

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, condemned the attack with a backhanded insult towards Saudi Arabia. "Despite some ongoing policy differences with the kingdom, no nation should be subjected to these kinds of attacks on it soil and against its people," he wrote on Twitter, declining to name Iran as the culprit.

Committee members Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Vir.) explicitly announced their opposition to war with Iran. And prominent war powers critic Sen. Jeff Markley (D-Ore.) quipped that, "[b]ack when Presidents used to follow the Constitution, they sought consent for military action from Congress, not foreign governments that murder reporters," referring to the assassination of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

"Diplomacy by Twitter has not worked so far and it surely is not working with Iran. The president needs to stop threatening military strikes via social media," said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Mary.) in response to a question from the National Interest . "The attack on Saudi Arabia is troubling whether it was perpetrated by Houthi rebels or Iran. The U.S. should regain its leadership by working with our allies to isolate Iran for its belligerent actions in the region."

"The U.S. should not be looking for any opportunity to start a dangerous and costly war with Iran. Congress has not authorized war against Iran and we've made it crystal clear that Saudi Arabia needs to withdraw from Yemen," he continued.

Asked how he would vote on a declaration of war, the senator told the National Interest : "Let's hope it does not come to that. Congress has not authorized war against Iran. The majority voted to engage them diplomatically to slow their nuclear ambitions. The international community is ready to work with the U.S. again to ease economic pressure on Iran in exchange for their restraint. We are at a dangerous precipice."

In a statement emailed to the National Interest and posted to Twitter, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) was even more direct: "The US should never go to war to protect Saudi oil."

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has long been a critic of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, proposing a successful bill to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort. (He did not have enough votes to override the veto.) After the attacks, he wrote a long Twitter thread explaining how "the Saudis sowed the seeds of this mess" in Yemen.

"It's simply amazing how the Saudis call all our shots these days. We don't have a mutual defense alliance with KSA, for good reason. We shouldn't pretend we do," Murphy added. "And frankly, no matter where this latest drone strike was launched from, there is no short or long term upside to the U.S. military getting more deeply involved in the growing regional contest between the Saudis and Iranians."

But the reaction did not fall neatly along party lines.

"Iran is one of the most dangerous state sponsors of terrorism. This may well be the thing that calls for military action against Iran, if that's what the intelligence supports," said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) in a Monday interview with Fox News. Others pointed out that attacking Iran would contradict Trump's own principles.

"Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First,'" said Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, invoking a popular Trump slogan. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.), who had invoked Trump's antiwar message in a public feud with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) over the weekend, took to CNN to warn against striking Iran.

"This is a regional conflict, that there's no reason the superpower of the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran. It would be a needless escalation of this," he told journalist Jake Tapper. "Those who loved the Iraq War, the Cheneys, the Boltons, the Kristols, they all are clamoring and champing at the bit for another war in Iran. But it's not a walk in the park."

Davis agreed with Paul's assessment. "There's too many people who have lost touch with understanding what war is all about. They think it's easy," he told the National Interest . "Just imagine this. What we go ahead and do this, and Iran makes good on their threats, and American warships get sunk in the Gulf?" "This is not America's fight," he concluded. "The American armed forces are not on loan as a Saudi defense force."

"There's another claim that the impact on oil markets is sufficient to impact the vital U.S. interest in the free flow of energy coming out of that region, but that argument quickly descends into absurdity when we remember that the Trump administration has been trying to zero-out Iranian oil exports, for a host of spurious reasons," Glaser told the National Interest . "Washington is also aggressively sanctioning Venezuela, making it harder for Caracas to bring oil to market, too. If we really cared about the supply of oil, we wouldn't be doing this."

In any case, the attack may not have affected oil markets in such a straightforward way. Latham says that the attack struck an oil desulphurization facility. At the moment, desulphurized fuel is in high demand from the shipping industry, which is rushing to comply with new international environmental regulations.

"In order to have clean ships by the first of January next year, all the world's shipping fleet from about now until the end of the year are busy emptying their tanks of heavy sulphur fuel oil and filling their tanks with low sulphur fuel oil, which is the new standard," Latham explained, claiming that the attack could have taken up to 20 percent of the world's desulphurization capacity out of commission.

"This little accident was designed to be maximally disruptive to the world's oil market. It could not have happened at a worse time." "But what is really interesting is in Amsterdam this morning, I saw that for fuel oil -- the sulphurous stuff -- the price went down," Latham continued, speculating that international powers might delay the new environmental regulations by months and inadvertently drive down the price of oil in the long run.

On Sunday, Trump tapped into emergency U.S. oil reserves, in order to stabilize prices. It's not clear, however, that the United States has enough oil to cope with wider attacks on energy infrastructure. "If the Iranians did this, they have shown they have pretty immense capabilities clearly," Parsi told the National Interest . "In the case of a full-scale war, imagine what this will do for the global economy. It's not that difficult to imagine what that will do to Trump's re-election prospects. I think that is something Trump understands."

Matthew Petti is a national security reporter at the National Interest.

[Sep 18, 2019] This B's posting is further proof that the US of A (and it's flunky allies) are indeed led by the stupid, corrupt, and ignorant

The dangerous disease that inflict the USA neoliberal elite can be called "supremacism delirium"
As for quality of arms produced, when profit is the main motivation, the quality of design suffer. Still despite recent setbacks the USA remain the leader in new arm technologies.
Sep 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
GeorgeV , Sep 17 2019 20:09 utc | 8
B's posting is further proof that the US of A (and it's flunky allies) are indeed led by the stupid, corrupt, and ignorant.

While Russia and Iran are taking rational routes to protect themselves, the US and it's allies are pouring billions, if not trillions, of dollars (and thousands of lives) into a foreign policy that can only be described as the foreign policy of God, for it passes all human understanding.

karlof1 , Sep 17 2019 20:12 utc | 9

Thanks b! One way looking radar is so Pre-Second World War! The Patriot's MPQ-53 radar has a search sector of 90° and track capability of 120°--an amazingly inferior capability I wasn't aware of, nor is the vast majority of the public, which is why that twitter gif I linked to on the previous thread is humorous. In that comment, it was said that the radar's were reoriented to aim at Houthiland which is the given excuse as to why the Iranian attack wasn't detected. I don't buy that for an instant.

Houthi media's gone silent for now as it awaits a response from Saudis before launching there next attack in under 48 hours--yes, they did place an actual time, but were very general about the types of targets, although the top threat remains hydrocarbon infrastructure. RT reports :

"Saudi Arabia's energy minister said that its oil supplies had resumed and that its oil market would be 'fully back online' by the end of September following attacks which Washington blames on Iran while Riyadh is still probing.

"Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman told the media that oil production in October would reach 9.89 million barrels per day and 12 million bpd by the end of November."

We shall see if the output equals the boast, particularly if Houthis continue their attacks. No questions about providing better defenses reminds me of the Death Star Commandeer's famous last words about his weapon's invincibility.

Meanwhile, Nuttyahoo's coalition's narrowly losing the election.

Christian J Chuba , Sep 17 2019 20:18 utc | 11
Fighting Dirty w/Aysymmetric Warfare

I love how the warmongers on FOX / CNN make Iran / Russia sound nefarious that they call their strategy A2D2 or asymmetric warfare (aka actual defense of their country instead of power projection). How is using short / medium range missiles or a green water navy 'asymmetric'?

If we do go to war w/Iran the only way we win is by committing war crimes by bombing population centers until they surrender, we can't beat them in a straight up fight. I'm not a military wonk but I can see the relative competence levels. We can't even get a decent photo of a boat with a bomb on it after it's been sitting in broad daylight for 10hrs.

[Sep 18, 2019] Jerry Nadler is aiming to become the Rachael Maddow of Adam Schiffs

Humor aside Corey Lewandowski Opening statement deserves to be listened. Just 5 min.
This was obviously a Dog & Pony show by Nadler and his gang who can't shoot strait
Sep 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Seminole Nation , 5 hours ago

"Jerry Nadler is aiming to become the Rachael Maddow of Adam Schiffs" – Dan Bongino (3-24-19)

Gilbert Perea , 9 hours ago

You have to laugh , I wonder if Mr. Cowen has a chicken wing in his jacket pocket.

RIC shady , 7 hours ago

"The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all." - Valery Legasov, Soviet chemist

ZENIGMATV , 3 hours ago

Nadler:Corey what time is it? Corey :It's 2pm. Nadler: The clock shows 1:59 . Charge Corey for lying to Congress! All a gotcha game by a group of angry haters.

ZENIGMATV , 3 hours ago

Nadler:Corey what time is it? Corey :It's 2pm. Nadler: The clock shows 1:59 . Charge Corey for lying to Congress! All a gotcha game by a group of angry haters.

Jim Carpenter , 6 hours ago

Nadler provides so much comic relief!!!! He is definitely one of my all time favorite oafs.

Forever Joy , 9 hours ago

40 million tax payer dollars wasted...boom! Pathetic, thanks Democrats!

Bobwehada Babyitzaboy , 3 hours ago

3rd time. If that were good for the left they wouldn't shut up about it. This is another witch hunt with attempt to deceive

Dr.Roberto Rodriguez Jr. , 5 hours ago

What a joke. Democratic live in a fantasy world

Ricky Alfaro , 5 hours ago

Corey is toast!

Teresa Upchurch , 8 hours ago

This is obviously a Dog & Pony show by the Nadler nerd group of Demonrats! Can't even follow the House rules. Sickening !!!

[Sep 18, 2019] F-35 Fighter as the ritual construction similar to Egyptian pyramids, the Cathedral for MIC.

Sep 18, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

The Egyptians had pyramids. The Romans had roads, aqueducts, and coliseums. The medieval Europeans had castles and cathedrals. These days, America's pyramids, aqueducts, and cathedrals are those warplanes, among other deadly weapons programs , including a $1.7 trillion one to "modernize" the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

... ... ...

As ephemeral as the F-35 stealth fighter may prove in historical terms, it's already a classic symbol of America's ever more fruitless forever wars . Like them , the F-35 program has proven staggeringly expensive, incredibly wasteful, and impossible to stop, no matter the woeful results . It has come to symbolize the too-big-to-fail, too-sacrosanct-to-reject part of America's militarized culture of technological violence.

... ... ...

Harper's Andrew Cockburn recently used it to illustrate what he termed "the Pentagon Syndrome ," the practice of expending enormous sums on weapons of marginal utility.

[Sep 18, 2019] US wants to seize all money Edward Snowden makes from new book - Reuters

Notable quotes:
"... The United States is seeking all proceeds earned by Snowden for the book, the Justice Department said. The lawsuit also names the "corporate entities" behind the book's publication as nominal defendants. ..."
"... Ben Wizner, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who represents Snowden, said the lawsuit was without merit. "This book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news organizations," he said in a statement, adding that Snowden would have submitted it for review if he thought the government would review it in good faith. ..."
Sep 18, 2019 | uk.reuters.com

The United States filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked secret documents about U.S. telephone and internet surveillance in 2013, saying his new book violates non-disclosure agreements.

The Justice Department said Snowden published his memoir, "Permanent Record," without submitting it to intelligence agencies for review, adding that speeches given by Snowden also violated nondisclosure agreements. In 2013, Snowden wrote "Everything You Know about the Constitution is Wrong."

The United States is seeking all proceeds earned by Snowden for the book, the Justice Department said. The lawsuit also names the "corporate entities" behind the book's publication as nominal defendants.

Ben Wizner, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who represents Snowden, said the lawsuit was without merit. "This book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news organizations," he said in a statement, adding that Snowden would have submitted it for review if he thought the government would review it in good faith.

Representatives for the book's publisher, Macmillan Publishers, and its unit Henry Holt & Co, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Snowden has lived in Russia since he revealed details of U.S. intelligence agencies' secret surveillance programs.

Though he is viewed by some as a hero, U.S. authorities want him to stand in a criminal trial over his disclosures of classified information.

Speaking by video link at an event in Berlin to promote the book, Snowden said that while he had signed a non-disclosure agreement to maintain secrecy, he had also sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

"You've told the government you're not going to talk to journalists. You've told them you're not going to write a book," Snowden said. "At the same time you have an oath to defend the Constitution. And the secret that you are asked to protect is that the government is violating that Constitution and the rights of people around the world."

Reporting by Makini Brice; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington and Paul Carrell in Berlin; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Lisa Shumaker Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

[Sep 18, 2019] Thanks to the USA track record, everything now is viewed from the prism of possible false flag attack

As S Brian Wilson put it: "There was a moment in Viet Nam when I questioned whether everything I had been taught about "America" was one big fabricated lie – a huge pretend. "
Sep 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Jackrabbit , Sep 17 2019 20:50 utc | 16
Well, I still think the failure to anticipate a Houthi attack is suspicious.

Another "failure of imagination" like 9-11 that conveniently allowed the attack to happen.

Even if the radar only points one way, they could've set up radars that pointed in other directions. After all, the Houthi had already demonstrated their ability to strike targets far from Yemen.

And the damage done is also suspicious. 17 targets hit by 10 long-range drones/cruise missiles? And the high precision? USA+Saudis are saying the ONLY explanation is that Iran participated in the attack. But there's another explanation: sabotage (or photoshop) that increased the damage so that oil prices would go higher and fears of war with Iran would distract everyone from the possibility that its really all about oil prices and Netanyahu's election.

Self-inflicted damage after a major attack? That too was something we saw in 9-11 when WTC7 was brought down.

PS Like many, my initial reaction was that this attack would be the justification for war with Iran. But increased TENSIONS are probably enough for TPTB to achieve some very desireable ojectives:

1. Election of Netanyahu
TINA!

2. Funding Trump's "Deal of the Century" for Palestinians
Saudis will pay them to leave with the increased revenue from higher oil prices

3. USA financial bailout
Financial firms have tens of billions invested in fracking which is not profitable at low oil prices

4. More pressure on Iran
But not war ... yet

[Sep 17, 2019] The Spy Who Failed by Scott Ritter

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The source was said to be responsible for the reporting used by the former director of the CIA, John Brennan, in making the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election for the purpose of tipping the scales in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump. ..."
"... On closer scrutiny, however, this aspect of the story falls apart, as does just about everything CNN, The New York Times ..."
"... "And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free," John 8:32, is etched into the wall of the main lobby of the Old CIA Headquarters Building. ..."
"... Every Russian diplomat assigned to the United States is screened to ascertain his or her susceptibility for recruitment. The FBI does this from a counterintelligence perspective, looking for Russian spies. The CIA does the same, but with the objective of recruiting a Russian source who can remain in the employ of the Russian government, and thereby provide the CIA with intelligence information commensurate to their standing and access. Turning a senior Russian diplomat is difficult; recruiting a junior Russian diplomat like Oleg Smolenkov less so. Someone like Smolenkov would be viewed not so much by the limited access he provided at the time of recruitment, but rather his potential for promotion and the increased opportunity for more essential access provided by such. ..."
"... The reality is, however, that the CIA and the FBI have different goals and objectives when it comes to the Russians they recruit. As such, Smolenkov's recruitment was most likely a CIA-only affair, run by NR but closely monitored by the Russian Operations Group of the Agency's Central Eurasia Division, who would have responsibility for managing Smolenkov upon his return to Moscow. ..."
"... But his job as foreman of the Rossotrudnichestvo coop was not the kind of job a Maurive Thorez graduate gets; Smolenkov had to have felt slighted. He allegedly turned to drink, and his marriage was on the rocks; his colleagues spoke of a man who believed his salary was too low. ..."
"... The enticements of money and future opportunity -- the CIA's principle recruitment ploys -- more than likely were a factor in convincing this dissatisfied diplomat to defect. ..."
"... the fact is, sometime in 2007-2008, Smolenkov was recruited by the CIA. ..."
"... He was granted a "second-level" security clearance, which allowed him to handle top secret information. ..."
"... Moscow Station, however, was having trouble carrying out its clandestine tasks. In the fall of 2011, the CIA's chief of station in Moscow, Steven Hall, had been approached by his counterpart in the Russian Federal Security Service (the FSB, Russia's equivalent of the FBI) and warned that the CIA should stop trying to recruit agents from within the FSB ranks; the FSB had detected several of these attempts, which it deemed inappropriate given the ongoing cooperation between the intelligence services of the two countries regarding the war on terrorism. ..."
"... The loss of Hall at this very sensitive time created a problem for both the CIA and Smolenkov. Smolenkov's new assignment was a dream come true for the CIA -- never before had the agency managed to place a controlled agent into the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation. ..."
"... With communications down, and the chief of station evicted, Smolenkov was left in a state of limbo while the CIA trained up new case officers capable of operating in Moscow and sought a replacement for Hall. ..."
"... "To put it mildly," Ushakov said, "it is surprising that this extremely crude, clumsy attempt at recruitment took place in a situation where both President Obama and President Putin have clearly stated the importance of more active cooperation and contacts between the special services of the two countries." ..."
"... As a senior aide to Ushakov, Smolenkov was ideally positioned to gather intelligence about the Russian response. If he was able to communicate this information to the CIA, it would have provided Obama and his advisers time to prepare a response to the Russian letter. The situation meant that Smolenkov may have been reporting on events related to the expulsion of Hall, one of the CIA officers specifically trained to manage his reporting. ..."
"... Smolenkov's success was directly linked to the work of his boss, Ushakov. In June 2015, Ushakov was put in charge of establishing a high-level working group in the fuel and energy sector for the purpose of improving bilateral cooperation with Azerbaijan. The reporting Smolenkov would have been able to provide on the work of this group would have been of tremendous assistance to those in the Obama administration working on U.S. energy policy, especially as it related to countering Russian moves in the former Soviet Republics. ..."
"... Ushakov's 10-year tenure as Russia's ambassador to the U.S. gave him unprecedented insight into U.S. decision making, experience and expertise Putin increasingly relied upon as he formulated and implemented responses to U.S. efforts to contain and punish Russia on the international stage. ..."
"... While Ushakov's meetings with Putin were conducted either in private, or in small groups of senior advisers, meaning Smolenkov was not present, Smolenkov was able to collect intelligence on the periphery by photographing itineraries and working papers, as well as overhearing comments made by Ushakov, that collectively would provide U.S. policymakers with important insight into Putin's thinking. ..."
"... According to the FSB, the Russians were adept at identifying CIA officers working under State Department cover and would subject these individuals to extensive surveillance. ..."
"... In addition to the decimation of its staff, Moscow Station was experiencing an alarming number of its agents being discovered by the FSB and arrested. While the Russians were circumspect about most of these cases, on several occasions they indicated that they had uncovered a spy by intercepting the electronic communications between him and the CIA. This meant that the Russians were aware of, and actively pursuing, the Google-based internet-based system used by the CIA to communicate with its agents in Russia. ..."
"... Sometime in early August 2016, a courier from the CIA arrived at the White House carrying a plain, unmarked white envelope. Inside was an intelligence report from Smolenkov that CIA Director Brennan considered to be so sensitive that he kept it out of the President's Daily Brief, concerned that even that restrictive process was too inclusive to adequately protect the source. The intelligence was to be read by four people only -- Obama, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Avril Haines and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. The document was to be returned to the courier once it had been read. ..."
"... The contents of the report were alarming -- Putin had personally ordered the cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election in favor of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. ..."
"... The White House found the Smolenkov report so convincing that in September 2016, during a meeting of the G-20 in China, Obama pulled Putin aside and told him to stop meddling in the U.S. election. Putin was reportedly nonplussed by Obama's intervention. ..."
"... It is not publicly known what prompted the report from Smolenkov which Brennan found so alarming. Was it received out of the blue, a target of opportunity which Smolenkov exploited? Was it based upon a specific tasking submitted by Smolenkov's CIA handlers in response to a tasking from above? Or was it a result of the intervention of the CIA director, who tasked Smolenkov outside normal channels? In any event, once Brennan created his special analytical unit, Smolenkov became his dedicated source. If Smolenko was in this for the money, as appears to be the case, he would have been motivated to come up with the "correct" answer to Brennan's tasking for information on Putin's role. By late 2016, Western media had made quite clear what kind of answer Brennan wanted. ..."
"... Brennan took the extraordinary measure of sequestering the source from the rest of the Intelligence Community. He also confronted the head of the Russian FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, about the risks involved in interfering in U.S. elections. ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Smolenkov's firing occurred right before the Intelligence Community released its much-anticipated assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election ..."
"... Brennan had sold the Smolenkov reporting to both President Obama and President-elect Trump, along with the rest of the intelligence community, as "high-quality information." It was, at best, nothing more than uncorroborated rumor or, at worst, simple disinformation. This reporting, which was parroted by an unquestioning mainstream media that accepted it as fact, created an impression amongst the American public that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered and directed a Russian interference campaign during the 2016 election designed "to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible," according to the ICA. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... Concerned that Smolenkov could be arrested by the Russians and, in doing so, have control over the narrative of Russian interference transfer to Moscow, the CIA once again approached Smolenkov to defect to the United States. This time the Russian agent agreed. ..."
"... Sometime in June 2018, Smolenkov and his wife bought a home worth nearly $1 million in northern Virginia. The couple used their real names. They were not afraid. ..."
"... I can only speculate as to the circumstances that led to Smolenkov's firing by secret decree. Normally, Russians charged with transmitting classified material to the intelligence services of a foreign state are arrested, placed on trial and given lengthy prison sentences, or worse. This did not happen to Smolenkov. ..."
"... In any case, the Smolenkov report in the white envelope represented a level of access that would have significantly deviated from what one could expect from a person in his position and which suggests he may have been telling the CIA what he knew Brennan wanted to hear. ..."
"... The third scenario is that Smolenkov, a low-level failure of a diplomat with drinking issues, marital problems and monetary frustrations, was recruited by the CIA, but only with the complicity of the Russian security services. ..."
"... The same red flags that the CIA looks for when recruiting agents are also looked at by Russian counterintelligence. At what point in the recruitment process the Russians stepped in is unknown (if they did at all.) ..."
"... Moreover, this muddling diplomat whose questionable behavioral practices scream "recruit me" is, within three years of returning to Moscow, given a significant promotion that enables him to follow Ushakov into the Presidential Administration–a posting which would require extensive vetting by the Russian security services. Smolenkov's promotion pattern is enough, in and of itself, to raise red flags within the counterintelligence offices tasked with monitoring such things. The fact that it did not indicates that the quality and quantity of reporting being provided by Smolenkov was deemed by the Americans too important to interfere with. ..."
"... In this scenario, Smolenkov would have been playing to a script written by the Russian security services. Since he, technically, had broken no laws by serving as a double agent, he would not be subjected to arrest and trial. But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit. ..."
"... In my view, if one assumes that the Smolenkov July 2016 report at the center of this drama was not a result of serendipity, but rather a product derived from a specific request from his CIA managers to find out how high up in the Russian decision-making chain the authorization went for what U.S. intelligence agencies were already publicly pushing as an alleged DNC cyber attack, then the answer I believe becomes clear–the Russians knew the U.S. had an intelligence deficit. ..."
"... In my view, the CIA, Russia and Smolenkov were happy to maintain the status quo, with Smolenkov living in comfortable retirement with his family, the CIA continuing to accuse Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, and Russia denying it. ..."
"... Trump's instructions to Barr are linked to a desire on the part of the president to hold to account those responsible for creating the narrative of possible collusion. Reports indicate that Barr is particularly interested in finding out how and why the CIA concluded that Putin personally ordered the Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. ..."
"... Seen in this light, the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth. ..."
"... A few days following Smolenkov's "outing" by the U.S. media, the Russian government filed a request with Interpol for an investigation into how someone who had gone missing in Montenegro was now living in the United States. ..."
"... The only person at risk from this entire sordid affair is Brennan, whose reputation and potential livelihood is on the line. At best, Brennan is guilty of extremely poor judgement; at worst, he actively conspired to use the office of Director of the CIA to interfere in the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Neither option speaks well of the U.S. Intelligence Community and those in Congress charged with oversight of its operations. ..."
"... Watch Scott Ritter discussing this article on ..."
"... Consortium News does not necessarily endorse the views of its authors. ..."
"... If you value this original article, please consider ..."
"... making a donation ..."
"... to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
"... Before commenting please read Robert Parry's ..."
"... Allegations unsupported by facts, gross or misleading factual errors and ad hominem attacks, and abusive language toward other commenters or our writers will be removed. If your comment does not immediately appear, please be patient as it is manually reviewed. ..."
"... And under the third scenario, with Smolenkov a double agent all along, Ritter writes: "But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit." ..."
"... That doesn't make sense to me. In fact I see the opposite: if he had been a successfully run double agent all that time, then when his usefulness had ended he would have been decently pensioned off – not simply cut loose to fend for himself – but *not* allowed to travel abroad unimpeded (with his whole family, no less) where he would have the opportunity to cause mischief. ..."
"... In the extremely sophisticated world of high grade intelligence I have repeatedly said that the Brennan, Clapper, Comey trio were lead-footed imbeciles ..."
"... Read The CIA as Organized Crime and Strength of the Wolf and Strength of the Pack by Douglas Valentine. ..."
"... "Kiriakou also notes that the way Smolenkov's intelligence was handled raises echoes of the CIA's manipulation of intelligence to help justify the Iraq war. The information from Smolenkov was handled personally by then-CIA Director John Brennan. Brennan reportedly sidelined other CIA analysts and kept the Smolenkov information out of the Presidential Daily Briefing – instead delivering it personally to President Obama and a small group of officials." ..."
"... More like a Le Carre' film. The CIA was originally sold as an intelligence gathering and analysis organization, and was not supposed to be involved in operations. Thus, it was founded on lies and the lies have only grown since. ..."
"... Even the former communist state governments in Europe and the Soviet Union rued the day that they unleashed their secret police from accountability, and thereby became subservient to their power. ..."
"... I suspect Scott was provided a great deal of the reporting in this fascinating article from a disgruntled insider, or former insider. Knowledge of Brennan's break with protocol to form a select 'stand alone fusion cell' that reported only to him is something that I haven't seen reported before. In any case this story adds another red flag to the entire Russiagate hoax. ..."
"... Just as Mueller failed to interview Julian Assange or Christopher Steele for his report -- obvious red flags -- we should now watch the conduct of Barr's investigation. Will Barr's investigators interview Smolenkov? ..."
"... ( ) the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth. ..."
"... "If Smolenkov was a spy, he could have delivered important insights about Russia's foreign policy thinking and planning to U.S. intelligence. But if he was the source for the U.S. intelligence community's certainty that Putin personally orchestrated a covert interference campaign, that certainty rests on a weak foundation. Smolenkov served the wrong boss in the Kremlin to get reliable information about such ventures." ..."
Sep 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

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OPINION: Scott Ritter probes Oleg Smolenkov's role as a CIA asset and the use of his data by the director of the CIA to cast doubt over the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

By Scott Ritter
 Special to Consortium News

Reports that the CIA conducted an emergency exfiltration of a long-time human intelligence source who was highly placed within the Russian Presidential Administration sent shock waves throughout Washington, D.C.

The source was said to be responsible for the reporting used by the former director of the CIA, John Brennan, in making the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election for the purpose of tipping the scales in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump.

According to CNN's Jim Sciutto, the decision to exfiltrate the source was driven in part by concerns within the CIA over President Trump's cavalier approach toward handling classified information, including his willingness to share highly classified intelligence with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a controversial visit to the White House in May 2017.

On closer scrutiny, however, this aspect of the story falls apart, as does just about everything CNN, The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets have reported. There was a Russian spy whose information was used to push a narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election; this much appears to be true. Everything else that has been reported is either a mischaracterization of fact or an outright fabrication designed to hide one of the greatest intelligence failures in U.S. history -- the use by a CIA director of intelligence data specifically manipulated to interfere in the election of an American president.

The consequences of this interference has deleteriously impacted U.S. democratic institutions in ways the American people remain ignorant of -- in large part because of the complicity of the U.S. media when it comes to reporting this story.

This article attempts to set the record straight by connecting the dots presented by available information and creating a narrative shaped by a combination of derivative analysis and informed speculation. At best, this article brings the reader closer to the truth about Oleg Smolenkov's role as a CIA asset; at worst, it raises issues and questions that will help in determining the truth.

"And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free," John 8:32, is etched into the wall of the main lobby of the Old CIA Headquarters Building.

The Recruit

Oleg Smolenkov

In 2007, Oleg Smolenkov was living the life of a Russian diplomat abroad, serving in the Russian embassy in Washington. At 33 years of age, married with a 1-year old son, Smolenkov was the picture of a young diplomat on the rise. A protégé of Russian Ambassador Yuri Ushakov, Smolenkov worked as a second secretary assigned to the Russian Cultural Center, a combined museum and exhibition hall operated by the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation (better known by its common Russian name, Rossotrudnichestvo), an autonomous government agency operating under the auspices of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In addition to hosting Russian artists and musicians, Rossotrudnichestvo oversaw a program where it organized all-expense paid cultural exchanges for young Americans to travel to Russia, where they were accommodated in luxury hotels and met with Russian officials. Smolenkov's boss, Yegeny Zvedre, would also tour the United States, speaking at public forums where he addressed U.S.-Russian cooperation. As for Smolenkov himself, life was much more mundane -- he served as a purchasing agent for Rossotrudnichestvo, managing procurement and contract issues for a store operating out of the Rossotrudnichestvo building, which stood separate from the main embassy compound.

Rossotrudnichestvo had a darker side: the FBI long suspected that it operated as a front to recruit Americans to spy for Russia, and as such every Russian employee was viewed as a potential officer in the Russian intelligence service. This suspicion brought with it a level of scrutiny which revealed much about the character of the individual being surveilled, including information of a potentially compromising nature that could be used by the American intelligence services as the basis of a recruitment effort.

Every Russian diplomat assigned to the United States is screened to ascertain his or her susceptibility for recruitment. The FBI does this from a counterintelligence perspective, looking for Russian spies. The CIA does the same, but with the objective of recruiting a Russian source who can remain in the employ of the Russian government, and thereby provide the CIA with intelligence information commensurate to their standing and access. Turning a senior Russian diplomat is difficult; recruiting a junior Russian diplomat like Oleg Smolenkov less so. Someone like Smolenkov would be viewed not so much by the limited access he provided at the time of recruitment, but rather his potential for promotion and the increased opportunity for more essential access provided by such.

The responsibility within the CIA for recruiting Russian diplomats living in the United States falls to the National Resources Division, or NR, part of the Directorate of Operations, or DO -- the clandestine arm of the CIA. In a perfect world, the CIA domestic station in Washington, D.C., would coordinate with the local FBI field office and develop a joint approach for recruiting a Russian diplomat such as Smolenkov.

The reality is, however, that the CIA and the FBI have different goals and objectives when it comes to the Russians they recruit. As such, Smolenkov's recruitment was most likely a CIA-only affair, run by NR but closely monitored by the Russian Operations Group of the Agency's Central Eurasia Division, who would have responsibility for managing Smolenkov upon his return to Moscow.

The precise motive for Smolenkov to take up the CIA's offer of recruitment remains unknown. He graduated from one of the premier universities in Russia, the Maurice Thorez Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, and he married his English language instructor. Normally a graduate from an elite university such as Maurice Thorez has his or her pick of jobs in the Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Defense or the security services. Smolenkov was hired by the Foreign Ministry as a junior linguist, assigned to the Second European Department, which focuses on Great Britain, Scandinavia and the Baltics, before getting assigned to the embassy in Washington.

Felt Underpaid

But his job as foreman of the Rossotrudnichestvo coop was not the kind of job a Maurive Thorez graduate gets; Smolenkov had to have felt slighted. He allegedly turned to drink, and his marriage was on the rocks; his colleagues spoke of a man who believed his salary was too low.

The enticements of money and future opportunity -- the CIA's principle recruitment ploys -- more than likely were a factor in convincing this dissatisfied diplomat to defect. Did the CIA compromise him by dangling the temptation of contract-based embezzlement? Or did the FBI uncover some sort of personal or financial impropriety that made the Russian diplomat vulnerable to recruitment? Only the CIA and Smolenkov know the precise circumstances behind the Russian's decision to betray his country. But the fact is, sometime in 2007-2008, Smolenkov was recruited by the CIA.

After Smolenkov accepted the CIA's offer, there was much work to be done -- the new agent had to be polygraphed to ascertain his reliability, trained on covert means of intelligence collection, including covert photography, as well as on how to securely communicate with the CIA in order to transmit information and receive instructions. Smolenkov was also introduced to his "handler," a CIA case officer who would be responsible for managing the work of Smolenkov, including overseeing the bank account where Smolenkov's CIA "salary" would be deposited. Various contingencies would be prepared for, including procedures for reestablishing communications should the existing means become unavailable, emergency contact procedures and emergency exfiltration plans in case Smolenkov became compromised.

Took Away His Name, and Gave Him a Code

The recruitment of a diplomat willing to return to Moscow and be run in place is a rare accomplishment, and Smolenkov's identity would become a closely guarded secret within the ranks of the CIA. Smolenkov's true identity would be known to only a few select individuals; to everyone else who had access to his reporting, he was simply a codename, comprised of a two-letter digraph representing Russia (this code changed over time), followed by a word chosen at random by a CIA algorithm (for example, Adolf Tolkachev, the so-called "billion dollar spy," was known by the codename CKSPHERE, with CK being the digraph in use for the Soviet Union at the time of his recruitment.) Because the specific details from the information provided by Smolenkov could compromise him as the source, the Russian Operations Group would "blend" his reporting in with other sources in an effort to disguise it before disseminating it to a wider audience.

Smolenkov followed Ambassador Ushakov when the latter departed the United States for Moscow in the summer of 2008; soon after arriving back in Moscow, Smolenkov and his wife divorced. Ushakov took a position as the deputy chief of the Government Staff of the Russian Federation responsible for international relations and foreign policy support. Part of the Executive Office of the Government of the Russian Federation, Ushakov coordinated the international work of the prime minister, deputy prime ministers and senior officials of the Government Executive Office. Smolenkov took up a position working for Ushakov, and soon found himself moving up the ranks of the Russian Civil Service, being promoted in 2010 to the rank of state advisor to the Russian Federation of the Third Class, a second-tier rank that put him on the cusp of joining the upper levels of the Russian government bureaucracy. He was granted a "second-level" security clearance, which allowed him to handle top secret information.

Moscow Station

Ukashov, r. with Putin (Kremlin photo)

In 2013 Ushakov received a new assignment, this time to serve in the Presidential Executive Office as the aide for international relations. Smolenkov joined Ushakov as his staff manager. Vladimir Putin was one year into his second stint as president and brought Ushakov, who had advised him on foreign relations while Putin was prime minister, to continue that service. Ushakov maintained an office at the Boyarsky Dvor (Courtyard of the Boyars), on 8 Staraya Square.

The Boyarsky Dvor was physically separate from the Kremlin, meaning neither Ushakov nor Smolenkov had direct access to the Russian president. Nevertheless, Smolenkov's new job had to have pleased his CIA masters. In the five years Smolenkov worked at the Executive Office of the Government, he was not privy to particularly sensitive information. His communications with CIA would most likely have been administrative in nature, with the CIA more interested in Smolenkov's growth potential than immediate value of any intelligence he could produce.

Smolenkov's arrival in the Presidential Administration coincided with a period of operational difficulty for the CIA in Moscow. First, the CIA's internet-based covert communications system, which used Google's email platform as the foundation for accessing various web pages where information was exchanged between the agent and his CIA handlers, had been globally compromised. Smolenkov had been trained on this system, and it provided his lifeline to the CIA. The compromise first occurred in Iran, and then spread to China; in both countries, entire networks of CIA agents were rounded up, with many being subsequently executed . China is believed to have shared the information on how to detect the covert communication-linked web pages with Russia; fortunately for Moscow Station, they were able to make the appropriate changes in the system to safeguard the security and identity of its agents. In the meantime, communications between the CIA and Smolenkov were cut off until the CIA could make contact using back-up protocols and re-train Smolenkov on the new communications procedures.

Moscow Station, however, was having trouble carrying out its clandestine tasks. In the fall of 2011, the CIA's chief of station in Moscow, Steven Hall, had been approached by his counterpart in the Russian Federal Security Service (the FSB, Russia's equivalent of the FBI) and warned that the CIA should stop trying to recruit agents from within the FSB ranks; the FSB had detected several of these attempts, which it deemed inappropriate given the ongoing cooperation between the intelligence services of the two countries regarding the war on terrorism.

But Hall had his orders, and after a year-long pause to review its operating procedures, Moscow Station resumed its targeting of FSB officers. Things went real bad real fast. In January 2013, a CIA officer named Benjamin Dillon was arrested by the FSB as he tried to recruit a Russian agent, declared persona non grata, and expelled from Russia. Then in May 2013 the FSB arrested another CIA officer, Ryan Fogle. Fogle was paraded before television cameras together with his spy paraphernalia, and like Dillon before him, expelled from the country. Moreover, the Russians, in condemning the CIA actions, revealed the identity of the CIA's Moscow chief of station (Hall), who because of the public disclosure was compelled to depart Russia.

A CIA Dream

Steve Hall (CNN/YouTube)

The loss of Dillon and Fogle was a serious blow to Moscow Station, but one from which the CIA could recover. But the near simultaneous loss of two case officers and the chief of station was a different matter altogether. Hall was one of the few people in the CIA who had been "read in" on the recruitment of Smolenkov, and as such was involved in the overall management of the Russian agent. The loss of Hall at this very sensitive time created a problem for both the CIA and Smolenkov. Smolenkov's new assignment was a dream come true for the CIA -- never before had the agency managed to place a controlled agent into the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation.

But while Smolenkov had been able to provide evidence of access, by way of photographs of presidential documents, the CIA needed to confirm that Smolenkov hadn't been turned by the Russians and was not being used to pass on disinformation designed to mislead those who used Smolenkov's reporting. Normally this was done by subjecting the agent to a polygraph examination -- a "swirl," in CIA parlance. This examination could take place at an improvised covert location in Russia, or in a more controlled environment outside of Russia, if Smolenkov was able to exit on work or during vacation. But arranging the examination required close coordination between the CIA and its agent, as well as a healthy degree of trust between the agent and those directing him. With communications down, and the chief of station evicted, Smolenkov was left in a state of limbo while the CIA trained up new case officers capable of operating in Moscow and sought a replacement for Hall.

One of the ironies surrounding the arrest and expulsion of CIA officer Fogle, and the subsequent outing and eviction of Hall, was that Smolenkov was ideally positioned to provide an inside perspective on how the Russian leadership reacted to the incident. Smolenkov's boss, Ushakov, was tasked with overseeing Russia's diplomatic response. In a statement given to the Russian media, Ushakov expressed surprise at the timing of the incident. "To put it mildly," Ushakov said, "it is surprising that this extremely crude, clumsy attempt at recruitment took place in a situation where both President Obama and President Putin have clearly stated the importance of more active cooperation and contacts between the special services of the two countries."

Ushakov coordinated closely with the head of Putin's Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, regarding the content of a letter Putin was planning to send in response to a previous communication from Obama. While the original text focused on missile defense issues, Ushakov and Patrushev inserted language about the Fogle incident. As a senior aide to Ushakov, Smolenkov was ideally positioned to gather intelligence about the Russian response. If he was able to communicate this information to the CIA, it would have provided Obama and his advisers time to prepare a response to the Russian letter. The situation meant that Smolenkov may have been reporting on events related to the expulsion of Hall, one of the CIA officers specifically trained to manage his reporting.

The Center

Amid the operational challenges and opportunity provided by Smolenkov's new position within the Russian Presidential Administration, the CIA underwent a radical reorganization which impacted how human agents, and the intelligence they produced, would be managed. The past practice of having intelligence operations controlled by insular regional divisions, which promoted both a physical and philosophical divide between the collectors and their analytical counterparts in the respective regional division within the Directorate of Intelligence, or DI, was discontinued by Brennan, who had taken over as director of the CIA in May 2013.

To replace what he viewed as an antiquated organizational structure, Brennan created what he called "Mission Centers," which combined analytical, operational, technical and support expertise under a single roof. For Moscow Station and Smolenkov, this meant that the Russia and Eurasia Division, with its Russian Operations Group, no longer existed. Instead, Moscow Station would take its orders from a new Europe and Eurasia Mission Center headed by an experienced CIA Russia analyst named Peter Clement.

Clement, who had earned a PhD in Russian history from Michigan State University, had a diverse resumé with the CIA which included service as the director for Russia on the National Security Council and as the CIA representative to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. Clement served as the director of the Office of Russian and Eurasian Analysis and as the CIA's Russia issue manager from 1997 to 2003; as the President's Daily Brief (PDB) briefer for Vice President Dick Cheney from 2003-2004, and from 2005-2013, as the deputy director for intelligence for analytic programs. In 2015 Brennan appointed Clement to serve as the deputy assistant director of CIA for Europe and Eurasia, where he directed the activities of the newly created Europe and Eurasia Mission Center. If one was looking for the perfect candidate to manage the fusion of operational, analytical and technical experience into a singular, mission-focused entity, Peter Clement was it.

Peter Clement (C-Span)

As Clement got on with the business of whipping the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center into shape, Smolenkov was busy establishing himself as an intelligence source of some value. Smolenkov's success was directly linked to the work of his boss, Ushakov. In June 2015, Ushakov was put in charge of establishing a high-level working group in the fuel and energy sector for the purpose of improving bilateral cooperation with Azerbaijan. The reporting Smolenkov would have been able to provide on the work of this group would have been of tremendous assistance to those in the Obama administration working on U.S. energy policy, especially as it related to countering Russian moves in the former Soviet Republics.

Another project of interest was Russia's sale of advanced Mi-35 helicopters to Pakistan in support of their counterterrorism efforts. Coming at a time when U.S.-Pakistani relations were floundering, the Russian sale of advanced helicopters was viewed with concern by both the Department of State and the Department of Defense. Again, Smolenkov's reporting on this issue would have been well received by critical policymakers in both departments.

But the most critical role played by Ushakov was advising Putin on the uncertain state of relations between the U.S. and Russia in the aftermath of the 2014 crisis in Ukraine, and Russia's annexation of Crimea. Ushakov's 10-year tenure as Russia's ambassador to the U.S. gave him unprecedented insight into U.S. decision making, experience and expertise Putin increasingly relied upon as he formulated and implemented responses to U.S. efforts to contain and punish Russia on the international stage.

While Ushakov's meetings with Putin were conducted either in private, or in small groups of senior advisers, meaning Smolenkov was not present, Smolenkov was able to collect intelligence on the periphery by photographing itineraries and working papers, as well as overhearing comments made by Ushakov, that collectively would provide U.S. policymakers with important insight into Putin's thinking.

Managing an important resource like Smolenkov was one of the critical challenges faced by Clement and the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center. Smolenkov's reporting continued to be handled using special HUMINT procedures designed to protect the source. However, within the Center knowledge of Smolenkov's work would have been shared with analysts who worked side by side with their operational colleagues deciding how the intelligence could best be used, as well as coming up with follow-up questions for Smolenkov regarding specific issues of interest.

Given the unique insight Smolenkov's reporting provided into Putin's thinking, it would be logical that intelligence sourced from Smolenkov would frequently find itself briefed to the president and his inner circle via the PDB process, which was exacting in terms of vetting the accuracy and reliability of any intelligence reporting that made it onto its pages. As a long-time Russia expert with extensive experience in virtually every aspect of how the CIA turned raw reporting into finished intelligence, Clement was ideally suited to making sure his Center handled the Smolenkov product responsibly, and in a manner which maximized its value.

Meanwhile, Moscow Station continued to exhibit operational problems. By 2015 the CIA had managed to rebuild its stable of case officers operating from the U.S. embassy. But the FSB always seemed to be one step ahead. According to the FSB, the Russians were adept at identifying CIA officers working under State Department cover and would subject these individuals to extensive surveillance. As if to prove the Russian's point, in short order the FSB rounded up the newly assigned case officers, along with the deputy chief of station, declared them persona non grata, and expelled them from Russia. To make matters worse, the FSB released surveillance video of all these officers, who in some cases were joined by their spouses, as they engaged in elaborate ruses to evade Russian surveillance in order to carry out their covert assignments.

Moscow Station's string of bad luck continued into 2016, when one of its officers, having been detected by the FSB during a meeting, fled via taxi to the U.S. embassy, only to be tackled by a uniformed FSB officer as he tried to enter the compound. In the scuffle that followed, the CIA officer managed to make entry into the embassy building, compelling the FSB guard to release him once jurisdiction was lost. The CIA officer, who suffered a separated shoulder during the incident, left Russia shortly thereafter, together with a female colleague who had also been detected by the FSB while engaged in clandestine activities and subsequently declared persona non grata.

FSB Headquarters in the Lubyanka Building, Moscow.

The FSB indicated, at the time these two officers were being expelled, that it had evicted three other CIA officers during the year. In addition to the decimation of its staff, Moscow Station was experiencing an alarming number of its agents being discovered by the FSB and arrested. While the Russians were circumspect about most of these cases, on several occasions they indicated that they had uncovered a spy by intercepting the electronic communications between him and the CIA. This meant that the Russians were aware of, and actively pursuing, the Google-based internet-based system used by the CIA to communicate with its agents in Russia.

Meanwhile, Smolenkov continued to send his reports to his CIA handlers unabated, using the same internet-based system. Under normal circumstances, an exception to compromise would raise red flags within the counterintelligence staff that evaluated an agent's reporting and activity. But by the summer of 2016, nothing about the work of the CIA, and in particular the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center could be considered "normal" when it came to the Russian target.

Little White Envelope

Sometime in early August 2016, a courier from the CIA arrived at the White House carrying a plain, unmarked white envelope. Inside was an intelligence report from Smolenkov that CIA Director Brennan considered to be so sensitive that he kept it out of the President's Daily Brief, concerned that even that restrictive process was too inclusive to adequately protect the source. The intelligence was to be read by four people only -- Obama, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Avril Haines and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. The document was to be returned to the courier once it had been read.

Brennan in Oval Office where he had envelope delivered. (White House photo/Pete Souza)

The contents of the report were alarming -- Putin had personally ordered the cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election in favor of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.

The intelligence report was not a product of Clement's Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, but rather a special unit of handpicked analysts from the CIA, NSA and FBI who were brought together under great secrecy in late July and reported directly to Brennan. These analysts were made to sign non-disclosure agreements protecting their work from their colleagues.

This new analytical unit focused on three new sensitive sources of information -- the Smolenkov report, additional reporting provided by a former MI6 officer named Christopher Steele, and a signals intelligence report provided by a Baltic nation neighboring Russia. The Steele information was of questionable provenance, so much so that FBI Director James Comey could not, or would not, vouch for its credibility. The same held true for the NSA's assessment of the Baltic SIGINT report. By themselves, the Steele reporting and Baltic SIGINT report were of little intelligence value. But when viewed together, they were used to corroborate the explosive contents of the Smolenkov intelligence. The White House found the Smolenkov report so convincing that in September 2016, during a meeting of the G-20 in China, Obama pulled Putin aside and told him to stop meddling in the U.S. election. Putin was reportedly nonplussed by Obama's intervention.

It is extraordinarily difficult for a piece of intelligence to be deemed important and reliable enough to be briefed to the president of the United States. The principal forum for such a briefing is the Presidential Daily Brief, which prior to 2004 was a product produced exclusively by the CIA. When the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was signed into law in 2004, the responsibility for the PDB was transferred to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a newly created entity responsible for oversight and coordination of the entire Intelligence Community, or IC. The PDB is considered to be an IC product, the production of which is coordinated by ODNI's PDB staff in partnership with the CIA Directorate of Intelligence (DI)'s President's Analytic Support Staff.

Since he began reporting about his work in the Russian Presidential Administration in 2013, Smolenkov had, on numerous occasions, produced intelligence whose content and relevance was such that it would readily warrant inclusion in the PDB. After 2015, the decision to submit a Smolenkov-sourced report for inclusion in the PDB would be made by Clement and his staff. For a report to be nominated, it would have to pass an exacting quality control review process which evaluated it for accuracy, relevance and reliability.

U.S. Embassy Moscow ( Wikimedia Commons)

Sometime in the leadup to August 2016, this process was halted. Oleg Smolenkov was a controlled asset of the CIA. While he was given certain latitude on what information he could collect, generally speaking Smolenkov worked from an operations order sent to him by his CIA controllers which established priorities for intelligence collection based upon information provided by Smolenkov about what he could reasonably access. Before tasking Smolenkov, his CIA handlers would screen the request from an operational and counterintelligence perspective, conducting a risk-reward analysis that weighed the value of the intelligence being sought with the possibility of compromise. Only then would Smolenkov be cleared to collect the requested information.

It is not publicly known what prompted the report from Smolenkov which Brennan found so alarming. Was it received out of the blue, a target of opportunity which Smolenkov exploited? Was it based upon a specific tasking submitted by Smolenkov's CIA handlers in response to a tasking from above? Or was it a result of the intervention of the CIA director, who tasked Smolenkov outside normal channels? In any event, once Brennan created his special analytical unit, Smolenkov became his dedicated source. If Smolenko was in this for the money, as appears to be the case, he would have been motivated to come up with the "correct" answer to Brennan's tasking for information on Putin's role. By late 2016, Western media had made quite clear what kind of answer Brennan wanted.

Every intelligence report produced by a controlled asset is subjected to a counterintelligence review where it is examined for any evidence of red flags that could be indicative of compromise. One red flag is the issue of abnormal access. Smolenkov did not normally have direct contact with Putin, if ever. His intelligence reports would have been written from the perspective of the distant observer. His report about Putin's role in interfering in the 2016 election, however, represented a whole new level of access and trust. Under normal circumstances, a report exhibiting such tendency would be pulled aside for additional scrutiny; if the report was alarming enough, the CIA might order the agent to be subjected to a polygraph to ensure he had not been compromised.

This did not happen. Instead, Brennan took the extraordinary measure of sequestering the source from the rest of the Intelligence Community. He also confronted the head of the Russian FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, about the risks involved in interfering in U.S. elections.

Whether Brennan further tasked Smolenkov to collect on Putin is not known. Nor is it known whether Smolenkov produced more than that single report about Putin's alleged direct role in ordering the Russian intelligence services to intervene in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Despite Brennan's extraordinary effort to keep the existence of a human source within the Russian Presidential Administration a closely-held secret, by December 2016 both The Washington Post and The New York Times began quoting their sources about the existence of a sensitive intelligence source close to the Russian president. The timing of these press leaks coincided with Smolensky being fired from his job working for the Presidential Administration; the method of firing came in the form of a secret decree. When the CIA found out, they desperately tried to convince Smolenkov to agree to extraction, fearing for his safety should he remain in Moscow. This Smolenkov allegedly refused to do, prompting the counterintelligence-minded within the CIA to become concerned that Brennan and his coterie of analysts had been taken for a ride by a Russian double agent.

Trump and Barr on Feb. 14, 2019. (Wikimedia Commons)

Smolenkov's firing occurred right before the Intelligence Community released its much-anticipated assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election . Like the special analytical unit created by Brennan to handle the intelligence about Putin ordering the Russian intelligence services to intervene in favor of Trump in the 2016 election, Brennan opted to produce the Russian interference assessment outside the normal channels. Usually, when the IC opts to produce an assessment, there is a formal process which has a national intelligence officer (NIO) from within the National Intelligence Council take the lead on coordinating the collection and assessment of all relevant intelligence. The NIO usually coordinates closely with the relevant Mission Centers to ensure no analytical stone was left unturned in the pursuit of the truth.

The 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was produced differently -- no Mission Center involvement, no NIO assigned, no peer review. Just Brennan's little band of sequestered analysts.

Smolenkov's information took top billing in the ICA, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections," published on Jan. 6, 2017. "We assess," the unclassified document stated, "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump." Smolenkov's reporting appears to be the sole source for this finding.

The ICA went on to note, "We have high confidence in these judgments." According to the Intelligence Community's own definition, "high confidence'" generally indicates judgments based on high-quality information, and/or the nature of the issue makes it possible to render a solid judgment. A "high confidence" judgment is not a fact or a certainty, however, and still carries a risk of being wrong.

The same day the ICA was published, Brennan, accompanied by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Admiral Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, met with President-elect Trump in Trump Tower, where he was briefed on the classified information behind the Russian ICA. Included in this briefing was the intelligence from "a top-secret source" close to Putin which sustained the finding of Putin's direct involvement.

Brennan had sold the Smolenkov reporting to both President Obama and President-elect Trump, along with the rest of the intelligence community, as "high-quality information." It was, at best, nothing more than uncorroborated rumor or, at worst, simple disinformation. This reporting, which was parroted by an unquestioning mainstream media that accepted it as fact, created an impression amongst the American public that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered and directed a Russian interference campaign during the 2016 election designed "to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible," according to the ICA.

As CIA director, Brennan understood very well the role played by intelligence in shaping the decisions of key policy makers, and the absolute need for those who brief the president and his key advisers to ensure only the highest quality information and derived assessments are briefed. In this, Brennan failed.

Coming in From the Cold

Tivat, Montenegro

After being fired from his position within the Presidential Administration, Smolenkov continued to live in Moscow, very much a free man. By this time he was the father of three children, his new wife having given birth to two daughters. Following Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, Brennan resigned as CIA director. By May, Brennan was testifying before Congress about the issue of Russian interference. Increasingly, attention was being drawn to the existence of a highly-placed source near Putin, with both The New York Times and The Washington Post publishing surprisingly detailed reports.

Concerned that Smolenkov could be arrested by the Russians and, in doing so, have control over the narrative of Russian interference transfer to Moscow, the CIA once again approached Smolenkov to defect to the United States. This time the Russian agent agreed.

In July 2017, Smolenkov, accompanied by his wife and three children, travelled to Montenegro on vacation. They arrived in the resort city of Tivat, flying on a commercial air flight from Moscow. The CIA took control of the family a few days later, spiriting them away aboard a yacht that had been moored at the Tivat marina. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Smolenkov and his family were placed under the control of the CIA's resettlement unit.

According to the Russian media, Smolenkov's disappearance was discovered in September 2017. The FSB opened an investigation into the matter, initially suspecting foul play. Soon, however, the FSB reached a different conclusion -- that Smolenkov and his family had defected to the United States.

Normally a defector would be subjected to a debriefing, inclusive of a polygraph, to confirm that he or she had not been turned into a double agent. Smolenkov had, over the course of a decade of spying, accumulated a considerable amount of money which the CIA was holding in escrow. This money would be released to Smolenkov upon the successful completion of his debriefing. In the case of Smolenkov, however, there doesn't seem to have been a detailed, lengthy debriefing. His money was turned over to him. Sometime in June 2018, Smolenkov and his wife bought a home worth nearly $1 million in northern Virginia. The couple used their real names. They were not afraid.

I can only speculate as to the circumstances that led to Smolenkov's firing by secret decree. Normally, Russians charged with transmitting classified material to the intelligence services of a foreign state are arrested, placed on trial and given lengthy prison sentences, or worse. This did not happen to Smolenkov.

But this does not mean the Russian authorities were ignorant of his activities. This raises another possibility, that Smolenkov could have been turned by the Russian security services before he had compromised any classified information, and that he operated as a double agent his entire CIA career. Since the only classified information he transferred would, in this case, be approved for release by the Russian security services, he would not have technically committed a crime. If Smolenkov was working both sides, it could have been a Russian vehicle to create distrust between the U.S. intelligence community and Trump.

Smolenkov was fired, and left to his own devices, once his utility to Russia had expired. Having escaped being arrested as a spy, Smolenkov believed he might be able to live a normal life in Moscow. But when the potential for compromise arose due to leaks to the press, I assess that it was in the CIA's interest to bring Smolenkov in, if for no other reason than to control the narrative of Russian interference.

Three Scenarios

Old CIA building in Langely, Virginia.

There are three scenarios that could be at play regarding Smolenkov's bone fides as a human intelligence source for the CIA. First, that this was a solid recruitment, that Smolenkov was the high-level asset the CIA and Brennan claim he was, and the information he provided regarding the involvement of Putin was unimpeachable. Mitigating against this is the fact that when Smolenkov was fired from his position in late 2016, he was not arrested and put on trial for spying.

Russia is fully capable of conducting secret trials, and controlling the information that is made available about such a trial. Moreover, Russia is a vindictive state–persons who commit treason are not tolerated. As Putin himself noted in comments made in March 2018, "Traitors will kick the bucket. Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces silver they were given, they will choke on them." The odds of Smolenkov being fired for committing treason, and then being allowed to voluntarily exit Russia with his family and passports, are virtually nil.

The second scenario is a variation of the first, where Smolenkov starts as a solid recruitment, with his reporting commensurate with his known level of access–peripheral contact with documents and information pertaining to the work of the aide to President Putin on international relations. Sometime in July 2016 Smolenkov produces a report that catches the attention of DCI Brennan, who flags it and pulls Smolenkov out of the normal operational channels for CIA-controlled human sources, and instead creating a new, highly-compartmentalized fusion cell to handle this report, and possibly others.

Three questions emerge from the second scenario. First, was Smolenkov responding to an urgent tasking from Brennan to find out how high up the Russian chain of command went the knowledge of the alleged DNC cyber attack, or did Smolenkov produce this report on his own volition? Was Brennan arranging evidence to show that there was indeed a Russian hack. After all, all the FBI had to go by was a draft of a report by the virulently anti-Russian private security firm CrowdStrike. The FBI never examined the DNC server itself.

In any case, the Smolenkov report in the white envelope represented a level of access that would have significantly deviated from what one could expect from a person in his position and which suggests he may have been telling the CIA what he knew Brennan wanted to hear. As such, normal counterintelligence procedures should have mandated an operational pause while the intelligence report in question was scrubbed to ensure viability. Under no circumstances would a report so flagged be allowed to be put into the Presidential Daily Brief. However, by pulling the report from the control of the Europe and Eurasian Mission Center, turning it over to a stand-alone fusion cell, and bypassing the PDB process to brief the president and a handful of advisors, there would be no counterintelligence concerns raised. This implies that Brennan had a role in the tasking of Smolenkov, and was waiting for the report to come in, which Brennan then took control of to preclude any counter-intelligence red flags being raised.

The third scenario is that Smolenkov, a low-level failure of a diplomat with drinking issues, marital problems and monetary frustrations, was recruited by the CIA, but only with the complicity of the Russian security services.

The same red flags that the CIA looks for when recruiting agents are also looked at by Russian counterintelligence. At what point in the recruitment process the Russians stepped in is unknown (if they did at all.) But it is curious that this professional failure was suddenly transferred from running a co-op to being the right hand man of one of the most influential foreign policy experts in Russia–Yuri Ushakov.

Moreover, this muddling diplomat whose questionable behavioral practices scream "recruit me" is, within three years of returning to Moscow, given a significant promotion that enables him to follow Ushakov into the Presidential Administration–a posting which would require extensive vetting by the Russian security services. Smolenkov's promotion pattern is enough, in and of itself, to raise red flags within the counterintelligence offices tasked with monitoring such things. The fact that it did not indicates that the quality and quantity of reporting being provided by Smolenkov was deemed by the Americans too important to interfere with.

In this scenario, Smolenkov would have been playing to a script written by the Russian security services. Since he, technically, had broken no laws by serving as a double agent, he would not be subjected to arrest and trial. But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit.

The most pressing question that emerges from this possibility is why? Why would the Russian security services want to cook the books, so to speak, in a manner which made the Russians look guilty of the very thing they were publicly denying?

In my view, if one assumes that the Smolenkov July 2016 report at the center of this drama was not a result of serendipity, but rather a product derived from a specific request from his CIA managers to find out how high up in the Russian decision-making chain the authorization went for what U.S. intelligence agencies were already publicly pushing as an alleged DNC cyber attack, then the answer I believe becomes clear–the Russians knew the U.S. had an intelligence deficit.

I am speculating here, but if the Russians provided an answer guaranteed to attract attention at a critical time in the U.S. presidential election process, it would inject the CIA and its reporting into the democratic processes of the United States, and thereby politicize the CIA and the entire intelligence community by default. This would suppose, however, that the agencies did not have their own motives for wanting to stop Trump.

Rogers, Comey, Clapper and Brennan all in a row.

In this scenario, the Russians would have been in control of when to expose the CIA's activities–all they had to do was fire Smolenkov, which in the end they did, right as Smolenkov's report was front and center in the post-election finger-pointing that was taking place regarding the allegation of Russian interference. The best acts of political sabotage are done subtlety, where the culprit remains in the shadows while the victims proceed, unaware that they have been played.

For the Russians, it didn't matter who won the election, even if they may have favored Trump; simply getting President Obama to commit to the bait by confronting Putin at the G20 meeting in September 2016 would have been a victory, because I assess that at that point the Russians knew that they were driving the American narrative. When the President of the United States acts on intelligence that later turns out to be false, it is an embarrassment that drives a wedge between the intelligence community and the Executive Branch of government. I have no solid evidence for this. But in my speculation on what may have happened, this was the Russian objective–to drive that wedge.

An Idyllic Truce

In my view, the CIA, Russia and Smolenkov were happy to maintain the status quo, with Smolenkov living in comfortable retirement with his family, the CIA continuing to accuse Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, and Russia denying it. As well, Russia seems to have brushed off the sanctions that resulted from this alleged "interference." This idyllic truce started to unravel in May 2019, when Trump ordered Attorney General William Barr to "get to the bottom" of what role the CIA played in initiating the investigation into allegations of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russians that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller's investigation concluded earlier this year, with a 400-plus page report being published which did not find any evidence of active collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Trump's instructions to Barr are linked to a desire on the part of the president to hold to account those responsible for creating the narrative of possible collusion. Reports indicate that Barr is particularly interested in finding out how and why the CIA concluded that Putin personally ordered the Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Barr's investigation will inevitably lead him to the intelligence report that was hand couriered to the White House in early August 2016, which would in turn lead to Smolenkov, and in doing so open up the can of worms of Smolenkov's entire history of cooperation with the CIA. Not only could the entire foundation upon which the intelligence community has based its assessment of Russian interference collapse, it could also open the door for potential charges of criminal misconduct by Brennan and anyone else who helped him bypass normal vetting procedures and, in doing so, allowed a possible Russian double agent to influence the decisions of the president of the United States.

Seen in this light, the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth.

At the end of the day, Smolenkov and his family are not at risk. If the Russian government wanted to exact revenge for his actions, it would have done so after firing him in late 2016. In any event, Smolenkov and his family would never have been allowed to leave Russia had he been suspected or accused of committing crimes against the state. A few days following Smolenkov's "outing" by the U.S. media, the Russian government filed a request with Interpol for an investigation into how someone who had gone missing in Montenegro was now living in the United States.

The only person at risk from this entire sordid affair is Brennan, whose reputation and potential livelihood is on the line. At best, Brennan is guilty of extremely poor judgement; at worst, he actively conspired to use the office of Director of the CIA to interfere in the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Neither option speaks well of the U.S. Intelligence Community and those in Congress charged with oversight of its operations.

Watch Scott Ritter discussing this article on CN Live! Episode 9 .

Consortium News does not necessarily endorse the views of its authors.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

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Linda Wood , September 17, 2019 at 00:34

Brennan may have written the white envelope report and attributed it to Smolenkov, who may or may not have been a double agent. The Russian interference story is not just something Brennan wanted to hear, it's what the military industrial complex needs us to believe.

Dan Anderson , September 16, 2019 at 22:09

I trust Scott Ritter. Had we listened to him, the USA would not have invaded Iraq over WMDs. Reading the piece added to my distrust of our intelligence community, remembering this haunting exchange on live TV.

David G , September 16, 2019 at 18:32

I'm surprised Scott Ritter thinks it likely that Russia engineered the "Putin meddled" narrative – that just seems unbelievable to me. There are enough moving parts here that one doesn't have to commit to one of Ritter's three scenarios: numerous variations are possible. For instance, Smolenkov may have been fired for some mundane mix of reasons going to performance and reliability. He may have been considered dubious without Russian counterintelligence having fingered him as a U.S. agent.

And under the third scenario, with Smolenkov a double agent all along, Ritter writes: "But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit."

That doesn't make sense to me. In fact I see the opposite: if he had been a successfully run double agent all that time, then when his usefulness had ended he would have been decently pensioned off – not simply cut loose to fend for himself – but *not* allowed to travel abroad unimpeded (with his whole family, no less) where he would have the opportunity to cause mischief.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , September 16, 2019 at 15:26

Were it not so powerful militarily and financially, the United States would be the laughingstock of the world. This entire business is just another avenue travelled in America's nonstop Russophobia lunatic wanderings. The DNC material was not hacked as a number of true experts have told us, including the key one now languishing in a British prison. Putin had no plan because nothing ever happened.

Nothing. And I think we've all seen that when Putin plans something, it happens. The article is interesting for its laying out of elaborate security procedures – kind of a high-level almost academic "police procedural" – but I do feel in the end it is not that helpful, much as I respect Mr Ritter.

When nothing has happened, it does seem a bit odd to scrutinize every piece of fiber and bit of dust and to construct a massive scenario of "what ifs."

Meanwhile, the murder of Seth Rich, a genuine and meaningful event, goes virtually uninvestigated.

No wonder you are in so much trouble, America, and no wonder you make so much trouble for others.

Anonymot , September 16, 2019 at 15:16

In the extremely sophisticated world of high grade intelligence I have repeatedly said that the Brennan, Clapper, Comey trio were lead-footed imbeciles. That has been the CIA tradition since Dulles left. All of those in our intelligence racket have led us to the trough of poisoned water and all of our Presidents drank. They have all become very rich, but not from book sales nor from consulting fees.

It says a lot about the entire echelon of those who decide our fates. There is no way to know whether it stems from ignorance or incompetence, but those with the Deep State mindset like each other, hire each other, and have been in some sort of daisy chain since university. We not only need to describe How it happens as this article does very well, but even more importantly Why. Only then can we start to do something about it, although it is probably far too late – it would be like taking the shell off of an egg and leaving that delicate interior membrane just inside the shell intact.

Clods like these (add the Clintons) should have their post-employment millions confiscated and put on trial.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , September 16, 2019 at 15:39

Sorry, but "Big Intelligence" is always a failure, and on many levels. It is not a matter of any "clods." It is a matter of the very nature of the institution and the nature of the people who use its output. The CIA only has a good record at doing bad things. I refer to its operations side and the havoc and violence they have released through the decades. It is an army of richly-equipped thugs without uniforms interfering in the business of others, "lying, cheating, and stealing."

The true intelligence side of things fails and always has to a great extent. https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/why-the-cia-always-will-be-a-costly-flop/

jessika , September 16, 2019 at 15:11

I find it maddening that we "puppet proles" are treated like stupid fools, lied to constantly, and nothing happens to stop the mad lying/false flag garbage that keeps on. Now, today, after Bolton departure, out of the weirdness comes Pompous Pompeo spewing even worse madness that could tip "us" into attacking Iran! Saudis are insane, Netanyahu faces his electorate tomorrow, and we should believe MbS and cronies? Trump is nothing but a stooge!

Maricata , September 16, 2019 at 19:28

Read The CIA as Organized Crime and Strength of the Wolf and Strength of the Pack by Douglas Valentine.

Please, CN, have Mr. Valentine on your livc broadcast

Jeff Harrison , September 16, 2019 at 14:36

It occurs to me that this may have an inappropriate title. Plausibly Mr. Ritter has pegged what Smolenkov was eventually – a double agent. In which case I would probably call him pretty successful.

hetro , September 16, 2019 at 13:06

Also published yesterday, this Aaron Mate interview with John Kiriakou on Smolenkov:

"Kiriakou also notes that the way Smolenkov's intelligence was handled raises echoes of the CIA's manipulation of intelligence to help justify the Iraq war. The information from Smolenkov was handled personally by then-CIA Director John Brennan. Brennan reportedly sidelined other CIA analysts and kept the Smolenkov information out of the Presidential Daily Briefing – instead delivering it personally to President Obama and a small group of officials."

"That is a highly highly unusual thing to do, but I think [Brennan] did it because he knew that the source wasn't well placed, he knew that the source was lying about his access to Putin -- or information coming from Putin -- and I think that for whatever reason John Brennan really wanted the president to run with this narrative that the Russians were trying to somehow impact the 2016 election, when the intelligence just simply wasn't there," Kiriakou says.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/09/15/outing-of-cias-kremlin-mole-echoes-iraq-wmd-hoax/

dean 1000 , September 16, 2019 at 11:53

When Trump campaigned against the bloody foreign policies of the duopoly he was also campaigning against an out of control, coup making, drug running, blackmailing, imperial CIA. my comment to The Brennan wanted to 'get' Trump to save his own hide, the CIA, and the duopoly from further embarrassment.

If Smolenkov is missing from his Virginia home (Chancellor below at 9.15.19 at 23:40) hopefully he is in hiding to assure he can tell a Grand Jury about any instructions or suggestions he may have received from Brennan, or others regarding the election of Donald Trump.

Zhu , September 16, 2019 at 05:25

Re John 8:32, people forget Pilate's remark, "what is truth"?

Igor Bundy , September 16, 2019 at 04:29

The next report from the CIA will be from hogwarts and how the measter is concatenating a secret potion on how to turn dykes into donkeys.. This is especially impotent to the CIA and such.. to hide in plain sight..

Imagine them trying to make a bond movie from this. Or more of Bourne.. But now it makes sense of all the shows that show the CIA as protector of humanity and the good guys.. There are no righteous intelligence agencies anywhere, only how evil and their limits.. Why their powers should be limited and their actions also limited to a small sphere. Because where does it stop? Once given the power to shape reality, then the entire world is shaped according to a few with psychopathic tendencies. Which normal person would want to control everyone according to their own reality? When you cant control your very own family, you have to be one heck of a control freak to do it globally and to force everyone to do as told. But these are the dreams and aspirations of an ape.. To remake the world in his own image.. and the prize is the banana..

John Wright , September 16, 2019 at 15:11

More like a Le Carre' film. The CIA was originally sold as an intelligence gathering and analysis organization, and was not supposed to be involved in operations. Thus, it was founded on lies and the lies have only grown since.

Neither the CIA nor the FBI are salvageable at this point. They need to be abolished, their functions reconsidered and new institutions which adhere to the Constitution created. Of course, the entire military intelligence complex needs to be dismantled, starting with the DHS, but that will require a revolution in this country.

Perhaps after the crash

junaid , September 16, 2019 at 03:12

US President Donald Trump dismissed another official – National Security Advisor John Bolton. what threatens relations between the US and Russia What threatens relations between the US and Russia

Fran Macadam , September 16, 2019 at 01:49

Even the former communist state governments in Europe and the Soviet Union rued the day that they unleashed their secret police from accountability, and thereby became subservient to their power.

Chancellor , September 15, 2019 at 23:40

"But his job as foreman of the Rossotrudnichestvo coop was not the kind of job a Maurive (sic) Thorez graduate gets;"

Of course it isn't, because that was never really his job. My guess is that his real job all along was to be recruited by the CIA, when, in fact, he was always a double agent. The rumors that he drank too much, was dissatisfied with his pay, and so on, strike me as too obvious a come-on to an over-confident CIA. If Mr. Ritter knows that this is the type of individual the CIA looks for, then the Russian security services know this as well. After all, they tagged every American on the Moscow Station. Clearly, they have excellent tradecraft.

The final coup by the Russian security services was to create a situation where Smolenkov would have to be extracted by the CIA, although the Russians probably didn't think it would take so long. Now it appears that Smolenkov is missing from the Virginia home that he purchased openly under his own name. I wouldn't be surprised if he is living comfortably somewhere back in Russia–this time having been "extracted" by the Russians, since his cover as a CIA asset was finally blown.

Clearly this is speculation, but no more so than the scenarios Mr. Ritter posits.

Fabrizio Zambuto , September 16, 2019 at 14:11

Third scenario seems possible. He starts to drink, he shows how unsatisfied he is, knows Americans will target him.
Meanwhile he gets spoonfed the intel he will have to share with the CIA.

According to Lavrov, he was a employee with little access to the echelons.

Last but not least: Putin said traitors will be punished but they don't get killed, they're sent to Prison and handed years like Skripal which managed to go to UK thanks to a swap.

Overall I like the article but too much Hollywood in the story. Why was he fired?

John Wright , September 15, 2019 at 23:38

[The Chinese play Go, the Russians Chess and the Americans Poker (badly)]

I think it's pretty clear that Mr. Ritter's third scenario is the correct interpretation of the facts. I wouldn't even be surprised if the Russians surreptitiously got the U.S. media to out their double agent. Timing is everything, after all, and now he's Langley's problem to deal with.

The Russians know that the corrupt Anglo-American Deep State will work against any relationship which is beneficial to Russia, so they have absolutely nothing to lose by feeding the Deep State a narrative that can potentially wreak havoc within it.

Having Smolenkov feed this narrative into the bowels of the CIA clearly helped advance the Deep State's rather obvious operation to create the appearance of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, all the more reason for Brennan and company to swallow it hook, line and sinker.

So Deep State tool Obama bites on the interference narrative, confronts Putin and takes illegal actions that, if exposed, have the potential to seriously damage his legacy and the presidency. This plausible result would cause Americans to lose even more faith in their increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional government and affect world opinion.

We now see that if Barr actually does his job as mandated by the Constitution, then this becomes a very distinct possibility.

Had the rabid neocon Clinton won, her administration would've undoubtedly buried Obama's unconstitutional indiscretion, but fingerprints would've lingered for a future Republican to possibly uncover and cause chaos with. It's even possible that Smolenkov would've remained in place and continued to feed even more poisonous disinformation to the U.S. intelligence morass, setting Clinton up for who knows what.

However, the unstable, narcissistic and easily played Trump miraculously wins. He's immediately and continuously hit with RussiaGate. Trump reacts predictably by fanning the flames of distraction when he calls out the Deep State and keeps punching back. The Executive Branch is divided against itself, Congress and the electorate are further polarized and a significant amount of energy is tied up with unproductive domestic political machinations.

Almost three years of noise and crisis worked to increase Trump's natural dysfunction while the Russians and Chinese quietly manage their coordinated effort to transform the global power structure in their favor.

Will this Russian gift keep on giving?

Will Barr, or someone else if Trump fires him, dig into the entire RussiaGate mess and expose all the lies and blatant illegality potentially causing a serious national crisis, further damaging the reputation and credit worthiness of the U.S. ?

Or will Barr remain a faithful Deep State fixer, convince Trump that taking down Obama would not be good for the economic health of the country (and his re-election), and carefully steer everything he can down the memory hole?

Are those vodka glasses I hear clinking in Beijing?

[I'm just left wondering who will produce the deliciously embarrassing (to the U.S.) film that this would make.]

Taras77 , September 15, 2019 at 19:42

Remarkable detail on the recruitment and control of agents by the CIA. In this case, it would appear that Brennan has been played big time. IMO, to see Smolenkov walk away with his loot in the bank, there can not be any other conclusion.

Hence, the obvious panic by brennan to use the likely suspects, NYT and wapo, to cast more haze on the story. If there were treason, I doubt Smolenkov would be walking because the Russians do not take that lightly. Actually, they have acted and are acting with competence and confidence in the face of the bumbling, fumbling bombast and threats of the group around trump which passes themselves off as diplomats and security advisors.

Brennan in his obsession to interfere with the political process prob contributed to his malfeasance and a possible crime-I am no legal expert but it certainly seems that he committed crimes.

Of course, this raises the question as to whether barr et al will act accordingly and bring him to justice-I have strong doubts about barr taking on the cia as they will certainly close ranks to protect him. My doubts about barr, however, go well beyond this particular issue vis-a-vis the cia.

SilentPartner , September 15, 2019 at 18:58

I suspect Scott was provided a great deal of the reporting in this fascinating article from a disgruntled insider, or former insider. Knowledge of Brennan's break with protocol to form a select 'stand alone fusion cell' that reported only to him is something that I haven't seen reported before. In any case this story adds another red flag to the entire Russiagate hoax.

Just as Mueller failed to interview Julian Assange or Christopher Steele for his report -- obvious red flags -- we should now watch the conduct of Barr's investigation. Will Barr's investigators interview Smolenkov? This should be an important metric to determine how serious his investigation is. Another metric for Barr will be whether Ghislaine Maxwell is indicted and arrested in the Jefferey Epstein affair. If not, we will soon know just how deep goes the corruption of the ruling class.

Sam F , September 15, 2019 at 18:28

Many thanks to Scott Ritter for this information and cogent argument.

However it is not clear how Russia would expect to benefit by allowing Smolenkov to deceive the CIA that Putin directly ordered interference in the US election. While later discrediting of the US "Russia-gate" nonsense would make the US IC look bad, it is unclear that this could be done, and it would have been done by now to reduce political tensions, but still has not been done. Putin himself denied the accusations as nonsense.

So something is missing: if that was not the plan, Smolenkov was not asked to do that, and he would not have been viewed as harmless when fired for that. If he had other incriminating info on decision makers there, he would not have been allowed to leave, and having escaped, he would have concealed his new location. Perhaps his superiors ill-advisedly asked him to make false statements, for which he was not blamed.

Anon , September 16, 2019 at 07:09

I agree. The logic of "embarrassing" the CIA and dividing them from the president by passing inflammatory information seems a stretch. On the other hand, I agree there do appear a number of "red flags."

I'm wondering about the merit of the idea that this guy cooked up the story himself, though I'm not sure that works either. It just seems to me something is missing.

Ojkelly , September 16, 2019 at 12:00

I thought the idea was that a Brennan minion planted or asked for the "Putin is interfering " report, or even made it up and attributed it to a minor asset.

Brendan , September 15, 2019 at 15:00

( ) the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth.

That's very likely to be true, but I think there's more to it than just getting Brennan's version of events published before anyone elses. If you want to implant your narrative in the public's mind it certainly does help to get your story out first, but in this case there's an additional motive for leaking the spy story.

One effect of the leak was that Smolenko suddenly disappeared. His family apparently fled their house in a hurry, leaving belongings lying around according to media reports.

Normally the CIA would never 'out' a valued asset, even a used one, because that would discourage potential informers. And CNN and the NYT would not reveal details that would identify a Russian defector – as happened in this case when Russian Kommersant identified Smolenkov. American mainstream media would first check that it was OK to publish those details.

This looks far too unusual to be simply a result of incompetence by Americans. A much better explanation is that some powerful people were really desperate to make Smolenko disappear. And the reason is that he knew too much. And now he has gone into hiding, supposedly to escape vengeance from Putin. What is most significant is that he does not face as many questions about his role in Russiagate.

Abe , September 15, 2019 at 14:31

As far as spying is concerned, "a different set of calculations" prevails under Trump
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house-spying-devices-1491351

The Blue Fairy , September 16, 2019 at 00:57

A general search for Intel on google doesn't yield an abundance of articles that mention its move to Israel in 1974, but I discovered it when the Spectre/Meltdown (intentional Israeli processor security flaws, I mean "features") became known in 2018. "Nothing is ever impossible, in this life" except for a computer that's not infested with the US-Israeli partnership. We are also not surprised that Intel was not on Donald Trump's list of American companies to bring back to the US.

Mike from Jersey , September 15, 2019 at 14:23

Good article. This is the kind of analysis you will not find in the New York Times or the Washington Post. This is why I come to the Consortium News.

hetro , September 15, 2019 at 13:46

If I'm following properly, the white paper from Smolenkov is at the heart of the January 6, 2017, "assessments" that the case would be made–Trump as dupe of Putin.

Recall, too, that these "assessments" differed. Brennan's and Comey's were "high"; Clapper's was "moderate."

And, as Scott Ritter points out, they were "estimates" not based on hard proof; they were essentially "guesses."

Why the discrepancy? (Related: William Binney says this "moderate" from Clapper means the NSA knows Russia did not hack the DNC.)

I think this discrepancy question is important. How could a (supposedly) verifiable report via white paper from a verifiable double agent Smolenkov be anything but a slam dunk (unanimous) "high" for the major intelligence agencies?

The other question is Scott's WHY the Russian intelligence apparatus, with Putin complicit, would set out to embarrass the US intelligence agencies with a cooked up story–that made Putin look bad?

Of course, they could not know back at that time how the story would cook and proliferate across US mainstream media with all the glee of Russia-bashing run amok and its TDS.

This view would also suggest a belief that somewhere in the US justice system was the integrity to dig everything out and expose the fraud.

nwwoods , September 15, 2019 at 17:56

I believe that it was NSA which declared "moderate confidence", so no, not Clapper. Clapper, in my opinion, was in on the gambit, a witting confederate of ringleader Brennan.

hetro , September 16, 2019 at 11:30

Yes. Technically Clapper resigned as head of the NSA in 2016, and it was Mike Rogers, the new head in 2017 who declared the assessment "moderate." Clapper had been involved with Brennan and Comey in forming the January 6, 2017 assessment.

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/trump-is-right-to-doubt-the-obama-intelligence-communitys-claims/

The question still remains: why the discrepancy in this "assessment" at the very beginning of Trump's presidency, with its powerful impact.

JP McEvoy , September 15, 2019 at 12:33

One thing is for sure, if anything bad happens to the mole, it's won't be the Russians who did it. Watch your back Mr. Skrip – er – I mean Smolenkov.

Robert Emmett , September 15, 2019 at 11:25

Damn! Please allow me to toss the "curveball" too. What's that? The real one or the fake, you say? Ha ha. Yes, exactly! O, Vaunted sacred screed of PDB where the truth shall set you free to prime the pump with lies. (hint: to spare your soul don't look into their eyes)

I haven't exactly been able to figure out what's wrong with Brennan's face, 'til I just got it. He's been double-yoked! His own plus Barrack's (truer sp.). Egg that just won't wash off! So you have to wear it everywhere, every day. Talk about serviceable villains hiding in plain sight. Hey, Clapper! Don't get any on ya! Haha. Too late!

Carroll Price , September 15, 2019 at 10:43

Another example of checker champions competing with chess masters.

CortesKid , September 15, 2019 at 10:33

Brilliant and thorough. As I was reading Mr. Ritter's analysis, an overwhelming impression was building, analogous to the third scenario, that Smolenkov , indeed, was a lure perfectly placed to catch an intelligence agency or three. As I've watched and read many Russian official's communications, especially their diplomatic efforts, it has become obvious to me that, on average, they are some of the few "adults in the room." In broadstrokes, they are playing chess, while the whole of the West, with its increasingly senile elites, is at the Checkers table.

And in even broader strokes, I believe that at the heart of all of these shenanigans, is a foundational turning away from a matured-and-deflating West, to an energized and expanding Eurasia (Brezhinki's nightmare). As you know, changes on the scale of hegemon are never easy. "Dying empires don't lay down, they double-down."

And I don't necessarily think Smolenkov and family are safe–from, for instance, "Novichok" delivered via some American ally's secret service–as a pretense for further demonization of Russia.

Brendan , September 15, 2019 at 07:51

Sorry but the theory that's proposed above is a bit too convoluted to be believable – that Russia manipulated the CIA with the fake hacking story from Smolenkov and then the CIA chief Brennan used it to manipulate Obama who then unwittingly revealed to Putin that the USA was fooled by the story.

I'd rather follow Occam's razor and go for a simpler scenario. Brennan and the CIA persuaded Smolenkov to invent the story (that he had inside knowledge that Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC).

Not only that, but Obama suspected that the story was fake, since it was passed on to him outside the normal channels and was investigated in a similar unconventional way. It's hard to believe that Obama was easily hoodwinked and simply accepted the story as fact without any convincing evidence.

The Democratic Party's fingerprints are all over the Russiagate story. The DNC commissioned the Steele dossier and Steele met officials in the Obama administration's State Department before the 2016 election. We're expected to believe that this all went on behind President Obama's back.

We're also expected to believe that Obama innocently believed Smolenkov's report, as if the CIA and FBI would never tell a lie. He's not completely stupid – at the very least he must have had serious doubts about the allegations, or he could even have been in on the Russiagate fabrication himself.

Maricata , September 16, 2019 at 19:34

It is more and more difficult to ascertain reality from fantasy, certainty from assumptions. And this all plays into the hands of the ruling elites and their international and national pratorean guards.

Americans do not ask questions. They prefer to believe than to know and thus the {swirl} will yield nothing.

F. G. Sanford , September 15, 2019 at 07:05

Putin must surely have smirked. The little white envelope worked.
The debate made it plain he had pulled Brennan's chain,
And behind the scene subterfuge lurked!

Only four people went to the meeting. Connections might prove rather fleeting.
The "puppet" rebuke at the time seemed a fluke,
No one dared claim that Clinton was cheating!

Brennan's confidence level was high. He had sources and methods to spy.
He had top secret stuff that he claimed was enough,
But no evidence he'd specify!

Then Clinton claimed Russian subversion. In retrospect, not a diversion.
She must have been tipped by somebody loose lipped,
And she ran with the Putin incursion!

Strzok and Page were kept out of the loop. They didn't get insider poop.
They found no 'there' there, Comey's cupboard looked bare,
Brennan's spy had not yet flown the coop.

The durable lie picked up traction. Their spook would require extraction.
How could Clinton be sure that the blame would endure,
And the Steele Dossier would get action?

The 'Agent in Place' was a double. He didn't get in any trouble.
Hillary's pride had some hubris to hide,
In the end it would burst Brennan's bubble!

The big secret meeting was leaked. On the stage, "He's a puppet!" she shrieked.
Perhaps Susan Rice was inclined to be nice,
And her duty to Hillary peaked!

So now, they blame Trump for the outing. But it's over except for the shouting.
The 'insurance' is void, the illusion destroyed,
And poor Hillary just keeps on pouting!

David Otness , September 14, 2019 at 23:41

Scott -- so glad I got the head's-up on this via the CN Live show. I just now finished it and am putting it into perspective. Well-researched, and well-written -- it's truly a web so very reminiscent of what should have remained Cold War 1.0 finis.

And Episode Nine of CN Live is showing us where this internet platform can go with the assembled experience and talent exhibited. The tech glitches were too bad, but the audio was quite good enough.

Thanks for this travel guide to the heart of the labyrinth. Hopefully good things come of it. I do worry about Barr's too many allegiances to his CIA incubator though, especially with all of the ongoing coverups of the Epstein fiasco (engineered or not,) that complicate and obfuscate the twin scandals that both end up under Barr's purview.

Ya done good, nonetheless. Thank you.

Abe , September 14, 2019 at 22:07

"After the U.S. reports came out, an anonymous, well-informed Russian Telegram channel, The Ruthless PR Guy, reported that the asset was Kremlin official Oleg Smolenkov. On Tuesday (10 September 2019] morning, the Moscow daily Kommersant published a story confirming that it was him based on anonymous sources and some pretty convincing circumstantial evidence. [ ]

"If Smolenkov was a spy, he could have delivered important insights about Russia's foreign policy thinking and planning to U.S. intelligence. But if he was the source for the U.S. intelligence community's certainty that Putin personally orchestrated a covert interference campaign, that certainty rests on a weak foundation. Smolenkov served the wrong boss in the Kremlin to get reliable information about such ventures."

Was this man the prized US asset in the Kremlin? By Leonid Bershidsky http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0919/bershidsky091119.php3#Asy3R8hJ2mAQPm1y.99

Ojkelly , September 14, 2019 at 22:01

Mr Ritter, Very lightly done. " Curveball made me do it" is the defense.
Brennan, well,I am not knowledgeable , but tight with Barry, unprofessional to my view, has an issue. He made the most outrageous statements, Commander believing his own BS, NYT magazine. Imagine going around saying that Trump was a Russian agent . Did incomparable harm.And Morrell endorsing Hillary Clinton :beyond the pale , Professional members of the agency must've been? Shocked appalled, whatever.

Jeff Harrison , September 14, 2019 at 21:52

Whooof! Obviously the MSM won't touch any of this stuff. I also don't have a lot of confidence in the US government's ability to clean up the mess it has made. Amusingly, I've watched the US's ham handed operations around the world and wondered when somebody would return the complement. If Mr. Ritter is to be believed, it seems the Russians have started. As Mr. Lawrence pointed out on CN live, Americans need to dispense with the notion that we are exceptional. That's a weakness as it leads to complacency. How many more bricks of trust in our government will we have to see broken before the entire edifice collapses? I would also like to point out that we wouldn't be having these kind of problems if we weren't hell bent on being the global hegemon.

Clark M Shanahan , September 14, 2019 at 22:54

"If Mr. Ritter is to be believed"
Jeffrey, I've followed Mr Ritter.
You can believe what he is stating, he's a good man.

he follows soon, here w/G. Galloway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NutNHIj2nU8

Clark M Shanahan , September 15, 2019 at 08:46

my bad: Ritter starts at 48 minutes, before Nixon & Maupin

Jeff Harrison , September 15, 2019 at 17:43

I'm hip, Clark. I said that simply because I have no other collaborating commentary. Ritter had my vote when he stood up to Shrub over Iraq's WMDs. But you do have to keep the realization that you could be wrong so if Mr. Ritter is to be believed. I think that the odds that Ritter is wrong are in the general vicinity of the odds that the US will start acting like a normal nation.

[Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

Highly recommended!
Sep 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

A retired Australian diplomat who served in Moscow dissects the emergence of the new Cold War and its dire consequences.

I n 2014, we saw violent U.S.-supported regime change and civil war in Ukraine. In February, after months of increasing tension from the anti-Russian protest movement's sitdown strike in Kiev's Maidan Square, there was a murderous clash between protesters and Ukrainian police, sparked off by hidden shooters (we now know that were expert Georgian snipers) , aiming at police. The elected government collapsed and President Yanukevich fled to Russia, pursued by murder squads.

The new Poroshenko government pledged harsh anti-Russian language laws. Rebels in two Russophone regions in Eastern Ukraine took local control, and appealed for Russian military help. In March, a referendum took place in Russian-speaking Crimea on leaving Ukraine, under Russian military protection. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, a request promptly granted by the Russian Parliament and President. Crimea's border with Ukraine was secured against saboteurs. Crimea is prospering under its pro-Russian government, with the economy kick-started by Russian transport infrastructure investment.

In April, Poroshenko ordered full military attack on the separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. A brutal civil war ensued, with aerial and artillery bombardment bringing massive civilian death and destruction to the separatist region. There was major refugee outflow into Russia and other parts of Ukraine. The shootdown of MH17 took place in July 2014.

Poroshenko: Ordered military attack.

By August 2015, according to UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates, 13,000 people had been killed and 30,000 wounded. 1.4 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced, and 925,000 had fled to neighbouring countries, mostly Russia and to a lesser extent Poland.

There is now a military stalemate, under the stalled Minsk peace process. But random fatal clashes continue, with the Ukrainian Army mostly blamed by UN observers. The UN reported last month that the ongoing war has affected 5.2 million people, leaving 3.5 million of them in need of relief, including 500,000 children. Most Russians blame the West for fomenting Ukrainian enmity towards Russia. This war brings back for older Russians horrible memories of the Nazi invasion in 1941. The Russia-Ukraine border is only 550 kilometres from Moscow.

Flashpoint Syria

Russian forces joined the civil war in Syria in September 2015, at the request of the Syrian Government, faltering under the attacks of Islamist extremist rebel forces reinforced by foreign fighters and advanced weapons. With Russian air and ground support, the tide of war turned. Palmyra and Aleppo were recaptured in 2016. An alleged Syrian Government chemical attack at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017 resulted in a token U.S. missile attack on a Syrian Government airbase: an early decision by President Trump.

NATO, Strategic Balance, Sanctions

An F-15C Eagle from the 493rd Fighter Squadron takes off from Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, March 6, 2014. The 48th Fighter Wing sent an additional six aircraft and more than 50 personnel to support NATO's air policing mission in Lithuania, at the request of U.S. allies in the Baltics. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Emerson Nunez/Released)

Tensions have risen in the Baltic as NATO moves ground forces and battlefield missiles up to the Baltic states' borders with Russia. Both sides' naval and air forces play dangerous brinksmanship games in the Baltic. U.S. short-range, non-nuclear-armed anti-ballistic missiles were stationed in Poland and Romania, allegedly against threat of Iranian attack. They are easily convertible to nuclear-armed missiles aimed at nearby Russia.

Nuclear arms control talks have stalled. The INF intermediate nuclear forces treaty expired in 2019, after both sides accused the other of cheating. In March 2018, Putin announced that Russia has developed new types of intercontinental nuclear missiles using technologies that render U.S. defence systems useless. The West has pretended to ignore this announcement, but we can be sure Western defence ministries have noted it. Nuclear second-strike deterrence has returned, though most people in the West have forgotten what this means. Russians know exactly what it means.

Western economic sanctions against Russia continue to tighten after the 2014 events in Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to block the nearly completed Nordstream Baltic Sea underwater gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Sanctions are accelerating the division of the world into two trade and payments systems: the old NATO-led world, and the rest of the world led by China, with full Russian support and increasing interest from India, Japan, ROK and ASEAN.

Return to Moscow

In 2013, my children gave me an Ipad. I began to spend several hours a day reading well beyond traditional mainstream Western sources: British and American dissident sites, writers like Craig Murray in UK and in the U.S. Stephen Cohen, and some Russian sites – rt.com, Sputnik, TASS, and the official Foreign Ministry site mid.ru. in English.

In late 2015 I decided to visit Russia independently to write Return to Moscow , a literary travel memoir. I planned to compare my impressions of the Soviet Union, where I had lived and worked as an Australian diplomat in 1969-71, with Russia today. I knew there had been huge changes. I wanted to experience 'Putin's Russia' for myself, to see how it felt to be there as an anonymous visitor in the quiet winter season. I wanted to break out of the familiar one-dimensional hostile political view of Russia that Western mainstream media offer: to take my readers with me on a cultural pilgrimage through the tragedy and grandeur and inspiration of Russian history. As with my earlier book on Spain 'Walking the Camino' , this was not intended to be a political book, and yet somehow it became one.

I was still uncommitted on contemporary Russian politics before going to Russia in January 2016. Using the metaphor of a seesaw, I was still sitting somewhere around the middle.

My book was written in late 2015 – early 2016, expertly edited by UWA Publishing. It was launched in March 2017. By this time my political opinions had moved decisively to the Russian end of the seesaw, on the basis of what I had seen in Russia, and what I had read and thought during the year.

I have been back again twice, in winter 2018 and 2019. My 2018 visit included Crimea, and I happened to see a Navalny-led Sunday demonstration in Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed all three independent visits: in my opinion, they give my judgements on Russia some depth and authenticity.

Russophobia Becomes Entrenched

Russia was a big talking point in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the initially unlikely Republican candidate Donald Trump's chances improved, anti-Putin and anti-Russian positions hardened in the outgoing Obama administration and in the Democratic Party establishment which backed candidate Hillary Clinton.

Russia and Putin became caught up in the Democratic Party's increasingly obsessive rage and hatred against the victorious Trump. Russophobia became entrenched in Washington and London U.S. and UK political and strategic elites, especially in intelligence circles: think of Pompeo, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. All sense of international protocol and diplomatic propriety towards Russia and its President was abandoned, as this appalling Economist cover from October 2016 shows.

My experience of undeclared political censorship in Australia since four months after publication of 'Return to Moscow' supports the thesis that:

We are now in the thick of a ruthless but mostly covert Anglo-American alliance information war against Russia. In this war, individuals who speak up publicly in the cause of detente with Russia will be discouraged from public discourse.

In the Thick of Information War

When I spoke to you two years ago, I had no idea how far-reaching and ruthless this information war is becoming. I knew that a false negative image of Russia was taking hold in the West, even as Russia was becoming a more admirable and self-confident civil society, moving forward towards greater democracy and higher living standards, while maintaining essential national security. I did not then know why, or how.

I had just had time to add a few final paragraphs in my book about the possible consequences for Russia-West relations of Trump's surprise election victory in November 2016. I was right to be cautious, because since Trump's inauguration we have seen the step-by-step elimination of any serious pro-detente voices in Washington, and the reassertion of control over this haphazard president by the bipartisan imperial U.S. deep state, as personified from April 2018 by Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Adviser Bolton. Bolton has now been thrown from the sleigh as decoy for the wolves: under the smooth-talking Pompeo, the imperial policies remain.

Truth, Trust and False Narratives

Let me now turn to some theory about political reality and perception, and how national communities are persuaded to accept false narratives. Let me acknowledge my debt to the fearless and brilliant Australian independent online journalist, Caitlin Johnstone.

Behavioural scientists have worked in the field of what used to be called propaganda since WW1. England has always excelled in this field. Modern wars are won or lost not just on the battlefield, but in people's minds. Propaganda, or as we now call it information warfare, is as much about influencing people's beliefs within your own national community as it is about trying to demoralise and subvert the enemy population.

The IT revolution of the past few years has exponentially magnified the effectiveness of information warfare. Already in the 1940s, George Orwell understood how easily governments are able to control and shape public perceptions of reality and to suppress dissent. His brilliant books 1984 and Animal Farm are still instruction manuals in principles of information warfare. Their plots tell of the creation by the state of false narratives, with which to control their gullible populations.

The disillusioned Orwell wrote from his experience of real politics. As a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War, he saw how both Spanish sides used false news and propaganda narratives to demonise the enemy. He also saw how the Nazi and Stalinist systems in Germany and Russia used propaganda to support show trials and purges, the concentration camps and the Gulag, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, German master race and Stalinist class enemy ideologies; and hows dissident thought was suppressed in these controlled societies. Orwell tried to warn his readers: all this could happen here too, in our familiar old England. But because the good guys won the war against fascism, his warnings were ignored.

We are now in Britain, U.S. and Australia actually living in an information warfare world that has disturbing echoes of the world that Orwell wrote about. The essence of information control is the effective state management of two elements, trust and fear , to generate and uphold a particular view of truth. Truth, trust and fear : these are the three key elements, now as 100 years ago in WWI Britain.

People who work or have worked close to government – in departments, politics, the armed forces, or top universities – mostly accept whatever they understand at the time to be 'the government view' of truth. Whether for reasons of organisational loyalty, career prudence or intellectual inertia, it is usually this way around governments. It is why moral issues like the Vietnam War and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq were so distressing for people of conscience working in or close to government and military jobs in Canberra. They were expected to engage in 'doublethink' as Orwell had described it:

Even in Winston's nightmare world, there were still choices – to retreat into the non-political world of the proles, or to think forbidden thoughts and read forbidden books. These choices involved large risks and punishments. It was easier and safer for most people to acquiesce in the fake news they were fed by state-controlled media.

'Trust, Truth and False Narratives'

Fairfax journalist Andrew Clark, in the Australian Financial Review , in an essay optimistically titled "Not fake news: Why truth and trust are still in good shape in Australia", (AFR Dec. 22, 2018), cited Professor William Davies thus:

"Most of the time, the edifice that we refer to as "truth" is really an investment of trust in our structures of politics and public life' 'When trust sinks below a certain point, many people come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham."

Here is my main point: Effective information warfare requires the creation of enough public trust to make the public believe that state-supported lies are true.

The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining.

Caitlin Johnstone a few days ago put it this way:

" Power is being able to control what happens. Absolute power is being able to control what people think about what happens. If you can control what happens, you can have power until the public gets sick of your BS and tosses you out on your ass. If you can control what people think about what happens, you can have power forever. As long as you can control how people are interpreting circumstances and events, there's no limit to the evils you can get away with."

The Internet has made propaganda campaigns that used to take weeks or months a matter of hours or even minutes to accomplish. It is about getting in quickly, using large enough clusters of trusted and diverse sources, in order to cement lies in place, to make the lies seem true, to magnify them through social messaging: in other words, to create credible false narratives that will quickly get into the public's bloodstream.

Over the past two years, I have seen this work many times: on issues like framing Russia for the MH17 tragedy; with false allegations of Assad mounting poison gas attacks in Syria; with false allegations of Russian agents using lethal Novichok to try to kill the Skripals in Salisbury; and with the multiple lies of Russiagate.

It is the mind-numbing effect of constant repetition of disinformation by many eminent people and agencies, in hitherto trusted channels like the BBC or ABC or liberal Anglophone print media that gives the system its power to persuade the credulous. For if so many diverse and reputable people repeatedly report such negative news and express such negative judgements about Russia or China or Iran or Syria, surely they must be right?

We have become used to reading in our quality newspapers and hearing on the BBC and ABC and SBS gross assaults on truth, calmly presented as accepted facts. There is no real public debate on important facts in contention any more. There are no venues for dissent outside contrarian social media sites.

Sometimes, false narratives inter-connect. Often a disinformation narrative in one area is used to influence perceptions in other areas. For example, the false Skripals poisoning story was launched by British intelligence in March 2018, just in time to frame Syrian President Assad as the guilty party in a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma the following month.

The Skripals Gambit

The Skripals gambit was also a failed British attempt to blight the Russia –hosted Football World Cup in June 2018. In the event, hundreds of thousands of Western sports fans returned home with the warmest memories of Russian good sportsmanship and hospitality.

How do I know the British Skripals narrative is false? For a start, it is illogical, incoherent, and constantly changes. Allegedly, two visiting Russian FSB agents in March 2018 sprayed or smeared Novichok, a deadly toxin instantly lethal in the most microscopic quantities, on the Skripals' house front doorknob. There is no video footage of the Skripals at their front door on the day. We are told they were found slumped on a park bench, and that is maybe where they had been sprayed with nerve gas? Shortly afterwards, Britain's Head of Army Nursing who happened to be passing by found them, and supervised their hospitalisation and emergency treatment.

Allegedly, much of Salisbury was contaminated by Novichok, and one unfortunate woman mysteriously died weeks later, yet the Skripals somehow did not die, as we are told. But where are they now? We saw a healthy Yulia in a carefully scripted video interview released in May 2018, after an alleged 'one in a million' recovery. We were assured her father had recovered too, but nobody has seen him at all. The Skripals have simply disappeared from sight since 16 months ago. Are they now alive or dead? Are they in voluntary or involuntary British custody?

A month after the poisoning, the UK Government sent biological samples from the Skripals to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , for testing. The OPCW sent the samples to a trusted OPCW laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland.

Lavrov Spiez BZ claims, April 2018

A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dramatically announced in Moscow that the Spiez lab had found in the samples a temporary-effect nerve agent BZ, used by U.S. and UK but not by Russia, that would have disabled the Skripals for a few days without killing them. He also revealed the Spiez lab had found that the Skripal samples had been twice tampered with while still in UK custody: first soon after the poisoning, and again shortly before passing them to the OPCW. He said the Spiez lab had found a high concentration of Novichok, which he called A- 234, in its original form. This was extremely suspicious as A-234 has high volatility and could not have retained its purity over a two weeks period. The dosage the Spiez lab found in the samples would have surely killed the Skripals. The OPCW under British pressure rejected Lavrov's claim, and suppressed the Spiez lab report.

Let's look finally at the alleged assassins.

'Boshirov and Petrov'

These two FSB operatives who visited Salisbury under the false identities of 'Boshirov' and 'Petrov' did not look or behave like credible assassins. It is more likely that they were sent to negotiate with Sergey Skripal about his rumoured interest in returning to Russia. They needed to apply for UK visas a month in advance of travel: ample time for the British agencies to identify them as FSB operatives, and to construct a false attempted assassination narrative around their visit. This false narrative repeatedly trips over its own lies and contradictions. British social media are full of alternative theories and rebuttals. Russians find the whole British Government Skripal narrative laughable. They have invented comedy skits and video games based on it. Yet it had major impact on Russia-West relations.

The Douma False Narrative

I turn now to the claimed Assad chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018.This falsely alleged attack triggered a major NATO air attack on Syrian targets, ordered by Trump. We came close to WWIII in these dangerous days. Thanks to the restraint of the then Secretary of Defence James Mattis and his Russian counterparts, the risk was contained.

The allegation that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used outlawed chemical weapons against his own people was based solely on the evidence of faked video images of child victims, made by the discredited White Helmets, a UK-sponsored rebel-linked 'humanitarian' propaganda organisation with much blood on its hands. Founded in 2013 by a British private security specialist of intelligence background, James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets specialised in making fake videos of alleged Assad regime war crimes against Syrian civilians. It is by now a thoroughly discredited organisation that was prepared to kill its prisoners and then film their bodies as alleged victims of government chemical attacks.

White Helmets

As the town of Douma was about to fall to advancing Syrian Government forces, the White Helmets filled a room with stacked corpses of murdered prisoners, and photographed them as alleged victims of aerial gas attack. They also made a video alleging child victims of this attack being hosed down by White Helmets. A video of a child named Hassan Diab went viral all over the Western world.

Hassan Diab later testified publicly in The Hague that he had been dragged terrified from his family by force, smeared with some sort of grease, and hosed down with water as part of a fake video. He went from hero to zero overnight, as Western governments and media rejected his testimony as Russian and Syrian propaganda.

In a late development, there is proof that the OPCW suppressed its own engineers' report from Douma that the alleged poison gas cylinders could not have possibly been dropped from the air through the roof of the house where one was found, resting on a bed under a convenient hole in the roof.

I could go on discussing the detail of such false narratives all day. No matter how often they are exposed by critics, our politicians and mainstream media go on referencing them as if they are true. Once people have come to believe false narratives, it is hard to refute them.

So it is with the false narrative that Russian internet interference enabled Trump to win the 2016 U.S. presidential elections: a thesis for which no evidence was found by [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller, yet continues to be cited by many U.S. liberal Democratic media as if it were true. So, even, with MH17.

Managing Mass Opinion

This mounting climate of Western Russophobia is not accidental: it is strategically directed, and it is nourished with regular maintenance doses of fresh lies. Each round of lies provides a credible platform for the next round somewhere else. The common thread is a claimed malign Russian origin for whatever goes wrong.

So where is all this disinformation originating? Information technology firms in Washington and London that are closely networked into government elites, often through attending the same establishment schools or colleges like Eton and Yale, have closely studied and tested the science of influencing crowd opinions through mainstream media and online. They know, in a way that Orwell or Goebbels could hardly have dreamt, how to put out and repeat desired media messages. They know what sizes of 'internet attraction nodes' need to be established online, in order to create diverse critical masses of credible Russophobic messaging, which then attracts enough credulous and loyal followers to become self-propagating.

Firms like the SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) and the now defunct Cambridge Analytica pioneered such work in the UK. There are many similar firms in Washington, all in the business of monitoring, generating and managing mass opinion. It is big business, and it works closely with the national security state.

Starting in November 2018, an enterprising group of unknown hackers in the UK , who go by the name 'Anonymous', opened a remarkable window into this secret world. Over a few weeks, they hacked and dumped online a huge volume of original documents issued by and detailing the activities of the Institute for Statecraft (IfS) and the Integrity initiative (II). Here is the first page of one of their dumps, exposing propaganda against Jeremy Corbyn.

We know from this material that the IfS and II are two secret British disinformation networks operating at arms' length from but funded by the UK security services and broader UK government establishment. They bring together high-ranking military and intelligence personnel, often nominally retired, journalists and academics, to produce and disseminate propaganda that serves the agendas of the UK and its allies.

Stung by these massive leaks, Chris Donnelly, a key figure in IfS and II and a former British Army intelligence officer, made a now famous seven-minute YouTube video in December 2018, artfully filmed in a London kitchen, defending their work.

He argued – quite unconvincingly in my opinion – that IfS and II are simply defending Western societies against disinformation and malign influence, primarily from Russia. He boasted how they have set up in numerous targeted European countries, claimed to be under attack from Russian disinformation, what he called 'clusters of influence' , to 'educate' public opinion and decision-makers in pro-NATO and anti-Russian directions.

Donnelly spoke frankly on how the West is already at war with Russia, a 'new kind of warfare', in which he said 'everything becomes a weapon'. He said that 'disinformation is the issue which unites all the other weapons in this conflict and gives them a third dimension'.

He said the West has to fight back, if it is to defend itself and to prevail.

We can confirm from the Anonymous leaked files the names of many people in Europe being recruited into these clusters of influence. They tend to be significant people in journalism, publishing, universities and foreign policy think-tanks: opinion-shapers. The leaked documents suggest how ideologically suitable candidates are identified: approached for initial screening interviews; and, if invited to join a cluster of influence, sworn to secrecy.

Remarkably, neither the Anonymous disclosures nor the Donnelly response have ever been reported in Australian media. Even in Britain – where evidence that the Integrity Initiative was mounting a campaign against [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn provoked brief media interest. The story quickly disappeared from mainstream media and the BBC. A British under-foreign secretary admitted in Parliamentary Estimates that the UK Foreign Office subsidises the Institute of Statecraft to the tune of nearly 3 million pounds per year. It also gives various other kinds of non-monetary assistance, e.g. providing personnel and office support in Britain's overseas embassies.

This is not about traditional spying or seeking agents of influence close to governments. It is about generating mass disinformation, in order to create mass climates of belief.

In my opinion, such British and American disinformation efforts, using undeclared clusters of influence, through Five Eyes intelligence-sharing, and possibly with the help of British and American diplomatic missions, may have been in operation in Australia for many years.

Such networks may have been used against me since around mid-2017, to limit the commercial outreach of my book and the impact of its dangerous ideas on the need for East-West detente; and efficiently to suppress my voice in Australian public discourse about Russia and the West. Do I have evidence for this? Yes.

It is not coincidence that the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2017 somehow lost all my sign-and-sell books from my sold-out scheduled speaking event; that a major debate with [Australian writer and foreign policy analyst] Bobo Lo at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne was cancelled by his Australian sponsor, the Lowy institute, two weeks before the advertised date; that my last invitation to any writers festival was 15 months ago, in May 2018; that Return to Moscow was not shortlisted for any Australian book prize, though I entered it in all of them ; that since my book's early promotion ended around August 2017, I have not been invited to join any ABC discussion panels, or to give any talks on Russia in any universities or institutes, apart from the admirable Australian Institute of International Affairs and the ISAA.

My articles and shorter opinion commentaries on Russia and the West have not been published in mainstream media or in reputable online journals like Eureka Street, The Conversation, Inside Story or Australian Book Review . Despite being an ANU Emeritus Fellow, I have not been invited to give a public talk or join any panel in ANU (Australian National University) or any Canberra think tank. In early 2018, I was invited to give a private briefing to a group of senior students travelling on an immersion course to Russia. I was not invited back in 2019, after high-level private advice within ANU that I was regarded as too pro-Putin.

In all these ways – none overt or acknowledged – my voice as an open-minded writer and speaker on Russia-West relations seems to have been quietly but effectively suppressed in Australia. I would like to be proved wrong on this, but the evidence is there.

This may be about "velvet-glove deterrence" of my Russia-sympathetic voice and pen, in order to discourage others, especially those working in or close to government. Nobody is going to put me in jail, unless I am stupid enough to violate Australia's now strict foreign influence laws. This deterrence is about generating fear of consequences for people still in their careers, paying their mortgages, putting kids through school. Nobody wants to miss their next promotion.

There are other indications that Australian national security elite opinion has been indoctrinated prudently to fear and avoid any kind of public discussion of positive engagement with Russia (or indeed, with China).

There are only two kinds of news about Russia now permitted in our mainstream media, including the ABC and SBS: negative news and comment, or silence. Unless a story can be given an anti-Russian sting, it will not be carried at all. Important stories are simply spiked, like last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivistok, chaired by President Putin and attended by Prime Ministers Abe, Mahathir and Modi, among 8500 participants from 65 countries.

The ABC idea of a balanced panel to discuss any Russian political topic was exemplified in an ABC Sunday Extra Roundtable panel chaired by Eleanor Hall on July, 22 2018, soon after the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki. The panel – a former ONA Russia analyst, a professor of Soviet and Russian History at Melbourne University, and a Russian émigré dissident journalist introduced as the 'Washington correspondent for Echo of Moscow radio' spent most of their time sneering at Putin and Trump. There were no other views.

A powerful anti-Russian news narrative is now firmly in place in Australia, on every topic in contention: Ukraine, MH17, Crimea, Syria, the Skripals, Navalny and public protest in Russia. There is ill-informed criticism of Russia, or silence, on the crucial issues of arms control and Russia-China strategic and economic relations as they affect Australia's national security or economy. There is no analysis of the negative impact on Australia of economic sanctions against Russia. There is almost no discussion of how improved relations with China and Russia might contribute to Australia's national security and economic welfare, as American influence in the world and our region declines, and as American reliability as an ally comes more into question. Silence on inconvenient truths is an important part of the disinformation tool kit.

I see two overall conflicting narratives – the prevailing Anglo-American false narrative; and valiant efforts by small groups of dissenters, drawing on sources outside the Anglo-American official narrative, to present another narrative much closer to truth. And this is how most Russians now see it too.

The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018 was damaged by the Skripal and Syria fabrications. Trump left that summit friendless, frightened and humiliated. He soon surrendered to the power of the U.S. imperial state as then represented by [Mike] Pompeo and [John] Bolton, who had both been appointed as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in April 2018 and who really got into their stride after the Helsinki Summit. Pompeo now smoothly dominates Trump's foreign policy.

Self-Inflicted Wounds

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (Gage Skidmore)

Finally, let me review the American political casualties over the past two years – self-inflicted wounds – arising from this secret information war against Russia. Let me list them without prejudging guilt or innocence. Slide 20 – Self-inflicted wounds: casualties of anti-Russian information warfare.

Trump's first National Security Adviser, the highly decorated Michael Flynn lost his job after only three weeks, and soon went to jail. His successor H R McMaster lasted 13 months until replaced by John Bolton. Trump's first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson lasted just 14 months until his replacement by Trump's appointed CIA chief (in January 2017) Mike Pompeo. Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon lasted only seven months. Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is now in jail.

Defence Secretary James Mattis lasted nearly two years as Secretary of Defence, and was an invaluable source of strategic stability. He resigned in December 2018. The highly capable Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman lasted just two years: he is resigning next month. John Kelly lasted 18 months as White House Chief of Staff. Less senior figures like George Papadopoulos and Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen both served jail time. The pattern I see here is that people who may have been trying responsibly as senior U.S. officials to advance Trump's initial wish to explore possibilities for detente with Russia – policies that he had advocated as a candidate – were progressively purged, one after another . The anti-Russian U.S. bipartisan imperial state is now firmly back in control. Trump is safely contained as far as Russia is concerned .

Russians do not believe that any serious detente or arms control negotiations can get under way while cold warriors like Pompeo continue effectively to control Trump. There have been other casualties over the past two years of tightening American Russophobia. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning come to mind. The naive Maria Butina is a pathetic victim of American judicial rigidity and deep state vindictiveness.

False anti-Russian Government narratives emanating from London and Washington may be laughed at in Moscow , but they are unquestioningly accepted in Canberra. We are the most gullible of audiences. There is no critical review. Important contrary factual information and analysis from and about Russia just does not reach Australian news reporting and commentary, nor – I fear – Australian intelligence assessment. We are prisoners of the false narratives fed to us by our senior Five Eyes partners U.S. and UK.

To conclude: Some people may find what I am saying today difficult to accept. I understand this. I now work off open-source information about Russia with which many people here are unfamiliar, because they prefer not to read the diverse online information sources that I choose to read. The seesaw has tilted for me: I have clearly moved a long way from mainstream Western perceptions on Russia-West relations.

Under Trump and Pompeo, as the Syria and Iran crises show, the present risk of global nuclear war by accident or incompetent Western decision-making is as high as it ever was in the Cold War. The West needs to learn again how to dialogue usefully and in mutually respectful ways with Russia and China. This expert knowledge is dying with our older and wiser former public servants and ex-military chiefs.

These remarks were delivered by Tony Kevin at the Independent Scholars Association of Australia in Canberra, Australia on Wednesday.

Watch Tony Kevin interviewed Friday night on CN Live!

Tony Kevin is a retired Australian diplomat who was posted to Moscow from 1969 to 1971, and was later Australia's ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. His latest book is Return to Moscow, published by UWA Publishing.

Bruce , September 17, 2019 at 08:58

Excellent article. It's very interesting to see how the state and its media lackey set the narrative.

Most of this comment relates to the Skripals but also applies to other matters (the Skripals writing was some of Craig Murray's finest work in my opinion). One of the hallmarks of a hoax is a constantly evolving storyline. I think governments have learned from past "mistakes" with their hoaxes/deception where they've given a description of events and then scientists/engineers/chemists etc have come in and criticised their version of events with details and scientific arguments. Nowadays, governments are very reluctant to commit to a version of events, and instead rely on the media (their propaganda assets) to provide a scattergun set of information to muddy the waters and thoroughly confuse the population. The government is then insulated from some of the more bizarre allegations (the headlines of which are absorbed nonetheless), and can blame it on the media (who would use an anonymous government source naturally). Together with classifying just about everything on national security grounds, they can stonewall for as long as they want.

The British are masters of propaganda. They maintained a global empire for a very long time, and the prevailing view (in the west at least) was probably one of tea-drinking cricket playing colonials/gentlemen. But you don't maintain an empire without being absolutely ruthless and brutal. They've been doing this for a very long time.

When we hear something from the BBC or ABC, we should think "State Media".
That's probably why its got a nice folksy nickname of "aunty" .build up the trust.

Leslie Louis , September 17, 2019 at 04:00

Society is suffering the extreme paradox; there is the potential for everyone to have a voice, but the last vestiges of free speech have been whittled away. Fake news is universal, assisted by the fake "left". It is impossible to get published any challenge to even the most outlandish versions of identity politics. As the experience of Tony Kevin exemplifies, all avenues for dissent against hegemonic orthodoxies are closed off.
Disinformation is now an essential weapon in waging hot and cold wars. Cold War historians are well informed on false flags, "black ops", and other organised dirty tactics. I do not know what happened to the Skripals, and while it is legitimate to bear in mind KGB assassinations, despite the enormous resources at its disposal, the English security state has been unable to construct a credible case. Surely scepticism is provoked by the leading role being played by the notorious Bellingcat outfit.

Zenobia van Dongen , September 17, 2019 at 00:29

Here is part of an eyewitness account:
"After the Orange Revolution which began in Kiev, the country was divided literally into two parts -- the supporters of integration with Russia and the supporters of an independent Ukraine. For almost 100 years belonging to the Soviet Union, the propaganda about the assistance and care from our "big brother" Russia, in Ukraine as a whole and the Donbass in particular has borne fruit. At the end of February 2014, some cities of the Southeast part were boiling with mass social and political protest against the new Ukrainian government in defense of the status of the Russian language, voicing separatist and pro-Russian slogans. The division took place in our city of Sloviansk too. Some people stood for separation from Ukraine, while Ukrainian patriots stood for the unity of our country.
On April 12, 2014 our city of Sloviansk in the Donetsk region was seized by Russian mercenaries and local volunteers. From that moment onward, armed assaults on state institutions began. The city police department, the Sloviansk City Hall, the building of the Ukraine Security Service was occupied. Armed militants seized state institutions and confiscated private property. They threatened and beat people, and those who refused to obey were taken away to an unknown destination and people started disappearing. The persecution and abduction of patriotic citizens began."

Michael McNulty , September 16, 2019 at 11:36

Watching Vietnam news coverage as a kid in the '60s I noticed the planes carpet-bombing South East Asia were American, not Russian. And as I only watched the footage and never listened to the commentary (I was waiting for the kids programs that followed) the BS they came out with to explain it all never reached me. I saw with my own eyes what the US really was and is, and always believed growing up they were the belligerent side not Russia. Once the USSR fell it was clear there were no longer any constraints on US excesses.

dean 1000 , September 15, 2019 at 18:17

Doublethink, not to mention doublespeak, is so apt to describe what is happening. If Orwell was writing today it would have to be classified as non-fiction.

Free speech is impossible unless every election district has a radio/TV station where candidates, constituents, and others can debate, discuss and speak to the issues without bending a knee to large campaign contributors or the controllers of corporate or government media. It may start with low-power pirate radio/TV broadcasts. No, the pirate speakers will not have to climb a cell tower to broadcast an opinion to the neighborhood or precinct.
If genuine free speech is going to exist it will start as something unauthorized and unlawful. If it sticks to the facts it will quickly prove its value.

Download a free pdf copy of '1984.' https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/1984.pdf

Njegos , September 15, 2019 at 03:39

Excellent article. The only exhibit missing was reference to Bill Browder's lies. Browder's rubbish has been exposed by intrepid journalists and documentary makers such as Andrei Nekrasov, Sasha Krainer and Lucy Komisar but to read or listen to our media, you'd think BB was some sort of human rights hero. That's because BB's fairy tale fits nicely into the MSM's hatred of Putin and Russia. Debunk Browder and a major pillar of anti-Russia prejudice collapses. Therefore, Browder will never face any serious questions by the MSM.

John A , September 16, 2019 at 09:18

judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the mainstream media at all.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-magnitskiy-myth-exploded/

MSM propaganda by omission. Anything that doesn't fit the government narrative gets zero publicity.

Jim Ingram , September 14, 2019 at 21:12

Well said and needing to be said Tony.

Mr. Dan , September 14, 2019 at 19:41

I have stopped following australian mainstream media including the darlings of the 'left' ABC/SBS over a decade ago, completely. My disgust with their 'coverage' of the 2008 GFC was more than enough. Since 2008-9 things have deteriorated drastically into conspiracy theory propaganda by omission la-la land *it seems*, given I don't tune in at all.

The author has a well supported view. I find it a little naive in him thinking that the MSM has that much power over shaping public opinion in australia.

People who want to be informed do so. The half intelligent conformists on hamster wheel of lifetime mortgage debt have 'careers' to hold onto, so parroting the group think or living in ignorance is much easier. The massive portion of australian racists, inbred bogans and idiots that make up the large LNP, One Nation etc. voting block are completely beyond salvation or ability to process, and critically evaluate any information. The smarter ones drool on about the 'UN Agenda 21' conspiracy at best. Utterly hopeless.

I don't expect things to change as the australian economy is slowly hollowed out by the rich, and the education system (that has always been about conforming, wearing school uniform and regurgitating what the teacher/lecturer says at best) is gutted completely. Welcome to australistan.

Fran Macadam , September 14, 2019 at 19:21

Note that the prohibition against false propaganda to indoctrinate the domestic population by the American government was lifted by President Obama at the tail end of his administration. The Executive Order legalizes all the deceptive behavior Tony itemizes in his article.

Josep , September 17, 2019 at 04:10

I thought it was Reagan who did that by abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. At least in terms of television and radio (?) broadcasts.

Stephen Morrell , September 14, 2019 at 19:02

Thank you Tony for your thoughtful talk (and interview on CN Live! too).

What's encouraging is this cohort of what might be called 'millennial journalists' coming through willing to do 'shoe-leather' journalism and stand up to smears and flack for revealing uncomfortable facts and truth. They're the online 5th estate holding the 4th to account (to steal Ray McGovern's apt view), and they're congealing against the onslaught.

Some include Max Blumenthal and Rania Kahlek (both now being pilloried by MSM and others for visiting Syrian government held areas and reporting that life isn't hellish as MSM would have everyone believe heaven forbid); Vanessa Bealey who's exposed a lot of White Helmet horrors and false-flag attacks in Syria (and being attacked by all and sundry for exposing the White Helmets in particular); Abby Martin whose Empire Files are excellent and always edifying; Dan Cohen who has written the best expose of the actors behind the Hong Kong rioting and co-authored the best expose of the background of Guaido et al.; Whitney Webb of Mint Press whose series on Epstein is overwhelming and likely a ticking timebomb; Caitlin Johnstone of course; and Aaron 'Buzzsaw' Mate who made his first mark with a wonderful takedown interview of Russiaphobe MI6 shill Luke Harding. Others too of course, with most appearing or having written pieces on CN. John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Greg Palast, et al. won't drop off their twigs disappointed.

This, along with the fact that MSM -- that cowed and compromised fourth estate -- increasingly is held in such laughable contempt by most people under about 50 yr, is highly encouraging indeed. Truth is the new black.

nwwoods , September 15, 2019 at 11:49

The Blogmire is an excellent resource for detailed analysis of the Skripal hoax. The author happens to be a long-time resident of Salisbury, and is intimately familiar with the topography, public services, etc., and a very thorough investigator.

John Wright , September 14, 2019 at 18:35

I'm not surprised that Mr. Kevin is being isolated and shunned by the Australian establishment. Truth and truth tellers are always the first casualties of war. I do hope that his experience will encourage him to increase his resistance to the corrosiveness of mendacious propaganda and those who promulgate it.

Truth is the single best weapon when fighting for a peaceful future.

If Australia is to flourish in the 21st century, it really needs to understand Russia and China, how they relate to each other, and how this key alliance will interface with the rest of the world. Australia and Australians simply cannot afford to get sucked down further by facilitating the machinations of the collapsing Anglo-American Empire. They have served the empire ably and faithfully, but now need to take a cold hard look at reality and realign their long-term interests with the coming global power shift. If not, they could literally find themselves in the middle of an unwinnable and devastating war.

* * *

The first Anglo-American Russian cold war began with the Russian revolution and was only briefly suspended when the West needed the Soviet people to throw themselves in front of the Nazi blitzkrieg in order to save Western Europe. Following their catastrophically costly contribution to the victory on the Continent, the Russians were greeted with an American nuclear salute on their eastern periphery, signalling their return to the diplomatic and economic deep freeze.

While the Anglo-American Empire solidified and extended its hold on the globe, the enlarged but war-ravaged and isolated Soviet Union hunkered down and survived on scraps and sheer will until its collapse in 1989. Declaring the cold war over, and with promises to help their new Russian friends build a prosperous future, the duplicitous West then ransacked their neighbors resources and sold them into debt peonage. The Russians cried foul, the West shrugged and Putin pushed back. Unable to declaw the bear, the west closed the cage door again and the second cold war commenced.

* * *

The first cold war was essentially an offensive war disguised as a defensive war. It enabled the Anglo-American Empire to leverage its post-war advantage and establish near total dominance around the globe through naked violence and monetary hegemony.

Today, with its dominance rapidly slipping away, the Anglo-American Empire is waging a truly defensive cold war. On the home front, they fight to convince their subjects of their eternal exceptionalism with ever more absurd and vile propaganda denigrating their adversaries . Abroad, they disrupt and defraud in a desperate attempt to delay the demise of the PetroDollar ponzi.

The Russians and the Chinese, having both been brutally burned by the Western elites, will not be fooled into abandoning their natural geographic partnership. They are no longer content to sit quietly at the kids' table taking notes. While they may not demand to sit at the head of the table, it is clear that they will insist on a round table, and one that is large enough to include their growing list of friends.

If the Americans don't smash the table, it could be the first of many peaceful pot lucks.

John Read , September 15, 2019 at 02:11

Well said. Great comments. Thanks to Tony Kevin.

Mia , September 14, 2019 at 18:33

Thank you Tony for continuing to shine light on the pathetic propaganda information bubble Australians have been immersed in .. you demonstrate great courage and you are not alone ??

Peter Loeb , September 14, 2019 at 12:58

WITH THANKS TO TONY KEVIN

An excellent article.

There is a lack of comments from some of the common writers upon whose views I often rely.

Personally, I often avoid the very individual responses from websites as I have no way
of checking out previous ideas of theirs. Who funds them? With which organizations are they
affiliated? And so forth and so on.

Peter Loeb, Boston, Massachusetts

Peter Sapo , September 14, 2019 at 10:24

As a fellow Australian, everything Tony Kevin said makes perfect sense. Our mainstream media landscape is designed to distribute propaganda to folk accross the political spectrum. Have you noticed that the ABC regurgitates stories from the BBC? The BBC has a long history (at least since WW2) of supporting government propaganda initiatives. Based on this fact, it is hard to see how ABC and SBS don't do the same when called upon by their minders.

Francis Lee , September 14, 2019 at 09:48

I just wonder where the Anglo-Zionist empire thinks it is going. It should be obvious that any NATO war against Russia involving a nuclear exchange is unwinnable. It seems equally likely the even a conventional war will not necessarily bring the result expected by the assorted 'experts' – nincompoops living in their own fantasy world. The idea that the US can fight a war without the US homeland becoming very much involved basically ended when Putin announced the creation of Russia's set of advanced hypersonic missile system. But this was apparently ignored by the 'defence' establishment. It was not true, it could not possibly be true, or so we were told.

Moreover the cost of such wars involving hundreds of thousands of troops and military hardware are massively expensive and would occasion a massive resistance from the populations affected. It was the wests wars in Korea, and Indo-China that bankrupted the US and led to the US$ being removed from the gold standard. The American military is rapidly consuming the American economy, or at least what is left of it. From a realist foreign policy perspective this is simply madness. Great powers end wars, they don't start them. Great powers are creditor nations, not debtor nations. Such is the realist foreign policy view. But foreign policy realists are few and far between in the Washington Beltway and MIC/NSA Pentagon and US/UK/AUSTRALIAN MSM.

Thus the neo-hubris of the English speaking world is such that if it is followed to its logical conclusion then total annihilation would be the logical outcome. A sad example of not very bright people who face no domestic opposition, believing in their own bullshit:

"American elites proved themselves to be master manipulators of propaganda constructs But the real danger from such manipulations arises not when those manipulations are done out of knowledge of reality, which is distorted for propaganda purposes, but when those who manipulation begin to sincerely believe in their own falsifications and when they buy into their own narrative. They stop being manipulators and they become believers in a narrative. They become manipulated themselves." (Losing Military Supremacy – Andrei, Martyanov)

Or maybe just the whole thing is a bluff. Those policy elites maybe just want to loot the US Treasury for more cash to be put their way.

John Wright , September 15, 2019 at 19:15

The self-serving Israeli Zionists know that the American cow is running dry and their days of freely milking it are coming to an end. They have an historic relationship with Russia and, leveraging their nuclear arsenal, know they can make a deal with the emerging China-Russia-centric global paradigm to extort enough protection to maintain their armed enclave for the foreseeable future. Their no so hidden alliance with the equally sociopathic Saudis will become even more obvious for all to see.

Israel, like China and Russia, knows how to play a long game. Thus, Israel will consolidate its land grab with the just announced expansion into the Jordan Valley and quietly continue as much ethnic cleansing as possible while the rest of the world is preoccupied with the incipient global power shift (True victims of history, the Palestinians have no real friends). While they will bemoan the loss of their muscular American stooge, Israel enjoyed a very lucrative 70 year run and will part with a pile of useful and deadly toys. They're also fully aware that no one else will ever let them take advantage to the degree they've been able to with the U.S.A. (Unlimited Stupidity of Arrogance?)

Eventually, the social schizophrenia that is the state of Israel will catch up with them and they will implode. Let's hope that breakdown doesn't involve the use of their nuclear arsenal.

Yes, the U.S. Treasury will continue to be looted until the last teller turns the lights out or the electricity is shut off, whichever comes first.

The Western transnational financial elites will accept their losses, regroup and make deals with the new bosses where they can; but their days of running the game unopposed are over.

Today is a good day to learn Mandarin (or Russian, if you prefer to live in Europe).

Bill , September 16, 2019 at 03:36

Very well said and I agree with a lot of what you say.

Tiu , September 14, 2019 at 06:01

Won't be too long before writing articles like this will get you busted for "hate-speech" (e.g. anything that is contrary to the official version prescribed by the "democratically elected" government)
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uk-tony-blair-think-tank-proposes-end-free-speech
Personally I always encourage people to read George Orwell, especially 1984. We're there, and have been for a long time.

geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 01:15

Tony Kevin – Nice rundown of what ails society. You have a fine writing style that gets the point across to the reader. Kudos and cheers.

Michael , September 13, 2019 at 22:34

The 'modernization' of the Smith Mundt Act in 2013 "to authorize the domestic dissemination of information and material [PROPAGANDA] about the United States intended primarily for foreign audiences" was a major nail in the Democracy coffin, consolidating the blatant ruling of the US Police State by our 17 Intelligence Agencies (our betters). The Telecommunications Act of 1996 lead to ownership of (>80%) of our media (the MSM by a handful of owners, all disseminating the same narratives from above (CIA, State Department, FBI etc) and squelching any dissenting views, particularly related to foreign policies.
Tony's article sadly just confirms the depth and breadth of our Global Stasi, with improved, innovative and (mostly) subtle surveillance, and the controlling constant interference with alternate viewpoints and discussions, the real basis for free societies. It is bad enough to be ruled by neoliberal psychopathic hyenas and jackals, soon we won't be able to even bitch about what they are doing.

Tom Kath , September 13, 2019 at 21:42

The most impressive article I have read in a very long time. I congratulate and thank Tony.
I have myself recently addressed the issue of whether it is a virtue to have an "open mind". – The ability to be converted or have your mind changed, or is it the ability to change your own mind ?
Tony Kevin clearly illustrates the difference.

Litchfield , September 13, 2019 at 16:11

Great article.
Please keep writing.
Do start a website, a la Craig Murray.
There are people who are proactively looking for alternative viewpoints and informed analysis.
How about starting a website and publishing some excerpts of your book there?

Or, sell chapters separately by download from your website?
You could also have a discussion blog/forum there.

John Zimmermann , September 13, 2019 at 16:02

Excellent essay. Thanks Mr. Kevin.

rosemerry , September 13, 2019 at 15:37

At least Tony Kevin was an Australian ambassador, not like Mike Morrell and the chosen russop?obes the USA assumes are needed as diplomats!! Now he is treated as Stephen Cohen is- a true expert called "controversial" as he dares to go by real facts and evidence, not prejudice.

If instead of enemies, the West could consider getting to understand those they are wary of, and give them a chance to explain their point of view and actually listen and reflect on it.
(Dmitri Peskov valiantly explained the Russian official response as soon as the "Skripal poisoning" story broke, but it was fully ignored by UK/US media, while all of Theresa May's fanciful imaginings were respectfully relayed to the public).

geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 23:26

As you usually are with your comments, you are spot on again, rosemerry.

Martin - Swedish citizen , September 13, 2019 at 14:46

Excellent article!
I find the mechanics of how the propaganda is spread and the illusion upheld the most important part of this article, since this knowledge is required to counter it.
When (not if) the fraud becomes more common knowledge, our societies are likely to tumble.

Pablo Diablo , September 13, 2019 at 14:45

Whoever controls the media, controls the dialogue.
Whoever controls the dialogue, controls the agenda.

peter mcloughlin , September 13, 2019 at 13:40

' The present risk of global nuclear war is as high as it ever was in the Cold War.' And possibly higher. The Cold War, though dangerous, was the peace. The world has experienced periods of peace (or relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the two Peloponnesian Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna, to name a few. The Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One. That conflict was followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was followed by the United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are they will not prevent a third world war. The powers that are leading us towards conflagration see this as a re-run of the first Cold War. They are dangerously mistaken.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/

Guy , September 13, 2019 at 13:21

With so many believing the lies ,how will this mess ever come to light . I don't reside in Australia but anywhere in the Western world the shakedown is the same .In my own house ,the discussion on world politics descends into absolute stupidity . As one can't get past the constant programming that has settled in the minds of the comfortable with the status quo of lies by our media. There are intelligent sources of news sources but none get past the absolutely complete control of MSM.So the bottom line is ,for now ,the lies and liars are winning the propaganda war.

Anton Antonovich , September 13, 2019 at 13:16

He speaks the truth. Liars and dissemblers have won over the minds and hearts of so many lazy shameful citizens who will not accept the truth Tony Kevin wants to share with the world.

junaid , September 13, 2019 at 13:08

Washington resumes military assistance to Kyiv. According to American lawmakers, Ukraine is fighting one of the main enemies. "Contain Russia": what the US pays for Ukraine

"Contain Russia": what the US pays for Ukraine

Lily , September 13, 2019 at 23:42

The Pentagon is using the Ukrainian territory for experiments on chemical weapons.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3T9ktfz_FfA

John A , September 14, 2019 at 06:55

Anyone or article who spells Kiev as Kyiv can be safely ignored as western anti-Russia propaganda. It's a true tell.

Robert Edwards , September 13, 2019 at 12:53

The Cold war is totally manufacture to keep the dollars flowing into the MIC – what a sham . and a disgrace to humanity.

Cavaleiro Marginal , September 13, 2019 at 12:52

"The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining."

This had occurred in Brazil since the very first day of Lula's presidency. Eleven years late, 2013, a color revolution began. Nobody (and I mean REALLY nobody) could realize a color revolution was happening at that time. In 2016, Dilma Rousseff was kicked from power throughout a ridiculous and illegal coup perpetrated by the parliament. In 2018 Lula was imprisoned in an Orwellian process; illegal, unconstitutional, with nothing (REALLY nothing) proved against him. Then a liar clown was elected to suppress democracy

I knew on the news that in Canada and Australia the police politely (how civilized ) went to some journalist's homes to have a chat this year. Canadians and Aussies, be aware. The fascism's dog is a policial state very well informed by the propaganda they call news.

Robert Fearn , September 13, 2019 at 12:48

As a Canadian author who wrote a book about various tragic American government actions, like Vietnam, I can relate to the difficulties Tony has had with his book. I would mail my book, Amoral America, from Canada to other countries, like the US, and it would never arrive. Book stores would not handle it, etc. etc.

Josep , September 17, 2019 at 05:21

Not to disagree, but some years ago I read about anecdotes of anti-Americanism in Canada, coming from both USians and Canadians, whether it be playful banter or legitimate criticism. I believe it is more concentrated among the people than among the governmental elites (with the exception of the Iraq War era when both the people and the government were against it). And considering what you describe in your book and the difficulty you've faced in distributing it abroad, maybe the said people are on to something.

Stephen , September 13, 2019 at 11:44

This interview by Abby Martin with Mark Ames is a little dated but is a fairly accurate history. I post it to try and counter the nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7HwvFyMg7A

All the empire wants is to do it all again.

Jeremy Kuzmarov , September 13, 2019 at 10:33

Outstanding article and analysis. Thank you Sir! Jeremy Kuzmarov

Jeff Harrison , September 13, 2019 at 10:17

Thank you, sir. A far better peroration than I could have produced but what I have concluded nonetheless.

Skip Scott , September 13, 2019 at 10:10

Fantastic article. Left unmentioned is the origin of the west's anti-Russia narrative. Russia was being pillaged by the west under Yeltsin, and Russia was to become our newest vassal. Life expectancy dropped a full decade for the average Russian under Yeltsin. The average standard of living dropped dramatically as well. Putin reversed all that, and enjoys massive popular support as a result. The Empire will never tolerate a national leader who works for the benefit of the average citizen. It must be full-on rape, pillage and plunder- OR ELSE. Keep that in mind as we watch the latest theatrical performances by our DNC controlled "Commander in Chief" wannabes.

Realist , September 17, 2019 at 05:48

?The ongoing success of the "Great Lie" (that Washington is protecting the entire world from
anarchy perpetrated by a few bad actors on the global stage) and all of its false narrative subtexts
(including but far from limited to the Maidan, Crimea, Donbass, MH-17, the Skripals, gassing
"one's own people," piracy on the high Mediterranean, etc) just underscores how successful was
the false flag operation known as 9-11, even as the truth of that travesty is slowly being
unraveled by relentless truth-seekers applying logic and the scientific method to the problem.
Most Americans today would gladly concur, if queried, that Osama bin Laden was most certainly
a perfidious tool of Russia and its diabolical leader, Mr. Putin (be sure to call him "Vlad," to
conjure up images of Dracula for effect). The Winston Smith's are rare birds in America or in
any of its reliable vassal states. Never mind that the spooks from Langley (and the late
"chessmaster") concocted and orchestrated all these tales from the crypt.

Lily , September 13, 2019 at 07:54

Great summary of the developement of a new cold war. The narrative of the Mainstream Media is dangerous as well as laughable. I am glad to hear the Russian reaction to this bullshit propaganda. As often the people are so much wiser than their government – at least in the West.

During the Football WM a famous broadcaster of the German State TV channel ARD, who is a giftet propagandist, regrettet publicly the difficulty to convince the stubborn Germans to look at Russia as an enemy because they have started to look at Russia as a friend long ago.

Contrary to the people and the big firms who are completely against the sanctions against Russia and 100 % pro Northstream the German government with Chancelor Merkel is one of the top US vassalles. Even the Green Party which started as an environmental and peace party are now against North Stream and in favour of the filthy US fracking gas thanks to NATO propaganda although Russia has never let them down. Most of "Die Grünen" party have been turned into fervent friends of our American occupants which is very sad.

Thank you Tony Kevin. It has been great to read your article. I cant wait to read your book 'Return to Moscow' and to watch your interview on CN Live.

Godfree Roberts , September 13, 2019 at 07:37

Good summary of the status quo. From my experience of writing similarly about China, precisely the same policies and forces are at work.

The good news is that they are failing.

junaid , September 13, 2019 at 07:15

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the end of the war in Syria and the country's return to a state of peace. "Syria is returning to normal life": Lavrov announced the end of the war

"Syria is returning to normal life": Lavrov announced the end of the war

Gezzah Potts , September 13, 2019 at 05:47

You hit several nails squarely on the head with your excellent article Tony. Thank you for the truth of how the media is in Australia. It is indeed chilling where all this is leading. The blatant lies just spewed out as fact by both ABC and SBS. They, in my opinion are nothing but stenographers for the Empire, of which Australia is a fully subservient vassal state, with no independence.
I try to boycott all Australian presstitutes . Oops, I mean 'media' now. Occasionally, I do slip up and watch SBS or The Drum or News on ABC.
Virtually all my news comes from independent news sites like this one.
I have been accused of being a 'Putin lover', a Russian troll, a conspiracy theorist, while people I know have claimed that "Putin is a monster whose murdered millions of people".
On and on this crap goes. And the end result? Ask Stephen Cohen. Things are very surreal now. Sadly, you've been made an Unperson Tony.

Robyn , September 13, 2019 at 04:08

Bravo, Tony, great article. I enjoyed your book and recommend it to CN readers who haven't yet read it.

The world looks entirely different when one stops reading/watching the MSM and turns to CN, Caitlin Johnstone and many others who are doing a sterling job.

Cascadian , September 13, 2019 at 03:52

I don't know which is worse, to not know what you are (reliably uninformed) and be happy, or to become what you've always wanted to be (reliably informed) and feel alone.

Realist , September 14, 2019 at 00:19

Knowing the truth has always seemed paramount to me, even if it means realising that the entire world and all in it are damned, and deliberately by our own actions. Hope is always the last part of our essence to die, or so they say: maybe we will somehow be redeemed through our own self-immolation as a species.

Deb , September 13, 2019 at 02:54

As an Australian I have no difficulty accepting what Tony Kevin has said here. He should do what Craig Murray has done start a website.

[Sep 17, 2019] The reincarnation of the idea of Soviet Nomenklatura on a new level in a different social system

Highly recommended!
Sep 17, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , September 15, 2019 at 11:33 AM

https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1173204669356740608

Branko Milanovic‏ @BrankoMilan

Homoploutia, a concept I introduce in "Capitalism, Alone". In today's liberal capitalism, it is common that the same people are rich *both* in terms of capital they own and earnings they receive. This was almost unheard of in classical capitalism where capitalists seldom doubled as wage workers.

4:59 AM - 15 Sep 2019

anne -> anne... , September 15, 2019 at 11:47 AM
https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1173204677611196416

Branko Milanovic‏ @BrankoMilan

So here, using @lisdata, you have a nice illustration of advanced capitalist countries where people in the top decile by capital and labor income increasing coincide (right end) and Brazil and Mexico where they do not.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EEgPbuWXsAEays-.jpg:large

4:59 AM - 15 Sep 2019

anne -> anne... , September 15, 2019 at 11:49 AM
https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1173204681184751617

Branko Milanovic‏ @BrankoMilan

Note the ambivalence * of homoploutia: in some sense it is desirable (and risk-reducing) that capitalists also work, or that high earners possess capital too. But in another way, it makes inequality-reducing policies more difficult.

* Contradiction

4:59 AM - 15 Sep 2019

likbez -> anne... , September 16, 2019 at 09:03 PM
Yes, under neoliberalism like under Bolshevism, your social position is not determined solely by the capital you own. It is also determined by the position you hold in the industry or government (and your earnings/wages are derivative of that).

So we see the reincarnation of the idea of Soviet Nomenklatura on a new level in a different social system. The term can still serve its purpose, and IMHO is better than "Homoploutia."

It is also interesting that older middle-class folk, who due to their private savings, 401K, Roth and ISA accounts, SS pension (say $6K-7K a month for a couple), and sometimes government or industry pension are formally millionaires (with some multimillionaires) are not generally viewed as belonging to the upper 10%. They are looked at as an aberration by the most sociologists.

That's because they are now retired and no longer hold any meaningful for the upper 10% level position in the industry or government. In other words, they do not belong to Nomenklatura. Or more correctly no longer belong to Nomenklatura (for those who retired from high level positions)

And, correspondingly, often are treated as junk in the neoliberal society.

[Sep 17, 2019] The Spy Who Failed by Scott Ritter

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The source was said to be responsible for the reporting used by the former director of the CIA, John Brennan, in making the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election for the purpose of tipping the scales in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump. ..."
"... On closer scrutiny, however, this aspect of the story falls apart, as does just about everything CNN, The New York Times ..."
"... "And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free," John 8:32, is etched into the wall of the main lobby of the Old CIA Headquarters Building. ..."
"... Every Russian diplomat assigned to the United States is screened to ascertain his or her susceptibility for recruitment. The FBI does this from a counterintelligence perspective, looking for Russian spies. The CIA does the same, but with the objective of recruiting a Russian source who can remain in the employ of the Russian government, and thereby provide the CIA with intelligence information commensurate to their standing and access. Turning a senior Russian diplomat is difficult; recruiting a junior Russian diplomat like Oleg Smolenkov less so. Someone like Smolenkov would be viewed not so much by the limited access he provided at the time of recruitment, but rather his potential for promotion and the increased opportunity for more essential access provided by such. ..."
"... The reality is, however, that the CIA and the FBI have different goals and objectives when it comes to the Russians they recruit. As such, Smolenkov's recruitment was most likely a CIA-only affair, run by NR but closely monitored by the Russian Operations Group of the Agency's Central Eurasia Division, who would have responsibility for managing Smolenkov upon his return to Moscow. ..."
"... But his job as foreman of the Rossotrudnichestvo coop was not the kind of job a Maurive Thorez graduate gets; Smolenkov had to have felt slighted. He allegedly turned to drink, and his marriage was on the rocks; his colleagues spoke of a man who believed his salary was too low. ..."
"... The enticements of money and future opportunity -- the CIA's principle recruitment ploys -- more than likely were a factor in convincing this dissatisfied diplomat to defect. ..."
"... the fact is, sometime in 2007-2008, Smolenkov was recruited by the CIA. ..."
"... He was granted a "second-level" security clearance, which allowed him to handle top secret information. ..."
"... Moscow Station, however, was having trouble carrying out its clandestine tasks. In the fall of 2011, the CIA's chief of station in Moscow, Steven Hall, had been approached by his counterpart in the Russian Federal Security Service (the FSB, Russia's equivalent of the FBI) and warned that the CIA should stop trying to recruit agents from within the FSB ranks; the FSB had detected several of these attempts, which it deemed inappropriate given the ongoing cooperation between the intelligence services of the two countries regarding the war on terrorism. ..."
"... The loss of Hall at this very sensitive time created a problem for both the CIA and Smolenkov. Smolenkov's new assignment was a dream come true for the CIA -- never before had the agency managed to place a controlled agent into the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation. ..."
"... With communications down, and the chief of station evicted, Smolenkov was left in a state of limbo while the CIA trained up new case officers capable of operating in Moscow and sought a replacement for Hall. ..."
"... "To put it mildly," Ushakov said, "it is surprising that this extremely crude, clumsy attempt at recruitment took place in a situation where both President Obama and President Putin have clearly stated the importance of more active cooperation and contacts between the special services of the two countries." ..."
"... As a senior aide to Ushakov, Smolenkov was ideally positioned to gather intelligence about the Russian response. If he was able to communicate this information to the CIA, it would have provided Obama and his advisers time to prepare a response to the Russian letter. The situation meant that Smolenkov may have been reporting on events related to the expulsion of Hall, one of the CIA officers specifically trained to manage his reporting. ..."
"... Smolenkov's success was directly linked to the work of his boss, Ushakov. In June 2015, Ushakov was put in charge of establishing a high-level working group in the fuel and energy sector for the purpose of improving bilateral cooperation with Azerbaijan. The reporting Smolenkov would have been able to provide on the work of this group would have been of tremendous assistance to those in the Obama administration working on U.S. energy policy, especially as it related to countering Russian moves in the former Soviet Republics. ..."
"... Ushakov's 10-year tenure as Russia's ambassador to the U.S. gave him unprecedented insight into U.S. decision making, experience and expertise Putin increasingly relied upon as he formulated and implemented responses to U.S. efforts to contain and punish Russia on the international stage. ..."
"... While Ushakov's meetings with Putin were conducted either in private, or in small groups of senior advisers, meaning Smolenkov was not present, Smolenkov was able to collect intelligence on the periphery by photographing itineraries and working papers, as well as overhearing comments made by Ushakov, that collectively would provide U.S. policymakers with important insight into Putin's thinking. ..."
"... According to the FSB, the Russians were adept at identifying CIA officers working under State Department cover and would subject these individuals to extensive surveillance. ..."
"... In addition to the decimation of its staff, Moscow Station was experiencing an alarming number of its agents being discovered by the FSB and arrested. While the Russians were circumspect about most of these cases, on several occasions they indicated that they had uncovered a spy by intercepting the electronic communications between him and the CIA. This meant that the Russians were aware of, and actively pursuing, the Google-based internet-based system used by the CIA to communicate with its agents in Russia. ..."
"... Sometime in early August 2016, a courier from the CIA arrived at the White House carrying a plain, unmarked white envelope. Inside was an intelligence report from Smolenkov that CIA Director Brennan considered to be so sensitive that he kept it out of the President's Daily Brief, concerned that even that restrictive process was too inclusive to adequately protect the source. The intelligence was to be read by four people only -- Obama, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Avril Haines and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. The document was to be returned to the courier once it had been read. ..."
"... The contents of the report were alarming -- Putin had personally ordered the cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election in favor of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. ..."
"... The White House found the Smolenkov report so convincing that in September 2016, during a meeting of the G-20 in China, Obama pulled Putin aside and told him to stop meddling in the U.S. election. Putin was reportedly nonplussed by Obama's intervention. ..."
"... It is not publicly known what prompted the report from Smolenkov which Brennan found so alarming. Was it received out of the blue, a target of opportunity which Smolenkov exploited? Was it based upon a specific tasking submitted by Smolenkov's CIA handlers in response to a tasking from above? Or was it a result of the intervention of the CIA director, who tasked Smolenkov outside normal channels? In any event, once Brennan created his special analytical unit, Smolenkov became his dedicated source. If Smolenko was in this for the money, as appears to be the case, he would have been motivated to come up with the "correct" answer to Brennan's tasking for information on Putin's role. By late 2016, Western media had made quite clear what kind of answer Brennan wanted. ..."
"... Brennan took the extraordinary measure of sequestering the source from the rest of the Intelligence Community. He also confronted the head of the Russian FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, about the risks involved in interfering in U.S. elections. ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Smolenkov's firing occurred right before the Intelligence Community released its much-anticipated assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election ..."
"... Brennan had sold the Smolenkov reporting to both President Obama and President-elect Trump, along with the rest of the intelligence community, as "high-quality information." It was, at best, nothing more than uncorroborated rumor or, at worst, simple disinformation. This reporting, which was parroted by an unquestioning mainstream media that accepted it as fact, created an impression amongst the American public that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered and directed a Russian interference campaign during the 2016 election designed "to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible," according to the ICA. ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... Concerned that Smolenkov could be arrested by the Russians and, in doing so, have control over the narrative of Russian interference transfer to Moscow, the CIA once again approached Smolenkov to defect to the United States. This time the Russian agent agreed. ..."
"... Sometime in June 2018, Smolenkov and his wife bought a home worth nearly $1 million in northern Virginia. The couple used their real names. They were not afraid. ..."
"... I can only speculate as to the circumstances that led to Smolenkov's firing by secret decree. Normally, Russians charged with transmitting classified material to the intelligence services of a foreign state are arrested, placed on trial and given lengthy prison sentences, or worse. This did not happen to Smolenkov. ..."
"... In any case, the Smolenkov report in the white envelope represented a level of access that would have significantly deviated from what one could expect from a person in his position and which suggests he may have been telling the CIA what he knew Brennan wanted to hear. ..."
"... The third scenario is that Smolenkov, a low-level failure of a diplomat with drinking issues, marital problems and monetary frustrations, was recruited by the CIA, but only with the complicity of the Russian security services. ..."
"... The same red flags that the CIA looks for when recruiting agents are also looked at by Russian counterintelligence. At what point in the recruitment process the Russians stepped in is unknown (if they did at all.) ..."
"... Moreover, this muddling diplomat whose questionable behavioral practices scream "recruit me" is, within three years of returning to Moscow, given a significant promotion that enables him to follow Ushakov into the Presidential Administration–a posting which would require extensive vetting by the Russian security services. Smolenkov's promotion pattern is enough, in and of itself, to raise red flags within the counterintelligence offices tasked with monitoring such things. The fact that it did not indicates that the quality and quantity of reporting being provided by Smolenkov was deemed by the Americans too important to interfere with. ..."
"... In this scenario, Smolenkov would have been playing to a script written by the Russian security services. Since he, technically, had broken no laws by serving as a double agent, he would not be subjected to arrest and trial. But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit. ..."
"... In my view, if one assumes that the Smolenkov July 2016 report at the center of this drama was not a result of serendipity, but rather a product derived from a specific request from his CIA managers to find out how high up in the Russian decision-making chain the authorization went for what U.S. intelligence agencies were already publicly pushing as an alleged DNC cyber attack, then the answer I believe becomes clear–the Russians knew the U.S. had an intelligence deficit. ..."
"... In my view, the CIA, Russia and Smolenkov were happy to maintain the status quo, with Smolenkov living in comfortable retirement with his family, the CIA continuing to accuse Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, and Russia denying it. ..."
"... Trump's instructions to Barr are linked to a desire on the part of the president to hold to account those responsible for creating the narrative of possible collusion. Reports indicate that Barr is particularly interested in finding out how and why the CIA concluded that Putin personally ordered the Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. ..."
"... Seen in this light, the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth. ..."
"... A few days following Smolenkov's "outing" by the U.S. media, the Russian government filed a request with Interpol for an investigation into how someone who had gone missing in Montenegro was now living in the United States. ..."
"... The only person at risk from this entire sordid affair is Brennan, whose reputation and potential livelihood is on the line. At best, Brennan is guilty of extremely poor judgement; at worst, he actively conspired to use the office of Director of the CIA to interfere in the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Neither option speaks well of the U.S. Intelligence Community and those in Congress charged with oversight of its operations. ..."
"... Watch Scott Ritter discussing this article on ..."
"... Consortium News does not necessarily endorse the views of its authors. ..."
"... If you value this original article, please consider ..."
"... making a donation ..."
"... to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
"... Before commenting please read Robert Parry's ..."
"... Allegations unsupported by facts, gross or misleading factual errors and ad hominem attacks, and abusive language toward other commenters or our writers will be removed. If your comment does not immediately appear, please be patient as it is manually reviewed. ..."
"... And under the third scenario, with Smolenkov a double agent all along, Ritter writes: "But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit." ..."
"... That doesn't make sense to me. In fact I see the opposite: if he had been a successfully run double agent all that time, then when his usefulness had ended he would have been decently pensioned off – not simply cut loose to fend for himself – but *not* allowed to travel abroad unimpeded (with his whole family, no less) where he would have the opportunity to cause mischief. ..."
"... In the extremely sophisticated world of high grade intelligence I have repeatedly said that the Brennan, Clapper, Comey trio were lead-footed imbeciles ..."
"... Read The CIA as Organized Crime and Strength of the Wolf and Strength of the Pack by Douglas Valentine. ..."
"... "Kiriakou also notes that the way Smolenkov's intelligence was handled raises echoes of the CIA's manipulation of intelligence to help justify the Iraq war. The information from Smolenkov was handled personally by then-CIA Director John Brennan. Brennan reportedly sidelined other CIA analysts and kept the Smolenkov information out of the Presidential Daily Briefing – instead delivering it personally to President Obama and a small group of officials." ..."
"... More like a Le Carre' film. The CIA was originally sold as an intelligence gathering and analysis organization, and was not supposed to be involved in operations. Thus, it was founded on lies and the lies have only grown since. ..."
"... Even the former communist state governments in Europe and the Soviet Union rued the day that they unleashed their secret police from accountability, and thereby became subservient to their power. ..."
"... I suspect Scott was provided a great deal of the reporting in this fascinating article from a disgruntled insider, or former insider. Knowledge of Brennan's break with protocol to form a select 'stand alone fusion cell' that reported only to him is something that I haven't seen reported before. In any case this story adds another red flag to the entire Russiagate hoax. ..."
"... Just as Mueller failed to interview Julian Assange or Christopher Steele for his report -- obvious red flags -- we should now watch the conduct of Barr's investigation. Will Barr's investigators interview Smolenkov? ..."
"... ( ) the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth. ..."
"... "If Smolenkov was a spy, he could have delivered important insights about Russia's foreign policy thinking and planning to U.S. intelligence. But if he was the source for the U.S. intelligence community's certainty that Putin personally orchestrated a covert interference campaign, that certainty rests on a weak foundation. Smolenkov served the wrong boss in the Kremlin to get reliable information about such ventures." ..."
Sep 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

56 Comments

OPINION: Scott Ritter probes Oleg Smolenkov's role as a CIA asset and the use of his data by the director of the CIA to cast doubt over the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

By Scott Ritter
 Special to Consortium News

Reports that the CIA conducted an emergency exfiltration of a long-time human intelligence source who was highly placed within the Russian Presidential Administration sent shock waves throughout Washington, D.C.

The source was said to be responsible for the reporting used by the former director of the CIA, John Brennan, in making the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election for the purpose of tipping the scales in favor of then-candidate Donald Trump.

According to CNN's Jim Sciutto, the decision to exfiltrate the source was driven in part by concerns within the CIA over President Trump's cavalier approach toward handling classified information, including his willingness to share highly classified intelligence with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a controversial visit to the White House in May 2017.

On closer scrutiny, however, this aspect of the story falls apart, as does just about everything CNN, The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets have reported. There was a Russian spy whose information was used to push a narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election; this much appears to be true. Everything else that has been reported is either a mischaracterization of fact or an outright fabrication designed to hide one of the greatest intelligence failures in U.S. history -- the use by a CIA director of intelligence data specifically manipulated to interfere in the election of an American president.

The consequences of this interference has deleteriously impacted U.S. democratic institutions in ways the American people remain ignorant of -- in large part because of the complicity of the U.S. media when it comes to reporting this story.

This article attempts to set the record straight by connecting the dots presented by available information and creating a narrative shaped by a combination of derivative analysis and informed speculation. At best, this article brings the reader closer to the truth about Oleg Smolenkov's role as a CIA asset; at worst, it raises issues and questions that will help in determining the truth.

"And Ye Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free," John 8:32, is etched into the wall of the main lobby of the Old CIA Headquarters Building.

The Recruit

Oleg Smolenkov

In 2007, Oleg Smolenkov was living the life of a Russian diplomat abroad, serving in the Russian embassy in Washington. At 33 years of age, married with a 1-year old son, Smolenkov was the picture of a young diplomat on the rise. A protégé of Russian Ambassador Yuri Ushakov, Smolenkov worked as a second secretary assigned to the Russian Cultural Center, a combined museum and exhibition hall operated by the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation (better known by its common Russian name, Rossotrudnichestvo), an autonomous government agency operating under the auspices of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In addition to hosting Russian artists and musicians, Rossotrudnichestvo oversaw a program where it organized all-expense paid cultural exchanges for young Americans to travel to Russia, where they were accommodated in luxury hotels and met with Russian officials. Smolenkov's boss, Yegeny Zvedre, would also tour the United States, speaking at public forums where he addressed U.S.-Russian cooperation. As for Smolenkov himself, life was much more mundane -- he served as a purchasing agent for Rossotrudnichestvo, managing procurement and contract issues for a store operating out of the Rossotrudnichestvo building, which stood separate from the main embassy compound.

Rossotrudnichestvo had a darker side: the FBI long suspected that it operated as a front to recruit Americans to spy for Russia, and as such every Russian employee was viewed as a potential officer in the Russian intelligence service. This suspicion brought with it a level of scrutiny which revealed much about the character of the individual being surveilled, including information of a potentially compromising nature that could be used by the American intelligence services as the basis of a recruitment effort.

Every Russian diplomat assigned to the United States is screened to ascertain his or her susceptibility for recruitment. The FBI does this from a counterintelligence perspective, looking for Russian spies. The CIA does the same, but with the objective of recruiting a Russian source who can remain in the employ of the Russian government, and thereby provide the CIA with intelligence information commensurate to their standing and access. Turning a senior Russian diplomat is difficult; recruiting a junior Russian diplomat like Oleg Smolenkov less so. Someone like Smolenkov would be viewed not so much by the limited access he provided at the time of recruitment, but rather his potential for promotion and the increased opportunity for more essential access provided by such.

The responsibility within the CIA for recruiting Russian diplomats living in the United States falls to the National Resources Division, or NR, part of the Directorate of Operations, or DO -- the clandestine arm of the CIA. In a perfect world, the CIA domestic station in Washington, D.C., would coordinate with the local FBI field office and develop a joint approach for recruiting a Russian diplomat such as Smolenkov.

The reality is, however, that the CIA and the FBI have different goals and objectives when it comes to the Russians they recruit. As such, Smolenkov's recruitment was most likely a CIA-only affair, run by NR but closely monitored by the Russian Operations Group of the Agency's Central Eurasia Division, who would have responsibility for managing Smolenkov upon his return to Moscow.

The precise motive for Smolenkov to take up the CIA's offer of recruitment remains unknown. He graduated from one of the premier universities in Russia, the Maurice Thorez Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, and he married his English language instructor. Normally a graduate from an elite university such as Maurice Thorez has his or her pick of jobs in the Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Defense or the security services. Smolenkov was hired by the Foreign Ministry as a junior linguist, assigned to the Second European Department, which focuses on Great Britain, Scandinavia and the Baltics, before getting assigned to the embassy in Washington.

Felt Underpaid

But his job as foreman of the Rossotrudnichestvo coop was not the kind of job a Maurive Thorez graduate gets; Smolenkov had to have felt slighted. He allegedly turned to drink, and his marriage was on the rocks; his colleagues spoke of a man who believed his salary was too low.

The enticements of money and future opportunity -- the CIA's principle recruitment ploys -- more than likely were a factor in convincing this dissatisfied diplomat to defect. Did the CIA compromise him by dangling the temptation of contract-based embezzlement? Or did the FBI uncover some sort of personal or financial impropriety that made the Russian diplomat vulnerable to recruitment? Only the CIA and Smolenkov know the precise circumstances behind the Russian's decision to betray his country. But the fact is, sometime in 2007-2008, Smolenkov was recruited by the CIA.

After Smolenkov accepted the CIA's offer, there was much work to be done -- the new agent had to be polygraphed to ascertain his reliability, trained on covert means of intelligence collection, including covert photography, as well as on how to securely communicate with the CIA in order to transmit information and receive instructions. Smolenkov was also introduced to his "handler," a CIA case officer who would be responsible for managing the work of Smolenkov, including overseeing the bank account where Smolenkov's CIA "salary" would be deposited. Various contingencies would be prepared for, including procedures for reestablishing communications should the existing means become unavailable, emergency contact procedures and emergency exfiltration plans in case Smolenkov became compromised.

Took Away His Name, and Gave Him a Code

The recruitment of a diplomat willing to return to Moscow and be run in place is a rare accomplishment, and Smolenkov's identity would become a closely guarded secret within the ranks of the CIA. Smolenkov's true identity would be known to only a few select individuals; to everyone else who had access to his reporting, he was simply a codename, comprised of a two-letter digraph representing Russia (this code changed over time), followed by a word chosen at random by a CIA algorithm (for example, Adolf Tolkachev, the so-called "billion dollar spy," was known by the codename CKSPHERE, with CK being the digraph in use for the Soviet Union at the time of his recruitment.) Because the specific details from the information provided by Smolenkov could compromise him as the source, the Russian Operations Group would "blend" his reporting in with other sources in an effort to disguise it before disseminating it to a wider audience.

Smolenkov followed Ambassador Ushakov when the latter departed the United States for Moscow in the summer of 2008; soon after arriving back in Moscow, Smolenkov and his wife divorced. Ushakov took a position as the deputy chief of the Government Staff of the Russian Federation responsible for international relations and foreign policy support. Part of the Executive Office of the Government of the Russian Federation, Ushakov coordinated the international work of the prime minister, deputy prime ministers and senior officials of the Government Executive Office. Smolenkov took up a position working for Ushakov, and soon found himself moving up the ranks of the Russian Civil Service, being promoted in 2010 to the rank of state advisor to the Russian Federation of the Third Class, a second-tier rank that put him on the cusp of joining the upper levels of the Russian government bureaucracy. He was granted a "second-level" security clearance, which allowed him to handle top secret information.

Moscow Station

Ukashov, r. with Putin (Kremlin photo)

In 2013 Ushakov received a new assignment, this time to serve in the Presidential Executive Office as the aide for international relations. Smolenkov joined Ushakov as his staff manager. Vladimir Putin was one year into his second stint as president and brought Ushakov, who had advised him on foreign relations while Putin was prime minister, to continue that service. Ushakov maintained an office at the Boyarsky Dvor (Courtyard of the Boyars), on 8 Staraya Square.

The Boyarsky Dvor was physically separate from the Kremlin, meaning neither Ushakov nor Smolenkov had direct access to the Russian president. Nevertheless, Smolenkov's new job had to have pleased his CIA masters. In the five years Smolenkov worked at the Executive Office of the Government, he was not privy to particularly sensitive information. His communications with CIA would most likely have been administrative in nature, with the CIA more interested in Smolenkov's growth potential than immediate value of any intelligence he could produce.

Smolenkov's arrival in the Presidential Administration coincided with a period of operational difficulty for the CIA in Moscow. First, the CIA's internet-based covert communications system, which used Google's email platform as the foundation for accessing various web pages where information was exchanged between the agent and his CIA handlers, had been globally compromised. Smolenkov had been trained on this system, and it provided his lifeline to the CIA. The compromise first occurred in Iran, and then spread to China; in both countries, entire networks of CIA agents were rounded up, with many being subsequently executed . China is believed to have shared the information on how to detect the covert communication-linked web pages with Russia; fortunately for Moscow Station, they were able to make the appropriate changes in the system to safeguard the security and identity of its agents. In the meantime, communications between the CIA and Smolenkov were cut off until the CIA could make contact using back-up protocols and re-train Smolenkov on the new communications procedures.

Moscow Station, however, was having trouble carrying out its clandestine tasks. In the fall of 2011, the CIA's chief of station in Moscow, Steven Hall, had been approached by his counterpart in the Russian Federal Security Service (the FSB, Russia's equivalent of the FBI) and warned that the CIA should stop trying to recruit agents from within the FSB ranks; the FSB had detected several of these attempts, which it deemed inappropriate given the ongoing cooperation between the intelligence services of the two countries regarding the war on terrorism.

But Hall had his orders, and after a year-long pause to review its operating procedures, Moscow Station resumed its targeting of FSB officers. Things went real bad real fast. In January 2013, a CIA officer named Benjamin Dillon was arrested by the FSB as he tried to recruit a Russian agent, declared persona non grata, and expelled from Russia. Then in May 2013 the FSB arrested another CIA officer, Ryan Fogle. Fogle was paraded before television cameras together with his spy paraphernalia, and like Dillon before him, expelled from the country. Moreover, the Russians, in condemning the CIA actions, revealed the identity of the CIA's Moscow chief of station (Hall), who because of the public disclosure was compelled to depart Russia.

A CIA Dream

Steve Hall (CNN/YouTube)

The loss of Dillon and Fogle was a serious blow to Moscow Station, but one from which the CIA could recover. But the near simultaneous loss of two case officers and the chief of station was a different matter altogether. Hall was one of the few people in the CIA who had been "read in" on the recruitment of Smolenkov, and as such was involved in the overall management of the Russian agent. The loss of Hall at this very sensitive time created a problem for both the CIA and Smolenkov. Smolenkov's new assignment was a dream come true for the CIA -- never before had the agency managed to place a controlled agent into the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation.

But while Smolenkov had been able to provide evidence of access, by way of photographs of presidential documents, the CIA needed to confirm that Smolenkov hadn't been turned by the Russians and was not being used to pass on disinformation designed to mislead those who used Smolenkov's reporting. Normally this was done by subjecting the agent to a polygraph examination -- a "swirl," in CIA parlance. This examination could take place at an improvised covert location in Russia, or in a more controlled environment outside of Russia, if Smolenkov was able to exit on work or during vacation. But arranging the examination required close coordination between the CIA and its agent, as well as a healthy degree of trust between the agent and those directing him. With communications down, and the chief of station evicted, Smolenkov was left in a state of limbo while the CIA trained up new case officers capable of operating in Moscow and sought a replacement for Hall.

One of the ironies surrounding the arrest and expulsion of CIA officer Fogle, and the subsequent outing and eviction of Hall, was that Smolenkov was ideally positioned to provide an inside perspective on how the Russian leadership reacted to the incident. Smolenkov's boss, Ushakov, was tasked with overseeing Russia's diplomatic response. In a statement given to the Russian media, Ushakov expressed surprise at the timing of the incident. "To put it mildly," Ushakov said, "it is surprising that this extremely crude, clumsy attempt at recruitment took place in a situation where both President Obama and President Putin have clearly stated the importance of more active cooperation and contacts between the special services of the two countries."

Ushakov coordinated closely with the head of Putin's Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, regarding the content of a letter Putin was planning to send in response to a previous communication from Obama. While the original text focused on missile defense issues, Ushakov and Patrushev inserted language about the Fogle incident. As a senior aide to Ushakov, Smolenkov was ideally positioned to gather intelligence about the Russian response. If he was able to communicate this information to the CIA, it would have provided Obama and his advisers time to prepare a response to the Russian letter. The situation meant that Smolenkov may have been reporting on events related to the expulsion of Hall, one of the CIA officers specifically trained to manage his reporting.

The Center

Amid the operational challenges and opportunity provided by Smolenkov's new position within the Russian Presidential Administration, the CIA underwent a radical reorganization which impacted how human agents, and the intelligence they produced, would be managed. The past practice of having intelligence operations controlled by insular regional divisions, which promoted both a physical and philosophical divide between the collectors and their analytical counterparts in the respective regional division within the Directorate of Intelligence, or DI, was discontinued by Brennan, who had taken over as director of the CIA in May 2013.

To replace what he viewed as an antiquated organizational structure, Brennan created what he called "Mission Centers," which combined analytical, operational, technical and support expertise under a single roof. For Moscow Station and Smolenkov, this meant that the Russia and Eurasia Division, with its Russian Operations Group, no longer existed. Instead, Moscow Station would take its orders from a new Europe and Eurasia Mission Center headed by an experienced CIA Russia analyst named Peter Clement.

Clement, who had earned a PhD in Russian history from Michigan State University, had a diverse resumé with the CIA which included service as the director for Russia on the National Security Council and as the CIA representative to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. Clement served as the director of the Office of Russian and Eurasian Analysis and as the CIA's Russia issue manager from 1997 to 2003; as the President's Daily Brief (PDB) briefer for Vice President Dick Cheney from 2003-2004, and from 2005-2013, as the deputy director for intelligence for analytic programs. In 2015 Brennan appointed Clement to serve as the deputy assistant director of CIA for Europe and Eurasia, where he directed the activities of the newly created Europe and Eurasia Mission Center. If one was looking for the perfect candidate to manage the fusion of operational, analytical and technical experience into a singular, mission-focused entity, Peter Clement was it.

Peter Clement (C-Span)

As Clement got on with the business of whipping the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center into shape, Smolenkov was busy establishing himself as an intelligence source of some value. Smolenkov's success was directly linked to the work of his boss, Ushakov. In June 2015, Ushakov was put in charge of establishing a high-level working group in the fuel and energy sector for the purpose of improving bilateral cooperation with Azerbaijan. The reporting Smolenkov would have been able to provide on the work of this group would have been of tremendous assistance to those in the Obama administration working on U.S. energy policy, especially as it related to countering Russian moves in the former Soviet Republics.

Another project of interest was Russia's sale of advanced Mi-35 helicopters to Pakistan in support of their counterterrorism efforts. Coming at a time when U.S.-Pakistani relations were floundering, the Russian sale of advanced helicopters was viewed with concern by both the Department of State and the Department of Defense. Again, Smolenkov's reporting on this issue would have been well received by critical policymakers in both departments.

But the most critical role played by Ushakov was advising Putin on the uncertain state of relations between the U.S. and Russia in the aftermath of the 2014 crisis in Ukraine, and Russia's annexation of Crimea. Ushakov's 10-year tenure as Russia's ambassador to the U.S. gave him unprecedented insight into U.S. decision making, experience and expertise Putin increasingly relied upon as he formulated and implemented responses to U.S. efforts to contain and punish Russia on the international stage.

While Ushakov's meetings with Putin were conducted either in private, or in small groups of senior advisers, meaning Smolenkov was not present, Smolenkov was able to collect intelligence on the periphery by photographing itineraries and working papers, as well as overhearing comments made by Ushakov, that collectively would provide U.S. policymakers with important insight into Putin's thinking.

Managing an important resource like Smolenkov was one of the critical challenges faced by Clement and the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center. Smolenkov's reporting continued to be handled using special HUMINT procedures designed to protect the source. However, within the Center knowledge of Smolenkov's work would have been shared with analysts who worked side by side with their operational colleagues deciding how the intelligence could best be used, as well as coming up with follow-up questions for Smolenkov regarding specific issues of interest.

Given the unique insight Smolenkov's reporting provided into Putin's thinking, it would be logical that intelligence sourced from Smolenkov would frequently find itself briefed to the president and his inner circle via the PDB process, which was exacting in terms of vetting the accuracy and reliability of any intelligence reporting that made it onto its pages. As a long-time Russia expert with extensive experience in virtually every aspect of how the CIA turned raw reporting into finished intelligence, Clement was ideally suited to making sure his Center handled the Smolenkov product responsibly, and in a manner which maximized its value.

Meanwhile, Moscow Station continued to exhibit operational problems. By 2015 the CIA had managed to rebuild its stable of case officers operating from the U.S. embassy. But the FSB always seemed to be one step ahead. According to the FSB, the Russians were adept at identifying CIA officers working under State Department cover and would subject these individuals to extensive surveillance. As if to prove the Russian's point, in short order the FSB rounded up the newly assigned case officers, along with the deputy chief of station, declared them persona non grata, and expelled them from Russia. To make matters worse, the FSB released surveillance video of all these officers, who in some cases were joined by their spouses, as they engaged in elaborate ruses to evade Russian surveillance in order to carry out their covert assignments.

Moscow Station's string of bad luck continued into 2016, when one of its officers, having been detected by the FSB during a meeting, fled via taxi to the U.S. embassy, only to be tackled by a uniformed FSB officer as he tried to enter the compound. In the scuffle that followed, the CIA officer managed to make entry into the embassy building, compelling the FSB guard to release him once jurisdiction was lost. The CIA officer, who suffered a separated shoulder during the incident, left Russia shortly thereafter, together with a female colleague who had also been detected by the FSB while engaged in clandestine activities and subsequently declared persona non grata.

FSB Headquarters in the Lubyanka Building, Moscow.

The FSB indicated, at the time these two officers were being expelled, that it had evicted three other CIA officers during the year. In addition to the decimation of its staff, Moscow Station was experiencing an alarming number of its agents being discovered by the FSB and arrested. While the Russians were circumspect about most of these cases, on several occasions they indicated that they had uncovered a spy by intercepting the electronic communications between him and the CIA. This meant that the Russians were aware of, and actively pursuing, the Google-based internet-based system used by the CIA to communicate with its agents in Russia.

Meanwhile, Smolenkov continued to send his reports to his CIA handlers unabated, using the same internet-based system. Under normal circumstances, an exception to compromise would raise red flags within the counterintelligence staff that evaluated an agent's reporting and activity. But by the summer of 2016, nothing about the work of the CIA, and in particular the Europe and Eurasia Mission Center could be considered "normal" when it came to the Russian target.

Little White Envelope

Sometime in early August 2016, a courier from the CIA arrived at the White House carrying a plain, unmarked white envelope. Inside was an intelligence report from Smolenkov that CIA Director Brennan considered to be so sensitive that he kept it out of the President's Daily Brief, concerned that even that restrictive process was too inclusive to adequately protect the source. The intelligence was to be read by four people only -- Obama, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy National Security Advisor Avril Haines and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. The document was to be returned to the courier once it had been read.

Brennan in Oval Office where he had envelope delivered. (White House photo/Pete Souza)

The contents of the report were alarming -- Putin had personally ordered the cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election in favor of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump.

The intelligence report was not a product of Clement's Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, but rather a special unit of handpicked analysts from the CIA, NSA and FBI who were brought together under great secrecy in late July and reported directly to Brennan. These analysts were made to sign non-disclosure agreements protecting their work from their colleagues.

This new analytical unit focused on three new sensitive sources of information -- the Smolenkov report, additional reporting provided by a former MI6 officer named Christopher Steele, and a signals intelligence report provided by a Baltic nation neighboring Russia. The Steele information was of questionable provenance, so much so that FBI Director James Comey could not, or would not, vouch for its credibility. The same held true for the NSA's assessment of the Baltic SIGINT report. By themselves, the Steele reporting and Baltic SIGINT report were of little intelligence value. But when viewed together, they were used to corroborate the explosive contents of the Smolenkov intelligence. The White House found the Smolenkov report so convincing that in September 2016, during a meeting of the G-20 in China, Obama pulled Putin aside and told him to stop meddling in the U.S. election. Putin was reportedly nonplussed by Obama's intervention.

It is extraordinarily difficult for a piece of intelligence to be deemed important and reliable enough to be briefed to the president of the United States. The principal forum for such a briefing is the Presidential Daily Brief, which prior to 2004 was a product produced exclusively by the CIA. When the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was signed into law in 2004, the responsibility for the PDB was transferred to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a newly created entity responsible for oversight and coordination of the entire Intelligence Community, or IC. The PDB is considered to be an IC product, the production of which is coordinated by ODNI's PDB staff in partnership with the CIA Directorate of Intelligence (DI)'s President's Analytic Support Staff.

Since he began reporting about his work in the Russian Presidential Administration in 2013, Smolenkov had, on numerous occasions, produced intelligence whose content and relevance was such that it would readily warrant inclusion in the PDB. After 2015, the decision to submit a Smolenkov-sourced report for inclusion in the PDB would be made by Clement and his staff. For a report to be nominated, it would have to pass an exacting quality control review process which evaluated it for accuracy, relevance and reliability.

U.S. Embassy Moscow ( Wikimedia Commons)

Sometime in the leadup to August 2016, this process was halted. Oleg Smolenkov was a controlled asset of the CIA. While he was given certain latitude on what information he could collect, generally speaking Smolenkov worked from an operations order sent to him by his CIA controllers which established priorities for intelligence collection based upon information provided by Smolenkov about what he could reasonably access. Before tasking Smolenkov, his CIA handlers would screen the request from an operational and counterintelligence perspective, conducting a risk-reward analysis that weighed the value of the intelligence being sought with the possibility of compromise. Only then would Smolenkov be cleared to collect the requested information.

It is not publicly known what prompted the report from Smolenkov which Brennan found so alarming. Was it received out of the blue, a target of opportunity which Smolenkov exploited? Was it based upon a specific tasking submitted by Smolenkov's CIA handlers in response to a tasking from above? Or was it a result of the intervention of the CIA director, who tasked Smolenkov outside normal channels? In any event, once Brennan created his special analytical unit, Smolenkov became his dedicated source. If Smolenko was in this for the money, as appears to be the case, he would have been motivated to come up with the "correct" answer to Brennan's tasking for information on Putin's role. By late 2016, Western media had made quite clear what kind of answer Brennan wanted.

Every intelligence report produced by a controlled asset is subjected to a counterintelligence review where it is examined for any evidence of red flags that could be indicative of compromise. One red flag is the issue of abnormal access. Smolenkov did not normally have direct contact with Putin, if ever. His intelligence reports would have been written from the perspective of the distant observer. His report about Putin's role in interfering in the 2016 election, however, represented a whole new level of access and trust. Under normal circumstances, a report exhibiting such tendency would be pulled aside for additional scrutiny; if the report was alarming enough, the CIA might order the agent to be subjected to a polygraph to ensure he had not been compromised.

This did not happen. Instead, Brennan took the extraordinary measure of sequestering the source from the rest of the Intelligence Community. He also confronted the head of the Russian FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, about the risks involved in interfering in U.S. elections.

Whether Brennan further tasked Smolenkov to collect on Putin is not known. Nor is it known whether Smolenkov produced more than that single report about Putin's alleged direct role in ordering the Russian intelligence services to intervene in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Despite Brennan's extraordinary effort to keep the existence of a human source within the Russian Presidential Administration a closely-held secret, by December 2016 both The Washington Post and The New York Times began quoting their sources about the existence of a sensitive intelligence source close to the Russian president. The timing of these press leaks coincided with Smolensky being fired from his job working for the Presidential Administration; the method of firing came in the form of a secret decree. When the CIA found out, they desperately tried to convince Smolenkov to agree to extraction, fearing for his safety should he remain in Moscow. This Smolenkov allegedly refused to do, prompting the counterintelligence-minded within the CIA to become concerned that Brennan and his coterie of analysts had been taken for a ride by a Russian double agent.

Trump and Barr on Feb. 14, 2019. (Wikimedia Commons)

Smolenkov's firing occurred right before the Intelligence Community released its much-anticipated assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election . Like the special analytical unit created by Brennan to handle the intelligence about Putin ordering the Russian intelligence services to intervene in favor of Trump in the 2016 election, Brennan opted to produce the Russian interference assessment outside the normal channels. Usually, when the IC opts to produce an assessment, there is a formal process which has a national intelligence officer (NIO) from within the National Intelligence Council take the lead on coordinating the collection and assessment of all relevant intelligence. The NIO usually coordinates closely with the relevant Mission Centers to ensure no analytical stone was left unturned in the pursuit of the truth.

The 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was produced differently -- no Mission Center involvement, no NIO assigned, no peer review. Just Brennan's little band of sequestered analysts.

Smolenkov's information took top billing in the ICA, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections," published on Jan. 6, 2017. "We assess," the unclassified document stated, "Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump." Smolenkov's reporting appears to be the sole source for this finding.

The ICA went on to note, "We have high confidence in these judgments." According to the Intelligence Community's own definition, "high confidence'" generally indicates judgments based on high-quality information, and/or the nature of the issue makes it possible to render a solid judgment. A "high confidence" judgment is not a fact or a certainty, however, and still carries a risk of being wrong.

The same day the ICA was published, Brennan, accompanied by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Admiral Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, met with President-elect Trump in Trump Tower, where he was briefed on the classified information behind the Russian ICA. Included in this briefing was the intelligence from "a top-secret source" close to Putin which sustained the finding of Putin's direct involvement.

Brennan had sold the Smolenkov reporting to both President Obama and President-elect Trump, along with the rest of the intelligence community, as "high-quality information." It was, at best, nothing more than uncorroborated rumor or, at worst, simple disinformation. This reporting, which was parroted by an unquestioning mainstream media that accepted it as fact, created an impression amongst the American public that Vladimir Putin had personally ordered and directed a Russian interference campaign during the 2016 election designed "to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible," according to the ICA.

As CIA director, Brennan understood very well the role played by intelligence in shaping the decisions of key policy makers, and the absolute need for those who brief the president and his key advisers to ensure only the highest quality information and derived assessments are briefed. In this, Brennan failed.

Coming in From the Cold

Tivat, Montenegro

After being fired from his position within the Presidential Administration, Smolenkov continued to live in Moscow, very much a free man. By this time he was the father of three children, his new wife having given birth to two daughters. Following Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, Brennan resigned as CIA director. By May, Brennan was testifying before Congress about the issue of Russian interference. Increasingly, attention was being drawn to the existence of a highly-placed source near Putin, with both The New York Times and The Washington Post publishing surprisingly detailed reports.

Concerned that Smolenkov could be arrested by the Russians and, in doing so, have control over the narrative of Russian interference transfer to Moscow, the CIA once again approached Smolenkov to defect to the United States. This time the Russian agent agreed.

In July 2017, Smolenkov, accompanied by his wife and three children, travelled to Montenegro on vacation. They arrived in the resort city of Tivat, flying on a commercial air flight from Moscow. The CIA took control of the family a few days later, spiriting them away aboard a yacht that had been moored at the Tivat marina. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Smolenkov and his family were placed under the control of the CIA's resettlement unit.

According to the Russian media, Smolenkov's disappearance was discovered in September 2017. The FSB opened an investigation into the matter, initially suspecting foul play. Soon, however, the FSB reached a different conclusion -- that Smolenkov and his family had defected to the United States.

Normally a defector would be subjected to a debriefing, inclusive of a polygraph, to confirm that he or she had not been turned into a double agent. Smolenkov had, over the course of a decade of spying, accumulated a considerable amount of money which the CIA was holding in escrow. This money would be released to Smolenkov upon the successful completion of his debriefing. In the case of Smolenkov, however, there doesn't seem to have been a detailed, lengthy debriefing. His money was turned over to him. Sometime in June 2018, Smolenkov and his wife bought a home worth nearly $1 million in northern Virginia. The couple used their real names. They were not afraid.

I can only speculate as to the circumstances that led to Smolenkov's firing by secret decree. Normally, Russians charged with transmitting classified material to the intelligence services of a foreign state are arrested, placed on trial and given lengthy prison sentences, or worse. This did not happen to Smolenkov.

But this does not mean the Russian authorities were ignorant of his activities. This raises another possibility, that Smolenkov could have been turned by the Russian security services before he had compromised any classified information, and that he operated as a double agent his entire CIA career. Since the only classified information he transferred would, in this case, be approved for release by the Russian security services, he would not have technically committed a crime. If Smolenkov was working both sides, it could have been a Russian vehicle to create distrust between the U.S. intelligence community and Trump.

Smolenkov was fired, and left to his own devices, once his utility to Russia had expired. Having escaped being arrested as a spy, Smolenkov believed he might be able to live a normal life in Moscow. But when the potential for compromise arose due to leaks to the press, I assess that it was in the CIA's interest to bring Smolenkov in, if for no other reason than to control the narrative of Russian interference.

Three Scenarios

Old CIA building in Langely, Virginia.

There are three scenarios that could be at play regarding Smolenkov's bone fides as a human intelligence source for the CIA. First, that this was a solid recruitment, that Smolenkov was the high-level asset the CIA and Brennan claim he was, and the information he provided regarding the involvement of Putin was unimpeachable. Mitigating against this is the fact that when Smolenkov was fired from his position in late 2016, he was not arrested and put on trial for spying.

Russia is fully capable of conducting secret trials, and controlling the information that is made available about such a trial. Moreover, Russia is a vindictive state–persons who commit treason are not tolerated. As Putin himself noted in comments made in March 2018, "Traitors will kick the bucket. Trust me. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange for it, those thirty pieces silver they were given, they will choke on them." The odds of Smolenkov being fired for committing treason, and then being allowed to voluntarily exit Russia with his family and passports, are virtually nil.

The second scenario is a variation of the first, where Smolenkov starts as a solid recruitment, with his reporting commensurate with his known level of access–peripheral contact with documents and information pertaining to the work of the aide to President Putin on international relations. Sometime in July 2016 Smolenkov produces a report that catches the attention of DCI Brennan, who flags it and pulls Smolenkov out of the normal operational channels for CIA-controlled human sources, and instead creating a new, highly-compartmentalized fusion cell to handle this report, and possibly others.

Three questions emerge from the second scenario. First, was Smolenkov responding to an urgent tasking from Brennan to find out how high up the Russian chain of command went the knowledge of the alleged DNC cyber attack, or did Smolenkov produce this report on his own volition? Was Brennan arranging evidence to show that there was indeed a Russian hack. After all, all the FBI had to go by was a draft of a report by the virulently anti-Russian private security firm CrowdStrike. The FBI never examined the DNC server itself.

In any case, the Smolenkov report in the white envelope represented a level of access that would have significantly deviated from what one could expect from a person in his position and which suggests he may have been telling the CIA what he knew Brennan wanted to hear. As such, normal counterintelligence procedures should have mandated an operational pause while the intelligence report in question was scrubbed to ensure viability. Under no circumstances would a report so flagged be allowed to be put into the Presidential Daily Brief. However, by pulling the report from the control of the Europe and Eurasian Mission Center, turning it over to a stand-alone fusion cell, and bypassing the PDB process to brief the president and a handful of advisors, there would be no counterintelligence concerns raised. This implies that Brennan had a role in the tasking of Smolenkov, and was waiting for the report to come in, which Brennan then took control of to preclude any counter-intelligence red flags being raised.

The third scenario is that Smolenkov, a low-level failure of a diplomat with drinking issues, marital problems and monetary frustrations, was recruited by the CIA, but only with the complicity of the Russian security services.

The same red flags that the CIA looks for when recruiting agents are also looked at by Russian counterintelligence. At what point in the recruitment process the Russians stepped in is unknown (if they did at all.) But it is curious that this professional failure was suddenly transferred from running a co-op to being the right hand man of one of the most influential foreign policy experts in Russia–Yuri Ushakov.

Moreover, this muddling diplomat whose questionable behavioral practices scream "recruit me" is, within three years of returning to Moscow, given a significant promotion that enables him to follow Ushakov into the Presidential Administration–a posting which would require extensive vetting by the Russian security services. Smolenkov's promotion pattern is enough, in and of itself, to raise red flags within the counterintelligence offices tasked with monitoring such things. The fact that it did not indicates that the quality and quantity of reporting being provided by Smolenkov was deemed by the Americans too important to interfere with.

In this scenario, Smolenkov would have been playing to a script written by the Russian security services. Since he, technically, had broken no laws by serving as a double agent, he would not be subjected to arrest and trial. But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit.

The most pressing question that emerges from this possibility is why? Why would the Russian security services want to cook the books, so to speak, in a manner which made the Russians look guilty of the very thing they were publicly denying?

In my view, if one assumes that the Smolenkov July 2016 report at the center of this drama was not a result of serendipity, but rather a product derived from a specific request from his CIA managers to find out how high up in the Russian decision-making chain the authorization went for what U.S. intelligence agencies were already publicly pushing as an alleged DNC cyber attack, then the answer I believe becomes clear–the Russians knew the U.S. had an intelligence deficit.

I am speculating here, but if the Russians provided an answer guaranteed to attract attention at a critical time in the U.S. presidential election process, it would inject the CIA and its reporting into the democratic processes of the United States, and thereby politicize the CIA and the entire intelligence community by default. This would suppose, however, that the agencies did not have their own motives for wanting to stop Trump.

Rogers, Comey, Clapper and Brennan all in a row.

In this scenario, the Russians would have been in control of when to expose the CIA's activities–all they had to do was fire Smolenkov, which in the end they did, right as Smolenkov's report was front and center in the post-election finger-pointing that was taking place regarding the allegation of Russian interference. The best acts of political sabotage are done subtlety, where the culprit remains in the shadows while the victims proceed, unaware that they have been played.

For the Russians, it didn't matter who won the election, even if they may have favored Trump; simply getting President Obama to commit to the bait by confronting Putin at the G20 meeting in September 2016 would have been a victory, because I assess that at that point the Russians knew that they were driving the American narrative. When the President of the United States acts on intelligence that later turns out to be false, it is an embarrassment that drives a wedge between the intelligence community and the Executive Branch of government. I have no solid evidence for this. But in my speculation on what may have happened, this was the Russian objective–to drive that wedge.

An Idyllic Truce

In my view, the CIA, Russia and Smolenkov were happy to maintain the status quo, with Smolenkov living in comfortable retirement with his family, the CIA continuing to accuse Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election, and Russia denying it. As well, Russia seems to have brushed off the sanctions that resulted from this alleged "interference." This idyllic truce started to unravel in May 2019, when Trump ordered Attorney General William Barr to "get to the bottom" of what role the CIA played in initiating the investigation into allegations of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russians that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller's investigation concluded earlier this year, with a 400-plus page report being published which did not find any evidence of active collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Trump's instructions to Barr are linked to a desire on the part of the president to hold to account those responsible for creating the narrative of possible collusion. Reports indicate that Barr is particularly interested in finding out how and why the CIA concluded that Putin personally ordered the Russian intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Barr's investigation will inevitably lead him to the intelligence report that was hand couriered to the White House in early August 2016, which would in turn lead to Smolenkov, and in doing so open up the can of worms of Smolenkov's entire history of cooperation with the CIA. Not only could the entire foundation upon which the intelligence community has based its assessment of Russian interference collapse, it could also open the door for potential charges of criminal misconduct by Brennan and anyone else who helped him bypass normal vetting procedures and, in doing so, allowed a possible Russian double agent to influence the decisions of the president of the United States.

Seen in this light, the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth.

At the end of the day, Smolenkov and his family are not at risk. If the Russian government wanted to exact revenge for his actions, it would have done so after firing him in late 2016. In any event, Smolenkov and his family would never have been allowed to leave Russia had he been suspected or accused of committing crimes against the state. A few days following Smolenkov's "outing" by the U.S. media, the Russian government filed a request with Interpol for an investigation into how someone who had gone missing in Montenegro was now living in the United States.

The only person at risk from this entire sordid affair is Brennan, whose reputation and potential livelihood is on the line. At best, Brennan is guilty of extremely poor judgement; at worst, he actively conspired to use the office of Director of the CIA to interfere in the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Neither option speaks well of the U.S. Intelligence Community and those in Congress charged with oversight of its operations.

Watch Scott Ritter discussing this article on CN Live! Episode 9 .

Consortium News does not necessarily endorse the views of its authors.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

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Linda Wood , September 17, 2019 at 00:34

Brennan may have written the white envelope report and attributed it to Smolenkov, who may or may not have been a double agent. The Russian interference story is not just something Brennan wanted to hear, it's what the military industrial complex needs us to believe.

Dan Anderson , September 16, 2019 at 22:09

I trust Scott Ritter. Had we listened to him, the USA would not have invaded Iraq over WMDs. Reading the piece added to my distrust of our intelligence community, remembering this haunting exchange on live TV.

David G , September 16, 2019 at 18:32

I'm surprised Scott Ritter thinks it likely that Russia engineered the "Putin meddled" narrative – that just seems unbelievable to me. There are enough moving parts here that one doesn't have to commit to one of Ritter's three scenarios: numerous variations are possible. For instance, Smolenkov may have been fired for some mundane mix of reasons going to performance and reliability. He may have been considered dubious without Russian counterintelligence having fingered him as a U.S. agent.

And under the third scenario, with Smolenkov a double agent all along, Ritter writes: "But once his existence became the fodder of the U.S. media via inference and speculation, his services as a double agent were no longer needed. He was fired from his position, via a secret Presidential proclamation, and set free to live his life as he saw fit."

That doesn't make sense to me. In fact I see the opposite: if he had been a successfully run double agent all that time, then when his usefulness had ended he would have been decently pensioned off – not simply cut loose to fend for himself – but *not* allowed to travel abroad unimpeded (with his whole family, no less) where he would have the opportunity to cause mischief.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , September 16, 2019 at 15:26

Were it not so powerful militarily and financially, the United States would be the laughingstock of the world. This entire business is just another avenue travelled in America's nonstop Russophobia lunatic wanderings. The DNC material was not hacked as a number of true experts have told us, including the key one now languishing in a British prison. Putin had no plan because nothing ever happened.

Nothing. And I think we've all seen that when Putin plans something, it happens. The article is interesting for its laying out of elaborate security procedures – kind of a high-level almost academic "police procedural" – but I do feel in the end it is not that helpful, much as I respect Mr Ritter.

When nothing has happened, it does seem a bit odd to scrutinize every piece of fiber and bit of dust and to construct a massive scenario of "what ifs."

Meanwhile, the murder of Seth Rich, a genuine and meaningful event, goes virtually uninvestigated.

No wonder you are in so much trouble, America, and no wonder you make so much trouble for others.

Anonymot , September 16, 2019 at 15:16

In the extremely sophisticated world of high grade intelligence I have repeatedly said that the Brennan, Clapper, Comey trio were lead-footed imbeciles. That has been the CIA tradition since Dulles left. All of those in our intelligence racket have led us to the trough of poisoned water and all of our Presidents drank. They have all become very rich, but not from book sales nor from consulting fees.

It says a lot about the entire echelon of those who decide our fates. There is no way to know whether it stems from ignorance or incompetence, but those with the Deep State mindset like each other, hire each other, and have been in some sort of daisy chain since university. We not only need to describe How it happens as this article does very well, but even more importantly Why. Only then can we start to do something about it, although it is probably far too late – it would be like taking the shell off of an egg and leaving that delicate interior membrane just inside the shell intact.

Clods like these (add the Clintons) should have their post-employment millions confiscated and put on trial.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , September 16, 2019 at 15:39

Sorry, but "Big Intelligence" is always a failure, and on many levels. It is not a matter of any "clods." It is a matter of the very nature of the institution and the nature of the people who use its output. The CIA only has a good record at doing bad things. I refer to its operations side and the havoc and violence they have released through the decades. It is an army of richly-equipped thugs without uniforms interfering in the business of others, "lying, cheating, and stealing."

The true intelligence side of things fails and always has to a great extent. https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/why-the-cia-always-will-be-a-costly-flop/

jessika , September 16, 2019 at 15:11

I find it maddening that we "puppet proles" are treated like stupid fools, lied to constantly, and nothing happens to stop the mad lying/false flag garbage that keeps on. Now, today, after Bolton departure, out of the weirdness comes Pompous Pompeo spewing even worse madness that could tip "us" into attacking Iran! Saudis are insane, Netanyahu faces his electorate tomorrow, and we should believe MbS and cronies? Trump is nothing but a stooge!

Maricata , September 16, 2019 at 19:28

Read The CIA as Organized Crime and Strength of the Wolf and Strength of the Pack by Douglas Valentine.

Please, CN, have Mr. Valentine on your livc broadcast

Jeff Harrison , September 16, 2019 at 14:36

It occurs to me that this may have an inappropriate title. Plausibly Mr. Ritter has pegged what Smolenkov was eventually – a double agent. In which case I would probably call him pretty successful.

hetro , September 16, 2019 at 13:06

Also published yesterday, this Aaron Mate interview with John Kiriakou on Smolenkov:

"Kiriakou also notes that the way Smolenkov's intelligence was handled raises echoes of the CIA's manipulation of intelligence to help justify the Iraq war. The information from Smolenkov was handled personally by then-CIA Director John Brennan. Brennan reportedly sidelined other CIA analysts and kept the Smolenkov information out of the Presidential Daily Briefing – instead delivering it personally to President Obama and a small group of officials."

"That is a highly highly unusual thing to do, but I think [Brennan] did it because he knew that the source wasn't well placed, he knew that the source was lying about his access to Putin -- or information coming from Putin -- and I think that for whatever reason John Brennan really wanted the president to run with this narrative that the Russians were trying to somehow impact the 2016 election, when the intelligence just simply wasn't there," Kiriakou says.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/09/15/outing-of-cias-kremlin-mole-echoes-iraq-wmd-hoax/

dean 1000 , September 16, 2019 at 11:53

When Trump campaigned against the bloody foreign policies of the duopoly he was also campaigning against an out of control, coup making, drug running, blackmailing, imperial CIA. my comment to The Brennan wanted to 'get' Trump to save his own hide, the CIA, and the duopoly from further embarrassment.

If Smolenkov is missing from his Virginia home (Chancellor below at 9.15.19 at 23:40) hopefully he is in hiding to assure he can tell a Grand Jury about any instructions or suggestions he may have received from Brennan, or others regarding the election of Donald Trump.

Zhu , September 16, 2019 at 05:25

Re John 8:32, people forget Pilate's remark, "what is truth"?

Igor Bundy , September 16, 2019 at 04:29

The next report from the CIA will be from hogwarts and how the measter is concatenating a secret potion on how to turn dykes into donkeys.. This is especially impotent to the CIA and such.. to hide in plain sight..

Imagine them trying to make a bond movie from this. Or more of Bourne.. But now it makes sense of all the shows that show the CIA as protector of humanity and the good guys.. There are no righteous intelligence agencies anywhere, only how evil and their limits.. Why their powers should be limited and their actions also limited to a small sphere. Because where does it stop? Once given the power to shape reality, then the entire world is shaped according to a few with psychopathic tendencies. Which normal person would want to control everyone according to their own reality? When you cant control your very own family, you have to be one heck of a control freak to do it globally and to force everyone to do as told. But these are the dreams and aspirations of an ape.. To remake the world in his own image.. and the prize is the banana..

John Wright , September 16, 2019 at 15:11

More like a Le Carre' film. The CIA was originally sold as an intelligence gathering and analysis organization, and was not supposed to be involved in operations. Thus, it was founded on lies and the lies have only grown since.

Neither the CIA nor the FBI are salvageable at this point. They need to be abolished, their functions reconsidered and new institutions which adhere to the Constitution created. Of course, the entire military intelligence complex needs to be dismantled, starting with the DHS, but that will require a revolution in this country.

Perhaps after the crash

junaid , September 16, 2019 at 03:12

US President Donald Trump dismissed another official – National Security Advisor John Bolton. what threatens relations between the US and Russia What threatens relations between the US and Russia

Fran Macadam , September 16, 2019 at 01:49

Even the former communist state governments in Europe and the Soviet Union rued the day that they unleashed their secret police from accountability, and thereby became subservient to their power.

Chancellor , September 15, 2019 at 23:40

"But his job as foreman of the Rossotrudnichestvo coop was not the kind of job a Maurive (sic) Thorez graduate gets;"

Of course it isn't, because that was never really his job. My guess is that his real job all along was to be recruited by the CIA, when, in fact, he was always a double agent. The rumors that he drank too much, was dissatisfied with his pay, and so on, strike me as too obvious a come-on to an over-confident CIA. If Mr. Ritter knows that this is the type of individual the CIA looks for, then the Russian security services know this as well. After all, they tagged every American on the Moscow Station. Clearly, they have excellent tradecraft.

The final coup by the Russian security services was to create a situation where Smolenkov would have to be extracted by the CIA, although the Russians probably didn't think it would take so long. Now it appears that Smolenkov is missing from the Virginia home that he purchased openly under his own name. I wouldn't be surprised if he is living comfortably somewhere back in Russia–this time having been "extracted" by the Russians, since his cover as a CIA asset was finally blown.

Clearly this is speculation, but no more so than the scenarios Mr. Ritter posits.

Fabrizio Zambuto , September 16, 2019 at 14:11

Third scenario seems possible. He starts to drink, he shows how unsatisfied he is, knows Americans will target him.
Meanwhile he gets spoonfed the intel he will have to share with the CIA.

According to Lavrov, he was a employee with little access to the echelons.

Last but not least: Putin said traitors will be punished but they don't get killed, they're sent to Prison and handed years like Skripal which managed to go to UK thanks to a swap.

Overall I like the article but too much Hollywood in the story. Why was he fired?

John Wright , September 15, 2019 at 23:38

[The Chinese play Go, the Russians Chess and the Americans Poker (badly)]

I think it's pretty clear that Mr. Ritter's third scenario is the correct interpretation of the facts. I wouldn't even be surprised if the Russians surreptitiously got the U.S. media to out their double agent. Timing is everything, after all, and now he's Langley's problem to deal with.

The Russians know that the corrupt Anglo-American Deep State will work against any relationship which is beneficial to Russia, so they have absolutely nothing to lose by feeding the Deep State a narrative that can potentially wreak havoc within it.

Having Smolenkov feed this narrative into the bowels of the CIA clearly helped advance the Deep State's rather obvious operation to create the appearance of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, all the more reason for Brennan and company to swallow it hook, line and sinker.

So Deep State tool Obama bites on the interference narrative, confronts Putin and takes illegal actions that, if exposed, have the potential to seriously damage his legacy and the presidency. This plausible result would cause Americans to lose even more faith in their increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional government and affect world opinion.

We now see that if Barr actually does his job as mandated by the Constitution, then this becomes a very distinct possibility.

Had the rabid neocon Clinton won, her administration would've undoubtedly buried Obama's unconstitutional indiscretion, but fingerprints would've lingered for a future Republican to possibly uncover and cause chaos with. It's even possible that Smolenkov would've remained in place and continued to feed even more poisonous disinformation to the U.S. intelligence morass, setting Clinton up for who knows what.

However, the unstable, narcissistic and easily played Trump miraculously wins. He's immediately and continuously hit with RussiaGate. Trump reacts predictably by fanning the flames of distraction when he calls out the Deep State and keeps punching back. The Executive Branch is divided against itself, Congress and the electorate are further polarized and a significant amount of energy is tied up with unproductive domestic political machinations.

Almost three years of noise and crisis worked to increase Trump's natural dysfunction while the Russians and Chinese quietly manage their coordinated effort to transform the global power structure in their favor.

Will this Russian gift keep on giving?

Will Barr, or someone else if Trump fires him, dig into the entire RussiaGate mess and expose all the lies and blatant illegality potentially causing a serious national crisis, further damaging the reputation and credit worthiness of the U.S. ?

Or will Barr remain a faithful Deep State fixer, convince Trump that taking down Obama would not be good for the economic health of the country (and his re-election), and carefully steer everything he can down the memory hole?

Are those vodka glasses I hear clinking in Beijing?

[I'm just left wondering who will produce the deliciously embarrassing (to the U.S.) film that this would make.]

Taras77 , September 15, 2019 at 19:42

Remarkable detail on the recruitment and control of agents by the CIA. In this case, it would appear that Brennan has been played big time. IMO, to see Smolenkov walk away with his loot in the bank, there can not be any other conclusion.

Hence, the obvious panic by brennan to use the likely suspects, NYT and wapo, to cast more haze on the story. If there were treason, I doubt Smolenkov would be walking because the Russians do not take that lightly. Actually, they have acted and are acting with competence and confidence in the face of the bumbling, fumbling bombast and threats of the group around trump which passes themselves off as diplomats and security advisors.

Brennan in his obsession to interfere with the political process prob contributed to his malfeasance and a possible crime-I am no legal expert but it certainly seems that he committed crimes.

Of course, this raises the question as to whether barr et al will act accordingly and bring him to justice-I have strong doubts about barr taking on the cia as they will certainly close ranks to protect him. My doubts about barr, however, go well beyond this particular issue vis-a-vis the cia.

SilentPartner , September 15, 2019 at 18:58

I suspect Scott was provided a great deal of the reporting in this fascinating article from a disgruntled insider, or former insider. Knowledge of Brennan's break with protocol to form a select 'stand alone fusion cell' that reported only to him is something that I haven't seen reported before. In any case this story adds another red flag to the entire Russiagate hoax.

Just as Mueller failed to interview Julian Assange or Christopher Steele for his report -- obvious red flags -- we should now watch the conduct of Barr's investigation. Will Barr's investigators interview Smolenkov? This should be an important metric to determine how serious his investigation is. Another metric for Barr will be whether Ghislaine Maxwell is indicted and arrested in the Jefferey Epstein affair. If not, we will soon know just how deep goes the corruption of the ruling class.

Sam F , September 15, 2019 at 18:28

Many thanks to Scott Ritter for this information and cogent argument.

However it is not clear how Russia would expect to benefit by allowing Smolenkov to deceive the CIA that Putin directly ordered interference in the US election. While later discrediting of the US "Russia-gate" nonsense would make the US IC look bad, it is unclear that this could be done, and it would have been done by now to reduce political tensions, but still has not been done. Putin himself denied the accusations as nonsense.

So something is missing: if that was not the plan, Smolenkov was not asked to do that, and he would not have been viewed as harmless when fired for that. If he had other incriminating info on decision makers there, he would not have been allowed to leave, and having escaped, he would have concealed his new location. Perhaps his superiors ill-advisedly asked him to make false statements, for which he was not blamed.

Anon , September 16, 2019 at 07:09

I agree. The logic of "embarrassing" the CIA and dividing them from the president by passing inflammatory information seems a stretch. On the other hand, I agree there do appear a number of "red flags."

I'm wondering about the merit of the idea that this guy cooked up the story himself, though I'm not sure that works either. It just seems to me something is missing.

Ojkelly , September 16, 2019 at 12:00

I thought the idea was that a Brennan minion planted or asked for the "Putin is interfering " report, or even made it up and attributed it to a minor asset.

Brendan , September 15, 2019 at 15:00

( ) the timing of the CNN and New York Times reports about the "exfiltration" of the CIA's "sensitive source" seems to be little more than a blatant effort by Brennan and his allies in the media to shape a narrative before Barr uncovers the truth.

That's very likely to be true, but I think there's more to it than just getting Brennan's version of events published before anyone elses. If you want to implant your narrative in the public's mind it certainly does help to get your story out first, but in this case there's an additional motive for leaking the spy story.

One effect of the leak was that Smolenko suddenly disappeared. His family apparently fled their house in a hurry, leaving belongings lying around according to media reports.

Normally the CIA would never 'out' a valued asset, even a used one, because that would discourage potential informers. And CNN and the NYT would not reveal details that would identify a Russian defector – as happened in this case when Russian Kommersant identified Smolenkov. American mainstream media would first check that it was OK to publish those details.

This looks far too unusual to be simply a result of incompetence by Americans. A much better explanation is that some powerful people were really desperate to make Smolenko disappear. And the reason is that he knew too much. And now he has gone into hiding, supposedly to escape vengeance from Putin. What is most significant is that he does not face as many questions about his role in Russiagate.

Abe , September 15, 2019 at 14:31

As far as spying is concerned, "a different set of calculations" prevails under Trump
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house-spying-devices-1491351

The Blue Fairy , September 16, 2019 at 00:57

A general search for Intel on google doesn't yield an abundance of articles that mention its move to Israel in 1974, but I discovered it when the Spectre/Meltdown (intentional Israeli processor security flaws, I mean "features") became known in 2018. "Nothing is ever impossible, in this life" except for a computer that's not infested with the US-Israeli partnership. We are also not surprised that Intel was not on Donald Trump's list of American companies to bring back to the US.

Mike from Jersey , September 15, 2019 at 14:23

Good article. This is the kind of analysis you will not find in the New York Times or the Washington Post. This is why I come to the Consortium News.

hetro , September 15, 2019 at 13:46

If I'm following properly, the white paper from Smolenkov is at the heart of the January 6, 2017, "assessments" that the case would be made–Trump as dupe of Putin.

Recall, too, that these "assessments" differed. Brennan's and Comey's were "high"; Clapper's was "moderate."

And, as Scott Ritter points out, they were "estimates" not based on hard proof; they were essentially "guesses."

Why the discrepancy? (Related: William Binney says this "moderate" from Clapper means the NSA knows Russia did not hack the DNC.)

I think this discrepancy question is important. How could a (supposedly) verifiable report via white paper from a verifiable double agent Smolenkov be anything but a slam dunk (unanimous) "high" for the major intelligence agencies?

The other question is Scott's WHY the Russian intelligence apparatus, with Putin complicit, would set out to embarrass the US intelligence agencies with a cooked up story–that made Putin look bad?

Of course, they could not know back at that time how the story would cook and proliferate across US mainstream media with all the glee of Russia-bashing run amok and its TDS.

This view would also suggest a belief that somewhere in the US justice system was the integrity to dig everything out and expose the fraud.

nwwoods , September 15, 2019 at 17:56

I believe that it was NSA which declared "moderate confidence", so no, not Clapper. Clapper, in my opinion, was in on the gambit, a witting confederate of ringleader Brennan.

hetro , September 16, 2019 at 11:30

Yes. Technically Clapper resigned as head of the NSA in 2016, and it was Mike Rogers, the new head in 2017 who declared the assessment "moderate." Clapper had been involved with Brennan and Comey in forming the January 6, 2017 assessment.

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/trump-is-right-to-doubt-the-obama-intelligence-communitys-claims/

The question still remains: why the discrepancy in this "assessment" at the very beginning of Trump's presidency, with its powerful impact.

JP McEvoy , September 15, 2019 at 12:33

One thing is for sure, if anything bad happens to the mole, it's won't be the Russians who did it. Watch your back Mr. Skrip – er – I mean Smolenkov.

Robert Emmett , September 15, 2019 at 11:25

Damn! Please allow me to toss the "curveball" too. What's that? The real one or the fake, you say? Ha ha. Yes, exactly! O, Vaunted sacred screed of PDB where the truth shall set you free to prime the pump with lies. (hint: to spare your soul don't look into their eyes)

I haven't exactly been able to figure out what's wrong with Brennan's face, 'til I just got it. He's been double-yoked! His own plus Barrack's (truer sp.). Egg that just won't wash off! So you have to wear it everywhere, every day. Talk about serviceable villains hiding in plain sight. Hey, Clapper! Don't get any on ya! Haha. Too late!

Carroll Price , September 15, 2019 at 10:43

Another example of checker champions competing with chess masters.

CortesKid , September 15, 2019 at 10:33

Brilliant and thorough. As I was reading Mr. Ritter's analysis, an overwhelming impression was building, analogous to the third scenario, that Smolenkov , indeed, was a lure perfectly placed to catch an intelligence agency or three. As I've watched and read many Russian official's communications, especially their diplomatic efforts, it has become obvious to me that, on average, they are some of the few "adults in the room." In broadstrokes, they are playing chess, while the whole of the West, with its increasingly senile elites, is at the Checkers table.

And in even broader strokes, I believe that at the heart of all of these shenanigans, is a foundational turning away from a matured-and-deflating West, to an energized and expanding Eurasia (Brezhinki's nightmare). As you know, changes on the scale of hegemon are never easy. "Dying empires don't lay down, they double-down."

And I don't necessarily think Smolenkov and family are safe–from, for instance, "Novichok" delivered via some American ally's secret service–as a pretense for further demonization of Russia.

Brendan , September 15, 2019 at 07:51

Sorry but the theory that's proposed above is a bit too convoluted to be believable – that Russia manipulated the CIA with the fake hacking story from Smolenkov and then the CIA chief Brennan used it to manipulate Obama who then unwittingly revealed to Putin that the USA was fooled by the story.

I'd rather follow Occam's razor and go for a simpler scenario. Brennan and the CIA persuaded Smolenkov to invent the story (that he had inside knowledge that Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC).

Not only that, but Obama suspected that the story was fake, since it was passed on to him outside the normal channels and was investigated in a similar unconventional way. It's hard to believe that Obama was easily hoodwinked and simply accepted the story as fact without any convincing evidence.

The Democratic Party's fingerprints are all over the Russiagate story. The DNC commissioned the Steele dossier and Steele met officials in the Obama administration's State Department before the 2016 election. We're expected to believe that this all went on behind President Obama's back.

We're also expected to believe that Obama innocently believed Smolenkov's report, as if the CIA and FBI would never tell a lie. He's not completely stupid – at the very least he must have had serious doubts about the allegations, or he could even have been in on the Russiagate fabrication himself.

Maricata , September 16, 2019 at 19:34

It is more and more difficult to ascertain reality from fantasy, certainty from assumptions. And this all plays into the hands of the ruling elites and their international and national pratorean guards.

Americans do not ask questions. They prefer to believe than to know and thus the {swirl} will yield nothing.

F. G. Sanford , September 15, 2019 at 07:05

Putin must surely have smirked. The little white envelope worked.
The debate made it plain he had pulled Brennan's chain,
And behind the scene subterfuge lurked!

Only four people went to the meeting. Connections might prove rather fleeting.
The "puppet" rebuke at the time seemed a fluke,
No one dared claim that Clinton was cheating!

Brennan's confidence level was high. He had sources and methods to spy.
He had top secret stuff that he claimed was enough,
But no evidence he'd specify!

Then Clinton claimed Russian subversion. In retrospect, not a diversion.
She must have been tipped by somebody loose lipped,
And she ran with the Putin incursion!

Strzok and Page were kept out of the loop. They didn't get insider poop.
They found no 'there' there, Comey's cupboard looked bare,
Brennan's spy had not yet flown the coop.

The durable lie picked up traction. Their spook would require extraction.
How could Clinton be sure that the blame would endure,
And the Steele Dossier would get action?

The 'Agent in Place' was a double. He didn't get in any trouble.
Hillary's pride had some hubris to hide,
In the end it would burst Brennan's bubble!

The big secret meeting was leaked. On the stage, "He's a puppet!" she shrieked.
Perhaps Susan Rice was inclined to be nice,
And her duty to Hillary peaked!

So now, they blame Trump for the outing. But it's over except for the shouting.
The 'insurance' is void, the illusion destroyed,
And poor Hillary just keeps on pouting!

David Otness , September 14, 2019 at 23:41

Scott -- so glad I got the head's-up on this via the CN Live show. I just now finished it and am putting it into perspective. Well-researched, and well-written -- it's truly a web so very reminiscent of what should have remained Cold War 1.0 finis.

And Episode Nine of CN Live is showing us where this internet platform can go with the assembled experience and talent exhibited. The tech glitches were too bad, but the audio was quite good enough.

Thanks for this travel guide to the heart of the labyrinth. Hopefully good things come of it. I do worry about Barr's too many allegiances to his CIA incubator though, especially with all of the ongoing coverups of the Epstein fiasco (engineered or not,) that complicate and obfuscate the twin scandals that both end up under Barr's purview.

Ya done good, nonetheless. Thank you.

Abe , September 14, 2019 at 22:07

"After the U.S. reports came out, an anonymous, well-informed Russian Telegram channel, The Ruthless PR Guy, reported that the asset was Kremlin official Oleg Smolenkov. On Tuesday (10 September 2019] morning, the Moscow daily Kommersant published a story confirming that it was him based on anonymous sources and some pretty convincing circumstantial evidence. [ ]

"If Smolenkov was a spy, he could have delivered important insights about Russia's foreign policy thinking and planning to U.S. intelligence. But if he was the source for the U.S. intelligence community's certainty that Putin personally orchestrated a covert interference campaign, that certainty rests on a weak foundation. Smolenkov served the wrong boss in the Kremlin to get reliable information about such ventures."

Was this man the prized US asset in the Kremlin? By Leonid Bershidsky http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0919/bershidsky091119.php3#Asy3R8hJ2mAQPm1y.99

Ojkelly , September 14, 2019 at 22:01

Mr Ritter, Very lightly done. " Curveball made me do it" is the defense.
Brennan, well,I am not knowledgeable , but tight with Barry, unprofessional to my view, has an issue. He made the most outrageous statements, Commander believing his own BS, NYT magazine. Imagine going around saying that Trump was a Russian agent . Did incomparable harm.And Morrell endorsing Hillary Clinton :beyond the pale , Professional members of the agency must've been? Shocked appalled, whatever.

Jeff Harrison , September 14, 2019 at 21:52

Whooof! Obviously the MSM won't touch any of this stuff. I also don't have a lot of confidence in the US government's ability to clean up the mess it has made. Amusingly, I've watched the US's ham handed operations around the world and wondered when somebody would return the complement. If Mr. Ritter is to be believed, it seems the Russians have started. As Mr. Lawrence pointed out on CN live, Americans need to dispense with the notion that we are exceptional. That's a weakness as it leads to complacency. How many more bricks of trust in our government will we have to see broken before the entire edifice collapses? I would also like to point out that we wouldn't be having these kind of problems if we weren't hell bent on being the global hegemon.

Clark M Shanahan , September 14, 2019 at 22:54

"If Mr. Ritter is to be believed"
Jeffrey, I've followed Mr Ritter.
You can believe what he is stating, he's a good man.

he follows soon, here w/G. Galloway:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NutNHIj2nU8

Clark M Shanahan , September 15, 2019 at 08:46

my bad: Ritter starts at 48 minutes, before Nixon & Maupin

Jeff Harrison , September 15, 2019 at 17:43

I'm hip, Clark. I said that simply because I have no other collaborating commentary. Ritter had my vote when he stood up to Shrub over Iraq's WMDs. But you do have to keep the realization that you could be wrong so if Mr. Ritter is to be believed. I think that the odds that Ritter is wrong are in the general vicinity of the odds that the US will start acting like a normal nation.

[Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

Highly recommended!
Sep 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

A retired Australian diplomat who served in Moscow dissects the emergence of the new Cold War and its dire consequences.

I n 2014, we saw violent U.S.-supported regime change and civil war in Ukraine. In February, after months of increasing tension from the anti-Russian protest movement's sitdown strike in Kiev's Maidan Square, there was a murderous clash between protesters and Ukrainian police, sparked off by hidden shooters (we now know that were expert Georgian snipers) , aiming at police. The elected government collapsed and President Yanukevich fled to Russia, pursued by murder squads.

The new Poroshenko government pledged harsh anti-Russian language laws. Rebels in two Russophone regions in Eastern Ukraine took local control, and appealed for Russian military help. In March, a referendum took place in Russian-speaking Crimea on leaving Ukraine, under Russian military protection. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, a request promptly granted by the Russian Parliament and President. Crimea's border with Ukraine was secured against saboteurs. Crimea is prospering under its pro-Russian government, with the economy kick-started by Russian transport infrastructure investment.

In April, Poroshenko ordered full military attack on the separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. A brutal civil war ensued, with aerial and artillery bombardment bringing massive civilian death and destruction to the separatist region. There was major refugee outflow into Russia and other parts of Ukraine. The shootdown of MH17 took place in July 2014.

Poroshenko: Ordered military attack.

By August 2015, according to UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates, 13,000 people had been killed and 30,000 wounded. 1.4 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced, and 925,000 had fled to neighbouring countries, mostly Russia and to a lesser extent Poland.

There is now a military stalemate, under the stalled Minsk peace process. But random fatal clashes continue, with the Ukrainian Army mostly blamed by UN observers. The UN reported last month that the ongoing war has affected 5.2 million people, leaving 3.5 million of them in need of relief, including 500,000 children. Most Russians blame the West for fomenting Ukrainian enmity towards Russia. This war brings back for older Russians horrible memories of the Nazi invasion in 1941. The Russia-Ukraine border is only 550 kilometres from Moscow.

Flashpoint Syria

Russian forces joined the civil war in Syria in September 2015, at the request of the Syrian Government, faltering under the attacks of Islamist extremist rebel forces reinforced by foreign fighters and advanced weapons. With Russian air and ground support, the tide of war turned. Palmyra and Aleppo were recaptured in 2016. An alleged Syrian Government chemical attack at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017 resulted in a token U.S. missile attack on a Syrian Government airbase: an early decision by President Trump.

NATO, Strategic Balance, Sanctions

An F-15C Eagle from the 493rd Fighter Squadron takes off from Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, March 6, 2014. The 48th Fighter Wing sent an additional six aircraft and more than 50 personnel to support NATO's air policing mission in Lithuania, at the request of U.S. allies in the Baltics. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Emerson Nunez/Released)

Tensions have risen in the Baltic as NATO moves ground forces and battlefield missiles up to the Baltic states' borders with Russia. Both sides' naval and air forces play dangerous brinksmanship games in the Baltic. U.S. short-range, non-nuclear-armed anti-ballistic missiles were stationed in Poland and Romania, allegedly against threat of Iranian attack. They are easily convertible to nuclear-armed missiles aimed at nearby Russia.

Nuclear arms control talks have stalled. The INF intermediate nuclear forces treaty expired in 2019, after both sides accused the other of cheating. In March 2018, Putin announced that Russia has developed new types of intercontinental nuclear missiles using technologies that render U.S. defence systems useless. The West has pretended to ignore this announcement, but we can be sure Western defence ministries have noted it. Nuclear second-strike deterrence has returned, though most people in the West have forgotten what this means. Russians know exactly what it means.

Western economic sanctions against Russia continue to tighten after the 2014 events in Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to block the nearly completed Nordstream Baltic Sea underwater gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Sanctions are accelerating the division of the world into two trade and payments systems: the old NATO-led world, and the rest of the world led by China, with full Russian support and increasing interest from India, Japan, ROK and ASEAN.

Return to Moscow

In 2013, my children gave me an Ipad. I began to spend several hours a day reading well beyond traditional mainstream Western sources: British and American dissident sites, writers like Craig Murray in UK and in the U.S. Stephen Cohen, and some Russian sites – rt.com, Sputnik, TASS, and the official Foreign Ministry site mid.ru. in English.

In late 2015 I decided to visit Russia independently to write Return to Moscow , a literary travel memoir. I planned to compare my impressions of the Soviet Union, where I had lived and worked as an Australian diplomat in 1969-71, with Russia today. I knew there had been huge changes. I wanted to experience 'Putin's Russia' for myself, to see how it felt to be there as an anonymous visitor in the quiet winter season. I wanted to break out of the familiar one-dimensional hostile political view of Russia that Western mainstream media offer: to take my readers with me on a cultural pilgrimage through the tragedy and grandeur and inspiration of Russian history. As with my earlier book on Spain 'Walking the Camino' , this was not intended to be a political book, and yet somehow it became one.

I was still uncommitted on contemporary Russian politics before going to Russia in January 2016. Using the metaphor of a seesaw, I was still sitting somewhere around the middle.

My book was written in late 2015 – early 2016, expertly edited by UWA Publishing. It was launched in March 2017. By this time my political opinions had moved decisively to the Russian end of the seesaw, on the basis of what I had seen in Russia, and what I had read and thought during the year.

I have been back again twice, in winter 2018 and 2019. My 2018 visit included Crimea, and I happened to see a Navalny-led Sunday demonstration in Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed all three independent visits: in my opinion, they give my judgements on Russia some depth and authenticity.

Russophobia Becomes Entrenched

Russia was a big talking point in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the initially unlikely Republican candidate Donald Trump's chances improved, anti-Putin and anti-Russian positions hardened in the outgoing Obama administration and in the Democratic Party establishment which backed candidate Hillary Clinton.

Russia and Putin became caught up in the Democratic Party's increasingly obsessive rage and hatred against the victorious Trump. Russophobia became entrenched in Washington and London U.S. and UK political and strategic elites, especially in intelligence circles: think of Pompeo, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. All sense of international protocol and diplomatic propriety towards Russia and its President was abandoned, as this appalling Economist cover from October 2016 shows.

My experience of undeclared political censorship in Australia since four months after publication of 'Return to Moscow' supports the thesis that:

We are now in the thick of a ruthless but mostly covert Anglo-American alliance information war against Russia. In this war, individuals who speak up publicly in the cause of detente with Russia will be discouraged from public discourse.

In the Thick of Information War

When I spoke to you two years ago, I had no idea how far-reaching and ruthless this information war is becoming. I knew that a false negative image of Russia was taking hold in the West, even as Russia was becoming a more admirable and self-confident civil society, moving forward towards greater democracy and higher living standards, while maintaining essential national security. I did not then know why, or how.

I had just had time to add a few final paragraphs in my book about the possible consequences for Russia-West relations of Trump's surprise election victory in November 2016. I was right to be cautious, because since Trump's inauguration we have seen the step-by-step elimination of any serious pro-detente voices in Washington, and the reassertion of control over this haphazard president by the bipartisan imperial U.S. deep state, as personified from April 2018 by Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Adviser Bolton. Bolton has now been thrown from the sleigh as decoy for the wolves: under the smooth-talking Pompeo, the imperial policies remain.

Truth, Trust and False Narratives

Let me now turn to some theory about political reality and perception, and how national communities are persuaded to accept false narratives. Let me acknowledge my debt to the fearless and brilliant Australian independent online journalist, Caitlin Johnstone.

Behavioural scientists have worked in the field of what used to be called propaganda since WW1. England has always excelled in this field. Modern wars are won or lost not just on the battlefield, but in people's minds. Propaganda, or as we now call it information warfare, is as much about influencing people's beliefs within your own national community as it is about trying to demoralise and subvert the enemy population.

The IT revolution of the past few years has exponentially magnified the effectiveness of information warfare. Already in the 1940s, George Orwell understood how easily governments are able to control and shape public perceptions of reality and to suppress dissent. His brilliant books 1984 and Animal Farm are still instruction manuals in principles of information warfare. Their plots tell of the creation by the state of false narratives, with which to control their gullible populations.

The disillusioned Orwell wrote from his experience of real politics. As a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War, he saw how both Spanish sides used false news and propaganda narratives to demonise the enemy. He also saw how the Nazi and Stalinist systems in Germany and Russia used propaganda to support show trials and purges, the concentration camps and the Gulag, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, German master race and Stalinist class enemy ideologies; and hows dissident thought was suppressed in these controlled societies. Orwell tried to warn his readers: all this could happen here too, in our familiar old England. But because the good guys won the war against fascism, his warnings were ignored.

We are now in Britain, U.S. and Australia actually living in an information warfare world that has disturbing echoes of the world that Orwell wrote about. The essence of information control is the effective state management of two elements, trust and fear , to generate and uphold a particular view of truth. Truth, trust and fear : these are the three key elements, now as 100 years ago in WWI Britain.

People who work or have worked close to government – in departments, politics, the armed forces, or top universities – mostly accept whatever they understand at the time to be 'the government view' of truth. Whether for reasons of organisational loyalty, career prudence or intellectual inertia, it is usually this way around governments. It is why moral issues like the Vietnam War and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq were so distressing for people of conscience working in or close to government and military jobs in Canberra. They were expected to engage in 'doublethink' as Orwell had described it:

Even in Winston's nightmare world, there were still choices – to retreat into the non-political world of the proles, or to think forbidden thoughts and read forbidden books. These choices involved large risks and punishments. It was easier and safer for most people to acquiesce in the fake news they were fed by state-controlled media.

'Trust, Truth and False Narratives'

Fairfax journalist Andrew Clark, in the Australian Financial Review , in an essay optimistically titled "Not fake news: Why truth and trust are still in good shape in Australia", (AFR Dec. 22, 2018), cited Professor William Davies thus:

"Most of the time, the edifice that we refer to as "truth" is really an investment of trust in our structures of politics and public life' 'When trust sinks below a certain point, many people come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham."

Here is my main point: Effective information warfare requires the creation of enough public trust to make the public believe that state-supported lies are true.

The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining.

Caitlin Johnstone a few days ago put it this way:

" Power is being able to control what happens. Absolute power is being able to control what people think about what happens. If you can control what happens, you can have power until the public gets sick of your BS and tosses you out on your ass. If you can control what people think about what happens, you can have power forever. As long as you can control how people are interpreting circumstances and events, there's no limit to the evils you can get away with."

The Internet has made propaganda campaigns that used to take weeks or months a matter of hours or even minutes to accomplish. It is about getting in quickly, using large enough clusters of trusted and diverse sources, in order to cement lies in place, to make the lies seem true, to magnify them through social messaging: in other words, to create credible false narratives that will quickly get into the public's bloodstream.

Over the past two years, I have seen this work many times: on issues like framing Russia for the MH17 tragedy; with false allegations of Assad mounting poison gas attacks in Syria; with false allegations of Russian agents using lethal Novichok to try to kill the Skripals in Salisbury; and with the multiple lies of Russiagate.

It is the mind-numbing effect of constant repetition of disinformation by many eminent people and agencies, in hitherto trusted channels like the BBC or ABC or liberal Anglophone print media that gives the system its power to persuade the credulous. For if so many diverse and reputable people repeatedly report such negative news and express such negative judgements about Russia or China or Iran or Syria, surely they must be right?

We have become used to reading in our quality newspapers and hearing on the BBC and ABC and SBS gross assaults on truth, calmly presented as accepted facts. There is no real public debate on important facts in contention any more. There are no venues for dissent outside contrarian social media sites.

Sometimes, false narratives inter-connect. Often a disinformation narrative in one area is used to influence perceptions in other areas. For example, the false Skripals poisoning story was launched by British intelligence in March 2018, just in time to frame Syrian President Assad as the guilty party in a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma the following month.

The Skripals Gambit

The Skripals gambit was also a failed British attempt to blight the Russia –hosted Football World Cup in June 2018. In the event, hundreds of thousands of Western sports fans returned home with the warmest memories of Russian good sportsmanship and hospitality.

How do I know the British Skripals narrative is false? For a start, it is illogical, incoherent, and constantly changes. Allegedly, two visiting Russian FSB agents in March 2018 sprayed or smeared Novichok, a deadly toxin instantly lethal in the most microscopic quantities, on the Skripals' house front doorknob. There is no video footage of the Skripals at their front door on the day. We are told they were found slumped on a park bench, and that is maybe where they had been sprayed with nerve gas? Shortly afterwards, Britain's Head of Army Nursing who happened to be passing by found them, and supervised their hospitalisation and emergency treatment.

Allegedly, much of Salisbury was contaminated by Novichok, and one unfortunate woman mysteriously died weeks later, yet the Skripals somehow did not die, as we are told. But where are they now? We saw a healthy Yulia in a carefully scripted video interview released in May 2018, after an alleged 'one in a million' recovery. We were assured her father had recovered too, but nobody has seen him at all. The Skripals have simply disappeared from sight since 16 months ago. Are they now alive or dead? Are they in voluntary or involuntary British custody?

A month after the poisoning, the UK Government sent biological samples from the Skripals to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , for testing. The OPCW sent the samples to a trusted OPCW laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland.

Lavrov Spiez BZ claims, April 2018

A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dramatically announced in Moscow that the Spiez lab had found in the samples a temporary-effect nerve agent BZ, used by U.S. and UK but not by Russia, that would have disabled the Skripals for a few days without killing them. He also revealed the Spiez lab had found that the Skripal samples had been twice tampered with while still in UK custody: first soon after the poisoning, and again shortly before passing them to the OPCW. He said the Spiez lab had found a high concentration of Novichok, which he called A- 234, in its original form. This was extremely suspicious as A-234 has high volatility and could not have retained its purity over a two weeks period. The dosage the Spiez lab found in the samples would have surely killed the Skripals. The OPCW under British pressure rejected Lavrov's claim, and suppressed the Spiez lab report.

Let's look finally at the alleged assassins.

'Boshirov and Petrov'

These two FSB operatives who visited Salisbury under the false identities of 'Boshirov' and 'Petrov' did not look or behave like credible assassins. It is more likely that they were sent to negotiate with Sergey Skripal about his rumoured interest in returning to Russia. They needed to apply for UK visas a month in advance of travel: ample time for the British agencies to identify them as FSB operatives, and to construct a false attempted assassination narrative around their visit. This false narrative repeatedly trips over its own lies and contradictions. British social media are full of alternative theories and rebuttals. Russians find the whole British Government Skripal narrative laughable. They have invented comedy skits and video games based on it. Yet it had major impact on Russia-West relations.

The Douma False Narrative

I turn now to the claimed Assad chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018.This falsely alleged attack triggered a major NATO air attack on Syrian targets, ordered by Trump. We came close to WWIII in these dangerous days. Thanks to the restraint of the then Secretary of Defence James Mattis and his Russian counterparts, the risk was contained.

The allegation that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used outlawed chemical weapons against his own people was based solely on the evidence of faked video images of child victims, made by the discredited White Helmets, a UK-sponsored rebel-linked 'humanitarian' propaganda organisation with much blood on its hands. Founded in 2013 by a British private security specialist of intelligence background, James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets specialised in making fake videos of alleged Assad regime war crimes against Syrian civilians. It is by now a thoroughly discredited organisation that was prepared to kill its prisoners and then film their bodies as alleged victims of government chemical attacks.

White Helmets

As the town of Douma was about to fall to advancing Syrian Government forces, the White Helmets filled a room with stacked corpses of murdered prisoners, and photographed them as alleged victims of aerial gas attack. They also made a video alleging child victims of this attack being hosed down by White Helmets. A video of a child named Hassan Diab went viral all over the Western world.

Hassan Diab later testified publicly in The Hague that he had been dragged terrified from his family by force, smeared with some sort of grease, and hosed down with water as part of a fake video. He went from hero to zero overnight, as Western governments and media rejected his testimony as Russian and Syrian propaganda.

In a late development, there is proof that the OPCW suppressed its own engineers' report from Douma that the alleged poison gas cylinders could not have possibly been dropped from the air through the roof of the house where one was found, resting on a bed under a convenient hole in the roof.

I could go on discussing the detail of such false narratives all day. No matter how often they are exposed by critics, our politicians and mainstream media go on referencing them as if they are true. Once people have come to believe false narratives, it is hard to refute them.

So it is with the false narrative that Russian internet interference enabled Trump to win the 2016 U.S. presidential elections: a thesis for which no evidence was found by [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller, yet continues to be cited by many U.S. liberal Democratic media as if it were true. So, even, with MH17.

Managing Mass Opinion

This mounting climate of Western Russophobia is not accidental: it is strategically directed, and it is nourished with regular maintenance doses of fresh lies. Each round of lies provides a credible platform for the next round somewhere else. The common thread is a claimed malign Russian origin for whatever goes wrong.

So where is all this disinformation originating? Information technology firms in Washington and London that are closely networked into government elites, often through attending the same establishment schools or colleges like Eton and Yale, have closely studied and tested the science of influencing crowd opinions through mainstream media and online. They know, in a way that Orwell or Goebbels could hardly have dreamt, how to put out and repeat desired media messages. They know what sizes of 'internet attraction nodes' need to be established online, in order to create diverse critical masses of credible Russophobic messaging, which then attracts enough credulous and loyal followers to become self-propagating.

Firms like the SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) and the now defunct Cambridge Analytica pioneered such work in the UK. There are many similar firms in Washington, all in the business of monitoring, generating and managing mass opinion. It is big business, and it works closely with the national security state.

Starting in November 2018, an enterprising group of unknown hackers in the UK , who go by the name 'Anonymous', opened a remarkable window into this secret world. Over a few weeks, they hacked and dumped online a huge volume of original documents issued by and detailing the activities of the Institute for Statecraft (IfS) and the Integrity initiative (II). Here is the first page of one of their dumps, exposing propaganda against Jeremy Corbyn.

We know from this material that the IfS and II are two secret British disinformation networks operating at arms' length from but funded by the UK security services and broader UK government establishment. They bring together high-ranking military and intelligence personnel, often nominally retired, journalists and academics, to produce and disseminate propaganda that serves the agendas of the UK and its allies.

Stung by these massive leaks, Chris Donnelly, a key figure in IfS and II and a former British Army intelligence officer, made a now famous seven-minute YouTube video in December 2018, artfully filmed in a London kitchen, defending their work.

He argued – quite unconvincingly in my opinion – that IfS and II are simply defending Western societies against disinformation and malign influence, primarily from Russia. He boasted how they have set up in numerous targeted European countries, claimed to be under attack from Russian disinformation, what he called 'clusters of influence' , to 'educate' public opinion and decision-makers in pro-NATO and anti-Russian directions.

Donnelly spoke frankly on how the West is already at war with Russia, a 'new kind of warfare', in which he said 'everything becomes a weapon'. He said that 'disinformation is the issue which unites all the other weapons in this conflict and gives them a third dimension'.

He said the West has to fight back, if it is to defend itself and to prevail.

We can confirm from the Anonymous leaked files the names of many people in Europe being recruited into these clusters of influence. They tend to be significant people in journalism, publishing, universities and foreign policy think-tanks: opinion-shapers. The leaked documents suggest how ideologically suitable candidates are identified: approached for initial screening interviews; and, if invited to join a cluster of influence, sworn to secrecy.

Remarkably, neither the Anonymous disclosures nor the Donnelly response have ever been reported in Australian media. Even in Britain – where evidence that the Integrity Initiative was mounting a campaign against [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn provoked brief media interest. The story quickly disappeared from mainstream media and the BBC. A British under-foreign secretary admitted in Parliamentary Estimates that the UK Foreign Office subsidises the Institute of Statecraft to the tune of nearly 3 million pounds per year. It also gives various other kinds of non-monetary assistance, e.g. providing personnel and office support in Britain's overseas embassies.

This is not about traditional spying or seeking agents of influence close to governments. It is about generating mass disinformation, in order to create mass climates of belief.

In my opinion, such British and American disinformation efforts, using undeclared clusters of influence, through Five Eyes intelligence-sharing, and possibly with the help of British and American diplomatic missions, may have been in operation in Australia for many years.

Such networks may have been used against me since around mid-2017, to limit the commercial outreach of my book and the impact of its dangerous ideas on the need for East-West detente; and efficiently to suppress my voice in Australian public discourse about Russia and the West. Do I have evidence for this? Yes.

It is not coincidence that the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2017 somehow lost all my sign-and-sell books from my sold-out scheduled speaking event; that a major debate with [Australian writer and foreign policy analyst] Bobo Lo at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne was cancelled by his Australian sponsor, the Lowy institute, two weeks before the advertised date; that my last invitation to any writers festival was 15 months ago, in May 2018; that Return to Moscow was not shortlisted for any Australian book prize, though I entered it in all of them ; that since my book's early promotion ended around August 2017, I have not been invited to join any ABC discussion panels, or to give any talks on Russia in any universities or institutes, apart from the admirable Australian Institute of International Affairs and the ISAA.

My articles and shorter opinion commentaries on Russia and the West have not been published in mainstream media or in reputable online journals like Eureka Street, The Conversation, Inside Story or Australian Book Review . Despite being an ANU Emeritus Fellow, I have not been invited to give a public talk or join any panel in ANU (Australian National University) or any Canberra think tank. In early 2018, I was invited to give a private briefing to a group of senior students travelling on an immersion course to Russia. I was not invited back in 2019, after high-level private advice within ANU that I was regarded as too pro-Putin.

In all these ways – none overt or acknowledged – my voice as an open-minded writer and speaker on Russia-West relations seems to have been quietly but effectively suppressed in Australia. I would like to be proved wrong on this, but the evidence is there.

This may be about "velvet-glove deterrence" of my Russia-sympathetic voice and pen, in order to discourage others, especially those working in or close to government. Nobody is going to put me in jail, unless I am stupid enough to violate Australia's now strict foreign influence laws. This deterrence is about generating fear of consequences for people still in their careers, paying their mortgages, putting kids through school. Nobody wants to miss their next promotion.

There are other indications that Australian national security elite opinion has been indoctrinated prudently to fear and avoid any kind of public discussion of positive engagement with Russia (or indeed, with China).

There are only two kinds of news about Russia now permitted in our mainstream media, including the ABC and SBS: negative news and comment, or silence. Unless a story can be given an anti-Russian sting, it will not be carried at all. Important stories are simply spiked, like last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivistok, chaired by President Putin and attended by Prime Ministers Abe, Mahathir and Modi, among 8500 participants from 65 countries.

The ABC idea of a balanced panel to discuss any Russian political topic was exemplified in an ABC Sunday Extra Roundtable panel chaired by Eleanor Hall on July, 22 2018, soon after the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki. The panel – a former ONA Russia analyst, a professor of Soviet and Russian History at Melbourne University, and a Russian émigré dissident journalist introduced as the 'Washington correspondent for Echo of Moscow radio' spent most of their time sneering at Putin and Trump. There were no other views.

A powerful anti-Russian news narrative is now firmly in place in Australia, on every topic in contention: Ukraine, MH17, Crimea, Syria, the Skripals, Navalny and public protest in Russia. There is ill-informed criticism of Russia, or silence, on the crucial issues of arms control and Russia-China strategic and economic relations as they affect Australia's national security or economy. There is no analysis of the negative impact on Australia of economic sanctions against Russia. There is almost no discussion of how improved relations with China and Russia might contribute to Australia's national security and economic welfare, as American influence in the world and our region declines, and as American reliability as an ally comes more into question. Silence on inconvenient truths is an important part of the disinformation tool kit.

I see two overall conflicting narratives – the prevailing Anglo-American false narrative; and valiant efforts by small groups of dissenters, drawing on sources outside the Anglo-American official narrative, to present another narrative much closer to truth. And this is how most Russians now see it too.

The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018 was damaged by the Skripal and Syria fabrications. Trump left that summit friendless, frightened and humiliated. He soon surrendered to the power of the U.S. imperial state as then represented by [Mike] Pompeo and [John] Bolton, who had both been appointed as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in April 2018 and who really got into their stride after the Helsinki Summit. Pompeo now smoothly dominates Trump's foreign policy.

Self-Inflicted Wounds

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (Gage Skidmore)

Finally, let me review the American political casualties over the past two years – self-inflicted wounds – arising from this secret information war against Russia. Let me list them without prejudging guilt or innocence. Slide 20 – Self-inflicted wounds: casualties of anti-Russian information warfare.

Trump's first National Security Adviser, the highly decorated Michael Flynn lost his job after only three weeks, and soon went to jail. His successor H R McMaster lasted 13 months until replaced by John Bolton. Trump's first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson lasted just 14 months until his replacement by Trump's appointed CIA chief (in January 2017) Mike Pompeo. Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon lasted only seven months. Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is now in jail.

Defence Secretary James Mattis lasted nearly two years as Secretary of Defence, and was an invaluable source of strategic stability. He resigned in December 2018. The highly capable Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman lasted just two years: he is resigning next month. John Kelly lasted 18 months as White House Chief of Staff. Less senior figures like George Papadopoulos and Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen both served jail time. The pattern I see here is that people who may have been trying responsibly as senior U.S. officials to advance Trump's initial wish to explore possibilities for detente with Russia – policies that he had advocated as a candidate – were progressively purged, one after another . The anti-Russian U.S. bipartisan imperial state is now firmly back in control. Trump is safely contained as far as Russia is concerned .

Russians do not believe that any serious detente or arms control negotiations can get under way while cold warriors like Pompeo continue effectively to control Trump. There have been other casualties over the past two years of tightening American Russophobia. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning come to mind. The naive Maria Butina is a pathetic victim of American judicial rigidity and deep state vindictiveness.

False anti-Russian Government narratives emanating from London and Washington may be laughed at in Moscow , but they are unquestioningly accepted in Canberra. We are the most gullible of audiences. There is no critical review. Important contrary factual information and analysis from and about Russia just does not reach Australian news reporting and commentary, nor – I fear – Australian intelligence assessment. We are prisoners of the false narratives fed to us by our senior Five Eyes partners U.S. and UK.

To conclude: Some people may find what I am saying today difficult to accept. I understand this. I now work off open-source information about Russia with which many people here are unfamiliar, because they prefer not to read the diverse online information sources that I choose to read. The seesaw has tilted for me: I have clearly moved a long way from mainstream Western perceptions on Russia-West relations.

Under Trump and Pompeo, as the Syria and Iran crises show, the present risk of global nuclear war by accident or incompetent Western decision-making is as high as it ever was in the Cold War. The West needs to learn again how to dialogue usefully and in mutually respectful ways with Russia and China. This expert knowledge is dying with our older and wiser former public servants and ex-military chiefs.

These remarks were delivered by Tony Kevin at the Independent Scholars Association of Australia in Canberra, Australia on Wednesday.

Watch Tony Kevin interviewed Friday night on CN Live!

Tony Kevin is a retired Australian diplomat who was posted to Moscow from 1969 to 1971, and was later Australia's ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. His latest book is Return to Moscow, published by UWA Publishing.

Bruce , September 17, 2019 at 08:58

Excellent article. It's very interesting to see how the state and its media lackey set the narrative.

Most of this comment relates to the Skripals but also applies to other matters (the Skripals writing was some of Craig Murray's finest work in my opinion). One of the hallmarks of a hoax is a constantly evolving storyline. I think governments have learned from past "mistakes" with their hoaxes/deception where they've given a description of events and then scientists/engineers/chemists etc have come in and criticised their version of events with details and scientific arguments. Nowadays, governments are very reluctant to commit to a version of events, and instead rely on the media (their propaganda assets) to provide a scattergun set of information to muddy the waters and thoroughly confuse the population. The government is then insulated from some of the more bizarre allegations (the headlines of which are absorbed nonetheless), and can blame it on the media (who would use an anonymous government source naturally). Together with classifying just about everything on national security grounds, they can stonewall for as long as they want.

The British are masters of propaganda. They maintained a global empire for a very long time, and the prevailing view (in the west at least) was probably one of tea-drinking cricket playing colonials/gentlemen. But you don't maintain an empire without being absolutely ruthless and brutal. They've been doing this for a very long time.

When we hear something from the BBC or ABC, we should think "State Media".
That's probably why its got a nice folksy nickname of "aunty" .build up the trust.

Leslie Louis , September 17, 2019 at 04:00

Society is suffering the extreme paradox; there is the potential for everyone to have a voice, but the last vestiges of free speech have been whittled away. Fake news is universal, assisted by the fake "left". It is impossible to get published any challenge to even the most outlandish versions of identity politics. As the experience of Tony Kevin exemplifies, all avenues for dissent against hegemonic orthodoxies are closed off.
Disinformation is now an essential weapon in waging hot and cold wars. Cold War historians are well informed on false flags, "black ops", and other organised dirty tactics. I do not know what happened to the Skripals, and while it is legitimate to bear in mind KGB assassinations, despite the enormous resources at its disposal, the English security state has been unable to construct a credible case. Surely scepticism is provoked by the leading role being played by the notorious Bellingcat outfit.

Zenobia van Dongen , September 17, 2019 at 00:29

Here is part of an eyewitness account:
"After the Orange Revolution which began in Kiev, the country was divided literally into two parts -- the supporters of integration with Russia and the supporters of an independent Ukraine. For almost 100 years belonging to the Soviet Union, the propaganda about the assistance and care from our "big brother" Russia, in Ukraine as a whole and the Donbass in particular has borne fruit. At the end of February 2014, some cities of the Southeast part were boiling with mass social and political protest against the new Ukrainian government in defense of the status of the Russian language, voicing separatist and pro-Russian slogans. The division took place in our city of Sloviansk too. Some people stood for separation from Ukraine, while Ukrainian patriots stood for the unity of our country.
On April 12, 2014 our city of Sloviansk in the Donetsk region was seized by Russian mercenaries and local volunteers. From that moment onward, armed assaults on state institutions began. The city police department, the Sloviansk City Hall, the building of the Ukraine Security Service was occupied. Armed militants seized state institutions and confiscated private property. They threatened and beat people, and those who refused to obey were taken away to an unknown destination and people started disappearing. The persecution and abduction of patriotic citizens began."

Michael McNulty , September 16, 2019 at 11:36

Watching Vietnam news coverage as a kid in the '60s I noticed the planes carpet-bombing South East Asia were American, not Russian. And as I only watched the footage and never listened to the commentary (I was waiting for the kids programs that followed) the BS they came out with to explain it all never reached me. I saw with my own eyes what the US really was and is, and always believed growing up they were the belligerent side not Russia. Once the USSR fell it was clear there were no longer any constraints on US excesses.

dean 1000 , September 15, 2019 at 18:17

Doublethink, not to mention doublespeak, is so apt to describe what is happening. If Orwell was writing today it would have to be classified as non-fiction.

Free speech is impossible unless every election district has a radio/TV station where candidates, constituents, and others can debate, discuss and speak to the issues without bending a knee to large campaign contributors or the controllers of corporate or government media. It may start with low-power pirate radio/TV broadcasts. No, the pirate speakers will not have to climb a cell tower to broadcast an opinion to the neighborhood or precinct.
If genuine free speech is going to exist it will start as something unauthorized and unlawful. If it sticks to the facts it will quickly prove its value.

Download a free pdf copy of '1984.' https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/1984.pdf

Njegos , September 15, 2019 at 03:39

Excellent article. The only exhibit missing was reference to Bill Browder's lies. Browder's rubbish has been exposed by intrepid journalists and documentary makers such as Andrei Nekrasov, Sasha Krainer and Lucy Komisar but to read or listen to our media, you'd think BB was some sort of human rights hero. That's because BB's fairy tale fits nicely into the MSM's hatred of Putin and Russia. Debunk Browder and a major pillar of anti-Russia prejudice collapses. Therefore, Browder will never face any serious questions by the MSM.

John A , September 16, 2019 at 09:18

judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the mainstream media at all.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-magnitskiy-myth-exploded/

MSM propaganda by omission. Anything that doesn't fit the government narrative gets zero publicity.

Jim Ingram , September 14, 2019 at 21:12

Well said and needing to be said Tony.

Mr. Dan , September 14, 2019 at 19:41

I have stopped following australian mainstream media including the darlings of the 'left' ABC/SBS over a decade ago, completely. My disgust with their 'coverage' of the 2008 GFC was more than enough. Since 2008-9 things have deteriorated drastically into conspiracy theory propaganda by omission la-la land *it seems*, given I don't tune in at all.

The author has a well supported view. I find it a little naive in him thinking that the MSM has that much power over shaping public opinion in australia.

People who want to be informed do so. The half intelligent conformists on hamster wheel of lifetime mortgage debt have 'careers' to hold onto, so parroting the group think or living in ignorance is much easier. The massive portion of australian racists, inbred bogans and idiots that make up the large LNP, One Nation etc. voting block are completely beyond salvation or ability to process, and critically evaluate any information. The smarter ones drool on about the 'UN Agenda 21' conspiracy at best. Utterly hopeless.

I don't expect things to change as the australian economy is slowly hollowed out by the rich, and the education system (that has always been about conforming, wearing school uniform and regurgitating what the teacher/lecturer says at best) is gutted completely. Welcome to australistan.

Fran Macadam , September 14, 2019 at 19:21

Note that the prohibition against false propaganda to indoctrinate the domestic population by the American government was lifted by President Obama at the tail end of his administration. The Executive Order legalizes all the deceptive behavior Tony itemizes in his article.

Josep , September 17, 2019 at 04:10

I thought it was Reagan who did that by abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. At least in terms of television and radio (?) broadcasts.

Stephen Morrell , September 14, 2019 at 19:02

Thank you Tony for your thoughtful talk (and interview on CN Live! too).

What's encouraging is this cohort of what might be called 'millennial journalists' coming through willing to do 'shoe-leather' journalism and stand up to smears and flack for revealing uncomfortable facts and truth. They're the online 5th estate holding the 4th to account (to steal Ray McGovern's apt view), and they're congealing against the onslaught.

Some include Max Blumenthal and Rania Kahlek (both now being pilloried by MSM and others for visiting Syrian government held areas and reporting that life isn't hellish as MSM would have everyone believe heaven forbid); Vanessa Bealey who's exposed a lot of White Helmet horrors and false-flag attacks in Syria (and being attacked by all and sundry for exposing the White Helmets in particular); Abby Martin whose Empire Files are excellent and always edifying; Dan Cohen who has written the best expose of the actors behind the Hong Kong rioting and co-authored the best expose of the background of Guaido et al.; Whitney Webb of Mint Press whose series on Epstein is overwhelming and likely a ticking timebomb; Caitlin Johnstone of course; and Aaron 'Buzzsaw' Mate who made his first mark with a wonderful takedown interview of Russiaphobe MI6 shill Luke Harding. Others too of course, with most appearing or having written pieces on CN. John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Greg Palast, et al. won't drop off their twigs disappointed.

This, along with the fact that MSM -- that cowed and compromised fourth estate -- increasingly is held in such laughable contempt by most people under about 50 yr, is highly encouraging indeed. Truth is the new black.

nwwoods , September 15, 2019 at 11:49

The Blogmire is an excellent resource for detailed analysis of the Skripal hoax. The author happens to be a long-time resident of Salisbury, and is intimately familiar with the topography, public services, etc., and a very thorough investigator.

John Wright , September 14, 2019 at 18:35

I'm not surprised that Mr. Kevin is being isolated and shunned by the Australian establishment. Truth and truth tellers are always the first casualties of war. I do hope that his experience will encourage him to increase his resistance to the corrosiveness of mendacious propaganda and those who promulgate it.

Truth is the single best weapon when fighting for a peaceful future.

If Australia is to flourish in the 21st century, it really needs to understand Russia and China, how they relate to each other, and how this key alliance will interface with the rest of the world. Australia and Australians simply cannot afford to get sucked down further by facilitating the machinations of the collapsing Anglo-American Empire. They have served the empire ably and faithfully, but now need to take a cold hard look at reality and realign their long-term interests with the coming global power shift. If not, they could literally find themselves in the middle of an unwinnable and devastating war.

* * *

The first Anglo-American Russian cold war began with the Russian revolution and was only briefly suspended when the West needed the Soviet people to throw themselves in front of the Nazi blitzkrieg in order to save Western Europe. Following their catastrophically costly contribution to the victory on the Continent, the Russians were greeted with an American nuclear salute on their eastern periphery, signalling their return to the diplomatic and economic deep freeze.

While the Anglo-American Empire solidified and extended its hold on the globe, the enlarged but war-ravaged and isolated Soviet Union hunkered down and survived on scraps and sheer will until its collapse in 1989. Declaring the cold war over, and with promises to help their new Russian friends build a prosperous future, the duplicitous West then ransacked their neighbors resources and sold them into debt peonage. The Russians cried foul, the West shrugged and Putin pushed back. Unable to declaw the bear, the west closed the cage door again and the second cold war commenced.

* * *

The first cold war was essentially an offensive war disguised as a defensive war. It enabled the Anglo-American Empire to leverage its post-war advantage and establish near total dominance around the globe through naked violence and monetary hegemony.

Today, with its dominance rapidly slipping away, the Anglo-American Empire is waging a truly defensive cold war. On the home front, they fight to convince their subjects of their eternal exceptionalism with ever more absurd and vile propaganda denigrating their adversaries . Abroad, they disrupt and defraud in a desperate attempt to delay the demise of the PetroDollar ponzi.

The Russians and the Chinese, having both been brutally burned by the Western elites, will not be fooled into abandoning their natural geographic partnership. They are no longer content to sit quietly at the kids' table taking notes. While they may not demand to sit at the head of the table, it is clear that they will insist on a round table, and one that is large enough to include their growing list of friends.

If the Americans don't smash the table, it could be the first of many peaceful pot lucks.

John Read , September 15, 2019 at 02:11

Well said. Great comments. Thanks to Tony Kevin.

Mia , September 14, 2019 at 18:33

Thank you Tony for continuing to shine light on the pathetic propaganda information bubble Australians have been immersed in .. you demonstrate great courage and you are not alone ??

Peter Loeb , September 14, 2019 at 12:58

WITH THANKS TO TONY KEVIN

An excellent article.

There is a lack of comments from some of the common writers upon whose views I often rely.

Personally, I often avoid the very individual responses from websites as I have no way
of checking out previous ideas of theirs. Who funds them? With which organizations are they
affiliated? And so forth and so on.

Peter Loeb, Boston, Massachusetts

Peter Sapo , September 14, 2019 at 10:24

As a fellow Australian, everything Tony Kevin said makes perfect sense. Our mainstream media landscape is designed to distribute propaganda to folk accross the political spectrum. Have you noticed that the ABC regurgitates stories from the BBC? The BBC has a long history (at least since WW2) of supporting government propaganda initiatives. Based on this fact, it is hard to see how ABC and SBS don't do the same when called upon by their minders.

Francis Lee , September 14, 2019 at 09:48

I just wonder where the Anglo-Zionist empire thinks it is going. It should be obvious that any NATO war against Russia involving a nuclear exchange is unwinnable. It seems equally likely the even a conventional war will not necessarily bring the result expected by the assorted 'experts' – nincompoops living in their own fantasy world. The idea that the US can fight a war without the US homeland becoming very much involved basically ended when Putin announced the creation of Russia's set of advanced hypersonic missile system. But this was apparently ignored by the 'defence' establishment. It was not true, it could not possibly be true, or so we were told.

Moreover the cost of such wars involving hundreds of thousands of troops and military hardware are massively expensive and would occasion a massive resistance from the populations affected. It was the wests wars in Korea, and Indo-China that bankrupted the US and led to the US$ being removed from the gold standard. The American military is rapidly consuming the American economy, or at least what is left of it. From a realist foreign policy perspective this is simply madness. Great powers end wars, they don't start them. Great powers are creditor nations, not debtor nations. Such is the realist foreign policy view. But foreign policy realists are few and far between in the Washington Beltway and MIC/NSA Pentagon and US/UK/AUSTRALIAN MSM.

Thus the neo-hubris of the English speaking world is such that if it is followed to its logical conclusion then total annihilation would be the logical outcome. A sad example of not very bright people who face no domestic opposition, believing in their own bullshit:

"American elites proved themselves to be master manipulators of propaganda constructs But the real danger from such manipulations arises not when those manipulations are done out of knowledge of reality, which is distorted for propaganda purposes, but when those who manipulation begin to sincerely believe in their own falsifications and when they buy into their own narrative. They stop being manipulators and they become believers in a narrative. They become manipulated themselves." (Losing Military Supremacy – Andrei, Martyanov)

Or maybe just the whole thing is a bluff. Those policy elites maybe just want to loot the US Treasury for more cash to be put their way.

John Wright , September 15, 2019 at 19:15

The self-serving Israeli Zionists know that the American cow is running dry and their days of freely milking it are coming to an end. They have an historic relationship with Russia and, leveraging their nuclear arsenal, know they can make a deal with the emerging China-Russia-centric global paradigm to extort enough protection to maintain their armed enclave for the foreseeable future. Their no so hidden alliance with the equally sociopathic Saudis will become even more obvious for all to see.

Israel, like China and Russia, knows how to play a long game. Thus, Israel will consolidate its land grab with the just announced expansion into the Jordan Valley and quietly continue as much ethnic cleansing as possible while the rest of the world is preoccupied with the incipient global power shift (True victims of history, the Palestinians have no real friends). While they will bemoan the loss of their muscular American stooge, Israel enjoyed a very lucrative 70 year run and will part with a pile of useful and deadly toys. They're also fully aware that no one else will ever let them take advantage to the degree they've been able to with the U.S.A. (Unlimited Stupidity of Arrogance?)

Eventually, the social schizophrenia that is the state of Israel will catch up with them and they will implode. Let's hope that breakdown doesn't involve the use of their nuclear arsenal.

Yes, the U.S. Treasury will continue to be looted until the last teller turns the lights out or the electricity is shut off, whichever comes first.

The Western transnational financial elites will accept their losses, regroup and make deals with the new bosses where they can; but their days of running the game unopposed are over.

Today is a good day to learn Mandarin (or Russian, if you prefer to live in Europe).

Bill , September 16, 2019 at 03:36

Very well said and I agree with a lot of what you say.

Tiu , September 14, 2019 at 06:01

Won't be too long before writing articles like this will get you busted for "hate-speech" (e.g. anything that is contrary to the official version prescribed by the "democratically elected" government)
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uk-tony-blair-think-tank-proposes-end-free-speech
Personally I always encourage people to read George Orwell, especially 1984. We're there, and have been for a long time.

geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 01:15

Tony Kevin – Nice rundown of what ails society. You have a fine writing style that gets the point across to the reader. Kudos and cheers.

Michael , September 13, 2019 at 22:34

The 'modernization' of the Smith Mundt Act in 2013 "to authorize the domestic dissemination of information and material [PROPAGANDA] about the United States intended primarily for foreign audiences" was a major nail in the Democracy coffin, consolidating the blatant ruling of the US Police State by our 17 Intelligence Agencies (our betters). The Telecommunications Act of 1996 lead to ownership of (>80%) of our media (the MSM by a handful of owners, all disseminating the same narratives from above (CIA, State Department, FBI etc) and squelching any dissenting views, particularly related to foreign policies.
Tony's article sadly just confirms the depth and breadth of our Global Stasi, with improved, innovative and (mostly) subtle surveillance, and the controlling constant interference with alternate viewpoints and discussions, the real basis for free societies. It is bad enough to be ruled by neoliberal psychopathic hyenas and jackals, soon we won't be able to even bitch about what they are doing.

Tom Kath , September 13, 2019 at 21:42

The most impressive article I have read in a very long time. I congratulate and thank Tony.
I have myself recently addressed the issue of whether it is a virtue to have an "open mind". – The ability to be converted or have your mind changed, or is it the ability to change your own mind ?
Tony Kevin clearly illustrates the difference.

Litchfield , September 13, 2019 at 16:11

Great article.
Please keep writing.
Do start a website, a la Craig Murray.
There are people who are proactively looking for alternative viewpoints and informed analysis.
How about starting a website and publishing some excerpts of your book there?

Or, sell chapters separately by download from your website?
You could also have a discussion blog/forum there.

John Zimmermann , September 13, 2019 at 16:02

Excellent essay. Thanks Mr. Kevin.

rosemerry , September 13, 2019 at 15:37

At least Tony Kevin was an Australian ambassador, not like Mike Morrell and the chosen russop?obes the USA assumes are needed as diplomats!! Now he is treated as Stephen Cohen is- a true expert called "controversial" as he dares to go by real facts and evidence, not prejudice.

If instead of enemies, the West could consider getting to understand those they are wary of, and give them a chance to explain their point of view and actually listen and reflect on it.
(Dmitri Peskov valiantly explained the Russian official response as soon as the "Skripal poisoning" story broke, but it was fully ignored by UK/US media, while all of Theresa May's fanciful imaginings were respectfully relayed to the public).

geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 23:26

As you usually are with your comments, you are spot on again, rosemerry.

Martin - Swedish citizen , September 13, 2019 at 14:46

Excellent article!
I find the mechanics of how the propaganda is spread and the illusion upheld the most important part of this article, since this knowledge is required to counter it.
When (not if) the fraud becomes more common knowledge, our societies are likely to tumble.

Pablo Diablo , September 13, 2019 at 14:45

Whoever controls the media, controls the dialogue.
Whoever controls the dialogue, controls the agenda.

peter mcloughlin , September 13, 2019 at 13:40

' The present risk of global nuclear war is as high as it ever was in the Cold War.' And possibly higher. The Cold War, though dangerous, was the peace. The world has experienced periods of peace (or relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the two Peloponnesian Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna, to name a few. The Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One. That conflict was followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was followed by the United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are they will not prevent a third world war. The powers that are leading us towards conflagration see this as a re-run of the first Cold War. They are dangerously mistaken.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/

Guy , September 13, 2019 at 13:21

With so many believing the lies ,how will this mess ever come to light . I don't reside in Australia but anywhere in the Western world the shakedown is the same .In my own house ,the discussion on world politics descends into absolute stupidity . As one can't get past the constant programming that has settled in the minds of the comfortable with the status quo of lies by our media. There are intelligent sources of news sources but none get past the absolutely complete control of MSM.So the bottom line is ,for now ,the lies and liars are winning the propaganda war.

Anton Antonovich , September 13, 2019 at 13:16

He speaks the truth. Liars and dissemblers have won over the minds and hearts of so many lazy shameful citizens who will not accept the truth Tony Kevin wants to share with the world.

junaid , September 13, 2019 at 13:08

Washington resumes military assistance to Kyiv. According to American lawmakers, Ukraine is fighting one of the main enemies. "Contain Russia": what the US pays for Ukraine

"Contain Russia": what the US pays for Ukraine

Lily , September 13, 2019 at 23:42

The Pentagon is using the Ukrainian territory for experiments on chemical weapons.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3T9ktfz_FfA

John A , September 14, 2019 at 06:55

Anyone or article who spells Kiev as Kyiv can be safely ignored as western anti-Russia propaganda. It's a true tell.

Robert Edwards , September 13, 2019 at 12:53

The Cold war is totally manufacture to keep the dollars flowing into the MIC – what a sham . and a disgrace to humanity.

Cavaleiro Marginal , September 13, 2019 at 12:52

"The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining."

This had occurred in Brazil since the very first day of Lula's presidency. Eleven years late, 2013, a color revolution began. Nobody (and I mean REALLY nobody) could realize a color revolution was happening at that time. In 2016, Dilma Rousseff was kicked from power throughout a ridiculous and illegal coup perpetrated by the parliament. In 2018 Lula was imprisoned in an Orwellian process; illegal, unconstitutional, with nothing (REALLY nothing) proved against him. Then a liar clown was elected to suppress democracy

I knew on the news that in Canada and Australia the police politely (how civilized ) went to some journalist's homes to have a chat this year. Canadians and Aussies, be aware. The fascism's dog is a policial state very well informed by the propaganda they call news.

Robert Fearn , September 13, 2019 at 12:48

As a Canadian author who wrote a book about various tragic American government actions, like Vietnam, I can relate to the difficulties Tony has had with his book. I would mail my book, Amoral America, from Canada to other countries, like the US, and it would never arrive. Book stores would not handle it, etc. etc.

Josep , September 17, 2019 at 05:21

Not to disagree, but some years ago I read about anecdotes of anti-Americanism in Canada, coming from both USians and Canadians, whether it be playful banter or legitimate criticism. I believe it is more concentrated among the people than among the governmental elites (with the exception of the Iraq War era when both the people and the government were against it). And considering what you describe in your book and the difficulty you've faced in distributing it abroad, maybe the said people are on to something.

Stephen , September 13, 2019 at 11:44

This interview by Abby Martin with Mark Ames is a little dated but is a fairly accurate history. I post it to try and counter the nonsense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7HwvFyMg7A

All the empire wants is to do it all again.

Jeremy Kuzmarov , September 13, 2019 at 10:33

Outstanding article and analysis. Thank you Sir! Jeremy Kuzmarov

Jeff Harrison , September 13, 2019 at 10:17

Thank you, sir. A far better peroration than I could have produced but what I have concluded nonetheless.

Skip Scott , September 13, 2019 at 10:10

Fantastic article. Left unmentioned is the origin of the west's anti-Russia narrative. Russia was being pillaged by the west under Yeltsin, and Russia was to become our newest vassal. Life expectancy dropped a full decade for the average Russian under Yeltsin. The average standard of living dropped dramatically as well. Putin reversed all that, and enjoys massive popular support as a result. The Empire will never tolerate a national leader who works for the benefit of the average citizen. It must be full-on rape, pillage and plunder- OR ELSE. Keep that in mind as we watch the latest theatrical performances by our DNC controlled "Commander in Chief" wannabes.

Realist , September 17, 2019 at 05:48

?The ongoing success of the "Great Lie" (that Washington is protecting the entire world from
anarchy perpetrated by a few bad actors on the global stage) and all of its false narrative subtexts
(including but far from limited to the Maidan, Crimea, Donbass, MH-17, the Skripals, gassing
"one's own people," piracy on the high Mediterranean, etc) just underscores how successful was
the false flag operation known as 9-11, even as the truth of that travesty is slowly being
unraveled by relentless truth-seekers applying logic and the scientific method to the problem.
Most Americans today would gladly concur, if queried, that Osama bin Laden was most certainly
a perfidious tool of Russia and its diabolical leader, Mr. Putin (be sure to call him "Vlad," to
conjure up images of Dracula for effect). The Winston Smith's are rare birds in America or in
any of its reliable vassal states. Never mind that the spooks from Langley (and the late
"chessmaster") concocted and orchestrated all these tales from the crypt.

Lily , September 13, 2019 at 07:54

Great summary of the developement of a new cold war. The narrative of the Mainstream Media is dangerous as well as laughable. I am glad to hear the Russian reaction to this bullshit propaganda. As often the people are so much wiser than their government – at least in the West.

During the Football WM a famous broadcaster of the German State TV channel ARD, who is a giftet propagandist, regrettet publicly the difficulty to convince the stubborn Germans to look at Russia as an enemy because they have started to look at Russia as a friend long ago.

Contrary to the people and the big firms who are completely against the sanctions against Russia and 100 % pro Northstream the German government with Chancelor Merkel is one of the top US vassalles. Even the Green Party which started as an environmental and peace party are now against North Stream and in favour of the filthy US fracking gas thanks to NATO propaganda although Russia has never let them down. Most of "Die Grünen" party have been turned into fervent friends of our American occupants which is very sad.

Thank you Tony Kevin. It has been great to read your article. I cant wait to read your book 'Return to Moscow' and to watch your interview on CN Live.

Godfree Roberts , September 13, 2019 at 07:37

Good summary of the status quo. From my experience of writing similarly about China, precisely the same policies and forces are at work.

The good news is that they are failing.

junaid , September 13, 2019 at 07:15

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the end of the war in Syria and the country's return to a state of peace. "Syria is returning to normal life": Lavrov announced the end of the war

"Syria is returning to normal life": Lavrov announced the end of the war

Gezzah Potts , September 13, 2019 at 05:47

You hit several nails squarely on the head with your excellent article Tony. Thank you for the truth of how the media is in Australia. It is indeed chilling where all this is leading. The blatant lies just spewed out as fact by both ABC and SBS. They, in my opinion are nothing but stenographers for the Empire, of which Australia is a fully subservient vassal state, with no independence.
I try to boycott all Australian presstitutes . Oops, I mean 'media' now. Occasionally, I do slip up and watch SBS or The Drum or News on ABC.
Virtually all my news comes from independent news sites like this one.
I have been accused of being a 'Putin lover', a Russian troll, a conspiracy theorist, while people I know have claimed that "Putin is a monster whose murdered millions of people".
On and on this crap goes. And the end result? Ask Stephen Cohen. Things are very surreal now. Sadly, you've been made an Unperson Tony.

Robyn , September 13, 2019 at 04:08

Bravo, Tony, great article. I enjoyed your book and recommend it to CN readers who haven't yet read it.

The world looks entirely different when one stops reading/watching the MSM and turns to CN, Caitlin Johnstone and many others who are doing a sterling job.

Cascadian , September 13, 2019 at 03:52

I don't know which is worse, to not know what you are (reliably uninformed) and be happy, or to become what you've always wanted to be (reliably informed) and feel alone.

Realist , September 14, 2019 at 00:19

Knowing the truth has always seemed paramount to me, even if it means realising that the entire world and all in it are damned, and deliberately by our own actions. Hope is always the last part of our essence to die, or so they say: maybe we will somehow be redeemed through our own self-immolation as a species.

Deb , September 13, 2019 at 02:54

As an Australian I have no difficulty accepting what Tony Kevin has said here. He should do what Craig Murray has done start a website.

[Sep 17, 2019] The reincarnation of the idea of Soviet Nomenklatura on a new level in a different social system

Highly recommended!
Sep 17, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , September 15, 2019 at 11:33 AM

https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1173204669356740608

Branko Milanovic‏ @BrankoMilan

Homoploutia, a concept I introduce in "Capitalism, Alone". In today's liberal capitalism, it is common that the same people are rich *both* in terms of capital they own and earnings they receive. This was almost unheard of in classical capitalism where capitalists seldom doubled as wage workers.

4:59 AM - 15 Sep 2019

anne -> anne... , September 15, 2019 at 11:47 AM
https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1173204677611196416

Branko Milanovic‏ @BrankoMilan

So here, using @lisdata, you have a nice illustration of advanced capitalist countries where people in the top decile by capital and labor income increasing coincide (right end) and Brazil and Mexico where they do not.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EEgPbuWXsAEays-.jpg:large

4:59 AM - 15 Sep 2019

anne -> anne... , September 15, 2019 at 11:49 AM
https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1173204681184751617

Branko Milanovic‏ @BrankoMilan

Note the ambivalence * of homoploutia: in some sense it is desirable (and risk-reducing) that capitalists also work, or that high earners possess capital too. But in another way, it makes inequality-reducing policies more difficult.

* Contradiction

4:59 AM - 15 Sep 2019

likbez -> anne... , September 16, 2019 at 09:03 PM
Yes, under neoliberalism like under Bolshevism, your social position is not determined solely by the capital you own. It is also determined by the position you hold in the industry or government (and your earnings/wages are derivative of that).

So we see the reincarnation of the idea of Soviet Nomenklatura on a new level in a different social system. The term can still serve its purpose, and IMHO is better than "Homoploutia."

It is also interesting that older middle-class folk, who due to their private savings, 401K, Roth and ISA accounts, SS pension (say $6K-7K a month for a couple), and sometimes government or industry pension are formally millionaires (with some multimillionaires) are not generally viewed as belonging to the upper 10%. They are looked at as an aberration by the most sociologists.

That's because they are now retired and no longer hold any meaningful for the upper 10% level position in the industry or government. In other words, they do not belong to Nomenklatura. Or more correctly no longer belong to Nomenklatura (for those who retired from high level positions)

And, correspondingly, often are treated as junk in the neoliberal society.

[Sep 17, 2019] Oh SNAP!! Tulsi throws down the gauntlet caucus99percent

Sep 17, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Oh SNAP!! Tulsi throws down the gauntlet

bondibox on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 8:46am

. @realDonaldTrump

Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not "America First." https://t.co/kJOCpqwaQS

-- Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) September 16, 2019

The tweet she was referring to was this:

Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!

-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2019

Trump is at the Saudis beck and call. He deserves to be called out with the strongest of language.

Linda Wood on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 9:38am

Her language

gets very strong when it comes to the Sauds, which is the main reason I support her.

Le Frog on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 10:03am
Or maybe Saudi Arabia is a powerful pawn

in American imperialism and the power imbalance isn't about just oil? How about we elaborate on that. It's not enough to criticize American military meddling without also calling out the geopolitical and economic meddling. These are intertwined and while I think Tulsi is very strong and very correct on military "interventions," she can and should go further. (All Americand should, no arguments here.) I mean, as far as this tweet goes, it's a cheap shot at a total loser who is already an easy target. Is she tweeting this at the American companies with interests in Saudi oil?

Alligator Ed on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 4:03pm
Monsieur le Frog

@Le Frog be careful whom you mock.

as far as this tweet [by Tulsi] goes, it's a cheap shot at a total loser who is already an easy target. Is she tweeting this at the American companies with interests in Saudi oil?

The "total loser" is a master politician, surviving a coup attempt , battling hostile MSM 24/7 and with an enlarging voter base. Include rising favorability ratings, though still less than 50%. His popularity currently equals that of Obomber at a similar point in first term.

in American imperialism and the power imbalance isn't about just oil? How about we elaborate on that. It's not enough to criticize American military meddling without also calling out the geopolitical and economic meddling. These are intertwined and while I think Tulsi is very strong and very correct on military "interventions," she can and should go further. (All Americand should, no arguments here.) I mean, as far as this tweet goes, it's a cheap shot at a total loser who is already an easy target. Is she tweeting this at the American companies with interests in Saudi oil?

CS in AZ on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 10:41am
I don't understand her tweet

I'm not trying to be contrary, but I honestly do not get what she's saying here, other than Trump is being KSA's "bitch" because he's waiting to hear what they say before letting bombs fly at whoever the US "believes" is responsible. Personally I think that's a big improvement over him immediately ordering an attack on Iran, or wherever.

If her statement criticized the "locked and loaded" part of his statement and she directly said we should not be bombing anyone on behalf of Saudi Arabia, then I'd agree with her.

But instead she criticized his waiting to hear from the country that was actually bombed, before doing anything or taking unilateral action. Calling him SKA's bitch, means he's being weak and submissive. Goading him into quicker action ... seems like an odd way to discourage war and the macho-man thinking that drives it.

I guess I really don't understand at all why people like this rhetoric from her. I personally have a confused, but basically negative, gut reaction to her comment.

tle on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 5:39pm
She DID criticize his "locked and loaded" remark

@CS in AZ @CS in AZ I ran across her statements on youtube. And I don't see how you can interpret what she said as "goading" him.

I'm not trying to be contrary, but I honestly do not get what she's saying here, other than Trump is being KSA's "bitch" because he's waiting to hear what they say before letting bombs fly at whoever the US "believes" is responsible. Personally I think that's a big improvement over him immediately ordering an attack on Iran, or wherever.

If her statement criticized the "locked and loaded" part of his statement and she directly said we should not be bombing anyone on behalf of Saudi Arabia, then I'd agree with her.

But instead she criticized his waiting to hear from the country that was actually bombed, before doing anything or taking unilateral action. Calling him SKA's bitch, means he's being weak and submissive. Goading him into quicker action ... seems like an odd way to discourage war and the macho-man thinking that drives it.

I guess I really don't understand at all why people like this rhetoric from her. I personally have a confused, but basically negative, gut reaction to her comment.

Linda Wood on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 9:22pm
If Saudi Arabia

@CS in AZ

was a country at peace and was suddenly attacked, I could sort of understand your objection to Gabbard criticizing Trump for waiting to hear from the Saudi princes about what to do next.

But that's not the situation. Saudi Arabia has been targeting school buses, hospitals, weddings, and has starved 85,000 children to death in Yemen, and we have HELPED! Starving a child to death is torture.

The fact that the civilized world hasn't rained retribution down on the Saudi government for supporting Al Qaeda, for supporting ISIS and its atrocities, and for using the people of Yemen for target practice just to benefit our defense contractors, is an abomination. We are not just being USED by the Saudi government. We are being ABUSED, as a nation, as a people, as a culture that's supposed to have values. We are being transformed into the sucking scum of the earth. For money. For a few contractors.

I'm not trying to be contrary, but I honestly do not get what she's saying here, other than Trump is being KSA's "bitch" because he's waiting to hear what they say before letting bombs fly at whoever the US "believes" is responsible. Personally I think that's a big improvement over him immediately ordering an attack on Iran, or wherever.

If her statement criticized the "locked and loaded" part of his statement and she directly said we should not be bombing anyone on behalf of Saudi Arabia, then I'd agree with her.

But instead she criticized his waiting to hear from the country that was actually bombed, before doing anything or taking unilateral action. Calling him SKA's bitch, means he's being weak and submissive. Goading him into quicker action ... seems like an odd way to discourage war and the macho-man thinking that drives it.

I guess I really don't understand at all why people like this rhetoric from her. I personally have a confused, but basically negative, gut reaction to her comment.

earthling1 on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 10:49am
Tweetle-Dee, Tweetle Dumb

Trump is his own worst enemy. His thoughtless tweets reveal him to be some seriously damaged goods.
Not since the late days of dementia ridden Reagan has a more dangerous finger been on "The Button".

Alligator Ed on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 4:14pm
Conflation of politics and policy leads erroneous conclusions

@earthling1 @earthling1 Trump's policies are by and larger terrible, neoliberal, disguised as populism. But before considering that Trump is an idiot, rather than one prone to bad choices in policy, please consider his current POLIICAL status. See my comment above to Monsieur le Frog.

Trump is his own worst enemy. His thoughtless tweets reveal him to be some seriously damaged goods.
Not since the late days of dementia ridden Reagan has a more dangerous finger been on "The Button".

wokkamile on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 10:59am
Tulsi might

have not unreasonably read his tweet as saying what it clearly seems to be saying, that the US will wait to see who the Saudis decide carried out the bombing, and the US will wait for their instructions on how the US should proceed -- deferring to the Saudis on two counts.

Does seem rather clear, and odd, for a US president to state a foreign power should dictate our actions on their behalf.

I didn't read it at all as a complaint that the US has to wait and cool its heels for the Saudis in order to rush into military action.

Of course she went on twitter to respond to DT's tweet. Twitter, the short-form of communication, where brief tweets are always vulnerable to misunderstanding.

CS in AZ on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 11:19am
Cooperation is not 'deferring' to another country

@wokkamile

This used to be called diplomacy. That's what we (the peace-not-war minded) people) wanted from our government. I still do, and I'm forced to say I think I actually agree with trump on this one. His tweet was unusually diplomatic and relatively calm. I was glad he said something reasonable, for perhaps the first time ever.

WE (the US) are not the world dictatorship that should feel free to bomb anyone anywhere anytime, and screw the rest of the world. Cooperation among governments is not being anyone's bitch. That's the pro war, pro US empire kind of thinking.

America first... see, that's not really what I believe in. So I see now, that must be why I felt so disturbed by her comment. I just disagree with her basic premise.

have not unreasonably read his tweet as saying what it clearly seems to be saying, that the US will wait to see who the Saudis decide carried out the bombing, and the US will wait for their instructions on how the US should proceed -- deferring to the Saudis on two counts.

Does seem rather clear, and odd, for a US president to state a foreign power should dictate our actions on their behalf.

I didn't read it at all as a complaint that the US has to wait and cool its heels for the Saudis in order to rush into military action.

Of course she went on twitter to respond to DT's tweet. Twitter, the short-form of communication, where brief tweets are always vulnerable to misunderstanding.

wokkamile on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 5:25pm
No, diplomacy

@CS in AZ @CS in AZ is when two countries engage in discussions to possibly reach a mutual agreement. That seems like an incredibly expansive and pro-Trump reading of his bizarre tweet.

Twump's tweet, in the clear language of the brief text, was about the US president waiting to hear marching orders from Crown Prince Mohammed "Ben" Salman as to what the US should do.

Tulsi's tweet and use of the word "bitch" was actually referencing a previous tweet she had made months ago criticizing the way the US seems to be subservient to the Saudis.

#5

This used to be called diplomacy. That's what we (the peace-not-war minded) people) wanted from our government. I still do, and I'm forced to say I think I actually agree with trump on this one. His tweet was unusually diplomatic and relatively calm. I was glad he said something reasonable, for perhaps the first time ever.

WE (the US) are not the world dictatorship that should feel free to bomb anyone anywhere anytime, and screw the rest of the world. Cooperation among governments is not being anyone's bitch. That's the pro war, pro US empire kind of thinking.

America first... see, that's not really what I believe in. So I see now, that must be why I felt so disturbed by her comment. I just disagree with her basic premise.

Linda Wood on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 9:03pm
@wokkamile

@wokkamile

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-17/tulsi-gabbard-slams-trump-maki...

Gabbard Campaign Video Slams Trump For Making US "The Prostitute Of Saudi Arabia"

by Tyler Durden
Wed, 04/17/2019

Democratic presidential candidate for 2020 Rep. Tulsi Gabbard lashed out at Trump on Wednesday after the president vetoed the Yemen War Powers Resolution this week, which sought to end US support for the Sauid-led war in Yemen.

The Hawaiian congresswomen and outspoken US foreign policy critic asserted the president is turning the nation "into the prostitute of Saudi Arabia" and further stated he vetoed the bill "to please his Saudi masters" in a minute-and-a-half campaign video.

"Unlike Donald Trump I will not turn our great country into the prostitute of Saudi Arabia."

#5.1 #5.1 is when two countries engage in discussions to possibly reach a mutual agreement. That seems like an incredibly expansive and pro-Trump reading of his bizarre tweet.

Twump's tweet, in the clear language of the brief text, was about the US president waiting to hear marching orders from Crown Prince Mohammed "Ben" Salman as to what the US should do.

Tulsi's tweet and use of the word "bitch" was actually referencing a previous tweet she had made months ago criticizing the way the US seems to be subservient to the Saudis.

Alligator Ed on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 4:19pm
Thanks for the additional info

@Linda Wood which provides the context for Tulsi's latest tweet. In this manner, Tulsi continues to emphasize a theme: no matter the circumstance (i.e., excuses), Saudi is a barbarous country, executing its detractors with swords rather than nice "surgical" drone strikes like Obomba and DJT have used.

#5.1.1

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-17/tulsi-gabbard-slams-trump-maki...

Gabbard Campaign Video Slams Trump For Making US "The Prostitute Of Saudi Arabia"

by Tyler Durden
Wed, 04/17/2019

Democratic presidential candidate for 2020 Rep. Tulsi Gabbard lashed out at Trump on Wednesday after the president vetoed the Yemen War Powers Resolution this week, which sought to end US support for the Sauid-led war in Yemen.

The Hawaiian congresswomen and outspoken US foreign policy critic asserted the president is turning the nation "into the prostitute of Saudi Arabia" and further stated he vetoed the bill "to please his Saudi masters" in a minute-and-a-half campaign video.

"Unlike Donald Trump I will not turn our great country into the prostitute of Saudi Arabia."

magiamma on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 11:34am
We stand to gain

By this oil price hike. More fracked oil that we can sell at a doable price.

tle on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 6:52pm
What is this WE of which you speak?

@magiamma @magiamma *~*

Yes, oil companies stand to benefit, but that doesn't exactly trickle down to actual people.

By this oil price hike. More fracked oil that we can sell at a doable price.

magiamma on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 8:31pm
The U.S., we...

@tle specifically the companies that are fracking and the banks that have given those companies loans

#6 #6 *~*

Yes, oil companies stand to benefit, but that doesn't exactly trickle down to actual people.

Centaurea on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 8:36pm
The collective "we",

@tle

I would assume.

#6 #6 *~*

Yes, oil companies stand to benefit, but that doesn't exactly trickle down to actual people.

crescentmoon on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 1:51pm
Yes. Often, I start from the

Yes. Often, I start from the question, "Who does this serve?" And I see how it helps Israel and the US. How does it serve Iran? I don't see it.

The Voice In th... on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 3:51pm
I guess I'm naiive

@crescentmoon

I just see this as Yemen fighting back on imperial KSA who they are at war with.
Asymmetrical warfare. Like Vietnam.

Yes. Often, I start from the question, "Who does this serve?" And I see how it helps Israel and the US. How does it serve Iran? I don't see it.

NYCVG on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 4:57pm
@The Voice In the Wilderness Yemen found a way to

@The Voice In the Wilderness Yemen found a way to strike back. That's what I think also, the voice in the wilderness

#7

I just see this as Yemen fighting back on imperial KSA who they are at war with.
Asymmetrical warfare. Like Vietnam.

artisan on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 5:03pm
According to this

very convoluted version , Iranian drones were launched from an Iranian affiliated militia base in Iraq in retaliation for Saudi funded Israeli drone strikes originating from a US/Kurdish base in Syria that struck Iranian/Iraqi bases, weapons depots, and a convoy in August.

wendy davis on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 5:31pm
bernhard at

@artisan

Moon of Alabama weighed in on that, if it helps:

Middle East Eye, a Qatari financed outlet, reported yesterday that the attack was launched from Iraq by Iran aligned forces in revenge for Israeli attacks in Syria. The author, David Hearst, is known for slandered reporting. The report is based on a single anonymous Iraqi intelligence source. Qatar, which is struggling with Saudi Arabia and the UAE over its support for the Muslim Brotherhood, would like to see a larger conflict involving its rivals east and west of the Persian Gulf. The report should therefore be disregarded.

but with all the various reports it does seem clear that who launched them (drone or planes) look hard to ascertain for certain. but trump was far more careful than pompeo and lindsey graham who want to bomb bomb bomb iran on speculation, because iran is evil.

ah, i've been trying to figure out ho to compile a post on possibilities v. blame, and it's getting further and further away from me. but both KSA and trump (or his generals) may really understand what's at stake. what's bibi saying?

very convoluted version , Iranian drones were launched from an Iranian affiliated militia base in Iraq in retaliation for Saudi funded Israeli drone strikes originating from a US/Kurdish base in Syria that struck Iranian/Iraqi bases, weapons depots, and a convoy in August.

artisan on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 5:59pm
Whoever did it,

@wendy davis

it's clear that Gulf oil installations are vulnerable from a new generation of drones that these players are assembling or otherwise acquiring themselves. Several years ago, the Iranians were able to hack a Predator drone and bring it down intact, suitable for reverse engineering. In past war games, the entire US fleet in the Persian Gulf was destroyed in a matter of minutes by swarms of Iranian missiles. The Yemen war is likely to be over and the possibility of an attack on Iran seems more unlikely now as well.

#8

Moon of Alabama weighed in on that, if it helps:

Middle East Eye, a Qatari financed outlet, reported yesterday that the attack was launched from Iraq by Iran aligned forces in revenge for Israeli attacks in Syria. The author, David Hearst, is known for slandered reporting. The report is based on a single anonymous Iraqi intelligence source. Qatar, which is struggling with Saudi Arabia and the UAE over its support for the Muslim Brotherhood, would like to see a larger conflict involving its rivals east and west of the Persian Gulf. The report should therefore be disregarded.

but with all the various reports it does seem clear that who launched them (drone or planes) look hard to ascertain for certain. but trump was far more careful than pompeo and lindsey graham who want to bomb bomb bomb iran on speculation, because iran is evil.

ah, i've been trying to figure out ho to compile a post on possibilities v. blame, and it's getting further and further away from me. but both KSA and trump (or his generals) may really understand what's at stake. what's bibi saying?

wendy davis on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 6:27pm
saudi arabia has no defenses

@artisan

against such a swarm attack like this (and so accurately targeted), nor does the US, according to b and a few others. iran probably does have russian missile defense, but clearly: riyadh needs to make peace with the houthis at any cost. there must be next to nothing left standing there after what, four years?

#8.1

it's clear that Gulf oil installations are vulnerable from a new generation of drones that these players are assembling or otherwise acquiring themselves. Several years ago, the Iranians were able to hack a Predator drone and bring it down intact, suitable for reverse engineering. In past war games, the entire US fleet in the Persian Gulf was destroyed in a matter of minutes by swarms of Iranian missiles. The Yemen war is likely to be over and the possibility of an attack on Iran seems more unlikely now as well.

The Voice In th... on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 1:39pm
Using $100K missiles to stop $100 drones

@wendy davis
seems a losing strategy.

EDIT:
I have since read that these are special fancy $1K drones. Still seems like a losing proposition.

#8.1.1

against such a swarm attack like this (and so accurately targeted), nor does the US, according to b and a few others. iran probably does have russian missile defense, but clearly: riyadh needs to make peace with the houthis at any cost. there must be next to nothing left standing there after what, four years?

UntimelyRippd on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 1:15pm
Not if you're in the missile-selling business.

@The Voice In the Wilderness

#8.1.1.1
seems a losing strategy.

EDIT:
I have since read that these are special fancy $1K drones. Still seems like a losing proposition.

dystopian on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 8:23pm
Tulsi's tweet this afternoon

This is a new tweet from Tulsi this afternoon with a short vid...

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1173723701373591552

Go Tulsi Go!

Alligator Ed on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 4:30pm
Tulsi delivers a severe blow to Trump in her video.

@dystopian She, as many predicted, is pushing Trump further and further into a non-confrontational foreign policy. There is not one of the Klown Kontenders with enough guts to call out Trump as forcefully as this--including Bernie.

This is a new tweet from Tulsi this afternoon with a short vid...

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1173723701373591552

Go Tulsi Go!

MinuteMan on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 9:10am
Grave new world

The attack marks a turning point in asymmetrical warfare: no longer can a country bomb its neighbor without fearing a significant attack in return. An that attack won't be tossing a few rockets in the general direction of a targey; instead they'll be precision strikes taking out key infrastructure.

The concept of an air force has changed and the big powers won't have a monopoly going forward. Mutually assured destruction lite.

[Sep 17, 2019] Explaining CIA's 'Agent Smolenkov'

Notable quotes:
"... This damage to supposed bastions of US journalism cannot be overstated. More than two years of spinning speculation-cum-reporting about Russian collusion with Trump and/or interference in US politics has produced not a crumb of substantive fact. ..."
"... So when they got the chance to seemingly resurrect their buried "Russiagate" yarn with this latest fable about agent Oleg Smolenkov being exfiltrated from Russia to the US, they leapt at it because their equally buried reputations are also at stake. ..."
"... As far as we can tell, an anonymous intelligence source started the ball rolling. The source is likely to be former CIA chief John Brennan or former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Both are hangouts for the anti-Trump media since they lost their intel jobs at the beginning of 2017, and both are believed to have seeded the "Russiagate" narrative in 2016 from before Trump was elected. ..."
"... Thus, if Smolenkov is peddling fiction to his former handlers in the CIA, that means he has no credibility as a "top mole". ..."
"... Again, opportunism is the key. Somebody came up with a lurid story about "Russian interference" in US democracy and "collusion" with Trump. Maybe it was Smolenkov who saw an opportunity to win a big pay day from his CIA patrons by flogging them a blockbuster. ..."
"... CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, Brennan and Clapper are so much damaged goods from past failure of "Russiagate" fabrications, they find an opportunity to salvage their disgraced names by outing the hapless Smolenkov at this juncture. ..."
"... There is a sinister similarity here to the Sergei Skripal case in England. Is Smolenkov being set up for hit which can then be conveniently blamed on Russia as "revenge" by the Russophobic, anti-Trump, deep state US media? ..."
Sep 17, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

The saga of daring escape by a supposed Russian CIA agent from the Kremlin's clutches and then the added twist of a security-risk American president putting the agent's life in danger does indeed sound like a pulp fiction novel, as Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov put it.

How to explain this sensational story? "Opportunism" is one word that comes to mind.

The news media who pushed the story, CNN, the New York Times and Washington Post, are vehemently "anti-Trump". Any chance to damage this president and they grab it.

Also, perhaps more importantly, these media are desperate to salvage their shot-through journalistic credibility since the "Russiagate" narrative they had earnestly propagated died a death, after the two-year Mueller circus finally left town empty-handed.

This damage to supposed bastions of US journalism cannot be overstated. More than two years of spinning speculation-cum-reporting about Russian collusion with Trump and/or interference in US politics has produced not a crumb of substantive fact. That means those media responsible for the "Russiagate" nonsense have forfeited that precious quality – credibility. They no longer deserve to be categorized as news services, and are more appropriately now listed as fiction peddlers.

So when they got the chance to seemingly resurrect their buried "Russiagate" yarn with this latest fable about agent Oleg Smolenkov being exfiltrated from Russia to the US, they leapt at it because their equally buried reputations are also at stake.

As far as we can tell, an anonymous intelligence source started the ball rolling. The source is likely to be former CIA chief John Brennan or former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Both are hangouts for the anti-Trump media since they lost their intel jobs at the beginning of 2017, and both are believed to have seeded the "Russiagate" narrative in 2016 from before Trump was elected.

Notably, the current CIA assessment of the latest US media reporting on the exfiltrated spy is that the reporting is "false" and "misguided". In particular, the CNN spin that the agent (Smolenkov) had to be extricated from Russia in 2017 because Langley feared that Trump may have endangered the supposed Kremlin mole when he hosted Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in the White House in May 2017.

Also of note is the dismissive response from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who rubbished the reports. He was head of the CIA during 2017. (Admittedly, Pompeo is a self-confessed liar.)

According to CNN, NY Times and Washington Post, the former spy in the Kremlin, named as Oleg Smolenkov by subsequent Russian media reporting, was a top mole with direct access to President Vladimir Putin. It is claimed that Smolenkov confirmed allegations about a Putin-directed plot to interfere in US presidential elections. The agent is said to have also confirmed that Putin (allegedly) ordered the hacking of the Democratic party's central database to obtain scandalous material on Hillary Clinton which was then fed to the Wikileaks whistleblower site for the purpose of scuttling her bid for the presidency in November 2016, thus favoring Trump.

Smolenkov was allegedly providing this information on a purported Kremlin interference campaign in 2016.

The US media claim Smolenkov was exfiltrated from Russia by the CIA in June 2017 – out of concern for his safety, which CNN reported was being jeopardized by President Trump due to his implied compromised relations with Putin. Smolenkov and his family disappeared while on a holiday in Montenegro in June 2017.

After the story broke earlier this week about the exfiltrated Kremlin mole, subsequent media reporting tracked down Oleg Smolenkov and his wife living in a $1-million-dollar mansion in Stafford, Virginia. Curiously, public records showed the house purchase was in their names, which seems odds for a supposed top-level spy, who had apparently committed extreme betrayal against the Kremlin, to be living openly. The family apparently fled the house to unknown whereabouts on September 9 after the story about his alleged spy role broke this week.

Who is Oleg Smolenkov? The Kremlin said this week that he previously worked in the presidential administration, but he was sacked "several years ago". He did not have direct access to President Putin's office, according to the Kremlin. For his part, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov says he never heard of the man before, never mind ever having met him.

It is understood that Smolenkov previously worked in the Russian embassy in Washington under ambassador Yuri Ushakov (1999-2008). Smolenkov reportedly continued working for Ushakov when the diplomat returned to Moscow after his ambassadorial tenure in the US.

Here is where we may speculate that Smolenkov was recruited by the CIA during his diplomatic assignment in the US. But we assume that the Kremlin's assessment is correct; he did not have a senior position or access to Putin's office. By contrast, the US media are claiming Smolenkov was "one of the CIA's most valuable assets" in the Kremlin and that he was providing confirmatory information that Putin was (allegedly) running an interference campaign to subvert the US presidential elections.

The discerning detail as to the truth of the imbroglio is revealed by the US media claims that Smolenkov corroborated the alleged hacking into the Democratic party database in 2016. However, that specific allegation has been disproven by several top hacker experts, notably William Binney who was formerly technical head at the US National Security Agency. There was no hacking. The damaging information on Hillary Clinton was leaked by a Democratic party insider, possibly Seth Rich, who soon after was shot dead by an unknown attacker. In short, the entire narrative about the Kremlin hacking into the Democratic party is a fiction. The premise to "Russiagate" is baseless.

Thus, if Smolenkov is peddling fiction to his former handlers in the CIA, that means he has no credibility as a "top mole".

Again, opportunism is the key. Somebody came up with a lurid story about "Russian interference" in US democracy and "collusion" with Trump. Maybe it was Smolenkov who saw an opportunity to win a big pay day from his CIA patrons by flogging them a blockbuster. Or maybe, Brennan and Clapper (known liars in the public record) dreamt up a scheme of Kremlin malignancy to benefit Trump, and if that could be tied to Trump then his election would be discredited and nullified. But what they needed was a "Kremlin source" to "corroborate" their readymade story of "Russian interference". Step forward Oleg Smolenkov – fired and out of work – to do the needful "corroboration" and in return he gets a new life for himself and family with a mansion in a leafy Virginian suburb.

CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, Brennan and Clapper are so much damaged goods from past failure of "Russiagate" fabrications, they find an opportunity to salvage their disgraced names by outing the hapless Smolenkov at this juncture.

That then raises the grave question of why he was permitted to live openly in his own name?

There is a sinister similarity here to the Sergei Skripal case in England. Is Smolenkov being set up for hit which can then be conveniently blamed on Russia as "revenge" by the Russophobic, anti-Trump, deep state US media?

[Sep 17, 2019] The latest warmonger's lie to start a war with Iran

Notable quotes:
"... @Fishtroller 02 ..."
Sep 17, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

gjohnsit on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 3:10pm Remember in 2002 when the neocons in Washington told us that we had to attack Iraq because of 9/11, eventhough Iraq had nothing to do with it?

So now Iran is being blamed for the attack on Saudi oil fields, and anonymous warmongers claim that they have proof.

The United States has identified the exact locations in Iran from which a combination of more than 20 drones and cruise missiles were launched against Saudi oil facilities over the weekend, a senior U.S. official told CBS News national security correspondent David Martin on Tuesday. The official said the locations are in southern Iran, at the northern end of the Persian Gulf.

What a coincidence! That also happens to be around Iran's major oil fields.
What's more, the Saudi air defenses would have stopped it if it came from Yemen.

Saudi Arabia's air defenses have been aimed south for months, to protect against missile attacks launched by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, so they were useless against the missiles and drones coming in from the north, the official told Martin.

Let's put a pin in that for now.
Washington immediately dismissed the Houthi's claim of responsibility for the attack. Why? Because the Houthis don't have the knowledge or the means to carry it out.

But U.S. officials have cast doubt on the Houthis’ claim, arguing that the sophisticated nature of the attack suggested that it was beyond the capabilities of the rebel group.

The NY Times is even more direct.

Analysts say this is what the Houthis appear to have used to hit the Abha International Airport in southern Saudi Arabia a few months ago. But the Quds 1 lacks the range to get from northern Yemen to the oil installations in Saudi Arabia.

The range, scale and precision of the latest attack — including the successful penetration of Saudi air defenses and the avoidance of obstacles like power lines and communication towers — far exceeds anything the Houthis have ever done.

So it's all wrapped up. The Houthis aren't capable of doing it, and we have proof that Iran did it. We just can't show it to you.

It makes a good story if you have no long-term memory.
Because this happened less than a month ago.


A drone attack launched by Yemen’s Houthi group on an oilfield in eastern Saudi Arabia on Saturday caused a fire at a gas plant but had no impact on oil production, state-run oil company Saudi Aramco said.

A Houthi military spokesman said earlier that the group had targeted the Shaybah oilfield with 10 drones, in what he said was the “biggest attack in the depths” of the kingdom, the world’s top oil exporter, by the Iran-aligned group.

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih described Shaybah as a “vital facility”.

That oilfield is 900 kilometres away from Yemen.
Literally everything about this Houthi attack is the same as Saturday's attack, except for fewer explosions. So what the fuck is the NY Times talking about?

To make this even more interesting, I happened upon this report by the UAE following the Houthi attack from last month.

The report also reveals critical Saudi defence weaknesses to the weaponised drones used by the Houthis.

It reports that from January to May there were 155 such attacks against Saudi targets in Yemen and throughout the Gulf, a much higher figure than previously admitted.

“The attack on the Lahj Military Base demonstrates a weakness in Saudi air defences and the lack of capacity in electronic war if we take into account that these drones are basic and are not launched on tarmac,” the report says.

“Air defences such as the Patriot are not capable of spotting these drones because the systems are designed to intercept long and medium range Scud missiles.”

Najran airport has been hit repeatedly by Houthi drones despite being protected by a Patriot battery, the report reveals.

155 drone attacks? U.S. Patriot missiles unable to detect and stop them?
Why that sounds a lot different than what we are being told.

Recall that the Houthis had brought down a U.S. drone just a few weeks ago. That was the second U.S. drone they shot down just this summer.
Recall that the Houthis have been hitting Riyadh with missiles for over a year.

All the evidence points to the Houthis being more than capable of not just being responsible for this attack, but for repeating this attack in a matter of weeks Mark F. McCarty

Fishtroller 02 on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 4:06pm

Because the US has now pissed off all of Europe

and probably most of the UN, they are going to have a harder time getting anyone on board the Pompeo Holy War train. We are going to have to show our allies totally verifiable evidence that Iran lobbed those drones, and it looks like we can't do that.

Probably because they didn't do it! And once that starts looking clear to the world, the last remnants of US credibility will fly away for good.

gjohnsit on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 4:23pm
It's been more than four days

@Fishtroller 02

We are going to have to show our allies totally verifiable evidence that Iran lobbed those drones, and it looks like we can't do that.

If we had proof it was Iran we would have shown it to someone by now.
Aren't we monitoring the airspace around Iran?

And what is Iran's motivation?
It's not worth the risk for Iran if they were caught.

OTOH, if Iran gives the weapons to the Houthis...that makes a Hell of a lot more sense.

and probably most of the UN, they are going to have a harder time getting anyone on board the Pompeo Holy War train. We are going to have to show our allies totally verifiable evidence that Iran lobbed those drones, and it looks like we can't do that.

Probably because they didn't do it! And once that starts looking clear to the world, the last remnants of US credibility will fly away for good.

[Sep 17, 2019] Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) slammed President Donald Trump for turning the nation into "Saudi Arabia's bitch" after he assured the kingdom that the U.S. is "locked and loaded" as it waits to hear who may be behind an attack on its oil supply.

Sep 17, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

EMichael , September 17, 2019 at 05:55 AM

Voice of reason and authority on this one.

"Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) slammed President Donald Trump for turning the nation into "Saudi Arabia's bitch" after he assured the kingdom that the U.S. is "locked and loaded" as it waits to hear who may be behind an attack on its oil supply.

"Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters," the Democratic presidential candidate tweeted Sunday. "Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First.'"

Gabbard previously accused Trump of making the U.S. "Saudi Arabia's bitch" last November for his failure to take action against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who, according to the U.S. intelligence community, directed the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tulsi-gabbard-donald-trump-saudi-arabia-oil-attack_n_5d7fc275e4b077dcbd622d5b

"Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has doubled down attacking President Donald Trump over his response to the weekend's drone attacks on major oil sites in Saudi Arabia.

Trump assured Saudi Arabia via Twitter that the U.S. is "locked and loaded" and awaiting its direction following the strikes, which were claimed by Yemen's Houthi rebels but which Trump claimed were backed by Iran.

The Democratic presidential candidate -- a combat veteran and a major in the Army National Guard ― called Trump's response "disgraceful" in a new video shared online Monday.

"Mr. President, as you know, I have never engaged in hateful rhetoric against you or your family and I never will," said Gabbard. "But your offering our military assets to the dictator of Saudi Arabia to use as he sees fit is a betrayal of my brothers and sisters in uniform who are ready to give our lives for our country."

Gabbard said Trump's belief he can "pimp out our proud servicemen and women to the prince of Saudi Arabia is disgraceful and it once again shows that you are unfit to serve as our commander in chief."

"My fellow service members and I, we are not your prostitutes," she concluded. "You are not our pimp."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tulsi-gabbard-donald-trump-doubles-down-saudi-arabia_n_5d809229e4b077dcbd63a808

ilsm -> EMichael... , September 17, 2019 at 09:02 AM
Make a note, I agree with you here.
Paine -> ilsm... , September 17, 2019 at 09:10 AM
She is a gem
House of Saud butt port
Donald the double down
cheeks of Araby
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to ilsm... , September 17, 2019 at 09:57 AM
Most of our disagreements here are not on either economic or political principles, but rather the awarding of style points with considerable confusion regarding the (sometimes remotely) possible, the plausible, and the actual.

[Sep 17, 2019] Stingray devices were detected near White House -- Isreali intelligence is most probably culprit

Notable quotes:
"... Only President Donald Trump, predictably, had something so say in his usual personalized fashion, which was that the report was "hard to believe," that "I don't think the Israelis were spying on us. My relationship with Israel has been great Anything is possible but I don't believe it." ..."
"... So Trump is stupid, a liar and an Israeli sycophant what's the solution? ..."
Sep 17, 2019 | www.unz.com

anon [113] Disclaimer , says: September 17, 2019 at 6:41 am GMT

Too bad Tulsi can't call out Israel the way she does KSA.

Trump offers to pimp out our military to his Saudi masters

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Jo8QU2s_5I?feature=oembed

cranc , says: September 17, 2019 at 8:21 am GMT
Just bewildering to read the Left's continuing insistence that Israel is best understood as 'just another outpost of the American empire'. This is probably the most damaging idea in circulation right now, as its diversionary effect is only matched by its absurdity.
The Left simply cannot 'go there' though, no matter how much factual evidence is stacked up. (On top of the spying and theft we have 'The Lobby' documentary, the defence pact, party funding, etc. etc.). They have to avoid the reality, one which can only be explained through cross border tribal allegiances and religious history going back many centuries. These, of course, lay outside the Left's purview, and any consideration of them is dogmatically opposed. It is getting to be a kind of insanity.

Tulsi can allege that Saudi Arabia was behind the 9/11 attacks and that they pull the strings in Washington, (and many on the Left will applaud) but she cannot point out the rather more glaring 9/11 connections to Israel and the whole machinery of control that lies at the centre of American empire.
As she votes against BDS, has there ever been a more ridiculous double standard ?

Realist , says: September 17, 2019 at 9:09 am GMT

Only President Donald Trump, predictably, had something so say in his usual personalized fashion, which was that the report was "hard to believe," that "I don't think the Israelis were spying on us. My relationship with Israel has been great Anything is possible but I don't believe it."

So Trump is stupid, a liar and an Israeli sycophant what's the solution?

JoaoAlfaiate , says: September 17, 2019 at 11:09 am GMT
It's amazing how little coverage this story got. Can you imagine if Russian devices had been found? It would be on CNN, etc. hour after hour and they'd be interviewing Nancy Pelosi non stop.
sally , says: September 17, 2019 at 12:19 pm GMT
@Cloak And Dagger I think you are correct there maybe many Americans in the USA.. It may take the few Americans who have been allowed to see the big picture at the USA
Hans , says: September 17, 2019 at 1:02 pm GMT
"I've never seen a President -- I don't care who he is -- stand up to them. It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip these people have on our government, they would RISE UP IN ARMS. Our citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on." – Admiral Thomas Moorer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, interview, 24 Aug. 1983

Admiral Moorer, "the dirty anti-semite," was one of the few people with influence to call out Israel for their deliberate attack on the USS Liberty – https://www.erasingtheliberty.com/

The American Legion continues to wet its pants apparently believing that kissing (((ass))) is more patriotic than standing up for America and members of the Navy.

USS Liberty Veterans banned forever from Am Legion Nat'l Convention – https://israelpalestinenews.org/uss-liberty-vets-banned-forever-american-legion-national-conference/

DESERT FOX , says: September 17, 2019 at 1:17 pm GMT
Whats new about Israeli spying against the zio/US, hell the government is full of zionists in every facet of the government, they run every department, including and especially the CIA , which would be better named the Mossad West, in fact the Mossad is so embedded in the CIA that the only way to end this would be to as JFK said to scatter it to the winds aka abolish the Mossad infested CIA.

[Sep 17, 2019] Meddling schmeddling by PaulR

Notable quotes:
"... dezinformatziia, active measures ..."
"... active measures ..."
"... "We vote for one party which is 100% anti-Russian rather than for another party which is 100% anti-Russian? Is that the point? Because here in Canada, that's basically the choice on offer [A]t the end of the day we're still going to end up electing somebody determined to prove that he or she is more anti-Russian that the next guy or girl. " ..."
"... For Heaven's sake, the worst country for meddling in other nations' internal affairs is the US, by far! With respect to the Arctic, both Canada and Russia signed the Treaty of the Sea, under which various challenges to ownership of the seabed are settled by the terms of the treaty. The US, of course didn't sign it. Why would they when they sincerely believe that their impressive military can just grab whatever pieces of the Arctic they want. ..."
Sep 17, 2019 | irrussianality.wordpress.com

September 10, 2019

15 Comments

You may have missed it in the all the excitement around the world, but Canada has a general election coming up in October. As you know, elections equal Russian meddling. They're when our Eastern friends pull out all their computer bots, fire up their trolls, and start spreading shedloads of disinformation in order to confuse and disorientate us, so that we lose our faith in democracy and then we we well I'm not sure what we're meant to do then; the ultimate aim of it all rather defeats me. We vote for one party which is 100% anti-Russian rather than for another party which is 100% anti-Russian? Is that the point? Because here in Canada, that's basically the choice on offer. Those pesky Russkies can confuse us all they like with their dezinformatziia, active measures , and maskirovka , but at the end of the day we're still going to end up electing somebody determined to prove that he or she is more anti-Russian that the next guy or girl. Meddling, schmeddling – it's not going to make a blind bit of difference to the result.

None of this stops the fearmongers, however, and so it was that yesterday the Canadian press was happily quoting a new report from the University of Calgary, saying that, 'Russia could meddle in Canada's election due to "growing interest" in Arctic'. Now, I've been saying for a while now that these worries are exaggerated, but for some reason 'Professor at University of Ottawa says it's a load of nonsense' doesn't generate any headlines, whereas 'part-time lecturer in Calgary says it's so' is national news. Well, so be it. We all know that the press has its biases. So rather than rely on the media, I thought I'd better check out what the report in question actually has to say, and it turns out that it's not quite what you'd imagine, at least not entirely.

The report is written by one Sergey Sukhankin who is said to be 'a Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation' in Washington DC, and to be currently 'teaching at the University of Alberta and MacEwan University (Edmonton)'. According to his Linkedin page, he has a 3 month contract to teach a single course at the former, and a 9 month contract as a lecturer in the latter. He's also listed as an 'Associate Expert at the International Center for Policy Studies (Kyiv).' Anyway, he starts off his report encouragingly enough by declaring that he aims 'to give a more balanced and nuanced picture of the situation, particularly with regard to Canada', and it is a 'tactical error to label as disinformation or propaganda every news item emanating from Russia. This creates the perception of a Russian disinformation machine that is much more powerful than it really is.' Personally, I would say that it's not a 'tactical error', it's just plain wrong, but at least Sukhankin isn't trying to overdo things. But this praiseworthy restraint doesn't mean that he wants us to let down our guard. No, he says, 'the peril is real', 'the West must stick to confronting the Kremlin', and (and this is the bit which got the headlines):

The Kremlin has a growing interest in dominating the Arctic, where it sees Russia as in competition with Canada. This means Canada can anticipate escalations in information warfare Perceived as one of Russia's chief adversaries in the Arctic region, Canada is a prime target in the information wars, with Russia potentially even meddling in the October 2019 federal election.

There's a leap of logic here which I must admit I failed to understand. Why does 'competition' in the Arctic 'mean' that Canada 'can anticipate escalations in information warfare', let alone 'meddling' in the election? Why does the one necessarily lead to the other? I don't see it. It would only make sense if the second part (the meddling) helped achieve some objectives in the first part (competition in the Arctic) but Sukhankin doesn't show how they would. He just connects two unconnected things. But we'll get back to the Arctic a little later. For now, let's return to the report.

This essentially has two parts. The first is a fairly standard summary of the general argument that Russia is engaged in some sort of information war designed to undermine the West from within. It makes reference to the normal vocabulary of Soviet active measures and the like, as well as to the conventional list of sources, such as Peter Pomerantseve, Michael Weiss, and Edward Lucas (not the most reliable types in my opinion). In short, it doesn't add anything new. By contrast, the second part, which specifically focuses on alleged Russian information operations against Canada, is much more interesting.

Russian disinformation about Canada, says Sukhankin, is centred on four themes:

  1. 'Canada as a safe haven of russophobia and (neo)fascism.
  2. 'Canada as part of the colonial forces in the Baltic Sea region'.
  3. 'Canada as Washington's useful satellite'.
  4. 'Canada as a testing ground for the practical implementation of immoral Western values.'

The extent to which these could all be called 'disinformation' is debatable ('Canada as Washington's useful satellite' doesn't seem entirely inaccurate to me). But the key point Sukhankin makes is that these themes reflect the Russian government's own internal, domestic political priorities – i.e. its desire to convince its own citizens that its policies are right, by means of discrediting others. In general, says Sukhankin, Russian propaganda targets 'the following audiences, prioritized from the greatest to the smallest'.

Canada, therefore, falls into the lowest priority of targets. This reflects the fact that, as Sukhankin says, 'Russians don't see Canada as a fully independent political actor'. To be frank, we're not high on Russia's information war hitlist. The Russian government doesn't care that much about us, and it cares even less about our internal politics. Consequently, says Sukhankin, while the Russian media and social media do publish anti-Canadian stories, the point of them isn't to 'meddle' in Canadian internal affairs. Rather, he says, in what to me is the most crucial statement in his report:

Russia's anti-Canadian propaganda, which still plays a marginal part compared to other theatres, is primarily tailored for domestic Russian consumption – it is not designed for a Canadian audience. [my underlining]

Here, therefore, we run into a huge problem. We're told to fear the genuine 'peril' of Russian disinformation, and Russian 'meddling' in Canada's election, but we're also told that Russia doesn't actually care very much about Canadian internal affairs and that in any case Russian disinformation isn't targeted at Canadians. It seems to me that you can't have it both ways. If it's not targeted at Canadians, then it doesn't constitute meddling, interference, or anything else of the sort. The logical conclusion of Sukhankin's analysis is that we should calm down a little and stop worrying so much.

That, however, would not fit with the current zeitgeist . Although his logic points him in one direction, Sukhankin apparently feels a desperate need to nonetheless throw in something about the dangers of Russian interference in Canadian internal affairs. So all of a sudden, completely out of the blue, and unconnected with anything else, in his final paragraph he suddenly throws in a quotation from the head of that most neutral of trustworthy academic sources, the head of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Alexandra Chiczij, saying that, 'The Kramlin's propaganda machine will increasingly target our country with anti-Canadian fabrications in an attempt to sow discord, conflict, and to undermine our democratic institutions.' Sukhankin then adds that this might happen 'during the 2019 Canadian federal election.' No evidence to support this claim – which is entirely at odds which everything which preceded it – is produced. Why would Russia suddenly become so interested in Canadian internal affairs? Sukhankin thinks he has an answer, 'from this author's point of view, Moscow's next theme could be the Arctic', he says. But since this is his last paragraph, he doesn't have time to develop this thought. As I said, it just comes out of the blue.

It's also rather odd. As I said earlier, it's not at all clear why interfering in Canada's election (exactly how, Sukhankin never makes clear) would promote Russia's interests in the Arctic. But more than that it ignores the nature of Russian-Canadian Arctic politics. In my conversations with both Canadian and Russian officials, the Arctic is always mentioned as a zone of cooperation rather than competition. In an era when Canadian and Russian diplomats barely talk to each other, the Arctic is the one subject they both think it's actually possible to discuss in a constructive manner. Conversations about how to improve Canada-Russia relations generally take the form of something like, 'Let's not aim too high. Let's just take little steps, and focus on areas where agreement is possible, especially the Arctic'. To pick on the Arctic as the subject likely to provoke Russia (for purposes unknown) to 'meddle' in Canada's oncoming election (by means and to effect unknown) seems to me to completely misread the situation.

In short, what we have here is a report which tells us that Canada doesn't matter much to Russians, and that to date Russians have shown little or no interest in targeting Canadian public opinion, let alone interfering in Canadian politics, and yet which nonetheless concludes that we face the 'peril' of Moscow 'potentially even meddling in the October 2019 federal election'. I don't know about you, but that doesn't make any sense to me.

  1. Mitleser says: September 10, 2019 at 3:00 pm "4. Canada as a testing ground for the practical implementation of immoral Western values.'"

    Reminds me of one of the comments to an another article of yours.

    " Canada has generally been the test case for new features of this "western universalism," and, as a peripheral resource-based economy tightly tied into globalized value-chains, we have often been intellectually colonized by liberal-internationalist views (for good and ill). Unlike Russia, as we are small in population and sit next to the US, we have rarely had the capacity (or the will) to resist US-led "universalism," but our analysis when we have tried has been much the same as Remizov's ."
    https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2017/11/02/interview-with-mikhail-remizov/#comment-6953

    Like Like Reply

  2. Mao Cheng Ji says: September 10, 2019 at 3:46 pm "in order to confuse and disorientate us"

    May I ask: do you, Canadians, typically say " disorientate ", in the British manner? Or was it your British identity speaking?

    Anyhow. I envy the hack who thought of "sow discord". I love it. It's so biblical: "he that soweth discord among brethren."

    Clearly, it could only be SATAN.

  1. dewittbourchier says: September 10, 2019 at 4:13 pm We should not be surprised at how febrile things are.

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/the-real-story-behind-the-havana-embassy-mystery

    Quite literally US diplomats in Cuba, and with them many US policymakers and journalistic organisations descended into mass hysteria about Cicadas.

  1. Alex Kramer says: September 10, 2019 at 6:35 pm Makes sense to me as both Canadian academia and media are full of dipshit Russophobes.
  1. Karl Kolchak says: September 10, 2019 at 8:22 pm If Russia wants the weakest possible Canada, wouldn't it be in their interests to see a feckless little poodle like Trudeau remain as PM?
  1. Lyttenburgh says: September 11, 2019 at 5:21 am "We vote for one party which is 100% anti-Russian rather than for another party which is 100% anti-Russian? Is that the point? Because here in Canada, that's basically the choice on offer [A]t the end of the day we're still going to end up electing somebody determined to prove that he or she is more anti-Russian that the next guy or girl. "

    [WARNING/ATTENTION/УВАГА!]

    This is very lowbrow, but relevant

    Now, on a more serious note – about propacondom Sergey Sukhankin (formerly from Kaliningrad oblast, RF).

    He's one of those "professional victims of the Putinist Regime", that "miraculously" escaped our Northern Mordor, and now spends ink, bytes and bodily fluids in a ceaseless struggle with the Dark Overlord. "Russian interference" is both his idea fix and bread and butter. E.g., check out his logorrhea on "Russian trace" in Catalonia's referendum (published by his sponsors in Jamestown foundation AKA CIA). There are many stock accusations, about RT, "pro-Kremline profiles" in FB and Twitter, and, the horror of horrors, the fact that the Immortal Regiment now dares to happen on the sacred soil of the country, which dispatched the Blue Division to the Abode of all Evil. He admits, that to proof the fact that the "Russian meddling" was the cause of what transpired in Catalonia (uh, you remember what happened back then, right?) is difficult, but what is without doubt, is that it benefits Kremlin and the Terrible Russkiy Mir.

    Sukhankin is also an active participant in the anti-Russian propaganda efforts of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), where he regularly rubs shoulders and tries to imitate another well known "researcher" and expert on Russian maskirovka, dezinformatsiya and active measures, Russophobic fantasy and sci-fi author Mark Galeotti.

    1. archie1954 says: September 17, 2019 at 3:57 pm For Heaven's sake, the worst country for meddling in other nations' internal affairs is the US, by far! With respect to the Arctic, both Canada and Russia signed the Treaty of the Sea, under which various challenges to ownership of the seabed are settled by the terms of the treaty. The US, of course didn't sign it. Why would they when they sincerely believe that their impressive military can just grab whatever pieces of the Arctic they want.

      As a matter of fact, the US wants to separate Canada right across the middle by designating the waterway between the mainland and the Arctic Islands as an international one. It is the US which is meddling in Canada's internal affairs, not Russia!

      Like Like Reply

  2. Patrick Armstrong says: September 11, 2019 at 7:35 am The guys just trying to get a job by saying what the Boss wants to hear.
  1. Josh says: September 11, 2019 at 8:45 am It always baffles me how, usually motivated by an American Russophobe, the Arctic gets used or abused for this polemic. As you correctly point out, the Arctic council is an example of multipolar peaceful talks. In addition, we forget that when we look at the Arctic sea routes opening up, that it is primarily the NEP – the route along Russia and in Russian waters – is the one more navigable. Yet even to keep that one open for the small amount of time per year, Russia has a lot of maintenance to do with expensive ice breakers. It follows quite logically that Russia puts a lot of effort and money into this; and the regimented discipline of the army is the better and cheaper option for the safety and rescue services.

    If Canada wanted to do the same thing in the NWP, not only is this route much more treacherous, iced up and difficult, the investment would be higher than that which Russia is making, while global warming will only help this passage marginally.

    All this to say that the sea routes are the most talked about issues here; mineral, oil and other deposits along the continental shelves are dealt with rigourously and with full support from all sides through the UN. The only small conflict is the disputed island between Canada and the US.

[Sep 17, 2019] Iran Rejects US Accusation It Is Behind Saudi Attacks

Notable quotes:
"... Send Pompeo to the UN...... looks like yellow cake to me. ..."
Sep 17, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , September 15, 2019 at 06:19 AM

Iran Rejects US Accusation It Is Behind
Saudi Attacks https://nyti.ms/30iNte7
NYT - Michael Wolgelenter - September 15

Iran on Sunday forcefully rejected charges by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that it was responsible for drone attacks that caused serious damage to two crucial Saudi Arabian oil installations, with the foreign minister dismissing the remarks as "max deceit."

The attacks on Saturday, which hold the potential to disrupt global oil supplies, were claimed by Houthi rebels in Yemen. Mr. Pompeo said that Iran had launched "an unprecedented attack on the world's oil supply," although he did not offer any evidence and stopped short of saying that Iran had carried out the missile strikes.

The Houthis are part of a complex regional dynamic in the Middle East, receiving support from Iran while the Saudis, Tehran's chief rival for supremacy in the region and the leader of a coalition that is fighting the Houthis in Yemen, are aligned with the United States.

Seyed Abbas Mousavi, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, castigated the Saudis for their role in the war in Yemen, where the Saudis have directed airstrikes that have caused heavy civilian casualties and exacerbated a humanitarian crisis. He also ridiculed Mr. Pompeo's comments.

The semiofficial Fars news agency reported on its English-language website that Mr. Mousavi described Mr. Pompeo's allegations as "blind and fruitless remarks" that were "meaningless" in a diplomatic context.

Saudi Arabia has yet to publicly accuse Iran of involvement in the attack. On Sunday, its Foreign Ministry urged international action to preserve the world oil supply in response to the attack, but it said nothing about assigning blame or striking back.

The developments come at a moment of rising tensions between Iran and the United States, which have mounted since President Trump pulled out of the 2015 accord in which Iran agreed with the West to restrict its nuclear program. Since the American withdrawal, Iran has gradually pulled away from its some obligations under the agreement. ...

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , September 15, 2019 at 06:23 AM
... "US & its clients are stuck in Yemen because of illusion that weapon superiority will lead to military victory," Mr. Zarif wrote on Twitter. "Blaming Iran won't end disaster. Accepting our April '15 proposal to end war & begin talks may.

The attack on Saturday, which the Houthis said involved 10 drones, represented the rebels' most serious strike since Saudi Arabia inserted itself into the conflict in Yemen four years ago. That the rebels could cause such extensive damage to such a crucial part of the global economy astonished some observers. ...

im1dc , September 16, 2019 at 04:59 AM
It's Monday September 16th, 2019 and the weeks starts off like this:

GM's UAW Strike

Yemeni Houti Rebels Drones wipe out 50% of Saudi Arabia's oil production

Trump tweets in response is "locked and loaded" implying a new US war in the ME

One of Trump's White House flunky's declared "it is better if Trump does not study an issue" before making decisions (oh yea,"Stupid is what Stupid does")

Biden and S. Warren tied in the DEM race for 2020

Piketty's new Economics tome is out

PM Netanyahu is losing his re-election bid in Israel, to be determined by tomorrow's Election

We live in interesting times...

...the question I pose for the times is 'Are the People are better lead by businessmen, politicians, academics, or intellectuals?

ilsm -> im1dc... , September 16, 2019 at 06:29 AM
The biggest damage from

"Yemeni Houti Rebels Drones wipe out 50% of Saudi Arabia's oil production"

is the ARAMCO IPO.

"Trump tweets in response is "locked and loaded" implying a new US war in the ME"

Send Pompeo to the UN...... looks like yellow cake to me.

[Sep 17, 2019] Russia Absolutely Pwn3d The FBI During Obama Years Report

Sep 17, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Transmedia001 , 8 minutes ago link

Another media spin in preparation of the public proof that the Steale dossier and Russia Gate was a soft coup and media hoax. Articles like this allow the traitors to argue that they didn't know it was fake or that certain assets were not Russian because the Russians were several steps ahead manipulating the situation using FBI hacked coms.

Time to start setting fire to every MSM outlet and making s'mores as we watch it all burn.

Koba the Dread , 21 minutes ago link

What a terrible typographical error. Somehow the word "Russian" was inserted in this text when the word "Israeli" was supposed to be used. Hey, typographers, pay more attention.

MaxThrust , 25 minutes ago link

"The technical break-through allowed Russian spies in American cities, key insights into how FBI surveillance teams were operating. "

The Russians learned how the FBI goes about lying to cover up for it's actions. How "False Flag" operations are coordinated and how entrapment schemes are run.

NiggaPleeze , 31 minutes ago link

We didn't understand that they were at political war with us already in the second term

Spying is not political war, moron. But fact is the Evil Empire never stopped its war against Russia - under Yeltsin they just moved it inside the country with their *** oligarch traitors, getting Russia to dismantle its industry, etc.

beemasters , 47 minutes ago link

According to a report this week, Israel has been spying on the White House. While that news itself isn't shocking, the Trump administration's response – or lack thereof – has taken many in DC by surprise.

But, unlike past administrations, the Trump team has not taken any action against surveillance by one of its closest allies, and spying on US soil has had no real consequences for Israel, American officials said.

Israeli spying is not new – but the Trump administration's response is

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/israel-trump-spy-white-house-netanyahu-surveillance-a9104776.html

They are now voting for the next POTUS in Israhell, as we speak. Will it be Netanyahu again?

Neochrome , 52 minutes ago link

We didn't understand that they were at political war with us

Is that why US was (is) spying on Merkel?

youshallnotkill , 54 minutes ago link

Russia Absolutely Pwn3d The FBI During Obama Years

And this headline makes abundantly clear which side the Tylers cheer for.

(Not that there was any doubt about it).

Joiningupthedots , 1 hour ago link

So the FBI wants more money for "integrated" communications or something?

This **** is not dissimilar to the CIA/MI6 pet rock trasmitters in the Moscow parks.

Spy agencies spy on each other....its their job LOL

Heroic Couplet , 1 hour ago link

"Shortly before the Obama administration approved a deal granting Russia 20% of America's uranium," LInk? If Russia mines uranium in the Western Hemisphere, it cannot export it. See Forbes Magazine, 13Dec2018, the article debunking Hillary-Uranium One.

booboo , 1 hour ago link

All roads lead to that neocon infested festering cesspool of anti American shitlips called the State Department. With friends like that who needs "the Russians"

truthalwayswinsout , 1 hour ago link

How can you believe this?

If the Russians did crack certain communications and the US knew it, they would use that to really screw the Russians and let them think they had us by the balls.

And they certainly would no be admitting any of it in an article.

Totally_Disillusioned , 1 hour ago link

And all the while the FBI / DOJ was running cover for the Clintonn Foundation and the Clintons, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and the Awan brothers and surveilling American citizens with help of contractors. NOT ONE FBI whistle blower came forward...

I have been asking "Why?" At first I thought perhaps the threats to self/family may be the reason, but I'm now convinced THEY WERE ALL IN ON THE CORRUPTION. This agency is totally and thoroughly corrupt and beyond redemption. This is why Wray continues to carry water for the corrupt FBI leadership. Time to completely dismantle and re-engineer into the US Marshalls office.

[Sep 15, 2019] Donald Trump as the DNC s nominee by Michael Hudson

Highly recommended!
DNC is a criminal organization and the fact that Debbie Wasserman Schultz escaped justice is deeply regreatable.
Notable quotes:
"... The problem facing the Democratic National Committee today remains the same as in 2016: How to block even a moderately left-wing social democrat by picking a candidate guaranteed to lose to Trump, so as to continue the policies that serve banks, the financial markets and military spending for Cold War 2.0. ..."
"... Trump meanwhile has done most everything the Democratic Donor Class wants: He has cut taxes on the wealthy, cut social spending for the population at large, backed Quantitative Easing to inflate the stock and bond markets, and pursued Cold War 2.0. Best of all, his abrasive style has enabled Democrats to blame the Republicans for the giveaway to the rich, as if they would have followed a different policy. ..."
"... The effect has been to make America into a one-party state. Republicans act as the most blatant lobbyists for the Donor Class. But people can vote for a representative of the One Percent and the military-industrial complex in either the Republican or Democratic column. That is why most Americans owe allegiance to no party. ..."
"... I'm just curious about how much longer this log-jam situation can persist before real political realignment takes place. Bernie Sander is ultimately a relic not a representative of new political vigor running through the party, like Trump he would be largely be on his own without much congressional support from his own party. ..."
"... As the 2016 election and Brexit have illuminated, globalisation is a religion for the upper middle classes. ..."
"... They just refuse to understand that political solidarity, key to any such policies is permanently damaged by immigration. ..."
"... If you make people chose between their ethnicity being displaced and class conflict, they'll pick the preservation of their ethnicity and it's territory every time. I ..."
"... My prediction: The elites in the US won't give way, people will simply become demoralised and the Trump/Sanders moment will pass with significant damage done to the legitimacy of American democracy and media but with progressives unable to deal with immigration (Much like the right can't deal with global warming) they will fail to get much done. The general population has become too atomised and detached, beaten-down bystanders to their own politics and society to mount a popular political movement. Immigrants, recent descendants of immigrants and the upper middle classes will continue to instinctually understand globalisation is how they loot America and will not vote for 'extreme' candidates that threaten this. The upper middle class will continue to dominate the overton window and use it to inject utter economic lies to the public. ..."
Sep 15, 2019 | www.unz.com

Originally from: Breaking Up the Democratic Party, by Michael Hudson - The Unz Review

I hope that the candidate who is clearly the voters' choice, Bernie Sanders, may end up as the party's nominee. If he is, I'm sure he'll beat Donald Trump handily, as he would have done four years ago. But I fear that the DNC's Donor Class will push Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or even Pete Buttigieg down the throats of voters. Just as when they backed Hillary the last time around, they hope that their anointed neoliberal will be viewed as the lesser evil for a program little different from that of the Republicans.

So Thursday's reality TV run-off is about "who's the least evil?" An honest reality show's questions would focus on "What are you against ?" That would attract a real audience, because people are much clearer about what they're against: the vested interests, Wall Street, the drug companies and other monopolies, the banks, landlords, corporate raiders and private-equity asset strippers. But none of this is to be permitted on the magic island of authorized candidates (not including Tulsi Gabbard, who was purged from further debates for having dared to mention the unmentionable).

Donald Trump as the DNC's nominee

The problem facing the Democratic National Committee today remains the same as in 2016: How to block even a moderately left-wing social democrat by picking a candidate guaranteed to lose to Trump, so as to continue the policies that serve banks, the financial markets and military spending for Cold War 2.0.

DNC donors favor Joe Biden, long-time senator from the credit-card and corporate-shell state of Delaware, and opportunistic California prosecutor Kamala Harris, with a hopey-changey grab bag alternative in smooth-talking small-town Rorschach blot candidate Pete Buttigieg. These easy victims are presented as "electable" in full knowledge that they will fail against Trump.

Trump meanwhile has done most everything the Democratic Donor Class wants: He has cut taxes on the wealthy, cut social spending for the population at large, backed Quantitative Easing to inflate the stock and bond markets, and pursued Cold War 2.0. Best of all, his abrasive style has enabled Democrats to blame the Republicans for the giveaway to the rich, as if they would have followed a different policy.

The Democratic Party's role is to protect Republicans from attack from the left, steadily following the Republican march rightward. Claiming that this is at least in the direction of being "centrist," the Democrats present themselves as the lesser evil (which is still evil, of course), simply as pragmatic in not letting hopes for "the perfect" (meaning moderate social democracy) block the spirit of compromise with what is attainable, "getting things done" by cooperating across the aisle and winning Republican support. That is what Joe Biden promises.

The effect has been to make America into a one-party state. Republicans act as the most blatant lobbyists for the Donor Class. But people can vote for a representative of the One Percent and the military-industrial complex in either the Republican or Democratic column. That is why most Americans owe allegiance to no party.

The Democratic National Committee worries that voters may disturb this alliance by nominating a left-wing reform candidate. The DNC easily solved this problem in 2016: When Bernie Sanders intruded into its space, it the threw the election. It scheduled the party's early defining primaries in Republican states whose voters leaned right, and packed the nominating convention with Donor Class super-delegates.

After the dust settled, having given many party members political asthma, the DNC pretended that it was all an unfortunate political error. But of course it was not a mistake at all. The DNC preferred to lose with Hillary than win with Bernie, whom springtime polls showed would be the easy winner over Trump. Potential voters who didn't buy into the program either stayed home or voted green.

follyofwar , says: September 12, 2019 at 2:20 pm GMT

No votes will be cast for months, so I don't know how Mr. Hudson can say that Sanders is "clearly the voters choice." He would be 79 on election day, well above the age when most men die, which is something that voters should seriously consider. Whoever his VP is will probably be president before the end of Old Bernie's first term, so I hope he chooses his VP wisely.

In any case I laugh at how the media always reports that Biden, who has obviously lost more than a few brain cells, has such a commanding lead over this field of second-raters. The voters, having much better things to do, haven't even started to pay attention yet.

And, how could anyone seriously believe in these polls anyway? Only older people have land lines today. If calling people is the methodology pollsters are using, then the results would be heavily skewed towards former VP Biden, whose name everyone knows. I lost all faith in polls when the media was saying, with certainty, that Hillary was a lock to win against the insurgent Trump.

Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate beside Trump with charisma today. With her cool demeanor, she is certainly the least unlikeable. She would be Trump's most formidable opponent. But the democrats, like their counterparts, are owned by Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex. Sadly, most democrats still believe that the party is working in their best interests, while the republicans are the party of the rich.

If you watch the debates tonight, which I will not be, you will notice that Tulsi Gabbard won't be on stage. That is by design. She is a leper. At least the republicans allowed Trump to be onstage in 2016, which makes them more democratic than the democrats. Plus they didn't have Super Delegates to prevent Trump from achieving the nomination he had rightfully won. Something to think about since the DNC, not the voters, annointed Hillary last time.

If the YouTube Oligarchs still allow it, I plan on watching the post-debate analysis with characters like Richard Spencer and Eric Striker. Those guys are most entertaining, and have insights that are not permitted to be uttered in the controlled, mind-numbing farce of the mainstream media.

anon [110] Disclaimer , says: September 12, 2019 at 3:29 pm GMT
> When neoliberals shout, "But that's socialism," Americans finally are beginning to say, "Then give us socialism."

True, true! Also, when the neoliberals shout, "But that's nationalism," Americans finally are beginning to say, "Then give us nationalism."

One plus one is

Dutch Boy , says: September 12, 2019 at 3:42 pm GMT
Elizabeth Warren seems a more likely nominee than Sanders.
Biff , says: September 12, 2019 at 4:37 pm GMT
@Dutch Boy

Elizabeth Warren seems a more likely nominee than Sanders.

Elizabeth Warren is phony as phuck(PAP). Just like forked tongued Obama she's really just a tool for the neo-liberal establishment, which does make her more likely.

Svevlad , says: September 12, 2019 at 5:06 pm GMT
@anon Hehe. I propose that the anti-neoliberals join forces to beat this terrible beast...
Altai , says: September 12, 2019 at 6:19 pm GMT
Here is another question. Can the DNC or RNC really change institutionally fast enough?

I'm just curious about how much longer this log-jam situation can persist before real political realignment takes place. Bernie Sander is ultimately a relic not a representative of new political vigor running through the party, like Trump he would be largely be on his own without much congressional support from his own party.

As the 2016 election and Brexit have illuminated, globalisation is a religion for the upper middle classes. Many of them may be progressives but they refuse to understand the very non-progressive consequences of mass immigration (Or, one should say over-immigration) or globalisation more generally. The increasing defection of such individuals to the Liberal Democrats in Britain is a fascinating example. They just refuse to understand that political solidarity, key to any such policies is permanently damaged by immigration.

It is interesting to see the see-saw effect of UKip and now the Brexit party in the UK (Well, in England). With them first drawing working class voters from Labour without increasing Conservative performance, bringing about a massive conservative majority and now threatening to siphon voters from the Tories with the opposite effect.

But UKip and later the Brexit party almost exist through the indispensable leadership of Nigel Farage and a very specific motivating goal of leaving the EU. I can't see a third party rising to put pressure on the mainstream parties.

If you make people chose between their ethnicity being displaced and class conflict, they'll pick the preservation of their ethnicity and it's territory every time. I f the centre left refuses to understand this (Something that wouldn't have been hard for them to understand when they still drew candidates from the working classes) they will continue their slide into oblivion as they have done across the Western world. (Excluding 2 party systems and Denmark where they do understand this)

My prediction: The elites in the US won't give way, people will simply become demoralised and the Trump/Sanders moment will pass with significant damage done to the legitimacy of American democracy and media but with progressives unable to deal with immigration (Much like the right can't deal with global warming) they will fail to get much done. The general population has become too atomised and detached, beaten-down bystanders to their own politics and society to mount a popular political movement. Immigrants, recent descendants of immigrants and the upper middle classes will continue to instinctually understand globalisation is how they loot America and will not vote for 'extreme' candidates that threaten this. The upper middle class will continue to dominate the overton window and use it to inject utter economic lies to the public.

The novel internet mass media outlets that allowed such unpoliced political discussion to reach mass audiences will be pacified by whatever means and America will slide into an Italian style trans-generational malaise at a national level for some time.

A123 , says: September 12, 2019 at 6:48 pm GMT
@Altai

Here is another question. Can the DNC or RNC really change institutionally fast enough?

Trump is trying to change the RNC away from Globalist elites and towards Christian Populist beliefs and Main Street America. I am some what hopeful, as the U.S. is not alone in this trajectory. There is a global tail wind that should help the GOP change quickly enough.

The true test will be the 2024 GOP nomination. A bold choice will have to break through to keep the RNC from backsliding into the clutches of Globalist failure.

PEACE

davidgmillsatty , says: September 12, 2019 at 7:43 pm GMT
I think Sanders could have beat Trump in 2016. This time around it is not that clear because so many of his supporters in 2016 feel burnt.

Badly burnt. Or Bernt. He threw his support for Hillary, even if it was tepid, and then got a bad case of Russiagateitis which his base on the left really hated. His left base never bought Russiagate for a minute. We knew it was an internal leak, probably by Seth Rich, who provided all the information to Assange. He still seems to be a strong Israel supporter even if has stood up to Netanyahu.

And while it may seem odd, many of his base on the left have grown weary of the global climate change agenda.

He has not advocated nuclear power and there is a growing movement for that on the left, especially by those who think renewables will not generate the power we need.

But since Sanders does seem to attract the rural and suburban vote more than any other Democrat, Sanders has a chance to chip away at Trumps' base and win the Electoral College. Another horrible loss to rural and suburban America by the Democrats will cost them the EC again by a substantial margin, even if they manage to pull off another popular vote win.

A123 , says: September 13, 2019 at 12:20 am GMT
@bluedog

the republican party is as globalist as you can find,and I'm sure you will be the first one to inform us when the global elite including those in America throw in the towel,

Some elite Globalist NeverTrumpers, such as George Will and Bill Kristol, have thrown in the towel on the GOP. This allows their "neocon" followers to return to their roots in the war mongering Democrat Party. So it *IS* happening.

The real questions are:
-- Can it happen fast enough?
-- Can it be sustained after Donald Trump term limits out?

I'm not bold enough to say it is inevitable. All I will say is, "There are reasons to be at least mildly hopeful."

PEACE

RadicalCenter , says: September 13, 2019 at 3:45 am GMT
@follyofwar Based on gabbard's immigration statements, voting for her is also voting for our continuing displacement.
Carlton Meyer , says: Website September 13, 2019 at 4:22 am GMT
Has everyone forgot the last time the DNC openly cheated Sanders he said nothing publicly, but then endorsed Clinton? Sanders knows he is not allowed to become president, his role to prevent the formation of a third party, and to keep the Green Party small. Otherwise he would jump to the Green Party right now and may beat the DNC and Trump.

Sanders treats progressives like Charlie Brown. Once again, inviting them to run a kick the football, only to pull it away and watch them fall. He recently backed off his opposition to the open borders crazies, rarely mentions cuts to military spending to fund things, and has even joined the stupid fake russiagate bandwagon.

Note that he dismisses the third party idea as unworkable, when he already knows the DNC is unworkable. Why not give the Green party a chance? Cause he don't want to win knowing he'd be killed or impeached for some reason.

follyofwar , says: September 13, 2019 at 2:06 pm GMT
@Carlton Meyer The Stalinist DNC openly cheated Tulsi Gabbard when they left her off the debate stage last night. When asked about it on 'The View' recently, Sanders said nothing in her defense, or that she deserved to be on the stage. Nice way to stab her in the back for leaving her DNC position to support you last time, Bernie. Socialist Sanders wants to be president, yet is afraid of the DNC. Nice!

Those polls were rigged against Tulsi, and everyone who is paying attention knows it. But, far from hurting her candidacy by not making the DNC's arbitrary cut, her exclusion may wind up helping her. Kim Iverson, Michael Tracey, and comedian Jimmy Dore, anti-war progressive YouTubers with large, loyal followings, have lambasted the out-of touch DNC for its actions. Tucker Carlson on the anti-war right has also done so.

One hopes that the DNC's stupidity in censoring her message may wind up being the best thing ever for Tulsi's insurgent candidacy. We shall see. OTOH, who can trust the polls to tell us the truth of where her popularity stands.

follyofwar , says: September 13, 2019 at 2:29 pm GMT
@RadicalCenter Do you forget about Trump's declaration that he wants the largest amount of immigration ever, as long as they come in legally? There are no good guys in our two sclerotic monopoly parties when it comes to immigration. Since both are terrible on that topic, at least Tulsi seems to have the anti-war principles that Trump does not.
Justvisiting , says: September 13, 2019 at 7:37 pm GMT
@Carlton Meyer Great comment.

Bernie has had many opportunities in the past few years to show real courage and stand for something, anything. He has failed every time.

I am actually beginning to feel sorry for him–he knows he has a mission, but he just can't seem to figure out what it is anymore

Getting old is not fun.

[Sep 15, 2019] Demythologizing the Roots of the New Cold War by Ted Snider

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Like the Cold War, the new cold war was triggered by an American lie. It was a lie so duplicitous, so all encompassing, that it would lead many Russians to see the agreement that ended the cold war as a devastating and humiliating deception that was really intended to clear the way for the US to surround and finally defeat the Soviet Union. It was a lie that tilled the soil for all future "Russian aggression." ..."
"... That key promise made to Gorbachev was shattered, first by President Clinton and then subsequently supported by every American President: NATO engulfed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, most recently, Montenegro. ..."
"... When Clinton decided to break Bush's promise and betray Russia, George Kennen, father of the containment policy, warned that NATO expansion would be "the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-cold-war era." "Such a decision," he prophesied, "may be expected to . . . restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations . . .." ..."
"... As Matlock explains, the urgent transition allowed "privileged insiders[to] join the criminals who had been running a black market [and to] steal what they could, as fast as they could." The sudden, uncompromising transition imposed on Russia by the United States enabled, according to Cohen, "a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its people into poverty and misery." ..."
"... The rape of Russia was funded, overseen and ordered by the United States and handed over by President George H.W. Bush to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much of their advice, Matlock says generously, "was not only useless, but sometimes actually damaging." ..."
"... The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US and the transition experts and international development experts it funded and sent over led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." Russia's reward for ending the Cold War and joining the Western economic community was, in Cohen's words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration of the highly professionalized Soviet middle class, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy [for men, it had fallen below sixty], the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia's wealth, and more." ..."
"... By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." 75%! Millions and millions of Russian lives were destroyed by the American welcoming of Russia into the global economic community. ..."
"... But before Putin came to power, there was more Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a necessity for Clinton and the United States because Yeltsin was the pliable puppet who would continue to enforce the cruel economic transition. But to continue the interference in, and betrayal of, the Russian people economically, it would now be necessary to interfere in and betray the Russian democracy. ..."
"... Intoxicated with American support, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament that had rescinded his powers and abolished the constitution of which he was in violation. In a 636-2 vote, the Russian parliament impeached Yeltsin. But, President Clinton again sided with Yeltsin against the Russian people and the Russian law, backed him and gave him $2.5 billion in aid. Clinton was blocking the Russian people's choice of leaders. ..."
"... "Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers, drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996." ..."
"... Asserting its right as the unipolar victor of a Cold War it never won, betraying the central promise of the negotiated end of the cold war by engulfing Russia's neighbors, arming those nations against its written and signed word and stealing all Russian hope in capitalism and democracy by kidnapping and torturing Russian capitalism and democracy, the roots of the new cold war were not planted by Russian lies and aggression, as the doctrinal Western version teaches, but by the American lies and aggression that the fact checked, demythologized version of history reveals. ..."
Sep 09, 2019 | original.antiwar.com

When Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev received his peace prize in 1990, the Nobel Prize committee declared that "the two mighty power blocs, have managed to abandon their life-threatening confrontation" and confidently expressed that "It is our hope that we are now celebrating the end of the Cold War." Recently, U.N. General Secretary António Guterres funereally closed the celebrations with the realization that "The Cold War is back."

In a very short span of history, the window that had finally opened for Russia and the United States to build a new international system in which they work cooperatively to address areas of common interest had slammed back closed. How was that historic opportunity wasted? Why was the road from the Nobel committee's hope to the UN's eulogy such a short one?

The doctrinal narrative that is told in the U.S. is the narrative of a very short road whose every turn was signposted by Russian lies, betrayal, deception and aggression. The American telling of history is a tale in which every blow to the new peace was a Russian blow. The fact checked version offers a demythologized history that is unrecognizably different. The demythologized version is also a history of lies, betrayal, deception and aggression, but the liar, the aggressor, is not primarily Russia, but America. It is the history of a promise so historically broken that it laid the foundation of a new cold war.

But it was not the first promise the United States broke: it was not even the first promise they broke in the new cold war.

The Hot War

Most histories of the cold war begin at the dawn of the post World War II period. But the history of U.S-U.S.S.R. animosity starts long before that: it starts as soon as possible, and it was hot long before it turned cold.

The label "Red Scare" first appeared, not in the 1940s or 50s, but in 1919. Though it is a chapter seldom included in the history of American-Russian relations, America actively and aggressively intervened in the Russian civil war in an attempt to push the Communists back down. The United States cooperated with anti-Bolshevik forces: by mid 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had sent 13,000 American troops to Soviet soil. They would remain there for two years, killing and injuring thousands. Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev would later remind America of "the time you sent your troops to quell the revolution." Churchill would record for history the admission that the West "shot Soviet Russians on sight," that they were "invaders on Russian soil," that "[t]hey armed the enemies of the Soviet government," that "[t]hey blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed for its downfall."

When the cause was lost, and the Bolsheviks secured power, most western countries refused to recognize the communist government. However, realism prevailed, and within a few short years, by the mid 1920s, most countries had recognized the communist government and restored diplomatic relations. All but the US It was not until several years later that Franklin D. Roosevelt finally recognized the Soviet government in 1933.

The Cold War

It would be a very short time before the diplomatic relations that followed the hot war would be followed by a cold war. It might even be possible to pin the beginning of the cold war down to a specific date. On April 22 and 23, President Truman told Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "Carry out his agreement" and establish a new, free, independent government in Poland as promised at Yalta. Molotov was stunned. He was stunned because it was not he that was breaking the agreement because that was not what Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had agreed to at Yalta. The final wording of the Yalta agreement never mentioned replacing Soviet control of Poland.

The agreement that Roosevelt revealed to congress and shared with the world – the one that still dominates the textbook accounts and the media stories – is not the one he secretly shook on with Stalin. Roosevelt lied to congress and the American people. Then he lied to Stalin.

In exchange for Soviet support for the creation of the United Nations, Roosevelt secretly agreed to Soviet predominance in Poland and Eastern Europe. The cold war story that the Soviet Union marched into Eastern Europe and stole it for itself is a lie: Roosevelt handed it to them.

So did Churchill. If Roosevelt's motivation was getting the UN, Churchill's was getting Greece. Fearing that the Soviet Union would invade India and the oil fields of Iran, Churchill saw Greece as the geographical roadblock and determined to hold on to it at all cost. The cost, it turned out, was Romania. Churchill would give Stalin Romania to protect his borders; Stalin would give Churchill Greece to protect his empire's borders. The deal was sealed on October 9, 1944.

Churchill says that in their secret meeting, he asked Stalin, "how would it do for you to have ninety percent predominance in Romania, for us to have ninety percent predominance in Greece? . . ." He then went on to offer a fifty-fifty power split in in Yugoslavia and Hungary and to offer the Soviets seventy-five percent control of Bulgaria. The exact conversation may never have happened, according to the political record, but Churchill's account captures the spirit and certainly captures the secret agreement.

Contrary to the official narrative, Stalin never betrayed the west and stole Eastern Europe: Poland, Romania and the rest were given to him in secret. Then Roosevelt lied to congress and to the world.

That American lie raised the curtain on the cold war.

The New Cold War

Like the Cold War, the new cold war was triggered by an American lie. It was a lie so duplicitous, so all encompassing, that it would lead many Russians to see the agreement that ended the cold war as a devastating and humiliating deception that was really intended to clear the way for the US to surround and finally defeat the Soviet Union. It was a lie that tilled the soil for all future "Russian aggression."

At the close of the cold war, at a meeting held on February 9, 1990, George H.W. Bush's Secretary of State, James Baker, promised Gorbachev that if NATO got Germany and Russia pulled its troops out of East Germany, NATO would not expand east of Germany and engulf the former Soviet states. Gorbachev records in his memoirs that he agreed to Baker's terms "with the guarantee that NATO jurisdiction or troops would not extend east of the current line." In Super-power Illusions , Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was the American ambassador to Russia at the time and was present at the meeting, confirms Gorbachev's account, saying that it "coincides with my notes of the conversation except that mine indicate that Baker added "not one inch." Matlock adds that Gorbachev was assured that NATO would not move into Eastern Europe as the Warsaw Pact moved out, that "the understanding at Malta [was] that the United States would not 'take advantage' of a Soviet military withdrawal from Eastern Europe." At the February 9 meeting, Baker assured Gorbachev that "neither the President or I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place."

But the promise was not made just once, and it was not made just by the United States. The promise was made on two consecutive days: first by the Americans and then by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. According to West German foreign ministry documents, on February 10, 1990, the day after James Baker's promise, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told his Soviet counterpart Eduard Shevardnadze "'For us . . . one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.' And because the conversation revolved mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: 'As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general.'"

A few days earlier, on January 31, 1990, Genscher had said in a major speech that there would not be "an expansion of NATO territory to the east, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union."

Gorbachev says the promise was made not to expand NATO "as much as a thumb's width further to the east." Putin also says mourns the broken promise, asking at a conference in Munich in February 2007, "What happened to the assurances our Western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them."

Putin went on to remind his audience of the assurances by pointing out that the existence of the NATO promise is not just the perception of him and Gorbachev. It was also the view of the NATO General Secretary at the time: "But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. [Manfred] Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: 'The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.' Where are those guarantees?"

Recent scholarship supports the Russian version of the story. Russian expert and Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, Richard Sakwa says that "[r]ecent studies demonstrate that the commitment not to enlarge NATO covered the whole former Soviet bloc and not just East Germany." And Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Politics at Princeton University and of Russian Studies and History at New York University, adds that the National Security Archive has now published the actual documents detailing what Gorbachev was promised. Published on December 12, 2017, the documents finally, and authoritatively, reveal that "The truth, and the promises broken, are much more expansive than previously known: all of the Western powers involved – the US, the UK, France, Germany itself – made the same promise to Gorbachev on multiple occasions and in various emphatic ways."

That key promise made to Gorbachev was shattered, first by President Clinton and then subsequently supported by every American President: NATO engulfed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, most recently, Montenegro.

It was this shattered promise, this primal betrayal, this NATO expansion to Russia's borders that created the conditions and causes of future conflicts and aggressions. When, in 2008, NATO promised Georgia and Ukraine eventual membership, Russia saw the threat of NATO encroaching right to its borders. It is in Georgia and Ukraine that Russia felt it had to draw the line with NATO encroachment into its core sphere of influence. Sakwa says that the war in Georgia was "the first war to stop NATO enlargement; Ukraine was the second." What are often cited as acts of Russian aggression that helped maintain the new cold war are properly understood as acts of Russian defense against US aggression that made a lie out of the promise that ended the Cold War.

When Clinton decided to break Bush's promise and betray Russia, George Kennen, father of the containment policy, warned that NATO expansion would be "the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-cold-war era." "Such a decision," he prophesied, "may be expected to . . . restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations . . .."

The broken promise restored the cold war. Though it is the most significant root of the new cold war, it was not the first. There was a prior broken promise, and this time the man who betrayed Russia was President H.W. Bush.

The end of the Cold War resulted from negotiations and not from any sort of military victory. Stephen Cohen says that "Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush negotiated with the last Soviet Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, what they said was the end of the Cold War on the shared, expressed premise that it was ending 'with no losers, only winners.'"

The end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union occurred so closely chronologically that it permitted the American mythologizers to conflate them in the public imagination and create the doctrinal history in which the US defeat of the Soviet Union ended the cold war. But the US did not defeat the Soviet Union. Gorbachev brought about what Sakwa calls a "self-willed disintegration of the Soviet bloc." The Soviet Union came to an end, not by external force or pressure, but out of Gorbachev's recognition of the Soviet Union's own self interest. Matlock flatly states that "pressure from governments outside the Soviet Union, whether from America or Europe or anywhere else, had nothing to do with [the Soviet collapse]." "Cohen demythologizes the history by reinstating the chronological order: Gorbachev negotiated the end of the cold war "well before the disintegration of the Soviet Union." The Cold War officially ended well before the end of the Soviet Union with Gorbachev's December 7, 1988 address to the UN

Matlock says that "Gorbachev is right when he says that we all won the Cold War." He says that President Reagan would write in his notes, "Let there be no talk of winners and losers." When Gorbachev compelled the countries of the Warsaw Pact to adopt reforms like his perestroika in the Soviet Union and warmed them that the Soviet army would no longer be there to keep their communist regimes in power, Matlock points out in Superpower Illusions that "Bush assured Gorbachev that the United States would not claim victory if the Eastern Europeans were allowed to replace the Communist regimes that had been imposed on them." Both the reality and the promise were that there was no winner of the Cold War: it was a negotiated peace that was in the interest of both countries.

When in 1992, during his losing re-election campaign, President Bush arrogantly boasted that "We won the Cold War!" he broke his own promise to Gorbachev and helped plant the roots of the new cold war. "In psychological and political terms," Matlock says, "President Bush planted a landmine under the future U.S.-Russian relationship" when he broke his promise and made that claim.

Bush's broken promise had two significant effects. Psychologically, it created the appearance in the Russian psyche that Gorbachev had been tricked by America: it eroded trust in America and in the new peace. Politically, it created in the American psyche the false idea that Russia was a defeated country whose sphere of interest did not need to be considered. Both these perceptions contributed to the new cold war.

Not only was the broken promise of NATO expansion not the first broken American promise, it was also not the last. In 1997, when President Clinton made the decision to expand NATO much more than an inch to the east, he at least signed the Russia-NATO Founding Act , which explicitly promised that as NATO expanded east, there would be no "permanent stationing of substantial combat forces." This obliterated American promise planted the third root of the new cold war.

Since that third promise, NATO has, in the words of Stephen Cohen, built up its "permanent land, sea and air power near Russian territory, along with missile-defense installations." US and NATO weapons and troops have butted right up against Russia's borders, while anti-missile installations have surrounded it, leading to the feeling of betrayal in Russia and the fear of aggression. Among the earliest moves of the Trump administration were the moving of NATO troops into Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and nearby Norway.

Mikhail Gorbachev, who offered the West Russia and cooperation in place of the Soviet Union and Cold War, was rewarded with lies, broken promises and betrayal. That was the sowing of the first seeds of the new cold war. The second planting happened during the Yeltsin years that followed. During this stage, the Russian people were betrayed because their hopes for democracy and for an economic system compatible with the West were both destroyed by American intervention.

The goal, Matlock too gently explains, "had to be a shift of the bulk of the economy to private ownership." What transpired was what Naomi Klein called in The Shock Doctrine "one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history." The States allowed no gradual transition. Matlock says the "Western experts advised a clean break with the past and a transition to private ownership without delay." But there was no legitimate private capital coming out of the communist system, so there was no private money with which to privatize. So, there was only one place for the money to come. As Matlock explains, the urgent transition allowed "privileged insiders[to] join the criminals who had been running a black market [and to] steal what they could, as fast as they could." The sudden, uncompromising transition imposed on Russia by the United States enabled, according to Cohen, "a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its people into poverty and misery."

The rape of Russia was funded, overseen and ordered by the United States and handed over by President George H.W. Bush to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much of their advice, Matlock says generously, "was not only useless, but sometimes actually damaging."

Sometimes damaging? In the first year, millions lost their entire life savings. Subsidy cuts meant that many Russians didn't get paid at all. Klein says that by 1992, Russians were consuming 40% less than they were the year before, and one third of them had suddenly sunk below the poverty line. The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US and the transition experts and international development experts it funded and sent over led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." Russia's reward for ending the Cold War and joining the Western economic community was, in Cohen's words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration of the highly professionalized Soviet middle class, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy [for men, it had fallen below sixty], the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia's wealth, and more."

By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." 75%! Millions and millions of Russian lives were destroyed by the American welcoming of Russia into the global economic community.

But before Putin came to power, there was more Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a necessity for Clinton and the United States because Yeltsin was the pliable puppet who would continue to enforce the cruel economic transition. But to continue the interference in, and betrayal of, the Russian people economically, it would now be necessary to interfere in and betray the Russian democracy.

In late 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin won a year of special powers from the Russian Parliament: for one year, he was to be, in effect, the dictator of Russia to facilitate the midwifery of the birth of a democratic Russia. In March of 1992, under pressure from the, by now, impoverished, devastated and discontented population, parliament repealed the dictatorial powers it had granted him. Yeltsin responded by declaring a state of emergency, re-bestowing upon himself the repealed dictatorial powers. Russia's Constitutional Court ruled that Yeltsin was acting outside the constitution. But the US sided – against the Russian people and against the Russian Constitutional Court – with Yeltsin.

Intoxicated with American support, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament that had rescinded his powers and abolished the constitution of which he was in violation. In a 636-2 vote, the Russian parliament impeached Yeltsin. But, President Clinton again sided with Yeltsin against the Russian people and the Russian law, backed him and gave him $2.5 billion in aid. Clinton was blocking the Russian people's choice of leaders.

Yeltsin took the money and sent police officers and elite paratroopers to surround the parliament building. Clinton "praised the Russian President has (sic) having done 'quite well' in managing the standoff with the Russian Parliament," as The New York Times reported at the time. Clinton added that he thought "the United States and the free world ought to hang in there" with their support of Yeltsin against his people, their constitution and their courts, and judged Yeltsin to be "on the right side of history."

On the right side of history and armed with machine guns and tanks, in October 1993, Yeltsin's troops opened fire on the crowd of protesters, killing about 100 people before setting the Russian parliament building on fire. By the time the day was over, Yeltsin's troops had killed approximately 500 people and wounded nearly 1,000. Still, Clinton stood with Yeltsin. He provided ludicrous cover for Yeltsin's massacre , claiming that "I don't see that he had any choice . If such a thing happened in the United States, you would have expected me to take tough action against it." Clinton's Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, said that the US supported Yeltsin's suspension of parliament in these "extraordinary times."

In 1996, elections were looming, and America's hegemonic dreams still needed Yeltsin in power. But it wasn't going to happen without help. Yeltsin's popularity was nonexistent, and his approval rating was at about 6%. According to Cohen, Clinton's interference in Russian politics, his "crusade" to "reform Russia," had by now become official policy . And so, America boldly interfered directly in Russian elections . Three American political consultants, receiving "direct assistance from Bill Clinton's White House," secretly ran Yeltsin's reelection campaign. As Time magazine broke the story , "For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin's campaign."

"Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers, drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996."

More incriminating still is that Richard Dresner, one of the three American consultants, maintained a direct line to Clinton's Chief Strategist, Dick Morris. According to reporting by Sean Guillory , in his book, Behind the Oval Office , Morris says that, with Clinton's approval, he received weekly briefings from Dresner that he would give to Clinton. Based on those briefings, Clinton would then provide recommendations to Dresner through Morris.

Then ambassador to Russia, Thomas Pickering, even pressured an opposing candidate to drop out of the election to improve Yeltsin's odds of winning.

The US not only helped run Yeltsin's campaign, they helped pay for it. The US backed a $10.2 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan for Russia, the second-biggest loan the IMF had ever given. The New York Times reported that the loan was "expected to be helpful to President Boris N. Yeltsin in the presidential election in June." The Times explained that the loan was "a vote of confidence" for Yeltsin who "has been lagging well behind in opinion polls" and added that the US Treasury Secretary "welcomed the fund's decision."

Yeltsin won the election by 13%, and Time magazine's cover declared: "Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win". Cohen reports that the US ambassador to Russia boasted that "without our leadership we would see a considerably different Russia today." That's a confession of election interference.

Asserting its right as the unipolar victor of a Cold War it never won, betraying the central promise of the negotiated end of the cold war by engulfing Russia's neighbors, arming those nations against its written and signed word and stealing all Russian hope in capitalism and democracy by kidnapping and torturing Russian capitalism and democracy, the roots of the new cold war were not planted by Russian lies and aggression, as the doctrinal Western version teaches, but by the American lies and aggression that the fact checked, demythologized version of history reveals.

Ted Snider writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.

[Sep 15, 2019] Donald Trump as the DNC s nominee by Michael Hudson

Highly recommended!
DNC is a criminal organization and the fact that Debbie Wasserman Schultz escaped justice is deeply regreatable.
Notable quotes:
"... The problem facing the Democratic National Committee today remains the same as in 2016: How to block even a moderately left-wing social democrat by picking a candidate guaranteed to lose to Trump, so as to continue the policies that serve banks, the financial markets and military spending for Cold War 2.0. ..."
"... Trump meanwhile has done most everything the Democratic Donor Class wants: He has cut taxes on the wealthy, cut social spending for the population at large, backed Quantitative Easing to inflate the stock and bond markets, and pursued Cold War 2.0. Best of all, his abrasive style has enabled Democrats to blame the Republicans for the giveaway to the rich, as if they would have followed a different policy. ..."
"... The effect has been to make America into a one-party state. Republicans act as the most blatant lobbyists for the Donor Class. But people can vote for a representative of the One Percent and the military-industrial complex in either the Republican or Democratic column. That is why most Americans owe allegiance to no party. ..."
"... I'm just curious about how much longer this log-jam situation can persist before real political realignment takes place. Bernie Sander is ultimately a relic not a representative of new political vigor running through the party, like Trump he would be largely be on his own without much congressional support from his own party. ..."
"... As the 2016 election and Brexit have illuminated, globalisation is a religion for the upper middle classes. ..."
"... They just refuse to understand that political solidarity, key to any such policies is permanently damaged by immigration. ..."
"... If you make people chose between their ethnicity being displaced and class conflict, they'll pick the preservation of their ethnicity and it's territory every time. I ..."
"... My prediction: The elites in the US won't give way, people will simply become demoralised and the Trump/Sanders moment will pass with significant damage done to the legitimacy of American democracy and media but with progressives unable to deal with immigration (Much like the right can't deal with global warming) they will fail to get much done. The general population has become too atomised and detached, beaten-down bystanders to their own politics and society to mount a popular political movement. Immigrants, recent descendants of immigrants and the upper middle classes will continue to instinctually understand globalisation is how they loot America and will not vote for 'extreme' candidates that threaten this. The upper middle class will continue to dominate the overton window and use it to inject utter economic lies to the public. ..."
Sep 15, 2019 | www.unz.com

Originally from: Breaking Up the Democratic Party, by Michael Hudson - The Unz Review

I hope that the candidate who is clearly the voters' choice, Bernie Sanders, may end up as the party's nominee. If he is, I'm sure he'll beat Donald Trump handily, as he would have done four years ago. But I fear that the DNC's Donor Class will push Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or even Pete Buttigieg down the throats of voters. Just as when they backed Hillary the last time around, they hope that their anointed neoliberal will be viewed as the lesser evil for a program little different from that of the Republicans.

So Thursday's reality TV run-off is about "who's the least evil?" An honest reality show's questions would focus on "What are you against ?" That would attract a real audience, because people are much clearer about what they're against: the vested interests, Wall Street, the drug companies and other monopolies, the banks, landlords, corporate raiders and private-equity asset strippers. But none of this is to be permitted on the magic island of authorized candidates (not including Tulsi Gabbard, who was purged from further debates for having dared to mention the unmentionable).

Donald Trump as the DNC's nominee

The problem facing the Democratic National Committee today remains the same as in 2016: How to block even a moderately left-wing social democrat by picking a candidate guaranteed to lose to Trump, so as to continue the policies that serve banks, the financial markets and military spending for Cold War 2.0.

DNC donors favor Joe Biden, long-time senator from the credit-card and corporate-shell state of Delaware, and opportunistic California prosecutor Kamala Harris, with a hopey-changey grab bag alternative in smooth-talking small-town Rorschach blot candidate Pete Buttigieg. These easy victims are presented as "electable" in full knowledge that they will fail against Trump.

Trump meanwhile has done most everything the Democratic Donor Class wants: He has cut taxes on the wealthy, cut social spending for the population at large, backed Quantitative Easing to inflate the stock and bond markets, and pursued Cold War 2.0. Best of all, his abrasive style has enabled Democrats to blame the Republicans for the giveaway to the rich, as if they would have followed a different policy.

The Democratic Party's role is to protect Republicans from attack from the left, steadily following the Republican march rightward. Claiming that this is at least in the direction of being "centrist," the Democrats present themselves as the lesser evil (which is still evil, of course), simply as pragmatic in not letting hopes for "the perfect" (meaning moderate social democracy) block the spirit of compromise with what is attainable, "getting things done" by cooperating across the aisle and winning Republican support. That is what Joe Biden promises.

The effect has been to make America into a one-party state. Republicans act as the most blatant lobbyists for the Donor Class. But people can vote for a representative of the One Percent and the military-industrial complex in either the Republican or Democratic column. That is why most Americans owe allegiance to no party.

The Democratic National Committee worries that voters may disturb this alliance by nominating a left-wing reform candidate. The DNC easily solved this problem in 2016: When Bernie Sanders intruded into its space, it the threw the election. It scheduled the party's early defining primaries in Republican states whose voters leaned right, and packed the nominating convention with Donor Class super-delegates.

After the dust settled, having given many party members political asthma, the DNC pretended that it was all an unfortunate political error. But of course it was not a mistake at all. The DNC preferred to lose with Hillary than win with Bernie, whom springtime polls showed would be the easy winner over Trump. Potential voters who didn't buy into the program either stayed home or voted green.

follyofwar , says: September 12, 2019 at 2:20 pm GMT

No votes will be cast for months, so I don't know how Mr. Hudson can say that Sanders is "clearly the voters choice." He would be 79 on election day, well above the age when most men die, which is something that voters should seriously consider. Whoever his VP is will probably be president before the end of Old Bernie's first term, so I hope he chooses his VP wisely.

In any case I laugh at how the media always reports that Biden, who has obviously lost more than a few brain cells, has such a commanding lead over this field of second-raters. The voters, having much better things to do, haven't even started to pay attention yet.

And, how could anyone seriously believe in these polls anyway? Only older people have land lines today. If calling people is the methodology pollsters are using, then the results would be heavily skewed towards former VP Biden, whose name everyone knows. I lost all faith in polls when the media was saying, with certainty, that Hillary was a lock to win against the insurgent Trump.

Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate beside Trump with charisma today. With her cool demeanor, she is certainly the least unlikeable. She would be Trump's most formidable opponent. But the democrats, like their counterparts, are owned by Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex. Sadly, most democrats still believe that the party is working in their best interests, while the republicans are the party of the rich.

If you watch the debates tonight, which I will not be, you will notice that Tulsi Gabbard won't be on stage. That is by design. She is a leper. At least the republicans allowed Trump to be onstage in 2016, which makes them more democratic than the democrats. Plus they didn't have Super Delegates to prevent Trump from achieving the nomination he had rightfully won. Something to think about since the DNC, not the voters, annointed Hillary last time.

If the YouTube Oligarchs still allow it, I plan on watching the post-debate analysis with characters like Richard Spencer and Eric Striker. Those guys are most entertaining, and have insights that are not permitted to be uttered in the controlled, mind-numbing farce of the mainstream media.

anon [110] Disclaimer , says: September 12, 2019 at 3:29 pm GMT
> When neoliberals shout, "But that's socialism," Americans finally are beginning to say, "Then give us socialism."

True, true! Also, when the neoliberals shout, "But that's nationalism," Americans finally are beginning to say, "Then give us nationalism."

One plus one is

Dutch Boy , says: September 12, 2019 at 3:42 pm GMT
Elizabeth Warren seems a more likely nominee than Sanders.
Biff , says: September 12, 2019 at 4:37 pm GMT
@Dutch Boy

Elizabeth Warren seems a more likely nominee than Sanders.

Elizabeth Warren is phony as phuck(PAP). Just like forked tongued Obama she's really just a tool for the neo-liberal establishment, which does make her more likely.

Svevlad , says: September 12, 2019 at 5:06 pm GMT
@anon Hehe. I propose that the anti-neoliberals join forces to beat this terrible beast...
Altai , says: September 12, 2019 at 6:19 pm GMT
Here is another question. Can the DNC or RNC really change institutionally fast enough?

I'm just curious about how much longer this log-jam situation can persist before real political realignment takes place. Bernie Sander is ultimately a relic not a representative of new political vigor running through the party, like Trump he would be largely be on his own without much congressional support from his own party.

As the 2016 election and Brexit have illuminated, globalisation is a religion for the upper middle classes. Many of them may be progressives but they refuse to understand the very non-progressive consequences of mass immigration (Or, one should say over-immigration) or globalisation more generally. The increasing defection of such individuals to the Liberal Democrats in Britain is a fascinating example. They just refuse to understand that political solidarity, key to any such policies is permanently damaged by immigration.

It is interesting to see the see-saw effect of UKip and now the Brexit party in the UK (Well, in England). With them first drawing working class voters from Labour without increasing Conservative performance, bringing about a massive conservative majority and now threatening to siphon voters from the Tories with the opposite effect.

But UKip and later the Brexit party almost exist through the indispensable leadership of Nigel Farage and a very specific motivating goal of leaving the EU. I can't see a third party rising to put pressure on the mainstream parties.

If you make people chose between their ethnicity being displaced and class conflict, they'll pick the preservation of their ethnicity and it's territory every time. I f the centre left refuses to understand this (Something that wouldn't have been hard for them to understand when they still drew candidates from the working classes) they will continue their slide into oblivion as they have done across the Western world. (Excluding 2 party systems and Denmark where they do understand this)

My prediction: The elites in the US won't give way, people will simply become demoralised and the Trump/Sanders moment will pass with significant damage done to the legitimacy of American democracy and media but with progressives unable to deal with immigration (Much like the right can't deal with global warming) they will fail to get much done. The general population has become too atomised and detached, beaten-down bystanders to their own politics and society to mount a popular political movement. Immigrants, recent descendants of immigrants and the upper middle classes will continue to instinctually understand globalisation is how they loot America and will not vote for 'extreme' candidates that threaten this. The upper middle class will continue to dominate the overton window and use it to inject utter economic lies to the public.

The novel internet mass media outlets that allowed such unpoliced political discussion to reach mass audiences will be pacified by whatever means and America will slide into an Italian style trans-generational malaise at a national level for some time.

A123 , says: September 12, 2019 at 6:48 pm GMT
@Altai

Here is another question. Can the DNC or RNC really change institutionally fast enough?

Trump is trying to change the RNC away from Globalist elites and towards Christian Populist beliefs and Main Street America. I am some what hopeful, as the U.S. is not alone in this trajectory. There is a global tail wind that should help the GOP change quickly enough.

The true test will be the 2024 GOP nomination. A bold choice will have to break through to keep the RNC from backsliding into the clutches of Globalist failure.

PEACE

davidgmillsatty , says: September 12, 2019 at 7:43 pm GMT
I think Sanders could have beat Trump in 2016. This time around it is not that clear because so many of his supporters in 2016 feel burnt.

Badly burnt. Or Bernt. He threw his support for Hillary, even if it was tepid, and then got a bad case of Russiagateitis which his base on the left really hated. His left base never bought Russiagate for a minute. We knew it was an internal leak, probably by Seth Rich, who provided all the information to Assange. He still seems to be a strong Israel supporter even if has stood up to Netanyahu.

And while it may seem odd, many of his base on the left have grown weary of the global climate change agenda.

He has not advocated nuclear power and there is a growing movement for that on the left, especially by those who think renewables will not generate the power we need.

But since Sanders does seem to attract the rural and suburban vote more than any other Democrat, Sanders has a chance to chip away at Trumps' base and win the Electoral College. Another horrible loss to rural and suburban America by the Democrats will cost them the EC again by a substantial margin, even if they manage to pull off another popular vote win.

A123 , says: September 13, 2019 at 12:20 am GMT
@bluedog

the republican party is as globalist as you can find,and I'm sure you will be the first one to inform us when the global elite including those in America throw in the towel,

Some elite Globalist NeverTrumpers, such as George Will and Bill Kristol, have thrown in the towel on the GOP. This allows their "neocon" followers to return to their roots in the war mongering Democrat Party. So it *IS* happening.

The real questions are:
-- Can it happen fast enough?
-- Can it be sustained after Donald Trump term limits out?

I'm not bold enough to say it is inevitable. All I will say is, "There are reasons to be at least mildly hopeful."

PEACE

RadicalCenter , says: September 13, 2019 at 3:45 am GMT
@follyofwar Based on gabbard's immigration statements, voting for her is also voting for our continuing displacement.
Carlton Meyer , says: Website September 13, 2019 at 4:22 am GMT
Has everyone forgot the last time the DNC openly cheated Sanders he said nothing publicly, but then endorsed Clinton? Sanders knows he is not allowed to become president, his role to prevent the formation of a third party, and to keep the Green Party small. Otherwise he would jump to the Green Party right now and may beat the DNC and Trump.

Sanders treats progressives like Charlie Brown. Once again, inviting them to run a kick the football, only to pull it away and watch them fall. He recently backed off his opposition to the open borders crazies, rarely mentions cuts to military spending to fund things, and has even joined the stupid fake russiagate bandwagon.

Note that he dismisses the third party idea as unworkable, when he already knows the DNC is unworkable. Why not give the Green party a chance? Cause he don't want to win knowing he'd be killed or impeached for some reason.

follyofwar , says: September 13, 2019 at 2:06 pm GMT
@Carlton Meyer The Stalinist DNC openly cheated Tulsi Gabbard when they left her off the debate stage last night. When asked about it on 'The View' recently, Sanders said nothing in her defense, or that she deserved to be on the stage. Nice way to stab her in the back for leaving her DNC position to support you last time, Bernie. Socialist Sanders wants to be president, yet is afraid of the DNC. Nice!

Those polls were rigged against Tulsi, and everyone who is paying attention knows it. But, far from hurting her candidacy by not making the DNC's arbitrary cut, her exclusion may wind up helping her. Kim Iverson, Michael Tracey, and comedian Jimmy Dore, anti-war progressive YouTubers with large, loyal followings, have lambasted the out-of touch DNC for its actions. Tucker Carlson on the anti-war right has also done so.

One hopes that the DNC's stupidity in censoring her message may wind up being the best thing ever for Tulsi's insurgent candidacy. We shall see. OTOH, who can trust the polls to tell us the truth of where her popularity stands.

follyofwar , says: September 13, 2019 at 2:29 pm GMT
@RadicalCenter Do you forget about Trump's declaration that he wants the largest amount of immigration ever, as long as they come in legally? There are no good guys in our two sclerotic monopoly parties when it comes to immigration. Since both are terrible on that topic, at least Tulsi seems to have the anti-war principles that Trump does not.
Justvisiting , says: September 13, 2019 at 7:37 pm GMT
@Carlton Meyer Great comment.

Bernie has had many opportunities in the past few years to show real courage and stand for something, anything. He has failed every time.

I am actually beginning to feel sorry for him–he knows he has a mission, but he just can't seem to figure out what it is anymore

Getting old is not fun.

[Sep 15, 2019] Snowden Spills Infamous Whistleblower Opines On Spycraft, AI, And Being Suicided

When the ideology collapses like neoliberalism collapsed in 2008 defections and leaks from the intelligence agencies became more prominent and higher level. Just before the USSR collapsed there were several high level officers of KGB that changed sides including at least one general of KGB.
We can probably view Snowden and Manning as signs of similar process which started in the USA after the collapse of neoliberalism. They suggest that loyalty to the USA in CIA or NSA is on low level not became of some external factors, but due to lack of conviction in the sanity of the current social system in the USA (aka neoliberal society). So "protest defections" will probably continues unabated.
Of course, dealing with intelligence agencies is tricky as Snowden revelation might just be a limited revenge of CIA to NSA. But in any case it is undisputable that while few Snowden files were published the mere fact of exfiltration of so much highly sensitive information did some damage to military industrial complex. That makes is less pausible that he operates as CIA mole, which several commenters below suggest.
At the same time in this interview Snowden sounds like a naive and disoriented person: " I try to keep a distance between myself and Russian society, and this is completely intentional. I live my life with basically the English-speaking community." English speaking community in Russia probably has highest in the world percentage of intelligence officers of Western countries including CIA officers.
Another somewhat suspicious fact is that very few files that Snowden files were released. So the whole story now looks like "Too much ado about nothing." Unlike Wikileaks that published Manning materials.
Notable quotes:
"... He describes the 18 years since the September 11 attacks as "a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts and secret wars". ..."
"... Snowden also said: " The greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities, such as facial and pattern recognition. ..."
"... " An AI-equipped surveillance camera would be not a mere recording device, but could be made into something closer to an automated police officer ." - The Guardian ..."
"... You have to remember, in the beginning I didn't even know mass surveillance was a thing because I worked for the CIA, which is a human intelligence organization. But when I was sent back to NSA headquarters and my very last position to directly work with a tool of mass surveillance, there was a guy who was supposed to be teaching me . And sometimes he would spin around in his chair, showing me nudes of whatever target's wife he's looking at. And he's like: "Bonus!" ..."
"... The most important part of the Rubik's cube was actually not as a concealment device, but a distraction device. I had to get things out of that building many times. I really gave Rubik's cubes to everyone in my office as gifts and guards saw me coming and going with this Rubik's cube all the time. So I was the Rubik's cube guy . ..."
"... When you're doing this for the first time, you're just going down the hallway and trying not to shake. And then, as you do it more times, you realize that it works. You realize that a metal detector won't detect an SD card because it has less metal in it than the brackets on your jeans. ..."
"... I try to keep a distance between myself and Russian society, and this is completely intentional. I live my life with basically the English-speaking community . I'm the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. And, you know, I'm an indoor cat. It doesn't matter where I am -- Moscow, Berlin, New York -- as long as I have a screen to look into. ..."
"... 16 June 2013 The revelations expand to include the UK, with news that GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications during the 2009 G20 summit in London, and that the British spy agency has also tapped the fibre-optic cables carrying much of the internet's traffic. ..."
"... 3 July 2013 While en route from Moscow, Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, is forced to land in Vienna after European countries refuse his plane airspace, suspecting that Snowden was on board. It is held and searched for 12 hours. ..."
"... December 2016 Oliver Stone releases the movie Snowden featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Melissa Leo, Tom Wilkinson, Zachary Quinto and a cameo by former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. ..."
"... When he originally contacted Glenn Greenwald, I was suspicious. I said then, nothing will come of this, and nothing did, because WE NEVER GOT TO SEE all the files he had and what was on them. ..."
"... Read in Reuters that he's requested asylum in France. ..."
"... It will be common knowledge soon that it was the NSA (Admiral Rogers) that first detected the coup against Trump and the illegal surveillance. Remember friends, the FISA warrants were a cover for the illegal spying the Obama administration was ALREADY doing on Trump, Cruz, and others. ..."
"... I try to keep a distance between myself and Russian society, and this is completely intentional. I live my life with basically the English-speaking community. ..."
"... What an ungrateful twat. Russia saved his bacon and yet he wants to know nothing of the country and its people and maybe begin to understand WHY they would offer to help him...even if he doesnt like the Russain government, he CHOOSES to know nothing of the Russian people. What a loser! ..."
"... Maybe he doesn't know how to speak Russian, seeing as how getting stuck in Russia was not exactly his original plan. He just happened to be in a Russian airport when the USA happened to revoke his passport, making it impossible for him to leave. ..."
"... There is also the other angle, that perhaps he might be working as a CIA agent even now, and that his predicament is actually all entirely pre-meditated by the USA. Russia might take his getting friendly with the locals as being a bit impolite if he is doing spy work for the USA while living in Russia. ..."
"... He doesnt need to be "palsy-walsy" with Russians, he has NO knowledge of the country he lives in and its people and doesn't want to. That is ungrateful to the nth degree. ..."
"... If Russia wanted to they could shut down his ability to give video-conferences etc. They don't, they continue to show him a hospitality that he seems willing to spit on! ..."
"... Serious damage? I fear Snowden and Assange wasted their lives upon the American people. Was Snowden wrong morally? He fought the totalitarian giant and for this the people sit back in their arm chairs and moralize whether it was right or wrong. We don't deserve to be "free.". ..."
"... Why and how has Greenwald been able to "sit on" countless info files but never released them? If that is true then why haven't US authorities gone after him as well? Way too many strange aspects to Snowden's cover story and how he's allowed by the Russian's to make public statements about their local political landscape. ..."
"... It's not just that. Greenwald lives full time in Brazil for a very good reason--Brazil has no extradition treaty with the US. He's relatively safe there, although his boyfriend was stupid enough to go to London briefly and nearly got the Assange treatment... ..."
"... What I hate is that Snowden gave all those documents to Greenwald who said he was going to publish them and once he went to the Intercept under Omadyar...nothing but silence on those files. To my mind he betrayed Snowden. ..."
"... Book tour, Docudrama and T-Shirt? ..."
"... That part of the narrative does seem a bit odd, doesn't it? She's allowed to come and go as she pleases in the USA, yet is married to this guy wanted by the US authorities? Hmm. Nothing suspicious about that. ..."
"... Can anybody name something that Snowfen revealed that wasn't common knowledge? ..."
Sep 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Meeting with both The Guardian and Spiegel Online in Moscow as part of its promotion, the infamous whistleblower spent nearly five hours with the two media outlets - offering a taste of what's in the book, details on his background, and his thoughts on artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and other intelligence gathering tools coming to a dystopia near you.

While The Guardian interview is 'okay,' scroll down for the far more interesting Spiegel interview, where Snowden goes way deeper into his cloak-and-dagger life, including thoughts on getting suicided.

First, The Guardian :

Snowden describes in detail for the first time his background, and what led him to leak details of the secret programms being run by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK's secret communication headquarters, GCHQ .

He describes the 18 years since the September 11 attacks as "a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts and secret wars".

Snowden also said: " The greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities, such as facial and pattern recognition.

" An AI-equipped surveillance camera would be not a mere recording device, but could be made into something closer to an automated police officer ." - The Guardian

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

Other notables from the Guardian interview:

The Der Spiegel interview, meanwhile, is way more interesting ... For example:

" If I Happen to Fall out of a Window, You Can Be Sure I Was Pushed. "

Meeting Edward Snwoden is pretty much exactly how children imagine the grand game of espionage is played.

But then, on Monday, there he was, standing in our room on the first floor of the Hotel Metropol, as pale and boyish-looking as the was when the world first saw him in June 2013 . For the last six years, he has been living in Russian exile. The U.S. has considered him to be an enemy of the state, right up there with Julian Assange, ever since he revealed, with the help of journalists, the full scope of the surveillance system operated by the National Security Agency (NSA).

For quite some time, though, he remained silent about how he smuggled the secrets out of the country and what his personal motivations were. - Spiegel Online

Select excerpts via Der Spiegel (emphasis ours):

***

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Snowden, you always said: "I am not the story." But now you've written 432 pages about yourself. Why?

Edward Snowden: Because I think it's more important than ever to explain systems of mass surveillance and mass manipulation to the public. And I can't explain how these systems came to be without explaining my role in helping to build them.

DER SPIEGEL: Wasn't it just as important four or even six years ago?

Snowden: Four years ago, Barack Obama was president. Four years ago, Boris Johnson wasn't around and the AfD ( Germany's right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany ) was still kind of a joke. But now in 2019, no one is laughing. When you look around the world, when you look at the rising factionalization of society, when you see this new wave of authoritarianism sweeping over many countries: Everywhere political classes and commercial classes are realizing they can use technology to influence the world on a new scale that was not previously available. We are seeing our systems coming under attack.

DER SPIEGEL: What systems?

Snowden: The political system, the legal system, the social system. And we have the proclivity to think that if we get rid of the people we don't like, the problem is solved. We go: "Oh, it's Donald Trump. Oh, it's Boris Johnson. Oh, it's the Russians" But Donald Trump is not the problem. Donald Trump is the product of the problem.

***

DER SPIEGEL: While writing, did you discover any truths about yourself that you didn't like?

Snowden: The most unflattering thing is to realize just how naïve and credulous I was and how that could make me into a tool of systems that would use my skills for an act of global harm . The class of which I am a part of, the global technological community, was for the longest time apolitical. We have this history of thinking: "We're going to make the world better."

***

DER SPIEGEL: Was that your motivation when you entered the world of espionage?

Snowden: Entering the world of espionage sounds so grand. I just saw an enormous landscape of opportunities because the government in its post-9/11 spending blitz was desperate to hire anybody who had high-level technical skills and a clearance. And I happened to have both. It was weird to be just a kid and be brought into CIA headquarters, put in charge of the entire Washington metropolitan area's network .

DER SPIEGEL: Was it not also fascinating to be able to invade pretty much everybody's life via state-sponsored hacking?

Snowden: You have to remember, in the beginning I didn't even know mass surveillance was a thing because I worked for the CIA, which is a human intelligence organization. But when I was sent back to NSA headquarters and my very last position to directly work with a tool of mass surveillance, there was a guy who was supposed to be teaching me . And sometimes he would spin around in his chair, showing me nudes of whatever target's wife he's looking at. And he's like: "Bonus!"

***

DER SPIEGEL: You became seriously ill and fell into depression. Have you ever had suicidal thoughts?

Snowden: No! This is important for the record. I am not now, nor have I ever been suicidal. I have a philosophical objection to the idea of suicide, and if I happen to fall out of a window, you can be sure I was pushed.

***

DER SPIEGEL: You write that you sometimes smuggled SD memory cards inside a Rubik's cube .

Snowden: The most important part of the Rubik's cube was actually not as a concealment device, but a distraction device. I had to get things out of that building many times. I really gave Rubik's cubes to everyone in my office as gifts and guards saw me coming and going with this Rubik's cube all the time. So I was the Rubik's cube guy . And when I came out of the tunnel with my contraband and saw one of the bored guards, I sometimes tossed the cube to him. He's like, "Oh, man, I had one of these things when I was a kid, but you know, I could never solve it. So I just pulled the stickers off." That was exactly what I had done -- but for different reasons.

DER SPIEGEL: You even put the SD cards into your mouth.

Snowden: When you're doing this for the first time, you're just going down the hallway and trying not to shake. And then, as you do it more times, you realize that it works. You realize that a metal detector won't detect an SD card because it has less metal in it than the brackets on your jeans.

***

DER SPIEGEL: You describe your arrival in Moscow as a walk in the park. You say you refused to cooperate with the Russian intelligence agency FSB and they let you go. That sounds implausible to us.

Snowden: I think what explains the fact that the Russian government didn't hang me upside down my ankles and beat me with a shock prod until secrets came out was because everyone in the world was paying attention to it. And they didn't know what to do. They just didn't know how to handle it. I think their answer was: "Let's wait and see."

DER SPIEGEL: Do you have Russian friends?

Snowden: I try to keep a distance between myself and Russian society, and this is completely intentional. I live my life with basically the English-speaking community . I'm the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. And, you know, I'm an indoor cat. It doesn't matter where I am -- Moscow, Berlin, New York -- as long as I have a screen to look into.

***

Read the rest of Der Spiegel' s interview with Edward Snowden here .

Meanwhile, The Guardian provides an interesting 'Snowden Timeline':

Snowden's timeline

mrjinx007 , 18 minutes ago link

I'm an indoor cat. It doesn't matter where I am -- Moscow, Berlin, New York -- as long as I have a screen to look into.

Snowed-in.

headless blogger , 27 minutes ago link

There's really no way to know that for sure if this guy is legit. If he is part of an operation, let's hope it's for something good. When he originally contacted Glenn Greenwald, I was suspicious. I said then, nothing will come of this, and nothing did, because WE NEVER GOT TO SEE all the files he had and what was on them.

Just what this man is up to we will likely never know. These kinds of operations can take years to set up.

My guess is Snowden is the Decoy, the distraction. There is likely someone else or something else that all of this camouflages.

Decoherence , 35 minutes ago link

He met his pole dancer on hot or not and allowed her to shape his views on politics. That sounds like desperation or pretty bad judgment.

Equinox7 , 36 minutes ago link

Things go both ways in a surveillance environment. Snowden will be exposed in time as a CIA operative. The NSA has everything including Hillary's private emails. Obama and many in his regime were also using private email servers, and the NSA has them all.

Snowden was trying to destroy the NSA, when they are what was needed to take down the CIA, FBI, and the Deep State. I don't like the NSA being in existence, but this will help in prosecuting the criminals.

NiggaPleeze , 12 minutes ago link

So what is the NSA waiting for? The statute of limitations to expire? LOL. Snowden wasn't trying to do anything except educate people on what their government is doing. You obviously hate truth and knowledge. You work for the NSA?

BennyBoo , 37 minutes ago link

I don't believe a damned thing about anything published about any of the alphabet agencies - good, bad, neutral, doesn't matter it's all clown show bs.

VooDoo6Actual , 37 minutes ago link

Any other critical thinkers notice the CIA activated their asset again finally ? A predictable programmed book really ? Just imagine what kind of juicy already known statecraft he will reveal. Lol. America loves their confabulated mythical pseudo-hero's & cucked political demigods full of bovine scat don't they.

The UberMensch hero who somehow miraculously survived the 'enkryptonite' where other HVT can't. Amazing. Need to hurl makes me gag reflex & gut retch.

VooDoo6Actual , 26 minutes ago link

"Trump is the Anti-Mass Surveillance" ... LMAO -

TRUMP REQUESTS PERMANENT REAUTHORIZATION OF NSA MASS SURVEILLANCE https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/16/alarm-trump-requests-permanent-reauthorization-nsa-mass-spying-program-exposed

vasilievich , 58 minutes ago link

Read in Reuters that he's requested asylum in France.

JBLight , 1 hour ago link

Snowden is still CIA and his mission was to throw the NSA under the bus.

It will be common knowledge soon that it was the NSA (Admiral Rogers) that first detected the coup against Trump and the illegal surveillance. Remember friends, the FISA warrants were a cover for the illegal spying the Obama administration was ALREADY doing on Trump, Cruz, and others.

Gonzogal , 1 hour ago link

I try to keep a distance between myself and Russian society, and this is completely intentional. I live my life with basically the English-speaking community.

What an ungrateful twat. Russia saved his bacon and yet he wants to know nothing of the country and its people and maybe begin to understand WHY they would offer to help him...even if he doesnt like the Russain government, he CHOOSES to know nothing of the Russian people. What a loser!

Pure Speculation , 24 minutes ago link

Just how is he to know who is undercover security services and who is just plain good and interesting?

Maybe he doesn't know how to speak Russian, seeing as how getting stuck in Russia was not exactly his original plan. He just happened to be in a Russian airport when the USA happened to revoke his passport, making it impossible for him to leave.

There is also the other angle, that perhaps he might be working as a CIA agent even now, and that his predicament is actually all entirely pre-meditated by the USA. Russia might take his getting friendly with the locals as being a bit impolite if he is doing spy work for the USA while living in Russia.

Gonzogal , 1 hour ago link

He doesnt need to be "palsy-walsy" with Russians, he has NO knowledge of the country he lives in and its people and doesn't want to. That is ungrateful to the nth degree.

If Russia wanted to they could shut down his ability to give video-conferences etc. They don't, they continue to show him a hospitality that he seems willing to spit on!

vasilievich , 56 minutes ago link

No, really, I met people there who were deep and friendly and sensitive. Lots critical of what's not right with their own society, and yet not traitors to their country.

Gonzogal , 49 minutes ago link

I agree with you vasilievich....I am looking forward to visiting Russia next spring in time for the V-Day and the Immortal Regiment, then spend a month visiting Russian and hopefully getting to interact with Russians "on the street".

One of the differences with Russia and the "West" is that Putins hours long live "conversations" with Russians and the way he gets his government to follow up up problems, which he himself follows up on to insure actions are taken, ensure that people have that freedom to be critical of their own society. Such an opposite to what happens to critics in the "west"

vasilievich , 1 hour ago link

Yes, that's inexplicable, at least to me. I lived there and liked Russians very much.

richsob , 1 hour ago link

My take on Snowden is he's basically a decent guy who did some serious damage. Was he wrong legally? Hell yes! Was he wrong morally? Possibly. Would I put the guy in prison if I could? Yeah for about 30 days because the bottom line of what he did was to expose **** that needed to be exposed.

It's complicated but occasionally a guy like this is needed to stir the pot.

NAV , 1 hour ago link

Serious damage? I fear Snowden and Assange wasted their lives upon the American people. Was Snowden wrong morally? He fought the totalitarian giant and for this the people sit back in their arm chairs and moralize whether it was right or wrong. We don't deserve to be "free.".

ISEEIT , 1 hour ago link

I personally consider Snowden to be a limited hangout operative.

Bingo Hammer , 1 hour ago link

There is still more and something very fishy about Snowden.....if he really did so much so called "damage" to the US why do US authorities never mention him? Why do they never pressure Russia to send him back?

Why and how has Greenwald been able to "sit on" countless info files but never released them? If that is true then why haven't US authorities gone after him as well? Way too many strange aspects to Snowden's cover story and how he's allowed by the Russian's to make public statements about their local political landscape.

puckles , 55 minutes ago link

It's not just that. Greenwald lives full time in Brazil for a very good reason--Brazil has no extradition treaty with the US. He's relatively safe there, although his boyfriend was stupid enough to go to London briefly and nearly got the Assange treatment...

Gonzogal , 1 hour ago link

What I hate is that Snowden gave all those documents to Greenwald who said he was going to publish them and once he went to the Intercept under Omadyar...nothing but silence on those files. To my mind he betrayed Snowden.

smacker , 1 hour ago link

I think Greenwald lives in Rio, Brazil and is partnered to a Brazilian guy, so Brazil would not extradite him.

5fingerdiscount , 2 hours ago link

Book tour, Docudrama and T-Shirt?

Jazzman , 2 hours ago link

The quality of low rank NSA employees is rapidly deteriorating since 2013... ^^

Pure Speculation , 2 hours ago link

That part of the narrative does seem a bit odd, doesn't it? She's allowed to come and go as she pleases in the USA, yet is married to this guy wanted by the US authorities? Hmm. Nothing suspicious about that.

cakesquid , 28 minutes ago link

strong suit you must mean..

How does what I wrote translate into an integrity issue?

Been married twice, fully faithful. But at his age particularly, would not recommend it to a guy who is in an unstable situation anyway. (not to mention the girl originally rejected him when the going got rough).

Live a little, enjoy your youth, and enjoy the infamy!

Bob_Sacamano , 2 hours ago link

Can anybody name something that Snowfen revealed that wasn't common knowledge?

[Sep 15, 2019] Conflicting groups within the elite often represent difficult types of capital

Sep 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

sad canuck , Sep 15 2019 21:29 utc | 36

@1 steven t johnson

Agree with respect to points 1 and 2 but is at least Kotkin's is a bit more insightful than the recent Markovits book on meritocracy. In the latter, Markovits divides the entire country into middle class and elites, with the owners and Kotkin's clerisy combined and subject to the same structure, rewards and stresses.

Never a mention of capital or ownership of the means of production. Guess one should not be shocked that a Yale professor considers himself elite, but a little surprising that he does not understand that he serves at the pleasure of the owners. That's a club and he's not in it as the comic-laureate Carlin would say. A little class consciousness goes a long way.

[Sep 15, 2019] Americar real Conflict in Trump era is between the two factions of neoliberal elites: financial oligarchy (and associated with them Silicon Valley Moduls) and old manufacturing elite

This is the conflict between financial elite and Silicon Valley modules against traditional manufactures and extractive industries like oil, gas, coil, iron ore, etc.
Notable quotes:
"... The First Estate, once the province of the Catholic Church, has morphed into what Samuel Coleridge in the 1830s called "the Clerisy," a group that extends beyond organized religion to the universities, media, cultural tastemakers and upper echelons of the bureaucracy. The role of the Second Estate is now being played by a rising Oligarchy, notably in tech but also Wall Street, that is consolidating control of most of the economy. ..."
Sep 15, 2019 | dailycaller.com

A recent OECD report , is under assault, and shrinking in most places while prospects for upward mobility for the working class also declines.T

he anger of the Third Estate, both the growing property-less Serf class as well as the beleaguered Yeomanry, has produced the growth of populist, parties both right and left in Europe, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In the U.S., this includes not simply the gradual, and sometimes jarring, transformation of the GOP into a vehicle for populist rage, but also the rise on the Democratic side of politicians such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, each of whom have made class politics their signature issue.

(RELATED: Bernie Sanders Says Middle Class Will Pay More In Taxes)

The Rise of Neo-Feudalism

Today's neo-feudalism recalls the social order that existed before the democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th Century, with our two ascendant estates filling the roles of the former dominant classes.

The First Estate, once the province of the Catholic Church, has morphed into what Samuel Coleridge in the 1830s called "the Clerisy," a group that extends beyond organized religion to the universities, media, cultural tastemakers and upper echelons of the bureaucracy. The role of the Second Estate is now being played by a rising Oligarchy, notably in tech but also Wall Street, that is consolidating control of most of the economy.

Together these two classes have waxed while the Third Estate has declined. This essentially reversed the enormous gains made by the middle and even the working class over the past 50 years. The top 1% in America captured just 4.9 percent of total U.S. income growth in 1945-1973, but since then the country's richest classes has gobbled up an astonishing 58.7% of all new wealth in the U.S., and 41.8 percent of total income growth during 2009-2015 alone.

In this period, the Oligarchy has benefited from the financialization of the economy and the refusal of the political class in both parties to maintain competitive markets. As a result, American industry has become increasingly concentrated. For example, the five largest banks now account for close to 50 percent of all banking assets, up from barely 30 percent just 20 years ago. (RELATED: The Biggest Bank You've Never Heard Of)

Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Immelt, Charles Schwab and Jamie Dimon, at Georgetown University. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Immelt, Charles Schwab and Jamie Dimon, at Georgetown University. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

The concentration numbers in tech are even more frightening. Once a highly competitive industry, it is now among the most concentrated . Like the barbarian chieftains who seized land after the fall of Rome, a handful of companies -- Facebook , Google , Apple, Microsoft and Amazon -- have gained total control over a host of markets, from social media to search, the software operating systems, cloud computing and e-commerce. In many key markets such as search, these companies enjoy market shares reaching to eighty or ninety percent.

As they push into fields such as entertainment, space travel, finance and autonomous vehicles, they have become, as technology analyst Izabella Kaminska notes, the modern-day "free market" equivalents of the Soviet planners who operated Gosplan, allocating billions for their own subjective priorities. Libertarians might point out that these tech giants are still privately held firms but they actually represent , as one analyst put it, "a new form of monopoly power made possible by the 'network effect' of those platforms through which everyone must pass to conduct the business of life."

The role of the Clerisy

The new feudalism, like the original, is not based simply around the force of arms, or in this case what Marx called "the cash nexus." Like the church in Medieval times, the Clerisy sees itself as anointed to direct human society, a modern version of what historian Marc Bloch called the "oligarchy of priests and monks whose task it was to propitiate heaven." This modern-day version of the old First Estate sets down the ideological tone in the schools, the mass media, culture and the arts. There's also a Clerisy of sorts on the right, and what's left of the center, but this remains largely, except for Fox, an insignificant remnant.

Like their predecessors, today's Clerisy embraces an orthodoxy, albeit secular, on a host of issues from race and gender to the environment. Universities have become increasingly dogmatic in their worldview. One study of 51 top colleges found the proportion of liberals to conservatives as much as 70:1, and usually at least 8:1. At elite liberal arts schools like Wellesley, Swarthmore and Williams, the proportion reaches 120:1.

Similar attitudes can be seen in virtually all other culturally dominant institutions, starting with Hollywood. Over 99 percent of all major entertainment executives' donations went to Democrats in 2018, even though roughly half the population would prefer they keep their politics more to themselves. (RELATED: Here Are Reactions From Democrats, Liberal Celebrities To The Mueller Testimony)

The increasing concentration of media in ever fewer centers -- London, New York, Washington, San Francisco -- and the decline of the local press has accentuated the elite Clerisy's domination. With most reporters well on the left, journalism, as a 2019 Rand report reveals, is steadily moving from a fact-based model to one that is dominated by predictable opinion. This, Rand suggests has led to what they called "truth decay."

The new geography of feudalism

The new feudalism increasingly defines geography not only in America but across much of the world. The great bastion of both the Oligarchy and high reaches of the Clerisy lies in the great cities, notably New York, London, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle. These are all among the most expensive places to live in the world and play a dominant role in the global media.

Yet these cities are not the progressive, egalitarian places evoked by great urbanists like the late Jane Jacobs, but more closely resemble the "gated" cities of the Middle Ages, and their equivalents in places as diverse as China and Japan. American cities now have higher levels of inequality, notes one recent study , than Mexico. In fact, the largest gaps ( between the bottom and top quintiles of median incomes are in the heartland of progressive opinion, such as in the metropolitan areas of San Francisco, New York, San Jose, and Los Angeles. (RELATED: Got Income Inequality? Least Affordable Cities Are Also the Bluest)

In some of the most favored blue cities, such as Seattle , Portland and San Francisco , not only is the middle class disappearing, but there has been something equivalent of "ethnic cleansing" amidst rising high levels of inequality, homelessness and social disorder. Long-standing minority communities like the Albina neighborhood in Portland are disappearing as 10,000 of the 38,000 residents have been pushed out of the historic African-American section. In San Francisco, the black population has dropped from 18% in the 1970s to single digits and what remains, notes Harry Alford , National Black Chamber of Commerce president, "are predominantly living under the poverty level and is being pushed out to extinction."

This exclusive and exclusionary urbanity contrasts with the historic role of cities. The initial rise of the Third Estate was tied intimately to the " freedom of the city . " But with the diminishing prospects for blue-collar industries, as well as high housing costs, many minorities and immigrants are increasingly migrating away from multi-culturally correct regions like Chicago , New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco for less regulated, generally less "woke" places like Phoenix, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Atlanta and Las Vegas.

Yet even as the middle-class populations flee, poverty remains deeply entrenched in our big cities, with a rate roughly twice that of the suburbs. The much-celebrated urban renaissance has been largely enjoyed by the upper echelons but not the working classes. In the city of Philadelphia , for example, the "center city" income rose, but citywide between 2000 and 2014, for every district that, like downtown, gained in income, two suffered income declines. Similarly, research shows that the number of high poverty (greater than 30 percent below the poverty line) neighborhoods in the U.S. has tripled since 1970 from 1,100 to 3,100.

Undermining the Third Estate

The impact of the rising Clerisy and Oligarchs poses a direct threat to the future of the Third Estate. On the economic side, relentless consolidation and financialization has devastated Main Street. In the great boom of the 1980s, small firms and start-ups powered the economy, but more recently the rates of entrepreneurship have dropped as mega-mergers, chains and on-line giants slowly reduced the scope of opportunities. Perhaps most disturbing of all has been the decline in new formations among younger people.

This phenomenon is most evident in the tech world. Today is not a great time to start a tech company unless you are in the charmed circle of elite firms with access to venture and private equity funds. The old garage start-up culture of Silicon Valley is slowly dying, as large firms gobble up or crush competitors. Indeed, since the rise of the tech economy in the 1990s, the overall degree of industry concentration has grown by 75 percent.

Like the peasant farmer or artisan in the feudal era, the entrepreneur not embraced by the big venture firms lives largely at the sufferance of the tech overlords. As one online publisher notes on his firm's status with Google:

If you're a Star Trek fan, you'll understand the analogy. It's a bit like being assimilated by the Borg. You get cool new powers. But having been assimilated, if your implants were ever removed, you'd certainly die. That basically captures our relationship to Google.

The Clerisy's War on the Middle Class

For generations, the Clerisy has steadfastly opposed the growth of suburbia, driven in large part by the aesthetic concerns –the conviction that single-family homes are fundamentally anti-social– and, increasingly, by often dubious assertions on their environmental toxicity. In places like California, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, government policies discourage peripheral construction where home ownership rates tend to be higher, in favor of dense, largely rental housing.

This marks a dramatic turnaround. During the middle of the 20th Century, ownership rates in the United States leaped from 44 percent in 1940 to 63 percent in the late 1970s. Yet in the new generation this prospect is fading. In the United States, home ownership among post-college millennials (aged 25-34) has dropped from 45.4 percent in 2000 to 37.0 percent in 2016, a drop of 18 percent from the 1970s, according to Census Bureau data . In contrast, their parents and grandparents witnessed a dramatic rise of homeownership from 44 percent in 1940 to 63 percent 30 years later.

But the Clerisy's war on middle- and working-class aspiration goes well beyond housing. Climate change policies already enacted in California and Germany have driven millions into "energy poverty." If adopted, many of the latest proposals for such things as the Green New Deal all but guarantee the rapid reduction of millions of highly productive and often well-paying energy, aerospace, automobile and logistics jobs.

Political implications

The war of the Estates is likely to shape our political landscape for decades to come. Parts of the Third Estate –those working with their hands or operating small businesses– increasingly flock to the GOP, according to a recent CityLab report. Trump also has a case to make with these workers, as real wages for blue-collar workers are now rising for the first time in decades. Unemployment is near record lows not only for whites but also Latinos and African-Americans. Of course, if the economy weakens, he may lose some of this support. (RELATED: Trump Blasts Media For 'Barely' Covering 'Great' Economy, Low Unemployment)

But the emergence of neo-feudalism also lays the foundation for a larger, more potent and radicalized left. As opportunities for upward mobility shrink, a new generation, indoctrinated in leftist ideology sometimes from grade school and ever more predictably in undergraduate and graduate school, tilts heavily to the left, embracing what is essentially an updated socialist program of massive redistribution, central direction of the economy and racial redress.

Antifa members in Berkeley, California. AFP/Getty/Amy Osborne.

Antifa members in Berkeley, California. AFP/Getty/Amy Osborne.

In France's most recent presidential election, the former Trotskyite Jean-Luc Melenchon won the under-24 vote, beating the "youthful" Emmanuel Macron by almost two to one. Similarly in the United Kingdom, the birthplace of modern capitalism, the Labour Party , under the neo- Marxist Jeremy Corbyn , won over 60 percent of the vote among voters under 40, compared to just 23 percent for the Conservatives. Similar trends can be seen across Europe, where the Red and Green Party enjoys wide youth support.

The shift to hard-left politics also extends to the United States– historically not a fertile area for Marxist thinking. In the 2016 primaries , the openly socialist Bernie Sanders easily outpolled Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined. A 2016 poll by the Communism Memorial Foundation found that 44 percent of American millennials favored socialism while another 14 percent chose fascism or communism. By 2024, these millennials will be by far the country's biggest voting bloc .

In the current run-up to the Democratic nomination these young voters overwhelming tilt toward Sanders and his slightly less radical colleague Warren, while former Vice President Joe Biden retains the support of older Democrats. The common themes of the "new" Left, with such things as guaranteed annual incomes, rent control, housing subsidies, and free college might prove irresistible to a generation that has little hope of owning a home, could remain childless, and might never earn enough money to invest in much of anything. (RELATED: Bernie Sanders Says 'Health Care For All' Will Require Tax Increases)

At the end, the war of the estates raises the prospect of rising autocracy, even under formally democratic forms. In his assessment in "Democracy in America ," Alexis de Tocqueville suggests a new form of tyranny -- in many ways more insidious than that of the monarchical state -- that grants favors and entertainments to its citizens but expects little in obligation. Rather than expect people to become adults, he warns, a democratic state can be used to keep its members in "perpetual childhood" and "would degrade men rather than tormenting them."

With the erosion of the middle class, and with it dreams of upward mobility, we already see more extreme, less liberally minded class politics. A nation of clerics, billionaires and serfs is not conducive to the democratic experiment; only by mobilizing the Third Estate can we hope that our republican institutions will survive intact even in the near future.

Mr. Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and the executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His next book, "The Coming Of Neo-Feudalism," will be out this spring.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

[Sep 14, 2019] BTW, Tulsi's now gotten her 3rd qualifying poll. She'll surge back much stronger. And maybe even smarter, if she endorses this:

Sep 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

anon [113] Disclaimer , says: September 14, 2019 at 4:42 am GMT

@follyofwar Agreed . she was better off absent from that snore session. They all looked weak and pathetic. BTW, Tulsi's now gotten her 3rd qualifying poll. She'll surge back much stronger. And maybe even smarter, if she endorses this:

Ask Tulsi Gabbard to co-sponsor Betty McCollum's bill, H.R.2407 – Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act: https://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/co-sponsor-hr2407?source=twitter-share-button&utm_source=twitter&share=7f93c0fd-5214-4398-93a8-03155a1dc1b1 via @Roots_Action

https://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/co-sponsor-hr2407?source=twitter-share-button&utm_source=twitter&share=7f93c0fd-5214-4398-93a8-03155a1dc1b1

Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: Website September 14, 2019 at 7:18 am GMT

That means protection against the Republican-Democratic threats to cut back Social Security to balance the budget in the face of tax cuts for the richest One Percent and rising Cold War military spending. This means a government strong enough to take on the vested financial and corporate interests and prosecute Wall Street's financial crime and corporate monopoly power.

Analogies with late Imperial Rome are by now so cliché that even your average dullard is familiar with them. But I find that the most fascinating -- and frightening -- parallels are with another empire of more recent vintage: the Empire of Japan.

The above quote brought to my mind the political unrest in Tokyo during the 1930s. Far from being the work of a cabal of "militarists", as postwar legend would have it, Japan's various internecine (and often bloody) political feuds and expensive military ventures were driven by a public heavily invested in these affairs; hoping against hope for an outlet to vent their increasing rage over dwindling social programs and opportunities at the cost of propping up a concurrently fattening elite class.

Analyzing events like the Ni-ni-roku jiken (2/26 Incident) can be highly instructional for Americans seeking some manner of explanation for their present failing political system. While it is true that this nearly successful insurrection was carried out by ultra-nationalists, their intention was not to deny the people a voice in the running of government with their aspiration for direct rule by the Shōwa Emperor (then as now, the Emperor served in a quasi-religious capacity with little ability to actually govern). Rather, they felt that parliamentary democracy was a sham that benefitted only the monied and privileged; and that only the Emperor, as the living incarnation of the Japanese state, could act and respond according to the sovereign will of its people. What appeared to be a desire for authoritarianism was, in fact, the radical, ideological inversion of the Marxist concept of a "dictatorship of the proletariat". The Shōwa Emperor, in other words, was the instrument of effecting the will of the nation; the "Emperor of the people" (天皇の國民 Tennō no kokumin ).

I view in a similar vein the fascination and dreams that Trump and other such figures excite in many: The radical hope that only a leader willing to smash the system, which to all intents and purposes appears to only serve the few, can paradoxically restore the ability of the many to express and act. Bogged down as we are by ballooning military debt (and blood), economic stagnation, and an ever-widening chasm between the "haves" and "have-nots", and it becomes difficult to ignore the parallels between the US today and Japan in 1936.

This was an interesting article, but I hold no illusions about the future. There will be no breakup of the two major parties, no viable alternatives. Things will only get worse.

I envy those in their 50s and up today -- they will likely miss out on the momentous history that people my generation and younger will be bearing reluctant witness to.

Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: September 14, 2019 at 7:24 am GMT
Biden will be 77 years old in Novembrer

Bernie Sanders is 78 years old

Donald Trump is 73 years old

Gerontocracy ?

[Sep 14, 2019] What a politician says to win an election and what he actually does in office are two very different things; politicians regularly break their promises. This is not just a fluke but the outcome of the way the system is set up

Notable quotes:
"... As in every election we're now being bombarded with propaganda about how "your vote makes a difference" and associated nonsense. According to the official version ordinary citizens control the state by voting for candidates in elections. The President and other politicians are supposedly servants of "the people" and the government an instrument of the general populace. This version is a myth. ..."
"... It does not matter who is elected because the way the system is set up all elected representatives must do what big business and the state bureaucracy want, not what "the people" want. Elected representatives are figureheads. ..."
"... Politicians' rhetoric may change depending on who is elected, but they all have to implement the same policies given the same situation. Elections are a scam whose function is to create the illusion that "the people" control the government, not the elite, and to neutralize resistance movements. All voting does is strengthen the state & ruling class, it is not an effective means to change government policy. ..."
"... What a politician says to win an election and what he actually does in office are two very different things; politicians regularly break their promises. This is not just a fluke but the outcome of the way the system is set up. Bush the second said he wouldn't engage in "nation-building" (taking other countries over) during the 2000 election campaign but has done it several times. He also claimed to support a balanced budget, but obviously abandoned that. Clinton advocated universal health care during the 1992 election campaign but there were more people without health insurance when he left office than when he took office. Bush the first said, "read my lips – no new taxes!" while running for office but raised taxes anyway. Reagan promised to shrink government but he drastically expanded the military-industrial complex and ran up huge deficits. Rather than shrinking government, he reoriented it to make it more favorable to the rich. ..."
"... Carter promised to make human rights the "soul of our foreign policy" but funded genocide in East Timor and backed brutal dictators in Argentina, South Korea, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere. During the 1964 elections leftists were encouraged by Democrats to vote for Johnson because Goldwater, his Republican opponent, was a fanatical warmonger who would escalate US involvement in Vietnam. ..."
"... Johnson won, and immediately proceeded to escalate US involvement in Vietnam. FDR promised to maintain a balanced budget and restrain government spending but did the exact opposite. Wilson won reelection in 1916 on the slogan "he kept us out of war" but then lied us into World War One. Hoover pledged to abolish poverty in 1928 but instead saw it skyrocket. ..."
Sep 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

Johnny Walker Read says: September 14, 2019 at 12:21 pm GMT 2

I have no Idea when this article was printed, but it matters not. This holds true for every election ever held in America.

If voting mattered they wouldn't let us do it.


As in every election we're now being bombarded with propaganda about how "your vote makes a difference" and associated nonsense. According to the official version ordinary citizens control the state by voting for candidates in elections. The President and other politicians are supposedly servants of "the people" and the government an instrument of the general populace. This version is a myth.

It does not matter who is elected because the way the system is set up all elected representatives must do what big business and the state bureaucracy want, not what "the people" want. Elected representatives are figureheads.

Politicians' rhetoric may change depending on who is elected, but they all have to implement the same policies given the same situation. Elections are a scam whose function is to create the illusion that "the people" control the government, not the elite, and to neutralize resistance movements. All voting does is strengthen the state & ruling class, it is not an effective means to change government policy.

https://www.bigeye.com/elections.htm

Johnny Walker Read , says: September 14, 2019 at 12:41 pm GMT

From the same article, a list of campaign promises never kept (needs to be updated with Obama/Trump).

What a politician says to win an election and what he actually does in office are two very different things; politicians regularly break their promises. This is not just a fluke but the outcome of the way the system is set up. Bush the second said he wouldn't engage in "nation-building" (taking other countries over) during the 2000 election campaign but has done it several times. He also claimed to support a balanced budget, but obviously abandoned that. Clinton advocated universal health care during the 1992 election campaign but there were more people without health insurance when he left office than when he took office. Bush the first said, "read my lips – no new taxes!" while running for office but raised taxes anyway. Reagan promised to shrink government but he drastically expanded the military-industrial complex and ran up huge deficits. Rather than shrinking government, he reoriented it to make it more favorable to the rich.

Carter promised to make human rights the "soul of our foreign policy" but funded genocide in East Timor and backed brutal dictators in Argentina, South Korea, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia and elsewhere. During the 1964 elections leftists were encouraged by Democrats to vote for Johnson because Goldwater, his Republican opponent, was a fanatical warmonger who would escalate US involvement in Vietnam.

Johnson won, and immediately proceeded to escalate US involvement in Vietnam. FDR promised to maintain a balanced budget and restrain government spending but did the exact opposite. Wilson won reelection in 1916 on the slogan "he kept us out of war" but then lied us into World War One. Hoover pledged to abolish poverty in 1928 but instead saw it skyrocket.
https://www.bigeye.com/elections.htm

[Sep 13, 2019] Something to thank Russians for

Sep 13, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Robert McGregor , September 13, 2019 at 3:43 pm

I'm no fan of Trump, but I would like to see a comparison of the total "US instigated foreign fatalities" for his last 2 & 1/2 years compared with Obama's last 2 & 1/2 years, and what we guess the number would have been under Hillary. I'm sorry, but I think Trump's number would be the lowest. In coming up with an explanation, I like to use the "Reality Show Entertainment Value" theory which many have described. In this case, people like to watch Trump bullshitting and freaking out the establishment, but they really don't like watching dead bodies burn up or be carried away in body bags. That reality is not attractive entertainment, despite the fantasy of it being bankable entertainment when Tarantino flame throws a teenager at the end of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."

Obama and Hillary are not "reality TV fans." They are more immersed in their megalomaniac view of themselves as world actors, and will willfully kill a few hundred thousand if they think it advances their misguided objectives.

Jonathan Holland Becnel , September 13, 2019 at 4:07 pm

Whoa there, buddy.

Spoiler alert.

-Tarantino fan :)

P.S. 'It 2' is def one of the best movies of the year. Still need to see Parasite and the Joker.

Punxsutawney , September 13, 2019 at 7:21 pm

Well, the "Liberal" excuse for this is that Putin is controlling him. Well if so, that's one thing to thank the Russians for.

[Sep 13, 2019] Trump the Russian Puppet. A Story That Just Will Not Die -- Strategic Culture

RussiaGate serves several very useful political purposes. First and foremost it supports exorbitant financing of MIC at the expense of everybody else, and as such it will not be abandoned, facts be dammed. In this sense Philip Giraldi is right. BTW intelligence agencies are apart of MIc and they (and first of all Brennan's faction of CIA and FBI (counterintelligence)) are the main force in RussiaGate. US government also was instrumental for the same reasons: for them maintaning EU hostility to Russia and preventing alliance of Russia and Germany is the ancient geopolitical goal, the goal which contributed to flaring two world wars.
But in view of Trump appointment of a war criminal and rabid warmonger Bolton as well as his track record of incompetence and impulsivity one can feel some sympathy to those who try to impeach Trump ;-)
Sep 13, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org
Philip Giraldi September 12, 2019 © Photo: Wikimedia Certainly, there are many things that President Donald Trump can rightly be criticized for, but it is interesting to note how the media and chattering classes continue to be in the grip of the highly emotional but ultimately irrational "Trump derangement syndrome (TDS)." TDS means that even the most ridiculous claims about Trump behavior can be regurgitated by someone like Jake Tapper or Rachel Maddow without anyone in the media even daring to observe that they are both professional dissemblers of truth who lie regularly to enhance their professional resumes.

There are two persistent bogus narratives about Donald Trump that are, in fact, related. The first is that his campaign and transition teams collaborated with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton. Even Robert Mueller, he of the famous fact-finding commission, had to admit that that was not demonstrable. The only government that succeeded in collaborating with the incoming Trumpsters was that of Israel, but Mueller forgot to mention that or even look into it.

Nevertheless, Russia as a major contributing element in the Trump victory continues to be cited in the mainstream media, seemingly whenever Trump is mentioned, as if it were demonstrated fact. The fact is that whatever Russia did was miniscule and did not in any way alter the outcome of the election. Similarly, allegations that the Kremlin will again be at it in 2020 are essentially baseless fearmongering and are a reflection of the TDS desire to see the president constantly diminished in any way possible.

The other narrative that will not die is the suggestion that Donald Trump is either a Russian spy or is in some other, possibly psychological fashion, controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin. That spy story was first floated by several former senior CIA officers who were closely tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently because they believed they would benefit materially if she were elected.

Former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell was the most aggressive promoter of Trump as Russian spy narrative. In August 2016, he wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled "I Ran the CIA. Now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton." Morell's story began with the flat assertion that "Mrs. Clinton is highly qualified to be commander in chief. I trust she will deliver on the most important duty of a president – keeping our nation safe Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security."

In his op-ed, Morell ran through the litany of then GOP candidate Trump's observed personality and character failings while also citing his lack of experience, but he delivered what he thought to be his most crushing blow when he introduced Vladimir Putin into the discussion. Putin, it seems, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, is "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."

How can one be both unwitting and a recruited agent? Some might roll their eyes at that bit of hyperbole, but Morell, who was a top analyst at the Agency but never acquired or ran an actual spy in his entire career, goes on to explain how Moscow is some kind of eternal enemy. For Morell that meant that Trump's often stated willingness to work with Putin and the nuclear armed state he headed was somehow the act of a Manchurian Candidate, seen by Morell as a Russian interest, not an American one. So much for the presumed insider knowledge that came from the man who "ran the CIA."

The most recent "former intelligence agents'" blast against Trump appeared in the Business Insider last month in an article entitled "US spies say Trump's G7 performance suggests he's either a 'Russian asset' or a 'useful idiot' for Putin." The article cites a number of former government officials, including several from the CIA and FBI, who claimed that Trump's participation at the recent G7 summit in Biarritz France was marked by pandering to Putin and the Kremlin's interests, including a push to re-include Russia in the G-7, from which it was expelled after the annexation of Crimea.

One current anonymous FBI source cited in the article described the Trump performance as a "new low," while a former senior Justice Department official, labeled Trump's behavior as "directly out of the Putin playbook. We have a Russian asset sitting in the Oval Office." An ex-CIA officer speculated that the president's "intent and odd personal fascination with President Putin is worth serious scrutiny," concluding that the evidence is "overwhelming" that Trump is a Russian asset, while other CIA and NSA veterans suggested that Trump might be flattering Putin in exchange for future business concessions in Moscow.

Another recently retired FBI special agent opined that Trump was little more than "useful idiot" for the Russians, though he added that it would not surprise him if there were also Russian spies in Trump's inner circle.

The comments in the article are almost incoherent. They come from carefully selected current and former government employees who suffer from an excess of TDS, or possibly pathological paranoia, and hate the president for various reasons. What they are suggesting is little more than speculation and not one of them was able to cite any actual evidence to support their contentions. And, on the contrary, there is considerable evidence that points the other way. The US-Russia relationship is at its lowest point ever according to some observers and that has all been due to policies promoted by the Trump Administration to include the continuing threats over Crimea, sanctions against numerous Russian officials, abrogation of existing arms treaties, and the expansion of aggressive NATO activity right up to the borders with Russia.

Just this past week, the United States warned Russia against continuing its aerial support for the Syrian Army advance to eliminate the last major terrorist pocket in Idlib province. Once against, Washington is operating on the side of terrorists in Syria and against Russia, a conflict that the United States entered into illegally in the first place. Either Donald Trump acting as "the Russian agent" actually thinks threatening a Moscow that is pursuing its legitimate interests is a good idea or the labeling of the president as a "Putin puppet" or "useful idiot" is seriously misguided.

[Sep 13, 2019] Tucker Carlson Pushes for End of the Neo-cons Reuters and Haaretz

Notable quotes:
"... Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down. ..."
"... Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as whatever was most useful politically. ..."
Sep 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"Carlson concluded by warning about the many other Boltons in the federal bureaucracy, saying that "war may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it's always good business."

He went on to slam Trump's special representative for Iran and contender to replace Bolton, Brian Hook, as an "unapologetic neocon" who "has undisguised contempt for President Trump, and he particularly dislikes the president's nationalist foreign policy." Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif echoed Carlson hours later in a tweet, arguing that "Thirst for war – maximum pressure – should go with the warmonger-in-chief." Reuters and Haaretz

-------------

Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down.

Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as whatever was most useful politically.

They are not conservative at all, not one bit. Carlson was absolutely right about that.

They despise nationalism. They despise the idea of countries. In that regard they are like all groups who aspire to globalist dominion for their particular ideas.

They should all be driven from government. pl

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-trump-bolton-neo-cons-iran-fox-news-tucker-carlson-1.7833399?=&ts=_1568393219979b

[Sep 13, 2019] Chile's Neoliberal Flip-Flop - CounterPunch.org

Notable quotes:
"... Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at [email protected] . ..."
Sep 13, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

As for the gory details of CIA involvement in the Chilean coup d'état of 1973, Costa-Gavras' film "Missing" (Universal Pictures, 1982) staring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek exposes the surreptitious U.S. involvement via CIA operatives, supportive of Pinochet's cold-bloodied massacre of students and other innocent bystanders. Not surprisingly, the film was removed from the U.S. market following a lawsuit against the director and Universal Pictures by former ambassador Nathaniel Davis for defamation of character. When Davis lost his lawsuit, the film was re-released by Universal in 2006.

The face of neoliberalism in Chile today is disheartened, reflecting deep losses for the wealthy class as the people of the country reject Milton Friedman's neoliberal policies, including clever tax evasion techniques by the business class. Could this be the start of a worldwide movement against neoliberalism?

After all, Chile is the country that neoliberal advocates crowned their "newborn" in the battle against big government, "get government off our backs," according to Milton Friedman (and, Reagan picked up on the adage.) But, au contraire, according to the film "Missing," fascism took control over Chile. Is it possible that Friedman and Kissinger secretly cherished a fascist empire, where control would be complete, disguised as "the land of individual economic freedom?" Whatever their motives, that's what they got, and they never hesitated to revere Chile's remarkable economic achievements, fascism and all, which is powerfully expressed in the film "Missing," from end to end the heavy hand of fascism is ever-present.

Today is a new day as the people of Chile abandon decades of rotting neoliberal policies. They've had enough of Milton Freidman. The people have decided that the "state" is a beneficial partner for achievement of life's dreams. The "state" is not the menacing force of evil preached by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

The people of Chile are embracing an anti-neoliberalistic nation/state for the first time in over four decades. Will the world follow in their footsteps similar to the world adopting the principles of the "Miracle of Chile" these past four decades?

As for the new way forward, it's all about student debt. Yes, student debt was the catalyst behind Chile's repudiation of neoliberalism. In 2011 students in Chile made headlines by launching nationwide strikes over high tuition costs that drove their families into debt (sound familiar?) The strike lasted for eight months.

Over time, the student marches gained recognition by other like-minded organizations like trade unions and protests of environmental degradation. According to Tasha Fairfield, an assistant professor for the London School of Economics' Department of International Development, the strikes were pivotal: "The student movement played a critical role in creating political space," according to Fairfield, it "dramatically changed the political context in Chile and helped to place the issues of Chile's extreme inequalities centrally on the national agenda," Sebastian Rosemont, Chilean Activists Change the Rules of the Game, Foreign Policy In Focus, Dec. 2, 2014.

Subsequently, the national election of 2013 swept the left wing into power with a huge wave of public support, gaining strong majorities in both houses of the National Congress as well as electing Michelle Bachelet president. The big leftward sweep came as over two thirds of the population grew to support student demands for free university tuition.

Ever since the 2013 election, neoliberal policies have crumbled like a decrepit equestrian statue of Pinochet, who carried the stigma of brutal criminality to, and beyond, the grave.

In stark contrast to 40 years ago, today, when students, armed with only stones clashed with police equipped with full regalia of riot gear, tear gas, and armored vehicles, the harsh police activity drew heavy international criticism. That, combined with more than two-thirds of the population in support of the student movement, led to a new politics, Nueva Mayoria (New Majority), a center-left coalition made up of Bachelet's Socialist Party, the Christian Democratic Party, and the Party for Democracy.

Whereupon, Nueva Mayoria, turning up its nose to neoliberalism, raised corporate taxes from 20 percent to 25 percent and closed tax loopholes for companies and wealthy business owners. Those changes added $8.3 billion annually to government coffers, thus, serving as a source of funds to provide free education to all Chileans by 2020, as well as improved health care, and including a roll back of the for-profit schools that emerged under Pinochet's dictatorship, which is another neoliberal fascination, witness the U.S. for-profit schools listed on the New York Stock Exchange honestly, what's with that? In order to achieve success, the new Chilean politics astutely employed a key tactical move by applying the corporate tax hikes to only the largest corporations. As a result, nearly 95% of businesses are not be affected by higher taxation. This, in fact, served to secure a broad base of support for the new politics by having those who can afford to pay Pay.

Along those same lines, the new government removed a tax dodge employed by large business owners that allowed them to mostly escape taxes on $270 billion of profits (similar to the U.S. 15% "carried interest" for private equity entities, e.g., Mitt Romney's 15% tax rate).

Thus, it's little wonder that public backlash is challenging neoliberalism, especially considering the conditions throughout the Pinochet regime, as described in the meticulously structured documentary film, "The Pinochet Case," (Icarus Films, 2002), which opens with scenes of ordinary Chileans scouring the desert for the remains of family members who were tortured and killed decades previous.

Chile, "The Babe of Neoliberalism," came to life as an experiment for the "Chicago School" of economic thought. It worked. Today neoliberal theory rules the world, laissez-faire capitalism as practiced from China to the United States, privatization, open markets, slash government, and deregulation, in short, "whatever works best for profits works best for society." But, does it?

Forty years of neoliberal thought and practice has changed the world's socio-economic landscape, but it only really, truly works for the same class of people today as it did 800 years ago for the nobility of the Middle Ages.

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at [email protected] .

[Sep 13, 2019] Wallace against the USA neocolonialism

Leopard can't change its spots...
Notable quotes:
"... After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace promoted a new vision for America's role in the world that suggested that rather than playing catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with partners to establish a new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism. ..."
"... In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with a focus on peaceful cooperation. In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in war would allow the United States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." ..."
"... Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but rather "economic assistance without political conditions to further the independent economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high "the principle of self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial areas." He saw the key policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance of the right of peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system." ..."
"... The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing its political culture and kicking its addiction to a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying on militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that the US work in conjunction with nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable future rather than creating one failed state after another. ..."
Sep 13, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Stephen M , September 10, 2019 at 15:14

This is as good a time as any to point to an alternative vision of foreign policy. One based on the principle of non-interference, respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and, above all, international law. One based on peaceful coexistence and mutual cooperation. A vision of the world at peace and undivided by arbitrary distinctions. Such a world is possible and even though there are currently players around the world who are striving in that direction we need look no further than our own history for inspiration. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you one Henry A. Wallace, for your consideration.

(The following excerpts from an article by Dr. Dennis Etler. Link to the full article provided below.) --

The highest profile figure who articulated an alternative vision for American foreign policy was the politician Henry Wallace, who served as vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1940-1944 and ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the Progressive Party.

After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace promoted a new vision for America's role in the world that suggested that rather than playing catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with partners to establish a new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism.

Wallace gave a speech in 1942 that declared a "Century of the Common Man." He described a post-war world that offered "freedom from want," a new order in which ordinary citizens, rather than the rich and powerful, would play a decisive role in politics.

That speech made direct analogy between the Second World War and the Civil War, suggesting that the Second World War was being fought to end economic slavery and to create a more equal society. Wallace demanded that the imperialist powers like Britain and France give up their colonies at the end of the war.

In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with a focus on peaceful cooperation. In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in war would allow the United States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."

Wallace responded to Luce with a demand to create a world in which "no nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism." Wallace took the New Deal global. His foreign policy was to be based on non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Sadly, since then, despite occasional efforts to head in a new direction, the core constituency for US foreign policy has been corporations, rather than the "common man" either in the United States, or the other nations of the world, and United States foreign relations have been dominated by interference in the political affairs of other nations. As a result the military was transformed from an "arsenal for democracy" during the Second World War into a defender of privilege at home and abroad afterwards.

-- -
Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but rather "economic assistance without political conditions to further the independent economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high "the principle of self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial areas." He saw the key policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance of the right of peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system."

--

Wallace's legacy suggests that it is possible to put forth a vision of an honest internationalism in US foreign policy that is in essence American. His approach was proactive not reactive. It would go far beyond anything Democrats propose today, who can only suggest that the United States should not start an unprovoked war with Iran or North Korea, but who embrace sanctions and propagandist reports that demonize those countries.

Rather than ridiculing Trump's overtures to North Korea, they should go further to reduce tensions between the North and the South by pushing for the eventual withdrawal of troops from South Korea and Japan (a position fully in line with Wallace and many other politicians of that age).
Rather than demonizing and isolating Russia (as a means to score political points against Trump), progressives should call for a real détente, that recognizes Russia's core interests, proposes that NATO withdraw troops from Russia's borders, ends sanctions and reintegrates Russia into the greater European economy. They could even call for an end to NATO and the perpetuation of the dangerous global rift between East and West that it perpetuates.
Rather than attempt to thwart China's rise, and attack Trump for not punishing it enough, progressives should seek to create new synergies between China and the US economically, politically and socioculturally.
-- -
In contrast to the US policy of perpetual war and "destroying nations in order to save them," China's BRI proposes an open plan for development that is not grounded in the models of French and British imperialism. It has proposed global infrastructure and science projects that include participants from nations in Africa, Asia, South and Central America previously ignored by American and European elites -- much as Wallace proposed an equal engagement with Latin America. When offering developmental aid and investment China does not demand that free market principles be adopted or that the public sector be privatized and opened up for global investment banks to ravish.
--
The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing its political culture and kicking its addiction to a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying on militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that the US work in conjunction with nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable future rather than creating one failed state after another.

Link to the full article provided below.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/henry-wallaces-internationalism-path-american-foreign-policy-could-have-taken-still-can/5683683

[Sep 13, 2019] The danger of the proto-fascistic value system that demands unqualified, blind support for political leaders and their war agenda

Sep 13, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

The irony of the Bush administration demanding unquestioning obedience following 9/11, in the name of defending American freedom and democracy, is not lost on my students. Many openly recognize the danger of the proto-fascistic value system that demands unqualified, blind support for political leaders and their war agenda, without any consideration of the dangers involved in an infinite war conducted in country after country, with little concern for the humanitarian consequences.

One benefit of the intellectual curiosity of young Americans today is it translates into a willingness to seriously consider the motives of the 9/11 attackers. This curiosity barely existed in the days and years after September 11. Sure, Americans purchased books about the Middle East and Islam in rising numbers post-9/11. But I can't remember a single person that I spoke to in my years of studying U.S. foreign policy who bothered to actually read an interview with Osama Bin Laden. Had they done so, they would have discovered that his and his comrades' ideology, while fanatical and extreme, was also driven by serious grievances against the United States that are shared by majorities in Muslim countries. These include: anger at U.S. military support for Israel and its illegal occupation of Palestine; bitterness over U.S. military bases throughout the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia; opposition to U.S. support for authoritarian regimes in the region; and disgust with the U.S. in the wake of the 1991 Iraq war and subsequent sanctions, which caused the deaths of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children.

War fatigue became a staple of American politics in the late 2000s and 2010s, as most Americans came to see the Iraq war as immoral and not worthy of the cost in finances, lives, and blood, and considering the lies for war regarding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and fictitious ties to Al Qaeda terrorism. Many young Americans seem to share this war fatigue today, even if they weren't closely following American politics during the 2000s.

Having been exposed to the words of Osama Bin Laden, my students also understand just how dangerous the onset of the "War on Terror" was, in a conflict which Bin Laden coldly and diabolically sought to draw the U.S. into destructive wars in the Middle East, in order to achieve a "balance of terror" on both sides, defined by vicious acts of destruction against civilian populations by both the U.S. military and Islamic fundamentalists.

... ... ...

Anthony DiMaggio is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He holds a PhD in political communication, and is the author of the newly released: The Politics of Persuasion: Economic Policy and Media Bias in the Modern Era (Paperback, 2018), and Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media , and U.S. Foreign Policy After 9/11 (Paperback: 2016). He can be reached at: [email protected]

[Sep 13, 2019] Antiwar.com wins legal case against FBI

Notable quotes:
"... The Inteligence elite mistake their power over people -- and the unspeakable sums of money that are flooded into their agencies -- for success. As you might imagine, that has spelled disaster where ever in the world that they operate. God help the society where they gain the upper hand. Like in the United States, for example. Their minds are broken beyond repair because reality actively lies to them. ..."
Sep 13, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/court-fbi-must-destroy-...

Court: FBI Must Destroy Memos Calling Antiwar.com a Threat
Ruling comes after a eight-year battle over secret surveillance of the popular website after 9/11.
By KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS • September 12, 2019

In a major victory for Antiwar.com, free speech and journalism, a federal appeals court has ruled that the FBI must expunge surveillance memos that agents had drafted about the website's co-founders Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo in the early years following the 9/11 attacks.

"It's been a long fight and I'm glad we had an outcome that could might affect future FBI behavior," said Garris, who runs Antiwar.com, based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I just wish Justin was still here to know that this has happened."

Raimondo, 67, passed away in June from a long bout with cancer. He and Garris had sued the FBI in 2013 demanding it turn over all the memos and records it was keeping on the two men and the website, which has been promoting anti-interventionist news and views from a libertarian-conservative perspective since 1995

They won their case, and in 2017 the FBI agreed to turn over all the memos and settle their legal fees, $299,000, but the final expungement of two key memos involving intelligence gathered on the men and Antiwar.com, had yet to be expunged from the agency's record...

It all began when an observant reader brought a heavily redacted 2004 memo to Antiwar.com's attention in 2011. It was part of a batch of documents the reader had obtained through FOIA requests. It was clear from the documents' contents that the FBI had been collecting information and records on Raimondo and Garris for some time. At one point the FBI agent writing the April 30, 2004 memo on Antiwar.com recommended further monitoring of the website in the form of opening a "preliminary investigation to determine if [redaction] are engaging in, or have engaged in, activities which constitute a threat to national security."

Why? Because the website was questioning U.S. war policy ...

Agents noted that Antiwar.com had, or linked to, published counter-terrorism watch lists (already in the public domain). The FBI noted at least two of Raimondo's columns and wondered openly, "who are (Antiwar.com's) contributors and what are the funds utilized for?" This, after acknowledging there was no evidence of any crime being plotted or committed.

Other things noted in the documents::

-- Garris had passed along a threat he received on Sept. 12, 2001 from a Antiwar.com reader obviously disgruntled with the website's coverage of 9/11. The subject line read, "YOUR SITE IS GOING DOWN," and proceeded with this missive: "Be warned assholes, ill be posting your site address to all the hack boards tonight your site is history."

Concerned, Garris forwarded the email to the FBI field office in San Francisco. Garris heard nothing, but by January 2002, it turned up again, completely twisted around, in a secret FBI memo entitled, "A THREAT BY GARRIS TO HACK FBI WEBSITE."

It turns out this "threat" went on to justify, at least in part, the FBI's ongoing interest in monitoring the website.

-- The FBI took interest in Raimondo's writing about a 2001 FBI investigation of five Israeli nationals who were witnessed smiling and celebrating and taking pictures of the burning Twin Towers from a rooftop perch across the river from Manhattan in Union City, New Jersey, on 9/11. After witnesses called the police, the individuals, who all worked for a local moving company, were taken into custody and grilled by FBI and CIA for two months after it was deemed their work visas had expired. They were eventually deported without charge.

Raimondo, in writing about the case in 2002, linked to an American-generated terror watchlist (which had been published elsewhere on the Internet) that went out to Italian financial institutions and included the name of the man who owned the New Jersey moving company in question.

-- The FBI noted Antiwar.com was cited in an article, the name of the author redacted, about U.S aid to Israel.

-- They also noted that Raimondo had appeared on MSNBC to talk about his opposition to the Iraq War.

-- It also cited an article that listed Antiwar.com as a reference was handed out in 2002 at a "peaceful protest" at a British air base in the U.K.

-- The FBI was watching a member of a domestic neo-Nazi group who had "discussed a website, Antiwar.com" while encouraging fellow members at a conference to "educate themselves" about the Middle East conflict.

-- The agency said a special agent's review of hard drives seized during an investigation of an unnamed subject, revealed that the subject had visited Antiwar.com between July 25, 2002 and June 15, 2003, "among many other websites."

The FBI acknowledged it searched the Web, as well as Lexis-Nexis, the Universal Index (FBI central records), the agency's Electronic Case File, Department of Motor Vehicles and Dunn & Bradsheet (credit reports) for information on Antiwar.com and for "one or more individuals" working for the website.

Looking back, it's hard to fathom how such tiny (Constitutionally protected) crumbs led the FBI to the conclusion that Garris and Raimondo, two dedicated activists (Raimondo was also a prolific author) with decades of time in California's political trenches, might be a "threat to national security," but there you are...

The case decided on Wednesday revolved around two remaining memos that the FBI had so far refused to expunge. One involved the call Garris made to the FBI in 2002. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in Northern California found that the government did not have a compelling law enforcement reason to keep them.

"Maintenance of a record that describes only First Amendment activity and does not implicate national security is not pertinent to the FBI's authorized activities," the court concluded...

Garris said he was relieved and elated that the court was able to end this ugly chapter for the website...

>dervish
This is an example of why the innocent have nothing to fear from "all surveillance, all the time" is patently untrue.

Not to mention that casual erasures of any part of the Bill of Rights by government are frickin' scary, as are casual acceptance and rationalization of same by ordinary Americans (and/or those seeming like ordinary Americans).

In his memoir, True Compass , Ted Kennedy said that LBJ told him that LBJ considered the FBI culpable in the assassination of JFK, in that the FBI had had its eye on Oswald and considered him dangerous, but never warned the Secret Service.

Many years later, we have failures by the FBI and CIA to coordinate and act upon intel involved in 911. They did nothing about reports from citizens of the suspicious activities of the Saudi assassins while the assassins were in the US, such as taking flying lessons, but saying they didn't need to learn how to land. Moreover, the FBI and CIA had months of Arab conversations awaiting translation because of a shortage of translators cause by the FBI's and CIA's unwillingess to use Arab translators.

Then we have two warnings, not from ordinary citizens, but from the Russian government, that the Tsarnaevs were a threat. Now, that alone sure sounds to me like probable cause for surveillance. However, the FBI interviewed them and supposedly was unable to justify doing anything else.

So, we have culpability in a Presidential assassination AND two terrorist attacks. And that certainly can't be all before and after 1960. For instance, speaking of JFK, there was the Bay of Pigs fiasco. On the bright side, that taught JFK to squint at the CIA and the military, which, in turn, may have avoided nuclear disaster over the Cuban missile "crisis." (When we place missiles somewhere, it's defense on our part and a deterrent; when another nation, especially Russia, does the same, it's casus belli , unless some brilliant politicians can scale it "all the way down" to a "crisis" or a "national emergency." Our hypocrisy sickens.

BTW, according to the memoir, JFK was questioning our Vietnam involvement and Bobby Kennedy had flat out become convinced that bombing should stop immediately and peace negotiations should begin. He volunteered to negotiate the peace himself, but LBJ refused. So, that's another thing Bobby and Jack had in common. (Interestingly to me, by Ted's own account, he was the last of the three Kennedy brothers to lose support for the Vietnam War!)

jim p on Thu, 09/12/2019 - 7:20pm

Doubtless there are other agencies with files and stalking
Pluto's Republic on Thu, 09/12/2019 - 8:34pm
Thanks for reporting on this, Linda

The socially destructive solutions designed by the Intelligence Communities since the mid-20th century are paying off in one way:

There is now a copious amount of research and data, that once harnessed and put to work, will clearly demonstrate without doubt how tragic and destructive their outcomes have been. They have accomplished precisely the opposite of the goal they were reaching for. For example, apply their social engineering to reduce the number of terrorists in a region, and in less than a decade the region will be overrun with terrorists.

Use their strategic genius to stop the flow of drugs from hot-spots of the world, and in another decade, much of the world will be saturated with illegal drugs.

Humanity throughout the world are the losers, and they pay dearly for the blindness of Nazi-mentored techniques and strategies that are embraced by intelligence agencies and military intelligence. In the long term, they are bringers of chaos.

The nazis always lose. Ever since we brought them to America after World War II to teach us their techniques -- the US has lost every war it attempted. The effects of this influence has turned America into a prison complex.

The Inteligence elite mistake their power over people -- and the unspeakable sums of money that are flooded into their agencies -- for success. As you might imagine, that has spelled disaster where ever in the world that they operate. God help the society where they gain the upper hand. Like in the United States, for example. Their minds are broken beyond repair because reality actively lies to them.

If you ask them to send a rocket to the moon, they'll wait until the full moon is directly overhead, then fire the rocket. They are void of subtlety. The failure will be classified and forgotten.

We need Taoist leaders if we want to solve real world problems.

[Sep 12, 2019] Israel accused of placing StingRays devices near White House

Sep 12, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Though it's easy to imagine the outpouring of fury and wall to wall media coverage -- complete with urgent Congressional hearings -- should such allegations center on any other foreign country caught spying on the White House (let's say Russia for example), the bombshell Politico report has barely made a dent in the mainstream media or big cable networks' coverage.

This is partly because the administration's own reaction has been muted, as the report notes that "the Trump administration took no action to punish or even privately scold the Israeli government" after being informed by US intelligence that Israel likely planted the devices.

Politico's sources in most instances held top intelligence and national security posts, who describe the following of the recovered spy devices :

The miniature surveillance devices, colloquially known as "StingRays," mimic regular cell towers to fool cell phones into giving them their locations and identity information . Formally called international mobile subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and data use .

The devices were likely intended to spy on President Donald Trump, one of the former officials said, as well as his top aides and closest associates -- though it's not clear whether the Israeli efforts were successful.

From the moment the report was unveiled early Thursday, Israel's stance has been to vehemently deny, and to even suggest the accusations are tinged with "anti-Semitism".

Pure Speculation , 7 minutes ago link

The statement from the prime minister's office added, "There is a longstanding commitment, and a directive from the Israeli government not to engage in any intelligence operations in the U.S. This directive is strictly enforced without exception."

Uh huh... Sure. So how do you explain Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell then?

Vuke , 19 minutes ago link

Come on readers. Next they'll be saying Israel controls all levels of government through political donations. Possible from the $2 Billion a year they get? Anybody know how much total Israeli contributions go to the Pres, Congress etc?

africoman , 21 minutes ago link

How sweet & bitter this revelation come on the anniversary of 911 & perps are free solidifying their grips over America etc

it would be ironically surprising if the MSM took it for repointing to Americans on such a day or we

How could you deprogram Americans especially trumptards when others such as Ilhan Omar tried to hint them who did 911?

i commemorate the anniversary of 911 cos it happened on the eve of my new year and at least 3 of my people died in that fateful event

i wish isisrahell annexed their strong holds DC and leave Palestinians alone

attah-boy-Luther , 32 minutes ago link

... ... ...

http://themillenniumreport.com/2019/09/9-11-truth-exploding-worldwide-perps-desperate-to-distract-populace-and-disarm-patriots/#more-84351

Mustafa Kemal , 33 minutes ago link

I was hoping to see a comment from Einstein, but cant find him. Wonder where he is. I guess we will just have to lower our standards and look to ZD1 for the real scoop.

[Sep 12, 2019] You know who would be a good replacement for Bolton ? Tulsi Gabbard.

Sep 12, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

cartman September 10, 2019 at 8:51 am

Trump Fires John Bolton After "Disagreeing Strongly With His Suggestions

One less warmongering neo-con in the swamp.

That still leaves Patriarch Pompous Dumpus of the UOC-KP-CIA in place.

Mark Chapman September 10, 2019 at 11:13 am
Good catch; you were first with that blockbuster. You know who would be a good replacement? Tulsi Gabbard. It would please those who moan the government is too partisan, it would remove the only real non-ideologue from the Democratic slate, and leave them with doddering Uncle Joe and a bunch of no-ideas bobbleheads. Few would dare question her lack of foreign-policy experience, given her actual experience of being at the sharp end of it with the military. The American people claim to be sick of war – although not sick enough of it to do any real protesting against it – and Gabbard is anti-war. She's easy on the eyes, but if Trump tried his grab-'er-by-the-pussy move, he would find himself only needing one glove this winter; her obvious toughness would appeal to feminists. I think she'd take it if asked, because although she despises Trump and his government, she would not be able to resist the opportunity to shape America's foreign policy. She would eat news outlets who tried to portray her as an apologist for terror or Putin or whatever for lunch.
Northern Star September 10, 2019 at 2:57 pm
Nope .Major Gabbard is needed as America's CIC aka POTUS.

Nothing short of that is called for.

To implement even partially achieve (implement) her agenda she needs the full weight and authority of the Oval office.

BTW Tulsi has the skills to totally fuck up bashers of women:

Mark Chapman September 10, 2019 at 10:38 pm
Well, she was not on the short list of names I saw for potential Bolton replacements. I don't see her making president, though, her support base is just not big enough. But if the Democrats put all their eggs in the Burnout Joe basket, he will in all probability lose to Trump. Trump's support has eroded, but not so far that very many people want to see Joe Biden running the country.

[Sep 12, 2019] Tulsi. Tulsi. Tulsi: Harris is making as many gaffes as that moron Biden .

Sep 12, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Northern Star September 8, 2019 at 2:05 pm

Tulsi. Tulsi. Tulsi
Harris is making as many gaffes as that moron Biden .

https://www.youtube.com/embed/FxUxij7Fkj0?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Mark Chapman

[Sep 12, 2019] Dances With Bears: MARK GALEOTTI IS A FACT FAKER HIS BOOK ON RUSSIAN CRIME IS A HATE CRIME, A WAR CRIME

Sep 12, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al September 9, 2019 at 9:14 am

I only mentioned Mark 'Gerasimov' Galeotti recently linked to a MT source one of you posted and hey, presto

Dances With Bears: MARK GALEOTTI IS A FACT FAKER – HIS BOOK ON RUSSIAN CRIME IS A HATE CRIME, A WAR CRIME
http://johnhelmer.net/mark-galeotti-is-a-fact-faker-his-book-on-russian-crime-is-a-hate-crime-a-war-crime/

Repeating lies over and over makes old-fashioned Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda. Repeating lies, then contradicting them; moving them from one government-paid think-tank to another; footnoting a new lie to an older version; quoting policemen and gangsters saying fatuities; adding slang and the words of pop songs -- this is still Goebbels-type but stretched out and product-diversified to make its author more money. This is Mark Galeotti's method .
####

The rest at the link and a deep dive on Galeotti himself.

[Sep 12, 2019] On 6 May, a volunteer subject, a 20-year-old soldier, was dosed with sarin there, began foaming at the mouth, collapsed into convulsions, and died an hour later

Sep 12, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al September 7, 2019 at 4:07 am

The subject itself is v. interesting but I'm only posting this because, well you'll see from the brief section below:

The Groaning Man: From mind control to murder? How a deadly fall revealed the CIA's darkest secrets
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-how-a-deadly-fall-revealed-the-cias-darkest-secrets

Olson's doubts deepened. In spring 1953, he visited the top-secret Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, where government scientists were studying the effects of sarin and other nerve gases. On 6 May, a volunteer subject, a 20-year-old soldier, was dosed with sarin there, began foaming at the mouth, collapsed into convulsions, and died an hour later. Afterward, Olson spoke about his discomfort with a psychiatrist who helped direct the research, William Sargant .
####

That's very unBritish! Not really. This is not the first time that something that has been declassified in the United States and uncovered British (shameful) secrets. The thing is the Brits like to see themselves as not 'going as far' as their American cousins and this myth is perpetuated – a bit like the British sense of 'fairness'. Yet again we discover that the UK has worked hand in glove in the deepest of sh*t, something that most probably would have been buried forever under their Secrets Act if it wasn't for the US' relative openness.


https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-how-a-deadly-fall-revealed-the-cias-darkest-secrets

Olson's doubts deepened. In spring 1953, he visited the top-secret Microbiological Research Establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, where government scientists were studying the effects of sarin and other nerve gases. On 6 May, a volunteer subject, a 20-year-old soldier, was dosed with sarin there, began foaming at the mouth, collapsed into convulsions, and died an hour later. Afterward, Olson spoke about his discomfort with a psychiatrist who helped direct the research, William Sargant .
####

That's very unBritish! Not really. This is not the first time that something that has been declassified in the United States and uncovered British (shameful) secrets. The thing is the Brits like to see themselves as not 'going as far' as their American cousins and this myth is perpetuated – a bit like the British sense of 'fairness'. Yet again we discover that the UK has worked hand in glove in the deepest of sh*t, something that most probably would have been buried forever under their Secrets Act if it wasn't for the US' relative openness.

[Sep 11, 2019] John Brennan's and Jim Clappers' Last Gasp by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
The fact that Smolenkov purchased house on his name excludes his "extraction" to the USA. He probably legally emigrated amazing some serious money in Russia
Notable quotes:
"... [Smolenkov] follows Ushakov back to Moscow, where he is a mid-level paper pusher doing administrative support for Ushakov. The CIA gets copies of Putin's itineraries that Smolenkov photographs. He is a big hit, but ultimately produces nothing of vital importance because all truly sensitive information is hand carried by principles, and never seen by administrative staff. Moreover Ushakov advises on international relations, and would not be privy to anything dealing with intelligence. Ushakov, as a long-serving Ambassador to the US, would be asked by Putin to opine on US politics. Smolenkov has access to Ushakov's post-meeting verbal comments, which he turns over to the CIA. ..."
"... The initial reports of the Steele Dossier appeared in June 2016. This coincided with John Brennan ordering Moscow Station to turn up the heat on Smolenkov to gain access to what Putin is thinking. But Smolenkov has no real direct access. Instead, he starts fabricating and/or exaggerating his access to convince his CIA handler that he is on the job and worth every penny he is being paid by US taxpayers. ..."
"... The information Smolenkov creates is passed to his CIA handler via the secure communications channel set up when he was signed up as a spy. But these reports are not handled in the normal way that sensitive human intelligence is treated at CIA Headquarters. Instead, the material is accepted at face value and not vetted to confirm its accuracy. My intel friend, citing a knowledgeable source, indicates that Smolenkov was not polygraphed. ..."
"... This raised red flags in the CIA Counterintelligence staff, especially when Brennan starts briefing the President using the information provided by Smolenkov. Brennan responds by locking most of the CIA's Russian experts out of the loop. Later, Brennan does the same thing with the National Intelligence Council, locking out the National Intelligence Officers who would normally oversee the production of a National Intelligence Assessment. In short, Brennan cooked the books using Smolenkov's intelligence, which had it been subjected to normal checks and balances would never have passed muster. It's Brennan's leaks to the press that eventually prompt the CIA to pull the plug on Smolenkov. ..."
"... The dossier attributed to Steele, it has seemed to me, showed every sign of being the proverbial 'camel produced by a committee.' ..."
"... Although I know that fabricating evidence and corrupting judicial proceedings is part of its supposed author's 'stock in trade', I think it is unclear whether he contributed all that much to the dossier. ..."
"... His prime role, I think, was to contribute a veneer of intelligence respectability to a farrago the actual origins of which could not be acknowledged, so it could be used in support of FISA applications and in briefings to journalists. ..."
"... Although it had started much earlier, the moving into 'high gear' of the conspiracy behind 'Russiagate, of which the dossier was one manifestation, and the phone 'digital forensics' produced by 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait another, were I think essentially panicky 'firefighting' operations. ..."
"... Part of this involved turning the conspiracy to prevent Trump being elected into a conspiracy to destabilise his Presidency and ensure he did not carry through on any of his 'anti-Borgist' agenda. ..."
Sep 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

A flood of news in the last 24 hours regarding Russiagate. I am referring specifically to reports that the CIA ex-filtrated Oleg Smolenkov, a mid-level Russian Foreign Ministry bureaucrat who reportedly hooked himself on the coat-tails of Yuri Ushakov, who was Ambassador to the US from 1999 through 2008. He was recruited by the CIA (i.e., asked to collect information and pass it to the U.S. Government via his or her case officer) at sometime during this period. Smolenkov is being portrayed as a supposedly "sensitive" source. But if you read either the Washington Post or New York Times accounts of this event there is not a lot of meat on this hamburger.

Regardless of the quality of his reporting, Smolenkov is the kind of recruited source that looks good on paper and helps a CIA case officer get promoted but adds little to actual U.S. intelligence on Russia. If you understood the CIA culture you would immediately recognize that a case officer (CIA terminology for the operations officer tasked with identifying and recruiting human sources) gets rewarded by recruiting persons who ostensibly will have access to information the CIA has identified as a priority target. In this case, we're talking about possible access to Vladimir Putin.

If you take time to read both articles you will quickly see that the real purpose of this "information operation" is to paint Donald Trump as a security threat that must be stopped. This is conveniently timed to assist Jerry Nadler's mission impossible to secure Trump's impeachment. But I think there is another dynamic at play--these competing explanations for what prompted the exfiltration of this CIA asset say more about the incompetence of Barack Obama and his intel chiefs. John Brennan and Jim Clapper in particular.

A former intelligence officer and friend summarized the various press accounts as the follows and offered his own insights in a note I received this morning:

[Smolenkov] follows Ushakov back to Moscow, where he is a mid-level paper pusher doing administrative support for Ushakov. The CIA gets copies of Putin's itineraries that Smolenkov photographs. He is a big hit, but ultimately produces nothing of vital importance because all truly sensitive information is hand carried by principles, and never seen by administrative staff. Moreover Ushakov advises on international relations, and would not be privy to anything dealing with intelligence. Ushakov, as a long-serving Ambassador to the US, would be asked by Putin to opine on US politics. Smolenkov has access to Ushakov's post-meeting verbal comments, which he turns over to the CIA.

The initial reports of the Steele Dossier appeared in June 2016. This coincided with John Brennan ordering Moscow Station to turn up the heat on Smolenkov to gain access to what Putin is thinking. But Smolenkov has no real direct access. Instead, he starts fabricating and/or exaggerating his access to convince his CIA handler that he is on the job and worth every penny he is being paid by US taxpayers.

The information Smolenkov creates is passed to his CIA handler via the secure communications channel set up when he was signed up as a spy. But these reports are not handled in the normal way that sensitive human intelligence is treated at CIA Headquarters. Instead, the material is accepted at face value and not vetted to confirm its accuracy. My intel friend, citing a knowledgeable source, indicates that Smolenkov was not polygraphed.

This raised red flags in the CIA Counterintelligence staff, especially when Brennan starts briefing the President using the information provided by Smolenkov. Brennan responds by locking most of the CIA's Russian experts out of the loop. Later, Brennan does the same thing with the National Intelligence Council, locking out the National Intelligence Officers who would normally oversee the production of a National Intelligence Assessment. In short, Brennan cooked the books using Smolenkov's intelligence, which had it been subjected to normal checks and balances would never have passed muster. It's Brennan's leaks to the press that eventually prompt the CIA to pull the plug on Smolenkov.

There is public evidence that Brennan not only cooked the books but that the leaks of this supposedly "sensitive" intelligence occurred when he was Director and lying Jim Clapper was Director of National Intelligence. If Oleg Smolenkov was really such a terrific source of intel, then where are the reports? It is one thing to keep such reports close hold when the source is still in place. But he has been out of danger for more than two years. Those reports should have been shared with the Senate and House Intelligence committees. If there was actual solid intelligence in those reports that corroborated the Steele Dossier, then that information would have been leaked and widely circulated. This is Sherlock Holmes dog that did not bark.Then we have the odd fact that this guy's name is all over the press and he is buying real estate in true name. What the hell!! If the CIA genuinely believed that Mr. Smolenkov was in danger he would not be walking around doing real estate deals in true name. In fact, the sources for both the Washington Post and NY Times pieces push the propaganda that Smolenkov is a sure fire target for a Russian retaliatory hit. Really? Then why publish his name and confirm his location.

That leaves me with the alternative explanation--Smolenkov is a propaganda prop and is being trotted out by Brennan to try to provide public pressure to prevent the disclosure of intelligence that will show that the CIA and the NSA were coordinating and operating with British intelligence to entrap and smear Donald Trump and members of his campaign.

I want you to take a close look at the two pieces on this exfiltration (i.e., Washington Post and NY Times) and note the significant differences

REASON FOR THE EXFILTRATION :

Let's start with the Washington Post:

The exfiltration took place sometime after an Oval Office meeting in May 2017, when President Trump revealed highly classified counterterrorism information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador, said the current and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation.

What was the information that Trump revealed? He was discussing intel that Israel passed regarding ISIS in Syria. (See the Washington Post story here .) Why would he talk to the Russians about that? Because every day, at least once a day, U.S. and Russian military authorities are sharing intelligence with one another in a phone call that originates from the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center (aka CAOC) at the Al Udeid Air Force Base in Qatar. Trump's conversation not only was appropriate but fully within his right to do so as Commander-in-Chief.

What the hell does this have to do with a sensitive source in Moscow? NOTHING!! Red Herring.

The NY Times account is more detailed and damning of Obama instead of Trump:

But when intelligence officials revealed the severity of Russia's election interference with unusual detail later that year, the news media picked up on details about the C.I.A.'s Kremlin sources.

C.I.A. officials worried about safety made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to extract the source from Russia. The situation grew more tense when the informant at first refused, citing family concerns -- prompting consternation at C.I.A. headquarters and sowing doubts among some American counterintelligence officials about the informant's trustworthiness. But the C.I.A. pressed again months later after more media inquiries. This time, the informant agreed. . . .

The decision to extract the informant was driven "in part" because of concerns that Mr. Trump and his administration had mishandled delicate intelligence, CNN reported. But former intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source, and other current American officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency's sources alone was the impetus for the extraction. . . .

But the government had indicated that the source existed long before Mr. Trump took office, first in formally accusing Russia of interference in October 2016 and then when intelligence officials declassified parts of their assessment about the interference campaign for public release in January 2017. News agencies, including NBC, began reporting around that time about Mr. Putin's involvement in the election sabotage and on the C.I.A.'s possible sources for the assessment.

Trump played no role whatsoever in releasing information that allegedly compromised this so-called "golden boy" of Russian intelligence. The NY Times account makes it very clear that the release of information while Obama was President, not Trump, is what put the source in danger. Who leaked that information?

WHAT DID THE SOURCE KNOW AND WHAT DID HE TELL US?

But how valuable was this source really? What did he provide that was so enlightening? On this point the New York Times and Washington Post are more in sync.

First the NY Times:

The Moscow informant was instrumental to the C.I.A.'s most explosive conclusion about Russia's interference campaign: that President Vladimir V. Putin ordered and orchestrated it himself . As the American government's best insight into the thinking of and orders from Mr. Putin, the source was also key to the C.I.A.'s assessment that he affirmatively favored Donald J. Trump's election and personally ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee .

The Washington Post provides a more fulsome account:

U.S. officials had been concerned that Russian sources could be at risk of exposure as early as the fall of 2016, when the Obama administration first confirmed that Russia had stolen and publicly disclosed emails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta.

In October 2016, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a joint statement that intelligence agencies were "confident that the Russian Government directed" the hacking campaign. . . .

In January 2017, the Obama administration published a detailed assessment that unambiguously laid the blame on the Kremlin, concluding that "Putin ordered an influence campaign" and that Russia's goal was to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process and harm Clinton's chances of winning.

"That's a pretty remarkable intelligence community product -- much more specific than what you normally see," one U.S. official said. "It's very expected that potential U.S. intelligence assets in Russia would be under a higher level of scrutiny by their own intelligence services."

Sounds official. But there is no actual forensic or documentary evidence (by that I mean actual corroborating intelligence reports) to back up these claims by our oxymoronically christened intelligence community.

Vladimir Putin ordered the hack? Where is the report? It is either in a piece of intercepted electronics communication and/or in a report derived from information provided by Mr. Smolenkov. Where is it? Why has that not been shared in public? Don't have to worry about exposing the source now. He is already in the open. What did he report? Answer--no direct evidence.

Then there is the lie that the Russians hacked the DNC. They did not. Bill Binney, a former Technical Director of the NSA, and I have written on this subject previously ( see here ) and there is no truth to this claim. Let me put it simply--if the DNC had been hacked by the Russians using spearphising (this is claimed in the Robert Mueller report) then the NSA would have collected those messages and would be able to show they were transferred to the Russians. That did not happen.

This kind of chaotic leaking about an old intel op is symptomatic of panic. CIA is already officially denying key parts of the story. My money is on John Brennan and Jim Clapper as the likely impetus for these reports. They are hoping to paint Trump as a national security threat and distract from the upcoming revelations from the DOJ Inspector General report on the FISA warrants and, more threatening, the decisions that Prosecutor John Durham will take in deciding to indict those who attempted to launch a coup against Donald Trump, a legitimately elected President of the United States.

blue peacock , 10 September 2019 at 02:34 PM

I'm always skeptical of NY Times and WaPo and CNN reporting on anything national security related. It seems there is always an axe to grind.

I don't know why folks believe these media outlets have any credibility.

Larry Johnson -> blue peacock... , 10 September 2019 at 03:16 PM
Important to focus on the fact they are telling different and even contradictory stories. That's confusion on the part of the deep state.
Ana said in reply to Larry Johnson ... , 11 September 2019 at 10:00 AM
... And what helps us to decode the plot!
turcopolier -> blue peacock... , 11 September 2019 at 09:47 AM
BP

As I told LJ yesterday while he was writing this piece I have a slightly different theory of this matter. It is true that CIA suffered for a long time from a dearth of talent in the business of recruiting and running foreign clandestine HUMINT assets. This was caused by a focus by several CIA Directors on technical collection means rather than espionage. This policy drove many skilled case officers into retirement but the situation has much improved in the last decade and it must be remembered that an agency only needs a few skilled case officers with the right access to human targets to acquire some very fine and useful well placed foreign agents (spies). IMO it is likely that CIA has/had several well placed Russian assets in Moscow of whom Smolenkov was probably the least useful and the most expendable. It may well be that Brennan was using the chicken feed provided by Smolenkov to fuel the conspiracy run by him and Clapper against Trump's campaign and presidency, but Brennan left office and then the CIA under other management was faced with the problem of a Russian government which was told in the US press by implication that either the US had deep penetrations of Russian diplomatic and intelligence communications or that there were deep penetration moles in Moscow. that being the case it seems likely to me that the Russians would have been beating the bushes looking for the moles. In that situation the CIA may have decided to exfiltrate Smolenkov and his wife while leaving enough clues along the way that would have indicated that he might have been THE MOLE. People do not need a lot of encouragement to accept thoughts that they want to believe. A point in favor of this theory is that once CIA had him in the States they quickly lost interest in him, terminated their relationship with him and paid him his back pay and showed him the door. No new identity, no resettlement, he was given none of that. Finding himself alone in a strange land, Smolenkov then bought a house in the suburbs of Washington in HIS OWN NAME. Say what? That would not have happened if CIA had maintained some sort of relationship with him. And then... someone in CIA leaked the story of the exfiltration as movie plot to "a former senior intelligence officer" who gives sit to Sciutto at CNN. Why would they do that? IMO they would have though that having the story appear in the media would reinfocer Smolenkov's importance in Russian minds. Well, pilgrims, Clapper fits the bill as the "former blah, blah". He is an employee of CNN. CNN hates Trump and they quickly broadcast the story far and away. Unfortunately for CNN the story immediately began to disintegrate even in the eyes of the NY Times. The Smolenkov/Brennan affair will undoubtedly be part of the road that leads to doom for Brennan and Clapper but the possible CIA story is equally interesting.

ambrit , 10 September 2019 at 03:51 PM
Sir;
The fact that Mr. Smolenkov is out and about in his new home in the West shows that he is a small fish. As you say, if he was really in danger, he would be living somewhere in the West now under a new name and maybe a new face. The fact that his 'handlers' allow this lax security to happen is a sign of how unimportant he is. Unless, my inner cynic prompts, he is destined to become one of the "honoured dead," perhaps by a false flag 'liquidation.'
How low will Clapper and Brennan et. al. go?
Thanks for keeping this matter front and centre.
Fred , 10 September 2019 at 04:22 PM
So the son of Our Man in Havana went to Moscow. It would make a decent movies if it weren't for the damage Brennan and company have done to us. Obama, of course, knew nothing......
Diana C , 10 September 2019 at 04:49 PM
I have lost hope that anyone--especially Brennan and Clapper--will be held accountable for their attempt to "launch a coup" (as you put it).

Since their coup attempt ultimately failed, most people will be wanting just to move on.

As an unimportant citizen liveing in a fly-over state, I feel very angry that my tax dollars were wasted on these many government hearings and enormously expensive investigations rather than on actually on governing and improving the governing of our country.

The least we should be able to expect is that people who live off our tax dollars should be held accountable for all that wasted expense and for the lack of actual governing going on in The House and The Senate. So many problems that need the attention of our elected representative and Senators were ignored while elected representatives and representatives got to capture the spotlight and try to become "media stars" while accomplishing nothing.

I also feel terrible that men have been sent to prison for seemingly nothing and have their lives ruined for nothing but the chance of some to grand stand and claim they are really doing the jobs they were sent to do. So many people with no real sense of honor or of what is right and what is wrong.

Thanks, Larry. You have been consistently one of the good guys. (And I bet you are happy now that Yosemite Sam Bolton is no longer advising the POTUS.)

fredw , 10 September 2019 at 06:09 PM
"The fact that his 'handlers' allow this lax security to happen is a sign of how unimportant he is."

It indicates to me that he and any handlers believe that the Russians are OK with it. That could be for various reasons. But relying on Russian tolerance because he is a "small fish" seems incredibly trusting. Neither fled agents nor their handlers are known for their trusting natures. They have had some reasons stronger than that for their unconcern. Whether those reasons will survive publicity remains to be seen.

Oscar , 10 September 2019 at 06:31 PM
Are those CIA agents as stupid, naive & incompetent as you paint them to be?
If that's the case our country is in real danger! You are. Pro Trump
and, you are basically defending him, but Putin do own Donald Trump,whether you like it or not!
turcopolier -> Oscar ... , 11 September 2019 at 08:56 AM
Oscar
What is the evidence for "Putin do own Trump?"Is it Trump's attempts to conduct foreign policy relationships with Russia? That is his job.
JohnH , 10 September 2019 at 08:16 PM
My question is: why did they push this report now? Any way you cut it, the Times and Post are just providing some trivia and drivel. Without substance, they can accomplish nothing and substance has been what's been missing all along.

I doubt that Democrats, having been burned once, are eager to explore Brennan's smoke and mirrors again. It's never been a big concern to voters. And unless Brennan & Co. can do better than this superficial stuff, voters are never going to be concerned.

Maybe the Times and Post just felt sorry for Brennan, who's been off barking at the moon for years now.

Factotum , 10 September 2019 at 08:40 PM
Have a cup of Ovomaltine.
Rhondda , 10 September 2019 at 08:48 PM
...Smolenkov is a propaganda prop and is being trotted out by Brennan to try to provide public pressure to prevent the disclosure of intelligence that will show that the CIA and the NSA were coordinating and operating with British intelligence to entrap and smear Donald Trump and members of his campaign...

Well said. Thank you for following this closely and shining the light! You are an amazing American patriot, Mr. Larry C. Johnson. A glass in your honor!

plantman , 10 September 2019 at 09:13 PM
I think AG Barr might have cut these guys (Brennan and Clapper) some slack and let them off the hook, but NOW, what can he do but prosecute??

Brennan has shown that he is going to persevere with his fallacious attacks on Trump come hell or high water.

He needs to be stopped and brought to justice...

[email protected] -> plantman... , 11 September 2019 at 08:51 AM
Haha! Dream on. Barr IS CIA...remember his role back in the Slick WIlly days in Mena Arkansas?
Roy G , 10 September 2019 at 11:27 PM
IMO this scenario is the most plausible, Thanks for the sanity check. That said, given the desperation by these Sorcerer's Apprentices, I would be on the lookout for Mr. Smolenkov lest he be 'Skirpal-ed' in the coming weeks.
anon , 10 September 2019 at 11:36 PM
This whole story convinces now more than ever before that there is a high level spy/mole in the us administration and intelligence community.The only question is it spying for russia or china or both.Just a beautiful thing to watch.Those knickers,must surely be in a knot by now.
Even rocketman had a giggle.
Jim Ticehurst , 10 September 2019 at 11:52 PM
How many CIA Assets have been exposed..Tortured and Murdered During The Barrack Obama Reign...In May..2014 HE Paid a Surprise Visit to Afghanastan..His White House Bureau Chief Sent out an email to Reporters with a List of Who would meet With President Obama..It Contained the NAME of the CIA...Chief of Station in Kabul...Now that is REAL MESSY..
turcopolier , 11 September 2019 at 08:59 AM
[email protected]

Is there any basis for any of your assertions or are you just running your mouth?

David Habakkuk , 11 September 2019 at 10:37 AM
Larry,

Having been away from base, I have not been able to comment on some very fascinating recent posts.

Both your recent pieces, and Robert Willman's most helpful update on the state of play relating to the unraveling of the frame-up against Michael Flynn, have provided a lot to chew over.

Among other things, they have made me think further about the 302s recording the interviews with Bruce Ohr produced by Joseph Pientka – a character about whom I think we need to know more.

On reflection, I think that the picture that emerges of Ohr as an incurious and gullible nitwit, swallowing whole bucket loads of 'horse manure' fed him by Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson, may be a carefully – indeed maybe cunningly – crafted fiction.

The interpretation your former intelligence officer friend puts on the Smolenkov affair, and also some of what Sidney Powell has to say in the ''Motion to Compel' on behalf of Flynn, both 'mesh' with what I have long suspected.

The dossier attributed to Steele, it has seemed to me, showed every sign of being the proverbial 'camel produced by a committee.'

Although I know that fabricating evidence and corrupting judicial proceedings is part of its supposed author's 'stock in trade', I think it is unclear whether he contributed all that much to the dossier.

His prime role, I think, was to contribute a veneer of intelligence respectability to a farrago the actual origins of which could not be acknowledged, so it could be used in support of FISA applications and in briefings to journalists.

Although it had started much earlier, the moving into 'high gear' of the conspiracy behind 'Russiagate, of which the dossier was one manifestation, and the phone 'digital forensics' produced by 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait another, were I think essentially panicky 'firefighting' operations.

They are likely to have been responses, first, to the realisation that material leaked from the DNC was going to be published by WikiLeaks, and then the discovery, probably significantly later, that the source was Seth Rich, and his subsequent murder.

Although the operation to divert responsibility to the Russians which then became necessary was strikingly successful, it did not have the expected result of saving Hillary Clinton from defeat.

What I then think may have emerged was a two-pronged strategy.

Part of this involved turning the conspiracy to prevent Trump being elected into a conspiracy to destabilise his Presidency and ensure he did not carry through on any of his 'anti-Borgist' agenda.

In different ways, both the framing of Flynn, and the final memorandum in the dossier, dated 13 December 2016, were part of this strategy.

Also required however was another 'insurance policy' – which was what the Bruce Ohr 302s were intended to provide.

The purpose of this was to have 'evidence' in place, should the first prong of the strategy run into problems, to sustain the case that people in the FBI and DOJ, and Bruce and Nellie Ohr in particular, were not co-conspirators with Steele and Simpson, but their gullible dupes.

This brings me to an irony. Some people have tried to replace the 'narrative' in which Steele was an heroic exposer of a Russian plot to destroy American democracy by an alternative in which he was the gullible 'patsy' of just such a plot.

In fact there is one strand, and one strand only, in the dossier which smells strongly to me of FSB-orchestrated disinformation.

Some of the material on Russian cyber operations, including critically the suggestions about the involvement of Aleksej Gubarev and his company XBT which provoked legal action by these against BuzzFeed and Steele, look to me as though they could come from sources in the FSB.

But, if this is so, the likely conduit is not through Steele, but from FSB to FBI cyber people.

How precisely this worked is unclear, but I cannot quite get rid of the suspicion that Major Dmitri Dokuchaev just might be serving out his sentence for treason in a comfortable flat somewhere above the Black Sea. Indeed, I can imagine a lecture to FSB trainees on how to make 'patsies' of people like the Ohrs.

If this is so, however, it mat also be the case that these are attempting to make 'patsies' of Steele and Simpson.

[Sep 11, 2019] Video Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 The Bamboozle Has Captured Us

Highly recommended!
David Warner Mathisen definitely know what he is talking about due to his long military career... Free fall speed is documented and is an embarrassment to the official story, because free fall is impossible for a naturally collapsing building.
Now we need to dig into the role of Larry Silverstein in the Building 7 collapse.
Notable quotes:
"... Below is a video showing several film sequences taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen years ago on September 11, 2001. ..."
"... The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative" promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004. ..."
"... Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7 ..."
"... This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001. ..."
"... its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed, as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an interview here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview. ..."
"... the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building ..."
"... Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states). ..."
"... Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day. ..."
"... In addition to these interviews and the Dig Within blog of Kevin Ryan, I would also strongly recommend everybody read the article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls entitled " Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative? " which was published on Global Research a few days ago, on September 6, 2019. ..."
"... on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept what we already know. ..."
"... Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see here for example, and also here . ..."
"... The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare: ..."
"... David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University. ..."
Sep 11, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

Below is a video showing several film sequences taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen years ago on September 11, 2001.

The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative" promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004.

  1. Building.
  2. Seven.
  3. Freefall.
  4. Speed.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mamvq7LWqRU

Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by any airplane on September 11, 2001, and concluded that fires could not possibly have caused the collapse of that 47-story steel-frame building -- rather, the collapse seen could have only been caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every support column (43 in number).

This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001.

Various individuals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to argue that the collapse of Building 7 was slower than freefall speed, but its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed, as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an interview here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview.

Although the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building prior to the flight of the aircraft into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (Buildings One and Two), as well as the power to cover up the evidence of this criminal activity and to deflect questioning by government agencies and suppress the story in the mainstream news, the collapse of Building 7 is by no means the only evidence which points to the same conclusion.

Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states).

However, eighteen years later there is simply no excuse anymore -- except for the fact that the ramifications of the admission that the official story is a flagrant fraud and a lie are so distressing that many people cannot actually bring themselves to consciously admit what they in fact already know subconsciously.

For additional evidence, I strongly recommend the work of the indefatigable Kevin Robert Ryan , whose blog at Dig Within should be required reading for every man and woman in the united states -- as well as those in the rest of the world, since the ramifications of the murders of innocent men, women and children on September 11, 2001 have led to the murders of literally millions of other innocent men, women and children around the world since that day, and the consequences of the failure to absorb the truth of what actually took place, and the consequences of the failure to address the lies that are built upon the fraudulent explanation of what took place on September 11, continue to negatively impact men and women everywhere on our planet.

Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day.

I would also strongly recommend listening very carefully to the series of five interviews with Kevin Ryan on Guns and Butter with Bonnie Faulkner, which can be found in the Guns and Butter podcast archive here . These interviews, from 2013, are numbered 287, 288, 289, 290, and 291 in the archive.

Selected Articles: 9/11: Do You Still Believe that Al Qaeda Masterminded the Attacks?

I would in fact recommend listening to nearly every interview in that archive of Bonnie Faulkner's show, even though I do not of course agree with every single guest nor with every single view expressed in every single interview. Indeed, if you carefully read Kevin Ryan's blog which was linked above, you will find a blog post by Kevin Ryan dated June 24, 2018 in which he explicitly names James Fetzer along with Judy Woods as likely disinformation agents working to discredit and divert the efforts of 9/11 researchers. James Fetzer appears on Guns and Butter several times in the archived interview page linked above.

In addition to these interviews and the Dig Within blog of Kevin Ryan, I would also strongly recommend everybody read the article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls entitled " Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative? " which was published on Global Research a few days ago, on September 6, 2019.

That article contains a number of stunning quotations about the ongoing failure to address the now-obvious lies we are being told about the attacks of September 11. One of these quotations, by astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996), is particularly noteworthy -- even though I certainly do not agree with everything Carl Sagan ever said or wrote. Regarding our propensity to refuse to acknowledge what we already know deep down to be true, Carl Sagan said:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken.

This quotation is from Sagan's 1995 text, The Demon-Haunted World (with which I have points of disagreement, but which is extremely valuable for that quotation alone, and which I might suggest turning around on some of the points that Sagan was arguing as well, as a cautionary warning to those who have accepted too wholeheartedly some of Sagan's teachings and opinions).

This quotation shows that on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept what we already know. This internal division is actually addressed in the world's ancient myths, which consistently illustrate that our egoic mind often refuses to acknowledge the higher wisdom we have available to us through the reality of our authentic self, sometimes called our Higher Self. Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see here for example, and also here .

The important author Peter Kingsley has noted that in ancient myth, the role of the prophet was to bring awareness and acknowledgement of that which the egoic mind refuses to see -- which is consistent with the observation that it is through our authentic self (which already knows) that we have access to the realm of the gods. In the Iliad, for example, Dr. Kingsley notes that Apollo sends disaster upon the Achaean forces until the prophet Calchas reveals the source of the god's anger: Agamemnon's refusal to free the young woman Chryseis, whom Agamemnon has seized in the course of the fighting during the Trojan War, and who is the daughter of a priest of Apollo. Until Agamemnon atones for this insult to the god, Apollo will continue to visit destruction upon those following Agamemnon.

Until we acknowledge and correct what our Higher Self already knows to be the problem, we ourselves will be out of step with the divine realm.

If we look the other way at the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children on September 11, 2001, and deliberately refuse to see the truth that we already know deep down in our subconscious, then we will face the displeasure of the Invisible Realm. Just as we are shown in the ancient myths, the truth must be acknowledged and admitted, and then the wrong that has been done must be corrected.

In the case of the mass murder perpetrated on September 11, eighteen years ago, that admission requires us to face the fact that the "terrorists" who were blamed for that attack were not the actual terrorists that we need to be focusing on.

Please note that I am very careful not to say that "the government" is the source of the problem: I would argue that the government is the lawful expression of the will of the people and that the government, rightly understood, is exactly what these criminal perpetrators actually fear the most, if the people ever become aware of what is going on. The government, which is established by the Constitution, forbids the perpetration of murder upon innocent men, women and children in order to initiate wars of aggression against countries that never invaded or attacked us (under the false pretense that they did so). Those who do so are actually opposed to our government under the Constitution and can be dealt with within the framework of the law as established by the Constitution, which establishes a very clear penalty for treason.

When the people acknowledge and admit the complete bankruptcy of the lie we have been told about the attacks of September 11, the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate repeal and dismantling of the so-called "USA PATRIOT Act" which was enacted in the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001 and which clearly violates the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Additionally, the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate cessation of the military operations which were initiated based upon the fraudulent narrative of the attacks of that day, and which have led to invasion and overthrow of the nations that were falsely blamed as being the perpetrators of those attacks and the seizure of their natural resources.

The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That human right has been grievously trampled upon under the false description of what actually took place during the September 11 attacks. Numerous technology companies have been allowed and even encouraged (and paid, with public moneys) to create technologies which flagrantly and shamelessly violate "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" and which track their every move and even enable secret eavesdropping upon their conversation and the secret capture of video within their homes and private settings, without any probable cause whatsoever.

When we admit and acknowledge that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, which has been falsely used as a supposed justification for the violation of these human rights (with complete disregard for the supreme law of the land as established in the Constitution), then we will also demand the immediate cessation of any such intrusion upon the right of the people to "be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" -- including the cessation of any business models which involve spying on men and women.

Companies which cannot find a business model that does not violate the Bill of Rights should lose their corporate charter and the privilege of limited liability, which are extended to them by the people (through the government of the people, by the people and for the people) only upon the condition that their behavior as corporations do not violate the inherent rights of men and women as acknowledged in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

It is well beyond the time when we must acknowledge and admit that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, 2001 -- and that we continue to be lied to about the events of that awful day. September 11, 2001 is in fact only one such event in a long history which stretches back prior to 2001, to other events which should have awakened the people to the presence of a very powerful and very dangerous criminal cabal acting in direct contravention to the Constitution long before we ever got to 2001 -- but the events of September 11 are so blatant, so violent, and so full of evidence which contradicts the fraudulent narrative that they actually cannot be believed by anyone who spends even the slightest amount of time looking at that evidence.

Indeed, we already know deep down that we have been bamboozled by the lie of the so-called "official narrative" of September 11.

But until we admit to ourselves and acknowledge to others that we've ignored the truth that we already know, then the bamboozle still has us .

*

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David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.

The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © David W. Mathisen , Global Research, 2019 Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.

[Sep 11, 2019] John Brennan's and Jim Clappers' Last Gasp by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
The fact that Smolenkov purchased house on his name excludes his "extraction" to the USA. He probably legally emigrated amazing some serious money in Russia
Notable quotes:
"... [Smolenkov] follows Ushakov back to Moscow, where he is a mid-level paper pusher doing administrative support for Ushakov. The CIA gets copies of Putin's itineraries that Smolenkov photographs. He is a big hit, but ultimately produces nothing of vital importance because all truly sensitive information is hand carried by principles, and never seen by administrative staff. Moreover Ushakov advises on international relations, and would not be privy to anything dealing with intelligence. Ushakov, as a long-serving Ambassador to the US, would be asked by Putin to opine on US politics. Smolenkov has access to Ushakov's post-meeting verbal comments, which he turns over to the CIA. ..."
"... The initial reports of the Steele Dossier appeared in June 2016. This coincided with John Brennan ordering Moscow Station to turn up the heat on Smolenkov to gain access to what Putin is thinking. But Smolenkov has no real direct access. Instead, he starts fabricating and/or exaggerating his access to convince his CIA handler that he is on the job and worth every penny he is being paid by US taxpayers. ..."
"... The information Smolenkov creates is passed to his CIA handler via the secure communications channel set up when he was signed up as a spy. But these reports are not handled in the normal way that sensitive human intelligence is treated at CIA Headquarters. Instead, the material is accepted at face value and not vetted to confirm its accuracy. My intel friend, citing a knowledgeable source, indicates that Smolenkov was not polygraphed. ..."
"... This raised red flags in the CIA Counterintelligence staff, especially when Brennan starts briefing the President using the information provided by Smolenkov. Brennan responds by locking most of the CIA's Russian experts out of the loop. Later, Brennan does the same thing with the National Intelligence Council, locking out the National Intelligence Officers who would normally oversee the production of a National Intelligence Assessment. In short, Brennan cooked the books using Smolenkov's intelligence, which had it been subjected to normal checks and balances would never have passed muster. It's Brennan's leaks to the press that eventually prompt the CIA to pull the plug on Smolenkov. ..."
"... The dossier attributed to Steele, it has seemed to me, showed every sign of being the proverbial 'camel produced by a committee.' ..."
"... Although I know that fabricating evidence and corrupting judicial proceedings is part of its supposed author's 'stock in trade', I think it is unclear whether he contributed all that much to the dossier. ..."
"... His prime role, I think, was to contribute a veneer of intelligence respectability to a farrago the actual origins of which could not be acknowledged, so it could be used in support of FISA applications and in briefings to journalists. ..."
"... Although it had started much earlier, the moving into 'high gear' of the conspiracy behind 'Russiagate, of which the dossier was one manifestation, and the phone 'digital forensics' produced by 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait another, were I think essentially panicky 'firefighting' operations. ..."
"... Part of this involved turning the conspiracy to prevent Trump being elected into a conspiracy to destabilise his Presidency and ensure he did not carry through on any of his 'anti-Borgist' agenda. ..."
Sep 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

A flood of news in the last 24 hours regarding Russiagate. I am referring specifically to reports that the CIA ex-filtrated Oleg Smolenkov, a mid-level Russian Foreign Ministry bureaucrat who reportedly hooked himself on the coat-tails of Yuri Ushakov, who was Ambassador to the US from 1999 through 2008. He was recruited by the CIA (i.e., asked to collect information and pass it to the U.S. Government via his or her case officer) at sometime during this period. Smolenkov is being portrayed as a supposedly "sensitive" source. But if you read either the Washington Post or New York Times accounts of this event there is not a lot of meat on this hamburger.

Regardless of the quality of his reporting, Smolenkov is the kind of recruited source that looks good on paper and helps a CIA case officer get promoted but adds little to actual U.S. intelligence on Russia. If you understood the CIA culture you would immediately recognize that a case officer (CIA terminology for the operations officer tasked with identifying and recruiting human sources) gets rewarded by recruiting persons who ostensibly will have access to information the CIA has identified as a priority target. In this case, we're talking about possible access to Vladimir Putin.

If you take time to read both articles you will quickly see that the real purpose of this "information operation" is to paint Donald Trump as a security threat that must be stopped. This is conveniently timed to assist Jerry Nadler's mission impossible to secure Trump's impeachment. But I think there is another dynamic at play--these competing explanations for what prompted the exfiltration of this CIA asset say more about the incompetence of Barack Obama and his intel chiefs. John Brennan and Jim Clapper in particular.

A former intelligence officer and friend summarized the various press accounts as the follows and offered his own insights in a note I received this morning:

[Smolenkov] follows Ushakov back to Moscow, where he is a mid-level paper pusher doing administrative support for Ushakov. The CIA gets copies of Putin's itineraries that Smolenkov photographs. He is a big hit, but ultimately produces nothing of vital importance because all truly sensitive information is hand carried by principles, and never seen by administrative staff. Moreover Ushakov advises on international relations, and would not be privy to anything dealing with intelligence. Ushakov, as a long-serving Ambassador to the US, would be asked by Putin to opine on US politics. Smolenkov has access to Ushakov's post-meeting verbal comments, which he turns over to the CIA.

The initial reports of the Steele Dossier appeared in June 2016. This coincided with John Brennan ordering Moscow Station to turn up the heat on Smolenkov to gain access to what Putin is thinking. But Smolenkov has no real direct access. Instead, he starts fabricating and/or exaggerating his access to convince his CIA handler that he is on the job and worth every penny he is being paid by US taxpayers.

The information Smolenkov creates is passed to his CIA handler via the secure communications channel set up when he was signed up as a spy. But these reports are not handled in the normal way that sensitive human intelligence is treated at CIA Headquarters. Instead, the material is accepted at face value and not vetted to confirm its accuracy. My intel friend, citing a knowledgeable source, indicates that Smolenkov was not polygraphed.

This raised red flags in the CIA Counterintelligence staff, especially when Brennan starts briefing the President using the information provided by Smolenkov. Brennan responds by locking most of the CIA's Russian experts out of the loop. Later, Brennan does the same thing with the National Intelligence Council, locking out the National Intelligence Officers who would normally oversee the production of a National Intelligence Assessment. In short, Brennan cooked the books using Smolenkov's intelligence, which had it been subjected to normal checks and balances would never have passed muster. It's Brennan's leaks to the press that eventually prompt the CIA to pull the plug on Smolenkov.

There is public evidence that Brennan not only cooked the books but that the leaks of this supposedly "sensitive" intelligence occurred when he was Director and lying Jim Clapper was Director of National Intelligence. If Oleg Smolenkov was really such a terrific source of intel, then where are the reports? It is one thing to keep such reports close hold when the source is still in place. But he has been out of danger for more than two years. Those reports should have been shared with the Senate and House Intelligence committees. If there was actual solid intelligence in those reports that corroborated the Steele Dossier, then that information would have been leaked and widely circulated. This is Sherlock Holmes dog that did not bark.Then we have the odd fact that this guy's name is all over the press and he is buying real estate in true name. What the hell!! If the CIA genuinely believed that Mr. Smolenkov was in danger he would not be walking around doing real estate deals in true name. In fact, the sources for both the Washington Post and NY Times pieces push the propaganda that Smolenkov is a sure fire target for a Russian retaliatory hit. Really? Then why publish his name and confirm his location.

That leaves me with the alternative explanation--Smolenkov is a propaganda prop and is being trotted out by Brennan to try to provide public pressure to prevent the disclosure of intelligence that will show that the CIA and the NSA were coordinating and operating with British intelligence to entrap and smear Donald Trump and members of his campaign.

I want you to take a close look at the two pieces on this exfiltration (i.e., Washington Post and NY Times) and note the significant differences

REASON FOR THE EXFILTRATION :

Let's start with the Washington Post:

The exfiltration took place sometime after an Oval Office meeting in May 2017, when President Trump revealed highly classified counterterrorism information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador, said the current and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation.

What was the information that Trump revealed? He was discussing intel that Israel passed regarding ISIS in Syria. (See the Washington Post story here .) Why would he talk to the Russians about that? Because every day, at least once a day, U.S. and Russian military authorities are sharing intelligence with one another in a phone call that originates from the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center (aka CAOC) at the Al Udeid Air Force Base in Qatar. Trump's conversation not only was appropriate but fully within his right to do so as Commander-in-Chief.

What the hell does this have to do with a sensitive source in Moscow? NOTHING!! Red Herring.

The NY Times account is more detailed and damning of Obama instead of Trump:

But when intelligence officials revealed the severity of Russia's election interference with unusual detail later that year, the news media picked up on details about the C.I.A.'s Kremlin sources.

C.I.A. officials worried about safety made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to extract the source from Russia. The situation grew more tense when the informant at first refused, citing family concerns -- prompting consternation at C.I.A. headquarters and sowing doubts among some American counterintelligence officials about the informant's trustworthiness. But the C.I.A. pressed again months later after more media inquiries. This time, the informant agreed. . . .

The decision to extract the informant was driven "in part" because of concerns that Mr. Trump and his administration had mishandled delicate intelligence, CNN reported. But former intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source, and other current American officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency's sources alone was the impetus for the extraction. . . .

But the government had indicated that the source existed long before Mr. Trump took office, first in formally accusing Russia of interference in October 2016 and then when intelligence officials declassified parts of their assessment about the interference campaign for public release in January 2017. News agencies, including NBC, began reporting around that time about Mr. Putin's involvement in the election sabotage and on the C.I.A.'s possible sources for the assessment.

Trump played no role whatsoever in releasing information that allegedly compromised this so-called "golden boy" of Russian intelligence. The NY Times account makes it very clear that the release of information while Obama was President, not Trump, is what put the source in danger. Who leaked that information?

WHAT DID THE SOURCE KNOW AND WHAT DID HE TELL US?

But how valuable was this source really? What did he provide that was so enlightening? On this point the New York Times and Washington Post are more in sync.

First the NY Times:

The Moscow informant was instrumental to the C.I.A.'s most explosive conclusion about Russia's interference campaign: that President Vladimir V. Putin ordered and orchestrated it himself . As the American government's best insight into the thinking of and orders from Mr. Putin, the source was also key to the C.I.A.'s assessment that he affirmatively favored Donald J. Trump's election and personally ordered the hacking of the Democratic National Committee .

The Washington Post provides a more fulsome account:

U.S. officials had been concerned that Russian sources could be at risk of exposure as early as the fall of 2016, when the Obama administration first confirmed that Russia had stolen and publicly disclosed emails from the Democratic National Committee and the account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta.

In October 2016, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a joint statement that intelligence agencies were "confident that the Russian Government directed" the hacking campaign. . . .

In January 2017, the Obama administration published a detailed assessment that unambiguously laid the blame on the Kremlin, concluding that "Putin ordered an influence campaign" and that Russia's goal was to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process and harm Clinton's chances of winning.

"That's a pretty remarkable intelligence community product -- much more specific than what you normally see," one U.S. official said. "It's very expected that potential U.S. intelligence assets in Russia would be under a higher level of scrutiny by their own intelligence services."

Sounds official. But there is no actual forensic or documentary evidence (by that I mean actual corroborating intelligence reports) to back up these claims by our oxymoronically christened intelligence community.

Vladimir Putin ordered the hack? Where is the report? It is either in a piece of intercepted electronics communication and/or in a report derived from information provided by Mr. Smolenkov. Where is it? Why has that not been shared in public? Don't have to worry about exposing the source now. He is already in the open. What did he report? Answer--no direct evidence.

Then there is the lie that the Russians hacked the DNC. They did not. Bill Binney, a former Technical Director of the NSA, and I have written on this subject previously ( see here ) and there is no truth to this claim. Let me put it simply--if the DNC had been hacked by the Russians using spearphising (this is claimed in the Robert Mueller report) then the NSA would have collected those messages and would be able to show they were transferred to the Russians. That did not happen.

This kind of chaotic leaking about an old intel op is symptomatic of panic. CIA is already officially denying key parts of the story. My money is on John Brennan and Jim Clapper as the likely impetus for these reports. They are hoping to paint Trump as a national security threat and distract from the upcoming revelations from the DOJ Inspector General report on the FISA warrants and, more threatening, the decisions that Prosecutor John Durham will take in deciding to indict those who attempted to launch a coup against Donald Trump, a legitimately elected President of the United States.

blue peacock , 10 September 2019 at 02:34 PM

I'm always skeptical of NY Times and WaPo and CNN reporting on anything national security related. It seems there is always an axe to grind.

I don't know why folks believe these media outlets have any credibility.

Larry Johnson -> blue peacock... , 10 September 2019 at 03:16 PM
Important to focus on the fact they are telling different and even contradictory stories. That's confusion on the part of the deep state.
Ana said in reply to Larry Johnson ... , 11 September 2019 at 10:00 AM
... And what helps us to decode the plot!
turcopolier -> blue peacock... , 11 September 2019 at 09:47 AM
BP

As I told LJ yesterday while he was writing this piece I have a slightly different theory of this matter. It is true that CIA suffered for a long time from a dearth of talent in the business of recruiting and running foreign clandestine HUMINT assets. This was caused by a focus by several CIA Directors on technical collection means rather than espionage. This policy drove many skilled case officers into retirement but the situation has much improved in the last decade and it must be remembered that an agency only needs a few skilled case officers with the right access to human targets to acquire some very fine and useful well placed foreign agents (spies). IMO it is likely that CIA has/had several well placed Russian assets in Moscow of whom Smolenkov was probably the least useful and the most expendable. It may well be that Brennan was using the chicken feed provided by Smolenkov to fuel the conspiracy run by him and Clapper against Trump's campaign and presidency, but Brennan left office and then the CIA under other management was faced with the problem of a Russian government which was told in the US press by implication that either the US had deep penetrations of Russian diplomatic and intelligence communications or that there were deep penetration moles in Moscow. that being the case it seems likely to me that the Russians would have been beating the bushes looking for the moles. In that situation the CIA may have decided to exfiltrate Smolenkov and his wife while leaving enough clues along the way that would have indicated that he might have been THE MOLE. People do not need a lot of encouragement to accept thoughts that they want to believe. A point in favor of this theory is that once CIA had him in the States they quickly lost interest in him, terminated their relationship with him and paid him his back pay and showed him the door. No new identity, no resettlement, he was given none of that. Finding himself alone in a strange land, Smolenkov then bought a house in the suburbs of Washington in HIS OWN NAME. Say what? That would not have happened if CIA had maintained some sort of relationship with him. And then... someone in CIA leaked the story of the exfiltration as movie plot to "a former senior intelligence officer" who gives sit to Sciutto at CNN. Why would they do that? IMO they would have though that having the story appear in the media would reinfocer Smolenkov's importance in Russian minds. Well, pilgrims, Clapper fits the bill as the "former blah, blah". He is an employee of CNN. CNN hates Trump and they quickly broadcast the story far and away. Unfortunately for CNN the story immediately began to disintegrate even in the eyes of the NY Times. The Smolenkov/Brennan affair will undoubtedly be part of the road that leads to doom for Brennan and Clapper but the possible CIA story is equally interesting.

ambrit , 10 September 2019 at 03:51 PM
Sir;
The fact that Mr. Smolenkov is out and about in his new home in the West shows that he is a small fish. As you say, if he was really in danger, he would be living somewhere in the West now under a new name and maybe a new face. The fact that his 'handlers' allow this lax security to happen is a sign of how unimportant he is. Unless, my inner cynic prompts, he is destined to become one of the "honoured dead," perhaps by a false flag 'liquidation.'
How low will Clapper and Brennan et. al. go?
Thanks for keeping this matter front and centre.
Fred , 10 September 2019 at 04:22 PM
So the son of Our Man in Havana went to Moscow. It would make a decent movies if it weren't for the damage Brennan and company have done to us. Obama, of course, knew nothing......
Diana C , 10 September 2019 at 04:49 PM
I have lost hope that anyone--especially Brennan and Clapper--will be held accountable for their attempt to "launch a coup" (as you put it).

Since their coup attempt ultimately failed, most people will be wanting just to move on.

As an unimportant citizen liveing in a fly-over state, I feel very angry that my tax dollars were wasted on these many government hearings and enormously expensive investigations rather than on actually on governing and improving the governing of our country.

The least we should be able to expect is that people who live off our tax dollars should be held accountable for all that wasted expense and for the lack of actual governing going on in The House and The Senate. So many problems that need the attention of our elected representative and Senators were ignored while elected representatives and representatives got to capture the spotlight and try to become "media stars" while accomplishing nothing.

I also feel terrible that men have been sent to prison for seemingly nothing and have their lives ruined for nothing but the chance of some to grand stand and claim they are really doing the jobs they were sent to do. So many people with no real sense of honor or of what is right and what is wrong.

Thanks, Larry. You have been consistently one of the good guys. (And I bet you are happy now that Yosemite Sam Bolton is no longer advising the POTUS.)

fredw , 10 September 2019 at 06:09 PM
"The fact that his 'handlers' allow this lax security to happen is a sign of how unimportant he is."

It indicates to me that he and any handlers believe that the Russians are OK with it. That could be for various reasons. But relying on Russian tolerance because he is a "small fish" seems incredibly trusting. Neither fled agents nor their handlers are known for their trusting natures. They have had some reasons stronger than that for their unconcern. Whether those reasons will survive publicity remains to be seen.

Oscar , 10 September 2019 at 06:31 PM
Are those CIA agents as stupid, naive & incompetent as you paint them to be?
If that's the case our country is in real danger! You are. Pro Trump
and, you are basically defending him, but Putin do own Donald Trump,whether you like it or not!
turcopolier -> Oscar ... , 11 September 2019 at 08:56 AM
Oscar
What is the evidence for "Putin do own Trump?"Is it Trump's attempts to conduct foreign policy relationships with Russia? That is his job.
JohnH , 10 September 2019 at 08:16 PM
My question is: why did they push this report now? Any way you cut it, the Times and Post are just providing some trivia and drivel. Without substance, they can accomplish nothing and substance has been what's been missing all along.

I doubt that Democrats, having been burned once, are eager to explore Brennan's smoke and mirrors again. It's never been a big concern to voters. And unless Brennan & Co. can do better than this superficial stuff, voters are never going to be concerned.

Maybe the Times and Post just felt sorry for Brennan, who's been off barking at the moon for years now.

Factotum , 10 September 2019 at 08:40 PM
Have a cup of Ovomaltine.
Rhondda , 10 September 2019 at 08:48 PM
...Smolenkov is a propaganda prop and is being trotted out by Brennan to try to provide public pressure to prevent the disclosure of intelligence that will show that the CIA and the NSA were coordinating and operating with British intelligence to entrap and smear Donald Trump and members of his campaign...

Well said. Thank you for following this closely and shining the light! You are an amazing American patriot, Mr. Larry C. Johnson. A glass in your honor!

plantman , 10 September 2019 at 09:13 PM
I think AG Barr might have cut these guys (Brennan and Clapper) some slack and let them off the hook, but NOW, what can he do but prosecute??

Brennan has shown that he is going to persevere with his fallacious attacks on Trump come hell or high water.

He needs to be stopped and brought to justice...

[email protected] -> plantman... , 11 September 2019 at 08:51 AM
Haha! Dream on. Barr IS CIA...remember his role back in the Slick WIlly days in Mena Arkansas?
Roy G , 10 September 2019 at 11:27 PM
IMO this scenario is the most plausible, Thanks for the sanity check. That said, given the desperation by these Sorcerer's Apprentices, I would be on the lookout for Mr. Smolenkov lest he be 'Skirpal-ed' in the coming weeks.
anon , 10 September 2019 at 11:36 PM
This whole story convinces now more than ever before that there is a high level spy/mole in the us administration and intelligence community.The only question is it spying for russia or china or both.Just a beautiful thing to watch.Those knickers,must surely be in a knot by now.
Even rocketman had a giggle.
Jim Ticehurst , 10 September 2019 at 11:52 PM
How many CIA Assets have been exposed..Tortured and Murdered During The Barrack Obama Reign...In May..2014 HE Paid a Surprise Visit to Afghanastan..His White House Bureau Chief Sent out an email to Reporters with a List of Who would meet With President Obama..It Contained the NAME of the CIA...Chief of Station in Kabul...Now that is REAL MESSY..
turcopolier , 11 September 2019 at 08:59 AM
[email protected]

Is there any basis for any of your assertions or are you just running your mouth?

David Habakkuk , 11 September 2019 at 10:37 AM
Larry,

Having been away from base, I have not been able to comment on some very fascinating recent posts.

Both your recent pieces, and Robert Willman's most helpful update on the state of play relating to the unraveling of the frame-up against Michael Flynn, have provided a lot to chew over.

Among other things, they have made me think further about the 302s recording the interviews with Bruce Ohr produced by Joseph Pientka – a character about whom I think we need to know more.

On reflection, I think that the picture that emerges of Ohr as an incurious and gullible nitwit, swallowing whole bucket loads of 'horse manure' fed him by Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson, may be a carefully – indeed maybe cunningly – crafted fiction.

The interpretation your former intelligence officer friend puts on the Smolenkov affair, and also some of what Sidney Powell has to say in the ''Motion to Compel' on behalf of Flynn, both 'mesh' with what I have long suspected.

The dossier attributed to Steele, it has seemed to me, showed every sign of being the proverbial 'camel produced by a committee.'

Although I know that fabricating evidence and corrupting judicial proceedings is part of its supposed author's 'stock in trade', I think it is unclear whether he contributed all that much to the dossier.

His prime role, I think, was to contribute a veneer of intelligence respectability to a farrago the actual origins of which could not be acknowledged, so it could be used in support of FISA applications and in briefings to journalists.

Although it had started much earlier, the moving into 'high gear' of the conspiracy behind 'Russiagate, of which the dossier was one manifestation, and the phone 'digital forensics' produced by 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait another, were I think essentially panicky 'firefighting' operations.

They are likely to have been responses, first, to the realisation that material leaked from the DNC was going to be published by WikiLeaks, and then the discovery, probably significantly later, that the source was Seth Rich, and his subsequent murder.

Although the operation to divert responsibility to the Russians which then became necessary was strikingly successful, it did not have the expected result of saving Hillary Clinton from defeat.

What I then think may have emerged was a two-pronged strategy.

Part of this involved turning the conspiracy to prevent Trump being elected into a conspiracy to destabilise his Presidency and ensure he did not carry through on any of his 'anti-Borgist' agenda.

In different ways, both the framing of Flynn, and the final memorandum in the dossier, dated 13 December 2016, were part of this strategy.

Also required however was another 'insurance policy' – which was what the Bruce Ohr 302s were intended to provide.

The purpose of this was to have 'evidence' in place, should the first prong of the strategy run into problems, to sustain the case that people in the FBI and DOJ, and Bruce and Nellie Ohr in particular, were not co-conspirators with Steele and Simpson, but their gullible dupes.

This brings me to an irony. Some people have tried to replace the 'narrative' in which Steele was an heroic exposer of a Russian plot to destroy American democracy by an alternative in which he was the gullible 'patsy' of just such a plot.

In fact there is one strand, and one strand only, in the dossier which smells strongly to me of FSB-orchestrated disinformation.

Some of the material on Russian cyber operations, including critically the suggestions about the involvement of Aleksej Gubarev and his company XBT which provoked legal action by these against BuzzFeed and Steele, look to me as though they could come from sources in the FSB.

But, if this is so, the likely conduit is not through Steele, but from FSB to FBI cyber people.

How precisely this worked is unclear, but I cannot quite get rid of the suspicion that Major Dmitri Dokuchaev just might be serving out his sentence for treason in a comfortable flat somewhere above the Black Sea. Indeed, I can imagine a lecture to FSB trainees on how to make 'patsies' of people like the Ohrs.

If this is so, however, it mat also be the case that these are attempting to make 'patsies' of Steele and Simpson.

[Sep 11, 2019] Video Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 The Bamboozle Has Captured Us

Highly recommended!
David Warner Mathisen definitely know what he is talking about due to his long military career... Free fall speed is documented and is an embarrassment to the official story, because free fall is impossible for a naturally collapsing building.
Now we need to dig into the role of Larry Silverstein in the Building 7 collapse.
Notable quotes:
"... Below is a video showing several film sequences taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen years ago on September 11, 2001. ..."
"... The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative" promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004. ..."
"... Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7 ..."
"... This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001. ..."
"... its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed, as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an interview here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview. ..."
"... the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building ..."
"... Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states). ..."
"... Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day. ..."
"... In addition to these interviews and the Dig Within blog of Kevin Ryan, I would also strongly recommend everybody read the article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls entitled " Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative? " which was published on Global Research a few days ago, on September 6, 2019. ..."
"... on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept what we already know. ..."
"... Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see here for example, and also here . ..."
"... The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare: ..."
"... David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University. ..."
Sep 11, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

Below is a video showing several film sequences taken from different locations and documenting multiple angles of World Trade Center Building 7 collapsing at freefall speed eighteen years ago on September 11, 2001.

The four words "Building Seven Freefall Speed" provide all the evidence needed to conclude that the so-called "official narrative" promoted by the mainstream media for the past eighteen years is a lie, as is the fraudulent 9/11 Commission Report of 2004.

  1. Building.
  2. Seven.
  3. Freefall.
  4. Speed.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Mamvq7LWqRU

Earlier this month, a team of engineers at the University of Alaska published their draft findings from a five-year investigation into the collapse of Building 7, which was not hit by any airplane on September 11, 2001, and concluded that fires could not possibly have caused the collapse of that 47-story steel-frame building -- rather, the collapse seen could have only been caused by the near-simultaneous failure of every support column (43 in number).

This damning report by a team of university engineers has received no attention from the mainstream media outlets which continue to promote the bankrupt "official" narrative of the events of September 11, 2001.

Various individuals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tried to argue that the collapse of Building 7 was slower than freefall speed, but its rate of collapse can be measured and found to be indistinguishable from freefall speed, as physics teacher David Chandler explains in an interview here (and as he eventually forced NIST to admit), beginning at around 0:43:00 in the interview.

Although the collapse of the 47-story steel-beam building World Trade Center 7 into its own footprint at freefall speed is all the evidence needed to reveal extensive and deliberate premeditated criminal activity by powerful forces that had the ability to prepare pre-positioned demolition charges in that building prior to the flight of the aircraft into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (Buildings One and Two), as well as the power to cover up the evidence of this criminal activity and to deflect questioning by government agencies and suppress the story in the mainstream news, the collapse of Building 7 is by no means the only evidence which points to the same conclusion.

Indeed, the evidence is overwhelming, to the point that no one can any longer be excused for accepting the official story. Certainly during the first few days and weeks after the attacks, or even during the first few years, men and women could be excused for accepting the official story (particularly given the level to which the mainstream media controls opinion in the united states).

However, eighteen years later there is simply no excuse anymore -- except for the fact that the ramifications of the admission that the official story is a flagrant fraud and a lie are so distressing that many people cannot actually bring themselves to consciously admit what they in fact already know subconsciously.

For additional evidence, I strongly recommend the work of the indefatigable Kevin Robert Ryan , whose blog at Dig Within should be required reading for every man and woman in the united states -- as well as those in the rest of the world, since the ramifications of the murders of innocent men, women and children on September 11, 2001 have led to the murders of literally millions of other innocent men, women and children around the world since that day, and the consequences of the failure to absorb the truth of what actually took place, and the consequences of the failure to address the lies that are built upon the fraudulent explanation of what took place on September 11, continue to negatively impact men and women everywhere on our planet.

Additionally, I would also recommend the interviews which are archived at the website of Visibility 9-11 , which includes valuable interviews with Kevin Ryan but also numerous important interviews with former military officers who explain that the failure of the military to scramble fighters to intercept the hijacked airplanes, and the failure of air defense weapons to stop a jet from hitting the Pentagon (if indeed a jet did hit the Pentagon), are also completely inexplicable to anyone who knows anything at all about military operations, unless the official story is completely false and something else was going on that day.

I would also strongly recommend listening very carefully to the series of five interviews with Kevin Ryan on Guns and Butter with Bonnie Faulkner, which can be found in the Guns and Butter podcast archive here . These interviews, from 2013, are numbered 287, 288, 289, 290, and 291 in the archive.

Selected Articles: 9/11: Do You Still Believe that Al Qaeda Masterminded the Attacks?

I would in fact recommend listening to nearly every interview in that archive of Bonnie Faulkner's show, even though I do not of course agree with every single guest nor with every single view expressed in every single interview. Indeed, if you carefully read Kevin Ryan's blog which was linked above, you will find a blog post by Kevin Ryan dated June 24, 2018 in which he explicitly names James Fetzer along with Judy Woods as likely disinformation agents working to discredit and divert the efforts of 9/11 researchers. James Fetzer appears on Guns and Butter several times in the archived interview page linked above.

In addition to these interviews and the Dig Within blog of Kevin Ryan, I would also strongly recommend everybody read the article by Dr. Gary G. Kohls entitled " Why Do Good People Become Silent About the Documented Facts that Disprove the Official 9/11 Narrative? " which was published on Global Research a few days ago, on September 6, 2019.

That article contains a number of stunning quotations about the ongoing failure to address the now-obvious lies we are being told about the attacks of September 11. One of these quotations, by astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996), is particularly noteworthy -- even though I certainly do not agree with everything Carl Sagan ever said or wrote. Regarding our propensity to refuse to acknowledge what we already know deep down to be true, Carl Sagan said:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken.

This quotation is from Sagan's 1995 text, The Demon-Haunted World (with which I have points of disagreement, but which is extremely valuable for that quotation alone, and which I might suggest turning around on some of the points that Sagan was arguing as well, as a cautionary warning to those who have accepted too wholeheartedly some of Sagan's teachings and opinions).

This quotation shows that on some level, we already know we have been bamboozled, even if our conscious mind refuses to accept what we already know. This internal division is actually addressed in the world's ancient myths, which consistently illustrate that our egoic mind often refuses to acknowledge the higher wisdom we have available to us through the reality of our authentic self, sometimes called our Higher Self. Previous posts have compared this tendency of the egoic mind to the blissfully ignorant character of Michael Scott in the television series The Office (US version): see here for example, and also here .

The important author Peter Kingsley has noted that in ancient myth, the role of the prophet was to bring awareness and acknowledgement of that which the egoic mind refuses to see -- which is consistent with the observation that it is through our authentic self (which already knows) that we have access to the realm of the gods. In the Iliad, for example, Dr. Kingsley notes that Apollo sends disaster upon the Achaean forces until the prophet Calchas reveals the source of the god's anger: Agamemnon's refusal to free the young woman Chryseis, whom Agamemnon has seized in the course of the fighting during the Trojan War, and who is the daughter of a priest of Apollo. Until Agamemnon atones for this insult to the god, Apollo will continue to visit destruction upon those following Agamemnon.

Until we acknowledge and correct what our Higher Self already knows to be the problem, we ourselves will be out of step with the divine realm.

If we look the other way at the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children on September 11, 2001, and deliberately refuse to see the truth that we already know deep down in our subconscious, then we will face the displeasure of the Invisible Realm. Just as we are shown in the ancient myths, the truth must be acknowledged and admitted, and then the wrong that has been done must be corrected.

In the case of the mass murder perpetrated on September 11, eighteen years ago, that admission requires us to face the fact that the "terrorists" who were blamed for that attack were not the actual terrorists that we need to be focusing on.

Please note that I am very careful not to say that "the government" is the source of the problem: I would argue that the government is the lawful expression of the will of the people and that the government, rightly understood, is exactly what these criminal perpetrators actually fear the most, if the people ever become aware of what is going on. The government, which is established by the Constitution, forbids the perpetration of murder upon innocent men, women and children in order to initiate wars of aggression against countries that never invaded or attacked us (under the false pretense that they did so). Those who do so are actually opposed to our government under the Constitution and can be dealt with within the framework of the law as established by the Constitution, which establishes a very clear penalty for treason.

When the people acknowledge and admit the complete bankruptcy of the lie we have been told about the attacks of September 11, the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate repeal and dismantling of the so-called "USA PATRIOT Act" which was enacted in the weeks immediately following September 11, 2001 and which clearly violates the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Additionally, the correction of that lie will involve demanding the immediate cessation of the military operations which were initiated based upon the fraudulent narrative of the attacks of that day, and which have led to invasion and overthrow of the nations that were falsely blamed as being the perpetrators of those attacks and the seizure of their natural resources.

The imposition of a vast surveillance mechanism upon the people of this country (and of other countries) based on the fraudulent pretext of "preventing terrorism" (and the lying narrative that has been perpetuated with the full complicity of the mainstream media for the past eighteen years) is in complete violation of the human rights which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights and which declare:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That human right has been grievously trampled upon under the false description of what actually took place during the September 11 attacks. Numerous technology companies have been allowed and even encouraged (and paid, with public moneys) to create technologies which flagrantly and shamelessly violate "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" and which track their every move and even enable secret eavesdropping upon their conversation and the secret capture of video within their homes and private settings, without any probable cause whatsoever.

When we admit and acknowledge that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, which has been falsely used as a supposed justification for the violation of these human rights (with complete disregard for the supreme law of the land as established in the Constitution), then we will also demand the immediate cessation of any such intrusion upon the right of the people to "be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" -- including the cessation of any business models which involve spying on men and women.

Companies which cannot find a business model that does not violate the Bill of Rights should lose their corporate charter and the privilege of limited liability, which are extended to them by the people (through the government of the people, by the people and for the people) only upon the condition that their behavior as corporations do not violate the inherent rights of men and women as acknowledged in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

It is well beyond the time when we must acknowledge and admit that we have been lied to about the events of September 11, 2001 -- and that we continue to be lied to about the events of that awful day. September 11, 2001 is in fact only one such event in a long history which stretches back prior to 2001, to other events which should have awakened the people to the presence of a very powerful and very dangerous criminal cabal acting in direct contravention to the Constitution long before we ever got to 2001 -- but the events of September 11 are so blatant, so violent, and so full of evidence which contradicts the fraudulent narrative that they actually cannot be believed by anyone who spends even the slightest amount of time looking at that evidence.

Indeed, we already know deep down that we have been bamboozled by the lie of the so-called "official narrative" of September 11.

But until we admit to ourselves and acknowledge to others that we've ignored the truth that we already know, then the bamboozle still has us .

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.

The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © David W. Mathisen , Global Research, 2019 Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

David Warner Mathisen graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point and became an Infantry officer in the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. He is a graduate of the US Army's Ranger School and the 82nd Airborne Division's Jumpmaster Course, among many other awards and decorations. He was later selected to become an instructor in the Department of English Literature and Philosophy at West Point and has a Masters degree from Texas A&M University.

[Sep 11, 2019] On possible Oleg Smolenkov connection to Steele dossier

Sep 10, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

librul , Sep 10 2019 19:54 utc | 19

Is someone brewing up some fresh Novichok nerve agent as we speak?

Don't touch those doorknobs, Oleg!

for future reference: this post was for amusement purposes only

[Sep 11, 2019] There is the possibility that CIA extracted a minor source to divert attention from someone or someones who remain(s) in place.

Notable quotes:
"... So, this fully-spun story, apparently a mix of fact and fiction, arises at this moment to prop up the Russia-leaked-email hoax? ..."
"... If that's the case, does that mean this story's "authors" release it now to keep at least part of the Russia hoax alive as the Flynn case plods toward charges being dropped or because the Concord case is turning into a cluster f*k? Maybe someone is worried about the DNC-insider-leaked-email story breaking out? We need to talk about Rich? ..."
"... if I am wrong in supposing that a senior Chekist would never, as a question of policy, have been allowed a passport for foreign travel for him and his family. ..."
"... If Oleg Smolenkov reported allegedly "valuable" insider information about Russia's interference in US elections, as they say first hand, then why did Mueller's investigation fail? ..."
"... The New York Times story resurrects the Russia collusion hoax. This time the proof comes from Oleg Smolenkov. The story is identical to what the Steele dossier claimed: Putin personally directed a campaign to interfere in the US presidential elections. ..."
"... Every part of Steele narrative has already been shown to be a hoax and a fabrication. What proves that the Steele dossier is a work of fiction is that it is written from a fly-on-the-wall point of view. Only a person who was sitting in the same room with Putin when he had secret meetings could have written it. So how many moles did the West have sitting on Putin's desk? It seems like the CIA mole and Steele's secret source are one and the same source. But if Oleg Smolenkov was CIA's most tightly guarded secret, how did the information end up in Steele's dossier? ..."
"... Larry Johnson just posted about this on SST, and his take seems much more plausible: Desperation on the part of Clapper and his cabal as the chickens are coming home to roost. This story is chock full of holes, and the media hackery is disintegrating under its own weight. ..."
"... Perhaps someone should advise Smolenskov to stay away from park benches after eating seafood and to not touch doorknob's etc. ..."
"... "For those curious about what's going on with this bizarre Russia 'spy' story: Burr/Durham know Steele was fed obvious disinformation, they know who originated it, they know who peddled it, and it's just a matter of rounding up the whole network." ..."
"... In his third entry, he poses the following question: "So the only two unanswered questions about this particular pre-emptive leak campaign from the usual Russia hoax suspects are 1) why now, and 2) what specific event or official revelation are they trying to get ahead of?" ..."
"... Why the CIA would allow such a spy, once extradited, to live under his real name is beyond me. ..."
"... Because this man has nothing to do with "spies", "secrets" and "special services". He is an ordinary civilian, a former official from Russia. Many Russian ex- lives in abroad, including high-ranking persons. Smolenkov of course had no access to any "secrets", and had no access to entourage of the Russian president. ..."
"... That's the end of Smolenkov's anonymous quiet comfortable lifesyle. It doesn't send out a very reassuring message - that the CIA can publicly expose someone it considers a very useful asset. There must be a good reason why they threw Smolenkov under the bus in that way. ..."
"... It must be a very nice house. A 3-ish acre lot in that neighborhood has an assessment of $140k for the land. But the assessment for improvements for this house is over $900k while others in the neighborhood are more in the $600k range. I was looking at the aerial photos and trying to pick out what seem to be other nice houses, including ones with swimming pools which this one lacks, and which also have big garages (this one has 4 car garage apparently), but couldn't find a neighbor above an assessment in the $600k's. ..."
"... The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister. ..."
"... My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity. ..."
"... Sergei Skripal was not just an turncoat for UK he also worked for Estonian intelligence. It seems to me the poisoning fits better as an Estonian job, to keep relations in Europe with Russia in very bad shape. It's easy to say that the Russians wouldn't be so incompetent, also goes for the UK, which could have come up with something more compelling if they pre planned it as false flag. ..."
"... Joe Mifsud and Claire Smith of MI6, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, especially FBI special agent Joseph Pientka plus that BIG shot FBI agent (who's name I forget) are the names to remember. Why aren't Misud and Smith extradited to face inquiry? ..."
"... So what is emerging? is Mueller due in court to prosecute the Russian ad agency that has fully shirt fronted him? Is Flynn business about to upend a steaming pot of turds over Mueller and other heads. Is Seth Rich about to be posthumously knighted by some New York monarch for his role in smashing the HRC cart in public? Or is Julian Assange about to be put through more torture for being a journalist and publisher? ..."
Sep 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

b , Sep 10 2019 18:01 utc | 2

Pat Lang has this interesting take :
All

And then there is the possibility that CIA extracted a minor source to divert attention from someone or someones who remain(s) in place. The open purchase of a house in the outer suburbs of Washington by the extracted would seem to support the possibility that this is all a diversion. The narrative continues that "a former senior intelligence official" told Sciutto, an Obama man, at CNN of all this. Clapper is "a former senior intelligence official" and a CNN "contributor" (employee) is he not? He is dumb enough to have had this story planted on him.

Double games, triple games ... Spies are so confusing ...

james , Sep 10 2019 18:14 utc | 3

thanks b... i agree about your comment on pls comment - double / triple and etc games can be played with spies... what seems clear to me is that some in the cia-msm want to frame trump.. this one feel apart fairly quickly... the frame up of russia over skripal has never been addressed by the usa.. in fact, most folks - using ew as an example - are still drinking the russia done it koolaid 24/7..
james , Sep 10 2019 18:14 utc | 3 casey , Sep 10 2019 18:18 utc | 4
So, this fully-spun story, apparently a mix of fact and fiction, arises at this moment to prop up the Russia-leaked-email hoax?

If that's the case, does that mean this story's "authors" release it now to keep at least part of the Russia hoax alive as the Flynn case plods toward charges being dropped or because the Concord case is turning into a cluster f*k? Maybe someone is worried about the DNC-insider-leaked-email story breaking out? We need to talk about Rich?

Funny about Lang and his crew. So much practical experience and yet they would make an interesting case study of extreme psychological compartmentalization as a means of denial.

Hoarsewhisperer , Sep 10 2019 18:19 utc | 5
Lucky Oleg & Antonina. In Oz a 760 square metre house used be known as having an area of 81 squares (8,172 square feet. In well-maintained condition such a 3-storey house anywhere in Oz would cost between A$2.5 million and A$3.5 million. Being in AmeriKKA Oleg's house probably has a basement too. That's another $150,000 minimum if it's damp-proof and ventilated.
karlof1 , Sep 10 2019 18:24 utc | 6
Nice networking by 4 BigLie Media outlets to make certain Russia knows where this man and his family reside. Maybe it's for an Outlaw US Empire sequel to MI-6's Novochock BigLie to be sprung as the election heats up. If I were the Smolenskovs, I'd demand an immediate identity change, sell ASAP and move to Idaho.
Michael Droy , Sep 10 2019 18:31 utc | 7
If Skripal could live safely under his own name I guess this guy could too. It just makes it easier for the US to get him in their own time. I don't really see this guy served any purpose until he was outed. Just a late effort to pretend that Russiagate had any credibility.
Montreal , Sep 10 2019 18:32 utc | 8
I wish that there was a resident Russian on this site, as there is on Craig Murray's.

That person could then tell me if I am wrong in supposing that a senior Chekist would never, as a question of policy, have been allowed a passport for foreign travel for him and his family.

Sergei , Sep 10 2019 18:33 utc | 9
If Oleg Smolenkov reported allegedly "valuable" insider information about Russia's interference in US elections, as they say first hand, then why did Mueller's investigation fail?
Petri Krohn , Sep 10 2019 18:57 utc | 10
WAS SMOLENKOV A SOURCE FOR THE STEELE DOSSIER?

The New York Times story resurrects the Russia collusion hoax. This time the proof comes from Oleg Smolenkov. The story is identical to what the Steele dossier claimed: Putin personally directed a campaign to interfere in the US presidential elections.

Every part of Steele narrative has already been shown to be a hoax and a fabrication. What proves that the Steele dossier is a work of fiction is that it is written from a fly-on-the-wall point of view. Only a person who was sitting in the same room with Putin when he had secret meetings could have written it. So how many moles did the West have sitting on Putin's desk? It seems like the CIA mole and Steele's secret source are one and the same source. But if Oleg Smolenkov was CIA's most tightly guarded secret, how did the information end up in Steele's dossier?

Roy G , Sep 10 2019 19:10 utc | 11
Larry Johnson just posted about this on SST, and his take seems much more plausible: Desperation on the part of Clapper and his cabal as the chickens are coming home to roost. This story is chock full of holes, and the media hackery is disintegrating under its own weight.
Arioch , Sep 10 2019 19:19 utc | 12
> Obama administration .... Russia had stolen .... Democratic National Committee and ..... John Podesta.

So we have to allege that Podesta's laptop between naked underage girls photos had list of CIA secret agents in Russian government? What else rid it contain and where did Podesta stole those lists?

Same question about Paki-managed DNC server. Was managing CIA agents in foreign governments outsourced to DNC or what?

"Once in the lifetime of yer townfolk! F..en circus! Imbecile clowns! Degenerate tamers! Deformed strongmen! Dysfunctional acrobats! Don't miss out!"

Qua , Sep 10 2019 19:21 utc | 13
Perhaps someone should advise Smolenskov to stay away from park benches after eating seafood and to not touch doorknob's etc.
Uncle $cam , Sep 10 2019 19:24 utc | 14
Speaking of outed Spy's..."Undercover" -- Valerie Plame for Congress "When elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers"
Gigi , Sep 10 2019 19:26 utc | 15
@2
Diversion is one of the three possibilities that I can think of:

1) clan wars within US special services, particularly in view of the 2020 elections.

2) diversion (as suggested by col. Pat Lang)

3) preparation of the ground to make this guy a "sacrificial lamb" like Scripal, to avoid any new rapprochement between the US and Russia after the end of the Muller report.

(comment originally posted at http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2019/09/he-was-never-qualified-to-start-with.html#disqus_thread )

james , Sep 10 2019 19:35 utc | 16
@11 roy g.. this is what i said @3 "what seems clear to me is that some in the cia-msm want to frame trump.. this one feel apart fairly quickly..." for others who want to read larry johnsons latest at sst here...

@4 casey - last line.. ditto my thoughts..

karlof1 , Sep 10 2019 19:39 utc | 17
Interesting Tweet thread by a Sean M Davis has 5 entries and almost 1000 retweets beginning with this:

"For those curious about what's going on with this bizarre Russia 'spy' story: Burr/Durham know Steele was fed obvious disinformation, they know who originated it, they know who peddled it, and it's just a matter of rounding up the whole network."

In his third entry, he poses the following question: "So the only two unanswered questions about this particular pre-emptive leak campaign from the usual Russia hoax suspects are 1) why now, and 2) what specific event or official revelation are they trying to get ahead of?"

The easy answer is the story itself is enough of a distraction as the 1000 retweets show.

Clueless Joe , Sep 10 2019 19:44 utc | 18
I tend to agree with Larry Johnson (at Pat Lang's) that this guy wasn't that useful back then. He might have become more useful, had he stayed at the Kremlin and rose further up the ladder, granted; or Obama's top guys assumed he wouldn't and it wasn't an issue to risk to burn him.
Clueless Joe , Sep 10 2019 19:44 utc | 18
I tend to agree with Larry Johnson (at Pat Lang's) that this guy wasn't that useful back then. He might have become more useful, had he stayed at the Kremlin and rose further up the ladder, granted; or Obama's top guys assumed he wouldn't and it wasn't an issue to risk to burn him.
librul , Sep 10 2019 19:54 utc | 19
Is someone brewing up some fresh Novichok nerve agent as we speak?

Don't touch those doorknobs, Oleg!

for future reference: this post was for amusement purposes only

alaff , Sep 10 2019 19:57 utc | 20
This whole story is entirely in the spirit of Hollywood comics. I had a good laugh when I saw the news about the "valuable spy successfully extracted from Russia".

Here are some reasons why this is fake/disinformation:

1) The news was published by CNN. I think there's no need to explain whether it is worth taking seriously the "sensations" published by news outlets with a reputation like CNN.

2) Sorry, but you must be a complete idiot (in the medical sense) to openly declare in the media that you had a "very valuable spy" in the immediate circle of the president of the Russian Federation (or any other country). Just because in this way you, by your own hands, are giving your opponent the reason to "strengthen control", conduct checks and identify those [other] people who might be able to work for you for a long time and be useful. When this really takes place in real life (the presence of a spy of the highest rank, close to the head of state), then this becomes public only after many years/decades, when the 'Top Secret' stamp is removed from the documents, you know.

3) V.Putin is a former intelligence officer. To put it mildly, it is very naive to assume that the presence of an "American spy" (close to Putin) would not be known to a person with Putin's experience/knowledge/capacity.

4) To be a spy, a member of the inner circle of the President of Russia (or any other country) and not to be exposed, one need to have extraordinary abilities and competencies. This is the highest class. In recent years, it seems only the lazy one did not notice and did not note the monstrous degradation of the American political class. These people do not know how to behave in a civilized society, do not have the traditions and culture of diplomacy and communication. The situation is similar in the American defense industry. With this level of decline in the competence of the American elite (political, military, etc.), to assume that they have such a ultra-high-class spy is at least very strange.

5) The fact that the "valuable spy" in the inner circle of the Russian president is pure CNN fiction is confirmed in practice. What I mean:

6) Serious Russian experts unequivocally spoke out that all this was fake and that Smolenkov certainly could not be a spy. In particular, Armen Gasparyan, one of the leading Russian political scientists, historian, writer (incidentally, who wrote several books on intelligence), spoke quite fully about this in his recent commentary .

Why the CIA would allow such a spy, once extradited, to live under his real name is beyond me.

Because this man has nothing to do with "spies", "secrets" and "special services". He is an ordinary civilian, a former official from Russia. Many Russian ex- lives in abroad, including high-ranking persons. Smolenkov of course had no access to any "secrets", and had no access to entourage of the Russian president.

An attempt to present Smolenkov as a "valuable spy" from exactly the same series as the clumsy attempt by the British government to introduce two Russian civilians (Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov) as "GRU agents". It is hardly reasonable to take this seriously.

However, all this is just my personal opinion.

Brendan , Sep 10 2019 20:05 utc | 21
That's the end of Smolenkov's anonymous quiet comfortable lifesyle. It doesn't send out a very reassuring message - that the CIA can publicly expose someone it considers a very useful asset. There must be a good reason why they threw Smolenkov under the bus in that way.
Mao Cheng Ji , Sep 10 2019 20:33 utc | 22
$925K for a 8k sqft house on 1.2 hectares? Sounds like a bargain. Not a very nice neighborhood, perhaps?
Sorghum , Sep 10 2019 20:52 utc | 23
This guy could not possibly be what the CIS and media are presenting to be. Living under his own name in Virginia? Could it be any simpler to find him? The Russians do have search engines, too.

B may be right that this is a double or triple play, but find it hard to see the benefits to pretending to have had a deep mole in the Kremlin. I also find it implausible that any Russsian diplomat who has been stationed in DC would not be viewed as potentially compromised. It would be relatively simple to feed him bullshit and see what filters into DC.

Margaret , Sep 10 2019 20:59 utc | 24
Many thoughtful comments here. My take, as a fan of Le Carre and Mad Magazine's Spy vs Spy cartoon, is that USA's spy was discovered and turned. He was dismissed, employed somewhere close by, and fed chicken feed for his CIA masters. When they realized he was a failure, the CIA got him and his family out with the possible object of turning him into a propaganda subject. Of course he would have to die first, but CIA could make it look like the Russians did it.
Smiley , Sep 10 2019 21:05 utc | 25
I'm generally interested in how spies are referred to in corporate media stories.

For instance, we were told constantly that Skirpal was a 'Russian Spy'. This ran contrary to the normal usage, which would have referred to a British Spy within the Russian government as a 'British Spy'. If that signaled a general change in language, then Solemenkov, would also be referred to as a Russian Spy and not as an American Spy. He shares with Skirpal having a Russian nationality, while he was spying for the Americans. Of course, when the propagandists are going for an emotional reaction, they can be relied on to use whichever helps tilt the story in their direction.

Smiley , Sep 10 2019 21:07 utc | 26
Historically, spy agencies aren't really known for their great humanity in pulling out a spy who is in a useful position just because they fear for that spy's safety. The more common course of action for Spy Bosses is to keep the spy in place, keep pushing for more, more, more information from the spy, before perhaps holding a brief moment of silence over their spy ending up in prison.
S , Sep 10 2019 21:18 utc | 27
@karlof1 #6:
Maybe it's for an Outlaw US Empire sequel to MI-6's Novochock BigLie to be sprung as the election heats up.

That's what I thought as well. Why would the MSM hype a spy other than establishing his persona in the public eye, to be followed by some event later? Either he's a double agent and they will kill him and blame it on Russia, or he is not a double agent and they will use him to announce some "strong evidence" of Trump–Russia connection.

Sabine , Sep 10 2019 21:57 utc | 28
so when can we expect the US / Russia to finally save us all from ourselfs?

fuck are you guys not tired of this bullshit kabuki theatre that you get fed daily in order to keep you amused and busy?

William Gruff , Sep 10 2019 22:09 utc | 29
Part of the intention of this farce is to give the CIA and the CIA News Network (CNN) the opportunity to pretend that they are not knotted together like mating dogs (I leave it up to the reader to guess which one is the bitch).
Madeira , Sep 10 2019 22:11 utc | 30
A theory:

1. Smolenkov was the source of the Steele Report, in other words he received a substantial payment to come up with fictional "dirt" on Trump.

2. With all the publicity about the Steele report, Brennan/Obama/etc. were scared (and with good reason) that the Russians would figure out that Smolenkov was the source and would then make a grand show of his confessing to how he had made everything up at the request of US/UK intelligence agencies.

3. Therefore he was extricated for a very good reason (if you are Obama/Brennan, that is).

4. His extrication is now being used as an anti-Trump weapon, but also as a pre-emptive measure to reduce the fallout if (or when) reports emerge that Smolenkov was the source for Steele.

Peter AU 1 , Sep 10 2019 22:33 utc | 31
Be interesting to know what was occurring if Smolenkov was the source for the Steele report. Whatever information he was sending, that he just left on holidays makes me think Russian intel were on the ball and had started feeding him a bit of disinformation.
karlof1 , Sep 10 2019 22:35 utc | 32
Sabine @28--

I don't expect the US--and by US I mean the Current Oligarchy--to save anyone, while Russia is very busy trying to save its current and future populace--the differences being quite extreme. Since the US isn't intent on saving anyone, it wants to ensure its populace thinks other governments act the same way toward their populaces so the US populace doesn't get any ideas about saving itself from its own viscous government. Busting that narrative is what keeps us busy--There IS an alternative.

Smiley , Sep 10 2019 22:41 utc | 33
From digging around on the property site (from the link).

It must be a very nice house. A 3-ish acre lot in that neighborhood has an assessment of $140k for the land. But the assessment for improvements for this house is over $900k while others in the neighborhood are more in the $600k range. I was looking at the aerial photos and trying to pick out what seem to be other nice houses, including ones with swimming pools which this one lacks, and which also have big garages (this one has 4 car garage apparently), but couldn't find a neighbor above an assessment in the $600k's.

The neighborhood as a whole has had its valuations decline in the 2018 biannual assessment. Not sure why, but maybe the neighborhood of 20 year old mansions isn't as hot as some newer developments. The last previous lowering of assessment values occurred during the Great-Not-A-Depression in the 2008 revaluations. Note, the land is not considered to have lower values, but all of the homes on the street have had the assessments of the improvements on the property lowered in the last reassessments.

Hard to tell much about the selling price from neighboring properties. Many of the neighbors bought their homes direct from the construction company back in the early years of the century. So not too many direct compares for homes bought in 2018.

Smiley , Sep 10 2019 22:54 utc | 34
A point that appears to have missed by several is that an aide to an aide to the foreign minister is not likely to have access to Putin's super-top-secret plans to use a few thousand dollars worth of utube and twit ads to change the course of multi-billion dollar American election, nor would he have access to information that might be used to blackmail a potential foreign leader. Both would be closely held secrets and apparently way above his pay grade. Often the FM wouldn't know of either, and both operations would be compartmentalized into a close team Putin can trust.

The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister.

My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity.

Turner , Sep 10 2019 23:02 utc | 35
Does anyone really believe that the Kremlin takes as the truth what they hear on CNN?
karlof1 , Sep 10 2019 23:11 utc | 36
Smiley @33&34--

House likely bought by CIA and annual upkeep--taxes etc.--also paid by them.

MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely contributor to the Steele Dossier given the overall web of established connections--that was most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA, although CIA was involved in Russiagate Cover-up.

In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged spy? Aside from the UNSC vote debacle on Libya, I see nothing but a string of successes, although the Ukraine Coup wasn't debauched. IMO, Outlaw US Empire policy toward Russia has failed spectacularly, and it is within the US government where I'd expect to find well placed spies.

james , Sep 10 2019 23:15 utc | 37
@35 turner.. no.. and no one here at moa believes anything out of the western msm either... see @ 29 william gruff comment for more meaningful lingo on the set up..
Uncle $cam , Sep 10 2019 23:21 utc | 38
Does anyone really believe that the Kremlin takes as the truth what they hear on CNN?

ha! Emphatically, Yes, most Mericans, think they think that.. Because most Mericans think everyone but Merican's are stupid.

Smiley , Sep 10 2019 23:21 utc | 39
Here's a tough problem for a counter-intelligence agent. Find the source of info for a fictional report.

Normally, after a link, one avenue of investigation would be to check who had access to the leaked information. But, if the report is completely fictional, then there is no list of people who had access to information that didn't exist. Everyone or no one had equal access to the non-existent information. The Tailor of Moscow had the same access to the non-existent information as did Putin's closest personal aide. Who done it?

willie , Sep 10 2019 23:30 utc | 40
Headline in le Figaro:

Ingérence russe :la CIA disposait d'une source haut-placée au Kremlin.
Russian collusion: CIA had high placed source at the Kremlin.

A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about it. Really, when a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be nigh.

Jackrabbit , Sep 11 2019 0:30 utc | 41
Evidence-free accusations of Russian meddling. Now with extra sauce.

<> <> <> <> <> <>

We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was deliberately planned as part of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling.

JasonT , Sep 11 2019 0:44 utc | 42
smiley @34 seems to have the most logical take on this.
GoldmanKropotkin , Sep 11 2019 0:47 utc | 43
The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-officials-putin-personally-involved-u-s-election-hack-n696146

Notice the source is spies working for US Allies. Remember that the NSA did not sign off on the Russian interference/hacking because they were concerned that too much critical info rested on intelligence from a single foreign country.

Sergei Skripal was not just an turncoat for UK he also worked for Estonian intelligence. It seems to me the poisoning fits better as an Estonian job, to keep relations in Europe with Russia in very bad shape. It's easy to say that the Russians wouldn't be so incompetent, also goes for the UK, which could have come up with something more compelling if they pre planned it as false flag.

Notice how we have some sources saying concern grew after the Trump Putin meeting, where supposedly Trump gave Israeli intelligence to Putin on Syria, I think they were concerned Trump would have no problem revealing a spy for another government, much like he was free with foreign intelligence.

I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect the real source, who is working for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016, Deputy Chief of Staff of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the foreign policy of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia.

Yeah, Right , Sep 11 2019 0:57 utc | 44
Just out of curiousity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have to exclude this from his report? The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check.The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have already noticed that he has done a runner. Check.

What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that starts with: "we know the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being relayed to us by an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and now living in the USA".

I mean, bit of a slam-dunk, don't you think?

uncle tungsten , Sep 11 2019 3:00 utc | 45
I call it a red herring, and I bet this sucker has been fully set up. Publicly listed address and all the indicators are that he is held in reserve to throw to the dogs whenever the action gets too close to the mongrel perpetrators.

Joe Mifsud and Claire Smith of MI6, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, especially FBI special agent Joseph Pientka plus that BIG shot FBI agent (who's name I forget) are the names to remember. Why aren't Misud and Smith extradited to face inquiry?

So what is emerging? is Mueller due in court to prosecute the Russian ad agency that has fully shirt fronted him? Is Flynn business about to upend a steaming pot of turds over Mueller and other heads. Is Seth Rich about to be posthumously knighted by some New York monarch for his role in smashing the HRC cart in public? Or is Julian Assange about to be put through more torture for being a journalist and publisher?

This poor Russian sod is a patsy for the vicious deep state game that now needs to prey on him and deliver his carcass to the howling mob and so distract them again. This Friday's quiet press releases might hold a clue.

snake , Sep 11 2019 3:47 utc | 46
plausible

maybe

where is the diversion.. lots of activity in Afghanistan and Golan today.. Turkey is moving into N. Syria.. Venezuela.. where is the diversion/

dltravers , Sep 11 2019 3:51 utc | 47
This guy will probably be making the rounds on CNN and cable news promoting the Steele dossier and the Russian collusion hoax as its complete disintegration is now fully evident. Offer up some turds on a plate, dress it up with a pinch a parsley and the truth will be avoided.

The whole 2 year media storm of lies on Russian collusion will be avoided by offering up another turd on a plate. This guy will pull down a few million and the media will never admit their false reporting.

Jen , Sep 11 2019 4:54 utc | 48
It would seem that a great deal has certainly changed at the CIA since 2003 when Valerie Plame was revealed as a spy by a newspaper journalist who was given the information about her during a phone conversation with someone close to the White House at the time, apparently to punish her ambassador husband Joseph Wilson for going to Niger to verify if that country had exported uranium to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Then there was shock and anger at the time that the cover of a CIA operative had been blown.

Now the CIA doesn't even bother to give Smolenkov and his family new identities and biographies to explain their living in Washington DC, and even co-operates with the outgoing Obama administration in 2016 in risking the exposure of one of its own to try to stop Donald Trump from ensconcing himself in the White House.

Something certainly has changed in the culture of the CIA: while it was always a political animal, it is becoming an extremely ideological one as well.

Sunny Runny Burger , Sep 11 2019 5:40 utc | 49
The idea that this could be a fake spy is interesting.

Sabine wrote:

fuck are you guys not tired of this bullshit kabuki theatre that you get fed daily in order to keep you amused and busy?

Only speaking for myself I ignore almost all of it (and actively treat it as propaganda, deception, and manipulation) and take a lot of breaks. I test the waters (or sewage) from time to time but I don't expect much and have no right to expect anything either.

However despite such sentiments the last decade seems like it has been an improvement although too many people (and probably me as well) are searching for "replacements" to failures when maybe there shouldn't be any: any false choice requires at least two wrong answers but there could be any number .

az , Sep 11 2019 9:16 utc | 51
In Bulgaria is a spy scandal too.
Reschetnikov is banned for ten years to visit Bulgaria. A reporter from NYT has tried to interview him before steps are take in Bulgaria to investigate the case. The officials say the Russians wanted to divert Bulgaria to the asia-project and that money-laundering was used to finance subversive activities. The case started on 9.09 2019. Today the parliament heard the statements of the agencies. Nothing new they sayed
az , Sep 11 2019 9:20 utc | 52
I think the Nato-gang want to have a military war in the black sea. Turkey did not close the Bosporus for the Russians, so they lost the war in Syria.
Josh , Sep 11 2019 10:53 utc | 53
Sounds fishy, the whole thing. Of course, when everyone is lying about everything while they are pretending to fight with each other, it may well get a bit convoluted. CIA outing thrir own dude on their own propaganda outlet is quite strange though. Also, their dude just trotting about using his real name (in a publicly listed mansion no less),... ehh... Who knows...
Josh , Sep 11 2019 11:05 utc | 54
Of course, they could be trying to 'put him on the spot' to use him for yet another propaganda push (whether he wants to play along, or not). But, again, the whole thing seems a bit strange.
milomilo , Sep 11 2019 11:30 utc | 55
i would caution people here on patrick lang's views on this issue. remember he is an existensialist american "patriot" who stop at nothing and will approve of any warcrime to held up the mighty american empire. Look at patrick lang's history , he is ex intelligence and thus never left the "services" even when he is "retired".

Pat lang's hate toward those who criticize american empire is legendary.. just look at his own comments on SST.

another one to watch is patrick lang's friend called TTG which also US intelligence and it is not unknown for this guy to post or inject nonsense narrative on SST especially on intelligence matters concerning russia.

The posts that seems clean of US narrative lies seem to come from Publius Tacitus and Walrus. But then again never take off your mandatory antipropaganda shield especially on SST owned by ex spook who love the american empire and military trashing of the world

Sunny Runny Burger , Sep 11 2019 12:34 utc | 56
The following rumor (through sputniknews.com) is sort of educational even if it should turn out to not be true (its Boolean value is essentially irrelevant which is interesting as a separate matter as well): Trump mistrusts spies etc .
donkeytale , Sep 11 2019 12:41 utc | 57
Sabine - are you guys not tired of this bullshit kabuli theatre

No, we are tirelessly...chasing our own tails...endlessly drinking one exclusive flavour of koolaid...The Infotainment Sickness Unto Death...

cirsium , Sep 11 2019 14:25 utc | 58
@Jen, 48

It wasn't just shock. Scooter Libby, Cheney's (?) Chief of Staff, broke a federal law when he exposed Valerie Palme as a CIA operative. He served part of a prison sentence for this. Joseph Wilson verified that Saddam Hussein did not buy yellow cake. After his report was ignored, he wrote an article about his findings. I remember reading it in the International Herald Tribune. It put the WMD narrative in doubt.

[Sep 11, 2019] Andrew Bacevich, Ending War, American-Style

Sep 11, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

September 11, 2019 by Yves Smith Yves here. Note that for all of Trump's considerable faults, including hiring John Bolton in the first place and taking too long to get rid of him, Bolton's opposition to finding a way for the US to extricate itself from the war in Afghanistan was reportedly the last straw.

By Andrew Bacevich, who serves as president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft . His new book The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory will be published in January. Originally published at TomDispatch

When the conflict that the Vietnamese refer to as the American War ended in April 1975, I was a U.S. Army captain attending a course at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In those days, the student body at any of our Army's myriad schools typically included officers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).

Since ARVN's founding two decades earlier, the United States had assigned itself the task of professionalizing that fledgling military establishment. Based on a conviction that the standards, methods, and ethos of our armed forces were universally applicable and readily exportable, the attendance of ARVN personnel at such Army schools was believed to contribute to the professionalizing of the South Vietnamese military.

Evidence that the U.S. military's own professional standards had recently taken a hit -- memories of the My Lai massacre were then still fresh -- elicited no second thoughts on our part. Association with American officers like me was sure to rub off on our South Vietnamese counterparts in ways that would make them better soldiers. So we professed to believe, even while subjecting that claim to no more scrutiny than we did the question of why most of us had spent a year or more of our lives participating in an obviously misbegotten and misguided war in Indochina.

For serving officers at that time one question in particular remained off-limits (though it had been posed incessantly for years by antiwar protestors in the streets of America): Why Vietnam? Prizing compliance as a precondition for upward mobility, military service rarely encourages critical thinking.

On the day that Saigon, the capital of the Republic of Vietnam, fell and that country ceased to exist, I approached one of my ARVN classmates, also a captain, wanting at least to acknowledge the magnitude of the disaster that had occurred. "I'm sorry about what happened to your country," I told him.

I did not know that officer well and no longer recall his name. Let's call him Captain Nguyen. In my dim recollection, he didn't even bother to reply. He simply looked at me with an expression both distressed and mournful. Our encounter lasted no more than a handful of seconds. I then went on with my life and Captain Nguyen presumably with his. Although I have no inkling of his fate, I like to think that he is now retired in Southern California after a successful career in real estate. But who knows?

All I do know is that today I recall our exchange with a profound sense of embarrassment and even shame. My pathetic effort to console Captain Nguyen had been both presumptuous and inadequate. Far worse was my failure -- inability? refusal? -- to acknowledge the context within which that catastrophe was occurring: the United States and its armed forces had, over years, inflicted horrendous harm on the people of South Vietnam.

In reality, their defeat was our defeat. Yet while we had decided that we were done paying, they were going to pay and pay for a long time to come.

Rather than offering a fatuous expression of regret for the collapse of his country, I ought to have apologized for having played even a miniscule role in what was, by any measure, a catastrophe of epic proportions. It's a wonder Captain Nguyen didn't spit in my eye.

I genuinely empathized with Captain Nguyen. Yet the truth is that, along with most other Americans, soldiers and civilians alike, I was only too happy to be done with South Vietnam and all its troubles. Dating back to the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the United States and its armed forces had made a gargantuan effort to impart legitimacy to the Republic of Vietnam and to coerce the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to its north into giving up its determination to exercise sovereignty over the entirety of the country. In that, we had failed spectacularly and at a staggering cost.

"Our" war in Indochina -- the conflict we chose to call the Vietnam War -- officially ended in January 1973 with the signing in Paris of an "Agreement Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam." Under the terms of that fraudulent pact, American prisoners of war were freed from captivity in North Vietnam and the last U.S. combat troops in the south left for home, completing a withdrawal begun several years earlier. Primary responsibility for securing the Republic of Vietnam thereby fell to ARVN, long deemed by U.S. commanders incapable of accomplishing that mission.

Meanwhile, despite a nominal cessation of hostilities, approximately 150,000 North Vietnamese regulars still occupied a large swathe of South Vietnamese territory -- more or less the equivalent to agreeing to end World War II when there were still several German panzer tank divisions lurking in Belgium's Ardennes Forest. In effect, our message to our enemy and our ally was this: We're outta here; you guys sort this out . In a bit more than two years, that sorting-out process would extinguish the Republic of Vietnam.

Been There, Done That

The course Captain Nguyen and I were attending in the spring of 1975 paid little attention to fighting wars like the one that, for years, had occupied the attention of my army and his. Our Army, in fact, was already moving on. Having had their fill of triple-canopy jungles in Indochina, America's officer corps now turned to defending the Fulda Gap, the region in West Germany deemed most hospitable to a future Soviet invasion. As if by fiat, gearing up to fight those Soviet forces and their Warsaw Pact allies, should they (however improbably) decide to take on NATO and lunge toward the English Channel, suddenly emerged as priority number one. At Fort Knox and throughout the Army's ranks, we were suddenly focused on "high-intensity combined arms operations" -- essentially, a replay of World War II-style combat with fancier weaponry. In short, the armed forces of the United States had reverted to "real soldiering."

And so it is again today. At the end of the 17th year of what Americans commonly call the Afghanistan War -- one wonders what name Afghans will eventually assign it -- U.S. military forces are moving on. Pentagon planners are shifting their attention back to Russia and China. Great power competition has become the name of the game. However we might define Washington's evolving purposes in its Afghanistan War -- "nation building," "democratization," "pacification" -- the likelihood of mission accomplishment is nil. As in the early 1970s, so in 2019, rather than admitting failure, the Pentagon has chosen to change the subject and is once again turning its attention to "real soldiering."

Remember the infatuation with counterinsurgency (commonly known by its acronym COIN) that gripped the national security establishment around 2007 when the Iraq "surge" overseen by General David Petraeus briefly ranked alongside Gettysburg as a historic victory? Well, these days promoting COIN as the new American way of war has become, to put it mildly, a tough sell. Given that few in Washington will openly acknowledge the magnitude of the military failure in Afghanistan, the incentive for identifying new enemies in settings deemed more congenial becomes all but irresistible.

Only one thing is required to validate this reshuffling of military priorities. Washington needs to create the appearance, as in 1973, that it's exiting Afghanistan on its own terms. What's needed, in short, is an updated equivalent of that "Agreement Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam."

Until last weekend, the signing of such an agreement seemed imminent. Donald Trump and his envoy, former ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, appeared poised to repeat the trick that President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger pulled off in 1973 in Paris: pause the war and call it peace. Should fighting subsequently resume after a "decent interval," it would no longer be America's problem. Now, however, to judge by the president's twitter account -- currently the authoritative record of U.S. diplomacy -- the proposed deal has been postponed, or perhaps shelved, or even abandoned altogether. If National Security Advisor John Bolton has his way , U.S. forces might just withdraw in any case, without an agreement of any sort being signed.

Based on what we can divine from press reports, the terms of that prospective Afghan deal would mirror those of the 1973 Paris Accords in one important respect. It would, in effect, serve as a ticket home for the remaining U.S. and NATO troops still in that country (though for the present only the first 5,000 of them would immediately depart). Beyond that, the Taliban was to promise not to provide sanctuary to anti-American terrorist groups, even though the Afghan branch of ISIS is already firmly lodged there. Still, this proviso would allow the Trump administration to claim that it had averted any possible recurrence of the 9/11 terror attacks that were, of course, planned by Osama bin Laden while residing in Afghanistan in 2001 as a guest of the Taliban-controlled government. Mission accomplished , as it were.

Back in 1973, North Vietnamese forces occupying parts of South Vietnam neither disarmed nor withdrew. Should this new agreement be finalized, Taliban forces currently controlling or influencing significant swaths of Afghan territory will neither disarm nor withdraw. Indeed, their declared intention is to continue fighting.

In 1973, policymakers in Washington were counting on ARVN to hold off Communist forces. In 2019, almost no one expects Afghan security forces to hold off a threat consisting of both the Taliban and ISIS. In a final insult, just as the Saigon government was excluded from U.S. negotiations with the North Vietnamese, so, too, has the Western-installed government in Kabul been excluded from U.S. negotiations with its sworn enemy, the Taliban.

A host of uncertainties remain. As with the olive branches that President Trump has ostentatiously offered to Russia, China, and North Koea, this particular peace initiative may come to naught -- or, given the approach of the 2020 elections, he may decide that Afghanistan offers his last best hope of claiming at least one foreign policy success. One way or another, in all likelihood, the deathwatch for the U.S.-backed Afghan government has now begun. One thing only is for sure. Having had their fill of Afghanistan, when the Americans finally leave, they won't look back. In that sense, it will be Vietnam all over again.

What Price Peace?

However great my distaste for President Trump, I support his administration's efforts to extricate the United States from Afghanistan. I do so for the same reason I supported the Paris Peace Accords of 1973. Prolonging this folly any longer does not serve U.S. interests. Rule number one of statecraft ought to be: when you're doing something really stupid, stop. To my mind, this rule seems especially applicable when the lives of American soldiers are at stake.

In Vietnam, Washington wasted 58,000 of those lives for nothing. In Afghanistan, we have lost more than 2,300 troops , with another 20,000 wounded, again for next to nothing. Last month, two American Special Forces soldiers were killed in a firefight in Faryab Province. For what?

That said, I'm painfully aware of the fact that, on the long-ago day when I offered Captain Nguyen my feeble condolences, I lacked the imagination to conceive of the trials about to befall his countrymen. In the aftermath of the American War, something on the order of 800,000 Vietnamese took to open and unseaworthy boats to flee their country. According to estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, between 200,000 and 400,000 boat people died at sea. Most of those who survived were destined to spend years in squalid refugee camps scattered throughout Southeast Asia. Back in Vietnam itself, some 300,000 former ARVN officers and South Vietnamese officials were imprisoned in so-called reeducation camps for up to 18 years. Reconciliation did not rank high on the postwar agenda of the unified country's new leaders.

Meanwhile, for the Vietnamese, north and south, the American War has in certain ways only continued. Mines and unexploded ordnance left from that war have inflicted more than 100,000 casualties since the last American troops departed. Even today, the toll caused by Agent Orange and other herbicides that the U.S. Air Force sprayed with abandon over vast stretches of territory continues to mount. The Red Cross calculates that more than one million Vietnamese have suffered health problems, including serious birth defects and cancers as a direct consequence of the promiscuous use of those poisons as weapons of war.

For anyone caring to calculate the moral responsibility of the United States for its actions in Vietnam, all of those would have to find a place on the final balance sheet. The 1.3 million Vietnamese admitted to the United States as immigrants since the American War formally concluded can hardly be said to make up for the immense damage suffered by the people of Vietnam as a direct or indirect result of U.S. policy.

As to what will follow if Washington does succeed in cutting a deal with the Taliban, well, don't count on President Trump (or his successor for that matter) welcoming anything like 1.3 million Afghan refugees to the United States once a "decent interval" has passed. Yet again, our position will be: we're outta here; you guys sort this out.

Near the end of his famed novel, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald described two of his privileged characters, Tom and Daisy, as "careless people" who "smashed up things and creatures" and then "retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness" to "let other people clean up the mess they had made." That description applies to the United States as a whole, especially when Americans tire of a misguided war. We are a careless people. In Vietnam, we smashed up things and human beings with abandon, only to retreat into our money, leaving others to clean up the mess in a distinctly bloody fashion.

Count on us, probably sooner rather than later, doing precisely the same thing in Afghanistan.

RBHoughton , September 11, 2019 at 1:05 am

Bacevich is right. Vietnam was a tragedy. Here we are at Ground Hog Day in Afghanistan.

I was touched by the author's recollection of Capt Nguyen. I well know that awful moment when , reflecting on some past event, I have recognised my own actions as insensitive, crass and unfeeling. How do we get so wrapped-up in ourselves that the feelings of others hardly impinge on our sensitivities? What happened to society? Is that where the West has gone wrong?

Btw, quote "to judge by the president's twitter account -- currently the authoritative record of U.S. diplomacy" unquote. I hope those owning the Twitter Nest note the future use of their archive.

VietnamVet , September 11, 2019 at 3:42 am

Andrew Bacevich is right. However, there is an amazing human disinclination to face facts but live with delusions which risk extinction for immediate gratification. The lessons from Vietnam were never learned. The Bush/Cheney fateful decision to occupy Afghanistan at the same time as invading Iraq ultimately led to the current predatory corporate military rule that will never voluntarily withdraw from overseas. The intent of the media/intelligence coup against the President is to prevent peace from breaking out. Executives and wealthy shareholders would lose their taxpayer gravy train. The troops and contractors now in Eastern Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are expendable. They will not have two years to get out. No planning, deep-sixing science, and profits over safety all assure that sooner or later there will be another black swan event. Be it Brexit, closure of Strait of Hormuz, subprime auto loans, WWIII, or climate change, assuredly something will give the final push and the American Empire will collapse.

Mattski , September 11, 2019 at 7:43 am

"Après moi, le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society."

No Pasaran , September 11, 2019 at 5:05 am

Prof. Bacevich is very perceptive and he writes well; his essays are always worth reading. Nevertheless, he is a retired US Army officer after all and there is that thing about leopards and spots. There is a tell in this article, when he speaks of the day that Saigon 'fell'. I too remember well that day in April of '75. I was studying in Madison, on the GI Bill. My friends and I all rejoiced on that day, as Saigon had finally been 'liberated'.

Ian Perkins , September 11, 2019 at 11:13 am

I was at high school in the UK, and my friends and I also rejoiced on that day.

Donald , September 11, 2019 at 12:29 pm

Why rejoice? The point should be that the US had no business in Vietnam, not that one group finally succeeded in uniting the country under the rule of one dictatorial party. Not all Vietnamese welcomed the "liberation" and many died fleeing the country.

I am sure this will be misunderstood, so I'll add that I think that the US role was one massive war crime and we never should have been there at all, that Ho Chi Minh probably would have won a fair election in the 1950's etc

Being antiwar has nothing necessarily to do with favoring the side our government opposes. It simply means that there is no moral justification for the US invading Vietnam or Iraq, supporting jihadists in Syria, helping the Saudis and the Israelis bomb civilians, and so on.

The Rev Kev , September 11, 2019 at 6:39 pm

Prof. Bacevich has an personal stake in what he writes about. His son, Lt. Andrew John Bacevich, was killed in action by an IED during the occupation back in 2007. He was already a severe critic of the war at the time but I am guessing that this underlined the futility of it tall.

Ignacio , September 11, 2019 at 6:01 am

Although it is true that the willing of Trump to put an end to the Afghan occupation must be seen as a positive, his policy of ever increasing military budgets make this affirmation from Bacevich "the incentive for identifying new enemies in settings deemed more congenial becomes all but irresistible" truer that ever. These expenditures must be justified in practical terms and It worries me what the new enemies in Trump's brain are.

fajensen , September 11, 2019 at 8:17 am

One was hoping that the Space Marines would focus The Decider's attention firmly on those pesky Centaurians .

Ignacio , September 11, 2019 at 9:23 am

Ha, ha hah!
Yes, Hollywood has made a big effort to explain us, the common people, that US's military expenses will protect us from Centaurians, Klingons, meteorites and some other rogue invaders. I cannot imagine any other reason.

Steve H. , September 11, 2019 at 6:37 am

> Prizing compliance as a precondition for upward mobility, military service rarely encourages critical thinking.

John Boyd: "And you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go." He raised his hand and pointed. "If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments." Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. "Or you can go that way and you can do something -- something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?" [Robert Coram]

Jesper , September 11, 2019 at 7:42 am

Which is worse? Living in a cave in Afghanistan or living in a prison in Europe/US?
If the invasion of Afghanistan was about capturing some people and then imprisoning them then that question might possibly be relevant.
If the invasion was about prestige then sometimes the best revenge and biggest insult is to treat that someone as irrelevant and insignificant. If the opportunity presents itself to do something then by all means do something, do what prestige demands but if that does not happen then what?
Sometimes the measure of someone is had by the measure of his/her enemies. Giving someone the significance of being the enemy might provide that someone with a better life. There are people with money who'd be willing to fund the enemy of their enemy. But how do those financiers know if they are funding some chancers/charlatans or the real thing? Spread some uncertainty about who are charlatans/chancers and see what happens to the funding . Maybe the guilty ones might feel it necessary to publicly provide the necessary proof of their guilt, doubtful but & if the location of them is found then threaten closure of the diplomatic missions of the nation where they are unless they are handed over. The diplomatic missions are cushy positions and closing them will only hurt the 'elite', the general population is left unharmed.

Afghanistan is unlikely to change anytime soon. As with all predictions of the future that one might be very wrong. However, the ones predicting that Afghanistan can and will change due to military occupation are in my opinion the ones who need to somehow provide support for their prediction.

The Rev Kev , September 11, 2019 at 9:11 am

A few predictions here. After the US and the rest of the Coalition leaves Afghanistan, not much happens for awhile. But then the government starts to lose ground. Slowly at first, and then quickly. Eventually Kabul falls. Long before then the US and other countries would have had evacuated their embassies so that there is no repeat of the frantic helicopter evacuations like happened in Saigon. There is a swell of refugees, particularly those who worked with the Coalition but Trump refuses all entry of them into the US saying that there are "very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very, very bad drug dealers" in Afghanistan.
Five years after the last troops are out of Afghanistan the war is all but forgotten in the same way that the vets of the Korean War were forgotten. Not for nothing did they call Korea the "Forgotten War.' By then the US is immersed in another campaign – probably in Africa – and news about what is happening in Afghanistan is relegated to the back pages. The vets will remember, but the nation will ignore them in the same way that Vietnam vets were forgotten after that war ended until the striking Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built in Washington by the vets themselves. In West Point text books, the war is relegated to the back pages as the cadets will instead study peer warfare with Russia and China.

Alex Cox , September 11, 2019 at 1:50 pm

One very important question remains.
By 2001 the Taliban had reduced opium production to virtually zero. Every year since the US/NATO invasion, opium production has increased.
What will the Afghans do when the US and British are no longer around to facilitate the heroin trade? Perhaps that's why negotiations are proving so difficult.

ewmayer , September 11, 2019 at 4:56 pm

"By 2001 the Taliban had reduced opium production to virtually zero."

You need to update things past 2001 :

The Taliban banned the cultivation of opium in 2001, shortly before being ousted by the US-led NATO coalition. However, after 2005, the Taliban began to regroup, and encouraged opium production to finance its insurgency by forcing locals to grow opium and punishing those who refused. Besides, major opium traffickers annually pay vast amounts to the Taliban in exchange for safe transport routes secured by the group.

The Taliban uses the money it collects from the opium trade to pay fighters' salaries, buy fuel, food, weapons and explosives. Based on some reports, around 40% of the Taliban's funding comes from opium production, while the rest of its expenditure is borne by foreign patrons and tax collections. The group's annual income from the opium trade was estimated to be $400 million in 2011, but it is believed to have significantly increased in recent years.

The Taliban collect two types of taxes from opium businesses: a transportation tax from drug trafficking and a 10% tax from opium cultivation. In exchange, the group provides security for the drug convoys and carries out attacks on government institutions like checkpoints in order to allow drug convoys to pass. The group has also launched attacks on government forces to safeguard drug labs and factories.

The Taliban don't need US/UK to facilitate things. In fact, getting the US out of the country might eliminate one of their major Heroin-related business rivals, the CIA.

Ian Perkins , September 11, 2019 at 11:10 am

Bacevich states, "Rule number one of statecraft ought to be: when you're doing something really stupid, stop. To my mind, this rule seems especially applicable when the lives of American soldiers are at stake. In Vietnam, Washington wasted 58,000 of those lives for nothing."
Why does he find his rule especially applicable to the paltry number of US dead, given that at least fifty times as many Indochinese died?
This attitude is surely one reason for the loathing felt by much of the world toward the USA. People are justifiably sick of hearing how US lives are inherently more valuable than their own.

juliania , September 11, 2019 at 12:24 pm

I guess you missed this part of the article:

" That said, I'm painfully aware of the fact that, on the long-ago day when I offered Captain Nguyen my feeble condolences, I lacked the imagination to conceive of the trials about to befall his countrymen. In the aftermath of the American War, something on the order of 800,000 Vietnamese took to open and unseaworthy boats to flee their country. According to estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, between 200,000 and 400,000 boat people died at sea. Most of those who survived were destined to spend years in squalid refugee camps scattered throughout Southeast Asia. Back in Vietnam itself, some 300,000 former ARVN officers and South Vietnamese officials were imprisoned in so-called reeducation camps for up to 18 years. Reconciliation did not rank high on the postwar agenda of the unified country's new leaders.

Meanwhile, for the Vietnamese, north and south, the American War has in certain ways only continued. Mines and unexploded ordnance left from that war have inflicted more than 100,000 casualties since the last American troops departed. Even today, the toll caused by Agent Orange and other herbicides that the U.S. Air Force sprayed with abandon over vast stretches of territory continues to mount. The Red Cross calculates that more than one million Vietnamese have suffered health problems, including serious birth defects and cancers as a direct consequence of the promiscuous use of those poisons as weapons of war.

For anyone caring to calculate the moral responsibility of the United States for its actions in Vietnam, all of those would have to find a place on the final balance sheet. The 1.3 million Vietnamese admitted to the United States as immigrants since the American War formally concluded can hardly be said to make up for the immense damage suffered by the people of Vietnam as a direct or indirect result of U.S. policy ."

Note in particular the phrase "the people of Vietnam" in the last sentence. I find your criticism to be unwarranted.

Ian Perkins , September 11, 2019 at 1:01 pm

I neither missed nor ignored Bacevich's caveat.
I was focusing on his 'rule number one', which seems to make the lives of a few US soldiers more sacred than those of the many people – civilians as well as soldiers – they kill.
I am not trying to say that Bacevich is as evil and abhorrent as say Bolton. I don't think he is, though I suspect he's on the same side when it comes down to it.
I am suggesting that the USA will fail to win the hearts and minds of the world's people while killing them and belittling their deaths.

(and you might note the phrase "can hardly be said to make up for" in the last sentence!)

John Wright , September 11, 2019 at 6:38 pm

As I remember the movie Dr. Strangelove, as the USA nuclear weapon was launched toward Russia, Russia was given an option to destroy some USA cities as a way of the USA doing fair and suitable penance.

I don't imagine the USA's military is viewed in the world as other than operating in the USA elites' interests, despite any media (Cable, internet, print,Hollywood films) verbiage about "bringing democracy" or "bringing freedom" to other nations.

I believe the Peace Corps was established as a way to make the world a better place with USA's expertise and as a way to win "hearts and minds of the world's people".

Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Corps , the Peace Corps budget in 2018 was 398 million.

The USA defense budget for 2019 is shown as 686 billion putting the Peace Corps budget as 0.058% of the, perhaps understated, defense budget.

I believe winning the world's hearts and minds via USA military action is very unlikely at best.

The small Peace Corps budget is evidence that concern about winning hearts and minds in foreign countries is a very small priority in Washington D.C.

Ford Prefect , September 11, 2019 at 11:44 am

If you fund, arm, and train an army for a decade and it still can't defend itself against insurgents, then you have to wonder whose side is right? If it actually had the backing of the people on the ground and dedicated troops and government, then it should be able to hold its ground well.

The US has had exactly the same outcomes in Vietnam and Afghanistan with training the respective armies.

In Iraq, it is largely coherent tribal entities of Kurds and Shiites that have been providing the backbone of relatively successful military organizations (not the same one despite being in the same country). Both groups have their own independent goals. The US forefeited its abiltiy to create a true national army in Iraq when they disbanded the former Iraqi Army shortly after invading. That resulted in a well-trained insurgency.

Ian Perkins , September 11, 2019 at 12:27 pm

"The US has had exactly the same outcomes in Vietnam and Afghanistan with training the respective armies."
Hardly. From 1979 the US funded, armed and trained the Mujaheddin, who won. I'm not aware of them funding, arming or training the Viet Cong or Viet Minh.
They didn't win when they backed the losing sides, that's true. But it isn't saying much beyond the obvious.

Susan the other` , September 11, 2019 at 3:12 pm

I like Bacevich but he really demurred from making his underlying point. He asked "Why Vietnam" and then he proceeded to fluff through that question. But the analogy to Afghanistan remains at a much deeper level. That level (imo) is this: Why Vietnam? Because, at that hysterical cold war turning point, Vietnam was the gateway to Southern China (Gore Vidal). Our main objective was to position ourselves to invade Southern China and protect the old imperialist interests of the UK and France (aka Nato). But we dithered and hesitated. Thank god. It could have been a much worse debacle. So here it is: We invaded Afghanistan and sent a zillion dollars worth of materiel to Iraq in order to take over the Middle East. And that meant invading Iran. But just like China, Iran was a dangerous plan. Too many things could go wrong, so everyone knew they would go wrong. Duh. And so we dithered and hesitated. And made up for it by blatant propaganda for 15 years. We're "outta there" because we should never have been in there. And one of the tragedies is our abandonment of the Kurds. Just like the South Vietnamese. Bacevich didn't mention the Kurds. He implied our abandonment would upset the poor Afghans. But, they won't care at all. They'll be flipping all of our departing helicopters the bird. Still there was a point to be made about our fecklessness. Interesting aside here that Bacevich, a well thought-out moral person, is the new President of the Quincy Institute. It will probably become famous for deep, murky contradictions. And pompous rationalizations without ever really making the point. Just to the taste of Soros and the Kochs.

Susan the other` , September 11, 2019 at 3:25 pm

I suspect, re Afghanistan, there is an upside that will never be made into a finer point. That is, we have worn out the appetite for a wider war for all concerned and managed to come to agreement with all parties of interest in Middle East oil. Including Russia. And Israel. And nobody will make much fuss about it, but we will still leave a very high-tech military contingent in Afghanistan because Eurasia is a vast opportunity.

barrisj , September 11, 2019 at 7:30 pm

Vietnam War strictly motivated by the "Domino Theory" and "monolithic Asian communism", per Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, et al. Kennedy was said to be having "second thoughts" about expanded US presence at the time of his assassination; however, LBJ went all-in, urged on by McNamara and the generals 11 years later it all went tits-up, Nixon ended the draft, all relatively quiet on the war front, then Carter and Brzezinski funded Islamic militants in Afghanistan to harry the Russkies and ca. 20yrs later, Cheney-Bush repeat the Russian quagmire plus ça change etc" .

stan6565 , September 11, 2019 at 3:55 pm

The author is too limited in his appraisals of USA wars, and the commentariat here too polite to expand on the list of the criminal wars waged by the USA since Vietnam.

Iraq and Afghanistan were mentioned, yes, but there were also open wars of aggression against Yugoslavia, then Serbia, Grenada and Libya as well as clandestine wars against a good chunk of the globe, Israel/Palestine, Russian backyard countries, China, Venezuela, a swathe of Central American countries, and so on ad infinitum.

USA's holy grail of subjugating all oil producing countries in the world, except for those that can fight back, and purported payment to those unable to fight back, with readily printable papers of questionable value, is not a long term strategy. Not long term as in 10 or 20 more years. Then what? John Bolton or his clone on a cocktail of steroids and amphetamine, lobbing nuclear weapons indiscriminately all over the place?

The Indispensable Nation.

[Sep 11, 2019] NYT tries to save Russiagate narrative using Smolenkov defection

Sep 11, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

Some former intelligence officials said the president's closed-door meetings with Mr. Putin and other Russian officials , along with Twitter posts about delicate intelligence matters , have sown concern among overseas sources.

"We have a president who, unlike any other president in modern history, is willing to use sensitive, classified intelligence however he sees fit," said Steven L. Hall, a former C.I.A. official who led the agency's Russia operations. "He does it in front of our adversaries. He does it by tweet. We are in uncharted waters."

But the government had indicated that the source existed long before Mr. Trump took office, first in formally accusing Russia of interference in October 2016 and then when intelligence officials declassified parts of their assessment about the interference campaign for public release in January 2017. News agencies, including NBC , began reporting around that time about Mr. Putin's involvement in the election sabotage and on the C.I.A.'s possible sources for the assessment.

The following month, The Washington Post reported that the C.I.A.'s conclusions relied on "sourcing deep inside the Russian government." And The New York Times later published articles disclosing details about the source .

The news reporting in the spring and summer of 2017 convinced United States government officials that they had to update and revive their extraction plan, according to people familiar the matter.

The extraction ensured the informant was in a safer position and rewarded for a long career in service to the United States. But it came at a great cost: It left the C.I.A. struggling to understand what was going on inside the highest ranks of the Kremlin.

The agency has long struggled to recruit sources close to Mr. Putin, a former intelligence officer himself wary of C.I.A. operations. He confides in only a small group of people and has rigorous operational security, eschewing electronic communications.

James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence who left office at the end of the Obama administration, said he had no knowledge of the decision to conduct an extraction. But, he said, there was little doubt that revelations about the extraction were "going to make recruiting assets in Russia even more difficult than it already is." Correction : Sept. 10, 2019

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the timing of the initial reporting on the C.I.A.'s 2016 exfiltration offer to a Russian informant. An offer that appears to be the same one that The New York Times described was reported in 2018 in Bob Woodward's book "Fear."

[Sep 11, 2019] We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was deliberately planned as part of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling.

OK, lets' assume that neoliberal MSM are not lying. Then why Mueller did not include him in his report? He was already in the USA since June 2017. It is unclear when he was fired by russians.
Also as Smolenkov for a long time lived in the USA he knew very well what the USA wants and could lie with impunity trying to earn more money. In a way similar personality as Skripal.
Is the idea to create the second Skripals-style false poisoning hysteria to help to sustain RussiaGate?
Notable quotes:
"... The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister. ..."
"... My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity. ..."
"... MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely contributor to the Steele Dossier given the overall web of established connections--that was most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA, although CIA was involved in Russiagate Cover-up. ..."
"... In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged spy? Aside from the UNSC vote debacle on Libya ..."
"... A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about it. Really,when a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be nigh. ..."
"... We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was deliberately planned as part of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling. ..."
"... The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016 ..."
"... I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect the real source, who is working for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016, Deputy Chief of Staff of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the foreign policy of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia. ..."
"... Just out of curiosity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have to exclude this from his report? The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check. The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have already noticed that he has done a runner. Check. ..."
"... What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that starts with: "we know the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being relayed to us by an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and now living in the USA". ..."
"... Well, I just think Putin had more important things to think about than the charade that is now the US electoral process. Probably he felt (I'm guessing of course) that the whole Russiagate scenario was a desperate move to throw a curtain over the demise of American democracy that served his, Putin's, purposes very well because it kept the idiots busy while he shored up the badly leaking ship of his own state. ..."
"... And I go with Smiley@34 - no spy of even mediocre caliber would agree to being placed in such an exposed position under his own name, for crying out loud! ..."
"... It doesn't make sense that he would leave himself exposed if either in Russia or in the US he had undercover connections of this sort. Just doesn't make sense. But that he was the best the US operatives could come up with right now simply speaks to further deterioration of US ability to field persuasive stories. ..."
"... Putin hasn't had to worry about vendettas or showing corruption in American politics. Take a reliable poll. Who in the US thinks our politics ISN'T corrupt? ..."
"... We didn't need Putin, mastermind though he is, to 'create an image' of American unreliability. Was it Putin who reneged on so many treaties? Was it Putin who antagonized the Koreas? Was it Putin who set up the trade war with China? Was it Putin who threatened and sanctioned Russia, Iran, Venezuela? ..."
"... What can the Russians do to get ahead of the narrative on the likely impending demise of Smolenkov by novichok or polonium poisoning? ..."
"... The concern is about the three hundred million other Americans who are at least partially captured by the false narratives pumped out non-stop from their Plato's Cave displays. Is there anything that the Russians can do now to inoculate some Americans against the hard sell they will be facing when the corporate mass media ( Mighty Wurlitzer ) cranks up the multi-channel marketing campaign for the United States' own Skripal farce? ..."
Sep 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Smiley , Sep 10 2019 22:54 utc | 34

A point that appears to have missed by several is that an aide to an aide to the foreign minister is not likely to have access to Putin's super-top-secret plans to use a few thousand dollars worth of utube and twit ads to change the course of multi-billion dollar American election, nor would he have access to information that might be used to blackmail a potential foreign leader.

Both would be closely held secrets and apparently way above his pay grade. Often the FM wouldn't know of either, and both operations would be compartmentalized into a close team Putin can trust.

The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister.

My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity.

karlof1 , Sep 10 2019 23:11 utc | 36

Smiley @33&34--

House likely bought by CIA and annual upkeep--taxes etc.--also paid by them.

MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely contributor to the Steele Dossier given the overall web of established connections--that was most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA, although CIA was involved in Russiagate Cover-up.

In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged spy? Aside from the UNSC vote debacle on Libya, I see nothing but a string of successes, although the Ukraine Coup wasn't debauched. IMO, Outlaw US Empire policy toward Russia has failed spectacularly, and it is within the US government where I'd expect to find well placed spies.

Smiley , Sep 10 2019 23:21 utc | 39
Here's a tough problem for a counter-intelligence agent. Find the source of info for a fictional report.

Normally, after a link, one avenue of investigation would be to check who had access to the leaked information. But, if the report is completely fictional, then there is no list of people who had access to information that didn't exist. Everyone or no one had equal access to the non-existent information.

The Tailor of Moscow had the same access to the non-existent information as did Putin's closest personal aide. Who done it?

willie , Sep 10 2019 23:30 utc | 40
Headline in le Figaro: Ingérence russe :la CIA disposait d'une source haut-placée au Kremlin (Russian collusion: CIA had high placed source at the Kremlin.)

A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about it. Really,when a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be nigh.

Jackrabbit , Sep 11 2019 0:30 utc | 41
Evidence-free accusations of Russian meddling. Now with extra sauce.

<> <> <> <> <> <>

We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was deliberately planned as part of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling.

GoldmanKropotkin , Sep 11 2019 0:47 utc | 43
The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/u-s-officials-putin-personally-involved-u-s-election-hack-n696146

Notice the source is spies working for US Allies. Remember that the NSA did not sign off on the Russian interference/hacking because they were concerned that too much critical info rested on intelligence from a single foreign country.

Sergei Skripal was not just an turncoat for UK he also worked for Estonian intelligence. It seems to me the poisoning fits better as an Estonian job, to keep relations in Europe with Russia in very bad shape. It's easy to say that the Russians wouldn't be so incompetent, also goes for the UK, which could have come up with something more compelling if they pre planned it as false flag.

Notice how we have some sources saying concern grew after the Trump Putin meeting, where supposedly Trump gave Isreali intelligence to Putin on Syria, I think they were concerned Trump would have no problem revealing a spy for another government, much like he was free with foreign intelligence.

I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect the real source, who is working for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016, Deputy Chief of Staff of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the foreign policy of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia.

Yeah, Right , Sep 11 2019 0:57 utc | 44
Just out of curiosity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have to exclude this from his report? The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check. The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have already noticed that he has done a runner. Check.

What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that starts with: "we know the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being relayed to us by an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and now living in the USA".

I mean, bit of a slam-dunk, don't you think?

juliania , Sep 11 2019 14:57 utc | 58

Well, I just think Putin had more important things to think about than the charade that is now the US electoral process. Probably he felt (I'm guessing of course) that the whole Russiagate scenario was a desperate move to throw a curtain over the demise of American democracy that served his, Putin's, purposes very well because it kept the idiots busy while he shored up the badly leaking ship of his own state.

And I go with Smiley@34 - no spy of even mediocre caliber would agree to being placed in such an exposed position under his own name, for crying out loud!

This was a guy who had big money stashed away, wanted to be in a place where rich guys are held in high esteem, planned his exit from a no-longer-friendly-to-rich-folk environment (if you had money in Russia these days, you should use it for the good of the country).

It doesn't make sense that he would leave himself exposed if either in Russia or in the US he had undercover connections of this sort. Just doesn't make sense. But that he was the best the US operatives could come up with right now simply speaks to further deterioration of US ability to field persuasive stories.

And this gave me some amusement:

Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said. [Quote from Goldman Kropotkin@43]

Putin hasn't had to worry about vendettas or showing corruption in American politics. Take a reliable poll. Who in the US thinks our politics ISN'T corrupt?

juliania , Sep 11 2019 15:11 utc | 59
We didn't need Putin, mastermind though he is, to 'create an image' of American unreliability. Was it Putin who reneged on so many treaties? Was it Putin who antagonized the Koreas? Was it Putin who set up the trade war with China? Was it Putin who threatened and sanctioned Russia, Iran, Venezuela?

We, our leaders, masterminded it all. Sorry, Mr. Putin - you lose that enviable title. We own it.

William Gruff , Sep 11 2019 15:50 utc | 60

What can the Russians do to get ahead of the narrative on the likely impending demise of Smolenkov by novichok or polonium poisoning?

I know some here might say "Everyone would know it is a false flag if Smolenkov gets assassinated!" and that is certainly true if by "everyone" one means the regular readers here and at a few other analysis sites that are not controlled by the empire.

The concern is about the three hundred million other Americans who are at least partially captured by the false narratives pumped out non-stop from their Plato's Cave displays. Is there anything that the Russians can do now to inoculate some Americans against the hard sell they will be facing when the corporate mass media ( Mighty Wurlitzer ) cranks up the multi-channel marketing campaign for the United States' own Skripal farce?

[Sep 11, 2019] On view of Russiagate hysteria it is pretty clear that Vladimir Putin s observations about American society and the growing sense that middle class America is being left behind is accurate

Sep 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Sally Snyder , Sep 11 2019 17:43 utc | 3

Given that Washington continuously claims that Russians are responsible for the election of Donald Trump, here is an interesting look at what Vladimir Putin had to say about why Donald Trump was elected:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/09/vladimir-putin-on-americas-middle-class.html

While drawing links from economic class to voting patterns is difficult given that education impacts voting rates, it is pretty clear that Vladimir Putin's observations about American society and the growing sense that middle class America is being left behind is accurate. It is becoming increasingly clear that globalization benefits the few at the top and leaves behind the vast majority of society who feel that their place in society is under threat.

[Sep 11, 2019] On possible Oleg Smolenkov connection to Steele dossier

Sep 10, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

librul , Sep 10 2019 19:54 utc | 19

Is someone brewing up some fresh Novichok nerve agent as we speak?

Don't touch those doorknobs, Oleg!

for future reference: this post was for amusement purposes only

[Sep 10, 2019] Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein by Larry C Johnsons

Highly recommended!
Sep 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Diana C ,

"Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein."

As usual, your analogy here is spot on. I'm still giggling.

[Sep 10, 2019] Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik

Highly recommended!
This is a Marxist critique of neoliberalism. Not necessary right but they his some relevant points.
Notable quotes:
"... The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. ..."
"... The ex ante tendency toward overproduction arises because the vector of real wages across countries does not increase noticeably over time in the world economy, while the vector of labor productivities does, typically resulting in a rise in the share of surplus in world output. ..."
"... While the rise in the vector of labor productivities across countries, a ubiquitous phenomenon under capitalism that also characterizes neoliberal capitalism, scarcely requires an explanation, why does the vector of real wages remain virtually stagnant in the world economy? The answer lies in the sui generis character of contemporary globalization that, for the first time in the history of capitalism, has led to a relocation of activity from the metropolis to third world countries in order to take advantage of the lower wages prevailing in the latter and meet global demand. ..."
"... The current globalization broke with this. The movement of capital from the metropolis to the third world, especially to East, South, and Southeast Asia to relocate plants there and take advantage of their lower wages for meeting global demand, has led to a desegmentation of the world economy, subjecting metropolitan wages to the restraining effect exercised by the third world's labor reserves. Not surprisingly, as Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the real-wage rate of an average male U.S. worker in 2011 was no higher -- indeed, it was marginally lower -- than it had been in 1968. 5 ..."
"... This ever-present opposition becomes decisive within a regime of globalization. As long as finance capital remains national -- that is, nation-based -- and the state is a nation-state, the latter can override this opposition under certain circumstances, such as in the post-Second World War period when capitalism was facing an existential crisis. But when finance capital is globalized, meaning, when it is free to move across country borders while the state remains a nation-state, its opposition to fiscal deficits becomes decisive. If the state does run large fiscal deficits against its wishes, then it would simply leave that country en masse , causing a financial crisis. ..."
"... The state therefore capitulates to the demands of globalized finance capital and eschews direct fiscal intervention for increasing demand. It resorts to monetary policy instead since that operates through wealth holders' decisions, and hence does not undermine their social position. But, precisely for this reason, monetary policy is an ineffective instrument, as was evident in the United States in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis when even the pushing of interest rates down to zero scarcely revived activity. 6 ..."
"... If Trump's protectionism, which recalls the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931 and amounts to a beggar-my-neighbor policy, does lead to a significant export of unemployment from the United States, then it will invite retaliation and trigger a trade war that will only worsen the crisis for the world economy as a whole by dampening global investment. Indeed, since the United States has been targeting China in particular, some retaliatory measures have already appeared. But if U.S. protectionism does not invite generalized retaliation, it would only be because the export of unemployment from the United States is insubstantial, keeping unemployment everywhere, including in the United States, as precarious as it is now. However we look at it, the world would henceforth face higher levels of unemployment. ..."
"... The second implication of this dead end is that the era of export-led growth is by and large over for third world economies. The slowing down of world economic growth, together with protectionism in the United States against successful third world exporters, which could even spread to other metropolitan economies, suggests that the strategy of relying on the world market to generate domestic growth has run out of steam. Third world economies, including the ones that have been very successful at exporting, would now have to rely much more on their home market ..."
"... In other words, we shall now have an intensification of the imperialist stranglehold over third world economies, especially those pushed into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits in the new situation. By imperialism , here we do not mean the imperialism of this or that major power, but the imperialism of international finance capital, with which even domestic big bourgeoisies are integrated, directed against their own working people ..."
"... In short, the ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. To sustain itself, neoliberal capitalism starts looking for some other ideological prop and finds fascism. ..."
"... The first is the so-called spontaneous method of capital flight. Any political formation that seeks to take the country out of the neoliberal regime will witness capital flight even before it has been elected to office, bringing the country to a financial crisis and thereby denting its electoral prospects. And if perchance it still gets elected, the outflow will only increase, even before it assumes office. The inevitable difficulties faced by the people may well make the government back down at that stage. The sheer difficulty of transition away from a neoliberal regime could be enough to bring even a government based on the support of workers and peasants to its knees, precisely to save them short-term distress or to avoid losing their support. ..."
"... The third weapon consists in carrying out so-called democratic or parliamentary coups of the sort that Latin America has been experiencing. Coups in the old days were effected through the local armed forces and necessarily meant the imposition of military dictatorships in lieu of civilian, democratically elected governments. Now, taking advantage of the disaffection generated within countries by the hardships caused by capital flight and imposed sanctions, imperialism promotes coups through fascist or fascist-sympathizing middle-class political elements in the name of restoring democracy, which is synonymous with the pursuit of neoliberalism. ..."
"... And if all these measures fail, there is always the possibility of resorting to economic warfare (such as destroying Venezuela's electricity supply), and eventually to military warfare. Venezuela today provides a classic example of what imperialist intervention in a third world country is going to look like in the era of decline of neoliberal capitalism, when revolts are going to characterize such countries more and more. ..."
"... Despite this opposition, neoliberal capitalism cannot ward off the challenge it is facing for long. It has no vision for reinventing itself. Interestingly, in the period after the First World War, when capitalism was on the verge of sinking into a crisis, the idea of state intervention as a way of its revival had already been mooted, though its coming into vogue only occurred at the end of the Second World War. 11 Today, neoliberal capitalism does not even have an idea of how it can recover and revitalize itself. And weapons like domestic fascism in the third world and direct imperialist intervention cannot for long save it from the anger of the masses that is building up against it. ..."
Aug 25, 2019 | portside.org
Originally from: Monthly Review printer friendly
The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop.

Harry Magdoff's The Age of Imperialism is a classic work that shows how postwar political decolonization does not negate the phenomenon of imperialism. The book has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, it follows in V. I. Lenin's footsteps in providing a comprehensive account of how capitalism at the time operated globally. On the other hand, it raises a question that is less frequently discussed in Marxist literature -- namely, the need for imperialism. Here, Magdoff not only highlighted the crucial importance, among other things, of the third world's raw materials for metropolitan capital, but also refuted the argument that the declining share of raw-material value in gross manufacturing output somehow reduced this importance, making the simple point that there can be no manufacturing at all without raw materials. 1

Magdoff's focus was on a period when imperialism was severely resisting economic decolonization in the third world, with newly independent third world countries taking control over their own resources. He highlighted the entire armory of weapons used by imperialism. But he was writing in a period that predated the onset of neoliberalism. Today, we not only have decades of neoliberalism behind us, but the neoliberal regime itself has reached a dead end. Contemporary imperialism has to be discussed within this setting.

Globalization and Economic Crisis

There are two reasons why the regime of neoliberal globalization has run into a dead end. The first is an ex ante tendency toward global overproduction; the second is that the only possible counter to this tendency within the regime is the formation of asset-price bubbles, which cannot be conjured up at will and whose collapse, if they do appear, plunges the economy back into crisis. In short, to use the words of British economic historian Samuel Berrick Saul, there are no "markets on tap" for contemporary metropolitan capitalism, such as had been provided by colonialism prior to the First World War and by state expenditure in the post-Second World War period of dirigisme . 2

The ex ante tendency toward overproduction arises because the vector of real wages across countries does not increase noticeably over time in the world economy, while the vector of labor productivities does, typically resulting in a rise in the share of surplus in world output. As Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy argued in Monopoly Capital , following the lead of Michał Kalecki and Josef Steindl, such a rise in the share of economic surplus, or a shift from wages to surplus, has the effect of reducing aggregate demand since the ratio of consumption to income is higher on average for wage earners than for those living off the surplus. 3 Therefore, assuming a given level of investment associated with any period, such a shift would tend to reduce consumption demand and hence aggregate demand, output, and capacity utilization. In turn, reduced capacity utilization would lower investment over time, further aggravating the demand-reducing effect arising from the consumption side.

While the rise in the vector of labor productivities across countries, a ubiquitous phenomenon under capitalism that also characterizes neoliberal capitalism, scarcely requires an explanation, why does the vector of real wages remain virtually stagnant in the world economy? The answer lies in the sui generis character of contemporary globalization that, for the first time in the history of capitalism, has led to a relocation of activity from the metropolis to third world countries in order to take advantage of the lower wages prevailing in the latter and meet global demand.

Historically, while labor has not been, and is still not, free to migrate from the third world to the metropolis, capital, though juridically free to move from the latter to the former, did not actually do so , except to sectors like mines and plantations, which only strengthened, rather than broke, the colonial pattern of the international division of labor. 4 This segmentation of the world economy meant that wages in the metropolis increased with labor productivity, unrestrained by the vast labor reserves of the third world, which themselves had been caused by the displacement of manufactures through the twin processes of deindustrialization (competition from metropolitan goods) and the drain of surplus (the siphoning off of a large part of the economic surplus, through taxes on peasants that are no longer spent on local artisan products but finance gratis primary commodity exports to the metropolis instead).

The current globalization broke with this. The movement of capital from the metropolis to the third world, especially to East, South, and Southeast Asia to relocate plants there and take advantage of their lower wages for meeting global demand, has led to a desegmentation of the world economy, subjecting metropolitan wages to the restraining effect exercised by the third world's labor reserves. Not surprisingly, as Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the real-wage rate of an average male U.S. worker in 2011 was no higher -- indeed, it was marginally lower -- than it had been in 1968. 5

At the same time, such relocation of activities, despite causing impressive growth rates of gross domestic product (GDP) in many third world countries, does not lead to the exhaustion of the third world's labor reserves. This is because of another feature of contemporary globalization: the unleashing of a process of primitive accumulation of capital against petty producers, including peasant agriculturists in the third world, who had earlier been protected, to an extent, from the encroachment of big capital (both domestic and foreign) by the postcolonial dirigiste regimes in these countries. Under neoliberalism, such protection is withdrawn, causing an income squeeze on these producers and often their outright dispossession from their land, which is then used by big capital for its various so-called development projects. The increase in employment, even in countries with impressive GDP growth rates in the third world, falls way short of the natural growth of the workforce, let alone absorbing the additional job seekers coming from the ranks of displaced petty producers. The labor reserves therefore never get used up. Indeed, on the contrary, they are augmented further, because real wages continue to remain tied to a subsistence level, even as metropolitan wages too are restrained. The vector of real wages in the world economy as a whole therefore remains restrained.

Although contemporary globalization thus gives rise to an ex ante tendency toward overproduction, state expenditure that could provide a counter to this (and had provided a counter through military spending in the United States, according to Baran and Sweezy) can no longer do so under the current regime. Finance is usually opposed to direct state intervention through larger spending as a way of increasing employment. This opposition expresses itself through an opposition not just to larger taxes on capitalists, but also to a larger fiscal deficit for financing such spending. Obviously, if larger state spending is financed by taxes on workers, then it hardly adds to aggregate demand, for workers spend the bulk of their incomes anyway, so the state taking this income and spending it instead does not add any extra demand. Hence, larger state spending can increase employment only if it is financed either through a fiscal deficit or through taxes on capitalists who keep a part of their income unspent or saved. But these are precisely the two modes of financing state expenditure that finance capital opposes.

Its opposing larger taxes on capitalists is understandable, but why is it so opposed to a larger fiscal deficit? Even within a capitalist economy, there are no sound economic theoretical reasons that should preclude a fiscal deficit under all circumstances. The root of the opposition therefore lies in deeper social considerations: if the capitalist economic system becomes dependent on the state to promote employment directly , then this fact undermines the social legitimacy of capitalism. The need for the state to boost the animal spirits of the capitalists disappears and a perspective on the system that is epistemically exterior to it is provided to the people, making it possible for them to ask: If the state can do the job of providing employment, then why do we need the capitalists at all? It is an instinctive appreciation of this potential danger that underlies the opposition of capital, especially of finance, to any direct effort by the state to generate employment.

This ever-present opposition becomes decisive within a regime of globalization. As long as finance capital remains national -- that is, nation-based -- and the state is a nation-state, the latter can override this opposition under certain circumstances, such as in the post-Second World War period when capitalism was facing an existential crisis. But when finance capital is globalized, meaning, when it is free to move across country borders while the state remains a nation-state, its opposition to fiscal deficits becomes decisive. If the state does run large fiscal deficits against its wishes, then it would simply leave that country en masse , causing a financial crisis.

The state therefore capitulates to the demands of globalized finance capital and eschews direct fiscal intervention for increasing demand. It resorts to monetary policy instead since that operates through wealth holders' decisions, and hence does not undermine their social position. But, precisely for this reason, monetary policy is an ineffective instrument, as was evident in the United States in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis when even the pushing of interest rates down to zero scarcely revived activity. 6

It may be thought that this compulsion on the part of the state to accede to the demand of finance to eschew fiscal intervention for enlarging employment should not hold for the United States. Its currency being considered by the world's wealth holders to be "as good as gold" should make it immune to capital flight. But there is an additional factor operating in the case of the United States: that the demand generated by a bigger U.S. fiscal deficit would substantially leak abroad in a neoliberal setting, which would increase its external debt (since, unlike Britain in its heyday, it does not have access to any unrequited colonial transfers) for the sake of generating employment elsewhere. This fact deters any fiscal effort even in the United States to boost demand within a neoliberal setting. 7

Therefore, it follows that state spending cannot provide a counter to the ex ante tendency toward global overproduction within a regime of neoliberal globalization, which makes the world economy precariously dependent on occasional asset-price bubbles, primarily in the U.S. economy, for obtaining, at best, some temporary relief from the crisis. It is this fact that underlies the dead end that neoliberal capitalism has reached. Indeed, Donald Trump's resort to protectionism in the United States to alleviate unemployment is a clear recognition of the system having reached this cul-de-sac. The fact that the mightiest capitalist economy in the world has to move away from the rules of the neoliberal game in an attempt to alleviate its crisis of unemployment/underemployment -- while compensating capitalists adversely affected by this move through tax cuts, as well as carefully ensuring that no restraints are imposed on free cross-border financial flows -- shows that these rules are no longer viable in their pristine form.

Some Implications of This Dead End

There are at least four important implications of this dead end of neoliberalism. The first is that the world economy will now be afflicted by much higher levels of unemployment than it was in the last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, when the dot-com and the housing bubbles in the United States had, sequentially, a pronounced impact. It is true that the U.S. unemployment rate today appears to be at a historic low, but this is misleading: the labor-force participation rate in the United States today is lower than it was in 2008, which reflects the discouraged-worker effect . Adjusting for this lower participation, the U.S. unemployment rate is considerable -- around 8 percent. Indeed, Trump would not be imposing protection in the United States if unemployment was actually as low as 4 percent, which is the official figure. Elsewhere in the world, of course, unemployment post-2008 continues to be evidently higher than before. Indeed, the severity of the current problem of below-full-employment production in the U.S. economy is best illustrated by capacity utilization figures in manufacturing. The weakness of the U.S. recovery from the Great Recession is indicated by the fact that the current extended recovery represents the first decade in the entire post-Second World War period in which capacity utilization in manufacturing has never risen as high as 80 percent in a single quarter, with the resulting stagnation of investment. 8

If Trump's protectionism, which recalls the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931 and amounts to a beggar-my-neighbor policy, does lead to a significant export of unemployment from the United States, then it will invite retaliation and trigger a trade war that will only worsen the crisis for the world economy as a whole by dampening global investment. Indeed, since the United States has been targeting China in particular, some retaliatory measures have already appeared. But if U.S. protectionism does not invite generalized retaliation, it would only be because the export of unemployment from the United States is insubstantial, keeping unemployment everywhere, including in the United States, as precarious as it is now. However we look at it, the world would henceforth face higher levels of unemployment.

There has been some discussion on how global value chains would be affected by Trump's protectionism. But the fact that global macroeconomics in the early twenty-first century will look altogether different compared to earlier has not been much discussed.

In light of the preceding discussion, one could say that if, instead of individual nation-states whose writ cannot possibly run against globalized finance capital, there was a global state or a set of major nation-states acting in unison to override the objections of globalized finance and provide a coordinated fiscal stimulus to the world economy, then perhaps there could be recovery. Such a coordinated fiscal stimulus was suggested by a group of German trade unionists, as well as by John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression in the 1930s. 9 While it was turned down then, in the present context it has not even been discussed.

The second implication of this dead end is that the era of export-led growth is by and large over for third world economies. The slowing down of world economic growth, together with protectionism in the United States against successful third world exporters, which could even spread to other metropolitan economies, suggests that the strategy of relying on the world market to generate domestic growth has run out of steam. Third world economies, including the ones that have been very successful at exporting, would now have to rely much more on their home market.

Such a transition will not be easy; it will require promoting domestic peasant agriculture, defending petty production, moving toward cooperative forms of production, and ensuring greater equality in income distribution, all of which need major structural shifts. For smaller economies, it would also require their coming together with other economies to provide a minimum size to the domestic market. In short, the dead end of neoliberalism also means the need for a shift away from the so-called neoliberal development strategy that has held sway until now.

The third implication is the imminent engulfing of a whole range of third world economies in serious balance-of-payments difficulties. This is because, while their exports will be sluggish in the new situation, this very fact will also discourage financial inflows into their economies, whose easy availability had enabled them to maintain current account deficits on their balance of payments earlier. In such a situation, within the existing neoliberal paradigm, they would be forced to adopt austerity measures that would impose income deflation on their people, make the conditions of their people significantly worse, lead to a further handing over of their national assets and resources to international capital, and prevent precisely any possible transition to an alternative strategy of home market-based growth.

In other words, we shall now have an intensification of the imperialist stranglehold over third world economies, especially those pushed into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits in the new situation. By imperialism , here we do not mean the imperialism of this or that major power, but the imperialism of international finance capital, with which even domestic big bourgeoisies are integrated, directed against their own working people.

The fourth implication is the worldwide upsurge of fascism. Neoliberal capitalism even before it reached a dead end, even in the period when it achieved reasonable growth and employment rates, had pushed the world into greater hunger and poverty. For instance, the world per-capita cereal output was 355 kilograms for 1980 (triennium average for 1979–81 divided by mid–triennium population) and fell to 343 in 2000, leveling at 344.9 in 2016 -- and a substantial amount of this last figure went into ethanol production. Clearly, in a period of growth of the world economy, per-capita cereal absorption should be expanding, especially since we are talking here not just of direct absorption but of direct and indirect absorption, the latter through processed foods and feed grains in animal products. The fact that there was an absolute decline in per-capita output, which no doubt caused a decline in per-capita absorption, suggests an absolute worsening in the nutritional level of a substantial segment of the world's population.

But this growing hunger and nutritional poverty did not immediately arouse any significant resistance, both because such resistance itself becomes more difficult under neoliberalism (since the very globalization of capital makes it an elusive target) and also because higher GDP growth rates provided a hope that distress might be overcome in the course of time. Peasants in distress, for instance, entertained the hope that their children would live better in the years to come if given a modicum of education and accepted their fate.

In short, the ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. To sustain itself, neoliberal capitalism starts looking for some other ideological prop and finds fascism. This changes the discourse away from the material conditions of people's lives to the so-called threat to the nation, placing the blame for people's distress not on the failure of the system, but on ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority groups, the other that is portrayed as an enemy. It projects a so-called messiah whose sheer muscularity can somehow magically overcome all problems; it promotes a culture of unreason so that both the vilification of the other and the magical powers of the supposed leader can be placed beyond any intellectual questioning; it uses a combination of state repression and street-level vigilantism by fascist thugs to terrorize opponents; and it forges a close relationship with big business, or, in Kalecki's words, "a partnership of big business and fascist upstarts." 10

Fascist groups of one kind or another exist in all modern societies. They move center stage and even into power only on certain occasions when they get the backing of big business. And these occasions arise when three conditions are satisfied: when there is an economic crisis so the system cannot simply go on as before; when the usual liberal establishment is manifestly incapable of resolving the crisis; and when the left is not strong enough to provide an alternative to the people in order to move out of the conjuncture.

This last point may appear odd at first, since many see the big bourgeoisie's recourse to fascism as a counter to the growth of the left's strength in the context of a capitalist crisis. But when the left poses a serious threat, the response of the big bourgeoisie typically is to attempt to split it by offering concessions. It uses fascism to prop itself up only when the left is weakened. Walter Benjamin's remark that "behind every fascism there is a failed revolution" points in this direction.

Fascism Then and Now

Contemporary fascism, however, differs in crucial respects from its 1930s counterpart, which is why many are reluctant to call the current phenomenon a fascist upsurge. But historical parallels, if carefully drawn, can be useful. While in some aforementioned respects contemporary fascism does resemble the phenomenon of the 1930s, there are serious differences between the two that must also be noted.

First, we must note that while the current fascist upsurge has put fascist elements in power in many countries, there are no fascist states of the 1930s kind as of yet. Even if the fascist elements in power try to push the country toward a fascist state, it is not clear that they will succeed. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that fascists in power today cannot overcome the crisis of neoliberalism, since they accept the regime of globalization of finance. This includes Trump, despite his protectionism. In the 1930s, however, this was not the case. The horrors associated with the institution of a fascist state in the 1930s had been camouflaged to an extent by the ability of the fascists in power to overcome mass unemployment and end the Depression through larger military spending, financed by government borrowing. Contemporary fascism, by contrast, lacks the ability to overcome the opposition of international finance capital to fiscal activism on the part of the government to generate larger demand, output, and employment, even via military spending.

Such activism, as discussed earlier, required larger government spending financed either through taxes on capitalists or through a fiscal deficit. Finance capital was opposed to both of these measures and it being globalized made this opposition decisive . The decisiveness of this opposition remains even if the government happens to be one composed of fascist elements. Hence, contemporary fascism, straitjacketed by "fiscal rectitude," cannot possibly alleviate even temporarily the economic crises facing people and cannot provide any cover for a transition to a fascist state akin to the ones of the 1930s, which makes such a transition that much more unlikely.

Another difference is also related to the phenomenon of the globalization of finance. The 1930s were marked by what Lenin had earlier called "interimperialist rivalry." The military expenditures incurred by fascist governments, even though they pulled countries out of the Depression and unemployment, inevitably led to wars for "repartitioning an already partitioned world." Fascism was the progenitor of war and burned itself out through war at, needless to say, great cost to humankind.

Contemporary fascism, however, operates in a world where interimperialist rivalry is far more muted. Some have seen in this muting a vindication of Karl Kautsky's vision of an "ultraimperialism" as against Lenin's emphasis on the permanence of interimperialist rivalry, but this is wrong. Both Kautsky and Lenin were talking about a world where finance capital and the financial oligarchy were essentially national -- that is, German, French, or British. And while Kautsky talked about the possibility of truces among the rival oligarchies, Lenin saw such truces only as transient phenomena punctuating the ubiquity of rivalry.

In contrast, what we have today is not nation-based finance capitals, but international finance capital into whose corpus the finance capitals drawn from particular countries are integrated. This globalized finance capital does not want the world to be partitioned into economic territories of rival powers ; on the contrary, it wants the entire globe to be open to its own unrestricted movement. The muting of rivalry between major powers, therefore, is not because they prefer truce to war, or peaceful partitioning of the world to forcible repartitioning, but because the material conditions themselves have changed so that it is no longer a matter of such choices. The world has gone beyond both Lenin and Kautsky, as well as their debates.

Not only are we not going to have wars between major powers in this era of fascist upsurge (of course, as will be discussed, we shall have other wars), but, by the same token, this fascist upsurge will not burn out through any cataclysmic war. What we are likely to see is a lingering fascism of less murderous intensity , which, when in power, does not necessarily do away with all the forms of bourgeois democracy, does not necessarily physically annihilate the opposition, and may even allow itself to get voted out of power occasionally. But since its successor government, as long as it remains within the confines of the neoliberal strategy, will also be incapable of alleviating the crisis, the fascist elements are likely to return to power as well. And whether the fascist elements are in or out of power, they will remain a potent force working toward the fascification of the society and the polity, even while promoting corporate interests within a regime of globalization of finance, and hence permanently maintaining the "partnership between big business and fascist upstarts."

Put differently, since the contemporary fascist upsurge is not likely to burn itself out as the earlier one did, it has to be overcome by transcending the very conjuncture that produced it: neoliberal capitalism at a dead end. A class mobilization of working people around an alternative set of transitional demands that do not necessarily directly target neoliberal capitalism, but which are immanently unrealizable within the regime of neoliberal capitalism, can provide an initial way out of this conjuncture and lead to its eventual transcendence.

Such a class mobilization in the third world context would not mean making no truces with liberal bourgeois elements against the fascists. On the contrary, since the liberal bourgeois elements too are getting marginalized through a discourse of jingoistic nationalism typically manufactured by the fascists, they too would like to shift the discourse toward the material conditions of people's lives, no doubt claiming that an improvement in these conditions is possible within the neoliberal economic regime itself. Such a shift in discourse is in itself a major antifascist act . Experience will teach that the agenda advanced as part of this changed discourse is unrealizable under neoliberalism, providing the scope for dialectical intervention by the left to transcend neoliberal capitalism.

Imperialist Interventions

Even though fascism will have a lingering presence in this conjuncture of "neoliberalism at a dead end," with the backing of domestic corporate-financial interests that are themselves integrated into the corpus of international finance capital, the working people in the third world will increasingly demand better material conditions of life and thereby rupture the fascist discourse of jingoistic nationalism (that ironically in a third world context is not anti-imperialist).

In fact, neoliberalism reaching a dead end and having to rely on fascist elements revives meaningful political activity, which the heyday of neoliberalism had precluded, because most political formations then had been trapped within an identical neoliberal agenda that appeared promising. (Latin America had a somewhat different history because neoliberalism arrived in that continent through military dictatorships, not through its more or less tacit acceptance by most political formations.)

Such revived political activity will necessarily throw up challenges to neoliberal capitalism in particular countries. Imperialism, by which we mean the entire economic and political arrangement sustaining the hegemony of international finance capital, will deal with these challenges in at least four different ways.

The first is the so-called spontaneous method of capital flight. Any political formation that seeks to take the country out of the neoliberal regime will witness capital flight even before it has been elected to office, bringing the country to a financial crisis and thereby denting its electoral prospects. And if perchance it still gets elected, the outflow will only increase, even before it assumes office. The inevitable difficulties faced by the people may well make the government back down at that stage. The sheer difficulty of transition away from a neoliberal regime could be enough to bring even a government based on the support of workers and peasants to its knees, precisely to save them short-term distress or to avoid losing their support.

Even if capital controls are put in place, where there are current account deficits, financing such deficits would pose a problem, necessitating some trade controls. But this is where the second instrument of imperialism comes into play: the imposition of trade sanctions by the metropolitan states, which then cajole other countries to stop buying from the sanctioned country that is trying to break away from thralldom to globalized finance capital. Even if the latter would have otherwise succeeded in stabilizing its economy despite its attempt to break away, the imposition of sanctions becomes an additional blow.

The third weapon consists in carrying out so-called democratic or parliamentary coups of the sort that Latin America has been experiencing. Coups in the old days were effected through the local armed forces and necessarily meant the imposition of military dictatorships in lieu of civilian, democratically elected governments. Now, taking advantage of the disaffection generated within countries by the hardships caused by capital flight and imposed sanctions, imperialism promotes coups through fascist or fascist-sympathizing middle-class political elements in the name of restoring democracy, which is synonymous with the pursuit of neoliberalism.

And if all these measures fail, there is always the possibility of resorting to economic warfare (such as destroying Venezuela's electricity supply), and eventually to military warfare. Venezuela today provides a classic example of what imperialist intervention in a third world country is going to look like in the era of decline of neoliberal capitalism, when revolts are going to characterize such countries more and more.

Two aspects of such intervention are striking. One is the virtual unanimity among the metropolitan states, which only underscores the muting of interimperialist rivalry in the era of hegemony of global finance capital. The other is the extent of support that such intervention commands within metropolitan countries, from the right to even the liberal segments.

Despite this opposition, neoliberal capitalism cannot ward off the challenge it is facing for long. It has no vision for reinventing itself. Interestingly, in the period after the First World War, when capitalism was on the verge of sinking into a crisis, the idea of state intervention as a way of its revival had already been mooted, though its coming into vogue only occurred at the end of the Second World War. 11 Today, neoliberal capitalism does not even have an idea of how it can recover and revitalize itself. And weapons like domestic fascism in the third world and direct imperialist intervention cannot for long save it from the anger of the masses that is building up against it.

Notes
  1. Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).
  2. Samuel Berrick Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade, 1870–1914 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960).
  3. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
  4. One of the first authors to recognize this fact and its significance was Paul Baran in The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957).
  5. Joseph E. Stiglitz, " Inequality is Holding Back the Recovery ," New York Times , January 19, 2013.
  6. For a discussion of how even the recent euphoria about U.S. growth is vanishing, see C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh, " Vanishing Green Shoots and the Possibility of Another Crisis ," The Hindu Business Line , April 8, 2019.
  7. For the role of such colonial transfers in sustaining the British balance of payments and the long Victorian and Edwardian boom, see Utsa Patnaik, "Revisiting the 'Drain,' or Transfers from India to Britain in the Context of Global Diffusion of Capitalism," in Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri , ed. Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (Delhi: Tulika, 2017), 277-317.
  8. Federal Reserve Board of Saint Louis Economic Research, FRED, "Capacity Utilization: Manufacturing," February 2019 (updated March 27, 2019), http://fred.stlouisfed.org .
  9. This issue is discussed by Charles P. Kindleberger in The World in Depression, 1929–1939 , 40th anniversary ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2013).
  10. Michał Kalecki, " Political Aspects of Full Employment ," Political Quarterly (1943), available at mronline.org.
  11. Joseph Schumpeter had seen Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace as essentially advocating such state intervention in the new situation. See his essay, "John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)," in Ten Great Economists (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952).

Utsa Patnaik is Professor Emerita at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her books include Peasant Class Differentiation (1987), The Long Transition (1999), and The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (2007). Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997), The Value of Money(2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism(2011).

[Sep 10, 2019] How Deep Is the Rot in America s Institutions by Charles Hugh Smith

Highly recommended!
The question why the USA intelligence agencies were "unaware" about Epstein activities is an interesting one. Similar question can be asked about Hillary "activities" related to "Clinton cash".
Actually the way the USA elite deal with scandals is to ostracize any whistleblower and silence any media that tryt to dig the story. Open repression including physical elimination is seldom used those days as indirect methods are quite effective.
Notable quotes:
"... Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall. ..."
"... If you doubt this, then please explain how 1) the NSA, CIA and FBI didn't know what Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and with whom; 2) Epstein was free to pursue his sexual exploitation of minors for years prior to his wrist-slap conviction and for years afterward; 3) Epstein, the highest profile and most at-risk prisoner in the nation, was left alone and the security cameras recording his cell and surroundings were "broken." ..."
"... America's ruling class has crucified whistleblowers , especially those uncovering fraud in the defense (military-industrial-security) and financial (tax evasion) sectors and blatant violations of public trust, civil liberties and privacy. ..."
"... Needless to say, a factual accounting of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, self-serving exploitation of the many by the few, etc. is not welcome in America. Look at the dearth of investigative resources America's corporate media is devoting to digging down to the deepest levels of rot in the Epstein case. ..."
Sep 09, 2019 | www.oftwominds.com

Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall.

When you discover rot in an apparently sound structure, the first question is: how far has the rot penetrated? If the rot has reached the foundation and turned it to mush, the structure is one wind-storm from collapse.

How deep has the rot of corruption, fraud, abuse of power, betrayal of the public trust, blatant criminality and insiders protecting the guilty penetrated America's key public and private institutions? It's difficult to tell, as the law-enforcement and security agencies are themselves hopelessly compromised.

If you doubt this, then please explain how 1) the NSA, CIA and FBI didn't know what Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and with whom; 2) Epstein was free to pursue his sexual exploitation of minors for years prior to his wrist-slap conviction and for years afterward; 3) Epstein, the highest profile and most at-risk prisoner in the nation, was left alone and the security cameras recording his cell and surroundings were "broken."

If this all strikes you as evidence that America's security and law-enforcement institutions are functioning at a level that's above reproach, then 1) you're a well-paid shill who's protecting the guilty lest your own misdeeds come to light or 2) your consumption of mind-bending meds is off the charts.

How deep has the rot gone in America's ruling elite? One way to measure the depth of the rot is to ask how whistleblowers who've exposed the ugly realities of insider dealing, malfeasance, tax evasion, cover-ups, etc. have fared.

America's ruling class has crucified whistleblowers , especially those uncovering fraud in the defense (military-industrial-security) and financial (tax evasion) sectors and blatant violations of public trust, civil liberties and privacy.

Needless to say, a factual accounting of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, self-serving exploitation of the many by the few, etc. is not welcome in America. Look at the dearth of investigative resources America's corporate media is devoting to digging down to the deepest levels of rot in the Epstein case.

The closer wrong-doing and wrong-doers are to protected power-elites, the less attention the mass media devotes to them.

... ... ...

Here are America's media, law enforcement/security agencies and "leadership" class: they speak no evil, see no evil and hear no evil, in the misguided belief that their misdirection, self-service and protection of the guilty will make us buy the narrative that America's ruling elite and all the core institutions they manage aren't rotten to the foundations.

Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall.

[Sep 10, 2019] Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik

Highly recommended!
This is a Marxist critique of neoliberalism. Not necessary right but they his some relevant points.
Notable quotes:
"... The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. ..."
"... The ex ante tendency toward overproduction arises because the vector of real wages across countries does not increase noticeably over time in the world economy, while the vector of labor productivities does, typically resulting in a rise in the share of surplus in world output. ..."
"... While the rise in the vector of labor productivities across countries, a ubiquitous phenomenon under capitalism that also characterizes neoliberal capitalism, scarcely requires an explanation, why does the vector of real wages remain virtually stagnant in the world economy? The answer lies in the sui generis character of contemporary globalization that, for the first time in the history of capitalism, has led to a relocation of activity from the metropolis to third world countries in order to take advantage of the lower wages prevailing in the latter and meet global demand. ..."
"... The current globalization broke with this. The movement of capital from the metropolis to the third world, especially to East, South, and Southeast Asia to relocate plants there and take advantage of their lower wages for meeting global demand, has led to a desegmentation of the world economy, subjecting metropolitan wages to the restraining effect exercised by the third world's labor reserves. Not surprisingly, as Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the real-wage rate of an average male U.S. worker in 2011 was no higher -- indeed, it was marginally lower -- than it had been in 1968. 5 ..."
"... This ever-present opposition becomes decisive within a regime of globalization. As long as finance capital remains national -- that is, nation-based -- and the state is a nation-state, the latter can override this opposition under certain circumstances, such as in the post-Second World War period when capitalism was facing an existential crisis. But when finance capital is globalized, meaning, when it is free to move across country borders while the state remains a nation-state, its opposition to fiscal deficits becomes decisive. If the state does run large fiscal deficits against its wishes, then it would simply leave that country en masse , causing a financial crisis. ..."
"... The state therefore capitulates to the demands of globalized finance capital and eschews direct fiscal intervention for increasing demand. It resorts to monetary policy instead since that operates through wealth holders' decisions, and hence does not undermine their social position. But, precisely for this reason, monetary policy is an ineffective instrument, as was evident in the United States in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis when even the pushing of interest rates down to zero scarcely revived activity. 6 ..."
"... If Trump's protectionism, which recalls the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931 and amounts to a beggar-my-neighbor policy, does lead to a significant export of unemployment from the United States, then it will invite retaliation and trigger a trade war that will only worsen the crisis for the world economy as a whole by dampening global investment. Indeed, since the United States has been targeting China in particular, some retaliatory measures have already appeared. But if U.S. protectionism does not invite generalized retaliation, it would only be because the export of unemployment from the United States is insubstantial, keeping unemployment everywhere, including in the United States, as precarious as it is now. However we look at it, the world would henceforth face higher levels of unemployment. ..."
"... The second implication of this dead end is that the era of export-led growth is by and large over for third world economies. The slowing down of world economic growth, together with protectionism in the United States against successful third world exporters, which could even spread to other metropolitan economies, suggests that the strategy of relying on the world market to generate domestic growth has run out of steam. Third world economies, including the ones that have been very successful at exporting, would now have to rely much more on their home market ..."
"... In other words, we shall now have an intensification of the imperialist stranglehold over third world economies, especially those pushed into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits in the new situation. By imperialism , here we do not mean the imperialism of this or that major power, but the imperialism of international finance capital, with which even domestic big bourgeoisies are integrated, directed against their own working people ..."
"... In short, the ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. To sustain itself, neoliberal capitalism starts looking for some other ideological prop and finds fascism. ..."
"... The first is the so-called spontaneous method of capital flight. Any political formation that seeks to take the country out of the neoliberal regime will witness capital flight even before it has been elected to office, bringing the country to a financial crisis and thereby denting its electoral prospects. And if perchance it still gets elected, the outflow will only increase, even before it assumes office. The inevitable difficulties faced by the people may well make the government back down at that stage. The sheer difficulty of transition away from a neoliberal regime could be enough to bring even a government based on the support of workers and peasants to its knees, precisely to save them short-term distress or to avoid losing their support. ..."
"... The third weapon consists in carrying out so-called democratic or parliamentary coups of the sort that Latin America has been experiencing. Coups in the old days were effected through the local armed forces and necessarily meant the imposition of military dictatorships in lieu of civilian, democratically elected governments. Now, taking advantage of the disaffection generated within countries by the hardships caused by capital flight and imposed sanctions, imperialism promotes coups through fascist or fascist-sympathizing middle-class political elements in the name of restoring democracy, which is synonymous with the pursuit of neoliberalism. ..."
"... And if all these measures fail, there is always the possibility of resorting to economic warfare (such as destroying Venezuela's electricity supply), and eventually to military warfare. Venezuela today provides a classic example of what imperialist intervention in a third world country is going to look like in the era of decline of neoliberal capitalism, when revolts are going to characterize such countries more and more. ..."
"... Despite this opposition, neoliberal capitalism cannot ward off the challenge it is facing for long. It has no vision for reinventing itself. Interestingly, in the period after the First World War, when capitalism was on the verge of sinking into a crisis, the idea of state intervention as a way of its revival had already been mooted, though its coming into vogue only occurred at the end of the Second World War. 11 Today, neoliberal capitalism does not even have an idea of how it can recover and revitalize itself. And weapons like domestic fascism in the third world and direct imperialist intervention cannot for long save it from the anger of the masses that is building up against it. ..."
Aug 25, 2019 | portside.org
Originally from: Monthly Review printer friendly
The ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop.

Harry Magdoff's The Age of Imperialism is a classic work that shows how postwar political decolonization does not negate the phenomenon of imperialism. The book has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, it follows in V. I. Lenin's footsteps in providing a comprehensive account of how capitalism at the time operated globally. On the other hand, it raises a question that is less frequently discussed in Marxist literature -- namely, the need for imperialism. Here, Magdoff not only highlighted the crucial importance, among other things, of the third world's raw materials for metropolitan capital, but also refuted the argument that the declining share of raw-material value in gross manufacturing output somehow reduced this importance, making the simple point that there can be no manufacturing at all without raw materials. 1

Magdoff's focus was on a period when imperialism was severely resisting economic decolonization in the third world, with newly independent third world countries taking control over their own resources. He highlighted the entire armory of weapons used by imperialism. But he was writing in a period that predated the onset of neoliberalism. Today, we not only have decades of neoliberalism behind us, but the neoliberal regime itself has reached a dead end. Contemporary imperialism has to be discussed within this setting.

Globalization and Economic Crisis

There are two reasons why the regime of neoliberal globalization has run into a dead end. The first is an ex ante tendency toward global overproduction; the second is that the only possible counter to this tendency within the regime is the formation of asset-price bubbles, which cannot be conjured up at will and whose collapse, if they do appear, plunges the economy back into crisis. In short, to use the words of British economic historian Samuel Berrick Saul, there are no "markets on tap" for contemporary metropolitan capitalism, such as had been provided by colonialism prior to the First World War and by state expenditure in the post-Second World War period of dirigisme . 2

The ex ante tendency toward overproduction arises because the vector of real wages across countries does not increase noticeably over time in the world economy, while the vector of labor productivities does, typically resulting in a rise in the share of surplus in world output. As Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy argued in Monopoly Capital , following the lead of Michał Kalecki and Josef Steindl, such a rise in the share of economic surplus, or a shift from wages to surplus, has the effect of reducing aggregate demand since the ratio of consumption to income is higher on average for wage earners than for those living off the surplus. 3 Therefore, assuming a given level of investment associated with any period, such a shift would tend to reduce consumption demand and hence aggregate demand, output, and capacity utilization. In turn, reduced capacity utilization would lower investment over time, further aggravating the demand-reducing effect arising from the consumption side.

While the rise in the vector of labor productivities across countries, a ubiquitous phenomenon under capitalism that also characterizes neoliberal capitalism, scarcely requires an explanation, why does the vector of real wages remain virtually stagnant in the world economy? The answer lies in the sui generis character of contemporary globalization that, for the first time in the history of capitalism, has led to a relocation of activity from the metropolis to third world countries in order to take advantage of the lower wages prevailing in the latter and meet global demand.

Historically, while labor has not been, and is still not, free to migrate from the third world to the metropolis, capital, though juridically free to move from the latter to the former, did not actually do so , except to sectors like mines and plantations, which only strengthened, rather than broke, the colonial pattern of the international division of labor. 4 This segmentation of the world economy meant that wages in the metropolis increased with labor productivity, unrestrained by the vast labor reserves of the third world, which themselves had been caused by the displacement of manufactures through the twin processes of deindustrialization (competition from metropolitan goods) and the drain of surplus (the siphoning off of a large part of the economic surplus, through taxes on peasants that are no longer spent on local artisan products but finance gratis primary commodity exports to the metropolis instead).

The current globalization broke with this. The movement of capital from the metropolis to the third world, especially to East, South, and Southeast Asia to relocate plants there and take advantage of their lower wages for meeting global demand, has led to a desegmentation of the world economy, subjecting metropolitan wages to the restraining effect exercised by the third world's labor reserves. Not surprisingly, as Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out, the real-wage rate of an average male U.S. worker in 2011 was no higher -- indeed, it was marginally lower -- than it had been in 1968. 5

At the same time, such relocation of activities, despite causing impressive growth rates of gross domestic product (GDP) in many third world countries, does not lead to the exhaustion of the third world's labor reserves. This is because of another feature of contemporary globalization: the unleashing of a process of primitive accumulation of capital against petty producers, including peasant agriculturists in the third world, who had earlier been protected, to an extent, from the encroachment of big capital (both domestic and foreign) by the postcolonial dirigiste regimes in these countries. Under neoliberalism, such protection is withdrawn, causing an income squeeze on these producers and often their outright dispossession from their land, which is then used by big capital for its various so-called development projects. The increase in employment, even in countries with impressive GDP growth rates in the third world, falls way short of the natural growth of the workforce, let alone absorbing the additional job seekers coming from the ranks of displaced petty producers. The labor reserves therefore never get used up. Indeed, on the contrary, they are augmented further, because real wages continue to remain tied to a subsistence level, even as metropolitan wages too are restrained. The vector of real wages in the world economy as a whole therefore remains restrained.

Although contemporary globalization thus gives rise to an ex ante tendency toward overproduction, state expenditure that could provide a counter to this (and had provided a counter through military spending in the United States, according to Baran and Sweezy) can no longer do so under the current regime. Finance is usually opposed to direct state intervention through larger spending as a way of increasing employment. This opposition expresses itself through an opposition not just to larger taxes on capitalists, but also to a larger fiscal deficit for financing such spending. Obviously, if larger state spending is financed by taxes on workers, then it hardly adds to aggregate demand, for workers spend the bulk of their incomes anyway, so the state taking this income and spending it instead does not add any extra demand. Hence, larger state spending can increase employment only if it is financed either through a fiscal deficit or through taxes on capitalists who keep a part of their income unspent or saved. But these are precisely the two modes of financing state expenditure that finance capital opposes.

Its opposing larger taxes on capitalists is understandable, but why is it so opposed to a larger fiscal deficit? Even within a capitalist economy, there are no sound economic theoretical reasons that should preclude a fiscal deficit under all circumstances. The root of the opposition therefore lies in deeper social considerations: if the capitalist economic system becomes dependent on the state to promote employment directly , then this fact undermines the social legitimacy of capitalism. The need for the state to boost the animal spirits of the capitalists disappears and a perspective on the system that is epistemically exterior to it is provided to the people, making it possible for them to ask: If the state can do the job of providing employment, then why do we need the capitalists at all? It is an instinctive appreciation of this potential danger that underlies the opposition of capital, especially of finance, to any direct effort by the state to generate employment.

This ever-present opposition becomes decisive within a regime of globalization. As long as finance capital remains national -- that is, nation-based -- and the state is a nation-state, the latter can override this opposition under certain circumstances, such as in the post-Second World War period when capitalism was facing an existential crisis. But when finance capital is globalized, meaning, when it is free to move across country borders while the state remains a nation-state, its opposition to fiscal deficits becomes decisive. If the state does run large fiscal deficits against its wishes, then it would simply leave that country en masse , causing a financial crisis.

The state therefore capitulates to the demands of globalized finance capital and eschews direct fiscal intervention for increasing demand. It resorts to monetary policy instead since that operates through wealth holders' decisions, and hence does not undermine their social position. But, precisely for this reason, monetary policy is an ineffective instrument, as was evident in the United States in the aftermath of the 2007–09 crisis when even the pushing of interest rates down to zero scarcely revived activity. 6

It may be thought that this compulsion on the part of the state to accede to the demand of finance to eschew fiscal intervention for enlarging employment should not hold for the United States. Its currency being considered by the world's wealth holders to be "as good as gold" should make it immune to capital flight. But there is an additional factor operating in the case of the United States: that the demand generated by a bigger U.S. fiscal deficit would substantially leak abroad in a neoliberal setting, which would increase its external debt (since, unlike Britain in its heyday, it does not have access to any unrequited colonial transfers) for the sake of generating employment elsewhere. This fact deters any fiscal effort even in the United States to boost demand within a neoliberal setting. 7

Therefore, it follows that state spending cannot provide a counter to the ex ante tendency toward global overproduction within a regime of neoliberal globalization, which makes the world economy precariously dependent on occasional asset-price bubbles, primarily in the U.S. economy, for obtaining, at best, some temporary relief from the crisis. It is this fact that underlies the dead end that neoliberal capitalism has reached. Indeed, Donald Trump's resort to protectionism in the United States to alleviate unemployment is a clear recognition of the system having reached this cul-de-sac. The fact that the mightiest capitalist economy in the world has to move away from the rules of the neoliberal game in an attempt to alleviate its crisis of unemployment/underemployment -- while compensating capitalists adversely affected by this move through tax cuts, as well as carefully ensuring that no restraints are imposed on free cross-border financial flows -- shows that these rules are no longer viable in their pristine form.

Some Implications of This Dead End

There are at least four important implications of this dead end of neoliberalism. The first is that the world economy will now be afflicted by much higher levels of unemployment than it was in the last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, when the dot-com and the housing bubbles in the United States had, sequentially, a pronounced impact. It is true that the U.S. unemployment rate today appears to be at a historic low, but this is misleading: the labor-force participation rate in the United States today is lower than it was in 2008, which reflects the discouraged-worker effect . Adjusting for this lower participation, the U.S. unemployment rate is considerable -- around 8 percent. Indeed, Trump would not be imposing protection in the United States if unemployment was actually as low as 4 percent, which is the official figure. Elsewhere in the world, of course, unemployment post-2008 continues to be evidently higher than before. Indeed, the severity of the current problem of below-full-employment production in the U.S. economy is best illustrated by capacity utilization figures in manufacturing. The weakness of the U.S. recovery from the Great Recession is indicated by the fact that the current extended recovery represents the first decade in the entire post-Second World War period in which capacity utilization in manufacturing has never risen as high as 80 percent in a single quarter, with the resulting stagnation of investment. 8

If Trump's protectionism, which recalls the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931 and amounts to a beggar-my-neighbor policy, does lead to a significant export of unemployment from the United States, then it will invite retaliation and trigger a trade war that will only worsen the crisis for the world economy as a whole by dampening global investment. Indeed, since the United States has been targeting China in particular, some retaliatory measures have already appeared. But if U.S. protectionism does not invite generalized retaliation, it would only be because the export of unemployment from the United States is insubstantial, keeping unemployment everywhere, including in the United States, as precarious as it is now. However we look at it, the world would henceforth face higher levels of unemployment.

There has been some discussion on how global value chains would be affected by Trump's protectionism. But the fact that global macroeconomics in the early twenty-first century will look altogether different compared to earlier has not been much discussed.

In light of the preceding discussion, one could say that if, instead of individual nation-states whose writ cannot possibly run against globalized finance capital, there was a global state or a set of major nation-states acting in unison to override the objections of globalized finance and provide a coordinated fiscal stimulus to the world economy, then perhaps there could be recovery. Such a coordinated fiscal stimulus was suggested by a group of German trade unionists, as well as by John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression in the 1930s. 9 While it was turned down then, in the present context it has not even been discussed.

The second implication of this dead end is that the era of export-led growth is by and large over for third world economies. The slowing down of world economic growth, together with protectionism in the United States against successful third world exporters, which could even spread to other metropolitan economies, suggests that the strategy of relying on the world market to generate domestic growth has run out of steam. Third world economies, including the ones that have been very successful at exporting, would now have to rely much more on their home market.

Such a transition will not be easy; it will require promoting domestic peasant agriculture, defending petty production, moving toward cooperative forms of production, and ensuring greater equality in income distribution, all of which need major structural shifts. For smaller economies, it would also require their coming together with other economies to provide a minimum size to the domestic market. In short, the dead end of neoliberalism also means the need for a shift away from the so-called neoliberal development strategy that has held sway until now.

The third implication is the imminent engulfing of a whole range of third world economies in serious balance-of-payments difficulties. This is because, while their exports will be sluggish in the new situation, this very fact will also discourage financial inflows into their economies, whose easy availability had enabled them to maintain current account deficits on their balance of payments earlier. In such a situation, within the existing neoliberal paradigm, they would be forced to adopt austerity measures that would impose income deflation on their people, make the conditions of their people significantly worse, lead to a further handing over of their national assets and resources to international capital, and prevent precisely any possible transition to an alternative strategy of home market-based growth.

In other words, we shall now have an intensification of the imperialist stranglehold over third world economies, especially those pushed into unsustainable balance-of-payments deficits in the new situation. By imperialism , here we do not mean the imperialism of this or that major power, but the imperialism of international finance capital, with which even domestic big bourgeoisies are integrated, directed against their own working people.

The fourth implication is the worldwide upsurge of fascism. Neoliberal capitalism even before it reached a dead end, even in the period when it achieved reasonable growth and employment rates, had pushed the world into greater hunger and poverty. For instance, the world per-capita cereal output was 355 kilograms for 1980 (triennium average for 1979–81 divided by mid–triennium population) and fell to 343 in 2000, leveling at 344.9 in 2016 -- and a substantial amount of this last figure went into ethanol production. Clearly, in a period of growth of the world economy, per-capita cereal absorption should be expanding, especially since we are talking here not just of direct absorption but of direct and indirect absorption, the latter through processed foods and feed grains in animal products. The fact that there was an absolute decline in per-capita output, which no doubt caused a decline in per-capita absorption, suggests an absolute worsening in the nutritional level of a substantial segment of the world's population.

But this growing hunger and nutritional poverty did not immediately arouse any significant resistance, both because such resistance itself becomes more difficult under neoliberalism (since the very globalization of capital makes it an elusive target) and also because higher GDP growth rates provided a hope that distress might be overcome in the course of time. Peasants in distress, for instance, entertained the hope that their children would live better in the years to come if given a modicum of education and accepted their fate.

In short, the ideology of neoliberal capitalism was the promise of growth. But with neoliberal capitalism reaching a dead end, this promise disappears and so does this ideological prop. To sustain itself, neoliberal capitalism starts looking for some other ideological prop and finds fascism. This changes the discourse away from the material conditions of people's lives to the so-called threat to the nation, placing the blame for people's distress not on the failure of the system, but on ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority groups, the other that is portrayed as an enemy. It projects a so-called messiah whose sheer muscularity can somehow magically overcome all problems; it promotes a culture of unreason so that both the vilification of the other and the magical powers of the supposed leader can be placed beyond any intellectual questioning; it uses a combination of state repression and street-level vigilantism by fascist thugs to terrorize opponents; and it forges a close relationship with big business, or, in Kalecki's words, "a partnership of big business and fascist upstarts." 10

Fascist groups of one kind or another exist in all modern societies. They move center stage and even into power only on certain occasions when they get the backing of big business. And these occasions arise when three conditions are satisfied: when there is an economic crisis so the system cannot simply go on as before; when the usual liberal establishment is manifestly incapable of resolving the crisis; and when the left is not strong enough to provide an alternative to the people in order to move out of the conjuncture.

This last point may appear odd at first, since many see the big bourgeoisie's recourse to fascism as a counter to the growth of the left's strength in the context of a capitalist crisis. But when the left poses a serious threat, the response of the big bourgeoisie typically is to attempt to split it by offering concessions. It uses fascism to prop itself up only when the left is weakened. Walter Benjamin's remark that "behind every fascism there is a failed revolution" points in this direction.

Fascism Then and Now

Contemporary fascism, however, differs in crucial respects from its 1930s counterpart, which is why many are reluctant to call the current phenomenon a fascist upsurge. But historical parallels, if carefully drawn, can be useful. While in some aforementioned respects contemporary fascism does resemble the phenomenon of the 1930s, there are serious differences between the two that must also be noted.

First, we must note that while the current fascist upsurge has put fascist elements in power in many countries, there are no fascist states of the 1930s kind as of yet. Even if the fascist elements in power try to push the country toward a fascist state, it is not clear that they will succeed. There are many reasons for this, but an important one is that fascists in power today cannot overcome the crisis of neoliberalism, since they accept the regime of globalization of finance. This includes Trump, despite his protectionism. In the 1930s, however, this was not the case. The horrors associated with the institution of a fascist state in the 1930s had been camouflaged to an extent by the ability of the fascists in power to overcome mass unemployment and end the Depression through larger military spending, financed by government borrowing. Contemporary fascism, by contrast, lacks the ability to overcome the opposition of international finance capital to fiscal activism on the part of the government to generate larger demand, output, and employment, even via military spending.

Such activism, as discussed earlier, required larger government spending financed either through taxes on capitalists or through a fiscal deficit. Finance capital was opposed to both of these measures and it being globalized made this opposition decisive . The decisiveness of this opposition remains even if the government happens to be one composed of fascist elements. Hence, contemporary fascism, straitjacketed by "fiscal rectitude," cannot possibly alleviate even temporarily the economic crises facing people and cannot provide any cover for a transition to a fascist state akin to the ones of the 1930s, which makes such a transition that much more unlikely.

Another difference is also related to the phenomenon of the globalization of finance. The 1930s were marked by what Lenin had earlier called "interimperialist rivalry." The military expenditures incurred by fascist governments, even though they pulled countries out of the Depression and unemployment, inevitably led to wars for "repartitioning an already partitioned world." Fascism was the progenitor of war and burned itself out through war at, needless to say, great cost to humankind.

Contemporary fascism, however, operates in a world where interimperialist rivalry is far more muted. Some have seen in this muting a vindication of Karl Kautsky's vision of an "ultraimperialism" as against Lenin's emphasis on the permanence of interimperialist rivalry, but this is wrong. Both Kautsky and Lenin were talking about a world where finance capital and the financial oligarchy were essentially national -- that is, German, French, or British. And while Kautsky talked about the possibility of truces among the rival oligarchies, Lenin saw such truces only as transient phenomena punctuating the ubiquity of rivalry.

In contrast, what we have today is not nation-based finance capitals, but international finance capital into whose corpus the finance capitals drawn from particular countries are integrated. This globalized finance capital does not want the world to be partitioned into economic territories of rival powers ; on the contrary, it wants the entire globe to be open to its own unrestricted movement. The muting of rivalry between major powers, therefore, is not because they prefer truce to war, or peaceful partitioning of the world to forcible repartitioning, but because the material conditions themselves have changed so that it is no longer a matter of such choices. The world has gone beyond both Lenin and Kautsky, as well as their debates.

Not only are we not going to have wars between major powers in this era of fascist upsurge (of course, as will be discussed, we shall have other wars), but, by the same token, this fascist upsurge will not burn out through any cataclysmic war. What we are likely to see is a lingering fascism of less murderous intensity , which, when in power, does not necessarily do away with all the forms of bourgeois democracy, does not necessarily physically annihilate the opposition, and may even allow itself to get voted out of power occasionally. But since its successor government, as long as it remains within the confines of the neoliberal strategy, will also be incapable of alleviating the crisis, the fascist elements are likely to return to power as well. And whether the fascist elements are in or out of power, they will remain a potent force working toward the fascification of the society and the polity, even while promoting corporate interests within a regime of globalization of finance, and hence permanently maintaining the "partnership between big business and fascist upstarts."

Put differently, since the contemporary fascist upsurge is not likely to burn itself out as the earlier one did, it has to be overcome by transcending the very conjuncture that produced it: neoliberal capitalism at a dead end. A class mobilization of working people around an alternative set of transitional demands that do not necessarily directly target neoliberal capitalism, but which are immanently unrealizable within the regime of neoliberal capitalism, can provide an initial way out of this conjuncture and lead to its eventual transcendence.

Such a class mobilization in the third world context would not mean making no truces with liberal bourgeois elements against the fascists. On the contrary, since the liberal bourgeois elements too are getting marginalized through a discourse of jingoistic nationalism typically manufactured by the fascists, they too would like to shift the discourse toward the material conditions of people's lives, no doubt claiming that an improvement in these conditions is possible within the neoliberal economic regime itself. Such a shift in discourse is in itself a major antifascist act . Experience will teach that the agenda advanced as part of this changed discourse is unrealizable under neoliberalism, providing the scope for dialectical intervention by the left to transcend neoliberal capitalism.

Imperialist Interventions

Even though fascism will have a lingering presence in this conjuncture of "neoliberalism at a dead end," with the backing of domestic corporate-financial interests that are themselves integrated into the corpus of international finance capital, the working people in the third world will increasingly demand better material conditions of life and thereby rupture the fascist discourse of jingoistic nationalism (that ironically in a third world context is not anti-imperialist).

In fact, neoliberalism reaching a dead end and having to rely on fascist elements revives meaningful political activity, which the heyday of neoliberalism had precluded, because most political formations then had been trapped within an identical neoliberal agenda that appeared promising. (Latin America had a somewhat different history because neoliberalism arrived in that continent through military dictatorships, not through its more or less tacit acceptance by most political formations.)

Such revived political activity will necessarily throw up challenges to neoliberal capitalism in particular countries. Imperialism, by which we mean the entire economic and political arrangement sustaining the hegemony of international finance capital, will deal with these challenges in at least four different ways.

The first is the so-called spontaneous method of capital flight. Any political formation that seeks to take the country out of the neoliberal regime will witness capital flight even before it has been elected to office, bringing the country to a financial crisis and thereby denting its electoral prospects. And if perchance it still gets elected, the outflow will only increase, even before it assumes office. The inevitable difficulties faced by the people may well make the government back down at that stage. The sheer difficulty of transition away from a neoliberal regime could be enough to bring even a government based on the support of workers and peasants to its knees, precisely to save them short-term distress or to avoid losing their support.

Even if capital controls are put in place, where there are current account deficits, financing such deficits would pose a problem, necessitating some trade controls. But this is where the second instrument of imperialism comes into play: the imposition of trade sanctions by the metropolitan states, which then cajole other countries to stop buying from the sanctioned country that is trying to break away from thralldom to globalized finance capital. Even if the latter would have otherwise succeeded in stabilizing its economy despite its attempt to break away, the imposition of sanctions becomes an additional blow.

The third weapon consists in carrying out so-called democratic or parliamentary coups of the sort that Latin America has been experiencing. Coups in the old days were effected through the local armed forces and necessarily meant the imposition of military dictatorships in lieu of civilian, democratically elected governments. Now, taking advantage of the disaffection generated within countries by the hardships caused by capital flight and imposed sanctions, imperialism promotes coups through fascist or fascist-sympathizing middle-class political elements in the name of restoring democracy, which is synonymous with the pursuit of neoliberalism.

And if all these measures fail, there is always the possibility of resorting to economic warfare (such as destroying Venezuela's electricity supply), and eventually to military warfare. Venezuela today provides a classic example of what imperialist intervention in a third world country is going to look like in the era of decline of neoliberal capitalism, when revolts are going to characterize such countries more and more.

Two aspects of such intervention are striking. One is the virtual unanimity among the metropolitan states, which only underscores the muting of interimperialist rivalry in the era of hegemony of global finance capital. The other is the extent of support that such intervention commands within metropolitan countries, from the right to even the liberal segments.

Despite this opposition, neoliberal capitalism cannot ward off the challenge it is facing for long. It has no vision for reinventing itself. Interestingly, in the period after the First World War, when capitalism was on the verge of sinking into a crisis, the idea of state intervention as a way of its revival had already been mooted, though its coming into vogue only occurred at the end of the Second World War. 11 Today, neoliberal capitalism does not even have an idea of how it can recover and revitalize itself. And weapons like domestic fascism in the third world and direct imperialist intervention cannot for long save it from the anger of the masses that is building up against it.

Notes
  1. Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).
  2. Samuel Berrick Saul, Studies in British Overseas Trade, 1870–1914 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960).
  3. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
  4. One of the first authors to recognize this fact and its significance was Paul Baran in The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957).
  5. Joseph E. Stiglitz, " Inequality is Holding Back the Recovery ," New York Times , January 19, 2013.
  6. For a discussion of how even the recent euphoria about U.S. growth is vanishing, see C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh, " Vanishing Green Shoots and the Possibility of Another Crisis ," The Hindu Business Line , April 8, 2019.
  7. For the role of such colonial transfers in sustaining the British balance of payments and the long Victorian and Edwardian boom, see Utsa Patnaik, "Revisiting the 'Drain,' or Transfers from India to Britain in the Context of Global Diffusion of Capitalism," in Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri , ed. Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (Delhi: Tulika, 2017), 277-317.
  8. Federal Reserve Board of Saint Louis Economic Research, FRED, "Capacity Utilization: Manufacturing," February 2019 (updated March 27, 2019), http://fred.stlouisfed.org .
  9. This issue is discussed by Charles P. Kindleberger in The World in Depression, 1929–1939 , 40th anniversary ed. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2013).
  10. Michał Kalecki, " Political Aspects of Full Employment ," Political Quarterly (1943), available at mronline.org.
  11. Joseph Schumpeter had seen Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace as essentially advocating such state intervention in the new situation. See his essay, "John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946)," in Ten Great Economists (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952).

Utsa Patnaik is Professor Emerita at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her books include Peasant Class Differentiation (1987), The Long Transition (1999), and The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (2007). Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997), The Value of Money(2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism(2011).

[Sep 10, 2019] Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein by Larry C Johnsons

Highly recommended!
Sep 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Diana C ,

"Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein."

As usual, your analogy here is spot on. I'm still giggling.

[Sep 10, 2019] How Deep Is the Rot in America s Institutions by Charles Hugh Smith

Highly recommended!
The question why the USA intelligence agencies were "unaware" about Epstein activities is an interesting one. Similar question can be asked about Hillary "activities" related to "Clinton cash".
Actually the way the USA elite deal with scandals is to ostracize any whistleblower and silence any media that tryt to dig the story. Open repression including physical elimination is seldom used those days as indirect methods are quite effective.
Notable quotes:
"... Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall. ..."
"... If you doubt this, then please explain how 1) the NSA, CIA and FBI didn't know what Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and with whom; 2) Epstein was free to pursue his sexual exploitation of minors for years prior to his wrist-slap conviction and for years afterward; 3) Epstein, the highest profile and most at-risk prisoner in the nation, was left alone and the security cameras recording his cell and surroundings were "broken." ..."
"... America's ruling class has crucified whistleblowers , especially those uncovering fraud in the defense (military-industrial-security) and financial (tax evasion) sectors and blatant violations of public trust, civil liberties and privacy. ..."
"... Needless to say, a factual accounting of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, self-serving exploitation of the many by the few, etc. is not welcome in America. Look at the dearth of investigative resources America's corporate media is devoting to digging down to the deepest levels of rot in the Epstein case. ..."
Sep 09, 2019 | www.oftwominds.com

Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall.

When you discover rot in an apparently sound structure, the first question is: how far has the rot penetrated? If the rot has reached the foundation and turned it to mush, the structure is one wind-storm from collapse.

How deep has the rot of corruption, fraud, abuse of power, betrayal of the public trust, blatant criminality and insiders protecting the guilty penetrated America's key public and private institutions? It's difficult to tell, as the law-enforcement and security agencies are themselves hopelessly compromised.

If you doubt this, then please explain how 1) the NSA, CIA and FBI didn't know what Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and with whom; 2) Epstein was free to pursue his sexual exploitation of minors for years prior to his wrist-slap conviction and for years afterward; 3) Epstein, the highest profile and most at-risk prisoner in the nation, was left alone and the security cameras recording his cell and surroundings were "broken."

If this all strikes you as evidence that America's security and law-enforcement institutions are functioning at a level that's above reproach, then 1) you're a well-paid shill who's protecting the guilty lest your own misdeeds come to light or 2) your consumption of mind-bending meds is off the charts.

How deep has the rot gone in America's ruling elite? One way to measure the depth of the rot is to ask how whistleblowers who've exposed the ugly realities of insider dealing, malfeasance, tax evasion, cover-ups, etc. have fared.

America's ruling class has crucified whistleblowers , especially those uncovering fraud in the defense (military-industrial-security) and financial (tax evasion) sectors and blatant violations of public trust, civil liberties and privacy.

Needless to say, a factual accounting of corruption, cronyism, incompetence, self-serving exploitation of the many by the few, etc. is not welcome in America. Look at the dearth of investigative resources America's corporate media is devoting to digging down to the deepest levels of rot in the Epstein case.

The closer wrong-doing and wrong-doers are to protected power-elites, the less attention the mass media devotes to them.

... ... ...

Here are America's media, law enforcement/security agencies and "leadership" class: they speak no evil, see no evil and hear no evil, in the misguided belief that their misdirection, self-service and protection of the guilty will make us buy the narrative that America's ruling elite and all the core institutions they manage aren't rotten to the foundations.

Either we root out every last source of rot by investigating, indicting and jailing every wrong-doer and everyone who conspired to protect the guilty in the Epstein case, or America will have sealed its final fall.

[Sep 10, 2019] PATRICK LAWRENCE The Establishment is Changing its Tune on Russia

Notable quotes:
"... Macron then outdid himself: "We are living the end of Western hegemony," he told the assembled envoys. ..."
"... Macron is an opportunistic main-chancer in European politics, and it is not at all certain how far he can or will attempt to advance his new vision of either the West or Europe in the Continent's councils of state. But as evidence of a new current in Western thinking about Russia, the non–West in general, and Europe's long-nursed desire for greater independence from Washington, the importance of his comments is beyond dispute. ..."
"... Macron may prove a pushover, or a would-be Gaullist who fails to make the grade. Or he may have just announced a long-awaited inflection point in trans–Atlantic ties. Either way, he has put highly significant questions on the table. It will be interesting to see what responses they may elicit, not least from the Trump White House. ..."
"... who in their right mind would trust the U.S. anymore for any reason? ..."
"... Until now, the conflict with Russia has resulted in the conversion of the Ukrainian (and other formerly eastern bloc countries) economy from highly industrial to a supplier of cheap labor, some agricultural products, and raw materials to the EU. ..."
"... The empire's war machine always needs a boogeyman. ..."
"... America has earned the mistrust of most of the world. Although establishing a good relationship with Russia is a good idea, using it to isolate Russia probably will not work. ..."
"... Many of Patrick's observations are astute and well-reasoned. But he is ABSOLUTELY WRONG to put any faith whatsoever in Trump being able to negotiate ANYTHING of importance, whether it be with North Korea or Russia. Wake up! There is "no one home" in Donald Trump!! ..."
"... We are witnessing a severely incapacitated, mentally ill individual pretending to be a leader, who is endangering the entire planet. If this doesn't scare the shit out of you, you need to have your head examined! ..."
"... IMHO, it is a fool's errand for our policy makers to think that Russia can be "peeled away from China", or that Russia and China has not seen through that strategy as another ploy by the West to retain hegemony. ..."
"... The West has been hostile to Russia since its inception as a non-monarchy in 1917. ..."
"... The New York Times has played an effective Orwellian role in recent years, simply by reflecting unannounced policy directives – notably the smooth shifts in designated official enemies from ISIS to Russia/Putin to China/Xi all in the space of six short years. ..."
"... The Times has become nothing but a bunch of stenographers for the Intelligence Community. ..."
"... You nailed it in calling it Orwellian. ISIS as "official" enemy indeed is a classic representation of 'doublespeak.' All of those *accidental* U.S. arms-drops on their positions, helicopters showing up to rescue their leaders, the apparent invisibility of those oil tanker fleets freely and blatantly running the highways into Turkey for several years ..."
"... As much of that oil was shipped to Israel by Erdogan's kid at below market prices, it was another testament to the duplicitous nature of the entire scheme to bring Syria down. Fail. Epic fail. I love it. That egg looks great on Netanyahu's face. ..."
"... Trump and the establishment punish and sanction Russia but get along fine with MBS Mohammad Bone Sawman. I voted for Trump but got Hillary's foreign policy. The Devil runs America. ..."
Sep 10, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

In desultory fashion over the past month or so, we have had indications that the policy cliques in Washington are indeed reconsidering the Cold War II they set in motion during the Obama administration's final years. And President Donald Trump, persistent in his effort to reconstruct relations with Russia, now finds an unlikely ally in Emmanuel Macron. This suggests a nascent momentum in a new direction.

"Pushing Russia away from Europe is a profound strategic mistake," the French president asserted in a stunning series of remarks to European diplomats immediately after the Group of 7 summit in Biarritz late last month.

This alone is a bold if implicit attack on the hawkish Russophobes Trump now battles in Washington. Macron then outdid himself: "We are living the end of Western hegemony," he told the assembled envoys.

It is difficult to recall when a Western leader last spoke so truthfully and insightfully of our 21 st century realities, chief among them the inevitable rise of non–Western nations to positions of parity with the Atlantic world. You have nonetheless read no word of this occasion in our corporate media: Macron's startling observations run entirely counter to the frayed triumphalism and nostalgia that grip Washington as its era of preeminence fades.

President Donald J. Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron in joint press conference in Biarritz, France, site of the G7 Summit, Aug. 26, 2019. (White House/ Andrea Hanks)

There is much to indicate that the West's aggressively hostile posture toward Russia remains unchanged. The Russophobic rhetoric emanating from Washington and featured daily in our corporate television broadcasts continues unabated. Last month Washington formally abandoned the bilateral treaty limiting deployment of intermediate-range ballistic missiles, signed with Moscow in 1987. As anyone could have predicted, NATO now suggests it will upgrade its missile defense systems in Poland and Romania. This amounts to an engraved invitation to the Russian Federation to begin a new arms race.

But a counter-argument favoring a constructive relationship with Russia is now evident. This is not unlike the abrupt volte-face in Washington's thinking on North Korea: It is now broadly accepted that the Korean crisis can be resolved only at the negotiating table.

The Times Are Changing

The New York Times seems to be on board with this this sharp turn in foreign policy. It reported the new consensus on North Korea in a news analysis on July 11. Ten days later it published another arguing that it's time to put down the spear and make amends with Moscow. Here is the astonishing pith of the piece: "China, not Russia, represents by far the greater challenge to American objectives over the long term. That means President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China."

It is encouraging that the Times has at last discovered the well-elaborated alliance between Moscow and Beijing. It took the one-time newspaper of record long enough. But there is another feature of this article that is important to note: It was published as a lead editorial. This is not insignificant.

It is essential, when reading the Times , to understand the close -- not to say corrupt -- relations it has maintained with political power in Washington over many generations. This is well-documented in histories of the paper and of institutions such as the CIA. An editorial advancing a policy shift of this magnitude almost certainly reflects the paper's close consultations, at senior levels of management, with policy-setting officials at the National Security Council, the State Department, or at the Pentagon. The editorial is wholly in keeping with Washington's pronounced new campaign to designate China as America's most dangerous threat.

It is impossible to say whether Trump is emboldened by an inchoate shift of opinion on Russia, but he flew his banner high at the Biarritz G–7. Prior to his departure for the summit in southwest France he asserted that Russia should be readmitted to the group when it convenes in the U.S. next year. Russia was excluded in 2014, following its annexation of Crimea in response to the coup in Kiev.

Trump repeated the thought in Biarritz, claiming there was support among other members for the restoration of the G–8. "I think it's a work in progress," he said. "We have a number of people that would like to see Russia back."

Macron is plainly one of those people. It was just after Trump sounded his theme amid Biarritz's faded grandeur -- and what an excellent choice for a convention of the Western powers -- that the French president made his own plea for repairing ties with Russia and for Europe to escape its fate as "a theater for strategic struggle between the U.S. and Russia."

Biarritz from the Pointe Saint-Martin, 1999. (Wikimedia Commons)

"The European continent will never be stable, will never be secure, if we don't pacify and clarify our relations with Russia," Macron said in his address to Western diplomats. Then came his flourish on the imminent end of the Atlantic world's preeminence.

"The world order is being shaken like never before. It's being shaken because of errors made by the West in certain crises, but also by the choices made by the United States in the past few years -- and not just by the current administration."

Macron is an opportunistic main-chancer in European politics, and it is not at all certain how far he can or will attempt to advance his new vision of either the West or Europe in the Continent's councils of state. But as evidence of a new current in Western thinking about Russia, the non–West in general, and Europe's long-nursed desire for greater independence from Washington, the importance of his comments is beyond dispute.

The question now is whether or how soon better ties with Moscow will translate into practical realities. At present, Trump and Macron share a good idea without much substance to it.

Better US-Russia Ties May Be in Pipeline

But Trump may have taken a step in the right direction. Within days of his return from Biarritz, he put a hold on the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a military aid program that was to provide Kiev with $250 million in assistance during the 2019 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1 and runs to Sept. 30, 2020. The funds are designated for weaponry, training and intelligence support.

Trump has asked his national security advisers to review the commitment. The delay, coming hard on his proposal to readmit Russia to a reconstituted G–8, cannot possibly be read as a coincidence.

There will be other things to watch for in months to come. High among these is Trump's policy toward the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking Russian gas fields to terminals in Western Europe, thereby cutting Ukraine out of the loop. Trump, his desire to improve ties with Moscow notwithstanding, has vigorously opposed this project. The Treasury Department has threatened sanctions against European contractors working on it. If Trump is serious about bringing Russia back into the fold, this policy will have to go. This may mean going up against the energy lobby in Washington and Ukraine's many advocates on Capitol Hill.

To date, U.S. threats to retaliate against construction of Nord Stream 2 have done nothing but irritate Europeans, who have ignored them, while furthering the Continent's desire to escape Washington's suffocating embrace. This is precisely the kind of contradiction Macron addressed when he protested that Europeans need to begin acting in their own interests rather than acquiesce as Washington force-marches them on a never-ending anti–Russia crusade.

Macron may prove a pushover, or a would-be Gaullist who fails to make the grade. Or he may have just announced a long-awaited inflection point in trans–Atlantic ties. Either way, he has put highly significant questions on the table. It will be interesting to see what responses they may elicit, not least from the Trump White House.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via his Patreon site .

Erelis , September 10, 2019 at 18:49

A few European countries may develop warmer relations .but reproachment with Russia will not happen in our lifetimes. Macron offered nothing but rhetoric. The West continues economic warfare and a militaristic stance toward Russia. Western institutions and interests are too tied into Russo-phobia to give it up–it is a financial and emotional heroin to the West. Break the Russian/Chinese alliance? Ain't gonna happen.

As for the NYTimes. They recently have published unsubstantiated accounts about some spy close to Putin who swears by gawd that Putin personally ordered Trump's victory. How is it going to be possible for Trump or even a new democratic president to engage Russia diplomatically with such widely published and accepted propaganda?. Every leading democratic party candidate have sworn to the Russiagate hoax and issued highly aggressive rhetoric. They will be called traitors if they even speak with Putin unless they attempt to punch out Putin.

Jim Glover , September 10, 2019 at 17:36

Now that the war monger Bolton is gone that is good news for pursuing Peace.
It is also good that Patrick points out what has been hiding in plain site from the divide and conquer propaganda from the mass media that the Cold War and the old ones have always been about the West against the East. Maybe the Trump challengers can join the new Pursuit of Peace for the good of Humanity. It Can't hurt!

Stephen M , September 10, 2019 at 15:14

This is as good a time as any to point to an alternative vision of foreign policy. One based on the principle of non-interference, respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and, above all, international law. One based on peaceful coexistence and mutual cooperation. A vision of the world at peace and undivided by arbitrary distinctions. Such a world is possible and even though there are currently players around the world who are striving in that direction we need look no further than our own history for inspiration. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you one Henry A. Wallace, for your consideration.

(The following excerpts from an article by Dr. Dennis Etler. Link to the full article provided below.) --

The highest profile figure who articulated an alternative vision for American foreign policy was the politician Henry Wallace, who served as vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1940-1944 and ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the Progressive Party.

After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace promoted a new vision for America's role in the world that suggested that rather than playing catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with partners to establish a new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism.

Wallace gave a speech in 1942 that declared a "Century of the Common Man." He described a post-war world that offered "freedom from want," a new order in which ordinary citizens, rather than the rich and powerful, would play a decisive role in politics.
That speech made direct analogy between the Second World War and the Civil War, suggesting that the Second World War was being fought to end economic slavery and to create a more equal society. Wallace demanded that the imperialist powers like Britain and France give up their colonies at the end of the war.
In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with a focus on peaceful cooperation. In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in war would allow the United States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
Wallace responded to Luce with a demand to create a world in which "no nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism." Wallace took the New Deal global. His foreign policy was to be based on non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty.
--
Sadly, since then, despite occasional efforts to head in a new direction, the core constituency for US foreign policy has been corporations, rather than the "common man" either in the United States, or the other nations of the world, and United States foreign relations have been dominated by interference in the political affairs of other nations. As a result the military was transformed from an "arsenal for democracy" during the Second World War into a defender of privilege at home and abroad afterwards.

-- -
Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but rather "economic assistance without political conditions to further the independent economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high "the principle of self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial areas." He saw the key policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance of the right of peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system."

--

Wallace's legacy suggests that it is possible to put forth a vision of an honest internationalism in US foreign policy that is in essence American. His approach was proactive not reactive. It would go far beyond anything Democrats propose today, who can only suggest that the United States should not start an unprovoked war with Iran or North Korea, but who embrace sanctions and propagandist reports that demonize those countries.

Rather than ridiculing Trump's overtures to North Korea, they should go further to reduce tensions between the North and the South by pushing for the eventual withdrawal of troops from South Korea and Japan (a position fully in line with Wallace and many other politicians of that age).
Rather than demonizing and isolating Russia (as a means to score political points against Trump), progressives should call for a real détente, that recognizes Russia's core interests, proposes that NATO withdraw troops from Russia's borders, ends sanctions and reintegrates Russia into the greater European economy. They could even call for an end to NATO and the perpetuation of the dangerous global rift between East and West that it perpetuates.
Rather than attempt to thwart China's rise, and attack Trump for not punishing it enough, progressives should seek to create new synergies between China and the US economically, politically and socioculturally.
-- -
In contrast to the US policy of perpetual war and "destroying nations in order to save them," China's BRI proposes an open plan for development that is not grounded in the models of French and British imperialism. It has proposed global infrastructure and science projects that include participants from nations in Africa, Asia, South and Central America previously ignored by American and European elites -- much as Wallace proposed an equal engagement with Latin America. When offering developmental aid and investment China does not demand that free market principles be adopted or that the public sector be privatized and opened up for global investment banks to ravish.
--
The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing its political culture and kicking its addiction to a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying on militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that the US work in conjunction with nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable future rather than creating one failed state after another.

Link to the full article provided below.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/henry-wallaces-internationalism-path-american-foreign-policy-could-have-taken-still-can/5683683

Alan Ross , September 10, 2019 at 15:09

Now it is clear why the CIA spilled the phony beans on a spy they had in Putin's inner circle – to revive the anti-Russian animus that has been dying down.

Rob , September 10, 2019 at 12:00

But if there is a rapprochement between the U.S. and Russia, will that put the brakes on the new arms race?Surely, the defense industry will fight that with every fiber of their being. China alone is not so great a potential military adversary as to warrant so a great expenditure. Or is it? I have little doubt that some interested parties will see it that way.

David Otness , September 10, 2019 at 11:16

A breath of fresh air ?
Dare we hope?
Good luck peeling away Russia from China, they have some very solid bonds established. Besides, who in their right mind would trust the U.S. anymore for any reason?

... ... ...

Vera Gottlieb , September 10, 2019 at 11:04

Well, for far too long has Europe allowed itself to be "run" by the US. And sadly, Europe – up to now- has lacked the backbone to stand up to the Americans. Time to realize that, even without the US, the sun will still rise in the East America this America the other why should we have to wait until the US makes up it's mind on anything. We are grown up folks who can manage very well by ourselves without constantly having to worry as to what the US might do or say. Enough of this blackmail.

Richard A. , September 10, 2019 at 10:18

Prime Minister Abe favors readmitting Russia into the G7: https://youtu.be/yOC5g31cL30

Robert , September 10, 2019 at 10:02

Insightful, Patrick. This new shift will present many new challenges and opportunities for the US and Russia. I can see that if Trump is permitted (by deep state and NATO) as much access to Putin as Netanyahu has had, I can see a far more balanced US foreign policy and certainly a large step toward reducing world conflicts. Iran may be convinced to negotiate with Trump for removal of sanctions coupled with a new nuclear deal. I have no idea if this will impact the Iran-China oil/security agreement which is a (very expensive, unpopular but necessary) lifesaver for Iran and huge investment opportunity for China (backed with up to 5000 Chinese military). Syria needs the removal of US sanctions to stabilize its economy, and with the US onside, more pressure can be put on Turkey to stop arming the terrorists in Idlib, enforce their removal/surrender, and accommodate the Kurds within Syria. Finally, with EU participation, I can see rapid settlement of the civil war in Eastern Ukraine, and normalization of trade with Russia. Until now, the conflict with Russia has resulted in the conversion of the Ukrainian (and other formerly eastern bloc countries) economy from highly industrial to a supplier of cheap labor, some agricultural products, and raw materials to the EU.

AnneR , September 10, 2019 at 09:51

Mr Lawrence, apparently the tune has not changed re Russiagate, not really. That is if the news item on the BBC World Service this a.m. is owt to go by.

This was all about some supposed CIA asset in the Kremlin that they got out in 2017 (Smolenkov according to RT and Sputnik) who played a role, so the BBC said in furtherance of maintaining Russophobia, in providing said "reputable" secret agency (as now so viewed by the Demrats and DNC) with info about Russian – nay, Putin's personal – interference in the 2016 US presidential election. All of the (dis/mis) information that the MSM presstitutes have been selling us on both sides of the pond re the "heinous" activities of Russia-Putin were rehearsed again from Russiagate to Russian attempted and completed assassinations of escaped/released ex-spies, Skripal among them.

They, the US-UK-IS deep states, will not let it go. And their stenographers in the MSM continue to propagate the real dis/misinformation in order to keep the corporate-capitalist-imperialist western dominance warmongering/war-profiteering status quo in operation.

Meanwhile, NPR (and PBS doubtless) are to be headed by one John Lansing, who till now was in charge of that dispenser of "the truth, whole and unadulterated" the Voice of America and Radio Marti; and the BBC is partnering with DARPA-Mossad via Google, FB, Twit and the rest of the internet behemoths, as they told us (well, they didn't advert to the underlying structure, of course). Why is the BBC so doing? In order, they said, to ensure that we, the plebeians, the mindless bewildered herd, are no longer subjected to, no longer have our perspectives distorted by "Dis or Misinformation."

Heartening to know, ain't it, that they – the really existing state-funded and controlled media – have our best interests at heart?

Patrick Lawrence , September 10, 2019 at 16:26

I'm v pleased you picked up on this shard of nonsense, AnneR, and then took the trouble to write of it. I thought to do the same while reading this morn's New York Times. A flimsier, more obvious propaganda ploy I have not seen in a while, and this is saying something. This fellow must be Guccifer 2's in-law or something. My read: Those who recklessly over-invested in the Russiagate universe thought it would go away the instant HRC was elected. They're now stuck w/ it three years on, and this is another effort to keep it alive long enough to get it into the histories. They'll never make it. Transparently horse-droppings. Tks again for writing. Patrick.

Skip Scott , September 10, 2019 at 09:23

The empire's war machine always needs a boogeyman. Macron is proposing transitioning to a multi-polar world, and ending its vassal status to empire. Good luck with that. We can only hope that Putin's countering of our war machine keeps MAD a reality, and that the example that Russia and China are setting in opposition to empire will encourage other vassals to rebel. Waging peace in a multi-polar world is the only moral course of action. The war machine, with its huge waste of manpower and resources, is the main factor in our current path to extinction. Reining it in is the first step to ensure mankind's survival.

Herman , September 10, 2019 at 09:11

America has earned the mistrust of most of the world. Although establishing a good relationship with Russia is a good idea, using it to isolate Russia probably will not work. Meremark's comments puts it very well. Meeremark is on the mark.

Peter Janney , September 10, 2019 at 08:23

Many of Patrick's observations are astute and well-reasoned. But he is ABSOLUTELY WRONG to put any faith whatsoever in Trump being able to negotiate ANYTHING of importance, whether it be with North Korea or Russia. Wake up! There is "no one home" in Donald Trump!!

We are witnessing a severely incapacitated, mentally ill individual pretending to be a leader, who is endangering the entire planet. If this doesn't scare the shit out of you, you need to have your head examined!

jessika , September 10, 2019 at 07:47

The US has been fed b.s. for so long and it's hard to see getting the country in any decent shape, foreign policy or otherwise. The Pentagon and alphabet agencies have been calling the shots since the days of the Dulles bros. I can't see anything other than a top heavy collapse since this long con. It's good to hear Macron saying this and good for Orange Bejesus wanting to get along with Russia, but how far gone have humans gone before Mother Nature gives us the swiftest kick due to our stupidity?

peter mcloughlin , September 10, 2019 at 05:09

I agree with Patrick Lawrence's perceptive analyses of 'frayed triumphalism and nostalgia'. An empire on the rise, for example modern China, is probably less dangerous than one in decline. There are more of the latter type, making geopolitics dangerously unstable, and increasingly difficult to prevent world war, where the pattern of history seems to be pointing us.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/

Moi , September 10, 2019 at 02:54

Zhu, if you are not aware, China has just delivered the biggest F.You to the US in geopolitical history by more or less buying Iran oil.

China is to invest $US280 billion upgrading Iran's oil and gas sectors, unlocking a further $500 billion of otherwise unrecoverable oil, upping it's own oil purchases, opening factories to make "made in China" products, etc.

They also get to deploy 5,000 Chinese "security officers" so if the US attacks Iran they could kill lots of Chinese military.

See: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190907-a-blow-to-washington-china-to-invest-280-billion-in-iranian-sectors-targeted-by-sanctions/

Zhu , September 10, 2019 at 00:46

Should be "not submit, noy obey."

incontinent reader , September 10, 2019 at 00:39

IMHO, it is a fool's errand for our policy makers to think that Russia can be "peeled away from China", or that Russia and China has not seen through that strategy as another ploy by the West to retain hegemony. As for inviting Russia back into the G-8 and Russia's response, the following exchange at last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vliadivostok is instructive [Yandex/Google translation of the Russian text]:

Sergey Brilev: Mr Abe, I would like to ask you about this. When I just said, "the big Seven" We all heard the report that President Trump was at the last summit of the "Seven" a kind of lawyer [advocate] for the Russian Federation and Vladimir Putin. You've seen it from the inside. Without breaking any obvious rules, after all it is a closed club, maybe you will tell how it was? (Laughter.)

Shinzo Abe: As for the G–7, there used to be a G-8, there was a discussion that creative influence on the international community is important. But as President Putin is well aware, because he took part in the" G-8″, there are such rules: you can only quote yourself, so other leaders can not be quoted. So I can't say exactly what President Trump said there, for example. But I personally said that Russian influence, Russian creative influence, plays an important role in solving international problems. Therefore, I raised the issue of Russia's possible return to this format. (Applause.)

Sergei Brilev: if they call, will you go, Mr President?

Vladimir Putin: Where?

S. Brilev: The "G-8". In the States, I think it's next. There, however, will be the height of Trump's campaign.

Vladimir Putin: At the time, the next "G-8" was to be held in Russia.

Sergei Brilev: In Sochi, yes.

Vladimir Putin: We are open. If our partners want to come to us, we will be happy. (Applause.) But we did not postpone it, our partners postponed it. If they want to restore the "Eight", please. But I think it's clear to everyone today, and President Macron just recently said publicly that the West's leadership is coming to an end. I cannot imagine an effective international organization that works without India and without China. (Applause.)

Any format is always good, it is always a positive exchange of views, even when it is held in a raised tone, as far as I understand, and it was this time in the "Seven", it is still useful. Therefore, we do not refuse any format of cooperation.

Jeff Harrison , September 10, 2019 at 00:32

I have to object on several levels, Patrick.

"Are Western democracies, the U.S. and France in the lead, rethinking the hostility toward Russia they conjured out of nothing since Moscow responded to the coup Washington cultivated in Ukraine five years ago?" Good question but it beggars the truth that The West has been hostile to Russia since its inception as a non-monarchy in 1917. The US refused to recognize it until 1933. The classic phrase "godless communist hordes" was intended to drive home the point that the commies were theoretically atheists and they were not capitalists. Russia helped it along by trying to spread communism just as the US is trying to spread capitalism now (we like to claim we're spreading democracy but that's bunk.) I'm not sure which is more distasteful, having some foreign economic structure shoved down your throat (communism) or some foreign political structure shoved down your throat (totalitarian dictatorship). Both suck.

"China, not Russia, represents by far the greater challenge to American objectives over the long term. That means President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China." I realize you're quoting the Times but mind if I ask, what, precisely, are American objectives? If our objective was to simply live peaceably with the other nations of the world and dazzle them with the brilliance of every little thing we did, nobody, not Russia, not China, nobody could challenge that objective. But that's not our objective, now is it? It could be best characterized by the weekly exchange between Pinkie and The Brain. Pinkie: What are we going to do this week, Brain? Brain: Same thing we do every week, Pinkie. Establish world domination. That's never going to work. There are too many people in this world and too many countries in this world who will not put up with diktats from somebody else for the Brain to succeed.

As for the G7 becoming the G8, as I've already said, it's not gonna happen. Putin has already said that it should include India and China. The West won't accept that. Frankly, if membership in "the club" can be lifted as easily as it was last time, why should Russia be interested? As I've said, I think that Russia has turned eastward. If the west has something on offer, great but they wouldn't be looking for it. Russia has managed to make the sanctions regime very painful for the EU even though the EU doesn't seem to notice. Offering Russia a very junior chair at the G7 whilst maintaining the sanctions and other visions of economic warfare against Russia is not a calculus that Russia will be interested in.

This could turn into the one bridge too far for the Europeans.

Zhu , September 9, 2019 at 21:13

It'll be China, China, china, next. How dare they prosper! How dare they not submit and not obey!

jaycee , September 9, 2019 at 20:07

The New York Times has played an effective Orwellian role in recent years, simply by reflecting unannounced policy directives – notably the smooth shifts in designated official enemies from ISIS to Russia/Putin to China/Xi all in the space of six short years.

Judging by the Times' own comment sections, a fair number of the general public are quick to internalize a hatred of the "enemy" without reflection on how/why the object of their ire can be one day one villain, and then a whole new villain the next.

Steve , September 10, 2019 at 07:11

The Times has become nothing but a bunch of stenographers for the Intelligence Community. The days of them treating their sources with skepticism are LONG gone. I'm no fan of Ben Rhodes, but that guy was spot-on when he referred to the Washington press corps as a bunch of 20-something know-nothings whose ignorance makes them easily manipulated into becoming an echo chamber of support for whatever policies their government sources are pushing.

lysias , September 10, 2019 at 08:21

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

David Otness , September 10, 2019 at 11:01

" .. notably the smooth shifts in designated official enemies from ISIS to Russia/Putin to China/Xi all in the space of six short years."

You nailed it in calling it Orwellian. ISIS as "official" enemy indeed is a classic representation of 'doublespeak.' All of those *accidental* U.S. arms-drops on their positions, helicopters showing up to rescue their leaders, the apparent invisibility of those oil tanker fleets freely and blatantly running the highways into Turkey for several years. (The Russians sure found them in a hurry.) As much of that oil was shipped to Israel by Erdogan's kid at below market prices, it was another testament to the duplicitous nature of the entire scheme to bring Syria down. Fail. Epic fail. I love it. That egg looks great on Netanyahu's face.

Brent , September 9, 2019 at 20:00

Trump and the establishment punish and sanction Russia but get along fine with MBS Mohammad Bone Sawman. I voted for Trump but got Hillary's foreign policy. The Devil runs America.

Tim , September 9, 2019 at 19:48

Yes Bob, it would be a good change, except, if Britain is co-opted by the US, then it will be a wholly owned subsidy and block change in Europe.

Tim Jones , September 9, 2019 at 20:50

subsidiary

Tim Jones , September 9, 2019 at 19:40

Just hope Brexit is negotiated and Britain is not fully taken over by Washington as a new investment opportunity.

Ikallicrates , September 10, 2019 at 10:57

US corporations did indeed anticipate that post Brexit UK would be a new investment opportunity. The US health insurance industry, for example, was poised to swoop down on the UK as soon as the Tories finished destroying the NHS. But thanks to BoJo's bungling of Brexit, the Tories could lose the next general election, so they've reversed direction and are appeasing angry Brits by promising to save the NHS. By bringing down the Tories, BoJo may make Britain great again (#MBGA).

Meremark , September 9, 2019 at 19:18

RT said Putin says Russia in G-8 is improvident without China and India economies and geo-strategies also figured in. A G-10 league?

Putin's chessmanship is operaticly clean. not to be confused with poker as people generally do confuse. This lacks the bluffing of poker; in this the pieces of global power projection are standing on the board, chess obvious.

Maybe not so easy to peel Russia apart from China, if that's Plan B kicking around the Pentagon. At some point maybe they can consider Plan Delta ? which stands for change.

Steve , September 10, 2019 at 07:03

Let's be honest, the G-7 is pretty outdated. Canada and Italy are pretty much out of their league. America's hat and a fourth western European power seem unnecessary. Replace them with China and India, and bring Russia back in to make it the G-8.

floyd gardner , September 10, 2019 at 11:28

Thank you, Meremark. Putin does not take his directives from the NYT.

Daniel Rich , September 9, 2019 at 19:17

Macron, a Rothschild pawn, gives as much abut true Democrat as he does about the Yellow Vests' protest

No, no, not the Hong Kong, US flags waving goons, but ordinary French citizens who're fed up with the direction their government moves onward to, the ones you hear nothing about.

Bob Van Noy , September 9, 2019 at 17:25

Thank you Patrick Lawrence, if your analysis is correct it would be a turning point in international relations and extremely significant. I like to think that the web has put us about a week or two ahead of the headlines here at CN, so if the NYT is finally calling the events accurately, it would by a stunning breakthrough

[Sep 10, 2019] Now it is more then two years since intellignce againces started to push the Russiagate hoax

Sep 10, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Lyttennburgh said in reply to The Twisted Genius ... , 10 September 2019 at 03:20 AM

Ok, TTG. What's your proof? How can you believe, religiously, everything claimed without any proof?

The CNN article provided enough rope to hang itself with it. Literally anyone can try to verify it in a few easy steps:

1) Make a list of RusGov ranking officials by, say, May 2016.
2) See, who's absent in the current composition of the RusGov
3) Find out, who amongst those absent is no longer in Russia.
4) Of them, find out who had any kind of plausible potential to be the CIA asset, by having the access to all sorts of data and "insight into Putin's head" as per this CNN article.

Go ahead! Hey, anyone - care to join?

Ken , 09 September 2019 at 10:20 PM
After over two years of the Russiagate hoax pushed by the intelligence agencies, it's surprising you now uncritically swallow this new story.
confusedponderer said in reply to The Twisted Genius ... , 10 September 2019 at 06:11 AM
TTG,

re " I don't believe he's a Russian asset, either. His personality makes him unsuitable as a controlled asset. "

I think the key word here is indeed controlled . I have doubts that anyone can control him, and that excludes himself.

Should it ever come to the D's going for impeachment (which would IMO be understandable if unwise and pricely) and succeed - what would the US get instead?

Pence.

The difference that that dude is white & white and not orange & yellow. That's about it. Pence likely would immediately pardon Trump for whatever he was found to have done.

He is probably just as far right as Trump, only more discrete and self controlled - and of course evangelical. The evangelical part can be somewhat problematic as seen in Brazil under also evangelical Bolsonaro.

One of Bolsonaro's "underling politicos", formerly an evangelical bishop (or something like that) demanded to confiscate US marvel comics since in these comics some superheros , ghasp, were gay - and that that is utterly unacceptable since it undermines Brazil's ... immensely high moral principles.

Also, since Boslonaro took office the destruction of Amazonas, compared to the last year, has reportedly already doubled - and we're only in early september by now.

CK -> The Twisted Genius ... , 10 September 2019 at 07:23 AM
"His personality makes him unsuitable as a controlled asset."
and yet the IC keeps trying to do just that.
Eric Newhill , 10 September 2019 at 07:23 AM
Crappily assembled Steele dossier/crossfire hurricane coup d'etat fails. Democrats are floating only craven extremist nutjobs that most Americans can't handle and whose policies can't possibly work in the real world. So they will certainly lose in 2020. All manner of hyper aggressive negative media BS has failed. What's a power crazed global elitist to do? :-(

On to deep state plan F!!! Trump is a national security risk because he's CRAZY! and irresponsible! This one will stick. Sure. Bring out the liars! Spin the story! That's the ticket. And we can still shout "Racist!" all day every day.

Yawn.

Lyttennburgh , 10 September 2019 at 07:23 AM
And Lo and behold - some people (think) they've found the mole! Meet Oleg Smolenkov.

https://twitter.com/lincolnpigman/status/1171207593559281665

If (if!) true, it means:

a) CIA didn't bother to provide a new identity to this "high value asset", whose home is ludicruously easy to google

b) The guy in question was neither member of the RusGov (the Cabinet of the Ministers), neither was he a member of the Security Council, nor he was a "silovik". He was a secretary in Russia's embassy in D.C. In 2010 he became referent in the department of the Presidential Administration ( https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B5%D1%84%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B0_%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B9%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%A4%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%B8). This shows that either CNN is dumb, and can't distinguish between the RusGov and the Administration of the President, or they were lying, or... that's another guy.

b , 10 September 2019 at 05:38 AM
According to the NYT the guy was asked to exfiltrate in 2016, way be fore Trump, but at first rejected.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/09/us/politics/cia-informant-russia.html
"when intelligence officials revealed the severity of Russia's election interference with unusual detail later that year, the news media picked up on details about the C.I.A.'s Kremlin sources.

C.I.A. officials worried about safety made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to extract the source from Russia. The situation grew more tense when the informant at first refused, citing family concerns -- prompting consternation at C.I.A. headquarters and sowing doubts among some American counterintelligence officials about the informant's trustworthiness. But the C.I.A. pressed again months later after more media inquiries. This time, the informant agreed."

This has nothing to do with Trump but with leaks from Brennan and Co who outed the spy. He worked in the Kremlin administration and had good but not top access.

Kommersant reports that the guy's name is Oleg Smolenko.
He and his wife bought a house in Stafford Virginia, LOT 28 HUNTERS POND, under their own name.
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/4087921

Maybe Pat or someone else in the area can visit them and find out how much of their information is true and how much is bonkers. I'd bet on 50:50.

anon , 10 September 2019 at 05:38 AM
Most of trump and the 7 Russians is fake news. The fact is that the USA has sought Russian assistance in pressuring Israel. The rest is a smoke screen. The whole scenario is being carefully managed so as to not set off a middle east war. The outcome of this project coming at the tail end of the Arab spring will become clear after the election.
turcopolier , 10 September 2019 at 09:20 AM
All

And then there is the possibility that CIA extracted a minor source to divert attention from someone or someones who remain(s) in place. The open purchase of a house in the outer suburbs of Washington by the extracted would seem to support the possibility that this is all a diversion. The narrative continues that "a former senior intelligence official" told Sciutto, an Obama man, at CNN of all this. Clapper is "a former senior intelligence official" and a CNN "contributor" (employee) is he not? He is dumb enough to have had this story planted on him.

Peter VE , 10 September 2019 at 09:58 AM
I'm sure Mr. Smolenko has been following the story of Sergei Skripal and wondering if perhaps he would have been better off going to prison in Russia....
Rhondda , 10 September 2019 at 10:08 AM
Info-seeding operation: plausible 'Kremlin source' needed for bare-naked Steele dossier...?
turcopolier , 10 September 2019 at 10:16 AM
Rhondda

Say what?

Rhondda said in reply to turcopolier ... , 10 September 2019 at 10:29 AM
LOL Sorry. Too terse? It strikes me that this CNN assertion is useful -- to provide a fig-leaf, albeit lacy, for the wretched Steele dossier's 'Kremlin source'.

I'm always amazed how little it takes and how little there is there. I'm probably wrong, but that's what came to my mind.

[Sep 10, 2019] Justice declined to pursue Comey leaks as a criminal case

Notable quotes:
"... The most alarming aspect of the Trump–Russia investigation, and of the stark difference between the aggression with which it was pursued and the see-no-evil passivity of the Clinton emails caper, is the way the investigative process was used to influence political outcomes. ..."
"... Ardent Trump supporters are growling over news that the FBI's former director, James Comey, will not be prosecuted by the Justice Department for the mishandling of memoranda he wrote about his contacts with the president. The news has been reported by The Hill 's John Solomon and the Washington Post 's Devlin Barrett , among others. ..."
"... Indications are that Horowitz referred the memos issue to the Justice Department for possible prosecution and that, after reviewing the IG's findings, Justice declined to pursue the matter as a criminal case. ..."
Sep 10, 2019 | www.nationalreview.com

A free society cannot stay free for long if the criminal-justice system becomes a political weapon, if that becomes our norm.

The most alarming aspect of the Trump–Russia investigation, and of the stark difference between the aggression with which it was pursued and the see-no-evil passivity of the Clinton emails caper, is the way the investigative process was used to influence political outcomes.

The way to right that wrong is to prevent it from becoming the new normal, not to turn the tables of abuse when power shifts from one side to the other. We can only make things worse by losing the distinction between rebuking errors in judgment and criminalizing them.

Ardent Trump supporters are growling over news that the FBI's former director, James Comey, will not be prosecuted by the Justice Department for the mishandling of memoranda he wrote about his contacts with the president. The news has been reported by The Hill 's John Solomon and the Washington Post 's Devlin Barrett , among others.

Comey's handling of his memos is one aspect of probes related to investigations attendant to the 2016 election, which are being conducted by Justice Department independent counsel Michael Horowitz. Indications are that Horowitz referred the memos issue to the Justice Department for possible prosecution and that, after reviewing the IG's findings, Justice declined to pursue the matter as a criminal case.

[Sep 10, 2019] Behaving like a normal country

Sep 10, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Martin , Sep 10 2019 4:56 utc | 24

As newly appointed US Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, was reported to have claimed about wanting for Russia to ''behave like a normal country'', Sergey Lavrov urged for him to clarify what he means by ''normality'' during a press conference in the Russian capital; if Russia was to behave like the US, it would have had to bomb Iraq, Libya, supporting an armed, anti-constitutional coup in Kiev, and allocating millions in the interference in the affairs of other countries, as in the ''promotion of democracy'' in Russia.

Sergey Shoygu did not have much to add, but what he did add could not be clearer: Russia will probably have to remain being ''not normal''.

[Sep 09, 2019] Will NPR Now Officially Change Its Name to National Propaganda Radio? by Edward Curtin

The main achievement of neoliberal and imperial (warmongering) propaganda in the USA is that it achieved the complete, undisputed dominance in MSM
Pot Calling the Kettle Black: "The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation machine is being unleashed via new platforms and continues to grow in Russia and internationally. Russia seeks to destroy the very idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts as it attempts to influence opinions about the United States and its allies. It is not an understatement to say that this new form of combat on the information battlefield may be the fight of the 21st century."
Notable quotes:
"... Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to "court the compatible left." ..."
"... The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites. ..."
"... Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media (The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world. ..."
Sep 08, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to "court the compatible left."

Right-wing and left-wing collaborators were needed to create a powerful propaganda apparatus that would be capable of hypnotizing audiences into believing the myth of American exceptionalism and its divine right to rule the world.

The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites.

Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters, and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, with particular emphasis on the complicity between the CIA and the famous literary journal, The Paris Review.

By the mid-1970s, as a result of the Church Committee hearings, it seemed as if the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. had been caught in flagrante delicto and disgraced, confessed their sins, and resolved to go and sin no more.

Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media (The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world.

It seemed as if all would be hunky-dory now with the bad boys purged from the American “free” press. Seemed to the most naïve, that is, by which I mean the vast numbers of people who wanted to re-stick their heads in the sand and believe, as Ronald Reagan’s team of truthtellers would announce, that it was “Morning in America” again with the free press reigning and the neo-conservatives, many of whom had been “converted” from their leftist views, running things in Washington.

... ... ...

...read Lansing’s July 10, 2019 testimony before the House Appropriations Sub-Committee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs: “United States Efforts to Counter Russian Disinformation and Malign Influence.”

Here is an excerpt:

USAGM provides consistently accurate and compelling journalism that reflects the values of our society: freedom, openness, democracy, and hope. Our guiding principles—enshrined in law—are to provide a reliable, authoritative, and independent source of news that adheres to the strictest standards of journalism…

Russian Disinformation. And make no mistake, we are living through a global explosion of disinformation, state propaganda, and lies generated by multiple authoritarian regimes around the world. The weaponization of information we are seeing today is real. The Russian government and other authoritarian regimes engage in far-reaching malign influence campaigns across national boundaries and language barriers.

The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation machine is being unleashed via new platforms and continues to grow in Russia and internationally. Russia seeks to destroy the very idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts as it attempts to influence opinions about the United States and its allies. It is not an understatement to say that this new form of combat on the information battlefield may be the fight of the 21st century.

Then research the history of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, Radio and Television Marti, etc. You will be reassured that Lansing’s July testimony was his job interview to head National Propaganda Radio.

Edward Curtin writes, and his writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He writes as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. He believes a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore sees all his work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding. His website is edwardcurtin.com

[Sep 09, 2019] no title

Notable quotes:
"... And behind it all, the demonization (demonetization) of Russia (and Putin) still continues. ..."
"... is admittedly so cool (given the advanced technology) to be dropping bombs on women and children for the uncountable time, clearly we now know we are going broke killing the innocent. We are bludgeoning them to the point that we have broken our rifles on their corpses. Time to let off. ..."
Sep 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

jared , Sep 9 2019 17:36 utc | 119

Excellent posting on RT: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/468193-russiagate-collusion-trump-election/

Which is re-publication of article by Stephen Cohen on The Nation -
https://www.thenation.com/article/what-we-still-do-not-know-about-russiagate/

Very well written and keeping focus on what's important. Very useful, revealing event with many issues remaining to be fully considered regarding behaviors of
- the elected officials,
- the "intelligence" "community",
- the media,
- the public.

And behind it all, the demonization (demonetization) of Russia (and Putin) still continues.

There likely are cases where Russia is acting nefariously or in bad faith, but who could tell given all the b/s they are feeding us.

So it's clear (to anyone interested) that they are misleading us, and (I think) clear why they are misleading us, but that does stop the the constant stream of crap in the media - "news" and "entertainment".

Is their target audience the most obtuse among us?

While is admittedly so cool (given the advanced technology) to be dropping bombs on women and children for the uncountable time, clearly we now know we are going broke killing the innocent. We are bludgeoning them to the point that we have broken our rifles on their corpses. Time to let off.

Leaving aside the need to feed the war machine (particularly in light of slowing economy), many on both sides seemed to fear that the public had succeeded in electing a populist and that could not be allowed. So they attacked him knowing the technocratic state would support them. But Trump out-smarted them and went all in deep state, elitest and sooth the worried vested interests and their owners. So that's all past us now. Still, kind of hard to over-look. Does Shiff take himself seriously?

[Sep 09, 2019] Robert Mueller was "special counsel" in name only. The real boss was Andrew Weissman

Notable quotes:
"... The "report" was his work. Mueller never looked for anything, never found anything and never wrote anything. ..."
"... The entire charade was part of the "resistance" to straight jacket Trump until the mid term elections, a strategy put in motion by Comey and Brennan, which achieved the desired result: Republicans lost the House. ..."
"... Of course there was "little Russia in Russiagate." The narrative was all disinformation set loose by Crowdstrike and Fusion GPS, paid for by Hillary and the DNC with the blessing of President Obama. Welcome to the tin foil hat brigade as contributor. ..."
Sep 09, 2019 | www.unz.com

Officially, at least in the FBI's version, its operation "Crossfire Hurricane," the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that began in mid-2016 was due to suspicious remarks made to visitors by a young and lowly Trump aide, George Papadopoulos. This too is not believable, as I pointed out previously . Most of those visitors themselves had ties to Western intelligence agencies. That is, the young Trump aide was being enticed, possibly entrapped, as part of a larger intelligence operation against Trump. (Papadopoulos wasn't the only Trump associate targeted, Carter Page being another.)

But the question remains: Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump's presidential campaign? A reflexive answer might be because candidate Trump promised to "cooperate with Russia," to pursue a pro-détente foreign policy, but this was hardly a startling, still less subversive, advocacy by a would-be Republican president. All of the major pro-détente episodes in the 20th century had been initiated by Republican presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.

So, again, what was it about Trump that so spooked the spooks so far off their rightful reservation and so intrusively into American presidential politics? Investigations being overseen by Attorney General William Barr may provide answers -- or not.

... ... ...

It is true, of course, that Barr and Durham, as Trump appointees, are not the ideal investigators of Intel misdeeds in the Russiagate saga. Much better would be a truly bipartisan, independent investigation based in the Senate, as was the Church Committee of the mid-1970s, which exposed and reformed (it thought at the time) serious abuses by US intelligence agencies. That would require, however, a sizable core of nonpartisan, honorable, and courageous senators of both parties, who thus far seem to be lacking.

There are also, however, the ongoing and upcoming Democratic presidential debates. First and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in Russiagate.) At every "debate" or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be asked about this grave threat to American democracy -- what they think about what happened and would do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy.

Anon [421] • Disclaimer says:

September 9, 2019 at 5:24 pm GMT • 100 Words

"former special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of "collusion."

Let me unpack that for you, esteemed professor: RM was "special counsel" in name only. The real boss was Andrew Weissman. The "report" was his work. Mueller never looked for anything, never found anything and never wrote anything.

The entire charade was part of the "resistance" to straight jacket Trump until the mid term elections, a strategy put in motion by Comey and Brennan, which achieved the desired result: Republicans lost the House.

Of course there was "little Russia in Russiagate." The narrative was all disinformation set loose by Crowdstrike and Fusion GPS, paid for by Hillary and the DNC with the blessing of President Obama. Welcome to the tin foil hat brigade as contributor.

Kolya Krassotkin , says: September 9, 2019 at 5:02 pm GMT

Given the impunity with which Israel nakedly interferes in American elections, worrying about Russian interference is laugh-out-loud funny.

But I forgot. Israel is our best "friend."

[Sep 09, 2019] The Corbett report video on WTC7

Notable quotes:
"... Thanks for posting the Corbett report video on WTC7. I had seen the Barry Jennings interview before, but had not read it in detail for many, many years. It is very significant, just as is the way the official narrative has ignored it. ..."
"... Also, this morning, Sputnik news has picked up on the UAF WTC7 report. The word is spreading, slowly, although in this case the authorities will probably just blame in on Putin causing trouble. I still have not seen a mainstream news outlet pick it up yet though. Maybe this will change on Sept. 11th. Or maybe they will just pretend it doesn't exist. ..."
"... The most fascinating aspect of 9/11 is the speed with which the Cheney Gang decided that a large scale military response was the only 'logical' option. ..."
"... Professor Hulsey did a presentation this week to accompany the draft UAF report. A youtube of the slides, with audio, is attached. For those that are serious about critiquing the report, I strongly recommend that you listen to the presentation, as well as (please) read the report carefully. ..."
"... On September 3rd, the University of Alaska Fairbanks released a study on their analysis of the infamous Twin Towers collapse. In it, they found that the third tower's collapse was, "caused not by fire but rather by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building." ..."
"... remember watching a video of multiple interviews with first responders and was gobsmacked at their tale. Only a controlled demolition will achieve the sight of that collapse. Simultaneous controlled demolition. That collapse could not have the observed uniformity when an isolated fire is concentrated in one corner. ..."
"... Now of course we have additional facts, that there were important records of an ongoing financial investigation there, it was a CIA office, also the NYC gov't under Mayor Giuliani (remember him) had it as the emergency command center, luckily moved that day to a temporary one out on the piers due to some military exercise or something. ..."
"... Finally to any honest skeptics out there who are unsure about the whole September 11th 2001 thing -- there's a lot of fake "9/11" stuff out there too about nuclear bombs, beam weapons, all kinds of nonsense put out to distract us from the reality that those three buildings, and the Pentagon too, were deliberately set up to destroy evidence and scare everyone into a panic so things could change politically. ..."
"... If you look at what's happened in the US and the world, things changed for the worse after the 2001 event. It must have taken years to plan and execute this criminal hoax. One of many I'm sure. ..."
Sep 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

ADKC , Sep 8 2019 14:58 utc | 2

Latest video from The Corbett Report, relating to WTC 7:

The Corbett Report - 9/11 Whistleblowers: Barry Jennings

retiredmecheng , Sep 8 2019 16:03 utc | 11

@AKDC @2

Thanks for posting the Corbett report video on WTC7. I had seen the Barry Jennings interview before, but had not read it in detail for many, many years. It is very significant, just as is the way the official narrative has ignored it.

Also, this morning, Sputnik news has picked up on the UAF WTC7 report. The word is spreading, slowly, although in this case the authorities will probably just blame in on Putin causing trouble. I still have not seen a mainstream news outlet pick it up yet though. Maybe this will change on Sept. 11th. Or maybe they will just pretend it doesn't exist.

Also, just for continuity, the UAF WTC7 report was discussed extensively on last week's open thread, starting at comment #131. I have really enjoyed being part of the discussion. And as Jackrabbit said so eloquently in his post, there are so many other aspects of the official 9/11 narrative that "stink", that it is hard to know where to start when performing a critique.

Sputnik WTC7 Coverage of UAF Report

Walter , Sep 8 2019 16:22 utc | 17
see 9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money (2015) at Corbett

also

Episode 346 – 9/11 War Games (Corbett)

His Oklahoma investigation also> and an interesting evaluation of T McVeigh's - strange life, which may continue (he says) - that dovetails to the Epstein "suicide"...which may also have been a jailbreak.

Like I said - it's a Big Global Picture, and disturbing.

Zack , Sep 9 2019 4:40 utc | 83
Had read somewhere awhile back that the WTC towers had to have some sort of demolition plan built into them from the beginning in case one started to tip over onto other buildings and/or for whenever they needed to be demolished.

Instead of having to rig up the whole building for destruction wouldn't it be easier just to put the building into an unsafe condition that triggers the buildings own self destruction mechanism?

Could the towers have come down perfectly because they were designed to go down like that from the beginning?

Think about Larry Silverman's "pull it" statement...

Hoarsewhisperer , Sep 9 2019 5:02 utc | 86
The most fascinating aspect of 9/11 is the speed with which the Cheney Gang decided that a large scale military response was the only 'logical' option.
ted01 , Sep 9 2019 5:04 utc | 87
Nicholas Negroponte - brother of John Negroponte - war criminal, facilitator of right wing paramilitary death squads & supporter of your 80's style Central American military dictator. As Reagan's man in Honduras, that country became the headquarters for the Contras in their bloody campaign against the people of Nicaragua. This is only a small part of what this shitstain has inflicted on the world.

A true American hero - I very much doubt that young Nicholas is much different.

retiredmecheng , Sep 9 2019 6:16 utc | 94
@Peter AU1 @92

This is my second attempt at this post. The first one disappeared. Apologies if it shows as a duplicate.

Professor Hulsey did a presentation this week to accompany the draft UAF report. A youtube of the slides, with audio, is attached. For those that are serious about critiquing the report, I strongly recommend that you listen to the presentation, as well as (please) read the report carefully.

Let me know if the link doesn't work.

Hulsey WTC7 Presentation

Martin , Sep 9 2019 9:57 utc | 103
On September 3rd, the University of Alaska Fairbanks released a study on their analysis of the infamous Twin Towers collapse. In it, they found that the third tower's collapse was, "caused not by fire but rather by the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building."

https://www.wakingtimes.com/2019/09/04/university-of-alaska-study-definitively-concludes-fire-did-not-cause-building-7-collapse-on-9-11/

uncle tungsten , Sep 9 2019 10:48 utc | 104
Thank you retiredmecheng #95. That was an excellent video presentation. NIST response will be interesting. We have waited a while for this panel to present their response to NIST and the wait was worth it. There must have been some mighty important reason to drop that building and to prevent any access to the two burning floors.

I remember watching a video of multiple interviews with first responders and was gobsmacked at their tale. Only a controlled demolition will achieve the sight of that collapse. Simultaneous controlled demolition. That collapse could not have the observed uniformity when an isolated fire is concentrated in one corner.

jonku , Sep 9 2019 17:06 utc | 114
retiredmecheng | Sep 9 2019 6:16 utc | 94

Thanks for your considered and clear explanations re: WTC 7 and its demise.

I agree that it seems undeniable that the building did not "fall down" due to a fire ... at the time I assumed that they had filled it with explosives during the day, so that it could be demolished later. Was unsure of the why, but in the moment it was entirely clear that the building was deliberately destroyed.

Now of course we have additional facts, that there were important records of an ongoing financial investigation there, it was a CIA office, also the NYC gov't under Mayor Giuliani (remember him) had it as the emergency command center, luckily moved that day to a temporary one out on the piers due to some military exercise or something.

Anyone with two brain cells can see that two planes can't take down three buildings.

Finally to any honest skeptics out there who are unsure about the whole September 11th 2001 thing -- there's a lot of fake "9/11" stuff out there too about nuclear bombs, beam weapons, all kinds of nonsense put out to distract us from the reality that those three buildings, and the Pentagon too, were deliberately set up to destroy evidence and scare everyone into a panic so things could change politically.

If you look at what's happened in the US and the world, things changed for the worse after the 2001 event. It must have taken years to plan and execute this criminal hoax. One of many I'm sure.

[Sep 09, 2019] From mind control to murder? How a deadly fall revealed the CIA's darkest secrets - Stephen Kinzer/Guardian

Sep 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

BM , Sep 9 2019 11:48 utc | 106

From mind control to murder? How a deadly fall revealed the CIA's darkest secrets - Stephen Kinzer/Guardian

I read about that a year or so ago. In one of the North Korea threads, someone posted some links to the Erik Olson website, in connection with the use of biological weapons in North Korea.

If I remember correctly there was a very detailed pdf report, maybe published by or on behalf of Erik Olson, about Frank Olson's death and the circumstances leading to it.

It was a lot more detailed about some of the areas whitewashed by the Guardian article, such as connections between his trips to Germany and his realization that germ warfare was being used in North Korea, and also more about the Porton Down war criminal William Sargant.

[Sep 09, 2019] Meet American Empire's 'Doctor Death' The American Conservative

Notable quotes:
"... by Stephen Kinzer, September 2019, Henry Holt & Co., 368 pages ..."
Sep 09, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Meet American Empire's 'Doctor Death' Stephen Kinzer's new book shows how Greatest Generation spooks justified their horrific experiments on unwitting Americans. By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos • September 10, 2019

(Photo by © Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images). On right, Sidney Gottlieb testifies before Congress in the 1970's Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control by Stephen Kinzer, September 2019, Henry Holt & Co., 368 pages

In the 1962 film adaptation of Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate, a diabolical North Korean doctor named Yen Lo tells Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw to "pass the time with a little solitaire." These trigger words, accompanied by a Queen of Diamonds playing card, prompts the lanky soldier to get up, and when instructed, brutally kill two of his own comrades sitting on the stage, both of whom appear under the same trance as Raymond.

Later, we find out this was not a dream but a real test of Shaw's programming through elaborate mind control, undertaken before he is sent home to the United States as a sleeper agent for a Communist Party cell, led by his own mother. "His brain has not only been washed, as they say, but cleaned," declares a gleeful Dr. Lo.

"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962, Universal Artists)

The film was released when the country was in a state of high Cold War anxiety. The idea that the Communists were deep into finding a way to brainwash and program individuals to deploy as weapons of war was not new, of course. It was just finding its way into the increasingly paranoid popular culture. But what Americans did not know was that our own government was in part responsible for those stories as a cover for their own brainwashing experiments, which were racing along at the speed of a freight train.

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In 1953, Allen Dulles told a group of fellow Princeton alumni that the U.S. was far behind the Russians and North Koreans in "brain warfare." He warned of a mind control gap that would likely grow because "we in the West..have no human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques."

This was a lie of breathtaking proportions. For several years, his CIA had already been conducting extreme experiments on unwitting "human guinea pigs" at black sites in France, Germany, and South Korea. Shortly after he broadcast this cynical lament to the Princeton lads, he approved MK-ULTRA, the most illicit and morally corrupt intelligence program in American history (that we know of). In it, the CIA tested a stomach roiling variety of unregulated drugs, electro-shock, sensory deprivation, and other extreme techniques on unwitting souls across the United States -- in "safe houses," prisons, psychiatric hospitals, doctors' offices -- even in the CIA itself. People died, went crazy, or withered away in a vegetative state, often with little or no clue of what had happened to them.

In Poisoner in Chief, released today, journalist and author Stephen Kinzer makes Dr. Sidney Gottlieb the manifestation of the U.S. government's Cold War obsession with winning, its warped moral compass, and its utter disregard for the law. From 1951 to the late 1960s, under Dulles' protection, Gottlieb was the principal player in what can only be called a maniacal mission to find the perfect drug to destroy/control/reprogram the human mind (he believed, though he was never able to prove, that the drug was LSD).

Gottlieb was also the chief scientist in a CIA program that developed poisons with which to assassinate world leaders (failed attempts included Cuba's Fidel Castro and Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba), tested aerosol-delivered germs and deadly gases, and honed extreme torture techniques. He's been called Dr. Death, Washington's "official poisoner," and a mad scientist. But "Sidney Gottlieb" never became a household name, mostly because he never paid for his crimes. Thanks to Deep State politics, statutes of limitations, a great lawyer, and depressingly weak congressional investigators, Gottlieb was able to take the worst of his secrets to the grave in 1999.

Now, pulling together a trove of existing research, newly unearthed documents, and fresh interviews, Kinzer puts the fetid corpus of American Empire back under a microscope. It isn't pretty -- but it is instructive.

"Commitment to a cause provides the ultimate justification for immoral acts. Patriotism is the most seductive of those causes," Kinzer surmises in an attempt to give context to Gottlieb and Dulles, and Gottlieb's closest patron and conspirator, Richard Helms, who served as CIA chief after Dulles and during the later years of MK-ULTRA.

"Some do things they know are wrong for what they consider good reasons," Kinzer continued. "No one else of Gottlieb's generation, however, had the government-given power to do so many things that were so profoundly and horrifically wrong. No other American -- at least, none that we know of -- ever wielded such terrifying life-or-death power while remaining so completely invisible."

With so much material to work with, Poisoner in Chief is a parade of outrages. But by the time the twisted calliope falls silent, two major themes are left to contemplate.

First, Gottlieb did not emerge in a vacuum but in the primordial ooze of moral justification following World War II. While America was putting its public virtue on display during the Nuremberg trials , the army under the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was courting Nazi scientists who had been involved in the most grotesque human experimentation imaginable during the war. Their expertise in biological warfare and psychoactive drugs was highly prized. The Americans had to make sure, after all, that the commies didn't get to them first.

So under Operation Paperclip , the army "bleached" their records and brought these men in among several hundred other scientists, engineers, and technicians who served the Third Reich. Instead of prison, they were settled into comfortable obscurity in suburban Washington, working for the U.S. government.

For those whose crimes were not so easily scrubbed, the army found ways to collaborate with them overseas in even less controlled environs. Like Kurt Blome , a Nazi scientist who deliberately infected prisoners with deadly viruses, including the plague, at the Auschwitz concentration camp and other sites. After saving him from the gallows at Nuremburg, officials quietly installed him in the European Command Intelligence Center at Oberursel, West Germany -- otherwise known as "Camp King" -- to conduct more experiments, but on our side.

The same went for Japanese scientist Shiro Ishi, who was reportedly responsible for some 10,000 deaths in and around his Manchurian complex called Unit 731 during the war. His ghastly activities included everything from slow-roasting test subjects with electricity, to amputating limbs and dissecting people alive to monitor their slow deaths. At one point, he lined up naked Chinese women and children to see how long they would live after being struck by shrapnel in the buttocks. He also created tons of anthrax that was later used to kill thousands of Chinese civilians.

But instead of bringing this monster to justice, U.S. agents granted Ishi and his Japanese collaborators immunity and obtained all of his research on how toxins affect the body -- including all of the tissue slides from people whose organs were taken out while they were still alive. "Scientists at Camp Detrick (Maryland) were delighted," Kinzer writes.

"Thus did the man responsible for directing the dissection of thousands of living prisoners escape punishment," he adds, noting that Ishi and his minions were deployed to U.S. detention centers in East Asia, where they "helped Americans conceive and carry out experiments on human subjects that could not legally be conducted in the United States.

Secondly, Kinzer highlights how easily American government officials adopted their former wartime foes' detached, ruthless approach to human experimentation, embarking without guidance or oversight on what appears to be a fanatical quest without consequences. At a time when many Americans were zooming to suburbia in search of "Leave it to Beaver," Gottlieb was hiring people like George White, straight out of "The Sweet Smell of Success."

White was "a hard charging narcotics detective who lived large in the twilight world of crime and drugs" writes Kinzer. In 1953 he started setting up "safe houses" in New York and San Francisco where he would use pay hoodlums and prostitutes in drugs and dough to dose unsuspecting subjects with increasing amounts of LSD at "parties" while the CIA peeped the action from two-way mirrors outfitted with cameras.

Meanwhile, Gottlieb gave tons of cash and LSD to doctors like Harris Isbell at the Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky. "Officially this center was a hospital, but it functioned more like a prison," writes Kizner. "Most inmates were African American from the margins of society. They were unlikely to complain if abused."

And abused they were, like most of the test subjects at the prison programs financed by the CIA. If they were told they were part of a test (agreement was typically in exchange for something, like good behavior credits or high grade heroin), they weren't told what kind of drugs they were given or how much. Many of the experiments involved dosing subjects with greater and greater amounts of LSD over long periods of time. Gottlieb wanted to see at what point the mind would dissolve. "He was pleased to have secured a supply of 'expendables' across the United States," Kinzer notes.

Certainly his test subjects at the CIA interrogation cites overseas were "expendable." Kinzer offers a number of cases in which foreign detainees, usually suspected spies, were given massive amounts of different drugs "to see if their minds could be altered." Others were given electro shock. They were later killed, "and their bodies burned."

Then there were the seemingly random tragedies. Like art student Stanley Glickman who was believed to be drugged directly by Gottlieb while at a Paris cafe in 1952, and then taken into a hospital where more "testing" occurred. It was the end of "his productive life," writes Kinzer. Glickman died alone and mentally ill in New York city several decades later. Or Frank Olson, a CIA scientist who "fell or jumped" from a Manhattan hotel window after being unwittingly dosed at a "retreat" hosted by Gottlieb a week earlier. Though his family tried, they were never able to pin his strange death on Gottlieb or the government.

"A Clockwork Orange" (Warner Bros./1971)

Kinzer shows that sometimes paranoia comes from a very real place -- that Big Brother was not only watching, but for nearly 20 years he was drugging and testing germs and other toxins on unsuspecting Americans like they were laboratory animals. And Gottlieb, Dulles, and Helms were no fictional spawn of an over-active imagination. They were highly respected and powerful men with a combined 105 years of government service. They were the system.

So how do we digest this today? We can start by acknowledging that the ends will always justify the means because the government always gets away with it. And we are still living with the effects. The torture techniques set into motion in the 1950's, for example, later surfaced in the dark corners of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, and more recently in the dirty cells of Abu Ghraib detention center.

Indeed, with a head full of Red Menace and lord knows what else, these so-called stalwart men of the "Greatest Generation" pounded the earth as though America owned the world. Perhaps it did. American Empire had many faces during the Cold War, and thanks to Kinzer, Sidney Gottlieb is one you shouldn't forget.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is e xecutive editor at . Follow her on Twitter @Vlahos_at_TAC

[Sep 07, 2019] People who identify more intensely with a political tribe or ideology share an underlying psychological trait: low levels of cognitive flexibility, according to a new study.

Sep 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Joe , September 06, 2019 at 06:20 PM

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190829081401.htm

'Mental rigidity' at root of intense political partisanship on both left and right, study finds

People who identify more intensely with a political tribe or ideology share an underlying psychological trait: low levels of cognitive flexibility, according to a new study.

This "mental rigidity" makes it harder for people to change their ways of thinking or adapt to new environments, say researchers. Importantly, mental rigidity was found in those with the most fervent beliefs and affiliations on both the left and right of the political divide.

The study of over 700 US citizens, conducted by scientists from the University of Cambridge, is the largest -- and first for over 20 years -- to investigate whether the more politically "extreme" have a certain "type of mind" through the use of objective psychological testing.

The findings suggest that the basic mental processes governing our ability to switch between different concepts and tasks are linked to the intensity with which we attach ourselves to political doctrines -- regardless of the ideology.
---
A tautology. People with inflexible minds a have inflexible minds.

But they are referring to us, and the mechanism is hysteria. Certain ideas we cannot hold else we get severe anxiety. It also refers to our favorite economists who teach a 'This time is different' code only to discover that are the umptenth set of economists to do 'This time is different'.

Inevitably we end u with voter's regret, a fear that we are easily duped into a fraud.

[Sep 07, 2019] Mueller Helped Saudis Cover Up Involvement In 9-11 Attacks Lawsuit

Sep 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Robert Mueller - pitched as an incorruptible beacon of justice when he was tasked with (unsuccessfully) hunting down ties between Donald Trump and Russia - was nothing more than a hatchet man for the deep state , who participated in a coverup of Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11 according to a new report by the New York Post 's Paul Sperry - citing former FBI investigators and a new lawsuit by 9/11 victims.

According to Sperry, Mueller stonewalled after FBI agents discovered evidence of "multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks, " while the former FBI director allegedly "covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh -- and may have even misled Congress about what he knew. "

" He was the master when it came to covering up the kingdom's role in 9/11 ," said Sharon Premoli, a September 11th survivor who was pulled out of the rubble of the World Trade Center, and is now suing Saudi Arabia as a plaintiff in a new lawsuit .

"In October of 2001, Mueller shut down the government's investigation after only three weeks , and then took part in the Bush [administration's] campaign to block, obfuscate and generally stop anything about Saudi Arabia from being released," she added.

" Any letting the Saudis off the hook came from the White House ," said former Agent Mark Rossini, adding "I can still see that photo of Bandar and Bush enjoying cigars on the balcony of the White House two days after 9/11."

Speaking with multiple FBI case agents, Sperry lists a series of incidents describing Mueller 'throwing up roadblocks' in front of his own investigators - "making it easier for Saudi suspects to escape questioning." And according to the lawsuit, Mueller "deep-sixed what evidence his agents did manage to uncover."

Via the NY Post :

***

"He's a villain, and an arrogant one to boot," said former FBI agent Mark Wauck, who called Mueller a "servant of the deep state."

Tunga , 12 minutes ago link

Oh those securities!

"

"Certain key unknown figures in the Federal Reserve may have 'conspired' with key unknown figures at the Bank of New York to create a situation where $240 billion in off balance sheet securities created in 1991 as part of an official covert operation to overthrow the Soviet Union, could be cleared without publicly acknowledging their existence. These securities, originally managed by Cantor Fitzgerald, were cleared and settled in the aftermath of September 11th

through the BoNY. The $100 billion account balance bubble reported by the Wall Street Journalas being experienced in the BoNY was tip of a three day operation, when these securities were moved from off-balance-sheet to the balance sheet.

LEEPERMAX , 13 minutes ago link

A FUMBLING two-faced WEAK, FRAIL man with NO MORALS or INTEGRITY was what we saw that day in front of the committee.

Conscious Reviver , 19 minutes ago link

Mueller's a real criminal, but it is not the Saudis who is helped cover up for, it's the Evil Entity Israel that did 9/11. Everyone with two working brain cells knows that, except the Zionist shill that wrote this crap article.

mrjinx007 , 20 minutes ago link

911 is just four days away. Let's listen to them read 3000 names on that day and feel warm and cozys so we remember one more time what president **** Cheney and Vice President Donald Rumsfeld brought upon this country with the help of Susan Rice and the general's speech about mushroom clouds.

warpigs , 33 minutes ago link

Is this 9-11 stuff still considered a real foreign attack by anyone?

What the actual ****?

Of course ir was an internal hit job by our own and other govies.

19 dirtball inbred retards circumvent the most advanced nation's entire security apparatus to kill 3-4k people? Really?

I have to, at this point, assume good people are simply too scared to say out loud over Thanksgiving sinner table that they believe their gov is evil.

Fantasy Free Economics , 41 minutes ago link

Coverups and conspiracies are a way of life in Washington. Coverups are discovered after it is too late to do anything. There is a huge coverup going on right now to prevent anointed members of the power structure of the world from being exposed. http://quillian.net/blog/the-importance-of-covering-up-the-epstein-affair/

robertsgt40 , 1 hour ago link

How about the FBI cover-up of the "five dancing Israelis" that confirmed on Israeli TV, they were there to "document the event" by video and were allowed to leave the country without further ado.

And then there's Lucky Larry Silverstein who collected handsomely from insurances on the collapse of bldgs 1,2 and my favorite bldg7.

DutchTaco , 1 hour ago link

9/11 was just operation Northwood in action. Same goes for MH17, also an operation Northwood to make people hate each other

[Sep 07, 2019] 14 Strange Facts Exposed As General Flynn's Endgame Approaches

Sep 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Here are just some of the twists and turns in the case, which has gone on for more than three years.

  1. Flynn's trip to Russia in 2015, where it was claimed Flynn went without the knowledge or approval of the DIA or anyone in Washington, was proven not to be true .
  2. Flynn was suspected of being compromised by a supposed Russian agent, Cambridge academic Svetlana Lokhova, based on allegations from Western intelligence asset Stefan Halper. This was also proven to be not true.
  3. Flynn's phone calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were framed as being incredibly shady and a potential violation of the Logan Act . This allegation was always preposterous .
  4. Unnamed intelligence officials leaked the details of the Flynn-Kislyak phone calls to The Washington Post.
  5. FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joseph Pientka were dispatched by Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe to interview Flynn at the White House, even though the FBI had already reviewed the transcripts of the calls and cleared Flynn of any crimes .
  6. Both FBI Director James Comey and McCabe testified to Congress that Flynn didn't lie.
  7. Despite what McCabe and Comey both testified to under oath before Congress, the Mueller special counsel's office decided to prosecute Flynn for perjury in November of 2017 .
  8. The very strange post-dated FD-302 form on the FBI's January 2017 interview of Flynn that wasn't filled out until August 2017, almost seven months afterward, is revealed in a court filing by Flynn's defense team .
  9. FBI agent Pientka became the "DOJ's Invisible Man," despite the fact that Congress has repeatedly called for him to testify. Pientka has remained out of sight and out of mind more than a year and a half since his name first surfaced in connection with the Flynn case.
  10. Judge Rudolph Contreras was removed from the Flynn case immediately after accepting Flynn's guilty plea and was replaced by Judge Emmit Sullivan .
  11. Sullivan issued what's known as a Brady order to prosecutors -- which ordered them to immediately turn over any exculpatory evidence to Flynn's defense team. Flynn's team then made a filing alleging the withholding of exculpatory evidence .
  12. Flynn was given a chance to withdraw his guilty plea by Judge Sullivan but refused , and insisted to go forward with sentencing.
  13. Flynn suddenly fired his lawyers for the past two years and hired Sidney Powell to lead his new legal team following special counsel Robert Mueller's disastrous testimony to Congress . And now, the latest startling development:
  14. Flynn filed to have the Mueller prosecution team replaced for having withheld exculpatory evidence , despite Sullivan having directly ordered them to hand any such evidence over months ago.

Now, it's not that far-fetched of an idea that the Mueller special counsel prosecutors would hide exculpatory evidence from the Flynn defense team, since they've just admitted to having done exactly that in another case their office has been prosecuting .

The defense team for Internet Research Agency/Concord, more popularly known as "the Russian troll farm case," hasn't been smooth going for the Mueller prosecutors.

First, the prosecution team got a real tongue-lashing from Judge Dabney L. Friedrich in early July , when it turned out they had no evidence whatsoever to prove their assertion that the Russian troll farms were being run by the Putin government.

Then, in a filing submitted to the court on Aug. 30, the IRA/Concord defense team alerted Judge Friedrich that the prosecutors just got around to handing them key evidence the prosecutors had for the past 18 months. The prosecution gave no explanation whatsoever as to why they hid this key evidence for more than a year.

It's hard to see at this point how the entire IRA/Concord case isn't tossed out.

What would it mean for Flynn's prosecutors to have been caught hiding exculpatory evidence from him and his lawyers, even after the presiding judge explicitly ordered them in February to hand over everything they had?

It would mean that the Flynn case is tossed out, since the prosecution team was caught engaging in gross misconduct.

Now you can see why Flynn refused to withdraw his guilty plea when Judge Sullivan gave him the opportunity to do so in late December 2018.

A withdrawal of the guilty plea or a pardon would let the Mueller prosecution team off the hook.

And they're not getting off the hook.

Flynn hired the best lawyer he possibly could have when it comes to exposing prosecutorial misconduct. Nobody knows the crafty, corrupt, and dishonest tricks federal prosecutors use better than Powell, who actually wrote a compelling book about such matters, entitled " License to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice ."

Everything this Mueller prosecution team did in withholding exculpatory evidence from Flynn's defense team -- and continued to withhold even after Judge Sullivan specifically issued an order about it -- is going to be fully exposed.

Defying a federal judge's Brady order is a one-way ticket to not only getting fired, it's a serious enough offense to warrant disbarment and prosecution.

If it turns out Mueller special counsel prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence -- not only in the IRA/Concord case, but also in the cases against Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Rick Gates, Roger Stone, and others -- that will have a huge impact.

If they are willing to withhold exculpatory evidence in one case, why wouldn't they do the same thing in other cases they were prosecuting? Haven't they have already demonstrated they are willing to break the rules? Tags

Tirion , 3 minutes ago link

We have become a third-world country. Even throwing Mueller and his entire prosecutors' team in jail would not be enough to restore confidence in our legal system. But it would be a start.

consistentliving , 2 hours ago link

On or about December 28, 2016, the Russian Ambassador contacted FLYNN.

c. On or about December 29, 2016, FLYNN called a senior official of the Presidential Transition Team ("PTT official"), who was with other senior ·members of the Presidential Transition Team at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, to discuss what, if anything, to communicate to the Russian Ambassador about the U.S. Sanctions. On that call, FLYNN and 2 Case 1:17-cr-00232-RC Document 4 Filed 12/01/17 Page 2 of 6 the PTT official discussed the U.S. Sanctions, including the potential impact of those sanctions on the incoming administration's foreign policy goals. The PIT official and FLYNN also discussed that the members of the Presidential Transition Team at Mar-a-Lago did not want Russia to escalate the situation. d. Immediately after his phone call with the PTT official, FLYNN called the Russian Ambassador and requested that Russia not escalate the situation and only respond to the U.S. Sanctions in a reciprocal manner. e. Shortly after his phone call with the Russian Ambassador, FLYNN spoke with the PTT official to report on the substance of his call with the Russian Ambassador, including their discussion of the U.S. Sanctions. f. On or about December 30, 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin released a statement indicating that Russia would not take retaliatory measures in response to the U.S. Sanctions at that time. g. On or about December 31, 2016, the Russian Ambassador called FLYNN and informed him that Russia had chosen not to retaliate in response to FL YNN's request. h. After his phone call with the Russian Ambassador, FLYNN spoke with senior members of the Presidential Transition Team about FL YNN's conversations with the Russian Ambassador regarding the U.S. Sanctions and Russia's decision not to escalate the situation.

https://www.justice.gov/file/1015126/download

Charlie_Martel , 2 hours ago link

The coup plot between the international intelligence community (which includes our FBI-CIA-etc) and their unregistered foreign agents in the multinational corporate media is slowly being revealed.

Mah_Authoritah , 2 hours ago link

The truth is so precious that it must be spoon fed.

Transmedia001 , 3 hours ago link

Here’s another possibility... elites in the US Gov set on running a soft coup against a duly elected president and his team made up a whole pile of **** and passed it off as truth.

spoonful , 2 hours ago link

Agreed, so long as you put Flynn on the side of the elites

Boris Badenov , 3 hours ago link

The Manafort thing has me totally riled since HRC's "Password" guy and his brother were PARTNERS with manafort, did the same damn things, and were NOT investigated.

Donald Trump is many things to many people, but is not his social personna to be patient. He is being VERY patient to let this unfold, to "give a man enough rope" or political party and its owner, as it may be....

Donna Brazile's book is under-rated: it holds they keys as to who ran the DNC and why after Obie bailed.

TheAnswerIs42 , 3 hours ago link

Our local community rag (Vermont) had an opinion piece last week about "The slide towards Facism", where the author breathlessly stated that she had learned from a MSNBC expose by Rachel Maddow that the administration was firing researchers at NASA and EPA as well as cutting back funding for LGBTQ support groups. Oh the horror. The author conveniently forgot that the same dyke had lied for 2 years about Russia,Russia,Russia but it's still OK to believe any **** that drops out of her mouth.

This is the level of insanity happening around here. Of course it is Bernie's turf.

People who are so stupid and gullible deserve everything they are gonna get.

LEEPERMAX , 4 hours ago link

14 Strange Facts About Mueller's "Michael Flynn Scam"

https://youtu.be/ksb8VsOMqQg

LEEPERMAX , 4 hours ago link

MUELLER and his "Band of Legal Clowns" have played us all for "Absolute Fools" again and again.

THE U.S. IS A CAPTURED OPERATION

Drop-Hammer , 4 hours ago link

Poor Flynn. Rail-roaded by ZOG and Obama and Hillary and Co. I hope beyond hope that the truth is revealed and that he can sue the **** out of the seditionists/(((seditionists))) who put him into this mess such that his great-great-grandchildren will never have to work.

I also blame Trump for throwing Flynn under the bus.

Westcoastliberal , 3 hours ago link

Trump didn't throw Flynn under the bus, I think he would pardon him later, but Trump needs to let this play out. Otherwise the left will bury him.

just the tip , 36 minutes ago link

trump threw flynn under the bus when trump said the reason he let flynn go was flynn lied to pence.

Homer E. Rectus , 4 hours ago link

If they are willing to withhold exculpatory evidence in one case, why wouldn’t they do the same thing in other cases they were prosecuting? Haven’t they have already demonstrated they are willing to break the rules?

Duh! Because it's easy and the media never covers it and AG Barr and FBI director Wray will cover it all up. America no longer operates under rule of law, and now we all know it. Never cooperate with them!

Roger Casement , 4 hours ago link

Mike Flynn stands for us. Help him put handicapped trolls out of work.

Buy lunch for Sidney Powell. o7

https://mikeflynndefensefund.org/

ztack3r , 4 hours ago link

flynn didn't rape children, to buzy trying to fight liberators of iraq and afganistan from invasion... that's his major crime.

I guess, kelly, mattis, mcmaster neither are on the child rape trend. but what can they do? when the entire cia and doj and fbi are full on controlled and run by the pedos? it's like when all the cardinals and the pope are pedos, what a bishop to do...

Why would CIA Rothschild'd up puppet Trump pick only the best William Barr?

Who told Acosta to cut no prosecution deal with Epstein? George Bush? Robert Mukasey? or Bob Mueller?

Trump, Barr, Bush, Mueller all on the same no rule of law national no government pys op , for Epstein & 9/11 clean op team Poppa Bush, Clinton, & Mossad.

Barr: CIA operative

It is a sobering fact that American presidents (many of whom have been corrupt) have gone out of their way to hire fixers to be their attorney generals.

Consider recent history: Loretta Lynch (2015-2017), Eric Holder (2009-2015), Michael Mukasey (2007-2009), Alberto Gonzales (2005-2007), John Ashcroft (2001-2005),Janet Reno (1993-2001), **** Thornburgh (1988-1991), Ed Meese (1985-1988), etc.

Barr, however, is a particularly spectacular and sordid case. As George H.W. Bush’s most notorious insider, and as the AG from 1991 to 1993, Barr wreaked havoc, flaunted the rule of law, and proved himself to be one of the CIA/Deep State’s greatest and most ruthless champions and protectors :

A strong case can be made that William Barr was as powerful and important a figure in the Bush apparatus as any other, besides Poppy Bush himself.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/ciabushiran-contra-covert-operative-fixer-william-barr-nominated-attorney-general/5662609

my new username , 4 hours ago link

That's FBI lawfare: either you plead guilty of crimes you did not commit, or we frame your son, as well as bankrupt you.

Roger Casement , 5 hours ago link

Mike Flynn stands for us. Going to buy guns or butter for the cause?

These consiglieres went after his son. They aren't lawyers. They are hitmen.

https://mikeflynndefensefund.org/

ztack3r , 4 hours ago link

there is a war on america, and the DoD and men like flynn are too arrogant, dumb, and proud to admit they have been fucked and conned deeply by men way smarter than them...

we don't need ******* brains, but killers to wage this revolution against the american pedostate.

and that, what they master, they don't want to do.

if they want money, they should have learned to trade and not kill...

[Sep 06, 2019] Trump vs MSM spectacle gets boring

Notable quotes:
"... Anyone read Ronan Farrows "War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence"? In one passage he describes a meeting at the State Department where they are complaining that nobody is interested in their policy prescriptions and decide that the problem is that they need some graphs. They all turn to Farrrow and look at him as he is the youngest in the meeting and figure he is the only one who would know how to do that. "Ageism" he thought. ..."
"... The problem with the mainstream media calling out Trump is that this is like the pot calling a kettle black. Trump is awful, sure. But so is the corporate media with its pro-war and neoliberal economic agenda. ..."
"... As Ian Welsh notes, the press is Trump's enemy, not the servant of the people: https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-press-is-trumps-enemy-not-the-lefts-friend/ ..."
"... RussiaRussiaRussia has been very profitable, not only personally for the talking heads in the intelligence community but for the press. Removing clearance not only hits the talking heads in the wallet, it disrupts the relation between the press and its network of anonymous sources. ..."
"... Re 2), there seems to be an element of induced demand to support the preponderance of repetitive coverage, somewhat akin to the dopamine manipulation in video games and on social media websites. Bug and feature. ..."
Sep 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

The Rev Kev , August 17, 2018 at 7:59 am

This author is right. I do not know if you would call what the media did a form of virtue-signalling or whatever but the net effect is a demonstration that the media is into coordinated campaigns. I do not think that people have forgotten the "This Is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy" Sinclair script a few months ago. This is just more of the same.
I don't even know why they act so b***-hurt when Trump attacks their honesty. In the last few months I have seen them call him a traitor, a gay-bitch, they have called for a military coup to unseat him, they have begged for the deep state to rescue them, they have elevated people who are responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers to the ranks of noble heroes of the Republic. As far as I am concerned, they have made their own bed and now they can lay in it, even if they have to share it with Donald J. Trump.

Kokuanani , August 17, 2018 at 9:20 am

Big media outlets need not actually report news that affects your life and point to serious solutions for social ills. They can just bad mouth Trump.

Substitute "The Democratic Party" for "big media outlets" and you've got another accurate picture.

Angie Neer , August 17, 2018 at 1:40 pm

Yesterday when I looked at the NYT online, the big featured graphic in the center of the page, typically a photo, was a rotating feed of Trump tweets, in headline-sized text. It struck me as a new low in the pathetic Trump-media feedback loop. It's all a game of "made you look!"

Bill Smith , August 17, 2018 at 2:05 pm

Yeah, they probably got a summer intern to do that.

Anyone read Ronan Farrows "War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence"? In one passage he describes a meeting at the State Department where they are complaining that nobody is interested in their policy prescriptions and decide that the problem is that they need some graphs. They all turn to Farrrow and look at him as he is the youngest in the meeting and figure he is the only one who would know how to do that. "Ageism" he thought.

Altandmain , August 17, 2018 at 6:25 pm

The problem with the mainstream media calling out Trump is that this is like the pot calling a kettle black. Trump is awful, sure. But so is the corporate media with its pro-war and neoliberal economic agenda.

As Ian Welsh notes, the press is Trump's enemy, not the servant of the people: https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-press-is-trumps-enemy-not-the-lefts-friend/

A case could be made that independent media like Naked Capitalism is doing a key public service. Not the corporate media though, whose main objective is always to maximize advertising revenues and to impose the views of its owners, the very rich, on society.

Lambert Strether , August 18, 2018 at 2:32 pm

Two random comments on this topic:

1) The best justification for giving officials formally out of government clearance on either side of the revolving door is that you may need to call on them for advice. It seems to me that this incentivizes "intelligence" over wisdom. And for wisdom, long experience plus open sources should be enough. (For example, if you want to call in an ex-official on North Korean nukes, they don't really need to know the details of the latest weaponry, or Kim's weight gain, or whatever. That can be explained to them by the customer , as needed. What's really needed is an outside voice -- the role played by an honest consultant -- plus wisdom about power relations on the Korean peninsula. No need for clearance there.)

2) RussiaRussiaRussia has been very profitable, not only personally for the talking heads in the intelligence community but for the press. Removing clearance not only hits the talking heads in the wallet, it disrupts the relation between the press and its network of anonymous sources.


Enquiring Mind, August 18, 2018 at 9:02 pm

Re 2), there seems to be an element of induced demand to support the preponderance of repetitive coverage, somewhat akin to the dopamine manipulation in video games and on social media websites. Bug and feature.

[Sep 06, 2019] The CIA Bull in Glenn Simpson's Russia Shop naked capitalism

Notable quotes:
"... Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I’m wondering why it’s that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. ..."
Sep 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

https://eus.rubiconproject.com/usync.html

https://acdn.adnxs.com/ib/static/usersync/v3/async_usersync.html

https://c.deployads.com/sync?f=html&s=2343&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2018%2F01%2Fcia-bull-glenn-simpsons-russia-shop.html <img src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=16807273&cv=2.0&cj=1" /> The CIA Bull in Glenn Simpson's Russia Shop Posted on January 22, 2018 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

In criminal trials the rule for prosecuting and defending lawyers is the same. Never ask a witness a question unless you already know the answer. The corollary rule for defending lawyers is – if the answer to your question will incriminate your client, don't ask it, and hope the prosecutor fails to do his job.

Glenn Simpson, a former employee of the Wall Street Journal in New York, is currently on trial in the US for having fabricated a dossier of allegations of Russian misconduct (bribes, sex, blackmail, hacking) involving President Donald Trump and circulating them to the press; the objective was to damage Trump's candidacy before the election of November 8, 2016. Simpson was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on August 22, 2017; then the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on November 8 and again on November 14, 2017. So far, Simpson's veracity and business conduct face nothing more than the court of public opinion. He has not yet been charged with criminal or civil offences. That will happen if the evidence materializes that Simpson has been lying.

Simpson's collaborator in the dossier and his business partner, Christopher Steele, is facing trial in the London High Court, charged with libels he and Simpson published in their dossier. Together, they are material witnesses in two federal US court trials for defamation, one in Miami and one in New York. If they perjure themselves giving evidence in those cases, they are likely to face criminal indictments. If they tell the truth, they are likely to face fresh defamation proceedings; perhaps a civil racketeering suit for fraud; maybe a false statement prosecution under the US criminal code.

One question for them is as obvious as its answer. Who do an American ex-journalist on US national security and an ex-British intelligence agent go to for sources on Russian undercover operations outside Russia in general, the US in particular? Answer -- first, their friends and contacts from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); second, their friends and contacts from the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, as the UK counterpart is known.

Why then did the twenty-two congressmen, the members of the House Intelligence Committee who subpoenaed Simpson for interview, fail to pursue what information he and Steele received either directly from the CIA or indirectly through British intelligence?

The answer noone in the US wants to say aloud is the possibility that it was the CIA which provided Simpson and Steele with names and source materials for their dossier, creating the evidence of a Russian plot against the US election, and generating evidence of Russian operations. If that is what happened, then Simpson and Steele were participants in a false-flag CIA operation in US politics.

This isn't idle speculation. It has been under investigation at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) since Simpson and Steele decided in mid-2016 to go to the FBI to request an investigation, and then told American press to get the FBI to confirm it was investigating. At the fresh request this month from the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI is still investigating .

Simpson's appearance at the House Intelligence Committee was the sequel to his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee; for that story, read this .

Simpson's three lawyers from the Washington, DC, firm of Cunningham Levy Muse, who appeared with him at the Senate and House committee hearings. From left to right, Robert Muse; Joshua Levy, and Rachel Clattenburg.  
The firm's other name partner, Bryan Cunningham, was a CIA officer specializingin cyber operations.

The transcripts of the House Intelligence Committee were released last Thursday. Simpson's first appearance was on November 8, and can be read in full here .

Simpson's lawyers did all the talking; Simpson said nothing, pleading the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.

Although his lawyers repeatedly claimed during the earlier Senate Committee hearing that Simpson was testifying voluntarily, the House Committee recorded that Simpson was compelled to testify. "Our record today," the November 8 transcript begins, "will reflect that you have been compelled to appear today pursuant to a subpoena issued on October 4th, 2017." Simpson then told the Committee through his lawyers that he would plead the Fifth Amendment and not answer any questions. The first transcript is a record of debate between Republican and Democratic members of the Committee.

This resulted in an agreement for Simpson to testify under the subpoena but on terms his lawyers said would limit the scope of the questions which he would agree to answer.

Steele, according to the November 8 transcript, was also summoned to testify. A British citizen with home in Berkshire and office in London, he refused and the Committee recorded his "noncooperation and nontestimony."

Republicans outnumber Democrats on the House Committee, 13 to 9. Just 5 Republican members were at Simpson's November 14 appearance; 7 Democrats. The Republican committee chairman, Devin Nunes, was absent. Release of Simpson's transcript was an initiative of the Democrats. In a statement by their leader on the committee, Adam Schiff, the Democrats claimed last week "thus far, Committee Republicans have refused to look into this key area and we hope the release of this transcript will reinforce the importance of these critical questions to our investigation."

Read the November 14 testimony here .

Members of the House Intelligence Committee on the podium at an open hearing inNovember 2017.    From left to right: Adam Schiff (D), Michael Conaway (R),and Thomas Rooney (R).

Search the 165 pages of the transcript for the CIA, and you will find many references to the letters, C, I and A – spe cia lize, so cia l, commer cia l, espe cia lly, asso cia tion, finan cia l and politi cia n. There were 44 mentions of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI); 4 mentions of "British Intelligence" – the spy agency to which Steele belonged ten years ago – one mention each of the Israeli Mossad, the Chinese and Indian intelligence services.

According to Simpson, "foreign intelligence services hacking American political operations is not that unusual, actually, and there's a lot of foreign intelligence services that play in American elections." He mentioned the Chinese and the Indians, not the Israelis. The Mossad, Simpson did tell the Committee, was his source for his belief that Russian intelligence has been operating through the Jewish Orthodox Chabad movement, and the Russian Orthodox Church. "The Orthodox church is also an arm of the Russian State now the Mossad guys used to tell me about how the Russians were laundering money through the Orthodox church in Israel, and that it was intelligence operations."

There are just two references in the Committee transcript to the CIA. One was a passing remark to imply the Russians cannot "break[ing] into the CIA, [so instead] you are breaking into, you know, places where, you know, an open society leaves open."

The second was a bombshell. It dropped during questioning by Congressman Thomas Rooney (right),
a 3-term Republican representative from Florida with a career as an army lawyer. Rooney asked Simpson: "Do you or anyone else independently verify or corroborate any information in the dossier?"

Simpson replied by saying, "Yes. Well, numerous things in the dossier have been verified. You know, I don't have access to the intelligence or law enforcement information that I see made reference to, but, you know, things like, you know, the Russian Government has been investigating Hillary Clinton and has a lot of information about her."

Then Simpson contradicted himself, disclosing what he had just denied. "When the original memos came in saying that the Kremlin was mounting a specific operation to get Donald Trump elected President , that was not what the Intelligence Community was saying. The Intelligence Community was saying they are just seeking to disrupt our election and our political process, and that this is sort of kind of just a generally nihilistic, you know, trouble-making operation. And, you know, Chris turned out to be right, it was specifically designed to elect Donald Trump President."

How did Simpson know with such confidence what the "Intelligence Community" was "saying", and who were Simpson's and Steele's sources in the "Intelligence Community"? Rooney failed to inquire. Instead, he and Simpson exchanged question and answer regarding the approach Simpson and Steele made to the FBI when they delivered their dossier. In the details of that, Simpson repeated what he had already told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Rooney then asked what contact had been made with the CIA or "any other intelligence officials". Simpson claimed he didn't understand the question at first, then he stumbled.

Source: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00/20180118/106796/HMTG-115-IG00-20180118-SD002.pdf -- page 61 .

What Simpson was concealing in the two pauses, reported in the transcript as hyphens, Rooney did not realize. Simpson was implying that noone from Fusion GPS, his consulting company, had been in contact with the CIA, nor him personally. But Simpson left open that Steele had been in contact with the CIA. Rooney followed with a question about "anyone", but that was so imprecise, Simpson recovered his confidence to say "No". That was a cover-up – and the House Intelligence Committee let it drop noiselessly.

Intelligence community sources and colleagues who know Simpson and Steele say Simpson was notorious at the Wall Street Journal for coming up with conspiracy theories for which the evidence was missing or unreliable. He told the Committee that disbelief on the part of his editors and management had been one of his reasons for leaving the newspaper. "One of the reasons why I left the Wall Street Journal was because I wanted to write more stories about Russian influence in Washington, D.C., on both the Democrats and the Republicans eventually the Journal lost interest in that subject. And I was frustrated that was where I left my journalism career."

Left: Glenn Simpson reporter for the Wall Street Journal in 1996, promoting his book, Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics.  Right: Simpson in Washington in August 2017.

When Simpson was asked "do you – did you find anything to -- that you verified as false in the dossier, since or during?" Simpson replied: "I have not seen anything – ". Note the hypthen, the stenographer's signal that Simpson was pausing.

"[Question]. So everything in that dossier, as far as you're concerned, is true or could be true?"

"MR. SIMPSON: I didn't say that. What I said was it was credible at the time it came in. We were able to corroborate various things that supported its credibility."

Sources in London are divided on the question of where Steele's sources came from – CIA, MI6, or elsewhere. What has been clear for the year in which the dossier's contents have been in public circulation is that the sources the dossier referred to as "Russian" were not. For details of the sourcing . The subsequent identification of the Maltese source Joseph Mifsud, and the Greek-American George Papadopoulos, corroborates their lack of direct Russian sources. Instead, the sources identified in the dossier were either Americans, Americans of Russian ethnic origin, or Russians with no direct knowledge repeating hearsay three or four times removed from source.

So were the allegations of the dossier manufactured by a CIA disinformation unit, and fed back to the US through the British agent, Steele? Or were they a Simpson conspiracy theory of the type that failed to pass veracity testing when Simpson was at the Wall Street Journal? The House Intelligence Committee failed to inquire.

One independent clue is what financial and other links Simpson and Steele and their consulting firms, Fusion GPS and Orbis Business Intelligence, have had with US Government agencies other than the FBI, and what US Government contracts they were paid for, before the Republican and Democratic Party organizations commissioned the anti-Trump job?

The House Committee has subpoenaed business records from Fusion, but Simpson's lawyers say they will refuse to hand them over. The financial records of Steele's firm are openly accessible through the UK government company registry, Companies House. Click to read here .

Because the Trump dossier work ran from the second half of 2015 to November 2016, the financial reports of Orbis for the financial years ending March 31, 2016, and March 31, 2017, are the primary sources. For FY 2016 and FY 2017, open this link to read.

The papers reveal that Orbis was a small firm with no more than 7 employees. Steele's business partner and co-shareholder, Christopher Burrows, is another former MI6 spy. They had been hoping for MI6 support of their private business, but it failed to materialize, says an London intelligence source. "Chris Burrows is another from the same background. They all hope to be Hakluyt [a leading commercial intelligence operation in London] but didn't get the nod on departure."

Left: Christopher Steele; right, Christopher Burrows.

They do not report the Orbis income. Instead, for 2016 the company filings indicate £155,171 in cash at the bank, and income of £245,017 owed by clients and contractors. Offsetting that figure, Orbis owed £317,848 – to whom and for what purposes is not reported. The unaudited accounts show Orbis's profit jumped from £121,046 in 2015 to £199,223 in 2016, and £441,089 in 2017.

The financial data are complicated by the operation by Steele and Burrows of a second company, Orbis Business Intelligence International, a subsidiary they created in 2010, a year after the parent company was formed. Follow its affairs here .

According to British press reports , Orbis and Steele were paid £200,000 for the dossier. Simpson told the House Intelligence Committee the sum was much less -- $160,000 (about £114,000). Simpson's firm, he also testified, was being paid at a rate of about $50,000 per month for a total of about $320,000. If the British sources are more accurate than Simpson's testimony, Steele's takings from the dossier represented roughly half the profit on the Orbis balance-sheet.

British sources also report that a US Government agency paid for Orbis to work on evidence and allegations of corruption at the world soccer federation, Fédération Internationale de Football (FIFA). Indictments in this case were issued by the US Department of Justice in May 2015 , and the following December . What role the two-partner British consultancy played in the complex investigations by teams from the Justice Department, the FBI and also the Internal Revenue Service is unclear. That Steele, Burrows and Orbis depended on US government sources for their financial well-being appears to be certain.

Another reported version of the FIFA contract is that Steele, Burrows and Orbis were hired by the British Football Association to collect materials on FIFA corruption, and provide them to the FBI and other US investigators, and then to the press. The scheme's objective was reportedly to advance the British bidding for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022 by discrediting the rival bids from Russia and Qatar. Click to read . Were MI6 and CIA sources mobilized by Orbis to feed the FBI with evidence the US investigators were unable to turn up, or was Orbis the conduit through which disinformation targeting Russia was fed to make it appear more credible to the FBI, and to the media?

US Congressional investigators have so far failed to notice the similarities between the FIFA and the Trump dossier operations. Early this month two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that they have called for a Justice Department and FBI investigation of Steele for providing false information to the FBI. The provision of the US code making lying a federal crime requires the falsehoods occur "within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States." Simpson has testified that when Steele briefed the FBI on the dossier, he did so at meetings in Rome, Italy.

Now then, Part I and this sequel of the Simpson-Steele story having been read and thoroughly mulled over, what can the meaning be?

In the short run, this case was a black job assigned by Republican Party candidates for president, then the Democratic National Committee, for the purpose of discrediting Trump in favour of Hillary Clinton. It failed on Election Day in 2016; the Democrats are still trying.

In the long run, the case is a measurement of the life, or the half-life, of truth. Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote once that nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily. On his clock, that was five minutes. He didn't know the United States, or shall we say the stretch from Washington through New York to the North End of Boston. There, truth has an even shorter life. Scarcely a second.

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Rhondda , January 22, 2018 at 3:57 pm

I pay pretty close attention to this topic and I must say I sometimes wonder if the Russians haven’t sold the rope to the American political elite. I read all 311 pages of Simpson’s testimony. I was struck that much of what he was “fed” by Steele confirmed his “OMG Russia corruption” biases.

And I say “fed to him” when I’m in a generous mood, giving him the benefit of the doubt, because usually I am of the opinion that he’s either a really crappy CIA agent posing as a journalist or just a garden variety rat f*!@er. A black job political operative, stitching together a few almost-believable “facts” and out-and-out fabrications with squishy words like “collusion” and “ties.”

From the embedded link in Helmer’s text above:
http://johnhelmer.net/glenn-simpson-chases-his-shadow-into-a-black-hole/

London due diligence firms say the record of Simpson’s firm Fusion GPS and Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence operations in the US has discredited them in the due diligence market. The London experts believe the Senate Committee transcript shows Simpson and Steele were hired for the black job of discrediting the target of their research, Trump; did a poor job; failed in 2016; and now are engaged in bitter recriminations against each other to avoid multi-million dollar court penalties.

A source at a London firm which is larger and better known than Steele’s Orbis says “standard due diligence means getting to the truth. It’s confidential to the client, and not leaked. There are also black jobs, white jobs, and red jobs. Black means the client wants you to dig up dirt on the target, and make it look credible for publishing in the press. White means the client wants you to clear him of the wrongdoing which he’s being accused of in the media or the marketplace; it’s also leaked to the press. A red job is where the client pays the due diligence firm to hire a journalist to find out what he knows and what he’s likely to publish, in order to bribe or stop him. The Steele dossier on Trump is an obvious black job. Too obvious.”

Emphasis mine.

3.14e-9 , January 22, 2018 at 6:49 pm

Rhondaa writes:

I read all 311 pages of Simpson’s testimony. I was struck that much of what he was “fed” by Steele confirmed his “OMG Russia corruption” biases.

Same here, but not just about what he was fed by Steele. Simpson claimed to have done some of his own research and said it was consistent with what he got from Steele.

I’m about three-quarters of the way through the transcript of Simpson’s interrogation by the House Intelligence Committee, and I’ve read all 312 pages of the Senate Judiciary Committee transcript, which bears little resemblance to what was reported in the major media – shocking, I know.

Among the “bombshells” the mainstream reported was “proof” that it wasn’t the dossier that launched the FBI’s investigation of Trump, and therefore the dossier couldn’t have been used as justification for a FISA warrant. A bigger bombshell, which of course none of them mentioned, is that Simpson, with his client’s consent, was secretly briefing Clinton-friendly reporters on information from Steele’s memos, and they used it to write stories based on “unnamed sources.” He even admitted that he didn’t verify the information before feeding it to the media, said he didn’t feel he needed to, because it came from a trustworthy source. Where have we heard that before?

Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I’m wondering why it’s that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. It’s well-established that the State Department often acts as a cover for the CIA, and the agency under Secretary Clinton had a strong anti-Russia faction that’s on the record as meddling in Ukraine’s presidential election. And how much doubt could there be that both Clintons kept the CIA connections they made while in office?

Then there was the whole “Grizzly Steppe” report just before Trump’s inauguration, presented as a consensus among “17 intelligence agencies” that the Russians “hacked the election” to help Trump win.

I’m not 100-percent convinced that U.S. intelligence was behind the dossier, but it’s enough of a possibility that I’m not writing it off as some nutty “conspiracy theory.”

integer , January 23, 2018 at 4:16 am

Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I’m wondering why it’s that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing.

FWIW this NC commenter has never had any problem believing that this may be the case. In fact I am fairly certain that it is the case, although from what I understand the FBI and MI6 were also involved.

Adding: Heh. I posted this before looking at Rev Kev’s link to the Raimondo article, which comes to the same conclusions. Interesting times!

Scott1 , January 22, 2018 at 4:37 pm

I believe that Seth Abramson or someone put photographs to the Steele dossier showing people in the places & at the times delineated in the Steele dossier.
From the very first Steele said he would not & could not reveal his sources. It was from the first indicated that it would be to the FBI & CIA to discover.
He said he believed that his sources were credible.
When I was studying Intelligence services the CIA was said to be the private army of the CIA. These days I don’t know exactly who the CIA works for, or answers to.
I certainly don’t think well of the CIA believing they are wrapped up working for their Front businesses more than focusing on the mission of spying in the interests of the American people.
Of private intelligence companies I get what I can from IHS Jane’s.
That the CIA lost 20 assets, human beings, in China for incompetent secret communications methods would lead professionals to withhold as much of identities as possible.
For awhile there I believe Steele was worried about his own health.
David Corn at Mother Jones was reticent to break the story.
So now what I see to look for is what Steele said needed to be done, & that being what Mueller is doing at the behest of the DOJ.
The US has been at war, albeit Hybrid war since the imposition of sanctions for their violations of international law as regarded the annexation of Crimea & the attack on the Ukraine.
Sanctions are Economic Warfare.
That the US feels the right to engage in warfare of any kind Economic or Hot over violations of International Law leads me to believe that the UN will fail to prevent the apocalyptic riot.
But that as regards Trump becomes neither here nor there, correct?

The Rev Kev , January 23, 2018 at 12:29 am

Justin Raimondo has weighed in on this story at https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2018/01/22/russsia-gate-implodes/ and he does not sound like a happy camper.

John Gilberts , January 24, 2018 at 12:25 am

William Binney, former NSA technical official and whistleblower, comments on the FISA memo, that has apparently just been released. Obviously, a major development in ‘Russia-gate’.

William Binney Exposes Secret FISA Memo
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48650.htm

[Sep 06, 2019] The Fog of Intervention

Sep 06, 2019 | newrepublic.com

Samantha Power did not set out to justify war. By Daniel Bessner

September 4, 2019
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Let's say it's January 2021 , and President Bernie Sanders has just assumed office. On his second day as commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in world history, Bernie and his foreign policy team are ushered into the White House Situation Room. After being seated at a long wooden table, a group of diplomats and military officers informs Bernie that armed militants in the Central African Republic have placed artillery around a town and are threatening to bombard its 10,000 inhabitants. The townspeople have requested that the United States destroy the weapons and save their lives. What should Bernie do?

For Samantha Power , who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during Barack Obama's second term, this really is no question at all: You eliminate the weapons. Power has dedicated her life to promoting humanitarian intervention -- the idea that the United States, as the world's "indispensable nation," has the moral duty to use its awesome military capabilities to prevent or halt atrocities. First as a war reporter covering the Balkans in the 1990s, then as the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of " A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide , and finally as a government official herself, Power has insisted that the "responsibility to protect" innocents from slaughter is sacrosanct, even if it means U.S. military adventurism or violating foreign nations' sovereignty. When civilians are threatened, Power believes we must save them.

THE EDUCATION OF AN IDEALIST: A MEMOIR by Samantha Power Dey Street Books, 592 pp., $29.99

For this position, she has been both praised and lambasted. Power's supporters see her as a moral beacon in a world focused on power politics at the expense of human rights. In the last two decades, she has shaped the way a generation of liberal analysts and policymakers understand international relations and their role within it: Barack Obama has called her "one of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy," while Ben Rhodes has said she was "who I wanted to become when I moved down to Washington." Meanwhile, critics like the law professor Aziz Rana understand her as an unreconstructed "war hawk," who employs the discourse of human rights to mask American imperialism. For them, Power embodies the contradictions of liberal geopolitics, in which lofty rhetoric is used to justify military action in regions where the United States has at best tangential interests.

Power's memoir arrives at a time when she and her approach have fallen from favor -- both with the current administration, which has adopted a nakedly transactional approach to foreign affairs, and with left-wing foreign policy thinkers, who want to dismantle U.S. military dominance. Against these tides, Power's new book seems intended to rehabilitate both her agenda and her own reputation, as she narrates in vivid and engaging prose her rapid rise to some of the most influential positions in U.S. foreign policy-making. It's the story of a sympathetic protagonist just trying to save innocent lives -- yet one that inadvertently demonstrates the lethality of good intentions. The most startling thing about a book titled The Education of an Idealist is that Power appears not to have learned very much.

Power's early years exemplified the peripatetic privilege of the global bourgeoisie. She was born in Ireland in 1970, the daughter of a doctor mother and a dentist father. In 1979, after her father's alcoholism destroyed her parents' marriage, Power's mother moved with Samantha and her brother to the United States. Power quickly acclimated to American life; she lost her Irish accent, began a lifelong love affair with baseball, and started on her high school's basketball team. She also studied hard for the SAT, and in 1988 was accepted to Yale University.

During Power's sophomore year, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and she became a political junkie who quizzed herself on the news of the day. In the summer of 1990, she took a trip to Europe that would transform her life. Power began her journey with a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Walking through the bleak Secret Annex drove home to Power "the horror of Hitler's crimes," and after her visit she started to keep a list of books she wanted to read on "what U.S. officials knew about the Holocaust and what they could have done to save more Jews." Soon after, she traveled to Dachau, where she "wondered aloud what the modern world would look like if President Roosevelt had not finally entered the war." (Ignoring, naturally, the Soviet Union's role in ending World War II, and that it was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz.)

Power's trip persuaded her that U.S. military force could legitimately be used to save innocent lives. The Holocaust became for her the moral justification for American empire in an era in which the United States no longer faced any perceived existential threats. Power concluded that if the United States didn't rule the world, genocide was inevitable, and for the remainder of her career she would view atrocities in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East through the prism of the Holocaust: After all, if the U.S. military had liberated victims of genocide in the 1940s, why couldn't it do the same in the 1990s , 2000s , and 2010s ?

If the U.S. military had liberated victims of genocide in the 1940s, why couldn't it do the same in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s?

The timing of Power's trip was also crucial for her intellectual development. Before the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, it was difficult to argue that the U.S. military could serve as a neutral arbiter of human rights. Not only was the nation engaged in an avowedly political struggle with an existential communist enemy, but the Vietnam War and several other failed interventions underlined the dangers of using military force for ideological ends. Communism's collapse made it possible for Power to imagine the U.S. military as a nonideological guarantor of broadly accepted human rights. The empire could act for humanity, not politics. For Power -- and for many in her generation -- the U.S. military was the base upon which the liberal international order of free markets, democracy, and human rights would be constructed.

By her senior year at Yale, Power had determined that she "wanted to end up in a position to 'do something'" about humanitarian crises. After graduating, she interned at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where Mort Abramowitz, the endowment's president and a former ambassador to Turkey, was turning his attention to the incipient Bosnian War. The more Power learned about the conflict and its atrocities, "the more unnerved" she became. The war, she writes, provided her with "a focus -- a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized." To publicize their suffering, she decided to become a war reporter , and in late 1993 she moved to the Balkans, armed with little more than a laptop. Power was in Zagreb, Croatia, when on February 5, 1994, Bosnian Serbs mortared the Markale market in Sarajevo, killing 68 civilians. As she watched news footage of "market vendors carrying away the bloodied remains of their mutilated friends," she found herself "rooting for the first time in [her] life for the United States to use military force." She spent the next year and a half writing pieces on civilian suffering that she hoped would engender a domestic outcry and convince President Bill Clinton to forcibly end the siege of Sarajevo.

As time went on and Clinton refused to intervene (the U.S.-led NATO Operation Deliberate Force would not commence until August 1995), Power began to consider a new track that was "less about describing events and more about directly trying to shape them." The decisive moment came in July 1995, when she learned that the Bosnian Serb army murdered more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. The sheer brutality of the genocide compelled Power to take up a place at Harvard Law School (she had applied and been accepted earlier that year), with the intention of becoming a prosecutor "who could bring murderers to justice."

At Harvard, Power returned to the question that had haunted her at the Anne Frank House and Dachau: Don't Americans, as citizens of the world's greatest power, have a personal responsibility to save lives if we have the capacity to do so? She enrolled in a class on the ethics of using force and, most important for her future career, she wrote a paper that examined "what U.S. policymakers themselves were thinking" when they failed to respond to twentieth-century genocides. This paper was her first step toward her 2002 book "A Problem From Hell," which codified a decade of liberal thinking about humanitarian intervention, and which transformed Power into an internationally renowned expert on human rights and genocide prevention.

"A Problem From Hell" had two main arguments. First, it claimed that throughout the twentieth century "the United States has consistently refused to take risks in order to suppress genocide" and, by not acting, had failed the people of Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, among other places. Second, the book maintained that in the future, U.S. decision-makers should take steps to prevent or halt atrocities along "a continuum of intervention" that would range "from condemning the perpetrators or cutting off U.S. aid to bombing or rallying a multinational invasion force." Power did not, as many critics later avowed, unthinkingly advocate military intervention; rather, she considered intervention as the final in a series of graduated steps intended to avert or stop genocide. But as Power herself would soon learn, when Americans were presented with the hammer of military force, many atrocities began to look like nails.

Power's book was perfectly primed for the post-9/11 moment, during which the question on many Americans' minds was not whether the United States should remake the world, but how. "A Problem From Hell" quickly became a cudgel in the debate over invading Iraq; as Power notes, several pundits clamoring for war invoked her book, arguing that the 1980s Iraqi campaign of genocide against the Kurds gave the United States a casus belli. Even though Power herself opposed the invasion, the writers who referenced "A Problem From Hell" were not exactly misreading the book: Power had placed U.S. military intervention on the menu of options available to policymakers who said they wanted to protect human rights.

In a moment defined by paranoia, revenge fantasies, and a sense of moral crusade, it is not particularly surprising that "A Problem From Hell" was employed to rationalize war. The book's relevance at the time, in fact, helps explain why it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in April 2003, one month after the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq.

Samantha Power in 2013 at an International Civil Society event with Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Adviser Susan Rice Jin Lee/Bloomberg/Getty

With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Power got the chance to use her ideas to shape U.S. policy more directly. Obama and Power first met in the spring of 2005, when Obama was an ambitious junior senator from Illinois. They worked together for a year (Power volunteered to serve in his office), and when Obama won the Democratic primary in 2008, he hired her as a foreign policy adviser, later appointing her to the National Security Council as senior director for multilateral affairs and senior director for human rights.

In government, Power swiftly learned that few officials cared about human rights; many, in fact, deemed them a distraction from more important issues of power politics. Nevertheless, while at the NSC, Power helped expand by $50 million U.S. aid to Iraqi refugees, increased the number of Iraqis allowed to resettle in the United States, and doubled the government's refugee stipend. She also advocated for the United States to run for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council , which it won in 2009. From this perch, U.S. officials spurred a number of resolutions focused on revealing human rights abuses in various nations, including Iran, Syria, Sudan, and North Korea. Moreover, Power proudly emphasizes, the United States "succeeded in getting the Human Rights Council to reduce by half the share of country-specific resolutions on Israel."

As this last comment indicates, for Power, protecting human rights means disciplining nations of the Global South that are not U.S. allies. Throughout The Education of an Idealist , she barely mentions Israel or Saudi Arabia -- she says nothing about Israel's occupation of the West Bank or the Saudi war on women and LGBTQI+ people. These silences are deafening, because the type of world Power wants to build will never be realized if only certain countries -- namely, those that stand outside America's imperial sphere -- are held to account. Her approach does not make much sense from a pragmatic perspective either: U.S. officials have the highest likelihood of ending human rights abuses in countries that depend on us; there is little point in spending political capital in a mostly quixotic attempt to transform antagonists like North Korea.

Meanwhile, Power completely ignores the human rights violations that took place in her own country under Obama's watch; like many liberal interventionists, she is far more vexed by suffering abroad. Nowhere does she address police violence against African Americans, mass surveillance , refugee detention , or mass incarceration . Nor does she give much thought to the colonial violence that defines American history: In The Education of an Idealist , she recalls inviting a Serbian official to meet with her in the so-called Indian Treaty Room, where she lectured him on the importance of apprehending the war criminal Ratko Mladić. Somehow, Power overlooks the irony of championing justice in a room named for repeatedly broken treaties that the U.S. government made with the native population against which it committed genocide.

Power's most consequential decision during Obama's first term displayed a shortsightedness that has often accompanied her faith in U.S. military power. With the outbreak of civil war in Libya, Power began to advocate vociferously in favor of intervention to stop a potential massacre at Benghazi. In particular, during a March 15, 2011, meeting, Power endorsed U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's proposal to establish a no-fly zone over Libya and attack Muammar Qaddafi's forces. Obama approved Rice's plan, and on March 19, a U.S.-led NATO coalition began bombing Libya , initiating a process that concluded with Qaddafi's death. Despite the war's expansion and the chaos that ensued, Power remains proud of her contribution. For her, "once the revolution spread, the real question became how to use the tools at our disposal to bring about the best possible -- or the least bad -- outcome."

But was that the real question? Here are some other questions that are equally important and that she should have taken more seriously before Obama commenced Operation Odyssey Dawn: Is the war likely to expand? If the war expands and Qaddafi is deposed, who will govern Libya? Is the United States -- especially the American public -- willing to commit itself to reconstruction efforts? What precedent does the intervention potentially set? Power never really asked these questions, because ultimately, as the historian Stephen Wertheim has argued, she considers humanitarian intervention a categorical imperative (as long as it doesn't involve U.S. allies, of course). For this reason, throughout her time in office Power regularly encouraged war.

In Obama's second term, Power left the NSC to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In this position, she won many admirable victories: She aided in establishing a U.N. post dedicated to monitoring global LGBT rights; brought countries together to end the deadly Ebola outbreak of 2014; and promoted a resolution that demanded the United Nations deport any peacekeeping units from countries in which U.N. soldiers were reported to have committed sexual assault.

Yet it was also during Obama's second term that Power found herself less able to convince the president of the moral necessity of intervention. In her memoir, she relates that when she first learned that Bashar al-Assad's government had employed chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war, she hoped "Obama would respond forcefully" and was disappointed when he didn't. Nevertheless, in August 2013, Power was heartened to discover that Obama intended to answer the Syrian government's murder of 1,400 people in a chemical weapons attack with airstrikes of military targets.

Power's expectations, however, were dashed when she was informed that Obama had decided to seek congressional authorization for the airstrikes. "What happens if Congress doesn't support you?" she asked the president. "Does that mean Assad could just keep using chemical weapons?" In the end, Obama determined that Congress would rebuff his plan and chose not to go ahead with a vote; against Power's wishes, he also refused to intervene. Instead, the president accepted Russia's offer to work together to disable Assad's chemical weapons program. For her part, Power "shuddered at the inadequacy of the effort" to decrease Assad's stockpile, despite the fact that U.S.-Russian collaboration provided an opportunity to build the trust necessary to reach a political resolution of the conflict.

Power's recollection of the Syria debate highlights her meritocratic skepticism of democratic politics. She writes that she "regretted that our administration had not ascertained whether we had the votes before the President announced he was going to Congress. Had he known he would fail, [she] did not believe he would have chosen the path he did." Power, in other words, wanted Congress to rubber-stamp Obama's decision to intervene; she wasn't interested in having a real public discussion about the potential benefits and drawbacks of using military force. In fact, Power has the temerity to express disappointment with the U.S. public for refusing to support intervention. Most Americans, she laments, "wanted no part of Syria. The student activists, civic groups, churches, mosques, and synagogues that had come out en masse to demand help for the people of Darfur [where in the mid-2000s a genocide erupted] were largely silent." Such a statement evinces the privilege of an individual who has no reason to fear the effects another Middle Eastern intervention might have on her own family -- or on the people of the Middle East.

The assumption running through Power's career is that the American empire is able to act as a force for good in the world. At her memoir's end -- and in the wake of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria -- she affirms that "on issue after issue, either the United States brought a game plan to the table or else the problem worsened." Though this might be true in some cases, it is certainly not the rule, especially when one considers the disastrous effects of the nation's wars in the Greater Middle East; its pointless antagonism of China, Russia, and Iran; its unwillingness to take the business-unfriendly steps required to arrest climate change; and its unhesitating promotion of a capitalist system that has exploited the labor of untold millions. The last several decades have taught us that the world needs far less American "leadership" than it has enjoyed.

If you accept Power's premises, then humanitarian intervention boils down to a purely philosophical inquiry: Is it right to save lives if one has the capacity to do so? The answer, of course, is yes. The problem, though, is that intervention is not a thought experiment; it takes place in a world of brutal realities. In particular, humanitarian forces confront radical uncertainty. Is intervention likely to impel more violence in the long term? Do policymakers actually know enough about the situation on the ground to make the "right" decisions? Is the American public willing to commit itself to years-long reconstruction efforts? Honest answers here may not sit well with idealism. In many instances, the most moral act is not to act at all.

Simply maintaining an enormous military able to intervene anywhere in the world carries its own set of malign consequences: endless wars, global arms proliferation, a militaristic political culture, the diversion of resources from welfare to weapons, and the strengthening of the military-industrial complex, to name just a few. The Education of an Idealist does not account for these social ills, or consider that the only way we can avoid them is by giving up the capacities that enable us (theoretically, if not in practice) to alleviate foreign suffering.

The historian Samuel Moyn has warned that we must be careful not to elevate "the narrow and rare problem of when to send the military to help strangers into the decisive one around which the future of American foreign policy revolves." Power's memoir shows how much the discourse of humanitarian intervention obscures. By focusing on the question "Do we save innocent lives?" liberal interventionists like Power shift our attention from an equally important query: "How do we change conditions so lives don't need to be saved?" A world oriented around this last question would look very different from the one we have now. Daniel Bessner is the Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington and author of Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual . @ dbessner

[Sep 06, 2019] Didn't I tell you American get their reality from their Plato's Cave screens?

Sep 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

William Gruff , Sep 5 2019 20:00 utc | 28

"Do you really think they spend $400 on a hammer?"

That line comes straight out of a movie . Didn't I tell you American get their reality from their Plato's Cave screens?

I briefly worked in a machine shop that did DoD contract work. We would buy washers by the pound from the hardware store down the street, heat seal them individually into little plastic baggies with the part number printed on them, and then sell them to the Navy for $50 each .

Yeah, the military pays $400 each, if not a good deal more, for their hammers.

[Sep 06, 2019] The Myopia of American Strategic Planning

they will spend a lot of money replicating Russian technology...
Sep 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Grieved , Sep 6 2019 2:14 utc | 103
I actually had read that news report in Tass about Putin's offer to Trump and I didn't regard it as trolling until I saw b's article. Putin's logic was that Russia had already invested the money and could make some back, and meanwhile the US could save some money and move towards a strategic parity - which I believe Russia would actually prefer over a superiority, since a stable balance is far less frantic than an arms race.

So it all made sense to me.

This has been a fun thread but it's all a nonsense here tonight of course. Pity. I liked what I was reading from Putin:

Putin told the plenary session of the fifth Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) on Thursday that at the last meeting with his American partners in Osaka, Japan "the issue was raised as to how and in what way it would be possible to count Russian modern weapons, including the hypersonic missile systems, into the common agreements, considering that so far not a single country in the world possesses these weapons, not even the US."

"I told Donald the following: "if you want, we can sell you some and this way we will balance everything out. But truth be told, they are saying that they will soon produce it themselves.

Perhaps they will, but why waste money when we already have spent some and can get something back, and at the same time not harm our security but rather create a situation where there is a balance," Putin elaborated.

G'night all.

Tonymike , Sep 5 2019 17:54 utc | 8

In reading this excellent brief analysis, I would suggest that followers read the also excellent books, Losing Military Supremacy "The Myopia of American Strategic Planning" by Andrei Martyanov and In the Shadows of the American Century "The Rise and Decline of US Global Power," by Alfred w. McCoy, to get an understanding of the minds of the Military Industrial Complex. The book by Mr. Martyanov provides examples of why the American military can't win battles against 2nd and 3rd peer adversaries (Vietnam (The American War as the Vietnamese call it), Korean War (The UN Police Action), Afghanistan War, and their future inability to win any future wars against a 1st peer adversary (Russia, China). The American military tells itself it is a great fighting force without peer but it also believes it's own press that the US military brought the German Werhmarcht to their knees, when we know the Russians won War World II. McCoy's book, which is well researched, also states the same premise but from an american perspective.

The MIC will be the downfall of the US and it the deepest of the Deep State. The 1 TRILLION dollar yearly military budget (minus the unknown Black budget) will bankrupt this country. It is also unfortunate that the noble peace prize winner Obama, authorized a Trillion dollar upgrade to the US nuclear arsenal, when he could have halved the number of warheads and still had plenty to destroy the planet a hundred times over. So much for the prince of peace.
We would also do well to stop giving other countries billions in military aid (israhell, saudi barbaria, UAE, etc) to drop bombs and snipe poor people attempting to live free. Hopefully the end is near.

PS: If you want to read a near term fictional book on the demise of the MIC and changes to the culture in America, the book "Twilight's Last Gleaming" by John Michael Greer is spellbinding and a great read. Interestingly enough, he has written over thirty books and writes about post industrial collapse and their outcomes.

steven t johnson , Sep 5 2019 20:01 utc | 29
Carriers are floating air bases for attacking weaker nations with miniscule inexperienced air forces and skimpy ground air defense. They are for force projection in wars of aggression, not general wars in defense of the nation. The only sense in which they are weaknesses is that high losses for the master race that expects easy victory are doubly shocking.

Stealth aircraft are equally first strike weapons aimed at knocking out radar, hitting enemy planes on the ground and sowing confusion. As they are not tactical aircraft such flaws as rain shadow, etc. that render them unfit combat aircraft against an enemy in the air may be irrelevant.

Missile defenses have a lousy record against missiles in flight, but the radar targeting makes them very adaptable as first strike weapons against enemy launch sites. All "antimissile" missile defense systems should be regarded as being an effort in that direction. Air defense systems that concentrate on electronic warfare, confusing the air with flak, taking down manned aircraft, camouflage, etc. are something else, unromantic but vital.

Nobody can effectively use mass drone attacks or cruise missile attacks for strategic victory, because strategic bombing does not actually work without ground attacks interdicting supplies and/or actively preventing rebuilding/reorganization. Thus it is not a meaningful failure for US air defenses to fail against Houthi air attacks. The Houthi air attacks are also not going to win the war. The inability of the Saudis to win ground loses it for them, meaning endless war is financially debilitating, plus, again, self-sacrifice is not something the Saudi monarchy can call upon.

Lastly, the Russians do no have hypersonic weapons. Even if they did, the notion that weapon systems largely useful in first strikes indicates a horrible misreading of Russia's military situation. There is no reasonable strategy for them that involves a first strike.

Bemildred , Sep 6 2019 7:23 utc | 120
Meanwhile, in reality:
WASHINGTON: Yesterday, the Army awarded two key contracts to catch up to Russia and China in the race to field battle-ready hypersonic missiles. After years of one-off experimental prototypes, the US plans to produce and field actual weapons.

Hypersonics: Army Awards $699M To Build First Missiles For A Combat Unit

Barovsky , Sep 6 2019 11:35 utc | 131
FYI:

https://southfront.org/us-army-awards-two-key-hypersonic-missile-contracts/

Originally appeared at ZeroHedge

The race for hypersonic missiles heated up last week when the US Army awarded two key contracts to catch up to Russia and China. After a decade of experimental prototypes, the Army is expected to get its hands on hypersonic missiles that will be fielded in the next four years, reported Breaking Defense.

Harry Law , Sep 6 2019 12:36 utc | 136
"Carriers are today, at least for Russia, India and China, not threats but large and juicy targets".

Gary Brecher 'the war nerd' said years ago that carriers were obsolete this article both informative and witty is a must read...

"The Chinese military has developed a ballistic missile, Dong Feng 21, specifically designed to kill US aircraft carriers: "Because the missile employs a complex guidance system, low radar signature and a maneuverability that makes its flight path unpredictable, the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased. It is estimated that the missile can travel at mach 10 and reach its maximum range of 2000km in less than 12 minutes." That's the US Naval Institute talking, remember. They're understating the case when they say that, with speed, satellite guidance and maneuverability like that, "the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased."

You know why that's an understatement? Because of a short little sentence I found farther on in the article -- and before you read that sentence, I want all you trusting Pentagon groupies to promise me that you'll think hard about what it implies. Here's the sentence: "Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack." http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/

[Sep 06, 2019] 9-11 and Jeffrey Epstein Media Malfeasance on Steroids by Kevin Barrett

It is not vey clear for whom Epstein used to work. Mossad connection is just one hypothesis. What sovereign state would allow compromising politician by a foreign intelligence service. This just does not compute.
But the whole tone of discussion below clearly point to the crisis of legitimacy of neoliberal elite. And Russiagate had shown that the elite cares about it and tried to patch the cracks.
Sep 06, 2019 | www.unz.com

As Eric Rasmusen writes: "Everybody, it seems, in New York society knew by 2000 that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were corrupting teenage girls, but the press wouldn't cover it." Likewise, everybody in New York society has long known that Larry Silverstein, who bought the asbestos-riddled white elephant World Trade Center in July 2001 and immediately doubled the insurance, is a mobbed-up friend of Netanyahu and a confessed participant in the controlled demolition of Building 7 , from which he earned over 700 million insurance dollars on the pretext that al-Qaeda had somehow brought it down. But the press won't cover that either.

The New York Times , America's newspaper of record, has the investigative talent and resources to expose major corruption in New York. Why did the Times spend almost two decades ignoring the all-too-obvious antics of Epstein and Silverstein? Why is it letting the absurd tale of Epstein's alleged suicide stand? Why hasn't it used the work of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth -- including the brand-new University of Alaska study on the controlled demolition of WTC-7 -- to expose the biggest scandal of the 21 st century, if not all of American history?

The only conceivable answer is that The New York Times is somehow complicit in these monstrous crimes. It must be protecting its friends in high places. So who are those friends, and where are those high places?

One thing Epstein and Silverstein have in common, besides names ending in "-stein," is alleged involvement in the illicit sex industry. Epstein's antics, or at least some of them, are by now well-known. Not so for Silverstein, who apparently began his rags-to-9/11-riches story as a pimp supplying prostitutes and nude dancers to the shadier venues of NYC, alongside other illicit activities including "the heroin trade, money laundering and New York Police corruption." All of this was exposed in a mid-1990s lawsuit. But good luck finding any investigative reports in The New York Times .

Another Epstein-Silverstein connection is their relationships to major American Jewish organizations. Even while he was allegedly pimping girls and running heroin, Larry Silverstein served as president for United Jewish Appeal of New York. As for Epstein, he was the boy toy and protégé of Les Wexner, co-founder of the Mega Group of Jewish billionaires associated with the World Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League, and other pro-Israel groups. Indeed, there is no evidence that "self-made billionaire" Epstein ever earned significant amounts of money; his only investment "client" was Les Wexner. Epstein, a professional sexual blackmailer, used his supposed billionaire status as a cover story. In fact, he was just an employee working for Wexner and associated criminal/intelligence networks.

Which brings us to the third and most important Epstein-Silverstein similarity: They were both close to the government of Israel. Jeffrey Epstein's handler was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Mossad super-spy Robert Maxwell; among his friends was Ehud Barak, who is currently challenging Netanyahu for leadership of Israel. Larry Silverstein, too, has friends in high Israeli places. According to Haaretz , Silverstein has "close ties with Netanyahu" (speaking to him on the phone every weekend) as well as with Ehud Barak, "whom Silverstein in the past offered a job as his representative in Israel" and who called Silverstein immediately after 9/11.

We may reasonably surmise that both Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Silverstein have been carrying on very important work on behalf of the state of Israel. And we may also surmise that this is the reason The New York Times has been covering up the scandals associated with both Israeli agents for almost two decades. The Times , though it pretends to be America's newspaper of record, has always been Jewish-owned-and-operated. Its coverage has always been grotesquely distorted in favor of Israel . It has no interest in exposing the way Israel controls the United States by blackmailing its leaders (Epstein) and staging a fake "Arab-Muslim attack on America" (Silverstein). The awful truth is that The New York Times is part of the same Jewish-Zionist " we control America " network as Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Silverstein.

Epstein "Suicide" Illustrates Zionist Control of USA -- and the Decadence and Depravity of Western Secularism

Since The New York Times and other mainstream media won't go there, let's reflect on the facts and lessons of the Jeffrey Epstein suicide scandal -- a national disgrace that ought to shock Americans into rethinking their worldviews in general, and their views on the official myth of 9/11 in particular.

On Saturday, August 10, 2019, convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was allegedly found dead in his cell at Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York City, one of America's most corrupt prisons. The authorities claim Epstein hanged himself. But nobody, not even the presstitutes of America's corporate propaganda media, convincingly pretends to believe the official story.

Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile pimp to presidents and potentates. His job was recruiting young girls for sex, then offering them to powerful men -- in settings outfitted with hidden video cameras. When police raided his New York townhouse on July 6-7 2019 they found locked safes full of pornographic pictures of underage girls, along with piles of compact discs labeled "young (name of girl) + (name of VIP)." Epstein had been openly and brazenly carrying on such activities for more than two decades, as reported throughout most of that period by alternative media outlets including my own Truth Jihad Radio and False Flag Weekly News . (Even before the 2016 elections, my audience knew that both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were blackmailed clients of Jeffrey Epstein, that Clinton was a frequent flyer on Epstein's "Lolita Express" private jet, and that Trump had been credibly accused in a lawsuit of joining Epstein in the brutal rape of a 13-year-old, to whom Trump then allegedly issued death threats.) It was only in the summer of 2019 that mainstream media and New York City prosecutors started talking about what used to be consigned to the world of "conspiracy theories."

So who was Epstein working for? His primary employer was undoubtedly the Israeli Mossad and its worldwide Zionist crime network. Epstein's handler was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Mossad super-spy Robert Maxwell. According to sworn depositions, Ghislaine Maxwell recruited underage girls for Epstein and oversaw his sex trafficking operations. As the New Yorker reported August 16: "In court papers that were unsealed on August 9th, it was alleged that Maxwell had been Epstein's central accomplice, first as his girlfriend, and, later, as his trusted friend and procuress, grooming a steady stream of girls, some as young as fourteen, coercing them to have sex with Epstein at his various residences around the world, and occasionally participating in the sexual abuse herself." Alongside Maxwell, Epstein's other Mossad handler was Les Wexner, co-founder of the notorious Mega Group of billionaire Israeli spies , who appears to have originally recruited the penniless Epstein and handed him a phony fortune so Epstein could pose as a billionaire playboy.

Even after Epstein's shady "suicide" mega-Mossadnik Maxwell continued to flaunt her impunity from American justice. She no doubt conspired to publicize the August 15 New York Post photograph of herself smiling and looking "chillingly serene" at In-And-Out-Burger in Los Angeles, reading The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of C.I.A. Operatives . That nauseating photo inspired the New Yorker to accuse her of having "gall" -- a euphemism for the Yiddish chutzpah , a quality that flourishes in the overlapping Zionist and Kosher Nostra communities.

Maxwell and The New York Post , both Kosher Nostra/Mossad assets, were obviously sending a message to the CIA: Don't mess with us or we will expose your complicity in these scandalous crimes. That is the Mossad's standard operating procedure: Infiltrate and compromise Western intelligence services in order to prevent them from interfering with the Zionists' over-the-top atrocities. According to French historian Laurent Guyénot's hypothesis, the CIA's false flag fake assassination attempt on President John F. Kennedy, designed to be blamed on Cuba, was transformed by Mossad into a real assassination -- and the CIA couldn't expose it due to its own complicity. (The motive: Stop JFK from ending Israel's nuclear program.) The same scenario, Guyénot argues, explains the anomalies of the Mohamed Merah affair , the Charlie Hebdo killings, and the 9/11 false flag operation. It would not be surprising if Zionist-infiltrated elements of the CIA were made complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's sexual blackmail activities, in order to protect Israel in the event Epstein had to be "burned" (which is apparently what has finally occurred).

So what really happened to Epstein? Perhaps the most likely scenario is that the Kosher Nostra, which owns New York in general and the mobbed-up MCC prison in particular, allowed the Mossad to exfiltrate Epstein to Occupied Palestine, where he will be given a facelift, a pension, a luxury suite overlooking the Mediterranean, and a steady stream of young sex slaves (Israel is the world's capital of human trafficking, an honor it claimed from the Kosher Nostra enclaves of Odessa after World War II). Once the media heat wave blows over, Epstein will undoubtedly enjoy visits from his former Mossad handler Ghislaine Maxwell, his good friend Ehud Barak, and various other Zionist VIPs. He may even offer fresh sex slaves to visiting American congressmen.

This is not just a paranoid fantasy scenario. According to Eric Rasmusen : "The Justice Dept. had better not have let Epstein's body be cremated. And they'd better give us convincing evidence that it's his body. If I had $100 million to get out of jail with, acquiring a corpse and bribing a few people to switch fingerprints and DNA wouldn't be hard. I find it worrying that the government has not released proof that Epstein is dead or a copy of the autopsy."

But didn't the alleged autopsy reportedly find broken neck bones that are more commonly associated with strangulation murders than suicides? That controversy may have been scripted to distract the public from an insider report on 4chan , first published before the news of Epstein's "suicide" broke, that Epstein had been "switched out" of MCC. If so, the body with the broken neck bones wasn't Epstein's.

The Epstein affair (like 9/11) illustrates two critically important truths about Western secularism: there is no truth, and there are no limits. A society that no longer believes in God no longer believes in truth, since God is al-haqq, THE truth, without Whom the whole notion of truth has no metaphysical basis. The postmodern philosophers understand this perfectly well. They taught a whole generation of Western humanities scholars that truth is merely a function of power: people accept something as "true" to the extent that they are forced by power to accept it. So when the most powerful people in the world insist that three enormous steel-frame skyscrapers were blown to smithereens by relatively modest office fires on 9/11, that absurd assertion becomes the official "truth" as constructed by such Western institutions as governments, courts, media, and academia. Likewise, the assertion that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide under circumstances that render that assertion absurd will probably become the official "truth" as recorded and promulgated by the West's ruling institutions, even though nobody will ever really believe it.

Epstein's career as a shameless, openly-operating Mossad sexual blackmailer -- like the in-your-face 9/11 coup -- also illustrates another core truth of Western secularism: If there is no God, there are no limits (in this case, to human depravity and what it can get away with). Or as Dostoevsky famously put it: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Since God alone can establish metaphysically-grounded limits between what is permitted and what is forbidden, a world without God will feature no such limits; in such a world Aleister Crowley's satanic motto "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" becomes the one and only commandment. In today's Godless West, why should men not "do what they wilt" and indulge their libidos by raping young girls if they can get away with it? After all, all the other sexual taboos are being broken, one by one. Fornication, adultery, homosexuality, sadomasochism, gender-bending all of these have been transformed during my lifetime from crimes and vices to "human rights" enjoyed by the most liberal and fashionable right-thinking Western secularists. Even bestiality and necrophilia are poised to become normalized "sexual identities" whose practitioners will soon be proudly marching in "bestiality pride" and "necrophilia pride" parades. So why not normalize pedophilia and other forms of rape perpetrated by the strong against the weak? And why not add torture and murder in service to sexual gratification? After all, the secret bible of the sexual identity movement is the collected works of the Marquis de Sade, the satanic prophet of sexual liberation, with whom the liberal progressivist secular West is finally catching up. It will not be surprising if, just a few years after the Jeffrey Epstein "suicide" is consigned to the memory hole, we will be witnessing LGBTQBNPR parades, with the BNPR standing for bestiality, necrophilia, pedophilia, and rape. (It would have been LGBTQBNPRG, with the final G standing for Gropers like President Trump, except that the G was already taken by the gays.) The P's, pioneers of pedophile pride parades, will undoubtedly celebrate Jeffrey Epstein as an ahead-of-his-time misunderstood hero who was unjustly persecuted on the basis of his unusual sexual orientation.

It is getting harder and harder to satirize the decadence and depravity of the secular West, which insists on parodying itself with ever-increasing outlandishness. When the book on this once-mighty civilization is written, and the ink is dry, readers will be astounded by the limitless lies of the drunk-on-chutzpah psychopaths who ran it into the ground.

NoseytheDuke , says: September 5, 2019 at 4:30 am GMT

Correct me if I am wrong but I thought Lucky Larry only leased the WTC buildings rather than actually purchased them. I think I have read that his investment was in the region of 150 mill for which he has recouped a whopping 4 bill.
Wizard of Oz , says: September 5, 2019 at 4:42 am GMT
Would you please answer a preliminary question before I put finishing this on my busy agenda? You stake a fair bit of your credit on what you say about Larry Silverstein and insurance. My present understanding is that the insurance cover for WTC 1 and 2 was increased as a routine part of the financing deal he had made for a purchase which was only months old. Not true? Not the full story? Convince us.

As to WTC 7 my understanding is that he had owned the building for some years and had not recently increased the insurance. Not true? And when did any clause get into his WTC7 insurance contract which might have had some effect on inflating the payout?

Fozzy Bear , says: September 5, 2019 at 4:55 am GMT
“Trump had been credibly accused in a lawsuit of joining Epstein in the brutal rape of a 13-year-old, to whom Trump then allegedly issued death threats.)”
The “Katie Johnson” case collapsed in 2016 when it was revealed that “she” was in fact a middle-aged man, a stringer for the Jerry Springer show. Just another Gloria Allred fraud.
nsa , says: September 5, 2019 at 5:26 am GMT
“a society that no longer believes in god no longer believes in the truth, since god is the truth….blah blah blah”
This is thin gruel indeed…..just silly platitudes from a muzzie convert. There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe with each galaxy containing as many as 100 billion stars. And there is no telling how many universes there are. Does anyone really believe Barrett’s preferred deity takes a time out from running this vast empire to service Barrett’s yearning for “truth”? Just goes to prove that humans will believe almost any idea as long as it’s sufficiently idiotic.
utu , says: September 5, 2019 at 5:47 am GMT
The release of Prof. J. Leroy Hulsey report on the finite element analysis of the WTC7 collapse should be a big news.

http://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7

http://ine.uaf.edu/media/222439/uaf_wtc7_draft_report_09-03-2019.pdf

Conclusion form the EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse.”

“It is our conclusion based upon these findings that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of all columns in the building and not a progressive collapse involving the sequential failure of columns throughout the building.”

WorkingClass , says: September 5, 2019 at 5:47 am GMT
Trump is Israel’s best friend. Right? So why is the Jew York Times trying to destroy him? I don’t get it.
Mark James , says: September 5, 2019 at 5:52 am GMT
Speaking of the truth v. parody I’d really rather work on the cause of Epstein’s death –yes I think he’s dead– suicide or strangulation ?
There are some things the Justice Dept. could do if they wanted to. Why they apparently didn’t want to expose the corpse in greater detail, let media view the cell, have correspondent(s) interview the ex- cellmate of Epstein, et.al just leads to suspicions. This is something they should have to answer for . That includes AG Barr. Trump could make it happen–like every thing else– if Barr says no. The President won’t.

... ... ...

utu , says: September 5, 2019 at 5:58 am GMT
Dostoyevsky with his “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” overlooked the Jewish God who permits much more when it comes to Jewish gentile relations. The Jewish God is not limited by the Kant’s First Moral Imperative. The Jewish God’s moral laws are not universal. They are context dependent according to the Leninist Who, whom rule.
utu , says: September 5, 2019 at 6:00 am GMT

Not so for Silverstein, who apparently began his rags-to-9/11-riches story as a pimp supplying prostitutes and nude dancers to the shadier venues of NYC, alongside other illicit activities including “the heroin trade, money laundering and New York Police corruption.”

I would like to see more about the beginnings of Silverstein’s career.

BlackDragon , says: September 5, 2019 at 6:19 am GMT
Good work Kevin, Irrelevant exactly what Silverstein did in way of insurance.The FACT is that WTC7 DID NOT FALL due to fires. Neither did WTC1 or 2. The 6 million dollar question is ‘WHO put the ‘bang’ in the building?’ to bring them down, by what ever means. Im in favour of nukes for 1 and 2.
Answer that! Why isnt Silverstein arrested? I think Kevin provided the answer in the article..
Antares , says: September 5, 2019 at 6:27 am GMT
I liked the article but skipped the part about some god. Nothing matches intellectual integrity.

“It is getting harder and harder to satirize the decadence and depravity of the secular West”

This is the same line of reasoning as Vltchek’s but then from a(nother) religious point of view.

The Duke of Dork , says: September 5, 2019 at 6:28 am GMT
I just stumbled onto your article from a link on reddit, r/epstein. You make some convincing arguments. I was thrilled that you brought 9/11 into this – because the Epstein “suicide” and how it is being covered reminds me so much of how I felt after 9/11 and the run-up to the war. -But you lost me at the end with the stuff about Godless secularism. I’ve read the bible and it is not the answer to what’s wrong with the world.
Sean , says: September 5, 2019 at 6:31 am GMT

Why did the Times spend almost two decades ignoring the all-too-obvious antics of Epstein and Silverstein? Why is it letting the absurd tale of Epstein’s alleged suicide stand?

One thing cannot be denied : Epstein was arrested, denied bail and jailed awaiting trail on a Federal indictment for much the same offence he had pleaded guilty to a decade ago, which did not involve even a single homicide yet made him universally reviled and in as much trouble with the legal system as a man could be (almost certain never to get out again). Epstein was in far more trouble that anyone of his financial resources has ever been, but then that was for paying for sex acts with young teen girls.

What an awesomely impressive testament to the impunity enjoyed by the Jewish elite Epstein is. It is no wonder that Larry Silverstein was insouciant about the risks of a Jewish lightning fraud controlled demolition killing thousands of people in a building he had just bought and increased the insurance coverage of. After all, it wasn’t anything serious like paying for getting hundreds of handjobs from underage girls. And it is not like someone like the Pizzagate nut that fired his AR15 into underground child molestation complex beneath the Dems restaurant/pedophile centre would take all those WTC deaths seriously enough to shoot at him just because of inevitable internet accusations of mass murder. Mr Barrett, why don’t you step up and do it, thereby proving you believe the things you say .

Macon Richardson , says: September 5, 2019 at 7:11 am GMT
@NoseytheDuke Yes, he leased the World Trade Center buildings one and two from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He built World Trade Center building seven, having acquired a ground lease from Port Authority.

I can’t imagine why you ask this question in a public venue. I found the answer in less than one minute on the internet.

I assume the insurance policies were for the present value of his net profits for the duration of the leases.

Lastoknow , says: September 5, 2019 at 7:26 am GMT
I recall reading about this guy prior to the event. I believe it was USATODAY . He and a silent partner had bought the complex with a down of 63million and had it insured for 7billion. I thought it odd that the port authority would let go of the property at the time.
As the building deficiencies became known afterwards,my thoughts were along the line of insurance fraud.
I came across a copy of the rand Corp “state of the world 2000” which accurately describes the scenario and resulting culture of terror as “one possible future “…. funny how it’s taken all these years to discover this website.
Sean , says: September 5, 2019 at 9:08 am GMT

Indeed, there is no evidence that “self-made billionaire” Epstein ever earned significant amounts of money.

Good thing that Wexner is Jewish so we can discount the possibility that he was telling the truth the other month when he said that Epstein stole vast amounts of Wexner money

his only investment “client” was Les Wexner

Clever of Wexner to give Epstein 80 million dollars to deliberately lose.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-lost-usd80-million-in-hedge-fund-bet-gone-bad.html

Alongside Maxwell, Epstein’s other Mossad handler was Les Wexner, co-founder of the notorious Mega Group of billionaire Israeli spies

Wexner and his fellow Mossad spy Maxwell leaving Virginia Roberts alive to repeatedly sue them, and use the world”s media to accuse them of sexually abusing, trafficking, pimping her out to VIPs, and fiming the trysts was a brilliant way to keep everything a secret.

Mossad handler Ghislaine Maxwell, his good friend Ehud Barak, and various other Zionist VIPs.

Yes, they are the greatest covert operatives ever.

Just another serf , says: September 5, 2019 at 9:45 am GMT
Epstein’s crimes are simple breaches of etiquette when compared to Silverstein. I believe the term “Silverstein valleys” has been used to describe the melted granite discovered beneath the former towers, Silverstein grins widely in interviews, while so many suffered horribly.

One might even consider the 9/11 deaths to be something of a “holocaust”. Certainly one of the most evil human beings to have walked the Earth.

Whitewolf , says: September 5, 2019 at 10:11 am GMT
@Wizard of Oz Silverstein said he gave the okay for wtc 7 to be “pulled”. The building was on fire at the time. Either someone wired it to be pulled while it was on fire and already damaged or it was wired for demolition beforehand. The second scenario seems a lot more likely. In that case all the insurance contract details are largely irrelevant to the bigger picture.
Twodees Partain , says: September 5, 2019 at 10:54 am GMT
The idea that the CIA is somehow independent of Mossad and that Mossad would have to warn the CIA off of the Epstein matter is implausible to me. Guyenot’s hypothesis tends to give cover to the CIA in the assassination of JFK by claiming that the CIA plot was set in motion as some sort of attempt to control JFK and that it was hijacked into an actual assassination by Mossad. That just isn’t credible.

It’s much more accurate to observe that the CIA was erected by the same zionists who oversaw the creation of Israel and later the forming of Mossad, and that the two agencies have been joined at the hip ever since.

anon [383] • Disclaimer , says: September 5, 2019 at 11:33 am GMT
@WorkingClass Bad cop good cop. NYT is trying to destroy him . Israel says to him :” send this , do this ,allow us to do this , increase this by this amount , and we will make sure that in final analysis you don’t get hurt ”
Trump possibly knows that the only people who could hurt him is the Jewish people of power .

Has NYT ever criticized Trump for relocating embassy , recognizing Golan, for allowing Israel use Anerican resources to hit Syria or Gaza , for allowing Israel drag US into more military involvement. for allowing Israel wage war against Gaza ,? Has NYT ever explored the dynamics behind abrogation of JCPOA and application of more sanctions?

NYT has focused on Russia gate knowing in advance that it has no merit and no public traction, Is it hurting Trump or itself ?

Kevin Barrett , says: • Website September 5, 2019 at 12:25 pm GMT
@NoseytheDuke It was a 100 year lease, which is better described by the word purchase .
anon [383] • Disclaimer , says: September 5, 2019 at 12:28 pm GMT
People with normal IQ would believe that Epstein killed himself, if the following took place –

Media day and night asking questions about him from 360 degree of inquiries

1 why the surveillance video were not functioning despite the serious nature of the charges against a man who could rat out a lot in court against powerful people
2 why the coroner initially thought that Epstein was murdered
3 how many guards and how many fell asleep?
4 who and why allowed the spin story around Epstein brilliance and high IQ build up over the years ?
5 how does Epstein come to get linked to non -Jews people who have absolute loyalty to Israel
6 how did Epstein get involved with Jewish leaders ?
7 How did Epstein continue to enjoy seat on Harvard and enjoy social celebrity status after plea deal ?
8 Why did Wexner allow this man so much control over his asset ?
9 Media felt if terrorism were unique Muslim thing , why media is not alluding to the fact that pedophilia is a unique Jewish thing ?
10 why the angle of Israel being sex slavery capital and Epstein being sex slave pimp not being connected ?
11 how death in prison in foreign unfriendly countries often become causus celebre by US media , politicians , NGO and US treasury – why not this death ?

Kevin Barrett , says: • Website September 5, 2019 at 12:37 pm GMT
@Fozzy Bear Not true. A respectable civil rights attorney, Lisa Bloom, handled Katie Johnson’s case. Shortly before the scheduled press conference at which Johnson was to appear publicly, she received multiple death threats: “Bloom said that her firm’s website was hacked, that Anonymous had claimed responsibility, and that death threats and a bomb threat came in afterwards.” https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/3/13501364/trump-rape-13-year-old-lawsuit-katie-johnson-allegation Johnson folded because she was terrified (and perhaps paid off).
DaveE , says: September 5, 2019 at 12:51 pm GMT
@Twodees Partain In “Body of Secrets” by James Bamford, a newspaper article from the Truman era is referenced where the OSS, predecessor of the CIA, is described as “a converted vault in Washington used as an office space for 5 or 6 Jews working to protect our national secrets” (or similar wording).

Going from memory and gave away my copy of the book….. sorry for the vague reference, but you can look it up.

DanFromCT , says: September 5, 2019 at 1:24 pm GMT
@nsa An atheist like “nsa” must concede Dosteovsky’s point from his novel The Possessed that even for the atheist the concept of God represents the collective consciousness, highest principles, and ontological aspirations of believers. Given this sense, “nsa’s” real animus is more than likely an atavistic hatred of Christians and Muslims, probably for just being alive in his paranoid mind. What imbecility when this clown cites a multiverse of universes that has no proof and less plausibility for its existence than the tooth fairy. I’d also bet “nsa” speaks algebra, too, like the recently deceased mathematical genius, Jeffrey Epstein.

What’s Mr. Wexner’s, Mega’s, and Mossad/CIA’s involvement? That’s the real question trolls like “nsa” and the Dems and Republicans alike are crapping in their pants we’ll find out. When evidence starts to cascade out of their ability to spin or suppress it, things will get interesting. Meanwhile, Fox News is still doing its best from what I can tell to run cover for 911, now extended to the suspiciously related perps in the Epstein affair.

Patrikios Stetsonis , says: September 5, 2019 at 1:24 pm GMT
“The Epstein affair (like 9/11) illustrates two critically important truths about Western secularism: there is no truth, and there are no limits. A society that no longer believes in God no longer believes in truth…..”

You said it ALL Kevin.

... ... ...

Mulegino1 , says: September 5, 2019 at 1:37 pm GMT

“While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.”

More prophetic words were ever spoken or written by any of the statesmen of the Twentieth Century than these, even though they themselves were insufficient to describe the horrors that the Zionist state would bring upon the world if left unchecked- and its power and influence have been unchecked since the 1960’s. The last time that the world stood up to Zionist power in an appreciable way was during the Suez Crisis.

renfro , says: September 5, 2019 at 1:41 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz

Not the full story? Convince us.

Connect the dots….

DOT.. Port loses claim for asbestos removal | Business Insurance
https://www.businessinsurance.com › article › ISSUE01 › port-loses-claim-…
May 13, 2001 – The suit sought claim of the Port Authority’s huge cost of removing asbestos from hundreds of properties ranging from the enormous World Trade Center complex

DOT…Silverstein knew when he leased WTC 7 that he would have to pay out of pocket for asbestos abatement removal in WTC 7, multiple millions, which is why the Port Authority leased it so cheaply.

DOT…In May, 2000, a year before, signing the lease, he already had the design drawn for a new WTC building. Silverstein had no plans to remove the asbestos as he already had plans to replace it.

DOT… Larry Silverstein signs the lease just six weeks before the WTC’s twin towers were brought to the ground by terrorists in the September 11, 2001, attacks.

DOT….After leasing the complex, Silverstein negotiated with 24 insurance companies for a maximum coverage of $3.55 billion per catastrophic occurrence. However, the agreements had not been finalized before 9/11.

DOT…..Silverstein tries to sue insurers for double the payout claiming 2 catastrophic occurrences because of 2 planes involved.

DOT….Silver loses that lawsuit but sues the air lines and settles for almost another billion, $ 750,000,000.

Just another Jew insurance fire folks. He planned on tearing down WTC 7 to begin with. The only missing DOT is who he hired to set the demolition explosives in WTC 7. Were they imported from our ME ally?

[Sep 06, 2019] US State Dept Program Offers $15 Million to Iran Revolutionary Guards

While people do not agree of detail the main theme is common: government stories explaining both 9/11 and Epstein death are not credible. And that government tried to create an "artificial reality" to hide real events and real culprits.
Absence of credible information create fertile ground for creation of myths and rumors, sometimes absurd. But that'a well known sociaological phenomenon studies by late Tamotsu Shibutani in the context of WWII rumors ( Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (1966)).
Now we can interpret famous quote of William Casey "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false as an admission of the fact that the government can create artificial reality" much like in film Matrix and due to thick smoke of propaganda people are simply unable to discern the truth.
Sep 06, 2019 | www.unz.com

renfro , says: September 5, 2019 at 2:31 pm GMT

A foreign policy of "maximum pressure" and swagger: tawdry bribes, heavy-handed threats, and complete failure ..now what group does this remind me of?

US State Dept Program Offers $15 Million to Iran Revolutionary Guards September 4, 2019

The US State Department has unveiled a new $15 million "reward program" for anyone who provides information on the financial inner workings of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, in an attempt to further disrupt them.
The program comes after the US declared the Revolutionary Guards "terrorists," but remains very unusual, in as much as it targets an agency of a national government instead of just some random militant group.

The Financial Times reports on the farce that is our government's Iran policy:

Four days before the US imposed sanctions on an Iranian tanker suspected of shipping oil to Syria, the vessel's Indian captain received an unusual email from the top Iran official at the Department of State.
"This is Brian Hook . . . I work for secretary of state Mike Pompeo and serve as the US Representative for Iran," Mr Hook wrote to Akhilesh Kumar on August 26, according to several emails seen by the Financial Times. "I am writing with good news."
The "good news" was that the Trump administration was offering Mr Kumar several million dollars to pilot the ship -- until recently known as the Grace 1 -- to a country that would impound the vessel on behalf of the US. To make sure Mr Kumar did not mistake the email for a scam, it included an official state department phone number.
The administration's Iran obsession has reached a point where they are now trying to bribe people to act as pirates on their behalf. When the U.S. was blocked by a court in Gibraltar from taking the ship, they sought to buy the loyalty of the captain in order to steal it. Failing that, they resorted to their favorite tool of sanctions to punish the captain and his crew for ignoring their illegitimate demand. The captain didn't respond to the first message, so Hook persisted with his embarrassing scheme:
"With this money you can have any life you wish and be well-off in old age," Mr Hook wrote in a second email to Mr Kumar that also included a warning. "If you choose not to take this easy path, life will be much harder for you."
Many people have already mocked Hook's message for its resemblance to a Nigerian prince e-mail scam, and I might add that he comes across here sounding like a B-movie gangster. Hook's contact was not an isolated incident, but part of a series of e-mails and texts that he has sent to various ships' captains in a vain effort to intimidate them into falling in line with the administration's economic war. This is what comes of a foreign policy of "maximum pressure" and swagger: tawdry bribes, heavy-handed threats, and complete failure.

independent109 , says: September 5, 2019 at 2:53 pm GMT
The Committee of 300 is an evolution of the British East Indies Company Council of 300. The list personally last seen included many Windsors (Prince Andrew), Rothchilds, other Royals. Some of the Americans included some now dead and other still living: George HW Bush, Bill Clinton Tom Steyer, Al Gore, John Kerry, Netanyahu, lots of bankers, Woolsey (ex CIA), journalists like Michael Bloomberg, Paul Krugman, activists and politians like Tony Blair, now dead Zbigniew Brzezinski, CEOs Charles and Edgar Bronfman. The list is long and out of date but these people control much of what goes on whether good or bad. Their hands are everywhere doing good and maybe some of this bad stuff.
Irish Savant , says: Website September 5, 2019 at 2:56 pm GMT
Given the facts a 10 year-old child could see that the official 911 explanation was totally flawed. Just three of these facts are sufficient, the 'dancing Israelis', Silverstein admitting to the 'pull (demolish) it' order and the collapse of steel-framed WTC 7 in freefall despite not being hit. It is not hyperbole to say that America is a failed state given that the known perpetrators were never even charged. ZOG indeed.
Junior , says: September 5, 2019 at 4:08 pm GMT
@Kevin Barrett

A respectable civil rights attorney, Lisa Bloom, handled Katie Johnson's case.

"Respectable"?
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
You do realize that Lisa Bloom is the daughter of Glora Allred and defender of Harvey Weinstein do you not?

You people are so desperate to try to link Trump to Epstein it's pathetic.

I suggest you go back to your gatekeeping nonsense of trying to discredit the 9/11 Truth Movement by spreading misinformation about nukes in the towers.

Tony Hall , says: September 5, 2019 at 4:20 pm GMT
This article stakes out much important ground of information and interpretation Kevin Barrett. The essay resonates as a historic statement of some of our current predicaments. What about the comparisons that might be made concerning the mysteries attending the disappearing corpses of Osama bin Laden and Jeffrey Epstein. And according to Christopher Ketcham, the release of the High Fivin' Urban Movers back to Israel was partially negotiated by Alan Dershowitz who played a big role in defending Epstein over a long period.
Tony Hall , says: September 5, 2019 at 4:29 pm GMT
@anon The ultimate "nutjob quackery" of 9/11 is Phillip Zelikow's 9/11 Commission Report, a document that stands as a testimony and marker signifying the USA's descent into a mad hatter's imperium of lies. legend and illusion.
restless94110 , says: September 5, 2019 at 4:40 pm GMT
Has someone (hint: the author of this article) got a real bad case of TDS? Yes, someone has.

Does someone think the pedophilia means consensual relations with 17 year olds? Yes, someone does.

Ronald Thomas West , says: Website September 5, 2019 at 4:58 pm GMT

It is getting harder and harder to satirize the decadence and depravity of the secular West, which insists on parodying itself with ever-increasing outlandishness. When the book on this once-mighty civilization is written, and the ink is dry, readers will be astounded by the limitless lies of the drunk-on-chutzpah psychopaths who ran it into the ground

You might try:

https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2019/07/29/gina-haspel-wild-indians/

'Believers' aren't exactly innocent in the criminal history of the disintegrating Western culture

follyofwar , says: September 5, 2019 at 5:02 pm GMT
@Kevin Barrett Adding to Junior's comment, I quit reading after you wrote of "credible accusations" of Mr. Trump being involved "in the brutal rape of a 13 year old." And feminist shakedown artist Lisa Bloom, daughter of the even more infamous feminist shakedown artist G. Allred, is your "credible source?" Bloom has about as much credibility as the sicko democrat women who tried to derail Judge Kavanaugh.

Regardless of how much one might hate Trump (and I'm no Trump supporter) levelling such unfounded accusations is journalistic malfeasance. Did we elect the Devil Incarnate? Mr. Barrett, I'm done reading you.

9/11 Inside job , says: September 5, 2019 at 5:09 pm GMT
The special relationship between the CIA and the Mossad was driven partly by the efforts of CIA officer James Angleton . Philip Weiss in his article in Mondoweiss entitled "The goy and the golem: James Angleton and the rise of Israel." states that Angleton's " greatest service to Israel was his willingness no to say a word about the apparent diversion of highly enriched plutonium from a plant in Western Pennsylvania to Israel's nascent nuclear program " The same program which JFK tried to curtail which efforts may have led to his assassination .

... ... ...

Intelligent Dasein , says: Website September 5, 2019 at 5:22 pm GMT

a confessed participant in the controlled demolition of Building 7,

For the love of God, this is stupid. Larry Silverstein was talking about the Fire Commander , for fuck's sake. The Fire Commander made the decision to pull the firefighters out of the building because they could not put the fire out and were in unnecessary danger. That's all he meant. There is not one word in this that has anything to do with a controlled demolition whatsoever.

In order to believe what the 9/11 Douchers would have you believe about this comment, you would have to believe that 1) Building 7 was wired for demolition beforehand; 2) That the NYC Fire Commander somehow knew about this; 3) That the NYC Fire Commander was perfectly okay with allowing his men to spend hours inside a burning building in which he knew that explosive charges had already been rigged to blow; 4) That the NYC Fire Commander had the authority to decide when the charges should be blown and had access to the master switch that would blow them all; 5) That after 7 hours of attempting to fight the fire, the NYC Fire Commander (who by now can be nothing but a full-fledged member of the conspiracy) decides, after briefly consulting with Larry Silverstein, "Oh, the hell with this! Let's just blow up the building now!", to which Larry Silverstein agrees; 6) That after spending 7 hours in a burning building that had fires burning randomly throughout it and that had been struck by multiple pieces of debris, all of the explosive charges and their detonators were still in perfect working order; 7) That none of the firefighters extensively searching the building for survivors happened to notice any of the pre-placed explosive charges nor thought it necessary to report about such; 8) That the NYC Fire Commander then proceeds to "pull" the building after presumably giving some other order for the men to evacuate, which order was never recorded because the "pull" order must have meant "blow up the building"; 9) And that Larry Silverstein, after being part of a massive conspiracy involving insurance fraud, murder, and arson which, if exposed, would send him to a federal death sentence, just decides to casually mention all of this in a television interview for all and sundry to see, but it is only the 9/11 Douchers who pick up on the significance of it.

Does any of this sound remotely believable? Did anyone subscribing to this nonsense stop to think about the context in which this conversation took place? Do any of you 9/11 Douchers even care that you're being completely ridiculous and grasping at nonexistent straws in your vain attempt to establish some sort of case for controlled demolition? Do you even care that everybody can see that what you are saying makes no sense at all? It is perfectly obvious that Larry Silverstein is NOT talking about controlled demolition here. To believe otherwise would require you to literally be insane, to not understand the plain meaning of words and to have no awareness of conversational contexts; yet not only have you swallowed all of this, you have been beating the drum of this insanity for nearly 20 years.

There is no point in reasoning with an insane person. There is, however, the possibility that you don't really believe what you are saying and are just flogging a hobbyhorse, in which case it is you who are engaging in mendacious journalism and trafficking in lies. In either case, you need to be silenced. Neither lies nor insanity have any "right" to be uttered in the public square. You 9/11 Douchers are really the ones doing everything you accuse the mainstream media of doing, and worse. You have become a danger to the public weal and must be stopped. Your conspiratorial nonsense just isn't cute anymore.

Major1 , says: September 5, 2019 at 5:31 pm GMT
Let's recap:

The official stories about the Kennedy assassination, Epstein's death, and 9/11 are clearly suspect. No one with the capacity for critical thinking can seriously deny this. Which elements of these stories are true and which are false will never be resolved.

Because:
The mainstream media including Fox News have abdicated their mission as fact finders and truth tellers. They peddle entertainment and sell ad space. Rachel Maddow foaming at the mouth about Trump's pee tape and Hannity fulminating about FISA abuse are the same product, simply aimed at different demographics.

Nothing in the above two paragraphs is even remotely novel. It's all been said before twenty bazillion times.

... ... ...

Kevin Barrett , says: Website September 5, 2019 at 5:39 pm GMT
Being a feminist or Democrat (or nonfeminist or Republican) is irrelevant to a person's credibility. It's possible that Lisa Bloom was part of a conspiracy to invent a fictitious Katy Johnson story, in which case Bloom is guilty of criminal fraud as well as civil libel. That would be quite a risk for her to take, to say the least. It's also possible that she was somehow duped by others, in which case they would be running the civil and criminal liabilities, while she would just get disbarred for negligence.

The same is true of Johnson's attorney Thomas Meagher.

It is also possible that Johnson's story is at least roughly accurate. There is supporting testimony from another Epstein victim.

If you set aside your prejudices about Democrats-Republicans, feminists-antifeminists, Trump-Hillary, etc., and just look at what's been reported, you'll agree with me that the allegations are credible (but of course unproven). If you suffer emotional blocks against thinking such things about a President, as so many did when similar things were reported about Bill Clinton, I sympathize but also urge you to get psychiatric treatment so you can learn to face unpleasant facts and then get to work cleaning up this country.

CanSpeccy , says: Website September 5, 2019 at 5:42 pm GMT
@utu

The release of Prof. J. Leroy Hulsey report on the finite element analysis of the WTC7 collapse should be a big news.

But won't be.

Democracy works this way. The ruling elite, via the media, Hollywood, etc., tell the people what to think, the people then vote according to the way they think.

Ensuring such top-down control was a primary objective of the bankers, j0urnalists -- including doyen of American journalism, Walter Lippman, and politicians who established the Council on Foreign Relations , America's ruling political establishment.

So the truth of 9/11 will never be known to the majority unless we have a public statement from George W. Bush acknowledging that he personally lit the fuse that set off the explosions that brought WTC 7 down at free-fall speed .

This is fortunate for the intrepid Dr. Hulsey* who would, presumably, otherwise have had to be dispatched by a sudden heart attack, traffic accident, weight-lifting accident suicide with a bullet to the back of the head. As it is, hardly anyone will ever know what he will say or what it means.

* Fortunate also for those who so rashly advocate for truth here and elsewhere on the yet to be fully controlled Internets.

Durruti , says: September 5, 2019 at 5:45 pm GMT
Kevin Barrett

Nicely done. Article will not be featured on front page NYT & discussed on TV.

There are many highlights in your article. This is one.

Epstein's career as a shameless, openly-operating Mossad sexual blackmailer -- like the in-your-face 9/11 coup -- also illustrates another core truth of Western secularism: If there is no God, there are no limits (in this case, to human depravity and what it can get away with). Or as Dostoevsky famously put it: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted."

Morality is officially out of style.

Durruti

anonymous [307] Disclaimer , says: September 5, 2019 at 6:11 pm GMT
Please consult the following papers about the CIA/Mossad crimes against humanity and their pimps who pose as 'politicians' of the fake Western 'democracy' where Epstein was their agent serving their interest as a PIMP.

{from being the work of a single political party, intelligence agency or country, the power structure revealed by the network connected to Epstein is nothing less than a criminal enterprise that is willing to use and abuse children in the pursuit of ever more power, wealth and control.}

https://www.mintpressnews.com/genesis-jeffrey-epstein-bill-clinton-relationship/261455/

[Government by Blackmail: Jeffrey Epstein, Trump's Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era]

https://www.mintpressnews.com/blackmail-jeffrey-epstein-trump-mentor-reagan-era/260760/

Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal

https://www.mintpressnews.com/mega-group-maxwells-mossad-spy-story-jeffrey-epstein-scandal/261172/

[Sep 04, 2019] The Future of the Grand Spectacle which is the USA reality by C.J. Hopkins

Sep 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

If you want a vision of the future, don't imagine "a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever," as Orwell suggested in 1984 . Instead, imagine that human face staring mesmerized into the screen of some kind of nifty futuristic device on which every word, sound, and image has been algorithmically approved for consumption by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA") and its "innovation ecosystem" of "academic, corporate, and governmental partners."

The screen of this futuristic device will offer a virtually unlimited range of "non-divisive" and "hate-free" content, none of which will falsify or distort the "truth," or in any way deviate from "reality." Western consumers will finally be free to enjoy an assortment of news, opinion, entertainment, and educational content (like this Guardian podcast about a man who gave birth , or MSNBC's latest bombshell about Donald Trump's secret Russian oligarch backers ) without having their enjoyment totally ruined by discord-sowing alternative journalists like Aaron Maté or satirists like myself.

"Fake news" will not appear on this screen. All the news will be "authentic." DARPA and its partners will see to that. You won't have to worry about being "influenced" by Russians, Nazis, conspiracy theorists, socialists, populists, extremists, or whomever. Such Persons of Malicious Intent will still be able to post their content (because of "freedom of speech" and all that stuff), but they will do so down in the sewers of the Internet where normal consumers won't have to see it. Anyone who ventures down there looking for it (i.e., such "divisive" and "polarizing" content) will be immediately placed on an official DARPA watchlist for "potential extremists," or "potential white supremacists," or "potential Russians."

Once that happens, their lives will be over (i.e., the lives of the potentially extremist fools who have logged onto whatever dark web platform will still be posting essays like this, not the lives of the Persons of Malicious Intent, who never had any lives to begin with, and who by that time will probably be operating out of some heavily armed, off-the-grid compound in Idaho). Their schools, employers, and landlords will be notified. Their photos and addresses will be published online. Anyone who ever said two words to them (or, God help them, appears in a photograph with them) will have 24 hours to publicly denounce them, or be placed on DARPA’s watchlist themselves.

The Alarmist , says: September 4, 2019 at 9:02 am GMT

@El Dato Dude, you watch RT? You may as well go turn yourself in at the local Federal Building.
The Alarmist , says: September 4, 2019 at 9:03 am GMT
I’d laugh, if this was actually satire and not the reality unfolding before our very eyes.

[Sep 04, 2019] Jim Comey, Have the Grace to Shut Up!! by Larry C Johnson

Sep 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

You think that a guy who has been repeatedly rebuked by the Department of Justice Inspector General for violating DOJ and FBI policies and procedures would have the grace to be silent. You would be wrong. Jim Comey has anointed himself as the Jesus Christ of America. Only Jim is wise and good. Only Jimmy can save us from that anti-Christ, Donald Trump.

And Comey's latest? Trump's a narcissist. Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein. Jim Comey tweeted out the following today (Sunday):

James Comey ‏ Verified account @ Comey 4h 4 hours ago

It's Sunday morning. A devastating hurricane is approaching. A gunman just slaughtered innocents in Texas. But the President of the United States is wasting time airing personal grievances and live-Tweeting Fox. Narcissism is not leadership. America deserves better. Could not agree more. Except the narcissist in Chief is not Trump. It is you, Jimmy Comey. It was not Donald Trump who overstepped his authority and read out a detailed list of charges against Hillary Clinton. It was not Donald Trump that sat on the news that Anthony "Little Dick" Weiner's laptop contained more classified Hillary emails. It was not Donald Trump who then belatedly announced the discovery of said emails.

Jimmy Comey has achieved new lows in smug sanctimony. His self-righteous bullshit has passed the point of tiresome. It is just annoying. I spoke with a retired FBI buddy today. He was one of the first ones detailed to CIA Headquarters in the late 1990s in an effort to improve inter-agency coordination (and that mission failed in large measure because of the behavior of another narcissist, the CIA Chief of Alec Station). He was beyond sad and embarrassed at the spectacle and conduct of Jim Comey. My friend told me that he used to happily introduce himself as a "retired FBI agent." No longer. He simply says that he worked for the Government and tries to avoid saying anything about having served with the FBI. The big hammer is still to drop and Comey is not likely to walk away a free man. He lied to a Federal Court. He needs to be held accountable.

Posted at 08:52 AM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink

Factotum , 03 September 2019 at 11:22 AM

Trey Gowdy also long warned us about the self-annointed Saint James Comey. I sense a trend among knowledgable pundits.
Rob Naardin , 04 September 2019 at 11:00 AM
I can't wait to see the dark forces of the deep state in bright orange prison jumpsuits.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kudos-andy-for-ball-of-collusion/

Diana C , 04 September 2019 at 11:40 AM
"Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein."

As usual, your analogy here is spot on. I'm still giggling.

My literary analogy would have been that Comey is the very inept Walter Mitty of today's America. He does imagine himself as the "voice crying in the wilderness."

It sounds, however like a braying donkey wanting some attention. He was one of the Democrats' "useful idiots." Too bad they didn't realize that they might actually get a certified idiot.

[Sep 04, 2019] The Future of the Grand Spectacle which is the USA reality by C.J. Hopkins

Sep 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

If you want a vision of the future, don't imagine "a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever," as Orwell suggested in 1984 . Instead, imagine that human face staring mesmerized into the screen of some kind of nifty futuristic device on which every word, sound, and image has been algorithmically approved for consumption by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ("DARPA") and its "innovation ecosystem" of "academic, corporate, and governmental partners."

The screen of this futuristic device will offer a virtually unlimited range of "non-divisive" and "hate-free" content, none of which will falsify or distort the "truth," or in any way deviate from "reality." Western consumers will finally be free to enjoy an assortment of news, opinion, entertainment, and educational content (like this Guardian podcast about a man who gave birth , or MSNBC's latest bombshell about Donald Trump's secret Russian oligarch backers ) without having their enjoyment totally ruined by discord-sowing alternative journalists like Aaron Maté or satirists like myself.

"Fake news" will not appear on this screen. All the news will be "authentic." DARPA and its partners will see to that. You won't have to worry about being "influenced" by Russians, Nazis, conspiracy theorists, socialists, populists, extremists, or whomever. Such Persons of Malicious Intent will still be able to post their content (because of "freedom of speech" and all that stuff), but they will do so down in the sewers of the Internet where normal consumers won't have to see it. Anyone who ventures down there looking for it (i.e., such "divisive" and "polarizing" content) will be immediately placed on an official DARPA watchlist for "potential extremists," or "potential white supremacists," or "potential Russians."

Once that happens, their lives will be over (i.e., the lives of the potentially extremist fools who have logged onto whatever dark web platform will still be posting essays like this, not the lives of the Persons of Malicious Intent, who never had any lives to begin with, and who by that time will probably be operating out of some heavily armed, off-the-grid compound in Idaho). Their schools, employers, and landlords will be notified. Their photos and addresses will be published online. Anyone who ever said two words to them (or, God help them, appears in a photograph with them) will have 24 hours to publicly denounce them, or be placed on DARPA’s watchlist themselves.

The Alarmist , says: September 4, 2019 at 9:02 am GMT

@El Dato Dude, you watch RT? You may as well go turn yourself in at the local Federal Building.
The Alarmist , says: September 4, 2019 at 9:03 am GMT
I’d laugh, if this was actually satire and not the reality unfolding before our very eyes.

[Sep 04, 2019] Are General Flynn s Prosecutors Panicking by Larry C Johnson

Notable quotes:
"... Last Friday, August 30th, Sidney Powell filed a brief with the District Court in the District of Columbia laying out in exquisite detail the misconduct of the Mueller prosecutors, who have withheld exculpatory evidence. The document is still behind a pay wall (Pacer). But let me share with you some of the salient points of this filing: ..."
"... Likewise, the prosecutors did not produce evidence of Weissmann's and Ahmad's relationship and work with Bruce Ohr on transmitting the corrupt information to the FBI, and the numerous 302s resulting from the interviews of Bruce Ohr by the second agent. ..."
"... This case, involving Adam Lovinger, is related to issues involving Mr. Flynn, as Mr. Lovinger was wrongly charged (and secretly cleared) after blowing the whistle on the fraudulent payments to FBI/CIA/DOD operative Stefan Halper -- a central figure in the government's targeting and intelligence abuses of the last several years -- including against Mr. Flynn. ..."
"... Got that? The Mueller prosecutors lied about what the investigation of Mr. Lovinger concluded. He did NOT, repeat NOT, "yield any classified or sensitive information. " But Mueller's team of hacks, disgraceful pieces of excrement, took out the word, "NOT". ..."
"... How in the hell does Goldman know what is in those "transcripts"? He was told. ..."
"... But there is a broader, more important point--Michael Flynn's conversation with the Russian Ambassador was not illegal. It was not improper. He could discuss whatever he wanted to discuss as the incoming National Security Advisor for Donald Trump. This was a false claim by the Mueller Prosecutors. ..."
"... If the Mueller team, what is left of it, was confident of their position, they would not have leaked this story to the New York Times hack, Goldman. This is a sign of desperation and panic. ..."
"... Knowing what we know about Judge Sullivan, who is in charge of the Michael Flynn case, he is likely to be furious by this bald lying by Mueller's hacks. ..."
"... On another front of the Russiagate affair, per a Monsieur America Twitter thread, Loretta Lynch in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee has absolved herself of any involvement in the FISA warrant on Carter Page. https://twitter.com/MonsieurAmerica/status/1168885394269564928 ..."
"... Now the rats are throwing their subordinates under the sinking ship. Good to know the grandma AG had time to meet Hillary's husband on the tarmac but no time to be briefed about "foreign interference" in our election. I can't wait to hear Obama's excuse. ..."
"... Flynn may have been set up and lied to right and left, BUT... how did he get three stars? He comes across in this as a victim and a dummy. ..."
Sep 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The short answer to the title of this article--YES!!

Michael Flynn's new lawyer, Sidney Powell, is a honey badger. If you do not know anything about honey badgers I encourage you to watch the documentary, Honey Badgers, Master's of Mayhem . They tear the testicles off of lions. And it sure looks like Ms. Powell is emasculating prosecutor Andrew Weisman.

Last Friday, August 30th, Sidney Powell filed a brief with the District Court in the District of Columbia laying out in exquisite detail the misconduct of the Mueller prosecutors, who have withheld exculpatory evidence. The document is still behind a pay wall (Pacer). But let me share with you some of the salient points of this filing:

The government's most stunning suppression of evidence is perhaps the text messages of Peter Srzok and Lisa Page. In July of 2017, (now over two years ago), the Inspector General of the Department of Justice advised Special Counsel of the extreme bias in the now infamous text messages of these two FBI employees. Mr. Van Grack did not produce a single text messages to the defense until March 13, 2018, when he gave them a link to then-publicly available messages.14

Mr. Van Grack and Ms. Ahmad, among other things, did not disclose that FBI Agent Strzok had been fired from the Special Counsel team as its lead agent almost six months earlier because of his relationship with Deputy Director McCabe's Counsel -- who had also been on the Special Counsel team -- and because of their text messages and conduct. One would think that more than a significant subset of those messages had to have been shared by the Inspector General of the Department of Justice with Special Counsel to warrant such a high-level and immediate personnel change.

Indeed, Ms. Page left the Department of Justice because of her conduct, and Agent Strzok was terminated from the FBI because of it.

Likewise, the prosecutors did not produce evidence of Weissmann's and Ahmad's relationship and work with Bruce Ohr on transmitting the corrupt information to the FBI, and the numerous 302s resulting from the interviews of Bruce Ohr by the second agent.

The Government's misconduct was not limited to General Flynn. Ms. Powell describes in detail how the Government lied in another case related to General Flynn:

In yet another recent demonstration of egregious government misconduct, the government completely changed the meaning of exculpatory information in a declassified version of a report -- by omitting the word "not." This case, involving Adam Lovinger, is related to issues involving Mr. Flynn, as Mr. Lovinger was wrongly charged (and secretly cleared) after blowing the whistle on the fraudulent payments to FBI/CIA/DOD operative Stefan Halper -- a central figure in the government's targeting and intelligence abuses of the last several years -- including against Mr. Flynn.

Mr. Lovinger had been an analyst at the Pentagon for more than ten years when he was detailed to the White House at then-National Security Advisor Flynn's request. Mr. Lovinger voiced concerns internally regarding the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment for prioritizing academic reports (one of which was written by Stefan Halper) at the expense of real threat assessments. He was recalled to the Pentagon, accused of mishandling sensitive information, stripped of his security clearance, and suspended. As it turned out, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service conducted a thorough examination of his electronic devices, but "[a]gents found no evidence he leaked to the press, as charged, or that he was a counterintelligence risk.

Even though the investigation exonerated Mr. Lovinger of these charges a full month before Mr. Lovinger's hearing, the government did not reveal to Mr. Lovinger's attorneys that this investigation occurred.17 Even worse, the declassified version of the NCIS left out a crucial "not". It read that the investigation "did yield any classified or sensitive information,"18 when the truth was the investigation "did not yield any classified or sensitive information."19 The declassified version omitted the word "not."

Got that? The Mueller prosecutors lied about what the investigation of Mr. Lovinger concluded. He did NOT, repeat NOT, "yield any classified or sensitive information. " But Mueller's team of hacks, disgraceful pieces of excrement, took out the word, "NOT".

Now here is where it gets interesting. Sidney Powell filed her document on Friday night (30 August). She also submitted a sealed portion detailing how the Mueller team has lied about the evidence. I have seen one of the affidavits she filed. I will not say who or what it contained other than to expose specific details how Michael Flynn's Fourth Amendment rights were violated. But the prosecutors ran immediately to Adam Goldman of the New York Times as leaked this sealed information.

Adam wrote an article the same day and "reported" the following:

Lawyers for Michael T. Flynn, the president's first national security adviser, escalated their attacks on prosecutors on Friday, recycling unfounded conspiratorial accusations in a last-ditch bid to delay his sentencing in a case in which he has twice admitted guilt.

The move could anger Emmet G. Sullivan, the federal judge who will sentence Mr. Flynn. The filings could magnify any doubts by Judge Sullivan about whether Mr. Flynn truly accepts responsibility for his crime of lying to the F.B.I. and whether he fulfilled his cooperation agreement with the government in one of the lingering cases brought by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

In a pair of filings, Mr. Flynn's lawyers made clear that they view him as a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, amplifying right-wing theories about a so-called deep state of government bureaucrats working to undermine President Trump. The defense lawyers accused prosecutors of engaging in "pernicious" conduct in Mr. Flynn's case, saying they had been "manipulating or controlling the press to their advantage to extort that plea."

Yet, when you read the full filing by Ms. Powell, not a single "unfounded conspiratorial accusation" is discussed. The prosecutors gave that protected information to Goldman.

Worse, the prosecutors gave Goldman information from the NSA intercepts of Michael Flynn's conversation with the Russian Ambassador. So far, the Mueller team of miscreants have refused to turn over this material to Michael Flynn's lawyer. But they shared it with Goldman, who wrote:

"We must have access to that information to represent our client consistently with his constitutional rights and our ethical obligations," Mr. Flynn's lawyers wrote.

The classified transcripts of the calls make clear that the two men discussed sanctions at length and that Mr. Flynn was highly unlikely to have forgotten those details when questioned by the F.B.I., several former United States officials familiar with the documents have said. It was clear, the officials said, that sanctions were the only thing Mr. Flynn wanted to talk about with Mr. Kislyak.

Mr. Flynn's lawyers also suggested in the filing that the government had exculpatory material, but it is not clear if they consider the transcripts to be that material. Some conservatives have embraced a theory that Mr. Flynn's nonchalance in the F.B.I. interview, which agents documented because it seemed at odds with how blatantly he was lying, was exonerating.

How in the hell does Goldman know what is in those "transcripts"? He was told.

But there is a broader, more important point--Michael Flynn's conversation with the Russian Ambassador was not illegal. It was not improper. He could discuss whatever he wanted to discuss as the incoming National Security Advisor for Donald Trump. This was a false claim by the Mueller Prosecutors.

If the Mueller team, what is left of it, was confident of their position, they would not have leaked this story to the New York Times hack, Goldman. This is a sign of desperation and panic.

Knowing what we know about Judge Sullivan, who is in charge of the Michael Flynn case, he is likely to be furious by this bald lying by Mueller's hacks.

Should be an interesting week ahead. Sidney Powell will probably be feasting on a heaping plate of prosecutor balls. Like the Honey Badger, she is ripping them a new one.

Posted at 10:27 PM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink

Factotum , 03 September 2019 at 11:24 AM

Year of the Woman finally finds the right woman. I'm with her.
Jack , 03 September 2019 at 12:05 PM
What were Flynn's previous attorneys doing? They got him to cop the plea deal.
Larry Johnson -> Jack... , 03 September 2019 at 12:34 PM
They were incompetents. They should be sued for malpractice and disbarred. They helped serve up General Flynn and he trusted them. That's now water under the bridge. Sidney Powell is a force to be reckoned with.
Don Schmeling said in reply to Jack... , 03 September 2019 at 06:40 PM
They might have been too scared of what Mueller would do to them if they put up a good case for Flynn.

I think the same thing happened to George Popadopoulos who had his lawyers roll over and play dead before Mueller.
You need to find Lawyers who are not afraid of the system, or are in bed with the system.

Factotum said in reply to Don Schmeling... , 03 September 2019 at 09:22 PM
The "confession" they got Papadopolus to sign made no sense and almost looked like it had been altered after Papadopolus had already signed his name. There were a series of very disjointed and irrelevant statements of facts, to which Papadopolus agreed they were factual.

Then pow at the very end was basically a confession he had violated the Logan Act.

None of the prior statements supported this conclusion, but as the cherry on top of his "confession" was the claim he engaged in policy level discussions with the very highest Russian higher ups while Obama was still President. (Was he ever in this role - hard to remember?).

That always struck me as a very weird "confession - but there is was with Papadolopus's signature on it, and accepted by the deep state investigating authorities.

This "confession" deserves a re-read in light of what we are learning now about the set-up and ambush mentality of the deep state "investigators.

jd hawkins said in reply to Factotum... , 04 September 2019 at 04:15 AM
I'm in your 'Amen' corner on this.
ex PFC Chuck , 03 September 2019 at 05:38 PM
On another front of the Russiagate affair, per a Monsieur America Twitter thread, Loretta Lynch in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee has absolved herself of any involvement in the FISA warrant on Carter Page. https://twitter.com/MonsieurAmerica/status/1168885394269564928
Fred -> ex PFC Chuck ... , 03 September 2019 at 06:54 PM
Now the rats are throwing their subordinates under the sinking ship. Good to know the grandma AG had time to meet Hillary's husband on the tarmac but no time to be briefed about "foreign interference" in our election. I can't wait to hear Obama's excuse.
Ghost Ship , 03 September 2019 at 07:30 PM
did yield any classified or sensitive information
Logically just doesn't make sense - it's almost as if the person editing the NCIS report decided he didn't like doing what he asked to do and produced a piece of text that only really made sense with a "not" in it. Either that, or he was actually an idiot.
JamesT -> Ghost Ship... , 04 September 2019 at 12:35 AM
Or the mangled language was used to let them claim it was accidental ... "gosh, we just made an honest mistake".
MP98 , 04 September 2019 at 12:01 AM
Flynn may have been set up and lied to right and left, BUT... how did he get three stars? He comes across in this as a victim and a dummy.

He should have known that the FBI NEVER interviews people honestly. The agents told him that he didn't need a lawyer so he didn't call one. That's just massive stupid.

Cops I know have told me to NEVER talk to police without a lawyer present. How come the former head of the DIA didn't know that?

[Sep 04, 2019] What We Still Do Not Know About Russiagate by Stephen F. Cohen's

Notable quotes:
"... It must again be emphasized: It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a more toxic allegation in American presidential history than the one leveled against candidate, and then president, Donald Trump that he "colluded" with the Kremlin in order to win the 2016 presidential election -- and, still more, that Vladimir Putin's regime, "America's No. 1 threat," had compromising material on Trump that made him its "puppet." Or a more fraudulent accusation. ..."
"... Was it plausible, for example, that Trump, a longtime owner and operator of international hotels, would commit an indiscreet act in a Moscow hotel that he did not own or control? Or that, as Steele also claimed, high-level Kremlin sources had fed him damning anti-Trump information even though their vigilant boss, Putin, wanted Trump to win the election? ..."
"... Nor was Russian "meddling" in the election anything akin to a "digital Pearl Harbor," as widely asserted, and it was certainly far less and less intrusive than President Bill Clinton's political and financial "interference" undertaken to assure the reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996. ..."
"... Nonetheless, Russiagate's core allegation persists, like a legend, in American political life -- in media commentary, in financial solicitations by some Democratic candidates for Congress, and, as is clear from my own discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed people. The only way to dispel, to excoriate, such a legend is to learn and expose how it began -- by whom, when, and why. ..."
"... Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump's presidential campaign? ..."
"... the repeatedly hapless Comey seems incapable of having initiated such an audacious operation against a presidential candidate, still less a president-elect. As I have long suggested, John Brennan and James Clapper, head of the CIA and Office of National Intelligence under Obama respectively, are the more likely culprits. ..."
"... First and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in Russiagate.) ..."
"... At every "debate" or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be asked about this grave threat to American democracy -- what they think about what happened and would do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy. ..."
Sep 04, 2019 | www.thenation.com

It must again be emphasized: It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a more toxic allegation in American presidential history than the one leveled against candidate, and then president, Donald Trump that he "colluded" with the Kremlin in order to win the 2016 presidential election -- and, still more, that Vladimir Putin's regime, "America's No. 1 threat," had compromising material on Trump that made him its "puppet." Or a more fraudulent accusation.

Even leaving aside the misperception that Russia is the primary threat to America in world affairs, no aspect of this allegation has turned out to be true, as should have been evident from the outset. Major aspects of the now infamous Steele Dossier, on which much of the allegation was based, were themselves not merely "unverified" but plainly implausible.

Was it plausible, for example, that Trump, a longtime owner and operator of international hotels, would commit an indiscreet act in a Moscow hotel that he did not own or control? Or that, as Steele also claimed, high-level Kremlin sources had fed him damning anti-Trump information even though their vigilant boss, Putin, wanted Trump to win the election? Nonetheless, the American mainstream media and other important elements of the US political establishment relied on Steele's allegations for nearly three years, even heroizing him -- and some still do, explicitly or implicitly.

Not surprisingly, former special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of "collusion" between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. No credible evidence has been produced that Russia's "interference" affected the result of the 2016 presidential election in any significant way. Nor was Russian "meddling" in the election anything akin to a "digital Pearl Harbor," as widely asserted, and it was certainly far less and less intrusive than President Bill Clinton's political and financial "interference" undertaken to assure the reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996.

Nonetheless, Russiagate's core allegation persists, like a legend, in American political life -- in media commentary, in financial solicitations by some Democratic candidates for Congress, and, as is clear from my own discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed people. The only way to dispel, to excoriate, such a legend is to learn and expose how it began -- by whom, when, and why.

Officially, at least in the FBI's version, its operation "Crossfire Hurricane," the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that began in mid-2016 was due to suspicious remarks made to visitors by a young and lowly Trump aide, George Papadopoulos. This too is not believable, as I pointed out previously . Most of those visitors themselves had ties to Western intelligence agencies. That is, the young Trump aide was being enticed, possibly entrapped, as part of a larger intelligence operation against Trump. (Papadopoulos wasn't the only Trump associate targeted, Carter Page being another.)

But the question remains: Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump's presidential campaign? A reflexive answer might be because candidate Trump promised to "cooperate with Russia," to pursue a pro-détente foreign policy, but this was hardly a startling, still less subversive, advocacy by a would-be Republican president. All of the major pro-détente episodes in the 20th century had been initiated by Republican presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.

So, again, what was it about Trump that so spooked the spooks so far off their rightful reservation and so intrusively into American presidential politics? Investigations being overseen by Attorney General William Barr may provide answers -- or not. Barr has already leveled procedural charges against James Comey, head of the FBI under President Obama and briefly under President Trump, but the repeatedly hapless Comey seems incapable of having initiated such an audacious operation against a presidential candidate, still less a president-elect. As I have long suggested, John Brennan and James Clapper, head of the CIA and Office of National Intelligence under Obama respectively, are the more likely culprits.

The FBI is no longer the fearsome organization it once was and thus not hard to investigate, as Barr has already shown. The others, particularly the CIA, are a different matter, and Barr has suggested they are resisting. To investigate them, particularly the CIA, it seems, he has brought in a veteran prosecutor-investigator, John Durham.

Which raises other questions. Are Barr and Durham, whose own careers include associations with US intelligence agencies, determined to uncover the truth about the origins of Russiagate? And can they really do so fully, given the resistance already apparent? Even if so, will Barr make public their findings, however damning of the intelligence agencies they may be, or will he classify them? And if the latter, will President Trump use his authority to declassify the findings as the 2020 presidential election approaches in order to discredit the role of Obama's presidency and its would-be heirs?

Equally important perhaps, how will mainstream media treat the Barr-Durham investigation and its findings? Having driven the Russiagate narrative for so long and so misleadingly -- and with liberals perhaps finding themselves in the incongruous position of defending rogue intelligence agencies -- will they credit or seek to discredit the findings?

It is true, of course, that Barr and Durham, as Trump appointees, are not the ideal investigators of Intel misdeeds in the Russiagate saga. Much better would be a truly bipartisan, independent investigation based in the Senate, as was the Church Committee of the mid-1970s, which exposed and reformed (it thought at the time) serious abuses by US intelligence agencies. That would require, however, a sizable core of nonpartisan, honorable, and courageous senators of both parties, who thus far seem to be lacking.

There are also, however, the ongoing and upcoming Democratic presidential debates. First and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in Russiagate.)

At every "debate" or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be asked about this grave threat to American democracy -- what they think about what happened and would do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com .

Stephen F. Cohen Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now in their sixth year, are available at www.thenation.com .

[Sep 04, 2019] Military Intervention Isn t Humanitarian by Daniel Larison

Libya war was a pure oil grab. Pretexts always can be found.
Notable quotes:
"... Is intervention likely to impel more violence in the long term? Do policymakers actually know enough about the situation on the ground to make the "right" decisions? Is the American public willing to commit itself to years-long reconstruction efforts? Honest answers here may not sit well with idealism. In many instances, the most moral act is not to act at all. ..."
"... The most telling part of Power's career in government was that she served as ambassador to the U.N. at a time when the U.S. was enabling and supporting the Saudi coalition war on Yemen, and as part of the administration she had nothing to say about the crimes being committed against Yemeni civilians by coalition forces with U.S. military assistance and weapons. ..."
"... As Bessner notes, she doesn't have much to say about the abuses of U.S. clients in her book. She has been eager to advocate for using force against hostile or pariah regimes when they commit atrocities, but when client states use American weapons to commit the same atrocities while enjoying full U.S. backing Power didn't so much as utter a protest. After she left government and Trump became president, Power criticized U.S. support for the war, but when she was in a position to challenge a monstrous policy from inside the administration she apparently said nothing. ..."
"... And no one with enough intellectual honesty to mention that she was among the greatest enablers of Yemenis' suffering yet before the said "Tyrant" (who might be a tyrant to anyone but her social class) entered the office. Profiles in cowardice, all of them. ..."
Sep 04, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Daniel Bessner has written a very interesting review of Sar's memoir, The Education of an Idealist . Here he focuses on her narrow thinking about "humanitarian" intervention:

If you accept Power's premises, then humanitarian intervention boils down to a purely philosophical inquiry: Is it right to save lives if one has the capacity to do so? The answer, of course, is yes. The problem, though, is that intervention is not a thought experiment; it takes place in a world of brutal realities. In particular, humanitarian forces confront radical uncertainty. Is intervention likely to impel more violence in the long term? Do policymakers actually know enough about the situation on the ground to make the "right" decisions? Is the American public willing to commit itself to years-long reconstruction efforts? Honest answers here may not sit well with idealism. In many instances, the most moral act is not to act at all.

Can military intervention ever be humanitarian? It may be possible in theory, but as Bessner notes it doesn't work that way in practice. "Humanitarian" interventionists want the wars they support to be judged by their intentions to save lives and not by the results of ensuing chaos, instability, and violence. Taking sides in foreign conflicts inevitably means deciding that our government should end the lives of some people that have done nothing to us because we have concluded that it is the right thing to do. That takes for granted that our government has the right to act as judge and executioner in other people's wars simply because we have the power to affect the outcome. When we think about "humanitarian" intervention this way, we can see that it is driven by the worst kind of arrogant presumption. The first question we should ask is this: what gives us the authority to interfere in another country's internal conflict? We should also ask ourselves what gives us the right to cast aside international law whenever we deem it necessary. Isn't "humanitarian" intervention in practice little more than international armed vigilantism?

The Libyan war is one example of just such a "good" intervention that pretty clearly caused more harm than it prevented. It also violated most of the requirements of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine that was invoked to justify it. Like more than a few other die-hard Libyan war supporters, Power remains convinced that it was the right decision, because she doesn't ask the questions that would force her to confront the harm that the intervention did to Libya and the surrounding region. Bessner comments:

Power never really asked these questions, because ultimately, as the historian Stephen Wertheim has argued, she considers humanitarian intervention a categorical imperative (as long as it doesn't involve U.S. allies, of course).

That last qualification is an important one, and it gets at the heart of what is wrong with "humanitarian" interventionism in the U.S. and the West. If a government is considered to be on "our" side, it can commit war crimes with impunity, devastate whole countries, and starve tens of millions of people, and the most vocal "humanitarian" interventionists will usually have nothing to say about it. I have remarked on several occasions that "humanitarian" interventionists just ignored the catastrophe in Yemen despite the fact that it was the world's worst man-made humanitarian disaster, and it has only been in the last year or two that any of them have spoken up about it now that it is Trump's policy.

The most telling part of Power's career in government was that she served as ambassador to the U.N. at a time when the U.S. was enabling and supporting the Saudi coalition war on Yemen, and as part of the administration she had nothing to say about the crimes being committed against Yemeni civilians by coalition forces with U.S. military assistance and weapons.

As Bessner notes, she doesn't have much to say about the abuses of U.S. clients in her book. She has been eager to advocate for using force against hostile or pariah regimes when they commit atrocities, but when client states use American weapons to commit the same atrocities while enjoying full U.S. backing Power didn't so much as utter a protest. After she left government and Trump became president, Power criticized U.S. support for the war, but when she was in a position to challenge a monstrous policy from inside the administration she apparently said nothing.

Bessner observes that railing against hostile and pariah states while letting clients off the hook makes no sense if the goal is to minimize the harm to civilians:

Her approach does not make much sense from a pragmatic perspective either: U.S. officials have the highest likelihood of ending human rights abuses in countries that depend on us; there is little point in spending political capital in a mostly quixotic attempt to transform antagonists like North Korea.

Of course, it is much safer politically to denounce the states with which our government has no ties or influence, and it is much easier to remain silent about the crimes of client states that have significant clout in Washington. The point here is not just that Power failed her own test when she served in government, but that the impulse to intervene on "humanitarian" grounds amounts to agitating for war against certain governments while giving U.S. clients a free pass to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with our government's blessing.

Alex (the one that likes Ike) • 5 hours ago

There's yet one more reason to why she wasn't saying anything about Yemen when in office beside the one that it were her guys who directed that war then. Perhaps less phony, but, I'd rather say, more tragic. It's much easier to criticize someone for neglecting his duties than not to neglect those duties when you've got them yourself.

I almost see those lemmings on her Twitter chirping: 'Oh, you're so brave, you're standing up to the Terrible Orange Tyrant.' (Not that the "Tyrant" was even aware that she's standing up to him).

And no one with enough intellectual honesty to mention that she was among the greatest enablers of Yemenis' suffering yet before the said "Tyrant" (who might be a tyrant to anyone but her social class) entered the office. Profiles in cowardice, all of them.

[Sep 04, 2019] Deep State Dudley Doubles Down Explains What He Really Meant In Scandalous Anti-Trump Op-Ed

Sep 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

"Deep State" Dudley Doubles Down: "Explains" What He Really Meant In Scandalous Anti-Trump Op-Ed

by Tyler Durden Wed, 09/04/2019 - 10:21 0 SHARES

There is a saying, when in a hole stop digging.

Unfortunately for former Goldman managing director and NY Fed president, Bill " let them eat iPads " Dudley, that is a saying he is not familiar with, and one week after his stunning Bloomberg op-ed in which he advocated the Fed to prevent Trump's 2020 re-election by sending the economy in a recession, resulting in a brutal response from virtually everyone who slammed Dudley's musings as the final proof that the Fed was in fact a political animal, one which is more powerful than the executive branch in its ability to pick and choose presidents, Dudley is out with an "explainer", seeking to "answer" some of the main questions posed by his "provocative" piece.

After reading " What I Meant When I Said 'Don't Enable Trump ", let's just say that Dudley fails in explaining why he said is not what he said, and if anything he has successfully doubled down, giving Trump even more ammunition to throw the book at the political Fed for not cutting rates fast enough as the president has been demanding for months, and for eventually taking the blame for the coming economic and market crash.

Dudley's letter, written in rhetorical Q&A format, begins by asking himself what motivated him to write this article. His answer is two fold:

First, President Trump's trade war with China was increasing uncertainty about how global trading rules would evolve, what tariffs would be imposed, what changes firms might need to make to their global supply chains, and what the downside risks might be for the U.S. economy. Just a few days before the article was published, the president ordered U.S. firms to pull out of China.

Second, the president continued to attack the Federal Reserve and push it to ease monetary policy further. He emphasized that the Fed, not the White House or its trade war with China, should be blamed if the economy faltered. His attacks on the Fed included characterizing Chairman Jerome Powell as an "enemy" -- on par, in his view, with President Xi Jinping of China.

As Dudley "saw it", the combination of the trade war and the president's attacks on the Fed "threatened to put the central bank in an untenable position", one where Trump was shifting responsibility for the downside risks from his trade war onto the Fed. "I thought this was an important issue worth exploring."

What Dudley means here is that whereas traditionally the Fed has been commended for bailing out banks the world by throwing trillions of dollars at a problem and hoping it goes away, even though some time in 2016 it became clear that this approach was doomed to failure and so it would be great to have a hapless scapegoat in the White House - i.e., someone such as president Donald Trump - to take the blame for decades of disastrous monetary policy which has resulted int he world's biggest asset bubble in history, what happened next was not part of the program , namely Trump flipping the table on the Fed and making it the key catalyst for the upcoming US recession.

Indeed, one can say that Trump - painted daily as a bumbling buffoon by his enemies, and sometimes, friends - has in fact played his cards perfectly, demanding the Fed cut rates well into late 2018, something which the Fed eventually did, and giving Trump all the leverage in claiming that he was, in fact right, and the Fed was wrong. Certainly, with the market now expecting 4 or more rate cuts by the end of 2020 and tying the fate of the S&P to this expectation being fulfilled, one can argue that Trump will be even more right, and that the Fed - who can forget Powell's famous statement that we are "a long way" from neutral less than a year ago when the Fed chair was still hawkish - was not only wrong, but clueless .

As such, one can counter Dudley's rambling, defensive op-ed part 2 published today in Bloomberg , by simply pointing out that the reason for the former Goldman banker's anger is not so much Trump's trade war with China - which increasingly more Americans agree with and even Trump's enemies concede was long overdue - nor Trump's "attacks" on Fed independence, of course the Fed was never actually independent as anyone who remembers how LBJ literally attacked a Fed chairman in 1965, demanding more money, knows very well, but because Trump managed to quickly and effectively outsmart the Fed, and box the Fed chairman so that the Fed is now forced to underwriter Trump's trade war, as we explained first one month ago .

So, apparently unable to express what he meant the first time around and sparking a firestorm of criticism, what was Dudley's oh so complicated message that was lost in translation:

First, the Fed needs to be cautious that it does not inadvertently enable the president's trade war with China.

As I wrote: "what if the Fed's accommodation encourages the president to escalate the trade war further, increasing the risk of recession? The central bank's efforts to cushion the blow might not be merely ineffectual. They might actually make things worse."

In my judgment, there is a risk that the Fed, by easing, might encourage the president to take even more aggressive actions on trade and in raising tariffs . This might create even greater downside risks for the economy that monetary policy might prove ill-suited to address.

One can argue that this is a credible complaint. The only problem is Dudley should be addressing his anger not at Trump, but at Powell, who certified before the world that any further escalations in Trump's trade war are effectively a justification for more rate cuts, for one simple reason: the US economy was doing well enough not to need a rate cut, yet the Fed - having become the world's central bank - desperately needed a pretext to cut, and found one in Trump's trade war. Whether this was Powell's intention is unclear, although as we said at the time, "it certainly means that Trump is now de facto in charge of the Fed's monetary policy by way of US foreign policy, and it also means that as BofA wrote, "the Fed is unintentionally underwriting the trade war."

Of course, what Dudley is concerned about is not the trade war itself, but how it could implicate the Fed as the global economy continues to grind to a halt, and as he says, "the Fed's problems might not end there. Not only might the Fed be unable to rescue the economy, but it also might be blamed for the economy's poor performance. This risk is higher because of the president's ongoing attacks on the Fed." This is a point he echoes toward the end of the article as well, writing that " I don't think the Fed should be attacked for the economy's performance when the president's own actions are creating the downside risks."

Bingo: that's it right there - the "risk" that the Fed may be blamed for not just the "economy's poor performance" but that the great unwashed masses may one day wake up and realize that the reason why the global financial system is facing a crisis of monumental proportions has nothing to do with Trump - who is merely a vessel and a symptom of a broken system - and everything to do with a central bank which ever since its creation in 1913 has had one purpose, to make the rich richer and perpetuate a broken monetary system (even Mark Carney is saying the days of the dollar as a reserve currency are now over), is why Dudley is so very much on edge. After all, those same great unwashed masses, following the moment of epiphany may pay Dudley a visit in his mansion and demand an explanation of their own why everything has gone to hell, as it almost certainly will after the next recession.

Once one realizes that this is the true motive behind not just today's Dudley article, but also his prior op-ed, then everything falls into place, including Dudley's hint that the Fed's actions will affect the "political outcome in 2020."

Addressing what was arguably the most sensitive aspect of his original oped, namely the conclusion which suggested that the Fed should throw the economy into recession just to prevent Trump's re-election, to wit:

"There's even an argument that the election itself falls within the Fed's purview. After all, Trump's reelection arguably presents a threat to the U.S. and global economy, to the Fed's independence and its ability to achieve its employment and inflation objectives. If the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020."

... Dudley says that his "intention was to be provocative." So what was his intention, if not to bring attention to the fact that contrary to countless lies, the Fed was never independent? He explains:

I was exploring where logic might take you if you started with two premises: 1) President Trump's trade war was likely to be bad for the U.S. economy, and 2) the Fed's goal is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome with respect to employment and inflation. In such circumstances, how should the Fed behave and what should it consider?

I was suggesting that if the Fed pushed backed that it might be able to achieve a better economic outcome. I was not suggesting that the Fed should do so regardless of the consequences for the economy or that it should stand by and allow a recession. And I was not trying to suggest that the Fed should take sides in the upcoming election.

So... Dudley's point is that the Fed is not political, and yet it should push back on the president's decisions to "achieve a better economic outcome"? A quick question here: Better for who? The banks, which were the only beneficiaries of Fed policies for the past decade? The 0.01% who got richer and richer since the financial crisis as the US middle class disappeared? And then there is the question of what mandate does the Fed have, in Dudley's eyes, to one up the president when it comes to the best economic outcome.

Actually, an even simpler question: who "elected" the Fed? And just whose interests does the Fed represent? Maybe for the third part of his increasingly surreal op-ed series, Bill Dudley can start with a discussion of just how the Fed - an entity which as Bernanke's former advisor once said : "people would be stunned to know the extent to which the Fed is privately owned" - represents the interests of the majority of Americans.

Then again, we doubt there will be a part 3 as by this point the backpedaling in Dudley's "explainer" was so furious, not even he had any idea what it was he was trying to say, as the following "Q & A" confirms:

Q. Do you think the Fed should conduct monetary policy with an eye on influencing the outcome of the 2020 presidential election?

A. I do not. Doing so would be far outside the scope of the Fed's authority and clearly inappropriate. Moreover, the Fed would be perceived as partisan and such a perception would likely compromise the Fed's independence. Behaving in such a manner not only would be wrong, but it also would not be in the Fed's interests.

So, it's not within the scope of the Fed's authority to influence the outcome of a presidential election as that would "compromise the Fed's independence", but it is the scope to "achieve a better economic outcome" than that pursued by the president? Interesting, please tell us more.

And so he does, when in the very next rhetorical answer, Dudley tries to reconcile what he wrote in: "Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020."

I think central bankers should be aware of all the factors that affect the economic outlook. What the Fed does or doesn't do can influence electoral outcomes, which in turn can have consequences for the economy and for monetary policy . But the Fed should never be motivated by political considerations or deliberately set monetary policy with the goal of influencing an election.

In other words, be aware of how your actions could sink Trump's reelection chances, but... don't follow through on them, especially since that would confirm the issue raised above, namely that the Fed was never independent and apolitical, and would culminate with the end of the US Federal Reserve, And yes, it is ironic that Dudley's letter has done more damage to the perception of Fed "independence" than hundreds of Trump tweets slamming Powell.

In parting, and having "resolved" any speculation that he was calling for a monetary coup against the president - at least in his own mind - Dudley touches on the two most important points address in his letter, Fed independence, and what on earth prompted Dudley to write the original "hornets nest" op-ed in the first place.

So, on the first topic, whether "the Fed has been politicized", Dudley answers:

In my view, President Trump's persistent attacks on the Fed have politicized the central bank. People now wonder whether the president's attacks are influencing the Fed's decisions. For example, if the Fed eases monetary policy further at its upcoming September policy-making meeting, people are likely to wonder about the motivation. Is it concern about the economic outlook, or the president's attacks on the Fed? In contrast, I don't believe the Fed is politicized in the sense that it would consider trying to influence election outcomes.

Once again, the Fed was always politicized (see LBJ vs William McChesney Martin, and countless other examples of presidents bossing Fed Chairs around), but it desperately tried to deflect attention from this to avoid being called into Congress any time the leading political party needed lower rates to pursue a voter-friendly agenda, as will be the case with Helicopter money, aka MMT, in a few years, when the Fed will no longer be an independent entity in any capacity, and will be tasked with monetizing all the debt the US issues to pursue its Green New Stupidity.

However, where Dudley made a catastrophic fuck up is by himself suggesting that the Fed should not only try but succeed in influencing an election outcomes. It is this potentiality that sparked the outcry from both Democrats and Republicans, both Austrians and Keynesians alike, as that level of truth only emerges during periods of tremendous shock.

And, if nothing else, the second Dudley op-ed confirms that Dudley was in indeed in "shock" when he wrote his first Bloomberg column. And just in case there was any doubt, we leave readers with Dudley's conclusion, one in which the former NY Fed president says that while there may be a "deep state" or a conspiracy, he is part of neither:

The article is mine and mine alone. Fed officials were not involved in any way. There is no "deep state" or conspiracy that I am part of. Fed officials are not using me as a vehicle to signal their unhappiness with the president's attacks on the central bank and on Chairman Powell.

And the absolute punchline: " I wrote the article to express my concern that the president had placed the negative economic consequences of his trade war at the feet of the Fed, and that Fed officials had not pushed back against this more forcibly ." Which is amusing, because after all those often contradictory words, Dudley leaves his readers where they started: asking him how the Fed should "push back more forcibly" against the president, one which the Fed can prevent from getting re-elected - as Dudley himself admitted last week - if it only chooses, but it would never choose to do so as it is so apolitical, it should push to "achieve a better economic outcome" than the one sought by the president.

In short: if Dudley had dug the hole 6 feet deep with his original op-ed, he added a good 6 more feet with the sequel. We can't wait what "Deep State Dudley" does for part 3...

[Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda

Highly recommended!
Sep 02, 2019 | www.yahoo.com

Rob, yesterday

So all the fuss about "Russian hacking" was crocodile tears western propaganda.

[Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda

Highly recommended!
Sep 02, 2019 | www.yahoo.com

Rob, yesterday

So all the fuss about "Russian hacking" was crocodile tears western propaganda.

[Sep 03, 2019] Wallerstein on Racism

Notable quotes:
"... Hitler's Final Solution missed the entire point of racism within the capitalist world-economy. The object of racism is not to exclude people, much less exterminate them, but to keep them within the system as Untermenschen, to be exploited economically and used as political scapegoats . What happened with Nazism was what the French would call a dérapage – a blunder, a skid, a loss of control. Or perhaps it was the genie getting out of the bottle. ..."
"... Second, and just as important, there was a need to restore a sanitised racism to its original function: that of keeping people within the system, but as Untermenschen. If Jews could no longer be treated thus ..."
"... So began the era of what the Germans gingerly called the Gastarbeiter. ..."
"... Who were these Gastarbeiter? Mediterranean peoples in non-Mediterranean Europe, Latin Americans and Asians in North America, West Indians in North America and Western Europe, Black Africans and South Asians in Europe. And, since 1989, citizens of the former socialist bloc. They have come in large numbers because they wanted to come and because they could find jobs: indeed, were desperately needed to make the pan-European countries flourish. But they came, almost universally, as persons at the bottom of the heap – economically, socially and politically ..."
Sep 03, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

From the London Review of Books, " The Albatross of Racism " (2000):

Since 1989, social science has thrown very little light on [such matters as the growth of extreme right in Austria]. Indeed, its failure has been lamentable. All anyone – whatever their politics – talks about is globalisation, as though that were anything more than current rhetoric for the continuing struggle within the capitalist world-economy over the degree to which transborder flows should be unimpeded It is dust in our eyes. So, too, is the endless litany about ethnic violence, and here human rights activists, as well as social scientists, are to blame. Ethnic violence, however horrifying, is not the preserve of some less fortunate, less wise, less civilised other. It follows from the deep and growing inequalities within our world-system, and cannot be addressed by moral exhortation, or by any meddling on the part of the pure and advanced in zones controlled by the impure and backward. World social science has offered us no useful tools to analyse what has been happening in the world-system since 1989, and therefore no useful tools to understand contemporary Austrian reality.

The reason everyone was so appalled by Nazism after 1945 is obvious. While almost everyone in the pan-European world had been openly and happily racist and anti-semitic before 1945, hardly anyone had intended it to lead where it did. Hitler's Final Solution missed the entire point of racism within the capitalist world-economy. The object of racism is not to exclude people, much less exterminate them, but to keep them within the system as Untermenschen, to be exploited economically and used as political scapegoats . What happened with Nazism was what the French would call a dérapage – a blunder, a skid, a loss of control. Or perhaps it was the genie getting out of the bottle.

It was acceptable to be racist up to the point of a final solution, but no further . It had always been a delicate game, and no doubt there had been dérapages before – but never on such a large scale, never in so central an arena of the world-system, and never that visible. Collectively, the pan-European world came to terms with what had happened by banning public racism, primarily public anti-semitism. It became a taboo language .

One of the reasons the EU reacted so strongly to Haider is that Austria has refused to assume its share of guilt, insisting that it was primarily a victim. Perhaps a majority of Austrians had not wanted the Anschluss, although it is hard to believe it when you see newsreel clips of the cheering Viennese crowds. But, more to the point, no non-Jewish, non-Roma Austrian was considered anything other than German after the Anschluss, and the majority gloried in that fact.

The realisation that racism had been undone by going much too far had two major consequences in the post-1945 pan-European world. First, these countries sought to emphasise their internal virtues as integrative nations untroubled by racist oppression, 'free countries' facing an 'evil empire' whose racism, in its turn, became a regular theme of Western propaganda. All sorts of socio-political actions followed from this: the 1954 decision by the US Supreme Court to outlaw racial segregation; the philo-Israel policies of the whole pan-European world; even the new emphasis on ecumenicism within Western Christianity (as well as the invention of the idea of a joint Judaeo-Christian heritage).

Second, and just as important, there was a need to restore a sanitised racism to its original function: that of keeping people within the system, but as Untermenschen. If Jews could no longer be treated thus, or Catholics in Protestant countries, it was necessary to look further afield. In the pan-European world the post-1945 period was, at least at first, a time of incredible economic expansion accompanied by a radically reduced rate of reproduction. More workers were needed and fewer were being produced than ever before. So began the era of what the Germans gingerly called the Gastarbeiter.

Who were these Gastarbeiter? Mediterranean peoples in non-Mediterranean Europe, Latin Americans and Asians in North America, West Indians in North America and Western Europe, Black Africans and South Asians in Europe. And, since 1989, citizens of the former socialist bloc. They have come in large numbers because they wanted to come and because they could find jobs: indeed, were desperately needed to make the pan-European countries flourish. But they came, almost universally, as persons at the bottom of the heap – economically, socially and politically

The rhymes with immigration policy debates in this country are obvious. And I love the irony of dérapage .

[Sep 02, 2019] Tulsi Back from Guard Duty -- Will Continue

Sep 02, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

apenultimate on Fri, 08/30/2019 - 12:39am Even though she will not be included in the 3rd DNC debate, upon her return from Indonesia where she was training with her Hawaii National Guard unit, Tulsi has indicated that we should not be discouraged and she has given every indication she will continue to campaign at this point:

Don't Be Discouraged!

She was in Iowa today, campaigning!

[Sep 01, 2019] The Dangerous Stalinism of the "Woke" Hard-Left by Alan M. Dershowitz

Notable quotes:
"... For Stalinist and "wokers," there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged. ..."
"... We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny. ..."
Aug 31, 2019 | www.gatestoneinstitute.org

[Sep 01, 2019] Is Tulsi Gabbard Right About Syria She's Not Wrong by Peter Harris

Peter Harris continently forget that the USA is imperial power with expansionist, imperial goals in the Middle East (Iraq war was about oil) and unrelenting support of Israel. Which in turn is a destabilizing force in the Middle East. The only state with not no accepted borders which recently annexed Holland heights.
Sep 01, 2019 | nationalinterest.org
recent history of engineering the downfall of foreign regimes. Second, the U.S. military's top priority should be to eliminate terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda. From these two premises, a third foundation of Gabbard's foreign policy can be inferred: that the United States must sometimes tolerate the existence of brutal foreign governments, especially if they share a common interest in fighting the same terrorist groups as America.

None of these are radical assumptions about American foreign policy. Indeed, Gabbard's anti-interventionism is tightly aligned with the prevailing zeitgeist in U.S. politics. According to polling data, voters today are opposed to U.S. involvement in Yemen , supportive of a withdrawal from Afghanistan , and roughly evenly split on the question of whether the United States should cease operations in Syria. Military veterans are among those most critical of the so-called "forever wars" in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Gabbard's insistence that the U.S. military should focus on counterterrorism rather than regime change is also well within the mainstream of political opinion. In this regard, Gabbard is not unlike the last Democratic occupant of the Oval Office. After all, it was Barack Obama who, as a candidate for the presidency, explicitly coupled his headline promises to end the Iraq War and shrink America's overall military footprint with a commitment to ramp up the fight against Al Qaeda and their Taliban enablers in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

... ... ..

Peter Harris is an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University. You can follow him on Twitter: @ipeterharris .

[Sep 01, 2019] The Dangerous Stalinism of the "Woke" Hard-Left by Alan M. Dershowitz

Notable quotes:
"... For Stalinist and "wokers," there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged. ..."
"... We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny. ..."
Aug 31, 2019 | www.gatestoneinstitute.org

[Sep 01, 2019] Film 'Official Secrets' is the Tip of a Mammoth Iceberg Consortiumnews

Notable quotes:
"... Special to Consortium News ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... If you enjoyed this original article please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
"... Before commenting please read Robert Parry's ..."
"... . Allegations unsupported by facts, gross or misleading factual errors and ad hominem attacks, and abusive language toward other commenters or our writers will be removed. If your comment does not immediately appear, please be patient as it is manually reviewed. ..."
Sep 01, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Film 'Official Secrets' is the Tip of a Mammoth Iceberg August 29, 2019 • 37 Comments

A new film depicting the whistleblower Katherine Gun, who tried to stop the Iraq invasion, is largely accurate, but the story is not over, says Sam Husseini.

By Sam Husseini
Special to Consortium News

T wo-time Oscar nominee Keira Knightley is known for being in "period pieces" such as "Pride and Prejudice," so her playing the lead in the new film "Official Secrets," scheduled to be released in the U.S. on Friday, may seem odd at first. That is until one considers that the time span being depicted -- the early 2003 run-up to the invasion of Iraq -- is one of the most dramatic and consequential periods of modern human history.

It is also one of the most poorly understood, in part because the story of Katharine Gun, played by Knightley, is so little known. Having followed this story from the start, I find this film to be, by Hollywood standards, a remarkably accurate account of what has happened to date–"to date" because the wider story still isn't over.

Katharine Gun worked as an analyst for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent of the secretive U.S. National Security Agency. She tried to stop the impending invasion of Iraq in early 2003 by exposing the deceit of George W. Bush and Tony Blair in their claims about that country. For doing that she was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act -- a juiced up version of the U.S. Espionage Act, which in recent years has been used repeatedly by the Obama administration against whistleblowers and now by the Trump administration against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

Gun was charged for exposing -- around the time of Colin Powell's infamous testimony to the UN about Iraq's alleged WMDs – a top secret U.S. government memo showing it was mounting an illegal spying "surge" against other U.N. Security Council delegations in an effort to manipulate them into voting for an Iraq invasion resolution. The U.S. and Britain had successfully forced through a trumped up resolution, 1441 in November 2002. In early 2003, they were poised to threaten, bribe or blackmail their way to get formal United Nations authorization for the invasion. [See recent interview with Gun .]

Katherine Gun The leaked memo, published by the British Observer , was big news in parts of the world, especially the targeted countries on the Security Council, and helped prevent Bush and Blair from getting the second UN Security Council resolution they said they wanted. Veto powers Russia, China and France were opposed as well as U.S. ally Germany.

Washington invaded anyway of course -- without Security Council authorization -- by telling the UN weapons inspectors to leave Iraq and issuing a unilateral demand that Saddam Hussein leave Iraq in 48 hours -- and then saying the invasion would commence regardless .

'Most Courageous Leak' It was the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, where I work ( accuracy.org ), Norman Solomon, as well as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who in the U.S. most immediately saw the importance of what Gun had done. Ellsberg would later comment: "No one else -- including myself -- has ever done what Katharine Gun did: Tell secret truths at personal risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it. Hers was the most important -- and courageous -- leak I've ever seen, more timely and potentially more effective than the Pentagon Papers."

Of course, no one knew her name at the time. After the Observer broke the story on March 1, 2003, accuracy.org put out a series of news releases on it and organized a sadly, sparsely attended news conference with Ellsberg on March 11, 2003 at the National Press Club , focusing on Gun's revelations. Ellsberg called for more such truth telling to stop the impending invasion, just nine days away.

Though I've followed this case for years, I didn't realize until recently that accuray.org's work helped compel Gun to expose the document. At a recent D.C. showing of "Official Secrets" that Gun attended, she revealed that she had read a book co-authored by Solomon, published in January 2003 that included material from accuracy.org as well as the media watch group FAIR debunking many of the falsehoods for war.

Daniel Ellsberg on the cover of Time after leaking the Pentagon Papers

Gun said: "I went to the local bookshop, and I went into the political section. I found two books, which had apparently been rushed into publication, one was by Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, and it was called Target Iraq . And the other one was by Milan Rai. It was called War Plan Iraq . And I bought both of them. And I read them cover to cover that weekend, and it basically convinced me that there was no real evidence for this war. So I think from that point onward, I was very critical and scrutinizing everything that was being said in the media." Thus, we see Gun in "Official Secrets" shouting at the TV to Tony Blair that he's not entitled to make up facts. The film may be jarring to some consumers of major media who might think that Donald Trump invented lying in 2017. Gun's immediate action after reading critiques of U.S. policy and media coverage makes a strong case for trying to reach government workers by handing out fliers and books and putting up billboards outside government offices to encourage them to be more critically minded.

Solomon and Ellsberg had debunked Bush administration propaganda in real time. But Gun's revelation showed that the U.S. and British governments were not only lying to invade Iraq, they were violating international law to blackmail whole nations to get in line.

Mainstream reviews of "Official Secrets" still seem to not fully grasp the importance of what they just saw. The trendy AV Club review leads : "Virtually everyone now agrees that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a colossal mistake based on faulty (at best) or fabricated (at worst) intelligence." "Mistake" is a serious understatement even with "colossal" attached to it when the movie details the diabolical, illegal lengths to which the U.S. and British governments went to get other governments to go along with it.

Gun's revelations showed before the invasion that people on the inside, whose livelihood depends on following the party line, were willing to risk jail time to out the lies and threats.

Portrayal of The Observer

Other than Gun herself, the film focuses on a dramatization of what happened at her work; as well as her relationship with her husband, a Kurd from Turkey who the British government attempted to have deported to get at Gun. The film also portrays the work of her lawyers who helped get the Official Secrets charge against her dropped, as well as the drama at The Observer , which published the NSA document after much internal debate.

Observer reporter Martin Bright, whose strong work on the original Gun story was strangely followed by an ill-fated stint at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, has recently noted that very little additional work has been done on Gun's case. We know virtually nothing about the apparent author of the NSA document that she leaked -- one "Frank Koza." Other questions persist, such is prevalent is this sort of U.S. blackmail of foreign governments to get UN votes or for other purposes? How is it leveraged? Does it fit in with allegations made by former NSA analyst Russ Tice about the NSA having massive files on political people?

Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy is energetically depicted getting tips from former CIA man Mel Goodman. There do seem to be subtle but potentially serious deviations from reality in the film. Vulliamy is depicted as actually speaking with "Frank Koza," but that's not what he originally reported :

"The NSA main switchboard put The Observer through to extension 6727 at the agency which was answered by an assistant, who confirmed it was Koza's office. However, when The Observer asked to talk to Koza about the surveillance of diplomatic missions at the United Nations, it was then told 'You have reached the wrong number'. On protesting that the assistant had just said this was Koza's extension, the assistant repeated that it was an erroneous extension, and hung up."

There must doubtlessly be many aspects of the film that have been simplified or altered regarding Gun's personal experience. A compelling part of the film -- apparently fictitious or exaggerated -- is a GCHQ apparatchik questioning Gun to see if she was the source.

Little is known about the reaction inside the governments of Security Council members that the U.S. spied on. After the invasion, Mexican Ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser spoke in blunt terms about U.S. bullying -- saying it viewed Mexico as its patio trasero , or back yard -- and was Zinser was compelled to resign by President Vicente Fox. He then, in 2004 , gave details about some aspects of U.S. surveillance sabotaging the efforts of the other members of the Security Council to hammer out a compromise to avert the invasion of Iraq, saying the U.S. was "violating the U.N. headquarters covenant." In 2005, he tragically died in a car crash .

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept in 2016 boasted of how the NSA "during the wind-up to the Iraq War 'played a critical role' in the adoption of U.N. Security Council resolutions. The work with that customer was a resounding success." The relevant document specifically cites resolutions 1441 and 1472 and quotes John Negroponte , then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations: "I can't imagine better intelligence support for a diplomatic mission." (Notably, The Intercept has never published a word on " Katharine Gun ." )

Nor were the UN Security Council members the only ones on the U.S. hit list to pave the way for the Iraq invasion. Brazilian Jose Bustani, the director-general of the international Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. was ousted in an effective coup by John Bolton in April of 2002 . Bolton is now national security adviser.

"Official Secrets" director Gavin Hood is perhaps more right than he realizes when he says that his depiction of the Gun case is like the "tip of an iceberg," pointing to other deceits surrounding the Iraq war. His record with political films has been uneven until now. Peace activist David Swanson, for instance, derided his film on drones, " Eye in the Sky ." At a D.C. showing of "Official Secrets," Hood depicted those who backed the Iraq war as being discredited. But that's simply untrue.

Keira Knightley appears as Katherine Gun in Official Secrets (Courtesy of Sundance Institute.)

Leading presidential candidate Joe Biden -- who not only voted for the Iraq invasion, but presided over rigged hearings on in 2002 – has recently falsified his record repeatedly on Iraq at presidential debates with hardly a murmur. Nor is he alone. Those refusing to be held accountable for their Iraq war lies include not just Bush and Cheney, but John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi .

Biden has actually faulted Bush for not doing enough to get United Nations approval for the Iraq invasion. But as the Gun case helps show, there was no legitimate case for invasion and the Bush administration had done virtually everything, both legal and illegal, to get UN authorization.

Many who supported the invasion try to distance themselves from it. But the repercussions of that illegal act are enormous: It led directly or indirectly to the rise of ISIS, the civil war in Iraq and the war in Syria. Journalists who pushed for the Iraq invasion are prosperous and atop major news organizations, such as Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt. The editor who argued most strongly against publication of the NSA document at The Observer , Kamal Ahmed, is now editorial director of BBC News.

The British government -- unlike the U.S.– did ultimately produce a study ostensibly around the decision-making leading to the invasion of Iraq, the Chilcot Report of 2016. But that report -- called "devastating" by the The New York Times – made no mention of the Gun case . [See accuracy.org release from 2016: " Chilcot Report Avoids Smoking Gun ." ]

After Gun's identity became known, the Institute for Public Accuracy brought on Jeff Cohen, the founder of FAIR, to work with program director Hollie Ainbinder to get prominent individuals to support Gun . The film -- quite plausibly -- depicts the charges being dropped against Gun for the simple reason that the British government feared that a high profile proceeding would effectively put the war on trial, which to them would be have been a nightmare.

Sam Husseini is an independent journalist, senior analyst at the Institute for Public Accuracy and founder of VotePact.org . Follow him on twitter: @samhusseini .

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David G , August 31, 2019 at 19:49

Saw the film today. Solid work; recommended.

Did her ultimate court appearance really go down in such a dramatic fashion? I suppose I shouldn't be surprised if it did: English courtroom proceedings may not deliver better justice than U.S. ones, but they're definitely more entertaining.

William , August 31, 2019 at 19:06

U.S. Government officials should be indicted for war crimes. It is quite clear that U.S. officials conspired to ensure that an invasion
of Iraq would take place. The U.S. and Britain -- George Bush and Tony Blair -- initiated a war of aggression against Iraq, and under
international law should be tried for war crimes, just as numerous German officials were tried and convicted of war crimes.

No U.S. politician has called for investigation, and the main stream media has not touched this topic. It is unquestionably clear that
the U.S. congress is a collection of spineless, cowardly, corrupt, greedy men and women. They have allowed the U.S. to become a rogue,
criminal nation.

Vivek Jain , August 31, 2019 at 14:33

Must-read article by Phyllis Bennis:
The Roller Coaster of Relevance | The Security Council, Europe and the US War in Iraq
Institute for Policy Studies, 29 July 2004
https://www.tni.org/en/article/the-roller-coaster-of-relevance

Susan J Leslie , August 31, 2019 at 09:11

Katherine Gun is awesome! I heard her speak as part of a panel of whistleblowers – wish there were many more like her

michael , August 31, 2019 at 08:15

Inequality.org reports that the majority of our top 1% are corporate executives. Finance, which reportedly accounted for 3% of our economy in 1980, now accounts for 30%. Many of the US's 585 billionaires have monopolies in their business domain, no different from the Robber Barons of the late 19th and early 20th century. "Stability is more important than democracy", the market hates uncertainty, and our foreign policies, determined by think tanks staffed and funded by our "allies" Israel and Saudi Arabia, will continue to push for the greed of our Richest. "Democracy" is a just a hypocritical bon mot for stealing and destroying.
The Republicans have always supported these people. What is worrisome is that the Democrats have come to the same place as the GOP, since donations– pay-to-play- lead to re-elections. The Democrats have deserted the Poor and working class, since they have no money for pay-to-play. Our 17 technologically advanced Stasis work in concert with Congress, our entitled government bureaucrats, and their lapdog main stream media to "make things happen" for our Richest. How long before people like Assange, Katherine Gunn, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Binney, Kiriakou etc learn that it pays to keep their mouths shut? Transparency and whistleblowing is punished. Maybe other approaches are needed?

Tony , August 31, 2019 at 07:26

Very interesting to see what inspired her to act the way that she did.

Of course, the supporters of the war had various motives.
But one motive behind President Bush's plan was revealed by Russ Baker in his book 'Family of Secrets' page 423.

He recalls a conversation with Bush family friend and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. He says that he told him:

"He (George W. Bush) was thinking about invading in 1999."

Bush apparently said:

"If I have a chance to invade if I had that much (political) capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed, and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

So there we have it, he thought that a war would boost his presidency.

David G , August 31, 2019 at 05:16

"The editor who argued most strongly against publication of the NSA document at The Observer, Kamal Ahmed, is now editorial director of BBC News."

That's a repulsive little nugget I would never have known otherwise.

Thanks to Sam Husseini for this account. The film is playing in my town, at least for this coming week; I plan to get to it.

RomeoCharlie29 , August 30, 2019 at 19:24

This is a really interesting story and one I knew nothing about, although I was one who opposed the Iraq war because to me it was obvious the whole WMD issue was bullshit. Now I understand the perception that that war was an American/ Brit thing but you might recall that America's deputy Sheriff in the Pacific, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, was Gung ho for the war and committed Australian troops to the ill-fated endeavour with the result that our country has subsequently become a target for ISIS inspired terrorism. Australia's Opposition Leader at the time, Simon Crean led a vocal opposition to the war but "Little Johnny" as we called him was not to be denied. Incidentally I don't think he has ever admitted being wrong on this.

Xander Arena , August 30, 2019 at 18:15

Tip of an iceberg is right. Iraq was the second big lie of the 21st century. I wonder how the world will react to the University of Alaska Fairbanks report which proves fraud at NIST, and arguably reveals aiding and abetting of treason by the contractors who wrote NIST's analysis of the WTC7 destruction. The UAF report drops Tuesday 9/3/19, and chisels away at the big lie that preceded all the related Iraq deceit. BTW great article :)

Dan Anderson , August 30, 2019 at 16:49

I enjoyed the article and learned some things, but it does seem a bit of Hollywood promotion at the same time.

If only Gun's sacrifice had stopped the invasion it would have been a sensation. As is, the UN did not sanction the invasion, making that effort a bit moot, and since the reveal of NSA bugging the world under Obama that dulls the sensibilities of those who might today have otherwise been shocked, shocked like the Gary Powers U-2 spy plane downing over the USSR and Ike being caught in a lie on TV.

But overall, knowing the downhill Gun's livelihood has taken over the 15 years makes the story more of a warning for whistle blowers than inspiration. Maybe Gun will be well compensated by the movie makers!

Neil E Mac , August 30, 2019 at 15:54

En fin!

bevin , August 30, 2019 at 14:13

One thing is certain: The Observer of 2019 would not publish a story like this. That is one of the major changes since 2003: the capitalist media has tightened up. There are no longer papers competing to attract readers at risk of cozy relations with the State. The Observer/Guardian today – since the Snowden revelations- does what it is told.

Litchfield , August 30, 2019 at 13:16

"In 2005, he tragically died in a car crash."

Unfortunately -- or fortunately? -- this no longer seems to be credible when it comes to those who have gone ouit on a limb to challenge the Deep State, or the US version of the Deep State.

Can Bush and Blair be charged with crimes? In connection with the Third Reich there is AFAIK no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Well, Iraq was also full of 'humanity." These guys belong in The Hague. Or in Iraq, doing community service.

In connection with Ellsberg's reviewing the evidence and concluding there was no evidentiary justification for invading Iraq -- I wanna say, you didn't need to be Ellsberg or any kind of expert to see clearly that there was no evidence that justified invading Iraq. Millions of common folk could see this clearly. That is why over 14 million people worldwide demonstrated against the planned illegal invasion. That is why people like me when to NYC, to Washington, and also the front our local US Post Office in small towns all over the country to protest the country's being lied into war. And were greeted mostly with thumbs-up from the passers- and drivers-by.

The people knew it was all a pack of lies. It was the gullible PRESS that ginned up this show. Remember Judith what's her name at the NYT? These people also should be indicted as war criminals.

Dan Anderson , August 30, 2019 at 16:19

Judith Miller, the NYTimes reporter who did maybe the most to make the invasion of Iraq, is the last name you were seeking.

SteveF , August 30, 2019 at 12:22

The timescales are interesting, we have the alleged US blackmail to get this illegal war 'approved' by the UN and in the same timescale we have the Jeffery Epstein story unfolding and the corresponding allegations that he was a CIA/Mossad agent operating honey traps to entangle the rich and famous.
The evil machinations of our governments are indeed breathtaking.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , August 30, 2019 at 11:56

Good gripping tale.

As we can see from so very many modern instances, it matters not at all that truth is on your side, if what you are doing is attacking those with money and power.

And there's an entire American establishment dedicated to keeping it just that way.

America's history of the last half century, at least so far as foreign relations and control of an empire, is almost entirely an artificial construct.

Absolutely no truth in everything from John Kennedy's assassination, which was intimately concerned with America's relationship with Cuba, and the despicable Vietnam War to 9/11 and the despicable Neocon Wars in the Middle East.

From hundreds of millions of printed newspapers and television broadcasts to speeches from prominent American politicians, you have tissue of lies not unlike that that was constantly being created by Oceania's Inner Party in 1984.

That's not even the slightest exaggeration, but, truly, are Americans in general the least concerned or bothered?

We have no evidence of significant concern. None.

The Democratic Party just weeded out the only candidate it had, brave and informed enough to speak to truth in some of these matters.

The ten left just represent varying degrees of hopelessness. On and on with weaving dreams about this or that creative social program while the resources and close attention dedicated to destruction in a dozen lands make them all impossible.

At the sae time, there is an almost complete lack of information and courage about anything that is happening in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Israel, and in such massively important countries as China, Russia, and Iran.

Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are brave contemporary examples of the American establishment's methods for shutting down truth and punishing severely those who reveal it. While they have followers and supporters, I am always amazed at how relatively small their numbers are.

And we have remarkably few individuals like Manning or Assange, especially when you consider the scale and scope of America's many dark works. Mostly, we see only "willing helpers" carrying on with their sensitive, secretive careers in government.

In the Democratic nomination contest, the "star" liberals, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are virtually no different in these absolutely critical matters than a confirmed old puke of a war criminal like Joe Biden, someone who probably deserves recognition as father of Obama's industrial-scale extrajudicial killing project with drones and Hellfire missiles making legally-innocent people in a dozen countries just disappear. Biden has a long record of smarmy deeds and lack of courage and principles. He is, of course, most likely to get the nomination too.

Act, from America's CIA, no different in principle and in law to those of the old Argentine military junta's massive efforts at dragging people off the streets, drugging them, and throwing them out of planes over the ocean, something they did to thousands. Oh, and during that wonderful project there were no objections from America, only silence.

Aimee , August 30, 2019 at 22:31

Excellent post. Agree completely. Tulsi was our only hope and she never had a chance. We are doomed.

Coleen Rowley , August 30, 2019 at 23:29

Here are some of the reasons for the ever lessening concern over US-NATO-Israel-Saudi's (aka our current Empire's) wars: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/04/recipe-concocted-for-perpetual-war-is-a-bitter-one/ By the way my co-author and I tried unsuccessfully to get this published in about 15 different US papers before Robert Parry posted it on Consortiumnews.

Robert Edwards , August 30, 2019 at 11:17

It's time these liers and war criminals are brought to Justice – I know that's wishful , but sometimes wishes come true America must get back to a country run on integrity and honesty, otherwise all will be lost in the spiral of evil

JOHN CHUCKMAN , August 30, 2019 at 12:11

Sorry, but, oh please, America is lost. Has been so for a very long time.

Only tremendous outside influences like depression or war and the growth of competing states and the loss of the dollar's privileged status, are going to change the reality.

America's feeble democratic system is capable of changing almost nothing. After all, it was constructed with just that in mind.

john wilson , August 31, 2019 at 05:07

I think think the real worry is that these days they don't even bother to lie anymore and they just do what they want. Think Venezuela.

Guy , August 30, 2019 at 10:42

"Other questions persist, such is prevalent is this sort of U.S. blackmail of foreign governments to get UN votes or for other purposes? How is it leveraged? Does it fit in with allegations made by former NSA analyst Russ Tice about the NSA having massive files on political people?"
This also stands out , as given what we now know is standard modus opendi of CIA / Mossad operations ,due to the Epstein arrest and ensuing information , who knows what is used to leverage other nations to follow along with US and in this case UK demands.Birds of a feather fly together.
Very good report by Sam Husseini.

Litchfield , August 30, 2019 at 13:32

Absolutely. It is an obvious avenue now to investigate: How did the Epstein operation impact on the decision to invade Iraq? How were teh votes wrung out for the war authorization in October 2002?

Regarding Kerry, as a resident of Mass. I couldn't believe that Vietnam vet Kerry would vote Yes on the war authorization act. I called his office a number of time to beg him to vote no. Rumors emanated from within his office in Boston or wherever that phone calls from constituents were running 180 to 1 urging him to vote NO. But he voted YES anyhow.

I simply believe that Yalie Kerry didn't see what was up with the obvious lying that drove the runup to an illegal invasion. This is the kind of scenario where one now has to wonder -- and ask openly -- whether Kerry had been compromised in some way that made him vulnerable to blackmail. Why the hell else would he vote so stupidly?

Recall that Scott Ritter ran afoul of some kind of sex trap and so he, one of the most knowledgeable and outspoken critics of the fake WMD narrative, was effectively muzzled.

Did Kerry have a little skeleton in the closet somewhere?

The same could be asked of all the esp. Democratic legislators who voted YES. Because we now understand which state in the EAstern Med wanted the war most and profited the most from it. We now know how deep and how wide the tentacles of that state's intelligence service intrude into our own national sphere, our Congress, our own intelligence services, our media, and, most likely, our military. Epstein seems to been part f this web of pressure and blackmail.

Epstein is gone, but Ghislaine Maxwell apparently still runs free.
Let's bring her in for questioning specifically about pressure applied on the Oct. 2002 vote. (Although some speculate that she, too, is already dead.)

Guy , August 30, 2019 at 10:23

At a time when despair in political affairs is very depressing ,it is very refreshing to see that the voices of reason are being vindicated.
I really want to see this film as this is the first time that I hear of the voice of Katherine Gun .Bless her heart for standing up and her efforts to warn of deception . Does the film make any mention of Dr.David Kelly's so-called suicide / murder ? Will have to wait ans see.
Thank you CN for once again coming through for your excellent report.

Pablo , August 30, 2019 at 10:15

Lawrence Wilkerson (Powell's Chief of Staff?) told me that Collin knew Bush was fabricating, but went to the U.N. as a "loyal foot soldier".

AnneR , August 30, 2019 at 08:25

Thank you, Sam Husseini, for this overview of the background – real story – to the film Official Secrets.

To be frank, I'd not heard of Katherine Gun's revelations at the time – not surprising because I don't think that the US MSM gave the leak any oxygen. They were all too gung-ho for the war.

While the film undoubtedly soft-pedals some of the story and likely doesn't reveal or make explicit as much as we'd all hope, I really do hope that it receives at least as much publicity (good) and viewing as that execrable film Zero dark Thirty which basically supported the CIA and its torturers. But somehow I doubt that.

TomR , August 31, 2019 at 06:19

Zero Dark Thirty is just about the worst bullshit fake narrative put out by the CIA that I've ever seen. I watched it but cringed with the dramatized fake narrative that the CIA is famous for – think the bullshit 9/11 US govt. narrative – if you or anyone else believes that totally bunkum govt. narrative – well, I feel sorry for you.

Druid , August 31, 2019 at 17:28

Im a good- movie buff. I avoided Zero Dark Thirty. Not a farthing for those lies

Sylvia Bennet , August 30, 2019 at 07:51

I applaud Keira Knightley and all who were involved in bringing this story to the public. It is vital that more people who have the eyes and ears of the public speak out on these issues. Sadly, most of them keep their heads below the parapet. With the Main Stream Media colluding with corrupt corporations and governments to lie or distort the truth, we need decent people with influence to step up before it is too late.

Toxik , August 30, 2019 at 02:42

Looked at my local theaters and Official Secrets will not be shown.

jmg , August 29, 2019 at 18:39

Katharine Gun's case can also be very relevant for Julian Assange's defense:

"Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence. . . . The day before the trial, Gun's defence team had asked the government for any records of advice about the legality of the war that it had received during the run-up to the war. A full trial might have exposed any such documents to public scrutiny as the defence were expected to argue that trying to stop an illegal act (that of an illegal war of aggression) trumped Gun's obligations under the Official Secrets Act 1989. . . . In 2019 The Guardian stated the case was dropped 'when the prosecution realised that evidence would emerge that even British government lawyers believed the invasion was unlawful.'"

Katharine Gun – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Gun

So Katharine Gun, like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, etc., by revealing corruption and crimes, maybe didn't obey the code of silence of organized crime, government sector, but that's not a law.

For example, the US Executive Order 13526, Classified National Security Information, explicitly outlaws any classification that covers up crimes or embarrassing information.

This means that whistleblowers like Katharine Gun or Chelsea Manning, and investigative journalists like Julian Assange are the ones defending the law here, while the US and UK governments are the criminals.

lindaj , August 29, 2019 at 22:10

Hear, Hear!

Me Myself , August 30, 2019 at 12:11

The espionage act has and would protect those who were responsible for the war I believe.

If we could Abrogate the espionage act it would make are representatives more accountable.

I was unaware of Katherine Gun she is clearly a standout person and will join the ranks of are most respected truthers.

WTF Burkie , August 31, 2019 at 14:05

Our not are.b.c. burkhart

evelync , August 30, 2019 at 13:34

And the secrecy, apparently, is required in the name of "national security" .that's what I was told by a Harvard JFK School of Government associate when I emailed 200+ of 'em to express my outrage over their withdrawal of Chelsea Manning's honorary degree when Pompeo and Morrell bullied them. I responded with – that's INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE at Harvard – as a "respected" educational institution you should be front and center critiquing foreign policy instead of helping to bury the wrongdoing ..no wonder voters didn't trust the establishment candidates in 2016 but the DNC was too much a part of it all to see or care what was going on. Except for Tulsi Gabbard who resigned at DNC VP in protest for what was being done to the Sanders campaign and to endorse Sanders instead of Clinton. The DNC knee capped the campaign of the one person who had won peoples' trust for his honesty.

We have incompetent people with no moral fiber making terrible decisions and burying the mistakes under secrecy, a fear based "code of silence", as you say.

Biden touts his being chosen by Obama for VP; therefore "he's qualified".
Since Clinton and Biden were the most dangerously ambitious critics of Obama, I think he may have chosen to add them to his administration as VP and Sec of State to practice "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" .but his decision was very costly to the lives of people around the world including the Caribbean and South American countries whose wealth our oligarchs coveted.
And as far as Honduras is concerned those political choices by Obama sadly explains refugees fleeing from that violent country even now ..thanks to our failing to declare the 2009 Coup a "military coup". One of Clinton's "hard choices". Obama and Biden went along with that of course.
Daniel Immerwahr's "How to Hide an Empire" tells the sordid tale of how waterboarding was used long before Bush II – used on the freedom fighters for their independence in the Philippines after the Spanish American War and we took over as imperialists ..
Most people, I think, don't know all the gruesome details of our aggression but they now know enough to be troubled by it. Few political candidates have the backbone to criticize wrongheaded foreign policy.
I'm disappointed that Tulsi Gabbard won't be permitted to join Bernie Sanders at the September 12 2019 "debate" as the only ones who speak out on how wrong for this country and the world our foreign policies have been. This courageous woman should be heard.
When Bernie was challenged in the 2016 Miami debate on his enlightened views on Cuba and other Caribbean and South American countries, Clinton used Cold War rhetoric to attack him. She was shocked, I tell you, shocked that he would not grind his heel on the Cuban people. I wondered at the time whether she really believed the crap she was selling or just put on a good political show for the national security state.

We so need transparency if we want to be a real democracy.

Sam F , August 30, 2019 at 21:06

Very true that transparency is essential to democracy. That also requires lifelong monitoring of officials and their relatives for paybacks and other influence. But (for example) Florida has an Sunshine Act that merely moves the bribes into other channels, and may be the most corrupt state. I am investigating extensive racketeering there involving state officials stealing conservation funds. They can be quire careless because their party runs the entire state including state and federal judiciary, and instantly approves whatever their rich "donors" want to steal. But the FBI and DOJ refuse to take action when given the evidence on a silver platter – no doubt because they are appointed by the same party. Theft is their sacred right and duty, to protect their country from its people.

michael , August 31, 2019 at 07:30

Florida's Sunshine laws were on display at Epstein's only trial, much of it still sealed from public view.

[Aug 30, 2019] Reminder DNC Lawyers to Court, We Do Not Owe Voters an 'Impartial' or 'Evenhanded' Primary Election naked capitalism

Aug 30, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

https://eus.rubiconproject.com/usync.html

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https://c.deployads.com/sync?f=html&s=2343&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2019%2F08%2Freminder-dnc-lawyers-to-court-we-do-not-owe-voters-an-impartial-or-evenhanded-primary-election.html <img src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=16807273&cv=2.0&cj=1" /> Yves here. The DNC position on elections does much to explain the 2016 California primary, which featured numerous reports by poll workers of dirty practices. Oddly, I saw two separate videos with many detailed first person accounts of a range of abuses which now seem to be not findable on Google. Oh, and there were no exit polls. Convenient, that.

By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at DownWithTyranny!

As Jimmy Breslin wrote in his blurb, this is the best book ever written about legendary Democratic Party boss Richard J. Daley, king of the smoke-filled back room deal. (Fun fact: John Belushi played a character closely based on Royko in an early Lawrence Kasden film, Continental Divide, that's well worth watching.)

This is your periodic reminder that the "Democratic Party" is not an organization that Democratic voters belong to or have any right to control. The Democratic Party is instead a private organization, much like a club, that non-members support by giving it their money, their time and their votes. (The same is true of the "Republican Party.) All other "rights" and promises offered by the Party to its supporters, including those obligations described in the DNC charter, are not obligations at all, but voluntary gifts that can be withdrawn at any time.

At least, that's how the DNC sees it.

Consider this report of a 2017 court filing , one that almost no one noticed, in which Sanders supporters sued the DNC for violating the section of its charter that requires DNC-run elections to be "impartial" and "evenhanded." The DNC's defense was, in essence, "So what?" (emphasis added below):

DNC Lawyers Argue DNC Has Right to Pick Candidates in Back Rooms

Attorneys claim the words 'impartial' and 'evenhanded' -- as used in the DNC Charter -- can't be interpreted by a court of law

On April 28 the transcript [pdf] was released from the most recent hearing at a federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on the lawsuit filed on behalf of Bernie Sanders supporters against the Democratic National Committee and former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for rigging the Democratic primaries for Hillary Clinton. Throughout the hearing, lawyers representing the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz double[d] down on arguments confirming the disdain the Democratic establishment has toward Bernie Sanders supporters and any entity challenging the party's status quo.

Shortly into the hearing, DNC attorneys claim Article V, Section 4 of the DNC Charter -- stipulating that the DNC chair and their staff must ensure neutrality in the Democratic presidential primaries -- is "a discretionary rule that it didn't need to adopt to begin with." Based on this assumption, DNC attorneys assert that the court cannot interpret, claim, or rule on anything associated with whether the DNC remains neutral in their presidential primaries.

The attorneys representing the DNC have previously argued that Sanders supporters knew the primaries were rigged, therefore annulling any potential accountability the DNC may have . In the latest hearing, they doubled down on this argument: "The Court would have to find that people who fervently supported Bernie Sanders and who purportedly didn't know that this favoritism was going on would have not given to Mr. Sanders, to Senator Sanders , if they had known that there was this purported favoritism."

"People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee -- nominating process in 2016 were fair and impartial," [Jared] Beck [the attorney representing Sanders supporters in the class action lawsuit] said. "And that's not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that's what the Democratic National Committee's own charter says . It says it in black and white. And they can't deny that." He added, " Not only is it in the charter, but it was stated over and over again in the media by the Democratic National Committee's employees , including Congresswoman Wassermann Schultz , that they were, in fact, acting in compliance with the charter . And they said it again and again, and we've cited several instances of that in the case."

According to this report, attorneys for the DNC argued that the DNC was not liable to Sanders supporters if they threw the primary race to Clinton, or tilted it toward her, because:

(a) Sanders supporters already knew the primary was rigged (did DNC lawyers really say that?), and

(b) the DNC charter requirement that elections be "impartial" and "evenhanded" is discretionary and not a requirement.

Shorter DNC lawyers: "We don't have to run an evenhanded primary, even if we say we're going to."

About the second point , let's look at the court transcript itself. In this section, the court asks: If Sanders supporters give money to an election run by the DNC, and if the DNC violates its charter and runs an election that unfairly disadvantages Sanders, do Sanders supporters have standing to sue?

DNC's response is below. "Mr. Spiva" is Bruce Spiva, one of the DNC's defense lawyers (emphasis mine):

THE COURT: All right. Let me ask the defense -- we're going to go into the issue of standing now at this point.

Let me ask counsel. If a person is fraudulently induced to donate to a charitable organization, does he have standing to sue the person who induced the donation?

MR. SPIVA: I think, your Honor, if the circumstance were such that the [charitable] organization promised that it was going to abide by some general principle, and the donee -- or donor, rather, ultimately sued, because they said, Well, we don't think you're living up to that general principle, we don't think you're, you know, serving kids adequately, we think your program is -- the way you're running your program is not adequate, you know, you're not doing it well enough, that that -- that they would not have standing in that circumstance .

[On the other hand] I think if somebody -- a charitable organization were to solicit funds and say, Hey, we're gonna spend this money on after-school programs for kids, and the executive director actually put the money in their pocket and went down the street and bought a Mercedes-Benz, I think in that circumstance, they would have standing.

I think this circumstance is even one step further towards the no standing side of that, because here we're talking about a political party and political principles and debate. And that's an area where there's a wealth of doctrine and case law about how that -- just simply giving money does not give one standing to direct how the party conducts its affairs, or to complain about the outcomes, or whether or not the party is abiding by its own internal rules .

And I should say, your Honor, I just want to be clear, because I know it may sometimes sound like I am somehow suggesting that I think the party did not -- you know, the party's position is that it has not violated in the least this provision of its charter.

THE COURT: I understand.

MR. SPIVA: So I just want to get that out there. But to even determine -- to make that determination would require the Court to wade into this political thicket. And -- you know, which would invade its First Amendment interests, and also, I think, would raise issues -- standing issues along all three prongs of the standing test.

After a legal discussion of the "three prongs," the court asks this:

THE COURT: And then one other question on the issue of standing for the defense. Is there a difference between a campaign promise made by a political candidate and a promise that pertains to the integrity of the primary process itself? In other words, President George H.W. Bush's --

MR. SPIVA: "Read my lips."

THE COURT: -- promise -- "read my lips, no new taxes," and then he raised taxes. Well, he could not be sued for raising taxes. But with respect to the DNC charter , Article V, Section 4, is there a difference between the two?

MR. SPIVA: Not one -- there's obviously a difference in degree. I think your Honor -- I'm not gonna -- I don't want to overreach and say that there's no difference. But I don't think there's a difference that's material in terms of how the Court should decide the question before it in terms of standing, in that this, again, goes to how the party runs itself, how it decides who it's going to associate with, how it decides how it's going to choose its standard bearer ultimately. In case after case, from O'Brien , to Wymbs , to Wisconsin v. LaFollette , Cousins v. Wigoda , the Supreme Court and other courts have affirmed the party's right to make that determination. Those are internal issues that the party gets to decide basically without interference from the courts .

[ ]

You know, again, if you had a charity where somebody said, Hey, I'm gonna take this money and use it for a specific purpose, X, and they pocketed it and stole the money, of course that's different.

But here, where you have a party that's saying, We're gonna, you know, choose our standard bearer, and we're gonna follow these general rules of the road, which we are voluntarily deciding, we could have -- and we could have voluntarily decided that, Look, we're gonna go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way. That's not the way it was done. But they could have. And that would have also been their right , and it would drag the Court well into party politics, internal party politics to answer those questions.

To this day the DNC believes that if it wanted to "go into back rooms" and "pick the [presidential] candidate," this would "have been their right," and no one outside the organization would have any right to enforce the DNC charter or interfere in any other way.

Good to know as we watch the 2020 machinations (for example, this one ) unfold before us.

[Aug 30, 2019] Will the DNC Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory Yet Again? by Thomas Knapp

They actually do not care much about the victory. Being stooges of MIC and thesecond war party means that they will be well fed anyway. Even without goverment positions.
Notable quotes:
"... Why doesn't the DNC want Gabbard in the debates? Two reasons come to mind. ..."
"... Firstly, her marquee issue is foreign policy. She thinks the US should be less militarily adventurous abroad, and as an army veteran of the post-9/11 round of American military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, she's got the credentials to make her points stick. ..."
"... Foreign policy is a weak spot for the increasingly hawkish Democratic establishment in general and the front-runner and current establishment pick, former vice-president Joe Biden, in particular. As a Senator, Biden voted to approve the ill-fated US invasion of Iraq. As vice-president, he supported President Barack Obama's extension of the war in Afghanistan and Obama's ham-handed interventions in Libya, Syria, and other countries where the US had no business meddling. The party's leaders would rather not talk about foreign policy at all and if they have to talk about it they don't want candidates coloring outside simplistic "Russia and China bad" lines. ..."
"... Gabbard damaged -- probably fatally -- the establishment's pre-Biden pick, US Senator Kamala Harris, by pointing out Harris's disgusting authoritarian record as California's attorney general. Gabbard knows how to land a punch, and the DNC doesn't want any more surprises. They're looking for a coronation, not a contest. ..."
Aug 27, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org
President Donald Trump faces an exceedingly narrow path to re-election in 2020. In order to beat him, the Democratic nominee only needs to pick up 38 electoral votes. With more than 100 electoral votes in play in states that Trump won narrowly in 2016 -- especially Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida -- all the Democrats have to do is pick a nominee ever so slightly more popular than Hillary Clinton.

That's a low bar that the Democratic National Committee seems determined, once again, to not get over. As in 2016, the DNC is putting its finger on the scale in favor of "establishment" candidates, the sentiments of the rank and file be damned.

Last time, the main victim was Bernie Sanders. This time, it's Tulsi Gabbard.

Michael Tracey delivers the gory details in a column at RealClearPolitics. Here's the short version:

By selectively disqualifying polls in which Gabbard (a US Representative from Hawaii) performs above the 2% threshold for inclusion in the next round of primary debates, the DNC is trying to exclude her while including candidates with much lower polling and fundraising numbers.

Why doesn't the DNC want Gabbard in the debates? Two reasons come to mind.

Firstly, her marquee issue is foreign policy. She thinks the US should be less militarily adventurous abroad, and as an army veteran of the post-9/11 round of American military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, she's got the credentials to make her points stick.

Foreign policy is a weak spot for the increasingly hawkish Democratic establishment in general and the front-runner and current establishment pick, former vice-president Joe Biden, in particular. As a Senator, Biden voted to approve the ill-fated US invasion of Iraq. As vice-president, he supported President Barack Obama's extension of the war in Afghanistan and Obama's ham-handed interventions in Libya, Syria, and other countries where the US had no business meddling. The party's leaders would rather not talk about foreign policy at all and if they have to talk about it they don't want candidates coloring outside simplistic "Russia and China bad" lines.

Secondly, Gabbard damaged -- probably fatally -- the establishment's pre-Biden pick, US Senator Kamala Harris, by pointing out Harris's disgusting authoritarian record as California's attorney general. Gabbard knows how to land a punch, and the DNC doesn't want any more surprises. They're looking for a coronation, not a contest.

If the DNC has its way, next year's primaries will simply ratify the establishment pick, probably a Joe Biden / Elizabeth Warren ticket, without a bunch of fuss and argument.

And if that happens, the Democratic Party will face the same problem it faced in 2016: The rank and file may not be very motivated to turn off their televisions and go vote.

Whatever their failings, rank and file Democrats seem to like well, democracy. They want to pick their party's nominees, not have those nominees picked for them in advance. Can't say I blame them.

Nor will I blame them for not voting -- or voting Libertarian -- if the DNC ignores them and limits their choices yet again. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Thomas Knapp Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism ( thegarrisoncenter.org ). He lives and works in north central Florida.

[Aug 30, 2019] Russiagate skeptics are vindicated, but conspiracy theorists are rewarded (w- Glenn Greenwald) - YouTube

Aug 30, 2019 | www.youtube.com

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Published on Aug 28, 2019

* Pushback with Aaron Maté *
Support Pushback by joining our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aaronmate

Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept joins Aaron Maté to discuss the disappearance of Russiagate after Robert Mueller's testimony; how Andrew McCabe has become the latest former U.S. intelligence official to join either CNN and MSNBC; and the absence of accountability for those who continue to promote what he calls the "moronic, irrational, baseless, conspiracist narrative" of Donald Trump as a Russian asset.

||| Pushback with Aaron Maté |||

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Minds: https://minds.com/thegrayzone Category News & Politics Comments • 259 Add a public comment...

Andrew Hackett , 1 day ago

Both of your guy's hard work is appreciated...

Oren Albert Meisel , 1 day ago

Aaron and Glenn are two massive beacons of truth in these dark times of journalistic decay

garyweglarz , 1 day ago (e

dited)

Lovey Dovey Doo , 1 day ago

The American "left" is not left, which explains why they love the CIA and the FBI.

Guo Mashi , 1 day ago div

class="comment-renderer-text-content expanded"> Greenwald hits the nail on the head. Hillary's little RUSSIA! RUSSIA!! RUSSIA!!! crying-boo-boo-hissy-fit has brought the world to the brink of destruction. Anyone still think that woman would have been a better president? Madame President "If I can't have it I will destroy the world"? This issue is not about past battles, but rather about what the DNC does now. Hillary 2.0 in whatever form they try to excrete upon us is just as dangerous. If the DNC can't offer a real choice for us and only comes up with another obsequious sniveling doorman for the MIC, we are truly and irrevocably doomed.

Brian Everill , 1 day ago (edited)

Mueller? Does he live in the United States of Amnesia? "Lying" is institutionalized in the United States of Hypocrisy? It is a corrupt and broken ethos, has been since its inception?

AR Frances , 1 day ago

Someone like Warren or really any of them, if they win the White House, will have to be very tough with Russia so Glenn is right. Increases to the military will be knee-jerk, nuclear clock too close to midnight.

GHart , 1 day ago (edited)

US Political Establishment: "Thank you Robert Mueller for the 3 years of providing evidence-free conspiracy theories, nonsensical distractions, hysterical red-baiting, and massive deflection from the corruption that seeps through both parties in America. You've served your purpose, now it's time for you to go down the memory hole!"

M Martin , 1 day ago

CNN and MSNBC are status quo outlets... they're just overly excited to have gov professionals and known republicans willing to come out and talk about how mean Trump is... nevermind focusing on policy issues that everyday Americans actually care about and want information and votes on

[Aug 30, 2019] Hollywood reboots Russophobia for the New Cold War by Max Parry

See also National Security Cinema The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood by Matthew Alford
Aug 30, 2019 | www.unz.com

It is apparent that the caricature of the Soviet Union in both productions is really a stand-in for the present-day Russian government under Vladimir Putin. As only American exceptionalism could permit, Hollywood did not hold the same disdain for his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, whose legacy of high inflation and national debt have since been eliminated. In fact, most have forgotten that the same filmdom community outraged about Russia's supposed interference in the 2016 U.S. election made a celebratory movie back in 2003, Spinning Boris , which practically boasted about the instrumental role the West played in Yeltsin's 1996 reelection in Russia.

The highly unpopular alcoholic politician benefited from a near universal media bias as virtually all the federation's news outlets came under the control of the 'oligarchs' (in America known simply as billionaires) which his economic policies of mass privatization of state industry enriched overnight.

Yeltsin initially polled at less than 10% and was far behind Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov until he became the recipient of billions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) thanks to his corrupt campaign manager, Anatoly Chubais, now one of the most hated men in all of Russia. After the purging of votes and rampant ballot-box stuffing, Yeltsin successfully closed the gap between his opponent thanks to the overt U.S. meddling.

Spinning Boris was directed by Roger Spottiswoode, who previously helmed an installment in the James Bond series, Tomorrow Never Dies . The 1997 entry in the franchise is one of thousands of Hollywood films and network television shows exposed by journalists Matthew Alford and Tom Secker as having been influenced or directly assisted by the Pentagon and CIA in their must-read book National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood. Based on evidence from documents revealed in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, their investigation divulges the previously unknown extent to which the national security complex has gone in exerting control over content in the film industry. While it has always been known that the military held sway over movies that required usage of its facilities and equipment to be produced, the level of impact on such films in the pre-production and editing stages, as well as the control over non-military themed flicks one wouldn't suspect to be under supervision by Washington and Langley, is exhaustively uncovered.

As expected, Hollywood and the military-industrial complex's intimate relationship during the Cold War is featured prominently in Alford and Secker's investigative work. It is unclear whether HBO or Netflix sought US military assistance or were directly involved with the national security state in their respective productions, but these are just two recent examples of many where the correlated increase in geopolitical tensions with Moscow is reflected. The upcoming sequel to DC's Wonder Woman set to be released next year , Wonder Woman 1984, featuring the female superhero " coming into conflict with the Soviet Union during the Cold War in the 1980s ", is yet another. Reprising her role is Israeli actress and IDF veteran is Gal Gadot as the title character, ironically starring in a blockbuster that will demonize the Eurasian state which saved her ethnicity from extinction. Given the Pentagon's involvement in the debacle surounding 2014's The Interview which provoked very real tensions with North Korea, it is likely they are at least closely examining any entertainment with content regarding Russia, if not directly pre-approving it for review.

Ultimately, the Western panic about its imperial decline is not limited to assigning blame to Moscow. Sinophobia has manifested as well in recent films such as the 2016 sci-fi film Arrival where the extra-terrestrials who reach Earth seem more interested in communicating with Beijing as the global superpower than the U.S. However, while the West forebodes the return of Russia and China to greater standing, you can be certain its real fear lies elsewhere. The fact that Chernobyl and Stranger Things are as preoccupied with portraying socialism in a bad light as they are in rendering Moscow nefarious shows the real underlying trepidation of the ruling elite that concerns the resurgence of class consciousness. The West must learn its lesson that its state of perpetual war has caused its own downfall or it could attempt a last line of defense that would inevitably conscript all of humanity to its death as the ruling class nearly did to the world in 1914 and 1939.

[Aug 29, 2019] Comey Is A Proven Liar And Leaker White House Slams Former FBI Director After IG Report Zero Hedge

Aug 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Update (1455ET) : The White House has issued an extremely strong statement on the Inspector General's report:

Statement from the Press Secretory

James Comey is a proven liar and leaker. The Inspector General's report shows Comey violated the most basic obligations of confidentiality that he owed to the United States Government and to the American people, "in order to achieve a personally desired outcome."

Because Comey shamefully leaked information to the press - in blatant violation of FBI policies - the Nation was forced to endure the baseless politically-motivated, two-year witch hunt.

Comey disgraced himself and his office to further a personal political agenda, and this report further confirms that fact.

* * *

Update (1405ET) : President Trump has taken a momentary break from helping Fla. Gov. Ron DeSantis batten down the hatches ahead of Hurricane Dorian's weekend landfall - and from doing everything he can to pump the market - by taking a shot at disgraced former FBI director James Comey following the Thursday publication of the DoJ's IG report, which confirmed that Comey violated both DoJ policy and the law, by leaking the contents of his memos to the press.

"Perhaps never in the history of our Country has someone been more thoroughly disgraced and excoriated than James Comey in the just-released Inspector General's Report," Trump tweeted. "He should be ashamed of himself!"

me title=

Of course, as we mentioned below, Comey doesn't see it that way. But maybe, someday, he'll at least acknowledge that he acted rashly - and put his subordinates in a very awkward position - by deciding to leak the memos as an unabashed strategy to try and undermine the newly inaugurated president of the country he claims to love so dearly.

* * *

In a long-awaited report released Thursday morning, the DOJ's inspector general revealed that former FBI Director James Comey's handling of the memos he took from meetings with President Trump before he was unceremoniously fired in early 2017 violated department policy and the law when he shared them with a longtime confidant, who then leaked their contents to the press.

"We conclude that Comey's retention, handling, and dissemination of certain Memos violated Department and FBI policies, and his FBI Employment Agreement," the Justice Department inspector general report states.

Fox News Host Sean Hannity warned that Comey should be worried about facing the repercussions for his decision to leak the contents of the memos.

"Without a doubt... [Comey] should be sweating a lot tonight about what might be in those reports. This report is expected to be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Jim Comey."

The IG's office had referred Comey for potential prosecution earlier this summer based on his handling of the memos, CNN reported. But the DoJ declined to bring a case, in part because prosecutors didn't believe there was evidence to show Comey knew and intended to violate laws pertaining to the handling of classified information.

Still, as Hannity said, things are "not looking good...for Mr. Super Patriot , a guy that knows better than us...we are told that the report will strongly rebuke the disgraced former FBI director, document his utter lack of candor. That means lying, " Hannity said.

As an earlier media report reminded us, the Comey report is separate from a larger report about how the DoJ handled the Russia investigation, though it's still not clear why the separate report is needed.

Comey infamously took created the memos after meetings with President Trump where Trump purportedly asked him to go easy on former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Comey then leaked the contents of these memos to a friend through a trusted confidant, helping to spur the launch of the Russia probe.

In a series of tweets replying to the report, Comey tried to spin the report's findings, highlighting a section of the report that was favorable to his narrative.

Here are some highlights from the report, starting with the conclusion:

Congress has provided the FBI with substantial powers and authorities to gather evidence as part of the FBI's criminal and counterintelligence mission. The FBI uses these authorities every day in its many investigations into allegations of drug trafficking, terrorism, fraud, organized crime, public corruption, espionage, and a host of other threats to national security and public safety. In the process, the FBI lawfully gains access to a significant amount of sensitive information about individuals, many of whom have not been charged, may never be charged, or may not even be a subject of the investigation. For this reason, the civil liberties of every individual who may fall within the scope of the FBI's investigative authorities depend on the FBI's ability to protect sensitive information from unauthorized disclosure.

As Comey himself explained in his March 20, 2017 testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, he was unable to provide details about the nature or scope of the FBI's ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election because the FBI is very careful in how we handle information about our cases and about the people we are investigating . Our ability to share details with the Congress and the American people is limited when those investigations are still open, which I hope makes sense. We need to protect people's privacy . We just cannot do our work well or fairly if we start talking about it while we're doing it.

However, after his removal as FBI Director two months later, Comey provided a copy of Memo 4, which Comey had kept without authorization, to Richman with instructions to share the contents with a reporter for The New York Times. Memo 4 included information that was related to both the FBI's ongoing investigation of Flynn and, by Comey's own account, information that he believed and alleged constituted evidence of an attempt to obstruct the ongoing Flynn investigation; later that same day, The New York Times published an article about Memo 4 entitled, "Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation."

The responsibility to protect sensitive law enforcement information falls in large part to the employees of the FBI who have access to it through their daily duties. On occasion, some of these employees may disagree with decisions by prosecutors, judges, or higher ranking FBI and Department officials about the actions to take or not take in criminal and counterintelligence matters. They may even, in some situations, distrust the legitimacy of those supervisory, prosecutorial, or judicial decisions. But even when these employees believe that their most strongly-held personal convictions might be served by an unauthorized disclosure, the FBI depends on them not to disclose sensitive information.

Former Director Comey failed to live up to this responsibility. By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees -- and the many thousands more former FBI employees -- who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information. Comey said he was compelled to take these actions "if I love this country and I love the Department of Justice, and I love the FBI." However, were current or former FBI employees to follow the former Director's example and disclose sensitive information in service of their own strongly held personal convictions, the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly, as Comey himself noted in his March 20, 2017 congressional testimony. Comey expressed a similar concern to President Trump, according to Memo 4, in discussing leaks of FBI information, telling Trump that the FBI's ability to conduct its work is compromised "if people run around telling the press what we do." This is no doubt part of the reason why Comey's closest advisors used the words "surprised," "stunned," "shocked," and "disappointment" to describe their reactions to learning what Comey had done.

We have previously faulted Comey for acting unilaterally and inconsistent with Department policy.103 Comey's unauthorized disclosure of sensitive law enforcement information about the Flynn investigation merits similar criticism. In a country built on the rule of law, it is of utmost importance that all FBI employees adhere to Department and FBI policies, particularly when confronted by what appear to be extraordinary circumstances or compelling personal convictions. Comey had several other lawful options available to him to advocate for the appointment of a Special Counsel, which he told us was his goal in making the disclosure. What was not permitted was the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome.

* * *

If he wanted to force the appointment of a special counsel, the report found that Comey had other lawful options besides leaking to the press, yet, he chose to ignore them.

Comey's unauthorized disclosure of sensitive law enforcement information about the Flynn investigation merits similar criticism. In a country built on the rule of law, it is of utmost importance that all FBI employees adhere to Department and FBI policies, particularly when confronted by what appear to be extraordinary circumstances or compelling personal convictions. Comey had several other lawful options available to him to advocate for the appointment of a Special Counsel, which he told us was his goal in making the disclosure. What was not permitted was the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive investigative information, obtained during the course of FBI employment, in order to achieve a personally desired outcome. The OIG has provided this report to the FBI and to the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility for action they deem appropriate.

Even members of Comey's leadership team were "shocked" by the then-director's actions.

IG: Members of Comey's senior leadership team used the adjectives "surprised," "stunned," "shocked," and "disappointment" to describe their reactions to learning that Comey acted on his own to provide the contents of Memo 4, through Richman, to a reporter

As Ryan Saavedra pointed out, the IG found that Comey set a "dangerous example" for the tens of thousands of FBI employees working under him...

...And the "bottom line", as one reporter put it:

Even CNN conceded that the report was "damning" for Comey.

Several Twitter wits sifted through the reports findings pertaining to Comey memos 1 through 7.

Read the full report released on Thursday morning bellow.

o1902 by Zerohedge on Scribd

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/423675889/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-uDafDhGIwmWhJXW0r6gm&show_recommendations=true

Questan1913 , 10 minutes ago link

Toothless Trump. Pity him. THEY let him play deal maker.......and nothing more. From a citizens point of view this is a lawless, unconstitutional, rogue government. The assassination of Epstein by this criminal government while incarcerated in the most hi-tech federal prison in NYC which incidentally is ATTACHED to the New York office of the Justice Department speaks for itself.

Lord Raglan , 3 minutes ago link

and the video cameras being "under repair"............what a crock............that's a nice touch........

Aubiekong , 13 minutes ago link

Comey was directed by president Obama to obstruct justice and destroy evidence all to protect Hillary Clinton.

hooligan2009 , 10 minutes ago link

bingo! so was brennan, yates, lynch, rice, mills, samuelson etc etc

navy62802 , 15 minutes ago link

Without an indictment, this is all meaningless. Nothing more than sound and fury.

Indelible Scars , 36 minutes ago link

If this doesn't tell you that our intelligence services are politically biased from the top down, nothing will. It is disgusting that a person like him and frankly, most FBI/CIA tops, can make it into such a dangerous and powerful positions.

Lord Raglan , 36 minutes ago link

Comey and McCabe have such big balls and feel so protected by the Deep State that I wouldn't be surprised if they both run for President on the Dem ticket when a few more of them get washed out.

Lord Raglan , 5 minutes ago link

Oligarchs = Deep State ..............semantics...............

lakecity55 , 37 minutes ago link

I'll bet this ********** is never prosecuted; in fact, the (((people))) he works for will likely enrich him with even more cash. He will live out his life untouched with every convenience money can buy in a huge home within a wealthy enclave.

The US is finished. People like Cummie helped kill the United States. I hope this ******* **** is happy with his money.

Real Estate Guru , 55 minutes ago link
Giant Meteor , 55 minutes ago link

Look you mugs, no prosecution of high level players post " global financial crisis" ever occurred. As the official story went, sure, there was some perhaps bad, tsk, tsk, judgement by high level players, and corrupt revolving door " government enforcers", but no crimes were ever committed, the verdict.

Except some very smart folks, that most citizens never heard of, and never will hear of, whom received absolutely zero play in the mainstream, whom diligentlly, methodically, laid out their ironclad case for prosecution, law, and procedure, on a variety of ummm, inconsistencies, and existing law, pointing to this thing known as control fraud, top among the provable crimes of the nations top men,

Clear as a ******* bell ..

Then there was John Corzine. Anyone remember him?

Nope, the departnent of just us, under the Obama regime simply wouldn't hear of such heresy .. nor his own justice head, Eric the place holder, and thus, systemically important, to big too fail " entities" , their execs, and a bevy of non prosecution agreement, no admissions of guilt, were born again .. free to continue hold on to their assets, free to continue new crime waves ..

The point is .. this matter before you now, being another scale, another aspect, but drawing water from the same poisoned chalice if government service , is how should one say, business as usual. Now tell me again about all those differences, between red team and blue team.

Follow the fiat, the bribes, the control fraud, the control files, which of course all draws ALL power through, and from the money changers, and their system.

Roger Rabbit , 34 minutes ago link

Because, if you actually read the ******* article, the memos weren't classified. So there's not much to go after him with. HOWEVER, he signed off on a FISA warrant which Horowitz determined was illegal. He will be in trouble further down the line..

Real Estate Guru , 59 minutes ago link

DOJ declines to prosecute James Comey on inspector general referral for leaking classified info

by Daniel Chaitin

& Jerry Dunleavy

| July 31, 2019 09:33 PM

The Justice Department declined to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey following a criminal referral from the agency's independent watchdog, which concluded that Comey had leaked classified information and showed a lack of candor with investigators.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz reached out to prosecutors about one of the memos Comey leaked to a friend, which detailed a conversation he had with President Trump, after he was fired by President Trump in May 2017.

Although prosecutors found the watchdog's findings compelling, they decided against prosecution under classified information protection laws because of there being too much uncertainty surrounding Comey's intent, according to the Hill . A month after he was fired, Comey testified to Congress he had leaked his notes to a friend to give to the media, hoping that it would spark a special counsel investigation.

Then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel the day after the New York Times first reported on details from one of Comey's leaked memos, which claimed Trump pressed his FBI director to drop an investigation into his national security adviser Michael Flynn. That memo was classified as "confidential" -- the lowest classification level -- after Comey sent the information.

With other investigations focused on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation underway, one source said the DOJ did not want to "make its first case against the Russia investigators with such thin margins and look petty and vindictive."

Comey's lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the DOJ and its inspector general also did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner's request for comment.

The news comes hours after conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch announced it had obtained an FBI log about special agents arriving at Comey's home in June 2017 to retrieve his memos. The notes show Comey handed over four of them to the FBI agents, and he said to the best of his recollection two might be missing.

Although the DOJ declined to prosecute in this case, Comey, who has become a vocal critic of the president since his ouster, is not yet in the clear.

Comey is also a possible target of Horowitz's separate investigation into alleged Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse. He signed three of the four FISA applications targeting former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page before being fired by Trump. Horowitz's report is expected to be released after Labor Day.

It is also likely that Comey's actions as FBI director will be scrutinized during the "investigation of the investigators," a review of the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, being led by Attorney General William Barr and the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, John Durham.

SHsparx , 47 minutes ago link

To what end though? There's a point where it veers from just delusion and starts looking like intentional disinfo.

freedommusic , 1 hour ago link

Their business model is STRESS... https://youtu.be/8Py2XuPTOQI?t=1042

puckles , 57 minutes ago link

OIG has no authority to indict (although their law enforcement arms can and do recommend for prosecution, which would not be produced here), but in most .GOV agencies their word is feared like that of almighty God. This report is utterly damning. If nothing results from it, it would be truly remarkable.

Anunnaki , 54 minutes ago link

Watch the pretzel logic for when the prosecutors decline to indict. It's a country club. They are all friends outside of work. Comey and Mueller took vacations together with their families for Chrissakes

Darracq , 1 hour ago link

Trump appointed deep state POS to key positions: Sessions then Barr, Wray at the FBI, Rosenshits gets to sneak away, Dan Coats gets to obstruct. Where are all the buckets of FISA documents that Trump ordered Barr to declassify? And tough guy "Mad Dog" Mattis is a ****** and sells out to Amazon. We are being had.

Anunnaki , 54 minutes ago link

Apparently the coup is ongoing

[Aug 29, 2019] Article Is the Democratic Establishment Backing Trump While Rigging the Nomination Against Bernie and Tulsi by Henry Samson

Images removed... See the original with full set of pictures
Notable quotes:
"... Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who gave up her DNC career to back Bernie Sanders in 2016 is the candidate the establishment most fears. Tulsi has more than met the debate criteria in the number of unique donations and in poll numbers in 26 of the most respected national polls, but the DNC, fearing she will take down another Establishment candidate, is refusing to let Tulsi into the third debate against candidates who have lower polling numbers in most polls and significantly fewer unique contributions than Tulsi has. The problem (or maybe plan) is that the smaller "DNC approved" polls have mostly been avoiding polling over the last month as a block to allowing Tulsi into the third debate. ..."
"... People fed up with the Democratic Party have encouraged both Tulsi and Bernie to run together as independent candidates. Tulsi especially has cross-party appeal for independents. Bernie is popular across the board as well and many view them as an unbeatable ticket, no matter what their political affiliation. Most Americans are independents or third party members by almost a two to one margin over the registrants of either of the major parties. However, because their Congressional seats are considered critical to fighting the military industrial complex and Wall Street, it is doubtful either Tulsi or Bernie will run as an independent. ..."
Aug 29, 2019 | www.opednews.com
Is the Democratic Establishment Backing Trump While Rigging the Nomination Against Bernie and Tulsi? By Henry Samson (Page 1 of 1 pages) (# of views) 29 comments
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(7 fans)

Tom Perez, Nancy Pelosi and Rusty Hicks
( Image by Henry Samson) Details DMCA

This is the question that was asked by a great many DNC/CDP members last weekend as they tried to understand the scheduling debacle that pitted the Democratic National Committee Meeting in San Francisco against the California Democratic Party meeting in San Jose (one to three hours away, depending on traffic). On the two main days for both events, August 23rd and 24 th , attendees had to choose which to attend and which to miss. It turned out that the CDP did better on overall attendance than the DNC. When Tom Perez spoke, there were about a hundred delegates in the DNC ballroom. The crowd significantly increased when Bernie spoke. At the CDP meeting, the crowd in the general sessions ranged between about 300 and 500.


Empty Seats at DNC during Perez's Speech
( Image by Henry Samson) Details DMCA

As Bernie was about to speak at the DNC Friday afternoon meeting, Kamala Harris's supporters loudly walked out of the hall and continued to make noise outside in a seeming attempt to drown out Bernie. One might think this would create disfavor with the DNC. However, most party leaders said they were supporting a Harris/Warren ticket, leading some progressives to wonder if this was an officially- -sanctioned affront against Bernie. The DNC was in charge of the microphone volume and there no lack of security to handle the problem.

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who gave up her DNC career to back Bernie Sanders in 2016 is the candidate the establishment most fears. Tulsi has more than met the debate criteria in the number of unique donations and in poll numbers in 26 of the most respected national polls, but the DNC, fearing she will take down another Establishment candidate, is refusing to let Tulsi into the third debate against candidates who have lower polling numbers in most polls and significantly fewer unique contributions than Tulsi has. The problem (or maybe plan) is that the smaller "DNC approved" polls have mostly been avoiding polling over the last month as a block to allowing Tulsi into the third debate.


Bernie Sanders
( Image by HenrySamson) Details DMCA

Bernie activists who have reportedly learned that the DNC plans to go after him, once Tulsi was out of the way, chose not to take things lying down. Tulsi is the only candidate with a history of having Bernie's back. Several activists went to party leaders and asked point blank whether blocking popular candidates like Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders from being nominated would be worth a second term for Donald Trump. To the surprise of the activists, leaders spoken to were clear that holding Bernie and Tulsi to the contract they were forced to sign before the first debate was more important than fairness and beating Donald Trump. Some leaders talked about which candidates they planned run in 2024 if Trump was re-elected. An assistant to one of the party bosses, who asked not to be identified for fear of losing his job, pointed out that the DNC actually makes more money as a result of anger about Donald Trump's Presidency than they would if a popular progressive, such as Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard, became President. One person pointed out that a ticket with Warren and Harris would be labeled progressive and the expected loss would be used to McGovern or kill the progressive movement within the party.


Tulsi Gabbard on Video at DNC Meeting
( Image by Henry Samson) Details DMCA

Tulsi Gabbard had been re-deployed prior to the DNC meeting and was only able to attend by pre-recorded video. Interestingly, at the DNC meeting, her table was placed in a corner away from everyone. The supporters at her table were told to sit there like good little children. One Tulsi supporter broke the mold and handed out copies of Senator Mike Gravel's endorsement letter of Tulsi Gabbard inside the DNC meeting. The letter on Gravel's stationary called Tulsi "the most qualified and prepared candidate." At the CDP event, the Gabbard supporters weren't sitting in a corner. Everyone who attended the larger CDP meeting received a copy of Gravel's endorsement letter and other literature in support of Gabbard. It was reported that over one thousand pieces of Tulsi literature were distributed to Democrats attending the CDP Executive Board meetings and caucuses. The attendees there were greeted by a giant volunteer-printed banner at the ballroom door at both general sessions. Top-behind-the-scenes DNC leader Bob Mulhulland was seen studying Tulsi's military picture on the banner.


Tulsi Banner Outside CDP General Assembly Room
( Image by Henry Samson) Details DMCA

The treatment of the press at the DNC event was rather interesting. The ballroom there was divided into two sections with the press at the back. DNC members could just walk in and out of their section of the room but the press section had metal detectors with guards searching bags and repeatedly running wands over reporters as if they were terrorists. The CDP meetings were significantly more relaxed. No metal detectors, wands or searches.


DNC Checking Reporters
( Image by Henry Samson) Details DMCA

Taking considerable floor time at the final CDP floor session was the issue of whether it was OK for Israelis to detain and torture Palestinian children. The fact that there was an argument between two sides to this issue on the floor shows how far the Democratic Party has fallen. At one time, the Democratic Party was seen as the party of peace. Now it is generally viewed as the party of war, pitting peaceniks Tulsi and Bernie at odds with the Democratic Establishment

At the CDP meeting, there was a great deal of dissatisfaction. According to past and current officials, the standing committee membership is less diverse than ever before. To fake diversity, a single individual fitting multiple categories was treated as multiple people. Most disabled people were cut from the standing committees. Supporters of one of Chairman Rusty Hick's opponents were summarily thrown off any committees that could make a difference in the party's positions on in the election. Five of the supporters of Berniecrat Daraka Larimore-Hall, who had been long-standing members of the Voter Services Committee, reported being suddenly removed without explanation. These were the most active Voting Services Committee members in terms of trying to improve voter integrity and protect the rights of voters. When questioned about the removals, Committee Chairman Jess Durfee said it was Rusty who had thrown these Berniecrats off the committee and that there was nothing he could do about it.

The priorities of the Voters Services Committee have changed as well. Removed from the goals were diversity and integrity of the vote (as in making sure all registered voters could vote regular ballots). Removed as a lead subcommittee chairman was a party delegate who had pushed through a call for expanding voting rights to felon prisoners and ensuring that registered voters were not disenfranchised due to election oddities. Instead, that subcommittee chairman was relegated to being a secondary assistant below the subcommittee assistant chairman on the subcommittee to which he was assigned this year.

There was some talk of a lawsuit over the committee assignment questionnaire. There were two sex-related questions, one of which demanded to know the sexual orientation of the applicants. All those who refused to answer on the grounds that it violated their privacy were denied committee positions. Also denied standing committee positions were all civil rights attorneys and all criminal defense attorneys.

People fed up with the Democratic Party have encouraged both Tulsi and Bernie to run together as independent candidates. Tulsi especially has cross-party appeal for independents. Bernie is popular across the board as well and many view them as an unbeatable ticket, no matter what their political affiliation. Most Americans are independents or third party members by almost a two to one margin over the registrants of either of the major parties. However, because their Congressional seats are considered critical to fighting the military industrial complex and Wall Street, it is doubtful either Tulsi or Bernie will run as an independent.


Henry Samson has been a professor of political science and legal ethics and an advisor to many successful candidates for public office. He is currently working on a book about the inequality crisis in America

[Aug 29, 2019] DNC Tyranny Strikes Again Rapes Tulsi Gabbard caucus99percent

Notable quotes:
"... The true third rail of US politics is empire. Any candidate that is publicly against the empire is the enemy of not only the state, it's quislings in the media, the corporations who profit from it and the party machines of both the GOP and the DNC. ..."
"... That is Gabbard's crime. And it's the only crime that matters. ..."
"... When the Empire is on the line, left and right in the US close ranks and unite against the threat. The good news is that all they have is their pathetic Russia bashing and appeals to their authority on foreign policy. ..."
"... One person, a DNC official to be precise, pointed out that: a ticket with Warren and Harris would be labeled progressive and the expected loss would be used to McGovern or kill the progressive movement within the party. ..."
"... So, there we have it. The war mongering neo cons and neo liberals are welcome in the Democratic (sic) Party, but us peace loving, non-imperialist progressives are not. Which explains, among a lot of more important things, why a pushy Dem. operative thinks she can come to my house without notice or invitation and insult me because I don't like her gal Hillary. ..."
Aug 29, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

FreeSociety on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 6:57am .

I'm sure most people here are no strangers to the realization that the DNC is an abusive, anti-democratic, tyrannical, Establishment organization that has its head up its own orifice (that is, when it isn't busy burying its nose way up that of the crooked Clintons ).

Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has met and exceeded the stated qualifying criteria necessary to participate in the 3rd and 4th Democratic Party debates by any objective measurement -- by having over 165,000 independent donors, and by polling over 2% in 26 separate polls -- including those in early Primary States such as New Hampshire and South Carolina.

But according to the DNC there are " qualifying polls " and non-qualifying polls -- to which they, and they alone, are the sole determinant and arbitrator of.

Thus by the authority of the DNC (and not the actual voters themselves) she only has just two " qualifying polls " (less than the 4 threshold number) -- all those 24 other independent polls do not count - and no explanation is given (or needed apparently) as to why.

So they will declare her unfit, and deem her to be excluded from the Debate Stage, as they seek to drive the only Anti-War, Pro-American, Anti-Globalist, progressive candidate out of the race (who also attracts support from both the left and the right, and has the distinction of being the most Google-Searched Democratic candidate following both of the earlier Democratic Debates).

This outrage tells you everything about how the process of running for President in this Country is totally controlled like .. i dunno an Iron Curtain . Anti-War, Anti-Establishment candidates must be made invisible by any means necessary (no matter how much of the entire process is exposed as a total farce to accomplish that end).

Jimmy Dore helps to illustrate just how totally arbitrary and absurdly unfair this is -- not just to Tulsi Gabbard, but unfair for the American public trying to evaluate their potential voting options and take control of their future .

So the question then is, what should Tulsi Gabbard do now?

I'm not sure what the most effective strategy is. This is an open discussion. But this whole process needs to be publicly discredited and shown for the tyranny and political repression that it is. The DNC is the enemy of the people.

What is Tulsi's next move?
Ideas?

Tulsi Gabbard's Full Campaign Statement

Link: Tulsi Gabbard's Full Campaign Statement

Wally on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 7:28am
Tulsi will do the Right Thing

I've long liked Tulsi's courage, contributed a few bucks to get her on the debate stage, and have faith she will do what's right when the time comes.

Edit/add: Unless she endorses anybody aside from Bernie.

FreeSociety on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 6:44pm
@Wally

@Wally

I don't have that much faith in Bernie anymore. His full-throated support for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and rejection of Jill Stein -- along with him giving multiple Clinton corruptions and scandals a complete pass (nothing to see folks), and covering up the DNC's efforts to defeat his own campaign -- turned him into a hypocrite, and a false messenger. You can't talk about the need for "Revolution", and then run straight into the arms of the Establishment -- kissing their feet and protecting them.

Meanwhile Sanders has bought several lavish Lake Houses in Vermont (as his payoff?) while he complains about the lifestyles of the rich, and has become preoccupied with useless " Identity Politics " divisiveness, boring, mindless Racism/White-Supremacist/Homophobe narratives, and the dishonest Russia-gate fear mongering (created by the Deep State). It is hard to take Sanders seriously anymore.

Tulsi Gabbard was different . She wasn't playing into any of the false divisions , and the false narratives. She never wasted a moment on "Impeachment", or chasing phony Deep-State setups. She knows what is real, and what is not real.

But as Jimmy Dore pointed out in the Video, Bernie Sanders now won't even come to the defense of Tulsi Gabbard, even though she put her neck on the line for him (back in 2016). Instead Sanders covers up for the likes of the crooked Clintons . That tells you something about Sanders real character. I'm no longer impressed with him.

Tulsi Gabbard or bust for me.

I've long liked Tulsi's courage, contributed a few bucks to get her on the debate stage, and have faith she will do what's right when the time comes.

Edit/add: Unless she endorses anybody aside from Bernie.

Wally on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 6:43pm
Bernie's press secretary Briahna Joy Gray

@FreeSociety

. . . has written some really great articles opposed to identity politics. You might consider googling them. I don't think Bernie is at all a proponent of the primacy of identity politics. He is constantly being criticized by IdPol proponents for placing an overriding emphasis on class.

While his takes on Russia are a bit off kilter, misguided and unwise in my estimation, I would not call them "fear mongering."

I wound up voting Green in 2016. Bernie lived to run another day by doing what he did. Most of his supporters have forgiven him or haven't given it a second thought. But if his endorsing her bothers you that much, it's certainly your right to object to it. For me, his campaigning alone has made socialism an issue. That's something in and of itself and pretty, pretty dang good in my estimation.

And whatever will you do if Tulsi endorses Bernie? Consign her to the depths of hell for evermore? And what if she endorses WARren or Biden et al or gawdforbid Hillary? Aside from Bernie, I don't think any of the other candidates would want her campaigning for them. If Bernie gets nominated, I hope she's ensured of a prominent spot in his administration.

FreeSociety on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 7:01pm
I'm not counting Tulsi out just yet

@Wally

I'm not counting Tulsi out just yet.

She might be able to turn a negative (DNC) into a positive and exploit the situation. She could do some Internet events, and Tucker Carlson would put her on TV again, and she might be able to create some public outrage, build some momentum .. and force, by public sentiment, to allow her back in some later Debates.

And if she supports Bernie, Bernie might just ignore or dismiss it. I don't think he has any real loyalty to her.

Wally on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 7:11pm
Don't give up the ship

@FreeSociety

Tulsi is a uniquely courageous person and a wonderful presidential candidate. If there was ranked voting, she'd definitely be my #2. Aside from Bernie, she's the only presidential candidate for whom I'd even consider voting.

I'm not going to suggest she drop out but if she does, I hope she endorses Bernie.

If Bernie is the nominee, I'm sure she will endorse him, just as I'm pretty darn sure she will endorse any other nominee given that she signed off on exactly that to become a candidate herself.

I'd say I hope you don't give up on her come those circumstances, but if it gets to that point, I'm giving up on politics period.

Centaurea on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 8:01pm
Oh, good grief

@FreeSociety

Not this again.

Meanwhile Sanders has bought several lavish Lake Houses in Vermont (as his payoff?)

Please provide evidence for this claim.

Bernie and Jane bought one (repeat one ) vacation property situated on the shore of Lake Champlain. They bought it before 2016, using money Jane inherited from her parents. The purchase price was around $600K, if I recall, which is pretty darn cheap for a vacation home. I've seen pictures of it. It's far from "lavish". Looks more like a middle-class vacation cabin.

You know, there are arguments you could make about Bernie that would be worth discussion. His dropping out of the race before Philly, for instance. This crap about "Bernie's rich, he owns a lot of fancy houses and flaunts his ill-gotten wealth" isn't one of them.

Centaurea on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 8:41am
From everything I've seen,

Tulsi's in it for the long haul. I don't think she expects to become POTUS this time around. At present, she seems to be positioning herself, making herself known to the public, building a base of support, and no doubt exploring alliances. I'm looking forward to seeing what she does. Warrior Tulsi.

gulfgal98 on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 11:47am
This comment is on the mark

@Centaurea in my humble opinion. There are a couple of things to note here. The main thing that spurs Tulsi to run is not for being the first anything or for self glorification. Her campaign is based upon her own strong beliefs against regime change wars, using those monies here in the US to help the people, and her belief in environmental stewardship.

Whether or not people like or support Tulsi Gabbard, no one can question her courage to go against the MIC and other powers that be. She is not ready to quit yet. I have felt from the beginning that Tulsi is running now for the future. My personal belief is that she will be a great President due to her courage, intelligence and leadership skills. I am hoping that if Bernie becomes President, he will appoint Tulsi as Secretary of State where her skills will be very valuable.

Yeah, I can dream, but if you are going to dream, dream big.

Tulsi's in it for the long haul. I don't think she expects to become POTUS this time around. At present, she seems to be positioning herself, making herself known to the public, building a base of support, and no doubt exploring alliances. I'm looking forward to seeing what she does. Warrior Tulsi.

irishking on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 9:19am
I just sent her $10.

Says she is not quitting. Would be nice if Sanders spoke up for her. She left DNC to endorse him in 2016.

Nastarana on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 9:19am
Here is an essay from Tom Luongo at

Strategic Culture:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/02/empire-coming-for-tuls...

An anti-imperialist policy threatens the Good People's livelihoods.

leveymg on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 11:03am
This quote from Luongo is a keeper:

@Nastarana

The true third rail of US politics is empire. Any candidate that is publicly against the empire is the enemy of not only the state, it's quislings in the media, the corporations who profit from it and the party machines of both the GOP and the DNC.

That is Gabbard's crime. And it's the only crime that matters.

When the Empire is on the line, left and right in the US close ranks and unite against the threat. The good news is that all they have is their pathetic Russia bashing and appeals to their authority on foreign policy.

Foreign policy, by the way, that most people in America, frankly, despise.

Every word of that is so true it makes me want to weep. I don't cry easily.

Thanks for posting that link! It will be shared, several times.

Strategic Culture:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/02/empire-coming-for-tuls...

An anti-imperialist policy threatens the Good People's livelihoods.

Nastarana on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 10:47am
And here is confirmation of what most of us have suspected,

that the DNC would rather lose with a "centrist" than win with Bernie or Tulsi:

Bernie activists who have reportedly learned that the DNC plans to go after him, once Tulsi was out of the way, chose not to take things lying down. Tulsi is the only candidate with a history of having Bernie's back. Several activists went to party leaders and asked point blank whether blocking popular candidates like Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders from being nominated would be worth a second term for Donald Trump. To the surprise of the activists, leaders spoken to were clear that holding Bernie and Tulsi to the contract they were forced to sign before the first debate was more important than fairness and beating Donald Trump. Some leaders talked about which candidates they planned run in 2024 if Trump was re-elected. An assistant to one of the party bosses, who asked not to be identified for fear of losing his job, pointed out that the DNC actually makes more money as a result of anger about Donald Trump's Presidency than they would if a popular progressive, such as Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard, became President. One person pointed out that a ticket with Warren and Harris would be labeled progressive and the expected loss would be used to McGovern or kill the progressive movement within the party.

The report is at open democracy.com and is worth reading in its' entirety. It seems that the Democrats scheduled a meeting of the DNC in SF and meetings of the California Democratic Party in San Jose (abt. 2-3hrs. away, best is to ride the BART) the same day. Party hack Tom Perez drew about 100 to his speech at the DNC.

Shahryar on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 10:59am
of course

@Nastarana

a ticket with Warren and Harris would be labeled progressive and the expected loss would be used to McGovern or kill the progressive movement within the party

Yet a loss by Hillary isn't blamed on centrists but is, instead, somehow, used to McGovern or kill....

that the DNC would rather lose with a "centrist" than win with Bernie or Tulsi:

Bernie activists who have reportedly learned that the DNC plans to go after him, once Tulsi was out of the way, chose not to take things lying down. Tulsi is the only candidate with a history of having Bernie's back. Several activists went to party leaders and asked point blank whether blocking popular candidates like Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders from being nominated would be worth a second term for Donald Trump. To the surprise of the activists, leaders spoken to were clear that holding Bernie and Tulsi to the contract they were forced to sign before the first debate was more important than fairness and beating Donald Trump. Some leaders talked about which candidates they planned run in 2024 if Trump was re-elected. An assistant to one of the party bosses, who asked not to be identified for fear of losing his job, pointed out that the DNC actually makes more money as a result of anger about Donald Trump's Presidency than they would if a popular progressive, such as Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard, became President. One person pointed out that a ticket with Warren and Harris would be labeled progressive and the expected loss would be used to McGovern or kill the progressive movement within the party.

The report is at open democracy.com and is worth reading in its' entirety. It seems that the Democrats scheduled a meeting of the DNC in SF and meetings of the California Democratic Party in San Jose (abt. 2-3hrs. away, best is to ride the BART) the same day. Party hack Tom Perez drew about 100 to his speech at the DNC.

FutureNow on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 12:35pm
Do you have a link for this?

@Nastarana
I went to opendemocracy.net and couldn't find this content.

that the DNC would rather lose with a "centrist" than win with Bernie or Tulsi:

Bernie activists who have reportedly learned that the DNC plans to go after him, once Tulsi was out of the way, chose not to take things lying down. Tulsi is the only candidate with a history of having Bernie's back. Several activists went to party leaders and asked point blank whether blocking popular candidates like Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders from being nominated would be worth a second term for Donald Trump. To the surprise of the activists, leaders spoken to were clear that holding Bernie and Tulsi to the contract they were forced to sign before the first debate was more important than fairness and beating Donald Trump. Some leaders talked about which candidates they planned run in 2024 if Trump was re-elected. An assistant to one of the party bosses, who asked not to be identified for fear of losing his job, pointed out that the DNC actually makes more money as a result of anger about Donald Trump's Presidency than they would if a popular progressive, such as Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard, became President. One person pointed out that a ticket with Warren and Harris would be labeled progressive and the expected loss would be used to McGovern or kill the progressive movement within the party.

The report is at open democracy.com and is worth reading in its' entirety. It seems that the Democrats scheduled a meeting of the DNC in SF and meetings of the California Democratic Party in San Jose (abt. 2-3hrs. away, best is to ride the BART) the same day. Party hack Tom Perez drew about 100 to his speech at the DNC.

snoopydawg on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 4:01pm
I think this is the same article as the snippet posted here

@FutureNow

https://www.opednews.com/articles/Is-the-Democratic-Establis-by-Henry-Sa...

Nastarana on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 10:58am
Let me just repeat that:

One person, a DNC official to be precise, pointed out that:

a ticket with Warren and Harris would be labeled progressive and the expected loss would be used to McGovern or kill the progressive movement within the party.

So, there we have it. The war mongering neo cons and neo liberals are welcome in the Democratic (sic) Party, but us peace loving, non-imperialist progressives are not. Which explains, among a lot of more important things, why a pushy Dem. operative thinks she can come to my house without notice or invitation and insult me because I don't like her gal Hillary.

wokkamile on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 12:08pm
Last I checked,

@Nastarana Harris has been plunging in the polls. I think Tulsi finished her off.

Why would any nominee want to have an unpopular pol on the ticket? Not much of a chance of that, so no need to worry about any Harris presence on the ticket or threat in any way.

As for the DNC possibly preferring Trump b/c it leads to better fundraising, the RNC is currently outraising the DNC by 2-to-1. Apparently Ds just aren't that angry. Or are channeling their anger in other ways.

One person, a DNC official to be precise, pointed out that:

a ticket with Warren and Harris would be labeled progressive and the expected loss would be used to McGovern or kill the progressive movement within the party.

So, there we have it. The war mongering neo cons and neo liberals are welcome in the Democratic (sic) Party, but us peace loving, non-imperialist progressives are not. Which explains, among a lot of more important things, why a pushy Dem. operative thinks she can come to my house without notice or invitation and insult me because I don't like her gal Hillary.

FreeSociety on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 6:36pm
@wokkamile

@wokkamile

Tulsi did finish her off, but the DNC is trying to prop her back up again by removing Tulsi from the picture.

I don't think Bernie is principled enough, or bold enough (based on his handling of 2016 and the Clintons/DNC) to ever select Tulsi Gabbard as his V.P.

But I do see him selecting someone (corrupt) like K. Harris just to check-off the "woman box". So Harris may have life after all due to the DNC rigging of things.

#7 Harris has been plunging in the polls. I think Tulsi finished her off.

Why would any nominee want to have an unpopular pol on the ticket? Not much of a chance of that, so no need to worry about any Harris presence on the ticket or threat in any way.

As for the DNC possibly preferring Trump b/c it leads to better fundraising, the RNC is currently outraising the DNC by 2-to-1. Apparently Ds just aren't that angry. Or are channeling their anger in other ways.

Wally on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 2:29pm
This really needs to be accurately sourced

@Nastarana

with a link at the very least. So if you have one, please share it.

Some guy said that he heard this and he told someone who told me . . . .

One person, a DNC official to be precise, pointed out that: a ticket with Warren and Harris would be labeled progressive and the expected loss would be used to McGovern or kill the progressive movement within the party.

So, there we have it. The war mongering neo cons and neo liberals are welcome in the Democratic (sic) Party, but us peace loving, non-imperialist progressives are not. Which explains, among a lot of more important things, why a pushy Dem. operative thinks she can come to my house without notice or invitation and insult me because I don't like her gal Hillary.

wouldsman on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 11:49am
I thought this account which is sourced to the Williamson camp,

adds to this story as it applies to Tulsi:
https://jackpineradicals.com/boards/topic/only-10-of-the-17-dnc-approved...

Alligator Ed on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 12:27pm
Since the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida

tossed out the suit against the DNC filed by Jared Beck, Elizabeth Beck, and Niko House, the DNC doesn't have single worry about how they conduct their political business. The declined prosecution against the DNC established the DNC's legal rights to make whatever decisions they want in smoke-filled rooms. There should be no doubt the DNC gets what Killary wants. This is why H. Rodent Clinton enters the race, erupting with all the subtlety of lava flowing down the slopes of Mauna Loa (or Karatoa, etc.)

Battle of Blair... on Wed, 08/28/2019 - 8:53pm
The DNC promised 17 qualifying polls. They delivered on 10.

7 polls that were supposed to be qualifying have not and are not going to be taken. Seems to me, the DNC needs to include 7 of the polls that were taken, which would put Tulsi in. but they won't. There's a reason they only took 10 of the 17 polls. It's rigged again.

[Aug 29, 2019] First McCabe, then; Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Strzok, the Ohrs, Steele (in absentia) Clinton Campaign people, etc. - Sic Sempe

Notable quotes:
"... "Who will watch the watchers?" Well, if Barr and company are not going to indict these characters, the answer is NOBODY! ..."
"... If you read the long litany of articles on SST by David Habakkuk and Larry Johnson, the pattern of a soft coup conspiracy against the possibility of HC's defeat is quite clear. ..."
Aug 29, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

"Federal prosecutors have been weighing for well over a year whether to charge McCabe, after the Justice Department's inspector general alleged that McCabe had misled investigators several times about a media disclosure regarding the investigation into Hillary Clinton's family foundation.

By the inspector general's telling, McCabe approved the disclosure and later -- when asked about the matter by investigators with the FBI's inspection division and inspector general's office -- denied having done so. McCabe's attorney has said previously that his statements "are more properly understood as the result of misunderstanding, miscommunication, and honest failures of recollection based on the swirl of events around him." Lying to investigators is a federal crime."

Washpost

-------------

This whole thing has the odor of something by Dostoevsky, C&P maybe?

"Who will watch the watchers?" Well, if Barr and company are not going to indict these characters, the answer is NOBODY!

If you read the long litany of articles on SST by David Habakkuk and Larry Johnson, the pattern of a soft coup conspiracy against the possibility of HC's defeat is quite clear.

And then following her loss, largely brought on IMO, by her unwillingness to cultivate the Deplorables, the semi-Deplorables and the Irredeemable Deplorables, this disdain on her part for ordinary people was further displayed in her offhand dismissal of coal miners as future wards of the state.

Once she had lost, the plot rolled on in an effort to make the ultimate Deplorable a failure in office.

It is de rigeur to write that both parties should feel equally wounded by the plot but they do not. pl

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/justice-dept-could-be-nearing-decision-on-whether-to-charge-andrew-mccabe/2019/08/26/0e1a636c-c840-11e9-a1fe-ca46e8d573c0_story.html

turcopolier ,

PRC90
We have to make it clear that fidelity to the constitution is not a pretense. IMO HRC and Obama are at the heart of this matter, but better to scourge them and let them go.

[Aug 28, 2019] Russiagate: It really is that simple

How are "Russian Oligarchs" different than "American Oligarchs" who bought Trump? Inquiring minds want to know :)
Notable quotes:
"... The mass media is desperate to propagate a fake narrative, they keep making "mistakes." Over and over. For 3 freakin years. ..."
Aug 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Mike Krieger summed the farce up best:

Michael Krieger

@LibertyBlitz

Replying to @LibertyBlitz

The mass media is desperate to propagate a fake narrative, they keep making "mistakes." Over and over. For 3 freakin years. It really is that simple.

[Aug 28, 2019] The 'Stabbed in the Back' Myths of the War Hawks

Aug 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Pulitzer Prize winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen put it best: "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." Those second fights are often longer, if less bloody, than the initial battles. The fights for memory and legacy often begin before the guns have even fallen silent.

America's wars are no strangers to this dynamic. From Vietnam to the present, our wars have always been refought by participants, journalists, scholars, and politicians. As we begin to seriously debate ending America's quixotic campaigns in the Greater Middle East, one particularly nasty narrative will be employed by the defenders of intervention and imperialism. It recurs like clockwork every time America loses a war: that we were stabbed in the back.

Dolchstosslegende

The modern stab-in-the-back myth got its start in Germany exactly a century ago. Imperial Germany was conceived of, created, and led by Prussia's military caste. Prussia, in Voltaire's bon mot, was an army with a state, not a state with an army. And Prussia, after crippling defeats by Napoleon at Jena and Auerstedt, had entered the First World War on a 50-year winning streak.

But by the fall of 1918, Germany had lost the war. With its spring offensives failing and fresh American troops flooding into France, final defeat was only a matter of time. While the front lines were still on French and Belgian soil, the German Army had been decisively beaten in the Hundred Days battles. After the Battle of Amiens, Germany's leaders, both military and civilian, knew that the war's outcome was simply a math problem.

Germany did the only thing it could do and sued for a humiliating peace. The Kaiser was forced to abdicate and flee, and a new civilian government signed an armistice and then the Treaty of Versailles. Germany gave up land, people, and most of its army, and took on both formal responsibility for the war and $5 billion in reparations.

Defeat was more than a bitter pill to swallow -- it was incomprehensible to millions, especially those who had been at the front and had often experienced more (bloody) successes than failures.

Germany's de facto military dictator, General Erich Ludendorff, was among the first to embrace the idea that the country had been betrayed by communists, politicians, and most of all, Jews. Though a wartime census showed that Jews were overrepresented in both the German Army as a whole and in frontline units, the "Big Lie" stuck. Its propagation was aided by often well-intentioned generals and politicians, who told the returning soldiers that "no enemy has vanquished you."

McMaster Uses Worn Vietnam Trope to Accuse Americans of Defeatism The Army's Iraq War History: Truth Telling or Mythmaking?

When Adolf Hitler, a decorated veteran and budding demagogue, embraced this fiction, the Dolchstosslegende (literally "dagger stab myth") was cemented. The German Army had not lost. It had been betrayed by the home front and the politicians.

Vietnam

Korea, America's first war of the nuclear age, did not occasion charges of betrayal within. Perhaps this was because outright defeat had been so close, both at the Pusan Perimeter in the summer of 1950, and again six months later, when Chinese troops poured across the Yalu River and drove the United Nations forces back over the 38th Parallel. A draw, especially with the specter of nuclear war in the background, didn't seem so bad.

Vietnam was different. The U.S. military, armed with futuristic black rifles and intercontinental bombers, lost to a Third World peasant army. Sure the U.S. won every battle, dropping more bombs on South Vietnam than it had on either Germany or Japan in World War II, whatever the cost. But they lost the war. The explanation: it was Jane Fonda and the hippies that stabbed the army in the back , undermining support at home and turning the U.S. tactical victory of 1968's Tet Offensive into a strategic defeat. As Vietnam veteran and former Senator James Webb famously said of Fonda: "I wouldn't walk across the street to watch her slit her wrist."

This narrative was buttressed by a wave of revisionist scholarship on Vietnam. Lewis Sorley's A Better War posits counterinsurgency and pacification as a path to victory and celebrates General Creighton Abrams's successes in the wake of the Tet Offensive. Mark Moyar, a historian now working at USAID, penned Triumph Forsaken , an apology for South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Max Boot, never one to miss a chance to extol the white man's burden, has weighed in with multiple volumes on "the road not taken."

Traditional historians make a few obvious counterpoints that are difficult to refute. Foremost among them is this one: despite two decades of French and American partnership and aid, the South Vietnamese state and army were unable to ever stand on their own. The Easter Offensive of 1972, sometimes celebrated as the finest hour of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), was defeated only with the aid of tremendous American fire support and at the cost of heavy ARVN casualties. Three years later, North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. North Vietnam, for all its missteps and brutality, endured over 1 million casualties and maintained the will to fight. The South did not.

Iraq

The Iraq war revisionist narrative is perhaps less plausible than that of Vietnam. True, the Sunni tribes of Anbar Province turned against al-Qaeda and the Sunni-Shia civil war had temporarily abated by 2008. These tactical realities led to absurd triumphalism from the neoconservative crowd, especially those insiders who saw themselves as the brain trust of the 2007 troop surge.

The surge, a reinforcement of only 30,000 soldiers and Marines, was hailed as one of the signal triumphs of American military history. General David Petraeus was celebrated as a "savior general." The language of the sycophantic press corps would have made even Douglas MacArthur blush. "The gold standard for wartime command," said then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, describing Petraeus. America was told that its forces, after initial missteps and much painful learning, had triumphed over terrorism in Iraq.

This victory, the story then goes, was squandered by President Barack Obama's pusillanimity and inattention. U.S. troops marched out of Iraq as victors in 2011 and then had to march back in three years later when the corrupt, sectarian Iraqi Army collapsed in the face of the ragtag forces of the Islamic State: a pickup truck-borne reconnaissance-in-force of just 1,500 jihadists.

The reality is that the only thing America won in Iraq was "a decent interval," in Henry Kissinger's infamous phrase. The surge had always been understood as merely a means to an end: political reconciliation between Iraq's Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds. This manifestly failed to occur. The security services became corrupt Shia fiefdoms, the Kurds intermittently plotted their exit, and the Sunnis, feeling themselves excluded from post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, sought new champions.

In a supremely cynical gambit, the Iraq war's architects flooded America's airwaves to blame Obama for a squandered victory in Iraq, especially after the Islamic State's lightning offensives of 2014. Obama and his defeatist cheerleaders in the media, we were told, had walked away when Iraq was on the path to peace and prosperity.

Such a claim, regardless of the intricacies of intra-Shia politics and status of forces agreements, rests on a foundation of hubris: the idea that America had the knowledge and skill to dictate successful political outcomes to Iraqis. Nouri al-Maliki, the sectarian Shiite leader blamed for setting conditions for the Islamic State's success, was plucked from obscurity and installed as Iraq's prime minister under American sponsorship. Given the inability and unwillingness of two U.S. presidents to curb or remove Maliki, and the inescapable postwar Iranian influence in Shia-led Iraq, claims of a squandered victory are hard to take seriously.

The late Michael Hastings put it best: the surge narrative was "perhaps the most impressive con job in recent American history." Maybe a decent interval was worth the casualties and cost of the surge. But deluding ourselves that "we won" is another matter.

Afghanistan

We are already seeing the new Dolchstosslegendes take shape in the debate over Afghanistan, Syria, and once again Iraq. As both President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidates make pledges about withdrawing from Afghanistan, the pushback is in full force. Regional stability, women's rights, and terrorism are all cited as reasons to stay, but the idea of stolen victory is also getting a workout.

Despite nearly 18 years of war and the deployment of nearly 100,000 U.S. troops at the war's height, plus security and development assistance that far exceeds the Marshall Plan, the Taliban today controls more of Afghanistan than at any point since their overthrow in 2002.

Opium cultivation, the primary funding source for the insurgents, sets new records year after year. The situation has gotten so bad that in May the Pentagon stopped releasing its district stabilization reports, which had been used to measure the security situation throughout Afghanistan. Despite then-commander General John Nicholson's November 2017 statement that the "most telling" metric of success is population control, the Department of Defense now asserts that the reports are "of limited decision-making value."

Afghan security force casualties, probably the most important gauge of the war's progress, are also unavailable, supposedly classified at the behest of the Afghan government. U.S. Central Command's new chief, Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, Jr., recently acknowledged to the Senate that Afghan army and police losses were unsustainable. A full third of the Afghan security force has to be replaced every year due to casualties, desertion, and failures to re-enlist. The trajectory of the war is pretty clear.

One could plausibly argue that America did win the Afghan war -- way back in 2002. The swift initial campaign, fought mostly by the Afghan Northern Alliance with support from U.S. Special Forces, CIA paramilitaries, and air power, toppled the Taliban government and shattered al-Qaeda's network in Central Asia. Everything that came after, the argument goes, was mission creep and utopian fantasy.

That case has its merits, but the war should be judged by America's professed goals there. These quickly grew to include the establishment of a stable, secure, and centralizing Afghan national government. By those lights, the war was, and is, an unwinnable quagmire.

Yet there are prominent national security professionals who will assert that Afghanistan was never lost, and in fact can still be won. Paul D. Miller, a Georgetown professor and former National Security Council staffer, made this case most recently in the pages of Foreign Policy . Clinging to the life raft of the possible, however faint, Miller wrote that "claiming the United States has failed is odd because the war is not over yet." After risibly declaring that "Obama nearly won the war in 2012," Miller judged Afghanistan a secret success, as a "mowing the grass" counterterrorism campaign.

After bemoaning the supposed hubris of those counseling withdrawal, Miller settled on a maximalism that is jarring to even a casual observer of the war: "more resources, real counterinsurgency, no deadline." Realist detractors, called out by name, are told to keep their opinions to themselves, because their lack of faith undermines a necessary Forever War.

Syria

In Syria, unlike in Afghanistan, the insurgent enemy was decisively defeated on the battlefield. The Islamic State's final sanctuary was destroyed in March. But after declaring a conclusion to this successful punitive expedition, President Trump reluctantly reversed himself and left a small residual U.S. force in place, ostensibly for counterterrorism purposes.

Trump had been relentlessly attacked by virtually the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment for his supposed fecklessness for even suggesting a withdrawal. Senators voted for an amendment rebuking the president by a margin of nearly 3-1. The secretary of defense, former General James Mattis, resigned in protest. Pundits and purported experts across the political spectrum inveighed against Trump's pullout plans.

The major U.S. papers are quick to report that the Islamic State is back, with fighters slipping across the porous Iraq-Syria border and "seeding a new insurgency." Intermittent attacks receive ample attention, as does the plight of Syria's Kurds, stuck between Assad's regime and their Turkish enemies.

The Islamic State is likely to survive and return for the same reason it appeared in the first place: victor's justice and the refusal of all parties to embrace political compromise and power-sharing. Bashar al-Assad's forces are engaged in a campaign of repression and violence in Sunni areas.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, under the supposedly less sectarian Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, a similar process grinds on. As The New Yorker 's Ben Taub detailed in a December piece, the conviction rate in Iraq's terrorism courts is 98 percent. The average trial lasts less than 10 minutes. The families of many of those on trial are themselves detained indefinitely in squalid desert camps. Despite American advisors, American aid, and American attention, Iraq's problems can only be solved by Iraqis. They are in no hurry to do so.

One might hope that the common-sense Middle American voter would see through this shallow sophistry. After all, the signature moment of Trump's insurgency within the GOP primaries was in South Carolina, where he denounced the 43rd president and the Iraq war and was rewarded with an easy victory and the dispatch of Jeb Bush, the squishy embodiment of GOP conventional wisdom on Iraq.

Today even recent veterans believe these wars were for naught. A new Pew survey found that 64 percent of Iraq veterans and 58 percent of Afghanistan veterans believe their wars were "not worth fighting." These men and women realize that we cannot fix foreign lands at the point of a bayonet, however impressive our temporary tactical victories may be.

But despite $6 trillion spent on these failed wars, American foreign policy remains largely the prerogative of elites. The stories of triumphs forsaken and troops stabbed in the back only need to reach and convince a small audience.

America's Dolchstosslegendes , fueled mostly by optimism and hubris, are not those of bitter German anti-Semites, looking for someone to blame. But our myths and rationalizations are still pernicious and consequential -- and they aren't going away.

General H. R. McMaster, formerly national security advisor to President Trump and now ensconced at one of the most influential think tanks in Washington, recently blamed "war weariness" and "a defeatist narrative" for challenging the ongoing American military commitment to Afghanistan. As we near a presidential election and perhaps a chance at some realism and retrenchment overseas, the myths of back-stabbing and lost victory must be rejected. Until Americans, and especially elites, accept the lessons of history and the limits of U.S. power, we will be doomed to repeat our Sisyphean wars of choice.

Gil Barndollar is the Military Fellow-in-Residence at the Catholic University of America's Center for the Study of Statesmanship. He served as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer from 2009-2016.

EliteCommInc. • 13 hours ago

Laughing ohhh brother . . .

It's hard to take any analysis seriously that starts out with the politically correct mantra

" about how the US lost Vietnam. As one of those post WWII conflicts that actually had some veracity as an effort on behalf of others one can say with some ease, we won that war and there's little question that the US service members who fought it were in fact betrayed.

And that betrayal continues with the nonsense about how we lost.

EliteCommInc. • 12 hours ago
"North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. North Vietnam, for all its missteps and brutality, endured over 1 million casualties and maintained the will to fight. The South did not."

They rolled in with the support of the Soviet Union, China and North Vietnam. You sure leave a lot out of your understanding of events at the time, Nevermind rethinking the matter today.

Sydney • 10 hours ago
Pay attention people; Prussia not Russia. Yes there was Prussia and it is not related to Russia. I'm making this comment because one of my colleagues wanted to corrected TAC article by claiming there must've been some misspelling. I wonder how many of my fellow homo sapiens think as my colleague does. I also wonder how many homos are in fact sapiēns?
chris chuba • 5 hours ago
Syria
I thought that you were going to mention the myth that had Obama bombed Assad after his 'red line' comment that moderate rebels would have taken over Syria and turned it into the Garden of Eden. This bizzare narrative is passionately defended by the likes of Jack Keane and too many others to count.

Even though Al Qaeda and ISIS were always, by far, the strongest factions, the demonstration of U.S. force would put so much fear into their hearts that it would allow our freedom fighters to walk into Damascus. After all that's what happened in Libya and we know how easily cowed ISIS and Al Qaeda are by one off bombings. Those are the people who start off battles using 1 - 3 VBIEDs (suicide vehicles).

gdpbull • 4 hours ago • edited
"The U.S. military, armed with futuristic black rifles and intercontinental bombers, lost to a Third World peasant army."

That's a myth within the myth. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was not a third world peasant army and should not be confused with the Viet Cong. That's an insult to the the NVA. They were highly trained and were equipped by the Soviet Union. The Viet Cong were virtually wiped out and were no longer a factor after the 68 Tet offensive. The NVA also kicked China back out of Vietnam in a border war in 1979, and destroyed the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

JeffK from PA • 2 hours ago
To borrow from Rod Dreher, we don't fail at war, we fail to pursue wars with sufficient enthusiasm and commitment.
PAX • an hour ago
Germany was not decisively defeated on the battle field. Not one inch of Germany was occupied by an allied soldier when the armistice was declared. Had the strike by the French military been detected by the Germans the outcome would have been very different. The sacking of Germany's wealth and infrastructure led to an economic collapse of the Weimar Republic. This allied induced economic chaos led to the monster Hitler and his thugees. Might be worth noting that prior to WW1 Germany and England were each other's best trading partners and the Kaiser visited England regularly. The war party -- derided in history as the "yellow press successfully lied about "the Hun" and got the war they wanted. Shades of 2003 Iraq; mainstream media, a powerful foreign lobby, a spineless congress, and a compliant president. Our decision makers have learned nothing from history except to follow the money. The neocons have learned everything. Lies (main stream media) and political contributions will get you endless wars. Just say NO! to Netanyahu.
concerned • an hour ago • edited
I have nothing but questions after reading this article and concern about how gullible, ignorant and loath we as a nation are when it comes to exposing the fallacy and ineptness of your so-called anointed ones and foreign policy by the armed conflict. Why do we not learn from our mistakes? Why do we continue to compound the mistakes we've made?

Part of the strategy in Afghanistan is nothing more than a rebranded "strategic hamlet" strategy used in Vietnam. How well did that work out? Easy answer, it didn't, it just ceded territory to the insurgency. Have we learned anything, not really, you still have some older cadre teaching the new generation lessons learned from over 40 years ago and those lessons haven't kept pace with developments in what we refer to as third world countries. We aren't adapting militarily with the exception of the lethality of today's modern weapons. And unfortunately should we engage in an armed conflict with a modernized advisary we'll still be teaching the lessons learned and tactics used when fighting lesser equipped insurgencies. I've gone off topic but watching the army I hold in esteem continue to do the same dumb s**t is disheartening.

Thanks for the article, I enjoyed. You've done a really good job of making your point without totally destroying the character of the perpetrators.

[Aug 28, 2019] Russiagate: It really is that simple

How are "Russian Oligarchs" different than "American Oligarchs" who bought Trump? Inquiring minds want to know :)
Notable quotes:
"... The mass media is desperate to propagate a fake narrative, they keep making "mistakes." Over and over. For 3 freakin years. ..."
Aug 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Mike Krieger summed the farce up best:

Michael Krieger

@LibertyBlitz

Replying to @LibertyBlitz

The mass media is desperate to propagate a fake narrative, they keep making "mistakes." Over and over. For 3 freakin years. It really is that simple.

[Aug 27, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard and Iisreal lobby: You can't take on MIC and at the same time take on Isreal. That's like fighting on two fronts. Unfortunatly. Policits is a dirty business after all. You just can't stay clean

Please remember that many people voted for Trump just because they can't vote for warmonger Hillary and/or to show middle finger to the Washington neoliberal establishment.
Everybody understand that he is just another billionaire with very shady past and questionable connection in NYC, but some people hoped that like FDR he can be the traitor of his own class. They were severely disappointed.
Voting is severely screwed in the USA as you are allowed to select out of two usually pre-selected by the elite candidates (Pepsi-Cola choice) but that all we have.
With all her warts, Tulsi foreign policy agenda is the most realistic and anti-war among all Democratic Candidates. And that's something to vote for.
Aug 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

anon [113] Disclaimer , says: August 27, 2019 at 5:11 pm GMT

Phil,

Just rewatched your appearance on "CrossTalk on Tulsi Gabbard: Peace Candidate." I've been somewhat manic about championing her, generally sharing her anti-war message, but periodically suffering some sucker-punch. Her supporters point to the smear campaign launched at her by neocons and neolibs as evidence of her threat to the MIC and establishment. There's a disconnect in that assertion. I wonder if either side realizes how conventional her positions are in general. Is there any real evidence that her understanding (lack of same) on Israel or Iran has change since she made this dreadful speech in 2015 to the CUFI conference? Frightening.

Tulsi Gabbard Speaks to Right-Wing Christians United for Israel Conference 2015

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PxXcUNct18Q?feature=oembed

Bardon Kaldian , says: August 27, 2019 at 5:17 pm GMT
@Curmudgeon There was no Abraham. This all is a story. It's about as meaningful as why Mr. Pickwick would do this or that.
Philip Giraldi , says: August 27, 2019 at 5:24 pm GMT
@anon True, her views on Iran and Syria (even after she visited and met with Bashar al-Assad) are dreadful and she is careful to say the right things about Israel. But she is at the same time the only candidate seriously talking about ending all the wars so she deserves support at least for that message, if only because it might force some others to confront the issue. Let's face it, our search for a truly acceptable candidate will not find one in either major party.

[Aug 26, 2019] Attempt of DNC to exclude Tulsi Gabbard from debate by manipulating the debate criteria

Aug 26, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Aug 25 2019 22:36 utc | 43

On the Gabbard Story-- Real Clear Politics did an excellent job of explaining the point-at-issue: the unknown criteria for the polls DNC hasn't told anyone which they are using or why. RT, in a more condensed article cited "Andrew Yang, who has since qualified, slammed the DNC in July for excluding one of two NBC polls he said had reached the 2 percent threshold in, [saying] ' It is frustrating to see the rules be changed mid-game .' The article also cites "Colorado Senator Michael Bennet [who] criticized the process in front of DNC Chair Tom Perez on Friday, saying it was 'stifling debate at a time when we need it most.'

These two important critiques when added to the information provided by the RCP article clearly show DNC manipulating the debate criteria in order to manage who participates.

I tried to find updated relevant polling data over the past week knowing the deadline was approaching and its importance to all the candidates, not just Gabbard, but is was very difficult to find just one poll let alone at least 4.

IMO, if she's excluded from the next round of debates because the DNC favored polls with tiny sample sizes versus far more relevant polls, then we will again know the Fix is In--Again--but for whom this time.

psychohistorian , Aug 25 2019 17:09 utc | 21

Below is a link to an article about Tulsi Gabbard being marginalized by the D part of the one party system in the US

Gabbard Victimized by DNC's Dubious Debate Criteria

I posted this in the last Open Thread but am copying it here because of its relevance, IMO

[Aug 26, 2019] What we need to know from the Horowitz report by Byron York

Notable quotes:
"... And what did the spying involve? In such intelligence work, wiretaps are recorded; transcripts are made. The same can be true for person-to-person conversations between FBI informants and Trump campaign figures. In May, Trey Gowdy, the former Republican congressman who read deeply into Trump-Russia materials when he was in the House, strongly implied the FBI had transcripts of informant communications. ..."
"... "If the bureau is going to send an informant in, the informant is going to be wired," Gowdy told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo. "And if the bureau is monitoring telephone calls, there's going to be a transcript of that." ..."
"... "Where are the transcripts, if any exist," Gowdy continued, "between the informants and the telephone calls to George Papadopoulos?" ..."
"... And then the biggest questions: If there was evidence gained from the wiretapping and informing, what was it? Was it valuable? What did it tell the FBI about Russia and the Trump campaign? And did it prove that the Justice Department was right all along to spy on the campaign -- that the spying was, in the words of Attorney General William Barr, "adequately predicated"? ..."
"... Here is why Republicans are skeptical. Special counsel Robert Mueller had access to the results of the FBI's spying, and Mueller could not establish that there was any conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. After a two-year investigation with full law enforcement powers, Mueller never alleged that any American took part in any such conspiracy or coordination. ..."
"... And even if it were entirely declassified, Horowitz will not tell the whole story of spying and the 2016 election. Horowitz is the inspector general of the Justice Department and does not have the authority to investigate outside the department. For example, he cannot probe the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency and its then-director John Brennan during the period in question. ..."
Aug 20, 2019 | www.washingtonexaminer.com

There will be much to learn in Inspector General Michael Horowitz's upcoming report on the Trump-Russia investigation, but most of it will likely boil down to just two questions. One, how much did the Obama Justice Department spy on the Trump campaign? And two, was it justified?

Many Democrats would immediately protest the word "spying." But the public already knows the FBI secured a warrant to wiretap low-level Trump adviser Carter Page a few months after Page left the campaign. The public also knows the FBI used informant Stefan Halper to gather information on other Trump campaign figures. And the public knows the FBI sent an undercover agent who went by the alias "Azra Turk" to London to tease information out of another low-level Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos.

Was that all? Were there more? Horowitz should give definitive answers.

And what did the spying involve? In such intelligence work, wiretaps are recorded; transcripts are made. The same can be true for person-to-person conversations between FBI informants and Trump campaign figures. In May, Trey Gowdy, the former Republican congressman who read deeply into Trump-Russia materials when he was in the House, strongly implied the FBI had transcripts of informant communications.

"If the bureau is going to send an informant in, the informant is going to be wired," Gowdy told Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo. "And if the bureau is monitoring telephone calls, there's going to be a transcript of that."

"Where are the transcripts, if any exist," Gowdy continued, "between the informants and the telephone calls to George Papadopoulos?"

The "if any exist" was Gowdy's way of casting his statements as a hypothetical, but there was no doubt he was speaking from the knowledge he gained as a congressional investigator.

And then the biggest questions: If there was evidence gained from the wiretapping and informing, what was it? Was it valuable? What did it tell the FBI about Russia and the Trump campaign? And did it prove that the Justice Department was right all along to spy on the campaign -- that the spying was, in the words of Attorney General William Barr, "adequately predicated"?

Here is why Republicans are skeptical. Special counsel Robert Mueller had access to the results of the FBI's spying, and Mueller could not establish that there was any conspiracy or coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. After a two-year investigation with full law enforcement powers, Mueller never alleged that any American took part in any such conspiracy or coordination.

So, Republicans know the end result of the investigation, but they don't know how it began. Yes, they know the official story of the start of what the FBI called Crossfire Hurricane -- that it began with a foreign intelligence service (Australia) telling U.S. officials that Papadopoulos appeared to have foreknowledge of a Russian plan to release damaging information about Hillary Clinton. But they don't think it's the whole story.

That's where Horowitz comes in.

There's one big potential problem that people on Capitol Hill are talking about, and that is the issue of classified information. Everyone expects a significant amount of Horowitz's report to be classified. How much, no one is quite sure. But the fact is, the report was done to tell the American people what the nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies did during the 2016 election. Issuing a report with page after page blacked out would not be a good way to do that. But no one will know the extent of the classification issue until Horowitz is ready to go public.

And even if it were entirely declassified, Horowitz will not tell the whole story of spying and the 2016 election. Horowitz is the inspector general of the Justice Department and does not have the authority to investigate outside the department. For example, he cannot probe the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency and its then-director John Brennan during the period in question.

That will be the role of another investigator, John Durham, the U.S. attorney appointed by Barr to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. Durham is working with the support of top Republicans on Capitol Hill, like Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, who recently said, "I really am very curious about the role that the CIA played here."

But first, the Horowitz report. It will be an important step in answering the questions of how much spying took place and whether it was justified. It's long past time Americans learned what happened.

[Aug 26, 2019] Business Groups Warn of Consequences as Trump's Trade War Spirals

Aug 26, 2019 | www.nytimes.com
Joshua Bolten, the president and chief executive of the Business Roundtable, an organization representing the leaders of the largest American companies, said on Sunday that many C.E.O.s were already "poised right on top of the brake."

There are two groups in American capitalist class: one anti-Russia and one anti-China.

The anti-Russia one is the "moderate" group, that still believes China can turn capitalist with due time; they go with Wolfowitz Doctrine, which states Russia, as the successor state of the USSR and heir of its nuclear arsenal, still represents American's strategic enemy.

The anti-China one is the "far-right" group, which believe China is indeed socialist and will become more socialist with time (and, therefore, will transform the world around it socialist). Thy use Huntington's "clash of civilization" doctrine as a screensaver to sell an anti-China rhetoric to the far-right indentured masses, but deep down know the true fight continues to be capitalism vs socialism.

Gramsci once stated that success begins with the correct analysis of the conjuncture. If that is true, then we already know who's gonna win: the anti-China group.

But the Gordian Knot is this: the very existence of two doctrines in the core of the American elite is already evidence the USA is no longer the world's sole superpower. If it was, then there would be no dilemma between the anti-Russia and the anti-China: there would simply be a unified, anti-Eurasia doctrine.

The very fact the American elite now must to compartmentalize its foreign policy is already a symptom of something that resembles a multipolar order: the USA is still the most powerful nation in the world, but now it is the first among equals (as opposed to being the king of nations, the "global cop").

Meanwhile, the post-war alliance continues to crumble. Mark Carney has revived Keynes "Bancor"; this is a last, desperate attempt of the First World minus the USA to preserve their dignity. The IMF already has a currency basket, but the problem is that it cannot force any country to take its loans: nations are still sovereign, and can only be interfered by the IMF if they ask for its interference. What Carney is asking for is literally an institution with absolute governance over all nations, genuine executive powers. Will the American elite -- who has the most formidable Military to date -- accept to relinquish their own power? Spoiler alert: no.

China and Russia have time and peace on their side. All they need to do is wait and continue to do what they are already doing, while Western Civilization continues to degenerate. The problem with this tactic is that the Western elites are not stupid, and will go on the offensive someday.

Russia has another problem: who's gonna succeed Putin after he retires? After the fall of the Romanovs, the Bolsheviks crushed the liberal army ("White Army") and the Anarchist-Nazi army ("Black Army") and were forced to found a new nation under a single party system (since all the other parties decided to form the White Army and fight a civil war, it had to do so because it was literally the only party left alive in Russia).

The intense and chaotic situation of the newly born Soviet Union and the premature death of Lenin resulted in a system with no clear path of succession. Stalin kind of created something that resembled a POTUS by reforming the office of General Secretary of the CPSU. But this was never official in the entire history of the USSR and each death of the de facto commander in chief was succeeded by a bloody palatial struggle. The system finally crumbled when Gorbachev -- the first and last General Secretary to be born after 1917 -- destroyed the CPSU and, with it, the entire USSR.

After the "democratization" (i.e. liberalization) of Russia (now "Russian Federation"), a bad carbon copy of the federal republic was created in a hurry in the vain hope imitating the capitalist system would make Russia as well organized and prosperous as the First World countries. But many mannerisms of the old system remains: there is no obsession in Russia with minority governments, much of the party divisions are artificial (mock liberalism) and, in practice, the important stuff is still decided between oligarchs, what is left of the State machine and the Military.

But now there is a high level of American infiltration in Russia. If, after Putin's death, the liberals make a move to take the government and do a Yeltsin 2.0, it will be up to the Military (hopefully) to make a decision. Depending on how this trade war between China and the USA will be at that point, things could pend to one side or the other. My high-risk bet here is that, 10-20 years from now, there will be a chance Russia may speculate with going back to socialism but "with Chinese characteristics" (if China is "winning" the trade war).

Posted by: vk | Aug 26 2019 0:46 utc | 50

[Aug 25, 2019] Propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbolism collective attitudes are amenable to many modes of alteration . intimidation intimidation .economic coercion drill

Aug 25, 2019 | off-guardian.org

TheThinker I've been reading a collection of essays by a Australian guy called Careys – on Democracy and propaganda, fully named, Taking the Risk out of Democracy. He died unpublished but his papers were collated in a book after. Here some bits from my read that were interesting.

In Jan 1994 David Hume reflecting on the consequences of the recent state terrorist projects that Washington had organised and directed in its Central American domains, with the Church a prime target. They took special note of 'what weight' the culture of terror has had in domestically the expectations of the majority vis-a-vis alternatives different for the powerful; the destruction of hope, they recognised, is one of the greatest achievements of the free world doctrine of 'low intensity conflict' what is called 'terror' when conducted by official enemies. Noam Chomsky 1994

Propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbolism collective attitudes are amenable to many modes of alteration . intimidation intimidation .economic coercion drill

But their arrangement and rearrangement occurs principally under the importers of significant symbolism and the technique of using significant symbols for this purpose is propaganda. Lasswell, Bardson & Janowitz 1953

Successful use of propaganda as a means of social control requires a number of conditions: The will to use it, the skills to produce the propaganda, the means to disseminate it; and the use of significant symbols with real power over emotional reactions – ideally symbols of the sacred and satanic (Light vs DARK)

A society or culture which is disposed to view the world in Manichean terms will be more vulnerable to control by propaganda. Conversely, a society where propaganda is extensively employed as a means of control, will tend to retain a Manichean world view, a view dominated by symbols and visions of the sacred and satanic.

Manichean – an adherent of the dualistic systems (dual = 2) religious systems of Manes, a combination of Gnostic, Buddiasm, Zoroastrianism and various other elements with a doctrine of a conflict between the Light and Dark, matter being regarded as dark and light / good vs evil – love vs hate

The 'public mind' was recognised long ago by corporate leaders to be 'the only serious danger confronting' their enterprise & major hazards facing industrialists along with the newly realised political power of the masses, which had to be beaten back.

Big Business in the US stated started the Americanise Movement ostensibly to Americanise worker, who was being perceived as being under threat from subversive forces of the Industrial Workers of the world.

what started as a method of controlling the political opinion of immigrant workers quickly turned into a massive program for the thinking of an entire population. One of the most startling examples of the escalation of the whole population in processes of propaganda was how Americanisation Program ( a word which conjures up the 'thought police') came to be transformed into a National Celebration Day for the 4th July, to many of us (Carey's words not mine) it comes as a shock to discover that American Independence Day had it's beginning in a Business led program to control public opinion rather than as a direct expression of a Nation celebrating its historical birth.

[Aug 25, 2019] MintCast Interviews Doug Valentine, expert on CIA covert operations

Notable quotes:
"... The politically minded rich, or what I call the overworld, have reason to tolerate mob violence that never occur to those of a lesser means ... in maintaining a violent status quo in our society ... of weak and failed states ..."
"... And not to leave out the ex-CIA guys who blew the whistle from Phillip Agee to John Kiriakou over the years. Phil Giraldi another, and the work David Talbot did with "The Devil's Chessboard." New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and the granddaddy of them all, Col L Fletcher Prouty. https://ratical.org/ratvill... ..."
"... Two interesting if not disparate notables from the ONI: Lee Harvey Oswald and Bob Woodward. ..."
Aug 25, 2019 | www.mintpressnews.com

Webb and Valentine begin the interview discussing how Valentine's journalistic work on the CIA led him to be spied on and even threatened by the agency and how being a dissident journalist in the 1990s compares to being one now. Valentine argues that, in the present, efforts to outlaw criticism of the state of Israel are like a gateway that will soon lead to the prohibition of criticism of the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies, the CIA among them.

<img src="https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cia_as_-_copy_3-x_small.jpg" alt="THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME" width="220" height="330" srcset="https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cia_as_-_copy_3-x_small.jpg 320w, https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cia_as_-_copy_3-x_small-200x300.jpg 200w" sizes="(max-width: 220px) 100vw, 220px" /> Valentine then touches on some of the themes covered in his book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World , including his assertion that the CIA operates as "the organized crime branch of the U.S. government" and his examination of how its activities have been influenced by its decades-long relationships with organized crime networks in the United States and throughout the world.

Lastly, Webb and Valentine discuss the CIA's long-standing interest in manipulating the media and how those efforts also extend to alternative media, not just mainstream media outlets. Valentine discusses the methods the CIA uses to target alternative, independent media and how we are seeing its efforts take place in real time.

Follow Doug Valentine on Twitter or visit his website to learn more about his work.

MintPress donors and patrons: Stay tuned later this week for a patron-exclusive extension of this podcast with Doug Valentine, which will discuss his work on the War on Drugs and the Drug Enforcement Agency and how both are key to unconstitutional, covert CIA programs. You can become a patron via Patreon or through our website.

Luther Blissett • 19 days ago ,

"The politically minded rich, or what I call the overworld, have reason to tolerate mob violence that never occur to those of a lesser means ... in maintaining a violent status quo in our society ... of weak and failed states. [...] Even in America, one of the more successful states, there has always been a negative space in which the overworld, corporate power, and privately organized violence all have access to and utilize each other, and rules are enforced by power that does not derive from the public state."

Peter Dale Scott - American War Machine p. 7-8

DaveO • 22 days ago ,

Thanks, Whitney. And thanks to Doug too.

And not to leave out the ex-CIA guys who blew the whistle from Phillip Agee to John Kiriakou over the years. Phil Giraldi another, and the work David Talbot did with "The Devil's Chessboard." New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and the granddaddy of them all, Col L Fletcher Prouty. https://ratical.org/ratvill...

pdurpan • a month ago ,

Whitney, are you aware of the lengthy (10 hour interview) with Kay Griggs? I am sure her observations will resonate with you. The time spent on that interview will be RICHLY rewarding, I promise.

She makes the point that it is not the CIA but Various military intel agencies like ONI (office of naval intelligence) and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) directing organized crime. Google Kay Griggs for You tube video of that long interview.

DaveO pdurpan • 22 days ago ,

Two interesting if not disparate notables from the ONI: Lee Harvey Oswald and Bob Woodward.
http://watergate.brightpixe...

[Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations

Highly recommended!
The more things change the more they stay the same. The level of paranoia of the neoliberal elite toward Russia probably exceeds the level achieved during the Cold War I, and their intellectual level is considerably lower, so the danger is greater.
Notable quotes:
"... I am coming to believe that it will never be possible to achieve anything resembling a sophisticated understanding of Russia in American governmental and journalistic circles. ..."
"... The lingering tendencies in [the United States] to see Russia as a great and dangerous enemy are simply silly, and should have no place in our thinking. We have never been at war with Russia, should never need to be and must not be. ..."
Aug 24, 2019 | www.russiamatters.org

[Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations

Highly recommended!
The more things change the more they stay the same. The level of paranoia of the neoliberal elite toward Russia probably exceeds the level achieved during the Cold War I, and their intellectual level is considerably lower, so the danger is greater.
Notable quotes:
"... I am coming to believe that it will never be possible to achieve anything resembling a sophisticated understanding of Russia in American governmental and journalistic circles. ..."
"... The lingering tendencies in [the United States] to see Russia as a great and dangerous enemy are simply silly, and should have no place in our thinking. We have never been at war with Russia, should never need to be and must not be. ..."
Aug 24, 2019 | www.russiamatters.org

[Aug 24, 2019] Forgive Max Boot. He's no idiot. He's just trying to make himself useful to MIC by Neal B. Freeman

Notable quotes:
"... Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a "Defense Expert," which, in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his enthusiasm for military operations involving other people. ..."
"... As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood, treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.) ..."
"... After the heavy fighting had faded, a consensus began to form, slowly at first and then picking up speed, that the invasion of Iraq had been one of the most disastrous self-inflicted mistakes in the history of American foreign policy. For almost everybody involved, as well as those many in the region who had hoped to remain uninvolved, the so-called discretionary war in Iraq had been a tragedy. ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... ingenium mala saepe movent ..."
Aug 24, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a "Defense Expert," which, in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his enthusiasm for military operations involving other people.

As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood, treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.)

After the heavy fighting had faded, a consensus began to form, slowly at first and then picking up speed, that the invasion of Iraq had been one of the most disastrous self-inflicted mistakes in the history of American foreign policy. For almost everybody involved, as well as those many in the region who had hoped to remain uninvolved, the so-called discretionary war in Iraq had been a tragedy.

As the question settled, some of us who had grown tired of Max Boot chirping in our ears began to wonder how he would respond. What might he say? Perhaps an abashed silence would do. Or should he undertake a penitential retreat to an obscure college, where he might meliorate his remorse with weed or alcohol? In less generous moments, we toyed with the idea that he might simply walk into the surf, after leaving an abject note of apology pinned against the sea breeze by a heavy shard of driftwood.

Our answer was a long time coming.

I am a heavy viewer of CNN, at both the airport and the barber shop, that is. One day last year, as I was having my thinning locks trimmed, the network ran a banner headline: MAX BOOT QUITS REPUBLICAN PARTY. I couldn't help myself. I started laughing. Soon the entire shop -- the sheeted customers, the startled barbers, the guys reading sticky magazines -- they were all asking, along with the rest of America, who is this Max Boot? I tried to answer but I couldn't. Each time I tried, I wound up laughing uncontrollably. CNN, which appears to have missed the earlier and equally newsworthy story, MAX BOOT JOINS REPUBLICAN PARTY, had reached its summary judgment: nothing had so become Max Boot's secret Republican career as the leaving of it. (Seriously, one thing you can count on is the acuity of CNN's news judgment. By a remarkable coincidence, both Arnold Thornbush of Ames, Iowa, and Phoebe Birdbath of Tempe, Arizona, had quit the GOP that very same day, but the CNN desk, laser-focused, could not be distracted from the big story.)

Ideas may or may not have consequences -- the debate rages -- but fake news most certainly does. Shortly after CNN's blockbuster story, The Washington Post , or what used to be The Washington Post , offered Max Boot a regular column. No, the Post couldn't find the stones to cast him as a defense expert. The Max Boot beat is still a bit undefined, but it seems to highlight his ad hominem attacks on former friends and associates from his secret Republican career.

Forgive Max Boot. He's no idiot. He's just trying to make himself useful.

Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around? The Max Bootification of the American Right

Neal B. Freeman is a former editor and columnist for National Review

Kronsteen1963 • a day ago

I never really knew Max Boot's background. So, after reading this column, I looked up his Wikipedia biography and it blew my mind. What on earth has this guy ever done to be considered a "Defense Expert?" He did not serve in the military or even in a civilian defense capacity. Nor does he seem to have any military related education - not a Service Academy, a military school, or a War College. As near as I can tell, this guy has made a career out of writing opinion pieces - jumping from a college newspaper to the Wall Street Journal to the Weekly Standard. Essentially, he's a glorified blogger who convinced a lot people that invading Iraq was a good idea. Unbelievable.
Sid Finster Kronsteen1963 • 20 hours ago
Max Boot has made a career out making of glib arguments for the causes that his bosses favored.

Sort of like those doctors who used their talents to work for the Tobacco Institute and insist that smoking did not cause cancer.

Alex (the one that likes Ike) • a day ago
Have some compassion, people! When the Democratic establishment finally follows its Republican counterpart to the oblivion, where all these poor unemployed people, these suffering dullards representatives of the strata of society with insufficient access to intellectual capacities go? On the other hand, ingenium mala saepe movent . Perhaps, after that he finally gets over himself and finds that eldritch ability to say two coherent words.
Mighty Whig • a day ago
I like the last line. Max is an old fashioned imperialist who made a home with the GOP when that seemed the most likely place for people of his views. Once Trump talked about walking that back, he quit.
stevek9 • a day ago • edited
Something always missing from articles like this, is the context. Max Boot is a Zionist. That is WHY he wants to destroy Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, ... anyone perceived as a threat to Israel. He has not been a failure but a success, or at least a partial success, as indeed we have destroyed Iraq, and Libya, and nearly destroyed Syria. You think he should be ashamed of his failures. Of course he is not, because he has not failed.
alan • a day ago • edited
That war mongering piece of filth should be loaded aboard a C 130 and sent on a one-way flight to Ukraine, his original lair, where, parachute, bandolier, and all, he can be jettisoned over Kiev.
Sid Finster • a day ago
As far as I can tell, neither Alfred Rosenberg nor Julius Striecher never fired a shot during World War II, neither so much as harmed a single hair on the head of an "Untermensch", combatant or not.

Both, however propagandized incessantly for aggressive war and genocide. Both men hanged at Nuremberg, for crimes against peace, aggressive war, and crimes against humanity. (I think Streicher only hanged for crimes against humanity, but the sentence was the same.)

Taras77 • 17 hours ago
In a group of brain dead walking/talking ziocon mouth pieces, max boot stands out as one of most brain dead-does not have an original thought in his head.

[Aug 24, 2019] Russiagate has elements which are similar to anti-Semitism hysteria in Nazi Germany

Aug 24, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Reader mark

This is a case of setting up a ludicrous straw man.

Suppose for the sake of argument it was established that the Russian state actually did try to kill Skripal. Of course they didn't, but assume they did.

It would be entirely legitimate to say "the Russians" did it. This wouldn't be racist, or bigoted, or anything else. It wouldn't mean that all 150 million Russians were personally involved, or approved of this action, or played an active part in it, or even that they knew of it or could care less about it.

It wouldn't be some kind of racist trope that bus driver Mr. Ivanovich in Novosibirsk was somehow responsible.

Any more than 300 million Americans and 60 million British were personally responsible for the conspiracy to invade Iraq, or Bush's and Blair's criminal war of aggression.

In like manner the 9/11 atrocity was carried out by a few hundred individuals. Mostly Israeli and dual national Americans, and a significant number of Israel First stooge goys serving Zionist interests.

The vast majority of Jews and Israelis in the world played no part at all, and are just passive recipients of the cover conspiracy theories to explain it away.

This is just a smokecreen that is habitually thrown up whenever anyone connects the dots between Silverstein, a 200 strong Mossad ring, Chertoff, and so many others.

[Aug 24, 2019] Forgive Max Boot. He's no idiot. He's just trying to make himself useful to MIC by Neal B. Freeman

Notable quotes:
"... Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a "Defense Expert," which, in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his enthusiasm for military operations involving other people. ..."
"... As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood, treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.) ..."
"... After the heavy fighting had faded, a consensus began to form, slowly at first and then picking up speed, that the invasion of Iraq had been one of the most disastrous self-inflicted mistakes in the history of American foreign policy. For almost everybody involved, as well as those many in the region who had hoped to remain uninvolved, the so-called discretionary war in Iraq had been a tragedy. ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... The Washington Post ..."
"... ingenium mala saepe movent ..."
Aug 24, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a "Defense Expert," which, in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his enthusiasm for military operations involving other people.

As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood, treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.)

After the heavy fighting had faded, a consensus began to form, slowly at first and then picking up speed, that the invasion of Iraq had been one of the most disastrous self-inflicted mistakes in the history of American foreign policy. For almost everybody involved, as well as those many in the region who had hoped to remain uninvolved, the so-called discretionary war in Iraq had been a tragedy.

As the question settled, some of us who had grown tired of Max Boot chirping in our ears began to wonder how he would respond. What might he say? Perhaps an abashed silence would do. Or should he undertake a penitential retreat to an obscure college, where he might meliorate his remorse with weed or alcohol? In less generous moments, we toyed with the idea that he might simply walk into the surf, after leaving an abject note of apology pinned against the sea breeze by a heavy shard of driftwood.

Our answer was a long time coming.

I am a heavy viewer of CNN, at both the airport and the barber shop, that is. One day last year, as I was having my thinning locks trimmed, the network ran a banner headline: MAX BOOT QUITS REPUBLICAN PARTY. I couldn't help myself. I started laughing. Soon the entire shop -- the sheeted customers, the startled barbers, the guys reading sticky magazines -- they were all asking, along with the rest of America, who is this Max Boot? I tried to answer but I couldn't. Each time I tried, I wound up laughing uncontrollably. CNN, which appears to have missed the earlier and equally newsworthy story, MAX BOOT JOINS REPUBLICAN PARTY, had reached its summary judgment: nothing had so become Max Boot's secret Republican career as the leaving of it. (Seriously, one thing you can count on is the acuity of CNN's news judgment. By a remarkable coincidence, both Arnold Thornbush of Ames, Iowa, and Phoebe Birdbath of Tempe, Arizona, had quit the GOP that very same day, but the CNN desk, laser-focused, could not be distracted from the big story.)

Ideas may or may not have consequences -- the debate rages -- but fake news most certainly does. Shortly after CNN's blockbuster story, The Washington Post , or what used to be The Washington Post , offered Max Boot a regular column. No, the Post couldn't find the stones to cast him as a defense expert. The Max Boot beat is still a bit undefined, but it seems to highlight his ad hominem attacks on former friends and associates from his secret Republican career.

Forgive Max Boot. He's no idiot. He's just trying to make himself useful.

Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around? The Max Bootification of the American Right

Neal B. Freeman is a former editor and columnist for National Review

Kronsteen1963 • a day ago

I never really knew Max Boot's background. So, after reading this column, I looked up his Wikipedia biography and it blew my mind. What on earth has this guy ever done to be considered a "Defense Expert?" He did not serve in the military or even in a civilian defense capacity. Nor does he seem to have any military related education - not a Service Academy, a military school, or a War College. As near as I can tell, this guy has made a career out of writing opinion pieces - jumping from a college newspaper to the Wall Street Journal to the Weekly Standard. Essentially, he's a glorified blogger who convinced a lot people that invading Iraq was a good idea. Unbelievable.
Sid Finster Kronsteen1963 • 20 hours ago
Max Boot has made a career out making of glib arguments for the causes that his bosses favored.

Sort of like those doctors who used their talents to work for the Tobacco Institute and insist that smoking did not cause cancer.

Alex (the one that likes Ike) • a day ago
Have some compassion, people! When the Democratic establishment finally follows its Republican counterpart to the oblivion, where all these poor unemployed people, these suffering dullards representatives of the strata of society with insufficient access to intellectual capacities go? On the other hand, ingenium mala saepe movent . Perhaps, after that he finally gets over himself and finds that eldritch ability to say two coherent words.
Mighty Whig • a day ago
I like the last line. Max is an old fashioned imperialist who made a home with the GOP when that seemed the most likely place for people of his views. Once Trump talked about walking that back, he quit.
stevek9 • a day ago • edited
Something always missing from articles like this, is the context. Max Boot is a Zionist. That is WHY he wants to destroy Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, ... anyone perceived as a threat to Israel. He has not been a failure but a success, or at least a partial success, as indeed we have destroyed Iraq, and Libya, and nearly destroyed Syria. You think he should be ashamed of his failures. Of course he is not, because he has not failed.
alan • a day ago • edited
That war mongering piece of filth should be loaded aboard a C 130 and sent on a one-way flight to Ukraine, his original lair, where, parachute, bandolier, and all, he can be jettisoned over Kiev.
Sid Finster • a day ago
As far as I can tell, neither Alfred Rosenberg nor Julius Striecher never fired a shot during World War II, neither so much as harmed a single hair on the head of an "Untermensch", combatant or not.

Both, however propagandized incessantly for aggressive war and genocide. Both men hanged at Nuremberg, for crimes against peace, aggressive war, and crimes against humanity. (I think Streicher only hanged for crimes against humanity, but the sentence was the same.)

Taras77 • 17 hours ago
In a group of brain dead walking/talking ziocon mouth pieces, max boot stands out as one of most brain dead-does not have an original thought in his head.

[Aug 24, 2019] Putin strongly objects to the USA start of production of midrange rockets which can be used from Romania s and Poland s existing launching facilities

While this is a Russian site with specific audience, comments show that people reject the USA policy which might creates problems for the USA in the future. Not the USA neoliberal/neocon elite cares.
This decisions just had shown to the whole would that Trump is a clown capable of twitting, not much more. Other people make key decisions for the county.
Aug 24, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Drew Hunkins , August 23, 2019 at 13:33

off topic:

Putin's taking the gloves off:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAfyftONbFY&list=LLWzo4sS343MNLWEG7VvwJ_Q&index=3&t=222s

Franz Bauer , 1 day ago

The deep state that controls the US are lying criminal psychopaths. Any agreements and treaties negotiated with them aren't worth the time or paper they are written on.

Narayana Narayana , 1 day ago

We love honourable putin's each decision because he always gives with legal proof. Love you honourable putin and Russia people. From India.

rafael albizu , 1 day ago (edited)

Super hypersonic russian rockets need just 5 minutes to hit target, & they're in Russian land, not in foreign usurped countries

Brian Ahern , 1 day ago

all.putin wants world peace but the Americans whats to tell everyone what to do and start wars what.they.sould buid a wall.around america stop them getting out

394pjo , 1 day ago (edited) div tabindex="0" role="artic

le"> We can certainly expect Poland and Romania to be targeted with Nuclear munitions at the very least. There will likely be an official Russian announcement of this fact as well. In the event of a breakout of hostilities with Nato then Russia will target the military infrastructure in both countries and vaporise them immediately. Unfortunately a very large number of Polish and Romanian civilians will be caught in the blasts. That will be tragic of course.

pulaat , 1 day ago

I live in the Netherlands and I am on the side of Russia. Europe is disgusting for not condemning the USA intentions. Eu will regret it. When bombs fall on Europe because of these incompetent leaders we will not forget.

Drew Hunkins , 1 day ago div tabindex="0" role="art

icle"> The Western public MUST, MUST become very familiar pronto with the few intellectuals, scholars, journalists, writers and authors who have been at the forefront for global peace and world justice for decades! It's our only hope! Right now the only sane voice on the national stage is Tulsi Gabbard. People must start reading: John Pilger, James Petras, Diana Johnstone, Stephen Lendman, Ray McGovern, Finian Cunningham, Andre Vltchek, Michael Parenti, Stephen Cohen, The Saker, Caitlin Johnstone, Paul Craig Roberts.

Techno Tard , 1 day ago

Good one U.S.A. government! Lets try to instigate a fkn war where we can actually be attacked on our home land!

Luis martins , 1 day ago (edited)

tit-for-tat that was the right words from Putin

Madaleine , 1 day ago

USA a decadent nation run by global mafia . Cannot trust what they say , is proven by their actions Sold their soul to the devil for money and power. Yet they will fail God is in charge!

Drew Hunkins , 1 day ago div tabindex="0" role="articl

e"> The double standard in the West is breathtaking. It's as simple as the Golden Rule: merely try to imagine the reaction in New York, London, Washington, Paris, Chicago, Boston if Russia or China were to do the exact same thing in southern Canada or the Caribbean. The Washington military empire builders could possibly destroy humanity with their reckless and imperial behavior. They simply cannot accept any sovereign nation-states that 1.) give the finger to Wall Street or the idea of the uni-polar world Washington's intent on establishing, or 2.) gives diplomatic support to the Palestinians or is even a mild thorn in the side of Israel. For further reading, see the following scholars, intellectuals, journalists and writers: James Petras, Diana Johnstone, John Pilger, Stephen Lendman, Michael Parenti, Finian Cunningham, Andre Vltchek and a few others I'm forgetting at the moment.

George Mavrides , 1 hour ago

US ramping up for a war before dollar collapse. However, a war against Russia and China is not one they can win.

JimmyRJump , 1 day ago (edited) div tabindex="0" role="articl

e"> Under Trump the USA are rapidly steering towards an open dictatorship, something they've been doing for years but more covertly. The USA have always been shouting the loudest about democracy and freedom but that's just a façade while they bully the world and their own people into submission. The curtain is falling faster and faster now. Oh, and ask the American Natives what the Americans do with treaties...

orderoutofchaos621 , 20 hours ago

The US does not want friendship with Russia, it seeks to either control it or destroy it. Since the first option isn't going to happen, it's obvious what's next and it'll start with more sanctions, expanding NATO into Georgia and Ukraine and placing nuclear missiles on Russia's Eastern and Western border.

Bernt Sunde , 1 day ago div class=

"comment-renderer-text-content expanded"> All it takes, is 1 single warhead fired from ex. Poland to reach Moscow. How many launchers do USA have placed in these countries near Russia? Is Moscow more than 500 KM away from any NATO border? If the enemy sets up catapults outside your city walls, isn't that a clear sign the enemy intend to fire those catapults against your walls? So what do you do? Do you sit and wait? Or do you take out the catapults before they break down your walls? As far as any strategist see this, it can be only one solution for survival.

joshron99 , 1 day ago div class="c

omment-renderer-text-content expanded"> During FDR's 'Pearl Harbor' speech he said, "It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago." There are echoes of this speech in Putin's words ( 02:18 ) and the type of treachery referred to by Roosevelt applies to the American exit from the INF. America has become a nation holding "a big stick" and loudly shouting about it (contrary to an earlier Roosevelt's advice). The White House acknowledged (and the NYT reported) that we are involved in seven wars right now (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Niger). We have 38 "named" foreign military bases as well as upwards of 600 overseas military installations of some sort including "lily pads," i.e., "cooperative security locations" and an undisclosed number of "black" locations. Our military budget is pushing towards a trillion dollars per year ($717 billion this year). We are threatening small countries such as Venezuela with military action (and yes, something needs to be done for the good of the people there but that should not include an American military attack which President Trump, our Secretary of State ("and his colleague") have said is "on the table." And now, we are dumping nuclear weapons treaties. We have truly become a country which "lives by the sword." Good luck to us all.

Deon Richards , 10 hours ago

Okay , so this is a broadcast of the President of Russia speaking to his security council right , this is official researched factual intel ....has to be on that level ...right . Now to the few negative responses I have come across ,what intel do you have and where did you get it...

Mad Rooky , 4 hours ago

Poland and Romania wanted to be on the safe side, but now they are getting a crosshair painted on their countries. What irony.

Drew Hunkins , 1 day ago

Instead of addressing and trying to ameliorate this most dangerous development, let's instead focus on Trump's idiotic and diversionary comments and tweets about buying Greenland or some such other nonsense.

[Aug 23, 2019] Spygate The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump by Jeff Carlson

Highly recommended!
Images removed. See the original for full version.
Much more plausible explanation of Russiagate then Mueller report that cost probably 1000 times less. Mueller and his team should commit hara-kiri in shame.
It contains more valuable information about Russiagate and color revolution against Trump initiatesd by Obama and Brennan. And what is important it is much shorter and up to the point. In other words, Jeff Carlson beat the whole Mueller team to the punch.
An excellent reporting by Jeff Carlson !!! Bravo!!!
Notable quotes:
"... Horowitz continued to push Congress for oversight access and encouraged passage of the Inspector General Empowerment Act . Horowitz would ultimately win his battle, but only as President Barack Obama was leaving office. On Dec. 16, 2016, Obama finally signed the Inspector General Empowerment Act into law. ..."
"... The IGs' memo included an assessment that Clinton's email account contained hundreds of classified emails, despite Clinton's claims that there was no classified information present on her server. ..."
"... On July 30, 2015, within weeks of the FBI's opening of the Clinton investigation, McCabe was suddenly promoted to the No. 3 position in the FBI. With his new title of associate deputy director, McCabe was transferred to FBI headquarters from the Washington Field Office, and his direct involvement in the Clinton investigation began. ..."
"... Strzok was one of the agents selected, and in late August 2015, he was assigned to the Mid-Year Exam team and transferred to FBI headquarters. Strzok, in his comments to lawmakers, acknowledged that the newly formed investigative team was largely made up of hand-picked personnel from the Washington Field Office and FBI headquarters. ..."
"... On Jan. 29, 2016, Comey appointed McCabe as FBI deputy director, replacing the retiring Giuliano, and McCabe assumed the No. 2 position in the FBI, after having held the No. 3 position for just six months. ..."
"... By early 2016, the three participants in the infamous "insurance policy" meeting -- McCabe, Strzok, and Page -- were now in place at the FBI. ..."
"... Priestap, who testified that he was unaware of the frequency of meetings between McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page, seems to have been kept in the dark regarding many of the actions taken by Strzok, who appeared to be exercising significant investigative control. ..."
"... It sounds like Peter Strzok was kind of driving the train here. Would you agree with that?" ..."
"... Peter and Jon, yeah." ..."
"... Do you know if Mr. McCabe was aware that some of his agent executives were concerned that they were being bypassed on information on what, by all accounts, was a sensitive, critical investigation?" ..."
"... My understanding was that he was aware." ..."
"... Notably, Comey had been convinced to remove the term "gross negligence" to describe Clinton's actions from his prepared statement by, among others, Page, Strzok, Anderson, and Moffa. ..."
"... While GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted, after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Most of these meetings with Papadopoulos -- whose own background and reasons for joining the Trump campaign remain suspicious -- occurred in the first half of 2016. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly so. ..."
"... As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of any traditional channels -- was gathered, Brennan began a process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director pushed the FBI toward the establishment of a formal counterintelligence investigation. ..."
"... The last major segment of Brennan's efforts involved a series of three reports. The first, titled the "Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security ," was released on Oct. 7, 2016. The second report, "GRIZZLY STEPPE -- Russian Malicious Cyber Activity ," was released on Dec. 29, 2016. The third report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections " -- also known as the intelligence community assessment (ICA) -- was released on Jan. 6, 2017. ..."
"... On July 5, 2016, Gaeta traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. At some point in early July, Steele passed his initial report to Nuland and the State Department. Nuland later said these documents were passed on at some point to both the FBI and then-Secretary of State John Kerry. ..."
"... Prior to joining Fusion GPS, Nellie had worked as an independent contractor for an internal open-source division of the CIA, Open Source Works, from 2008 to at least June 2010; it appears likely she remained in that role into 2014. ..."
"... Additionally, email communications between her and Bruce Ohr show that she routinely sent her husband at the DOJ articles on Russia -- most carrying a similar negative slant. The emails continued through the duration of Nellie's employment with Fusion GPS and usually contained a brief, often one-line comment from Nellie. ..."
"... In her testimony, Nellie described her work as online open-source efforts that utilized "Russian sources, media, social media, government, you know, business registers, legal databases, all kinds of things." Ohr said that she would "write occasional reports based on the open-source research that I described about Donald Trump's relationships with various people in Russia." ..."
"... Steele had produced eight reports from June 20, 2016, through the end of August 2016 (there also is one undated report included in the dossier). No further reports were generated by Steele until Sept. 14, when he suddenly wrote three separate memos in one day. One of the memos referenced a Russian bank named Alfa Bank, misspelled as "Alpha" in his memo. Steele's sudden burst of productivity was likely done in preparation for his Sept. 19 meeting in Rome with the FBI. ..."
"... The impact of Brennan's potential knowledge of the dossier in August 2016 should not be underestimated. As Brennan testified to Congress, his briefing to the Gang of Eight was done in consultation with the Obama administration: ..."
"... Halper, who has been outed as an FBI informant, stayed in contact with Carter Page for the next 14 months, severing ties exactly as the final FISA warrant on Page expired. ..."
"... Following the publication of the Isikoff article, the Hillary for America campaign released a statement on the same day that touted Isikoff's "bombshell report," with the full article attached. ..."
"... Winer had received a separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. This "second dossier" had been compiled by another longtime Clinton operative, former journalist Cody Shearer, and echoed claims made in the Steele dossier. Winer gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele then shared this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it as a means to corroborate Steele's own dossier. ..."
"... Steele also met with U.S. media during his visit to Washington, doing so "at Fusion's instruction." According to UK Court documents , Steele testified that he "briefed" The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, and CNN at the end of September 2016. Steele would engage in a second round of media contact in mid-October 2016, meeting again with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yahoo News. Steele testified that all these meetings were "conducted verbally in person." ..."
"... Sometime in late 2016, his wife, Nellie Ohr, provided him with a memory stick containing all of her research that she had compiled while employed at Fusion GPS. Bruce Ohr testified he gave the memory stick to Pientka. Nellie Ohr had left Fusion in September 2016. Through Pientka, Strzok now had all of Nellie Ohr's Fusion research in his possession. ..."
"... Flynn's 2015 dinner in Moscow was initially used to implicate the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. It was then used as a means to cast doubts on Flynn's ability as Trump's national security adviser. Following Flynn's resignation, it was then used as a means to pursue the ongoing collusion narrative that gained full strength in the early days of the Trump administration. ..."
"... On April 18, 2016, Rogers moved aggressively in response to the disclosures. He abruptly shut down all FBI outside-contractor access. At this point, both the FBI and the DOJ's NSD became aware of Rogers's compliance review. They may have known earlier, but they were certainly aware after outside-contractor access was halted. ..."
"... Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of the compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the NSA inspector general and associated FISA abuse to the FISA court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702-compliance review. ..."
Mar 28, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Updated: July 7, 2019

Efforts by high-ranking officials in the CIA , FBI , Department of Justice ( DOJ ), and State Department to portray President Donald Trump as having colluded with Russia were the culmination of years of bias and politicization under the Obama administration.

<img class="size-large wp-image-2855920" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/27/DOJ-FBI_infographic_3_Epoch-Times-1200x630.png" alt="" width="640" height="336" /> Click on image to enlarge.

The weaponization of the intelligence community and other government agencies created an environment that allowed for obstruction in the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the relentless pursuit of a manufactured collusion narrative against Trump.

A willing and complicit media spread unsubstantiated leaks as facts in an effort to promote the Russia-collusion narrative.

The Spygate scandal also raises a bigger question: Was the 2016 election a one-time aberration, or was it symptomatic of decades of institutional political corruption?

This article builds on dozens of congressional testimonies, court documents, and other research to provide an inside look at the actions of Obama administration officials in the scandal that's become known as Spygate.

<img class=" wp-image-2833768" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Michael-Horowitz-1200x1239.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="165" /> Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz . (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

To understand this abuse of power, it helps to go back to July 2011, when DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was appointed.

From the very start, Horowitz found his duties throttled by Attorney General Eric Holder, who placed limitations on the inspector general's right to have unobstructed access to information. Holder used this tactic to delay Horowitz's investigation of the failed sting operation known as Operation Fast and Furious.

"We got access to information up to 2010 in all of these categories. No law changed in 2010. No policy changed. It was simply a decision by the General Counsel's Office in 2010 that they viewed, now, the law differently. And as a result, they weren't going to give us that information," Horowitz told members of Congress in February 2015.

On Aug. 5, 2014, Horowitz and other inspectors general had sent a letter to Congress asking for unimpeded access to all records. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates responded on July 20, 2015, with a 58-page memorandum, titled " Memorandum for Sally Quillian Yates Deputy Attorney General ," written by Karl R. Thompson, the principal deputy assistant attorney general of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

<img class=" wp-image-2833772" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/sally-yates-1200x1188.jpg" alt="" width="161" height="159" /> Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The July 20, 2015, opinion was widely criticized . But it accomplished what it was intended to do. The opinion limited IG Horowitz's oversight from extending to any information collected under Title III -- including intercepted communications and national security letters. (Notably, The New York Times disclosed that national security letters were used in the surveillance of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.)

In response, on Aug. 3, 2015, IG Horowitz sent a blistering letter to Congress. The letter was signed not only by Horowitz but by all other acting inspectors general as well:

"The OLC opinion's restrictive reading of the IG Act represents a potentially serious challenge to the authority of every Inspector General and our collective ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner. Our concern is that, as a result of the OLC opinion, agencies other than DOJ may likewise withhold crucial records from their Inspectors General, adversely impacting their work.

Horowitz continued to push Congress for oversight access and encouraged passage of the Inspector General Empowerment Act . Horowitz would ultimately win his battle, but only as President Barack Obama was leaving office. On Dec. 16, 2016, Obama finally signed the Inspector General Empowerment Act into law.

It is against this backdrop of minimal oversight that Spygate took place.

Ironically, the Clinton email server investigation, known as the "Mid-Year Exam," originated from a disclosure contained in a June 29, 2015, memo sent by the inspectors general for both the State Department and the Intelligence Community to Patrick F. Kennedy, then-undersecretary of state for management.

The IGs' memo included an assessment that Clinton's email account contained hundreds of classified emails, despite Clinton's claims that there was no classified information present on her server.

On July 6, 2015, the IG for the Intelligence Community made a referral to the FBI, which resulted in the official opening of an investigation into the Clinton email server by FBI officials Randall Coleman and Charles Kable on July 10, 2015.

<img class="size-large wp-image-2833204" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Andrew-McCabe-Lisa-Page-Peter-Strzok-1200x720.jpg" alt="peter strzok andrew mccabe and lisa page" width="640" height="384" /> (L-R) FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe , and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. (Getty Images/Epoch Times)

A Hand-Picked Team

At this time, Peter Strzok was an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI's Washington Field Office. The assistant director in charge at the Washington Field Office during this period was Andrew McCabe, a position he assumed on Sept. 14, 2014.

On July 30, 2015, within weeks of the FBI's opening of the Clinton investigation, McCabe was suddenly promoted to the No. 3 position in the FBI. With his new title of associate deputy director, McCabe was transferred to FBI headquarters from the Washington Field Office, and his direct involvement in the Clinton investigation began.

Strzok would follow shortly. Less than a month after McCabe was transferred, FBI headquarters reached out to the Washington Field Office, saying it needed greater staffing and resources "based on what they were looking at, based on some of the investigative steps that were under consideration," Strzok told congressional investigators in a closed-door hearing on June 27, 2018.

Strzok was one of the agents selected, and in late August 2015, he was assigned to the Mid-Year Exam team and transferred to FBI headquarters. Strzok, in his comments to lawmakers, acknowledged that the newly formed investigative team was largely made up of hand-picked personnel from the Washington Field Office and FBI headquarters.

Starting in October 2015 and continuing into early 2016, FBI Director James Comey made a series of high-profile reassignments that resulted in the complete turnover of the upper-echelon of the FBI team working on the Clinton email investigation:

Comey is the only known senior FBI leadership official who remained involved throughout the entire Clinton email investigation. McCabe had the second-longest tenure.

On Jan. 29, 2016, Comey appointed McCabe as FBI deputy director, replacing the retiring Giuliano, and McCabe assumed the No. 2 position in the FBI, after having held the No. 3 position for just six months.

It was at this point that FBI lawyer Lisa Page was assigned to McCabe as his special counsel. This was not the first time that Page worked directly for McCabe. James Baker, the FBI's former general counsel, told congressional investigators that Page had worked for McCabe at various times during McCabe's career, going back as far as 2013.

By early 2016, the three participants in the infamous "insurance policy" meeting -- McCabe, Strzok, and Page -- were now in place at the FBI.

In January 2016, Bill Priestap was named as head of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, replacing Coleman and inheriting the Clinton email investigation in the process.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2857145" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/28/Spygate_Epoch-TImes.jpg" alt="" width="676" height="1280" />

According to Priestap, Coleman had "set up a reporting mechanism that leaders of that team would report directly to him, not through the customary other chain of command" in the Clinton email investigation. Priestap, who said he didn't know why Coleman had "set it up," kept the chain of command in place when he assumed Coleman's position in January 2016.

This new structure resulted in some unusual reporting lines that went outside normal chains of command. Strzok, who would not normally fall under Priestap's oversight, was now reporting directly to him.

As Priestap described it, the team involved in the Clinton investigation comprised three different but intertwined elements: the primary team, the filter team, and the senior leadership team.

While the elements of the day-to-day investigative team differed for the Clinton email investigation and the Trump–Russia investigation, the primary team remained the same throughout both cases -- as did the lines of communication between the FBI and the DOJ. According to testimony by Page, John Carlin, who ran the DOJ's National Security Division (NSD), was receiving briefings on both investigations directly from McCabe.

Priestap Left in the Dark

Priestap, who testified that he was unaware of the frequency of meetings between McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page, seems to have been kept in the dark regarding many of the actions taken by Strzok, who appeared to be exercising significant investigative control. Priestap was asked about this by congressional investigators during a June 5, 2018, testimony:

Rep. Meadows: " It sounds like Peter Strzok was kind of driving the train here. Would you agree with that?"

Mr. Priestap: " Peter and Jon, yeah."

<img class=" wp-image-2833249" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Priestap-1200x1548.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="205" /> Assistant Director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap. (Jennifer Zeng/The Epoch Times)

Additionally, Page often circumvented the established chain of command, not only with McCabe, for whom she reportedly served as a conduit for Strzok, but also with Baker. Additionally, there were concerns that Page bypassed both the executive assistant director for the National Security Branch -- first Giacalone, then Steinbach -- and Priestap, the head of counterintelligence. Anderson, the No. 2 lawyer, admitted in her testimony to congressional investigators that she had been aware of these concerns, saying, "Neither of them personally complained to me, but I was aware of their concerns."

A report published by IG Horowitz in June 2018, which reviewed the FBI's investigation of the Clinton email case, included the notable statement that several witnesses had informed the IG that Page "circumvented the official chain of command, and that Strzok communicated important Midyear case information to her, and thus to McCabe, without Priestap's or Steinbach's knowledge." Steinbach, who was the executive assistant director and Priestap's direct supervisor, left the FBI in early 2017.

According to Anderson, McCabe was aware of the ongoing concerns regarding Page's circumventions, but it appears that nothing was done to address them:

Mr. Baker: " Do you know if Mr. McCabe was aware that some of his agent executives were concerned that they were being bypassed on information on what, by all accounts, was a sensitive, critical investigation?"

Ms. Anderson: " My understanding was that he was aware."

DOJ Prevents 'Gross Negligence' Charges

By the spring of 2016, the Clinton email investigation was already winding down. This was due in large part to the fact that the DOJ, under Attorney General Loretta Lynch , had decided to set an unusually high threshold for the prosecution of Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that she would not be charged.

In order for Clinton to be prosecuted, the DOJ required the FBI to establish evidence of intent -- even though the gross negligence statute explicitly does not require this.

This meant that the FBI would have needed to find a smoking gun, such as an email or an admission made during FBI questioning, revealing that Clinton or her aides knowingly set up the private email server to send classified information.

According to Page, the DOJ played a far larger role in the Clinton investigation than previously had been known:

"Everybody talks about this as if this was the FBI investigation, and the truth of the matter is there was not a single step, other than the July 5th statement, there was not a single investigative step that we did not do in consultation with or at the direction of the Justice Department," Page told congressional investigators on July 13, 2018.

<img class=" wp-image-2833254" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/GettyImages-545524880-1200x1441.jpg" alt="" width="161" height="193" /> Attorney General Loretta Lynch. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Comey also had hinted at the influence exerted by the DOJ over the Clinton investigation, at a July 5, 2016, press conference , in which he recommended that Clinton not be charged, stating that "there are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent."

Notably, Comey had been convinced to remove the term "gross negligence" to describe Clinton's actions from his prepared statement by, among others, Page, Strzok, Anderson, and Moffa.

CIA Director Instigates Trump Investigation

As the Clinton investigation wound down, interest from the intelligence community in the Trump campaign was ramping up. Sometime in 2015, it appears former CIA Director John Brennan established himself as the point man to push for an investigation into the Trump campaign. Using a combination of unofficial foreign intelligence compiled by contacts, colleagues, and associates -- primarily from the UK , but also from other Five Eyes members, such as Australia -- Brennan then fed this information to the FBI. Brennan stated this fact repeatedly during a May 23, 2017, congressional testimony :

"I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign, was shared with the [FBI]."

<img class=" wp-image-2833258" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/GettyImages-687314312-1200x1279.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="171" /> CIA Director John Brennan. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Brennan also admitted that it was his intelligence that helped establish the FBI investigation:

"I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred."

In late 2015, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was involved in collecting information regarding then-candidate Trump and transmitting it to the United States. The GCHQ is the UK equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

<img class=" wp-image-2833230" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/George-Papadopoulos.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="192" /> Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

While GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted, after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Most of these meetings with Papadopoulos -- whose own background and reasons for joining the Trump campaign remain suspicious -- occurred in the first half of 2016. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly so.

<img class=" wp-image-2833234" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Alexander-Downer-1200x1391.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="186" /> Australian high commissioner to the UK, Alexander Downer. (GOH CHAI HIN/AFP/Getty Images)

Downer's conversation with Papadopoulos was reportedly disclosed to the FBI on July 22, 2016, through Australian government channels, although it may have come directly from Downer himself.

Details from the conversation between Downer and Papadopoulos were then used by the FBI to open its counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.

In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, the head of the UK's GCHQ, traveled to Washington to meet with Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Around the same time, Brennan formed an inter-agency task force comprising an estimated six agencies and/or government departments. The FBI, Treasury, and DOJ handled the domestic inquiry into Trump and possible Russia connections. The CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the NSA handled foreign and intelligence aspects.

During this time, Brennan appeared to have employed the use of reverse targeting , which refers to the targeting of a foreign individual with the intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen.

Mr. Brennan:

" We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA's foreign intelligence collection authorities. Any time we would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI because they have the legal authority to do it. We would not pursue that type of investigative, you know, sort of leads. We would give it to the FBI. So, we were picking things up that was of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there -- so they could piece it together with whatever they were collecting domestically here."

As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of any traditional channels -- was gathered, Brennan began a process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director pushed the FBI toward the establishment of a formal counterintelligence investigation.

The last major segment of Brennan's efforts involved a series of three reports. The first, titled the "Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security ," was released on Oct. 7, 2016. The second report, "GRIZZLY STEPPE -- Russian Malicious Cyber Activity ," was released on Dec. 29, 2016. The third report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections " -- also known as the intelligence community assessment (ICA) -- was released on Jan. 6, 2017.

This final report was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of President Donald Trump. Notably, Adm. Mike Rogers of the NSA publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning it only a moderate confidence level.

Fusion GPS and the Steele Dossier

Meanwhile, another less official effort began. Information paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign targeting Trump made its way to the highest levels of the FBI and the State Department, with a sophisticated strategy relying on the personal connections of hired operatives.

<img class=" wp-image-2833265" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/GettyImages-621958726-1200x1324.jpg" alt="" width="159" height="176" /> Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. (JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

At the center of the multi-pronged strategy to disseminate the information were Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and former British spy Steele.

In early March 2016, Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie -- the law firm used by the Clinton campaign and the DNC -- expressing interest in an "engagement," according to an Oct. 24, 2017, response letter by Perkins Coie. The firm hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to "perform a variety of research services during the 2016 election cycle."

Steele's firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, was retained by Fusion GPS during the period between June and November 2016. During this time, Steele produced 16 memos, with the last memo dated Oct. 20, 2016. There is one final memo that Steele wrote on Dec. 13 at the request of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

<img class=" wp-image-2833240" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/GettyImages-634408242-1200x1349.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="180" /> Sen. John McCain commissioned one of Steele's memos. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Steele provided Fusion GPS with something that Simpson's firm was lacking: access to individuals within the FBI and the State Department. These contacts could be traced back to at least 2010, when Steele had provided assistance in the FBI's investigation into FIFA over concerns that Russia might have been engaging in bribery to host the 2018 World Cup.

Sometime in the latter half of 2014, Steele began to informally provide reports he had prepared for a private client to the State Department. One of the recipients of the reports was Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

After Steele's company was hired by Fusion GPS in June 2016, he began to reach out to the FBI through Michael Gaeta, an FBI agent and assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Rome who Steele had worked with on the FIFA case. Gaeta also headed up the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit, which specializes in investigating criminal groups from Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine.

Gaeta was later identified as Steele's FBI handler, in a July 16, 2018, congressional testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees by Page.

<img class=" wp-image-2833242" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/victoria-nuland-1200x1373.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="183" /> Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On July 5, 2016, Gaeta traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. At some point in early July, Steele passed his initial report to Nuland and the State Department. Nuland later said these documents were passed on at some point to both the FBI and then-Secretary of State John Kerry.

Exactly what happened with the reports that Gaeta brought back from London, and precisely who he gave them to within the FBI, remains unknown, although some media reports have indicated they might have been sent to the FBI's New York Field Office. During the period following Steele's initial contact with the FBI, there appears to have been no further FBI interaction or contact with Steele.

Former CIA Contractor Worked for Fusion GPS

Notably, eight months before Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, Simpson had hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, to work for his firm as a researcher in October 2015. It was at this time that Fusion GPS was retained by the Washington Free Beacon to engage in research on the Trump campaign.

Prior to joining Fusion GPS, Nellie had worked as an independent contractor for an internal open-source division of the CIA, Open Source Works, from 2008 to at least June 2010; it appears likely she remained in that role into 2014.

Nellie told congressional investigators, in her Oct. 19, 2018, closed-door testimony, that part of her work for Fusion GPS was to research the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, including campaign associate Carter Page, early campaign supporter Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as Trump's family members, including some of his children.

Additionally, email communications between her and Bruce Ohr show that she routinely sent her husband at the DOJ articles on Russia -- most carrying a similar negative slant. The emails continued through the duration of Nellie's employment with Fusion GPS and usually contained a brief, often one-line comment from Nellie.

In her testimony, Nellie described her work as online open-source efforts that utilized "Russian sources, media, social media, government, you know, business registers, legal databases, all kinds of things." Ohr said that she would "write occasional reports based on the open-source research that I described about Donald Trump's relationships with various people in Russia."

The work Nellie conducted for Fusion GPS matches the same skill set used when she worked for Open Source Works, which is a division within the CIA that uses open-source information to produce intelligence products.

When asked how she came to be hired by Fusion GPS and who had approached her, Nellie responded, "Nobody approached me," telling investigators that it was she who had initiated contact and approached Fusion GPS after reading an article on Simpson.

Nellie would continue to work for Fusion GPS until September 2016. By this time, Simpson and Steele already had started working on pushing the Steele dossier into the FBI.

Following the end of her employment with Fusion GPS, Nellie provided Bruce with a memory stick that contained all of the research she had compiled during her time at the firm. Bruce then gave the memory stick to the FBI, through his handler, Joe Pientka.

Bruce Ohr Becomes a Conduit

Nearly a month after Gaeta brought back the reports that Steele provided in London, Simpson and Steele decided to pursue a new channel into the FBI through Bruce Ohr. Bruce had known Steele since at least 2007, when they met during an "official meeting" while Steele was still employed by the British government as an MI6 agent. Steele had already been in contact with Bruce via email in early 2016. Notably, most of these prior communications appeared to discuss Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and his ongoing efforts to obtain a U.S. visa.

<img class=" wp-image-2833270" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Bruce-ohr.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="191" /> Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

On July 29, 2016, Steele wrote to Bruce, saying that he would "be in DC at short notice on business," and asked to meet with both Bruce and his wife. On July 30, 2016, the Ohrs met Steele for breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel. Also present at the breakfast meeting was a fourth individual, described by Bruce as "an associate of Mr. Steele's, another gentleman, younger fellow. I didn't catch his name." Nellie testified that Steele's associate had a British accent.

The timing of the July 30 breakfast meeting is of particular note, as the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, "Crossfire Hurricane," was formally opened the following day, on July 31, 2016, by FBI agent Peter Strzok.

<img class=" wp-image-2833272" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Nellie-Ohr.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="183" /> Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

According to a transcript of Bruce's testimony before Congress, Steele relayed information from his dossier at this meeting and claimed that "a former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, had stated to someone that they had Donald Trump over a barrel."

Steele also referenced Deripaska's business dealings with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter Page's meetings in Moscow.

Lastly, Bruce noted that Steele told him he had been in contact with the FBI but now had additional reports. "Chris Steele had provided some reports to the FBI, I think two, but that Glenn Simpson had more," he said.

Immediately following the Ohrs' breakfast meeting with Steele, Bruce Ohr reached out to FBI Deputy Director McCabe and the two met in McCabe's office -- sometime between July 30 and the first days of August. Also present at this meeting was FBI lawyer Page, who had previously worked for Bruce Ohr at the DOJ, where he was her direct supervisor for five to six years.

Bruce Ohr would later testify that during the July/August meeting, he told McCabe that his wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion, noting, "I wanted the FBI to be aware of any possible bias." FBI General Counsel Baker, who reviewed a portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page -- which relied in part on the information from Steele -- told congressional investigators that he was never told of Ohr's concerns regarding possible bias and conflicts of interest.

On Aug. 15, 2016, a week or two following Bruce Ohr's meeting with McCabe, Strzok would send the now-infamous "insurance policy" text referencing McCabe to Lisa Page:

"I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office – that there's no way he gets elected – but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."

On Aug. 22, Bruce Ohr had a meeting with Simpson. Ohr would later discuss that meeting during his testimony:

"I don't know exactly what Chris Steele was thinking, of course, but I knew that Chris Steele was working for Glenn Simpson, and that Glenn might have additional information that Chris either didn't have or was not authorized to prevent [present], give me, or whatever."

It was at this meeting that Simpson first mentioned Belarusan-American businessman Sergei Millian and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.

Brennan's Briefings to the Gang of Eight <img class=" wp-image-2833280" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/GettyImages-103218413-1200x1585.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="211" /> Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

During this same period in late August 2016, Brennan began briefing members of the Gang of Eight on the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, through a series of meetings in August and September 2016. Notably, each Gang of Eight member was briefed separately, calling into question whether each of the members received the same information. Efforts by Democrats to block the release of transcripts from each meeting are ongoing. Comey, however, did not notify Congress of the FBI investigation until early March 2017, and it's entirely possible he was unaware of Brennan's private briefings during the summer of 2016.

During her testimony, FBI lawyer Lisa Page was questioned by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) in relation to an Aug. 25, 2016, text message that read, "What are you doing after the CH brief?" CH almost certainly referred to Crossfire Hurricane.

Lisa Page then was asked about an event that took place on the same day as the "CH brief" -- a briefing provided by Brennan to then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid:

"You give a brief on August the 25th. Director Brennan is giving a brief. It's not a Gang of Eight brief. It is a one-on-one, from what we can tell, a one-on-one briefing with Harry Reid at that point."

According to Meadows, Brennan briefed Reid on the Steele dossier:

"We have documents that would suggest that in that briefing the dossier was mentioned to Harry Reid and then obviously we're going to have to have conversations. Does that surprise you that Director Brennan would be aware [of the dossier]?"

Lisa Page appeared genuinely surprised that Brennan would have been aware of the dossier's existence at this early point, telling Meadows: "The FBI got this information from our source. If the CIA had another source of that information, I am neither aware of that nor did the CIA provide it to us if they did."

She elaborated further: "As of August of 2016, I don't know who Christopher Steele is. I don't know that he's an FBI source. I don't know what he does. I have never heard of him in all of my life."

This claim by Page seems incongruous when viewed against Bruce Ohr's testimony that he met with Page and McCabe in the first days of August following his July 30, 2016, breakfast with Steele:

"My initial meeting was with Mr. McCabe and with Lisa Page.

"I was telling them about what I was hearing from Chris Steele."

Meanwhile, Brennan's briefing prompted Reid to write not one but two letters to Comey. Both demanded that Comey commence an investigation, with the details to be made public.

Reid's first letter , which touched on Carter Page, was sent on Aug. 27, 2016. Reid's second letter , far angrier and declaring Comey to be in possession of material information, was sent on Oct. 30, 2016.

There had been reports that Comey had been considering closing the FBI investigation of Trump, something Brennan strongly opposed. Now, with Reid's letters sent, that avenue was effectively closed. The termination of the FBI's Trump–Russia investigation would be all but impossible in the face of Reid's public demands.

Perhaps it was in response to Reid's Aug. 27 letter that the FBI suddenly reached out to Steele in September 2016, asking him for all the information in his possession. The team working on Crossfire Hurricane received documents and a briefing from Steele in mid-September, reportedly at a meeting in Rome, where Gaeta also was present.

During Lisa Page's testimony, she appeared to corroborate this account, noting that the team received the "reports that are known as the dossier from an FBI agent who is Christopher Steele's handler in September of 2016." She would later clarify the timing, noting "we received the reporting from Steele in mid-September." A text sent to her by FBI agent Peter Strzok on Oct. 12, 2016, may provide us with the actual date:

"We got the reporting on Sept 19. Looks like [redacted] got it early August."

Steele had produced eight reports from June 20, 2016, through the end of August 2016 (there also is one undated report included in the dossier). No further reports were generated by Steele until Sept. 14, when he suddenly wrote three separate memos in one day. One of the memos referenced a Russian bank named Alfa Bank, misspelled as "Alpha" in his memo. Steele's sudden burst of productivity was likely done in preparation for his Sept. 19 meeting in Rome with the FBI.

The impact of Brennan's potential knowledge of the dossier in August 2016 should not be underestimated. As Brennan testified to Congress, his briefing to the Gang of Eight was done in consultation with the Obama administration:

"Through the so-called Gang-of-Eight process we kept Congress apprised of these issues as we identified them. Again, in consultation with the White House, I personally briefed the full details of our understanding of Russian attempts to interfere in the election to congressional leadership.

"Given the highly sensitive nature of what was an active counter-intelligence case, involving an ongoing Russian effort, to interfere in our presidential election, the full details of what we knew at the time were shared only with those members of Congress."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PseDla0l9xE?wmode=transparent&wmode=opaque The Carter Page FISA Warrant <img class=" wp-image-2833286" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Carter-Page.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="207" /> Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

As the dossier was making its way into the FBI, the agency began its preparations to obtain a FISA warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who was surveilled under Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

According to Baker's testimony, it appears that the FBI began to set its sights on Carter Page in the summer of 2016. When asked how he had first gained knowledge of the FBI's intention to pursue a FISA warrant on Carter Page, Baker testified that it came through his familiarity with the FBI's investigation:

Mr. Baker: " I learned of -- so I was aware when the FBI first started to focus on Carter Page, I was aware of that because it was part of the broader investigation that we were conducting. So I was aware that we were investigating him. And then at some point in time –"

Rep. Meadows: "But that was many years ago. That was in 2014. Or are you talking about 2016?"

Mr. Baker: " I am talking about 2016 in the summer."

Rep. Meadows: "Okay."

Mr. Baker: " Yeah. And so I was aware of the investigation, and then at some point in time, as part of the regular briefings on the case, the briefers mentioned that they were going to pursue a FISA."

It appears the FBI, and possibly the CIA, began to focus on Carter Page earlier than Baker was aware. Carter Page had been invited some months prior to a July 2016 symposium held at Cambridge regarding the upcoming election. The speaker list was notable:

Carter Page attended the event just four days after his July 2016 Moscow trip, and it was during this time in the UK that he first encountered Stefan Halper. Page's Moscow trip would later figure prominently in the Steele dossier.

Halper, who has been outed as an FBI informant, stayed in contact with Carter Page for the next 14 months, severing ties exactly as the final FISA warrant on Page expired.

Trisha Anderson, the principal deputy general counsel for the FBI and head of the bureau's National Security and Cyber Law Branch, approved the application for a warrant to spy on Carter Page before it went to FBI Director James Comey.

According to Anderson, pre-approvals for the Carter Page FISA warrant were provided by both McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, before the FISA application was ever presented to Anderson for review.

"[M]y boss and my boss' boss had already reviewed and approved this application. And, in fact, the Deputy Attorney General, who had the authority to sign the application, to be the substantive approver on the FISA application itself, had approved the application. And that typically would not have been the case before I did that," said Anderson.

The unusual preliminary reviews and approvals from both McCabe and Yates appear to have had a substantial impact on the normal review process, leading other individuals like Anderson to believe that the warrant application was more vetted than it really was.

Anderson also testified that she had not read the Carter Page FISA application prior to signing off on it and passing it along to Comey for the final FBI signature. According to FBI lawyer Sally Moyer, the underlying Woods file (a document that provides facts supporting the allegations made in a FISA application) was only read by the originating agent and the supervisory special agent in the field. Moyer also noted that the Woods file relating to the Page FISA had not been reviewed or audited by anyone.

The Carter Page FISA application was largely reliant on the Steele dossier, which was unverified at the time of its submission to the FISA court and remains unverified by the FBI to this day. Circular reporting, provided by Steele himself, was used as corroboration of the dossier. Additionally, Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, whose conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was used to open the FBI's July 31, 2016, counterintelligence investigation, is referenced in the FISA, yet there "is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos," according to a House Intelligence Committee memo.

Moyer testified that without the Steele dossier, the Carter Page application would have had a "50/50" chance of achieving the probable cause standard before the FISA court. Notably, the Steele dossier is generally considered to have been largely discredited.

A Perkins Coie Partner and Alfa Bank Allegations

<img class=" wp-image-2679668" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2018/10/05/Michael-Sussmann-Perkins-Coie.jpg" alt="Michael Sussmann Lawyer Perkins Coie" width="160" height="194" /> Michael Sussmann, partner at Perkins Coie. (Courtesy Perkins Coie)

On Sept. 19, shortly after Steele completed his latest three memos, FBI General Counsel James Baker met with Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann, the lawyer the DNC turned to on April 28, 2016, after discovering the alleged hacking of their servers.

Sussman, who sought out the meeting, presented Baker with documents that Baker described as "a stack of material I don't know maybe a quarter inch half inch thick something like that clipped together, and then I believe there was some type of electronic media, as well, a disk or something."

The information that Sussmann gave to Baker was related to what Baker described as "a surreptitious channel of communications" between the Trump Organization and "a Russian organization associated with the Russian Government."

Baker was describing alleged communications between Alfa Bank and a server in the Trump Tower. The allegations, which were investigated by the FBI and proven to be false, were widely covered in the media.

Just four days earlier, on Sept. 14, Steele mentioned Alfa Bank (misspelled as Alpha bank) in one of his memos.

According to Baker's testimony, there appears to have been at least three meetings with Sussmann -- the first in person and at least two subsequent meetings by phone. In either the second or third conversation, Baker came to understand The New York Times was also in possession of Sussmann's information. As would become clear later, other members of the media also had this same information.

As Baker was meeting with Sussmann, Steele was back in Washington for a series of meetings that included his DOJ contact, Bruce Ohr.

On Sept. 23, 2016, Bruce Ohr again met with Steele for breakfast, telling lawmakers during testimony, "Steele was in Washington, D.C., again, and he reached out to me, and, again, we met for breakfast, and he provided some additional information." Ohr said this meeting concerned similar topics that were discussed at the July 30, 2016, meeting but did not provide further details.

Bruce Ohr would also meet either that same month or in early October with FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and DOJ career officials from the criminal division, Bruce Swartz, Zainab Ahmad, and Andrew Weissman (Ohr testified that he was unsure whether Weismann was at this or a later meeting). Both Weissman and Ahmad would later become part of the team assembled by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Steele's Meetings With the Media

On the same day that Bruce Ohr met with Christopher Steele for breakfast, on Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff published an article about Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. The article, headlined " U.S. Intel Officials Probe Ties Between Trump Adviser and Kremlin ," was based on an interview with Steele. Isikoff's article would later be used by the FBI in the FISA spy warrant application on Carter Page as corroborating information.

Following the publication of the Isikoff article, the Hillary for America campaign released a statement on the same day that touted Isikoff's "bombshell report," with the full article attached.

A second lengthy article was published on Sept. 23, by Politico: " Who Is Carter Page? The Mystery of Trump's Man in Moscow ," by Julia Ioffe. This article was particularly interesting as it appeared to highlight media efforts by Fusion GPS:

"As I started looking into Page, I began getting calls from two separate 'corporate investigators' digging into what they claim are all kinds of shady connections Page has to all kinds of shady Russians. One is working on behalf of various unnamed Democratic donors; the other won't say who turned him on to Page's scent. Both claimed to me that the FBI was investigating Page for allegedly meeting with Igor Sechin and Sergei Ivanov, who was until recently Putin's chief of staff -- both of whom are on the sanctions list -- when Page was in Moscow in July for that speech."

Ioffe noted that "seemingly everyone I talked to had also talked to the Washington Post, and then there were these corporate investigators who drew a dark and complex web of Page's connections."

Her article also mentioned rumors regarding Alfa Bank:

"In the interest of due diligence, I also tried to run down the rumors being handed me by the corporate investigators: that Russia's Alfa Bank paid for the trip as a favor to the Kremlin; that Page met with Sechin and Ivanov in Moscow; that he is now being investigated by the FBI for those meetings because Sechin and Ivanov were both sanctioned for Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

It was probably during this same trip to Washington that Steele met with Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement and former special envoy for Libya, whom Steele had known since at least 2010.

Winer had received a separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. This "second dossier" had been compiled by another longtime Clinton operative, former journalist Cody Shearer, and echoed claims made in the Steele dossier. Winer gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele then shared this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it as a means to corroborate Steele's own dossier.

Steele also met with U.S. media during his visit to Washington, doing so "at Fusion's instruction." According to UK Court documents , Steele testified that he "briefed" The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, and CNN at the end of September 2016. Steele would engage in a second round of media contact in mid-October 2016, meeting again with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yahoo News. Steele testified that all these meetings were "conducted verbally in person."

Alfa Bank Media Leaks

<img class=" wp-image-2679669" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2018/10/05/james-baker.jpg" alt="James Baker FBi Special Counsel" width="160" height="203" /> Former FBI General Counsel James Baker.

As Steele's media meetings were going on, FBI General Counsel James Baker learned that Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann was also speaking with reporters from The New York Times regarding the Alfa Bank information that Sussmann had provided to the FBI. After some internal discussion, the FBI approached both Sussmann and The New York Times, asking that any story be held until the FBI had time to complete an investigation into the documents provided by Sussmann. It appears that an agreement was reached, and the FBI began to look into the claims regarding Alfa Bank and the server at Trump Tower.

But Sussman wasn't the only one that Baker, currently the subject of an ongoing criminal leak investigation, was speaking with. According to congressional investigators, beginning sometime in September 2016 -- before the presidential election -- Baker began having conversations with his old friend and journalist, David Corn of Mother Jones.

According to Baker, these conversations were in relation to ongoing FBI matters:

Rep. Jordan: " Did you talk to Mr. Corn prior to the election about anything, anything related to FBI matters? Not -- so we're not going to ask about the Steele dossier. Anything about FBI business, FBI matters?"

Mr. Baker: " Yes."

Rep. Jordan: " Yes. And do you know -- can you give me some dates or the number of times that you talked to Mr. Corn about FBI matters leading up to the 2016 Presidential election?"

Mr. Baker: " I don't remember, Congressman."

By Oct. 31, 2016, the FBI had apparently wrapped up their investigation into the Alfa Bank allegations, finding no evidence of anything untoward in the process. It was on this day that three separate articles on Alfa Bank would be published.

The first, " Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia " by The New York Times, appeared to be an updated version of the article they had intended to publish before the FBI asked them to delay their reporting. It stated the following:

"In classified sessions in August and September, intelligence officials also briefed congressional leaders on the possibility of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump. They focused particular attention on what cyberexperts said appeared to be a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia's biggest banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin."

The reference to "classified sessions in August and September" is likely in relation to the series of Gang of Eight briefings that former CIA Director John Brennan engaged in at that time -- including his briefing to then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. The article continued:

"F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 'look-up' messages -- a first step for one system's computers to talk to another -- to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts."

The second article, "Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?" by Slate Magazine, was solely focused on the allegations regarding a server in the Trump Tower that had allegedly been communicating with a server at Alfa Bank in Russia.

Immediately following the publication of the Slate article, Clinton posted a tweet that included a statement from Jake Sullivan, a senior policy adviser:

"Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank."

Sullivan's statement referenced the Slate article and included the following:

"This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.

"This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists."

The Alfa Bank story took off -- despite the same-day story from The New York Times that specifically noted the FBI had investigated that matter and found nothing untoward.

The final article published on Oct. 31, " A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump " by Mother Jones reporter -- and Baker's friend -- David Corn, also mentioned Alfa Bank:

"In recent weeks, reporters in Washington have pursued anonymous online reports that a computer server related to the Trump Organization engaged in a high level of activity with servers connected to Alfa Bank, the largest private bank in Russia. On Monday, a Slate investigation detailed the pattern of unusual server activity but concluded, 'We don't yet know what this [Trump] server was for, but it deserves further explanation.' In an email to Mother Jones, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, maintains, 'The Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.'"

More notably, Corn's article also provided the first public reporting on the existence of the Steele dossier:

"A former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump -- and that the FBI requested more information from him."

As it turns out, Corn had detailed, first-hand knowledge of the dossier. According to testimony from Baker, Corn had been provided with parts of the dossier by Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson. Baker knew of this fact, because within a week of publishing his article, Corn passed these dossier parts on to Baker personally:

Rep. Jordan: " Prior to the election Mr. Corn had a copy of the dossier and was talking to you about giving that to you so the FBI would have it. Is that all right? I mean all accurate."

Mr. Baker: " My recollection is that he had part of the dossier, that we had other parts already, and that we got still other parts from other people, and that -- and nevertheless some of the parts that David Corn gave us were parts that we did not have from another source?"

Steele had written four memos after the FBI team received his information in mid-September. All of the memos were written in October -- on the 12th, 18th, 19th, and the 20th. It is possible that these were the memos passed along to Baker by Corn.

Baker testified that he received elements of the dossier from Corn that were not in the FBI's possession at the time. He said that he immediately turned this information over to leadership within the FBI, noting, "I think it was Bill Priestap," the head of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.

The use of personal relationships as a mechanism to transmit outside information to the FBI was actually noted by Baker, who said of Corn: "Even though he was my friend, I was also an FBI official. He knew that. And so he wanted to somehow get that into the hands of the FBI."

Bruce Ohr's FBI Handler

Christopher Steele was terminated as a source by the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016, for communicating with the media. Despite this, DOJ official Bruce Ohr and Steele communicated regularly for another full year, until November 2017.

On Nov. 21, 2016, Ohr had a meeting with FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and was introduced to FBI agent Joe Pientka, who became Ohr's FBI handler. Pientka was also present with Strzok during the Jan. 24, 2017, interview of Trump's national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn .

The next day, Nov. 22, 2016, Ohr met alone with Pientka. Ohr would continue to relay his communications with Steele to the FBI through Pientka, who then recorded them in FD-302 forms. What Ohr didn't know was that Pientka was transmitting all the information directly to Strzok.

Ohr, in his testimony, detailed his interactions with Steele and Glenn Simpson, as well as his communications with officials at the FBI and DOJ. Notably, Ohr repeatedly stated that he never vetted any of the information provided by either Steele or Simpson. He simply turned it over or relayed it to the FBI -- usually to Pientka -- but Ohr also testified that "at least on two occasions I was handed onto a new agent."

Sometime in late 2016, his wife, Nellie Ohr, provided him with a memory stick containing all of her research that she had compiled while employed at Fusion GPS. Bruce Ohr testified he gave the memory stick to Pientka. Nellie Ohr had left Fusion in September 2016. Through Pientka, Strzok now had all of Nellie Ohr's Fusion research in his possession.

On Dec. 10, 2016, Bruce Ohr met with Simpson, who gave him a memory stick that Ohr believed contained a copy of the Steele dossier. Ohr also passed this second memory stick along to Pientka.

On Jan. 20, 2017, Ohr had one final communication with Simpson, a phone call that took place on the same day as Trump's inauguration. Ohr testified that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson was concerned that one of Steele's sources was about to be exposed through the pending publication of an article:

Mr. Ohr: " He says something along the lines of, I -- there's going to be some reporting in the next few days that's going to -- could expose the source, and the source could be in personal danger."

Rep. Meadows: " And why was he concerned about that source being exposed?"

Mr. Ohr: " I think he was aware of some kind of article that was likely to come out in the next, you know, few days or something."

Apparently, Simpson's information was at least partly accurate. On Jan. 24, 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sergei Millian, a Belarusan-American businessman and onetime Russian government translator, was both "Source D" and "Source E" in the dossier. It remains unknown exactly how Simpson knew in advance that Millian would be outed as a source.

But there are some questions as to the accuracy of the Journal's reporting. The dossier appears to conflict with the newspaper's article in at least one aspect. According to the dossier, Source E was used as confirmation for Source D -- meaning they can't be the same person.

McCain, the Dossier, and a UK Connection

Simpson and Steele were carefully thorough in their dissemination efforts. The dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources.

One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood may have previously worked on behalf of Steele's company, Orbis Business Intelligence; he was referenced in a UK court filing as an associate of Orbis. Wood was also referred to as an adviser to Orbis in a deposition by an associate of late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), David Kramer.

Kramer knew Wood previously from their mutual expertise on Russia. Kramer said in his deposition, which was part of a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed News, that Wood told him that "he was aware of information that he thought I should be aware of and that Senator McCain might be interested in."

<img class=" wp-image-2833323" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/kramer-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="173" /> McCain associate David Kramer. (Courtesy McCain Institute)

McCain, Wood, and Kramer would meet later that afternoon, on Nov. 19, 2016, in a private meeting room at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Wood told both Kramer and McCain that "he was aware of this information that had been gathered that raised the possibility of collusion and compromising material on the president-elect. And he explained that he knew the person who gathered the information and felt that the person was of the utmost credibility," Kramer said.

Kramer ascribed the word "collusion" three times to Wood in his deposition. He also said that Wood mentioned the possible existence of a video "of a sexual nature" that might have "shown the president-elect in a compromising situation." According to Kramer, Wood said that "if it existed, that it was from a hotel in Moscow when president-elect, before he was president-elect, had been in Moscow."

No such video was ever uncovered or given to Kramer.

Kramer testified that following the description of the video, "the senator turned to me and asked if I would go to London to meet with what turned out to be Mr. Steele."

Kramer traveled to London to meet with Steele on Nov. 28, 2016. Kramer reviewed all the memos during his meeting with Steele but wasn't provided with a physical copy of the dossier.

When Kramer returned to Washington, he was provided with a copy of the dossier -- which, at that point, consisted of 16 memos -- during a meeting with Simpson on Nov. 29, 2016. Kramer also testified that there was another individual, "a male," present at the meeting.

<img class=" wp-image-2849229" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/John-McCain-1200x1530.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="204" /> Late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Interestingly, Kramer testified that Simpson gave him two copies of the dossier, noting that Simpson told him that "one had more things blacked out than the other." Kramer said, "It wasn't entirely clear to me why there were two versions of this, so but I took both versions."

Kramer noted that Simpson, who was aware the dossier was being given to McCain, said the dossier "was a very sensitive document and needed to be handled very carefully."

Despite that warning, Kramer showed the dossier to a number of journalists and had discussions with at least 14 members of the media, along with some individuals in the U.S. government.

Kramer testified that he gave a physical copy of the dossier to reporters Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy; to Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post editorial page; Alan Cullison of The Wall Street Journal; Bob Little at NPR; Carl Bernstein at CNN; and Ken Bensinger at BuzzFeed. It's possible that Kramer gave copies to other reporters as well.

Kramer said that Simpson and Steele were aware of most of these contacts, but that Kramer hadn't told either of them that he gave the dossier to NPR. He also noted that Steele had been in contact with Bernstein at CNN and that the CNN and BuzzFeed meetings occurred at Steele's request. Steele told Kramer that he and Bensinger "had been in touch during the FIFA investigation; they got to know each other that way."

According to Kramer, he didn't believe that Fusion GPS and Simpson were aware of these two meetings with CNN and BuzzFeed.

Kramer testified that he, McCain, and McCain's chief of staff, Christopher Brose, met to review the dossier on Nov. 30, 2016. Kramer suggested that McCain "provide a copy of [the dossier] to the director of the FBI and the director of the CIA." McCain later passed a copy of the dossier to James Comey on Dec. 9, 2016. It isn't known whether McCain also provided a copy to then-CIA Director John Brennan. Notably, Brennan did attach a two-page summary of the dossier to the intelligence community assessment that he delivered to outgoing President Barack Obama on Jan. 5, 2017.

Kramer said that he wasn't aware of the content of McCain's Dec. 9 discussion with Comey, noting that he "did not get any readout from the senator on the meeting, but just that it had happened."

Kramer did, however, provide updates to both Steele and Simpson regarding the status of McCain's meeting with Comey, in subsequent discussions with Simpson and Steele:

"It was mostly just to inform him about whether or not the senator had transfer -- transmitted the document to the FBI. Both he and Mr. Steele were -- I kept them apprised of whether the senator was -- where the senator was in terms of his contact with the FBI."

The implications of this statement are significant. Kramer, a private citizen, was providing updates to a former British spy as to what a sitting senator, and chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, was saying to the director of the FBI.

Other members of the media also had advance knowledge of McCain's intention to meet with Comey. Kramer testified that both Mother Jones reporter David Corn and Guardian reporter Julian Borger came to meet with him. According to Kramer, "They were mostly interested in Senator McCain and his, whether he had given it to Director Comey or not."

Several days after McCain, Brose, and Kramer met to discuss the dossier, Kramer said that McCain instructed him to meet with Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, and Celeste Wallander, the senior director for Russia and Central Asia on the National Security Council.

The purpose of the meeting was to verify whether the dossier "was being taken seriously." Both Nuland and Wallander were previously aware of the dossier's existence, and both officials previously knew Steele, whom "they believed to be credible." Kramer said he didn't physically share the dossier with them at this point, but met again with Wallander "around New Years" and "gave her a copy of the document"

Nuland had actually received a copy of the earlier Steele memos back in July 2016.

Steele produced a final memo dated Dec. 13, 2016. According to UK court documents , Kramer, on behalf of McCain, had asked Steele to provide any further intelligence that he had gathered relating to "alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election." Notably, it appears it was this request from McCain that led Steele to produce his Dec. 13 memo.

Although Kramer didn't provide a date, he said he received the final Steele memo sometime after "Senator McCain had provided the copy to Director Comey." We know that Kramer received the final memo prior to Dec. 29 -- when Kramer met with BuzzFeed's Bensinger.

Kramer testified that Bensinger "said he wanted to read them, he asked me if he could take photos of them on his -- I assume it was an iPhone. I asked him not to. He said he was a slow reader, he wanted to read it. And so I said, you know, I got a phone call to make, and I had to go to the bathroom " Kramer said that he "left him to read it for 20, 30 minutes."

Kramer also testified that besides the reporters, he gave a final copy of the dossier to two other people in early January 2017: Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Il.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan's chief of staff, Jonathan Burks.

James Clapper Leaks Details of Obama–Trump Briefings

The ICA on alleged Russian hacking was released internally on Jan. 5, 2017. On this same day, outgoing president Obama held an undisclosed White House meeting to discuss the assessment -- and the attached summation of the dossier -- with national security adviser Susan Rice, FBI Director James Comey, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Rice would later send herself an email documenting the meeting.

The following day, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they gave Obama. Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey, Brennan, and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the ICA and the Steele dossier.

<img class=" wp-image-2833293" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/James-Clapper-1200x1296.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="173" /> Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview that he had done so at the request of Clapper and Brennan, "because that was the part that the leaders of the intelligence community agreed he needed to be told about."

Shortly after Comey's meeting with Trump, both the Trump–Comey meeting and the existence of the dossier were leaked to CNN. The significance of the meeting was material, as Comey noted in a Jan. 7 memo :

"Media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material."

The media had widely dismissed the dossier as unsubstantiated and, therefore, unreportable. It was only after learning that Comey briefed Trump on it that CNN reported on the dossier. The House Intelligence Committee report on Russian election interference confirmed that Clapper personally leaked confirmation of the dossier, along with Comey's meeting with Trump, to CNN:

"The Committee's investigation revealed that President-elect Trump was indeed briefed on the contents of the Steele dossier and when questioned by the Committee, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted that he confirmed the existence of the dossier to the media."

Additionally, the House intelligence report shows Clapper appears to have been the direct source for CNN's Jake Tapper and his Jan. 10 story that disclosed the existence of the dossier:

"When initially asked about leaks related to the ICA in July 2017, former DNI Clapper flatly denied 'discuss[ing] the dossier [compiled by Steele] or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists.' Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the 'dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,' and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic.

"Clapper's discussion with Tapper took place in early January 2017, around the time IC leaders briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump, on 'the Christopher Steele information,' a two-page summary of which was 'enclosed in' the highly-classified version of the ICA."

On Jan. 10, 2017, CNN published the article "Intel Chiefs Presented Trump With Claims of Russian Efforts to Compromise Him " by Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper, and Carl Bernstein. (The article would later be updated and have a Jan. 12, 2017, date.)

The allegations within the dossier were made public, and with reporting of the briefings by intelligence community leaders, instant credibility was given to the dossier's assertions.

Immediately following the CNN story, BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, and the Trump–Russia conspiracy was pushed into the mainstream.

David Kramer was asked about his reaction when CNN broke the story on the dossier. According to his deposition, Kramer stated, "I believe my words were 'Holy [expletive].'"

Kramer, who was actually meeting with The Guardian's Julian Borger when CNN reported on the dossier, said that he quickly spoke with Steele, who "was shocked."

On the following day, Jan. 11, 2017, Clapper issued a statement condemning the leaks -- without revealing the fact that he was the source of the leak.

On Nov. 17, 2016, Clapper submitted his resignation as director of national intelligence; his resignation became effective on Jan. 20, 2017. Later that year, CNN hired Clapper as its national security analyst.

The Effort to Remove General Flynn

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then-national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was interviewed on Jan. 24, 2017, by FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka about two December 2016 conversations that Flynn had had with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

<img class=" wp-image-2833340" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Michael-Flynn-1200x1469.jpg" alt="" width="161" height="197" /> National security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. (Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)

Details of the phone conversation had leaked to the media. Flynn ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI regarding his conversations with Kislyak. It remains unknown to this day who leaked Flynn's classified call -- a far more serious felony violation.

The Washington Post reported in January 2017 that the FBI had found no evidence of wrongdoing in Flynn's actual call with the Russian ambassador. The call, and the matters discussed in it, broke no laws.

Flynn has been portrayed in the media as being suspiciously close to Russia; a dinner in Moscow that occurred in late 2015 is frequently cited as evidence of this.

On Dec. 10, 2015, Flynn attended an event in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Russian television network RT. Flynn, who was seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin for the culminating dinner, was also interviewed on national security matters by an RT correspondent. Flynn's speaker's bureau, Leading Authorities Inc., was paid $45,000 for the event and Flynn received $33,000 of the total amount.

Seated at the same table with Flynn was Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate in the 2016 election. By all accounts, including Stein's , Flynn and Putin didn't engage in any real conversation. At the time, Flynn's trip didn't garner significant attention. But it would later be used by the media and the Clinton campaign to push the Russia-collusion narrative.

Notably, as stated by lawyer Robert Kelner, Flynn disclosed his Moscow trip to the Defense Intelligence Agency before he traveled there and provided a full briefing upon his return:

"As has previously been reported, General Flynn briefed the Defense Intelligence Agency, a component agency of the DoD, extensively regarding the RT speaking event trip both before and after the trip, and he answered any questions that were posed by the DIA concerning the trip during those briefings."

Flynn's trip to Russia was first brought to broader attention on July 18, 2016, during a live interview at the Republican National Convention with Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vjvvtuDEQJY?wmode=transparent&wmode=opaque

The Isikoff interview took place on July 18, 2016. Unknown at the time, the matter had also captured the attention of Christopher Steele, who had begun publishing his dossier memos on June 20, 2016.

Contained within an Aug. 10, 2016, memo was this initial reference to Flynn:

"Kremlin engaging with several high profile US players, including STEIN, PAGE and (former DIA Director Michael Flynn) and funding their recent visits to Moscow."

In addition to the obvious questions raised by the timing of Flynn's name appearing in Steele's Aug. 10 memo, is the manner in which Flynn is denoted. All other names are capitalized, in the manner of intelligence briefings. Flynn's name isn't capitalized and, in one case, appears within parentheses.

Steele met with Yahoo News' Isikoff in September 2016 and gave him information from the dossier. The resulting Sept. 23, 2016, article from Isikoff was then cited by the FBI as validating Steele's claims and was featured in the original FISA application , and its three subsequent renewals , for a warrant to spy on Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

Steele wasn't the only person Isikoff was working with. On April 26, 2016, Isikoff published a story on Yahoo News about Paul Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It was later learned from a Democratic National Committee (DNC) email leaked by Wikileaks that Isikoff had been working with Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American operative who was doing consulting work for the DNC. Chalupa met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose alleged ties between Trump, Manafort, and Russia.

The obvious question remains: How did the information on Flynn make its way into the dossier at the time it did, and who provided the information to Steele?

Flynn's 2015 dinner in Moscow was initially used to implicate the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. It was then used as a means to cast doubts on Flynn's ability as Trump's national security adviser. Following Flynn's resignation, it was then used as a means to pursue the ongoing collusion narrative that gained full strength in the early days of the Trump administration.

A Jan. 10, 2017, article in The New York Times, " Trump's National Security Pick Sees Ally in Fight Against Islamists: Russia ," highlighted the efforts:

"In an extraordinary report released last week, the agencies bluntly accused the Russian government of having worked to undermine American democracy and promote the candidacy of Mr. Trump. The report is likely to renew questions about Mr. Flynn's avowed eagerness to work with Russia, and his dismissal of concerns about President Vladimir V. Putin."

Flynn would resign from his position as national security adviser in February 2017. The sequence of events leading to his resignation were both coordinated and orchestrated, with acting Attorney General Sally Yates playing a leading role.

On Jan. 12, 2017, Flynn's Dec. 29, 2016, call with Kislyak was leaked to The Washington Post. The article portrayed Flynn as undermining Obama's Russia sanctions that had been imposed on the same day as Flynn's call with the Russian ambassador.

On Jan. 15, five days before Trump's inauguration, Vice President Mike Pence appeared on "Face the Nation" to defend Flynn's calls.

A few days later, on Jan. 19, Obama officials -- Yates, Clapper, Brennan and Comey -- met to discuss Flynn's situation. The concern they reportedly discussed was that Flynn might have misled Trump administration officials regarding the nature of his call with Kislyak.

<img class="wp-image-2852644 size-full" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2018/10/25/spygate-small.jpg" alt="" width="592" height="724" /> Click on the infographic to enlarge

Yates, Clapper, and Brennan supported informing the Trump administration of their concerns. Comey took a dissenting view. On Jan 23, Yates again pressured Comey, telling the FBI director that she believed Flynn could be vulnerable to blackmail. At this point, according to media reports, Comey relented, despite the FBI finding nothing unlawful in the content of Flynn's calls.

Strzok and Pientka, at the instruction of McCabe, interviewed Flynn the following day. According to court documents, McCabe and other FBI officials "decided the agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they wanted Flynn to be relaxed." It was during this interview that Flynn reportedly lied to the FBI.

The DOJ was provided with a detailed briefing of the Flynn interview on the following day. On Jan. 26, Yates contacted White House counsel Don McGahn, who agreed to meet to discuss the matter. Yates arrived at McGahn's office, bringing Mary McCord, John Carlin's acting replacement as head of the DOJ's National Security Division.

Yates later testified before Congress that the meeting surrounded Flynn's phone calls and his FBI interview. She also testified that Flynn's call and subsequent interview "was a topic of a whole lot of discussion in DOJ and with other members of the intel community." McGahn reportedly asked Yates, "Why does it matter to the DOJ if one White House official lies to another official?"

McGahn called Yates the following day and asked her to return for a second meeting. Yates returned to the White House without McCord. McGahn asked to examine the FBI's evidence on Flynn. Yates said she would respond by the following Monday.

Yates failed to provide McGahn with the FBI's evidence on Flynn. From that point, the pressure on Flynn and the Trump administration escalated -- with help from media reporting.

Flynn resigned on Feb. 13, after it was reported that he had misled Pence about phone conversations he'd had with Kislyak.

The following day, The New York Times reported that "phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials."

With Flynn gone and the Russian narrative firmly established, the conspirators then turned their attention to Trump's newly confirmed attorney general, Jeff Sessions . On March 1, 2017, The Washington Post reported that Sessions had twice had contact with the Russian ambassador, Kislyak. The following day, March 2, Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.

On the same day that Sessions recused himself, Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, detailed efforts at hampering the newly installed Trump administration, during a March 2, 2017, interview with MSNBC , in which she described how the Obama administration gathered and disseminated intelligence on the Trump team:

"I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill 'Get as much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.'

"The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, [they] would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. That's why you have the leaking."

Note that Farkas said "how we knew," not just "what we knew."

Obama Officials Used Unmasking to Target the Trump Campaign

On Tuesday, March 21, 2017, the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), met a classified source who showed him "dozens" of intelligence reports. Contained within these reports was evidence of surveillance on the Trump campaign. Nunes held a press conference on March 22 highlighting what he had found:

<img class=" wp-image-2849235" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/Devin-Nunes-1200x1522.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="203" /> Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

"I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition. Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting."

In a series of rapid-fire questions and answers, Nunes attempted to elaborate on what he had been shown:

"From what I know right now, it looks like incidental collection. We don't know exactly how that was picked up but we're trying to get to the bottom of it I think the NSA's going to comply. I am concerned – we don't know whether or not the FBI is going to comply. I have placed a call, I'm waiting to talk to Director Comey, hopefully later today.

"I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show the President-elect and his team were at least monitored and disseminated out in intelligence, in what appears to be raw -- well I shouldn't say raw -- but intelligence reporting channels.

"It looks to me like it was all legally collected, but it was essentially a lot of information on the President-elect and his transition team and what they were doing."

The documents Nunes had been shown highlighted the unmasking activities of the FBI, the Obama administration, and CIA Director Brennan in relation to the Trump campaign. Although March 2017 would prove chaotic, the Trump administration had survived the first crucial months, and would now begin to slowly assert its administrative authority.

Comey Testifies No Obstruction by Trump Administration

On May 3, 2017, James Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Under oath, Comey stated that his agency -- and the FBI's investigation -- had not been pressured by the Trump administration:

Sen. Hirono: " So if the attorney general or senior officials at the Department of Justice opposes a specific investigation, can they halt that FBI investigation?"

Mr. Comey: " In theory, yes."

Sen. Hirono: " Has it happened?"

Mr. Comey: " Not in my experience. Because it would be a big deal to tell the FBI to stop doing something that – without an appropriate purpose. I mean where oftentimes they give us opinions that we don't see a case there and so you ought to stop investing resources in it. But I'm talking about a situation where we were told to stop something for a political reason. That would be a very big deal. It's not happened in my experience."

<img class="wp-image-2849240" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/Former-FBI-Director-James-Comey-.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="199" /> FBI Director James Comey. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

Less than a week later, on May 9, Trump fired Comey based on a May 8 recommendation by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein .

Rosenstein would later tell members of Congress: "In one of my first meetings with then-Sen. Jeff Sessions last winter, we discussed the need for new leadership at the FBI. Among the concerns that I recall were to restore the credibility of the FBI, respect the established authority of the Department of Justice, limit public statements and eliminate leaks."

Regarding the recommendation, Rosenstein said: "I wrote it. I believe it. I stand by it."

McCabe's FBI Reaches Out Again to Steele

Within days of Trump's firing of Comey, the FBI, now under the leadership of acting-FBI Director Andrew McCabe, suddenly decided to reestablish direct contact with Christopher Steele through DOJ official Bruce Ohr.

The re-engagement attempt came six months after Steele had been formally terminated by the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016.

The FBI's re-engagement of Ohr was highlighted during a congressional review of some text messages between Ohr and Steele:

Mr. Ohr: " The FBI had asked me a few days before, when I reported to them my latest conversation with Chris Steele, they had had would he -- next time you talk with him, could you ask him if he would be willing to meet again."

Rep. Jordan: " So this is the re-engagement?"

Mr. Ohr: " Yes."

The texts being referenced were sent on May 15, 2017, and refer to a request that Ohr received from the FBI to ask Steele to re-engage with the FBI in the days after Comey had been fired on May 9.

This was the only time the FBI used Ohr to reach out to Steele.

The Battle Between McCabe and Rosenstein

Two days after Comey was fired, on May 11, 2017, McCabe testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. While the hearing's original intent had been to focus on national security threats, Trump's firing of Comey completely altered the topic of the hearing.

McCabe, who agreed that he would notify the committee "of any effort to interfere with the FBI's ongoing investigation into links between Russia and the Trump campaign," told members of Congress that there had been "no effort to impede our investigation to date." In other words, McCabe testified that he was unaware of any evidence of obstruction from Trump or his administration. Notably, Comey's May 3 testimony may have left McCabe with little choice other than to confirm there had been no obstruction.

<img class="wp-image-2849245 " src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/McCabe-1200x1290.jpg" alt="" width="161" height="173" /> Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

McCabe, however, failed to inform the committee that he was actively considering opening an obstruction-of-justice probe of Trump -- a path he would initiate in a meeting with Rosenstein just five days later.

On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein allegedly suggested to McCabe that he could secretly record Trump. It was at this meeting that McCabe was "pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation into the president," according to witness accounts reported by The Washington Post.

In addition to McCabe, Rosenstein, and McCabe's special counsel, Lisa Page, there were one or two others present, including Rosenstein's chief of staff , James Crowley, and possibly Scott Schools, the senior-most career attorney at the DOJ and a top aide to Rosenstein.

An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post, framed the conversation between McCabe and Rosenstein in an entirely different light, noting that Rosenstein had responded with angry sarcasm to McCabe, saying, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"

This was just five days after McCabe had publicly testified that there was no obstruction on the part of the Trump administration.

<img class="wp-image-2849247 " src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/Rod-Rosenstein-1200x1404.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="187" /> Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Sometime later that same day, both Rosenstein and Trump met with former FBI Director Robert Mueller in the Oval Office. The meeting was reported as being for the FBI director position, but the idea that Mueller would be considered for the FBI director role seems highly unlikely.

Mueller had previously served as the FBI director from 2001 to 2013 -- two years beyond the normal 10-year tenure for an FBI director. In 2011, Obama requested that Mueller stay on as FBI director for an additional two years, which required special congressional approval .

Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel the following day, on May 17, 2017, and in doing so, Rosenstein removed control of the Trump–Russia investigation from McCabe and put it in the hands of Mueller.

This was confirmed in a recent statement by a DOJ spokesperson, who said, "The deputy attorney general in fact appointed special counsel Robert Mueller, and directed that Mr. McCabe be removed from any participation in that investigation."

Following the appointment of Mueller as special counsel, it also appears the FBI's efforts to re-engage with Steele abruptly ended.

'There's No Big There There'

We know the FBI hadn't found any evidence of collusion in the May 2017 timeframe. While McCabe was attempting to open an obstruction investigation, Peter Strzok -- who played a key role in the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign -- texted Lisa Page about lacking evidence of collusion:

"You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I'd be there, no question. I hesitate, in part, because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there."

Page, who was asked about this text during her July 2018 testimony, said, "So I think this represents that even as far as May of 2017, we still couldn't answer the question."

James Baker, who was questioned about the Strzok text, was then asked if he'd seen any evidence to the contrary. He stumbled a bit in his reply:

Rep. Meadows: " Do you have any evidence to the contrary that you observed personally in your official capacity?"

Mr. Baker: " So the difficulty I'm having with your question is, what does 'collusion' mean, and what does 'prove' mean? And so I don't know how to respond to that."

FBI Leadership Speculates on New Trump–Russia Collusion Narrative

In his testimony, Baker disclosed the actual substance of discussions taking place at the upper echelons of the FBI immediately following Comey's firing -- that Vladimir Putin had ordered Trump to fire Comey:

Mr. Baker: " We discussed, so to the best of my recollection, with the same people I described earlier: Mr. McCabe, possibly Mr. Gattis [Carl Ghattas, executive assistant director of the National Security Branch], Mr. Priestap, possibly Lisa Page, possibly Pete Strzok. I don't remember that specifically."

Rep. Ratcliffe: " So there was -- there was a discussion between those folks, possibly all of the folks that you've identified, about whether or not President Trump had been ordered to fire Jim Comey by the Russian Government?"

Mr. Baker: " I wouldn't say ordered. I guess I would say the words I sort of used earlier, acting at the behest of and somehow following directions, somehow executing their will, whether -- and so literally an order or not, I don't know. But -- "

Rep. Ratcliffe: " And so -- "

Mr. Baker: " As a -- it was discussed as a theoretical possibility."

Rep. Ratcliffe: " When was it discussed?"

Mr. Baker: "After the firing, like in the aftermath of the firing."

The FBI, with no actual evidence of collusion after 10 months of investigating, began discussing a complete hypothetical at the highest levels of leadership as a means to possibly open an obstruction-of-justice investigation of the president of the United States.

During his testimony, Baker told lawmakers: "I had a jaundiced eye about everything, yes. I had skepticism about all this stuff. I was concerned about all of this. This whole situation was horrible, and it was novel and we were trying to figure out what to do, and it was highly unusual."

McCabe was later fired for lying to the DOJ inspector general and is currently the subject of a criminal grand jury investigation.

The Fixer

Despite the ongoing assault from the intelligence community and holdovers from the Obama administration, Trump was not entirely without allies.

Dana Boente, one of the nation's highest-profile federal prosecutors, served in a series of critical shifting roles within the Trump administration. Boente, who remained the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia until early 2018, concurrently became the acting attorney general following the firing of Sally Yates. Boente, who was specifically appointed by Trump, was not directly in the line of succession that had been previously laid out under an unusual executive order from the Obama administration.

<img class=" wp-image-2849248" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/Dana-Boente.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="213" /> FBI General Counsel Dana Boente. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Upon the confirmation of Sessions as attorney general, Boente next served as acting deputy attorney general until the confirmation of Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general on April 25, 2017. Boente then became the acting head of the DOJ's National Security Division on April 28, 2017, following the sudden resignation of Mary McCord.

Boente was appointed as FBI general counsel on Jan. 23, 2018, replacing Baker, who was demoted and reassigned. Baker is currently the subject of a criminal leak investigation. Boente remains in his position as FBI general counsel.

On March 31, 2017, the Trump administration asked for the resignations all 46 holdover U.S. attorneys from the Obama administration. Trump refused to accept the resignations of just three of them -- Boente, Rosenstein, and John Huber.

As Sessions noted in a March 29, 2018, letter to congressional chairmen Chuck Grassley, Bob Goodlatte, and Trey Gowdy, Huber was assigned by Sessions to lead a prosecution team and is currently working with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz:

"I already have directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues previously raised by the Committee. Specifically, I asked United States Attorney John W. Huber to lead this effort."

John Carlin's Race With Admiral Rogers

<img class=" wp-image-2833317" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Mike-Rogers-1200x1435.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="191" /> Director of the National Security Agency Admiral Mike Rogers. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

The Carter Page FISA application has been the subject of significant media attention, but there's another element to the story that, although largely ignored, is equally important. It involved what amounted to a surreptitious race between then-NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers and DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin.

Following a March 9, 2016, discovery that outside contractors for the FBI had been accessing raw FISA data since at least 2015, Rogers directed the NSA's Office of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702" at some point in early April 2016 ( Senate testimony & pages 83–84 of court ruling).

On April 18, 2016, Rogers moved aggressively in response to the disclosures. He abruptly shut down all FBI outside-contractor access. At this point, both the FBI and the DOJ's NSD became aware of Rogers's compliance review. They may have known earlier, but they were certainly aware after outside-contractor access was halted.

The DOJ's NSD maintains oversight of the intelligence agencies' use of Section 702 authority. The NSD and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) jointly conduct reviews of the intelligence agencies' Section 702 activities every 60 days. The NSD -- with notice to the ODNI -- is required to report any incidents of agency noncompliance or misconduct to the FISA court.

Instead of issuing individual court orders, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence (DNI) are required by Section 702 to provide the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) with annual certifications that specify categories of foreign intelligence information the government is authorized to acquire, pursuant to Section 702.

The attorney general and the DNI also must certify that Intelligence Community agencies will follow targeting procedures and minimization procedures that are approved by the FISC as part of the certification.

Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of the compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the NSA inspector general and associated FISA abuse to the FISA court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702-compliance review.

On Sept. 27, 2016, the day after he filed the annual certifications, Carlin announced his resignation , which would become effective on Oct. 15, 2016.

<img class=" wp-image-2849255" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/John-Carlin-FBI.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="192" /> John Carlin, DOJ's National Security Division. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On Oct. 4, 2016, a standard follow-up court hearing was held ( Page 19 ), with Carlin present. Again, he made no disclosure of FISA abuse or other related issues. This lack of disclosure would be noted by the court later in the April 2017 ruling:

"The government's failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing [was ascribed] to an institutional 'lack of candor.'"

Rogers appeared formally before the FISA court on Oct. 26, 2016, and presented the written findings of his audit:

"Two days later, on the day the Court otherwise would have had to complete its review of the certifications and procedures, the government made a written submission regarding those compliance problems and the Court held a hearing to address them.

"The government reported that the NSA IG and OCO were conducting other reviews covering different time periods, with preliminary results suggesting that the problem was widespread during all periods under review."

The FISA court was unaware of the FISA "query" violations until they were presented to the court by then-NSA Director Rogers.

Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications, apparently in order to avoid raising suspicions at the FISA court ahead of receiving the Carter Page FISA warrant.

The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page. FISA Abuse & the FISC

Rogers presented his findings directly to the FISA court's presiding judge, Rosemary Collyer. Collyer and Rogers would work together for the next six months, addressing the issues that Rogers had uncovered.

It was Collyer who wrote the April 26, 2017, FISA court ruling on the entire episode. It also was Collyer who signed the original FISA warrant on Carter Page on Oct. 21, 2016, before being apprised of the many issues by Rogers.

The litany of abuses described in the April 26, 2017, ruling was shocking and detailed the use of private contractors by the FBI in relation to Section 702 data. Collyer referred to it as "a very serious Fourth Amendment issue." The FBI was specifically singled out by the court numerous times in the ruling:

"The improper access previously afforded the contractors has been discontinued. The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported."

Rogers informed Collyer of the ongoing FISA abuses by the FBI and NSD just three days after she personally signed the Carter Page FISA warrant.

Virtually every FBI and NSD official with material involvement in the original Carter Page FISA application would later be removed -- either through firing or resignation.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated the wrong month for Christopher Steele's 2016 meeting with the FBI in Rome. The meeting took place in September 2016.

[Aug 23, 2019] Spygate The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump by Jeff Carlson

Highly recommended!
Images removed. See the original for full version.
Much more plausible explanation of Russiagate then Mueller report that cost probably 1000 times less. Mueller and his team should commit hara-kiri in shame.
It contains more valuable information about Russiagate and color revolution against Trump initiatesd by Obama and Brennan. And what is important it is much shorter and up to the point. In other words, Jeff Carlson beat the whole Mueller team to the punch.
An excellent reporting by Jeff Carlson !!! Bravo!!!
Notable quotes:
"... Horowitz continued to push Congress for oversight access and encouraged passage of the Inspector General Empowerment Act . Horowitz would ultimately win his battle, but only as President Barack Obama was leaving office. On Dec. 16, 2016, Obama finally signed the Inspector General Empowerment Act into law. ..."
"... The IGs' memo included an assessment that Clinton's email account contained hundreds of classified emails, despite Clinton's claims that there was no classified information present on her server. ..."
"... On July 30, 2015, within weeks of the FBI's opening of the Clinton investigation, McCabe was suddenly promoted to the No. 3 position in the FBI. With his new title of associate deputy director, McCabe was transferred to FBI headquarters from the Washington Field Office, and his direct involvement in the Clinton investigation began. ..."
"... Strzok was one of the agents selected, and in late August 2015, he was assigned to the Mid-Year Exam team and transferred to FBI headquarters. Strzok, in his comments to lawmakers, acknowledged that the newly formed investigative team was largely made up of hand-picked personnel from the Washington Field Office and FBI headquarters. ..."
"... On Jan. 29, 2016, Comey appointed McCabe as FBI deputy director, replacing the retiring Giuliano, and McCabe assumed the No. 2 position in the FBI, after having held the No. 3 position for just six months. ..."
"... By early 2016, the three participants in the infamous "insurance policy" meeting -- McCabe, Strzok, and Page -- were now in place at the FBI. ..."
"... Priestap, who testified that he was unaware of the frequency of meetings between McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page, seems to have been kept in the dark regarding many of the actions taken by Strzok, who appeared to be exercising significant investigative control. ..."
"... It sounds like Peter Strzok was kind of driving the train here. Would you agree with that?" ..."
"... Peter and Jon, yeah." ..."
"... Do you know if Mr. McCabe was aware that some of his agent executives were concerned that they were being bypassed on information on what, by all accounts, was a sensitive, critical investigation?" ..."
"... My understanding was that he was aware." ..."
"... Notably, Comey had been convinced to remove the term "gross negligence" to describe Clinton's actions from his prepared statement by, among others, Page, Strzok, Anderson, and Moffa. ..."
"... While GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted, after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Most of these meetings with Papadopoulos -- whose own background and reasons for joining the Trump campaign remain suspicious -- occurred in the first half of 2016. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly so. ..."
"... As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of any traditional channels -- was gathered, Brennan began a process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director pushed the FBI toward the establishment of a formal counterintelligence investigation. ..."
"... The last major segment of Brennan's efforts involved a series of three reports. The first, titled the "Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security ," was released on Oct. 7, 2016. The second report, "GRIZZLY STEPPE -- Russian Malicious Cyber Activity ," was released on Dec. 29, 2016. The third report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections " -- also known as the intelligence community assessment (ICA) -- was released on Jan. 6, 2017. ..."
"... On July 5, 2016, Gaeta traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. At some point in early July, Steele passed his initial report to Nuland and the State Department. Nuland later said these documents were passed on at some point to both the FBI and then-Secretary of State John Kerry. ..."
"... Prior to joining Fusion GPS, Nellie had worked as an independent contractor for an internal open-source division of the CIA, Open Source Works, from 2008 to at least June 2010; it appears likely she remained in that role into 2014. ..."
"... Additionally, email communications between her and Bruce Ohr show that she routinely sent her husband at the DOJ articles on Russia -- most carrying a similar negative slant. The emails continued through the duration of Nellie's employment with Fusion GPS and usually contained a brief, often one-line comment from Nellie. ..."
"... In her testimony, Nellie described her work as online open-source efforts that utilized "Russian sources, media, social media, government, you know, business registers, legal databases, all kinds of things." Ohr said that she would "write occasional reports based on the open-source research that I described about Donald Trump's relationships with various people in Russia." ..."
"... Steele had produced eight reports from June 20, 2016, through the end of August 2016 (there also is one undated report included in the dossier). No further reports were generated by Steele until Sept. 14, when he suddenly wrote three separate memos in one day. One of the memos referenced a Russian bank named Alfa Bank, misspelled as "Alpha" in his memo. Steele's sudden burst of productivity was likely done in preparation for his Sept. 19 meeting in Rome with the FBI. ..."
"... The impact of Brennan's potential knowledge of the dossier in August 2016 should not be underestimated. As Brennan testified to Congress, his briefing to the Gang of Eight was done in consultation with the Obama administration: ..."
"... Halper, who has been outed as an FBI informant, stayed in contact with Carter Page for the next 14 months, severing ties exactly as the final FISA warrant on Page expired. ..."
"... Following the publication of the Isikoff article, the Hillary for America campaign released a statement on the same day that touted Isikoff's "bombshell report," with the full article attached. ..."
"... Winer had received a separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. This "second dossier" had been compiled by another longtime Clinton operative, former journalist Cody Shearer, and echoed claims made in the Steele dossier. Winer gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele then shared this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it as a means to corroborate Steele's own dossier. ..."
"... Steele also met with U.S. media during his visit to Washington, doing so "at Fusion's instruction." According to UK Court documents , Steele testified that he "briefed" The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, and CNN at the end of September 2016. Steele would engage in a second round of media contact in mid-October 2016, meeting again with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yahoo News. Steele testified that all these meetings were "conducted verbally in person." ..."
"... Sometime in late 2016, his wife, Nellie Ohr, provided him with a memory stick containing all of her research that she had compiled while employed at Fusion GPS. Bruce Ohr testified he gave the memory stick to Pientka. Nellie Ohr had left Fusion in September 2016. Through Pientka, Strzok now had all of Nellie Ohr's Fusion research in his possession. ..."
"... Flynn's 2015 dinner in Moscow was initially used to implicate the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. It was then used as a means to cast doubts on Flynn's ability as Trump's national security adviser. Following Flynn's resignation, it was then used as a means to pursue the ongoing collusion narrative that gained full strength in the early days of the Trump administration. ..."
"... On April 18, 2016, Rogers moved aggressively in response to the disclosures. He abruptly shut down all FBI outside-contractor access. At this point, both the FBI and the DOJ's NSD became aware of Rogers's compliance review. They may have known earlier, but they were certainly aware after outside-contractor access was halted. ..."
"... Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of the compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the NSA inspector general and associated FISA abuse to the FISA court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702-compliance review. ..."
Mar 28, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Updated: July 7, 2019

Efforts by high-ranking officials in the CIA , FBI , Department of Justice ( DOJ ), and State Department to portray President Donald Trump as having colluded with Russia were the culmination of years of bias and politicization under the Obama administration.

<img class="size-large wp-image-2855920" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/27/DOJ-FBI_infographic_3_Epoch-Times-1200x630.png" alt="" width="640" height="336" /> Click on image to enlarge.

The weaponization of the intelligence community and other government agencies created an environment that allowed for obstruction in the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the relentless pursuit of a manufactured collusion narrative against Trump.

A willing and complicit media spread unsubstantiated leaks as facts in an effort to promote the Russia-collusion narrative.

The Spygate scandal also raises a bigger question: Was the 2016 election a one-time aberration, or was it symptomatic of decades of institutional political corruption?

This article builds on dozens of congressional testimonies, court documents, and other research to provide an inside look at the actions of Obama administration officials in the scandal that's become known as Spygate.

<img class=" wp-image-2833768" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Michael-Horowitz-1200x1239.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="165" /> Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz . (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

To understand this abuse of power, it helps to go back to July 2011, when DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was appointed.

From the very start, Horowitz found his duties throttled by Attorney General Eric Holder, who placed limitations on the inspector general's right to have unobstructed access to information. Holder used this tactic to delay Horowitz's investigation of the failed sting operation known as Operation Fast and Furious.

"We got access to information up to 2010 in all of these categories. No law changed in 2010. No policy changed. It was simply a decision by the General Counsel's Office in 2010 that they viewed, now, the law differently. And as a result, they weren't going to give us that information," Horowitz told members of Congress in February 2015.

On Aug. 5, 2014, Horowitz and other inspectors general had sent a letter to Congress asking for unimpeded access to all records. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates responded on July 20, 2015, with a 58-page memorandum, titled " Memorandum for Sally Quillian Yates Deputy Attorney General ," written by Karl R. Thompson, the principal deputy assistant attorney general of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

<img class=" wp-image-2833772" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/sally-yates-1200x1188.jpg" alt="" width="161" height="159" /> Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The July 20, 2015, opinion was widely criticized . But it accomplished what it was intended to do. The opinion limited IG Horowitz's oversight from extending to any information collected under Title III -- including intercepted communications and national security letters. (Notably, The New York Times disclosed that national security letters were used in the surveillance of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign.)

In response, on Aug. 3, 2015, IG Horowitz sent a blistering letter to Congress. The letter was signed not only by Horowitz but by all other acting inspectors general as well:

"The OLC opinion's restrictive reading of the IG Act represents a potentially serious challenge to the authority of every Inspector General and our collective ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner. Our concern is that, as a result of the OLC opinion, agencies other than DOJ may likewise withhold crucial records from their Inspectors General, adversely impacting their work.

Horowitz continued to push Congress for oversight access and encouraged passage of the Inspector General Empowerment Act . Horowitz would ultimately win his battle, but only as President Barack Obama was leaving office. On Dec. 16, 2016, Obama finally signed the Inspector General Empowerment Act into law.

It is against this backdrop of minimal oversight that Spygate took place.

Ironically, the Clinton email server investigation, known as the "Mid-Year Exam," originated from a disclosure contained in a June 29, 2015, memo sent by the inspectors general for both the State Department and the Intelligence Community to Patrick F. Kennedy, then-undersecretary of state for management.

The IGs' memo included an assessment that Clinton's email account contained hundreds of classified emails, despite Clinton's claims that there was no classified information present on her server.

On July 6, 2015, the IG for the Intelligence Community made a referral to the FBI, which resulted in the official opening of an investigation into the Clinton email server by FBI officials Randall Coleman and Charles Kable on July 10, 2015.

<img class="size-large wp-image-2833204" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Andrew-McCabe-Lisa-Page-Peter-Strzok-1200x720.jpg" alt="peter strzok andrew mccabe and lisa page" width="640" height="384" /> (L-R) FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe , and FBI lawyer Lisa Page. (Getty Images/Epoch Times)

A Hand-Picked Team

At this time, Peter Strzok was an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI's Washington Field Office. The assistant director in charge at the Washington Field Office during this period was Andrew McCabe, a position he assumed on Sept. 14, 2014.

On July 30, 2015, within weeks of the FBI's opening of the Clinton investigation, McCabe was suddenly promoted to the No. 3 position in the FBI. With his new title of associate deputy director, McCabe was transferred to FBI headquarters from the Washington Field Office, and his direct involvement in the Clinton investigation began.

Strzok would follow shortly. Less than a month after McCabe was transferred, FBI headquarters reached out to the Washington Field Office, saying it needed greater staffing and resources "based on what they were looking at, based on some of the investigative steps that were under consideration," Strzok told congressional investigators in a closed-door hearing on June 27, 2018.

Strzok was one of the agents selected, and in late August 2015, he was assigned to the Mid-Year Exam team and transferred to FBI headquarters. Strzok, in his comments to lawmakers, acknowledged that the newly formed investigative team was largely made up of hand-picked personnel from the Washington Field Office and FBI headquarters.

Starting in October 2015 and continuing into early 2016, FBI Director James Comey made a series of high-profile reassignments that resulted in the complete turnover of the upper-echelon of the FBI team working on the Clinton email investigation:

Comey is the only known senior FBI leadership official who remained involved throughout the entire Clinton email investigation. McCabe had the second-longest tenure.

On Jan. 29, 2016, Comey appointed McCabe as FBI deputy director, replacing the retiring Giuliano, and McCabe assumed the No. 2 position in the FBI, after having held the No. 3 position for just six months.

It was at this point that FBI lawyer Lisa Page was assigned to McCabe as his special counsel. This was not the first time that Page worked directly for McCabe. James Baker, the FBI's former general counsel, told congressional investigators that Page had worked for McCabe at various times during McCabe's career, going back as far as 2013.

By early 2016, the three participants in the infamous "insurance policy" meeting -- McCabe, Strzok, and Page -- were now in place at the FBI.

In January 2016, Bill Priestap was named as head of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, replacing Coleman and inheriting the Clinton email investigation in the process.

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2857145" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/28/Spygate_Epoch-TImes.jpg" alt="" width="676" height="1280" />

According to Priestap, Coleman had "set up a reporting mechanism that leaders of that team would report directly to him, not through the customary other chain of command" in the Clinton email investigation. Priestap, who said he didn't know why Coleman had "set it up," kept the chain of command in place when he assumed Coleman's position in January 2016.

This new structure resulted in some unusual reporting lines that went outside normal chains of command. Strzok, who would not normally fall under Priestap's oversight, was now reporting directly to him.

As Priestap described it, the team involved in the Clinton investigation comprised three different but intertwined elements: the primary team, the filter team, and the senior leadership team.

While the elements of the day-to-day investigative team differed for the Clinton email investigation and the Trump–Russia investigation, the primary team remained the same throughout both cases -- as did the lines of communication between the FBI and the DOJ. According to testimony by Page, John Carlin, who ran the DOJ's National Security Division (NSD), was receiving briefings on both investigations directly from McCabe.

Priestap Left in the Dark

Priestap, who testified that he was unaware of the frequency of meetings between McCabe, Strzok, and Lisa Page, seems to have been kept in the dark regarding many of the actions taken by Strzok, who appeared to be exercising significant investigative control. Priestap was asked about this by congressional investigators during a June 5, 2018, testimony:

Rep. Meadows: " It sounds like Peter Strzok was kind of driving the train here. Would you agree with that?"

Mr. Priestap: " Peter and Jon, yeah."

<img class=" wp-image-2833249" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Priestap-1200x1548.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="205" /> Assistant Director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap. (Jennifer Zeng/The Epoch Times)

Additionally, Page often circumvented the established chain of command, not only with McCabe, for whom she reportedly served as a conduit for Strzok, but also with Baker. Additionally, there were concerns that Page bypassed both the executive assistant director for the National Security Branch -- first Giacalone, then Steinbach -- and Priestap, the head of counterintelligence. Anderson, the No. 2 lawyer, admitted in her testimony to congressional investigators that she had been aware of these concerns, saying, "Neither of them personally complained to me, but I was aware of their concerns."

A report published by IG Horowitz in June 2018, which reviewed the FBI's investigation of the Clinton email case, included the notable statement that several witnesses had informed the IG that Page "circumvented the official chain of command, and that Strzok communicated important Midyear case information to her, and thus to McCabe, without Priestap's or Steinbach's knowledge." Steinbach, who was the executive assistant director and Priestap's direct supervisor, left the FBI in early 2017.

According to Anderson, McCabe was aware of the ongoing concerns regarding Page's circumventions, but it appears that nothing was done to address them:

Mr. Baker: " Do you know if Mr. McCabe was aware that some of his agent executives were concerned that they were being bypassed on information on what, by all accounts, was a sensitive, critical investigation?"

Ms. Anderson: " My understanding was that he was aware."

DOJ Prevents 'Gross Negligence' Charges

By the spring of 2016, the Clinton email investigation was already winding down. This was due in large part to the fact that the DOJ, under Attorney General Loretta Lynch , had decided to set an unusually high threshold for the prosecution of Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that she would not be charged.

In order for Clinton to be prosecuted, the DOJ required the FBI to establish evidence of intent -- even though the gross negligence statute explicitly does not require this.

This meant that the FBI would have needed to find a smoking gun, such as an email or an admission made during FBI questioning, revealing that Clinton or her aides knowingly set up the private email server to send classified information.

According to Page, the DOJ played a far larger role in the Clinton investigation than previously had been known:

"Everybody talks about this as if this was the FBI investigation, and the truth of the matter is there was not a single step, other than the July 5th statement, there was not a single investigative step that we did not do in consultation with or at the direction of the Justice Department," Page told congressional investigators on July 13, 2018.

<img class=" wp-image-2833254" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/GettyImages-545524880-1200x1441.jpg" alt="" width="161" height="193" /> Attorney General Loretta Lynch. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Comey also had hinted at the influence exerted by the DOJ over the Clinton investigation, at a July 5, 2016, press conference , in which he recommended that Clinton not be charged, stating that "there are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent."

Notably, Comey had been convinced to remove the term "gross negligence" to describe Clinton's actions from his prepared statement by, among others, Page, Strzok, Anderson, and Moffa.

CIA Director Instigates Trump Investigation

As the Clinton investigation wound down, interest from the intelligence community in the Trump campaign was ramping up. Sometime in 2015, it appears former CIA Director John Brennan established himself as the point man to push for an investigation into the Trump campaign. Using a combination of unofficial foreign intelligence compiled by contacts, colleagues, and associates -- primarily from the UK , but also from other Five Eyes members, such as Australia -- Brennan then fed this information to the FBI. Brennan stated this fact repeatedly during a May 23, 2017, congressional testimony :

"I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign, was shared with the [FBI]."

<img class=" wp-image-2833258" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/GettyImages-687314312-1200x1279.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="171" /> CIA Director John Brennan. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Brennan also admitted that it was his intelligence that helped establish the FBI investigation:

"I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred."

In late 2015, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was involved in collecting information regarding then-candidate Trump and transmitting it to the United States. The GCHQ is the UK equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

<img class=" wp-image-2833230" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/George-Papadopoulos.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="192" /> Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

While GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted, after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Most of these meetings with Papadopoulos -- whose own background and reasons for joining the Trump campaign remain suspicious -- occurred in the first half of 2016. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly so.

<img class=" wp-image-2833234" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Alexander-Downer-1200x1391.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="186" /> Australian high commissioner to the UK, Alexander Downer. (GOH CHAI HIN/AFP/Getty Images)

Downer's conversation with Papadopoulos was reportedly disclosed to the FBI on July 22, 2016, through Australian government channels, although it may have come directly from Downer himself.

Details from the conversation between Downer and Papadopoulos were then used by the FBI to open its counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.

In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, the head of the UK's GCHQ, traveled to Washington to meet with Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Around the same time, Brennan formed an inter-agency task force comprising an estimated six agencies and/or government departments. The FBI, Treasury, and DOJ handled the domestic inquiry into Trump and possible Russia connections. The CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the NSA handled foreign and intelligence aspects.

During this time, Brennan appeared to have employed the use of reverse targeting , which refers to the targeting of a foreign individual with the intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen.

Mr. Brennan:

" We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA's foreign intelligence collection authorities. Any time we would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI because they have the legal authority to do it. We would not pursue that type of investigative, you know, sort of leads. We would give it to the FBI. So, we were picking things up that was of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there -- so they could piece it together with whatever they were collecting domestically here."

As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of any traditional channels -- was gathered, Brennan began a process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director pushed the FBI toward the establishment of a formal counterintelligence investigation.

The last major segment of Brennan's efforts involved a series of three reports. The first, titled the "Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security ," was released on Oct. 7, 2016. The second report, "GRIZZLY STEPPE -- Russian Malicious Cyber Activity ," was released on Dec. 29, 2016. The third report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections " -- also known as the intelligence community assessment (ICA) -- was released on Jan. 6, 2017.

This final report was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of President Donald Trump. Notably, Adm. Mike Rogers of the NSA publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning it only a moderate confidence level.

Fusion GPS and the Steele Dossier

Meanwhile, another less official effort began. Information paid for by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign targeting Trump made its way to the highest levels of the FBI and the State Department, with a sophisticated strategy relying on the personal connections of hired operatives.

<img class=" wp-image-2833265" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/GettyImages-621958726-1200x1324.jpg" alt="" width="159" height="176" /> Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. (JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

At the center of the multi-pronged strategy to disseminate the information were Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and former British spy Steele.

In early March 2016, Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie -- the law firm used by the Clinton campaign and the DNC -- expressing interest in an "engagement," according to an Oct. 24, 2017, response letter by Perkins Coie. The firm hired Fusion GPS in April 2016 to "perform a variety of research services during the 2016 election cycle."

Steele's firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, was retained by Fusion GPS during the period between June and November 2016. During this time, Steele produced 16 memos, with the last memo dated Oct. 20, 2016. There is one final memo that Steele wrote on Dec. 13 at the request of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

<img class=" wp-image-2833240" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/GettyImages-634408242-1200x1349.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="180" /> Sen. John McCain commissioned one of Steele's memos. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Steele provided Fusion GPS with something that Simpson's firm was lacking: access to individuals within the FBI and the State Department. These contacts could be traced back to at least 2010, when Steele had provided assistance in the FBI's investigation into FIFA over concerns that Russia might have been engaging in bribery to host the 2018 World Cup.

Sometime in the latter half of 2014, Steele began to informally provide reports he had prepared for a private client to the State Department. One of the recipients of the reports was Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

After Steele's company was hired by Fusion GPS in June 2016, he began to reach out to the FBI through Michael Gaeta, an FBI agent and assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Rome who Steele had worked with on the FIFA case. Gaeta also headed up the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit, which specializes in investigating criminal groups from Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine.

Gaeta was later identified as Steele's FBI handler, in a July 16, 2018, congressional testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees by Page.

<img class=" wp-image-2833242" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/victoria-nuland-1200x1373.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="183" /> Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On July 5, 2016, Gaeta traveled to London and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. At some point in early July, Steele passed his initial report to Nuland and the State Department. Nuland later said these documents were passed on at some point to both the FBI and then-Secretary of State John Kerry.

Exactly what happened with the reports that Gaeta brought back from London, and precisely who he gave them to within the FBI, remains unknown, although some media reports have indicated they might have been sent to the FBI's New York Field Office. During the period following Steele's initial contact with the FBI, there appears to have been no further FBI interaction or contact with Steele.

Former CIA Contractor Worked for Fusion GPS

Notably, eight months before Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, Simpson had hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, to work for his firm as a researcher in October 2015. It was at this time that Fusion GPS was retained by the Washington Free Beacon to engage in research on the Trump campaign.

Prior to joining Fusion GPS, Nellie had worked as an independent contractor for an internal open-source division of the CIA, Open Source Works, from 2008 to at least June 2010; it appears likely she remained in that role into 2014.

Nellie told congressional investigators, in her Oct. 19, 2018, closed-door testimony, that part of her work for Fusion GPS was to research the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, including campaign associate Carter Page, early campaign supporter Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as Trump's family members, including some of his children.

Additionally, email communications between her and Bruce Ohr show that she routinely sent her husband at the DOJ articles on Russia -- most carrying a similar negative slant. The emails continued through the duration of Nellie's employment with Fusion GPS and usually contained a brief, often one-line comment from Nellie.

In her testimony, Nellie described her work as online open-source efforts that utilized "Russian sources, media, social media, government, you know, business registers, legal databases, all kinds of things." Ohr said that she would "write occasional reports based on the open-source research that I described about Donald Trump's relationships with various people in Russia."

The work Nellie conducted for Fusion GPS matches the same skill set used when she worked for Open Source Works, which is a division within the CIA that uses open-source information to produce intelligence products.

When asked how she came to be hired by Fusion GPS and who had approached her, Nellie responded, "Nobody approached me," telling investigators that it was she who had initiated contact and approached Fusion GPS after reading an article on Simpson.

Nellie would continue to work for Fusion GPS until September 2016. By this time, Simpson and Steele already had started working on pushing the Steele dossier into the FBI.

Following the end of her employment with Fusion GPS, Nellie provided Bruce with a memory stick that contained all of the research she had compiled during her time at the firm. Bruce then gave the memory stick to the FBI, through his handler, Joe Pientka.

Bruce Ohr Becomes a Conduit

Nearly a month after Gaeta brought back the reports that Steele provided in London, Simpson and Steele decided to pursue a new channel into the FBI through Bruce Ohr. Bruce had known Steele since at least 2007, when they met during an "official meeting" while Steele was still employed by the British government as an MI6 agent. Steele had already been in contact with Bruce via email in early 2016. Notably, most of these prior communications appeared to discuss Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and his ongoing efforts to obtain a U.S. visa.

<img class=" wp-image-2833270" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Bruce-ohr.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="191" /> Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

On July 29, 2016, Steele wrote to Bruce, saying that he would "be in DC at short notice on business," and asked to meet with both Bruce and his wife. On July 30, 2016, the Ohrs met Steele for breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel. Also present at the breakfast meeting was a fourth individual, described by Bruce as "an associate of Mr. Steele's, another gentleman, younger fellow. I didn't catch his name." Nellie testified that Steele's associate had a British accent.

The timing of the July 30 breakfast meeting is of particular note, as the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, "Crossfire Hurricane," was formally opened the following day, on July 31, 2016, by FBI agent Peter Strzok.

<img class=" wp-image-2833272" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Nellie-Ohr.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="183" /> Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

According to a transcript of Bruce's testimony before Congress, Steele relayed information from his dossier at this meeting and claimed that "a former head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, had stated to someone that they had Donald Trump over a barrel."

Steele also referenced Deripaska's business dealings with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and foreign policy adviser Carter Page's meetings in Moscow.

Lastly, Bruce noted that Steele told him he had been in contact with the FBI but now had additional reports. "Chris Steele had provided some reports to the FBI, I think two, but that Glenn Simpson had more," he said.

Immediately following the Ohrs' breakfast meeting with Steele, Bruce Ohr reached out to FBI Deputy Director McCabe and the two met in McCabe's office -- sometime between July 30 and the first days of August. Also present at this meeting was FBI lawyer Page, who had previously worked for Bruce Ohr at the DOJ, where he was her direct supervisor for five to six years.

Bruce Ohr would later testify that during the July/August meeting, he told McCabe that his wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion, noting, "I wanted the FBI to be aware of any possible bias." FBI General Counsel Baker, who reviewed a portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) application to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page -- which relied in part on the information from Steele -- told congressional investigators that he was never told of Ohr's concerns regarding possible bias and conflicts of interest.

On Aug. 15, 2016, a week or two following Bruce Ohr's meeting with McCabe, Strzok would send the now-infamous "insurance policy" text referencing McCabe to Lisa Page:

"I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office – that there's no way he gets elected – but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."

On Aug. 22, Bruce Ohr had a meeting with Simpson. Ohr would later discuss that meeting during his testimony:

"I don't know exactly what Chris Steele was thinking, of course, but I knew that Chris Steele was working for Glenn Simpson, and that Glenn might have additional information that Chris either didn't have or was not authorized to prevent [present], give me, or whatever."

It was at this meeting that Simpson first mentioned Belarusan-American businessman Sergei Millian and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.

Brennan's Briefings to the Gang of Eight <img class=" wp-image-2833280" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/GettyImages-103218413-1200x1585.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="211" /> Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

During this same period in late August 2016, Brennan began briefing members of the Gang of Eight on the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, through a series of meetings in August and September 2016. Notably, each Gang of Eight member was briefed separately, calling into question whether each of the members received the same information. Efforts by Democrats to block the release of transcripts from each meeting are ongoing. Comey, however, did not notify Congress of the FBI investigation until early March 2017, and it's entirely possible he was unaware of Brennan's private briefings during the summer of 2016.

During her testimony, FBI lawyer Lisa Page was questioned by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) in relation to an Aug. 25, 2016, text message that read, "What are you doing after the CH brief?" CH almost certainly referred to Crossfire Hurricane.

Lisa Page then was asked about an event that took place on the same day as the "CH brief" -- a briefing provided by Brennan to then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid:

"You give a brief on August the 25th. Director Brennan is giving a brief. It's not a Gang of Eight brief. It is a one-on-one, from what we can tell, a one-on-one briefing with Harry Reid at that point."

According to Meadows, Brennan briefed Reid on the Steele dossier:

"We have documents that would suggest that in that briefing the dossier was mentioned to Harry Reid and then obviously we're going to have to have conversations. Does that surprise you that Director Brennan would be aware [of the dossier]?"

Lisa Page appeared genuinely surprised that Brennan would have been aware of the dossier's existence at this early point, telling Meadows: "The FBI got this information from our source. If the CIA had another source of that information, I am neither aware of that nor did the CIA provide it to us if they did."

She elaborated further: "As of August of 2016, I don't know who Christopher Steele is. I don't know that he's an FBI source. I don't know what he does. I have never heard of him in all of my life."

This claim by Page seems incongruous when viewed against Bruce Ohr's testimony that he met with Page and McCabe in the first days of August following his July 30, 2016, breakfast with Steele:

"My initial meeting was with Mr. McCabe and with Lisa Page.

"I was telling them about what I was hearing from Chris Steele."

Meanwhile, Brennan's briefing prompted Reid to write not one but two letters to Comey. Both demanded that Comey commence an investigation, with the details to be made public.

Reid's first letter , which touched on Carter Page, was sent on Aug. 27, 2016. Reid's second letter , far angrier and declaring Comey to be in possession of material information, was sent on Oct. 30, 2016.

There had been reports that Comey had been considering closing the FBI investigation of Trump, something Brennan strongly opposed. Now, with Reid's letters sent, that avenue was effectively closed. The termination of the FBI's Trump–Russia investigation would be all but impossible in the face of Reid's public demands.

Perhaps it was in response to Reid's Aug. 27 letter that the FBI suddenly reached out to Steele in September 2016, asking him for all the information in his possession. The team working on Crossfire Hurricane received documents and a briefing from Steele in mid-September, reportedly at a meeting in Rome, where Gaeta also was present.

During Lisa Page's testimony, she appeared to corroborate this account, noting that the team received the "reports that are known as the dossier from an FBI agent who is Christopher Steele's handler in September of 2016." She would later clarify the timing, noting "we received the reporting from Steele in mid-September." A text sent to her by FBI agent Peter Strzok on Oct. 12, 2016, may provide us with the actual date:

"We got the reporting on Sept 19. Looks like [redacted] got it early August."

Steele had produced eight reports from June 20, 2016, through the end of August 2016 (there also is one undated report included in the dossier). No further reports were generated by Steele until Sept. 14, when he suddenly wrote three separate memos in one day. One of the memos referenced a Russian bank named Alfa Bank, misspelled as "Alpha" in his memo. Steele's sudden burst of productivity was likely done in preparation for his Sept. 19 meeting in Rome with the FBI.

The impact of Brennan's potential knowledge of the dossier in August 2016 should not be underestimated. As Brennan testified to Congress, his briefing to the Gang of Eight was done in consultation with the Obama administration:

"Through the so-called Gang-of-Eight process we kept Congress apprised of these issues as we identified them. Again, in consultation with the White House, I personally briefed the full details of our understanding of Russian attempts to interfere in the election to congressional leadership.

"Given the highly sensitive nature of what was an active counter-intelligence case, involving an ongoing Russian effort, to interfere in our presidential election, the full details of what we knew at the time were shared only with those members of Congress."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PseDla0l9xE?wmode=transparent&wmode=opaque The Carter Page FISA Warrant <img class=" wp-image-2833286" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Carter-Page.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="207" /> Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

As the dossier was making its way into the FBI, the agency began its preparations to obtain a FISA warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who was surveilled under Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

According to Baker's testimony, it appears that the FBI began to set its sights on Carter Page in the summer of 2016. When asked how he had first gained knowledge of the FBI's intention to pursue a FISA warrant on Carter Page, Baker testified that it came through his familiarity with the FBI's investigation:

Mr. Baker: " I learned of -- so I was aware when the FBI first started to focus on Carter Page, I was aware of that because it was part of the broader investigation that we were conducting. So I was aware that we were investigating him. And then at some point in time –"

Rep. Meadows: "But that was many years ago. That was in 2014. Or are you talking about 2016?"

Mr. Baker: " I am talking about 2016 in the summer."

Rep. Meadows: "Okay."

Mr. Baker: " Yeah. And so I was aware of the investigation, and then at some point in time, as part of the regular briefings on the case, the briefers mentioned that they were going to pursue a FISA."

It appears the FBI, and possibly the CIA, began to focus on Carter Page earlier than Baker was aware. Carter Page had been invited some months prior to a July 2016 symposium held at Cambridge regarding the upcoming election. The speaker list was notable:

Carter Page attended the event just four days after his July 2016 Moscow trip, and it was during this time in the UK that he first encountered Stefan Halper. Page's Moscow trip would later figure prominently in the Steele dossier.

Halper, who has been outed as an FBI informant, stayed in contact with Carter Page for the next 14 months, severing ties exactly as the final FISA warrant on Page expired.

Trisha Anderson, the principal deputy general counsel for the FBI and head of the bureau's National Security and Cyber Law Branch, approved the application for a warrant to spy on Carter Page before it went to FBI Director James Comey.

According to Anderson, pre-approvals for the Carter Page FISA warrant were provided by both McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, before the FISA application was ever presented to Anderson for review.

"[M]y boss and my boss' boss had already reviewed and approved this application. And, in fact, the Deputy Attorney General, who had the authority to sign the application, to be the substantive approver on the FISA application itself, had approved the application. And that typically would not have been the case before I did that," said Anderson.

The unusual preliminary reviews and approvals from both McCabe and Yates appear to have had a substantial impact on the normal review process, leading other individuals like Anderson to believe that the warrant application was more vetted than it really was.

Anderson also testified that she had not read the Carter Page FISA application prior to signing off on it and passing it along to Comey for the final FBI signature. According to FBI lawyer Sally Moyer, the underlying Woods file (a document that provides facts supporting the allegations made in a FISA application) was only read by the originating agent and the supervisory special agent in the field. Moyer also noted that the Woods file relating to the Page FISA had not been reviewed or audited by anyone.

The Carter Page FISA application was largely reliant on the Steele dossier, which was unverified at the time of its submission to the FISA court and remains unverified by the FBI to this day. Circular reporting, provided by Steele himself, was used as corroboration of the dossier. Additionally, Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, whose conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was used to open the FBI's July 31, 2016, counterintelligence investigation, is referenced in the FISA, yet there "is no evidence of any cooperation or conspiracy between Page and Papadopoulos," according to a House Intelligence Committee memo.

Moyer testified that without the Steele dossier, the Carter Page application would have had a "50/50" chance of achieving the probable cause standard before the FISA court. Notably, the Steele dossier is generally considered to have been largely discredited.

A Perkins Coie Partner and Alfa Bank Allegations

<img class=" wp-image-2679668" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2018/10/05/Michael-Sussmann-Perkins-Coie.jpg" alt="Michael Sussmann Lawyer Perkins Coie" width="160" height="194" /> Michael Sussmann, partner at Perkins Coie. (Courtesy Perkins Coie)

On Sept. 19, shortly after Steele completed his latest three memos, FBI General Counsel James Baker met with Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann, the lawyer the DNC turned to on April 28, 2016, after discovering the alleged hacking of their servers.

Sussman, who sought out the meeting, presented Baker with documents that Baker described as "a stack of material I don't know maybe a quarter inch half inch thick something like that clipped together, and then I believe there was some type of electronic media, as well, a disk or something."

The information that Sussmann gave to Baker was related to what Baker described as "a surreptitious channel of communications" between the Trump Organization and "a Russian organization associated with the Russian Government."

Baker was describing alleged communications between Alfa Bank and a server in the Trump Tower. The allegations, which were investigated by the FBI and proven to be false, were widely covered in the media.

Just four days earlier, on Sept. 14, Steele mentioned Alfa Bank (misspelled as Alpha bank) in one of his memos.

According to Baker's testimony, there appears to have been at least three meetings with Sussmann -- the first in person and at least two subsequent meetings by phone. In either the second or third conversation, Baker came to understand The New York Times was also in possession of Sussmann's information. As would become clear later, other members of the media also had this same information.

As Baker was meeting with Sussmann, Steele was back in Washington for a series of meetings that included his DOJ contact, Bruce Ohr.

On Sept. 23, 2016, Bruce Ohr again met with Steele for breakfast, telling lawmakers during testimony, "Steele was in Washington, D.C., again, and he reached out to me, and, again, we met for breakfast, and he provided some additional information." Ohr said this meeting concerned similar topics that were discussed at the July 30, 2016, meeting but did not provide further details.

Bruce Ohr would also meet either that same month or in early October with FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and DOJ career officials from the criminal division, Bruce Swartz, Zainab Ahmad, and Andrew Weissman (Ohr testified that he was unsure whether Weismann was at this or a later meeting). Both Weissman and Ahmad would later become part of the team assembled by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Steele's Meetings With the Media

On the same day that Bruce Ohr met with Christopher Steele for breakfast, on Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff published an article about Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. The article, headlined " U.S. Intel Officials Probe Ties Between Trump Adviser and Kremlin ," was based on an interview with Steele. Isikoff's article would later be used by the FBI in the FISA spy warrant application on Carter Page as corroborating information.

Following the publication of the Isikoff article, the Hillary for America campaign released a statement on the same day that touted Isikoff's "bombshell report," with the full article attached.

A second lengthy article was published on Sept. 23, by Politico: " Who Is Carter Page? The Mystery of Trump's Man in Moscow ," by Julia Ioffe. This article was particularly interesting as it appeared to highlight media efforts by Fusion GPS:

"As I started looking into Page, I began getting calls from two separate 'corporate investigators' digging into what they claim are all kinds of shady connections Page has to all kinds of shady Russians. One is working on behalf of various unnamed Democratic donors; the other won't say who turned him on to Page's scent. Both claimed to me that the FBI was investigating Page for allegedly meeting with Igor Sechin and Sergei Ivanov, who was until recently Putin's chief of staff -- both of whom are on the sanctions list -- when Page was in Moscow in July for that speech."

Ioffe noted that "seemingly everyone I talked to had also talked to the Washington Post, and then there were these corporate investigators who drew a dark and complex web of Page's connections."

Her article also mentioned rumors regarding Alfa Bank:

"In the interest of due diligence, I also tried to run down the rumors being handed me by the corporate investigators: that Russia's Alfa Bank paid for the trip as a favor to the Kremlin; that Page met with Sechin and Ivanov in Moscow; that he is now being investigated by the FBI for those meetings because Sechin and Ivanov were both sanctioned for Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

It was probably during this same trip to Washington that Steele met with Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement and former special envoy for Libya, whom Steele had known since at least 2010.

Winer had received a separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. This "second dossier" had been compiled by another longtime Clinton operative, former journalist Cody Shearer, and echoed claims made in the Steele dossier. Winer gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele then shared this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it as a means to corroborate Steele's own dossier.

Steele also met with U.S. media during his visit to Washington, doing so "at Fusion's instruction." According to UK Court documents , Steele testified that he "briefed" The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, The New Yorker, and CNN at the end of September 2016. Steele would engage in a second round of media contact in mid-October 2016, meeting again with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yahoo News. Steele testified that all these meetings were "conducted verbally in person."

Alfa Bank Media Leaks

<img class=" wp-image-2679669" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2018/10/05/james-baker.jpg" alt="James Baker FBi Special Counsel" width="160" height="203" /> Former FBI General Counsel James Baker.

As Steele's media meetings were going on, FBI General Counsel James Baker learned that Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann was also speaking with reporters from The New York Times regarding the Alfa Bank information that Sussmann had provided to the FBI. After some internal discussion, the FBI approached both Sussmann and The New York Times, asking that any story be held until the FBI had time to complete an investigation into the documents provided by Sussmann. It appears that an agreement was reached, and the FBI began to look into the claims regarding Alfa Bank and the server at Trump Tower.

But Sussman wasn't the only one that Baker, currently the subject of an ongoing criminal leak investigation, was speaking with. According to congressional investigators, beginning sometime in September 2016 -- before the presidential election -- Baker began having conversations with his old friend and journalist, David Corn of Mother Jones.

According to Baker, these conversations were in relation to ongoing FBI matters:

Rep. Jordan: " Did you talk to Mr. Corn prior to the election about anything, anything related to FBI matters? Not -- so we're not going to ask about the Steele dossier. Anything about FBI business, FBI matters?"

Mr. Baker: " Yes."

Rep. Jordan: " Yes. And do you know -- can you give me some dates or the number of times that you talked to Mr. Corn about FBI matters leading up to the 2016 Presidential election?"

Mr. Baker: " I don't remember, Congressman."

By Oct. 31, 2016, the FBI had apparently wrapped up their investigation into the Alfa Bank allegations, finding no evidence of anything untoward in the process. It was on this day that three separate articles on Alfa Bank would be published.

The first, " Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia " by The New York Times, appeared to be an updated version of the article they had intended to publish before the FBI asked them to delay their reporting. It stated the following:

"In classified sessions in August and September, intelligence officials also briefed congressional leaders on the possibility of financial ties between Russians and people connected to Mr. Trump. They focused particular attention on what cyberexperts said appeared to be a mysterious computer back channel between the Trump Organization and the Alfa Bank, which is one of Russia's biggest banks and whose owners have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin."

The reference to "classified sessions in August and September" is likely in relation to the series of Gang of Eight briefings that former CIA Director John Brennan engaged in at that time -- including his briefing to then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. The article continued:

"F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. Computer logs obtained by The New York Times show that two servers at Alfa Bank sent more than 2,700 'look-up' messages -- a first step for one system's computers to talk to another -- to a Trump-connected server beginning in the spring. But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts."

The second article, "Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?" by Slate Magazine, was solely focused on the allegations regarding a server in the Trump Tower that had allegedly been communicating with a server at Alfa Bank in Russia.

Immediately following the publication of the Slate article, Clinton posted a tweet that included a statement from Jake Sullivan, a senior policy adviser:

"Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank."

Sullivan's statement referenced the Slate article and included the following:

"This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.

"This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists."

The Alfa Bank story took off -- despite the same-day story from The New York Times that specifically noted the FBI had investigated that matter and found nothing untoward.

The final article published on Oct. 31, " A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump " by Mother Jones reporter -- and Baker's friend -- David Corn, also mentioned Alfa Bank:

"In recent weeks, reporters in Washington have pursued anonymous online reports that a computer server related to the Trump Organization engaged in a high level of activity with servers connected to Alfa Bank, the largest private bank in Russia. On Monday, a Slate investigation detailed the pattern of unusual server activity but concluded, 'We don't yet know what this [Trump] server was for, but it deserves further explanation.' In an email to Mother Jones, Hope Hicks, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, maintains, 'The Trump Organization is not sending or receiving any communications from this email server. The Trump Organization has no communication or relationship with this entity or any Russian entity.'"

More notably, Corn's article also provided the first public reporting on the existence of the Steele dossier:

"A former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump -- and that the FBI requested more information from him."

As it turns out, Corn had detailed, first-hand knowledge of the dossier. According to testimony from Baker, Corn had been provided with parts of the dossier by Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson. Baker knew of this fact, because within a week of publishing his article, Corn passed these dossier parts on to Baker personally:

Rep. Jordan: " Prior to the election Mr. Corn had a copy of the dossier and was talking to you about giving that to you so the FBI would have it. Is that all right? I mean all accurate."

Mr. Baker: " My recollection is that he had part of the dossier, that we had other parts already, and that we got still other parts from other people, and that -- and nevertheless some of the parts that David Corn gave us were parts that we did not have from another source?"

Steele had written four memos after the FBI team received his information in mid-September. All of the memos were written in October -- on the 12th, 18th, 19th, and the 20th. It is possible that these were the memos passed along to Baker by Corn.

Baker testified that he received elements of the dossier from Corn that were not in the FBI's possession at the time. He said that he immediately turned this information over to leadership within the FBI, noting, "I think it was Bill Priestap," the head of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.

The use of personal relationships as a mechanism to transmit outside information to the FBI was actually noted by Baker, who said of Corn: "Even though he was my friend, I was also an FBI official. He knew that. And so he wanted to somehow get that into the hands of the FBI."

Bruce Ohr's FBI Handler

Christopher Steele was terminated as a source by the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016, for communicating with the media. Despite this, DOJ official Bruce Ohr and Steele communicated regularly for another full year, until November 2017.

On Nov. 21, 2016, Ohr had a meeting with FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and was introduced to FBI agent Joe Pientka, who became Ohr's FBI handler. Pientka was also present with Strzok during the Jan. 24, 2017, interview of Trump's national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn .

The next day, Nov. 22, 2016, Ohr met alone with Pientka. Ohr would continue to relay his communications with Steele to the FBI through Pientka, who then recorded them in FD-302 forms. What Ohr didn't know was that Pientka was transmitting all the information directly to Strzok.

Ohr, in his testimony, detailed his interactions with Steele and Glenn Simpson, as well as his communications with officials at the FBI and DOJ. Notably, Ohr repeatedly stated that he never vetted any of the information provided by either Steele or Simpson. He simply turned it over or relayed it to the FBI -- usually to Pientka -- but Ohr also testified that "at least on two occasions I was handed onto a new agent."

Sometime in late 2016, his wife, Nellie Ohr, provided him with a memory stick containing all of her research that she had compiled while employed at Fusion GPS. Bruce Ohr testified he gave the memory stick to Pientka. Nellie Ohr had left Fusion in September 2016. Through Pientka, Strzok now had all of Nellie Ohr's Fusion research in his possession.

On Dec. 10, 2016, Bruce Ohr met with Simpson, who gave him a memory stick that Ohr believed contained a copy of the Steele dossier. Ohr also passed this second memory stick along to Pientka.

On Jan. 20, 2017, Ohr had one final communication with Simpson, a phone call that took place on the same day as Trump's inauguration. Ohr testified that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson was concerned that one of Steele's sources was about to be exposed through the pending publication of an article:

Mr. Ohr: " He says something along the lines of, I -- there's going to be some reporting in the next few days that's going to -- could expose the source, and the source could be in personal danger."

Rep. Meadows: " And why was he concerned about that source being exposed?"

Mr. Ohr: " I think he was aware of some kind of article that was likely to come out in the next, you know, few days or something."

Apparently, Simpson's information was at least partly accurate. On Jan. 24, 2017, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sergei Millian, a Belarusan-American businessman and onetime Russian government translator, was both "Source D" and "Source E" in the dossier. It remains unknown exactly how Simpson knew in advance that Millian would be outed as a source.

But there are some questions as to the accuracy of the Journal's reporting. The dossier appears to conflict with the newspaper's article in at least one aspect. According to the dossier, Source E was used as confirmation for Source D -- meaning they can't be the same person.

McCain, the Dossier, and a UK Connection

Simpson and Steele were carefully thorough in their dissemination efforts. The dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources.

One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood may have previously worked on behalf of Steele's company, Orbis Business Intelligence; he was referenced in a UK court filing as an associate of Orbis. Wood was also referred to as an adviser to Orbis in a deposition by an associate of late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), David Kramer.

Kramer knew Wood previously from their mutual expertise on Russia. Kramer said in his deposition, which was part of a defamation lawsuit against BuzzFeed News, that Wood told him that "he was aware of information that he thought I should be aware of and that Senator McCain might be interested in."

<img class=" wp-image-2833323" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/kramer-300x300.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="173" /> McCain associate David Kramer. (Courtesy McCain Institute)

McCain, Wood, and Kramer would meet later that afternoon, on Nov. 19, 2016, in a private meeting room at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Wood told both Kramer and McCain that "he was aware of this information that had been gathered that raised the possibility of collusion and compromising material on the president-elect. And he explained that he knew the person who gathered the information and felt that the person was of the utmost credibility," Kramer said.

Kramer ascribed the word "collusion" three times to Wood in his deposition. He also said that Wood mentioned the possible existence of a video "of a sexual nature" that might have "shown the president-elect in a compromising situation." According to Kramer, Wood said that "if it existed, that it was from a hotel in Moscow when president-elect, before he was president-elect, had been in Moscow."

No such video was ever uncovered or given to Kramer.

Kramer testified that following the description of the video, "the senator turned to me and asked if I would go to London to meet with what turned out to be Mr. Steele."

Kramer traveled to London to meet with Steele on Nov. 28, 2016. Kramer reviewed all the memos during his meeting with Steele but wasn't provided with a physical copy of the dossier.

When Kramer returned to Washington, he was provided with a copy of the dossier -- which, at that point, consisted of 16 memos -- during a meeting with Simpson on Nov. 29, 2016. Kramer also testified that there was another individual, "a male," present at the meeting.

<img class=" wp-image-2849229" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/John-McCain-1200x1530.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="204" /> Late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Interestingly, Kramer testified that Simpson gave him two copies of the dossier, noting that Simpson told him that "one had more things blacked out than the other." Kramer said, "It wasn't entirely clear to me why there were two versions of this, so but I took both versions."

Kramer noted that Simpson, who was aware the dossier was being given to McCain, said the dossier "was a very sensitive document and needed to be handled very carefully."

Despite that warning, Kramer showed the dossier to a number of journalists and had discussions with at least 14 members of the media, along with some individuals in the U.S. government.

Kramer testified that he gave a physical copy of the dossier to reporters Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy; to Fred Hiatt, the editor of the Washington Post editorial page; Alan Cullison of The Wall Street Journal; Bob Little at NPR; Carl Bernstein at CNN; and Ken Bensinger at BuzzFeed. It's possible that Kramer gave copies to other reporters as well.

Kramer said that Simpson and Steele were aware of most of these contacts, but that Kramer hadn't told either of them that he gave the dossier to NPR. He also noted that Steele had been in contact with Bernstein at CNN and that the CNN and BuzzFeed meetings occurred at Steele's request. Steele told Kramer that he and Bensinger "had been in touch during the FIFA investigation; they got to know each other that way."

According to Kramer, he didn't believe that Fusion GPS and Simpson were aware of these two meetings with CNN and BuzzFeed.

Kramer testified that he, McCain, and McCain's chief of staff, Christopher Brose, met to review the dossier on Nov. 30, 2016. Kramer suggested that McCain "provide a copy of [the dossier] to the director of the FBI and the director of the CIA." McCain later passed a copy of the dossier to James Comey on Dec. 9, 2016. It isn't known whether McCain also provided a copy to then-CIA Director John Brennan. Notably, Brennan did attach a two-page summary of the dossier to the intelligence community assessment that he delivered to outgoing President Barack Obama on Jan. 5, 2017.

Kramer said that he wasn't aware of the content of McCain's Dec. 9 discussion with Comey, noting that he "did not get any readout from the senator on the meeting, but just that it had happened."

Kramer did, however, provide updates to both Steele and Simpson regarding the status of McCain's meeting with Comey, in subsequent discussions with Simpson and Steele:

"It was mostly just to inform him about whether or not the senator had transfer -- transmitted the document to the FBI. Both he and Mr. Steele were -- I kept them apprised of whether the senator was -- where the senator was in terms of his contact with the FBI."

The implications of this statement are significant. Kramer, a private citizen, was providing updates to a former British spy as to what a sitting senator, and chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, was saying to the director of the FBI.

Other members of the media also had advance knowledge of McCain's intention to meet with Comey. Kramer testified that both Mother Jones reporter David Corn and Guardian reporter Julian Borger came to meet with him. According to Kramer, "They were mostly interested in Senator McCain and his, whether he had given it to Director Comey or not."

Several days after McCain, Brose, and Kramer met to discuss the dossier, Kramer said that McCain instructed him to meet with Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, and Celeste Wallander, the senior director for Russia and Central Asia on the National Security Council.

The purpose of the meeting was to verify whether the dossier "was being taken seriously." Both Nuland and Wallander were previously aware of the dossier's existence, and both officials previously knew Steele, whom "they believed to be credible." Kramer said he didn't physically share the dossier with them at this point, but met again with Wallander "around New Years" and "gave her a copy of the document"

Nuland had actually received a copy of the earlier Steele memos back in July 2016.

Steele produced a final memo dated Dec. 13, 2016. According to UK court documents , Kramer, on behalf of McCain, had asked Steele to provide any further intelligence that he had gathered relating to "alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election." Notably, it appears it was this request from McCain that led Steele to produce his Dec. 13 memo.

Although Kramer didn't provide a date, he said he received the final Steele memo sometime after "Senator McCain had provided the copy to Director Comey." We know that Kramer received the final memo prior to Dec. 29 -- when Kramer met with BuzzFeed's Bensinger.

Kramer testified that Bensinger "said he wanted to read them, he asked me if he could take photos of them on his -- I assume it was an iPhone. I asked him not to. He said he was a slow reader, he wanted to read it. And so I said, you know, I got a phone call to make, and I had to go to the bathroom " Kramer said that he "left him to read it for 20, 30 minutes."

Kramer also testified that besides the reporters, he gave a final copy of the dossier to two other people in early January 2017: Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Il.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan's chief of staff, Jonathan Burks.

James Clapper Leaks Details of Obama–Trump Briefings

The ICA on alleged Russian hacking was released internally on Jan. 5, 2017. On this same day, outgoing president Obama held an undisclosed White House meeting to discuss the assessment -- and the attached summation of the dossier -- with national security adviser Susan Rice, FBI Director James Comey, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Rice would later send herself an email documenting the meeting.

The following day, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they gave Obama. Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey, Brennan, and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the ICA and the Steele dossier.

<img class=" wp-image-2833293" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/James-Clapper-1200x1296.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="173" /> Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview that he had done so at the request of Clapper and Brennan, "because that was the part that the leaders of the intelligence community agreed he needed to be told about."

Shortly after Comey's meeting with Trump, both the Trump–Comey meeting and the existence of the dossier were leaked to CNN. The significance of the meeting was material, as Comey noted in a Jan. 7 memo :

"Media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material."

The media had widely dismissed the dossier as unsubstantiated and, therefore, unreportable. It was only after learning that Comey briefed Trump on it that CNN reported on the dossier. The House Intelligence Committee report on Russian election interference confirmed that Clapper personally leaked confirmation of the dossier, along with Comey's meeting with Trump, to CNN:

"The Committee's investigation revealed that President-elect Trump was indeed briefed on the contents of the Steele dossier and when questioned by the Committee, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted that he confirmed the existence of the dossier to the media."

Additionally, the House intelligence report shows Clapper appears to have been the direct source for CNN's Jake Tapper and his Jan. 10 story that disclosed the existence of the dossier:

"When initially asked about leaks related to the ICA in July 2017, former DNI Clapper flatly denied 'discuss[ing] the dossier [compiled by Steele] or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists.' Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the 'dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,' and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic.

"Clapper's discussion with Tapper took place in early January 2017, around the time IC leaders briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump, on 'the Christopher Steele information,' a two-page summary of which was 'enclosed in' the highly-classified version of the ICA."

On Jan. 10, 2017, CNN published the article "Intel Chiefs Presented Trump With Claims of Russian Efforts to Compromise Him " by Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper, and Carl Bernstein. (The article would later be updated and have a Jan. 12, 2017, date.)

The allegations within the dossier were made public, and with reporting of the briefings by intelligence community leaders, instant credibility was given to the dossier's assertions.

Immediately following the CNN story, BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, and the Trump–Russia conspiracy was pushed into the mainstream.

David Kramer was asked about his reaction when CNN broke the story on the dossier. According to his deposition, Kramer stated, "I believe my words were 'Holy [expletive].'"

Kramer, who was actually meeting with The Guardian's Julian Borger when CNN reported on the dossier, said that he quickly spoke with Steele, who "was shocked."

On the following day, Jan. 11, 2017, Clapper issued a statement condemning the leaks -- without revealing the fact that he was the source of the leak.

On Nov. 17, 2016, Clapper submitted his resignation as director of national intelligence; his resignation became effective on Jan. 20, 2017. Later that year, CNN hired Clapper as its national security analyst.

The Effort to Remove General Flynn

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then-national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was interviewed on Jan. 24, 2017, by FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka about two December 2016 conversations that Flynn had had with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

<img class=" wp-image-2833340" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Michael-Flynn-1200x1469.jpg" alt="" width="161" height="197" /> National security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. (Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)

Details of the phone conversation had leaked to the media. Flynn ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI regarding his conversations with Kislyak. It remains unknown to this day who leaked Flynn's classified call -- a far more serious felony violation.

The Washington Post reported in January 2017 that the FBI had found no evidence of wrongdoing in Flynn's actual call with the Russian ambassador. The call, and the matters discussed in it, broke no laws.

Flynn has been portrayed in the media as being suspiciously close to Russia; a dinner in Moscow that occurred in late 2015 is frequently cited as evidence of this.

On Dec. 10, 2015, Flynn attended an event in Moscow to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Russian television network RT. Flynn, who was seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin for the culminating dinner, was also interviewed on national security matters by an RT correspondent. Flynn's speaker's bureau, Leading Authorities Inc., was paid $45,000 for the event and Flynn received $33,000 of the total amount.

Seated at the same table with Flynn was Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate in the 2016 election. By all accounts, including Stein's , Flynn and Putin didn't engage in any real conversation. At the time, Flynn's trip didn't garner significant attention. But it would later be used by the media and the Clinton campaign to push the Russia-collusion narrative.

Notably, as stated by lawyer Robert Kelner, Flynn disclosed his Moscow trip to the Defense Intelligence Agency before he traveled there and provided a full briefing upon his return:

"As has previously been reported, General Flynn briefed the Defense Intelligence Agency, a component agency of the DoD, extensively regarding the RT speaking event trip both before and after the trip, and he answered any questions that were posed by the DIA concerning the trip during those briefings."

Flynn's trip to Russia was first brought to broader attention on July 18, 2016, during a live interview at the Republican National Convention with Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vjvvtuDEQJY?wmode=transparent&wmode=opaque

The Isikoff interview took place on July 18, 2016. Unknown at the time, the matter had also captured the attention of Christopher Steele, who had begun publishing his dossier memos on June 20, 2016.

Contained within an Aug. 10, 2016, memo was this initial reference to Flynn:

"Kremlin engaging with several high profile US players, including STEIN, PAGE and (former DIA Director Michael Flynn) and funding their recent visits to Moscow."

In addition to the obvious questions raised by the timing of Flynn's name appearing in Steele's Aug. 10 memo, is the manner in which Flynn is denoted. All other names are capitalized, in the manner of intelligence briefings. Flynn's name isn't capitalized and, in one case, appears within parentheses.

Steele met with Yahoo News' Isikoff in September 2016 and gave him information from the dossier. The resulting Sept. 23, 2016, article from Isikoff was then cited by the FBI as validating Steele's claims and was featured in the original FISA application , and its three subsequent renewals , for a warrant to spy on Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

Steele wasn't the only person Isikoff was working with. On April 26, 2016, Isikoff published a story on Yahoo News about Paul Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It was later learned from a Democratic National Committee (DNC) email leaked by Wikileaks that Isikoff had been working with Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American operative who was doing consulting work for the DNC. Chalupa met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose alleged ties between Trump, Manafort, and Russia.

The obvious question remains: How did the information on Flynn make its way into the dossier at the time it did, and who provided the information to Steele?

Flynn's 2015 dinner in Moscow was initially used to implicate the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. It was then used as a means to cast doubts on Flynn's ability as Trump's national security adviser. Following Flynn's resignation, it was then used as a means to pursue the ongoing collusion narrative that gained full strength in the early days of the Trump administration.

A Jan. 10, 2017, article in The New York Times, " Trump's National Security Pick Sees Ally in Fight Against Islamists: Russia ," highlighted the efforts:

"In an extraordinary report released last week, the agencies bluntly accused the Russian government of having worked to undermine American democracy and promote the candidacy of Mr. Trump. The report is likely to renew questions about Mr. Flynn's avowed eagerness to work with Russia, and his dismissal of concerns about President Vladimir V. Putin."

Flynn would resign from his position as national security adviser in February 2017. The sequence of events leading to his resignation were both coordinated and orchestrated, with acting Attorney General Sally Yates playing a leading role.

On Jan. 12, 2017, Flynn's Dec. 29, 2016, call with Kislyak was leaked to The Washington Post. The article portrayed Flynn as undermining Obama's Russia sanctions that had been imposed on the same day as Flynn's call with the Russian ambassador.

On Jan. 15, five days before Trump's inauguration, Vice President Mike Pence appeared on "Face the Nation" to defend Flynn's calls.

A few days later, on Jan. 19, Obama officials -- Yates, Clapper, Brennan and Comey -- met to discuss Flynn's situation. The concern they reportedly discussed was that Flynn might have misled Trump administration officials regarding the nature of his call with Kislyak.

<img class="wp-image-2852644 size-full" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2018/10/25/spygate-small.jpg" alt="" width="592" height="724" /> Click on the infographic to enlarge

Yates, Clapper, and Brennan supported informing the Trump administration of their concerns. Comey took a dissenting view. On Jan 23, Yates again pressured Comey, telling the FBI director that she believed Flynn could be vulnerable to blackmail. At this point, according to media reports, Comey relented, despite the FBI finding nothing unlawful in the content of Flynn's calls.

Strzok and Pientka, at the instruction of McCabe, interviewed Flynn the following day. According to court documents, McCabe and other FBI officials "decided the agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they wanted Flynn to be relaxed." It was during this interview that Flynn reportedly lied to the FBI.

The DOJ was provided with a detailed briefing of the Flynn interview on the following day. On Jan. 26, Yates contacted White House counsel Don McGahn, who agreed to meet to discuss the matter. Yates arrived at McGahn's office, bringing Mary McCord, John Carlin's acting replacement as head of the DOJ's National Security Division.

Yates later testified before Congress that the meeting surrounded Flynn's phone calls and his FBI interview. She also testified that Flynn's call and subsequent interview "was a topic of a whole lot of discussion in DOJ and with other members of the intel community." McGahn reportedly asked Yates, "Why does it matter to the DOJ if one White House official lies to another official?"

McGahn called Yates the following day and asked her to return for a second meeting. Yates returned to the White House without McCord. McGahn asked to examine the FBI's evidence on Flynn. Yates said she would respond by the following Monday.

Yates failed to provide McGahn with the FBI's evidence on Flynn. From that point, the pressure on Flynn and the Trump administration escalated -- with help from media reporting.

Flynn resigned on Feb. 13, after it was reported that he had misled Pence about phone conversations he'd had with Kislyak.

The following day, The New York Times reported that "phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials."

With Flynn gone and the Russian narrative firmly established, the conspirators then turned their attention to Trump's newly confirmed attorney general, Jeff Sessions . On March 1, 2017, The Washington Post reported that Sessions had twice had contact with the Russian ambassador, Kislyak. The following day, March 2, Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation.

On the same day that Sessions recused himself, Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, detailed efforts at hampering the newly installed Trump administration, during a March 2, 2017, interview with MSNBC , in which she described how the Obama administration gathered and disseminated intelligence on the Trump team:

"I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill 'Get as much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.'

"The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, [they] would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. That's why you have the leaking."

Note that Farkas said "how we knew," not just "what we knew."

Obama Officials Used Unmasking to Target the Trump Campaign

On Tuesday, March 21, 2017, the chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), met a classified source who showed him "dozens" of intelligence reports. Contained within these reports was evidence of surveillance on the Trump campaign. Nunes held a press conference on March 22 highlighting what he had found:

<img class=" wp-image-2849235" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/Devin-Nunes-1200x1522.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="203" /> Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

"I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions, the intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition. Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting."

In a series of rapid-fire questions and answers, Nunes attempted to elaborate on what he had been shown:

"From what I know right now, it looks like incidental collection. We don't know exactly how that was picked up but we're trying to get to the bottom of it I think the NSA's going to comply. I am concerned – we don't know whether or not the FBI is going to comply. I have placed a call, I'm waiting to talk to Director Comey, hopefully later today.

"I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show the President-elect and his team were at least monitored and disseminated out in intelligence, in what appears to be raw -- well I shouldn't say raw -- but intelligence reporting channels.

"It looks to me like it was all legally collected, but it was essentially a lot of information on the President-elect and his transition team and what they were doing."

The documents Nunes had been shown highlighted the unmasking activities of the FBI, the Obama administration, and CIA Director Brennan in relation to the Trump campaign. Although March 2017 would prove chaotic, the Trump administration had survived the first crucial months, and would now begin to slowly assert its administrative authority.

Comey Testifies No Obstruction by Trump Administration

On May 3, 2017, James Comey testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Under oath, Comey stated that his agency -- and the FBI's investigation -- had not been pressured by the Trump administration:

Sen. Hirono: " So if the attorney general or senior officials at the Department of Justice opposes a specific investigation, can they halt that FBI investigation?"

Mr. Comey: " In theory, yes."

Sen. Hirono: " Has it happened?"

Mr. Comey: " Not in my experience. Because it would be a big deal to tell the FBI to stop doing something that – without an appropriate purpose. I mean where oftentimes they give us opinions that we don't see a case there and so you ought to stop investing resources in it. But I'm talking about a situation where we were told to stop something for a political reason. That would be a very big deal. It's not happened in my experience."

<img class="wp-image-2849240" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/Former-FBI-Director-James-Comey-.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="199" /> FBI Director James Comey. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

Less than a week later, on May 9, Trump fired Comey based on a May 8 recommendation by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein .

Rosenstein would later tell members of Congress: "In one of my first meetings with then-Sen. Jeff Sessions last winter, we discussed the need for new leadership at the FBI. Among the concerns that I recall were to restore the credibility of the FBI, respect the established authority of the Department of Justice, limit public statements and eliminate leaks."

Regarding the recommendation, Rosenstein said: "I wrote it. I believe it. I stand by it."

McCabe's FBI Reaches Out Again to Steele

Within days of Trump's firing of Comey, the FBI, now under the leadership of acting-FBI Director Andrew McCabe, suddenly decided to reestablish direct contact with Christopher Steele through DOJ official Bruce Ohr.

The re-engagement attempt came six months after Steele had been formally terminated by the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016.

The FBI's re-engagement of Ohr was highlighted during a congressional review of some text messages between Ohr and Steele:

Mr. Ohr: " The FBI had asked me a few days before, when I reported to them my latest conversation with Chris Steele, they had had would he -- next time you talk with him, could you ask him if he would be willing to meet again."

Rep. Jordan: " So this is the re-engagement?"

Mr. Ohr: " Yes."

The texts being referenced were sent on May 15, 2017, and refer to a request that Ohr received from the FBI to ask Steele to re-engage with the FBI in the days after Comey had been fired on May 9.

This was the only time the FBI used Ohr to reach out to Steele.

The Battle Between McCabe and Rosenstein

Two days after Comey was fired, on May 11, 2017, McCabe testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. While the hearing's original intent had been to focus on national security threats, Trump's firing of Comey completely altered the topic of the hearing.

McCabe, who agreed that he would notify the committee "of any effort to interfere with the FBI's ongoing investigation into links between Russia and the Trump campaign," told members of Congress that there had been "no effort to impede our investigation to date." In other words, McCabe testified that he was unaware of any evidence of obstruction from Trump or his administration. Notably, Comey's May 3 testimony may have left McCabe with little choice other than to confirm there had been no obstruction.

<img class="wp-image-2849245 " src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/McCabe-1200x1290.jpg" alt="" width="161" height="173" /> Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)

McCabe, however, failed to inform the committee that he was actively considering opening an obstruction-of-justice probe of Trump -- a path he would initiate in a meeting with Rosenstein just five days later.

On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein allegedly suggested to McCabe that he could secretly record Trump. It was at this meeting that McCabe was "pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation into the president," according to witness accounts reported by The Washington Post.

In addition to McCabe, Rosenstein, and McCabe's special counsel, Lisa Page, there were one or two others present, including Rosenstein's chief of staff , James Crowley, and possibly Scott Schools, the senior-most career attorney at the DOJ and a top aide to Rosenstein.

An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post, framed the conversation between McCabe and Rosenstein in an entirely different light, noting that Rosenstein had responded with angry sarcasm to McCabe, saying, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"

This was just five days after McCabe had publicly testified that there was no obstruction on the part of the Trump administration.

<img class="wp-image-2849247 " src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/Rod-Rosenstein-1200x1404.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="187" /> Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Sometime later that same day, both Rosenstein and Trump met with former FBI Director Robert Mueller in the Oval Office. The meeting was reported as being for the FBI director position, but the idea that Mueller would be considered for the FBI director role seems highly unlikely.

Mueller had previously served as the FBI director from 2001 to 2013 -- two years beyond the normal 10-year tenure for an FBI director. In 2011, Obama requested that Mueller stay on as FBI director for an additional two years, which required special congressional approval .

Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel the following day, on May 17, 2017, and in doing so, Rosenstein removed control of the Trump–Russia investigation from McCabe and put it in the hands of Mueller.

This was confirmed in a recent statement by a DOJ spokesperson, who said, "The deputy attorney general in fact appointed special counsel Robert Mueller, and directed that Mr. McCabe be removed from any participation in that investigation."

Following the appointment of Mueller as special counsel, it also appears the FBI's efforts to re-engage with Steele abruptly ended.

'There's No Big There There'

We know the FBI hadn't found any evidence of collusion in the May 2017 timeframe. While McCabe was attempting to open an obstruction investigation, Peter Strzok -- who played a key role in the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign -- texted Lisa Page about lacking evidence of collusion:

"You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I'd be there, no question. I hesitate, in part, because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there."

Page, who was asked about this text during her July 2018 testimony, said, "So I think this represents that even as far as May of 2017, we still couldn't answer the question."

James Baker, who was questioned about the Strzok text, was then asked if he'd seen any evidence to the contrary. He stumbled a bit in his reply:

Rep. Meadows: " Do you have any evidence to the contrary that you observed personally in your official capacity?"

Mr. Baker: " So the difficulty I'm having with your question is, what does 'collusion' mean, and what does 'prove' mean? And so I don't know how to respond to that."

FBI Leadership Speculates on New Trump–Russia Collusion Narrative

In his testimony, Baker disclosed the actual substance of discussions taking place at the upper echelons of the FBI immediately following Comey's firing -- that Vladimir Putin had ordered Trump to fire Comey:

Mr. Baker: " We discussed, so to the best of my recollection, with the same people I described earlier: Mr. McCabe, possibly Mr. Gattis [Carl Ghattas, executive assistant director of the National Security Branch], Mr. Priestap, possibly Lisa Page, possibly Pete Strzok. I don't remember that specifically."

Rep. Ratcliffe: " So there was -- there was a discussion between those folks, possibly all of the folks that you've identified, about whether or not President Trump had been ordered to fire Jim Comey by the Russian Government?"

Mr. Baker: " I wouldn't say ordered. I guess I would say the words I sort of used earlier, acting at the behest of and somehow following directions, somehow executing their will, whether -- and so literally an order or not, I don't know. But -- "

Rep. Ratcliffe: " And so -- "

Mr. Baker: " As a -- it was discussed as a theoretical possibility."

Rep. Ratcliffe: " When was it discussed?"

Mr. Baker: "After the firing, like in the aftermath of the firing."

The FBI, with no actual evidence of collusion after 10 months of investigating, began discussing a complete hypothetical at the highest levels of leadership as a means to possibly open an obstruction-of-justice investigation of the president of the United States.

During his testimony, Baker told lawmakers: "I had a jaundiced eye about everything, yes. I had skepticism about all this stuff. I was concerned about all of this. This whole situation was horrible, and it was novel and we were trying to figure out what to do, and it was highly unusual."

McCabe was later fired for lying to the DOJ inspector general and is currently the subject of a criminal grand jury investigation.

The Fixer

Despite the ongoing assault from the intelligence community and holdovers from the Obama administration, Trump was not entirely without allies.

Dana Boente, one of the nation's highest-profile federal prosecutors, served in a series of critical shifting roles within the Trump administration. Boente, who remained the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia until early 2018, concurrently became the acting attorney general following the firing of Sally Yates. Boente, who was specifically appointed by Trump, was not directly in the line of succession that had been previously laid out under an unusual executive order from the Obama administration.

<img class=" wp-image-2849248" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/Dana-Boente.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="213" /> FBI General Counsel Dana Boente. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Upon the confirmation of Sessions as attorney general, Boente next served as acting deputy attorney general until the confirmation of Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general on April 25, 2017. Boente then became the acting head of the DOJ's National Security Division on April 28, 2017, following the sudden resignation of Mary McCord.

Boente was appointed as FBI general counsel on Jan. 23, 2018, replacing Baker, who was demoted and reassigned. Baker is currently the subject of a criminal leak investigation. Boente remains in his position as FBI general counsel.

On March 31, 2017, the Trump administration asked for the resignations all 46 holdover U.S. attorneys from the Obama administration. Trump refused to accept the resignations of just three of them -- Boente, Rosenstein, and John Huber.

As Sessions noted in a March 29, 2018, letter to congressional chairmen Chuck Grassley, Bob Goodlatte, and Trey Gowdy, Huber was assigned by Sessions to lead a prosecution team and is currently working with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz:

"I already have directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues previously raised by the Committee. Specifically, I asked United States Attorney John W. Huber to lead this effort."

John Carlin's Race With Admiral Rogers

<img class=" wp-image-2833317" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/11/Mike-Rogers-1200x1435.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="191" /> Director of the National Security Agency Admiral Mike Rogers. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

The Carter Page FISA application has been the subject of significant media attention, but there's another element to the story that, although largely ignored, is equally important. It involved what amounted to a surreptitious race between then-NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers and DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin.

Following a March 9, 2016, discovery that outside contractors for the FBI had been accessing raw FISA data since at least 2015, Rogers directed the NSA's Office of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702" at some point in early April 2016 ( Senate testimony & pages 83–84 of court ruling).

On April 18, 2016, Rogers moved aggressively in response to the disclosures. He abruptly shut down all FBI outside-contractor access. At this point, both the FBI and the DOJ's NSD became aware of Rogers's compliance review. They may have known earlier, but they were certainly aware after outside-contractor access was halted.

The DOJ's NSD maintains oversight of the intelligence agencies' use of Section 702 authority. The NSD and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) jointly conduct reviews of the intelligence agencies' Section 702 activities every 60 days. The NSD -- with notice to the ODNI -- is required to report any incidents of agency noncompliance or misconduct to the FISA court.

Instead of issuing individual court orders, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence (DNI) are required by Section 702 to provide the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) with annual certifications that specify categories of foreign intelligence information the government is authorized to acquire, pursuant to Section 702.

The attorney general and the DNI also must certify that Intelligence Community agencies will follow targeting procedures and minimization procedures that are approved by the FISC as part of the certification.

Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of the compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the NSA inspector general and associated FISA abuse to the FISA court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702-compliance review.

On Sept. 27, 2016, the day after he filed the annual certifications, Carlin announced his resignation , which would become effective on Oct. 15, 2016.

<img class=" wp-image-2849255" src="https://img.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2019/03/22/John-Carlin-FBI.jpg" alt="" width="160" height="192" /> John Carlin, DOJ's National Security Division. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On Oct. 4, 2016, a standard follow-up court hearing was held ( Page 19 ), with Carlin present. Again, he made no disclosure of FISA abuse or other related issues. This lack of disclosure would be noted by the court later in the April 2017 ruling:

"The government's failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing [was ascribed] to an institutional 'lack of candor.'"

Rogers appeared formally before the FISA court on Oct. 26, 2016, and presented the written findings of his audit:

"Two days later, on the day the Court otherwise would have had to complete its review of the certifications and procedures, the government made a written submission regarding those compliance problems and the Court held a hearing to address them.

"The government reported that the NSA IG and OCO were conducting other reviews covering different time periods, with preliminary results suggesting that the problem was widespread during all periods under review."

The FISA court was unaware of the FISA "query" violations until they were presented to the court by then-NSA Director Rogers.

Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications, apparently in order to avoid raising suspicions at the FISA court ahead of receiving the Carter Page FISA warrant.

The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page. FISA Abuse & the FISC

Rogers presented his findings directly to the FISA court's presiding judge, Rosemary Collyer. Collyer and Rogers would work together for the next six months, addressing the issues that Rogers had uncovered.

It was Collyer who wrote the April 26, 2017, FISA court ruling on the entire episode. It also was Collyer who signed the original FISA warrant on Carter Page on Oct. 21, 2016, before being apprised of the many issues by Rogers.

The litany of abuses described in the April 26, 2017, ruling was shocking and detailed the use of private contractors by the FBI in relation to Section 702 data. Collyer referred to it as "a very serious Fourth Amendment issue." The FBI was specifically singled out by the court numerous times in the ruling:

"The improper access previously afforded the contractors has been discontinued. The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported."

Rogers informed Collyer of the ongoing FISA abuses by the FBI and NSD just three days after she personally signed the Carter Page FISA warrant.

Virtually every FBI and NSD official with material involvement in the original Carter Page FISA application would later be removed -- either through firing or resignation.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated the wrong month for Christopher Steele's 2016 meeting with the FBI in Rome. The meeting took place in September 2016.

[Aug 23, 2019] Is nonsense economic throes promoted by NYT a deliberate policy or are they really ignorant ?

Aug 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

templar555510 , August 23, 2019 at 8:41 am

Spot-on . Whenever I read this nonsense in the NYT or elsewhere I always ask myself the same question ' Is this deliberate or are they really ignorant ? ' . I suspect the latter, but I could be wrong.

MichaelSF , August 23, 2019 at 12:17 pm

There's no reason it can't be both.

[Aug 23, 2019] Another "soft coup": A federal appeals court ruled late Tuesday that presidential electors who cast the actual ballots for president and vice president are free to vote as they wish and cannot be required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states

Aug 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

"Faithless elector: A court ruling just changed how we pick our president" [ NBC News ]. "A federal appeals court ruled late Tuesday that presidential electors who cast the actual ballots for president and vice president are free to vote as they wish and cannot be required to follow the results of the popular vote in their states . But once the electors are chosen and report in December to cast their votes as members of the Electoral College, they are fulfilling a federal function, and a state's authority has ended.

'The states' power to appoint electors does not include the power to remove them or nullify their votes,' the court said.

Because the Constitution contains no requirement for electors to follow the wishes of a political party, 'the electors, once appointed, are free to vote as they choose,' assuming that they cast their vote for a legally qualified candidate."

Readers will recall this post from December 16, 2016 , where I compared Democrat's scheme of persuading faithless electors to change their (presumed) voters based on intelligence that would not be shown to the public to the Chilean Constitutional order under Pinochet.

Today, we would use the term "soft coup," but I still think that was a pretty good call.

[Aug 23, 2019] Is nonsense economic throes promoted by NYT a deliberate policy or are they really ignorant ?

Aug 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

templar555510 , August 23, 2019 at 8:41 am

Spot-on . Whenever I read this nonsense in the NYT or elsewhere I always ask myself the same question ' Is this deliberate or are they really ignorant ? ' . I suspect the latter, but I could be wrong.

MichaelSF , August 23, 2019 at 12:17 pm

There's no reason it can't be both.

[Aug 22, 2019] Focus in Spygate Scandal Shifts to CIA, Former Director Brennan by Jeff Carlson

Notable quotes:
"... Toward the end of the segment , Bartiromo asked Graham: "Who do you think is the mastermind of this? Whose idea was it to insert Donald Trump into Russia meddling?" ..."
"... Graham responded: "You know, I really am very curious about the role the CIA played here. We know that the FISA warrant application was based on a dossier prepared by Christopher Steele, who was biased against Trump, that was unverified. That's one problem. But this whole intelligence operation -- what role did the CIA play?" ..."
"... "Over the spring of 2016, multiple European allies passed on additional information to the United States about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians. Is this accurate?" ..."
"... "Yes, it is, and it's also quite sensitive. The specifics are quite sensitive." ..."
"... "We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA's foreign intelligence collection authorities. Any time we would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI because they have the legal authority to do it. We would not pursue that type of investigative, you know, sort of leads. We would give it to the FBI. So, we were picking things up that was of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there -- so they could piece it together with whatever they were collecting domestically here." ..."
"... So, it's an intelligence-sharing operation between " ..."
"... Right. We put together a Fusion Center at CIA that brought NSA and FBI officers together with CIA to make sure that those proverbial dots would be connected." ..."
"... "I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign. I know that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials." ..."
"... "We have documents that would suggest that in that briefing the dossier was mentioned to Harry Reid and then, obviously, we're going to have to have conversations. Does that surprise you that Director Brennan would be aware of [the dossier]?" ..."
"... "Yes, sir. Because with all due honesty, if Director Brennan – so we got that information from our source, right? The FBI got this information from our source. If the CIA had another source of that information, I am neither aware of that nor did the CIA provide it to us if they did." ..."
"... "So what you're saying is, is that you had no knowledge of these potential unverified memos prior to the middle part of September in your investigation?" ..."
"... "That is correct, sir." ..."
Aug 22, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com
told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo that Justice Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz was "doing a very in-depth dive about the FISA warrant application" and "the behavior regarding the counterintelligence operation."

Graham noted that he believed Horowitz's report would be coming out in "weeks -- not days, not months" and would prove to be "ugly and damning regarding the Department of Justice's handling of the Russian probe." Graham noted that the IG's report has been delayed because "every time you turn around, you find something new."

Graham said he wants the IG's report to be as declassified as possible in order for the "American public to hear the story."

Graham said that prosecutor John Durham "will be looking at criminality, did somebody violate the law," while Horowitz "will be telling us about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and what should be done internally." He went so far as to mention exploring a possible restructuring of the Department of Justice.

Toward the end of the segment , Bartiromo asked Graham: "Who do you think is the mastermind of this? Whose idea was it to insert Donald Trump into Russia meddling?"

Graham responded: "You know, I really am very curious about the role the CIA played here. We know that the FISA warrant application was based on a dossier prepared by Christopher Steele, who was biased against Trump, that was unverified. That's one problem. But this whole intelligence operation -- what role did the CIA play?"

Graham then went a step further, asking: "Who knew about this in the White House? Here's a question: Was President Obama briefed on the fact that they were opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign? I'd like to know that."

Bartiromo, who noted that Brennan was running the CIA at that time and would have likely provided the Obama briefing, asked Graham if he was going to call Brennan to testify before Congress. Graham responded somewhat cryptically, saying only, "We'll see."

Brennan's Role

Brennan appears to have played a key role in establishing the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign -- including making repeated use of questionable foreign intelligence.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper personally confirmed foreign intelligence involvement during congressional testimony in May 2017:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein: "Over the spring of 2016, multiple European allies passed on additional information to the United States about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians. Is this accurate?"

James Clapper: "Yes, it is, and it's also quite sensitive. The specifics are quite sensitive."

Brennan has testified to Congress that any information, specifically "anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign was shared with the bureau [FBI]." Brennan also admitted that it was his intelligence that helped establish the FBI investigation:

"I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred."

Focus on Intelligence Role Prior to FBI Probe

John Solomon of The Hill, who has extensively covered the Spygate scandal, told Bartiromo in an interview that he was hearing that "John Durham and Bill Barr are focused on the part before the FBI officially got started on July 31, 2016, the period of March to July, and whether intelligence assets -- Western, private, or U.S. -- were deployed in an earlier effort to start probing the Trump campaign and its Russia ties -- maybe lay the breadcrumb trail of evidence that Christopher Steele then collected up and gave to the FBI."

Solomon noted that when Attorney General Barr said, "I believe there was political surveillance going on," this was likely what he was referring to.

This focus on the spring of 2016 is particularly interesting given that during this time, Brennan appeared to have employed the use of reverse targeting on members of the Trump campaign. Reverse targeting refers to the targeting of a foreign individual with the intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen. During an Aug. 17, 2018, interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Brennan said:

"We call it incidental collection in terms of CIA's foreign intelligence collection authorities. Any time we would incidentally collect information on a U.S. person, we would hand that over to the FBI because they have the legal authority to do it. We would not pursue that type of investigative, you know, sort of leads. We would give it to the FBI. So, we were picking things up that was of great relevance to the FBI, and we wanted to make sure that they were there -- so they could piece it together with whatever they were collecting domestically here."

As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of traditional channels -- was gathered on members of the Trump campaign, Brennan began his process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director helped push the FBI toward establishing a formal counterintelligence investigation.

Role of Joseph Mifsud

Solomon also discussed the role of Joseph Mifsud, the individual who told Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos in March 2016 that Russia had Hillary Clinton emails. Solomon noted that he had recently interviewed Stefan Roe, Mifsud's lawyer, who told him that Mifsud "had long worked with Western intelligence" and that he was "asked to connect George Papadopoulos to Russia -- meaning it was an operation, some form of an intelligence operation."

As Solomon noted, this would mean that the "flashpoint that started the whole investigation was, in fact, manufactured from the beginning." Solomon also noted that "both John Durham and two different committees in Congress have recently reached out to get this evidence from the lawyer, which includes an audiotaped deposition that Mr. Mifsud gave his lawyer before he went into hiding."

Bartiromo closed by asking Solomon the same question she put to Graham, "Who do you think is the mastermind?" Solomon responded in a similar fashion to Graham, noting: "I think the CIA. We have to take a closer look at them. We're starting to see some sign of it."

Role of UK Intelligence

Luke Harding, a journalist for The Guardian, had previously reported on the early involvement of UK intelligence and their interaction with the U.S. intelligence community, noting that Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was engaged in collecting information on the Trump campaign and transmitting it to the United States beginning in late 2015:

"In late 2015, the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ was carrying out standard 'collection' against Moscow targets. The intelligence was handed to the U.S. as part of a routine sharing of information," Harding wrote in an article on Nov. 15, 2017.

Additionally, in the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then-head of GCHQ, traveled to Washington to personally meet with Brennan:

"That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the U.S. to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at 'director level,' face-to-face between the two agency chiefs," Harding reported.

Around the same time, Brennan formed an inter-agency task force comprising an estimated six agencies and government departments. Brennan appeared to describe the task force formation during the Aug. 17, 2018, interview with MSNBC's Maddow:

Maddow: " So, it's an intelligence-sharing operation between "

Brennan: " Right. We put together a Fusion Center at CIA that brought NSA and FBI officers together with CIA to make sure that those proverbial dots would be connected."

FBI's 'Mid-Year Exam' Team Shifts to Trump Probe

By the spring of 2016, the Clinton email investigation was winding down. This was due in large part to the fact that the Department of Justice, under Attorney General Loretta Lynch, had decided to set an unusually high threshold for the prosecution of Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that she wouldn't be charged.

In order for Clinton to be prosecuted, the department required the FBI to establish evidence of intent -- even though the gross negligence statute explicitly doesn't require that.

It was at this same time that Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos had his April 26, 2016, meeting with Mifsud, followed a few weeks later with his ill-fated meeting with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in May. The meeting with Downer, then Australia's high commissioner to the UK, was established through a chain of two intermediaries.

Downer's conversation with Papadopoulos was reportedly disclosed to the FBI on July 22, 2016, through Australian government channels, although it also may have come directly from Downer himself via the U.S. Embassy in London. Details from the conversation between Downer and Papadopoulos were then used by the FBI to open its counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016.

Interestingly, the information allegedly relayed by Papadopoulos during the Downer meeting -- that the Russians had damaging information on Clinton -- appears nearly identical to claims later contained in the first memo from former MI6 spy and dossier author Christopher Steele that the FBI obtained in early July 2016.

Steele's first dossier document , dated June 20, 2016, noted that "a dossier of compromising information on Hillary Clinton has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years."

Which raises a good question, recently posed by internet researcher Nick Weil on Twitter: "When the FBI got the tip from Alexander Downer that the Russians had Hillary's 33k emails, the appropriate action would have been to re-open Mid Year Exam, no?"

Rather than deciding to re-examine the "Mid-Year Exam" investigation, which looked into Clinton's handling of her emails and use of a private server, the FBI instead used this information to establish an investigation into the Trump campaign.

What makes this sequence of events even more telling is exactly when the FBI first received information from Steele.

After Steele's company was hired by Fusion GPS in June 2016, he began to reach out to the FBI through Michael Gaeta, an FBI agent and assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Rome whom Steele had worked with on the FIFA case. Gaeta also headed up the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit, which specializes in investigating criminal groups from Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine.

Gaeta would later be identified as Steele's FBI handler, in a July 16, 2018, congressional testimony before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees by FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

Following a reported initial meeting that took place during late June 2016 in Rome, Gaeta traveled to London on July 5, 2016, and met with Steele at the offices of Steele's firm, Orbis. During the July 5 meeting, Steele provided the first memo in his dossier to Gaeta for ultimate transmission back to the FBI and the State Department.

At the exact time that Gaeta was meeting with Steele, on July 5, 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey announced the closure of the FBI's investigation into Clinton's use of a personal e-mail system during her time as secretary of state.

During the July 5, 2016, press conference , Comey recommended that Clinton not be charged, stating, "We cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts." Comey also noted that "although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case."

With the July 5 closure of the Clinton investigation, many of the same FBI agents who had worked on the case were assigned to the agency's July 31, 2016, counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign -- the opening of which was based on little more than details from the conversation between Downer and Papadopoulos, provided by the Australian government. Although all investigative focus fell on the Trump campaign, the fact that Downer said that the Russians had Clinton's emails appears not to have been an impetus for the FBI to reopen the Clinton email investigation.

CIA's Use of Unofficial Intel on Trump Campaign

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who has seen the electronic communication that was used to officially open the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, has publicly stated , "We now know that there was no official intelligence that was used to start this investigation."

Contrast Nunes's statement with what Brennan testified before Congress on May 23, 2017:

"I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign. I know that there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation by the bureau to determine whether or not U.S. persons were actively conspiring, colluding with Russian officials."

Brennan has claimed that he didn't see the dossier until "later in that year; I think it was in December [2016]." Brennan also stated in his testimony that the CIA didn't rely on the Steele dossier and that it "was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done."

https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.327.0_en.html#goog_94470757

https://g.jwpsrv.com/g/gcid-0.1.2.html?notrack Rewind 10 Seconds Next Up Live 00:00 00:00 00:00 Closed Captions Settings Fullscreen click to watch video

But this claim was countered during the July 16, 2018, testimony of former FBI lawyer Page, when the following discussion took place regarding Brennan's August 2016 briefing of then-Sen. Harry Reid:

Rep. Mark Meadows: "We have documents that would suggest that in that briefing the dossier was mentioned to Harry Reid and then, obviously, we're going to have to have conversations. Does that surprise you that Director Brennan would be aware of [the dossier]?"

Lisa Page: "Yes, sir. Because with all due honesty, if Director Brennan – so we got that information from our source, right? The FBI got this information from our source. If the CIA had another source of that information, I am neither aware of that nor did the CIA provide it to us if they did."

While some within the FBI likely had parts of the dossier in early July, Page testified that the counterintelligence investigative team didn't receive it until mid-September -- likely during a trip to Rome, where they met with Steele:

Rep. Meadows: "So what you're saying is, is that you had no knowledge of these potential unverified memos prior to the middle part of September in your investigation?"

Page: "That is correct, sir."

Was Reid's Letter Based on Steele Dossier Info?

In the days following Brennan's briefing, Reid sent a letter on Aug. 27, 2016, to Comey demanding an investigation -- and that the investigation be made public. Based on Brennan's briefing, it's highly likely that Reid knew an FBI investigation was already underway. Some of the details contained within Reid's letter relate to former Trump adviser Carter Page and match details contained only within the Steele dossier at the time.

Specifically, Reid claimed that Page had "conflicts of interest due to investments in Russia energy conglomerate Gazprom" and that he had "met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow in July of 2016, well after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee."

Page's investment in Gazprom was known prior to Reid's letter, but it appears that the first public allegations that Page had met with "high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow" weren't made until Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff published his article " U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin " on Sept. 23, 2016, based on information directly from Christopher Steele.

Prior to Isikoff's September article, the only place that information had been referenced, aside from Reid's letter, was in a July 19, 2016, Steele dossier memo (there is also a mention in a sequentially earlier, but undated memo from Steele). The Steele dossier wouldn't become public until its Jan. 10, 2017, publication by BuzzFeed.

During his May 2017 testimony, Brennan discussed his briefings to the Gang of Eight. Brennan testified that the briefings were done "in consultation with the White House" and stated that he gave the "same briefing to each of the Gang of Eight members." Notably, Brennan conducted his briefings individually over a period of almost a full month between Aug. 11, 2016, and Sept. 6, 2016.

However, Nunes has stated that he wasn't given the same briefing as was Reid, despite that Nunes held the position of chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time. Nunes made this disclosure in a July 28, 2019, interview with Bartiromo, noting: "We now know that John Brennan briefed Harry Reid on the dossier in August 2016. At the same time, he never briefed me or Paul Ryan, who was the speaker of the House at the time."

Brennan's Role in Official Reports

The last major segment of Brennan's efforts involved a series of three reports. The first report was released on Oct. 7, 2016, and the second on Dec. 29, 2016.

The third report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections " -- also known as the intelligence community assessment (ICA) -- was released Jan. 6, 2017.

This final report was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of Trump as president. Notably, Adm. Mike Rogers, then director of the National Security Agency , publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning it only a moderate confidence level.

As previously noted, while Brennan has denied using the dossier in the ICA, he did attach a two-page summary of the dossier to the intelligence community assessment that he, along with Clapper and Comey, delivered to President Barack Obama on Jan. 6, 2017.

Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey, Brennan, and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the ICA and the Steele dossier.

Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview that he'd done so at the request of Clapper and Brennan, "because that was the part that the leaders of the intelligence community agreed he needed to be told about."

[Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed

Highly recommended!
They are afraid to admin that a color revolution was launched to depose Trump after the elections of 2016. Essentially a coup d'état by intelligence agencies and Clinton wing of Democratic Party.
Notable quotes:
"... The 53 House Intel interviews. House Intelligence interviewed many key players in the Russia probe and asked the DNI to declassify those interviews nearly a year ago, after sending the transcripts for review last November. There are several big reveals, I'm told, including the first evidence that a lawyer tied to the Democratic National Committee had Russia-related contacts at the CIA. ..."
"... The Stefan Halper documents. It has been widely reported that European-based American academic Stefan Halper and a young assistant, Azra Turk, worked as FBI sources . ..."
"... Page/Papadopoulos exculpatory statements. Another of Nunes' five buckets, these documents purport to show what the two Trump aides were recorded telling undercover assets or captured in intercepts insisting on their innocence. Papadopoulos told me he told an FBI undercover source in September 2016 that the Trump campaign was not trying to obtain hacked Clinton documents from Russia and considered doing so to be treason. ..."
"... The 'Gang of Eight' briefing materials. These were a series of classified briefings and briefing books the FBI and DOJ provided key leaders in Congress in the summer of 2018 that identify shortcomings in the Russia collusion narrative. ..."
"... The Steele spreadsheet. I wrote recently that the FBI kept a spreadsheet on the accuracy and reliability of every claim in the Steele dossier. According to my sources, it showed as much as 90 percent of the claims could not be corroborated, were debunked or turned out to be open-source internet rumors. ..."
"... The Steele interview. It has been reported, and confirmed, that the DOJ's inspector general (IG) interviewed the former British intelligence operative for as long as 16 hours about his contacts with the FBI while working with Clinton's opposition research firm, Fusion GPS. It is clear from documents already forced into the public view by lawsuits that Steele admitted in the fall of 2016 that he was desperate to defeat Trump ..."
"... The redacted sections of the third FISA renewal application. This was the last of four FISA warrants targeting the Trump campaign; it was renewed in June 2017 after special counsel Robert Mueller 's probe had started, and signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein . It is the one FISA application that House Republicans have repeatedly asked to be released, and I'm told the big reveal in the currently redacted sections of the application is that it contained both misleading information and evidence of intrusive tactics used by the U.S. government to infiltrate Trump's orbit. ..."
"... Records of allies' assistance. Multiple sources have said a handful of U.S. allies overseas – possibly Great Britain, Australia and Italy – were asked to assist FBI efforts to check on Trump connections to Russia. ..."
"... Attorney General Bill Barr's recent comments that "the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign, to me, is unprecedented and it's a serious red line that's been crossed." ..."
Aug 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

As the Russiagate circus attempts to quietly disappear over the horizon, with Democrats preferring to shift the anti-Trump narrative back to "racist", "white supremacist", "xenophobe", and the mainstream media ready to squawk "recession"; the Trump administration may have a few more cards up its sleeve before anyone claims the higher ground in this farce we call an election campaign.

As The Hill's John Solomon details, in September 2018 that President Trump told my Hill.TV colleague Buck Sexton and me that he would order the release of all classified documents showing what the FBI, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other U.S. intelligence agencies may have done wrong in the Russia probe.

And while it's been almost a year since then, of feet-dragging and cajoling and deep-state-fighting, we wonder, given Solomon's revelations below, if the president is getting ready to play his 'Trump' card.

Here are the documents that Solomon believes have the greatest chance of rocking Washington, if declassified:

1.) Christopher Steele 's confidential human source reports at the FBI. These documents, known in bureau parlance as 1023 reports, show exactly what transpired each time Steele and his FBI handlers met in the summer and fall of 2016 to discuss his anti-Trump dossier. The big reveal, my sources say, could be the first evidence that the FBI shared sensitive information with Steele, such as the existence of the classified Crossfire Hurricane operation targeting the Trump campaign. It would be a huge discovery if the FBI fed Trump-Russia intel to Steele in the midst of an election, especially when his ultimate opposition-research client was Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The FBI has released only one or two of these reports under FOIA lawsuits and they were 100 percent redacted. The American public deserves better.

2.) The 53 House Intel interviews. House Intelligence interviewed many key players in the Russia probe and asked the DNI to declassify those interviews nearly a year ago, after sending the transcripts for review last November. There are several big reveals, I'm told, including the first evidence that a lawyer tied to the Democratic National Committee had Russia-related contacts at the CIA.

3.) The Stefan Halper documents. It has been widely reported that European-based American academic Stefan Halper and a young assistant, Azra Turk, worked as FBI sources . We know for sure that one or both had contact with targeted Trump aides like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos at the end of the election. My sources tell me there may be other documents showing Halper continued working his way to the top of Trump's transition and administration, eventually reaching senior advisers like Peter Navarro inside the White House in summer 2017. These documents would show what intelligence agencies worked with Halper, who directed his activity, how much he was paid and how long his contacts with Trump officials were directed by the U.S. government's Russia probe.

4.) The October 2016 FBI email chain. This is a key document identified by Rep. Nunes and his investigators. My sources say it will show exactly what concerns the FBI knew about and discussed with DOJ about using Steele's dossier and other evidence to support a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in October 2016. If those concerns weren't shared with FISA judges who approved the warrant, there could be major repercussions.

5.) Page/Papadopoulos exculpatory statements. Another of Nunes' five buckets, these documents purport to show what the two Trump aides were recorded telling undercover assets or captured in intercepts insisting on their innocence. Papadopoulos told me he told an FBI undercover source in September 2016 that the Trump campaign was not trying to obtain hacked Clinton documents from Russia and considered doing so to be treason. If he made that statement with the FBI monitoring, and it was not disclosed to the FISA court, it could be another case of FBI or DOJ misconduct.

6.) The 'Gang of Eight' briefing materials. These were a series of classified briefings and briefing books the FBI and DOJ provided key leaders in Congress in the summer of 2018 that identify shortcomings in the Russia collusion narrative. Of all the documents congressional leaders were shown, this is most frequently cited to me in private as having changed the minds of lawmakers who weren't initially convinced of FISA abuses or FBI irregularities.

7.) The Steele spreadsheet. I wrote recently that the FBI kept a spreadsheet on the accuracy and reliability of every claim in the Steele dossier. According to my sources, it showed as much as 90 percent of the claims could not be corroborated, were debunked or turned out to be open-source internet rumors. Given Steele's own effort to leak intel in his dossier to the media before Election Day, the public deserves to see the FBI's final analysis of his credibility. A document I reviewed recently showed the FBI described Steele's information as only "minimally corroborated" and the bureau's confidence in him as "medium."

8.) The Steele interview. It has been reported, and confirmed, that the DOJ's inspector general (IG) interviewed the former British intelligence operative for as long as 16 hours about his contacts with the FBI while working with Clinton's opposition research firm, Fusion GPS. It is clear from documents already forced into the public view by lawsuits that Steele admitted in the fall of 2016 that he was desperate to defeat Trump , had a political deadline to make his dirt public, was working for the DNC/Clinton campaign and was leaking to the news media. If he told that to the FBI and it wasn't disclosed to the FISA court, there could be serious repercussions.

9.) The redacted sections of the third FISA renewal application. This was the last of four FISA warrants targeting the Trump campaign; it was renewed in June 2017 after special counsel Robert Mueller 's probe had started, and signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein . It is the one FISA application that House Republicans have repeatedly asked to be released, and I'm told the big reveal in the currently redacted sections of the application is that it contained both misleading information and evidence of intrusive tactics used by the U.S. government to infiltrate Trump's orbit.

10.) Records of allies' assistance. Multiple sources have said a handful of U.S. allies overseas – possibly Great Britain, Australia and Italy – were asked to assist FBI efforts to check on Trump connections to Russia. Members of Congress have searched recently for some key contact documents with British intelligence . My sources say these documents might help explain Attorney General Bill Barr's recent comments that "the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign, to me, is unprecedented and it's a serious red line that's been crossed."

These documents, when declassified, would show more completely how a routine counterintelligence probe was hijacked to turn the most awesome spy powers in America against a presidential nominee in what was essentially a political dirty trick orchestrated by Democrats.

rahrog , 2 minutes ago link

America's Ruling Class is laughing at all you fools still falling for the Rs v Ds scam.

Stupid people lose.

LibertyVibe , 3 minutes ago link

I disagree with Solomon. Nothing will "doom" the swamp unless the righteous few are willing to indict, prosecute and carry out sentencing for the guilty. Exposing the guilty accomplishes nothing, because anyone paying attention already knows of their crimes. Those who want to believe lies will still believe them after the truth comes out.
It's ALL A WASTE OF TIME unless we follow through.

#TheDailyNews #DrainTheSwamp

Lord Raglan , 5 minutes ago link

Where's all the other, earlier docs Trump was going to declassify? Just wondering..............

TheFQ , 16 minutes ago link

Does anyone see a pattern here after the 2009 Tea Party movement began?

2009 - Republicans: "If we win back the House, we can accomplish our agenda."

2011 - Republicans: "If we win back the Senate, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: After winning back the House)

2012 - Republicans: "If we win back the Senate, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 2 YEARS After winning back the House)

2013 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 1 YEAR after winning back the House and the Senate)

2014 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 2 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)

2015 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 3 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)

2016 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 4 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)

2017 - Republicans: "Now that we've won back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: After winning back the House 6 YEARS AGO and the Senate 4 YEARS AGO)

2018 - Republicans: "Now that we've won back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: After winning back the House 7 YEARS AGO and the Senate 5 YEARS AGO)

2019 - John Solomon - "If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed"

I hate to say it, but I DON'T BELIEVE YOU, JOHN.

ALL WE HAVE HEARD OVER THE COURSE OF THIS DECADE IS "IF THIS HAPPENS...THEN THEY ARE DOOMED / WE CAN ACCOMPLISH OUR AGENDA / YADDA YADDA YADDA.

WHEN THE FOLLOWING ARE FOUND GUILTY OF TREASON, THEN AND ONLY THEN WILL I BELIEVE YOU:

WHY ARE THESE TREASONOUS, VILE, CORRUPT CRIMINALS NOT INDICTED FOR TREASON?

WTF?

FFS...

benb , 12 minutes ago link

WHY ARE THESE TREASONOUS, VILE, CORRUPT CRIMINALS NOT INDICTED FOR TREASON?

Because the people doing the indicting are in on it.

enfield0916 , 36 minutes ago link

As if there's any major philosophical difference between the Librtads and Zionist Cocksuckvatives.

Both sides use the .gov agencies to subvert and ignore the Constitution whenever possible. Best example is WikiLeaks and how each party wished Assange would just go away when he revealed damaging information about both sides on multiple occasions.

[Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed

Highly recommended!
They are afraid to admin that a color revolution was launched to depose Trump after the elections of 2016. Essentially a coup d'état by intelligence agencies and Clinton wing of Democratic Party.
Notable quotes:
"... The 53 House Intel interviews. House Intelligence interviewed many key players in the Russia probe and asked the DNI to declassify those interviews nearly a year ago, after sending the transcripts for review last November. There are several big reveals, I'm told, including the first evidence that a lawyer tied to the Democratic National Committee had Russia-related contacts at the CIA. ..."
"... The Stefan Halper documents. It has been widely reported that European-based American academic Stefan Halper and a young assistant, Azra Turk, worked as FBI sources . ..."
"... Page/Papadopoulos exculpatory statements. Another of Nunes' five buckets, these documents purport to show what the two Trump aides were recorded telling undercover assets or captured in intercepts insisting on their innocence. Papadopoulos told me he told an FBI undercover source in September 2016 that the Trump campaign was not trying to obtain hacked Clinton documents from Russia and considered doing so to be treason. ..."
"... The 'Gang of Eight' briefing materials. These were a series of classified briefings and briefing books the FBI and DOJ provided key leaders in Congress in the summer of 2018 that identify shortcomings in the Russia collusion narrative. ..."
"... The Steele spreadsheet. I wrote recently that the FBI kept a spreadsheet on the accuracy and reliability of every claim in the Steele dossier. According to my sources, it showed as much as 90 percent of the claims could not be corroborated, were debunked or turned out to be open-source internet rumors. ..."
"... The Steele interview. It has been reported, and confirmed, that the DOJ's inspector general (IG) interviewed the former British intelligence operative for as long as 16 hours about his contacts with the FBI while working with Clinton's opposition research firm, Fusion GPS. It is clear from documents already forced into the public view by lawsuits that Steele admitted in the fall of 2016 that he was desperate to defeat Trump ..."
"... The redacted sections of the third FISA renewal application. This was the last of four FISA warrants targeting the Trump campaign; it was renewed in June 2017 after special counsel Robert Mueller 's probe had started, and signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein . It is the one FISA application that House Republicans have repeatedly asked to be released, and I'm told the big reveal in the currently redacted sections of the application is that it contained both misleading information and evidence of intrusive tactics used by the U.S. government to infiltrate Trump's orbit. ..."
"... Records of allies' assistance. Multiple sources have said a handful of U.S. allies overseas – possibly Great Britain, Australia and Italy – were asked to assist FBI efforts to check on Trump connections to Russia. ..."
"... Attorney General Bill Barr's recent comments that "the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign, to me, is unprecedented and it's a serious red line that's been crossed." ..."
Aug 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

As the Russiagate circus attempts to quietly disappear over the horizon, with Democrats preferring to shift the anti-Trump narrative back to "racist", "white supremacist", "xenophobe", and the mainstream media ready to squawk "recession"; the Trump administration may have a few more cards up its sleeve before anyone claims the higher ground in this farce we call an election campaign.

As The Hill's John Solomon details, in September 2018 that President Trump told my Hill.TV colleague Buck Sexton and me that he would order the release of all classified documents showing what the FBI, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other U.S. intelligence agencies may have done wrong in the Russia probe.

And while it's been almost a year since then, of feet-dragging and cajoling and deep-state-fighting, we wonder, given Solomon's revelations below, if the president is getting ready to play his 'Trump' card.

Here are the documents that Solomon believes have the greatest chance of rocking Washington, if declassified:

1.) Christopher Steele 's confidential human source reports at the FBI. These documents, known in bureau parlance as 1023 reports, show exactly what transpired each time Steele and his FBI handlers met in the summer and fall of 2016 to discuss his anti-Trump dossier. The big reveal, my sources say, could be the first evidence that the FBI shared sensitive information with Steele, such as the existence of the classified Crossfire Hurricane operation targeting the Trump campaign. It would be a huge discovery if the FBI fed Trump-Russia intel to Steele in the midst of an election, especially when his ultimate opposition-research client was Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The FBI has released only one or two of these reports under FOIA lawsuits and they were 100 percent redacted. The American public deserves better.

2.) The 53 House Intel interviews. House Intelligence interviewed many key players in the Russia probe and asked the DNI to declassify those interviews nearly a year ago, after sending the transcripts for review last November. There are several big reveals, I'm told, including the first evidence that a lawyer tied to the Democratic National Committee had Russia-related contacts at the CIA.

3.) The Stefan Halper documents. It has been widely reported that European-based American academic Stefan Halper and a young assistant, Azra Turk, worked as FBI sources . We know for sure that one or both had contact with targeted Trump aides like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos at the end of the election. My sources tell me there may be other documents showing Halper continued working his way to the top of Trump's transition and administration, eventually reaching senior advisers like Peter Navarro inside the White House in summer 2017. These documents would show what intelligence agencies worked with Halper, who directed his activity, how much he was paid and how long his contacts with Trump officials were directed by the U.S. government's Russia probe.

4.) The October 2016 FBI email chain. This is a key document identified by Rep. Nunes and his investigators. My sources say it will show exactly what concerns the FBI knew about and discussed with DOJ about using Steele's dossier and other evidence to support a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant targeting the Trump campaign in October 2016. If those concerns weren't shared with FISA judges who approved the warrant, there could be major repercussions.

5.) Page/Papadopoulos exculpatory statements. Another of Nunes' five buckets, these documents purport to show what the two Trump aides were recorded telling undercover assets or captured in intercepts insisting on their innocence. Papadopoulos told me he told an FBI undercover source in September 2016 that the Trump campaign was not trying to obtain hacked Clinton documents from Russia and considered doing so to be treason. If he made that statement with the FBI monitoring, and it was not disclosed to the FISA court, it could be another case of FBI or DOJ misconduct.

6.) The 'Gang of Eight' briefing materials. These were a series of classified briefings and briefing books the FBI and DOJ provided key leaders in Congress in the summer of 2018 that identify shortcomings in the Russia collusion narrative. Of all the documents congressional leaders were shown, this is most frequently cited to me in private as having changed the minds of lawmakers who weren't initially convinced of FISA abuses or FBI irregularities.

7.) The Steele spreadsheet. I wrote recently that the FBI kept a spreadsheet on the accuracy and reliability of every claim in the Steele dossier. According to my sources, it showed as much as 90 percent of the claims could not be corroborated, were debunked or turned out to be open-source internet rumors. Given Steele's own effort to leak intel in his dossier to the media before Election Day, the public deserves to see the FBI's final analysis of his credibility. A document I reviewed recently showed the FBI described Steele's information as only "minimally corroborated" and the bureau's confidence in him as "medium."

8.) The Steele interview. It has been reported, and confirmed, that the DOJ's inspector general (IG) interviewed the former British intelligence operative for as long as 16 hours about his contacts with the FBI while working with Clinton's opposition research firm, Fusion GPS. It is clear from documents already forced into the public view by lawsuits that Steele admitted in the fall of 2016 that he was desperate to defeat Trump , had a political deadline to make his dirt public, was working for the DNC/Clinton campaign and was leaking to the news media. If he told that to the FBI and it wasn't disclosed to the FISA court, there could be serious repercussions.

9.) The redacted sections of the third FISA renewal application. This was the last of four FISA warrants targeting the Trump campaign; it was renewed in June 2017 after special counsel Robert Mueller 's probe had started, and signed by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein . It is the one FISA application that House Republicans have repeatedly asked to be released, and I'm told the big reveal in the currently redacted sections of the application is that it contained both misleading information and evidence of intrusive tactics used by the U.S. government to infiltrate Trump's orbit.

10.) Records of allies' assistance. Multiple sources have said a handful of U.S. allies overseas – possibly Great Britain, Australia and Italy – were asked to assist FBI efforts to check on Trump connections to Russia. Members of Congress have searched recently for some key contact documents with British intelligence . My sources say these documents might help explain Attorney General Bill Barr's recent comments that "the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign, to me, is unprecedented and it's a serious red line that's been crossed."

These documents, when declassified, would show more completely how a routine counterintelligence probe was hijacked to turn the most awesome spy powers in America against a presidential nominee in what was essentially a political dirty trick orchestrated by Democrats.

rahrog , 2 minutes ago link

America's Ruling Class is laughing at all you fools still falling for the Rs v Ds scam.

Stupid people lose.

LibertyVibe , 3 minutes ago link

I disagree with Solomon. Nothing will "doom" the swamp unless the righteous few are willing to indict, prosecute and carry out sentencing for the guilty. Exposing the guilty accomplishes nothing, because anyone paying attention already knows of their crimes. Those who want to believe lies will still believe them after the truth comes out.
It's ALL A WASTE OF TIME unless we follow through.

#TheDailyNews #DrainTheSwamp

Lord Raglan , 5 minutes ago link

Where's all the other, earlier docs Trump was going to declassify? Just wondering..............

TheFQ , 16 minutes ago link

Does anyone see a pattern here after the 2009 Tea Party movement began?

2009 - Republicans: "If we win back the House, we can accomplish our agenda."

2011 - Republicans: "If we win back the Senate, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: After winning back the House)

2012 - Republicans: "If we win back the Senate, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 2 YEARS After winning back the House)

2013 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 1 YEAR after winning back the House and the Senate)

2014 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 2 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)

2015 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 3 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)

2016 - Republicans: "If we win back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: 4 YEARS after winning back the House and the Senate)

2017 - Republicans: "Now that we've won back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: After winning back the House 6 YEARS AGO and the Senate 4 YEARS AGO)

2018 - Republicans: "Now that we've won back the Presidency, we can accomplish our agenda." (NOTE: After winning back the House 7 YEARS AGO and the Senate 5 YEARS AGO)

2019 - John Solomon - "If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed"

I hate to say it, but I DON'T BELIEVE YOU, JOHN.

ALL WE HAVE HEARD OVER THE COURSE OF THIS DECADE IS "IF THIS HAPPENS...THEN THEY ARE DOOMED / WE CAN ACCOMPLISH OUR AGENDA / YADDA YADDA YADDA.

WHEN THE FOLLOWING ARE FOUND GUILTY OF TREASON, THEN AND ONLY THEN WILL I BELIEVE YOU:

WHY ARE THESE TREASONOUS, VILE, CORRUPT CRIMINALS NOT INDICTED FOR TREASON?

WTF?

FFS...

benb , 12 minutes ago link

WHY ARE THESE TREASONOUS, VILE, CORRUPT CRIMINALS NOT INDICTED FOR TREASON?

Because the people doing the indicting are in on it.

enfield0916 , 36 minutes ago link

As if there's any major philosophical difference between the Librtads and Zionist Cocksuckvatives.

Both sides use the .gov agencies to subvert and ignore the Constitution whenever possible. Best example is WikiLeaks and how each party wished Assange would just go away when he revealed damaging information about both sides on multiple occasions.

[Aug 20, 2019] Trump Promised Massive Infrastructure Projects -- Instead We ve Gotten Nothing>

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... So far, that wager has netted Americans nothing. No money. No deal. No bridges, roads or leadless water pipes. And there's nothing on the horizon since Trump stormed out of the most recent meeting. That was a three-minute session in May with Democratic leaders at which Trump was supposed to discuss the $2 trillion he had proposed earlier to spend on infrastructure. In a press conference immediately afterward, Trump said if the Democrats continued to investigate him, he would refuse to keep his promises to the American people to repair the nation's infrastructure. ..."
"... Candidate Donald Trump knew it was no joke. On the campaign trail, he said U.S. infrastructure was "a mess" and no better than that of a "third-world country. " When an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia in 2015, killing eight and injuring about 200 , he tweeted , "Our roads, airports, tunnels, bridges, electric grid -- all falling apart." Later, he tweeted , "The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me." ..."
"... Donald Trump promised to make America great again. And that wouldn't be possible if America's rail system, locks, dams and pipelines -- that is, its vital organs -- were "a mess." Trump signed what he described as a contract with American voters to deliver an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his administration. ..."
"... He mocked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton's proposal to spend $275 billion. "Her number is a fraction of what we're talking about. We need much more money to rebuild our infrastructure," he told Fox News in 2016 . "I would say at least double her numbers, and you're going to really need a lot more than that." ..."
"... In August of 2016, he promised , "We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports that our country deserves. American cars will travel the roads, American planes will connect our cities, and American ships will patrol the seas. American steel will send new skyscrapers soaring. We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation." ..."
"... That contract Trump signed with American voters to produce an infrastructure plan in the first 100 days: worthless. It never happened. He gave Americans an Infrastructure Week in June of 2017, though, and at just about the 100-day mark, predicted infrastructure spending would "take off like a rocket ship." Two more Infrastructure Weeks followed in the next two years, but no money. ..."
"... This year, by which time the words Infrastructure Week had become a synonym for promises not kept, Trump met on April 30 with top Democratic leaders and recommended a $2 trillion infrastructure investment. Democrats praised Trump afterward for taking the challenge seriously and for agreeing to find the money. ..."
"... Almost immediately, Trump began complaining that Democrats were trying to hoodwink him into raising taxes to pay for the $2 trillion he had offered to spend. ..."
"... Trump and the Republicans relinquished one way to pay for infrastructure when they passed a tax cut for the rich and corporations in December of 2017. As a result, the rich and corporations pocketed hundreds of billions -- $1 trillion over 10 years -- and Trump doesn't have that money to invest in infrastructure. Corporations spent their tax break money on stock buybacks, further enriching the already rich. They didn't invest in American manufacturing or worker training or wage increases. ..."
"... I have seen this movie before. A State builds a highway, it then leases that highway to a corporation for a bucket of cash which it uses to bribe the electorate to win the next election or two. The corporation shoves brand new toll booths on the highway charging sky high rates which puts a crimp in local economic activity. After the lease is up after twenty years, the State gets to take over the highway again to find that the corporation cut back on maintenance so that the whole highway has to be rebuilt again. Rinse and repeat. ..."
"... Promises by any narcissist mean nothing. You cannot hang your hat on any word that Trump speaks, because it's not about you or anyone else, but about him and only him. ..."
"... Here is a heads up. If any infrastructure is done it will be airports. The elite fly and couldn't give a crap about the suspension and wheel destroying potholes we have to slalom around every day. They also don't care that the great unwashed waste thousands of hours stuck in traffic when a bridge is closed or collapses. ..."
Jul 26, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. In a bit of synchronicity, when a reader was graciously driving me to the Department of Motor Vehicles (a schlepp in the wilds of Shelby County), she mentioned she'd heard local media reports that trucks had had their weight limits lowered due to concern that some overpasses might not be able to handle the loads. Of course, a big reason infrastructure spending has plunged in the US is that it's become an excuse for "public-private partnerships," aka looting, when those deals take longer to get done and produce bad results so often that locals can sometimes block them.

By Tom Conway, the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW) . Produced by the Independent Media Institute

Bad news about infrastructure is as ubiquitous as potholes. Failures in a 108-year-old railroad bridge and tunnel cost New York commuters thousands of hours in delays. Illinois doesn't regularly inspect , let alone fix, decaying bridges. Flooding in Nebraska caused nearly half a billion dollars in road and bridge damage -- just this year.

No problem, though. President Donald Trump promised to fix all this. The great dealmaker, the builder of eponymous buildings, the star of "The Apprentice," Donald Trump, during his campaign, urged Americans to bet on him because he'd double what his opponent would spend on infrastructure. Double, he pledged!

So far, that wager has netted Americans nothing. No money. No deal. No bridges, roads or leadless water pipes. And there's nothing on the horizon since Trump stormed out of the most recent meeting. That was a three-minute session in May with Democratic leaders at which Trump was supposed to discuss the $2 trillion he had proposed earlier to spend on infrastructure. In a press conference immediately afterward, Trump said if the Democrats continued to investigate him, he would refuse to keep his promises to the American people to repair the nation's infrastructure.

The comedian Stephen Colbert described the situation best, saying Trump told the Democrats: "It's my way or no highways."

The situation, however, is no joke. Just ask the New York rail commuters held up for more than 2,000 hours over the past four years by bridge and tunnel breakdowns. Just ask the American Society of Civil Engineers , which gave the nation a D+ grade for infrastructure and estimated that if more than $1 trillion is not added to currently anticipated spending on infrastructure, "the economy is expected to lose almost $4 trillion in GDP , resulting in a loss of 2.5 million jobs in 2025."

Candidate Donald Trump knew it was no joke. On the campaign trail, he said U.S. infrastructure was "a mess" and no better than that of a "third-world country. " When an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia in 2015, killing eight and injuring about 200 , he tweeted , "Our roads, airports, tunnels, bridges, electric grid -- all falling apart." Later, he tweeted , "The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me."

Donald Trump promised to make America great again. And that wouldn't be possible if America's rail system, locks, dams and pipelines -- that is, its vital organs -- were "a mess." Trump signed what he described as a contract with American voters to deliver an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his administration.

He mocked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton's proposal to spend $275 billion. "Her number is a fraction of what we're talking about. We need much more money to rebuild our infrastructure," he told Fox News in 2016 . "I would say at least double her numbers, and you're going to really need a lot more than that."

In August of 2016, he promised , "We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports that our country deserves. American cars will travel the roads, American planes will connect our cities, and American ships will patrol the seas. American steel will send new skyscrapers soaring. We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation."

In his victory speech and both of his State of the Union addresses, he pledged again to be the master of infrastructure. "We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, school, hospitals. And we will put millions of our people to work," he said the night he won.

That sounds excellent. That's exactly what 75 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll said they wanted. That would create millions of family-supporting jobs making the steel, aluminum, concrete, pipes and construction vehicles necessary to accomplish infrastructure repair. That would stimulate the economy in ways that benefit the middle class and those who are struggling.

That contract Trump signed with American voters to produce an infrastructure plan in the first 100 days: worthless. It never happened. He gave Americans an Infrastructure Week in June of 2017, though, and at just about the 100-day mark, predicted infrastructure spending would "take off like a rocket ship." Two more Infrastructure Weeks followed in the next two years, but no money.

Trump finally announced a plan in February of 2018 , at a little over the 365-day mark, to spend $1.5 trillion on infrastructure. It went nowhere because it managed to annoy both Democrats and Republicans.

It was to be funded by only $200 billion in federal dollars -- less than what Hillary Clinton proposed. The rest was to come from state and local governments and from foreign money interests and the private sector. Basically, the idea was to hand over to hedge fund managers the roads and bridges and pipelines originally built, owned and maintained by Americans. The fat cats at the hedge funds would pay for repairs but then toll the assets in perpetuity. Nobody liked it.

That was last year. This year, by which time the words Infrastructure Week had become a synonym for promises not kept, Trump met on April 30 with top Democratic leaders and recommended a $2 trillion infrastructure investment. Democrats praised Trump afterward for taking the challenge seriously and for agreeing to find the money.

"It couldn't have gone any better," Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal , D-Mass., told the Washington Post, even though Neal was investigating Trump for possible tax fraud.

Almost immediately, Trump began complaining that Democrats were trying to hoodwink him into raising taxes to pay for the $2 trillion he had offered to spend.

Trump and the Republicans relinquished one way to pay for infrastructure when they passed a tax cut for the rich and corporations in December of 2017. As a result, the rich and corporations pocketed hundreds of billions -- $1 trillion over 10 years -- and Trump doesn't have that money to invest in infrastructure. Corporations spent their tax break money on stock buybacks, further enriching the already rich. They didn't invest in American manufacturing or worker training or wage increases.

Three weeks after the April 30 meeting, Trump snubbed Democrats who returned to the White House hoping the president had found a way to keep his promise to raise $2 trillion for infrastructure. Trump dismissed them like naughty schoolchildren. He told them he wouldn't countenance Democrats simultaneously investigating him and bargaining with him -- even though Democrats were investigating him at the time of the April meeting and one of the investigators -- Neal -- had attended.

Promise not kept again.

Trump's reelection motto, Keep America Great, doesn't work for infrastructure. It's still a mess. It's the third year of his presidency, and he has done nothing about it. Apparently, he's saving this pledge for his next term.

In May, he promised Louisianans a new bridge over Interstate 10 -- only if he is reelected. He said the administration would have it ready to go on "day one, right after the election." Just like he said he'd produce an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his first term.

He's doubling down on the infrastructure promises. His win would mean Americans get nothing again.

Arizona Slim , July 26, 2019 at 6:26 am

Paging Bernie Sanders: You need to be all over this Trump-fail. And sooner, rather than later.

The Rev Kev , July 26, 2019 at 6:40 am

The whole thing seems so stupid. The desperate need is there, the people are there to do the work, the money spent into the infrastructure would give a major boost to the real economy, the completed infrastructure would give the real economy a boost for years & decades to come – it is win-win right across the board. But the whole thing is stalled because the whole deal can't be rigged to give a bunch of hedge fund managers control of that infrastructure afterwards. If it did, the constant rents that Americans would have to pay to use this infrastructure would bleed the economy for decades to come.

I have seen this movie before. A State builds a highway, it then leases that highway to a corporation for a bucket of cash which it uses to bribe the electorate to win the next election or two. The corporation shoves brand new toll booths on the highway charging sky high rates which puts a crimp in local economic activity. After the lease is up after twenty years, the State gets to take over the highway again to find that the corporation cut back on maintenance so that the whole highway has to be rebuilt again. Rinse and repeat.

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, can you imagine how history would have gone if they had been handed over to a bunch of corporations who would have built toll booths over the whole network? Would have done wonders for the American economy I bet.

Wukchumni , July 26, 2019 at 6:48 am

One of the things discussed at our town hall meeting the other night, was a much needed $481k public bathroom, and that was the low bid.

It has to be ADA compliant with ramps, etc.

$48,100 seems like it'd be plenty to get 'r done, as you can build a house with a couple of bathrooms, and a few bedrooms, a kitchen and living room for maybe $200k.

Ignacio , July 26, 2019 at 8:58 am

And if toll revenues don't come as high as expected, mother state will come to the rescue of those poor fund managers. I find it amazing that Trump uses the stupid Russia, Russia, Russia! fixation of democrats as an excuse to do nothing about infrastructure. Does this work with his electorate?

cnchal , July 26, 2019 at 7:09 am

Tom, grow up.

Promises by any narcissist mean nothing. You cannot hang your hat on any word that Trump speaks, because it's not about you or anyone else, but about him and only him.

Here is a heads up. If any infrastructure is done it will be airports. The elite fly and couldn't give a crap about the suspension and wheel destroying potholes we have to slalom around every day. They also don't care that the great unwashed waste thousands of hours stuck in traffic when a bridge is closed or collapses.

Carla , July 26, 2019 at 7:47 am

Well, fix the airports and you've still got Boeing, self-destructing as fast as it can. And Airbus can't fill all the orders no matter how hard it tries. Guess everybody will just have to . stay home.

WheresOurTeddy , July 26, 2019 at 7:16 am

Are all the coal jobs back? How about the manufacturing? NAFTA been repealed and replaced with something better yet? How's the wall coming and has Mexico sent the check yet? Soldiers back from Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria yet?

Got that tax cut for rich people and a ton of conservative judges through though, didn't he?

Katniss Everdeen , July 26, 2019 at 8:17 am

"It couldn't have gone any better," Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal, D-Mass., told the Washington Post, even though Neal was investigating Trump for possible tax fraud.

What a surprise. It's simply "amazing" that the insane status quo jihad that has been waged against Trump since he announced his candidacy had real consequences for the country. Who would have thought that calling ANY president ignorant, ugly, fat, a liar, a traitor, a cheater, an agent of Putin, a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, a bigot, an isolationist and an illegitimate occupant of the White House 24/7 since he or she won the election would make actual accomplishment nearly impossible.

The mere mention of his name on college campuses has even been legitimized as a fear-inducing, "safety"-threatening "microagression."

It's just so rich that having determined to prevent Trump from doing absolutely anything he promised during the campaign by any and all means, regardless of what the promise was or how beneficial it may have been, his numerous, bilious "critics" now have the gonads to accuse him of not getting anything done.

With all due respect to the author of this piece, the result he laments was exactly the point of this relentless nightmare of Trump derangement to which the nation has been subjected for three years. I tend to think that the specific promise most targeted for destruction was his criticism of NATO and "infrastructure" was collateral damage, but that's neither here nor there.

The washington status quo has succeeded in its mission to cripple a president it could not defeat electorally, and now tries to blame him for their success. Cutting off your nose to spite your face has always been a counterproductive strategy.

[Aug 20, 2019] Propagandists Freak Out Over Gabbard s Destruction of Harris by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
all neocon scum instantly had risen to the surface to defend the neoliberal empire and its wars...
Notable quotes:
"... In the race to determine who will serve as commander in chief of the most powerful military force in the history of civilization, night two of the CNN Democratic presidential debates saw less than six minutes dedicated to discussing U.S. military policy during the 180-minute event. ..."
"... That's six, as in the number before seven. Not 60. Not 16. Six. From the moment Jake Tapper said "I want to turn to foreign policy" to the moment Don Lemon interrupted Rep. Tulsi Gabbard just as she was preparing to correctly explain how President Donald Trump is supporting Al-Qaeda in Idlib , approximately five minutes and 50 seconds had elapsed. The questions then turned toward the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections and impeachment proceedings. ..."
"... But the near-absence of foreign policy discussion didn't stop the Hawaii lawmaker from getting in some unauthorized truth-telling anyway. Attacking the authoritarian prosecutorial record of Sen. Kamala Harris to thunderous applause from the audience, Gabbard criticized the way her opponent "put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana;" "blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the court's forced her to do so;" "kept people in prisons beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California;" and "fought to keep the cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way." ..."
"... That was all it took. Harris's press secretary Ian Sams unleashed a string of tweets about Gabbard being an "Assad apologist," which were followed by a deluge of establishment narrative managers who sent the word "Assad" trending on Twitter, at times when Gabbard's name somehow failed to trend despite being the top-searched candidate on Google after the debate. ..."
"... "Somehow I have a hard time believing that 'Assad' is the top trending item in the United States but 'Tulsi' is nowhere to be found," tweeted journalist Michael Tracey. ..."
"... It really is interesting how aggressively the narrative managers thrust this line into mainstream consciousness all at the same time. ..."
"... The Washington Post 's Josh Rogin went on a frantic, lie-filled Twitter storm as soon as he saw an opportunity, claiming with no evidence whatsoever that Gabbard lied when she said she met with Assad for purposes of diplomacy and that she "helped Assad whitewash a mass atrocity," and falsely claiming that " she praised Russian bombing of Syrian civilians ." ..."
"... War is the glue that holds the empire together . A politician can get away with opposing some aspects of the status quo when it comes to healthcare or education, but war as a strategy for maintaining global dominance is strictly off limits. This is how you tell the difference between someone who actually wants to change things and someone who's just going through the motions for show; the real rebels forcefully oppose the actual pillars of empire by calling for an end to military bloodshed, while the performers just stick to the safe subjects. ..."
"... The shrill, hysterical pushback that Gabbard received last night was very encouraging, because it means she's forcing them to fight back. In a media environment where the war propaganda machine normally coasts along almost entirely unhindered in mainstream attention, the fact that someone has positioned themselves to move the needle like this says good things for our future. If our society is to have any chance of ever throwing off the omnicidal, ecocidal power establishment which keeps us in a state of endless war and soul-crushing oppression, the first step is punching a hole in the narrative matrix which keeps us hypnotized into believing that this is all normal and acceptable. ..."
"... Her immediate response to the first question directed to her, regardless of topic, should be prefaced with something like "I would appreciate the media and the opposition please refrain from deliberately misrepresenting my policies and remarks, most notably trying to tar me with more of the fallacious war propaganda they both dispense so freely and without any foundation. ..."
"... Gabbard has any chance to be elected only if she starts vigorously throwing over the tables of the money-lenders in the temple, so to speak. ..."
"... Hide the empire in plain sight, that way no one will notice it. Then someone like Tulsi Gabbard goes and talks about it on national TV. Can't have that, can we? People might begin to see it if we do that ..."
"... Pro war democrats are now using the Russian ruse to go after anti war candidates like Gabbard. It's despicable to even insinuate Gabbard is working for Putin or had any other rationale for going to Syria than seeking peace. This alone proved Harris unfit for the presidency. Her awful record speaks for itself. ..."
"... And she has courage. She quit the DNC to support Bernie and went to Syria to seek the truth and peace. ..."
"... She is unique. The media is trying Ron-Paul-Type-Blackout on her, lest the public catches on to the fact that she is exactly what the country needs. ..."
"... Warmonger candidates had better reconsider their positions if they believe that voters will back their stance. Just ask Hillary Clinton how that worked out for her and her warrior mentality in 2016. ..."
"... she has cross over appeal with republicans who want out of the wars. People like Tucker Carson and Paul Craig Roberts support her. Thats why the DNC hate her.. ..."
"... There's an obvious effort to Jane Fodarize Tulsi before she threatens the favorites. She seems to keep a cool head, so much of it is likely to backfire and bring the narrative back where it belongs. ..."
"... In contrast to Gabbard, a service member with extensive middle east combat experience, Cooper is a chickenhawk and a naif to murder and torture; ..."
"... "Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Whoever disrupts that narrative control is doing the real work." ..."
"... I read "narrative control" as brainwashing. ..."
Aug 02, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Establishment narrative managers distracted attention from a notable antiwar contender, seizing instead the chance to marshal an old smear against her, writes Caitlin Johnstone.

In the race to determine who will serve as commander in chief of the most powerful military force in the history of civilization, night two of the CNN Democratic presidential debates saw less than six minutes dedicated to discussing U.S. military policy during the 180-minute event.

That's six, as in the number before seven. Not 60. Not 16. Six. From the moment Jake Tapper said "I want to turn to foreign policy" to the moment Don Lemon interrupted Rep. Tulsi Gabbard just as she was preparing to correctly explain how President Donald Trump is supporting Al-Qaeda in Idlib , approximately five minutes and 50 seconds had elapsed. The questions then turned toward the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections and impeachment proceedings.

Night one of the CNN debates saw almost twice as much time, with a whole 11 minutes by my count dedicated to questions of war and peace for the leadership of the most warlike nation on the planet. This discrepancy could very well be due to the fact that night two was the slot allotted to Gabbard, whose campaign largely revolves around the platform of ending U.S. warmongering.

CNN is a virulent establishment propaganda firm with an extensive history of promoting lies and brazen psyops in facilitation of U.S. imperialism, so it would make sense that they would try to avoid a subject which would inevitably lead to unauthorized truth-telling on the matter.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Cfp_IIdVnXs?feature=oembed

But the near-absence of foreign policy discussion didn't stop the Hawaii lawmaker from getting in some unauthorized truth-telling anyway. Attacking the authoritarian prosecutorial record of Sen. Kamala Harris to thunderous applause from the audience, Gabbard criticized the way her opponent "put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana;" "blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the court's forced her to do so;" "kept people in prisons beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California;" and "fought to keep the cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way."

Harris Folded Under Pressure

Harris, who it turns out fights very well when advancing but folds under pressure, had no answer for Gabbard's attack, preferring to focus on attacking former Vice President Joe Biden instead.

Later, when she was a nice safe distance out of Gabbard's earshot, she uncorked a long-debunked but still effective smear that establishment narrative managers have been dying for an excuse to run wild with.

"This, coming from someone who has been an apologist for an individual, Assad, who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches," Harris told Anderson Cooper after the debate, referring to the president of Syria. "She who has embraced and been an apologist for him in a way that she refuses to call him a war criminal. I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously and so I'm prepared to move on."

That was all it took. Harris's press secretary Ian Sams unleashed a string of tweets about Gabbard being an "Assad apologist," which were followed by a deluge of establishment narrative managers who sent the word "Assad" trending on Twitter, at times when Gabbard's name somehow failed to trend despite being the top-searched candidate on Google after the debate.

As of this writing, "Assad" is showing on the No. 5 trending list on the side bar of Twitter's new layout, while Gabbard's name is nowhere to be seen. This discrepancy has drawn criticism from numerous Gabbard defenders on the platform .

"Somehow I have a hard time believing that 'Assad' is the top trending item in the United States but 'Tulsi' is nowhere to be found," tweeted journalist Michael Tracey.

It really is interesting how aggressively the narrative managers thrust this line into mainstream consciousness all at the same time.

The Washington Post 's Josh Rogin went on a frantic, lie-filled Twitter storm as soon as he saw an opportunity, claiming with no evidence whatsoever that Gabbard lied when she said she met with Assad for purposes of diplomacy and that she "helped Assad whitewash a mass atrocity," and falsely claiming that " she praised Russian bombing of Syrian civilians ."

... ... ...

War is the glue that holds the empire together . A politician can get away with opposing some aspects of the status quo when it comes to healthcare or education, but war as a strategy for maintaining global dominance is strictly off limits. This is how you tell the difference between someone who actually wants to change things and someone who's just going through the motions for show; the real rebels forcefully oppose the actual pillars of empire by calling for an end to military bloodshed, while the performers just stick to the safe subjects.

The shrill, hysterical pushback that Gabbard received last night was very encouraging, because it means she's forcing them to fight back. In a media environment where the war propaganda machine normally coasts along almost entirely unhindered in mainstream attention, the fact that someone has positioned themselves to move the needle like this says good things for our future. If our society is to have any chance of ever throwing off the omnicidal, ecocidal power establishment which keeps us in a state of endless war and soul-crushing oppression, the first step is punching a hole in the narrative matrix which keeps us hypnotized into believing that this is all normal and acceptable.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Whoever disrupts that narrative control is doing the real work.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Follow her work on Facebook , Twitter , or her website . She has a podcast and a new book " Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers ."

Realist , August 2, 2019 at 20:06

I'm going to venture a guess and say that the media fixers for the Deep State's political song and dance show are not going to allow Tulsi back on that stage for the next installation of "Killer Klowns on Parade." Just as she had the right to skewer Harris for her sweeping dishonesty and hypocrisy in public office, she has just as much right to proactively respond to the smears and slanders directed against her by both the party establishment and its media colluders.

Her immediate response to the first question directed to her, regardless of topic, should be prefaced with something like "I would appreciate the media and the opposition please refrain from deliberately misrepresenting my policies and remarks, most notably trying to tar me with more of the fallacious war propaganda they both dispense so freely and without any foundation. It is beneath all dignity to attempt to win elections with lies and deceptions, just as it is to use them as pretexts for wars of choice that bring no benefit to either America or the countries being attacked. As I've repeatedly made clear, I only want to stop the wasteful destruction and carnage, but you deceitfully try to imply that I'm aligned with one of the several foreign governments that our leaders have needlessly and foolishly chosen to make war upon. You've done so on this stage and you've continued this misrepresentation throughout the American media. Please stop it. Play fair. Confine your remarks only to the truth."

That would raise a kerfuffle, but one that is distinctly called for. Going gently towards exit stage right consequent to their unanswered lies will accomplish nothing. If the Dems choose to excommunicate her for such effrontery, she should run as a Green, or an independent. This is a danger the Dem power structure dare not allow to happen. They don't even want the particulars of the actual history of these wars discussed in public. Thus, they will not even give her the chance to offer a rejoinder such as I outlined above. They will simply rule that she does not qualify for any further debates based on her polling numbers (which can be faked) and/or her financial support numbers. That is nominally how they've already decided to winnow down the field to the few who are acceptable to the Deep State–preferably Harris, Biden or Booker. Someone high profile but owned entirely by the insider elites. Yes, this rules out Bernie and maybe even Warren unless she secretly signed a blood pact with Wall Street to walk away from her platform if elected.

Gabbard has any chance to be elected only if she starts vigorously throwing over the tables of the money-lenders in the temple, so to speak.

Tom Kath , August 2, 2019 at 20:05

There is a big difference between "PRINCIPLES" and "POLICY". Principles should never change, but policy must. This is where I believe Tulsi can not only make a big difference, but ultimately even win. – Not this time around perhaps, she is young and this difference will take time to reveal itself.

O Society , August 2, 2019 at 16:39

Hide the empire in plain sight, that way no one will notice it. Then someone like Tulsi Gabbard goes and talks about it on national TV. Can't have that, can we? People might begin to see it if we do that

http://osociety.org/2019/08/02/how-to-hide-an-empire-a-history-of-the-greater-united-states/

ranney , August 2, 2019 at 16:24

What is happening to Tulsi (the extraordinary spate of lies about her relationship with Assad coming from all directions) provides a good explanation why Bernie and Elizabeth have been smart not to make many comments about foreign policy.

The few Bernie has made indicate to me that he is sympathetic to the Palestinian problem, but smart enough to keep quiet on the subject until, God willing, he is in a position to actually do something about it. It will be interesting to see if debate questions force them to be more forthcoming about their opinions.

Emma Peele , August 2, 2019 at 16:05

Pro war democrats are now using the Russian ruse to go after anti war candidates like Gabbard. It's despicable to even insinuate Gabbard is working for Putin or had any other rationale for going to Syria than seeking peace. This alone proved Harris unfit for the presidency. Her awful record speaks for itself.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , August 2, 2019 at 15:58

Tulsi is the most original and interesting candidate to come along in many years. She's authentic, something not true of most of that pack.

And not true of most of the House and Senate with their oh-so-predictable statements on most matters and all those crinkly-faced servants of plutocracy. She has courage too, a rare quality in Washington where, indeed, cowards often do well. Witness Trump, Biden, Clinton, Bush, Johnson, et al.

If there's ever going to be any change in a that huge country which has become a force for darkness and fear in much of the world, it's going to come from the likes of Tulsi. But I'm not holding my breath. It's clear from many signals, the establishment very much dislikes her. So, the odds are, they'll make sure she doesn't win.

Still, I admire a valiant try. Just as I admire honesty, something almost unheard of in Washington, but she has it, in spades.

emma peele , August 2, 2019 at 16:48

And she has courage. She quit the DNC to support Bernie and went to Syria to seek the truth and peace.

Mike from Jersey , August 2, 2019 at 16:55

She is unique. The media is trying Ron-Paul-Type-Blackout on her, lest the public catches on to the fact that she is exactly what the country needs.

Sally Snyder , August 2, 2019 at 15:17

Here is an article that looks at the level of support from American voters for yet another war in the Middle East:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/07/main-street-america-and-another-war-in.html

Warmonger candidates had better reconsider their positions if they believe that voters will back their stance. Just ask Hillary Clinton how that worked out for her and her warrior mentality in 2016.

Robert , August 2, 2019 at 14:49

Tulsi is the most promising candidate to successfully run against Trump for 2 reasons. 1. She has a sane, knowledgeable foreign/military policy promoting peace and non-intervention. 2) She understands the disastrous consequences of the WTO and "free" trade deals on the US economy. No other Democratic candidate has these 2 policies. Unfortunately, these policies are so dangerous to the real rulers of the world, her message is already being shut down and distorted.

emma peele , August 2, 2019 at 16:53

And she has cross over appeal with republicans who want out of the wars. People like Tucker Carson and Paul Craig Roberts support her. Thats why the DNC hate her..

Skip Scott , August 2, 2019 at 14:05

I read this article over on Medium this morning. Thanks for re-printing it here. I made the following comment there as well.

I was a somewhat enthusiastic supporter of Tulsi until just recently when she voted for the anti-BDS resolution. I guess "speaking truth to power" has its limits. What I fear is that the war machine will manipulate her if she ever gets elected. Once you accept any of the Empire's propaganda narrative, it is a slippery slope to being fully co-opted. Tulsi has said she is a "hawk" when it comes to fighting terrorists. All the MIC would have to do is another false flag operation, blame it on the "terrorists", and tell Tulsi it's time to get tough. Just as they manipulated the neo-liberals with the R2P line of bullshit, and Trump with the "evil Assad gasses his own people" bullshit, Tulsi could be brought to heel as well.

I will probably continue to send small donations to Tulsi just to keep her on the debate stage. But I've taken off the rose colored glasses.

Bob Herrschaft , August 2, 2019 at 13:57

Well said, Caitlin! There's an obvious effort to Jane Fodarize Tulsi before she threatens the favorites. She seems to keep a cool head, so much of it is likely to backfire and bring the narrative back where it belongs.

P. Michael Garber , August 2, 2019 at 13:42

Great article! Anderson Cooper in his post-debate interview with Gabbard appeared to be demanding a loyalty oath from her: "Will you say the words 'Bashar Assad is a murderer and torturer'?" In contrast to Gabbard, a service member with extensive middle east combat experience, Cooper is a chickenhawk and a naif to murder and torture; in that context his attack was inappropriate and disrespectful, and as he kept pressing it I thought he appeared unhinged. Gabbard could have done more to call out Cooper's craven attack (personally I think she could have decked him and been well within her rights), but she handled it with her customary grace and poise.

hetro , August 2, 2019 at 13:09

Seems to me Caitlin is right on, and her final statement is worth emphasizing: "Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Whoever disrupts that narrative control is doing the real work."

I read "narrative control" as brainwashing.

Note also that Caitlin is careful to qualify she does not fully agree with Gabbard, in context with year after year of demonizing Assad amidst the murk of US supported type militants, emphasis on barrel bombs, etc etc, all in the "controlling the narrative/propaganda" sphere.

Another interesting piece to consider on the smearing of Gabbard:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-02/empire-coming-tulsi-gabbard

Brian Murphy , August 2, 2019 at 16:25

"A soldier knows when you are taking flak you are over your target." nice.

[Aug 20, 2019] Trump Promised Massive Infrastructure Projects -- Instead We ve Gotten Nothing>

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... So far, that wager has netted Americans nothing. No money. No deal. No bridges, roads or leadless water pipes. And there's nothing on the horizon since Trump stormed out of the most recent meeting. That was a three-minute session in May with Democratic leaders at which Trump was supposed to discuss the $2 trillion he had proposed earlier to spend on infrastructure. In a press conference immediately afterward, Trump said if the Democrats continued to investigate him, he would refuse to keep his promises to the American people to repair the nation's infrastructure. ..."
"... Candidate Donald Trump knew it was no joke. On the campaign trail, he said U.S. infrastructure was "a mess" and no better than that of a "third-world country. " When an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia in 2015, killing eight and injuring about 200 , he tweeted , "Our roads, airports, tunnels, bridges, electric grid -- all falling apart." Later, he tweeted , "The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me." ..."
"... Donald Trump promised to make America great again. And that wouldn't be possible if America's rail system, locks, dams and pipelines -- that is, its vital organs -- were "a mess." Trump signed what he described as a contract with American voters to deliver an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his administration. ..."
"... He mocked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton's proposal to spend $275 billion. "Her number is a fraction of what we're talking about. We need much more money to rebuild our infrastructure," he told Fox News in 2016 . "I would say at least double her numbers, and you're going to really need a lot more than that." ..."
"... In August of 2016, he promised , "We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports that our country deserves. American cars will travel the roads, American planes will connect our cities, and American ships will patrol the seas. American steel will send new skyscrapers soaring. We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation." ..."
"... That contract Trump signed with American voters to produce an infrastructure plan in the first 100 days: worthless. It never happened. He gave Americans an Infrastructure Week in June of 2017, though, and at just about the 100-day mark, predicted infrastructure spending would "take off like a rocket ship." Two more Infrastructure Weeks followed in the next two years, but no money. ..."
"... This year, by which time the words Infrastructure Week had become a synonym for promises not kept, Trump met on April 30 with top Democratic leaders and recommended a $2 trillion infrastructure investment. Democrats praised Trump afterward for taking the challenge seriously and for agreeing to find the money. ..."
"... Almost immediately, Trump began complaining that Democrats were trying to hoodwink him into raising taxes to pay for the $2 trillion he had offered to spend. ..."
"... Trump and the Republicans relinquished one way to pay for infrastructure when they passed a tax cut for the rich and corporations in December of 2017. As a result, the rich and corporations pocketed hundreds of billions -- $1 trillion over 10 years -- and Trump doesn't have that money to invest in infrastructure. Corporations spent their tax break money on stock buybacks, further enriching the already rich. They didn't invest in American manufacturing or worker training or wage increases. ..."
"... I have seen this movie before. A State builds a highway, it then leases that highway to a corporation for a bucket of cash which it uses to bribe the electorate to win the next election or two. The corporation shoves brand new toll booths on the highway charging sky high rates which puts a crimp in local economic activity. After the lease is up after twenty years, the State gets to take over the highway again to find that the corporation cut back on maintenance so that the whole highway has to be rebuilt again. Rinse and repeat. ..."
"... Promises by any narcissist mean nothing. You cannot hang your hat on any word that Trump speaks, because it's not about you or anyone else, but about him and only him. ..."
"... Here is a heads up. If any infrastructure is done it will be airports. The elite fly and couldn't give a crap about the suspension and wheel destroying potholes we have to slalom around every day. They also don't care that the great unwashed waste thousands of hours stuck in traffic when a bridge is closed or collapses. ..."
Jul 26, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. In a bit of synchronicity, when a reader was graciously driving me to the Department of Motor Vehicles (a schlepp in the wilds of Shelby County), she mentioned she'd heard local media reports that trucks had had their weight limits lowered due to concern that some overpasses might not be able to handle the loads. Of course, a big reason infrastructure spending has plunged in the US is that it's become an excuse for "public-private partnerships," aka looting, when those deals take longer to get done and produce bad results so often that locals can sometimes block them.

By Tom Conway, the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW) . Produced by the Independent Media Institute

Bad news about infrastructure is as ubiquitous as potholes. Failures in a 108-year-old railroad bridge and tunnel cost New York commuters thousands of hours in delays. Illinois doesn't regularly inspect , let alone fix, decaying bridges. Flooding in Nebraska caused nearly half a billion dollars in road and bridge damage -- just this year.

No problem, though. President Donald Trump promised to fix all this. The great dealmaker, the builder of eponymous buildings, the star of "The Apprentice," Donald Trump, during his campaign, urged Americans to bet on him because he'd double what his opponent would spend on infrastructure. Double, he pledged!

So far, that wager has netted Americans nothing. No money. No deal. No bridges, roads or leadless water pipes. And there's nothing on the horizon since Trump stormed out of the most recent meeting. That was a three-minute session in May with Democratic leaders at which Trump was supposed to discuss the $2 trillion he had proposed earlier to spend on infrastructure. In a press conference immediately afterward, Trump said if the Democrats continued to investigate him, he would refuse to keep his promises to the American people to repair the nation's infrastructure.

The comedian Stephen Colbert described the situation best, saying Trump told the Democrats: "It's my way or no highways."

The situation, however, is no joke. Just ask the New York rail commuters held up for more than 2,000 hours over the past four years by bridge and tunnel breakdowns. Just ask the American Society of Civil Engineers , which gave the nation a D+ grade for infrastructure and estimated that if more than $1 trillion is not added to currently anticipated spending on infrastructure, "the economy is expected to lose almost $4 trillion in GDP , resulting in a loss of 2.5 million jobs in 2025."

Candidate Donald Trump knew it was no joke. On the campaign trail, he said U.S. infrastructure was "a mess" and no better than that of a "third-world country. " When an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia in 2015, killing eight and injuring about 200 , he tweeted , "Our roads, airports, tunnels, bridges, electric grid -- all falling apart." Later, he tweeted , "The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me."

Donald Trump promised to make America great again. And that wouldn't be possible if America's rail system, locks, dams and pipelines -- that is, its vital organs -- were "a mess." Trump signed what he described as a contract with American voters to deliver an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his administration.

He mocked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton's proposal to spend $275 billion. "Her number is a fraction of what we're talking about. We need much more money to rebuild our infrastructure," he told Fox News in 2016 . "I would say at least double her numbers, and you're going to really need a lot more than that."

In August of 2016, he promised , "We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports that our country deserves. American cars will travel the roads, American planes will connect our cities, and American ships will patrol the seas. American steel will send new skyscrapers soaring. We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation."

In his victory speech and both of his State of the Union addresses, he pledged again to be the master of infrastructure. "We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, school, hospitals. And we will put millions of our people to work," he said the night he won.

That sounds excellent. That's exactly what 75 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll said they wanted. That would create millions of family-supporting jobs making the steel, aluminum, concrete, pipes and construction vehicles necessary to accomplish infrastructure repair. That would stimulate the economy in ways that benefit the middle class and those who are struggling.

That contract Trump signed with American voters to produce an infrastructure plan in the first 100 days: worthless. It never happened. He gave Americans an Infrastructure Week in June of 2017, though, and at just about the 100-day mark, predicted infrastructure spending would "take off like a rocket ship." Two more Infrastructure Weeks followed in the next two years, but no money.

Trump finally announced a plan in February of 2018 , at a little over the 365-day mark, to spend $1.5 trillion on infrastructure. It went nowhere because it managed to annoy both Democrats and Republicans.

It was to be funded by only $200 billion in federal dollars -- less than what Hillary Clinton proposed. The rest was to come from state and local governments and from foreign money interests and the private sector. Basically, the idea was to hand over to hedge fund managers the roads and bridges and pipelines originally built, owned and maintained by Americans. The fat cats at the hedge funds would pay for repairs but then toll the assets in perpetuity. Nobody liked it.

That was last year. This year, by which time the words Infrastructure Week had become a synonym for promises not kept, Trump met on April 30 with top Democratic leaders and recommended a $2 trillion infrastructure investment. Democrats praised Trump afterward for taking the challenge seriously and for agreeing to find the money.

"It couldn't have gone any better," Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal , D-Mass., told the Washington Post, even though Neal was investigating Trump for possible tax fraud.

Almost immediately, Trump began complaining that Democrats were trying to hoodwink him into raising taxes to pay for the $2 trillion he had offered to spend.

Trump and the Republicans relinquished one way to pay for infrastructure when they passed a tax cut for the rich and corporations in December of 2017. As a result, the rich and corporations pocketed hundreds of billions -- $1 trillion over 10 years -- and Trump doesn't have that money to invest in infrastructure. Corporations spent their tax break money on stock buybacks, further enriching the already rich. They didn't invest in American manufacturing or worker training or wage increases.

Three weeks after the April 30 meeting, Trump snubbed Democrats who returned to the White House hoping the president had found a way to keep his promise to raise $2 trillion for infrastructure. Trump dismissed them like naughty schoolchildren. He told them he wouldn't countenance Democrats simultaneously investigating him and bargaining with him -- even though Democrats were investigating him at the time of the April meeting and one of the investigators -- Neal -- had attended.

Promise not kept again.

Trump's reelection motto, Keep America Great, doesn't work for infrastructure. It's still a mess. It's the third year of his presidency, and he has done nothing about it. Apparently, he's saving this pledge for his next term.

In May, he promised Louisianans a new bridge over Interstate 10 -- only if he is reelected. He said the administration would have it ready to go on "day one, right after the election." Just like he said he'd produce an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his first term.

He's doubling down on the infrastructure promises. His win would mean Americans get nothing again.

Arizona Slim , July 26, 2019 at 6:26 am

Paging Bernie Sanders: You need to be all over this Trump-fail. And sooner, rather than later.

The Rev Kev , July 26, 2019 at 6:40 am

The whole thing seems so stupid. The desperate need is there, the people are there to do the work, the money spent into the infrastructure would give a major boost to the real economy, the completed infrastructure would give the real economy a boost for years & decades to come – it is win-win right across the board. But the whole thing is stalled because the whole deal can't be rigged to give a bunch of hedge fund managers control of that infrastructure afterwards. If it did, the constant rents that Americans would have to pay to use this infrastructure would bleed the economy for decades to come.

I have seen this movie before. A State builds a highway, it then leases that highway to a corporation for a bucket of cash which it uses to bribe the electorate to win the next election or two. The corporation shoves brand new toll booths on the highway charging sky high rates which puts a crimp in local economic activity. After the lease is up after twenty years, the State gets to take over the highway again to find that the corporation cut back on maintenance so that the whole highway has to be rebuilt again. Rinse and repeat.

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, can you imagine how history would have gone if they had been handed over to a bunch of corporations who would have built toll booths over the whole network? Would have done wonders for the American economy I bet.

Wukchumni , July 26, 2019 at 6:48 am

One of the things discussed at our town hall meeting the other night, was a much needed $481k public bathroom, and that was the low bid.

It has to be ADA compliant with ramps, etc.

$48,100 seems like it'd be plenty to get 'r done, as you can build a house with a couple of bathrooms, and a few bedrooms, a kitchen and living room for maybe $200k.

Ignacio , July 26, 2019 at 8:58 am

And if toll revenues don't come as high as expected, mother state will come to the rescue of those poor fund managers. I find it amazing that Trump uses the stupid Russia, Russia, Russia! fixation of democrats as an excuse to do nothing about infrastructure. Does this work with his electorate?

cnchal , July 26, 2019 at 7:09 am

Tom, grow up.

Promises by any narcissist mean nothing. You cannot hang your hat on any word that Trump speaks, because it's not about you or anyone else, but about him and only him.

Here is a heads up. If any infrastructure is done it will be airports. The elite fly and couldn't give a crap about the suspension and wheel destroying potholes we have to slalom around every day. They also don't care that the great unwashed waste thousands of hours stuck in traffic when a bridge is closed or collapses.

Carla , July 26, 2019 at 7:47 am

Well, fix the airports and you've still got Boeing, self-destructing as fast as it can. And Airbus can't fill all the orders no matter how hard it tries. Guess everybody will just have to . stay home.

WheresOurTeddy , July 26, 2019 at 7:16 am

Are all the coal jobs back? How about the manufacturing? NAFTA been repealed and replaced with something better yet? How's the wall coming and has Mexico sent the check yet? Soldiers back from Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria yet?

Got that tax cut for rich people and a ton of conservative judges through though, didn't he?

Katniss Everdeen , July 26, 2019 at 8:17 am

"It couldn't have gone any better," Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal, D-Mass., told the Washington Post, even though Neal was investigating Trump for possible tax fraud.

What a surprise. It's simply "amazing" that the insane status quo jihad that has been waged against Trump since he announced his candidacy had real consequences for the country. Who would have thought that calling ANY president ignorant, ugly, fat, a liar, a traitor, a cheater, an agent of Putin, a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, a bigot, an isolationist and an illegitimate occupant of the White House 24/7 since he or she won the election would make actual accomplishment nearly impossible.

The mere mention of his name on college campuses has even been legitimized as a fear-inducing, "safety"-threatening "microagression."

It's just so rich that having determined to prevent Trump from doing absolutely anything he promised during the campaign by any and all means, regardless of what the promise was or how beneficial it may have been, his numerous, bilious "critics" now have the gonads to accuse him of not getting anything done.

With all due respect to the author of this piece, the result he laments was exactly the point of this relentless nightmare of Trump derangement to which the nation has been subjected for three years. I tend to think that the specific promise most targeted for destruction was his criticism of NATO and "infrastructure" was collateral damage, but that's neither here nor there.

The washington status quo has succeeded in its mission to cripple a president it could not defeat electorally, and now tries to blame him for their success. Cutting off your nose to spite your face has always been a counterproductive strategy.

[Aug 20, 2019] Propagandists Freak Out Over Gabbard s Destruction of Harris by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
all neocon scum instantly had risen to the surface to defend the neoliberal empire and its wars...
Notable quotes:
"... In the race to determine who will serve as commander in chief of the most powerful military force in the history of civilization, night two of the CNN Democratic presidential debates saw less than six minutes dedicated to discussing U.S. military policy during the 180-minute event. ..."
"... That's six, as in the number before seven. Not 60. Not 16. Six. From the moment Jake Tapper said "I want to turn to foreign policy" to the moment Don Lemon interrupted Rep. Tulsi Gabbard just as she was preparing to correctly explain how President Donald Trump is supporting Al-Qaeda in Idlib , approximately five minutes and 50 seconds had elapsed. The questions then turned toward the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections and impeachment proceedings. ..."
"... But the near-absence of foreign policy discussion didn't stop the Hawaii lawmaker from getting in some unauthorized truth-telling anyway. Attacking the authoritarian prosecutorial record of Sen. Kamala Harris to thunderous applause from the audience, Gabbard criticized the way her opponent "put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana;" "blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the court's forced her to do so;" "kept people in prisons beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California;" and "fought to keep the cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way." ..."
"... That was all it took. Harris's press secretary Ian Sams unleashed a string of tweets about Gabbard being an "Assad apologist," which were followed by a deluge of establishment narrative managers who sent the word "Assad" trending on Twitter, at times when Gabbard's name somehow failed to trend despite being the top-searched candidate on Google after the debate. ..."
"... "Somehow I have a hard time believing that 'Assad' is the top trending item in the United States but 'Tulsi' is nowhere to be found," tweeted journalist Michael Tracey. ..."
"... It really is interesting how aggressively the narrative managers thrust this line into mainstream consciousness all at the same time. ..."
"... The Washington Post 's Josh Rogin went on a frantic, lie-filled Twitter storm as soon as he saw an opportunity, claiming with no evidence whatsoever that Gabbard lied when she said she met with Assad for purposes of diplomacy and that she "helped Assad whitewash a mass atrocity," and falsely claiming that " she praised Russian bombing of Syrian civilians ." ..."
"... War is the glue that holds the empire together . A politician can get away with opposing some aspects of the status quo when it comes to healthcare or education, but war as a strategy for maintaining global dominance is strictly off limits. This is how you tell the difference between someone who actually wants to change things and someone who's just going through the motions for show; the real rebels forcefully oppose the actual pillars of empire by calling for an end to military bloodshed, while the performers just stick to the safe subjects. ..."
"... The shrill, hysterical pushback that Gabbard received last night was very encouraging, because it means she's forcing them to fight back. In a media environment where the war propaganda machine normally coasts along almost entirely unhindered in mainstream attention, the fact that someone has positioned themselves to move the needle like this says good things for our future. If our society is to have any chance of ever throwing off the omnicidal, ecocidal power establishment which keeps us in a state of endless war and soul-crushing oppression, the first step is punching a hole in the narrative matrix which keeps us hypnotized into believing that this is all normal and acceptable. ..."
"... Her immediate response to the first question directed to her, regardless of topic, should be prefaced with something like "I would appreciate the media and the opposition please refrain from deliberately misrepresenting my policies and remarks, most notably trying to tar me with more of the fallacious war propaganda they both dispense so freely and without any foundation. ..."
"... Gabbard has any chance to be elected only if she starts vigorously throwing over the tables of the money-lenders in the temple, so to speak. ..."
"... Hide the empire in plain sight, that way no one will notice it. Then someone like Tulsi Gabbard goes and talks about it on national TV. Can't have that, can we? People might begin to see it if we do that ..."
"... Pro war democrats are now using the Russian ruse to go after anti war candidates like Gabbard. It's despicable to even insinuate Gabbard is working for Putin or had any other rationale for going to Syria than seeking peace. This alone proved Harris unfit for the presidency. Her awful record speaks for itself. ..."
"... And she has courage. She quit the DNC to support Bernie and went to Syria to seek the truth and peace. ..."
"... She is unique. The media is trying Ron-Paul-Type-Blackout on her, lest the public catches on to the fact that she is exactly what the country needs. ..."
"... Warmonger candidates had better reconsider their positions if they believe that voters will back their stance. Just ask Hillary Clinton how that worked out for her and her warrior mentality in 2016. ..."
"... she has cross over appeal with republicans who want out of the wars. People like Tucker Carson and Paul Craig Roberts support her. Thats why the DNC hate her.. ..."
"... There's an obvious effort to Jane Fodarize Tulsi before she threatens the favorites. She seems to keep a cool head, so much of it is likely to backfire and bring the narrative back where it belongs. ..."
"... In contrast to Gabbard, a service member with extensive middle east combat experience, Cooper is a chickenhawk and a naif to murder and torture; ..."
"... "Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Whoever disrupts that narrative control is doing the real work." ..."
"... I read "narrative control" as brainwashing. ..."
Aug 02, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Establishment narrative managers distracted attention from a notable antiwar contender, seizing instead the chance to marshal an old smear against her, writes Caitlin Johnstone.

In the race to determine who will serve as commander in chief of the most powerful military force in the history of civilization, night two of the CNN Democratic presidential debates saw less than six minutes dedicated to discussing U.S. military policy during the 180-minute event.

That's six, as in the number before seven. Not 60. Not 16. Six. From the moment Jake Tapper said "I want to turn to foreign policy" to the moment Don Lemon interrupted Rep. Tulsi Gabbard just as she was preparing to correctly explain how President Donald Trump is supporting Al-Qaeda in Idlib , approximately five minutes and 50 seconds had elapsed. The questions then turned toward the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections and impeachment proceedings.

Night one of the CNN debates saw almost twice as much time, with a whole 11 minutes by my count dedicated to questions of war and peace for the leadership of the most warlike nation on the planet. This discrepancy could very well be due to the fact that night two was the slot allotted to Gabbard, whose campaign largely revolves around the platform of ending U.S. warmongering.

CNN is a virulent establishment propaganda firm with an extensive history of promoting lies and brazen psyops in facilitation of U.S. imperialism, so it would make sense that they would try to avoid a subject which would inevitably lead to unauthorized truth-telling on the matter.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Cfp_IIdVnXs?feature=oembed

But the near-absence of foreign policy discussion didn't stop the Hawaii lawmaker from getting in some unauthorized truth-telling anyway. Attacking the authoritarian prosecutorial record of Sen. Kamala Harris to thunderous applause from the audience, Gabbard criticized the way her opponent "put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana;" "blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the court's forced her to do so;" "kept people in prisons beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California;" and "fought to keep the cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way."

Harris Folded Under Pressure

Harris, who it turns out fights very well when advancing but folds under pressure, had no answer for Gabbard's attack, preferring to focus on attacking former Vice President Joe Biden instead.

Later, when she was a nice safe distance out of Gabbard's earshot, she uncorked a long-debunked but still effective smear that establishment narrative managers have been dying for an excuse to run wild with.

"This, coming from someone who has been an apologist for an individual, Assad, who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches," Harris told Anderson Cooper after the debate, referring to the president of Syria. "She who has embraced and been an apologist for him in a way that she refuses to call him a war criminal. I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously and so I'm prepared to move on."

That was all it took. Harris's press secretary Ian Sams unleashed a string of tweets about Gabbard being an "Assad apologist," which were followed by a deluge of establishment narrative managers who sent the word "Assad" trending on Twitter, at times when Gabbard's name somehow failed to trend despite being the top-searched candidate on Google after the debate.

As of this writing, "Assad" is showing on the No. 5 trending list on the side bar of Twitter's new layout, while Gabbard's name is nowhere to be seen. This discrepancy has drawn criticism from numerous Gabbard defenders on the platform .

"Somehow I have a hard time believing that 'Assad' is the top trending item in the United States but 'Tulsi' is nowhere to be found," tweeted journalist Michael Tracey.

It really is interesting how aggressively the narrative managers thrust this line into mainstream consciousness all at the same time.

The Washington Post 's Josh Rogin went on a frantic, lie-filled Twitter storm as soon as he saw an opportunity, claiming with no evidence whatsoever that Gabbard lied when she said she met with Assad for purposes of diplomacy and that she "helped Assad whitewash a mass atrocity," and falsely claiming that " she praised Russian bombing of Syrian civilians ."

... ... ...

War is the glue that holds the empire together . A politician can get away with opposing some aspects of the status quo when it comes to healthcare or education, but war as a strategy for maintaining global dominance is strictly off limits. This is how you tell the difference between someone who actually wants to change things and someone who's just going through the motions for show; the real rebels forcefully oppose the actual pillars of empire by calling for an end to military bloodshed, while the performers just stick to the safe subjects.

The shrill, hysterical pushback that Gabbard received last night was very encouraging, because it means she's forcing them to fight back. In a media environment where the war propaganda machine normally coasts along almost entirely unhindered in mainstream attention, the fact that someone has positioned themselves to move the needle like this says good things for our future. If our society is to have any chance of ever throwing off the omnicidal, ecocidal power establishment which keeps us in a state of endless war and soul-crushing oppression, the first step is punching a hole in the narrative matrix which keeps us hypnotized into believing that this is all normal and acceptable.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Whoever disrupts that narrative control is doing the real work.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Follow her work on Facebook , Twitter , or her website . She has a podcast and a new book " Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers ."

Realist , August 2, 2019 at 20:06

I'm going to venture a guess and say that the media fixers for the Deep State's political song and dance show are not going to allow Tulsi back on that stage for the next installation of "Killer Klowns on Parade." Just as she had the right to skewer Harris for her sweeping dishonesty and hypocrisy in public office, she has just as much right to proactively respond to the smears and slanders directed against her by both the party establishment and its media colluders.

Her immediate response to the first question directed to her, regardless of topic, should be prefaced with something like "I would appreciate the media and the opposition please refrain from deliberately misrepresenting my policies and remarks, most notably trying to tar me with more of the fallacious war propaganda they both dispense so freely and without any foundation. It is beneath all dignity to attempt to win elections with lies and deceptions, just as it is to use them as pretexts for wars of choice that bring no benefit to either America or the countries being attacked. As I've repeatedly made clear, I only want to stop the wasteful destruction and carnage, but you deceitfully try to imply that I'm aligned with one of the several foreign governments that our leaders have needlessly and foolishly chosen to make war upon. You've done so on this stage and you've continued this misrepresentation throughout the American media. Please stop it. Play fair. Confine your remarks only to the truth."

That would raise a kerfuffle, but one that is distinctly called for. Going gently towards exit stage right consequent to their unanswered lies will accomplish nothing. If the Dems choose to excommunicate her for such effrontery, she should run as a Green, or an independent. This is a danger the Dem power structure dare not allow to happen. They don't even want the particulars of the actual history of these wars discussed in public. Thus, they will not even give her the chance to offer a rejoinder such as I outlined above. They will simply rule that she does not qualify for any further debates based on her polling numbers (which can be faked) and/or her financial support numbers. That is nominally how they've already decided to winnow down the field to the few who are acceptable to the Deep State–preferably Harris, Biden or Booker. Someone high profile but owned entirely by the insider elites. Yes, this rules out Bernie and maybe even Warren unless she secretly signed a blood pact with Wall Street to walk away from her platform if elected.

Gabbard has any chance to be elected only if she starts vigorously throwing over the tables of the money-lenders in the temple, so to speak.

Tom Kath , August 2, 2019 at 20:05

There is a big difference between "PRINCIPLES" and "POLICY". Principles should never change, but policy must. This is where I believe Tulsi can not only make a big difference, but ultimately even win. – Not this time around perhaps, she is young and this difference will take time to reveal itself.

O Society , August 2, 2019 at 16:39

Hide the empire in plain sight, that way no one will notice it. Then someone like Tulsi Gabbard goes and talks about it on national TV. Can't have that, can we? People might begin to see it if we do that

http://osociety.org/2019/08/02/how-to-hide-an-empire-a-history-of-the-greater-united-states/

ranney , August 2, 2019 at 16:24

What is happening to Tulsi (the extraordinary spate of lies about her relationship with Assad coming from all directions) provides a good explanation why Bernie and Elizabeth have been smart not to make many comments about foreign policy.

The few Bernie has made indicate to me that he is sympathetic to the Palestinian problem, but smart enough to keep quiet on the subject until, God willing, he is in a position to actually do something about it. It will be interesting to see if debate questions force them to be more forthcoming about their opinions.

Emma Peele , August 2, 2019 at 16:05

Pro war democrats are now using the Russian ruse to go after anti war candidates like Gabbard. It's despicable to even insinuate Gabbard is working for Putin or had any other rationale for going to Syria than seeking peace. This alone proved Harris unfit for the presidency. Her awful record speaks for itself.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , August 2, 2019 at 15:58

Tulsi is the most original and interesting candidate to come along in many years. She's authentic, something not true of most of that pack.

And not true of most of the House and Senate with their oh-so-predictable statements on most matters and all those crinkly-faced servants of plutocracy. She has courage too, a rare quality in Washington where, indeed, cowards often do well. Witness Trump, Biden, Clinton, Bush, Johnson, et al.

If there's ever going to be any change in a that huge country which has become a force for darkness and fear in much of the world, it's going to come from the likes of Tulsi. But I'm not holding my breath. It's clear from many signals, the establishment very much dislikes her. So, the odds are, they'll make sure she doesn't win.

Still, I admire a valiant try. Just as I admire honesty, something almost unheard of in Washington, but she has it, in spades.

emma peele , August 2, 2019 at 16:48

And she has courage. She quit the DNC to support Bernie and went to Syria to seek the truth and peace.

Mike from Jersey , August 2, 2019 at 16:55

She is unique. The media is trying Ron-Paul-Type-Blackout on her, lest the public catches on to the fact that she is exactly what the country needs.

Sally Snyder , August 2, 2019 at 15:17

Here is an article that looks at the level of support from American voters for yet another war in the Middle East:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/07/main-street-america-and-another-war-in.html

Warmonger candidates had better reconsider their positions if they believe that voters will back their stance. Just ask Hillary Clinton how that worked out for her and her warrior mentality in 2016.

Robert , August 2, 2019 at 14:49

Tulsi is the most promising candidate to successfully run against Trump for 2 reasons. 1. She has a sane, knowledgeable foreign/military policy promoting peace and non-intervention. 2) She understands the disastrous consequences of the WTO and "free" trade deals on the US economy. No other Democratic candidate has these 2 policies. Unfortunately, these policies are so dangerous to the real rulers of the world, her message is already being shut down and distorted.

emma peele , August 2, 2019 at 16:53

And she has cross over appeal with republicans who want out of the wars. People like Tucker Carson and Paul Craig Roberts support her. Thats why the DNC hate her..

Skip Scott , August 2, 2019 at 14:05

I read this article over on Medium this morning. Thanks for re-printing it here. I made the following comment there as well.

I was a somewhat enthusiastic supporter of Tulsi until just recently when she voted for the anti-BDS resolution. I guess "speaking truth to power" has its limits. What I fear is that the war machine will manipulate her if she ever gets elected. Once you accept any of the Empire's propaganda narrative, it is a slippery slope to being fully co-opted. Tulsi has said she is a "hawk" when it comes to fighting terrorists. All the MIC would have to do is another false flag operation, blame it on the "terrorists", and tell Tulsi it's time to get tough. Just as they manipulated the neo-liberals with the R2P line of bullshit, and Trump with the "evil Assad gasses his own people" bullshit, Tulsi could be brought to heel as well.

I will probably continue to send small donations to Tulsi just to keep her on the debate stage. But I've taken off the rose colored glasses.

Bob Herrschaft , August 2, 2019 at 13:57

Well said, Caitlin! There's an obvious effort to Jane Fodarize Tulsi before she threatens the favorites. She seems to keep a cool head, so much of it is likely to backfire and bring the narrative back where it belongs.

P. Michael Garber , August 2, 2019 at 13:42

Great article! Anderson Cooper in his post-debate interview with Gabbard appeared to be demanding a loyalty oath from her: "Will you say the words 'Bashar Assad is a murderer and torturer'?" In contrast to Gabbard, a service member with extensive middle east combat experience, Cooper is a chickenhawk and a naif to murder and torture; in that context his attack was inappropriate and disrespectful, and as he kept pressing it I thought he appeared unhinged. Gabbard could have done more to call out Cooper's craven attack (personally I think she could have decked him and been well within her rights), but she handled it with her customary grace and poise.

hetro , August 2, 2019 at 13:09

Seems to me Caitlin is right on, and her final statement is worth emphasizing: "Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Whoever disrupts that narrative control is doing the real work."

I read "narrative control" as brainwashing.

Note also that Caitlin is careful to qualify she does not fully agree with Gabbard, in context with year after year of demonizing Assad amidst the murk of US supported type militants, emphasis on barrel bombs, etc etc, all in the "controlling the narrative/propaganda" sphere.

Another interesting piece to consider on the smearing of Gabbard:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-02/empire-coming-tulsi-gabbard

Brian Murphy , August 2, 2019 at 16:25

"A soldier knows when you are taking flak you are over your target." nice.

[Aug 20, 2019] Tulsi A Living Reminder of Iraq s Liars and Apologists by David Masciotra

Notable quotes:
"... Gabbard calls out the betrayers; Dems try to forget their heroes Mueller and Biden are among them. ..."
"... The gains of war in Iraq remain elusive, especially considering that the justifications for invasion -- weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's connection to al-Qaeda, the ambition to create a Western-style democracy at gunpoint -- remain "murky at best." That's a quote from the 9/11 Commission's conclusion on the so-called evidence linking Iraq to Osama bin Laden's group, which actually did carry out the worst terrorist attack in American history. ..."
"... As far as stupid and barbarous decisions are concerned, it is difficult to top the war in Iraq. It is also difficult to match its price tag, which, according to a recent Brown University study, amounts to $1.1 trillion. ..."
"... Gore Vidal once christened his country the "United States of Amnesia," explaining that Americans live in a perpetual state of a hangover: "Every morning we wake up having forgotten what happened the night before." ..."
"... The war in Iraq ended only nine years ago, but it might as well have never taken place, given the curious lack of acknowledgement in our press and political debates. As families mourn their children, babies are born with irreversible deformities, and veterans dread trying to sleep through the night, America's political class, many of whom sold the war to the public, have moved on. When they address Iraq at all, they act as though they have committed a minor error, as though large-scale death and destruction are the equivalent of a poor shot in golf when the course rules allow for mulligans. ..."
"... As the Robert Mueller fiasco smolders out, it is damning that the Democratic Party, in its zest and zeal to welcome any critical assessment of Trump's unethical behavior, has barely mentioned that Mueller, in his previous role as director of the FBI, played a small but significant role in convincing the country to go to war in Iraq. ..."
"... Mueller testified to Congress that "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security." He also warned that Saddam could "supply terrorists with radiological material" for the purposes of devising a nuclear bomb. Leaving aside any speculation about Mueller's intentions and assuming he had only the best of motives, it is quite bizarre, even dangerous, to treat as oracular someone who was wrong on such a life-or-death question. ..."
"... The former vice president now claims that his "only mistake was trusting the Bush administration," implying he was tricked into supporting the war. This line is not as persuasive as he imagines. First, it raises the question -- can't we nominate someone who wasn't tricked? Second, its logic crumbles in the face of Biden's recent decision to hire Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, as his campaign's foreign policy advisor. Burns was also a vociferous supporter of the war. An enterprising reporter should ask Biden whether Burns was also tricked. Is the Biden campaign an assembly of rubes? ..."
"... Instead, the press is likelier to interrogate Biden over his holding hands and giving hugs to women at public events. Criticism of Biden's "inappropriate touching" has become so strident that the candidate had to record a video to explain his behavior. The moral standards of America's political culture seem to rate kissing a woman on the back of the head as a graver offense than catastrophic war. ..."
Aug 02, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Gabbard calls out the betrayers; Dems try to forget their heroes Mueller and Biden are among them.

Estimates of the number of civilians who died during the war in Iraq range from 151,000 to 655,000. An additional 4,491 American military personnel perished in the war. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, toxicologist at the University of Michigan, has organized several research expeditions to Iraq to measure the contamination and pollution still poisoning the air and water supply from the tons of munitions dropped during the war. It does not require any expertise to assume what the studies confirm: disease is still widespread and birth defects are gruesomely common. Back home, it is difficult to measure just how many struggle with critical injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The gains of war in Iraq remain elusive, especially considering that the justifications for invasion -- weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's connection to al-Qaeda, the ambition to create a Western-style democracy at gunpoint -- remain "murky at best." That's a quote from the 9/11 Commission's conclusion on the so-called evidence linking Iraq to Osama bin Laden's group, which actually did carry out the worst terrorist attack in American history.

As far as stupid and barbarous decisions are concerned, it is difficult to top the war in Iraq. It is also difficult to match its price tag, which, according to a recent Brown University study, amounts to $1.1 trillion.

Gore Vidal once christened his country the "United States of Amnesia," explaining that Americans live in a perpetual state of a hangover: "Every morning we wake up having forgotten what happened the night before."

The war in Iraq ended only nine years ago, but it might as well have never taken place, given the curious lack of acknowledgement in our press and political debates. As families mourn their children, babies are born with irreversible deformities, and veterans dread trying to sleep through the night, America's political class, many of whom sold the war to the public, have moved on. When they address Iraq at all, they act as though they have committed a minor error, as though large-scale death and destruction are the equivalent of a poor shot in golf when the course rules allow for mulligans.

As the Robert Mueller fiasco smolders out, it is damning that the Democratic Party, in its zest and zeal to welcome any critical assessment of Trump's unethical behavior, has barely mentioned that Mueller, in his previous role as director of the FBI, played a small but significant role in convincing the country to go to war in Iraq.

Mueller testified to Congress that "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security." He also warned that Saddam could "supply terrorists with radiological material" for the purposes of devising a nuclear bomb. Leaving aside any speculation about Mueller's intentions and assuming he had only the best of motives, it is quite bizarre, even dangerous, to treat as oracular someone who was wrong on such a life-or-death question.

Far worse than the worship of Mueller is the refusal to scrutinize the abysmal foreign policy record of Joe Biden, currently the frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Of the Democrats in the Senate at that time, Biden was the most enthusiastic of the cheerleaders for war, waving his pompoms and cartwheeling in rhythm to Dick Cheney's music. Biden said repeatedly that America had "no choice but to eliminate the threat" posed by Saddam Hussein. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his blustering was uniquely influential.

The former vice president now claims that his "only mistake was trusting the Bush administration," implying he was tricked into supporting the war. This line is not as persuasive as he imagines. First, it raises the question -- can't we nominate someone who wasn't tricked? Second, its logic crumbles in the face of Biden's recent decision to hire Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, as his campaign's foreign policy advisor. Burns was also a vociferous supporter of the war. An enterprising reporter should ask Biden whether Burns was also tricked. Is the Biden campaign an assembly of rubes?

Instead, the press is likelier to interrogate Biden over his holding hands and giving hugs to women at public events. Criticism of Biden's "inappropriate touching" has become so strident that the candidate had to record a video to explain his behavior. The moral standards of America's political culture seem to rate kissing a woman on the back of the head as a graver offense than catastrophic war.

Polling well below Biden in the race is the congresswoman from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard. She alone on the Democratic stage has made criticism of American militarism central to her candidacy. A veteran of the Iraq war and a highly decorated major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, Gabbard offers an intelligent and humane perspective on foreign affairs. She's called the regime change philosophy "disastrous," advocated for negotiation with hostile foreign powers, and backed a reduction in drone strikes. She pledges if she becomes president to end American involvement in Afghanistan.

When Chris Matthews asked Gabbard about Biden's support for the Iraq war, she said, "It was the wrong vote. People like myself, who enlisted after 9/11 because of the terrorist attacks, were lied to. We were betrayed."

Her moral clarity is rare in the political fog of the presidential circus. She cautions against accepting the "guise of humanitarian justification for war," and notes that rarely does the American government bomb and invade a country to actually advance freedom or protect human rights.

Gabbard's positions are vastly superior to that of the other young veteran in the race, Pete Buttigieg. The mayor of South Bend recently told New York that one of his favorite novels is The Quiet American , saying that its author, Graham Greene, "points out the dangers of well-intentioned interventions."

Buttigieg's chances of winning the nomination seem low, and his prospects of becoming a literary critic appear even lower. The Quiet American does much more than raise questions about interventions: it is a merciless condemnation of American exceptionalism and its attendant indifference to Vietnamese suffering.

Americans hoping for peace won't find much comfort in the current White House either. President Trump has made the world more dangerous by trashing the Iran nuclear deal, and his appointment of John Bolton, a man who makes Donald Rumsfeld look like Mahatma Gandhi, as national security advisor is certainly alarming.

America's willful ignorance when it comes to the use of its own military exposes the moral bankruptcy at the heart of its political culture. Even worse, it makes future wars all but inevitable.

If no one can remember a war that ended merely nine years ago, and there's little room for Tulsi Gabbard in the Democratic primary, how will the country react the next time a president, and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declare that they have no choice but to remove a threat?

Norman Solomon, journalist and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy, knows the answer to that question. He provides it in the title of his book on how the media treats American foreign policy decisions: War Made Easy .

David Masciotra is the author of four books, including Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky) and Barack Obama: Invisible Man (Eyewear Publishing).

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Walter • a day ago

Where ae the people who told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Should they be tried for lying to the American public? 4500 troops killed and over $1.1 TRILLION wasted with no good results .With hundreds of thousands of Iraq's killed. .
Clyde Schechter Walter • a day ago
Where are they, indeed? They are still running US foreign policy; that's where they are. They are pundits in all the major media; that's where they are.

I cannot even imagine what historians will say about the uncanny persistence of these charlatans' influence in this era after a consistent record of disastrous, abysmal misadventures.

JeffK from PA Walter • 17 hours ago
You don't have to look too hard to find them. Bolton, Pompeo, and other neocons are hiding in plain sight. The Military Industrial Complex is embedded in our foreign policy like a tick on a dog.
Sid Finster JeffK from PA • 13 hours ago
Why not start with Bush and Blair?
IanDakar Sid Finster • 10 hours ago
Because you'd be knocking out a storm trooper instead of the emperor, at least as far as Bush goes. Same for why the focus is on Bolton rather than simply Trump.

I CAN see an argument that Trump/Bush knew what they were doing when they brought those people in though. f you feel that way and see it more of an owner of a hostile attack dog then yeah, you'd want to include those two too.

JeffK from PA Sid Finster • 10 hours ago
Cheney. Pure evil.
Sid Finster Walter • 13 hours ago
Nuremberg provides an instructive precedent. Start at the top with Bush and Blair keep going on down.
Disqus10021 Sid Finster • 11 hours ago
Recommended viewing: the 1961 movie "Judgment at Nuremberg".
L Walter • 12 hours ago
One might wonder where that intelligence was gathered, and then maybe we could find out why these wars have been happening.
Alex (the one that likes Ike) • a day ago
Here stands Tulsi. A woman, who, unlike their conventional troupe, can win this election. They reject her because... what? Moar war? She's not the member of the Cult? Or it's simply some sort of collective political death wish?
Anonne Alex (the one that likes Ike) • 12 hours ago
They reject her because she had the temerity to speak truth to power and supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 race. She stepped down from her position as Vice Chair of the DNC to endorse Sanders. She has real courage, and earned their wrath. She's not perfect but she's braver and stronger than almost the entire field. Only Bernie is on par.
Alex (the one that likes Ike) Anonne • 9 hours ago
And Bernie is the one they also hate, maybe a little bit less openly. Thus they reject those who can win the election. It's either a self-destructiveness or they think that it's better to keep on losing than to rebuild the party into what it needs to be.
Nelson Alex (the one that likes Ike) • 8 hours ago
What do you mean "they"? Anyone is free to support her campaign.
former-vet • a day ago • edited
Democrats and the Republican establishment, both, love war. It wasn't a coincidence that Hillary Clinton chose Madeleine Albright to be a keynote speaker at "her" party convention ("we think the deaths of a half million children are worth it"). Liberals know that there isn't really any "free" free, and that taxing the rich won't match their dreams -- it is the blood and bones of innocent foreigners that must pay for their lust. Establishment Republicans are more straightforward: they simply profit off the death and destruction.

This is why Trump is being destroyed, and why Tulsi is attacked. If only "she" (the one who gloated over Khameni's murder) had been elected, we'd be in a proxy war with Russia now! A real war with Iran! This is what the American people want, and what they'll likely get when they vote another chicken-hawk in come 2020.

Sid Finster former-vet • 13 hours ago
Agree, except that Trump is not governing as a non-interventionist.

About the only thing one can say is that his is a slightly less reckless militarist than what the political class in this country wants.

Nelson former-vet • 8 hours ago
Khameni is still alive. You're thinking of Gaddafi.
Fayez Abedaziz • a day ago
Tulsi, like Sanders is a 'danger' to everything Israel wants.
So, all...all the main 'news' networks and online sites don't like them and give more coverage to the same old Dem bull peddlers like ignorant Booker and the lousy opportunist low IQ Kamala Harris and Gillibrand.
TomG • 17 hours ago • edited
Manafort and his ilk can be tried and convicted for their lies. I guess if the lie is big enough we grant a pass on any need for prosecution. Justice for all? I don't think so.

Max Blumenthal posted a powerful piece at Consortium News (7/31/2019) about Biden's central and south American mis-adventures. Biden still extols his own policies however disastrous. The hubris of the man is worse than nauseating.

Great article, Mr. Masciotra.

OrvilleBerry • 14 hours ago
Whether one thinks Gabbard has a shot at the nomination or not, it's important to keep her on the stage in the next round of debates. Go to Tulsi2020.com and give her just one dollar (or more if you can)
so she has enough unique contributors to make the next round. And if you get polled,early on give her your vote.
Strawman • 12 hours ago
The moral standards of America's political culture seem to rate kissing a woman on the back of the head as a graver offense than catastrophic war.

Perfectly encapsulates the collective puerility of the American electorate. Thomas Jefferson must be spinning in his grave.

Disqus10021 • 12 hours ago • edited
The total US costs related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are expected to be considerably larger than $1.1 trillion, according to this study:
https://www.hks.harvard.edu...
Try $4-$6 trillion, according to the author of the study.

Long after I, Andrew Bacevitch and Hillary Clinton have gone to our reward, there will still be thousands of wounded warriors from these US Middle East adventures dependent on VA benefits for their survival and competing with civilian seniors for government handouts. A war with Iran would make the US fiscal situation that much worse.

The religious folks who were so anxious to protect family values only a few years ago seem to have their heads in the sand when it comes to the financial future of today's young Americans.

A few weeks ago, I made a token contribution to Tulsi Gabbard's campaign to help her qualify for the July Democratic debates. She will need more new contributors to qualify for the next round of debates.

david • 12 hours ago
"The war in Iraq ended only nine years ago,..."

Ahh..., really? So why do we still have over 5000 soldiers in Iraq?

christopher kelly police ret. • 11 hours ago
Tulsi was marvelous in knocking out Harris.
Zsuzsi Kruska • 10 hours ago
Tulsi hasn't a chance of the nomination, but she's exposing things and maybe more people will get a clue about what's really going on with American lives and taxes being squandered for the profit of the few who benefit from these atrocities and wars abroad, done in the name of all Americans.
Eric • 10 hours ago
Donated my $3 to Tulsi yesterday. She's the only Democrat I would vote for and she needs to stay in this race as long as possible.
Steve Naidamast • 10 hours ago
Being a supporter of Tulsi Gabbard for the very reasons that the author writes, has me agreeing with everything he has promoted in his piece.

However, to answer his own question as to why Americans are lured into commenting on such innocuous and foolish things in such an important election such as Biden's touching of women, is answered by the author's own prose.

He states that Americans are only provided such nonsense from the press that is monitoring the election process. What else can people talk about? And even if many Americans are clearheaded enough to understand the charade of the current Democratic debates, what or who will actually provide legitimate coverage with the exception of online sites as the American Conservative, among others?

If most Americans were actually thinking individuals, Tulsi Gabbard would be a shoo-in for the presidency in 2020. However, given the two factors of a highly corrupted mainstream press and too many Americans not studying enough civics to understand what is going on around them, it is highly unlikely that Tulsi Gabbard will even get close to the possibility of being nominated...

JeffK from PA • 10 hours ago
Cheney, mentioned in the article, was pure evil. I voted for GB2 for two reasons. 1) He was a very good Texas governor. He actually got anti-tax Texas to raise taxes dedicated to support education, in return for stricter standards for teachers. A good trade since Texas public schools were awful. 2) Dick Cheney. I thought he was the adult in the room that would provide steady and reliable guidance for Bush.

Boy was I wrong about Cheney. "Deficits don't matter". Just watch the movie Vice. Christian Bale does an incredible job portraying the pure evil of Cheney and the Military Industrial Complex. The movie is chilling to watch. And it is basically true. Politifact does a good job of scoring the accuracy of Cheney's role in the Bush administration as portrayed in the movie.

https://www.politifact.com/...

Mccormick47 • 10 hours ago
The trouble is, Conservatives promoting Gabbard and Williamson as their preferred candidates poisons their chances of staying in the race.
Mark Thomason • 9 hours ago
I remember a friend of mine, a proud Marine, saying before the Iraq War, "Well, they better find some WMD for all this."

They didn't. That should matter.

[Aug 20, 2019] In this sordid world, people without power have absolutely no value.

Notable quotes:
"... When Trump was first elected, I tried to calm down friends with advanced TDS, who expected Kristallnacht to be directed at their favorite brunch spots, by saying that "This is what empires in decline look like." ..."
"... In this sordid world, girls/women have absolutely no value ..."
"... Don't forget the young boys who get traded around like fudge recipes. Something quick on the Hollywood angle on bent dicks. It applies almost everywhere in America now: https://news.avclub.com/corey-feldman-made-a-documentary-about-sexual-abuse-he-1834310252 ..."
"... My reinterpretation of your comment would be; In this sordid world, people without power have absolutely no value. ..."
"... Epstein's World was tied in with Hollywood and Wall Street. Both are homoerotic paedophile havens. The world of the Vatican is tied in to Wall Street; it has it's own bank, the Instituto per le Opere de Religioni. ..."
"... As is true with the continued withholding of key documents in the JFK assassination, I believe that if the lousy reporting and official screwups in the Epstein case persist, it will be perfectly fine for the public to conclude and believe the absolute worst and act accordingly. ..."
"... Given the spotiness and inadequacy of reporting on the Epstein affair I wonder if an avenue for exploration might be that of a more direct involvement of media moguls and highly placed media staff in being serviced by Epstein i.e., the decision-makers regarding what gets covered and published are themselves subject to exposure, embarrassment, and other things that befall men caught in such matters. ..."
Aug 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Michael Fiorillo , , August 14, 2019 at 11:38 am

I can't add much to Yve's excellent post and the follow-up comments, except to say that the events of recent days and weeks have made Pizzagate (as deranged as it was) into some kind of weird Jungian premonition which is to say, the s&#* is out of control.

When Trump was first elected, I tried to calm down friends with advanced TDS, who expected Kristallnacht to be directed at their favorite brunch spots, by saying that "This is what empires in decline look like."

In regard to this sordid tale, I'm reminded of Robert Graves' (and the superb BBC TV version of) "I, Claudius."

"Don't eat the figs."

adrena , , August 14, 2019 at 11:48 am

In this sordid world, girls/women have absolutely no value.

ambrit , , August 14, 2019 at 12:16 pm

Don't forget the young boys who get traded around like fudge recipes. Something quick on the Hollywood angle on bent dicks. It applies almost everywhere in America now: https://news.avclub.com/corey-feldman-made-a-documentary-about-sexual-abuse-he-1834310252

My reinterpretation of your comment would be; In this sordid world, people without power have absolutely no value. Otherwise, I'm with you all the way. Abuse is abuse. No other definition is logical.

ambrit , , August 14, 2019 at 4:18 pm

Epstein's World was tied in with Hollywood and Wall Street. Both are homoerotic paedophile havens. The world of the Vatican is tied in to Wall Street; it has it's own bank, the Instituto per le Opere de Religioni.

Who knows? Perhaps there will be some Prelates unearthed from the Lolita Express passenger log.

Pelham , , August 14, 2019 at 1:54 pm

As is true with the continued withholding of key documents in the JFK assassination, I believe that if the lousy reporting and official screwups in the Epstein case persist, it will be perfectly fine for the public to conclude and believe the absolute worst and act accordingly.

Actually, we SHOULD believe the worst.

Robin Kash , , August 14, 2019 at 2:16 pm

Given the spotiness and inadequacy of reporting on the Epstein affair I wonder if an avenue for exploration might be that of a more direct involvement of media moguls and highly placed media staff in being serviced by Epstein i.e., the decision-makers regarding what gets covered and published are themselves subject to exposure, embarrassment, and other things that befall men caught in such matters.

Who covers the press and roots out its secret malefactions? Rogue reporters? And who publishes them? Indeed!

[Aug 19, 2019] Conspiracy theory label can generate propaganda sufficiently toxic to severely damage or even destroy political opponents. For instance, Russiagate.

Aug 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

Sean McBride says: August 17, 2019 at 7:57 pm GMT 100 Words "dominate both polls" = "dominate both poles"?

A nice analysis of the rhetorical structure of conspiracy theories in general.

Another important aspect of this: the use of conspiracy theories to generate propaganda sufficiently toxic to severely damage or even destroy political opponents. For instance, Russiagate.

The mainstream media, since 2016, while railing against the conspiratorial mindset expressed in Internet alternative media channels, have been wallowing in it, promoting it with all the power at their disposal. Talk about twisty and sinister doublethink. One could almost describe it as diabolical.

They are often portraying false conspiracy theories as truth, and true conspiracy research as lies -- turning reality upside down and inside out.

[Aug 19, 2019] Does insanity of Maher reflects insanity of the US neoliberal elite as a whole

Aug 19, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Whoa Molly! , July 28, 2018 at 7:31 am

Maher comes across as literally unhinged. Insane.

As James Howard Kunstler said recently, " I think that the thinking class in the United States has literally lost its mind. Donald Trump's persona is so odious that it's just driven them mad and he's like a giant splinter in the eye of the thinking class ."

I don't get it. Either Maher is part of the thinking class that has lost it's mind, or he's a destructive, cynical (familyblog) who is deliberately inflaming his 'Liberal Goodthinking' audience and gaslighting Wilkerson.

The LIberal Goodthinkers have gone so crazy they are making Trump look good.

Dangerous times.

PS: Thanks for term "Liberal Goodthinkers". Pretty good.

juliania , July 28, 2018 at 10:35 am

It's the thinking class versus the deplorables. And the former is enabling the latter in no uncertain terms. This period of lunacy won't be forgotten come voting time. Whereas, had the dems gracefully accepted defeat and concentrated on real issues that concern us all, they might have had a shot at the midterm merrygoround. Instead, they chose to keep the failed slurs of the last campaign a topic of conversation all the way through, as in fact the term 'transition' on these boards does as well. Transition = transitory.

Something is making Trump a very viable stayer through these turbulent times, and the minefield that these people have turned being President into is a sad commentary on the state of our union. But like the sanctions that are unthinkingly dispersed hither and yon, the blowback can be supercharged, and I can't think of more worthy recipients.

Damson , July 29, 2018 at 10:43 am

The Chattering Class is the UK term.. 'Thinking' is rather too generous for the mind-drool exemplified by Maher and his ilk

NotTimothyGeithner , July 28, 2018 at 9:09 am

Maher was a long time libertarian, and with the rightward shift of Team Blue and medical Marijuana (after all we still need to arrest minorities), Bill became a "liberal" type. He's still the same POS he was in the 90's.

Ur-Blintz , July 28, 2018 at 10:03 am

Bingo! How he ever fooled anyone into thinking he was less than a narcissistic, libertarian. money grubbing sociopath is beyond me. First time I saw him, way back when, he was railing against Social Security and he is perhaps most responsible for making a celebrity out of Arianna Huffington, giving her a nationwide pulpit on his original show when she was repulsively right-wing.

[Aug 18, 2019] IV- MICHELS: THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY by Dr. Mustafa Delican

Highly recommended!
Aug 18, 2019 | dergipark.org.tr

To Michels organizations are the only means for the creation of a collective will and they work under the Iron Law of Oligarchy. He explicitly points out the indispensability of oligarchy from the organizations by saying that "It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over electors, of the mandatanes over the mandators, of the delegates over delegators, who says organization, says oligarchy" (Michels 1966, p.365).

Oligarchical tendencies in organizations is not related to ideology or ends of the organizations. Of course, it is evident that any organization which is set up for autocratic aims , it is oligarchic by nature. To Michels, regardless of any ideological concerns, all types of organizations have oligarchic tendencies. It was his major question in political parties that "how can oligarchic tendencies be explained in socialist and democratic parties, which they declared war against it?"( Michels 1966, pp. 50-51).

When he examines this question throughout in his book: Political Parties, he sees organization itself particularly bureaucracy, nature of human being and the phenomenon of leadership as major factors for oligarchical tendencies in organizations. According to Michels' assessments, the crowd is always subject to suggestion and the masses have an apathy for guidance of their need. In contrast the leaders have a natural greed of power ( Michels 1966, pp. 64, 205). To Michels, leadership itself is not compatible with the most essential postulates of democracy, but leadership is a necessary phenomenon in every form of society. He says "At the outset, leaders arise spontaneously, their functions are ACCESSORY and GRATUITOUS. Soon however, they become professional leaders, and in this second stage of development they are stable and irremovable"(

Michels 1966, p. 364).

Leaders also have personal qualities that make them successful as a ruling class. These qualities are , the force of will, knowledge, strength of conviction, self sufficiency, goodness of heart and disinterestedness ( Michels 1966, p. 100 ). Furthermore there is a reciprocal relationship between leadership functions and the organizational structure. Majority of leaders abuse organizational opportunities for their personal aims by using their personal qualities and by creating means, organizational process or principles like party discipline.

As for as organization itself is considered as a source of oligarchy, Michels says that it is generally because of "PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION ITSELF, that is to say, upon the tactical and technical necessities which result from the consolidation of every disciplined political aggregate."( Michels 1966, p. 365). Further as a particular type of organization bureaucracy and its features require an oligarchic structure.

At the societal level, although development in the democracy, oligarchy still exists. First of all he says by looking at the state as an organization, which needs a bureaucracy that is the source of enemy of individual freedom, the state represents a single gigantic oligarchy. An attempt to destroy this gigantic* oligarchy in fact brings a number of smaller oligarchies in society but does not eliminate it ( Michels 1966, p. 188,191,202). Secondly he agrees with Jean Jack Rousseau on the idea that "it is always against the natural order of things that the majority rule and the minority ruled." (Michels 1965, p. 106). Along with this idea professional leadership is seen by Michels as an incompatible phenomenon with

democracy, because , although the leaders at once are not more than executive agents off collective will, as soon as they gain the technical specialization, they emancipate themselves form the masses and start to use their power against the majority. ( Michels 1966, p.70). In addition to this, representative political system is not compatible with the ideal democracy, because to Michels, "a mass which delegates its sovereignty, that is to say transfer its sovereignty to the hands of the few individuals, abdicates its sovereign function ( Michels 1966, p. 73).

The third factor is related to level of socio-economic development of societies and experience of democracy in history. To him in this time ideal democracy is impossible due to socio-economic conditions, that further more he says that," The democracy has an inherent preference for the authoritarian solution of the important questions" (Michels 1966, p. 51, 342).

As a logical result of his iron law of oligarchy, he admits there are elites in society but not elite circulation in terms of replacing one another. He does not redefine the concept of elite, he took Pareto's theory of circulation of elites and modified it. To Michels, there is a battle between the old and new elites, leaders.

The end of this war is not an absolute replacement of the old elites by the new elites, but a reunion of elites, a perennial amalgamation. Complete replacement of elites is rare in history. The old elites attract, absorb and assimilate the new ones, and it is a continuous process (Michels 1966, p. 182, 343; Michels 1949, p. 63). Because for Michels, first " old aristocracy does not disappear, does not become proletarian or impoverished ( at least in absolute sense ), does not make way for new group of rulers , but that always remains at the head of nations, which it led over the course of centuries...[and second]...the old aristocracy be it very old rejuvenated, does not exercise the rule alone but is forced to shave it with some kind of new ruler" (Michels 1965, p. 75-76).

Aristocracy for Michels is not homogenous stratum, and consists of nobility and ruling class. Nobility represents a small but strong part of aristocracy. In this sense it seems that nobility represents real oligarchical power in the society. To Michels nobility holds itself at the helm and does not even dream of disappearing from the stage of history. Though not coinciding with aristocracy,

To Michels nobility holds itself at the helm and does not even dream of disappearing from the stage of history. Though not coinciding with aristocracy, and not constituting more than a part of it, nobility generally takes hold of it and makes itself its master. It pervades, conquers, and molds, the high middle class according to its own moral and social essence" ( Michels 1949,p. 77, 80 ). In contrast to nobility aristocracy is heterogeneous and a place where lower classes' members can easily rise and members of aristocracy can be subject to downward social mobility. For his time, he describes elements of aristocracy (1) aristocrats by birth (2) aristocracy of government clerks, (3) aristocracy of money (4) aristocracy of knowledge . All this groups also represent ruling class (Michels 1965, p. 76 ).

Michels does not get in too much special analysis of the relationships between aristocracy, ruling class and majority. I think he doesn't see that there are much differences in oligarchy in organization and oligarchy in society at large.

To me these two must be separated because (1) for individuals society in a sense an unavoidable place to be in contrast to organizations, particularly voluntary organization , (2) while society represent a more natural entity, organizations are more artificial entities and (3) organizations are set to realize certain targets in a certain period of time, in contrast society's targets are relatively unstable, and subject to reconstruction by people. To think of these questions, does not necessarily reject the existence of oligarchical tendencies in societies. In fact as Michels pointed out democracy has a legacy to solve important questions of society, by using oligarchic methods. Furthermore he also points out that at any social organization there is an intermixture of oligarchic and democratic tendencies. He says that"... In modem party life, aristocracy gladly present itself in democratic guise, while the substance of democracy is permeated with aristocratic elements. On the one side we have aristocracy is a democratic form, and on the other hand democracy with an aristocratic context" (Michels 1966, p.50).

... ... ...

In terms of replacement of old elites by new ones, there is a distinction between Pareto and Michels. Michels does not admit replacement of elites, but admits, amalgamation of new and old elites. In fact historically we can see both of them happened. In short term amalgamation of old and new elites, and in long terms replacement of old elites by new ones. This time period depends on changes in society at large. For example, consider socialist revolutions and aftermath of independent movement in developing countries where these two movements took place, old elites were wiped out. This type of changes are rarely in history. In short term, amalgamation of elites takes place and new elites gradually increases its proportion in the elite strata and ruling class. For example as a result of

industrialization in burope, Hughes observes that at the beginning ...upper class oligarchy shared power with the old aristocracy-but with each year that passed the balance seemed to incline more heavily in favor of the former" (Hughes 1965, pp.149-150). It can be concluded that new elites are bom as a result of socio- economic , political, and historical changes in society, and then these new elites via upward mobility, and that in the end the new elites take place the highest position in the society. In this process the adaptation ability of old elites determine their fates.

On democracy, Pareto always separate ideal democracy and democracy applied, and prefers to talk about the subjects of democracy rather than democracy itself. Michels is clearly in favor of democracy, Mosca was previously against democracy but after the experience of Fascism in Italy, he changed his mind.

How elitist theories affected democracy ? Two answers have given for this question. On the negative side, it has been said that these anti-democratic theories helped European ruling classes by restoring their self confidence and by increasing their consciousness about their privileges; therefore, elite theories become a vehicle for ruling classes (Hughes 1965 (b), p. 149), On the positive side, it has said that elitist theories have helped to enhance democratic theories, Michels himself believed that research on oligarchies necessary for development of democracy by saying that "...a serene and frank examination of oligarchical dangers of democracy will enable us to minimize these dangers,...(Michels 1966, p.370).

It can be said that elitist theories extended and increased awareness of masses and scientist against governments and ruling classes. As a result, many researches have been conducted on application of democracy in organizations.

Researches have shown that oligarchical tendencies are dominant in organizations and can not be eliminated totally. Further more, attempts to reduce oligarchic contrgl in organizations with very few exception have failed. In general, in voluntary organizations, the functional requirements of democracy con not be met most of the time (Lipset, Trow, and Coleman 1956, p.4,6,452).

Is democracy still compatible with elite theories? That has been the question that lead to redefine, reconceptualize the democracy. Here we must pay attention that Pareto, Mosca, and Michels worked J.J. Rousseau's definition of democracy: government by the people, but not government for the people (Burnham 1943, pp.156-7).

New democratic theories like political pluralism, theory of the mass society are compatible with elitist theories. Schumpeter was one of the earliest thinker that he redefined democracy considering elitists 1 arguments. To him democracy defined as "...institutional arrangement for arriving the power to decide by means of competitive struggle for the people's vote" (Bottomore 1964, p.10).

In contrast to compatibility of elitist theories with democracy, it can not be compatible with Marxism. Michels pointed out that M [t]he law of circulation of elites destroy the thesis of the possibility of a society without social levels...[and]... destroy equally the supposition of a ruling class that remains closed and inaccessible" (Michels 1965, p. 106). In terms of preference of political systems he clearly says that "the defects inherent in democracy are obvious. It is none the less true that as a form of social life we must choose democracy as the least of evils" (Michels 1966, p.370).

VI- CONCLUSIONS

Elitist theorists not only introduced elites but also contributed on better understanding of social and political life of societies. The key concept is "power" and who has the power she/he is the leader of society. Heredity, wealth, intellect, organizations are the means to get power.

[Aug 18, 2019] IV- MICHELS: THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY by Dr. Mustafa Delican

Highly recommended!
Aug 18, 2019 | dergipark.org.tr

To Michels organizations are the only means for the creation of a collective will and they work under the Iron Law of Oligarchy. He explicitly points out the indispensability of oligarchy from the organizations by saying that "It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over electors, of the mandatanes over the mandators, of the delegates over delegators, who says organization, says oligarchy" (Michels 1966, p.365).

Oligarchical tendencies in organizations is not related to ideology or ends of the organizations. Of course, it is evident that any organization which is set up for autocratic aims , it is oligarchic by nature. To Michels, regardless of any ideological concerns, all types of organizations have oligarchic tendencies. It was his major question in political parties that "how can oligarchic tendencies be explained in socialist and democratic parties, which they declared war against it?"( Michels 1966, pp. 50-51).

When he examines this question throughout in his book: Political Parties, he sees organization itself particularly bureaucracy, nature of human being and the phenomenon of leadership as major factors for oligarchical tendencies in organizations. According to Michels' assessments, the crowd is always subject to suggestion and the masses have an apathy for guidance of their need. In contrast the leaders have a natural greed of power ( Michels 1966, pp. 64, 205). To Michels, leadership itself is not compatible with the most essential postulates of democracy, but leadership is a necessary phenomenon in every form of society. He says "At the outset, leaders arise spontaneously, their functions are ACCESSORY and GRATUITOUS. Soon however, they become professional leaders, and in this second stage of development they are stable and irremovable"(

Michels 1966, p. 364).

Leaders also have personal qualities that make them successful as a ruling class. These qualities are , the force of will, knowledge, strength of conviction, self sufficiency, goodness of heart and disinterestedness ( Michels 1966, p. 100 ). Furthermore there is a reciprocal relationship between leadership functions and the organizational structure. Majority of leaders abuse organizational opportunities for their personal aims by using their personal qualities and by creating means, organizational process or principles like party discipline.

As for as organization itself is considered as a source of oligarchy, Michels says that it is generally because of "PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION ITSELF, that is to say, upon the tactical and technical necessities which result from the consolidation of every disciplined political aggregate."( Michels 1966, p. 365). Further as a particular type of organization bureaucracy and its features require an oligarchic structure.

At the societal level, although development in the democracy, oligarchy still exists. First of all he says by looking at the state as an organization, which needs a bureaucracy that is the source of enemy of individual freedom, the state represents a single gigantic oligarchy. An attempt to destroy this gigantic* oligarchy in fact brings a number of smaller oligarchies in society but does not eliminate it ( Michels 1966, p. 188,191,202). Secondly he agrees with Jean Jack Rousseau on the idea that "it is always against the natural order of things that the majority rule and the minority ruled." (Michels 1965, p. 106). Along with this idea professional leadership is seen by Michels as an incompatible phenomenon with

democracy, because , although the leaders at once are not more than executive agents off collective will, as soon as they gain the technical specialization, they emancipate themselves form the masses and start to use their power against the majority. ( Michels 1966, p.70). In addition to this, representative political system is not compatible with the ideal democracy, because to Michels, "a mass which delegates its sovereignty, that is to say transfer its sovereignty to the hands of the few individuals, abdicates its sovereign function ( Michels 1966, p. 73).

The third factor is related to level of socio-economic development of societies and experience of democracy in history. To him in this time ideal democracy is impossible due to socio-economic conditions, that further more he says that," The democracy has an inherent preference for the authoritarian solution of the important questions" (Michels 1966, p. 51, 342).

As a logical result of his iron law of oligarchy, he admits there are elites in society but not elite circulation in terms of replacing one another. He does not redefine the concept of elite, he took Pareto's theory of circulation of elites and modified it. To Michels, there is a battle between the old and new elites, leaders.

The end of this war is not an absolute replacement of the old elites by the new elites, but a reunion of elites, a perennial amalgamation. Complete replacement of elites is rare in history. The old elites attract, absorb and assimilate the new ones, and it is a continuous process (Michels 1966, p. 182, 343; Michels 1949, p. 63). Because for Michels, first " old aristocracy does not disappear, does not become proletarian or impoverished ( at least in absolute sense ), does not make way for new group of rulers , but that always remains at the head of nations, which it led over the course of centuries...[and second]...the old aristocracy be it very old rejuvenated, does not exercise the rule alone but is forced to shave it with some kind of new ruler" (Michels 1965, p. 75-76).

Aristocracy for Michels is not homogenous stratum, and consists of nobility and ruling class. Nobility represents a small but strong part of aristocracy. In this sense it seems that nobility represents real oligarchical power in the society. To Michels nobility holds itself at the helm and does not even dream of disappearing from the stage of history. Though not coinciding with aristocracy,

To Michels nobility holds itself at the helm and does not even dream of disappearing from the stage of history. Though not coinciding with aristocracy, and not constituting more than a part of it, nobility generally takes hold of it and makes itself its master. It pervades, conquers, and molds, the high middle class according to its own moral and social essence" ( Michels 1949,p. 77, 80 ). In contrast to nobility aristocracy is heterogeneous and a place where lower classes' members can easily rise and members of aristocracy can be subject to downward social mobility. For his time, he describes elements of aristocracy (1) aristocrats by birth (2) aristocracy of government clerks, (3) aristocracy of money (4) aristocracy of knowledge . All this groups also represent ruling class (Michels 1965, p. 76 ).

Michels does not get in too much special analysis of the relationships between aristocracy, ruling class and majority. I think he doesn't see that there are much differences in oligarchy in organization and oligarchy in society at large.

To me these two must be separated because (1) for individuals society in a sense an unavoidable place to be in contrast to organizations, particularly voluntary organization , (2) while society represent a more natural entity, organizations are more artificial entities and (3) organizations are set to realize certain targets in a certain period of time, in contrast society's targets are relatively unstable, and subject to reconstruction by people. To think of these questions, does not necessarily reject the existence of oligarchical tendencies in societies. In fact as Michels pointed out democracy has a legacy to solve important questions of society, by using oligarchic methods. Furthermore he also points out that at any social organization there is an intermixture of oligarchic and democratic tendencies. He says that"... In modem party life, aristocracy gladly present itself in democratic guise, while the substance of democracy is permeated with aristocratic elements. On the one side we have aristocracy is a democratic form, and on the other hand democracy with an aristocratic context" (Michels 1966, p.50).

... ... ...

In terms of replacement of old elites by new ones, there is a distinction between Pareto and Michels. Michels does not admit replacement of elites, but admits, amalgamation of new and old elites. In fact historically we can see both of them happened. In short term amalgamation of old and new elites, and in long terms replacement of old elites by new ones. This time period depends on changes in society at large. For example, consider socialist revolutions and aftermath of independent movement in developing countries where these two movements took place, old elites were wiped out. This type of changes are rarely in history. In short term, amalgamation of elites takes place and new elites gradually increases its proportion in the elite strata and ruling class. For example as a result of

industrialization in burope, Hughes observes that at the beginning ...upper class oligarchy shared power with the old aristocracy-but with each year that passed the balance seemed to incline more heavily in favor of the former" (Hughes 1965, pp.149-150). It can be concluded that new elites are bom as a result of socio- economic , political, and historical changes in society, and then these new elites via upward mobility, and that in the end the new elites take place the highest position in the society. In this process the adaptation ability of old elites determine their fates.

On democracy, Pareto always separate ideal democracy and democracy applied, and prefers to talk about the subjects of democracy rather than democracy itself. Michels is clearly in favor of democracy, Mosca was previously against democracy but after the experience of Fascism in Italy, he changed his mind.

How elitist theories affected democracy ? Two answers have given for this question. On the negative side, it has been said that these anti-democratic theories helped European ruling classes by restoring their self confidence and by increasing their consciousness about their privileges; therefore, elite theories become a vehicle for ruling classes (Hughes 1965 (b), p. 149), On the positive side, it has said that elitist theories have helped to enhance democratic theories, Michels himself believed that research on oligarchies necessary for development of democracy by saying that "...a serene and frank examination of oligarchical dangers of democracy will enable us to minimize these dangers,...(Michels 1966, p.370).

It can be said that elitist theories extended and increased awareness of masses and scientist against governments and ruling classes. As a result, many researches have been conducted on application of democracy in organizations.

Researches have shown that oligarchical tendencies are dominant in organizations and can not be eliminated totally. Further more, attempts to reduce oligarchic contrgl in organizations with very few exception have failed. In general, in voluntary organizations, the functional requirements of democracy con not be met most of the time (Lipset, Trow, and Coleman 1956, p.4,6,452).

Is democracy still compatible with elite theories? That has been the question that lead to redefine, reconceptualize the democracy. Here we must pay attention that Pareto, Mosca, and Michels worked J.J. Rousseau's definition of democracy: government by the people, but not government for the people (Burnham 1943, pp.156-7).

New democratic theories like political pluralism, theory of the mass society are compatible with elitist theories. Schumpeter was one of the earliest thinker that he redefined democracy considering elitists 1 arguments. To him democracy defined as "...institutional arrangement for arriving the power to decide by means of competitive struggle for the people's vote" (Bottomore 1964, p.10).

In contrast to compatibility of elitist theories with democracy, it can not be compatible with Marxism. Michels pointed out that M [t]he law of circulation of elites destroy the thesis of the possibility of a society without social levels...[and]... destroy equally the supposition of a ruling class that remains closed and inaccessible" (Michels 1965, p. 106). In terms of preference of political systems he clearly says that "the defects inherent in democracy are obvious. It is none the less true that as a form of social life we must choose democracy as the least of evils" (Michels 1966, p.370).

VI- CONCLUSIONS

Elitist theorists not only introduced elites but also contributed on better understanding of social and political life of societies. The key concept is "power" and who has the power she/he is the leader of society. Heredity, wealth, intellect, organizations are the means to get power.

[Aug 18, 2019] Trump Slams NYT After Leaker Reveals Pivot From Russiagate To Racism Witch Hunt

Notable quotes:
"... "The failing New York Times, in one of the most devastating portrayals of bad journalism in history, got caught by a leaker that they are shifting from the Phony Russian Collusion Narrative (the Mueller Report & his testimony were a total disaster), to a Racism Witch Hunt ," Trump wrote on Twitter ..."
"... Systematic deception by the press is a national security issue. In a real crisis, 2/3rds of this country is not going to believe either the government nor the media. That will be a real problem, and it's a massive weakness. ..."
"... Neoliberal MSM propaganda like heroin. Those "news" outlets don't care about actual facts or news, they are more script writers than anything else. ..."
Aug 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Trump Slams NYT After Leaker Reveals Pivot From 'Russiagate' To 'Racism Witch Hunt'

by Tyler Durden Sun, 08/18/2019 - 11:49 0 SHARES

President Trump slammed the "failing New York Times" on Sunday after leaked comments from executive editor Dean Baquet revealed that the paper is pivoting from the Russia narrative (which he described as being "a little tiny bit flat-footed") to 'Trump is a racist.'

"The failing New York Times, in one of the most devastating portrayals of bad journalism in history, got caught by a leaker that they are shifting from the Phony Russian Collusion Narrative (the Mueller Report & his testimony were a total disaster), to a Racism Witch Hunt ," Trump wrote on Twitter, adding "'Journalism' has reached a new low in the history of our Country. It is nothing more than an evil propaganda machine for the Democrat Party. The reporting is so false, biased and evil that it has now become a very sick joke But the public is aware! The reporting is so false, biased and evil that it has now become a very sick joke But the public is aware!"

Sanity Bear , 13 minutes ago link

Systematic deception by the press is a national security issue. In a real crisis, 2/3rds of this country is not going to believe either the government nor the media. That will be a real problem, and it's a massive weakness.

MrAToZ , 37 minutes ago link

Neoliberal MSM propaganda like heroin. Those "news" outlets don't care about actual facts or news, they are more script writers than anything else. These pretend journalists have conjured up a narrative and it is all about repeat repeat repeat, keeping that constant drip going into the vein of the Dem constituency. It's been going on for decades and the only people that are too stupid to see it are the Dems themselves.

[Aug 18, 2019] The fundamental problem in politics is not the opposition of wickedness, but the restraint of righteousness. Hillary has always loved to kill people is distant lands

Aug 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

stevek , 18 minutes ago link

Hillary has always loved to kill people. Its in her (evil) blood.

Creative_Destruct , 22 minutes ago link

"This damn Serbian war is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world and to problems within this nation."

Story of the last several decades (fill in the blank with your pick of the name of a US war or a SJW cause):

This damn _________ war is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world and to problems within this nation.

Kissinger had many flaws, but he hit the nail on the head when he said:

"The fundamental problem in politics is not the opposition of wickedness, but the restraint of righteousness"

TheDayAfter , 1 hour ago link

We all know the Hypocrisy of that War. Clinton had to distract the masses from MonicaGate and Hillary had to prove to the MIC that she could be beneficial to them.

Result : Those Kosovo Albanians had a state handed to them, and instead of building it(with uncle Sam's and EU help) as prosperous country, they used their weapons and "expertise" in becoming the low level gangsters of Europe. Every Europol analysis points to the direction of Kosovo Albanians as the criminal thugs in prostitution and drug trade and protection rackets. The largest percentage of a single ethnic group in European jails is that of Albanians.

TeaClipper , 1 hour ago link

The most unjust and illegal of wars in the late 20c.

There was only one reason to bomb white Christian brothers in Serbia thereby aiding the Muslim of Kosovo and Albania, and that was Russia, which by that stage had got its act together and dealt with the traitorous oligarchs who had sold their country out to the west.

Hillary and her cronies no doubt lost a lot of money when the Russians shut their rat lines down.

I hope I live long enough to see those fuckers swing, and Tony Blair, Alistair Campnell and Peter Mandelson as well.

PKKA , 3 hours ago link

Again, your Muslims are to blame for everything. Muslims are all different. And it is necessary to separate the faithful Muslims from the bandits who are only covered by Muslim slogans.
NATO and your godless government are to blame!

An Afghan Freedom Fighter in Donbass - ENG SUBTITLE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc2KeSkl5H0

Joe A , 3 hours ago link

It happened at the time of the Lewinsky affair and the possible impeachment of Clinton. They needed a distraction.

Milosevic btw. agreed to all conditions imposed on the FR of Yugoslavia except for one condition that nobody would accept: the full and unhindered access to the territory of FRY by NATO troops. That effectively meant an occupation. Nobody would agree to that. NATO and Albright deliberately came up with that condition for they knew it was unacceptable. Even Kissinger said that condition was over the top. NATO and Albright wanted that war. Serbia btw. saved Albright twice when she was still a little Slovakian Jewish girl whose family found refuge twice in Serbia. Once they escaped the Nazis that way and the second time the communists.

NATO thought they would need 48 hours but they needed 78 days and Milosevic only gave in after NATO switched from hitting military targets to civilian targets: Hospitals, commuter trains, civilian industry, an open market, random houses in random villages. After Milosevic pulled out his troops out of Kosovo, the KLA started killing Serbs and moderate Albanians, not to mention engage in organ trafficking (...). As the article said, well over 200k Serbs, moderate Albanians, Roma and other minorities were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo.

The US also used cluster bombs and DU weapons. Of the 4000 Italian KFOR troops that went into Kosovo after the bombing, 700 are dead from cancer and leukemia with several hundreds more seriously ill. The American KFOR troops wore hazmat suits. The Italians did not have them and were not warned. Today, many people in southern Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo itself are sick and dying.

HoyeruNew , 3 hours ago link

yes just like USA tried to help Vietnam against communists... by killing 2 million Vietnamese. and tried to help Korea by killing 20 % of the population. and by helping Iraq get rid of "bad" Saddam Hussein by killing 2 million Iraqies.

Oh, the Americans are oh so helpfiul!

ItsDanger , 2 hours ago link

Not disagreeing with you but lets remember that communists were killing a lot of people in other areas not long before those wars in SE Asia. May have been a wash in the end.

seryanhoj , 1 hour ago link

13 million gallons of agent orange dropped on Vietnamese forests was our way of saying we love you. The genetic deformities are still widespread.

So glad they kicked the US out of there.

Magnum , 3 hours ago link

That conflict led to hundreds of thousands of BOSNIANS moving to USA. Gotta keep the refugees flowing no matter what....

JoeBattista , 3 hours ago link

Bring back the draft. On the whole Americans have no idea what the carnage of combat produces. Combat vets do. And the ones that aren't natural psychopaths never want to experience it again. This volunteer army we have is over loaded with a them. A military draft will actually bring some sort civilian control.

seryanhoj , 1 hour ago link

They killed the draft so they would no longer be embarrassed by student protests and having to mow them down.

It worked. Today's snowflakes don't care about slaughter , only mini verbal aggressions against perverts.

seryanhoj , 1 hour ago link

Such ********. Do the millions we kill have any human rights? It's been going on for 4000 years. Ruthless pursuit of empire and fabricating phony justifications.

He–Mene Mox Mox , 3 hours ago link

Hillary seems to enjoy killing people. If it wasn't Gaddaffi, it was all the people on her body bag count, and now it's known she encouraged killing people in Serbia. Someone needs to take that old cow out into the center of the town and burn her at the stake.

Red Corvair , 4 hours ago link

Partially true, otherwise as usually excellent Dr. Paul, ... The Pandora's box situation was opened years before Clinton's bombing of Serbia, which was part of a larger scheme started nearly a decade before.

That was when the US armed the religious extremists in Bosnia, in order to bring war, "civil war" and chaos, and disintegration, the way they more recently tried to do with Syria, or "succeeded" in doing in Libya, bringing chaos and open-air slave markets in a country that was one of the most developed on the African continent under Gaddafi (a truth that was so easily erased by propaganda).

And the whole neocon scheme started two decades before, with the Zbigniew Brzezinski doctrine, when the US started arming the mujahedin in Afghanistan, provoking the trap for the Soviet invasion of 1979, which was the real opening of US neocon's Pandora's box we are regrettably so familiar with by now. We've all fallen in that old neocon/military-industrial-congressional-complex trap by now. And there seems to be no end in sight to those eternal wars "for civilization" (the old colonial trope dressed under new fatigues). Unless serious societal and political changes take place in the US to put an end to the US "imperial" death drive.

[Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

Highly recommended!
Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

STEPHEN COHEN: I'm not aware that Russia attacked Georgia. The European Commission, if you're talking about the 2008 war, the European Commission, investigating what happened, found that Georgia, which was backed by the United States, fighting with an American-built army under the control of the, shall we say, slightly unpredictable Georgian president then, Saakashvili, that he began the war by firing on Russian enclaves. And the Kremlin, which by the way was not occupied by Putin, but by Michael McFaul and Obama's best friend and reset partner then-president Dmitry Medvedev, did what any Kremlin leader, what any leader in any country would have had to do: it reacted. It sent troops across the border through the tunnel, and drove the Georgian forces out of what essentially were kind of Russian protectorate areas of Georgia.

So that- Russia didn't begin that war. And it didn't begin the one in Ukraine, either. We did that by [continents], the overthrow of the Ukrainian president in [20]14 after President Obama told Putin that he would not permit that to happen. And I think it happened within 36 hours. The Russians, like them or not, feel that they have been lied to and betrayed. They use this word, predatl'stvo, betrayal, about American policy toward Russia ever since 1991, when it wasn't just President George Bush, all the documents have been published by the National Security Archive in Washington, all the leaders of the main Western powers promised the Soviet Union that under Gorbachev, if Gorbachev would allow a reunited Germany to be NATO, NATO would not, in the famous expression, move two inches to the east.

Now NATO is sitting on Russia's borders from the Baltic to Ukraine. So Russians aren't fools, and they're good-hearted, but they become resentful. They're worried about being attacked by the United States. In fact, you read and hear in the Russian media daily, we are under attack by the United States. And this is a lot more real and meaningful than this crap that is being put out that Russia somehow attacked us in 2016. I must have been sleeping. I didn't see Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and 2016. This is reckless, dangerous, warmongering talk. It needs to stop. Russia has a better case for saying they've been attacked by us since 1991. We put our military alliance on the front door. Maybe it's not an attack, but it looks like one, feels like one. Could be one.

Disturbed Voter , July 30, 2018 at 6:32 am

Real politik. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Don't start fights in the first place. The idea that American leadership is any better than mid-Victorian imperialism, is laughable.

Jerri-Lynn Scofield , July 30, 2018 at 8:15 am

Here's the RNN link to part one: The Russia "National Security Crisis" is a U.S. Creation .

integer , July 30, 2018 at 7:12 am

AARON MATE: We hear, often, talk of Putin possibly being the richest person in the world as a result of his entanglement with the very corruption of Russia you're speaking about

Few appear to be aware that Bill Browder is single-handedly responsible for starting, and spreading, the rumor that Putin's net worth is $200 billion (for those who are unfamiliar with Browder, I highly recommend watching Andrei Nekrasov's documentary titled " The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes "). Browder appears to have first started this rumor early in 2015 , and has repeated it ad nauseam since then, including in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 . While Browder has always framed the $200 billion figure as his own estimate, that subtle qualifier has had little effect on the media's willingness to accept it as fact.

Interestingly, during the press conference at the Helsinki Summit, Putin claimed Browder sent $400 million of ill-gotten gains to the Clinton campaign. Putin retracted the statement and claimed to have misspoke a week or so later, however by that time the $400 million figure had been cited by numerous media outlets around the world. I think it is at least possible that Putin purposely exaggerated the amount of money in question as a kind of tit-for-tat response to Browder having started the rumor about his net worth being $200 billion.

Blue Pilgrim , July 30, 2018 at 11:39 am

The stories I saw said there was a mistranslation -- but that the figure should have $400 thousand and not $400 million. Maybe Putin misspoke, but the $400,000 number is still significant, albeit far more reasonable.

Putin never was on the Forbes list of billionaires, btw, and his campaign finance statement comes to far less. It never seems to occur to rabid capitalists or crooks that not everyone is like them, placing such importance on vast fortunes, or want to be dishonest, greedy, or power hungry. Putin is only 'well off' and that seems to satisfy him just fine as he gets on with other interests, values, and goals.

integer , July 30, 2018 at 12:03 pm

Yes, $400,000 is the revised/correct figure. My having written that "Putin retracted the statement" was not the best choice of phrase. Also, the figure was corrected the day after it was made, not "a week or so later" as I wrote in my previous comment. From the Russia Insider link:

Browder's criminal group used many tax evasion methods, including offshore companies. They siphoned shares and funds from Russia worth over 1.5 billion dollars. By the way, $400,000 was transferred to the US Democratic Party's accounts from these funds. The Russian president asked us to correct his statement from yesterday. During the briefing, he said it was $400,000,000, not $400,000. Either way, it's still a significant amount of money.

JohnnyGL , July 30, 2018 at 2:54 pm

I hadn't heard about the revision/edit to the $400M, thanks!

Seems crazy to think how much Russo-phobia seems to have been ginned up by one tax-dodging hedgie with an axe to grind.

Procopius , July 31, 2018 at 1:11 am

There's something weird about the anti-Putin hysteria. Somehow, many, many people have come to believe they must demonstrate their membership in the tribe by accepting completely unsupported assertions that go against common sense.

Eureka Springs , July 30, 2018 at 7:58 am

In a sane world we the people would be furious with the Clinton campaign, especially the D party but the R's as well, our media (again), and our intel/police State (again). Holding them all accountable while making sure this tsunami of deception and lies never happens again.

It's amazing even in time of the internetz those of us who really dig can only come up with a few sane voices. It's much worse now in terms of the numbers of sane voices than it was in the run up to Iraq 2.

CenterOfGravity , July 30, 2018 at 12:52 pm

Regardless of broad access to far more information in the digital age, never under estimate the self-preservation instinct of American exceptionalist mythology. There is an inverse relationship between the decline of US global primacy and increasingly desperate quest for adventurism. Like any case of addiction, looking outward for blame/salvation is imperative in order to prevent the mirror of self-reflection/realization from turning back onto ourselves.

integer , July 30, 2018 at 9:28 am

we're not to believe we're not supposed to believe we're supposed to believe

Believe whatever you want, however your comment gives the impression that you came to this article because you felt the need to push back against anything that does not conform to the liberal international order's narrative on Putin and Russia, rather than "with an eagerness to counterbalance the media's portrayal of Putin". WRT to whataboutism, I like Greenwald's definition of the term :

"Whataboutism": the term used to bar inquiry into whether someone adheres to the moral and behavioral standards they seek to impose on everyone else. That's its functional definition.

Rojo , July 30, 2018 at 12:25 pm

Invoking "whataboutism" is a liberal team-Dem tell.

Amfortas the Hippie , July 30, 2018 at 2:20 pm

aye. I've never seen it used by anyone aside from the worst Hill Trolls.
Indeed, when it was first thrown at me, I endeavored to look it up, and found that all references to it were from Hillaryites attempting to diss apostates and heretics.

Jonathan Holland Becnel , July 30, 2018 at 8:22 pm

Eh, probably

John Oliver, whos been completely sucking lately with TDS, did a semi decent segment on Whataboutism.

Eureka Springs , July 30, 2018 at 9:52 am

The degree of consistency and or lack of hypocrisy based on words and actions separates US from Russia to an astonishing level. That is Russia's largest threat to US, our deceivers. The propaganda tables have turned and we are deceiving ourselves to points of collective insanity and warmongering with a great nuclear power while we are at it. Warmongering is who we are and what we do.

Does Russia have a GITMO, torture Chelsea Manning, openly say they want to kill Snowden and Assange? Is Russia building up arsenals on our borders while maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and conducting several wars at any given moment while constantly threatening to foment more wars? Is Russia dropping another trillion on nuclear arsenals? Is Russia forcing us to maintain such an anti democratic system and an even worse, an entirely hackable electronic voting system?

You ready to destroy the world, including your own, rather than look in the mirror?

rkka , July 30, 2018 at 9:52 am

You're talking about extending Russian military power into Europe when the military spending of NATO Europe alone exceeds Russia's by almost 5-1 (more like 12-1 when one includes the US and Canada), have about triple the number of soldiers than Russia has, and when the Russian ground forces are numerically smaller than they have been in at least 200 years?

" to put their self-interests above those of their constituents and employees, why can't we apply this same lens to Putin and his oligarchs?"

The oligarchs got their start under Yeltsin and his FreeMarketDemocraticReformers, whose policies were so catastrophic that deaths were exceeding births by almost a million a year by the late '90s, with no end in sight. Central to Yeltsin's governance was the corrupt privatization, by which means the Seven Bankers came to control the Russian economy and Russian politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semibankirschina

Central to Putin's popularity are the measures he took to curb oligarchic predation in 2003-2005. Because of this, Russia's debt:GDP ratio went from 1.0 to about 0.2, and Russia's demographic recovery began while Western analysis were still predicting the death of Russia.

So Putin is the anti-oligarch in Russian domestic politics.

Blue Pilgrim , July 30, 2018 at 12:17 pm

"While it's true that power corrupts"

I know of many people who sacrifice their own interests for those of their children (over whom they have virtually absolute power), family member and friends. I know of others who dedicate their lives to justice, peace, the well being of their nation, the world, and other people -- people who find far greater meaning and satisfaction in this than in accumulating power or money. Other people have their own goals, such as producing art, inventing interesting things, reading and learning, and don't care two hoots about power or money as long as their immediate needs are met.

I'm cynical enough about humans without thinking the worst of everyone and every group or culture. Not everyone thinks only of nails and wants to be hammers, or are sociopaths. There are times when people are more or less forced into taking power, or getting more money, even if they don't want it, because they want to change things for the better or need to defend themselves.
There are people who get guns and learn how to use them only because they feel a need for defending themselves and family but who don't like guns and don't want to shoot anyone or anything.

There are many people who do not want to be controlled and bossed around, but neither want to boss around anyone else. The world is full of such people. If they are threatened and attacked, however, expect defensive reactions. Same as for most animals which are not predators, and even predators will generally not attack other animals if they are not hungry or threatened -- but that does not mean they are not competent or can be dangerous.

Capitalism is not only inherently predatory, but is inherently expansive without limits, with unlimited ambition for profits and control. It's intrinsically very competitive and imperialist. Capitalism is also a thing which was exported to Russia, starting soon after the Russian Revolution, which was immediately attacked and invaded by the West, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia had it's own problems, which it met with varying degrees of success, but were quite different from the aggressive capitalism and imperialism of the US and Europe.

Not every culture and person are the same.

BenX , July 30, 2018 at 3:28 pm

The pro-Putin propaganda is pretty interesting to witness, and of course not everything Cohen says is skewed pro-Putin – that's what provides credibility. But "Putin kills everybody" is something NOBODY says (except Cohen, twice in one interview) – Putin is actually pretty selective of those he decides to have killed. But of course, he doesn't kill anyone, personally – therefore he's an innocent lamb, accidentally running Russia as a dictator.

rkka , July 31, 2018 at 9:11 am

The most recent dictator in Russian history was Boris Yeltsin, who turned tanks on his legislature while it was in the legal and constitutional process of impeaching him, and whose policies were so catastrophic for Russians (who were dying off at the rate of 900k/yr) that he had to steal his re-election because he had a 5% approval rating.

But he did as the US gvt told him, so I guess that makes him a Democrat.

Under Putin Russia recovered from being helpless, bankrupt & dying, but Russia has an independent foreign policy, so that makes Putin a dictator.

Plenue , July 30, 2018 at 3:54 pm

"Does any sane person believe that there will ever be a Putin-signed contract provided as evidence? Does any sane person believe that Putin actually needs to "approve" a contract rather than signaling to his oligarch/mafia hierarchy that he's unhappy about a newspaper or journalist's reporting?"

Why do you think Putin even needs, or feels a need, to have journalists killed in the first place? I see no evidence to support this basic assumption.

The idea of Russia poised to attack Europe is interesting, in light of the fact that they've cut their military spending by 20%. And even before that the budgets of France, Germany, and the UK combined well exceeded that of Russia, to say nothing of the rest of NATO or the US.

Putin's record speaks for itself. This again points to the absurdity of claiming he's had reporters killed: he doesn't need to. He has a vast amount of genuine public support because he's salvaged the country and pieced it back together after the pillaging of the Yeltsin years. That he himself is a corrupt oligarch I have no particular doubt of. But if he just wanted to enrich himself, he's had a very funny way of going about it. Pray tell, what are these 'other interpretations'?

"The US foreign policy has been disastrous for millions of people since world war 2. But Cohen's arguments that Russia isn't as bad as the US is just a bunch of whattaboutism."

What countries has the Russian Federation destroyed?

witters , July 31, 2018 at 1:30 am

Here is a fascinating essay ["Are We Reading Russia Right?"] by Nicolai N. Petro who currently holds the Silvia-Chandley Professorship of Peace Studies and Nonviolence at the University of Rhode Island. His books include, Ukraine
in Crisis (Routledge, 2017), Crafting Democracy (Cornell, 2004), The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Harvard, 1995), and Russian Foreign Policy, co-authored with Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Longman, 1997). A graduate of the University of Virginia, he is the recipient of Fulbright awards to Russia and to Ukraine, as well as fellowships from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington,
D.C., and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, he served as special assistant for policy toward the Soviet Union in the U.S. Department of State from 1989 to 1990. In addition to scholarly publications
on Russia and Ukraine, he has written for Asia Times, American Interest, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian (UK), The Nation, New York Times, and Wilson Quarterly. His writings have appeared frequently on the web sites of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and The National Interest.

I warn you – it is terrifying!

http://npetro.net/resources/Petro-FF+Spring+2018.pdf

Carolinian , July 30, 2018 at 8:55 am

Thanks for so much for this. Great stuff. Cohen says the emperor has no clothes so naturally the empire doesn't want him on television. I believe he has been on CNN one or two times and I saw him once on the PBS Newshour where the interviewer asked skeptical questions with a pained and skeptical look. He seems to be the only prominent person willing to stand up and call bs on the Russia hate. There are plenty of pundits and commentators who do that but not many Princeton professors.

Thye Rev Kev , July 30, 2018 at 9:04 am

It has been said in recent years that the greatest failure of American foreign policy was the invasion of Iraq. I think that they are wrong. The greatest failure, in my opinion, is to push both China and Russia together into a semi-official pact against American ambitions. In the same way that the US was able to split China from the USSR back in the seventies, the best option was for America to split Russia from China and help incorporate them into the western system. The waters for that idea have been so fouled by the Russia hysteria, if not dementia, that that is no longer a possibility. I just wish that the US would stop sowing dragon's teeth – it never ends well.

NotTimothyGeithner , July 30, 2018 at 9:45 am

The best option, but the "American exceptionalists" went nuts. Also, the usual play book of stoking fears of the "yellow menace" would have been too on the nose. Americans might not buy it, and there was a whole cottage industry of "the rising China threat" except the potential consumer market place and slave labor factories stopped that from happening.

Bringing Russia into the West effectively means Europe, and I think that creates a similar dynamic to a Russian/Chinese pact. The basic problem with the EU is its led by a relatively weak but very German power which makes the EU relatively weak or controllable as long as the German electorate is relatively sedate. I think they still need the international structures run by the U.S. to maintain their dominance. What Russia and the pre-Erdogan Turkey (which was never going to be admitted to the EU) presented was significant upsets to the existing EU order with major balances to Germany which I always believed would make the EU potentially more dynamic. Every decision wouldn't require a pilgrimage to Berlin. The British were always disinterested. The French had made arrangements with Germany, and Italy is still Italy. Putting Russia or Turkey (pre-Erdogan) would have disrupted this arrangement.

John Wright , July 30, 2018 at 11:11 am

>which is oddly not easy to locate on its site

It appeared to me that Aaron Mate knew he was dealing with a weak hand by the end of the interview.

When Mate stated "it's widely held that Putin is responsible for the killing of journalists and opposition activists who oppose him."

There are many widely held beliefs in the world, and that does not make them true.

For example, It was widely held, and still may be believed by some, that Saddam Hussein was involved in the events of 9/11.

It is widely believed that humans are not responsible, in any part, for climate change.

Mate may have been embarrassed when he saw the final version and as a courtesy to him, the interview was made more difficult to find.

pretzelattack , July 30, 2018 at 11:35 am

iirc he didn't say it was true.

Elizabeth Burton , July 30, 2018 at 7:18 pm

The Crimea voted to be annexed by Russia by a clear majority. The US overran Hawaii with total disregard for the wishes of the native population. Your comparison is invalid.

vato , July 31, 2018 at 3:37 am

"Putin's finger prints are all over the Balkan fiasco".How is that with Putin only becoming president in 2000 and the Nato bombing started way beforehand. It's ridiculous to think that Putin had any major influence at that time as govenor or director of the domestic intelligence service on what was going during the bombing of NATO on Belgrad. Even Gerhard Schroeder, then chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, admitted in an interview in 2014 with a major German Newspaper (Die Zeit) that this invasion of Nato was a fault and against international law!

Can you concrete what you mean by "fingerprints" or is this just another platitudes?

ewmayer , July 31, 2018 at 6:05 pm

"Somebody called it Trump derangement syndrome."

I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].

Symptoms include:

o Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently absurd MSM propaganda. For example, the meme that releasing factual information about actual election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging of its own nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;

o Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on and lying to the American people, spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer Brennan;

o Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples of "norms-respecting Republican patriots";

o Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating Russian stooge.

[Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

Highly recommended!
Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

ewmayer , July 31, 2018 at 6:05 pm

"Somebody called it Trump derangement syndrome."

I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].

Symptoms include:

[Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

Highly recommended!
Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

ewmayer , July 31, 2018 at 6:05 pm

"Somebody called it Trump derangement syndrome."

I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].

Symptoms include:

[Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

Highly recommended!
Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

STEPHEN COHEN: I'm not aware that Russia attacked Georgia. The European Commission, if you're talking about the 2008 war, the European Commission, investigating what happened, found that Georgia, which was backed by the United States, fighting with an American-built army under the control of the, shall we say, slightly unpredictable Georgian president then, Saakashvili, that he began the war by firing on Russian enclaves. And the Kremlin, which by the way was not occupied by Putin, but by Michael McFaul and Obama's best friend and reset partner then-president Dmitry Medvedev, did what any Kremlin leader, what any leader in any country would have had to do: it reacted. It sent troops across the border through the tunnel, and drove the Georgian forces out of what essentially were kind of Russian protectorate areas of Georgia.

So that- Russia didn't begin that war. And it didn't begin the one in Ukraine, either. We did that by [continents], the overthrow of the Ukrainian president in [20]14 after President Obama told Putin that he would not permit that to happen. And I think it happened within 36 hours. The Russians, like them or not, feel that they have been lied to and betrayed. They use this word, predatl'stvo, betrayal, about American policy toward Russia ever since 1991, when it wasn't just President George Bush, all the documents have been published by the National Security Archive in Washington, all the leaders of the main Western powers promised the Soviet Union that under Gorbachev, if Gorbachev would allow a reunited Germany to be NATO, NATO would not, in the famous expression, move two inches to the east.

Now NATO is sitting on Russia's borders from the Baltic to Ukraine. So Russians aren't fools, and they're good-hearted, but they become resentful. They're worried about being attacked by the United States. In fact, you read and hear in the Russian media daily, we are under attack by the United States. And this is a lot more real and meaningful than this crap that is being put out that Russia somehow attacked us in 2016. I must have been sleeping. I didn't see Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and 2016. This is reckless, dangerous, warmongering talk. It needs to stop. Russia has a better case for saying they've been attacked by us since 1991. We put our military alliance on the front door. Maybe it's not an attack, but it looks like one, feels like one. Could be one.

Disturbed Voter , July 30, 2018 at 6:32 am

Real politik. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Don't start fights in the first place. The idea that American leadership is any better than mid-Victorian imperialism, is laughable.

Jerri-Lynn Scofield , July 30, 2018 at 8:15 am

Here's the RNN link to part one: The Russia "National Security Crisis" is a U.S. Creation .

integer , July 30, 2018 at 7:12 am

AARON MATE: We hear, often, talk of Putin possibly being the richest person in the world as a result of his entanglement with the very corruption of Russia you're speaking about

Few appear to be aware that Bill Browder is single-handedly responsible for starting, and spreading, the rumor that Putin's net worth is $200 billion (for those who are unfamiliar with Browder, I highly recommend watching Andrei Nekrasov's documentary titled " The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes "). Browder appears to have first started this rumor early in 2015 , and has repeated it ad nauseam since then, including in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 . While Browder has always framed the $200 billion figure as his own estimate, that subtle qualifier has had little effect on the media's willingness to accept it as fact.

Interestingly, during the press conference at the Helsinki Summit, Putin claimed Browder sent $400 million of ill-gotten gains to the Clinton campaign. Putin retracted the statement and claimed to have misspoke a week or so later, however by that time the $400 million figure had been cited by numerous media outlets around the world. I think it is at least possible that Putin purposely exaggerated the amount of money in question as a kind of tit-for-tat response to Browder having started the rumor about his net worth being $200 billion.

Blue Pilgrim , July 30, 2018 at 11:39 am

The stories I saw said there was a mistranslation -- but that the figure should have $400 thousand and not $400 million. Maybe Putin misspoke, but the $400,000 number is still significant, albeit far more reasonable.

Putin never was on the Forbes list of billionaires, btw, and his campaign finance statement comes to far less. It never seems to occur to rabid capitalists or crooks that not everyone is like them, placing such importance on vast fortunes, or want to be dishonest, greedy, or power hungry. Putin is only 'well off' and that seems to satisfy him just fine as he gets on with other interests, values, and goals.

integer , July 30, 2018 at 12:03 pm

Yes, $400,000 is the revised/correct figure. My having written that "Putin retracted the statement" was not the best choice of phrase. Also, the figure was corrected the day after it was made, not "a week or so later" as I wrote in my previous comment. From the Russia Insider link:

Browder's criminal group used many tax evasion methods, including offshore companies. They siphoned shares and funds from Russia worth over 1.5 billion dollars. By the way, $400,000 was transferred to the US Democratic Party's accounts from these funds. The Russian president asked us to correct his statement from yesterday. During the briefing, he said it was $400,000,000, not $400,000. Either way, it's still a significant amount of money.

JohnnyGL , July 30, 2018 at 2:54 pm

I hadn't heard about the revision/edit to the $400M, thanks!

Seems crazy to think how much Russo-phobia seems to have been ginned up by one tax-dodging hedgie with an axe to grind.

Procopius , July 31, 2018 at 1:11 am

There's something weird about the anti-Putin hysteria. Somehow, many, many people have come to believe they must demonstrate their membership in the tribe by accepting completely unsupported assertions that go against common sense.

Eureka Springs , July 30, 2018 at 7:58 am

In a sane world we the people would be furious with the Clinton campaign, especially the D party but the R's as well, our media (again), and our intel/police State (again). Holding them all accountable while making sure this tsunami of deception and lies never happens again.

It's amazing even in time of the internetz those of us who really dig can only come up with a few sane voices. It's much worse now in terms of the numbers of sane voices than it was in the run up to Iraq 2.

CenterOfGravity , July 30, 2018 at 12:52 pm

Regardless of broad access to far more information in the digital age, never under estimate the self-preservation instinct of American exceptionalist mythology. There is an inverse relationship between the decline of US global primacy and increasingly desperate quest for adventurism. Like any case of addiction, looking outward for blame/salvation is imperative in order to prevent the mirror of self-reflection/realization from turning back onto ourselves.

integer , July 30, 2018 at 9:28 am

we're not to believe we're not supposed to believe we're supposed to believe

Believe whatever you want, however your comment gives the impression that you came to this article because you felt the need to push back against anything that does not conform to the liberal international order's narrative on Putin and Russia, rather than "with an eagerness to counterbalance the media's portrayal of Putin". WRT to whataboutism, I like Greenwald's definition of the term :

"Whataboutism": the term used to bar inquiry into whether someone adheres to the moral and behavioral standards they seek to impose on everyone else. That's its functional definition.

Rojo , July 30, 2018 at 12:25 pm

Invoking "whataboutism" is a liberal team-Dem tell.

Amfortas the Hippie , July 30, 2018 at 2:20 pm

aye. I've never seen it used by anyone aside from the worst Hill Trolls.
Indeed, when it was first thrown at me, I endeavored to look it up, and found that all references to it were from Hillaryites attempting to diss apostates and heretics.

Jonathan Holland Becnel , July 30, 2018 at 8:22 pm

Eh, probably

John Oliver, whos been completely sucking lately with TDS, did a semi decent segment on Whataboutism.

Eureka Springs , July 30, 2018 at 9:52 am

The degree of consistency and or lack of hypocrisy based on words and actions separates US from Russia to an astonishing level. That is Russia's largest threat to US, our deceivers. The propaganda tables have turned and we are deceiving ourselves to points of collective insanity and warmongering with a great nuclear power while we are at it. Warmongering is who we are and what we do.

Does Russia have a GITMO, torture Chelsea Manning, openly say they want to kill Snowden and Assange? Is Russia building up arsenals on our borders while maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and conducting several wars at any given moment while constantly threatening to foment more wars? Is Russia dropping another trillion on nuclear arsenals? Is Russia forcing us to maintain such an anti democratic system and an even worse, an entirely hackable electronic voting system?

You ready to destroy the world, including your own, rather than look in the mirror?

rkka , July 30, 2018 at 9:52 am

You're talking about extending Russian military power into Europe when the military spending of NATO Europe alone exceeds Russia's by almost 5-1 (more like 12-1 when one includes the US and Canada), have about triple the number of soldiers than Russia has, and when the Russian ground forces are numerically smaller than they have been in at least 200 years?

" to put their self-interests above those of their constituents and employees, why can't we apply this same lens to Putin and his oligarchs?"

The oligarchs got their start under Yeltsin and his FreeMarketDemocraticReformers, whose policies were so catastrophic that deaths were exceeding births by almost a million a year by the late '90s, with no end in sight. Central to Yeltsin's governance was the corrupt privatization, by which means the Seven Bankers came to control the Russian economy and Russian politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semibankirschina

Central to Putin's popularity are the measures he took to curb oligarchic predation in 2003-2005. Because of this, Russia's debt:GDP ratio went from 1.0 to about 0.2, and Russia's demographic recovery began while Western analysis were still predicting the death of Russia.

So Putin is the anti-oligarch in Russian domestic politics.

Blue Pilgrim , July 30, 2018 at 12:17 pm

"While it's true that power corrupts"

I know of many people who sacrifice their own interests for those of their children (over whom they have virtually absolute power), family member and friends. I know of others who dedicate their lives to justice, peace, the well being of their nation, the world, and other people -- people who find far greater meaning and satisfaction in this than in accumulating power or money. Other people have their own goals, such as producing art, inventing interesting things, reading and learning, and don't care two hoots about power or money as long as their immediate needs are met.

I'm cynical enough about humans without thinking the worst of everyone and every group or culture. Not everyone thinks only of nails and wants to be hammers, or are sociopaths. There are times when people are more or less forced into taking power, or getting more money, even if they don't want it, because they want to change things for the better or need to defend themselves.
There are people who get guns and learn how to use them only because they feel a need for defending themselves and family but who don't like guns and don't want to shoot anyone or anything.

There are many people who do not want to be controlled and bossed around, but neither want to boss around anyone else. The world is full of such people. If they are threatened and attacked, however, expect defensive reactions. Same as for most animals which are not predators, and even predators will generally not attack other animals if they are not hungry or threatened -- but that does not mean they are not competent or can be dangerous.

Capitalism is not only inherently predatory, but is inherently expansive without limits, with unlimited ambition for profits and control. It's intrinsically very competitive and imperialist. Capitalism is also a thing which was exported to Russia, starting soon after the Russian Revolution, which was immediately attacked and invaded by the West, and especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia had it's own problems, which it met with varying degrees of success, but were quite different from the aggressive capitalism and imperialism of the US and Europe.

Not every culture and person are the same.

BenX , July 30, 2018 at 3:28 pm

The pro-Putin propaganda is pretty interesting to witness, and of course not everything Cohen says is skewed pro-Putin – that's what provides credibility. But "Putin kills everybody" is something NOBODY says (except Cohen, twice in one interview) – Putin is actually pretty selective of those he decides to have killed. But of course, he doesn't kill anyone, personally – therefore he's an innocent lamb, accidentally running Russia as a dictator.

rkka , July 31, 2018 at 9:11 am

The most recent dictator in Russian history was Boris Yeltsin, who turned tanks on his legislature while it was in the legal and constitutional process of impeaching him, and whose policies were so catastrophic for Russians (who were dying off at the rate of 900k/yr) that he had to steal his re-election because he had a 5% approval rating.

But he did as the US gvt told him, so I guess that makes him a Democrat.

Under Putin Russia recovered from being helpless, bankrupt & dying, but Russia has an independent foreign policy, so that makes Putin a dictator.

Plenue , July 30, 2018 at 3:54 pm

"Does any sane person believe that there will ever be a Putin-signed contract provided as evidence? Does any sane person believe that Putin actually needs to "approve" a contract rather than signaling to his oligarch/mafia hierarchy that he's unhappy about a newspaper or journalist's reporting?"

Why do you think Putin even needs, or feels a need, to have journalists killed in the first place? I see no evidence to support this basic assumption.

The idea of Russia poised to attack Europe is interesting, in light of the fact that they've cut their military spending by 20%. And even before that the budgets of France, Germany, and the UK combined well exceeded that of Russia, to say nothing of the rest of NATO or the US.

Putin's record speaks for itself. This again points to the absurdity of claiming he's had reporters killed: he doesn't need to. He has a vast amount of genuine public support because he's salvaged the country and pieced it back together after the pillaging of the Yeltsin years. That he himself is a corrupt oligarch I have no particular doubt of. But if he just wanted to enrich himself, he's had a very funny way of going about it. Pray tell, what are these 'other interpretations'?

"The US foreign policy has been disastrous for millions of people since world war 2. But Cohen's arguments that Russia isn't as bad as the US is just a bunch of whattaboutism."

What countries has the Russian Federation destroyed?

witters , July 31, 2018 at 1:30 am

Here is a fascinating essay ["Are We Reading Russia Right?"] by Nicolai N. Petro who currently holds the Silvia-Chandley Professorship of Peace Studies and Nonviolence at the University of Rhode Island. His books include, Ukraine
in Crisis (Routledge, 2017), Crafting Democracy (Cornell, 2004), The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Harvard, 1995), and Russian Foreign Policy, co-authored with Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Longman, 1997). A graduate of the University of Virginia, he is the recipient of Fulbright awards to Russia and to Ukraine, as well as fellowships from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington,
D.C., and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, he served as special assistant for policy toward the Soviet Union in the U.S. Department of State from 1989 to 1990. In addition to scholarly publications
on Russia and Ukraine, he has written for Asia Times, American Interest, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian (UK), The Nation, New York Times, and Wilson Quarterly. His writings have appeared frequently on the web sites of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and The National Interest.

I warn you – it is terrifying!

http://npetro.net/resources/Petro-FF+Spring+2018.pdf

Carolinian , July 30, 2018 at 8:55 am

Thanks for so much for this. Great stuff. Cohen says the emperor has no clothes so naturally the empire doesn't want him on television. I believe he has been on CNN one or two times and I saw him once on the PBS Newshour where the interviewer asked skeptical questions with a pained and skeptical look. He seems to be the only prominent person willing to stand up and call bs on the Russia hate. There are plenty of pundits and commentators who do that but not many Princeton professors.

Thye Rev Kev , July 30, 2018 at 9:04 am

It has been said in recent years that the greatest failure of American foreign policy was the invasion of Iraq. I think that they are wrong. The greatest failure, in my opinion, is to push both China and Russia together into a semi-official pact against American ambitions. In the same way that the US was able to split China from the USSR back in the seventies, the best option was for America to split Russia from China and help incorporate them into the western system. The waters for that idea have been so fouled by the Russia hysteria, if not dementia, that that is no longer a possibility. I just wish that the US would stop sowing dragon's teeth – it never ends well.

NotTimothyGeithner , July 30, 2018 at 9:45 am

The best option, but the "American exceptionalists" went nuts. Also, the usual play book of stoking fears of the "yellow menace" would have been too on the nose. Americans might not buy it, and there was a whole cottage industry of "the rising China threat" except the potential consumer market place and slave labor factories stopped that from happening.

Bringing Russia into the West effectively means Europe, and I think that creates a similar dynamic to a Russian/Chinese pact. The basic problem with the EU is its led by a relatively weak but very German power which makes the EU relatively weak or controllable as long as the German electorate is relatively sedate. I think they still need the international structures run by the U.S. to maintain their dominance. What Russia and the pre-Erdogan Turkey (which was never going to be admitted to the EU) presented was significant upsets to the existing EU order with major balances to Germany which I always believed would make the EU potentially more dynamic. Every decision wouldn't require a pilgrimage to Berlin. The British were always disinterested. The French had made arrangements with Germany, and Italy is still Italy. Putting Russia or Turkey (pre-Erdogan) would have disrupted this arrangement.

John Wright , July 30, 2018 at 11:11 am

>which is oddly not easy to locate on its site

It appeared to me that Aaron Mate knew he was dealing with a weak hand by the end of the interview.

When Mate stated "it's widely held that Putin is responsible for the killing of journalists and opposition activists who oppose him."

There are many widely held beliefs in the world, and that does not make them true.

For example, It was widely held, and still may be believed by some, that Saddam Hussein was involved in the events of 9/11.

It is widely believed that humans are not responsible, in any part, for climate change.

Mate may have been embarrassed when he saw the final version and as a courtesy to him, the interview was made more difficult to find.

pretzelattack , July 30, 2018 at 11:35 am

iirc he didn't say it was true.

Elizabeth Burton , July 30, 2018 at 7:18 pm

The Crimea voted to be annexed by Russia by a clear majority. The US overran Hawaii with total disregard for the wishes of the native population. Your comparison is invalid.

vato , July 31, 2018 at 3:37 am

"Putin's finger prints are all over the Balkan fiasco".How is that with Putin only becoming president in 2000 and the Nato bombing started way beforehand. It's ridiculous to think that Putin had any major influence at that time as govenor or director of the domestic intelligence service on what was going during the bombing of NATO on Belgrad. Even Gerhard Schroeder, then chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, admitted in an interview in 2014 with a major German Newspaper (Die Zeit) that this invasion of Nato was a fault and against international law!

Can you concrete what you mean by "fingerprints" or is this just another platitudes?

ewmayer , July 31, 2018 at 6:05 pm

"Somebody called it Trump derangement syndrome."

I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].

Symptoms include:

o Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently absurd MSM propaganda. For example, the meme that releasing factual information about actual election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging of its own nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;

o Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on and lying to the American people, spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer Brennan;

o Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples of "norms-respecting Republican patriots";

o Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating Russian stooge.

[Aug 17, 2019] Unleashing country-wide epidemic of Russophenia and anti-Russian hysteria as well as stifling debate regarding the US policy toward a nation armed with thousands of nuclear weapons might be not such a huge folly as some think

Aug 17, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

RAP999 • 2 years ago ,

Look at the bright side. If the Russkies nuke Washington and NYC think how much better off the rest of the country will be.

[Aug 17, 2019] America s Benevolent Bombing of Serbia by James Bovard

By all measures Clinton is a war criminal... Hilary is a female sociopath or worse.
Notable quotes:
"... Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of 1999, "I urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?" ..."
"... The Kosovo Liberation Army's savage nature was well known before the Clinton administration formally christened them "freedom fighters" in 1999. ..."
"... Sen. Joe Lieberman whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." ..."
"... Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because, it alleged the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo. After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Clinton and Britain's Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war had stopped a new Hitler in his tracks. ..."
Aug 16, 2019 | www.fff.org

Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton commenced bombing Serbia in the name of human rights, justice, and ethnic tolerance. Approximately 1,500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO bombing in one of the biggest sham morality plays of the modern era. As British professor Philip Hammond recently noted, the 78-day bombing campaign "was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called 'dual-use' targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorise the country into surrender."

Clinton's unprovoked attack on Serbia, intended to help ethnic Albanians seize control of Kosovo, set a precedent for "humanitarian" warring that was invoked by supporters of George W. Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq, Barack Oba-ma's bombing of Libya, and Donald Trump's bombing of Syria.

Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo, and there is an 11-foot statue of him standing in the capitol, Pristina, on Bill Clinton Boulevard. A commentator in the United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton "with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999." It would have been a more accurate representation if Clinton was shown standing on the corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.

Bombing Serbia was a family affair in the Clinton White House. Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of 1999, "I urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?" A biography of Hillary Clinton, written by Gail Sheehy and published in late 1999, stated that Mrs. Clinton had refused to talk to the president for eight months after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. She resumed talking to her husband only when she phoned him and urged him in the strongest terms to begin bombing Serbia; the president began bombing within 24 hours. Alexander Cockburn observed in the Los Angeles Times,

It's scarcely surprising that Hillary would have urged President Clinton to drop cluster bombs on the Serbs to defend "our way of life." The first lady is a social engineer. She believes in therapeutic policing and the duty of the state to impose such policing. War is more social engineering, "fixitry" via high explosive, social therapy via cruise missile . As a tough therapeutic cop, she does not shy away from the most abrupt expression of the therapy: the death penalty.

I followed the war closely from the start, but selling articles to editors bashing the bombing was as easy as pitching paeans to Scientology. Instead of breaking into newsprint, my venting occurred instead in my journal:

The KLA

The Kosovo Liberation Army's savage nature was well known before the Clinton administration formally christened them "freedom fighters" in 1999. The previous year, the State Department condemned "terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army." The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden. Arming the KLA helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many congressmen eager to portray U.S. bombing as an engine of righteousness. Sen. Joe Lieberman whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values."

In early June 1999, the Washington Post reported that "some presidential aides and friends are describing [bombing] Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton's 'finest hour.'" Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because, it alleged the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo. After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Clinton and Britain's Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war had stopped a new Hitler in his tracks.

In a speech to American troops in a Thanksgiving 1999 visit, Clinton declared that the Kosovar children "love the United States because we gave them their freedom back." Perhaps Clinton saw freedom as nothing more than being tyrannized by people of the same ethnicity. As the Serbs were driven out of Kosovo, Kosovar Albanians became increasingly oppressed by the KLA, which ignored its commitment to disarm. The Los Angeles Times reported on November 20, 1999,

As a postwar power struggle heats up in Kosovo Albanian politics, extremists are trying to silence moderate leaders with a terror campaign of kidnappings, beatings, bombings, and at least one killing. The intensified attacks against members of the moderate Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK, have raised concerns that radical ethnic Albanians are turning against their own out of fear of losing power in a democratic Kosovo.

American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serbian civilians, bombing Serbian churches, and oppressing non-Muslims. Almost a quarter million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Clinton promised to protect them. In March 2000 renewed fighting broke out when the KLA launched attacks into Serbia, trying to seize territory that it claimed historically belonged to ethnic Albanians. UN Human Rights Envoy Jiri Dienstbier reported that "the [NATO] bombing hasn't solved any problems. It only multiplied the existing problems and created new ones. The Yugoslav economy was destroyed. Kosovo is destroyed. There are hundreds of thousands of people unemployed now."

U.S. complicity in atrocities

Prior to the NATO bombing, American citizens had no responsibility for atrocities committed by either Serbs or ethnic Albanians. However, after American planes bombed much of Serbia into rubble to drive the Serbian military out of Kosovo, Clinton effectively made the United States responsible for the safety of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo. That was equivalent to forcibly disarming a group of people, and then standing by, whistling and looking at the ground, while they are slaughtered. Since the United States promised to bring peace to Kosovo, Clinton bears some responsibility for every burnt church, every murdered Serbian grandmother, every new refugee column streaming north out of Kosovo. Despite those problems, Clinton bragged at a December 8, 1999, press conference that he was "very, very proud" of what the United States had done in Kosovo.

I had a chapter on the Serbian bombing campaign titled "Moralizing with Cluster Bombs" in Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton–Gore Years (St. Martin's Press, 2000), which sufficed to spur at least one or two reviewers to attack the book. Norman Provizer, the director of the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership, scoffed in the Denver Rocky Mountain News, "Bovard chastises Clinton for an illegal, undeclared war in Kosovo without ever bothering to mention that, during the entire run of American history, there have been but four official declarations of war by Congress."

As the chaotic situation in post-war Kosovo became stark, it was easier to work in jibes against the debacle. In an October 2002 USA Today article ("Moral High Ground Not Won on Battlefield") bashing the Bush administration's push for war against Iraq, I pointed out, "A desire to spread freedom does not automatically confer a license to kill . Operation Allied Force in 1999 bombed Belgrade, Yugoslavia, into submission purportedly to liberate Kosovo. Though Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic raised the white flag, ethnic cleansing continued -- with the minority Serbs being slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground in the same way the Serbs previously oppressed the ethnic Albanians."

In a 2011 review for The American Conservative, I scoffed, "After NATO planes killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo were slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO's 'peace' produced a quarter million Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees."

In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities that included murdering persons to extract and sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts. Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in "unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites."

The New York Times reported that the trials of Kosovo body snatchers may be stymied by cover-ups and stonewalling: "Past investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo have been undermined by witnesses' fears of testifying in a small country where clan ties run deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy high posts in the government." American politicians almost entirely ignored the scandal. Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as "the George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.

Clinton's war on Serbia opened a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and pundits portrayed that war as a moral triumph, it was easier for subsequent presidents to portray U.S. bombing as the self-evident triumph of good over evil. Honest assessments of wrongful killings remain few and far between in media coverage.

This article was originally published in the July 2019 edition of Future of Freedom .

Category: Foreign Policy & War

James Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, Playboy, American Spectator, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. He is the author of Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty (2017, published by FFF); Public Policy Hooligan (2012); Attention Deficit Democracy (2006); The Bush Betrayal (2004); Terrorism and Tyranny (2003); Feeling Your Pain (2000); Freedom in Chains (1999); Shakedown (1995); Lost Rights (1994); The Fair Trade Fraud (1991); and The Farm Fiasco (1989). He was the 1995 co-recipient of the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the recipient of the 1996 Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. His book Lost Rights received the Mencken Award as Book of the Year from the Free Press Association. His Terrorism and Tyranny won Laissez Faire Book's Lysander Spooner award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. Read his blog . Send him email .

[Aug 17, 2019] The Anti-Russia Inquisition Intensifies by Ted Galen Carpenter

Images and links to video removed.
The title sounds like it was written yesterday, despite the fact the article is two years ago. That suggest that Russophobia is the official policy of both parties. Why they are trying to remove Trump, who folded after thee month in power, is less clear. May be the crimes they committed are such that anybody in power then Clinton gang is very dangerous for them.
Please looks also at selected comments. They are definitely sounds as written yesterday.
Notable quotes:
"... Congressional Democrats and their media allies have renewed their offensive in the past two weeks. Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) even argues that the evidence already amassed seems to be enough to warrant President Trump's impeachment. It was especially notable that no prominent Democrat denounced such an inflammatory accusation. Indeed, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee appear to be escalating their concept of what constitutes a thorough investigation, now insisting that any contact by advisers to the Trump campaign with any Russian official be subject to scrutiny. ..."
"... They and their neoconservative allies also insist on a laser-like focus on the alleged misdeeds of the Trump people and nothing else. ..."
"... Such an outrageous accusation might have made even the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy blush. That it came from a prominent Republican also suggests that the current bout of Russophobia is not purely a partisan phenomenon. The broader implications are extremely worrisome. A campaign appears to be underway to intimidate and silence critics of the current policy toward Russia, and even policy regarding NATO. ..."
"... The track record on previous group think on such decisions as the military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Libya also confirms that it can produce truly tragic results. Creating a similar situation of stifling debate regarding U.S. policy toward a nation armed with thousands of nuclear weapons is the essence of folly. ..."
May 07, 2017 | nationalinterest.org

or a brief period in April, it appeared that the campaign that Democrats and neo-conservative Republicans were waging for a comprehensive investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election had peaked and was beginning to ebb. The Trump administration's decision to launch missile strikes against a Syrian air base despite Russian President Vladimir Putin vehement objections to the assault on his ally, quieted accusations that Trump was Putin's puppet. Indeed, hawks in both parties praised Trump for taking action in Syria, and the president's supporters at Fox News and elsewhere contended that the U.S. attack discredited the notion that he was guilty of appeasing Russia.

But the hiatus in the allegations of collusion was only temporary. Worse, the resurgent anti-Russia hysteria has broader, ominous implications for U.S. foreign policy and the health of political discourse in the United States.

Congressional Democrats and their media allies have renewed their offensive in the past two weeks. Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) even argues that the evidence already amassed seems to be enough to warrant President Trump's impeachment. It was especially notable that no prominent Democrat denounced such an inflammatory accusation. Indeed, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee appear to be escalating their concept of what constitutes a thorough investigation, now insisting that any contact by advisers to the Trump campaign with any Russian official be subject to scrutiny.

They and their neoconservative allies also insist on a laser-like focus on the alleged misdeeds of the Trump people and nothing else. The current scandal erupted full force when leaked reports from the U.S. intelligence community that newly installed National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the campaign and discussed sensitive issues, including the ongoing U.S. economic sanctions against Russia, thus apparently undermining the Obama administration's policies. Flynn's action showed poor judgment, and his attempt to conceal the contact from Vice President Mike Pence, was even worse. A recent Washington Post article contends that Flynn went ahead with his meeting even though senior Trump campaign officials cautioned against it and warned him that it was almost certain that U.S. intelligence agencies were electronically monitoring Kislyak and all of his contacts.

Examining Flynn's behavior is appropriate, but even that investigation should focus not only on his questionable Russia contacts but on the leak of the intelligence report outing him. Indeed, an intelligence official's unmasking the identity of an American citizen in that fashion constitutes a felony. However, except for perfunctory statements from a few Democratic members of Congress that such an illegal leak also needed to be investigated, little interest has emerged in actually doing so.

Such an outrageous accusation might have made even the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy blush. That it came from a prominent Republican also suggests that the current bout of Russophobia is not purely a partisan phenomenon. The broader implications are extremely worrisome. A campaign appears to be underway to intimidate and silence critics of the current policy toward Russia, and even policy regarding NATO.

Attempting to enshrine Washington's group think on crucial issues is unhealthy for any democratic system. The track record on previous group think on such decisions as the military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Libya also confirms that it can produce truly tragic results. Creating a similar situation of stifling debate regarding U.S. policy toward a nation armed with thousands of nuclear weapons is the essence of folly.

Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the National Interest, is the author of 10 books, the contributing editor of 10 books, and the author of more than 650 articles on international affairs.

nicksorokin • 2 years ago ,

Mr. Carpenter makes the excellent point that political sobriety, rational thought and action, and responsible dialogue is missing from the cadre of drum beating anti-Trump die hearts, who are using the made-up Trump collusion story to destroy the Trump presidency.
Their kamikaze style political tactics will end badly for the democrats, who will be pulverized during the next election for neglecting the people’s business in favor of political scandal, turmoil and extremist partisan behavior.
Keep it up Chuck, you are working overtime to insure greater Republican gains.

RedBaron9495 • 2 years ago ,

Actually, I am an agent of all people who disapprove of Washington’s willingness to use nuclear war in order to establish Washington’s hegemony over the world, but let us understand what it means to be a “Russian agent.”

It means to respect international law, which Washington does not. It means to respect life, which Washington does not. It means to respect the national interests of other countries, which Washington does not. It means to respond to provocations with diplomacy and requests for cooperation, which Washington does not. But Russia does. Clearly, a “Russian agent” is a moral person who wants to preserve life and the national identity and dignity of other peoples.

RussG • 2 years ago ,

Aren't people in the US getting tired of the Russia bashing? Really. And don't the Russia bashers know that the longer this goes on, without evidence, the public is slowly waking up to the truth. Now to blame Russia for the US failings in Afghanistan is beyond ridiculous. Keep it up, kiddies.

greg789 • 2 years ago ,

Neo-cons and Democrats - Traitors all.

dsafd asdfasdf • 2 years ago ,

Russian troll! Carpenter paid by putin! Lock him up! Send him back to Moscow!

deliaruhe • 2 years ago ,

The success of the web of lies that got 65 to 75 percent of Americans to believe that Saddam had WMD and was responsible for 9/11 only encourages these regime-change lunatics. All they have to do now is articulate the equivalent of Bush’s “We cannot wait for the smoking gun, which might come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” — i.e., we don’t need evidence, we just need to generate enough fear — and they’ll have all the public support they could possibly need to commence with their program of regime change at home, followed by regime change in Russia. That’s the diabolical beauty of governing a population through the politics of fear — which has been the practise since the beginning of the first Cold War.

johnnydavis1 • 2 years ago ,

It's interesting that the Democrats and the media didn't seem very interested in Hillary Clinton's foreign ties (and the money she received), or the potential blackmail that could have been tied to any of her "missing" emails that the Russians and others probably have.

toolateformost johnnydavis1 • 2 years ago ,

Its interesting that you are ignoring the traitor in the white house.
Trump will look great in orange

Wyrdless toolateformost • 2 years ago ,

Do you have any evidence?

toolateformost Wyrdless • 2 years ago ,

I can't share it with you because it's classified and I don't (unlike Trumps administration) believe in sharing sensitive information with Russian stooges.

Wyrdless toolateformost • 2 years ago ,

LOL, love the sarcasm

Kizar_Sozay • 2 years ago ,

The media is upset the Russians (allegedly) did what American journalists should have been doing.

St Reformed • 2 years ago ,

Russia [aka Soviet Union] was simply a "red herring" (pun intended) during the Cold War days when the Left always blamed American first. Now post-Soviet autocratic Russia is a lethal menace behind every GOP trash can. The irony is so rich.

VoteOutIncumbents • 2 years ago ,

I am old enough to have a conscious memory of the end days of the McCarthy smears. This seems a lot like that. Wild charges, no evidence. Senator McCarthy always "had" a list of 57, 95, or 212 active communists in the State Department, he just never got around to disclosing names. Evidence? The Democrats don't seem to need it. Just investigate, investigate, investigate. Anything to distract from the true reasons for Clinton's loss. The party of FDR wrote off the white working class. They thought they'd have enough minority and female voters to win. They didn't.

odys • 2 years ago ,

Oh, oh. Mike Rogers, Obama's head of the NSA is testifying that the NSA did NOT have high confidence that the wusskies interfered to help Trump win. I wonder if Boris Badanoff and Natasha threatened him and his family?

odys • 2 years ago • edited ,

Maybe we should call in moose and squirrel.

Look, Democrats just cannot bring themselves to accept the blame for their loss, no surprise, they truly believe they are on the right side of history, Cuba, North Korea, and venezuela not withstanding. But the aging cold warriors, like McNasty, pine for the days when people used to seek their opinion on the USSR.

dannyboy116 • 2 years ago ,

Thank you for an excellent article. Building a sense of hysteria against the one country in the world with as many nuclear weapons as us is truly foolish and dangerous.

Robert • 2 years ago ,

And the best part in this fishing expedition of democRATS and politicized government agencies is that they have found NOTHING, only the daily, weekly and monthly fabrications cooked backstage by MSM and accomplices agents leaning or part of Obanus regime..

The Dead Rabbits • 2 years ago ,

Really good piece. So why does DC go bonkers over Russia but not deeper and more problematic connections of politicians and public figures such as with Turkey, China, or Israel? It's all about the emails and Hillary's lame excuses.

R. Arandas • 2 years ago ,

I find it ironic because during the Cold War, it was generally Republicans who opposed the Soviet Union and its foreign policy the most strongly, with both language and action, while Democrats favored conciliation with American rivals. Nowadays, however, conservatives seem more pro-Russia while liberals seem much more hostile.

Wyrdless • 2 years ago ,

Let's be realistic, given the enormous number of leaks about Trump, if there was anything to this we would know by now.

That's why I say :. Bring on the investigation!

It will just end in the entire media/Dem establishment looking bad.

Also:. Why would Putin want a US president that has a very aggressive pro drilling stance and who wants a larger US military?

I would imagine it's the last thing he wants. Putin would probably *VASTLY* prefer Sanders who is anti-energy, anti-military and honeymooned in Moscow during the cold war as a political statement.

Drinas Philip K • 2 years ago ,

Buhaha You assume that I am a russian/live in Russia because I dare (oh, by the Gods what a sacrilege!) to support russian foreign policy..
This alone is a good example of the delusional and zealot-like nature of russophobes such as you..
Learn my uneducated "friend" that I live in an EU country, born and raised here-and judging by the median US salary there is a great chance I make more $$ than you..But then again only a cretin would judge a country based solely on these metrics..(Well, a cretin and a russophobe in your case..)

Wakko • 2 years ago ,

Americans don't see it, but this anti-russian craze is creating serious pressures in Europe, where voters more and more consider EU governments' blind following of U.S. foreign policy as dangerous to their interests. Contrary to U.S. establishment, we Europeans are not supremacists who believe that only their opinions and ways are the right ones and the whole world needs to bow down to them. Remember what is the basis of democracy? It's pluralism of opinions and civilised discussion. If Washington continues this ideological war for longer time, it may cause serious problems for NATO.

[Aug 17, 2019] Clapper: "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique

Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another. It may also include prejudice , discrimination , or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity , or the belief that members of different races or ethnicities should be treated differently. [1] [2] [3] Modern variants of racism are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These views can take the form of social actions , practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. [2] [1] [4]
Notable quotes:
"... Given the Democratic Party's reliance on the Russia narrative, these types of comments are likely to continue and worsen as the highly polarized investigations continue ..."
May 30, 2017 | observer.com

During an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd on May 28, Clapper said, "If you put that in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election," he said. "And just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So, we were concerned."

It's unclear what Clapper meant or what evidence he has to suggest that Russians are "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor." His comments are xenophobic towards an entire ethnicity and are far beyond criticism of Putin and the Russian government.

His comments go far into neo-McCarthyist territory, which many critics and skeptics have warned the Democratic Party and intelligence community against. Clapper jumped from explaining the investigation into Russia's role in the election to propagating an unhealthy and unfounded definition of the Russian people. These comments are the type of sentiments that provoke such policies as deporting all Russians from the United States, severing all ties with Russians, banning all multi-national corporations from engaging in business with Russians, dispelling the Russian Embassy, and setting off a chain of events that exponentially increase the likelihood of military conflict between two nuclear superpowers.

In the United States alone, nearly three million people claim direct Russian ancestry and almost one million people speak Russian. However, Russia's interference in the election and the current political climate have fostered an environment in which Clapper could say this on national television without anyone batting an eye. Chuck Todd ignored the comment and proceeded with the interview as though Clapper's response was normal.

The mainstream media have contributed to this Russiophobic rhetoric by perpetuating, elevating and sensationalizing the Russia narrative. Several hucksters and conspiracy theorists have gained massive followings from crying Russia at every opportunity, such as British Conservative Louise Mensch and former Bill Clinton volunteer director Claude Taylo r, who continue duping followers into believing they have exclusive sources or insight into the "smoking gun" on Trump's ties with Russia. By interviewing them, the mainstream media have irresponsibly elevated these people as reliable sources on the subject. The New York Times even published an op-ed by Mensch, who has furthered baseless claims that Russia was behind Anthony Weiner's sexting crimes and has called Bernie Sanders a "Russian agent."

Given the Democratic Party's reliance on the Russia narrative, these types of comments are likely to continue and worsen as the highly polarized investigations continue .

[Aug 17, 2019] Unleashing country-wide epidemic of Russophenia and anti-Russian hysteria as well as stifling debate regarding the US policy toward a nation armed with thousands of nuclear weapons might be not such a huge folly as some think

Aug 17, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

RAP999 • 2 years ago ,

Look at the bright side. If the Russkies nuke Washington and NYC think how much better off the rest of the country will be.

[Aug 17, 2019] The more you peel the onion, the more pathetic the Democratic leadership gets

Aug 17, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

JohnH -> Christopher H.... , August 06, 2019 at 08:03 PM

Obama didn't lead on race, either. In fact, Obama was largely missing in action: "The Obama administration's civil rights record has been remarkably thin. In the first four years, the administration did not file a single major employment discrimination, housing, or education case, which are three traditional areas of civil rights enforcement. Additionally, in all of these areas, the number of cases filed appears to be either at the same level as the George W. Bush administration

In the other area of traditional civil rights enforcement, namely voting rights, the administration has been active, particularly on the divisive issue of voter identification. However, this activity all arose during the 2012 presidential campaign and seems quite likely to have been related to, or motivated by, that campaign. The Obama administration has, in fact, largely been absent on issues relating to redistricting, a traditional activity that often implicates the preclearance mandate of the Department of Justice."
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1016&context=ijlse

The more you peel the onion, the more pathetic the Democratic leadership gets...

JohnH -> JohnH... , August 07, 2019 at 09:35 AM
In the typical behavior of the two party duopoly, Democrats treated racial discrimination with benign neglect while Republicans pushed the issue.

That's the main difference between Obama's racial policies and Trump's. Democrats ignored their base, Trump is pandering to his

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to kurt... , August 07, 2019 at 04:30 AM
"Republican and representative democracy are interchangeable words..... What our big problem is are the legacies of slavery like the EC, property tax based schools and the 2nd Amendment..."

[Little "r" republican is a word with a meaning. Representative democracy is the euphemism of choice by republicans. The US Senate and the related electoral college were concessions from the larger more populous states to the little states (VT, NH, ME, RI, and DE. In the 1790 census VA had the largest population across the board, free white males of age, under age free white males, free female, AND slaves. So, VA was making a concession to the little... ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1790_United_States_Census

[Also the 2nd Amendment was never intended by the Frames to mean anything like what the NRA says it means. Even the NRA knows better themselves, but their political opposition has a severe problem with facts and representing facts in a manner that leads to understanding and consensus.]

[Aug 17, 2019] Voters are little more than a necessary evil for political elites

Notable quotes:
"... By and large voters get to ratify one of the two evils carefully vetted by the party campaign apparatus with regular inputs from their paymasters. ..."
Aug 16, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

JohnH -> EMichael... , August 06, 2019 at 07:42 AM

What a joke! "Pols do care about issues."

EMichael forgets that voters are little more than a necessary evil for political elites, who are driven more by a need for power and to serve those who fund their campaigns. So, yes, pols do care about issues, but mostly only those issues of concern to their puppet masters.

By and large voters get to ratify one of the two evils carefully vetted by the party campaign apparatus with regular inputs from their paymasters.

kurt -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , August 06, 2019 at 02:35 PM

Not for nothing, the post you replied to is demonstrably and utterly BS. It is making perfect the enemy of good. It is making progressivism the enemy of itself.
JohnH -> kurt... , August 06, 2019 at 03:39 PM
LOL!!! "The perfect being the enemy of good." Democrats' message is "don't let the promise of doing something good stand in the way of doing nothing." The latter pretty well summed up Obama's Republican-lite approach to governance.

We're been watching Democrats' promises for 40 years, and what we've seen is a gradual erosion o the social safety net, in concert with their Republican ring leaders.

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to kurt... , August 07, 2019 at 03:42 AM
"Not for nothing, the post you replied to is demonstrably and utterly BS. It is making perfect the enemy of good. It is making progressivism the enemy of itself."

[Whereas your response was an entirely well explained and convincing argument :<) ]

kurt -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , August 07, 2019 at 10:06 AM
It was pretty self-evident BS. Nobody gets elected without people voting for them. When the Tea Party was supposedly economic anxiety, sociolgists pointed out that it was really racial fear and anxiety about immigration. The idea that Obama was somehow Republican lite is beyond stupid and contrary to reality. He wasn't perfect but he was a very good President who had to operate with the constraint of also being the first black man in the office - and had to be careful not to scare white people to much.
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to kurt... , August 07, 2019 at 11:44 AM
I am sure that is what you believe. OTOH, my confirmation bias has much older roots than yours finding itself emerge into sunshine in 1968 with frequent glimmering rays of hope yet little light of change since then.
ilsm -> EMichael... , August 06, 2019 at 02:05 PM
Moral and political inconsistency!
mulp said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , August 07, 2019 at 02:22 AM
Why public day care in the 60s when 80% of kids got more education playing with their peers in backyards or playgrounds supervised by parents, mostly moms?

Women for the most part didn't need to work if they had young kids.

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to mulp ... , August 07, 2019 at 03:52 AM
Perhaps women married to a banker or engineer. My mom was working throughout my childhood, pants factory then High's Ice cream store manager in the early fifties, then childcare in our home in the late fifties in Occoquan because it was too small to have much for jobs, then in a Peebles department store in the early sixties and back to daycare in our home and school crossing guard overlapping until dad had her working in his own boat livery and bait shop business at Lake Orange beginning in 1966. OTOH, most black women had been working throughout the 20th century which is why they were not covered by FDR's AFDC. Stay at home moms were a luxury of the post WWII booming middle class that had a very short shelf life. People that were not beneficiaries of that boom just missed it entirely.
kurt -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , August 06, 2019 at 10:22 AM
You know that we deliberately segregated America in the 50's-80's and that prior to that there wasn't nearly as much segregation. It isn't a natural state, it was something that was done deliberately by the Robert Moses flavor of HUD. Redlining, etc. Levittown had deed restrictions that would not allow a home to be sold to an african-american. The invention of Suburbs was fundamentally used to segregate our nation.
ilsm -> kurt... , August 06, 2019 at 02:13 PM
Tell us all who the "we" was who established redlining, a version of you imaginary "deed restrictions".

[Aug 17, 2019] The Campaign Press: Members of the 10 Percent, Reporting for the One Percent

Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Our Famously Free Press

"The Campaign Press: Members of the 10 Percent, Reporting for the One Percent" [Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone ]. "Anyone who's worked in the business (or read Manufacturing Consent) knows nobody calls editors to red-pencil text.

The pressure comes at the point of hire. If you're the type who thinks Jeff Bezos should be thrown out of an airplane, or that it's a bad look for a DC newspaper to be owned by a major intelligence contractor, you won't rise.

Meanwhile, the Post has become terrific at promoting Jennifer Rubins and Max Boots. Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets and/or simplistic partisan storylines.

Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in newsrooms. Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn't create it. He sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward 'elites' to his side.

The criticism works because national media are elites, ten-percenters working for one-percenters.

The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder for politicians. Sanders wasn't the first, and won't be the last."

• Yep. I'm so glad Rolling Stone has Matt Taibbi on-board. Until advertisers black-list "the One Percent," I suppose.

[Aug 17, 2019] Ukraine reveals it staged 'murder' of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko

Aug 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Marko , August 14, 2019 at 18:24

Remember this ? :

"Ukraine reveals it staged 'murder' of Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/30/russian-journalist-arkady-babchenko-who-was-reported-killed-is-still-alive

In this case the authorities voluntarily admitted to the ruse , but if they had chosen to , and with the cooperation of a handful of family members and the like , Babchenko could have remained "dead" , while living a long and happy life in some faraway place.

[Aug 17, 2019] In the grand scheme of things, there is a compelling historical argument for the idea that when the NSA/CIA was created, Dulles found an opportunity to consolidate control of information and by logic, populations which was in reality, a velvet coup

Notable quotes:
"... The other aspect this control and coup was NACA being taken over by Nazi Intel/strategists/scientists/war planners through Paper Clip and other relations of the Dulles family were involved with this. Dulles had not one patriotic bone in his body but only cared about elitism, and power. Yes, he made patriotic statements but they were as thin as his skin. ..."
Aug 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Tim Jones , August 15, 2019 at 20:47

Because "The links between high government officials, CIA, FBI, and organized crime is astonishing." we will never have an answer, just like John Kennedy, MLK, etc.

In the grand scheme of things, there is a compelling historical argument for the idea that when the NSA/CIA was created, Dulles found an opportunity to consolidate control of information and by logic, populations which was in reality, a velvet coup.

The other aspect this control and coup was NACA being taken over by Nazi Intel/strategists/scientists/war planners through Paper Clip and other relations of the Dulles family were involved with this. Dulles had not one patriotic bone in his body but only cared about elitism, and power. Yes, he made patriotic statements but they were as thin as his skin.

[Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name. ..."
"... In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets, also funded by the FO. ..."
"... "The Guardian is struggling for money" Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets. ..."
Aug 16, 2019 | off-guardian.org

OffGuardian already covered the Global Media Freedom Conference, our article Hypocrisy Taints UK's Media Freedom Conference , was meant to be all there was to say. A quick note on the obvious hypocrisy of this event. But, in the writing, I started to see more than that. This event is actually creepy. Let's just look back at one of the four "main themes" of this conference:

Building trust in media and countering disinformation
"Countering disinformation"? Well, that's just another word for censorship. This is proven by their refusal to allow Sputnik or RT accreditation. They claim RT "spreads disinformation" and they "countered" that by barring them from attending. "Building trust"? In the post-Blair world of PR newspeak, "building trust" is just another way of saying "making people believe us" (the word usage is actually interesting, building trust not earning trust). The whole conference is shot through with this language that just feels off. Here is CNN's Christiane Amanpour :
Our job is to be truthful, not neutral we need to take a stand for the truth, and never to create a false moral or factual equivalence."
Being "truthful not neutral" is one of Amanpour's personal sayings , she obviously thinks it's clever. Of course, what it is is NewSpeak for "bias". Refusing to cover evidence of The White Helmets staging rescues, Israel arming ISIS or other inconvenient facts will be defended using this phrase – they will literally claim to only publish "the truth", to get around impartiality and then set about making up whatever "truth" is convenient. Oh, and if you don't know what "creating a false moral quivalence is", here I'll demonstrate: MSM: Putin is bad for shutting down critical media. OffG: But you're supporting RT being banned and Wikileaks being shut down. BBC: No. That's not the same. OffG: It seems the same. BBC: It's not. You're creating a false moral equivalence . Understand now? You "create a false moral equivalence" by pointing out mainstream media's double standards. Other ways you could mistakenly create a "false moral equivalence": Bringing up Gaza when the media talk about racism. Mentioning Saudi Arabia when the media preach about gay rights. Referencing the US coup in Venezuela when the media work themselves into a froth over Russia's "interference in our democracy" Talking about the invasion of Iraq. Ever. OR Pointing out that the BBC is state funded, just like RT. These are all no-longer flagrant examples of the media's double standards, and if you say they are , you're "creating a false moral equivalence" and the media won't have to allow you (or anyone who agrees with you) air time or column inches to disagree. Because they don't have a duty to be neutral or show both sides, they only have a duty to tell "the truth" as soon as the government has told them what that is. Prepare to see both those phrases – or variations there of – littering editorials in the Guardian and the Huffington Post in the coming months. Along with people bemoaning how "fake news outlets abuse the notion of impartiality" by "being even handed between liars the truth tellers". (I've been doing this site so long now, I have a Guardian-English dictionary in my head).

Equally dodgy-sounding buzz-phrases litter topics on the agenda. "Eastern Europe and Central Asia: building an integrated support system for journalists facing hostile environments" , this means pumping money into NGOs to fund media that will criticize our "enemies" in areas of strategic importance. It means flooding money into the anti-government press in Hungary, or Iran or (of course), Russia. That is ALL it means. I said in my earlier article I don't know what "media sustainability" even means, but I feel I can take a guess. It means "save the government mouthpieces". The Guardian is struggling for money, all print media are, TV news is getting lower viewing figures all the time. "Building media sustainability" is code for "pumping public money into traditional media that props up the government" or maybe "getting people to like our propaganda". But the worst offender on the list is, without a doubt "Navigating Disinformation"

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1vbSj1WQqUw?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

"Navigating Disinformation" was a 1 hour panel from the second day of the conference. You can watch it embedded above if you really feel the need. I already did, so you don't have to. The panel was chaired by Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Foreign Minister. The members included the Latvian Foreign Minister, a representative of the US NGO Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Information

Have you guessed what "disinformation" they're going to be talking about? I'll give you a clue: It begins with R. Freeland, chairing the panel, kicks it off by claiming that "disinformation isn't for any particular aim" . This is a very common thing for establishment voices to repeat these days, which makes it all the more galling she seems to be pretending its is her original thought. The reason they have to claim that "disinformation" doesn't have a "specific aim" is very simple: They don't know what they're going to call "disinformation" yet. They can't afford to take a firm position, they need to keep their options open. They need to give themselves the ability to describe any single piece of information or political opinion as "disinformation." Left or right. Foreign or domestic. "Disinformation" is a weaponised term that is only as potent as it is vague. So, we're one minute in, and all "navigating disinformation" has done is hand the State an excuse to ignore, or even criminalise, practically anything it wants to. Good start. Interestingly, no one has actually said the word "Russia" at this point. They have talked about "malign actors" and "threats to democracy", but not specifically Russia. It is SO ingrained in these people that "propaganda"= " Russian propaganda" that they don't need to say it.

The idea that NATO as an entity, or the individual members thereof, could also use "disinformation" has not just been dismissed it was literally never even contemplated. Next Freeland turns to Edgars Rinkēvičs, her Latvian colleague, and jokes about always meeting at NATO functions. The Latvians know "more than most" about disinformation, she says. Rinkēvičs says disinformation is nothing new, but that the methods of spreading it are changing then immediately calls for regulation of social media. Nobody disagrees. Then he talks about the "illegal annexation of Crimea", and claims the West should outlaw "paid propaganda" like RT and Sputnik. Nobody disagrees. Then he says that Latvia "protected" their elections from "interference" by "close cooperation between government agencies and social media companies". Everyone nods along. If you don't find this terrifying, you're not paying attention. They don't say it, they probably don't even realise they mean it, but when they talk about "close cooperation with social media networks", they mean government censorship of social media. When they say "protecting" their elections they're talking about rigging them. It only gets worse. The next step in the Latvian master plan is to bolster "traditional media".

The problems with traditional media, he says, are that journalists aren't paid enough, and don't keep up to date with all the "new tricks". His solution is to "promote financing" for traditional media, and to open more schools like the "Baltic Centre of Media Excellence", which is apparently a totally real thing .

It's a training centre which teaches young journalists about "media literacy" and "critical thinking". You can read their depressingly predictable list of "donors" here . I truly wish I was joking. Next up is Courtney Radsch from CPJ – a US-backed NGO, who notionally "protect journalists", but more accurately spread pro-US propaganda. (Their token effort to "defend" RT and Sputnik when they were barred from the conference was contemptible).

She talks for a long time without saying much at all. Her revolutionary idea is that disinformation could be countered if everyone told the truth. Inspiring. Beata Balogova, Journalist and Editor from Slovakia, gets the ship back on course – immediately suggesting politicians should not endorse "propaganda" platforms. She shares an anecdote about "a prominent Slovakian politician" who gave exclusive interviews to a site that is "dubiously financed, we assume from Russia". They assume from Russia. Everyone nods.

It's like they don't even hear themselves.

Then she moves on to Hungary. Apparently, Orban has "created a propaganda machine" and produced "antisemitic George Soros posters". No evidence is produced to back-up either of these claims. She thinks advertisers should be pressured into not giving money to "fake news sites". She calls for "international pressure", but never explains exactly what that means. The stand-out maniac on this panel is Emine Dzhaparova, the Ukrainian First Deputy Minister of Information Policy. (She works for the Ministry of Information – nicknamed the Ministry of Truth, which was formed in 2014 to "counter lies about Ukraine". Even The Guardian thought that sounded dodgy.)

She talks very fast and, without any sense of irony, spills out a story that shoots straight through "disinformation" and becomes "incoherent rambling". She claims that Russian citizens are so brainwashed you'll never be able to talk to them, and that Russian "cognitive influence" is "toxic like radiation." Is this paranoid, quasi-xenophobic nonsense countered? No. Her fellow panelists nod and chuckle. On top of that, she just lies. She lies over and over and over again. She claims Russia is locking up Crimean Tartars "just for being muslims", nobody questions her. She says the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, but doesn't mention that her side is responsible for over 80% of civilian deaths.

She says only 30% of Crimeans voted in the referendum, and that they were "forced". A fact not supported by any polls done by either side in the last four years, and any referenda held on the peninsula any time in the last last 30 year. It's simply a lie. Nobody asks her about the journalists killed in Ukraine since their glorious Maidan Revolution . Nobody questions the fact that she works for something called the "Ministry of Information". Nobody does anything but nod and smile as the "countering disinformation" panel becomes just a platform for spreading total lies.

When everyone on the panel has had their ten minutes on the soapbox, Freeland asks for recommendations for countering this "threat" – here's the list:

  1. Work to distinguish "free speech" from "propaganda", when you find propaganda there must be a "strong reaction".
  2. Pressure advertisers to abandon platforms who spread misinformation.
  3. Regulate social media.
  4. Educate journalists at special schools.
  5. Start up a "Ministry of Information" and have state run media that isn't controlled, like in Ukraine.

This is the Global Conference on Media Freedom and all these six people want to talk about is how to control what can be said, and who can say it. They single only four countries out for criticism: Hungary, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Russia .and Russia takes up easily 90% of that. They mention only two media outlets by name: RT and Sputnik. This wasn't a panel on disinformation, it was a public attack forum – a month's worth of 2 minutes of hate. These aren't just shills on this stage, they are solid gold idiots, brainwashed to the point of total delusion.

They are the dangerous glassy eyes of a Deep State that never questions itself, never examines itself, and will do anything it wants, to anyone it wants whilst happily patting itself on the back for its superior morality. They don't know, they don't care. They're true believers. Terrifyingly dead inside. Talking about state censorship and re-education camps under a big sign that says "Freedom". And that's just one talk. Just one panel in a 2 day itinerary filled to the brim with similarly soul-dead servants of authority. Truly, perfectly Orwellian.

Jonathan Jarvis

https://southfront.org/countering-russian-disinformation-or-new-wave-of-freedom-of-speech-suppression/

Read and be appalled at what America is up to .keep for further reference. We are in danger.

Tim Jenkins
It would serve Ms. Amanpour well, to relax, rewind & review her own interview with Sergei Lavrov:-

Then she might see why Larry King could stomach the appalling corporate dictatorship, even to the core of False & Fake recording of 'our' "History of the National Security State" , No More

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H7aKGOpSwE

Amanpour was forced to laugh uncontrollably, when confronted with Lavrov's humorous interpretations of various legal aspects of decency & his Judgement of others' politicians and 'Pussy Riots' >>> if you haven't seen it, it is to be recommended, the whole interview, if nothing else but to study the body language and micro-facial expressions, coz' a belly up laugh is not something anybody can easily control or even feign that first spark of cognition in her mind, as she digests Lavrov's response :- hilarious

Einstein
A GE won't solve matters since we have a Government of Occupation behind a parliament of puppets.

Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name.

In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets, also funded by the FO.

Pryce's ventriloquist's dummy in parliament, the pompous Alan Duncan, announced another £10 million of public money for this odious brainwashing programme.

Tim Jenkins
That panel should be nailed & plastered over, permanently:-

and as wall paper, 'Abstracts of New Law' should be pasted onto a collage of historic extracts from the Guardian, in offices that issue journalistic licenses, comprised of 'Untouchables' :-

A professional habitat, to damp any further 'Freeland' amplification & resonance,

of negative energy from professional incompetence.

Francis Lee
Apropos of the redoubtable Ms Freeland, Canada's Foreign Secretary.

The records now being opened by the Polish government in Warsaw reveal that Freeland's maternal grandfather Michael (Mikhailo) Chomiak was a Nazi collaborator from the beginning to the end of the war. He was given a powerful post, money, home and car by the German Army in Cracow, then the capital of the German administration of the Galician region. His principal job was editor in chief and publisher of a newspaper the Nazis created. His printing plant and other assets had been stolen from a Jewish newspaper publisher, who was then sent to die in the Belzec concentration camp. During the German Army's winning phase of the war, Chomiak celebrated in print the Wehrmacht's "success" at killing thousands of US Army troops. As the German Army was forced into retreat by the Soviet counter-offensive, Chomiak was taken by the Germans to Vienna, where he continued to publish his Nazi propaganda, at the same time informing for the Germans on other Ukrainians. They included fellow Galician Stepan Bandera, whose racism against Russians Freeland has celebrated in print, and whom the current regime in Kiev has turned into a national hero.

Those Ukrainian 'Refugees' admitted to Canada in 1945 were almost certainly members of the 14th Waffen SS Division Galizia 1. These Ukie collaboraters – not to be confused with the other Ukie Nazi outfit – Stepan Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army -were held responsible for the massacre of many Poles in the Lviv area the most infamous being carried out in the Polish village of Huta Pienacka. In the massacre, the village was destroyed and between 500] and 1,000 of the inhabitants were killed. According to Polish accounts, civilians were locked in barns that were set on fire while those attempting to flee were killed. That's about par for the course.
Canada's response was as follows:

The Canadian Deschênes Commission was set up to investigate alleged war crimes committed by the collaborators

Memorial to SS-Galizien division in Chervone, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine

The Canadian "Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes" of October 1986, by the Honourable Justice Jules Deschênesconcluded that in relation to membership in the Galicia Division:

''The Galicia Division (14. Waffen grenadier division der SS [gal.1]) should not be indicted as a group. The members of Galicia Division were individually screened for security purposes before admission to Canada. Charges of war crimes of Galicia Division have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this Commission. Further, in the absence of evidence of participation or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.''

However, the Commission's conclusion failed to acknowledge or heed the International Military Tribunal's verdict at the Nuremberg Trials, in which the entire Waffen-SSorganisation was declared a "criminal organization" guilty of war crimes. Also, the Deschênes Commission in its conclusion only referenced the division as 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr.1), thus in legal terms, only acknowledging the formation's activity after its name change in August 1944, while the massacre of Poles in Huta Pieniacka, Pidkamin and Palikrowy occurred when the division was called SS Freiwilligen Division "Galizien". Nevertheless, a subsequent review by Canada's Minister of Justice again confirmed that members of the Division were not implicated in war crimes.

Yes, the west looks after its Nazis and even makes them and their descendants political figureheads.

mark
Most of these people are so smugly and complacently convinced of their own moral superiority that they just can't see the hypocrisy and doublethink involved in the event.
Mikalina
Eva Bartlett gives a wider perspective:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/londons-media-freedom-conference-smacks-irony-critics-barred-no-mention-jailed-assange/5683808
Harry Stotle
Freedom-lover, Cunt, will be furious when he hears about this!

Apparently Steve Bell is doubleplusbad for alluding to the fact Netanyahu has got his hand shoved deep into Tom Watson's arse – the Guardian pulled Bell's most recent ouvre which suggests the media's antisemitism trope might not be quite as politically untainted as the likes of Freedland, Cohen and Viner would have you believe.
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/guardian-cartoonist-steve-bell-specious-charge-of-antisemitism-in-email-to-all-paper-1.486570

Meanwhile Owen Jones has taken to Twitter to rubbish allegations that a reign of terror exists at Guardian Towers – the socialist firebrand is quoted as saying 'journalists are free to say whatever they like, so long as it doesn't stray too far from Guardian-groupthink'.

Tutisicecream
Good analysis Kit, of the cognitive dissonant ping pong being played out by Nazi sympathisers such as Hunt and Freeland.

The echo chamber of deceit is amplified again by the selective use of information and the ignoring of relevant facts, such as the miss reporting yesterday by Reuters of the Italian Neo-Nazi haul of weapons by the police, having not Russian but Ukrainian links.

Not a word in the WMSM about this devious miss-reporting as the creation of fake news in action. But what would you expect?

Living as I do in Russia I can assure anyone reading this that the media freedom here is on a par with the West and somewhat better as there is no paranoia about a fictitious enemy – Russians understand that the West is going through an existential crisis (Brexit in the UK, Trump and the Clinton war of sameness in the US and Macron and Merkel in the EU). A crisis of Liberalism as the failed life-support of capitalism. But hey, why worry about the politics when there is bigger fish to fry. Such as who will pay me to dance?

The answer is clear from what Kit has writ. The government will pay the piper. How sweet.

I'd like to thank Kit for sitting through such a turgid masquerade and as I'm rather long in the tooth I do remember the old BBC schools of journalism in Yelsin's Russia. What I remember is that old devious Auntie Beeb was busy training would be hopefuls in the art of discretion regarding how the news is formed, or formulated.

In other words your audience. And it ain't the public

Steve Hayes
The British government's "Online Harms" White Paper has a whole section devoted to "disinformation" (ie, any facts, opinions, analyses, evaluations, critiques that are critical of the elite's actual disinformation). If these proposals become law, the government will have effective control over the Internet and we will be allowed access to their disinformation, shop and watch cute cat videos.
Question This
The liberal news media & hypocrisy, who would have ever thought you'd see those words in the same sentence. But what do you expect from professional liars, politicians & 'their' free press?

Can this shit show get any worse? Yes, The other day I wrote to my MP regards the SNP legislating against the truth, effectively making it compulsory to lie! Mr Blackford as much as called me a transphobic & seemed to go to great length publishing his neo-liberal ideological views in some scottish rag, on how right is wrong & fact is turned into fiction & asked only those that agreed with him contact him.

Tim Jenkins
"The science or logical consistency of true premise, cannot take place or bear fruit, when all communication and information is 'marketised and weaponised' to a mindset of possession and control." B.Steere
Mikalina
I saw, somewhere (but can't find it now) a law or a prospective law which goes under the guise of harassment of MPs to include action against constituents who 'pester' them.

I've found a link for the Jo Cox gang discussing it, though.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/new-research-on-the-intimidation-and-harassment-of-mps-featured-in-inaugural-conference

Question This
I only emailed him once! That's hardly harassment. Anyway I sent it with proton-mail via vpn & used a false postcode using only my first name so unlikely my civil & sincere correspondence will see me locked up for insisting my inalienable rights of freedom of speech & beliefs are protected. But there again the state we live in, i may well be incarcerated for life, for such an outrageous expectation.
Where to?
"The Guardian is struggling for money" Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets.
Harry Stotle
Its the brazen nature of the conference that is especially galling, but what do you expect when crooks and liars no longer feel they even have to pretend?

Nothing will change so long as politicians (or their shady backers) are never held to account for public assets diverted toward a rapacious off-shore economic system, or the fact millions of lives have been shattered by the 'war on terror' and its evil twin, 'humanatarian regime change' (while disingenuous Labour MPs wail about the 'horrors' of antisemitism rather than the fact their former leader is a key architect of the killings).

Kit remains a go-to voice when deconstructing claims made by political figures who clearly regard the MSM as a propaganda vehicle for promoting western imperialism – the self-satisfied smugness of cunts like Jeremy Cunt stand in stark contrast to a real journalist being tortured by the British authorities just a few short miles away.

It's a sligtly depressing thought but somebody has the unenviable task of monitoring just how far our politicians have drifted from the everyday concerns of the 'just about managing' and as I say Mr Knightly does a fine job in informing readers what the real of agenda of these media love-ins are actually about – it goes without saying a very lengthy barge pole is required when the Saudis are invited but not Russia.

Where to?
This Media Freedom Conference is surely a creepy theatre of the absurd.

It is a test of what they can get away with.

Mikalina
Yep. Any soviet TV watcher would recognise this immediately. Message? THIS is the reality – and you are powerless.
mark
When are they going to give us the Ministry of Truth we so desperately need?

[Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.' ..."
"... Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of the public. ..."
"... All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria, blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included bankers, financiers, industrialists, and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the ill-fated beer-hall putsch. (See here , and here .) ..."
"... The purpose of this propaganda barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering business interests.' ..."
Aug 16, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Lapdogs for the Government

Here was, of course, another surreal spectacle, this time courtesy of one of the Deep State's most dangerous, reviled, and divisive figures, a notable protagonist in the Russia-Gate conspiracy, and America's most senior diplomat no less.

Not only is it difficult to accept that the former CIA Director actually believes what he is saying, well might we ask, "Who can believe Mike Pompeo?"

And here's also someone whose manifest cynicism, hypocrisy, and chutzpah would embarrass the much-derided scribes and Pharisees of Biblical days.

We have Pompeo on record recently in a rare moment of honesty admitting – whilst laughing his ample ass off, as if recalling some "Boy's Own Adventure" from his misspent youth with a bunch of his mates down at the local pub – that under his watch as CIA Director:

We lied, cheated, we stole we had entire training courses.'

It may have been one of the few times in his wretched existence that Pompeo didn't speak with a forked tongue.

At all events, his candour aside, we can assume safely that this reactionary, monomaniacal, Christian Zionist 'end-timer' passed all the Company's "training courses" with flying colours.

According to Matthew Rosenberg of the New York Times, all this did not stop Pompeo however from name-checking Wikileaks when it served his own interests. Back in 2016 at the height of the election campaign, he had ' no compunction about pointing people toward emails stolen* by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and then posted by WikiLeaks."

[NOTE: Rosenberg's omission of the word "allegedly" -- as in "emails allegedly stolen" -- is a dead giveaway of bias on his part (a journalistic Freudian slip perhaps?), with his employer being one of those MSM marques leading the charge with the "Russian Collusion" 'story'. For a more insightful view of the source of these emails and the skullduggery and thuggery that attended Russia-Gate, readers are encouraged to check this out.]

And this is of course The Company we're talking about, whose past and present relationship with the media might be summed up in two words: Operation Mockingbird (OpMock). Anyone vaguely familiar with the well-documented Grand Deception that was OpMock, arguably the CIA's most enduring, insidious, and successful psy-ops gambit, will know what we're talking about. (See here , here , here , and here .) At its most basic, this operation was all about propaganda and censorship, usually operating in tandem to ensure all the bases are covered.

After opining that the MSM is 'totally infiltrated' by the CIA and various other agencies, for his part former NSA whistleblower William Binney recently added , ' When it comes to national security, the media only talk about what the administration wants you to hear, and basically suppress any other statements about what's going on that the administration does not want get public. The media is basically the lapdogs for the government.'

Even the redoubtable William Casey , Ronald Reagan's CIA Director back in the day was reported to have said something along the following lines:

We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.'

In order to provide a broader and deeper perspective, we should now consider the views of a few others on the subjects at hand, along with some history. In a 2013 piece musing on the modern significance of the practice, my compatriot John Pilger ecalled a time when he met Leni Riefenstahl back in 70s and asked her about her films that 'glorified the Nazis'.

Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of the public.

All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria, blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included bankers, financiers, industrialists, and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the ill-fated beer-hall putsch. (See here , and here .)

" Triumph " apparently still resonates today. To the surprise of few one imagines, such was the impact of the film -- as casually revealed in the excellent 2018 Alexis Bloom documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes -- it elicited no small amount of admiration from arguably the single most influential propagandist of recent times.

[Readers might wish to check out Russell Crowe's recent portrayal of Ailes in Stan's mini-series The Loudest Voice , in my view one the best performances of the man's career.]

In a recent piece unambiguously titled "Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems", my other compatriot Caitlin Johnstone also had a few things to say about the subject, echoing Orwell when she observed it was all about "controlling the narrative".

Though I'd suggest the greater "root" problem is our easy propensity to ignore this reality, pretend it doesn't or won't affect us, or reject it as conspiratorial nonsense, in this, of course, she's correct. As she cogently observes,

I write about this stuff for a living, and even I don't have the time or energy to write about every single narrative control tool that the US-centralised empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them emerging too damn fast, because they're just that damn crucial for maintaining existing power structures.'

The Discreet Use of Censorship and Uniformed Men

It is hardly surprising that those who hold power should seek to control the words and language people use' said Canadian author John Ralston Saul in his 1993 book Voltaire's Bastards–the Dictatorship of Reason in the West .

Fittingly, in a discussion encompassing amongst other things history, language, power, and dissent, he opined, ' Determining how individuals communicate is' an objective which represents for the power elites 'the best chance' [they] have to control what people think. This translates as: The more control 'we' have over what the proles think, the more 'we' can reduce the inherent risk for elites in democracy.

' Clumsy men', Saul went on to say, 'try to do this through power and fear. Heavy-handed men running heavy-handed systems attempt the same thing through police-enforced censorship. The more sophisticated the elites, the more they concentrate on creating intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures. These systems require only the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.'

In other words, along with assuming it is their right to take it in the first place, ' those who take power will always try to change the established language ', presumably to better facilitate their hold on it and/or legitimise their claim to it.

For Oliver Boyd-Barrett, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas.' Yet for the author of the recently published RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media , 'No such infrastructure exists.'

The mainstream media he says, is 'owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates' that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates:

The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of US plutocratic self-regard is also well documented.'

Of course the word "inability" suggests the MSM view themselves as having some responsibility for maintaining such an egalitarian news and information environment. They don't of course, and in truth, probably never really have! A better word would be "unwilling", or even "refusal". The corporate media all but epitomise the " plutocratic self-regard" that is characteristic of "oligopoly capitalism".

Indeed, the MSM collectively functions as advertising, public relations/lobbying entities for Big Corp, in addition to acting as its Praetorian bodyguard , protecting their secrets, crimes, and lies from exposure. Like all other companies they are beholden to their shareholders (profits before truth and people), most of whom it can safely be assumed are no strangers to "self-regard", and could care less about " histories, perspectives and vocabularies" that run counter to their own interests.

It was Aussie social scientist Alex Carey who pioneered the study of nationalism , corporatism , and moreso for our purposes herein, the management (read: manipulation) of public opinion, though all three have important links (a story for another time). For Carey, the following conclusion was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' This former farmer from Western Australia became one of the world's acknowledged experts on propaganda and the manipulation of the truth.

Prior to embarking on his academic career, Carey was a successful sheep grazier . By all accounts, he was a first-class judge of the animal from which he made his early living, leaving one to ponder if this expertise gave him a unique insight into his main area of research!

In any event, Carey in time sold the farm and travelled to the U.K. to study psychology, apparently a long-time ambition. From the late fifties until his death in 1988, he was a senior lecturer in psychology and industrial relations at the Sydney-based University of New South Wales, with his research being lauded by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, both of whom have had a thing or three to say over the years about The Big Shill. In fact such was his admiration, Pilger described him as "a second Orwell", which in anyone's lingo is a big call.

Carey unfortunately died in 1988, interestingly the year that his more famous contemporaries Edward Herman and Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media was published, the authors notably dedicating their book to him.

Though much of his work remained unpublished at the time of his death, a book of Carey's essays – Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty -- was published posthumously in 1997. It remains a seminal work.

In fact, for anyone with an interest in how public opinion is moulded and our perceptions are managed and manipulated, in whose interests they are done so and to what end, it is as essential reading as any of the work of other more famous names. This tome came complete with a foreword by Chomsky, so enamoured was the latter of Carey's work.

For Carey, the three "most significant developments" in the political economy of the twentieth century were: the growth of democracy the growth of corporate power; and the growth of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

Carey's main focus was on the following: advertising and publicity devoted to the creation of artificial wants; the public relations and propaganda industry whose principal goal is the diversion to meaningless pursuits and control of the public mind; and the degree to which academia and the professions are under assault from private power determined to narrow the spectrum of thinkable (sic) thought.

For Carey, it is an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is 'distinctive' of totalitarian regimes. Yet as he stresses: the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not).' In this context, 'conventional wisdom" becomes conventional ignorance; as for "common sense", maybe not so much.

The purpose of this propaganda barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering business interests.'

An extreme example of this view playing itself right under our noses and over decades was the cruel fiction of the " trickle down effect " (TDE) -- aka the 'rising tide that would lift all yachts' -- of Reaganomics . One of several mantras that defined Reagan's overarching political shtick, the TDE was by any measure, decidedly more a torrent than a trickle, and said "torrent" was going up not down. This reality as we now know was not in Reagan's glossy economic brochure to be sure, and it may have been because the Gipper confused his prepositions and verbs.

Yet as the GFC of 2008 amply demonstrated, it culminated in a free-for all, dog eat dog, anything goes, everyman for himself form of cannibal (or anarcho) capitalism -- an updated, much improved version of the no-holds-barred mercenary mercantilism much reminiscent of the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons who 'infested' it, only one that doesn't just eat its young, it eats itself!

Making the World Safe for Plutocracy

In the increasingly dysfunctional, one-sided political economy we inhabit then, whether it's widgets or wars or anything in between, few people realise the degree to which our opinions, perceptions, emotions, and views are shaped and manipulated by propaganda (and its similarly 'evil twin' censorship ,) its most adept practitioners, and those elite, institutional, political, and corporate entities that seek out their expertise.

It is now just over a hundred years since the practice of propaganda took a giant leap forward, then in the service of persuading palpably reluctant Americans that the war raging in Europe at the time was their war as well.

This was at a time when Americans had just voted their then-president Woodrow Wilson back into office for a second term, a victory largely achieved on the back of the promise he'd "keep us out of the War." Americans were very much in what was one of their most isolationist phases , and so Wilson's promise resonated with them.

But over time they were convinced of the need to become involved by a distinctly different appeal to their political sensibilities. This "appeal" also dampened the isolationist mood, one which it has to be said was not embraced by most of the political, banking, and business elites of the time, most of whom stood to lose big-time if the Germans won, and/or who were already profiting or benefitting from the business of war.

For a president who "kept us out of the war", this wasn't going to be an easy 'pitch'. In order to sell the war the president established the Committee on Public Information (aka the Creel Committee) for the purposes of publicising the rationale for the war and from there, garnering support for it from the general public.

Enter Edward Bernays , the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who's generally considered to be the father of modern public relations. In his film Rule from the Shadows: The Psychology of Power , Aaron Hawkins says Bernays was influenced by people such as Gustave le Bon , Walter Lippman , and Wilfred Trotter , as much, if not moreso, than his famous uncle.

Either way, Bernays 'combined their perspectives and synthesised them into an applied science', which he then 'branded' "public relations".

For its part the Creel committee struggled with its brief from the off; but Bernays worked with them to persuade Americans their involvement in the war was justified -- indeed necessary -- and to that end he devised the brilliantly inane slogan, "making the world safe for democracy" .

Thus was born arguably the first great propaganda catch-phrases of the modern era, and certainly one of the most portentous. The following sums up Bernays's unabashed mindset:

The conscious, intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.'

The rest is history (sort of), with Americans becoming more willing to not just support the war effort but encouraged to view the Germans and their allies as evil brutes threatening democracy and freedom and the 'American way of life', however that might've been viewed then. From a geopolitical and historical perspective, it was an asinine premise of course, but nonetheless an extraordinary example of how a few well chosen words tapped into the collective psyche of a country that was decidedly opposed to any U.S involvement in the war and turned that mindset completely on its head.

' [S]aving the world for democracy' (or some 'cover version' thereof) has since become America's positioning statement, 'patriotic' rallying cry, and the "Get-out-of-Jail Free" card for its war and its white collar criminal clique.

At all events it was by any measure, a stroke of genius on Bernays's part; by appealing to people's basic fears and desires, he could engineer consent on a mass scale. It goes without saying it changed the course of history in more ways than one. That the U.S. is to this day still using a not dissimilar meme to justify its "foreign entanglements" is testament to both its utility and durability.

The reality as we now know was markedly different of course. They have almost always been about power, empire, control, hegemony, resources, wealth, opportunity, profit, dispossession, keeping existing capitalist structures intact and well-defended, and crushing dissent and opposition.

The Bewildered Herd

It is instructive to note that the template for 'manufacturing consent' for war had already been forged by the British. And the Europeans did not 'sleepwalk' like some " bewildered herd ' into this conflagration.

For twenty years prior to the outbreak of the war in 1914, the then stewards of the British Empire had been diligently preparing the ground for what they viewed as a preordained clash with their rivals for empire the Germans.

To begin with, contrary to the opinion of the general populace over one hundred years later, it was not the much touted German aggression and militarism, nor their undoubted imperial ambitions, which precipitated its outbreak. The stewards of the British Empire were not about to let the Teutonic upstarts chow down on their imperial lunch as it were, and set about unilaterally and preemptively crushing Germany and with it any ambitions it had for creating its own imperial domain in competition with the Empire upon which Ol' Sol never set.

The "Great War" is worth noting here for other reasons. As documented so by Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty in their two books covering the period from 1890-1920, we learn much about propaganda, which attest to its extraordinary power, in particular its power to distort reality en masse in enduring and subversive ways.

In reality, the only thing "great" about World War One was the degree to which the masses fighting for Britain were conned via propaganda and censorship into believing this war was necessary, and the way the official narrative of the war was sustained for posterity via the very same means. "Great" maybe, but not in a good way!

In these seminal tomes -- World War One Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War and its follow-up Prolonging the Agony: How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WWI by Three-And-A-Half Years -- Macgregor and Docherty provide a masterclass for us all of the power of propaganda in the service of firstly inciting, then deliberately sustaining a major war.

The horrendous carnage and destruction that resulted from it was of course unprecedented, the global effects of which linger on now well over one hundred years later.

Such was the enduring power of the propaganda that today most folks would have great difficulty in accepting the following; this is a short summary of historical realities revealed by Macgregor and Docherty that are at complete odds with the official narrative, the political discourse, and the school textbooks:

It was Great Britain (supported by France and Russia) and not Germany who was the principal aggressor in the events and actions that let to the outbreak of war; The British had for twenty years prior to 1914 viewed Germany as its most dangerous economic and imperial rival, and fully anticipated that a war was inevitable; In the U.K. and the U.S., various factions worked feverishly to ensure the war went on for as long as possible, and scuttled peacemaking efforts from the off; key truths about this most consequential of geopolitical conflicts have been concealed for well over one hundred years, with no sign the official record will change; very powerful forces (incl. a future US president) amongst U.S. political, media, and economic elites conspired to eventually convince an otherwise unwilling populace in America that U.S. entry onto the war was necessary; those same forces and many similar groups in the U.K. and Europe engaged in everything from war profiteering, destruction/forging of war records, false-flag ops, treason, conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and direct efforts to prolong the war by any means necessary, many of which will rock folks to their very core.

But peace was not on the agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so embarrassing and costly, some key players in the British government were willing to talk about peace. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be thrown under the bus. The unelected European leaders had one common bond: They would fight Germany until she was crushed.

Prolonging the Agony details how this secret cabal organised to this end the change of government without a single vote being cast. David Lloyd George was promoted to prime minister in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister in France. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite leader, Lord Alfred Milner into power at the very inner-core of the decision-makers in British politics.

Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The men entrusted with the task would keep going till the end and their place-men were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and America.

Propaganda Always Wins

But just as the pioneering adherents of propaganda back in the day might never have dreamt how sophisticated and all-encompassing the practice would become, nor would the citizenry at large have anticipated the extent to which the industry has facilitated an entrenched, rapacious plutocracy at the expense of our economic opportunity, our financial and material security, our physical, social and cultural environment, our values and attitudes, and increasingly, our basic democratic rights and freedoms.

We now live in the Age of the Big Shill -- cocooned in a submissive void no less -- an era where nothing can be taken on face value yet where time and attention constraints (to name just a few) force us to do so; [where] few people in public life can be taken at their word; where unchallenged perceptions become accepted reality; where 'open-book' history is now incontrovertible not-negotiable, upon pain of imprisonment fact; where education is about uniformity, function, form and conformity, all in the service of imposed neo-liberal ideologies embracing then prioritising individual -- albeit dubious -- freedoms.

More broadly, it's the "Roger Ailes" of this world -- acting on behalf of the power elites who after all are their paymasters -- who create the intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures, whilst ensuring these systems require only 'the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.'

They are the shapers and moulders of the discourse that passes for the accepted lingua franca of the increasingly globalised, interconnected, corporatised political economy of the planet. Throughout this process they 'will always try to change the established language.'

And we can no longer rely on our elected representatives to honestly represent us and our interests. Whether this decision making is taking place inside or outside the legislative process, these processes are well and truly in the grip of the banks and financial institutions and transnational organisations. In whose interests are they going to be more concerned with?

We saw this all just after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) when the very people who brought the system to the brink, made billions off the dodge for their banks and millions for themselves, bankrupted hundreds of thousands of American families, were called upon by the U.S. government to fix up the mess, and to all intents given a blank cheque to so do.

That the U.S. is at even greater risk now of economic implosion is something few serious pundits would dispute, and a testament to the effectiveness of the snow-job perpetrated upon Americans regarding the causes, the impact, and the implications of the 2008 meltdown going forward.

In most cases, one accepts almost by definition such disconnects (read: hidden agendas) are the rule rather than the exception, hence the multi-billion foundation -- and global reach and impact -- of the propaganda business. This in itself is a key indicator as to why organisations place so much importance on this aspect of managing their affairs.

At the very least, once corporations saw how the psychology of persuasion could be leveraged to manipulate consumers and politicians saw the same with the citizenry and even its own workers, the growth of the industry was assured.

As Riefenstahl noted during her chinwag with Pilger after he asked if those embracing the "submissive void" included the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? " Everyone ," she said.

By way of underscoring her point, she added enigmatically: 'Propaganda always wins if you allow it'.

Greg Maybury is a freelance writer based in Perth, Australia. His main areas of interest are American history and politics in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military, and geopolitical affairs. For 5 years he has regularly contributed to a diverse range of news and opinion sites, including OpEd News, The Greanville Post, Consortium News, Dandelion Salad, Global Research, Dissident Voice, OffGuardian, Contra Corner, International Policy Digest, the Hampton Institute, and others.

nottheonly1

This brilliant essay is proof of the reflective nature of the Universe. The worse the propaganda and oppression becomes, the greater the likelihood such an essay will be written.

Such is the sophistication and ubiquity of the narrative control techniques used today -- afforded increasingly by 'computational propaganda' via automated scripts, hacking, botnets, troll farms, and algorithms and the like, along with the barely veiled censorship and information gatekeeping practised by Google and Facebook and other tech behemoths -- it's become one of the most troubling aspects of the technological/social media revolution.

Very rarely can one experience such a degree of vindication. My moniker 'nottheonly1' has received more meaning with this precise depiction of the long history of the manipulation of the masses. Recent events have destroyed but all of my confidence that there might be a peaceful way out of this massive dilemma. Due to this sophistication in controlling the narrative, it has now become apparent that we have arrived at a moment in time where total lawlessness reigns. 'Lawlessness' in this case means the loss of common law and the use of code law to create ever new restrictions for free speech and liberty at large.

Over the last weeks, comments written on other discussion boards have unleashed a degree of character defamation and ridicule for the most obvious crimes perpetrated on the masses through propaganda. In this unholy union of constant propaganda via main stream 'media' with the character defamation by so called 'trolls' – which are actually virtual assassins of those who write the truth – the ability of the population, or parts thereof to connect with, or search for like minded people is utterly destroyed. This assault on the online community has devastating consequences. Those who have come into the cross hairs of the unintelligence agencies will but turn away from the internet. Leaving behind an ocean of online propaganda and fake information. Few are now the web sites on which it is possible to voice one's personal take on the status quo.

There is one word that describes these kind of activities precisely: traitor. Those who engage in the character defamation of commenters, or authors per se, are traitors to humanity. They betray the collective consciousness with their poisonous attacks of those who work for a sea change of the status quo. The owner class has all game pieces positioned. The fact that Julian Assange is not only a free man, but still without a Nobel price for peace, while war criminals are recipients, shows just how much the march into absolute totalitarianism has progressed. Bernays hated the masses and offered his 'services' to manipulate them often for free.

Even though there are more solutions than problems, the time has come where meaningful participation in the search for such solution has been made unbearable. It is therefore that a certain fatalism has developed – from resignation to the acceptance of the status quo as being inevitable. Ancient wisdom has created a proverb that states 'This too, will pass'. While that is a given, there are still enough Human Beings around that are determined to make a difference. To this group I count the author of this marvelous, albeit depressing essay. Thank you more that words can express. And thank you, OffGuardian for being one of the last remaining places where discourse is possible.

GMW
Really great post! Thanks. I'm part of the way through reading Alex Carey's book: "Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty," referenced in this article. I've learned more about the obviously verifiable history of U.S. corporate propaganda in the first four chapters than I learned gaining a "minor" in history in 1974 (not surprisingly I can now clearly see). I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in just how pervasive, entrenched and long-standing are the propaganda systems shaping public perception, thought and behavior in America and the West.
Norcal
Wow Greg Maybury great essay, congratulations. This quote is brilliant, I've never see it before, "For Carey, the following conclusion was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' "

Too, Rodger Ailes was the man credited with educating Nixon up as how to "use" the TV media, and Ailes never looked back as he manipulated media at will. Thank you!

nondimenticare
That is also one of the basic theses of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech.
vexarb
I read in 'Guns, Germs and Steel' about Homo Sapiens and his domesticated animals. Apparently we got on best in places where we could find animals that are very like us: sheep, cattle, horses and other herd animals which instinctively follow their Leader. I think our cousins the chimpanzee are much the same; both species must have inherited this common trait from some pre-chimpanzee ancestor who had found great survival value in passing on the sheeple trait to their progeny. As have the sheep themselves.

By the way, has anybody observed sheeple behaviour in ants and bees? For instance, quietly following a Leader ant to their doom, or noisily ganging up to mob a worker bee that the Queen does not like?

Andy
Almost unbelievable that this was commisioned by the BBC 4 part series covering much of what is in Gregs essay. Some fabulous old footage too. https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/
S.R.Passerby
I'd say the elites are both for and against. Competing factions. It's clear that many are interested in overturning democracy, whilst others want to exploit it.

The average grunt on the street is in the fire, regardless of the pan chosen by the elites.

[Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name. ..."
"... In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets, also funded by the FO. ..."
"... "The Guardian is struggling for money" Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets. ..."
Aug 16, 2019 | off-guardian.org

OffGuardian already covered the Global Media Freedom Conference, our article Hypocrisy Taints UK's Media Freedom Conference , was meant to be all there was to say. A quick note on the obvious hypocrisy of this event. But, in the writing, I started to see more than that. This event is actually creepy. Let's just look back at one of the four "main themes" of this conference:

Building trust in media and countering disinformation
"Countering disinformation"? Well, that's just another word for censorship. This is proven by their refusal to allow Sputnik or RT accreditation. They claim RT "spreads disinformation" and they "countered" that by barring them from attending. "Building trust"? In the post-Blair world of PR newspeak, "building trust" is just another way of saying "making people believe us" (the word usage is actually interesting, building trust not earning trust). The whole conference is shot through with this language that just feels off. Here is CNN's Christiane Amanpour :
Our job is to be truthful, not neutral we need to take a stand for the truth, and never to create a false moral or factual equivalence."
Being "truthful not neutral" is one of Amanpour's personal sayings , she obviously thinks it's clever. Of course, what it is is NewSpeak for "bias". Refusing to cover evidence of The White Helmets staging rescues, Israel arming ISIS or other inconvenient facts will be defended using this phrase – they will literally claim to only publish "the truth", to get around impartiality and then set about making up whatever "truth" is convenient. Oh, and if you don't know what "creating a false moral quivalence is", here I'll demonstrate: MSM: Putin is bad for shutting down critical media. OffG: But you're supporting RT being banned and Wikileaks being shut down. BBC: No. That's not the same. OffG: It seems the same. BBC: It's not. You're creating a false moral equivalence . Understand now? You "create a false moral equivalence" by pointing out mainstream media's double standards. Other ways you could mistakenly create a "false moral equivalence": Bringing up Gaza when the media talk about racism. Mentioning Saudi Arabia when the media preach about gay rights. Referencing the US coup in Venezuela when the media work themselves into a froth over Russia's "interference in our democracy" Talking about the invasion of Iraq. Ever. OR Pointing out that the BBC is state funded, just like RT. These are all no-longer flagrant examples of the media's double standards, and if you say they are , you're "creating a false moral equivalence" and the media won't have to allow you (or anyone who agrees with you) air time or column inches to disagree. Because they don't have a duty to be neutral or show both sides, they only have a duty to tell "the truth" as soon as the government has told them what that is. Prepare to see both those phrases – or variations there of – littering editorials in the Guardian and the Huffington Post in the coming months. Along with people bemoaning how "fake news outlets abuse the notion of impartiality" by "being even handed between liars the truth tellers". (I've been doing this site so long now, I have a Guardian-English dictionary in my head).

Equally dodgy-sounding buzz-phrases litter topics on the agenda. "Eastern Europe and Central Asia: building an integrated support system for journalists facing hostile environments" , this means pumping money into NGOs to fund media that will criticize our "enemies" in areas of strategic importance. It means flooding money into the anti-government press in Hungary, or Iran or (of course), Russia. That is ALL it means. I said in my earlier article I don't know what "media sustainability" even means, but I feel I can take a guess. It means "save the government mouthpieces". The Guardian is struggling for money, all print media are, TV news is getting lower viewing figures all the time. "Building media sustainability" is code for "pumping public money into traditional media that props up the government" or maybe "getting people to like our propaganda". But the worst offender on the list is, without a doubt "Navigating Disinformation"

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1vbSj1WQqUw?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

"Navigating Disinformation" was a 1 hour panel from the second day of the conference. You can watch it embedded above if you really feel the need. I already did, so you don't have to. The panel was chaired by Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Foreign Minister. The members included the Latvian Foreign Minister, a representative of the US NGO Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Information

Have you guessed what "disinformation" they're going to be talking about? I'll give you a clue: It begins with R. Freeland, chairing the panel, kicks it off by claiming that "disinformation isn't for any particular aim" . This is a very common thing for establishment voices to repeat these days, which makes it all the more galling she seems to be pretending its is her original thought. The reason they have to claim that "disinformation" doesn't have a "specific aim" is very simple: They don't know what they're going to call "disinformation" yet. They can't afford to take a firm position, they need to keep their options open. They need to give themselves the ability to describe any single piece of information or political opinion as "disinformation." Left or right. Foreign or domestic. "Disinformation" is a weaponised term that is only as potent as it is vague. So, we're one minute in, and all "navigating disinformation" has done is hand the State an excuse to ignore, or even criminalise, practically anything it wants to. Good start. Interestingly, no one has actually said the word "Russia" at this point. They have talked about "malign actors" and "threats to democracy", but not specifically Russia. It is SO ingrained in these people that "propaganda"= " Russian propaganda" that they don't need to say it.

The idea that NATO as an entity, or the individual members thereof, could also use "disinformation" has not just been dismissed it was literally never even contemplated. Next Freeland turns to Edgars Rinkēvičs, her Latvian colleague, and jokes about always meeting at NATO functions. The Latvians know "more than most" about disinformation, she says. Rinkēvičs says disinformation is nothing new, but that the methods of spreading it are changing then immediately calls for regulation of social media. Nobody disagrees. Then he talks about the "illegal annexation of Crimea", and claims the West should outlaw "paid propaganda" like RT and Sputnik. Nobody disagrees. Then he says that Latvia "protected" their elections from "interference" by "close cooperation between government agencies and social media companies". Everyone nods along. If you don't find this terrifying, you're not paying attention. They don't say it, they probably don't even realise they mean it, but when they talk about "close cooperation with social media networks", they mean government censorship of social media. When they say "protecting" their elections they're talking about rigging them. It only gets worse. The next step in the Latvian master plan is to bolster "traditional media".

The problems with traditional media, he says, are that journalists aren't paid enough, and don't keep up to date with all the "new tricks". His solution is to "promote financing" for traditional media, and to open more schools like the "Baltic Centre of Media Excellence", which is apparently a totally real thing .

It's a training centre which teaches young journalists about "media literacy" and "critical thinking". You can read their depressingly predictable list of "donors" here . I truly wish I was joking. Next up is Courtney Radsch from CPJ – a US-backed NGO, who notionally "protect journalists", but more accurately spread pro-US propaganda. (Their token effort to "defend" RT and Sputnik when they were barred from the conference was contemptible).

She talks for a long time without saying much at all. Her revolutionary idea is that disinformation could be countered if everyone told the truth. Inspiring. Beata Balogova, Journalist and Editor from Slovakia, gets the ship back on course – immediately suggesting politicians should not endorse "propaganda" platforms. She shares an anecdote about "a prominent Slovakian politician" who gave exclusive interviews to a site that is "dubiously financed, we assume from Russia". They assume from Russia. Everyone nods.

It's like they don't even hear themselves.

Then she moves on to Hungary. Apparently, Orban has "created a propaganda machine" and produced "antisemitic George Soros posters". No evidence is produced to back-up either of these claims. She thinks advertisers should be pressured into not giving money to "fake news sites". She calls for "international pressure", but never explains exactly what that means. The stand-out maniac on this panel is Emine Dzhaparova, the Ukrainian First Deputy Minister of Information Policy. (She works for the Ministry of Information – nicknamed the Ministry of Truth, which was formed in 2014 to "counter lies about Ukraine". Even The Guardian thought that sounded dodgy.)

She talks very fast and, without any sense of irony, spills out a story that shoots straight through "disinformation" and becomes "incoherent rambling". She claims that Russian citizens are so brainwashed you'll never be able to talk to them, and that Russian "cognitive influence" is "toxic like radiation." Is this paranoid, quasi-xenophobic nonsense countered? No. Her fellow panelists nod and chuckle. On top of that, she just lies. She lies over and over and over again. She claims Russia is locking up Crimean Tartars "just for being muslims", nobody questions her. She says the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, but doesn't mention that her side is responsible for over 80% of civilian deaths.

She says only 30% of Crimeans voted in the referendum, and that they were "forced". A fact not supported by any polls done by either side in the last four years, and any referenda held on the peninsula any time in the last last 30 year. It's simply a lie. Nobody asks her about the journalists killed in Ukraine since their glorious Maidan Revolution . Nobody questions the fact that she works for something called the "Ministry of Information". Nobody does anything but nod and smile as the "countering disinformation" panel becomes just a platform for spreading total lies.

When everyone on the panel has had their ten minutes on the soapbox, Freeland asks for recommendations for countering this "threat" – here's the list:

  1. Work to distinguish "free speech" from "propaganda", when you find propaganda there must be a "strong reaction".
  2. Pressure advertisers to abandon platforms who spread misinformation.
  3. Regulate social media.
  4. Educate journalists at special schools.
  5. Start up a "Ministry of Information" and have state run media that isn't controlled, like in Ukraine.

This is the Global Conference on Media Freedom and all these six people want to talk about is how to control what can be said, and who can say it. They single only four countries out for criticism: Hungary, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Russia .and Russia takes up easily 90% of that. They mention only two media outlets by name: RT and Sputnik. This wasn't a panel on disinformation, it was a public attack forum – a month's worth of 2 minutes of hate. These aren't just shills on this stage, they are solid gold idiots, brainwashed to the point of total delusion.

They are the dangerous glassy eyes of a Deep State that never questions itself, never examines itself, and will do anything it wants, to anyone it wants whilst happily patting itself on the back for its superior morality. They don't know, they don't care. They're true believers. Terrifyingly dead inside. Talking about state censorship and re-education camps under a big sign that says "Freedom". And that's just one talk. Just one panel in a 2 day itinerary filled to the brim with similarly soul-dead servants of authority. Truly, perfectly Orwellian.

Jonathan Jarvis

https://southfront.org/countering-russian-disinformation-or-new-wave-of-freedom-of-speech-suppression/

Read and be appalled at what America is up to .keep for further reference. We are in danger.

Tim Jenkins
It would serve Ms. Amanpour well, to relax, rewind & review her own interview with Sergei Lavrov:-

Then she might see why Larry King could stomach the appalling corporate dictatorship, even to the core of False & Fake recording of 'our' "History of the National Security State" , No More

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H7aKGOpSwE

Amanpour was forced to laugh uncontrollably, when confronted with Lavrov's humorous interpretations of various legal aspects of decency & his Judgement of others' politicians and 'Pussy Riots' >>> if you haven't seen it, it is to be recommended, the whole interview, if nothing else but to study the body language and micro-facial expressions, coz' a belly up laugh is not something anybody can easily control or even feign that first spark of cognition in her mind, as she digests Lavrov's response :- hilarious

Einstein
A GE won't solve matters since we have a Government of Occupation behind a parliament of puppets.

Latest is the secretive Andy Pryce squandering millions of public money on the "Open Information Partnership" (OIP) which is the latest name-change for the Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, just like al-Qaeda kept changing its name.

In true Orwellian style, they splashed out on a conference for "defence of media freedom", when they are in the business of propaganda and closing alternative 'narratives' down. And the 'media' they would defend are, in fact, spies sent to foreign countries to foment trouble to further what they bizarrely perceive as 'British interests'. Just like the disgraceful White Helmets, also funded by the FO.

Pryce's ventriloquist's dummy in parliament, the pompous Alan Duncan, announced another £10 million of public money for this odious brainwashing programme.

Tim Jenkins
That panel should be nailed & plastered over, permanently:-

and as wall paper, 'Abstracts of New Law' should be pasted onto a collage of historic extracts from the Guardian, in offices that issue journalistic licenses, comprised of 'Untouchables' :-

A professional habitat, to damp any further 'Freeland' amplification & resonance,

of negative energy from professional incompetence.

Francis Lee
Apropos of the redoubtable Ms Freeland, Canada's Foreign Secretary.

The records now being opened by the Polish government in Warsaw reveal that Freeland's maternal grandfather Michael (Mikhailo) Chomiak was a Nazi collaborator from the beginning to the end of the war. He was given a powerful post, money, home and car by the German Army in Cracow, then the capital of the German administration of the Galician region. His principal job was editor in chief and publisher of a newspaper the Nazis created. His printing plant and other assets had been stolen from a Jewish newspaper publisher, who was then sent to die in the Belzec concentration camp. During the German Army's winning phase of the war, Chomiak celebrated in print the Wehrmacht's "success" at killing thousands of US Army troops. As the German Army was forced into retreat by the Soviet counter-offensive, Chomiak was taken by the Germans to Vienna, where he continued to publish his Nazi propaganda, at the same time informing for the Germans on other Ukrainians. They included fellow Galician Stepan Bandera, whose racism against Russians Freeland has celebrated in print, and whom the current regime in Kiev has turned into a national hero.

Those Ukrainian 'Refugees' admitted to Canada in 1945 were almost certainly members of the 14th Waffen SS Division Galizia 1. These Ukie collaboraters – not to be confused with the other Ukie Nazi outfit – Stepan Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army -were held responsible for the massacre of many Poles in the Lviv area the most infamous being carried out in the Polish village of Huta Pienacka. In the massacre, the village was destroyed and between 500] and 1,000 of the inhabitants were killed. According to Polish accounts, civilians were locked in barns that were set on fire while those attempting to flee were killed. That's about par for the course.
Canada's response was as follows:

The Canadian Deschênes Commission was set up to investigate alleged war crimes committed by the collaborators

Memorial to SS-Galizien division in Chervone, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine

The Canadian "Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes" of October 1986, by the Honourable Justice Jules Deschênesconcluded that in relation to membership in the Galicia Division:

''The Galicia Division (14. Waffen grenadier division der SS [gal.1]) should not be indicted as a group. The members of Galicia Division were individually screened for security purposes before admission to Canada. Charges of war crimes of Galicia Division have never been substantiated, either in 1950 when they were first preferred, or in 1984 when they were renewed, or before this Commission. Further, in the absence of evidence of participation or knowledge of specific war crimes, mere membership in the Galicia Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.''

However, the Commission's conclusion failed to acknowledge or heed the International Military Tribunal's verdict at the Nuremberg Trials, in which the entire Waffen-SSorganisation was declared a "criminal organization" guilty of war crimes. Also, the Deschênes Commission in its conclusion only referenced the division as 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (Galizische Nr.1), thus in legal terms, only acknowledging the formation's activity after its name change in August 1944, while the massacre of Poles in Huta Pieniacka, Pidkamin and Palikrowy occurred when the division was called SS Freiwilligen Division "Galizien". Nevertheless, a subsequent review by Canada's Minister of Justice again confirmed that members of the Division were not implicated in war crimes.

Yes, the west looks after its Nazis and even makes them and their descendants political figureheads.

mark
Most of these people are so smugly and complacently convinced of their own moral superiority that they just can't see the hypocrisy and doublethink involved in the event.
Mikalina
Eva Bartlett gives a wider perspective:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/londons-media-freedom-conference-smacks-irony-critics-barred-no-mention-jailed-assange/5683808
Harry Stotle
Freedom-lover, Cunt, will be furious when he hears about this!

Apparently Steve Bell is doubleplusbad for alluding to the fact Netanyahu has got his hand shoved deep into Tom Watson's arse – the Guardian pulled Bell's most recent ouvre which suggests the media's antisemitism trope might not be quite as politically untainted as the likes of Freedland, Cohen and Viner would have you believe.
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/guardian-cartoonist-steve-bell-specious-charge-of-antisemitism-in-email-to-all-paper-1.486570

Meanwhile Owen Jones has taken to Twitter to rubbish allegations that a reign of terror exists at Guardian Towers – the socialist firebrand is quoted as saying 'journalists are free to say whatever they like, so long as it doesn't stray too far from Guardian-groupthink'.

Tutisicecream
Good analysis Kit, of the cognitive dissonant ping pong being played out by Nazi sympathisers such as Hunt and Freeland.

The echo chamber of deceit is amplified again by the selective use of information and the ignoring of relevant facts, such as the miss reporting yesterday by Reuters of the Italian Neo-Nazi haul of weapons by the police, having not Russian but Ukrainian links.

Not a word in the WMSM about this devious miss-reporting as the creation of fake news in action. But what would you expect?

Living as I do in Russia I can assure anyone reading this that the media freedom here is on a par with the West and somewhat better as there is no paranoia about a fictitious enemy – Russians understand that the West is going through an existential crisis (Brexit in the UK, Trump and the Clinton war of sameness in the US and Macron and Merkel in the EU). A crisis of Liberalism as the failed life-support of capitalism. But hey, why worry about the politics when there is bigger fish to fry. Such as who will pay me to dance?

The answer is clear from what Kit has writ. The government will pay the piper. How sweet.

I'd like to thank Kit for sitting through such a turgid masquerade and as I'm rather long in the tooth I do remember the old BBC schools of journalism in Yelsin's Russia. What I remember is that old devious Auntie Beeb was busy training would be hopefuls in the art of discretion regarding how the news is formed, or formulated.

In other words your audience. And it ain't the public

Steve Hayes
The British government's "Online Harms" White Paper has a whole section devoted to "disinformation" (ie, any facts, opinions, analyses, evaluations, critiques that are critical of the elite's actual disinformation). If these proposals become law, the government will have effective control over the Internet and we will be allowed access to their disinformation, shop and watch cute cat videos.
Question This
The liberal news media & hypocrisy, who would have ever thought you'd see those words in the same sentence. But what do you expect from professional liars, politicians & 'their' free press?

Can this shit show get any worse? Yes, The other day I wrote to my MP regards the SNP legislating against the truth, effectively making it compulsory to lie! Mr Blackford as much as called me a transphobic & seemed to go to great length publishing his neo-liberal ideological views in some scottish rag, on how right is wrong & fact is turned into fiction & asked only those that agreed with him contact him.

Tim Jenkins
"The science or logical consistency of true premise, cannot take place or bear fruit, when all communication and information is 'marketised and weaponised' to a mindset of possession and control." B.Steere
Mikalina
I saw, somewhere (but can't find it now) a law or a prospective law which goes under the guise of harassment of MPs to include action against constituents who 'pester' them.

I've found a link for the Jo Cox gang discussing it, though.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/new-research-on-the-intimidation-and-harassment-of-mps-featured-in-inaugural-conference

Question This
I only emailed him once! That's hardly harassment. Anyway I sent it with proton-mail via vpn & used a false postcode using only my first name so unlikely my civil & sincere correspondence will see me locked up for insisting my inalienable rights of freedom of speech & beliefs are protected. But there again the state we live in, i may well be incarcerated for life, for such an outrageous expectation.
Where to?
"The Guardian is struggling for money" Surely, they would be enjoying some of the seemingly unlimited US defense and some of the mind control programmes budgets.
Harry Stotle
Its the brazen nature of the conference that is especially galling, but what do you expect when crooks and liars no longer feel they even have to pretend?

Nothing will change so long as politicians (or their shady backers) are never held to account for public assets diverted toward a rapacious off-shore economic system, or the fact millions of lives have been shattered by the 'war on terror' and its evil twin, 'humanatarian regime change' (while disingenuous Labour MPs wail about the 'horrors' of antisemitism rather than the fact their former leader is a key architect of the killings).

Kit remains a go-to voice when deconstructing claims made by political figures who clearly regard the MSM as a propaganda vehicle for promoting western imperialism – the self-satisfied smugness of cunts like Jeremy Cunt stand in stark contrast to a real journalist being tortured by the British authorities just a few short miles away.

It's a sligtly depressing thought but somebody has the unenviable task of monitoring just how far our politicians have drifted from the everyday concerns of the 'just about managing' and as I say Mr Knightly does a fine job in informing readers what the real of agenda of these media love-ins are actually about – it goes without saying a very lengthy barge pole is required when the Saudis are invited but not Russia.

Where to?
This Media Freedom Conference is surely a creepy theatre of the absurd.

It is a test of what they can get away with.

Mikalina
Yep. Any soviet TV watcher would recognise this immediately. Message? THIS is the reality – and you are powerless.
mark
When are they going to give us the Ministry of Truth we so desperately need?

[Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.' ..."
"... Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of the public. ..."
"... All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria, blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included bankers, financiers, industrialists, and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the ill-fated beer-hall putsch. (See here , and here .) ..."
"... The purpose of this propaganda barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering business interests.' ..."
Aug 16, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Lapdogs for the Government

Here was, of course, another surreal spectacle, this time courtesy of one of the Deep State's most dangerous, reviled, and divisive figures, a notable protagonist in the Russia-Gate conspiracy, and America's most senior diplomat no less.

Not only is it difficult to accept that the former CIA Director actually believes what he is saying, well might we ask, "Who can believe Mike Pompeo?"

And here's also someone whose manifest cynicism, hypocrisy, and chutzpah would embarrass the much-derided scribes and Pharisees of Biblical days.

We have Pompeo on record recently in a rare moment of honesty admitting – whilst laughing his ample ass off, as if recalling some "Boy's Own Adventure" from his misspent youth with a bunch of his mates down at the local pub – that under his watch as CIA Director:

We lied, cheated, we stole we had entire training courses.'

It may have been one of the few times in his wretched existence that Pompeo didn't speak with a forked tongue.

At all events, his candour aside, we can assume safely that this reactionary, monomaniacal, Christian Zionist 'end-timer' passed all the Company's "training courses" with flying colours.

According to Matthew Rosenberg of the New York Times, all this did not stop Pompeo however from name-checking Wikileaks when it served his own interests. Back in 2016 at the height of the election campaign, he had ' no compunction about pointing people toward emails stolen* by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee and then posted by WikiLeaks."

[NOTE: Rosenberg's omission of the word "allegedly" -- as in "emails allegedly stolen" -- is a dead giveaway of bias on his part (a journalistic Freudian slip perhaps?), with his employer being one of those MSM marques leading the charge with the "Russian Collusion" 'story'. For a more insightful view of the source of these emails and the skullduggery and thuggery that attended Russia-Gate, readers are encouraged to check this out.]

And this is of course The Company we're talking about, whose past and present relationship with the media might be summed up in two words: Operation Mockingbird (OpMock). Anyone vaguely familiar with the well-documented Grand Deception that was OpMock, arguably the CIA's most enduring, insidious, and successful psy-ops gambit, will know what we're talking about. (See here , here , here , and here .) At its most basic, this operation was all about propaganda and censorship, usually operating in tandem to ensure all the bases are covered.

After opining that the MSM is 'totally infiltrated' by the CIA and various other agencies, for his part former NSA whistleblower William Binney recently added , ' When it comes to national security, the media only talk about what the administration wants you to hear, and basically suppress any other statements about what's going on that the administration does not want get public. The media is basically the lapdogs for the government.'

Even the redoubtable William Casey , Ronald Reagan's CIA Director back in the day was reported to have said something along the following lines:

We know our disinformation program is complete when almost everything the American public believes is false.'

In order to provide a broader and deeper perspective, we should now consider the views of a few others on the subjects at hand, along with some history. In a 2013 piece musing on the modern significance of the practice, my compatriot John Pilger ecalled a time when he met Leni Riefenstahl back in 70s and asked her about her films that 'glorified the Nazis'.

Using groundbreaking camera and lighting techniques, Riefenstahl produced a documentary that mesmerized Germans; as Pilger noted, her Triumph of the Will 'cast Adolf Hitler's spell'. She told the veteran Aussie journalist the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of the public.

All in all, Riefenstahl produced arguably for the rest of the world the most compelling historical footage of mass hysteria, blind obedience, nationalistic fervour, and existential menace, all key ingredients in anyone's totalitarian nightmare. That it also impressed a lot of very powerful, high profile people in the West on both sides of the pond is also axiomatic: These included bankers, financiers, industrialists, and sundry business elites without whose support Hitler might've at best ended up a footnote in the historical record after the ill-fated beer-hall putsch. (See here , and here .)

" Triumph " apparently still resonates today. To the surprise of few one imagines, such was the impact of the film -- as casually revealed in the excellent 2018 Alexis Bloom documentary Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes -- it elicited no small amount of admiration from arguably the single most influential propagandist of recent times.

[Readers might wish to check out Russell Crowe's recent portrayal of Ailes in Stan's mini-series The Loudest Voice , in my view one the best performances of the man's career.]

In a recent piece unambiguously titled "Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems", my other compatriot Caitlin Johnstone also had a few things to say about the subject, echoing Orwell when she observed it was all about "controlling the narrative".

Though I'd suggest the greater "root" problem is our easy propensity to ignore this reality, pretend it doesn't or won't affect us, or reject it as conspiratorial nonsense, in this, of course, she's correct. As she cogently observes,

I write about this stuff for a living, and even I don't have the time or energy to write about every single narrative control tool that the US-centralised empire has been implementing into its arsenal. There are too damn many of them emerging too damn fast, because they're just that damn crucial for maintaining existing power structures.'

The Discreet Use of Censorship and Uniformed Men

It is hardly surprising that those who hold power should seek to control the words and language people use' said Canadian author John Ralston Saul in his 1993 book Voltaire's Bastards–the Dictatorship of Reason in the West .

Fittingly, in a discussion encompassing amongst other things history, language, power, and dissent, he opined, ' Determining how individuals communicate is' an objective which represents for the power elites 'the best chance' [they] have to control what people think. This translates as: The more control 'we' have over what the proles think, the more 'we' can reduce the inherent risk for elites in democracy.

' Clumsy men', Saul went on to say, 'try to do this through power and fear. Heavy-handed men running heavy-handed systems attempt the same thing through police-enforced censorship. The more sophisticated the elites, the more they concentrate on creating intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures. These systems require only the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.'

In other words, along with assuming it is their right to take it in the first place, ' those who take power will always try to change the established language ', presumably to better facilitate their hold on it and/or legitimise their claim to it.

For Oliver Boyd-Barrett, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas.' Yet for the author of the recently published RussiaGate and Propaganda: Disinformation in the Age of Social Media , 'No such infrastructure exists.'

The mainstream media he says, is 'owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates' that lie at the very heart of US oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates:

The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of US plutocratic self-regard is also well documented.'

Of course the word "inability" suggests the MSM view themselves as having some responsibility for maintaining such an egalitarian news and information environment. They don't of course, and in truth, probably never really have! A better word would be "unwilling", or even "refusal". The corporate media all but epitomise the " plutocratic self-regard" that is characteristic of "oligopoly capitalism".

Indeed, the MSM collectively functions as advertising, public relations/lobbying entities for Big Corp, in addition to acting as its Praetorian bodyguard , protecting their secrets, crimes, and lies from exposure. Like all other companies they are beholden to their shareholders (profits before truth and people), most of whom it can safely be assumed are no strangers to "self-regard", and could care less about " histories, perspectives and vocabularies" that run counter to their own interests.

It was Aussie social scientist Alex Carey who pioneered the study of nationalism , corporatism , and moreso for our purposes herein, the management (read: manipulation) of public opinion, though all three have important links (a story for another time). For Carey, the following conclusion was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' This former farmer from Western Australia became one of the world's acknowledged experts on propaganda and the manipulation of the truth.

Prior to embarking on his academic career, Carey was a successful sheep grazier . By all accounts, he was a first-class judge of the animal from which he made his early living, leaving one to ponder if this expertise gave him a unique insight into his main area of research!

In any event, Carey in time sold the farm and travelled to the U.K. to study psychology, apparently a long-time ambition. From the late fifties until his death in 1988, he was a senior lecturer in psychology and industrial relations at the Sydney-based University of New South Wales, with his research being lauded by such luminaries as Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, both of whom have had a thing or three to say over the years about The Big Shill. In fact such was his admiration, Pilger described him as "a second Orwell", which in anyone's lingo is a big call.

Carey unfortunately died in 1988, interestingly the year that his more famous contemporaries Edward Herman and Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media was published, the authors notably dedicating their book to him.

Though much of his work remained unpublished at the time of his death, a book of Carey's essays – Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty -- was published posthumously in 1997. It remains a seminal work.

In fact, for anyone with an interest in how public opinion is moulded and our perceptions are managed and manipulated, in whose interests they are done so and to what end, it is as essential reading as any of the work of other more famous names. This tome came complete with a foreword by Chomsky, so enamoured was the latter of Carey's work.

For Carey, the three "most significant developments" in the political economy of the twentieth century were: the growth of democracy the growth of corporate power; and the growth of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

Carey's main focus was on the following: advertising and publicity devoted to the creation of artificial wants; the public relations and propaganda industry whose principal goal is the diversion to meaningless pursuits and control of the public mind; and the degree to which academia and the professions are under assault from private power determined to narrow the spectrum of thinkable (sic) thought.

For Carey, it is an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is 'distinctive' of totalitarian regimes. Yet as he stresses: the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not).' In this context, 'conventional wisdom" becomes conventional ignorance; as for "common sense", maybe not so much.

The purpose of this propaganda barrage, as Sharon Bader has noted, has been to convince as many people as possible that it is in their interests to relinquish their own power as workers, consumers, and citizens, and 'forego their democratic right to restrain and regulate business activity. As a result the political agenda is now confined to policies aimed at furthering business interests.'

An extreme example of this view playing itself right under our noses and over decades was the cruel fiction of the " trickle down effect " (TDE) -- aka the 'rising tide that would lift all yachts' -- of Reaganomics . One of several mantras that defined Reagan's overarching political shtick, the TDE was by any measure, decidedly more a torrent than a trickle, and said "torrent" was going up not down. This reality as we now know was not in Reagan's glossy economic brochure to be sure, and it may have been because the Gipper confused his prepositions and verbs.

Yet as the GFC of 2008 amply demonstrated, it culminated in a free-for all, dog eat dog, anything goes, everyman for himself form of cannibal (or anarcho) capitalism -- an updated, much improved version of the no-holds-barred mercenary mercantilism much reminiscent of the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons who 'infested' it, only one that doesn't just eat its young, it eats itself!

Making the World Safe for Plutocracy

In the increasingly dysfunctional, one-sided political economy we inhabit then, whether it's widgets or wars or anything in between, few people realise the degree to which our opinions, perceptions, emotions, and views are shaped and manipulated by propaganda (and its similarly 'evil twin' censorship ,) its most adept practitioners, and those elite, institutional, political, and corporate entities that seek out their expertise.

It is now just over a hundred years since the practice of propaganda took a giant leap forward, then in the service of persuading palpably reluctant Americans that the war raging in Europe at the time was their war as well.

This was at a time when Americans had just voted their then-president Woodrow Wilson back into office for a second term, a victory largely achieved on the back of the promise he'd "keep us out of the War." Americans were very much in what was one of their most isolationist phases , and so Wilson's promise resonated with them.

But over time they were convinced of the need to become involved by a distinctly different appeal to their political sensibilities. This "appeal" also dampened the isolationist mood, one which it has to be said was not embraced by most of the political, banking, and business elites of the time, most of whom stood to lose big-time if the Germans won, and/or who were already profiting or benefitting from the business of war.

For a president who "kept us out of the war", this wasn't going to be an easy 'pitch'. In order to sell the war the president established the Committee on Public Information (aka the Creel Committee) for the purposes of publicising the rationale for the war and from there, garnering support for it from the general public.

Enter Edward Bernays , the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who's generally considered to be the father of modern public relations. In his film Rule from the Shadows: The Psychology of Power , Aaron Hawkins says Bernays was influenced by people such as Gustave le Bon , Walter Lippman , and Wilfred Trotter , as much, if not moreso, than his famous uncle.

Either way, Bernays 'combined their perspectives and synthesised them into an applied science', which he then 'branded' "public relations".

For its part the Creel committee struggled with its brief from the off; but Bernays worked with them to persuade Americans their involvement in the war was justified -- indeed necessary -- and to that end he devised the brilliantly inane slogan, "making the world safe for democracy" .

Thus was born arguably the first great propaganda catch-phrases of the modern era, and certainly one of the most portentous. The following sums up Bernays's unabashed mindset:

The conscious, intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.'

The rest is history (sort of), with Americans becoming more willing to not just support the war effort but encouraged to view the Germans and their allies as evil brutes threatening democracy and freedom and the 'American way of life', however that might've been viewed then. From a geopolitical and historical perspective, it was an asinine premise of course, but nonetheless an extraordinary example of how a few well chosen words tapped into the collective psyche of a country that was decidedly opposed to any U.S involvement in the war and turned that mindset completely on its head.

' [S]aving the world for democracy' (or some 'cover version' thereof) has since become America's positioning statement, 'patriotic' rallying cry, and the "Get-out-of-Jail Free" card for its war and its white collar criminal clique.

At all events it was by any measure, a stroke of genius on Bernays's part; by appealing to people's basic fears and desires, he could engineer consent on a mass scale. It goes without saying it changed the course of history in more ways than one. That the U.S. is to this day still using a not dissimilar meme to justify its "foreign entanglements" is testament to both its utility and durability.

The reality as we now know was markedly different of course. They have almost always been about power, empire, control, hegemony, resources, wealth, opportunity, profit, dispossession, keeping existing capitalist structures intact and well-defended, and crushing dissent and opposition.

The Bewildered Herd

It is instructive to note that the template for 'manufacturing consent' for war had already been forged by the British. And the Europeans did not 'sleepwalk' like some " bewildered herd ' into this conflagration.

For twenty years prior to the outbreak of the war in 1914, the then stewards of the British Empire had been diligently preparing the ground for what they viewed as a preordained clash with their rivals for empire the Germans.

To begin with, contrary to the opinion of the general populace over one hundred years later, it was not the much touted German aggression and militarism, nor their undoubted imperial ambitions, which precipitated its outbreak. The stewards of the British Empire were not about to let the Teutonic upstarts chow down on their imperial lunch as it were, and set about unilaterally and preemptively crushing Germany and with it any ambitions it had for creating its own imperial domain in competition with the Empire upon which Ol' Sol never set.

The "Great War" is worth noting here for other reasons. As documented so by Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty in their two books covering the period from 1890-1920, we learn much about propaganda, which attest to its extraordinary power, in particular its power to distort reality en masse in enduring and subversive ways.

In reality, the only thing "great" about World War One was the degree to which the masses fighting for Britain were conned via propaganda and censorship into believing this war was necessary, and the way the official narrative of the war was sustained for posterity via the very same means. "Great" maybe, but not in a good way!

In these seminal tomes -- World War One Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War and its follow-up Prolonging the Agony: How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WWI by Three-And-A-Half Years -- Macgregor and Docherty provide a masterclass for us all of the power of propaganda in the service of firstly inciting, then deliberately sustaining a major war.

The horrendous carnage and destruction that resulted from it was of course unprecedented, the global effects of which linger on now well over one hundred years later.

Such was the enduring power of the propaganda that today most folks would have great difficulty in accepting the following; this is a short summary of historical realities revealed by Macgregor and Docherty that are at complete odds with the official narrative, the political discourse, and the school textbooks:

It was Great Britain (supported by France and Russia) and not Germany who was the principal aggressor in the events and actions that let to the outbreak of war; The British had for twenty years prior to 1914 viewed Germany as its most dangerous economic and imperial rival, and fully anticipated that a war was inevitable; In the U.K. and the U.S., various factions worked feverishly to ensure the war went on for as long as possible, and scuttled peacemaking efforts from the off; key truths about this most consequential of geopolitical conflicts have been concealed for well over one hundred years, with no sign the official record will change; very powerful forces (incl. a future US president) amongst U.S. political, media, and economic elites conspired to eventually convince an otherwise unwilling populace in America that U.S. entry onto the war was necessary; those same forces and many similar groups in the U.K. and Europe engaged in everything from war profiteering, destruction/forging of war records, false-flag ops, treason, conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and direct efforts to prolong the war by any means necessary, many of which will rock folks to their very core.

But peace was not on the agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so embarrassing and costly, some key players in the British government were willing to talk about peace. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be thrown under the bus. The unelected European leaders had one common bond: They would fight Germany until she was crushed.

Prolonging the Agony details how this secret cabal organised to this end the change of government without a single vote being cast. David Lloyd George was promoted to prime minister in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister in France. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite leader, Lord Alfred Milner into power at the very inner-core of the decision-makers in British politics.

Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The men entrusted with the task would keep going till the end and their place-men were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and America.

Propaganda Always Wins

But just as the pioneering adherents of propaganda back in the day might never have dreamt how sophisticated and all-encompassing the practice would become, nor would the citizenry at large have anticipated the extent to which the industry has facilitated an entrenched, rapacious plutocracy at the expense of our economic opportunity, our financial and material security, our physical, social and cultural environment, our values and attitudes, and increasingly, our basic democratic rights and freedoms.

We now live in the Age of the Big Shill -- cocooned in a submissive void no less -- an era where nothing can be taken on face value yet where time and attention constraints (to name just a few) force us to do so; [where] few people in public life can be taken at their word; where unchallenged perceptions become accepted reality; where 'open-book' history is now incontrovertible not-negotiable, upon pain of imprisonment fact; where education is about uniformity, function, form and conformity, all in the service of imposed neo-liberal ideologies embracing then prioritising individual -- albeit dubious -- freedoms.

More broadly, it's the "Roger Ailes" of this world -- acting on behalf of the power elites who after all are their paymasters -- who create the intellectual systems which control expression through the communications structures, whilst ensuring these systems require only 'the discreet use of censorship and uniformed men.'

They are the shapers and moulders of the discourse that passes for the accepted lingua franca of the increasingly globalised, interconnected, corporatised political economy of the planet. Throughout this process they 'will always try to change the established language.'

And we can no longer rely on our elected representatives to honestly represent us and our interests. Whether this decision making is taking place inside or outside the legislative process, these processes are well and truly in the grip of the banks and financial institutions and transnational organisations. In whose interests are they going to be more concerned with?

We saw this all just after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) when the very people who brought the system to the brink, made billions off the dodge for their banks and millions for themselves, bankrupted hundreds of thousands of American families, were called upon by the U.S. government to fix up the mess, and to all intents given a blank cheque to so do.

That the U.S. is at even greater risk now of economic implosion is something few serious pundits would dispute, and a testament to the effectiveness of the snow-job perpetrated upon Americans regarding the causes, the impact, and the implications of the 2008 meltdown going forward.

In most cases, one accepts almost by definition such disconnects (read: hidden agendas) are the rule rather than the exception, hence the multi-billion foundation -- and global reach and impact -- of the propaganda business. This in itself is a key indicator as to why organisations place so much importance on this aspect of managing their affairs.

At the very least, once corporations saw how the psychology of persuasion could be leveraged to manipulate consumers and politicians saw the same with the citizenry and even its own workers, the growth of the industry was assured.

As Riefenstahl noted during her chinwag with Pilger after he asked if those embracing the "submissive void" included the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? " Everyone ," she said.

By way of underscoring her point, she added enigmatically: 'Propaganda always wins if you allow it'.

Greg Maybury is a freelance writer based in Perth, Australia. His main areas of interest are American history and politics in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military, and geopolitical affairs. For 5 years he has regularly contributed to a diverse range of news and opinion sites, including OpEd News, The Greanville Post, Consortium News, Dandelion Salad, Global Research, Dissident Voice, OffGuardian, Contra Corner, International Policy Digest, the Hampton Institute, and others.

nottheonly1

This brilliant essay is proof of the reflective nature of the Universe. The worse the propaganda and oppression becomes, the greater the likelihood such an essay will be written.

Such is the sophistication and ubiquity of the narrative control techniques used today -- afforded increasingly by 'computational propaganda' via automated scripts, hacking, botnets, troll farms, and algorithms and the like, along with the barely veiled censorship and information gatekeeping practised by Google and Facebook and other tech behemoths -- it's become one of the most troubling aspects of the technological/social media revolution.

Very rarely can one experience such a degree of vindication. My moniker 'nottheonly1' has received more meaning with this precise depiction of the long history of the manipulation of the masses. Recent events have destroyed but all of my confidence that there might be a peaceful way out of this massive dilemma. Due to this sophistication in controlling the narrative, it has now become apparent that we have arrived at a moment in time where total lawlessness reigns. 'Lawlessness' in this case means the loss of common law and the use of code law to create ever new restrictions for free speech and liberty at large.

Over the last weeks, comments written on other discussion boards have unleashed a degree of character defamation and ridicule for the most obvious crimes perpetrated on the masses through propaganda. In this unholy union of constant propaganda via main stream 'media' with the character defamation by so called 'trolls' – which are actually virtual assassins of those who write the truth – the ability of the population, or parts thereof to connect with, or search for like minded people is utterly destroyed. This assault on the online community has devastating consequences. Those who have come into the cross hairs of the unintelligence agencies will but turn away from the internet. Leaving behind an ocean of online propaganda and fake information. Few are now the web sites on which it is possible to voice one's personal take on the status quo.

There is one word that describes these kind of activities precisely: traitor. Those who engage in the character defamation of commenters, or authors per se, are traitors to humanity. They betray the collective consciousness with their poisonous attacks of those who work for a sea change of the status quo. The owner class has all game pieces positioned. The fact that Julian Assange is not only a free man, but still without a Nobel price for peace, while war criminals are recipients, shows just how much the march into absolute totalitarianism has progressed. Bernays hated the masses and offered his 'services' to manipulate them often for free.

Even though there are more solutions than problems, the time has come where meaningful participation in the search for such solution has been made unbearable. It is therefore that a certain fatalism has developed – from resignation to the acceptance of the status quo as being inevitable. Ancient wisdom has created a proverb that states 'This too, will pass'. While that is a given, there are still enough Human Beings around that are determined to make a difference. To this group I count the author of this marvelous, albeit depressing essay. Thank you more that words can express. And thank you, OffGuardian for being one of the last remaining places where discourse is possible.

GMW
Really great post! Thanks. I'm part of the way through reading Alex Carey's book: "Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty," referenced in this article. I've learned more about the obviously verifiable history of U.S. corporate propaganda in the first four chapters than I learned gaining a "minor" in history in 1974 (not surprisingly I can now clearly see). I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in just how pervasive, entrenched and long-standing are the propaganda systems shaping public perception, thought and behavior in America and the West.
Norcal
Wow Greg Maybury great essay, congratulations. This quote is brilliant, I've never see it before, "For Carey, the following conclusion was inescapable: 'It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.' "

Too, Rodger Ailes was the man credited with educating Nixon up as how to "use" the TV media, and Ailes never looked back as he manipulated media at will. Thank you!

nondimenticare
That is also one of the basic theses of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech.
vexarb
I read in 'Guns, Germs and Steel' about Homo Sapiens and his domesticated animals. Apparently we got on best in places where we could find animals that are very like us: sheep, cattle, horses and other herd animals which instinctively follow their Leader. I think our cousins the chimpanzee are much the same; both species must have inherited this common trait from some pre-chimpanzee ancestor who had found great survival value in passing on the sheeple trait to their progeny. As have the sheep themselves.

By the way, has anybody observed sheeple behaviour in ants and bees? For instance, quietly following a Leader ant to their doom, or noisily ganging up to mob a worker bee that the Queen does not like?

Andy
Almost unbelievable that this was commisioned by the BBC 4 part series covering much of what is in Gregs essay. Some fabulous old footage too. https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/
S.R.Passerby
I'd say the elites are both for and against. Competing factions. It's clear that many are interested in overturning democracy, whilst others want to exploit it.

The average grunt on the street is in the fire, regardless of the pan chosen by the elites.

[Aug 16, 2019] One of the ways the Deep State undermines conspiracy theories is to plant evidence purporting to support the theory, but easily disproved by easily available information

Notable quotes:
"... Even more importantly, we should all be troubled by efforts to shut down content and discussions labeled "false and misleading" on major social media platforms . ..."
"... Conspiracies can be found out by many different ways e.g. documents uncovered, discrepancies, evidence that contradicts what has been claimed etc. ..."
"... "A two decade old CT, like 9/11, or worse, one six decades old (the JFK assassination), are false because they would have involved too many people–someone would have blown the whistle, if only on their deathbed." ..."
"... "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. ..."
"... The old adage 'two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead' applies here. ..."
"... This co-ordinated and global media attack on the 'Conspiracy Theorist' is co-ordinated and Global for good reason. ..."
"... The determination of international deepstate to make illegal any question or recognition of it under guise of 'Conspiracy theorist=domestic terrorist/anti-semite/anti-Zionist/BDS/trump supporting white supremacist(etc)'- conflating those ULTRA memes with growing awareness of the Anglo/Yankee/zionist PSYOPS underway globally, mean we are entering a choke point in progression of reason, truth and beauty. ..."
"... The danger of the conspiracy theorist to the present world order, is that most of the BIG ones, the nasty ones, are true. And CIA operation Mockingbirds' job (Quote) 'is to Guard against the illicit Transformation of Probability into Certainty," that they are . ..."
"... Ultimately, the average conspiracy theorist has a better grasp of how the world works than the average liberal. ..."
"... The reality is that the ruling class and its public servants really do have a parasitic and predatory relationship to the vast majority of humanity ..."
"... I like Michael Moore's response when asked if he believed the conspiracy theories which were floating about at the time: "Just the ones that are true" ..."
"... A conspiracy theory, like any theory is as strong as the evidence put forward to support it. ..."
"... One of the ways they will do this is to plant "evidence" purporting to support the theory, but easily disproved by easily available information. Unfortunately,it is a sad fact that far too many "conspiracy theorists" readily accept and share along with genuine evidence, this planted "evidence" to the wider internet, thereby undermining the solid evidence of a conspiracy, by associating it with the easily disprovable nonsense. ..."
"... For example, after the attack on the WTC Kissinger was appointed to the head the 9/11 commission (before stepping down). ..."
"... 'Conspiracy theorists' would have thought – why are neocons appointing a mass-murdering neocon to investigate an event that might have involved neocons (raising obvious credibility issues) – whereas those who regard conspiracy theorists as dribbling fruitcakes would have welcomed the appointment of the nobel peace prize winner. ..."
OffGuardian

Noam Chomsky has pointed out , the more educated we are, the more we are a target for state-corporate propaganda. Even journalists outside the mainstream may internalize establishment values and prejudices. Which brings us to Parramore's embrace of the term "conspiracy theory." Once a neutral and little-used phrase, "conspiracy theory" was infamously weaponized in 1967 by a memo from the CIA to its station chiefs worldwide.

Troubled by growing mass disbelief in the "lone nut" theory of President Kennedy's assassination, and concerned that "[c]onspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization," the agency directed its officers to "discuss the publicity problem with friendly and elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)" and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose."

As Kevin Ryan writes , and various analyses have shown :

In the 45 years before the CIA memo came out, the phrase 'conspiracy theory' appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times only 50 times, or about once per year. In the 45 years after the CIA memo, the phrase appeared 2,630 times, or about once per week."
While it turns out that Parramore knows something about this hugely successful propaganda drive, she chose in her NBC piece to deploy the phrase as the government has come to define it, i.e., as "something that requires no consideration because it is obviously not true." This embeds a fallacy in her argument which only spreads as she goes on. Likewise, the authors of the studies she cites, who attempt to connect belief in "conspiracy theories" to "narcissistic personality traits," are not immune to efforts to manipulate the wider culture. Studies are only as good as the assumptions from which they proceed; in this case, the assumption was provided by an interested Federal agency. And what of their suggested diagnosis?

The DSM-5's criteria for narcissism include "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity a need for admiration and lack of empathy." My experience in talking to writers and advocates who -- to mention a few of the subjects Parramore cites -- seek justice in the cases of the political murders of the Sixties , have profound concerns about vaccine safety , or reject the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 , does not align with that characterization.

On the contrary, most of the people I know who hold these varied (and not always shared) views are deeply empathic, courageously humble, and resigned to a life on the margins of official discourse, even as they doggedly seek to publicize what they have learned. A number of them have arrived at their views through painful, direct experience, like the loss of a friend or the illness of a child, but far from having a "negative view of humanity," as Parramore writes, most hold a deep and abiding faith in the power of regular people to see injustice and peacefully oppose it. In that regard, they share a great deal in common with writers like Parramore: ultimately, we all want what's best for our children, and none of us want a world ruled by unaccountable political-economic interests. If we want to achieve that world, then we should work together to promote speech that is free from personal attacks on all sides. Even more importantly, we should all be troubled by efforts to shut down content and discussions labeled "false and misleading" on major social media platforms.

Who will decide what is false and what is true? ... ... ...

President Kennedy said:

a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
Perhaps we should take a closer look at ideas that so frighten the powers-that-be. Far from inviting our ridicule, the people who insist that we look in these forbidden places may one day deserve our thanks.
John Kirby is a documentary filmmaker. His latest project, Four Died Trying, examines what John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were doing in the last years of their lives which may have led to their deaths.
George
I am responding to an earlier comment you made because, for some reason, I cannot reply to it in the proper place.

"The old adage 'two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead' applies here."

Wrong: secrets can be uncovered even if both of them are dead.

"The conspiracies we know about are exposed because someone talks, or a computer gets hacked."

Conspiracies can be found out by many different ways e.g. documents uncovered, discrepancies, evidence that contradicts what has been claimed etc.

"A two decade old CT, like 9/11, or worse, one six decades old (the JFK assassination), are false because they would have involved too many people–someone would have blown the whistle, if only on their deathbed."

Always a bad sign when you start to repeat "would have". Lots of presumption here.

"No new facts have emerged because the only people who knew anything are long dead, taking the reasons to their graves .."

New facts can emerge all the time even regarding the most ancient of events.

" .or in the case of 9/11, because there was no great conspiracy, beyond the one reported."

So you now have godlike omniscience?

"A propensity for subscribing to conspiracy theories, is, sad to say, indicative of mental inadequacy "

There's no point in going much further here. You now devolve into psychobabble which, as always, is based on the dogmatic assertion that you are right. (cf. the formerly mentioned godlike omniscience)

Ragnar
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.

It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." These words are attributed to Joseph Goebbels.

-So, George, it would hardly make a difference whether the State is Marxist or Capitalist. It's either power or truth. They are inherently different and can not be reconciled. Ultimately, there is no bridge possible.

However, so-called "common" goals are of a lower order and cooperation here is possible, temporarily. These relationships are unstable and prone to breaking up precisely because they're ultimately not common at all. The principle are different and the personalities too. Ships Passing In The Night, like. -See?

George
We all have common goals. Basically the goals of life and health. And these are hardly goals "of a lower order". If that was true then we must be living in a state of "postmodernist relativity" where anyone can decide arbitrarily what matters. And that would certainly lead to your ships-passing-in-the-night scenario i.e. the ultimate divide-and-rule vision.

As for power, the late Marxist writer Ellen Meiksins Wood noted that, in modern times, we have an unprecedented degree of political freedom. But the reason for that is that power no longer lies in politics. It lies in economics. What is the point of having formal rights when your livelihood is gone?

William HBonney

The old adage 'two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead' applies here.

The conspiracies we know about are exposed because someone talks, or a computer gets hacked. A two decade old CT, like 9/11, or worse, one six decades old (the JFK assassination), are false because they would have involved too many people – someone would have blown the whistle, if only on their deathbed. No new facts have emerged because the only people who knew anything are long dead, taking the reasons to their graves, or in the case of 9/11, because there was no great conspiracy, beyond the one reported.

A propensity for subscribing to conspiracy theories, is, sad to say, indicative of mental inadequacy. Such people are unable to deal with the complexities of the world as it is, and therefore seek to make it a world of black and white, good and evil, heroes and villains. The internet, with its blurring of fantasy and fact enables them. This is why discussions like this get so polarised.

TFS

1. 9/11 and JFK are false because WILLIAM HBonney has declared it so.

Boom, thanks for watching kids.

2. In other news, some Conspiracy Theorists Imagined 747-E4Bs above Washington at the time of 9/11 and 25+second delay introduced into the Air Traffic Control System but the Official Conspiracy Account of 9/11 didn't discuss it because there was nothing to see.

3. In related news, HWB wack jobs go on one

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/07/no_author/new-york-fire-commissioners-call-for-new-9-11-investigation-about-pre-planted-explosives/

4. Corbett, goes off on one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXYswf3lzU8

5. And again, Corbett goes even more mental. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWLis-TVB2w

6. But it's ok kidz, because HWB wack jobs, like first responders, police, fire personnel architects, physicists, former military personnel, pilots, Nobel Peace Prixe winners, medical experts, etc etc all collectively asertained that the Official Conspiracy Theory of 9/11 is about as usefull as the Warren Commission Report.

7. HOWEVER, HWB THINKS YOU'RE A WACK JOB.

r. rebar
unless & until someone goes to jail -- there are no conspiracies & as silence is -- like any commodity -- only as good as the price paid to maintain it -- those who know have a real vested interest in not talking (it's not a secret if you tell someone)
roger morris
Ms Parramore is doing nothing more than her profession and tenure demands. Witting or un-witting. This co-ordinated and global media attack on the 'Conspiracy Theorist' is co-ordinated and Global for good reason.

It is the 'Great Wurlitzer' at full throat coinciding with extraordinary reductions in internet freedoms of information flow. The determination of international deepstate to make illegal any question or recognition of it under guise of 'Conspiracy theorist=domestic terrorist/anti-semite/anti-Zionist/BDS/trump supporting white supremacist(etc)'- conflating those ULTRA memes with growing awareness of the Anglo/Yankee/zionist PSYOPS underway globally, mean we are entering a choke point in progression of reason, truth and beauty.

A read of the Cass Sunstein/Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule Paper describing 'Conspiracy theory' as a 'crippled Epistemology' and determining 'COINTELPRO' type strategies to counter the danger of their truth becoming certainty, will enlighten those in the dark of IIO methodology and expose Ms Parramore as a true MOCKINGBIRD.

The danger of the conspiracy theorist to the present world order, is that most of the BIG ones, the nasty ones, are true. And CIA operation Mockingbirds' job (Quote) 'is to Guard against the illicit Transformation of Probability into Certainty," that they are .

mathias alexand
Try this for conspiracy thinking

https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2016/05/31/part-2/

George
Good link. I like this bit:

"Ultimately, the average conspiracy theorist has a better grasp of how the world works than the average liberal. Even the most outlandish "conspiracy theory" in existence -- that people like George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth are shape-shifting, extra-dimensional reptilians -- is closer to the truth than what liberals believe.

The reality is that the ruling class and its public servants really do have a parasitic and predatory relationship to the vast majority of humanity "

I've often felt there is a lot of (metaphorical!) truth in David Icke's ravings, although the reptile image is unfortunate in that actual reptiles are amongst the most sedate and peaceful creatures.

Molloy
Eichmann and today's useful idiots; Hannah Arendt

(start Arendt quote)

Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain, in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused so many millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed. What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath ("Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement. I refuse it; I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience tells me that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony.

I won't do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me"), and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might "do so under oath or without an oath," declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? Or who, repeatedly and with a great show of feeling, assured the court, as he had assured the police examiner, that the worst thing he could do would be to try to escape his true responsibilities, to fight for his neck, to plead for mercy -- and then, upon instruction of his counsel, submitted a handwritten document that contained a plea for mercy?

As far as Eichmann was concerned, these were questions of changing moods, not of inconsistencies, and as long as he was capable of finding, either in his memory or on the spur of the moment, an elating stock phrase to go with them, he was quite content.
(end quote)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/02/16/eichmann-in-jerusalem-i

Molloy
Chomsky dealing with the indoctrinated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU&app=desktop Why it is important to call out the so-called 'Global Elite' facilitators on here.

And why it is essential to understand what Eichmann was facilitating (and the madness that morphed into the same apartheid bigotry in the 21st century).

Better understand than be hanged.

Gary Weglarz

I appreciate the article, but the sentence below is offered with no logical or rational support – it is simply an evidence free assertion:

("But Parramore and many journalists like her are neither assets of an intelligence service nor unthinking tools of big media; ) – really?

It is quite clear that if someone "is" (an asset of an intelligence service) that they will certainly not be broadcasting this fact to the world or to friends and family. And for someone to assert that "conspiracies" don't exist in the real world requires a level of credulity that most intelligent and rational people the least bit familiar with the historical record would find rather difficult to muster up. I dare say it would be much easier in fact to prove the assertion that our Western history is simply the "history of conspiracies" given the oligarchic control of Western populations for millennia. This is hardly "rocket science" as they say. We do have a rather well documented historical record to fall back on to show the endless scheming of Western oligarchy behind the backs of Western populations.

wardropper
I like Michael Moore's response when asked if he believed the conspiracy theories which were floating about at the time: "Just the ones that are true"
John Thatcher
A conspiracy theory, like any theory is as strong as the evidence put forward to support it. Often people offer as fact conspiracies that only as yet exist as theories,with greater or lesser amounts of evidence to support.I have no doubt that interested parties who are the accused in these theories, will mount efforts to discredit any theory mounted against them or those they represent.

One of the ways they will do this is to plant "evidence" purporting to support the theory, but easily disproved by easily available information. Unfortunately,it is a sad fact that far too many "conspiracy theorists" readily accept and share along with genuine evidence, this planted "evidence" to the wider internet, thereby undermining the solid evidence of a conspiracy, by associating it with the easily disprovable nonsense.

Harry Stotle

Isn't it high time we had a term to describe those who always accept the official version of events after controversial political incidents no matter how implausible this account might be?

For example, after the attack on the WTC Kissinger was appointed to the head the 9/11 commission (before stepping down).

'Conspiracy theorists' would have thought – why are neocons appointing a mass-murdering neocon to investigate an event that might have involved neocons (raising obvious credibility issues) – whereas those who regard conspiracy theorists as dribbling fruitcakes would have welcomed the appointment of the nobel peace prize winner.

Anyway, here's a clip of Henry – the believers in everything the government say would never have considered the objections raised in the film – such questions are tantamount to mental illness according to these 'progressives'.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/YcxjJDlbnC4?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

[Aug 16, 2019] Notice the continued exclusion of Representative Gabbard and her criticism of the destructive Empire

Aug 16, 2019 | www.unz.com
anonymous [340] Disclaimer , says: August 16, 2019 at 1:54 am GMT
@Hanrahan Notice the continued exclusion of Representative Gabbard and her criticism of the destructive Empire -- despite focusing on Beltway politics, he hasn't typed her name since June 28. He wants the "Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders-AOC Democrats" to go even kookier because this website's "Mr. Paleoconservative" has become a Beltway fixture, cheerleading for Team Red in the next Most Important Election Ever

.

[Aug 16, 2019] Two key questions facing the nation is the unchecked power of MIC and financial oligarchy. Unless they are tamed the USA will follow the road of the USSR sooner or later

Notable quotes:
"... The election will be waged, like the primaries, around race-baiting. Biden will be the first victim. The other white candidates are running scared & becoming more shrill in their denunciations of whites in general by the hour. ..."
Aug 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

swamped , says: August 16, 2019 at 8:20 am GMT

"the Great Arsenal of Democracy was looted by" the military-industrial complex Arsenal & it's unending wars & nothing short of nuclear annihilation is going to change that. There is no Democrat who is willing to bet their chance at the presidency on pulling it down.

And the American public, by and large, is put to sleep by lengthy discussions of the intricacies of trade policy.

The election will be waged, like the primaries, around race-baiting. Biden will be the first victim. The other white candidates are running scared & becoming more shrill in their denunciations of whites in general by the hour.

There's no telling where it all may lead but it's becoming clearer day by day that the hostility will outlast the primaries & the general election will be a very ugly affair. There's no turning back to the soothing center now, it will be an us-vs.-them type election & hopefully, Pat Buchanan, still America's shrewdest pundit, will keep us fully apprised.

[Aug 16, 2019] According to Dr.Crenshaw who treated JFK at the Parkland Hospital Kennedy was shot once or twice from the front

Aug 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

9/11 Inside job , says: August 14, 2019 at 1:37 pm GMT

Need to investigate the role , if any , of Dr. Michael Baden in the Epstein and JFK autopsy cover-ups .

According to Dr.Crenshaw who treated JFK at the Parkland Hospital Kennedy was shot once or twice from the front and , therefore, Oswald could not possibly have been the killer. See " Trauma Room One , the JFK Medical Coverup Exposed . " By Dr. Michael Crenshaw .

[Aug 16, 2019] The Perverted Face of Elite America by Matt Purple

Notable quotes:
"... Bill Clinton flew ..."
"... dozens of times ..."
"... on the Lolita Express; was it really beyond him to order a hit? ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... Are the Elites the arch villains from the comic books, probably not, but then again many of them operate corporations that cause suffering to economically deprived populations all over the world. ..."
"... Why is this surprising? Aristocrats have always behaved this way. ..."
"... The sexual abuse of children and kids in their early teens is a very democratic crime. While physical abuse and neglect are linked to lower-income parents, sexual abuse occurs in all strata of society. It is not confined to the elites or to money changers. Nor to Jews, if that is what you are implying. ..."
"... Unconcerned about negative consequences, these people have become increasingly brazen. They certainly know that the laws that apply to you and me do not apply to them. ..."
"... In the words of George Carlin, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it." I stopped reading after the first two para's on this, tone is exactly the same as the sneering disdain from the empire's various MSM propaganda arms aimed at those "not in the club." ..."
"... 1) Either our intelligence agencies knew what was going on with Epstein and did nothing to stop him. Or... ..."
"... 2) They had no clue .. ..."
"... Occam's Razor says Possibility No. 1 is more likely to be the truth. But what would such a truth tell us? ..."
"... "What I am saying is that Epstein's direct testimony – AND ONLY EPSTEIN'S DIRECT TESTIMONY – had the potential to create a Common Knowledge moment that could bring down – not just specific sociopathic oligarchs like Mob Boss Donald or Mob Boss Bill or Mob Boss Andrew if they were the specific targets of that testimony – but the entire Mob system of sociopathic oligarchy. ..."
"... One strongly suspects that Ghislaine Maxwell knows just as much as Epstein did. Her participation was just as important to the operation of this "trafficking" ring. She was the lead recruiter, handled logistics, "grooming" and also was Epstein's "in" to many of his VIP associates (who were really clients). If witness accounts are accurate, she was also a participant in a good number of these depraved, criminal acts. ..."
"... The fact she has not been charged is quite the tell about our system of "justice." ..."
"... This is a dangerous slope. People once bowed to the elites because there was a principle of enforcement called nobless oblige. Society felt that elites had to be held to a higher standard because they carried greater responsibilities and burdens for society and the welfare of the national good. ..."
"... Since the 1960s nobless oblige has been downgraded to sound bites and photo ops for publicity and marketing. The elites have all but abandoned their responsibilities to support religion, to support education (except to indocrinate), to support tradition and society and the national good. The elites have become inward looking, inbred and narcissistic with little to no outward focus except in a marxist totalitarian vein of thought which serves their interest, indulges their hungers, preserves their wealth and power. ..."
"... My point was that as popolo minuti transform into popolo grossi in terms of access to power, they tend to start to transform into them in terms of moral character as well. (Inequality of) power corrupts, and absolute (inequality of) power corrupts absolutely. Thus, it seems that the over-representation of psychopaths in positions of power is because the psychopathy is acquired (and plenty of studies show drastic declines in empathy with even a little priming for power), rather than because it is easier for psychopaths to rise to the top. The worst of the popolo grossi tend to be hereditary. ..."
"... I think we're a lot closer to 1789 France than we want to believe. Read some Chris Hedges to see how the socialists see the current situation. Here's an example. https://www.commondreams.or... ..."
"... "given that all available evidence points to gross negligence on the part of the jail." How is gross negligence different from deliberate negligence? ..."
Aug 16, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

In our tense populist moment, Jeffrey Epstein's crimes land like a grenade. • August 15, 2019

Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in Cambridge, MA on 9/8/04. (Photo by Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images) Hands up, those of you who made a Fort Marcy Park joke last Saturday. Anyone? Surely there were a few. Fort Marcy Park was the Washington, D.C. woodland where White House attorney Vince Foster was found dead in 1993, and while his demise was repeatedly ruled a suicide, certain conservatives spent years afterwards hallucinating that the Clintons had him killed. Now, a quarter century later, both right and left are back in conspiracy mode. Mere hours after pedo-to-the-stars Jeffrey Epstein was reported to have killed himself, the hash tag #ClintonBodyCount began circulating on Twitter, followed closely by #TrumpBodyCount. Both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump had been associates of Epstein's; both, the thinking went, might have been desperate for him not to take the stand.

It is wrong, of course, to publicly speculate that Epstein was whacked, given that all available evidence points to gross negligence on the part of the jail. But can you really blame people? Twenty-five years ago, if you'd said that a roll call of America's elites, everyone from a former president to the most famous lawyer in the country, would be implicated in a sex trafficking ring masterminded by an enigmatic Wall Street financier who was also a member of the Trilateral Commission , you would have been laughed into the darkest corner of the local subway platform (next to the guy holding the "Vatican Hides Pedophiles" sign, presumably). Today, you'd be reading AP copy. Validate an improbable conspiracy theory, and you grant license to all the related improbable conspiracy theories: Bill Clinton flew dozens of times on the Lolita Express; was it really beyond him to order a hit?

And if we know one thing about the Epstein story, it's that everything about it is utterly improbable. Epstein stands credibly accused of assembling a veritable underage harem . One of his victims, Virginia Guiffre, has already implicated Prince Andrew , the third-born of Queen Elizabeth II, and a picture has since emerged showing the royal with his arm around the then-teenager's waist. Guiffre says she was also ordered to have sex with , among others, a "foreign president," a "well-known prime minister," and a "large hotel chain owner." Such an open secret was all this perversion that the current president of the United States made cheeky reference to it back in 2002. So invincible did Epstein think himself that he discussed underage sex openly, telling a New York Times reporter that laws against pedophilia were a "cultural aberration."

That Epstein looked to other cultures to rationalize his behavior is nothing new -- Oscar Wilde wrapped his similar predilections in lofty talk about the Greek ideal. What is different is that rather than being hunted and exposed by the powerful, as Wilde was, Epstein was protected by them for decades. Even after he was convicted of soliciting an underage prostitute in 2008, he was sentenced to only 18 months in prison, held in a private wing of the Palm Beach County stockade, and let out on generous "work release."

Study the Epstein case long enough and you end up at Alex Jones's favorite conclusion: they're all sons of bitches. Everyone who was anyone seemed to be in on this, or at least acting at the behest of someone who was. The essence of the conspiratorial mindset is that powerful shadowy forces are, first, capable of and engaged in the most dastardly skullduggery imaginable, and, second, in cabal-like cooperation with each other across all levels of power. The Epstein case seems to affirm both planks. It makes our elites seem like aliens, of a different culture, a different moral code, a different species -- how else could they have let slide what none of us ever would? Mary Colum's remark to Ernest Hemingway, "The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money," has rarely rang less true.

There's been for some time now a sense of drift between most Americans and their elites, driven by factors like income inequality, geographic enclaving, and cultural differences. We are living in a populist moment, to be sure, an era when the usual purveyors of class warfare sound more apt than they otherwise would. In such a fraught environment, the Epstein revelation lands like a grenade. Not only are America's gentry hitching rides on the Acela while mumbling about deplorables -- so the feeling goes -- they're also running cover for a Caligula who's preying on little Susie down the street. Suddenly the populist divide doesn't just run between classes or races or regular toast versus avocado, but between ethical extremes, good and literal evil.

This is, of course, what most populists profess: the people as a group are wholesome, the elites as a group are venal, and the former has to be vaulted over the latter in order for society to be made whole again. Yet Epstein's crimes are so wicked as to potentially set this moral chasm ablaze like never before. That's why, though Trump may have associated with Epstein, he's unlikely to be damaged by him: everything that's happened only confirms what he's been saying for years. In fact, you might view the Epstein fracas as a dialectic between two of his former associates, Trump's throw-them-out populism versus Clinton's benevolent stewardship of society by the smart set. And Trump won out.

Just as populisms aren't driven entirely by economic causes, so too are revolutions often about more than bread. Consider the Russian Revolution, sparked at least in small part by the people's perception of Rasputin as a sexual deviant. Consider, too, the French Revolution's rage against the profligate "Madame Déficit" Marie Antoinette. In such cases, the moral tends to get intertwined with the economic; license is seen as enabling decadence while the people pray and starve. This can be a blind spot in traditional conservative thinking. We rightly detest (most) revolutions and the tremors they cause, but we sometimes fail to notice that the Jacobins have good reason to be angry and that the ruling classes they overthrow really are that loathsome.

America is nowhere near 1789 France, or armed revolution in general. But we are anxious, restive, hungry for justice. A republic likes ours depends on the harmonious coexistence of its people and its elites, a matter that our Founders spent a good deal of time worrying about. Now we have a hideous face f0r elite corruption, one that's enabled fever in the national mind and dehumanized those around him. For those of us who prize stability and liberty in a polity, who think populism is always best in modest doses, the weeks ahead may be reason for worry.

Because it seems there's only more to come. On Wednesday, another victim came forward , alleging that Epstein raped her when she was 14 after she turned down sex with him. That this carnal omega, this pathetic loser, this finger-sniffing pervert from every teen comedy lurking outside the pretty girl's home longing for a piece of discarded lingerie was somehow elevated into a Teflon-coated Wall Street sun god is beyond comprehension. My friend Michael Davis calls Epstein and company the Hellfire Club , but just how much will they torch on their way down?

Matt Purple is the managing editor of .

Amy Ehlers • a day ago • edited

When I started to see what was going on in this country, which was my journey, I was amazed to find out that there is sex trafficking 8 blocks from the White House and I learned of this in 2011. Lisa Ling did a great documentary on it. "Night time traffic greater than the day time." Pimps attempting to recruit girls walking home from school. If you pay attention it is also a journey of the food chain of Corporate America that supports this.
This is a Money Changer issue, that is about the closing of eyes from both parties. and please don't tell me this is not so. I know better than that.
Krazy Uncle • a day ago
To be absolutely, clear there was speculation that Epstein was going to be assassinated weeks before it happened. For the most part citizens aren't so much surprised, as disappointed that Justice is once again foiled.

Are the Elites the arch villains from the comic books, probably not, but then again many of them operate corporations that cause suffering to economically deprived populations all over the world.

When the World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, just how close do they seem to achieve a god like status when looking up from the bottom? Maybe that's one reason that people are so angry when it seems that the most vulnerable among us, our children, are the victims of a limited number of the Elites and their twisted and horrific appetites.

I personally doubt much will come of the Epstein affair it will most likely be just one more myth added to the tally of injustice, and the people will have to bitterly swallow it whole. It will probably take many more cases like this being exposed before the people actually have their fill, and decide to do something about it. In the meantime, prepare to see more of the same by the laughing and mocking Elites

Krazy Uncle Bill In Montgomey • 15 hours ago
In this day and age, I doubt a reporter will touch this story, and if they did, the real story would never make it into the Main Stream Media. And, most likely the reporter would be permanently black balled, and never work in Journalism again. It's happened many times before, because it doesn't fit within the approved propaganda message.

Give the story a couple decades or more, and it may come out, but otherwise it will be handled as a whack-job Conspiracy Theory.

The Fourth Estate is the only business that is protected by the Constitution, and yet it has been neutered, and those in the Press, who were supposed to be the Watchdogs for the people, have become the Lapdogs of the Elites.

What passes as News today is formulaic programming, passed on from the Propagandist to the Media, both nationally and locally.

Have you ever seen Conan O'Brian's local news videos?
Newscasters Agree: Rising Gas Prices Edition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAkxR9T01pw
There is one reporter, Julie K. Brown, of the Miami Herald that actually brought to light the Epstein story again.
Here's the Thing: How Julie Brown broke the Jeffrey Epstein story
https://www.wrvo.org/post/heres-thing-how-julie-brown-broke-jeffrey-epstein-story

So, there is at least one reporter that has the guts to do investigative journalism hope her life insurance policy is up to date.

p.s. I didn't listen to the broadcast in the second link I just posted it in case others are interested. I've read the story elsewhere.

polistra24 • a day ago
Why is this surprising? Aristocrats have always behaved this way.
minsredmash • a day ago
Two Republican state senators and two New York City Policemen died violently within 72 hours ....

1. On June 4, former Arkansas Senator Linda Collins-Smith, 57, was found dead outside her home, her body unrecognizable on discovery. Police are now investigating her death as a homicide. On June 5, the county prosecutor announced that the circuit judge sealed the documents and statements obtained by police.
2. On June 5, Deputy Chief Steven Silks, 62, weeks away from retirement, was found in an unmarked police car with a gunshot wound to the head. News reports reported indicate it seemed self-inflicted.
3. On June 5, former Oklahoma Sen. Jonathan Nichols, 53, was found shot dead in his home. Police have not announced whether they are investigating a suicide or homicide..
4. On June 6, Detective Joseph Calabrese, 58, was found near his police car on a Brooklyn, NY beach, dead of a gunshot wound in what one report called an apparent suicide.
RIP.
Many other Americans died violently this past week. Why link these four together?

The answer comes down to a dark suspicion and a few hard facts which suggest that one or more of these four deaths might have had something to do with these individuals' work against pedophiles and human trafficking, or the official corruption so often surrounding both.

Source .

Now Jeffrey Epstein...

Jessica Ramer Amy Ehlers • a day ago
The sexual abuse of children and kids in their early teens is a very democratic crime. While physical abuse and neglect are linked to lower-income parents, sexual abuse occurs in all strata of society. It is not confined to the elites or to money changers. Nor to Jews, if that is what you are implying.

Just about everyone in America has a family member who was sexually abused by someone who was usually not elite. Therefore, I cannot get worked up about class issues because of Jeffrey Epstein.

What I can get worked up about are the way elites start wars for poor people to die in and the way poor people get cruel sentences while the elite either walk or get the Epstein treatment--private wing, generous work release.

mrscracker Jessica Ramer • 16 hours ago
I agree. Young girls are trafficked in more circles than the elite. I don't understand the connection to any particular social class. But better connected people do have better lawyers and can get away with more. Until like Mr. Epstein , they don't.
Bill In Montgomey • a day ago • edited
The true character of these people is starting to be revealed. This (lack of) character is not only displayed when these men travel to Pedo Island, it's on display everywhere they go, in everything they do. Every organization they lead, or have anything to do with, is likely rotten to the core.

Unconcerned about negative consequences, these people have become increasingly brazen. They certainly know that the laws that apply to you and me do not apply to them.

If the system is so corrupt to have protected Epstein for decades, who else is being protected? Who else is getting away with figurative rape in every department of government, or house of finance?

The sooner the public recognizes the "true face" of our elites and rulers the better. Left to their own devices, these people - who think they have class but in reality are the worst kind of trash - can bring down a nation.

Krazy Uncle Bill In Montgomey • a day ago
who else is being protected?

Good point... who else indeed... and how many more children are suffering?

prodigalson • a day ago
Literally no one I know thought this guy would make it to trial alive with the exception of me, as I still had some hope in the system, and I was proven wrong. I've lost whatever remaining faith I had in the system.

In the words of George Carlin, "it's a big club, and you ain't in it." I stopped reading after the first two para's on this, tone is exactly the same as the sneering disdain from the empire's various MSM propaganda arms aimed at those "not in the club."

Sid Finster • a day ago
There are two possibilities here:

1) Either our intelligence agencies knew what was going on with Epstein and did nothing to stop him. Or...

2) They had no clue ... which would mean our much vaunted intelligence community knew nothing about the travel habits of the "ruling class" of the world, about Jeff Epstein's real activities, had received no tips, had no insiders, and were incapable of "putting two and two together," etc. In short, Big Brother - with all its resources and intelligence and sources - with capabilities that put the Gestapo or the KGB to shame - had no idea.

Occam's Razor says Possibility No. 1 is more likely to be the truth. But what would such a truth tell us?

Mccormick47 Sid Finster • a day ago
The third possibility is that BigBrother was in on it and didn't object to sacrificing teenage girls to get compromising information on people they wanted tp blackmail.
Sid Finster • a day ago
"What I am saying is that Epstein's direct testimony – AND ONLY EPSTEIN'S DIRECT TESTIMONY – had the potential to create a Common Knowledge moment that could bring down – not just specific sociopathic oligarchs like Mob Boss Donald or Mob Boss Bill or Mob Boss Andrew if they were the specific targets of that testimony – but the entire Mob system of sociopathic oligarchy.

Jeffrey Epstein was the Missionary to bring down the monsters behind the monster, to bring down the SYSTEM of monsters. Jeffrey Epstein's books and records are not. The individual voices of Jeffrey Epstein's victims are not.

And that's what makes me angriest of all.

That while the individual victims of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes will maybe (maybe!) get some smattering of "justice" and recompense from the show trial of a monster's estate, there will be no Justice served against the monsters behind the monster, that the Mob system of sociopathic oligarchy that CREATED this Jeffrey Epstein and the next Jeffrey Epstein and the next and the next will continue unabated. Untouched. Golden."

https://www.epsilontheory.c...

Bill In Montgomey Sid Finster • a day ago
One strongly suspects that Ghislaine Maxwell knows just as much as Epstein did. Her participation was just as important to the operation of this "trafficking" ring. She was the lead recruiter, handled logistics, "grooming" and also was Epstein's "in" to many of his VIP associates (who were really clients). If witness accounts are accurate, she was also a participant in a good number of these depraved, criminal acts.

The fact she has not been charged is quite the tell about our system of "justice."

Tony55398 • a day ago
Whether Epstein was killed or committed suicide I don't know. I would however like to know who these elites were who participated in the rapes of these young girls. They are just as guilty as Epstein whether they knew the ages of these girls or not, it was there responsibility to find out.
ChristopherRobin1 • a day ago
This is a dangerous slope. People once bowed to the elites because there was a principle of enforcement called nobless oblige. Society felt that elites had to be held to a higher standard because they carried greater responsibilities and burdens for society and the welfare of the national good.

Since the 1960s nobless oblige has been downgraded to sound bites and photo ops for publicity and marketing. The elites have all but abandoned their responsibilities to support religion, to support education (except to indocrinate), to support tradition and society and the national good. The elites have become inward looking, inbred and narcissistic with little to no outward focus except in a marxist totalitarian vein of thought which serves their interest, indulges their hungers, preserves their wealth and power.

What you are have been seeing since the 1960s is the veneer being pulled off the rich and powerful. I would say Nixon and Princess Diana and Ted Kennedy did the most to pull down the veneer from the rich and powerful but it could be argued that Nixon and Princess Diana and Ted Kennedy were accidental victims of circumstance. However Epstein's human trafficking of children for sex and blackmail .... breaks the most because his crimes were no accident nor was he a victim of circumstance. Epstein planned this and created an organization around it elevating his elitist crimes to a level no that I dont think anyone in modern history can match.

atimoshenko ChristopherRobin1 • a day ago
I doubt that history's elites were ever any better. It's just that with far less transparency and access, it was much easier for them to hide how awful they were. The 1960s was the start of mass media, and so the veneer started to crack.
Bill In Montgomey ChristopherRobin1 • a day ago
I do think this COULD qualify as "the story of the century." That is, If the story was told in its entirety - all "names" exposed.

If fully told, the swamp might, in fact, be "drained."

Now the people in said swamp have a strong incentive to protect their domain. Which is why so many of us are skeptical the true story will ever be told.

If there was ever a time where brave and patriotic whistleblowers were needed ...

BXVI • a day ago • edited
"This is, of course, what most populists profess: the people as a group are wholesome, the elites as a group are venal, and the former has to be vaulted over the latter in order for society to be made whole again."

Sorry, but take a look at the average American. The so-called "people" are for the most part just as morally obtuse as the "elites" but they carry the additional burden of being not only ignorant but also stupid. Just look around. Best recent example of the utter stupidity of the American people: a recent survey shows they think 23% of the population is gay. Really.

johnhenry • a day ago
"Hands up, those of you who made a Fort Marcy Park joke last Saturday."

Matt, are you tired of people making jokes about *purple prose*?
Just wondering :)

atimoshenko • a day ago
But isn't the issue exactly that the "only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money" comment is perfectly true?

The rich and powerful are us, but corrupted by riches and power. Many of them behave the way many of us would quickly start to behave if we found ourselves in their shoes. If the gap in power between you and most other people is so huge that you can do anything to them and get away with it, your morals stop applying to them because you start to view them as somewhat subhuman. In this sense, I'm sure Epstein never even thought of raping the underage daughters of other elites.

Thus, the issue is stratospheric inequality of power (by whatever fungible measure you choose - money, political, religious, social, etc). And we see it happen ALL the time throughout history and across geographies - as soon as the power gap is in excess of social boundaries, as soon as there is a group of people you can do pretty much anything you want to and get away with it, you start going a little crazy. Exploitation, rape, torture, murder, slavery - everything starts looking justified. Then it's just a matter of degree, with tin-pot dictators on one end and Epstein somewhere in the middle.

Cosmin Visan atimoshenko • 20 hours ago
Read Machiavelli. He observed that the popolo minuti (regular folks) just wished to be left alone by authorities whereas popolo grossi (fat cats) were of a different psychological composition: they delighted in deception, were vain, greedy and hungry for power.

Centuries later, studies of psychopaths reveal these creatures are different from regular humans at the brain level. The elites are psychopathic (the key ones are) and no, they ain't like regular people. They are literally a different kind.

atimoshenko Cosmin Visan • 11 hours ago • edited
My point was that as popolo minuti transform into popolo grossi in terms of access to power, they tend to start to transform into them in terms of moral character as well. (Inequality of) power corrupts, and absolute (inequality of) power corrupts absolutely. Thus, it seems that the over-representation of psychopaths in positions of power is because the psychopathy is acquired (and plenty of studies show drastic declines in empathy with even a little priming for power), rather than because it is easier for psychopaths to rise to the top. The worst of the popolo grossi tend to be hereditary.

In my opinion, there is nothing so dangerous as to believe that evil people are a different breed from the rest of us. Instead, they tend to simply be us, but in different circumstances. History tends to show that revolutions aimed at replacing the evil people with better people end up with corrupted revolutionaries, rather than a fundamentally less abusive system.

minsredmash atimoshenko • 6 hours ago • edited
"It reminds me of a well known speech by a defense counsel, who pleaded his client's poverty as an excuse of robbing and murdering six of his victims, on the lines that "My client's poverty drove him to murder six people, everybody else would have done the same!"

Dostoevsky, The Idiot.

phreethink • a day ago
Outstanding article. However, I think we're a lot closer to 1789 France than we want to believe. Read some Chris Hedges to see how the socialists see the current situation. Here's an example. https://www.commondreams.or...
Zsuzsi Kruska • a day ago
Elites, that is those with more wealth and/or power than the rest of the masses have always been this way. Remember how decadent the European aristocracy was with their sport of "wenching"? that is going around in groups raping young peasant girls. Also, there was the Hellfire Club which you can research if you want details. This scandal will get less and less coverage in the MSM until it fades away like all the others involving the rich and powerful.
Jr. • a day ago
The Global "Elite" control our Ruling Class by means of blackmail. A person does not get raised to high truly influential positions of power(Politicians, Judges, Hollywood, etc.) unless they have enough dirt on you to know that they can control you without question. The most powerful form of blackmail that they have is ped0filia because it is THE most abhorrent crime that someone can commit, so much so that even criminals in prison refuse to allow ped0 scumbags to be housed near them.

Trump has an obvious penchant for beautiful WOMEN not kids. He was helping and somewhat part of the "Elite" in that he was joining in with them to buy politicians for influence but Trump neutralized that being over his head by openly admitting to buying politicians. They thought it was safe to allow him to run because they thought it was a joke and he would never get elected. They were wrong. In my opinion, they don't have enough dirt on him to get him to go along with their agenda of selling out the USA to the highest bidder hence the all-out attacks on him.

The key to understanding the "Elite"/Ruling Class dynamic is not conflating the two and realizing that blackmail is the main tool used by the one to keep the other under their control.

*Sorry about the Trump tangent above but it's absolutely ridiculous that people are trying to tie Trump to Epstein even though Trump has been trying to bring national attention to the Epstein case FOR YEARS.

Cosmin Visan • 20 hours ago
"given that all available evidence points to gross negligence on the part of the jail." How is gross negligence different from deliberate negligence?

You can tell? And btw the WaPo just came out with news that broken bones in Epstein's neck are more usual in cases of homicide.
I generally see anyone who belittles

'Conspiracy theorists' as part of an Establishment that uses 'incompetence' as the perennial excuse for everything that goes wrong.

stevek9 • 19 hours ago • edited
The old accusation, that you are a 'conspiracy theorist' (a term invented by the CIA after the Kennedy assassination) is holding less and less weight. The irrational kooks now seem to be the people who think Epstein committed suicide. Jokes were everywhere about how 'we were shocked to hear about the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, next Tuesday' when a day later we hear, 'Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide'.

By the way, this equivalence between Trump and Clinton is bogus, I believe. There isn't much evidence of any involvement of Trump (some evidence to the contrary in fact), but there is a load of evidence suggesting 'Wild Bill' was availing himself.

JeffK from PA stevek9 • 5 hours ago • edited
Remember when Maxine Waters was labelled a kook for saying the CIA was bringing cocaine into her LA district? She was mocked and ridiculed. Now we know she was right. You can't make this stuff up.
YoungHegelian2020 • 18 hours ago
I'm sorry, but this case stinks to high heaven, and if you're ready to accept "gross negligence" as the explanation you're likely to believe ANYTHING the authorities tell you. Epstein was either murdered, as the autopsy and reports of shrieking from his cell indicate, or subbed out by intelligence services and replaced by a murdered homeless person who received plastic surgery. Study the history of modern intelligence services: appearances are deceiving, and systemic disinformation is endemic to politics. Careful public speculation, acknowledging where we're uncertain, is very much the responsible thing to do; otherwise there is no hope of democratic accountability. The investigation we're being promised will be conducted by the exact same institution -- the US Department of Justice -- that was responsible for keeping Epstein safe and securing his public testimony about his criminal network. These are the people you want us to trust? Come on, a little critical reasoning, please!
Bryan • 10 hours ago
The most ridiculous part is the idea that being rich and powerful gives you a predilection to turn a blind eye. My wife's family turned a blind eye to a perverted uncle that molested multiple family members over decades. No one stood up, it would've been a shame to them to admit it. How is this any different?
Will Thomas • 10 hours ago • edited
No one really cares. He was pretty rich. Talk radio and weird cable conspiracies shows will benefit. Truth is irrelevant.

[Aug 15, 2019] We're just going to vote in two corrupt, out of touch and mentally declining frauds to throw hot garbage at each other, and what is the left supposed to do?

Aug 15, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Grant , , , August 15, 2019 at 3:50 pm

"they = the voters in the Dem primaries?"

Isn't it interesting that the Democrats are only about a third of the country now, but because they and the other rotten party have rigged our political system so no other parties can emerge, that they essentially will determine who will go up against Trump? The Democratic voters are just as lost as the politicians they vote for. Turnout is often low for primaries within that party, in a party that only a third of the country identifies with, and there is little chance that anyone will get a majority of voters. So, it is entirely possible that the person chosen to go against Trump will have support of, what, 4-5% of the US electorate? And if they are stupid enough to choose Biden, and they are, the general election will be Biden vs Trump. The USSR at least ended in interesting ways. We're just going to vote in two corrupt, out of touch and mentally declining frauds to throw hot garbage at each other, and what is the left supposed to do? There will never be a better argument for a third party if those two are the options given to us by the duds in the two major parties. I can't even contemplate who Biden would choose as his VP, and possibly lock us into a decade of hell, and then the environmental crisis hits.

notabanker , , August 15, 2019 at 4:28 pm

If the US electorate allows 4-5% to decide, then they deserve who they get. It’s not difficult to vote in a primary.

Grant , , August 15, 2019 at 5:07 pm

It is not an issue in regards to difficulty, generally, it is the options people are given and how often it is that the options people are given are net negatives regardless as to who wins, and people realizing that what the general public wants is not reflected in policy. Bernie is an exceptuon, and look at all the nonsense thrown at him, and all the undemocratic means those in power use to maintain their power. I am not saying that justifies inactivity, but it does help to explain it. But, lets say Biden or someone similar is chosen by Democrats in the primaries. What percentage of the electorate, given all I mentioned, will have chosen him?

edmondo , , August 15, 2019 at 5:29 pm

If the US electorate allows 4-5% to decide, then they deserve who they get. It’s not difficult to vote in a primary.

Depends where you live. If you live in most states and you want to vote in a Democratic Party presidential primary, you have to be registered as a Democrat. Here in AZ I can vote for every office except president by being a No Party Preference voter registrant. If I want to vote against Joe Biden, I have to change my voter registration to “D”. Not gonna happen.

https://eus.rubiconproject.com/usync.html

https://acdn.adnxs.com/ib/static/usersync/v3/async_usersync.html

https://c.deployads.com/sync?f=html&s=2343&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2019%2F08%2F200pm-water-cooler-8-15-2019.html <img src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=16807273&cv=2.0&cj=1" />

Grant , August 15, 2019 at 8:07 pm

“Here in California, owned and operated by the Democratic Party, voting for someone other than the approved candidate could quickly get your vote “lost” or “disqualified” and that is not mentioning the rigging of convention delegates.”

This ultimately why Bernie is up against it. I think he has a real shot to win and am not very concerned about the polls, he is doing well despite all that is aligned against him. Palast showed what that rotten party did in 2016 in the primaries (it is entirely possible that Bernie won the state or at least came even closer to winning), and you could include tons since. My favorite was how they used superdelegates at the state level in California to get Bauman to lead the state party, and he had to resign in shame. He was previously a pharma lobbyist that was paid to lobby the state against bargaining down the price of drugs. Then there is stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWi6HS9Wfgw

As the DNC has argued in court though, they don’t have to run a fair primary and can pick whoever those at the top of the party want, right? It would be amazing if someone within the DNC and the state party here (I live in Southern California) would leak what they are doing. Not expecting it, but it would be great.

https://eus.rubiconproject.com/usync.html

https://acdn.adnxs.com/ib/static/usersync/v3/async_usersync.html

https://c.deployads.com/sync?f=html&s=2343&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2019%2F08%2F200pm-water-cooler-8-15-2019.html <img src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=16807273&cv=2.0&cj=1" />

Carey , August 15, 2019 at 6:33 pm

“It’s not difficult to vote in a primary.”

True. However, if one is voting™ for
a non-corporatist candidate, getting
that vote counted has been problematic,
and I expect it to be more so in 2020:

https://hooktube.com/watch?v=D5ugmNoanx8

Reply ↓

Off The Street , August 15, 2019 at 4:06 pm

Once people spoke of TINA. Biden’s campaign now gives rise to VANITY.
Viabile
Alternatives
Not
Indicated
This
Year

[Aug 15, 2019] Legitimacy of elections

Paper ballot with both parties reps participating in counting them is the only 100% secure method. Addition of electronics always lessen security.
Aug 15, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

"Judge: Georgia must scrap old voting machines after 2019" [ Associated Press ]. "U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg's order on Thursday prohibits the state from using its antiquated paperless touchscreen machines and election management system beyond this year. She also said the state must be ready to use hand-marked paper ballots if its new system isn't in place for the March 24 presidential primary election."

[Aug 15, 2019] One of the many purposes of Russiagate was to misdirect people away from the fact that Trump's election represents (among other things) a huge split in the ruling class, which can roughly be described as one between extractive industries (energy, agriculture, mining, etc.) and finance, media and tech.

Aug 15, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Michael Fiorillo , , August 14, 2019 at 11:53 am

" (the) factional struggle evident in the rise of Trump "

Thank you.

One of the many purposes of Russiagate was to misdirect people away from the fact that Trump's election represents (among other things) a huge split in the ruling class, which can roughly be described as one between extractive industries (energy, agriculture, mining, etc.) and finance, media and tech. A map of the 2016 election results strongly supports this analysis. Thus, Comcast was more than happy to give free reign to Rachel Maddow's two+ years of disinfotainment

This split in the ruling class would provide an immense opportunity if the US had a real functioning Left, rather than lumpen bourgeois and childish virtue signalling about open borders and reparations.

[Aug 14, 2019] Charge of anti-Semitism as a sign of a bitter factional struggle in UK Labor Party between neoliberal and alternatives to neoliberalism wings

Highly recommended!
It attests inventiveness and vicious amorality of neoliberals, who now promote the idea that criticizing neoliberalism and removing Democratic party in the USA and Labor Party in the UK from clutches of Clintonism//Brairism is inherently Anti-Semitic ;-)
Israel lobby wants to extent the anti-Semitism smear to any critique of Israel. which is of course standard dirty trick in witch hunts like neo-McCarthyism.
Notable quotes:
"... This, of course, is compounded by the over-amplifying of anti-Semitism by the media and the alacrity with which it has been taken up by Corbyn opponents, including hypocrites who floated "rootless cosmopolitan" criticisms of Ed Miliband when it suited just a few years ago. ..."
"... The resolution of the anti-Semitism crisis then is not a matter of compromise -- for each side the issue will only go away with the complete crushing and driving out of the party of the other. ..."
"... A good analysis. But, it emphasizes the point I made in the previous post, which is that, the right are currently engaged in an all out push to remove Corbyn and crush the left with the same old bureaucratic means. Whatever else Williamson may or may not be guilty of, his point that the leadership have facilitated this situation by their continual appeasement of the right is absolutely valid. Its that he is being attacked for, not anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Coming on the day when the FT have a column seriously positing that criticizing capitalism is inherently anti-Semitic, it seems to me that dancing on the head of a pin ..."
"... As many of the comments on your blog on Williamson attest, the salient feature of this - well, call it witch-hunt for the sake of argument - is the double standards where we have to be whiter than white, whilst no account whatsoever is taken of the most egregious racism elsewhere. ..."
"... The other nonsense that has grown up is that it is only those that suffer any form of discrimination who can define what that discrimination is, i.e. only Jews can define anti-Semitism, only black people can define racism against them, only women can define discrimination against women. ..."
"... That then assumes that the members of each of these groups are themselves homogeneous, and agreed in such definitions. In reality, it means that dominant elements, i.e. those connected to the ruling class and ruling ideas get to make those determinations. ..."
"... If we look at anti-Semitism, for example, it is quite clear that there is no agreement amongst Jews on what constitutes anti-Semitism. The JVL, certainly have a different definition than the JLM. ..."
"... Secker wrote a piece in the Morning Star last year comparing claims of anti-Semitism within Labour to the story of the emperor's new clothes. ..."
"... Given that the actual data, even allowing for all of the spurious and mischievous accusations of anti-Semitism in the party, made by right-wing enemies of the the party, and particularly of Corbyn and his supporters, amounts to only 0.1% of the membership, and given that of these, 40% were straight away found to be accusations against people who were not even LP members, with a further 20%, being found to have absolutely no evidence to back them, its quite possible that individual members of the LP, have never seen any instance of it. ..."
"... Take out all those mischievous and malicious allegations made in order to whip up the hysteria, so as to to damage the party, by its enemies, and you arrive at a figure of only 400 potential cases, out of a membership of 600,000, which is 1 member in 1500. ..."
"... In fact, based upon the actual facts, as opposed to the fiction and factional hysteria that is being whipped up by right-wing opponents of Corbyn and the party, and by supporters of Zionism for their own narrow political reasons, the chances are about 14: that you will never see any even potential instance of anti-Semitism, even on the narrow definition that the party has now imposed upon itself, which comes pretty close if not entirely to identifying anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, or even just criticism of the current Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu. ..."
"... In the US, Jewish groups that have long been ardent defenders of Israel have more recently come out to criticize the regime of Netanyahu, and the actions of the Israeli state. The main defenders of Zionism, besides the actual Zionists themselves, appear to be people like the AWL, who for whatever reason hitched their wagon to Zionist ideology some time ago, ..."
"... Just because the only case of stabbing I have witnessed was more than 50 years ago, does not, and should not lead me to think that knife crime was worse 50 years ago than it is today. The actual data would seem to suggest that cases of anti-Semitism were greater in the LP in previous times than they are currently, contrary to what the media and those with factional motives would have us believe. ..."
"... The apparent level of anti-semitism in Labour is a modern phenomenon turbo-charged and amplified by social media. People have their views reinforced within their bunkers where anti-Israeli memes become anti-Zionist and then become anti-Semitic. It is much easier to send an anonymous email than a letter. ..."
"... I wouldn't trust Lansman on this issue, any more than on many others. Lansman abolished democracy, to the extent it existed to begin with, by turning it into his personal fiefdom, reminiscent of the activities of Hyndman and the SDF. His position on anti-Semitism, and fighting the witch-hunt, and of appeasing the Blair-right's as they attacked Corbyn, has been appalling throughout. ..."
"... Having abolished any democracy in Momentum, which he now runs as its CEO, he also appears to want Corbyn to do the same thing with the Labour Party, abolishing its internal democratic procedures, and putting himself personally in charge of those disciplinary measures ..."
"... Its notable that, yesterday, when the Welsh Labour Grass Roots organisation came out to call for Williamson's suspension to be reversed, Kinnock and other Blair-rights immediately called for an investigation into them, ..."
"... This truly is reaching into the realms of McCarthyism, where you are found guilty not just of witchcraft, but of consorting with witches, or even having an opinion as to whether an individual charged with witchcraft is guilty, or even the extent to which the number of witches amongst might be exaggerated. ..."
"... It's not a factually accurate description of global political realities, because Israel does not control the US, if that is what the image is intended to imply. But, the message, is thereby anti-Israeli state, not anti-Semitic. It could only be considered anti-Semitic, if in fact you are a Zionist and claim that Israel and Jews are are interchangeable terms, which they are not. ..."
"... If we replace Zionism with Toryism, and Jew with British, the situation becomes fairly clear. If the we show the British state as being controlled by Tories, who implement their ideology of Toryism, in what way would criticism of the British state, under the control of such Tories, or criticism of Tories be the equivalent of British people as a whole? ..."
"... The hope of a Two-State Solution disappeared long ago, and was never credible. It simply allows Zionists to proclaim they are in favour of it, whilst doing everything to make it practically impossible, such as extending West Bank Settlements. The solution must flow from a struggle for democratic rights for Israeli Arabs, and for a right for all Arabs in occupied territories to be extended the same rights as any other Israeli, including the right to vote, and send representatives to the Knesset. As I argued thirty years ago, the longer-term solution is a Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine, guaranteeing democratic rights to all, as part of building a wider Federal Republic of MENA. ..."
"... Jim Denham: imperialist lackey and sycophant turned Witch hunter in chief ..."
"... Let us be very clear about what this witch hunt is about, it is about purging from public life any credible and effective opposition to Israel in particular and more generally opposition to the imperialist barbarians of the imperialist core. It is about driving from universities, social media and intellectual life any form of opposition to the interests of the imperialists. ..."
"... A UN report has concluded that Israel deliberately targeted and killed hundreds of protesting civilians, including children and disabled people and it shot 20,000+ people (yes 20,000+!). The UN says this likely a war crime. Why are the noble defenders of the Palestinian cause in the dock and not notorious Palestinian haters like Jim Denham? ..."
"... These attacks on Corbyn and his supporters, repeated in all of the most aggressive imperialist countries, are simply a proxy attack on the Palestinian people themselves. ..."
"... Jim Denham's comment here illustrates the problem entirely. The picture he has linked to shows an alien symbiote having attached itself to the face of the statue of liberty. The statue of liberty here represents the US. The symbiote has on its back the Israeli Flag, and likewise, thereby represents the state of Israel. The picture therefore, represents the well-worn, and clearly factually wrong meme that Israel controls the US. ..."
"... But, as a Zionist organisation, the AWL and its members cannot distinguish between the state of Israel and Jews, so they cannot distinguish between criticism of the state of Israel, and criticism if Jews. For them, as for the Zionist ideology of the state of Israel, which is most clearly manifest in the ideology of its current political leadership, in the form of the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu, with the recent introduction of blatantly racist laws that discriminate even more openly against not Jewish Israeli citizens, and with his willingness to try to keep his corrupt regime in office by going into coalition with an avowedly Neo-Nazi party that until recent times was considered beyond the pale, even by most Zionists, the term Zionism is synonymous with the term Jew. So, any criticism of Zionism, or of Israel is for them immediately equated with anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Once again Jim Denham reefuses to engage in rational debate, and again resorts instead to his assumption that Israel = Jews, as well as his crude attempts at a typical Stalinist amalgam, to conflate the views of his opponents with some hate figure. ..."
"... Again Jim Denham makes the conflation of Israel and Jews explicit when he says, "This image also plays on the tired and disgraceful antisemitic 'conspiracy theory' trope of undue Israeli (Jewish) influence on world affairs." ..."
"... The way that the right are using anti-Zionism as the equivalent for anti-Semitism, and the appeasement of that attack has led them to widen the scope of that attack. As Labour List reports , right-wing Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh, is now claiming that to be anti-capitalist is also to be "anti-Semitic". The idea was put forward also by former Blair-right spin doctor, John McTernan, who wrote an article in the FT to that same effect ..."
"... As the right-wing extend their witch-hunt against socialists in the LP to claim that Marxists are necessarily misogynist, as well as anti-Semitic – and the same logic presented by McDonagh, McTernon, and Phillips would presumably mean that the Left must also be xenophobic, homophobic, anti- Green, and many other charges they want to throw into the mix – it will be interesting to see whether and to what extent the AWL, join them in that assault, in the same way they have done in their promotion of Zionism. ..."
Aug 14, 2019 | averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com

... ... ...

The problem, however, is because this is overlaid by factional struggle ...

This, of course, is compounded by the over-amplifying of anti-Semitism by the media and the alacrity with which it has been taken up by Corbyn opponents, including hypocrites who floated "rootless cosmopolitan" criticisms of Ed Miliband when it suited just a few years ago.

Here's the thing. Just because your opponents take up an issue, some times cynically and in bad faith. and use it to inflict as much damage as they can does not mean the problem is fictitious.

Precisely because they can point to Facebook groups full of useful fools, and Twitter accounts with Corbyn-supporting hashtags acting as if the Israel lobby and "Zionists" are the only active force in British politics, this is the stuff that makes the attacks effective and trashes the standing of the party in the eyes of many Jews and the community's allies and friends.

The institutional anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is, therefore, somewhat different to the kind you find in other institutions. It is sustained by the battle for the party, a grim battlefront in a zero sum game of entrenched position vs entrenched position. As such, whatever the leadership do, whatever new processes the General Secretary introduces for one side it will never be enough because, as far as many of them concerned, the leadership are politically illegitimate; and for the other it's a sop and capitulation.

The resolution of the anti-Semitism crisis then is not a matter of compromise -- for each side the issue will only go away with the complete crushing and driving out of the party of the other. A situation that can only poison the well further, and guarantee anti-Semitism won't honestly and comprehensively be confronted.

Boffy said... 3 March 2019 at 16:42
A good analysis. But, it emphasizes the point I made in the previous post, which is that, the right are currently engaged in an all out push to remove Corbyn and crush the left with the same old bureaucratic means. Whatever else Williamson may or may not be guilty of, his point that the leadership have facilitated this situation by their continual appeasement of the right is absolutely valid. Its that he is being attacked for, not anti-Semitism.

It is first necessary to close ranks, and defeat the assault of the Right. As Marr said to Blair this morning, had Prescott announced he was forming a separate group, and was establishing his own witch-hunting bureaucratic apparatus in the party, Blair would have sacked him immediately - actually not so easy as the Deputy is elected. But the thrust is valid. Unless Corbyn deals with Watson, the Right will roll over the Left, despite the huge disparity in numbers.

Again it comes down to whether Corbyn is up for that task, or whether we need a leadership of the left with a bit more backbone to see it through.

asquith said... 3 March 2019 at 18:54
I'm afraid this IS due to the "intersectionality" cult, whereby certain groups are always privileged and wrong, and some are always oppressed and right. Jews are, according to this "analysis", the uber-privileged and uber-white.

We've heard several times that according to "intersectionality" that it's impossible to be racist against white people because racism requires both prejudice and power, and white people are by definition powerful. Therefore, anti-Semitism is dismissed because it can't be a thing because Jews are all-powerful and even more oppressive than other whites.

Those who don't subscribe to all of these beliefs are nevertheless tinged with them, which is why people who aren't staunch antisemites will nevertheless fail to take anti-Semitism seriously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66qe76gkCxo&t=166s

Ian Gibson said... 4 March 2019 at 05:30
Coming on the day when the FT have a column seriously positing that criticizing capitalism is inherently anti-Semitic, it seems to me that dancing on the head of a pin about whether the 'careless' anti-Semitism you've described means the party is institutionally anti-Semitic is rather missing the point. (OK, the column is by John McTernan, but the FT gave him column inches to argue that case, and I guess they didn't mean it as the satire it most certainly is.)

As many of the comments on your blog on Williamson attest, the salient feature of this - well, call it witch-hunt for the sake of argument - is the double standards where we have to be whiter than white, whilst no account whatsoever is taken of the most egregious racism elsewhere. We live in society: we can never, ever be that whiter than white - especially when it comes to Israel/Palestine, which is so full of contradictions and traps for the unwary (e.g. the position of the Israeli state claiming to speak for all Jewry around the world, in the way that the Board of Deputies position themselves as speaking for all British Jews - neither close to being true, but small wonder that opponents of what they do and stand for take that universality at face value.)

The fight we need to take up is to compare and contrast just how pro-active the current party is against anti-Semitism in its constitution and machinery with the glaring absence of such elsewhere, and to present a positive picture of what we are doing, rather than mumbling apologetically into our beards. We need to take the fight to the rigged system at the same time as being unstinting in rooting out the troubling stuff.

Boffy said... 4 March 2019 at 09:47
The other nonsense that has grown up is that it is only those that suffer any form of discrimination who can define what that discrimination is, i.e. only Jews can define anti-Semitism, only black people can define racism against them, only women can define discrimination against women.

That then assumes that the members of each of these groups are themselves homogeneous, and agreed in such definitions. In reality, it means that dominant elements, i.e. those connected to the ruling class and ruling ideas get to make those determinations.

If we look at anti-Semitism, for example, it is quite clear that there is no agreement amongst Jews on what constitutes anti-Semitism. The JVL, certainly have a different definition than the JLM.

But, just rationally, the concept that only those discriminated against get to define the discrimination is bonkers. Suppose you come from Somalia or some other country that practices FGM, you could argue that it is part of your cultural heritage, and that anyone seeking to prevent you from undertaking this barbaric practice was thereby racist, on your self-definition of what that discrimination against you amounts to. Or Saudis might argue that it is racist to argue against their practice of lopping off women's heads, or stoning them to death for adultery, including having been raped, etc.

Jim Denham said... 4 March 2019 at 15:25
The JVL come pretty close to arguing that there is *no* anti-Semitism in the Labour party (Jenny Manson, for instance, says she's never witnessed any)and Glyn Secker wrote a piece in the Morning Star last year comparing claims of anti-Semitism within Labour to the story of the emperor's new clothes.
Boffy said... 5 March 2019 at 09:00
Given that the actual data, even allowing for all of the spurious and mischievous accusations of anti-Semitism in the party, made by right-wing enemies of the the party, and particularly of Corbyn and his supporters, amounts to only 0.1% of the membership, and given that of these, 40% were straight away found to be accusations against people who were not even LP members, with a further 20%, being found to have absolutely no evidence to back them, its quite possible that individual members of the LP, have never seen any instance of it.

Take out all those mischievous and malicious allegations made in order to whip up the hysteria, so as to to damage the party, by its enemies, and you arrive at a figure of only 400 potential cases, out of a membership of 600,000, which is 1 member in 1500. If the average branch size if 100 active members, it means on average there is one potential case of anti-Semitism in every 15 branches. So, if you are a member in any of the other 14 branches, you would never see that one potential case of anti-Semitism.

In fact, based upon the actual facts, as opposed to the fiction and factional hysteria that is being whipped up by right-wing opponents of Corbyn and the party, and by supporters of Zionism for their own narrow political reasons, the chances are about 14: that you will never see any even potential instance of anti-Semitism, even on the narrow definition that the party has now imposed upon itself, which comes pretty close if not entirely to identifying anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, or even just criticism of the current Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu.

In the US, Jewish groups that have long been ardent defenders of Israel have more recently come out to criticize the regime of Netanyahu, and the actions of the Israeli state. The main defenders of Zionism, besides the actual Zionists themselves, appear to be people like the AWL, who for whatever reason hitched their wagon to Zionist ideology some time ago, probably in their usual knee-jerk reaction of putting a plus sign wherever the SWP put a minus. Having done so, and as a result of the bureaucratic centrist nature of the sect, they find themselves now having to follow through on the position they adopted on the basis of the "practical politics" - opportunism - as it dictated itself to them at the time.

If, and probably more likely when, they change position, it will come as with all their previous changes of position with the assertion that "nothing has changed", as when after claiming a few years ago that the LP was a stinking corpse - as they ridiculously stood their own candidates in elections with the inevitable result - and the next minute proclaimed themselves as its most ardent militants, as they sought to use their sharp elbows to gain positions on Momentum's leading bodies!

Boffy said... 5 March 2019 at 09:22
Incidentally, on the question of "observance", the only time I have seen someone get stabbed, is more than 50 years ago, when I was at school. I've seen plenty of other violent stuff in the intervening period, for example, people getting glassed, people having wrought iron tables smashed over their heads. My sister, who is several years older than me, and was out bopping during the days of the Teddy Boys, saw more people getting slashed, in the 1950's, because the flick knife was the Ted's favoured weapon.

But, that doesn't mean that I disbelieve the media when it talks about the current spate of knife crimes. Its just that, however, terrible such crimes are for those that suffer or witness them, and no matter how much the media that has to sensationalise every story, for its own commercial purposes, talks about an epidemic or a knife crime crisis, the number of knife crimes per head of population is extremely small.

The chances that 999 out of 1,000 of us will never be the victim of, or witness knife crime does not mean it doesn't exist. But, those that then claim that the 999 out of 1,000 of us who say we have not seen it, must be somehow being dishonest, are not dealing with the facts, and are simply fuelling a moral panic.

When some phenomena is statistically insignificant, which 1 in 1,500 cases, is, and when as with many such phenomena there is no normal distribution of the occurrence of such cases - for example, knife crime will tend to be concentrated in particular areas - trying to present any kind of rational analysis based upon personal observation is a mug's game.

Just because the only case of stabbing I have witnessed was more than 50 years ago, does not, and should not lead me to think that knife crime was worse 50 years ago than it is today. The actual data would seem to suggest that cases of anti-Semitism were greater in the LP in previous times than they are currently, contrary to what the media and those with factional motives would have us believe. It is certainly thec ase that anti-Semitism is a bigger problem in the Tory party, and other right-wing organisations than it is in the LP, again not that you would know that from the reporting of it, or from the attitude of certain factional sects, such as the AWL.

Jim Denham said... 5 March 2019 at 11:14

Labour has 'much larger' group of antisemitic members which Corbyn has failed to deal with, Momentum founder warns

By Rob Merrick Deputy Political Editor The Independent, Monday 25 February 2019 16:10 |

Labour has "a much larger" group of antisemitic members than it recognises which Jeremy Corbyn has failed to "deal with", Momentum founder Jon Lansman has warned.

The Labour leader's long-standing ally said "conspiracy theorists" had infiltrated the party – a consequence of its huge surge in membership in recent years.

Mr Lansman stopped short of backing the call from Tom Watson, Labour's deputy leader, for Mr Corbyn to take personal charge of the antisemitism complaints dogging Labour.

But he said: "I do think we have a major problem and it always seems to me that we underestimate the scale of it. I think it is a widespread problem.

"I think it is now obvious that we have a much larger number of people with hardcore antisemitic opinions which, unfortunately, is polluting the atmosphere in a lot of constituency parties and in particular online. We have to deal with these people."

Speedy said... 6 March 2019 at 06:39
Approaching this from another angle...

The apparent level of anti-semitism in Labour is a modern phenomenon turbo-charged and amplified by social media. People have their views reinforced within their bunkers where anti-Israeli memes become anti-Zionist and then become anti-Semitic. It is much easier to send an anonymous email than a letter.

History is very much the tale of new technology transforming the potential of human behaviour and beliefs, and one of the oldest beliefs ("the blood libel") is anti-Semitism.

This is how Labour has changed - ie, the rise of Corbyn has coincided with the ubiquity of this technology. In fact, arguably the rise of Corbyn was aided by it.

Corbyn's nuanced position on Israel/Palestine gives permission to social media extremists.

The rest is history.

Incidentally, this is why you are less likely to confront anti-Semitism in real-life while the internet may be awash with it - there are the real and virtual identities which only occasionally bleed into each other.

Which is true and which is not? We might wonder if technology has evolved ahead of human adaptation - the "real world" filters that govern apparently "real" behaviour missing.

I'm sure even certain posters here are less bananas in "real life" than their online comments might suggest!

Boffy said... 6 March 2019 at 10:42
I wouldn't trust Lansman on this issue, any more than on many others. Lansman abolished democracy, to the extent it existed to begin with, by turning it into his personal fiefdom, reminiscent of the activities of Hyndman and the SDF. His position on anti-Semitism, and fighting the witch-hunt, and of appeasing the Blair-right's as they attacked Corbyn, has been appalling throughout.

Having abolished any democracy in Momentum, which he now runs as its CEO, he also appears to want Corbyn to do the same thing with the Labour Party, abolishing its internal democratic procedures, and putting himself personally in charge of those disciplinary measures. That truly would be the actions of a Bonapartist. That Tom Watson is prepared to do that, as he sets himself up in a situation of dual power, to confront Corbyn is no surprise that anyone who even remotely considers themselves a part of the Left should support should a move is a disgrace. Perhaps no surprise that the AWL supporters of Zionism, and the witch-hunt, appear to be doing so, then.

Its notable that, yesterday, when the Welsh Labour Grass Roots organisation came out to call for Williamson's suspension to be reversed, Kinnock and other Blair-rights immediately called for an investigation into them, and for its Secretary who sits on Labour's NEC to also be suspended, for interfering in an ongoing investigation! So, why did those same Blair-rights not call for the suspension of Watson, who immediately demanded Williamson's suspension, and withdrawal of the whip, before any investigation, or indeed of Hodge and others who on a daily basis go to the media to sally forth about cases that are under investigation, or waiting for investigation.

This truly is reaching into the realms of McCarthyism, where you are found guilty not just of witchcraft, but of consorting with witches, or even having an opinion as to whether an individual charged with witchcraft is guilty, or even the extent to which the number of witches amongst might be exaggerated.

Jim Denham's comment is a case in point. How much more "anti-Semitism" exists? What is the factual basis of the statement, as opposed to click bait headline. Even if the actual extent is 100% more than the data so far presented, that would mean that potentially 1 in 750 LP members might be guilty of some form of anti-Semitism. Its hardly an epidemic, or institutional anti-Semitism, and far less than exists in the Tory Party, which is also infected by Islamaphobia, misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia.

In fact, its probably much less than you would find in the BBC, Sky or other establishment institutions. Anti-Semitism exists, and is a problem, but that does not mean it is not being used by Labour's enemies or the proponents of Zionism for their own political ends. The real conspiracy theorists are those that try to present anti-Semitism as a conspiracy based upon infiltration of the LP, the same people who presented the support for Corbyn from 300,000 new members as really just being a case of far left entryism, by Trots.

Jim Denham said... 7 March 2019 at 09:10
This is a meme, taken from Incog Man, a far-right site. It was posted with positive endorsement by a Labour member, Kayla Bibby, a delegate to conference in fact:

Link to the meme:

https://static.timesofisrael.com/jewishndev/uploads/2019/02/ellmann-640x400.jpg

Bibby subsequently received only a formal warning, with Thomas Gardiner of Labour's Governance and Legal Unit (what used to be the Compliance Unit), saying it was only anti-Israel, and not anti-Semitic.

Not only could a Labour member post something obviously anti-Semitic, it was not deemed to be so by the Compliance Unit. I bet we all know people who would agree.

Boffy said... 7 March 2019 at 12:36
It's not a factually accurate description of global political realities, because Israel does not control the US, if that is what the image is intended to imply. But, the message, is thereby anti-Israeli state, not anti-Semitic. It could only be considered anti-Semitic, if in fact you are a Zionist and claim that Israel and Jews are are interchangeable terms, which they are not.

In fact, there are probably not an inconsiderable number of Jews, who think that the state of Israel does exercise undue influence over US policy, and certainly it seems to be the case that, in the US, more liberal Jewish groups, seem to think that one reason that the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu, in Israel, was so supportive of Trump, and we see the same support for Trump amongst Zionists in Britain, is at least in part due to the fact that Obama had been distancing the US from its historical uncritical support for Israel.

If we replace Zionism with Toryism, and Jew with British, the situation becomes fairly clear. If the we show the British state as being controlled by Tories, who implement their ideology of Toryism, in what way would criticism of the British state, under the control of such Tories, or criticism of Tories be the equivalent of British people as a whole?

Clearly it wouldn't, because there are a majority of British people who oppose Toryism, and thereby oppose the actions of the British state under the control of the Tories. A nationalist, or racist might want to equate the nation state with the whole of its people, but the people who are doing that here, by interpreting criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism, are the Zionists themselves, and their apologists, because they seek thereby to delegitimize any criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism by equating it with anti-Semitism.

That in effect makes the Zionists themselves, and their apologists anti-Semites, because in adopting this equation of Jewishness with being Zionist, and with Israel, they make all Jews thereby responsible for the actions of Zionism and of the state of Israel!

Boffy said... 7 March 2019 at 13:47
The problem for the AWL, and its members like Jim Denham, on this issue comes down to this. Until thirty years ago, the organisation, under its previous names, was an ardent defender of the ideas and traditions of Jim Cannon. Cannon's "The Struggle for a Proletarian Party" was required reading for all of its members. Then, in an about face, the organisation overnight collapsed into what Trotsky called "the petit-bourgeois Third Camp", and so became ardent defenders of the enemies of Cannon, the petit-bourgeois Third Camp of Burnham- Shachtman. That kind of wild zig-zag is typical of bureaucratic-centrist organisations, which is what the AWL is.

As part of this collapse into the petit-bourgeois Third Camp, and the moralistic politics it is based upon, the AWL also adopted the ideas of Third Campists like Al Glotzer, in relation to Israel and Zionism, as opposed to the position of Mandel, which represented a continuation of the ideas of Cannon and Trotsky. I set this out in a short blog post 12 years ago Glotzer and the Jews as Special , after the AWL had repeatedly censored it appearing on their website in response to an article setting out Glotzer's position.

Having committed themselves to the reactionary Zionist ideology that essentially underpins Glotzer's stance - the same thing idea of having lost faith in the working-class, and so having to rely on the bourgeois state, or "progressive imperialism" to accomplish the tasks of the working-class, is behind the AWL's support for NATo's war against Serbia, Iraq, Libya etc., but is also behind the politics of other Third Campists such as the SWP, that instead look to other larger forces, such as reactionary "anti-imperialist" states to carry forward its moral agenda - the AWL are left now trying to defend their position of support for the creation of a racist, expansionist state in Israel, as the inevitable consequences of that venture unfold.

For a Marxist, it is not at all difficult to say that the establishment of the state of Israel is one that we should not have supported at the time, because it would lead to the kind of consequences we see today, and yet, to say, 75 years on from the creation of that state, it is an established fact, and trying to unwind history, by calling for the destruction of that state would have even more calamitous consequences for the global working-class. It is quite easy for a Marx to say that the current nature of the Israeli state, as a racist Zionist state, based, like almost no other state in the world on a confessional basis, i.e. of being a Jewish state, a state for Jews in preference to every other ethnic/religious group flows from the ideology, and nature of its creation. But, then to argue that the answer to that is not a destruction of the state of Israel, which could only be done on the bones of millions of Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, but is to wage a working-class based struggle against that racist foundation upon which the state has been founded, and that struggle is one that must unite Jews and Arabs alike. In fact, the position of palestinians today is a mirror image of that of the Jews 75 years ago.

The hope of a Two-State Solution disappeared long ago, and was never credible. It simply allows Zionists to proclaim they are in favour of it, whilst doing everything to make it practically impossible, such as extending West Bank Settlements. The solution must flow from a struggle for democratic rights for Israeli Arabs, and for a right for all Arabs in occupied territories to be extended the same rights as any other Israeli, including the right to vote, and send representatives to the Knesset. As I argued thirty years ago, the longer-term solution is a Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine, guaranteeing democratic rights to all, as part of building a wider Federal Republic of MENA.

Anonymous said... 7 March 2019 at 16:54

Jim Denham: imperialist lackey and sycophant turned Witch hunter in chief

Let us be very clear about what this witch hunt is about, it is about purging from public life any credible and effective opposition to Israel in particular and more generally opposition to the imperialist barbarians of the imperialist core. It is about driving from universities, social media and intellectual life any form of opposition to the interests of the imperialists.

This is nothing but authoritarianism in action, censorship of political opponents and the closing down of any credible definition of free speech.

In other words this is something any leftist worth half an atom would be fighting against with all their energies.

But what do we find, pathetic pro war pro imperialists leftists and post modern liberals joining the witch hunt.

Meanwhile in the real world:

A UN report has concluded that Israel deliberately targeted and killed hundreds of protesting civilians, including children and disabled people and it shot 20,000+ people (yes 20,000+!). The UN says this likely a war crime. Why are the noble defenders of the Palestinian cause in the dock and not notorious Palestinian haters like Jim Denham?

How can anyone on the left get away with supporting and providing ideological cover for Israel How can any leftist allow a socialist movement to be sabotaged by the Israel state and its army of appalling immoral apologists?

These attacks on Corbyn and his supporters, repeated in all of the most aggressive imperialist countries, are simply a proxy attack on the Palestinian people themselves.

Boffy said... 8 March 2019 at 11:15
Jim Denham's comment here illustrates the problem entirely. The picture he has linked to shows an alien symbiote having attached itself to the face of the statue of liberty. The statue of liberty here represents the US. The symbiote has on its back the Israeli Flag, and likewise, thereby represents the state of Israel. The picture therefore, represents the well-worn, and clearly factually wrong meme that Israel controls the US.

But, as a Zionist organisation, the AWL and its members cannot distinguish between the state of Israel and Jews, so they cannot distinguish between criticism of the state of Israel, and criticism if Jews. For them, as for the Zionist ideology of the state of Israel, which is most clearly manifest in the ideology of its current political leadership, in the form of the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu, with the recent introduction of blatantly racist laws that discriminate even more openly against not Jewish Israeli citizens, and with his willingness to try to keep his corrupt regime in office by going into coalition with an avowedly Neo-Nazi party that until recent times was considered beyond the pale, even by most Zionists, the term Zionism is synonymous with the term Jew. So, any criticism of Zionism, or of Israel is for them immediately equated with anti-Semitism.

It is what leads such Zionists to then also insist on their right to determine who is a Jew or not. The AWL do that with all those Jews, such as the JVL, who refuse to accept the AWL's definition of anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism. Its like the old saw that the definition of a Scot is someone who wears a kilt, and when asked about Jock McTavish, from Arbroath, who does not wear a kilt, the reply comes back, then he cannot really be a Scot!

The Zionists insists on defining anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, and thereby closing down debate. Jim Denham does that most clearly here, in his refusal to debate the actual substantive points. It is typical of the attitude of the AWL, in general which long since gave up trying to defend its bourgeois liberal, opportunist politics by rational debate, and instead turned to bureaucratic censorship, and ill-tempered invective.

Boffy said... 9 March 2019 at 08:58
Once again Jim Denham reefuses to engage in rational debate, and again resorts instead to his assumption that Israel = Jews, as well as his crude attempts at a typical Stalinist amalgam, to conflate the views of his opponents with some hate figure.

Again Jim Denham makes the conflation of Israel and Jews explicit when he says, "This image also plays on the tired and disgraceful antisemitic 'conspiracy theory' trope of undue Israeli (Jewish) influence on world affairs."

The conflation of equating Israel with the term Jew flows directly from the Zionist ideology that underpins the Israeli State, but which also adopted by the AWL, and its members like Jim Denham. It thereby effectively denies statehood to non-Jewish Israeli citizens, making them non-persons, erasing them from history, in the same way that Jim Denham has sought to do in diminishing if not entirely denying the genocides against other ethnic groups such as Native North Americans, Australian and New Zealand aboriginals etc., as a result of his Zionist privileging of the specific genocide against Jews in the Holocaust.

It is the same kind of racism, of course, that is applied by the BNP and other white nationalists, who seek to portray Britain as being a nation for white Britons, and thereby deny other Britons the right to consider themselves really British. Every socialist, can understand the racist nature of that ideology when it is applied to Britain, and elsewhere, but the AWL, and its members, like Jim Denham, deny it when it is applied to Israel, which they want to treat as being different to every other state on the planet, in defence of their Zionist ideology that privileges Israeli Jews over others, and by extension equates the term Jew with the term Israel.

Its most extreme version comes with the fascists that Netanyahu has now gone into alliance with, whose ideology states that God only put gentiels on the Earth to be slaves and serve the needs of Jews, as the chosen people! It means that they see the place of non-Jewish Israelis in those terms, as being allowed to remain in Israel only on that subservient basis. This is the ideology that the AWL is now logically tied to, in having adopted Zionism as the answer to the problems of Jewish workers rather than socialism.

And, of course, the extension of that principle for other Zionists is illustrated in their support for fascists like Orban in Hungary, who wants to adopt a similar nationalist ideology of keeping Hungary, and other "white" European nations exclusively for "whites", in the same way that Zionists want to keep Israel exclusively for Jews.

It is a sorry state when socialists have degenerated to such an extent that not only do they fail to distinguish between nationalist ideology and socialist ideology by adopting nationalist solutions to workers problems such as "nationalisation", by the capitalist state, but where, in adopting such reactionary nationalist ideology, the logic of their position drives them to supporting the idea that nation states should be exclusively for particular ethnic groups, such as Israel for the Jews, Hungary for white Christians and so on.

Boffy said... 9 March 2019 at 16:31
The way that the right are using anti-Zionism as the equivalent for anti-Semitism, and the appeasement of that attack has led them to widen the scope of that attack. As Labour List reports , right-wing Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh, is now claiming that to be anti-capitalist is also to be "anti-Semitic". The idea was put forward also by former Blair-right spin doctor, John McTernan, who wrote an article in the FT to that same effect

Channelling Jim Denham, McTernan writes,

"As the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out, anti-Semitic tropes share three elements: money or finance is always in the mix; an acknowledged cleverness that is also seen as conniving; and, power -- particularly a power to manipulate more powerful entities.

All of these feature in the criticism of Israel and the so-called Israel lobby. They can be easily moulded into a critique of capitalism, too."

The line of argument was illustrated to me some weeks ago, in a comment I received in relation to an article I wrote about Marx's analysis of fictitious capital, as part of my critique of Paul Mason's Postcapitalism . The commenter, argued that Marx's analysis of fictitious capital appeared to be simply Marx blaming bankers and money lenders, for which read Jews, for the world's ills, and was thereby simply an expression of the well-known fact that Marx was a self-hating Jew, much as the AWL, describe all those other Jews that do not share their commitment to |Zionism. The commenter as evidence of this provided a link to a literary critique of Marx's On The Jewish Question , which is cited as proving that Marx was an anti-semite.

In fact, I pointed out that in nothing that Marx had written about fictitious capital, or what I had written describing Marx's analysis of fictitious capital are bankers discussed, let alone Jewish bankers. The anonymous commenter, has, in fact, since deleted their comments, meaning that my responses to them were also deleted.
But, this is the way this right-wing witch-hunt proceeds, by throwing a net to catch whatever they can trawl in, and at the very least sowing the seeds of doubt as they require those being attacked to respond to their wild accusations. It means that any statement can be framed to mean that there is some subtext beneath the actual words and pictures that is somehow anti-Semitic, if only you know the relevant coda to unlock the true meaning, and anyone who doubts the meaning being placed upon it, is thereby a defender of the anti-Semitic message. As with the attacks on Momentum, and the initial surge of membership supporting Corbyn, it is always phrased in dark conspiratorial language, about unseen forces being behind what is seen on the surface. So, we were supposed to believe that a few hundred Trots in Britain somehow morphed into 300,000 new LP members! But, Momentum now having shown that it is a tame part of the establishment, is even able to recruit McTernan himself as a member.

The appeasement as with all witch-hunts only provokes the witch-hunters to widen the scope of their activities. The AWL, which was at the forefront of helping the witch-hunters with their shameful support for the witch-hunting of Jackie Walker, was repaid by having their own members expelled too, and having right-wing Labour MP's appear on TV, to characterise the AWL themselves as "anti-Semites", despite their well-known Zionist politics. Yet, oddly, the AWL seem to consider that a price worth paying, as their advocacy of Zionism seems to trump any other consideration for them in their politics.

Boffy said... 10 March 2019 at 11:09
It didn't take long for my comment of yesterday to be proved correct. Today we learn that Jess Phillips has claimed that Marxism is necessarily misogynist, because it places class oppression above all else, and so now claims that as well as the Left in the party being anti-Semitic, it is also misogynist. The attack of the Right, as I said yesterday will spread ever wider on this irrational basis, using all of the usual conspiratorial language that such witch-hunts have always adopted. Rather like a Dan Brown novel, it will imply that there are dark (Marxist) forces at work, of which Corbyn is the head of the coven (or even worse that some unseen Dark Overlord is really standing behind Corbyn, who is only its representative on Earth (i.e. in the LP).

It will suggest that these dark forces do not speak openly, but only in codes and symbols that have to be unlocked by the forces of Light, who like Jim Denham, can look into the minds of men and women, and see what is really going inside.

I actually found that despite the anonymous Zionist commenter to my article on Medium having deleted their comments, my replies to them, were in fact still floating around here , here , and here .

As the right-wing extend their witch-hunt against socialists in the LP to claim that Marxists are necessarily misogynist, as well as anti-Semitic – and the same logic presented by McDonagh, McTernon, and Phillips would presumably mean that the Left must also be xenophobic, homophobic, anti- Green, and many other charges they want to throw into the mix – it will be interesting to see whether and to what extent the AWL, join them in that assault, in the same way they have done in their promotion of Zionism.

[Aug 14, 2019] The Citadels of America s Elites Fractured and At Odds with Each Other by Alastair Crooke

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The speed with which US political leaders of all stripes have united behind the idea of a 'new cold war' is something that takes my breath away. Eighteen months ago the phrase was dismissed as fringe scaremongering. Today it is consensus. ..."
"... It is clear that there is indeed now a clear bi-partisan consensus in the US on China ..."
"... A US policy boiled down to one overriding component: 'hammering Russia'. "Hammering Russia" (he insisted repeatedly), will continue until President Putin understands there is no military solution in Syria (he said with heightened verbal emphasis). Russia falsely assumes that Assad has 'won' war: "He hasn't", Jeffrey said. And the US is committed to demonstrating this fundamental 'truth'. ..."
"... Recall how little time ago, the talk was of partnership, of the US working with Russia to find a solution in Syria. Now the talk of the US Envoy is the talk of Cold War with Russia as much as were his Aspen colleagues – albeit in respect to China. ..."
"... All this braggadocio is reminiscent of late 2003 when the war in Iraq was just entering its insurgent stage: It was said then that mere "boys go to Baghdad; but real men chose to go to Tehran ". It gained wide circulation in Washington at the time. This type of talk gave rise, as I well recall, to something approaching an hysteric elation. Officials seemed to be walking six inches above the ground, in anticipation of all the dominos expected to fall in succession. ..."
"... The point here is that the tacit coupling of Russia – now termed a major 'foe' of America by US Defense officials – and China, inevitably is being refracted back at the US, in terms of a growing strategic Russo-Chinese partnership, ready to challenge the US and its allies. ..."
"... So, as we look around, the picture seems to be one in which US bellicosity is somehow consolidating as an élite consensus (with but a few individuals courageously pushing-back on the trend). So what is going on? ..."
"... The two FT correspondents effectively were signalling – in their separate articles – that the US is entering on a momentous and hazardous transformation. Further, it would seem that America's élite is being fractured into balkanised enclaves that are not communicating with one another – nor wanting to communicate with each other. Rather, it is another conflict between deadly rivals. ..."
"... One such orientation insists on a renewal of the Cold War to sustain and renew that supersized military-security complex, which accounts for more than half of America's GDP. Another élite demands that US dollar global hegemony be preserved. ..."
"... Another orientation of the Deep State is disgusted at the contagion of sexual decadence and corruption that has wormed its way into American governance – and truly hopes that Trump will 'drain the swamp'. ..."
"... But all these divided Deep State factions believe that belligerence can work. ..."
"... Like any cosseted élite, they have an exaggerated sense of their entitlement – and their impunity. ..."
"... These élite factions – for all their internal rivalry – however seem to have coalesced around a singularity of talking and thinking that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of an America subject to severe stress and strain – the fable of a hegemon which still can elect which non-compliant governments and peoples to bully and remove from the global map. Their rhetoric alone is curdling the atmospherics in the non-West. ..."
"... The leader of any nation is never sovereign. He or she sits atop a pyramid of quarrelling princelings (Deep State princelings, in this instance), who have their own interests and agenda. Trump is not immune to their machinations. ..."
"... One obvious example being Mr Bolton's successful gambit in persuading the Brits to seize the Grace I tanker off Gibraltar. At a stroke, Bolton escalated the conflict with Iran ('increased the pressure' on Iran, as Bolton would probably term it); put the UK at the forefront of America's 'war' with Iran; divided the JCPOA signatories, and embarrassed the EU. He is a canny 'operator' – no doubt about it. ..."
Aug 03, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

Something is 'up'. When two Financial Times columnists – pillars of the western Establishment – raise a warning flag, we must take note: Martin Wolf was first off, with a piece dramatically headlined: The looming 100-year, US-China Conflict . No 'mere' trade war, he implied, but a full-spectrum struggle. Then his FT colleague Edward Luce, pointed out that Wolf's "argument is more nuanced than the headline. Having spent part of this week among leading policymakers and thinkers at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado," Lucetr writes , "I am inclined to think Martin was not exaggerating. The speed with which US political leaders of all stripes have united behind the idea of a 'new cold war' is something that takes my breath away. Eighteen months ago the phrase was dismissed as fringe scaremongering. Today it is consensus."

A significant shift is underway in US policy circles, it seems. Luce's final 'take' is that "it is very hard to see what, or who, is going to prevent this great power rivalry from dominating the 21st century". It is clear that there is indeed now a clear bi-partisan consensus in the US on China. Luce is surely right. But that is far from being the end of it. A collective psychology of belligerence seems to be taking shape, and, as one commentator noted, it has become not just a great-power rivalry, but a rivalry amongst 'Beltway' policy wonks to show "who has the bigger dick".

And quick to demonstrate his, at Aspen (after others had unveiled their masculinity on China and Iran), was the US envoy for Syria (and deputy US National Security Adviser), James Jeffrey: A US policy boiled down to one overriding component: 'hammering Russia'. "Hammering Russia" (he insisted repeatedly), will continue until President Putin understands there is no military solution in Syria (he said with heightened verbal emphasis). Russia falsely assumes that Assad has 'won' war: "He hasn't", Jeffrey said. And the US is committed to demonstrating this fundamental 'truth'.

Therefore, the US plans to 'up the pressure'; will escalate the cost to Russia, until a political transition is in place, with a new Syria emerging as a "normal nation". The US will 'leverage' the costs on Russia across the board: Through military pressure – ensuring a lack of military progress in Idlib; through Israelis operating freely across Syria's airspace; through 'US partners' (i.e. the Kurds) consolidating in NE Syria; through economic costs ("our success" in stopping reconstruction aid to Syria); through extensive US sanctions on Syria (integrated with those on Iran) – "these sanctions are succeeding"; and thirdly, by diplomatic pressure: i.e. "hammering Russia" in the UN.

Well, the US shift on Syria also takes one's breath away. Recall how little time ago, the talk was of partnership, of the US working with Russia to find a solution in Syria. Now the talk of the US Envoy is the talk of Cold War with Russia as much as were his Aspen colleagues – albeit in respect to China. Such 'machismo' is evidenced too coming from the US President: "I could – if I wanted – end the US war in Afghanistan in a week", (but it would entail the deaths of 10 million Afghans), Trump exclaimed. And, in the same mode, Trump now suggests that for Iran, he is easy: war or not – either path is fine, for him.

All this braggadocio is reminiscent of late 2003 when the war in Iraq was just entering its insurgent stage: It was said then that mere "boys go to Baghdad; but real men chose to go to Tehran ". It gained wide circulation in Washington at the time. This type of talk gave rise, as I well recall, to something approaching an hysteric elation. Officials seemed to be walking six inches above the ground, in anticipation of all the dominos expected to fall in succession.

The point here is that the tacit coupling of Russia – now termed a major 'foe' of America by US Defense officials – and China, inevitably is being refracted back at the US, in terms of a growing strategic Russo-Chinese partnership, ready to challenge the US and its allies.

Last Tuesday, a Russian aircraft, flying in a joint air patrol with a Chinese counterpart, deliberately entered South Korean airspace. And, just earlier, two Russian Tu-95 bombers and two Chinese H-6 warplanes -- both nuclear capable -- reportedly had entered South Korea's air defense identification zone.

"This is the first time I'm aware of that Chinese and Russian fighters have jointly flown through the air defence identification zone of a major US ally -- in this case two US allies. Clearly it's geopolitical signalling as well as intelligence collection," said Michael Carpenter, a former Russia specialist with the US Department of Defense. It was a message to the US, Japan, and South Korea: If you strengthen the US-Japan military alliance, Russia and China have no choice but to react militarily as well.

So, as we look around, the picture seems to be one in which US bellicosity is somehow consolidating as an élite consensus (with but a few individuals courageously pushing-back on the trend). So what is going on?

The two FT correspondents effectively were signalling – in their separate articles – that the US is entering on a momentous and hazardous transformation. Further, it would seem that America's élite is being fractured into balkanised enclaves that are not communicating with one another – nor wanting to communicate with each other. Rather, it is another conflict between deadly rivals.

One such orientation insists on a renewal of the Cold War to sustain and renew that supersized military-security complex, which accounts for more than half of America's GDP. Another élite demands that US dollar global hegemony be preserved.

Another orientation of the Deep State is disgusted at the contagion of sexual decadence and corruption that has wormed its way into American governance – and truly hopes that Trump will 'drain the swamp'.

And yet another, which sees DC's now explicit amorality as risking the loss of America's global standing and leadership – wants to see a return of traditional American mores – a 'moral rearmament', as it were. (And then there are the deplorables, who simply want that America should attend to its own internal refurbishment.)

But all these divided Deep State factions believe that belligerence can work.

However, the more these fractured, rival US élite factions with their moneyed and comfortable lifestyles, cloister themselves in their enclaves, certain in their separate views about how America can retain its global supremacy, the less likely it is that they will understand the very real impact of their collective belligerence on the outside world. Like any cosseted élite, they have an exaggerated sense of their entitlement – and their impunity.

These élite factions – for all their internal rivalry – however seem to have coalesced around a singularity of talking and thinking that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of an America subject to severe stress and strain – the fable of a hegemon which still can elect which non-compliant governments and peoples to bully and remove from the global map. Their rhetoric alone is curdling the atmospherics in the non-West.

But a further implication of the incoherence within the élites is applicable to Trump. It is widely assumed that because he says he does not want more wars – and because he is US President – wars will not happen. But that is not how the world works.

The leader of any nation is never sovereign. He or she sits atop a pyramid of quarrelling princelings (Deep State princelings, in this instance), who have their own interests and agenda. Trump is not immune to their machinations.

One obvious example being Mr Bolton's successful gambit in persuading the Brits to seize the Grace I tanker off Gibraltar. At a stroke, Bolton escalated the conflict with Iran ('increased the pressure' on Iran, as Bolton would probably term it); put the UK at the forefront of America's 'war' with Iran; divided the JCPOA signatories, and embarrassed the EU. He is a canny 'operator' – no doubt about it.

And this is the point: these princelings can initiate actions (including false flags) that drive events to their agenda; that can corner a President. And that is presuming that the President is somehow immune to a great 'switch in mood' among his own lieutenants (even if that consensus is nothing more than a fable that belligerency succeeds). But is it safe to assume Trump is immune to the general 'mood' amongst the varied élites? Do not his recent glib comments about Afghanistan and Iran suggest that he might leaning towards the new belligerency? Martin Wolf concluded his FT piece by suggesting the shift in the US suggests we may be witnessing a stumbling towards a century of conflict. But in the case of Iran, any mis-move could result in something more immediate – and uncontained.

[Aug 14, 2019] There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer

Highly recommended!
If UK government is an example -- they are already on the same level. Look at Skripal case.
Notable quotes:
"... Now people might say "see the elites succeeded, they crushed the democratic will, got their policies enacted and successfully replaced Democracy with Oligarchism while the sheep did nothing". But this is actually where the elites (Political, Economic and Technical) show their utter incompetency in understanding statecraft and governance. ..."
"... The greatest danger to any state is NOT foreign invasion or even a rebellion by the peasants. Rather it is internal conflict between the elites within the society. ..."
"... If the elites sabotage the legitimacy of the vote by propagandized the masses so that they can't make informed decisions or become to apathetic to vote, then the entire process by which Western Elites resolve internal conflicts in irrevocably tainted and delegitimized, what will happen next time the elites have an major internal dispute? The losing side will simply see the failure of their political position as the result of them not being corrupt and dishonest enough to beat the other side so they will response by trying to subvert the other side's policies through even more corrupt and dishonest actions. ..."
"... Hilary vs Trump is a good example of where the US (and the west in general) is heading, there's scarcely a hair's difference between the policies these two advocated and the terrible consequences that the commoners will be subjected to regardless of who ended up winning the presidency. However, that hair's difference, while having no real impact of the massive majority of the world's population, it still meant tens of BILLIONS of dollars going to one group of elites vs another group of elites. ..."
"... Linking this back to Assange, he campaigned against the Western Elites control of the narrative and for that "crime" they will destroy him whatever the cost to the Empire's prestige, reputation, trust and self-worth. ..."
Apr 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kadath , Apr 11, 2019 9:56:58 AM | link

@Cynica #30,

oh, I quite agree that the UK government is deliberately torpedoing Brexit through a deliberate campaign of profound incompetence in the hopes that this will allow them to prevent Brexit without outraging the voting public. However, my assertion is that the US & UK elites while think this campaign is oh so clever and will allow them to subvert the will of the people, they are in fact showing their true incompetence by choosing this method of Publicly campaigning on one policy to get elected, then deliberately and obviously sabotaging it.

in civics 101 we are taught that the advantage of a Democracy is that an "informed populous, making informed decisions will enact informed policies that accurately represent the will of the people (and hopefully be the best policies overall). of course, we all know in reality that the political & economic (and now the technical elites) have always despised the whole concept of Democracy because it restricts their power. Their current vision for subverting the will of the people is through total information control or the "control of the narrative" as they call it. But at the end of the day all this really means is a massive domestic propaganda campaign aimed at the seething masses of plebeians aimed that tricking the masses into voting as the elite require. However, a Democracy is still a Democracy so deliberately mis-informing the populous into voting for policies that are bad for the people, but good for the elite will create a dispirited, apathetic population that isn't politically invested in the government.

Now people might say "see the elites succeeded, they crushed the democratic will, got their policies enacted and successfully replaced Democracy with Oligarchism while the sheep did nothing". But this is actually where the elites (Political, Economic and Technical) show their utter incompetency in understanding statecraft and governance.

The greatest danger to any state is NOT foreign invasion or even a rebellion by the peasants. Rather it is internal conflict between the elites within the society. When civics 101 teachers say that "informed populous, making informed decisions will enact informed policies that accurately represent the will of the people", what they really mean (without being able to forthrightly state) is that through the mandate of the vote the populous will resolve specific conflicts between the elites and that the legitimacy resolution of the dispute is intrinsically & inseparably tied to the legitimacy of the vote.

If the elites sabotage the legitimacy of the vote by propagandized the masses so that they can't make informed decisions or become to apathetic to vote, then the entire process by which Western Elites resolve internal conflicts in irrevocably tainted and delegitimized, what will happen next time the elites have an major internal dispute? The losing side will simply see the failure of their political position as the result of them not being corrupt and dishonest enough to beat the other side so they will response by trying to subvert the other side's policies through even more corrupt and dishonest actions.

Hilary vs Trump is a good example of where the US (and the west in general) is heading, there's scarcely a hair's difference between the policies these two advocated and the terrible consequences that the commoners will be subjected to regardless of who ended up winning the presidency. However, that hair's difference, while having no real impact of the massive majority of the world's population, it still meant tens of BILLIONS of dollars going to one group of elites vs another group of elites.

Everyday, throughout the world, people are killed over essentially trivial amounts of money ($20 drug deals gone bad, $10,000 life insurance schemes), does anyone really think that in a conflict over billions of dollars, Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer. Bear in mind, that we have overwhelming evidence that the Iraq War, the Libyan war and the Syrian "civil" war were about Western interest's desire to loot these countries natural resource (and the Western tax payer to boot!).

Linking this back to Assange, he campaigned against the Western Elites control of the narrative and for that "crime" they will destroy him whatever the cost to the Empire's prestige, reputation, trust and self-worth. But as I said, their too greedy to see the bigger picture and how their actions against truth, justice, and democracy will place the dagger in the hand that slits their own throats. What group (the public at large, the military, a subgroup of the elite, etc...) specifically does the deed is irrelevant, without a legitimate way to resolve the inevitable internal conflicts between the elites, the end result is clear, societal collapse.

[Aug 14, 2019] Charge of anti-Semitism as a sign of a bitter factional struggle in UK Labor Party between neoliberal and alternatives to neoliberalism wings

Highly recommended!
It attests inventiveness and vicious amorality of neoliberals, who now promote the idea that criticizing neoliberalism and removing Democratic party in the USA and Labor Party in the UK from clutches of Clintonism//Brairism is inherently Anti-Semitic ;-)
Israel lobby wants to extent the anti-Semitism smear to any critique of Israel. which is of course standard dirty trick in witch hunts like neo-McCarthyism.
Notable quotes:
"... This, of course, is compounded by the over-amplifying of anti-Semitism by the media and the alacrity with which it has been taken up by Corbyn opponents, including hypocrites who floated "rootless cosmopolitan" criticisms of Ed Miliband when it suited just a few years ago. ..."
"... The resolution of the anti-Semitism crisis then is not a matter of compromise -- for each side the issue will only go away with the complete crushing and driving out of the party of the other. ..."
"... A good analysis. But, it emphasizes the point I made in the previous post, which is that, the right are currently engaged in an all out push to remove Corbyn and crush the left with the same old bureaucratic means. Whatever else Williamson may or may not be guilty of, his point that the leadership have facilitated this situation by their continual appeasement of the right is absolutely valid. Its that he is being attacked for, not anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Coming on the day when the FT have a column seriously positing that criticizing capitalism is inherently anti-Semitic, it seems to me that dancing on the head of a pin ..."
"... As many of the comments on your blog on Williamson attest, the salient feature of this - well, call it witch-hunt for the sake of argument - is the double standards where we have to be whiter than white, whilst no account whatsoever is taken of the most egregious racism elsewhere. ..."
"... The other nonsense that has grown up is that it is only those that suffer any form of discrimination who can define what that discrimination is, i.e. only Jews can define anti-Semitism, only black people can define racism against them, only women can define discrimination against women. ..."
"... That then assumes that the members of each of these groups are themselves homogeneous, and agreed in such definitions. In reality, it means that dominant elements, i.e. those connected to the ruling class and ruling ideas get to make those determinations. ..."
"... If we look at anti-Semitism, for example, it is quite clear that there is no agreement amongst Jews on what constitutes anti-Semitism. The JVL, certainly have a different definition than the JLM. ..."
"... Secker wrote a piece in the Morning Star last year comparing claims of anti-Semitism within Labour to the story of the emperor's new clothes. ..."
"... Given that the actual data, even allowing for all of the spurious and mischievous accusations of anti-Semitism in the party, made by right-wing enemies of the the party, and particularly of Corbyn and his supporters, amounts to only 0.1% of the membership, and given that of these, 40% were straight away found to be accusations against people who were not even LP members, with a further 20%, being found to have absolutely no evidence to back them, its quite possible that individual members of the LP, have never seen any instance of it. ..."
"... Take out all those mischievous and malicious allegations made in order to whip up the hysteria, so as to to damage the party, by its enemies, and you arrive at a figure of only 400 potential cases, out of a membership of 600,000, which is 1 member in 1500. ..."
"... In fact, based upon the actual facts, as opposed to the fiction and factional hysteria that is being whipped up by right-wing opponents of Corbyn and the party, and by supporters of Zionism for their own narrow political reasons, the chances are about 14: that you will never see any even potential instance of anti-Semitism, even on the narrow definition that the party has now imposed upon itself, which comes pretty close if not entirely to identifying anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, or even just criticism of the current Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu. ..."
"... In the US, Jewish groups that have long been ardent defenders of Israel have more recently come out to criticize the regime of Netanyahu, and the actions of the Israeli state. The main defenders of Zionism, besides the actual Zionists themselves, appear to be people like the AWL, who for whatever reason hitched their wagon to Zionist ideology some time ago, ..."
"... Just because the only case of stabbing I have witnessed was more than 50 years ago, does not, and should not lead me to think that knife crime was worse 50 years ago than it is today. The actual data would seem to suggest that cases of anti-Semitism were greater in the LP in previous times than they are currently, contrary to what the media and those with factional motives would have us believe. ..."
"... The apparent level of anti-semitism in Labour is a modern phenomenon turbo-charged and amplified by social media. People have their views reinforced within their bunkers where anti-Israeli memes become anti-Zionist and then become anti-Semitic. It is much easier to send an anonymous email than a letter. ..."
"... I wouldn't trust Lansman on this issue, any more than on many others. Lansman abolished democracy, to the extent it existed to begin with, by turning it into his personal fiefdom, reminiscent of the activities of Hyndman and the SDF. His position on anti-Semitism, and fighting the witch-hunt, and of appeasing the Blair-right's as they attacked Corbyn, has been appalling throughout. ..."
"... Having abolished any democracy in Momentum, which he now runs as its CEO, he also appears to want Corbyn to do the same thing with the Labour Party, abolishing its internal democratic procedures, and putting himself personally in charge of those disciplinary measures ..."
"... Its notable that, yesterday, when the Welsh Labour Grass Roots organisation came out to call for Williamson's suspension to be reversed, Kinnock and other Blair-rights immediately called for an investigation into them, ..."
"... This truly is reaching into the realms of McCarthyism, where you are found guilty not just of witchcraft, but of consorting with witches, or even having an opinion as to whether an individual charged with witchcraft is guilty, or even the extent to which the number of witches amongst might be exaggerated. ..."
"... It's not a factually accurate description of global political realities, because Israel does not control the US, if that is what the image is intended to imply. But, the message, is thereby anti-Israeli state, not anti-Semitic. It could only be considered anti-Semitic, if in fact you are a Zionist and claim that Israel and Jews are are interchangeable terms, which they are not. ..."
"... If we replace Zionism with Toryism, and Jew with British, the situation becomes fairly clear. If the we show the British state as being controlled by Tories, who implement their ideology of Toryism, in what way would criticism of the British state, under the control of such Tories, or criticism of Tories be the equivalent of British people as a whole? ..."
"... The hope of a Two-State Solution disappeared long ago, and was never credible. It simply allows Zionists to proclaim they are in favour of it, whilst doing everything to make it practically impossible, such as extending West Bank Settlements. The solution must flow from a struggle for democratic rights for Israeli Arabs, and for a right for all Arabs in occupied territories to be extended the same rights as any other Israeli, including the right to vote, and send representatives to the Knesset. As I argued thirty years ago, the longer-term solution is a Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine, guaranteeing democratic rights to all, as part of building a wider Federal Republic of MENA. ..."
"... Jim Denham: imperialist lackey and sycophant turned Witch hunter in chief ..."
"... Let us be very clear about what this witch hunt is about, it is about purging from public life any credible and effective opposition to Israel in particular and more generally opposition to the imperialist barbarians of the imperialist core. It is about driving from universities, social media and intellectual life any form of opposition to the interests of the imperialists. ..."
"... A UN report has concluded that Israel deliberately targeted and killed hundreds of protesting civilians, including children and disabled people and it shot 20,000+ people (yes 20,000+!). The UN says this likely a war crime. Why are the noble defenders of the Palestinian cause in the dock and not notorious Palestinian haters like Jim Denham? ..."
"... These attacks on Corbyn and his supporters, repeated in all of the most aggressive imperialist countries, are simply a proxy attack on the Palestinian people themselves. ..."
"... Jim Denham's comment here illustrates the problem entirely. The picture he has linked to shows an alien symbiote having attached itself to the face of the statue of liberty. The statue of liberty here represents the US. The symbiote has on its back the Israeli Flag, and likewise, thereby represents the state of Israel. The picture therefore, represents the well-worn, and clearly factually wrong meme that Israel controls the US. ..."
"... But, as a Zionist organisation, the AWL and its members cannot distinguish between the state of Israel and Jews, so they cannot distinguish between criticism of the state of Israel, and criticism if Jews. For them, as for the Zionist ideology of the state of Israel, which is most clearly manifest in the ideology of its current political leadership, in the form of the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu, with the recent introduction of blatantly racist laws that discriminate even more openly against not Jewish Israeli citizens, and with his willingness to try to keep his corrupt regime in office by going into coalition with an avowedly Neo-Nazi party that until recent times was considered beyond the pale, even by most Zionists, the term Zionism is synonymous with the term Jew. So, any criticism of Zionism, or of Israel is for them immediately equated with anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Once again Jim Denham reefuses to engage in rational debate, and again resorts instead to his assumption that Israel = Jews, as well as his crude attempts at a typical Stalinist amalgam, to conflate the views of his opponents with some hate figure. ..."
"... Again Jim Denham makes the conflation of Israel and Jews explicit when he says, "This image also plays on the tired and disgraceful antisemitic 'conspiracy theory' trope of undue Israeli (Jewish) influence on world affairs." ..."
"... The way that the right are using anti-Zionism as the equivalent for anti-Semitism, and the appeasement of that attack has led them to widen the scope of that attack. As Labour List reports , right-wing Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh, is now claiming that to be anti-capitalist is also to be "anti-Semitic". The idea was put forward also by former Blair-right spin doctor, John McTernan, who wrote an article in the FT to that same effect ..."
"... As the right-wing extend their witch-hunt against socialists in the LP to claim that Marxists are necessarily misogynist, as well as anti-Semitic – and the same logic presented by McDonagh, McTernon, and Phillips would presumably mean that the Left must also be xenophobic, homophobic, anti- Green, and many other charges they want to throw into the mix – it will be interesting to see whether and to what extent the AWL, join them in that assault, in the same way they have done in their promotion of Zionism. ..."
Aug 14, 2019 | averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com

... ... ...

The problem, however, is because this is overlaid by factional struggle ...

This, of course, is compounded by the over-amplifying of anti-Semitism by the media and the alacrity with which it has been taken up by Corbyn opponents, including hypocrites who floated "rootless cosmopolitan" criticisms of Ed Miliband when it suited just a few years ago.

Here's the thing. Just because your opponents take up an issue, some times cynically and in bad faith. and use it to inflict as much damage as they can does not mean the problem is fictitious.

Precisely because they can point to Facebook groups full of useful fools, and Twitter accounts with Corbyn-supporting hashtags acting as if the Israel lobby and "Zionists" are the only active force in British politics, this is the stuff that makes the attacks effective and trashes the standing of the party in the eyes of many Jews and the community's allies and friends.

The institutional anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is, therefore, somewhat different to the kind you find in other institutions. It is sustained by the battle for the party, a grim battlefront in a zero sum game of entrenched position vs entrenched position. As such, whatever the leadership do, whatever new processes the General Secretary introduces for one side it will never be enough because, as far as many of them concerned, the leadership are politically illegitimate; and for the other it's a sop and capitulation.

The resolution of the anti-Semitism crisis then is not a matter of compromise -- for each side the issue will only go away with the complete crushing and driving out of the party of the other. A situation that can only poison the well further, and guarantee anti-Semitism won't honestly and comprehensively be confronted.

Boffy said... 3 March 2019 at 16:42
A good analysis. But, it emphasizes the point I made in the previous post, which is that, the right are currently engaged in an all out push to remove Corbyn and crush the left with the same old bureaucratic means. Whatever else Williamson may or may not be guilty of, his point that the leadership have facilitated this situation by their continual appeasement of the right is absolutely valid. Its that he is being attacked for, not anti-Semitism.

It is first necessary to close ranks, and defeat the assault of the Right. As Marr said to Blair this morning, had Prescott announced he was forming a separate group, and was establishing his own witch-hunting bureaucratic apparatus in the party, Blair would have sacked him immediately - actually not so easy as the Deputy is elected. But the thrust is valid. Unless Corbyn deals with Watson, the Right will roll over the Left, despite the huge disparity in numbers.

Again it comes down to whether Corbyn is up for that task, or whether we need a leadership of the left with a bit more backbone to see it through.

asquith said... 3 March 2019 at 18:54
I'm afraid this IS due to the "intersectionality" cult, whereby certain groups are always privileged and wrong, and some are always oppressed and right. Jews are, according to this "analysis", the uber-privileged and uber-white.

We've heard several times that according to "intersectionality" that it's impossible to be racist against white people because racism requires both prejudice and power, and white people are by definition powerful. Therefore, anti-Semitism is dismissed because it can't be a thing because Jews are all-powerful and even more oppressive than other whites.

Those who don't subscribe to all of these beliefs are nevertheless tinged with them, which is why people who aren't staunch antisemites will nevertheless fail to take anti-Semitism seriously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66qe76gkCxo&t=166s

Ian Gibson said... 4 March 2019 at 05:30
Coming on the day when the FT have a column seriously positing that criticizing capitalism is inherently anti-Semitic, it seems to me that dancing on the head of a pin about whether the 'careless' anti-Semitism you've described means the party is institutionally anti-Semitic is rather missing the point. (OK, the column is by John McTernan, but the FT gave him column inches to argue that case, and I guess they didn't mean it as the satire it most certainly is.)

As many of the comments on your blog on Williamson attest, the salient feature of this - well, call it witch-hunt for the sake of argument - is the double standards where we have to be whiter than white, whilst no account whatsoever is taken of the most egregious racism elsewhere. We live in society: we can never, ever be that whiter than white - especially when it comes to Israel/Palestine, which is so full of contradictions and traps for the unwary (e.g. the position of the Israeli state claiming to speak for all Jewry around the world, in the way that the Board of Deputies position themselves as speaking for all British Jews - neither close to being true, but small wonder that opponents of what they do and stand for take that universality at face value.)

The fight we need to take up is to compare and contrast just how pro-active the current party is against anti-Semitism in its constitution and machinery with the glaring absence of such elsewhere, and to present a positive picture of what we are doing, rather than mumbling apologetically into our beards. We need to take the fight to the rigged system at the same time as being unstinting in rooting out the troubling stuff.

Boffy said... 4 March 2019 at 09:47
The other nonsense that has grown up is that it is only those that suffer any form of discrimination who can define what that discrimination is, i.e. only Jews can define anti-Semitism, only black people can define racism against them, only women can define discrimination against women.

That then assumes that the members of each of these groups are themselves homogeneous, and agreed in such definitions. In reality, it means that dominant elements, i.e. those connected to the ruling class and ruling ideas get to make those determinations.

If we look at anti-Semitism, for example, it is quite clear that there is no agreement amongst Jews on what constitutes anti-Semitism. The JVL, certainly have a different definition than the JLM.

But, just rationally, the concept that only those discriminated against get to define the discrimination is bonkers. Suppose you come from Somalia or some other country that practices FGM, you could argue that it is part of your cultural heritage, and that anyone seeking to prevent you from undertaking this barbaric practice was thereby racist, on your self-definition of what that discrimination against you amounts to. Or Saudis might argue that it is racist to argue against their practice of lopping off women's heads, or stoning them to death for adultery, including having been raped, etc.

Jim Denham said... 4 March 2019 at 15:25
The JVL come pretty close to arguing that there is *no* anti-Semitism in the Labour party (Jenny Manson, for instance, says she's never witnessed any)and Glyn Secker wrote a piece in the Morning Star last year comparing claims of anti-Semitism within Labour to the story of the emperor's new clothes.
Boffy said... 5 March 2019 at 09:00
Given that the actual data, even allowing for all of the spurious and mischievous accusations of anti-Semitism in the party, made by right-wing enemies of the the party, and particularly of Corbyn and his supporters, amounts to only 0.1% of the membership, and given that of these, 40% were straight away found to be accusations against people who were not even LP members, with a further 20%, being found to have absolutely no evidence to back them, its quite possible that individual members of the LP, have never seen any instance of it.

Take out all those mischievous and malicious allegations made in order to whip up the hysteria, so as to to damage the party, by its enemies, and you arrive at a figure of only 400 potential cases, out of a membership of 600,000, which is 1 member in 1500. If the average branch size if 100 active members, it means on average there is one potential case of anti-Semitism in every 15 branches. So, if you are a member in any of the other 14 branches, you would never see that one potential case of anti-Semitism.

In fact, based upon the actual facts, as opposed to the fiction and factional hysteria that is being whipped up by right-wing opponents of Corbyn and the party, and by supporters of Zionism for their own narrow political reasons, the chances are about 14: that you will never see any even potential instance of anti-Semitism, even on the narrow definition that the party has now imposed upon itself, which comes pretty close if not entirely to identifying anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, or even just criticism of the current Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu.

In the US, Jewish groups that have long been ardent defenders of Israel have more recently come out to criticize the regime of Netanyahu, and the actions of the Israeli state. The main defenders of Zionism, besides the actual Zionists themselves, appear to be people like the AWL, who for whatever reason hitched their wagon to Zionist ideology some time ago, probably in their usual knee-jerk reaction of putting a plus sign wherever the SWP put a minus. Having done so, and as a result of the bureaucratic centrist nature of the sect, they find themselves now having to follow through on the position they adopted on the basis of the "practical politics" - opportunism - as it dictated itself to them at the time.

If, and probably more likely when, they change position, it will come as with all their previous changes of position with the assertion that "nothing has changed", as when after claiming a few years ago that the LP was a stinking corpse - as they ridiculously stood their own candidates in elections with the inevitable result - and the next minute proclaimed themselves as its most ardent militants, as they sought to use their sharp elbows to gain positions on Momentum's leading bodies!

Boffy said... 5 March 2019 at 09:22
Incidentally, on the question of "observance", the only time I have seen someone get stabbed, is more than 50 years ago, when I was at school. I've seen plenty of other violent stuff in the intervening period, for example, people getting glassed, people having wrought iron tables smashed over their heads. My sister, who is several years older than me, and was out bopping during the days of the Teddy Boys, saw more people getting slashed, in the 1950's, because the flick knife was the Ted's favoured weapon.

But, that doesn't mean that I disbelieve the media when it talks about the current spate of knife crimes. Its just that, however, terrible such crimes are for those that suffer or witness them, and no matter how much the media that has to sensationalise every story, for its own commercial purposes, talks about an epidemic or a knife crime crisis, the number of knife crimes per head of population is extremely small.

The chances that 999 out of 1,000 of us will never be the victim of, or witness knife crime does not mean it doesn't exist. But, those that then claim that the 999 out of 1,000 of us who say we have not seen it, must be somehow being dishonest, are not dealing with the facts, and are simply fuelling a moral panic.

When some phenomena is statistically insignificant, which 1 in 1,500 cases, is, and when as with many such phenomena there is no normal distribution of the occurrence of such cases - for example, knife crime will tend to be concentrated in particular areas - trying to present any kind of rational analysis based upon personal observation is a mug's game.

Just because the only case of stabbing I have witnessed was more than 50 years ago, does not, and should not lead me to think that knife crime was worse 50 years ago than it is today. The actual data would seem to suggest that cases of anti-Semitism were greater in the LP in previous times than they are currently, contrary to what the media and those with factional motives would have us believe. It is certainly thec ase that anti-Semitism is a bigger problem in the Tory party, and other right-wing organisations than it is in the LP, again not that you would know that from the reporting of it, or from the attitude of certain factional sects, such as the AWL.

Jim Denham said... 5 March 2019 at 11:14

Labour has 'much larger' group of antisemitic members which Corbyn has failed to deal with, Momentum founder warns

By Rob Merrick Deputy Political Editor The Independent, Monday 25 February 2019 16:10 |

Labour has "a much larger" group of antisemitic members than it recognises which Jeremy Corbyn has failed to "deal with", Momentum founder Jon Lansman has warned.

The Labour leader's long-standing ally said "conspiracy theorists" had infiltrated the party – a consequence of its huge surge in membership in recent years.

Mr Lansman stopped short of backing the call from Tom Watson, Labour's deputy leader, for Mr Corbyn to take personal charge of the antisemitism complaints dogging Labour.

But he said: "I do think we have a major problem and it always seems to me that we underestimate the scale of it. I think it is a widespread problem.

"I think it is now obvious that we have a much larger number of people with hardcore antisemitic opinions which, unfortunately, is polluting the atmosphere in a lot of constituency parties and in particular online. We have to deal with these people."

Speedy said... 6 March 2019 at 06:39
Approaching this from another angle...

The apparent level of anti-semitism in Labour is a modern phenomenon turbo-charged and amplified by social media. People have their views reinforced within their bunkers where anti-Israeli memes become anti-Zionist and then become anti-Semitic. It is much easier to send an anonymous email than a letter.

History is very much the tale of new technology transforming the potential of human behaviour and beliefs, and one of the oldest beliefs ("the blood libel") is anti-Semitism.

This is how Labour has changed - ie, the rise of Corbyn has coincided with the ubiquity of this technology. In fact, arguably the rise of Corbyn was aided by it.

Corbyn's nuanced position on Israel/Palestine gives permission to social media extremists.

The rest is history.

Incidentally, this is why you are less likely to confront anti-Semitism in real-life while the internet may be awash with it - there are the real and virtual identities which only occasionally bleed into each other.

Which is true and which is not? We might wonder if technology has evolved ahead of human adaptation - the "real world" filters that govern apparently "real" behaviour missing.

I'm sure even certain posters here are less bananas in "real life" than their online comments might suggest!

Boffy said... 6 March 2019 at 10:42
I wouldn't trust Lansman on this issue, any more than on many others. Lansman abolished democracy, to the extent it existed to begin with, by turning it into his personal fiefdom, reminiscent of the activities of Hyndman and the SDF. His position on anti-Semitism, and fighting the witch-hunt, and of appeasing the Blair-right's as they attacked Corbyn, has been appalling throughout.

Having abolished any democracy in Momentum, which he now runs as its CEO, he also appears to want Corbyn to do the same thing with the Labour Party, abolishing its internal democratic procedures, and putting himself personally in charge of those disciplinary measures. That truly would be the actions of a Bonapartist. That Tom Watson is prepared to do that, as he sets himself up in a situation of dual power, to confront Corbyn is no surprise that anyone who even remotely considers themselves a part of the Left should support should a move is a disgrace. Perhaps no surprise that the AWL supporters of Zionism, and the witch-hunt, appear to be doing so, then.

Its notable that, yesterday, when the Welsh Labour Grass Roots organisation came out to call for Williamson's suspension to be reversed, Kinnock and other Blair-rights immediately called for an investigation into them, and for its Secretary who sits on Labour's NEC to also be suspended, for interfering in an ongoing investigation! So, why did those same Blair-rights not call for the suspension of Watson, who immediately demanded Williamson's suspension, and withdrawal of the whip, before any investigation, or indeed of Hodge and others who on a daily basis go to the media to sally forth about cases that are under investigation, or waiting for investigation.

This truly is reaching into the realms of McCarthyism, where you are found guilty not just of witchcraft, but of consorting with witches, or even having an opinion as to whether an individual charged with witchcraft is guilty, or even the extent to which the number of witches amongst might be exaggerated.

Jim Denham's comment is a case in point. How much more "anti-Semitism" exists? What is the factual basis of the statement, as opposed to click bait headline. Even if the actual extent is 100% more than the data so far presented, that would mean that potentially 1 in 750 LP members might be guilty of some form of anti-Semitism. Its hardly an epidemic, or institutional anti-Semitism, and far less than exists in the Tory Party, which is also infected by Islamaphobia, misogyny, homophobia and xenophobia.

In fact, its probably much less than you would find in the BBC, Sky or other establishment institutions. Anti-Semitism exists, and is a problem, but that does not mean it is not being used by Labour's enemies or the proponents of Zionism for their own political ends. The real conspiracy theorists are those that try to present anti-Semitism as a conspiracy based upon infiltration of the LP, the same people who presented the support for Corbyn from 300,000 new members as really just being a case of far left entryism, by Trots.

Jim Denham said... 7 March 2019 at 09:10
This is a meme, taken from Incog Man, a far-right site. It was posted with positive endorsement by a Labour member, Kayla Bibby, a delegate to conference in fact:

Link to the meme:

https://static.timesofisrael.com/jewishndev/uploads/2019/02/ellmann-640x400.jpg

Bibby subsequently received only a formal warning, with Thomas Gardiner of Labour's Governance and Legal Unit (what used to be the Compliance Unit), saying it was only anti-Israel, and not anti-Semitic.

Not only could a Labour member post something obviously anti-Semitic, it was not deemed to be so by the Compliance Unit. I bet we all know people who would agree.

Boffy said... 7 March 2019 at 12:36
It's not a factually accurate description of global political realities, because Israel does not control the US, if that is what the image is intended to imply. But, the message, is thereby anti-Israeli state, not anti-Semitic. It could only be considered anti-Semitic, if in fact you are a Zionist and claim that Israel and Jews are are interchangeable terms, which they are not.

In fact, there are probably not an inconsiderable number of Jews, who think that the state of Israel does exercise undue influence over US policy, and certainly it seems to be the case that, in the US, more liberal Jewish groups, seem to think that one reason that the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu, in Israel, was so supportive of Trump, and we see the same support for Trump amongst Zionists in Britain, is at least in part due to the fact that Obama had been distancing the US from its historical uncritical support for Israel.

If we replace Zionism with Toryism, and Jew with British, the situation becomes fairly clear. If the we show the British state as being controlled by Tories, who implement their ideology of Toryism, in what way would criticism of the British state, under the control of such Tories, or criticism of Tories be the equivalent of British people as a whole?

Clearly it wouldn't, because there are a majority of British people who oppose Toryism, and thereby oppose the actions of the British state under the control of the Tories. A nationalist, or racist might want to equate the nation state with the whole of its people, but the people who are doing that here, by interpreting criticism of the Israeli state with anti-Semitism, are the Zionists themselves, and their apologists, because they seek thereby to delegitimize any criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism by equating it with anti-Semitism.

That in effect makes the Zionists themselves, and their apologists anti-Semites, because in adopting this equation of Jewishness with being Zionist, and with Israel, they make all Jews thereby responsible for the actions of Zionism and of the state of Israel!

Boffy said... 7 March 2019 at 13:47
The problem for the AWL, and its members like Jim Denham, on this issue comes down to this. Until thirty years ago, the organisation, under its previous names, was an ardent defender of the ideas and traditions of Jim Cannon. Cannon's "The Struggle for a Proletarian Party" was required reading for all of its members. Then, in an about face, the organisation overnight collapsed into what Trotsky called "the petit-bourgeois Third Camp", and so became ardent defenders of the enemies of Cannon, the petit-bourgeois Third Camp of Burnham- Shachtman. That kind of wild zig-zag is typical of bureaucratic-centrist organisations, which is what the AWL is.

As part of this collapse into the petit-bourgeois Third Camp, and the moralistic politics it is based upon, the AWL also adopted the ideas of Third Campists like Al Glotzer, in relation to Israel and Zionism, as opposed to the position of Mandel, which represented a continuation of the ideas of Cannon and Trotsky. I set this out in a short blog post 12 years ago Glotzer and the Jews as Special , after the AWL had repeatedly censored it appearing on their website in response to an article setting out Glotzer's position.

Having committed themselves to the reactionary Zionist ideology that essentially underpins Glotzer's stance - the same thing idea of having lost faith in the working-class, and so having to rely on the bourgeois state, or "progressive imperialism" to accomplish the tasks of the working-class, is behind the AWL's support for NATo's war against Serbia, Iraq, Libya etc., but is also behind the politics of other Third Campists such as the SWP, that instead look to other larger forces, such as reactionary "anti-imperialist" states to carry forward its moral agenda - the AWL are left now trying to defend their position of support for the creation of a racist, expansionist state in Israel, as the inevitable consequences of that venture unfold.

For a Marxist, it is not at all difficult to say that the establishment of the state of Israel is one that we should not have supported at the time, because it would lead to the kind of consequences we see today, and yet, to say, 75 years on from the creation of that state, it is an established fact, and trying to unwind history, by calling for the destruction of that state would have even more calamitous consequences for the global working-class. It is quite easy for a Marx to say that the current nature of the Israeli state, as a racist Zionist state, based, like almost no other state in the world on a confessional basis, i.e. of being a Jewish state, a state for Jews in preference to every other ethnic/religious group flows from the ideology, and nature of its creation. But, then to argue that the answer to that is not a destruction of the state of Israel, which could only be done on the bones of millions of Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, but is to wage a working-class based struggle against that racist foundation upon which the state has been founded, and that struggle is one that must unite Jews and Arabs alike. In fact, the position of palestinians today is a mirror image of that of the Jews 75 years ago.

The hope of a Two-State Solution disappeared long ago, and was never credible. It simply allows Zionists to proclaim they are in favour of it, whilst doing everything to make it practically impossible, such as extending West Bank Settlements. The solution must flow from a struggle for democratic rights for Israeli Arabs, and for a right for all Arabs in occupied territories to be extended the same rights as any other Israeli, including the right to vote, and send representatives to the Knesset. As I argued thirty years ago, the longer-term solution is a Federal Republic of Israel and Palestine, guaranteeing democratic rights to all, as part of building a wider Federal Republic of MENA.

Anonymous said... 7 March 2019 at 16:54

Jim Denham: imperialist lackey and sycophant turned Witch hunter in chief

Let us be very clear about what this witch hunt is about, it is about purging from public life any credible and effective opposition to Israel in particular and more generally opposition to the imperialist barbarians of the imperialist core. It is about driving from universities, social media and intellectual life any form of opposition to the interests of the imperialists.

This is nothing but authoritarianism in action, censorship of political opponents and the closing down of any credible definition of free speech.

In other words this is something any leftist worth half an atom would be fighting against with all their energies.

But what do we find, pathetic pro war pro imperialists leftists and post modern liberals joining the witch hunt.

Meanwhile in the real world:

A UN report has concluded that Israel deliberately targeted and killed hundreds of protesting civilians, including children and disabled people and it shot 20,000+ people (yes 20,000+!). The UN says this likely a war crime. Why are the noble defenders of the Palestinian cause in the dock and not notorious Palestinian haters like Jim Denham?

How can anyone on the left get away with supporting and providing ideological cover for Israel How can any leftist allow a socialist movement to be sabotaged by the Israel state and its army of appalling immoral apologists?

These attacks on Corbyn and his supporters, repeated in all of the most aggressive imperialist countries, are simply a proxy attack on the Palestinian people themselves.

Boffy said... 8 March 2019 at 11:15
Jim Denham's comment here illustrates the problem entirely. The picture he has linked to shows an alien symbiote having attached itself to the face of the statue of liberty. The statue of liberty here represents the US. The symbiote has on its back the Israeli Flag, and likewise, thereby represents the state of Israel. The picture therefore, represents the well-worn, and clearly factually wrong meme that Israel controls the US.

But, as a Zionist organisation, the AWL and its members cannot distinguish between the state of Israel and Jews, so they cannot distinguish between criticism of the state of Israel, and criticism if Jews. For them, as for the Zionist ideology of the state of Israel, which is most clearly manifest in the ideology of its current political leadership, in the form of the Bonapartist regime of Netanyahu, with the recent introduction of blatantly racist laws that discriminate even more openly against not Jewish Israeli citizens, and with his willingness to try to keep his corrupt regime in office by going into coalition with an avowedly Neo-Nazi party that until recent times was considered beyond the pale, even by most Zionists, the term Zionism is synonymous with the term Jew. So, any criticism of Zionism, or of Israel is for them immediately equated with anti-Semitism.

It is what leads such Zionists to then also insist on their right to determine who is a Jew or not. The AWL do that with all those Jews, such as the JVL, who refuse to accept the AWL's definition of anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism. Its like the old saw that the definition of a Scot is someone who wears a kilt, and when asked about Jock McTavish, from Arbroath, who does not wear a kilt, the reply comes back, then he cannot really be a Scot!

The Zionists insists on defining anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, and thereby closing down debate. Jim Denham does that most clearly here, in his refusal to debate the actual substantive points. It is typical of the attitude of the AWL, in general which long since gave up trying to defend its bourgeois liberal, opportunist politics by rational debate, and instead turned to bureaucratic censorship, and ill-tempered invective.

Boffy said... 9 March 2019 at 08:58
Once again Jim Denham reefuses to engage in rational debate, and again resorts instead to his assumption that Israel = Jews, as well as his crude attempts at a typical Stalinist amalgam, to conflate the views of his opponents with some hate figure.

Again Jim Denham makes the conflation of Israel and Jews explicit when he says, "This image also plays on the tired and disgraceful antisemitic 'conspiracy theory' trope of undue Israeli (Jewish) influence on world affairs."

The conflation of equating Israel with the term Jew flows directly from the Zionist ideology that underpins the Israeli State, but which also adopted by the AWL, and its members like Jim Denham. It thereby effectively denies statehood to non-Jewish Israeli citizens, making them non-persons, erasing them from history, in the same way that Jim Denham has sought to do in diminishing if not entirely denying the genocides against other ethnic groups such as Native North Americans, Australian and New Zealand aboriginals etc., as a result of his Zionist privileging of the specific genocide against Jews in the Holocaust.

It is the same kind of racism, of course, that is applied by the BNP and other white nationalists, who seek to portray Britain as being a nation for white Britons, and thereby deny other Britons the right to consider themselves really British. Every socialist, can understand the racist nature of that ideology when it is applied to Britain, and elsewhere, but the AWL, and its members, like Jim Denham, deny it when it is applied to Israel, which they want to treat as being different to every other state on the planet, in defence of their Zionist ideology that privileges Israeli Jews over others, and by extension equates the term Jew with the term Israel.

Its most extreme version comes with the fascists that Netanyahu has now gone into alliance with, whose ideology states that God only put gentiels on the Earth to be slaves and serve the needs of Jews, as the chosen people! It means that they see the place of non-Jewish Israelis in those terms, as being allowed to remain in Israel only on that subservient basis. This is the ideology that the AWL is now logically tied to, in having adopted Zionism as the answer to the problems of Jewish workers rather than socialism.

And, of course, the extension of that principle for other Zionists is illustrated in their support for fascists like Orban in Hungary, who wants to adopt a similar nationalist ideology of keeping Hungary, and other "white" European nations exclusively for "whites", in the same way that Zionists want to keep Israel exclusively for Jews.

It is a sorry state when socialists have degenerated to such an extent that not only do they fail to distinguish between nationalist ideology and socialist ideology by adopting nationalist solutions to workers problems such as "nationalisation", by the capitalist state, but where, in adopting such reactionary nationalist ideology, the logic of their position drives them to supporting the idea that nation states should be exclusively for particular ethnic groups, such as Israel for the Jews, Hungary for white Christians and so on.

Boffy said... 9 March 2019 at 16:31
The way that the right are using anti-Zionism as the equivalent for anti-Semitism, and the appeasement of that attack has led them to widen the scope of that attack. As Labour List reports , right-wing Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh, is now claiming that to be anti-capitalist is also to be "anti-Semitic". The idea was put forward also by former Blair-right spin doctor, John McTernan, who wrote an article in the FT to that same effect

Channelling Jim Denham, McTernan writes,

"As the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out, anti-Semitic tropes share three elements: money or finance is always in the mix; an acknowledged cleverness that is also seen as conniving; and, power -- particularly a power to manipulate more powerful entities.

All of these feature in the criticism of Israel and the so-called Israel lobby. They can be easily moulded into a critique of capitalism, too."

The line of argument was illustrated to me some weeks ago, in a comment I received in relation to an article I wrote about Marx's analysis of fictitious capital, as part of my critique of Paul Mason's Postcapitalism . The commenter, argued that Marx's analysis of fictitious capital appeared to be simply Marx blaming bankers and money lenders, for which read Jews, for the world's ills, and was thereby simply an expression of the well-known fact that Marx was a self-hating Jew, much as the AWL, describe all those other Jews that do not share their commitment to |Zionism. The commenter as evidence of this provided a link to a literary critique of Marx's On The Jewish Question , which is cited as proving that Marx was an anti-semite.

In fact, I pointed out that in nothing that Marx had written about fictitious capital, or what I had written describing Marx's analysis of fictitious capital are bankers discussed, let alone Jewish bankers. The anonymous commenter, has, in fact, since deleted their comments, meaning that my responses to them were also deleted.
But, this is the way this right-wing witch-hunt proceeds, by throwing a net to catch whatever they can trawl in, and at the very least sowing the seeds of doubt as they require those being attacked to respond to their wild accusations. It means that any statement can be framed to mean that there is some subtext beneath the actual words and pictures that is somehow anti-Semitic, if only you know the relevant coda to unlock the true meaning, and anyone who doubts the meaning being placed upon it, is thereby a defender of the anti-Semitic message. As with the attacks on Momentum, and the initial surge of membership supporting Corbyn, it is always phrased in dark conspiratorial language, about unseen forces being behind what is seen on the surface. So, we were supposed to believe that a few hundred Trots in Britain somehow morphed into 300,000 new LP members! But, Momentum now having shown that it is a tame part of the establishment, is even able to recruit McTernan himself as a member.

The appeasement as with all witch-hunts only provokes the witch-hunters to widen the scope of their activities. The AWL, which was at the forefront of helping the witch-hunters with their shameful support for the witch-hunting of Jackie Walker, was repaid by having their own members expelled too, and having right-wing Labour MP's appear on TV, to characterise the AWL themselves as "anti-Semites", despite their well-known Zionist politics. Yet, oddly, the AWL seem to consider that a price worth paying, as their advocacy of Zionism seems to trump any other consideration for them in their politics.

Boffy said... 10 March 2019 at 11:09
It didn't take long for my comment of yesterday to be proved correct. Today we learn that Jess Phillips has claimed that Marxism is necessarily misogynist, because it places class oppression above all else, and so now claims that as well as the Left in the party being anti-Semitic, it is also misogynist. The attack of the Right, as I said yesterday will spread ever wider on this irrational basis, using all of the usual conspiratorial language that such witch-hunts have always adopted. Rather like a Dan Brown novel, it will imply that there are dark (Marxist) forces at work, of which Corbyn is the head of the coven (or even worse that some unseen Dark Overlord is really standing behind Corbyn, who is only its representative on Earth (i.e. in the LP).

It will suggest that these dark forces do not speak openly, but only in codes and symbols that have to be unlocked by the forces of Light, who like Jim Denham, can look into the minds of men and women, and see what is really going inside.

I actually found that despite the anonymous Zionist commenter to my article on Medium having deleted their comments, my replies to them, were in fact still floating around here , here , and here .

As the right-wing extend their witch-hunt against socialists in the LP to claim that Marxists are necessarily misogynist, as well as anti-Semitic – and the same logic presented by McDonagh, McTernon, and Phillips would presumably mean that the Left must also be xenophobic, homophobic, anti- Green, and many other charges they want to throw into the mix – it will be interesting to see whether and to what extent the AWL, join them in that assault, in the same way they have done in their promotion of Zionism.

[Aug 14, 2019] The Citadels of America s Elites Fractured and At Odds with Each Other by Alastair Crooke

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The speed with which US political leaders of all stripes have united behind the idea of a 'new cold war' is something that takes my breath away. Eighteen months ago the phrase was dismissed as fringe scaremongering. Today it is consensus. ..."
"... It is clear that there is indeed now a clear bi-partisan consensus in the US on China ..."
"... A US policy boiled down to one overriding component: 'hammering Russia'. "Hammering Russia" (he insisted repeatedly), will continue until President Putin understands there is no military solution in Syria (he said with heightened verbal emphasis). Russia falsely assumes that Assad has 'won' war: "He hasn't", Jeffrey said. And the US is committed to demonstrating this fundamental 'truth'. ..."
"... Recall how little time ago, the talk was of partnership, of the US working with Russia to find a solution in Syria. Now the talk of the US Envoy is the talk of Cold War with Russia as much as were his Aspen colleagues – albeit in respect to China. ..."
"... All this braggadocio is reminiscent of late 2003 when the war in Iraq was just entering its insurgent stage: It was said then that mere "boys go to Baghdad; but real men chose to go to Tehran ". It gained wide circulation in Washington at the time. This type of talk gave rise, as I well recall, to something approaching an hysteric elation. Officials seemed to be walking six inches above the ground, in anticipation of all the dominos expected to fall in succession. ..."
"... The point here is that the tacit coupling of Russia – now termed a major 'foe' of America by US Defense officials – and China, inevitably is being refracted back at the US, in terms of a growing strategic Russo-Chinese partnership, ready to challenge the US and its allies. ..."
"... So, as we look around, the picture seems to be one in which US bellicosity is somehow consolidating as an élite consensus (with but a few individuals courageously pushing-back on the trend). So what is going on? ..."
"... The two FT correspondents effectively were signalling – in their separate articles – that the US is entering on a momentous and hazardous transformation. Further, it would seem that America's élite is being fractured into balkanised enclaves that are not communicating with one another – nor wanting to communicate with each other. Rather, it is another conflict between deadly rivals. ..."
"... One such orientation insists on a renewal of the Cold War to sustain and renew that supersized military-security complex, which accounts for more than half of America's GDP. Another élite demands that US dollar global hegemony be preserved. ..."
"... Another orientation of the Deep State is disgusted at the contagion of sexual decadence and corruption that has wormed its way into American governance – and truly hopes that Trump will 'drain the swamp'. ..."
"... But all these divided Deep State factions believe that belligerence can work. ..."
"... Like any cosseted élite, they have an exaggerated sense of their entitlement – and their impunity. ..."
"... These élite factions – for all their internal rivalry – however seem to have coalesced around a singularity of talking and thinking that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of an America subject to severe stress and strain – the fable of a hegemon which still can elect which non-compliant governments and peoples to bully and remove from the global map. Their rhetoric alone is curdling the atmospherics in the non-West. ..."
"... The leader of any nation is never sovereign. He or she sits atop a pyramid of quarrelling princelings (Deep State princelings, in this instance), who have their own interests and agenda. Trump is not immune to their machinations. ..."
"... One obvious example being Mr Bolton's successful gambit in persuading the Brits to seize the Grace I tanker off Gibraltar. At a stroke, Bolton escalated the conflict with Iran ('increased the pressure' on Iran, as Bolton would probably term it); put the UK at the forefront of America's 'war' with Iran; divided the JCPOA signatories, and embarrassed the EU. He is a canny 'operator' – no doubt about it. ..."
Aug 03, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

Something is 'up'. When two Financial Times columnists – pillars of the western Establishment – raise a warning flag, we must take note: Martin Wolf was first off, with a piece dramatically headlined: The looming 100-year, US-China Conflict . No 'mere' trade war, he implied, but a full-spectrum struggle. Then his FT colleague Edward Luce, pointed out that Wolf's "argument is more nuanced than the headline. Having spent part of this week among leading policymakers and thinkers at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado," Lucetr writes , "I am inclined to think Martin was not exaggerating. The speed with which US political leaders of all stripes have united behind the idea of a 'new cold war' is something that takes my breath away. Eighteen months ago the phrase was dismissed as fringe scaremongering. Today it is consensus."

A significant shift is underway in US policy circles, it seems. Luce's final 'take' is that "it is very hard to see what, or who, is going to prevent this great power rivalry from dominating the 21st century". It is clear that there is indeed now a clear bi-partisan consensus in the US on China. Luce is surely right. But that is far from being the end of it. A collective psychology of belligerence seems to be taking shape, and, as one commentator noted, it has become not just a great-power rivalry, but a rivalry amongst 'Beltway' policy wonks to show "who has the bigger dick".

And quick to demonstrate his, at Aspen (after others had unveiled their masculinity on China and Iran), was the US envoy for Syria (and deputy US National Security Adviser), James Jeffrey: A US policy boiled down to one overriding component: 'hammering Russia'. "Hammering Russia" (he insisted repeatedly), will continue until President Putin understands there is no military solution in Syria (he said with heightened verbal emphasis). Russia falsely assumes that Assad has 'won' war: "He hasn't", Jeffrey said. And the US is committed to demonstrating this fundamental 'truth'.

Therefore, the US plans to 'up the pressure'; will escalate the cost to Russia, until a political transition is in place, with a new Syria emerging as a "normal nation". The US will 'leverage' the costs on Russia across the board: Through military pressure – ensuring a lack of military progress in Idlib; through Israelis operating freely across Syria's airspace; through 'US partners' (i.e. the Kurds) consolidating in NE Syria; through economic costs ("our success" in stopping reconstruction aid to Syria); through extensive US sanctions on Syria (integrated with those on Iran) – "these sanctions are succeeding"; and thirdly, by diplomatic pressure: i.e. "hammering Russia" in the UN.

Well, the US shift on Syria also takes one's breath away. Recall how little time ago, the talk was of partnership, of the US working with Russia to find a solution in Syria. Now the talk of the US Envoy is the talk of Cold War with Russia as much as were his Aspen colleagues – albeit in respect to China. Such 'machismo' is evidenced too coming from the US President: "I could – if I wanted – end the US war in Afghanistan in a week", (but it would entail the deaths of 10 million Afghans), Trump exclaimed. And, in the same mode, Trump now suggests that for Iran, he is easy: war or not – either path is fine, for him.

All this braggadocio is reminiscent of late 2003 when the war in Iraq was just entering its insurgent stage: It was said then that mere "boys go to Baghdad; but real men chose to go to Tehran ". It gained wide circulation in Washington at the time. This type of talk gave rise, as I well recall, to something approaching an hysteric elation. Officials seemed to be walking six inches above the ground, in anticipation of all the dominos expected to fall in succession.

The point here is that the tacit coupling of Russia – now termed a major 'foe' of America by US Defense officials – and China, inevitably is being refracted back at the US, in terms of a growing strategic Russo-Chinese partnership, ready to challenge the US and its allies.

Last Tuesday, a Russian aircraft, flying in a joint air patrol with a Chinese counterpart, deliberately entered South Korean airspace. And, just earlier, two Russian Tu-95 bombers and two Chinese H-6 warplanes -- both nuclear capable -- reportedly had entered South Korea's air defense identification zone.

"This is the first time I'm aware of that Chinese and Russian fighters have jointly flown through the air defence identification zone of a major US ally -- in this case two US allies. Clearly it's geopolitical signalling as well as intelligence collection," said Michael Carpenter, a former Russia specialist with the US Department of Defense. It was a message to the US, Japan, and South Korea: If you strengthen the US-Japan military alliance, Russia and China have no choice but to react militarily as well.

So, as we look around, the picture seems to be one in which US bellicosity is somehow consolidating as an élite consensus (with but a few individuals courageously pushing-back on the trend). So what is going on?

The two FT correspondents effectively were signalling – in their separate articles – that the US is entering on a momentous and hazardous transformation. Further, it would seem that America's élite is being fractured into balkanised enclaves that are not communicating with one another – nor wanting to communicate with each other. Rather, it is another conflict between deadly rivals.

One such orientation insists on a renewal of the Cold War to sustain and renew that supersized military-security complex, which accounts for more than half of America's GDP. Another élite demands that US dollar global hegemony be preserved.

Another orientation of the Deep State is disgusted at the contagion of sexual decadence and corruption that has wormed its way into American governance – and truly hopes that Trump will 'drain the swamp'.

And yet another, which sees DC's now explicit amorality as risking the loss of America's global standing and leadership – wants to see a return of traditional American mores – a 'moral rearmament', as it were. (And then there are the deplorables, who simply want that America should attend to its own internal refurbishment.)

But all these divided Deep State factions believe that belligerence can work.

However, the more these fractured, rival US élite factions with their moneyed and comfortable lifestyles, cloister themselves in their enclaves, certain in their separate views about how America can retain its global supremacy, the less likely it is that they will understand the very real impact of their collective belligerence on the outside world. Like any cosseted élite, they have an exaggerated sense of their entitlement – and their impunity.

These élite factions – for all their internal rivalry – however seem to have coalesced around a singularity of talking and thinking that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of an America subject to severe stress and strain – the fable of a hegemon which still can elect which non-compliant governments and peoples to bully and remove from the global map. Their rhetoric alone is curdling the atmospherics in the non-West.

But a further implication of the incoherence within the élites is applicable to Trump. It is widely assumed that because he says he does not want more wars – and because he is US President – wars will not happen. But that is not how the world works.

The leader of any nation is never sovereign. He or she sits atop a pyramid of quarrelling princelings (Deep State princelings, in this instance), who have their own interests and agenda. Trump is not immune to their machinations.

One obvious example being Mr Bolton's successful gambit in persuading the Brits to seize the Grace I tanker off Gibraltar. At a stroke, Bolton escalated the conflict with Iran ('increased the pressure' on Iran, as Bolton would probably term it); put the UK at the forefront of America's 'war' with Iran; divided the JCPOA signatories, and embarrassed the EU. He is a canny 'operator' – no doubt about it.

And this is the point: these princelings can initiate actions (including false flags) that drive events to their agenda; that can corner a President. And that is presuming that the President is somehow immune to a great 'switch in mood' among his own lieutenants (even if that consensus is nothing more than a fable that belligerency succeeds). But is it safe to assume Trump is immune to the general 'mood' amongst the varied élites? Do not his recent glib comments about Afghanistan and Iran suggest that he might leaning towards the new belligerency? Martin Wolf concluded his FT piece by suggesting the shift in the US suggests we may be witnessing a stumbling towards a century of conflict. But in the case of Iran, any mis-move could result in something more immediate – and uncontained.

[Aug 14, 2019] There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer

Highly recommended!
If UK government is an example -- they are already on the same level. Look at Skripal case.
Notable quotes:
"... Now people might say "see the elites succeeded, they crushed the democratic will, got their policies enacted and successfully replaced Democracy with Oligarchism while the sheep did nothing". But this is actually where the elites (Political, Economic and Technical) show their utter incompetency in understanding statecraft and governance. ..."
"... The greatest danger to any state is NOT foreign invasion or even a rebellion by the peasants. Rather it is internal conflict between the elites within the society. ..."
"... If the elites sabotage the legitimacy of the vote by propagandized the masses so that they can't make informed decisions or become to apathetic to vote, then the entire process by which Western Elites resolve internal conflicts in irrevocably tainted and delegitimized, what will happen next time the elites have an major internal dispute? The losing side will simply see the failure of their political position as the result of them not being corrupt and dishonest enough to beat the other side so they will response by trying to subvert the other side's policies through even more corrupt and dishonest actions. ..."
"... Hilary vs Trump is a good example of where the US (and the west in general) is heading, there's scarcely a hair's difference between the policies these two advocated and the terrible consequences that the commoners will be subjected to regardless of who ended up winning the presidency. However, that hair's difference, while having no real impact of the massive majority of the world's population, it still meant tens of BILLIONS of dollars going to one group of elites vs another group of elites. ..."
"... Linking this back to Assange, he campaigned against the Western Elites control of the narrative and for that "crime" they will destroy him whatever the cost to the Empire's prestige, reputation, trust and self-worth. ..."
Apr 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kadath , Apr 11, 2019 9:56:58 AM | link

@Cynica #30,

oh, I quite agree that the UK government is deliberately torpedoing Brexit through a deliberate campaign of profound incompetence in the hopes that this will allow them to prevent Brexit without outraging the voting public. However, my assertion is that the US & UK elites while think this campaign is oh so clever and will allow them to subvert the will of the people, they are in fact showing their true incompetence by choosing this method of Publicly campaigning on one policy to get elected, then deliberately and obviously sabotaging it.

in civics 101 we are taught that the advantage of a Democracy is that an "informed populous, making informed decisions will enact informed policies that accurately represent the will of the people (and hopefully be the best policies overall). of course, we all know in reality that the political & economic (and now the technical elites) have always despised the whole concept of Democracy because it restricts their power. Their current vision for subverting the will of the people is through total information control or the "control of the narrative" as they call it. But at the end of the day all this really means is a massive domestic propaganda campaign aimed at the seething masses of plebeians aimed that tricking the masses into voting as the elite require. However, a Democracy is still a Democracy so deliberately mis-informing the populous into voting for policies that are bad for the people, but good for the elite will create a dispirited, apathetic population that isn't politically invested in the government.

Now people might say "see the elites succeeded, they crushed the democratic will, got their policies enacted and successfully replaced Democracy with Oligarchism while the sheep did nothing". But this is actually where the elites (Political, Economic and Technical) show their utter incompetency in understanding statecraft and governance.

The greatest danger to any state is NOT foreign invasion or even a rebellion by the peasants. Rather it is internal conflict between the elites within the society. When civics 101 teachers say that "informed populous, making informed decisions will enact informed policies that accurately represent the will of the people", what they really mean (without being able to forthrightly state) is that through the mandate of the vote the populous will resolve specific conflicts between the elites and that the legitimacy resolution of the dispute is intrinsically & inseparably tied to the legitimacy of the vote.

If the elites sabotage the legitimacy of the vote by propagandized the masses so that they can't make informed decisions or become to apathetic to vote, then the entire process by which Western Elites resolve internal conflicts in irrevocably tainted and delegitimized, what will happen next time the elites have an major internal dispute? The losing side will simply see the failure of their political position as the result of them not being corrupt and dishonest enough to beat the other side so they will response by trying to subvert the other side's policies through even more corrupt and dishonest actions.

Hilary vs Trump is a good example of where the US (and the west in general) is heading, there's scarcely a hair's difference between the policies these two advocated and the terrible consequences that the commoners will be subjected to regardless of who ended up winning the presidency. However, that hair's difference, while having no real impact of the massive majority of the world's population, it still meant tens of BILLIONS of dollars going to one group of elites vs another group of elites.

Everyday, throughout the world, people are killed over essentially trivial amounts of money ($20 drug deals gone bad, $10,000 life insurance schemes), does anyone really think that in a conflict over billions of dollars, Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer. Bear in mind, that we have overwhelming evidence that the Iraq War, the Libyan war and the Syrian "civil" war were about Western interest's desire to loot these countries natural resource (and the Western tax payer to boot!).

Linking this back to Assange, he campaigned against the Western Elites control of the narrative and for that "crime" they will destroy him whatever the cost to the Empire's prestige, reputation, trust and self-worth. But as I said, their too greedy to see the bigger picture and how their actions against truth, justice, and democracy will place the dagger in the hand that slits their own throats. What group (the public at large, the military, a subgroup of the elite, etc...) specifically does the deed is irrelevant, without a legitimate way to resolve the inevitable internal conflicts between the elites, the end result is clear, societal collapse.

[Aug 14, 2019] Grandpa Putin Loses Another Bet

Aug 14, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

FZ , Aug 14 2019 1:02 utc | 100

@ B, you overlooked this one. . .

Grandpa Putin Loses Another Bet
TrueStory Gazette, Aug. 2019

Several anonymous, unverified, and possibly non-existent sources announced today that they know, might know, or could possibly have heard from unknown others, who they suspect might know or could have reasonably speculated that Vladimir Putin lost a bet he made with his 2-year old grandson, Vladimir, Jr.

We caught up with the young Putin as he emerged from his daycare school in central Moscow. "Yes, he said, it is true. Grandpa lost the bet we made last week. We wagered about how long Western media could cling to even a microcosm of credibility. Grandpa said it would last until the end of this year, but I bet him that it would be gone much sooner than that."

Two-year old Putin, who is an avid reader of Moon of Alabama, said that when he woke up this morning he read the latest article. He said, "I just rubbed Grandpa's face into that article. He shrieked. He was so embarrassed. He had to admit that western media's credibility is already totally kaput, not even a shred of credibility left, zero."

"Now Grandpa is the laughing stock of my daycare center. One of my classmates, who is four, said 'how could your Grandpa be so dumb. Even a two-year old could see that western media's credibility is in the dumpster. Your Grandpa is such a loser!'"

The young Putin, who stands only up to our reporter's waist, said that he is studying English but still struggles with difficult words like "history." But he is not shy. When asked what was the prevailing political view at his childcare center, he looked our reporter in the eye, raised both fists, and loudly proclaimed, "All of us kids agree that U.S. Empire is a hysterectomy!"

We asked Vladimir, Jr. about the stakes of his bet, what did he win? He said, "Grandpa said I could have a place called Camp Pendleton in California to make a playground for kids but I will have to wait a little while until he acquires it. I'm going to make it a playground for Russian and American kids and we also will invite all of the kids from Central America and Mexico."

Asked if he knew that Camp Pendleton was a U.S. military base, he replied, "I don't know what it is now, but it's going to be a great playground for kids." And he added, "Look Pal, my Grandpa loses lots of times. He loses his keys and his wallet and every bet he ever made with me. But one thing about Grandpa, he ALWAYS KEEPS HIS PROMISES!"

[Aug 14, 2019] In any case the stuff the Deep State factions are struggling over, war, empire, funny money, and other con games, are inherently corrupt and corrupting, and formal dominance could only mean submission to the rules of the Game. Probably better to lose influentially; victory is death.

Notable quotes:
"... In the case of Epstein, I was thinking not that he was a principal who had to be offed because he ' knew too much ', but was more like the racehorse whose head winds up in someone's bed. ..."
Aug 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Anarcissie , , August 14, 2019 at 5:03 pm

If you consider social democrat types to be Left -- the 'near Left' -- then they've made great progress during the reign of Trump. It is true they are nowhere near dominance as yet, but in any case the stuff the Deep State factions are struggling over, war, empire, funny money, and other con games, are inherently corrupt and corrupting, and formal dominance could only mean submission to the rules of the Game. Probably better to lose influentially; victory is death.

In the case of Epstein, I was thinking not that he was a principal who had to be offed because he ' knew too much ', but was more like the racehorse whose head winds up in someone's bed. Or hearing that someone has been given plutonium tea. 'We can do this, sucker!'

elissa3 , , August 14, 2019 at 2:55 pm

A more elaborate take on factional struggle: https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug19/deep-state-war8-19.html

[Aug 14, 2019] Russiagate as a smoke screen for the struggle between two powerful groups of the US elite

Apr 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Zachary Smith , Apr 1, 2019 5:14:39 PM | 93 ">link

@ bevin #90

But that doesn't bother Trump, Bolton, Pompeo and their mob. They think quarter by quarter. Immediate gratification is the name of their game. They know that "in the long run we are all dead". And they don't care what happens then.

Your viewpoint is the same as that of Jonathon Cook. He says "Russiagate" was a faction fight between two groups of the Power Elites.

One wanted to keep 'putting the lipstick on the pig' which is predatory Capitalism, and the other wants to let it all hang out and rape the planet NOW.

Just as there was a clueless "liberal" cheering group for Mueller, the Looters have a fan club among the "right". Both sets of the applauding groups are just puppets. And of course neither has recognized their true role in the unfolding dramas.

[Aug 14, 2019] Grandpa Putin Loses Another Bet

Aug 14, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

FZ , Aug 14 2019 1:02 utc | 100

@ B, you overlooked this one. . .

Grandpa Putin Loses Another Bet
TrueStory Gazette, Aug. 2019

Several anonymous, unverified, and possibly non-existent sources announced today that they know, might know, or could possibly have heard from unknown others, who they suspect might know or could have reasonably speculated that Vladimir Putin lost a bet he made with his 2-year old grandson, Vladimir, Jr.

We caught up with the young Putin as he emerged from his daycare school in central Moscow. "Yes, he said, it is true. Grandpa lost the bet we made last week. We wagered about how long Western media could cling to even a microcosm of credibility. Grandpa said it would last until the end of this year, but I bet him that it would be gone much sooner than that."

Two-year old Putin, who is an avid reader of Moon of Alabama, said that when he woke up this morning he read the latest article. He said, "I just rubbed Grandpa's face into that article. He shrieked. He was so embarrassed. He had to admit that western media's credibility is already totally kaput, not even a shred of credibility left, zero."

"Now Grandpa is the laughing stock of my daycare center. One of my classmates, who is four, said 'how could your Grandpa be so dumb. Even a two-year old could see that western media's credibility is in the dumpster. Your Grandpa is such a loser!'"

The young Putin, who stands only up to our reporter's waist, said that he is studying English but still struggles with difficult words like "history." But he is not shy. When asked what was the prevailing political view at his childcare center, he looked our reporter in the eye, raised both fists, and loudly proclaimed, "All of us kids agree that U.S. Empire is a hysterectomy!"

We asked Vladimir, Jr. about the stakes of his bet, what did he win? He said, "Grandpa said I could have a place called Camp Pendleton in California to make a playground for kids but I will have to wait a little while until he acquires it. I'm going to make it a playground for Russian and American kids and we also will invite all of the kids from Central America and Mexico."

Asked if he knew that Camp Pendleton was a U.S. military base, he replied, "I don't know what it is now, but it's going to be a great playground for kids." And he added, "Look Pal, my Grandpa loses lots of times. He loses his keys and his wallet and every bet he ever made with me. But one thing about Grandpa, he ALWAYS KEEPS HIS PROMISES!"

[Aug 14, 2019] Russiagate as a smoke screen for the struggle between two powerful groups of the US elite

Apr 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Zachary Smith , Apr 1, 2019 5:14:39 PM | 93 ">link

@ bevin #90

But that doesn't bother Trump, Bolton, Pompeo and their mob. They think quarter by quarter. Immediate gratification is the name of their game. They know that "in the long run we are all dead". And they don't care what happens then.

Your viewpoint is the same as that of Jonathon Cook. He says "Russiagate" was a faction fight between two groups of the Power Elites.

One wanted to keep 'putting the lipstick on the pig' which is predatory Capitalism, and the other wants to let it all hang out and rape the planet NOW.

Just as there was a clueless "liberal" cheering group for Mueller, the Looters have a fan club among the "right". Both sets of the applauding groups are just puppets. And of course neither has recognized their true role in the unfolding dramas.

[Aug 14, 2019] There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer

Highly recommended!
If UK government is an example -- they are already on the same level. Look at Skripal case.
Notable quotes:
"... Now people might say "see the elites succeeded, they crushed the democratic will, got their policies enacted and successfully replaced Democracy with Oligarchism while the sheep did nothing". But this is actually where the elites (Political, Economic and Technical) show their utter incompetency in understanding statecraft and governance. ..."
"... The greatest danger to any state is NOT foreign invasion or even a rebellion by the peasants. Rather it is internal conflict between the elites within the society. ..."
"... If the elites sabotage the legitimacy of the vote by propagandized the masses so that they can't make informed decisions or become to apathetic to vote, then the entire process by which Western Elites resolve internal conflicts in irrevocably tainted and delegitimized, what will happen next time the elites have an major internal dispute? The losing side will simply see the failure of their political position as the result of them not being corrupt and dishonest enough to beat the other side so they will response by trying to subvert the other side's policies through even more corrupt and dishonest actions. ..."
"... Hilary vs Trump is a good example of where the US (and the west in general) is heading, there's scarcely a hair's difference between the policies these two advocated and the terrible consequences that the commoners will be subjected to regardless of who ended up winning the presidency. However, that hair's difference, while having no real impact of the massive majority of the world's population, it still meant tens of BILLIONS of dollars going to one group of elites vs another group of elites. ..."
"... Linking this back to Assange, he campaigned against the Western Elites control of the narrative and for that "crime" they will destroy him whatever the cost to the Empire's prestige, reputation, trust and self-worth. ..."
Apr 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kadath , Apr 11, 2019 9:56:58 AM | link

@Cynica #30,

oh, I quite agree that the UK government is deliberately torpedoing Brexit through a deliberate campaign of profound incompetence in the hopes that this will allow them to prevent Brexit without outraging the voting public. However, my assertion is that the US & UK elites while think this campaign is oh so clever and will allow them to subvert the will of the people, they are in fact showing their true incompetence by choosing this method of Publicly campaigning on one policy to get elected, then deliberately and obviously sabotaging it.

in civics 101 we are taught that the advantage of a Democracy is that an "informed populous, making informed decisions will enact informed policies that accurately represent the will of the people (and hopefully be the best policies overall). of course, we all know in reality that the political & economic (and now the technical elites) have always despised the whole concept of Democracy because it restricts their power. Their current vision for subverting the will of the people is through total information control or the "control of the narrative" as they call it. But at the end of the day all this really means is a massive domestic propaganda campaign aimed at the seething masses of plebeians aimed that tricking the masses into voting as the elite require. However, a Democracy is still a Democracy so deliberately mis-informing the populous into voting for policies that are bad for the people, but good for the elite will create a dispirited, apathetic population that isn't politically invested in the government.

Now people might say "see the elites succeeded, they crushed the democratic will, got their policies enacted and successfully replaced Democracy with Oligarchism while the sheep did nothing". But this is actually where the elites (Political, Economic and Technical) show their utter incompetency in understanding statecraft and governance.

The greatest danger to any state is NOT foreign invasion or even a rebellion by the peasants. Rather it is internal conflict between the elites within the society. When civics 101 teachers say that "informed populous, making informed decisions will enact informed policies that accurately represent the will of the people", what they really mean (without being able to forthrightly state) is that through the mandate of the vote the populous will resolve specific conflicts between the elites and that the legitimacy resolution of the dispute is intrinsically & inseparably tied to the legitimacy of the vote.

If the elites sabotage the legitimacy of the vote by propagandized the masses so that they can't make informed decisions or become to apathetic to vote, then the entire process by which Western Elites resolve internal conflicts in irrevocably tainted and delegitimized, what will happen next time the elites have an major internal dispute? The losing side will simply see the failure of their political position as the result of them not being corrupt and dishonest enough to beat the other side so they will response by trying to subvert the other side's policies through even more corrupt and dishonest actions.

Hilary vs Trump is a good example of where the US (and the west in general) is heading, there's scarcely a hair's difference between the policies these two advocated and the terrible consequences that the commoners will be subjected to regardless of who ended up winning the presidency. However, that hair's difference, while having no real impact of the massive majority of the world's population, it still meant tens of BILLIONS of dollars going to one group of elites vs another group of elites.

Everyday, throughout the world, people are killed over essentially trivial amounts of money ($20 drug deals gone bad, $10,000 life insurance schemes), does anyone really think that in a conflict over billions of dollars, Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer. Bear in mind, that we have overwhelming evidence that the Iraq War, the Libyan war and the Syrian "civil" war were about Western interest's desire to loot these countries natural resource (and the Western tax payer to boot!).

Linking this back to Assange, he campaigned against the Western Elites control of the narrative and for that "crime" they will destroy him whatever the cost to the Empire's prestige, reputation, trust and self-worth. But as I said, their too greedy to see the bigger picture and how their actions against truth, justice, and democracy will place the dagger in the hand that slits their own throats. What group (the public at large, the military, a subgroup of the elite, etc...) specifically does the deed is irrelevant, without a legitimate way to resolve the inevitable internal conflicts between the elites, the end result is clear, societal collapse.

[Aug 13, 2019] The Man Who Weaponizes And Loses Everything

Don't forget when Putin weaponized Beluga Whales
Also Putin said he wont do any deals with the US until they have become mature enough to hold on to them.:)
Aug 13, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Putin's Russia weaponizes everything , including humor, health information, giant squids, robotic cockroaches, tedium and postmodernism.

At the same time these outlets tell us that Putin is losing many things, or already lost them.

Which bears asking: Is there a causality between weaponizing and losing stuff?

[Aug 13, 2019] Russia is behind everything: Russia Caused Far Right Nationalism (if you believe the media) by Steven D

Notable quotes:
"... So, at last, buried deep within the Times story, is the source for its claim that Russia is behind everything. So, what is the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), and who is behind it? ..."
"... If you go to Wikipedia, you find it was founded by George Weidenfeld, a famous London publisher, lifelong Zionist and friend to, among others, Angela Merkel, Kurt Waldheim (yes, that Kurt Waldheim) and too many Israeli politicians and military figures to count. When he died in 2016, he was granted the singular honor by Israel of burial at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Before his death, he founded a chair for Israel Studies at University of Sussex, for the purpose of countering criticism of Israel . ..."
"... Weidenfeld died at the age of 96 in 2016. During the last few years of his life, he emphasized that he regarded Israel studies as explicitly political. ..."
"... ISD partners with and receives funding from a number of private social media multinational corporations, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft. It also has ties to numerous governmental agencies around the world, including the US State Department, a plethora of NGOs and several US and UK neoliberal think tanks, like the Brookings Institution, as well as charitable foundations ranging from The Carnegie Corporation to the Open Societies Foundation (founder: George Soros). All in all, ISD is deeply tied to groups promoting the global status quo. Many of them also take a confrontational stance when it comes to Russia , while ignoring any bad actions by Israel, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the United Sates. ..."
"... Neoliberalism, a policy model that advocates the control of economic factors to the private sector from the public sector, has been a dominant ideology since the 1980s. It rests on two main planks. Firstly, by increased competition that is achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets and, secondly, through privatization and limits on the ability of government to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt, the paper – dated June 2016 - explained. [...] ..."
"... The IMF authors also state that the costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent and such costs epitomize the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda. They further argue that increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth. ..."
"... I'm just dumbfounded at how many people have thrown out their reasoning skills and bought into the Russian propaganda nonsense. ..."
"... But you don't have a right to say whatever you want about Israeli politics, stooge. ..."
"... Nice. I like to remind people of that time when Putin came before congress and told them to vote against Obama's Iran treaty and got a standing ovation. ..."
"... totally nuts. "Team Putin", "I long for...Putin in the Hague", "...watched Rachael Maddow...", someone dissing Caitlin Johnstone because she's Australian, "Dorsey and Gabbard and Assad and Putin, they're all in the same boat", "Russians actually showed up in Sweden and offered to pay immigrants to act out a riot." ..."
Aug 13, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Steven D on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 12:40pm I know it's difficult to pull away from the Epstein murder suicide (which Russia caused by the way if you believe MsNBC ), but I saw a story in the NY Times today that blames Russia for the rise of right wing nationalism everywhere, even in Sweden .

Of course, Trump is blamed as well, because he and Putin are best buds. And what they want, apparently is "far-right wing nationalism" to spread across the entire globe.

To dig beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden, though, is to uncover the workings of an international disinformation machine, devoted to the cultivation, provocation and amplication of far-right, anti-immigrant passions and political forces. Indeed, that machine, most influentially rooted in Vladimir V. Putin's Russia and the American far right , underscores a fundamental irony of this political moment: the globalization of nationalism.

The central target of these manipulations from abroad -- and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists' success -- is the country's increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.

A New York Times examination of its content, personnel and traffic patterns illustrates how foreign state and nonstate actors have helped give viral momentum to a clutch of Swedish far-right web sites.

Russian and Western entities that traffic in disinformation, including an Islamaphobic think tank whose former chairman is now Mr. Trump's national security adviser, have been crucial linkers to the Swedish sites, helping to spread their message to susceptible Swedes.

Beyond the fact that these bare-faced allegations in the Times article about Russia's influence in spreading right wing nationalism are not supported by any, well, facts, is the reality that Sweden, just as in the United States has a long history of nationalist and nativist movements.

The nationalist party in Sweden is the Sverigedemokraterna, ort Sweden Democrats. According to Wikipedia , it was formed in 1988, or more than 30 years ago. Not surprisingly, with the increase in immigration, especially refugees from the Middle East, the party has shown significant growth over the last decade, similar to the rise in strength of nationalist parties and movements in other European countries such as France, Austria, the Netherlands, Greece and Germany .

An article in The Harvard Political Review, dated February 11, 2017 , sums up nicely the factors that have led to the ascendancy of right wing nationalism in Europe.

These right nationalist campaigns, including those of Brexit and Trump, have run on two fundamental ideas currently trending in many western countries: uplifting the poor working class in a crippling globalized economy, and constricting immigration from the Middle East. Although the political clashes in culture and economics seems to be the major driving forces of the rise of the far right, there is another factor at work. The economy and immigration concerns have only been political speaking points disguising the true catastrophe of modern politics: the loss of the general public's trust in institutions .

Two and a half years later, however, The New York Times is having none of those squishy nuanced arguments. It focuses its narrative primarily on Putin and Russia as the source of rising right wing nationalism.

At least six Swedish sites have received financial backing through advertising revenue from a Russian- and Ukrainian-owned auto-parts business based in Berlin, whose online sales network oddly contains buried digital links to a range of far-right and other socially divisive content.

Writers and editors for the Swedish sites have been befriended by the Kremlin. And in one strange Rube Goldbergian chain of events, a frequent German contributor to one Swedish site has been implicated in the financing of a bombing in Ukraine, in a suspected Russian false-flag operation.

The distorted view of Sweden pumped out by this disinformation machine has been used, in turn, by anti-immigrant parties in Britain, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to stir xenophobia and gin up votes, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue , a London-based nonprofit that tracks the online spread of far-right extremism.

So, at last, buried deep within the Times story, is the source for its claim that Russia is behind everything. So, what is the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), and who is behind it?

If you go to Wikipedia, you find it was founded by George Weidenfeld, a famous London publisher, lifelong Zionist and friend to, among others, Angela Merkel, Kurt Waldheim (yes, that Kurt Waldheim) and too many Israeli politicians and military figures to count. When he died in 2016, he was granted the singular honor by Israel of burial at the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Before his death, he founded a chair for Israel Studies at University of Sussex, for the purpose of countering criticism of Israel .

Weidenfeld died at the age of 96 in 2016. During the last few years of his life, he emphasized that he regarded Israel studies as explicitly political.

Teaching the subject, he said, was "very important" in universities "with an anti-Israel or anti-Semitic presence." Weidenfeld's comments indicate that he conflated criticism of Israel as a state with bigotry against Jews.

ISD partners with and receives funding from a number of private social media multinational corporations, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft. It also has ties to numerous governmental agencies around the world, including the US State Department, a plethora of NGOs and several US and UK neoliberal think tanks, like the Brookings Institution, as well as charitable foundations ranging from The Carnegie Corporation to the Open Societies Foundation (founder: George Soros). All in all, ISD is deeply tied to groups promoting the global status quo. Many of them also take a confrontational stance when it comes to Russia , while ignoring any bad actions by Israel, Saudi Arabia, and, of course, the United Sates.

Obviously, it's become a reflexive response by the corporate and legacy media in the US to blame Russia for all our troubles regarding race and political polarization, as if none of these problems existed before Trump assumed office. Certainly, I agree Trump's actions have enabled right wing extremists and exacerbated racial tensions in our country, but neither he nor Russia created the problems of racism and xenophobia that have been with us since the beginning of American history. To continue to harp on Russia as the sole bad actor in foreign and domestic affairs around the world is ludicrous, especially as it ignores the underlying factors that are driving right wing nationalism: increasing poverty, massive wealth and income inequality (which has arguably surpassed the levels that existed prior to the Great Depression ) and the increasing efforts in the media to divide people from one another along racial and ethnic lines.

No one who benefits from these levels of income and wealth inequality wants to point out the real reason why populist/nationalist movements are attracting more and more followers. As always, it's the economy, stupid. A 2016 study conducted by the IMF , hardly a bastion of radical leftists, makes this point very clear:

Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality and have not delivered as expected, according to a 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Neoliberalism, a policy model that advocates the control of economic factors to the private sector from the public sector, has been a dominant ideology since the 1980s. It rests on two main planks. Firstly, by increased competition that is achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic markets and, secondly, through privatization and limits on the ability of government to run fiscal deficits and accumulate debt, the paper – dated June 2016 - explained. [...]

The IMF authors also state that the costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent and such costs epitomize the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda. They further argue that increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth.

Obviously, that isn't the reality that the powers that be in our country want to promote - not at all. It might give people the idea that, instead of living in a democracy, we are actually governed by puppets of wealthy and powerful corporations that are squeezing us dry to benefit their bottom lines. Those in control of our two major parties much prefer disinformation, such as the promotion of the conspiracy theory that our former Cold War adversary bears most, if not all, of the blame for everything bad happening in our country, from the election of Trump to gun violence to political polarization. Telling the truth would be harmful to their interests. These same powerful and wealthy interests would risk the takeover of governments around the world by fascist and right wing authoritarian regimes, rather than change existing policies that favor unfettered capitalism and globalism, policies that are literally threatening our future on this planet.

In short, expect more truthiness like this from the Times and other media outlets when it comes to explaining the causes of right wing nationalism here and abroad:

As the 2018 elections approached, Swedish counterintelligence was on high alert for foreign interference. Russia, the hulking neighbor to the east, was seen as the main threat. After the Kremlin's meddling in the 2016 American election, Sweden had reason to fear it could be next.

"Russia's goal is to weaken Western countries by polarizing the debate," said Daniel Stenling, the Swedish Security Service's counterintelligence chief. "For the last five years, we have seen more and more aggressive intelligence work against our nation."

But as it turned out, there was no hacking and dumping of internal campaign documents, as in the United States. Nor was there an overt effort to swing the election to the Sweden Democrats , perhaps because the party, in keeping with Swedish popular opinion, has become more critical of the Kremlin than some of its far-right European counterparts.

Instead, security officials say, the foreign influence campaign took a different, more subtle form: helping nurture Sweden's rapidly evolving far-right digital ecosystem.

Oh those subtle Russkies! How they manage the time to destroy the democracies of every country on earth is beyond me, but then, I'm not a reporter for The New York Times.

MrWebster on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 3:04pm

Russia also behind some left wing movements

The NYTimes in 2016 put the blame for the movement against TPP squarely on Putin.

In Attempted Hit Piece, NYT Makes Putin Hero of Defeating TPP

And a few more.

PUTIN IS FUNDING GREEN GROUPS TO DISCREDIT NATURAL GAS FRACKING

Anti-GMO articles tied to Russian sites, ISU research shows

POLITICS JANUARY 30, 2018 Russian Trolls Stoked Anger Over Black Lives Matter More Than Was Previously Known

But blaming the rise of far right nationalism on Russia is definitely a major point as it diverts attention from the many and varied causes for it which goes to the very heart of the globlist neoliberal capitalist order. Just as a side note, academia is one of the important stalwarts in the diversion as they are gladly producing phony studies of tweets, etc which confirm these beliefs.

BTW, the idea that Russia was responsbile for the rise of white nationalism and racism goes back a while now. There were a few diaries on TOP that got a lot of attention claiming Putin had a major hand in Charotsville when it occurred.

I am surprised by the continued insistence that Russia is making "divisions" over BLM. It is an obvious attempt to minimalize America racism, and also to marginalize BLM and smear it as Russian lackies (shades of the Civil Rigths movement and MLK). This originally caused some anger within Black activists so the narrative became that Russians were pushing both pro-BLM and anti-BLM messages (although wink wink, we know the Russians are really anti-Black).

k9disc on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 3:32pm
Interesting... If You Look at the IMF Quote, They Are Still

doing neoliberalism, they've just switched the type of market. It looks like a good fit if you are looking at tanking the labor market. Import cheap, disempowered labor to create the market that you want.

I was going to say something about how Globalists are really pushing immigration too far. It would be better to rise the standard of living in your colonies and vassal states, but that would cost money and dilute control, so instead you import them and shift to domestic colonialism.

Inserting large, non-assimilated populations into democratic states IS a problem to many people. Loss of self governance - "We didn't get a say in this.", loss of a national or cultural identity - which becomes white vs non-white, it rigs the labor market and promotes inequality via a two tiered economic system.

But that IMF quote jumped out at me, and they're still doing neoliberalism, but they're doing it to crush labor markets instead of opening markets or tapping international labor markets. It fits well within neoliberal ideology.

snoopydawg on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 4:27pm
Both parties are pushing Russia Gate on us

Rubio is saying that Russian bots are spreading the Clintons killed Epstein crap on Twitter. Seriously? But he says nothing about Trump who retweeted a tweet saying that the Clintons killed Epstein. Or s lil Marco calling Trump a Russian bot?

Then there's this one.

HeyRussians, writing here on an AMERICAN platform, I have a constitutional right to say whatever I want about American or Russian politics. No one is forcing you to read what I say. Stop with the demands for censorship. Russian "sovereignty" does not extend to Twitter.

-- Michael McFaul (@McFaul) August 11, 2019

Shahryar on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 4:53pm
the comments are frightening

@snoopydawg

totally nuts. "Team Putin", "I long for...Putin in the Hague", "...watched Rachael Maddow...", someone dissing Caitlin Johnstone because she's Australian, "Dorsey and Gabbard and Assad and Putin, they're all in the same boat", "Russians actually showed up in Sweden and offered to pay immigrants to act out a riot."

Rubio is saying that Russian bots are spreading the Clintons killed Epstein crap on Twitter. Seriously? But he says nothing about Trump who retweeted a tweet saying that the Clintons killed Epstein. Or s lil Marco calling Trump a Russian bot?

Then there's this one.

HeyRussians, writing here on an AMERICAN platform, I have a constitutional right to say whatever I want about American or Russian politics. No one is forcing you to read what I say. Stop with the demands for censorship. Russian "sovereignty" does not extend to Twitter.

-- Michael McFaul (@McFaul) August 11, 2019

snoopydawg on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 5:01pm
Aren't they though?

@Shahryar

I'm just dumbfounded at how many people have thrown out their reasoning skills and bought into the Russian propaganda nonsense.

Here's Rubio's tweet..

Marco Rubio

#Putin bots & trolls are aggressively pushing hashtags on social media promoting Trump & Clinton conspiracies about #Epstein death.

It's sad (and frightening) to see so many Americans on both sides of partisan unwittingly helping them.

Putin has weaponized our polarization.

I agree that it's sad and frightening that so many believe him.

#7

totally nuts. "Team Putin", "I long for...Putin in the Hague", "...watched Rachael Maddow...", someone dissing Caitlin Johnstone because she's Australian, "Dorsey and Gabbard and Assad and Putin, they're all in the same boat", "Russians actually showed up in Sweden and offered to pay immigrants to act out a riot."

snoopydawg on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 5:14pm
This one zings!

@Shahryar

But you don't have a right to say whatever you want about Israeli politics, stooge.

Nice. I like to remind people of that time when Putin came before congress and told them to vote against Obama's Iran treaty and got a standing ovation.

#7

totally nuts. "Team Putin", "I long for...Putin in the Hague", "...watched Rachael Maddow...", someone dissing Caitlin Johnstone because she's Australian, "Dorsey and Gabbard and Assad and Putin, they're all in the same boat", "Russians actually showed up in Sweden and offered to pay immigrants to act out a riot."

lotlizard on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 6:08am
Twenty-nine standing ovations, to be exact.

@snoopydawg
https://www.salon.com/2011/05/24/netanyahu_standing_ovations/

Congress treated Bibi like the Lady from Twenty-Nine Palms .

#7.1

But you don't have a right to say whatever you want about Israeli politics, stooge.

Nice. I like to remind people of that time when Putin came before congress and told them to vote against Obama's Iran treaty and got a standing ovation.

Alligator Ed on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 5:06pm
That tweet is a pathetic mixed message

@snoopydawg @snoopydawg The Hillbots, not the Rooskies, are all in for restricting "hate speech", which means anybody who disagrees with them. Talk about xenophobia. Dems have this in spades, as well as more than a few Repugnants. We are being outmaneuvered away from peaceful co-existence to Russia ruins everything.

Orange man bad is corollary to RussiaRussiaRussia.

Rubio is saying that Russian bots are spreading the Clintons killed Epstein crap on Twitter. Seriously? But he says nothing about Trump who retweeted a tweet saying that the Clintons killed Epstein. Or s lil Marco calling Trump a Russian bot?

Then there's this one.

HeyRussians, writing here on an AMERICAN platform, I have a constitutional right to say whatever I want about American or Russian politics. No one is forcing you to read what I say. Stop with the demands for censorship. Russian "sovereignty" does not extend to Twitter.

-- Michael McFaul (@McFaul) August 11, 2019

detroitmechworks on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 5:07pm
Yep, according to the new speech parameters.

@Alligator Ed Mentioning that Israel units have skulls and reapers on their unit patches and then playing this video is considered anti-semitic.

//www.youtube.com/embed/hn1VxaMEjRU?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

ludwig ii on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 8:39pm
So Twitter is an "AMERICAN" platform

@snoopydawg guaranteeing American constitutional rights? But I thought the current Democratic talking point is that the big tech monopolies are private companies so they can censor and misinform with impunity. Does McFail also concede that we have a right to privacy on that wonderful "AMERICAN" platform?

It's hilarious this was Obama's ambassador to Russia. I didn't think you were supposed to hate the people, culture, and government of the country to whom you had been assigned as a diplomat.

Rubio is saying that Russian bots are spreading the Clintons killed Epstein crap on Twitter. Seriously? But he says nothing about Trump who retweeted a tweet saying that the Clintons killed Epstein. Or s lil Marco calling Trump a Russian bot?

Then there's this one.

HeyRussians, writing here on an AMERICAN platform, I have a constitutional right to say whatever I want about American or Russian politics. No one is forcing you to read what I say. Stop with the demands for censorship. Russian "sovereignty" does not extend to Twitter.

-- Michael McFaul (@McFaul) August 11, 2019

snoopydawg on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 11:56pm
Can you imagine the outrage if the things that people are

@ludwig ii

saying about Russia were instead directed at Israel? AIPAC would be in front of congress daily to get people to stop saying those things.

Misfud is the guy who told Papadapoulus that Russia had Hillary's emails who then 'got drunk and blabbed it to the Dutch ambassador' who then told someone in the FBI who then decided to open an investigation into the Trump campaign. I just read that this information about Misfud has come to the intelligence committee's attention. So I'm sure that any day now we will be told to forget everything we've been told about how Trump colluded with Russia right? Any day...yup...congress is going to tell us that the two year long propaganda campaign that they have been pushing on us was false. Just like Trump said it was. Any..day..

#7 guaranteeing American constitutional rights? But I thought the current Democratic talking point is that the big tech monopolies are private companies so they can censor and misinform with impunity. Does McFail also concede that we have a right to privacy on that wonderful "AMERICAN" platform?

It's hilarious this was Obama's ambassador to Russia. I didn't think you were supposed to hate the people, culture, and government of the country to whom you had been assigned as a diplomat.

Cant Stop the M... on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 5:00pm
Rubio is clearly working with the Clintons

@snoopydawg

Has been a big promoter of Russiagate for years, since near the beginning. How do I know he's working with the Clintons? Longtime Clinton ally and co-chair of the Hillary Clinton Transition Team, Neera Tanden, repeatedly cites him as a source of validity for Russiagate in this video. You can make a drinking game out of how many times she says "Marco Rubio."

//www.youtube.com/embed/zoOQEImqd2U?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

Cant Stop the M... on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 5:03pm
One really weird thing about that video

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

is that Chris Cuomo actually behaves like a real journalist. I wonder how many more talking heads up there in corporateworld actually would like to be journalists?

Wonder what it was about Neera that pushed him over the edge and made him betray his journalistic leanings.

Maybe Chris Cuomo is a Russian asset.

#7

Has been a big promoter of Russiagate for years, since near the beginning. How do I know he's working with the Clintons? Longtime Clinton ally and co-chair of the Hillary Clinton Transition Team, Neera Tanden, repeatedly cites him as a source of validity for Russiagate in this video. You can make a drinking game out of how many times she says "Marco Rubio."

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==

karl pearson on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 5:03pm
Society's Institutions

The economy and immigration concerns have only been political speaking points disguising the true catastrophe of modern politics: the loss of the general public's trust in institutions.

Years ago in a sociology class, I learned that 5 components are necessary for a functioning society: family, education, religion, an economic structure, and a political system. These 5 elements are interrelated, so when one goes awry, other parts are affected. It is no secret that our political system is broken and our economic system (neoliberalism) is cracking. Many mainstream churches are losing membership, being replaced by non-affiliated ones. For a couple of decades public education has been the enemy due to right-wing conservatives, hoping to replace this system with private and home schooling. Public universities are in their crosshairs, too. Of course, all these malfunctioning components affect the basic structure of a society: the family. I'm afraid we're in for a bumpy ride, before the air is cleared.

k9disc on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 6:32pm
5 components are necessary for a functioning society:

5 components are necessary for a functioning society: family, education, religion, an economic structure, and a political system.

Corporate owns all of them, save the family, but they're working on it...

Education - completely corporate dominated with public acquiescence.
Political - Think tanks create policy for sponsored talent to ratify
Religion - Atheism, Megachurches, televangelists, political activity, NGOs as slush funds
Economic - Private FED, banks, ratings institutions, bailed out by stakholder bail-in
Family - 2 worker families, tv as baby sitter, mobile phones

Seriously, corporate owns or can significantly disrupt all 5 pillars of a functioning society. It's rather terrifying.

@karl pearson

The economy and immigration concerns have only been political speaking points disguising the true catastrophe of modern politics: the loss of the general public's trust in institutions.

Years ago in a sociology class, I learned that 5 components are necessary for a functioning society: family, education, religion, an economic structure, and a political system. These 5 elements are interrelated, so when one goes awry, other parts are affected. It is no secret that our political system is broken and our economic system (neoliberalism) is cracking. Many mainstream churches are losing membership, being replaced by non-affiliated ones. For a couple of decades public education has been the enemy due to right-wing conservatives, hoping to replace this system with private and home schooling. Public universities are in their crosshairs, too. Of course, all these malfunctioning components affect the basic structure of a society: the family. I'm afraid we're in for a bumpy ride, before the air is cleared.

The Voice In th... on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 10:43am
Religion needed for a functioning society?

@k9disc
I think not.

5 components are necessary for a functioning society: family, education, religion, an economic structure, and a political system.

Corporate owns all of them, save the family, but they're working on it...

Education - completely corporate dominated with public acquiescence.
Political - Think tanks create policy for sponsored talent to ratify
Religion - Atheism, Megachurches, televangelists, political activity, NGOs as slush funds
Economic - Private FED, banks, ratings institutions, bailed out by stakholder bail-in
Family - 2 worker families, tv as baby sitter, mobile phones

Seriously, corporate owns or can significantly disrupt all 5 pillars of a functioning society. It's rather terrifying.

#8

k9disc on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 12:43pm
Actually, I Think It Is. And Perhaps Religion Is a Poor Choice

of word, but I think in any society larger than a tribe you have to have some kind of common ground, a common belief system - cultural mores and values. If you look at secular humanism and atheism as religion or belief system, it completely fits.

Politics and science are near religions for many people at this point in time, IMO, replete with priests, choirs, dogma, and blasphemy.

Politics and science are also highly material at this point in time. Values are predicated on profits and social control and ideas are nothing more than mechanistic computations. If you suggest something that costs profits or removes social control, or you offer ideas that say we're in anything but a mechanistic, dead, dumb universe, you're blaspheming.

I'd say they did a pretty fine job of creating new religions and belief systems, and they are every bit as dogmatic and stupid as their big boss man in the sky predecessors.
@The Voice In the Wilderness

#8.1
I think not.

k9disc on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 12:44pm
Also, Just to Note... I Was Working From the List Provided

upthread.
@The Voice In the Wilderness

#8.1
I think not.

snoopydawg on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 7:04pm
Kambama's fully on board with Russia Gate

Kamala seems so much more passionate about displacing blame onto Russia for structural US racism than about fighting the disenfranchisement of black and brown citizens, including the many she gleefully sent to prison. https://t.co/hpcTt7QRtF

-- Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 11, 2019

She said that Russian bots were helping push what Tulsi said about her and they spread the "taking a knee" when it was Kaepernick who started it. Kamillary for this BS! She hired Hillary's campaign team as well as her lawyers. Hillary got people to go to the Hamptons for a Harris fundraiser.

on the cusp on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 7:11pm
Facism all the way up to

the White House, propaganda from all sources of public information.
It feels like 1943.

Steven D on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 9:51pm
More like 1933

@on the cusp with nukes.

the White House, propaganda from all sources of public information.
It feels like 1943.

Pricknick on Sun, 08/11/2019 - 10:25pm
Late to the game

but is very good to hear from you again Steven.

snoopydawg on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 2:12am
Russia + Vlad + Epstein + Trump

Trump is a student of Hitler & a disciple of Putin, with whom he's had several secret conversations with Putin giving him advice. Putin certainly knows how to make troublesome people disappear while keeping enough distance to claim plausible deniability & may have given Trump some tips on how to do the same (assuming Trump hadn't already learned that from his ample experience with mobsters).

A disciple? A student of Hitler? Seriously where do people come up with this sh*t? And why do others agree with that person? SMDH. I can't understand how anyone can believe this.

wokkamile on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 8:39am
According to one of

Trump's previous wives, Donald kept a copy of a book of Hitler's speeches on the bedside table.

The Voice In th... on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 10:46am
ex-wives tell a lot of lies

@wokkamile
ex-husbands too

Trump's previous wives, Donald kept a copy of a book of Hitler's speeches on the bedside table.

Deja on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 11:14am
That's why the ATF . . .

@The Voice In the Wilderness
. . . didn't take my tip seriously. The lady on the other end of the line was all ears about the assault rifles stamped "US ARMOURY" that I reported being hidden in the garage of where I had lived, as well as something I had never seen that might have been a grenade launcher due to the size of the barrel.

However, when she found out I was the "estranged" wife of the person who possessed them, she actually told me my tip would not go any further because "estranged" wives can't be believed.

No way in hell I was going to report it while I was still living there. I did it after going into hiding almost a thousand miles away. Our son and I remained in hiding for 6 years, until the ex also almost killed the next love of his life in front of a neighbor. We were freed by that neighbor's testimony and a 99 year prison sentence for retaliation (he held her at gunpoint too after being released on no bond for assaulting her because his dad was buddies with the local judge). But yeah, ex wives lie.

Now I know: If you see something, say not a goddamned thing because you won't be believed anyway.

#13
ex-husbands too

wokkamile on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 4:22pm
Indeed. Ex wives

@The Voice In the Wilderness can also tell some inconvenient truths. This one is backed by the fellow who gave him the book . When a reporter, who had heard about this, asked Trump about it, he claimed it was a copy of Mein Kampf, and that anyway it's all innocent enough because the friend who gave it to him was a Jew.

When the friend was contacted, he clarified that it wasn't MK but My New Order, a book of Hitler's speeches. And that, actually, he isn't Jewish.

This story definitely seems to be true.

#13
ex-husbands too

travelerxxx on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 9:05pm
I think she told the truth.

@wokkamile

Further, Trump's ex-wife brought this up - if I remember correctly - 20, or more, years ago. It was from an interview in Vanity Fair. You can dredge it up online if you want. The Vanity Fair site was where I read it years ago.

I don't think Trump was planning a presidential bid back in the day, so the revelation of Trump's reading material wasn't quite the bombshell then. Curious? Yes, even then. Hardly surprising if you've followed Trump's antics over the decades.

#13.1 can also tell some inconvenient truths. This one is backed by the fellow who gave him the book . When a reporter, who had heard about this, asked Trump about it, he claimed it was a copy of Mein Kampf, and that anyway it's all innocent enough because the friend who gave it to him was a Jew.

When the friend was contacted, he clarified that it wasn't MK but My New Order, a book of Hitler's speeches. And that, actually, he isn't Jewish.

This story definitely seems to be true.

wokkamile on Mon, 08/12/2019 - 10:00pm
No need to dredge

@travelerxxx the link to that VF article is at the top of the article I linked above.

We know he had a brief bid for the presidency in the 2000 cycle, iirc.

And practicing his speechmaking with the Hitler speeches: reminds me that Hitler himself spent years before he came to power practicing in front of a mirror, with a photographer capturing images.

No, Donald is not Hitler. But does have authoritarian/dictatorial tendencies, along with the desire to whip up the crowd on an ignorant populist basis, including racial division.

#13.1.2

Further, Trump's ex-wife brought this up - if I remember correctly - 20, or more, years ago. It was from an interview in Vanity Fair. You can dredge it up online if you want. The Vanity Fair site was where I read it years ago.

I don't think Trump was planning a presidential bid back in the day, so the revelation of Trump's reading material wasn't quite the bombshell then. Curious? Yes, even then. Hardly surprising if you've followed Trump's antics over the decades.

travelerxxx on Tue, 08/13/2019 - 3:01am
Tired eyes

@wokkamile

...the link to that VF article is at the top of the article I linked above.

And so it is! I missed it! Thanks.

#13.1.2.1 the link to that VF article is at the top of the article I linked above.

We know he had a brief bid for the presidency in the 2000 cycle, iirc.

And practicing his speechmaking with the Hitler speeches: reminds me that Hitler himself spent years before he came to power practicing in front of a mirror, with a photographer capturing images.

No, Donald is not Hitler. But does have authoritarian/dictatorial tendencies, along with the desire to whip up the crowd on an ignorant populist basis, including racial division.

[Aug 13, 2019] Putin is the Emmanuel Goldstein of the Neoliberal World Order, every bad decision, every mistake, every failure, especially the ones that were obviously flawed from the start, are the results of that dastardly Putin.

Aug 13, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Aug 13 2019 15:43 utc | 29

Much of that crap appears to be Projection. Putin's Polices Destroying Russian Farmers will probably be next since as you'll learn once you click that it's the exact opposite. It looks quite possible that the opening up of ag lands in Russia's Far East will see China cease its imports of soybeans from the Western Hemisphere as it's already done so in response to Trump's Trade War. As the article notes:

"Net farm income in America has plunged by nearly half over the last five years from $123.4 billion in 2013 to $63 billion last year. It plummeted by 16 percent last year alone."

And with China's market closed, the result this year will be even worse. And it's all Putin's fault!

And to make matters worse, Putin has weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's budget deficit, forcing it to spend "more than twice as fast as tax collections" and now stands at $867 Billion through "the first 10 months of the budget year." (No link, from Business section of today's newspaper.) IMO, that will be headlined as: Putin Loses Control Over Russia's Budget as Deficit Skyrockets!

It's this one most of us are hopeful of reading soon:

Putin Sinks US Empire Without Firing One Shot.

FSD , Aug 13 2019 15:53 utc | 32

@karlof1

Yes, we're in rich psychological terrain. Aberrant terrain, to the extent such things can be extrapolated to system behavior.

It's a psychological projection. The Full Spectrum Dominance crowd feels their quest receding into permanent incompletion. So they wishfully project their sense of loss onto the opponent. Wanting everything, dominance perceives alternate visions as being nothing less than obstinate escapees. Who knew they were in a figmentary prison in the first place? Competing visions, through no real fault of their own, become weapon pointed at this totalizing vision. Heck, they're not even competing. They're just living.

Dominance's blind spot is that it never stops to ask if others want to be dominated. This makes it structurally myopic and prone to self-deception.

The same psychology is found in the sanctioning impulse. "In order to preserve our sense of omnipotence, we hereby subtract you from the game board." But pariah nations, while perhaps vanishing psychologically to the offended party ('you're dead to me now') don't vanish in any existential sense. They re-gather under different umbrellas: SCO, OBOR, AIIB, etc.

Too many subtractions and the subtractees acquire a critical mass all their own. Subtraction adds up. There is an opportunity here to exploit the Empire's irrational denialism -via the rational accumulation of estranged and heretofore 'banished' interests.

One day, the lesser critical mass will achieve parity, then dominance or perhaps simply multipolarity. Before that day, a ruinous world war could happen first. This latter decision has already been taken since pre-kinetic versions of WW3 are popping up everywhere at once as though instigated by some spanning Hidden Hand.

Pro Jection , Aug 13 2019 16:00 utc | 33
It is called projection. We know that the western banking maffia is losing it. Freud would have confirmed.
Kadath , Aug 13 2019 16:47 utc | 40
Putin is the Emmanuel Goldstein of the Neoliberal World Order, every bad decision, every mistake, every failure, especially the ones that were obviously flawed from the start, are the results of that dastardly Putin. It's amazing how in the Empire of the Lies, a competent political leader of a sovereign country is becoming a Lex Luthor like supervillain mastermind.

It's almost romantic that these Western elites spend so much time high up in their ivory towers surrounded by the wastelands of their own making, clutching their pearls, thinking about Putin and wondering how he will get to them.

ToivoS , Aug 13 2019 17:59 utc | 53
We should note that Obama was the first to announce Putin would fail in Syria when the Russians came to help out the Assad government against the US backed Takfaris. The results of Russian support were quite spectacular. Of course, the war is still going on but there is no question that Russia saved the Syrian state. Can anyone mention a single military victory that the US has achieved since what? Grenada under Reagan and Bush I against Panama ?? Other than those two "victories" the US has lost every war it has engaged in since the end of WWII.
Mishko , Aug 13 2019 17:59 utc | 54
It gets confusing, but that is the point of all this.
We should be scared of our hero, tragic anti-hero, uber villain and rolemodel.
Not just Russians under the bed, but THE Russian under the bed.
Or so many a lady (or not, as the case may be) might wish or be fearful of or both...
(In other news: Epstein dead? Highly unlikely, ever so doubtful, I do side with Aangirfan on this)
S , Aug 13 2019 18:26 utc | 56

I especially like how Putin lost in Crimea. One of his best losses, in my opinion.

Also, Masha and the Bear , Russia's ultimate weapon in the war for the minds of the Western youth, continues its march across the globe: the "Маша плюс каша" episode is at 4.08 billion views ( 4th most-viewed video on YouTube ) and growing fast, set to overtake Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again" (4.20 billion) and Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" (4.35 billion) in the coming weeks.

so , Aug 13 2019 18:40 utc | 59
If Putin ran for President of the United States of America I'd vote for him in a heartbeat.
S , Aug 13 2019 19:51 utc | 73
@Bemildred #10: What a great piece by Patrick Armstrong. Very logical and rational. Perfect for deprogramming people brainwashed by the Mockingbird Media.
Nathan Mulcahy , Aug 13 2019 19:56 utc | 74
How much more do the lobotomized American Sheeple (generally not represented in this forum) need to realize that the mainstream "news" media are the propaganda arms of the western (Anglo-Zionist) power structure?

Enjoy a similar example, this with Putin's "bitch".
https://youtu.be/rLEchPZm318


ben , Aug 13 2019 20:16 utc | 77
"Let us be clear here. It is the United States who has broken its word and treaties consistently. We said we wouldn't move NATO up to Russia's borders and then we did. We unilaterally walked away from the ABM treaty, we unilaterally walked away from the Iran nuclear deal, we unilaterally walked away from the INF treaty and we will almost certainly walk away from the nuclear test ban treaty. We always allege violations from the other side but never provide any proof of said violations. The United States has invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria - so far without consequences. The United States has fomented coups in Ukraine (twice), Georgia, probably in Brazil, Venezuela (twice) - again, without consequences. And people wonder why I gag when I listen to Pompous pontificate that Iran needs to start acting like a normal nation."

Posted by: Jeff | Aug 13 2019 17:03 utc | 43

Clear, concise, and right on target. Should be on a handbill, and passed out to the general public. Thanks Jeff!!

alain , Aug 13 2019 20:32 utc | 79
Breaking News : Putin has a private army now. How devilish. CNN is definitely a bunch of clowns, that makes you laugh everytime they talk. Enjoy this one:

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/08/africa/putins-private-army-car-intl/

[Aug 13, 2019] Understandably, senator McConnell' has reacted with aghast over the political attacks. He called it "modern-day McCarthyism" harking back to the Cold War years of Red Baiting. He even said it was worse that the past McCarthyism. And he has a point there.

Aug 13, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

psychohistorian , Aug 12 2019 5:03 utc | 67

Below is a link to a Strategic Culture posting that speaks to my comment above (#58) claim of public ignorance and ability to be manipulated

Moscow Mitch, Secret Russian Subs and Russophobia Derangement

The take away quote
"
At a recent political event in his home state of Kentucky, McConnell was heckled and booed by Democrat supporters chanting "Moscow Mitch, Moscow Mitch!" The protesters were wearing T-shirts and brandishing placards with images of McConnell donning a Cossack hat with Soviet-era hammer and sickles.

Understandably, the 77-year-old senator has reacted with aghast over the political attacks. He called it "modern-day McCarthyism" harking back to the Cold War years of Red Baiting. He even said it was worse that the past McCarthyism. And he has a point there.

McConnell's exasperation is borne out of the complete irrational vacuousness of the accusations. The six-time elected lawmaker is the longest-serving Republican senator. He is a grandee of the traditionally rightwing party, with an "impeccable" record of being hawkish towards Russia and President Vladimir Putin.

How anyone can construe that good ole boy McConnell is a Russian stooge is too absurd for words. What the accusations do betray is the total derangement and politically illiterate condition of mainstream American political and media culture.
"

Jackrabbit , Aug 12 2019 4:24 utc | 64

Grieved thanks for the warning but ...

Sometimes it's appropriate to call out, for the benefit of others, the propaganda memes and dishonest arguments employed by a pro-establishment commenter.

One such trick is the pretense that a pro-establishment commenter is concerned about "cynicism" or "conspiracy theories". You see, thinking for yourself may cause a reluctance to love Big Brother. And sharing that thinking in an open forum is even more problematical.

A pro-establishment commenter with pro-establishment concerns often attempts to cover their tracks. They claim to be socialist and/or that they are seeking "common ground" but such characterizations are merely honey for the distasteful medicine that the pro-establishment commenter seeks to administer.

Unsuspecting readers often fall prey to the soothing words of a pro-establishment trickster. Sometimes even supporting the pro-establishment commenter's right to express views that are already well-covered in MSM. But just as "SALE" sounds sooo appealing yet often is not what it seems, concerns of a pro-establish commenter are often misleading and crafted to confuse and misdirect.

So I implore you ... don't be fooled. Think for yourself. And don't take allow yourself to be swindled by a "SALE" that is really just bait and switch.

[Aug 12, 2019] New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called Epstein's death "way too convenient."

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "How many other millionaires and billionaires were part of the illegal activities that he was engaged in?" he asked. ..."
Aug 12, 2019 | www.rt.com

"How many other millionaires and billionaires were part of the illegal activities that he was engaged in?" he asked. Even the BBC website has as its heading of a news story today "Jeffrey Epstein: Questions raised over financier's death."

[Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests of voters. ..."
Aug 12, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Mark Thomason , August 12, 2019 at 10:34

Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests of voters.

[Aug 12, 2019] New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called Epstein's death "way too convenient."

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "How many other millionaires and billionaires were part of the illegal activities that he was engaged in?" he asked. ..."
Aug 12, 2019 | www.rt.com

"How many other millionaires and billionaires were part of the illegal activities that he was engaged in?" he asked. Even the BBC website has as its heading of a news story today "Jeffrey Epstein: Questions raised over financier's death."

[Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests of voters. ..."
Aug 12, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Mark Thomason , August 12, 2019 at 10:34

Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests of voters.

[Aug 12, 2019] If the authorities and the Ministry of Truth say that Epstein is dead I go to my Orwellian dictionary and it states that he is alive .

Aug 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

9/11 Inside job , says: August 11, 2019 at 11:33 pm GMT

Per ArcAngel "If the authorities and the Ministry of Truth say that Epstein is dead I go to my Orwellian dictionary and it states that he is alive . "

[Aug 12, 2019] Clinton and to rush to Brexit? Why, the evil Russians, of course, are behind it all by Craig Murray

Russophrenia is rampant in the USA those days...
From comments: "I’ll say it again. Why aren’t progressive Dimocraps clamoring to have Hillary water-boarded so the truth can be heard?."
Aug 12, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Douglas Adams famously suggested that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. In the world of the political elite, the answer is Russiagate. What has caused the electorate to turn on the political elite, to defeat Hillary

[Aug 12, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard to report for active duty in Indonesia for 2 weeks

Aug 12, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

im1dc , August 12, 2019 at 08:35 AM

Tulsi Gabbard has this unique resume item

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/tulsi-gabbard-to-report-for-active-duty-in-indonesia-for-2-weeks/ar-AAFHdcb

"Tulsi Gabbard to report for active duty in Indonesia for 2 weeks"

by Brian Pascus...CBS News...1 hr ago

"Tulsi Gabbard, Democrat from Hawaii and presidential candidate, will be taking a two-week absence from her campaign Monday to report for active duty with the Hawaiian Army National Guard in Indonesia, she said in an interview with CBSN's Caitlin Huey-Burns.

"I'm stepping off of the campaign trail for a couple of weeks and putting on my army uniform to go on a joint training exercise mission in Indonesia," she said. Gabbard has also taken two weeks off to report for active service in 2017."...

[Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is Dead, but for the Political Establishment, it is Still the New 42 by Craig Murray

"Mueller's Inquiry was never a serious search for truth is that at no stage was any independent forensic independence taken from the DNC's servers, instead the word of the DNC's own security consultants was simply accepted as true. Finally no progress has been made – or is intended to be made – on the question of who killed Seth Rich, while the pretend police investigation has "lost" his laptop. "
See also Robert Muller: Establishment Sweethard helped Bush to see the Iraqq war https://youtu.be/mK5T_rZmVyg
Notable quotes:
"... Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests of voters. ..."
Aug 12, 2019 | consortiumnews.com
... ... ...

So, there we have it. Russiagate as a theory is as completely exploded as the appalling Guardian front page lie published by Kath Viner and Luke Harding fabricating the "secret meetings" between Paul Manafort and Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy. But the political class and the mainstream media, both in the service of billionaires, have moved on to a stage where truth is irrelevant, and I do not doubt that Russiagate stories will thus persist. They are so useful for the finances of the armaments and security industries, and in keeping the population in fear and jingoist politicians in power.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.

michael , August 12, 2019 at 19:53

So far there is as much evidence presented that Martians interfered in the 2016 Election as RUSSIANS!!!
Just a much needed excuse to blow on the dying embers of the Cold War and get the nuclear weapons ready.
I'm still waiting for Robert Mueller to be tried for lying to Congress (when asked who hired him, instead of saying "I have no idea", he said "Bush!" It is a matter of public record that Reagan hired him, a blatant lie! Is Michael Flynn out of jail yet?)

Drew Hunkins , August 12, 2019 at 14:49

" and I do not doubt that Russiagate stories will thus persist. They are so useful for the finances of the armaments and security industries, and in keeping the population in fear and jingoist politicians in power "

They are also extremely useful as a scapegoat for the corporate warmongering DNC to camouflage the genuine reasons they lost to Trump of all people.

Mark Thomason , August 12, 2019 at 10:34

Like the Wolfowitz explanation of the Iraq War, Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized. Cold Warriors like to hate on Russia. It justifies arms spending and their own importance. Clintonistas need an excuse to distract from her being a loser. The DNC needs an excuse for manipulating the candidate selection in favor of donor interests. "Moderates" need a distraction from their ongoing refusal to address the interests of voters.

jessika , August 12, 2019 at 09:38

"Those whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad".

Larry Mofield , August 12, 2019 at 08:41

If Russia actually wanted to help someone win I think it would be Hilary because Trump is a plain shooter from the hip and takes nothing off of nobody.
If anything Sanders should had sued the DNC and Hilary for rigging the DNC
Go figure why he has kept his mouth shut.

Bif Webster , August 12, 2019 at 11:13

Putin preferred Obama to his running mates as well. But you won't ever hear that on the corporate "news" media.

Others sued on behalf of Bernie. That case died in south Florida, near Wasserman-Schultz's district yeah, and the excuse was, "The DNC is a 'private organization" and do what they like, apparently. However, the "judge" did not find it odd that a private entity can run a public election? And how there's an obvious conflict of interest involved?

Bernie kept his mouth shut because he's inside the Belly of the Beast.

Martin , August 12, 2019 at 11:54

i think there was something of a lawsuit, but the judge decided that the rigging was an inside thing to which no external laws applied. if you got a non-profit or a company and there's no internal rules that forbid the rigging of votes, rigging is not illegal. the superdelegates still exist.

Seer , August 12, 2019 at 12:04

He kept his mouth shut because advancing "My Revolution" was more important. And, because he's NOT a Democrat: he's only "allowed" to run as one: he is therefore a little more constrained. Had he lashed out he'd have NOT been allowed to run again as a Democrat -- bank on that!

Tulsi Gabbard, on the other hand, is a Democrat, in which case she really couldn't be kicked out: it was she who acted as Bernie's mouth on this matter.

Trump is a piece of crap. There's nothing straight about him at all. He's a con-man of the highest order. Other than give money to the rich he's done nothing: and "nothing," is probably the best that could have been hoped for given that he could have started some wars (he hasn't found one that he feels safe would not undermine his presidency, otherwise he'd be lighting it up). The reason the guy is so good at firing people is because he's so crappy about firing them.

Oh yeah, I have not cast a single vote for anyone I have mentioned here.

evelync , August 12, 2019 at 13:20

Interesting question, Larry Mofield!

Bernie's not a stupid guy and I believe (as does Cornel West and Noam Chomsky) he's dedicated to policies that serve working people and sustainability.(as I see it – reversing the NeoLiberal agenda in order to restore a level playing field for working people and also to shift to a democratic, non imperial foreign policy.)

So why didn't he, let's call him "David", not aim his slingshot at the DNC, let's call it "Goliath"?

Probably because a single stone in a slingshot was hopeless. He was up against a massive corrupt network of hangers on, IMO, who rabidly shouted down the person who dared to question Clinton's policies.

For an even more recent example of a delusional grandiose, imperial mind set, let's take the 200+ people affiliated with the JFK School of Government at Harvard. The ones who accepted the School's shameful withdrawal of Chelsea Manning's honorary fellowship because Pompeo and Morrell attacked it with Cold War rhetoric. Manning's crime? Telling people the truth about horrific wrongdoing she witnessed in Iraq. When I emailed 200 people at the JFK School a shame-on-you letter I heard back from only one who chastised (threatened) me for not understanding "National Security" .say what????) Others chimed in to agree with her. (I shared that email with Robert Parry at the time and he emailed back that he didn't blame me for being outraged. He was such a wonderful person.)

So Bernie had the whole MSNBC related propaganda machine at his throat.
– think Mimi Rocah's recent "he makes my skin crawl" comment, knowing surely, that her words would be applauded over there.
and think all the people who have accepted since 2016 that the Russians cost Hillary Clinton the election in denial over the truth – a flawed candidate who seemed to consider her constituency the big banks and the polluters and the war machine.

I know lifelong conservative Republicans who liked Bernie in 2016 and like him now because they find him truthful but didn't trust Clinton and some voted for Trump in order to beat her.

This country is filled with a patronage network of well off established people including Democrats who believe everything's fine as it is and are willing to shut their eyes to what's not working – the financial crisis of the working class, the racism underlying the for profit prison system and immigration system, the horrific endless regime change wars and the massive deregulation of banks on Bill Clinton's watch and much more, including the Climate Crisis.

It's taken almost 3 years to discredit what apparently was a faux "excuse" why Hillary Clinton lost. Too many voters in key states didn't trust her to serve their interests because she clearly was an apparatchik for the MICIMATT.

Enough of Trump's voters were willing to gamble on this "unknown" character who piggy backed off what Bernie was saying at the time – too bad he was lying ..

rosemerry , August 12, 2019 at 15:39

The whole suggestion has ignored any words and actions of Pres. Putin, who is careful to keep to the truth. He often stated that he would accept whoever the US population chose (ie did not even want to lean towards the one claiming to desire better relations, let alone interfere) because the difference between US administrations was small and policies unlikely to change in 2016. Because the US constantly causes "régime change" does not mean that Russia does. The quick decision to "blame Russia" immediately after Trump's win, activated by Obama expelling diplomats and stealing their US property, set the ball rolling and it has not stopped.

phillip sawicki , August 12, 2019 at 08:37

T he AP and no doubt other media are setting the stage for claiming that if Trump is reelected in 2020, the Russians again were responsible. As HItler learned, repeat a lie often enough and it will assume the appearance of truth. It's not surprising that the Democrats led by Hillary are behind this maneuver. The Dems have been blaming Russia ever since Truman did so in 1945.

Sally Snyder , August 12, 2019 at 08:05

As shown in this article, key Western countries including the United States have put in place a mechanism that is supposed to protect us from election meddling:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-g7-rapid-response-mechanism.html

Given the anti-Russia bias that took root and has become pervasive in the West since 2014 and, in particular, since the Hillary Clinton loss in 2016 which is blamed on Russian-sourced disinformation, it is interesting to see that the G7 has been driven to take extreme moves to battle what they see as an "evil Russia".

jdd , August 12, 2019 at 07:05

Devastating. A cogent and insightful analysis of Judge Koeltl's decision. Thank you Ambassador Murray.

Michaelevan Hammond , August 12, 2019 at 02:16

What's hilarious is that Binney was able to discern that the download was later split in two and then transmitted state side. Think of when you download a movie or a file .. it doesn't come in 2 parts, you either download the whole thing or it is an error/fail. Binney is able to show that the whole thing is one download at 49mbps impossible speed for transatlantic transmission .he absolute fastest you can achieve over the cable is 29mbps ..plus there are 6-12 NSA monitoring junctions added to the cable to capture such things and not one had any Russians attempting to "hack"(2001 term). It was all just deflection for Hillary and she may we'll have selfishly killed the Dems party.

Realist , August 12, 2019 at 00:37

Russiagate is not "dead." It has more lives than a cat bitten by a vampire. It is permanently undead. The antithesis of a dead parrot.

Check out some of its latest incarnations:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-11/moscow-mitch-secret-russian-subs-and-russophobia-derangement

How many times does Rachel Maddow have to tell you? Anyone who did not vote for Hillary Clinton and refuses to back her never-ending, constantly metamorphosing coup against Trump has got to be a Putin agent even Mitch McConnell. Check back tomorrow for the latest Maddowsplaining on this and other bad crazyness.

Seer , August 12, 2019 at 12:07

I agree. The FACT that the US has been sanctioning Russia for the better part of 100 years pretty much tells it all. It's about the West's ruling elite keeping Their game going: but, nothing lasts forever, and this game is about to run out on them (the perpetual growth model, which has given them their power, is ending).

Realist , August 12, 2019 at 00:18

Unless he was being sarcastic, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough tweeted that the Russians were probably behind Jeff Epstein's "suiciding" in the high security NYC federal lockup!

Anyone who truly believes that Epstein actually took his own life probably does still have a severe case of Putin Derangement Syndrome, aka Russophrenia, Russiagate-itis, -osis or whatever ya wanna call it. Their minds cannot co-exist within both the Deep State Matrix and objective reality at the same time. Blaming all evil in the world on Russia gives them license to act outside conventional morality with impunity.

Mark Stanley , August 12, 2019 at 11:32

Yes, they are endeavoring to tip-toe around this one. If Epstein had started squealing, the excrement would really have hit the fan. After his purported suicide, the smokescreen "conspiracy" word popped up immediately in every mainstream mention of Epstein.
If the populace found out about the deranged sexual practices of too many of the world's elites it would certainly upset the apple cart–to use an American expression.

Seer , August 12, 2019 at 15:51

This IS VERY DEEP! First three parts of this most excellent four part series is available, starting with this one (Mint Press also needs supporting).

https://www.mintpressnews.com/shocking-origins-jeffrey-epstein-blackmail-roy-cohn/260621/

After reading this I now understand why Trump won't release his tax returns.

Realist , August 12, 2019 at 18:12

Seer,

Probably, because like Romney, he didn't pay any.

Dershowitz's client Leonna Helmsley explained the principle decades ago: "Only the little people pay taxes." Probably as truthful a description of the American system as you will ever hear. Sadly, it went down the memory hole because the media will never mention it again. Investigative reporters like David Cay Johnston have to write individually researched books on the subject and hope that the swamp creatures don't seek retribution against him some dark night.

The most the public is ever going to get in this world is perhaps a brief glimmer of the truth through the hard work and suffering of individuals like Assange, Manning and a few other brave altruistic souls, but never justice. The system is set up to sacrifice the lives of millions for the benefit of dozens.

[Aug 12, 2019] Clinton and to rush to Brexit? Why, the evil Russians, of course, are behind it all by Craig Murray

Russophrenia is rampant in the USA those days...
From comments: "I’ll say it again. Why aren’t progressive Dimocraps clamoring to have Hillary water-boarded so the truth can be heard?."
Aug 12, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Douglas Adams famously suggested that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. In the world of the political elite, the answer is Russiagate. What has caused the electorate to turn on the political elite, to defeat Hillary

[Aug 12, 2019] If the authorities and the Ministry of Truth say that Epstein is dead I go to my Orwellian dictionary and it states that he is alive .

Aug 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

9/11 Inside job , says: August 11, 2019 at 11:33 pm GMT

Per ArcAngel "If the authorities and the Ministry of Truth say that Epstein is dead I go to my Orwellian dictionary and it states that he is alive . "

[Aug 12, 2019] There is the possibility that Epstein functioned as a pass to the highest echelons

The philandering and pedophilia of elites and politicians clearly gave intelligence againces significant leverage over many movers and shakers within Western establishments
Aug 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

Goy , says: August 10, 2019 at 10:44 pm GMT

@Haxo Angmark Why would anyone have to bring down Trump? The man is fully compromised, a puppet and the FBI has already likely 15 years of material on him as revealed in Kushner, Inc.

There is the possibility that Epstein functioned as a pass to the highest echelons: you would compromise yourself by having intercourse with minors, let Epstein record it, hand it over to Mossad and possibly other agencies he worked with. To show that you can be trusted. Not unlike Unz himself suggested and exemplified by McCain.

But that is not necessary for Trump. Netanyahu gets everything he wants. And the whole Trump campaign was a distraction, bankrolled by Sheldon Adelson and managed by a former AIPAC guy and Christian Zionist and personal friend of Adelson Steve Bannon no less. Anyone who still believes Trump is not part of the deepest filth of "the swamp" is delusional and ignores way too many facts.

There is no left, no right. There is no democracy. There is an unelected oligarchy and its political puppets. Long since bought and paid for before you and I were even born

Goy , says: August 11, 2019 at 1:29 am GMT

@peterAUS Well, the particularity with Epstein is: Many people did and are paying attention. Millions. And the elite knows that we know. As you said it yourself: this was not just a cover-up. It was a demonstration of power directed at us.

And they are laughing at us; as they are getting away; as they are taking every bit of freedom and sovereignty away which the patriot act hadn’t already devoured, through bipartisan decision of the system which should (theoretically) serve the people.

The Dystopia is also already here: the cold-blooded apathy with which the ruling class in Britain treated victims as in Rotherham, the Savile case and now Epstein exposing their true characters, and those are also the leaders and elites who lecture us on morality: Ghislaine Maxwell -- save nature! Clinton Foundation, Mother Merkel… It’s disgusting.

And so many unthinkable theories which were declared “conspiracy theories” about WW2, the aftermath and our current reality turn out to be true.

But I agree: the internet allowed us to decode the illusion of the media Matrix and its artificial reality. And it is those possibilities which the ruling class wants to snuff out for good. So that the monopoly to manufacture consent, truth and reality goes back to them

Securitate , says: August 11, 2019 at 5:20 pm GMT

Systemic elite kompromat shielded with arbitrary acts spanning all levels of government. Now anybody who tells you this is a democracy, or an open society, or a free country, or any of that shit, is either a mental defective or a pedo CP star in Comey’s personal Playpen stash.

You can’t pretend we’re ever going to vote our way out of this. We’re deep in the forcible-overthrow zone. If you aspire to rights or rule of law lots of CIA vermin are going to have to be Ceaușescued.

Alden , says: August 11, 2019 at 5:25 pm GMT
@Bardon Kaldian Epstein was a pimp. The girls were prostitutes
Colin Wright , says: • Website August 11, 2019 at 6:59 pm GMT
@Bardon Kaldian ‘…All pimps are criminals. But not all criminals are the same.’

Indeed. Some grow up in circumstances at least as dreadful as those of their victims, and while they indeed need to be locked up, are to be pitied as well.

Others have been given perfectly decent lives, and are even affluent — and yet still commit acts of depravity and cruelty.

These I have no sympathy for at all. Who is worse: the person who has never known a decent life, or the person who has been offered it, but prefers moral depravity?

Jeffrey Epstein enjoyed chewing up unfortunate children and spitting them out like sunflower husks when he was done. There was nothing keeping him from being a reasonably decent, moral man.

annamaria , says: August 12, 2019 at 1:30 am GMT
@Bardon Kaldian Could you just show some decency and stop fantasizing about “female sexuality?”

This is a story of Mossad’s blackmailing operation and the abuse of underage girls.
If you have an itch for discussing “female desires” and such, look for the appropriate blogs. This forum is not an appropriate venue for you: https://empireexposed.blogspot.com/2018/02/chapter-14-jeffrey-epstein-scandal.html

During the ensuing decade since Epstein’s conviction, the seedy truth has slowly trickled out, exposing the dark, twisted, perverse sex slave trafficking operation that Epstein and his bevy of co-conspirators recruited child victims as sex slaves from poor neighborhoods in Florida, New York, South America, Europe and Russia, including three 12-year old girls from France as a birthday gift. Incredibly, his procuring pimp co-conspirators and scores of powerful pedo patrons were all granted immunity…

[Aug 12, 2019] The primary mission of intelligence agencies is self-preservation, and that means co-operation with other nation's intelligence agencies whenever possible. They are on one team, and those outside the intelligence "community" are on the other team. /

Aug 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

Justvisiting , says: August 11, 2019 at 7:20 pm GMT

@freedom-cat

I'm hoping that an element within our intelligence services did the right thing and Offed him to send a loud and clear message to the rest of the tribal members involved in false flags against USA and world. Obviously, JE was a very high ranking mossad agent who had strong ties with ALL the Israelis and Americans who did 9/11.

The primary mission of intelligence agencies is self-preservation, and that means co-operation with other nation's intelligence agencies whenever possible.

As a practical matter it is highly likely that both Israeli and US Intelligence agencies had access to the Epstein blackmail materials to use as they wish.

( and, as a practical matter it is highly likely that both Israeli and US Intelligence agencies were behind 911, the Kennedy assassinations, etc etc etc)

They are on one team, and those outside the intelligence "community" are on the other team.

Anon [245] Disclaimer , says: August 12, 2019 at 12:54 am GMT
Question for all,

Ever consider a rogue upper echelon CIA faction may have ran Epstein, hoping it looked optically like the Mossad ran him?

Epstein was probably a sex criminal from his early adulthood, but knew a few people. Hell, his handlers could have told him they were Mossad. I think our CIA/NSA has some brass who wouldnt mind calling America's foreign policy shots from behind the scenes via blackmail info on influential company leaders and corporate officers/assorted congresscritters. Epstein could privide this while appearing to be Mossad.

Its hard to believ CIA would let the Mossad get kompramat on our politicians so they could boss them around. Turf concerns and a bruised ego would lead me to believe the CIA would at least brief new members of congress about this anyway. I think it could have been them. "He belongs to intelligence".

Beefcake the Mighty , says: August 12, 2019 at 1:13 am GMT
@Anon Interesting idea, but aren't the CIA and Mossad joined at the hip at this stage? How likely is it that rogue elements within the CIA haven't been purged by now?
peterAUS , says: August 12, 2019 at 1:36 am GMT
@Anon

Ever consider a rogue upper echelon CIA faction may have ran Epstein, hoping it looked optically like the Mossad ran him?

No. For simple reasons: "What's there for me" and "Unless having THAT clearance I'll never know".

Re the former: if they can pull this to him what can they pull on me (or people I care for) if/when they want it.

Gets worse.

What if they pull that just to get a kick of out of it? Like aristocrats/nobles of Rome would pull it on a gladiator/slave? Or Middle Age noble on a serf?

I remember when Milosevic died and I'd mention that over lunch in white-collar/corporate environment. He WAS a head of state, European, White. I remember the jokes. And I was thinking (stupid, I know) the same: if they can do this to him, what can they do to me? Nobody else was, of course, at least where I was moving around (senior corporate management, that is .or so I say).
Then, there was a S.A.S. guy. Quote from Wikipedia:

He was a lance corporal in 1980, serving in Pagoda Troop, 'B' Squadron, 22 SAS Regiment, when he led "Blue Team" in the storming of the Iranian Embassy in London during a hostage siege on 5 May 1980. McAleese fought in the Falklands War in 1982, and in Ulster. He was awarded the Military Medal for gallantry in action at the Loughgall ambush in Armagh on 8 May 1987,[4] and was present at the Drumnakilly ambush in County Tyrone in August 1988.[5] He also served as a bodyguard for three Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom.

The last sentence could be interesting.
And, then ..

Four days after his son's funeral John McAleese was arrested by officers from West Mercia Police on charges of accessing indecent images of juveniles on the internet via a home computer.

So, again, if they can do that to this fellow, what can they do to me?
Etc.

Hehehe ..now the funny part: how many people reading this knew about Mr. McAleese? No need to state it here.

Oh, BTW, how many people you know are paying attention to this? Real attention, I mean?
Funny too.

[Aug 11, 2019] One weak spot of the conspiracy theory that Epstein was killed: Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss

Highly recommended!
The question why Epstein was not terminated oversees is the critical one. It supports suicide version of his demise.
Notable quotes:
"... Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss. ..."
Aug 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Petrel , 10 August 2019 at 06:53 PM

Epstein may have been lured back to the US with some cover story of a get-out-of-jail fake death -- only the powers that be had decided to terminate his contract.
ancientarcher said in reply to Petrel... , 11 August 2019 at 03:28 AM
We still don't know whether it's the real Epstein who died! We'll be told that, of course. But if you believe that, you'll believe anything
JP Billen , 10 August 2019 at 07:39 PM
Petrel -

Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss.

[Aug 11, 2019] One weak spot of the conspiracy theory that Epstein was killed: Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss

Highly recommended!
The question why Epstein was not terminated oversees is the critical one. It supports suicide version of his demise.
Notable quotes:
"... Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss. ..."
Aug 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Petrel , 10 August 2019 at 06:53 PM

Epstein may have been lured back to the US with some cover story of a get-out-of-jail fake death -- only the powers that be had decided to terminate his contract.
ancientarcher said in reply to Petrel... , 11 August 2019 at 03:28 AM
We still don't know whether it's the real Epstein who died! We'll be told that, of course. But if you believe that, you'll believe anything
JP Billen , 10 August 2019 at 07:39 PM
Petrel -

Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss.

[Aug 11, 2019] Maybe Putin should urge the Russian Paralament to pass an Epstein Act and start sanctioning the hell out of US leaders.

Aug 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

The Alarmist , says: August 10, 2019 at 8:58 pm GMT

Maybe Putin should urge the Russian Paralament to pass an Epstein Act and start sanctioning the hell out of US leaders.

[Aug 11, 2019] This does significantly strain the overall credibility of the system

Aug 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

John Merryman , 10 August 2019 at 06:20 PM

This does significantly strain the overall credibility of the system, among those who would like nothing more than to believe in it, but still have some conscience and working brain cells.

Yet having been raised fairly rural, with a significant respect for the natural cycles, this is nothing so much as watching necrotic tissue decay even further. Only for those raised in fairly sterile conditions, does it seem abnormal.

strateshooter , 11 August 2019 at 09:06 AM
this corruption in US politics and DOJ is now so so pervasive hat I think only way to clear the cancer is for trump to use the Military to replace CIA, FBI, DOJ , clean out the Judges , clean out the Media and start again with STRICT compliance to the Laws of the US Constitution.

The FBI /DOJ is clearly infested with the cancer of corruption.
The DC and NY offices need to be fired in entirety and replaced by mid America new blood.

EK -> strateshooter... , 11 August 2019 at 10:43 AM
I was wondering when I would see a Trump supporter explicitly promoting a military coup in the US in a Trump supportive blog with the alibi of returning to "Constitution and Law strict compliance"...

No wonder a military coup is anti-constitutional....

I always thought all these stories of the "deep state", the "borg", "drainning the swmp", "paedophilia conspiracy theories", "Epstein case", "white supremacism terrorism", and attacks by Trump, and his ideologues, against any US institution, were designed to sow the enough ammount of distrust and confussion amongst the US population so that they become more rone to allow such an outrage...

"The FBI /DOJ is clearly infested with the cancer of corruption."

Mainly since both ends of the bipartisan system try to hijack the independence of some these powers by placing their ideologically kindred men any time they grab presidency. This includes Trump.

"The DC and NY offices need to be fired in entirety and replaced by mid America new blood."

A public officers corps which reachs its position by merits independent from political filiation is the best gurantee for a Constitutional rule and a vaccine against authoritarian aims/intends like coup d´etats.

turcopolier -> EK... , 11 August 2019 at 11:15 AM
EK

I suppose that from your position of "resistance" tht I appear to be a Trump supporter but I am not. I support the constitution and little else.

[Aug 11, 2019] Epstein s suicide is simply too convenient for too many wealthy, politically powerful people (of both parties) whom he might have implicated.

Notable quotes:
"... Last time we were promised someone whose integrity was “beyond question” we got Robert Mueller and a team of Hillary donors investigating a GOP President ..."
Aug 11, 2019 | twitter.com

Robert P. George ‏ 8:12 AM - 10 Aug 2019

Epstein's suicide--while on suicide watch in a prison--is simply too convenient for too many wealthy, politically powerful people (of both parties) whom he might have implicated. The investigation must be thorough, transparent, and by someone whose integrity is beyond question.

Robert P. George‏ @McCormickProf Aug 10

We won't get a special counsel in a case like this, but if I had the power to appoint one the choice would be easy: Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School. We need a person of his exceptional ability and integrity to get to the bottom of this and stop the further erosion of trust.

Will Chamberlain‏ @willchamberlain Aug 10

Replying to @McCormickProf

Last time we were promised someone whose integrity was “beyond question” we got Robert Mueller and a team of Hillary donors investigating a GOP President

[Aug 11, 2019] What hopefully happens now is called diffusion of responsibility .

Notable quotes:
"... What hopefully happens now is called "diffusion of responsibility". The AG is suitably "appalled". We find that the dumbest prison guard in the history of New York was rostered on that night. He was called away to the telephone- by what proved to be an overseas telemarketing call. The paper records got jammed in the printer. The supervisor had a flat tire on the way to work. The computer broke down. You know the drill. ..."
Aug 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

walrus , 10 August 2019 at 06:51 PM

What hopefully happens now is called "diffusion of responsibility". The AG is suitably "appalled". We find that the dumbest prison guard in the history of New York was rostered on that night. He was called away to the telephone- by what proved to be an overseas telemarketing call. The paper records got jammed in the printer. The supervisor had a flat tire on the way to work. The computer broke down. You know the drill.

I said "hopefully" because if an investigation discovers a perpetrator, then they will be dead in short order too. You always remove two links between victim and murderer. That way the crime is impossible to investigate.

What this now means in practical terms is that HRC is free to run again for President.

[Aug 11, 2019] Politico attack of Gabbard

What a neoliberal scam are those Politico authors are...
Aug 11, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Gabbard (D)(1): "Tulsi Gabbard's daredevil act" [ Politico ]. "Gabbard delivered a piercing, if inaccurate, appraisal of Kamala Harris' law enforcement record -- then turned it into a misleading, yet effective, online ad push." • That's all Politico says. I heard what Gabbard said, when she said it, and could have backed up every line of it with links. Gabbard was even nicer than she could have been, because she left out Mnuchin. I wish I could say this article was shocking, but it isn't.

[Aug 11, 2019] The party of JFK and RFK is dead. The leading present Democrats do not believe in countries

Notable quotes:
"... Joe Biden is both sadly demented and deeply compromised to the Chinese Communist Party through his use of his office as VP to fund his son's investment fund with money from China's government owned and run central bank. His condition and his compromised state will keep him from the WH. ..."
"... Gabbart is the only person that seems rational and slightly honest. Harris traded sex for political advancement I understand why she would be a favorite. No moral or ethical standards willing to do anything for what she wants. Perfect useful idiot. ..."
Aug 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Tulsi Gabbard is an exception to the subject of my title, but she is not going to be nominated. I am currently contributing to her campaign as a tribute to a gallant lady.

Joe Biden is both sadly demented and deeply compromised to the Chinese Communist Party through his use of his office as VP to fund his son's investment fund with money from China's government owned and run central bank. His condition and his compromised state will keep him from the WH.

They will both be irrelevant in the 2020 election as will as the Zombie candidates like Bullock, Delaney, etc. i.e. the "moderates."

The rest of the pastiche of 2020 "Democrat" candidates are essentially Globalist advocates of reduced US sovereignty as a step toward their "ideal" of a world socialist state in which they will be part of the new Nomenklatura and will enjoy exemptions from the inevitable shortages of everything resulting from universal "sharing" with the unfortunate masses who will be proletarians engaged in slave labor or doing the gardening at the dachas of people like Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O'Roarke and the like.

The barely hidden opposition by the leftist Democrats to border control is telling. The leftist Democrats want to take down the SW border of the US until it is nothing but a line on the map. They want to do that that in order to flood the country with illegals who can be voted for Democrat majorities in states where they control the state governments. Remember, the states run federal elections.

California is an example of dirty dealing intended to further rig election outcomes. Gavin Newsom, the apparent present leader of the Sacramento cabal, has signed into law a statute seeking to bar Trump from the ballot if he will not surrender his federal tax returns for public inspection. Was the possibility of illegally voting millions of non-citizens by driver licensing of illegals and their simultaneous voter-registration at the DMV not enough to ensure victory? Thank god that a change in the number of presidential electors allotted to California is not within the capability of the Sacramento cabal.

Americans and other people who will vote in 2020 will have a stark choice. Do you wish to remain living in a sovereign state or do you wish to become a building bloc in a world socialist empire?

Unfortunately the only choice available to the US sovereignty side will be Donald Trump, the real estate hustler from New York City. Weld is not a serious candidate. pl

Stueeeeee , 11 August 2019 at 05:58 PM

Both parties seem inclined to bring about "paradise on earth". To understand these internationalists, I cite Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor conversation with Christ:

..."'So that, in truth, Thou didst Thyself lay the foundation for the destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it. Yet what was offered Thee? There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness those forces are miracle, mystery and authority. Thou hast rejected all three and hast set the example for doing so. When the wise and dread spirit set Thee on the pinnacle of the temple and said to Thee, "If Thou wouldst know whether Thou art the Son of God then cast Thyself down, for it is written: the angels shall hold him up lest he fall and bruise himself, and Thou shalt know then whether Thou art the Son of God and shalt prove then how great is Thy faith in Thy Father." But Thou didst refuse and wouldst not cast Thyself down. Oh, of course, Thou didst proudly and well, like God; but the weak, unruly race of men, are they gods? Oh, Thou didst know then that in taking one step, in making one movement to cast Thyself down, Thou wouldst be tempting God and have lost all Thy faith in Him, and wouldst have been dashed to pieces against that earth which Thou didst come to save. And the wise spirit that tempted Thee would have rejoiced. But I ask again, are there many like Thee? And couldst Thou believe for one moment that men, too, could face such a temptation? Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most agonising spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the heart? Oh, Thou didst know that Thy deed would be recorded in books, would be handed down to remote times and the utmost ends of the earth, and Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous. And as man cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of his own for himself, and will worship deeds of sorcery and witchcraft, though he might be a hundred times over a rebel, heretic and infidel. Thou didst not come down from the Cross when they shouted to Thee, mocking and reviling Thee, "Come down from the cross and we will believe that Thou art He." Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him for ever. But Thou didst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature. Look round and judge; fifteen centuries have passed, look upon them. Whom hast Thou raised up to Thyself? I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him- Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. He is weak and vile. What though he is everywhere now rebelling against our power, and proud of his rebellion? It is the pride of a child and a schoolboy. They are little children rioting and barring out the teacher at school. But their childish delight will end; it will cost them dear. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union. The great conquerors, Timours and Ghenghis-Khans, whirled like hurricanes over the face of the earth striving to subdue its people, and they too were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal unity. Hadst Thou taken the world and Caesar's purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands? We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him. Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism. But then the beast will crawl to us and lick our feet and spatter them with tears of blood. And we shall sit upon the beast and raise the cup, and on it will be written, "Mystery." But then, and only then, the reign of peace and happiness will come for men. Thou art proud of Thine elect, but Thou hast only the elect, while we give rest to all. And besides, how many of those elect, those mighty ones who could become elect, have grown weary waiting for Thee, and have transferred and will transfer the powers of their spirit and the warmth of their heart to the other camp, and end by raising their free banner against Thee. Thou didst Thyself lift up that banner. But with us all will be happy and will no more rebel nor destroy one another as under Thy freedom. Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them. Freedom, free thought, and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!"

"'Receiving bread from us, they will see clearly that we take the bread made by their hands from them, to give it to them, without any miracle. They will see that we do not change the stones to bread, but in truth they will be more thankful for taking it from our hands than for the bread itself! For they will remember only too well that in old days, without our help, even the bread they made turned to stones in their hands, while since they have come back to us, the very stones have turned to bread in their hands. Too, too well will they know the value of complete submission! And until men know that, they will be unhappy. Who is most to blame for their not knowing it?-speak! Who scattered the flock and sent it astray on unknown paths? But the flock will come together again and will submit once more, and then it will be once for all. Then we shall give them the quiet humble happiness of weak creatures such as they are by nature. Oh, we shall persuade them at last not to be proud, for Thou didst lift them up and thereby taught them to be proud. We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions. They will tremble impotently before our wrath, their minds will grow fearful, they will be quick to shed tears like women and children, but they will be just as ready at a sign from us to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song. Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child's game, with children's songs and innocent dance. Oh, we shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves. And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as their saviours who have taken on themselves their sins before God. And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient- and they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully. The most painful secrets of their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they. It is prophesied that Thou wilt come again in victory, Thou wilt come with Thy chosen, the proud and strong, but we will say that they have only saved themselves, but we have saved all. We are told that the harlot who sits upon the beast, and holds in her hands the mystery, shall be put to shame, that the weak will rise up again, and will rend her royal purple and will strip naked her loathsome body. But then I will stand up and point out to Thee the thousand millions of happy children who have known no sin. And we who have taken their sins upon us for their happiness will stand up before Thee and say: "Judge us if Thou canst and darest." Know that I fear Thee not. Know that I too have been in the wilderness, I too have lived on roots and locusts, I too prized the freedom with which Thou hast blessed men, and I too was striving to stand among Thy elect, among the strong and powerful, thirsting "to make up the number." But I awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those who have corrected Thy work. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness of the humble. What I say to Thee will come to pass, and our dominion will be built up. I repeat, to-morrow Thou shalt see that obedient flock who at a sign from me will hasten to heap up the hot cinders about the pile on which I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou. To-morrow I shall burn Thee. Dixi.'"*...

Sbin , 11 August 2019 at 06:33 PM
Dem candidate clown car is every bit as vile as the Gop clown car in 16.

Gabbart is the only person that seems rational and slightly honest. Harris traded sex for political advancement I understand why she would be a favorite. No moral or ethical standards willing to do anything for what she wants. Perfect useful idiot.

[Aug 11, 2019] Some government inspector in Texas had agreed to testify about the details of a gigantic corruption ring that was closely connected with LBJ. I can't remember the exact details, but not long afterward, he was found dead, shot seven times.

Notable quotes:
"... Malcolm Wallace and LBJ had been closely linked. In the early 50’s, LBJ had gone to great extents to save Wallace’s life after he shot down a professional golfer who was having an affair with LBJ’s alcoholic sister. Although guilty of murder, Wallace ended up with a minor sentence. ..."
"... Interestingly, a Wallace fingerprint was apparently found at the TSBD “Sniper nest” from where Oswald allegedly shot JFK. Probably some insurance taken against LBJ by his co-conspirators… ..."
Aug 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

Ron Unz: August 10, 2019 at 11:47 pm GMT

This reminds me a little of a almost forgotten incident from the 1960s

Some government inspector in Texas had agreed to testify about the details of a gigantic corruption ring that was closely connected with LBJ. I can't remember the exact details, but not long afterward, he was found dead, shot seven times.

The local Texas court ruled it an apparent suicide and that's exactly how it was reported in the Washington Post and the other national newspapers

Iris : August 11, 2019 at 12:16

His name was Henry Marshall.

In 1984, Billie Sol Estes told a grand jury investigating the 1961 shooting death of Henry Marshall, an official with the Department of Agriculture, that LBJ’s associate Malcolm Wallace was Marshall’s murderer.

Malcolm Wallace and LBJ had been closely linked. In the early 50’s, LBJ had gone to great extents to save Wallace’s life after he shot down a professional golfer who was having an affair with LBJ’s alcoholic sister. Although guilty of murder, Wallace ended up with a minor sentence.

Interestingly, a Wallace fingerprint was apparently found at the TSBD “Sniper nest” from where Oswald allegedly shot JFK. Probably some insurance taken against LBJ by his co-conspirators…

lysias , says: August 11, 2019 at 1:34 am GMT

@Iris Shortly before he died, Estes collaborated with a French journalist on a book called “Le dernier temoin” (“The Last Witness”) in which Estes claimed that he had participated in a meeting with LBJ in which the JFK assassination was planned. The book was published in French (I have a copy), but no English translation has ever appeared.

[Aug 11, 2019] Critical U.S. Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online Despite Official Denials

Aug 11, 2019 | www.vice.com

"The top voting machine company [Election Systems & Software] in the country insists that its election systems are never connected to the internet. But researchers found 35 of the systems have been connected to the internet for months and possibly years, including in some swing states." • The only reason I can imagine, besides corruption, for election officials to buy these things is that they want the capability to fix elections, and that goes for both parties.

[Aug 11, 2019] Maybe Putin should urge the Russian Paralament to pass an Epstein Act and start sanctioning the hell out of US leaders.

Aug 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

The Alarmist , says: August 10, 2019 at 8:58 pm GMT

Maybe Putin should urge the Russian Paralament to pass an Epstein Act and start sanctioning the hell out of US leaders.

[Aug 07, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard on Foreign Policy and War

Notable quotes:
"... Ms. Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii, has railed against "regime change wars" and warned of a nuclear arms race ..."
"... Ms. Gabbard has focused on ending what she calls "regime change wars ..."
"... She has introduced legislation in Congress that would prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars for weapons that violate a 1987 nuclear arms-control pact. ..."
Jun 26, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

Ms. Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii, has railed against "regime change wars" and warned of a nuclear arms race

Ms. Gabbard has focused on ending what she calls "regime change wars ," the "new Cold War" and the nuclear arms race.

She has introduced legislation in Congress that would prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars for weapons that violate a 1987 nuclear arms-control pact.

And she has spoken out forcefully in opposition to President Trump's Iran strategy and North Korean policy , and what she sees as a general culture of warmongering.

[Aug 07, 2019] On Saker critique of Tulsi

Notable quotes:
"... The Saker also strongly criticized Milosevic for seeking an accommodation with the West after sustaining a brutal 70+ day all-out aerial assault by NATO and ground assault by Albania. He was silent on Russia's cowardly abandonment of Serbia leaving it to face the West utterly alone. ..."
"... The Saker can deliver a good analysis from time to time but can fail spectacularly as well. IIRC, he predicted that no one in Ukraine would lift a finger to stop Western domination (wrong), completely missed Crimea (just about everyone missed that in his defense) and that Russia would never intervene in Syria as it had no compelling national interest to protect (wrong again). He is right just enough to remain interesting. ..."
Aug 07, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Patient Observer August 6, 2019 at 6:30 pm

The Saker is back on his high horse – criticizing Gabbard for not going down in flames as she tries to navigate the myriad of traps laid out the the US Government and MSM.

http://thesaker.is/what-tulsi-gabbards-caving-in-to-the-israel-lobby-really-shows/

The Saker also strongly criticized Milosevic for seeking an accommodation with the West after sustaining a brutal 70+ day all-out aerial assault by NATO and ground assault by Albania. He was silent on Russia's cowardly abandonment of Serbia leaving it to face the West utterly alone.

The Saker can deliver a good analysis from time to time but can fail spectacularly as well. IIRC, he predicted that no one in Ukraine would lift a finger to stop Western domination (wrong), completely missed Crimea (just about everyone missed that in his defense) and that Russia would never intervene in Syria as it had no compelling national interest to protect (wrong again). He is right just enough to remain interesting.

[Aug 07, 2019] On September 13, 2018, Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard took to the floor of the House to rebuke the administration, accusing President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence of protecting "al-Qaeda and other jihadist forces in Syria," all the while "threatening Russia, Syria, and Iran, with military force if they dare attack these terrorists."

Aug 07, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al August 2, 2019 at 6:09 am

East-West Committee via Antiwar.com: Re-posting: Interview with Tulsi Gabbard
https://eastwestaccord.com/re-posting-interview-with-tulsi-gabbard/

james carden

August 1, 2019

On September 13, 2018, Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard took to the floor of the House to rebuke the administration, accusing President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence of protecting "al-Qaeda and other jihadist forces in Syria," all the while "threatening Russia, Syria, and Iran, with military force if they dare attack these terrorists."
####

Plenty more timely reminder at the link.

[Aug 07, 2019] Gabbard's sister is absolutely right

Aug 07, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Northern Star July 31, 2019 at 10:22 pm

https://www.foxnews.com/media/tulsi-gabbards-sister-hammers-biased-and-unfair-cnn-before-second-debate-even-gets-underway
Gabbard's sister is absolutely right.
Tulsi was more or less ignored by the CNN DNC programmed moderators throughout the Detroit debate last night.
It was clear that Biden was the senile soup du jour to be force fed down the vox populi throats of the
American electorate.
Northern Star August 1, 2019 at 4:38 am

https://www.youtube.com/embed/WMT5-C3igZ4?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Tulsi v Copmala

Tulsi. 1
Copmala. 0

Patient Observer August 1, 2019 at 2:10 pm
https://www.rt.com/usa/465579-kamala-harris-destroyed-tulsi/

In under a minute, Gabbard shredded Harris to pieces for jailing more than 1,500 nonviolent marijuana offenders while admitting in a radio interview that she had smoked marijuana in college, and for her "tough-on-crime" stances. "She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row she kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor and she fought to keep the cash bail system in place," Gabbard continued, leaving Harris unable to counter.

The MSM is having a difficult time ignoring her. She may have a chance. I will make another donation to her campaign.

Northern Star August 2, 2019 at 3:04 am
A careful detailed analysis of the Detroit debate TAB* put on Copmala by Tulsi:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/WiDrd73kacY?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

TAB: Total Ass Beating

Mark Chapman August 2, 2019 at 2:44 pm
She beat Harris like a red-headed stepchild. Her monotonous reiteration "I'm proud of my record" reminded me of the Breakfast Moment in Happy Gilmour, when Shooter McGavin mocks Happy for daring to challenge him in golf.

Shooter: "Oh, you're on. But you're in big trouble, pal. I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast."

Happy: "You eat pieces of shit for breakfast??"

Shooter: "No".

https://www.youtube.com/embed/wMAhCCZDwtU?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

thern Star August 2, 2019 at 4:31 am Very cogent..
A lot of the crucial but easily overlooked put on the table.
Never underestimate the significance of the obvious!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/DBtKMo5PVH4?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Like Reply August 2, 2019 at 5:05 am Shouda' seen this coming Tulsi is a Russian puppet!
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/01/progressives-say-kamala-harris-team-inventing-conspiracies-about-tulsi-gabbard

Like Reply August 2, 2019 at 4:44 pm I think a lot of people DID see that coming, to the extent that the only behavior acceptable today in the American political milieu is a rehash of that sophomore's question, "Can you say in one sentence or less what makes America the Greatest Country In The World?" The American media typically pleats that 'the system is broken', but not during election season. Then, America is the greatest and running on all cylinders, and the successful candidate is the one who will convince voters that, rather than fix the whatever system, he/she/ze/zir (it's only a matter of time) will take a system that is the best in the world and make itr squeeze out even more happiness and satisfaction for Americans. Anyway, if you go off-message with that, you are under the soulless influence of the Russians.

Anyway, it looks as if the democrats have gone to the well too often with that Russian bullshit, and people are starting to get impatient with the cop-out – it's just an excuse for having no good answer. You can always say, "X is because Russia". I think Harris just bit the dust, and will lose a lot of support over this and gradually drop out. I got a kick out of the "Gabbard is a non-issue, and won't even make the second debates" or something to that effect. Whoever smugly said that was apparently asleep when a Ukrainian comedian who plays a president on TV won the presidency in a landslide. The incumbent once thought it was safe to laugh politely at him, because he was a non-issue, too.

I saw this story also on the same site, although it was not necessary to click on it, for obvious reasons.

"A salute to the bravery of Olga Misik, 17, who during recent bloody protests for free Moscow elections sat before Putin's armed-to-the-teeth goons and calmly read aloud the Russian constitution, including Article 31 affirming the right to peaceful political assembly. She was later arrested and allegedly beaten. "Injustice always concerns everyone," said Olga, who takes the long view of repression. "Today the Moscow City Duma, tomorrow the governor of the region It is only a matter of time."

'Bloody protests for free Moscow elections'?? They were bloody? Really? and the issue was free Moscow elections? Not candidates being allowed to run despite having been disqualified for not reaching the signatory threshold? The game of coming up with enough signatures to demonstrate a valid support base is an old one, trawling the obituaries and all manner of dodges to come up with enough for people who don't really have any support, but want a soapbox from which to squawk their message and then say they were cheated of victory by the Kremlin. Putin's armed-to-the-teeth goons? Really? American police called to control demonstrations are unarmed? Since when? Does arming them make them goons? I can't see their teeth – how does the reporter know they are armed to the teeth? Olga takes the long view of repression, does she? From the jaded pinnacle of 17? I'm surprised they did not ask her views on gay sex – she's old enough. Just.

Embarrassing western hyperbole – a Russian review of the PISA tests that descended to the same level might read, "A salute to the simple-mindedness of the Amerikantsi 'students', who must have gone to school at a mental institution, or been taught by the homeless lunatics that abound in and around Amerikantsi cities. Once again they managed to score so poorly that one might reasonably wonder if they arrived at the testing institution by accident, thinking instead that they were being taken to see one of the violence-and-profanity-riddled Amerikantsi movies that pollute the television and cause the Amerikantsi schoolchildren to shoot each other as if they lived inside a video game where it is not real blood. It's difficult to imagine a sensible explanation for such a dismal performance, in which they finished below the OECD average in every category."

But you won't see anything like that in a Russian newspaper, or hear it on a Russian news program. Because they don't act like the country is run by hysterical 12-year-olds. However, if the Americans want to pin their new hopes for Putin's political immolation on some 17-year-old attention-junkie bint, they should knock themselves out. They are merely hardening Russian opinion against them, and they may not care but some day they will. And then they will wail, "Why do they hate us? It must be because of our freedom!"

I was particularly intrigued by the mention of the Democrats getting caught fabricating fake Russian troll accounts to pretend the Russians were trying to influence some state election or other, I forget what, supposedly reported in the Times. I didn't see that, and I don't recall anyone mentioning it here.

Like Reply Mark Chapman August 2, 2019 at 3:10 pm A very cogent argument for (a) keeping the debates agenda-free and independently managed, and (2) a less-insane democratic party.

[Aug 07, 2019] Taibbi via Antiwar.com: The rise and fall of superhero Robert Mueller

Aug 07, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al August 2, 2019 at 5:31 am

Taibbi via Antiwar.com: The rise and fall of superhero Robert Mueller
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-superhero-robert

The testimony of Robert Mueller should have marked the end of a national nightmare. Instead, a new legend was born

This myth died on television .

Mueller on the stand was a potted plant. Reporters saw Moses and Jesus. If you need evidence we're in a religious mania, look no further. This was a pure exercise in restoring an idol for worship

In mid-March, just before Mueller's probe wrapped up, CNN found a whopping zero percent of Americans identified "Russian investigation" as their primary concern heading into 2020. The network wrote (emphasis mine):..,

ussiagate should be dead. Instead, it's gaining new life, with impeachment looking like the New Testament phase of the religion
####

Much, much more at the link.

Mark Chapman August 2, 2019 at 5:11 pm
Every time I read a piece by Matt Taibbi, I ask myself, "Why don't you read Matt Taibbi more often?" By God, he can write – I nearly horked up a lung when he described John Brennan as a 'paranoid outpatient'. His descriptions of the frantic dissembling amongst the Democrats create passages in which you can actually smell the despair and incoherent rage, like burnt hair.

The whole Mueller testimonial dirge will turn out to have only divided Americans further. Republicans will chuckle with satisfaction at watching Mueller fly into a window like a careless jackdaw, while Democrats will sense that something crazy happened but that this is a time for blind loyalty. And never the twain shall meet. The fact that that was supposed to be East and West makes the irony but more pronounced.

[Aug 07, 2019] Gaslighting Americans with Russiagate

Aug 07, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

I figured that since 'gaslighting' is a relatively new term, and although I already had a general idea what it meant from context, it would be best to look it up. I was surprised to learn the concept of ' gaslighting ' has been around since 1938.

"a form of psychological manipulation in which a person seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's belief."

In America's case, gaslighting – like charity – begins at home, and the full force of US government efforts to convince the skeptical that America is more powerful and influential than ever, is still kicking ass and taking names, is felt by Americans.

Mark Chapman July 31, 2019 at 10:40 am

I repeat the assessment of Veteran Intelligence Professional for Sanity (VIPS), to the effect that the hack – if you can call it that – could not have been carried out over the internet, as the data-transfer rate was far too high. In fact, it had all the fingerprints of a portable device such as a thumb drive, coupled directly to the server at a convenient USB port. And then Democratic staffer Seth Rich died, with no convincing explanation for his death. Conservative American techhies tried to explain it away with a barrage of bullshit about how that level of bandwidth could be realized over the internet and how various tags and suchlike proved it was the Russians, but the Russians certainly would know better by now than to leave those kinds of traces, and the US intelligence agencies are quite proud of their ability to insert identifiers to make a transmission appear to have originated someplace else. It's kind of like how Israel and the Ukrainian SBU destroyed people's faith in voice intercepts.

Further musing, from the sublime

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-01/if-there-really-was-evidence-russian-hacking-nsa-would-have-it

To the attempt-to-have-one's-cake-and-eat-it, decidedly less sublime.

https://thefederalist.com/2017/03/21/russians-did-not-hack-election/

The latter reference, despite its hopeful headline, merely argues the election was not 'hacked'; it was 'meddled with', and since the Russians wanted Trump to win, they probably did get up to mischief, we're pretty sure.

This one even speculates that Russia wants American voters to know it can hack them anytime it likes.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/election-cybersecurity/

The electorate is now so polarized, demoralized and witless with fear and fury that voting in America is merely a knee-jerk homage to democracy. Nobody will be remotely surprised if the winner is not who they voted for, even if everyone says "Hey! I voted for him/her too!!" They will just look at each other, nod significantly, and whisper "The Russians". And when you think about it, that's just about where the US government wants them, except for the part about their legitimacy being conferred by Vladimir Putin. That's going to be a hard one for the winner to spin away.

et Al August 1, 2019 at 4:27 am
US intelligence agencies are quite proud of their ability to insert identifiers to make a transmission appear to have originated someplace else. ..

Yes, the famous 'Vault 7' set of NSA tools that were leaked, including a reversing tool so that they can check if someone is trying to pass off their sneaky cyber stuff as American when it's not.

Northern Star July 31, 2019 at 3:17 pm
"PART II: Gaslighting
Author's Note: Because "NATO" these days is little more than a box of spare parts out of which Washington assembles "coalitions of the willing", it's easier for me to write "NATO" than "Washington plus/minus these or those minions".

Both Devastating .Absolutely spot on devastating: (Above is excerpt from the first link)

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2018/07/16/psychoanalysing-nato-projection-and-gaslighting/

"The majority of Americans accept mass murder under the pretext of the right to protect, because their ability to form rational and reasoned opinions has been engineered out of them. This is now the definition of US exceptionalism. It is their ability to manipulate the world into accepting their lawlessness and global hegemony agenda. In seeking to impose its own image upon our world the US has drifted so far from its founding principles, one wonders how they will ever return to them. They have employed a recognised form of torture to ensure capitulation to their mission of world domination which entails the mental, physical and spiritual torture of target civilian populations.

In conclusion, the US has indeed achieved exceptionalism. The US has become an exceptional global executioner and persecutor of Humanity. Imperialism is a euphemism for the depths of abuse the US is inflicting upon the people of this world."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47139.htm

Mark, Your piece is every bit as eloquent and relentless in denouncing the *absolutely* unredeemable, thus subject to that demanded by moral economy.

[Aug 07, 2019] Integrity Initiative forthcoming reviews of forthcoming Assange book: Luke Harding can be relied on to add his 2 cents' worth of conspiracy paranoid garbage, Shaun Walker will be parsing the book for dill references and non-Russia experts like Marina Hyde and Natalie Nougat-head will want a crack as well at reviewing the book.

Aug 07, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Jennifer Hor August 2, 2019 at 1:01 pm

Look out for the bad reviews from The Fraudian's writers: Luke Harding can be relied on to add his 2 cents' worth of conspiracy paranoid garbage, Shaun Walker will be parsing the book for dill references and non-Russia experts like Marina Hyde and Natalie Nougat-head will want a crack as well at reviewing the book.

Probably the only half-decent reviews will be from Mary Dejevski and Prof. Stephen Cohen but theirs will be buried in a back page or inaccessible behind an Error 404 wall.

[Aug 07, 2019] It's the 6th Division now!

Aug 07, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al August 2, 2019 at 3:48 am

It's the 6th Division now!

The Register: New British Army psyops unit fires rebrandogun, smoke clears to reveal I'm sorry, Dave
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/08/01/british_army_shows_us_its_cyber_ring/

This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it

6 (UK) Division is the new organisational home for the Army's "asymmetric edge", comprising all things "Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, Information Operations, Electronic Warfare, Cyber and Unconventional Warfare".

Launched this morning, 6 Div is a rebranding of the formation formerly known as Force Troops Command, which covered a hotchpotch of Royal Signals, Intelligence Corps and other units, including the infamous 77 Brigade
####

Don't forget to hit the comments for hilarity!

Also, the timing of the announcement says plenty, i.e. slipping it in to the news stream when people have already gone on holiday and all the BREXIT and other bollocks. I've not seen this reported on the tv in the UK – which is currently facing severe flooding etc.

et Al August 2, 2019 at 4:07 am
Is it just me or is all the PPNN reporting that 'Putin's support has dropped to levels not seen since 2011!'. Of course they don't actually give you any numbers and cherry pick dodgy poll numbers but there really is this Pavlovian reaction anytime there is a demonstration in Russia, like undertakers gathering at an allegedly dangerous road crossing waiting for some cyclist to be dragged under a trash lorry so that they can tut tut and then profit from the cyclist's misfortune. Nix that, the PPNN are just professional versions of MacBeth's witches, something which they don't understand is a story .
Mark Chapman August 2, 2019 at 3:01 pm
Putin is in as much danger of being unceremoniously chucked out of office as he is of choking to death on his grandmother's knitting. The west is ever hopeful, and dutifully rallies to the glorification of every new dissident firebrand, but whether or not they know it, they are just going through the motions. The only group, and I mean the only one, that would benefit from Putin's overthrow would be the disaffected kreakliy and the poncy forgotten semi-intellectuals. They would be feted by the west as political visionaries, and perhaps given minor government positions to satisfy their vanity. But who else would make out like a bandit? The military? Hardly – the west, after years of giggling about Russia's decrepit military, lapsed into an uneasy silence on the subject just about the time that long-distance Kalibr cruise-missile attack took place from the Caspian Sea into Syria, and a west given meddling-room would want to disband the Russian military, if anything, down to a token force of absolutely-trustworthy sycophants who would probably be issued with American weapons. The oligarchs? Hardly – western business would be snapping up former state assets while simultaneously carrying out an 'anti-corruption drive' under the new President's imprimatur. Small businesses? Hardly – corporate interest would be in melding large state interests into the Corporate Borg, and their method is to squeeze out small business in order to expand market share. The people? Hardly – Russia would be a convenient place to move all the refugee immigrants from that entire hemisphere, while the stubborn loyalty of the population to Putin would not be forgotten.

It is no coincidence that it is always the same people who show up to bitch and carp about how dreadful Putin is, and how Russia needs American-style freedom and democracy and non-stop Pride parades and all the trappings of fresh admission to Club West. They are the only people who would stand to benefit from driving Putin out. Nobody else is interested.

Mark Chapman August 2, 2019 at 4:50 pm
They're just trying to get some mileage out of Olga what's-her-name, and make it look like a drop in Putin's poll numbers happened exactly at the moment this young political firebrand emerged. Pretty sad, really, but you can't tell 'em, and it wouldn't make any difference. They have to try, it's the same instinct that makes a dog lick its nose if you smear cheese on it. The western media would rush to interview and endorse a talking Russian toad if it said "I hate Putin".

[Aug 06, 2019] The Declining Empire Of Chaos Is Going Nuts Over Iran

Notable quotes:
"... Tensions were then focused on Syria , where a mercenary army of at least 200,000 men, armed and trained by the US, UK, Israel, France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost managed to completely topple the country. ..."
"... As the Americans, British, French and Israelis conducted their bombing missions in Syria, the danger of a deliberate attack on Russian positions always remained, something that would have had devastating consequences for the region and beyond. It is no secret that US military planners have repeatedly argued for a direct conflict with Moscow in a contained regional theater. (Clinton called for the downing of Russian jets over Syria, and former US officials claimed that some Russians had to " pay a little price ".) ..."
"... Trump's dramatic U-turn following his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un (a public relations/photo opportunity) began to paint a fairly comical and unreliable picture of US power, revealing to the world the new US president's strategy. The president threatens to nuke a country, but only as a negotiating tactic to bring his opponent to the negotiating table and thereby clinch a deal. He then presents himself to his domestic audience as the "great" deal-maker. ..."
"... With Iran, the recent target of the US administration, the bargaining method is the same, though with decidedly different results. In the cases of Ukraine and North Korea, the two most powerful lobbies in Washington, the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, have had little to say. Of course the neocons and the arms lobbyists are always gunning for war, but these two powerful state-backed lobbies were notably silent with regard to these countries, less towards Syria obviously. As distinguished political scientist John J. Mearsheimer has repeatedly explained , the Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals. ..."
"... These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated by decades of conflict. ..."
"... The reasons vary with each case, and I have previously explained extensively why the possibilities for conflict are unthinkable. With Ukraine, a conflict on European soil between Russia and NATO was unthinkable , bringing to mind the type of devastation that was seen during the Second World War. Good sense prevailed, and even NATO somewhat refused to fully arm the Ukrainian army with weapons that would have given them an overwhelming advantage over the Donbass militias. ..."
"... In Syria, any involvement with ground troops would have been collective suicide, given the overwhelming air power deployed in the country by Russia. Recall that since the Second World War, the US has never fought a war in an airspace that was seriously contested (in Vietnam, US air losses were only elevated because of Sino-Soviet help), allowing for ground troops to receive air cover and protection . A ground assault in Syria would have therefore been catastrophic without the requisite control of Syria's skies. ..."
"... Because a war with Iran would be difficult to de-escalate, we can conclude that the possibility of war being waged against the country is unlikely if not impossible. The level of damage the belligerents would inflict on each other would make any diplomatic resolution of the conflict difficult. While the powerful Israeli and Saudi lobbies in the US may be beating the war drums, an indication of what would happen if war followed can be seen in Yemen. Egypt and the UAE were forced to withdraw from the coalition fighting the Houthis after the UAE suffered considerable damage from legitimate retaliatory missile strikes from the Yemen's Army Missile Forces. ..."
"... An open war against Iran continues to be a red line that the ruling financial elites in the US, Israelis and Saudis don't want to cross, having so much at stake. ..."
"... With an election looming, Trump cannot risk triggering a new conflict and betraying one of his most important electoral promises. The Western elite does not seem to have any intention of destroying the petrodollar-based world economy with which it generates its own profits and controls global finance. ..."
"... Even if we consider the possibility of Netanyahu and Bin Salman being mentally unstable, someone within the royal palace in Riyadh or the government in Tel Aviv would have counseled them on the political and personal consequences of an attack on Iran. ..."
Aug 06, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

In 2014 we were almost at the point of no return in Ukraine following the coup d'etat supported and funded by NATO and involving extremist right-wing Ukrainian nationalists. The conflict in the Donbass risked escalating into a conflict between NATO and the Russian Federation, every day in the summer and autumn of 2014 threatening to be doomsday. Rather than respond to the understandable impulse to send Russian troops into Ukraine to defend the population of Donbass, Putin had the presense of mind to pursue the less direct and more sensible strategy of supporting the material capacity of the residents of Donbass to resist the depredations of the Ukrainian army and their neo-Nazi Banderite thugs. Meanwhile, Europe's inept leaders initially egged on Ukraine's destabilization, only to get cold feet after reflecting on the possibility of having a conflict between Moscow and Washington fought on European soil.

With the resistance in Donbass managing to successfully hold back Ukrainian assaults, the conflict began to freeze, almost to the point of a complete ceasefire, even as Ukrainian provocations continue to this day.

Tensions were then focused on Syria , where a mercenary army of at least 200,000 men, armed and trained by the US, UK, Israel, France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost managed to completely topple the country. Russian intervention in 2015 managed to save the country with no time to spare, destroying large numbers of terrorists and reorganizing the Syrian armed forces and training and equipping them with the necessary means to beat back the jihadi waves. The Russians also ensured control of the skies through their network of Pantsir-S1, Pantsir-S2, S-300 and S-400 air-defence systems, together with their impressive jamming (Krasukha-4), command and control information management system (Strelets C4ISR System) and electronic-warfare technologies (1RL257 Krasukha-4).

As the Americans, British, French and Israelis conducted their bombing missions in Syria, the danger of a deliberate attack on Russian positions always remained, something that would have had devastating consequences for the region and beyond. It is no secret that US military planners have repeatedly argued for a direct conflict with Moscow in a contained regional theater. (Clinton called for the downing of Russian jets over Syria, and former US officials claimed that some Russians had to " pay a little price ".)

Since Trump became president, the rhetoric of war has soared considerably, even as the awareness remains that any new conflict would sink Trump's chances of re-election. Despite this, Trump's bombings in Syria were real and potentially very harmful to the Syrian state. Nevertheless, they were foiled by Russia's electronic-warfare capability, which was able to send veering away from their intended target more than 70% of the latest-generation missiles launched by the British, French, Americans and Israelis.

One of the most terrifying moments for the future of humanity came a few months later when Trump started hurling threats and abuses at Kim Jong-un , threatening to reduce Pyongyang to ashes. Trump, moreover, delivered his fiery threats in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

Trump's dramatic U-turn following his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un (a public relations/photo opportunity) began to paint a fairly comical and unreliable picture of US power, revealing to the world the new US president's strategy. The president threatens to nuke a country, but only as a negotiating tactic to bring his opponent to the negotiating table and thereby clinch a deal. He then presents himself to his domestic audience as the "great" deal-maker.

With Iran, the recent target of the US administration, the bargaining method is the same, though with decidedly different results. In the cases of Ukraine and North Korea, the two most powerful lobbies in Washington, the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, have had little to say. Of course the neocons and the arms lobbyists are always gunning for war, but these two powerful state-backed lobbies were notably silent with regard to these countries, less towards Syria obviously. As distinguished political scientist John J. Mearsheimer has repeatedly explained , the Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals.

The difference between the case of Iran and the aforementioned cases of Ukraine, Syria and North Korea is precisely the direct involvement of these two lobbies in the decision-making process underway in the US.

These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated by decades of conflict.

What readers can be assured of is that in the cases of Ukraine, Syria, North Korea and Iran, the US is unable to militarily impose its geopolitical or economic will.

The reasons vary with each case, and I have previously explained extensively why the possibilities for conflict are unthinkable. With Ukraine, a conflict on European soil between Russia and NATO was unthinkable , bringing to mind the type of devastation that was seen during the Second World War. Good sense prevailed, and even NATO somewhat refused to fully arm the Ukrainian army with weapons that would have given them an overwhelming advantage over the Donbass militias.

In Syria, any involvement with ground troops would have been collective suicide, given the overwhelming air power deployed in the country by Russia. Recall that since the Second World War, the US has never fought a war in an airspace that was seriously contested (in Vietnam, US air losses were only elevated because of Sino-Soviet help), allowing for ground troops to receive air cover and protection . A ground assault in Syria would have therefore been catastrophic without the requisite control of Syria's skies.

In North Korea, the country's tactical and strategic nuclear and conventional deterrence discourages any missile attack. Any overland attack is out of the question, given the high number of active as well as reserve personnel in the DPRK army. If the US struggled to control a completely defeated Iraq in 2003, how much more difficult would be to deal with a country with a resilient population that is indisposed to bowing to the US? The 2003 Iraq campaign would really be a "cakewalk" in comparison. Another reason why a missile attack on North Korea is impossible is because of the conventional power that Pyongyang possesses in the form of tens of thousands of missiles and artillery pieces that could easily reduce Seoul to rubble in a matter of minutes. This would then lead to a war between the US and the DPRK being fought on the Korean Peninsula. Moon Jae-in, like Merkel and Sarkozy in the case of Ukraine, did everything in his power to prevent such a devastating conflict.

Concerning tensions between the US and Iran and the resulting threats of war, these should be taken as bluster and bluff. America's European allies are heavily involved in Iran and depend on the Middle East for their oil and gas imports. A US war against Iran would have devastating consequences for the world economy, with the Europeans seeing their imports halved or reduced. As Professor Chossudovsky of the strategic think tank Global Research has so ably argued , an attack on Iran is unsustainable, as the oil sectors of the UAE and Saudi Arabia would be hit and shut down. Exports would instantly end after the pipelines going West are bombed by the Houthis and the Strait of Hormuz closed. The economies of these two countries would implode and their ruling class wiped out by internal revolts. The state of Israel as well as US bases in the region would see themselves overwhelmed with missiles coming from Syria, Lebanon, the Golan Heights and Iran. The Tel Aviv government would last a few hours before capitulating under the pressure of its own citizens, who, like the Europeans, are unused to suffering war at home.

Because a war with Iran would be difficult to de-escalate, we can conclude that the possibility of war being waged against the country is unlikely if not impossible. The level of damage the belligerents would inflict on each other would make any diplomatic resolution of the conflict difficult. While the powerful Israeli and Saudi lobbies in the US may be beating the war drums, an indication of what would happen if war followed can be seen in Yemen. Egypt and the UAE were forced to withdraw from the coalition fighting the Houthis after the UAE suffered considerable damage from legitimate retaliatory missile strikes from the Yemen's Army Missile Forces.

An open war against Iran continues to be a red line that the ruling financial elites in the US, Israelis and Saudis don't want to cross, having so much at stake.

With an election looming, Trump cannot risk triggering a new conflict and betraying one of his most important electoral promises. The Western elite does not seem to have any intention of destroying the petrodollar-based world economy with which it generates its own profits and controls global finance. And finally, US military planners do not intend to suffer a humiliating defeat in Iran that would reveal the extent to which US military power is based on propaganda built over the years through Hollywood movies and wars successfully executed against relatively defenceless countries. Even if we consider the possibility of Netanyahu and Bin Salman being mentally unstable, someone within the royal palace in Riyadh or the government in Tel Aviv would have counseled them on the political and personal consequences of an attack on Iran.

It is telling that Washington, London, Tel Aviv and Riyadh have to resort to numerous but ultimately useless provocations against Iran, as they can only rely on hybrid attacks in order to economically isolate it from the rest of the world.

Paradoxically, this strategy has had devastating consequences for the role of the US dollar as a reserve currency together with the SWIFT system. In today's multipolar environment, acting in such an imperious manner leads to the acceleration of de-dollarization as a way of circumventing sanctions and bans imposed by the US.

A reserve currency is used to facilitate transactions. If the disadvantages come to exceed the benefits, it will progressively be used less and less, until it is replaced by a basket of currencies that more closely reflect the multipolar geopolitical reality.

The warmongers in Washington are exasperated by their continuing inability to curb the resilience and resistance of the people in Venezuela, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Donbass, countries and regions understood by the healthy part of the globe as representing the axis of resistance to US Imperialism.

Batman11 , 14 minutes ago link

A multi-polar world became a uni-polar world with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama said it was the end of history.

That didn't last long, did it?

The US came up with a great plan for an open, globalised world.

China went from almost nothing to become a global superpower.

It was a great plan for China, which is now the problem for the US.

Batman11 , 24 minutes ago link

The cry of US elites can be heard across the world.

Mummy.

What's gone wrong?

I am used to always getting my own way.

Thought.Adjuster , 55 minutes ago link

If Folks would just accept a unipolar World, we could all live together in peace.

ZeroPorridge , 6 minutes ago link

Monopoly means utter slavery.

Like in a living body, each cells on their own, grouped by function, none really being the boss of the rest.

uhland62 , 1 hour ago link

America must always threaten someone with war. Syria, Iran, Venezuela, China, Russia, so many to choose from.

Conflicts must never be resolved; they must always kept simmering, so a hot war can be triggered quickly. All Presidents are turned in the first three months after sworn in.

Jazzman , 1 hour ago link

Without required air superiority they are what? Say it! Say it loud!

Dude-dude , 49 minutes ago link

It's what happens as empires mature. Governance becomes bloated, corrupt and inept (often leading to wars). Maturity time has become significantly reduced due to the rate of information technology advance. America is five years away from going insolvent according to most models and forecasts. All new debt after 2024 will be used to pay the interest on existing debts and liabilities. There is simply no stopping it. The US already pays close to 500 billion in annual interest on debts and liabilities. Factor in a 600 billion or 700 billion dollar annual military budget, and unrestrained deficit spending clocking in at over a trillion, and, well, it isn't going to work for long. Considering most new well paying jobs are government jobs... The end is either full socialism / fascism (folks still don't get how similar these are), a currency crisis and panic, depression and institutional deterioration. The only good news to libertarians I guess - if you can call it good - is that the blotted government along with the crony corporations will mostly and eventually collapse. Libertarian governance might not be a choice by an electorate, it might simply become fact in the aftermath.

-- ALIEN -- , 3 hours ago link

As the falling EROEI of oil gets worse; countries will collapse... It's all downhill from here

...what few are left.

Lokiban , 3 hours ago link

I guess Trump eventually will understand this lesson in politics that friendship, mutual respect and helping each other accomplishes way way more then threatening countries to be bombed back into the stoneage.
Noone likes to do a cutthroat deal enforced upon them by thuggery. Trump's got to learn that you can't run politics like you do your bussinesses, it's not working unles that was his plan all this time, to destroy America.

NumbersUsa , 3 hours ago link

"The Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals.

These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated by decades of conflict."

Excellent and Factual points! Thank You!

Scaliger , 3 hours ago link

https://www.jta.org/2019/07/01/united-states/the-israel-projects-ceo-is-leaving-amid-advocacy-groups-fundraising-difficulties

Minamoto , 3 hours ago link

America is increasingly looking like Ancient Rome towards the end. It is overstretched, nearly insolvent, fewer allies want to be allies, it's population is sick, physically and mentally. Obesity, diabetes, drug use/addiction make it impossible for the Pentagon to meet recruitment goal. Mental illness causes daily mass killing. The education system is so broken/broke that there is little real education being done. Americans are among the most ignorant, least educated and least educate-able people in the developed world.

Militarily, the USA can bomb but that's about it... defeats upon defeats over the past two decades demonstrate the US military is a paper tiger of astonishing incompetence.

Boeing can't make planes anymore. Lockheed is not much better. Parts of the F-35 are made by Chinese subsidiaries. The most recently built aircraft carrier cannot launch fighter jets.

-- ALIEN -- , 3 hours ago link

We gots NASCAR, big trucks, free TV, fast food, and endless ****.

Go 'Merica!

Justin Case , 2 hours ago link

Recent estimates indicate that more than 550,000 people experience homelessness in the US on any given night, with about two-thirds ending up in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs, and one-third finding their way to unsheltered locations like parks, vehicles, and metro stations. According to the Urban Institute, about 25% of homeless people have jobs.

I find that it is difficult for me to wrap my head around pain and suffering on such an immense scale. Americans often think of the homeless as drug-addicted men that don't want to work, but the truth is that about a quarter of the homeless population is made up of children.

foxenburg , 2 hours ago link

Seriously, why would Iran want to hijack a German ship? Iran took the UK one in retaliation for the Brits seizing the one at Gibraltar. Had that not happened, no Brit ships in the Persian Gulf would have been touched. This is all a carefully engineered USA provocation designed to, inter alia, increase tension in the Persian Gulf, put more nails in coffin of JCPOA...and most importantly give UK an excuse, as remaining signatory, to call for the original UN sanctions on Iran to be snapped-back.

terrific , 4 hours ago link

Federico, let me explain it simply: the U.S. is allied with Israel, and Iran hates Israel. Why, I don't know (nor do I care), but that's why the U.S. needs to keep Iran in check.

Grouchy-Bear , 4 hours ago link

You are confused...

Israel hates Iran and it is Israel that needs to be kept in check...

CatInTheHat , 4 hours ago link

Yet CONGRESS just passed the largest defense bill in history. The WAR industry is bankrupting us financially spiritually and morally.

A war is coming. But upon whom this time (or STILL?), because with President Bolton and Vice President Adelson in power, China Iran or Russia or maybe all three, are open options.

Ofelas , 4 hours ago link

Interview with a Russian I saw 2 years ago "USA wants to create local conflicts on foreign shores, ...on our borders, we will not allow that to happen and make the war international" I will translate: Russia will not be pulled in to some stupid small war draining their resources while the US sits comfortable, they will throw their missiles around - no escape from nuclear winter.

libtears , 3 hours ago link

Us pays more in interest than defense spending now. You'll need to factor that into your predictions

UBrexitUPay4it , 3 hours ago link

If spending has reached the limit now, during peacetime....what will happen during a protracted war? Even if it stays conventional, it would appear that a huge war effort, comparable to WWII, just won't be possible. The US seems to be in a pre-war Britain position, but there isn't a friendly giant across the water to bail them out with both cash and resources.

Either things become insane in fairly short order, or wiser heads will prevail and the US will step back from the brink. Do we have any wiser heads at the moment?

I keep seeing John Bolton's moustache, Andi am not filled with confidence.

[Aug 06, 2019] Half-d>ecent NYT article about Tulsi

I would not call this article decent. At best it is half-decent ;-) This is a typical NYT anti-Tulsi propaganda but it does make several relent observation buried in the sea of anti-Tulsi crapola.
Notable quotes:
"... “We should be coming to other leaders in other countries with respect, building a relationship based on cooperation rather than with, you know, a police baton,” she says. ..."
"... While she is the embodiment of this anti-interventionist message onstage, there is a much larger movement brewing. There is big money in peace. Two billionaire philanthropists from opposite ends of the political spectrum — George Soros and Charles Koch — came together this summer to fund the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank to argue against American intervention abroad. ..."
Aug 06, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Northern Star August 3, 2019 at 2:55 am

Decent NYT article about Tulsi:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-2020-presidential-race.html?ref=oembed

Aug. 2, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard Thinks We're Doomed by Nellie Bowles

Tulsi Gabbard is running for president of a country that she believes has wrought horror on the world, and she wants its citizens to remember that.

She is from Hawaii, and she spends each morning surfing. But that is not what she talks about in this unlikely campaign. She talks about the horror.

She lists countries: Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq. Failure after failure, she says. To drive the point home, she wants to meet on a Sioux tribe reservation in North Dakota, where, she explains, the United States government committed its original atrocity.

“These Indigenous people have been disrespected, mistreated with broken promises and desecrated lands,” Ms. Gabbard says.

... ... ...

But her run, and the unusual cross-section of voters she appeals to — Howard Zinn fans, anti-drug-war libertarians, Russia-gate skeptics, and conservatives suspicious of Big Tech — signifies just how much both parties have shifted, not just on foreign policy. It could end up being a sign that President Trump’s isolationism is not the aberration many believed, but rather a harbinger of a growing national sentiment that America should stand alone.

To Ms. Gabbard, it is the United States that has been the cruel and destabilizing force.

... ... ...

“We should be coming to other leaders in other countries with respect, building a relationship based on cooperation rather than with, you know, a police baton,” she says.

... ... ...

While she is the embodiment of this anti-interventionist message onstage, there is a much larger movement brewing. There is big money in peace. Two billionaire philanthropists from opposite ends of the political spectrum — George Soros and Charles Koch — came together this summer to fund the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank to argue against American intervention abroad.

... ... ...

Ms. Gabbard says she is driven by the feeling that death could come at any moment, which she realized at age 10 but which became more intense in Iraq.

“My first deployment was at the height of the war in 2005. We were 40 miles north of Baghdad. And there was a huge sign by one of the main gates that just read: ‘Is today the day?’” she says. “It was such a stark reminder that my time could come at any moment. That any day could be my last.”

She is not sure who put the sign up or why. But it was this message of potentially imminent doom that she wanted to leave the audience with at the second Democratic debate.

“As we stand here tonight,” she told the crowd. “There are thousands of nuclear missiles pointing right at us, and if we were to get an attack, we would have 30 minutes, 30 minutes, before we were hit.”

Ms. Gabbard continued.

“There is no shelter. This is the warmonger’s hoax. There is no shelter. It’s all a lie.”

>

[Aug 06, 2019] Other trivia is that Tulsi was a martial arts instructor in 2002.

Aug 06, 2019 | www.unz.com

SaneClownPosse , says: August 6, 2019 at 10:41 pm GMT

Well, Tulsi Gabbard may actually have a real shot at POTUS.

https://www.houseofnames.com/gabbard-family-crest

"The surname Gabbard was first found in Norfolk where they held a family seat from very ancient times."

https://www.houseofnames.com/blogs/family-seat

"A seat or family seat was the principal manor of a medieval lord, which was normally an elegant country mansion and usually denoted that the family held political and economic influences in the area. In some cases, the family seat was a manor house."

She is descended from "to the manor born", thus qualified to be POTUS.

Other trivia is that Tulsi was a martial arts instructor in 2002. Similar to Justin Trudeau's part time drama teacher and ski instructor qualifications to be PM of Canada.

[Aug 06, 2019] Did Tulsi Gabbard succumb to the Israel Lobby ot this was taktical move?

Politics is a drity business. The last think any aspiring politician wants is to fight on two fronts. For example against forign wars and Isreal lobby. that's creates Doublespeak situation for candidates like Tulsi...
Notable quotes:
"... But the Empire is taking no chances. The Empire has sicced its Presstitute Battalion on her. Josh Rogin (Washington Post), Joy Reid (MSNBC), Wajahat Ali (New York Times and CNN), and, of course the Twitter trolls paid to slander and misrepresent public figures that the Empire targets. Google added its weight to the obfuscation of Gabbard. ..."
Aug 06, 2019 | www.unz.com

Originally from: Tulsi Gabbard R.I.P., by Paul Craig Roberts - The Unz Review

It is unfortunate that Tulsi Gabbard succumbed to the Israel Lobby. The forces of the Empire saw it as a sign of weakness and have set about destroying her.

The ruling elite see Gabbard as a threat just as they saw Trump as a threat. A threat is an attractive political candidate who questions the Empire's agenda. Trump questioned the hostility toward Russia orchestrated by the military/security complex. Gabbard questions the Empire's wars in the Middle East. This is questioning that encroaches on the agendas of the military/security complex and Israel Lobby. If fear of Israel is what caused Gabbard to vote the AIPAC line on the bill forbidding criticism of Israel, she won't be able to stick to her line against Washington's aggression in the Middle East. Israel is behind that aggression as it serves Israeli interests.

But the Empire is taking no chances. The Empire has sicced its Presstitute Battalion on her. Josh Rogin (Washington Post), Joy Reid (MSNBC), Wajahat Ali (New York Times and CNN), and, of course the Twitter trolls paid to slander and misrepresent public figures that the Empire targets. Google added its weight to the obfuscation of Gabbard.

Gabbard, who in the second "debate" between Democratic Party candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, took down the despicable Kamala Harris with ease, was promptly labeled "an Assad apologist" and a conspiracist with Russia to put herself as a Putin agent in the White House. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/08/01/crazed-democrats-now-claim-it-is-tulsi-gabbard-who-is-in-conspiracy-with-putin/

Wars in the Middle East against Israel's enemies and preparation for major wars against Iran, Russia, and China are the bread and butter for the powerful US military/security complex lobby. All that is important to the military/security complex is their profits, not whether they get all of us killed. In other words, their propaganda about protecting America is a lie. They endanger us all in order to have enemies in order to justify their massive budget and power.

Those of us who actually know, such as myself and Stephen Cohen, have been warning for years that the orchestrated hostility against Russia is producing a far more dangerous Cold War than the original one. Indeed, beginning with the criminal George W. Bush regime, the arms control treaties achieved at great political expense by US and Soviet leaders have been abandoned by Washington. The lastest treaty to be discarded by Washington in service to the military/security lobby is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) negotiated by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbechev. This treaty banned missiles that Washington could place in Europe on Russia's border with which to attack Russia with little or no reaction time, and Russian missiles that could be used to attack Washington's NATO puppet states in Europe and UK. The treaty resulted in the elimination of 2,692 missiles and a decade of verification inspections that satisfied both parties to the agreement. But suddenly Washington has pulled out of the treaty. The main purpose of pulling out of the treaty is to enable the military/security complex to develop and produce new missiles at the taxpayers' expense, but Washington also sees a military advantage in withdrawing from the INF treaty.

Washington, of course, blames the US withdrawal on Russia, just as Washington blames every country that Washington intends to attack. But it is completely obvious even to a moron that Russia has no interest whatsoever in abandoning the treaty. Russian intermediate-range missiles cannot reach the United States. Russia has no reason to attack Europe, which has no military forces of any consequence. It is the American nuclear missiles on European soil that are the problem

Washington, however, does gain by tearing up the INF treaty. At Europe's risk, not America's, Washington's intermediate-range nuclear misslies stationed in Europe on Russia's borders permit a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia. Because of proximity, the warning time is only a couple of minutes. Washington's crazed war planners believe that so much of the Russian retaliatory capacity would be destroyed, that Russia would surrender rather than retaliate with diminished forces and risk a second attack.

Putin stresses this danger as does the Russian military. US missiles on Russia's border puts the world on a hair trigger. Aside from the fact that a nuclear attack on Russia is the likely intent of the criminal neoconservatives, nuclear warning systems are notorious for false alarms. During Cold War I, both sides worked to build trust, but since the criminal Clinton regime Washington has worked to destroy all trust between the two dominant nuclear powers. All that is required to obliterate life on earth, thanks entirely to the crazed fools in Washington, is one false alarm received by the Russians. Unlike past false alarms, next time the Russians will have no choice but to believe it.

Intermediate-range nuclear missiles leave no time for a phone call between Putin and Trump. The Russian leader who has suffered hundreds of diplomatic insults, demonization of his person and his country, illegal sanctions, endless false accusations, and endless threats cannot assume that the warning is false.

The idiots in Washington and the presstitutes have programmed the end of the world. When the alarm goes off, the Russian leader has no choice but to push the button.

Any remaining doubt in the Russian government of Washington's hostile intentions toward Russia has been dispelled by Trump's National Security Advisor, the neocon warmonger John Bolton. Bolton recently announced that the last remaining arms control agreement, START, will not be renewed by Washington in 2021.

Thus, the trust built between the nuclear powers that began with President John F. Kennedy and reached its greatest success with Reagan and Gorbachev has been erased. It will be lucky if the world survives the destruction of trust between the two major nuclear powers.

ORDER IT NOW

The American government in Washington has been made so utterly stupid by its arrogant hubris that it has no comprehension of the dangerous situation that it, and it alone, has created. We are all at risk every minute of our lives because of the power, of which President Eisenhower warned us more than a half century ago to no avail, of the US military/security complex, an organized powerful force determined and able to destroy any American president who would threaten their budget and power by making peace.

Donald Trump is a strong personality, but he has been cowed by the Israel Lobby and the military/security complex. As reigning president, Trump sat there Twittering while an attack orchestrated by the military/security complex and the Democratic Party, with 100% cooperation from the American media, tried to portray him as a Russian agent as grounds for his impeachment.

A strong personality in what is allegedly the most powerful office in the world who allows his entire first term to be wasted by his opponents in an attempt to frame him and drive him from office is all we need to know about the likely fate of Tulsi Gabbard.

[Aug 06, 2019] Antiwar.com vs. the Decline of American Journalism by Justin Raimondo

Notable quotes:
"... it turned out that the very people who were up in arms about "fake news" were the ones propagating their own version of it. WikiLeaks did much to expose their game by publicizing the key role played by the Legacy Media in acting as an extension of the Clinton campaign. However, the real unmasking came after the November election, when the rage of the liberal elites became so manifest that "reporters" who would normally be loath to reveal their politics came out of the closet, so to speak, and started telling us that the old journalistic standard of objectivity no longer applied. The election of Trump, they averred, meant that the old standards must be abandoned and a new, and openly partisan bias must take its place. In honor of this new credo, the Washington Post has adopted a new slogan: " Democracy dies in darkness "! ..."
"... Rep. Gabbard's "crime" was to challenge the US-funded effort to overthrow the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad as contrary to our interests and the prospects for peace in the region. For that she has been demonized in the media – and, not coincidentally, the very same media that is now an instrument in the hands of our "intelligence community." For ..."
"... And of course it's not just the Washington Post : the entire "mainstream" media is now colluding with the "intelligence community" in an effort to discredit and derail any efforts at a rapprochement with Russia. We haven't seen this kind of hysteria since the frigid winter of the cold war. ..."
"... My longtime readers will not be shocked by any of this: during the run up to the Iraq war, the media was chock full of fake news about Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons of mass destruction, which all the "experts" told us were certainly there and ready to rain death and destruction at any minute. Who can forget the series of articles by Judith Miller that adorned the front page of the New York Times – which were merely Bush administration talking points reiterated by Donald Rumsfeld & Co. on the Sunday talk shows? Miller has now become synonymous with the very concept of fake news – and yet how quickly we forget the lesson we should have learned from that shameful episode in the history of American journalism . ..."
"... Blinded by partisan bias, all too willing to be used as an instrument of the Deep State -- and determined to "control exactly what people think," which is, as Mika Brzezinski put it the other day, " our job " – the English-speaking media has become increasingly unreliable. This has become a big problem for us here at Antiwar.com: we now have to check and re-check everything that they report as fact. Not that we didn't do that anyway, but the difference is that, these days, we have to be more careful than ever before linking to it, or citing it as factual. ..."
"... The day of the "alternative media" has passed. We are simply part of the media, period: the increasingly tiny portion of it that doesn't fall for war propaganda, that doesn't have a partisan agenda, and that harkens back to the "old" journalistic standards of yesteryear – objective reporting of facts. That doesn't mean we don't have opinions, or an agenda – far from it! However, we base those opinions on what, to the best of our ability, we can discern as the facts. ..."
"... And we have a pretty good record in this regard. Back when everyone who was anyone was telling us that those "weapons of mass destruction" were lurking in the Iraqi shadows, we said it was nonsense – and we were right. As the "experts" said that war with Iraq would "solve" the problem of terrorism and bring enlightenment to the Middle East, we said the war would usher in the reign of chaos – and we were right. We warned that NATO expansion would trigger an unnecessary conflict with Russia, and we were proved right about that, too. The Kosovo war was hailed as a "humanitarian" act – and we rightly predicted it would come back to haunt us in the form of a gangster state riven by conflict. ..."
"... There's one way in which we are significantly different from the rest of the media – we depend on our readers for the financial support we need to keep going. The Washington Post has Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest men in the world – not to mention a multi-million dollar contract with the "intelligence community." The New York Times has Carlos Slim, another billionaire with seemingly bottomless pockets. We, on the other hand, just have you. ..."
Aug 06, 2019 | original.antiwar.com

We're not the alternative media – we're the best media you've got!

Posted on August 06, 2019 August 4, 2019 The more things change, the more they stay the same: the sun comes up in the morning; another Hitler arises in the fantasies of the foreign-policy establishment; and Josh Rogin writes another column attacking Tusli Gabbard, the most pro-peace candidate in the Democratic lineup. Justin blasted Rogin the first time he tried this, back in February of 2017, proving that the whole story was "fake news". We think it's important to revisit Justin's analysis of the media-enhanced demand for war. As Justin notes, the only real alternative to this, the only real "alternative media," are sites like Antiwar. com and WikiLeaks.

This column is also timely because it was written during another Antiwar.com fundraising drive. That time, we had $31,000 in matching funds, now we have $40,000, and as usual we need your support. Please donate – the War Party media is backed by billionaires, so we need all friends of peace.

Originally published February 24, 2017

If we look at the phrase itself, it seems to mean the media that presents itself as the alternative to what we call the "corporate media," i.e. the New York Times , the Washington Post , your local rag – in short, the Legacy Media that predominated in those bygone days before the Internet. And yet this whole arrangement seems outdated, to say the least. The Internet has long since been colonized by the corporate giants: BuzzFeed, for example, is regularly fed huge dollops of cash from its corporate owners. And the Legacy Media has adapted to the primacy of online media, however reluctantly and ineptly. So the alternative media isn't defined by how they deliver the news, but rather by 1) what they judge to be news, and 2) how they report it.

And that's the problem.

There's been much talk of "fake news," a concept first defined by the "mainstream" media types as an insidious scheme by the Russians and/or supporters of Donald Trump to deny Hillary Clinton her rightful place in the Oval Office. Or it was Macedonian teenagers out to fool us into giving them clicks. Or something. Facebook and Google announced a campaign to eliminate this Dire Threat, and the mandarins of the "mainstream" reared up in righteous anger, lecturing us that journalistic standards were being traduced.

Yet it turned out that the very people who were up in arms about "fake news" were the ones propagating their own version of it. WikiLeaks did much to expose their game by publicizing the key role played by the Legacy Media in acting as an extension of the Clinton campaign. However, the real unmasking came after the November election, when the rage of the liberal elites became so manifest that "reporters" who would normally be loath to reveal their politics came out of the closet, so to speak, and started telling us that the old journalistic standard of objectivity no longer applied. The election of Trump, they averred, meant that the old standards must be abandoned and a new, and openly partisan bias must take its place. In honor of this new credo, the Washington Post has adopted a new slogan: " Democracy dies in darkness "!

This from the newspaper that ran a front page story citing the anonymous trolls at PropOrNot.com as credible sources for an account of alleged "Russian agents of influence" in the media – a story that slimed Matt Drudge and Antiwar.com, among others.

This from the newspaper that ran another big story claiming the Russians had infiltrated Vermont's power grid without bothering to check with the power company .

This from the newspaper that regularly publishes "news" accounts citing anonymous "intelligence officials" claiming the Trump administration is rife with Russian "agents."

This from the newspaper that published a piece by foreign affairs columnist Josh Rogin that falsely claimed Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's trip to Syria was funded by a group that is "nonexistent" and strongly implied she was in the pay of the Syrian government or some other foreign entity. Well after the smear circulated far and wide, the paper posted the following correction:

" An earlier version of this op-ed misspelled the name of AACCESS Ohio and incorrectly stated that the organization no longer exists. AACCESS Ohio is an independent non-profit organization that is a member of the ACCESS National Network of Arab American Community organizations but is currently on probation due to inactivity. The op-ed also incorrectly stated that Bassam Khawam is Syrian American. He is Lebanese American. This version has been corrected."

In other words, the entire story was fake news .

Rep. Gabbard's "crime" was to challenge the US-funded effort to overthrow the regime of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad as contrary to our interests and the prospects for peace in the region. For that she has been demonized in the media – and, not coincidentally, the very same media that is now an instrument in the hands of our "intelligence community." For it is these spooks who, for years, have been canoodling with the Saudis in an effort to rid the region of the last secular obstacle to the Sunni-ization of the Middle East. That they have Tulsi Gabbard in their sights is no surprise.

And of course it's not just the Washington Post : the entire "mainstream" media is now colluding with the "intelligence community" in an effort to discredit and derail any efforts at a rapprochement with Russia. We haven't seen this kind of hysteria since the frigid winter of the cold war.

My longtime readers will not be shocked by any of this: during the run up to the Iraq war, the media was chock full of fake news about Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons of mass destruction, which all the "experts" told us were certainly there and ready to rain death and destruction at any minute. Who can forget the series of articles by Judith Miller that adorned the front page of the New York Times – which were merely Bush administration talking points reiterated by Donald Rumsfeld & Co. on the Sunday talk shows? Miller has now become synonymous with the very concept of fake news – and yet how quickly we forget the lesson we should have learned from that shameful episode in the history of American journalism.

So fake news is nothing new, nor is the concept of the "mainstream" media as a megaphone for war propaganda. What's different today is that many are waking up to this fact – and turning to the "alternative." I've been struck by this rising phenomenon over the past year or so: Matt Drudge gave Antiwar.com a permanent link. Our audience has increased by many thousands. And I've been getting a steady stream of interview requests. I was quite pleased to read the following in a recent piece in The Nation about the media's fit of Russophobia and the key role played by the journalist I. F. Stone during the 1950s:

"To conclude where I began, think for a moment about I.F. Stone during his haunted 1950s. While he was well-regarded by a lot of rank-and-file reporters, few would say so openly. He was PNG [persona non grata] among people such as [ New York Times publisher Arthur] Sulzberger – an outcast .

"Now think about now.

"A few reporters and commentators advise us that the name of the game these days is to sink the single most constructive policy the Trump administration has announced. The rest is subterfuge, rubbish. This is prima facie the case, though you can read it nowhere in the Times or any of the other corporate media. A few have asserted that we may now be witnessing a coup operation against the Trump White House. This is a possibility, in my view. We cannot flick it off the table. With the utmost purpose, I post here one of these pieces. "A Win for the Deep State" came out just after Flynn was forced from office. It is by a writer named Justin Raimondo and appeared in a wholly out-of-bounds web publication called Antiwar.com. I know nothing about either, but it is a thought-provoking piece."

Well, we aren't quite "wholly out of bounds," except in certain circles, but all in all this is a great compliment – and it's illustrative of author Patrick Lawrence's point, which is that

"We, readers and viewers, must discriminate among all that is put before us so as to make the best judgments we can and, not least, protect our minds. The other side of the coin, what we customarily call 'alternative media,' assumes an important responsibility. They must get done, as best they can, what better-endowed media now shirk. To put this simply and briefly, they and we must learn that they are not 'alternative' to anything. In the end there is no such thing as 'alternative media,' as I often argue. There are only media, and most of ours have turned irretrievably bad."

We here at Antiwar.com take our responsibility to you, our readers and supporters, very seriously. We're working day and night, 24/7, to separate fact from fiction, knee-jerk "analysis" from intelligent critique, partisan bullshit from truth. And we've had to work much harder lately because the profession of journalism has fallen on hard times.

Blinded by partisan bias, all too willing to be used as an instrument of the Deep State -- and determined to "control exactly what people think," which is, as Mika Brzezinski put it the other day, " our job " – the English-speaking media has become increasingly unreliable. This has become a big problem for us here at Antiwar.com: we now have to check and re-check everything that they report as fact. Not that we didn't do that anyway, but the difference is that, these days, we have to be more careful than ever before linking to it, or citing it as factual.

The day of the "alternative media" has passed. We are simply part of the media, period: the increasingly tiny portion of it that doesn't fall for war propaganda, that doesn't have a partisan agenda, and that harkens back to the "old" journalistic standards of yesteryear – objective reporting of facts. That doesn't mean we don't have opinions, or an agenda – far from it! However, we base those opinions on what, to the best of our ability, we can discern as the facts.

And we have a pretty good record in this regard. Back when everyone who was anyone was telling us that those "weapons of mass destruction" were lurking in the Iraqi shadows, we said it was nonsense – and we were right. As the "experts" said that war with Iraq would "solve" the problem of terrorism and bring enlightenment to the Middle East, we said the war would usher in the reign of chaos – and we were right. We warned that NATO expansion would trigger an unnecessary conflict with Russia, and we were proved right about that, too. The Kosovo war was hailed as a "humanitarian" act – and we rightly predicted it would come back to haunt us in the form of a gangster state riven by conflict.

I could spend several paragraphs boasting about how right we were, but you get the idea. Our record is a good one. And we intend to make it even better. But we can't do it – we can't do our job – without your help.

There's one way in which we are significantly different from the rest of the media – we depend on our readers for the financial support we need to keep going. The Washington Post has Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest men in the world – not to mention a multi-million dollar contract with the "intelligence community." The New York Times has Carlos Slim, another billionaire with seemingly bottomless pockets. We, on the other hand, just have you.

Okay, I'll cut to the chase: we've come to a crucial point in our current fundraising campaign, and now it's make it or break it time for Antiwar.com.

A group of our most generous supporters has pledged $40,000 in matching funds – but that pledge is strictly conditional . What this means is that we must match that amount in the short time left in our campaign in order to get the entire $40,000.

Please, send your tax-deductible donation now – because we're not the "alternative media," we're the best media you've got.

[Aug 06, 2019] The Military-Industrial Jobs Scam naked capitalism

Aug 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. This is a very important post, documenting how despite defense contractor claims to the contrary, increased military spending has been accompanied by job losses in the US. This should come as no surprise. Military contracting is an exercise in pork, and regularly flagrantly disregards national security. A classic example: US uniforms and boots are made in China.

Another example of the benefits of military pork going outside the US was the use of contractors during the war in Iraq. From a 2007 Vanity Fair story:

In one place the job of laundering soldiers' uniforms, for example, might be performed by a company working directly for KBR. But in another a subcontractor will have sub-subcontracted the work to someone else, and sometimes even sub-sub-sub-subcontracted it. "I've come across examples where you get down four or five levels," says a government auditor who spoke on condition of anonymity. "There's the U.S. prime, the subcontractor from the Middle East, then a sub-subcontractor from Pakistan, then a shell corporation with a box number in Michigan, and finally the Iraqis who're actually doing the work -- for next to nothing."

This system has created great difficulties for anyone attempting to oversee the process on behalf of American taxpayers. It has also substantially increased the overall costs of the war by creating the conditions for obscene markups between contract levels. "There is an enormous need to get a closer handle on the detail in the field," says the auditor. "If you go ask one of the inspectors general, 'Tell me about the subcontracts,' they can't tell you anything. It's a black hole. What this means for oversight, and basic issues of fairness, is that there is none."

On top of that, inflating the number of people tasked to an activity was routine, and the article has first hand accounts from individuals who tried opposing the practice.

In other words, the contracting fraud results in US taxpayers paying way more than it would have cost for US personnel to do the work with the added insult that the tasks were performed by locals for a pittance.

By Nia Harris, a Research Associate at the Center for International Policy, Cassandra Stimpson, a Research Associate at the Center for International Policy and Ben Freeman, Director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy and Co-Chair of its Sustainable Defense Task Force. Originally published at TomDispatch

A Marilyn has once again seduced a president. This time, though, it's not a movie star ; it's Marillyn Hewson, the head of Lockheed Martin, the nation's top defense contractor and the largest weapons producer in the world. In the last month, Donald Trump and Hewson have seemed inseparable. They " saved " jobs at a helicopter plant. They took the stage together at a Lockheed subsidiary in Milwaukee. The president vetoed three bills that would have blocked the arms sales of Lockheed (and other companies) to Saudi Arabia. Recently, the president's daughter Ivanka even toured a Lockheed space facility with Hewson.

On July 15th, the official White House Twitter account tweeted a video of the Lockheed CEO extolling the virtues of the company's THAAD missile defense system, claiming that it "supports 25,000 American workers." Not only was Hewson promoting her company's product, but she was making her pitch -- with the weapon in the background -- on the White House lawn. Twitter immediately burst with outrage over the White House posting an ad for a private company, with some calling it "unethical" and "likely unlawful."

None of this, however, was really out of the ordinary as the Trump administration has stopped at nothing to push the argument that job creation is justification enough for supporting weapons manufacturers to the hilt. Even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he was already insisting that military spending was a great jobs creator. He's only doubled down on this assertion during his presidency. Recently, overriding congressional objections, he even declared a national "emergency" to force through part of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that he had once claimed would create more than a million jobs. While this claim has been thoroughly debunked , the most essential part of his argument -- that more money flowing to defense contractors will create significant numbers of new jobs -- is considered truth personified by many in the defense industry, especially Marillyn Hewson.

The facts tell a different story.

Lockheed Locks Down Taxpayer Dollars, While Cutting American Jobs

To test Trump's and Hewson's argument, we asked a simple question: When contractors receive more taxpayer money, do they generally create more jobs? To answer it, we analyzed the reports of major defense contractors filed annually with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC ). Among other things, these reveal the total number of people employed by a firm and the salary of its chief executive officer. We then compared those figures to the federal tax dollars each company received, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, which measures the "dollars obligated," or funds, the government awards company by company.

We focused on the top five Pentagon defense contractors, the very heartland of the military-industrial complex, for the years 2012 to 2018. As it happened, 2012 was a pivotal year because the Budget Control Act (BCA) first went into effect then, establishing caps on how much money could be spent by Congress and mandating cuts to defense spending through 2021. Those caps were never fully adhered to. Ultimately, in fact, the Pentagon will receive significantly more money in the BCA decade than in the prior one, a period when the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at their heights.

In 2012, concerned that those caps on defense spending would cut into their bottom lines, the five top contractors went on the political offensive, making future jobs their weapon of choice. After the Budget Control Act passed, the Aerospace Industries Association -- the leading trade group of the weapons-makers -- warned that more than one million jobs would be at risk if Pentagon spending were cut significantly. To emphasize the point, Lockheed sent layoff notices to 123,000 employees just before the BCA was implemented and only days before the 2012 election. Those layoffs never actually happened, but the fear of lost jobs would prove real indeed and would last.

Consider it mission accomplished, since Pentagon spending was actually higher in 2018 than in 2012 and Lockheed received a sizeable chunk of that cash infusion. From 2012 to 2018, among government contractors, that company would, in fact, be the top recipient of taxpayer dollars every single year, those funds reaching their zenith in 2017, as it raked in more than $50.6 billion federal dollars. By contrast, in 2012, when Lockheed was threatening its employees with mass layoffs , the firm received nearly $37 billion .

So what did Lockheed do with those additional $13 billion taxpayer dollars? It would be reasonable to assume that it used some of that windfall (like those of previous years) to invest in growing its workforce. If you came to that conclusion, however, you would be sorely mistaken. From 2012 to 2018, overall employment at Lockheed actually fell from 120,000 to 105,000 , according to the firm's filings with the SEC and the company itself reported a slightly larger reduction of 16,350 jobs in the U.S. In other words, in the last six years Lockheed dramatically reduced its U.S. workforce, even as it hired more employees abroad and received more taxpayer dollars.

So where is all that additional taxpayer money actually going, if not job creation? At least part of the answer is contractor profits and soaring CEO salaries. In those six years, Lockheed's stock price rose from $82 at the beginning of 2012 to $305 at the end of 2018, a nearly four-fold increase. In 2018 , the company also reported a 9% ($590 million) rise in its profits, the best in the industry. And in those same years, the salary of its CEO increased by $1.4 million, again according to its SEC filings .

In short, since 2012 the number of taxpayer dollars going to Lockheed has expanded by billions, the value of its stock has nearly quadrupled, and its CEO's salary went up 32%, even as it cut 14% of its American work force. Yet Lockheed continues to use job creation, as well as its employees' present jobs, as political pawns to get yet more taxpayer money. The president himself has bought into the ruse in his race to funnel ever more money to the Pentagon and promote arms deals to countries like Saudi Arabia, even over the nearly unified objections of an otherwise incredibly divided Congress.

Lockheed Is the Norm, Not the Exception

Despite being this country's and the world's top weapons maker, Lockheed isn't the exception but the norm. From 2012 to 2018, the unemployment rate in the U.S. plummeted from roughly 8% to 4%, with more than 13 million new jobs added to the economy. Yet, in those same years, three of the five top defense contractors slashed jobs. In 2018, the Pentagon committed approximately $118 billion in federal money to those firms, including Lockheed -- nearly half of all the money it spent on contractors. This was almost $12 billion more than they had received in 2012 . Yet, cumulatively, those companies lost jobs and now employ a total of 6,900 fewer employees than they did in 2012, according to their SEC filings .

In addition to the reductions at Lockheed, Boeing slashed 21,400 jobs and Raytheon cut 800 employees from its payroll. Only General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman added jobs -- 13,400 and 16,900 employees, respectively -- making that total figure look modestly better. However, even those "gains" can't qualify as job creation in the normal sense, since they resulted almost entirely from the fact that each of those companies bought another Pentagon contractor and added its employees to its own payroll. CSRA, which General Dynamics acquired in 2018, had 18,500 employees before the merger, while Orbital ATK, which General Dynamics acquired last year, had 13,900 employees. Subtract these 32,400 jobs from the corporate totals and job losses at the firms become staggering.

In addition, those employment figures include all company employees, even those now working outside the U.S. Lockheed is the only top five Pentagon contractor that provides information on the percentage of its employees in the U.S., so if the other firms are shipping jobs overseas, as Lockheed has done and as Raytheon is planning to do, far more than 6,900 full-time jobs in the U.S. have been lost in the last six years.

Where, then, did all that job-creation money really go? Just as at Lockheed, at least part of the answer is that the money went to the bottom-line and to top executives. According to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consulting firm that provides annual analyses of the defense industry, "the aerospace and defense (A&D) sector scored record revenues and profits in 2018" with an "operating profit of $81 billion, surpassing the previous record set in 2017." According to the report, Pentagon contractors were at the forefront of these profit gains. For example, Lockheed's profit improvement was $590 million, followed closely by General Dynamics at $562 million. As employment shrank, CEO salaries at some of these firms only grew. In addition to compensation for Lockheed's CEO jumping from $4.2 million in 2012 to $5.6 million in 2018, compensation for the CEO of General Dynamics increased from $6.9 million in 2012 to a whopping $20.7 million in 2018.

Perpetuating the Same Old Story

This is hardly the first time that these companies have extolled their ability to create jobs while cutting them. As Ben Freeman previously documented for the Project On Government Oversight, these very same firms cut almost 10% of their workforce in the six years before the BCA came into effect, even as taxpayer dollars heading their way annually jumped by nearly 25% from $91 billion to $113 billion.

Just as then, the contractors and their advocates -- and there are many of them, given that the weapons-making outfits spend more than $100 million on lobbying yearly, donate tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress every election season, and give millions to think tanks annually -- will rush to defend such job losses. They will, for instance, note that defense spending leads to job growth among the subcontractors used by the major weapons firms. Yet research has repeatedly shown that, even with this supposed "multiplier effect," defense spending produces fewer jobs than just about anything else the government puts our money into. In fact, it's about 50% less effective at creating jobs than if taxpayers were simply allowed to keep their money and use it as they wished.

As Brown University's Costs of War project has reported , "$1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs, compared with 26,700 in education, 16,800 in clean energy, and 17,200 in health care." Military spending actually proved to be the worst job creator of any federal government spending option those researchers analyzed. Similarly, according to a report by Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for every $1 million of spending on defense, 6.9 jobs are created both directly in defense industries and in the supply chain. Spending the same amount in the fields of wind or solar energy, she notes, leads to 8.4 or 9.5 jobs, respectively. As for the education sector, the same amount of money produced 19.2 jobs in primary and secondary education and 11.2 jobs in higher education. In other words, not only are the green energy and education areas vital to the future of the country, they are also genuine job-creating machines. Yet, the government gives more taxpayer dollars to the defense industry than all these other government functions combined .

You don't, however, have to turn to critics of defense spending to make the case. Reports from the industry's own trade association show that it has been shedding jobs. According to an Aerospace Industries Association analysis , it supported approximately 300,000 fewer jobs in 2018 than it had reported supporting just three years earlier.

If the nation's top defense contractor and the industry as a whole have been shedding jobs, how have they been able to consistently and effectively perpetuate the myth that they are engines of job creation? To explain this, add to their army of lobbyists, their treasure trove of campaign contributions, and those think tanks on the take, the famed revolving door that sends retired government officials into the world of the weapons makers and those working for them to Washington.

While there has always been a cozy relationship between the Pentagon and the defense industry, the lines between contractors and the government have blurred far more radically in the Trump years. Mark Esper, the newly minted secretary of defense, for example, previously worked as Raytheon's top lobbyist in Washington. Spinning the other way, the present head of the Aerospace Industries Association, Eric Fanning , had been both secretary of the Army and acting secretary of the Air Force. In fact, since 2008, as the Project On Government Oversight's Mandy Smithberger found , "at least 380 high-ranking Department of Defense officials and military officers shifted into the private sector to become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defense contractors."

Whatever the spin, whether of that revolving door or of the defense industry's publicists, the bottom line couldn't be clearer: if job creation is your metric of choice, Pentagon contractors are a bad taxpayer investment. So whenever Marillyn Hewson or any other CEO in the military-industrial complex claims that spending yet more taxpayer dollars on defense contractors will give a jobs break to Americans, just remember their track record so far: ever more dollars invested means ever fewer Americans employed.

JBird4049 , August 5, 2019 at 1:01 am

I seem to recall reading repeatedly that half of the American combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were private contractors hired by such upstanding companies like Blackwater as well as much, or perhaps mostly, were the staffing in such as cooks, janitors, even drivers. Workers doing gig work in a war zone.

The American government got to use statistical legerdemain to cut the number of Americans fighting, dying, and being injured, which means that the official numbers of American military casualties is a lie, but it played well in the "news" stories sound bites.

The funds to pay for the hidden forces were used to pay the inflated contracts with the money often going more to companies' profits than in paying the workers. Sometimes, as in the case of the "retired" combat veterans, the pay was very, very good, but too often it was chump pay especially as the wounded did not qualify for the benefits of the military such as long term medical care or disability payments. This last bit also reduces the long term costs of the wars for the government as any help that they might get would be something like Social Security.

There are probably a fair number of disabled Americans wasting away from their unofficial military service without any of the support, problematic as it is sometimes, that the military veterans get. Then there are the lack of survivors benefits.

And yes, many people took those jobs because they were none to be had that paid the bills, but the companies made bank.

sd , August 5, 2019 at 3:01 am

To be clear, it wasn't combat troops. It was logistics support which was contracted out to Halliburton under LOGCAP. Halliburton in turn used a subsidiary and subbed it out further. USAID and various "reconstruction" contracts further inflated the number of contractors.

The significance of participating in the "Coalition" of nations was that their citizens would not be considered mercenaries under UN agreements. Hence everyone jumping on board for a piece of the pie.

JCC , August 5, 2019 at 9:39 am

True, the vast majority were logistical support personnel. I was one of them, IT services.

The layers were 3 to 5 deep, everything from laundry services and kitchen people from Pakistan and electricians and carpenters from the Philippines. KBR made bank while paying these people squat. And not only was KBR/Haliburton getting rich over over there, they failed to deliver on many of the services they were paid to provide.

Oh the stories I could tell. I learned the true meaning of War Profiteering courtesy of companies like KBR.

The Rev Kev , August 5, 2019 at 9:56 am

Then I suppose that the contents of this old 2010 article would be no surprise to you-

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jun/09/arianna-huffington/halliburton-kbr-and-iraq-war-contracting-history-s/

JCC , August 5, 2019 at 10:49 am

I thought about doing a list of just what I saw, including the illegal billed for "force protection" mentioned in this article:

In April 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil fraud case against KBR over the issue of using private security forces in Iraq to protect its workers and subcontractors. Private security wasn't allowed under the LOGCAP contract because the U.S. military was supposed to provide protection.

Not only did Haliburton/KBR bill for it, they never provided it, at least not at the largest post there, Balad Air Base.

This article is a decent summary of the big picture, on the ground level it looked a lot worse, including costing some their lives as a direct result of incompetence and worse.

Oh , August 5, 2019 at 6:49 pm

A small biz without Cheney connections would have been nailed to the wall with the management going to prison for a crime like this.

David in Santa Cruz , August 5, 2019 at 1:20 am

This used to be called the "self-licking ice cream cone." These people have no morals, and don't care about anyone but themselves. They are merchants of death.

Off The Street , August 5, 2019 at 10:39 am

That sweet tooth got extended once the perps could brag about drinking your milkshake . Strange how they didn't get any cavities but the rest of the populace did.

skippy , August 5, 2019 at 4:05 am

Sniff I remember all the Bush Jr years of buddies getting sweetheart contracts and doing nada besides shuffling some papers .

Joe Well , August 5, 2019 at 10:14 am

>>A classic example: US uniforms and boots are made in China.

New Balance, the sneaker company with a small but significant US manufacturing capability, has been protesting this vociferously for years.

After the most recent presidential election, one of their executives told a trade publication that they were still optimistic for the future (what else were they supposed to say?) and said specifically that they were hopeful that the new administration would enforce Made-in-USA rules more forcefully (which they had been saying like a mantra forever).

And you can probably guess what happened. There was a Twitter storm of people burning New Balance sneakers. The Intercept columnist Sean King put New Balance on a list of companies to boycott.

And that is how this particular scam-laden military empire perpetuates itself: with a fake opposition stuffed with scams of its own. How much do you wanna bet that the current holders of said military contracts were astroturfing this opposition?

shinola , August 5, 2019 at 10:14 am

From the article:
As Brown University's Costs of War project has reported, "$1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs, compared with 26,700 in education "
This implies that a job in the MIC sector making WMD pays nearly 2.4x more than a job educating our children. What's wrong with this picture?

Trump throws billion$ more into the "defense" budget than was requested. MIC related stock prices seem to be doing rather well. Mr. President, what's in your portfolio?

Eugene , August 5, 2019 at 12:23 pm

At least we get to voice our concerns – free speech – guaranteed so far, but that's all. One day, the Ponzi will collapse, probably sooner than we think. And who will get blamed? None other then the POTUS, but he'll escape any legal hassle's because he'll be diagnosed with the dreaded "DEMENTIA". Where have we heard that before.

[Aug 06, 2019] Note to Tulsi: Strengthening the party and fighting for its message are not mutually exclusive

Aug 06, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Julio -> EMichael... , August 05, 2019 at 10:32 AM

Our policies are to do, mostly, with Republicans.
Our failure to convince voters, in a democracy, that there are alternatives to the gradual rot of the last two generations -- that is to do, mostly, with Democrats.

Sure, undermining the party after it's made its choice of nominee is stupid and counterproductive. But strengthening the party and fighting for its message are not mutually exclusive. That is where we are now; Sarandonism is, for the moment, irrelevant.

I asked you a long time ago if you supported democracy, and you took offense. How then am I supposed to interpret "blame the American voters"?

[Aug 06, 2019] If fear of Israel is what caused Gabbard to vote the AIPAC line on the bill forbidding criticism of Israel, she won't be able to stick to her line against Washington's aggression in the Middle East. Israel is behind that aggression as it serves Israeli interests.

Aug 06, 2019 | www.unz.com

RobinG , says: August 6, 2019 at 3:40 am GMT

From Paul Craig Roberts:

If fear of Israel is what caused Gabbard to vote the AIPAC line on the bill forbidding criticism of Israel, she won't be able to stick to her line against Washington's aggression in the Middle East. Israel is behind that aggression as it serves Israeli interests.
***
A strong personality .who allows his entire first term to be wasted by his opponents in an attempt to frame him and drive him from office is all we need to know about the likely fate of Tulsi Gabbard.

This piece, "Tulsi Gabbard: R.I.P.," is a good example of why I don't normally read PCR. He blogs for his loyal followers, but says nothing we don't know, with little or no value added. And then his analysis is weak. Perhaps he thinks this jab will stiffen Tulsi's spine, (he's been a fan) and improve her platform. But she might just blow off his criticism as irrelevant, which it may be.

PCR assumes that Tulsi voted against BDS out of fear. I believe that's wrong. She voted out of idealism. That's what her Aloha movement is about. It may be naïve to think you can make everybody happy, but if the Israel she supports turns out to be one state of equal rights, that's fine.

"All we need to know" is one of my least favorite phrases. It's almost never true, certainly not in this case. Trump's example (and he hasn't been as cowed as his detractors make him out) doesn't foretell Tulsi's behavior. He's overflowing with bombast. She's calm, with a core of steel.

Art , says: August 6, 2019 at 7:09 am GMT

@RobinG

PCR assumes that Tulsi voted against BDS out of fear. I believe that’s wrong. She voted out of idealism. That’s what her Aloha movement is about. It may be naïve to think you can make everybody happy, but if the Israel she supports turns out to be one state of equal rights, that’s fine.

RobinG,

There are many good Dems who support the Palestinians. To get into the next debate, Tulsi is looking for 4 polls who give her 2% support. To gain the support of those good people, she must show sympathy for the Palestinians.

No empathy for the obvious plight of the Palestinians is a turn off among people of good heart – something that Gabbard does not need.

Tulsi needs to be explicit concerning Israel/Palestine – it is unbecoming not to be.

Art

[Aug 06, 2019] Team Pelosi is just grandstanding using Russiagate as a smoke screen. I mean, who could take them seriously, when they haven't bothered to try and do anything to strengthen integrity of the elections for decades?

Aug 06, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

kurt -> Julio ... , August 05, 2019 at 01:06 PM

There are some other big institutional failures playing into this. The press has for the better part of the last 40 years pretended that both parties were both acting in good faith and just had different ideas about what worked best - which clearly isn't true. They also engaged in a false "it's both sides" narrative. The Dems took way too long to figure out that the Rs are insurgent, anti-democratic, and unafraid to destroy the country to gain power. The big internet companies knew what was going on with Cambridge and the Russians and did nothing about it. Our voting infrastructure has been taken over by partisans that are actively ensuring that votes can be meddled with. I mean - it is a huge convergence of events - and while I think you are acting in good faith, there are a bunch of posters who are acting like force multipliers for Russia and the Sarandon types. I don't see how anyone can ignore the threat of foreign interference, the fact that Trump did in fact collude with Russia by any definition of the word, the fact that the Mueller report all but says "there were crimes, but we cant get the evidence because of obstruction," and the obvious fact that the R establishment has gone full on anti-democracy and be pro democracy. We are in a much scary place than I think most people understand or are willing to admit. Remember, Hitler was a joke and then he wasn't.
kurt -> kurt... , August 05, 2019 at 01:07 PM
Also - just so it doesn't go unsaid. Bernie LOST the primary by millions of votes. This is undeniable.
kurt -> kurt... , August 05, 2019 at 05:28 PM
The accusation that Dems have done nothing about voter security is belied by the fact that TODAY there are 2 simple bills being held up by Moscow Mitch. It is belied by the fact that Dems in all 50 states tried to enact paper trails. It is impossible to have a discussion about anything when some people just insist on a set of facts that are not facts. It is stupid and embarrassing. The interwebs are an fen sewer.
JohnH -> kurt... , August 05, 2019 at 05:53 PM
LOL!!! Two bill after 20 years??? And motivated by dubious fears of Russian meddling when corporations, billionaires, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others have been meddling for decades without so much as a whimper from kurt's beloved Democrats!!!

And, of course, Team Pelosi finally gets around to introducing some bills only when it's obvious to any idiot, even kurt, that they won't get past the Senate!!!

IMO, Team Pelosi is just grandstanding. I mean, who could take them seriously, when they haven't bothered to try and do anything for decades?

JohnH -> kurt... , August 05, 2019 at 06:06 PM
"Kids at hacking conference show how easily US elections could be sabotaged:"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/22/us-elections-hacking-voting-machines-def-con

But has Team Pelosi cared enough to do something about it until she got Putin Derangement Syndrome? No, of course, not asleep at the wheel appeasing or complicit with the monied interests who have ample resources to subvert elections.

JohnH -> kurt... , August 05, 2019 at 02:21 PM
And what did Ds do during the last 40 years to fix the voting infrastructure? Gore and Kerry just shrugged and let Bush become President. And Ds never mounted any sort of effort to secure the hackable, inauditable voting machines.

Simply put, Kurt's beloved Ds we're engaged in appeasement or complicity... take your pick.

[Aug 06, 2019] The Declining Empire Of Chaos Is Going Nuts Over Iran

Notable quotes:
"... Tensions were then focused on Syria , where a mercenary army of at least 200,000 men, armed and trained by the US, UK, Israel, France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost managed to completely topple the country. ..."
"... As the Americans, British, French and Israelis conducted their bombing missions in Syria, the danger of a deliberate attack on Russian positions always remained, something that would have had devastating consequences for the region and beyond. It is no secret that US military planners have repeatedly argued for a direct conflict with Moscow in a contained regional theater. (Clinton called for the downing of Russian jets over Syria, and former US officials claimed that some Russians had to " pay a little price ".) ..."
"... Trump's dramatic U-turn following his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un (a public relations/photo opportunity) began to paint a fairly comical and unreliable picture of US power, revealing to the world the new US president's strategy. The president threatens to nuke a country, but only as a negotiating tactic to bring his opponent to the negotiating table and thereby clinch a deal. He then presents himself to his domestic audience as the "great" deal-maker. ..."
"... With Iran, the recent target of the US administration, the bargaining method is the same, though with decidedly different results. In the cases of Ukraine and North Korea, the two most powerful lobbies in Washington, the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, have had little to say. Of course the neocons and the arms lobbyists are always gunning for war, but these two powerful state-backed lobbies were notably silent with regard to these countries, less towards Syria obviously. As distinguished political scientist John J. Mearsheimer has repeatedly explained , the Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals. ..."
"... These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated by decades of conflict. ..."
"... The reasons vary with each case, and I have previously explained extensively why the possibilities for conflict are unthinkable. With Ukraine, a conflict on European soil between Russia and NATO was unthinkable , bringing to mind the type of devastation that was seen during the Second World War. Good sense prevailed, and even NATO somewhat refused to fully arm the Ukrainian army with weapons that would have given them an overwhelming advantage over the Donbass militias. ..."
"... In Syria, any involvement with ground troops would have been collective suicide, given the overwhelming air power deployed in the country by Russia. Recall that since the Second World War, the US has never fought a war in an airspace that was seriously contested (in Vietnam, US air losses were only elevated because of Sino-Soviet help), allowing for ground troops to receive air cover and protection . A ground assault in Syria would have therefore been catastrophic without the requisite control of Syria's skies. ..."
"... Because a war with Iran would be difficult to de-escalate, we can conclude that the possibility of war being waged against the country is unlikely if not impossible. The level of damage the belligerents would inflict on each other would make any diplomatic resolution of the conflict difficult. While the powerful Israeli and Saudi lobbies in the US may be beating the war drums, an indication of what would happen if war followed can be seen in Yemen. Egypt and the UAE were forced to withdraw from the coalition fighting the Houthis after the UAE suffered considerable damage from legitimate retaliatory missile strikes from the Yemen's Army Missile Forces. ..."
"... An open war against Iran continues to be a red line that the ruling financial elites in the US, Israelis and Saudis don't want to cross, having so much at stake. ..."
"... With an election looming, Trump cannot risk triggering a new conflict and betraying one of his most important electoral promises. The Western elite does not seem to have any intention of destroying the petrodollar-based world economy with which it generates its own profits and controls global finance. ..."
"... Even if we consider the possibility of Netanyahu and Bin Salman being mentally unstable, someone within the royal palace in Riyadh or the government in Tel Aviv would have counseled them on the political and personal consequences of an attack on Iran. ..."
Aug 06, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

In 2014 we were almost at the point of no return in Ukraine following the coup d'etat supported and funded by NATO and involving extremist right-wing Ukrainian nationalists. The conflict in the Donbass risked escalating into a conflict between NATO and the Russian Federation, every day in the summer and autumn of 2014 threatening to be doomsday. Rather than respond to the understandable impulse to send Russian troops into Ukraine to defend the population of Donbass, Putin had the presense of mind to pursue the less direct and more sensible strategy of supporting the material capacity of the residents of Donbass to resist the depredations of the Ukrainian army and their neo-Nazi Banderite thugs. Meanwhile, Europe's inept leaders initially egged on Ukraine's destabilization, only to get cold feet after reflecting on the possibility of having a conflict between Moscow and Washington fought on European soil.

With the resistance in Donbass managing to successfully hold back Ukrainian assaults, the conflict began to freeze, almost to the point of a complete ceasefire, even as Ukrainian provocations continue to this day.

Tensions were then focused on Syria , where a mercenary army of at least 200,000 men, armed and trained by the US, UK, Israel, France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost managed to completely topple the country. Russian intervention in 2015 managed to save the country with no time to spare, destroying large numbers of terrorists and reorganizing the Syrian armed forces and training and equipping them with the necessary means to beat back the jihadi waves. The Russians also ensured control of the skies through their network of Pantsir-S1, Pantsir-S2, S-300 and S-400 air-defence systems, together with their impressive jamming (Krasukha-4), command and control information management system (Strelets C4ISR System) and electronic-warfare technologies (1RL257 Krasukha-4).

As the Americans, British, French and Israelis conducted their bombing missions in Syria, the danger of a deliberate attack on Russian positions always remained, something that would have had devastating consequences for the region and beyond. It is no secret that US military planners have repeatedly argued for a direct conflict with Moscow in a contained regional theater. (Clinton called for the downing of Russian jets over Syria, and former US officials claimed that some Russians had to " pay a little price ".)

Since Trump became president, the rhetoric of war has soared considerably, even as the awareness remains that any new conflict would sink Trump's chances of re-election. Despite this, Trump's bombings in Syria were real and potentially very harmful to the Syrian state. Nevertheless, they were foiled by Russia's electronic-warfare capability, which was able to send veering away from their intended target more than 70% of the latest-generation missiles launched by the British, French, Americans and Israelis.

One of the most terrifying moments for the future of humanity came a few months later when Trump started hurling threats and abuses at Kim Jong-un , threatening to reduce Pyongyang to ashes. Trump, moreover, delivered his fiery threats in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly.

Trump's dramatic U-turn following his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un (a public relations/photo opportunity) began to paint a fairly comical and unreliable picture of US power, revealing to the world the new US president's strategy. The president threatens to nuke a country, but only as a negotiating tactic to bring his opponent to the negotiating table and thereby clinch a deal. He then presents himself to his domestic audience as the "great" deal-maker.

With Iran, the recent target of the US administration, the bargaining method is the same, though with decidedly different results. In the cases of Ukraine and North Korea, the two most powerful lobbies in Washington, the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, have had little to say. Of course the neocons and the arms lobbyists are always gunning for war, but these two powerful state-backed lobbies were notably silent with regard to these countries, less towards Syria obviously. As distinguished political scientist John J. Mearsheimer has repeatedly explained , the Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals.

The difference between the case of Iran and the aforementioned cases of Ukraine, Syria and North Korea is precisely the direct involvement of these two lobbies in the decision-making process underway in the US.

These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated by decades of conflict.

What readers can be assured of is that in the cases of Ukraine, Syria, North Korea and Iran, the US is unable to militarily impose its geopolitical or economic will.

The reasons vary with each case, and I have previously explained extensively why the possibilities for conflict are unthinkable. With Ukraine, a conflict on European soil between Russia and NATO was unthinkable , bringing to mind the type of devastation that was seen during the Second World War. Good sense prevailed, and even NATO somewhat refused to fully arm the Ukrainian army with weapons that would have given them an overwhelming advantage over the Donbass militias.

In Syria, any involvement with ground troops would have been collective suicide, given the overwhelming air power deployed in the country by Russia. Recall that since the Second World War, the US has never fought a war in an airspace that was seriously contested (in Vietnam, US air losses were only elevated because of Sino-Soviet help), allowing for ground troops to receive air cover and protection . A ground assault in Syria would have therefore been catastrophic without the requisite control of Syria's skies.

In North Korea, the country's tactical and strategic nuclear and conventional deterrence discourages any missile attack. Any overland attack is out of the question, given the high number of active as well as reserve personnel in the DPRK army. If the US struggled to control a completely defeated Iraq in 2003, how much more difficult would be to deal with a country with a resilient population that is indisposed to bowing to the US? The 2003 Iraq campaign would really be a "cakewalk" in comparison. Another reason why a missile attack on North Korea is impossible is because of the conventional power that Pyongyang possesses in the form of tens of thousands of missiles and artillery pieces that could easily reduce Seoul to rubble in a matter of minutes. This would then lead to a war between the US and the DPRK being fought on the Korean Peninsula. Moon Jae-in, like Merkel and Sarkozy in the case of Ukraine, did everything in his power to prevent such a devastating conflict.

Concerning tensions between the US and Iran and the resulting threats of war, these should be taken as bluster and bluff. America's European allies are heavily involved in Iran and depend on the Middle East for their oil and gas imports. A US war against Iran would have devastating consequences for the world economy, with the Europeans seeing their imports halved or reduced. As Professor Chossudovsky of the strategic think tank Global Research has so ably argued , an attack on Iran is unsustainable, as the oil sectors of the UAE and Saudi Arabia would be hit and shut down. Exports would instantly end after the pipelines going West are bombed by the Houthis and the Strait of Hormuz closed. The economies of these two countries would implode and their ruling class wiped out by internal revolts. The state of Israel as well as US bases in the region would see themselves overwhelmed with missiles coming from Syria, Lebanon, the Golan Heights and Iran. The Tel Aviv government would last a few hours before capitulating under the pressure of its own citizens, who, like the Europeans, are unused to suffering war at home.

Because a war with Iran would be difficult to de-escalate, we can conclude that the possibility of war being waged against the country is unlikely if not impossible. The level of damage the belligerents would inflict on each other would make any diplomatic resolution of the conflict difficult. While the powerful Israeli and Saudi lobbies in the US may be beating the war drums, an indication of what would happen if war followed can be seen in Yemen. Egypt and the UAE were forced to withdraw from the coalition fighting the Houthis after the UAE suffered considerable damage from legitimate retaliatory missile strikes from the Yemen's Army Missile Forces.

An open war against Iran continues to be a red line that the ruling financial elites in the US, Israelis and Saudis don't want to cross, having so much at stake.

With an election looming, Trump cannot risk triggering a new conflict and betraying one of his most important electoral promises. The Western elite does not seem to have any intention of destroying the petrodollar-based world economy with which it generates its own profits and controls global finance. And finally, US military planners do not intend to suffer a humiliating defeat in Iran that would reveal the extent to which US military power is based on propaganda built over the years through Hollywood movies and wars successfully executed against relatively defenceless countries. Even if we consider the possibility of Netanyahu and Bin Salman being mentally unstable, someone within the royal palace in Riyadh or the government in Tel Aviv would have counseled them on the political and personal consequences of an attack on Iran.

It is telling that Washington, London, Tel Aviv and Riyadh have to resort to numerous but ultimately useless provocations against Iran, as they can only rely on hybrid attacks in order to economically isolate it from the rest of the world.

Paradoxically, this strategy has had devastating consequences for the role of the US dollar as a reserve currency together with the SWIFT system. In today's multipolar environment, acting in such an imperious manner leads to the acceleration of de-dollarization as a way of circumventing sanctions and bans imposed by the US.

A reserve currency is used to facilitate transactions. If the disadvantages come to exceed the benefits, it will progressively be used less and less, until it is replaced by a basket of currencies that more closely reflect the multipolar geopolitical reality.

The warmongers in Washington are exasperated by their continuing inability to curb the resilience and resistance of the people in Venezuela, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Donbass, countries and regions understood by the healthy part of the globe as representing the axis of resistance to US Imperialism.

Batman11 , 14 minutes ago link

A multi-polar world became a uni-polar world with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis Fukuyama said it was the end of history.

That didn't last long, did it?

The US came up with a great plan for an open, globalised world.

China went from almost nothing to become a global superpower.

It was a great plan for China, which is now the problem for the US.

Batman11 , 24 minutes ago link

The cry of US elites can be heard across the world.

Mummy.

What's gone wrong?

I am used to always getting my own way.

Thought.Adjuster , 55 minutes ago link

If Folks would just accept a unipolar World, we could all live together in peace.

ZeroPorridge , 6 minutes ago link

Monopoly means utter slavery.

Like in a living body, each cells on their own, grouped by function, none really being the boss of the rest.

uhland62 , 1 hour ago link

America must always threaten someone with war. Syria, Iran, Venezuela, China, Russia, so many to choose from.

Conflicts must never be resolved; they must always kept simmering, so a hot war can be triggered quickly. All Presidents are turned in the first three months after sworn in.

Jazzman , 1 hour ago link

Without required air superiority they are what? Say it! Say it loud!

Dude-dude , 49 minutes ago link

It's what happens as empires mature. Governance becomes bloated, corrupt and inept (often leading to wars). Maturity time has become significantly reduced due to the rate of information technology advance. America is five years away from going insolvent according to most models and forecasts. All new debt after 2024 will be used to pay the interest on existing debts and liabilities. There is simply no stopping it. The US already pays close to 500 billion in annual interest on debts and liabilities. Factor in a 600 billion or 700 billion dollar annual military budget, and unrestrained deficit spending clocking in at over a trillion, and, well, it isn't going to work for long. Considering most new well paying jobs are government jobs... The end is either full socialism / fascism (folks still don't get how similar these are), a currency crisis and panic, depression and institutional deterioration. The only good news to libertarians I guess - if you can call it good - is that the blotted government along with the crony corporations will mostly and eventually collapse. Libertarian governance might not be a choice by an electorate, it might simply become fact in the aftermath.

-- ALIEN -- , 3 hours ago link

As the falling EROEI of oil gets worse; countries will collapse... It's all downhill from here

...what few are left.

Lokiban , 3 hours ago link

I guess Trump eventually will understand this lesson in politics that friendship, mutual respect and helping each other accomplishes way way more then threatening countries to be bombed back into the stoneage.
Noone likes to do a cutthroat deal enforced upon them by thuggery. Trump's got to learn that you can't run politics like you do your bussinesses, it's not working unles that was his plan all this time, to destroy America.

NumbersUsa , 3 hours ago link

"The Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals.

These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated by decades of conflict."

Excellent and Factual points! Thank You!

Scaliger , 3 hours ago link

https://www.jta.org/2019/07/01/united-states/the-israel-projects-ceo-is-leaving-amid-advocacy-groups-fundraising-difficulties

Minamoto , 3 hours ago link

America is increasingly looking like Ancient Rome towards the end. It is overstretched, nearly insolvent, fewer allies want to be allies, it's population is sick, physically and mentally. Obesity, diabetes, drug use/addiction make it impossible for the Pentagon to meet recruitment goal. Mental illness causes daily mass killing. The education system is so broken/broke that there is little real education being done. Americans are among the most ignorant, least educated and least educate-able people in the developed world.

Militarily, the USA can bomb but that's about it... defeats upon defeats over the past two decades demonstrate the US military is a paper tiger of astonishing incompetence.

Boeing can't make planes anymore. Lockheed is not much better. Parts of the F-35 are made by Chinese subsidiaries. The most recently built aircraft carrier cannot launch fighter jets.

-- ALIEN -- , 3 hours ago link

We gots NASCAR, big trucks, free TV, fast food, and endless ****.

Go 'Merica!

Justin Case , 2 hours ago link

Recent estimates indicate that more than 550,000 people experience homelessness in the US on any given night, with about two-thirds ending up in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs, and one-third finding their way to unsheltered locations like parks, vehicles, and metro stations. According to the Urban Institute, about 25% of homeless people have jobs.

I find that it is difficult for me to wrap my head around pain and suffering on such an immense scale. Americans often think of the homeless as drug-addicted men that don't want to work, but the truth is that about a quarter of the homeless population is made up of children.

foxenburg , 2 hours ago link

Seriously, why would Iran want to hijack a German ship? Iran took the UK one in retaliation for the Brits seizing the one at Gibraltar. Had that not happened, no Brit ships in the Persian Gulf would have been touched. This is all a carefully engineered USA provocation designed to, inter alia, increase tension in the Persian Gulf, put more nails in coffin of JCPOA...and most importantly give UK an excuse, as remaining signatory, to call for the original UN sanctions on Iran to be snapped-back.

terrific , 4 hours ago link

Federico, let me explain it simply: the U.S. is allied with Israel, and Iran hates Israel. Why, I don't know (nor do I care), but that's why the U.S. needs to keep Iran in check.

Grouchy-Bear , 4 hours ago link

You are confused...

Israel hates Iran and it is Israel that needs to be kept in check...

CatInTheHat , 4 hours ago link

Yet CONGRESS just passed the largest defense bill in history. The WAR industry is bankrupting us financially spiritually and morally.

A war is coming. But upon whom this time (or STILL?), because with President Bolton and Vice President Adelson in power, China Iran or Russia or maybe all three, are open options.

Ofelas , 4 hours ago link

Interview with a Russian I saw 2 years ago "USA wants to create local conflicts on foreign shores, ...on our borders, we will not allow that to happen and make the war international" I will translate: Russia will not be pulled in to some stupid small war draining their resources while the US sits comfortable, they will throw their missiles around - no escape from nuclear winter.

libtears , 3 hours ago link

Us pays more in interest than defense spending now. You'll need to factor that into your predictions

UBrexitUPay4it , 3 hours ago link

If spending has reached the limit now, during peacetime....what will happen during a protracted war? Even if it stays conventional, it would appear that a huge war effort, comparable to WWII, just won't be possible. The US seems to be in a pre-war Britain position, but there isn't a friendly giant across the water to bail them out with both cash and resources.

Either things become insane in fairly short order, or wiser heads will prevail and the US will step back from the brink. Do we have any wiser heads at the moment?

I keep seeing John Bolton's moustache, Andi am not filled with confidence.

[Aug 06, 2019] Congress Spending Surge is National Suicide by Ron Paul

Aug 06, 2019 | www.unz.com

With a national debt approaching $23 trillion and a trillion dollar deficit for this year alone, Congress last week decided to double down on suicidal spending, passing a two year budget that has the United States careening toward catastrophe. While we cannot say precisely when the economic crash will occur, we do know that it is coming. And last week Congress pounded down on the accelerator.

We are told that the US economy is experiencing unprecedented growth, while at the same time the Fed is behaving as it does when we are in recession by cutting rates and dodging insults from the President because it's not cutting fast enough. This is not economic policy – it's schizophrenia!

But that's only the beginning.

Take what they call "national defense" spending. This is the misnomer they use to try and convince us that pumping trillions into the military-industrial complex will make us safe and free. Nothing could be further from the truth: probably ninety percent of the "defense" budget is aggressive militarism and welfare for the rich.

Under this budget deal the military budget would increase to nearly $1.4 trillion for two years. Of course that's only a fraction of real military spending, which is, all told, well over one trillion dollars per year.

What do we get for this money? Are we safer? Not at all. We are more vulnerable than ever. We spend billions fighting "terrorism" in Africa while terrorism has actually increased since the creation of the US Africa Command – "AFRICOM" – in 2007. Meanwhile we continue to spend to maintain our illegal military occupation of a large section of Syria – which benefits terrorist groups seeking to overthrow Assad.

We're sending thousands more troops to the Middle East including basing US troops in Saudi Arabia for the first time since 2003. Back then, even neocon Paul Wolfowitz praised our departure from Saudi Arabia because, as he rightly stated, US troops on Saudi soil was a great recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.

Now we've pulled out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty so that we can deploy once-forbidden missiles on China's front door. A new arms race with China will mean a new boon for our new Defense Secretary's former colleagues at Raytheon!

[Aug 05, 2019] Gabbard must poll 2% or more in at least 4 different polls between 6/28 8/28 to qualify for the 3rd debate; she's received enough donations to qualify. She needs to be on the podium!

Aug 05, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Aug 4 2019 22:17 utc | 48

Wow!! Honesty in reporting!! I must applaud Caitlin Johnstone's boldfaced honesty in her "Propagandists Freak Out Over Gabbard's Destruction of Harris: Establishment narrative managers distracted attention from a notable antiwar contender, seizing instead the chance to marshal an old smear against her, writes Caitlin Johnstone."

I stopped reading after this passage and had to come her and post a comment about the most honest description of CNN I've ever read:

"CNN is a virulent establishment propaganda firm with an extensive history of promoting lies and brazen psyops in facilitation of U.S. imperialism, so it would make sense that they would try to avoid a subject which would inevitably lead to unauthorized truth-telling on the matter."

Johnstone then recites the smearing attacks alluded to @46 but also tells us why:

"Gabbard just publicly eviscerated a charming, ambitious and completely amoral centrist who would excel at putting a friendly humanitarian face on future wars if elected, and that's why the narrative managers are flipping out so hard right now."

Harris and Michelle Obama I see as one and the same--both equally putrid. I know I dropped by unequivocal support for Gabbard, but that doesn't mean I'm 100% against her and her efforts. I wholeheartedly support Caitlin's conclusion:

"The shrill, hysterical pushback that Gabbard received last night was very encouraging, because it means she's forcing them to fight back. In a media environment where the war propaganda machine normally coasts along almost entirely unhindered in mainstream attention, the fact that someone has positioned themselves to move the needle like this says good things for our future. If our society is to have any chance of ever throwing off the omnicidal, ecocidal power establishment which keeps us in a state of endless war and soul-crushing oppression, the first step is punching a hole in the narrative matrix which keeps us hypnotized into believing that this is all normal and acceptable.

"Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Whoever disrupts that narrative control is doing the real work."

Gabbard must poll 2% or more in at least 4 different polls between 6/28 & 8/28 to qualify for the 3rd debate; she's received enough donations to qualify. She needs to be on the podium!

karlof1 , Aug 4 2019 21:36 utc | 45

Proven Propagandist Bellingcat joins D-Party talking-point hit parade attacking Gabbard for being "Assad Apologist." Interesting how she's getting the similar sort of negative publicity Trump got quite a lot of at the outset of his campaign, which only serves to increase her national exposure. Her retorts are forceful and having success; and as Trump proved, smear campaigns no longer are assured of success. Clearly, the Current Oligarchy and their D-Party allies are convinced that the massive propaganda smearing of Assad was successful; but, was it really?

[Aug 05, 2019] Media Tulsi is New Darling of 'Russia's Propaganda Machine' The American Conservative

Aug 05, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Media: Tulsi is New Darling of 'Russia's Propaganda Machine' Remember when Red-baiting was considered dogmatic and passé by the left-wing hive? By Barbara Boland • August 5, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard in Amherst, New Hampshire, July 4, 2019.. ( Andrew Cline/Shutterstock) What do Hawaii Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and billionaire real estate heir Donald J. Trump have in common?

According to MSNBC, Gabbard is part of the Russian scheme that "Moscow used when it interfered in the 2016" election.

The establishment loathes any candidate who seeks an end to U.S. military adventurism abroad -- so much so that they are willing to make the logically incoherent claim that Russian bots elected Trump. Now they're apparently also attempting to elect his 2020 Democratic rival.

The mind-bending MSNBC article resurfaced on social media after Gabbard became the most Googled candidate thanks to several viral moments during the debates.

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NBC News rests its claim that "Russia's propaganda machine" has "discovered" Tulsi Gabbard on the fact that "there have been at least 20 Gabbard stories on three major Moscow-based English-language websites affiliated with or supportive of the Russian government: RT, the Russian-owned TV outlet; Sputnik News, a radio outlet; and Russia Insider, a blog that experts say closely follows the Kremlin line. The coverage devoted to Gabbard, both in news and commentary, exceeds that afforded to any of the declared or rumored Democratic candidates despite Gabbard's lack of voter recognition."

Because Russian media reports on Gabbard, that means they're seeking to elect her. How sneaky.

A more obvious explanation for the increased coverage is that as a member of Congress, Gabbard has made many statements regarding the war in Syria and America's and Russia's involvement, and because as a presidential candidate, she's made foreign policy the centerpiece of her campaign.

Or it could be because -- Russian bots.

MSNBC says that "negative coverage and fabricated stories about Hillary Clinton" in 2016 were "amplified by a huge network of fake social media accounts and bots" and that "experts who track inauthentic social media accounts have already found some extolling Gabbard's positions since she declared."

It continues: "Within a few days of Gabbard announcing her presidential bid, DisInfo 2018 , part of the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge, found that three of the top 15 URLs shared by the 800 social media accounts affiliated with known and suspected Russian propaganda operations directed at U.S. citizens were about Gabbard."

New Knowledge is the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election. Apparently they've told NBC News that they spotted "chatter" about Gabbard "in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns. The chatter discussed Gabbard's usefulness."

Further, "Josh Russell, a researcher and 'troll hunter' known for identifying fake accounts, similarly told NBC News he recently spotted a few clusters of suspicious accounts that retweeted the same exact text about Gabbard, mostly neutral or slightly positive headlines."

"A few clusters" of "mostly neutral or slightly positive headlines." Scary stuff.

I'm old enough to remember when Democrats mocked the very idea of Russians being a threat.

Remember Obama's famous comeback : "Governor Romney, I'm glad you recognize that al-Qaeda is a threat, because a couple of months ago when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

Romney is a "Cold War holdover" with an "apparent determination to take U.S.-Russian relations back to the 1950s," chided Joe Biden, Obama's running mate, at an April campaign event.

Romney "acts like he thinks the Cold War is still on, Russia is still our major adversary. I don't know where he has been," Biden said in an interview with Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation . "We have disagreements with Russia, but they're united with us. This is not 1956. He just seems to be uninformed or stuck in a Cold War mentality."

This all feels so long ago. Ever since the Democrats lost the 2016 election to Trump, there's been endless fear mongering about how Russians are hiding behind every candidate. Now, if a Democratic candidate dares to defy the establishment line on foreign interventionism, she must be aided by the Russians.

Because that's the only reason someone might say , "I will not apologize to you, or to anyone for doing all that I can to prevent our country from continuing to make these perpetual wrong decisions that have taken a toll on the lives of my brothers and sisters in uniform. I will continue to do all that I can to make sure that we end these wasteful regime change wars."

Barbara Boland is 's foreign policy and national security reporter. Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC.

[Aug 05, 2019] UK 'up to its neck' in Russiagate affair, says George Galloway, as secret texts reveal British role

Barr now has goods to jail major conspirators for life. It is unlikely happened but we can hope.
Notable quotes:
"... "Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign country interfering in American affairs," former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the 'Russiagate' investigation. ..."
"... The Guardian reported on texts between former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, who now heads GCHQ. The two men met in 2016 to discuss "our strange situation" – an apparent reference to Russia's alleged interference in US domestic politics. ..."
"... British intelligence "appears to have played a key role in the early stages," the report said. ..."
"... Galloway said the revelation was not surprising because people "already knew" that British intelligence had played a part in the Russia-related investigations in the US. He recalled that it was former British spy Christopher Steele who drew up the now-infamous Steele dossier, which made multiple unverifiable and salacious claims about Trump and has since been largely discredited. Britain is "up to its neck in the whole Russiagate affair," he said. ..."
"... Asked what the UK stood to gain by trying to implicate Russia in a US election scandal at a time when then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was dismissing baseless claims of Russian interference in the Brexit campaign, Galloway noted that Johnson's comments on Russia have appeared to strangely sway between friendly and antagonistic. ..."
"... In June 2016, the FBI opened a covert investigation codenamed 'Crossfire Hurricane' into Trump's now disproven collusion with Moscow, which was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller. ..."
Jul 31, 2019 | www.rt.com

While hysteria raged about possible Russian "interference" in the 2016 US election, British intelligence officials were secretly playing a "key role" in helping instigate investigations into Donald Trump, secret texts have shown. "Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign country interfering in American affairs," former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the 'Russiagate' investigation.

The Guardian reported on texts between former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, who now heads GCHQ. The two men met in 2016 to discuss "our strange situation" – an apparent reference to Russia's alleged interference in US domestic politics.

British intelligence "appears to have played a key role in the early stages," the report said.

www.youtube.com/embed/y0X5ubiSd0M

Galloway said the revelation was not surprising because people "already knew" that British intelligence had played a part in the Russia-related investigations in the US. He recalled that it was former British spy Christopher Steele who drew up the now-infamous Steele dossier, which made multiple unverifiable and salacious claims about Trump and has since been largely discredited. Britain is "up to its neck in the whole Russiagate affair," he said.

The texts also reveal that the Brexit vote was viewed by some in the FBI as something that had been influenced by Russia.

Asked what the UK stood to gain by trying to implicate Russia in a US election scandal at a time when then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was dismissing baseless claims of Russian interference in the Brexit campaign, Galloway noted that Johnson's comments on Russia have appeared to strangely sway between friendly and antagonistic.

Johnson is like "a sofa that bears the impression of the last person to sit upon him," the former MP quipped. What happens next will depend on who is leading the tango, "the orange man in Washington or the blonde mop-head in London."

In June 2016, the FBI opened a covert investigation codenamed 'Crossfire Hurricane' into Trump's now disproven collusion with Moscow, which was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Ultimately, the two-year-long probe that followed came up short, producing no evidence to prove a conspiracy or collusion between Trump campaign officials and Russia

See also:

Also on rt.com Fear behind fury: As DNI, Ratcliffe could expose FISA files that Russiagaters hope stay buried

[Aug 05, 2019] US federal court exposes Democratic Party conspiracy against Assange and WikiLeaks by Eric London

Notable quotes:
"... The ruling exposes the illegality of the conspiracy by the US government, backed by the governments of Britain, Ecuador, Australia and Sweden and the entire corporate media and political establishment, to extradite Assange to the US, where he faces 175 years in federal prison on charges including espionage. ..."
"... The dismissal of the civil suit exposes massive unreported conflicts of interest and prosecutorial misconduct and criminal abuse of process by those involved. The criminal prosecution of Assange has nothing to do with facts and is instead aimed at punishing him for telling the truth about the war crimes committed by US imperialism and its allies. ..."
"... The judge labeled WikiLeaks an "international news organization" and said Assange is a "publisher," exposing the liars in the corporate press who declare that Assange is not subject to free speech protections. Judge Koeltl continued: "In New York Times Co. v. United States ..."
"... New York Times Co. v. United States ..."
"... The DNC's baseless complaint cited the New York Times ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... Everyone seems to forget one thing.. Assange knows who gave Assange the DNC data. At some point you have to entertain the idea that eventually he'll play that card. ..."
"... The DNC never allowed a REAL cyber-inspection of it's servers, did they? They also never said the information contained in the supposedly 'stolen' E-Mails was "WRONG" or "INACCURATE", have they? It says volumes.... Occam's Razor points to disgruntled DNC employee Seth Rich using a large capacity flash drive to download the E-Mails, etc which he then passed to someone who got it to Wikileaks. For which he was killed!! ..."
"... No. they never did. Also, if you examine Mueller's BS indictments, the domain they claim was used to phish for Podesta's password (and others) was registered on the same day or perhaps the day before they unsealed the indictment. It's a total fabrication, start to finish! ..."
"... That's just one example of many. The Malware they allegedly 'discovered' (by a Ukranian owned security company Crowdstrike) was not Russian, it was Ukrainian and been floating around the internet for years prior to this alleged non-existent 'hack'.. The whole thing has more holes than proverbial swiss ..."
"... For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations ..."
"... Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match ..."
"... It is beyond astonishing that Democrats and the media have successfully shifted 99% of the public's attention AWAY FROM the actual content of what information was stolen from top ranking Democrats, especially the Hillary for President Campaign. ..."
"... beaglebailey > michiganderforfreedom ..."
"... ironically surely an equally damning 'leak' came from the DNCs own ex-Chair Donna Brazille in her self-serving 'memoir' Hacks ... in it she revealed Obama left DNC $24m in debt and Hillary Clinton then bailed it out and effectively bought the entire apparatus as her personal plaything. When that is understood all the 'corruption' about rigging the primaries against Sanders wasn't rigging at all, after all he was standing on Clinton's private property at the time. Blair and Brown dutifully followed the same NSA playbook and left Labour broke, presumably so Blair's 'charity' could then step in to buy it... but Corbyn then balanced the books in 6 months of his taking over ..."
"... The corporate media, having already gone to great lengths to convict Assange of such in the court of public opinion, would like to see that "conviction" stand. ..."
"... "The DNC's published internal communications allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election." That's precisely the kind of "problem" the bourgeoisie will no longer tolerate. ..."
"... Reporting the truth “undermined and distorted the DNC's ability to communicate the party's values and visions to the American electorate.” ..."
"... They're sick and tired of basic democratic rights almost as much as they're sick and tired of the working class ..."
Jul 31, 2019 | www.wsws.org

In a ruling published late Tuesday, Judge John Koeltl of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York delivered a devastating blow to the US-led conspiracy against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In his ruling, Judge Koeltl, a Bill Clinton nominee and former assistant special prosecutor for the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, dismissed "with prejudice" a civil lawsuit filed in April 2018 by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) alleging WikiLeaks was civilly liable for conspiring with the Russian government to steal DNC emails and data and leak them to the public.

Jennifer Robinson, a leading lawyer for Assange, and other WikiLeaks attorneys welcomed the ruling as "an important win for free speech."

The decision exposes the Democratic Party in a conspiracy of its own to attack free speech and cover up the crimes of US imperialism and the corrupt activities of the two parties of Wall Street. Judge Koeltl stated:

If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC's political financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them 'secret' and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or other media outlet. But that would impermissibly elevate a purely private privacy interest to override the First Amendment interest in the publication of matters of the highest public concern. The DNC's published internal communications allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election. This type of information is plainly of the type entitled to the strongest protection that the First Amendment offers.

The ruling exposes the illegality of the conspiracy by the US government, backed by the governments of Britain, Ecuador, Australia and Sweden and the entire corporate media and political establishment, to extradite Assange to the US, where he faces 175 years in federal prison on charges including espionage.

The plaintiff in the civil case -- the Democratic Party -- has also served as Assange's chief prosecutor within the state apparatus for over a decade. During the Obama administration, Democratic Party Justice Department officials, as well as career Democratic holdovers under the Trump administration, prepared the criminal case against him.

The dismissal of the civil suit exposes massive unreported conflicts of interest and prosecutorial misconduct and criminal abuse of process by those involved. The criminal prosecution of Assange has nothing to do with facts and is instead aimed at punishing him for telling the truth about the war crimes committed by US imperialism and its allies.

The judge labeled WikiLeaks an "international news organization" and said Assange is a "publisher," exposing the liars in the corporate press who declare that Assange is not subject to free speech protections. Judge Koeltl continued: "In New York Times Co. v. United States , the landmark 'Pentagon Papers' case, the Supreme Court upheld the press's right to publish information of public concern obtained from documents stolen by a third party."

As a legal matter, by granting WikiLeaks' motion to dismiss, the court ruled that the DNC had not put forward a "factually plausible" claim. At the motion to dismiss stage, a judge is required to accept all the facts alleged by the plaintiff as true. Here, the judge ruled that even if all the facts alleged by the DNC were true, no fact-finder could "draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged."

Going a step further, the judge called the DNC's arguments "threadbare," adding: "At no point does the DNC allege any facts" showing that Assange or WikiLeaks "participated in the theft of the DNC's information."

Judge Koeltl said the DNC's argument that Assange and WikiLeaks "conspired with the Russian Federation to steal and disseminate the DNC's materials" is "entirely divorced from the facts." The judge further ruled that the court "is not required to accept conclusory allegations asserted as facts."

The judge further dismantled the DNC's argument that WikiLeaks is guilty-by-association with Russia, calling the alleged connection between Assange and the Russian government "irrelevant," because "a person is entitled to publish stolen documents that the publisher requested from a source so long as the publisher did not participate in the theft."

Judge Koeltl also rejected the DNC's claim "that WikiLeaks can be held liable for the theft as an after-the-fact coconspirator of the stolen documents." Calling this argument "unpersuasive," the judge wrote that it would "eviscerate" constitutional protections: "Such a rule would render any journalist who publishes an article based on stolen information a coconspirator in the theft."

In its April 2018 complaint, the DNC put forward a series of claims that have now been exposed as brazen lies, including that Assange, Trump and Russia "undermined and distorted the DNC's ability to communicate the party's values and visions to the American electorate."

The complaint also alleged: "Russian intelligence services then disseminated the stolen, confidential materials through GRU Operative #1, as well as WikiLeaks and Assange, who were actively supported by the Trump Campaign and Trump Associates as they released and disclosed the information to the American public at a time and in a manner that served their common goals."

At the time the DNC filed its complaint, the New York Times wrote that the document relies on "publicly-known facts" as well as "information that has been disclosed in news reports and subsequent court proceedings." The lawsuit "comes amid a swirl of intensifying scrutiny of Mr. Trump, his associates and their interactions with Russia," the Times wrote.

It is deeply ironic that Judge Koeltl cited the Pentagon Papers case, New York Times Co. v. United States , in his ruling.

The DNC's baseless complaint cited the New York Times eight times as "proof" of Assange and WikiLeaks' ties to Russia, including articles by Times reporters Andrew Kramer, Michael Gordon, Niraj Chokshi, Sharon LaFraniere, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Eric Lichtblau, Noah Weiland, Alicia Parlapiano and Ashley Parker, as well as a July 26, 2016 article by Charlie Savage titled "Assange, avowed foe of Clinton, timed email release for Democratic Convention."

The first of these articles was published just weeks after the New York Times hired James Bennet as its editorial page editor in March 2016. James Bennet's brother, Michael Bennet, is a presidential candidate, a senator from Colorado and former chair of the DNC's Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. In 2018, Bennet signed a letter to Vice President Mike Pence noting he was "extremely concerned" that Ecuador had not canceled asylum for Assange, who was then trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

"It is imperative," the letter read, "that you raise US concerns with [Ecuadorian] President [Lenin] Moreno about Ecuador's continued support for Mr. Assange at a time when WikiLeaks continues its efforts to undermine democratic processes globally."

In April 2019, after the Trump administration announced charges against Assange, the New York Times editorial board, under James Bennet's direction, wrote: "The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime." Two weeks later, Michael Bennet announced his presidential run and has since enjoyed favorable coverage in the Times editorial page.

Additionally, the father of James and Michael Bennet, Douglas Bennet, headed the CIA-linked United States Agency for International Development in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

On Wednesday, the Times published a brief, six-paragraph article on page 25 under the headline, "DNC lawsuit against election is dismissed." In its online edition, the Times prominently featured a link to its special page for the Mueller Report, which is based on the same DNC-instigated threadbare lies that Judge Koeltl kicked out of federal court

LC • 9 hours ago

Everyone seems to forget one thing.. Assange knows who gave Assange the DNC data. At some point you have to entertain the idea that eventually he'll play that card.

Liberalism Has Failed • 2 days ago

The DNC never allowed a REAL cyber-inspection of it's servers, did they? They also never said the information contained in the supposedly 'stolen' E-Mails was "WRONG" or "INACCURATE", have they? It says volumes.... Occam's Razor points to disgruntled DNC employee Seth Rich using a large capacity flash drive to download the E-Mails, etc which he then passed to someone who got it to Wikileaks. For which he was killed!!

LC > Liberalism Has Failed • 9 hours ago

No. they never did. Also, if you examine Mueller's BS indictments, the domain they claim was used to phish for Podesta's password (and others) was registered on the same day or perhaps the day before they unsealed the indictment. It's a total fabrication, start to finish!

That's just one example of many. The Malware they allegedly 'discovered' (by a Ukranian owned security company Crowdstrike) was not Russian, it was Ukrainian and been floating around the internet for years prior to this alleged non-existent 'hack'.. The whole thing has more holes than proverbial swiss


Tradairn > SFWhite • a day ago

Then why does the US keep interfering in other countries' political processes? You've become the schoolyard bully of the world.

SFWhite > Tradairn • 18 hours ago

Quoting from JFK's speech archived in the JFK Library:
THE PRESIDENT AND THE PRESS: ADDRESS BEFORE THE AMERICAN NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION, APRIL 27, 1961
https://www.jfklibrary.org/...

If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.

It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions--by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper.

***For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.***

michiganderforfreedom • 2 days ago

It is beyond astonishing that Democrats and the media have successfully shifted 99% of the public's attention AWAY FROM the actual content of what information was stolen from top ranking Democrats, especially the Hillary for President Campaign.

Had the actual Content of what had been stolen was simply meeting schedules, work shift assignments, lawn sign purchase orders and speech notes, NONE of this scandal would have happened!!

But, the CONTENT of what was stolen revealed the upper echelon of Democrat Party leadership to be nothing but lying, conniving, cheating, law-breaking dirty politicians who are hell-bent on bringing down the American Federation at any cost.

If the actual Content had been cookie recipes and wedding plans, we would not have been put though this traumatic national wringer!!

beaglebailey > michiganderforfreedom • 7 hours ago

This was the reason Hillary's campaign came up with the idea to blame it on Russia. This kept people from focusing on their content and it worked. To this day Hillary's supporters think that her rigging the primary is a conspiracy theory. And it's why they believe that Russia interfered with the election. How sad to see people who saw through the Saddam had WMDs have fallen for the new WMDs scam.

Charlotte Ruse • 4 days ago

"The decision exposes the Democratic Party in a conspiracy of its own to attack free speech and cover up the crimes of US imperialism and the corrupt activities of the two parties of Wall Street."

One should never forget that the corrupt political duopoly is controlled by the military/security/surveillance/corporate state. Assange, published documents revealing to millions that the US committed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, murdered innocent civilians, and slaughtered two Reuter Reporters.

Revealing atrocities is BAD MARKETING for the military industry which for decades has been robbing the US Treasury blind. Assange's documents threatens the "official narrative" spread by the state-run mainstream news convincing the public to passively accept the plundering of the US Treasury to enhance the wealth of a small cabal of war profiteer gangsters.

In other words, Assange is being attacked by the US Government because he revealed that a big CON GAME is being perpetuated against the American public by the security state.

Dennis Stein > Charlotte Ruse • 3 days ago

“We’ll Know Our Disinformation Program Is Complete When Everything the American Public Believes Is False”

—CIA Director William Casey at an early February 1981 meeting of newly elected President Reagan.

Adrian • 4 days ago

Great news on Assange... but ironically surely an equally damning 'leak' came from the DNCs own ex-Chair Donna Brazille in her self-serving 'memoir' Hacks ... in it she revealed Obama left DNC $24m in debt and Hillary Clinton then bailed it out and effectively bought the entire apparatus as her personal plaything. When that is understood all the 'corruption' about rigging the primaries against Sanders wasn't rigging at all, after all he was standing on Clinton's private property at the time. Blair and Brown dutifully followed the same NSA playbook and left Labour broke, presumably so Blair's 'charity' could then step in to buy it... but Corbyn then balanced the books in 6 months of his taking over

Ed Bergonzi • 5 days ago

This is good news. But now the advantage is with Trump. What will the Democrats do if Trump presses for extradition claiming "national security" concerns, i.e., Assange's exposure of US war crimes. I think their present silence regarding Judge Koeltl's decision speaks volumes.

Greg • 5 days ago • edited

"Going a step further, the judge called the DNC’s arguments “threadbare,” adding: “At no point does the DNC allege any facts” showing that Assange or WikiLeaks “participated in the theft of the DNC’s information.”

The corporate media, having already gone to great lengths to convict Assange of such in the court of public opinion, would like to see that "conviction" stand.

"On Wednesday, the Times published a brief, six-paragraph article on page 25..."

Greg • 5 days ago • edited

"The DNC's published internal communications allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election." That's precisely the kind of "problem" the bourgeoisie will no longer tolerate.

Reporting the truth “undermined and distorted the DNC's ability to communicate the party's values and visions to the American electorate.”

They're sick and tired of basic democratic rights almost as much as they're sick and tired of the working class. They practically come out and say it: "There was no attempt by other reporters to pursue the matter, and Conway then began to rant about Trump's reasons for targeting the four congresswomen, saying, “He's tired, a lot of us are sick and tired of this country—of America coming last, to people who swore an oath of office.”

[Aug 05, 2019] I would not be surprised if some of the mass shootings (and other supposed terrorist incidents blamed on radicalised Muslim individuals) that have occurred in the US and elsewhere eventually turn out to have the fingerprints of agencies that claim to be protecting the public.

Aug 05, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Aug 4 2019 22:47 utc | 51

Evelyn @ 34, O @ 48:

My suspicion is that some of these supposed "loner" white supremacist individuals have had some contact with security forces in the past either as or through informants. I would not be surprised if many (if not most) such individuals ended up converted to extreme forms of fascism by joining online groups and networks infiltrated by government law and order / security organisations (you can guess which ones in your own countries) looking for gullible informants and patsies.

Before the 1992 Ruby Ridge siege and shoot-out in Idaho that resulted in the deaths of his wife and son, the survivalist Randy Weaver had resisted being drawn into white supremacist groups such as the Aryan Nations (though he personally knew some people in those groups) on the suspicion that he was being set up by law enforcement agencies. (An informant for one such agency met Weaver at an Aryan Nations meeting in 1986. )

WSWS.org has published articles in the past on the close association between far-right extremists and sections of the military and security forces in Germany (like this one , and this one also).

I would not be surprised if some of the mass shootings (and other supposed terrorist incidents blamed on radicalised Muslim individuals) that have occurred in the US and elsewhere eventually turn out to have the fingerprints of agencies that claim to be protecting the public.

[Aug 04, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard's foreign policy views are a clear and present danger to Israel's and Washington's grand strategy to secure permanent military hegemony in the Middle East.

Aug 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

NietzscheanAntifascist , says: August 4, 2019 at 2:31 pm GMT

...As for Tulsi Gabbard, her foreign policy views are a clear and present danger to Israel's and Washington's grand strategy to secure permanent military hegemony in the Middle East. If the PNAC grand strategy succeeds, there will never be any justice or sovereignty for the Palestinian people. I think she was being strategic with the BDS vote (as with her defense of Joe Biden, a head-fake which opened up the opportunity for her to take down Kamala Harris).

Gabbard's mission faces long enough odds without her publicly confirming the worst paranoid Zionist fears about her. She's already being denounced as an "Assad apologist" and "Putin puppet" (don't you love the sub literary assonance and alliteration?); she can dispel the outrageous slanders, but if she were on the record in support of BDS, it would have been the nail in the coffin of her campaign. Gabbard strikes me as radically pragmatic.

We will need her remarkable leadership skills to avoid civil war as the empire collapses. Please don't throw in the towel yet or give up on the one hope that remains.

[Aug 04, 2019] Henry Wallace on Maerican fascism

Aug 04, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Watt4Bob , August 4, 2019 at 9:28 am

We were warned about the situation you describe.

The following is a portion of an op-ed piece that appeared in the New York Times On April 4, 1944 . It was written by Henry Wallace, FDR's vice president;

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

The full text is quite useful in understanding that there is no question as to how and why we find ourselves in the present predicament, it is the logical outcome of a process that was well understood during FDR's tenure.

That understanding has since been deliberately eradicated by the powerful interests that control our media.

[Aug 03, 2019] Tulsi wasn't supposed to do that

"Harris is the establishment's primary backup candidate after Biden. She was supposed to coast through the primaries while all the attention was on Handsy Joe. Now she's wounded, and the establishment is royally pissed."
Notable quotes:
"... Not only was she not supposed to attack Kamala Harris, but she most certainly wasn't supposed to have landed such an effective blow and lived to tell about it. ..."
Aug 03, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

gjohnsit on Fri, 08/02/2019 - 5:53pm

Not only was she not supposed to attack Kamala Harris, but she most certainly wasn't supposed to have landed such an effective blow and lived to tell about it.

... ... ...

[Aug 03, 2019] Gabbard needs 130,000 donors ($2 will work) to qualify for the September debates; hope folks will step up, as she's the strongest voice breaking the MIC/Neocon Narrative.

Aug 03, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

kabobyak , Aug 3 2019 1:22 utc | 44

Kamala Harris (Dem.-AIPAC) goes full-bore Mccarthy after Tulsi Gabbard skewers her in the debates. After attacking Biden in the first debate with a proven winning argument (Racist!), Harris and her campaign now employ the other proven winning argument (Assad apologist! Putin Apologist!) all over the Twittersphere: suddenly #5 trending on Twitter is Assad(!), with MSM joining the frenzy to attack Gabbard. NPR's approach is to never mention Gabbard's name; maybe the only lesson they learned from the 2016 election is to not give coverage to a candidate they despise. https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/08/01/propagandists-are-freaking-out-over-gabbards-destruction-of-harris/

Gabbard needs 130,000 donors ($2 will work) to qualify for the September debates; hope folks will step up, as she's the strongest voice breaking the MIC/Neocon Narrative. Without her in the race, I'd predict those issues will disappear from the media and Presidential campaigns. Of course that's the goal for those forces, but 2020 may be the best chance yet of bursting open that rotten fruit.

Piotr Berman , Aug 3 2019 4:35 utc | 59

Gabbard needs 130,000 donors ($2 will work) to qualify for the September debates; hope folks will step up, as she's the strongest voice breaking the MIC/Neocon Narrative. Without her in the race, I'd predict those issues will disappear from the media and Presidential campaigns. Of course that's the goal for those forces, but 2020 may be the best chance yet of bursting open that rotten fruit.

Posted by: kabobyak | Aug 3 2019 1:22 utc | 44

Bow, bow, to the great kabobyak! Bow, bow, to the great kabobyak! (for the correct tune, check "Miya sama, Mikado", for original tune, check "Miya-san, miya san"). Our after the kabobyak appeal, Gabbard raised the number of donations above 150,000!

Some commenters had justified objections to Gabbard, but the game here is to shake the "bipartisan consensus" to inflict "maximum misery" to all perceived opponents of USA. It is not easy to convey this message to the American majority. And Tulsi has other positive messages too, she apparently eviscerated Kamala Harris for her past as a cruelly heartless prosecutor, fighting to keep innocent in prison. Mind you, Hillary, Kamala etc. do those things out of conviction that it is popular, or that the public is divided as follows: those who donate to campaigns and those who do not care. Once they are properly scared, politicians can actually improve. Alas, for decades they were "improperly scared", thus concluding that to survive on the national (or state-wide) arena they need a psychopathic persona.

BTW, there are websites tabulating donations and industries, and Gabbard is apparently supported by fitness clubs. Survival of the fittest may be actually a positive social value.

d. , Aug 3 2019 10:31 utc | 70
kabobyak #45

Whats the appeal of Tulsi? She is a former CFR member that is also in bed with the Adelsons. At best she would be another Obama, at worst a new Trump.

Anacharsis , Aug 3 2019 10:44 utc | 71
d. @ 70

It seems people don't really want to see Tulsi as president so much as to see her on the next debate stage.

kabobyak , Aug 3 2019 10:58 utc | 73
D. @ 70

I guess we don't really know what Gabbard would be. All the Dems and Repubs have bad connections; almost all have pushed (or are still pushing) the lunatic Russiagate hoax, and that includes Bernie. OK to sit back and watch the circus, but if Gabbard gets no support for what she is currently speaking out on, it sends a strong message to anyone else thinking of carrying the water further on issues of war and peace.

dltravers , Aug 3 2019 13:30 utc | 84
Anacharsis @ 71 and d @ 70

There is plenty not to like about Tulsi Gabbard. Maybe someday I will dislike her as much as I dislike Kamilla Harris and some of the others. Whoever wins, we will end up with the same bureaucracy anyway so it will pretty much business as usual.


oglalla , Aug 3 2019 13:47 utc | 85
>> As Caitlin Johnstone writes, the fact that Gabbard is under such attack
>> by war cheerleaders like Lindsey Graham and Josh Rogin shows they
>> view her as a threat to their narrative control.

Yes, it "shows".

The appearance of a fight "shows" they're actually fighting. It "shows" you that the DNC and American democracy isn't a complete sham. So you found someone (within the establishment and who votes establishment) you can pour your heart, energy, and money into. And who will, after the primary, endorse the establishment pick. And another election cycle passes with no effort for a genuinely independent challenge. Just like every prior cycle that I paid attention to.

Anacharsis , Aug 3 2019 13:48 utc | 86
Posted by: dltravers | Aug 3 2019 13:30 utc | 84

"Maybe someday I will dislike her as much as I dislike Kamilla Harris"

Not a chance in hell--Kamala takes the despicable cake: people don't know the tip of the iceberg with regard to how genuinely corrupt she is. I'm pretty sure it is a travesty she's not in prison right now.

Bemildred , Aug 3 2019 13:50 utc | 87
RE Tulsi, other politicians, who to trust?

Well you don't trust any of them, but you vote for the ones pushing policy you want to see happen, and you vote for the ones that try to make that happen, and you abandon them immediately if they renege. In the current rigged system, you can't assume anybody can be relied on, I mean pressure will be applied, and all kinds of dirty politics is totally the way we do things here. So when one leader falls you look for the next to pick up the flag, and follow them now. It's not about the leader. Tulsi is talking the talk, that's all you can do in a campaign. I'd support her against anybody who is mouthing weasel words. Right now there are three candidates with something to say: Tulsi, Elizabeth, and Bernie, any will do, lets see who gets traction when people start to pay attention again.

Anacharsis , Aug 3 2019 13:56 utc | 88
Bemildred @ 87:

I have no illusions that there are any perfect candidates, but out of how many people in the U.S.?--These are as good as can be put up on a stage???

Bemildred , Aug 3 2019 14:11 utc | 89
Anacharsis @88: Well, on the one hand we have slid a long way downhill intellectually here, can't deny it.

On the other hand among 300-plus-something millions here, I'm sure we could find better, but they won't run, the system is rigged, and we know it. They rub it in our faces. Once it collapses of its own fecklessness, maybe then you will see some new faces worthy of respect here.

Other oligarchies get overthrown, oligarchy seems to be the human norm for humans, they fail with some regularity in history, it can for sure happen here too.

Piotr Berman , Aug 3 2019 14:49 utc | 94
Tulsi, Elizabeth, and Bernie, any will do, lets see who gets traction when people start to pay attention again.

Posted by: Bemildred | Aug 3 2019 13:50 utc | 87

"The people" are a bottleneck of the democracy. They have to select representatives to decide on complex issues that they scant idea about, and their access to information reminds my "The Library of Babel", a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). The library contains every possible book, and for any "genuine book", every possible variation, with truth replaced with something else in every possible pattern -- the paradoxes of infinity were a major theme in Borges stories.

Creating a message that relates these issues to everyday experience of the people, so their common sense is switched on, is hard, but not impossible. For example, for all ravages of "imperial complex", military plus weapon making plus economic impositions and distortions, the largest loot is collected by business in all aspects of healthcare, be it making drugs and devices, administering insurance, "providing healthcare" etc. More than a sixth of American GDP at hugely inflated prices adds to... surely, these are trillions. This rapacity can be contained by a "single payer" system that can provide more care for more people at smaller costs (e.g. compare costs and outcomes in USA and Australia). Not so long time ago, you were a Commie or a Socialist (equally bad) if you were proposing that. Sanders championed it and failed, but now, it became a mainstream idea with a decent chance of being implemented in the next decade.

Even now there is unceasing propaganda for "creativity and efficiency of free market" in healthcare, but the shift in public opinion AND in political programs is clear.

[Aug 03, 2019] Clarification of Gabbard's vote on H.Res.246 on BDS caucus99percent

Aug 03, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Clarification of Gabbard's vote on H.Res.246 on BDS

Linda Wood on Sat, 08/03/2019 - 1:54pm I have read Tulsi Gabbard's response to criticism of her Yes vote on H.Res.246 , which opposes BDS but which also affirms the right of Americans to support BDS. She is quoted here in making that point:

https://mondoweiss.net › 2019/08 › gabbard-condemn-cosponsor

Tulsi Gabbard voted to condemn BDS, but she's become a co-sponsor of Ilhan Omar's boycott bill

Congresswoman and presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) has become the fifteenth House member to cosponsor H.Res.496 , a resolution affirming that Americans have the right to boycott foreign countries to advance the cause of human rights...

The article then quotes Gabbard on her vote in support of the anti-BDS resolution, H.Res.246 :

https://mondoweiss.net › 2019/08 › gabbard-condemn-cosponsor

... H.Res.246 does not in any way limit or hinder our First Amendment rights. In fact, it affirms every American's right to exercise free speech for or against U.S. foreign policy, as well as the right of Israeli and Palestinian people to live in safe and sovereign states free from fear and violence and with mutual recognition. The right to protest the actions of our government is essential if America is to truly be a free society.

I support BDS as far as I understand it. And I disagree strongly with the parts of 246 that establish support for Israel's right to exist because I question the whole premise. But I understand Gabbard's position.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/246/text

H.Res.246 - Opposing efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement targeting Israel.

116th Congress (2019-2020)

Resolved, That the House of Representatives --

(1) opposes the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (BDS Movement) targeting Israel, including efforts to target United States companies that are engaged in commercial activities that are legal under United States law, and all efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel;

(2) urges Israelis and Palestinians to return to direct negotiations as the only way to achieve an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;

(3) affirms the Constitutional right of United States citizens to free speech, including the right to protest or criticize the policies of the United States or foreign governments ;

(4) supports the full implementation of the United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014 (Public Law 113–296; 128 Stat. 4075) and new efforts to enhance government-wide, coordinated United States-Israel scientific and technological cooperation in civilian areas, such as with respect to energy, water, agriculture, alternative fuel technology, civilian space technology, and security, in order to counter the effects of actions to boycott, divest from, or sanction Israel; and

(5) reaffirms its strong support for a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resulting in two states -- a democratic Jewish State of Israel, and a viable, democratic Palestinian state -- living side-by-side in peace, security, and mutual recognition.

[Aug 03, 2019] The empire via the NYTimes has it's knives out for Tulsi Gabbard doing a large front page hit piece spread on her today.

Aug 03, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Stever , Aug 3 2019 14:51 utc | 96

The empire via the NYTimes has it's knives out for Tulsi Gabbard doing a large front page hit piece spread on her today.

"Tulsi Gabbard Thinks We're Doomed"

The author tries to mock her repeatedly and this is but one example

"Tulsi Gabbard is running for president of a country that she believes has wrought horror on the world, and she wants its citizens to remember that."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-2020-presidential-race.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

It seems like they are pushing Kamala after Tulsi threw water on her in the debates and she melted.

[Aug 03, 2019] The CIA Takeover of America in the 1960s Is the Story of Our Times. The Killing of the Kennedys and Today's New Cold War by Edward Curtin

That the rogue elements of the CIA participated in the assassination of JFK now is undisputable. And they probably were connected to the very top. Presence of Bush Senior on Dealey Plaza (who was top CIA executive at the time) at the moment of assassination tells a lot in this respect as well as the speed and intensity of the cover up. The only discussion can be about motives and the degree in which LBJ was involved.
Notable quotes:
"... The killing of the Kennedys and today's new Cold War and war against terror are two ends of a linked intelligence operation. ..."
"... The assassination of the top four leaders of the political left in the five year period – President John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 – represented nothing less than a slow-motion coup on the political scene. ..."
"... If anyone wishes to understand what has happened to the United States since this coup, and thus to its countless victims at home and throughout the world, one must understand these assassinations and how the alleged assassins were manipulated by the coup organizers and how the public was hoodwinked in a mind-control operation on a vast scale. ..."
"... Sandra Serrano, a Kennedy campaign worker and a courageous witness, was bullied by the CIA-connected police interrogator Sergeant Enrique "Hank" Hernandez. She had been sitting outside on a metal fire escape getting some air when the polka dot dress girl, accompanied by a man, ran out and down the stairs, shouting, "We've shot him, we've shot him." When Serrano asked whom did they shoot, the girl replied, "We've shot Senator Kennedy." Then she and her companion, both of whom Serrano had earlier seen ascending the stairs with Sirhan, disappeared into the night. A little over an hour after the shooting Serrano was interviewed on live television by NBC's Sander Vanocur where she recounted this. And there were others who saw and heard this girl say the same thing as she and her companion fled the crime scene. Nevertheless, the LAPD, led by Lieutenant Manuel Pena, also CIA affiliated, who was brought out of retirement to run the investigation dubbed "Special Unit Senator," worked with Hernandez and others to dismiss the girl as of no consequence. ..."
Apr 02, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

The CIA Takeover of America in the 1960s Is the Story of Our Times. The Killing of the Kennedys and Today's New Cold War A Quasi-Review of A Lie Too Big To Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Lisa Pease By Edward Curtin Global Research, August 03, 2019 Region: USA Theme: History , Law and Justice , Media Disinformation

First published by Global Research on April 2, 2019

"'We're all puppets,' the suspect [Sirhan Sirhan] replied, with more truth than he could have understood at that moment." – Lisa Pease , quoting from the LAPD questioning of Sirhan

When Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968, the American public fell into an hypnotic trance in which they have remained ever since. The overwhelming majority accepted what was presented by government authorities as an open and shut case that a young Palestinian American, Sirhan Sirhan , had murdered RFK because of his support for Israel, a false accusation whose ramifications echo down the years. That this was patently untrue and was contradicted by overwhelming evidence made no difference.

Sirhan did not kill Robert Kennedy, yet he remains in jail to this very day. Robert Kennedy, Jr., who was 14 years old at the time of his father's death, has visited Sirhan in prison, claims he is innocent, and believes there was another gunman. Paul Schrade , an aide to the senator and the first person shot that night, also says Sirhan didn't do it. Both have plenty of evidence. And they are not alone.

There is a vast body of documented evidence to prove this, an indisputably logical case marshalled by serious writers and researchers. Lisa Pease is the latest. It is a reason why a group of 60 prominent Americans has recently called for a reopening of, not just this case, but those of JFK, MLK, and Malcom X. The blood of these men cries out for the revelation of the truth that the United States national security state and its media accomplices have fought so mightily to keep hidden for so many years.

That they have worked so hard at this reveals how dangerous the truth about these assassinations still is to this secret government that wages propaganda war against the American people and real wars around the world. It is a government of Democrats, Republicans, and their intelligence allies working together today to confuse the American people and provoke Russia in a most dangerous game that could lead to nuclear war, a possibility that so frightened JFK and RFK after the Cuban Missile Crisis that they devoted themselves to ending the Cold War, reconciling with the Soviet Union, abolishing nuclear weapons, reining in of the power of the CIA, and withdrawing from Vietnam. That is why they were killed.

The web of deceit surrounding the now officially debunked Democratic led Russia-gate propaganda operation that has strengthened Trump to double-down on his anti-Russia operations (a Democratic goal) is an example of the perfidious and sophisticated mutuality of this game of mass mind-control.

The killing of the Kennedys and today's new Cold War and war against terror are two ends of a linked intelligence operation.

Moreover, more than any other assassination of the 1960s, it is the killing of Bobby Kennedy that has remained shrouded in the most ignorance.

It is one of the greatest propaganda success stories of American history.

In her exhaustive new examination of the case, A Lie Too Big To Fail , Lisa Pease puts it succinctly at the conclusion of her unravelling of the official lies that have mesmerized the public:

The assassination of the top four leaders of the political left in the five year period – President John Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968 – represented nothing less than a slow-motion coup on the political scene.

If anyone wishes to understand what has happened to the United States since this coup, and thus to its countless victims at home and throughout the world, one must understand these assassinations and how the alleged assassins were manipulated by the coup organizers and how the public was hoodwinked in a mind-control operation on a vast scale. It is not ancient history, for the forces that killed these leaders rule the U.S. today, and their ruthlessness has subsequently informed the actions of almost all political leaders in the years since. A bullet to the head when you seriously talk about peace and justice is a not so gentle reminder to toe the line or else.

"But the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time," writes Pease, "and too few recognize this. We can't fix a problem we can't even acknowledge exists."

Nothing could be truer.

Lisa Pease has long recognized the problem, and for the past twenty-five years, she has devoted herself to shedding light on the CIA's culpability, particularly in the Robert Kennedy case. Few people possess the grit and grace to spend so much of their lives walking this path of truth. The extent of her research is dazzling, so dazzling in its voluminous detail that a reviewer can only touch on it here and there. She has written a book that is daunting in its comprehensiveness. It demands focused attention and perseverance, for it runs to over 500 pages with more than 800 footnotes. This book will remain a touchstone for future research on the RFK assassination, whether one agrees or disagrees with all of her detailed findings and speculations. For this book is so vast and meticulous in its examination of all aspects of the case that one can surely find areas that one might question or disagree with.

Nevertheless, Pease fundamentally proves that Sirhan did not shoot RFK and that there was a conspiracy organized and carried out by shadowy intelligence forces that did so. These same forces worked with the Los Angeles Police Department, federal, state, and judicial elements to make sure Sirhan was quickly accused of being the lone assassin and dispatched to prison after a show trial. And the mass media carried out its assigned role of affirming the government's case to shield the real killers and to make sure the cover-up was successful.

The Blatant Conspiracy behind Senator Robert F. Kennedy's Assassination

No doubt others will investigate this case further. Yet I think no more research is really needed, for as with these other assassinations, additional analyses will only result in pseudo-debates about minutiae. Such debates will only serve to prolong the hallucinatory grip the perpetrators of these crimes have on a day of reckoning, suggesting as they would that we do not really know what happened. This is an old tactic meant to delay forevermore such a day of reckoning.

The facts are clear for all to see if they have the will to truth. All that is now needed is a public tribunal, which is planned for later this year, in which the fundamental, clear-cut facts of these cases are presented to the American public. In the case of Robert Kennedy's assassination as with the others, a little knowledge goes a long way, and only those who are closed to basic logic and evidence will refuse to see that government forces conspired to kill these men and did so because all were seeking peace and justice that was then, and is now, a threat to the war-making forces of wealth and power that control the American government.

Pease writes:

Anyone who has looked closely and honestly at the evidence has realized that more than one person was involved in Robert Kennedy's death. So why can't reporters see this? Why can't the media explain this? Because the media and the government are two sides of the same coin, and those who challenge the government's version of history, as numerous reporters have found out, all too often lose status and sometimes whole careers. Kristina Borjesson published an anthology of such stories in her book Into the Buzzsaw, in which journalists describe how they lost their careers when eachof them expressed a truth that the government did not want exposed.

Lisa Pease discloses such truths. I am reporting on her work. Therefore, the mainstream media, except for an extraordinary reporter or two, such as Tom Jackman of The WashingtonPost , will likely ignore both of us, but the publication where you are reading this is on the side of truth, and in the disclosure of truth lies our hope.

Since more than one person was involved in the killing of RFK, there was – ipso facto – a conspiracy. This is not theory but fact. The fact of a conspiracy. For more than fifty years, mainstream reporters have been cowed by this word "conspiracy," thanks to the CIA. Many others have been intelligence assets posing as journalists, regurgitating the lies. This is a fact.

The official story is that after giving his victory speech for winning the 1968 Democratic California Primary, Kennedy, as he was walking through a crowded hotel pantry, was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, who was standing to his left between 3-6 feet away. Sirhan's revolver held eight bullets, and as he was shooting, he was tackled by a group of large men who subdued him. All witnesses place Sirhan in front of Kennedy and all claim he was firing a gun.

Fact: As the autopsy definitively showed, RFK was shot from the rear at point blank range, three bullets entering his body, with the fatal headshot coming upward at a 45-degree angle from 1-3 inches behind his right ear. Not one bullet from Sirhan's gun hit the Senator. In addition, an audio recording shows that many more bullets than the eight in Sirhan's gun were fired in the hotel pantry that night. It was impossible for Sirhan to have killed RFK.

Let me repeat: More than one gunman, contrary to the government's claims, equals a conspiracy. So why lie about that?

What is amazing is that the obvious conclusion to such simple syllogistic logic (Sirhan in front, bullets in the back, therefore ) that a child could understand has been dismissed by the authorities for fifty-one years. The fact that the government authorities – the LAPD, the Sheriff's Office, the District Attorney, federal and state government officials, the FBI, the CIA – have from the start so assiduously done all in their power to pin the blame on "a lone assassin," Sirhan, proves they are part of a coordinated cover-up, which in turn suggests their involvement in the crime.

The fact that Robert Kennedy was shot from the back and not the front where Sirhan was standing immediately brings to mind the Zapruder film that shows that JFK was killed from the front right and not from the 6 th floor rear where Oswald was allegedly shooting from. That unexpected film evidence was hidden from the public for many years, but when it was finally seen, the case for a government conspiracy was solidified.

While no such video evidence has surfaced in the RFK case, the LAPD made sure that no photographic evidence contradicting the official lies would be seen. As Lisa Pease writes:

Less than two months after the assassination, the LAPD took the extraordinary step of burning some 2,400 photos from the case in Los Angeles County General's medical waste incinerator. Why destroy thousands of photos in an incinerator if there was nothing to hide? The LAPD kept hundreds of innocuous crowd scene photos that showed no girl in a polka dot dress or no suspicious activities or individuals. Why were those photos preserved? Perhaps because those photos had nothing in them that warranted their destruction.

While "perhaps" is a mild word, the cover-up of "the girl in the polka dot dress" needs no perhaps. Dozens of people reported seeing a suspicious, curvaceous girl in a white dress with black polka dots with Sirhan in the pantry and other places. She was seen with various other men as well. The evidence for her involvement in the assassination is overwhelming, and yet the LAPD did all in its power to deny this by browbeating witnesses and by allowing her to escape.

Sandra Serrano, a Kennedy campaign worker and a courageous witness, was bullied by the CIA-connected police interrogator Sergeant Enrique "Hank" Hernandez. She had been sitting outside on a metal fire escape getting some air when the polka dot dress girl, accompanied by a man, ran out and down the stairs, shouting, "We've shot him, we've shot him." When Serrano asked whom did they shoot, the girl replied, "We've shot Senator Kennedy." Then she and her companion, both of whom Serrano had earlier seen ascending the stairs with Sirhan, disappeared into the night. A little over an hour after the shooting Serrano was interviewed on live television by NBC's Sander Vanocur where she recounted this. And there were others who saw and heard this girl say the same thing as she and her companion fled the crime scene. Nevertheless, the LAPD, led by Lieutenant Manuel Pena, also CIA affiliated, who was brought out of retirement to run the investigation dubbed "Special Unit Senator," worked with Hernandez and others to dismiss the girl as of no consequence.

Lisa Pease covers all this and much more. She shows how Sirhan was obviously hypnotized, how the trial was a farce, how the police destroyed evidence from the door frames in the pantry that proved more than the eight bullets in Sirhan's gun were fired, how Officer DeWayne Wolfer manipulated the ballistic evidence, etc. Through years of digging into court records, archives, transcripts, the public library, and doing countless interviews, she proves without a doubt that Sirhan did not kill Kennedy and that the assassination and the cover-up were part of a very sophisticated intelligence operation involving many parts and players. She shows how no matter what route Kennedy took in the hotel that night, the killers had all exits covered and that he would not be allowed to leave alive.

While some of her more speculative points – e.g. that Robert Maheu (Howard Hughes/CIA) was "the most credible high-level suspect for the planner of Robert Kennedy's assassination," that Kennedy was shot twice in the head from behind, etc. are open to debate, they do not detract from her fundamentally powerful case that RFK, like his brother John, was assassinated by a CIA-run operation intended to silence their voices of courageous resistance to an expanding secret government dedicated to war, murder, and human exploitation. The U.S. government of today.

When Bobby Kennedy was entering the kitchen pantry, he was escorted by a security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar, a man long suspected of being the assassin. Cesar was carrying a gun that he drew but denied firing, despite witnesses' claims to the contrary. Conveniently, the police never examined the gun. He has long been suspected of being CIA affiliated, and now Pease says she has found evidence to confirm that. She writes, "It's hard to overstate the significance of finding a current or future CIA contract agent holding Kennedy's right arm at the moment of the shooting."

Yes, it is. As she rightly claims, the CIA takeover of America in the 1960s is the story of our time. And our time is now. None of this is ancient history. That is so crucial to grasp. For those who think that learning the truth about the 1960s assassinations is an exercise in futility reserved for those who are living in the past, they need to think again. Our descent into endless war and massive media propaganda to support it is part of a long-term project that began with the elimination of JFK, Malcom X, MLK, and Robert Kennedy. They were killed for reasons, and those reasons still exist, even if they don't physically, but only in spirit. Their killers roam the land because they have become far more deeply part of the institutional structure of government and the media.

Pease says:

It was horrible that Robert Kennedy was taken from us far too soon. It is horrible that one man has borne the guilt for an operation he neither planned nor willingly participated in. It's horrible the conspiracy was so obvious that bullets had to be lost and switched to hide it. And it's horrible that the mainstream media has never dared to tell the people of this country that the government lied to us about what they really found when they looked into this case. Until the media can deal with the truth of the Robert Kennedy assassination, and until the people can be made aware of the CIA's role in slanting the truth on topics of great importance, America's very survival is in jeopardy .We've come perilously close to losing democracy itself because of fake, CIA-sponsored stories about our history. Should America ever become a dictatorship, the epitaph of our democracy must include the role the mainstream media, by bowing to the National Security state, played in killing it.

By writing A Lie Too Big To Fail, Lisa Pease has done her valiant part in refuting the lie that is now failing. Now it is up to all of us to spread the word of truth by focusing on the fundamental facts so we can finally take back our country from the CIA.

Then we can say with RFK and his favorite poet Aeschylus:

And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

[Aug 03, 2019] Was future President George H. W. Bush at Dealey Plaza during JFK's assassination - Quora

Notable quotes:
"... There is a photo of someone who looks like him standing in front of the School Book Depository. Bush is one of the few people in America who can't remember where he was that day. ..."
Aug 03, 2019 | www.quora.com

Kevin Stewart , Writer Answered Nov 4 2018 · Author has 370 answers and 39.7k answer views

There is some flimsy photo evidence of someone who looked like him in Dealey Plaza, so my answer would be, "not sure." But anecdotally, there sure seems to be a large number of "coincidences" around a guy who could apparently walk across a snow covered field without leaving foot prints , so maybe.

Since the beginning, the rumored driving motive for JFK's assassination, (from both sides really) was the cluster-fuck known as "The Bay of Pigs invasion," so we'll start there. At the end of Mark Lane's book "Plausible Denial," (the account of E. Howard Hunt's ill-fated lawsuit against The Liberty Lobby) some interesting facts about the Bay of Pigs invasion were tossed out that leaves one scratching his or her head and wondering if 41 had anything to do with it. The operation was ostensibly to deliver small arms and ordnance to a (turns out to be fictional) 25,000 man rebel army that was in the Cuban hills waiting for help to depose Castro.

The US Navy supplied a couple of ships, but they were decommissioned, had their numbers scraped off, and were renamed the "Houston" and the "Barbara," (or the Spanish spelling of Barbara.) This is while 41 was living in Houston with his wife Barbara. Also, the CIA code name for the invasion was "Operation Zapata."

This while the name of 41's business was "Zapata Offshore." (Or something like that. 41 had business' using Zapata's name since his days as an oilman in Midland Texas.) The day after Kennedy's killing, a George Bush met with Army Intel. What went on in that meeting is a mystery, and the CIA unconvincingly claims that they had another guy working for them named George Bush, only he wasn't hired until 1964 and his expertise was meteorology so it's difficult to understand why they wanted to talk with him on that day. Then there's the fact that Oswald's CIA handler, a guy name Georges DeMorinshilt (sp?) had the name George (Poppy) Bush in his address book along with 41's Houston address and phone number.

Of course this is all coincidental, but consider: 41 was a failed two-term congressman who couldn't hold his seat, (in Houston Texas of all places) and yet was made by Nixon the ambassador to the UN, then Ford named him ambassador to China and the Director of the CIA. Wow! What a lucky guy.

So was he involved with the Kennedy assassination and photographed in Dealey Plaza? Don't know. I was 13 at the time, but in the intervening years, the politics in this country, especially relating to the Republican Party, have become shall we say, "Kalfkaesque."

Steven Hager , Author of "Killing Kennedy." Updated Dec 31, 2018 · Author has 1.2k answers and 1.4m answer views

There is a photo of someone who looks like him standing in front of the School Book Depository. Bush is one of the few people in America who can't remember where he was that day.

There is also a memo by J.Edgar Hoover referencing a "George Bush of the CIA" reporting on "misguided Cubans" in Dallas that day. The CIA had a safe house stuffed with Cuban agents in the Oak Cliff neighborhood, and Lee Harvey Oswald rented a room nearby shortly before the assassination took place.

Michael Tarnpoll , We came so goddamn close Answered Feb 2, 2017 · Author has 3.7k answers and 1.5m answer views

The George Bush connections to JFK's assassination

Astoundingly, Bush, the elder, claims that he does not remember where he was when Kennedy was assassinated. I do. I'll bet a dollar that you do (if old enough). Everyone above the age of fifty-five does except George H. W. Bush. He does however, remember that he was not at Dealey Plaza at the time.

It is interesting to note that photographs and videos exist showing a man who looks very much like Bush, at the site, at the time. It was not difficult to find them on line in the past. Now, they seem to have been expunged somehow, though a few blurry photos can still be found.

[Aug 03, 2019] Was George Bush in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963

Sep 7, 2013 | theamericanchronicle.blogspot.com

We discovered some fascinating evidence that George Bush was directly involved in the murder of President John F Kennedy, the latest of which evidence comes from the late Roger Craig. The evidence seems overwhelming that George Herbert Walker Bush was in Dealey Plaza at the time of the president's murder, supervising the Cubans involved in the assassination squad. Evidence for Bush's involvement is legion. Bush denies remembering where he was on November 22d, largely because he can't remember which lie he should tell about it. It saves him the embarrassing contradictions in which Nixon found himself when explaining his whereabouts on that day. But not remembering one's location on that historic and traumatic day doesn't pass the laugh test although Bush did manage to laugh about it at Gerald Ford's funeral – precisely when he mentioned the murder. The laugh speaks volumes of Bush's contempt for Kennedy. We have written previously about the memo which Hoover wrote about a meeting he had with "Mr George Bush of the CIA" – a memo which irrefutably links Bush with the CIA operating under cover as an "independent oil man from Houston." We reported in a recent blog posting identifying Hunt as Bush's case officer in the CIA. These two independent witnesses help cement Bush's involvement with the agency as well as his presence in the City of Hate on the day he helped murder the president. Bush was on business for the CIA which is why he had official communication with the FBI and most likely Hoover himself in Washington, DC the following day. His official post was Dallas. Bush's cover story is that he spoke at an oil convention – the Dallas based American Association of Oil Well Drilling Contractors, but this is at best plausible deniability.

The important point is that this story demonstrates that he was in Dallas, a fact which the Dallas Morning News reported occurring on the evening of November 21, 1963. Indeed, he stayed at the Sheraton Hotel which was also headquarters of Secret Service communications and other elements coordinating the assassination. Many have covered the James Parrot story in which Bush called the FBI to warm it about suspicious activity of Parrot. But Parrot worked for Bush, and Bush used this lame story to provide an alibi for his non-presence in Dallas.

Unfortunately, the lady doth protest too much. The Tyler, TX story – the one where Bush supposedly called the FBI from Tyler is a giant hoax. It didn't happen. Someone impersonating Bush made the call because Bush was too busy supervising the assassination at that time. As we will show momentarily, Bush was nowhere near Tyler. The aforementioned memo's citation of the "mis-guided" anti-Castro Cubans clearly associates Bush with Alpha 66, Operation 40, and groups the CIA was training for assassination duty. The pretext is that it was against Castro, but the plan was always against Kennedy. But how do we know that? A CIA pilot told the story of George Bush being the pay master for Castro.

We have posted elsewhere in this Chronicle that Cuba was an invention – a hoax – to justify covert and bellicose operations – to justify the permanent war and police state. Castro was on the CIA payroll and has always been a pawn of the New York banksters. Now here is the kicker, as John Hankey quotes Dallas Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig speaking with Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who prosecuted Clay Shaw for his involvement with the murder: "Jim also asked me about the arrests made in Dealey Plaza that day. I told him I knew of twelve arrests, one in particular made by R. E. Vaughn of the Dallas Police Department. The man Vaughn arrested was coming from the Dal-Tex Building across from the Texas School Book Depository. The only thing which Vaughn knew about him was that he was an independent oil operator from Houston, Texas. The prisoner was taken from Vaughn by Dallas Police detectives and that was the last that he saw or heard of the suspect." (emphasis added)

Here is extraordinary evidence that George Bush was arrested in Dallas at the time of the assassination. But why was he arrested? We diverge from Hankey's explanation that he was caught where he wasn't supposed to be. Citizens knew that bullets were fired from Dal-Tex and were jeering the people coming out. The police were providing Bush an escort of safety from one of the crime scenes, as the Dallas Police were heavily involved in the murder. Thus an enormous amount of evidence places George Bush in the City of Hate and Dealey Plaza on 11/21-22. The evidence consists of newspaper accounts, FBI memoranda, photographs, and first person witness accounts. George Herbert Walker Bush murdered John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Reference Jim Fetzer, John Hankey, Was George H. W. Bush Involved With Assassination of JFK? VeteransToday.com, November 16, 2011 Copyright 2013 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

[Aug 03, 2019] Obama s election and betrayal was probably the last successful bait and switch maneuver by Clinton wing of Democratic Party before it disintegrated in 2016

Notable quotes:
"... The establishment's "Democracy Works!" propaganda seeks to stifle such Movements, directing attention to establishment candidates voice those concerns. But those candidates invariably prove to be ineffective because they can never get enough support to win and their efforts largely end with the election. ..."
Aug 03, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Aug 3 2019 15:24 utc | 99

oglalla @85

Yes!

Bemildred @87:

Well you don't trust any of them, but you vote for the ones pushing policy you want to see happen, and you vote for the ones that try to make that happen, and you abandon them immediately if they renege.

Obama's election and betrayal proved that this strategy doesn't work.

Tulsi is not anti-war', she's anti- dumb wars . Just as Colin Powell was ('Powell Doctrine' LOL). Just as Obama was ("don't do stupid stuff"). Just as Trump is (amid howls of "isolationist!" LOL).

The fact is, every candidate will salute the flag as soon as the requisite false flag outrage occurs.

Furthermore, even if you ardently support Tulsi because she voices something that appears to be anti-war, you have to contend with passionate supporters of other candidates: those who want a candidate of color, those who want an older more experienced candidate, those who want a women candidate; those who want a socialist candidate, etc. In this way the electorate is played against each other and in the end the establishment's favored candidate emerges naturally as the "democratic choice" (with the help of establishment money and media support) .

Relying on voting for change is not enough . There has to be independent Movements for each fundamental change: Democracy, Anti-war; Economic fairness. Like the Yellow Vest Movement.

The establishment's "Democracy Works!" propaganda seeks to stifle such Movements, directing attention to establishment candidates voice those concerns. But those candidates invariably prove to be ineffective because they can never get enough support to win and their efforts largely end with the election.

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

[Aug 03, 2019] Russian General recently remarked specific to electronic countermeasures/jammers that the more complex they are, the easier they are to confound or defeat.

Aug 03, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Walter , Aug 3 2019 11:27 utc | 76

@ # 41 > "With the USAF and the military as a whole, increasing amounts of money are thrown at ever increasingly complex weapons systems yet performance in all sectors deteriorates while the ability to recruit also degrades. The problems are widely written..."

Indeed, Ruskie General recently remarked specific to electronic countermeasures/jammers that the more complex they are, the easier they are to confound or defeat.

The general principle operates in all realms.

I did make a note of the guy's name...but it is obvious, isn't it? I mean one has only to look...

[Aug 03, 2019] Tulsi wasn't supposed to do that

"Harris is the establishment's primary backup candidate after Biden. She was supposed to coast through the primaries while all the attention was on Handsy Joe. Now she's wounded, and the establishment is royally pissed."
Notable quotes:
"... Not only was she not supposed to attack Kamala Harris, but she most certainly wasn't supposed to have landed such an effective blow and lived to tell about it. ..."
Aug 03, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

gjohnsit on Fri, 08/02/2019 - 5:53pm

Not only was she not supposed to attack Kamala Harris, but she most certainly wasn't supposed to have landed such an effective blow and lived to tell about it.

... ... ...

[Aug 03, 2019] Name a job that you can completely suck at and still keep your job?

Aug 03, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Patrick Armstrong -> Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) ... , 03 August 2019 at 01:10 PM

Somebody in the twitterverse asked the twits this question: "Name a job that you can completely suck at and still keep your job?" Instantly answered by Max Blumenthal "Beltway think tank senior fellow"


Patrick Armstrong

[Aug 03, 2019] The what to they call it in the US? Ah dog and pony show, that's right; anyway this dog and pony show has become much more practised and polished in its performance since the trump asshole was initially installed.

Aug 03, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

A User , Aug 3 2019 3:40 utc | 53

It appears to me, a simple citizen of planet earth that the temporary joining together of both halves of the american empire party in order to prevent a fellow DC politician from being installed as the Director Intelligence will enter the history books as the classic example, the epitome of how the deep state or secret state or whatever this a-democratic & inhuman coalition of the ungood and the greedy is finally called.

The what to they call it in the US? Ah dog and pony show, that's right; anyway this dog and pony show has become much more practised and polished in its performance since the trump asshole was initially installed. It took them forever to purge Flynn as National Security advisor which wasn't even a cabinet position.
Now after one trump trial balloon tweet, the scum floating on the surface of the DC cesspool quickly drop all the animosity that they reckon they feel for each other and unite to make sure that the only advice the orange fool can access is their advice.

Trump should just go for temporary appointments, I dunno how disadvantaged a temp is at that level, but it would stop the MIC from gaining the complete control they currently have.

[Aug 03, 2019] The Best Guide For The Perplexed Progressive in 2020 is 2016 by John V. Walsh

Aug 01, 2019 | www.unz.com

2016 was widely recognized as the year of "populism," more adequately described as the year of revolt against the political Establishment -- in both Parties. The Democratic Primary in 2016 was a battle of progressive forces against the Democratic Establishment, and the battle lines were clearly drawn. Those lines remain much the same as we approach 2020.

On the Progressive or Populist side were those who opposed the endless wars in the Middle East, and on the Establishment side those who supported those long and bloody wars. On the Progressive Side were those who supported badly needed domestic reforms, most notably Medicare for All, which after all is a reform of almost 20% of the entire economy and a reform that has to do with life itself. In contrast on the Establishment side were those who supported ObamaCare, a device for leaving our health care to the tender mercies of the Insurance behemoths with its ever increasing premiums and ever decreasing coverage.

In 2016 the pundits gave progressives little chance of success. Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in, we were all assured by a horde of "reliable sources." And given the control that the Clintonites exercised over the Democratic Party apparatus, there was little prospect of a successful rebellion and every chance of having one's career badly damaged by opposing Party elite. Summer soldiers and duplicitous candidates were not interested in challenging the Establishment.

In 2016 Bernie Sanders was the only politician who was willing to take on the Establishment. Although not technically a Democrat, he caucused with them and worked with them. And he was a lifelong, reliable and ardent advocate for Medicare for All and a consistent opponent of the endless wars. For these things he was prepared to do battle against overwhelming odds on the chance that he might prevail and because from his grass roots contacts he sensed that a rebellion was brewing.

In 2016 only one among the current crop of candidates followed Bernie, supported him and joined him on the campaign trail -- Tulsi Gabbard. At the time she was a two term Congresswoman and Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a career building position, from which she would have to resign in order to support one of the candidates. Moreover, reports said she bridled at the internal bias of the DNC in favor of Hillary. To express her displeasure with the DNC and to support Bernie, she had to defy the Clinton Establishment, which might even have terminated her political career. But she was a foe of the endless wars, partly based on her own experience as a National Guard member who had been deployed to Iraq in a medical unit and saw the ravages of war first hand. So she joined Bernie, introducing him at many of his rallies and strengthening his antiwar message.

Bernie and Tulsi proved themselves in the defining battle of 2016. They let us know unequivocally where they stand. And Bernie might well have won the nomination were he not cheated out of it by the Establishment which continues to control the levers of power in the Democratic Party to this day.

In 2016 these two stood in stark contrast to the other 2020 Democratic candidates. Let us take one example of these others, Elizabeth Warren, a darling of the main stream media which often refers to her as ideologically aligned to Bernie Sanders. Perhaps she is so aligned at times -- at least in words; she is after all in favor of Medicare for All, although she hastens to add that she is "open to other approaches." That qualifier is balm to the ears of the Insurance behemoths. Translation: she has already surrendered before the battle has begun.

In 2016 a critical primary for Bernie was Masschusetts where Senator Warren wields considerable influence. Clinton defeated Sanders there by a mere 1.5% whereas she had lost to Obama there by 15% in 2008. Wikipedia has this to say of the primary:

"Following the primary, Elizabeth Warren, the state's senior US senator, was widely criticized by Sanders supporters online for her refusal to endorse him prior to the primary. Supporters of Bernie Sanders have argued that an endorsement from Warren, whose political positions were similar to that of Sanders's, and who was a frequent critic of Hillary Clinton in the past, could have handed Massachusetts to him. "

One must conclude that either Warren does not genuinely share the views of Sanders or she is loath to buck the Establishment and fight for those views. In either event she, and the others who failed to back Bernie in 2016, are not made of the stuff that can win Medicare for All, bring an end to the regime change wars and illegal sanctions of the last four or more administrations, begin serious negotiations to end the existential nuclear peril, and address the many other problems facing us and all of humanity.

John V. Walsh can be reached at [email protected]

Anonymous [322] • Disclaimer , says: August 1, 2019 at 4:26 am GMT

“Bernie walked the walk”
When was that? The time he toured through Baltimore and called it a third world city while assiduously not discussing how, why, and because of who it became so?
The way he openly sold out to Clinton and ducked into his new third manor house to avoid being held to task for leaving his base out to dry the very moment they were ready to seriously break ranks from the neolib political machine?
Is he walking the walk now as he tries to rationalize away his underpaying of his campaign workers and cuts hours to minimize the costs of the 15 dollar floor price he demanded for everyone other employer?
The man is a DNC stooge through and through.
And Tulsi being anti-war out of personal squeamishness doesn’t make up for the rest of her painfully party-line-compliant platform, particularly when the Deep State has multiple active avenues available to at the very least keep our military presence still existing military presence trapped and held hostage. All the dove cooing in recorded world history won’t hold up when, not if, Britain or France or whoever deliberately sinks another navy vessel and drags her by the hair into another desert scrum.
Daniel Rich , says: August 1, 2019 at 6:09 am GMT
@Anonymous Quote: “When was that?”

Reply: The moment he endorsed HRC and showed his true colors.

Kronos , says: August 1, 2019 at 8:15 am GMT
@Tusk As with the 1960 Presidential Election, Hillary stole that election fair and square. Had Sanders went full third party, it would’ve destroyed the Democrats outright. Despite Clinton’s cheating, Bernie went ahead and bent the knee. Strangely enough, Trump’s victory saved Sanders and his faction. Had Clinton won, she would’ve purged the Sanders supporters relentlessly.

There is such a thing as a tactical retreat. Now he’s able to play again.

Nik , says: August 1, 2019 at 8:15 am GMT
I dont remember either Bernard Saunders or Tulsi Gabbard even uttering the word Apartheid.

These peopke are hypnotized

alexander , says: August 1, 2019 at 9:35 am GMT
The reality, Mr. Walsh,

is that our “establishment elite” have failed the United States of America.

How, you may ask ?

The answer is simple.

By defrauded us into multiple illegal wars of aggression they have bankrupted the entire nation.

The iron fact is that because our “elites” lied us into illegal war we are now 22.5 trillion dollars in heinous debt.

Why is this okay ?

The answer is simple.

It is not okay, NOT AT ALL .

And it is not enough (anymore) to just demand we “end our wars”, Mr. Walsh.

The cost in treasure has been too high and the burden on the US taxpayer too obscene.

Without demanding “accountability” from our elites, who lied us into this catastrophe, our nation is most probably going under.

I say…. make them pay …”every penny”…. for the cost of the wars they lied us into.

An initiative, like the “War fraud Accountability Act” (retroactive to 2002) would do just that.

it would replenish the coffers of our nation with all the assets of the larcenous profiteers who deceived us all….into heinous war debt.

As we witness the rise of China as the new global economic powerhouse, we can see first hand how a nation can rise to immense wealth and global influence “precisely because” it was never deceived by its “ruling class” into squandering all its resources initiating and fighting endless criminal wars.

Just imagine where the USA would be today, had we chosen the same course.

stone cold , says: August 1, 2019 at 10:25 am GMT
Until Dems are willing to refuse to depend on Haim Saban’s “generous donation” to the Dem candidate, none of their candidates will deserve to be the the POTUS candidate. Ditto for the Republicans and their fetish with Shelly Adelson. Candidates must kowtow to Israel or else there will be no dough for them and they might even be challenged in their incumbencies next time around by ADL/AIPAC. Until we get rid of Israeli money and political power, we are toast.
War for Blair Mountain , says: August 1, 2019 at 11:47 am GMT
You left out two facts:

1)Both Sanders and Gabbard are onboard for going to war against Christian Russia over Crimea..Sanders has gone so far as saying that a Military response against Russia is an option if all else fails in getting Russia out of Crimea…

2)Both Sanders and Gabbard are waging a war of RACIAL EXTERMINATION against Working Class Native Born White American Males….And that’s WHITE GENOCIDE!!!!

Justvisiting , says: August 1, 2019 at 12:54 pm GMT
@Kronos Bernie “bent the knee” once and got to enjoy his lakeside home and his wife protected from fraud prosecution after she stole money from People’s United Bank for her college scam.

He is owned.

If Tulsi were a serious threat she would be neutralized one way or another.

“Progressives” are virtue signaling fools–the kleptocracy marches on and laughs at them.

concerned , says: August 1, 2019 at 1:14 pm GMT
Check out “The National Security State Needs an Enemy: Senator Warren Warns About “White Supremacist” Threat” by Kurt Nimmo at:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/state-needs-enemy-warren-warns-about-white-supremacist-threat/5685241?print=1

One has to wonder where Dems like Warren and their identity politics is taking the US. Will everyone who even slightly disagrees with them be labeled a terrorist?

[Aug 02, 2019] Tulsi doubled down on defending current biden position on Iraq and didn't show any inclination whatsover to attack Biden warmongering and his key role in unleashing Iraq war

Aug 02, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

wokkamile on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 12:28pm

Will repeat here

@Wally as this question is being raised again in a few threads: my guess is Tulsi gives great weight to people who apologize and own up for their mistakes (Joe on his Iraq vote) and she believes in forgiveness, and 2dly she knows she also has made mistakes in her public service career.

Besides the above, she might have felt some of the others on the stage were doing a fair job of going after Joe last night, albeit not on Iraq, and she didn't want to contribute to the pile-on. She may also have had a strategy of focusing on Harris in this debate.

There will be future debates to go after Joe on Iraq, if she chooses. Perhaps we might hope for a sponsored debate where the mods spend more than 1% of the air time talking about FP. Last night, unless I missed something, the few minutes on foreign stuff was only about trade, not FP as usually understood.

Wally on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 1:06pm
Sho'me Biden's apology

@wokkamile

I did find this July 9, 2019 article in truthdig calling on him to apologize, tho.

And no matter how it's sliced, Biden's still a warmonger.

I sense something is afoot. Pure speculation but crazier things have happened:

Michelle as Biden's VP. Vote for Joe, get Michelle.

#1 as this question is being raised again in a few threads: my guess is Tulsi gives great weight to people who apologize and own up for their mistakes (Joe on his Iraq vote) and she believes in forgiveness, and 2dly she knows she also has made mistakes in her public service career.

Besides the above, she might have felt some of the others on the stage were doing a fair job of going after Joe last night, albeit not on Iraq, and she didn't want to contribute to the pile-on. She may also have had a strategy of focusing on Harris in this debate.

There will be future debates to go after Joe on Iraq, if she chooses. Perhaps we might hope for a sponsored debate where the mods spend more than 1% of the air time talking about FP. Last night, unless I missed something, the few minutes on foreign stuff was only about trade, not FP as usually understood.

wokkamile on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 1:45pm
In an important

@Wally @Wally sense, what matters to the issue and complaint being discussed is not what you or I think of Joe and Iraq (we agree) or even what the objective truth is (I did a full 0.5 sec google search, lazy latte-sipping liberal that I am, and couldn't find an explicit use of the term "apology" from Joe).

What matters is TG's perception or memory of what Joe said about his vote. In the video linked above, she talks about how Joe has said it was a mistake -- true -- and that "he's apologized for it, many times" (I couldn't find a link proving that).

Edit: In Tulsi's forgiving world, she might equate or accept the term "mistake" in lieu of an official, formal expression of regret using the term "apology".

I might be able to give you Tulsi's private # and you could ask her personally, but in the words of that immortal American Statesman Richard Nixon, That Would Be Wrong.

#1.2

I did find this July 9, 2019 article in truthdig calling on him to apologize, tho.

And no matter how it's sliced, Biden's still a warmonger.

I sense something is afoot. Pure speculation but crazier things have happened:

Michelle as Biden's VP. Vote for Joe, get Michelle.

Wally on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 1:49pm
Can you be my campaign manager . . .

@wokkamile
. . . when I run for Pope? I can't wait for you to spin my many wrong thoughts;>).

#1.2.1 #1.2.1 sense, what matters to the issue and complaint being discussed is not what you or I think of Joe and Iraq (we agree) or even what the objective truth is (I did a full 0.5 sec google search, lazy latte-sipping liberal that I am, and couldn't find an explicit use of the term "apology" from Joe).

What matters is TG's perception or memory of what Joe said about his vote. In the video linked above, she talks about how Joe has said it was a mistake -- true -- and that "he's apologized for it, many times" (I couldn't find a link proving that).

Edit: In Tulsi's forgiving world, she might equate or accept the term "mistake" in lieu of an official, formal expression of regret using the term "apology".

I might be able to give you Tulsi's private # and you could ask her personally, but in the words of that immortal American Statesman Richard Nixon, That Would Be Wrong.

gulfgal98 on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 6:16pm
While I had problems with this

@wokkamile IMO, this is not a fatal error by Tulsi.

Despite what we are being sold, Biden is a very weak candidate and many others are working to take him down. No one was willing to take on Harris who was designated as the rising star in the Hamptons. But Tulsi did, based upon principle. Funny thing is that Tulsi told Harris that she was coming after her in advance, but Harris was unprepared.

#1 as this question is being raised again in a few threads: my guess is Tulsi gives great weight to people who apologize and own up for their mistakes (Joe on his Iraq vote) and she believes in forgiveness, and 2dly she knows she also has made mistakes in her public service career.

Besides the above, she might have felt some of the others on the stage were doing a fair job of going after Joe last night, albeit not on Iraq, and she didn't want to contribute to the pile-on. She may also have had a strategy of focusing on Harris in this debate.

There will be future debates to go after Joe on Iraq, if she chooses. Perhaps we might hope for a sponsored debate where the mods spend more than 1% of the air time talking about FP. Last night, unless I missed something, the few minutes on foreign stuff was only about trade, not FP as usually understood.

Centaurea on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 9:45pm
It was my impression

@wokkamile
that this is exactly what Tulsi was doing. It seems to have been effective. For one thing, it took everyone, including the CNN hosts, off guard.

She may also have had a strategy of focusing on Harris in this debate.

#1 as this question is being raised again in a few threads: my guess is Tulsi gives great weight to people who apologize and own up for their mistakes (Joe on his Iraq vote) and she believes in forgiveness, and 2dly she knows she also has made mistakes in her public service career.

Besides the above, she might have felt some of the others on the stage were doing a fair job of going after Joe last night, albeit not on Iraq, and she didn't want to contribute to the pile-on. She may also have had a strategy of focusing on Harris in this debate.

There will be future debates to go after Joe on Iraq, if she chooses. Perhaps we might hope for a sponsored debate where the mods spend more than 1% of the air time talking about FP. Last night, unless I missed something, the few minutes on foreign stuff was only about trade, not FP as usually understood.

[Aug 02, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard has just signed on as a co-sponsor of Audit the Fed bill

Aug 02, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Joe , July 26, 2019 at 03:28 PM

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-25/presidential-candidate-tulsi-gabbard-co-sponsors-audit-fed-bill

Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Luke Rudkowski of "We Are Change," a libertarian media organization, that Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has just signed on as a co-sponsor of Audit the Fed bill, officially known as H.R.24 The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2019.

[Aug 02, 2019] Last night Tulsi Gabbard went after Harris on her support of the for profit prison system in Cali at the expense of human beoings

Aug 02, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

ilsm , August 01, 2019 at 11:15 AM

Last night Tulsi Gabbard went after Harris on her support of the for profit prison system in Cali at the expense of human beoings......

soon enough Harris supporters were tweeting that Gabbard is an "Assad apologist".

"Assad apologist is war monger agit prop against anyone who might get in the way of the profitable forever wars for al Qaeda (in Idlib etc) and the Saudi royals.

im1dc": propagandizing for the war profiteers is not limited to the press it is in the diverse democrat campaigns pandering for contributions caring nothing for the US or humans in general. Gabbard being the obvious exception garnering their sound bites.

anne -> ilsm... , August 01, 2019 at 11:38 AM
The Joseph McCarthy-style attack on the Representative by the California Senator and associates is shocking and dangerous and revealing of "character."

[Aug 02, 2019] Gabbard Hammers Harris After Foreign Agent Or Traitor Accusations

Aug 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

After Democratic 2020 candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) dressed down Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) over her criminal justice record, Harris hit back - suggesting that Gabbard is somehow 'below her' - and an "apologist" for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

In case you missed the original smackdown:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/VxaRt-LlpEk

In response, Harris thumbed her nose at Gabbard , telling CNN 's Anderson Cooperafter the debate: "This is going to sound immodest, but obviously I'm a top-tier candidate and so I did expect that I'd be on the stage and take some hits tonight ... when people are at 0 or 1% or whatever she might be at , so I did expect to take some hits tonight."

Harris added "Listen, I think that this coming from someone who has been an apologist for an individual , [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad, who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches. She has embraced and been an apologist for him in the way she refuses to call him a war criminal. I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously, so I'm prepared to move on."

Wait a second...

Tulsi wasn't having it. In a Thursday interview with CNN 's Chris Cuomo, Gabbard punched back - saying "[T]he only response that I've heard her and her campaign give is to push out smear attacks on me, claim that I am somehow some kind of foreign agent or a traitor to my country, the country that I love, the country that I put my life on the line to serve , the country that I still serve today as a soldier in the Army National Guard."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/wO9EV3-fd1o?start=70

Gabbard also made clear that she believes Assad is " a brutal dictator, just like Saddam Hussein, just like Gaddafi in Libya ," adding "The reason that I'm so outspoken on this issue of ending these wasteful regime change wars is because I have seen firsthand this high human cost of war and the impact that it has on my fellow brothers and sisters in uniform. "

[Aug 02, 2019] The Empire Is Coming For Tulsi Gabbard by Tom Luongo

Notable quotes:
"... When Lindsey Graham tweets about Tulsi Gabbard twice after a debate, when the Washington Post neocons like Josh Rogin are attacking her , you know she's got their panties in a bunch. ..."
"... You expect it from the Harris camp, obviously. But when it comes directly from people like Navid Jamali (double agent, navy intelligence, MSNBC contributor) you know the empire is beginning to get worried. ..."
"... Gabbard is now getting the Ron Paul treatment. It will only intensify from here. They will come after her with everything they have. ..."
"... When the Empire is on the line, left and right in the US close ranks and unite against the threat. The good news is that all they have is their pathetic Russia bashing and appeals to their authority on foreign policy. ..."
"... The colonial masters have been forgetting that more and more people are not benefitting from having like 800 military bases/wars/colonies all over and want them dissolved. Go Gabbard. ..."
"... The longer the US acts like a colonial power, the more painful the dismantling will be. ..."
"... Harris is done. Tulsi destroyed her. ..."
Aug 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Tom Luongo via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The second debate among Democratic hopefuls was notable for two things. The lack of common decency of most of them and Tulsi Gabbard's immense, career-ending attack on Kamala Harris' (D-Deep State) record as an Attorney General in California.

Harris came out of the first debate the clear winner and Gabbard cut her down to size with one of the single best minutes of political television since Donald Trump told Hillary Clinton, "Because you'd be in jail."

Gabbard's takedown of Harris was so spot on and her closing statement about the irresponsible nature of the Trump Administration's foreign policy was so powerful she had to be actively suppressed on Twitter. And, within minutes of the debate ending the media and the political machines moved into overdrive to smear her as a Russian agent, an Assad apologist and a favorite of the alt-right.

Now, folks, let me tell you something. I write and talk about Gabbard a lot and those to the right of me are really skeptical of her being some kind of plant for Israel or the establishment. If she were truly one of those she wouldn't have been polling at 1% going into that debate.

She would have been promoted as Harris' strongest competition and served up for Harris to co-opt.

That is not what happened.

No, the fact that Gabbard is being smeared as viciously and baselessly as she is by all the right people on both the left and the right is all the proof you need that she is 1) the real deal and 2) they are scared of her.

When Lindsey Graham tweets about Tulsi Gabbard twice after a debate, when the Washington Post neocons like Josh Rogin are attacking her , you know she's got their panties in a bunch.

You expect it from the Harris camp, obviously. But when it comes directly from people like Navid Jamali (double agent, navy intelligence, MSNBC contributor) you know the empire is beginning to get worried.

Gabbard is now getting the Ron Paul treatment. It will only intensify from here. They will come after her with everything they have.

In the past week she's destroyed Kamala Harris on national TV, sued Google for electioneering and signed onto Thomas Massie's (R-KY) bill to audit the Federal Reserve. What does she do next week, end the Drug War?

Tulsi Gabbard is admittedly a work in progress. But what I see in her is something that has the potential to be very special. She's young enough to be both passionately brave and willing to go where the truth takes her.

And that truth has taken her where Democrats have feared to tread for more than forty years: the US Empire.

The entire time I was growing up the prevailing wisdom was Social Security was the third rail of US politics. That, like so many other pearls of wisdom, was nonsense.

The true third rail of US politics is empire. Any candidate that is publicly against the empire is the enemy of not only the state, it's quislings in the media, the corporations who profit from it and the party machines of both the GOP and the DNC.

That is Gabbard's crime. And it's the only crime that matters.

When the Empire is on the line, left and right in the US close ranks and unite against the threat. The good news is that all they have is their pathetic Russia bashing and appeals to their authority on foreign policy.

Foreign policy, by the way, that most people in America, frankly, despise.

And the response to her performance at the second debate was as predictable as the sun rising in the east. It's also easily countered. Gabbard will face an uphill battle from here and we'll find out in the coming weeks just how deep into Trump Derangement Syndrome the average Democrat voter is.

If she doesn't begin climbing in the polls then the Democrats are lost. They will have signed onto crazy Progressivism and more Empire in their lust to destroy Donald Trump. But they will lose because only a principled anti-imperialist like Gabbard can push Trump back to his days when he was the outsider in the GOP debates, railing against our stupid foreign policy.

No one else in the field would be remotely credible on this point. It's the area where Trump is the weakest. He's not weak on women's rights, racism, gay rights or any of the rest of the idiotic identity politics of the rest of the Democratic field.

He's weakest on the one issue that got him elected in the first place, foreign policy. Hillary was the candidate of Empire. Trump was not. It's why we saw an international conspiracy formed to destroy him and his presidency. Now that same apparatus is mobilized against Tulsi Gabbard.

That's good. As a solider she knows that when you're taking flak you are over your target. Now let's hope she's capable of sustaining herself to push this election cycle away from the insanity the elite want to distract us with and make it about the only thing keeping the world from healing, ending the empire of chaos.

uhland62 , 1 hour ago link

Those who benefit from the US being a Colonial Empire are closing ranks and that is certainly a huge endorsement for Gabbard.

The colonial masters have been forgetting that more and more people are not benefitting from having like 800 military bases/wars/colonies all over and want them dissolved. Go Gabbard.

The longer the US acts like a colonial power, the more painful the dismantling will be.

vasilievich , 1 hour ago link

Do politicians control the military, especially the strategic arm and weapons of mass destruction, both here in the US and in Russia? Perhaps only partially, and even that is doubtful given rapidly unfolding emergency situations. A convincing case could be made that it's too late, that war is inevitable.

CashMcCall , 3 minutes ago link

You sound intelligent. Read Herman Kahn's treatise "On Thermonuclear War." It is mathematical. But Basically nuclear war is out of hands of politicians. But it won't start from large nuclear powers. If Iran sunk a US Carrier, there would be NO NUCLEAR WAR PERIOD. But a nuclear war could be caused by an accident of smaller powers but it would be very limited and not spread.

"The more destructive we [America] look, the less they like us and our program. To the extent that some in our midst talk and threaten potential world annihilation as a U.S. defense measure, we focus undeserved attention on ourselves as being dangerous and even irresponsible -- appearing to be willing to risk uncounted hundreds of millions or billions of bystanders as to our selfish ambitions and desires." Herman Kahn...

That quote typifies Trump's cavalier yapping about nuclear weapons and his threats in the last year to expunge North Korea, Iran and most recently Afghanistan. This is the kind of conversation that most people in the world hate and they hate Trump and the United States for it. The US is blamed for Trump's loose cannon conduct. So that generates concern and heightens the potential for a nuclear weapons accident.

As for the world, it would survive a nuclear war. Many people would survive just as the animals of Chernobyl have survived and thrived even though radioactive. Dumb politicians like Trump that talk out their *** and sound imbalanced appear flaky. Rest assured the Joint Chief's would never let Trump near a nuclear weapon.

With nuclear war you also have to mathematically project dud rockets and rockets that land on your own people or detonate at launch.

stilletto2 , 1 hour ago link

Forget Biden, a deadbeat deep state ***. he could never be elected being such a MIC pawn. Just go Tulsi first (with Rand Paul would be good!) . She'll have to dig deep in the shitheap to find another honest Dem to play sidekick. But Tulsi stands out above them all as intelligent and independant. No surprise the Dem and Rep MSM ****-spewers are attacking her. Go tulsi -the only candidate i would vote for (since they'll nobble her candidacy i guess i wont be voting).

Liked Trump when he was anti-swamp. But they nobbled him and now he's just a ***-pawn. So sad he sold his balls.

MaxThrust , 1 hour ago link

I like Tulsi but to be Anti-War and a member of the CFR is a massive contradiction.

Mount Wannahockalugi , 2 hours ago link

Tulsi's predicament if of her own doing. She's to the right for today's Dems, but still too far to the left for the GOP. Her positions on the 2nd Amendment and accusing Trump of being an Al Qaeda sympathizer have pretty much killed her chances with moderates, too. She's not really that sane, she just looks that way because the rest of the Dem candidates are socialist whack jobs.

empire explosives , 2 hours ago link

Ultimately, she does not need the Dems or the GOP. just the people.

Boogity , 2 hours ago link

Newsflash: Trump does support Al Qaeda by virtue his blind support of the Saudi regime which champions, funds, and spreads Sunni Wahhabism, the violent Jihadist core philosophy of both Al Qaeda and Isis.

CashMcCall , 1 hour ago link

She is not a draft dodger like Trump.

StephenHopkins , 2 hours ago link

The new Bernie Sanders. But I think Tulsi is genuine, and honest. That's why they have to neutralize her.

Rufus Temblor , 2 hours ago link

Compare Tulsi Gabbard to Kamala Harris. Harris is a frontrunner for the nomination only because she is a she and is half black. That is all she has going for her. She owes her political career to her willingness to **** an old geezer politician from California (Willie Brown?) As a result, she became state AG. Which shows you just how corrupt politics is at the state level. Now she's a real candidate for the demorat nomination even though she is a a total POS, especially compared to someone like Gabbard, who has served her country, talks straight, and doesn't take **** from the pompous a-holes in the dem establishment. I hope she stays in the race.

CashMcCall , 1 hour ago link

Harris is done. Tulsi destroyed her.

[Aug 02, 2019] Harris' press secretary Ian Sams unleashed a string of tweets about Gabbard being an "Assad apologist", which was followed by a deluge of establishment narrative managers who sent the word "Assad" trending on Twitter

Aug 02, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Caitlin Johnstone chimes in link

In the race to determine who will serve as Commander in Chief of the most powerful military force in the history of civilization, night two of the CNN Democratic presidential debates saw less than six minutes dedicated to discussing US military policy during the 180-minute event.

That's six, as in the number before seven. Not sixty. Not sixteen. Six. From the moment Jake Tapper said "I want to turn to foreign policy" to the moment Don Lemon interrupted Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard just as she was preparing to correctly explain how President Trump is supporting Al-Qaeda in Idlib, approximately five minutes and fifty seconds had elapsed.
...
Harris' press secretary Ian Sams unleashed a string of tweets about Gabbard being an "Assad apologist", which was followed by a deluge of establishment narrative managers who sent the word "Assad" trending on Twitter, at times when Gabbard's name somehow failed to trend despite being the top-searched candidate on Google after the debate. As of this writing, "Assad" is showing on the #5 trending list on the side bar of Twitter's new layout, while Gabbard's name is nowhere to be seen. This discrepancy has drawn criticism from numerous Gabbard defenders on the platform.

"Somehow I have a hard time believing that 'Assad' is the top trending item in the United States but 'Tulsi' is nowhere to be found," tweeted journalist Michael Tracey.

[Aug 02, 2019] Brutus questions whether "democracy" is sensible in a nation of three million!

Aug 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

Jacques Sheete , says: August 2, 2019 at 12:16 pm GMT

@Bert

Democracy was the next step, but it only works in small polities.

And for very short periods of time.

Anyway, yours is a key concept that most 'Merkins are completely ignorant of, yet some of the anti-federalists were aware of it. Here, Brutus questions whether "democracy" is sensible in a nation of three million !

Now, in a large extended country, it is impossible to have a representation, possessing the sentiments, and of integrity, to declare the minds of the people, without having it so numerous and unwieldly, as to be subject in great measure to the inconveniency of a democratic government.

The territory of the United States is of vast extent; it now contains near three millions of souls, and is capable of containing much more than ten times that number. Is it practicable for a country, so large and so numerous as they will soon become, to elect a representation, that will speak their sentiments, without their becoming so numerous as to be incapable of transacting public business?

It certainly is not.

Brutus, (Robert Yates), To the Citizens of the State of New-York, October 18, 1787

[Aug 02, 2019] In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class

Aug 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

anonymous [340] Disclaimer , says: July 30, 2019 at 1:16 pm GMT

@Miro23 No, some saw this well in advance:

"In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.

A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics."

Linh Dinh, "Orlando Shooting Means Trump for President," @ The Unz Review (June 12, 2016).

anonymous [239] Disclaimer , says: July 30, 2019 at 2:01 pm GMT
Note how the 'free press' of the US has been not only complicit in all this every step of the way but is coordinated with it, staying silent about things in front of its nose and launching propaganda campaigns on cue. Obviously the media is in close cooperation with elements of the political establishment. Oh, but we have the freest media in the world. I know so because I read it in the newspaper.

[Aug 02, 2019] Trump Pretends to Like Union Members -- But He Really Likes the Fat Cats by Tom Conway

Notable quotes:
"... This isn't a glitch. It's a pattern. Although Trump is fond of surrounding himself with union members and asserting that they love him, he doesn't really like unions, especially ones that challenge him or dare to question his lies. Remember how he personally attacked Steelworker Chuck Jones who exposed Trump and Pence for claiming to save 1,100 jobs at Carrier when they really preserved only about half that many -- and then only after a grant of $7 million from the taxpayers of Indiana? ..."
"... A president who supported organized labor would oppose freeriders who won't pay their fair share but still want all the benefits of union membership. A president who supported unions would not issue executive orders crippling unions representing federal workers. A president who supported unions would not delay or eliminate health and safety regulations designed to protect workers from sickness and death. ..."
"... That's not Donald Trump. He supported Mark Janus, an Illinois government employee who wanted everything for nothing. Janus was fine with collecting the higher wages that the labor union representing him secured for workers, but Janus didn't want to contribute one red cent for that representation. ..."
"... So with right-wing corporate billionaires picking up the tab for him, Janus took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered unions to provide workers like Janus with essentially a free lunch. That is, the court said unions must represent freeloaders like him, but those workers don't have to pay anything for all they get -- no dues, no fees, nothing. ..."
"... And then there are his labor secretary choices. First he wanted Andy Puzder, CEO of the restaurant corporation that owns Hardee's and Carl's Jr., an opponent of raising the minimum wage who said he preferred machines to humans. Puzder withdrew, and Alexander Acosta took over until he was forced to resign last month as a result of the unconscionable plea deal he gave an accused molester a decade ago when Acosta was a federal prosecutor. ..."
"... Now the interim secretary is Patrick Pizzella, who lobbied for years to prevent Congress from extending minimum wage requirements to the Northern Mariana Islands , a commonwealth of the United States, where workers were paid as little as $1 an hour but the corporate bosses got to mark the merchandise produced there as Made in America. I guess that's how you Make America Great Again, huh? ..."
"... Now, Trump has picked Scalia, son of the late, anti-worker Supreme Court justice. This is the guy who killed a proposed ergonomics rule to protect workers against injuries from repetitive motions, denigrating the research as "junk science" and "quackery." ..."
"... This is the guy who stopped the fiduciary rule that would have required brokers to act in clients' best interest rather than brokers' personal financial benefit by forbidding brokers from recommending investments that paid brokers big commissions but provided clients with low returns. This corrupt practice costs workers and retirees about $17 billion a year . ..."
"... Scalia is a corporate shill. And he'd be reporting to Trump, whose slavish support of corporate bosses over working Americans has revealed he's nothing more than a poser in a red MAGA baseball cap. ..."
"... The decline of the unions has been 50 years in the making under Democrats and Republicans. Blaming Trump is a convenient scapegoat and pinata for the left, but just the icing on the cake for decades of bad DC policies. Trump didn't create the Rust Belt or sign NAFTA. ..."
"... The strange thing is that with the Trump administration attacking all of the American friends/allies, no one is willing to step in and help America with curtailing Chinese trade abuses. ..."
"... I think the point they're making is by no means that this started with Trump, or that the Democrats have been all that great. Merely that he's been significantly worse (and many of the examples are egregiously anti-labor actions that would not have been done under a Clinton ((or a Bush or Romney for that matter)) and that the preposterousness of his thin pretence at being a friend of labor is an order of magnitude greater even than Biden's. ..."
Aug 02, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

By Tom Conway, the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW) . Produced by the Independent Media Institute

Donald Trump: billionaire of the people. When he ran for office, he said , "The American worker will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them."

And how's that working out for the American worker? Not very well, actually, not very well. When it comes down to picking sides -- standing up for workers' rights or lining the pockets of CEOs and shareholders -- Trump aligned himself and his policies with the fat cats. This cost workers money and safety. The truth is that American corporations got a president who protected them and fought for them.

The proof is in Trump'slegislation, regulation and secretary selections. The most recent example is Trump's Twitter appointment of Eugene Scalia as Secretary of Labor. This is the department specifically designated to "foster, promote, and develop the welfare of wage earners, job seekers, and retirees." Scalia, though, has made his fortune over decades by fighting to ensure that the big guys -- corporations -- don't, in fact, have to abide by regulations intended to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the little guys -- wage earners, job seekers, and retirees.

That is who Trump chose to protect wage earners -- a corporatist so egregious that when former President George W. Bush wanted Scalia as Labor Department solicitor, Bush had to give him a recess appointment because Republicans in the Senate balked at approving him.

This isn't a glitch. It's a pattern. Although Trump is fond of surrounding himself with union members and asserting that they love him, he doesn't really like unions, especially ones that challenge him or dare to question his lies. Remember how he personally attacked Steelworker Chuck Jones who exposed Trump and Pence for claiming to save 1,100 jobs at Carrier when they really preserved only about half that many -- and then only after a grant of $7 million from the taxpayers of Indiana?

A president who supported organized labor would oppose freeriders who won't pay their fair share but still want all the benefits of union membership. A president who supported unions would not issue executive orders crippling unions representing federal workers. A president who supported unions would not delay or eliminate health and safety regulations designed to protect workers from sickness and death.

That's not Donald Trump. He supported Mark Janus, an Illinois government employee who wanted everything for nothing. Janus was fine with collecting the higher wages that the labor union representing him secured for workers, but Janus didn't want to contribute one red cent for that representation.

So with right-wing corporate billionaires picking up the tab for him, Janus took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered unions to provide workers like Janus with essentially a free lunch. That is, the court said unions must represent freeloaders like him, but those workers don't have to pay anything for all they get -- no dues, no fees, nothing.

Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The whole point of Janus' and the billionaires' court crusade was to bankrupt and try to kill unions. And Trump was on their side.

If Trump really were the billionaire of the people, he'd have stood with the union. That's who Trump promised that he would protect, the organization of average people trying to earn an honest living and standing up to big government and big corporations.

But he didn't.

That was in June of last year. Just last week , Trump went to court seeking enforcement of his executive orders restricting unions representing federal workers and enabling him to quickly fire workers. The unions contend Trump does not have this authority. This is not settled in court yet, but Trump is asking a judge to let him impose the orders before it is.

That sounds like a president using all of the power of big government to step on the tens of thousands of little guys who do the grueling work, day after day, to ensure the federal government serves the American people reasonably well.

There's even more. So much more.

Trump slow-walked implementation of silica and beryllium exposure safeguards intended to save workers' lives and delayed a rule requiring mine operators to identify potential hazards before workers begin their shifts. He helped thwart an attempt to extend overtime pay to 4 million workers . Trump blocked a rule that would have made it harder for corporations that violate labor laws to get federal contracts. Trump lifted not one finger to help those crushed by a starvation $7.25 minimum wage not raised in a decade .

And then there are his labor secretary choices. First he wanted Andy Puzder, CEO of the restaurant corporation that owns Hardee's and Carl's Jr., an opponent of raising the minimum wage who said he preferred machines to humans. Puzder withdrew, and Alexander Acosta took over until he was forced to resign last month as a result of the unconscionable plea deal he gave an accused molester a decade ago when Acosta was a federal prosecutor.

Now the interim secretary is Patrick Pizzella, who lobbied for years to prevent Congress from extending minimum wage requirements to the Northern Mariana Islands , a commonwealth of the United States, where workers were paid as little as $1 an hour but the corporate bosses got to mark the merchandise produced there as Made in America. I guess that's how you Make America Great Again, huh?

Now, Trump has picked Scalia, son of the late, anti-worker Supreme Court justice. This is the guy who killed a proposed ergonomics rule to protect workers against injuries from repetitive motions, denigrating the research as "junk science" and "quackery."

This is the guy who argued that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), an agency of the Labor Department, had no authority to regulate worker safety at SeaWorld after a 12,300-poundorca that had killed twice before attacked and drowned a trainer in front of hundreds of horrified children.

This is the guy who stopped the fiduciary rule that would have required brokers to act in clients' best interest rather than brokers' personal financial benefit by forbidding brokers from recommending investments that paid brokers big commissions but provided clients with low returns. This corrupt practice costs workers and retirees about $17 billion a year .

This is the guy who persuaded an appeals court to force card dealers in Las Vegas to split the tips they earn with their supervisors.

This guy is among the lawyers representing a petroleum producers' trade association that is suing to overturn a California regulation calling for worker participation to improve refinery safety. The state passed the legislation after a refinery fire in Richmond, California, sent 15,000 nearby residents to hospitals and doctor's offices for treatment, mostly for breathing problems. The lawsuit was filed in July, just days before an explosion and fire at an Exxon Mobil refinery in Texas that injured 37 people.

Scalia is a corporate shill. And he'd be reporting to Trump, whose slavish support of corporate bosses over working Americans has revealed he's nothing more than a poser in a red MAGA baseball cap.

Partyless Poster , , August 2, 2019 at 4:22 pm

So this is whats exasperating, if the Democrats actually hammered on these issues the would have so much support, instead its Russia Russia Russia all the time. "Inauthentic opposition" its like they don't want to win.

John Beech , , August 2, 2019 at 4:24 pm

Come on, nobody likes dealing with unions, not even Bernie. I suspect he's been hoist by his own petard because he's now on the horns of the pay dilemma of private enterprise due to his campaign workers unionizing and making pay demands.

Dealing with a labor union presents me with a conundrum. While I agree with the philosophy of a labor union, and for them having a voice because they 'should', I break with them in favor of management's view of union labor. Why? It's because the union members aren't good team players.

Sadly – and proving my pay grade doesn't extend high enough to have all the answers – I also break with one of management practices. This because I feel management are also poor team players because they pay themselves so darned much it seems unfair.

Basically I feel like one for all and all for one works for Musketeers and teams, the spirit falls apart with private capital. And that Marx business of, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" is a proven loser.

I theorize each time it's because labor and management aren't really working for one team. How is Southwest's vaunted employee owned doing? Everybody happy? I doubt it. I almost wish there were privately held companies where there's an owner and employees, and employee-owned only. And publicly held must be accountable to government oversight to prevent abuses.

Why? I suspect if 'all' shares of Southwest were owned by the employees 'only' then the collectively 'they' would be rich in fact because only they owned the means of production (moving people and cargo via air for lucre).

Anyway, the key part everybody forgets about Marx is he prefaced the above in part with . . ."after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want."

This is an important point being overlooked because it presupposes people 'want' to go to work. Don't know about you but I don't really know many who want to work. Most would rather sip margaritas on the beach instead of going into work. Thus, as long as this is the case, the Marxist dream is just that, a pipe dream because most folks are 'lazy' – or put another way – don't want to exist only to work. Don't really blame them.

Anyway, if we recognize the truth of this (that many don't especially want to work), then it follows we also receive less productive work from some vs. others, then paying everybody the same is inherently unfair. And by extension, setting a minimum pay means everybody at that level is worth the same, and we know this isn't true!

So if you here are are forced to accept the validity of some of this, e.g. some who will show up and be a warm body – but – won't be a team player and give their heart to doing the best job, and others won't show up for a paycheck at all if not forced by want, then everybody isn't worth the same wage! In fact, is it unreasonable to presuppose some simply aren't worth a minimum amount of pay? Further to the point, forcing a minimum pay becomes in some terms, almost immoral and the antithesis of freedom because we don't receive some fair bit of labor in exchange from some.

Could this be why so many, especially amongst the working poor, are simply against Socialism/Communism/Marxism even if they can't put the 'why they're against it' into words? Yes, I know they're not the same but they'll be tarred with the same brush by Capitalist forces so the answers needs must.

Anyway, circling back, I am delighted with Bernie's newfound union involvement from management's perspective. Why? It's because I very much look forward to see how his views evolve.

skippy , , August 2, 2019 at 5:16 pm

I think the American neoliberal matrix has shifted social perspectives during its decadal tenure E.g. there is only the Market where one can become a Kardashian, Entertainment, IT, YouTube Vloger, et al and Brand Name Commodity for sale . individual needs and wants expressed in a manner Marx never envisioned.

The financial elites are already on Mars for all intents and purposes .

YankeeFrank , , August 2, 2019 at 7:32 pm

Oh please, all this team player talk and some people don't deserve a minimum wage do you have any idea how massively the US employee is exploited and trashed by the "team players" in management?

Everyone, even those who don't want to work, deserve to live. You have apparently imbibed the capitalist mantra that work defines moral value so fully that anyone who can't or won't work should starve.

The fact is our society produces so much surplus value it could (and does) afford to support a substantial number who don't work for various reasons (mainly disability due to working physically demanding jobs for decades that ruin their bodies). Work doesn't equal morality. Try to dig yourself out of the neoliberal mindset, its inhumane and morally hollow.

jrs , , August 2, 2019 at 7:51 pm

+1000 even those who don't want to work, deserve to live.

Besides the fact that I suspect there are actually VERY FEW who don't want to do any work. The beef isn't actually with this tiny minority but that they don't work to some capitalists definition of optimum (explotation). When a medieval peasant spent less time working than we do. So maybe they are working like medieval peasants which should actually be MORE THAN possible, if technology has done anything, but oddly since all the wealth funneled to the top, it's not.

Left in Wisconsin , , August 2, 2019 at 7:36 pm

Anyway, if we recognize the truth of this (that many don't especially want to work), then it follows we also receive less productive work from some vs. others, then paying everybody the same is inherently unfair. And by extension, setting a minimum pay means everybody at that level is worth the same, and we know this isn't true!

No doubt some workers do more and/or better work than others but, for almost all jobs, it is a myth that there is an economically fair way to pay workers based on their productivity. Because outside of a few truly solo occupations, all output is collective output – there is no way to distinguish each individual worker's contribution to that output. So pay is always a socio-economic outcome, based as much on social convention and bargaining power as any putative economic contribution. At one time, this was well and truly understood. But economists have massively obfuscated this common-sense point.

The fairest pay for production workers (regardless of what industry they work in or what goods or services they produce) is the pay that those workers, via their union, determine to be most fair. The reason why unions always push for equal pay for the same job is because they view favoritism as a more serious offense against fairness than someone not as talented getting the same pay as someone more talented.

Darthbobber , , August 2, 2019 at 7:58 pm

I recommend William Morris's excellent essay, "Useful Work versus Useless Toil." Conveys very well the problems with most employment.

Morris was quite good, BTW, at presenting his understanding of Marc's central points in an empirical English fashion.

Andy Raushner , , August 2, 2019 at 4:53 pm

Considering a producer led recession is starting, Trump has problems.

John Beech , , August 2, 2019 at 6:32 pm

Well, defacto, President Trump doesn't actually have a problem with such a recession because he's on Mars with the rest of the elites. It's 'we the people' who have the problem because we're the ones who actually suffer in a recession.

Louis Fyne , , August 2, 2019 at 5:23 pm

" Not very well, actually, not very well. When it comes down to picking sides -- standing up for workers' rights or lining the pockets of CEOs and shareholders -- Trump aligned himself and his policies with the fat cats . "

Oh, if only Democrats were in complete control of the White House, Senate and House at some point within the past 10 years!

The decline of the unions has been 50 years in the making under Democrats and Republicans. Blaming Trump is a convenient scapegoat and pinata for the left, but just the icing on the cake for decades of bad DC policies. Trump didn't create the Rust Belt or sign NAFTA.

just saying.

The Rage , , August 2, 2019 at 5:51 pm

NAFTA is a big nothing. It helped boost capital flows which capital needs for production. US growth is running above shrinking supply, which rejects your point.

The post-war era is the only time in is history, workers made such gains. Pretty clear why.

Just Saying ..

Noel Nospamington , , August 2, 2019 at 6:17 pm

The USA has had trade surpluses with Canada under NAFTA:

The United States has a $12.5 billion trade surplus with Canada in 2016. Canada has historically held a trade deficit with the United States in every year since 1985 in net trade of goods, excluding services. The trade relationship between the two countries crosses all industries and is vitally important to both nations' success as each country is one of the largest trade partners of the other.

And yet Trump blackmailed Canada into the USMCA which is far worse than NAFTA for both countries, and provides more benefits to large multi-national corporations.

Lets hope that the American congress kills USMCA, and leaves NAFTA in place.

The strange thing is that with the Trump administration attacking all of the American friends/allies, no one is willing to step in and help America with curtailing Chinese trade abuses.

Darthbobber , , August 2, 2019 at 8:04 pm

I think the point they're making is by no means that this started with Trump, or that the Democrats have been all that great. Merely that he's been significantly worse (and many of the examples are egregiously anti-labor actions that would not have been done under a Clinton ((or a Bush or Romney for that matter)) and that the preposterousness of his thin pretence at being a friend of labor is an order of magnitude greater even than Biden's.

[Aug 02, 2019] Gotta love it! Democrats are beside themselves with outrage at Russian meddling but they could care less about election meddling that cost them wins in 2000 (Florida), and 2004 (Ohio.)

Aug 02, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

JohnH -> EMichael... , July 26, 2019 at 07:25 AM

Gotta love it! Democrats are beside themselves with outrage at Russian meddling but they could care less about election meddling that cost them wins in 2000 (Florida), and 2004 (Ohio.) And they won't say a word about blatant meddling going on right now. In fact, they want to turn the meddlers into censors to determine what information the American people can use to make decisions about who will govern them:

"On June 28th, 2019 in the immediate hours following the first Democratic Presidential debate, millions of Americans were searching online for information about Tulsi Gabbard. In fact, according to multiple news reports, Tulsi was the most searched candidate on Google. Then, without any explanation, Google suspended Tulsi's Google Ads account.

For hours, Tulsi's campaign advertising account remained offline while Americans everywhere were searching for information about her. During this time, Google obfuscated and dissembled with a series of inconsistent and incoherent reasons for its actions. In the end, Google never explained to us why Tulsi's account was suspended.

Google controls 88 percent of all internet search in the United States – essentially giving it control over our access to information. That's one reason why Tulsi has been a vocal proponent of breaking up the tech monopolies. And no matter what the motivation was for doing so, Google's arbitrary and capricious decision to suspend Tulsi's Google Ads account during a critical moment in our campaign should be of concern to all political candidates and in fact all Americans. Because if Google can do this to Tulsi, a combat veteran and four term Congresswoman who is running for the nation's highest office, Google can do this to any candidate, from any party, running for any office in the United States."

Vote for Tulsi! End election meddling by Big Tech, banksters, billionaires, and multi-nationals, meddlers that the Democratic yield shields.


ilsm -> JohnH... , July 28, 2019 at 05:14 PM
You cannot make up the effects of unaddressed angst (now mass psychosis) over Hillary (put her in jail) losing to Trump!

Thy delude themselves to think that putting the deep state in the middle of election campaigns and who they can talk to, might as well ask the Gestapo!

[Aug 02, 2019] Does the New York Times Have an Editing Program that Automatically Puts "Free" Before "Trade?

Aug 02, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , August 02, 2019 at 04:21 AM

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/does-the-new-york-times-have-an-editing-program-that-automatically-puts-free-before-trade

August 1, 2019

Does the New York Times Have an Editing Program that Automatically Puts "Free" Before "Trade?"
By Dean Baker

Readers must be wondering because it happens so frequently in contexts where it is clearly inappropriate. The latest example is in an article * about the state of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination following the second round of debates.

The piece told readers:

"After a few candidates used the Detroit debate to demand that Mr. Biden account for Mr. Obama's record on issues such as deportations and free trade, Mr. Biden was joined by some of the former president's advisers, who chastised the critics for committing political malpractice."

The word "free" in this context adds nothing and is in fact wrong. The Obama administration did virtually nothing to promote free trade in highly paid professional services, like physicians services, which would have reduced inequality. It only wanted to reduce barriers that protected less educated workers, like barriers to trade in manufactured goods.

And, it actively worked to increase patent and copyright protections, which are the complete opposite of free trade. These protections also have the effect of increasing inequality.

Given the reality of trade policy under President Obama it is difficult to understand why the New York Times felt the need to modify "trade" with the adjective "free." Maybe it needs to get this editing program fixed.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/us/politics/biden-obama.html

[Aug 02, 2019] A lot of US debt is "invested" in bombing sand piles for Prince bin Salman.

Aug 02, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

ilsm -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , July 23, 2019 at 04:05 AM

A lot of US debt is "invested" in bombing sand piles for Prince bin Salman.

The budget deal raises the pentagon's budget from $733 to 738B the 733B the glut that got through the House.

The total US G debt is pretty close to the sum of pentagon largesse since 1947.

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to ilsm... , July 23, 2019 at 04:22 AM
According to Tim Taylor we should save some of that sand. Maybe sand will be the next oil for funding ME dictators.

Hey, everyone loves a parade and what's a parade without tanks? If gives us something in common with the commies. On the one hand, this is a paranoid world and on the other hand, people love to see stuff get blown up. Battling against empire is an uphill battle with a long historical track record of failures so obscure that mostly no one has even ever heard of them. I guess if someone is committed to fighting a losing battle then they might as well go for losing big.

mulp -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , July 24, 2019 at 05:50 AM
"According to Tim Taylor we should save some of that sand. Maybe sand will be the next oil for funding ME dictators"

Wrong kind of sand. Not sure why, but water borne sand is jagged, but wind borne sand is smooth.

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to mulp ... , July 24, 2019 at 09:52 AM
[Good to know. Thanks. Do you think that finite (made from desert sand) will eventually be formulated to last long enough for general construction use?]

https://materialdistrict.com/article/finite-concrete-desert-sand/

Finite: a more sustainable alternative to concrete made from desert sand


26 March 2018

Sand is worldwide in high demand and heavily used in many industries, especially construction. With deserts full of it, one can easily be fooled into thinking that sand is an almost infinite resource. However, desert sand has little use; the grains are too smooth and fine to bind together, so it is not suitable for the making of for instance concrete. The start-up Finite, founded by researchers from Imperial College London, created a material composite made with desert sand that serves as a more sustainable alternative to concrete.

The supply of construction-grade sand is dwindling worldwide. This type of sand is stripped from beaches and riverbeds, but because of the heavy use, the supply is diminishing rapidly. Desert sand, on the other hand, is plentiful. This sand is not used in construction, as its grains are too smooth and fine to bind together for building materials.

The newly developed composite makes use of desert sand and "other abundant fine powders that traditionally have no use". According to the inventors, Finite can be turned into structures that have the same strength as housing bricks and residential concrete.

The material is more environmentally friendly than concrete, with a concrete footprint that is less than half that of concrete. Unlike concrete, which must be either downcycled or sent to the landfill at the end of its life, the new material can easily be reused as it can be remoulded for multiple lifecycle uses. The material can be coloured using natural dyes.

Finite can be used in desert areas, made with local sand rather than imported concrete. For now, the material is only suitable for temporary constructions, after which the material can be reused or left to decompose. For permanent structures, the material still has to pass rounds of testing and regulations...

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to ilsm... , July 23, 2019 at 05:59 AM
As ice melts, Greenland could become big sand
exporter: study https://reut.rs/2Gmryx1

Alister Doyle - February 11, 2019

OSLO (Reuters) - Greenland could start to export sand in a rare positive spinoff from global warming that is melting the island's vast ice sheet and washing large amounts of sediment into the sea, scientists said on Monday.

Mining of sand and gravel, widely used in the construction industry, could boost the economy for Greenland's 56,000 population who have wide powers of self-rule within Denmark but rely heavily on subsidies from Copenhagen.

By mining sand, "Greenland could benefit from the challenges brought by climate change," a team of scientists in Denmark and the United States wrote in the journal Nature Sustainability.

The study, headlined "Promises and perils of sand exploitation in Greenland", said the Arctic island would have to assess risks of coastal mining, especially to fisheries.

Rising global temperatures are melting the Greenland ice sheet, which locks up enough water to raise global sea levels by about seven meters (23 ft) if it ever all thawed, and carrying ever more sand and gravel into coastal fjords.

"You can think of it (the melting ice) as a tap that pours out sediment to the coast," said lead author Mette Bendixen, a researcher at the University of Colorado's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

Worldwide demand for sand totaled about 9.55 billion tonnes in 2017 with a market value of $99.5 billion and is projected to reach almost $481 billion in 2100, driven by rising demand and likely shortages, the study said.

That meant a rare opportunity for the island. ...


RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , July 23, 2019 at 09:56 AM
"As you be muche the worse. and I cast awaie.
An yll wynde, that blowth no man to good, men saie.
Wel (quoth he) euery wind blowth not down the corn
I hope (I saie) good hap [luck] be not all out worn." - John Heywood - 1546
Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , July 24, 2019 at 03:57 AM
Hmmm. "It's an Ille Wynde
that blows no Bodye Goode?"
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , July 24, 2019 at 05:03 AM
Mister Sandman brings dream to Greenland.
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , July 24, 2019 at 05:06 AM
Mister Sandman is moving into Frosty the Snowman's old digs in uptown Nuuk.
anne , July 23, 2019 at 04:11 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/opinion/biden-sanders-health-care.html

July 22, 2019

Biden and Sanders, Behaving Badly
A bad-faith debate over health care coverage.
By Paul Krugman

Health care was a key factor in Democrats' victory in the 2018 midterm elections, and it should be a big plus in 2020 as well. The shared Democratic position -- that every legal resident should have access to affordable care, regardless of income or health status -- is immensely popular. The de facto Republican position -- that we should go back to a situation in which those whose jobs don't come with health benefits, or who suffer from pre-existing medical conditions, can't get insurance -- is so unpopular that G.O.P. candidates consistently lie about their own proposals.

But right now, two of the major contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, are having an ugly argument about health care that could hurt the party's chances. There are real, important differences between the two men's policy proposals, and it's fine to point that out. What's not fine is the name-calling and false assertions. Both men are behaving badly. And for their party's sake, and their country's, they need to stop it.

Let's back up. There are, broadly speaking, two ways a country can try to achieve universal health insurance. One is single-payer: The government simply pays the bills. The other retains a role for private insurance but relies on a combination of regulations and subsidies to ensure that everyone gets covered.

We don't have to speculate about how these systems would work in practice, because every advanced country except the U.S. has some form of universal coverage. Some, like Canada and Britain, use single-payer (in Britain the government also operates the hospitals and pays the doctors). Others, like Switzerland and the Netherlands, have a large role for private insurers.

The clean little secret of health care is that both approaches work when countries try to make them work. In fact, we can see both systems at work right here in America.

More than 100 million Americans are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, which are both single-payer programs; despite Ronald Reagan's ominous warnings back in 1961, neither destroyed American freedom. Since 2014, millions more have been covered by the Affordable Care Act, which was underfunded and has been subject to extensive Republican sabotage; nonetheless, states like California that have tried to make the act work have experienced huge declines in the number of residents without insurance.

Which brings us back to the Democratic quarrel.

Sanders, of course, has made Medicare for All his signature proposal. Could such a plan work? Absolutely. But there are two valid criticisms of his proposal.

First, it would have to be paid for with higher taxes. While many people would find the increased tax burden offset by lower premiums, the required tax increases would be daunting. And while Sanders has in fact proposed a number of new taxes, independent estimates say that the revenue they'd generate would fall far short of what his plan would cost.

Second, the Sanders plan would require that roughly 180 million Americans give up their current private insurance and replace it with something different. Persuading them that this would be an improvement, even if true, would be a tall order. Indeed, there's good reason to believe that eliminating the option of retaining private insurance would be an electoral loser. (Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, take heed.)

On the other side, Biden is proposing to build on Obamacare. That can sound like tinkering at the edges. But his actual plan is much bigger and better than is widely realized, with large increases in funding, a public option, and more. It would, arguably, bring the A.C.A. close to the standards of successful European systems.

That said, the Biden plan would preserve the crazy-quilt, Rube Goldberg aspects of our current system, which impose a lot of unnecessary costs and make it too easy for people to fall through the cracks.

So there's plenty of room for a good-faith Sanders-Biden argument. Unfortunately, that's not the argument they're having.

Instead, Sanders is arguing that only single-payer can purge "corporate greed" from the system -- an assertion belied by European experience -- and broadly hinting that Biden is in the pocket of corporate interests. That's a criticism you can level about some of Biden's past policy positions, like his advocacy of the 2005 bankruptcy law. But it's not a fair criticism of a health plan that's actually pretty good, and which most people would have considered radical just a few years ago.

For his part, Biden is declaring that the Sanders plan would undermine Medicare. In fact, it would enhance current recipients' benefits. And it's a bad sign that Biden, who poses as Obamacare's great defender, is using a G.O.P. scare tactic familiar from the utterly dishonest campaign against the A.C.A. No Democrat should be stooping to that level.

Unfortunately, Biden and Sanders will be appearing on different nights during the next Democratic debates. So it will be up to other candidates, or the moderators, to put them on the spot. It's time for both men to stop poisoning their own party's well.

ilsm -> anne... , July 23, 2019 at 04:18 AM
It may get ugly if Sanders points to the elephant in the room......

US remains, and Obamacare did nothing to alter it, the only "developed" country where establishments that finance the health of human beings are run as profit generating businesses.

ilsm -> ilsm... , July 23, 2019 at 01:47 PM
The established democrats are against any progress, as they diss Bernie they are done with me.
mulp -> ilsm... , July 24, 2019 at 06:41 AM
Medicare is a bad model for health care because its based on a piece work production system, ie, payment only for doing medical work, and no payment for preventing preventable medical treatment.

For example, prescribing opiates repeatedly was paid for each and every time, but working to not prescribe opiates is not.

And now getting people off it opiate addiction is paid for, but not working with patients to prevent addiction to opiates.

Thanks to Nixon, a number of very good HMOs were created and required to be options in employer benefit programs, in NH, this resulted in half of all NH residents picking the HMO Mathew Thornton health plan over BCBS which in 1970 covered 80% of NH residents. The HMO only had clinics covering only 60-70% of the population while BCBS paid almost any doctor in the four state region.

MTHP was extremely well liked. It provided great health care. Doctors ran it, not bean counters. Doctors didn't need to invent diseases to get paid for spending time with patients.

But Bernie has stated that HMOs are bad because they seek to not provide medical treatments, as if health care is about making patients suffer both illnesses and then the treatments.

HMOs operate on the Deming model. Design the system for high quality so less work is required, thus lower cost to deliver the best outcome, whether a qualty car, walkman, TV, health.

JohnH -> anne... , July 23, 2019 at 07:46 AM
Coming from Krugman, with a view of how he trashed Bernie's plan on behalf of Hillary in 2016, this is pretty rich.

I guess it's up to Krugman to decide when it's OK to behave badly

And then he attacks Bernie's plan: people won't want to pay more in taxes to fund Medicare for All. Nowhere is it mentioned that the taxes would be in lieu of insurance premiums and as we all know (!!!) people are just delighted to pay those insurance companies because, you know it's better to be ripped off by private enterprise than to pay taxes for real insurance coverage with no deductibles and co-pays!!!

Krugman just can't seem to wean himself of those industry talking points

Christopher H. said in reply to anne... , July 23, 2019 at 07:58 AM
Krugman has gone back to his 2016 ways. It is really sad. I'm surprised Kurt and EMike haven't joined him yet. There's still time.

"It's time for both men to stop poisoning their own party's well."

You need to turn out your base to win, not soft-peddle to win in purple and red states.

Hillary tried EMike's and the centrists' strat and she lost.

If Biden is the nominee, there's a chance he could lose, but then Krugman was never serious about beating Trump despite his overheated rhetoric.

Julio -> anne... , July 23, 2019 at 10:27 AM
"And while Sanders has in fact proposed a number of new taxes, independent estimates say that the revenue they'd generate would fall far short of what his plan would cost."

Mealy-mouthed way of saying that Sanders is lying.

JohnH -> anne... , July 23, 2019 at 01:11 PM
It seems that Krugman is programmed to object strenuously to anything that does not preserve the inefficient, Rube Goldberg health insurance system were have in place today. And here I thought that economists were all about efficiency!!!

I guess industry talking points override efficiency!!!

anne , July 23, 2019 at 04:13 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/2020-trump-economy.html

July 18, 2019

Deficit Man and the 2020 Election
The Trump bump probably peaked too early.
By Paul Krugman

I've seen a number of people suggest that the 2020 election will be a sort of test: Can a sufficiently terrible president lose an election despite a good economy? And that is, in fact, the test we'd be running if the election were tomorrow.

On one side, Donald Trump wastes no opportunity to remind us how awful he is. His latest foray into overt racism delights his base but repels everyone else. On the other side, he presides over an economy in which unemployment is very low and real G.D.P. grew 3.2 percent over the past year.

But the election won't be tomorrow, it will be an exhausting 15 months from now. Trump's character won't change, except possibly for the worse. But the economy might look significantly different.

So let's talk about the Trump economy.

The first thing you need to know is that the Trump tax cut caused a huge rise in the budget deficit, which the administration expects to hit $1 trillion this year, up from less than $600 billion in 2016. This tidal wave of red ink is even more extraordinary than it looks, because it has taken place despite falling unemployment, which usually leads to a falling deficit.

Strange to say, none of the Republicans who warned of a debt apocalypse under President Barack Obama have protested the Trump deficits. (Should we put Paul Ryan's face on milk cartons?) For that matter, even the centrists who obsessed over federal debt during the Obama years have been pretty quiet. Clearly, deficits only matter when there's a Democrat in the White House.

Oh, and the imminent fiscal crisis people like Erskine Bowles used to warn about keeps not happening: Long-term interest rates remain very low.

Now, the evidence on the effects of deficit spending is clear: It gives the economy a short-run boost, even when we're already close to full employment. If anything, the growth bump under Trump has been smaller than you might have expected given the deficit surge, perhaps because the tax cut was so badly designed, perhaps because Trump's trade wars have deterred business spending.

For now, however, Deficit Man is beating Tariff Man. As I said, we've seen good growth over the past year.

But the tax cut was supposed to be more than a short-run Keynesian stimulus. It was sold as something that would greatly improve the economy's long-run performance; in particular, lower corporate tax rates were supposed to lead to a huge boom in business investment that would, among other things, lead to sharply higher wages. And this big rise in long-run growth would supposedly create a boom in tax revenues, offsetting the upfront cost of tax cuts.

None of this is happening. Corporations are getting to keep a lot more of their profits, but they've been using the money to buy back their own stock, not raise investment. Wages are rising, but not at an extraordinary pace, and many Americans don't feel that they're sharing in the benefits of a growing economy.

And this is probably as good as it gets.

I'm not forecasting a recession. It could happen, and we're very badly positioned to respond if it does, but the more likely story is just a slowdown as the effects of the deficit splurge wear off. In fact, if you believe the "nowcasters" (economists who try to get an early read on the economy from partial data), that slowdown is already happening. For example, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York believes that the economy's growth was down to 1.5 percent in the second quarter.

And it's hard to see where another economic bump can come from. With Democrats controlling the House, there won't be another big tax cut. The Fed may cut interest rates, but those cuts are already priced into long-term interest rates, which are what matter for spending, and the economy seems to be slowing anyway.

Which brings us back to the 2020 election.

Political scientists have carried out many studies of the electoral impact of the economy, and as far as I know they all agree that what matters is the trend, not the level. The unemployment rate was still over 7 percent when Ronald Reagan won his 1984 landslide; it was 7.7 percent when Obama won in 2012. In both cases, however, things were clearly getting better.

That's probably not going to be the story next year. If we don't have a recession, unemployment will still be low. But economic growth will probably be meh at best -- which means, if past experience is any guide, that the economy won't give Trump much of a boost, that it will be more or less a neutral factor.

And on the other hand, Trump's awfulness will remain.

Republicans will, of course, portray the Democratic nominee -- whoever she or he may be -- as a radical socialist poised to throw the border open to hordes of brown-skinned rapists. And one has to admit that this strategy might work, although it failed last year in the midterms. To be honest, I'm more worried about the effects of sexism if the nominee is a woman -- not just the sexism of voters, but that of the news media, which still holds women to different standards.

But as far as the economy goes, the odds are that Trump's deficit-fueled bump came too soon to do him much political good.

ilsm -> anne... , July 23, 2019 at 04:21 AM
There remains time for democrats to preside over a new debt ceiling crisis...... anything to oust Trump!

Cover will be provided by the, 30 months too long, Mueller circus.

Christopher H. said in reply to anne... , July 23, 2019 at 09:12 AM
Krugman was predicting overheating in 2016. It would be nice if he admitted when he was wrong.

He's very dismissive of monetary policy and the Fed here. Maybe the Fed has been overly tight?

Maybe Trump's jawboning on the Fed pushed it to stop tightening?

You won't get honest objective answers from Krugman. He's much like the Republicans who are always lying.

mulp -> Christopher H.... , July 24, 2019 at 06:48 AM
Right, zero inflation, just housing prices going up 10% per year.

Hey, you are getting richer as the house you can't buy because your savings and income isn't rising faster than 10% per year so you can finally go into debt and then do cash out refis so you have a constant 80% debt in rising "wealth".

Constantly increasing debt on constantly incressing "wealth" is not inflation.

Just keep saying "there is no inflation, just higher living costs".

Christopher H. said in reply to mulp ... , July 24, 2019 at 08:15 AM
asset appreciation isn't *inflation*

inflation is all prices going up like in the 1970s.

This is why I skip your comments

kurt -> mulp ... , July 25, 2019 at 04:12 PM
You are correct in that housing should be included in CPI. It is now most families biggest cost and housing insecurity is a thing.
Christopher H. said in reply to kurt... , July 27, 2019 at 10:00 AM
Dean Baker disagrees with you and I'd take his opinion over yours and mulps any time of the day. He called the housing bubble.

My guess is that you have no idea but just wanted to try to troll me.

http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/inflation-housing-2018-06.pdf

Measuring the Inflation Rate:
Is Housing Different?

anne , July 23, 2019 at 04:20 AM
http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/the-aging-crisis-is-actually-just-a-labor-crisis-for-the-wealthy

July 22, 2019

The "Aging Crisis" Is Actually Just a Labor Crisis for the Wealthy
By Dean Baker

The New York Times told us * last week that China is running out of people. That might seem an odd concern for a country with a population of more than 1.4 billion, but you can read it for yourself:

"Driving this regression in women's status is a looming aging crisis, and the relaxing of the draconian 'one-child' birth restrictions that contributed to the graying population. The Communist Party now wants to try to stimulate a baby boom."

What exactly is supposed to be China's "aging crisis?" China has had a low birth rate for the last four decades, as the government consciously tried to slow the country's population growth. As a result, it does have an aging population and a declining ratio of workers to retirees, but this raises the obvious question, "So what?"

We see endless news articles and columns implying that the prospect of a declining number of workers supporting a growing population of retirees is some sort of crisis. The people making such assertions really need some knowledge of demographics.

The United States and other wealthy countries have been seeing drops in the ratio of workers to retirees for many decades. In the U.S. case, we went from having 5.1 workers for every Social Security retiree in 1960 to just 2.8 workers for each retiree today.

We pay higher taxes for Social Security and Medicare today than we did in 1960 (Medicare did not yet exist), but few would say that current tax rates are a crisis. If China has to see equivalent increases in taxes in the next decade or two to support its retirees, it is hard to see it as a major problem.

Reporters and media commentators like to report on taxes as the biggest concern for working people, but as economists like to point out, the main factor determining living standards is what goes into workers' paychecks, not what the government takes out in taxes.

The Social Security payroll tax rose by 6.4 percentage points between 1960 and 1990. The Medicare tax rose by 2.95 percentage points, for a total increase in federal payroll taxes of 9.35 percentage points.

In spite of this large increase in payroll taxes over this period, workers enjoyed considerably higher after-tax wages in 1990 than in 1960. This was true because real wages rose, especially in the first part of this period (1960 to 1973), when real wages for the typical worker rose at a 2.2 percent annual rate.

The story is even more dramatic in China. Real wages have risen just over 7.0 percent annually over the last decade. Suppose wage growth slows to 5.0 percent over the next two decades. Suppose the country has to raise taxes on workers by 20 percentage points over this period to cover the cost of its aging population. In that case, after taxes, wages would still be more than twice as high as they are today. What is the problem?

The basic story is that if an economy maintains a healthy rate of productivity growth, which allows for healthy real wage growth, then the demographic changes are a relatively small matter. This doesn't mean that society will not face some problems in adjusting for the needs of an aging population ― the U.S. faced many problems associated with the care and education of the Baby Boomers when we were children ― but these problems are far from insoluble.

If simple arithmetic shows that the people shortage story is nonsense, then why does it continually appear in the media? The most obvious explanation is that the concerns over a smaller workforce fall into the well-known "it's hard to get good help" problem.

This is the standard refrain of rich people, employers and major media outlets. A smaller labor market could present employers with a world where workers have more bargaining power and can therefore demand wage increases that are equal to, possibly even greater than, the rate of productivity growth.

As workers move from lower-paying to higher-paying ― and therefore higher productivity ― jobs, it will be harder to get people to work at many of the lowest-paying jobs, such as domestic workers, valets in restaurants, and other jobs that primarily involve providing services to the wealthy.

That probably does look like a crisis to a small segment of the population. The wealthy may really have some cause to be concerned about the prospect of a declining population and workforce. The rest of us, not so much.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/world/asia/china-women-discrimination.html

mulp -> anne... , July 24, 2019 at 06:57 AM
The workers in fast food serve primarily the wealthy???

The workers in dollar stores serve primarily the wealthy?

The workers serving the wealthy are primarily middle class, whether food service, retail, child care, etc.

The problem for China is providing opportunity for the young entrepreneurs. Without an abundant eager labor force, the old established businesses will dominate and slow change. Thhey won't be challenged to do better.

Joe , July 23, 2019 at 04:31 AM
Modern money theory and its challenges - VoxEU
---------

Some misperceptions.

MMT is not modern, it is standard generational practice.
Given the nearly unlimited history of humans doing MMT some rules have emerged:
1) MMTs generally last anywhere from three days to three months.
2) The exception to rule 1 is war time where MMT hangs around with price controls.
3) We have a legal issue. This is the first time we have done a good old MMT using double accounting money, we usually do it by repricing gold or exiting the gold market.

I am not sure we have the brains in DC to pull this off without a nightmare result, due to MMT becoming a tribal slogan with no real definition attached.

im1dc , July 23, 2019 at 04:52 AM
The 'Bond Market' agrees with S. Warren, to a point...

S. Warren does not have a friend in Bond World yet they agree...interesting

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/454198-the-bond-market-agrees-with-elizabeth-warren-up-to-a-point

"The bond market agrees with Elizabeth Warren, up to a point"

By Desmond Lachman, Opinion Contributor...07/23/19...07:30 AM EDT

'The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill'

"Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is not known for her enthusiasm for the financial markets in general and for the bond market in particular. But there seems to be one important point on which Warren and the world's bond markets currently agree: both the U.S. and the rest of the world could soon be heading for a nasty economic recession.

In a recent article, Warren warned that the odds of another economic downturn were high and growing. In her view, this is due to the precarious state of our economy, which is built on an excessive amount of household and corporate debt. That makes the U.S. economy particularly vulnerable to a number of serious shocks that she now sees on the horizon and that she thinks "could cause our economy's shaky foundation to crumble."

By its nature, the bond market does not spell out the reasons why it prices bonds in any particular manner. But we can infer the bond market's economic outlook from market bond prices.

One indication that the government bond markets now seem to be sharing Warren's gloomy economic prognosis is the fact that long-term U.S. Treasury bond rates have declined to significantly below the Federal Reserve's short-term policy rate. This so-called yield curve inversion implies that the U.S. Treasury bond market is expecting that the U.S. economy will soon go into a recession that will keep interest rates low for a long time.

A more dramatic indication of sovereign bond market pessimism is the fact that a record US$13 trillion of global sovereign bonds, and around one half of all European sovereign bonds, now offer negative interest rates."...

RC (Ron) Weakley , July 23, 2019 at 04:54 AM
RE: Acknowledging and pricing macroeconomic uncertainties

Lars Peter Hansen, Thomas Sargent 22 July 2019


False pretences of knowledge about complicated economic situations have become all too common in public policy debates. While we do know some things, we don't know everything. We believe that prudent decision-making should acknowledge what we don't know. Decision makers should strive to quantify dimensions of their ignorance and adjust their decisions accordingly. This essay describes a tractable approach for acknowledging, characterizing, and responding to the limited understandings discovered by researchers' efforts to interpret existing evidence by using theories and statistical methods available at any particular moment.

An economic model tells how chance, occurrences, and purposeful decisions influence future outcomes. Economic researchers use formal statistical models to describe and interpret data and to formulate policy advice for government and private decision makers. Whether they acknowledge it explicitly or not, real world decision makers also use models or 'views' about how their decisions affect future outcomes. Because they ignore some forces and oversimplify others, all models are just approximations to reality, some better than others depending on the purposes to which they are put. Furthermore, at any time, we can choose among multiple models and are unsure how much credibility to assign to each of them.

Data can surely help us assess the credibility of alternative models, but the real world is so complicated and data are so limited that data can only tell us so much. Therefore, economic modellers and decision makers require ways to express their opinions about the plausibility and usefulness of alternative models for the problem at hand. Because data are only partially informative about a model's plausibility, a decision-maker's purpose as well as his or her 'subjective beliefs' play important roles too. The more complex the situation, the bigger the challenge of confronting uncertainty.

Economists and other scholars have created theoretical foundations for uncertainty. For instance, both John Maynard Keynes (1921) and Frank Knight (1921) wrote on the subject, but mostly in literary ways that are challenging to interpret and to make operational so that they can be applied in quantitative work. The eminent statistician Abraham Wald (1950) introduced a theoretic framework for making decisions under uncertainty. Leonard J. Savage (1954) constructed a complete axiomatic approach to Bayesian decision theory by including subjective probabilities that are entirely in the mind of a decision maker. Itzhak Gilboa and David Schmeidler (1989) extended this approach in ways that acknowledged that a decision maker might not have a unique subjective probability distribution. Recent research in control theory and in dynamic decision theory provides useful practical tools for assessing and coping with various sources of uncertainty. We have worked on these topics for a number of years. Along with others, we have used mathematics and statistics to construct operational quantitative tools that shed light on how financial markets and the macroeconomy work and how alternative fiscal and monetary policies affect them.

In a recent paper (Hansen and Sargent 2019), we propose ways to categorise and respond to the multiple forms of uncertainty that confront decision makers and model builders. Thus, we distinguish among (1) uncertainty within a model; (2) uncertainty across a set of available known models; and (3) uncertainty about each model. We refer to (1) as risk – uncertainty about future outcomes that is described by a single known probability distribution. (This is the type of uncertainty assumed up until now in most work in theoretical and applied finance and macroeconomics.) We call uncertainty of type (2) ambiguity and represent it as being unsure about what weights or probabilities to attach to the available models. We call (3) model misspecification and represent it by surrounding each available model with a vast cloud statistical models with unknown forms that nevertheless fit the available data nearly as well as does an available model.

The models that we economists build and use are highly stylised

*

[These guys both need a new stylist.

Just how certain can they be about uncertainty? If uncertainty were quantifiable then how uncertain would it be? Uncertainty is a lot more than just confidence intervals on statistical data sets. Operators and relationships among interdependent variables are often uncertain while data is just distributed within variance. The past may not be a reliable indicator of the future. I will take Keynes on uncertainty and stay out of the deep end of the pool.]

[Aug 02, 2019] It is quite intriguing that so many of these cases involve the sort of criminal or sexual misbehavior that would be ideally suited for blackmailing powerful individuals who are less likely to be vulnerable to other influences

Aug 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

Hail , says: Website July 30, 2019 at 5:20 am GMT

it is quite intriguing that so many of these cases involve the sort of criminal or sexual misbehavior that would be ideally suited for blackmailing powerful individuals who are less likely to be vulnerable to other influences. So perhaps many of the elected officials situated at the top of our democratic system merely reign as political puppets, dancing to invisible strings.

I would invite Ron Unz and readers to look up the recent case of a Mark W. Levin (b.1944 or '45). He has a murky background, but by the 2000s was apparently involved closely with some outer-tier DC organizations and by the 2010s at a small DC graduate school aimed at aspiring intelligence agents.

Levin pressured young men for sex, used blackmail and threats, though the stick was mixed in with carrots. In a word, he appeared to be part of an operation with some striking similarities to the kinds of political blackmail operations (or the gaining of 'compromised' people) alleged/proposed in this article.

The Mark W. Levin story was reported in mainstream media (see some excerpts, below; Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo for much more), but there are some questions have deserved asking since the scandal broke in spring 2017, such as: What was the source of Levin's money, with which he paid for some students' tuition? Do we know for sure that Levin was "acting alone"? Did he have any political objectives? The story was fairly extensively reported on, but I don't think any of these questions were answered.

It's possible Mark W. Levin was just a lone, sick con-artist acting alone for homosexual-gratification and power, which is what the media depicted him as. It is also possible that he really was (at least at one time) part of a blackmail operation, and that after years of service he finally went down or was discarded, messily (a lawsuit against him was made public in spring 2017).

This is really a small-time case compared to Epstein, but it may be useful for comparative purposes.

Excerpts from some press reports in the case:

[Hide MORE]

In the late 1990s, Levin began attending the institute's public lectures. Then he started handing over checks to pay for the tuitions of certain students, though the source of the money was a mystery

By late 2012, the alleged victim said, Levin told him that if he wanted to remain a candidate for Levin's covert group, he needed to avoid marriage, children, sexually transmitted diseases and relationships with Muslim women. Levin warned him, he said, that his "guys" would constantly watch him and that if he didn't follow instructions, he would be blacklisted from government jobs.

Levin began inviting his protege back to his Arlington apartment building to practice drawing a weapon – shirtless. Soon, the man said, Levin began fondling him and giving him prostate exams, telling him the inspections were key to his recruitment. Levin also bathed him in the shower under the pretext of helping him with his hygiene, according to the alleged victims' lawsuit [ ]

Although Levin told him that he was free to refuse, the Arlington man said he did not want to imperil his candidacy for the clandestine organization or risk losing out on government jobs.

When the Falls Church man applied for his internship in July 2016, Levin told him "The Watchers" or "my guys" had been surveilling him.

"Then, Mark told me: 'I've killed 38 people. We have people killed all the time. And we cover our tracks,' " he said. "I was intimidated."

John Doe recalls following Levin's instructions him to masturbate and ejaculate on his own stomach.

"Levin proceeded to play with the semen on Mr. Doe's stomach, and then informed Mr. Doe that his semen output was insufficient and could have damaging effects on Mr. Doe's 'candidacy,' and this exercise would therefore need to be repeated in the future," the complaint states.

Though the men say they found such treatment degrading, they say they trusted Levin's credentials and believed his threats, some veiled and some explicit, about his ability to harm them.

[Aug 02, 2019] Well-placed contemporary sources have claimed that Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, purchased the secret correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and his longtime mistress

Aug 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

jokelly says: July 30, 2019 at 3:31 am GMT 300 Words

Similar rumors swirl around events much farther back in history as well, sometimes with enormous consequences. Well-placed contemporary sources have claimed that Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, purchased the secret correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and his longtime mistress, and that the existence of that powerful leverage may have been an important factor behind Wilson's astonishingly rapid rise from president of Princeton in 1910 to governor of New Jersey in 1911 to president of the United States in 1912. Once in office, Wilson signed the controversial legislation establishing the Federal Reserve system in 1913 and also named Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court despite the public opposition of nearly our entire legal establishment. Wilson's swiftly changing views on American involvement in the First World War may also have influenced by such personal pressures rather than solely determined by his perceptions of the national interest

When writing of the Protocols in the "International Jew" Henry Ford discussed the blackmail issue, referring anonymously to three political figures, one of whom was clearly Wilson, that were then under control of the hidden hand. Don't know who the other two were.

Re Wilson and Untermyer, my understanding was that Unternyer simultaneously represented Mrs. Peck, the wife of one of Wilson's fellow professors with who Wilson had an affair, in a (potential) alienation of affections claim against Wilson, and represented Wilson in the same matter, and supplied the money to Wilson to settle the claim, thereby cementing control over him. (Don't remember where I read this.)

Re the pedophilia issue, don't rule out that there is an element of Evil involved in this.

[Aug 01, 2019] I could live with Gabbard replacing Bolton or Pompeo in a second Trump administration

Aug 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

spyware-free , 13 minutes ago link

I could live with Gabbard replacing Bolton or Pompeo in a second Trump administration.

AKKadian , 12 minutes ago link

You never Know, right!

Someone Else , 9 minutes ago link

A cancerous tumor would be preferable to Bolton or Pompeo, but then I repeat myself.

[Aug 01, 2019] One advantage of the two party system

Aug 01, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Plp -> Plp... , July 31, 2019 at 01:48 PM

Even a compulsory choice between two poisons is preferred to being forced to take the designated poison

likbez -> Plp... , August 01, 2019 at 09:40 AM

> Even a compulsory choice between two poisons is preferred to being forced to take the designated poison

Wrong.

It's two batches of the same poison. One is artificially sweetened.

[Aug 01, 2019] Tulsi Big Donor Gains--Now at 120,228>

Aug 01, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Tulsi Big Donor Gains--Now at 120,228

apenultimate on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 7:31pm Well, Tulsi for the past couple months had been averaging around 500 new unique donors per day. Early in the day before her 2nd debate performance, her campaign announced she had reached 110,000 unique donors. In 1.5 days, she gained more than 10,000 more.

During the first debate, in the week after the debate Tulsi gained 8,500 donors above her usual donor gains. Tulsi managed to do 9,500 more than average in less than 2 days this time around. This time around seems much better.

She needed a debate boost from the second debate of 8,000 donors above her typical daily donor gain to be ensured to reach the 130,000 unique donor minimum. She has already surpassed that gain.

But, the polling requirements still need to be met . . .

Tulsi is going on an annual 2-week National Guard training pretty much now. She will not be able to personally campaign during this time. That's one reason this debate was so crucial. Let's see if it can elevate her in the coming polls.

A national Economist/YouGov poll had her at 2% through July 30. That one is not qualifying, but it's a good trend.

I have *heard* (but not confirmed) that only one qualifying poll from each of the first 4 states are allowed for qualifying (but all qualifying national polls count). Tulsi has 1 qualifying poll from New Hampshire. If what I heard above is true, this means no other polls from New Hampshire count towards the debate requirements. They must be qualifying polls from Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina, or national polls from here on out.

Centaurea on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 7:54pm
I posted this comment

on Snoopydawg's thread about Tulsi confronting Kamala, but I'd like to repost it here. I think the American people are responding not just to what Tulsi is saying, but how she is presenting herself.

Tulsi is a warrior. That's one of the main things she's accomplishing here: letting the voters see that about her.

She's directly confronting and exposing the old guard and their heirs presumptive. She's taking on the "powers that be", right to their faces, with strength and confidence.

And she's demonstrating to the American people that she is fully willing and capable of doing so.

[Aug 01, 2019] Tulsi's Last Stand? The most interesting Democrat running for president could be felled by a party that cares more about wokeness than war by W. James Antle III

Notable quotes:
"... Gabbard has been perhaps the most interesting Democrat running for president and Wednesday night could be her last stand. She gets to share the stage with frontrunner Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton a vote for the Iraq war. There is no guarantee she will get another opportunity: the eligibility criteria for subsequent debates is more stringent and she has yet to qualify. ..."
"... represent our military veterans' sharp turn against forever war, arguably the most important public opinion trend of our time. ..."
"... Tulsi is more experienced and articulate on foreign AND domestic policy than any other Democrat up there (Bernie being an independent). She's also more genuine. ..."
"... being 'woke', as the author failed to point out, is code for having the backing of the still extant Clinton/Obama cartel and hence the idiot US media. ..."
Jul 31, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

... ... ...

Screenshot It was already one of the most memorable moments of the Democratic presidential debates in this young election cycle. "Leaders as disparate as President Obama and President Trump have both said they want to end U.S. involvement in Afghanistan but it isn't over for America," observed moderator Rachel Maddow. "Why isn't it over? Why can't presidents of very different parties and very different temperaments get us out of there? And how could you?"

Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio responded with talking points that could have been ripped out of a George W. Bush speech circa 2004. "[T]he lesson that I've learned over the years is that you have to stay engaged in these situations," he said, later adding, "Whether we're talking about Central America, whether we're talking about Iran, whether we're talking about Afghanistan, we have got to be completely engaged."

Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii was having none of it. "Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged?" she asked a sputtering Ryan. "As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable. We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan." Gabbard noted that she had joined the military to fight those who attacked us on 9/11, not to nation-build indefinitely in Afghanistan, and pointed out the perfidy of Saudi Arabia.

Some likened Gabbard's rebuke of Ryan to the famous 2007 exchange between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani . Except Paul, then a relatively unknown congressman from Texas, was speaking truth to power against "America's Mayor" and the national GOP frontrunner. Gabbard is polling at 0.8 percent in the national RealClearPolitics average, and was challenging someone at 0.3 percent.

Ryan's asterisk candidacy is unsurprising. But Gabbard has been perhaps the most interesting Democrat running for president and Wednesday night could be her last stand. She gets to share the stage with frontrunner Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton a vote for the Iraq war. There is no guarantee she will get another opportunity: the eligibility criteria for subsequent debates is more stringent and she has yet to qualify.

The huge Democratic field has been a bust. Of the more than 20 declared presidential candidates, only seven are polling at 2 percent or more in the national averages. Two more -- Senators Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar -- are polling at least that well in Iowa. Only four candidates are consistently polling in the double digits: Biden, who recovered from his early debate stumbles and remains comfortably in the lead; Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has nevertheless mostly failed to recapture his 2016 magic; Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who seems ascendant; and Senator Kamala Harris of California, potentially the main threat to Biden's rock-solid black support.

Low-polling candidates have still managed to have an impact. Some, like former secretary of housing and urban development Julian Castro, have helped coax contenders likelier to win the nomination to the left on immigration. We've thus seen Democrats raise their hands in support of decriminalizing illegal border crossings in the midst of a migrant crisis not entirely of the Trump administration's making, expanding Medicare to cover everyone even at the expense of private health insurance, and ensuring that "everyone" includes illegal immigrants. Transgender abortions, also at taxpayer expense, have come up too.

Gabbard has so far been unable to penetrate this madness despite being young (she's 38), attractive, telegenic, a military veteran, a woman of color, and an articulate, passionate opponent of the regime change wars that have brought our country so much pain. While reliably progressive, she has occasionally reached across the political divide on issues like religious liberty and Big Tech censorship, a potent combination that could prove more responsive to Trump voters' concerns than what we've heard from her neocon lite interlocutor from Youngstown.

"None of this seems to matter in a Democratic Party that cares more about wokeness than war. In fact, Gabbard's conservative fans -- The View brought up Ann Coulter -- are often held against her, as is her failure to go all in on Trump-Russia. Ninety-five Democrats stand ready to impeach Trump over mean tweets with nary a peep over the near-bombing of Iran or the active thwarting of Congress's will on Yemen.

That's not to say that no one else running is sound on foreign policy -- Bernie has realist advisers and it took real courage for Warren to back Trump's abortive withdrawals from Afghanistan and Syria -- and it required a Democratic House to advance the bipartisan Yemen resolution. But none of them are basing their campaigns on it in the same way Gabbard has. Nor do any of them better represent our military veterans' sharp turn against forever war, arguably the most important public opinion trend of our time.

Liberals remain skeptical of Gabbard's turn away from social conservatism (which admittedly went far beyond sincerely opposing gay marriage while Barack Obama was merely pretending to do so), which she attributes to "aloha." In meeting with Bashar al-Assad, she hurt her credibility as a foe of the Syria intervention, failing to realize that doves are held to a higher standard on these matters than hawks .

A saner Democratic Party might realize the chances are far greater that their nominee will be a covert hawk rather than a secret right-winger. Only time will tell if vestiges of that party still exist.

W. James Antle III is the editor of .

Gyre a spencer • 3 hours ago

Tulsi is more experienced and articulate on foreign AND domestic policy than any other Democrat up there (Bernie being an independent). She's also more genuine.

But being 'woke', as the author failed to point out, is code for having the backing of the still extant Clinton/Obama cartel and hence the idiot US media. And that she does not have

interguru • 2 days ago
Unfortunately foreign policy and the forever war are not an issue that resonates with voters on either side. Here is an excerpt from NPR .
"That is one finding from the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, which shows that Americans have limited confidence in its public schools, courts, organized labor and banks -- and even less confidence in big business, the presidency, the political parties and the media.
.....
The only institution that Americans have overwhelming faith in is the military -- 87 percent say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the military. That is a striking change from the 1970s during and after the Vietnam War."

A military that has been a consistent loser for decades. How depressing

Bill In Montgomey interguru • a day ago
"Patriotism" now = "Support for military" (and for wars).
Sigh.
𝙆𝙧𝙖𝙯𝙮 𝙐𝙣𝙘𝙡𝙚 • 2 days ago
For me, a candidates stance on war will be one of the deciding factors as to their earning my vote -- So far Tulsi's position has my interest.
Vance Shogun Downing bbkingfish • a day ago
Given that this magazine was partially founded as a reaction to the Iraq War, why does an article about Tulsi Gabbard, one of the only presidential candidates who takes a mostly non-interventionist foreign policy stance, surprise you? She is a progressive, yes, and a Democrat, but her stance on war is very conservative.

You don't have to be a Republican to be conservative or to hold some conservative views.

James OGallagher bbkingfish • 20 hours ago • edited
No one with a brain ever believed that Twerp was anti interventionist. Many dopes convinced themselves of that because they wanted to believe
HerrinSchadenfreude fuow • a day ago
Warren is a corporate kiss a** and a perfect example of precisely why the person you're talking to might as well be listening to a Chipmunks song for all the ridiculous partisan deflection going on. Literally nothing of value in any of that and the implication that Dumbocraps are any different than Republicans in talking a lot and saying and doing nothing is frankly one of the insults to the intelligence that convinced me very early to reject both "sides" of this Candyland based majik partisan aisle
Brian • 2 days ago
I was ready to replace Mike Pompeo with Tulsi Gabbard the day after the first debate. It would be very unfortunate if she got bumped out. I live in California (an open primary state), which means I would have voted for her in the primary
Zaphod Braden • a day ago
Tulsi is the only Democrat that could beat Trump . ...makes me wonder is this all a dog & pony show?
Tulsi is a combat vet who could shame Trump.
=marco01= Zaphod Braden • a day ago
Trump is incapable of shame
christiansmiller Zaphod Braden • a day ago
Very true. She could get enough votes from Independents, Republicans and Ron Paul Libertarians to put her over the top.
Reid Dalton • a day ago • edited
It doesn't "hurt" Tulsi's "credibility" that she met with Assad. It's been clear from the beginning of the Syrian civil war that he was the sole viable protector of Christian and other religious minorities in the region after the fall of Saddam. The U.S. should never have armed and trained the country's rebels. But it's again apparent that Democrats have no interest in saving Christians from Islamic killers.
cka2nd Reid Dalton • 15 hours ago
Have the Republicans been any better at saving Christians from Islamic killers in either Iraq or Syria (or Egypt)?
Sid Finster cka2nd • 3 hours ago
Neither Team D nor Team R cares in the slightest about Christians in the Middle East, or, for that matter, in Israel.
Sid Finster • a day ago
Team D would rather lose to Trump than reform.

This is entirely consistent with The Iron Law of Oligarchy and especially The Iron Law of Institutions.

FL_Cottonmouth Sid Finster • a day ago
To whom do the Democrats/CNN think this appeals? There are large majorities of Americans with zero emotional/ideological attachment to "free-market capitalism" who would eagerly vote for a Bernie Sanders who stuck to economic-populist issues - like me, for example - but who are repelled by cultural/social controversies over "isms" and "phobias." Seriously, "40 acres and a mule" Play Hide
Mark Thomason • a day ago
Foreign policy does not elect American presidents.

I like her, and support her, and think she's made valuable points. I hope it is heard. However, there was never any chance that her course would lead to the White House.

Maybe she can get a senior post and shape policy on our endless wars. Or maybe she'll have a louder voice in Congress. However, the best she could do with this is influence.

Bakka ja nai • a day ago
I will vote for her in the California primaries, even if I have to write her in as a candidate.
FL_Cottonmouth • a day ago
How fitting, because I gave up on Tulsi yesterday - before the debate - when I found out that she voted in favor of that anti-BDS resolution. Play Hide
James OGallagher FL_Cottonmouth • 20 hours ago
They all support Israel w/o condition. Unfortunately. None of them are any better than her on this issue, and they are much worse than her on most FP and military issues.
christiansmiller • a day ago
I am fully supporting Gabbard's campaign, but few people are concerned about our senseless wars. The issue does not make the top ten voter concerns in recent polls.
James OGallagher christiansmiller • 20 hours ago
Sad.
Collin Reid • a day ago
For whatever reason the President Primary debates tend to avoid most foreign policy issues. Democrats love getting the gory details of healthcare that sort prove Reagan's joke "They know too much" but there are few question on Foreign Policy. I think it reasonable to ask "What would your administration do with Venezuela?" (And Yes I like really basic Open End questions at debates.)

And yes there are good parts of Tulsi but she does need to campaign things outside of No Wars as that usually does not win Primaries.

cka2nd Collin Reid • 14 hours ago • edited
The last time it really mattered was 2008, when Hilary's support for the invasion of Iraq really came back to bite her on the butt against Obama.
Zsuzsi Kruska • a day ago
Forever wars are driven by Wash. through campaign funds coming from the war industry, foreign states and those in the USA who support other countries over their own. How could an anti-war candidate get those funds necessary for campaigning? And, as I said before, Obama and Trump both campaigned to end the wars but didn't. What makes anyone think the next president, when in office, will do anything different? Plus, one has to take into consideration the DNC's choice, and all the intrigues surrounding that process. Tulsi hasn't paid all those dues necessary for a shot at the presidency.
Alex (the one that likes Ike) Steve Naidamast • a day ago • edited
Some people were as stupid as to think that Trump would lose by a landslide in 2016. Some people were as stupid as to think that Candidate Five-Year-Old-Girl-in-a-Grown-Up-Woman's-Body, who managed to hijack (or, rather, joyride) Obama's foreign policy and to start two (or, rather, three, given that Yemen is also her legacy) foreign wars yet, knowing about the "nice" legacy of Afghanistan and Iraq, would be any appealing. So I wonder how anyone with both hemispheres functional can believe that discarding Gabbard and Sanders, while picking any of the political reincarnations of the ingnorant, arrogant and, first of all, almost childishly self-righteous moron who managed to wreck the country's entire foreign policy without even being the president can win against the man who cleaned up that child's (despite her physically being his age-mate) mess in Syria and, judging by what the Italian press says, is letting others to clean an even greater mess of hers in Libya.
JPH • a day ago
Looks that on foreign policy Tulsi is the only sane option.
That's exactly why the bipartisan establishment, the corrupt corporate media and the MIC hate her vehemently.
Eric • a day ago
I am a registered Republican so I can't vote for Tulsi in the MD primaries, but I will consider donating to her campaign to help her get into the third debate.

I can forgive a Democrat for supporting universal healthcare so long as they
don't buy into the identity politics garbage.

Although I'm fairly conservative, I will take a Democrat with character over who we have in the White House today.

Hellprin_fan Eric • 20 hours ago
It's not like you have a choice in a Republican primary; why not change your registration to Democratic for the presidential primary?
christiansmiller Eric • 19 hours ago
I have never voted for a Democrat in my very long life, but I am a donating heavily to Tulsi because of her stand on foreign policy
blimbax Eric • 3 hours ago
Eric, you can change your registration for long enough to vote for someone you obviously think is worth voting for.

I was a registered Democrat for all of my voting life, although I often voted for Republicans. As a result of Bush Jr.'s war against Iraq, I swore never to vote for a Republican again.

But when Ron Paul was on the ballot in the Republican primary, I re-registered, as a Republican, just so I could vote for him. (In California, the party determines whether its primary is open or closed.) After 6 weeks, following the primary, I re-registered again, this time as a no-party-preference voter.

It's not that I liked everything Ron Paul believed in (but I did like the fact that he was genuine and truthful). But I agreed with him on the really important issues involving foreign policy.

So you have options, Eric. It won't soil you to change party registration temporarily if it allows you to vote for someone you might vote for in the general election. In fact, you might feel good about it. I know I did. Voting for Ron Paul was the first time in a long time that I felt good about my vote. And this time, I'll vote for Tulsi Gabbard in the primary even if I have to write her name in.

Salt Lick • 19 hours ago
Tulsi is not running for President. She's running for running mate for either Bernie or Warren. Both need her foreign policy chops and military cred.
She will bring voters to the ticket, unlike most V.P. picks.

Given Bernie age, should he pick her, she could end up President after all.
Works for me.

cka2nd • 14 hours ago
The Democratic Party uber alles types over at Daily Kos are supporting Gabbard's primary challenger for her Congressional seat, attacking her for her previous stands on abortion and same sex marriage, and really laying into her for playing footsies with a dictator like Assad. And while Bernie has some support over there, especially among the readers who take their polls, there are others who still won't forgive him for not actually joining the Dems officially (and who buy all of the "he cost Clinton the election" stupidity).
Alex (the one that likes Ike) cka2nd • 3 hours ago
The most tragic thing is not that they simply buy that stupidity. It is that they still buy it. After almost three years. Bernie didn't cost Clinton the election. Clinton cost Democrats the election. Much like any of her political reincarnations they are about to pick will.
Jonathan Dillard Lester • 14 hours ago
I thought she did just fine in the debate tonight, and there is the matter of her lawsuit against Google, so I wouldn't count her out just yet.
CJL_1976 • 9 hours ago
As a non-interventionist lefty, why am I aligned with paleoconservatives on so many issues?

[Aug 01, 2019] Liberal Media Is Freaking Out Over Gabbard's Destruction Of Harris by Caitlin Johnstone

Notable quotes:
"... Attacking the authoritarian prosecutorial record of Senator Kamala Harris to thunderous applause from the audience, Gabbard criticized the way her opponent "put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana," "blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the court's forced her to do so," "kept people in prisons beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California," and "fought to keep the cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way." ..."
"... That was all it took. Harris' press secretary Ian Sams unleashed a string of tweets about Gabbard being an "Assad apologist", which was followed by a deluge of establishment narrative managers who sent the word "Assad" trending on Twitter, at times when Gabbard's name somehow failed to trend despite being the top-searched candidate on Google after the debate. As of this writing, "Assad" is showing on the #5 trending list on the side bar of Twitter's new layout, while Gabbard's name is nowhere to be seen. This discrepancy has drawn criticism from numerous Gabbard defenders on the platform . ..."
"... It really is interesting how aggressively the narrative managers thrust this line into mainstream consciousness all at the same time. ..."
"... "Beware the Russian bots and their promotion of Tulsi Gabbard and sowing racial dischord [sic], especially around Kamala Harris," tweeted New York Times and CNN contributor Wajahat Ali. ..."
"... All the usual war cheerleaders from Lindsey Graham to Caroline Orr to Jennifer Rubin piled on, because this feeding frenzy had nothing to do with concern that Gabbard adores Bashar al-Assad and everything to do with wanting more war. Add that to the fact that Gabbard just publicly eviscerated a charming, ambitious and completely amoral centrist who would excel at putting a friendly humanitarian face on future wars if elected, and it's easy to understand why the narrative managers are flipping out so hard right now. ..."
"... War is the glue that holds the empire together . A politician can get away with opposing some aspects of the status quo when it comes to healthcare or education, but war as a strategy for maintaining global dominance is strictly off limits. This is how you tell the difference between someone who actually wants to change things and someone who's just going through the motions for show; the real rebels forcefully oppose the actual pillars of empire by calling for an end to military bloodshed, while the performers just stick to the safe subjects. ..."
"... The shrill, hysterical pushback that Gabbard received last night was very encouraging, because it means she's forcing them to fight back. In a media environment where the war propaganda machine normally coasts along almost entirely unhindered in mainstream attention, the fact that someone has positioned themselves to move the needle like this says good things for our future. If our society is to have any chance of ever throwing off the omnicidal, ecocidal power establishment which keeps us in a state of endless war and soul-crushing oppression, the first step is punching a hole in the narrative matrix which keeps us hypnotized into believing that this is all normal and acceptable. ..."
Aug 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via CaitlinJohnstone.com,

In the race to determine who will serve as Commander in Chief of the most powerful military force in the history of civilization, night two of the CNN Democratic presidential debates saw less than six minutes dedicated to discussing US military policy during the 180-minute event.

That's six, as in the number before seven. Not sixty. Not sixteen. Six. From the moment Jake Tapper said "I want to turn to foreign policy" to the moment Don Lemon interrupted Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard just as she was preparing to correctly explain how President Trump is supporting Al-Qaeda in Idlib , approximately five minutes and fifty seconds had elapsed. The questions then turned toward the Mueller report and impeachment proceedings.

Night one of the CNN debates saw almost twice as much time, with a whole eleven minutes by my count dedicated to questions of war and peace for the leadership of the most warlike nation on the planet. This discrepancy could very well be due to the fact that night two was the slot allotted to Gabbard, whose campaign largely revolves around the platform of ending US warmongering. CNN is a virulent establishment propaganda firm with an extensive history of promoting lies and brazen psyops in facilitation of US imperialism , so it would make sense that they would try to avoid a subject which would inevitably lead to unauthorized truth-telling on the matter.

But the near-absence of foreign policy discussion didn't stop the Hawaii congresswoman from getting in some unauthorized truth-telling anyway.

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

Attacking the authoritarian prosecutorial record of Senator Kamala Harris to thunderous applause from the audience, Gabbard criticized the way her opponent "put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana," "blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the court's forced her to do so," "kept people in prisons beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California," and "fought to keep the cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way."

Harris, who it turns out fights very well when advancing but folds under pressure, had no answer for Gabbard's attack, preferring to focus on attacking Joe Biden instead . Later, when she was a nice safe distance out of Gabbard's earshot, she uncorked a long-debunked but still effective smear which establishment narrative managers have been dying for an excuse to run wild with.

"This, coming from someone who has been an apologist for an individual, Assad, who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches," Harris told Anderson Cooper after the debate.

"She who has embraced and been an apologist for him in a way that she refuses to call him a war criminal. I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously and so I'm prepared to move on."

That was all it took. Harris' press secretary Ian Sams unleashed a string of tweets about Gabbard being an "Assad apologist", which was followed by a deluge of establishment narrative managers who sent the word "Assad" trending on Twitter, at times when Gabbard's name somehow failed to trend despite being the top-searched candidate on Google after the debate. As of this writing, "Assad" is showing on the #5 trending list on the side bar of Twitter's new layout, while Gabbard's name is nowhere to be seen. This discrepancy has drawn criticism from numerous Gabbard defenders on the platform .

"Somehow I have a hard time believing that 'Assad' is the top trending item in the United States but 'Tulsi' is nowhere to be found," tweeted journalist Michael Tracey.

It really is interesting how aggressively the narrative managers thrust this line into mainstream consciousness all at the same time.

The Washington Post 's Josh Rogin went on a frantic, lie-filled Twitter storm as soon as he saw an opportunity, claiming with no evidence whatsoever that Gabbard lied when she said she met with Assad for purposes of diplomacy and that she "helped Assad whitewash a mass atrocity", and falsely claiming that " she praised Russian bombing of Syrian civilians ".

In reality all Gabbard did was meet with Assad to discuss the possibility of peace, and, more importantly, she said the US shouldn't be involved in regime change interventionism in Syria. This latter bit of business is the real reason professional war propagandists like Rogin are targeting her; not because they honestly believe that a longtime US service member and sitting House Representative is an "Assad apologist", but because she commits the unforgivable heresy of resisting the mechanics of America's forever war .

MSNBC's Joy Reid gleefully leapt into the smearing frenzy, falsely claiming that "Gabbard will not criticize Assad, no matter what." Gabbard has publicly and unequivocally both decried Assad as a "brutal dictator" and claimed he's guilty of war crimes, much to the irritation of anti-imperialists like myself who hold a far more skeptical eye to the war propaganda narratives about what's going on in Syria. At no time has Gabbard ever claimed that Assad is a nice person or that he isn't a brutal leader; all she's done is say the US shouldn't get involved in another regime change war there because US regime change interventionism is consistently and predictably disastrous. That's not being an "Assad apologist", that's having basic common sense.

"Beware the Russian bots and their promotion of Tulsi Gabbard and sowing racial dischord [sic], especially around Kamala Harris," tweeted New York Times and CNN contributor Wajahat Ali.

All the usual war cheerleaders from Lindsey Graham to Caroline Orr to Jennifer Rubin piled on, because this feeding frenzy had nothing to do with concern that Gabbard adores Bashar al-Assad and everything to do with wanting more war. Add that to the fact that Gabbard just publicly eviscerated a charming, ambitious and completely amoral centrist who would excel at putting a friendly humanitarian face on future wars if elected, and it's easy to understand why the narrative managers are flipping out so hard right now.

War is the glue that holds the empire together . A politician can get away with opposing some aspects of the status quo when it comes to healthcare or education, but war as a strategy for maintaining global dominance is strictly off limits. This is how you tell the difference between someone who actually wants to change things and someone who's just going through the motions for show; the real rebels forcefully oppose the actual pillars of empire by calling for an end to military bloodshed, while the performers just stick to the safe subjects.

The shrill, hysterical pushback that Gabbard received last night was very encouraging, because it means she's forcing them to fight back. In a media environment where the war propaganda machine normally coasts along almost entirely unhindered in mainstream attention, the fact that someone has positioned themselves to move the needle like this says good things for our future. If our society is to have any chance of ever throwing off the omnicidal, ecocidal power establishment which keeps us in a state of endless war and soul-crushing oppression, the first step is punching a hole in the narrative matrix which keeps us hypnotized into believing that this is all normal and acceptable.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Whoever disrupts that narrative control is doing the real work.

* * *

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John Law Lives , 4 minutes ago link

"It really is interesting how aggressively the narrative managers thrust this line into mainstream consciousness all at the same time." - C.J.

I think we see evidence of this sort of thing all the time. "Russian collusion" was thrust upon MSM consumers in coordinated fashion for many months. Now that it has largely fizzled out, "racism" has taken its place. "Racism". "Racism". "Racism". It seems as if MSM drones plug into the Mothership to get their talking points. This sort of behavior was featured in the 1939 film, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", when the Establishment decided Mr. Smith needed to be crushed.

Harris's deflection of Gabbard's attacks are right in line with the Establishment's treatment of people who don't tow the line. Harris is trying to dismiss Gabbard as if her opinion has no weight. Harris is probably wishing hard that Gabbard won't make the next round of debates.

throw the bum out , 10 minutes ago link

Horrible Harris got her *** handed to her by Tulsi.

I would love to see someone say to Kamala, "your panties came down for Willie Brown"...that's how you got your first break.

http://www.limitstogrowth.org/ltg-uploads/2018/02/KamalaHarrisWillieBrownPatronageJob.png

vienna_proxy , 18 minutes ago link

if Tulsi is nominee, i'll vote for her and vote republican for house/senate etc. her anti-war policy is what i was hoping Trump would do. in reality if the republicans hold a chamber in congress then any anti-gun and healthcare bills won't get through. but on day one Tulsi can start removing our troops from Ukraine, Syria, Afghan, Iraq, Saudi, Turkey, and wherever the hell else they are

Terminaldude , 19 minutes ago link

Tulsi Gabbard is the real thing. She has seen the results of WAR and the pain that comes with it through lost limbs, PTSD, etc..

The rest of them are shills for the MIC as well as NWO... .I wonder how many of them know a certain J. Epstein?

Ignorance is bliss , 16 minutes ago link

Tulsi Gabbard is no cankles. She is a veteran, she's female, and she has some good policies. Buyer beware her site mentions nothing about gun control. Liberals always make me nervous.

As president I'll end the failed war on drugs, legalize marijuana, end cash bail, and ban private prisons and bring about real criminal justice reform. ( link )

Everyone talks a big game..but Trump's actually delivered on a few good policies. Example he ended Trans-Pacific partnership. He is renegotiating bad deals with NAFTA and China. He's able to take the heat form the deep state and criminals all around him. He's kept the stock market up. I suspect the stock market is the tide lifting all boats. So far Trump's been pretty good.

But Gabbard has a lot of appeal.

Someone Else , 17 minutes ago link

The only thing I have against Tulsi Gabbard is that she recently voted for the ridiculous Democrat sponsored Defense budget that was even more than the Pentagon requested.

Till then I supported her 100%.

Now, more like 90%.

eleventwelve , 23 minutes ago link

Tulsi Gabbard should be the Democratic Nominee. I support Trump, voted for him, but he is too distracted, too much of an overactive schmoe. He made all of these promises and yes the attacks have been relentless, but nothing is being accomplished. Trump has deep state clowns all around him including Bolton and Pompeo. The deficit is going through the roof, the artificial, superficial manipulated stock market is going to eventually hurt a lot of people.

I don't agree with many of her policies but Tulsi Gabbard is a sane and a thoughtful thinker. She will think before reacting. Her Ron Paul approach to our overreach in the world is absolutely appropriate. Think about this, we spend $850 Billion Dollars on defense so we can feed the war industry. That is more than all the countries of the world combined literally!!! If we brought all the troops home, closed up most bases outside the US, and protected our borders, our deficit would plummet, we could rebuild the infrastructure, we could figure out the health care B.S. We would get along with the rest of the world instead of being looked at as an enemy.

Everybody is coming out of the woodwork because she knows, like most, that Assad did not pepper spray his own people. Cripes, when does this insanity end?

Publicus_Reanimated , 2 minutes ago link

Drawing down the US military to the point you describe will put 1 million American men and women between the ages of 18 and 40 out of work. Do you not realize in addition to feeding the MIC the military is one giant jobs program? Those young men and women, the vast majority of whom do not want to learn to code, would find themselves competing against foreigners and teenagers for $15 minimum wage jobs.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world would openly laugh at us and secretly plot how to take advantage of the power vacuum. Evil does not rest when unopposed, it becomes stronger.

When half the world's population (= all Chinese plus all Muslims) wants to destroy your country, "insanity" is defined as beating your swords into ploughshares.

giovanni_f , 25 minutes ago link

The enemies of Tulsi Gabbard are not the Zionazis who helped Trump win the elections or MAGA hat wearing hillbillies who have no clue whats the difference between Hong Kong and King Kong. It is the liberals who voted for Hillary and went berserk after their beloved mafia bitch lost who hate Tulsi Gabbard. Because she makes them look like what they are, i.e. scum. Sure, conservatives will never vote for a intelligent woman. But they are not the problem.

kudocast , 21 minutes ago link

"Liberals who voted for Hillary" is a false premise. The Democratic National Committee forced Hillary Clinton on liberals, they fixed the primaries so she would win. Liberals and progressives wanted Bernie Sanders who would have kicked Trump's ***.

[Aug 01, 2019] A suggested explanation off Tulsi's strategy: Why go after Biden? He's already imploding; she would only look cruel, beating up on a senile old man

Notable quotes:
"... On top of the cake Kamala Not-The-Wrestler responded as expected, with a neoMcCarthyite slander, which will only work with Tulsi's haters and make Harris look like a tool to everyone else. ..."
"... @doh1304 ..."
"... Harris' record was both fair game and easy pickings because no one had gone there yet. It gained Tulsi the maximum impact because those who don't follow politics had not heard about any of these issues. ..."
"... Joe is so far down in the actual REAL polls, (not the land line polls as has been exposed), that the oligarchy has given up on him. Tulsi senses Joe is low hanging fruit. The DNC is going to cheat Bernie with either Kamala or Liz. Tulsi just took out Kamala. ..."
"... @k9disc ..."
Aug 01, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Why go after Biden? He's already imploding; she would only look cruel, beating up on a senile old man for her own aggrandizement. Harris, OTOH, is a clear enemy, perpetrator of obvious crimes. Exposing her could only make her look like a paladin.

On top of the cake Kamala Not-The-Wrestler responded as expected, with a neoMcCarthyite slander, which will only work with Tulsi's haters and make Harris look like a tool to everyone else.

Harris is sort of right, it is a strategy only used by someone trying to come from behind, but that's because people with Tulsi's integrity are not allowed to start at the "Top-tier". up 14 users have voted. --

A PROUD Hillary hater since 1993

gjohnsit on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 3:29pm

One thing is for certain

@doh1304
Harris' record was both fair game and easy pickings because no one had gone there yet. It gained Tulsi the maximum impact because those who don't follow politics had not heard about any of these issues.

Battle of Blair... on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 6:31pm
Joe is so far down in the

Joe is so far down in the actual REAL polls, (not the land line polls as has been exposed), that the oligarchy has given up on him. Tulsi senses Joe is low hanging fruit. The DNC is going to cheat Bernie with either Kamala or Liz. Tulsi just took out Kamala.

Don't be surprised if she goes after Pocahontas in the next debates.

k9disc on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 7:58pm
I Saw the Set Up for Warren as Shepherd. Delaney's "Can't Do"

attitude certainly was smacked down in righteous fashion. Hollywood level righteous.

Having those extras on stage feature so prominently in the debates certainly was interesting.

snoopydawg on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 8:33pm
I'm seeing the same thing

@k9disc

The crisis actors are just there to say what the democrats can't do or to derail anyone who thinks they are going to change the system. Delaney, Bullock, DeBlasio and everyone else who doesn't stand a chance have all been negative on Warren and Bernie pushing their MFA. Did Delaney set himself up for Warren to smack him down? The silly ass smile on his face made me think that. Then he was all over Twitter the next day saying how good he did in the debate. And after 24 hours he finally had a comeback to Warren's response.

The other reason for so many candidates of course is to split the votes during the first part so that the super delegates can come in and play.

attitude certainly was smacked down in righteous fashion. Hollywood level righteous.

Having those extras on stage feature so prominently in the debates certainly was interesting.

#7

[Aug 01, 2019] Harris's spokesman explains Tulsi's takedown of Kamala It was Russia! caucus99percent

Aug 01, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Harris's spokesman explains Tulsi's takedown of Kamala: It was Russia!

gjohnsit on Thu, 08/01/2019 - 11:47am Snoopydawg has got the takedown covered , so I won't duplicate it.
Instead I'd like to show you how TOP has gone into a full-throated whine party over it.

On Wednesday night, that meant that Gabbard got to go after Kamala Harris on her actions as attorney general, using loaded phrases and selected statements to paint Harris as someone who was ready to throw pot-smokers behind bars for eternity and personally throw the execution switch for death row inmates after hiding evidence of their innocence.

There's no doubt that Harris will face more kicks about her AG role during this campaign, and she certainly expected to receive some blows. But Gabbard knew she could square off with Harris in the certainty that no one, but no one, came into the Wednesday night debate thinking, "I need to prepare some talking points against Tulsi Gabbard." And even if she had, CNN gave Harris little time to muster her thoughts before calling in more witnesses to bolster Gabbard's attacks.

It wasn't just the tools on GOS that Tulsi knocked off balance, it was Harris herself . Even CNN noticed.

Worse than that -- for Harris -- is the fact that it became crystal clear in the aftermath of the debate that Gabbard had gotten under her skin. In a post-debate interview, CNN's Anderson Cooper asked Harris about the moment with Gabbard.
"This is going to sound immodest, but obviously I'm a top-tier candidate and so I did expect that I'd be on the stage and take some hits tonight," Harris said. "When people are at 0 or 1% or whatever she might be at, so I did expect to take some hits tonight."
Woof.
First of all, if you are running for president and you hear the words, "This is going to sound immodest" come out of your mouth, it may be best to recalibrate what you are going to say.
Second, what Harris is actually saying is, basically, this: The dork took a shot at the most popular kid in school. Big whoop.
That is not a good look. For any candidate. Ever. (And, yes, politics is a LOT like high school.)

That's gonna leave a mark.
But never fear, because there is a reason for Harris getting taken down by Gabbard - Russia .

The #KamalaHarrisDestroyed hashtag had disappeared from the list of trending U.S. terms by 9:30 a.m. Thursday.

Harris's spokesman, Ian Sams, responded to the hashtag, noting that at least some of the accounts promoting it appeared to be bots.

"The Russian propaganda machine that tried to influence the 2016 election is now promoting the presidential aspirations of a controversial Hawaii Democrat," he said.

Reporters writing their stories with eyes on the modern-day assignment desk of Twitter, read this:

"The Russian propaganda machine that tried to influence the 2016 election is now promoting the presidential aspirations of a controversial Hawaii Democrat" https://t.co/2kpKQqW3Ir

-- Ian Sams (@IanSams) August 1, 2019

Damn! Putin was on the debate stage and no one noticed?
That has got to be the weakest response in recent history.

Here's the thing, the Harris campaign is already guilty of crying wolf over Russia.

Harris has already been caught misrepresenting alleged Russian propaganda activity. She claimed in a radio interview on July 12 that she had been subjected to Russian bot attacks on social media sites like Twitter.

But CNN debunked the claim days later, reporting that Twitter saw no evidence that Russian bots were targeting Harris.

[Aug 01, 2019] Comey Avoids DOJ Prosecution On Memo Leak; FISA Abuse Still On The Table

Aug 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Former FBI Director James Comey will avoid prosecution after illegally leaking personal memos in the hopes of instigating the special counsel's investigation into the 2016 US election, as reported yesterday by The Hill 's John Solomon and confirmed today by Fox News .

According to Solomon, DOJ Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz referred Comey for possible prosecution under laws governing the handling of classified information, however Attorney General William Barr has declined to prosecute - as the DOJ does not believe they have enough evidence of Comey's intent to violate the law.

"Everyone at the DOJ involved in the decision said it wasn't a close call," an official told Fox News . "They all thought this could not be prosecuted."

That said, it's important to note that this decision was the result of a 'carve-out' investigation separate of the IG probe on FISA abuse .

The Conservative Treehouse lays out the situation:

This is NOT the Inspector General Michael Horowitz report on DOJ and FBI FISA abuse.

This is a carve-out.

...

From the outset it was reported and confirmed that U.S. Attorney John Huber was assigned to assist Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Huber's job was to stand-by in case the IG carved out a particular concern, discovered during his investigation, that might involve criminal conduct.

Earlier this week Matt Whitaker said : "John Huber is reviewing anything related to Comey's memos and the like. "

Put the two data points together and what you realize is that during the OIG review of potential DOJ and FBI FISA abuse IG Horowitz investigated the Comey Memo's and then passed that specific issue along to John Huber for DOJ review.

The IG criminal referral for the James Comey memo leaking was a carve-out sent to U.S. Attorney John Huber.

...

This is not the inspector general report on DOJ and FBI FISA abuse. This is an IG report carved out of the larger investigation. - Conservative Treehouse

In short, we will first see an IG report just covering Comey, with a more comprehensive report to follow on FISA abuse. _arrow 1

chunga , 2 minutes ago

Every day this gets a little more humiliating.

libertysghost , 2 minutes ago

So it has to be proven that the head of the FBI knew what the frikin laws were that he was violating?

Knowing the laws were not in his job description?

Aside from that not being a standard for determining prosecution for anyone else aside from Deep Staters, the claim is laughable on its face. Did Comey's office (or Comey himself) ever provide evidence for the prosecution of ANY individual for ANYTHING where they argued "intent" didn't matter? I'm 100% sure he did. So why is this hard to point out in showing that "intent" doesn't matter?

FFS...this is a scam. I was leery as soon as Trump handing over declassification to Barr. We will know who is involved in the cover up by their response to this...in particular those claiming to be at the front lines of demanding consequences for the spying/coup.


Bavarian , 3 minutes ago

This was always small potatoes. FISA and the involvement in setting up the coup will involve the meat of his convictions anyway. Anyone thinking he's walking isn't paying attention.

I am Groot , 5 minutes ago

Comey: Oh I'm sorry, I didn't mean to help throw a coup.

Barr: Ok, no problem, we won't charge you. We know it was just an accident. You're all good. You can go on CNN and rub everybody's nose in it now

Real Estate Guru , 14 minutes ago

What makes you think that Comey didn't cut a deal with Barr to get the others, folks? Stay tuned!

You do the math.

I am Groot , 12 minutes ago

WHY THE **** WOULD BARR CUT A DEAL WITH ANY OF THOSE TREASONOUS ***** !

THEY ARE ALL GUILTY AS HELL ! ! !

Real Estate Guru , 11 minutes ago

I agree. But this fool might be naming Obama for all we know. That would be worth it, or Hillary.

Either way, he is going down on the FISA warrants. He signed off on them.

I am Groot , 8 minutes ago

Obama is fucked six ways to Sunday. They have the FBI text messages that prove he was directing all of this and was neck deep in it.

spyware-free , 12 minutes ago

Then why not state that as the reason? There is enough evidence to prosecute. They could have at the least waited and added the charge to future indictments instead of dismissing right away.

buckboy , 13 minutes ago

Prosecuting Comey by DOJ risks DOJ involvement and alike................just too many to protect.

TruthAbsolute , 13 minutes ago

haha the USA has a two tier justice system...You poor sick Patriots!

libertysghost , 21 minutes ago

Comey will walk and Trump will be impeached for "obstructing" an investigation into a non-existent crime, because he tried to defend himself against the coup proclaiming his innocents.

If this happens...

Cabreado , 22 minutes ago

Maintaining some sense of optimism just got a little harder...

enough of this , 23 minutes ago

All those dire pronouncements by conservative pundits that Comey would be nailed for taking classified information home from his office and releasing it to his friend, who in turn leaked it to the press was all ********. It turns out Comey could do it with impunity and he knew he would skate because his deep-state pals at the DOJ would never indict him for doing so. Rigged justice system = Rigged outcome.

SRV , 25 minutes ago

Flynn is facing 5 years for a clear FBI trap, after spying on everything he said in the WH... not a good start for Barr... and if he's a plant, it's over.

Real Estate Guru , 20 minutes ago

Flynn is a Patriot. He is not going down. He has not even been sent anywhere. Relax. if they had him, he would be in jail by now. He is like the invisible russians that Mueller convicted of nothing. They showed up by the way, and wanted to see the evidence...Mueller just blew them off. Mueller is a shill for Weissmann, he is clueless, feeble, and doesnt know one damn thing. No sentencing of anybody. Flynn is a hero, not a criminal. That tells you everything you need to know.

Real Estate Guru , 27 minutes ago

They have something far larger than this, and they don't want to lose the first case on him. Don't worry, the stuff that is coming out on this guy will easily convict him within weeks. It will involve the FISA warrants.

- Hannity, Soloman

Stay tuned...much more to come Patriots!

LookAtMeme.com , 14 minutes ago

Who said that they have to charge Comey piecemeal starting with smaller charges and therefore it's best to let him skate on those smaller charges? Prosecutors regularly load up charges against defendants.

RagaMuffin , 28 minutes ago

Unless he can be nailed on a larger charge, this is how the Swamp protects its own, particularly since intent is not the basis of whether the law was broken?

Roger Rabbit , 23 minutes ago

He IS going to be nailed on a much bigger charge: FISA abuse. It's already well established he lied to the FISA court. Too bad they are all Jesuit graduates though, hence why they've taken no corrective action, and never objected to what was obviously FISA fraud.

LookAtMeme.com , 16 minutes ago

It's already well established by Comey's own congressional testimony that he purposely leaked FBI documents in order to prompt an investigation of the President.

LookAtMeme.com , 5 minutes ago

If they intend to prosecute Comey for other crimes later then they don't have to "waste time" exonerating him now. They can throw the entire ball of wax at him at a later date. The man admitted to congress that he leaked FBI documents in order to prompt an investigation of the President. We all know this.

Ergo I.C. , 31 minutes ago

"... however Attorney General William Barr has declined to prosecute - as the DOJ does not believe they have enough evidence of Comey's intent to violate the law."

WTH! FBI agents went to Comey's house a month after he was fired to pick up documents he was not suppose to have. Not enough evidence to show intent my ***!

[Aug 01, 2019] The two party system institutionalizes the capture of the political process by special interests, dichotomized into two differently armed powers of equal importance.

Aug 01, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Paine ... , July 27, 2019 at 04:41 AM

Not all prayers are answered. The two party system intervened in the US political process to elect its representation and leadership a long time ago. The two party system is not constitutional, but it is not unconstitutional either. It just is. The two party system takes all the air out of the political room. The two party system institutionalizes the capture of the political process by special interests, dichotomized into two differently armed powers of equal importance. The first is the moneyed interests of corporate wealth and power which provide media access and control. The second is the social interests of large voting blocks that are not in certain conflict with corporate money. To get elected politicians must then pander for cheap votes and the money to buy them with. How could Russians possibly compete with that?
ilsm -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , July 27, 2019 at 04:49 AM
Two party system!

if you have to ask the FBI who you can talk to (what the democrats call election security).....

you end up with a two sided coin with one face.

fortunately both parties have

the best interest of the Saudi

royal family and the war machine

covered.

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to ilsm... , July 27, 2019 at 05:27 AM
Remember that the Bill of Rights was just an afterthought to the US Constitution that was deemed necessary to obtain ratification without further insurrection by the people. The US Constitution itself had not blatantly encompassed the creation of the two party system, but such division of special interests was evident from the participants division of economic interests. First and foremost, the US Constitution was about the preservation of property rights despite the division between what was considered valuable property in the North and what was considered valuable property in the South. A stable, yet plutocratic, republic was necessary for the preservation of all property rights. The US was founded as an ownership state, "for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People," ( John Wycliffe in 1384 subsequently quote by Abe Lincoln) just not for and by all the people.
Joe -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , July 27, 2019 at 10:09 AM
Why do I have the larger view here? Well, the Constitution is fairly simple when the two other branches do their job. The other two branches cannot do their job. Obama couldn't do his job without losing four elections. The current Congress cannot do its job, for a variety of reasons. We are in that period when legislation is not working, the money is tied up in interest payments, and the new generation refuses to pay for all the rolled over losses from past Congressional failures. We are sort of stuck with an inoperable Constitution.
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Joe... , July 28, 2019 at 06:27 AM
"Why do I have the larger view here?..."

[ROTFLMAO!

Having some diced chicken in your scrambled eggs? It certainly must be an appealing way to answer the age old question of which came first.]

JohnH -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , July 27, 2019 at 06:49 AM
A two party system is just one step from a one party system. Tight oligopoly instead of monopoly.

The wealthy have to spread their largesse around a little bit more, but not as much as they would if they had to buy 4-5 parties. Plus, in a two party system, there are always stooges in waiting, eager to serve, in case the incumbent stooges go too far off the rails.

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to JohnH... , July 27, 2019 at 07:25 AM
Exactly.

[Aug 01, 2019] I could live with Gabbard replacing Bolton or Pompeo in a second Trump administration

Aug 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

spyware-free , 13 minutes ago link

I could live with Gabbard replacing Bolton or Pompeo in a second Trump administration.

AKKadian , 12 minutes ago link

You never Know, right!

Someone Else , 9 minutes ago link

A cancerous tumor would be preferable to Bolton or Pompeo, but then I repeat myself.

[Aug 01, 2019] One advantage of the two party system

Aug 01, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Plp -> Plp... , July 31, 2019 at 01:48 PM

Even a compulsory choice between two poisons is preferred to being forced to take the designated poison

likbez -> Plp... , August 01, 2019 at 09:40 AM

> Even a compulsory choice between two poisons is preferred to being forced to take the designated poison

Wrong.

It's two batches of the same poison. One is artificially sweetened.

[Jul 31, 2019] ET TU, TULSI???

The far left wants too much form Tulsi. You can't fight on two fronts when attacking the the neocon foreign policy.
Notable quotes:
"... Israel is the litmus test issue in American politics for a lot of good reasons. It may or may not be the worst regime in the world. There are a lot of bad ones competing for that title, many of whom we support. But Israel is the candidate we not only support but sponsor and champion to the point where it is at times very very hard to tell who is leading and who is following, between Israel and the US. This seems to have a lot to do with the end-times preoccupations that seem to have been at the heart of what passes for American spirituality since the earliest colonial days. ..."
Jul 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Circe , Jul 29 2019 17:07 utc | 34

ET TU, TULSI???

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51998.htm

I should always trust my instincts. Attending an event hosted by the Adelsons was disturbing enough, but I trusted people here instead and brushed off my suspicions.

She's finished!

paul , Jul 29 2019 19:17 utc | 38

Israel is the litmus test issue in American politics for a lot of good reasons. It may or may not be the worst regime in the world. There are a lot of bad ones competing for that title, many of whom we support. But Israel is the candidate we not only support but sponsor and champion to the point where it is at times very very hard to tell who is leading and who is following, between Israel and the US. This seems to have a lot to do with the end-times preoccupations that seem to have been at the heart of what passes for American spirituality since the earliest colonial days.

Gabbard has now broken a lot of hopes. She has jumped the shark spectacularly, shamelessly craving the support of the 'Israel Lobby'. Her claims to be against the regime change wars when these wars are relentlessly pushed by the Israel Lobby she is now shamelessly courting?!!!

I suppose we can hope that Tulsi takes a flying leap back over the shark, say by visiting Gaza the way she recently visited Puerto Rico. If she doesn't now make a huge point of it, in words and actions, that she will NOT be yet another tool of the Israel Lobby, the neocons, the neolibs, etc., then she must be opposed as the turncoat shill she now seems to be.

Jason , Jul 29 2019 21:51 utc | 42
No use wasting breath on Gabbard. Trump vs. Biden in 2020 with Trump taking the Midwest and the electoral college like 2016 is unavoidable. If undermining Gabbard is your deal, I'd wait until 2024.
Jackrabbit , Jul 29 2019 21:54 utc | 43
Circe, Paul, Nottheonly1, and everyone

I took a lot of flak when I pointed out the simple truth that Gabbard is not against war and not against US/NATO imperialism but simply against "regime change wars" that USA failed to win.

Trump was also against dumb wars and his imperialist detractors called him an isolationist - but that was merely a neat way to burnish his populist credentials. Trump has acted much like his imperialist predecessors who hedge their peace talk with exceptionalist morality that requires utmost strength in a "dangerous world". And these faux democratic leaders are all-too-willing to lead the propaganda effort when called upon to support Deep State objectives.

Democracy Works! (no, not for YOU)

It's for the children! (no, not YOUR children)

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

OutOfThinAir , Jul 29 2019 22:40 utc | 45
Gabbard reminds me that the leaders of every nation should be watching re-runs of Mister Roger's Neighborhood and apply its lessons to the abstract and Alpha-male dominated world of international relations.

I'm only half-joking. In a world of technological parity, real-time communication, and rapid travel the importance of being a good neighbor has never been more important. At the minimum, that means doing no harm and, at the max, doing nice things with no expectations.

Alas, we're stuck with countries building walls, using prosperity as a weapon, and thinking that power never waxes and wanes. Shame that human wisdom hasn't kept up with material progress.

Pft , Jul 29 2019 22:47 utc | 46
I had an uneasy interest/hope in/for Gabbard. No more after she sold herself to Israeli interests.

Lets face it, nobody worth his/her salt can get close to the Presidency without being backed by one or more factions of the elite. The unrepresented bottom 90% (non military/vet) simply has no representation, and more than half are too stupid to know it.

Change for the better will never happen under the present system. The US and the world will continue falling into the abyss. One day soon the people find out what that means. Thats when the gloves come off. Nowhere to hide then. Serve your masters well or be disappeared.

Jackrabbit , Jul 29 2019 23:38 utc | 47
Jason @42 is right. Gabbard was never going to make it anyway. She's there because fake democratic choice is the establishment's way of cementing their control.

As in:

=

Democracy Works! (no, not for YOU)

It's for the children! (no, not YOUR children)

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

SteveK9 , Jul 30 2019 13:33 utc | 84
Gabbard: One can either give up participating (definitely an option) or look for the best alternative to doing nothing. As pointed out by others there is a power structure in America, which cannot be opposed in totality.

On the other hand, politicians are famous for not keeping their promises. There is the possibility of not keeping promises to Adelson as well. One person can only do so much, even the President. So, we have to keep supporting alternatives, if there is any chance at all to change direction. Outside forces are definitely going to help here ... Russia and China are busy building a new 'World Order' which will be very good for America, when we finally give up the Empire.

Environmental fanatics: The two essential factors in preserving Earth's ecosystem are: 1) limit to human population ... I believe this is happening and human population will reach a peak and begin to decline I think best estimates are ~ 2050 at 10 billion, 2) widespread, near total replacement of fossil energy use by nuclear power, which can easily be made to have virtually zero environmental impact, while allowing a high standard of living for Earth's entire population.

[Jul 31, 2019] Gabbard says she will end these endless regime-change wars and use the "trillions of dollars we have been wasting on these wars and these weapons" on domestic spending.

Jul 31, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

Jodi Schneider Senior International Editor Gabbard says she will " end these endless regime-change wars " and use the "trillions of dollars we have been wasting on these wars and these weapons" on domestic spending.

Gabbard
Photographer: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

[Jul 31, 2019] Team D would rather lose to Trump than reform. This is entirely consistent with The Iron Law of Oligarchy and especially The Iron Law of Institutions.

Notable quotes:
"... Only four candidates are consistently polling in the double digits: Biden, who recovered from his early debate stumbles and remains comfortably in the lead; Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has nevertheless mostly failed to recapture his 2016 magic; Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who seems ascendant; and Senator Kamala Harris of California, potentially the main threat to Biden's rock-solid black support. ..."
"... Gabbard has so far been unable to penetrate this madness despite being young (she's 38), attractive, telegenic, a military veteran, a woman of color, and an articulate, passionate opponent of the regime change wars that have brought our country so much pain. While reliably progressive, she has occasionally reached across the political divide on issues like religious liberty and Big Tech censorship, a potent combination that could prove more responsive to Trump voters' concerns than what we've heard from her neocon lite interlocutor from Youngstown. ..."
"... That's not to say that no one else running is sound on foreign policy -- Bernie has realist advisers and it took real courage for Warren to back Trump's abortive withdrawals from Afghanistan and Syria -- and it required a Democratic House to advance the bipartisan Yemen resolution. But none of them are basing their campaigns on it in the same way Gabbard has. Nor do any of them better represent our military veterans' sharp turn against forever war, arguably the most important public opinion trend of our time. ..."
"... Unfortunately foreign policy and the forever war are not an issue that resonates with voters on either side. Here is an excerpt from NPR . ..."
"... The most important public opinion of our time is not the military realizing that forever war is bad, it's that climate change is occurring now. It is the only issue that will matter to our grandchildren and we haven't begun to deal with it. We need to get serious about this. "A stitch in time saves 9" comes to mind. ..."
"... Foreign policy does not elect American presidents. I like her, and support her, and think she's made valuable points. I hope it is heard. However, there was never any chance that her course would lead to the White House. ..."
Jul 31, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

It was already one of the most memorable moments of the Democratic presidential debates in this young election cycle. "Leaders as disparate as President Obama and President Trump have both said they want to end U.S. involvement in Afghanistan but it isn't over for America," observed moderator Rachel Maddow. "Why isn't it over? Why can't presidents of very different parties and very different temperaments get us out of there? And how could you?"

Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio responded with talking points that could have been ripped out of a George W. Bush speech circa 2004. "[T]he lesson that I've learned over the years is that you have to stay engaged in these situations," he said, later adding, "Whether we're talking about Central America, whether we're talking about Iran, whether we're talking about Afghanistan, we have got to be completely engaged."

Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii was having none of it. "Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged?" she asked a sputtering Ryan. "As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable. We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan." Gabbard noted that she had joined the military to fight those who attacked us on 9/11, not to nation-build indefinitely in Afghanistan, and pointed out the perfidy of Saudi Arabia.

Some likened Gabbard's rebuke of Ryan to the famous 2007 exchange between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani . Except Paul, then a relatively unknown congressman from Texas, was speaking truth to power against "America's Mayor" and the national GOP frontrunner. Gabbard is polling at 0.8 percent in the national RealClearPolitics average, and was challenging someone at 0.3 percent.

Ryan's asterisk candidacy is unsurprising. But Gabbard has been perhaps the most interesting Democrat running for president and Wednesday night could be her last stand. She gets to share the stage with frontrunner Joe Biden, like Hillary Clinton a vote for the Iraq war. There is no guarantee she will get another opportunity: the eligibility criteria for subsequent debates is more stringent and she has yet to qualify.

The huge Democratic field has been a bust. Of the more than 20 declared presidential candidates, only seven are polling at 2 percent or more in the national averages. Two more -- Senators Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar -- are polling at least that well in Iowa. Only four candidates are consistently polling in the double digits: Biden, who recovered from his early debate stumbles and remains comfortably in the lead; Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has nevertheless mostly failed to recapture his 2016 magic; Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who seems ascendant; and Senator Kamala Harris of California, potentially the main threat to Biden's rock-solid black support.

Low-polling candidates have still managed to have an impact. Some, like former secretary of housing and urban development Julian Castro, have helped coax contenders likelier to win the nomination to the left on immigration. We've thus seen Democrats raise their hands in support of decriminalizing illegal border crossings in the midst of a migrant crisis not entirely of the Trump administration's making, expanding Medicare to cover everyone even at the expense of private health insurance, and ensuring that "everyone" includes illegal immigrants. Transgender abortions, also at taxpayer expense, have come up too.

Gabbard has so far been unable to penetrate this madness despite being young (she's 38), attractive, telegenic, a military veteran, a woman of color, and an articulate, passionate opponent of the regime change wars that have brought our country so much pain. While reliably progressive, she has occasionally reached across the political divide on issues like religious liberty and Big Tech censorship, a potent combination that could prove more responsive to Trump voters' concerns than what we've heard from her neocon lite interlocutor from Youngstown.

The Tulsi Effect: Forcing War Onto the Democratic Agenda Memo to Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi

"None of this seems to matter in a Democratic Party that cares more about wokeness than war. In fact, Gabbard's conservative fans -- The View brought up Ann Coulter -- are often held against her, as is her failure to go all in on Trump-Russia. Ninety-five Democrats stand ready to impeach Trump over mean tweets with nary a peep over the near-bombing of Iran or the active thwarting of Congress's will on Yemen.

That's not to say that no one else running is sound on foreign policy -- Bernie has realist advisers and it took real courage for Warren to back Trump's abortive withdrawals from Afghanistan and Syria -- and it required a Democratic House to advance the bipartisan Yemen resolution. But none of them are basing their campaigns on it in the same way Gabbard has. Nor do any of them better represent our military veterans' sharp turn against forever war, arguably the most important public opinion trend of our time.

Liberals remain skeptical of Gabbard's turn away from social conservatism (which admittedly went far beyond sincerely opposing gay marriage while Barack Obama was merely pretending to do so), which she attributes to "aloha." In meeting with Bashar al-Assad, she hurt her credibility as a foe of the Syria intervention, failing to realize that doves are held to a higher standard on these matters than hawks .

A saner Democratic Party might realize the chances are far greater that their nominee will be a covert hawk rather than a secret right-winger. Only time will tell if vestiges of that party still exist.

W. James Antle III is the editor of .

a spencer • 15 hours ago

I generally like Tulsi, but she's a mixed bag for Democrats and an easy mark for her Beltway opponents. She needs more time, but could be a very effective member of a Democrat's cabinet.
interguru • 15 hours ago
Unfortunately foreign policy and the forever war are not an issue that resonates with voters on either side. Here is an excerpt from NPR .
"That is one finding from the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, which shows that Americans have limited confidence in its public schools, courts, organized labor and banks -- and even less confidence in big business, the presidency, the political parties and the media.
.....
The only institution that Americans have overwhelming faith in is the military -- 87 percent say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the military. That is a striking change from the 1970s during and after the Vietnam War."

A military that has been a consistent loser for decades. How depressing!

𝙆𝙧𝙖𝙯𝙮 𝙐𝙣𝙘𝙡𝙚 • 15 hours ago
For me, a candidates stance on war will be one of the deciding factors as to their earning my vote -- So far Tulsi's position has my interest.
Brian • 13 hours ago
I was ready to replace Mike Pompeo with Tulsi Gabbard the day after the first debate. It would be very unfortunate if she got bumped out. I live in California (an open primary state), which means I would have voted for her in the primary.
polistra24 • 12 hours ago
Doesn't matter. Candidates and presidents are puppets. Some puppets are more interesting than others.
blimbax • 10 hours ago
Anyone who wants to keep as much focus on foreign policy issues as possible during the Democratic Party primary campaigns should contribute to Tulsi Gabbard's campaign. It looks like she needs another 20,000 unique contributors in order to qualify for the third debate in September. Even contributing a dollar or two is sufficient.
Alex (the one that likes Ike) • 8 hours ago
Fortunately, she is yet so young. She has many years before her, and, when the old Democratic Party dies, much like its old Republican counterpart did in 2016, Tulsi and people like her will be able to take over.

Also, covert hawks are either critically endangered or extinct in the wild. They're all open now in both parties.

Zaphod Braden • 7 hours ago
Tulsi is the only Democrat that could beat Trump . ...makes me wonder is this all a dog & pony show?
Tulsi is a combat vet who could shame Trump.
deepdiver • 5 hours ago
tulsi needs to make a stand and and pull away from the leftists..she will not so "aloha tulsi, see ya" sistah"
Hank Linderman • 4 hours ago
Tulsi will be the leading progressive / conservative on the stage this evening, looking forward to seeing how she handles being asked to criticize Bernie. (I'm a Tulsi fan.)

Btw, a saner American Conservative would realize a big field almost always looks like this. Can you name the 20 or so who ran as Republicans a few years ago?

The most important public opinion of our time is not the military realizing that forever war is bad, it's that climate change is occurring now. It is the only issue that will matter to our grandchildren and we haven't begun to deal with it. We need to get serious about this. "A stitch in time saves 9" comes to mind.

What you seem to be missing about the Democratic Party is that the rift between progressives (extremists asking for higher wages for those who work, etc.) and establishment types (let's fix the ACA) is ultimately more significant than the upcoming Presidential election.

This is why I tell anyone who askes that I don't have a favorite for the Democratic Presidential nominee yet, but I know exactly who I want for VP. That person is whoever comes in second. If HRC had chosen Bernie for VP, she would be President today and no Republican Congress would have dared to impeach her for fear of seating the first Democratic Socialist President in America's history.

After multiple *change* elections that have failed to deliver, change will once again be on the ballot in 2020. This time, for the sake of our Nation and our world, let's hope it's real change this time. Tulsi would certainly be part of that, maybe not as a nominee, but in the Cabinet.

Sid Finster • 3 hours ago
Team D would rather lose to Trump than reform. This is entirely consistent with The Iron Law of Oligarchy and especially The Iron Law of Institutions.
Mark Thomason • 3 hours ago
Foreign policy does not elect American presidents. I like her, and support her, and think she's made valuable points. I hope it is heard. However, there was never any chance that her course would lead to the White House.

Maybe she can get a senior post and shape policy on our endless wars. Or maybe she'll have a louder voice in Congress. However, the best she could do with this is influence.

Bakka ja nai • 2 hours ago
I will vote for her in the California primaries, even if I have to write her in as a candidate.

[Jul 31, 2019] Jack Ruby was the Mafia capo of Dallas

Jul 31, 2019 | www.unz.com

ploni almoni , says: July 30, 2019 at 1:55 am GMT

@Kevin Barrett Jack Ruby did not kill Oswald "for the Jews." He was the Mafia capo of Dallas and was following orders in Plan B when two previous attempts to kill Oswald failed. He tried to get out of it, but had no choice but to follow orders that he could not refuse.

[Jul 31, 2019] Stages of capitalist development explain more than white papers and propaganda can conceal.

Jul 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

donkeytale , Jul 30 2019 12:10 utc | 80

Stages of capitalist development explain more than white papers and propaganda can conceal. The relevant comparative period is 1990 - present (China/Russia) versus 1950-1980 (US/West).
Ex-communist countries like Russia and China have experienced the same decline in the share of public property, but starting from a much higher level of public wealth. The share of net public wealth was as large as 70–80 percent in both countries in 1980, and fell to 20 percent (Russia) and 30–35 percent (China) in 2015.

The Chinese share is higher but not incomparable to that observed in Western high-income countries during the "mixed economy" period (1950–1980).

In other words, China and Russia have ceased to be communist in that public ownership is no longer the dominant form of property. However, these countries still have much more significant public wealth than Western high-income economies, due largely to lower public debts and greater public assets.

[Jul 30, 2019] The main task of Democratic Party is preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left and killing such social movements

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways: ..."
"... i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power; ..."
"... (ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;" ..."
"... (iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders; ..."
"... iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its business party duopoly. ..."
"... It is not broken. It is fixed. Against us. ..."
"... The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts. ..."
"... By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity" and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background. ..."
"... When this political theatre in the US finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard core imperialists who's time has reached its end. ..."
"... This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry ..."
Jul 30, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

g3 , July 30, 2019 at 4:08 am

Mainstream Dems are performing their role very well. Most likely I am preaching to the choir. But anyways, here is a review of Lance Selfa's book "Democrats: a critical history" by Paul Street :

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/hope-killers-by-paul-street/

Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways:

i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power;

(ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;"

(iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders;

iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its business party duopoly.

It is not broken. It is fixed. Against us.

Norb , July 30, 2019 at 7:18 am

The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts.

By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity" and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background.

I have little faith in my fellow citizens as the majority are too brainwashed to see the danger of this political theatre. Most ignore politics, while those that do show an interest exercise that effort mainly by supporting whatever faction they belong. Larger issues and connections between current events remain a mystery to them as a result.

Military defeat seems the only means to break this cycle. Democrats, being the fake peaceniks that they are, will be more than happy to defer to their more authoritarian Republican counterparts when dealing with issues concerning war and peace. Look no further than Tulsi Gabbard's treatment in the party. The question is really should the country continue down this Imperialist path.

In one sense, economic recession will be the least of our problems in the future. When this political theatre in the US finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard core imperialists who's time has reached its end.

This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry.

[Jul 30, 2019] The main task of Democratic Party is preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left and killing such social movements

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways: ..."
"... i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power; ..."
"... (ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;" ..."
"... (iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders; ..."
"... iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its business party duopoly. ..."
"... It is not broken. It is fixed. Against us. ..."
"... The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts. ..."
"... By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity" and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background. ..."
"... When this political theatre in the US finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard core imperialists who's time has reached its end. ..."
"... This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry ..."
Jul 30, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

g3 , July 30, 2019 at 4:08 am

Mainstream Dems are performing their role very well. Most likely I am preaching to the choir. But anyways, here is a review of Lance Selfa's book "Democrats: a critical history" by Paul Street :

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/hope-killers-by-paul-street/

Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways:

i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power;

(ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;"

(iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders;

iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its business party duopoly.

It is not broken. It is fixed. Against us.

Norb , July 30, 2019 at 7:18 am

The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts.

By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity" and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background.

I have little faith in my fellow citizens as the majority are too brainwashed to see the danger of this political theatre. Most ignore politics, while those that do show an interest exercise that effort mainly by supporting whatever faction they belong. Larger issues and connections between current events remain a mystery to them as a result.

Military defeat seems the only means to break this cycle. Democrats, being the fake peaceniks that they are, will be more than happy to defer to their more authoritarian Republican counterparts when dealing with issues concerning war and peace. Look no further than Tulsi Gabbard's treatment in the party. The question is really should the country continue down this Imperialist path.

In one sense, economic recession will be the least of our problems in the future. When this political theatre in the US finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard core imperialists who's time has reached its end.

This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry.

[Jul 30, 2019] The -Existential Battle- Is for Control of the Democratic Party

The purpose of the "Clintonized" Democratic Party is to diffuse public dissent to neoliberal rule in an orderly fashion. The militarization of US economy and society means that by joining the war coalition, the Democratic party doesn't have to win any presidential elections to remain in power. Because military-industrial complex rules the country.
Yes Clinton neoliberals want to stay in control and derail Sanders, much like they did in 2016. Biden and Harris are Clinton faction Trojan horses to accomplish that. But times changed and they might have to agree on Warren inread of Biden of Harris.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump fought the swamp, and the swamp won. Trump campaigned on ending our stupid pointless wars and spending that money on ourselves – and it looked at first like he might actually deliver (how RACIST of the man!) but not to worry, he is now surrounded by uber hawks and the defense industry dollars are continuing to flow. Which the Democrats are fine with. ..."
"... Trump campaigned on a populist platform, but once elected the only thing he really pushed for was a big juicy tax cut for himself and his billionaire buddies – which the Democrats are fine with (how come they can easily block attempts to stop the flow of cheap labor across the southern border, but not block massive giveaway tax cuts to the super rich? Because they have their priorities). ..."
"... So yeah, Trump is governing a lot like Hilary Clinton would have. ..."
"... I think it's much more likely that a Sanders victory would see the Clintonistas digging even further into the underbelly of the Democratic Party. There they would covertly and overtly sabotage Sanders, brief against him in the press and weaken, corrupt and hamstring any legislation that he proposes ..."
"... electing Sanders can not be the endgame, only the beginning. I think Nax is completely right that a Sanders win would bring on the full wrath of all its opponents. Then the real battle would begin. ..."
"... The notion that real change could happen in this country by winning an election or two is naive in the extreme. But that doesn't make it impossible. ..."
"... Lots of people hired by the Clintons, Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Cuomo, etc. will have to be defenestrated. Lose their public sector jobs, if not outright charged with crimes. No one must be left in a position to hurt you after the election. Anyone on the "other side" must lose all power or ability to damage you, except those too weak. These people can be turned and used by you; they can be kept in line with fear. But all the leaders must go. ..."
"... In order for Sanders to survive the onslaught that will surely come, he must have a jobs program ready to go on day one of his administration- and competent people committed to his cause ready to cary out the plan. ..."
"... Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways: ..."
"... i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power; ..."
"... (ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;" ..."
"... (iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders; ..."
"... iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its business party duopoly. ..."
"... It is not broken. It is fixed. Against us. ..."
"... Obama spent tens of trillions of dollars saving Wall Street – at the expense of Main Street – so that nothing got resolved about the problems that caused the crash in the first place. Trump's policies are doubling down on these problems so there is going to be a major disruption coming down the track. A major recession perhaps or maybe even worse. ..."
"... The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts. ..."
"... By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity" and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background. ..."
"... When this political theatre in the US finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard core imperialists who's time has reached its end. ..."
"... This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry ..."
"... By owning the means of production, the Oligarchs will be able to produce the machinery of oppression without the resort to 'money.' In revolutionary times, the most valuable commodity would be flying lead. ..."
"... Could that be why "our" three-letter agencies have been stocking up on that substance for awhile, now? ..."
"... " The purpose of the Democratic Party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion." ..."
"... Yes, this election is starting to remind me of 2004. High-up Dems, believing they're playing the long game, sacrifice the election to maintain standing with big biz donors. ..."
"... Sadly, when Sanders speaks of a "revolution", and when he is referred to as a revolutionary, while at the same time accepting that the Democratic Party is a Party of the top 10%, puts into context just how low the bar is for a political revolution in America. ..."
"... actual democracy is an impediment to those who wield power in today's America, and in that respect the class war continues to be waged, primarily through divisive social issues to divert our attention from the looting being done by and for the rich and the decline in opportunity and economic security for everyone else. ..."
"... the Democratic Party consultant class, I call them leeches, is fighting for its power at the expense of the party and the country. ..."
"... The DLC-type New Democrats (corporatists) have been working to destroy New Deal Democrats and policies as a force in the party. The New Deal Democrats brought in bank regulations, social security, medicare, the voting rights act, restraint on financial predation, and various economic protections for the little-guy and for Main Street businesses. ..."
"... The DLC Dems have brought deregulation of the banks and financial sector, an attempt to cut social security, expansion of prisons, tax cuts for corporations and the billionaires, the return of monopoly power, and the economic squeeze on Main Street businesses forced to compete with monopolies. ..."
Jul 30, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

... ... ...

That 2020 existential battle, of course, is always cast as between the Democrats and the Republicans.

But there's another existential battle going on, one that will occur before the main event -- the battle for control of the Democratic Party. In the long run, that battle may turn out to be more important than the one that immediately follows it.

... ... ...

Before mainstream Democrats can begin the "existential battle" with the forces of Trump and Republicanism, they have to win the existential battle against the force that wants to force change on their own party.

They're engaged in that battle today, and it seems almost all of the "liberal media," sensing the existential nature of the threat, is helping them win it. Katie Halper, in a second perceptive piece on the media's obvious anti-Sanders bias, " MSNBC's Anti-Sanders Bias Is Getting Truly Ridiculous ," writes: "When MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah ( 7/21/19 ) said that Bernie Sanders 'made [her] skin crawl,' though she 'can't even identify for you what exactly it is,' she was just expressing more overtly the anti-Sanders bias that pervades the network."

... ... ...

MSNBC is clearly acting as a messaging arm of the Democratic Party mainstream in its battle with progressives in general and Sanders in particular, and Zerlina Maxwell, who's been variously employed by that mainstream, from her work with Clinton to her work on MSNBC, is an agent in that effort.

Let me repeat what Matt Taibbi wrote: " [Sanders'] election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. "

... ... ...

TG , July 30, 2019 at 1:45 pm

Agreed. Trump fought the swamp, and the swamp won. Trump campaigned on ending our stupid pointless wars and spending that money on ourselves – and it looked at first like he might actually deliver (how RACIST of the man!) but not to worry, he is now surrounded by uber hawks and the defense industry dollars are continuing to flow. Which the Democrats are fine with.

Trump campaigned on enforcing the laws against illegal immigration and limiting legal immigration, but he's now pretty much given up, the southern border is open full "Camp of the Saints" style and he's pushing for more legal 'guest' workers to satisfy the corporate demands for cheap labor – and the Democrats are for this (though Sanders started to object back in 2015 before he was beaten down).

Trump campaigned on a populist platform, but once elected the only thing he really pushed for was a big juicy tax cut for himself and his billionaire buddies – which the Democrats are fine with (how come they can easily block attempts to stop the flow of cheap labor across the southern border, but not block massive giveaway tax cuts to the super rich? Because they have their priorities).

Soon I expect that Trump will propose massive regressive tax increases on the working class – which of course the Democrats will be fine with ('to save the planet').

So yeah, Trump is governing a lot like Hilary Clinton would have.

And elections are pretty much pointless. Even if Sanders does win, he'll get beaten down faster even than Trump was.

Redlife2017 , July 30, 2019 at 4:52 am

I think people have a hard time with real inflection points. Most of life uses more short-term linear decision making. But at inflection points we have multiple possibilities that turn into rather surprising turns of events, such as Brexit and Trump. We still have people saying in the UK – "but they wouldn't do that!" The hell "they" won't. Norms are thrown out of the window and people start realising how wide the options are. This is not positive or negative. Just change or transformation.

That is my philosophical way of agreeing with you! It is easy to point at the hostility of the mainstream media and DNC as there being no way for Sanders to win. After all in 2004, look what the media and DNC did to Howard Dean. But people weren't dying then like they are now. The "Great Recession" wasn't on anyone's radar. People felt rich, like everything would be fine. We are not in that situation – the facts on the ground are so wildly different that the DNC and mainstream media will find it hard to stay in control.

Nax , July 30, 2019 at 2:42 am

I think it's much more likely that a Sanders victory would see the Clintonistas digging even further into the underbelly of the Democratic Party. There they would covertly and overtly sabotage Sanders, brief against him in the press and weaken, corrupt and hamstring any legislation that he proposes.

If Sanders should win against Trump expect the establishment to go into full revolt. Capital strike, mass layoffs, federal reserve hiking interest rates to induce a recession, a rotating cast of Democrats siding with Republicans to block legislation, press comparing him to worse than Carter before he even takes office and vilifying him all day every day.

I wouldn't be shocked to see Israel and the Saudis generate a crisis in, for example, Iran so Sanders either bends the knee to the neocons or gets to be portrayed as a cowardly failure for abandoning our 'allies' for the rest of his term.

Tyronius , July 30, 2019 at 4:59 am

You've just convinced me that the American Experiment is doomed. No one else but Sanders can pull America out of its long slow death spiral and your litany of the tactics of subversion of his presidency is persuasive that even in the event of his electoral victory, there will be no changing of the national direction.

JCC , July 30, 2019 at 9:05 am

I'm reading a series of essays by Morris Berman in his book "Are We There Yet". A lot of critics complain that he is too much the pessimist, but he presents some good arguments, dark though they may be, that the American Experiment was doomed from the start due to the inherent flaw of Every Man For Himself and its "get mine and the hell with everybody else" attitude that has been a part of the experiment from the beginning.

He is absolutely right about one thing, we are a country strongly based on hustling for money as much or more than anything else, and both Trump and the Clintons are classic examples of this, and why the country often gets the leaders it deserves.

That's why I believe that we need people like Sanders and Gabbard in the Oval Office. It is also why I believe that should either end up even getting close, Nax is correct. Those with power in this country will not accept the results and will do whatever is necessary to subvert them, and the Voter will buy that subversion hook, line, and sinker.

Left in Wisconsin , July 30, 2019 at 11:32 am

No. The point is that electing Sanders can not be the endgame, only the beginning. I think Nax is completely right that a Sanders win would bring on the full wrath of all its opponents. Then the real battle would begin.

The notion that real change could happen in this country by winning an election or two is naive in the extreme. But that doesn't make it impossible.

Big River Bandido , July 30, 2019 at 7:16 am

Lots of people hired by the Clintons, Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Cuomo, etc. will have to be defenestrated. Lose their public sector jobs, if not outright charged with crimes. No one must be left in a position to hurt you after the election. Anyone on the "other side" must lose all power or ability to damage you, except those too weak. These people can be turned and used by you; they can be kept in line with fear. But all the leaders must go.

Norb , July 30, 2019 at 6:09 am

In order for Sanders to survive the onslaught that will surely come, he must have a jobs program ready to go on day one of his administration- and competent people committed to his cause ready to cary out the plan.

The high ground is being able to express a new vision for the common good, 24/7, and do something to bring it about. You win even if you suffer losses.

Without that, life in the USA will become very disruptive to say the least.

g3 , July 30, 2019 at 4:08 am

Mainstream Dems are performing their role very well. Most likely I am preaching to the choir. But anyways, here is a review of Lance Selfa's book "Democrats: a critical history" by Paul Street :

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/hope-killers-by-paul-street/

Besides preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left, the Democrats have been adept at killing social movements altogether. They have done – and continue to do – this in four key ways:

i) inducing "progressive" movement activists (e.g. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink and the leaders of Moveon.org and United for Peace and Justice today) to focus scarce resources on electing and defending capitalist politicians who are certain to betray peaceful- and populist-sounding campaign promises upon the attainment of power;

(ii) pressuring activists to "rein in their movements, thereby undercutting the potential for struggle from below;"

(iii) using material and social (status) incentives to buy off social movement leaders;

iv) feeding a pervasive sense of futility regarding activity against the dominant social and political order, with its business party duopoly.

It is not broken. It is fixed. Against us.

The Rev Kev , July 30, 2019 at 4:43 am

Pretty bad optics on MSNBC's part being unable to do simple numbers and I can fully believe that their motto starts with the words "This is who we are". Jimmy Dore has put out a few videos on how bad MSNBC has been towards Bernie and Progressives lately so it is becoming pretty blatant. Just spitballing a loose theory here but perhaps the Democrats have decided on a "poisoned chalice" strategy and do want not to win in 2020.

After 2008 the whole economy should have had a major re-set but Obama spent tens of trillions of dollars saving Wall Street – at the expense of Main Street – so that nothing got resolved about the problems that caused the crash in the first place. Trump's policies are doubling down on these problems so there is going to be a major disruption coming down the track. A major recession perhaps or maybe even worse.

Point is that perhaps the Democrats have calculated that it would be best for them to leave the Republicans in power to own this crash which will help them long term. And this explains why most of those democrat candidates look like they have fallen out of a clown car. The ones capable of going head to head with Trump are sidelined while their weakest candidates are pushed forward – people like Biden and Harris. Just a theory mind.

Norb , July 30, 2019 at 7:18 am

The militarization of US economy and society underscores your scenario. By being part of the war coalition, the Democratic party, as now constituted, doesn't have to win any presidential elections. The purpose of the Democratic party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion. This allows the war machine to grind on and the politicians are paid handsomely for their efforts.

By joining the war coalition, the Democrats only have leverage over Republicans if the majority of citizens get "uppity" and start demanding social concessions. Democrats put down the revolt by subterfuge, which is less costly and allows the fiction of American Democracy and freedom to persist for a while longer. Republicans, while preferring more overt methods of repressing the working class, allow the fiction to continue because their support for authoritarian principles can stay hidden in the background.

I have little faith in my fellow citizens as the majority are too brainwashed to see the danger of this political theatre. Most ignore politics, while those that do show an interest exercise that effort mainly by supporting whatever faction they belong. Larger issues and connections between current events remain a mystery to them as a result.

Military defeat seems the only means to break this cycle. Democrats, being the fake peaceniks that they are, will be more than happy to defer to their more authoritarian Republican counterparts when dealing with issues concerning war and peace. Look no further than Tulsi Gabbard's treatment in the party. The question is really should the country continue down this Imperialist path.

In one sense, economic recession will be the least of our problems in the future. When this political theatre in the US finally reaches its end date, what lies behind the curtain will surely shock most of the population and I have little faith that the citizenry are prepared to deal with the consequences. A society of feckless consumers is little prepared to deal with hard core imperialists who's time has reached its end.

This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry.

notabanker , July 30, 2019 at 9:17 am

This wrath of frustrated Imperialists will be turned upon the citizenry.

When their fiat money is worthless, we'll see how effective that "wrath" really is.

ambrit , July 30, 2019 at 12:55 pm

By owning the means of production, the Oligarchs will be able to produce the machinery of oppression without the resort to 'money.'
In revolutionary times, the most valuable commodity would be flying lead.

Carey , July 30, 2019 at 3:49 pm

Could that be why "our" three-letter agencies have been stocking up on that substance for awhile, now?

Phil in KC , July 30, 2019 at 1:09 pm

" The purpose of the Democratic Party is to diffuse public dissent in an orderly fashion."

Wow! I'm going to be keeping that little nugget in mind as I watch the debates. Well-stated, Norb.

DJG , July 30, 2019 at 8:43 am

If the nation wishes true deliverance, not just from Trump and Republicans, but from the painful state that got Trump elected in the first place, it will first have to believe in a savior.

No, no, no, no, no. No oooshy religion, which is part of what got us into this mess. Cities on a hill. The Exceptional Nation(tm). Obligatory burbling of Amazing Grace. Assumptions that everyone is a Methodist. And after Deliverance, the U S of A will be magically re-virginated (for the umpteenth time), pure and worthy of Manifest Destiny once again.

If you want to be saved, stick to your own church. Stop dragging it into the public sphere. This absurd and sloppy religious language is part of the problem. At the very least it is kitsch. At its worst it leads us to bomb Muslim nations and engage in "Crusades."

Other than that, the article makes some important points. In a year or so, there will be a lot of comments here on whether or not to vote for the pre-failed Democratic candidate, once the Party dumps Bernie Sanders. There is no requirement of voting for the Democrats, unless you truly do believe that they will bring the Deliverance (and untarnish your tarnished virtue). Vote your conscience. Not who Nate Silver indicates.

mle in detroit , July 30, 2019 at 10:30 am

+100

ptb , July 30, 2019 at 9:21 am

Yes, this election is starting to remind me of 2004. High-up Dems, believing they're playing the long game, sacrifice the election to maintain standing with big biz donors. The leading issue of the day (Iraq/GWOT/Patriot Act) was erased from mainstream US politics and has been since. Don't for a minute think they won't do a similar thing now. Big donors don't particularly fear Trump, nor a 6-3 conservative supreme court, nor a Bolton state dept, nor a racist DHS/ICE – those are not money issues for them.

KYrocky , July 30, 2019 at 9:32 am

Sadly, when Sanders speaks of a "revolution", and when he is referred to as a revolutionary, while at the same time accepting that the Democratic Party is a Party of the top 10%, puts into context just how low the bar is for a political revolution in America.

The candidate who would fight and would govern for the 90% of Americans is a revolutionary.

The fact that it can be said as a given that neither major Party is being run specifically to serve the vast majority of our country is itself an admission for that the class war begun by Reagan has been won, in more of a silent coup, and the rich have control of our nation.

Sadly, actual democracy is an impediment to those who wield power in today's America, and in that respect the class war continues to be waged, primarily through divisive social issues to divert our attention from the looting being done by and for the rich and the decline in opportunity and economic security for everyone else.

Sanders is considered a revolutionary merely for stating the obvious, stating the truth. That is what makes him dangerous to those that run the Democratic Party, and more broadly those who run this nation.

Sanders would do better to cast himself not as a revolutionary, but as a person of the people, with the belief that good government does not favor the wants of the richest over the needs of our country. That is what makes him a threat. To the rich unseen who hold power, to the Republican Party, and to some Democrats.

freedomny , July 30, 2019 at 11:28 am

Good read:

https://eand.co/why-the-21st-century-needs-an-existential-revolution-c3068a10b689

dbk , July 30, 2019 at 11:45 am

Perhaps another indication of internal discord that's getting out of hand:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/5-more-top-dccc-staffers-out-in-ongoing-diversity-saga

I agree with the thesis here, and confess to being puzzled by comments on LGM (for example) politics threads of the ilk "I'm with Warren but am good with Buttigieg too," or "I'm with Sanders but am good with Harris, too," etc.

Really?

Matthew G. Saroff , July 30, 2019 at 11:55 am

I love reading Taibbi, but in his article , that quote, " Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector ," should be the lede, and its buried 2/3 of the way down.

This primary season is about how the Democratic Party consultant class, I call them leeches, is fighting for its power at the expense of the party and the country.

flora , July 30, 2019 at 1:07 pm

Yves writes: it is unfortunate that this struggle is being personified, as in too often treated by the media and political operatives as being about Sanders.

I agree. Sanders represents the continuing New Deal-type policies. The DLC-type New Democrats (corporatists) have been working to destroy New Deal Democrats and policies as a force in the party. The New Deal Democrats brought in bank regulations, social security, medicare, the voting rights act, restraint on financial predation, and various economic protections for the little-guy and for Main Street businesses.

The DLC Dems have brought deregulation of the banks and financial sector, an attempt to cut social security, expansion of prisons, tax cuts for corporations and the billionaires, the return of monopoly power, and the economic squeeze on Main Street businesses forced to compete with monopolies.

The MSM won't talk about any of the programmatic differences between the two sides. The MSM won't recognize the New Deal style Democratic voters even exist; the New Deal wing voters are quickly labeled 'deplorable' instead voters with competing economic policies to the current economic policies.

So, we're left with the MSM focusing on personalities to avoid talking about the real policy differences, imo.

sharonsj , July 30, 2019 at 2:53 pm

When Bernie talks about a revolution, he explains how it must be from the grassroots, from the bottom up. If he manages to get elected, his supporters have to make sure they get behind the politicians who also support him and, if they don't, get rid of them.

Without continuing mass protests, nothing is going to happen. Other countries have figured this out but Americans remain clueless.

[Jul 30, 2019] Mystery Airstrikes On Iraqi Camp Were Israeli Stealth Jets In Anti-Iran Escalation

Jul 30, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Mystery Airstrikes On Iraqi Camp Were Israeli Stealth Jets In "Anti-Iran" Escalation

by Tyler Durden Tue, 07/30/2019 - 13:50 0 SHARES

Regional experts had immediately suspected the possibility of an Israeli air raid after a pro-Iranian militia arms depot in Iraq was obliterated during a mysterious attack on July 19 , and another reported follow-up attack this past Sunday.

The attack happened around 80 km from the Iranian border and 40 km north-east of Baghdad at Camp Ashraf, former home to the Iranian exile group Mojahedin-e Khalq, but now reportedly in the hands of Iranian intelligence and paramilitaries.

Speculation was rampant in the days that followed as to the source of the 'mysterious' air strikes - or what was also initially reported as a drone strike - however, some pointed the finger at an American operation targeting Iranian militants inside Iraq.

Israeli F-35 stealth fighters. File image: Israeli Defense Forces

But now Israeli and regional media, citing western diplomats, have confirmed it was a nearly unprecedented Israeli operation on Iraqi soil -- representing a major escalation and expansion of Israel's anti-Iran operations.

Israel reportedly launched a total of two separate air strike operations on the camp using its US-supplied F-35 stealth fighter jets.

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz :

Israel has expanded the scope of its anti-Iranian attacks and struck targets in Iraq , the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported Tuesday.

According to the report, which cites anonymous Western diplomats, Israel struck Iranian warehouses storing arms and missiles at Camp Ashraf , north-east of Baghdad, twice in the past month.

On July 19, the base was struck by an Israeli F-35 fighter jet, the sources added. The base was allegedly attacked again on Sunday.

The report alleges the primary target included a shipment of Iranian ballistic missiles which recently entered Iraq via the nearby Iranian border.

And though not confirmed, the report further claimed that "Iranian advisers" had been injured in the series of airstrikes.

Israel has over the past couple of years conducted "hundreds" of attacks inside Syria, which defense officials have claimed were primarily against Iranian and Hezbollah bases, but if this month's air strikes on Camp Ashraf are confirmed Israeli assaults, it would constitute a major widening in terms of the scope of Tel Aviv's "anti-Iran" targeting operations.

The news is also sure to enrage officials in Baghdad, who will mount protests defending Iraqi sovereignty. Israel hasn't mounted a known significant attack on Iraqi soil since the days of former dictator Saddam Hussein.

[Jul 29, 2019] Looks like Epstein turned informant for Mueller s FBI in 2008. Likely earlier

Highly recommended!
Did Mueller done this at the request of Clintons?
Notable quotes:
"... That was while Robert Mueller ran the Bureau, which means everything about Epstein's blackmail and kompromat operation has been tucked safely away out of sight in FBI files for at least a decade. Much longer, new evidence shows. ..."
"... *CIA Acknowledged in 2003, It Knew that Ghislaine Maxwell's Late Father was a Major Foreign Intelligence Agent Operating Inside the U.S. ..."
"... That Robert Maxwell was a ruthless, corrupt, tax-dodging international businessman who served as an Israeli agent is highly probable. ..."
"... For the first time, Maxwell had failed to get his own way. He started to threaten and bluster. He then demanded that, for past services, he should receive immediately a quick fix of £400million to bale him out of his financial difficulties. ..."
"... Instead of providing the money, a small group of Mossad officers set about planning his murder. They feared that he was going to publicly expose all Mossad had done in the time he worked for them. They knew that he was gradually becoming mentally unstable and paranoid. He was taking a cocktail of drugs - Halcion and Zanax - which had serious side effects. ..."
"... Then Maxwell was contacted. He was told to fly to Gibraltar, go aboard the Lady Ghislaine and sail to the Canary Islands. There at sea he would receive his £400million quick fix in the form of a banker's draft. Maxwell did as he was told. ..."
"... As Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent told us: "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over." ..."
"... The incontrovertible facts about his murder are contained in a previously-unseen autopsy report by Britain's then-leading forensic pathologist Dr Iain West and Israel State Pathologist Dr Yehuda Hiss. Of all the documents in our possession, these reports confirm the truth about Maxwell's death. ..."
"... Boy that Mueller has had a busy career hasn't he? Didn't he start out in Chicago where he gave Whitey Bulgar cover for being a mob boss? Then there's his cover up before and after 9/11. The weapons of mass destruction that he said Saddam had. The anthrax prosecution, Epstein's pedophilia cover up, HSBC and now he is trying to cover Hillary's buttocks. And maybe Obama's? I'm sure I've missed a few things that he did or didn't do. ..."
"... Acosta was told to stand down by someone at the top of the food chain. Mueller. Ugh what a slimy piece of work he is. But not to the Russia Gaters. Oh no. "He is a highly decorated marine who takes no guff from anyone. ..."
"... In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe. ..."
"... Inquiring minds want to know did Maxwell have access to Margaret and Ron because they liked him or because he had something on them? ..."
"... Epstein is the destruction of the Deep State. ..."
"... That pedophelia and politics scandal, better known as the Franklin Coverup, made the papers for a few months, too, before it was made to go away. Similarly, a couple of the operators served some time on reduced charges after that one. ..."
"... The two main suspects in the Bush, Sr. White House child ring were Craig Spence and Lawrence E. King Jr. King sang the National anthem at two GOP national conventions. He served time in jail for bank fraud. Spence was a Republican lobbyist before he committed suicide. Several of his partners went to jail for being involved in the adult part of the homosexual prostitution ring. ..."
"... Mueller's scrupulous avoidance of the CIA link in his prosecution of Manuel Noriega and his diversion of the PanAm 103 bombing and framing of two Libyans. Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation. ..."
"... Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation. ..."
"... The anthrax investigation is the most serious of his crimes. Mueller is being sued by his lead investigator in that case. ..."
"... Every now and then, here and there the curtain lifts for a moment and the political elite of a country, the business elite, the spy services, the military, and organized crime are revealed to be all working together, indeed practically joined at the hip ..."
"... partnership started during the early Cold War with US intelligence officers facilitating the drug trade out of Turkey and Burma through Europe. That soon spread to the Americas and globally. Covert operations such as Gladio, Condor, and the Safari Club, and associated banks (Franklin National Bank, BCCI, Riggs Bank, HSBC, etc.) produced massive human rights violations, transnational terrorism and governmental corruption. The CIA's secret wars provided funds and official cover for private-public sector alliance of criminals, bankers and spooks around the world. ..."
"... The CIA, MI6 and Mossad ran overlapping coordinated operations using privateers, paramilitaries and organized crime networks that consumed vast amounts of cash generated by money laundering mechanisms. Enriched by the looting of the former Soviet Union, along with the infusion of Arab oil money (the Saudi Yamamah slush fund), the "Octopus" became the instrument of Oligarchs that have thoroughly corrupted western governments and secret services. ..."
"... The Snowden release included a number of documents that illustrate the on-line entrapment and political disruption activities run by the two main communications intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Epstein recruits young girls, throws parties where he invites potential hedge fund clients, lets nature take its course and films the proceedings, extracts blackmail in the form of investments to his (largely fake) hedge fund, which actually just buys an index fund (no actual fund management required). He takes a percentage from the coerced investments. Nobody talks because they have too much to lose. No suspicious payments to raise eyebrows at the IRS. ..."
"... Epstein brought in the clients. The CIA/MI-6/Mossad provided necessary cover from the FBI and local cops - then, three or four agencies shared the intelligence take, as they had for decades from Robert Maxwell's operations. ..."
"... For Ghislaine, it was simply carrying on the family business for fun and profit. For the spooks, it was business as usual going back to the Green House, the Berlin bordello founded in the the 1870s by Wilhelm Steiber, a Prussian Police section chief, to provide useful intelligence to Bismarck's Military Intelligence, which he reorganized. ..."
"... Epstein is also well acquainted with University President Lawrence H. Summers. The two serve together on the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two elite international relations organizations. ..."
"... Epstein's relationships within the academy are remarkable since the tycoon, who has amassed his fortune by managing the wealth of billionaires from his private Caribbean island, does not hold a bachelor's degree. ..."
"... There's a rocky road ahead for Larry Summers. Summers introduces Epstein into the Harvard fold, but becomes reckless with his newly-refined Neoliberalism and his opinions concerning "lady scholars." ..."
Jul 11, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

leveymg on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 11:30am

That was while Robert Mueller ran the Bureau, which means everything about Epstein's blackmail and kompromat operation has been tucked safely away out of sight in FBI files for at least a decade. Much longer, new evidence shows.

For those who may have wondered why Epstein was given such an incredible deal in sentencing, that explains it. Epstein was an extraordinary value informant, and he leveraged it. https://truepundit.com/fbi-pedophile-jeffrey-epstein-was-informant-for-m...

A figure who often gets overlooked in this is Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's chief procurer of underage girls. Ghislaine, the daughter of publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, was granted immunity and never charged in exchange for her own cooperation in the 2008 pseudo-prosecution. https://heavy.com/news/2019/03/ghislaine-maxwell/ ; https://pagesix.com/2016/03/17/alleged-epstein-madam-forced-to-hand-over...

The real question is, why did the FBI wait for more than a decade to bust Epstein and Maxwell?

Epstein and Maxwell came to the attention of the FBI in 1996, when, curiously, the Bureau never acted on an accusation that they had together sexually abused a 15 year old girl in a bedroom inside Epstein's Manhattan townhouse. Documents in a recent law suit filed by an alleged victim, Maria Farmer, show that the FBI had been aware of Epstein and Maxwell's child abuse activities in New York for at least a dozen years before Epstein was finally charged in 2008 with much-reduced Florida state offenses. https://www.yourtango.com/2019323698/who-maria-farmer-latest-woman-accus...

Farmer claims she reported her sexual assault to New York police and the FBI in 1996. "To my knowledge, I was the first person to report Maxwell and Epstein to the FBI," she wrote in her affidavit."

*CIA Acknowledged in 2003, It Knew that Ghislaine Maxwell's Late Father was a Major Foreign Intelligence Agent Operating Inside the U.S.

Previously, Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, had for many years been known to have been involved in high-level espionage in the United States, as detailed in a 2003 publication of the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf . Therein, the CIA reviewer of a biography by British author Gordon Thomas acknowledged about Maxwell: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-pub...

That Robert Maxwell was a ruthless, corrupt, tax-dodging international businessman who served as an Israeli agent is highly probable.

For the deeper background to the Epstein-Maxwell multinational blackmail, coverup and kompromat operation, we have to look at the events that led up to the 1991 death of Robert Maxwell. A summary of the Maxwell bio by its authors recounts:

British Publisher Robert Maxwell
Was Mossad Spy
By Gordon Thomas And Martin Dillon
The Mirror - UK
12-6-2002
[ . . .]
Eleven years after former Daily Mirror owner Robert Maxwell plunged from his luxury yacht to a watery grave, his death still arouses intense interest.

Many different theories have circulated about what really happened on board the Lady Ghislaine that night in May 1991.

[ . . . ]

The Jewish millionaire and former Labour MP [born Ludvik Hoch
in Czechoslovakia] died the way he had lived - threatening.

He had threatened his wife. Threatened his children. Threatened the staff of this newspaper.

But finally he issued one threat too many - he threatened Mossad.

He told them that unless they gave him £400million to save his crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them.

In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe.

On top of that he had built himself a position of power within the crime families of eastern Europe, teaching them how to funnel their vast wealth from drugs, arms smuggling and prostitution to banks in safe havens around the globe.

Maxwell passed on all the secrets he learned to Mossad in Tel Aviv. In turn, they tolerated his excesses, vanities and insatiable appetite for a luxurious lifestyle and women.

He told his controllers who they should target and how they should do it. He appointed himself as Israel's unofficial ambassador to the Soviet Bloc. Mossad saw the advantage in that.

[ . . . ]

The more successful Maxwell became the more risks he took and the more dangerous he was to Mossad. At the same time, the very public side of Maxwell, who then owned 400 companies, began to unwind.

He spent lavishly and lost money on deals. The more he lost, the more he tried to claw money from the banks. Then he saw a way out of his problems.

He was approached by Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB. Spymaster and tycoon met in the utmost secrecy in the Kremlin.

Kryuchkov had an extraordinary proposal. He wanted Maxwell to help orchestrate the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader. That would bring to an end a fledgling democracy and a return to the Cold War days.

In return, Maxwell's massive debts would be wiped out by a grateful Kryuchkov, who planned to replace Gorbachev. The KGB chief wanted Maxwell to use the Lady Ghislaine, named after Maxwell's daughter, as a meeting place between the Russian plotters, Mossad chiefs and Israel's top politicians.

The plan was for the Israelis to go to Washington and say that democracy could not work in Russia and that it was better to allow the country to return to a modified form of communism, which America could help to control. In return, Kryuchkov would guarantee to free hundreds of thousands of Jews and dissidents in the Soviet republics.

Kryuchkov told Maxwell that he would be seen as a saviour of all those Jews. It was a proposal he could not refuse. But when he put it to his Mossad controllers they were horrified. They said Israel would have no part in such a madcap plan.

For the first time, Maxwell had failed to get his own way. He started to threaten and bluster. He then demanded that, for past services, he should receive immediately a quick fix of £400million to bale him out of his financial difficulties.

Instead of providing the money, a small group of Mossad officers set about planning his murder. They feared that he was going to publicly expose all Mossad had done in the time he worked for them. They knew that he was gradually becoming mentally unstable and paranoid. He was taking a cocktail of drugs - Halcion and Zanax - which had serious side effects.

The group of Mossad plotters sensed, like Solomon, he could bring their temple tumbling down and cause incalculable harm to Israel. The plan to kill him was prepared in the utmost secrecy. A four-man squad was briefed.

Then Maxwell was contacted. He was told to fly to Gibraltar, go aboard the Lady Ghislaine and sail to the Canary Islands. There at sea he would receive his £400million quick fix in the form of a banker's draft. Maxwell did as he was told.

On the night of November 4, 1991, the Lady Ghislaine, one of the world's biggest yachts, was at sea.

[ . . . ]

As Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent told us: "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over."

The incontrovertible facts about his murder are contained in a previously-unseen autopsy report by Britain's then-leading forensic pathologist Dr Iain West and Israel State Pathologist Dr Yehuda Hiss. Of all the documents in our possession, these reports confirm the truth about Maxwell's death.

Gordon Thomas & Martin Dillon are authors of The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy, published by Robson Books.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12419168&method=f...

The obvious question, why did the U.S. government let these intelligence crimes continue for decades, isn't being asked. The answer is almost self-evident. Information and leverage obtained by Maxwell-Epstein and Co. was far too valuable to its several operators to let it all end too soon.

###

Linda Wood on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 12:45pm
Two parts of your reporting

leap out at me as suggesting how Epstein connects to much bigger subjects. First is the assertion that Maxwell was

... teaching them how to funnel their vast wealth from drugs, arms smuggling and prostitution to banks in safe havens around the globe.

This area of trafficking and money laundering directly connects to Mueller and his essential exoneration of HSBC .

The other quotation that suggests the importance of money laundering is here:

The plan was for the Israelis to go to Washington and say that democracy could not work in Russia and that it was better to allow the country to return to a modified form of communism, which America could help to control.

The life's work of Antony Sutton at Stanford's Hoover Institution shows that American industry was ALWAYS controlling communism as well as Soviet industrial development, and that a trend toward social democracy, represented by Gorbachev, would have put an end to that control.

leveymg on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 4:29pm
Curiously, the CIA review of the Maxwell bio doesn't touch on

@Linda Wood his money laundering and blackmailing activities. While the review confirms that Robert Maxwell was for decades a major Mossad agent actively setting up operations and cover in the United States and the UK, I can only surmise that the spreading political influence of Eastern European organized crime networks and child honey traps are things that the Agency didn't want to discuss publicly in 2003.

As for Mueller, let's not forget that he was FBI Director and before that the head of the Criminal Division at Main Justice at the time that global "black finance" grew along with the catastrophic spread of multinational crime and terrorism. BCCI, Iran-Contra, 9/11, and the rise of transnational Oligarchs happened on his watch. As the Chief Law Enforcement Officer in the United States at the time, it is hard to imagine anyone more responsibility for the ultimate consequences than Robert Mueller. There is perhaps someone who bears ultimate responsibility, the President who appointed Mueller: George Herbert Walker Bush and his lesser son, Shrub, who promoted him.

Pluto's Republic on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 5:21pm
From your own research

@leveymg

... wouldn't you assume that this entire affair is an ongoing Mossad operation, which may or may not have concluded? The US IC is just another operative inside the envelope, but Mossad owns the assets and the intellectual property. I think we could assume that some of this is automated and Mossad has ongoing leverage still in play.

The obvious question, why did the U.S. government let these intelligence crimes continue for decades, isn't being asked. The answer is almost self-evident. Information and leverage obtained by Maxwell-Epstein and Co. was far too valuable to its several operators to let it all end too soon.

.

Mossad's legendary blackmail traps ensnared even high-level deep state authorities and made them pliable. The recent history of United States foreign policy is an enigma that can only be solved when that assumption is inserted. Once the assumption is in place, it opens like a Pandora's box. Don't you find that to be the case?

Thanks for compiling this revealing argument.

Deja on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 11:03pm
HSBC?

@Linda Wood
From your link:

In a recent investigation I presented the case that British banking and financial giant HSBC conspired with banking institutions with documented links to terrorist financing, including those responsible for helping bankroll the 9/11 attacks.

Thank you for the link!

Linda Wood on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 1:11pm
HSBC article

linked here does not mention Mueller but does outline the crimes Mueller worked so hard not to solve:

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2012/07/black-dossier-hsbc-terro...

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2012
Black Dossier: HSBC & Terrorist Finance

Moral equivalencies abound. After all, when American secret state agencies manage drug flows or direct terrorist proxies to attack official enemies it's not quite the same as battling terror or crime.

Pounding home that point, a new report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused HSBC of exposing "the U.S. financial system to a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing risks due to poor anti-money laundering (AML) controls."

That 335-page report, "U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History," (large pdf file available here ) was issued after a year-long Senate investigation zeroed-in on the bank's U.S. affiliate, HSBC Bank USA, N.A., better known as HBUS.

Drilling down, we learned that amongst the "services" offered by HSBC subsidiaries and correspondent banks were sweet deals with financial entities with terrorist ties; the transportation of billions of dollars in cash by plane and armored car through their London Banknotes division; the clearing of sequentially-numbered travelers checks through dodgy Cayman Islands accounts for Mexican drug lords and Russian mafiosi.

From richly-appointed suites at Canary Wharf, London, the bank's "smartest guys in the room" handed some of the most violent gangsters on earth the financial wherewithal to organize their respective industries: global crime.

A case in point. In 2008 alone the Senate revealed that the bank's Cayman Islands branch handled some 50,000 client accounts (all without benefit of offices or staff on Grand Cayman, mind you), yet still managed to ship some $7 billion (£10.9bn) in cash from Mexico into the U.S. Now that's creative accounting!...

Alligator Ed on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 10:49pm
Thank you, Linda

@Linda Wood HSBC, huh--there must be some clever name for it, which deserves no research.
what an eloquent article you presented. Brief but right on target. It isn't just sex, drugs and rock and roll. Now it is drugs - money -sexual perversion--and perhaps worse? Rumors are flying about what video on the Weiner laptop showed. It is strictly heresay, but a core of folks seem to believe the suspicions are possible.

snoopydawg on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 8:48pm
Boy that Mueller has had a busy career hasn't he? Didn't he start out in Chicago where he gave Whitey Bulgar cover for being a mob boss? Then there's his cover up before and after 9/11. The weapons of mass destruction that he said Saddam had. The anthrax prosecution, Epstein's pedophilia cover up, HSBC and now he is trying to cover Hillary's buttocks. And maybe Obama's? I'm sure I've missed a few things that he did or didn't do.

Acosta is saying that if he hadn't made the plea deal then Epstein would never have served any time in prison. Well he actually only slept there since he got to leave every day for work and then there's the massages he got after his busy day at work. But there were more than 80 pages that the Feds wrote on his escapades so I think that story he told congress is true. Acosta was told to stand down by someone at the top of the food chain. Mueller. Ugh what a slimy piece of work he is. But not to the Russia Gaters. Oh no. "He is a highly decorated marine who takes no guff from anyone.

In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe.

Inquiring minds want to know did Maxwell have access to Margaret and Ron because they liked him or because he had something on them?

Great information! The more I learn the more I need a shower.

Linda Wood on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 9:11pm
That needing a shower thing

@snoopydawg

is how I've been feeling all week from reading about this, just more and more demoralized when I think about the depravation of our so-called "leadership." What is it that we're supposed to think of as the new normal after this behavior?

Alligator Ed on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 10:53pm
Linda, you could shower in my extra long tub

@Linda Wood No problem--but, seriously, yecch! Epstein is the destruction of the Deep State.

leveymg on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 1:02pm
Remember Craig Spence and the 1989 Whitehouse Call Boy Ring?

@snoopydawg

That pedophelia and politics scandal, better known as the Franklin Coverup, made the papers for a few months, too, before it was made to go away. Similarly, a couple of the operators served some time on reduced charges after that one.

The two main suspects in the Bush, Sr. White House child ring were Craig Spence and Lawrence E. King Jr. King sang the National anthem at two GOP national conventions. He served time in jail for bank fraud. Spence was a Republican lobbyist before he committed suicide. Several of his partners went to jail for being involved in the adult part of the homosexual prostitution ring.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/Franklin/FranklinCoverup/l...

Roy Blakeley on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 12:29pm
And let's not forget

@snoopydawg

Mueller's scrupulous avoidance of the CIA link in his prosecution of Manuel Noriega and his diversion of the PanAm 103 bombing and framing of two Libyans. Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation.

Linda Wood on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 1:09pm
Absolutely.

@Roy Blakeley

You sum it up perfectly:

Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation.

The anthrax investigation is the most serious of his crimes. Mueller is being sued by his lead investigator in that case.

Because researchers in our biological weapons labs went public with what they were doing, and where such research was being done in the U.S., we learned the CIA was one of several outfits doing biological weapons research.

But Mueller exonerated all of them, including the CIA, with no explanation and only focused on a lone vaccine researcher at the Army lab when journalists began to ask why no one had been indicted after seven years of investigation, at which point the FBI attempted to harass the suspect into committing suicide.

lotlizard on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 1:44am
Comparable to "Deep State" scandals in Turkey?

Every now and then, here and there the curtain lifts for a moment and the political elite of a country, the business elite, the spy services, the military, and organized crime are revealed to be all working together, indeed practically joined at the hip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susurluk_scandal

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/ergenekon-plot-massive-trial-...

leveymg on Sat, 07/13/2019 - 11:08am
Read "Politics of Heroin in SE Asia". The CIA-Mafia-warlord

@lotlizard @lotlizard

partnership started during the early Cold War with US intelligence officers facilitating the drug trade out of Turkey and Burma through Europe. That soon spread to the Americas and globally. Covert operations such as Gladio, Condor, and the Safari Club, and associated banks (Franklin National Bank, BCCI, Riggs Bank, HSBC, etc.) produced massive human rights violations, transnational terrorism and governmental corruption. The CIA's secret wars provided funds and official cover for private-public sector alliance of criminals, bankers and spooks around the world.

This "dark alliance" assumed a political and economic life of its own beyond its original intent to counter communist movements. By the Vietnam War, Agency operators were running most of the heroin trade in the world through proprietary airlines, banks and logistics companies. In the mid-1970s, CIA Director Bush expanded privatization with Saudi funding in his Safari Club deal that eventually morphed into Al Qaeda and ISIS.

The CIA, MI6 and Mossad ran overlapping coordinated operations using privateers, paramilitaries and organized crime networks that consumed vast amounts of cash generated by money laundering mechanisms. Enriched by the looting of the former Soviet Union, along with the infusion of Arab oil money (the Saudi Yamamah slush fund), the "Octopus" became the instrument of Oligarchs that have thoroughly corrupted western governments and secret services.

Multinational honey trap operations such as Maxwell-Epstein & Co. are an inevitable and continuing part of this privatization and criminalization of intelligence that stretches back to the days of Tom Braden and Cord Meyer handing out stacks of greenbacks to Mafiosi on the Corsican Docks.

leveymg on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 11:31am
NSA and GCHQ have gotten into the honeytrap and influence game

@leveymg

The Snowden release included a number of documents that illustrate the on-line entrapment and political disruption activities run by the two main communications intelligence agencies.

"Honey-trap; a great option. Very successful, when it works" (GCHQ, UK training program slide)

https://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2014/05/lots-of-secret-nsa-documents-plu...

The "Information Ops" category is of particular interest to me...

Does this really seem like the sort of thing that would be done only to a jihadist...?

WoodsDweller on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 1:48pm
Here's an interesting take

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/epstein-was-running-a-blackmail-scheme-...

Without quoting the whole thing (which is worth a read):

Epstein recruits young girls, throws parties where he invites potential hedge fund clients, lets nature take its course and films the proceedings, extracts blackmail in the form of investments to his (largely fake) hedge fund, which actually just buys an index fund (no actual fund management required). He takes a percentage from the coerced investments. Nobody talks because they have too much to lose. No suspicious payments to raise eyebrows at the IRS.

There's no need to invoke the Mafia/Russia/Mossad/CIA/etc, that's just needlessly overfitting.

Except such an operation would be quite attractive to intelligence services. Maybe they were in on the ground floor, maybe they made Epstein an offer he couldn't refuse once they heard about it.

leveymg on Sat, 07/13/2019 - 10:28am
My gut tells me that G. Maxwell provided the Know-how, and

@WoodsDweller

Epstein brought in the clients. The CIA/MI-6/Mossad provided necessary cover from the FBI and local cops - then, three or four agencies shared the intelligence take, as they had for decades from Robert Maxwell's operations.

For Ghislaine, it was simply carrying on the family business for fun and profit. For the spooks, it was business as usual going back to the Green House, the Berlin bordello founded in the the 1870s by Wilhelm Steiber, a Prussian Police section chief, to provide useful intelligence to Bismarck's Military Intelligence, which he reorganized.

Steiber is considered the father of modern espionage. His methods were vastly influential, and he attracted students from London, St. Petersburg to Tokyo. Each put their own national spin on the science of sexual blackmail. As for the Japanese, they are among the most interesting and innovative in their use of a parallel network of privatized intelligence services incorporating underworld Yakuzi groups alongside conventional military intelligence units. Using compromise, they gained and maintained control over Imperial Japan and its Colonies: https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/03/15/eastern-peril/

To realize these divinely inspired ambitions, Japan needed a modern espionage system. Adopting the German model, Japanese officials were sent to study under Wilhelm Stieber in the mid-1870s. Over the next decade Japan built up separate army and naval intelligence services, each with an accompanying branch of secret military police (Kempeitai for the army and Tokeitai for the navy). These latter organizations also provided an excellent counter-espionage service. However, where the Japanese were unique was in the use of spies belonging to unofficial secret societies working alongside or independently of the official intelligence agencies. These shadowy institutions were ultra-nationalist by nature, drawing their membership from a cross-section of Japanese society, including the military, politics, industry and Yakuza underworld. Under ruthless leadership, their henchmen would spy on, subvert and corrupt Japan's Far East neighbours.

For more on Steiber and his superior, von Hinckeldey, methods of international counter-insurgency, espionage, and political policing included deception and a forerunner of today's internet surveillance: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2006/11/29/275653/-

While armies are essential to the maintenance of autocracy, the preservation of dynastic rule and the prevention of democracy requires an effective secret police. The suppression of its middle-class constitutionalists [during the 1840s] was followed by the expansion of the Prussian political police under Karl Ludwig Friedrich von Hinckeldey.

Appointed police president of Berlin in late 1848, Hinckeldey was an innovator of many of the features of modern systematic political policing. Among the tactics that he introduced with his new police system in Berlin was the "Litfass columns". Named for Ernst Litfass, Frederick William's court printer, he had dozens of these large poles erected in strategic spots around Berlin. The public posting of political notices was then banned. By application to a state office for a waiver, however, the columns could be used to display messages. The police dutifully recorded the names of all who had applied. A. Richie, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1998 at p.134.

LEGACY OF THE LITFASS COLUMNS: A similar ploy was later adopted by the People's Republic of China. In the mid-1980s, the Communist authorities at first appear to tolerate the operation of a so-called Democracy Wall, where "dissidents" in Beijing could post political writings, initially, without being arrested. Similar walls then sprung up under the noses of the authorities in other Chinese cities. For this apparent opening to democracy, the Deng regime much applauded, particularly by some in the Reagan-Bush Administration, eager to legitimize the regime and its growing commercial ties with U.S. corporations. Eventually, many of those who had availed themselves of the wall to post political messages were, of course, arrested in the roundup of hundreds of thousands of democracy supporters that followed the Tienamen Square massacre. The impression of anonymity and "freedom" conveyed by the Internet, of course, presents a similar opportunity for police to cast a wide net for identifying persons and organizations who may not hold favor for the regime in power, or may not in the future.

Hinckeldey also founded the Police Union, the first recorded international network of counterrevolutionary police spies in modern times. Primarily made up of police officers from Prussia and the German states, the Union operated throughout Europe, Britain and in the United States. The Union was run by his deputy, the notorious police provocateur, Wilhelm Steiber, who would later reorganize the Okhrana along similar lines. Internationally active from 1851-1866, the Police Union, according to Mathieu Deflem, was "one of the first formal initiatives in industrial society to establish an organized police system across national borders."13

I disagree with the Alternet view on this. See, this is the norm. A purely private sexual blackmail ring of any scale would be the historical exception. It certainly wouldn't survive very long.

Pluto's Republic on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 5:45pm
This is a chilling thought I try to avoid.

@leveymg

...authorities at first appear to tolerate the operation of a so-called Democracy Wall, where "dissidents" in Beijing could post political writings.... Similar walls then sprung up under the noses of the authorities in other Chinese cities. Eventually, many of those who had availed themselves of the wall to post political messages were, of course, arrested in the roundup of hundreds of thousands of democracy supporters....

The impression of anonymity and "freedom" conveyed by the Internet, of course, presents a similar opportunity for police to cast a wide net for identifying persons and organizations who may not hold favor for the regime in power, or may not in the future.

But why should one avoid the thought? If the situation looks like the people are going to lose the war for their minds, and are unwilling to back a publisher like Assange who has given his all to try to empower them, why should anyone put themselves at risk by expressing their opinions? It's a honeypot of our own making, just as Facebook is where people go to write their own dossiers for the Authorities.

leveymg on Sat, 07/13/2019 - 10:36am
Every time you entrap yourself as

@Pluto's Republic an enemy of the status quo, you raise the calculated costs of the eventual crackdown, pushing back the day of reckoning. Keep it up! Visible rebellion is the only defense of the people.

Pluto's Republic on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 5:54pm
Background: If someone were to choose the ideal node

...from which to leverage access to the elite, Harvard University would be a top choice.

Jeffery Epstein actually entered the social salons of the elite through many doors. He was, of course, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. One would have to be to rub shoulders with the political elite. From there he matriculated to the Trilateral Commission becoming friendly with Harvard President, Larry Summers. **

Becoming a surprise mystery philanthropist at Harvard, with Summers help, was a booster rocket for Epstein. In the Havard Crimson , in June 2003, Epstein's involvement with Harvard was celebrated.

People in the News: Jeffrey E. Epstein

Elusive financier Jeffrey E. Epstein donated $30 million this year to Harvard for the founding of a mathematical biology and evolutionary dynamics program.

While the mathematics teacher turned magnate remained unknown to most people until he flew President Clinton, Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker to Africa to explore the problems of AIDS and economic development facing the region, Epstein has been a familiar face to many at Harvard for years.

Networking with the University's leading intellectuals, Epstein has spurred research through both discussions with and dollars contributed to various faculty members.

Lindsley Professor of Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn, former Dean of the Faculty Henry A. Rosovsky and Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz are among Epstein's bevy of eminent friends that includes princes, presidents and Nobel Prize winners.

Epstein is also well acquainted with University President Lawrence H. Summers. The two serve together on the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two elite international relations organizations.

Epstein's collection of high-profile friends also includes newly-recruited professor Martin A. Nowak, who will run Harvard's mathematical biology and evolutionary dynamics program.

Like Kosslyn, Rosovsky and Dershowitz, Nowak praises Epstein's numerous relationships within the scientific community.

"I am amazed by the connections he has in the scientific world," Nowak says. "He knows an amazing number of scientists. He knows everyone you can imagine."

Epstein's relationships within the academy are remarkable since the tycoon, who has amassed his fortune by managing the wealth of billionaires from his private Caribbean island, does not hold a bachelor's degree.

Yet, friends and beneficiaries say they do not see Epstein merely as a man with deep pockets, but as an intellectual equal.

Dershowitz says Epstein is "brilliant" and Kosslyn calls Epstein "one of the brightest people I've ever known."

Epstein's beneficiaries say they are particularly appreciative of the no-strings-attached approach Epstein takes with his donations.

"He is one of the most pleasant philanthropists," Nowak says. "Unlike many people who support science, he supports science without any conditions. There are not any disadvantages to associating with him."

Friends and associates say Harvard stands to benefit from its evolving relationship with Epstein.

"I hope that he will, over time, become one of the leading supporters of science at Harvard," Rosovsky writes in an e-mail.

__________________________________________
** A footnote on Larry Summers seems important here: Harvard-trained economists have been running the US economy for a very long time, and continue to do so. Summers began his ascent as a professor of economics at Harvard University, leaving shortly before Bill Clinton won the Presidency. He was clearly the Neoliberal seed planted for the New American Century.

In 1993, Summers was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury.

While working for the Clinton administration Summers played a leading role in the American response to the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the Russian financial crisis. He was also influential in the Harvard Institute for International Development and American-advised privatization of the economies of the post-Soviet states, and in the deregulation of the U.S financial system, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

At This Point the Ball is Passed to the Bush Team Republicans, while the Democrats Sit Back and Wait for 2008.

There's now a Treasury surplus to transfer to the wealthy, and the necessary deregulation for Wall Street empowerment is in place. The Soviet era had ended and Russia is ended forever. The world is finally primed to be seized by the One Exceptional Power. It's 2001, and we are standing on the threshold of the New American Century . Time to throw a flash-bang of chaos onto the world stage and trigger the booming War Economy that will carry us directly to global control.

There's a rocky road ahead for Larry Summers. Summers introduces Epstein into the Harvard fold, but becomes reckless with his newly-refined Neoliberalism and his opinions concerning "lady scholars."

Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end", and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization. Remarking upon political correctness in institutions of higher education, Summers said in 2016:

Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering

There is a great deal of absurd political correctness. Now, I'm somebody who believes very strongly in diversity, who resists racism in all of its many incarnations, who thinks that there is a great deal that's unjust in American society that needs to be combated, but it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses.

After his departure from Harvard, Summers cooled his jets on Wall Street, positioning himself to be called back into the game when it was Team Democrat's turn in 2008.

Summers worked as a managing partner at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co., and as a freelance speaker at other financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Summers rejoined public service during the Obama administration, serving as the Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession.

Jeffery Epstein continued to weave himself into the fabric of government like a good psychopath would. He was by no means the only one.

[Jul 29, 2019] American Ron Unz on Pizzagate

Highly recommended!
Jul 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

I don't use Social Media myself, but near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, I gradually began seeing more and more Trump supporters referring to something called "Pizzagate," a burgeoning sexual scandal that they claimed would bring down Hillary Clinton and many of the top leaders of her party, with the chatter actually increasing after Trump was elected. As near as I could tell, the whole bizarre theory had grown up on the far-right fringe of the Internet, with the utterly fantastical plot having something to do with stolen secret emails, DC pizza parlors, and a ring of pedophiles situated near the top of the Democratic Party. But given all the other strange and unlikely things I'd gradually discovered about our history, it didn't seem like something I could necessarily dismiss out of hand.

At the beginning of December, a right-wing blogger produced a lengthy exposition of the Pizzagate charges, which finally gave me some understanding of what was actually under discussion, and I soon made arrangements to republish his article. It quickly attracted a great deal of interest, and some websites pointed to it as the best single introduction to the scandal for a general audience.

Pizzagate Aedon Cassiel • December 2, 2016 • 3,100 Words

A couple of weeks later, I republished an additional article by the same writer, describing a long list of previous pedophilia scandals that had occurred in elite American and European political circles. Although many of these seemed to be solidly documented, nearly all of them had received minimal coverage by our mainstream media outlets. And if such political pedophile rings had existed in the relatively recent past, was it so totally implausible that there might be another one simmering beneath the surface of today's Washington DC?

Precedents for Pizzagate Aedon Cassiel • December 23, 2016 • 6,200 Words

Those interested in the details of the Pizzagate Hypothesis are advised to read these articles, especially the first one, but I might as well provide a brief summary.

John Podesta had been a longtime fixture in DC political circles, becoming chief of staff to President Bill Clinton in 1998, and afterward remaining one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party establishment. While serving as as chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, his apparent carelessness with the password security of his Gmail account allowed it to easily be hacked, and tens of thousands of his personal emails were soon published on WikiLeaks. A swarm of young anti-Clinton activists began scouring this treasure-trove of semi-confidential information, seeking evidence of mundane bribery and corruption, but instead they came across some quite odd exchanges, seemingly written in coded language.

Now use of coded language in a supposedly secure private email account raises all sorts of natural suspicions regarding what might have been under discussion, with the most likely possibilities being illegal drugs or sex. But most of the references didn't seem to fit the former category, and in our remarkably libertine era, in which political candidates compete for the right to be Grand Marshal at an annual Gay Pride Parade, one of the few sexual activities still discussed only in whispers would seem to be pedophilia, with some of the very strange remarks possibly hinting at this.

The researchers also soon discovered that his brother Tony Podesta, one of the wealthiest and most successful lobbyists in DC, had extremely odd taste in art. Major items of his very extensive personal collection seemed to represent tortured or murdered bodies, and one of his favorite artists was best known for paintings depicting young children being held captive, lying dead, or suffering under severe distress. Such peculiar artwork obviously isn't illegal, but it might naturally arouse some suspicions. And oddly enough, arch-Democrat Podesta had long been a close personal friend of former Republican Speaker and convicted child-molester Dennis Hastert, welcoming him back into DC society after his release from prison.

Furthermore, some of the rather suspiciously-worded Podesta emails referred to events held at a local DC pizza parlor, greatly favored by the Democratic Party elite, whose owner was the gay former boyfriend of David Brock, a leading Democratic activist. The public Instagram account of that pizza-entrepreneur apparently contained numerous images of young children, sometimes tied or bound, with those images frequently labeled by hashtags using the traditional gay slang for underage sexual targets . Some photos showed the fellow wearing a tee-shirt bearing the statement "I Love Children" in French, and by a very odd coincidence, his possibly assumed name was phonetically identical to that very same French phrase, thus proclaiming to the world that he was "a lover of children." Closely connected Instagram accounts also included pictures of young children, sometimes shown amid piles of high-value currency, with queries about how much those particular children might be worth. None of this seemed illegal, but surely any reasonable person would regard the material as extremely suspicious.

DC is sometimes described as "Powertown," being the seat of the individuals who make America's laws and govern our society, with local political journalists being closely attuned to the relative status of such individuals. And oddly enough, GQ Magazine had ranked that gay pizza parlor owner with a strange focus on young children as being one of the 50 most powerful people in our national capital, placing him far ahead of many Cabinet members, Senators, Congressional Chairmen, Supreme Court justices, and top lobbyists. Was his pizza really that delicious?

These few paragraphs provide merely a sliver of the large quantity of highly-suspicious material surrounding various powerful figures at the apex of the DC political world. A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation.

I usually regard videos as a poor means of imparting serious information, far less effective and meaningful than the simple printed word. But the overwhelming bulk of the evidence supporting the Pizzagate Hypothesis consists of visual images and screen shots, and these are naturally suited to a video presentation.

Some of the best summaries of the Pizzagate case were produced by a young British YouTuber named Tara McCarthy, whose work was published under the name of "Reality Calls," and her videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Although her channel was eventually banned and her videos purged, copies were later reloaded to other accounts, both on YouTube and BitChute. Some of the evidence she presents seemed rather innocuous or speculative to me and other elements were probably based upon her unfamiliarity with American society and culture. But a great deal of extremely suspicious material remains, and I would suggest that people watch the videos and decide for themselves.

Around the same time that I first became familiar with the details of the Pizzagate controversy, the topic also started reaching the pages of my morning newspapers, but in an rather strange manner. Political stories began giving a sentence or two to the "Pizzagate hoax," describing it as a ridiculous right-wing "conspiracy theory" but excluding all relevant details. I had an eery feeling that some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch causing the entire mainstream media to begin displaying identical signs declaring "Pizzagate Is False -- Nothing To See There!" in brightly flashing neon. I couldn't recall any previous example of such a strange media reaction to some obscure Internet controversy.

Articles in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times also suddenly appeared denouncing the entirety of the alternative media -- Left, Right, and Libertarian -- as "fake news" websites promoting Russian propaganda , while urging that their content be blocked by all patriotic Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Prior to that moment, I'd never even heard the term "fake news" but suddenly it was ubiquitous across the media, once again almost as if some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch.

I naturally began to wonder whether the timing of these two strange developments was entirely coincidental. Perhaps Pizzagate was indeed true and struck so deeply at the core of our hugely corrupted political system that the media efforts to suppress it were approaching the point of hysteria.

Not long afterward, Tara McCarthy's detailed Pizzagate videos were purged from YouTube. This was among the very first instances of video content being banned despite fully conforming to all existing YouTube guidelines, another deeply suspicious development.

I also noticed that mere mention of Pizzagate had become politically lethal. Donald Trump had selected Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as his National Security Advisor, and Flynn's son served as the latter's chief of staff. The younger Flynn happened to Tweet out a couple of links to Pizzagate stories, pointing out that the accusations hadn't yet been actually investigated let alone disproven, and very soon afterward, he was purged from the Trump transition team, foreshadowing his father's fall a few weeks later. It seemed astonishing to me that a few simple Tweets about an Internet controversy could have such huge real-life impact near the top of our government.

The media continued its uniform drumbeat of "Pizzagate Has Been Disproven!" but we were never told how or by whom, and I was not the only individual to notice the hollowness of such denunciations. An award-winning investigative journalist named Ben Swann at a CBS station in Atlanta broadcast a short television segment summarizing the Pizzagate controversy and noting that contrary to widespread media claims, Pizzagate had neither been investigated nor debunked. Swann was almost immediately purged by CBS but a copy of his television segment remains available for viewing on the Internet.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-GZFHLAcG8A?feature=oembed

There is an old wartime proverb that enemy flak is always heaviest over the most important target, and the remarkably ferocious wave of attacks and censorship against anyone broaching the subject of Pizzagate seems to raise obvious dark suspicions. Indeed, the simultaneous waves of attacks against all alternative media outlets as "Russian propaganda outlets" laid the basis for the continuing regime of Social Media censorship that has become a central aspect of today's world.

Pizzagate may or may not turn out to be true, but the ongoing Internet crackdown has similarly engulfed topics of a somewhat similar nature but with vastly stronger documentation. Although I don't use Twitter myself, I encountered the obvious implications of this new censorship policy following McCain's death last August. The senator had died on a Saturday afternoon, and readership of Sydney Schanberg's long 2008 expose quickly exploded, with numerous individuals Tweeting out the story and a large fraction of our incoming traffic therefore coming from Twitter. This continued until the following morning, at which point the huge flood of Tweets continued to grow, but all incoming Twitter traffic suddenly and permanently vanished, presumably because "shadow banning" had rendered those Tweets invisible. My own article on McCain's very doubtful war record simultaneously suffered the same fate, as did numerous other articles of a controversial nature that we published later that same week.

Perhaps that censorship decision was made by some ignorant young intern at Twitter, casually choosing to ban as "hate speech" or "fake news" a massively-documented 8,400 word expose by one of America's most distinguished journalists, a Pulitzer-prize winning former top editor at The New York Times .

Or perhaps certain political-puppeteers who had spent decades controlling that late Arizona senator sought to ensure that their political puppet-strings remained invisible even after his death.

[Jul 29, 2019] The hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy".

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... " that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise." ..."
"... "Indeed, under our putative system of democracy, especially since JFK, the oligarchy will not allow the election of any candidate who cannot be blackmailed." ..."
"... No wonder the shenannigans of compromised office-holding puppets (actors, really) and their shadowy string-pullers never seem to be known to their spear-carriers in MSM. ..."
Jul 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

St-Germain , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:25 pm GMT

Kudos, Ron Unz. Excellent article and a useful tutorial on the hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy".

I applaud your parlor joke:

" that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise."

A great French investigative reporter crafted an unfunny version:

"Indeed, under our putative system of democracy, especially since JFK, the oligarchy will not allow the election of any candidate who cannot be blackmailed."

-- Thierry Meyssan, Before our very eyes -- fake wars and big lies from 9/11 to Donald Trump , p. 146.

He had just described the 911 caper as a Cheney-led deep-state coup to activate the secret but long-standing CoG procedure to sideline the Constitution. It succeeded when clueless Dubya was reinstated as figure-head president within 24 hours after agreeing to the clique's CoG (continuity of government) agenda, including the planned wars.

No wonder the shenannigans of compromised office-holding puppets (actors, really) and their shadowy string-pullers never seem to be known to their spear-carriers in MSM.

[Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "After watching seven hours of a spectacle that felt much more cruel than enlightening, I cannot avoid pondering a question which honestly gives me no joy to ponder: just how much damage has MSNBC in particular done to the left?" The Hill's Rising star began, before excoriating her former employer's "fevered speculations" about an "Infowars conspiracy theory" and the way it hosted people like Jonathan "maybe Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s" Chait and "conspiracy gadfly Louise Mensch" in search of ratings bumps. ..."
"... "This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats' chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up," Ball argued. "Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, I don't know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers' movement, whether we're going to war with Iran? I'm just spitballing here. ..."
"... Ball argued that the fact that MSNBC is doing so much damage to the Democratic Party in the name of ratings proves that MSNBC isn't "on Team D in the same way that Fox News is on Team R", saying they're really just in it for the money. But this is where Ball gets it wrong. It is of course true that ratings are a factor, and that conspiracy theories can be used to sell advertising space, but MSNBC would have had a much easier time marketing conspiracy theories about Trump's loyalties to Israel and Saudi Arabia , both of which would have had vastly more factual evidence to back them up. The only difference is that the US-centralized empire doesn't have agendas that it wants to advance against those two countries. ..."
"... Ball is correct that MSNBC doesn't serve the Democratic party, but she's incorrect that it serves only money. MSNBC, which is now arguably a more aggressive war propaganda network than Fox News, serves first and foremost the US national security state. And so do all the other western mainstream news networks. ..."
"... From the Pentagon's point of view, US hegemony good, Russia-China alliance very, very bad. ..."
"... I t was determined with the help of influential neoconservative think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view became the establishment orthodoxy , any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An "attack" on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity is now treated as a direct attack on the empire. ..."
"... This is why we've seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as "enemies" as though they pose some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack. ..."
"... This "if you're not obeying us you're attacking us" mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a Russian "attack" on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government. It's got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans. It's about continuing to rule the world. ..."
Jul 28, 2019 | ronpaulinstitute.org

Former MSNBC host Krystal Ball slammed her ex-employer's relentless promotion of the Russiagate conspiracy theory following the embarrassing spectacle of Robert Mueller's hearing before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday.

"After watching seven hours of a spectacle that felt much more cruel than enlightening, I cannot avoid pondering a question which honestly gives me no joy to ponder: just how much damage has MSNBC in particular done to the left?" The Hill's Rising star began, before excoriating her former employer's "fevered speculations" about an "Infowars conspiracy theory" and the way it hosted people like Jonathan "maybe Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s" Chait and "conspiracy gadfly Louise Mensch" in search of ratings bumps.

"This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats' chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up," Ball argued. "Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, I don't know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers' movement, whether we're going to war with Iran? I'm just spitballing here.

I actually heard some pundit on Chris Hayes last night opine that independent women in middle America were going to be swayed by what Mueller said yesterday. Are you kidding me? This is almost as bonkers and lacking in factual basis as that time Mimi Rocah said that Bernie Sanders is not pro-women because that was what her feelings told her. Rocah, by the way, a political prosecutor with no political background, is only opining at MSNBC because of her role in leading viewers to believe that any day now SDNY is going to bring down Trump and his entire family."

Ball argued that the fact that MSNBC is doing so much damage to the Democratic Party in the name of ratings proves that MSNBC isn't "on Team D in the same way that Fox News is on Team R", saying they're really just in it for the money. But this is where Ball gets it wrong. It is of course true that ratings are a factor, and that conspiracy theories can be used to sell advertising space, but MSNBC would have had a much easier time marketing conspiracy theories about Trump's loyalties to Israel and Saudi Arabia , both of which would have had vastly more factual evidence to back them up. The only difference is that the US-centralized empire doesn't have agendas that it wants to advance against those two countries.

Ball is correct that MSNBC doesn't serve the Democratic party, but she's incorrect that it serves only money. MSNBC, which is now arguably a more aggressive war propaganda network than Fox News, serves first and foremost the US national security state. And so do all the other western mainstream news networks.

Consider the way the Syrian province of Idlib is being reported on right now, to pick one of many possible examples. Al-Qaeda-controlled Idlib is the final stronghold of the extremist militant groups that the US and its allies flooded Syria with in a premeditated campaign to effect regime change, and Syria and its allies are fighting to recapture the region. They are using methods that are identical to those commonly used by the US and its allies, yet the bombing campaigns of the US-centralized empire receive virtually no critical coverage while western mainstream outlets like CNN and the BBC are churning out brazenly propagandistic pieces about the evils of the Assad coalition's airstrikes.

"Civilians are dying in Idlib, just as they died in their thousands in recent US UK air strikes in eg Raqqa and Mosul," political analyst Charles Shoebridge observed on Twitter today. "The difference is that when it's (often unverified) claims that Russia or Syria are doing the killing, US UK media make it front page news."

There are many gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative that outlets like MSNBC have been bashing everyone over the head with, but the most obvious and easily provable of them is the indisputable fact that Donald Trump has escalated tensions against Russia more than any US president in decades. You never hear anyone talk about this self-evident fact in all the endless yammering about Russia, though, because it doesn't advance the agendas of either of America's two mainstream parties, and it doesn't advance the interests of US imperialism. Democrats don't like acknowledging the fact that Trump has been consistently and aggressively working directly against the interests of Moscow , and Trump supporters don't like acknowledging that their president is just as much of a neocon-coddling globalist as those they claim to oppose, so the war machine has gone conveniently unchallenged in manufacturing new cold war escalations against a nation they've had marked for destruction since the fall of the Soviet Union.

In a very interesting new Grayzone interview packed full of ideas that you'll never hear voiced on western mass media, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov spoke openly about the various ways that Russia, China, and other nations who've resisted absorption into the blob of the US power alliance have been working toward the creation of a multipolar world. Ryabkov said other nations have been watching the way the dominance of the US dollar has been used to economically terrorize noncompliant nations into subservience by way of sanctions and other manipulations, with Washington expecting that the dollar and the US financial system will remain "the cardiovascular system of the whole organism."

"That will not be the case," Ryabkov said. "People will bypass, in literal terms. And people will find ways how to defend themselves, how to protect themselves, how to guarantee themselves against any emergencies if someone comes up at the White House or whatever, at the Treasury, at the State, and says 'Hey guys, now we should stop what is going on in Country X, and let's squeeze them out.' And this country sits on the dollar. So they will be done the moment those ideas will be pronounced. So China, Russia and others, we create alternatives that we will most probably continue using not just national currencies, but baskets of currencies, currencies of third countries, other modern barter schemes."

"We will use ways that will diminish the role of dollar and US banking system with all these risks of assets and transactions being arrested, being stopped," Ryabkov concluded.

That, right there, is the real reason you're being sold Russia hysteria today.

And it isn't just on the matter of financial systems in which the unabsorbed powers are uniting against the imperial blob. Russia and China just carried out their first joint air patrol on Tuesday, drawing a hostile response from imperial vassals Japan and South Korea.

"Russian and Chinese bombers on 'first' joint patrol in the Asia-Pacific region. The China-Russia alliance has become a reality and will last for long time," reads a post by one Russian Twitter commentator in response to the news.

The emergence of this alliance, which the Chinese government has warned Washington is 'not vulnerable to interference', has been something the west has feared for a long time. A Pentagon white paper published this past May titled "Russian Strategic Intentions" mentions the word "China" 108 times. Some noteworthy excerpts:

I think you get the picture. From the Pentagon's point of view, US hegemony good, Russia-China alliance very, very bad. Analysts like the white paper's authors, and even The New York Times editorial board , have urged the drivers of US foreign policy to attempt to lure Moscow away from Beijing, the latter rightly perceived as the greater long-term threat to US dominance due to China's surging economic power. But diplomacy has clearly been ruled out toward this end, with only a steadily escalating campaign to shove Russia off the world stage now deemed acceptable.

It was determined with the help of influential neoconservative think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view became the establishment orthodoxy , any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An "attack" on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity is now treated as a direct attack on the empire.

This is why we've seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as "enemies" as though they pose some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack.

This "if you're not obeying us you're attacking us" mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a Russian "attack" on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government. It's got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans. It's about continuing to rule the world.

Reprinted with permission from Medium.com . Support Ms. Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal .

[Jul 29, 2019] Looks like Epstein turned informant for Mueller s FBI in 2008. Likely earlier

Highly recommended!
Did Mueller done this at the request of Clintons?
Notable quotes:
"... That was while Robert Mueller ran the Bureau, which means everything about Epstein's blackmail and kompromat operation has been tucked safely away out of sight in FBI files for at least a decade. Much longer, new evidence shows. ..."
"... *CIA Acknowledged in 2003, It Knew that Ghislaine Maxwell's Late Father was a Major Foreign Intelligence Agent Operating Inside the U.S. ..."
"... That Robert Maxwell was a ruthless, corrupt, tax-dodging international businessman who served as an Israeli agent is highly probable. ..."
"... For the first time, Maxwell had failed to get his own way. He started to threaten and bluster. He then demanded that, for past services, he should receive immediately a quick fix of £400million to bale him out of his financial difficulties. ..."
"... Instead of providing the money, a small group of Mossad officers set about planning his murder. They feared that he was going to publicly expose all Mossad had done in the time he worked for them. They knew that he was gradually becoming mentally unstable and paranoid. He was taking a cocktail of drugs - Halcion and Zanax - which had serious side effects. ..."
"... Then Maxwell was contacted. He was told to fly to Gibraltar, go aboard the Lady Ghislaine and sail to the Canary Islands. There at sea he would receive his £400million quick fix in the form of a banker's draft. Maxwell did as he was told. ..."
"... As Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent told us: "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over." ..."
"... The incontrovertible facts about his murder are contained in a previously-unseen autopsy report by Britain's then-leading forensic pathologist Dr Iain West and Israel State Pathologist Dr Yehuda Hiss. Of all the documents in our possession, these reports confirm the truth about Maxwell's death. ..."
"... Boy that Mueller has had a busy career hasn't he? Didn't he start out in Chicago where he gave Whitey Bulgar cover for being a mob boss? Then there's his cover up before and after 9/11. The weapons of mass destruction that he said Saddam had. The anthrax prosecution, Epstein's pedophilia cover up, HSBC and now he is trying to cover Hillary's buttocks. And maybe Obama's? I'm sure I've missed a few things that he did or didn't do. ..."
"... Acosta was told to stand down by someone at the top of the food chain. Mueller. Ugh what a slimy piece of work he is. But not to the Russia Gaters. Oh no. "He is a highly decorated marine who takes no guff from anyone. ..."
"... In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe. ..."
"... Inquiring minds want to know did Maxwell have access to Margaret and Ron because they liked him or because he had something on them? ..."
"... Epstein is the destruction of the Deep State. ..."
"... That pedophelia and politics scandal, better known as the Franklin Coverup, made the papers for a few months, too, before it was made to go away. Similarly, a couple of the operators served some time on reduced charges after that one. ..."
"... The two main suspects in the Bush, Sr. White House child ring were Craig Spence and Lawrence E. King Jr. King sang the National anthem at two GOP national conventions. He served time in jail for bank fraud. Spence was a Republican lobbyist before he committed suicide. Several of his partners went to jail for being involved in the adult part of the homosexual prostitution ring. ..."
"... Mueller's scrupulous avoidance of the CIA link in his prosecution of Manuel Noriega and his diversion of the PanAm 103 bombing and framing of two Libyans. Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation. ..."
"... Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation. ..."
"... The anthrax investigation is the most serious of his crimes. Mueller is being sued by his lead investigator in that case. ..."
"... Every now and then, here and there the curtain lifts for a moment and the political elite of a country, the business elite, the spy services, the military, and organized crime are revealed to be all working together, indeed practically joined at the hip ..."
"... partnership started during the early Cold War with US intelligence officers facilitating the drug trade out of Turkey and Burma through Europe. That soon spread to the Americas and globally. Covert operations such as Gladio, Condor, and the Safari Club, and associated banks (Franklin National Bank, BCCI, Riggs Bank, HSBC, etc.) produced massive human rights violations, transnational terrorism and governmental corruption. The CIA's secret wars provided funds and official cover for private-public sector alliance of criminals, bankers and spooks around the world. ..."
"... The CIA, MI6 and Mossad ran overlapping coordinated operations using privateers, paramilitaries and organized crime networks that consumed vast amounts of cash generated by money laundering mechanisms. Enriched by the looting of the former Soviet Union, along with the infusion of Arab oil money (the Saudi Yamamah slush fund), the "Octopus" became the instrument of Oligarchs that have thoroughly corrupted western governments and secret services. ..."
"... The Snowden release included a number of documents that illustrate the on-line entrapment and political disruption activities run by the two main communications intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Epstein recruits young girls, throws parties where he invites potential hedge fund clients, lets nature take its course and films the proceedings, extracts blackmail in the form of investments to his (largely fake) hedge fund, which actually just buys an index fund (no actual fund management required). He takes a percentage from the coerced investments. Nobody talks because they have too much to lose. No suspicious payments to raise eyebrows at the IRS. ..."
"... Epstein brought in the clients. The CIA/MI-6/Mossad provided necessary cover from the FBI and local cops - then, three or four agencies shared the intelligence take, as they had for decades from Robert Maxwell's operations. ..."
"... For Ghislaine, it was simply carrying on the family business for fun and profit. For the spooks, it was business as usual going back to the Green House, the Berlin bordello founded in the the 1870s by Wilhelm Steiber, a Prussian Police section chief, to provide useful intelligence to Bismarck's Military Intelligence, which he reorganized. ..."
"... Epstein is also well acquainted with University President Lawrence H. Summers. The two serve together on the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two elite international relations organizations. ..."
"... Epstein's relationships within the academy are remarkable since the tycoon, who has amassed his fortune by managing the wealth of billionaires from his private Caribbean island, does not hold a bachelor's degree. ..."
"... There's a rocky road ahead for Larry Summers. Summers introduces Epstein into the Harvard fold, but becomes reckless with his newly-refined Neoliberalism and his opinions concerning "lady scholars." ..."
Jul 11, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

leveymg on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 11:30am

That was while Robert Mueller ran the Bureau, which means everything about Epstein's blackmail and kompromat operation has been tucked safely away out of sight in FBI files for at least a decade. Much longer, new evidence shows.

For those who may have wondered why Epstein was given such an incredible deal in sentencing, that explains it. Epstein was an extraordinary value informant, and he leveraged it. https://truepundit.com/fbi-pedophile-jeffrey-epstein-was-informant-for-m...

A figure who often gets overlooked in this is Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's chief procurer of underage girls. Ghislaine, the daughter of publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, was granted immunity and never charged in exchange for her own cooperation in the 2008 pseudo-prosecution. https://heavy.com/news/2019/03/ghislaine-maxwell/ ; https://pagesix.com/2016/03/17/alleged-epstein-madam-forced-to-hand-over...

The real question is, why did the FBI wait for more than a decade to bust Epstein and Maxwell?

Epstein and Maxwell came to the attention of the FBI in 1996, when, curiously, the Bureau never acted on an accusation that they had together sexually abused a 15 year old girl in a bedroom inside Epstein's Manhattan townhouse. Documents in a recent law suit filed by an alleged victim, Maria Farmer, show that the FBI had been aware of Epstein and Maxwell's child abuse activities in New York for at least a dozen years before Epstein was finally charged in 2008 with much-reduced Florida state offenses. https://www.yourtango.com/2019323698/who-maria-farmer-latest-woman-accus...

Farmer claims she reported her sexual assault to New York police and the FBI in 1996. "To my knowledge, I was the first person to report Maxwell and Epstein to the FBI," she wrote in her affidavit."

*CIA Acknowledged in 2003, It Knew that Ghislaine Maxwell's Late Father was a Major Foreign Intelligence Agent Operating Inside the U.S.

Previously, Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, had for many years been known to have been involved in high-level espionage in the United States, as detailed in a 2003 publication of the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf . Therein, the CIA reviewer of a biography by British author Gordon Thomas acknowledged about Maxwell: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-pub...

That Robert Maxwell was a ruthless, corrupt, tax-dodging international businessman who served as an Israeli agent is highly probable.

For the deeper background to the Epstein-Maxwell multinational blackmail, coverup and kompromat operation, we have to look at the events that led up to the 1991 death of Robert Maxwell. A summary of the Maxwell bio by its authors recounts:

British Publisher Robert Maxwell
Was Mossad Spy
By Gordon Thomas And Martin Dillon
The Mirror - UK
12-6-2002
[ . . .]
Eleven years after former Daily Mirror owner Robert Maxwell plunged from his luxury yacht to a watery grave, his death still arouses intense interest.

Many different theories have circulated about what really happened on board the Lady Ghislaine that night in May 1991.

[ . . . ]

The Jewish millionaire and former Labour MP [born Ludvik Hoch
in Czechoslovakia] died the way he had lived - threatening.

He had threatened his wife. Threatened his children. Threatened the staff of this newspaper.

But finally he issued one threat too many - he threatened Mossad.

He told them that unless they gave him £400million to save his crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them.

In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe.

On top of that he had built himself a position of power within the crime families of eastern Europe, teaching them how to funnel their vast wealth from drugs, arms smuggling and prostitution to banks in safe havens around the globe.

Maxwell passed on all the secrets he learned to Mossad in Tel Aviv. In turn, they tolerated his excesses, vanities and insatiable appetite for a luxurious lifestyle and women.

He told his controllers who they should target and how they should do it. He appointed himself as Israel's unofficial ambassador to the Soviet Bloc. Mossad saw the advantage in that.

[ . . . ]

The more successful Maxwell became the more risks he took and the more dangerous he was to Mossad. At the same time, the very public side of Maxwell, who then owned 400 companies, began to unwind.

He spent lavishly and lost money on deals. The more he lost, the more he tried to claw money from the banks. Then he saw a way out of his problems.

He was approached by Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB. Spymaster and tycoon met in the utmost secrecy in the Kremlin.

Kryuchkov had an extraordinary proposal. He wanted Maxwell to help orchestrate the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader. That would bring to an end a fledgling democracy and a return to the Cold War days.

In return, Maxwell's massive debts would be wiped out by a grateful Kryuchkov, who planned to replace Gorbachev. The KGB chief wanted Maxwell to use the Lady Ghislaine, named after Maxwell's daughter, as a meeting place between the Russian plotters, Mossad chiefs and Israel's top politicians.

The plan was for the Israelis to go to Washington and say that democracy could not work in Russia and that it was better to allow the country to return to a modified form of communism, which America could help to control. In return, Kryuchkov would guarantee to free hundreds of thousands of Jews and dissidents in the Soviet republics.

Kryuchkov told Maxwell that he would be seen as a saviour of all those Jews. It was a proposal he could not refuse. But when he put it to his Mossad controllers they were horrified. They said Israel would have no part in such a madcap plan.

For the first time, Maxwell had failed to get his own way. He started to threaten and bluster. He then demanded that, for past services, he should receive immediately a quick fix of £400million to bale him out of his financial difficulties.

Instead of providing the money, a small group of Mossad officers set about planning his murder. They feared that he was going to publicly expose all Mossad had done in the time he worked for them. They knew that he was gradually becoming mentally unstable and paranoid. He was taking a cocktail of drugs - Halcion and Zanax - which had serious side effects.

The group of Mossad plotters sensed, like Solomon, he could bring their temple tumbling down and cause incalculable harm to Israel. The plan to kill him was prepared in the utmost secrecy. A four-man squad was briefed.

Then Maxwell was contacted. He was told to fly to Gibraltar, go aboard the Lady Ghislaine and sail to the Canary Islands. There at sea he would receive his £400million quick fix in the form of a banker's draft. Maxwell did as he was told.

On the night of November 4, 1991, the Lady Ghislaine, one of the world's biggest yachts, was at sea.

[ . . . ]

As Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent told us: "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over."

The incontrovertible facts about his murder are contained in a previously-unseen autopsy report by Britain's then-leading forensic pathologist Dr Iain West and Israel State Pathologist Dr Yehuda Hiss. Of all the documents in our possession, these reports confirm the truth about Maxwell's death.

Gordon Thomas & Martin Dillon are authors of The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy, published by Robson Books.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12419168&method=f...

The obvious question, why did the U.S. government let these intelligence crimes continue for decades, isn't being asked. The answer is almost self-evident. Information and leverage obtained by Maxwell-Epstein and Co. was far too valuable to its several operators to let it all end too soon.

###

Linda Wood on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 12:45pm
Two parts of your reporting

leap out at me as suggesting how Epstein connects to much bigger subjects. First is the assertion that Maxwell was

... teaching them how to funnel their vast wealth from drugs, arms smuggling and prostitution to banks in safe havens around the globe.

This area of trafficking and money laundering directly connects to Mueller and his essential exoneration of HSBC .

The other quotation that suggests the importance of money laundering is here:

The plan was for the Israelis to go to Washington and say that democracy could not work in Russia and that it was better to allow the country to return to a modified form of communism, which America could help to control.

The life's work of Antony Sutton at Stanford's Hoover Institution shows that American industry was ALWAYS controlling communism as well as Soviet industrial development, and that a trend toward social democracy, represented by Gorbachev, would have put an end to that control.

leveymg on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 4:29pm
Curiously, the CIA review of the Maxwell bio doesn't touch on

@Linda Wood his money laundering and blackmailing activities. While the review confirms that Robert Maxwell was for decades a major Mossad agent actively setting up operations and cover in the United States and the UK, I can only surmise that the spreading political influence of Eastern European organized crime networks and child honey traps are things that the Agency didn't want to discuss publicly in 2003.

As for Mueller, let's not forget that he was FBI Director and before that the head of the Criminal Division at Main Justice at the time that global "black finance" grew along with the catastrophic spread of multinational crime and terrorism. BCCI, Iran-Contra, 9/11, and the rise of transnational Oligarchs happened on his watch. As the Chief Law Enforcement Officer in the United States at the time, it is hard to imagine anyone more responsibility for the ultimate consequences than Robert Mueller. There is perhaps someone who bears ultimate responsibility, the President who appointed Mueller: George Herbert Walker Bush and his lesser son, Shrub, who promoted him.

Pluto's Republic on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 5:21pm
From your own research

@leveymg

... wouldn't you assume that this entire affair is an ongoing Mossad operation, which may or may not have concluded? The US IC is just another operative inside the envelope, but Mossad owns the assets and the intellectual property. I think we could assume that some of this is automated and Mossad has ongoing leverage still in play.

The obvious question, why did the U.S. government let these intelligence crimes continue for decades, isn't being asked. The answer is almost self-evident. Information and leverage obtained by Maxwell-Epstein and Co. was far too valuable to its several operators to let it all end too soon.

.

Mossad's legendary blackmail traps ensnared even high-level deep state authorities and made them pliable. The recent history of United States foreign policy is an enigma that can only be solved when that assumption is inserted. Once the assumption is in place, it opens like a Pandora's box. Don't you find that to be the case?

Thanks for compiling this revealing argument.

Deja on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 11:03pm
HSBC?

@Linda Wood
From your link:

In a recent investigation I presented the case that British banking and financial giant HSBC conspired with banking institutions with documented links to terrorist financing, including those responsible for helping bankroll the 9/11 attacks.

Thank you for the link!

Linda Wood on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 1:11pm
HSBC article

linked here does not mention Mueller but does outline the crimes Mueller worked so hard not to solve:

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2012/07/black-dossier-hsbc-terro...

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2012
Black Dossier: HSBC & Terrorist Finance

Moral equivalencies abound. After all, when American secret state agencies manage drug flows or direct terrorist proxies to attack official enemies it's not quite the same as battling terror or crime.

Pounding home that point, a new report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused HSBC of exposing "the U.S. financial system to a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing risks due to poor anti-money laundering (AML) controls."

That 335-page report, "U.S. Vulnerabilities to Money Laundering, Drugs, and Terrorist Financing: HSBC Case History," (large pdf file available here ) was issued after a year-long Senate investigation zeroed-in on the bank's U.S. affiliate, HSBC Bank USA, N.A., better known as HBUS.

Drilling down, we learned that amongst the "services" offered by HSBC subsidiaries and correspondent banks were sweet deals with financial entities with terrorist ties; the transportation of billions of dollars in cash by plane and armored car through their London Banknotes division; the clearing of sequentially-numbered travelers checks through dodgy Cayman Islands accounts for Mexican drug lords and Russian mafiosi.

From richly-appointed suites at Canary Wharf, London, the bank's "smartest guys in the room" handed some of the most violent gangsters on earth the financial wherewithal to organize their respective industries: global crime.

A case in point. In 2008 alone the Senate revealed that the bank's Cayman Islands branch handled some 50,000 client accounts (all without benefit of offices or staff on Grand Cayman, mind you), yet still managed to ship some $7 billion (£10.9bn) in cash from Mexico into the U.S. Now that's creative accounting!...

Alligator Ed on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 10:49pm
Thank you, Linda

@Linda Wood HSBC, huh--there must be some clever name for it, which deserves no research.
what an eloquent article you presented. Brief but right on target. It isn't just sex, drugs and rock and roll. Now it is drugs - money -sexual perversion--and perhaps worse? Rumors are flying about what video on the Weiner laptop showed. It is strictly heresay, but a core of folks seem to believe the suspicions are possible.

snoopydawg on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 8:48pm
Boy that Mueller has had a busy career hasn't he? Didn't he start out in Chicago where he gave Whitey Bulgar cover for being a mob boss? Then there's his cover up before and after 9/11. The weapons of mass destruction that he said Saddam had. The anthrax prosecution, Epstein's pedophilia cover up, HSBC and now he is trying to cover Hillary's buttocks. And maybe Obama's? I'm sure I've missed a few things that he did or didn't do.

Acosta is saying that if he hadn't made the plea deal then Epstein would never have served any time in prison. Well he actually only slept there since he got to leave every day for work and then there's the massages he got after his busy day at work. But there were more than 80 pages that the Feds wrote on his escapades so I think that story he told congress is true. Acosta was told to stand down by someone at the top of the food chain. Mueller. Ugh what a slimy piece of work he is. But not to the Russia Gaters. Oh no. "He is a highly decorated marine who takes no guff from anyone.

In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe.

Inquiring minds want to know did Maxwell have access to Margaret and Ron because they liked him or because he had something on them?

Great information! The more I learn the more I need a shower.

Linda Wood on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 9:11pm
That needing a shower thing

@snoopydawg

is how I've been feeling all week from reading about this, just more and more demoralized when I think about the depravation of our so-called "leadership." What is it that we're supposed to think of as the new normal after this behavior?

Alligator Ed on Thu, 07/11/2019 - 10:53pm
Linda, you could shower in my extra long tub

@Linda Wood No problem--but, seriously, yecch! Epstein is the destruction of the Deep State.

leveymg on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 1:02pm
Remember Craig Spence and the 1989 Whitehouse Call Boy Ring?

@snoopydawg

That pedophelia and politics scandal, better known as the Franklin Coverup, made the papers for a few months, too, before it was made to go away. Similarly, a couple of the operators served some time on reduced charges after that one.

The two main suspects in the Bush, Sr. White House child ring were Craig Spence and Lawrence E. King Jr. King sang the National anthem at two GOP national conventions. He served time in jail for bank fraud. Spence was a Republican lobbyist before he committed suicide. Several of his partners went to jail for being involved in the adult part of the homosexual prostitution ring.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/Franklin/FranklinCoverup/l...

Roy Blakeley on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 12:29pm
And let's not forget

@snoopydawg

Mueller's scrupulous avoidance of the CIA link in his prosecution of Manuel Noriega and his diversion of the PanAm 103 bombing and framing of two Libyans. Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation.

Linda Wood on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 1:09pm
Absolutely.

@Roy Blakeley

You sum it up perfectly:

Bobby Mueller has been a real go to guy when the security establishment needs a phony investigation.

The anthrax investigation is the most serious of his crimes. Mueller is being sued by his lead investigator in that case.

Because researchers in our biological weapons labs went public with what they were doing, and where such research was being done in the U.S., we learned the CIA was one of several outfits doing biological weapons research.

But Mueller exonerated all of them, including the CIA, with no explanation and only focused on a lone vaccine researcher at the Army lab when journalists began to ask why no one had been indicted after seven years of investigation, at which point the FBI attempted to harass the suspect into committing suicide.

lotlizard on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 1:44am
Comparable to "Deep State" scandals in Turkey?

Every now and then, here and there the curtain lifts for a moment and the political elite of a country, the business elite, the spy services, the military, and organized crime are revealed to be all working together, indeed practically joined at the hip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susurluk_scandal

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/ergenekon-plot-massive-trial-...

leveymg on Sat, 07/13/2019 - 11:08am
Read "Politics of Heroin in SE Asia". The CIA-Mafia-warlord

@lotlizard @lotlizard

partnership started during the early Cold War with US intelligence officers facilitating the drug trade out of Turkey and Burma through Europe. That soon spread to the Americas and globally. Covert operations such as Gladio, Condor, and the Safari Club, and associated banks (Franklin National Bank, BCCI, Riggs Bank, HSBC, etc.) produced massive human rights violations, transnational terrorism and governmental corruption. The CIA's secret wars provided funds and official cover for private-public sector alliance of criminals, bankers and spooks around the world.

This "dark alliance" assumed a political and economic life of its own beyond its original intent to counter communist movements. By the Vietnam War, Agency operators were running most of the heroin trade in the world through proprietary airlines, banks and logistics companies. In the mid-1970s, CIA Director Bush expanded privatization with Saudi funding in his Safari Club deal that eventually morphed into Al Qaeda and ISIS.

The CIA, MI6 and Mossad ran overlapping coordinated operations using privateers, paramilitaries and organized crime networks that consumed vast amounts of cash generated by money laundering mechanisms. Enriched by the looting of the former Soviet Union, along with the infusion of Arab oil money (the Saudi Yamamah slush fund), the "Octopus" became the instrument of Oligarchs that have thoroughly corrupted western governments and secret services.

Multinational honey trap operations such as Maxwell-Epstein & Co. are an inevitable and continuing part of this privatization and criminalization of intelligence that stretches back to the days of Tom Braden and Cord Meyer handing out stacks of greenbacks to Mafiosi on the Corsican Docks.

leveymg on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 11:31am
NSA and GCHQ have gotten into the honeytrap and influence game

@leveymg

The Snowden release included a number of documents that illustrate the on-line entrapment and political disruption activities run by the two main communications intelligence agencies.

"Honey-trap; a great option. Very successful, when it works" (GCHQ, UK training program slide)

https://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2014/05/lots-of-secret-nsa-documents-plu...

The "Information Ops" category is of particular interest to me...

Does this really seem like the sort of thing that would be done only to a jihadist...?

WoodsDweller on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 1:48pm
Here's an interesting take

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/epstein-was-running-a-blackmail-scheme-...

Without quoting the whole thing (which is worth a read):

Epstein recruits young girls, throws parties where he invites potential hedge fund clients, lets nature take its course and films the proceedings, extracts blackmail in the form of investments to his (largely fake) hedge fund, which actually just buys an index fund (no actual fund management required). He takes a percentage from the coerced investments. Nobody talks because they have too much to lose. No suspicious payments to raise eyebrows at the IRS.

There's no need to invoke the Mafia/Russia/Mossad/CIA/etc, that's just needlessly overfitting.

Except such an operation would be quite attractive to intelligence services. Maybe they were in on the ground floor, maybe they made Epstein an offer he couldn't refuse once they heard about it.

leveymg on Sat, 07/13/2019 - 10:28am
My gut tells me that G. Maxwell provided the Know-how, and

@WoodsDweller

Epstein brought in the clients. The CIA/MI-6/Mossad provided necessary cover from the FBI and local cops - then, three or four agencies shared the intelligence take, as they had for decades from Robert Maxwell's operations.

For Ghislaine, it was simply carrying on the family business for fun and profit. For the spooks, it was business as usual going back to the Green House, the Berlin bordello founded in the the 1870s by Wilhelm Steiber, a Prussian Police section chief, to provide useful intelligence to Bismarck's Military Intelligence, which he reorganized.

Steiber is considered the father of modern espionage. His methods were vastly influential, and he attracted students from London, St. Petersburg to Tokyo. Each put their own national spin on the science of sexual blackmail. As for the Japanese, they are among the most interesting and innovative in their use of a parallel network of privatized intelligence services incorporating underworld Yakuzi groups alongside conventional military intelligence units. Using compromise, they gained and maintained control over Imperial Japan and its Colonies: https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/03/15/eastern-peril/

To realize these divinely inspired ambitions, Japan needed a modern espionage system. Adopting the German model, Japanese officials were sent to study under Wilhelm Stieber in the mid-1870s. Over the next decade Japan built up separate army and naval intelligence services, each with an accompanying branch of secret military police (Kempeitai for the army and Tokeitai for the navy). These latter organizations also provided an excellent counter-espionage service. However, where the Japanese were unique was in the use of spies belonging to unofficial secret societies working alongside or independently of the official intelligence agencies. These shadowy institutions were ultra-nationalist by nature, drawing their membership from a cross-section of Japanese society, including the military, politics, industry and Yakuza underworld. Under ruthless leadership, their henchmen would spy on, subvert and corrupt Japan's Far East neighbours.

For more on Steiber and his superior, von Hinckeldey, methods of international counter-insurgency, espionage, and political policing included deception and a forerunner of today's internet surveillance: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2006/11/29/275653/-

While armies are essential to the maintenance of autocracy, the preservation of dynastic rule and the prevention of democracy requires an effective secret police. The suppression of its middle-class constitutionalists [during the 1840s] was followed by the expansion of the Prussian political police under Karl Ludwig Friedrich von Hinckeldey.

Appointed police president of Berlin in late 1848, Hinckeldey was an innovator of many of the features of modern systematic political policing. Among the tactics that he introduced with his new police system in Berlin was the "Litfass columns". Named for Ernst Litfass, Frederick William's court printer, he had dozens of these large poles erected in strategic spots around Berlin. The public posting of political notices was then banned. By application to a state office for a waiver, however, the columns could be used to display messages. The police dutifully recorded the names of all who had applied. A. Richie, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1998 at p.134.

LEGACY OF THE LITFASS COLUMNS: A similar ploy was later adopted by the People's Republic of China. In the mid-1980s, the Communist authorities at first appear to tolerate the operation of a so-called Democracy Wall, where "dissidents" in Beijing could post political writings, initially, without being arrested. Similar walls then sprung up under the noses of the authorities in other Chinese cities. For this apparent opening to democracy, the Deng regime much applauded, particularly by some in the Reagan-Bush Administration, eager to legitimize the regime and its growing commercial ties with U.S. corporations. Eventually, many of those who had availed themselves of the wall to post political messages were, of course, arrested in the roundup of hundreds of thousands of democracy supporters that followed the Tienamen Square massacre. The impression of anonymity and "freedom" conveyed by the Internet, of course, presents a similar opportunity for police to cast a wide net for identifying persons and organizations who may not hold favor for the regime in power, or may not in the future.

Hinckeldey also founded the Police Union, the first recorded international network of counterrevolutionary police spies in modern times. Primarily made up of police officers from Prussia and the German states, the Union operated throughout Europe, Britain and in the United States. The Union was run by his deputy, the notorious police provocateur, Wilhelm Steiber, who would later reorganize the Okhrana along similar lines. Internationally active from 1851-1866, the Police Union, according to Mathieu Deflem, was "one of the first formal initiatives in industrial society to establish an organized police system across national borders."13

I disagree with the Alternet view on this. See, this is the norm. A purely private sexual blackmail ring of any scale would be the historical exception. It certainly wouldn't survive very long.

Pluto's Republic on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 5:45pm
This is a chilling thought I try to avoid.

@leveymg

...authorities at first appear to tolerate the operation of a so-called Democracy Wall, where "dissidents" in Beijing could post political writings.... Similar walls then sprung up under the noses of the authorities in other Chinese cities. Eventually, many of those who had availed themselves of the wall to post political messages were, of course, arrested in the roundup of hundreds of thousands of democracy supporters....

The impression of anonymity and "freedom" conveyed by the Internet, of course, presents a similar opportunity for police to cast a wide net for identifying persons and organizations who may not hold favor for the regime in power, or may not in the future.

But why should one avoid the thought? If the situation looks like the people are going to lose the war for their minds, and are unwilling to back a publisher like Assange who has given his all to try to empower them, why should anyone put themselves at risk by expressing their opinions? It's a honeypot of our own making, just as Facebook is where people go to write their own dossiers for the Authorities.

leveymg on Sat, 07/13/2019 - 10:36am
Every time you entrap yourself as

@Pluto's Republic an enemy of the status quo, you raise the calculated costs of the eventual crackdown, pushing back the day of reckoning. Keep it up! Visible rebellion is the only defense of the people.

Pluto's Republic on Fri, 07/12/2019 - 5:54pm
Background: If someone were to choose the ideal node

...from which to leverage access to the elite, Harvard University would be a top choice.

Jeffery Epstein actually entered the social salons of the elite through many doors. He was, of course, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. One would have to be to rub shoulders with the political elite. From there he matriculated to the Trilateral Commission becoming friendly with Harvard President, Larry Summers. **

Becoming a surprise mystery philanthropist at Harvard, with Summers help, was a booster rocket for Epstein. In the Havard Crimson , in June 2003, Epstein's involvement with Harvard was celebrated.

People in the News: Jeffrey E. Epstein

Elusive financier Jeffrey E. Epstein donated $30 million this year to Harvard for the founding of a mathematical biology and evolutionary dynamics program.

While the mathematics teacher turned magnate remained unknown to most people until he flew President Clinton, Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker to Africa to explore the problems of AIDS and economic development facing the region, Epstein has been a familiar face to many at Harvard for years.

Networking with the University's leading intellectuals, Epstein has spurred research through both discussions with and dollars contributed to various faculty members.

Lindsley Professor of Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn, former Dean of the Faculty Henry A. Rosovsky and Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz are among Epstein's bevy of eminent friends that includes princes, presidents and Nobel Prize winners.

Epstein is also well acquainted with University President Lawrence H. Summers. The two serve together on the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, two elite international relations organizations.

Epstein's collection of high-profile friends also includes newly-recruited professor Martin A. Nowak, who will run Harvard's mathematical biology and evolutionary dynamics program.

Like Kosslyn, Rosovsky and Dershowitz, Nowak praises Epstein's numerous relationships within the scientific community.

"I am amazed by the connections he has in the scientific world," Nowak says. "He knows an amazing number of scientists. He knows everyone you can imagine."

Epstein's relationships within the academy are remarkable since the tycoon, who has amassed his fortune by managing the wealth of billionaires from his private Caribbean island, does not hold a bachelor's degree.

Yet, friends and beneficiaries say they do not see Epstein merely as a man with deep pockets, but as an intellectual equal.

Dershowitz says Epstein is "brilliant" and Kosslyn calls Epstein "one of the brightest people I've ever known."

Epstein's beneficiaries say they are particularly appreciative of the no-strings-attached approach Epstein takes with his donations.

"He is one of the most pleasant philanthropists," Nowak says. "Unlike many people who support science, he supports science without any conditions. There are not any disadvantages to associating with him."

Friends and associates say Harvard stands to benefit from its evolving relationship with Epstein.

"I hope that he will, over time, become one of the leading supporters of science at Harvard," Rosovsky writes in an e-mail.

__________________________________________
** A footnote on Larry Summers seems important here: Harvard-trained economists have been running the US economy for a very long time, and continue to do so. Summers began his ascent as a professor of economics at Harvard University, leaving shortly before Bill Clinton won the Presidency. He was clearly the Neoliberal seed planted for the New American Century.

In 1993, Summers was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury.

While working for the Clinton administration Summers played a leading role in the American response to the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the Russian financial crisis. He was also influential in the Harvard Institute for International Development and American-advised privatization of the economies of the post-Soviet states, and in the deregulation of the U.S financial system, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.

At This Point the Ball is Passed to the Bush Team Republicans, while the Democrats Sit Back and Wait for 2008.

There's now a Treasury surplus to transfer to the wealthy, and the necessary deregulation for Wall Street empowerment is in place. The Soviet era had ended and Russia is ended forever. The world is finally primed to be seized by the One Exceptional Power. It's 2001, and we are standing on the threshold of the New American Century . Time to throw a flash-bang of chaos onto the world stage and trigger the booming War Economy that will carry us directly to global control.

There's a rocky road ahead for Larry Summers. Summers introduces Epstein into the Harvard fold, but becomes reckless with his newly-refined Neoliberalism and his opinions concerning "lady scholars."

Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end", and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization. Remarking upon political correctness in institutions of higher education, Summers said in 2016:

Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering

There is a great deal of absurd political correctness. Now, I'm somebody who believes very strongly in diversity, who resists racism in all of its many incarnations, who thinks that there is a great deal that's unjust in American society that needs to be combated, but it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses.

After his departure from Harvard, Summers cooled his jets on Wall Street, positioning himself to be called back into the game when it was Team Democrat's turn in 2008.

Summers worked as a managing partner at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co., and as a freelance speaker at other financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Summers rejoined public service during the Obama administration, serving as the Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession.

Jeffery Epstein continued to weave himself into the fabric of government like a good psychopath would. He was by no means the only one.

[Jul 29, 2019] American Ron Unz on Pizzagate

Highly recommended!
Jul 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

I don't use Social Media myself, but near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, I gradually began seeing more and more Trump supporters referring to something called "Pizzagate," a burgeoning sexual scandal that they claimed would bring down Hillary Clinton and many of the top leaders of her party, with the chatter actually increasing after Trump was elected. As near as I could tell, the whole bizarre theory had grown up on the far-right fringe of the Internet, with the utterly fantastical plot having something to do with stolen secret emails, DC pizza parlors, and a ring of pedophiles situated near the top of the Democratic Party. But given all the other strange and unlikely things I'd gradually discovered about our history, it didn't seem like something I could necessarily dismiss out of hand.

At the beginning of December, a right-wing blogger produced a lengthy exposition of the Pizzagate charges, which finally gave me some understanding of what was actually under discussion, and I soon made arrangements to republish his article. It quickly attracted a great deal of interest, and some websites pointed to it as the best single introduction to the scandal for a general audience.

Pizzagate Aedon Cassiel • December 2, 2016 • 3,100 Words

A couple of weeks later, I republished an additional article by the same writer, describing a long list of previous pedophilia scandals that had occurred in elite American and European political circles. Although many of these seemed to be solidly documented, nearly all of them had received minimal coverage by our mainstream media outlets. And if such political pedophile rings had existed in the relatively recent past, was it so totally implausible that there might be another one simmering beneath the surface of today's Washington DC?

Precedents for Pizzagate Aedon Cassiel • December 23, 2016 • 6,200 Words

Those interested in the details of the Pizzagate Hypothesis are advised to read these articles, especially the first one, but I might as well provide a brief summary.

John Podesta had been a longtime fixture in DC political circles, becoming chief of staff to President Bill Clinton in 1998, and afterward remaining one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party establishment. While serving as as chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, his apparent carelessness with the password security of his Gmail account allowed it to easily be hacked, and tens of thousands of his personal emails were soon published on WikiLeaks. A swarm of young anti-Clinton activists began scouring this treasure-trove of semi-confidential information, seeking evidence of mundane bribery and corruption, but instead they came across some quite odd exchanges, seemingly written in coded language.

Now use of coded language in a supposedly secure private email account raises all sorts of natural suspicions regarding what might have been under discussion, with the most likely possibilities being illegal drugs or sex. But most of the references didn't seem to fit the former category, and in our remarkably libertine era, in which political candidates compete for the right to be Grand Marshal at an annual Gay Pride Parade, one of the few sexual activities still discussed only in whispers would seem to be pedophilia, with some of the very strange remarks possibly hinting at this.

The researchers also soon discovered that his brother Tony Podesta, one of the wealthiest and most successful lobbyists in DC, had extremely odd taste in art. Major items of his very extensive personal collection seemed to represent tortured or murdered bodies, and one of his favorite artists was best known for paintings depicting young children being held captive, lying dead, or suffering under severe distress. Such peculiar artwork obviously isn't illegal, but it might naturally arouse some suspicions. And oddly enough, arch-Democrat Podesta had long been a close personal friend of former Republican Speaker and convicted child-molester Dennis Hastert, welcoming him back into DC society after his release from prison.

Furthermore, some of the rather suspiciously-worded Podesta emails referred to events held at a local DC pizza parlor, greatly favored by the Democratic Party elite, whose owner was the gay former boyfriend of David Brock, a leading Democratic activist. The public Instagram account of that pizza-entrepreneur apparently contained numerous images of young children, sometimes tied or bound, with those images frequently labeled by hashtags using the traditional gay slang for underage sexual targets . Some photos showed the fellow wearing a tee-shirt bearing the statement "I Love Children" in French, and by a very odd coincidence, his possibly assumed name was phonetically identical to that very same French phrase, thus proclaiming to the world that he was "a lover of children." Closely connected Instagram accounts also included pictures of young children, sometimes shown amid piles of high-value currency, with queries about how much those particular children might be worth. None of this seemed illegal, but surely any reasonable person would regard the material as extremely suspicious.

DC is sometimes described as "Powertown," being the seat of the individuals who make America's laws and govern our society, with local political journalists being closely attuned to the relative status of such individuals. And oddly enough, GQ Magazine had ranked that gay pizza parlor owner with a strange focus on young children as being one of the 50 most powerful people in our national capital, placing him far ahead of many Cabinet members, Senators, Congressional Chairmen, Supreme Court justices, and top lobbyists. Was his pizza really that delicious?

These few paragraphs provide merely a sliver of the large quantity of highly-suspicious material surrounding various powerful figures at the apex of the DC political world. A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation.

I usually regard videos as a poor means of imparting serious information, far less effective and meaningful than the simple printed word. But the overwhelming bulk of the evidence supporting the Pizzagate Hypothesis consists of visual images and screen shots, and these are naturally suited to a video presentation.

Some of the best summaries of the Pizzagate case were produced by a young British YouTuber named Tara McCarthy, whose work was published under the name of "Reality Calls," and her videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Although her channel was eventually banned and her videos purged, copies were later reloaded to other accounts, both on YouTube and BitChute. Some of the evidence she presents seemed rather innocuous or speculative to me and other elements were probably based upon her unfamiliarity with American society and culture. But a great deal of extremely suspicious material remains, and I would suggest that people watch the videos and decide for themselves.

Around the same time that I first became familiar with the details of the Pizzagate controversy, the topic also started reaching the pages of my morning newspapers, but in an rather strange manner. Political stories began giving a sentence or two to the "Pizzagate hoax," describing it as a ridiculous right-wing "conspiracy theory" but excluding all relevant details. I had an eery feeling that some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch causing the entire mainstream media to begin displaying identical signs declaring "Pizzagate Is False -- Nothing To See There!" in brightly flashing neon. I couldn't recall any previous example of such a strange media reaction to some obscure Internet controversy.

Articles in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times also suddenly appeared denouncing the entirety of the alternative media -- Left, Right, and Libertarian -- as "fake news" websites promoting Russian propaganda , while urging that their content be blocked by all patriotic Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Prior to that moment, I'd never even heard the term "fake news" but suddenly it was ubiquitous across the media, once again almost as if some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch.

I naturally began to wonder whether the timing of these two strange developments was entirely coincidental. Perhaps Pizzagate was indeed true and struck so deeply at the core of our hugely corrupted political system that the media efforts to suppress it were approaching the point of hysteria.

Not long afterward, Tara McCarthy's detailed Pizzagate videos were purged from YouTube. This was among the very first instances of video content being banned despite fully conforming to all existing YouTube guidelines, another deeply suspicious development.

I also noticed that mere mention of Pizzagate had become politically lethal. Donald Trump had selected Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as his National Security Advisor, and Flynn's son served as the latter's chief of staff. The younger Flynn happened to Tweet out a couple of links to Pizzagate stories, pointing out that the accusations hadn't yet been actually investigated let alone disproven, and very soon afterward, he was purged from the Trump transition team, foreshadowing his father's fall a few weeks later. It seemed astonishing to me that a few simple Tweets about an Internet controversy could have such huge real-life impact near the top of our government.

The media continued its uniform drumbeat of "Pizzagate Has Been Disproven!" but we were never told how or by whom, and I was not the only individual to notice the hollowness of such denunciations. An award-winning investigative journalist named Ben Swann at a CBS station in Atlanta broadcast a short television segment summarizing the Pizzagate controversy and noting that contrary to widespread media claims, Pizzagate had neither been investigated nor debunked. Swann was almost immediately purged by CBS but a copy of his television segment remains available for viewing on the Internet.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-GZFHLAcG8A?feature=oembed

There is an old wartime proverb that enemy flak is always heaviest over the most important target, and the remarkably ferocious wave of attacks and censorship against anyone broaching the subject of Pizzagate seems to raise obvious dark suspicions. Indeed, the simultaneous waves of attacks against all alternative media outlets as "Russian propaganda outlets" laid the basis for the continuing regime of Social Media censorship that has become a central aspect of today's world.

Pizzagate may or may not turn out to be true, but the ongoing Internet crackdown has similarly engulfed topics of a somewhat similar nature but with vastly stronger documentation. Although I don't use Twitter myself, I encountered the obvious implications of this new censorship policy following McCain's death last August. The senator had died on a Saturday afternoon, and readership of Sydney Schanberg's long 2008 expose quickly exploded, with numerous individuals Tweeting out the story and a large fraction of our incoming traffic therefore coming from Twitter. This continued until the following morning, at which point the huge flood of Tweets continued to grow, but all incoming Twitter traffic suddenly and permanently vanished, presumably because "shadow banning" had rendered those Tweets invisible. My own article on McCain's very doubtful war record simultaneously suffered the same fate, as did numerous other articles of a controversial nature that we published later that same week.

Perhaps that censorship decision was made by some ignorant young intern at Twitter, casually choosing to ban as "hate speech" or "fake news" a massively-documented 8,400 word expose by one of America's most distinguished journalists, a Pulitzer-prize winning former top editor at The New York Times .

Or perhaps certain political-puppeteers who had spent decades controlling that late Arizona senator sought to ensure that their political puppet-strings remained invisible even after his death.

[Jul 29, 2019] The hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy".

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... " that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise." ..."
"... "Indeed, under our putative system of democracy, especially since JFK, the oligarchy will not allow the election of any candidate who cannot be blackmailed." ..."
"... No wonder the shenannigans of compromised office-holding puppets (actors, really) and their shadowy string-pullers never seem to be known to their spear-carriers in MSM. ..."
Jul 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

St-Germain , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:25 pm GMT

Kudos, Ron Unz. Excellent article and a useful tutorial on the hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy".

I applaud your parlor joke:

" that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise."

A great French investigative reporter crafted an unfunny version:

"Indeed, under our putative system of democracy, especially since JFK, the oligarchy will not allow the election of any candidate who cannot be blackmailed."

-- Thierry Meyssan, Before our very eyes -- fake wars and big lies from 9/11 to Donald Trump , p. 146.

He had just described the 911 caper as a Cheney-led deep-state coup to activate the secret but long-standing CoG procedure to sideline the Constitution. It succeeded when clueless Dubya was reinstated as figure-head president within 24 hours after agreeing to the clique's CoG (continuity of government) agenda, including the planned wars.

No wonder the shenannigans of compromised office-holding puppets (actors, really) and their shadowy string-pullers never seem to be known to their spear-carriers in MSM.

[Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "After watching seven hours of a spectacle that felt much more cruel than enlightening, I cannot avoid pondering a question which honestly gives me no joy to ponder: just how much damage has MSNBC in particular done to the left?" The Hill's Rising star began, before excoriating her former employer's "fevered speculations" about an "Infowars conspiracy theory" and the way it hosted people like Jonathan "maybe Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s" Chait and "conspiracy gadfly Louise Mensch" in search of ratings bumps. ..."
"... "This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats' chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up," Ball argued. "Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, I don't know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers' movement, whether we're going to war with Iran? I'm just spitballing here. ..."
"... Ball argued that the fact that MSNBC is doing so much damage to the Democratic Party in the name of ratings proves that MSNBC isn't "on Team D in the same way that Fox News is on Team R", saying they're really just in it for the money. But this is where Ball gets it wrong. It is of course true that ratings are a factor, and that conspiracy theories can be used to sell advertising space, but MSNBC would have had a much easier time marketing conspiracy theories about Trump's loyalties to Israel and Saudi Arabia , both of which would have had vastly more factual evidence to back them up. The only difference is that the US-centralized empire doesn't have agendas that it wants to advance against those two countries. ..."
"... Ball is correct that MSNBC doesn't serve the Democratic party, but she's incorrect that it serves only money. MSNBC, which is now arguably a more aggressive war propaganda network than Fox News, serves first and foremost the US national security state. And so do all the other western mainstream news networks. ..."
"... From the Pentagon's point of view, US hegemony good, Russia-China alliance very, very bad. ..."
"... I t was determined with the help of influential neoconservative think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view became the establishment orthodoxy , any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An "attack" on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity is now treated as a direct attack on the empire. ..."
"... This is why we've seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as "enemies" as though they pose some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack. ..."
"... This "if you're not obeying us you're attacking us" mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a Russian "attack" on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government. It's got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans. It's about continuing to rule the world. ..."
Jul 28, 2019 | ronpaulinstitute.org

Former MSNBC host Krystal Ball slammed her ex-employer's relentless promotion of the Russiagate conspiracy theory following the embarrassing spectacle of Robert Mueller's hearing before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees on Wednesday.

"After watching seven hours of a spectacle that felt much more cruel than enlightening, I cannot avoid pondering a question which honestly gives me no joy to ponder: just how much damage has MSNBC in particular done to the left?" The Hill's Rising star began, before excoriating her former employer's "fevered speculations" about an "Infowars conspiracy theory" and the way it hosted people like Jonathan "maybe Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s" Chait and "conspiracy gadfly Louise Mensch" in search of ratings bumps.

"This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats' chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up," Ball argued. "Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, I don't know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers' movement, whether we're going to war with Iran? I'm just spitballing here.

I actually heard some pundit on Chris Hayes last night opine that independent women in middle America were going to be swayed by what Mueller said yesterday. Are you kidding me? This is almost as bonkers and lacking in factual basis as that time Mimi Rocah said that Bernie Sanders is not pro-women because that was what her feelings told her. Rocah, by the way, a political prosecutor with no political background, is only opining at MSNBC because of her role in leading viewers to believe that any day now SDNY is going to bring down Trump and his entire family."

Ball argued that the fact that MSNBC is doing so much damage to the Democratic Party in the name of ratings proves that MSNBC isn't "on Team D in the same way that Fox News is on Team R", saying they're really just in it for the money. But this is where Ball gets it wrong. It is of course true that ratings are a factor, and that conspiracy theories can be used to sell advertising space, but MSNBC would have had a much easier time marketing conspiracy theories about Trump's loyalties to Israel and Saudi Arabia , both of which would have had vastly more factual evidence to back them up. The only difference is that the US-centralized empire doesn't have agendas that it wants to advance against those two countries.

Ball is correct that MSNBC doesn't serve the Democratic party, but she's incorrect that it serves only money. MSNBC, which is now arguably a more aggressive war propaganda network than Fox News, serves first and foremost the US national security state. And so do all the other western mainstream news networks.

Consider the way the Syrian province of Idlib is being reported on right now, to pick one of many possible examples. Al-Qaeda-controlled Idlib is the final stronghold of the extremist militant groups that the US and its allies flooded Syria with in a premeditated campaign to effect regime change, and Syria and its allies are fighting to recapture the region. They are using methods that are identical to those commonly used by the US and its allies, yet the bombing campaigns of the US-centralized empire receive virtually no critical coverage while western mainstream outlets like CNN and the BBC are churning out brazenly propagandistic pieces about the evils of the Assad coalition's airstrikes.

"Civilians are dying in Idlib, just as they died in their thousands in recent US UK air strikes in eg Raqqa and Mosul," political analyst Charles Shoebridge observed on Twitter today. "The difference is that when it's (often unverified) claims that Russia or Syria are doing the killing, US UK media make it front page news."

There are many gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative that outlets like MSNBC have been bashing everyone over the head with, but the most obvious and easily provable of them is the indisputable fact that Donald Trump has escalated tensions against Russia more than any US president in decades. You never hear anyone talk about this self-evident fact in all the endless yammering about Russia, though, because it doesn't advance the agendas of either of America's two mainstream parties, and it doesn't advance the interests of US imperialism. Democrats don't like acknowledging the fact that Trump has been consistently and aggressively working directly against the interests of Moscow , and Trump supporters don't like acknowledging that their president is just as much of a neocon-coddling globalist as those they claim to oppose, so the war machine has gone conveniently unchallenged in manufacturing new cold war escalations against a nation they've had marked for destruction since the fall of the Soviet Union.

In a very interesting new Grayzone interview packed full of ideas that you'll never hear voiced on western mass media, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov spoke openly about the various ways that Russia, China, and other nations who've resisted absorption into the blob of the US power alliance have been working toward the creation of a multipolar world. Ryabkov said other nations have been watching the way the dominance of the US dollar has been used to economically terrorize noncompliant nations into subservience by way of sanctions and other manipulations, with Washington expecting that the dollar and the US financial system will remain "the cardiovascular system of the whole organism."

"That will not be the case," Ryabkov said. "People will bypass, in literal terms. And people will find ways how to defend themselves, how to protect themselves, how to guarantee themselves against any emergencies if someone comes up at the White House or whatever, at the Treasury, at the State, and says 'Hey guys, now we should stop what is going on in Country X, and let's squeeze them out.' And this country sits on the dollar. So they will be done the moment those ideas will be pronounced. So China, Russia and others, we create alternatives that we will most probably continue using not just national currencies, but baskets of currencies, currencies of third countries, other modern barter schemes."

"We will use ways that will diminish the role of dollar and US banking system with all these risks of assets and transactions being arrested, being stopped," Ryabkov concluded.

That, right there, is the real reason you're being sold Russia hysteria today.

And it isn't just on the matter of financial systems in which the unabsorbed powers are uniting against the imperial blob. Russia and China just carried out their first joint air patrol on Tuesday, drawing a hostile response from imperial vassals Japan and South Korea.

"Russian and Chinese bombers on 'first' joint patrol in the Asia-Pacific region. The China-Russia alliance has become a reality and will last for long time," reads a post by one Russian Twitter commentator in response to the news.

The emergence of this alliance, which the Chinese government has warned Washington is 'not vulnerable to interference', has been something the west has feared for a long time. A Pentagon white paper published this past May titled "Russian Strategic Intentions" mentions the word "China" 108 times. Some noteworthy excerpts:

I think you get the picture. From the Pentagon's point of view, US hegemony good, Russia-China alliance very, very bad. Analysts like the white paper's authors, and even The New York Times editorial board , have urged the drivers of US foreign policy to attempt to lure Moscow away from Beijing, the latter rightly perceived as the greater long-term threat to US dominance due to China's surging economic power. But diplomacy has clearly been ruled out toward this end, with only a steadily escalating campaign to shove Russia off the world stage now deemed acceptable.

It was determined with the help of influential neoconservative think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view became the establishment orthodoxy , any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An "attack" on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity is now treated as a direct attack on the empire.

This is why we've seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as "enemies" as though they pose some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack.

This "if you're not obeying us you're attacking us" mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a Russian "attack" on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government. It's got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans. It's about continuing to rule the world.

Reprinted with permission from Medium.com . Support Ms. Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal .

[Jul 29, 2019] The great antisemitism witchhunt McCarthyism redux by John Wight

Notable quotes:
"... Reds under the bed has been replaced with antisemites under the bed; this with the full and open complicity of a mainstream media whose dread over the prospect of transformational political change is entwined in tight embrace with that of an Establishment -- political and security -- in ensuring nothing but nothing will ever change in this country apart from the colour of the curtains on the windows in Downing Street. ..."
"... There is nothing more grotesque than being lectured to about antisemitism, or any other form of racism, by apologists for a racist apartheid state. Yet this grotesquerie is precisely where we have arrived at in response to Corbyn's unlikely elevation to the leadership of the Labour Party. ..."
"... I think one has to appreciate, despite all the 'far-left' labels stuck on him, that Corbyn only appeared to be a 'raving looney leftie' in comparison with the rightwing Blairite majority of MPs who've controlled the Labour Party for so long and capitulated to and followed a Thatcherite political agenda, for decades. ..."
"... Anti-semitism oldest form of gas lighting that was ever created in the western world especially after the second world war. If one were to go to Palestine it is not uncommon to find some ebraic semite wearing a t shirt with on it printed an IDF soldier taking aim at a pregnant arab semite. Israel has to be exposed for what it is. It is an anglo-zionist colonial outpost.. Zionism was born in England it pre dates Herzl. ..."
"... The key to the anti-Semitism problem is the conflation of Judaism with Zionism. This didn't happen by accident, it is a deliberate and relatively modern policy. (An old (Jewish) friend described the indoctrination he got to me growing up. That was quite a long time ago, its probably so ingrained now that nobody notices this process any more.) ..."
"... The comparison to a witch hunt is perfectly accurate. The attack works by mere accusation. The facts, evidence, criteria of evaluation are all irrelevant. ..."
Jun 29, 2019 | OffGuardian
This article was first published on March 1st of this year, however, it is given fresh relevance in the wake of Labour's reinstatement, and then re-suspension, of Derby MP Chris Williamson

Photo: The Crucible at the Pacific Conservatory Theatre

PUTNAM: Now look you, sir. Let you strike out against the Devil, and the village will bless you for it! Come down, speak to them -- pray with them. They're thirsting for your word, Mister! Surely you'll pray with them.

PARRIS: (swayed) I'll lead them in a psalm, but let you say nothing of witchcraft yet. I will not discuss it. The cause is yet unknown. I have had enough contention since I came; I want no more.
Arthur Miller – The Crucible

In his magisterial autobiography, Timebends , describing his motivation behind his classic work The Crucible (extracted above) -- the most compelling and enduring allegorical piece of drama to grace the American theatre -- Arthur Miller reveals the following:

What I sought was a metaphor, an image that would spring out of the heart, all-inclusive, full of light, a sonorous instrument whose reverberations would penetrate to the centre of this miasma. For if the current degeneration of discourse continued, as I had every reason to believe it would, we could no longer be a democracy, a system that requires a certain basic trust in order to exist."

The 'miasma' referred to by Miller in the above passage was the atmosphere of censorious paranoia whipped up by the anti-Communist witchhunts of the 1940s and 1950s, starting under the auspices of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), established in 1938, joined thereafter by Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate hearings into alleged Communist infiltration from the late 1940s.

The period concerned, commonly referred to as McCarthyism, illuminated the parameters of free speech and expression in a country and culture which prides itself on both. It drilled home the profound truth that tyranny is less the by-product of totalitarian political systems and more the product of totalitarian ideas and nostrums that sustain political orthodoxy in a given space and time. And, too, whenever those ideas and nostrums come under challenge, said democracy is exposed as a cloak behind which mendacity resides, ruthlessly seeking malcontents to expose and miscreants to punish.

In Britain in 2019 we need no longer turn to US history for an understanding of McCarthyism and its execrable fruits.

For in Britain in 2019 McCarthyism is with us and among us, corroding our public and political discourse, poisoning it with the untruths, lies and mendacious smears of some of the most malignant political forces that ever existed in these islands.

Reds under the bed has been replaced with antisemites under the bed; this with the full and open complicity of a mainstream media whose dread over the prospect of transformational political change is entwined in tight embrace with that of an Establishment -- political and security -- in ensuring nothing but nothing will ever change in this country apart from the colour of the curtains on the windows in Downing Street.

Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party has to intents been usurped by his deputy Tom Watson, a man for whom Shakespeare's "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!" line from The Tempest could have been written with in mind.

Labour Friends of Israel

Watson is the Labour Party's Matthew Hopkins, the infamous witch-hunter whose reign of terror in 17th century Britain finds its metaphorical equivalent in the 21st century with the objective not of locating and hanging out to dry antisemites but instead anti-Zionists, which means to say genuine anti-racists.

For what is Zionism if not racism, a species of white supremacy responsible for relegating the humanity of five million men, women and children of the illegally occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip to that of latter-day Helots?

Adding to the mountain of intellectual and moral ordure erected in service to this miasma of untruth and base hypocrisy, are the findings of a UN investigation into the Palestinians killed and wounded by Israeli snipers during last year's Great Return March in Gaza.

According to the UN's Santiago Canton:

Israeli soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of those violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity."

In diplomatic-speak, Mr Canton is here referencing the manner in which Israeli soldiers shot down dozens of unarmed Palestinians -- among them children, medics and journalists -- like deer in a forest, with some of those Israeli soldiers caught on tape laughing and celebrating their 'kills'.

It is to this monstrosity of an apartheid state Tom Watson and his friends are giving succour and sanction; and it this supremacist juggernaut of oppression we are expected to accept as compatible with left-wing progressive values.

There is nothing more grotesque than being lectured to about antisemitism, or any other form of racism, by apologists for a racist apartheid state. Yet this grotesquerie is precisely where we have arrived at in response to Corbyn's unlikely elevation to the leadership of the Labour Party.

His legacy as a staunch supporter of Palestinian human rights and self-determination has been weaponised against him and his supporters by a pro-Israel lobby within and without the Labour Party, plumbing depths of indecency last witnessed during the era of McCarthyism across the Atlantic.

For those who doubt how deeply entrenched the pro-Israel lobby now is within the UK body politic, Al Jazeera's blistering documentary The Lobby is required viewing.

Given the context and the stakes involved in this ongoing witch hunt and smear campaign, the lack of meaningful resistance on the part of Corbyn is unconscionable; his refusal to mobilise his base in the face of it inexplicable. The result has not been to see it disappear but for it to prosper and grow in ferocity.

Be under no illusion either of the complicity of key figures in and around the Labour leadership in whipping up and/or acquiescing in this baseless hysteria -- Lansman, McDonnell et al. -- to the point where Corbyn has been rendered well nigh unelectable as a prospective prime minister.

That this is a smear campaign and witchhunt conducted, regardless of the fog of obfuscation deployed to the contrary, on behalf of a foreign power -- and an apartheid power at that -- compounds the offence.

But this issue is now bigger than Corbyn. It is about where we stand on matters of intellectual and moral integrity; and most of all on the rights we accrue to an oppressed people and those of their oppressor. Future generations are watching and waiting for the stance that we take.

Arthur Miller understood this, which is why his light will shine forever bright as a beacon of moral courage in an age of deceit.

End.

Ben Trovata

"They misunderestimated me."George Bush,the Younger,Nov. 6, 2000.

I'll not supply any facts. None whatsoever,saying only: Corbyn( I believe) is made of better material. Blairites must be expelled, or otherwise, go away!

MichaelK
I think one has to appreciate, despite all the 'far-left' labels stuck on him, that Corbyn only appeared to be a 'raving looney leftie' in comparison with the rightwing Blairite majority of MPs who've controlled the Labour Party for so long and capitulated to and followed a Thatcherite political agenda, for decades.

Corbyn himself isn't really a 'revolutionary' or even a radical. He's what half a century ago would have been described as a pretty normal, middle-of-the-road, Labour social democrat, barely on the left of the Party at all. But some of this is debatable, depending on where one stands on the spectrum personally. It's a sign of how far 'left' politics and 'left' discourse has degenerated in the UK, and political culture's moved so far to the right, that Corbyn, like a relic of a bygone era, is perceived as far more leftwing than he actually is, in reality.

What he is though, is ineffective as a leader. He lacks authority, I think, because he fundamentally lacks a set of strong ideas that show what he stands for and where he wants the country to move. There's no real narrative that mobilises support for him, and this is the curse of Labour; the leadership's fear of mobilising the membership and their supporters and votes in the country, too much and too far, which could easily lead to them raising their expectations way beyond what's 'realistic' and possible within the boundaries of bourgeois liberal democracy. Labour fought for political power in parliament; but didn't believe in openly challenging economic power in society in any meaningful way, because that strategy was simply not allowed because it was 'revolutionary' and not reformist.

mark
Of course Corbyn is a "raving loony lefty."
He wants to re nationalise the railways (maybe.)
And build a few council houses (maybe.)
How raving loony is that?
Obviously he's a raving loony.
Oh, and he objects to the genocide of the Palestinians.
Obviously a raving anti semite as well.
Just ask the Board of Deputies and Margaret Hodge and the Daily Mail. They'll explain it all to you.
Barovsky
More to the point; he's a (Labour) Party man. The Party comes first, regardless. For almost 130 years the Labour Party has been an integral part of British capitalism and imperialism and the British state. Thus Corbyn, a run-of-the-mill social democrat is concerned only with the survival of the Party and he will do whatever is necessary in its defence including defenestrating his election manifesto (compare his draft with the one finally circulated in 2017)!

Should he by some chance actually end up as PM, what are the odds of him actually reversing austerity when he's already sold out over every key part of his original manifesto?

There are going to be a lot of very disappointed and once more disconnected Labour voters.

mathias alexand
What is this "leadership" and "authority" thing? As for his ideas he could have any number of them that you will never hear about in the MSM.
Maggie
True Mathias, but you can see and hear about them on the Jimmy Dore Show whose shows truly are a breath of fresh air:

Bernie Sanders of Britain and why he is widely loved, and sadly rare. July 2016

https://www.youtube.com/embed/a29WF44jDug?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Labour Party Platform, Amazingly specific and pro worker. May 2017

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vI073wq2zKY?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Jeremy Corbyn Delivers Inspiring Speech June 2017

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8RsSPOcVcNM Wimbledon issues ban on chanting Jeremy Corbyn July 2017

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0MwqZkBOEz0 Pro Jeremy Corbyn ad makes Right wingers cry.July 2017

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ptC-0_gObNM NBC News Smears Jeremy Corbyn as an anti semite. July 2017

https://www.youtube.com/embed/F4d-ZAPx1q4 BBC Andrew Neil smashes Jeremy Corbyn Smear on Live TV Feb 2018

https://www.youtube.com/embed/IJZkYDYh37U Corbyn responds rationally to Russian nerve attack and is immediately smeared March 2018

https://www.youtube.com/embed/OsnAIUZIt8M Corbyn smeared as anti semite for attacking Bankers. September 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9US9v0ndus

And on and on it goes, and the sh*t does stick. For the majority of people eventually just cave in and believe this Zionist garbage.

falcemartello
Anti-semitism oldest form of gas lighting that was ever created in the western world especially after the second world war. If one were to go to Palestine it is not uncommon to find some ebraic semite wearing a t shirt with on it printed an IDF soldier taking aim at a pregnant arab semite. Israel has to be exposed for what it is. It is an anglo-zionist colonial outpost.. Zionism was born in England it pre dates Herzl.

Hence until more exposure of the brutal nature of the Israeli zionist and their parents the anglo-zionist becomes exposed then the diluted term of anti semite will continue to be used. I find that with the dying western paradigm so will this gaslighting term become irrelevant .If any intellectual honesty were to be used the real anti semites are the zionist.

Post Scriptum : Israel has a shelf life and it is omploding with in hence so will zionism.

Having experience racism first hand growing up and still being exposed to it today for mhy ethnicity I am not fortunate enough as the ashkanazi /zionist to deflect and gaslight my oppressors.

harry law
Former South African Minister Ronnie Kasrils himself Jewish on Thursday accused Israel of conducting a policy against the Palestinians that was "worse" than apartheid.

Speaking on the sidelines of a UN meeting on the situation in the Palestinian territories, Kasrils said South Africa's townships had never been attacked by helicopter gunships and tanks, in contrast to the military means employed by Israel.

https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/israel-worse-than-apartheid-sa-kasrils-352481

andyoldlabour
Labour Friends of Israel, Conservative Friends of Israel, Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel – all different organisations?

No, of course they are not, even if the ordinary man in the street may think so.

They are all controlled by the Israeli state, to do the bidding of that state, to demonise any person who shows empathy with the plight of the Palestinian people, any person who dares criticise the actions of the Israeli state.

On the other hand, you have Jewish Friends of Labour, seen by the Israeli state as "self hating Jews", the "wrong type of Jew".
What we are seeing at the moment is – Zio-McCarthyism.

Capricornia Man
'McCarthyism' is exactly what I have been calling the witch-hunt for some time. It's surprising that the term is taking so long to come into general use when it is the appropriate term based on historical analogy, as shown by the article. The pile-on against anyone who dares to support the political and national rights of the Palestinians induces physical illness in anyone remotely interested in justice and truth.

The rancid 'liberal' media frames its "coverage" by treating accusations of 'antisemitism' not as the thing which has to be proved, but as the proof itself. A classic McCarthyite process.

The vast majority of Britons must be fed up having their politics held up to ransom in this manner. Stand up for yourselves and by-pass the fifth column and the coward element in the Labour Party.

vwbeetle
To read the Guardian, one would think that Williamson has no supporters in Labour whatsoever. As far as the Guardian is concerned, Jewish Voice for Labour and its condemnation of the witch hunt and smear campaign against Corbyn and Williamson and anyone who supports Palestinian rights, does not exist. Up until a couple of years ago I was a regular contributor on CIF discussion threads, largely rebutting Zionists and their propaganda and outright lies. I was eventually blocked, probably because large numbers of Zionists reported me, despite the fact that I largely restricted my posts to historical facts. Over the past two years it is almost impossible to make comments on CIF about any article about Israel/Palestine, or the anti-semitism smear campaign. What has happened at the Guardian? Does anyone know why the paper seems to have changed course?
MichaelK
The lurch to the political right at the Guardian is linked to the Snowden and Assange revelations that challenged the cosy ideological relationship between the media and the state, to a degree that is simply not allowed, if one wants to be seen as loyal and responsible. There are consequences is one, as an individual, group or institution, is perceived as being illoyal by the Establishment and the state.

Assange and Snowden pulled the Guardian over an invisible line, into a grey area, at the time, which was perceived as being tantamount to treason, and now the Guardian has been successfully reined in once more and now co-opperates with the state on matters relating to 'national security.' The damage, has been undone and a proper and reasonable relationship established.

Haltonbrat
The Guardian has been pro-Zionist since the days of editor CP Scott who introduced the Zionist leader to Looyd George and supported the Zionists in his writings in the Manchester Guardian.
Shardlake
It all changed, and not for the better, after Alan Rusbridger left. It's as much a mouthpiece now for this appalling government as the Murdoch press and their like. There's been a continual shift in centre ground politics to the right since the days of Thatcher.

We are seeing what Edward Bernays described in 1928 as the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of.

In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.

It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Stephen Morrell
PS. The Labour Party never fails to disappoint
Stephen Morrell
It's time to stop calling Israel an 'apartheid state'. Snipers today, missiles and bombs tomorrow, with deliberate and active ruination of amenity, infrastructure and the means to live -- by siege, every day.

Israel's atrocities are not simply 'crimes against humanity'. They're crimes directed against a particular ethnic/national/racial segment of humanity. That's called genocide. Netanyahu and his gang are genocidal, and consequently the garrison state of Israel is also a 'genocide state'. Time to start applying the g-word.

Haltonbrat
Yes, The actions of Israel meet the UN definition of genocide.
mark
The Times of Israel, a national newspaper, quite openly advocated genocide. It called for the Palestinian people to be exterminated at concentration camps in the desert. The "Justice" Minister, a woman called Shaked, called for Palestinian mothers to be exterminated, so that no Palestinian children could be born. Two rabbis in Israel published a book called "The King's Torah." It called for all Palestinian children to be murdered.

Killing a goy, any goy, is a Mitzvah, a praiseworthy act.

If the Jews get the war with Iran they have been trying to incite and agitate for for so long, they will use this as cover to carry out actual genocide on a massive scale.

People need to give up completely on Labour. It is infested wall to wall with 30 shekel whores.

maggie
Hi Mark, Do you have links to the information you have posted please.

If we give up on Labour, then who do we rely on? I think what we should be doing is focussing all our energies on removing (de selecting) the 90 "friends of Israhell" who have been baying for Chris Williamson and Jeremy Corbyn to be removed permanently from the Labour Party. Beginning with the evil with Hodge, and her cronies headed by Tom Watson.

mark
The Times of Israel, 1/8/14.
"When Genocide Is Permissible", by Yochanan Gordon.
Openly advocates, endorses and justifies the genocide of the Palestinians.

Ayelet Shaked, 14/7/14.
"Mothers of all Palestinians should be killed. They have to die and their houses should be demolished. They are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands."
A day before Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khudair was kidnapped and burned alive by 6 Jew thugs, Shaked published a call for the genocide of the Palestinians in Facebook.
"The entire Palestinian people is the enemy, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure."
She called for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers. "to prevent them giving birth to little snakes."

The King's Torah, 230 page book published 2009 by Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva. Authors Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur. Endorsed by many leading rabbis.
It openly incites and calls for the extermination of the Palestinians, and explains how this is morally justified.
It is a call for indiscriminate extermination.
The killing of children, en masse, responds to "the existence of an internal need for revenge."
"In the face of revenge, no one is innocent, be they old, young, children, men or women, and regardless of their health."
It rejects any notion of international law and the protection of civilians in time of war, or international humanitarian law on the prevention of genocide. Israel is above international law, because Jews are superior to Gentiles and the lives of Gentiles have no value.

Jews are indoctrinated from birth to hate all the goyim.
Israel is an openly genocidal, terrorist, racist state.
There is no doubt that in the event of a major war with Iran, it would use this as cover to commit genocide, which has been long planned.

Stephen Morrell
I apologise for taking up so much space in replying to your very telling question about what alternative is there to Labour. First, it should now be clear to everyone that Labour, whether led by Corbyn or any other 'left' social democrat, is no answer to the dire situation we face. Right now there is no mass party on this planet that can provide the leadership necessary, let alone serve as the instrument, for the revolutionary change so desperately needed to excise the malignancy of capitalism from the human social organism. This is a crisis of revolutionary leadership.

The bourgeois Greens are not the answer either, and most of the traditional left and 'far' left are mired in one form or another of opportunistic kow-towing to Corbyn and Labour or the Greens. This isn't to say that one should never vote Labour, the party of the working class. It's to say that one should only give support to Labour, as 'a rope supports a hanging man' (Lenin), when it furthers revolutionary and class consciousness in the working class. The working class, as politically backward as it might be now in many ways, is the only class with the social power to overthrow the capitalists -- it can stop and start production at will and, most importantly, if it had the political consciousness and leadership to do so, it could take over production and overthrow capitalism. Such a consciousness is smothered and suppressed by Labour and the current leaders of the trade unions (such as the latter currently exist).

Presently Labour deserves no vote because under Corbyn they've refused to support Brexit and are pushing for a second referendum. Tony Benn, Corbyn's mentor, would have been railing against him over his betrayal of this fundamental class issue in Britain. Corbyn is Blair lite. On the EU he's Blair quiet.

If in power, Corbyn would either be forced to bow to the diktats of capital and the ruling class or be pushed out, and pronto. Already forces centred on MI6's The Guardian, the Zionist lobby, the aristocratic feudal relics, the military, 'the City' rentiers, and of course the Blairites, have been undermining him because of his mild reformist and foreign policy stances. However, the ruling class would rush to Corbyn and Labour, or another 'left' alternative, if their rule were seriously threatened by an awakened working class. Before fascism, Corbyn would be their best and last hope.

What then of the left and far left? They're all still propaganda groups. We have the likes of the SP, SWP, Socialist Alternative and so on, who've advocated a vote for Labour unconditionally at just about every election. And they've also supported the bourgeois Greens. In doing so, they provide no alternative to Labour. Instead their strategy is to try to pressure Labour to the left. How's that been working? Corbyn still supports the EU. How many times has he mentioned Julian Assange? Or the basic necessity to do away with the monarchy and House of Lords and all the other 'traditions of the dead generations [that] weigh like a nightmare upon the living' (Marx). At least in the US, the ISO (followers of the late Tony Cliff) have decided to sate their opportunistic appetites and dissolve themselves to join the Democratic Socialists of America (ie, social democrats inside a bourgeois party, the Democratic Party of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Then we have the Socialist Equity Party, ostensibly 'Trotskyist' and followers of David North, that declares trade unions in principle to be an instrument for the subjugation of the working class. Imagine that: the prime defense organs of the working class historically are written off in advance because their leaderships betray the rank and file (which they do, but not always, not inevitably). Outfits like the SEP don't have a perspective to take these trade union leaderships on from within and fight to replace them with a revolutionary leadership in the heat of struggle to turn the unions into real working class defense organs.

Consequently, a revolutionary consciousness cannot be developed from within the working class in struggle for it to act in its own historic interests. The SEP have a slew of other programmatic issues that are awry as well, but their outlook boils down to opportunism afraid of itself.

This isn't to say that the World Socialist Website is completely useless. It isn't, but its articles on workers and trade union struggles in particular need to be taken with a large grain of salt.

In short, if there are only propaganda groups at the moment that pose an alternative to Labour, then it at least behoves those looking for an alternative to Labour to not waste time or effort on any group that can't get even the basics of a program right, let alone before they even dirty their hands in actual struggle.

What's left then? Right now, the first criteria to look out for is if an ostensibly revolutionary group advocates 'No vote to Labour', and draws a class line for Brexit and against a new referendum; one that works consistently to destroy any illusions in the bourgeois state and its parliament ever being 'reformed' to act in the interests of the working class -- which means also exposing those who do. That's pretty fundamental, but it's a start.

So far the only group that does these things in the UK is the Spartacist League of Britain. See:
https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wh/index.html
and
https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1157/brexit.html

mark
Very shrewd assessment. But I'd say a re run of pre war Weimar is the most likely outcome. People are far more likely to turn to far worse than Trump or Farage as things deteriorate. Expect to see more Zionist controlled opposition like the EDL.
maggie
Mmm.. Stephen, a very interesting reply.. and links, which I will read and try to digest, though I have to confess a lot of the information contained therein, at 'first glance' I thought had been tried, tested and failed owing to the avarice of the capitalists and their power to remove the ground from under our feet.
This may be the wrong interpretation? But I will read the links more thoroughly and try to get my head around the concepts.

What I think we could do immediately, is to have the one man one vote system, to elect the 'man/woman' we choose to represent us and dispense with 'parties' altogether.
Surely, it can't be that difficult with today's technology, which would automatically dispense with the ballot box and the inherent frauds that continually happen.
Or am I being too simplistic and naïve?
Then again.. isn't this just the Russian system, and was that of Libya?

Stephen Morrell
The organs of power that spring up during revolutions are what work at the time. They're not created a priori, but they go on to serve the basis for the exercise of mass democracy. The Paris Commune had the The Committee of Public Safety, Russia had soviets (Russian for workers' council) that first arose in 1905 and again in 1917. The basis for their power rests on a politically conscious and armed constituency that has risen up which can recall elected representatives at any time (because they're armed).

Soviets elect representatives to higher soviet bodies (collegiate system), but their main purpose is to decide and vote on what, not whom. On an economic plan for example.

In contrast, bourgeois democracy at most gives you the privilege of voting for which scumbag will oppress you for the next 4 or 5 years. This is not to denigrate democratic rights but it is the way capitalist rule is disguised and legitimated; and we're made to feel responsible for outcomes because we participated in voting in elections. We help the executioner load his gun. One should never confuse elections with democracy.

I can recommend the following reading list which might help:

EH Carr, "What is History" (a great, broad-brushed approach to understanding different stages in human history and development).

K Marx, F Engels, "The Communist Manifesto"

F Engels, "Socialism Utopian and Scientific"

VI Lenin, "What Is To Be Done" (On the need for a party of the Bolshevik type)

VI Lenin, "State and Revolution" (On why the existing state must be smashed replaced by a new one, and what happens to it after a socialist revolution)

LD Trotsky, "Lessons of October" (On why the revolution occurred in backward Russia and not Germany)

LD Trotsky, "Results and Prospects" (On why backward countries in the epoch of imperialism not being able make a bourgeois revolution whose tasks can only be accomplished by a proletarian revolution -- the theory of 'Permanent Revolution')

LD Trotsky, "The Revolution Betrayed" (Why Stalin arose and soviet democracy was smashed in the USSR)

Some of these are a little heavy going and polemical (eg, Lenin), and Marx is full of historical and literary references, but patience will be rewarded. Except for EH Carr (available as a Penguin classic), these can all be accessed at: https://www.marxists.org/

espartaco
Too much ado about nothing It is very simple Socialism has NOTHING to do with religion Judaism, Christianism, Islamism or whatever. They invite these kind problems because the bourgeois that control Labour, allowed every kind of minorities to infiltrate the Party (and all other parties) to, eventually, destroy it through religious, racial and minority wars. What you see is what you get when leftist minoritymongering has taken over politics. The solution is very simple, all religious groups should be thrown out of the party, together with all the bourgeois. MP's first !!!
lundiel
I agree. We currently have MPs of all parties acting as agents for their countries of birth, or as agents of third countries (Ms Smeeth). This worked when they (agents) had no real political power, they were limited to cultural exchange visits etc. The change came with the growth in size and power of our security services .there's more than one way to skin a cat like Corbyn!
Maggie
Fear not Lundiel, the work is already begun . Jeremy will NEVER be allowed to lead.

Anonymous 'Civil Servants' (Deep State Operatives) have briefed the media regarding the allegedly frail condition of possible PM-to-be Jeremy Corbyn on the basis of – no evidence whatever.
Understandably, Corbyn is very angry about this demanding an investigation into the leak.

Given the story is without foundation and knowing the threat the establishment sees in Corbyn, a leader whose policies include the creation of a National Bank (aaaarghh the fiend the fiend) and the renationalisation of public utilities (including transport) a leader whose knee-jerk reaction to Ashkenazi Jewish assaults against the Semitic population in Israel is to speak out loudly and boldly in defence of Palestinians' rights

given all this, we know that the idea of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister of Great Britain is absolutely unacceptable to our ruling 'establishment'.

Let it be said then what Mr Corbyn and his inner circle must be thinking about the appearance of this non-story that the establishment is 'creating the option to eliminate' Mr. Corbyn (by heart attack dart?) in the event of his winning or threatening to win a UK general election.

Performing such a national service would be 'business as usual' for our "protectors" at MI5.

For example -Keith Mothersson: After he died in 2009, his obituary appeared in The Guardian.

The following facts are not included in the obituary of this heroic absolute gentleman:

"Keith created an organisation in 2008/9 called "ALL FAITHS FOR 9/11 TRUTH".
He, like most members of '9/11 Truth (UK & Ireland)', saw 9/11 truth as a spiritual (as much as a political) matter.
He went round the country meeting religious leaders and forming connections and bonds between the various groups he had organised. There were C of E, Catholic, Muslim (the largest group based in a couple of the biggest mosques in the country), Buddhist, and even a Jewish group.
I was involved with Keith, approaching 'Catholic' leaders (as an aside, the couple I tried to talk to [it was early days] were hostile to the idea even engaging with the issue maybe, for someone who has taken vows of obedience, this is an issue for the Pope alone)."

The thing is that Keith was the connection and bond between the groups he had started forming.

He lived in Perth, Scotland. On one evening during September 2009 Keith returned to his house in Perth. He arrived home in a dishevelled state, exhausted and confused. He told his partner that he been accosted by a group of men on the walk home and had "a terrible struggle in a van". He had been held down then released. He repeated "Why me?" to himself a few times before his partner helped him to bed.

She told friends that when Keith woke up he didn't know who he was. He did not recognise her either. He was taken to hospital where he lay silently in bed for two weeks before dying.

A multi-faith, well-organised, religious collective demanding answers re 9/11 represented a genuine threat to the "Deep State".
Keith had gone too far. He was "eliminated" and his nascent organisation along with him.
And there is no one to whom one can even report this terrible crime. Such is the nature of our society.
https://wwwkevboyle.blogspot.com/2019/06/corbyns-health-and-keith-mothersson.html

Jeremy Corbyn is not a fool. He understands very well the 'options' for the Deep State such a story creates and what this leak could possibly imply.. that is why I believe he may look as if he is indecisive?

Mucho
Very interesting Maggie, thanks
andyoldlabour
That is indeed correct. The various politicians who are involved in this disgraceful hounding of Corbyn and others, have pledged alliegence to Israel and the interference of Israel in the politics of the UK.
Martin Usher
The key to the anti-Semitism problem is the conflation of Judaism with Zionism. This didn't happen by accident, it is a deliberate and relatively modern policy. (An old (Jewish) friend described the indoctrination he got to me growing up. That was quite a long time ago, its probably so ingrained now that nobody notices this process any more.)

I may have a very simplistic view of things but to me Judaism is an Abrahamic religion with deep roots going back thousands of years. Zionism is a relatively modern European movement that dates from the latter half of the 19th century that has origins and aims that are not unlike many other 'volk' movements from the same period. Most of these were relatively harmless, 'back to the land' sorts of things but the racial undertones provided the underpinnings for, among others, the Nazis.

I know I'll probably get flamed for saying this but seriously there's a huge undercurrent of racism in some parts of Jewish society. I was first made aware of this many years ago when and old (goy) friend made the mistake of marrying an Orthodox girl. Up to that point I had only known secular/reform Jews so didn't think too much of it but the reaction from her family was quite extreme, protracted and not at all nice. The culture's there if you look for it -- its actually not unlike radical Islam in mindset so if it ever gets to a position of power (e.g. in modern Israel) then its going to be trouble for the untermensch!

Ramdan
"Israeli Zionism is the singular cancer that has been forcefully injected into the minds of world leaders across the globe; a cancer that these similarly affected leaders would wantonly force upon what little remains of the moral, civilized and correct conscience of man."

https://www.globalresearch.ca/rise-and-kill-first-the-secret-israeli-worldwide-assassination-program/5682052

vwbeetle
Zionism is a malevolent influence upon the body politic of the western world.
Francis Lee
The picture of Tom Watson and the other political 5th Columnists in the Labour party standing in front of a very large blue and white star of David flag tells us all we need to know. A bit like a political group in the UK sporting a Hammer and Sickle flag at Tory party conference. Labour Friends of Israel is of course a Zionist front in the LP. It's object is to further Israeli interests, and therefore it necessarily means against British interests. What else would they be doing? Promoting socialism perhaps? LFI has already been set in motion to get Corbyn and his co-thinkers to change their ways or else. In this sense also the British elite are working hand-in-glove with LFI and the Israelis, and it wouldn't at all surprise me if the CIA were not also involved at some level.

The trouble with Labour is that it doesn't want to be regarded as being 'extreme' or 'unrespectable'; oh dear no. We've even done away with Clause 4. Now how much higher do you want us to jump? We want to be Her Majesty's loyal opposition. 'Pale pink humbug' as Orwell called it. He called it right.

mathias alexand
Labour is hampered by a lack of internal democracy which goes back to its origins as an alliance of pre-existing groups like trade unions, etc.
DunGroanin
The Obsessive Groaniads daily pile of AS mud slinging, Barbara Ellen froths
"maddening, mendacious, slippery, gormless, prevaricating'
she snarls NOT writing about the tory clowns.
"I've long been anti-Corbyn for reasons beyond Brexit (antisemitism, anybody?)"
She raves and slobbers not realising that she is projecting.

Another article there by a 'famous' author – ive never heard of – has his unnamed publicist getting lots of free advertising for his 'great' writings for free because he thinks he has been subjected to AS!

Complete Utter Nonsensical Crappery by the shameless gormless Groaniad.

Ho hum – wait till the next government tasks the completion and implementation of Leveson 2.

Gezzah Potts
DG . What do you expect from these presstitute stenographers. Full boycott of all mainstream media, including alleged 'progressive' media. On a tangent, used to read Barbara Ellen many years ago (30?) when she wrote for the NME which was basically my 'bible' back then. How sad the once great Babs Ellen has become a . Slug.
DunGroanin
Ah the NME – a bible for us back in the day – see how it was taken out and shot after it supported Corbyn in 2017.

A very accidental death it suffered.

Imagine what they would bave done to Russell Brand if he had had the same influence.

Yes i'm afraid most of the neolib con artiste creatures of the Obssezsive Groan are beyond saving. They will sizzle in the light.

Gezzah Potts
Thanks DG. I only know the NME is now online only, didn't know the reasons for its print demise. I wonder what the late Steven Wells would have made of all this ludicrous crap? I just can't tolerate the cretinous craven presstitutes in the MSM anymore. Gets me too fecked off knowing what they're loudly spouting is pro empire, pro imperialist bullshit in the service of the 0.01℅. Good site for you to check is Neoliberalism Softpanorama. A vast treasure trove of info.
Francis Lee
What is difficult to forgive is the fact in times gone by, and occasionally today, the Jewish intelligentsia have made a huge input into the development of western civilization. In terms of politics, Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, Greogy Lukacs, Eduard Bernstein, Leon Trotsky, Leonard Woolf; in terms of social theory, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt; in terms of literaure Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow. Contemporary intellectuals being Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and possibly a less well-known and very courageous Jewish oppositionist, Gideon Levy, who writes for Haaretz. These were the guys I cut my teeth on as a student and whom I still revere to a great extent. It was the Jewish intelligentsia who led the opposition against the forces of reaction, particularly in Europe.

Times have changed it seems, Israel and Zionism are now the forces of reaction.

John Calvert
Yes. But how many of those great names would have willingly and proudly posed in front of the national flag of the state of Israel?
Philip Toal
Facts would be appreciated in light of the truth that G. levy, Finkelstein, Pappe etc. are indeed alive and well. It's apparently a case of informed opinions based on pure facts as opposed to ignorance as to who is alive or dead that is issue important.
Chris W
Antinationalism for goyim and nationalism for jews – because goyim have these genocidal tendencies Many, many Jews deep down believe that Non-Jews want to kill them, so pre-emptive strikes is the way to go. Most of all strikes against the ethnic and religious identity of non-Jewish people, because those identities make a people strong. So socialist Jews in Europe and zionist ones everywhere fight the same pro-Jewish/anti-goyim fight
harry law
John McDonnell encapsulates for me the pathetic spinelessness of the Labour Party, in a long interview with the Jewish news the interviewer asked him why Corbyn shared platforms with Anti-semites "So when we're talking about sharing a platform with anti-Semites, we're not talking about people who are just supportive of the Palestinian cause, do you think it might be time for an apology"?

JmD: "You have to look at why he was sharing platforms, it was not to endorse them, it was to try and engage with them".
There you have it, his friend Corbyn spent the past 30 years of his life traversing the country addressing Palestinian and antiwar groups and offering them his support, then in one sentence McDonnell throws his friend under the bus "it was not to endorse them". With a friend like McDonnell who needs enemies.
My advice to McDonnell is get on your belly and crawl and then ask for forgiveness from the Board of Deputies, it still will not be enough. They will only be happy when Corbyn is destroyed.

mark
However much you grovel and appease these people, it is never enough. Give $10 billion to Israel and you're anti semitic because you haven't given it $50 billion. Fight 5 wars for Israel, and you're anti semitic because you haven't fought 10 wars for Israel.

Netanyahu explained it all quite well.

"If we get caught, they will just replace us with persons of the same cloth. So it does not matter what you do. America is a golden calf, and we will suck it dry, chop it up and sell it off piece by piece till there is nothing left but the world's biggest welfare state that we will create and control. Why? Because it is the Will of God and America is big enough to take the hit. So we can do it again and again and again. This is what we do to countries that we hate. We destroy them very slowly and make them suffer for refusing to be our slaves."

To America, add Britain.

Steve Hayes
The comparison to a witch hunt is perfectly accurate. The attack works by mere accusation. The facts, evidence, criteria of evaluation are all irrelevant. Accuse emotively, and construe any dissent or even scepticism as proof of guilt. This is the modus operandi of the witch hunters, the arbiters of truth and the only acceptable version of reality. This becomes a loyalty test. Anyone who refuses to support the witch hunters is either already a witch or in imminent danger of becoming one. https://viewsandstories.blogspot.com/2018/09/on-dog-whistles-and-witch-finders.html
Harry Stotle
'The attack works by mere accusation. The facts, evidence, criteria of evaluation are all irrelevant. Accuse emotively, and construe any dissent or even scepticism as proof of guilt. This is the modus operandi of the witch hunters' – hammer, welcome to head of nail.
Maggie
Right out of Goebel's hand book
Steve Hayes
Maggie I am pretty sure that none of the quotes you attribute to Goebbels were said/written by him. Perhaps you could cite your source(s)?
Mucho
Hurricane survivors forced to pledge allegiance to Israel to receive Support (In Texas Town) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqOIeUTx8VQ&t=11s

Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney talks with PressTV about how the Israeli Lobby owns both the Congress and the Senate and how AIPAC and the ADL took her out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_VNOk7Wv5A

More than 200 British MPs sign a pledge to Israel https://unitedwithisrael.org/over-200-uk-candidates-sign-pro-israel-pledge/

Montel Jordan – This Is How We Do It https://www.youtube.com/embed/0hiUuL5uTKc

Mucho
More than 200 British MPs sign a pledge to Israel ..should say Candidates for election, not MPs

[Jul 29, 2019] Pizzagate: Do We Know The Full Scope Yet?!

Jul 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

ChanceIs Pinto Currency Feb 19, 2017 4:24 PM I think that PizzaGate is for real. I will take the "safer" position that there is reason for investigation, but there is nothing which John Q Public can observe that makes a very firm case for prosecution (of John Podesta). Dave Seaman gives a "credible" update on PizzaGate evert few days. This from Sunday afternoon, Feb 19:

Pizzagate: Do We Know The Full Scope Yet?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnyh1d_2KnQ sleigher Pinto Currency Feb 19, 2017 5:22 PM "When they start arresting the pedophiles in Congress, the voting balance will change for Trump."

Looks like it is starting... Just not Congress yet

http://www.neonnettle.com/features/738-pedogate-high-profile-pedophiles-... Chris Dakota Pinto Currency Feb 19, 2017 5:55 PM FBI insider arrests coming this week.

At least 30 in congress for pedogate. Wahooo ronaldwilsonreagan Feb 19, 2017 1:04 PM No fan of Drumpf's bi-polar behavior but it pales in comparison to obama's clear insanity. We actually had a president who bragged he was good at killing people. That's as insane as it comes. DownWithYogaPants Wahooo Feb 19, 2017 1:12 PM Any usage of the name "Drumpf" will get you a downvote from me. It's a name. It has no bearing but yet it appears you think it has some sort of magical powers when you use. The fact it was popularized by a weak comedian also brings a ding. vulcanraven DownWithYogaPants Feb 19, 2017 1:54 PM Drumpf=The regressive liberal crybaby callsign

[Jul 29, 2019] Longtime NYPD said as a father it was one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen.

Jul 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Chris Dakota -> Pairadimes Feb 19, 2017 5:54 PM

http://yournewswire.com/district-attorney-obama-treason/

and then kill them all, every damn one of them!

You better be tough to watch this, not for women unless you are like me who will watch it and spread it.

Warning: you can't unwatch this and will need to claim your space after and pray.

This IS John Podesta. This IS what I said was coming to him last summer/fall.

What did I say about this coming eclipse? It is in Pisces, water, water pourer, dams, leaks, secrets and film. Note the color purple which is the Pisces color.

People are saying this is John Podesta torturing a boy in a shower. I had to turn the sound off it was so horrific. This came from Weiners laptop, the cops must be leaking now Life insurance file.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud_TJe0v6IY

John Podesta's voice a match!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=29&v=qzRcPK571mI

divingengineer -> Chris Dakota Feb 19, 2017 6:04 PM

Is this what Comey showed the Senate group this week when they came out looking like they were seasick?

Chris Dakota -> divingengineer Feb 19, 2017 6:13 PM

Yes and longtime NYPD said "as a father it was one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen."

because it is evil.

I am thinking it is MKULTRA stuff, designed with strobe light to split the personality. vulcanraven Pinto Currency Feb 19, 2017 1:47 PM I fucking hope so. I just wonder what the hell they are waiting for, but the more I think about it this is the best I can come up with:

If Pedogate is finally blown wide open, it is going to rip a hole through the fabric of reality for the unawashed sheeple. It will also destroy any and all faith in the US government, and full blown chaos will erupt everywhere.

So whoever is holding the goods on PG, also knows that reality hangs in the balance upon opening that can of worms. I also believe when the dam finally does break and people are getting led away in handcuffs on national TV, a large majority of the population will still be in full blown denial... finding any and every reason to somehow blame the scandal on Trump/Russia/The Flying Spaghetti Monster

[Jul 29, 2019] Deep State Wants Epstein Gone by Greg Hunte

Notable quotes:
"... I guarantee you, they want Epstein gone. There is no doubt about that. I don't know why the Bureau of Prisons put Epstein in a jail cell with a cop that killed four people and buried them in his back yard. ..."
"... Epstein should have been in solitary confinement under watch. So, whoever made that decision, it was a complete error in judgment, if not intentional. That should not have happened in the first place ..."
"... U.S. Attorney (and former Labor Secretary) Alexander Acosta would not have said this if it were not true. It is true. There are intelligence connections. Is this a blackmail operation? We know Epstein has a 'black book.' We know Epstein probably has video of massages by young girls of high profile people, including politicians... ..."
"... There are going to be some big names that are going to be connected to Epstein and his pedophile child trafficking ring. There is no question about it. ..."
Jul 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Via Greg Hunter's USAWatchdog.com ,

Former CIA Officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp says there are big stories with big implications for America that are unfolding now.

One of the biggest earthquakes that is going off will be the high ranking Deep State elite surrounding convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein. Shipp says,

"Oh my goodness gracious, the Deep State is darn well scared, and some of its political top participants, I guarantee you, they want Epstein gone. There is no doubt about that. I don't know why the Bureau of Prisons put Epstein in a jail cell with a cop that killed four people and buried them in his back yard.

Epstein should have been in solitary confinement under watch. So, whoever made that decision, it was a complete error in judgment, if not intentional. That should not have happened in the first place."

Shipp goes on to point out, " It looks pretty clear to me that the Deep State intelligence Shadow government was involved, and it gets worse..."

" Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Epstein's alleged recruiter for young girls, was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, (Correction: Shipp said John by mistake) who was a known Mossad Agent.

He bilked pension funds to cover losses in his business... He was found dead floating next to his yacht from an alleged heart attack. So, there are some strange connections to the Deep State. U.S. Attorney (and former Labor Secretary) Alexander Acosta would not have said this if it were not true. It is true. There are intelligence connections. Is this a blackmail operation? We know Epstein has a 'black book.' We know Epstein probably has video of massages by young girls of high profile people, including politicians...

. There are going to be some big names that are going to be connected to Epstein and his pedophile child trafficking ring. There is no question about it."

Another huge story unfolding is the investigation into the "hoax" and "witch hunt" of Russian collusion with President Trump that has now been totally disproven. The real story is how traitors in the U.S. government made up a crimes to frame the President, his campaign and his Administration. People high up in the Obama Administration committed massive crimes, only to fail badly in removing Trump from office . Kevin Shipp says,

...for President Trump, "This is a fight to the death. . . . Trump has to win. . . . There is no question about it. They want Donald Trump gone anyway that they can. We know the Shadow Government, including the CIA, and I studied this in detail, were responsible for the assassination of JFK using the Mafia, and that's how far they will go. You are talking trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars they could lose if the President isn't in their pocket . . . . They want him dead, and he is under serious risk right now. . . . He has got to push this forward. He has to win for the Constitution and for his family that might be assassinated."

Yet another big risk, says Shipp, is the global economic system suffering a financial calamity. This includes the U.S. Shipp contends,

" Russia and China are stocking up on gold . . . as they agree to stop using the U.S. dollar and go to the yuan and ruble, which means they will stop recognizing the U.S. dollar. The dollar will lose its value because of that. We have a huge debt, and by 2025, our deficit will be $30 trillion. It is impossible to pay that off. The global deficit is $245 trillion. This thing has got to burst, and it's going to burst...

Donald Trump has come out against the Deep State and Shadow Government in ways I could only dream of. I am a Trump supporter, but what he has got on his hands is a coming catastrophe. You cannot stop the collapse caused by the deficit ...

Trump will take some significant action. This is a national security issue, and he can step in and make some changes. This is a huge catastrophe, and Americans are not aware of what is coming . . . and are not ready for a financial calamity. "

Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Former CIA Officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/KG3nliHdYmg

To Donate to USAWatchdog.com Click Here. (By the way, YouTube demonetized this video before I posted it. So, it must be good. There is lots of new information and analysis in this 80 minute interview.)

There is free information on Kevin Shipp's website called ForTheLoveofFreedom.net. At the very top of the page is a new section called "The Shipp Brief." Shipp gives a new "brief" every day. You can also scroll down and find Shipp's donation page that has multiple ways you can support his work. It's all on ForTheLoveofFreedom.net.

[Jul 29, 2019] Once you start researching the Epstein matter - not for the lurid details - but the unprecedented, jaw dropping preferential treatment of an actual human sex trafficker ( not this fake #metoo hysteria) all hope is lost.

Notable quotes:
"... The Epstein conspiracy grows worse. One of the victims filed a federal lawsuit. Once filed, this is public record. The only redactions allowed are social security numbers and the like. ..."
"... When the Miami Herald went to obtain the Motion for Summary Judgment, it was completely redacted. 137 pages of blacked out paragraphs. ..."
"... This type of redaction is unheard, unprecedented- appalling. ..."
"... If the redactions stand, we should riot in the street. We knew justice was bought, but pedophilia usually will stir up some dregs of bureaucratic slugs to action. ..."
"... Once you start researching the Epstein matter - not for the lurid details - but the unprecedented, jaw dropping preferential treatment of an actual human sex trafficker ( not this fake #metoo hysteria) – all hope is lost. ..."
"... Dozens of little girls – all poor and from fatherless backgrounds marred by parental drug abuse, suicides and physical abuse- selected and sexually devastated by Epstein- not a word. ..."
Jul 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

TKK , says: July 29, 2019 at 11:31 am GMT

The Epstein conspiracy grows worse. One of the victims filed a federal lawsuit. Once filed, this is public record. The only redactions allowed are social security numbers and the like.

When the Miami Herald went to obtain the Motion for Summary Judgment, it was completely redacted. 137 pages of blacked out paragraphs.

A motion for summary judgment is basically saying there are no material issues in dispute- nothing to litigate. This document would contain all relevant facts about the case. This type of redaction is unheard, unprecedented- appalling.

The only reason the Herald is in pursuit ( and any other MSM) is because they believed it would destroy Trump.

It's now on appeal. If the redactions stand, we should riot in the street. We knew justice was bought, but pedophilia usually will stir up some dregs of bureaucratic slugs to action.

And with a parallel to McCain, if Clinton slithers out of this- with over 27 flights on the Lolita Express- he is officially the most untouchable man in history.

Once you start researching the Epstein matter - not for the lurid details - but the unprecedented, jaw dropping preferential treatment of an actual human sex trafficker ( not this fake #metoo hysteria) – all hope is lost.

Note the strange silence from Hollywood and the elites regarding Epstein's victims, when they were wearing hair shirts over Christine Fords 30 year old accusation.

A wealthy smug scold, who looks like an exploded can of rotten biscuit dough had them weeping on camera.

Dozens of little girls – all poor and from fatherless backgrounds marred by parental drug abuse, suicides and physical abuse- selected and sexually devastated by Epstein- not a word.

[Jul 29, 2019] American Pravda John McCain, Jeffrey Epstein, and Pizzagate by Ron Unz

Notable quotes:
"... top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia's entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history. ..."
"... An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence. ..."
"... I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise. ..."
"... In The Dark Side of Camelot , famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claimed that secret blackmail evidence of JFK's extra-marital affairs probably played a crucial role in having his administration overrule the unanimous verdict of all top Pentagon advisors and award the largest military procurement contract in U.S. history to General Dynamics instead of Boeing, thereby saving the former company from likely bankruptcy and its major organized-crime shareholders from devastating financial losses. Hersh also suggests that a similar factor likely explains JFK's last-minute reversal in the choice of his Vice President, a decision that landed Lyndon Johnson on the 1960 ticket and placed him in the White House after Kennedy's 1963 assassination. ..."
"... Similar rumors swirl around events much farther back in history as well, sometimes with enormous consequences. Well-placed contemporary sources have claimed that Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, purchased the secret correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and his longtime mistress, and that the existence of that powerful leverage may have been an important factor behind Wilson's astonishingly rapid rise from president of Princeton in 1910 to governor of New Jersey in 1911 to president of the United States in 1912. ..."
"... Without naming any names, since 2001 it has been difficult to avoid noticing that one of the most zealous and committed supporters of the Neocon party-line on all Middle Eastern foreign policy matters has been a leading Republican senator from one of the most socially-conservative Southern states, a man whose rumored personal inclinations have long circulated on the Internet. The strikingly-sudden reversal of this individual on a major policy question certainly supports these suspicions. There have also been several other such examples involving prominent Republicans. ..."
"... There are lurid rumors that the Syndicate possessed secret photos of Hoover wearing a dress and high-heels, but just a few years ago Rep. Mike Honda of San Jose desperately placed his eight-year-old transgendered grand-daughter front-and-center in his unsuccessful attempt to win reelection. ..."
"... There seems to be a great deal of evidence that powerful organizations and individuals have successfully managed to suppress credible accusations of that practice for very long periods of time if no group with substantial media influence chose to target the offenders for unmasking. ..."
"... There is also the intriguing example of Dennis Hastert. As the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House in U.S. history, holding office during 1999-2007, Hastert was third in line to the Presidency and even ranked as our nation's top Republican elected official during some of that period. Based upon my newspaper readings, he had always struck me as a rather bland and ordinary individual, with journalists sometimes even strongly hinting at his mediocrity, so that I occasionally wondered just how someone so unimpressive could have risen to such extremely high national office. ..."
"... During the summer of 2007, the Internet was ablaze with claims that Sen. John Edwards, a runner-up in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, had just fathered a child with his mistress, and those reports were backed by seemingly-credible visual evidence, including photos showing the married senator holding his new-born baby. Yet as the days and even the weeks went by, not a whiff of this salacious scandal ever reached the pages of any of my morning newspapers or the rest of the mainstream media although it was a top conversation topic everywhere else. ..."
"... Probably one reason I paid so little attention to the topic was the exceptionally lurid nature of the claims being made. Epstein was supposedly an enormously wealthy Wall Street financier of rather mysterious personal background and source of funds, who owned a private island and an immense New York City mansion, both regularly stocked with harems of underage girls provided for sexual purposes. He allegedly hobnobbed on a regular basis with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Harvard's Alan Dershowitz, and numerous other figures in the international elite, as well as a gaggle of ordinary billionaires, frequently transporting those individuals on his personal jet known as "the Lolita Express" for the role it played in facilitating illegal secret orgies with young girls. When right-wing bloggers on obscure websites claimed that former President Clinton and the British Royals were being sexually serviced by the underage girls of a James Bond super-villain brought to life, I just assumed those accusations were the wildest sort of Internet exaggeration. ..."
"... The author of a long 2003 Epstein profile that had appeared in Vanity Fair explained that she had personally spoken to some of his victims and included their highly-credible accounts in her article, but that those portions had been stricken and removed by her timorous editors. ..."
"... As presented by these media outlets, Epstein's personal rise also seemed rather inexplicable unless he had benefited from some powerful network or similar organization. Lacking any college degree or credentials, he had somehow gotten a job teaching at one of New York City's most elite prep schools, then quickly jumped to working at a top investment bank, rising to partner with astonishing speed until he was fired a few years later for illegal activity. Despite such a scanty and doubtful record, he was soon managing money for some of America's wealthiest individuals, and keeping so much of it for himself that he was regularly described as a billionaire. According to newspaper accounts, his great specialty was "making connections for people." ..."
"... Obviously, Epstein was a ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustler. But extremely wealthy individuals must surely be surrounded by great swarms of ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustlers, and why would he have been so much more successful than all those others? Perhaps a clue comes from the offhand remark of Epstein's now-disgraced prosecutor, saying that he had been told to go very easy on the sex-trafficker because he "belonged to intelligence." The vague phrasing of that statement raises questions about whether the intelligence service may not have been one controlled by the U.S. government. ..."
"... Philip Giraldi, a highly-regarded former CIA officer, put things very plainly when he suggested that Epstein had probably been working for the Israeli Mossad, operating "honey traps" to obtain blackmail information on all the wealthy and powerful individuals whom he regularly plied with underage girls. Indeed, longtime Canadian journalist Eric Margolis recounted his early 1990s visit to Epstein's enormous NYC mansion, in which he had barely crossed the threshold before he was offered an "intimate massage" by one of the many young girls there, presumably in a bedroom well-stocked with hidden cameras. ..."
"... Given my personal lack of interest in the Epstein case, then or now, perhaps a few of these details may be garbled, but it seems undeniable that he was exactly the sort of remarkable renegade often faced by Agent 007 in the movies, and the true facts will presumably come out at his trial. ..."
"... John Podesta had been a longtime fixture in DC political circles, becoming chief of staff to President Bill Clinton in 1998, and afterward remaining one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party establishment. While serving as as chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, his apparent carelessness with the password security of his Gmail account allowed it to easily be hacked, and tens of thousands of his personal emails were soon published on WikiLeaks. A swarm of young anti-Clinton activists began scouring this treasure-trove of semi-confidential information, seeking evidence of mundane bribery and corruption, but instead they came across some quite odd exchanges, seemingly written in coded language. ..."
"... Now use of coded language in a supposedly secure private email account raises all sorts of natural suspicions regarding what might have been under discussion, with the most likely possibilities being illegal drugs or sex. But most of the references didn't seem to fit the former category, and in our remarkably libertine era, in which political candidates compete for the right to be Grand Marshal at an annual Gay Pride Parade, one of the few sexual activities still discussed only in whispers would seem to be pedophilia, with some of the very strange remarks possibly hinting at this. ..."
"... The researchers also soon discovered that his brother Tony Podesta, one of the wealthiest and most successful lobbyists in DC, had extremely odd taste in art. Major items of his very extensive personal collection seemed to represent tortured or murdered bodies, and one of his favorite artists was best known for paintings depicting young children being held captive, lying dead, or suffering under severe distress. ..."
"... Furthermore, some of the rather suspiciously-worded Podesta emails referred to events held at a local DC pizza parlor, greatly favored by the Democratic Party elite, whose owner was the gay former boyfriend of David Brock, a leading Democratic activist. The public Instagram account of that pizza-entrepreneur apparently contained numerous images of young children, sometimes tied or bound, with those images frequently labeled by hashtags using the traditional gay slang for underage sexual targets ..."
"... Closely connected Instagram accounts also included pictures of young children, sometimes shown amid piles of high-value currency, with queries about how much those particular children might be worth. None of this seemed illegal, but surely any reasonable person would regard the material as extremely suspicious. ..."
"... oddly enough, GQ Magazine had ranked that gay pizza parlor owner with a strange focus on young children as being one of the 50 most powerful people in our national capital, placing him far ahead of many Cabinet members, Senators, Congressional Chairmen, Supreme Court justices, and top lobbyists. Was his pizza really that delicious? ..."
"... Some of the best summaries of the Pizzagate case were produced by a young British YouTuber named Tara McCarthy, whose work was published under the name of "Reality Calls," and her videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Although her channel was eventually banned and her videos purged, copies were later reloaded to other accounts, both on YouTube and BitChute. Some of the evidence she presents seemed rather innocuous or speculative to me and other elements were probably based upon her unfamiliarity with American society and culture. But a great deal of extremely suspicious material remains, and I would suggest that people watch the videos and decide for themselves. ..."
Jul 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

...The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America's political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty , which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.

As publisher of The American Conservative , I ran Schanberg's remarkable piece as a cover story, and across several websites over the years it has surely been read many hundreds of thousands of times, including a huge spike around the time of McCain's death. I therefore find it rather difficult to believe that the many journalists investigating McCain's background might have remained unaware of this material. Yet no hints of these facts were provided in any of the articles appearing in any remotely prominent media outlets as can be seen by searching for web pages containing "McCain and Schanberg" dated around the time of the Senator's passing.

John McCain and the POW Cover-Up Sydney Schanberg • May 25, 2010 • 8,200 Words

Schanberg's journalistic stature had hardly been forgotten by his former colleagues. Upon his death a couple of years ago, the Times ran a very long and glowing obituary , and a few months later I attended the memorial tribute to his life and career held at the New York Times headquarters building, which more than two hundred prominent journalists mostly from his own generation, including those of the highest rank. Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. gave a speech describing how as a young man he had always so greatly admired Schanberg and had been mortified by the unfortunate circumstances of his departure from the family's newspaper. Former Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld recounted the many years he had worked closely with the man he had long considered his closest friend and colleague, someone whom he almost seemed to regard as his older brother. But during the two hours of praise and remembrance scarcely a single word was uttered in public about the gigantic story that had occupied the last two decades of Schanberg's celebrated career.

This same blanket of media silence also enveloped the very serious accusations regarding McCain's own Vietnam War record. A few years ago, I drew upon the Times and other fully mainstream sources to strongly suggest that McCain's stories of his torture as a POW were probably fictional, invented to serve as a cover and an excuse for the very real record of his wartime collaboration with his Communist captors. Indeed, at the time our American media reported his activities as one of the leading propagandists of our North Vietnamese foes, but these facts were later flushed down the memory-hole. McCain's father then ranked as one of America's top military officers, and it seems likely that his personal political intervention ensured that the official narrative of his son's wartime record was transmuted from traitor to war-hero, thereby allowing the younger McCain to later embark upon his celebrated political career.

John McCain: When "Tokyo Rose" Ran for President Ron Unz • March 9, 2015 • 4,200 Words

The story of the abandoned Vietnam POWs and McCain's own Communist propaganda broadcasts hardly exhaust the catalog of the major skeletons in the late Senator's closet. McCain was regularly described by reporters as being remarkably hot-headed and having a violent temper, but the national press left it to the alternative media to investigate the real-life implications of those rather suggestive phrases.

In a September 1, 2008 Counterpunch expose later published online , Alexander Cockburn reported that interviews with two emergency room physicians in Phoenix revealed that around the time that McCain was sucked into the political maelstrom of the Keating Five Scandal, his wife Cindy was admitted to her local hospital suffering from a black eye, facial bruises, and scratches consistent with physical violence, and this same situation occurred two additional times over the next few years. Cockburn also noted several other highly suspicious marital incidents during the years that followed, including the Senator's wife appearing with a bandaged wrist and her arm in a sling not long after she joined her husband on the 2008 campaign trail, an injury reported by our strangely incurious political journalists as being due to "excessive hand-shaking." It's an odd situation when a tiny leftist newsletter can easily uncover facts that so totally eluded the vast resources of our entire national press corps. If there were credible reports that Melania Trump had been repeatedly admitted to local emergency rooms suffering from black eyes and facial bruises, would our corporate media have remained so uninterested in any further investigation?

McCain had first won his Arizona Congressional seat in 1982, not long after he moved into the state, with his campaign bankrolled by his father-in-law's beer-distributorship fortune, and that inheritance eventually elevated the McCain household into one of the wealthiest in the Senate. But although the Senator spent the next quarter-century in public life, even nearly upsetting George W. Bush for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, only in late 2008 did I learn from the Times that the Phoenix beer-monopoly in question, then valued at around $200 million, had accrued to a man whose lifelong business partner Kemper Marley had long been deeply linked to organized crime . Indeed, close associates of that latter individual had been convicted by a jury of the car-bomb assassination of a Phoenix investigative crime reporter just a few years before McCain's sudden triumphal entrance into Arizona politics. Perhaps such guilt-by-association is improper, but would our national press-corps have remained silent if the personal fortune of our current president were only a step or two removed from the car-bomb assassins of a nosy journalist who died while investigating mobsters?

As I gradually became aware of these enormities casually hidden in McCain's background, my initial reaction was disbelief that someone whose record was so deeply tarnished in so many different ways could ever have reached such a pinnacle of American political power. But as the media continued to avert its eyes from these newly revealed facts, even those disclosed in the pages of the Times itself, I gradually began to consider matters in a different light. Perhaps McCain's elevation to great American political power was not in spite of the devastating facts littering his personal past, but because of them. As I wrote a few years ago:

Today when we consider the major countries of the world we see that in many cases the official leaders are also the leaders in actuality: Vladimir Putin calls the shots in Russia, Xi Jinping and his top Politburo colleagues do the same in China, and so forth. However, in America and in some other Western countries, this seems to be less and less the case, with top national figures merely being attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability, a development that may eventually have dire consequences for the nations they lead. As an extreme example, a drunken Boris Yeltsin freely allowed the looting of Russia's entire national wealth by the handful of oligarchs who pulled his strings, and the result was the total impoverishment of the Russian people and a demographic collapse almost unprecedented in modern peacetime history.

An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence.

I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.

In physics, when an object deviates from its expected trajectory for inexplicable reasons, we assume that some unknown force has been at work, and tracing the record of such deviations may help to determine the characteristic properties of the latter. Over the years, I've increasingly become aware of such strange ideological deviations in public policy, and although some are readily explained, others suggest the existence of hidden forces far beneath the surface of our regular political world. This same situation may have occurred throughout our history, and sometimes the political decisions that so baffled contemporaries eventually came to light decades later.

In The Dark Side of Camelot , famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claimed that secret blackmail evidence of JFK's extra-marital affairs probably played a crucial role in having his administration overrule the unanimous verdict of all top Pentagon advisors and award the largest military procurement contract in U.S. history to General Dynamics instead of Boeing, thereby saving the former company from likely bankruptcy and its major organized-crime shareholders from devastating financial losses. Hersh also suggests that a similar factor likely explains JFK's last-minute reversal in the choice of his Vice President, a decision that landed Lyndon Johnson on the 1960 ticket and placed him in the White House after Kennedy's 1963 assassination.

As I recently mentioned , in the 1950s Sen. Estes Kefauver shifted the focus of his Organized Crime Hearings after the Chicago Syndicate confronted him with the photographs of his sexual encounter with two mob-supplied women. A decade later, California Attorney-General Stanley Mosk suffered much the same fate, with the facts remaining hidden for over twenty years.

Similar rumors swirl around events much farther back in history as well, sometimes with enormous consequences. Well-placed contemporary sources have claimed that Samuel Untermyer, a wealthy Jewish lawyer, purchased the secret correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and his longtime mistress, and that the existence of that powerful leverage may have been an important factor behind Wilson's astonishingly rapid rise from president of Princeton in 1910 to governor of New Jersey in 1911 to president of the United States in 1912. Once in office, Wilson signed the controversial legislation establishing the Federal Reserve system in 1913 and also named Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court despite the public opposition of nearly our entire legal establishment. Wilson's swiftly changing views on American involvement in the First World War may also have influenced by such personal pressures rather than solely determined by his perceptions of the national interest.

Without naming any names, since 2001 it has been difficult to avoid noticing that one of the most zealous and committed supporters of the Neocon party-line on all Middle Eastern foreign policy matters has been a leading Republican senator from one of the most socially-conservative Southern states, a man whose rumored personal inclinations have long circulated on the Internet. The strikingly-sudden reversal of this individual on a major policy question certainly supports these suspicions. There have also been several other such examples involving prominent Republicans.

But consider the far different situation of Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who in 1987 became the first member of the Congress to voluntarily admit that he was gay. Not long afterward, a notorious scandal erupted when it was revealed that his own DC townhouse had been used by a former boyfriend as headquarters for a male-prostitution ring. Frank claimed to have had no knowledge of that sordid situation, and his liberal Massachusetts constituents apparently accepted that, since he was resoundingly reelected and went on to serve another 24 years in Congress. But surely if Frank had been a Republican from a socially-conservative district, anyone possessing such evidence would have totally controlled his political survival, and with Frank spending several years as Chairman of the very powerful House Financial Services Committee, the value of such a hold would have been enormous.

This demonstrates the undeniable reality that what constitutes effective blackmail material may vary tremendously across different eras and regions. Today, it is widely accepted that longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover lived his life as a deeply-closeted homosexual and there seem to be serious claims that he also had some black ancestry, with the secret evidence of these facts probably helping to explain why for decades he stubbornly refused to admit the existence of American organized crime or focus his G-men on efforts to uproot it. But in today's America, he surely would have proudly proclaimed his sexuality and racial ancestry in an New York Times Magazine cover-story, rightly believing that they enhanced his political invulnerability on the national stage. There are lurid rumors that the Syndicate possessed secret photos of Hoover wearing a dress and high-heels, but just a few years ago Rep. Mike Honda of San Jose desperately placed his eight-year-old transgendered grand-daughter front-and-center in his unsuccessful attempt to win reelection.

The decades have certainly softened the effectiveness of many forms of blackmail, but pedophilia still ranks as an extremely powerful taboo. There seems to be a great deal of evidence that powerful organizations and individuals have successfully managed to suppress credible accusations of that practice for very long periods of time if no group with substantial media influence chose to target the offenders for unmasking.

The most obvious example is the Catholic Church, and the failings of its American and international hierarchy in that regard have regularly made the front pages of our leading newspapers. But until the early 2000s and the breakthrough reporting of the Boston Globe as recounted in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight , the Church had routinely fended off such scandals.

Consider also the remarkable case of British television personality Sir Jimmy Savile , one of his country's most admired celebrities, eventually knighted for his public service. Only shortly after his death at age 84 did the press begin revealing that he had probably molested many hundreds of children during his long career. Accusations by his young victims had stretched back across forty years, but his criminal activities had seemingly been protected by his wealth and celebrity, along with his numerous supporters in the media.

There is also the intriguing example of Dennis Hastert. As the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House in U.S. history, holding office during 1999-2007, Hastert was third in line to the Presidency and even ranked as our nation's top Republican elected official during some of that period. Based upon my newspaper readings, he had always struck me as a rather bland and ordinary individual, with journalists sometimes even strongly hinting at his mediocrity, so that I occasionally wondered just how someone so unimpressive could have risen to such extremely high national office.

Then a few years ago, he was suddenly thrust back into the headlines, arrested by the FBI and charged with financial crimes relating to what apparently had been his past history of abusing young boys, at least one of whom had committed suicide, with the federal judge who sent him to prison denouncing him as "a serial child molester" at sentencing . Perhaps I've led an overly sheltered life, but my impression is that only a tiny sliver of Americans have had a long record of child molestation, and all things being equal, it seems rather unlikely that someone of such a background but who possesses no other great talents or skills would rise to near the absolute top of our political heap. So perhaps not all things were otherwise equal. If some powerful elements held the hard evidence that placed a particular elected official under their total control, making great efforts to elevate him to Speaker of the House would be a very shrewd investment.

At times the unwillingness of our national media to see major stories in front of their very noses reaches ridiculous extremes. During the summer of 2007, the Internet was ablaze with claims that Sen. John Edwards, a runner-up in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries, had just fathered a child with his mistress, and those reports were backed by seemingly-credible visual evidence, including photos showing the married senator holding his new-born baby. Yet as the days and even the weeks went by, not a whiff of this salacious scandal ever reached the pages of any of my morning newspapers or the rest of the mainstream media although it was a top conversation topic everywhere else. Eventually, the National Enquirer , a notorious gossip tabloid, scored a journalistic first , by receiving a Pulitzer Prize nomination for breaking the story that no other outlet seemed willing to cover. Would our media have similarly averted its eyes from a newborn baby Trump coming from the wrong side of the bed?

Over the years, it became increasingly obvious to me that nearly all elements of our national media were often quite willing to enlist in a "conspiracy of silence" to minimize or entirely ignore stories of tremendous potential interest to their readership and major public importance. I could easily have doubled or tripled the number of such notable examples I provided above without much effort. Moreover, it is quite intriguing that so many of these cases involve the sort of criminal or sexual misbehavior that would be ideally suited for blackmailing powerful individuals who are less likely to be vulnerable to other influences. So perhaps many of the elected officials situated at the top of our democratic system merely reign as political puppets, dancing to invisible strings.

Given my awareness of this remarkable track-record of major media cover-ups, I'm ashamed to admit that I had paid almost no attention to the Jeffrey Epstein case until it exploded across our national headlines earlier this month, suddenly becoming one of the biggest news stories in our country.

For many years, reports about Epstein and his illegal sex-ring had regularly circulated on the fringes of the Internet, with agitated commenters citing the case as proof of the dark and malevolent forces that secretly controlled our corrupted political system. But I almost entirely ignored these discussions, and I'm not sure that I ever once clicked on a single link.

Probably one reason I paid so little attention to the topic was the exceptionally lurid nature of the claims being made. Epstein was supposedly an enormously wealthy Wall Street financier of rather mysterious personal background and source of funds, who owned a private island and an immense New York City mansion, both regularly stocked with harems of underage girls provided for sexual purposes. He allegedly hobnobbed on a regular basis with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Harvard's Alan Dershowitz, and numerous other figures in the international elite, as well as a gaggle of ordinary billionaires, frequently transporting those individuals on his personal jet known as "the Lolita Express" for the role it played in facilitating illegal secret orgies with young girls. When right-wing bloggers on obscure websites claimed that former President Clinton and the British Royals were being sexually serviced by the underage girls of a James Bond super-villain brought to life, I just assumed those accusations were the wildest sort of Internet exaggeration.

Moreover, these angry writers did occasionally let slip that the fiendish target of their wrath had already been charged in a Florida courtroom, eventually pleading guilty to a single sexual offense and receiving a thirteen month jail sentence, mitigated by very generous work-release provisions. This hardly seemed like the sort of judicial punishment that would lend credence to the fantastical accusations against him. If Epstein had already been investigated by law enforcement authorities and given the sentence one might expect for writing a bad check, I found it quite unlikely that he was actually the Goldfinger or Dr. No that deluded Internet activists made him out to be.

Then these same wild, implausible claims previously found only on anonymous comment-threads were suddenly repeated as solid fact on the front pages of the Times and all my other morning newspapers, and the former federal prosecutor who had signed off on Epstein's legal slap-on-the-wrist was forced to resign from the Trump Cabinet. Epstein's safe had been found to contain a huge cache of child-pornography and other highly suspicious material, and he was quickly rearrested on charges that could send him to federal prison for decades. Prestigious media outlets described Epstein as the mastermind of a huge sex-trafficking ring, and numerous underage victims began coming forward, telling their stories of how he had molested, raped, and pimped them. The author of a long 2003 Epstein profile that had appeared in Vanity Fair explained that she had personally spoken to some of his victims and included their highly-credible accounts in her article, but that those portions had been stricken and removed by her timorous editors.

As presented by these media outlets, Epstein's personal rise also seemed rather inexplicable unless he had benefited from some powerful network or similar organization. Lacking any college degree or credentials, he had somehow gotten a job teaching at one of New York City's most elite prep schools, then quickly jumped to working at a top investment bank, rising to partner with astonishing speed until he was fired a few years later for illegal activity. Despite such a scanty and doubtful record, he was soon managing money for some of America's wealthiest individuals, and keeping so much of it for himself that he was regularly described as a billionaire. According to newspaper accounts, his great specialty was "making connections for people."

Obviously, Epstein was a ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustler. But extremely wealthy individuals must surely be surrounded by great swarms of ruthlessly opportunistic financial hustlers, and why would he have been so much more successful than all those others? Perhaps a clue comes from the offhand remark of Epstein's now-disgraced prosecutor, saying that he had been told to go very easy on the sex-trafficker because he "belonged to intelligence." The vague phrasing of that statement raises questions about whether the intelligence service may not have been one controlled by the U.S. government.

Philip Giraldi, a highly-regarded former CIA officer, put things very plainly when he suggested that Epstein had probably been working for the Israeli Mossad, operating "honey traps" to obtain blackmail information on all the wealthy and powerful individuals whom he regularly plied with underage girls. Indeed, longtime Canadian journalist Eric Margolis recounted his early 1990s visit to Epstein's enormous NYC mansion, in which he had barely crossed the threshold before he was offered an "intimate massage" by one of the many young girls there, presumably in a bedroom well-stocked with hidden cameras.

Given my personal lack of interest in the Epstein case, then or now, perhaps a few of these details may be garbled, but it seems undeniable that he was exactly the sort of remarkable renegade often faced by Agent 007 in the movies, and the true facts will presumably come out at his trial. Or perhaps not. Whether he lives to see trial is not entirely clear given the considerable number of powerful individuals who might prefer that hidden facts remain hidden, and the Friday newspapers reported that Epstein had been found injured and unconscious in his prison cell.

When one seemingly implausible pedophilia scandal has suddenly jumped from obscure corners of the Internet to the front pages of our leading newspapers, we must naturally begin to wonder whether others might not eventually do the same. And a very likely candidate comes to mind, one that seemed to me far better documented than the vague accusations being thrown about over the last few years against a wealthy financier once given a thirteen-month jail sentence in Florida a decade earlier.

I don't use Social Media myself, but near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign, I gradually began seeing more and more Trump supporters referring to something called "Pizzagate," a burgeoning sexual scandal that they claimed would bring down Hillary Clinton and many of the top leaders of her party, with the chatter actually increasing after Trump was elected. As near as I could tell, the whole bizarre theory had grown up on the far-right fringe of the Internet, with the utterly fantastical plot having something to do with stolen secret emails, DC pizza parlors, and a ring of pedophiles situated near the top of the Democratic Party. But given all the other strange and unlikely things I'd gradually discovered about our history, it didn't seem like something I could necessarily dismiss out of hand.

At the beginning of December, a right-wing blogger produced a lengthy exposition of the Pizzagate charges, which finally gave me some understanding of what was actually under discussion, and I soon made arrangements to republish his article. It quickly attracted a great deal of interest, and some websites pointed to it as the best single introduction to the scandal for a general audience.

Pizzagate Aedon Cassiel • December 2, 2016 • 3,100 Words

A couple of weeks later, I republished an additional article by the same writer, describing a long list of previous pedophilia scandals that had occurred in elite American and European political circles. Although many of these seemed to be solidly documented, nearly all of them had received minimal coverage by our mainstream media outlets. And if such political pedophile rings had existed in the relatively recent past, was it so totally implausible that there might be another one simmering beneath the surface of today's Washington DC?

Precedents for Pizzagate Aedon Cassiel • December 23, 2016 • 6,200 Words

Those interested in the details of the Pizzagate Hypothesis are advised to read these articles, especially the first one, but I might as well provide a brief summary.

John Podesta had been a longtime fixture in DC political circles, becoming chief of staff to President Bill Clinton in 1998, and afterward remaining one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party establishment. While serving as as chairman of Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, his apparent carelessness with the password security of his Gmail account allowed it to easily be hacked, and tens of thousands of his personal emails were soon published on WikiLeaks. A swarm of young anti-Clinton activists began scouring this treasure-trove of semi-confidential information, seeking evidence of mundane bribery and corruption, but instead they came across some quite odd exchanges, seemingly written in coded language.

Now use of coded language in a supposedly secure private email account raises all sorts of natural suspicions regarding what might have been under discussion, with the most likely possibilities being illegal drugs or sex. But most of the references didn't seem to fit the former category, and in our remarkably libertine era, in which political candidates compete for the right to be Grand Marshal at an annual Gay Pride Parade, one of the few sexual activities still discussed only in whispers would seem to be pedophilia, with some of the very strange remarks possibly hinting at this.

The researchers also soon discovered that his brother Tony Podesta, one of the wealthiest and most successful lobbyists in DC, had extremely odd taste in art. Major items of his very extensive personal collection seemed to represent tortured or murdered bodies, and one of his favorite artists was best known for paintings depicting young children being held captive, lying dead, or suffering under severe distress. Such peculiar artwork obviously isn't illegal, but it might naturally arouse some suspicions. And oddly enough, arch-Democrat Podesta had long been a close personal friend of former Republican Speaker and convicted child-molester Dennis Hastert, welcoming him back into DC society after his release from prison.

Furthermore, some of the rather suspiciously-worded Podesta emails referred to events held at a local DC pizza parlor, greatly favored by the Democratic Party elite, whose owner was the gay former boyfriend of David Brock, a leading Democratic activist. The public Instagram account of that pizza-entrepreneur apparently contained numerous images of young children, sometimes tied or bound, with those images frequently labeled by hashtags using the traditional gay slang for underage sexual targets. Some photos showed the fellow wearing a tee-shirt bearing the statement "I Love Children" in French, and by a very odd coincidence, his possibly assumed name was phonetically identical to that very same French phrase, thus proclaiming to the world that he was "a lover of children." Closely connected Instagram accounts also included pictures of young children, sometimes shown amid piles of high-value currency, with queries about how much those particular children might be worth. None of this seemed illegal, but surely any reasonable person would regard the material as extremely suspicious.

DC is sometimes described as "Powertown," being the seat of the individuals who make America's laws and govern our society, with local political journalists being closely attuned to the relative status of such individuals. And oddly enough, GQ Magazine had ranked that gay pizza parlor owner with a strange focus on young children as being one of the 50 most powerful people in our national capital, placing him far ahead of many Cabinet members, Senators, Congressional Chairmen, Supreme Court justices, and top lobbyists. Was his pizza really that delicious?

These few paragraphs provide merely a sliver of the large quantity of highly-suspicious material surrounding various powerful figures at the apex of the DC political world. A vast cloud of billowing smoke is certainly no proof of any fire, but only a fool would completely ignore it without attempting further investigation.

I usually regard videos as a poor means of imparting serious information, far less effective and meaningful than the simple printed word. But the overwhelming bulk of the evidence supporting the Pizzagate Hypothesis consists of visual images and screen shots, and these are naturally suited to a video presentation.

Some of the best summaries of the Pizzagate case were produced by a young British YouTuber named Tara McCarthy, whose work was published under the name of "Reality Calls," and her videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Although her channel was eventually banned and her videos purged, copies were later reloaded to other accounts, both on YouTube and BitChute. Some of the evidence she presents seemed rather innocuous or speculative to me and other elements were probably based upon her unfamiliarity with American society and culture. But a great deal of extremely suspicious material remains, and I would suggest that people watch the videos and decide for themselves.

Around the same time that I first became familiar with the details of the Pizzagate controversy, the topic also started reaching the pages of my morning newspapers, but in an rather strange manner. Political stories began giving a sentence or two to the "Pizzagate hoax," describing it as a ridiculous right-wing "conspiracy theory" but excluding all relevant details. I had an eery feeling that some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch causing the entire mainstream media to begin displaying identical signs declaring "Pizzagate Is False -- Nothing To See There!" in brightly flashing neon. I couldn't recall any previous example of such a strange media reaction to some obscure Internet controversy.

Articles in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times also suddenly appeared denouncing the entirety of the alternative media -- Left, Right, and Libertarian -- as "fake news" websites promoting Russian propaganda , while urging that their content be blocked by all patriotic Internet giants such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Prior to that moment, I'd never even heard the term "fake news" but suddenly it was ubiquitous across the media, once again almost as if some unseen hand had suddenly flipped a switch.

I naturally began to wonder whether the timing of these two strange developments was entirely coincidental. Perhaps Pizzagate was indeed true and struck so deeply at the core of our hugely corrupted political system that the media efforts to suppress it were approaching the point of hysteria.

Not long afterward, Tara McCarthy's detailed Pizzagate videos were purged from YouTube. This was among the very first instances of video content being banned despite fully conforming to all existing YouTube guidelines, another deeply suspicious development.

I also noticed that mere mention of Pizzagate had become politically lethal. Donald Trump had selected Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, as his National Security Advisor, and Flynn's son served as the latter's chief of staff. The younger Flynn happened to Tweet out a couple of links to Pizzagate stories, pointing out that the accusations hadn't yet been actually investigated let alone disproven, and very soon afterward, he was purged from the Trump transition team, foreshadowing his father's fall a few weeks later. It seemed astonishing to me that a few simple Tweets about an Internet controversy could have such huge real-life impact near the top of our government.

The media continued its uniform drumbeat of "Pizzagate Has Been Disproven!" but we were never told how or by whom, and I was not the only individual to notice the hollowness of such denunciations. An award-winning investigative journalist named Ben Swann at a CBS station in Atlanta broadcast a short television segment summarizing the Pizzagate controversy and noting that contrary to widespread media claims, Pizzagate had neither been investigated nor debunked. Swann was almost immediately purged by CBS but a copy of his television segment remains available for viewing on the Internet.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-GZFHLAcG8A?feature=oembed

There is an old wartime proverb that enemy flak is always heaviest over the most important target, and the remarkably ferocious wave of attacks and censorship against anyone broaching the subject of Pizzagate seems to raise obvious dark suspicions. Indeed, the simultaneous waves of attacks against all alternative media outlets as "Russian propaganda outlets" laid the basis for the continuing regime of Social Media censorship that has become a central aspect of today's world.

Pizzagate may or may not turn out to be true, but the ongoing Internet crackdown has similarly engulfed topics of a somewhat similar nature but with vastly stronger documentation. Although I don't use Twitter myself, I encountered the obvious implications of this new censorship policy following McCain's death last August. The senator had died on a Saturday afternoon, and readership of Sydney Schanberg's long 2008 expose quickly exploded, with numerous individuals Tweeting out the story and a large fraction of our incoming traffic therefore coming from Twitter. This continued until the following morning, at which point the huge flood of Tweets continued to grow, but all incoming Twitter traffic suddenly and permanently vanished, presumably because "shadow banning" had rendered those Tweets invisible. My own article on McCain's very doubtful war record simultaneously suffered the same fate, as did numerous other articles of a controversial nature that we published later that same week.

Perhaps that censorship decision was made by some ignorant young intern at Twitter, casually choosing to ban as "hate speech" or "fake news" a massively-documented 8,400 word expose by one of America's most distinguished journalists, a Pulitzer-prize winning former top editor at The New York Times .

Or perhaps certain political-puppeteers who had spent decades controlling that late Arizona senator sought to ensure that their political puppet-strings remained invisible even after his death.

Related Reading:

John McCain and the POW Cover-Up by Sydney Schanberg John McCain: When "Tokyo Rose" Ran for President Pizzagate by Aedon Cassiel What We Know About Pizzagate So Far by Tara McCarthy Precedents for Pizzagate by Aedon Cassiel

Carlton Meyer , says: Website July 29, 2019 at 4:13 am GMT

My tribute to the late Senator, from my blog:

Aug 27, 2018 -- The Truth about John McCain

John McCain was a leading American neocon who always advocated war and ever greater military spending for a growing worldwide empire. This made him a successful politician and explains why our neocon corporate media praises him and refuses to reports facts about his life. By several accounts ("The Nightingale Song" for example) he only got into the Naval Academy for a free college degree because dad and grandfather were admirals, and should have been kicked out several times. He graduated near the bottom of his class and was a lousy pilot who got into trouble often and crashed two aircraft because of neglect. He was shot down on his first tour over Vietnam while bombing a civilian power plant, and getting captured is not heroic.

[Hide MORE]
What happened in captivity is controversial, but upon returning from POW status he passed a physical and regained flight status as a pilot. Yet after he finished 20 years of service that allowed generous retirement pay, he obtained a 100% VA disability rating allowing him to collect some $40,000 a year tax free too! The LA Times mentioned this when McCain insisted he was fit to serve as President. For the past two decades, he hauled in over $240,000 a year from the Feds for military retirement, 100% VA disability, social security retirement, while working full-time in the US Senate. He was paid for being retired, disabled, and gainfully employed! This is textbook case of why our system needs reform to protect taxpayers from rich welfare kings like McCain.

McCain's loyal wife was disabled in a serious auto accident while he was a POW. Soon after he returned, McCain dumped her for a wealthy woman 20 years younger. The Reagans were so angry they never spoke to him again. He then married his new babe before he officially got divorced, so there's that bigamy thing. McCain used his wife's family money to run for Congress and quickly got into trouble with the Keating Five scandal. McCain got $112,000 in "campaign contributions" and an equal amount of luxury perks from one of our nation's leading fraudsters. In return, he helped change laws and threatened regulators to allow this multi-billion real estate scam to grow.

I don't know why any Arizonian voted for this crazed man, especially since he was a big advocate for open borders. At a union meeting, he told workers illegals are needed because Americans are too lazy to work farm fields, even for $50 an hour. McCain never labored his entire life, always on the government dole earning ten times minimum wage worker pay, whose increase he opposed.

McCain grew up wealthy and enjoyed free government health care his entire life, yet thought it nothing workers deserve. While running for President and attacking programs for the poor, a reporter asked how many houses he owned. He was unsure, but thought maybe seven. But his worst damage was to oppose any attempt at world peace, often demanding that the USA bomb the neocon designated villain of the year, currently Iran. McCain was a key player in the senseless deaths of thousands of American GIs and a million foreigners over the past two decades. He will not be missed.

Sep 2, 2018 -- John McCain Will Not Be Missed

As a follow-up to my Aug 27th blog, I ask people to name McCain's most important accomplishment during his long political career. They can think of none, but the TV tells them McCain was great because he was a neocon. Senator Paul Laxalt saw more combat than McCain and had an equally long and distinguished career. He was not a crazed neocon so our media barely reported his death last month.

Here are two examples of McCain's bad character just this past year. McCain had always opposed Obamacare and campaigned against it. The Republicans had tried to repeal it for years. The election of President Trump also brought in more Republican congressmen. The House easily repealed it, and the Senate finally had a majority to vote for a partial repeal. This would be a big victory for the Republicans led by President Trump. When the vote was held, McCain shocked everyone and voted against it, thus abandoning his principles and backstabbing his party! This was applauded by the Democrats and the insurance companies who profit from Obamacare. They praised McCain as a "maverick", although everyone knows this was done just to thwart a Trump victory.

On his deathbed, McCain directed his staff not to invite his Presidential running mate Sarah Palin to his funeral. She campaigned for him as a loyal teammate and never said a bad word about McCain during the campaign or after their loss. McCain blamed her for his loss and expressed this in a childish manner. Allow me to summarize his life. John McCain was a selfish, spoiled brat who had no sense of decency.

Richard Wave , says: July 29, 2019 at 4:15 am GMT
Another great article, Ron.

One of the most blatant examples of news media's silence on a topic of great national interest is the lack of coverage of closed-door "globalist" meetings like Bilderberg (which is attended by employees of such publications as The New York Times and Washington Post .)
The overheard conversation between Angela Merkel and Mark Zuckerberg on what Facebook can do to further her immigration agenda also received astonishingly little coverage from the establishment press:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/30/angela-merkel-caught-on-hot-mic-confronting-mark-z/

Alden , says: July 29, 2019 at 4:28 am GMT
If you look closely at Hoover's pictures it's hard to miss the kinky hair, broad nose and just something about the bone structure of his face that reveals some negro ancestry. There's a high school picture of him in some kind of band or cadet uniform that makes his bit of black blood obvious.

That Mayor Moscone of San Francisco who was shot had a thing for 11-13 black girls, small ones. He liked to beat them up a bit too. Probably not as badly as the bearings their mothers face them all their lives. His driver was a district attorney investigator who had to drive him to the projects and Protero Silver Av neighborhoods to meet his little friends. He met them at their mothers homes. I assume the mothers consented and some pimps arranged things.

One time Mayor Moscone drive himself to the Sunnyvale projects. While he was inside with his little friend some black guys removed all the tires from his city car and he had to call the police to drive him home.

He had 4 or 5 kids, Catholic Church attendance catholic schools the whole ostentatious Italian Catholic thing but he liked sex with those really young black girls in their project homes.

Miro23 , says: July 29, 2019 at 4:46 am GMT

But as the media continued to avert its eyes from these newly revealed facts, even those disclosed in the pages of the Times itself, I gradually began to consider matters in a different light. Perhaps McCain's elevation to great American political power was not in spite of the devastating facts littering his personal past, but because of them.

Agree with this. The message from the McCain funeral was that the blackmailed US political class would be well looked after -right to the end -- if they remained docile and obedient and followed their scripts.

For "War Hero" McCain, it was his unswerving hard line calling for the destruction of Iran.

But, the Zio-Glob still failed to get their war through McCain, and they also failed to get it through Hillary Clinton. Both of them were rejected by voters despite massive media support. This points to a basic problem that the Empire's has with Democracy. The public clearly doesn't want another ME war, and is now aware that it was tricked into Iraq (WMD), and significantly, their (the public's) resistance to war is sufficiently strong enough to overcome massed MSM propaganda pushing the other way.

If the MSM can't swing it, then they need to get a compromised candidate elected on an anti-war and immigration control platform, who then does a 180º turn when in office. Trump wasn't their candidate (which suggests that he's clean), and (so far) he hasn't enabled a war with Iran, so what happens with him is an open question.

Also agree that the media reaction to the Pizzagate (pedophilia) story was one of extreme sensitivity -- almost panic, with a massive and coordinated overreaction. This suggests that Pizzagate is in fact the nightmare subject at the root of American politician's worst dreams.

Jimmy R , says: July 29, 2019 at 4:52 am GMT

The most obvious example is the Catholic Church, and the failings of its American and international hierarchy in that regard have regularly made the front pages of our leading newspapers. But until the early 2000s and the breakthrough reporting of the Boston Globe as recounted in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, the Church had routinely fended off such scandals.

I'm an investigator in Boston. Just to put things in perspective, Globe's Spotlight investigation really only involved 8 priests (3 of them no longer in the priesthood- one in prison- at the time of the Spotlight piece) and went back 30 years. I don't have numbers on minors involved in this Epstein scandal but I would guess they are much higher.

I always found it curious that Marty Baron decides to launch a major expose of the Boston Catholic Church right after arriving from Miami. Seriously? A dozen priests out of thousands in the Boston Archdiocese? I really would like to know who was behind this concerted operation to take down the heart of American Catholicism. They make the folks behind the Trump-Russia collusion plot look like amateurs.

trelane , says: July 29, 2019 at 5:13 am GMT
Strange. What a funny thing.

I guess I was just your puppet you held on a string.

Strange how you stopped loving me. How you stopped needing me. . When she came along

https://www.youtube.com/embed/KAVLz8hKYGk?feature=oembed

Tusk , says: July 29, 2019 at 5:14 am GMT
Don't forget the arrest of Ars Technica writer Peter Bright, @DrPizza on twitter (account still up), who was arrested last month for soliciting sex with children and admitted to abusing an 11 year old girl. A guy named 'Dr Pizza' who had a pizza emoji next to his name, who tweeted often that Pizzagate was completely made up and once to the effect that "why would pedophiles put badges that could identify them up online" was arrested for being a pedophile and then subsequently came out he had constantly argued for relaxations on things like child porn and sexual-related issues. If this doesn't at least give doubters cause for concern that maybe something is up I don't know what will.

https://noqreport.com/2019/06/13/internal-boards-show-dr-pizza-debated-ars-technica-staff-legalizing-child-porn/

https://heavy.com/news/2019/06/peter-bright-dr-pizza/

Alfred , says: July 29, 2019 at 5:34 am GMT
This is a well-known weakness of Representative Democracy -- in all its versions.

The Balfour Declaration which led eventually to the creation of the state of Israel was undoubtedly the result of complex blackmail and bribery. Perhaps the USA would not have entered into WW1 unless Jews were promised Palestine in a deal.

Democracy is supposed to be a negative-feedback system -- like all control system. The only way to make it function properly is to have Direct Democracy -- where people vote on all issues and at the lowest level commensurate with the matter to be decided.

Anon [185] Disclaimer , says: July 29, 2019 at 5:37 am GMT
Journolist is probably weak sauce compared to the major editors of the largest television networks and newspaper syndicates deciding amongst themselves "whats news". Ive thought this for years. We know the CIA has people placed in media organizations, and probably has dirt on highly placed people in media organizations who are not CIA.
utu , says: July 29, 2019 at 5:46 am GMT

McCain's own Communist propaganda broadcasts

McCain must have been susceptible to pressure from Russians or Chinese who certainly knew everything McCain did in Vietnam? Or is KGB/FSB also run form Tel Aviv?

R.G. Camara , says: Website July 29, 2019 at 5:46 am GMT
Alex Jones -- yes, Alex Jones -- gave a coherent argument about the pedophilia accusations that avoided Satanism and the like but was still coherent. And its the same as the one you talk about.

Simple Kompromat .

Basically, national intelligence agencies identify up-and-comers in media and politics, then either get kompromat on them early or, if they can find nothing, set up a scenario where kompromat is created. In this latter scenario, the up-and-comer is invited to dinner, drugged, and then wakes up with either a dead body next to him or is shown pictures of him either killing someone or else molesting children. Then the up-and-comer is trapped for life.

Remember The Godfather, Part II ? They got the Nevada Senator to become their slave when they drugged him in a whorehouse and Neri killed the girl he was sleeping with, and the senator wakes up confused next to the girl and doesn't know if he did it or not -- and Michael promises to keep it all quiet -- for a price, of course. That's how it happens to these folks.

Then they own you for years.

Which makes you really scared -- not only is the FBI and NSA and CIA spying on us all illegally and spying on Trump at Obama's behest and allowing Hillary to skate -- they're running murder and child sex rings themselves. To gain leverage.

R.G. Camara , says: Website July 29, 2019 at 5:52 am GMT
@Jimmy R Surprisingly, the Globe's in-bad-faith attack on the Church might have begun a a greater renewal in it. Once it came out, people who had faith started noticing that almost all the priests doing the abuse were -- gay men abusing teenage boys. 81% of the cases weren't "pedophilia", they were homosexuals getting sexually mature but underage, vulnerable boys behind closed doors and taking advantage of them.

Catholics like Michael Voris at Church Militant have put 2 and 2 together. The problems in the Church isn't pedophilia, its homosexuals -- and Voris has exposed a ton more, including many bishops, and called them out harshly. The Church is supposed to purge homosexuals from the priesthood (by Catholic dogma), but haven't -- because higher-up homos have protected the lot.

But now many Catholic lay groups are organized and pushing to attack the illegal gay priests and get them out of the cloth. The homomafia is now proven to exist -- and, much like when the original Mafia was admitted to exist by the Kefauver hearings, an organized rounding up can occur.

renfro , says: July 29, 2019 at 6:04 am GMT

I learn from the Times that the Phoenix beer-monopoly in question, then valued at around $200 million, had accrued to a man whose lifelong business partner Kemper Marley had long been deeply linked to organized crime.

Jim Hensley the beer baron and McCain father in law was convicted of liquor related federal crimes (stealing from warehouses) but must have had a friendly judge lol cause he didn't do jail time , got probation and paid a big fine. He was working for Kemper Marley at the time.
So liar McCain married into a crime family .makes sense for a career fuck up who once his father died would start failing downward instead of upward.

Organized crime loves beer and liquor distributorships cause its a all cash business .the retailer pays you for the beer before it goes on their shelves or in their bar. no credit, no billing, pay up front. I bought a beer distributorship in 1975 so I know a bit about it .and Hensley had to have had some state officials in his pocket or his friend Marley had them cause is no way the state is going to give you a license if you've been convicted on anything worse than a speeding ticket.
You've got to be investigated by your state FBI for starters, account for every year of your life, your schools, your wife's life, your parents and relatives, list people you associate with in business or socially, then they go interview people who know you,,,in fact they do that before they even personally interview you and you have to give them your financial records, what your source of money is and all your tax returns. All of this is to make sure you have no ties to any kind of organized crime and the money purchasing the distributorship isn't coming from any shady figures.
Hensley or his backer had some very serious political pull and pay offs.

The number one career choice for aspiring crooks and fuckups is politics .McCain with his punk complex temper couldn't have held on to job anywhere else.

eah , says: July 29, 2019 at 6:07 am GMT
Over the years, it became increasingly obvious to me that nearly all elements of our national media were often quite willing to enlist in a "conspiracy of silence" to minimize or entirely ignore stories of tremendous potential interest to their readership and major public importance.

Yes, how about an update on the investigation into the killing of Seth Rich -- does that count as a 'cold case' at this point?

Also media interest in the Las Vegas mass shooting seemed to fizzle -- as did the investigation.

getaclue , says: July 29, 2019 at 6:29 am GMT
This is the concept of Kakistocracy. I always found McCain getting a pass on what he did to the left behind POWs hard to fathom -- this explains it. Before I read this article I thought that Pizzagate was just some kind of lunacy/nothing and had heard some guy went and shot up a restaurant over it (probably the creeps involved in it arranged that themselves to discredit those exposing them?) and it was since faded away discredited, I see it attacked by the same people who are always using the CIA created term "Conspiracy Theory" seems it is in fact the opposite of what I thought (due to the Globalist Propagandist Media) and its creepy players are "running" things and highly protected by the Propagandist Globalist NWO Media, seems Obama himself is in deep if the video is correct? hard to even look at the video as to these creatures .So Question? Is the Q thing also for real? I have never really followed it and seen it "debunked" on a site that made it sound like lunacy but this makes me wonder .
IfAmericansKnew , says: Website July 29, 2019 at 6:32 am GMT
Well done and case in point -- a current puppet show:

2020 presidential candidates' views on Israel

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8KY2_qaROFY?feature=oembed

Truth will set America free -- only If Americans Knew !

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXLRhe7EQV3rg-bdK0cr1zw

Parisian Guy , says: July 29, 2019 at 6:43 am GMT
@Jimmy R Sometimes ago, the Mexican Bishops Conference, when speaking about Mexican monopolistic oligarches, said they were like contemporary slave-owners .
About one year later, one of theses oligarches, Carlos Slim, bought a part of the NYTimes. Then the NYT started its own crusade against Catholic priests paedophilia.

At the time, I noticed the coincidence, but it was like I was the only one noticing it.
Is J. Gutierez around? He may confirm the story.

Dan Hayes , says: July 29, 2019 at 6:45 am GMT
@Jimmy R Jimmy R:

I appreciate your telling "the rest of the story" regarding the actual (as opposed to purported) extent of the Boston sex abuse scandal.

The same abuse exaggerations also occurred in Pennsylvania."Grossly misleading, irresponsible, inaccurate, and unjust" is how former New York Times religion reporter Peter Steinfels described last August's grand jury report in its sweeping accusations that Pennsylvania Catholic bishops refused to protect children from sexual abuse.

BTW, some time ago our patron Ron off-handedly accepted as factual the Globe narrative. When contrary opinion and facts were brought to his attention, he appeared to have accepted that they were at least worthy of consideration. (Or that's the way I vaguely remember what transpired.)

Mark James , says: July 29, 2019 at 6:48 am GMT
I did not know anything about any physical violence that may or many not have been present in McCain's marriage. I certainly did feel, that much of the senator's last days were being carefully orchestrated in order to maintain the highest degree of hero status possible. His wealthy wife certainly had the resources to leave if she wanted to. She always seemed to me extremely loyal and attentive.

I would say it was similar concerning Bush 41. Perfectly understandable that negative stories wouldn't be brought up during his long wake/funeral -- in Tx and DC -- but how about never? Several books have said that Bush's -- and campaign manager W. Casey -- CIA connections helped Reagan get elected by keeping the hostages in Iran .

The Vice-Pres was also up to his neck in the Iran/Contra affair in spite of him saying he was "out of the loop (he wasn't)." A sexual affair is unimportant. But the family says it never happened. Others have said otherwise. Jesse Ventura and his writer Dick Russell have done a nice job laying out some things that you will never hear from the Bush flack John Meacham. Or pretty much anyone else in on- air media.

niteranger , says: July 29, 2019 at 6:56 am GMT
The Corporate Fascist Military Industrial-Intelligence Police State will tell us who our heroes, presidents, and icons are. It has already been decided. McCain was commonly known as "crash" for all the incidents he had. He was a terrible pilot and would have never been one except for his father. His beatings of his wife were widely known but covered up because of his "War Hero Status." Our entire society is nothing more than a projection by the "controllers."

Examples of this are of course Obama and his wife. The media asked him almost no questions and he was guided by the Jew Axelrod to the Media's satisfaction. What Obama and his wife got away with in Chicago would embarrass the Mafia. Michele Obama had to surrender her law license to the Illinois State Disciplinary Committee. The files have been sealed.

Just look at the group running for President. All basically selected by the same controllers. They will not make a mistake in letting another Trump spoil their plans. Our entire democracy is just a mirage. The founder fathers were afraid that this would happen but their plans in the Constitution to protect the nation have become "gang banged" by the Marxist Mobs whose heroes are icons like Obama who bombed seven Muslim countries, murdered thousands of innocent people, destroyed the middle class and started wars and lied to the nation yet these people are on their knees to his royal presence.

We have no chance of getting to the truth on anything because to even ask a question is now an act of racism, antisemitism, and hatred.

LondonBob , says: July 29, 2019 at 7:28 am GMT
One of the more extreme accusers in Britain has revealed to be a fantasist, his claims went well beyond other claims and included such unlikely characters as Field Marshall Lord Brammal, and this is being used to Bury the paedophile scandal in Britain. Greville Janner's children have been given prominent coverage to suggest this shows their father is innocent despite the fact that the evidence against their father is very substantial and has little to do with the fantasist.

https://villagemagazine.ie/index.php/2019/07/does-nicks-conviction-mean-jimmy-savile-is-innocent-yes-if-you-work-for-the-british-media/

Perhaps most interesting is the allegations surrounding Kincora Boys' Home, in particular the involvement of the intelligence services.

https://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/leo-mckinstry/569181/sex-abuse-claims-Leo-McKinstry

The Alarmist , says: July 29, 2019 at 8:50 am GMT

There is an old wartime proverb that enemy flak is always heaviest over the most important target, and the remarkably ferocious wave of attacks and censorship against anyone broaching the subject of Pizzagate seems to raise all sorts of dark suspicions.

I guess we can look forward to another day of heavy DDoS of unz.com.

How is it we don't yet have a Grand Unifying Theory that links the seemingly unconnected paedophelia stories that have simmered simultaneously in D.C., Westminster, and Brussels over the past couple of decades? The Church would seem to fit right in in this NWO orgy, but has instead been hung out to dry.

HoekomSA , says: July 29, 2019 at 9:15 am GMT
One of the elite one worlder groups is the (in)famous Skull and Bones society at Yale. Its membership included both president Bushes as well as John Kerry and a multitude of other politicians. Anthony Sutton carried out an expose in his book America's secret establishment. Part of the inition occurs in a crypt surrounded by skulls , including Geronimos's skull while lying in a coffin. If that isnt weird enough part of the initiation includes something around sexual misadventure. According to Kay Riggs, whose husband was a colnel in the intelligence services the sexual side of the initiation involves the person being sodomised by an member of the society. According to her , in order to enter the higher levels of many parts of government this is not an uncommon practice.

In the murky world of american political elites the truth is impossible to be certain of.

The skull and bones society has been well publicised so presumably now the power has been withdrawn from it.

Bill Jones , says: July 29, 2019 at 9:16 am GMT
I've had much enjoyment over the years by asking McCain worshipers to give me the name of one Vietnamese with as many confirmed kills of American military as John McCain.
swamped , says: July 29, 2019 at 9:29 am GMT
Another long-winded & annoyingly inchoate ramble raising several important but seemingly disparate subjects, each of which could & probably should have been pursued independently. Is there really any viable connection between Sydney Schanberg & Epstein, between the Catholic Church & John McCain, between Berezovsky & Pizzagate, etc.? What a jumbled mishmash that leaves you more confused than when you started. "Perhaps" this & "perhaps" that, doesn't help very much. The most urgent question though is why are so many high & mighty tempted by pedophilia in the first place, where does that psychosis come from & why are the power games more important than the pawns, the poor kids, that are used to play it? Hanging is much too good for an unspeakable filth like Epstein & whoever aided him. There is no punishment or torture ever devised that would be sufficient, if found guilty, for the crimes for which he stands accused. That should come first, the rest is chickenfeed.
Bill Jones , says: July 29, 2019 at 9:33 am GMT
Picky typo-asshole here, reporting for duty
"but I might was well provide a brief summary."

but I might as well provide a brief summary.

Ahoy , says: July 29, 2019 at 9:39 am GMT
We have progressed (here we laugh) from the times of Gentlemen and Ladies to so-called emancipated men and women with human rights fit for animals. Just to refresh your memory

https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=RDKAVLz8hKYGk

After I heard this I am convinced we moved from great CASH to trash.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=RDKAVLz8hKYGk

Ahoy , says: July 29, 2019 at 9:54 am GMT

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lq0fUa0vW_E?feature=oembed

https://www.youtube.com/embed/UcVM20BboZI?feature=oembed

Realist , says: July 29, 2019 at 10:09 am GMT
@Mike Johnson

The last big VA scandal where many Veterans died waiting to get medical treatment happened in Arizona. You cannot tell me that McCain did not know that Veterans were dying while waiting to get help at the Phoenix VA. In my opinion McCain was a worthless human being.

The most devastating victory the North Vietnamese had over the US was the return of McCain alive.

Gordo , says: July 29, 2019 at 10:11 am GMT
Thank you for this article Mr Unz.
Nodwink , says: July 29, 2019 at 10:23 am GMT
I'm not convinced by the evidence against Comet Ping Pong, but I am intrigued by the possible connections that the Podesta brothers have to the disappearance of the British girl, Madelaine McCann, in Portugal over a decade ago. John Podesta is known to have been in Portugal around the time of Madelaine's disappearance. There is also a description eerily similar to Anthony Wiener.
Jacques Sheete , says: July 29, 2019 at 10:37 am GMT
I've long been convinced, and who can deny, that most of the wars the US has been involved in, and all of the ones Zionists and Communists have been involved in, have roots in outrageous sadistic psychopathology like this.:

Major items of his very extensive personal collection seemed to represent tortured or murdered bodies, and one of his favorite artists was best known for paintings depicting young children being held captive, lying dead, or suffering under severe distress

.

As for the slime, McCain, and the rest of the political establishment, none of it surprises me. The type was recognized long ago.

(1) Roy Cohn (1927-86) allegedly ran child sex and blackmail operations for decades, operating out of locales such as New York's Plaza Hotel

(2) Robert Keith Gray (1921-2014), USA lobbyist, "specialist in homosexual blackmail operations for the CIA and reported to have collaborated with Roy Cohn"

(3) Bruce Ritter (1927-99), Roman Catholic priest and founder of Covenant House for homeless teenagers, "eventually accused of having sexual relationships with many of the underaged boys he had taken in", Ritter supported by Cardinal Spellman closely tied to Roy Cohn, and tied to George H W Bush's Yale room-mate

(4) Craig Spence (1941-89), another USA lobbyist; "in June 1989, it was revealed that he had been pimping out children to the power elite in the nation's capital throughout the 1980s in apartments that were bugged with video and audio recording equipment reports on Spence's child sex ring also reveal his close ties to none other than the ubiquitous Roy Cohn

"Spence had been able to enter the White House late at night during the George H.W. Bush administration with young men whom the Washington Times described as 'call boys' Spence often boasted that he was working for the CIA Not long after the Washington Times report on his activities was published, Spence was found dead in the Boston Ritz Carlton and his death was quickly ruled a suicide."

(5) Lawrence E. King Jr, lobbyist and credit union banker, key figure in the "infamous Franklin child sex abuse and ritual murder scandal run out of Omaha, Nebraska Larry King and his Nebraska-based call boy ring, was discovered by looking through the credit card chits of Spence's ring King and Spence were essentially business partners as their child trafficking rings were operated under a larger group that was nicknamed 'Bodies by God' the rings run by both King and Spence were connected to each other and both were also connected to prominent officials in the Reagan and subsequent George H.W. Bush administrations, including officials with ties to the CIA and Roy Cohn and his network"

(6) Jeffrey Epstein (born 1953) then comes in on the scene, convicted of the same kinds of activities, and linked to the networks reflected in the above

(7) NXIVM recent sex-slave and child pornography scandal involving Clare Bronfman

By the way, the 'police break-in' to Epstein's New York City 27,000 square foot mansion, is regarded as a staged fake event by many, because as was clear, Epstein had multiple live-in staffers, there was always a butler or someone present 24/7, who would simply have opened the door for the police. The crowbar damage to the door would not have opened the high-security portal, and would have set off massive alarms. The people walking out with cheap rubbish bags of alleged 'evidence' did not even look like police or feds on a high-profile operation.

Epstein always had lots of aides & helpers such as Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of 'Israeli super-spy Robert Maxwell', allegedly helping procure all the young girls etc., yet somehow not yet so touched by these events when a 'serious' prosecution would certain quickly dragnet all such people. What is really going on, remains yet to be seen.

Greg Bacon , says: Website July 29, 2019 at 10:46 am GMT
That some, if not many US politicians have degenerate backgrounds and bizarre tastes can't be brushed off as some coincidence.

If you're a tiny ME nation that is doing a good job of occupying the most powerful military on Earth or if you're some bankster gangster that wants to keep your fraudulent fiat money scheme afloat, our corrupt politicians are just what the doctor ordered.

Jacques Sheete , says: July 29, 2019 at 10:48 am GMT
@Tusk

A guy named 'Dr Pizza' who had a pizza emoji next to his name, who tweeted often that Pizzagate was completely made up and once to the effect that "why would pedophiles put badges that could identify them up online" was arrested for being a pedophile and then subsequently came out he had constantly argued for relaxations on things like child porn and sexual-related issues.

The bastards just love molesting our minds as well. Who can deny that they enjoy it even more when they ply their perversions in our faces? It should also be crystal clear that the gratuitous Isreali sniping and crippling and a thousand other outrageous crimes against humanity stimulate the hell out of the perverts.

When will people finally get it through their heads that politics is all about domination , most often in perverted and sadistic forms?

None of this should be a bit surprising.

Jacques Sheete , says: July 29, 2019 at 10:58 am GMT
@Jimmy R I'm no Catholic, but it's long been obvious that the incessant harping on the Church's pedophilia is a twofer; it's not only a huge smear campaign, but it's no doubt worth $$ to the usual suspects. Look what the Commies did to religious folk in the former USSR and to the largely Christian Germany, and tell me that there's no connection.

Sadistic perverts rule with the consistent support of the "great" US moneyed ruling classes while the drooling rubes and dupes do their part as well.

Robjil , says: July 29, 2019 at 11:08 am GMT
@Jimmy R It is all about stopping the Catholic Church from having a voice to oppose Zion BC wars and coups. The Jewish Zionists want to continue the mass destruction of our planet without any back talk.

Planted Memories is a good trick to silence any organization and a big one like the Catholic Church.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/201211/implanting-false-memories

Planted memories have used since the 1990s against the Catholic Church in a big way. After the end of the cold war, the ZUS wanted wars for Zion mania. No back talk allowed from any one or group is "allowed". This planted memories games works like a charm and has been used over and over again on the Catholic Church to silence it. It allows the wars and the coups for Zion BC go on and on endlessly with no back talk. It is a common trick for many cases these days.

"There is no credible scientific support for the idea that we can take eleven years of brutalization and banish it into the unconscious and then undergo some therapy which is going to make us aware of it," Dr. Loftus reported as she discussed the Holly Ramona case, "and yet these kinds of things were being introduced into court cases throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s and still today." While her outspoken opposition to recovered memory has led to her being targeted by feminist and victims' rights groups over the years (including the controversial "Jane Doe case"), Dr. Loftus continues to stand by her own research into false memory.

Brabantian , says: July 29, 2019 at 11:11 am GMT
Regarding the fabled photos of J Edgar Hoover in a woman's dress and with his gay lover, held as successful blackmail by the Jewish mob & Meyer Lansky, Ms Whitney Webb says in her Mint Press News series on Epstein connections:

Anthony Summers, former BBC journalist and author of 'Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover', has argued that it was not Lansky, but William Donovan, the director of the OSS, who obtained the original photos of Hoover and later shared them with Lansky.

Ms Webb argues for a quite long series of connections between the USA-Canadian Jewish & Italian mobs going back a century, the paedophile and under-age-sex-slave blackmail groups, and the USA & Israel intel agencies. Her series is quite something, the first two installments:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/shocking-origins-jeffrey-epstein-blackmail-roy-cohn/260621/
https://www.mintpressnews.com/blackmail-jeffrey-epstein-trump-mentor-reagan-era/260760/
Many connections are indeed striking. Trump's current USA Attorney General Barr (born 1950) & his father Donald Barr (1921-2004), were both CIA-intel officers & both linked to Epstein. William was CIA officer 1973-77, the CIA supporting him going to law school, father Donald with OSS & Bill Donovan the CIA predecessor during WW2.

Barr's later law firm Kirkland & Ellis represented Epstein; Donald Barr, when NYC Dalton School headmaster, gave Jeffrey Epstein his first job, teaching teen-age girls & boys 1973-75, whilst William Barr was at the CIA. Father Donald Barr was fascinated by sex slavery as much as Epstein apparently, Barr authoring a 1973 fantasy novel on the subject, 'Space Relations: A Slightly Gothic Interplanetary Tale" book published when Jeffrey Epstein was his underling & school-teacher of teens.

Ms Webb recounts multiple child molestation and political blackmail groups -- which had a collective name, 'Bodies from God' -- all linking ultimately with Jeffrey Epstein, intel agencies, and Jewish mobsters; Lansky etc., and such as the Bronfmans of Canada, the Bronfmans in 1991 joining with Epstein's patron & the original buyer of his New York City mansion, Les Wexner, to found the 'Mega Group' of 20 or so Zionist Jewish billionaires who are now often perceived to be the Mossad-backed money source for Epstein. A short list of these groups and persons mentioned by Webb

[MORE]
(1) Roy Cohn (1927-86) allegedly ran child sex and blackmail operations for decades, operating out of locales such as New York's Plaza Hotel

(2) Robert Keith Gray (1921-2014), USA lobbyist, "specialist in homosexual blackmail operations for the CIA and reported to have collaborated with Roy Cohn"

(3) Bruce Ritter (1927-99), Roman Catholic priest and founder of Covenant House for homeless teenagers, "eventually accused of having sexual relationships with many of the underaged boys he had taken in", Ritter supported by Cardinal Spellman closely tied to Roy Cohn, and tied to George H W Bush's Yale room-mate

(4) Craig Spence (1941-89), another USA lobbyist; "in June 1989, it was revealed that he had been pimping out children to the power elite in the nation's capital throughout the 1980s in apartments that were bugged with video and audio recording equipment reports on Spence's child sex ring also reveal his close ties to none other than the ubiquitous Roy Cohn

"Spence had been able to enter the White House late at night during the George H.W. Bush administration with young men whom the Washington Times described as 'call boys' Spence often boasted that he was working for the CIA Not long after the Washington Times report on his activities was published, Spence was found dead in the Boston Ritz Carlton and his death was quickly ruled a suicide."

(5) Lawrence E. King Jr, lobbyist and credit union banker, key figure in the "infamous Franklin child sex abuse and ritual murder scandal run out of Omaha, Nebraska Larry King and his Nebraska-based call boy ring, was discovered by looking through the credit card chits of Spence's ring King and Spence were essentially business partners as their child trafficking rings were operated under a larger group that was nicknamed 'Bodies by God' the rings run by both King and Spence were connected to each other and both were also connected to prominent officials in the Reagan and subsequent George H.W. Bush administrations, including officials with ties to the CIA and Roy Cohn and his network"

(6) Jeffrey Epstein (born 1953) then comes in on the scene, convicted of the same kinds of activities, and linked to the networks reflected in the above

(7) NXIVM recent sex-slave and child pornography scandal involving Clare Bronfman

By the way, the 'police break-in' to Epstein's New York City 27,000 square foot mansion, is regarded as a staged fake event by many, because as was clear, Epstein had multiple live-in staffers, there was always a butler or someone present 24/7, who would simply have opened the door for the police. The crowbar damage to the door would not have opened the high-security portal, and would have set off massive alarms. The people walking out with cheap rubbish bags of alleged 'evidence' did not even look like police or feds on a high-profile operation.

Epstein always had lots of aides & helpers such as Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of 'Israeli super-spy Robert Maxwell', allegedly helping procure all the young girls etc., yet somehow not yet so touched by these events when a 'serious' prosecution would certain quickly dragnet all such people. What is really going on, remains yet to be seen.

Biff , says: July 29, 2019 at 11:16 am GMT
Trust Wikipedia to get the story strait(sarcasm).

"

Pizzagate" is a debunked conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle.[2][3][4] It has been extensively discredited by a wide range of organizations, including the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia.[3][4][5]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory

Some of Pizzagate's proponents, including David Seaman and Michael G. Flynn (Michael Flynn's son), have evolved the conspiracy into a broader government conspiracy called "Pedogate". According to this theory, a "satanic cabal of elites" of the New World Order operates international child sex trafficking rings.[27]

Was Epstein part of a "Satanic cabal" ?

TKK , says: July 29, 2019 at 11:31 am GMT
The Epstein conspiracy grows worse.

One of the victims filed a federal lawsuit. Once filed, this is public record. The only redactions allowed are social security numbers and the like.

When the Miami Herald went to obtain the Motion for Summary Judgment, it was completely redacted. 137 pages of blacked out paragraphs.

A motion for summary judgment is basically saying there are no material issues in dispute- nothing to litigate. This document would contain all relevant facts about the case.

This type of redaction is unheard, unprecedented- appalling.

The only reason the Herald is in pursuit ( and any other MSM) is because they believed it would destroy Trump.

It's now on appeal. If the redactions stand, we should riot in the street. We knew justice was bought, but pedophilia usually will stir up some dregs of bureaucratic slugs to action.

And with a parallel to McCain, if Clinton slithers out of this- with over 27 flights on the Lolita Express- he is officially the most untouchable man in history.

Once you start researching the Epstein matter- not for the lurid details- but the unprecedented, jaw dropping preferential treatment of an actual human sex trafficker ( not this fake #metoo hysteria)

-- all hope is lost.

Note the strange silence from Hollywood and the elites regarding Epstein's victims, when they were wearing hair shirts over Christine Fords 30 year old accusation.

A wealthy smug scold, who looks like an exploded can of rotten biscuit dough had them weeping on camera.

Dozens of little girls -- all poor and from fatherless backgrounds marred by parental drug abuse, suicides and physical abuse- selected and sexually devastated by Epstein- not a word.

Sick of Orcs , says: July 29, 2019 at 11:32 am GMT
Who can forget Gerry Studds, democrap ephebophile?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Studds

onebornfree , says: Website July 29, 2019 at 11:47 am GMT
Ron Unz says: " ..at the core of our hugely corrupted political system .."

So whats to be done? Isn't that the big question here?

I believe that its only with the an understanding of the true, 100% corrupt nature of the state, that real-world solutions to the massive [ and progressively worse] problems it causes in society can be worked out and then implemented.

Ron, the big picture here that you, like most, either genuinely don't see [ or conveniently refuse to see] is this:

The True Nature of All Governments:

"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [via central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed","improved", nor "limited" in scope, simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree

"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock

"Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure." Robert LeFevre

Without an generally accepted understanding of the true nature of all states and governments, we are lost, as far as I can see.

Regards, onebornfree

Iris , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:01 pm GMT
@Jimmy R Also, there is a major distinction: child abuse in the Catholic Church is committed by isolated individuals whose sole responsibility is involved when the crime is committed. It is not institutionalised, pre-planned and organised by a group, as it is within the political establishment.

It is the same difference as between a criminal and organised crime, and it is a major difference, in magnitude and in nature.

Moi , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:18 pm GMT
@Mike Johnson McCain was busy helping the missus with her beer franchise so missed the VA scandal.
JohnnyWalker123 , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:18 pm GMT
Very interesting article.

I actually highly reccomend a film called "Eyes Wide Shut."

The film, which stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, was directed by the late Stanley Kubrick and released back in 1999. It was extremely hyped at the time, especially given that Kubrick died several days after completing the film.

While I won't summarize the entire film, there is one very important scene in which Tom Cruise's character sneaks into a large New York mansion and stumbles upon a Satanic sexual ritual/orgy. At the ritual/orgy, there are various individuals in costumes&masks who engage in debauched sexual practices with sex slaves. Later in the movie, one of the men there (who happens to be a prominent local Jewish socialite) tells Tom Cruise's character that the Satanic sexual gathering was full of very important and powerful local figures. Tom Cruise's character is ominously threatened into silence. At the end of the film, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman allow their young daughter to be taken by the Satanic sexual abusers.

After he was finished with the movie, Stanley Kubrick showed it to execs from Warner Brothers for the first time. They ended up getting into a contentious argument over the film. The next day, Kubrick (who was a very healthy man) was announced dead of a heart attack. Around 30 minutes of the film was later edited out by Warner Brothers before it was released. Supposedly (and this has NOT been confirmed) there were scenes of child sexual abuse in the original that Kubrick made, but this was edited out.

The movie would go on to become very popular in "conspiracy" circles. Many of these people said that Kubrick (who was notoriously reclusive, enigmatic, and fond of "conspiracy theories") was exposing the secret world of the Illuminati and their debauched sexual practices, including their sexual enslavement of children.

There are very interesting similarities between the movie's Satanic sexual gathering and an eerie real life Rothschild ball held back in 1972 (at one of the family mansions). The movie even used a Rothschild mansion (Mentmore Towers) as the setting for the Satanic sexual orgy.

When you hear all the allegations being made against Epstein, it makes you wonder. The New York mansion. The weird Occult/Satanic temple on his island. The really young women coerced into orgies. The hordes of wealth, famous, and powerful people who "partied" with Epstein. The threats made against journalists and accusers who've come forward. The Jewish connection. The Rothschild connection (Dershowitz was introduced to Epstein by the Rothschilds). The Royal family and Prince Andrew connection ("Eyes Wide Shut" had a character with the surname "Windsor"). There are many similarities to "Eyes Wide Shut."

If we assume that the Illuminati (or a similar elite society) actually exists, maybe it makes sense that they would invite powerful people to attend their parties and engage in debauched sexual acts, especially with the underaged. By encouraging this, the society would get blackmail material on the elite of society. Once those elites were under blackmail, they'd be puppets. These compromised elites would also be willing to recruit more new members and bring them to the sexual parties.

So perhaps Epstein started off by befriending a few of the elite (with the Mossad helping facilitate the social interaction). He then invited them to some type of perverse sexual party. Once Epstein got tapes and pictures of them, these elites then became Israeli pawns and also became willing to invite their elite friends to the parties.

That may explain why Epstein became so popular and why no one was willing to take him down. That may also explain why everyone quoted in news articles always used to mention his supposed "brilliance."

Even Newsweek noted the similarity between "Eyes Wide Shut" and the Epstein situation.

https://www.newsweek.com/eyes-wide-shut-missing-footage-epstein-kubrick-death-1449108

If you're interested in seeing the ritual that I mentioned above, here's a short video from the movie. I wouldn't be surprised if Epstein was doing something similar to this in his Occult/Satanic temple on his island.

RoatanBill , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:18 pm GMT
What this article should convince everyone of is that 'rules but no rulers' makes perfect sense. That's what real anarchism means -- rules but no rulers. If your immediate mental picture was of a bomb thrower, then your mind has been successfully infiltrated by the powers that shouldn't be.

Why is it that one person with the title of 'President' can declare things that affect the lives of millions of USians and billions world wide. No one should have that much power.

"The way to get rid of corruption in high places is to get rid of high places." -- Frank Chodorov

If the deep state has managed to install their puppets in positions of authority shouldn't we all be trying to get rid of the positions of authority instead of rotating through that position replaceable candidates offered up by the deep state political parties?

If you vote, you are tacitly approving of a system that has enslaved your mind.
If you're not an anarchist, you are part of the problem.

Moi , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:21 pm GMT
@Alden I guess why they named a convention center after him Homofrisco.
St-Germain , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:25 pm GMT
Kudos, Ron Unz. Excellent article and a useful tutorial on the hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy".

I applaud your parlor joke:

" that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise."

A great French investigative reporter crafted an unfunny version:

"Indeed, under our putative system of democracy, especially since JFK, the oligarchy will not allow the election of any candidate who cannot be blackmailed."

-- Thierry Meyssan, Before our very eyes -- fake wars and big lies from 9/11 to Donald Trump , p. 146.

He had just described the 911 caper as a Cheney-led deep-state coup to activate the secret but long-standing CoG procedure to sideline the Constitution. It succeeded when clueless Dubya was reinstated as figure-head president within 24 hours after agreeing to the clique's CoG (continuity of government) agenda, including the planned wars.

No wonder the shenannigans of compromised office-holding puppets (actors, really) and their shadowy string-pullers never seem to be known to their spear-carriers in MSM.

for-the-record , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:43 pm GMT
@niteranger Michele Obama had to surrender her law license to the Illinois State Disciplinary Committee

Reference for this, please.

DESERT FOX , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:51 pm GMT
McCain was a psycopath and a traitor and proof of the zionists love of war and killers was their praise for this psycopath in his death and funeral and on the other hand no mention was ever made about the crime committed against the crew of the USS Liberty by the joint Israeli and zio/US attack on the Liberty, this shows how f##ked up this zionist ruled country has become!

Get and read the book Blood in the Water by Joan Mellen about the joint Israeli and zio/US attack on the Liberty, who McCains father participated in the cover up of this war crime!

Truth3 , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:53 pm GMT
Ron Unz American Treasure.

Way to go, Sir.

Arrow , says: July 29, 2019 at 12:59 pm GMT
@Jimmy R Last I heard he was happily married to a 12 year old boy and living on a beach in Thailand.
Jacques Sheete , says: July 29, 2019 at 1:15 pm GMT

The number one career choice for aspiring crooks and fuckups is politics .McCain with his punk complex temper couldn't have held on to job anywhere else.

Perverts and psychopaths as well.

" nobody is going to be a thief with me as his accomplice,
and that right there is why I'm going in no governor's entourage."

Juvenal, Satires, Volume 3, (3.41-48) ~100 AD

Now do not be vexed with me when I speak the truth. For there is no human being who will preserve his life if he genuinely opposes either you or any other multitude and prevents many unjust and unlawful things from happening in the city. Rather, if someone who really fights for the just is going to preserve himself even for a short time, it is necessary for him to lead a private rather than a public life.

-Socrates, as quoted by Plato, Apology, (~400BC) 31e -32a
http://www.sjsu.edu/people/james.lindahl/courses/Phil70A/s3/apology.pdf

Rich , says: July 29, 2019 at 1:23 pm GMT
@Jimmy R The Diocese of Rockville Centre, where I live, has released a list of 61 priests accused of sexual misconduct. The Diocese of Newark, NJ has released a list of 82 priests. The Diocese of Brooklyn, NY has released a list of 108 priests. The Diocese of NY has released a list of 120. That's a lot more than eight, and I think if the Church is willing to give us this many names, there are probably quite a few who managed to fly under the radar.

I was raised a Catholic and really wish I didn't have to accept this reality. I've read stories that the Church was infiltrated in the 20th century, and perhaps it's true, but maybe it's been going on for a very long time. It does seem to be a bit unnatural for a man to become celibate, and that might be one of the reasons so many deviants were attracted to the priesthood, I don't know. I do know I never trusted any of them alone with my kids and I'd advise others to do the same.

It's a shame, because as a society we need some kind of moralistic code, but the Church has failed, or is at least failing, at this time in its history.

[Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland

Highly recommended!
On one hand Mueller supported and promoted the witch hunt which is the Russiagate. On the other water suddenly became a little bit hot for him and his henchmen as there is a slight chance that Barr is not joking.
Mueller is the first prosecutor in the history of Justice Department who claimed that he does not exonerate the falsely accused of Russian connections President. Which is 100% pure McCartuism-style witch hunt. Of course as he supported Iraw WDM and presided over Anthrax investigation (or cover up to be more correct) this is easy for him to be legal innovator in this area.
Notable quotes:
"... the report was clear that members of Trump's team had been encouraged to lie to investigators, and this had been widely reported throughout the media and in several books. ..."
"... On many important questions, Mueller stated that he could not comment because those matters were under investigation by other departments, or they were not "in my purview." That was his response to questions about the Steele report and the FISA warrant used to spy on the Trump campaign, which are under investigation by the Department of Justice. But he also responded this way to questions on the Russia investigation. How can the special prosecutor charged with investigating whether Russia interfered with our elections decline comment on the topic? ..."
"... Well that proves it, I guess. After all, did Mueller testify to Congress as to the extent of Iraq's much-vaunted WMD program, and lo! there it was(n't)! ..."
"... Or for that matter, Mueller claimed that Concord Management had ties to the Russian government. Turns out that he had no evidence for his claim. ..."
"... Mueller is the god that failed. The Democrats considered him their savior. It was "wait til the Mueller report". "Soon it will be Mueller time". "Just wait on Mueller, you'll see." ..."
"... Then, in the Mueller hearing they quoted scripture from the book of Mueller, asking their savior to provide more divine wisdom on the scripture. But he was no god. He was a human whose mental faculties had declined due to the aging process all of us mortals must endure. And it became abundantly clear that he had been just a figurehead in a witch hunt by radical major Democratic party donor prosecutors. Mueller was shamelessly used by morally bankrupt Democrat apparatchiks. ..."
"... To all the Mueller supporters, he couldn't even answer simple questions like "when did you and your team conclude there was no collusion/conspiracy with Russia?" ..."
"... That question 1) fell under his purview, 2) arose from the four corners of his report, 3) not in anyway prohibited by the DoJ directive and 4) not about something that would be easy to forget. ..."
"... Yet he refused to answer. Some stand up guy he is. ..."
Jul 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

That answer appears to directly contradict page 180 of the report which states, "As defined in legal dictionaries, collusion is largely synonymous with conspiracy as that crime is set forth in the general federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371," Collins pointed out.

"Are you sitting here today testifying something different than what your report states?"

Mueller stuttered and appeared confused, flipped to the relevant page of the report, and said that he would defer to the report.

Throughout the hearing, Democratic members would read the definition of corruption or obstruction and then try to get Mueller to explain how various actions did not qualify or why the report did not reach a finding. Each time, Mueller declined to comment.

To say that watching his testimony was painful is an understatement.

In an exchange with Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) that exemplifies the entire hearing, the Pennsylvania Republican asked, "You made a decision not to prosecute, right?"

"No, we made a decision not to decide whether to prosecute or not."

In the afternoon intelligence committee hearing, Rep. John Ratcliffe asked Mueller to clear up confusion regarding his morning testimony, where he appeared to contradict the report on the question of whether he had whiffed on an indictment because the Office of Legal Counsel said it was not possible to indict a sitting president.

"What I wanted to say [in the morning] is that we did not make any determination with regard to culpability, in any way. We did not start that process, down the road," said Mueller.

But in his morning testimony before the House Judiciary committee, he said: "The president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed."

See if you can make sense of this exchange:

Democratic Rep. Andre Carson: "Would you agree that these acts demonstrated a betrayal of the democratic values our country rests on?"

Mueller: "I can't agree with that. Not that it's not true, but I cannot agree with it."

This was typical of Mueller's bizarre testimony throughout the day.

Democrats used the hearing to read huge portions of the report, as well as Donald Trump's tweets and campaign utterances, as if somehow they were covering new ground. In one such exchange, a member asked: "Trump and his campaign welcomed and encouraged Russian interference?"

Mueller: "Yes."

Question: "And then Trump and his campaign lied about it to cover it up?"

Mueller: "Yes."

Anyone who has followed news coverage of the Mueller report knows that line of questioning is not breaking new ground, as the report was clear that members of Trump's team had been encouraged to lie to investigators, and this had been widely reported throughout the media and in several books.

Even so, Democrats persisted in reading publicly available Trump statements aloud. During his portion of time, Rep. Mike Quigley chose to read Trump's campaign trail statements about Wikileaks .

"I love Wikileaks."

"This Wikileaks is like a treasure trove."
"Boy, I love reading those Wikileaks."

He then asked Mueller to react to Trump's statements. "Problematic is an understatement, in terms of giving some hope or some boost to what is and should be illegal activity," Mueller said. Did we really need Mueller's opinion on Trump's statements uttered on the stump, all of which were made before he was elected president? How is this type of commentary valuable?

On many important questions, Mueller stated that he could not comment because those matters were under investigation by other departments, or they were not "in my purview." That was his response to questions about the Steele report and the FISA warrant used to spy on the Trump campaign, which are under investigation by the Department of Justice. But he also responded this way to questions on the Russia investigation. How can the special prosecutor charged with investigating whether Russia interfered with our elections decline comment on the topic?

Congressional hearings aren't like a court room. There's no judge that can order an uncooperative witness to answer. That's one of the many reasons that highly politicized Congressional hearings often quickly descend into kangaroo-court style bludgeoning of the witness.

Yet today, because the confused witness appeared flummoxed by rapid-fire questions and by the contents of his own report, his evasions and memory lapses instead undermined the credibility of the report itself, and had people questioning whether Mueller had really led the investigation or not.

Barbara Boland is 's foreign policy and national security reporter. Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC.

eddie parolini • 3 days ago • edited

In reference to Russia meddling in the 2016 election, he specifically said that Russia had meddled in the past, Russia was meddling as of right now, and Russia would continue to meddle in the future.

I guess that qualifies as having nothing to say about Russia meddling if you want to believe that he had nothing to say about Russia meddling in our elections.

Sid Finster eddie parolini • 3 days ago • edited
Well that proves it, I guess. After all, did Mueller testify to Congress as to the extent of Iraq's much-vaunted WMD program, and lo! there it was(n't)!

https://fas.org/irp/congres...

Or for that matter, Mueller claimed that Concord Management had ties to the Russian government. Turns out that he had no evidence for his claim.

https://assets.documentclou...

gdpbull • 3 days ago
Mueller is the god that failed. The Democrats considered him their savior. It was "wait til the Mueller report". "Soon it will be Mueller time". "Just wait on Mueller, you'll see."

Then, in the Mueller hearing they quoted scripture from the book of Mueller, asking their savior to provide more divine wisdom on the scripture. But he was no god. He was a human whose mental faculties had declined due to the aging process all of us mortals must endure. And it became abundantly clear that he had been just a figurehead in a witch hunt by radical major Democratic party donor prosecutors. Mueller was shamelessly used by morally bankrupt Democrat apparatchiks.

But they will not stop just because their god failed. They will find another god and keep right on investigating.

MAGA_Ken • 2 days ago
To all the Mueller supporters, he couldn't even answer simple questions like "when did you and your team conclude there was no collusion/conspiracy with Russia?"

That question 1) fell under his purview, 2) arose from the four corners of his report, 3) not in anyway prohibited by the DoJ directive and 4) not about something that would be easy to forget.

Yet he refused to answer. Some stand up guy he is.

[Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing.... ..."
"... Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system??? ..."
"... The Russians trying to rig the elections meme was a fallback for the failure of the “trump is a russianstooge" meme. ..."
Jul 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> catherine... , 27 July 2019 at 11:30 PM
Here are some insights into the minds of many movers and shakers in Russiagate:

Key US officials behind the Russia investigation have made no secret of their animus towards Russia.

"I do always hate the Russians," Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer on the Russia probe, testified to Congress in July 2018. "It is my opinion that with respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life."

As he opened the FBI's probe of the Trump campaign's ties to Russians in July 2016, FBI agent Peter Strzok texted Page: "fuck the cheating motherfucking Russians Bastards. I hate them I think they're probably the worst. Fucking conniving cheating savages."

Speaking to NBC News in May 2017, former director of national intelligence James Clapper explained why US officials saw interactions between the Trump camp and Russian nationals as a cause for alarm: "The Russians," Clapper said, "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned."

In a May interview with Lawfare, former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who helped oversee the Russia probe, explained the origins of the investigation as follows: "It was about Russia, period, full stop. When the [George] Papadopoulos information comes across our radar screen, it's coming across in the sense that we were always looking at Russia. we've been thinking about Russia as a threat actor for decades and decades."

https://www.thenation.com/article/questions-mueller-russiagate/

It was always about Russians no matter what they do or don't do. Large strata of US so called "elite" is obsessed with Russia. Not even China.

plantman , 27 July 2019 at 12:55 PM

I believe Larry Johnson is right when he says:

"You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing....

My question for Larry Johnson requires some speculation on his part: How did the claims of "Russia meddling" which began with the DNC and Hillary campaign, take root at the FBI, CIA and NSA???

Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system???

Walrus , 27 July 2019 at 12:55 PM
The Russians trying to rig the elections meme was a fallback for the failure of the “trump is a russianstooge" meme.

[Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland

Highly recommended!
On one hand Mueller supported and promoted the witch hunt which is the Russiagate. On the other water suddenly became a little bit hot for him and his henchmen as there is a slight chance that Barr is not joking.
Mueller is the first prosecutor in the history of Justice Department who claimed that he does not exonerate the falsely accused of Russian connections President. Which is 100% pure McCartuism-style witch hunt. Of course as he supported Iraw WDM and presided over Anthrax investigation (or cover up to be more correct) this is easy for him to be legal innovator in this area.
Notable quotes:
"... the report was clear that members of Trump's team had been encouraged to lie to investigators, and this had been widely reported throughout the media and in several books. ..."
"... On many important questions, Mueller stated that he could not comment because those matters were under investigation by other departments, or they were not "in my purview." That was his response to questions about the Steele report and the FISA warrant used to spy on the Trump campaign, which are under investigation by the Department of Justice. But he also responded this way to questions on the Russia investigation. How can the special prosecutor charged with investigating whether Russia interfered with our elections decline comment on the topic? ..."
"... Well that proves it, I guess. After all, did Mueller testify to Congress as to the extent of Iraq's much-vaunted WMD program, and lo! there it was(n't)! ..."
"... Or for that matter, Mueller claimed that Concord Management had ties to the Russian government. Turns out that he had no evidence for his claim. ..."
"... Mueller is the god that failed. The Democrats considered him their savior. It was "wait til the Mueller report". "Soon it will be Mueller time". "Just wait on Mueller, you'll see." ..."
"... Then, in the Mueller hearing they quoted scripture from the book of Mueller, asking their savior to provide more divine wisdom on the scripture. But he was no god. He was a human whose mental faculties had declined due to the aging process all of us mortals must endure. And it became abundantly clear that he had been just a figurehead in a witch hunt by radical major Democratic party donor prosecutors. Mueller was shamelessly used by morally bankrupt Democrat apparatchiks. ..."
"... To all the Mueller supporters, he couldn't even answer simple questions like "when did you and your team conclude there was no collusion/conspiracy with Russia?" ..."
"... That question 1) fell under his purview, 2) arose from the four corners of his report, 3) not in anyway prohibited by the DoJ directive and 4) not about something that would be easy to forget. ..."
"... Yet he refused to answer. Some stand up guy he is. ..."
Jul 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

That answer appears to directly contradict page 180 of the report which states, "As defined in legal dictionaries, collusion is largely synonymous with conspiracy as that crime is set forth in the general federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371," Collins pointed out.

"Are you sitting here today testifying something different than what your report states?"

Mueller stuttered and appeared confused, flipped to the relevant page of the report, and said that he would defer to the report.

Throughout the hearing, Democratic members would read the definition of corruption or obstruction and then try to get Mueller to explain how various actions did not qualify or why the report did not reach a finding. Each time, Mueller declined to comment.

To say that watching his testimony was painful is an understatement.

In an exchange with Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) that exemplifies the entire hearing, the Pennsylvania Republican asked, "You made a decision not to prosecute, right?"

"No, we made a decision not to decide whether to prosecute or not."

In the afternoon intelligence committee hearing, Rep. John Ratcliffe asked Mueller to clear up confusion regarding his morning testimony, where he appeared to contradict the report on the question of whether he had whiffed on an indictment because the Office of Legal Counsel said it was not possible to indict a sitting president.

"What I wanted to say [in the morning] is that we did not make any determination with regard to culpability, in any way. We did not start that process, down the road," said Mueller.

But in his morning testimony before the House Judiciary committee, he said: "The president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed."

See if you can make sense of this exchange:

Democratic Rep. Andre Carson: "Would you agree that these acts demonstrated a betrayal of the democratic values our country rests on?"

Mueller: "I can't agree with that. Not that it's not true, but I cannot agree with it."

This was typical of Mueller's bizarre testimony throughout the day.

Democrats used the hearing to read huge portions of the report, as well as Donald Trump's tweets and campaign utterances, as if somehow they were covering new ground. In one such exchange, a member asked: "Trump and his campaign welcomed and encouraged Russian interference?"

Mueller: "Yes."

Question: "And then Trump and his campaign lied about it to cover it up?"

Mueller: "Yes."

Anyone who has followed news coverage of the Mueller report knows that line of questioning is not breaking new ground, as the report was clear that members of Trump's team had been encouraged to lie to investigators, and this had been widely reported throughout the media and in several books.

Even so, Democrats persisted in reading publicly available Trump statements aloud. During his portion of time, Rep. Mike Quigley chose to read Trump's campaign trail statements about Wikileaks .

"I love Wikileaks."

"This Wikileaks is like a treasure trove."
"Boy, I love reading those Wikileaks."

He then asked Mueller to react to Trump's statements. "Problematic is an understatement, in terms of giving some hope or some boost to what is and should be illegal activity," Mueller said. Did we really need Mueller's opinion on Trump's statements uttered on the stump, all of which were made before he was elected president? How is this type of commentary valuable?

On many important questions, Mueller stated that he could not comment because those matters were under investigation by other departments, or they were not "in my purview." That was his response to questions about the Steele report and the FISA warrant used to spy on the Trump campaign, which are under investigation by the Department of Justice. But he also responded this way to questions on the Russia investigation. How can the special prosecutor charged with investigating whether Russia interfered with our elections decline comment on the topic?

Congressional hearings aren't like a court room. There's no judge that can order an uncooperative witness to answer. That's one of the many reasons that highly politicized Congressional hearings often quickly descend into kangaroo-court style bludgeoning of the witness.

Yet today, because the confused witness appeared flummoxed by rapid-fire questions and by the contents of his own report, his evasions and memory lapses instead undermined the credibility of the report itself, and had people questioning whether Mueller had really led the investigation or not.

Barbara Boland is 's foreign policy and national security reporter. Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC.

eddie parolini • 3 days ago • edited

In reference to Russia meddling in the 2016 election, he specifically said that Russia had meddled in the past, Russia was meddling as of right now, and Russia would continue to meddle in the future.

I guess that qualifies as having nothing to say about Russia meddling if you want to believe that he had nothing to say about Russia meddling in our elections.

Sid Finster eddie parolini • 3 days ago • edited
Well that proves it, I guess. After all, did Mueller testify to Congress as to the extent of Iraq's much-vaunted WMD program, and lo! there it was(n't)!

https://fas.org/irp/congres...

Or for that matter, Mueller claimed that Concord Management had ties to the Russian government. Turns out that he had no evidence for his claim.

https://assets.documentclou...

gdpbull • 3 days ago
Mueller is the god that failed. The Democrats considered him their savior. It was "wait til the Mueller report". "Soon it will be Mueller time". "Just wait on Mueller, you'll see."

Then, in the Mueller hearing they quoted scripture from the book of Mueller, asking their savior to provide more divine wisdom on the scripture. But he was no god. He was a human whose mental faculties had declined due to the aging process all of us mortals must endure. And it became abundantly clear that he had been just a figurehead in a witch hunt by radical major Democratic party donor prosecutors. Mueller was shamelessly used by morally bankrupt Democrat apparatchiks.

But they will not stop just because their god failed. They will find another god and keep right on investigating.

MAGA_Ken • 2 days ago
To all the Mueller supporters, he couldn't even answer simple questions like "when did you and your team conclude there was no collusion/conspiracy with Russia?"

That question 1) fell under his purview, 2) arose from the four corners of his report, 3) not in anyway prohibited by the DoJ directive and 4) not about something that would be easy to forget.

Yet he refused to answer. Some stand up guy he is.

[Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing.... ..."
"... Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system??? ..."
"... The Russians trying to rig the elections meme was a fallback for the failure of the “trump is a russianstooge" meme. ..."
Jul 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> catherine... , 27 July 2019 at 11:30 PM
Here are some insights into the minds of many movers and shakers in Russiagate:

Key US officials behind the Russia investigation have made no secret of their animus towards Russia.

"I do always hate the Russians," Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer on the Russia probe, testified to Congress in July 2018. "It is my opinion that with respect to Western ideals and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous threat to that way of life."

As he opened the FBI's probe of the Trump campaign's ties to Russians in July 2016, FBI agent Peter Strzok texted Page: "fuck the cheating motherfucking Russians Bastards. I hate them I think they're probably the worst. Fucking conniving cheating savages."

Speaking to NBC News in May 2017, former director of national intelligence James Clapper explained why US officials saw interactions between the Trump camp and Russian nationals as a cause for alarm: "The Russians," Clapper said, "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned."

In a May interview with Lawfare, former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who helped oversee the Russia probe, explained the origins of the investigation as follows: "It was about Russia, period, full stop. When the [George] Papadopoulos information comes across our radar screen, it's coming across in the sense that we were always looking at Russia. we've been thinking about Russia as a threat actor for decades and decades."

https://www.thenation.com/article/questions-mueller-russiagate/

It was always about Russians no matter what they do or don't do. Large strata of US so called "elite" is obsessed with Russia. Not even China.

plantman , 27 July 2019 at 12:55 PM

I believe Larry Johnson is right when he says:

"You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing....

My question for Larry Johnson requires some speculation on his part: How did the claims of "Russia meddling" which began with the DNC and Hillary campaign, take root at the FBI, CIA and NSA???

Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system???

Walrus , 27 July 2019 at 12:55 PM
The Russians trying to rig the elections meme was a fallback for the failure of the “trump is a russianstooge" meme.

[Jul 28, 2019] The CIA Wants To Hide All Its 'Assets'

Jul 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Generation O , 16 minutes ago link

I've communicated in the past with former U.S. Army unit leaders whose occasional mission was to escort CIA teams into Laos during the Vietnam war, who were to bring back significant amounts of heroin for placement in the body bags of killed U.S. soldiers for shipment back to the States for distribution. I was told that in some cases, the CIA team did not make it back with the heroin, courtesy of the accompanying U.S. military unit. I guess that saves the trouble of making such activities public.

Promethus , 27 minutes ago link

The CIA / FBI are the deep state's thugs.

Element , 5 minutes ago link

um, they are both state security agencies, those tend to not **** around.

LetThemEatRand , 34 minutes ago link

The point is to criminalize things like the Pentagon Papers (and of course, Wikileaks).

[Jul 28, 2019] Tulsi, Israel and BDS movement

Jul 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Fluff The Cat , 1 hour ago link

Gabbard is more controlled opposition. Remember, she voted for the anti-BDS resolution, more sanctions and is anti-2nd Amendment. Don't be fooled by her shtick.

serotonindumptruck , 1 hour ago link

The Saker exposes Gabbard as the charlatan that she is.

https://thesaker.is/what-tulsi-gabbards-caving-in-to-the-israel-lobby-really-shows/

JD Rock , 50 minutes ago link

shes going after our guns first😡

CatInTheHat , 1 hour ago link

I will not support her.

She says she is against forever wars yet she voted to pass the monstrosity that is the new defense bill. She is also a friend to Israhell as she voted for anti BDS.

I don't listen to what politicians say but what they do that falls in line with the most important elements of empire.

[Jul 28, 2019] Washington's Blog, 13 Shocking Facts about Robert Mueller

Jul 28, 2019 | washingtonsblog.com
  1. Paul Merrell July 25, 2019 at 21:10 Washington's Blog, 13 Shocking Facts about Robert Mueller: https://washingtonsblog.com/2017/11/10-shocking-facts-special-prosecutor-robert-mueller.html

[Jul 28, 2019] Dementia or very skillful, convincing acting: Mueller would have looked a lot better if he had only taken the time to read... the Mueller report.

Mueller came across as an old man.... muddling.... confused.... He was out of his depth. One would have to conclude that he is not remotely credible based on his inability to answer questions and apparent ignorance of a report he is supposed to have authored. Embarrassingly inept!
Jul 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Hangfire-13 , 2 days ago

Mueller would have looked a lot better if he had only taken the time to read... the Mueller report.

William Jones , 2 days ago

Better to be thought a fool than recognized as an accomplice.

Solgato Blogopogo , 1 day ago

Mueller sold America on the existence of WMDs in Iraq too.

BigWater59 , 1 day ago

This was a dog and pony show with the main act being a dementia patient in poor health. SAD

Steven Trekking , 2 days ago

FFS, I live in the UK and even I have heard the link between Fusion GPS and the dodgy dossier. Has Mueller been working alone in a cave or something? Has he tried Wikipedia?

Ivana Seymore , 2 days ago

I think we should bring Mueller to the stand as a witness for his investigation of nineleven...

George Christiansen , 2 days ago div tabindex="0" role="artic

le"> The had the lesson taught to them, but I seriously doubt that they learned anything. I also think that Mueller was largely playing dumb. His job is to continue to raise doubt, not to bring clarity. He is till doing a great job in that regards. I hope it leads to jail time.

Ron Preece , 3 days ago

$30,000,000 down the toilet. Mueller deserves the Roger Stone Treatment !

Amani jm , 3 days ago

div> Collussion and Obstruction are synonymus? Muller: NO But Your report said so. Muller: I stick with the report. Hahahahaah

Steve Lee , 2 days ago

In all honesty either Muller was lying, unbelievably incompetent or genuinely has some form of dementia and that is meant in a true honest opinion..

dotatough , 1 day ago

"They do not deserve to rule, that much is clear." Love ya Tucc

Eric Sanders , 3 days ago

Did anyone ask Mueller if he actually wrote the report?

Elizabeth Maldonado , 2 days ago (edited)

Mueller's playing dum to cover his own hide and the democraps should be ashamed wasting tax payers money & that bringing the only work they done in 2 years corrupt sorry individuals

Bleyluige , 1 day ago

Like someboday said, the person who learned most about the Mueller report during the hearing was Robert Mueller!

balsawerkz , 2 days ago

When are leaders going to call out Adam Schiff on his extremely obvious cocaine eyes?

Carlos Matos , 1 day ago (edited)

Tucker spitting some hard truth there at 7:30

Edmund007013 , 1 day ago

Mueller obviously has deep dementia and should be in a nursing home. Great Summary Tucker ! Well done !

Chris Wriight , 1 day ago

"Daft old man blinking in the sunlight after his curtain was torn away" hit the nail on the head😂

Ken H , 3 days ago

Recall Nadler and Schiff. Those stuffed, spineless suits.

Joel Martin , 1 day ago

So basically the whole "Russia" investigation was complete sham!

Tad Ulrich , 14 hours ago

Well worth watching this just for Tucker's superb commentary alone! With this Mueller fiasco, a stake has been driven deep into the Deep State's heart.

Jennie Gall , 2 days ago

OR it's a BRILLIANT RUSE in this Political Theater. He was ACTING. This isn't the real Robert Mueller.

Robert Boothby , 3 days ago

Tucker, that was another fine job. "The ruling class did this to us". Well said and spot on! Keep it up for as long as they allow it. Thank you.

[Jul 28, 2019] The Russiagate Fever is breaking caucus99percent

Jul 28, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

The Russiagate Fever is breaking

gjohnsit on Sat, 07/27/2019 - 5:21pm The ruling elites have compared Russiagate to Pearl Harbor , 9/11 , and Kristallnacht.
Yet for some reason, the American public has refused to agree with it's importance .

In a recent Gallup poll on problems facing the country, the "Situation with Russia" was such a marginal concern that it did not even register.

In fact, Republicans have flat out rejected the konspiracy theory altogether. A fact that the elites refused to accept.

Fortunately, the MSNBC-watching Democrats were willing to give the investigation the benefit of the doubt.
Until now .

Since the public release of a redacted version of the Mueller report, Democrats have grown more skeptical that the Russia investigation was conducted fairly, according to a new poll.
...Both Democrats and Republicans have tilted toward a belief that the inquiry, which wrapped up this spring after almost two years, was not conducted fairly. An April survey -- conducted shortly after the report's release -- found that 46 percent of voters thought the probe had been fair, compared with 29 percent who felt it had been unfair.

But there was a much bigger swing among Democrats, the most recent poll found. Among Democratic voters, the number who consider the investigation unfair shot up by 15 percentage points since then, while the number who thought it had been a fair investigation dropped by 9 points.
It's unclear what accounts for Democrats' plummeting confidence -- it's possible that they feel the investigation was unfair in that the outcome was too favorable to President Donald Trump; believe that Mueller was boxed in by Trump's Justice Department; or feel that it's unfair because the president has not faced any serious consequences as a result of the investigation.

Right. It was unfair FOR Trump. ROTFL.

It's obvious that the elites in the media have completely lost touch with the vast majority of the public. They don't even attempt to understand us. Nor do they give us any credit for being able to come to logical conclusions different from what they are selling.

It's also obvious that the MSM has no Plan B, for what happens after Russiagate flops.
They've even started pointing fingers at each other.

But the American political press found Mueller insufficiently dazzling.
The New York Times declared, in language Trump could have written himself, "Mueller's Performance Was a Departure From His Much-Fabled Stamina." The Washington Post announced, "On Mueller's Final Day on the National Stage, a Halting, Faltering Performance," and, in a separate piece, dubbed Mueller a "weary old man."

Although other pieces from the same outlets covered the substance of Mueller's testimony, the conclusion that he had failed to excite his audience framed the totality of coverage.

Maybe it's because Mueller didn't say anything new. Maybe because he refused to answer nearly 200 questions.
Maybe it's because the whole thing feels like an artificial scandal designed to distract us from things of importance. And it isn't working.

snoopydawg on Sat, 07/27/2019 - 7:34pm
Mueller said that the Russian interference is as big as 9/11

What a crock of pootie. Just like he lied about WMDs, he's lying to the country again. As Jim Jordan pointed out Misfud was the person who got the whole thing rolling. Misfud told Papadapolous that Russia had dirt on Hillary. Did Mueller interview Misfud and ask him how he knew that? Of course not because Mueller knew that Misfud has ties to the state department. As do most of the people sent out to try to entrap Trump. Mueller did get away with lying to congress when he talked about the IRA and their connections to Russian intelligence after the judge told him not to. But this pretty much sums it up.

Why no impeachment? Reason 1 - Because Mueller would be forced by the defense to answer the 198 times he refused. Mifsud & Kilimnick are Western operatives! @aaronjmate @stranahan @caitoz @nikoCSFB @TFL1728 @21WIRE @jimmy_dore @freedomrideblog @

-- Garland Nixon (@GarlandNixon) July 27, 2019

The Voice In th... on Sat, 07/27/2019 - 9:09pm
I'd much rather that Osama bin Laden bought

@snoopydawg
Facebook ads instead of flying lessons for his followers.

What a crock of pootie. Just like he lied about WMDs, he's lying to the country again. As Jim Jordan pointed out Misfud was the person who got the whole thing rolling. Misfud told Papadapolous that Russia had dirt on Hillary. Did Mueller interview Misfud and ask him how he knew that? Of course not because Mueller knew that Misfud has ties to the state department. As do most of the people sent out to try to entrap Trump. Mueller did get away with lying to congress when he talked about the IRA and their connections to Russian intelligence after the judge told him not to. But this pretty much sums it up.

Why no impeachment? Reason 1 - Because Mueller would be forced by the defense to answer the 198 times he refused. Mifsud & Kilimnick are Western operatives! @aaronjmate @stranahan @caitoz @nikoCSFB @TFL1728 @21WIRE @jimmy_dore @freedomrideblog @

-- Garland Nixon (@GarlandNixon) July 27, 2019

The Liberal Moonbat on Sat, 07/27/2019 - 8:04pm
"Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and Kristallnacht???"

For their despicable insensitivity and wrongful appropriation of others' suffering, they were subsequently eaten alive by social-warrior Twitter mobs, beaten into delivering sniveling, shame-drenched public recantations, and passively accepted losing their jobs no matter how good they might otherwise have been at them...Right? RIGHT?

Linda Wood on Sat, 07/27/2019 - 11:40pm
Fever from Russiagate

causes me to read Tucker Carlson in order to cool off.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-the-russia-hoax-is-over-a...

Tucker Carlson: The Russia hoax is over and it's time to hold people accountable for years of lies.
By Tucker Carlson | Fox News - July 26, 2019

The Russia hoax ended on Wednesday -- we can say that. It ended not with a bang, but with the muddled half-memories of a fading old man slipping in and out of focus.

America sat transfixed by Robert Mueller's halting testimony before Congress. No honest person could have come away at the end believing that the president of the United States colluded with the Russian government to steal an election. That was the allegation, you'll remember.

And then, after the most extensive investigation in modern American history, we found the truth. And so, we can say conclusively, once again, what we told you the day this all started, the whole thing is a crock. It never happened. They were lying to you. That's clear now. The debate is over.

But that doesn't mean the Russia story has quite ended. There are loose ends. For two and a half years, some of the most powerful people in America -- supposedly serious, well-educated people, very smart people -- these people made wild and untrue and totally reckless allegations about issues critical to the life of this country, all on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. It's hard to believe they did that. But they did do it.

What should happen to these people now? Congressman Adam Schiff, for example. Schiff claimed he possessed actual evidence of Russian collusion. And he didn't just say that one time, he said it repeatedly.

... But what about his enablers? And there are a lot of them --the journalists, the pundits, the fellow lawmakers who helped Adam Schiff tell his lies. These are the people you'll remember who blithely accused the sitting president of the United States of treason.

One of them was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has said, among other things, the following: "Trump's eagerness to sell out America proves the Russians must have something personally politically or financially on President Trump."

It proves that Trump is committing treason. Think about that. Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House, third in line for the presidency. She is the country's most powerful lawmaker, supposedly a wise and sober person. And yet, there she was telling you it's been proved that the president of the United States is working for a hostile foreign power.

Has any Speaker in American history ever said something that irresponsible? Maybe nothing comes to mind. But if you think that's shocking, consider this: Pelosi is still saying that. "Tucker Carlson Tonight's" investigative producer, Alex Pfeiffer, ran into Pelosi Thursday afternoon on Capitol Hill and asked her. Listen to what she told our show.

Alex Pfeiffer, Fox News investigative producer: Speaker Pelosi, Alex Pfeiffer of "Tucker Carlson Tonight." In January, you wondered what Putin had on Trump. After yesterday, are you any closer to figuring that out?

Pelosi: We have it up on the courts right now.

Pfeiffer: Are you any closer to figuring out what Putin has on Trump?

Pelosi: That's why we need to have him to answer our subpoena.

Pfeiffer: You still think Putin might have some sort of blackmail on the president?

Pelosi: I wonder what Putin has politically, financially or personally.

Pfeiffer: So our president could be subject to blackmail, you think?

The exchange isn't long, but it really tells you everything you need to know. Pelosi told our show President Trump is a traitor who is committing treason. And yet, she doesn't want to impeach him. How does that make sense?

Well, it only makes sense when you understand that Pelosi doesn't mean a single word that she says. Everything is political, meaning it's only about power.

That's not just annoying. It's also ominous. And here's why.

Fifteen years ago this spring, we invaded Iraq to stop a WMD program that didn't exist. Thousands of American troops died in the process, trillions of dollars were wasted. It was the single greatest mistake in this country in generations. And yet -- and here's the key -- nobody in Washington was ever punished for it.

The people who planned it went on to even better jobs. One of them is now our national security adviser, John Bolton. Five years after the Iraq War, our economy collapsed. Remember that? The subprime meltdown? The specific causes were complex, but the themes were instantly recognizable -- greed and stupidity. And yet, once again, no one was ever punished.

Now, fast forward another 11 years to today, right now. America stands on the brink of yet more foolish foreign entanglements, and on the brink of and potentially another financial meltdown. Why is that? Because nobody in Washington has learned anything. And why would they learn anything? When they screw up there are never any consequences. They skate by on the usual mixture of aggression and BS. "Nothing to see here, keep moving."

Imagine for a second, what would happen if you let your kids act like that? Well, they'd been in prison by now. So, maybe it's time to stop the cycle in Washington.

How about this? If you get caught lying about the big things, whether it's about weapons of mass destruction, or subprime mortgages or Russian collusion, you have to admit it and serve penance, -- not necessarily prison time, though we're open. But punishment of some kind.

You can't stay in Washington, making six times the average American salary. You can't do that. No, sorry.

You've got to leave. You've got to relocate to Camden, New Jersey, maybe or Gary, Indiana, and do something useful. Like clean motel rooms for minimum wage, put the little "sanitized for your protection" strips on toilets. Not forever, just for a decade or two, until you've learned your lesson. Call us when you've done that, but not before.

Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on July 25, 2019.

[Jul 28, 2019] I hate to say it, but corporate Democrats along with those who Maddow has totally brainwashed are still true believers in the entire lie.

Jul 27, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Drew Hunkins , July 25, 2019 at 15:01

PCR just posted a piece over at his site in which he declares that Russiagate is now over. https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/07/25/repub

I hate to say it, but corporate Democrats along with those who Maddow has totally brainwashed are still true believers in the entire lie. You cannot get through to these people, they will not come to terms with the fact that they've been hoodwinked and bamboozled for the last three years. They read it in WaPo and the NYTimes and heard it on NPR so it's gospel.

For the next 40 years these people will be writing essays, books and giving talks about how the evil Russians interfered in our democracy [sic] to elect their preferred president. It's maddening and perhaps beyond hope.

Rob , July 25, 2019 at 17:18

To your point, the NYT is warning that Russia will interfere AGAIN in the next election. They take it as a given that they interfered in the last one, and so do many, if not most, of their readers, notwithstanding the absence of evidence. This is a full-on, non-stop propaganda effort. Facts will not get in the way.

anon4d2 , July 25, 2019 at 20:37

So we need evidence that Russia
1. Is interfering on both sides of every controversy;
2. Is representing the majority of the US better than the incumbents; or
3. Is plotting with Holland to take over the universe with UFOs and occult powers;
But perhaps it is better to concentrate on the influence of Israel, which is fact.

Drew Hunkins , July 26, 2019 at 10:24

“This is a full-on, non-stop propaganda effort. Facts will not get in the way.”

Exactly!

[Jul 28, 2019] There may be some fireworks with that judge because of Mueller's statements. He was expressly warned by the judge that she would consider a range of sanctions were there any repetition

This is semi-senile Deep State patsy just was unable to change the course on the middle of the action ;-)
Jul 28, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Paul Merrell , July 25, 2019 at 15:53

@ "Mueller implied in his testimony that there was a link between the IRA and the Russian government despite an order from a judge for him to stop making that connection."

There may be some fireworks with that judge because of Mueller's statements. He was expressly warned by the judge that she would consider a range of sanctions were there any repetition. On the other hand, as far as I could tell a few years ago when I had last researched the topic, federal judges are very reluctant to sanction federal attorneys. I could find only one published instance where that had occurred, and it was only a measly $500 penalty. (Rule 11 sanctions are supposed to compensate the other side for the expenses of opposing an unjustifiable position, as measured by the reasonable billing rate of the other side's lawyers, although judges do have authority for departures.)

Misbehavior by federal lawyers is exceedingly common, I suspect precisely because they are so seldom held to account for unprincipled behavior. That Mueller conducted such a shoddy investigation is no surprise to me.

Me Myself , July 25, 2019 at 13:31

Robert Mueller can easily be seen as carrying democrats hopes and dreams just like a good Mueller.
Why does it matter where truth of damning information about our government officials comes from ( rhetorical ).
I appreciate knowing it.
Watching what appears to be a modern day Coup d'état in this country is more than just disappointing not surprising though.
No focus from congress on what was clearly demonstrated in the evidence provided by publishing's of undisputed truth by (Chelsea Manning .Julian Assange and Others)

I thought it would be interesting living in the Middle Ages, once upon a time, Its not as fun as thought it might.

[Jul 28, 2019] Another Epstein Domino Trump's National Security Advisor tied to Epstein Maxwell Cabal

Notable quotes:
"... Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Robert Maxwell and girlfriend and "Nazi guard" for Epstein"s child sex stable also ran a fake charity closed day ago called Terra Mar. The FBI is now investigating if the charity was used to pay off Epstein/Maxwell child rape victims. ..."
"... The UK Guardian and Transparify.org list the think tank now run by General McMaster and tied to Platero, Maxwell and Epstein as invisibly funded and "deceptive." ..."
Jul 28, 2019 | www.veteranstoday.com

Following the bread crumbs from Epstein has led to a fake charity and from there to General McMaster, former National Security Advisor to Donald Trump, who now heads a reputedly fake London based think tank secretly funded by money laundered through the repressive Bahraini royal family.

But there is more.

Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Robert Maxwell and girlfriend and "Nazi guard" for Epstein"s child sex stable also ran a fake charity closed day ago called Terra Mar. The FBI is now investigating if the charity was used to pay off Epstein/Maxwell child rape victims.

The charity takes us further into Maxwell's den of Mossad partnerships. Most serious of all are those through her lifelong friend Calfo Platero, who ties Epstein and Maxwell to the highly disreputable London based Institute for Strategic Studies. The UK Guardian and Transparify.org list the think tank now run by General McMaster and tied to Platero, Maxwell and Epstein as invisibly funded and "deceptive." However, in 2016, the organization that McMaster joined when he left the Trump White House in 2018 admitted to taking secret funding from the rulers of Bahrain under an agreement that they would keep the funding secret.

Bahrain has been cited with numerous human rights abuses and an attempt to murder an American diplomat and blame it on Iran. Middle East Eye confirmed Bahrain's involvement, a major "revolving door" scandal for a high level Trump appointee.

[Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!

Highly recommended!
Jul 27, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Glennn , July 26, 2019 at 12:16

Russia interfered on a massive scale and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!

How evil? Well do the math. $43,000 to $46,000 of that was spent during the election and of those ads 8.4 percent were political. That's $3,684 dollars.

But the political ads were aimed in both directions so that's roughly $1,932 spent "promoting" Trump.

And now Mueller tells us the evil mastermind is at it again -- as we sit here -- probably spending even more this time. Let us know when he's spent a full thousand dollars Bob and we'll start loading the bombs.

Oh, and we found all this out for around thirty million dollars.

stephen kelley , July 25, 2019 at 22:34

think about it! with the myriad of problems we must contend with: growing social inequality, huge tax breaks for the rich, government deregulation of private business, a climate catastrophe, unending wars, nuclear annihilation spurred on especially by u.s. imperialism, the gutting of what little social safety net we have left and so on and so so on. and we are supposed to be outraged at supposed foreign interference with our supposed democratic process? please, this is total insanity!!!

John Wolfe , July 25, 2019 at 18:29

Of course, relatively speaking, it’s a nothing. Every knowledgeable person knows that we in the US orchestrated both the financing and the strategy of the 1996 Yeltsin campaign -- a political rescue so efficiently carried out that our operatives bragged brazenly about it to Time Magazine, which made it the cover story for its July 14, 1996 edition (“Yanks to the Rescue”).

The Lamestream Corporate media always underplayed the fact that Yeltsin ordered the execution of 1,100 demonstrators who protested the IMF backed “reforms”, and that Clinton approved of his deadly and heavy hand in implementing a neoliberal economic order. Clinton never threatened to suspend aid to the Russian Federation despite its numerous abuses of human rights.

Also forgotten is that Yeltsin ordered the Russian Parliament (Duma) shelled before it could vote on Yeltsin’s economic “reforms”, which were implemented at the point of a gun. At various times between 1993 and 1997, it was Yeltsin who declared martial law, suspended the Duma, and declared himself possessed of dictatorial powers.

How many Americans ever knew this? 20%? How many remember it today? Maybe 5%? That means there is no context for gauging Muellers’ testimony.

But, it is, by MSNBC standards, Vladimir Putin who is Evil Incarnate. Has Maddow ever mentioned Yeltsin, a tyrant of the first order? No, because at GE, Comcast, and NBC, tyranny in the name of enforcing neoliberalism is perfectly acceptable.

This post is a bit off topic, and is a bit relativistic, as I know we should be concerned if it is really true that Manafort was giving internal polling data to a Russian Federation person so that the IRA could better target swing states in our Midwest.

Bob Van Noy , July 26, 2019 at 08:26

John Wolfe, your comment is not off topic at all, it’s crucial to further understanding of the totality of the Russia did it mentality, and That is well documented in a small but powerful book called “Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance” by F. William Engdahl which I will link.

The American People have been propagandized so thoroughly that they can hardly recognize the truth any longer.

Too, I will link an article in Off Guardian this morning that is worth mentioning if one wants to see Real Reporting On MH-17.

https://www.amazon.com/Manifest-Destiny-Democracy-Cognitive-Dissonance/dp/3981723732

And:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/07/26/mh17-call-for-justice/

[Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Evidence accumulates that Obama was the real leader of this color revolution against Trump with Brannan as his chief lieutenant and Comey as a willing accomplice.
Now that the dust has settled, one must ask why the Deep State wanted Trump gone. Why does the Obama-Clinton mafia hates him so much? Is this due to Trump committed an unforgivable sin in suggesting we “get along with Russia” and thus potentially cut the revenues of military-industrial complex ? This is not true -- Trump inflated the Pentagon budget to astronomical height. Then why ?
Notable quotes:
"... The full details of the plot to take out Donald Trump remain to be revealed. But there should now be no doubt that his effort was not the work of a few rogue intelligence and law enforcement officials acting on their own. This was a full blown covert action undertaken with the full knowledge and blessing of Barack Obama. ..."
"... Operation Crossfire Hurricane was launched the end of July 2016. CIA Director John Brennan briefed key Democrat members of Congress in early August on allegations that Donald Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin. And Peter Strzok traveled to London in early August 2016 to meet with the CIA and with Alexander Downer, who was claiming that George Papadopolous was talking up the Russians. Following that trip Strozk texted the following to his mistress, Lisa Page : ..."
"... We also know that Senior Obama Administration officials, such as NSC Director Susan Rice and UN Ambassdor Samantha Power, were pushing to "unmask" Trump campaign officials who were named in US intelligence documents. ..."
"... Let us look at this from another angle. If the Russians were actually trying to interfere in the 2016 election, then it was known to both US intelligence and law enforcement. Hell, we are told in the Mueller report that the FBI detected the Russians trying to hack the DNC way back in 2015. If there really was intelligence on Russian efforts to meddle why did the Obama Administration do nothing other than sanction FBI's Crossfire Hurricane? ..."
"... On what basis did Barack Obama insist it was impossible to rig the US Presidential election? This is a critical anomaly. Why was the Obama team asleep at the switch, especially on the intel front, it the Russians actually were engaged in rigging the election to install Donald Trump? ..."
"... Obama seemed to have got a taste for spying on his domestic political opponents from monitoring Israeli attempts to block the Iran nuclear deal. I think the lock her up stuff really scared the Obama people, who had much to hide. ..."
Jul 27, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The full details of the plot to take out Donald Trump remain to be revealed. But there should now be no doubt that his effort was not the work of a few rogue intelligence and law enforcement officials acting on their own. This was a full blown covert action undertaken with the full knowledge and blessing of Barack Obama.

As I have written previously , the claim that Russia tried to hijack our election is a damn lie. But you do not have to take my word for it. Just listen to Barack Obama speaking in October 2016 in response to Donald Trump's expressed concerns about election meddling :

"There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America's elections, in part because they are so decentralized. There is no evidence that that has happened in the past, or that there are instances that that could happen this time," the president said to the future president in October 2016.

"Democracy survives because we recognize that there is something more important than any individual campaign, and that is making sure the integrity and trust in our institutions sustains itself. Becasue Democracy works by consent, not by force," Obama said.

"I have never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place. It is unprecedented. It happens to be based on no fact. Every expert regardless of political party... who has ever examined these issues in a serious way will tell you that instances of significant voter fraud are not to be found. Keep in mind elections are run by state and local officials."

It is important to remember what had transpired in the Trump/Russia collusion case by this point. Operation Crossfire Hurricane was launched the end of July 2016. CIA Director John Brennan briefed key Democrat members of Congress in early August on allegations that Donald Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin. And Peter Strzok traveled to London in early August 2016 to meet with the CIA and with Alexander Downer, who was claiming that George Papadopolous was talking up the Russians. Following that trip Strozk texted the following to his mistress, Lisa Page :

Strzok: And hi. Went well, best we could have expected. Other than [REDACTED] quote: " the White House is running this. " My answer, "well, maybe for you they are." And of course, I was planning on telling this guy, thanks for coming, we've got an hour, but with Bill [Priestap] there, I've got no control .

Page: Yeah, whatever (re the WH comment). We've got the emails that say otherwise.

The White House clearly knew. But Strzok's text is not the only evidence. We also know that Senior Obama Administration officials, such as NSC Director Susan Rice and UN Ambassdor Samantha Power, were pushing to "unmask" Trump campaign officials who were named in US intelligence documents.

There are only two possibilities:

  1. Obama was being briefed by Susan Rice and DNI James Clapper and CIA Director about the project to take out Trump, or
  2. Obama was kept in the dark.

Let us look at this from another angle. If the Russians were actually trying to interfere in the 2016 election, then it was known to both US intelligence and law enforcement. Hell, we are told in the Mueller report that the FBI detected the Russians trying to hack the DNC way back in 2015. If there really was intelligence on Russian efforts to meddle why did the Obama Administration do nothing other than sanction FBI's Crossfire Hurricane?

On what basis did Barack Obama insist it was impossible to rig the US Presidential election? This is a critical anomaly. Why was the Obama team asleep at the switch, especially on the intel front, it the Russians actually were engaged in rigging the election to install Donald Trump?

turcopolier , 26 July 2019 at 04:19 PM

All

My wife was for many years an election official in Virginia. IMO Obama was right in saying that a US presidential election is impossible to "rig." The US Constitution requires that federal elections be run by the states WITHOUT federal supervision. As a result the methods and equipment in the states and the various parts of the states vary widely and the state systems are not tied together with a national electronic network as, for example, the system is in France where the result of a national election is reported on TeeVee immediately when the polls close.

Bill H , 26 July 2019 at 04:51 PM
Asking the question, "Can you cite one specific case where a single vote was definitively changed by Russian meddling?" causes panic in a person who is declaiming about the evils of Russian meddling in our elections.
Alexandria , 26 July 2019 at 07:02 PM
Bill H,

When you ask that question, the invariable retort is that the Russians are so clever that you wouldn't know that you were being gulled; or, when I say that I have never seen a Russian produced facebook ad, the rejoinder is that the Russians concentrated on Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and, of course, I would have been privy to the bot-sent emails and facebook ads generated by the Internet Research Agency.

Jack said in reply to The Twisted Genius ... , 27 July 2019 at 12:41 AM
TTG

You've maintained all along that the Russians interfered in the election, yet I believe it is your position that the Russians did not change a single vote. Is that correct or do you believe the Russians changed the votes before tabulation?

What did the Russians do that the Trump and Hillary campaigns did not do? Did they also turnout the tens of thousands who showed up for Trump rallies that Hillary could never muster? Are they still turning out thousands at recent Trump rallies? I'm curious how come Brennan and Clapper could not turn out thousands to Hillary's rallies when according to our German friend "b", the omnipotent US Intel services just turned out a quarter of the population of Hong Kong to protest CCP authoritarianism?

Did the Israeli, Saudi and Chinese governments interfere in the election? How would you compare what they did to what you believe the Russians did?

uieter about it. All that is very different from the absolute covert nature of the Russian IO in the 2016 election. I have no idea what China did or is doing.

Larry Johnson -> The Twisted Genius ... , 27 July 2019 at 11:36 AM
You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication. The lies on this are enormous. If the FBI really had detected GRU hacking of the DNC in 2015, which is claimed in the fabricated meme, then you would expect the FBI and the other counter intel elements of the USG to take action. THEY DID NOTHING.

The issue of Russian hacking only emerged when Hillary and the DNC learned that DNC emails were going to be put out by WIKILEAKS. Again, not one shred of actual evidence that the Russians did it, but blaming the Russians became a convenient excuse in a bid to divert attention from the real story--i.e,. Hillary and the DNC colluded to defeat Bernie Sanders.

The only real solid evidence of colluding with foreigners, in this case the Ukraine, comes courtesy of Hillary and her campaign. Hiring a foreign intel officer (ie. Steele) who then takes info from Russians of questionable background and spread it around as "truth". That was not a Russian IO. Pure Clinton IO.

blue peacock said in reply to The Twisted Genius ... , 27 July 2019 at 12:29 PM
"What the Russians did was insert misattributed information and disinformation into the election cycle...That is what separates the Russian IO from anything Clinton, Trump or any of their supporters did."

I believe supporters of both candidates did exactly what you say the Russians did - insert misattributed information & disinformation into the media stream. If you watch MSNBC or Fox on any given day there is much assertion & opinion masquerading as news. And the Twitter & Facebook and blog universe are teeming with stories and innuendo that are more fiction than fact all from anonymous accounts.

The Russia Collusion hysteria is replete with examples of "misattributed information and disinformation". It seems that yellow journalism is as American as apple pie.

The whole opaque PAC structure with names like "Americans for Democracy" funded by chain structures hiding the real financiers and calling up down is something that we see growing in every election cycle and is already of significant scale both in terms of financing and dubiousness.

It is also rather common that "experts" who are called upon to opine on issues routinely never disclose their conflicts of interest. Jeffrey Sachs and so many others on the payroll of CCP entities never disclose those payments as they extoll the virtues of offshoring our industrial base to China and are apologists for CCP espionage.

The Twisted Genius -> blue peacock... , 27 July 2019 at 01:42 PM
Blue peacock, supporters of Clinton and Trump did not put out misattributed info. They both put out truth, innuendo, exaggerations, misleading info and even outright lies, but they put it out as themselves. They didn't represent themselves as someone other than who they were. The PAC structure comes close to skirting this requirement for truthful attribution, but a quick internet search blows away the facades of these PACs. What the Russians did was pure black propaganda.
Fred -> The Twisted Genius ... , 27 July 2019 at 09:23 AM
TTG,

You mean the kindly grandmother, Loretta Lynch, Attorney General of the United States, did not inform President Obama that the FBI had obtained a FISA warrant to surveil the Republican candidate for the presidency and members of his staff becasue he was working with Russians? Or do you mean that James Comey failed to tell his boss, Loretta Lynch; or do you mean John Brennan failed to tell Obama about that Steele dossier from Fusion GPS that Mueller know anything about; or do you mean that James Clapper failed to tell Jeh Johnson about that too? The Russians made them do all those things as part of an interference campaign, right? It couldn't have been they were corrupt and incompetant.

"Instead, Obama...." made an "If you like your doctor, you can keep you doctor" statement that he knew was completely false. Trump didn't win, Russians influenced Americans to vote for Trump, just ask the losers of the election, their paid sources and their colleagues in Congress. In fact Americans love Hilary so much she's just where in the polls right now?

catherine , 27 July 2019 at 12:20 AM
I continue to be astounded by the outrage at "Russian meddling". So some Russians used the internet to post true or false information on candidates in a election.... so what?...millions of American partisan trolls were doing the same thing for or against a candidate. We had tons of fake info written by American bloggers and posters all over the net, Facebook, twitter etc..

Its not like Putin came to the US and gave a speech to congress in favor of Trump ...as Netanyahu did in appearing before the US congress and urging them to go against President Obama's Syria policy for heaven's sake.
It is so ridiculous I have given up hope of finding enough IQs above that of a cabbage to form a sane government.

LondonBob , 27 July 2019 at 06:57 AM
Obama seemed to have got a taste for spying on his domestic political opponents from monitoring Israeli attempts to block the Iran nuclear deal. I think the lock her up stuff really scared the Obama people, who had much to hide.
J , 27 July 2019 at 12:27 PM
This has shown two things IMO

1. The FBI cannot be trusted to uphold defend and protect our Constitution, as they sought actively to overturn a duly elected POTUS.; and

2 - Mueller's incompetence is astounding.

Is the only entity of the Defense Department called the U.S. Army the only ones left actually upholding, defending, and protecting our Constitution and our Constitution processes? I don't see the other entities of the DOD called Navy and Air Force doing their jobs upholding our Constitution!

Thumbs up to the Army, thumbs down to the Navy and Air Force!

Mark Logan said in reply to J... , 27 July 2019 at 02:14 PM
J,

I'm a little more charitable to the FBI. The Trumps lied their asses off to the FBI about their foreign contacts. Which IMO, wrong or right, left the FBI all but no recourse but to investigate those lies. Even if the lies were simply based in long-seated personal habits, it takes investigation to prove that is the case.

plantman , 27 July 2019 at 12:55 PM
I believe Larry Johnson is right when he says:

"You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing....

My question for Larry Johnson requires some speculation on his part: How did the claims of "Russia meddling" which began with the DNC and Hillary campaign, take root at the FBI, CIA and NSA???

Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system???

rg , 27 July 2019 at 01:46 PM
Larry, sorry to nitpick, but I have such regard for your work that it pains me to see the typographical error in your second sentence, where you say "his error" shortly after referring to Trump. I'm guessing that you meant to say "this error", but it reads as if it means "Trump's error".

And while I'm at it, your last sentence has "it" instead of "if".

Keep up your great work for this excellent website.

turcopolier , 27 July 2019 at 03:35 PM
Mark Logan

Sadly naive in that you think the conspirators were actually acting in good faith. You think they were right when they used the Steele Dossier in applying for a FISA warrant in Colyyer's Star Chamber? Steele was a paid informant for the FBI as was Page.

turcopolier , 27 July 2019 at 03:35 PM
Mark Logan

How do you know "they lied their asses off?" Mueller's report stated that no American had conspired with the Russians,

[Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!

Highly recommended!
Jul 27, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Glennn , July 26, 2019 at 12:16

Russia interfered on a massive scale and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!

How evil? Well do the math. $43,000 to $46,000 of that was spent during the election and of those ads 8.4 percent were political. That's $3,684 dollars.

But the political ads were aimed in both directions so that's roughly $1,932 spent "promoting" Trump.

And now Mueller tells us the evil mastermind is at it again -- as we sit here -- probably spending even more this time. Let us know when he's spent a full thousand dollars Bob and we'll start loading the bombs.

Oh, and we found all this out for around thirty million dollars.

stephen kelley , July 25, 2019 at 22:34

think about it! with the myriad of problems we must contend with: growing social inequality, huge tax breaks for the rich, government deregulation of private business, a climate catastrophe, unending wars, nuclear annihilation spurred on especially by u.s. imperialism, the gutting of what little social safety net we have left and so on and so so on. and we are supposed to be outraged at supposed foreign interference with our supposed democratic process? please, this is total insanity!!!

John Wolfe , July 25, 2019 at 18:29

Of course, relatively speaking, it’s a nothing. Every knowledgeable person knows that we in the US orchestrated both the financing and the strategy of the 1996 Yeltsin campaign -- a political rescue so efficiently carried out that our operatives bragged brazenly about it to Time Magazine, which made it the cover story for its July 14, 1996 edition (“Yanks to the Rescue”).

The Lamestream Corporate media always underplayed the fact that Yeltsin ordered the execution of 1,100 demonstrators who protested the IMF backed “reforms”, and that Clinton approved of his deadly and heavy hand in implementing a neoliberal economic order. Clinton never threatened to suspend aid to the Russian Federation despite its numerous abuses of human rights.

Also forgotten is that Yeltsin ordered the Russian Parliament (Duma) shelled before it could vote on Yeltsin’s economic “reforms”, which were implemented at the point of a gun. At various times between 1993 and 1997, it was Yeltsin who declared martial law, suspended the Duma, and declared himself possessed of dictatorial powers.

How many Americans ever knew this? 20%? How many remember it today? Maybe 5%? That means there is no context for gauging Muellers’ testimony.

But, it is, by MSNBC standards, Vladimir Putin who is Evil Incarnate. Has Maddow ever mentioned Yeltsin, a tyrant of the first order? No, because at GE, Comcast, and NBC, tyranny in the name of enforcing neoliberalism is perfectly acceptable.

This post is a bit off topic, and is a bit relativistic, as I know we should be concerned if it is really true that Manafort was giving internal polling data to a Russian Federation person so that the IRA could better target swing states in our Midwest.

Bob Van Noy , July 26, 2019 at 08:26

John Wolfe, your comment is not off topic at all, it’s crucial to further understanding of the totality of the Russia did it mentality, and That is well documented in a small but powerful book called “Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance” by F. William Engdahl which I will link.

The American People have been propagandized so thoroughly that they can hardly recognize the truth any longer.

Too, I will link an article in Off Guardian this morning that is worth mentioning if one wants to see Real Reporting On MH-17.

https://www.amazon.com/Manifest-Destiny-Democracy-Cognitive-Dissonance/dp/3981723732

And:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/07/26/mh17-call-for-justice/

[Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Evidence accumulates that Obama was the real leader of this color revolution against Trump with Brannan as his chief lieutenant and Comey as a willing accomplice.
Now that the dust has settled, one must ask why the Deep State wanted Trump gone. Why does the Obama-Clinton mafia hates him so much? Is this due to Trump committed an unforgivable sin in suggesting we “get along with Russia” and thus potentially cut the revenues of military-industrial complex ? This is not true -- Trump inflated the Pentagon budget to astronomical height. Then why ?
Notable quotes:
"... The full details of the plot to take out Donald Trump remain to be revealed. But there should now be no doubt that his effort was not the work of a few rogue intelligence and law enforcement officials acting on their own. This was a full blown covert action undertaken with the full knowledge and blessing of Barack Obama. ..."
"... Operation Crossfire Hurricane was launched the end of July 2016. CIA Director John Brennan briefed key Democrat members of Congress in early August on allegations that Donald Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin. And Peter Strzok traveled to London in early August 2016 to meet with the CIA and with Alexander Downer, who was claiming that George Papadopolous was talking up the Russians. Following that trip Strozk texted the following to his mistress, Lisa Page : ..."
"... We also know that Senior Obama Administration officials, such as NSC Director Susan Rice and UN Ambassdor Samantha Power, were pushing to "unmask" Trump campaign officials who were named in US intelligence documents. ..."
"... Let us look at this from another angle. If the Russians were actually trying to interfere in the 2016 election, then it was known to both US intelligence and law enforcement. Hell, we are told in the Mueller report that the FBI detected the Russians trying to hack the DNC way back in 2015. If there really was intelligence on Russian efforts to meddle why did the Obama Administration do nothing other than sanction FBI's Crossfire Hurricane? ..."
"... On what basis did Barack Obama insist it was impossible to rig the US Presidential election? This is a critical anomaly. Why was the Obama team asleep at the switch, especially on the intel front, it the Russians actually were engaged in rigging the election to install Donald Trump? ..."
"... Obama seemed to have got a taste for spying on his domestic political opponents from monitoring Israeli attempts to block the Iran nuclear deal. I think the lock her up stuff really scared the Obama people, who had much to hide. ..."
Jul 27, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The full details of the plot to take out Donald Trump remain to be revealed. But there should now be no doubt that his effort was not the work of a few rogue intelligence and law enforcement officials acting on their own. This was a full blown covert action undertaken with the full knowledge and blessing of Barack Obama.

As I have written previously , the claim that Russia tried to hijack our election is a damn lie. But you do not have to take my word for it. Just listen to Barack Obama speaking in October 2016 in response to Donald Trump's expressed concerns about election meddling :

"There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America's elections, in part because they are so decentralized. There is no evidence that that has happened in the past, or that there are instances that that could happen this time," the president said to the future president in October 2016.

"Democracy survives because we recognize that there is something more important than any individual campaign, and that is making sure the integrity and trust in our institutions sustains itself. Becasue Democracy works by consent, not by force," Obama said.

"I have never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place. It is unprecedented. It happens to be based on no fact. Every expert regardless of political party... who has ever examined these issues in a serious way will tell you that instances of significant voter fraud are not to be found. Keep in mind elections are run by state and local officials."

It is important to remember what had transpired in the Trump/Russia collusion case by this point. Operation Crossfire Hurricane was launched the end of July 2016. CIA Director John Brennan briefed key Democrat members of Congress in early August on allegations that Donald Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin. And Peter Strzok traveled to London in early August 2016 to meet with the CIA and with Alexander Downer, who was claiming that George Papadopolous was talking up the Russians. Following that trip Strozk texted the following to his mistress, Lisa Page :

Strzok: And hi. Went well, best we could have expected. Other than [REDACTED] quote: " the White House is running this. " My answer, "well, maybe for you they are." And of course, I was planning on telling this guy, thanks for coming, we've got an hour, but with Bill [Priestap] there, I've got no control .

Page: Yeah, whatever (re the WH comment). We've got the emails that say otherwise.

The White House clearly knew. But Strzok's text is not the only evidence. We also know that Senior Obama Administration officials, such as NSC Director Susan Rice and UN Ambassdor Samantha Power, were pushing to "unmask" Trump campaign officials who were named in US intelligence documents.

There are only two possibilities:

  1. Obama was being briefed by Susan Rice and DNI James Clapper and CIA Director about the project to take out Trump, or
  2. Obama was kept in the dark.

Let us look at this from another angle. If the Russians were actually trying to interfere in the 2016 election, then it was known to both US intelligence and law enforcement. Hell, we are told in the Mueller report that the FBI detected the Russians trying to hack the DNC way back in 2015. If there really was intelligence on Russian efforts to meddle why did the Obama Administration do nothing other than sanction FBI's Crossfire Hurricane?

On what basis did Barack Obama insist it was impossible to rig the US Presidential election? This is a critical anomaly. Why was the Obama team asleep at the switch, especially on the intel front, it the Russians actually were engaged in rigging the election to install Donald Trump?

turcopolier , 26 July 2019 at 04:19 PM

All

My wife was for many years an election official in Virginia. IMO Obama was right in saying that a US presidential election is impossible to "rig." The US Constitution requires that federal elections be run by the states WITHOUT federal supervision. As a result the methods and equipment in the states and the various parts of the states vary widely and the state systems are not tied together with a national electronic network as, for example, the system is in France where the result of a national election is reported on TeeVee immediately when the polls close.

Bill H , 26 July 2019 at 04:51 PM
Asking the question, "Can you cite one specific case where a single vote was definitively changed by Russian meddling?" causes panic in a person who is declaiming about the evils of Russian meddling in our elections.
Alexandria , 26 July 2019 at 07:02 PM
Bill H,

When you ask that question, the invariable retort is that the Russians are so clever that you wouldn't know that you were being gulled; or, when I say that I have never seen a Russian produced facebook ad, the rejoinder is that the Russians concentrated on Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio and, of course, I would have been privy to the bot-sent emails and facebook ads generated by the Internet Research Agency.

Jack said in reply to The Twisted Genius ... , 27 July 2019 at 12:41 AM
TTG

You've maintained all along that the Russians interfered in the election, yet I believe it is your position that the Russians did not change a single vote. Is that correct or do you believe the Russians changed the votes before tabulation?

What did the Russians do that the Trump and Hillary campaigns did not do? Did they also turnout the tens of thousands who showed up for Trump rallies that Hillary could never muster? Are they still turning out thousands at recent Trump rallies? I'm curious how come Brennan and Clapper could not turn out thousands to Hillary's rallies when according to our German friend "b", the omnipotent US Intel services just turned out a quarter of the population of Hong Kong to protest CCP authoritarianism?

Did the Israeli, Saudi and Chinese governments interfere in the election? How would you compare what they did to what you believe the Russians did?

uieter about it. All that is very different from the absolute covert nature of the Russian IO in the 2016 election. I have no idea what China did or is doing.

Larry Johnson -> The Twisted Genius ... , 27 July 2019 at 11:36 AM
You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication. The lies on this are enormous. If the FBI really had detected GRU hacking of the DNC in 2015, which is claimed in the fabricated meme, then you would expect the FBI and the other counter intel elements of the USG to take action. THEY DID NOTHING.

The issue of Russian hacking only emerged when Hillary and the DNC learned that DNC emails were going to be put out by WIKILEAKS. Again, not one shred of actual evidence that the Russians did it, but blaming the Russians became a convenient excuse in a bid to divert attention from the real story--i.e,. Hillary and the DNC colluded to defeat Bernie Sanders.

The only real solid evidence of colluding with foreigners, in this case the Ukraine, comes courtesy of Hillary and her campaign. Hiring a foreign intel officer (ie. Steele) who then takes info from Russians of questionable background and spread it around as "truth". That was not a Russian IO. Pure Clinton IO.

blue peacock said in reply to The Twisted Genius ... , 27 July 2019 at 12:29 PM
"What the Russians did was insert misattributed information and disinformation into the election cycle...That is what separates the Russian IO from anything Clinton, Trump or any of their supporters did."

I believe supporters of both candidates did exactly what you say the Russians did - insert misattributed information & disinformation into the media stream. If you watch MSNBC or Fox on any given day there is much assertion & opinion masquerading as news. And the Twitter & Facebook and blog universe are teeming with stories and innuendo that are more fiction than fact all from anonymous accounts.

The Russia Collusion hysteria is replete with examples of "misattributed information and disinformation". It seems that yellow journalism is as American as apple pie.

The whole opaque PAC structure with names like "Americans for Democracy" funded by chain structures hiding the real financiers and calling up down is something that we see growing in every election cycle and is already of significant scale both in terms of financing and dubiousness.

It is also rather common that "experts" who are called upon to opine on issues routinely never disclose their conflicts of interest. Jeffrey Sachs and so many others on the payroll of CCP entities never disclose those payments as they extoll the virtues of offshoring our industrial base to China and are apologists for CCP espionage.

The Twisted Genius -> blue peacock... , 27 July 2019 at 01:42 PM
Blue peacock, supporters of Clinton and Trump did not put out misattributed info. They both put out truth, innuendo, exaggerations, misleading info and even outright lies, but they put it out as themselves. They didn't represent themselves as someone other than who they were. The PAC structure comes close to skirting this requirement for truthful attribution, but a quick internet search blows away the facades of these PACs. What the Russians did was pure black propaganda.
Fred -> The Twisted Genius ... , 27 July 2019 at 09:23 AM
TTG,

You mean the kindly grandmother, Loretta Lynch, Attorney General of the United States, did not inform President Obama that the FBI had obtained a FISA warrant to surveil the Republican candidate for the presidency and members of his staff becasue he was working with Russians? Or do you mean that James Comey failed to tell his boss, Loretta Lynch; or do you mean John Brennan failed to tell Obama about that Steele dossier from Fusion GPS that Mueller know anything about; or do you mean that James Clapper failed to tell Jeh Johnson about that too? The Russians made them do all those things as part of an interference campaign, right? It couldn't have been they were corrupt and incompetant.

"Instead, Obama...." made an "If you like your doctor, you can keep you doctor" statement that he knew was completely false. Trump didn't win, Russians influenced Americans to vote for Trump, just ask the losers of the election, their paid sources and their colleagues in Congress. In fact Americans love Hilary so much she's just where in the polls right now?

catherine , 27 July 2019 at 12:20 AM
I continue to be astounded by the outrage at "Russian meddling". So some Russians used the internet to post true or false information on candidates in a election.... so what?...millions of American partisan trolls were doing the same thing for or against a candidate. We had tons of fake info written by American bloggers and posters all over the net, Facebook, twitter etc..

Its not like Putin came to the US and gave a speech to congress in favor of Trump ...as Netanyahu did in appearing before the US congress and urging them to go against President Obama's Syria policy for heaven's sake.
It is so ridiculous I have given up hope of finding enough IQs above that of a cabbage to form a sane government.

LondonBob , 27 July 2019 at 06:57 AM
Obama seemed to have got a taste for spying on his domestic political opponents from monitoring Israeli attempts to block the Iran nuclear deal. I think the lock her up stuff really scared the Obama people, who had much to hide.
J , 27 July 2019 at 12:27 PM
This has shown two things IMO

1. The FBI cannot be trusted to uphold defend and protect our Constitution, as they sought actively to overturn a duly elected POTUS.; and

2 - Mueller's incompetence is astounding.

Is the only entity of the Defense Department called the U.S. Army the only ones left actually upholding, defending, and protecting our Constitution and our Constitution processes? I don't see the other entities of the DOD called Navy and Air Force doing their jobs upholding our Constitution!

Thumbs up to the Army, thumbs down to the Navy and Air Force!

Mark Logan said in reply to J... , 27 July 2019 at 02:14 PM
J,

I'm a little more charitable to the FBI. The Trumps lied their asses off to the FBI about their foreign contacts. Which IMO, wrong or right, left the FBI all but no recourse but to investigate those lies. Even if the lies were simply based in long-seated personal habits, it takes investigation to prove that is the case.

plantman , 27 July 2019 at 12:55 PM
I believe Larry Johnson is right when he says:

"You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing....

My question for Larry Johnson requires some speculation on his part: How did the claims of "Russia meddling" which began with the DNC and Hillary campaign, take root at the FBI, CIA and NSA???

Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system???

rg , 27 July 2019 at 01:46 PM
Larry, sorry to nitpick, but I have such regard for your work that it pains me to see the typographical error in your second sentence, where you say "his error" shortly after referring to Trump. I'm guessing that you meant to say "this error", but it reads as if it means "Trump's error".

And while I'm at it, your last sentence has "it" instead of "if".

Keep up your great work for this excellent website.

turcopolier , 27 July 2019 at 03:35 PM
Mark Logan

Sadly naive in that you think the conspirators were actually acting in good faith. You think they were right when they used the Steele Dossier in applying for a FISA warrant in Colyyer's Star Chamber? Steele was a paid informant for the FBI as was Page.

turcopolier , 27 July 2019 at 03:35 PM
Mark Logan

How do you know "they lied their asses off?" Mueller's report stated that no American had conspired with the Russians,

[Jul 27, 2019] Pornographic Democracy by Linh Dinh

Jul 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

Pornography multiplies frequency, duration, angles, positions and sexual partners, an endless and eternal sexual buffet, except that none of it is really happening. Similarly, American democracy gives the appearance of boundless participation by all citizens, for they can't just vote in caucuses and elections, but cheer at conventions, march in protest, write letters to newspapers, comment on the internet and follow, blow by blow, the serial mud wrestling between opposing politicians. Pissed, they can freely curse Bush, Obama or Trump without fearing a midnight knock on the door. Alas, none of their "political activities" actually matters, for Americans don't influence their government's policies, much less decide them. It's all an elaborate spectacle to make each chump think he's somehow a player, in on the action, when he's actually all alone, in the dark, to beat his own meat, yet again.

He has railroaded, premasticated opinions on everything, but without the means to act on any of it. Only his impotence is real.

[Jul 27, 2019] Luongo Gabbard Going After Google Is Double Plus Good

Notable quotes:
"... Any candidate that is publicly against the empire is the enemy of not only the state, it's quislings in the media, the corporations who profit from it and the party machines of both the GOP and the DNC. That is Gabbard's crime. And it's the only crime that matters. ..."
"... This represents an intervention into her ability to speak to voters and, as such, is a violation of not only her First Amendment rights but also, more critically, campaign finance law. ..."
"... On a day when it became clear to the world that Robert Mueller led an investigation to affect the outcome of the 2018 mid-term elections (and beyond) while attempting to overthrow an elected President, Gabbard attacking the one of the main pillars of the information control system is both welcome and needed. ..."
"... Her filing this lawsuit is making it clear that even a fairly conventional Democrat on most all other issues is to be marginalized if she criticizes the empire. ..."
"... You can disagree with Tulsi on many things but she is absolutely right and the only one who gets the real problem.Military Industrial Complex & The Empire. ..."
Jul 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Tom Luongo,

Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) is suing Google . It's about time someone did. It's one thing to for conservatives and libertarians to be outraged by their treatment by the tech giant, it's another for them to go after a female Democrat.

Since Trump's election the campaign to curtail free speech has went into overdrive and we are now far beyond Orwell's dystopian vision in 1984 in terms of technological infrastructure.

Google makes Big Brother look like George Carlin's the Hippy Dippy Weather Man with the "hippy dippy weather, man." The drive to stamp out all forms of political division has only one thing animating it, protecting the drive of the elites I call The Davos Crowd to erect a transnational superstate to herd humanity to their vision of sustainability.

Gabbard is the only person running for the Democratic nomination worth any amount of my time. Her fundamental criticisms of the U.S. warfare state are spot on. She's sincere about this. It's costing her stature within her own party.

She's a committed anti-imperialist. She's also young, inexperienced and a little bit naive. But that, to me, is part of her charm. It means she is still malleable. She's smart enough to be outraged about where we are headed and young enough to be flexible about what the solutions are to stop it from happening.

So, as such, she's the perfect champion for the defenders of free speech and critics of the U.S. empire. A young, attractive, intelligent woman of mixed-race heritage with a service record who stands athwart the mainstream on the most important issue in politics today: the U.S. empire.

The entire time I was growing up the prevailing wisdom was Social Security was the third rail of U.S. politics. That, like so many other pearls of wisdom, was nonsense.

The true third rail of U.S. politics is empire.

Any candidate that is publicly against the empire is the enemy of not only the state, it's quislings in the media, the corporations who profit from it and the party machines of both the GOP and the DNC. That is Gabbard's crime. And it's the only crime that matters.

For that crime Google acted to blunt interest in her campaign in the critical hours after the first democratic debate. So, Gabbard, rightly, sued them.

The two main points of her lawsuit are:

1) suspending her Google Ad account for six hours while search traffic for her was spiking and

2) Gmail disproportionately junked her campaign emails.

This represents an intervention into her ability to speak to voters and, as such, is a violation of not only her First Amendment rights but also, more critically, campaign finance law.

Whether this lawsuit goes anywhere or not is beside the point. Google will ignore it until they can't and then settle with her before discovery. Gabbard doing this is good PR for her as it sets her on the right side of an incredibly important issue, censorship and technological bias/de-platforming of political outsiders.

It's also good because if she does pursue this principally, it will lead to potential discovery of Google's internal practices, lending the DoJ a hand in pursuing all the big tech firms for electioneering.

On a day when it became clear to the world that Robert Mueller led an investigation to affect the outcome of the 2018 mid-term elections (and beyond) while attempting to overthrow an elected President, Gabbard attacking the one of the main pillars of the information control system is both welcome and needed.

Her filing this lawsuit is making it clear that even a fairly conventional Democrat on most all other issues is to be marginalized if she criticizes the empire.

As libertarians and conservatives it is irrelevant if she is conventional in other areas. It doesn't matter that she's been to a CFR meeting or two or that she's anti-gun. She's not going to be president.

This is not about our virtue-signaling about the purity of essence of our political figures. They are tools to our ends. And on now two incredibly important issues leading up to the 2020 election Tulsi Gabbard is on the right side of them.

She is someone we can and should reach out to and support while she makes these issues the centerpiece of her campaign. Her timing is even more excellent than what I've already stated.

Filing this lawsuit is a pre-emptive strike at Google now that she's qualified for the next two Democratic debates. And it may assist her in breaking out of the bottom tier of the Democratic field, Ron Paul style if she gets her opportunity.

Shedding light on Google's anti-free speech practices is a fundamental good, one we should celebrate. Dare I say, it's double plus good.

* * *

Join my Patreon and install Brave if you both hate big tech censorship and the empire in equal measure.

Thordoom , 8 minutes ago link

You can disagree with Tulsi on many things but she is absolutely right and the only one who gets the real problem.Military Industrial Complex & The Empire.

If you won't kill this problem you can virtue signal about your left and right opinions about your perfect candidate as much as you want without getting anything done ( Trump). Purism won't help you. It only gets you distracted and controlled by the elites.

otschelnik , 11 minutes ago link

The point of this article is that Gabbard is taking on GOOGLE, for screwing with her account. See Google demonitizes, deboosts, deplatforms people without them even knowing it, and diddles their search algorythms NOT ONLY against conservatives, but for independent democrats like Gabbard. THAT'S THE POINT, not who or what Gabbard stands for. The dem party did the same to Gabbard during the 2016 election, cut her off from financing, because she supported Bernie Sanders.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3609

This is the sort of **** things dim's do, and progressive companies like Fakebook, Twatter and Goolag. Now Gabbard may not have views that we can support, but if she is taking on GOOLAG, than we should stand like a wall behind her. This is a big threat to 1st amendment rights.

chunga , 1 hour ago link

I hope this girl switches to an Independant. A lot of people are sick to death of the blues and the reds.

GoldHermit , 52 minutes ago link

Blues and reds is a sham used by the poliicians to divide the populace.

espirit , 48 minutes ago link

Throw in some greens and purples...

LetThemEatRand , 1 hour ago link

Good point, chunga. She is already being given the Ron Paul treatment by MSM (they either slam her as basically a naive fool, or just ignore her), so no way does she rise to the top of the **** pile of Blue Team candidates. Would make a good run as an independent, and maybe wake some people up.

[Jul 27, 2019] Mueller Magoo by W. James Antle III

Notable quotes:
"... He demonstrated a thin grasp of his own report's findings, even as he implored lawmakers in both parties to read it. He asked members of Congress to repeat their questions 48 times . ..."
"... That's not to say Mueller did nothing for Democrats. He said President Trump was not "exculpated" by his report. He raised the specter of falsified documents and all but said that he punted on obstruction of justice only because a sitting president cannot be indicted under existing Justice Department guidelines. He gamely testified his investigation was no "witch hunt." And some of his seeming confusion was likely strategic: he was trying to avoid giving partisans easy footage confirming their talking points. ..."
"... While Democrats have not totally given up on "collusion," moving the goalposts away from Hillary Clinton's detailed explanation of how the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to fix the election toward vaguer references to "contacts" and "foreign help," obstruction of justice was the name of the game. Mueller acknowledged that there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump campaign with collusion-related crimes, even if he stopped short of calling that an exoneration of the president. Paul Manafort, George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Roger Stone -- these were not criminal masterminds. In fact, they were all incredibly sloppy. If they had colluded, they all could easily have been charged. ..."
"... No one who could be indicted was charged with aiding the president in obstructing the investigation either. ..."
"... The real answer Mueller declined to give appears to be that his obstruction allegations would have hinged heavily on Trump's use presidential powers under Article II of the Constitution. The Justice Department under Barr's leadership does not believe this amounted to obstruction in theory or practice. Thus the self-evidently never-fired Mueller was reduced to dropping breadcrumbs and hoping congressional Democrats would find them. ..."
"... Mueller's seeming lack of familiarity with his own investigation lessened the GOP's problem because it helps shift the focus to the "angry Democrats" in the special counsel's office -- people like Andrew Weissman, who attended Hillary's election night party -- rather than Mueller himself. The Democrats are still at square one, trying to dial back Manchurian candidate expectations among the base and shift the impeachment rationale to Trump's passive willingness to benefit from Russian interference without expressing a modicum of outrage. ..."
"... With 95 Democrats willing to impeach Trump over mean tweets, anything is possible. But it's going to take a lot more than Mueller to move House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into that camp. ..."
"... The Steele dossier, whether a truthful compilation or a complete fabrication, is itself an attempt by foreign spies to influence our election. "Collusion" staring us in the face right here. ..."
"... The public spectacle was heart-breaking. It was obvious that Mueller had lost some mental faculties. Surely his special investigative team had to know that, having worked with him for 2+ years, and so the Democrat leadership had to know that as well. And yet they insisted he testify, even though he basically begged to not testify and let him just go off into the twilight of retirement. But no, they threatened to subpoena him. ..."
"... Actually, Trump committed a lot of unforced errors, as well as being generally lazy, stupid and unprepared. ..."
"... With this in mind, to believe the RussiaGate conspiracy theories, one must simultaneously believe that the Russians have abilities that border on psychic mind control superpowers, but at the same time, these same evil geniuses cannot be bothered to plan what to do if their nefarious schemes actually worked out. ..."
"... One can easily accept that Trump is a roaring moron, but one also has to believe that his alleged puppetmaster cannot take the time to consult an attorney or a peruse a copy of the United States Code, available for free on the internet to anyone who bothers to take a peek. And that's just the legal requirements. I won't even go into the clownshow that was Trump's appointments and staffing. ..."
"... The testimony was a complete success because it maintained the status quo. Trump is not going anywhere, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that Russia tampered with the election rendering even more sanctions and increasing cold war tensions, and the only ones indicted were accused of process crimes. Meanwhile, the business of Goldman Sachs gets done in the halls of power. ..."
"... Robert "Saddam has WMD of Mass Destruction" Mueller has been the bag man for the establishment for a long time. Even his dotage, he still managed to perform his job flawlessly. ..."
"... 12 indictments against often former employees of a Russian clickbait farm for spectacularly laughable memes that will never amount to anything because there will never be a trial. One of the parties showed up in court and demanded actual evidence as part of discovery, causing Mueller to desperately ask for a continuance. The judge called Mueller out by denying it. The judge also called Mueller out by showing that he had no evidence that the defendant at issue had any ties tot he Russian government. ..."
"... A paltry $150k was spent for online ads over two years, by Russians, they tell you. They also tell you that about half those ads didn't run until after the election was over and that most of the ads didn't endorse a specific candidate or policy. Yet, you insist this Russian social media blitz altered the outcome of your election somehow. With well north of $3 billion spent on traditional advertising, leave it to MSM to float a turd of such odious girth. ..."
"... Next, Mueller indicts 13 Russian intelligence journeymen and it will never amount to anything. None of them will ever be extradited. There will never be a trial. Never a legal discovery process. No burden of proof that they actually hacked or colluded. No US intelligence agency has ever examined the servers in question. ..."
"... An impeachment is another word for "indictment", and as the saying goes you can indict a ham sandwich. Or impeach a baloney sandwich. If Trump were to wind up in the dock it would be "anything goes", including subpoenas being issued to Madame Hillary. There won't be any impeachment. Too much of a danger of overflowing sewage. ..."
"... Seth Rich could rise up from the dead and show us all, live on CNN, how he leaked the DNC emails, right after DWS confessed on MSNBC to ordering Seth Rich's murder and HRC admitted under oath that she invented russiagate on a bet with Podesta to see whether people really are that stupid and gullible, and CNN, MSNBC and the entire DNC and their cultists would keep pushing the conspiracy theory, never even missing a beat. ..."
"... I'm glad Mr. Mueller finally admitted publicly that he held the President to an Orwellian standard of "probably guilty, which we can't prove, until proven innocent, which we never do" that no American has ever been held to by law enforcement. ..."
Jul 25, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testifies before the House Intelligence Committee about his report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in the Rayburn House Office Building July 24, 2019(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) The late Sen. Arlen Specter ended the drive to impeach Bill Clinton by invoking Scottish law and voting "not proven" in the 42rd president's Senate trial. Democrats hope to begin the drive to impeach Donald Trump with a finding by special counsel Robert Mueller that the worst allegations against the 45th president are not proven.

Even this task was made more difficult by the former FBI director and Trump-Russia investigator's unimpressive public congressional testimony. Mueller had trouble identifying questioners. He demonstrated a thin grasp of his own report's findings, even as he implored lawmakers in both parties to read it. He asked members of Congress to repeat their questions 48 times .

The uber-competent G-man about whom liberals sang Christmas carols was not on display Wednesday. "Mueller Time" gave way to Mr. Magoo.

A cursory glance at Politico 's homepage revealed the damage. "'Euphoria': White House, GOP exult after a flat Mueller performance," blared the top headline. Another reads, "Bob Mueller is struggling." And another: "Impeachment drive slowed by Mueller's troubles." Even the New York Times could only manage: "Mueller sticks to script but shows flashes of indignation."

"This is delicate to say, but Mueller, whom I deeply respect, has not publicly testified before Congress in at least six years," fretted Barack Obama's man David Axelrod. "And he does not appear as sharp as he was then."

That's not to say Mueller did nothing for Democrats. He said President Trump was not "exculpated" by his report. He raised the specter of falsified documents and all but said that he punted on obstruction of justice only because a sitting president cannot be indicted under existing Justice Department guidelines. He gamely testified his investigation was no "witch hunt." And some of his seeming confusion was likely strategic: he was trying to avoid giving partisans easy footage confirming their talking points.

But Democrats wanted much more. Ever since Attorney General William Barr released his summary, they have wanted to challenge his framing of the report. His testimony, like that 448-page document, contained plenty of damning information. The bottom line -- that Mueller could not prove a Trump-Russia conspiracy to swing the 2016 presidential election and lacks a convincing explanation for his obstruction equivocation -- remains unchanged.

While Democrats have not totally given up on "collusion," moving the goalposts away from Hillary Clinton's detailed explanation of how the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to fix the election toward vaguer references to "contacts" and "foreign help," obstruction of justice was the name of the game. Mueller acknowledged that there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone in the Trump campaign with collusion-related crimes, even if he stopped short of calling that an exoneration of the president. Paul Manafort, George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Roger Stone -- these were not criminal masterminds. In fact, they were all incredibly sloppy. If they had colluded, they all could easily have been charged.

If Justice Department regulations on presidential indictments did not prevent a finding of insufficient evidence to charge conspiracy, why did these guidelines require Congress to make the final determination on obstruction? No one who could be indicted was charged with aiding the president in obstructing the investigation either.

The real answer Mueller declined to give appears to be that his obstruction allegations would have hinged heavily on Trump's use presidential powers under Article II of the Constitution. The Justice Department under Barr's leadership does not believe this amounted to obstruction in theory or practice. Thus the self-evidently never-fired Mueller was reduced to dropping breadcrumbs and hoping congressional Democrats would find them.

Both parties entered the hearings with a fundamental problem. For Republicans, how do you discredit Mueller for his negative findings about the president while also affirming his failure to prove an election-related conspiracy as definitive? The Democrats' dilemma was that they knew Trump had behaved badly in response to Russian election interference and the subsequent investigation, but hoped Mueller would discover something worse. When he merely supplied color and a reliable narrator for what we largely already knew, many Democrats wanted to pivot back to impeaching Trump over that unseemly behavior.

Mueller's seeming lack of familiarity with his own investigation lessened the GOP's problem because it helps shift the focus to the "angry Democrats" in the special counsel's office -- people like Andrew Weissman, who attended Hillary's election night party -- rather than Mueller himself. The Democrats are still at square one, trying to dial back Manchurian candidate expectations among the base and shift the impeachment rationale to Trump's passive willingness to benefit from Russian interference without expressing a modicum of outrage.

You can argue that we should expect more from a president than to simply have refrained from directly conspiring with a hostile foreign power to reach the White House. Yet that case becomes harder to make when that is precisely what you have conditioned rank-and-file Democrats to expect from the Mueller report. No dramatic reading of that report, least of all by a 74-year-old clearly no longer accustomed to congressional testimony, will deliver on those expectations.

With 95 Democrats willing to impeach Trump over mean tweets, anything is possible. But it's going to take a lot more than Mueller to move House Speaker Nancy Pelosi into that camp.

stevek9 • 3 days ago

I would say this is by far the most charitable interpretation of Mueller's testimony I've seen. He didn't want to talk about the 'Steele Dossier' ... the whole basis for the Russiagate farce, and then claimed he didn't know who GPS Fusion was ... the outfit hired by Clinton to write the dossier in the first place. That this whole pile of rubbish was not laughed out of existence is a tribute to the ability of the media (who hated Trump), to convince a large number of people of a preposterous fantasy.

He reminds me a little bit of my dad, and a little bit of Cato the Younger. But to his fellow Republicans--he's Mr. Magoo.

Wilfred • 3 days ago
The Steele dossier, whether a truthful compilation or a complete fabrication, is itself an attempt by foreign spies to influence our election. "Collusion" staring us in the face right here.

Why haven't the Democrats been investigated for it?

rick allen Wilfred • 2 days ago
Maybe because there's a little difference between hiring a private firm to do opposition research, and Russian military intelligence stealing and releasing tens of thousands of private documents from one political party to help the other win the Presidency?
Fabian Wilfred • a day ago
The dossier is not an attempt by foreign spies. It's an attempt by the Democrats to use foreign spies.
WorkingClass • 3 days ago
The majority of House Democrats voted against impeachment. I would say this was a good day for Democrats.
KevinS • 3 days ago
"You can argue that we should expect more from a president than to simply have refrained from directly conspiring with a hostile foreign power to reach the White House."

Ya think?

tweets21 • 2 days ago
Even after the spectacle, and the grueling two years of media hype, nothing has moved the dial from those who hate Trump, and those who are Trump supporters. The 2020 election may again come down to the electoral college system. We already know where voters on the upper east coast and California stand. Major populations.
gdpbull • 2 days ago
The public spectacle was heart-breaking. It was obvious that Mueller had lost some mental faculties. Surely his special investigative team had to know that, having worked with him for 2+ years, and so the Democrat leadership had to know that as well. And yet they insisted he testify, even though he basically begged to not testify and let him just go off into the twilight of retirement. But no, they threatened to subpoena him.

By all accounts, Mueller had a long a admirable career. Its disgusting that most people's memory of him and his legacy will be of this last public embarrassing spectacle.

The Democratic Party has shown its complete lack of moral compass. When it comes to politics, anything goes, including the destruction of people's lives. They even eat their own when its considered politically expedient. The Anita Hill hearings, Kavannah hearings, me too movement, show me the man and the people around him, we'll find the crimes mentality. What's next? Murder? It would not surprise me in the least.

Its clear now that the entire Russian collusion narrative was a set-up by the Democratic party. It was all about entrapment, perjury traps, and selective media leaking.

Connecticut Farmer gdpbull • 2 days ago
The bottom line was, is, and always will be as follows: The Democrat Party expected their candidate to win in a cakewalk over Trump. If she won we wouldn't have heard one word about these Russians (Oh, and by the way, do these "Russians" have names?). It was Clinton's election to lose and she promptly went out and lost it! Period! End of story! In their eyes the candidate of "The Deplorables" won and the Democrats are enraged--so enraged that since Election Day 2016 they have been doing all they can do to delegitimize the election and Trump's status as POTUS. And all the while-- thanks to BOTH parties--the nation's infrastructure steadily crumbles and the immigration crisis remains unresolved (to cite just two examples).
interguru • 2 days ago
On impeachment: Just imagine that Barak Obama had illegally spent $120,000 of his campaign cash for hush money to his prostitute. What would happen?
Micha_Elyi interguru • 2 days ago • edited
"On impeachment: Just imagine that Barak Obama had illegally spent $120,000 of his campaign cash for hush money to his prostitute. What would happen?"--interguru

Democrats would rise in unison and begin shouting "It's only about sex!" And that time, they'd be correct.

Admit it, interguru, all the covering for Clinton that the Democrats conducted in order to yank his lying-under-oath balls out of the fire rendered impotent their usual tactics of denigrate and defame.

JeffK from PA interguru • a day ago
Then Republicans might actually like him. Hold him up as a 'real man'.
Sid Finster interguru • a day ago
Fine, but that has nothing to do with the russiagate conspiracy theory.

In fact, if Trump were really a puppet of Russia, they'd never let him commit an unforced error that pointless. Some money could be funneled from any of a million sources, and nobody would be any the wiser.

Actually, Trump committed a lot of unforced errors, as well as being generally lazy, stupid and unprepared.

https://www.theguardian.com...

With this in mind, to believe the RussiaGate conspiracy theories, one must simultaneously believe that the Russians have abilities that border on psychic mind control superpowers, but at the same time, these same evil geniuses cannot be bothered to plan what to do if their nefarious schemes actually worked out.

Orwell wept.

One can easily accept that Trump is a roaring moron, but one also has to believe that his alleged puppetmaster cannot take the time to consult an attorney or a peruse a copy of the United States Code, available for free on the internet to anyone who bothers to take a peek. And that's just the legal requirements. I won't even go into the clownshow that was Trump's appointments and staffing.

Salt Lick • 2 days ago
The testimony was a complete success because it maintained the status quo. Trump is not going anywhere, both Democrats and Republicans agreed that Russia tampered with the election rendering even more sanctions and increasing cold war tensions, and the only ones indicted were accused of process crimes. Meanwhile, the business of Goldman Sachs gets done in the halls of power.

Robert "Saddam has WMD of Mass Destruction" Mueller has been the bag man for the establishment for a long time. Even his dotage, he still managed to perform his job flawlessly.

Paddywagon • 2 days ago
*42nd president's Senate trial
Sid Finster jimrussell • 2 days ago
What utter nonsense, unless you believe that "Russia" wrote the DNC emails, or that a clickbait troll farm (see paragraph 95 of the IRA indictment if you don't believe me) that has no discernable connection tot he Russian government has some amazing influence over gullible American voters.
Sid Finster jimrussell • a day ago
12 indictments against often former employees of a Russian clickbait farm for spectacularly laughable memes that will never amount to anything because there will never be a trial. One of the parties showed up in court and demanded actual evidence as part of discovery, causing Mueller to desperately ask for a continuance. The judge called Mueller out by denying it. The judge also called Mueller out by showing that he had no evidence that the defendant at issue had any ties tot he Russian government.

https://www.courthousenews....

A paltry $150k was spent for online ads over two years, by Russians, they tell you. They also tell you that about half those ads didn't run until after the election was over and that most of the ads didn't endorse a specific candidate or policy. Yet, you insist this Russian social media blitz altered the outcome of your election somehow. With well north of $3 billion spent on traditional advertising, leave it to MSM to float a turd of such odious girth.

Next, Mueller indicts 13 Russian intelligence journeymen and it will never amount to anything. None of them will ever be extradited. There will never be a trial. Never a legal discovery process. No burden of proof that they actually hacked or colluded. No US intelligence agency has ever examined the servers in question.

Russians didn't write the emails and Julian Assange is emphatic that Russia had nothing to do with them. Yet, no one in our vast and vaunted intelligence community has bothered to interview him. As they say, a smart lawyer never asks a question if he might not want to hear the answer.

Everything, all of it, is based on intel supplied by a cyber security firm on the DNC payroll. You can't make this shit up.

The other indictments are thoroughly unrelated to hacking or collusion by anybody, much less Russia.

W Porter • 2 days ago • edited
Sen Specter did NOT "end the drive to impeach Bill Clinton", as the opening sentence of this article declares. The drive to impeach Bill Clinton ended when the House passed articles of impeachment. That's right: Bill Clinton was actually impeached. No, he wasn't "convicted" in his senate trial (thanks to Specter) and so wasn't removed from office. But he was, actually, impeached.

Good question for trivia buffs: Only one of these presidents was impeached: Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Which one was it? (Hint: Nixon resigned before the House impeached him.)

Connecticut Farmer W Porter • 2 days ago
An impeachment is another word for "indictment", and as the saying goes you can indict a ham sandwich. Or impeach a baloney sandwich. If Trump were to wind up in the dock it would be "anything goes", including subpoenas being issued to Madame Hillary. There won't be any impeachment. Too much of a danger of overflowing sewage.
Sid Finster • 2 days ago
Seth Rich could rise up from the dead and show us all, live on CNN, how he leaked the DNC emails, right after DWS confessed on MSNBC to ordering Seth Rich's murder and HRC admitted under oath that she invented russiagate on a bet with Podesta to see whether people really are that stupid and gullible, and CNN, MSNBC and the entire DNC and their cultists would keep pushing the conspiracy theory, never even missing a beat.
Amanda Powell Sid Finster • 2 days ago
I see the fever swamp is well represented today.
𝙆𝙧𝙖𝙯𝙮 𝙐𝙣𝙘𝙡𝙚 • 2 days ago
I'm thinking the Democrats just wanted Mueller to give them the go ahead on impeachment... that way they could always blame it on him if the ploy failed... Too bad they are such cowards that none of the want to sign their name to impeachment proceedings...
MM • 2 days ago
I'm glad Mr. Mueller finally admitted publicly that he held the President to an Orwellian standard of "probably guilty, which we can't prove, until proven innocent, which we never do" that no American has ever been held to by law enforcement.

I'll illustrate:

Can anybody tell me the legal difference between those two statements? I really don't see any. Also, what was fascinating about Mr. Mueller's press conference was when he said this:

He actually paid indicted Russian nationals who will never stand trial in this country more constitutional lip service than Trump. Absolutely gorgeous...

Bag Man • 2 days ago
If the Democrats were using Mueller as their smoking gun to nail Trump it failed miserably. If they still want to impeach go ahead. It guarantees Trump's reelection.
Rossbach • a day ago
Mueller's investigation ended after all the subpoenas had been served, all the witnesses had been deposed, and all the evidence analyzed. If, after that, he could not determine that the president had committed a crime, then, according to established jurisprudential practice, the decision is that he is not guilty. It is singular that the 2 accusations, collusion and obstruction, were evaluated differently.

In the case of conspiracy ("collusion") the final report says, "The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." In the case of obstruction of justice, the final report says, "If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment."

So, in the case of conspiracy, the prosecutor had to prove that the President was guilty ("did not establish" conspiracy); in the case of obstruction, they had to prove that he was innocent ("did not commit obstruction"). Why did different standards apply to the two accusations?

Mueller said he didn't recommend that the grand jury indict the President for obstruction because one cannot indict a sitting President. But the President either obstructed justice or he didn't. If he did, why didn't Mueller say so? He didn't have to recommend as indictment in order to state a conclusion based on facts revealed in the investigation. What he appears to be saying is that because he couldn't prove that the President did not commit obstruction, he would recommend that congress play impeachment politics with the issue.

So, instead of a resolution of this matter, Mueller decided to bequeath to the nation a festering sore that, with that aid of congressional Democrats, would continue to undermine the President's administration.

[Jul 27, 2019] Hillary and Obama brought slavery back to Libya and ISIS and the largest refugee crisis since WW2 to Syria

Jul 27, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

emma peele , July 25, 2019 at 19:44

uh Hillary Clinton stood with Bush and lied the world into war. Hillary and Obama brought slavery back to Libya and ISIS and the largest refugee crisis since WW2 to Syria .
Dont forget genocide in Yemen ..

Hillary also supported disastrous free trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA and {TPP that brought back slavery} that harm workers on both sides of the borders

Hillary also toppled a democratically elected president in Honduras with Death Squads and Obama killed 40,000 innocent t people with Sanctions in Venezuela

They are fleeing Hillary and Obama's Terror spree ..and cheer on worse WW3 with Russia

Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network's Support For Endless War

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/01/03/reporter-quits-nbc-citing-networks-support-for-endless-war/

On Venezuela, Tucker Airs Anti-Trump Ideas While Maddow Wants John Bolton To Be More Hawkish

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/05/05/on-venezuela-tucker-airs-anti-trump-ideas-while-maddow-wants-john-bolton-to-be-more-hawkish/

boxerwar , July 25, 2019 at 22:12

c.. Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes, Emma Peele, Without a Doubt – and I absolutely adore your "Avengers" pseudonym !

Hillary's disgusting crimes, however, seem to me to be an attempt to ingratiate herself (and the Democrats) with the Ultra Hawkish Bush Era Republicans.
Who can ever forgive & forget her ghoulish pronouncement, "We came, we saw, He died!!"
(in reference to the ghoulishly brutal public murder of Libya's Qaddafi. {Qaddafi's "Green Book" was a well imagined Socio-Economic plan for for the economic liberation of Africa from the economic and cultural strictures of US, European Absolutist Brutal Dominion.} -- As it was, Libya, under Qaddafi, was a liberal, socialist society with free education, free health care for all citizens, and a nation with it's own currency , free from US/EURO manipulation and control.

-- This Is Why We Killed Him. --
This is US Command and Control World-Wide POLICY ! ! ! --
-- Anglo-Saxon Command and Control of the Whole Wide World and all it's resources Owned and Militarily Controlled by European Bankers

-- - EUROPEAN Bankers, Rothschild Criminal Banker WarMongers/ Wall Street and American Military Power --

These are They which Evilly Rule the World and Disparage or Murder (annihilate) All Others at their pleasure, and Trump is an evil antagonist with the personage of a King Leopold.

Please find "KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST' By Adam Hochschild

[Jul 27, 2019] The Tyranny Of The Police-State Disguised As Law-And-Order

Jul 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America's expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour) -- and that's just what the government spends on foreign wars. The U.S. military empire's determination to police the rest of the world has resulted in more than 1.3 million U.S. troops being stationed at roughly 1000 military bases in over 150 countries around the world. That doesn't include the number of private contractors pulling in hefty salaries at taxpayer expense. In Afghanistan, for example, private contractors outnumber U.S. troops three to one .

No matter how we might differ about the role of the U.S. military in foreign affairs, surely we can agree that America's war spending and commitment to policing the rest of the world are bankrupting the nation and spreading our troops dangerously thin.

All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama and George W. Bush -- to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which they might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability -- were inherited by Donald Trump. These presidential powers -- acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president -- enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

Yet no matter how we might differ about how success or failure of past or present presidential administrations, surely we can agree that the president should not be empowered to act as an imperial dictator with permanent powers.

Increasingly, at home, we're facing an unbelievable show of force by government agents. For example, with alarming regularity , unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by twitchy, hyper-sensitive, easily-spooked police officers who shoot first and ask questions later, and all the government does is shrug and promise to do better. Just recently, in fact, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals cleared a cop who aimed for a family's dog (who showed no signs of aggression), missed, and instead shot a 10-year-old lying on the ground . Indeed, there are countless incidents that happen every day in which Americans are shot, stripped, searched, choked, beaten and tasered by police for little more than daring to frown, smile, question, or challenge an order. Growing numbers of unarmed people are being shot and killed for just standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding something -- anything -- that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officer's mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

No matter how we might differ about where to draw that blue line of allegiance to the police state, surely we can agree that police shouldn't go around terrorizing and shooting innocent, unarmed children and adults or be absolved of wrongdoing for doing so .

Nor can we turn a blind eye to the transformation of America's penal system from one aimed at protecting society from dangerous criminals to a profit-driven system that dehumanizes and strips prisoners of every vestige of their humanity. For example, in Illinois, as part of a "training exercise" for incoming cadets, prison guards armed with batons and shields rounded up 200 handcuffed female inmates, marched them to the gymnasium, then forced them to strip naked (including removing their tampons and pads), " bend over and spread open their vaginal and anal cavities ," while male prison guards promenaded past or stood staring. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the entire dehumanizing, demoralizing mass body cavity strip search -- orchestrated not for security purposes but as an exercise in humiliation -- was legal. Be warned, however: this treatment will not be limited to those behind bars. In our present carceral state, there is no difference between the treatment meted out to a law-abiding citizen and a convicted felon: both are equally suspect and treated as criminals, without any of the special rights and privileges reserved for the governing elite. In a carceral state, there are only two kinds of people: the prisoners and the prison guards.

No matter how we might differ about where to draw the line when it comes to prisoners' rights, surely we can agree that no one -- woman, man or child -- should be subjected to such degrading treatment in the name of law and order .

In Washington, DC, in contravention of longstanding laws that restrict the government's ability to deploy the military on American soil, the Pentagon has embarked on a secret mission of "undetermined duration" that involves flying Black Hawk helicopters over the nation's capital , backed by active-duty and reserve soldiers. In addition to the increasing militarization of the police -- a de facto standing army -- this military exercise further acclimates the nation to the sight and sounds of military personnel on American soil and the imposition of martial law.

No matter how we might differ about the deference due to those in uniform, whether military or law enforcement, surely we can agree that America's Founders had good reason to warn against the menace of a national police force -- a.k.a. a standing army -- vested with the power to completely disregard the Constitution.

We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, disguised as "the better good," marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and carried out by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions. For example, in Pennsylvania, a school district is threatening to place children in foster care if parents don't pay their overdue school lunch bills . In Florida, a resident was fined $100,000 for a dirty swimming pool and overgrown grass at a house she no longer owned. In Kentucky, government bureaucrats sent a cease-and-desist letter to a church ministry, warning that the group is breaking the law by handing out free used eyeglasses to the homeless . These petty tyrannies inflicted on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace are what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

No matter how we might differ about the extent to which the government has the final say in how it flexes it power and exerts its authority, surely we can agree that the tyranny of the Nanny State -- disguised as "the better good," marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and inflicted on all those who do not belong to the elite ruling class that gets to call the shots -- should not be allowed to pave over the Constitution.

At its core, this is not a debate about politics, or constitutionalism, or even tyranny disguised as law-and-order. This is a condemnation of the monsters with human faces that have infiltrated our government.

For too long now, the American people have rationalized turning a blind eye to all manner of government wrongdoing -- asset forfeiture schemes, corruption, surveillance, endless wars, SWAT team raids, militarized police, profit-driven private prisons, and so on -- because they were the so-called lesser of two evils.

Yet the unavoidable truth is that the government has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism , torture, drug trafficking , sex trafficking , murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

No matter how you rationalize it, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

So how do you fight back?

How do you fight injustice? How do you push back against tyranny? How do you vanquish evil?

You don't fight it by hiding your head in the sand.

We have ignored the warning signs all around us for too long.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People , the government has ripped the Constitution to shreds and left us powerless in the face of its power grabs, greed and brutality.

What we are grappling with today is a government that is cutting great roads through the very foundations of freedom in order to get after its modern devils. Yet the government can only go as far as "we the people" allow.

Therein lies the problem.

The consequences of this failure to do our due diligence in asking the right questions, demanding satisfactory answers, and holding our government officials accountable to respecting our rights and abiding by the rule of law has pushed us to the brink of a nearly intolerable state of affairs.

Intolerable, at least, to those who remember what it was like to live in a place where freedom, due process and representative government actually meant something. Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we now find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives.

The hour grows late in terms of restoring the balance of power and reclaiming our freedoms, but it may not be too late. The time to act is now, using all methods of nonviolent resistance available to us.

"Don't sit around waiting for the two corrupted established parties to restore the Constitution or the Republic," Naomi Wolf once warned. Waiting and watching will get us nowhere fast.

If you're watching, you're not doing.

Easily mesmerized by the government's political theater -- the endless congressional hearings and investigations that go nowhere, the president's reality show antics, the warring factions, the electoral drama -- we have become a society of watchers rather than activists who are distracted by even the clumsiest government attempts at sleight-of-hand.

It's time for good men and women to do something. And soon.

Wake up and take a good, hard look around you. Start by recognizing evil and injustice and tyranny for what they are. Stop being apathetic. Stop being neutral. Stop being accomplices. Stop being distracted by the political theater staged by the Deep State: they want you watching the show while they manipulate things behind the scenes. Refuse to play politics with your principles. Don't settle for the lesser of two evils.

As British statesman Edmund Burke warned, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing."

SgtShaftoe , 13 hours ago link

With all respect John, The constitution allows the president to deploy soldiers on US soil (bypassing Posse Comitatus) during limited times of insurgency, foreign invasion, war. Everything is in order at the moment. The treasonous companies and actors will be brought to justice. The pedos, and the corrupt Intelligence apparatus is the target.

-- ALIEN -- , 14 hours ago link

The Energy Return on Energy Invested of OIL is falling, hence the debt to pretend everything is still normal.

The rising police state is to control the Sheeple as we become much poorer.

Schooey , 14 hours ago link

Sadly, this (the police state) is one issue that I think Trump has no clue about. Why would he? Somebody needs to get in his ear on this issue.

At the same time lawlessness, driven by the media (purposefully), increases. And increases the need for policing. The game is so ******* obvious. Stop the (((media))) and half the problem is solved.

hoytmonger , 13 hours ago link

Trump is an authoritarian, he prefers the police state and would rather it be more like Israel.

"Take the firearms first, and then go to court... I like taking the guns early."

Schooey , 14 hours ago link

"The national debt is the result of the federal government borrowing money to cover years and years of budget deficits." Right now, the U.S. government is operating in the negative on every front: it's spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily ( from foreign governments and Social Security ) to keep the government operating and keep funding its endless wars abroad ." Trillions.

jutah , 14 hours ago link

Since religious zealots are the root cause for the rise of fascism and totalitarian communism- which are reactions from the oppressions of religious authorities supported by secret societies, it is necessary that they must fall and be broken before any real meaningful change can take place. I will defend the right to free speech and the 2nd to my last breath, but when they come to burn down your houses of worship and throw you in the ovens again, we will continue to do nothing. Just as good people did before. We will be your pawns no longer, we're not doing your dirty work anymore. We will not continue to be your slaves that you exploit for your twisted beliefs. History will repeat itself and you will burn and we will watch. This needs to happen before the world has a chance to try again. But the real damage to you zionists will be the spreading of the truth. As enough people finally understand that you offer nothing but the dark con of man and reject your lies and oppression whole heartedly

Commodore 1488 , 14 hours ago link

Our leaders are in Israel, and they don't care how bad it collapses here. They will have us worse than Detroit and laugh.

HyperboreanWind , 14 hours ago link

The Promised Land For Organized Crime

https://archive.org/details/youtube-TB2nM9SI7EU

https://archive.org/details/youtube-tZOfDE2Y4lE

[Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened

Highly recommended!
He was like a deer in headlights. Mueller's testimony riddled with shaky moments, incomplete answers - YouTube
Looks like Mueller is not currently mentally capable of programming his microwave, never mind to be the primary author of his eport or supervise the investigation.
Shouldn't James Comey and Rod Rosenstein be sitting there, its obvious to me that Mueller is the patsy here.
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller : What page are you referencing? I can't find it" ..."
"... Rep: "Sir, you have the report upsidedown" ..."
Jul 26, 2019 | www.youtube.com

cannonball666 , 19 hours ago

Mueller: What page are you referencing? I can't find it"

Rep: "Sir, you have the report upsidedown"

Kris Roberts , 23 hours ago

"A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened"

Diana Seip , 1 day ago

Nadler should be charged with elderly abuse making Mueller testify today.

Louis Frost, 1 day ago

What's Fusion GPS???
Houston we have a problem,

[Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion

Highly recommended!
Jul 26, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Joe DeHaan , 6 hours ago

They should be charged with treason ! Investigation under false pretenses , ILLEGAL ! Contempt, obstruction ! Pick one !

John Roberts , 6 hours ago (edited)

They should be charged with sedition and hung in the capital square. BAN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!

Gary V , 6 hours ago

What a joke... MULLER appeared SENILE and incompetent led by Dems & their lawyers.

Troy Vincent , 2 hours ago

Exactly Tucker. Serious accountability is what we need for these maliciously lying government officials.

hp , 5 hours ago

Tucker is the last hope for main stream media. Keep up the good work.

Paul Haggar , 5 hours ago

Maybe Putin should get a twitter account haha...... I wonder how he likes the sanctions Pres Trump has placed on Russia

cardsblues219 , 7 hours ago

Schiff has to be charged with treason.

F16 Pilot 4 TRUMP , 4 hours ago (edited)

Tucker you forgot to mention the millions of Iraqs that got killed in the Gulf war over wmds..

Stephan Desy , 5 hours ago

I agree wholeheartedly with Tucker Carlson...This whole stupid Russia hysteria propagated by most of the media made me, an old timer liberal, agree with Tucker. Well played Democratic Party... well played.

G7Batten Batten , 2 hours ago

Exact on the spot as so often. Absolutely nothing will change unless the guilty are punished. May God continue to protect and guide you Tucker.

Zlatko Sich , 7 hours ago

Prison time, for Lying when you work for government. Same for journalists and television(lying and fake news ). This is a solution.

Ryan Mangrum , 43 minutes ago

It was a coup attempt. They should be charged with sedition and/or treason.

Guitarzan , 6 hours ago

Tucker's question about what should happen to the people who attempted to reverse the will of the American people? The answer is very straightforward. Those found guilty of sedition and treason should by law hanged by the neck until dead. This might discourage further efforts to undermine the will of the American people.

Frank Perez , 2 hours ago

They should go to jail, let's make an example of them. They wasted millions of the American tax money on a witch hunt...

[Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion

Highly recommended!
Jul 26, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Joe DeHaan , 6 hours ago

They should be charged with treason ! Investigation under false pretenses , ILLEGAL ! Contempt, obstruction ! Pick one !

John Roberts , 6 hours ago (edited)

They should be charged with sedition and hung in the capital square. BAN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!

Gary V , 6 hours ago

What a joke... MULLER appeared SENILE and incompetent led by Dems & their lawyers.

Troy Vincent , 2 hours ago

Exactly Tucker. Serious accountability is what we need for these maliciously lying government officials.

hp , 5 hours ago

Tucker is the last hope for main stream media. Keep up the good work.

Paul Haggar , 5 hours ago

Maybe Putin should get a twitter account haha...... I wonder how he likes the sanctions Pres Trump has placed on Russia

cardsblues219 , 7 hours ago

Schiff has to be charged with treason.

F16 Pilot 4 TRUMP , 4 hours ago (edited)

Tucker you forgot to mention the millions of Iraqs that got killed in the Gulf war over wmds..

Stephan Desy , 5 hours ago

I agree wholeheartedly with Tucker Carlson...This whole stupid Russia hysteria propagated by most of the media made me, an old timer liberal, agree with Tucker. Well played Democratic Party... well played.

G7Batten Batten , 2 hours ago

Exact on the spot as so often. Absolutely nothing will change unless the guilty are punished. May God continue to protect and guide you Tucker.

Zlatko Sich , 7 hours ago

Prison time, for Lying when you work for government. Same for journalists and television(lying and fake news ). This is a solution.

Ryan Mangrum , 43 minutes ago

It was a coup attempt. They should be charged with sedition and/or treason.

Guitarzan , 6 hours ago

Tucker's question about what should happen to the people who attempted to reverse the will of the American people? The answer is very straightforward. Those found guilty of sedition and treason should by law hanged by the neck until dead. This might discourage further efforts to undermine the will of the American people.

Frank Perez , 2 hours ago

They should go to jail, let's make an example of them. They wasted millions of the American tax money on a witch hunt...

[Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened

Highly recommended!
He was like a deer in headlights. Mueller's testimony riddled with shaky moments, incomplete answers - YouTube
Looks like Mueller is not currently mentally capable of programming his microwave, never mind to be the primary author of his eport or supervise the investigation.
Shouldn't James Comey and Rod Rosenstein be sitting there, its obvious to me that Mueller is the patsy here.
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller : What page are you referencing? I can't find it" ..."
"... Rep: "Sir, you have the report upsidedown" ..."
Jul 26, 2019 | www.youtube.com

cannonball666 , 19 hours ago

Mueller: What page are you referencing? I can't find it"

Rep: "Sir, you have the report upsidedown"

Kris Roberts , 23 hours ago

"A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened"

Diana Seip , 1 day ago

Nadler should be charged with elderly abuse making Mueller testify today.

Louis Frost, 1 day ago

What's Fusion GPS???
Houston we have a problem,

[Jul 26, 2019] Presidential Candidate Tulsi Gabbard Co-Sponsors Audit The Fed Bill

Jul 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Presidential Candidate Tulsi Gabbard Co-Sponsors "Audit The Fed" Bill

by Tyler Durden Fri, 07/26/2019 - 15:50 0 SHARES

Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Luke Rudkowski of " We Are Change ," a libertarian media organization, that Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has just signed on as a co-sponsor of Audit the Fed bill, officially known as H.R.24 The Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2019 .

The bill authorizes the General Accountability Office to perform a full audit of the Fed's conduct of monetary policy, including the Fed's mysterious dealings with Wall Street, central banks and governments.

During the interview, Massie said the latest development in attempting to audit the Federal Reserve is that Gabbard signed on as co-sponsor. He believes the topic will "get some airtime" in the upcoming presidential debates.

He said there are four Democratic co-sponsors and 80 Republican co-sponsors for the bill; it was recently passed in the House of Representatives as it heads to the Senate. Massie said:

"We have passed it in the House but have never passed it in the Senate. Because of a lot of these people in the House of Representatives who vote for it and support it in the House go to the Senate and decide it's not such a good idea."

Rudkowski then tells Massie about interesting parallels between some presidential candidates (Gabbard and Bernie Sanders), who have an anti-interventionists view along with being critical of the Federal Reserve.

Massie responds by saying, "Well if you're just trying to sorta tie the anti-war people to the Federal Reserve. I think the closest connection is the Federal Reserve enables the endless Wars that are being funded by controlling the value of our currency and without the massive borrowing and printing of money and controlling of interest rates - we wouldn't be able to sustain a permanent state of war. "

https://www.youtube.com/embed/WQEbGkzy6Sk

Last week, Ron Paul recently wrote that Massie needs to "expedite passage of their Audit the Fed legislation should the Federal Reserve decide to disobey the will of its creator – Congress – by involving itself in real-time payments. After all, their bipartisan legislation came just seven votes shy of passing not long ago. With the Fed extending its wings even further and the president finally making good on his promise to push the bill through, it should be all but certain of arriving on his Oval Office desk for signing."

With the US infected by a global industrial slowdown, and in President Trump's view a Federal Reserve-caused economic downturn, support for auditing the Fed will continue to increase among Americans across all political ideologies. It's not just Republicans who demand the audit, but now Gabbard and even Sanders (Democrats).

Auditing the Fed is the first step in changing monetary policy that has created a debt-and-bubble-based economy; promoted the welfare-warfare state; created the most massive wealth inequality crisis in history; led to an affordable housing crisis; transferred all the wealth to the top 1% of America, and could lead to the collapse of the American empire if not corrected in the next several years.

[Jul 26, 2019] The Dems Have No Trump

Notable quotes:
"... The upcoming Horowitz and Durham reports on their respective probes into "meddling into the meddling" will target many people in the Democratic Party, US intelligence services, and the media. In that order. Can the Dems survive such a thing? It's hard to see. ..."
"... After the opening credits, [Dominic] Cummings rejects an offer in 2015 by UKIP MP Douglas Carswell and political strategist Matthew Elliott to lead the Vote Leave campaign due to his contempt for "Westminster politics", but accepts when Carswell promises Cummings full control. ..."
"... The next sequences show Cummings outlining the core strategy on a whiteboard of narrow disciplined messaging delivered via algorithmic database-driven micro-targeting tools . Cummings rejects an approach by Nigel Farage and Arron Banks of Leave.EU to merge their campaigns, as his data shows Farage is an obstacle to winning an overall majority. ..."
"... [..] In a eureka moment, Cummings refines the core message to "Take Back Control", thus positioning Vote Leave as the historical status quo, and Remain as the "change" option . Cummings meets and hires Canadian Zack Massingham, co-founder of AggregateIQ, who offers to build a database using social media tools of [3 million] voters who are not on the UK electoral register but are inclined to vote to leave. ..."
"... [..] In the final stages, high-profile senior Tory MPs Michael Gove and Boris Johnson join the Vote Leave campaign emphasising the need to "Take Back Control", while Penny Mordaunt is shown on BBC raising concerns over the accession of Turkey. Gove and Johnson are shown as having some reticence over specific Vote Leave claims (e.g. £350 million for NHS, and 70 million potential Turkish emigrants) but are seen to overcome them. ..."
"... And now Cummings is back to finish the job. ..."
"... "algorithmic database-driven micro-targeting tools" ..."
"... They were sending targeted personalized messages to individual voters, by the millions. Algorithms. AI. Tailor made. If you're the opposition, and you don't have those tools, then what do you have exactly? ..."
Jul 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

It's a development that has long been evident in continental Europe, and that has now arrived on the shores of the US and UK. It is the somewhat slow but very certain dissolution of long-existing political parties, organizations and groups. That's what I was seeing during the Robert Mueller clown horror show on Wednesday.

Mueller was not just the Democratic Party's last hope, he was their identity. He was the anti-Trump. Well, he no longer is, he is not fit to play that role anymore. And there is nobody to take it over who is not going to be highly contested by at least some parts of the party. In other words: it's falling apart.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's a natural process, parties change as conditions do and if they don't do it fast enough they disappear. Look at the candidates the Dems have. Can anyone imagine the party, post-Mueller, uniting behind Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris? And then for one of them to beat Donald Trump in 2020? I was just watching a little clip from Sean Hannity, doing what Trump did last week, which is going after the Squad. Who he said are anti-Israel socialists and, most importantly, the de facto leaders of the party, not Nancy Pelosi. That is a follow-up consequence of Mueller's tragic defeat, the right can now go on the chase. The Squad is the face of the Dems because Trump and Hannity have made them that.

The upcoming Horowitz and Durham reports on their respective probes into "meddling into the meddling" will target many people in the Democratic Party, US intelligence services, and the media. In that order. Can the Dems survive such a thing? It's hard to see. The Dems have no Trump. They do have a DNC that will stifle any candidate they don't like (Bernie!), though. Just think what they would have done if Trump had run as a Democrat (crazy, but not that crazy).

The UK's issues are remarkably similar to those of the US. Only, in their case, the socialists have already taken over the left-wing party (if you can call the Dems left-wing). This has led to absolute stagnation. Tony Blair had moved Labour so far to the right (which he and his Blairites call center, because it sounds so much better), that injecting Jeremy Corbyn as leader was just too fast and furious.

So they labeled Corbyn an anti-semite, the most successful and equally empty smear campaign since Julian Assange was called a rapist. Corbyn never adequately responded, so he couldn't profile himself and now the Blairites are again calling on him to leave. Oh, and he never gave a direct answer to the question of Brexit yes or no either. Pity. Corbyn's support among the people is massive, but not in the party.

Which is why it's now up to Boris Johnson to 'deliver the will of the people'. And apparently the first thing the people want is 20,000 more policemen. Which were fired by the very party he at the time represented first as first mayor of London and then foreign minister, for goodness sake. His very own Tories closed 600 police stations since 2010 and will have to re-open many now.

Some survey must have told him it polled well. Just like polling was an essential part of pushing through Brexit. There's a very revealing TV movie that came out 6 months ago called Brexit: The Uncivil War, that makes this very clear. The extent to which campaigns these days rely on data gathering and voter targeting will take a while yet to be understood, but they're a future that is already here. Wikipedia in its description of the film puts it quite well:

After the opening credits, [Dominic] Cummings rejects an offer in 2015 by UKIP MP Douglas Carswell and political strategist Matthew Elliott to lead the Vote Leave campaign due to his contempt for "Westminster politics", but accepts when Carswell promises Cummings full control.

The next sequences show Cummings outlining the core strategy on a whiteboard of narrow disciplined messaging delivered via algorithmic database-driven micro-targeting tools . Cummings rejects an approach by Nigel Farage and Arron Banks of Leave.EU to merge their campaigns, as his data shows Farage is an obstacle to winning an overall majority.

[..] In a eureka moment, Cummings refines the core message to "Take Back Control", thus positioning Vote Leave as the historical status quo, and Remain as the "change" option . Cummings meets and hires Canadian Zack Massingham, co-founder of AggregateIQ, who offers to build a database using social media tools of [3 million] voters who are not on the UK electoral register but are inclined to vote to leave.

[..] In the final stages, high-profile senior Tory MPs Michael Gove and Boris Johnson join the Vote Leave campaign emphasising the need to "Take Back Control", while Penny Mordaunt is shown on BBC raising concerns over the accession of Turkey. Gove and Johnson are shown as having some reticence over specific Vote Leave claims (e.g. £350 million for NHS, and 70 million potential Turkish emigrants) but are seen to overcome them.

Dominic Cummings, played in the movie by Benedict Cumberbatch, is an independent political adviser who belongs to no party. But guess what? He was the first adviser Boris Johnson hired after his nomination Wednesday. Cummings didn't want Nigel Farage as the face of Brexit, because he polled poorly. He wanted Boris, because his numbers were better. Not because he didn't think Boris was a bumbling fool, he did.

And now Cummings is back to finish the job. Far as I can see, that can only mean one thing: elections, and soon (it's what Cummings does). A no-deal Brexit was voted down, in the same Parliament Boris Johnson now faces, 3 times, or was it 4? There is going to be a lot of opposition. Boris wants Brexit on October 31, and has practically bet his career on it. But there is going to be a lot of opposition.

He can't have elections before September, because of the summer recess. So perhaps end of September?! But he has Dominic Cummings and his "algorithmic database-driven micro-targeting tools" . Without which Brexit would never have been voted in. So if you don't want Brexit, you better come prepared.

Cummings and his techies weren't -just- sending out mass mails or that kind of stuff. That's already arcane. They were sending targeted personalized messages to individual voters, by the millions. Algorithms. AI. Tailor made. If you're the opposition, and you don't have those tools, then what do you have exactly?

Already thought before it all happened that it was funny that Boris Johnson's ascension and Robert Mueller's downfall were scheduled for the same day. There must be a pattern somewhere.

You can find the movie at HBO or Channel 4, I'm sure. Try this link for Channel 4. Seeing that movie, and thinking about the implications of the technology, the whole notion of Russian meddling becomes arcane as well. We just have no idea.

RoyalDraco , 1 minute ago link

The Demoncrats have one candidate who could beat Trump, namely Tulsi Gabbard. I disagree with her economics and her 2nd amendment stance, but enough Chump voters who based their vote on his promise to stop the continuous war on everyone, would switch to Tulsi if she were nominated, particularly if the Chump plays his Zio directive and starts a war with Iran which will not go well for anybody. But Tulsi will never have a fair shot at the nominations as the MIC Google has demon-strated in her law suit. **** the election. The people and their opinions are not a factor. **** the left right hatred division while the Owners just laugh from the shadows at us for being so easily manipulated.

freedommusic , 3 minutes ago link

The upcoming Horowitz and Durham reports on their respective probes into "meddling into the meddling" will target many people in the Democratic Party, US intelligence services, and the media. In that order. Can the Dems survive such a thing? It's hard to see.

Can criminals survive a functioning DOJ working under the Law?

Klassenfeind , 4 minutes ago link

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Another ***, peddling the best FOREIGN AGENT Israel ever had in the White House!

Sp4Ce F@rCe , 16 minutes ago link

'Pied Piper' anyone?

In its self-described "pied piper" strategy, the Clinton campaign proposed intentionally cultivating extreme right-wing presidential candidates, hoping to turn them into the new "mainstream of the Republican Party" in order to try to increase Clinton's chances of winning.

Trump is using Hillary's Pied Piper strategy against AoC and the Squid.

Elevate the radical leftists...they'll be seen as the face of the Democrat party...then 2020 is a sure Trump win.

Not that I care...I never consented to being governed by anyone.

It does make for good entertainment, however.

Automatic Choke , 21 minutes ago link

For decades, the Democratic party has been a joke: a weakly bound coalition of liberals and labor -- two groups with nothing in common, and a fair degree of hate for each other.

For decades, the Republican party has also been a joke: a weakly bound coalition of religious fundamentalists and fiscal conservatives -- two groups with nothing in common, and a fair degree of hate for each other.

In European politics, they call a shovel a shovel and work by coalition government. You have smaller parties which actually represent interest groups, although none are large enough for power themselves. They form and break coalitions -- some long lasting, some flittering around from election to election -- in order to form a majority ad hoc. It isn't a bad system, and the voters don't have to hold their noses so much at the polls.

(edit: all this squabbling between "the squad" and the Pelosi leadership makes much more sense when viewed as friction between the labor and liberal halves of the dems.)

[Jul 26, 2019] Of Two Minds - Epstein and the Explosive Crisis of the Deep State

Jul 26, 2019 | www.oftwominds.com

https://eus.rubiconproject.com/usync.html

https://acdn.adnxs.com/ib/static/usersync/v3/async_usersync.html

https://c.deployads.com/sync?f=html&s=2344&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oftwominds.com%2Fblogjuly19%2Fcrisis-deep-state7-19.html Epstein and the Explosive Crisis of the Deep State

July 15, 2019

Since the battle is for the legitimacy of the state, it must be waged at least partially in the open.

Speculations by outsiders must give Deep State insiders many opportunities to chuckle, "if only they knew." We don't know, of course, and public leaks are engineered to misdirect our attention from what's actually going on or "frame" our understanding in a positive way.

Decades later, history reveals a very ordinary mix of great successes and horrific failure in secret operations , caused by errors of judgment, faulty intelligence, poor planning and so on. In other words, life isn't tidy, either inside or outside the Deep State.

Nonetheless we can postulate a few things with some certainty. One is that the Deep State-- the unelected, permanent government which includes not just the intelligence community but a vast array of agencies and institutions as well as the top-level structures of diplomacy, finance and geopolitics--is not monolithic. There are different views and competing camps, but the disagreements and bureaucratic wars are kept out of sight.

Two, we know that at critical junctures of history one camp wins the narrative battle and establishes the over-riding direction of state policy. Put another way, one camp's understanding of the era's most pressing problems becomes the consensus, and from then on disagreements are within the broad outlines of the dominant ideology.

The end of World War II was a critical juncture. The proper role of the U.S. in the postwar era was up for grabs, and over the course of a few years, the CIA and other intelligence agencies were established and the doctrine of containment of the Soviet Union became the dominant narrative, a narrative that held with remarkable consistency for four decades until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

This collapse was another critical juncture, and debates over America's role in this "unipolar era" were finally settled in favor of the geopolitical-activist ideology of neoconservatism (Neocons).

This globalist ideology led to a variety of policy disasters and is now discredited in many circles, and has been under attack within the Deep State for some time. This is the divided Deep State I've written about for the past five years.

Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

Is the Deep State at War--With Itself? (December 14, 2016)

The failures of Neocon globalism have ushered in another critical juncture. What is America's proper role in a multi-polar world that is fracturing across multiple faultlines? This critical juncture is a manifestation of a broader profound political disunity in America and many other nations.

The corporate media has obligingly portrayed this profound political disunity as a contest between "good globalism" and "bad populism," a clear attempt to smear all those who see the dark side of globalism as a threat to the nation and indeed the world. This bias reflects the continued dominance of the Neocon-globalist camp.

But the cracks are now visible. The mainstream "influential" press has recently been publishing critiques admitting the failures of Neocon globalism and agonizing about how to "save" the globalist agenda despite its failures.

Globalization's Wrong Turn--And How It Hurt America (Foreign Affairs)

I have long held that there is a camp within the Deep State that grasps the end-game of Neocon globalism, and is busy assembling a competing nation-centric strategy. There is tremendous resistance to the abandonment of Neocon globalism, not just from those who see power slipping through their fingers but from all those firmly committed to the hubris of a magical faith in past success as the guarantor of future success.

Michael Grant described this complacent clinging to what's failed in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire , a short book I have been recommending since 2009:

There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all.

The faction within the Deep State that no longer accepts traditional fictions is gaining ground, and now another fracture in the Deep State is coming to the fore: the traditionalists who accept the systemic corruption of self-serving elites and those who have finally awakened to the mortal danger to the nation posed by amoral self-serving elites.

The debauchery of morals undermines the legitimacy of the state and thus of the entire power structure. As I recently noted in Following in Rome's Footsteps: Moral Decay, Rising Inequality (June 29, 2019), America's current path of moral decay and soaring wealth/power inequality is tracking Rome's collapse step for step.

Enter the sordid case of Jeffrey Epstein, suddenly unearthed after a decade of corporate-media/elitist suppression. It's laughable to see the corporate media's pathetic attempts to glom onto the case now, after actively suppressing it for decades: Jeffrey Epstein Was a Sex Offender. The Powerful Welcomed Him Anyway. (New York Times) Where was the NYT a decade ago, or five years ago, or even a year ago?

Of all the questions that are arising, the signal one is simply: why now? There are many questions, now that the dead-and-buried case has been dug up: where did Epstein get his fortune? Why did he return to the U.S. from abroad, knowing he'd be arrested? Why was the Miami Herald suddenly able to publish numerous articles exposing the scandalous suppression of justice after 11 years of silence? Years later, victims recount impact of Jeffrey Epstein abuse .

Here's my outsider's take: the anti-Neocon camp within the Deep State observed the test case of Harvey Weinstein and saw an opportunity to apply what it learned. If we draw circles representing the anti-Neocon camp and the moralists who grasp the state's legitimacy is hanging by a thread after decades of amoral exploitation and self-aggrandizement by the ruling elites, we would find a large overlap.

But even die-hard Neocons are starting to awaken to the danger to their power posed by the moral collapse of the ruling elites. They are finally awakening to the lesson of history, that the fatal danger to empires arises not from external foes but from inside the center of power as elite corruption erodes the legitimacy of the state.

The upstarts in the Deep State have united to declare open war on the degenerates and their enablers, who are everywhere in the Deep State: the media, the intelligence community, and on and on.

Since the battle is for the legitimacy of the state, it must be waged at least partially in the open. This is a war for the hearts and minds of the public, whose belief in the legitimacy of the state and its ruling elites underpins the power of the Deep State.

If this wasn't a war over the legitimacy of the state, the housecleaning would have been discrete. Insiders would be shuffled off to a corporate boardroom or do-nothing/fancy title office, or they'd retire, or if necessary, they'd die of a sudden heart attack or in a tragic accident ( if only they knew ).

The cockroaches are scurrying, and the challenge now is to crush as many as possible before they find cover. Bullies are at heart cowards, and once the bullies who were untouchable due to powerful friends in powerful places are exposed to an accounting of their behavior, they will spill the beans on everyone in a craven attempt to lighten the consequences of their corruption and debauchery.

Power is a funny thing: when it dissipates suddenly, it dissipates completely.

All those who were confident they were untouchable might want to heed this sign: carefully fall into the cliff .

The hidden conflicts within the Deep State are emerging, and the resulting crisis will be explosive. Remember, the housecleaning must be public or the legitimacy of the state will go over the cliff. If the Deep State wants to retain its power, it must root out the corrupt degenerates before they bring down the entire rotten structure.

[Jul 26, 2019] Of Two Minds - Our Ruling Elites Have No Idea How Much We Want to See Them All in Prison Jumpsuits

Jul 26, 2019 | www.oftwominds.com

https://eus.rubiconproject.com/usync.html

https://c.deployads.com/sync?f=html&s=2344&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oftwominds.com%2Fblogjuly19%2Fmoral-crisis7-19.html

https://acdn.adnxs.com/ib/static/usersync/v3/async_usersync.html The Nobility of the feudal era had some reciprocal obligation to its serfs; our New Nobility has no obligation to anyone but themselves. It is painfully obvious that there are two sets of laws in America: bankers can rip off billions and never serve time, and members of the Protected Class who sexually exploit children get a wrist-slap, if that.

Here's the sad reality: everybody in the Ruling Elites looked the other way: all the self-described "patriots" in the Intelligence services, all the technocrats in the Departments of Justice, State, etc., the Pentagon, and on and on. Everybody with any power knows the whole class of Ruling Elites is completely corrupt, by definition: to secure power in the U.S., you have to sell your soul to the Devil , one way or the other.

Like all Ruling Elites, America's Elites are absolutely confident in their power: this is hubris taken to new heights.

That the citizenry could finally have enough of their corrupt, self-serving Overlords does not seem in the realm of possibility to the Protected Few. There's always a way to lawyer-up and plea-bargain for a wrist-slap, a way to bend another "patriot" (barf), a way to offer a bribe cloaked as a plum position in a philanthro-capitalist NGO (non-governmental organization), and so on.

The possibility that moral outrage could spark a revolt seems improbable in such a distracted culture, but consider the chart below: even the most distracted, fragmented tribe of the peasantry eventually notices that they're not in the top 1%, or the top 0.1%, and that the Ruling Elites have overseen an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the few at the expense of the many:

[Jul 25, 2019] The Epstein Case Is A Rare Opportunity To Focus On The Depraved Nature Of America s Elite

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... When scanning the news most days, I see a constant amplification of wedge issues by mass media, blue-check pundits and even many in the so-called alternative media. I see people increasingly being encouraged to demonize and dehumanize their fellow citizens. Anyone who voted for Trump is automatically a Nazi, likewise, anyone who supports Sanders is an anti-American communist. The reality is neither of these things is even remotely true, so why are people so quick to say them? ..."
"... The Epstein case shines a gigantic spotlight on just how twisted and sociopathic the highest echelons of U.S. society have become. This is exactly what happens when you fail to put wealthy and powerful super predators behind bars. They get more brazen, they get more demented and, ultimately, they destroy the very fabric that holds society together. We are in fact ruled by monsters. ..."
Jul 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Perhaps, at long last, a serial rapist and pedophile may be brought to justice , more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won't change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity.

For decades, important, influential, "serious" people attended Epstein's dinner parties, rode his private jet, and furthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire. How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Epstein, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? Easy: They got something in exchange from him , whether it was a free ride on that airborne "Lolita Express," some other form of monetary largesse, entrée into the extravagant celebrity soirées he hosted at his townhouse, or, possibly and harrowingly, a pound or two of female flesh.

– From the New York Magazine article: Who Was Jeffrey Epstein Calling?

An honest assessment of the current state of American politics and society in general leaves little room for optimism regarding the public's ability to accurately diagnose, much less tackle, our fundamental issues at a root level. A primary reason for this state of affairs boils down to the ease with which the American public is divided against itself and conquered.

Though there are certain issues pretty much everyone can agree on, we simply aren't focusing our collective energy on them or creating the mass movements necessary to address them. Things such as systemic bipartisan corruption, the institutionalization of a two-tier justice system in which the wealthy and powerful are above the law, a broken economy that requires both parents to work and still barely make ends meet, and a military-industrial complex consumed with profits and imperial aggression not national defense. These are just a few of the many issues that should easily unite us against an entrenched power structure, but it is not happening. At least not yet.

We currently find ourselves at a unique inflection point in American history. Though I agree with Charles Hugh Smith's assessment that " Our Ruling Elites Have No Idea How Much We Want to See Them All in Prison Jumpsuits, " we have yet to reach the point where the general public is prepared to do something about it. I think there are several reasons for this, but the primary obstacle relates to how easily the citizenry is divided and conquered. The mass media, largely owned and controlled by billionaires and their corporations, is highly incentivized to keep the public divided against itself on trivial issues, or at best, on real problems that are merely symptoms of bipartisan elitist plunder.

The key thing, from a plutocrat's point of view, is to make sure the public never takes a step back and sees the root of society's problems. It isn't Trump or Obama, and it isn't the Republican or Democratic parties either. These individuals and political gangs are just useful vehicles for elitist plunder. They help herd the rabble into comfortable little tribal boxes that results in made for tv squabbling, while the true forces of power carry on with the business of societal pillaging behind the scenes.

You're encouraged to attach your identity to team Republican or team Democrat, but never unite as one voice against a bipartisan crew of depraved, corrupt and unaccountable power players molding society from the top. While the average person living paycheck to paycheck fashions themselves part of some biblical fight of good vs. evil by supporting team red or blue, the manipulative and powerful at the top remain beyond such plebeian theater (though they certainly encourage it). These folks know only one team -- team green. And their team keeps winning, by the way.

When scanning the news most days, I see a constant amplification of wedge issues by mass media, blue-check pundits and even many in the so-called alternative media. I see people increasingly being encouraged to demonize and dehumanize their fellow citizens. Anyone who voted for Trump is automatically a Nazi, likewise, anyone who supports Sanders is an anti-American communist. The reality is neither of these things is even remotely true, so why are people so quick to say them?

Why is most of the anger in this country being directed at fellow powerless Americans versus upward at the power structure which nurtured and continues to defend the current depraved status quo? I don't see any upside to actively encouraging one side of the political discussion to dehumanize the other side, and I suggest we consciously cease engaging in such behavior. Absolutely nothing good can come from it.

Which is partly why I've been so consumed by the Jeffrey Epstein case. For once, it allows us to focus our energy on the depraved nature of the so-called American "elite," rather than pick fights with each other. How many random Trump or Sanders supporters do you know who systematically molest children and then pass them off to their wealthy and powerful friends for purposes of blackmail?

The Epstein case shines a gigantic spotlight on just how twisted and sociopathic the highest echelons of U.S. society have become. This is exactly what happens when you fail to put wealthy and powerful super predators behind bars. They get more brazen, they get more demented and, ultimately, they destroy the very fabric that holds society together. We are in fact ruled by monsters.

Unfortunately, by being short-sighted, by fighting amongst ourselves, and by taking the easy route of punching down versus punching up, we allow such cretins to continue to rape and pillage what remains of our civilization.

If we can truly get to the bottom of exactly what Epstein was up to, I suspect it has the potential to focus the general public (beyond a few seconds) on the true nature of what's really going on and what makes the world tick. Revelations of such a nature could provide the proverbial tipping point that's so desperately needed, but this is also why the odds of us actually getting the whole story is quite low. There's simply too much at stake for those calling the shots.

* * *

Side note: I've been consistently updating my Epstein twitter thread as I learn new information. I suggest checking back in from time to time.

Liberty Blitzkrieg is now 100% ad free. As such, there's no monetization for this site other than reader support. To make this a successful, sustainable thing I ask you to consider the following options. You can become a Patron . You can visit the Support Page to donate via PayPal, Bitcoin or send cash/check in the mail.

Ali Tarpate , 23 minutes ago link

> ...f urthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire

He wasn't - he was set up by Mossad

Mossad Epstein Connection

Notice the Bronfman involvement...

giovanni_f , 32 minutes ago link

If we can truly get to the bottom of exactly what Epstein was up

1. We can't.
2. Epstein was in the business to set up people with kompromat material ...
3. ...and did it for someone else , it appears as he was protected from above for many years.
4. These " elses " won't allow that the support of the Americans to forever fight Israels wars gets shattered.
5. I expect operation diversion & coverup soon. My hunch is that they will pull a 9/11 hoax as a last resort if things get out of hand fast.
6. They did it in the past, they will do it in the future.
7. Human lives don't matter to them.

He–Mene Mox Mox , 35 minutes ago link

Michael Krieger said: "It's sad and mind-boggling how easy it is to divide and conquer the American public. Manipulating the masses in this country is trivial. The next few years will not be pretty".

Despite all the news of how the elites have manipulated the American public, it still goes on, unabated. Americans, for the most part, are dumb and fat couch potatoes. They are not going to rise up against their elite masters, because they don't have the wherewithal to do so. So, the show continues on, and the elites don't seem to have anything to worry about, and do as they will.

If Americans were truly energetic about reigning in the abuses of the elites, they would have done so back in the 1870's, when Mark Twain wrote about the Gilded Age Elites. Here it is, 149 years later, and nothing has changed in America today. The elites still rule, and everyone else is an indentured servant. Of course, there are benefits for the elites to keep the American masses dumbed down, and letting them lead couch potato life styles. Doing so, keeps them in power.

Give Me Some Truth , 14 minutes ago link

I suspect it was the CIA or FBI. But the goal was to keep Acosta from investigating Virginia Roberts' claims. If authorities did this they would have had to investigate Prince Andrew.

If they found her to be truthful, they might even have to arrest Prince Andrew (can you imagine this happening?). Or at least ask him to testify in a trial.

If the truth came out, this would humiliate the British nation, and Great Britain was (still is) one of America's most important allies in the "war on terror" and all our other neocon initiatives.

Acosta was essentially told to "back off" Prince Andrew (not necessarily Epstein, who was best buddies with "Andy.")

This doesn't mean Israel intelligence was not involved in some way. It just means that American intelligence was involved, or wanted to protect key people. Hell, they still do.

We can be almost certain that the exact same thing that happened with Acosta is happening right now. Some prosecutor is being told to "back off. Don't go here. Focus only on Epstein and Epstein only."

This is why Ghislaine Maxwell has not been charged and will not be charged. This is why the FBI has not raided Pedo Island or Pedo Ranch. This is why Epstein's four "co-accomplices" have not been charged.

Prosecutors have again been told that "intelligence" is saying that it's okay to do this (charge Epstein with sex crimes), but NOT okay to do this (investigate and arrest any fellow predators).

phillyla , 38 minutes ago link

It isn't just the elites and we need to stop pretending it is

"Child sex trafficking which is the buying and selling of women, young girls and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old, has become big business in America. It is the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second-most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.
Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
It's not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either.
According to a 2016 investigative report, "boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females)."
Who buys a child for sex?
Otherwise, ordinary men from all walks of life. "They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse."

https://www.groundzeromedia.org/7-17-19-apex-predator-den-of-vipers-heart-of-darkness-w-ed-Opperman/

Obamanism666 , 45 minutes ago link

If Epstein was muslin would this be a crime? Of course not it would be part of Muslim Culture. Look into the Abuse done to young girls in the Rotherham abuse case. BTW I am no sticking up for Epstein but the ruling elites and certain minorities are treated different from Joe and Jane Public

Give Me Some Truth , 53 minutes ago link

The headline for this story is great:

"The Epstein Case Is A Rare Opportunity To Focus "On The Depraved Nature Of America's Elite"

This IS a "rare opportunity' for Americans to do just this (focus on how deprived our elite leaders really are).

If Americans really started to do this, for an extended period of time, and got, you know, kind of pissed off about this state of affairs, we might even throw all the bums out. We might really "drain the swamp."

So this is a BIG story. Potentially.

Of course, the Powers that Be are going to do everything they can to make sure Americans do NOT focus on this story for too long. Or that the "narrative" is controlled. (For example by focusing only on Epstein, not his hundreds of depraved buddies and corrupt institutions).

Give Me Some Truth , 26 minutes ago link

I've been posting for 10 days that there are "too many" of these people. And they are too powerful.

Seems to me if authorities went after one of the "johns," they would have to go after ALL of the "Johns." And this includes Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, former senators, governors, CEOs, secretaries of the treasury, bankers, etc.

It's the massive numbers of possible offenders that is probably keeping all of these people "safe."

And I still think Prince Andrew is the biggest fish the authorities don't want to humiliate/charge.

Even more so than Clinton. Half the country would throw a party if Clinton was charged. But in the UK, 90 percent of British citizens would be mortified and greatly embarrassed if one of their Princes was proven to have done all the things that have been alleged he did.

[Jul 25, 2019] The Epstein Case Is A Rare Opportunity To Focus On The Depraved Nature Of America s Elite

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... When scanning the news most days, I see a constant amplification of wedge issues by mass media, blue-check pundits and even many in the so-called alternative media. I see people increasingly being encouraged to demonize and dehumanize their fellow citizens. Anyone who voted for Trump is automatically a Nazi, likewise, anyone who supports Sanders is an anti-American communist. The reality is neither of these things is even remotely true, so why are people so quick to say them? ..."
"... The Epstein case shines a gigantic spotlight on just how twisted and sociopathic the highest echelons of U.S. society have become. This is exactly what happens when you fail to put wealthy and powerful super predators behind bars. They get more brazen, they get more demented and, ultimately, they destroy the very fabric that holds society together. We are in fact ruled by monsters. ..."
Jul 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Perhaps, at long last, a serial rapist and pedophile may be brought to justice , more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won't change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity.

For decades, important, influential, "serious" people attended Epstein's dinner parties, rode his private jet, and furthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire. How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Epstein, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? Easy: They got something in exchange from him , whether it was a free ride on that airborne "Lolita Express," some other form of monetary largesse, entrée into the extravagant celebrity soirées he hosted at his townhouse, or, possibly and harrowingly, a pound or two of female flesh.

– From the New York Magazine article: Who Was Jeffrey Epstein Calling?

An honest assessment of the current state of American politics and society in general leaves little room for optimism regarding the public's ability to accurately diagnose, much less tackle, our fundamental issues at a root level. A primary reason for this state of affairs boils down to the ease with which the American public is divided against itself and conquered.

Though there are certain issues pretty much everyone can agree on, we simply aren't focusing our collective energy on them or creating the mass movements necessary to address them. Things such as systemic bipartisan corruption, the institutionalization of a two-tier justice system in which the wealthy and powerful are above the law, a broken economy that requires both parents to work and still barely make ends meet, and a military-industrial complex consumed with profits and imperial aggression not national defense. These are just a few of the many issues that should easily unite us against an entrenched power structure, but it is not happening. At least not yet.

We currently find ourselves at a unique inflection point in American history. Though I agree with Charles Hugh Smith's assessment that " Our Ruling Elites Have No Idea How Much We Want to See Them All in Prison Jumpsuits, " we have yet to reach the point where the general public is prepared to do something about it. I think there are several reasons for this, but the primary obstacle relates to how easily the citizenry is divided and conquered. The mass media, largely owned and controlled by billionaires and their corporations, is highly incentivized to keep the public divided against itself on trivial issues, or at best, on real problems that are merely symptoms of bipartisan elitist plunder.

The key thing, from a plutocrat's point of view, is to make sure the public never takes a step back and sees the root of society's problems. It isn't Trump or Obama, and it isn't the Republican or Democratic parties either. These individuals and political gangs are just useful vehicles for elitist plunder. They help herd the rabble into comfortable little tribal boxes that results in made for tv squabbling, while the true forces of power carry on with the business of societal pillaging behind the scenes.

You're encouraged to attach your identity to team Republican or team Democrat, but never unite as one voice against a bipartisan crew of depraved, corrupt and unaccountable power players molding society from the top. While the average person living paycheck to paycheck fashions themselves part of some biblical fight of good vs. evil by supporting team red or blue, the manipulative and powerful at the top remain beyond such plebeian theater (though they certainly encourage it). These folks know only one team -- team green. And their team keeps winning, by the way.

When scanning the news most days, I see a constant amplification of wedge issues by mass media, blue-check pundits and even many in the so-called alternative media. I see people increasingly being encouraged to demonize and dehumanize their fellow citizens. Anyone who voted for Trump is automatically a Nazi, likewise, anyone who supports Sanders is an anti-American communist. The reality is neither of these things is even remotely true, so why are people so quick to say them?

Why is most of the anger in this country being directed at fellow powerless Americans versus upward at the power structure which nurtured and continues to defend the current depraved status quo? I don't see any upside to actively encouraging one side of the political discussion to dehumanize the other side, and I suggest we consciously cease engaging in such behavior. Absolutely nothing good can come from it.

Which is partly why I've been so consumed by the Jeffrey Epstein case. For once, it allows us to focus our energy on the depraved nature of the so-called American "elite," rather than pick fights with each other. How many random Trump or Sanders supporters do you know who systematically molest children and then pass them off to their wealthy and powerful friends for purposes of blackmail?

The Epstein case shines a gigantic spotlight on just how twisted and sociopathic the highest echelons of U.S. society have become. This is exactly what happens when you fail to put wealthy and powerful super predators behind bars. They get more brazen, they get more demented and, ultimately, they destroy the very fabric that holds society together. We are in fact ruled by monsters.

Unfortunately, by being short-sighted, by fighting amongst ourselves, and by taking the easy route of punching down versus punching up, we allow such cretins to continue to rape and pillage what remains of our civilization.

If we can truly get to the bottom of exactly what Epstein was up to, I suspect it has the potential to focus the general public (beyond a few seconds) on the true nature of what's really going on and what makes the world tick. Revelations of such a nature could provide the proverbial tipping point that's so desperately needed, but this is also why the odds of us actually getting the whole story is quite low. There's simply too much at stake for those calling the shots.

* * *

Side note: I've been consistently updating my Epstein twitter thread as I learn new information. I suggest checking back in from time to time.

Liberty Blitzkrieg is now 100% ad free. As such, there's no monetization for this site other than reader support. To make this a successful, sustainable thing I ask you to consider the following options. You can become a Patron . You can visit the Support Page to donate via PayPal, Bitcoin or send cash/check in the mail.

Ali Tarpate , 23 minutes ago link

> ...f urthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire

He wasn't - he was set up by Mossad

Mossad Epstein Connection

Notice the Bronfman involvement...

giovanni_f , 32 minutes ago link

If we can truly get to the bottom of exactly what Epstein was up

1. We can't.
2. Epstein was in the business to set up people with kompromat material ...
3. ...and did it for someone else , it appears as he was protected from above for many years.
4. These " elses " won't allow that the support of the Americans to forever fight Israels wars gets shattered.
5. I expect operation diversion & coverup soon. My hunch is that they will pull a 9/11 hoax as a last resort if things get out of hand fast.
6. They did it in the past, they will do it in the future.
7. Human lives don't matter to them.

He–Mene Mox Mox , 35 minutes ago link

Michael Krieger said: "It's sad and mind-boggling how easy it is to divide and conquer the American public. Manipulating the masses in this country is trivial. The next few years will not be pretty".

Despite all the news of how the elites have manipulated the American public, it still goes on, unabated. Americans, for the most part, are dumb and fat couch potatoes. They are not going to rise up against their elite masters, because they don't have the wherewithal to do so. So, the show continues on, and the elites don't seem to have anything to worry about, and do as they will.

If Americans were truly energetic about reigning in the abuses of the elites, they would have done so back in the 1870's, when Mark Twain wrote about the Gilded Age Elites. Here it is, 149 years later, and nothing has changed in America today. The elites still rule, and everyone else is an indentured servant. Of course, there are benefits for the elites to keep the American masses dumbed down, and letting them lead couch potato life styles. Doing so, keeps them in power.

Give Me Some Truth , 14 minutes ago link

I suspect it was the CIA or FBI. But the goal was to keep Acosta from investigating Virginia Roberts' claims. If authorities did this they would have had to investigate Prince Andrew.

If they found her to be truthful, they might even have to arrest Prince Andrew (can you imagine this happening?). Or at least ask him to testify in a trial.

If the truth came out, this would humiliate the British nation, and Great Britain was (still is) one of America's most important allies in the "war on terror" and all our other neocon initiatives.

Acosta was essentially told to "back off" Prince Andrew (not necessarily Epstein, who was best buddies with "Andy.")

This doesn't mean Israel intelligence was not involved in some way. It just means that American intelligence was involved, or wanted to protect key people. Hell, they still do.

We can be almost certain that the exact same thing that happened with Acosta is happening right now. Some prosecutor is being told to "back off. Don't go here. Focus only on Epstein and Epstein only."

This is why Ghislaine Maxwell has not been charged and will not be charged. This is why the FBI has not raided Pedo Island or Pedo Ranch. This is why Epstein's four "co-accomplices" have not been charged.

Prosecutors have again been told that "intelligence" is saying that it's okay to do this (charge Epstein with sex crimes), but NOT okay to do this (investigate and arrest any fellow predators).

phillyla , 38 minutes ago link

It isn't just the elites and we need to stop pretending it is

"Child sex trafficking which is the buying and selling of women, young girls and boys for sex, some as young as 9 years old, has become big business in America. It is the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second-most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.
Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.
It's not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either.
According to a 2016 investigative report, "boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females)."
Who buys a child for sex?
Otherwise, ordinary men from all walks of life. "They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse."

https://www.groundzeromedia.org/7-17-19-apex-predator-den-of-vipers-heart-of-darkness-w-ed-Opperman/

Obamanism666 , 45 minutes ago link

If Epstein was muslin would this be a crime? Of course not it would be part of Muslim Culture. Look into the Abuse done to young girls in the Rotherham abuse case. BTW I am no sticking up for Epstein but the ruling elites and certain minorities are treated different from Joe and Jane Public

Give Me Some Truth , 53 minutes ago link

The headline for this story is great:

"The Epstein Case Is A Rare Opportunity To Focus "On The Depraved Nature Of America's Elite"

This IS a "rare opportunity' for Americans to do just this (focus on how deprived our elite leaders really are).

If Americans really started to do this, for an extended period of time, and got, you know, kind of pissed off about this state of affairs, we might even throw all the bums out. We might really "drain the swamp."

So this is a BIG story. Potentially.

Of course, the Powers that Be are going to do everything they can to make sure Americans do NOT focus on this story for too long. Or that the "narrative" is controlled. (For example by focusing only on Epstein, not his hundreds of depraved buddies and corrupt institutions).

Give Me Some Truth , 26 minutes ago link

I've been posting for 10 days that there are "too many" of these people. And they are too powerful.

Seems to me if authorities went after one of the "johns," they would have to go after ALL of the "Johns." And this includes Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, former senators, governors, CEOs, secretaries of the treasury, bankers, etc.

It's the massive numbers of possible offenders that is probably keeping all of these people "safe."

And I still think Prince Andrew is the biggest fish the authorities don't want to humiliate/charge.

Even more so than Clinton. Half the country would throw a party if Clinton was charged. But in the UK, 90 percent of British citizens would be mortified and greatly embarrassed if one of their Princes was proven to have done all the things that have been alleged he did.

[Jul 25, 2019] Everybody complains about politicians.

Jul 25, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Monty , July 23, 2019 at 12:55 pm

"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope."

Never gets old.

Arizona Slim , July 23, 2019 at 7:07 pm

Source of this delicious quote, please.

WheresOurTeddy , July 23, 2019 at 10:51 pm

George Carlin, or as I think of him, 21st century Mark Twain

[Jul 25, 2019] Everybody complains about politicians.

Jul 25, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Monty , July 23, 2019 at 12:55 pm

"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope."

Never gets old.

Arizona Slim , July 23, 2019 at 7:07 pm

Source of this delicious quote, please.

WheresOurTeddy , July 23, 2019 at 10:51 pm

George Carlin, or as I think of him, 21st century Mark Twain

[Jul 25, 2019] When Alex Stamos announced that the Internet Research Agency's ad buys were a drop in the ocean, Zuckerberg was promptly taken to the Congressional Woodshed and told to report to the Atlantic Council.

Notable quotes:
"... I think he fails to understand that Facebook is now an NSA asset. ..."
Jul 24, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

GramSci , , , July 23, 2019 at 8:04 am

When Alex Stamos announced that the Internet Research Agency's ad buys were a drop in the ocean, Zuckerberg was promptly taken to the Congressional Woodshed and told to report to the Atlantic Council. Those two billion-odd fake accounts may be a fraud perpetrated on the advertisers, but they are invaluable to US "law" enforcement and to US propaganda, where the ability to open a fake account on Facebook gives the illusion of privacy.

With all due respect to Mr. Greenspan and his Lowell House creds, I think he fails to understand that Facebook is now an NSA asset.

Summer , , July 23, 2019 at 11:55 am

+1
NSA and other law enforcement asset.
Remember stories about stupid criminals on the run who took the time to update their Facebook page?

The Rev Kev , July 23, 2019 at 10:38 am

This is a fascinating article and it certainly put a smile on my dial. As an asset for use by governments around the world, Facebook may be too invaluable to just let sink. One guy reported that he was in a meeting with Facebook’s top brass including the Zuck when a head honcho of the FBI came into the meeting and sang Zuck’s praises for all the help that Facebook gave the FBI. So the question remains. Just how many “real” Facebook accounts does Facebook have? Ones that people check on daily. Now that is the killer question.

[Jul 24, 2019] Robert Mueller literally just said he wasn t familiar with Fusion GPS

Looks like Mueller currently is not capable of programming his microwave, never mind to write a report or supervise an investigation.
Jul 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

My Lord. My Lord. Drug test everyone in Washington. Everyone!

Velocitor , 8 minutes ago link

He never heard of Fusion GPS!?!?? Whaaaa????

That would be like Archibald Cox saying he never heard of Watergate! Does Mueller have Alzheimer's? If he doesn't know that much, what's the point of even talking to him?

Dems should have adjourned right then, to save further embarrassment.

RictaviousPorkchop , 37 minutes ago link

After that performance Mueller should be on street corner begging for change.

[Jul 24, 2019] Fraud of Facebook user numbers

Jul 24, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

bruce , July 23, 2019 at 4:14 pm

I have three Facebook accounts. The two I never ever look at are the one for my cat and the one for my feminine alter ego. My own account is used for only one thing, watching "People You May Know" to see how far they've penetrated my graph; occasionally disturbing, occasionally hilarious. I've never looked at my "wall", issued or accepted a friend request, posted anything, messaged anyone but they have my email, and wow do I hate this company!

May 2018, a woman I loved and was ultimately going to get to move in died (age 70, natural causes). Twice a week on average I get emails from Facebook inviting me to read her most recent messages. You can imagine how I feel about that. SHE DED!

Facebook has boasted on the order of 2-3 billion users, a significant percentage of the world's population, and I don't believe a word of it. One may assume that the early adopters were people with more tech savvy, affluence and most important, leisure time to screw around on the internet, and the proles don't have a lot of leisure time. Moreover, the value to the advertiser of a set of eyeball impressions is directly related to the amount of disposable income those eyeballs have, and sure, India has about one and a half billion people, but a lot of them have zero disposable income and zero leisure time.

Die Facebook die!

otishertz , July 23, 2019 at 5:37 pm

From the cited lawsuit:

"Based on a combination of publicly available research and Plaintiffs' own analysis, among 18-34 years-olds in Chicago, for example, Facebook asserted its Potential Reach was approximately 4 times (400%) higher than the number of real 18-34 year-olds with Facebook accounts in Chicago. Based on a combination of publicly available research and Plaintiffs' own analysis, Facebook's asserted Potential Reach in Kansas City was approximately 200% higher than the number of actual 18-54 year-olds with Facebook accounts in Kansas City. This inflation is apparent in other age categories as well."

otishertz , July 23, 2019 at 5:40 pm

"These foundational representations are false. Based on publicly available research and Plaintiffs' own analysis, Facebook overstates the Potential Reach of its advertisements. For example, based on publicly available data, Facebook's purported Potential Reach among the key 18-34 year-
22 old demographic in every state exceeds the actual population of 18-34 year-olds ."

[Jul 24, 2019] If one accepts that FB user numbers are fraudulent, the Russiagate narrative falls apart.

Notable quotes:
"... Russiagate, the most extensive disinformation/propaganda campaign since Iraqi WMD, has fallen/is falling apart without any need to reference fake Facebook accounts. ..."
"... The Collusion narrative/conspiracy theory was preposterous from the get-go, riven with internal inconsistencies, and the recent Federal court ruling that prevents Mueller from continuing to publicly accuse Concord management of "undermining our democracy" (that's a hot one) discredits the second of the three bases of the narrative. ..."
Jul 24, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Unsympathetic , , July 23, 2019 at 8:29 am

If one accepts that FB user numbers are fraudulent, the Russiagate narrative falls apart.

What if the fake ads were only "viewed" by fake accounts?

Larry , , July 23, 2019 at 8:38 am

Bingo. But it's a great story for political elites to paper over their complete failure to maintain their control.

Michael Fiorillo , , July 23, 2019 at 9:42 am

Russiagate, the most extensive disinformation/propaganda campaign since Iraqi WMD, has fallen/is falling apart without any need to reference fake Facebook accounts.

The Collusion narrative/conspiracy theory was preposterous from the get-go, riven with internal inconsistencies, and the recent Federal court ruling that prevents Mueller from continuing to publicly accuse Concord management of "undermining our democracy" (that's a hot one) discredits the second of the three bases of the narrative.

Someday the McResistance TM and unhinged liberals possessed by magical thinking must grapple with the fact that Trump was elected in America, by Americans, and that there is no Santa Claus.

Then again, maybe not.

[Jul 24, 2019] In case you didn't notice, Mueller has been enjoined from making any more claims about those Facebook pages as products of Russian state actors, since the accused unexpectedly showed up in court and demanded discovery of evidence, which Saint Santa Claus Mueller was unable to provide.

Notable quotes:
"... "Russia" with respect to Facebook was "Internet Research Agency," a Russian troll farm that ran a teeny number of ads in terms of both volume and dollar spend. A Federal judge ordered Muller to quit trying to depict its principals as connected to the Russian government because it was prejudicial to their case. No connection has ever been established nor is it it likely to be established. The ads were stunningly amateurish, all over the map in terms of messages, and apparently 25% were never viewed, and IIRC, over half ran after the election. ..."
Jul 24, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Michael Fiorillo , July 23, 2019 at 2:14 pm

Yep, those "Buff Bernie" and "Jesus Arm Wrestling With Satan" pages, often written in broken English and most of which appeared after the election, really did the job, didn't they?

In case you didn't notice, Mueller has been enjoined from making any more claims about those Facebook pages as products of Russian state actors, since the accused unexpectedly showed up in court and demanded discovery of evidence, which Saint Santa Claus Mueller was unable to provide.

Give it up, already: Trumpismo must be defeated politically, through traditional and creative political methods, and not via wishful thinking based on an opportunistic convergence of interests among the Clinton/Obama/Donor Class wing of the Democratic Party, factions in the National Security State that don't consider him an effective steward of empire, and a corporate media that gave him billions in free media but now wants us to think it opposes him.

Leslie Moonves of CBS' quote about how Trump was bad for America, but great for CBS shareholders, says far more about Trump's victory than all the hair-on-fire reports about Russia and Putin.

If there isn't some kind of reckoning for this disgraceful episode, which has only inoculated Trump against reports of what he actually is doing, and is an inestimable political gift to him, the Next Trump is going to make far more sinister use of it.

John Wright , July 23, 2019 at 2:16 pm

I look at the "Facebook threw the election to Trump" story as equivalent to blaming the camel's back breaking last piece of straw for the camel's injury without observing that the entire prior heavy straw loading made this possible.

The exposure of HRC's "deplorables" comment, or her "public positions vs private positions" comment or her selection of Tim Kaine as VP or her Wall Street speeches could have all been far more significant in her loss than any liked/forwarded Russian Facebook postings.

I have never done Facebook, so perhaps I am completely in the dark as far as its influence on potential voters.

How does one know that actual votes were flipped via a Facebook posting?

For example, if the Facebook forwarding content served only for confirmation bias, perhaps a very small number of voter minds were changed, as the voters were already Trump leaning.

That is a fundamental problem of any advertising/influence campaign, getting an ad possibly viewed is one thing, knowing that it was influenial is very difficult.

How exactly did Mueller determine, with any confidence, that voters' minds were changed via the Facebook platform?

If Mueller determined that these Facebook postings were truly influential in changing would be HRC voters to Trump voters, he could have a new, very profitable, career in the advertising industry.

jrs , July 23, 2019 at 2:36 pm

Question for you: Can you prove that the influence of social media was greater than the influence of mainstream media which covered Trump CONSTANTLY?

Mainstream media gave Trump $2 billion worth of free media, more coverage than any other candidate by far.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-2-billion-free-media_n_56e83410e4b065e2e3d75935

I find it hard to believe social media had more of an effect than constant mainstream media coverage and as far as I know noone has accused them of being influenced by Russians. Can you show otherwise on either of those points?

Because if the negative influence of Putin whatever it may be is less than the negative influence of selling ad revenue on t.v. well then the problem is capitalism not Russian oligarchy destroying democracy.

Yves Smith Post author , July 23, 2019 at 5:36 pm

You need to get that knee tended to.

"Russia" with respect to Facebook was "Internet Research Agency," a Russian troll farm that ran a teeny number of ads in terms of both volume and dollar spend. A Federal judge ordered Muller to quit trying to depict its principals as connected to the Russian government because it was prejudicial to their case. No connection has ever been established nor is it it likely to be established. The ads were stunningly amateurish, all over the map in terms of messages, and apparently 25% were never viewed, and IIRC, over half ran after the election.

[Jul 24, 2019] The degradation of political elites is a universal phenomenon. Of course, first of all it is noticeable in relation to the Western elites (American, European), but this can also be found in the post-Soviet space

Jul 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

alaff , Jul 23 2019 20:00 utc | 90

The degradation of political elites is a universal phenomenon. Of course, first of all it is noticeable in relation to the Western elites (American, European), but this can also be found in the post-Soviet space (Georgia, Armenia, Moldova etc). Ukraine is generally a special case - real freaks and Nazis in power, the speaker of parliament with the mental retardation certificate, the Attorney General of the country (btw, previously convicted) without a legal education etc.

So I join and also express my condolences to the people of Great Britain.

O , Jul 23 2019 22:07 utc | 105

Posted by: Ort | Jul 23 2019 21:42 utc | 99

The entire world political class and most of the commentariat of the political class indulges in kayfabe.

"In professional wrestling, kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ (also called work or worked) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or predetermined nature of any kind. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.[1]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

[Jul 24, 2019] Like his hero Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson believes history will treat him kindly because HE intends to write it."

Jul 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jul 23 2019 16:50 utc | 52

So, what options do the UK citizenry have until the next general election? IMO, Corbyn encapsulated it well in his two tweets :

"Boris Johnson has won the support of fewer than 100,000 unrepresentative Conservative Party members by promising tax cuts for the richest, presenting himself as the bankers' friend, and pushing for a damaging No Deal Brexit.

"But he hasn't won the support of our country."

And:

"Johnson's No Deal Brexit would mean job cuts, higher prices in the shops, and risk our NHS being sold off to US corporations in a sweetheart deal with Donald Trump.

"The people of our country should decide who becomes the Prime Minister in a General Election."

George Galloway on BoJo :

"In this sense Boris Johnson is a throwback to former times – not quite to the 19th century like his aide-de-camp Jacob Rees-Mogg but at least to the middle of the 20th century. On the face of it, Harold MacMillan, the then British PM, was a straight-laced, slightly eccentric upper-class Englishman. That his wife was upstairs in bed, for years, with one of his parliamentary colleagues Sir Robert Boothby didn't seem to faze him. Or us, but then we weren't to know about it.

"In deference to the new age, Boris Johnson has skipped the straight-laced bit; he has cuckolded his colleagues, even leaving cuckoos in their nests, has left a trail of lurid love-life stories to make a thriller-writer blush, and will likely bed down in Downing Street on Wednesday night with his 31 year-old girlfriend. But the rest is just the same. Johnson is (or has fashioned himself) as an upper-class English eccentric and will be hoping the deference is not dead amongst 21st century Britons.

"To be fair it should be said that Johnson is as colourful as his predecessor Mrs May was bloodless. He is clever and quick-witted (you get what you pay for at Eton), is well read and is a good writer too (he should be, he is Britain's most expensive newspaper columnist). Like his hero Winston Churchill, he believes history will treat him kindly because HE intends to write it."

George will soon be on RT's InQuestionRT as per his tweet at 5pm BST.

O , Jul 23 2019 17:43 utc | 59

The Anglo-Zionist have elevated another buffoon to entertain the masses. Trump was just the tip of the iceberg. It will not be long before President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho will soon be leading the global masses.

Didn't I hear something about Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson having presidential aspirations?

Uncle Jon , Jul 23 2019 18:22 utc | 68
b,

Boris Johnson's ascension to power in UK is just a clown act in a tragic circus. But a circus nonetheless. A none-story. A nothingburger.

I implore you to stay focused on Jeffery Epstein. That is the real story of our time. One that could bring down AIPAC/Israel and all of its' spies, the Clintons, Trump, and certain elements of the deep state once and for all, and free US from the shackles of Zionism.

Do not let this story die by way of side shows like the story above and etc.

By Phillip Giraldi from his article http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/israels-agents-of-influence/

"It's a big job to uncover Israeli subversion, but somebody needs to start doing it."

Let it be you. We trust your reporting and I hope you don't take your eyes off the ball. Forget about BoJo, Russiagate (it is really Israelgate) and Ukraine. Epstein is the story of the ages. One that could change the realm forever.

[Jul 24, 2019] The world's "leadership class" really is bereft of any level of competence or standing: trump, boris, macon, ursula (and remaining eucom and IMF "leaders"), pompeo, bolton, pence, nitenyahoo,et al. and on and on.

Jul 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Thomas , Jul 23 2019 15:06 utc | 25

It is starting to appear to be very much a contest of buffoons, which country has the more outrageous buffoon. At this point, it is a close race between the us and the uk but who is to judge.

The world's "leadership class" really is bereft of any level of competence or standing: trump, boris, macon, ursula (and remaining eucom and IMF "leaders"), pompeo, bolton, pence, nitenyahoo,et al. and on and on.

IMHO, Putin, lavrov, shoigu stand out head and shoulders above the aforementioned "leadership class."

jared , Jul 23 2019 15:24 utc | 30

@ Thomas | Jul 23 2019 15:06 utc | 25

That's because Putin and Xi (and some others) are in fact leaders, making rational decisions for the benefit of their nations.
Those others are just figureheads - ability is not so important as reliability and entertainment value.

Hoarsewhisperer , Jul 23 2019 15:33 utc | 34
It'll be interesting to see if BoJo can fake solemnity and diplomacy as convincingly as Trump can when in the company of other national leaders. I'm confident that Zelenski, being an actor, will be able to make it look easy.

There's a sort of precedent for this switch to comedy-based leadership.
I half-remember that when Ronnie Raygun offered himself as a candidate for POTUS, he answered the critics of his lack of experience by asserting that he had played many leadership roles during his movie career - making him the superior candidate.
And the sheeple bought it!

It seems that this is the dawn of a new "Anything's Possible" era.

Sad Canuck , Jul 23 2019 19:28 utc | 88
@70 O

Always thought professional wrestling provided a good analogy for our current situation. Trump and BoJo (and the nations they represent) do indeed represent classic "heels". In particular the USA is clearly now a "closet champion" or the "term for a heel in possession of a title belt who consistently dodges top flight competition and attempts to back down from challenges". What a world we inhabit.

[Jul 24, 2019] The "deep state" of intelligence agencies of the 5 eyes work together serving one master the Global Power elite. Just look at the amount of activity of MI6, GCHQ through the "Integrity Initiative" planting spies in the Sanders campaign and Halper in the Trump operation.

Jul 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Babyl-on , Jul 23 2019 14:55 utc | 24

There has not been a separate British empire for many decades. There is but one empire it is transnational. The "deep state" of intelligence agencies of the 5 eyes work together serving one master the Global Power elite. Just look at the amount of activity of MI6, GCHQ through the "Integrity Initiative" planting spies in the Sanders campaign and Halper in the Trump operation.

Last year a huge new "intelligence" facility was opened, not in the US but in the headquarters of the German fiefdom called the EU.

As we can see from events the US (imperial HQ) sense W. Bush announced the policy of a "Global war on terror" no longer recognizes the principal of sovereignty and has rejected the Westphalia agreement. The empire does not recognize any sovereignty other than its own.

It's just this simple, the oligarchy have a pot of commingled capital amounting to over 50 trillion. The US, its vassal and servant, owes them 22 trillion. Who do you think has the real power?

In 2008/9, when the gov and the banks sat down the banks simply said you can bail us out or we will see to it that no Social Security checks will go out.

Sure, there is a Treasury Department with some residual power but it is just a thin vial over the reality that the global financial system is privately owned - the 14 biggest banks the "14 families" have far more influence on the dollar than the Treasury does.

The private system of central banks managed by the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) and its "financial stability board." The system operated entirely for imperial interests which are above concern for any individual "nation" and don't forget, the US is a nation also and is subservient to the global power elite.

[Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable. ..."
"... A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time. ..."
"... Malaysia's exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained. ..."
"... The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court. ..."
"... The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27. ..."
"... Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29. ..."
"... In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source: https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian control. ..."
"... Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians; for details, read this . ..."
"... Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the June 19, 2019 , press conference of JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU. ..."
"... Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. ..."
"... She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony." ..."
"... According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the Ukrainian Army were there." ..."
"... Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There [they] have it. In Ukraine they have it." ..."
"... Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice for the victims," Zakaria said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?] "Part of the conclusions [inaudible] – do not change our positions." ..."
"... Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g. here for others)? ..."
"... Why is no journalist raising these questions? ..."
"... Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh? ..."
"... That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. ..."
"... Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.) ..."
"... Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists? ..."
"... And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate – almost in unison, right after the shooting of the plane. ..."
"... "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103 site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight. ..."
"... I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got – a YouTube link. Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did it – until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down in high summer. And so it went on. ..."
"... Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was being shelled – by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were seriously not barking. ..."
"... That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. ..."
"... Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia". ..."
"... If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians. ..."
"... The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold War–which the Obama regime was so very much responsible for–will begin to find peace. ..."
Jul 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. Hoo boy. The idea that eastern Ukrainian insurgents or Russia would target a passenger plane never made any sense (unless the plane had high-priority targets or cargo), although it's always been possible that the downing of MH17 was an accident, and some efforts to explain what happened are based on that idea. For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable.

A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time.

The sources of the breakthrough are Malaysian -- Prime Minister of Malaysia Mohamad Mahathir; Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the officer in charge of the MH17 investigation for the Prime Minister's Department and Malaysia's National Security Council following the crash on July 17, 2014; and a forensic analysis by Malaysia's OG IT Forensic Services of Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) telephone tapes which Dutch prosecutors have announced as genuine.

The 298 casualties of MH17 included 192 Dutch; 44 Malaysians; 27 Australians; 15 Indonesians. The nationality counts vary because the airline manifest does not identify dual nationals of Australia, the UK, and the US.

The new film throws the full weight of the Malaysian Government, one of the five members of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), against the published findings and the recent indictment of Russian suspects reported by the Dutch officials in charge of the JIT; in addition to Malaysia and The Netherlands, the members of the JIT are Australia, Ukraine and Belgium. Malaysia's exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained.

The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court.

For the first time also, the Malaysian Government reveals how it got in the way of attempts the US was organizing during the first week after the crash to launch a NATO military attack on eastern Ukraine. The cover story for that was to rescue the plane, passenger bodies, and evidence of what had caused the crash. In fact, the operation was aimed at defeating the separatist movements in the Donbass, and to move against Russian-held Crimea.

The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27.

The 28-minute documentary by Max van der Werff and Yana Yerlashova has just been released. Yerlashova was the film director and co-producer with van der Werff and Ahmed Rifazal. Vitaly Biryaukov directed the photography. Watch it in full here .

The full interview with Prime Minister Mahathir was released in advance; it can be viewed and read here .

Mahathir reveals why the US, Dutch and Australian governments attempted to exclude Malaysia from membership of the JIT in the first months of the investigation. During that period, US, Dutch, Australian and NATO officials initiated a plan for 9,000 troops to enter eastern Ukraine, ostensibly to secure the crash scene, the aircraft and passenger remains, and in response to the alleged Russian role in the destruction of MH17 on July 17; for details of that scheme, read this .

Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29.

Malaysian resistance to the US attempts to blame Moscow for the aircraft shoot-down was made clear in the first hours after the incident to then-President Barack Obama by Malaysia's Prime Minister at the time, Najib Razak. That story can be followed here and here .

In an unusual decision to speak in the new documentary, Najib's successor Prime Minister Mahathir announced: "They never allowed us to be involved from the very beginning. This is unfair and unusual. So we can see they are not really looking at the causes of the crash and who was responsible. But already they have decided it must be Russia. So we cannot accept that kind of attitude. We are interested in the rule of law, in justice for everyone irrespective of who is involved. We have to know who actually fired the missile, and only then can we accept the report as the complete truth."

On July 18, in the first Malaysian Government press conference after the shoot-down, Najib (right) announced agreements he had already reached by telephone with Obama and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian President. " 'Obama and I agreed that the investigation will not be hidden and the international teams have to be given access to the crash scene.' [Najib] said the Ukrainian president ‎has pledged that there would be a full, thorough and independent investigation and Malaysian officials would be invited to take part. 'He also confirmed that his government will negotiate with rebels in the east of the country in order to establish a humanitarian corridor to the crash site,' said Najib. He also said that no one should remove any debris or the black box from the scene. The Government of Malaysia is dispatching a special flight to Kiev, carrying a Special Malaysia Disaster Assistance and Rescue Team, as well as a medical team. But we must – and we will – find out precisely what happened to this flight. No stone can be left unturned."

The new film reveals in an interview with Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the head of the Malaysian team, what happened next. Sakri's evidence, filmed in his office at Putrajaya, is the first to be reported by the press outside Malaysia in five years. A year ago, Sakri gave a partial account of his mission to a Malaysian newspaper .

Source: https://www.youtube.com/

"I talked to my prime minister [Najib]," Colonel Sakri says. "He directed me to go to the crash site immediately." At the time Sakri was a senior security official at the Disaster Management Division of the Prime Minister's Department. Sakri says that after arriving in Kiev, Poroshenko's officials blocked the Malaysians. "We were not allowed to go there so I took a small team to leave Kiev going to Donetsk secretly." There Sakri toured the crash site, and met with officials of the Donetsk separatist administration headed by Alexander Borodai .

With eleven men, including two medical specialists, a signalman, and Malaysian Army commandos, Sakri had raced to the site ahead of an armed convoy of Australian, Dutch and Ukrainian government men. The latter were blocked by Donetsk separatist units. The Australian state press agency ABC reported their military convoy, prodded from Kiev by the appearance of Australian and Dutch foreign ministers Julie Bishop and Frans Timmermans, had been forced to abandon their mission. That was after Colonel Sakri had taken custody of the MH17 black boxes in a handover ceremony filmed at Borodai's office in Donetsk on July 22.

US sources told the Wall Street Journal at the time "the [Sakri] mission's success delivered a political victory for Mr. Najib's government it also handed a gift to the rebels in the form of an accord, signed by the top Malaysian official present in Donetsk, calling the crash site 'the territory of the Donetsk People's Republic.' That recognition could antagonize Kiev and Washington, which have striven not to give any credibility to the rebels, whose main leaders are Russian citizens with few ties to the area. State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said in a briefing Monday that the negotiation 'in no way legitimizes' separatists."

The Australian state radio then reported the Ukrainian government as claiming the black box evidence showed "the reason for the destruction and crash of the plane was massive explosive decompression arising from multiple shrapnel perforations from a rocket explosion." This was a fabrication – the evidence of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, first reported six weeks later in September by the Dutch Safety Board, showed nothing of the kind; read what their evidence revealed .

Foreign Minister Bishop, in Kiev on July 24, claimed she was negotiating with the Ukrainians for the Australian team in the country to carry arms. "I don't envisage that we will ever resort to [arms]," she told her state news agency, "but it is a contingency planning, and you would be reckless not to include it in this kind of agreement. But I stress our mission is unarmed because it is [a] humanitarian mission."

In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source: https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian control.

By the time she spoke to her state radio, Bishop was concealing that the plan for armed intervention, including 3,000 Australian troops, had been called off. She was also concealing that the black boxes were already in Colonel Sakri's possession.

The document signed by Sakri for the handover of the black boxes is visible in the new documentary. Sakri signed himself and added the stamp of the National Security Council of Malaysia.

Col. Sakri says on film the Donetsk leaders expressed surprise at the delay of the Malaysians in arriving at the crash site to recover the black boxes. "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." Source: https://www.youtube.com/ Min. 05:47.

Sakri goes on to say he was asked by the OSCE's special monitoring mission for Ukraine to hand over the black boxes; he refused. He was then met by agents of the FBI (Min 6:56). "They approached me to show them the black box. I said no." He also reports that in Kiev the Ukrainian Government tried "forcing me to leave the black boxes with them. We said no. We cannot. We cannot allow."

The handover ceremony in Donetsk, July 22, 2014: on far left, the two black boxes from MH17; in the centre, shaking hands, Alexander Borodai and Mohamad Sakri.

Permission for Colonel Sakri to speak to the press has been authorized by his superiors at the prime ministry in Putrajaya, and his disclosures agreed with them in advance.

Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians; for details, read this .

Van der Werff and Yerlashova contracted with OG IT Forensic Services , a Malaysian firm specializing in forensic analysis of audio, video and digital materials for court proceedings, to examine the telephone tapes. The Kuala Lumpur firm has been endorsed by the Malaysian Bar . The full 143-page technical report can be read here .

The findings reported by Akash Rosen and illustrated on camera are that the telephone recordings have been cut, edited and fabricated. The source of the tapes, according to the JIT press conference on June 19 by Dutch police officer Paulissen, head of the National Criminal Investigation Service of The Netherlands, was the Ukrainian SBU. Similar findings of tape fabrication and evidence tampering are reported on camera in the van der Werff film by a German analyst, Norman Ritter.

Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the June 19, 2019 , press conference of JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU.

Minute 16:02 Right: Norman Ritter presented his analysis to interviewer Billy Sixt to show the telephone tape evidence has been forged in nine separate "manipulations". One of the four accused by the JIT last month, Sergei Dubinsky, testifies from Min. 17 of the documentary. He says his men recovered the black boxes from the crash site and delivered them to Borodai at 23:00 hours on July 17; the destruction of the aircraft occurred at 1320.

Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. "I dare them to publish the uncut conversations, and then you will get a real picture of what was discussed." (Min. 17:59).

Van der Werff and Yerlashova filmed at the crash site in eastern Ukraine. Several local witnesses were interviewed, including a man named Alexander from Torez town, and Valentina Kovalenko, a woman from the farming village of Red October. The man said the missile equipment alleged by the JIT to have been transported from across the Russian border on July 17 was in Torez at least one, possibly two days before the shoot-down on July 17; he did not confirm details the JIT has identified as a Buk system.

Kovalenko, first portrayed in a BBC documentary three years ago (starting at Min.26:50) as a "unique" eye-witness to the missile launch, clarifies more precisely than the BBC reported where the missile she saw had been fired from.

BBC documentary, " The Conspiracy Files. Who Shot Down MH17 " -- Min. 27:00. The BBC broadcast its claims over three episodes in April-May 2016. For a published summary, read this .

This was not the location identified in press statements by JIT. Van der Werff explains: "we specifically asked [Kovalenko] to point exactly in the direction the missile came from. I then asked twice if maybe it was from the direction of the JIT launch site. She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony."

According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the Ukrainian Army were there."

Kovalenko also remembers that on the days preceding the July 17 missile firing she witnessed, there had been Ukrainian military aircraft operating in the sky above her village. She says they used evasion techniques including flying in the shadow of civilian aircraft she also saw at the same time.

On July 17, three other villagers told van der Werff they had seen a Ukrainian military jet in the vicinity and at the time of the MH17 crash.

Concluding the documentary, van der Werff and Yerlashova present an earlier interview filmed in Donetsk by independent Dutch journalist Stefan Beck, whom JIT officials had tried to warn off visiting the area. Beck interviewed Yevgeny Volkov, who was an air controller for the Ukrainian Air Force in July 2014. Volkov was asked to comment on Ukrainian Government statements, endorsed by the Dutch Safety Board report into the crash and in subsequent reports by the JIT, that there were no radar records of the airspace at the time of the shoot-down because Ukrainian military radars were not operational.

Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There [they] have it. In Ukraine they have it."

Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice for the victims," Zakaria said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?] "Part of the conclusions [inaudible] – do not change our positions."

By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

Jeff , July 23, 2019 at 2:54 am

I always come back to the same three questions:
1. If all civilian and military radars were out of order, why was the flight not redirected out of the Ukrainian airspace and into some territory with radar?
2. Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g. here for others)?
3. Why is no journalist raising these questions?

(I got a partial answer to 3. "because only Kremlin trolls and conspiracy specialists doubt the official/Bellingcat version")

vlade , July 23, 2019 at 4:13 am

Re 1) active radar is not used that much in civilian flight control anymore, it's basically a back-up for passive transponder pick up. Dnipro Control was monitoring the flight using passive (that's for example how they knew they were off their approved airway L980 and asked them to get back, which, if there was no radar, they could not do). Passive (civilian) radar is no use in tracking missiles or military planes with no transporder on.

So the question 1) is irrelevant.

Colonel Smithers , July 23, 2019 at 4:50 am

Thank you, Gentlemen.

Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh?

Having grown up in a military family and knowing what precautions are taken, I am staggered at how Bell End Cat can track down Russian secret servicemen with such ease and in their homeland.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 8:55 am

If you watch the film, you'd learn that there were back-ups so not all were out of order. And if we knew the answer to your questions, we'd likely know 'who done it.'

JerryDenim , July 23, 2019 at 4:28 am

Undoubtedly there's something quite rotten afoot here, and I'll be sure to give this film a watch, but honestly the Malaysians have zero credibility when it comes to airplane crashes involving their national airline, especially after they deliberately fed false information to rescue and recovery teams concerning MH 370's flight path. Whatever they knew or didn't know they had no interest in helping anyone find that airplane or discover what took place onboard before it vanished. They should spare us all any sanctimony about 'justice for victims, truth, rule of law, etc.'

It seems the world has a real credibility crisis today, not many state actors I trust to tell the truth or not politicize tragedy. These revelations certainly make it seem more likely Ukrainian forces were to blame for downing MH17, but at this point the mystery will never be conclusively solved. Two warring factions with the exact same equipment/weaponry in close proximity, compromised crash sites, tons of propaganda, lots of interested parties seeking to maximize the tragedy for political gain, corrupt authorities all around.

Not an ideal situation for objective fact finding to say the least. With the 1MBD scandal and investigation still ongoing I have no doubts the Malaysians are probably looking for leverage and bargaining chips where ever they can find them, further eroding their objectivity and authority in my opinion. Getting to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination will be easier than MH17, but if the truth does come out it will not be owed to the virtues of the Malaysian government. They've already shown the world how much they care about airplane crash investigations.

Yves Smith Post author , July 23, 2019 at 4:49 am

I have to tell you, this is an ad hominem argument, which is a violation of our site Policies. You need to deal with the evidence and not attack the source. With MH370, you had a crash of a plane under the control of the carrier, not as a result of an air strike.

Ian Perkins , July 23, 2019 at 11:19 am

Quite apart from the ad hominem nature of JerryDenim's comment (and I disagree with Yves Smith; I think the credibility of sources is relevant), what motive would Malaysia have for siding with Russia/east Ukraine against the west/west Ukraine? Does JerryDenim know of one, or have any suggestions?

vlade , July 23, 2019 at 4:31 am

TBH, I have dire doubts on anything Malaysian government says, due to their handling of MH370 where they continue lying in face of hard facts (that doesn't mean I believe any governments on this).

I believe that the most likely cause is an accidental shooting down, where an inexperienced and untrained separatist crew messed up (this is what you get when even a semi-sophisticated equipment gets to untrained people who are keen to use it).

For me it fits Occam's razor the most, and is the only theory which explains the (documented) boasting of the separatists of a large military plane being shot down immediately after the catastrophe.

Joe Well , July 23, 2019 at 9:23 am

>>I have dire doubts on anything Malaysian government says

But on the other side of the scale is the credibility of the US, Dutch and Ukranian security services.

>>the (documented) boasting of the separatists of a large military plane being shot down immediately after the catastrophe.

Isn't that what the Malaysians are trying to debunk by saying the recordings were falsified? (or were they talking about something else?)

RalphR , July 23, 2019 at 4:43 am

How is "Russia did it" logical? That part of Ukraine was in the hands of separatists, not "Russia". "Russia" was not directing their activities. Russia does not want to control the eastern part of Ukraine, which is an economic basket case. But it doesn't want hostile forces parked on its border.

RalphR , July 23, 2019 at 6:52 am

Sorry, that's irrelevant even if true. Even if "Russia" was formally providing troops, as opposed to engaged in a massive wink and nod (a LOT of Russians had relatives in eastern Ukraine, a point you forget re motives and numbers), that's way way way short of any evidence they were in charge.

Plus I was wrong on the key point, and it renders your argument moot. From Rev Kev below:

That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 9:18 am

This response is non-sensical. Have you been to the cemeteries you mention? Any picture can be posted and a caption written – that is no proof of anything. Besides the point being irrelevant to the question of who shot down the plane.

Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.)

Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists?

Eustache de Saint Pierre , July 23, 2019 at 1:33 pm

I suppose if one believes the West's preferred version of Putin as some Bond type villain who takes great delight in shooting down planes full of civilians, presumably while stroking a large white cat then I suppose the he dunnit version is the one for you.

Personally I believe that Putin is not an idiot & would likely have been more interested in putting out that fire than throwing more fuel onto it. As for who has any credibility – the Ukrainians under Porkyschenko with their Neo-Nazi element, would I think be at the bottom of my list & that is without mentioning Neo-Cons with their Noble Lie BS.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 2:03 pm

And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate – almost in unison, right after the shooting of the plane.

Colonel Smithers , July 23, 2019 at 5:07 am

Thank you, Yves.

"Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103 site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight.

The US team took charge even though they were on foreign soil.

The Rev Kev , July 23, 2019 at 5:57 am

That was a pretty gutsy move on the Malaysians to send in their own retrieval team for those recorders. I bet that those Malaysian commandos would have a story to tell or two. The danger wasn't from the rebels however but from the west and their allied Ukrainians. The rebels were more than glad to hand over the records that they found at first opportunity but the information, once in the hands of the west, has been seeping out with all the speed of the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got – a YouTube link. Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did it – until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down in high summer. And so it went on.

There was a very slow walk to stop people going to the crash site. One Australian couple who lost someone went there in spite of the efforts of our government to stop them. Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was being shelled – by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were seriously not barking. A link from this page talks about how there is a silence when MH17 got hit. I have heard recordings of aircraft that went down and there is usually something – a bang, crumpling, warning calls, shouts – but here there was nothing.

That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. Having said that, Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of the time and Julie Bishop was his Foreign minister and they are both hard right politicians (now both thankfully gone) and may have been entertaining such thoughts.

My belief is that this was an operation to try and retrieve the situation in the Ukraine for the west. The US alone spent over $5 billion on this coup but Russia grabbed the crown jewels of Crimea (with its naval bases & off-shore gas fields) and eastern Ukraine which has a border with Russia. That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. Ask yourself – who benefited from this tragedy and that will tell you where to go looking for answers. Maybe, like happened with the Meuller investigation, Russian legal representations should show up in a court of law and start demanding the discovery process of all the evidence. Now that could get interesting.

Camp Lo , July 23, 2019 at 9:07 am

Rebels were the first to respond to the crash scene, recording themselves with a camcorder. The rebels were convinced they had shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet and were searching for a pilot that would have ejected. The rebels then thought a fighter downed the airliner and they downed the fighter. Their commander speaking in both Russian and Ukrainian tells the rebels to stop filming and clear the area of civilians. The footage was aired by News Corp Australia.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 9:21 am

If you watch this film, there is a large segment about how the audio recordings were manipulated.

The Rev Kev , July 23, 2019 at 10:08 am

Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia".

Carolinian , July 23, 2019 at 9:37 am

If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians.

Of course Western sources will say the Russians have no credibility but then they don't either–the fog of propaganda war.

The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold War–which the Obama regime was so very much responsible for–will begin to find peace.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 2:00 pm

No, it would not. Watch the film if you want to get some sense of how complicated the whole thing is.

[Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable. ..."
"... A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time. ..."
"... Malaysia's exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained. ..."
"... The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court. ..."
"... The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27. ..."
"... Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29. ..."
"... In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source: https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian control. ..."
"... Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians; for details, read this . ..."
"... Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the June 19, 2019 , press conference of JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU. ..."
"... Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. ..."
"... She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony." ..."
"... According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the Ukrainian Army were there." ..."
"... Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There [they] have it. In Ukraine they have it." ..."
"... Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice for the victims," Zakaria said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?] "Part of the conclusions [inaudible] – do not change our positions." ..."
"... Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g. here for others)? ..."
"... Why is no journalist raising these questions? ..."
"... Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh? ..."
"... That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. ..."
"... Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.) ..."
"... Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists? ..."
"... And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate – almost in unison, right after the shooting of the plane. ..."
"... "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103 site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight. ..."
"... I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got – a YouTube link. Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did it – until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down in high summer. And so it went on. ..."
"... Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was being shelled – by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were seriously not barking. ..."
"... That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. ..."
"... Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia". ..."
"... If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians. ..."
"... The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold War–which the Obama regime was so very much responsible for–will begin to find peace. ..."
Jul 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. Hoo boy. The idea that eastern Ukrainian insurgents or Russia would target a passenger plane never made any sense (unless the plane had high-priority targets or cargo), although it's always been possible that the downing of MH17 was an accident, and some efforts to explain what happened are based on that idea. For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable.

A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time.

The sources of the breakthrough are Malaysian -- Prime Minister of Malaysia Mohamad Mahathir; Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the officer in charge of the MH17 investigation for the Prime Minister's Department and Malaysia's National Security Council following the crash on July 17, 2014; and a forensic analysis by Malaysia's OG IT Forensic Services of Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) telephone tapes which Dutch prosecutors have announced as genuine.

The 298 casualties of MH17 included 192 Dutch; 44 Malaysians; 27 Australians; 15 Indonesians. The nationality counts vary because the airline manifest does not identify dual nationals of Australia, the UK, and the US.

The new film throws the full weight of the Malaysian Government, one of the five members of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), against the published findings and the recent indictment of Russian suspects reported by the Dutch officials in charge of the JIT; in addition to Malaysia and The Netherlands, the members of the JIT are Australia, Ukraine and Belgium. Malaysia's exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained.

The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court.

For the first time also, the Malaysian Government reveals how it got in the way of attempts the US was organizing during the first week after the crash to launch a NATO military attack on eastern Ukraine. The cover story for that was to rescue the plane, passenger bodies, and evidence of what had caused the crash. In fact, the operation was aimed at defeating the separatist movements in the Donbass, and to move against Russian-held Crimea.

The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27.

The 28-minute documentary by Max van der Werff and Yana Yerlashova has just been released. Yerlashova was the film director and co-producer with van der Werff and Ahmed Rifazal. Vitaly Biryaukov directed the photography. Watch it in full here .

The full interview with Prime Minister Mahathir was released in advance; it can be viewed and read here .

Mahathir reveals why the US, Dutch and Australian governments attempted to exclude Malaysia from membership of the JIT in the first months of the investigation. During that period, US, Dutch, Australian and NATO officials initiated a plan for 9,000 troops to enter eastern Ukraine, ostensibly to secure the crash scene, the aircraft and passenger remains, and in response to the alleged Russian role in the destruction of MH17 on July 17; for details of that scheme, read this .

Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29.

Malaysian resistance to the US attempts to blame Moscow for the aircraft shoot-down was made clear in the first hours after the incident to then-President Barack Obama by Malaysia's Prime Minister at the time, Najib Razak. That story can be followed here and here .

In an unusual decision to speak in the new documentary, Najib's successor Prime Minister Mahathir announced: "They never allowed us to be involved from the very beginning. This is unfair and unusual. So we can see they are not really looking at the causes of the crash and who was responsible. But already they have decided it must be Russia. So we cannot accept that kind of attitude. We are interested in the rule of law, in justice for everyone irrespective of who is involved. We have to know who actually fired the missile, and only then can we accept the report as the complete truth."

On July 18, in the first Malaysian Government press conference after the shoot-down, Najib (right) announced agreements he had already reached by telephone with Obama and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian President. " 'Obama and I agreed that the investigation will not be hidden and the international teams have to be given access to the crash scene.' [Najib] said the Ukrainian president ‎has pledged that there would be a full, thorough and independent investigation and Malaysian officials would be invited to take part. 'He also confirmed that his government will negotiate with rebels in the east of the country in order to establish a humanitarian corridor to the crash site,' said Najib. He also said that no one should remove any debris or the black box from the scene. The Government of Malaysia is dispatching a special flight to Kiev, carrying a Special Malaysia Disaster Assistance and Rescue Team, as well as a medical team. But we must – and we will – find out precisely what happened to this flight. No stone can be left unturned."

The new film reveals in an interview with Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the head of the Malaysian team, what happened next. Sakri's evidence, filmed in his office at Putrajaya, is the first to be reported by the press outside Malaysia in five years. A year ago, Sakri gave a partial account of his mission to a Malaysian newspaper .

Source: https://www.youtube.com/

"I talked to my prime minister [Najib]," Colonel Sakri says. "He directed me to go to the crash site immediately." At the time Sakri was a senior security official at the Disaster Management Division of the Prime Minister's Department. Sakri says that after arriving in Kiev, Poroshenko's officials blocked the Malaysians. "We were not allowed to go there so I took a small team to leave Kiev going to Donetsk secretly." There Sakri toured the crash site, and met with officials of the Donetsk separatist administration headed by Alexander Borodai .

With eleven men, including two medical specialists, a signalman, and Malaysian Army commandos, Sakri had raced to the site ahead of an armed convoy of Australian, Dutch and Ukrainian government men. The latter were blocked by Donetsk separatist units. The Australian state press agency ABC reported their military convoy, prodded from Kiev by the appearance of Australian and Dutch foreign ministers Julie Bishop and Frans Timmermans, had been forced to abandon their mission. That was after Colonel Sakri had taken custody of the MH17 black boxes in a handover ceremony filmed at Borodai's office in Donetsk on July 22.

US sources told the Wall Street Journal at the time "the [Sakri] mission's success delivered a political victory for Mr. Najib's government it also handed a gift to the rebels in the form of an accord, signed by the top Malaysian official present in Donetsk, calling the crash site 'the territory of the Donetsk People's Republic.' That recognition could antagonize Kiev and Washington, which have striven not to give any credibility to the rebels, whose main leaders are Russian citizens with few ties to the area. State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said in a briefing Monday that the negotiation 'in no way legitimizes' separatists."

The Australian state radio then reported the Ukrainian government as claiming the black box evidence showed "the reason for the destruction and crash of the plane was massive explosive decompression arising from multiple shrapnel perforations from a rocket explosion." This was a fabrication – the evidence of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, first reported six weeks later in September by the Dutch Safety Board, showed nothing of the kind; read what their evidence revealed .

Foreign Minister Bishop, in Kiev on July 24, claimed she was negotiating with the Ukrainians for the Australian team in the country to carry arms. "I don't envisage that we will ever resort to [arms]," she told her state news agency, "but it is a contingency planning, and you would be reckless not to include it in this kind of agreement. But I stress our mission is unarmed because it is [a] humanitarian mission."

In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source: https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian control.

By the time she spoke to her state radio, Bishop was concealing that the plan for armed intervention, including 3,000 Australian troops, had been called off. She was also concealing that the black boxes were already in Colonel Sakri's possession.

The document signed by Sakri for the handover of the black boxes is visible in the new documentary. Sakri signed himself and added the stamp of the National Security Council of Malaysia.

Col. Sakri says on film the Donetsk leaders expressed surprise at the delay of the Malaysians in arriving at the crash site to recover the black boxes. "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." Source: https://www.youtube.com/ Min. 05:47.

Sakri goes on to say he was asked by the OSCE's special monitoring mission for Ukraine to hand over the black boxes; he refused. He was then met by agents of the FBI (Min 6:56). "They approached me to show them the black box. I said no." He also reports that in Kiev the Ukrainian Government tried "forcing me to leave the black boxes with them. We said no. We cannot. We cannot allow."

The handover ceremony in Donetsk, July 22, 2014: on far left, the two black boxes from MH17; in the centre, shaking hands, Alexander Borodai and Mohamad Sakri.

Permission for Colonel Sakri to speak to the press has been authorized by his superiors at the prime ministry in Putrajaya, and his disclosures agreed with them in advance.

Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians; for details, read this .

Van der Werff and Yerlashova contracted with OG IT Forensic Services , a Malaysian firm specializing in forensic analysis of audio, video and digital materials for court proceedings, to examine the telephone tapes. The Kuala Lumpur firm has been endorsed by the Malaysian Bar . The full 143-page technical report can be read here .

The findings reported by Akash Rosen and illustrated on camera are that the telephone recordings have been cut, edited and fabricated. The source of the tapes, according to the JIT press conference on June 19 by Dutch police officer Paulissen, head of the National Criminal Investigation Service of The Netherlands, was the Ukrainian SBU. Similar findings of tape fabrication and evidence tampering are reported on camera in the van der Werff film by a German analyst, Norman Ritter.

Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the June 19, 2019 , press conference of JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU.

Minute 16:02 Right: Norman Ritter presented his analysis to interviewer Billy Sixt to show the telephone tape evidence has been forged in nine separate "manipulations". One of the four accused by the JIT last month, Sergei Dubinsky, testifies from Min. 17 of the documentary. He says his men recovered the black boxes from the crash site and delivered them to Borodai at 23:00 hours on July 17; the destruction of the aircraft occurred at 1320.

Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. "I dare them to publish the uncut conversations, and then you will get a real picture of what was discussed." (Min. 17:59).

Van der Werff and Yerlashova filmed at the crash site in eastern Ukraine. Several local witnesses were interviewed, including a man named Alexander from Torez town, and Valentina Kovalenko, a woman from the farming village of Red October. The man said the missile equipment alleged by the JIT to have been transported from across the Russian border on July 17 was in Torez at least one, possibly two days before the shoot-down on July 17; he did not confirm details the JIT has identified as a Buk system.

Kovalenko, first portrayed in a BBC documentary three years ago (starting at Min.26:50) as a "unique" eye-witness to the missile launch, clarifies more precisely than the BBC reported where the missile she saw had been fired from.

BBC documentary, " The Conspiracy Files. Who Shot Down MH17 " -- Min. 27:00. The BBC broadcast its claims over three episodes in April-May 2016. For a published summary, read this .

This was not the location identified in press statements by JIT. Van der Werff explains: "we specifically asked [Kovalenko] to point exactly in the direction the missile came from. I then asked twice if maybe it was from the direction of the JIT launch site. She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony."

According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the Ukrainian Army were there."

Kovalenko also remembers that on the days preceding the July 17 missile firing she witnessed, there had been Ukrainian military aircraft operating in the sky above her village. She says they used evasion techniques including flying in the shadow of civilian aircraft she also saw at the same time.

On July 17, three other villagers told van der Werff they had seen a Ukrainian military jet in the vicinity and at the time of the MH17 crash.

Concluding the documentary, van der Werff and Yerlashova present an earlier interview filmed in Donetsk by independent Dutch journalist Stefan Beck, whom JIT officials had tried to warn off visiting the area. Beck interviewed Yevgeny Volkov, who was an air controller for the Ukrainian Air Force in July 2014. Volkov was asked to comment on Ukrainian Government statements, endorsed by the Dutch Safety Board report into the crash and in subsequent reports by the JIT, that there were no radar records of the airspace at the time of the shoot-down because Ukrainian military radars were not operational.

Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There [they] have it. In Ukraine they have it."

Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice for the victims," Zakaria said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?] "Part of the conclusions [inaudible] – do not change our positions."

By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

Jeff , July 23, 2019 at 2:54 am

I always come back to the same three questions:
1. If all civilian and military radars were out of order, why was the flight not redirected out of the Ukrainian airspace and into some territory with radar?
2. Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g. here for others)?
3. Why is no journalist raising these questions?

(I got a partial answer to 3. "because only Kremlin trolls and conspiracy specialists doubt the official/Bellingcat version")

vlade , July 23, 2019 at 4:13 am

Re 1) active radar is not used that much in civilian flight control anymore, it's basically a back-up for passive transponder pick up. Dnipro Control was monitoring the flight using passive (that's for example how they knew they were off their approved airway L980 and asked them to get back, which, if there was no radar, they could not do). Passive (civilian) radar is no use in tracking missiles or military planes with no transporder on.

So the question 1) is irrelevant.

Colonel Smithers , July 23, 2019 at 4:50 am

Thank you, Gentlemen.

Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh?

Having grown up in a military family and knowing what precautions are taken, I am staggered at how Bell End Cat can track down Russian secret servicemen with such ease and in their homeland.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 8:55 am

If you watch the film, you'd learn that there were back-ups so not all were out of order. And if we knew the answer to your questions, we'd likely know 'who done it.'

JerryDenim , July 23, 2019 at 4:28 am

Undoubtedly there's something quite rotten afoot here, and I'll be sure to give this film a watch, but honestly the Malaysians have zero credibility when it comes to airplane crashes involving their national airline, especially after they deliberately fed false information to rescue and recovery teams concerning MH 370's flight path. Whatever they knew or didn't know they had no interest in helping anyone find that airplane or discover what took place onboard before it vanished. They should spare us all any sanctimony about 'justice for victims, truth, rule of law, etc.'

It seems the world has a real credibility crisis today, not many state actors I trust to tell the truth or not politicize tragedy. These revelations certainly make it seem more likely Ukrainian forces were to blame for downing MH17, but at this point the mystery will never be conclusively solved. Two warring factions with the exact same equipment/weaponry in close proximity, compromised crash sites, tons of propaganda, lots of interested parties seeking to maximize the tragedy for political gain, corrupt authorities all around.

Not an ideal situation for objective fact finding to say the least. With the 1MBD scandal and investigation still ongoing I have no doubts the Malaysians are probably looking for leverage and bargaining chips where ever they can find them, further eroding their objectivity and authority in my opinion. Getting to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination will be easier than MH17, but if the truth does come out it will not be owed to the virtues of the Malaysian government. They've already shown the world how much they care about airplane crash investigations.

Yves Smith Post author , July 23, 2019 at 4:49 am

I have to tell you, this is an ad hominem argument, which is a violation of our site Policies. You need to deal with the evidence and not attack the source. With MH370, you had a crash of a plane under the control of the carrier, not as a result of an air strike.

Ian Perkins , July 23, 2019 at 11:19 am

Quite apart from the ad hominem nature of JerryDenim's comment (and I disagree with Yves Smith; I think the credibility of sources is relevant), what motive would Malaysia have for siding with Russia/east Ukraine against the west/west Ukraine? Does JerryDenim know of one, or have any suggestions?

vlade , July 23, 2019 at 4:31 am

TBH, I have dire doubts on anything Malaysian government says, due to their handling of MH370 where they continue lying in face of hard facts (that doesn't mean I believe any governments on this).

I believe that the most likely cause is an accidental shooting down, where an inexperienced and untrained separatist crew messed up (this is what you get when even a semi-sophisticated equipment gets to untrained people who are keen to use it).

For me it fits Occam's razor the most, and is the only theory which explains the (documented) boasting of the separatists of a large military plane being shot down immediately after the catastrophe.

Joe Well , July 23, 2019 at 9:23 am

>>I have dire doubts on anything Malaysian government says

But on the other side of the scale is the credibility of the US, Dutch and Ukranian security services.

>>the (documented) boasting of the separatists of a large military plane being shot down immediately after the catastrophe.

Isn't that what the Malaysians are trying to debunk by saying the recordings were falsified? (or were they talking about something else?)

RalphR , July 23, 2019 at 4:43 am

How is "Russia did it" logical? That part of Ukraine was in the hands of separatists, not "Russia". "Russia" was not directing their activities. Russia does not want to control the eastern part of Ukraine, which is an economic basket case. But it doesn't want hostile forces parked on its border.

RalphR , July 23, 2019 at 6:52 am

Sorry, that's irrelevant even if true. Even if "Russia" was formally providing troops, as opposed to engaged in a massive wink and nod (a LOT of Russians had relatives in eastern Ukraine, a point you forget re motives and numbers), that's way way way short of any evidence they were in charge.

Plus I was wrong on the key point, and it renders your argument moot. From Rev Kev below:

That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 9:18 am

This response is non-sensical. Have you been to the cemeteries you mention? Any picture can be posted and a caption written – that is no proof of anything. Besides the point being irrelevant to the question of who shot down the plane.

Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.)

Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists?

Eustache de Saint Pierre , July 23, 2019 at 1:33 pm

I suppose if one believes the West's preferred version of Putin as some Bond type villain who takes great delight in shooting down planes full of civilians, presumably while stroking a large white cat then I suppose the he dunnit version is the one for you.

Personally I believe that Putin is not an idiot & would likely have been more interested in putting out that fire than throwing more fuel onto it. As for who has any credibility – the Ukrainians under Porkyschenko with their Neo-Nazi element, would I think be at the bottom of my list & that is without mentioning Neo-Cons with their Noble Lie BS.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 2:03 pm

And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate – almost in unison, right after the shooting of the plane.

Colonel Smithers , July 23, 2019 at 5:07 am

Thank you, Yves.

"Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103 site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight.

The US team took charge even though they were on foreign soil.

The Rev Kev , July 23, 2019 at 5:57 am

That was a pretty gutsy move on the Malaysians to send in their own retrieval team for those recorders. I bet that those Malaysian commandos would have a story to tell or two. The danger wasn't from the rebels however but from the west and their allied Ukrainians. The rebels were more than glad to hand over the records that they found at first opportunity but the information, once in the hands of the west, has been seeping out with all the speed of the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got – a YouTube link. Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did it – until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down in high summer. And so it went on.

There was a very slow walk to stop people going to the crash site. One Australian couple who lost someone went there in spite of the efforts of our government to stop them. Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was being shelled – by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were seriously not barking. A link from this page talks about how there is a silence when MH17 got hit. I have heard recordings of aircraft that went down and there is usually something – a bang, crumpling, warning calls, shouts – but here there was nothing.

That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. Having said that, Tony Abbott was Prime Minister of the time and Julie Bishop was his Foreign minister and they are both hard right politicians (now both thankfully gone) and may have been entertaining such thoughts.

My belief is that this was an operation to try and retrieve the situation in the Ukraine for the west. The US alone spent over $5 billion on this coup but Russia grabbed the crown jewels of Crimea (with its naval bases & off-shore gas fields) and eastern Ukraine which has a border with Russia. That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. Ask yourself – who benefited from this tragedy and that will tell you where to go looking for answers. Maybe, like happened with the Meuller investigation, Russian legal representations should show up in a court of law and start demanding the discovery process of all the evidence. Now that could get interesting.

Camp Lo , July 23, 2019 at 9:07 am

Rebels were the first to respond to the crash scene, recording themselves with a camcorder. The rebels were convinced they had shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet and were searching for a pilot that would have ejected. The rebels then thought a fighter downed the airliner and they downed the fighter. Their commander speaking in both Russian and Ukrainian tells the rebels to stop filming and clear the area of civilians. The footage was aired by News Corp Australia.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 9:21 am

If you watch this film, there is a large segment about how the audio recordings were manipulated.

The Rev Kev , July 23, 2019 at 10:08 am

Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia".

Carolinian , July 23, 2019 at 9:37 am

If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians.

Of course Western sources will say the Russians have no credibility but then they don't either–the fog of propaganda war.

The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold War–which the Obama regime was so very much responsible for–will begin to find peace.

Olga , July 23, 2019 at 2:00 pm

No, it would not. Watch the film if you want to get some sense of how complicated the whole thing is.

[Jul 23, 2019] Some thoughts about Mueller testimony

Notable quotes:
"... Imagine you are a horny 15 year old boy and you have been promised sex with an incredible Hollywood talent. Driven by surging hormones your anticipation and excitement are off the scale. You are taken to the place where the tryst will happen. And you open the door. Waiting of you is Barney Fife. ..."
Jul 23, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Imagine you are a horny 15 year old boy and you have been promised sex with an incredible Hollywood talent. Driven by surging hormones your anticipation and excitement are off the scale. You are taken to the place where the tryst will happen. And you open the door. Waiting of you is Barney Fife.

That sort of sums up what is likely to happen tomorrow when Robert Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary and the House Intelligence committees. I have shut off almost all cable news. I cannot stomach the relentless hype about tomorrow's supposed "big day."

Blackberet , 23 July 2019 at 02:18 PM

Hmmm, given how the legacy media has managed to completely misinterpret what Mueller's Report actually says, imagine what a field day they will have interpreting "nothing" to mean something. Now, I wonder what that something might be...?

[Jul 23, 2019] >Robert O. Paxton's "The Five Stages of Fascism" by Lambert Strether

Fascism involved population mobilization in the face of the crisis. It can't emerge out of nothing. There should be a social crisis like current gradual collapse of neoliberalism.
The second observation is that there is nothing special about fascism. It is just extension of method of controlling the economy and population during the war into peaceful period. As such, it is not a black and white phenomenon and there can be shades of grey in fascism too. Methods can vary between different nations considerably.
As or the USA sliding into fascism there is no need to that. Existence of super-powerful intelligence agencies makes fascism with its methods redundant for the control of the economy and the population during the crisis. Inverted totalitarism is the motto of the day. In a way intelligence agencies can be viewed as modern day fascist party with permanent well paid party members (the prototype of such party was the core of Bolshevik party which consisted of "professional revolutionaries" who did not shy from terrorist methods much like intelligence agencies like CIA) and powerful financial support from the state.
Powerful intelligence agencies are incompatible with democracy and on national level in the USA democracy is a sham. It simply a Potemkin village hiding the rule of financial oligarchy (and associated military industrial complex and Silicon Valley perverts) via inverted totalitarism mechanism. Only if we view inverted totalitarism as a flavor of fascism )which is questionable as at the core of fascism is mass mobilization (think "Trump rallies" as a parody on that: "history repeats itself: first as tragedy the second as farce") , which inverted totalitarism tries to avoid at all costs) we can talk about the USA fascism.
Inverted totalitarism is much more sophisticated method of ruling population during the crisis them classic fascism and it has several advantages over fascism. Existence of powerful intelligence agencies makes creation of national far right nationalist party with charismatic leader redundant: they are such a party and they are already in power. So in a way, the elections or coup d'état to bring fascist leadership in power are simply redundant.
But if we talk about forceful rejection of the current corrupt democratic system )and neoliberal globalization pushed by corrupt neoliberal elite) by population in favor of more autocratic rule we can talk about modern fascism as a reaction of the crisis of neoliberalism. Revival of far right movement (which actually are not national-socialist, but neoliberal-socialist -- big difference) and far right parties in Europe attest that such elements of fascism are still in play.
Notable quotes:
"... fascist deliverables often have excellent symbolism -- graphic treatments especially -- fascism is about more than symbols, although you might not know it from the ruminations of our symbol-manipulating political class. ..."
"... Until the end of the nineteenth century, most political thinkers believed that widening the vote would inevitably benefit democracy and socialism. ..."
"... The populist leader to complete the road to fascism generally has to come out of a democratic process. They get voted into power by a disgruntled populace and by the time the populace realizes they have made a pact with the devil, power has been consolidated and there is no going back. ..."
"... The Tea Party was a warning shot across the bow where the Republican Party itself was helpless to prevent establishment candidates from being primaried. ..."
"... That leaves the door open for a Trump to come in announcing he will cut the Gordian knot with the sword of his personality "I am the only one who can .." ..."
"... Can a Trump do an end run on a paralyzed Congress to take over? Hitler did it in 1933. Is our Constitution and the defenders of it engaged and strong enough to prevent it? ..."
"... If you agree on the definition of fascism (I like the second), and you agree there are stages of fascism, the question becomes what phase are we in? I say phase two. ..."
"... Fascism is nationalist, but not all nationalism is fascism. Nor does it have to inevitably evolve into fascism. Economic protectionism also has a long history, and very little of that is fascist. I think that what we're seeing is just a bog-standard right-wing nationalist reaction to the demonstrable damage of globalization, enabled by the complete dereliction of duty by the left. Liberal cynics and ignorant useful idiots can cry 'fascism' all they want, but their whining isn't going to just magically make these nationalist movements genuinely fascist. ..."
"... Read Paxton's paper, or better yet download The Anatomy of Fascism (2004). (It's free if you Google around). It is not a challenging read, and as you progress the deja vu gets increasingly unnerving. ..."
"... Mobilized society around the State as a quasi-religious deity works, and as long as it can be sustained as long as a flow of enemies endures. What else is a soccer club after all? Below the surface, such a consolidation of power would be driven by an oligarchy, eventually yielding a Czar-like creature, but whomever will need to justify their excesses. ..."
"... Americans claim to be patriotic and hang flags in front of their houses but you don't see them lining up to join the military. ..."
"... Inverted totalitarianism is what we have now and Trump is just a bit player as are we all. When it finally breaks down we are more likely to have chaos than goose stepping regiments. ..."
"... Fascism is just rich people hiring thugs. The richer they are, the more thugs they can hire. ..."
"... That could be feudalism as well, as I'm sure Gramsci would be the first to admit. Do you actually want to move to Stage Three? ..."
Jul 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Robert O. Paxton's "The Five Stages of Fascism" Posted on July 22, 2019 by Lambert Strether By Lambert Strether of Corrente

The word "fascism" has been much in the news of late. Here is a chart of the year 2019 from Google Trends:

Interestingly, usage is more or less flat until the first spike, when President Trump put tanks on the National Mall for July 4 , and then a second, larger spike, when he gave his Greenville, NC speech, and the crowd chanted, of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, " send them back ." Omar reacted as follows:

... ... ...

Omar is a serious person and that's a serious charge, so it's worth looking at. Certainly my left/work corner of the Twittersphere was consumed by the word "fascism," to the extent that RussiaRussiaRussia was drowned out. Notably, however, the two spikes, and the resulting moral panic, were caused by symbols: Tanks on the mall, and a speech. (Interestingly, words about the border, like "concentration camps," and "fascism" do not spike simultaneously , even though one might expect them to. We'll see more about symbols in the Appendices.) However, although fascist deliverables often have excellent symbolism -- graphic treatments especially -- fascism is about more than symbols, although you might not know it from the ruminations of our symbol-manipulating political class.

So I thought it would be worthwhile to take a deeper look at the work of Columbia historian Robert O. Paxton , who is a scholar of fascism. Basically, this post will be the notes for the class I wish I had taken with him; Paxton writes as lucidly as another great scholar of fascism, Richard J. Evans, author of The Coming of the Third Reich and two wonderful successor volumes. I'm going to quote great slabs mostly from Paxton's article " The Five Stages of Fascism " (The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 1. Mar., 1998, pp. 1-23), but also from his later book, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004). "Five Stages" is only 24 pages, and easy, so do consider reading it in full, because I'm not really doing it justice; I'm leaving out all the historiography, for example.

And so to Paxton. I'm selecting passages partly when they contain useful ideas I just don't see in today's discourse, but mostly to give us tools to assess the current "conjuncture," as we say.

Fascism and Democracy

From the Five Stages of Fascism , page 3:

The fascist phenomenon was poorly understood at the beginning in part because it was unexpected. Until the end of the nineteenth century, most political thinkers believed that widening the vote would inevitably benefit democracy and socialism. Friedrich Engels, noting the rapid rise of the socialist vote in Germany and France, was sure that time and numbers were on his side. Writing the preface for a new edition in 1895 of Karl Marx's Class Struggles in France , he declared that "if it continues in this fashion, we will conquer the major part of the middle classes and the peasantry and will become the decisive power." It took two generations before the Left understood that fascism is, after all, an authentic mass popular enthusiasm and not merely [1] a clever manipulation of populist emotions by the reactionary Right or [2] by capitalism in crisis.

I think most "hot take" analysis by liberals would fall into the bucket labeled [1]; by the left, label [2]. I think the idea that democracy is, as it were, the host body for fascism deserves some thought. Certainly there was no fascism as such until democracy was well advanced.

Fascism: Made in America?

From the Five Stages of Fascism , page 12:

But it is further back in American history that one comes upon the earliest phenomenon that seems functionally related to fascism: the Ku Klux Klan. Just after the Civil War, some former Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans by the Radical Reconstructionists in 1867, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order. The Klan constituted an alternate civic authority, parallel to the legal state, which, in its founders' eyes, no longer defended their community's legitimate interests. In its adoption of a uniform (white robe and hood), as well as its techniques of intimidation and its conviction that violence was justified in the cause of the group's destiny, the first version of the Klan in the defeated American South was a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe. It is arguable, at least, that fascism (understood functionally) was born in the late 1860s in the American South.

(As an aside: It's probably coincidence, but Civil War tactics, especially by the time of the Overland Campaign, were also a "remarkable preview" of World War I. Intuitively, I feel that fascism does not take hold of the body politic without a lot of organic damage, whether in the entrenchments of the Civil War, the trenches of World War I, or -- just possibly -- the opioid crisis, deaths of despair, and falling life expectancy.) Hitler's American Model shows that Nazi jurists and lawyers came to America to research Jim Crow, and thought very highly of the legislation; they saw Jim Crow as an example of modernity -- how advanced the United States was. Of course, by their lights, Jim Crow was misdirected.

Mutability of Fascism

From the Five Stages of Fascism , page 4:

[Individual cases of fascism] differ in space because each national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy, as we shall see, not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly play a much greater role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms, which were pagan for contingent historical reasons. They differ in time because of the transformations and accommodations demanded of those movements that seek power.

And page 5:

Fascists deny any legitimacy to universal principles to such a point that they even neglect proselytism. Authentic fascism is not for export. Particular national variants of fascism differ far more profoundly one from another in themes and symbols than do the national variants of the true "isms." The most conspicuous of these variations, one that leads some to deny the validity of the very concept of generic fascism, concerns the nature of the indispensable enemy: within Mediterranean fascisms, socialists and colonized peoples are more salient enemies than is the Jewry. Drawing their slogans and their symbols from the patriotic repertory of one particular community, fascisms are radically unique in their speech and insignia. They fit badly into any system of universal intellectual principles.

One result of the "Lost Cause" propaganda and the historiography of the Dunning School -- William Dunning, ironically enough, professed at Columbia as well -- is that the notion that there might already have been an American Fascism (see above) is not available to us. Hence, we often see Nazis (and generally Nazis, not even Mussolini) as the quintessential fascists. The argument can be made that globalization has, in fact, created fascism of export -- some in my Twitterverse had no problem believing that Trump was simultaneously a Russian puppet and a fascist -- but I just don't see how that helps fascism to root itself (see below) in any given country, which is a requirement for it to grow.

The Stages of Fascism

From the Five Stages of Fascism , page 11:

But one must compare what is comparable. A regime where fascism exercises power is hardly comparable to a sect of dissident intellectuals. We must distinguish the different stages of fascism in time. It has long been standard to point to the difference between movements and regimes. I believe we can usefully distinguish more stages than that, if we look clearly at the very different sociopolitical processes involved in each stage. I propose to isolate five of them: (1) the initial creation of fascist movements; (2) their rooting as parties in a political system; (3) the acquisition of power; (4) the exercise of power; and, finally, in the longer term, (5) radicalization or entropy .

And stage 2, the importance of parties, pages 12-13:

The second stage -- rooting, in which a fascist movement becomes a party capable of acting decisively on the political scene -- happens relatively rarely. At this stage, comparison becomes rewarding: one can contrast successes with failures. Success depends on certain relatively precise conditions: the weakness of a liberal state, whose inadequacies seems to condemn the nation to disorder, decline, or humiliation; and political deadlock because the Right, the heir to power but unable to continue to wield it alone, refuses to accept a growing Left as a legitimate governing partner . Some fascist leaders, in their turn, are willing to reposition their movements in alliances with these frightened conservatives, a step that pays handsomely in political power, at the cost of disaffection among some of the early antibourgeois militants.

That underlined portion does seem familar, doesn't it? However, it's worth noting that there's no "seem" to American decline; how is a nation with dropping life expectancy not in decline? It's also worth noting that "frightened conservatives" doesn't necessarily equal Republicans; it was not, after all, the Republican Party that painted the anti-semitism target on Ilhan Omar's back. It's worth asking, then, whether centrist Democrats would seek a bipartisan alliance against the left.

Fascism Today

Here is Paxton's first definition of fascism, from the Five Stages of Fascism pages 22-23:

Where is the "fascism minimum" in all this? Has generic fascism evaporated in this analysis? It is by a functional definition of fascism that we can escape from these quandaries. Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline . Its complex tensions (political revolution versus social restoration, order versus aggressive expansionism, mass enthusiasm versus civic submission) are hard to understand solely by reading its propaganda. One must observe it in daily operation .

And his second, from The Anatomy of Fascism , page 218:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim- hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Speaking as an amateur, I think the two definitions map to each other, and both to the present day ("liberal democracy stands accused" v. "abandons democratic liberties," but I like the second one much better, because the language is crisper, and is testable. For example, "redemptive violence": During Reconstruction, the states that came under control of the former Slave Power, a process achieved by great violence, were referred to as "redeemed."

More from the Five Stages of Fascism , page 23:

Can fascism still exist today, in spite of the humiliating defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, the declining availability of the war option in a nuclear age, the seemingly irreversible globalization of the economy, and the triumph of in- dividualistic consumerism? After ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the rise of exclusionary nationalisms in postcommunist Eastern Europe, the "skinhead" phenomenon in Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy, and the election of `

Mirko Tremaglia, a veteran of the Republic of Salo, as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Italian Parliament during the Berlusconi government, it would be hard to answer "no" to that question.

The most interesting cases today, however, are not those that imitate the exotic colored-shirt movements of an earlier generation. New functional equivalents of fascism would probably work best, as George Orwell reminded us, clad in the mainstream patriotic dress of their own place and time. An authentically popular fascism in the United States would be pious and anti-Black; in Western Europe, secular and antisemitic, or more probably, these days, anti-Islamic; in Russia and Eastern Europe, religious, antisemitic, and slavophile. We may legitimately conclude, for example, that the skinheads are functional equivalents of Hitler's SA and Mussolini's squadristi : only if important elements of the conservative elite begin to cultivate them as weapons against some internal enemy, such as immigrants.

Rather prescient for 1998, I must say. (And much as I loathe black bloc, it may be that they have their place in making these "functional equivalents" less easy to form.) Nevertheless, we do not have a "mass-based party of committed nationalist militants ," Yet. Paxton goes on:

The right questions to ask of today's neo- or protofascisms are those appropriate for the second and third stages of the fascist cycle. Are they becoming rooted as parties that represent major interests and feelings and wield major influence on the political scene? [TBD] Is the economic or constitutional system in a state of blockage apparently insoluble by existing authorities? [Yes] Is a rapid political mobilization threatening to escape the control of traditional elites, to the point where they would be tempted to look for tough helpers in order to stay in charge? [TBD] It is by answering those kinds of questions, grounded in a proper historical understanding of the processes at work in past fascisms, and not by checking the color of the shirts or seeking traces of the rhetoric of the national-syndicalist dissidents of the opening of the twentieth century, that we may be able to recognize our own day's functional equivalents of fascism.

And from Anatomy , page 218:

Fascism exists at the level of Stage One within all democratic countries -- not excluding the United States. "Giving up free institutions," especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular "march" on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national "enemies" is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached Stage Two in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social, and political power.

Our immune system kills off little cancers all the time ; a metastatizing tumor takes a lot of effort to create. Stage One fascisms are little cancers, killed off by a healthy body politic. Stage Two fascisms, without treatment, will metastatize.

Conclusion

I think we're somewhere in Stage Two: Rooting -- or, to be optimistic, Up rooting. I invite the views of readers!

APPENDIX I: "Cosmopolitan"

Stoller tweeted, of a speech by possible Trump 2.0 Josh Hawley:

Then ensued the most moralizing and banal Twitter discussion I've seen in some time, and that's saying something. Hawley used the word "cosmopolitican" ( Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry here ), which Stoller's detractors felt proved Hawley was sending an anti-semitic dog whistle, and hence Stoller, in defending him, was an anti-semite too. (Paxton: "not by checking the color of the shirts or seeking traces of the rhetoric ."). To show how useless the entire episode was, I'll quote The Nation's Jeet Heer:

Of course, the view that "all politics is based on a division between friend and foe" could be traced right back to Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, whose doctrine that was , and so Heer could be said to be sending an anti-semitic dog whistle. Of course that's absurd, because context matters. Our symbol manipulating professional friends in the political class would do far better to look at function instead of checking their Index Expurgatorius of words suitable for censure and calling out. Liberals, and the left, have been calling out "dog whistles" for twenty years, at least. It hasn't gotten them anywhere. Yet still they do it!

Summer , July 22, 2019 at 4:25 pm

"Certainly there was no fascism as such until democracy was well advanced."

Coming back to this article later. This stopped me dead in my tracks: "democracy was well advanced."

Isn't that ultimately how fascism works? Pointing the finger at what passes for "democracy?"

Ford Prefect , July 22, 2019 at 6:41 pm

The populist leader to complete the road to fascism generally has to come out of a democratic process. They get voted into power by a disgruntled populace and by the time the populace realizes they have made a pact with the devil, power has been consolidated and there is no going back.

The Tea Party was a warning shot across the bow where the Republican Party itself was helpless to prevent establishment candidates from being primaried. Gerrymandering and polarization means that quite a few people on the right and left get into Congress and State legislatures simply by winning a primary. So blockades in Congress started with small groups of people who could control if a majority vote was possible. Since their positions are on the extreme end, no compromise is possible and the system seizes up.

That leaves the door open for a Trump to come in announcing he will cut the Gordian knot with the sword of his personality "I am the only one who can .."

Can a Trump do an end run on a paralyzed Congress to take over? Hitler did it in 1933. Is our Constitution and the defenders of it engaged and strong enough to prevent it? Can Congress with Mitch McConnell in the Senate do it? Can the Supreme Court with John Roberts as Chief Justice do it?

Harold , July 22, 2019 at 7:12 pm

"Certainly there was no fascism as such until democracy was well advanced."

What????? "Until 1922, Italy was a constitutional monarchy with a parliament; in 1913, the first universal male suffrage election was held. The so-called Statuto Albertino, which Carlo Alberto conceded in 1848 remained unchanged, even if the kings usually abstained from abusing their extremely large powers (for example, senators were not elected but chosen by the king)." (wikipedia)

Thus from 1870 to 1922 Italy was a not a democracy.

Under the Monarchical Constitution the King of Italy had exclusive power over foreign policy, which he repeatedly used to engage in misguided and stupid colonial adventures in Africa. An huge insurrection in the south was violently put down by the Piedmontese military, who also routinely shot strikers.

From 1922, when Italy became a republic, until 1923, when Mussolini took over, doesn't seem like a "well-advanced democracy" to me.

As for Germany, you had the Freikorps running around assassinating prominent political figures like Rathenau -- not to mention their earlier murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919 instigated by the future Social Democratic President Friedrich Ebert himself. Strikers and demonstrators were also routinely put down with bullets.

As the first elected president of Germany (1919-1925), Ebert presided over a bloody civil war and "used the presidency's emergency powers a total of 134 times. " (wikipedia) Seven years later Hitler was elected to head a coalition government with substantial financial assistance from Germany's wealthiest citizens and industrialists and also the from Catholic church. And as everyone knows one of H.'s first acts was to suspend parliament. You could hardly call Germany an example of well-advanced democracy either.

Bugs Bunny , July 22, 2019 at 4:31 pm

Excuse me, but I found this post really hard to follow. And I tried.

I think there is a definite growth in a certain very conservative strain of nationalism and a rejection of free trade across the world but I don't see a connection to the points laid out by Paxton. What we've got is something totally new that seems like a reaction to globalization (and neoliberalism) to people on the left, but maybe isn't that at all.

Lambert Strether Post author , July 22, 2019 at 5:49 pm

Well, they're class notes on a difficult topic. If you agree on the definition of fascism (I like the second), and you agree there are stages of fascism, the question becomes what phase are we in? I say phase two. (It also makes denial harder, but recognition easier, if one concedes that the Reconstruction South was fascist, indeed the first case.)

Plenue , July 22, 2019 at 6:24 pm

I'm of two minds on this. I get what you're saying, that fascism is a gradient, and not simply binary. So Trump could be seen as a step along the road to eventual full on fascism. But that seems to just be another way of saying he, and the current right wing movements, aren't actually fascist.

Fascism is nationalist, but not all nationalism is fascism. Nor does it have to inevitably evolve into fascism. Economic protectionism also has a long history, and very little of that is fascist. I think that what we're seeing is just a bog-standard right-wing nationalist reaction to the demonstrable damage of globalization, enabled by the complete dereliction of duty by the left. Liberal cynics and ignorant useful idiots can cry 'fascism' all they want, but their whining isn't going to just magically make these nationalist movements genuinely fascist.

The right-wing is perfectly capable of being racist and ugly (in fact right-wing politics is incapable of *not* being ugly) while still not being fascist.

Tomonthebeach , July 22, 2019 at 6:07 pm

Read Paxton's paper, or better yet download The Anatomy of Fascism (2004). (It's free if you Google around). It is not a challenging read, and as you progress the deja vu gets increasingly unnerving.

The one element that Paxton mentions time and again is the role played by the state's economy. Fascism in France, for example, did not take hold because their middle class were happy campers. Of course, after Hitler invaded, the French fascists ascended to power anyway and became the Vichy government. Because today's .01% have not shared their wealth with the middle class, it might not take much to tip the balance.

Deschain , July 22, 2019 at 4:44 pm

I mean Hawley literally identifies JC as a Jewish rabbi. Or is that a dog whistle too?

Summer , July 22, 2019 at 5:02 pm

After reading this, I'd say the issue is a lacking consensus about what "democracy" is that starts the problems. That lack has been manipulated. That would be key to it being a potent foe against fascism.

For instance, I don't see anything approaching "democracy" where the even concept of "royalty" still exists but, hey, maybe that's just me.

Synoia , July 22, 2019 at 5:04 pm

in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion

Such as using drones to execute people? Does that read like a definition of the CIA? Or the Current "Deep State"?

Lambert Strether Post author , July 22, 2019 at 5:51 pm

No. Drones are not necessarily "redemptive violence." No. Were the deep state to exist, it would not be a party.

Travis Bickle , July 22, 2019 at 5:09 pm

It's nice that there's a historical precedent that lends itself to academic analysis and distillation: that there are trends and history repeats itself. But, it's all just part of the human condition, and a widespread and inclusive Democracy is a historical aberration, and hardly something with any history of enduring.

Putting all this stuff to one side, isn't America today just experiencing a moment as the wheel of history turns? With progress, or just the natural passage of time, people and power always stratify, and there will be those left behind; those seeking power will mobilize those left behind by blaming their blight on some "other," (preferably recognizable at a glance). It is, after all, in the fundamental nature of man to seek (ever more) power.

Mobilized society around the State as a quasi-religious deity works, and as long as it can be sustained as long as a flow of enemies endures. What else is a soccer club after all? Below the surface, such a consolidation of power would be driven by an oligarchy, eventually yielding a Czar-like creature, but whomever will need to justify their excesses.

This is what it seems the Romanov family was before their demise, as the wheel turned yet again, when they got just TOO greedy in terms of the local gini coefficient and even WWI couldn't keep the masses sufficiently distracted.

Just a thought. As implied by Paxton, I don't think these times are exceptional any more than America is.

Carolinian , July 22, 2019 at 6:18 pm

Arguably fascism was an outgrowth of WW1 and the extreme nationalism and imperialism that preceded it. It's hard to see anything like that now. Americans claim to be patriotic and hang flags in front of their houses but you don't see them lining up to join the military.

It seems to me that what happened in the 20th century was so very much of its time. Inverted totalitarianism is what we have now and Trump is just a bit player as are we all. When it finally breaks down we are more likely to have chaos than goose stepping regiments. Start hoarding those canned goods.

Tomonthebeach , July 22, 2019 at 6:49 pm

That the times are not exceptional is hardly reassuring. The times seem to validate that those who are ignorant of their history are often doomed to repeat it. The signs of rising fascism can be seen in US militia groups and the political influence of their NRA, the rise of violent White Supremacy groups bringing together skinheads and sweet little college boys as we saw in Charlottesville. We have seen the growing political left-right chasm urged on by Gingrich. Polls show public support for police malfeasance and a report that 70% of Americans oppose holding US troops accountable for war crimes. The caging of refugees – something being called out as concentration camps (which by definition they are in that the concentrate all the immigrants in one spot) is already a fact of daily life. Members of the growing "locker her up" police state are posting racists and sexist things on Facebook which violate their oath of office. Yep! Nothing exceptional there.

Like pre WWI, the immoral, sex-trafficking US aristocracy is being led by a president who seems incapable of leading and governing, but he excels at staffing his government with billionaire crooks and scoundrels. The billionaire class has kept us in wars profitable to them, at the expense of the middle class just like the Kaisers and Tsars that created 2 World wars. Then we have the monthly Trump rallies which mirror those of Mussolini and Hitler. Just substitute red MAGA hats for brownshirts.

Yep, nothing exceptional, however until this week, the US press could not bring itself to use the "F" word.

ptb , July 22, 2019 at 5:24 pm

I would highlight, on the list of symptoms, the classic stereotypical element: fetishization of the military. (With budgets to match).

And add to the list of causes/development-mechanisms (stages 2-3): circumstances of foreign relations that make that fetishization logical.

To me this was the story of post-2001 USA, and perhaps with a politically-inverted reprise post-2016. It is also where the role of mass media kindof stands out – pushing this dangerous process forward with an enthusiasm I find disturbing.

Also these parts of the foundation for a fascist movement were built not just in the Bush era, but non stop ever since, and they span party lines. Perhaps I would call it a nationalist revival, rather than outright fascism. In this sense I am thinking it is in fact at stage 2, except the rooting isn't in a specific party, but the institutional governing networks that are common to both parties. That there is disagreement between the 2 parties about whom to "otherize" is perhaps fortunate, but one particular danger is that future developments may resolve this disagreement, in which case only a major setback on the foreign policy arena would remain on the checklist before the full pattern is liable to repeat itself.

Lambert Strether Post author , July 22, 2019 at 5:44 pm

> the rooting isn't in a specific party, but the institutional governing networks that are common to both parties.

I've been groping toward a formulation like that -- it's clear, for example, that the institutional machinery for rooted fascism has been developed on a bipartisan basis since at least 9/11, as the camps controversy shows -- but now I'm dubious about it. I don't see how militants would work for something as mushy as the Beltway network. You need a party, something to belong to. The KKK wasn't a professional association, after all.

ptb , July 22, 2019 at 7:32 pm

> You need a party, something to belong to. The KKK wasn't a professional association, after all.

Yes, that certainly shouldn't be overlooked, trying to understand political power of fascism via populist appeal.

The flip side, maybe, has to do with asking whether broadcast media (and social media) do answer to a Beltway network? This includes the think tanks (their less academic side) connecting media, govt, politics, and business the post 9/11 hyper patriotic sentiment was guided by neocon policy advocacy network plugging into cable TV media. The effect on business did happen to align with the nationalist interests (unlike the debate over NAFTA, as a counterexample) ..

Gramsci , July 22, 2019 at 5:29 pm

Fascism is just rich people hiring thugs. The richer they are, the more thugs they can hire.

Lambert Strether Post author , July 22, 2019 at 5:40 pm

That could be feudalism as well, as I'm sure Gramsci would be the first to admit. Do you actually want to move to Stage Three?

Stratos , July 22, 2019 at 5:33 pm

"It's worth asking, then, whether centrist [corporate] Democrats would seek a bipartisan alliance against the left."

Done and done. They have been in that alliance for decades now.

Plenue , July 22, 2019 at 5:58 pm

"And much as I loathe black bloc, it may be that they have their place in making these "functional equivalents" less easy to form."

They don't. Because these functional equivalents aren't forming to begin with. Maybe they could in the future; we certainly have plenty of broken veterans on the streets (though they seem to mostly just be killing themselves, over a hundred thousand suicides in the last twenty years. I'm curious why American versions of the Stahlhelms haven't formed. Maybe Americans just not doing collective action extends even to former 'Brothers in Arms'). But as of right now there are no Weimar paramilitaries engaging each other in bloody street warfare. US Nazis can't manage anything more than comically small gatherings that inevitably attract far larger counter protests that shout them down.

And should that change, it isn't going to be the combination of overzealous edgelords and undercover cops of black bloc smashing windows that challenges it.

dearieme , July 22, 2019 at 6:01 pm

Of course, the view that "all politics is based on a division between friend and foe" could be traced right back to Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.

Well, the Nazis and (I imagine) Sumer.

Alfred , July 22, 2019 at 6:06 pm

Did you recently observe in another post the importance of seeing "Jim Crow as an example of modernity" – or am I having a deju vu as I read this one? In any case, Jim Crow did indeed emerge and develop inside American modernity. It never challenged modernity, but rather was designed by modernity's boldest proponents to safeguard and advance it. The education policy of the Wallace administrations in Alabama – which were unabashedly progressive – offer a notable case in point. But plenty of other cases are reviewed in the remarkable book, Deluxe Jim Crow, by Karen Kruse Thomas. The 19th-century KKK was also part and parcel of a modern America (at least, as the New South understood it), and by no means a rejection of it. It was during the Progressive era, and not some period of reaction, that the link between the 19th- and 20th-century incarnations of the KKK were forged by the politics of the Lost Cause, largely through interventions in art-culture. There is a remarkable passage in Milton W. Brown's classic book, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (1955), pp. 85-87, in which he parallels the early 20th-century art theories of sculptor-critic F. W Ruckstull (born Ruckstuhl) with the cultural program pursued some decades later by Nazi Germany. Ruckstull's oeuvre included monuments memorializing both the northern and southern versions of the 'Civil War', though arguably with more sympathy for the latter than for the former. Brown's assessment of Ruckstull's work as "directly foreshadow[ing] the Nazi artistic credo" is as persuasive as it is disturbing. I can only fault him for neglecting to connect that work to the ideology of Lost Cause into which it plunged some of its deepest roots to find nourishment in the myths of "'native instincts'" and "'racial purity'" (p. 87). The issue of both Jim Crow and his brother, the 'modern' KKK, from the Lost Cause requires no demonstration. That fascist Germany produced not only an art almost indistinguishable from that of the Lost Cause, but also carried out social and financial policies directly inspired by the Jim Crow models of segregation and convict-leasing, cannot be doubted. But this line of descent is by no means extinct. I will close by mentioning that rehabilitation of the reputation of Albert Speer, the notorious architect to the Nazi government and hence a powerful influencer of its cultural as well as military policies, was one of the by-products of Postmodernism; which is to say, of the decades of neoliberal hegemony and the 'new' identity politics that so far seems to have been quite successful at underpinning it.

martell , July 22, 2019 at 6:29 pm

Just reread Nicos Poulantzas' "On the Popular Impact of Fascism" in anticipation of your post on Paxton. Poulantzas was a Marxist political theorist with some connection to the Althusserians. Like Paxton, he wrote a book on fascism: Fascism and Dictatorship . I took several things away from Poulantzas' essay on popular impact. First, the impact of fascism wasn't uniform as far as "the people" are concerned. Fascists infiltrated, took over, or created organizations of which some people, not others, were members, especially political parties. Fascism, according to Poulanztas, never had much appeal among either the German or Italian working class. It mainly appealed to members of the petty bourgeoisie (artisans, small-scale tradesmen, relatively well-compensated employees, and state employees). Based on the above synopsis of Paxton's views, he seems to have entirely overlooked this point. Poulantzas stresses, though, that the appeal of fascism fluctuated wildly, gaining support until it revealed itself as an anti-popular movement, subsequently losing popular support, and then gaining again owing to international affairs (the Anschluss, the war with Libya). I doubt such fluctuation is reflected by Paxton's stages. Finally, Poulantzas notes a number of reasons why a variety of different segments of the populace found fascism appealing: it offered a startlingly effective solution to terrible levels of unemployment, it tapped into justifiable (if not justified) beliefs to the effect that the nation was being treated as a second-class citizen in the international community, and it offered solutions to problems attending delayed formation of a nation-state in both Germany and Italy. Perhaps most importantly, Poulantzas closes his essay by noting that fascism had whatever popular appeal it had during the time of its initial ascendance owing in part to failure of the left. The problem, as Poulantzas saw it, was not that traditional right and left parties just couldn't get along, reached a stalemate, and were unable govern (which seems to be Paxton's view). The problem was that the left in Germany and Italy were unable to effectively organize working class people so as to bring about the fundamental changes in society that would have benefited this class. A sort of power vacuum came about, which fascists were able to exploit. In any case, those failures of the left also appear to go without mention in Paxton's account, which is understandable given that his politics are likely quite different from those of Poulantzas.

I suppose an upshot of this brief comparison of accounts of fascism is that I remain a fascism skeptic. I doubt the term currently applies to the situation in the US, even if it is qualified as 'stage two fascism.' I doubt too that stage two or any higher stage was ever reached at any point in American history or within any region of the US, including the post Civil War South. To the best of my knowledge, KKK activities were about restoring the position of what amounted to a landed aristocracy by way of race-based terrorism. Horrible? Yes. Unprecedented? Doubtful. A harbinger of 20th century fascism? Almost certainly not. For one thing (among many), I doubt that the Italian fascists were really about restoration. The German fascists certainly were not. They were radical revolutionaries, in their own way.

Bugs Bunny , July 22, 2019 at 6:51 pm

Thanks. This is a chain of logic that I can get down with.

There's something about the Paxton framework that just seems like, if one wanted to, you could drop it on almost any contemporary society with an authoritarian bent. China if you stretched it. From there, Russia or the Philippines follow easily enough. Then maybe Brazil, and why not all of Central America minus Costa Rica. Etc.

barrisj , July 22, 2019 at 7:49 pm

In fairness, Paxton, in his " Anatomy of Fascism", does in fact discuss Fascism as practiced by Italy and Germany in the 30s-early 40s in relation to authoritarian and totalitarian governments (Franco's Spain, the USSR and Stalinism, Mao's China, etc.), and does indeed make sharp distinctions. My reading of "Anatomy" points to Hitler's Third Reich and Mussolini's Italy as being quite sui generis , each arising from "special" circumstances that share certain Eurocentric features, and that the concatenation of events that solidified Fascism in each country then are so entirely different from the peculiarities of today's advanced capitalist "democracies", that compare-and-contrast exercises, or ticking one or more of five boxes or stages is a fool's errand. All organized societies will produce rabble-rousers and an eager rabble to be aroused, and within those societies there classically have been a marginalized "other" to serve as a rallying point for alleged causative agency in "national decline" or loss of status for a majority. Don't want to minimize Trump's crude race-baiting and all, but let's remember Godwin's Law in our attempt to fit Trump's foot into a fascist shoe.

The Rev Kev , July 22, 2019 at 7:24 pm

Did the author actually swiped Orlov's idea of "The Five Stages of Collapse"? I'm not sure how relevant a seven month graph would be when talking about fascism. Now if you have a twenty year one that might be more impressive but Google Trends is just one narrow slice of society after all. If you want to talk about fascism, I would be more impressed if he talked about Obama getting rid of habeas corpus in the US – something that goes back a thousand years in legal theory and practice. And why talk so much about the bogey men of American liberals – the KKK – when you actually had an actual American Nazi party called the German American Bund and which drew an audience of 20,000 at Madison Square Gardens back in 1939. To get a full picture, you cannot limit US fascism to American shores either but must consider them in context of America's foreign empire as the practices of what happens in the empire come back home sooner or later. The torture employed overseas has made its way back home and if you want to a direct influence, look at the militarization of US police as they receive military gear used overseas. Without mentioning the empire's yin of a fascist yang, you will never get a real comprehensive understanding of this subject in my opinion.

hamstak , July 22, 2019 at 8:02 pm

"Did the author actually swiped Orlov's idea of 'The Five Stages of Collapse'?"

I would guess no, given that the paper in question was published in March of 1998.

It is possible that both were plays on the "five stages of grief", which predates them both.

And there may have been some, or many other "five stages" preceding them -- it's "five stages" all the way down

barrisj , July 22, 2019 at 8:02 pm

The KKK example by Paxton is perhaps a bit of a stretch, because following the failure of Reconstruction and eradication of the Republicans, the resulting Democratic Party in fact neatly incorporated and served white supremacy and concomitant black suppression; the Klan was – as it were – an extraparlimentarian enforcement tool, sharing membership with local and state officials and community white citizens, and in fact was subsumed within the Party over time.

Democrats served the interests of powerful white elites, and pitted poor whites against black people for generations in order to maintain its political hegemony, and to resist any kind of economic reform and betterment.

Summer , July 22, 2019 at 7:48 pm

Because there is always the tendency to point fascism as a failure of "democracy" – instead of failure of the establishment or the failure of fascists! – it shows there is no working consensus for what a "democracy" is.

Monty , July 22, 2019 at 8:37 pm

Democracy is three wolves and two sheep deciding what's for dinner.

Frank Little , July 22, 2019 at 8:20 pm

Whether or not you think Hawley was using a dog whistle by pointing to a "cosmopolitan" elite, it strikes me as absurd that he is actually combatting the real powers that be. Here's a longer quote from the speech:

The cosmopolitan elite look down on the common affections that once bound this nation together: things like place and national feeling and religious faith.

They regard our inherited traditions as oppressive and our shared institutions -- like family and neighborhood and church -- as backwards.

What they offer instead is a progressive agenda of social liberation in tune with the priorities of their wealthy and well-educated counterparts around the world.

And all of this -- the economic globalizing, the social liberationism -- has worked quite well. For some. For the cosmopolitan class.

In case your curious, Hawley has raised over $1.6 million from the finance, insurance, and real estate sector for the 2020 cycle alone. He may not have been using an anti-Semitic dog whistle, but it's clear that to him lefty adjuncts below the poverty line are part of this elite while the FIRE sector, which could not be more in line with this "cosmopolitan consensus" that he's inveighing against, are not. The other top contributors according to OpenSecrets, in order:
-Other (?) – $1,606,786
-ideological/single issue – $1,516,586
-Misc business – $988,954
-Lawyers and lobbyists – $601,553
-Agribusiness – $464,414

for a grand total of $6,786,139.

That's just for 2020! Hard to see an industry that hasn't made off well in this cosmopolitan consensus.

This is relevant to the overall topic of fascism because gestures towards anti-capitalism were key to fascist success in winning some popular support but once in power they put all their focus on breaking trade unions, rounding up communists, and then cementing corporatist control over key industries.

His speech marks a notable shift among non-Trump people on the right, but reading the entire speech it's clear that his real priority is acknowledging the damage done to gain votes from a primarily white base while taking money from the people who did it. I don't know for sure but I'd bet he'd be more apt to include adjunct professors below the poverty line in the cosmopolitan elite than companies like Cargill.

Craig H. , July 22, 2019 at 9:14 pm

Not a bad synopsis. I would have squeezed in:

" some even doubt that the term fascism has any meaning other than as a smear word. The epithet has been so loosely used that practically everyone who holds or shakes authority has been someone's fascist. Perhaps, the doubters suggest, it would be better to just scrap the term." p.8

Then in footnote he writes the most credible support for this view:

Gilbert Allardyce "What Fascism is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept" American Historical Review April 1979

[Jul 22, 2019] The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist class

Jul 22, 2019 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

"The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it.

I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party.

There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittlers and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy.

You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel."

Jack London, The Iron Heel

[Jul 22, 2019] Comey Under DOJ Investigation For Misleading Trump While Targeting Him In FBI Probe

Notable quotes:
"... Former FBI Director James Comey has been under investigation for misleading President Trump - telling him in private that he wasn't the target of an ongoing FBI probe, while refusing to admit to this in public. ..."
"... Comey was essentially "running a covert operation" against Trump - which began with a private "defensive briefing" shortly after the inauguration. RCI 's sources say that Horowitz has pored over text messages between the FBI's former top-brass and other communications suggesting that Comey was in fact conducting a "counterintelligence assessment" of the president during their January 2017 meeting in New York. ..."
"... What's more, the FBI couldn't treat Trump as a suspect - formally, as they didn't have the legal grounds to do so according to former FBI counterintelligence lawyer Mark Wauck. " They had no probable cause against Trump himself for 'collusion' or espionage ," he said, adding "They were scrambling to come up with anything to hang a hat on, but had found nothing." ..."
"... According to House Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), Comey and the rest of the FBI's top team (including Peter Strzok and Lisa Page) were attempting to "stop" Trump's presidency for political reasons. ..."
"... "You have the culmination of the ultimate spying, where you have the FBI director spying on the president, taking notes [and] illegally leaking those notes of classified information" to the MSM, said Nunes in a recent interview. ..."
"... Comey is just the political class operative who they brought in to save Scooter Libby's butt in the Valerie Flame leak. Then he got a seven figure job as a reward at a hedge fund (with no prior experience in the financial industry). Then, they took him off the bench to be FBI director. ..."
"... The larger problem is that the "five eyes" system is broken in favor of British surveillance and interference in our elections, and, the Patriot Act practice of "masking" is a complete violation of the fourth amendment and a fraud. From a fourth amendment analysis, it's like letting the police search everyone's house every day as long as they don't look at the name on the address. ..."
"... This investigation would explain why Comey, Brennan, and other members of Barry Obama's regime are very quiet, while Congressional Democrats are freaking out. ..."
"... Does the DOJ investigate British agents? Serious question. ..."
Jul 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Former FBI Director James Comey has been under investigation for misleading President Trump - telling him in private that he wasn't the target of an ongoing FBI probe, while refusing to admit to this in public.

According to RealClearInvestigations ' Paul Sperry, "Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will file a report in September which contains evidence that Comey was misleading the president " while conducting an active investigation against him.

Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent . - RCI

According to two US officials familiar with Horowitz's upcoming report on FBI misconduct, Comey was essentially "running a covert operation" against Trump - which began with a private "defensive briefing" shortly after the inauguration. RCI 's sources say that Horowitz has pored over text messages between the FBI's former top-brass and other communications suggesting that Comey was in fact conducting a "counterintelligence assessment" of the president during their January 2017 meeting in New York.

What's more, Comey had an FBI agent in the White House who reported the activities of Trump and his aides, according to 'other officials familiar with the matter.'

The agent, Anthony Ferrante, who specialized in cyber crime, left the White House around the same time Comey was fired and soon joined a security consulting firm, where he contracted with BuzzFeed to lead the news site's efforts to verify the Steele dossier, in connection with a defamation lawsuit. -RCI

According to the report, Horowitz and his team have examined over 1 million documents and conducted over 100 interviews - including sit-downs with Comey and other current and former FBI and DOJ employees. "The period covering Comey's activities is believed to run from early January 2017 to early May 2017, when Comey was fired and his deputy Andrew McCabe, as the acting FBI director, formally opened full counterintelligence and obstruction investigations of the president."

McCabe's deputy, Lisa Page, appeared to dissemble last year when asked in closed-door testimony before the House Judiciary Committee if Comey and other FBI brass discussed opening an obstruction case against Trump prior to his firing in May 2017. Initially, she flatly denied it , swearing: "Obstruction of justice was not a topic of conversation during the time frame you have described." But then, after conferring with her FBI-assigned lawyer, she announced: " I need to take back my prior statement ." Page later conceded that there could have been at least "discussions about potential criminal activity" involving the president . -RCI

Comey coordination

Sperry notes that Comey wasn't working in isolation on the Trump effort. In particular, Horowitz has looked at the January 6, 2017 briefing on the infamous 'Steele Dossier' - a meeting which was used by BuzzFeed, CNN and others to legitimize reporting on the dossier's salacious and unsubstantiated claims .

Comey's meeting with Trump took place one day after the FBI director met in the Oval Office with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden to discuss how to brief Trump -- a meeting attended by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who would soon go to work for CNN. -RCI

While Comey claims in his book, "A Higher Loyalty" that he didn't have "a counterintelligence case file open on [Trump]," former federal prosecutor and National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy notes that just because Trump's name wasn't on a formal file or surveillance warrant doesn't mean that he wasn't under investigation.

"They were hoping to surveil him incidentally, and they were trying to make a case on him," said McCarthy. " The real reason Comey did not want to repeat publicly the assurances he made to Trump privately is that these assurances were misleading . The FBI strung Trump along, telling him he was not a suspect while structuring the investigation in accordance with the reality that Trump was the main subject ."

What's more, the FBI couldn't treat Trump as a suspect - formally, as they didn't have the legal grounds to do so according to former FBI counterintelligence lawyer Mark Wauck. " They had no probable cause against Trump himself for 'collusion' or espionage ," he said, adding "They were scrambling to come up with anything to hang a hat on, but had found nothing."

What remains unclear is why Comey would take such extraordinary steps against a sitting president . The Mueller report concluded there was no basis for the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theories. Comey himself was an early skeptic of the Steele dossier -- the opposition research memos paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign that were the road map of collusion theories -- which he dismissed as "salacious and unverified." -RCI

According to House Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), Comey and the rest of the FBI's top team (including Peter Strzok and Lisa Page) were attempting to "stop" Trump's presidency for political reasons.

"You have the culmination of the ultimate spying, where you have the FBI director spying on the president, taking notes [and] illegally leaking those notes of classified information" to the MSM, said Nunes in a recent interview.

Read the rest of Sperry's report here .

AI Agent , 4 minutes ago link

They will whitewash Comey. The deep state is alive and well, the DoJ and the FBI are as corrupt as they were the day before Trump took office.

Why do I say this? Well, the canary hasn't fallen off her perch yet. Hillary Clinton is still singing her song, and even making noises like she's going to run again, and she's not in prison. They have her solid on over a hundred felony counts of mishandling classified documents and they've not touched her. Proof of life that the Deep State is still in power.

MoreFreedom , 8 minutes ago link

So, was the Steele dossier the ex post facto excuse for illegally spying on Trump, or was it the ex post facto diversion for ALL of Obama's spying on politically powerful people, which we know included spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, spying on reporters, and spying on Trump. I'll bet Obama hopes the investigation doesn't get into all of his spying activities, and I wouldn't be surprised government officials in charge of the spying equipment are keeping it covered up because they don't want to lose their jobs (for either allowing such to happen, or because they fear the spying apparatus will be eliminated).

Did Obama also spy on SCOTUS justices, Congressmen, other Senators and other rich and powerful people? I'll bet he did, because we haven't seen all the unmasking documentation, and Obama took it to his library so no one can see it (at least so he thinks). Further, look at the way Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Rice are disparaging Trump (they protest too much). And look at how all the allegations about Trump are blowing right back into the faces of the Democrats who've shown their MO is to accuse their political opponents, of the illegal activity in which the Democrats are engaged.

They need to go to jail, for a long time, if not be executed for treason.

SgtShaftoe , 4 minutes ago link

Did Obama spy on SCOTUS justices, et al? - Yes. Look up project HAMR or "Hammer". MI5/6 was spying on all Americans comms to circumvent legal frameworks (5 eyes). Google is now fully Chinese intelligence - TREASON. It's coming and it's gonna blow most people's minds.

dcmbuffy , 10 minutes ago link

Just the minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.

J. Edgar Hoover

i at least agree with him on this one thought.

peippe , 9 minutes ago link

you realize J.Edgar probably said the above with a smile on his face.

Playtime's Over , 8 minutes ago link

been going on for longer than Obongo, but he put an inner cooled turbo on it.

radar99 , 13 minutes ago link

it all started with Obama. Time to investigate him and hang him for treason

SgtShaftoe , 8 minutes ago link

It started a very long time ago. 1913 was a notable date, so was JFK's assassination. So was 9/11. So was Operation Paperclip. These monsters have been slithering around a while. Now it's time for them to go bye-bye. Dark to Light. Execute.

Indelible Scars , 13 minutes ago link

B-B-But Nadler said...

JaxPavan , 14 minutes ago link

This goes back to Obama asking MI6 to surveil Trump and his campaign, and to continue it past the inauguration.

JaxPavan , 13 minutes ago link

correction: GCHQ

JaxPavan , 6 minutes ago link

Comey is just the political class operative who they brought in to save Scooter Libby's butt in the Valerie Flame leak. Then he got a seven figure job as a reward at a hedge fund (with no prior experience in the financial industry). Then, they took him off the bench to be FBI director.

The larger problem is that the "five eyes" system is broken in favor of British surveillance and interference in our elections, and, the Patriot Act practice of "masking" is a complete violation of the fourth amendment and a fraud. From a fourth amendment analysis, it's like letting the police search everyone's house every day as long as they don't look at the name on the address.

That our broken secrecy system effectively legalized Watergate under Obama and the "five eyes" is the real problem that needs fixing.

Stainless Steel Rat , 1 hour ago link

Three Things We Know For Sure

1. Trump did not collude with Russia

2. Mueller was sent on a witch hunt

3. Somebody's going under the bus

If not Comey, then who?

StiffLittleFinger , 39 minutes ago link

“I executed the session exactly as planned,”* Comey reported back to his “sensitive matter team.”

*in the meeting with Obama the day before

Equinox7 , 45 minutes ago link

This investigation would explain why Comey, Brennan, and other members of Barry Obama's regime are very quiet, while Congressional Democrats are freaking out. The end of the Deep State is starting.

valerie24 , 21 minutes ago link

Let’s hope so. The clock is ticking and this needs to happen by early 2020 or it won’t happen at all.

carbonmutant , 1 hour ago link

Are Comey's phones being bugged?

punchasocialist , 43 minutes ago link

Does the DOJ investigate British agents? Serious question.

[Jul 22, 2019] Report on evidence of felonies violating Civil Rights, and bribery by foreign agents, implicating United States Special Counsel Robert S Mueller III as a criminally-tainted agent of foreign racketeering interests

Notable quotes:
"... File talks about Mueller indulging big crimes as FBI director, helping Mueller's own eventual law firm to defraud millions out of a Hillary donor, with bribery of two USA federal judges, & threats to kill an ex-DOJ employee, with Mueller getting a big payday after he indulged it all as FBI chief, Mueller getting funds channeled from a criminal outfit based in the UK. ..."
Jul 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Brabantian says: May 6, 2019 at 2:39 am

Another item here, is the file which the US Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz acknowledged receiving a few months back, a file detailing alleged criminal acts of Robert Mueller himself.

The file was referenced in President Trump's tweets, a photo meme of Mueller in jail, and the President saying, "Heroes will come of this, and it won't be Mueller"

File talks about Mueller indulging big crimes as FBI director, helping Mueller's own eventual law firm to defraud millions out of a Hillary donor, with bribery of two USA federal judges, & threats to kill an ex-DOJ employee, with Mueller getting a big payday after he indulged it all as FBI chief, Mueller getting funds channeled from a criminal outfit based in the UK.

'Report on evidence of felonies violating Civil Rights, and bribery by foreign agents, implicating United States Special Counsel Robert S Mueller III as a criminally-tainted agent of foreign & racketeering interests'

https://www.docdroid.net/eVAAjIq/doj-ig-memo-mueller-bribery-extortion.pdf

[Jul 22, 2019] Wehret den Anf ngen

Jul 22, 2019 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

"To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: 'inverted totalitarianism,' a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on "private media" than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison -- 751 per 100,000 people -- of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has 'emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation's political traditions.'

The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization [and deregulation].

Chalmers Johnson, Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled

"Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one (I would in 2019 now say either) party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers.

That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents."

Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism

"The truth is that we were so spiritually and morally bankrupt that we could not even see some of those lines: we stepped over them blindly. Other times we saw the lines alright, but we wanted to cross them... It wasn't God who was dead. We were."

Ray A., Practice These Principles

"Oh where is the noble face of modesty, or the strength of virtue, now that blasphemy is in power and men have put justice behind them, and there is no law but lawlessness, and none act with fear of the gods?"

Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis

"Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life.
But now we are witnessing a transformation: a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, that we are not going to be judged."

Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism

[Jul 22, 2019] Zionists in the Bush Administration

Jul 22, 2019 | newobserveronline.com

Zionists in the Bush Administration

The IASPS conference study group leader was a Zionist named Richard Perle, who attended as a delegate from the American Enterprise Institute; while another Jewish neocon named Douglas Feith attended as a representative of Feith and Zell Associates.

Both these individuals then emerged as key players in the Bush administration: Perle was Chairman of George Bush's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, and Feith became Under Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon's Policy Advisor.

They were joined by a long list of similarly Israel-first Zionists in the Bush administration:

The scene was now set: all they needed was an excuse to maneuver America into destroying Iraq for the benefit of Israel, according to the plan which Perle and Feith had already helped to map out.

[Jul 22, 2019] All Hail Europe's Permanent Ruling Class

Notable quotes:
"... That said, Germany's military readiness directly relates to the invasion threat from Russia Europe actually faces. I.e., ZERO. Washington should take note but of course it won't because there is no money in it for the American Merchants of Death. And the Generals inside the Pentagon just have too much fun fear-mongering about illusory existential enemies. ..."
"... As Politico recently reported, "an investigative committee of the German parliament -- the toughest instrument that lawmakers can use to probe government misdeeds -- is digging into how lucrative contracts from her ministry were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight ..."
"... Yet another U.S. mirror image. Because that is exactly how inside baseball works in the Pentagon acquisition system. von der Leyen as a European Hack is no worse than the Washington / Pentagon Hacks on the other side of the Atlantic. Note, MIC lifer and Raytheon parasite Mark Esper currently sitting in the Big Seat in the Pentagon. You can be sure that DoD reform is way down on his bucket list. ..."
Jul 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Meet Ursula von der Leyen, the new president-elect of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union.

Like all those soon to occupy positions of power in the EU, von der Leyen did not run in the recent European elections for the position she is about to hold. She did not participate in the debates in front of various national electorates. But she was chosen -- after the elections -- by the political class in Brussels, ostensibly for her faith in and loyalty to the European superstate, and personally to the German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Since 2013, von der Leyen has been the German defense minister. During that time, a parliamentary report exposed German planes that can't fly and guns that don't shoot. Fewer than a fifth of Germany's helicopters are combat ready. Luftwaffe revealed that most of its 128 Typhoon jets were not ready to leave ground. All of Germany's six submarines were out of commission.

Another report by the Rand Corporation , a think tank, revealed that it would take Germany a month to mobilize in the case of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States. Von der Leyen is very unpopular in the German army , but very popular with the Eurocrats. She's a fervent supporter of a European army and a "United States of Europe" -- the ultimate qualification for being president of the European Commission.

But there is more to the von der Leyen story. As Politico recently reported , "an investigative committee of the German parliament -- the toughest instrument that lawmakers can use to probe government misdeeds -- is digging into how lucrative contracts from her ministry were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight, and whether a network of informal personal connections facilitated those deals."

The scent of corruption is a common element among those who are to hold key positions in the European Union over the next few years. Josep Borrell, minister of foreign affairs for the socialist government of Spain, was fined 30,000 euros for insider trading. He is expected to hold the foreign policy post in the European Commission.

Christine Lagarde, most recently chief of the IMF, was involved in the case of an arbitration panel that awarded a massive payout to a French tycoon while she was the finance minister of France. A special court for ministerial misconduct found her guilty of "negligence" but "waived any punishment or criminal record, citing her 'international reputation' and role in dealing with 'the international financial crisis.'" A marvelously L'état, C'est Moi form of legal reasoning. Lagarde is expected to be the next president of the European Central Bank.

The common threads of corruption, incompetence, and lack of accountability are what unites a political class that has divorced itself from the concerns of the average European. In the last days before her confirmation, von der Leyen pursued a charm offensive that included a commitment to a "Green New Deal," a continuation of an open borders policy , and a further deepening and enlargement of the European superstate. This included the story of her having offered hospitality to a Syrian immigrant who "now speaks German fluently."

Emmanuel Macron: Trade Wars for Me, But Not for Thee Voters in Europe Just Smashed the Mainstream Establishment

Obviously von der Leyen would never have won the May elections running on an agenda like that. But of course, she never had to run a campaign to win the votes of the peoples of Europe. The campaign that she did run was premised on her having built "an extensive international network in politics and business," as another Politico story put it .

Von der Leyen thrived in the networking atmosphere of World Economic Forum meetings, where she "serves on the organization's board of trustees," Politico noted, adding, "She's also forged close ties to powerful figures outside the world of politics, most notably Bertelsmann, Europe's largest media company, which owns RTL, the Continent's largest commercial broadcaster, book publisher Random House and a stable of magazines."

A senior Green quoted for the article said her fluency in French has helped her establish a rapport with the French political class that is unrivaled in Berlin.

It's clear that von der Leyen's domestic record appears to have had little effect on her election -- what matters is that she is universally liked by the who's who. "What matters most in these circles is the personal connection," said an adviser to the leader of one of the EU's smaller member states.

Those who count and those who are to be ruled are not the same group of people. That seems to be the essence of modern European politics: a political class and ideological cult that masquerades as a competent technocratic elite, despite its long and disastrous history. Von der Leyen's terrible record as defense minister meant nothing. Neither did Lagarde's record as head of the IMF, where, for instance, the Greek debt crisis was transformed into a social catastrophe. The deciding factor was their dedication to something that "those who count" are committed to. Elections are merely a necessary, archaic ritual of legitimization.

Napoleon Linarthatos is a writer based in New York.

Parrhesia • 10 hours ago

On Monday 22 July 1940, a major meeting was held at the Reich Economic Ministry in Berlin, under the chairmanship of Minister Walther Funk, to discuss a directive issued by Hermann Göring on 22 June, concerning the organization of a Greater European Economic Area under German leadership. The Germans were well advanced with their plans for a post-war settlement. One of the difficulties of planning lay in the fact that the Führer's aims and decisions were not yet known and the military measures against Britain were not yet concluded.

Plus ça change........

Lars • 10 hours ago
What? A techno-managerial clique ruling the rest of us Great Unwashed (see "Deplorables")? It couldn't happen here, could it? It's OK if they went to the right schools, isn't it?
genocidal_maniac • 10 hours ago
Too much use if the word disastrous. Disastrous is what Wilhelm II did to the German empire. This is not disastrous, but it is concerning like a rudderless ship.
Salt Lick • 7 hours ago
Today's Holy Roman Empire.

Voltaire's comment back then still rings true."It was neither Holy, Roman nor an Empire."

Sid Finster • 7 hours ago
Don't be asinine. Russia is not going to invade anything and has no claim on any part of western Europe. The only thing the German military is good for is for sucking up additional budgetary funds.
SteveM • 6 hours ago
Another report by the Rand Corporation, a think tank, revealed that it would take Germany a month to mobilize in the case of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States.

For the sake of completeness, the Rand Corporation is actually a marketing arm of the Pentagon fully funded by the U.S. government.

That said, Germany's military readiness directly relates to the invasion threat from Russia Europe actually faces. I.e., ZERO. Washington should take note but of course it won't because there is no money in it for the American Merchants of Death. And the Generals inside the Pentagon just have too much fun fear-mongering about illusory existential enemies.

Of course that does not dismiss the charges of cronyism and corruption associated with Ursula von der Leyen. But re:

But there is more to the von der Leyen story. As Politico recently reported, "an investigative committee of the German parliament -- the toughest instrument that lawmakers can use to probe government misdeeds -- is digging into how lucrative contracts from her ministry were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight , and whether a network of informal personal connections facilitated those deals."

Yet another U.S. mirror image. Because that is exactly how inside baseball works in the Pentagon acquisition system. von der Leyen as a European Hack is no worse than the Washington / Pentagon Hacks on the other side of the Atlantic. Note, MIC lifer and Raytheon parasite Mark Esper currently sitting in the Big Seat in the Pentagon. You can be sure that DoD reform is way down on his bucket list.

The real story is that taxpayers on both NATO poles are played for chumps by the Power Elites.

[Jul 22, 2019] War Profiteers And The Demise Of The US Military-Industrial Complex

Jul 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Dmitry Orlov via Club Orlov blog,

Within the vast bureaucratic sprawl of the Pentagon there is a group in charge of monitoring the general state of the military-industrial complex and its continued ability to fulfill the requirements of the national defense strategy. Office for acquisition and sustainment and office for industrial policy spends some $100,000 a year producing an Annual Report to Congress. It is available to the general public. It is even available to the general public in Russia, and Russian experts had a really good time poring over it.

In fact, it filled them with optimism. You see, Russia wants peace but the US seems to want war and keeps making threatening gestures against a longish list of countries that refuse to do its bidding or simply don't share its "universal values." But now it turns out that threats (and the increasingly toothless economic sanctions) are pretty much all that the US is still capable of dishing out -- this in spite of absolutely astronomical levels of defense spending.

Let's see what the US military-industrial complex looks like through a Russian lens.

It is important to note that the report's authors were not aiming to force legislators to finance some specific project. This makes it more valuable than numerous other sources, whose authors' main objective was to belly up to the federal feeding trough, and which therefore tend to be light on facts and heavy on hype. No doubt, politics still played a part in how various details are portrayed, but there seems to be a limit to the number of problems its authors can airbrush out of the picture and still do a reasonable job in analyzing the situation and in formulating their recommendations.

What knocked Russian analysis over with a feather is the fact that these INDPOL experts (who, like the rest of the US DOD, love acronyms) evaluate the US military-industrial complex from a market-based perspective! You see, the Russian military-industrial complex is fully owned by the Russian government and works exclusively in its interests; anything else would be considered treason. But the US military-industrial complex is evaluated based on its profitability! According to INDPOL, it must not only produce products for the military but also acquire market share in the global weapons trade and, perhaps most importantly, maximize profitability for private investors. By this standard, it is doing well: for 2017 the gross margin (EBITDA) for US defense contractors ranged from 15 to 17%, and some subcontractors - Transdigm, for example - managed to deliver no less than 42-45%. "Ah!" cry the Russian experts, "We've found the problem! The Americans have legalized war profiteering !" (This, by the way, is but one of many instances of something called systemic corruption, which is rife in the US.)

It would be one thing if each defense contractor simply took its cut off the top, but instead there is an entire food chain of defense contractors, all of which are legally required, no less, to maximize profits for their shareholders. More than 28,000 companies are involved, but the actual first-tier defense contractors with which the Pentagon places 2/3 of all defense contracts are just the Big Six: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynmics, BAE Systems and Boeing. All the other companies are organized into a pyramid of subcontractors with five levels of hierarchy, and at each level they do their best to milk the tier above them.

The insistence on market-based methods and the requirement of maximizing profitability turns out to be incompatible with defense spending on a very basic level: defense spending is intermittent and cyclical, with long fallow intervals between major orders. This has forced even the Big Six to make cuts to their defense-directed departments in favor of expanding civilian production. Also, in spite of the huge size of the US defense budget, it is of finite size (there being just one planet to blow up), as is the global weapons market. Since, in a market economy, every company faces the choice of grow or get bought out, this has precipitated scores of mergers and acquisitions, resulting in a highly consolidated marketplace with a few major players in each space.

As a result, in most spaces, of which the report's authors discuss 17, including the Navy, land forces, air force, electronics, nuclear weapons, space technology and so on, at least a third of the time the Pentagon has a choice of exactly one contractor for any given contract, causing quality and timeliness to suffer and driving up prices.

In a number of cases, in spite of its industrial and financial might, the Pentagon has encountered insoluble problems. Specifically, it turns out that the US has only one shipyard left that is capable of building nuclear aircraft carriers (at all, that is; the USS Gerald Ford is not exactly a success). That is Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport, Virginia. In theory, it could work on three ships in parallel, but two of the slips are permanently occupied by existing aircraft carriers that require maintenance. This is not a unique case: the number of shipyards capable of building nuclear submarines, destroyers and other types of vessels is also exactly one. Thus, in case of a protracted conflict with a serious adversary in which a significant portion of the US Navy has been sunk, ships will be impossible to replace within any reasonable amount of time.

The situation is somewhat better with regard to aircraft manufacturing. The plants that exist can produce 40 planes a month and could produce 130 a month if pressed. On the other hand, the situation with tanks and artillery is absolutely dismal. According to this report, the US has completely lost the competency for building the new generation of tanks. It is no longer even a question of missing plant and equipment; in the US, a second generation of engineers who have never designed a tank is currently going into retirement. Their replacements have no one to learn from and only know about modern tanks from movies and video games. As far as artillery, there is just one remaining production line in the US that can produce barrels larger than 40mm; it is fully booked up and would be unable to ramp up production in case of war. The contractor is unwilling to expand production without the Pentagon guaranteeing at least 45% utilization, since that would be unprofitable.

The situation is similar for the entire list of areas; it is better for dual-use technologies that can be sourced from civilian companies and significantly worse for highly specialized ones. Unit cost for every type of military equipment goes up year after year while the volumes being acquired continuously trend lower -- sometimes all the way to zero. Over the past 15 years the US hasn't acquired a single new tank. They keep modernizing the old ones, but at a rate that's no higher than 100 a year.

Because of all these tendencies and trends, the defense industry continues to lose not only qualified personnel but also the very ability to perform the work. INDPOL experts estimate that the deficit in machine tools has reached 27%. Over the past quarter-century the US has stopped manufacturing a wide variety of manufacturing equipment. Only half of these tools can be imported from allies or friendly nations; for the rest, there is just one source: China. They analyzed the supply chains for 600 of the most important types of weapons and found that a third of them have breaks in them while another third have completely broken down. In the Pentagon's five-tier subcontractor pyramid, component manufacturers are almost always relegated to the bottommost tier, and the notices they issue when they terminate production or shut down completely tend to drown in the Pentagon's bureaucratic swamp.

The end result of all this is that theoretically the Pentagon is still capable of doing small production runs of weapons to compensate for ongoing losses in localized, low-intensity conflicts during a general time of peace, but even today this is at the extreme end of its capabilities. In case of a serious conflict with any well-armed nation, all it will be able to rely on is the existing stockpile of ordnance and spare parts, which will be quickly depleted.

A similar situation prevails in the area of rare earth elements and other materials for producing electronics. At the moment, the accumulated stockpile of these supplies needed for producing missiles and space technology -- most importantly, satellites -- is sufficient for five years at the current rate of use.

The report specifically calls out the dire situation in the area of strategic nuclear weapons. Almost all the technology for communications, targeting, trajectory calculations and arming of the ICBM warheads was developed in the 1960s and 70s. To this day, data is loaded from 5-inch floppy diskettes, which were last mass-produced 15 years ago. There are no replacements for them and the people who designed them are busy pushing up daisies. The choice is between buying tiny production runs of all the consumables at an extravagant expense and developing from scratch the entire land-based strategic triad component at the cost of three annual Pentagon budgets.

There are lots of specific problems in each area described in the report, but the main one is loss of competence among technical and engineering staff caused by a low level of orders for replacements or for new product development. The situation is such that promising new theoretical developments coming out of research centers such as DARPA cannot be realized given the present set of technical competencies. For a number of key specializations there are fewer than three dozen trained, experienced specialists.

This situation is expected to continue to deteriorate, with the number of personnel employed in the defense sector declining 11-16% over the next decade, mainly due to a shortage of young candidates qualified to replace those who are retiring. A specific example: development work on the F-35 is nearing completion and there won't be a need to develop a new jet fighter until 2035-2040; in the meantime, the personnel who were involved in its development will be idled and their level of competence will deteriorate.

Although at the moment the US still leads the world in defense spending ($610 billion of $1.7 trillion in 2017, which is roughly 36% of all the military spending on the planet) the US economy is no longer able to support the entire technology pyramid even in a time of relative peace and prosperity. On paper the US still looks like a leader in military technology, but the foundations of its military supremacy have eroded. Results of this are plainly visible:

All of this points to the fact that the US is no longer much a military power at all. This is good news for at least the following four reasons.

First, the US is by far the most belligerent country on Earth, having invaded scores of nations and continuing to occupy many of them. The fact that it can't fight any more means that opportunities for peace are bound to increase.

Second, once the news sinks in that the Pentagon is nothing more than a flush toilet for public funds its funding will be cut off and the population of the US might see the money that is currently fattening up war profiteers being spent on some roads and bridges, although it's looking far more likely that it will all go into paying interest expense on federal debt (while supplies last).

Third, US politicians will lose the ability to keep the populace in a state of permanent anxiety about "national security." In fact, the US has "natural security" -- two oceans -- and doesn't need much national defense at all (provided it keeps to itself and doesn't try to make trouble for others). The Canadians aren't going to invade, and while the southern border does need some guarding, that can be taken care of at the state/county level by some good ol' boys using weapons and ammo they already happen to have on hand. Once this $1.7 trillion "national defense" monkey is off their backs, ordinary American citizens will be able to work less, play more and feel less aggressive, anxious, depressed and paranoid.

Last but not least, it will be wonderful to see the war profiteers reduced to scraping under sofa cushions for loose change. All that the US military has been able to produce for a long time now is misery, the technical term for which is "humanitarian disaster." Look at the aftermath of US military involvement in Serbia/Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and what do you see? You see misery -- both for the locals and for US citizens who lost their family members, had their limbs blown off, or are now suffering from PTSD or brain injury. It would be only fair if that misery were to circle back to those who had profited from it.

Tags War Conflict

[Jul 21, 2019] Breaking: Clinton Just Got Devastating News

Highly recommended!
Epstein issue and his connection to Clinton mafia was raised by press in 2016 but went nowhere.
The fact that Trump campaign targeted Clinton for his connection with Epstein means that Trump is probably was not involved as a client of Epstein brothel with underage prostitutes for high ranking politicians .
Notable quotes:
"... Now Bill Clinton is back in the press and not for his controversial relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but rather his friendship with Epstein. In fact, flight records indicate that Bill would frequent the island paradise during the 2002 and 2005 era while Hillary, Bill's wife, was a Senator in New York. ..."
"... The woman went on to say how orgies were a regular occurrence and that she recalled two young girls from New York who were always seen around the five-house compound but their personal back-stories were never revealed. ..."
"... Moreover, Epstein was invited to Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010 amongst 400 other guests, demonstrating his close friendship with the Clinton family. ..."
"... To top it all off blue blood, "Prince Andrew was allegedly one of the house's visitors. On Friday, the Duke of York was named in a federal lawsuit filed against Epstein, whom the FBI once reportedly linked to 40 young women. Filed in 2008 in the Southern District of Florida, the $50 million lawsuit claimed Epstein had a "sexual preference and obsession for underage minor girls gained access to primarily economically disadvantaged minor girls in his home and sexually assaulted these girls,"reported the Washington Post. ..."
Aug 12, 2016 | beforeitsnews.com

... ... ...

Back in 2005 police conducted an 11 month-long undercover investigation into Epstein and his estate after the mother of a 14-year-old girl went to police after suspecting her daughter was paid $300 for at least one sexual act on the island in which she was ordered to strip, leaving on just her panties, while giving Epstein a massage.

Although police found tons of photos of young women on the island and even interviewed eyewitnesses, Epstein was hit with a mere slap on the wrist after "pleading to a single charge of prostitution". Epstein later served 13-months of his 18-month service in jail.

In 2008, Epstein was hit again, this time with a $50 million civil suit after another victim filed in federal court claiming that she was "recruited" by Epstein to give him a "massage" but was essentially forced into having sexual intercourse with him for $200 which was payable upon completion. The women were coming out of the woodwork.

Now Bill Clinton is back in the press and not for his controversial relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but rather his friendship with Epstein. In fact, flight records indicate that Bill would frequent the island paradise during the 2002 and 2005 era while Hillary, Bill's wife, was a Senator in New York.

'I remember asking Jeffrey what's Bill Clinton doing here kind of thing, and he laughed it off and said well he owes me a favor,' one unidentified woman said in the lawsuit, which was filed in Palm Beach Circuit Court.

The woman went on to say how orgies were a regular occurrence and that she recalled two young girls from New York who were always seen around the five-house compound but their personal back-stories were never revealed.

"At least one woman on the compound was there unwillingly," reported the Daily Mail in a recent article. The woman was allegedly forced to have sex with "politicians, businessmen, royalty, academicians" at the retreat. Just one of "more than 40 women" that have come forth with claims against Epstein, showing the vast scale of the man's dark operations, which aren't limited only to Little St. James.

Moreover, Epstein was invited to Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010 amongst 400 other guests, demonstrating his close friendship with the Clinton family.

To top it all off blue blood, "Prince Andrew was allegedly one of the house's visitors. On Friday, the Duke of York was named in a federal lawsuit filed against Epstein, whom the FBI once reportedly linked to 40 young women. Filed in 2008 in the Southern District of Florida, the $50 million lawsuit claimed Epstein had a "sexual preference and obsession for underage minor girls gained access to primarily economically disadvantaged minor girls in his home and sexually assaulted these girls,"reported the Washington Post.

[Jul 21, 2019] Breaking: Clinton Just Got Devastating News

Highly recommended!
Epstein issue and his connection to Clinton mafia was raised by press in 2016 but went nowhere.
The fact that Trump campaign targeted Clinton for his connection with Epstein means that Trump is probably was not involved as a client of Epstein brothel with underage prostitutes for high ranking politicians .
Notable quotes:
"... Now Bill Clinton is back in the press and not for his controversial relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but rather his friendship with Epstein. In fact, flight records indicate that Bill would frequent the island paradise during the 2002 and 2005 era while Hillary, Bill's wife, was a Senator in New York. ..."
"... The woman went on to say how orgies were a regular occurrence and that she recalled two young girls from New York who were always seen around the five-house compound but their personal back-stories were never revealed. ..."
"... Moreover, Epstein was invited to Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010 amongst 400 other guests, demonstrating his close friendship with the Clinton family. ..."
"... To top it all off blue blood, "Prince Andrew was allegedly one of the house's visitors. On Friday, the Duke of York was named in a federal lawsuit filed against Epstein, whom the FBI once reportedly linked to 40 young women. Filed in 2008 in the Southern District of Florida, the $50 million lawsuit claimed Epstein had a "sexual preference and obsession for underage minor girls gained access to primarily economically disadvantaged minor girls in his home and sexually assaulted these girls,"reported the Washington Post. ..."
Aug 12, 2016 | beforeitsnews.com

... ... ...

Back in 2005 police conducted an 11 month-long undercover investigation into Epstein and his estate after the mother of a 14-year-old girl went to police after suspecting her daughter was paid $300 for at least one sexual act on the island in which she was ordered to strip, leaving on just her panties, while giving Epstein a massage.

Although police found tons of photos of young women on the island and even interviewed eyewitnesses, Epstein was hit with a mere slap on the wrist after "pleading to a single charge of prostitution". Epstein later served 13-months of his 18-month service in jail.

In 2008, Epstein was hit again, this time with a $50 million civil suit after another victim filed in federal court claiming that she was "recruited" by Epstein to give him a "massage" but was essentially forced into having sexual intercourse with him for $200 which was payable upon completion. The women were coming out of the woodwork.

Now Bill Clinton is back in the press and not for his controversial relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but rather his friendship with Epstein. In fact, flight records indicate that Bill would frequent the island paradise during the 2002 and 2005 era while Hillary, Bill's wife, was a Senator in New York.

'I remember asking Jeffrey what's Bill Clinton doing here kind of thing, and he laughed it off and said well he owes me a favor,' one unidentified woman said in the lawsuit, which was filed in Palm Beach Circuit Court.

The woman went on to say how orgies were a regular occurrence and that she recalled two young girls from New York who were always seen around the five-house compound but their personal back-stories were never revealed.

"At least one woman on the compound was there unwillingly," reported the Daily Mail in a recent article. The woman was allegedly forced to have sex with "politicians, businessmen, royalty, academicians" at the retreat. Just one of "more than 40 women" that have come forth with claims against Epstein, showing the vast scale of the man's dark operations, which aren't limited only to Little St. James.

Moreover, Epstein was invited to Chelsea Clinton's wedding in 2010 amongst 400 other guests, demonstrating his close friendship with the Clinton family.

To top it all off blue blood, "Prince Andrew was allegedly one of the house's visitors. On Friday, the Duke of York was named in a federal lawsuit filed against Epstein, whom the FBI once reportedly linked to 40 young women. Filed in 2008 in the Southern District of Florida, the $50 million lawsuit claimed Epstein had a "sexual preference and obsession for underage minor girls gained access to primarily economically disadvantaged minor girls in his home and sexually assaulted these girls,"reported the Washington Post.

[Jul 21, 2019] Merchants of Death business uber alles" as the new interpretation of "Drain the Swamp" election time slogan by Trump administration

"Drain the swamp" now means good times for Raytheon.
Jul 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

rwe2late , 1 hour ago link

Draining the swamp means hiring the lobbyists

- Orwell

...err, I meant Trump.

War is Peace

- well, now that's Orwell

(and many others in government and elsewhere)

Klassenfeind , 2 hours ago link

The Donald Trump Administration is looking more and more like George W. Bush's Administration: a dumb clueless idiot surrounded by neocons.

Remember Donald Rumsfeld , Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton , George Tenet, Henry Paulson, Paul Wolfowitz , and **** Cheney from the George W Bush Administration?

Tell me Trumptards, what's so "different this time" about Donald Trump hiring Bolton, Pompeo, Mattis/Shanahan/Esper, Haley, Haspel and Mnuchin?

[Jul 21, 2019] Merchants of Death business uber alles" as the new interpretation of "Drain the Swamp" election time slogan by Trump administration

"Drain the swamp" now means good times for Raytheon.
Jul 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

rwe2late , 1 hour ago link

Draining the swamp means hiring the lobbyists

- Orwell

...err, I meant Trump.

War is Peace

- well, now that's Orwell

(and many others in government and elsewhere)

Klassenfeind , 2 hours ago link

The Donald Trump Administration is looking more and more like George W. Bush's Administration: a dumb clueless idiot surrounded by neocons.

Remember Donald Rumsfeld , Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton , George Tenet, Henry Paulson, Paul Wolfowitz , and **** Cheney from the George W Bush Administration?

Tell me Trumptards, what's so "different this time" about Donald Trump hiring Bolton, Pompeo, Mattis/Shanahan/Esper, Haley, Haspel and Mnuchin?

[Jul 20, 2019] New US Pentagon Chief Vested Interest in War Conflict

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "President Trump's Cabinet is already rife with corruption, stocked full of former lobbyists and other private industry power players who don't seem to mind leveraging their government positions to enrich themselves personally. Esper should fit right in," ..."
"... The linkage between officials in US government, the Pentagon and private manufacturers is a notorious example of "revolving door". It is not unusual, or even remarkable, that individuals go from one sector to another and vice versa. That crony relationship is fundamental to the functioning of the "military-industrial complex" which dominates the entire American economy and the fiscal budget ($730 billion annually – half the total discretionary public spend by federal government). ..."
"... Raytheon is a $25 billion company whose business is all about selling missile-defense systems. Its products have been deployed in dozens of countries, including in the Middle East, as well as Japan, Romania and, as of next year, Poland. It is in Raytheon's vital vested interest to capitalize on alleged security threats from Iran, Russia, China and North Korea in order to sell "defense" systems to nations that then perceive a "threat" and need to be "protected". ..."
"... It is a certainty that Esper shares the same worldview, not just for engrained ideological reasons, but also because of his own personal motives for self-aggrandizement as a former employee of Raytheon and quite possibly as a future board member when he retires from the Pentagon. ..."
"... It is also about how US foreign policy and military decisions are formulated and executed, including decisions on matters of conflict and ultimately war. The insidiousness is almost farcical, if the implications weren't so disturbing, worthy of satire from the genre of Dr Strangelove or Catch 22. ..."
"... During senate hearings this week, Esper openly revealed his dubious quality of thinking and the kind of policies he will pursue as Pentagon chief. He told credulous senators that Russia was to blame for the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. That equates to more Raytheon profits from selling defense systems in Europe. ..."
"... It is ludicrous how blatant a so-called democratic nation (the self-declared "leader of the free world") is in actuality an oligarchic corporate state whose international relations are conducted on the basis of making obscene profits from conflict and war. ..."
Jul 20, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

Mark Esper is expected to be confirmed in coming days as the new US Secretary of Defense. His appointment is awaiting final Congressional approval after customary hearings this week before senators. The 55-year-old nominee put forward by President Trump was previously a decorated Lieutenant Colonel and has served in government office during the GW Bush administration.

But what stands out as his most conspicuous past occupation is working for seven years as a senior lobbyist for Raytheon, the US' third biggest military manufacturing company. The firm specializes in missile-defense systems, including the Patriot, Iron Dome and the Aegis Ashore system (the latter in partnership with Lockheed Martin).

As Defense Secretary, Esper will be the most senior civilian executive member of the US government, next to the president, on overseeing military policy, including decisions about declaring war and deployment of American armed forces around the globe. His military counterpart at the Pentagon is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, currently held by Marine General Joseph Dunford who is expected to be replaced soon by General Mark Milley (also in the process of senate hearings).

Esper's confirmation hearings this week were pretty much a rubber-stamp procedure, receiving lame questioning from senators about his credentials and viewpoints. The only exception was Senator Elizabeth Warren, who slammed the potential "conflict of interest" due to his past lobbying service for Raytheon. She said it "smacks of corruption". Other than her solitary objection, Esper was treated with kid gloves by other senators and his appointment is expected to be whistled through by next week. During hearings, the former lobbyist even pointedly refused to recuse himself of any matters involving Raytheon if he becomes the defense boss.

As Rolling Stone magazine quipped on Esper's nomination, "it is as swampy as you'd expect".

"President Trump's Cabinet is already rife with corruption, stocked full of former lobbyists and other private industry power players who don't seem to mind leveraging their government positions to enrich themselves personally. Esper should fit right in," wrote Rolling Stone.

The linkage between officials in US government, the Pentagon and private manufacturers is a notorious example of "revolving door". It is not unusual, or even remarkable, that individuals go from one sector to another and vice versa. That crony relationship is fundamental to the functioning of the "military-industrial complex" which dominates the entire American economy and the fiscal budget ($730 billion annually – half the total discretionary public spend by federal government).

Nevertheless, Esper is a particularly brazen embodiment of the revolving-door's seamless connection.

Raytheon is a $25 billion company whose business is all about selling missile-defense systems. Its products have been deployed in dozens of countries, including in the Middle East, as well as Japan, Romania and, as of next year, Poland. It is in Raytheon's vital vested interest to capitalize on alleged security threats from Iran, Russia, China and North Korea in order to sell "defense" systems to nations that then perceive a "threat" and need to be "protected".

It is a certainty that Esper shares the same worldview, not just for engrained ideological reasons, but also because of his own personal motives for self-aggrandizement as a former employee of Raytheon and quite possibly as a future board member when he retires from the Pentagon. The issue is not just merely about corruption and ethics, huge that those concerns are.

It is also about how US foreign policy and military decisions are formulated and executed, including decisions on matters of conflict and ultimately war. The insidiousness is almost farcical, if the implications weren't so disturbing, worthy of satire from the genre of Dr Strangelove or Catch 22.

How is Esper's advice to the president about tensions with Russia, Iran, China or North Korea, or any other alleged adversary, supposed to be independent, credible or objective? Esper is a de facto lobbyist for the military-industrial complex sitting in the Oval Office and Situation Room. Tensions, conflict and war are meat and potatoes to this person.

During senate hearings this week, Esper openly revealed his dubious quality of thinking and the kind of policies he will pursue as Pentagon chief. He told credulous senators that Russia was to blame for the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. That equates to more Raytheon profits from selling defense systems in Europe. Also, in a clumsy inadvertent admission he advised that the US needs to get out of the INF in order to develop medium-range missiles to "counter China". The latter admission explains the cynical purpose for why the Trump administration unilaterally ditched the INF earlier this year. It is not about alleged Russian breaches of the treaty; the real reason is for the US to obtain a freer hand to confront China.

It is ludicrous how blatant a so-called democratic nation (the self-declared "leader of the free world") is in actuality an oligarchic corporate state whose international relations are conducted on the basis of making obscene profits from conflict and war.

Little wonder then than bilateral relations between the US and Russia are in such dire condition. Trump's soon-to-be top military advisor Mark Esper is not going to make bilateral relations any better, that's for sure.

Also at a precarious time of possible war with Iran, the last person Trump should consult is someone whose corporate cronies are craving for more weapons sales. The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

Tags: Esper INF Treaty Pentagon US

[Jul 20, 2019] New US Pentagon Chief Vested Interest in War Conflict

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "President Trump's Cabinet is already rife with corruption, stocked full of former lobbyists and other private industry power players who don't seem to mind leveraging their government positions to enrich themselves personally. Esper should fit right in," ..."
"... The linkage between officials in US government, the Pentagon and private manufacturers is a notorious example of "revolving door". It is not unusual, or even remarkable, that individuals go from one sector to another and vice versa. That crony relationship is fundamental to the functioning of the "military-industrial complex" which dominates the entire American economy and the fiscal budget ($730 billion annually – half the total discretionary public spend by federal government). ..."
"... Raytheon is a $25 billion company whose business is all about selling missile-defense systems. Its products have been deployed in dozens of countries, including in the Middle East, as well as Japan, Romania and, as of next year, Poland. It is in Raytheon's vital vested interest to capitalize on alleged security threats from Iran, Russia, China and North Korea in order to sell "defense" systems to nations that then perceive a "threat" and need to be "protected". ..."
"... It is a certainty that Esper shares the same worldview, not just for engrained ideological reasons, but also because of his own personal motives for self-aggrandizement as a former employee of Raytheon and quite possibly as a future board member when he retires from the Pentagon. ..."
"... It is also about how US foreign policy and military decisions are formulated and executed, including decisions on matters of conflict and ultimately war. The insidiousness is almost farcical, if the implications weren't so disturbing, worthy of satire from the genre of Dr Strangelove or Catch 22. ..."
"... During senate hearings this week, Esper openly revealed his dubious quality of thinking and the kind of policies he will pursue as Pentagon chief. He told credulous senators that Russia was to blame for the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. That equates to more Raytheon profits from selling defense systems in Europe. ..."
"... It is ludicrous how blatant a so-called democratic nation (the self-declared "leader of the free world") is in actuality an oligarchic corporate state whose international relations are conducted on the basis of making obscene profits from conflict and war. ..."
Jul 20, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

Mark Esper is expected to be confirmed in coming days as the new US Secretary of Defense. His appointment is awaiting final Congressional approval after customary hearings this week before senators. The 55-year-old nominee put forward by President Trump was previously a decorated Lieutenant Colonel and has served in government office during the GW Bush administration.

But what stands out as his most conspicuous past occupation is working for seven years as a senior lobbyist for Raytheon, the US' third biggest military manufacturing company. The firm specializes in missile-defense systems, including the Patriot, Iron Dome and the Aegis Ashore system (the latter in partnership with Lockheed Martin).

As Defense Secretary, Esper will be the most senior civilian executive member of the US government, next to the president, on overseeing military policy, including decisions about declaring war and deployment of American armed forces around the globe. His military counterpart at the Pentagon is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, currently held by Marine General Joseph Dunford who is expected to be replaced soon by General Mark Milley (also in the process of senate hearings).

Esper's confirmation hearings this week were pretty much a rubber-stamp procedure, receiving lame questioning from senators about his credentials and viewpoints. The only exception was Senator Elizabeth Warren, who slammed the potential "conflict of interest" due to his past lobbying service for Raytheon. She said it "smacks of corruption". Other than her solitary objection, Esper was treated with kid gloves by other senators and his appointment is expected to be whistled through by next week. During hearings, the former lobbyist even pointedly refused to recuse himself of any matters involving Raytheon if he becomes the defense boss.

As Rolling Stone magazine quipped on Esper's nomination, "it is as swampy as you'd expect".

"President Trump's Cabinet is already rife with corruption, stocked full of former lobbyists and other private industry power players who don't seem to mind leveraging their government positions to enrich themselves personally. Esper should fit right in," wrote Rolling Stone.

The linkage between officials in US government, the Pentagon and private manufacturers is a notorious example of "revolving door". It is not unusual, or even remarkable, that individuals go from one sector to another and vice versa. That crony relationship is fundamental to the functioning of the "military-industrial complex" which dominates the entire American economy and the fiscal budget ($730 billion annually – half the total discretionary public spend by federal government).

Nevertheless, Esper is a particularly brazen embodiment of the revolving-door's seamless connection.

Raytheon is a $25 billion company whose business is all about selling missile-defense systems. Its products have been deployed in dozens of countries, including in the Middle East, as well as Japan, Romania and, as of next year, Poland. It is in Raytheon's vital vested interest to capitalize on alleged security threats from Iran, Russia, China and North Korea in order to sell "defense" systems to nations that then perceive a "threat" and need to be "protected".

It is a certainty that Esper shares the same worldview, not just for engrained ideological reasons, but also because of his own personal motives for self-aggrandizement as a former employee of Raytheon and quite possibly as a future board member when he retires from the Pentagon. The issue is not just merely about corruption and ethics, huge that those concerns are.

It is also about how US foreign policy and military decisions are formulated and executed, including decisions on matters of conflict and ultimately war. The insidiousness is almost farcical, if the implications weren't so disturbing, worthy of satire from the genre of Dr Strangelove or Catch 22.

How is Esper's advice to the president about tensions with Russia, Iran, China or North Korea, or any other alleged adversary, supposed to be independent, credible or objective? Esper is a de facto lobbyist for the military-industrial complex sitting in the Oval Office and Situation Room. Tensions, conflict and war are meat and potatoes to this person.

During senate hearings this week, Esper openly revealed his dubious quality of thinking and the kind of policies he will pursue as Pentagon chief. He told credulous senators that Russia was to blame for the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. That equates to more Raytheon profits from selling defense systems in Europe. Also, in a clumsy inadvertent admission he advised that the US needs to get out of the INF in order to develop medium-range missiles to "counter China". The latter admission explains the cynical purpose for why the Trump administration unilaterally ditched the INF earlier this year. It is not about alleged Russian breaches of the treaty; the real reason is for the US to obtain a freer hand to confront China.

It is ludicrous how blatant a so-called democratic nation (the self-declared "leader of the free world") is in actuality an oligarchic corporate state whose international relations are conducted on the basis of making obscene profits from conflict and war.

Little wonder then than bilateral relations between the US and Russia are in such dire condition. Trump's soon-to-be top military advisor Mark Esper is not going to make bilateral relations any better, that's for sure.

Also at a precarious time of possible war with Iran, the last person Trump should consult is someone whose corporate cronies are craving for more weapons sales. The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

Tags: Esper INF Treaty Pentagon US

[Jul 20, 2019] I want so much to sic Tulsi on creepy, Tio Joe, accomplice of banksters and credit card companies and also of the serial drone murderer.

Jul 20, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Add his violations of personal space of women and children and he's a perfect candidate for a RICO prosecution, not POTUS.

Oh, well, Warren's on deck; and, if she goes down (no pun intended), there are the unsweet sixteen or so more. Anybody but Bernie, Tulsi or Gravel is no doubt the hope of the establishment, including the PTB of the Democratic Party.

Is Bernie perfect? God, no. None of them are, including Tulsi. Are Bernie and Tulsi evil? I don't think so. I think, at worst, Bernie is doing what he thinks he must in order to represent the people of Vermont and, if he can win, the people of the other forty-nine states, too.

I will not vote for anyone who I believe to be evil, but I will vote for Bernie or Tulsi in the Democratic primary. If nothing else, that will mean one more vote against the rest of the pack...

[Jul 20, 2019] The European Union's New Executive Kowtows to the Left

Jul 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Ursula von der Leyen arrives clouded in scandal and ready to implement radical economic policies that will stifle growth.

like Jean-Claude Juncker, she arrives in Brussels with a record of negligence in her country of origin. Whereas Juncker was accused of failing in his duty to inform the Luxembourg Parliament of illegal wiretapping by the intelligence service, von der Leyen was denounced for mismanagement. In October 2018, when she was still Germany's minister of defense, she admitted that her department had made mistakes in awarding contracts to external consultants, amounting to several hundred million euros.

In 2012, Josep Borrell, former president of the European Parliament and former minister in various Spanish socialist governments, was forced to resign from his position as president of the European University Institute (UIE) following allegations of conflicts of interest. At that time, he was receiving €300,000 as a member of the board of directors of the Spanish sustainable energy company Abengoa, while at the same time promoting biofuels through the institute.

Nevertheless, alongside von der Leyen, Borrell is about to be confirmed as the new head of EU diplomacy. Another perfect candidate.

The scandal in Berlin is not the only reason the vote for Von der Leyen was narrow. It was also that socialists and environmentalists weren't given sufficient trade-offs (in their eyes). The European Union is all about distributing the large number of positions and policy priorities between the involved parties, and in this case, the left felt shafted.

The Nationalists Who Could Take Over the European Union Stopped Clocks: The European Union Gets War With Iran Exactly Right

A source from the PiS party (the ruling party in Poland) told journalist Oskar Górzyński of the media company Wirtualna Polska that it was a call from Chancellor Angela Merkel that tipped some Polish MEPs over. What did Mrs. Merkel promise them? More agricultural subsidies? The abandonment of the Article 7 sanction procedure against judicial reforms in Poland? Only Merkel knows that and she won't tell.

Bill Wirtz comments on European politics and policy in English, French, and German. His work has appeared in Newsweek, the Washington Examiner, CityAM, Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Die Welt.

[Jul 20, 2019] The Decline of Our Nation's Generals by Andrew Bacevich

Jul 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

... ... ...

The clichés poured forth from Milley's lips with all the practiced smarminess of a car salesman promoting a new line of pickup trucks. But what does this mean in practice, Senator James Inhofe, Senate Armed Services Committee chair, wanted to know? What is General Milley's top priority?

"The very number one for me," Milley replied, "is the modernization, recapitalization of the nation's nuclear triad."

Now pause here for a moment. The triad -- the claim that the safety and security of the United States requires a nuclear strike force consisting of long-range bombers and long-range land-based missiles and missile-firing submarines -- represented fresh thinking some 60 years ago. That was when ICBMs and Polaris submarines were entering service to complement Strategic Air Command's fleet of B47s and B52s. If indeed "the fundamental character of war is changing rapidly," how can it be that Milley's conception of originality is to field glitzier versions of weapons dating back to when he was born? To make such a claim is on a par with arguing that what the U.S. Army needed in 1940 was more horses and the U.S. Navy more battleships.

It is small wonder that so few observers pay serious attention to what senior military officers have to say. What they say is mostly drivel.

Andrew Bacevich is TAC 's writer-at-large and a co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

TomG • 17 hours ago

"What they say is mostly drivel."

Pathetic, expensive, immoral, divisive, destructive drivel with no end in sight...

JohnT • 17 hours ago
Wow! Finally! No retreat to the comfort of broad generalization like "the eilites" but rather a well considered, on target consideration of one of the individuals in a position of power and responsibility sufficient to make the absolutely necessary changes our remarkable nation's health demands. Thank you!
And, if the general can't make use of well a intended and considered constructive critique he is not the experienced, compassionate adult the task requires.
SteveM • 15 hours ago
It is small wonder that so few observers pay serious attention to what senior military officers have to say. What they say is mostly drivel.


Professor Bacevich has this one exactly backwards. Notice that when the sanctified Pentagon Generals make their fear-monger saturated pronouncements there is zero pushback from either the Politicos or the lapdog MSM. It is not that they are not listening. It's that they fully concur because they are intimidated by anyone wearing Stars on their shoulders.

They accept the "drivel" of the Pentagon Brass by default. BTW, which also includes the includes the updated National Defense Strategy which has the U.S. playing belligerent Global Cop in perpetuity and wasting taxpayer dollars out the wazoo.

If anything, the Congress and MSM should be paying more serious attention to the obsolete and unaffordable pronouncements of the Generals and start questioning their own instinctive deference to Pentagon authority which permits the warped, fully militarized and largely failed U.S. foreign policy to continue as is.

interguru • 15 hours ago
I am not the first person to note that the US is displaying more and more symptoms of a dying empire. To name a few; a broken political system, crony capitalism, a bloated military, use of mercenaries, and unpayable debt.

The other day, while watching some general being interviewed, I noticed another symptom. He, and other contemporary generals, have so many ribbons and metals on their chest that they could be melted down for ore. I found a site that lets me compare our beribboned commanders with those of yesteryear.

Civil War generals had few or no ribbons. World War I's General of the Armies Pershing displays two rows of narrow ribbons. By World War II General Eisenhower showed three ribbon rows. In 1950 General Bradley showed 6 rows ( you can see a detailed picture here ).

The pictures of today's generals and officers are bedazzling. Just one example, The page describing William J. Gainey, USA, Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman, JCS ( not even a general ), shows a picture with at least 8 rows of ribbons, with a list 24 lines long describing 56 awards after accounting for multiple awards.

As our military officers watch the country fall apart, at least they can fondle their decorations.

baldwin • 15 hours ago
The role of the generals and admirals is to advise. They can not make the politicians listen.
Sid Finster • 14 hours ago
The absolute last thing this country needs is celebrity generals, or even generals who hold power in the shadows as a sort of eminence grise.
Kent • 14 hours ago
Andrew J Bacevich does more for the long-term military strength and international standing of the USA than much of the military and political leadership of this country. A true patriot.
bbkingfish • 14 hours ago
Wow. That photograph of Gen. Milley illustrates the author's case beautifully. Worth a thousand words.
marku52 • 13 hours ago
That was amazing. "War is changing rapidly" coupled with "Most important: updating a 60 year old weapon system"

Not a single world about figuring out why every war since Gulf 1 has been an abject failure? Or the threat of our defense manufacturing infrastructure being sold by Wall Street to China? Not a word?

The man can really talk out of both sides of his mouth, can't he? Should do great on Capitol Hill...

Taras77 • 13 hours ago
Not sure how we got to this pathetic stage but my guess is that some of the pomposity is directly related to the armies of press following the generals around in Iraq, e.g. petraeus, et al
As a snarky comment, what in the world is with all of these "impressive" ribbons to the top of these generals' shoulders-from what I understand, about 70-80% of them are meaningless, only a few are for combat, valor, some are for merit, but are more or less automatic. Talk about grade creep, how about ribbon creep.
Ike had about one or two rows, all meaningful awards. Marshall had maybe one row, meaningful awards to a very competent general.

Those generals that came out of Iraq and Afghan were mostly mouth pieces for the press and the politicians, i.e. drivel. None of them could win a meaningful engagement without bombing the heck out of civilians and associated cities. In a word, pathetic.

Thomas Cass • 12 hours ago
Unless politicians feel pressure to act on military matters in a way that honors their or their constituents' lived experiences, how are they to be incentivized to ask the right questions? Some flavor of draft to increase stakeholders among the citizenry, or a service requirement for government office, might realize the serious attention for which Mr. Bacevich protests here, and drive the selection of better leaders.
James B • 11 hours ago
To me for, both the nation and the military, we need to have an update of the high tech weapon systems that the General talks about but we also need to have a reassessment of how we fight wars. The wars the US won are (in my mind) the Revolution and WWII. I think the Civil war was "lost" because although the US defeated the Confederacy it did not reunite the nation. WWI was said to be the war to end all wars - - that didn't happen. No question that both Korea and Vietnam were not won, despite the heroism of those fighting there - - those wars were handled by Washington politics. MacAuthor could have won Korea but was fired. The whole Vietnam was was managed by politics. Now to the middle east. Afghanistan is another example of political warfare as is Iraq and potentially Iran. I believe that a war can be partly won by high tech missiles, bombs, etc. but cannot be actually won except by occupying the ground. We did this in Europe with the troops giving out cigarettes and candy as they patrolled. That made them human to the previous "enemy". Our professional volunteer army doesn't have the manpower to do this. I believe we need to have a secondary low-tech army of drafted men and women who can be trained quickly to be able to follow commands, to use a rifle with accuracy, and to be able to reduce civilian conflict without violent response. The high tech folk require extended training, the low tech force is able to move in and actually win the war. How would this help the nation? It would force people to live and work with a diverse population and realize that we can be a single nation of people of different backgrounds and ethnicity. The "fly over land" people really aren't a bunch of idiot racist red-necks. The coastals are not (all) anxious to destroy America.
Kent James B • 11 hours ago
The US didn't just win in WWII because we occupied the ground. We won because we showed the German people that we were happy to fire bomb entire ancient cities and indiscriminately kill their women and children without a second thought.

And we were the good ones to surrender to. The Russians were happy to kill them all, with the exception of a few pretty blonds who would henceforth bear strong Russian boys.

You can't win a war without utterly defeating an entire population. Which is why we can't win our wars. None of these people have done anything to really harm us. And the American people still have enough dignity to not just slaughter these people for no reason. We're not entirely evil, yet.

Steve Naidamast • 10 hours ago
I have always wondered what such people mean when they say that the character of warfare is changing and the US has to adopt to such changes.

War is about 2 things; killing and destruction. That in a nutshell is the character of war. Anything else may describe the complexities of tactics and strategies or the causes of such conflicts but the actual features of any conflict are always the same.

The only thing that does change is the types of weapon systems used. The stupidity that has led militaries to use them hasn't changed since the dawn of time...

[Jul 20, 2019] House orders Pentagon to say if it weaponized ticks and released them by John M. Donnelly

Notable quotes:
"... If the answer is yes, then the IG must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the experiments' scope and "whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experiment design." The amendment is an attempt to confirm or deny reports that Pentagon researchers -- at places such as Fort Detrick in Maryland and Plum Island in New York -- implanted diseases into insects to learn about the effects of biological weapons and also looked into using such insects to disseminate biological agents. ..."
"... A book called "Bitten," published this year, makes the case that the Defense Department research occurred and hints at a possible connection between the experiments and the spread of maladies such as Lyme disease, which is borne by ticks. ..."
"... Between 300,000 and 427,000 new cases of Lyme disease occur each year, with further growth expected in the years ahead, said Smith, a founding co-chairman of the Congressional Lyme Disease Caucus, which advocates for greater awareness of the disease and for more funding for research into a cure. ..."
"... Pat Smith, president of the Lyme Disease Association, said in an interview Monday that she is hopeful the IG report could provide information that could save lives. ..."
"... "We need to find out: is there anything in this research that was supposedly done that can help us to find information that is germane to patient health and combating the spread of the disease," she said. ..."
Jul 15, 2019 | www.rollcall.com

The House quietly voted last week to require the Pentagon inspector general to tell Congress whether the department experimented with weaponizing disease-carrying insects and whether they were released into the public realm -- either accidentally or on purpose.

The unusual proposal took the form of an amendment that was adopted by voice vote July 11 during House debate on the fiscal 2020 defense authorization bill, which lawmakers passed the following day.

The amendment, by New Jersey Republican Christopher H. Smith , says the inspector general "shall conduct a review of whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975."

If the answer is yes, then the IG must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the experiments' scope and "whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experiment design." The amendment is an attempt to confirm or deny reports that Pentagon researchers -- at places such as Fort Detrick in Maryland and Plum Island in New York -- implanted diseases into insects to learn about the effects of biological weapons and also looked into using such insects to disseminate biological agents.

President Richard Nixon banned U.S. government research into biological weapons in 1969, but research into protecting U.S. military personnel from such agents may have continued, Smith said in an interview Monday.

A book called "Bitten," published this year, makes the case that the Defense Department research occurred and hints at a possible connection between the experiments and the spread of maladies such as Lyme disease, which is borne by ticks.

To Smith and other advocates of the Pentagon IG report, studying the past may provide data that can help stem the spread of Lyme disease in the future.

Between 300,000 and 427,000 new cases of Lyme disease occur each year, with further growth expected in the years ahead, said Smith, a founding co-chairman of the Congressional Lyme Disease Caucus, which advocates for greater awareness of the disease and for more funding for research into a cure.

"We need answers and we need them now," Smith said.

Smith's amendment was co-sponsored by Minnesota Democrat Collin C. Peterson , who is the House caucus's other leader, and by Maryland Republican Andy Harris .

Pat Smith, president of the Lyme Disease Association, said in an interview Monday that she is hopeful the IG report could provide information that could save lives.

"We need to find out: is there anything in this research that was supposedly done that can help us to find information that is germane to patient health and combating the spread of the disease," she said.

It remains to be seen whether Congress will send President Donald Trump a defense authorization bill with the weaponized ticks amendment. The Senate has passed its version without any similar provision, and now House and Senate negotiators must reconcile the two bills.

[Jul 20, 2019] the lyme disease bio-weapon mess has got coverage in Le Monde a couple of days ago

Jul 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mina , Jul 19 2019 14:01 utc | 118

speaking of bugs the lyme disease bio-weapon mess has got coverage in Le Monde a couple of days ago
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/neaxdq/the-conspiracy-theory-thats-got-a-congressman-demanding-a-probe-into-weaponized-ticks
https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/07/17/maladie-de-lyme-les-deputes-americains-veulent-savoir-si-l-armee-a-utilise-des-tiques-comme-armes-biologiques_5490385_3210.html

[Jul 20, 2019] The US Police-State Is Now Undeniable... by Eric Zuesse

Jul 20, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org
It's not just that the United States has a higher percentage of its people in prison than does any other nation on the planet . (El Salvador -- the land that was largely made what it today is, by its US trained-and-equipped death squads -- is now number 2 on that measure. In another country the US controls, Honduras, protesters tried to burn down the US Embassy on 31 May 2019 .)

This police-state operates also in far subtler ways. Here is one of those subtler ways, which has global importance:

The US Constitution has become thoroughly removed from the functioning US Government -- no restraint whatsoever upon governmental powers. For a prominent example of this: What is left of the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech (freedom to communicate to the public) and freedom of the press (freedom to transmit to the public) if even online publication (and increasingly not only printed and broadcast publication) is being censored by the government, and/or by the billionaires (such as the neoconservative Democrat Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter), the 607 individuals whose political donations collectively, and very effectively, control the US Government ?

If the public do not possess the means to communicate freely with one-another, then do they possess any meaningful freedom, at all? Or would such a nation instead be a dictatorship, no democracy, at all (except on paper , such as the now-irrelevant US Constitution)?

... ... ...

Billionaires' control over the US Government is so total, that they now are so brazen as to impose their censorship even directly, by the companies and 'nonprofits' (think tanks etc., such as Dorsey's friend and fellow-Democrat, the liberal neocon billionaire Nicholas Berggruen 's Berggruen Institute , which is tied to the liberal Huffington Post , which such wealthy people control even more directly than they control the USGovernment). This is how these people pretend to be 'progressive', even while they actually are peddling their international corporate empire, by means of hiding the corruption that stands behind and underneath this empire. Even liberal billionaires, such as these, are neoconservatives (US imperialists), because neoconservatism is US imperialism; and, for example, the progressive independent Julian Assange is the world's leading investigative journalist and publisher against imperialism itself -- against any imperialism. To him, there is no decent imperialism: it's always international dictatorship, never international democracy; and he (just as any progressive) is committed to democracy, not just nationally, but internationally. Democracy is his ideological commitment. Americans call American imperialism "regime change" operations, but it's always just raw imperialism -- the grabbing of other countries, and WikiLeaks is against that; he's against international dictatorship. So: how can the public vote in a truthfully-informed way, when the chief corruptors run the entire 'news' show, and thus can freely censor-out whatever they do not like ? It's simply not possible.

How can Dempsey do this, while also being a huge supporter of liberal 'causes', such as the ACLU ? Here is how: The ACLU and the other 'causes' that liberal billionaires contribute to, avoid the issue of imperialism , and avoid any other economic-class-focussed issue, and focus instead on other types of cases (including Black versus White, Jew versus Christian, male versus female, gay versus straight, etc.), which (whatever their own importance) pose no real threat to billionaires' personal wealth. The ACLU wouldn't be able to get the huge amounts of donations that they get from liberal billionaires and their corporations, unless it excluded the basic political issue, of the super-rich versus everyone else, and so it does this: it avoids this issue -- which is what makes it be a liberal organization, instead of a progressive organization (which, by its very nature, focuses on precisely issues of economic class, such as imperialism).

Imperialism has always been practiced by the aristocracy, never by the public -- never by the people who aren't agents of the aristocracy. Many billionaires are liberal. Virtually, if not entirely, none of them are progressive, because progressivism is the opposite of conservatism, whereas liberalism is a mixture of both. Every billionaire is conservative, though some of them (such as Dorsey) are liberal (mixed) conservatives. Not all of them are pure conservatives, such as the Koch brothers are. Every billionaire benefits from imperialism, because international corporations (which are the main thing that billionaires control) benefit from imperialism. Imperialism benefits only the super-rich, because the super-rich have become, and remain, super-rich only because of the military might that enforces their will when international diplomacy (the cheaper alternative) has failed. The entire taxpaying public -- 99+% of which are NOT billionaires -- pays the tab for this enormously expensive global military ( half of which is American). (America has emerged to become today's Sparta .) But the beneficiaries from imperialism are exclusively the super-rich -- it's an enormous public subsidy to international corporations, and to their investors. It's the biggest welfare-program that exists, and it is welfare for only the super-rich, at everybody else's expense. And especially at the expense of the publics in the lands that American billionaires want to grab -- such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Ukraine, Venezuela, China, and Russia. It enormously transfers wealth from the rest of the world, to the world's billionaires.

All of the world's millionaires, put together, are only 0.8% of the world's total population, but they own 44.8% of all of the world's privately owned wealth. The world's poorest 63.9% own just 1.9%. (Those facts are documented on page 20 there.) Thus, the entire poorest 63.9%, which are 3.211 billion people, own around 4% as much as do the few richest 0.8%, which are 42 million people. And, of course, according to Forbes , there are only 2,153 billionaires. So, there's 1 billionaire for every 19,531 millionaires. Billionaires are the rarest of the rare, and they control virtually all international corporations.

Those percentages -- the enormous inequality -- are about the same within the US as they are globally. How is it possible for democracy to exist in such conditions? It's not. Money is power. Corruption runs the world. And America's billionaires are the global masters of it.

...

Billionaires are disunited on lots of things -- for examples: fossil fuels, immigration, feminism -- but they are united in favor of imperialism. And, all throughout history, the aristocracy has been that way: imperialistic.

And America's imprisonment-rate, and the Assange case, are hardly the only indications that the US is no democracy but only a dictatorship. Here are some other such indications.

NOTE: Although in terms of per-capita military expenditure the US is higher than any other country (shown by MSN as being second-highest after Saudi Arabia, but this was only because the US systematically under-reports its actual annual military expenditures), the US is nowhere near the top for the percentage of its population who are employed in the military: it's #75 out of 170 countries , with North Korea being #1 on that. What this demonstrates is the extraordinarily high percentage of America's military expenditures that go to paying not soldiers but the military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Dynamics, the giant weapons-making firms. Those are the firms whose markets are virtually 100% the US Government and its allied regimes or vassal nations (such as NATO), America's allies. The controlling investors in those corporations are the chief beneficiaries of America's police-state. However, extractive corporations such as ExxonMobil are close behind, because only by means of this enormous military are they enabled to offer foreign regimes "an offer they can't refuse." Thus, the arms contractors, and the extractors, control US foreign policies, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Neoconservatism is America's bipartisan foreign policy.

[Jul 20, 2019] Western Interests Aim To Flummox Russia

Notable quotes:
"... One pressure on Putin comes from the Atlanticist Integrationists who have a material stake in their connections to the West and who want Russia to be integrated into the Western world. ..."
"... We agree with President Putin that the sanctions are in fact a benefit to Russia as they have moved Russia in self-sufficient directions and toward developing relationships with China and Asia. ..."
"... It is a self-serving Western myth that Russia needs foreign loans. This myth is enshrined in neoliberal economics, which is a device for Western exploitation and control of other countries. Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists. ..."
"... Neoliberals argue that Russia needs privatization in order to cover its budget deficit. Russia's government debt is only 17 percent of Russian GDP. According to official measures, US federal debt is 104 percent of GDP, 6.1 times higher than in Russia. If US federal debt is measured in real corrected terms, US federal debt is 185 percent of US GDP. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/08/deteriorating-economic-outlook/ ..."
"... Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists. ..."
"... Most of Russia's economic block has to be literally purged from their sinecures, some, indeed, have to be "re-educated" near Magadan or Tyumen, or Saransk. Too bad, two of these places are actually not too bad. Others deserved to be executed. Too bad this jackass Gaidar (actually no blood relation to Arkady whatsoever) died before he could be tried for crimes against humanity and genocide. Albeit, some say he died because of his consciousness couldn't take the burden. Looking at his swine face I, somehow, doubt it. ..."
"... This is not a US vs Russia issue. The real conflict is ... Globalism vs Russian nationalism and American nationalism. But since Jews control the media, they've spread the impression that it's about US vs Russia. ..."
"... Trump is an ultra-zionist for Sheldon Adelson and prolongs & creates wars for the Goldman banking crimesyndicat. ..."
"... Voltaire once said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." ..."
"... You write about Russia but have not done your homework. Russia is very dependent on Western technology and its entire high-tech industry depends on the import of Western machinery. Without such machinery many Russian factories, including military ones, would stall. Very important oil industry is particularly vulnerable. ..."
Mar 03, 2017 | www.unz.com
An article by Robert Berke in oilprice.com, which describes itself as "The No. 1 Source for Oil & Energy News," illustrates how interest groups control outcomes by how they shape policy choices.

Berke's article reveals how the US intends to maintain and extend its hegemony by breaking up the alliance between Russia, Iran, and China, and by oil privatizations that result in countries losing control over their sovereignty to private oil companies that work closely with the US government. As Trump has neutered his presidency by gratuitously accepting Gen. Flynn's resignation as National Security Advisor, this scheme is likely to be Trump's approach to "better relations" with Russia.

Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China. Should Putin fall for such a scheme, it would be a fatal strategic blunder from which Russia could not recover. Yet, Putin will be pressured to make this blunder.

One pressure on Putin comes from the Atlanticist Integrationists who have a material stake in their connections to the West and who want Russia to be integrated into the Western world. Another pressure comes from the affront that sanctions represent to Russians. Removing this insult has become important to Russians even though the sanctions do Russia no material harm.

We agree with President Putin that the sanctions are in fact a benefit to Russia as they have moved Russia in self-sufficient directions and toward developing relationships with China and Asia. Moreover, the West with its hegemonic impulses uses economic relationships for control purposes. Trade with China and Asia does not pose the same threat to Russian independence.

Berke says that part of the deal being offered to Putin is "increased access to the huge European energy market, restored western financial credit, access to Western technology, and a seat at the global decision-making table, all of which Russia badly needs and wants." Sweetening the honey trap is official recognization of "Crimea as part of Russia."

Russia might want all of this, but it is nonsense that Russia needs any of it.

Crimea is part of Russia, as it has been for 300 years, and no one can do anything about it. What would it mean if Mexico did not recognize that Texas and California were part of the US? Nothing.

Europe has scant alternatives to Russian energy. Russia does not need Western technology. Indeed, its military technology is superior to that in the West. And Russia most certainly does not need Western loans. Indeed, it would be an act of insanity to accept them.

It is a self-serving Western myth that Russia needs foreign loans. This myth is enshrined in neoliberal economics, which is a device for Western exploitation and control of other countries. Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists.

The Russian central bank has convinced the Russian government that it would be inflationary to finance Russian development projects with the issuance of central bank credit. Foreign loans are essential, claims the central bank.

Someone needs to teach the Russian central bank basic economics before Russia is turned into another Western vassal. Here is the lesson: When central bank credit is used to finance development projects, the supply of rubles increases but so does output from the projects. Thus, goods and services rise with the supply of rubles. When Russia borrows foreign currencies from abroad, the money supply also increases, but so does the foreign debt. Russia does not spend the foreign currencies on the project but puts them into its foreign exchange reserves. The central bank issues the same amount of rubles to pay the project's bills as it would in the absence of the foreign loan. All the foreign loan does is to present Russia with an interest payment to a foreign creditor.

Foreign capital is not important to countries such as Russia and China. Both countries are perfectly capable of financing their own development. Indeed, China is the world's largest creditor nation. Foreign loans are only important to countries that lack the internal resources for development and have to purchase the business know-how, techlology, and resources abroad with foreign currencies that their exports are insufficient to bring in.

This is not the case with Russia, which has large endowments of resources and a trade surplus. China's development was given a boost by US corporations that moved their production for the US market offshore in order to pocket the difference in labor and regulatory costs.

Neoliberals argue that Russia needs privatization in order to cover its budget deficit. Russia's government debt is only 17 percent of Russian GDP. According to official measures, US federal debt is 104 percent of GDP, 6.1 times higher than in Russia. If US federal debt is measured in real corrected terms, US federal debt is 185 percent of US GDP. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/08/deteriorating-economic-outlook/

Clearly, if the massive debt of the US government is not a problem, the tiny debt of Russia is not a problem.

Berke's article is part of the effort to scam Russia by convincing the Russian government that its prosperity depends on unfavorable deals with the West. As Russia's neoliberal economists believe this, the scam has a chance of success.

Another delusion affecting the Russian government is the belief that privatization brings in capital. This delusion caused the Russian government to turn over 20 percent of its oil company to foreign ownership. The only thing Russia achieved by this strategic blunder was to deliver 20 percent of its oil profits into foreign hands. For a one-time payment, Russia gave away 20 percent of its oil profits in perpetuity.

To repeat outselves, the greatest threat that Russia faces is not sanctions but the incompetence of its neoliberal economists who have been throughly brainwashed to serve US interests.

Mao Cheng Ji , February 14, 2017 at 6:55 pm GMT \n

When Russia borrows foreign currencies from abroad, the money supply also increases, but so does the foreign debt. Russia does not spend the foreign currencies on the project but puts them into its foreign exchange reserves. The central bank issues the same amount of rubles to pay the project's bills as it would in the absence of the foreign loan. All the foreign loan does is to present Russia with an interest payment to a foreign creditor.

Yes, correct. But this is an IMF rule, and Russia is an IMF member. To control its monetary policy it would have to get out.

Lyttenburgh , February 14, 2017 at 6:57 pm GMT \n

Another pressure comes from the affront that sanctions represent to Russians. Removing this insult has become important to Russians even though the sanctions do Russia no material harm.

Oh dear, neolibs at their "finest"!

This "theory" is simply not true. If anything, Russians don't want the sanctions to be lifted, because this will also force us to scrap our counter-sanctions against the EU. The agro-business in Russia had been expanding by leaps and bounds for the last two years. This persistent myth that "the Russians" (who exactly, I wonder – 2-3% of the pro-Western urbanites in Moscow and St. Pete?) are desperate to have the sanctons lifted is a self-deception of the West, who IS desparate of the fact that the sanctions didn't work.

Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists.

Yes! Ulyukayev is, probably, feeling lonely in his prison. I say – why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him up?

WorkingClass , February 14, 2017 at 7:59 pm GMT \n

Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China.

Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead.

SmoothieX12 , Website February 14, 2017 at 8:56 pm GMT \n
@WorkingClass
Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China.
Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead.

LOL! True. You forgot McCain, though.

SmoothieX12 , Website February 14, 2017 at 9:04 pm GMT \n
100 Words @Lyttenburgh
Another pressure comes from the affront that sanctions represent to Russians. Removing this insult has become important to Russians even though the sanctions do Russia no material harm.
Oh dear, neolibs at their "finest"! This "theory" is simply not true. If anything, Russians don't want the sanctions to be lifted, because this will also force us to scrap our counter-sanctions against the EU. The agro-business in Russia had been expanding by leaps and bounds for the last two years. This persistent myth that "the Russians" (who exactly, I wonder - 2-3% of the pro-Western urbanites in Moscow and St. Pete?) are desperate to have the sanctons lifted is a self-deception of the West, who IS desparate of the fact that the sanctions didn't work.
Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists.
Yes! Ulyukayev is, probably, feeling lonely in his prison. I say - why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him up? ;)

I say – why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him up?

Most of Russia's economic block has to be literally purged from their sinecures, some, indeed, have to be "re-educated" near Magadan or Tyumen, or Saransk. Too bad, two of these places are actually not too bad. Others deserved to be executed. Too bad this jackass Gaidar (actually no blood relation to Arkady whatsoever) died before he could be tried for crimes against humanity and genocide. Albeit, some say he died because of his consciousness couldn't take the burden. Looking at his swine face I, somehow, doubt it.

Priss Factor , February 14, 2017 at 10:38 pm GMT \n
100 Words

A silver-lining to this.

If the US continues to antagonize Russia, Russia will have to grow even more independent, nationalist, and sovereign. At any rate, this issue cannot be addressed until we face that the fact that globalism is essentially Jewish Supremacism that fears gentile nationalism as a barrier to its penetration and domination.

This is not a US vs Russia issue. The real conflict is ... Globalism vs Russian nationalism and American nationalism. But since Jews control the media, they've spread the impression that it's about US vs Russia.

Same thing with this crap about 'white privilege'. It is a misleading concept to fool Americans into thinking that the main conflict is between 'privileged whites' and 'people of color'. It is really to hide the fact that Jewish power and privilege really rules the US. It is a means to hoodwink people from noticing that the real divide is between Jews and Gentiles, not between 'privileged whites' and 'non-white victims'. After all, too many whites lack privilege, and too many non-whites do very well in America.

Seamus Padraig , February 14, 2017 at 11:29 pm GMT \n
@SmoothieX12
I say – why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him up?

Most of Russia's economic block has to be literally purged from their sinecures, some, indeed, have to be "re-educated" near Magadan or Tyumen, or Saransk. Too bad, two of these places are actually not too bad. Others deserved to be executed. Too bad this jackass Gaidar (actually no blood relation to Arkady whatsoever) died before he could be tried for crimes against humanity and genocide. Albeit, some say he died because of his consciousness couldn't take the burden. Looking at his swine face I, somehow, doubt it.

I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy for. It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this already.

Seamus Padraig , February 14, 2017 at 11:34 pm GMT \n

Does PCR really think that Putin is stupid enough to fall for Kissinger's hair-brained scheme? I mean, give Putin a little bit of credit. He has so far completely outmaneuvered Washington on virtually ever subject. I'm sure he's clever enough to see through such a crude divide-and-rule strategy.

anonymous , February 15, 2017 at 4:17 am GMT

The Russians can't be flummoxed, they aren't children. Russia and China border each other so they have a natural mutual interest in having their east-west areas be stable and safe, particularly when the US threatens both of them. This geography isn't going to change. Abandoning clients such as Syria and Iran would irreversibly damage the Russian brand as being unreliable therefore they'd find it impossible to attract any others in the future. They know this so it's unlikely they would be so rash as to snap at any bait dangled in front of them. And, as pointed out, the bait really isn't all that irresistible. It's always best to negotiate from a position of strength and they realize that. American policy deep thinkers are often fantasists who bank upon their chess opponents making hoped-for predictable moves. That doesn't happen in real life.

SmoothieX12 , Website February 15, 2017 at 2:29 pm GMT \n
@Seamus Padraig

I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy for. It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this already.

I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this already.

Partially, because Putin himself is an economic liberal and, to a degree, monetarist, albeit less rigid than his economic block. The good choices he made often were opposite to his views. As he himself admitted that Russia's geopolitical vector changed with NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia–a strengthening of Russia has become an imperative. This comeback was impossible within the largely "Western" monetarist economic model. Russia's comeback happened not thanks but despite Putin's economic views, Putin adjusted his views in the process, his economic block didn't. But many of them still remain his friends, despite the fact that many of them are de facto fifth column and work against Russia, intentionally and other wise. Eventually Putin will be forced to get down from his fence and take the position of industrialists and siloviki. Putin's present for Medvedev's birthday was a good hint on where he is standing economically today and I am beginning to like that but still–I personally am not convinced yet. We'll see. In many respects Putin was lucky and specifically because of the namely Soviet military and industry captains still being around–people who, unlike Putin, knew exactly what constituted Russia's strength. Enough to mention late Evgeny Primakov. Let's not forget that despite Putin's meteoric rise through the top levels of Russia's state bureaucracy, including his tenure as a Director of FSB, Putin's background is not really military-industrial. He is a lawyer, even if uniformed (KGB) part of his career. I know for a fact that initially (early 2000s) he was overwhelmed with the complexity of Russia's military and industry. Enough to mention his creature Serdyukov who almost destroyed Command and Control structure of Russia's Armed Forces and main ideologue behind Russia's military "reform", late Vitaly Shlykov who might have been a great GRU spy (and economist by trade) but who never served a day in combat units. Thankfully, the "reforms" have been stopped and Russian Armed Forces are still dealing with the consequences. This whole clusterfvck was of Putin's own creation–hardly a good record on his resume. Hopefully, he learned.

Vlad , February 17, 2017 at 8:44 am GMT \n
@Seamus Padraig

I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy for. It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this already.

He has not done it already because he just cannot let go of his dream to have it as he did in 2003, when Russia Germany and France together blocked legality of US war in Iraq. Putin still hopes for a good working relationship with major West European powers. Italy France and even Germany.

He still hopes to draw them away from the US. However the obvious gains from Import substitution campaign make it apparent that Russia does benefit from sanctions, that Russia can get anything it wants in technology from the East rather than the West. So the break with Western orientation is in the making. Hopefully.

annamaria , February 17, 2017 at 3:50 pm GMT \n

You forgot to mention the "moderate" jihadis, including the operatives from NATO, Israel, and US. (It seems that the Ukrainian "patriots" that have been bombing the civilians in East Ukraine, also include special "patriots" from the same unholy trinity: https://www.roguemoney.net/stories/2016/12/6/there-are-troops-jack-us-army-donbass ). There has been also a certain asymmetry in means: look at the map for the number and location of the US/NATO military bases. At least we can see that RF has been trying to avoid the hot phase of WWIII. http://russia-insider.com/sites/insider/files/NATO-vs-Russia640.jpg

annamaria , February 17, 2017 at 4:11 pm GMT \n
200 Words @Priss Factor A silver-lining to this.

If the US continues to antagonize Russia, Russia will have to grow even more independent, nationalist, and sovereign.

At any rate, this issue cannot be addressed until we face that the fact that globalism is essentially Jewish Supremacism that fears gentile nationalism as a barrier to its penetration and domination.

This is not a US vs Russia issue. The real conflict is Jewish Globalism vs Russian nationalism and American nationalism. But since Jews control the media, they've spread the impression that it's about US vs Russia.

Same thing with this crap about 'white privilege'. It is a misleading concept to fool Americans into thinking that the main conflict is between 'privileged whites' and 'people of color'. It is really to hide the fact that Jewish power and privilege really rules the US. It is a means to hoodwink people from noticing that the real divide is between Jews and Gentiles, not between 'privileged whites' and 'non-white victims'. After all, too many whites lack privilege, and too many non-whites do very well in America.

On the power and privilege that really rule the US:
"Sanctions – economic sanctions, as most of them are, can only stand and 'succeed', as long as countries, who oppose Washington's dictate remain bound into the western, dollar-based, fraudulent monetary scheme. The system is entirely privatized by a small Zionist-led elite. FED, Wall Street, Bank for International Settlement (BIS), are all private institutions, largely controlled by the Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan et al clans. They are also supported by the Breton Woods Organizations, IMF and World Bank, conveniently created under the Charter of the UN.
Few progressive economists understand how this debt-based pyramid scam is manipulating the entire western economic system. When in a just world, it should be just the contrary, the economy that shapes, designs and decides the functioning of the monetary system and policy.
Even Russia, with Atlantists still largely commanding the central bank and much of the financial system, isn't fully detached from the dollar dominion – yet."

http://thesaker.is/venezuela-washingtons-latest-defamation-to-bring-nato-to-south-america/

Anon , February 17, 2017 at 4:55 pm GMT \n
100 Words

"I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this (nationalize the "central bank) already".

I read about a rumor a few years ago that Putin has been warned that nationalizing the now private Russian central bank will bring absolutely dire consequences to both him and Russia. It is simply a step he cannot take.

How dire are the potential consequences? Consider that the refusal of the American government to reauthorize the private central bank in the US brought about the War of 1812. The Americans learned their lesson and quickly reauthorized the private bank after the war had ended.

Numerous attempts were made to assassinate President Andrew Jacksons specifically because of his refusal to reauthorize the private central bank.

JFK anyone?

Agent76 , February 17, 2017 at 6:07 pm GMT \n
100 Words

Here it is in audio form so you can just relax and just listen at your leisure.

*ALL WARS ARE BANKERS' WARS* By Michael Rivero https://youtu.be/WN0Y3HRiuxo

I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are started for no other purpose than to force private central banks onto nations, so let me share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is mired in so many wars against so many foreign nations. There is ample precedent for this.

Priss Factor , February 17, 2017 at 7:31 pm GMT \n
1,000 Words

Here is proof that there is no real Leftist power anymore.

Voltaire once said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

If the Left really rules America, how come it is fair game to criticize, condemn, mock, and vilify Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Bakunin, Emma Goldman & anarchists, Castro, Che(even though he is revered by many, one's career isn't damaged by attacking him), Tito, Ceucescu, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gramsci, Eurgene Debs, Pete Seeger, Abbie Hoffman, Bill Ayers, and etc.

You can say whatever you want about such people. Some will agree, some will disagree, but you will not be fired, blacklisted, or destroyed.

If the Left really rules, why would this be?

Now, what would happen if you name the Jewish Capitalists as the real holders of power?
What would happen if you name the Jewish oligarchic corporatists who control most of media?
What would happen if you said Jews are prominent in the vice industry of gambling?
What would happen if you named the Jewish capitalists in music industry that made so much money by spreading garbage?
What would happen if you said Jewish warhawks were largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?
And what would happen if you were question the MLK mythology and cult?
What would happen if you were to make fun of homos and trannies?
Now, keep in mind that blacks and homos are favored by Jews as their main allies.
(Some say the US is not a pro-minority nation, but it's still permissible to criticize, impugn, and vilify Chinese, Iranians, Muslims, Mexicans, Hindus, and etc. Trump was hard on China, Iran, Muslims, and Mexicans, and he got some flak over it but not enough to destroy him. Now, imagine what would have happened if he'd said such things about blacks, Africa, homos, Jews, and Israel? American politics isn't necessarily pro-minority. If it is, it should favor Palestinian-Americans just as much as Jewish-Americans. Actually, since there are fewer Palestinian-Americans than Jewish-Americans, the US, being pro-minority, should favor Palestinians over Jews in America. In reality, it is AIPAC that draws all the politicians. America is about Pro-Power, and since Jews have the Power and since Jews are a minority, it creates the false impression that the US is a minority-supremacist nation. But WHICH minority? Jews would like for us think that all minorities are represented equally in the US, but do Eskimos, Hawaiians, Guatemalans, Vietnamese, and etc. have the kind of power & protection that the Jewish minority has? Do we see politicians and powerbrokers flock to such minorities for funds and favors?)

So, what does it about the real power in America? So many 'conservatives' say the Left controls America. But in fact, an American can badmouth all true bonafide leftist leaders and thinkers(everyone from Lenin to Sartre). However, if an American were to badmouth Sheldon Adelson as a sick demented Zionist capitalist oligarch who wants to nuke Iran, he would be blacklisted by the most of the media. (If one must criticize Adelson, it has to be in generic terms of him a top donor to the likes of Romney. One mustn't discuss his zealous and maniacal views rooted in Zionist-supremacism. You can criticize his money but not the mentality that determines the use of that money.) Isn't it rather amusing how the so-called Liberals denounce the GOP for being 'extreme' but overlook the main reason for such extremism? It's because the GOP relies on Zionist lunatics like Adelson who thinks Iran should be nuked to be taught a lesson. Even Liberal Media overlook this fact. Also, it's interesting that the Liberal Media are more outraged by Trump's peace offer to Russia than Trump's hawkish rhetoric toward Iran. I thought Liberals were the Doves.

We know why politics and media work like this. It's not about 'left' vs 'right' or 'liberal' vs 'conservative'. It is really about Jewish Globalist Dominance. Jews, neocon 'right' or globo-'left', hate Russia because its brand of white gentile nationalism is an obstacle to Jewish supremacist domination. Now, Current Russia is nice to Jews, and Jews can make all the money they want. But that isn't enough for Jews. Jews want total control of media, government, narrative, everything. If Jews say Russia must have homo parades and 'gay marriage', Russia better bend over because its saying NO means that it is defiant to the Jewish supremacist agenda of using homomania as proxy to undermine and destroy all gentile nationalism rooted in identity and moral righteousness.
Russia doesn't allow that, and that is what pisses off Jews. For Jews, the New Antisemitism is defined as denying them the supremacist 'right' to control other nations. Classic antisemitism used to mean denying Jews equal rights under the law. The New Antisemitism means Jews are denied the right to gain dominance over others and dictate terms.
So, that is why Jews hate any idea of good relations with Russia. But Jews don't mind Trump's irresponsible anti-Iran rhetoric since it serves Zionist interest. So, if Trump were to say, "We shouldn't go to war with Russia; we should be friends" and "We should get ready to bomb, destroy, and even nuke Iran", the 'liberal' media would be more alarmed by the Peace-with-Russia statement. Which groups controls the media? 'Liberals', really? Do Muslim 'liberals' agree with Jewish 'liberals'?

Anyway, we need to do away with the fiction that Left rules anything. They don't. We have Jewish Supremacist rule hiding behind the label of the 'Left'. But the US is a nation where it's totally permissible to attack real leftist ideas and leaders but suicidal if anyone dares to discuss the power of super-capitalist Jewish oligarchs. Some 'leftism'!

We need to discuss the power of the Glob.

annamaria , February 17, 2017 at 9:42 pm GMT \n
300 Words @Quartermaster Trump has not been neutered. Buchanan has the right on this and Flynn's actions.

Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine. Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves. Putin is almost down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid now.

If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.

Roberts is the next best thing to insane.

This is rich from a Ukrainian nationalist ruled by Groysman/Kagans.
First, figure out who is your saint, a collaborationist Bandera (Babiy Yar and such) or a triple-sitizenship Kolomojski (auto-da-fe of civilians in Odessa). If you still want to bring Holodomor to a discussion, then you need to be reminded that 80% of Ukrainian Cheka at that time were Jewish. If you still think that Russians are the root of all evil, then try to ask the US for more money for pensions, education, and healthcare – instead of weaponry. Here are the glorious results of the US-approved governance from Kiev: http://gnnliberia.com/2017/02/17/liberia-ahead-ukraine-index-economic-freedom-2017/ "Liberia, Chad, Afghanistan, Sudan and Angola are ahead of Ukraine. All these countries are in the group of repressed economies (49.9-40 scores). Ukraine's economy has contracted deeply and remains very fragile."

Here are your relationships with your neighbors on the other side – Poland and Romania:
"The right-winged conservative orientation of Warsaw makes it remember old Polish-Ukrainian arguments and scores, and claim its rights on the historically Polish lands of Western Ukraine" http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/01/17/poland-will-begin-dividing-ukraine/
" the "Assembly of Bukovina Romanians" has recently applied to Petro Poroshenko demanding a territorial autonomy to the Chernivtsi region densely populated by Romanians. The "Assembly" motivated its demand with the Ukrainian president's abovementioned statement urging territorial autonomy for the Crimean Tatars." https://eadaily.com/en/news/2016/06/30/what-is-behind-romanias-activity-in-ukraine
And please read some history books about Crimea. Or at least Wikipedia:
"In 1783, Crimea was annexed by the Russian Empire. In 1954, the Crimean Oblast was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Nikita Khrushchev (a Soviet dictator). In 2014, a 96.77 percent of Crimeans voted for integration of the region into the Russian Federation with an 83.1 percent voter turnout." You see, the Crimeans do not like Nuland-Kagan and Pravyj Sector. Do you know why?

Astuteobservor II , February 17, 2017 at 9:56 pm GMT \n
100 Words @Seamus Padraig Does PCR really think that Putin is stupid enough to fall for Kissinger's hair-brained scheme? I mean, give Putin a little bit of credit. He has so far completely outmaneuvered Washington on virtually ever subject. I'm sure he's clever enough to see through such a crude divide-and-rule strategy.

well it depends. if putin is just out for himself, I can see him getting in bed with kissinger and co. if he is about russia, he would not. that is how I see it. it isn't about if putin is smart or stupid. just a choice and where his royalty lies.

Lyttenburgh , February 17, 2017 at 9:58 pm GMT \n
100 Words @Quartermaster Trump has not been neutered. Buchanan has the right on this and Flynn's actions.

Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine. Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves. Putin is almost down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid now.

If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.

Roberts is the next best thing to insane.

Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine.

How so? #Krymnash

Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves.

If by "decline" you mean "expects this year a modest growth as opposed to previous years" then you might be right.

I've been reading about Russia's imminent collapse and the annihilation of the economy since forever. Some no-names like you (or some Big Names with agenda) had been predicting it every year. Still didn't happen.

Putin is almost down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid now.

Can I see a source for that?

If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.

False equivalence.

P.S. Hey, Quart – how is Bezviz? Also – are you not cold here? Or are you one of the most racally pure Ukrs, currently residing in Ontario province (Canada), from whence you teach your less lucky raguls in Nizalezhnaya how to be more racially pure? Well, SUGS to be you!

bluedog , February 17, 2017 at 10:03 pm GMT \n
@Quartermaster Trump has not been neutered. Buchanan has the right on this and Flynn's actions.

Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine. Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves. Putin is almost down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid now.

If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.

Roberts is the next best thing to insane.

Do you have any links to verify this that Russia is down to bedrock,from everything I read and have read Russia's do pretty damn good, or is this just some more of your endless antiRussian propaganda,,

Philip Owen , February 17, 2017 at 10:54 pm GMT \n

The US needed huge amounts of British and French capital to develop. Russia has the same requirement otherwise it will be another Argentina.

annamaria , February 17, 2017 at 11:00 pm GMT \n
500 Words

A scandal of a EU member Poland: http://thesaker.is/zmiana-piskorski-and-the-case-for-polish-liberation/
Two days after he [Piskorski] publicly warned that US-NATO troops now have a mandate to suppress Polish dissent on the grounds of combatting "Russian hybrid war," he was snatched up by armed agents of Poland's Internal Security Agency while taking his children to school on May 18th, 2016. He was promptly imprisoned in Warsaw, where he remains with no formal charges to this day."

With the Poland's entry into EU, "Poland did not "regain" sovereignty, much less justice, but forfeited such to the Atlanticist project Poland has been de-industrialized, and thus deprived of the capacity to pursue independent and effective social and economic policies Now, with the deployment of thousands of US-NATO troops, tanks, and missile systems on its soil and the Polish government's relinquishment of jurisdiction over foreign armed forces on its territory, Poland is de facto under occupation. This occupation is not a mere taxation on Poland's national budget – it is an undeniable liquidation of sovereignty and inevitably turns the country into a direct target and battlefield in the US' provocative war on Russia."

" it's not the Russians who are going to occupy us now – they left here voluntarily 24 years ago. It's not the Russians that have ravaged Polish industry since 1989. It's not the Russians that have stifled Poles with usurious debt. Finally, it's not the Russians that are responsible for the fact that we have become the easternmost aircraft carrier of the United States anchored in Europe. We ourselves, who failed by allowing such traitors into power, are to blame for this."

More from a comment section: "Donald Tusk, who is now President of the European Council, whose grandfather, Josef Tusk, served in Hitler's Wehrmacht, has consistently demanded that the Kiev regime imposed by the US and EU deal with the Donbass people brutally, "as with terrorists". While the Polish special services were training the future participants of the Maidan operations and the ethnic cleansing of the Donbass, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs made this official statement (02-02-2014): "We support the hard line taken by the Right Sector The radical actions of the Right Sector and other militant groups of demonstrators and the use of force by protesters are justified The Right Sector has taken full responsibility for all the acts of violence during the recent protests. This is an honest position, and we respect it. The politicians have failed at their peacekeeping function. This means that the only acceptable option is the radical actions of the Right Sector. There is no other alternative".

In short, the US has been the most active enabler of the neo-Nazi movement in Europe. Mrs. Clinton seemingly did not get a memo about who is "new Hitler."

Chuck Orloski , February 17, 2017 at 11:17 pm GMT \n
100 Words

Scranton calling Mssrs. Roberts and Hudson:

Do you happen to know anything about western financial giants' influence upon Russia's "Atlanticist Integrationists"?

It's low hanging fruit for me to take a pick, but I am thinking The Goldman Sachs Group is well ensconced among Russian "Atlanticist Integrationists."

You guys are top seeded pros at uncovering Deep State-banker secrets. In contrast, I drive school bus and I struggle to even balance the family Wells Fargo debit card!

However, since our US Congress has anointed a seasoned G.S.G. veteran, Steve Mnuchin, as the administration's Treasury Secretary, he has become my favorite "Person of Interest" who I suspect spouts a Ural Mountain-level say as to how "Atlanticist Integrationists" operate.

Speaking very respectfully, I hope my question does not get "flummoxed" into resource rich Siberia.

Thank you very much!

Bobzilla , February 17, 2017 at 11:46 pm GMT \n
@WorkingClass

Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China.
Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead.

Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead

.

Most likely the Spirit of Anti-Christ keeping them alive to do his bidding.

Bill Jones , February 18, 2017 at 12:39 am GMT \n
@Priss Factor Here is proof that there is no real Leftist power anymore.

Voltaire once said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

If the Left really rules America, how come it is fair game to criticize, condemn, mock, and vilify Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Bakunin, Emma Goldman & anarchists, Castro, Che(even though he is revered by many, one's career isn't damaged by attacking him), Tito, Ceucescu, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gramsci, Eurgene Debs, Pete Seeger, Abbie Hoffman, Bill Ayers, and etc.

You can say whatever you want about such people. Some will agree, some will disagree, but you will not be fired, blacklisted, or destroyed.

If the Left really rules, why would this be?

Now, what would happen if you name the Jewish Capitalists as the real holders of power?
What would happen if you name the Jewish oligarchic corporatists who control most of media?
What would happen if you said Jews are prominent in the vice industry of gambling?
What would happen if you named the Jewish capitalists in music industry that made so much money by spreading garbage?
What would happen if you said Jewish warhawks were largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?
And what would happen if you were question the MLK mythology and cult?
What would happen if you were to make fun of homos and trannies?
Now, keep in mind that blacks and homos are favored by Jews as their main allies.
(Some say the US is not a pro-minority nation, but it's still permissible to criticize, impugn, and vilify Chinese, Iranians, Muslims, Mexicans, Hindus, and etc. Trump was hard on China, Iran, Muslims, and Mexicans, and he got some flak over it but not enough to destroy him. Now, imagine what would have happened if he'd said such things about blacks, Africa, homos, Jews, and Israel? American politics isn't necessarily pro-minority. If it is, it should favor Palestinian-Americans just as much as Jewish-Americans. Actually, since there are fewer Palestinian-Americans than Jewish-Americans, the US, being pro-minority, should favor Palestinians over Jews in America. In reality, it is AIPAC that draws all the politicians. America is about Pro-Power, and since Jews have the Power and since Jews are a minority, it creates the false impression that the US is a minority-supremacist nation. But WHICH minority? Jews would like for us think that all minorities are represented equally in the US, but do Eskimos, Hawaiians, Guatemalans, Vietnamese, and etc. have the kind of power & protection that the Jewish minority has? Do we see politicians and powerbrokers flock to such minorities for funds and favors?)

So, what does it about the real power in America? So many 'conservatives' say the Left controls America. But in fact, an American can badmouth all true bonafide leftist leaders and thinkers(everyone from Lenin to Sartre). However, if an American were to badmouth Sheldon Adelson as a sick demented Zionist capitalist oligarch who wants to nuke Iran, he would be blacklisted by the most of the media. (If one must criticize Adelson, it has to be in generic terms of him a top donor to the likes of Romney. One mustn't discuss his zealous and maniacal views rooted in Zionist-supremacism. You can criticize his money but not the mentality that determines the use of that money.) Isn't it rather amusing how the so-called Liberals denounce the GOP for being 'extreme' but overlook the main reason for such extremism? It's because the GOP relies on Zionist lunatics like Adelson who thinks Iran should be nuked to be taught a lesson. Even Liberal Media overlook this fact. Also, it's interesting that the Liberal Media are more outraged by Trump's peace offer to Russia than Trump's hawkish rhetoric toward Iran. I thought Liberals were the Doves.

We know why politics and media work like this. It's not about 'left' vs 'right' or 'liberal' vs 'conservative'. It is really about Jewish Globalist Dominance. Jews, neocon 'right' or globo-'left', hate Russia because its brand of white gentile nationalism is an obstacle to Jewish supremacist domination. Now, Current Russia is nice to Jews, and Jews can make all the money they want. But that isn't enough for Jews. Jews want total control of media, government, narrative, everything. If Jews say Russia must have homo parades and 'gay marriage', Russia better bend over because its saying NO means that it is defiant to the Jewish supremacist agenda of using homomania as proxy to undermine and destroy all gentile nationalism rooted in identity and moral righteousness.
Russia doesn't allow that, and that is what pisses off Jews. For Jews, the New Antisemitism is defined as denying them the supremacist 'right' to control other nations. Classic antisemitism used to mean denying Jews equal rights under the law. The New Antisemitism means Jews are denied the right to gain dominance over others and dictate terms.
So, that is why Jews hate any idea of good relations with Russia. But Jews don't mind Trump's irresponsible anti-Iran rhetoric since it serves Zionist interest. So, if Trump were to say, "We shouldn't go to war with Russia; we should be friends" and "We should get ready to bomb, destroy, and even nuke Iran", the 'liberal' media would be more alarmed by the Peace-with-Russia statement. Which groups controls the media? 'Liberals', really? Do Muslim 'liberals' agree with Jewish 'liberals'?

Anyway, we need to do away with the fiction that Left rules anything. They don't. We have Jewish Supremacist rule hiding behind the label of the 'Left'. But the US is a nation where it's totally permissible to attack real leftist ideas and leaders but suicidal if anyone dares to discuss the power of super-capitalist Jewish oligarchs. Some 'leftism'!

We need to discuss the power of the Glob.

Thanks for the digest of hasbarist crap.

Useful to have it all in one place..

annamaria , February 18, 2017 at 1:03 am GMT \n
100 Words

War profiteers (both of a dishonest character) have found each other: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-17/mccain-tells-europe-trump-administration-disarray http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-17/germany-issues-stark-warning-trump-stop-threatening-eu-favoring-russia
" Trump's administration was in "disarray," McCain told the Munich Security Conference, where earlier in the day Germany defense minister Ursula von der Leyen warned Trump to stop threatening the EU, abandoning Western values and seeking close ties with Russia, that the resignation of the new president's security adviser Michael Flynn over his contacts with Russia reflected deep problems in Washington."

What an amazing whoring performance for the war-manufacturers! And here is an interesting morsel of information about the belligerent Frau der Leyen: http://www.dw.com/en/stanford-accuses-von-der-leyen-of-misrepresentation/a-18775432
"Stanford university has said Ursula von der Leyen is misrepresenting her affiliation with the school. The German defense minister's academic career is already under scrutiny after accusations of plagiarism." No kidding. Some "Ursula von der Leyen' values" indeed.

Anonymous IX , February 18, 2017 at 2:42 am GMT \n
200 Words

I doubt we'll see little change from the Trump administration toward Russia.

From SOTT:

Predictable news coming out of Yemen: Saudi-backed "Southern Resistance" forces and Hadi loyalists, alongside al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), launched a new offensive against the Houthis in western Yemen on Wednesday.

This is not the first time Saudi-backed (and by extension, Washington-backed) forces have teamed up with al-Qaeda in Yemen .

Yemen is quickly becoming the "spark that lights the powder keg". The conflict has already killed, maimed and displaced countless thousands (thanks to the stellar lack of reporting from trustworthy western news sources, we can only estimate the scale of Saudi/U.S. crimes in Yemen), but now it seems that elements of the Trump administration are keen on escalation, likely in hopes of giving Washington an excuse to carpet bomb Tehran.

Apparently, we feel satisfied fighting with our old allies, al-Qaeda and Saudis.

I had hoped for much better from Trump.

Kiza , February 18, 2017 at 4:23 am GMT \n
200 Words

I think that the authors may be underestimating Putin in his determination to keep Russia and the Russian economy independent. For example, I find this rumoured offer of "increased access to the huge European energy market" very funny, for at least two reasons:
1) US wants to sell hydrocarbons (LPG) to the European market at significantly higher prices than the Russian prices, and
2) the current dependence of EU countries on the Russian energy would have never happened if there were better alternatives.

In other words, any detente offer that the West would make to Russia would last, as usual, not even until the signature ink dries on the new cooperation agreements. Putin does not look to me like someone who suffers much from wishful thinking.

The Russian relationship with China is not a bed of roses, but it is not China which is increasing military activity all around Russia, it is the West. Also, so far China has shown no interest in regime-changing Russia and dividing it into pieces. Would you rather believe in the reform capability of an addict in violence or someone who does not need to reform? Would the West self-reform and sincerely renounce violence just by signing a new agreement with Russia?

The new faux detente will never happen, as long as Putin is alive.

Max Havelaar , February 18, 2017 at 8:22 pm GMT \n
200 Words

Trump is an ultra-zionist for Sheldon Adelson and prolongs & creates wars for the Goldman banking crimesyndicat.

The only one stopping Trump is Putin or Russia's missile defenses.

Indeed, Putin's main inside enemy is Russia's central bank, or the Jewish oligarchs in Russia (Atlanticists). Also Russia needs to foster and encourage small&medium enterprises, that need cheap credit, to create competitive markets, where no prices are fixed and market shares change. These are most efficient resource users.

In the US, Wallstreet controls government = fascism = the IG Farben- Auschwitz concentration camps to maximize profits. This is the direction for the US economy.

Meanwhile in the EU, the former Auschwitz owners IG Farben (Bayer(Monsanto), Hoechst, BASF) the EU chemical giants, who have patented all natures molecules, are in controll again over EU. Deutsche bank et allies is eating Greece, Italy, Spain's working classes, using AUSTERITY as their creed.

So what is new? Nothing, the supercorporate-fascist elites are the same families, who 's morality is unchanged in a 100 years.

Anon , February 20, 2017 at 4:28 am GMT \n
@Priss Factor

Here is proof that there is no real Leftist power anymore.

Voltaire once said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."

... ... ...

Sergey Krieger , February 20, 2017 at 12:20 pm GMT \n
@Seamus Padraig

I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy for. It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this already.

I would really love to like Putin and I am trying but him protecting all those criminals and not reversing the history greatest heist of 90′s makes it impossible. While I am behind all his moves to restore Russian military and foreign policy, I am still waiting for more on home front. Note, not only the Bank must be nationalized. Everything, all industries, factories and other assets privatized by now must be returned to rightful owner. Public which over 70 years through great sacrifice built all of it.

Sergey Krieger , February 20, 2017 at 12:31 pm GMT \n
300 Words @SmoothieX12
I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this already.
Partially, because Putin himself is an economic liberal and, to a degree, monetarist, albeit less rigid than his economic block. The good choices he made often were opposite to his views. As he himself admitted that Russia's geopolitical vector changed with NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia--a strengthening of Russia has become an imperative. This comeback was impossible within the largely "Western" monetarist economic model. Russia's comeback happened not thanks but despite Putin's economic views, Putin adjusted his views in the process, his economic block didn't. But many of them still remain his friends, despite the fact that many of them are de facto fifth column and work against Russia, intentionally and other wise. Eventually Putin will be forced to get down from his fence and take the position of industrialists and siloviki. Putin's present for Medvedev's birthday was a good hint on where he is standing economically today and I am beginning to like that but still--I personally am not convinced yet. We'll see. In many respects Putin was lucky and specifically because of the namely Soviet military and industry captains still being around--people who, unlike Putin, knew exactly what constituted Russia's strength. Enough to mention late Evgeny Primakov. Let's not forget that despite Putin's meteoric rise through the top levels of Russia's state bureaucracy, including his tenure as a Director of FSB, Putin's background is not really military-industrial. He is a lawyer, even if uniformed (KGB) part of his career. I know for a fact that initially (early 2000s) he was overwhelmed with the complexity of Russia's military and industry. Enough to mention his creature Serdyukov who almost destroyed Command and Control structure of Russia's Armed Forces and main ideologue behind Russia's military "reform", late Vitaly Shlykov who might have been a great GRU spy (and economist by trade) but who never served a day in combat units. Thankfully, the "reforms" have been stopped and Russian Armed Forces are still dealing with the consequences. This whole clusterfvck was of Putin's own creation--hardly a good record on his resume. Hopefully, he learned.

Smoothie, you seem to have natural aversion towards lawyers
Albeit, the first Vladimir, I mean Lenin also was a lawyers by education still he was a rather quick study. Remember that military communism and Lenin after one year after Bolsheviks took power telling that state capitalism would be great step forward for Russia whcih obviously was backward and ruined by wars at the time and he proceeded with New Economic Policy and Lenin despite not being industry captain realized pretty well what constituted state power hence GOELRO plans and electrification of all Russia plans and so forth which was later turned by Stalin and his team into reality.

Now, Lenin was ideologically motivated and so is Putin. But he clearly has been trying to achieve different results by keeping same people around him and doing same things. Hopefully it is changing now, but it is so much wasted time when old Vladimir was always repeating that time is of essence and delay is like death knell. Putin imho is away too relax and even vain in some way, hence those shirtless pictures and those on the bike. And the way he walks a la "Я Московский озорной гуляка". As you said it looks like he is protecting those criminals who must be prosecuted and yes, many executed for what they caused.

I suspect in cases when it comes to economical development he is not picking right people for those jobs and it is his major responsibility to assign right people and delegate power properly, not to be forgotten to reverse what constitutes the history greatest heist and crime so called "privatization". Basically returning to more communal society minus Politburo.

There is a huge elephant in the room too. Russia demographic situation which I doubt can be addressed under current liberal order. all states which are in liberal state of affairs fail to basically procreate hence these waves of immigrants brought into all Western Nations. Russia cannot do it. It would be suicide which is what all Western countries are doing right now.

Boris N , February 20, 2017 at 8:58 pm GMT \n

Russia does not need Western technology. Indeed, its military technology is superior to that in the West.

You write about Russia but have not done your homework. Russia is very dependent on Western technology and its entire high-tech industry depends on the import of Western machinery. Without such machinery many Russian factories, including military ones, would stall. Very important oil industry is particularly vulnerable.

Some home reading (sorry, they are in Russian, but one ought to know the language if one writes about the country).

http://www.fa.ru/fil/orel/science/Documents/ISA%2014644146.pdf

http://rusrand.ru/analytics/stanki-stanki-stanki

[Jul 19, 2019] The 'Unconstitutional Animus' Against UK Labour Leader by Johanna Ross

Notable quotes:
"... A couple of weeks ago, The Times of London published an article about senior civil servants fearing U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was "too frail" to be prime minister. Reportedly they also thought he "lacks both a firm grasp of foreign affairs and the domestic agenda. ..."
"... This is the same civil service that is supposed to maintain complete neutrality and according to its code "must not act in a way that unjustifiably favours or discriminates against particular individuals or interests." ..."
"... Corbyn fought back, arguing that it was unacceptable that civil servants were briefing newspapers on an elected politician. He demanded an independent inquiry into who was spreading such fabrications in the press and "compromising the integrity of the civil service." ..."
"... Miller, who runs the Bristol-based Organisation for Propaganda Studies, said the scheme was found to be spreading its own disinformation and openly criticizing opposition leader Corbyn and his party. ..."
"... Miller said this was clear from the very beginning of the Integrity Initiative when it was regularly engaged in tweeting or retweeting attacks on Corbyn and his closest advisors. ..."
"... Miller calls the use of taxpayers' money to interfere in domestic politics an affront to democracy. ..."
"... Chris Williamson, a Labour MP and Corbyn supporter who was trying to investigate the Integrity Initiative, found himself suspended from the party after he was targeted with allegations of anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Corbyn's call for an independent investigation into the civil service leak to the press has also, as expected, been rejected by the government. ..."
"... If you enjoyed this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
"... Jews in Europe and the US have gone from being heavily discriminated against to having much more influence on government than their numbers warrant. I'm going to tell the Netanyahu joke to make my point. Don't know who to credit. Kudos anyway. "It is not anti-Semitic to disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu as he is as white as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan." ..."
"... If the Integrity Initiative really is shut down, the little Simon Bracey-Lane will be free to cross the pond and campaign for Bernie just like he did in 2015 / 2016. Nah, just kiddin', his cover is blown. But seriously, campaign managers for Tulsi Gabbard best be on guard against inflation from these snakes. ..."
"... This is a joke right. You say communist and you reference China, but in the last century it was ok to ship nearly the entire industrial base of Western Democracies to China so that a bunch of fat cat tycoons, investment bankers, hedge funders et al could become so rich they finally had enough money to purchase the U.S. Government, and it looks like the government of Britain too. ..."
"... This incessant accusation of antisemitism against anyone who supports justice for Palestinians does seem to be effective. A decade ago when I first noticed this smear tactic I assumed it would be self defeating on the part of the Zionists and their backers. It sort of seemed obvious that such a tactic would be self limiting with the broader world beginning to reject such slander. However, it seems the smear is more effective today than it was ten years ago. So depressing. Watching Corbyn's supporters ripping apart his own base in the Labour Party in an effort to appease the Israelis is appalling -- it seems the more that is conceded the more aggressive the Zionist become. Ten years ago it was proper to describe the West Bank as "occupied territory", soon it will be considered antisemitic to even go that far. ..."
"... in 2015, an unnamed, serving British general was quoted saying that if a Corbyn government implemented his well-established anti-imperial and anti-nuke agenda, "there would be mass resignations at all levels [of the military] and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-army-could-stage-mutiny-under-corbyn-says-senior-serving-general-10509742.html ..."
"... As Mayhew noted, 'the turning point' was the speech of George Marshall the US Secretary of State in June 1947. From 'the middle of 1947 onwards, decisions were taken towards uniting the free world, at the expense of widening the gap with the Communist world our immediate objective changed, from "one world" to "one free world"'. ..."
"... . That is what all of this is about: this is all a campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to keep expandable, pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt slavery. ..."
Jul 19, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

The 'Unconstitutional Animus' Against UK Labour Leader July 16, 2019 • 39 Comments

Johanna Ross spoke with David Miller, a propaganda researcher, after the recent publicity of U.K. civil service murmurings about Jeremy Corbyn's "fitness."

By Johanna Ross
in Edinburgh, Scotland
Special to Consortium News

A couple of weeks ago, The Times of London published an article about senior civil servants fearing U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was "too frail" to be prime minister. Reportedly they also thought he "lacks both a firm grasp of foreign affairs and the domestic agenda."

This is the same civil service that is supposed to maintain complete neutrality and according to its code "must not act in a way that unjustifiably favours or discriminates against particular individuals or interests."

Corbyn fought back, arguing that it was unacceptable that civil servants were briefing newspapers on an elected politician. He demanded an independent inquiry into who was spreading such fabrications in the press and "compromising the integrity of the civil service."

Controversial BBC graphic seeking to link Corbyn to Russia.

For David Miller, a professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, who investigates concentrations of power and ways to hold them accountable, the idea that the British civil service may not be impartial in its operations is hardly surprising.

Far from ever being objective, he told Consortium News that the civil service now clearly has "an unconstitutional animus against a potential Corbyn government and has been briefing against it one way or another through various agencies for some time now."

Catalog of Smears

Indeed, the anti-Corbyn bias within the establishment has been obvious in the catalog of smears on Corbyn and his team since he came to the Labour leadership; from allegations of being a "Soviet sleeper" to being "anti-Semitic" and now to questions about his overall fitness.

David Miller: Faction fight against Corbyn. (University of Bristol)

Miller said most of the allegations were created by a number of organisations and individuals who are "involved in a faction fight with the Corbyn leadership."

Noam Chomsky, a leading U.S. social critic, is among those who have spoken out against what he termed a "witch hunt" against the Labour leader and his supporters.

Whether or not anti-Semitism exists in the party, Miller said the accusations are out of hand. "Almost everyone who says anything which is either critical of Israel or critical of the party's response to the anti-Semitism crisis is denounced as an anti-Semite," Miller said. "The question is how long will it be before everyone sees that the people who are involved in this have overreached themselves."

Attempts to undermine potential socialist governments are of course, not new.

Miller gives the example of the Zinoviev case – when a fake letter was published in the Daily Mail in 1924 just prior to the general election, suggesting Communists in Britain were taking orders from Moscow. The goal was clearly to undermine the British Labour movement.

Miller also points to the case of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. "Despite what may now be said by some elements of the security state," Miller said that British agencies were engaged in an active plot to undermine Wilson's elected government.

As another example, Miller offered the "Information Research Department," first proposed in 1947 and sold to the cabinet as a bipartisan, anti-Communist and anti-American propaganda operation. In fact, Miller described it as a "secret, covert, anti-Communist propaganda operation which in the 70s was engaged in undermining the Wilson government."

Today, Miller said, similar agencies in the U.K. government are doing the same thing.

Harold Wilson in 1986. (Allan Warren, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Integrity Initiative

As an example, Miller cites the Integrity Initiative; organized by the government's Institute for Statecraft, which has a stated mission of countering "Russian disinformation and malign influence by harnessing existing expertise and establishing a network of experts, opinion formers and policy makers to educate national audiences in the threat and to help build national capacities to counter it." Its website is incidentally now empty pending an investigation into the "theft of its data" – after a hack exposed detail of the extent to which the government-funded program was itself engaged in disinformation.

Miller, who runs the Bristol-based Organisation for Propaganda Studies, said the scheme was found to be spreading its own disinformation and openly criticizing opposition leader Corbyn and his party.

"Corbyn has recently said in relation to the most recent criticism from the civil service that there are people in the establishment that are trying to undermine Corbyn, his office, his advisors and supporters of him," Miller said. "And that's what the Integrity Initiative was doing."

Cartoon published by Punch after the Zinoviev letter was released, depicting a Bolshevik campaigning for Ramsay MacDonald, head of the short-lived Labour government of 1924. (Wikimedia Commons)

Miller said this was clear from the very beginning of the Integrity Initiative when it was regularly engaged in tweeting or retweeting attacks on Corbyn and his closest advisors.

Miller calls the use of taxpayers' money to interfere in domestic politics an affront to democracy.

"A government-funded project was engaged in attacking the leader of the opposition," Miller said, "which is unconstitutional and something the U.K. civil service should not be involved in they crossed the line when they started attacking Corbyn. And when we look back on this period, the Integrity Initiative, its funding by the Foreign Office and its base in British military intelligence will be one of the strands of the activities which will be seen to have been a secret state campaign against the elected leader of the Labour party."

Miller would like to see an investigation into the attacks on Corbyn and whether they had been effectively funded by the Foreign Office, but doesn't hold out much hope of that happening.

Six months ago, Shadow Home Secretary Emily Thornberry demanded answers to how this could have happened, with no result.

And Chris Williamson, a Labour MP and Corbyn supporter who was trying to investigate the Integrity Initiative, found himself suspended from the party after he was targeted with allegations of anti-Semitism.

Corbyn's call for an independent investigation into the civil service leak to the press has also, as expected, been rejected by the government.

Johanna Ross is a freelance journalist based in the United Kingdom.

If you enjoyed this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

Michael McNulty , July 18, 2019 at 05:52

After he won the second round to remain Labour Party leader Corbyn should have left the party to form a new socialist party, taking his large following and their subscriptions with him. He would have had three years behind him with a new movement, one which would not have had the back-stabbers and poisoners he's having to deal with daily. It would have been quite established now and a real political force. I think the Labour Party is so polluted that the left must break away; it's the only way we can overturn the excesses and failures of neo-liberalism which for most people is a truly dreadful system.

Maz Palmer , July 17, 2019 at 15:02

They are all much worse than bozos (or Bezos); they are all plutocrats, oligarchs, neo-liberal neo-fascist capitalists. That is what all of this is about: this is all a campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to keep expandable, pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt slavery.

Hopelb , July 17, 2019 at 21:52

Upvote!

Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 14:55

"lacks both a firm grasp of foreign affairs and the domestic agenda."

It makes me wonder how Teresa May and her Cabinet, including the next PM, fares in such assessment. Nincompoops, loud mouths, poodles, and worshipers of woodoo economics.

James , July 17, 2019 at 14:22

I get it. Corbyn is Pro-Palestinian, anti-war and Pro-Worker so they are trying to get rid of him.

All I see are articles attacking him. Are there people/forces behind him supporting him? Is his support significant among other Labour MP's and the Public at large?

Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 16:11

The problem is that UK public opinion is quite chaotic at this point and "everything is possible". At some point, four parties had roughly the same poll numbers: Tories, Brexit, Labour and LibDems. However, in the last two weeks Labour and Tories gained with Labour ahead. In a system with single seat districts, "anything can happen", and a recent by-election suggested that Labour may have an advantage in "foot soldiers", volunteers who walk around a district chatting up voters. The internal fights in Labour attracted many new members, and from the point of view of "sensible folks in the Establishment", this is the worst type of rubble. No respect for monarchy, the Trident, necessity of low taxes on business and the rich and so on. And anti-Semitic to boot.

So the meaning of "Corbyn is frail" is that while he himself seems mild mannered, his victory will unleashed the unwashed hordes wrecking everything which is good and he hold dear, like the monarchy, the Trident and so on.

Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 16:45

The problem is that UK public opinion is quite chaotic lately and "everything is possible". At some point, four parties had roughly the same poll numbers: Tories, Brexit, Labour and LibDems. However, in the last two weeks Labour and Tories gained with Labour ahead. In a system with single seat districts, "anything can happen", and a recent by-election suggested that Labour may have an advantage in "foot soldiers", volunteers who walk around a district chatting up voters. The internal fights in Labour attracted many new members, and from the point of view of "sensible folks in the Establishment", this is the worst type of rabble. No respect for the monarchy, the Trident, the necessity of low taxes on business and the rich and so on. And anti-Semitic to boot.

So the meaning of "Corbyn is frail" is that while he himself seems mild mannered, his victory would unleashed unwashed hordes wrecking everything which is good and that we hold dear, like the monarchy, the Trident and so on.

Jeff Ewener , July 17, 2019 at 13:26

Gob-smacking. To call a man with the intelligence, experience, sensitivity & integrity of Jeremy Corbyn "unfit" to be the British Prime Minister, while a monstrosity like Boris Johnson is standing on the doorstep of Number 10 – just takes the breath away.

rosemerry , July 17, 2019 at 15:45

Not to mention the former "New Labour" leaders whose policies fell far away from the traditional policies Corbyn has held to and which caused so many Britons to support him as leader.

Hayman Fan , July 18, 2019 at 11:49

Integrity? Are you joking? Corbyn has been anti-EU for 40 years. In fact, he is the only main party leader who voted leave in the last people's vote (aka the referendum). But he has tried to hid that fact. He has been sitting on the fence and playing politics with the issue. Many fools in Britain believe Corbyn is a remainer. A man of integrity would have explained to the British people his long held position on the EU and Brexit. But he didn't do that because he isn't a man of integrity. He wants to con his way into power and if he gets there (looking unlikely right now), he and his Stalinist henchpeople will wield that power ruthlessly.

Richard Kuper , July 17, 2019 at 12:37

Fascinating article. May we repost it on jvl.org.uk?

Eddie , July 17, 2019 at 12:36

Comment that I posted on the Malware article do not post.

Zenobia van Dongen , July 17, 2019 at 11:39

In English-speaking countries anti-Semitic is just a code word for pro-Islamic. Miller himself is deeply involved in efforts to make extremist Islam respectable and justifying terrorist indoctrination.

Simeon Hope , July 17, 2019 at 13:05

Okay, I'll take your comment as made in good faith but you will need to back it up with good evidence. Where is it?

Qui? , July 18, 2019 at 03:22

Palestinians are semites, as the rest of the Arabs. So who is the real antisemite now?

Truth first , July 17, 2019 at 11:37

A "communist" who is against war, nukes and massive inequality is OK by me.

Hayman Fan , July 18, 2019 at 07:28

Is it indeed. Then your are a fool. Pol Pot was a communist who was against war and nukes and massive inequality. But implementing totalitarism by force didn't turn out well for the Cambodian people. And it wouldn't turn out well for the British people either. Except for Corbyn and his henchpeople of course.

dean 1000 , July 17, 2019 at 10:42

Jews in Europe and the US have gone from being heavily discriminated against to having much more influence on government than their numbers warrant. I'm going to tell the Netanyahu joke to make my point. Don't know who to credit. Kudos anyway. "It is not anti-Semitic to disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu as he is as white as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan."

Given the influence of US and European Jews it is well past time for them to stop screaming anti-semitism when someone has a divergent opinion. They should stop using Semitic people as human shields.

The left also likes to hurl anti-Semitism at political opponents when they don't have a relevant answer.

Unfounded criticism of Jews is anti-Jewish rather than anti-Semitic. Call it what it is.

Ron Striebig , July 17, 2019 at 06:26

As Albert Einstein says Capitalism is an Evil supported by those who are terrified of Jeremy Corbyn because like Jesus he is a true Socialist

Que Nelle , July 17, 2019 at 05:52

To be accused of antisemitism by zionists that champion the racist entity israel, is a badge of honor.

Vivian O'Blivion , July 17, 2019 at 03:30

If the Integrity Initiative really is shut down, the little Simon Bracey-Lane will be free to cross the pond and campaign for Bernie just like he did in 2015 / 2016. Nah, just kiddin', his cover is blown. But seriously, campaign managers for Tulsi Gabbard best be on guard against inflation from these snakes.

Hayman Fan , July 17, 2019 at 02:51

Guys be careful with this. Corbyn is a communist. He is surrounded by Stalinists. Their modus operandi is entryism + free stuff + perpetual attacks on cultural norms. They used to laud the USSR. Then Venezuala. Now China. If they ever manage to grab power, they will stamp on individual liberty. Just like China does. The Muslim vote is very important to them and whilst they despise conventional religions, they will happily 'buy' Muslim votes with anti Israeli and anti Semitic rhetoric. The loudest voices speaking up against Corbyn and his henchpeople are on the left. Be a little bit circumspect.

Truth first , July 17, 2019 at 11:36

A "communist" who is against war, nukes and massive inequality is OK by me.

Simeon Hope , July 17, 2019 at 13:09

Errr what ? Israel does enough on its own to show how anti-Arab and undemocratic it is without the need for Jeremy Corbyn to add anything. I'm a socialist. I support what Mr Corbyn is doing to promote socialism in the UK. There's not the slightest evidence he's an anti-Semite, and the tiny amount of anti-Semitism in the Labour party is dwarfed by what's emanating from the right against Jews and Muslims.

Just say no , July 17, 2019 at 13:58

This is a joke right. You say communist and you reference China, but in the last century it was ok to ship nearly the entire industrial base of Western Democracies to China so that a bunch of fat cat tycoons, investment bankers, hedge funders et al could become so rich they finally had enough money to purchase the U.S. Government, and it looks like the government of Britain too. That's where we are today.

There may be "communists" lurking somewhere mostly in the imagination who are trotted out whenever a left person obtains a plurality. What has happened to Jeremy Corbyn is horrifying and we have our own issues in the U.S. with the endless smears and lies regarding the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. We live in a world of fabrication, sanctions enough to go around for everyone. Even the little state of RI is sanctioned by Moody's for having the effrontery to pass a bill which "gives too much away to labor" but Moody's and the other ratings agencies gave triple AAA ratings to junk during the "great recession" plain and simple, and no one cared. We need a Nuremburg trial for Capitalism and all its practioners.

Piotr Berman , July 18, 2019 at 00:33

"You say communist and you reference China, "

You are wrong is several ways. First, "There may be "communists" lurking somewhere mostly in the imagination who are trotted out whenever a left person obtains a plurality." Corbyn was observed to be a threat the moment he was elected Labour leader, something that stumped large segments of "informed public". Due to the surprise element, the anti-Semitic angle was not exploited properly, with possible exception of some Zionist whack jobs who harranged him. Instead, two points were raised that really jolted my attention.

First, Corbyn was sooo extreme that he advocated discontinuation of Trident program and even, horror!, the entirety of British nuclear arms program. You could as well raise huge signs ?????? ?y???? ???????! on English shores.

Second, his bicycling habits were compared to China during the orthodox Communist year, when riding on non-descript bikes was heavily supported by pre-Capitalist leadership.

Mind you, a person of note may ride a bike without shame, but not the cheap and aged specimen favored by Corbyn. Finally, compromising photos were found showing Corbyn relaxing and revealing his red socks.

Paul Merrell , July 17, 2019 at 23:40

@ "Hayman Fan"

A rather dubious name, methinks. See https://preview.tinyurl.com/y3us8776

Sounds like you just couldn't stand not posting a troll comment on an article about your own activities, yes?

ToivoS , July 16, 2019 at 22:54

This incessant accusation of antisemitism against anyone who supports justice for Palestinians does seem to be effective. A decade ago when I first noticed this smear tactic I assumed it would be self defeating on the part of the Zionists and their backers. It sort of seemed obvious that such a tactic would be self limiting with the broader world beginning to reject such slander. However, it seems the smear is more effective today than it was ten years ago. So depressing. Watching Corbyn's supporters ripping apart his own base in the Labour Party in an effort to appease the Israelis is appalling -- it seems the more that is conceded the more aggressive the Zionist become. Ten years ago it was proper to describe the West Bank as "occupied territory", soon it will be considered antisemitic to even go that far.

David G , July 16, 2019 at 21:21

In addition, in 2015, an unnamed, serving British general was quoted saying that if a Corbyn government implemented his well-established anti-imperial and anti-nuke agenda, "there would be mass resignations at all levels [of the military] and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-army-could-stage-mutiny-under-corbyn-says-senior-serving-general-10509742.html

David G , July 16, 2019 at 21:07

" the 'Information Research Department,' first proposed in 1947 and sold to the cabinet as a bipartisan, anti-Communist and anti-American propaganda operation."

"Anti-American" is a slip, right? I assume it was pro-American (or pro-USAian).

David Miller , July 17, 2019 at 04:17

My apologies, I was paraphrasing the work of Lyn Smith in her article on IRD in Millennium in 1980. It should really be 'anti capitalist'. According Smith the founder of IRD (Christopher Mayhew) put forward a plan to set up a cold war propaganda agency:

'Mayhew put forward his ideas: the campaign should be as positive as possible laying stress on the merits of Social Democracy but, he pointed out "we shouldn't appear as defenders of the status quo but should attack Capitalism and Imperialism along with Russian Communism" In fact at this early stage, the idea was more of a "third force" propaganda attacking Capitalism as well as communism (this, however, was not to last for, as later documents reveal, anti Communism soon cam to the fore).'(Covert British Propaganda: The Information Research Department: 1947-77, Millennium, 9(1), p68-9)

In fact the idea that it would be anti capitalist was a ruse used by Mayhew to deceive the left members of the British cabinet. As my colleague and I Will Dinan summarised in our book A Century of Spin (Pluto Press, 2008, p130-1):

IRD was not created with the knowing support of the Labour Cabinet. The author of the paper which went to the cabinet – Christoper Mayhew – was a Labour right winger and cold warrior. He dissembled to the cabinet about the purpose and function of the IRD by claiming that it was to be a 'Third Force' campaign, understood as policy intended by the left to be independent of both the US and the USSR. According to Mayhew himself:

I thought it was necessary to present the whole campaign in a positive way, in a way which Dick Crossman and Michael Foot would fi nd it hard to oppose. And they were calling for a Third Force so I recommended in the original paper I put to Bevin that we call it a Third Force propaganda campaign.

As Mayhew noted, 'the turning point' was the speech of George Marshall the US Secretary of State in June 1947. From 'the middle of 1947 onwards, decisions were taken towards uniting the free world, at the expense of widening the gap with the Communist world our immediate objective changed, from "one world" to "one free world"'.

It is interesting, in this light, to reflect what might/will happen once a Corbyn government is elected with – how should we put this – a minority of leftists in the cabinet.

David G , July 17, 2019 at 15:27

Very interesting! I guess the propagandists back then had a little more finesse than the idiotic bludgeoning the US/UK establishment is laying on us these days. Thanks for the clarification, David Miller!

Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2019 at 21:05

The British Political Class has the same problem as the American Political Class – No integrity, No Honesty, No ethics. Just the sort of bozos we need running countries.

Maz Palmer , July 17, 2019 at 14:59

They are all much worse than bozos (or Bezos); they are all plutocrats, oligarchs, neo-liberal neo-fascist capitalists. That is what all of this is about: this is all a campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to keep expandable, pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt slavery.

[Jul 18, 2019] Brennan used using Dmitri Alperovitch of 'Crowdstrike' as a tool to corrupt the processes of investigation of DNC leaks.

Notable quotes:
"... Moreover, if, as the memorandum asserted, 'British officials' were also aware that the 'most reliable intelligence' exonerated the Syrian government, rather fundamental questions arose as to how the JIC had felt able to claim precisely the reverse in support of David Cameron's unsuccessful attempt on 29 August to win Commons' support for British participation in air strikes. ..."
"... At the time, the Director General, Defence and Intelligence at the FCO was one Robert Hannigan, who in April 2014 would be appointed as Director of GCHQ. The National Security Adviser was a certain Sir Kim Darroch, whose appointment as Ambassador to the U.S. would be announced in August 2015. Both have been in the news, in relation to 'Russiagate.' ..."
"... Obviously, the same question arises about both of them as about Brennan: are they 'Gleiwitz types', who were actively complicit in preparing a murderous 'false flag', or were they simply part of a rather stupid Anglo-American 'dog', whom the 'tail', in the shape of the jihadists and their Turkish, Saudi and Qatari backers, could 'wag', as they chose? ..."
"... From the articles which Seymour Hersh published in the 'London Review of Books', and other materials, it became evident that the Defense Intelligence Agency, then headed by General Flynn, had been aware of the likelihood of fresh 'false flags' -- after the small scale incidents in spring 2013. ..."
"... An argument that 'Sundance' has repeatedly made is that a lot of what was happening in mid-2016, including the dossier attributed to Steele, had to do with the need to find justifications for these questionable surveillance operations. ..."
"... While I think there is something in this, I have long thought that the discovery that a mass of material exfiltrated from the DNC, and was going to be published by 'WikiLeaks', and the subsequent murder of Seth Rich, are likely to have been critically important triggers. ..."
"... panic-stricken improvisation found alike in the dossier, and the claims about the 'digital forensics' made by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'CrowdStrike', and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait. ..."
"... A week later, Butowsky filed a new action, in which the suggestion of a very-wide ranging conspiracy to suppress the truth about both the DNC leaks and Rich's murder was turned into a catalogue of defamation claims against a long list of people, including, as well as a variety of lawyers involved, CNN, the'Nw York Times', Vox, and the DNC. ..."
"... 'That Seth Rich was wacked because he stole the DNC emails and transferred them to Wikileaks is a conspiracy theory. It is possible and even plausible, but there is no evidence to confirm it. Many people seem to believe it because it makes more sense than the competing conspiracy theory, that Russia hacked the DNC and handed the emails to Wikileaks. Isikoff's claim, that Russia planted the Rich conspiracy theory, has no sound base. That theory existed before anything "Russian" mentioned it.' ..."
"... Reading the full text of Ms. Craven's report, I can see quite how well justified was Larry's suggestion in his post that Folkenflik and NPR were on a very sticky wicket indeed (as we say in England.) ..."
"... However, 'fools rush in', as the saying goes, so Isikoff decided to conspire with Deborah Sines, apparently the former U.S. assistant attorney in charge of investigating Seth Rich's murder, to suggest that suggestions that the victim had been the source of the material from the DNC published by 'WikiLeaks' originated as just another Russian plot. ..."
"... It appears that prior to the publication of his 'report', Isikoff talked to Butowsky, who in his efforts to dissuade him explained that his involvement in the whole affair began when Ellen Ratner, a news analyst with Fox, and sister of the late Michael Ratner, who had been an attorney for Assange, contacted him in Fall 2016 about a meeting she had with her that figure. ..."
"... And then, not particularly surprisingly, Butowsky and Clevenger abandoned their inhibitions about identifying Ellen Ratner as a source, and filled in a lot of 'blanks' in their 'narrative' about how Seth Rich lived and died. ..."
"... Among the many problems for Brennan and his co-conspirators -- among whom, on the British side, Hannigan and Darroch, and also Sedwill, are very important -- one relates to the way that the capabilities of 'scientific forensics', in all kinds of areas, have increased by leaps and bounds in recent years. ..."
"... This has meant that they have had little option but to corrupt the processes of investigation. The ludicrous claims by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait, which nobody but a fool -- congenital 'useful idiot' one might say -- or a knave would dare to defend in public, are only one of many cases in point. ..."
Jul 18, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

David Habakkuk , 16 July 2019 at 01:14 PM

Larry,

One does not like to admit to having been one of John Brennan's 'useful idiots' -- I had thought I could see through any of the 'active measures' which he and his co-conspirators, on both sides of the Atlantic, could dream up. But I had swallowed whole the notion that Michael Flynn had been stupid enough knowingly to get involved in Erdoğan's feud with Gülen.

In fairness, however, I do think that when dealing with spiders like the former head of the CIA, a prudent fly needs to be sure he, or she, gets competent legal advice at the outset.

It may perhaps be interesting to put your account together with a post by 'Sundance' on the 'Conservative Treehouse' site on 14 July, headlined 'Devin Nunes Discusses Upcoming Mueller Testimony '

This takes up the issue, on which its author has commented extensively, of illegitimate access by contractors to the databases of NSA intercepts -- an issue which is clearly bound up with that of the use of such material to create the 'web' in which Flynn found himself hopelessly entangled.

The post by 'Sundance' suggests, just as you do, that the driving force behind what has happened was actually John Brennan. The April 2017 ruling by FISA Court Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer does not definitely establish that the illegitimate access of contractors started in 2012, but it definitely strongly suggests that it did.

Reading the 6 September 'Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity' memorandum to Obama, entitled 'Is Syria a Trap?', whose signatories included both you and Colonel Lang, it seemed overwhelmingly likely to some of us who were familiar with both your writings that Brennan had to have been involved in a conspiracy with the Turks, Saudis, and Qataris.

(To my surprise, this can no longer be accessed at the 'Consortium News' site. However, it is still available at http://www.shoah.org.uk/2013/09/10/page/2/ .)

One relevant question related to whether the role of the Americans involved in this conspiracy was simply 'ex post facto' exploitation of the patent 'false flag' sarin atrocity at Ghouta the previous 21 August to attempt to inveigle the United States into toppling Assad, or whether there was 'ex ante' complicity.

Moreover, if, as the memorandum asserted, 'British officials' were also aware that the 'most reliable intelligence' exonerated the Syrian government, rather fundamental questions arose as to how the JIC had felt able to claim precisely the reverse in support of David Cameron's unsuccessful attempt on 29 August to win Commons' support for British participation in air strikes.

At the time, the Director General, Defence and Intelligence at the FCO was one Robert Hannigan, who in April 2014 would be appointed as Director of GCHQ. The National Security Adviser was a certain Sir Kim Darroch, whose appointment as Ambassador to the U.S. would be announced in August 2015. Both have been in the news, in relation to 'Russiagate.'

Obviously, the same question arises about both of them as about Brennan: are they 'Gleiwitz types', who were actively complicit in preparing a murderous 'false flag', or were they simply part of a rather stupid Anglo-American 'dog', whom the 'tail', in the shape of the jihadists and their Turkish, Saudi and Qatari backers, could 'wag', as they chose?

From the articles which Seymour Hersh published in the 'London Review of Books', and other materials, it became evident that the Defense Intelligence Agency, then headed by General Flynn, had been aware of the likelihood of fresh 'false flags' -- after the small scale incidents in spring 2013.

And it was clear enough, if one bothered to study the 'open source' material at all carefully, that the DIA had been a key locus of opposition to the strategies being pursued by Brennan, together with his British co-conspirators.

Accordingly, the fact that an 'interagency memorandum of understanding', which according to Collyer's judgement looks as though it may well date from 2012 -- the year Brennan was appointed to head the CIA -- appears to have led, in that year, to the granting of access to the material, through the FBI, to outside contractors, looks somewhat interesting. (This is well covered by 'Sundance'.)

So, I find myself asking whether in fact this gross abuse of the role of the NSA was not linked at the outset to the divisions within the American intelligence apparatus and military about policy towards the Middle East, and also whether this may not be relevant to assessing the role of Robert Mueller, who was FBI Director through until September 2013.

An argument that 'Sundance' has repeatedly made is that a lot of what was happening in mid-2016, including the dossier attributed to Steele, had to do with the need to find justifications for these questionable surveillance operations.

While I think there is something in this, I have long thought that the discovery that a mass of material exfiltrated from the DNC, and was going to be published by 'WikiLeaks', and the subsequent murder of Seth Rich, are likely to have been critically important triggers.

Among other things, I do not think that the version given by 'Sundance' can explain the air of panic-stricken improvisation found alike in the dossier, and the claims about the 'digital forensics' made by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'CrowdStrike', and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait.

I see that there has now been a dramatic escalation in the legal battles which began when Ed Butowsky bought his initial action against David Folkenflik and his 'NPR' colleagues in June 2018. The discovery process in that action was followed by an 'Amended Complaint' on 5 March this year.

A week later, Butowsky filed a new action, in which the suggestion of a very-wide ranging conspiracy to suppress the truth about both the DNC leaks and Rich's murder was turned into a catalogue of defamation claims against a long list of people, including, as well as a variety of lawyers involved, CNN, the'Nw York Times', Vox, and the DNC.

On 9 July, Michael Isikoff published a story alleging that the claims about Rich and his murder were the result of a Russian 'active measures' operation -- to use a favourite phrase of TTG's.

A useful account, with links, is provided by our colleague 'b', at 'Moon of Alabama', at https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/07/isikoff-who-first-peddled-the-fake-steele-dossier-invents-new-russian-influence-story.html .

Concluding his piece, 'b' wrote:

'That Seth Rich was wacked because he stole the DNC emails and transferred them to Wikileaks is a conspiracy theory. It is possible and even plausible, but there is no evidence to confirm it. Many people seem to believe it because it makes more sense than the competing conspiracy theory, that Russia hacked the DNC and handed the emails to Wikileaks. Isikoff's claim, that Russia planted the Rich conspiracy theory, has no sound base. That theory existed before anything "Russian" mentioned it.'

As it happens, Butowsky and his lawyer, Ty Clevenger, obviously decided it was time to, as it were, 'unmask their batteries', and provide some of the evidence they have been accumulating.

There is another useful post by 'Sundance', which in turn links to a very interesting post on the Gateway Pundit' site. From there, you can access both Clevenger's blog post, and the text of the 'Amended Complaint.'

(See https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/07/15/lawsuit-claims-julian-assange-confirmed-dnc-emails-received-from-seth-rich-not-a-russian-hack/ .)

It seems likely that Butowsky and Clevenger were pushed into acting a bit sooner than they had intended. The fact that the name of Ellen Ratner, clearly a pivotal participant, was misspellled 'Rattner' in the 'Amended Complaint', is likely to be an indication of this.

However, I also think that Clevenger, who seems to me a first-class 'ferret', could do with the services of an old-style secretary, who checked his productions before they went out.

turcopolier , 16 July 2019 at 02:34 PM
As I have previously mentioned, I testified several times in Collyer's Washington district court on non-FISA matters. My impression was that she is a very ambitious woman who wishes always to do DoJ's bidding.

David Habakkuk -> turcopolier ... , 18 July 2019 at 01:28 PM

Pat,

Your recollections of Collyer had, unfortunately, slipped my mind when I posted my comment above. So, unfortunately, had Larry's post on Judge Caroline M. Craven's denial in her report dated 17 April 2019 of the Motion to Dismiss filed by David Folkenflik and his NPR colleagues in the defamation case brought against them by Ed Butowsky.

At the time of his post, the full text of the judgement was only available on PACER, which requires a subscription. However, looking at the 'Court Listener' site, I now see that both it and some other key documents in the case are freely available.

(See https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7244731/butowsky-v-folkenflik/ .)

Reading the full text of Ms. Craven's report, I can see quite how well justified was Larry's suggestion in his post that Folkenflik and NPR were on a very sticky wicket indeed (as we say in England.)

And I can also see more clearly why, following the judgement, Butowsky and Ty Clevenger felt they were in a position to launch an action both against some of the major legal players in the cover-up of the fact that the materials published by the DNC were leaked by Seth Rich, not hacked by the Russians, and also key disseminators of the cover-up, CNN, the NYT, and Vox.

The most important documents in that case are also now free available on 'Court Listener', at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/14681570/butowsky-v-gottlieb/ .

What looks to have happened subsequently is a natural enough process of escalation.

Among those who rather actively promoted the hogwash attributed to Christopher Steele was Michael Isikoff, who is, apparently, chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News. In April, he was reported in 'Vanity Fair' conceding that 'I think it's fair to say that all of us should have approached this, in retrospect, with more skepticism'.

(See https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/the-steele-dossiers-moment-of-truth-arrives-journalists-argue-its-impact .)

Any 'investigative reporter' worth his or her salt would have done elementary checks on the dossier immediately, and not touched it with a bargepole -- again, as we used to say in England. Also, even among the incompetent and corrupt, common prudence might have suggested caution.

However, 'fools rush in', as the saying goes, so Isikoff decided to conspire with Deborah Sines, apparently the former U.S. assistant attorney in charge of investigating Seth Rich's murder, to suggest that suggestions that the victim had been the source of the material from the DNC published by 'WikiLeaks' originated as just another Russian plot.

(See https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-the-true-origins-of-the-seth-rich-conspiracy-a-yahoo-news-investigation-100000831.html .)

It appears that prior to the publication of his 'report', Isikoff talked to Butowsky, who in his efforts to dissuade him explained that his involvement in the whole affair began when Ellen Ratner, a news analyst with Fox, and sister of the late Michael Ratner, who had been an attorney for Assange, contacted him in Fall 2016 about a meeting she had with her that figure.

Although Butowsky intended the conversation to be 'off the record', and the idea was emphatically not that Isikoff would contact Ellen Ratner, he did. It seems that -- not particularly surprisingly, in the current climate -- she lied to him, and he was stupid enough to think that this meant he could get away with publishing his story.

(See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/07/breaking-lawsuit-outs-reporter-ellen-ratner-as-source-for-seth-rich-information/ .)

And then, not particularly surprisingly, Butowsky and Clevenger abandoned their inhibitions about identifying Ellen Ratner as a source, and filled in a lot of 'blanks' in their 'narrative' about how Seth Rich lived and died.

I am still in the process of digesting the new information. However, a couple of preliminary observations about the implications may be worth making.

Among the many problems for Brennan and his co-conspirators -- among whom, on the British side, Hannigan and Darroch, and also Sedwill, are very important -- one relates to the way that the capabilities of 'scientific forensics', in all kinds of areas, have increased by leaps and bounds in recent years.

This has meant that they have had little option but to corrupt the processes of investigation. The ludicrous claims by Dmitri Alperovitch of 'Crowdstrike' and the former GCHQ person Matt Tait, which nobody but a fool -- congenital 'useful idiot' one might say -- or a knave would dare to defend in public, are only one of many cases in point.

What is really dangerous for the conspirators, however, is when the problems they have in contesting rational arguments about the 'scientific forensics' come together with problems relating to more 'old-fashioned' kinds of evidence: crucially, 'witness testimony'.

This, I think, may now be happening.

It also seems to me quite likely that some of those 'in the know' -- including perhaps Rosemary Collyer -- had seen what was liable to happen a good while ago, and decided that a prudent 'rat' keeps its options open.

[Jul 17, 2019] 13 Russian Indictments -- Letter From Putin to Mueller

Notable quotes:
"... I originally published this as a satirical Facebook Note on February 21, 2018, after the New York Times reported on February 16, 2018 that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had indicted 13 Russians. ..."
Jul 15, 2019 | medium.com

Michael Weddle Follow Jul 15 · 3 min read

I originally published this as a satirical Facebook Note on February 21, 2018, after the New York Times reported on February 16, 2018 that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had indicted 13 Russians.

February 21, 2018

The Honorable Robert Swan Mueller III
Special Investigating Counsel
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530–0001

Dear Mr. Mueller:

I read with great interest your indictments of 13 Russian citizens and three Russian corporations.

Please note that Russia encourages you to continue your investigatory efforts as we are confident you will find that neither myself or any representatives of my office and government have anything to do with what many of your politicians and media members are describing as "Russian collusion" or "Russian meddling" with the US 2016 elections.

Also, as a side note, please know that we in Russia are completely surprised at how you conducted your 2016 election. From the vantage point of anyone living outside of America those elections did not appear fair at all. We in Russia are surprised by this as we thought you were a better nation than what we saw from your 2016 national elections.

Although the United States of America and The Russian Federation hold no formal extradition treaty agreement, please be advised I am willing to use the powers of my office to contact those whom you've indicted and I will do my utmost to encourage them to come to America in order to stand the trial of your indictments. We are confident that your jurisprudence system for legal discovery will produce both remarkable and enlightening evidence for your investigation.

On a mundane matter, would you be willing to pay for the costs of their travel and housing expenses while they stand trial in America, or would you prefer that The Russian Federation to cover this expense?

Finally, please find attached a copy of the Constitution of The Russian Federation. You are welcome to share with your fellow citizens as we are confident they will become very surprised by what they learn from reading the contents of our Constitution.

http://www.constitution.ru/en/10003000-01.htm

Very truly yours,

Vladimir Putin, President The Russian Federation

PS: I strongly recommend that your FBI, NSA and DHS departments thoroughly examine the DNC computers in order to determine if they were actually "hacked." I'm confident you will discover that the documents published by Wikileaks were the product of an inside "leak" onto a thumb drive. Please note that I am shocked that the thoroughness of your investigation has not yet accomplished this simple and obvious task.

[Jul 17, 2019] 13 Russian Indictments -- Letter From Putin to Mueller

Notable quotes:
"... I originally published this as a satirical Facebook Note on February 21, 2018, after the New York Times reported on February 16, 2018 that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had indicted 13 Russians. ..."
Jul 15, 2019 | medium.com

Michael Weddle Follow Jul 15 · 3 min read

I originally published this as a satirical Facebook Note on February 21, 2018, after the New York Times reported on February 16, 2018 that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had indicted 13 Russians.

February 21, 2018

The Honorable Robert Swan Mueller III
Special Investigating Counsel
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530–0001

Dear Mr. Mueller:

I read with great interest your indictments of 13 Russian citizens and three Russian corporations.

Please note that Russia encourages you to continue your investigatory efforts as we are confident you will find that neither myself or any representatives of my office and government have anything to do with what many of your politicians and media members are describing as "Russian collusion" or "Russian meddling" with the US 2016 elections.

Also, as a side note, please know that we in Russia are completely surprised at how you conducted your 2016 election. From the vantage point of anyone living outside of America those elections did not appear fair at all. We in Russia are surprised by this as we thought you were a better nation than what we saw from your 2016 national elections.

Although the United States of America and The Russian Federation hold no formal extradition treaty agreement, please be advised I am willing to use the powers of my office to contact those whom you've indicted and I will do my utmost to encourage them to come to America in order to stand the trial of your indictments. We are confident that your jurisprudence system for legal discovery will produce both remarkable and enlightening evidence for your investigation.

On a mundane matter, would you be willing to pay for the costs of their travel and housing expenses while they stand trial in America, or would you prefer that The Russian Federation to cover this expense?

Finally, please find attached a copy of the Constitution of The Russian Federation. You are welcome to share with your fellow citizens as we are confident they will become very surprised by what they learn from reading the contents of our Constitution.

http://www.constitution.ru/en/10003000-01.htm

Very truly yours,

Vladimir Putin, President The Russian Federation

PS: I strongly recommend that your FBI, NSA and DHS departments thoroughly examine the DNC computers in order to determine if they were actually "hacked." I'm confident you will discover that the documents published by Wikileaks were the product of an inside "leak" onto a thumb drive. Please note that I am shocked that the thoroughness of your investigation has not yet accomplished this simple and obvious task.

[Jul 17, 2019] Sic Transit Gloria Mueller by Ray McGovern

Mueller looks more and more like dirty Clinton fixer.
Notable quotes:
"... The Feb. 2018 indictment referred repeatedly to the IRA simply as a "Russian organization." But in Mueller's report 14 months later, the "Russian organization" had somehow morphed into "Russia." The IRA's lawyers argued, in effect, that Mueller's ipse-dixit "Russia did it" does not suffice as proof of Russian government involvement. Federal Judge Friedrich agreed and ordered Mueller to cease promoting his evidence-less charge against the IRA; she added that "any future violations of her order will trigger a range of potential sanctions." ..."
"... In testimony to Congress in October 2017, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch had cautioned earlier that from 2015 to 2017, "Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or 'served,' a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds." Shamefully misleading "analysis" by Times reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti in a 10,000-word article on September 20, 2018 made the case that the IRA's 80,000 posts helped deliver the presidency to Trump. ..."
"... Shane and Mazzetti neglected to report the 33 trillion number for needed context, even though the Times ' own coverage of Stretch's 2017 testimony stated outright: "Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users' News Feeds everyday." ..."
"... CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, the Justice Department admitted. ..."
"... With Erin Ratner being named as a conduit between Seth Rich and Wikileaks in a lawsuit yesterday – the second flimsy leg of Mueller's claims – gets cut off at the knees. ..."
Jul 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

... ... ...

Requiem for 'Interference'

Daniel Lazare's July 12 Consortium News piece shatters one of the twin prongs in Mueller's case that "the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion." It was the prong dripping with incessant drivel about the Kremlin using social media to help Trump win in 2016.

Mueller led off his Russiagate report, a redacted version of which was published on April 18, with the dubious claim that his investigation had

" established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign, and then released stolen documents."

Judge to Mueller: Put Up or Shut Up

Mueller: Needs more time. (Flickr)

Regarding the social-media accusation, Judge Friederich has now told Mueller, in effect, to put up or shut up. What happened was this: On February 16, 2018 a typically credulous grand jury -- the usual kind that cynics say can be persuaded to indict the proverbial ham sandwich -- was convinced by Mueller to return 16 indictments of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and associates in St. Petersburg, giving his all-deliberate-speed investigation some momentum and a much-needed, if short-lived, "big win" in "proving" interference by Russia in the 2016 election. It apparently never occurred to Mueller and the super-smart lawyers around him that the Russians would outsmart them by hiring their own lawyers to show up in U.S. court and seek discovery. Oops.

The Feb. 2018 indictment referred repeatedly to the IRA simply as a "Russian organization." But in Mueller's report 14 months later, the "Russian organization" had somehow morphed into "Russia." The IRA's lawyers argued, in effect, that Mueller's ipse-dixit "Russia did it" does not suffice as proof of Russian government involvement. Federal Judge Friedrich agreed and ordered Mueller to cease promoting his evidence-less charge against the IRA; she added that "any future violations of her order will trigger a range of potential sanctions."

More specifically, at the conclusion of a hearing held under seal on May 28, Judge Friedrich ordered the government "to refrain from making or authorizing any public statement that links the alleged conspiracy in the indictment to the Russian government or its agencies." The judge ordered further that "any public statement about the allegations in the indictment . . . must make clear that, one, the government is summarizing the allegations in the indictment which remain unproven, and, two, the government does not express an opinion on the defendant's guilt or innocence or the strength of the evidence in this case."

Reporting Thursday on Judge Friedrich's ruling, former CIA and State Department official Larry C. Johnson described it as a "potential game changer," observing that Mueller "has not offered one piece of solid evidence that the defendants were involved in any way with the government of Russia." After including a lot of useful background material, Johnson ends by noting:

"Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot put that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth–if you cannot produce evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that part of the Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their accusers."

IRA Story a 'Stretch'

Last fall, investigative journalist Gareth Porter dissected and debunked The New York Times 's far-fetched claim that 80,000 Facebook posts by the Internet Research Agency helped swing the election to Donald Trump. What the Times story neglected to say is that the relatively paltry 80,000 posts were engulfed in literally trillions of posts on Facebook over the two-year period in question -- before and after the 2016 election.

Stretch and executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google hauled before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism on Oct. 31, 2017.

In testimony to Congress in October 2017, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch had cautioned earlier that from 2015 to 2017, "Americans using Facebook were exposed to, or 'served,' a total of over 33 trillion stories in their News Feeds." Shamefully misleading "analysis" by Times reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti in a 10,000-word article on September 20, 2018 made the case that the IRA's 80,000 posts helped deliver the presidency to Trump.

Shane and Mazzetti neglected to report the 33 trillion number for needed context, even though the Times ' own coverage of Stretch's 2017 testimony stated outright: "Facebook cautioned that the Russia-linked posts represented a minuscule amount of content compared with the billions of posts that flow through users' News Feeds everyday."

The chances that Americans saw any of these IRA ads -- let alone were influenced by them -- are infinitismal. Porter and others did the math and found that over the two-year period, the 80,000 Russian-origin Facebook posts represented just 0.0000000024 of total Facebook content in that time. Porter commented that this particular Times contribution to the Russiagate story "should vie in the annals of journalism as one of the most spectacularly misleading uses of statistics of all time."

And now we know, courtesy of Judge Friederich, that Mueller has never produced proof, beyond his say-so, that the Russian government was responsible for the activities of the IRA -- feckless as they were. That they swung the election is clearly a stretch.

The Other Prong: Hacking the DNC

The second of Mueller's two major accusations of Russian interference, as noted above, charged that "a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign, and then released stolen documents." Sadly for Russiagate aficionados, the evidence behind that charge doesn't hold water either.

CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, the Justice Department admitted.

The revelation came in a court filing by the government in the pre-trial phase of Roger Stone, a long-time Republican operative who had an unofficial role in the campaign of candidate Donald Trump. Stone has been charged with misleading Congress, obstructing justice and intimidating a witness.

The filing was in response to a motion by Stone's lawyers asking for "unredacted reports" from CrowdStrike challenging the government to prove that Russia hacked the DNC server. "The government does not possess the information the defendant seeks," the DOJ filing says.

Small wonder that Mueller had hoped to escape further questioning. If he does testify on July 24, the committee hearings will be well worth watching.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and a presidential briefer. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. His colleagues and he have been following closely the ins and outs of Russiagate.

Carlos , July 17, 2019 at 12:52

With Erin Ratner being named as a conduit between Seth Rich and Wikileaks in a lawsuit yesterday – the second flimsy leg of Mueller's claims – gets cut off at the knees.

cletus , July 17, 2019 at 05:29

just read your article at lewrockwell on 7/17.

you gave all the facts that irrefutably condemn the mueller hoax and reveal what a con man he is. I salute you for this.

unfortutunately, you then come to a conclusion that cannot be supported by an reasonable person.

you think that mueller's con will be called out by the republicans on the committee.

what a joke. They will avoid like the plague revealling that the russia claims by mueller are a hoax.
they'll focus completely on ' you did conclude that trump didn't collude with the russians, right?"

anyone who's been paying attention at all knows this.

Robert G. Hilton , July 17, 2019 at 01:13

There was no expert report showing hacking because the expert had found that the Russians did not hack. Simple as that. The way it works is, that an expert puts nothing in writing until AFTER orally consulting with the attorney who hired him. If the news is bad for said attorney, then the expert is instructed NEVER to put the bad news in writing. I used to hire experts when I litigated patent infringement cases, and that is the way it works. If you pay the expert, then you make the rules. The judge may understand this too. I'm pretty sure that the Crowd Strike expert also gave Muller (Andrew Wiseman?) the same news about no hacking.

michael weddle , July 16, 2019 at 22:41

Why, shortly after Random Juan claimed the presidency, was a Crowdstrike employee trying to stoke the Venezuelan coup?

https://steemit.com/venezuela/@michaelweddle/crowdstrike-employee-tweeting-pro-coup-propaganda-on-venezuela

Bailey , July 16, 2019 at 20:27

I wish that this constant debunking of Russia Gate would be doing some good. Sadly it's not. Most of the members of daily kos believe everything about Russia Gate and even after reading some of the great essays written here that debunks it they instead say that this website has been bought out by Russia.

I once thought that if people really looked at the evidence or lack of it that they would wake up and smell the propaganda. It has always been so obvious to me that there was never any there there and I couldn't understand how people bought into it. But I think it has to do with who people voted for in the last election. Hillary's supporters just can't believe that she could have lost without outside interference. Sad.

ex-PFC Chuck , July 16, 2019 at 18:08

A post yesterday at The Conservative Treehouse expands on a Gateway Pundit post about an amended filing to the court in a Texas libel suit that could blow the whole Russia-gate hoax wide open, taking with it whatever shred of credibility the Mueller Report might still have. Not to mention the rationale for silencing Assange, General Flynn's prosecution, and the murder of Seth Rich.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/07/15/lawsuit-claims-julian-assange-confirmed-dnc-emails-received-from-seth-rich-not-a-russian-hack/

Vera Moldt , July 16, 2019 at 17:13

It looks like this fraudulent fable has finally been debunked by the US judicial system. Now the Hillary bots will have to come up with another excuse for her wealthy donors as to why she lost the election to a much maligned TV host that spent a small fraction of her campaign funding. This also takes some of the fuel out of using the Russiagate fraud for a march to war with Russia that was accompanied by large defense spending increases. Russiagate was the perfect gift to the Clinton campaign apologists and the MIC that needs a causus belli to feed the public war machine. That gift box has now been unraveled to display an empty box. I'm surprised Ray McGovern did not bring up the issue of the alleged hacking of DNC emails to have been contrary to the capability of the internet at that time. The rate of transfer was consistent with downloading to a flash drive but impossible for transfer of packets across an IP network – further debunking the Russia hacking narrative. This whole house of cards has crashed in and it seems that it will be impossible for the Russiagate fraudsters to reconstruct their tawdry myth.

jaycee , July 16, 2019 at 14:08

Perceptive bloggers identified the IRA as a commercial clickbait operation two years ago. Everything about that operation was consistent with that description. Describing the IRA as a Russian government psy-op program, in turn, was inconsistent with the evidence at hand and so required the assumption that its purpose was to "sow chaos", or similar guesswork. It should be remembered that the Facebook / Twitter people were initially reluctant to go along with the latter theory, and only came on board after a great deal of pressure from members of Congress such as Mark Warner. So this whole nonsensical story was magnified at the insistence of powerful Democratic congressional persons, and Mueller was simply bolstering their arguments – which was his job it appears. The result has been not only a false consciousness deliberately seeded through the public, but also a raft of social media and alternative news censorship which has been silencing both alt-right and progressive voices.

Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2019 at 13:45

Thanx, Ray. I've said from the outset that Russiagate was bullshit perpetrated by Three Names who just couldn't stand the fact that this was the latest in a long string of failures that this incompetent, arrogant woman perpetrated on the American people. It was bullshit from jump street because Three Names won the election by 3M votes but in the American presidential election you not only need the votes, you need the distribution. Distribution she didn't have. Russia (or any other actor sufficiently large and determined) can sway votes for one candidate or another but they can't sway distribution. I personally thought the claim that Russia via the Internet Research Agency sought to sway the election by disparaging Three Names and pumping up Thump. Three Names won by 3M votes. Looks like Russia's IRA did a spectacularly poor job of meddling.

There are some take aways from this that the government should be looking into/doing something about.
1. Russiagate never had any legs. The legs that it got came from an effort by the deep state to create them out of thin air. The deep state tried to take on the role of the Praetorian Guard in old Rome. Their role originally was to protect the emperor but it morphed over the years into picking who would be the emperor. The likes of Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Struck (however you spell it) and his femme fatale (at a minimum, there may be more) should all be marched off to jail and locked up for a considerable period of time for their attempts to destroy our democracy (or republic – a distinction without a difference).

2. Seth Rich's murder needs to be actually investigated now that he has been outed as the source of the leak to Wikileaks.

3. The Republican party needs to be banned as a political party. Any clear eyed view of the 2016 election will conclude that the decades old effort by the Republicans at voter suppression and gerrymandering are what resulted in the 2016 results. 80,000 votes in three states that the Republicans have invested great voter suppression efforts – Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania would have changed the election results. This should have been a major neon sign that winner take all for electoral votes is a bad idea. If proportional EC votes were mandated, third parties would have a chance and our presidential elections might become actual contests. Otherwise, we'll continue to have elections that are between two candidates – worse and worser.

John Puma , July 16, 2019 at 12:36

The proportion of IRA "stories" among total Facebook postings
in the period in question, can be expressed in manner a bit more
readily grasped: on average, one IRA posting appeared among
every 412 million total. For perspective the US population is now
about 330 million.

The FBIs bungling with Crowdstrike information is reminiscent
of its reported 9-11 careless incompetence.

Jill , July 16, 2019 at 13:06

This may be why NPR featured that story:

"Businessman Ed Butowsky filed a lawsuit on Monday that outed FOX News reporter Ellen Ratner was his source for the Seth Rich information.

This comes after Michael Isikoff's report last week that labeled Butowsky as a Russian source."

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/07/breaking-lawsuit-outs-reporter-ellen-ratner-as-source-for-seth-rich-information/

Chet Roman , July 16, 2019 at 13:12

Yahoo's reporter Michael Isikoff is a sock puppet for the CIA/FBI that provided the info to NPR and was one of the first to spread the lies told to him by Steele about Russian interference. He must have tried to head off the lawsuit filed today. Ed Butowsky filed a lawsuit against the liberal media claiming defamation and business disparagement. He claims that Assange told Ellen Ratner (Fox News analyst and sister of Assange's lawyer who passed away) that Seth and Aaron Rich provided the emails to Wikileaks.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/07/15/lawsuit-claims-julian-assange-confirmed-dnc-emails-received-from-seth-rich-not-a-russian-hack/

Kieron , July 16, 2019 at 17:22

I don't think anyone with a couple of brain cells would dismiss the idea that an insider with the DNC having access to delicate, perhaps damaging material, being what seems on the surface, to be the victim of a motiveless murder would ask the question, was there any connection between Seth Rich's demise and the crap storm that ensued after the Wikileaks release. Really hello !

LarcoMarco , July 16, 2019 at 17:46

"NPR's Steve Inskeep talks to Michael Isikoff" – what a predictable farce! "We talked to Deborah Sines, who was the federal prosecutor in charge of the investigation into Seth Rich's death. She was an assistant U.S. attorney in the U.S. attorney's office in the District of Columbia, which prosecutes local murders. And she would see these conspiracy theories about her case circulating on the Web. She was – she wanted to find out where they were coming from."

At least we now know that Seth Rich's death is/was a Federal case. No more claiming the DCPD has jurisdiction. But no disclosures of the contents of Seth Rich's cell phone and laptop.

Eric32 , July 16, 2019 at 10:38

The author seems consumed by this carnival of politicized legalized covert intelligence operations, by people and entities trying to retain money and power.

What's important is that the system hasn't been working for decades, and there's going to be increasingly serious problems, maybe fatal ones, rising if a big overhaul doesn't occur.

Al Pinto , July 16, 2019 at 09:43

The DNC and MSM sold, and sold well, the Russiagate to the general public. Does it really matter, if the "Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election has now come apart at the seams"? Neither the DNC, nor the MSM will report/mention either of the court case, pretty much a blackout for the general public.

Even, if these court cases are widely reported, do you really believe that the majority of the people would change their mind? After almost three years, there's no way that these people will change their mind. The only change that widely reporting these court cases would result in is, that Trump and HRC supporters would hate each other even more.

This Russiagate will be with us pretty much forever, it'll morph in to accusing people of being Russian agents and/or Russian Bots. We already see this taking place and just wait, until next year. It's not going to be pretty

michael , July 16, 2019 at 12:40

Aaron Mate has done a brilliant job researching and debunking Russiagate. Unfortunately for him, he is now ostracized and has to survive on the margins, with other people with critical thinking skills.

Blessthebeasts , July 16, 2019 at 13:28

You're right. The truth doesn't matter, just the BS narrative that has been shoved down our throats for the last few years. It never made any sense to anyone who really thought about it but the media whores just keep spewing total nonsense and they surely won't change their ways now. The fact that the entire crock is really irrelevant to the majority of our citizens doesn't matter to them a bit.

AnneR , July 16, 2019 at 09:42

Thank you again Mr McGovern for another article on this never ending saga. While I hope that sanity begins to dawn among the so-called progressives, I have serious doubts.

1. Neither the BBC World Service nor NPR have mentioned (at least while I've been listening) Judge Friedrich's ruling vis a vis provide the evidence (discovery) to the IRA 12's lawyers or tear up the indictment (essentially). Indeed, I've not heard, on the MSM, anything about those 12 IRA folks employing a lawyer and challenging Mueller's indictment. Silence works as well as obfuscation, lies.

2. The Demrats simply will not let their Russophobia go. I gather (from RT – tut tut I must be an RU bottle) that Ms Harris AIPAC schmoozer, keen and eager lock 'em up and throw away the key, corporate-capitalist crony Kamala has been accusing the Russians of stirring up the controversy surrounding Kaepernick's bending of the knee. The Russians and their bots did it.

3. And then this morning on NPR – a Steve Inskip interview with Michael Isikoff focusing on the Seth Rich "conspiracy theory" and of course the whole thing (or that segment which I could stomach hearing) presumed as a matter of established, and thus true, fact that everything that went wrong for the DNC's HRC campaign was caused by the Russians – for which read Putin. Isikoff was there as an "investigative" journalist for "Yahoo News" – and his "investigation" had shown that the Russians were – who else – behind the conspiracy theory that Seth Rich was killed by HRC thugs in order to keep him permanently quiet about corruption in the DNC. (Corruption – a rather mealy-mouthed way of avoiding bringing into NPR daylight what the DNC were actually doing: determining who would be the Dem candidate willy nilly of who the voters wanted. But this mealy-mouthedness is fully in keeping with NPR's basic silence on what Wikileaks revealed via that insider download.)

Orwellian. Propaganda at its Bernays, Goebbels best. Despair . This business is *not* going away. The Demrats – both in DC and their bourgeois/progressive supporters have far too much invested in the whole confabulation for them to admit that the former deliberately lied and the latter were willing? hoodwinked.

Ray McGovern , July 16, 2019 at 14:57

Dear AnneR,

Thanks for your comment. I would like it if somehow "despair," could be disallowed.

There are enough of us, after all. And, as Annie Dillard put it, "There never was anybody but us."

I also take some inspiration from the dismal-sounding, yet somehow uplifting words of I. F. Stone:

"The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins."

THE CHALLENGE IS TO ACCEPT THAT, AND FIND JOY IN TRYING -- AND EVEN IN LOSING.

I believe the losing does not last forever; think we all need to do our part in the "interim."

Best regards,

Ray

DW Bartoo , July 16, 2019 at 19:44

That sums things up precisely, Ray.

None of us may live to see a complete turn-around, yet it is the honest effort to encourage and build the foundation for that fundamental systemic change to conscious and principled human awareness which is the measure we must make of ourselves.

Your sense of moral presence, Ray, is very much appreciated.

It serves as inspiration for all, and especially the young, who already understand, and encourages, as example, those who are coming to understand.

DW

AnneR , July 17, 2019 at 08:33

Dear Mr McGovern – thank you for reading and replying to my comment.

And, yes, I do understand the objection to despair – though not, might I add, any thought that its frank expression be expunged!

Were it only the whole Russiagate fabrication, delusions, time and money waste (oh well, only taxpayers' money) and fallout that was so dreadfully wrong, being heinously enacted. Indeed were it all that our taxes were being wasted on.

Perhaps that's it – Russiagate while distracting from the things that the DNC and HRC did, said, *also* makes for good deflection from the war crimes we are committing, the never ending imperialist warmongering we are engaged in, from the fact that many Demrats voted for those nice tax breaks given to the wealthiest tiers in our society, that many of those Demrats voted to hand over to the MIC *even more* loot even as the Pentagon can't account for the billions, or whatever fantastikal amount, it has already received over the years, deflection from the fact that despite such a "good" economy increasing numbers of people are living ever more economically precarious lives, rents rise astronomically, healthcare is a joke (or would be were its lack not so serious for so many). And that's not to mention the realities of climate change or the continuing (and MSM ignored) 70 plus year plight of Palestinians, among so many others.

My late husband used to tell me to write to NPR, the BBC, to let them know that they weren't codding everyone with their disinformation, non-information, lack of objectivity – their propaganda. And I did, often and used to ask for a response. Did I even get those? You must be joking

AnneR , July 17, 2019 at 14:08

In case someone might think that I expected either the BBC or NPR to alter their ways because of my "letters" (interestingly the BBC only allows/ed for around 1000 characters or something equally useless) – no. But when (in the case of the BBC) you can tick the "please reply" box and get total silence, not even a "thank you for your blah blah we shan't pay any attention to your complaints ," in response it is pretty frustrating.

As for NPR – I stopped our contributions. Why would we *pay* for the privilege of being propagandized? I just wish we had stopped them years earlier

Anyway, thank you Mr McGovern for your continuing coverage of this whole affair. I just wish my late partner in life and love had known of this website.

ML , July 16, 2019 at 09:24

Each morning when I arise, I get my coffee and settle down to read Consortium News. I also make a habit of a quick perusal of what the stenographers are jawing about on CNN today, there is a real doozy smearing Assange. The spinners are working overtime to patch over all the holes in their hoax story. I couldn't get through the whole thing because it's another smear piece and a long one including the old saw that Assange smeared feces on the Ecuadorian embassy's walls. I had to stop reading. Gosh, I can't abide those people. Thanks Ray, for telling the truth. We are drowning in $h** out there in la-la land. CN offers a much-needed dose of reality medicine. Thank you kindly, all.

Skip Scott , July 16, 2019 at 10:19

Here's a good essay by Caitlin Johnstone regarding the Assange hit-piece.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/new-cnn-assange-smear-piece-is-amazingly-dishonest-even-for-cnn-e7c361d98639

Marko , July 16, 2019 at 07:31

Even worse news for the Russiahoaxers is the recent revelation , documented in a lawsuit , that Ellen Ratner , sister of deceased Wikileaks' lawyer Michael Ratner, met with Assange in the fall of 2016 and was told by him that Aaron and Seth Rich provided the DNC leaks to Wikileaks. Ed Butowsky was made aware of this , with instructions by Ms. Ratner for him to relay the information to the Rich family. When he did so , in December 2016 , he was told by Joel Rich , Seth's father , that he was already aware of his sons' involvement.

This is no longer conspiracy talk , folks. Ed Butowsky is not dumb enough to make these claims on court documents without knowing he can back them up. Shit is about to get real for Mueller and the DNC.

"BREAKING: Lawsuit Outs Reporter Ellen Ratner as Source for Seth Rich Information" @ Gateway Pundit

Skip Scott , July 16, 2019 at 08:43

Wow! Thanks Marko. Here's the link.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/07/breaking-lawsuit-outs-reporter-ellen-ratner-as-source-for-seth-rich-information/

DW Bartoo , July 16, 2019 at 09:37

Well, Skip Scott, either this revelation will put "paid" to the "Russia-did-it!" charade, or else the Voracious Memory Hole will act like a giant black hole and the event horizon will be swallowed into total nothingness as a new Middle-Eastern Adventure captures the hearts and minds of the happy warriors and consumers of U$ Imperialism.

Whatever happens, it will be wholey interesting times ahead.

DW

jmg , July 16, 2019 at 10:01

There was a related, extensive 2018 interview about Butowsky's private investigation into the Seth Rich case to help the family, what they found, and what happened (the DNC assigned someone to represent the family, etc.; the mentioned lawsuits were later dropped/dismissed). It included, without naming Ratner, the unverified mention: "his friend came back from London with information that he said he wanted to get to the Rich family." Since this alleged private message appears to be not only doubtful, but of course also not confirmed by WikiLeaks, we can't really know if it happened or not.

Ed Butowsky Sits Down With Gateway Pundit for First Interview After Being Sued by Family in Seth Rich Murder Mystery -- March 19, 2018
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/03/ed-butowsky-sits-first-interview-gateway-pundit-sued-family-seth-rich-murder-mystery/

Eric32 , July 16, 2019 at 11:17

I wonder why Seth's murder hasn't been solved?
I wonder why there's almost no media attention paid?

O Society , July 16, 2019 at 17:32

Marko, polo! Here it is:

Seth Rich, disgruntled DNC worker, blows the whistle on HillBillary Clinton rigging the Democratic presidential primary against Bernie Sanders, so he gives data supporting his discovery of rigging to Wikileaks. Rich got the data on a thumdrive downloaded at DNC HQ itself.

No Russians, no hacking, just a whistleblower on the fraud ironically called US "democracy." We've all seen the data Rich leaked. Emails detailing HillBillary Clinton's graft and fraud and collusion against Sanders.

No wonder no other candidates besides Sanders ran against HillBillary, for they all knew the fix was in from its inception!

I dunno who killed Seth Rich, but I do know the Democratic party stole the election from Bernie, then projected its own crimes onto Russia, same way a kid projects his own crime of breaking a cookie jar on his brother when he tells Momma "He dit it –> He ate the cookies and broke the jar!" Meanwhile, there's chocolate smeared all over the DNC's face.

We have evidence for this, the leaked emails themselves tell the story

Gregory Herr , July 16, 2019 at 18:15

Seth Rich copied and leaked the DNC e-mails and was murdered for it. For this to become irrefutable common knowledge will be quite one godsend of a reality check. Maddow might not be able to get out of bed for weeks.

Repeat after me Rachel there was no Russian hack, there was no Russian hack, there was no Russian hack

jmg , July 16, 2019 at 07:13

From the Brennan–Comey–Rogers assessment/opinion (January 6, 2017):

"We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence. . . .

"- High confidence generally indicates that judgments are based on high-quality information from multiple sources. High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong.

"- Moderate confidence generally means that the information is credibly sourced and plausible but not of sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently to warrant a higher level of confidence."

Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

-- -- –

"When they say they have 'high confidence', that means they don't have any evidence!"
-- Bill Binney, former NSA Technical Director

DW Bartoo , July 16, 2019 at 07:10

Thank you, Ray McGovern for this splendid article laying out the facts which make clear the absurdities of these last several years. One hopes, now that the "Russia-did-it" canard is fully exposed, by US courts, that the truth may finally get through, over or around, the media wall of enforced ignorance and Mueller hero-worship, and reach the ears and eyes of the people.

Should that actually happen, it might even be possible that other truth, long subject to media manipulation and distortion, the cases of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning come readily to mind, could be seen in the honest light of day after an almost eight year protracted nightmare of media driven deceit, psychological torture, and deliberately vicious character assassination is revealed, in Assange's case, as it might well be, by Nils Melzer's report to the UN.

The legacy U$ corporate media have much to answer for, from promulgating lies that led to war, to missile attacks, and to brutal economic sanctions, a form of economic warfare, to efforts to start a new Cold War, and to aggrandize intelligence agencies which have sought to pervert justice and to illegally influence the political process by falsely accusing, on the flimsy words of partisan political operatives, another nation of the very actions those agencies have used, repeatedly and for many decades,to destroy the political processes of other nations, including the very nation singled out to take the blame for Hillary Clinton's abysmal and pathetic failure in the 2016 election.

What a waste of time, resources, trust, and energy it has bee, these last years, yet it was all so very profitable and lucrative for the media, even if it were "not good" for the country.

The media have damned and convicted themselves.

The U$ intelligence agencies have exposed themselves as corrupt, completely dishonest, vindictive, petty, and thoroughly untrustworthy.

It remains to be seen if the people have learned anything, and whether they will do anything with this costly, yet necessary, education.

DW

Allan , July 16, 2019 at 07:04

Will Adam Schiff spend the week with Bob Mueller to get their story straight

UserFriendly , July 16, 2019 at 05:18

?Unfortunately this is partially bunk. The first bit the judge didn't rule that there was no evidence, she ruled that Mueller publicly saying that the IRA = kremlin and they did try to help Trump win was prejudicial in the case against the IRA (quite obviously so). But him not being able to say that during his testimony should go over well with the democrats. Of course if he actually wanted to explain all he would have to do is drop the case against the IRA because it's never going to trial anyways. Almost makes you wonder if he filed those charges expressly so he wouldn't have to connect the imaginary dotts.

Aiya , July 16, 2019 at 11:03

What they called "trying to help Trump" was a miniscule amount of social media posts, 56% of which were made AFTER the election. And Facebook had to look 3 times to come up with ANYTHING–what they finally reported were posts coming from Russia or eastern Europe, posts in Cyrillic language, and posts from people with Russian/European names.

[Jul 17, 2019] Who's Afraid of William Barr by Stephen F. Cohen

Notable quotes:
"... New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of ..."
"... Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at ..."
"... New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at ..."
"... War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate ..."
Jul 17, 2019 | www.thenation.com
his Wikipedia biography , he has -- or he had -- "a sterling reputation" both among Republicans and Democrats. That changed when Barr announced his ongoing investigation into the origins of Russiagate, a vital subject I, too, have explored .

As Barr explained , "What we're looking at is: What was the predicate for conducting a counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign. How did the bogus narrative begin that Trump was essentially in cahoots with Russia to interfere with the U.S. election?" Still more, Barr, who is empowered to declassify highly sensitive documents, made clear that his primary focus was not the hapless FBI under James Comey but the CIA under John Brennan. Evidently this was too much for leading Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who assailed Barr for having "just destroyed the scintilla of credibility that he had left." Not known for a sense of irony, Schumer accused Barr of using "the words of conspiracy theorists," as though Russiagate itself is not among the most malign and consequential conspiracy theories in American political history.

More indicative is the reaction of the generally liberal pro-Democratic New York Times and Washington Post , the country's two most important political newspapers, to Barr's investigation. Leaning heavily on the "expert" opinion of former intelligence officials and McCarthy-echoing members of Congress such as Adam Schiff, both papers went into outrage mode. The Times bemoaned Barr's "drastic escalation of [Trump's] yearslong assault on the intelligence community" while rejecting "the president's unfounded claims that his campaign had been spied on," even though some forms of FBI and CIA infiltration and surveillance of the 2016 Trump campaign are now well documented. (See, for example, Lee Smith's reporting .)

Unconcerned by the activities of either agency, the papers warned ominously that Barr's probe "effectively strips [the CIA] of its most critical power: choosing which secrets it shares and which remain hidden." It "could be tremendously damaging to the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies." Not surprisingly, given the Times ' three-year role in promulgating Russiagate allegations, it preempted Barr's investigation by declaring that US intelligence agencies' covert actions were part of "a lawful investigation aimed at understanding a foreign power's efforts to manipulate an American election." Considering what is now known, this generalization seems a whitewash both of the Times ' coverage and the agencies' conduct. (In the Post , see coverage by Toluse Olorunnipa and Shane Harris .)

Hillary Clinton, also not surprisingly, agreed. As paraphrased by Matt Stevens in the Times on May 3 , she accused Barr of diverting attention "from what the real story is. The real story is the Russian interference in our election." According to the defeated Democratic candidate, "the Russians were successful in sowing 'discord and divisiveness' in the country, and helping Mr. Trump." But who has actually sowed more "discord and divisiveness" in America -- the Russians or Mrs. Clinton and her supporters, by still refusing to accept the legitimacy of her electoral loss and Trump's victory?

Unfortunately, but predictably, Barr's investigation has become polarizing, with Fox News, for example, bannering each new unsavory Russiagate revelation and the Times and the Post mostly ignoring them altogether. In particular, the Democratic Party, once traditionally skeptical of intelligence agencies, is becoming the party of an intel cult and thus of the new US-Russian Cold War. Only a few of the party's leaders, notably presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, demur from this dangerous folly. (Might Democratic reticence also be due to the circumstance that the intelligence chiefs now under investigation were appointees of former President Obama, who has been remarkably silent about the entire Russiagate saga? What, as I have asked previously, did Obama know, when did he know it, and what did he do?)

Everyone who cares about the quality of American political life, no matter what they think about Trump, should encourage Barr's probe. To resort to a familiar cliché, Russiagate allegations have become a spreading cancer in American politics, with Democratic congressional candidates raising funds by promising, despite the exculpatory findings of Robert Mueller regarding "collusion," to fight evil "Trump-Putin" forces in Washington. Meanwhile, some Republicans, despite ample contrary evidence, preposterously blame Russia itself -- for the infamous Steele Dossier, for example. (By the way, for more irony, Trump is regularly accused in the above-cited news accounts of "siding with" Russian President Vladimir Putin in denying that any "collusion" determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, a conclusion also reached by Mueller, thereby putting Trump, Putin, and Mueller on the same "side.")

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Ideally, we would have an investigation of the intelligence agencies entirely independent of the White House and headed by an eminent political figure who is not a presidential appointee, as was the 1975 Senate Church Committee. For now, we have only Trump's attorney general, William Barr. Nonetheless, we should support him, however conditionally. Rogue intelligence agencies subvert democracy, and the next candidate they target -- as they did Trump -- may be yours.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com .William Barr, a two-time attorney general who served at the CIA in the 1970s, would seem to be an ultimate Washington insider. According to his Wikipedia biography , he has -- or he had -- "a sterling reputation" both among Republicans and Democrats. That changed when Barr announced his ongoing investigation into the origins of Russiagate, a vital subject I, too, have explored .

As Barr explained , "What we're looking at is: What was the predicate for conducting a counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign. How did the bogus narrative begin that Trump was essentially in cahoots with Russia to interfere with the U.S. election?" Still more, Barr, who is empowered to declassify highly sensitive documents, made clear that his primary focus was not the hapless FBI under James Comey but the CIA under John Brennan. Evidently this was too much for leading Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who assailed Barr for having "just destroyed the scintilla of credibility that he had left." Not known for a sense of irony, Schumer accused Barr of using "the words of conspiracy theorists," as though Russiagate itself is not among the most malign and consequential conspiracy theories in American political history.

More indicative is the reaction of the generally liberal pro-Democratic New York Times and Washington Post , the country's two most important political newspapers, to Barr's investigation. Leaning heavily on the "expert" opinion of former intelligence officials and McCarthy-echoing members of congress such as Adam Schiff, both papers went into outrage mode. The Times bemoaned Barr's "drastic escalation of [Trump's] yearslong assault on the intelligence community" while rejecting "the president's unfounded claims that his campaign had been spied on," even though some forms of FBI and CIA infiltration and surveillance of the 2016 Trump campaign are now well documented. (See, for example, Lee Smith's reporting .)

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If you like this article, please give today to help fund The Nation 's work.

Unconcerned by the activities of either agency, the papers warned ominously that Barr's probe "effectively strips [the CIA] of its most critical power: choosing which secrets it shares and which remain hidden." It "could be tremendously damaging to the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies." Not surprisingly, given the Times ' three-year role in promulgating Russiagate allegations, it preempted Barr's investigation by declaring that US intelligence agencies' covert actions were part of "a lawful investigation aimed at understanding a foreign power's efforts to manipulate an American election." Considering what is now known, this generalization seems a whitewash both of the Times ' coverage and the agencies' conduct. (Writing for the Post , see coverage by Toluse Olorunnipa and Shane Harris .)

Hillary Clinton, also not surprisingly, agreed. As paraphrased by Matt Stevens in the Times on May 3 , she accused Barr of diverting attention "from what the real story is. The real story is the Russian interference in our election." According to the defeated Democratic candidate, "the Russians were successful in sowing 'discord and divisiveness' in the country, and helping Mr. Trump." But who has actually sowed more "discord and divisiveness" in America -- the Russians or Mrs. Clinton and her supporters, by still refusing to accept the legitimacy of her electoral loss and Trump's victory?

Unfortunately, but predictably, Barr's investigation has become polarizing, with Fox News, for example, bannering each new unsavory Russiagate revelation and the Times and Post mostly ignoring them altogether. In particular, the Democratic Party, once traditionally skeptical of intelligence agencies, is becoming the party of an intel cult and thus of the new US-Russian Cold War. Only a few of the party's leaders, notably presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, demur from this dangerous folly. (Might Democratic reticence also be due to the circumstance that the intelligence chiefs now under investigation were appointees of former President Obama, who has been remarkably silent about the entire Russiagate saga? What, as I have asked previously, did Obama know, when did he know it, and what did he do?)

Everyone who cares about the quality of American political life, no matter what they think about Trump, should encourage Barr's probe. To resort to a familiar cliché, Russiagate allegations have become a spreading cancer in American politics, with Democratic congressional candidates fund-raising by promising, despite the exculpatory findings of Robert Mueller regarding "collusion," to fight evil "Trump-Putin" forces in Washington. Meanwhile, some Republicans, despite ample contrary evidence, preposterously blame Russia itself -- for the infamous Steele Dossier, for example. (By the way, for more irony, Trump is regularly accused in the above-cited news accounts of "siding with" Russian President Vladimir Putin in denying that any "collusion" determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, a conclusion also reached by Mueller, thereby putting Trump, Putin, and Mueller on the same "side.")

Ideally, we would have an investigation of the intelligence agencies entirely independent of the White House headed by an eminent political figure who is not a presidential appointee, as was the 1975 Senate Church Committee. For now, we have only Trump's attorney general, William Barr. Nonetheless, we should support him, however conditionally. Rogue intelligence agencies subvert democracy, and the next candidate they target -- as they did Trump -- may be yours.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com . Ad Policy Stephen F. Cohen Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his new book War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback and in an ebook edition.

[Jul 17, 2019] The key role of MSM is to keep the populace focused as best it can on relatively trivial matters and diverted from the most urgent topics of our time by PAUL STREET

Jul 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

Alongside and consistent with other privilege- and power-serving missions, so-called mainstream corporate media's role is to keep the populace focused as best it can on relatively trivial matters and diverted from the most urgent topics of our time.

Kamala Harris Wants to Kill Your Health Insurance

Two Sundays ago, in a fit of masochistic media research, I watched some cable news talking heads do their weekly news roundups. CNN had a panel of know-it-all neoliberals who reflected on the Democratic Party's first two presidential debates. Everyone agreed that Kamala Harris had been the big winner but had erred badly by embracing "the abolition of private health insurance."

That's how CNN's "expert commentators" describe Medicare for All – not as high quality and low-cost health care as a human right with great direct and collateral benefits resulting from the eviction of corporate profit from coverage. Not as a great potential social and human rights victory, but as destruction : the "abolition" of (unmentionably parasitic, classist, exclusionary, inferior, and expensive, for-profit) health insurance.

Not that Senator Harris would seriously fight for Single Payer. She wouldn't. She's a corporate Democrat .

But I digress.

The chattering CNN craniums shifted to the United States Women's World Cup soccer team that was triumphing in Paris. The panelists applauded the team's star, Megan Rapione, a lesbian who refuses to visit the Donald Trump White House. (Good for her, but why not visit and spit in the Malignant One's eye?).

Joy Reid Blames Russia for Anti-Kamala Birtherism

Over on the openly partisan-Democratic cable network MSNBC (hereafter "MSDNC"), morning host Joy Reid was going off about the Huxwellian idiocy of Donald Trump's DMZ handshake with Kim Jong-Un and the strange kind of love Trump has for the North Korean dictator and other authoritarian heads-of-state. As usual with MSDNC, it was hard to detect the line separating the network's proper criticism of Trump from its deep investment in U.S. imperialism .

Consistent with the investment, Reid turned to the noxious racist vulgarity of online rightists who claim that Kamala Harris isn't a "real African-American." Reid showed viewers a copy of the Mueller Report and claimed without a hint of proof that the neo-Birther Internet campaign against Harris was directed by the Russians? Her evidence? The Mueller Report, completed prior to the Harris smear.

... ... ...

[Jul 15, 2019] Pete Buttigieg The made-to-order political "outsider" by Tom Hall

Highly recommended!
He is definitely a "CIA democrat" like Obama before him
Notable quotes:
"... In the media, Buttigieg is described as a 37-year-old "boy wonder," an "intelligent and worldly man" who speaks seven languages, whose speeches on the campaign trail exude intelligence and thoughtfulness, a former Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard and Oxford, who, driven by the ideal of public service, returned to his humble Midwestern roots to become mayor of his impoverished hometown, and who single-handedly sparked a renaissance in South Bend after a half-century of urban decay. ..."
"... Buttigieg has distinguished himself by his reluctance to take concrete positions on major political questions. His campaign website initially had no reference to policies, speaking only of the need to restore "values." ..."
"... As the campaign has developed, Buttigieg has taken substantive political positions that demonstrate he is a thoroughly establishment figure, aligned more with the "moderate" wing of the Democrats headed by former Vice President Joe Biden, and flatly opposed to the policies identified with Sanders ..."
"... Buttigieg was talent-spotted early and has moved in the top circles of the US national security establishment from the time he left college. From 2004 to 2005 (when he was 22 and 23), he worked as a conference director for the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consultancy that advises clients on international investment strategies. ..."
"... This aspect of Buttigieg's resumé closely resembles that of Barack Obama, who worked for CIA-connected Business International at age 21-22, making connections within the national security apparatus that stood him in good stead during his meteoric political rise. ..."
"... From 2007 to 2010, the year before his first mayoral campaign, Buttigieg served as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm with revenues of over $10 billion. ..."
"... Media comments suggest that the Democratic Party sees one of the functions of Buttigieg's campaign as preventing Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. ..."
"... However, from the standpoint of the American ruling class, Buttigieg's most important credential by far is his military record. Between 2009 and 2017, Buttigieg was a lieutenant and naval intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve. ..."
"... According to a report in the Hill , "Buttigieg's reserve training took place at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where he studied to become an intelligence officer. There, Buttigieg's background as a McKinsey consultant and his Rhodes scholar pedigree earned him a direct commission into the Navy." ..."
"... Two of the seven languages in which Buttigieg claims fluency are Arabic and Dari (the Afghan dialect of Persian, spoken by about one-third of the population). Such language skills are likely the product of intensive military-intelligence training. ..."
"... The presence of ex-military officers in the Democratic field is part of a larger process, the direct incorporation of military and intelligence figures into the leading personnel of the Democratic Party, a phenomenon the World Socialist Web Site identified among Democratic candidates for Congress in 2018 (see: The CIA Democrats ). ..."
Jul 15, 2019 | www.wsws.org

The World Socialist Web Site has begun an occasional series of articles profiling the major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the 2020 elections. WSWS writers will examine the political history and program of each candidate, making the case for a socialist alternative for the working class to both the Democrats and the Trump administration. The first article, on Elizabeth Warren , appeared on July 11.

Over the past six months, Pete Buttigieg has emerged as a potential dark horse candidate in the Democratic Party presidential primaries. The two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana -- now referred to by the shorthand title "Mayor Pete" -- has gained extensive media coverage and built a fundraising machine, raking in $24.8 million in the second quarter of 2019, the most for any Democrat.

Buttigieg has been the most aggressive holder of high-dollar fundraisers, attending dozens of such events, particularly in California and the northeast, and raising much of his money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

His poll numbers have not responded in direct proportion to the build-up, however. He regularly appears in fifth place, making him the lowest in the top tier of candidates. And his campaign received a significant blow in mid-June with the killing of a black resident of South Bend by a white cop, which forced Buttigieg to leave the campaign trail briefly to deal with the crisis.

Three factors account for Buttigieg's rise. His age, 37, is in sharp contrast to the two top candidates when he entered the race, Joe Biden, 76, and Bernie Sanders, 77, to say nothing of the geriatric leadership of the House Democrats: Nancy Pelosi, 79, Steny Hoyer, 80, and Jim Clyburn, 79. He is the only openly gay candidate among the 24 primary contestants, married to another gay man, Chasten Glezman. And most importantly -- from the standpoint of his acceptability to the US ruling elite -- he is a veteran of naval intelligence, having served a tour of duty in Afghanistan, where he helped identify targets for assassination squads.

These attributes -- comparative youth, identity as a gay man and a background in military intelligence, together with his public embrace of religion (he is a practicing Episcopalian) -- make Buttigieg something of a made-to-order candidate from the standpoint of the Democratic Party establishment. His candidacy ticks a number of boxes: anchoring the primary campaign in a right-wing national security perspective; employing youth and identity to appeal to the predominately youthful supporters of Sanders; and elevating a right-wing figure as a "next-generation" leader of the Democrats, although perhaps a more likely candidate for the vice presidency than the top job.

The American public could be forgiven for wondering why the mayor of a small Midwestern city (306th largest in the country) has suddenly appeared on their television screens in extensive and mostly favorable news reports that paint him as a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Buttigieg's only other foray into national politics was a failed 2017 bid for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a position that attracts relatively little public attention. A poll from late March found that 62 percent of respondents did not even know who Buttigieg was, although extensive media coverage has caused that figure to fall rapidly.

In the media, Buttigieg is described as a 37-year-old "boy wonder," an "intelligent and worldly man" who speaks seven languages, whose speeches on the campaign trail exude intelligence and thoughtfulness, a former Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard and Oxford, who, driven by the ideal of public service, returned to his humble Midwestern roots to become mayor of his impoverished hometown, and who single-handedly sparked a renaissance in South Bend after a half-century of urban decay.

As usual, the media depiction is largely at odds with reality.

One of the most noteworthy features of Buttigieg's campaign so far is its political amorphousness. Even by the standards of American capitalist elections, where issues of concern to the working class are systematically excluded from the public discussion, Buttigieg has distinguished himself by his reluctance to take concrete positions on major political questions. His campaign website initially had no reference to policies, speaking only of the need to restore "values."

As the campaign has developed, Buttigieg has taken substantive political positions that demonstrate he is a thoroughly establishment figure, aligned more with the "moderate" wing of the Democrats headed by former Vice President Joe Biden, and flatly opposed to the policies identified with Sanders. Buttigieg rejects the single-payer "Medicare for All" slogan proposed by Sanders and taken up by many other Democrats in favor of the establishment of a "public option" available on the health insurance exchanges set up under Obamacare.

One proposal that has garnered media attention is his plan to expand the Supreme Court to 15 judges, a cosmetic change that would not alter the fundamental character of the court as a bastion of political reaction. He has also called for elimination of the Electoral College, although this would require passage of a constitutional amendment, which is highly unlikely.

Voters would certainly find little in Buttigieg's political record, consisting of a two-term stint as mayor of South Bend, to inspire enthusiasm. In the press, Buttigieg is touted as a "turnaround" mayor who has placed the ailing former factory town and site of the University of Notre Dame on the road to economic recovery.

In actual fact, his main achievements include the bulldozing of hundreds of empty homes in blighted working class neighborhoods, the sprucing up of the downtown area, and the attraction of modest investment from IT corporations, measures whose impact is not to lift working class residents out of poverty, but rather to gentrify the city and drive up real estate values. Even a favorable review of "Mayor Pete's" time in office by an Indiana economist was forced to admit that "other than sharing in the unemployment-rate reductions of the national economic expansion, none of the top-line economic indicators for South Bend have changed markedly over Buttigieg's mayoral stint."

The New York Times wrote in a profile: "Some of the data is dismal. Though the overall poverty rate has fallen since Mr. Buttigieg took office, poverty among African-Americans stubbornly remains almost twice as high as for African-Americans nationwide. The city has one of the highest eviction rates in the country, which has doubled under the mayor, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In households with working adults, 54 percent do not earn enough to meet a 'survival budget,' according to the United Way."

A glaring spotlight was placed on the actual state of affairs in South Bend on June 16, when a white policeman shot to death a 53-year-old black man, Eric Logan. The cop, who had been previously linked to reports of brutality, was equipped with a body camera but did not turn it on when he confronted Logan in a parking lot and shot him fatally, claiming that Logan had menaced him with a knife.

Buttigieg had to leave the campaign trail and return to South Bend, appearing at town hall meetings where he and the police force were loudly denounced. While police killings are not primarily a racial issue -- the largest number of those killed by police are white, and minority police shoot people just as frequently as white police -- there is clearly a large element of racial injustice in South Bend. The city is 40 percent nonwhite, but under Buttigieg's leadership the proportion of African-American police has fallen from 10 percent in 2011 to only 5 percent today. At the Democratic debate in Miami, Buttigieg claimed to have tried and failed to recruit a more diverse police force.

Given this mediocre record, what recommends "Mayor Pete" for promotion to the highest levels of the American state? Clearly, other factors are driving his buildup in the media.

Buttigieg was talent-spotted early and has moved in the top circles of the US national security establishment from the time he left college. From 2004 to 2005 (when he was 22 and 23), he worked as a conference director for the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consultancy that advises clients on international investment strategies.

The Cohen Group is headed by former Republican Senator William Cohen, who was secretary of defense under Democratic President Bill Clinton. Its principals, besides Cohen, include Marc Grossman, undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Bush administration and special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under Obama; retired General Joseph Ralston, who concluded a 37-year Air Force career as chief of the European command and supreme allied commander, Europe; and Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to NATO and Grossman's successor as undersecretary of state for political affairs under Bush.

This aspect of Buttigieg's resumé closely resembles that of Barack Obama, who worked for CIA-connected Business International at age 21-22, making connections within the national security apparatus that stood him in good stead during his meteoric political rise.

From 2007 to 2010, the year before his first mayoral campaign, Buttigieg served as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm with revenues of over $10 billion.

Media comments suggest that the Democratic Party sees one of the functions of Buttigieg's campaign as preventing Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. An opinion piece in the Washington Post headlined "Buttigieg might save the Democratic Party from Sanders," applauded Buttigieg's public criticism of Sanders' occasional use of the word "socialism." Buttigieg said: "I think of myself as progressive. But I also believe in capitalism, but it has to be democratic capitalism." The Post author commented: "In many ways, Buttigieg is ideally suited to take on Sanders for the hearts, minds and political survival of the Democratic Party."

While the Democrats know that Sanders poses no threat to American capitalism, they are determined to prevent social opposition within the working class from finding even a distorted reflection in their general election campaign, as in 2016, when the DNC attempted to sabotage Sanders' primary campaign.

However, from the standpoint of the American ruling class, Buttigieg's most important credential by far is his military record. Between 2009 and 2017, Buttigieg was a lieutenant and naval intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve.

According to a report in the Hill , "Buttigieg's reserve training took place at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where he studied to become an intelligence officer. There, Buttigieg's background as a McKinsey consultant and his Rhodes scholar pedigree earned him a direct commission into the Navy."

"We had group of young, accomplished civilians -- assistant US attorneys and FBI agents," Thomas Gary, a senior petty officer at the Great Lakes station at the time, told the Hill . "Pete fit right in."

In 2014, during his first term as mayor, Buttigieg was deployed to Afghanistan, where he was a member of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, a counter-terrorism group established in 2008 by then-commanding General David Petraeus. Through his work in this task force, Buttigieg was involved in activities that placed individuals on the US military's "kill or capture list," targeting these opponents of the US occupation for assassination or extraordinary rendition to a CIA black site.

Two of the seven languages in which Buttigieg claims fluency are Arabic and Dari (the Afghan dialect of Persian, spoken by about one-third of the population). Such language skills are likely the product of intensive military-intelligence training.

The presence of ex-military officers in the Democratic field is part of a larger process, the direct incorporation of military and intelligence figures into the leading personnel of the Democratic Party, a phenomenon the World Socialist Web Site identified among Democratic candidates for Congress in 2018 (see: The CIA Democrats ).

Buttigieg is also on the board of directors of the Truman Center, an imperialist foreign policy group. Other board members include former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Leon Panetta, former CIA director and secretary of defense. The Truman Center is a veritable training center for CIA Democrats, offering workshops and messaging guidelines for up-and-coming politicians. It boasts on its website: "Our community includes more than 1,700 post-9/11 veterans, frontline civilians, policy experts, and political professionals who share a common vision of US leadership abroad."

Buttigieg's relative silence on foreign policy issues cannot be explained by a disinterest or lack of knowledge. It can be explained only as a deliberate attempt to avoid airing views he knows are widely unpopular, but which are mainstream within the Democratic Party.

When he finally delivered a significant foreign policy address, in May, it was at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, which is named in honor of former Democratic Congressman Lee H. Hamilton and former Republican Senator Richard G. Lugar, both pillars of the foreign policy establishment.

Buttigieg denounced China for "authoritarian capitalism" and a poor record on human rights, citing in particular the plight of Muslim Uighurs in Sinkiang, a longtime target of CIA efforts to destabilize the Beijing regime. He called for stepped-up US investment in infrastructure and education in order to "compete for the global economic future." And he referred sarcastically to Trump's dealings with Moscow, calling Russia "not a real estate opportunity but an adversarial actor."

In 2018, the Truman Center released a messaging pamphlet for elected officials and candidates that completely coincides with the Democrats' right-wing campaign against Trump over foreign policy. The first section, for example, declares Russia an "historic adversary" of the United States and asserts that the intelligence community (which is directly represented on the Truman Center's board) has "decisively confirmed" that Russia "interfered" in the 2016 elections.

In light of Buttigieg's national security background, his campaign proposal for the establishment of a "national service" program has particularly ominous implications. Buttigieg argues that such a program is necessary to promote a feeling of unity and "social cohesion" within the American population. In reality, such a program would amount to a return to the draft, combined perhaps with labor conscription, which could be used to suppress wages and living standards in the working class.

Whether or not Buttigieg ultimately wins the nomination, and at this point the possibility seems remote, his sudden elevation in advance of the primaries flows from definite political considerations within the Democratic Party itself. Whoever ultimately wins the nomination must be acceptable to the corporate aristocracy and the military apparatus the Democrats represent. However, the debacle of the Hillary Clinton campaign revealed, much to the Democrats' surprise, that any figure publicly identified with social inequality and war is liable to be deeply hated, particularly within the working class.

Within this context, Buttigieg has emerged as a figure whose particular combination of personal characteristics -- his youth, his sexual identity as a gay man, his association with the industrial Midwest where Clinton was wiped out by Trump, his media-concocted reputation for intelligent public speaking, and, above all, his lack of a well-known political track record -- might serve as a more suitable package for the same brand of politics.

One gets the sense that the Democratic Party is attempting replicate its success with Barack Obama, whose formless demagogy about "hope" and "change" was able to divert popular hostility to the political establishment, allowing the voters to see in him what they wanted to see. Buttigieg's status as the first gay man to become a serious presidential hopeful would thus parallel Obama's role as the "first black president."

In the context of popular disillusionment with eight bitter years under Obama, however, it is unlikely the Democrats will be able to pull off the same trick twice.

The author also recommends:

Pete Buttigieg's town hall debacle: A Democratic Party "golden boy" unmasked
 [25 June 2019]

[Jul 15, 2019] Pete Buttigieg The made-to-order political "outsider" by Tom Hall

Highly recommended!
He is definitely a "CIA democrat" like Obama before him
Notable quotes:
"... In the media, Buttigieg is described as a 37-year-old "boy wonder," an "intelligent and worldly man" who speaks seven languages, whose speeches on the campaign trail exude intelligence and thoughtfulness, a former Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard and Oxford, who, driven by the ideal of public service, returned to his humble Midwestern roots to become mayor of his impoverished hometown, and who single-handedly sparked a renaissance in South Bend after a half-century of urban decay. ..."
"... Buttigieg has distinguished himself by his reluctance to take concrete positions on major political questions. His campaign website initially had no reference to policies, speaking only of the need to restore "values." ..."
"... As the campaign has developed, Buttigieg has taken substantive political positions that demonstrate he is a thoroughly establishment figure, aligned more with the "moderate" wing of the Democrats headed by former Vice President Joe Biden, and flatly opposed to the policies identified with Sanders ..."
"... Buttigieg was talent-spotted early and has moved in the top circles of the US national security establishment from the time he left college. From 2004 to 2005 (when he was 22 and 23), he worked as a conference director for the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consultancy that advises clients on international investment strategies. ..."
"... This aspect of Buttigieg's resumé closely resembles that of Barack Obama, who worked for CIA-connected Business International at age 21-22, making connections within the national security apparatus that stood him in good stead during his meteoric political rise. ..."
"... From 2007 to 2010, the year before his first mayoral campaign, Buttigieg served as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm with revenues of over $10 billion. ..."
"... Media comments suggest that the Democratic Party sees one of the functions of Buttigieg's campaign as preventing Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. ..."
"... However, from the standpoint of the American ruling class, Buttigieg's most important credential by far is his military record. Between 2009 and 2017, Buttigieg was a lieutenant and naval intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve. ..."
"... According to a report in the Hill , "Buttigieg's reserve training took place at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where he studied to become an intelligence officer. There, Buttigieg's background as a McKinsey consultant and his Rhodes scholar pedigree earned him a direct commission into the Navy." ..."
"... Two of the seven languages in which Buttigieg claims fluency are Arabic and Dari (the Afghan dialect of Persian, spoken by about one-third of the population). Such language skills are likely the product of intensive military-intelligence training. ..."
"... The presence of ex-military officers in the Democratic field is part of a larger process, the direct incorporation of military and intelligence figures into the leading personnel of the Democratic Party, a phenomenon the World Socialist Web Site identified among Democratic candidates for Congress in 2018 (see: The CIA Democrats ). ..."
Jul 15, 2019 | www.wsws.org

The World Socialist Web Site has begun an occasional series of articles profiling the major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the 2020 elections. WSWS writers will examine the political history and program of each candidate, making the case for a socialist alternative for the working class to both the Democrats and the Trump administration. The first article, on Elizabeth Warren , appeared on July 11.

Over the past six months, Pete Buttigieg has emerged as a potential dark horse candidate in the Democratic Party presidential primaries. The two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana -- now referred to by the shorthand title "Mayor Pete" -- has gained extensive media coverage and built a fundraising machine, raking in $24.8 million in the second quarter of 2019, the most for any Democrat.

Buttigieg has been the most aggressive holder of high-dollar fundraisers, attending dozens of such events, particularly in California and the northeast, and raising much of his money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

His poll numbers have not responded in direct proportion to the build-up, however. He regularly appears in fifth place, making him the lowest in the top tier of candidates. And his campaign received a significant blow in mid-June with the killing of a black resident of South Bend by a white cop, which forced Buttigieg to leave the campaign trail briefly to deal with the crisis.

Three factors account for Buttigieg's rise. His age, 37, is in sharp contrast to the two top candidates when he entered the race, Joe Biden, 76, and Bernie Sanders, 77, to say nothing of the geriatric leadership of the House Democrats: Nancy Pelosi, 79, Steny Hoyer, 80, and Jim Clyburn, 79. He is the only openly gay candidate among the 24 primary contestants, married to another gay man, Chasten Glezman. And most importantly -- from the standpoint of his acceptability to the US ruling elite -- he is a veteran of naval intelligence, having served a tour of duty in Afghanistan, where he helped identify targets for assassination squads.

These attributes -- comparative youth, identity as a gay man and a background in military intelligence, together with his public embrace of religion (he is a practicing Episcopalian) -- make Buttigieg something of a made-to-order candidate from the standpoint of the Democratic Party establishment. His candidacy ticks a number of boxes: anchoring the primary campaign in a right-wing national security perspective; employing youth and identity to appeal to the predominately youthful supporters of Sanders; and elevating a right-wing figure as a "next-generation" leader of the Democrats, although perhaps a more likely candidate for the vice presidency than the top job.

The American public could be forgiven for wondering why the mayor of a small Midwestern city (306th largest in the country) has suddenly appeared on their television screens in extensive and mostly favorable news reports that paint him as a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Buttigieg's only other foray into national politics was a failed 2017 bid for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a position that attracts relatively little public attention. A poll from late March found that 62 percent of respondents did not even know who Buttigieg was, although extensive media coverage has caused that figure to fall rapidly.

In the media, Buttigieg is described as a 37-year-old "boy wonder," an "intelligent and worldly man" who speaks seven languages, whose speeches on the campaign trail exude intelligence and thoughtfulness, a former Rhodes scholar and graduate of Harvard and Oxford, who, driven by the ideal of public service, returned to his humble Midwestern roots to become mayor of his impoverished hometown, and who single-handedly sparked a renaissance in South Bend after a half-century of urban decay.

As usual, the media depiction is largely at odds with reality.

One of the most noteworthy features of Buttigieg's campaign so far is its political amorphousness. Even by the standards of American capitalist elections, where issues of concern to the working class are systematically excluded from the public discussion, Buttigieg has distinguished himself by his reluctance to take concrete positions on major political questions. His campaign website initially had no reference to policies, speaking only of the need to restore "values."

As the campaign has developed, Buttigieg has taken substantive political positions that demonstrate he is a thoroughly establishment figure, aligned more with the "moderate" wing of the Democrats headed by former Vice President Joe Biden, and flatly opposed to the policies identified with Sanders. Buttigieg rejects the single-payer "Medicare for All" slogan proposed by Sanders and taken up by many other Democrats in favor of the establishment of a "public option" available on the health insurance exchanges set up under Obamacare.

One proposal that has garnered media attention is his plan to expand the Supreme Court to 15 judges, a cosmetic change that would not alter the fundamental character of the court as a bastion of political reaction. He has also called for elimination of the Electoral College, although this would require passage of a constitutional amendment, which is highly unlikely.

Voters would certainly find little in Buttigieg's political record, consisting of a two-term stint as mayor of South Bend, to inspire enthusiasm. In the press, Buttigieg is touted as a "turnaround" mayor who has placed the ailing former factory town and site of the University of Notre Dame on the road to economic recovery.

In actual fact, his main achievements include the bulldozing of hundreds of empty homes in blighted working class neighborhoods, the sprucing up of the downtown area, and the attraction of modest investment from IT corporations, measures whose impact is not to lift working class residents out of poverty, but rather to gentrify the city and drive up real estate values. Even a favorable review of "Mayor Pete's" time in office by an Indiana economist was forced to admit that "other than sharing in the unemployment-rate reductions of the national economic expansion, none of the top-line economic indicators for South Bend have changed markedly over Buttigieg's mayoral stint."

The New York Times wrote in a profile: "Some of the data is dismal. Though the overall poverty rate has fallen since Mr. Buttigieg took office, poverty among African-Americans stubbornly remains almost twice as high as for African-Americans nationwide. The city has one of the highest eviction rates in the country, which has doubled under the mayor, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. In households with working adults, 54 percent do not earn enough to meet a 'survival budget,' according to the United Way."

A glaring spotlight was placed on the actual state of affairs in South Bend on June 16, when a white policeman shot to death a 53-year-old black man, Eric Logan. The cop, who had been previously linked to reports of brutality, was equipped with a body camera but did not turn it on when he confronted Logan in a parking lot and shot him fatally, claiming that Logan had menaced him with a knife.

Buttigieg had to leave the campaign trail and return to South Bend, appearing at town hall meetings where he and the police force were loudly denounced. While police killings are not primarily a racial issue -- the largest number of those killed by police are white, and minority police shoot people just as frequently as white police -- there is clearly a large element of racial injustice in South Bend. The city is 40 percent nonwhite, but under Buttigieg's leadership the proportion of African-American police has fallen from 10 percent in 2011 to only 5 percent today. At the Democratic debate in Miami, Buttigieg claimed to have tried and failed to recruit a more diverse police force.

Given this mediocre record, what recommends "Mayor Pete" for promotion to the highest levels of the American state? Clearly, other factors are driving his buildup in the media.

Buttigieg was talent-spotted early and has moved in the top circles of the US national security establishment from the time he left college. From 2004 to 2005 (when he was 22 and 23), he worked as a conference director for the Cohen Group, a Washington-based consultancy that advises clients on international investment strategies.

The Cohen Group is headed by former Republican Senator William Cohen, who was secretary of defense under Democratic President Bill Clinton. Its principals, besides Cohen, include Marc Grossman, undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Bush administration and special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan under Obama; retired General Joseph Ralston, who concluded a 37-year Air Force career as chief of the European command and supreme allied commander, Europe; and Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to NATO and Grossman's successor as undersecretary of state for political affairs under Bush.

This aspect of Buttigieg's resumé closely resembles that of Barack Obama, who worked for CIA-connected Business International at age 21-22, making connections within the national security apparatus that stood him in good stead during his meteoric political rise.

From 2007 to 2010, the year before his first mayoral campaign, Buttigieg served as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, an international consulting firm with revenues of over $10 billion.

Media comments suggest that the Democratic Party sees one of the functions of Buttigieg's campaign as preventing Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination. An opinion piece in the Washington Post headlined "Buttigieg might save the Democratic Party from Sanders," applauded Buttigieg's public criticism of Sanders' occasional use of the word "socialism." Buttigieg said: "I think of myself as progressive. But I also believe in capitalism, but it has to be democratic capitalism." The Post author commented: "In many ways, Buttigieg is ideally suited to take on Sanders for the hearts, minds and political survival of the Democratic Party."

While the Democrats know that Sanders poses no threat to American capitalism, they are determined to prevent social opposition within the working class from finding even a distorted reflection in their general election campaign, as in 2016, when the DNC attempted to sabotage Sanders' primary campaign.

However, from the standpoint of the American ruling class, Buttigieg's most important credential by far is his military record. Between 2009 and 2017, Buttigieg was a lieutenant and naval intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve.

According to a report in the Hill , "Buttigieg's reserve training took place at Naval Station Great Lakes in North Chicago, where he studied to become an intelligence officer. There, Buttigieg's background as a McKinsey consultant and his Rhodes scholar pedigree earned him a direct commission into the Navy."

"We had group of young, accomplished civilians -- assistant US attorneys and FBI agents," Thomas Gary, a senior petty officer at the Great Lakes station at the time, told the Hill . "Pete fit right in."

In 2014, during his first term as mayor, Buttigieg was deployed to Afghanistan, where he was a member of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, a counter-terrorism group established in 2008 by then-commanding General David Petraeus. Through his work in this task force, Buttigieg was involved in activities that placed individuals on the US military's "kill or capture list," targeting these opponents of the US occupation for assassination or extraordinary rendition to a CIA black site.

Two of the seven languages in which Buttigieg claims fluency are Arabic and Dari (the Afghan dialect of Persian, spoken by about one-third of the population). Such language skills are likely the product of intensive military-intelligence training.

The presence of ex-military officers in the Democratic field is part of a larger process, the direct incorporation of military and intelligence figures into the leading personnel of the Democratic Party, a phenomenon the World Socialist Web Site identified among Democratic candidates for Congress in 2018 (see: The CIA Democrats ).

Buttigieg is also on the board of directors of the Truman Center, an imperialist foreign policy group. Other board members include former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Leon Panetta, former CIA director and secretary of defense. The Truman Center is a veritable training center for CIA Democrats, offering workshops and messaging guidelines for up-and-coming politicians. It boasts on its website: "Our community includes more than 1,700 post-9/11 veterans, frontline civilians, policy experts, and political professionals who share a common vision of US leadership abroad."

Buttigieg's relative silence on foreign policy issues cannot be explained by a disinterest or lack of knowledge. It can be explained only as a deliberate attempt to avoid airing views he knows are widely unpopular, but which are mainstream within the Democratic Party.

When he finally delivered a significant foreign policy address, in May, it was at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, which is named in honor of former Democratic Congressman Lee H. Hamilton and former Republican Senator Richard G. Lugar, both pillars of the foreign policy establishment.

Buttigieg denounced China for "authoritarian capitalism" and a poor record on human rights, citing in particular the plight of Muslim Uighurs in Sinkiang, a longtime target of CIA efforts to destabilize the Beijing regime. He called for stepped-up US investment in infrastructure and education in order to "compete for the global economic future." And he referred sarcastically to Trump's dealings with Moscow, calling Russia "not a real estate opportunity but an adversarial actor."

In 2018, the Truman Center released a messaging pamphlet for elected officials and candidates that completely coincides with the Democrats' right-wing campaign against Trump over foreign policy. The first section, for example, declares Russia an "historic adversary" of the United States and asserts that the intelligence community (which is directly represented on the Truman Center's board) has "decisively confirmed" that Russia "interfered" in the 2016 elections.

In light of Buttigieg's national security background, his campaign proposal for the establishment of a "national service" program has particularly ominous implications. Buttigieg argues that such a program is necessary to promote a feeling of unity and "social cohesion" within the American population. In reality, such a program would amount to a return to the draft, combined perhaps with labor conscription, which could be used to suppress wages and living standards in the working class.

Whether or not Buttigieg ultimately wins the nomination, and at this point the possibility seems remote, his sudden elevation in advance of the primaries flows from definite political considerations within the Democratic Party itself. Whoever ultimately wins the nomination must be acceptable to the corporate aristocracy and the military apparatus the Democrats represent. However, the debacle of the Hillary Clinton campaign revealed, much to the Democrats' surprise, that any figure publicly identified with social inequality and war is liable to be deeply hated, particularly within the working class.

Within this context, Buttigieg has emerged as a figure whose particular combination of personal characteristics -- his youth, his sexual identity as a gay man, his association with the industrial Midwest where Clinton was wiped out by Trump, his media-concocted reputation for intelligent public speaking, and, above all, his lack of a well-known political track record -- might serve as a more suitable package for the same brand of politics.

One gets the sense that the Democratic Party is attempting replicate its success with Barack Obama, whose formless demagogy about "hope" and "change" was able to divert popular hostility to the political establishment, allowing the voters to see in him what they wanted to see. Buttigieg's status as the first gay man to become a serious presidential hopeful would thus parallel Obama's role as the "first black president."

In the context of popular disillusionment with eight bitter years under Obama, however, it is unlikely the Democrats will be able to pull off the same trick twice.

The author also recommends:

Pete Buttigieg's town hall debacle: A Democratic Party "golden boy" unmasked
 [25 June 2019]

[Jul 15, 2019] "Where is the evidence [for Russigate]? There is none."

Notable quotes:
"... The whole story of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is "crazy," he says. Hillary Clinton had done everything wrong as a candidate, had led the Democratic Party into misfortune. There was no need for anything Russian. "Where is the evidence? There is none." ..."
"... Two years ago Hersh published a piece on Syria in Welt. He needs to go to Deutschland to get published, being banned from the MSM. ..."
"... Just like Col. Lang, Juan Cole and so many others. Our press is strictly controlled to focus on The Narrative. ..."
"... "Please watch this clip. It captures Russiagate perfectly: blaming Russian bots, neoliberals like Kamala Harris show ignorance about domestic injustices & contempt for those fighting it; while at the same time, sounding like deranged conspiracy theorists in the process." ..."
"... Lots of garbage trying to pollute our minds. Truth is the only antidote, but at times it's hard to find. Search for it and fight complacency. ..."
Jul 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Other issues:

Form a portrait of Seymour Hersh in the German weekly Die Zeit (my translation):

The whole story of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election is "crazy," he says. Hillary Clinton had done everything wrong as a candidate, had led the Democratic Party into misfortune. There was no need for anything Russian. "Where is the evidence? There is none."

Use as open thread ...

Posted by b on July 14, 2019 at 13:16 UTC | Permalink

bjd , Jul 14 2019 13:30 utc | 1

I wonder if Hersch's analysis is a first in a major German newspaper. If so, that is major breakthrough into Western MSM.
asdf , Jul 14 2019 13:44 utc | 3

When if ever is Hersch going to publicly voice his thoughts on Seth Rich, as shared in the following phone recording? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=giuZdBAXVh0

Bart Hansen , Jul 14 2019 14:56 utc | 12

One - bjt

Two years ago Hersh published a piece on Syria in Welt. He needs to go to Deutschland to get published, being banned from the MSM.

Just like Col. Lang, Juan Cole and so many others. Our press is strictly controlled to focus on The Narrative.

karlof1 , Jul 15 2019 4:57 utc | 64

Aaron Mate says :

"Please watch this clip. It captures Russiagate perfectly: blaming Russian bots, neoliberals like Kamala Harris show ignorance about domestic injustices & contempt for those fighting it; while at the same time, sounding like deranged conspiracy theorists in the process."

Intro to most recent In The Now:

"This is really good -- from calling out U.S. foreign policy that causes ppl to migrate to the history of the term 'concentration camps' to the larger tradition of racist, state sanctioned violence against ppl from the Southern border region."

Lots of garbage trying to pollute our minds. Truth is the only antidote, but at times it's hard to find. Search for it and fight complacency.

[Jul 14, 2019] MODELS OF POWER STRUCTURE IN THE UNITED STATES Political Issues We Concern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women, they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. They arc in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. ..."
"... Social Register ..."
"... pluralist model ..."
Sep 07, 2011 | politicalissues.blog.com

Posted by Political Issues in Sep 07, 2011, under Issues

Who really holds power in the United States' Do "we the people" genuinely run the country through elected representatives? Or is there small elite of Americans that governs behind the scenes? It is difficult to determine the location of power in a society as complex as the Unite States In exploring this critical question, social scientists have developed two basic views of our nation's power structure the elite and pluralism models.

Elite Model

Karl Marx essentially believed that nineteenth century representative democracy was a shape.

He argued that industrial societies were dominated by relatively small numbers of people who owned factories and controlled natural resources.

In Marx's view, government officials and military leaders were essentially servants of the capitalist class and followed their wishes therefore, any key decisions made by politicians inevitably reflected the interests of the dominant bourgeoisie Like others who hold an elite model of power relations, Marx thus believed that society is ruled by a small group of individuals who share a common set of political and economic interests.

The Power Elite . In his pioneering work. The Power Elite , sociologist C. Wright Mills described the existence of a small ruling elite of military, industrial, and governmental leaders who controlled the fate of the United States. Power rested in the hands of a few, both inside and outside of government -- the power elite . In Mill's words:

The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women, they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. They arc in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society.

In Mills's model, the power structure of the United States can be illustrated by the use of a pyramid. At the top are the corporate rich, leaders of the executive branch of government, and heads of the military (whom Kills called the "warlords"). Below this triumvirate are local opinion leaders, members of the legislative branch of government, and leaders of special-interest groups. Mills contended that such individuals and groups would basically follow the wishes of the dominant power elite. At the bottom of society are the unorganized, exploited masses.

This power elite model is, in many respects, similar to the work of Karl Marx. The most striking difference is that Mills felt that the economically powerful coordinate their maneuvers with the military and political establishments in order to serve their mutual interests. Yet, reminiscent of Marx. Mills argued that the corporate rich were perhaps the most powerful element of the power elite (first among "equals"). And, of course, there is a further dramatic parallel between the work of these conflict theorists The powerless masses at the bottom of Mills's power elite model certainly bring to mind Marx's portrait of the oppressed workers of the world, who have "nothing to lose but their chains".

Mills failed to provide detailed case studies which would substantiate the interrelationship among members of the power elite. Instead, he suggested that such foreign policy decisions as America's entry into the Korean war reflected a determination by business and military leaders that each could benefit from such armed conflict. In Mills s view, such a sharing of perspectives was facilitated by the frequent interchange of commanding roles among the elite. For example, a banker might become the leader of a federal regulatory commission overseeing financial institutions, and a retired general might move to an executive position with a major defense contracting firm.

A fundamental element in Mills's thesis is that the power elite not only has relatively few members but also operates as a self-conscious, cohesive unit. Although not necessarily diabolical or ruthless, the elite comprises similar types of people who regularly interact with one another and have essentially the same political and economic interests. Mills's power elite is not a conspiracy but rather a community of interest and sentiment among a small number of influential Americans.

Admittedly, Mills failed to clarify when the elite acts and when it tolerates protests. Nevertheless, his challenging theories forced scholars to look more critically at the "democratic" political system of the United States.

The Ruling Class

Sociologist G. William Domhoff agreed with Mills that American society is run by a powerful elite. But, rather than fully accepting Mills's power elite model, Domhoff argued that the United States is controlled by a social upper class "that is a ruling class by virtue of its dominant role in the economy and government". This socially cohesive ruling class owns 20 to 25 percent of all privately held wealth and 45 to 50 percent of all privately held common stock.

Unlike Mills, Domhoff was quite specific about who belongs to this social upper class. Membership comes through being pan of a family recognized in The Social Register -- the directory of the social elite in many American cities. Attendance at prestigious private schools and membership in exclusive social clubs are further indications that a person comes from America's social upper class. Domhoff estimates that about 0.5 percent of the American population (or 1 of every 200 people) belongs to this social and political elite.

Of course, this would mean that the ruling class has more than 1 million members and could hardly achieve the cohesiveness that Mills attributed to the power elite. However, Domhoff adds that the social upper class as a whole does not rule the nation. Instead, members of this class who have assumed leadership roles within the corporate community or the nation's policy-planning network join with high-level employees of profit-making and nonprofit institutions controlled by the social upper class to exercise power.

In Domhoff's view, the ruling class should not be seen in a conspiratorial way, as "sinister men lurking behind the throne." On the contrary they tend to hold public positions of authority. Almost all important appointive government posts -- including those of diplomats and cabinet members -- are filled by members of the social upper class. Domhoff contends that members of this class dominate powerful corporations, foundations, universities, and the executive branch of government. They control presidential nominations and the political party process through campaign contributions. In addition, the ruling class exerts a significant (though not absolute) influence within Congress and units of state and local government.

Perhaps the major difference between the elite models of Mills and Domhoff is that Mills insisted on the relative autonomy of the political elite and attached great significance to the independent power of the military. By contrast, Domhoff suggests that high-level government and military leaders serve the interests of the social upper class. Both theorists, in line with a Marxian approach, assume that the rich are interested only in what benefits them financially. Furthermore, as advocates of elite models of power. Mills and Domhoff argue that the masses of American people have no real influence on the decisions of the powerful.

One criticism of the elite model is that its advocates sometimes suggest that elites are always victorious. With this in mind, sociologist J. Alien Whitt (1982) examined the efforts of California's business elites to support urban mass transit. He found that lobbying by these elites was successful in San Francisco but failed in Los Angeles. Whitt points out that opponents of policies backed by elites can mobilize to thwart their implementation.

Domhoff admits that the ruling class does not exercise total control over American society. However, he counters that this elite is able to set political terms under which other groups and classes must operate. Consequently, although the ruling class may lose on a particular issue, it will not allow serious challenges to laws which guarantee its economic privileges and political domination.

Pluralist Model

Several social scientists have questioned the elite models of power relations proposed by Marx, Mills, Domhoff, and other conflict theorists. Quite simply, the critics insist that power in the United States is more widely shared than the elite model indicates. In their view, a pluralist model more accurately describes the American political system. According to the pluralist model , "many conflicting groups within the community have access to government officials and compete with one another in an effort to influence policy decisions".

Veto Groups . David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd suggested that the American political system could best be understood through examination of the power of veto groups. The term veto groups refers to interest groups that have the capacity to prevent the exercise of power by others. Functionally, they serve to increase political participation by preventing the concentration of political power. Examples cited by Riesman include farm groups, labor unions, professional associations, and racial and ethnic groups. Whereas Mills pointed to the dangers of rule by an undemocratic power elite, Riesman insisted that veto groups could effectively paralyze the nation's political processes by blocking anyone from exercising needed leadership functions. In Riesman's words, "The only leaders of national scope left in the United States are those who can placate the veto groups".

Dahl's Study of Pluralism . Community studies of power have also supported the pluralist model. One of the most famous -- an investigation of decision making in New Haven, Connecticut -- was reported by Robert Dahl in his book, Who Governs? (1961). Dahl found that while the number of people involved in any important decision was rather small, community power was nonetheless diffuse. Few political actors exercised decision-making power on all issues. Therefore, one individual or group might be influential in a battle over urban renewal but at the same time might have little impact over educational policy. Several other studies of local politics, in such communities as Chicago and Oberlin, Ohio, further document that monolithic power structures do not operate on the level of local government.

Just as the elite model has been challenged on political and methodological grounds, the pluralist model has been subjected to serious questioning. Domhoff (1978) reexamined Dahl's study of decision making in New Haven and argued that Dahl and other pluralists had failed to trace how local elites prominent in decision making were part of a larger national ruling class. In addition, studies of community power, such as Dahl's work in New Haven, can examine decision making only on issues which become pan of the political agenda. This focus fails to address the possible power of elites to keep certain matters entirely out of the realm of government debate. Conflict theorists contend that these elites will not allow any outcome of the political process which threatens their dominance. Indeed, they may even be strong enough to block discussion of such measures by policymakers.

[Jul 14, 2019] MODELS OF POWER STRUCTURE IN THE UNITED STATES Political Issues We Concern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women, they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. They arc in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. ..."
"... Social Register ..."
"... pluralist model ..."
Sep 07, 2011 | politicalissues.blog.com

Posted by Political Issues in Sep 07, 2011, under Issues

Who really holds power in the United States' Do "we the people" genuinely run the country through elected representatives? Or is there small elite of Americans that governs behind the scenes? It is difficult to determine the location of power in a society as complex as the Unite States In exploring this critical question, social scientists have developed two basic views of our nation's power structure the elite and pluralism models.

Elite Model

Karl Marx essentially believed that nineteenth century representative democracy was a shape.

He argued that industrial societies were dominated by relatively small numbers of people who owned factories and controlled natural resources.

In Marx's view, government officials and military leaders were essentially servants of the capitalist class and followed their wishes therefore, any key decisions made by politicians inevitably reflected the interests of the dominant bourgeoisie Like others who hold an elite model of power relations, Marx thus believed that society is ruled by a small group of individuals who share a common set of political and economic interests.

The Power Elite . In his pioneering work. The Power Elite , sociologist C. Wright Mills described the existence of a small ruling elite of military, industrial, and governmental leaders who controlled the fate of the United States. Power rested in the hands of a few, both inside and outside of government -- the power elite . In Mill's words:

The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women, they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. They arc in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society.

In Mills's model, the power structure of the United States can be illustrated by the use of a pyramid. At the top are the corporate rich, leaders of the executive branch of government, and heads of the military (whom Kills called the "warlords"). Below this triumvirate are local opinion leaders, members of the legislative branch of government, and leaders of special-interest groups. Mills contended that such individuals and groups would basically follow the wishes of the dominant power elite. At the bottom of society are the unorganized, exploited masses.

This power elite model is, in many respects, similar to the work of Karl Marx. The most striking difference is that Mills felt that the economically powerful coordinate their maneuvers with the military and political establishments in order to serve their mutual interests. Yet, reminiscent of Marx. Mills argued that the corporate rich were perhaps the most powerful element of the power elite (first among "equals"). And, of course, there is a further dramatic parallel between the work of these conflict theorists The powerless masses at the bottom of Mills's power elite model certainly bring to mind Marx's portrait of the oppressed workers of the world, who have "nothing to lose but their chains".

Mills failed to provide detailed case studies which would substantiate the interrelationship among members of the power elite. Instead, he suggested that such foreign policy decisions as America's entry into the Korean war reflected a determination by business and military leaders that each could benefit from such armed conflict. In Mills s view, such a sharing of perspectives was facilitated by the frequent interchange of commanding roles among the elite. For example, a banker might become the leader of a federal regulatory commission overseeing financial institutions, and a retired general might move to an executive position with a major defense contracting firm.

A fundamental element in Mills's thesis is that the power elite not only has relatively few members but also operates as a self-conscious, cohesive unit. Although not necessarily diabolical or ruthless, the elite comprises similar types of people who regularly interact with one another and have essentially the same political and economic interests. Mills's power elite is not a conspiracy but rather a community of interest and sentiment among a small number of influential Americans.

Admittedly, Mills failed to clarify when the elite acts and when it tolerates protests. Nevertheless, his challenging theories forced scholars to look more critically at the "democratic" political system of the United States.

The Ruling Class

Sociologist G. William Domhoff agreed with Mills that American society is run by a powerful elite. But, rather than fully accepting Mills's power elite model, Domhoff argued that the United States is controlled by a social upper class "that is a ruling class by virtue of its dominant role in the economy and government". This socially cohesive ruling class owns 20 to 25 percent of all privately held wealth and 45 to 50 percent of all privately held common stock.

Unlike Mills, Domhoff was quite specific about who belongs to this social upper class. Membership comes through being pan of a family recognized in The Social Register -- the directory of the social elite in many American cities. Attendance at prestigious private schools and membership in exclusive social clubs are further indications that a person comes from America's social upper class. Domhoff estimates that about 0.5 percent of the American population (or 1 of every 200 people) belongs to this social and political elite.

Of course, this would mean that the ruling class has more than 1 million members and could hardly achieve the cohesiveness that Mills attributed to the power elite. However, Domhoff adds that the social upper class as a whole does not rule the nation. Instead, members of this class who have assumed leadership roles within the corporate community or the nation's policy-planning network join with high-level employees of profit-making and nonprofit institutions controlled by the social upper class to exercise power.

In Domhoff's view, the ruling class should not be seen in a conspiratorial way, as "sinister men lurking behind the throne." On the contrary they tend to hold public positions of authority. Almost all important appointive government posts -- including those of diplomats and cabinet members -- are filled by members of the social upper class. Domhoff contends that members of this class dominate powerful corporations, foundations, universities, and the executive branch of government. They control presidential nominations and the political party process through campaign contributions. In addition, the ruling class exerts a significant (though not absolute) influence within Congress and units of state and local government.

Perhaps the major difference between the elite models of Mills and Domhoff is that Mills insisted on the relative autonomy of the political elite and attached great significance to the independent power of the military. By contrast, Domhoff suggests that high-level government and military leaders serve the interests of the social upper class. Both theorists, in line with a Marxian approach, assume that the rich are interested only in what benefits them financially. Furthermore, as advocates of elite models of power. Mills and Domhoff argue that the masses of American people have no real influence on the decisions of the powerful.

One criticism of the elite model is that its advocates sometimes suggest that elites are always victorious. With this in mind, sociologist J. Alien Whitt (1982) examined the efforts of California's business elites to support urban mass transit. He found that lobbying by these elites was successful in San Francisco but failed in Los Angeles. Whitt points out that opponents of policies backed by elites can mobilize to thwart their implementation.

Domhoff admits that the ruling class does not exercise total control over American society. However, he counters that this elite is able to set political terms under which other groups and classes must operate. Consequently, although the ruling class may lose on a particular issue, it will not allow serious challenges to laws which guarantee its economic privileges and political domination.

Pluralist Model

Several social scientists have questioned the elite models of power relations proposed by Marx, Mills, Domhoff, and other conflict theorists. Quite simply, the critics insist that power in the United States is more widely shared than the elite model indicates. In their view, a pluralist model more accurately describes the American political system. According to the pluralist model , "many conflicting groups within the community have access to government officials and compete with one another in an effort to influence policy decisions".

Veto Groups . David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd suggested that the American political system could best be understood through examination of the power of veto groups. The term veto groups refers to interest groups that have the capacity to prevent the exercise of power by others. Functionally, they serve to increase political participation by preventing the concentration of political power. Examples cited by Riesman include farm groups, labor unions, professional associations, and racial and ethnic groups. Whereas Mills pointed to the dangers of rule by an undemocratic power elite, Riesman insisted that veto groups could effectively paralyze the nation's political processes by blocking anyone from exercising needed leadership functions. In Riesman's words, "The only leaders of national scope left in the United States are those who can placate the veto groups".

Dahl's Study of Pluralism . Community studies of power have also supported the pluralist model. One of the most famous -- an investigation of decision making in New Haven, Connecticut -- was reported by Robert Dahl in his book, Who Governs? (1961). Dahl found that while the number of people involved in any important decision was rather small, community power was nonetheless diffuse. Few political actors exercised decision-making power on all issues. Therefore, one individual or group might be influential in a battle over urban renewal but at the same time might have little impact over educational policy. Several other studies of local politics, in such communities as Chicago and Oberlin, Ohio, further document that monolithic power structures do not operate on the level of local government.

Just as the elite model has been challenged on political and methodological grounds, the pluralist model has been subjected to serious questioning. Domhoff (1978) reexamined Dahl's study of decision making in New Haven and argued that Dahl and other pluralists had failed to trace how local elites prominent in decision making were part of a larger national ruling class. In addition, studies of community power, such as Dahl's work in New Haven, can examine decision making only on issues which become pan of the political agenda. This focus fails to address the possible power of elites to keep certain matters entirely out of the realm of government debate. Conflict theorists contend that these elites will not allow any outcome of the political process which threatens their dominance. Indeed, they may even be strong enough to block discussion of such measures by policymakers.

[Jul 14, 2019] Putin as an old fashioned liberal who opposes neoliberalism

Notable quotes:
"... Israel Shamir can be reached at [email protected] ..."
Jul 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

If you have ever traveled in Russia outside of Moscow, you certainly have some horrible stories to tell about its atrocious roads, food and lodging or rather lack thereof. Things have changed greatly, and they keep changing. Now there are modern highways, plenty of cafés and restaurants, a lot of small hotels; plumbing has risen to Western standards; the old pearls of architecture have been lavishly restored; people live better than they ever did. They still complain a lot, but that is human nature. Young and middle-aged Russians own or charter motor boats and sail their plentiful rivers; they own country houses ("dachas") more than anywhere else. They travel abroad for their vacations, pay enormous sums of money for concerts of visiting celebrities, ride bikes in the cities – in short, Russia has become as prosperous as any European country.

This hard-earned prosperity and political longevity allows President Putin to hold his own in the international affairs. He is one of a few experienced leaders on the planet with twenty years at the top job. He has met with three Popes of Rome, four US Presidents, and many other rulers. This is important: 93-years old Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad who ruled his Malaysia for 40 years and has been elected again said the first ten years of a ruler are usually wasted in learning the ropes, and only after first twenty does he becomes proficient in the art of government. The first enemy a ruler must fight is his own establishment: media, army, intelligence and judges. While Trump is still losing in this conflict, Putin is doing fine – by his Judoka evasive action.

Recently a small tempest has risen in the Russian media, when a young journalist was detained by police, and a small quantity of drugs was allegedly discovered on his body. The police made many mistakes in handling the case. Perhaps they planted the evidence to frame the young man; perhaps they had made the obvious mistakes to frame the government. The response has been tremendous, as if the whole case had been prepared well in advance by the opposition hell-bent to annoy and wake up the people's ire against the police and administration. Instead of supporting the police, as Putin usually does, in this case he had the journalist released and senior police officers arrested. This prompt evasive action undid the opposition's build-up by one masterly stroke.

Recently he openly declared his distaste for liberalism in the interview for the FT . This is a major heresy, like Luther's Ninety-five Theses. "The liberals cannot dictate Their diktat can be seen everywhere: both in the media and in real life. It is deemed unbecoming even to mention some topics The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population." Putin condemned liberals' drive for more immigration. He called Angela Merkel's decision to admit millions of immigrants a "cardinal mistake"; he "understood" Trump's attempt to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from Mexico.

Putin is not an enemy of liberalism. He is rather an old-fashionable liberal of the 19 th century style. Not a current 'liberal', but a true liberal, rejecting totalitarian dogma of gender, immigration, multiculturalism and R2P wars. "The liberal idea cannot be destroyed; it has the right to exist and it should even be supported in some things. But it has no right to be the absolute dominating factor."

In Putin's Russia liberalism is non-exclusive, but presents just one possible line of development. Homosexuals are not discriminated against nor promoted. There are no gay parades, no persecution of gays, either. Russian children aren't being brainwashed to hate their fathers, taken away from their families and given to same-sex maniacs, as it happened in the recent Italian case . Kids aren't being introduced to joys of sex in primary schools. People are not requested to swear love to transgenders and immigrants. You can do whatever you wish, just do not force others to follow you – this is Putin's first rule, and this is true liberalism in my book.

There is very little immigration into Russia despite millions of requests: foreigners can come in as guest workers, but this does not lead to permanent residency or citizenship. The Police frequently check foreign-looking people and rapidly deport them if found in breach of visa rules. Russian nationalists would want even more action, but Putin is a true liberal.

... ... ...

Why does Putin care about the US? Why can't he just stop taking dollars? This means he is an American stooge! – an eager-for-action hothead zealot would exclaim. The answer is, the US has gained a lot of power; much more than it had in 1988, when Reagan negotiated with Gorbachev. The years of being the sole superpower weren't wasted. American might is not to be trifled with.

New York Times insinuated.

True, Russia is big enough to survive even that treatment, but Russians have got used to a good life, and they won't cherish being returned to the year 1956. They took action to prevent these worst-case scenarios; for instance, they sold much of their US debt and moved out of Microsoft , but these things are time-consuming and expensive. Putin hopes that eventually the US will abandon its quest for dominance and assume a live-and-let-live attitude as demanded by the international law. Until it happens, he is forced to play by Washington rules and try to limit antagonism.

An experienced broker came in, promising to deliver the deal. It is the Jewish state, claiming to have the means to navigate the US in the desired direction. This is a traditional Jewish claim, used in the days of the WWI to convince the UK to enter the deal: you give us Palestine; we shall bring the US into the European war on your side. Then it worked: the Brits and their Aussie allies stormed Gaza, eventually took over the Holy Land, issued the Balfour declaration promising to pass Palestine to the Jews, and in return, fresh American troops poured into the European theatre of war, causing German surrender.

This time, the Jewish state proposed that Putin should give up his ties with Iran; in return, they promised to assist in general warming of Russo-American relations. Putin had a bigger counter-proposal: Let the US lift its Iran sanctions and withdraw its armed forces from Syria, and Russia will try to usher Iranian armed forces out of Syria, too. The ensuing negotiations around Iran-Syria deal would lead to recognition of the US and Israel interests in Syria, and further on it could lead to negotiations in other spheres.

This was a clear win-win proposal. Iran would emerge free of sanctions; Israel and the US would have their interests recognised in Syria; the much-needed dialogue between Russia and the US will get a jump-start. But Israel does not like win-win proposals. The Jewish state wants clear victories, preferably with their enemy defeated, humiliated, hanged. Israel rejected the proposal, for it wanted Iran to suffer under sanctions.

... ... ...

Russia certainly wants to live in peace with the US, but not at the price Mr Netanyahu suggested. Mr Patrushev condemned the US sanctions against Iran. He said that Iran shot down the giant American drone RQ-4A Global Hawk worth more than a hundred million dollars over Iranian territory, not in the international airspace as the Pentagon claimed. He stated that American "evidence" that Iran had sabotaged tankers in the Persian Gulf was inconclusive. Russia demanded that the United States stop its economic war against Iran, recognize the legitimate authorities of Syria, led by President Bashar Assad, and withdraw its troops from Syria. Russia expressed its support for the legitimate government in Venezuela. Thus, Russia showed itself at this difficult moment as a reliable ally and partner, and at the same time assured the staggering Israeli leadership of its friendship.

The problem is that the drive for war with Iran is not gone. A few days ago, the Brits seized an Iranian super-tanker in the Straits of Gibraltar. The tanker was on its way to deliver oil to Syria. Before that, the United States had almost launched a missile attack on Iran. At the last moment, when the planes were already in the air, Trump stopped the operation. It is particularly disturbing that he himself unambiguously hinted that the operation was launched without his knowledge . That is, the chain of commands in the US is now torn, and it is not clear who can start a war. This has to be taken into account both in Moscow and in Tehran.

... ... ...

Russia wants to help Iran, not out of sheer love to the Islamic Republic, but as a part of its struggle for multi-polar world, where independent states carry on the way they like. Iran, North Korea, Venezuela – their fight for survival is a part and parcel of Russia's struggle. If these states will be taken over, Russia can become the next victim, Putin feels.

... ... ...

In this situation, Putin tries to build bridges to the new forces in Europe and the US, to work with nationalist right. It is not the most obvious partner for this old-fashioned liberal, but they fit into his idea of multi-polarity, of supremacy of national sovereignty and of resistance to the world hegemony of Atlantic powers. His recent visit to Italy, a country with strong nationalist political forces, had been successful; so was his meeting with the Pope.

In the aftermath of the audience with the Pope, Putin strongly defended the Catholic Church, saying that "There are problems, but they cannot be over-exaggerated and used for destroying the Roman Catholic Church itself. I get the feeling that these liberal circles are beginning to use certain problems of the Catholic Church as a tool for destroying the Church itself. This is what I consider to be incorrect and dangerous. After all, we live in a world based on Biblical values and traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than this liberal idea, which, in my opinion, is really ceasing to exist". For years, the Europeans haven't heard this message. Perhaps this is the right time to listen.

Israel Shamir can be reached at [email protected]

anonymous [340] Disclaimer , says: July 6, 2019 at 1:16 pm GMT

"President Trump seems to have some positive ideas, but his hands are tied up."

Pitifully naive.

Al Moanee , says: July 6, 2019 at 8:27 pm GMT
@Per/Norway

The author is referring to WWI and the Balfour Declaration of Nov 1917 which indeed was drafted on behalf of Jewish Zionist interests who in return did their level best in bringing Wilson, who was long backed by NYC banking interests (hence the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 enacted on his watch), into the war which materially changed its dynamics and outcome.

A123 , says: July 6, 2019 at 10:32 pm GMT

The Ukraine in all this? I would think it a far bigger concern for Russia in any trilateral meeting.

Do not expect anything on the Ukraine in the near future. Trump wants the DNC to nominate guaranteed loser Biden. Then he can beat him senseless using 'Ukrainian tampering with U.S. elections' via Biden's family business interests (1).
_____

Now that the Mueller exoneration is complete, the door is open to improved U.S. – Russia relations. The important thing is looking at Putin's and Trump's actions , more so than their words.

Trump's words sound 'officially concerned' about Crimea. However, this is primarily for EU consumption. What actions has the Trump administration taken about Crimea? Little or nothing depending on how you score the matter. So tacit acknowledgement pending a quid pro quo .

Putin administration words (but not Putin himself) have said strong sounding things about Iran. However, there are no actions that support a deep relationship.
-- Russia sells munitions to Iran on a 'cash & carry' basis along with many other nations including Turkey. Russia and Israel have much stronger ties on the military equipment basis. Look at their recent joint sale of AWACS to India (2).
-- Russia continues to let the Israeli air force freely strike Iranian al'Hezbollah and al'Quds targets in Syria.

It looks like the quid pro quo arrangement will be Crimea for an Iranian exit from Syria. It's a deal that would help peace throughout the region.

PEACE
______

(1) https://www.thenation.com/article/joe-biden-ukraine-burisma-holdings/

(2) https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/india-to-buy-2-more-awacs-worth-rs-5-7k-crore-from-israel/articleshow/67765253.cms

Priss Factor , says: July 6, 2019 at 10:33 pm GMT

Was Pat Robertson right about World War I?

https://israelpalestinenews.org/rothschild-reveals-crucial-role-ancestors-played-balfour-declaration-creation-israel/

A123 , says: July 6, 2019 at 11:08 pm GMT

But he is hampered by his "deep state", by Pompeo and Bolton; about the latter, Trump himself said that he wants to fight with the whole world. Presidents can't always remove the ministers from whom they want to get rid of – even the absolute monarchs of the past did not always succeed.

Actually, Trump is using Bolton against the deep state.

First and foremost, it is and advanced and skillful form of ' Good Cop – Bad Cop '. When Bolton says something and Trump openly disagrees, it places the Fake Steam Media complex in an untenable position. If they treat the story fairly, they embrace the anathema of saying positive things about Trump. But they do not have any options to twist the facts into their desired anti-American propaganda.

Secondarily, it also cleverly drives a wedge between two DNC factions:

-1- The true Clintonista believer, stricken by Trump Derangement Syndrome [TDS], will not accept anything less than Impeachment. Preferably followed by turning him over to the Fascist Stormtroopers of Antifa.
-2- Those with a less deranged view realise that a successful Impeachment process would generate President Pence. And, he would be much more likely to accept Bolton's advice. Perhaps Pence would pick Bolton to be Vice President.

Look at the circular firing squad that is forming up in the DNC nomination process to see how Trump's deliberate agitation of various factions is working in his favor. The TDS faction is winning and as a result the eventual DNC candidate will be unelectable.

PEACE

Rabbitnexus , says: July 7, 2019 at 2:49 am GMT
@AghaHussain sts plans have failed to materialise in Syria. The author here does a very good job of explaining Russia's position and between his and Saker's analyses your argument is kaput and only fools would buy it.

The Zionists went away empty handed with their visits to Russia and President Putin and if anything Russia's resistance to the Zionists has hardened lately.

People who have two dimensional thinking and a limited box of clues seem to think it is as simple as just saying no and digging their heels in but that way makes wars. Russia does not have the sort of power nor an insane leadership that it would take for that.

A123 , says: July 7, 2019 at 2:39 pm GMT
@animalogic to be rebuilt.

The best hope for an internal Iranian solution is IRGC enlightened self interest. A fairly bloodless replacement of Khameni with a general from the IRGC. It worked in Egypt and the world welcomed that military solution. One can be 99% certain that replacing Khameni would be just as welcome.

The new 'General Ayatollah in Chief' would have a free hand to disengage from Khameni's extremism. The economic recovery from ending sanctions would guarantee internal popularity. Think of it as MIGA, Make Iran Great Again , though they are unlikely to use that exact phrase.

PEACE

iendly Neighbourhood Terrorist , says: Website July 13, 2019 at 1:48 pm GMT

It's ludicrous to imagine that Russians are so wedded to the good life that they do not dare antagonise Amerikastan. What "good life" is this? Ask the pensioners struggling on a few thousand rubles a month how the hell they are supposed to manage. The luxuries enjoyed by the yuppies in Moscow (most of whom, fluently English speaking and firmly pro-Amerikastani, are a fifth column of Quislings) are not the life that the factory worker in Volgograd or the farmer outside St Petersburg will recognise.

Che Guava , says: July 13, 2019 at 3:42 pm GMT

Pres. Putin seems to be a pretty good person.

I want to sidetrack the thread to the matter of Edward Snowden.

Putin made a comment early on 'a strange young man'.

I understand exactly what he was saying. I am the same. No leaks. ht is a matter of honour.

OTOH, confronted by wall-to-wal evil bullshit as he was, I think he was not in the wrong (but have a little internal conflict on that, since the secrets 4 have to keep now are ooly technical and at times commercial, such a dilemna never arises.

In no situation would such be ethical.

he was sorry for Sowden's girlfriend, he dumped her. but, not long after, she was with him. Very romantic. Doubtless, Russian secret services had some role.

I like the happy ending there, it is very romantic.

Would make a great movie, but not possible from Hollywood, perhaps Russia could revive its moribund film industry?

Republic , says: July 13, 2019 at 3:44 pm GMT
@Malacaay

http://www.unz.com/akarlin/10-ways-russia-better-than-usa/

Anatoly Karlin published this two years ago:

10 ways Russia is better than the US

Agent76 , says: July 13, 2019 at 4:29 pm GMT

Oct 20, 2018 Putin: Russia Getting Rid Of US Dollar Matter Of National Security

Russian president Vladimir Putin: "That's what our American friends are doing. They're undermining trust in the dollar as a universal payment instrument and the main reserve currency."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/4fECrSQ9ifM?feature=oembed

Jun 8, 2018 Putin hints at end of dollar system – Direct Line 2018

Vladimir Putin has held his 16th Direct Line Q&A on June 7th.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/z01S7lOq-qI?feature=oembed

AnonFromTN , says: July 13, 2019 at 6:28 pm GMT
@AmRusDebate t in 2014, and had gone so deep that there is no light at the end of the tunnel now. It is still used by the Empire as an annoying sore right next to Russia, but that's all it can be. It did not and could not deliver what the Empire was hoping for. The imperial planners never take into account the critical condition for their "color revolutions" to bring US-friendly compradores to power anywhere: the country in question must be rotten through and through. Thus, instead of useful sharp tools they get worthless pieces of shit. They are still trying to use an inevitable stink for their purposes, but that's the only use shit is good for.
AnonFromTN , says: July 13, 2019 at 6:56 pm GMT
@Fiendly Neighbourhood Terrorist

It's not just Moscow yuppies. Visit any provincial city in Russia today and you'd see that it looks way better than it ever did in the USSR. There are cafes everywhere and lots of people in them spending serious money, because they can afford that. Drive on any road, in or between the cities, and you can see that the roads are in a better shape than they ever were, and there are lots of gas stations, cafes, and hotels along them, all doing brisk business. Russians have ten times more cars now than they had in the USSR, and they drive a lot.

RadicalCenter , says: July 13, 2019 at 7:04 pm GMT
@A123 be deployed right on Russia's border on yet another side. Russia would be readily bottled up and be denied the freedom to navigate through the surrounding waters. And it would be more vulnerable to land invasion from more points.

Russia should continue disentangling itself from US and US-Controller financial systems and institutions. Keep becoming more able to sustain its people without so many imports of foodstuffs and manufactured goods alike.

Far from giving up Crimea, Russia should bide its time and wait to retake the Donbass region or more when Ukraine collapses, breaks up, and/or is outright occupied by the US.

Ace , says: July 13, 2019 at 7:19 pm GMT
@A123

I rather doubt you're in any position to judge whether Khameni is a sociopath.

And your fixation on regime change is noted. The ultimate expression of Western arrogance: You, you benighted, retrograde, sociopathic worm, are not a fit chief executive of your nation so we have decided you must go. If we have to kill hundreds of thousands of your people that's just an unavoidable cost of our being the excellent people we are.

RadicalCenter , says: July 13, 2019 at 7:25 pm GMT
@Twodees Partain

Trump should put the warmongering establishment on the back foot by firing Bolton and hiring Tulsi Gabbard.

Watch the media contort itself deciding how to slander and attack a partly nonwhite "progressive" "pro-choice" woman who is also a veteran, LOL.

What if trump did this a month BEFORE the election?

Beefcake the Mighty , says: July 13, 2019 at 9:55 pm GMT
@Harbinger

Liberalism in the West today is similar to communism in the SU in the late 80's: a decrepit ideology that offers nothing to ordinary people and whose adherents are incapable of anything but mouthing the same rubbish over and over. It will similarly die a well-deserved death.

[Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Looks like Mueller and his team were extremely sloppy and just milked the US government and try to feed rumors to the media.
Mueller emerged as a stooge of Clinton mafia.
Notable quotes:
"... In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin Stooge. ..."
"... The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as "fact" in the Mueller report. ..."
"... On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them. ..."
"... Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in contempt for violating rule 57.7. ..."
"... the Court has entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential sanctions. ..."
"... But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the Mueller Report and the actual indictment: ..."
"... By attributing IRA's conduct to "Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government. ..."
"... But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. ..."
"... Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence. ..."
"... I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out. ..."
"... The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more totalitarian sooner. ..."
"... a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html .) ..."
"... Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/ ) ..."
"... 'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.' ..."
"... Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.' ..."
"... It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017. ..."
"... Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding). ..."
"... Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's 'information operations' team. ..."
"... The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study 'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko. ..."
"... A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a very long way. ..."
Jul 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

In the criminal case against alleged Russian operatives--Internet Research Agency and Concord Management and Consulting LLC--a Federal judge has declared that Robert Mueller has not offered one piece of solid evidence that these defendants were involved in any way with the Government of Russia. I think this is a potential game changer.

The world of law as opposed to the world of intelligence is as different as Mercury and Mars. The intelligence community aka IC can traffic in rumor and speculation. IC "solid" intelligence may be nothing more than the strident assertion of a source who lacks actual first hand knowledge of an event. The legal world does not enjoy that kind of sloppiness. If a prosecutor makes a claim, i.e., Jack shot Jill, then said prosecutor must show that Jack owned a firearm that matches the bullets recovered from Jill's body. Then the prosecutor needs to show that Jack was with Jill when the shooting took place and that forensic evidence recovered from Jack showed he had fired a firearm. Keep this distinction in mind as you consider what has transpired in the case against the Internet Research Agency and Concord Management and Consulting.

To understand why Judge Friedrich ruled as she did you must understand Local Rule 57.7. That rule: restricts public dissemination of information by attorneys involved in criminal cases where

"there is a reasonable likelihood that such dissemination will interfere with a fair trial or otherwise prejudice the administration of justice." It also authorizes the court "[i]n a widely publicized or sensational criminal case" to issue a special order governing extrajudicial statements and other matters designed to limit publicity that might interfere with the conduct of a fair trial. . . .

The rule prohibits lawyers associated with the prosecution or defense from publishing, between the time of the indictment and the commencement of trial, "[a]ny opinion as to the accused's guilt or innocence or as to the merits of the case or the evidence in the case."

In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin Stooge.

The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as "fact" in the Mueller report.

On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them.

Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in contempt for violating rule 57.7.

Judge Friedrich gave Concord a partial victory:

Although the Court agrees that the government violated Rule 57.7 , it disagrees that contempt proceedings are an appropriate response to that violation. Instead, the Court has entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential sanctions.

But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the Mueller Report and the actual indictment:

The Special Counsel Report describes efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. . . . But the indictment . . . does not link the defendants to the Russian government. Save for a single allegation that Concord and Concord Catering had several "government contracts" (with no further elaboration), id. ¶ 11, the indictment alleges only private conduct by private actors.

. . . the concluding paragraph of the section of the [Mueller] Report related to Concord states that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by" Concord's co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA). By attributing IRA's conduct to "Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government.

Similarly, the Attorney General drew a link between the Russian government and this case during a press conference in which he stated that "[t]he Special Counsel's report outlines two main efforts by the Russian government to influence the 2016 election." . . . The "[f]irst" involved "efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company with close ties to the Russian government, to sow social discord among American voters through disinformation and social media operations." Id. The "[s]econd" involved "efforts by Russian military officials associated with the GRU," a Russian intelligence agency, to hack and leak private documents and emails from the Democratic Party and the Clinton Campaign.

The Report explains that it used the term "established" whenever "substantial, credible evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence." . . . It then states in its conclusion that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by the IRA." In context, this statement characterizes the evidence against the defendants as "substantial" and "credible," and it provides the Special Counsel's Office's "conclusion" about what actually occurred.

But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. Although Mueller claims that it was "established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by" Concord's co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), he provided no such evidence.

According to Mate :

After two years and $35 million, Mueller apparently failed to uncover any direct evidence linking the Prigozhin-controlled IRA's activities to the Kremlin. His best evidence is that "[n]umerous media sources have reported on Prigozhin's ties to Putin, and the two have appeared together in public photographs."

Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence.

Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot put that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth--if you cannot produce evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that part of the Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their accusers.

Posted at 11:09 PM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink

Sonal Chawhan , 12 July 2019 at 05:38 AM

Impressive！Thanks for the post
SAS Base and Advance

Peter VE , 12 July 2019 at 09:14 AM

Minor quibble: Judge Friedrich is a woman. I expect that this will get no play from the MSM, since Judge Friedrich was appointed by Trump, and "everyone" knows she's just covering up for him.

Larry Johnson -> Peter VE... , 12 July 2019 at 11:37 AM

Thanks. Never heard of a chick named, "Dabney." I was thinking Dabney Coleman. Dating myself.

Peter VE -> Larry Johnson ... , 12 July 2019 at 02:17 PM

Maybe her name is misspelled reference to Dagney Taggart...

Flavius , 12 July 2019 at 10:33 AM

Under the conditions and in the environment that it was returned, this indictment was Mueller and his partisan team throwing raw meat fo the media so as to prolong their mission, nothing more. Once filed, no one involved ever expected to appear in a courtroom to prosecute anyone, or defend any part of it. It was an abuse of process, pure and simple.

Consider it as a count against Mueller, his competence or his integrity, maybe both. He let himself become a tool.

pretzelattack -> Flavius... , 12 July 2019 at 07:27 PM

Johnson refers to "heartfelt beliefs" but i doubt Mueller believes his own bs. in this i guess he distinguishes himself from earlier witch-hunters, who apparently sincerely believed their targets were minions of satan.

blue peacock , 12 July 2019 at 11:33 AM

I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out.

It seems on the current trajectory both the Trump colluded with Russia and our law enforcement & IC attempted a soft-coup will die on the vine. The latter because Trump is unwilling to declassify. It seems for him it was all just another reality TV show and him tweeting "witch hunt" constantly was what the script called for.

The next time the IC & law enforcement who now must believe that they are the real power behind the throne decide to exercise that power it will be a doozie.

The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more totalitarian sooner.

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/11/china-surveillance-google-ibm-semptian/

David Habakkuk , 12 July 2019 at 12:39 PM

Larry,

A fine piece.

I think a large question is raised as to how far the kind of sloppiness in the handling of evidence which Judge Friedrich identified in the Mueller report may have characterised a great deal of the treatment of matters to do with the post-Soviet space by the FBI and others – including almost all MSM journalists – for a very long time.

Unfortunately, one also finds this among some of the most useful critics of 'Russiagate'. So, for example, in a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html .)

He then however goes on to write: 'In other words, not only was the firm that hired Steele, Fusion GPS, hired by the Russians, but Steele himself was hired directly by the Russians.'

And Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/ )

Commenting on the fact that, in her scribbled notes, beside the names of Vladislav Surkov and Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who are indeed a top Putin adviser and a former SVR chief respectively, Kavalec writes 'source', McCarthy simply concludes that she meant that he had said that these were his – indirect – sources, and that this was accurate. And he goes on to write:

'Deripaska, Surkov, and Trubnikov were not informing on the Kremlin. These are Putin's guys. They were peddling what the Kremlin wanted the world to believe, and what the Kremlin shrewdly calculated would sow division in the American body politic. So, the question is: Did they find the perfect patsy in Christopher Steele?'

If you look at Kavalec's typing up of the notes, among a good deal of what looks to me like pure 'horse manure' – including the claim that 'Manafort has been the go-between with the campaign' – the single reference to Surkov and Trubnikov is that they are said to be 'also involved.'

As it happens, Surkov is a very complex figure indeed. His talents as a 'political technologist' were first identified by Khodorkovsky, before he subsequently played that role for Putin. It would obviously be possible that he and Steele still had common contacts.

The suggestion in Kavalec's notes that Sergei Millian 'may be involved in some way,' and also that, 'Per Steele, Millian is connected Simon Kukes (who took over management of Yukos when Khodorkovsky was arrested)' is interesting, but would seem to suggest that he would not have been cited to Kavalec as an intermediary.

All this is obviously worth putting together with claims made in the 'New York Times' follow-up on 9 July to the Reuters report on the same day breaking the story of the interviews carried out with Steele by the Inspector General's team in early June.

(See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/us/politics/ig-russia-investigation-steele.html?module=inline .)

According to this:

'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.'

Some observations prompted by all this.

Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.'

In trying to put together the accumulating evidence, it is necessary to realise, as so many people seem to find it difficult to do, that in matters like these people commonly play double games – often for very good reasons.

To say as Carlson does that Fusion and Steele were hired by 'the Russians' implies that these are some kind of collective entity – and then, one is one step away from the assumption that Veselnitskaya and Deripaska, as well as 'Putin's Cook', are simply puppets controlled by the master manipulator in the Kremlin. (The fact that Friedrich applies serious standards for assessing evidence to Mueller's version of this is one of the reasons why her judgement is so important.)

As regards what McCarthy says, to lump Surkov and Deripaska together as 'Putin's guys' is unhelpful. Actually, it seems to me very unlikely, although perhaps not absolutely impossible, that, had he been implicated in any conspiracy to intervene in an American election, Surkov would have been talking candidly about his role to anyone liable to relay the information to Steele.

Likewise, however, the notion of a Machiachiavellian Surkov, feeding disinformation about a non-existent plot through an intermediary to Steele, who swallows it hook, line and sinker, does not seem particularly plausible.

A rather more obvious possibility is that the intermediaries who were supposed to have conveyed a whole lot of 'smoking gun' evidence to Steele were either 1. fabrications, 2. people whom without their knowledge he cast in this role, or 3. co-conspirators. It would, obviously, be possible that Millian, although one can say no more than that at this stage, was involved in either or both of roles 2. and 3.

It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017.

(See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/House_Intelligence_Committee_Interview_of_Glenn_Simpson )

Providing his version of what was going on following his move from the Washington office of the 'Wall Street Journal' to its European headquarters in January 2005, Simpson told the Committee:

'And the oligarchs, during this period of consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin, when I was living in Brussels and doing all this work, was about him essentially taking control over both the oligarchs and the mafia groups. And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin now. And that's true of the diaspora as well. So the Russian mafia in the United States is believed bylaw enforcement criminologists to have – to be under the influence of the Russian security services. And this is convenient for the security services because it gives them a level of deniability.'

A bit less than two years after Simpson's move to Brussels, a similar account featured in what appears to have been the first attempt by Christopher Steele and his confederates to provide a 'narrative' in terms of which could situate the supposed assassination by polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.

This came in a BBC Radio 4 programme, entitled 'The Litvinenko Mystery', in which a veteran presenter with the Corporation, Tom Mangold, produced an account by the former KGB Major Yuri Shvets, supported by the former FBI Agent Robert Levinson, and an 'Unidentified Informer', who is told by Mangold that he cannot be identified 'reasons of your own personal security'.

(A full transcript is on the 'Evidence' archived website of the Litvinenko Inquiry – one needs to search for the reference HMG000513 – at https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

This figure, whose credentials we have no means of assessing, explains:

'Well it's not well known to Western leaders or Western people but it is pretty well known in Russia. Because essentially it is common knowledge in Russia that by the end of Nineties the so called Russian organised crime had been destroyed by the Government and then the Russian security agencies, primarily the law enforcement and primarily the FSB, essentially assumes the functions and methods of Russian organised crime. And they became one of the most dangerous organised crime group because they are protected by law. They're protected by all power of the State. They have essentially the free hand in the country and this shadow establishment essentially includes the entire structure of the FSB from the very top people in Moscow going down to the low offices.'

The story Mangold told was a pathetic tale of how Litvinenko and Shvets, trying to turn an honest penny from 'due diligence' work, identified damning evidence about the links of a figure close to Putin to organised crime, who in return sent Andrei Lugovoi to poison the former with polonium.

A few problems with this version have, however, subsequently, emerged. Among them is the fact that, at the time, Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding).

Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's 'information operations' team.

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the disappearance of Levinson, on the Iranian island of Kish, the following March, was not as was claimed for years related to his private sector work. His entrapment and imprisonment – from which we now know Deripaska was later involved in attempting to rescue him – related to an undercover mission on behalf of elements in the CIA.

The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study 'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko.

A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a very long way.

And, among other things, that raises a whole range of questions about Mueller.

Dan -> David Habakkuk ... , 12 July 2019 at 04:36 PM

Great info, thanks. I admittedly don't watch the skeptics' comments closely enough, and can be susceptible to twisted observations from guys like Carlson and Solomon.

[Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Looks like Mueller and his team were extremely sloppy and just milked the US government and try to feed rumors to the media.
Mueller emerged as a stooge of Clinton mafia.
Notable quotes:
"... In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin Stooge. ..."
"... The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as "fact" in the Mueller report. ..."
"... On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them. ..."
"... Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in contempt for violating rule 57.7. ..."
"... the Court has entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential sanctions. ..."
"... But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the Mueller Report and the actual indictment: ..."
"... By attributing IRA's conduct to "Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government. ..."
"... But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. ..."
"... Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence. ..."
"... I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out. ..."
"... The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more totalitarian sooner. ..."
"... a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html .) ..."
"... Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/ ) ..."
"... 'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.' ..."
"... Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.' ..."
"... It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017. ..."
"... Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding). ..."
"... Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's 'information operations' team. ..."
"... The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study 'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko. ..."
"... A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a very long way. ..."
Jul 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

In the criminal case against alleged Russian operatives--Internet Research Agency and Concord Management and Consulting LLC--a Federal judge has declared that Robert Mueller has not offered one piece of solid evidence that these defendants were involved in any way with the Government of Russia. I think this is a potential game changer.

The world of law as opposed to the world of intelligence is as different as Mercury and Mars. The intelligence community aka IC can traffic in rumor and speculation. IC "solid" intelligence may be nothing more than the strident assertion of a source who lacks actual first hand knowledge of an event. The legal world does not enjoy that kind of sloppiness. If a prosecutor makes a claim, i.e., Jack shot Jill, then said prosecutor must show that Jack owned a firearm that matches the bullets recovered from Jill's body. Then the prosecutor needs to show that Jack was with Jill when the shooting took place and that forensic evidence recovered from Jack showed he had fired a firearm. Keep this distinction in mind as you consider what has transpired in the case against the Internet Research Agency and Concord Management and Consulting.

To understand why Judge Friedrich ruled as she did you must understand Local Rule 57.7. That rule: restricts public dissemination of information by attorneys involved in criminal cases where

"there is a reasonable likelihood that such dissemination will interfere with a fair trial or otherwise prejudice the administration of justice." It also authorizes the court "[i]n a widely publicized or sensational criminal case" to issue a special order governing extrajudicial statements and other matters designed to limit publicity that might interfere with the conduct of a fair trial. . . .

The rule prohibits lawyers associated with the prosecution or defense from publishing, between the time of the indictment and the commencement of trial, "[a]ny opinion as to the accused's guilt or innocence or as to the merits of the case or the evidence in the case."

In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin Stooge.

The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as "fact" in the Mueller report.

On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them.

Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in contempt for violating rule 57.7.

Judge Friedrich gave Concord a partial victory:

Although the Court agrees that the government violated Rule 57.7 , it disagrees that contempt proceedings are an appropriate response to that violation. Instead, the Court has entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential sanctions.

But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the Mueller Report and the actual indictment:

The Special Counsel Report describes efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. . . . But the indictment . . . does not link the defendants to the Russian government. Save for a single allegation that Concord and Concord Catering had several "government contracts" (with no further elaboration), id. ¶ 11, the indictment alleges only private conduct by private actors.

. . . the concluding paragraph of the section of the [Mueller] Report related to Concord states that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by" Concord's co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA). By attributing IRA's conduct to "Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government.

Similarly, the Attorney General drew a link between the Russian government and this case during a press conference in which he stated that "[t]he Special Counsel's report outlines two main efforts by the Russian government to influence the 2016 election." . . . The "[f]irst" involved "efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company with close ties to the Russian government, to sow social discord among American voters through disinformation and social media operations." Id. The "[s]econd" involved "efforts by Russian military officials associated with the GRU," a Russian intelligence agency, to hack and leak private documents and emails from the Democratic Party and the Clinton Campaign.

The Report explains that it used the term "established" whenever "substantial, credible evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence." . . . It then states in its conclusion that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by the IRA." In context, this statement characterizes the evidence against the defendants as "substantial" and "credible," and it provides the Special Counsel's Office's "conclusion" about what actually occurred.

But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. Although Mueller claims that it was "established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by" Concord's co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), he provided no such evidence.

According to Mate :

After two years and $35 million, Mueller apparently failed to uncover any direct evidence linking the Prigozhin-controlled IRA's activities to the Kremlin. His best evidence is that "[n]umerous media sources have reported on Prigozhin's ties to Putin, and the two have appeared together in public photographs."

Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence.

Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot put that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth--if you cannot produce evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that part of the Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their accusers.

Posted at 11:09 PM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink

Sonal Chawhan , 12 July 2019 at 05:38 AM

Impressive！Thanks for the post
SAS Base and Advance

Peter VE , 12 July 2019 at 09:14 AM

Minor quibble: Judge Friedrich is a woman. I expect that this will get no play from the MSM, since Judge Friedrich was appointed by Trump, and "everyone" knows she's just covering up for him.

Larry Johnson -> Peter VE... , 12 July 2019 at 11:37 AM

Thanks. Never heard of a chick named, "Dabney." I was thinking Dabney Coleman. Dating myself.

Peter VE -> Larry Johnson ... , 12 July 2019 at 02:17 PM

Maybe her name is misspelled reference to Dagney Taggart...

Flavius , 12 July 2019 at 10:33 AM

Under the conditions and in the environment that it was returned, this indictment was Mueller and his partisan team throwing raw meat fo the media so as to prolong their mission, nothing more. Once filed, no one involved ever expected to appear in a courtroom to prosecute anyone, or defend any part of it. It was an abuse of process, pure and simple.

Consider it as a count against Mueller, his competence or his integrity, maybe both. He let himself become a tool.

pretzelattack -> Flavius... , 12 July 2019 at 07:27 PM

Johnson refers to "heartfelt beliefs" but i doubt Mueller believes his own bs. in this i guess he distinguishes himself from earlier witch-hunters, who apparently sincerely believed their targets were minions of satan.

blue peacock , 12 July 2019 at 11:33 AM

I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out.

It seems on the current trajectory both the Trump colluded with Russia and our law enforcement & IC attempted a soft-coup will die on the vine. The latter because Trump is unwilling to declassify. It seems for him it was all just another reality TV show and him tweeting "witch hunt" constantly was what the script called for.

The next time the IC & law enforcement who now must believe that they are the real power behind the throne decide to exercise that power it will be a doozie.

The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more totalitarian sooner.

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/11/china-surveillance-google-ibm-semptian/

David Habakkuk , 12 July 2019 at 12:39 PM

Larry,

A fine piece.

I think a large question is raised as to how far the kind of sloppiness in the handling of evidence which Judge Friedrich identified in the Mueller report may have characterised a great deal of the treatment of matters to do with the post-Soviet space by the FBI and others – including almost all MSM journalists – for a very long time.

Unfortunately, one also finds this among some of the most useful critics of 'Russiagate'. So, for example, in a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html .)

He then however goes on to write: 'In other words, not only was the firm that hired Steele, Fusion GPS, hired by the Russians, but Steele himself was hired directly by the Russians.'

And Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/ )

Commenting on the fact that, in her scribbled notes, beside the names of Vladislav Surkov and Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who are indeed a top Putin adviser and a former SVR chief respectively, Kavalec writes 'source', McCarthy simply concludes that she meant that he had said that these were his – indirect – sources, and that this was accurate. And he goes on to write:

'Deripaska, Surkov, and Trubnikov were not informing on the Kremlin. These are Putin's guys. They were peddling what the Kremlin wanted the world to believe, and what the Kremlin shrewdly calculated would sow division in the American body politic. So, the question is: Did they find the perfect patsy in Christopher Steele?'

If you look at Kavalec's typing up of the notes, among a good deal of what looks to me like pure 'horse manure' – including the claim that 'Manafort has been the go-between with the campaign' – the single reference to Surkov and Trubnikov is that they are said to be 'also involved.'

As it happens, Surkov is a very complex figure indeed. His talents as a 'political technologist' were first identified by Khodorkovsky, before he subsequently played that role for Putin. It would obviously be possible that he and Steele still had common contacts.

The suggestion in Kavalec's notes that Sergei Millian 'may be involved in some way,' and also that, 'Per Steele, Millian is connected Simon Kukes (who took over management of Yukos when Khodorkovsky was arrested)' is interesting, but would seem to suggest that he would not have been cited to Kavalec as an intermediary.

All this is obviously worth putting together with claims made in the 'New York Times' follow-up on 9 July to the Reuters report on the same day breaking the story of the interviews carried out with Steele by the Inspector General's team in early June.

(See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/us/politics/ig-russia-investigation-steele.html?module=inline .)

According to this:

'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.'

Some observations prompted by all this.

Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.'

In trying to put together the accumulating evidence, it is necessary to realise, as so many people seem to find it difficult to do, that in matters like these people commonly play double games – often for very good reasons.

To say as Carlson does that Fusion and Steele were hired by 'the Russians' implies that these are some kind of collective entity – and then, one is one step away from the assumption that Veselnitskaya and Deripaska, as well as 'Putin's Cook', are simply puppets controlled by the master manipulator in the Kremlin. (The fact that Friedrich applies serious standards for assessing evidence to Mueller's version of this is one of the reasons why her judgement is so important.)

As regards what McCarthy says, to lump Surkov and Deripaska together as 'Putin's guys' is unhelpful. Actually, it seems to me very unlikely, although perhaps not absolutely impossible, that, had he been implicated in any conspiracy to intervene in an American election, Surkov would have been talking candidly about his role to anyone liable to relay the information to Steele.

Likewise, however, the notion of a Machiachiavellian Surkov, feeding disinformation about a non-existent plot through an intermediary to Steele, who swallows it hook, line and sinker, does not seem particularly plausible.

A rather more obvious possibility is that the intermediaries who were supposed to have conveyed a whole lot of 'smoking gun' evidence to Steele were either 1. fabrications, 2. people whom without their knowledge he cast in this role, or 3. co-conspirators. It would, obviously, be possible that Millian, although one can say no more than that at this stage, was involved in either or both of roles 2. and 3.

It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017.

(See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/House_Intelligence_Committee_Interview_of_Glenn_Simpson )

Providing his version of what was going on following his move from the Washington office of the 'Wall Street Journal' to its European headquarters in January 2005, Simpson told the Committee:

'And the oligarchs, during this period of consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin, when I was living in Brussels and doing all this work, was about him essentially taking control over both the oligarchs and the mafia groups. And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin now. And that's true of the diaspora as well. So the Russian mafia in the United States is believed bylaw enforcement criminologists to have – to be under the influence of the Russian security services. And this is convenient for the security services because it gives them a level of deniability.'

A bit less than two years after Simpson's move to Brussels, a similar account featured in what appears to have been the first attempt by Christopher Steele and his confederates to provide a 'narrative' in terms of which could situate the supposed assassination by polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.

This came in a BBC Radio 4 programme, entitled 'The Litvinenko Mystery', in which a veteran presenter with the Corporation, Tom Mangold, produced an account by the former KGB Major Yuri Shvets, supported by the former FBI Agent Robert Levinson, and an 'Unidentified Informer', who is told by Mangold that he cannot be identified 'reasons of your own personal security'.

(A full transcript is on the 'Evidence' archived website of the Litvinenko Inquiry – one needs to search for the reference HMG000513 – at https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

This figure, whose credentials we have no means of assessing, explains:

'Well it's not well known to Western leaders or Western people but it is pretty well known in Russia. Because essentially it is common knowledge in Russia that by the end of Nineties the so called Russian organised crime had been destroyed by the Government and then the Russian security agencies, primarily the law enforcement and primarily the FSB, essentially assumes the functions and methods of Russian organised crime. And they became one of the most dangerous organised crime group because they are protected by law. They're protected by all power of the State. They have essentially the free hand in the country and this shadow establishment essentially includes the entire structure of the FSB from the very top people in Moscow going down to the low offices.'

The story Mangold told was a pathetic tale of how Litvinenko and Shvets, trying to turn an honest penny from 'due diligence' work, identified damning evidence about the links of a figure close to Putin to organised crime, who in return sent Andrei Lugovoi to poison the former with polonium.

A few problems with this version have, however, subsequently, emerged. Among them is the fact that, at the time, Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding).

Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's 'information operations' team.

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the disappearance of Levinson, on the Iranian island of Kish, the following March, was not as was claimed for years related to his private sector work. His entrapment and imprisonment – from which we now know Deripaska was later involved in attempting to rescue him – related to an undercover mission on behalf of elements in the CIA.

The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study 'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko.

A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a very long way.

And, among other things, that raises a whole range of questions about Mueller.

Dan -> David Habakkuk ... , 12 July 2019 at 04:36 PM

Great info, thanks. I admittedly don't watch the skeptics' comments closely enough, and can be susceptible to twisted observations from guys like Carlson and Solomon.

[Jul 13, 2019] I wonder what percentage of veterans got "woke" to this before Tulsi Gabbard?

Jul 13, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

+ 64% of veterans said the Iraq War wasn't worth fighting , considering the costs versus the benefit to the U.S., and more than 50% think the same about the war in Afghanistan I wonder what percentage of them got "woke" to this before Tulsi Gabbard?

[Jul 13, 2019] The return of Weimar Berlin - Lawlessness, Inequality, Extremism, Divisiveness and Crime

Notable quotes:
"... You hypocrites! You build monuments for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, 'If we had lived in the days of our ancestors , we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of His messengers ..."
"... this entire Russian collusion meme seems as though it is an hysterical reaction to the spin put out by the Clinton political faction and their neoliberal enablers after their shocking loss in the 2016 Presidential election. ..."
"... the financial corruption and private pilfering using public power, money laundering and the kind of soft corruption that is rampant amongst our new elite is all there ..."
"... We are reassured and misled by the same kinds of voices that have always served the status quo and the monied interests, the think tanks, the so-called 'institutes,' and the web sites and former con men who offer a constant stream of thinly disguised propaganda and misstatements of principle and history. We are comforted by their lies. ..."
"... We wish to strike a deal with the Lord, and a deal with the Devil -- to serve both God and Mammon as it suits us. It really is that cliché. And it is so finely woven into the fabric of our day that we cannot see it; we cannot see that it is happening to us and around us. ..."
"... It has always been so, especially in times of such vanity and greed as are these. Then is now. There is nothing new under the sun. And certainly nothing exceptional about the likes of us in our indulgent self-destruction. ..."
Feb 13, 2019 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

"He drew near and saw the city, and he wept for it saying, 'If you had only recognized the things that make for peace. But now you are blinded to them. Truly, the days will come when your enemies will set up barriers to surround you, and hem you in on every side. Then they will crush you into the earth, you and your children. And they will not leave one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the way to your salvation.'"

Luke 19:41-44

"You hypocrites! You build monuments for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, 'If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of His messengers.'"

Matthew 23:29-30

...the results of the Senate GOP finding no evidence of 'collusion' with Russia by the Trump Administration to influence the results of the presidential election..

This last item is not surprising, because this entire Russian collusion meme seems as though it is an hysterical reaction to the spin put out by the Clinton political faction and their neoliberal enablers after their shocking loss in the 2016 Presidential election.

Too bad though, because the financial corruption and private pilfering using public power, money laundering and the kind of soft corruption that is rampant amongst our new elite is all there. And by there we mean on both sides of the fence -- which is why it had to take a back seat to a manufactured boogeyman.

... ... ...

There is a long road ahead before we see anything like a resolution to this troubling period in American political history.

We look back at other troubled periods and places, and either see them as discrete and fictional, a very different world apart, or through some rosy lenses of good old times which were largely benign and peaceful. We fail to see the continuity, the similarity, and the commonality of a dangerous path with ourselves. As they did with their own times gone by. Madness blinds its acolytes, because they wish it so. They embrace it to hide their shame.

We are reassured and misled by the same kinds of voices that have always served the status quo and the monied interests, the think tanks, the so-called 'institutes,' and the web sites and former con men who offer a constant stream of thinly disguised propaganda and misstatements of principle and history. We are comforted by their lies.

People want to hear these reassuring words of comfort and embrace it like a 'religion,' because they do not wish to draw the conclusions that the genuine principles of faith suggest (dare we say command in this day and age) in their daily lives. They blind themselves by adopting a kind of a schizoid approach to life, where 'religion' occupies a discrete, rarefied space, and 'political or economic philosophy' dictates another set of everyday 'practical' observances and behaviors which are more pliable, and pleasing to our hardened and prideful hearts.

We wish to strike a deal with the Lord, and a deal with the Devil -- to serve both God and Mammon as it suits us. It really is that cliché. And it is so finely woven into the fabric of our day that we cannot see it; we cannot see that it is happening to us and around us.

And so we trot on into the abyss, one exception and excuse and rationalization for ourselves at a time. And we blind ourselves with false prophets and their profane theories and philosophies.

As for truth, the truth that brings life, we would interrupt the sermon on the mount itself, saying that this sentiment was all very well and good, but what stocks should we buy for our portfolio, and what horse is going to win the fifth at Belmont? Tell us something useful, practical! Oh, and can you please fix this twinge in my left shoulder? It is ruining my golf game.

"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves, after a fashion; they cannot understand destitution. Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of stripping themselves bare, they will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus's sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them. They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, hanging from a woman's beautiful throat."

Léon Bloy

No surprise in this. It has always been so, especially in times of such vanity and greed as are these. Then is now. There is nothing new under the sun. And certainly nothing exceptional about the likes of us in our indulgent self-destruction.

Are you not entertained?

[Jul 13, 2019] Concord Management and the End of Russiagate by Daniel Lazare

Notable quotes:
"... Thus, the IRA played a major role in the vast Kremlin conspiracy to alter the outcome of the 2016 election and install Donald Trump in office. But now Judge Dabney Friedrich has ordered Mueller to stop pushing such stories because they're unfair to Concord Management and Consulting, another Prigozhin company, which astonished the legal world in May 2018 by hiring an expensive Washington law firm and demanding its day in court ..."
"... Without the IRA, the only argument left in Mueller's brief is that Russia stole some 28,000 emails and other electronic documents from Democratic National Committee computers and then passed them along to WikiLeaks , which published them to great fanfare in July 2016. ..."
"... But as Consortium News pointed out the day the Mueller report came out, that's dubious as well. [See " The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report ," April 18.] The reason: it rests on a timeline that doesn't make sense: ..."
"... why would Assange announce the leaked emails on June 12 before hearing from the source on June 22? ..."
"... How could that be enough time to review the contents and ensure they were genuine? "If a single one of those emails had been shown to be maliciously altered," blogger Mark F. McCarty points out , "WikiLeaks's reputation would have been in tatters." Quite right. So if Mueller's chronology doesn't hold up, then Assange's original statement that "our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party" still stands – which it plainly does. ..."
"... Bottom line: Russiagate is going up in smoke. The claim that Russian military intelligence fed thousands of emails to WikiLeaks doesn't stand up to scrutiny while Mueller is not only unable to a prove a connection between the Internet Research Agency and the Kremlin but is barred from even discussing it, according to Friedrich's ruling, without risking a charge of contempt. After 22 months of investigating the ins and outs of Russian interference, Mueller seems to have finally come up dry. ..."
"... "Revenge of the oligarchs" might be a good headline for this story. The IRA indictment initially seemed to be a no-lose proposition for Mueller. He got to look good in the press, the media got to indulge in yet another round of Russia-bashing, while, best of all, no one had to prove a thing. "Mueller's allegations will never be tested in court," noted Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor turned pundit for the rightwing National Review . "That makes his indictment more a political statement than a charging instrument." ..."
"... Then came the unexpected. Concord Management hired Reed Smith, a top-flight law firm with offices around the world, and demanded to be heard. ..."
"... then the firm demanded to exercise its right of discovery, meaning that it wanted access to Mueller's immense investigative file. Blindsided, Mueller's requested a delay "on the astonishing ground," according to McCarthy , "that the defendant has not been properly served – notwithstanding that the defendant has shown up in court and asked to be arraigned." ..."
"... Prigozhin was forcing the special prosecutor to show what he's got, McCarthy went on, at zero risk to himself since he was not on U.S. soil. What was once a no-lose proposition for Mueller was suddenly a no-lose proposition for Putin's unexpectedly clever cook. ..."
"... Now Mueller is in an even worse pickle because he's barred from mentioning a major chunk of his report. What will he discuss if Democrats succeed in getting him to testify before the House intelligence and judiciary committees next week – the weather? ..."
"... If his team goes forward with the Concord prosecution, he'll risk having to turn over sensitive information while involving himself in a legal tangle that could go on for years, all without any conceivable payoff. If he drops it, the upshot will be a public-relations disaster of the first order ..."
"... As skeptics have pointed out, the IRA's social-media campaign was both more modest and more ineffectual then the Mueller report's over-the-top language about a "sweeping and systematic" conspiracy would suggest. Yet after Facebook Vice President Rob Goldman tweeted that "the majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election," he was forced to beg for forgiveness like a defendant in a Moscow show trial for daring to play down the magnitude of the crime. ..."
"... Hard to believe, but it is possible that the dumb Dem leaders still -- to this day -- believe their story-line. How else to account for the incredible denseness of Pelosi and Nadler, both of whom should be down at the southern border rather than fiddling on a rusty Russia-gate Stradivarius -- fiddling while little kids burn. ..."
"... Trump may be vulgar and unorganized but his efforts to maintain our sovereign borders are welcomed and will secure his second term. 6 or 7 years ago, every senior Democrat (Biden, Hillary, Schumer, Pelosi, etc.) were against open borders and illegal immigrants. Their current stance is crass politics not concern for human welfare. ..."
"... The whole Mueller investigation was always "theatre" and not "law." And not just "theatre" by Mueller, but by the media and the Democratic Party as well. ..."
"... Only a few things were proven: Mueller has no credibility, the "Justice Department" is dysfunctional, the mainstream media is a joke and the the DNC was able to rig the primaries and effectively hide that fact using the fog of the Russiagate farce. ..."
"... What do you do now Mr Mueller, now that your bluff has been called? Another one of many nails in the coffin of this ridiculous, American, Hallucination Hoax called Russiagate! ..."
"... Mueller thought he was simply practicing the real government policy on fooling the public with endless iterations of horse hockey which Dubya tried to obscure with his "fool me once, fool me twice " razz-ma-tazz. ..."
"... You can bet that the likes of Rachel Maddow will never change their tune on the subject of Russiagate. However, with the election season heating up, it might seem wise for them to start singing a different tune altogether, such as Sanders and Warren are too radical to have any chance of defeating Trump. The saddest thing of all is that the Dems' fixation on Russia and Putin is now coming back to bite them in the ass. Trump could not have asked for a better gift. ..."
"... These indictments (including the 12 GRU) were all press releases to fuel the "I'm doing something" and "Russia's involved" noise. Not a lawyer but those who are commented that these Russian "indictments" were not only without evidence (which would have come out in a court had such been the intent) but they went way beyond a straightforward indictment to something approximating an OP ED for the WoPo or NYT. ..."
"... I watched the excellent movie "The Big Short" last night, it was my second viewing after seeing it at the theater. It was painful to watch because it's about the abject failure and corruption of Wall Street, but beyond that, it's about the failure of Our System and about how the People always are the essential losers. ..."
"... We here at Consortiumnews have basically known these facts since Robert Parry's death, why?, because Robert was an extraordinary reporter who actually looked into the underlying dynamic of the subject he reported on. And, relying on his honesty, we were brought along on the Real story leading up to this. ..."
"... What's needed to convince Americans that "Russia" did not interfere in the election and did not hack the DNC is not a judge but an exorcist. ..."
"... This profound belief based on DNC, HRC confabulated and paid for evidence is in so many ways, if not totally, akin to the belief in UFOs and little green men (why is it always "men"?). Yet the same people who are "Russia and Putin did it" frenetic are those who denounce as insane nutters those who believe in the existence of UFOs and those grass colored men ..."
"... It should be interesting to see how this plays out, if the judiciary has the fortitude to stand up to the Den of Spooks. ..."
Jul 13, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

CAMPAIGN 2016 , INTELLIGENCE , RUSSIA , RUSSIAGATE , TRUMP ADMINISTRATION , WIKILEAKS Concord Management and the End of Russiagate? July 12, 2019 • 23 Comments

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A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has just shut down half of Robert Mueller's Russian-interference case, writes Daniel Lazare.

By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News

Don't look now, but a federal judge in Washington, D.C., has just shut down half of Robert Mueller's Russian-interference case.

In February 2018, the special prosecutor indicted a St. Petersburg troll farm called the Internet Research Agency along with two other companies, their owner, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, and 12 employees. The charge: fraud, traveling to the United States under false pretenses, and using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to "sow discord" and "interfere in US political and electoral processes without detection of their Russian affiliation."

The charge was both legally dubious and heavy-handed, a case of using a sledge hammer to swat a fly. But Mueller went even further in his report , an expurgated version of which was made public in April. No longer just a Russian company, the IRA was now an arm of the Russian government. "[T]he Special Counsel's investigation," it declared on page one, "established that Russia interfered in the 2016 election principally through two operations.

First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working in the Clinton campaign and then released stolen documents."

"Prigozhin," the report added, referring to the IRA owner, "is widely reported to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin." A few pages later, it said that the IRA's efforts "constituted 'active measures' a term that typically refers to operations conducted by Russian security services aimed at influencing the course of international affairs."

Thus, the IRA played a major role in the vast Kremlin conspiracy to alter the outcome of the 2016 election and install Donald Trump in office. But now Judge Dabney Friedrich has ordered Mueller to stop pushing such stories because they're unfair to Concord Management and Consulting, another Prigozhin company, which astonished the legal world in May 2018 by hiring an expensive Washington law firm and demanding its day in court.

Contrary to internet chatter , Friedrich did not offer an opinion as to whether the IRA-Kremlin connection is true or false. Rather, she told the special prosecutor to keep quiet because such statements go beyond the scope of the original indictment and are therefore prejudicial to the defendant. But it may be a distinction without a difference since the only evidence that Mueller puts forth in the public version of his report is a New York Times article from February 2018 entitled "Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian Oligarch Indicted by US, Is Known as 'Putin's Cook.'"

It's a case of trial by press clip that should have been laughed out of court – and now, more or less, it is. Without the IRA, the only argument left in Mueller's brief is that Russia stole some 28,000 emails and other electronic documents from Democratic National Committee computers and then passed them along to WikiLeaks , which published them to great fanfare in July 2016.

But as Consortium News pointed out the day the Mueller report came out, that's dubious as well. [See " The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report ," April 18.] The reason: it rests on a timeline that doesn't make sense:

But why would Assange announce the leaked emails on June 12 before hearing from the source on June 22? Was he clairvoyant? Why would he release a massive file just eight days after receiving it and as a little as four days after opening it up?

How could that be enough time to review the contents and ensure they were genuine? "If a single one of those emails had been shown to be maliciously altered," blogger Mark F. McCarty points out , "WikiLeaks's reputation would have been in tatters." Quite right. So if Mueller's chronology doesn't hold up, then Assange's original statement that "our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party" still stands – which it plainly does.

Going Up in Smoke

Bottom line: Russiagate is going up in smoke. The claim that Russian military intelligence fed thousands of emails to WikiLeaks doesn't stand up to scrutiny while Mueller is not only unable to a prove a connection between the Internet Research Agency and the Kremlin but is barred from even discussing it, according to Friedrich's ruling, without risking a charge of contempt. After 22 months of investigating the ins and outs of Russian interference, Mueller seems to have finally come up dry.

"Revenge of the oligarchs" might be a good headline for this story. The IRA indictment initially seemed to be a no-lose proposition for Mueller. He got to look good in the press, the media got to indulge in yet another round of Russia-bashing, while, best of all, no one had to prove a thing. "Mueller's allegations will never be tested in court," noted Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor turned pundit for the rightwing National Review . "That makes his indictment more a political statement than a charging instrument."

Then came the unexpected. Concord Management hired Reed Smith, a top-flight law firm with offices around the world, and demanded to be heard. The move was "a real head-scratcher," one Washington attorney told Buzzfeed , because Concord was beyond the reach of U.S. law and therefore had nothing to fear from an indictment and nothing to gain, apparently, from going to court. But then the firm demanded to exercise its right of discovery, meaning that it wanted access to Mueller's immense investigative file. Blindsided, Mueller's requested a delay "on the astonishing ground," according to McCarthy , "that the defendant has not been properly served – notwithstanding that the defendant has shown up in court and asked to be arraigned."

Prigozhin was forcing the special prosecutor to show what he's got, McCarthy went on, at zero risk to himself since he was not on U.S. soil. What was once a no-lose proposition for Mueller was suddenly a no-lose proposition for Putin's unexpectedly clever cook.

Now Mueller is in an even worse pickle because he's barred from mentioning a major chunk of his report. What will he discuss if Democrats succeed in getting him to testify before the House intelligence and judiciary committees next week – the weather?

If his team goes forward with the Concord prosecution, he'll risk having to turn over sensitive information while involving himself in a legal tangle that could go on for years, all without any conceivable payoff. If he drops it, the upshot will be a public-relations disaster of the first order.

As skeptics have pointed out, the IRA's social-media campaign was both more modest and more ineffectual then the Mueller report's over-the-top language about a "sweeping and systematic" conspiracy would suggest. Yet after Facebook Vice President Rob Goldman tweeted that "the majority of the Russian ad spend happened AFTER the election," he was forced to beg for forgiveness like a defendant in a Moscow show trial for daring to play down the magnitude of the crime.

But it wasn't Goldman who shaved the truth. Rather, it was Mueller. Thanks to the unexpected appearance of Concord Management, he's now paying the price.

Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com .

If you value this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

David H , July 12, 2019 at 18:17

Does "prejudicial to the defendant" mean the same thing as prejudiced against the defendant?

Stan W. , July 12, 2019 at 13:55

The myth regarding Russian influence in the 2016 election that enabled Donald Trump to "steal" the presidency from Hillary Clinton would make a good sequel to a movie from 1966. Its title: "THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING!"

Jeff Harrison , July 12, 2019 at 12:33

The one thing I'd like to know is: did Mueller ever provide the requested discovery documents or not?

Ray McGovern , July 12, 2019 at 11:20

BRAVO, Dan. AND, as you aware, the "hacking half" of Mueller's magnum opus also cannot bear close scrutiny.

Remember where you heard this first, "Current and former intelligence officials" tell me that Mueller has asked his mother to write a note to be excused from the field trip to Congress next Thursday, the 17th.

In my view, the only sympathy Mueller should be able to elicit at this point is the cruel reality that he chose to perform one last job for the Deep State after he had reached the age of statutory senility. His handlers will try to prop him up to the extent possible, but the die is now cast. The whipping-up of Russia-gate can now be seen -- at least by consortium news readers -- as a "best-defense-is-a-good-offensive" operation to obfuscate the reality of Deep-State-gate.

Hard to believe, but it is possible that the dumb Dem leaders still -- to this day -- believe their story-line. How else to account for the incredible denseness of Pelosi and Nadler, both of whom should be down at the southern border rather than fiddling on a rusty Russia-gate Stradivarius -- fiddling while little kids burn. They ought to do their Constitutional duty to impeach -- not on the basis of evidence-less Russia-gate charges -- but because the President is treading heavily on KIDS, as well as the Constitution.

Let's hear more from Tulsi Gabbard.

Again, great job, Dan. I can almost see Bob Parry smiling.

Ray

Chet Roman , July 12, 2019 at 18:15

You've been right all along Ray. Appreciate all your accurate investigating and reporting.

However, I must disagree with your suggestion of impeachment on two phony issues: kids and the constitution. You should focus your wrath on the Democrats that will not correct our immigration laws. The only reason there is a surge of children and families is because the democrats and their radical liberals have made it clear to the world that if you bring children you are free to illegally cross the border. You may be stopped but the kids you bring with you (your own or rent-a-kiddie) are essentially a get out of jail card. We now have Africans from the Congo crossing over with luggage, the latest group are Haitians, WTF?

As an immigrant I support our immigrants that come here legally but not those that break the law. Diversity is not our strength but just adds to the division and conflict within our society. Trump may be vulgar and unorganized but his efforts to maintain our sovereign borders are welcomed and will secure his second term. 6 or 7 years ago, every senior Democrat (Biden, Hillary, Schumer, Pelosi, etc.) were against open borders and illegal immigrants. Their current stance is crass politics not concern for human welfare.

Mike from Jersey , July 12, 2019 at 10:20

The whole Mueller investigation was always "theatre" and not "law." And not just "theatre" by Mueller, but by the media and the Democratic Party as well. And the Republicans cannot rejoice in the result since – not only did Mueller baselessly refuse to concede "exoneration" – Mueller's report itself is a joke in the first place. This article points that out.

So what are we left with?

Only a few things were proven: Mueller has no credibility, the "Justice Department" is dysfunctional, the mainstream media is a joke and the the DNC was able to rig the primaries and effectively hide that fact using the fog of the Russiagate farce.

In short, America's political system is completely broken.

O Society , July 12, 2019 at 09:20

We have heard the name of Judge Dabney Freidrich before. She is a bit of a wildcard here, as she does not necessarily do what the powers that be expect of her. Here she pulls the rug out from under Mueller when he and the Scooby Doo gang was no doubt expecting never to actually have to go to court against the Russian meddling kids:

https://osociety.org/2018/10/21/judge-orders-mueller-to-prove-russian-company-meddled-in-election/

and here she has Kavanaugh's back during his Supreme Court nomination process as he screams about his entitlement to do whatever he damned well pleases because he's entitled rich folk who went to Yale part of the Club aristocracy:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4946213-Judge-Dabney-Friedrich-s-Letter-to-the-Senate.html

Piotr Berman , July 12, 2019 at 09:19

About Prigozhin the oligarch, Wikipedia: "The Anti-Corruption Foundation accused Prigozhin of corrupt business practices. They estimated his illegal wealth to be worth more than one billion rubles.[11]" So the opposition outfit (and those exist in "dictatorial" Russia) accuses Prigozhin of amassing 16 million dollars of "illegal wealth". Poor Russia. In USA, a single doctor can get more by overbilling Medicare, Workers' Compensation etc.

KiwiAntz , July 12, 2019 at 09:16

Mueller, Mueller, Mueller- Class, anyone, anyone?? Ferris Mueller's Day Off is turning into a nightmare & his Report is crashing & burning, faster than a US Drone, shot down & blasted out of the Sky, by the IRG in the Sea of Homuz? It's all very well accusing people of crimes & slandering reputations knowing or hoping that under normal circumstances the accused wouldn't show up to defend the charges, but these accused Russians are prepared to challenge Mueller's fictitious findings? What do you do now Mr Mueller, now that your bluff has been called? Another one of many nails in the coffin of this ridiculous, American, Hallucination Hoax called Russiagate!

Realist , July 12, 2019 at 16:08

Mueller thought he was simply practicing the real government policy on fooling the public with endless iterations of horse hockey which Dubya tried to obscure with his "fool me once, fool me twice " razz-ma-tazz.

Mr. Mueller will take the "A" train to Davy Jones' locker trying to hoodwink the public on this fiasco, rather than getting religion and uttering the more appropriate "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."

AnneR , July 12, 2019 at 09:07

Nice, Mr Lazare, very, very nice. One can only hope that Mueller and the rest of the conspirators (for what else are they?) get their full comeuppance. However, I doubt that given past history and the ability of all those with and in power to escape full scrutiny and real punishment (a lengthy prison sentence).

Unfortunately and dishearteningly, I also doubt that the true believers, of which there are all too many and among whom all too many are highly and expensively educated, will let any of this alter by one iota their apparently adamantine position on "Russiagate," their anti-Putin Russophobia. Or their equally apparent adoration of HRC.

Rob , July 12, 2019 at 12:27

You can bet that the likes of Rachel Maddow will never change their tune on the subject of Russiagate. However, with the election season heating up, it might seem wise for them to start singing a different tune altogether, such as Sanders and Warren are too radical to have any chance of defeating Trump. The saddest thing of all is that the Dems' fixation on Russia and Putin is now coming back to bite them in the ass. Trump could not have asked for a better gift.

Antonio Costa , July 12, 2019 at 09:01

These indictments (including the 12 GRU) were all press releases to fuel the "I'm doing something" and "Russia's involved" noise. Not a lawyer but those who are commented that these Russian "indictments" were not only without evidence (which would have come out in a court had such been the intent) but they went way beyond a straightforward indictment to something approximating an OP ED for the WoPo or NYT.

The intel report ordered by Obama (2 of them) had no evidence, and the last one went on and on about RT as if RT has conspired to infiltrate the minds of US voters (huge laugh given their reach and those who watch, or listen generally don't need convincing of US government nefarious doings).

I did read both reports and indictments, and as a lay person it was clear there was no substance. In the case of the intel report even Obama concluded there was nothing.

Yet the 2+ year circus went on and on as a media ($$$) frenzy. No one really cared, nor do they to this day.

This is what the unraveling of an empire looks like. Let's hope there's a truly new and better day ahead after the collapse.

OlyaPola , July 12, 2019 at 08:58

When deflating a balloon care is required to ensure it doesn't shoot off in all directions exposing the skill levels of would-be performers.

Bob Van Noy , July 12, 2019 at 08:05

I watched the excellent movie "The Big Short" last night, it was my second viewing after seeing it at the theater. It was painful to watch because it's about the abject failure and corruption of Wall Street, but beyond that, it's about the failure of Our System and about how the People always are the essential losers.

We here at Consortiumnews have basically known these facts since Robert Parry's death, why?, because Robert was an extraordinary reporter who actually looked into the underlying dynamic of the subject he reported on. And, relying on his honesty, we were brought along on the Real story leading up to this.

Now, much like the movie I mentioned, we know we were right to trust CN, but there is little joy in watching the confirmation of a failed fourth estate and failed democratic experiment. Now we are left with the anxiety of how to repair this mess

Oh well, thanks Consortiumnews.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363/

Alfred di Genis , July 12, 2019 at 04:18

What's needed to convince Americans that "Russia" did not interfere in the election and did not hack the DNC is not a judge but an exorcist.

AnneR , July 12, 2019 at 09:13

Truly. This profound belief based on DNC, HRC confabulated and paid for evidence is in so many ways, if not totally, akin to the belief in UFOs and little green men (why is it always "men"?). Yet the same people who are "Russia and Putin did it" frenetic are those who denounce as insane nutters those who believe in the existence of UFOs and those grass colored men

Realist , July 12, 2019 at 04:17

Maybe Mueller should ask Putin for asylum before he concedes the truth and implicates Brennan, Clapper, Hillary and Obama as masterminds of Intelgate. I don't think he's getting a pardon from Trump.

That Hillary was so clever in her design to fatally slur both the Donald and the "New Hitler" in Moscow with one big lie, while deftly knifing Bernie in the back as attentions were directed at the bigger fish. Not!

It should be interesting to see how this plays out, if the judiciary has the fortitude to stand up to the Den of Spooks.

Ray McGovern , July 12, 2019 at 11:33

Realist,

You have that right, as usual. "If the judiciary ." A very BIG "If." How many judges like Dabney Friedrich, I wonder, are still on the bench? We may be about to see.

Ray

[Jul 12, 2019] Congress and the courts are the enablers of America's destruction. Legislation is morality; it's the definition of how you live together, where people can live together and raise their families. Our Congress instead serves the sex industry

Jul 12, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

NAV , 2 hours ago

Congress and the courts are the enablers of America's destruction. Legislation is morality; it's the definition of how you live together, where people can live together and raise their families. Our Congress instead serves the sex industry, whether it be in our schools and universities or in our homes via television and the internet and magazines. Yvonne Ridley in "**** in the USA" wrote on June 2, 2011:

"In Obama's Apple Pie America, cable and satellite companies pump *********** into millions of homes where the American Dream has, for some, become X-rated.

"And the Americans are keen to share – I remember one of the first things that followed the arrival of US forces in Afghanistan was the sex industry. Scores of channels promoting straight and gay **** suddenly became readily available on television sets without even the need to subscribe ."

And, our media, upon arrival, gleefully subjected small children to **** just to watch their innocence torn asunder.

*********** and its consequences in America wears a Supreme Court robe... *********** is the law of the land.

[Jul 12, 2019] The Heart of Darkness: The Sexual Predators Within America's Power Elite: book on the pedophile "epidemic in America and the purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States

Notable quotes:
"... Of course the types who perpetrated this horror should go down but if you are naive enough to believe the lie that zionists pull all the greedies (jew/gentile/saudi) strings instead of the blindingly obvious, that all the greedies pull the strings of everyone they can, including those of the stupid & ignorant israeli settlers, then the odds of you anon, finding any 'truth' in the machinations of empire are slim. ..."
Jul 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

anon , Jul 11 2019 6:36 utc | 134 whatever, coward. I won't be staying long I see little point is spending time at a place taken over by nonce's who can only read stuff that adheres to their tiny world view. Otherwise they lose their sh1t.

Even worse few do more than hunt out anything, including stuff from the very same msm they profess to eschew, which buttresses that view in an odd and pointless game of "see what I just read, one upmanship". Actually getting out and involved helping even one of the humans whose life is sh1t thanks to the empire is never even considered.

Of course the types who perpetrated this horror should go down but if you are naive enough to believe the lie that zionists pull all the greedies (jew/gentile/saudi) strings instead of the blindingly obvious, that all the greedies pull the strings of everyone they can, including those of the stupid & ignorant israeli settlers, then the odds of you anon, finding any 'truth' in the machinations of empire are slim.

If there weren't any twisted Clintons or Trumps prepared do do any damn thing just to sodomise a preadolescent girl, no one would abduct the girls in the first place.

Every f++ker who went to edelsteins island should be locked up for the rest of their lives unless they can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they only cut the grass/washed the dishes.

ps if 'the jews' control everything why are so many of em on the bones of their arses? Surely any jew who was stuck with driving a cab/pushing a pen/ or even robbing a bank would just manipulate the nearest billionaire 'goy' into handing over his/her dosh?

C I eh? , Jul 11 2019 8:01 utc | 137
@ anon

(((Debisdead))) comes back from the dead to tell everyone the rampant child abuse is the fault of anyone except the jewish names actually involved...

You said it.

What brought me here at 3:30 am was an Amber Alert on my phone, with an incredibly obnoxious alarm, for a child apparently abducted 500kms away. I've received three such alerts in the past hour so I know everyone in Ontario will be talking about it tomorrow.

Psych ops are ramping up ladies and gents...

john , Jul 11 2019 10:25 utc | 143
.

Krollchem , Jul 11 2019 5:19 utc | 129

For more on the pedophile "epidemic in America and the purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

The Heart of Darkness: The Sexual Predators Within America's Power Elite
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_heart_of_darkness_the_sexual_predators_within_americas_power_elite
By John W. Whitehead

Krollchem , Jul 11 2019 5:31 utc | 131
See also the global incident map for a small portion of sex trafficing in the US and around the world. http://human.globalincidentmap.com/

This site covers lots of other criminal incidents and other issues.


anon , Jul 11 2019 6:36 utc | 134
(((Debisdead))) comes back from the dead to tell everyone the rampant child abuse is the fault of anyone except the jewish names actually involved

etc etc etc... ad nauseum

Debsisdead , Jul 11 2019 7:45 utc | 136
re #

[Jul 11, 2019] As Acosta told his interviewers in the Trump transitiotion team "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone"

Notable quotes:
"... Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?" Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he'd had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He'd cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein's attorneys because he had "been told" to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. ..."
"... "I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone," he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.) ..."
Jul 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

It seems necessary to give some room to the discussion of the Epstein case. Vicky Ward, who wrote a 2002 portrait of Epstein for Vanity Fair , has a short recap of the case at the Daily Beast : Jeffrey Epstein's Sick Story Played Out for Years in Plain Sight .

This bit from it is quite interesting:

Epstein's name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who'd infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.

" Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?" Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he'd had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He'd cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein's attorneys because he had "been told" to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade.

"I was told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone," he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.)

'Belongs to intelligence' makes a lot of sense. The question is to which one. A lot of people will says "Mossad" but I don't believe that to be the (full) truth.

[Jul 11, 2019] Epstein, Trump and CIA

Jul 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Alexander P , Jul 10 2019 19:46 utc | 20

We do not know why Epstein resurfaced, there was no need to re-open the case unless 'they' wanted it to be reopened. Thus, there is definitely a deeper political purpose behind this. As I know the higher ups in both Democrat and Republican Party are in one way or another involved in this (both Clinton and Trump visited his island and I am sure many more prominent high ranking US career politicians), this could indeed be equally dangerous for either political party.

However, I don't think Trump needs convincing with regard to Iran he has been all in on that from day 1 of his presidency and never hesitated a moment to tear up the JCPOA. Bibi was right when he said there was never a US president as friendly towards Israel than Donald Trump. His actions have spoken louder than words. So for this case, we will just have to wait and see what pieces of information they allow the MSM to publish and we will know who they are after or what bigger political goal is at play.

jared , Jul 10 2019 20:03 utc | 27

Something does not smell right about this.
It's not like Epstein was some obscure issue or that Trump was uninformed about the case.
Who would allow a person with such baggage on the team?
And the issue was raised so no possibility it was over-looked.
Congress (including the now concerned repubs) had their shot at him, where was the indignation?
Looks like people were told to disregard the issue, until now.
Now like good soldiers they are all barking alert.
Looks like this guy was a plant, an insurance policy maybe.
Now that policy has been triggered - has Trump failed in playing his role?

Pft , Jul 10 2019 21:22 utc | 51

Trumps ex-pal Epstein linked to intelligence. Makes sense given he has Robert Maxwell's daughter doing the procuring. His was likely a black mail operation run by the intelligence agency

Trumps other ex-pal (partner) was also linked to intelligence. Bayrocks Felix Sater. I imagine some of their business practices could have landed Trump in jail unless like Felix he cooperated

Could Trump himself be a an intelligent asset? Perhaps under duress through his activities with Jeffrey and Felix.

If so, indeed the question is if its Israels or the US agency, or is there any difference now.

I don't pretend to know the answers.

Whats the end game?. Comeys daughter is one of the NY prosecutors.Dershowitz is an Israeli puppet and was behind getting the sealed files opened. Is Clinton and the Dems the target or is it meant to pressure Trump to go hard on Iran or risk something coming out? Something else?

I cant help but wonder why nobody choses to remind us about the case filed against Trump in 2016, where a woman claimed rape at age 13 at Epstein's apartment. Is wasn't covered much at the time either. Apparently silently withdrawn. Curious no? Not even the so called Deep State Media that everyone believes was against Trump. Theydon't seem to want to touch it now either. Maybe its just BS.

Of course, maybe just more distraction as they continue fleecing the bottom 90%

Mr. Lucky , Jul 10 2019 21:28 utc | 53

Epstein was/is Mossad. He ran honey traps for Israel.

This is one of the primary ways the Tribe controls US politicians.

This is how Deep State controls Trump, and why Trump betrayed every campaign promise, except the one to Israel.

Acosta was told to give Epstein a sweetheart deal and to stop the Federal investigation.

For his compliance, he was awarded the job of Labor Secretary in the Trump administration.

fastfreddy , Jul 10 2019 21:30 utc | 54

Billionaire, $6 B, Les Wexner, L Brands, Victoria's Secret.

from Wiki

Wexner had a close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who managed Wexner's financial assets. Wexner and Epstein parted when Epstein went to prison.[25] Wexner was believed to be the primary source of Epstein's wealth. [26]

fastfreddy , Jul 10 2019 21:45 utc | 62

I am trying to link Wexner with the Bronfman's (Seagrams Liquor Family) via a source other than the Mega Group (which may not be credible, IDK).Clare Bronfman and NEXIVM.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/

seagram-heiress-clare-bronfman-pleads-guilty-in-nxivm-sex-slave-case-825103/

https://www.wexnerfoundation.org/about-us/our-offices--staff


Looks like Epstein was running a high powered honey trap to ensnare Politicians, Lawyers, Government employees for the express purpose of promoting the "Greater Israel Project".

KC , Jul 10 2019 21:51 utc | 63

@fastfreddy - While I hesitate to engage in the ubiquitous Israel is at the root of all debacles conjecture, I think you might be onto something there. Sure would be interesting (now or when whatever shakes out of this) to compare the record on votes of importance to Israeli interests of any politician who gets implicated or indicted with who doesn't.

Alaric , Jul 10 2019 21:52 utc | 64

Protecting Epstein and his clients is secondary. The main goal is to protect his billionaire, Jewish, sponsors and whatever state sponsored him. The pleabs cannot know that their gov is corrupt but the bigger secret that must be kept is who is pulling the strings and how they are doing it.

Andrew Kreig , Jul 10 2019 22:02 utc | 68

Am enjoying the insights here and can share a few responses after years of reporting on Epstein, Clinton, Obama, Trump and Barr.

In response to lysias at #34 on Barr's intelligence and corruption cover-up background, here's a full history with links: "Trump Found His Roy Cohn In Deep State Fixer Bill Barr," May 27, 2019. https://www.justice-integrity.org/1659-trump-found-his-roy-cohn-in-deep-state-fixer-bill-barr

Regarding questions on Acosta by Jared at #27, here's a 2017 article showing that the facts were out about Acosta when the Senate confirmed him: "Did Trump Labor Pick Protect Trump, Rich Rapists, Tax Cheats, Crooked Bankers? Do We Find Out Wednesday?" March 14, 2017. http://ow.ly/hk8b309Uerm

Regarding MSM reluctance to mention rape of 12 and 13 year olds by Trump, as several commentators noted, here's a January 2017 wrap up of those matters with leading to other links: "Welcome To Waterbury: The city that holds secrets that could bring down Trump," Jan. 9, 2018. http://www.justice-integrity.org/1445-welcome-to-waterbury-the-city-that-holds-secrets-that-could-bring-down-trump. My colleague Wayne Madsen and I filed a FOIA action today at the U.S. Justice Department seeking further records.

Our view is that this is an intelligence / foreign policy operation and it's likely that Epstein's time has run out, an occupational hazard in that field. Further, Madsen and I have written separate books years ago documenting that all U.S. presidents after Carter -- but not yet Trump as proven -- have been covert assets of the CIA or FBI before -- stress that -- they entered politics. That's the way it is, and helps explain a lot of the complaints in comments above. Trump is in his own category of a corrupt stooge -- that's not necessarily better.

Can recommend excellent 2008 book "Flat Earth News" by longtime UK journalist Nick Davies that describes the deeply flawed nature of MSM from his perspective as a Guardian and other UK journalist, who aptly describes why lies and quarter-truths get printed. That's a longer story but the gist is what many here are suggesting.

last day of grace , Jul 10 2019 23:04 utc | 79

After years of study and many many books I believe the Mossad and CIA are one and the same. The Mossad is very useful when leaving sovereign footprints is verboten--and vice versa.

Jen , Jul 10 2019 23:06 utc | 80

"...'Belongs to intelligence' makes a lot of sense. The question is to which one. A lot of people will says "Mossad" but I don't believe that to be the (full) truth ..."

At the level that Jeffrey Epstein is operating, he is loyal primarily to himself but happily takes his reward from whichever intel agency at any time offers him the most or whose interests might prove the most lucrative for him.

And the interests of American, British, Israeli and other nations' intelligence agencies are surely so entwined that picking them apart is impossible. One thing for sure though: none of them serve the interests of the nations they supposedly work for.

last day of grace , Jul 10 2019 23:09 utc | 81

The function of the CIA/Mossad is to make sure the agenda and the narrative of the Deep State gets served. In that case one could truly blame Epstein's actions on individuals, or groups of individuals who dictate orders to the Mossad/CIA.

Really? , Jul 10 2019 23:31 utc | 85
@29

Epstein is CFR???
What???
HOw can that be?

Mr.Lucky , Jul 10 2019 23:37 utc | 86
Lozion:

I am not implying, I am stating that they absolutely have the goods on Trump.

His supporters knew he was a scum bag when they voted for him, but he promised to stop the invasion and they fell for it.

Why do you think that Trump did a 180 on every campaign promise once elected, except the promise to Israel?

Why do you think that Trump gave Acosta a job after the sweetheart deal?

Ask yourself another question: Why is happening as the election cycle is beginning?

Anyone who says Clinton is in trouble is delusional. Clinton is invincible.

They are going after Trump.

Really? , Jul 10 2019 23:39 utc | 89

"Something does not smell right about this."

Re timing, could it be connected to Mueller soon to be under oath and testifying?

could Mueller be a target of some kind?

jared , Jul 10 2019 23:50 utc | 93

Epstein reminds me of the Bill Browder affair. And the statement: To know who are the rulers not which are the ones you are not permitted to criticize. Or somethinh like that.

Alexander P. , Jul 11 2019 0:09 utc | 99
If indeed they are after Trump as he failed them on 'Iran', then it makes absolute sense that Dershowitz and Cernovich had the records unsealed as both are strong, strong Zionists and supporters of Israel. Getting a judge do the thing they need is just a formality. I agree with some writer above who asked, why the publicity if pressure can be applied in secret without the media being involved? But this may be the stated goal to bring Trump either completely in line now or publicly topple his presidency.

I get why @94 Really? and others would be sceptical at this stage but I know strong powers in the Zionist/Neo-con deep state want a direct confrontation with Iran for myriad number of reasons (stop the BRI, deal a blow to Syria and Hizbollah, take out Israel's No 1 enemy etc, shore up the Petrodollar), and Trump was still the most likely candidate to follow through with this, given his proximity to Zionism. So far he also has dully followed through with everything imaginable, except for actually attacking Iran.

Interesting development indeed. B. Clinton could be collateral damage, at this stage their power is overestimated in my opinion.

karlof1 , Jul 11 2019 0:11 utc | 100
Andrew Kreig @68--

Okay, An "intelligence op," but which one? The Epstein/Mueller link was made several months ago. I don't see any irregularities in the court judgement to order the unsealing as it's been ongoing for almost 2.5 years and involves odd bedfellows. Was Mueller even aware of the attempt to unseal Epstein's case? So many questions!

ekerbacker , Jul 11 2019 0:16 utc | 103

Arnon Milchan? He was Israeli. Should he be punished, absolutely. But you know who should be hung? Robert DeNiro. He knew Arnon Milchan was a spy and kept his mouth shut for decades. He is a POS of epic proportions.

Insofar as Epstein is concerned. It is all about timing. Mueller is set to testify and probably has skeletons in his closet with regards to Epstein's case. He is likely being told implicitly via the Epstein arrest to be on his best behavior by Barr, and Barr at this age probably can care less that Epstein is being sacrificed so he can make his point, particularly since Barr is probably the 2nd most powerful person in the USA right now.

Epstein was extremely likely an Israeli asset. The Israelis have through political power and force convinced many in the US IC that their ship is sailing in the same direction, and that they should be allowed to serve as the US's dog on a leash, and once in a while be unleashed to do what the US won't. So while he was an Israeli asset, his resources (that is compromising material) was often made available to the CIA, and thus Acosta was told that he is an intelligence asset.

The fireworks will start to fly if and when Epstein realizes he is being hung out to dry and won't be saved. But like almost every other case involving such rich and powerful people, don't hold your breath for justice to be served in the US.

Alexander P , Jul 11 2019 0:29 utc | 104
@96 and 33

What does protecting adolescent teenagers from predatory adults have to do with puritanism? Am I understanding this correctly that you advocate sex with minors as long as they have reached biological puberty? Never mind their mental maturity? So sexual relations involving young women is ok what about sexual relations with young men? This has nothing to do with a false pretentious morality but with the fact that teenagers have not yet reached the level of mental maturity that protects them from sexual exploitation that will haunt them for the rest of their lives, never mind their biological functions and ability to conceive or sire children. It is really puzzling that I even need to make these elaborations in here!

Debsisdead , Jul 11 2019 0:35 utc | 105
In many ways this thread is as sickening as the subject it discusses. All sorts of types left and right competing to show that they have the most insight into the forces behind the anal rape of a 12 year old girl See Andrew Kreig's excellent piece which does consider the horror of the acts, rather than just whether or not it plays into the particular vision of 'power politics' each poster invokes). In no instance does anyone express disgust at the actions of these low life scum other than for the corruption of the pols such as Acosta.
The glee which so many have displayed jumping into this horror story because it can be twisted and forced into their own particular theory about "how the world really works" while totally ignoring that these humans who were abducted at age eleven or twelve & then sold like cattle, now inhabit the netherworld of 'the great society' living in the fringes of prosperous cities in a ramshackle 'double wide', reveals a psychic corruption not a million miles away from that of the rapists.

This story is those young boys & girls, anyone who claims to want to use it to force the greedy rapists and warmongering grubs to face justice, will not succeed as long as they waste time speculating who works for who and who is really in control.

Prince Andrew still bludges off taxpayers despite being photographed with his arm around one of his victims, if you're english & really care about stopping this scum, instead of speculating on which shadowy 'palace spokesman suggested that the Daily Mail include the line "There is no suggestion that the duke had any sexual contact at the house, or knew what was allegedly going on there" you will find out how the at the time 17 y.o. Virginia Roberts feels about her public destruction now (A child the Mail described as an erotic masseuse - presumably to reduce the horror a normal human reacts to that pic whilst ensuring the victim is so humiliated she causes no further problem for "the royal family's" number one arms salesman). This victim first hung out with the andrew sleaze when she was 17 at the pimp's Florida hell hole where the age of consent is 18.

Concentrating on the effect on victims while protecting them from further harm will bring the creeps undone - nothing else will. It was only once people began to see past the priests claims that "the victims led me on" and considered the huge power imbalance that the catholic church came unstuck.
Most of all without humanity, there is no difference between any of us and the scum we criticise.

William Gruff , Jul 11 2019 0:55 utc | 106

Woohoo! Debsisdead isn't dead!

Now, to be on topic, why the insistence that Epstein finally getting outed for real is some mysterious intel op? The CIA has been screwing up left, right and center for years, so is it any surprise that one of their major kompromat operations is getting exposed? Their foolproof plan to install their tool Clinton in the White House in 2016 failed spectacularly and blew up in their faces, so tell me again how great they are at running covert ops? The CIA's own version of James Bond gets snuffed by the CIA's own death squads in Benghazi, but people still think the CIA has a clue what they're doing? The CIA's operatives in multiple embassies are being incapacitated by freakin' crickets and people think these clowns still somehow maintain some vestigial link to reality?

No, this is simply another massive screw-up by the establishment. This blind-sided the Deep State and so much took them by surprise that they were too late to get it clamped down in the mass media. If Epstein dies before the real dirt starts getting exposed then it proves me right and proves wrong all those who worship at the alter of the omnipotent Deep State.

[Jul 10, 2019] Podesta vs Epstein

Jul 10, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

johnwburns , 1 hour ago

Have another look at Tony Podesta's art collection.

http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/2016/11/26/sick-lets-revisit-the-podesta-penchant-for-pedophilic-cannibalistic-and-satanic-art/#sthash.6jj0GpQo.dpbs

cat2005 , 21 minutes ago

I never understood why people claimed Podesta had child abuse links until I read that article. It is enough to make even a hardened Podesta supporter cringe.

I need some mind bleach after reading that.

[Jul 10, 2019] RAY MCGOVERN

Notable quotes:
"... As Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA. ..."
"... "The media went along with this – actually, keeping this farcical, ridiculous thought going that the President of the United States was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Russia against his own country." ..."
"... Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. No fan of the current President, Ray has been trained to follow and analyze the facts, wherever they may lead. He spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, and prepared the President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). ..."
"... Mr. McGovern you are right in your analysis. Obama is in this up to his neck, however there will be a limited investigation at best because the Jews and Israel don't want this. They are involved and a real investigation would show what control they have over the FBI and CIA. ..."
"... The world is controlled by the Corporate Fascist Military-Intelligence Police State in which governments are nothing more than Proxies with Intelligence Agencies who work against the average citizen and for the Corporations. Politicians like Trump are nothing more than figureheads who must "Toe the Line" or else. ..."
Jul 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

JULY 8, 2019 1,500 WORDS 2 COMMENTS REPLY

As Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA.

King told a radio audience:

"There is no doubt to me there was severe, serious abuses that were carried out in the FBI and, I believe, top levels of the CIA against the President of the United States or, at that time, presidential candidate Donald Trump," according to The Hill.

King (image on the right), a senior congressman specializing in national security, twice chaired the House Homeland Security Committee and currently heads its Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. He also served for several years on the House Intelligence Committee.

He asserted:

"There was no legal basis at all for them to begin this investigation of his campaign – and the way they carried it forward, and the way information was leaked. All of this is going to come out. It's going to show the bias. It's going to show the baselessness of the investigation and I would say the same thing if this were done to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders It's just wrong."

The Long Island Republican added a well aimed swipe at what passes for the media today:

"The media went along with this – actually, keeping this farcical, ridiculous thought going that the President of the United States was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Russia against his own country."

According to King, the Justice Department's review, ordered by Attorney General William Barr , would prove that former officials acted improperly. He was alluding to the investigation led by John Durham , U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. Sounds nice. But waiting for Durham to complete his investigation at a typically lawyerly pace would, I fear, be much like the experience of waiting for Mueller to finish his; that is, like waiting for Godot. What about now?

So Where is the IG Report on FISA?

That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan , former FBI Director James Comey , former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe , former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein , and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!).

The DOJ inspector General's investigation, launched in March 2018, has centered on whether the FBI and DOJ filing of four FISA applications and renewals beginning in October 2016 to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page amounted to abuse of the FISA process. (Fortunately for the IG, Obama's top intelligence and law enforcement officials were so sure that Hillary Clinton would win that they did not do much to hide their tracks.)

The Washington Examiner reported last Tuesday, "The Justice Department inspector general's investigation of potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is complete, a Republican congressman said, though a report on its findings might not be released for a month." The report continued:

"House Judiciary Committee member John Ratcliffe (R, Texas) said Monday he'd met with DOJ watchdog Michael Horowitz last week about his FISA abuse report. In a media interview, Ratcliffe said they'd discussed the timing, but not the content of his report and Horowitz 'related that his team's investigative work is complete and they're now in the process of drafting that report. Ratcliffe said he was doubtful that Horowitz's report would be made available to the public or the Congress anytime soon. 'He [Horowitz] did relay that as much as 20% of his report is going to include classified information, so that draft report will have to undergo a classification review at the FBI and at the Department of Justice,' Ratcliffe said. 'So, while I'm hopeful that we members of Congress might see it before the August recess, I'm not too certain about that.'"

Earlier, Horowitz had predicted that his report would be ready in May or June but there may, in fact, be good reason for some delay. Fox News reported Friday that "key witnesses sought for questioning by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz (image on the left) early in his investigation into alleged government surveillance abuse have come forward at the 11th hour." According to Fox's sources, at least one witness outside the Justice Department and FBI has started cooperating -- a breakthrough that came after Durham was assigned to lead a separate investigation into the origins of the FBI's 2016 Russia case that led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe.

"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge.

Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 , prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information).

It is far from clear that DOJ IG Horowitz and Attorney General Barr will prevail in the end, even though President Trump has given Barr nominal authority to declassify as necessary. Why are the the stakes so extraordinarily high?

What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?

Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI Director McCabe, Lisa Page , wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president "wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire to provide him with "plausible denial."

It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him.

Moreover, one should not rule out seeing in the coming months an "Obama-made-us-do-it" defense -- whether grounded in fact or not -- by Brennan and perhaps the rest of the gang. Brennan may even have a piece of paper recording the President's "approval" for this or that -- or could readily have his former subordinates prepare one that appears authentic.

Reining in Devin Nunes

That the Deep State retains formidable power can be seen in the repeated Lucy-holding-then-withdrawing-the-football-for-Charlie Brown treatment experienced by House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member, Devin Nunes (R-CA, image on the right). On April 5, 2019, in the apparent belief he had a green light to go on the offensive, Nunes wrote that committee Republicans "will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved in the abuse of intelligence for political purposes. These people must be held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future."

On April 7, Nunes was even more specific, telling Fox News that he was preparing to send eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice "this week," concerning alleged misconduct during the Trump-Russia investigation, including leaks of "highly classified material" and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the FISA court. It seemed to be no-holds-barred for Nunes, who had begun to talk publicly about prison time for those who might be brought to trial.

Except for Fox, the corporate media ignored Nunes's explosive comments. The media seemed smugly convinced that Nunes's talk of "referrals" could be safely ignored -- even though a new sheriff, Barr, had come to town. And sure enough, now, three months later, where are the criminal referrals?

There is ample evidence that President Trump is afraid to run afoul of the Deep State functionaries he inherited. And the Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr leans hard on the president to unfetter Nunes, IG Horowitz, Durham and like-minded investigators, all hell may break lose, because the evidence against those who took serious liberties with the law is staring them all in the face.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. No fan of the current President, Ray has been trained to follow and analyze the facts, wherever they may lead. He spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, and prepared the President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

niteranger , says: July 9, 2019 at 11:30 pm GMT

Mr. McGovern you are right in your analysis. Obama is in this up to his neck, however there will be a limited investigation at best because the Jews and Israel don't want this. They are involved and a real investigation would show what control they have over the FBI and CIA.

Trump by now realizes these agencies can make anything up and the Jewish owned and controlled media will do their bidding. I have to assume that Trump has come to the conclusion that he wasn't suppose to win and that the NWO wasn't happy with that because he stands in their way especially on World Trade and Immigration.

The world is controlled by the Corporate Fascist Military-Intelligence Police State in which governments are nothing more than Proxies with Intelligence Agencies who work against the average citizen and for the Corporations. Politicians like Trump are nothing more than figureheads who must "Toe the Line" or else.

I believe Trump knows he could be assassinated at any time. Obama the "God King" did his part for NWO and that's why he gets a King's Ransom for his speeches for reading a teleprompter and banging on his chest and saying, "I did that." What he is really saying is I did that for you -- now where's my check!

Fran Macadam , says: July 10, 2019 at 12:24 am GMT

When they frog-marched you out of that Clinton event, Ray, they had no idea what they were unleashing.

[Jul 10, 2019] Neoliberal elite suicide rate might increases dramatically over the next six months.

Notable quotes:
"... US gives Israel billions each year. Israel gives some of that money to Epstein for a hedge fund front. Epstein buys island, planes, mansions, power and influence. Hires attractive under age girls for sexual acts with elites. Tapes the sexual acts. Sends tapes back to Mossad. Blackmails elites for money and favors. Sends money and favors back to Mossad. Epstein keeps the vig. Elites just **** their pants. Elites suicide rate increases dramatically over the next six months. ..."
"... Yes, the blackmailing would not just be for money but foreign policy actions too. And it isn't just the US, it's the UK too. Hence both suckers are trying to start a war with Iran. ..."
"... CCI has the goods on a third of congress and the whole msm. ..."
"... I am not holding my breath for your prediction xbkrisback. Appointing Comey's daughter as the chief prosecutor tells a sorry tale. And Comey and Mueller are best buds. ..."
"... Epstein will not give up the big names. Bubba took 26 trips to Pedo Island on the Lolita Express to refresh his tan. ..."
"... The power structure runs on pedophilia. And the horror of it is that pedophilia is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the abuse of children. Where is Carlos Danger's laptop with Huma's huge "life insurance" file on it? You know, the one that made grizzled NYPD detectives puke when they opened it. ..."
"... Epstein outdoes Berlusconi ..."
"... Have another look at Tony Podesta's art collection. http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/2016/11/26/sick-lets-revisit-the-podesta-penchant-for-pedophilic-cannibalistic-and-satanic-art/#sthash.6jj0GpQo.dpbs ..."
"... I never understood why people claimed Podesta had child abuse links until I read that article. It is enough to make even a hardened Podesta supporter cringe. ..."
"... Coulter's take on this sounds very plausible, because there certainly was evidence gathering by Epstein. ..."
"... By the way, that was the favorite tactic of the old pervert that ran the FBI ... J. Edgar Hoover. He would gather evidence, then have a couple of his agents pay the offender a visit, warning them to be careful, while delivering the clear message that the Director has the goods on you. ..."
"... If Epstein goes to prison (a real prison) for any length of time, that would negate the idea of state sponsorship, would it not? Conversely, if he gets another sweetheart deal, that would confirm it. ..."
Jul 10, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

xbkrisback , 1 hour ago

I think I figured this scam out. US gives Israel billions each year. Israel gives some of that money to Epstein for a hedge fund front. Epstein buys island, planes, mansions, power and influence. Hires attractive under age girls for sexual acts with elites. Tapes the sexual acts. Sends tapes back to Mossad. Blackmails elites for money and favors. Sends money and favors back to Mossad. Epstein keeps the vig. Elites just **** their pants. Elites suicide rate increases dramatically over the next six months.

smacker , 1 hour ago

Yes, the blackmailing would not just be for money but foreign policy actions too. And it isn't just the US, it's the UK too. Hence both suckers are trying to start a war with Iran.

cayman , 46 minutes ago

CCI has the goods on a third of congress and the whole msm. It's why elections haven't mattered in decades. It's why congress can have a 9% approval rating and yet nothing changes. CIA has so many offshore sources of revenue now, it is sovereign now.

RoyalDraco , 17 minutes ago

I am not holding my breath for your prediction xbkrisback. Appointing Comey's daughter as the chief prosecutor tells a sorry tale. And Comey and Mueller are best buds.

Epstein will not give up the big names. Bubba took 26 trips to Pedo Island on the Lolita Express to refresh his tan.

5 years at Club Fed and a list of names no one ever heard of. The power structure runs on pedophilia. And the horror of it is that pedophilia is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the abuse of children. Where is Carlos Danger's laptop with Huma's huge "life insurance" file on it? You know, the one that made grizzled NYPD detectives puke when they opened it.

HideTheWeenie , 1 hour ago

Epstein outdoes Berlusconi ... Takes bunga bunga parties to the next level - and on the road - in the air - island hopping

Coulter is right ... Nobody in financial circles ever bumped into Epstein. Nobody, nobody knows the guy outside of the teenage ***** connection.

johnwburns , 1 hour ago

Have another look at Tony Podesta's art collection. http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/2016/11/26/sick-lets-revisit-the-podesta-penchant-for-pedophilic-cannibalistic-and-satanic-art/#sthash.6jj0GpQo.dpbs

cat2005 , 21 minutes ago

I never understood why people claimed Podesta had child abuse links until I read that article. It is enough to make even a hardened Podesta supporter cringe.

I need some mind bleach after reading that.

RayUSA , 1 hour ago

Obviously, the more powerful people that are involved, the less chance this has of going anywhere.

Coulter's take on this sounds very plausible, because there certainly was evidence gathering by Epstein.

There would be no reason for that unless it was going to be used in the future for black mail.

By the way, that was the favorite tactic of the old pervert that ran the FBI ... J. Edgar Hoover. He would gather evidence, then have a couple of his agents pay the offender a visit, warning them to be careful, while delivering the clear message that the Director has the goods on you.

herbivore , 2 hours ago

If Epstein goes to prison (a real prison) for any length of time, that would negate the idea of state sponsorship, would it not? Conversely, if he gets another sweetheart deal, that would confirm it.

[Jul 09, 2019] Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge. ..."
"... Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 , prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information). ..."
"... Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI Director McCabe, Lisa Page, wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president "wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire to provide him with "plausible denial." ..."
"... It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him. ..."
"... "That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!)." ..."
"... It will be a very interesting 2020 campaign if the Democratic candidate has to run with the ripe stinking dead albatross of Russiagate around her neck. ..."
"... The only outcome that could be more bizarre than the last go-round would be to see Trump favored by all the smart money and then lose to the latest corporate Democrat to shamelessly sell out the middle class in broad daylight. ..."
"... The Grabber in Chief vs Willie Brown's mistress – wonderful. ..."
"... Forgive my cynicism but the US government is so corrupt, has wielded illegitimate power for so long, and has covered the tracks of countless functionaries who have not upheld the constitution that I doubt this will go anywhere. I have been quoting Ben Franklin for some time "you have a republic, if you can keep it." I don't think we can. A reading of "A History of Venice" by John J. Norris would be appropriate here. The most serene republic lasted for essentially 1,000 years from roughly 800 to not quite 1800, first as a democracy, later as an oligarchy. Much like us, including having the most feared secret service in Europe at the time, Venice kept its power through trade but at least we don't hoist the new president up on a chair so that he can throw golden Ducats to the crowd on Wall Street the way that a new Doge would. ..."
"... I don't suppose anything will happen to anybody important about this. After all, nothing happened to anybody when they were caught mass spying on any and all american citizens, even before they made it legal. ..."
"... Unfortunately Webb and Parry exposed much of these gangster criminal "intel" savages for running guns and drugs to Central American pseudo fascist mercenary sadists throughout much of the late 1970s through the '80s. I say unfortunately b/c nothing much ever came along by way of true justice, by way of the criminal players rotting in maximum security jail cells for years on end, not unlike the crack or heroin addict who steals a $400 television. ..."
"... This has been one long crime against the American people. King should read what he knows into the Congressional Record. I have no sympathy for Trump's fear of the deep state. He has sent people to die knowing full well that his actions were based on lies, lies that would result in the deaths of civilians as well as our own military. If he is going to do that, then he should have the courage to face the deep state. That's partial penance for all the deaths he has caused. ..."
"... I also don't care about Trump's personal issue about being surveilled. He personally supports that against everyone else. That is why I feel this is a crime against our people as a whole. Our constitution has been stripped bare. We don't have the rule of law. Mass surveillance covering the globe is current reality. It is dangerous. It is wrong. It is lawless. It is a disaster. ..."
"... Further, Russiagate was used to keep real opposition away from Trump. His supporters doubled down on "liking" Trump because he appeared to be a victim of these lies. Democrats meanwhile learned to further worship the IC. They ignored Trump's actual unlawful behavior, and, in the case of war crimes, still support Trump on every war/regime change action etc. recommended to them by their IC "resistance" "leaders". ..."
"... This has been one of the most effective propaganda tools I have ever seen against our populace. It has created a divided, unthinking populace who is ripe for the picking by evil men and women. I am truly hoping that once this is exposed people will stop this madness and pull together for a common good. But I'm quite worried that, like most cults, when the leader is shown to be wrong, people cling to them even more. ..."
"... there have always been nefarious agents in one government or another for one gangster interest or another, whether was Milner's roundtable or Dulles's Gladio werewolves, these are nefarious individuals there is no gray area in that, however they may conduct themselves and their personal lives, it is not sloppy journalism, is to call something what it is, a this shadow government working in many instances against the direct interest of the American people ..."
"... It's the propaganda, the United States is one of the most heavily propagandize societies in the world, we make the Soviets look like children. No one wants you to have sympathy for Donald Trump, you do not have to agree or like a person to see that the cartel seeking to damage him is also simultaneously against your interests and they are against your interests whether you're from the left or the right because they do not have an ideology just it will to power. ..."
"... So reminiscent of the darker days of the Cold War. A stark education has just played out to this point. ..."
Jul 08, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

The Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr leans hard on Trump to unfetter investigators, all hell may break lose, says Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern
 Special to Consortium News

A s Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA.

King told a radio audience: "There is no doubt to me there was severe, serious abuses that were carried out in the FBI and, I believe, top levels of the CIA against the President of the United States or, at that time, presidential candidate Donald Trump," according to The Hill.

King, a senior congressman specializing in national security, twice chaired the House Homeland Security Committee and currently heads its Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. He also served for several years on the House Intelligence Committee.

He asserted:

"There was no legal basis at all for them to begin this investigation of his campaign – and the way they carried it forward, and the way information was leaked. All of this is going to come out. It's going to show the bias. It's going to show the baselessness of the investigation and I would say the same thing if this were done to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders It's just wrong."

The Long Island Republican added a well aimed swipe at what passes for the media today: "The media went along with this – actually, keeping this farcical, ridiculous thought going that the President of the United States was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Russia against his own country."

King: Lashes out.

According to King, the Justice Department's review, ordered by Attorney General William Barr, would prove that former officials acted improperly. He was alluding to the investigation led by John Durham, U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. Sounds nice. But waiting for Durham to complete his investigation at a typically lawyerly pace would, I fear, be much like the experience of waiting for Mueller to finish his; that is, like waiting for Godot. What about now?

So Where is the IG Report on FISA?

That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!).

The DOJ inspector General's investigation, launched in March 2018, has centered on whether the FBI and DOJ filing of four FISA applications and renewals beginning in October 2016 to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page amounted to abuse of the FISA process. (Fortunately for the IG, Obama's top intelligence and law enforcement officials were so sure that Hillary Clinton would win that they did not do much to hide their tracks.)

The Washington Examiner reported last Tuesday, "The Justice Department inspector general's investigation of potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is complete, a Republican congressman said, though a report on its findings might not be released for a month." The report continued:

"House Judiciary Committee member John Ratcliffe (R, Texas) said Monday he'd met with DOJ watchdog Michael Horowitz last week about his FISA abuse report. In a media interview, Ratcliffe said they'd discussed the timing, but not the content of his report and Horowitz 'related that his team's investigative work is complete and they're now in the process of drafting that report. Ratcliffe said he was doubtful that Horowitz's report would be made available to the public or the Congress anytime soon. 'He [Horowitz] did relay that as much as 20% of his report is going to include classified information, so that draft report will have to undergo a classification review at the FBI and at the Department of Justice,' Ratcliffe said. 'So, while I'm hopeful that we members of Congress might see it before the August recess, I'm not too certain about that.'"

Horowitz: Still waiting for his report

Earlier, Horowitz had predicted that his report would be ready in May or June but there may, in fact, be good reason for some delay. Fox News reported Friday that "key witnesses sought for questioning by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz early in his investigation into alleged government surveillance abuse have come forward at the 11th hour." According to Fox's sources, at least one witness outside the Justice Department and FBI has started cooperating -- a breakthrough that came after Durham was assigned to lead a separate investigation into the origins of the FBI's 2016 Russia case that led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe.

"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge.

Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 , prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information).

It is far from clear that DOJ IG Horowitz and Attorney General Barr will prevail in the end, even though President Trump has given Barr nominal authority to declassify as necessary. Why are the the stakes so extraordinarily high?

What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?

Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI Director McCabe, Lisa Page, wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president "wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire to provide him with "plausible denial."

It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him.

Moreover, one should not rule out seeing in the coming months an "Obama-made-us-do-it" defense -- whether grounded in fact or not -- by Brennan and perhaps the rest of the gang. Brennan may even have a piece of paper recording the President's "approval" for this or that -- or could readily have his former subordinates prepare one that appears authentic.

Reining in Devin Nunes

That the Deep State retains formidable power can be seen in the repeated Lucy-holding-then-withdrawing-the-football-for-Charlie Brown treatment experienced by House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member, Devin Nunes (R-CA). On April 5, 2019, in the apparent belief he had a green light to go on the offensive, Nunes wrote that committee Republicans "will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved in the abuse of intelligence for political purposes. These people must be held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future."

On April 7, Nunes was even more specific, telling Fox News that he was preparing to send eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice "this week," concerning alleged misconduct during the Trump-Russia investigation, including leaks of "highly classified material" and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the FISA court. It seemed to be no-holds-barred for Nunes, who had begun to talk publicly about prison time for those who might be brought to trial.

Except for Fox, the corporate media ignored Nunes's explosive comments. The media seemed smugly convinced that Nunes's talk of "referrals" could be safely ignored -- even though a new sheriff, Barr, had come to town. And sure enough, now, three months later, where are the criminal referrals?

There is ample evidence that President Trump is afraid to run afoul of the Deep State functionaries he inherited. And the Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr leans hard on the president to unfetter Nunes, IG Horowitz, Durham and like-minded investigators, all hell may break lose, because the evidence against those who took serious liberties with the law is staring them all in the face.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. No fan of the current President, Ray has been trained to follow and analyze the facts, wherever they may lead. He spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, and prepared the President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

If you enjoyed this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

Joe T Wallace , July 8, 2019 at 20:24

I'm a great admirer of Ray McGovern's reporting. He exposes much that is never revealed by the mainstream media. That said, I do have one quibble about this article. In the seventh paragraph, just below the heading "So Where is the IG Report on FISA?" he writes:

"That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!)."

My immediate reaction was: Who is Horowitz? It was confusing not to know. Further down in the article, I learned that Ray was referring to Michael Horowitz, a DOJ watchdog who is preparing an IG report about FISA abuse, but readers should have been informed who he was earlier in the article.

John , July 8, 2019 at 17:10

Peter King? Devin Nunes?

At one point the article says little effort was made to cover tracks because of certainty that HRC would win but later that the FBI et al were planting land mines to either defeat Trump or blow up his presidency. Seemed contradictory to me.

Perhaps you have the skinny on these machinations, if indeed there were machinations by one person or group or another for this purpose or that.

But Peter King and Devin Nunes? If either ever was credible, their track record condemns them to be received, if at all, with extreme skepticism.

Realist , July 8, 2019 at 16:59

It will be a very interesting 2020 campaign if the Democratic candidate has to run with the ripe stinking dead albatross of Russiagate around her neck. Or will she be expected to repudiate the Hitlery-run DNC? Where does the money and the ground game originate if the latter?

The only outcome that could be more bizarre than the last go-round would be to see Trump favored by all the smart money and then lose to the latest corporate Democrat to shamelessly sell out the middle class in broad daylight. I won't like it, but I can see Trump Derangement Syndrome pulling out the chestnuts for the Dems, what with all their celebrity spokespeople constantly running and ranting like their hair is on fire underneath those pussy hats. My poor gullible sister from Cali embraces that whole ball of wax as revealed truth holier than the total dry weight of all the Abrahamic scriptures rolled into one big bale for the recycling center. Kamala Harris seems to be emerging as the new messiah anointed to lead this country back to Obamian gridlock and more prestidigitation like mandated insurance to ensure the health of the insurance companies. Again, it will only be the illusion of "free stuff."

The only way such a scenario won't cause four more years of turmoil for this country (rinse and repeat in 2024) is if the victor is Gabbard and she ends all the illegal and unconstitutional wars by edict, telling all the sure-to-be pissing and moaning Deep State functionaries to pick up their severance pay and go pound sand. Then shut the world-wide spider web of military bases and bring home the troops while we can still afford the carfare. That would be "morning in America," and Gabbard would be the most heroic chief exec since Lincoln and FDR made their marks in the history books, though such fantasies never play out in the real world. More likely all the criminal evidence of treason remains classified, most Americans pop the blue pill, the actual rabbit hole continues to grow ever deeper but the masses are contentedly oblivious to it all, satisfied to blame select scapegoats from Russia, China and other "malign" countries for our viewing entertainment.

Deniz , July 8, 2019 at 17:50

The Grabber in Chief vs Willie Brown's mistress – wonderful.

ML , July 8, 2019 at 20:12

You are really something, Realist. I love the way you flourish that pen of yours. Thank you.

Rob Roy , July 8, 2019 at 20:13

Realist, well said, per usual. To add a bit the Dems probably gave Trump the gift of a lifetime the next election. Wasting three years on Russiagate instead of hammering out a decent platform for the party was beyond dumb. That reminds me. the Dems's next dumbest idea choosing Joe Biden as their next candidate. Just like Hillary, he can't beat Trump. The duopoly is dead, they just don't know it.

As for Tulsi, she's got my vote.

John Earls , July 8, 2019 at 16:55

Looks like Barry Eisler's John Rain (expert in "death by natural causes") will have a lot of work in front of him if the investigation builds and a whole lot of "material witnesses" begin to testify.

ricardo2000 , July 8, 2019 at 16:33

I'm supposed to feel sorry for the surveillance of a right-wing creep? OH PLEASE.
No one in government, or the right wing ReThugs, has ever suffered the intrusive, lying, speculative 'investigations' that social justice, environmental, or human rights activists have over the past 70 years.

When these buttheads suffer what MLK and Malcolm X have suffered then I might just wipe away a few tears, after I stop roaring with laughter and get off the floor.

Realist , July 8, 2019 at 17:08

You prefer a race to the bottom of the cesspool?

You never win when you adopt the methods you claim to revile. The opponent who introduced the tactics you condemn wins if you embrace them as your own. You didn't beat him, you joined him.

LibertyBonBon , July 8, 2019 at 18:12

Must be nice to think the justice system should revolve around your particular emotions, rather than equality and objectivity. Safe and easy.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 20:41

ricardo2000, nothing personal, I get the revulsion to Trump and entourage not to mention a large portion of the Maga crowd but this right and left thing is really just an illusion, the people doing the persecuting here regardless of how disgusting Trump is are the same ones doing the persecuting to a large degree of everyone else from Assange to the Iranians, that is this government deep state in combination with all of the various American alphabet soup agencies as well as foreign deep states have cornered the market in State power, hate Trump but don't confuse this with a good thing.

O Society , July 8, 2019 at 16:18

Thank you, Ray McGovern. You are a good man, Charlie Brown!

Thing is, all of this was predictable from the beginning. Many of us saw it coming.

No one really wanted an incompetent baboon running things – the song about Monkey and the Engineer comes to mind – so Obama tried to hamstring Trump with this investigation. I mean, Obama couldn't very well have not completed the transfer of power because it is the most valuable thing about democracy. There is no ten year bloody hellified civil war every time the crown changes hands from one inbred to the next.

So Obama did the next best thing on his way out the Oval Office doors, he put Brennan and the boys on it. Seemed like a good idea at the time, I'm sure. But it backfired because he couldn't call the dogs off once he was no longer president. Not Brennan, not anyone could call them off after the snowball really got rolling because the spooks believed their own story and the media made too much money off selling the mythology:

https://osociety.org/2019/07/06/spooks-spooking-themselves/

Only question left to answer now is whether or not Trump the carnival barker can milk his opportunist Armageddon into a second term of fleecing the rubes.

http://osociety.org/2019/07/08/can-donald-trump-delay-an-economic-crash-until-2020

karlof1 , July 8, 2019 at 15:00

This is a very serious Constitutional Law issue and MUST be pursued–and it makes no difference the political party denomination of those breaking the law! The Current Oligarchy–Deep State–is the adversary of the vast majority of US citizens and humanity. With Epstein's arrest and the developments McGovern relates, some progress appears to be happening.

Lydia , July 8, 2019 at 14:51

You summed it up perfectly, Jill.

Pablo Diablo , July 8, 2019 at 14:42

"the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him." says it all. Trump is a loose cannon. The so called "Deep State" has been "controlling" our Presidents since at least the Dulles Brothers. Truman even admitted giving them power was a BIG mistake. Still question the Kennedy Assassination.
In the 70's, the FBI mailed me a box of drugs, which I refused to take from a very incompetent fake Mail Man, and three minutes later they showed up with a search warrant for my house that listed all the drugs in the failed mailed box signed by a Federal Judge. So much for FISA. The bullshit continues. I could reveal more if necessary.

robert e williamson jr , July 8, 2019 at 14:32

Sam F. whether you realize it or not you got it pretty much on the nose. Except for this.

The judiciary has been compromised by the congresses refusal to hold CIA et. al. accountable for their actions. Why? Those in congress remember what happened to JFK.

The number one reason is because the deep state ensures that if anyone goes after CIA officials or designees that the persons career and life are ruined. Which is something else that needs to be investigated. Something that if explored may very well put a stop to CIA's B.S. of lying about everything and getting away with it.

Currently no deterrent exists. None.

Anytime some one or entity gets close the Deep State ends up with their guy as AG. See the Bill Barr story.

Barr may get his chance to prove me right and at the same time prove "Lady Justice" has little to do with the DOJ! I think he is a cowardly blowhard. Justice would be Trump and Barr going to jail .

Justice in this country for the true scoundrels in government or billionaires is non- existent at this point in time. Putting Epstein in prison for life is called for and if he is threatened with that maybe his jaw will loosen up.

Until DOJ can become a deterrent to bad actors in government, all government the country will be controlled by the Deep State. The SWETS, super wealthy elitists.

Keep your eyes on George Soro and the Kochs.

Paul Merrell , July 8, 2019 at 17:28

@ "Justice would be Trump and Barr going to jail ."

Are you suggesting that *any* of their living predecessors don't deserve the same? If so, which do not and why?

Jay , July 8, 2019 at 14:18

Bif:

I agree something very suspect occurred.

And it's very likely the Obama White House knew that either the NSA or the FBI was tapping into the communications of some of Trump's campaign team BEFORE Hillary lost in Nov. 2016.

However the xenophobic, lying, terrorist (IRA) supporting, Peter King is not a credible messenger. (Right, Rep Steve King of Iowa is even worse than King of Long Island.)

Peter Dyer , July 8, 2019 at 14:09

Thanks, Ray.

DH Fabian , July 8, 2019 at 13:59

Actually, that deep split among the masses, and certainly within the Dem voting base, was achieved in the 1990s -- middle class vs. poor, workers vs. those left jobless, further split by race. The Obama years confirmed that this split is permanent. Russia had nothing to do with the Democrats' 2016 defeat, nor will it be the reason for their 2020 defeat. Democrats maintain their resistance against acknowledging the consequences of dividing and conquering their own voting base.

EuGene Miller , July 9, 2019 at 00:24

DH, that's an interesting assessment. However, I doubt that any House or Senate Democrat sought an advantage by "splitting their base". The elected Dems do not control the narrative. So, who benefits by splitting the masses into rival factions?

Perhaps the narrative of social and political discourse is defined by the owners, boards, and foundations that control the main-stream media and pop-culture.

Robert Reich wrote that an oligarchy divides-and-conquers the rest of us. I suspect that controlling the narrative is not simply a propaganda tool; it is the basis of divide-and-conquer strategy.

https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/57499-there-is-no-right-v-left-it-is-trump-and-the-oligarchs-against-the-rest

robert e williamson jr , July 8, 2019 at 13:56

Is it possible that the DOJ, see the Sec. of Labor's problems developing with the Espstein case, is about to have it's gloriously corrupt underbelly rolled over into the sunlight? (you must roll the snake over to see its belly)

Please Ray tell me this is where we might be heading or instead will we end up with the courts truncating investigation because they say it will be best for the country not to have all this filthy laundry dragged out into the sunlight or someones bull shit sources and methods might be exposed. The DOJ has become a really bad joke!

I'm hoping you know something I don't because Barr's past history pretty much speaks for itself I'd say after be made sure he pardoned all of Bush 41 henchmen!

At this point I certainly do not have much faith in the DOJ doing the right thing. What Acosta did in Florida with Epstein was hardly the right thing to do.

They all need to be locked up.

Eric32 , July 8, 2019 at 13:33

Very little "punishment" will occur, and no deep change cleanup will occur.
The US govt. is controlled by money and blackmail – not "voting" or public outrage.

So many high level people have so much dirt on other high level people that nothing major will be done.
A series of very big events, including the JFK murder and the 9/11 charade went unexposed and undealt with – there is no reason to think that this medium size event will wind up making a big difference.

What will happen is that US "democracy" will continue on its downward course, but maybe with a better facade.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 20:59

I personally believe that the empire will crash when it hits maximum overreach it will also simultaneously go broke at the same time, as the money interests at that point Will probably move east, this will partially be due to both the feds tendency to over inflate in order to cover military acquisitions as well as the decline of swift and the ascendancy of China in the rest. I actually think that this is what some American factions desire, it is potentially good for all of us if we can regain a republic but it will mean the end of American hegemony.

Gary Weglarz , July 8, 2019 at 13:22

This is the same "deep state" that assassinated a sitting president, then proceeded to assassinate the next three most important and influential progressive leaders in the country all over a five year period. Problem solved. And just when you thought Allen Dulles didn't know what to do with all those oh so experienced Nazi war criminals he'd recruited to the CIA.

When Congress investigated the CIA in the mid-1970's (before Congress became completely "owned" by the deep state) right on cue witnesses began to "commit suicide" just before they would be scheduled to testify. Problem solved. Hardly a raised eyebrow from the always complicit MSM through all of this. Expecting anything more than a massive coverup of this latest deep state corruption and abuse is beyond my abilities to even effectively fantasize about.

herbert davis , July 8, 2019 at 14:12

Justice in the USA?

John Drake , July 8, 2019 at 13:20

The corporate Democrats strike out again. They run a corrupt, violent(war monger) candidate, who loses to a buffoon-an election which was hers to lose. Meanwhile trying to hedge their bets they play sleazeball with the investigative arm's authority in order to sabotage said buffoon; which as it is revealed gives ammunition and the advantage to their target. i.e. "They were illegally picking on me"
If Trump is smart-a very long stretch, but some advisor might suggest this- he will expose all this slime closer to the election for maximum effect. What a distressing thought. All the more reason to run a progressive Presidential candidate that can disavow the DNC clowns and their corruption.

geeyp , July 8, 2019 at 12:37

It's past time for the Deep State to come up from the deep state of hell in which they reside. At least to purgatory for some fresh air and a wee ray of light. I couldn't let the Schumer warning keep me from giving the go ahead on this. If my coconut is shattered, someone somewhere (not our current media) would have a clue as to what happened to me. Sic 'em, President Trump and A.G. and Devin Nunes!

Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 12:14

The US needs to solve the underlying problem of corruption of secret agencies and judiciary, otherwise the political wrongdoing of one faction will only be matched by that of its opponents, regardless of a few prosecutions. I know from experience the extreme corruption of the Repubs, and little doubt that the Dems do such things at least when desperate.

The solution includes:
1. All secrets meaningfully shared among multiparty committees;
2. All politicians and top officials monitored for corrupt influence;
3. Entire federal judiciary fired, replaced, and monitored like the politicians; and
4. Amendments to protect elections and mass media from control by money power.
Until then all government acts are tribal gangsterism and little more.

Guy , July 8, 2019 at 13:50

You forgot about dual citizenship members of the senate and congress . Elected as a representative for the country of the US should mean just that and not another country . And while we are at it , major reform on monetary contributions to candidates running for re-election . There is something terribly wrong with needing millions if not billions of dollars to run the electoral races.There is much more that needs to be done but this would be a good start .

Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:32

Yes, the proposed Amendments would restrict funding of mass media and elections to registered individual contributions (some prefer government funding) limited to the average day's pay annually (for example), with full reporting by candidates and all intermediaries. We all can see the destruction of democracy that was caused by economic power controlling elections, mass media, the judiciary, etc.

But of course we cannot get those amendments because those tools of democracy now belong to the rich, etc. History suggests that we are in for generations of severe decline before the people are hurting enough to turn off the tube and do something, and generations more before they can re-establish democracy.

Herman , July 8, 2019 at 15:20

Ray McGovern writes:"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge"

On the matter of government reform classification there is a great need of public discussion and radical reform. Why? Because the government is playing with an essential right, the right to know. All the red herrings needed to be thrown in the trash and the burden placed on the classifiers to justify why the public does not have a right to know.

Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:24

Yes, the facts and their significance (especially about false flags and scandals) need to be publicly debated, as well as policy goals, and the policies derived from facts and goals. We have far too many government secrets to sustain a democracy.

I suggest limiting secrets to ongoing investigations (with a time limit), defensive military plans and operations (not alleged provocations or aggressive war schemes), and personal IDs of those at risk. Beyond that secrets disguise tyranny.

Ida G Millman , July 8, 2019 at 16:02

Another path towards a solution to government corruption could be term limits for all federal representatives. Limiting the number of terms would curtail the opportunities for forming the uninterrupted years of long coalitions between public servants and government officials that result in the abuses of power that have damaged the interests of ordinary less wealthy citizens, in favor of corporate and military interests.

In the matter of the original intentions of the men who wrote our founding documents, we should consider one of the enormous differences that technology has made between us: that our representatives can travel between DC and their homes with enough ease that they can continue reasonably, or nearly reasonably, satisfactory family lives – something that could not be done in the 18th century. The forefathers did not foresee that being a member of government would become a career for a lifetime. They assumed, I believe, that members of government would always be citizens who would give our country a few years of their lives and then return to private life to share their experience and knowledge with their neighbors.

Such a change would not magically reform government corruption. There will always be those who will find a way – but it could slow things down and it would certainly engage an increasing number of citizens who would participate in governing, as well as the circles of people surrounding each of them whose interest in and understanding of government would increase because everyone would know more of their representatives. Got that, kids? L&B&L

Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:37

Term limits are useful and we should enact more. There seems to be a sufficient supply of puppets for the rich/WallSt/Mic/zionists to ensure that all new candidates represent only those interests, unless we go further and control funding of mass media and elections, monitoring of politicians and judges for life, etc.

Rob Roy , July 8, 2019 at 20:28

Ida,
Term limits wouldn't be necessary if money were out of elections and all elections were publicly funded. Next, a law should be passed to prevent retired congress people from lobbying for any private company of any kind. Then people wouldn't have to spend all their time in congress lining up money for the next election, nor would they owe favors to anyone.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 21:19

Sam F, all of those goals seem very nice but it would probably be better if we just dissolved back into 50 states save for an interstate system and a very small navy for common defense, maybe four nuclear submarines total, the American people will be best off without a government completely working it out for themselves, if some of them work it out in completely different ways without hurting each other so be it. Besides even a libertarians would have to acknowledge democracy best works for smaller populations. We may never be able to curb the will to power of evil men but we can diminish their abilities to fleece the public if we are not subject to them.

Jay , July 8, 2019 at 11:42

Peter King?

Really now.

Not a credible source, no matter how invention filled Russia-gate is. And no matter how clear it is that in 2016 the FBI was poking around campaign Trump and likely telling the White House what it found.

Bif Webster , July 8, 2019 at 13:28

I agree that King isn't the best of messengers, but we can also go to others who are not right-wing to see something fishy went on.

Those text messages convinced me something was going on. And that was before all the other stuff came to light.

I think this will be about who has more dirt on the other side you know, leverage?

Jeff Harrison , July 8, 2019 at 11:41

Thank you, Ray. Forgive my cynicism but the US government is so corrupt, has wielded illegitimate power for so long, and has covered the tracks of countless functionaries who have not upheld the constitution that I doubt this will go anywhere. I have been quoting Ben Franklin for some time "you have a republic, if you can keep it." I don't think we can. A reading of "A History of Venice" by John J. Norris would be appropriate here. The most serene republic lasted for essentially 1,000 years from roughly 800 to not quite 1800, first as a democracy, later as an oligarchy. Much like us, including having the most feared secret service in Europe at the time, Venice kept its power through trade but at least we don't hoist the new president up on a chair so that he can throw golden Ducats to the crowd on Wall Street the way that a new Doge would.

I don't see that as necessarily much of a plus.

Steven Berge , July 8, 2019 at 11:40

I don't suppose anything will happen to anybody important about this. After all, nothing happened to anybody when they were caught mass spying on any and all american citizens, even before they made it legal.

Drew Hunkins , July 8, 2019 at 11:32

Unfortunately Webb and Parry exposed much of these gangster criminal "intel" savages for running guns and drugs to Central American pseudo fascist mercenary sadists throughout much of the late 1970s through the '80s. I say unfortunately b/c nothing much ever came along by way of true justice, by way of the criminal players rotting in maximum security jail cells for years on end, not unlike the crack or heroin addict who steals a $400 television.

Jill , July 8, 2019 at 11:15

This has been one long crime against the American people. King should read what he knows into the Congressional Record. I have no sympathy for Trump's fear of the deep state. He has sent people to die knowing full well that his actions were based on lies, lies that would result in the deaths of civilians as well as our own military. If he is going to do that, then he should have the courage to face the deep state. That's partial penance for all the deaths he has caused.

I also don't care about Trump's personal issue about being surveilled. He personally supports that against everyone else. That is why I feel this is a crime against our people as a whole. Our constitution has been stripped bare. We don't have the rule of law. Mass surveillance covering the globe is current reality. It is dangerous. It is wrong. It is lawless. It is a disaster.

Further, Russiagate was used to keep real opposition away from Trump. His supporters doubled down on "liking" Trump because he appeared to be a victim of these lies. Democrats meanwhile learned to further worship the IC. They ignored Trump's actual unlawful behavior, and, in the case of war crimes, still support Trump on every war/regime change action etc. recommended to them by their IC "resistance" "leaders".

People won't speak to one another because of this division, all based on lies. Democrats want Assange put to death because he exposed truthful information about Clinton. Neighbor has turned against neighbor over this. We have stopped talking and stopped thinking about whether claims make sense or have evidence behind them. Political parties have become cults with cult leaders. Meanwhile, many who think it was wrong to use surveillance against Trump, accept mass surveillance against everyone else, including themselves.

This has been one of the most effective propaganda tools I have ever seen against our populace. It has created a divided, unthinking populace who is ripe for the picking by evil men and women. I am truly hoping that once this is exposed people will stop this madness and pull together for a common good. But I'm quite worried that, like most cults, when the leader is shown to be wrong, people cling to them even more.

I cannot believe what Russiagate has done to our own people. I am terrified at the wars it has/may yet cause and the cruelty against others, both foreign and domestic, which it has wrought.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 21:51

What else would you call it, there have always been nefarious agents in one government or another for one gangster interest or another, whether was Milner's roundtable or Dulles's Gladio werewolves, these are nefarious individuals there is no gray area in that, however they may conduct themselves and their personal lives, it is not sloppy journalism, is to call something what it is, a this shadow government working in many instances against the direct interest of the American people, I'm not trying to be you over the head with this but Mr. McGovern was once upon a Time swimming in the same waters and he knows what he is talking about. The deep state maybe several different factions but all of it at least so far is fairly I'm Accountable, this thing must be named.

AnneR , July 8, 2019 at 14:18

First the Disclaimer: I'm not a supporter of either side of the one party two headed monster political machine, not of either HRC or DT, both, and their "parties," making me want to puke.

I am curious about the following: "He [DT] has sent people to die knowing full well that his actions were based on lies, lies that would result in the deaths of civilians as well as our own military. If he is going to do that, then he should have the courage to face the deep state. That's partial penance for all the deaths he has caused."

While I have no doubt that DT has been responsible for civilian deaths (I am far less concerned about military deaths – join the military and you cannot expect not to have to chance it, particularly in a warmongering nation state; if the recruit doesn't recognize this reality, then they need to do some reading), *most* such deaths in those countries we (the US and its vassal states and proxies) have been happily bombing, shelling, destroying one way or another, even since the late 1980s (not therefore including the appalling and illegal warring on Vietnam et al) are down, not to DT, but rather to presidents: BC, GHB, GWB, BO. Pretty evenly divided betwixt the two heads, wouldn't you say?

That's not to excuse DT (and I wouldn't excuse HRC either – think Libya; as bad as MA, if with different forms of warfare; but then they're buddies, like attracting like).

We – the US – need to stop killing other peoples (let's cry for the war-making profiteers), stop destroying other countries (and for our corporate-capitalists who plunder them); need to mind our own "shop" and business. And stop pretending that we're such a wonderful, white-hatted, "good" nation.

Jill , July 8, 2019 at 15:15

AnneR,

We have had war criminal presidents from the legacy parties, period. Barr is a party to war crimes so I share other's doubts that he will do anything about actual justice. He may be in on the current winning side of the IC and they may be purging some enemies at this time. That is the only thing I see Barr being involved in.

Speaking as someone who has done counter-recruitment in schools, I will just give you my experience. Students are tracked from grade school. A file is kept on them with over a thousand data points. These files are taken by recruiters and used to "pitch" the military to young people. I don't know if you were sophisticated at 16. I was a little bit but not much. So here's an example–they told one young woman who had a single mother that if she went in the military she would not be a burden on her mother any longer. They understood the family had few resources and they played on this young woman's "guilt" over being a financial "drain" on her mother. No, recruiters do not tell the truth to those they meet. They lie and they lie very well because they have excellent information to help them tell the correct lies. That girl is dead and I mourn her death.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 22:05

AnneR, you have so much anger, I understand, it is terrible what our nation has done and is continuing to do, it has gone on so long that many of the people currently perpetrating the crimes against foreign populations are themselves of descendents of peoples the US has victimized. It's the propaganda, the United States is one of the most heavily propagandize societies in the world, we make the Soviets look like children. No one wants you to have sympathy for Donald Trump, you do not have to agree or like a person to see that the cartel seeking to damage him is also simultaneously against your interests and they are against your interests whether you're from the left or the right because they do not have an ideology just it will to power.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 22:09

Jill that was an incredibly cogent description of the mess we are currently in, congratulations on such clarity, peace out.

David Otness , July 9, 2019 at 00:18

With you on all that you state, Jill. It's really exposed the U.S. population for what we unfortunately are, if not what we've become. So reminiscent of the darker days of the Cold War. A stark education has just played out to this point. I wonder how many have learned anything at all from it?

[Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Epstein case has all the earmarks of CIA protection of an asset. ..."
"... Successful entry into politics requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV" badge? ..."
"... Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in Iraq? ..."
Jul 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

lysias , Jul 9 2019 0:53 utc | 91

The Epstein case has all the earmarks of CIA protection of an asset.

snake , Jul 9 2019 4:03 utc | 99

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/07/08/trumpsteingate-the-coverup-of-donalds-little-girl-fetish-hits-high-gear/

Journalism. =>has disclosed the tunnel, and a few of its investigators are exploring its contents, expecting to find at the end of this tunnel Successful entry into politics requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV" badge?

Wonder if this has traction in the persons involved in Grace I, the failure of JCPOA.

Is the CAV badge the weapon that has corrupted nearly every nation state in the western world?

Politicians make promises, and then within hours for unexplained reasons, reverse them..Hmmm?

Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in Iraq?

How can CAV badge victims be identified and isolated from politics?
The CAV badge could explain so many USA positive, American negative events?

[Jul 09, 2019] Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge. ..."
"... Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 , prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information). ..."
"... Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI Director McCabe, Lisa Page, wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president "wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire to provide him with "plausible denial." ..."
"... It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him. ..."
"... "That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!)." ..."
"... It will be a very interesting 2020 campaign if the Democratic candidate has to run with the ripe stinking dead albatross of Russiagate around her neck. ..."
"... The only outcome that could be more bizarre than the last go-round would be to see Trump favored by all the smart money and then lose to the latest corporate Democrat to shamelessly sell out the middle class in broad daylight. ..."
"... The Grabber in Chief vs Willie Brown's mistress – wonderful. ..."
"... Forgive my cynicism but the US government is so corrupt, has wielded illegitimate power for so long, and has covered the tracks of countless functionaries who have not upheld the constitution that I doubt this will go anywhere. I have been quoting Ben Franklin for some time "you have a republic, if you can keep it." I don't think we can. A reading of "A History of Venice" by John J. Norris would be appropriate here. The most serene republic lasted for essentially 1,000 years from roughly 800 to not quite 1800, first as a democracy, later as an oligarchy. Much like us, including having the most feared secret service in Europe at the time, Venice kept its power through trade but at least we don't hoist the new president up on a chair so that he can throw golden Ducats to the crowd on Wall Street the way that a new Doge would. ..."
"... I don't suppose anything will happen to anybody important about this. After all, nothing happened to anybody when they were caught mass spying on any and all american citizens, even before they made it legal. ..."
"... Unfortunately Webb and Parry exposed much of these gangster criminal "intel" savages for running guns and drugs to Central American pseudo fascist mercenary sadists throughout much of the late 1970s through the '80s. I say unfortunately b/c nothing much ever came along by way of true justice, by way of the criminal players rotting in maximum security jail cells for years on end, not unlike the crack or heroin addict who steals a $400 television. ..."
"... This has been one long crime against the American people. King should read what he knows into the Congressional Record. I have no sympathy for Trump's fear of the deep state. He has sent people to die knowing full well that his actions were based on lies, lies that would result in the deaths of civilians as well as our own military. If he is going to do that, then he should have the courage to face the deep state. That's partial penance for all the deaths he has caused. ..."
"... I also don't care about Trump's personal issue about being surveilled. He personally supports that against everyone else. That is why I feel this is a crime against our people as a whole. Our constitution has been stripped bare. We don't have the rule of law. Mass surveillance covering the globe is current reality. It is dangerous. It is wrong. It is lawless. It is a disaster. ..."
"... Further, Russiagate was used to keep real opposition away from Trump. His supporters doubled down on "liking" Trump because he appeared to be a victim of these lies. Democrats meanwhile learned to further worship the IC. They ignored Trump's actual unlawful behavior, and, in the case of war crimes, still support Trump on every war/regime change action etc. recommended to them by their IC "resistance" "leaders". ..."
"... This has been one of the most effective propaganda tools I have ever seen against our populace. It has created a divided, unthinking populace who is ripe for the picking by evil men and women. I am truly hoping that once this is exposed people will stop this madness and pull together for a common good. But I'm quite worried that, like most cults, when the leader is shown to be wrong, people cling to them even more. ..."
"... there have always been nefarious agents in one government or another for one gangster interest or another, whether was Milner's roundtable or Dulles's Gladio werewolves, these are nefarious individuals there is no gray area in that, however they may conduct themselves and their personal lives, it is not sloppy journalism, is to call something what it is, a this shadow government working in many instances against the direct interest of the American people ..."
"... It's the propaganda, the United States is one of the most heavily propagandize societies in the world, we make the Soviets look like children. No one wants you to have sympathy for Donald Trump, you do not have to agree or like a person to see that the cartel seeking to damage him is also simultaneously against your interests and they are against your interests whether you're from the left or the right because they do not have an ideology just it will to power. ..."
"... So reminiscent of the darker days of the Cold War. A stark education has just played out to this point. ..."
Jul 08, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

The Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr leans hard on Trump to unfetter investigators, all hell may break lose, says Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern
 Special to Consortium News

A s Congress arrives back into town and the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees prepare to question ex-Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller on July 17, partisan lines are being drawn even more sharply, as Russias-gate blossoms into Deep-State-gate. On Sunday, a top Republican legislator, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) took the gloves off in an unusually acerbic public attack on former leaders of the FBI and CIA.

King told a radio audience: "There is no doubt to me there was severe, serious abuses that were carried out in the FBI and, I believe, top levels of the CIA against the President of the United States or, at that time, presidential candidate Donald Trump," according to The Hill.

King, a senior congressman specializing in national security, twice chaired the House Homeland Security Committee and currently heads its Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. He also served for several years on the House Intelligence Committee.

He asserted:

"There was no legal basis at all for them to begin this investigation of his campaign – and the way they carried it forward, and the way information was leaked. All of this is going to come out. It's going to show the bias. It's going to show the baselessness of the investigation and I would say the same thing if this were done to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders It's just wrong."

The Long Island Republican added a well aimed swipe at what passes for the media today: "The media went along with this – actually, keeping this farcical, ridiculous thought going that the President of the United States was somehow involved in a conspiracy with Russia against his own country."

King: Lashes out.

According to King, the Justice Department's review, ordered by Attorney General William Barr, would prove that former officials acted improperly. He was alluding to the investigation led by John Durham, U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. Sounds nice. But waiting for Durham to complete his investigation at a typically lawyerly pace would, I fear, be much like the experience of waiting for Mueller to finish his; that is, like waiting for Godot. What about now?

So Where is the IG Report on FISA?

That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!).

The DOJ inspector General's investigation, launched in March 2018, has centered on whether the FBI and DOJ filing of four FISA applications and renewals beginning in October 2016 to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page amounted to abuse of the FISA process. (Fortunately for the IG, Obama's top intelligence and law enforcement officials were so sure that Hillary Clinton would win that they did not do much to hide their tracks.)

The Washington Examiner reported last Tuesday, "The Justice Department inspector general's investigation of potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is complete, a Republican congressman said, though a report on its findings might not be released for a month." The report continued:

"House Judiciary Committee member John Ratcliffe (R, Texas) said Monday he'd met with DOJ watchdog Michael Horowitz last week about his FISA abuse report. In a media interview, Ratcliffe said they'd discussed the timing, but not the content of his report and Horowitz 'related that his team's investigative work is complete and they're now in the process of drafting that report. Ratcliffe said he was doubtful that Horowitz's report would be made available to the public or the Congress anytime soon. 'He [Horowitz] did relay that as much as 20% of his report is going to include classified information, so that draft report will have to undergo a classification review at the FBI and at the Department of Justice,' Ratcliffe said. 'So, while I'm hopeful that we members of Congress might see it before the August recess, I'm not too certain about that.'"

Horowitz: Still waiting for his report

Earlier, Horowitz had predicted that his report would be ready in May or June but there may, in fact, be good reason for some delay. Fox News reported Friday that "key witnesses sought for questioning by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz early in his investigation into alleged government surveillance abuse have come forward at the 11th hour." According to Fox's sources, at least one witness outside the Justice Department and FBI has started cooperating -- a breakthrough that came after Durham was assigned to lead a separate investigation into the origins of the FBI's 2016 Russia case that led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe.

"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge.

Judging by past precedent, Deep State intelligence and law enforcement officials will do all they can to use the "but-it's-classified" excuse to avoid putting themselves and their former colleagues in legal jeopardy. (Though this would violate Obama's executive order 13526 , prohibiting classification of embarrassing or criminal information).

It is far from clear that DOJ IG Horowitz and Attorney General Barr will prevail in the end, even though President Trump has given Barr nominal authority to declassify as necessary. Why are the the stakes so extraordinarily high?

What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?

Recall that in a Sept. 2, 2016 text message to the FBI's then-deputy chief of counterintelligence Peter Strzok, his girlfriend and then-top legal adviser to Deputy FBI Director McCabe, Lisa Page, wrote that she was preparing talking points because the president "wants to know everything we're doing." [Emphasis added.] It does not seem likely that the Director of National Intelligence, DOJ, FBI, and CIA all kept President Obama in the dark about their FISA and other machinations -- although it is possible they did so out of a desire to provide him with "plausible denial."

It seems more likely that Obama's closest intelligence confidant, Brennan, told him about the shenanigans with FISA, that Obama gave him approval (perhaps just tacit approval), and that Brennan used that to harness top intelligence and law enforcement officials behind the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him.

Moreover, one should not rule out seeing in the coming months an "Obama-made-us-do-it" defense -- whether grounded in fact or not -- by Brennan and perhaps the rest of the gang. Brennan may even have a piece of paper recording the President's "approval" for this or that -- or could readily have his former subordinates prepare one that appears authentic.

Reining in Devin Nunes

That the Deep State retains formidable power can be seen in the repeated Lucy-holding-then-withdrawing-the-football-for-Charlie Brown treatment experienced by House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member, Devin Nunes (R-CA). On April 5, 2019, in the apparent belief he had a green light to go on the offensive, Nunes wrote that committee Republicans "will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved in the abuse of intelligence for political purposes. These people must be held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future."

On April 7, Nunes was even more specific, telling Fox News that he was preparing to send eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice "this week," concerning alleged misconduct during the Trump-Russia investigation, including leaks of "highly classified material" and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the FISA court. It seemed to be no-holds-barred for Nunes, who had begun to talk publicly about prison time for those who might be brought to trial.

Except for Fox, the corporate media ignored Nunes's explosive comments. The media seemed smugly convinced that Nunes's talk of "referrals" could be safely ignored -- even though a new sheriff, Barr, had come to town. And sure enough, now, three months later, where are the criminal referrals?

There is ample evidence that President Trump is afraid to run afoul of the Deep State functionaries he inherited. And the Deep State almost always wins. But if Attorney General Barr leans hard on the president to unfetter Nunes, IG Horowitz, Durham and like-minded investigators, all hell may break lose, because the evidence against those who took serious liberties with the law is staring them all in the face.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. No fan of the current President, Ray has been trained to follow and analyze the facts, wherever they may lead. He spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, and prepared the President's Daily Brief for three presidents. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

If you enjoyed this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

Joe T Wallace , July 8, 2019 at 20:24

I'm a great admirer of Ray McGovern's reporting. He exposes much that is never revealed by the mainstream media. That said, I do have one quibble about this article. In the seventh paragraph, just below the heading "So Where is the IG Report on FISA?" he writes:

"That's the big one. If Horowitz is able to speak freely about what he has learned, his report could lead to indictments of former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein, and Dana Boente -- Boente being the only signer of the relevant FISA applications still in office. (No, he has not been demoted to file clerk in the FBI library; at last report, he is FBI General Counsel!)."

My immediate reaction was: Who is Horowitz? It was confusing not to know. Further down in the article, I learned that Ray was referring to Michael Horowitz, a DOJ watchdog who is preparing an IG report about FISA abuse, but readers should have been informed who he was earlier in the article.

John , July 8, 2019 at 17:10

Peter King? Devin Nunes?

At one point the article says little effort was made to cover tracks because of certainty that HRC would win but later that the FBI et al were planting land mines to either defeat Trump or blow up his presidency. Seemed contradictory to me.

Perhaps you have the skinny on these machinations, if indeed there were machinations by one person or group or another for this purpose or that.

But Peter King and Devin Nunes? If either ever was credible, their track record condemns them to be received, if at all, with extreme skepticism.

Realist , July 8, 2019 at 16:59

It will be a very interesting 2020 campaign if the Democratic candidate has to run with the ripe stinking dead albatross of Russiagate around her neck. Or will she be expected to repudiate the Hitlery-run DNC? Where does the money and the ground game originate if the latter?

The only outcome that could be more bizarre than the last go-round would be to see Trump favored by all the smart money and then lose to the latest corporate Democrat to shamelessly sell out the middle class in broad daylight. I won't like it, but I can see Trump Derangement Syndrome pulling out the chestnuts for the Dems, what with all their celebrity spokespeople constantly running and ranting like their hair is on fire underneath those pussy hats. My poor gullible sister from Cali embraces that whole ball of wax as revealed truth holier than the total dry weight of all the Abrahamic scriptures rolled into one big bale for the recycling center. Kamala Harris seems to be emerging as the new messiah anointed to lead this country back to Obamian gridlock and more prestidigitation like mandated insurance to ensure the health of the insurance companies. Again, it will only be the illusion of "free stuff."

The only way such a scenario won't cause four more years of turmoil for this country (rinse and repeat in 2024) is if the victor is Gabbard and she ends all the illegal and unconstitutional wars by edict, telling all the sure-to-be pissing and moaning Deep State functionaries to pick up their severance pay and go pound sand. Then shut the world-wide spider web of military bases and bring home the troops while we can still afford the carfare. That would be "morning in America," and Gabbard would be the most heroic chief exec since Lincoln and FDR made their marks in the history books, though such fantasies never play out in the real world. More likely all the criminal evidence of treason remains classified, most Americans pop the blue pill, the actual rabbit hole continues to grow ever deeper but the masses are contentedly oblivious to it all, satisfied to blame select scapegoats from Russia, China and other "malign" countries for our viewing entertainment.

Deniz , July 8, 2019 at 17:50

The Grabber in Chief vs Willie Brown's mistress – wonderful.

ML , July 8, 2019 at 20:12

You are really something, Realist. I love the way you flourish that pen of yours. Thank you.

Rob Roy , July 8, 2019 at 20:13

Realist, well said, per usual. To add a bit the Dems probably gave Trump the gift of a lifetime the next election. Wasting three years on Russiagate instead of hammering out a decent platform for the party was beyond dumb. That reminds me. the Dems's next dumbest idea choosing Joe Biden as their next candidate. Just like Hillary, he can't beat Trump. The duopoly is dead, they just don't know it.

As for Tulsi, she's got my vote.

John Earls , July 8, 2019 at 16:55

Looks like Barry Eisler's John Rain (expert in "death by natural causes") will have a lot of work in front of him if the investigation builds and a whole lot of "material witnesses" begin to testify.

ricardo2000 , July 8, 2019 at 16:33

I'm supposed to feel sorry for the surveillance of a right-wing creep? OH PLEASE.
No one in government, or the right wing ReThugs, has ever suffered the intrusive, lying, speculative 'investigations' that social justice, environmental, or human rights activists have over the past 70 years.

When these buttheads suffer what MLK and Malcolm X have suffered then I might just wipe away a few tears, after I stop roaring with laughter and get off the floor.

Realist , July 8, 2019 at 17:08

You prefer a race to the bottom of the cesspool?

You never win when you adopt the methods you claim to revile. The opponent who introduced the tactics you condemn wins if you embrace them as your own. You didn't beat him, you joined him.

LibertyBonBon , July 8, 2019 at 18:12

Must be nice to think the justice system should revolve around your particular emotions, rather than equality and objectivity. Safe and easy.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 20:41

ricardo2000, nothing personal, I get the revulsion to Trump and entourage not to mention a large portion of the Maga crowd but this right and left thing is really just an illusion, the people doing the persecuting here regardless of how disgusting Trump is are the same ones doing the persecuting to a large degree of everyone else from Assange to the Iranians, that is this government deep state in combination with all of the various American alphabet soup agencies as well as foreign deep states have cornered the market in State power, hate Trump but don't confuse this with a good thing.

O Society , July 8, 2019 at 16:18

Thank you, Ray McGovern. You are a good man, Charlie Brown!

Thing is, all of this was predictable from the beginning. Many of us saw it coming.

No one really wanted an incompetent baboon running things – the song about Monkey and the Engineer comes to mind – so Obama tried to hamstring Trump with this investigation. I mean, Obama couldn't very well have not completed the transfer of power because it is the most valuable thing about democracy. There is no ten year bloody hellified civil war every time the crown changes hands from one inbred to the next.

So Obama did the next best thing on his way out the Oval Office doors, he put Brennan and the boys on it. Seemed like a good idea at the time, I'm sure. But it backfired because he couldn't call the dogs off once he was no longer president. Not Brennan, not anyone could call them off after the snowball really got rolling because the spooks believed their own story and the media made too much money off selling the mythology:

https://osociety.org/2019/07/06/spooks-spooking-themselves/

Only question left to answer now is whether or not Trump the carnival barker can milk his opportunist Armageddon into a second term of fleecing the rubes.

http://osociety.org/2019/07/08/can-donald-trump-delay-an-economic-crash-until-2020

karlof1 , July 8, 2019 at 15:00

This is a very serious Constitutional Law issue and MUST be pursued–and it makes no difference the political party denomination of those breaking the law! The Current Oligarchy–Deep State–is the adversary of the vast majority of US citizens and humanity. With Epstein's arrest and the developments McGovern relates, some progress appears to be happening.

Lydia , July 8, 2019 at 14:51

You summed it up perfectly, Jill.

Pablo Diablo , July 8, 2019 at 14:42

"the effort to defeat Trump and, later, to emasculate and, if possible, remove him." says it all. Trump is a loose cannon. The so called "Deep State" has been "controlling" our Presidents since at least the Dulles Brothers. Truman even admitted giving them power was a BIG mistake. Still question the Kennedy Assassination.
In the 70's, the FBI mailed me a box of drugs, which I refused to take from a very incompetent fake Mail Man, and three minutes later they showed up with a search warrant for my house that listed all the drugs in the failed mailed box signed by a Federal Judge. So much for FISA. The bullshit continues. I could reveal more if necessary.

robert e williamson jr , July 8, 2019 at 14:32

Sam F. whether you realize it or not you got it pretty much on the nose. Except for this.

The judiciary has been compromised by the congresses refusal to hold CIA et. al. accountable for their actions. Why? Those in congress remember what happened to JFK.

The number one reason is because the deep state ensures that if anyone goes after CIA officials or designees that the persons career and life are ruined. Which is something else that needs to be investigated. Something that if explored may very well put a stop to CIA's B.S. of lying about everything and getting away with it.

Currently no deterrent exists. None.

Anytime some one or entity gets close the Deep State ends up with their guy as AG. See the Bill Barr story.

Barr may get his chance to prove me right and at the same time prove "Lady Justice" has little to do with the DOJ! I think he is a cowardly blowhard. Justice would be Trump and Barr going to jail .

Justice in this country for the true scoundrels in government or billionaires is non- existent at this point in time. Putting Epstein in prison for life is called for and if he is threatened with that maybe his jaw will loosen up.

Until DOJ can become a deterrent to bad actors in government, all government the country will be controlled by the Deep State. The SWETS, super wealthy elitists.

Keep your eyes on George Soro and the Kochs.

Paul Merrell , July 8, 2019 at 17:28

@ "Justice would be Trump and Barr going to jail ."

Are you suggesting that *any* of their living predecessors don't deserve the same? If so, which do not and why?

Jay , July 8, 2019 at 14:18

Bif:

I agree something very suspect occurred.

And it's very likely the Obama White House knew that either the NSA or the FBI was tapping into the communications of some of Trump's campaign team BEFORE Hillary lost in Nov. 2016.

However the xenophobic, lying, terrorist (IRA) supporting, Peter King is not a credible messenger. (Right, Rep Steve King of Iowa is even worse than King of Long Island.)

Peter Dyer , July 8, 2019 at 14:09

Thanks, Ray.

DH Fabian , July 8, 2019 at 13:59

Actually, that deep split among the masses, and certainly within the Dem voting base, was achieved in the 1990s -- middle class vs. poor, workers vs. those left jobless, further split by race. The Obama years confirmed that this split is permanent. Russia had nothing to do with the Democrats' 2016 defeat, nor will it be the reason for their 2020 defeat. Democrats maintain their resistance against acknowledging the consequences of dividing and conquering their own voting base.

EuGene Miller , July 9, 2019 at 00:24

DH, that's an interesting assessment. However, I doubt that any House or Senate Democrat sought an advantage by "splitting their base". The elected Dems do not control the narrative. So, who benefits by splitting the masses into rival factions?

Perhaps the narrative of social and political discourse is defined by the owners, boards, and foundations that control the main-stream media and pop-culture.

Robert Reich wrote that an oligarchy divides-and-conquers the rest of us. I suspect that controlling the narrative is not simply a propaganda tool; it is the basis of divide-and-conquer strategy.

https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/57499-there-is-no-right-v-left-it-is-trump-and-the-oligarchs-against-the-rest

robert e williamson jr , July 8, 2019 at 13:56

Is it possible that the DOJ, see the Sec. of Labor's problems developing with the Espstein case, is about to have it's gloriously corrupt underbelly rolled over into the sunlight? (you must roll the snake over to see its belly)

Please Ray tell me this is where we might be heading or instead will we end up with the courts truncating investigation because they say it will be best for the country not to have all this filthy laundry dragged out into the sunlight or someones bull shit sources and methods might be exposed. The DOJ has become a really bad joke!

I'm hoping you know something I don't because Barr's past history pretty much speaks for itself I'd say after be made sure he pardoned all of Bush 41 henchmen!

At this point I certainly do not have much faith in the DOJ doing the right thing. What Acosta did in Florida with Epstein was hardly the right thing to do.

They all need to be locked up.

Eric32 , July 8, 2019 at 13:33

Very little "punishment" will occur, and no deep change cleanup will occur.
The US govt. is controlled by money and blackmail – not "voting" or public outrage.

So many high level people have so much dirt on other high level people that nothing major will be done.
A series of very big events, including the JFK murder and the 9/11 charade went unexposed and undealt with – there is no reason to think that this medium size event will wind up making a big difference.

What will happen is that US "democracy" will continue on its downward course, but maybe with a better facade.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 20:59

I personally believe that the empire will crash when it hits maximum overreach it will also simultaneously go broke at the same time, as the money interests at that point Will probably move east, this will partially be due to both the feds tendency to over inflate in order to cover military acquisitions as well as the decline of swift and the ascendancy of China in the rest. I actually think that this is what some American factions desire, it is potentially good for all of us if we can regain a republic but it will mean the end of American hegemony.

Gary Weglarz , July 8, 2019 at 13:22

This is the same "deep state" that assassinated a sitting president, then proceeded to assassinate the next three most important and influential progressive leaders in the country all over a five year period. Problem solved. And just when you thought Allen Dulles didn't know what to do with all those oh so experienced Nazi war criminals he'd recruited to the CIA.

When Congress investigated the CIA in the mid-1970's (before Congress became completely "owned" by the deep state) right on cue witnesses began to "commit suicide" just before they would be scheduled to testify. Problem solved. Hardly a raised eyebrow from the always complicit MSM through all of this. Expecting anything more than a massive coverup of this latest deep state corruption and abuse is beyond my abilities to even effectively fantasize about.

herbert davis , July 8, 2019 at 14:12

Justice in the USA?

John Drake , July 8, 2019 at 13:20

The corporate Democrats strike out again. They run a corrupt, violent(war monger) candidate, who loses to a buffoon-an election which was hers to lose. Meanwhile trying to hedge their bets they play sleazeball with the investigative arm's authority in order to sabotage said buffoon; which as it is revealed gives ammunition and the advantage to their target. i.e. "They were illegally picking on me"
If Trump is smart-a very long stretch, but some advisor might suggest this- he will expose all this slime closer to the election for maximum effect. What a distressing thought. All the more reason to run a progressive Presidential candidate that can disavow the DNC clowns and their corruption.

geeyp , July 8, 2019 at 12:37

It's past time for the Deep State to come up from the deep state of hell in which they reside. At least to purgatory for some fresh air and a wee ray of light. I couldn't let the Schumer warning keep me from giving the go ahead on this. If my coconut is shattered, someone somewhere (not our current media) would have a clue as to what happened to me. Sic 'em, President Trump and A.G. and Devin Nunes!

Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 12:14

The US needs to solve the underlying problem of corruption of secret agencies and judiciary, otherwise the political wrongdoing of one faction will only be matched by that of its opponents, regardless of a few prosecutions. I know from experience the extreme corruption of the Repubs, and little doubt that the Dems do such things at least when desperate.

The solution includes:
1. All secrets meaningfully shared among multiparty committees;
2. All politicians and top officials monitored for corrupt influence;
3. Entire federal judiciary fired, replaced, and monitored like the politicians; and
4. Amendments to protect elections and mass media from control by money power.
Until then all government acts are tribal gangsterism and little more.

Guy , July 8, 2019 at 13:50

You forgot about dual citizenship members of the senate and congress . Elected as a representative for the country of the US should mean just that and not another country . And while we are at it , major reform on monetary contributions to candidates running for re-election . There is something terribly wrong with needing millions if not billions of dollars to run the electoral races.There is much more that needs to be done but this would be a good start .

Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:32

Yes, the proposed Amendments would restrict funding of mass media and elections to registered individual contributions (some prefer government funding) limited to the average day's pay annually (for example), with full reporting by candidates and all intermediaries. We all can see the destruction of democracy that was caused by economic power controlling elections, mass media, the judiciary, etc.

But of course we cannot get those amendments because those tools of democracy now belong to the rich, etc. History suggests that we are in for generations of severe decline before the people are hurting enough to turn off the tube and do something, and generations more before they can re-establish democracy.

Herman , July 8, 2019 at 15:20

Ray McGovern writes:"Classification," however, has been one of the Deep State's favorite tactics to stymie investigations -- especially when the material in question yields serious embarrassment or reveals crimes. And the stakes this time are huge"

On the matter of government reform classification there is a great need of public discussion and radical reform. Why? Because the government is playing with an essential right, the right to know. All the red herrings needed to be thrown in the trash and the burden placed on the classifiers to justify why the public does not have a right to know.

Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:24

Yes, the facts and their significance (especially about false flags and scandals) need to be publicly debated, as well as policy goals, and the policies derived from facts and goals. We have far too many government secrets to sustain a democracy.

I suggest limiting secrets to ongoing investigations (with a time limit), defensive military plans and operations (not alleged provocations or aggressive war schemes), and personal IDs of those at risk. Beyond that secrets disguise tyranny.

Ida G Millman , July 8, 2019 at 16:02

Another path towards a solution to government corruption could be term limits for all federal representatives. Limiting the number of terms would curtail the opportunities for forming the uninterrupted years of long coalitions between public servants and government officials that result in the abuses of power that have damaged the interests of ordinary less wealthy citizens, in favor of corporate and military interests.

In the matter of the original intentions of the men who wrote our founding documents, we should consider one of the enormous differences that technology has made between us: that our representatives can travel between DC and their homes with enough ease that they can continue reasonably, or nearly reasonably, satisfactory family lives – something that could not be done in the 18th century. The forefathers did not foresee that being a member of government would become a career for a lifetime. They assumed, I believe, that members of government would always be citizens who would give our country a few years of their lives and then return to private life to share their experience and knowledge with their neighbors.

Such a change would not magically reform government corruption. There will always be those who will find a way – but it could slow things down and it would certainly engage an increasing number of citizens who would participate in governing, as well as the circles of people surrounding each of them whose interest in and understanding of government would increase because everyone would know more of their representatives. Got that, kids? L&B&L

Sam F , July 8, 2019 at 17:37

Term limits are useful and we should enact more. There seems to be a sufficient supply of puppets for the rich/WallSt/Mic/zionists to ensure that all new candidates represent only those interests, unless we go further and control funding of mass media and elections, monitoring of politicians and judges for life, etc.

Rob Roy , July 8, 2019 at 20:28

Ida,
Term limits wouldn't be necessary if money were out of elections and all elections were publicly funded. Next, a law should be passed to prevent retired congress people from lobbying for any private company of any kind. Then people wouldn't have to spend all their time in congress lining up money for the next election, nor would they owe favors to anyone.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 21:19

Sam F, all of those goals seem very nice but it would probably be better if we just dissolved back into 50 states save for an interstate system and a very small navy for common defense, maybe four nuclear submarines total, the American people will be best off without a government completely working it out for themselves, if some of them work it out in completely different ways without hurting each other so be it. Besides even a libertarians would have to acknowledge democracy best works for smaller populations. We may never be able to curb the will to power of evil men but we can diminish their abilities to fleece the public if we are not subject to them.

Jay , July 8, 2019 at 11:42

Peter King?

Really now.

Not a credible source, no matter how invention filled Russia-gate is. And no matter how clear it is that in 2016 the FBI was poking around campaign Trump and likely telling the White House what it found.

Bif Webster , July 8, 2019 at 13:28

I agree that King isn't the best of messengers, but we can also go to others who are not right-wing to see something fishy went on.

Those text messages convinced me something was going on. And that was before all the other stuff came to light.

I think this will be about who has more dirt on the other side you know, leverage?

Jeff Harrison , July 8, 2019 at 11:41

Thank you, Ray. Forgive my cynicism but the US government is so corrupt, has wielded illegitimate power for so long, and has covered the tracks of countless functionaries who have not upheld the constitution that I doubt this will go anywhere. I have been quoting Ben Franklin for some time "you have a republic, if you can keep it." I don't think we can. A reading of "A History of Venice" by John J. Norris would be appropriate here. The most serene republic lasted for essentially 1,000 years from roughly 800 to not quite 1800, first as a democracy, later as an oligarchy. Much like us, including having the most feared secret service in Europe at the time, Venice kept its power through trade but at least we don't hoist the new president up on a chair so that he can throw golden Ducats to the crowd on Wall Street the way that a new Doge would.

I don't see that as necessarily much of a plus.

Steven Berge , July 8, 2019 at 11:40

I don't suppose anything will happen to anybody important about this. After all, nothing happened to anybody when they were caught mass spying on any and all american citizens, even before they made it legal.

Drew Hunkins , July 8, 2019 at 11:32

Unfortunately Webb and Parry exposed much of these gangster criminal "intel" savages for running guns and drugs to Central American pseudo fascist mercenary sadists throughout much of the late 1970s through the '80s. I say unfortunately b/c nothing much ever came along by way of true justice, by way of the criminal players rotting in maximum security jail cells for years on end, not unlike the crack or heroin addict who steals a $400 television.

Jill , July 8, 2019 at 11:15

This has been one long crime against the American people. King should read what he knows into the Congressional Record. I have no sympathy for Trump's fear of the deep state. He has sent people to die knowing full well that his actions were based on lies, lies that would result in the deaths of civilians as well as our own military. If he is going to do that, then he should have the courage to face the deep state. That's partial penance for all the deaths he has caused.

I also don't care about Trump's personal issue about being surveilled. He personally supports that against everyone else. That is why I feel this is a crime against our people as a whole. Our constitution has been stripped bare. We don't have the rule of law. Mass surveillance covering the globe is current reality. It is dangerous. It is wrong. It is lawless. It is a disaster.

Further, Russiagate was used to keep real opposition away from Trump. His supporters doubled down on "liking" Trump because he appeared to be a victim of these lies. Democrats meanwhile learned to further worship the IC. They ignored Trump's actual unlawful behavior, and, in the case of war crimes, still support Trump on every war/regime change action etc. recommended to them by their IC "resistance" "leaders".

People won't speak to one another because of this division, all based on lies. Democrats want Assange put to death because he exposed truthful information about Clinton. Neighbor has turned against neighbor over this. We have stopped talking and stopped thinking about whether claims make sense or have evidence behind them. Political parties have become cults with cult leaders. Meanwhile, many who think it was wrong to use surveillance against Trump, accept mass surveillance against everyone else, including themselves.

This has been one of the most effective propaganda tools I have ever seen against our populace. It has created a divided, unthinking populace who is ripe for the picking by evil men and women. I am truly hoping that once this is exposed people will stop this madness and pull together for a common good. But I'm quite worried that, like most cults, when the leader is shown to be wrong, people cling to them even more.

I cannot believe what Russiagate has done to our own people. I am terrified at the wars it has/may yet cause and the cruelty against others, both foreign and domestic, which it has wrought.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 21:51

What else would you call it, there have always been nefarious agents in one government or another for one gangster interest or another, whether was Milner's roundtable or Dulles's Gladio werewolves, these are nefarious individuals there is no gray area in that, however they may conduct themselves and their personal lives, it is not sloppy journalism, is to call something what it is, a this shadow government working in many instances against the direct interest of the American people, I'm not trying to be you over the head with this but Mr. McGovern was once upon a Time swimming in the same waters and he knows what he is talking about. The deep state maybe several different factions but all of it at least so far is fairly I'm Accountable, this thing must be named.

AnneR , July 8, 2019 at 14:18

First the Disclaimer: I'm not a supporter of either side of the one party two headed monster political machine, not of either HRC or DT, both, and their "parties," making me want to puke.

I am curious about the following: "He [DT] has sent people to die knowing full well that his actions were based on lies, lies that would result in the deaths of civilians as well as our own military. If he is going to do that, then he should have the courage to face the deep state. That's partial penance for all the deaths he has caused."

While I have no doubt that DT has been responsible for civilian deaths (I am far less concerned about military deaths – join the military and you cannot expect not to have to chance it, particularly in a warmongering nation state; if the recruit doesn't recognize this reality, then they need to do some reading), *most* such deaths in those countries we (the US and its vassal states and proxies) have been happily bombing, shelling, destroying one way or another, even since the late 1980s (not therefore including the appalling and illegal warring on Vietnam et al) are down, not to DT, but rather to presidents: BC, GHB, GWB, BO. Pretty evenly divided betwixt the two heads, wouldn't you say?

That's not to excuse DT (and I wouldn't excuse HRC either – think Libya; as bad as MA, if with different forms of warfare; but then they're buddies, like attracting like).

We – the US – need to stop killing other peoples (let's cry for the war-making profiteers), stop destroying other countries (and for our corporate-capitalists who plunder them); need to mind our own "shop" and business. And stop pretending that we're such a wonderful, white-hatted, "good" nation.

Jill , July 8, 2019 at 15:15

AnneR,

We have had war criminal presidents from the legacy parties, period. Barr is a party to war crimes so I share other's doubts that he will do anything about actual justice. He may be in on the current winning side of the IC and they may be purging some enemies at this time. That is the only thing I see Barr being involved in.

Speaking as someone who has done counter-recruitment in schools, I will just give you my experience. Students are tracked from grade school. A file is kept on them with over a thousand data points. These files are taken by recruiters and used to "pitch" the military to young people. I don't know if you were sophisticated at 16. I was a little bit but not much. So here's an example–they told one young woman who had a single mother that if she went in the military she would not be a burden on her mother any longer. They understood the family had few resources and they played on this young woman's "guilt" over being a financial "drain" on her mother. No, recruiters do not tell the truth to those they meet. They lie and they lie very well because they have excellent information to help them tell the correct lies. That girl is dead and I mourn her death.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 22:05

AnneR, you have so much anger, I understand, it is terrible what our nation has done and is continuing to do, it has gone on so long that many of the people currently perpetrating the crimes against foreign populations are themselves of descendents of peoples the US has victimized. It's the propaganda, the United States is one of the most heavily propagandize societies in the world, we make the Soviets look like children. No one wants you to have sympathy for Donald Trump, you do not have to agree or like a person to see that the cartel seeking to damage him is also simultaneously against your interests and they are against your interests whether you're from the left or the right because they do not have an ideology just it will to power.

Dunderhead , July 8, 2019 at 22:09

Jill that was an incredibly cogent description of the mess we are currently in, congratulations on such clarity, peace out.

David Otness , July 9, 2019 at 00:18

With you on all that you state, Jill. It's really exposed the U.S. population for what we unfortunately are, if not what we've become. So reminiscent of the darker days of the Cold War. A stark education has just played out to this point. I wonder how many have learned anything at all from it?

[Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Epstein case has all the earmarks of CIA protection of an asset. ..."
"... Successful entry into politics requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV" badge? ..."
"... Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in Iraq? ..."
Jul 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

lysias , Jul 9 2019 0:53 utc | 91

The Epstein case has all the earmarks of CIA protection of an asset.

snake , Jul 9 2019 4:03 utc | 99

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/07/08/trumpsteingate-the-coverup-of-donalds-little-girl-fetish-hits-high-gear/

Journalism. =>has disclosed the tunnel, and a few of its investigators are exploring its contents, expecting to find at the end of this tunnel Successful entry into politics requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV" badge?

Wonder if this has traction in the persons involved in Grace I, the failure of JCPOA.

Is the CAV badge the weapon that has corrupted nearly every nation state in the western world?

Politicians make promises, and then within hours for unexplained reasons, reverse them..Hmmm?

Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in Iraq?

How can CAV badge victims be identified and isolated from politics?
The CAV badge could explain so many USA positive, American negative events?

[Jul 09, 2019] Gabbard is NOT a member of the CFR. She has by her own admission, attended some meetings as an invited guest

Jul 09, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Sinophile , 20 hours ago

Gabbard is NOT a member of the CFR. She has by her own admission, attended some meetings as an invited guest. According to her, it was to engage members and find out what their inside game is. I don't know if Gabbard is for real. I voted for Trump because I perceived him to be the anti-war and anti-intervention candidate. Period. So, as I said, I don't know what to think about the lady. I do now understand however, why some individuals in olden times became hermits.

[Jul 09, 2019] Luongo- Epstein s Arrest Tells Me Trump Is Now Out For Blood by Tom Luongo

Notable quotes:
"... Serial pederast Jeffrey Epstein is going to be arrested again. The big questions are why? And why now? I never doubted Donald Trump's sincerity in wanting Hillary in jail. But the reality is that Trump was not in any position to do so. Until a few months ago. ..."
"... Mueller, his staff of hatchetmen, the Obama administration and the rest of the corrupt old-guard in D.C. fully expected to be allowed free rein to convict Trump politically of Obstruction of Justice based on an interpretation of Federal Statutes that could only be justified in the world of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report. When that didn't happen, they are now looking at potential blowback from a vain and vindictive man occupying the supposedly most powerful office in the world. ..."
"... It seems John Bolton has been more president than Trump recently. ..."
"... I was cautiously optimistic that Trump would turn the corner on his presidency now that Mueller, impeachment and the rest of it would lift from his shoulders. His foreign policy maneuvers didn't fill me with much, if any, confirmation of this hope. ..."
"... Because this goes directly to the heart of the matter. Trump left the Clintons' social circle in disgust and I'm convinced he ran to stop her corrupt sell out of the U.S. Never forget that, while corruption is rampant in D.C., it is not all-pervasive. It's not a black and white thing. ..."
"... The level of corruption of the Departments of Justice, State, Treasury and the intelligence agencies needed to coordinate the RussiaGate hoax all to serve as Hillary's revenge porn was too much for enough people. ..."
"... And there are still plenty of people in all of those departments willing to step up now that the board state has changed. Remember back when Trump said we should just leave Hillary be, she's been through enough? That wasn't him capitulating to the Deep State, that was him offering her a way out. He knew then what was going on but thought he was powerless to stop it, politically. ..."
"... And Robert Mueller is up to his neck in this. Because it was Mueller who helped Epstein mostly get off the hook the last time and had the court documents sealed. ..."
"... Even if Barr and Trump have a marriage of convenience here, it doesn't matter. What matters is that Epstein will no longer be able to hide behind Clinton bag men and will this time have to cut a real deal to stay out of gen pop. ..."
"... This Epstein arrest is a testament to what happens when the pendulum swings too far in one direction. Where despicable people get away with the most heinous acts simply because they are connected in a web of corruption and venality. ..."
"... Maybe this is the moment of Peak Swamp? Maybe it's the moment where we can see things begin, ever so slightly to improve. Is it too little, too late? Likely. But something had to be done to keep our faith in our political and social institutions intact. Because otherwise that way leads to only chaos and collapse. ..."
Jul 09, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Tom Luongo,

"Bernie Birnbaum is a horse of a different color, ethics-wise that is...

...as in he ain't got none!"

-- Johnny Caspar, "Miller's Crossing"

Serial pederast Jeffrey Epstein is going to be arrested again. The big questions are why? And why now? I never doubted Donald Trump's sincerity in wanting Hillary in jail. But the reality is that Trump was not in any position to do so. Until a few months ago.

When Attorney General William Barr ended the Mueller investigation back in February that was a turning point. I talked about it back then in a piece called " The Old Political Order is Just Old ."

Mueller, his staff of hatchetmen, the Obama administration and the rest of the corrupt old-guard in D.C. fully expected to be allowed free rein to convict Trump politically of Obstruction of Justice based on an interpretation of Federal Statutes that could only be justified in the world of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report. When that didn't happen, they are now looking at potential blowback from a vain and vindictive man occupying the supposedly most powerful office in the world.

But is that really the case anymore? It seems John Bolton has been more president than Trump recently.

I was cautiously optimistic that Trump would turn the corner on his presidency now that Mueller, impeachment and the rest of it would lift from his shoulders. His foreign policy maneuvers didn't fill me with much, if any, confirmation of this hope.

But domestically signs were there that he had stabilized the battlefield.

Epstein's arrest tells me he's now out for blood.

Because this goes directly to the heart of the matter. Trump left the Clintons' social circle in disgust and I'm convinced he ran to stop her corrupt sell out of the U.S. Never forget that, while corruption is rampant in D.C., it is not all-pervasive. It's not a black and white thing.

William Barr may not be a Boy Scout or anything but even he, like Trump, has a disgust circuit. And that circuit has a threshold.

The level of corruption of the Departments of Justice, State, Treasury and the intelligence agencies needed to coordinate the RussiaGate hoax all to serve as Hillary's revenge porn was too much for enough people.

And there are still plenty of people in all of those departments willing to step up now that the board state has changed. Remember back when Trump said we should just leave Hillary be, she's been through enough? That wasn't him capitulating to the Deep State, that was him offering her a way out. He knew then what was going on but thought he was powerless to stop it, politically.

To go after her you go after the person who is her Achilles' heel, Epstein through his association with Bill. Because what if this isn't just about Bill's antics? But this is more than just Hillary and Bill. This is likely far deeper a rabbit hole than anyone in D.C. wants to admit. Don't think for a second that Epstein hasn't been blackmailing very prominent people for years. Because he has. And they are all now scared to death.

And Robert Mueller is up to his neck in this. Because it was Mueller who helped Epstein mostly get off the hook the last time and had the court documents sealed.

Now that Mike Cernovich worked to get those documents unsealed, we have an arrest warrant a week later by a Justice Department led by someone, at this point, loyal to Trump.

Even if Barr and Trump have a marriage of convenience here, it doesn't matter. What matters is that Epstein will no longer be able to hide behind Clinton bag men and will this time have to cut a real deal to stay out of gen pop.

This process will be slow and painful, but it will grind to the kind of conclusion that will only benefit Trump's re-election bid. It will be an epic drip feed of leaks, innuendos, implications, indictments and the rest.

Because there comes a point where the Alinsky method of accusing your enemy of the thing you do backfires when it's raping 14-year-old girls.

Once this thing gets a head of steam, once the #MeToo crowd gets a hold of this, there won't be anyone left standing. I always said Hillary would indict herself. Her insane lust for power and revenge against her obstacles led us here. And it will lead her to the kind of shame and disgrace that befits her avarice.

When Nancy Pelosi's daughter is out there signaling for her mother on this immediately, you know this is bad. Pelosi doesn't roll over for nothing folks. Think what you want about her but she's a pitbull. And she rolled over on border wall funding last week.

This Epstein arrest is a testament to what happens when the pendulum swings too far in one direction. Where despicable people get away with the most heinous acts simply because they are connected in a web of corruption and venality.

Maybe this is the moment of Peak Swamp? Maybe it's the moment where we can see things begin, ever so slightly to improve. Is it too little, too late? Likely. But something had to be done to keep our faith in our political and social institutions intact. Because otherwise that way leads to only chaos and collapse.

* * *

Join my Patreon because you also weep for humanity at where these people have led us.

[Jul 07, 2019] Ship of Fools- Liner Notes

Notable quotes:
"... In 1996, Americans crowed about having meddled in the Russian presidential election. Well, you could argue that they can do stuff too. ..."
Jul 07, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

The signs are always there, it will always seem, in retrospect. Russian meddling in American elections. You double-take as you hear President Obama admonish the Russians, shortly after the 2016 presidential election, "We can do stuff to you." I'm old enough to remember that such 'stuff' has been going on for awhile. In 1996, Americans crowed about having meddled in the Russian presidential election. Well, you could argue that they can do stuff too.

Let's recount. Reagan told Gorbachev to "tear down that wall" in Berlin. He did, along with the Iron Curtain. The neoliberals rushed in like RawdyYates in Rawhide with their bling and sto ho ethos. The oligarchs took over in Russia. Clinton installed the dancing circus bear Boris Yeltsin and laughed so hard at the president's buffoonery that it looked for awhile like America would be friends-for-life with the Russkies. Maybe they could do stuff together.

... ... ...

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia. He is a former reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times

[Jul 07, 2019] Provoking World War III with Iran and a U.S. History of false flag operations by J.P. LINSTROTH

Notable quotes:
"... Let us examine U.S. interventionism past more closely. I know of four clear international instances where the United States intervened under dubious circumstances, initiating war. ..."
Jul 07, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

U.S. History of Provocation by J.P. LINSTROTH Facebook Twitter Reddit Email

In the history of the United States and its history of interventionism, the recent attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman seem to be foreboding and ominous signs of what may come -- an inevitable war with the Islamic Republic of Iran? To many who are watching the region closely, it is still unclear if Iran is behind such attacks. Moreover, and, thankfully, President Donald J. Trump backed away from bombing Iran after the Iranians allegedly and recently shot down a U.S. drone over the Strait of Hormuz.

Even so, the bellicose rhetoric between President Trump (threatening Iran's "obliteration") and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (calling Trump "mentally retarded") have continued. Watching from the sidelines, everyone hopes diplomacy will prevail.

Let us examine U.S. interventionism past more closely. I know of four clear international instances where the United States intervened under dubious circumstances, initiating war.

The first happened just before the beginning of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). President James K. Polk sent American troops to the Rio Grande River under the command of Zachary Taylor. The Mexicans had believed that the border had been at the Nueces River, not the Rio Grande, the Nueces being significantly north of the Rio Grande. This move was provocative and incited Mexican forces to attack the U.S. Army at its fortifications on the Rio Grande in 1846. As the attacks on U.S. soldiers were reported by Taylor to Polk, the U.S. Congress promptly declared war on Mexico.

Yet, in understanding these incidents, we have to likewise understand the motivations of the historical actors. Polk strongly believed in the Manifest Destiny of the United States to conquer the territories west of the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Indeed, Polk initially sent U.S. Congressman John Slidell as U.S. envoy to Mexico to negotiate buying the territories of California and New Mexico from Mexico for about $30 million. (The California and New Mexico territories included present-day California and New Mexico plus Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Colorado.) But Mexican legislators balked at the offer and Mexican newspapers printed the offer as an insult to Mexican pride. The rejected buy simply became war of territorial conquest.

At the end of the 19thcentury was the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the United States made its debut as an imperialistic world power, seeking its own colonies despite rejecting empire with the American Revolution. Congress declared war on Spain after the U.S.S. Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor. With no evidence, the U.S. blamed Spain and the war was on -- not just for Cuba, but for other Spanish colonies, and the U.S. thus acquired Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.

However, in all likelihood, the ship exploded because of an accident, possibly, a spark from the furnace setting off munitions nearby. Or, a mine in Havana Harbor planted by Cuban rebels detonated the hull of the vessel. In total, 261 sailors lost their lives from the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine. Yet, the causes of the war had more to do with the sensationalism of newspapers at the time owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, called "Yellow Journalism" -- what we call today, "fake news." Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers were publishing stories about Spanish atrocities in Cuba. Moreover, there was the supposed "de Lôme letter" allegedly a critical letter of President William McKinley, written by the Spanish Foreign Minister Enrique Dupuy de Lôme. All of these events "justified" war with Spain.

There was also the "Gulf of Tonkin incident" which began and escalated the Vietnam War under President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. The incident was allegedly a series of attacks by Northern Vietnamese naval torpedo vessels on American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, especially involving a destroyer, the U.S.S. Maddox. These skirmishes were said to have occurred on August 2 and August 4, 1964, with the second clash now believed to be entirely imaginary. The falsity of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents was allegedly substantiated by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the former Vietnam People's Army General Võ Nguyên Giáp. The Gulf of Tonkin skirmishes with the U.S. Navy and the Northern Vietnamese Navy led to the U.S. Congress passing the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution." It gave President Johnson: " all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression."

And lastly, there is the Iraq War (2003-2011). The United States invaded Iraq on the false pretext that Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, was actively developing a program for obtaining alleged WMDs. The United Nations Security Council had earlier passed two resolutions (678 and 687) which allowed the United States to force Iraq into complying with its international agreements, concerning biochemical and nuclear disarmament; both the UN head of inspections and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Iraq had no more weapons of mass destruction, yet the U.S. invaded. What is more, the intelligence community tried linking the Hussein government with Al-Qaeda, patently false. As a result of the George W. Bush Administration's War in Iraq, there were nearly 4,500 U.S. soldier deaths and almost 32,000 U.S. soldiers wounded in action.

So, this brings us to today with our military escalation with Iran under the Donald J. Trump Administration. Currently, we have deployed an aircraft carrier to the Arabian Sea as well as sending a Patriot missile defense system and four B-52 bombers to the region along with ordering the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad with the exception of essential personnel. According to Middle East expert Ilan Goldenberg Iran does not want a war with the United States. The question is whether we are forcing the situation, or unnecessarily exaggerating the threats from Iran. Certainly, it may depend upon how much National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo advocate for war. As Goldenberg states: "The bad news is that a war could still happen. Even if neither side wants to fight, miscalculation, missed signals, and the logic of escalation could conspire to turn even a minor clash into a regional conflagration -- with devastating effects for Iran, the United States, and the Middle East."

My worry, along with many other observers, is that such a conflict may snowball into a worse conflagration bringing in other international actors, maybe Russia. Neither the attack on these oil tankers nor the alleged shoot-down of an unmanned US drone so far has not led to any Gulf of Tonkin resolution. However, if another incident occurred causing Americans casualties and Iran was the claimed culprit, then the situation may get out of control.

For now, we can only hope from a distance that cooler heads in Washington, D.C. will prevail. We can certainly listen to diplomatic efforts of the likes of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that Iran does not want war with the United States and its coalition partners. We can examine the U.S. history of interventionism and learn from our past military mistakes.

If you are concerned about this pattern of provoking war by making claims that cannot be proven, please participate in your democracy:

Here is a petition against this possible war that you can sign online: https://www.change.org/p/stop-war-with-iran

Write a quick note to your US Senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/How_to_correspond_senators.htm

Send your thoughts to your member of Congress: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

[Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It wasn't to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton, which the Russian lawyer did not have and never produced. That was a ploy by Robert Goldstone, a British music publicist whose job is to get what his clients want, in this case, a meeting. So, recklessly, he invented the idea of Clinton dirt as a bait-and-switch to get Trump's people to come to it. He got the lawyer the meeting for her to lobby a potentially incoming administration against the Magnitsky Act, which is why she was in the United States in the first place. ..."
"... The lawyer lobbying against the act, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort that Browder's story was fake, a smokescreen to block the Russians from going after him for multi-millions in tax evasion. She argued the Magnitsky Act was built on this fraud. Manafort's notes, included in the Mueller Report, trace what she said. ..."
"... The Mueller investigators appear not to have looked into her charges. The report promotes Browder's fabrications, citing "the Magnitsky Act, which imposed financial sanctions and travel restrictions on Russian officials and which was named for a Russian tax specialist who exposed a fraud and later died in a Russian prison." ..."
"... But instead of his "lawyer" Magnitsky exposing Russian fraud, for which he was jailed and killed in prison, Magnitsky was actually Browder's accountant who was detained under investigation for his part in Browder's tax evasion and died of natural causes in prison, as Magnitsky's own mother admits to filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov in the film "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes." ..."
"... The documents include a deposition where Browder admits that the alleged "lawyer" Magnitsky did not go to law school nor have a law degree. Magnitsky's own testimony file identifies him as an "auditor." ..."
"... I interviewed Veselnitskaya in New York in November 2016. She explained what she later told the Trump group, that Browder's clients the Ziff Brothers had invested in Russian shares in a way that routed the money through loans so that they could evade U.S. taxes. ["Not invest – loans" in Manafort's notes.] ..."
Jul 03, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Consortiumnews Volume 25, Number 186 -- Saturday, July 6, 2019 INTELLIGENCE , RUSSIA , RUSSIAGATE , TRUMP ADMINISTRATION , U.S. Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax July 3, 2019 • 43 Comments

Save

Natalia Veselnitskaya didn't have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton and when the Russian lawyer met with Trump's people her focus was not on the 2016 campaign, writes Lucy Komisar.

By Lucy Komisar
Special to Consortium News

A "key event" described in the Mueller Report is the Trump Tower meeting where a Russian lawyer met with the president's son Donald Trump Jr, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Russiagaters have been obsessed with the meeting saying it was the smoking gun to prove collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to steal the 2016 election. Months after Mueller concluded that there was no collusion at all, the obsession has switched to "obstruction of justice," which is like someone being apprehended for resisting arrest without committing any other crime.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump team members in Trump Tower, and her interpreter, in background. (Lucy Komisar)

The Mueller report thus focuses instead on "efforts to prevent disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Russians and senior campaign officials."

But the report on this topic is deceptive. Ironically, as it attacks Donald Trump and top campaign officials for lying, the report itself lies about the issue the meeting addressed.

It wasn't to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton, which the Russian lawyer did not have and never produced. That was a ploy by Robert Goldstone, a British music publicist whose job is to get what his clients want, in this case, a meeting. So, recklessly, he invented the idea of Clinton dirt as a bait-and-switch to get Trump's people to come to it. He got the lawyer the meeting for her to lobby a potentially incoming administration against the Magnitsky Act, which is why she was in the United States in the first place.

The Magnitsky Act is a 2012 U.S. law that was promoted by William Browder, an American-born British citizen and hedge fund investor, who claimed his "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky had been imprisoned and murdered because he uncovered a scheme by Russian officials to steal $230 million from the Russian Treasury. It sanctioned Russians he said were involved or benefitted from Magnitsky's death. It has since been used by the U.S. to put sanctions on other Russians and nationals from other countries.

The lawyer lobbying against the act, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort that Browder's story was fake, a smokescreen to block the Russians from going after him for multi-millions in tax evasion. She argued the Magnitsky Act was built on this fraud. Manafort's notes, included in the Mueller Report, trace what she said.

Nothing Illegal

The Trump people did nothing illegal to meet with her. Their problem was the exaggerating communications Goldstone sent them about Veselnitskaya having "dirt" on Clinton. (While U.S. election laws says it's illegal for a campaign to receive "a thing of value" from a foreign source, it's never been established by a court that opposition research fits that description, the Mueller Report admits. ) Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats.

The Mueller investigators appear not to have looked into her charges. The report promotes Browder's fabrications, citing "the Magnitsky Act, which imposed financial sanctions and travel restrictions on Russian officials and which was named for a Russian tax specialist who exposed a fraud and later died in a Russian prison."

But instead of his "lawyer" Magnitsky exposing Russian fraud, for which he was jailed and killed in prison, Magnitsky was actually Browder's accountant who was detained under investigation for his part in Browder's tax evasion and died of natural causes in prison, as Magnitsky's own mother admits to filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov in the film "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes."

Mueller's investigators might have started with documents filed in U.S. federal court in the case of Veselnitskaya's client, Prevezon, a Russian holding company that settled a civil-forfeiture claim by the U.S. government that linked it, without proof, to the tax fraud.

The documents include a deposition where Browder admits that the alleged "lawyer" Magnitsky did not go to law school nor have a law degree. Magnitsky's own testimony file identifies him as an "auditor."

Why does that matter? Because it was Browder's red herring. Magnitsky had worked as Browder's accountant since 1997, fiddling on Browder's taxes on profits from sales of shares held by Russian shell companies run by his Hermitage Fund. He was not an attorney hired in 2007 to investigate and then expose a tax fraud against the Russian Treasury.

That fraud was exposed by Rimma Starova, the Russian nominee director of a British Virgin Islands shell company that held Hermitage's reregistered companies and who gave testimony to Russian police on April 9 and July 10, 2008 . It was reported by The New York Times and Vedomosti on July 24, 2008, months before Magnitsky mentioned it in an Oct. 7 interrogation.

Kremlin-connected?

Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. (Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Mueller Report says Veselnitskaya promised dirt on Hillary Clinton as "part of Russia and its government support for Trump." Two days before the meeting, Goldstone emailed Trump Jr. and said "the Russian government attorney" was flying in from Moscow. She had not been a government attorney since 2001, 15 years earlier.

I interviewed Veselnitskaya in New York in November 2016. She explained what she later told the Trump group, that Browder's clients the Ziff Brothers had invested in Russian shares in a way that routed the money through loans so that they could evade U.S. taxes. ["Not invest – loans" in Manafort's notes.]

The report says, "Natalia Veselnitskaya had previously worked for the Russian government and maintained a relationship with that government throughout this period of time." Later it says that from 1998 to 2001, she had worked as a prosecutor for the "Central Administrative District" of the Russian Prosecutor's office. "And continued to perform government-related work and maintain ties to the Russian government following her departure." We are meant to presume, with no evidence, as the media does – that means "a Kremlin-connected lawyer."

When Trump Jr asked for evidence, how the payments could be tied to the Clinton campaign, she said she couldn't trace them, according to the Mueller Report.

Then she turned to the Magnitsky Act. The report repeats earlier fakery: "She lobbied and testified about the Magnitsky Act, which imposed financial sanctions and travel restrictions on Russian officials and which was named for a Russian tax specialist who exposed a fraud and later died in a Russian prison." Magnitsky did not expose a fraud. Rimma Starova did.

A footnote in the report said: "Browder hired Magnitsky to investigate tax fraud by Russian officials, and Magnitsky was charged with helping Browder embezzle money." Browder did not hire Magnitsky to investigate the fraud. Magnitsky had been the accountant in charge of Hermitage since 1997, 10 years before the fraud. Embezzlement refers to Browder shifting assets out of Russia without paying taxes.

But the investigation's focus was not on Browder's fakery -- the substance of the Trump Tower meeting -- but on the communications organizing the event. The section on obstruction says Trump became aware of "emails setting up the June 9, 2016 meeting between senior campaign officials and Russians who offered derogatory information on Hillary Clinton as 'part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump.'"

That would have been inflated Goldstone's promises.

The report says "at the meeting the Russian attorney claimed that funds derived from illegal activities in Russia were provided to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats." Trump Jr. told a White House press officer that "they started with some Hillary thing, which was bs and some other nonsense, which we shot down fast."

As Veselnitskaya told me, she knew the Ziffs made contributions to Democrats. She probably started with that. Manafort's notes don't report a "Hillary thing," but are about Browder and the Ziffs.

On the issue of Browder, the Magnitsky story and the essence of the Trump Tower meeting, the Mueller Report is a deception intended to keep the myth of collusion in the air while dismissing that any collusion took place.

Lucy Komisar is an investigative reporter who writes about financial corruption and won a Gerald Loeb award, the most important prize in financial journalism, for breaking the story about how Ponzi schemer Allen Stanford got the Florida Banking Dept to allow him to move money offshore with no regulation. Her stories about William Browder focus on tax evasion. Find out more on The Komisar Scoop and on Twitter, @lucykomisar .

If you enjoyed this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

Zalamander , July 5, 2019 at 20:00

Joseph Mifsud, Konstanin Kilimnik and now Bill Browder have all been exposed as frauds. The Russiagate dominoes are collapsing one by one.

[Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... It wasn't to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton, which the Russian lawyer did not have and never produced. That was a ploy by Robert Goldstone, a British music publicist whose job is to get what his clients want, in this case, a meeting. So, recklessly, he invented the idea of Clinton dirt as a bait-and-switch to get Trump's people to come to it. He got the lawyer the meeting for her to lobby a potentially incoming administration against the Magnitsky Act, which is why she was in the United States in the first place. ..."
"... The lawyer lobbying against the act, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort that Browder's story was fake, a smokescreen to block the Russians from going after him for multi-millions in tax evasion. She argued the Magnitsky Act was built on this fraud. Manafort's notes, included in the Mueller Report, trace what she said. ..."
"... The Mueller investigators appear not to have looked into her charges. The report promotes Browder's fabrications, citing "the Magnitsky Act, which imposed financial sanctions and travel restrictions on Russian officials and which was named for a Russian tax specialist who exposed a fraud and later died in a Russian prison." ..."
"... But instead of his "lawyer" Magnitsky exposing Russian fraud, for which he was jailed and killed in prison, Magnitsky was actually Browder's accountant who was detained under investigation for his part in Browder's tax evasion and died of natural causes in prison, as Magnitsky's own mother admits to filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov in the film "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes." ..."
"... The documents include a deposition where Browder admits that the alleged "lawyer" Magnitsky did not go to law school nor have a law degree. Magnitsky's own testimony file identifies him as an "auditor." ..."
"... I interviewed Veselnitskaya in New York in November 2016. She explained what she later told the Trump group, that Browder's clients the Ziff Brothers had invested in Russian shares in a way that routed the money through loans so that they could evade U.S. taxes. ["Not invest – loans" in Manafort's notes.] ..."
Jul 03, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Consortiumnews Volume 25, Number 186 -- Saturday, July 6, 2019 INTELLIGENCE , RUSSIA , RUSSIAGATE , TRUMP ADMINISTRATION , U.S. Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax July 3, 2019 • 43 Comments

Save

Natalia Veselnitskaya didn't have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton and when the Russian lawyer met with Trump's people her focus was not on the 2016 campaign, writes Lucy Komisar.

By Lucy Komisar
Special to Consortium News

A "key event" described in the Mueller Report is the Trump Tower meeting where a Russian lawyer met with the president's son Donald Trump Jr, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Russiagaters have been obsessed with the meeting saying it was the smoking gun to prove collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to steal the 2016 election. Months after Mueller concluded that there was no collusion at all, the obsession has switched to "obstruction of justice," which is like someone being apprehended for resisting arrest without committing any other crime.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump team members in Trump Tower, and her interpreter, in background. (Lucy Komisar)

The Mueller report thus focuses instead on "efforts to prevent disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Russians and senior campaign officials."

But the report on this topic is deceptive. Ironically, as it attacks Donald Trump and top campaign officials for lying, the report itself lies about the issue the meeting addressed.

It wasn't to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton, which the Russian lawyer did not have and never produced. That was a ploy by Robert Goldstone, a British music publicist whose job is to get what his clients want, in this case, a meeting. So, recklessly, he invented the idea of Clinton dirt as a bait-and-switch to get Trump's people to come to it. He got the lawyer the meeting for her to lobby a potentially incoming administration against the Magnitsky Act, which is why she was in the United States in the first place.

The Magnitsky Act is a 2012 U.S. law that was promoted by William Browder, an American-born British citizen and hedge fund investor, who claimed his "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky had been imprisoned and murdered because he uncovered a scheme by Russian officials to steal $230 million from the Russian Treasury. It sanctioned Russians he said were involved or benefitted from Magnitsky's death. It has since been used by the U.S. to put sanctions on other Russians and nationals from other countries.

The lawyer lobbying against the act, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort that Browder's story was fake, a smokescreen to block the Russians from going after him for multi-millions in tax evasion. She argued the Magnitsky Act was built on this fraud. Manafort's notes, included in the Mueller Report, trace what she said.

Nothing Illegal

The Trump people did nothing illegal to meet with her. Their problem was the exaggerating communications Goldstone sent them about Veselnitskaya having "dirt" on Clinton. (While U.S. election laws says it's illegal for a campaign to receive "a thing of value" from a foreign source, it's never been established by a court that opposition research fits that description, the Mueller Report admits. ) Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats.

The Mueller investigators appear not to have looked into her charges. The report promotes Browder's fabrications, citing "the Magnitsky Act, which imposed financial sanctions and travel restrictions on Russian officials and which was named for a Russian tax specialist who exposed a fraud and later died in a Russian prison."

But instead of his "lawyer" Magnitsky exposing Russian fraud, for which he was jailed and killed in prison, Magnitsky was actually Browder's accountant who was detained under investigation for his part in Browder's tax evasion and died of natural causes in prison, as Magnitsky's own mother admits to filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov in the film "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes."

Mueller's investigators might have started with documents filed in U.S. federal court in the case of Veselnitskaya's client, Prevezon, a Russian holding company that settled a civil-forfeiture claim by the U.S. government that linked it, without proof, to the tax fraud.

The documents include a deposition where Browder admits that the alleged "lawyer" Magnitsky did not go to law school nor have a law degree. Magnitsky's own testimony file identifies him as an "auditor."

Why does that matter? Because it was Browder's red herring. Magnitsky had worked as Browder's accountant since 1997, fiddling on Browder's taxes on profits from sales of shares held by Russian shell companies run by his Hermitage Fund. He was not an attorney hired in 2007 to investigate and then expose a tax fraud against the Russian Treasury.

That fraud was exposed by Rimma Starova, the Russian nominee director of a British Virgin Islands shell company that held Hermitage's reregistered companies and who gave testimony to Russian police on April 9 and July 10, 2008 . It was reported by The New York Times and Vedomosti on July 24, 2008, months before Magnitsky mentioned it in an Oct. 7 interrogation.

Kremlin-connected?

Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. (Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Mueller Report says Veselnitskaya promised dirt on Hillary Clinton as "part of Russia and its government support for Trump." Two days before the meeting, Goldstone emailed Trump Jr. and said "the Russian government attorney" was flying in from Moscow. She had not been a government attorney since 2001, 15 years earlier.

I interviewed Veselnitskaya in New York in November 2016. She explained what she later told the Trump group, that Browder's clients the Ziff Brothers had invested in Russian shares in a way that routed the money through loans so that they could evade U.S. taxes. ["Not invest – loans" in Manafort's notes.]

The report says, "Natalia Veselnitskaya had previously worked for the Russian government and maintained a relationship with that government throughout this period of time." Later it says that from 1998 to 2001, she had worked as a prosecutor for the "Central Administrative District" of the Russian Prosecutor's office. "And continued to perform government-related work and maintain ties to the Russian government following her departure." We are meant to presume, with no evidence, as the media does – that means "a Kremlin-connected lawyer."

When Trump Jr asked for evidence, how the payments could be tied to the Clinton campaign, she said she couldn't trace them, according to the Mueller Report.

Then she turned to the Magnitsky Act. The report repeats earlier fakery: "She lobbied and testified about the Magnitsky Act, which imposed financial sanctions and travel restrictions on Russian officials and which was named for a Russian tax specialist who exposed a fraud and later died in a Russian prison." Magnitsky did not expose a fraud. Rimma Starova did.

A footnote in the report said: "Browder hired Magnitsky to investigate tax fraud by Russian officials, and Magnitsky was charged with helping Browder embezzle money." Browder did not hire Magnitsky to investigate the fraud. Magnitsky had been the accountant in charge of Hermitage since 1997, 10 years before the fraud. Embezzlement refers to Browder shifting assets out of Russia without paying taxes.

But the investigation's focus was not on Browder's fakery -- the substance of the Trump Tower meeting -- but on the communications organizing the event. The section on obstruction says Trump became aware of "emails setting up the June 9, 2016 meeting between senior campaign officials and Russians who offered derogatory information on Hillary Clinton as 'part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump.'"

That would have been inflated Goldstone's promises.

The report says "at the meeting the Russian attorney claimed that funds derived from illegal activities in Russia were provided to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats." Trump Jr. told a White House press officer that "they started with some Hillary thing, which was bs and some other nonsense, which we shot down fast."

As Veselnitskaya told me, she knew the Ziffs made contributions to Democrats. She probably started with that. Manafort's notes don't report a "Hillary thing," but are about Browder and the Ziffs.

On the issue of Browder, the Magnitsky story and the essence of the Trump Tower meeting, the Mueller Report is a deception intended to keep the myth of collusion in the air while dismissing that any collusion took place.

Lucy Komisar is an investigative reporter who writes about financial corruption and won a Gerald Loeb award, the most important prize in financial journalism, for breaking the story about how Ponzi schemer Allen Stanford got the Florida Banking Dept to allow him to move money offshore with no regulation. Her stories about William Browder focus on tax evasion. Find out more on The Komisar Scoop and on Twitter, @lucykomisar .

If you enjoyed this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.

Zalamander , July 5, 2019 at 20:00

Joseph Mifsud, Konstanin Kilimnik and now Bill Browder have all been exposed as frauds. The Russiagate dominoes are collapsing one by one.

[Jul 06, 2019] Back to Roman numerals in the USA? 56% of American parents not wanting Arabic numerals taught to their children

This level of ignorance is actually is pretty typical and not only for the USA... Kind of death sentence for democracy.
Jul 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Turkey, NATO and Russia - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Lars ,

Until you fix the problem with, according to a poll, 56% of American parents not wanting Arabic numerals taught to their children. I suspect that an equal number would not be able to find any of the mentioned places on a map.

Where those with crystal balls find certainty, I find something much less.

We do know that containment polices can work very well, but any involvement in the world's longest contested area is not worth the cost, nor the risk.

The US has already spent a fortune, with very little to show for it.

Maybe it is all about learning?

[Jul 06, 2019] Peace though procurement malpractice

Notable quotes:
"... The current batch of military hardware is so much garbage that when the President wants to use the "superb" pieces of crap (F35 and the new boats are prime examples) a general will have to become the sacrificial lamb and give the president the news that this stuff is for show only. ..."
Jul 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

cnchal, July 5, 2019 at 5:38 am

Peace though procurement malpractice. The current batch of military hardware is so much garbage that when the President wants to use the "superb" pieces of crap (F35 and the new boats are prime examples) a general will have to become the sacrificial lamb and give the president the news that this stuff is for show only.

[Jul 06, 2019] Believe it or Not, Pimplegate is REAL!

Notable quotes:
"... Yes, there is strong reason to believe that, during Tulsi's response to a question on Iran in the first debate, MSNBC technicians digitally implanted a pimple on Tulsi's chin. The "pimple" subsequently vanished. ..."
"... While placing a pimple on her chin is a childish prank, it is a childish prank played by one of the largest information company on the planet. It's not really a childish prank at that scale. ..."
"... Mics being turned off is another trick, not so childish, but still played out by a multibillion dollar institution. This is happening in a public policy event hosted by a news organization. ..."
Jul 06, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

veganmark on Fri, 07/05/2019 - 11:39pm

Take a look at these short videos:

Yes, there is strong reason to believe that, during Tulsi's response to a question on Iran in the first debate, MSNBC technicians digitally implanted a pimple on Tulsi's chin. The "pimple" subsequently vanished.

This bizarre behavior by MSNBC lends additional credence to claims by Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson that their mikes were turned off during portions of the debate.

Those responsible for this must be identified, fired, and, if feasible, prosecuted. Until MSNBC cooperates in these regards, it should be treated like a pariah. Complaints to the regulatory authorities are in order, and the public should be fully apprised of this. If this strategy of digital manipulation is not nipped in the bud NOW, who knows what dangerous frauds might await us in the future?

k9disc on Sat, 07/06/2019 - 12:34pm
Do You Think It Is Acceptable to Doctor Footage to Paint a

candidate in a bad light?

While placing a pimple on her chin is a childish prank, it is a childish prank played by one of the largest information company on the planet. It's not really a childish prank at that scale.

Mics being turned off is another trick, not so childish, but still played out by a multibillion dollar institution. This is happening in a public policy event hosted by a news organization.

It's rather ugly, IMO. And while I get the "distraction" angle, it's beyond that: it's a trial balloon. When it comes to psyops; we ain't seen nothin' yet.

@mimi

Jen on Sat, 07/06/2019 - 1:10pm
I did an eyeroll

@mimi I did an eyeroll when I first heard about it too. But then I started to understand. Tulsi is a beautiful woman, inside and out from what I've seen. I'm quite sure that her outer beauty is one thing that made lots of people google her.

Some people really are that superficial.

How would you go about trying to make her less beautiful without being overtly obvious? Did that pimple stop people from wanting to know who she is?

I really hope not. Personally, I think she's beautiful with or without a zit on her chin, but her message is what makes her shine so bright. They can't put a pimple on that.

[Jul 06, 2019] Brave Congressman Blasts 2-Party System as 'Existential Threat to America' then Quits His Party

Notable quotes:
"... In an inspiring op-ed on the 4th of July, the now-former Republican Congressman Justin Amash took to destroying the idea of identity politics, notably the two-party system, which he says is destroying the country. ..."
"... Amash declared that he is no longer going to identify with a party and declared himself an independent. ..."
Jul 04, 2019 | thefreethoughtproject.com

Brian James July 5, 2019 at 11:24

July 4, 2019 Brave Congressman Blasts 2-Party System as 'Existential Threat to America' then Quits His Party

In an inspiring op-ed on the 4th of July, the now-former Republican Congressman Justin Amash took to destroying the idea of identity politics, notably the two-party system, which he says is destroying the country.

Amash declared that he is no longer going to identify with a party and declared himself an independent.

https://thefreethoughtproject.com/congressman-declares-independence-america

[Jul 06, 2019] This election will spawn losers all over the place; the most tragic losers will be those that voted a supposed maverick into the high office in order to fight the 'liberal' or whatever establishment hoping to bring jobs back to the people.

Notable quotes:
"... you cannot fight the establishment with the establishment and Trump -who is a billionaire FFS- is another one who represents that. If he didn't he would not have been allowed to run. ..."
"... It is strange and telling that the discourse within the American public over the last 40 years or so allowed themselves to discuss and tackle to various levels of success issues like sexism, racism, institutional racism, misogyny, xenophobia, even sexuality and yes, even gun laws but one thing that is an absolute no-no in discourse is the economical and subsequentially political system. ..."
"... As long as people believe the American Dream is within reach to them, just like they believe it was for individuals like Trump, the economic system will remain its status quo and that is: riches for a few, struggles for many. ..."
"... You correctly state that you cannot fight the establishment with Trump. But I suggest he is the best choice. You assume a choice has been made to get that single person to help them. I suggest a choice has been made to plant a suicide bomber in the establishment. ..."
"... With Trump in that position, the entire credibility of the establishment has been destroyed. Trump is a clown. An idiot. Every time he spouting something misogynistic or racist he became a better weapon for the public to use to against the establishments structures. No better place for him than to have him as the Icon of the establishment. The (now) unacceptable face. ..."
"... As you say, the power is with the people. But they first must be angry and disgusted at the establishment. Clinton was not distasteful enough to rally the lefts anger. Trump is perfect. ..."
"... Trump will not stop the wars. All anyone had to do was look at the voting records of the republicans in office( that were reelected) that voted for more war equipment. They also wanted TTIP. Until the public realizes we have to change our state representatives nothing will change. ..."
Nov 10, 2016 | discussion.theguardian.com

CaptainSpaulding, 10 Nov 2016 10:42

This election will spawn losers all over the place; the most tragic losers will be those that voted a supposed maverick into the high office in order to fight the 'liberal' or whatever establishment hoping to bring jobs back to the people.

However, you cannot fight the establishment with the establishment and Trump -who is a billionaire FFS- is another one who represents that. If he didn't he would not have been allowed to run.

Just for the same reason that Bernie was squeezed out, not that I think he is a real socialist but one who would have come too close to do some real change. To quote Rosa Luxemburg: If an election would mean real change it would have been abolished

It is strange and telling that the discourse within the American public over the last 40 years or so allowed themselves to discuss and tackle to various levels of success issues like sexism, racism, institutional racism, misogyny, xenophobia, even sexuality and yes, even gun laws but one thing that is an absolute no-no in discourse is the economical and subsequentially political system.

As long as people believe the American Dream is within reach to them, just like they believe it was for individuals like Trump, the economic system will remain its status quo and that is: riches for a few, struggles for many.

The establishment will see for that and always find ways to maintain. One thing that has always worked perfectly fine is to find scapegoats like foreigners, immigrants, people on welfare, coloured people , minorities and so on. Can't even say this is typically American, it has worked most recently in the UK within the brexit discussion and in Germany and other places.

The power is with people, I remain optimistic; an election, though, will not change anything

SocTrap -> CaptainSpaulding 0 1

You correctly state that you cannot fight the establishment with Trump. But I suggest he is the best choice. You assume a choice has been made to get that single person to help them. I suggest a choice has been made to plant a suicide bomber in the establishment.

The problem has been that Obama has put an empathetic, intelligent and articulate face on the front of a deeply corrupted system. To attack the system one appears to be attacking him and that can be awkward.

With Trump in that position, the entire credibility of the establishment has been destroyed. Trump is a clown. An idiot. Every time he spouting something misogynistic or racist he became a better weapon for the public to use to against the establishments structures. No better place for him than to have him as the Icon of the establishment. The (now) unacceptable face.

As you say, the power is with the people. But they first must be angry and disgusted at the establishment. Clinton was not distasteful enough to rally the lefts anger. Trump is perfect.

BizaaroLand , 10 Nov 2016 10:42

One thing particular about Killery: I believe she was meant to deliver more war for her Davos employers. I've had enough of 'Mericuh's wars for profit, and to protect the Bankers fortunes. At this point I'm ready to vote for Idi Amin, if it stops the banker wars being waged for them by their proxy the United States.

boilingriver -> BizaaroLand 0 1

Trump will not stop the wars. All anyone had to do was look at the voting records of the republicans in office( that were reelected) that voted for more war equipment. They also wanted TTIP. Until the public realizes we have to change our state representatives nothing will change.

[Jul 06, 2019] Same old, same old, same old, same old. Prospective candidates spewing out the same tired old hot air about how, this time, it really, really, really, really will be different.

Notable quotes:
"... Just like Dubya. Just like Obomber. Just like the Orange Baboon. Whilst simultaneously begging for shekels from Adelson, Saban, Singer, Marcus. ..."
Jul 06, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

mark , July 3, 2019 at 00:17

Same old, same old, same old, same old. Prospective candidates spewing out the same tired old hot air about how, this time, it really, really, really, really will be different.

There won't be any more crazy multitrillion wars for Israel. Honest.

Just like Dubya. Just like Obomber. Just like the Orange Baboon. Whilst simultaneously begging for shekels from Adelson, Saban, Singer, Marcus.

... ... ...

[Jul 06, 2019] Many critics will blame Putin for betraying Assad, but I think he is merely showing that he is a master negotiator who recognizes the importance of 'good' relations with Turkey, and knows he will not get everything he wants in Syria

Notable quotes:
"... Buying S400 and losing F35 is a win win. ..."
"... Trump administration currently sees Turkey is essentially as a lever in relation to Iran. He suspects Erdo & Trump have a deal since the G20 whereby S-400 sanctions may be held in abeyance, in return for Turkey's acquiescence to, or even assistance with the maximum pressure campaign. ..."
"... Erdogan is still in the regime-changers' sights, under siege in all areas and consequently in a very weak position. I think those forecasting a full-scale defection into Russia's orbit misunderstand the realities of the maximum pressure campaign on Turkey itself and much further it can be pushed if need be. IMO it is more likely NATO will eventually welcome the reluctant black sheep back into the fold. ..."
"... Turkey is going to get their $4.3 billion dollars back at about the same time that Iran gets all of its money back, and Venezuela gets its gold back from the Bank of England - that is to say, never. As soon as Turkey asks for its money back, the US govt will impose sanctions on Turkey and that will be that. ..."
"... Any energy corridor that goes from the Persian Gulf to Europe has to pass through Turkey and also has to pass through either Syria or Iraq. The fact that Syria and Iraq are now effectively in Russia's sphere of influence makes a Turkish-Russian alliance make all the more sense. ..."
"... Reports from several months ago indicate the S-400 was cheaper than the Patriot, more mobile, and Russia was willing to share the technology and the US wasn't. Could be the S-400 being a better deal value factored in there somewhere. Putin? He's a businessman too. ..."
Jul 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

plantman , 06 July 2019 at 11:30 AM

What is most interesting to me, is that the Russian air force is actually pounding Turkey's militant allies on the ground in Idlib, but both men (Erdogan and Putin) are still strengthening their ties thru Turkstream, Russian tourism and building of a nuclear power plant. Diplomacy seems to have surpassed conditions on the ground in Syria.

Also, Iran's leaders feel slightly betrayed by Putin's deference to Erdogan. They must believe (as I do) that Putin has agreed to allow Turkey to occupy parts of Syria following the war.

Turkey has been very consistent on this issue from the very beginning...and it has plans to resettle parts of N Syria with the nearly 3 million refugees it is housing in S Turkey.

Many critics will blame Putin for betraying Assad, but I think he is merely showing that he is a master negotiator who recognizes the importance of 'good' relations with Turkey, and knows he will not get everything he wants in Syria. Compromise with Turkey opens up a path to ending the war and for pressuring US-Turkey relations which continue to worsen as Washington continues to support a de facto Kurdistan in E Syria.

Sbin , 06 July 2019 at 12:50 PM

Buying S400 and losing F35 is a win win.

Letting a committee design an aicraft instead of aerospace engineers is a bad idea. Pentagon should cut their loss much like with the Zumwalt program.

Barbara Ann , 06 July 2019 at 12:50 PM

M K Bhadrakumar is a great source for following the frenetic pace of developments in Eurasian geopolitics and he covered this very topic yesterday (see link).

His view of where the Trump administration currently sees Turkey is essentially as a lever in relation to Iran. He suspects Erdo & Trump have a deal since the G20 whereby S-400 sanctions may be held in abeyance, in return for Turkey's acquiescence to, or even assistance with the maximum pressure campaign.

Whilst S-400 delivery is contrary to US/NATO wishes/policy, it makes sense to me that it gets treated as a second order issue in this context. Turkey also wants Iran out of Syria, but if pushed even further into a corner Turkey could make life difficult for the US on Iran and therefore even potentially endanger Trump's re-election chances.

Erdogan is still in the regime-changers' sights, under siege in all areas and consequently in a very weak position. I think those forecasting a full-scale defection into Russia's orbit misunderstand the realities of the maximum pressure campaign on Turkey itself and much further it can be pushed if need be. IMO it is more likely NATO will eventually welcome the reluctant black sheep back into the fold.

The slippery Sultan has pushed it to the limit, but the anti-Iran coalition now needs him - at least in the short term. My guess is he gets to keep his shiny new AD system.

Where Turkey chooses to put it is a very interesting question; facing its ancient enemy in the West, or perhaps sited to cover the Cyprus EEZ and its oil?

https://indianpunchline.com/trump-outflanks-iran-to-the-west-and-east/

JJackson , 06 July 2019 at 12:53 PM

Re. 2 and possibly 5.

Does anyone understand the F35 deal between the participating partner nations.
Wikipedia say Turkey is a level 3 partner which cost it $4.3 billion and that sales are handled via the Pentagon.

Who decides if a partner in the project can be denied the right to buy their product? What I did not see is what F35 components were produced in Turkey and if they stopped exports what redundancy their was in the system.

Can Turkey say fine I will take my $4.3 billion back as the Russians and Chinese have both made me very attractive offers?

JamesT -> JJackson... , 06 July 2019 at 05:03 PM

Turkey is going to get their $4.3 billion dollars back at about the same time that Iran gets all of its money back, and Venezuela gets its gold back from the Bank of England - that is to say, never. As soon as Turkey asks for its money back, the US govt will impose sanctions on Turkey and that will be that.

Eugene Owens , 06 July 2019 at 01:14 PM

Regarding #1 and #2: S-400 is already in Algeria. And it will be in India by next year.

Reuters claims that Trump's good buddy King Salman signed a deal with Russia to buy S-400s.

Reuters also reported that Qatar was considering an S-400 purchase. So why is Pom-Pom only jumping on Turkey's back and not castigating the Saudis, Qataris, Algeriens, and Indians about the S-400? Keeping F-35 stealth capability from snooping by S-400s is the stated reason we don't want Turkey to have the S-400.

But when carrier based F35s are flying in the eastern Med, that stealth capability could be snooped on by the Algerien systems (or by Russian "field service reps" in Algeria with those systems). Ditto for the F35s in Italy. Could Israeli F35 stealth already be jeopardized by Russian system at Khmeimim AB in Syria?

#3 Idiots. But they are being used by Trump. He puts them up to it, so that he can pull back at the last minute and be Mr World Peace.

#4: State owned Rossiya TV lampooned Trump's Fourth of July celebration. Called it фигня (pronounced as 'fignya' and translates as bullshit). They mocked the tanks on display, said "the paint on these vehicles is peeling off. They have no cannons, and the optics were pasted on with adhesive tape" . Host Yevgeny Popov called the President "our Donald Trump" . Co-host Olga Skabeeva calls the parade "Putin's America" .

#5: See #3

#6 & 7: I was hoping #6 would stall #7, but I have serious doubts.

JamesT -> Eugene Owens... , 06 July 2019 at 04:44 PM

Eugene,

Is the S-400 in Algeria already? I have found reports that it was scheduled to be delivered in 2015 - but I can't find any reports on it actually being delivered. I don't think the Russians would have sold it to anyone other than Belarus and China until they had the S-500 ready to go.

Eugene Owens -> JamesT ... , 06 July 2019 at 09:48 PM

James -

Wiki says yes but their references to it are speculative.

Besides those there is a Business Insider article, German Edition, which claims Algeria has the S-400. It was dated last November.

Plus there is a report on Sputnik re S-400 in Algeria. But that is based on a MENAdefense.net article, which has photos (irrefutable they claim??) of several S-400 launchers in Algeria. Plus BAZ-64022 truck-tractors which are used with the S-400 and NOT the S-300. So maybe they do and are trying to hide the fact in order to avoid sanctions? Or maybe they have upgraded their S-300 PMU-2s to the PMU-3, which is a close match to the S-400. Or perhaps it is all propaganda?

Walrus , 06 July 2019 at 01:33 PM

Regarding the F35 and the S400, the obvious thing to do is to let them have both and swap information. We get S400 info and Russia gets F35 data.......except erdo will try and screw both of us.

The Twisted Genius , 06 July 2019 at 03:58 PM

I believe Putin's goal is to transform Turkey from a NATO state into an integral part of Russia's near abroad to eventually secure a guaranteed access to the Mediterranean and beyond and have a reliable buffer between Russia and Middle East. It's ensuring peace of mind, not rebuilding an empire.

JamesT -> The Twisted Genius ... , 06 July 2019 at 04:58 PM

TTG,

I think Putin's goal is more about forming a partnership with Turkey to build an energy corridor through Turkey to Europe. Control of this corridor, or at least membership in the alliance that controls this corridor, is a big deal from a geopolitical standpoint.

Thus Russia and Turkey can form something along the lines of an "OPEC on steroids" - Turkey can control who gets to pipe hydrocarbons to Europe and Russia can provide protection to those who wish to join their alliance (as they have already done for Syria).

Any energy corridor that goes from the Persian Gulf to Europe has to pass through Turkey and also has to pass through either Syria or Iraq. The fact that Syria and Iraq are now effectively in Russia's sphere of influence makes a Turkish-Russian alliance make all the more sense.

What Turkey has to gain from such an arrangement is not only transit fees for the hydrocarbons, but also a chance to develop their economy - if Turkey is at the head of the line for receipt of hydrocarbons to Europe, they are at the head of the line for building industry and businesses which use those hydrocarbons as inputs (eg refineries, plastics, aluminum, chemical production).

CK -> The Twisted Genius ... , 06 July 2019 at 05:09 PM

Access to the Med is already guaranteed by treaty just as is access to the Black Sea. Access beyond the Med is controlled at the Suez and the pillars of Hercules.

Eugene Owens -> CK... , 06 July 2019 at 10:01 PM

CK -

Guaranteed during peacetime. During any hostilities you can throw that treaty out the window.

Which is why TTG is correct that Putin's goal is to get Turkey out of NATO. And he may doublecross Assad by blessing Turkey's permanent occupation (or annexation) of those four districts of northern Aleppo Province (i.e. Afrin, Azaz, al-Bab, & Jarabulus). As payment for getting out of NATO.

Lars , 06 July 2019 at 05:52 PM

Until you fix the problem with, according to a poll, 56% of American parents not wanting Arabic numerals taught to their children. I suspect that an equal number would not be able to find any of the mentioned places on a map.

Where those with crystal balls find certainty, I find something much less. We do know that containment polices can work very well, but any involvement in the world's longest contested area is not worth the cost, nor the risk. The US has already spent a fortune, with very little to show for it.

Maybe it is all about learning?

Mark Logan , 06 July 2019 at 05:52 PM

Reports from several months ago indicate the S-400 was cheaper than the Patriot, more mobile, and Russia was willing to share the technology and the US wasn't. Could be the S-400 being a better deal value factored in there somewhere. Putin? He's a businessman too.

Yosemite Sam Bolton is probably being told to go out there and do his thing, and suffering from whip-lash when Trump yanks the carpet out from under them without apology. The poor dear must be like...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWYFxekoAsM

[Jul 06, 2019] I do think the protest against the Iraq war was a watershed moment, when the protests were simply ignored, and the in your face response by the powers that be.

Jul 06, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Herman , July 3, 2019 at 14:27

Went on Kunstler's website with the tasteless name and read comment about Hannity screaming to bomb Iran. And if Mr. Kunstler's facts are correct I imagine the Republicans will be saving Mueller's answers for the next election. Whatever Mr. Kunstler has to say, he says it well. What a mess. The way the bad guys have dug in and rigged the election process and the "News" business, it is difficult to imagine anything can change.

The controls of our society have become so efficient it is tempting to say what the hell and see if there is a good old film or an meaningful sporting event and let it go at that.

In saying that, it brings to mind the other CN article about anti-war sentiment and organizing against war and the war machine that has gone missing makes the point very well. I do think the protest against the Iraq war was a watershed moment, when the protests were simply ignored, and the in your face response by the powers that be.

Eddie S , July 4, 2019 at 10:01

"I do think the protest against the Iraq war was a watershed moment, when the protests were simply ignored, and the in your face response by the powers that be."

Yes, I know that the whole Iraq War-crime episode was an extremely disheartening episode to myself and millions of others who had marched in protest. It was horrible enough when the neo-cons were able to blatantly orchestrate an illegal invasion (with the obeisance of the long-cowed Democrats), but the RE-election of 'W' -- a year after the non-existence of the WMDs was proven by our OWN invading military -- was in a political sense worse because it showed that the majority of the US public was indifferent to illegal US invasions of other countries, so there would be little resistance in the future to these 'wars'.

It was only when the media was portraying the deaths & bad injuries to US soldiers occupying Iraq that a modest amount of public sentiment turned against the whole sordid episode.

So the tacit message was pretty clear to powers that be -- - as long as US troops aren't hurt, go-ahead and bomb-away those foreign men, women, and even children getting killed by them don't matter, especially if our military leaders offer-up oh-so-sincere apologies and state that 'these were unavoidable collateral civilian casualties because we only perform surgical strikes on terrorists' (and said in a most serious, gravitas-laden tone, so you KNOW they're telling the truth).

Windup , July 4, 2019 at 16:09

George wasn't 'elected' in the first place, let alone 're-elected'. I don't know if that makes you feel better. Maybe it does- at least about the American public (at that point in time anyway).

But it was certainly a forerunner to how we 'elect' our officials, which at this point is more blatantly fraudulent. At least to those of us not reading/watching msm.

[Jul 06, 2019] US is a Classic Empire and Is Becoming a Repressive Police State at Home by DAVE LINDORFF

Notable quotes:
"... The US today is a global empire. Our country's military, ballooning to some 2.1 million in uniform at a time that there is really no significant war underway. US military spending, greater in constant dollars than at any time since WWII, represents 34% of all global military spending, and the US military budget, depending on how one counts it, is larger than the next largest eight-to-ten countries' military budgets combined. ..."
"... And remember -- US empire and militarism is and has always been supported by both political parties. ..."
"... only 32% of Americans say they are "proud" (forget "extremely proud"!) of America's vaunted political system. In a close second for popular disgust, only 37% said they are "proud" of the US health care system. ..."
"... In my view, my country has become the world's leading "rogue" nation, dismissive of all international laws and codes of conduct, actively attacking many countries on its own authority, without the support of UN Security Council resolutions, exonerating war crimes committed by its soldiers, and committed to the first use of nuclear weapons, both as a first strike against major power rivals like Russia and China, and against non-nuclear nations like Iran, and equally dismissive of all efforts, large and small, to respond to the crisis of catastrophic global heating. ..."
Jul 05, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

... ... ...

The US today is a global empire. Our country's military, ballooning to some 2.1 million in uniform at a time that there is really no significant war underway. US military spending, greater in constant dollars than at any time since WWII, represents 34% of all global military spending, and the US military budget, depending on how one counts it, is larger than the next largest eight-to-ten countries' military budgets combined.

To show how ridiculously huge the US military is, consider that at $220 billion for fiscal year 2020, the US budget for Veterans Affairs alone (that's the agency that provides assistance of all kinds, including medical, to those who served in the military, not counting career soldiers who receive a pension that is counted separately) this one military budget line item is larger than the entire military budget of China, and is more than three times as large as the entire military budget of Russia, considered by many to be our primary "adversary"!

And remember -- US empire and militarism is and has always been supported by both political parties.

... ... ...

I read that a recent Gallup Organization poll shows a significant drop in the percentage of US Americans who are "extremely proud" of their country. True, 45% still say they are "proud" of America, but normally that is how many say they are "extremely proud" to be Americans. That's a significant fall-off. Even among normally super-patriotic Republicans the percentage of those saying they are "extremely proud" this July 4 of this country was down to 76%, a 10% drop from 2003, and close to the 68% low point reached at one point during the Obama administration.

The main cause of the loss of patriotic ardor appears to be dismay or disgust with the US political system. According to the poll, only 32% of Americans say they are "proud" (forget "extremely proud"!) of America's vaunted political system. In a close second for popular disgust, only 37% said they are "proud" of the US health care system.

So I guess I'm in pretty good company. I won't be oohing and aaahing at the local fireworks display this year. It's basically a glorification of US war-making anyhow, and there's nothing at all to be proud of in that regard, particularly with the US in the midst of a $1.5-trillion upgrade of its nuclear arsenal, threatening war with Iran, pulling out of a Reagan-era treaty banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles, and embarking in a new arms race both in space and in virtually unstoppable hypersonic cruise missiles.

In my view, my country has become the world's leading "rogue" nation, dismissive of all international laws and codes of conduct, actively attacking many countries on its own authority, without the support of UN Security Council resolutions, exonerating war crimes committed by its soldiers, and committed to the first use of nuclear weapons, both as a first strike against major power rivals like Russia and China, and against non-nuclear nations like Iran, and equally dismissive of all efforts, large and small, to respond to the crisis of catastrophic global heating. [

At home, the US legal system has become a supine supporter of virtually unlimited executive power, of unchecked police power, and of repressive actions against the supposedly constitutionally protected free press.

It's tempting to hope that the decline noted by Gallup in the percent of Americans expressing "extreme pride" and even of "pride" in the US, but support for the US among the country's citizens still remains shamefully high in the face of all these negatives.

Anyhow, count me among those who won't be celebrating today's July 4 national holiday.

Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: DAVE LINDORFF

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening! , an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

[Jul 06, 2019] Peace though procurement malpractice

Notable quotes:
"... The current batch of military hardware is so much garbage that when the President wants to use the "superb" pieces of crap (F35 and the new boats are prime examples) a general will have to become the sacrificial lamb and give the president the news that this stuff is for show only. ..."
Jul 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

cnchal, July 5, 2019 at 5:38 am

Peace though procurement malpractice. The current batch of military hardware is so much garbage that when the President wants to use the "superb" pieces of crap (F35 and the new boats are prime examples) a general will have to become the sacrificial lamb and give the president the news that this stuff is for show only.

[Jul 06, 2019] Back to Roman numerals in the USA? 56% of American parents not wanting Arabic numerals taught to their children

This level of ignorance is actually is pretty typical and not only for the USA... Kind of death sentence for democracy.
Jul 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Turkey, NATO and Russia - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Lars ,

Until you fix the problem with, according to a poll, 56% of American parents not wanting Arabic numerals taught to their children. I suspect that an equal number would not be able to find any of the mentioned places on a map.

Where those with crystal balls find certainty, I find something much less.

We do know that containment polices can work very well, but any involvement in the world's longest contested area is not worth the cost, nor the risk.

The US has already spent a fortune, with very little to show for it.

Maybe it is all about learning?

[Jul 06, 2019] The Antiwar Movement No One Can See by Allegra Harpootlian

Notable quotes:
"... "Each successor generation is less likely than the previous to prioritize maintaining superior military power worldwide as a goal of U.S. foreign policy, to see U.S. military superiority as a very effective way of achieving U.S. foreign policy goals, and to support expanding defense spending. At the same time, support for international cooperation and free trade remains high across the generations. In fact, younger Americans are more inclined to support cooperative approaches to U.S. foreign policy and more likely to feel favorably towards trade and globalization." ..."
"... Last year, for the first time since the height of the Iraq war 13 years ago, the Army fell thousands of troops short of its recruiting goals. That trend was emphasized in a 2017 Department of Defense poll that found only 14 percent of respondents ages 16 to 24 said it was likely they'd serve in the military in the coming years. This has the Army so worried that it has been refocusing its recruitment efforts on creating an entirely new strategy aimed specifically at Generation Z. ..."
"... These days, significant numbers of young veterans have been returning disillusioned and ready to lobby Congress against wars they once, however unknowingly, bought into. Look no further than a new left-right alliance between two influential veterans groups, VoteVets and Concerned Veterans for America, to stop those forever wars. Their campaign, aimed specifically at getting Congress to weigh in on issues of war and peace, is emblematic of what may be a diverse potential movement coming together to oppose America's conflicts. Another veterans group, Common Defense, is similarly asking politicians to sign a pledge to end those wars. In just a couple of months, they've gotten on board 10 congressional sponsors, including freshmen heavyweights in the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. ..."
"... In February 2018, Sanders also became the first senator to risk introducing a war powers resolution to end American support for the brutal Saudi-led war in Yemen. In April 2019, with the sponsorship of other senators added to his, the bill ultimately passed the House and the Senate in an extremely rare showing of bipartisanship, only to be vetoed by President Trump. That such a bill might pass the House, no less a still-Republican Senate, even if not by a veto-proof majority, would have been unthinkable in 2016. So much has changed since the last election that support for the Yemen resolution has now become what Tara Golshan at Vox termed "a litmus test of the Democratic Party's progressive shift on foreign policy." ..."
"... And for the first time ever, three veterans of America's post-9/11 wars -- Seth Moulton and Tulsi Gabbard of the House of Representatives, and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg -- are running for president, bringing their skepticism about American interventionism with them. The very inclusion of such viewpoints in the presidential race is bound to change the conversation, putting a spotlight on America's wars in the months to come. ..."
"... In May, for instance, Omar tweeted , "We have to recognize that foreign policy IS domestic policy. We can't invest in health care, climate resilience, or education if we continue to spend more than half of discretionary spending on endless wars and Pentagon contracts. When I say we need something equivalent to the Green New Deal for foreign policy, it's this." ..."
"... It is little recognized how hard American troops fought from 1965 to 1968. Our air mobile troops in particular made a great slaughter of NVA and VC while also taking heavy casualties. ..."
"... We were having such success that no one in the military thought the enemy could keep up the fight. Then, the Tet offensive with the beaten enemy attacking every city in the South. ..."
"... Perhaps there is no open anti-war movement because the Democratic party is now pro-war. ..."
"... President Obama, the Nobel peace prize winner, started a war with Libya, which had neither attacked nor threatened the US and which, by many accounts, was trying to improve relations with the US. GW Bush unnecessarily attacked Iraq and Clinton destroyed Haiti and bombed Yugoslavia, among other actions. ..."
Jul 02, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Originally from: TomDispatch.com

Peace activism is rising, but that isn't translating into huge street demonstrations, writes Allegra Harpootlian.

W hen Donald Trump entered the Oval Office in January 2017, Americans took to the streets all across the country to protest their instantly endangered rights. Conspicuously absent from the newfound civic engagement, despite more than a decade and a half of this country's fruitless, destructive wars across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, was antiwar sentiment, much less an actual movement.

Those like me working against America's seemingly endless wars wondered why the subject merited so little discussion, attention, or protest. Was it because the still-spreading war on terror remained shrouded in government secrecy? Was the lack of media coverage about what America was doing overseas to blame? Or was it simply that most Americans didn't care about what was happening past the water's edge? If you had asked me two years ago, I would have chosen "all of the above." Now, I'm not so sure.

After the enormous demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the antiwar movement disappeared almost as suddenly as it began, with some even openly declaring it dead. Critics noted the long-term absence of significant protests against those wars, a lack of political will in Congress to deal with them, and ultimately, apathy on matters of war and peace when compared to issues like health care, gun control, or recently even climate change .

The pessimists have been right to point out that none of the plethora of marches on Washington since Donald Trump was elected have had even a secondary focus on America's fruitless wars. They're certainly right to question why Congress, with the constitutional duty to declare war, has until recently allowed both presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump to wage war as they wished without even consulting them. They're right to feel nervous when a national poll shows that more Americans think we're fighting a war in Iran (we're not) than a war in Somalia ( we are ).

But here's what I've been wondering recently: What if there's an antiwar movement growing right under our noses and we just haven't noticed? What if we don't see it, in part, because it doesn't look like any antiwar movement we've even imagined?

If a movement is only a movement when people fill the streets, then maybe the critics are right. It might also be fair to say, however, that protest marches do not always a movement make. Movements are defined by their ability to challenge the status quo and, right now, that's what might be beginning to happen when it comes to America's wars.

What if it's Parkland students condemning American imperialism or groups fighting the Muslim Ban that are also fighting the war on terror? It's veterans not only trying to take on the wars they fought in, but putting themselves on the front lines of the gun control , climate change , and police brutality debates. It's Congress passing the first War Powers Resolution in almost 50 years. It's Democratic presidential candidates signing a pledge to end America's endless wars.

For the last decade and a half, Americans -- and their elected representatives -- looked at our endless wars and essentially shrugged. In 2019, however, an antiwar movement seems to be brewing. It just doesn't look like the ones that some remember from the Vietnam era and others from the pre-invasion-of-Iraq moment. Instead, it's a movement that's being woven into just about every other issue that Americans are fighting for right now -- which is exactly why it might actually work.

An estimated 100,000 people protested the war in Iraq in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 15, 2007 (Ragesoss, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

A Veteran's Antiwar Movement in the Making?

During the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s, protests began with religious groups and peace organizations morally opposed to war. As that conflict intensified, however, students began to join the movement, then civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. got involved, then war veterans who had witnessed the horror firsthand stepped in -- until, with a seemingly constant storm of protest in the streets, Washington eventually withdrew from Indochina.

You might look at the lack of public outrage now, or perhaps the exhaustion of having been outraged and nothing changing, and think an antiwar movement doesn't exist. Certainly, there's nothing like the active one that fought against America's involvement in Vietnam for so long and so persistently. Yet it's important to notice that, among some of the very same groups (like veterans, students, and even politicians) that fought against that war, a healthy skepticism about America's 21st century wars, the Pentagon, the military industrial complex, and even the very idea of American exceptionalism is finally on the rise -- or so the polls tell us.

"Arlington West of Santa Monica," a project of Veterans for Peace, puts reminders of the costs of war on the beach in Santa Monica, California. (Lorie Shaull via Flickr)

Right after the midterms last year, an organization named Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness reported mournfully that younger Americans were "turning on the country and forgetting its ideals," with nearly half believing that this country isn't "great" and many eyeing the U.S. flag as "a sign of intolerance and hatred." With millennials and Generation Z rapidly becoming the largest voting bloc in America for the next 20 years, their priorities are taking center stage. When it comes to foreign policy and war, as it happens, they're quite different from the generations that preceded them. According to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs ,

"Each successor generation is less likely than the previous to prioritize maintaining superior military power worldwide as a goal of U.S. foreign policy, to see U.S. military superiority as a very effective way of achieving U.S. foreign policy goals, and to support expanding defense spending. At the same time, support for international cooperation and free trade remains high across the generations. In fact, younger Americans are more inclined to support cooperative approaches to U.S. foreign policy and more likely to feel favorably towards trade and globalization."

Although marches are the most public way to protest, another striking but understated way is simply not to engage with the systems one doesn't agree with. For instance, the vast majority of today's teenagers aren't at all interested in joining the all-volunteer military. Last year, for the first time since the height of the Iraq war 13 years ago, the Army fell thousands of troops short of its recruiting goals. That trend was emphasized in a 2017 Department of Defense poll that found only 14 percent of respondents ages 16 to 24 said it was likely they'd serve in the military in the coming years. This has the Army so worried that it has been refocusing its recruitment efforts on creating an entirely new strategy aimed specifically at Generation Z.

In addition, we're finally seeing what happens when soldiers from America's post-9/11 wars come home infused with a sense of hopelessness in relation to those conflicts. These days, significant numbers of young veterans have been returning disillusioned and ready to lobby Congress against wars they once, however unknowingly, bought into. Look no further than a new left-right alliance between two influential veterans groups, VoteVets and Concerned Veterans for America, to stop those forever wars. Their campaign, aimed specifically at getting Congress to weigh in on issues of war and peace, is emblematic of what may be a diverse potential movement coming together to oppose America's conflicts. Another veterans group, Common Defense, is similarly asking politicians to sign a pledge to end those wars. In just a couple of months, they've gotten on board 10 congressional sponsors, including freshmen heavyweights in the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.

And this may just be the tip of a growing antiwar iceberg. A misconception about movement-building is that everyone is there for the same reason, however broadly defined. That's often not the case and sometimes it's possible that you're in a movement and don't even know it. If, for instance, I asked a room full of climate-change activists whether they also considered themselves part of an antiwar movement, I can imagine the denials I'd get. And yet, whether they know it or not, sooner or later fighting climate change will mean taking on the Pentagon's global footprint, too.

Think about it: not only is the U.S. military the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels but, according to a new report from Brown University's Costs of War Project, between 2001 and 2017, it released more than 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (400 million of which were related to the war on terror). That's equivalent to the emissions of 257 million passenger cars, more than double the number currently on the road in the U.S.

A Growing Antiwar Movement in Congress

One way to sense the growth of antiwar sentiment in this country is to look not at the empty streets or even at veterans organizations or recruitment polls, but at Congress. After all, one indicator of a successful movement, however incipient, is its power to influence and change those making the decisions in Washington. Since Donald Trump was elected, the most visible evidence of growing antiwar sentiment is the way America's congressional policymakers have increasingly become engaged with issues of war and peace. Politicians, after all, tend to follow the voters and, right now, growing numbers of them seem to be following rising antiwar sentiment back home into an expanding set of debates about war and peace in the age of Trump.

In campaign season 2016, in an op-ed in The Washington Post , political scientist Elizabeth Saunders wondered whether foreign policy would play a significant role in the presidential election. "Not likely," she concluded. "Voters do not pay much attention to foreign policy." And at the time, she was on to something. For instance, Sen. Bernie Sanders, then competing for the Democratic presidential nomination against Hillary Clinton, didn't even prepare stock answers to basic national security questions, choosing instead, if asked at all, to quickly pivot back to more familiar topics. In a debate with Clinton, for instance, he was asked whether he would keep troops in Afghanistan to deal with the growing success of the Taliban. In his answer, he skipped Afghanistan entirely, while warning only vaguely against a "quagmire" in Iraq and Syria.

Heading for 2020, Sanders is once again competing for the nomination, but instead of shying away from foreign policy, starting in 2017, he became the face of what could be a new American way of thinking when it comes to how we see our role in the world.

In February 2018, Sanders also became the first senator to risk introducing a war powers resolution to end American support for the brutal Saudi-led war in Yemen. In April 2019, with the sponsorship of other senators added to his, the bill ultimately passed the House and the Senate in an extremely rare showing of bipartisanship, only to be vetoed by President Trump. That such a bill might pass the House, no less a still-Republican Senate, even if not by a veto-proof majority, would have been unthinkable in 2016. So much has changed since the last election that support for the Yemen resolution has now become what Tara Golshan at Vox termed "a litmus test of the Democratic Party's progressive shift on foreign policy."

Nor, strikingly enough, is Sanders the only Democratic presidential candidate now running on what is essentially an antiwar platform. One of the main aspects of Elizabeth Warren's foreign policy plan, for instance, is to "seriously review the country's military commitments overseas, and that includes bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq." Entrepreneur Andrew Yang and former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel have joined Sanders and Warren in signing a pledge to end America's forever wars if elected. Beto O'Rourke has called for the repeal of Congress's 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that presidents have cited ever since whenever they've sent American forces into battle. Marianne Williamson , one of the many (unlikely) Democratic candidates seeking the nomination, has even proposed a plan to transform America's "wartime economy into a peace-time economy, repurposing the tremendous talents and infrastructure of [America's] military industrial complex to the work of promoting life instead of death."

And for the first time ever, three veterans of America's post-9/11 wars -- Seth Moulton and Tulsi Gabbard of the House of Representatives, and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg -- are running for president, bringing their skepticism about American interventionism with them. The very inclusion of such viewpoints in the presidential race is bound to change the conversation, putting a spotlight on America's wars in the months to come.

Get on Board or Get Out of the Way

When trying to create a movement, there are three likely outcomes : you will be accepted by the establishment, or rejected for your efforts, or the establishment will be replaced, in part or in whole, by those who agree with you. That last point is exactly what we've been seeing, at least among Democrats, in the Trump years. While 2020 Democratic candidates for president, some of whom have been in the political arena for decades, are gradually hopping on the end-the-endless-wars bandwagon, the real antiwar momentum in Washington has begun to come from new members of Congress like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Ilhan Omar who are unwilling to accept business as usual when it comes to either the Pentagon or the country's forever wars. In doing so, moreover, they are responding to what their constituents actually want.

As far back as 2014, when a University of Texas-Austin Energy Poll asked people where the U.S. government should spend their tax dollars, only 7 percent of respondents under 35 said it should go toward military and defense spending. Instead, in a "pretty significant political shift" at the time, they overwhelmingly opted for their tax dollars to go toward job creation and education. Such a trend has only become more apparent as those calling for free public college, Medicare-for-all, or a Green New Deal have come to realize that they could pay for such ideas if America would stop pouring trillions of dollars into wars that never should have been launched.

The new members of the House of Representatives, in particular, part of the youngest, most diverse crew to date , have begun to replace the old guard and are increasingly signalling their readiness to throw out policies that don't work for the American people, especially those reinforcing the American war machine. They understand that by ending the wars and beginning to scale back the military-industrial complex, this country could once again have the resources it needs to fix so many other problems.

In May, for instance, Omar tweeted , "We have to recognize that foreign policy IS domestic policy. We can't invest in health care, climate resilience, or education if we continue to spend more than half of discretionary spending on endless wars and Pentagon contracts. When I say we need something equivalent to the Green New Deal for foreign policy, it's this."

Ilhan Omar ✔ @IlhanMN

We have to recognize that foreign policy IS domestic policy. We can't invest in health care, climate resilience or education if we continue to spend more than half of discretionary spending on endless wars and Pentagon contracts. http://www. startribune.com/rep-ilhan-omar -with-perspective-of-a-foreigner-sets-ambitious-global-agenda/510489882/?om_rid=3005497801&om_mid=317376969&refresh=true

7,176 3:24 PM - May 28, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy Rep. Ilhan Omar, with 'perspective of a foreigner,' sets ambitious global agenda

From her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and with a growing international reputation, the former refugee is wading into debates over various global hot spots and controversies.

startribune.com

2,228 people are talking about this

A few days before that, at a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing, Ocasio-Cortez confronted executives from military contractor TransDigm about the way they were price-gouging the American taxpayer by selling a $32 "non-vehicular clutch disc" to the Department of Defense for $1,443 per disc. "A pair of jeans can cost $32; imagine paying over $1,000 for that," she said. "Are you aware of how many doses of insulin we could get for that margin? I could've gotten over 1,500 people insulin for the cost of the margin of your price gouging for these vehicular discs alone."

And while such ridiculous waste isn't news to those of us who follow Pentagon spending closely, this was undoubtedly something many of her millions of supporters hadn't thought about before. After the hearing, Teen Vogue created a list of the "5 most ridiculous things the United States military has spent money on," comedian Sarah Silverman tweeted out the AOC hearing clip to her 12.6 million followers, Will and Grace actress Debra Messing publicly expressed her gratitude to AOC, and according to Crowdtangle, a social media analytics tool, the NowThis clip of her in that congressional hearing garnered more than 20 million impressions.

Ocasio-Cortez calling out costs charged by military contractor TransDigm. (YouTube)

Not only are members of Congress beginning to call attention to such undercovered issues, but perhaps they're even starting to accomplish something. Just two weeks after that contentious hearing, TransDigm agreed to return $16.1 million in excess profits to the Department of Defense. "We saved more money today for the American people than our committee's entire budget for the year," said House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings.

Of course, antiwar demonstrators have yet to pour into the streets, even though the wars we're already involved in continue to drag on and a possible new one with Iran looms on the horizon. Still, there seems to be a notable trend in antiwar opinion and activism. Somewhere just under the surface of American life lurks a genuine, diverse antiwar movement that appears to be coalescing around a common goal: getting Washington politicians to believe that antiwar policies are supportable, even potentially popular. Call me an eternal optimist, but someday I can imagine such a movement helping end those disastrous wars.

Allegra Harpootlian is a media associate at ReThink Media , where she works with leading experts and organizations at the intersection of national security, politics, and the media. She principally focuses on U.S. drone policies and related use-of-force issues. She is also a political partner with the Truman National Security Project . Find her on Twitter @ally_harp .

This article is from TomDispatch.com .

Edwin Stamm , July 5, 2019 at 10:40

"How Obama demobilized the antiwar movement"
By Brad Plumer
August 29, 2013
Washington Post

"Reihan Salam points to a 2011 paper by sociologists Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, who find that antiwar protests shrunk very quickly after Obama took office in 2008 -- mainly because Democrats were less likely to show up:

Drawing upon 5,398 surveys of demonstrators at antiwar protests, interviews with movement leaders, and ethnographic observation, this article argues that the antiwar movement demobilized as Democrats, who had been motivated to participate by anti-Republican sentiments, withdrew from antiwar protests when the Democratic Party achieved electoral success, if not policy success in ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Heaney and Rojas begin by puzzling over a paradox. Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, but his first few years in office were rather different: "As president, Obama maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan. The antiwar movement should have been furious at Obama's 'betrayal' and reinvigorated its protest activity. Instead, attendance at antiwar rallies declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement dissipated.""

Rob , July 4, 2019 at 14:20

The author may be too young to realize that the overwhelming driving force in the anti-Vietnam War movement was hundreds of thousands of young men who were at risk of being drafted and sent to fight, die and kill in that godforsaken war. As the movement grew, it gathered in millions of others as well. Absent the military draft today, most of America's youth don't seem to give half a damn about the current crimes of the U.S. military. As the saying goes: They have no skin in the game.

bardamu , July 3, 2019 at 20:21

There has again been some shift in Sanders' public positions, while Tulsi Gabbard occupies a position that was not represented in '16, and HR Clinton was more openly bent on war than anyone currently at the table, though perhaps because that much of her position had become so difficult to deny over the years.

That said, Clinton lost to Obama in '08 because she could not as effectively deny her militarism. There was at the time within the Democratic Party more and clearer movement against the wars than there is now. One might remember the run for candidacy of Dennis Kucinich, for example. The 8 years of the Obama regime were a consistent frustration and disappointment to any antiwar or anticorporate voice within the Democratic Party, but complaints were muted because many would not speak against a Blue or a Black president. More than at any prior time, corporate media spokespersons could endorse radically pro-corporate positions and imply or accuse their opposition of racism.

That leaves it unclear, however, what any antiwar voices have to do with the Democratic Party itself, particularly if we take "the party" to mean the political organization itself as opposed to the people whom it claims to represent. The Party and the DNC were major engines in the rigging of the 2016 Democratic nomination–and also, lest we forget, contributors to the Donald Trump nomination campaign.

It should not escape us, as we search for souls and soulfulness among these remnants of Democratic Parties Past, that any turn of the party against war is surely due to Hillary Clinton's loss to presumed patsy candidate Donald Trump in 2016–the least and second-least popular major presidential contenders in history, clearly, in whichever order one wishes to put them.

There is some value in realism, then. So as much as one hates to criticize a Bernie Sanders in anything like the present field that he runs in, his is not a consistently antiwar position: he has gone back and forth. Tulsi Gabbard is the closest thing to an antiwar candidate within the Party. And under even under the most favorable circumstances, 2020 is at best not her year.

Most big money says war. scorched earth, steep hierarchy, and small constitution. Any who don't like it had best speak up and act up.

Jim Glover , July 3, 2019 at 17:43

I am for Tulsi, a Senator from Hawaii not a rep as this article says. Folk Music was in when the peace movement was strong and building, the same for Folk Rock who songs also had words you could get without Google.

So my way of "hoping" for an Anti-War/Peace Movement is to have a Folk Revival in my mind.

Nathan Mulcahy , July 3, 2019 at 14:11

The answer to the question why anti war movement is dead is so simple and obvious but apparently invisible to most Dems/libs/progressives (excuse my inability to discern the distinctions between labels). The answer points to our onetime "peace" president Obama. As far as foreign interventions go (and domestic spying, among other things) Obama had continued Baby Bush's policy. Even worse, Obama had given a bipartisan seal of approval (and legality) to most of Baby Bush's crimes. In other words, for 8 years, meaning during the "peace" president's reign, the loyal "lefty" sheeple have held their mouth when it came to war and peace.

Obama and the Dems have very effectively killed the ant war movement

P.Brooks , July 3, 2019 at 12:54

No More War

Don Bacon , July 3, 2019 at 12:29

The establishment will always be pro-war because there's so much money in it. Street demonstrations will never change that, as we recently learned with Iraq. The only strategy that has a chance of working is anti-enlistment. If they don't have the troops they can't invade anywhere, and recruitment is already a problem. It needs to be a bigger problem.

Anonymot , July 3, 2019 at 11:51

Sorry, ALL of these Democrat wannabes save one is ignorant of foreign affairs, foreign policy and its destruction of what they blather on about – domestic vote-getting sky pies. Oh yes, free everything: schools, health care, social justices and services. It's as though the MIC has not stolen the money from the public's pockets to get rich by sending cheap fodder out there to get killed and wounded, amputated physically and mentally.

Hillary signed the papers and talked the brainless idiocy that set the entire Middle East on fire, because she couldn't stand the sight of a man with no shirt on and sitting on the Russian equivalent of a Harley. She hates men, because she drew a bad one. Huma was better company. Since she didn't know anything beyond the superficial, she did whatever the "experts" whispered in her ears: War! Obama was in the same boat. The target, via gaining total control of oil from Libya to Syria and Iran was her Putin hate. So her experts set up the Ukraine. The "experts" are the MIC/CIA and our fearless, brainless, corrupt military. They have whispered the same psychotic message since the Gulf of Tonkin. We've lost to everyone with whom we've crossed swords and left them devastated and America diminished save for the few.

So I was a Sanders supporter until he backed the warrior woman and I, like millions of others backed off of her party. It's still her party. Everyone just loves every victim of every kind. They all spout minor variations on the same themes while Trump and his neocons quietly install their right wing empire. Except for one who I spotted when she had the independence to go look for herself in Syria.

Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate to be the candidate who has a balance of well thought through, realistic foreign policy as well as the domestic non-extremist one. She has the hurdle of being a too-pretty woman, of being from the remotest state, and not being a screamer. Even this article, written about peace by a woman fails to talk about her.

Tulsi has the registered voter count and a respectable budget, but the New York Times which is policy-controlled by a few of Hillary's billionaire friends has consistently shut her out, because Tulsi left the corrupt Hillary-owned DNC to back Sanders and Hillary never forgave her.

If you want to know who is against Trump and war, take 5 minutes and listen to what she really said during the 1st debate where the CBS folks gave her little room to talk. It will change your outlook on what really is possible.

https://www.tulsi2020.com/a/first-democratic-debate

P.Brooks , July 3, 2019 at 13:53

Hi Anonymot; I also exited my Sanders support after over 100 cash donations and over a years painful effort. I will never call him Bernie again; now it is Sanders, since Bernie makes him sound cute and cute was not the word that came into my mind as Mr. Sanders missed his world moment at the democratic election and backed Hillary Clinton (I can not vote for EVIL). Sanders then proceeded to give part of my money to the DNC & to EVIL Hillary Clinton.

So then what now? Easy as Pie; NO MORE DEMOCRATS EVER. The DNC & DCCC used Election Fraud & Election Crimes blatantly to beat Bernie Sanders. Right out in the open. The DNC & DCCC are War Mongering more then the Republicans which is saying allot. The mass media and major Internet Plateforms like Goggle & Facebook are all owned by Evil Oligarchs that profit from WAR and blatantly are today suppressing all dissenting opinions (anti Free Speech).

I stopped making cash donation to Tulsi Gabbard upon the realization that the Democrats were not at all a force for Life or Good and instead were a criminal organization. The voting for the lessor of two EVILs is 100% STUPID.

I told Tim Canova I could not support any Democrat ever again as I told Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi is still running as a criminal democrat. If she would run independent of the DNC then I would start to donate cash to her again. End of my story about Tulsi. I do like her antiwar dialog, but there is no; so called changing, the DNC from the inside. The Oligarchs own the DNC and are not supportive of "We The People" or the Constitution, or the American Republic.

The end of Tim Canova's effort was he was overtly CHEATED AGAIN by the DNC's Election Fraud & Election Crimes in his 2018 run for congress against Hillary Clinton's 100% corrupt campaign manager; who congress seated even over Tim's asking them not to seat her until his law suites on her election crimes against him were assessed. Election crimes and rigged voting machines in Florida are a way of life now and have been for decades and decades.

All elections must be publicly funded. All votes must be on paper ballots and accessible for recounts and that is just the very minimums needed to start changing the 100% corrupted election system we Americans have been railroaded into.

The supreme Court has recently ruled that gerrymandering is OK. The supreme court has proven to be a political organization with their Bush Gore decision and now are just political hacks and as such need to be ELECTED not appointed. Their rulings that Money is Free Speech & that Corporations are People has disenfranchised "We the People". That makes the Supreme Court a tool to be used by the world money elite to overturn the constitution of the United States of America.

No More War. No More War. No More War.

DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 16:40

Absolutely spot-on, superb comment, P .Brooks.

DW

Nathan Mulcahy , July 3, 2019 at 18:08

I saw the light (with what the Dems are really about) after Kucinich's candidacy. That made me one of the very few lefties in my circle not to have voted for Obama even the first time around. I hear a lot of talk about trying to reform the party from inside. Utter bu** sh**. "You cannot reform Mafia".

Ever since Kucinich, I have been voting Green. No, this is not a waste of my vote. Besides, I cannot be complicit to war crimes – that's what it makes anyone who votes for either of the two parties.

Steven , July 3, 2019 at 13:56

Wow you said a mouthful. It's worse than that its a cottage industry that includes gun running, drug running and human trafficking netting Trillions to the MIC, CIA and other alphabet agencies you can't fight the mark of the beast.

Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:01

I fully back/endorse Gabbard, but

The battering of Bernie is not fair. He is NOT a Democrat, therefore him being able to get "inside" that party to run AS a Dem put him in a tenuous situation. He really had no option other than to support HRC lest his movement, everyone's movement, would get extra hammering by the neocons and status quo powers. He wouldn't be running, again, had he not done this. Yeah, it's a bad taste, I get it, but had he disavowed HRC would the outcome -Trump- been any different? The BLAME goes fully on the DNC and the Clintons. Full stop.

I do not see AOC as a full progressive. She is only doing enough to make it appear so. The Green New Deal is stolen from the Green Party and is watered down. Think of this as "Obama Care" for the planet. As you should know, Gabbard's Off Fossil Fuels Act (OFF) actually has real teeth in it: and is closer to the Green Party's positions.

I support movements and positions. PRIMARY is peace. Gabbard, though not a pacifist, has the right path on all of this: I've been around long enough to understand exactly how she's approaching all of this. She is, however, taking on EVERYONE. As powerful a person as she is (she has more fortitude than the entire lot of combined POTUS candidates put together) going to require MASSIVE support; sadly, -to this point- this article doesn't help by implying that people aren't interested in foreign policy (it perpetuates the blockout of it- people have to be reeducated on its importance- not something that the MIC wants), people aren't yet able to see the connections. The education will occur will it happen in a timely way such that people would elect Gabbard? (things can turn on a dime, history has shown this; she has the makeup that suggests that she's going to have a big role in making history).

I did not support Bernie (and so far have not- he's got ample support; if it comes down to it he WILL get my vote- and I've held off voting for many years because there's been no real "peace" candidate on the plate). Gabbard, however, has my support now, and likely till the day I die: I've been around long enough to know what constitutes a great leader, and not since the late 60s have we had anyone like her. If Bernie gets the nomination it is my prediction that he will have Gabbard high on his staff, if not as VP: a sure fire way to win is to have Gabbard as VP.

I'm going to leave this for folks to contemplate as to whether Gabbard is real or not:

http://www.brasilwire.com/holy-war/

[excerpt:]

In a context in which Rio de Janeiro's evangelical churches have been accused of laundering money for the drug trafficking gangs, all elements of Afro-Brazilian culture including caipoeira, Jango drumming, and participation in Carnaval parades, have been banned by the traffickers in many favelas.

[end excerpt]

"caipoeria," is something that Gabbard has practiced:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw-njAmvZ80

"I trained in different martial arts since I was a kid including Capoeira -- an amazing art created by slaves in Brazil who were training to fight and resist against their slave masters, disguising their training with music, acrobatics, and dance. Yesterday I joined my friends Mestre Kinha and others at Capoeira Besouro Hawai'i for their batizado ceremony and some fun! " – Tulsi Gabbard December 9, 2018

The GOAL is to get her into the upper halls of governing power. If the people cannot see fit to it then I'll support Sanders (in the end) so that he can do it.

Harpootlian claims to see what's going on, but, unfortunately, she's not able to look close enough.

Anonymot, thank you for leading out here with Gabbard and her message.

michael , July 4, 2019 at 08:10

If Gabbard had the MSM coverage Buttigieg has received she probably be leading in the polls. It is surprising(?) that this supposedly anti-war author mentions corporatist Mayor Pete but not Gabbard.

David , July 4, 2019 at 19:55

She DOES (briefly)mention Gabbard, but she missed the fact that Gabbard is the most strongly anti-war candidate. She gets it entirely wrong about Buttigieg, who is strikingly pro-war, and supports getting in to a war with Iran.

Robert Harrow , July 3, 2019 at 15:54

And sadly, Ms. Gabbard is mired at the 1% mark in the polls, even after having performed so well in the debate.
This seems to me an indication of the public's lack of caring about our foreign wars.

antonio Costa , July 3, 2019 at 19:06

The reason she's "mired" is because a number of polls don't include her!! However they include, Marianne Williamson.

How's that for inverse totalitarianism par excellence .

Skip Scott , July 4, 2019 at 07:05

I did see one poll that had her at 2%. And given the reputation of many polling outfits, I take any professed results with a grain of salt. Tulsi's press coverage (what little she gets) has been mostly defamatory to the point of being libelous. If her strong performance continues in the primary debates despite all efforts to sabotage her, I think she could make a strong showing. That said, at some point she will have to renounce the DNC controlled democratic party and run as an Independent if she wants to make the General Election debates for 2020.

Piotr Berman , July 3, 2019 at 21:15

"Hillary signed the papers and talked the brainless idiocy that set the entire Middle East on fire, because she couldn't stand the sight of a man with no shirt on and sitting on the Russian equivalent of a Harley. She hates men "

If I were to psychologize, I would conjecture more un-gendered stereotype, namely that of a good student. He/she diligently learns in all classes from the prescribed textbooks and reading materials, and, alas, American education on foreign affairs is dominated by retirees from CIA and other armchair warriors. Of course, nothing wrong about good students in general, but I mean the type that is obedient, devoid of originality and independent thinking. When admonished, he/she remembers the pain for life and strives hard not to repeat it. E.g. as First Lady, Hillary kissed Arafat's wife to emulate Middle East custom, and NY tabloids had a feast for months.

Concerning Tulsi, no Hillary-related conspiracy is needed to explain the behavior of the mass media. Tulsi is a heretic to the establishment, and their idea is to be arbiters of what and who belongs to the "mainstream", and what is radical, marginal etc. Tulsi richly deserves her treatment. Confronted with taunts like "so you would prefer X to stay in power" (Assad, Maduro etc.) she replies that it should not be up to USA to decide who stays in power, especially if no better scenario is in sight. The gall, the cheek!

Strangely enough, Tulsi gets this treatment in places like The Nation and Counterpunch. As the hitherto "radical left" got a whiff of being admitted to the hallowed mainstream from time to time, they try to be "responsible".

Mary Jones-Giampalo , July 4, 2019 at 00:39

Yes! Thank You I was gritting my teeth reading this article #Tulsi2020

Eddie , July 3, 2019 at 11:42

The end of the anti-war movement expired when the snake-oil pitchman with the toothy smile and dark skin brought his chains we could beleive in to the White House. The so-called progressives simply went to sleep while they never criticized Barack Obama for escalating W. Bush's wars and tax cuts for the rich.

The fake left wing in the US remained silent when Obama dumped trillions of dollars into the vaults of his bankster pals as he stole the very homes from the people who voted him into office. Then along came the next hope and change miracle worker Bernie Sanders. Only instead of working miracles for the working class, Sanders showed his true colors when he fcuked his constituents to support the hated Hillary Clinton.

Let's start facing reality. The two-party dictatorship does not care about you unless you can pony up the big bucks like their masters in the oligarchy and the soulless corporations do. Unless and until workers end to the criminal stranglehold that the big-business parties and the money class have on the government, things will continue to slide into the abyss.

DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 11:33

An informed awareness of imperialism must also include an analysis of how "technology" is used and abused, from the use of "superior" weaponry against people who do not have such weapons, from blunderbuss and sailing ships, to B-52s and napalm, up to and including technology that may be "weaponized" against civilian populations WiTHIN a society, be it 24/7 surveillance or robotics and AI that could permit elites to dispense with any "need", on the part of the elites, to tolerate the very existence of a laborung class, or ANY who earn their wealth through actual work, from maids to surgeons, from machine operators to professors.

Any assumption, that any who "work", even lawyers or military officers, can consider their occupation or profession as "safe", is to assume that the scapegoating will stop with those the highly paid regard as "losers", such comfortable assumption may very well prove as illusory and ephemeral as an early morning mist before the hot and merciless Sun rises.

The very notions of unfettered greed and limitless power, resulting in total control, must be recognized as the prime drivers of endless war and shock-doctrine capitalism which, combined, ARE imperialism, unhinged and insane.

michael , July 3, 2019 at 11:06

This article is weak. Anyone who could equate Mayor Pete or the eleven Democrat "ex"-military and CIA analysts who gained seats in Congress in 2018 as anti-war is clueless. Tulsi Gabbard is anti-regime change war, but is in favor of fighting "terrorists" (created mostly by our CIA and Israel with Saudi funding). Mike Gravel is the only true totally anti-war 'candidate' and he supports Gabbard as the only anti-War of the Democrats.
In WWI, 90% of Americans who served were drafted, in WWII over 60% of Americans who served were drafted. The Vietnam War "peace demonstrations" were more about the Draft, and skin-in-the-game, than about War. Nixon and Kissinger abolished the Draft (which stopped most anti-war protests), but continued carpet bombing Vietnam and neighboring countries (Operations Menu, Freedom Deal, Patio, etc), and Vietnamized the War which was already lost, although the killing continued through 1973. The abolition of the Draft largely gutted the anti-war movement. Sporadic protests against Bush/ Cheney over Afghanistan and Iraq essentially disappeared under Obama/ Hillary in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan. Since their National Emergency proclamations no longer ever end, we are in a position to attack Venezuela (Obama), Ukraine (Obama), South Sudan (Obama), Iran (Carter, Clinton), Libya (Obama), Somalia (Obama), Yemen (Obama), Nicaragua (Trump) and even Burundi (Obama) and the Central African Republic (Obama). The continuing support of death squads in Honduras and other Latin American countries ("stability is more important than democracy") has contributed to the immigration crises over the last five years.
As Pelosi noted about Democratic progressives "there are like five of them". Obama not only failed to reverse any of the police state and warmongering of Bush/Cheney, he expanded both police state (arresting and prosecuting Chelsea Manning for exposing war crimes, as well as more whistleblowers than anyone in history), and wars in seven Arab Muslim countries. Black Americans, who had always been an anti-War bloc prior to Obama, converted to the new America. The Congressional Democrats joined with Republicans to give more to the military budget than requested by Trump. (Clinton squandered the Peace Dividend when the Soviet Union fell, and Lee Camp has exposed the $21 TRILLION "lost" by the Pentagon.)
The young author see anti-war improvements that are not there. The US is more pro-war in its foreign policies than at any time in its history. When there was a Draft, the public would not tolerate decades of war (lest their young men died). Sanctions are now the first attack (usually by National Emergencies!); the 500,000 Iraqi children killed by Clinton's sanctions (Madeline Albright: "we think it was worth it!") is just sadism and psychopathy at the top, which is necessary for War.

DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 11:38

Superb comment, michael, very much agreed with and appreciated.

DW

Anonymot , July 3, 2019 at 12:06

You are absolutely right. Obama and Hillary were the brilliant ideas of the MIC/CIA when they realized that NO ONE the Republicans put up after Bush baby's 2nd round. They chose 2 "victims" black & woman) who would do what they were told to do in order to promote their causes (blacks & get-filthy rich.) The first loser would get the next round. And that's exactly what happened until Hillary proved to be so unacceptable that she was rejected. We traded no new war for an administration leading us into a neo-nazi dictatorship.

Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:04

Thank you for this comment!

Mickey , July 3, 2019 at 10:47

Tulsi Gabbard is the only peace candidate in the Democratic Party

Mary Jones-Giampalo , July 4, 2019 at 00:41

Absolutely! #Tulsi2020

peter mcloughlin , July 3, 2019 at 10:43

Many current crises have the potential to escalate into a major confrontation between the nuclear powers, similar to the Cuban missile crisis, though there is no comparable sense of alarm. Then, tensions were at boiling point, when a small military exchange could have led to nuclear annihilation. Today there are many more such flashpoint – Syria, the South China Sea, Iran, Ukraine to name a few. Since the end of the Cold War there has been a gradual movement towards third world war. Condemnation of an attack on Iran must include, foremost, the warning that it could lead the US into a confrontation with a Sino-Russian alliance. The warning from history is states go to war over interests, but ultimately – and blindly – end up getting the very war they need to avoid: even nuclear war, where the current trend is going.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/

DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 10:36

Many truly superb, well-informed, and very enlightening comments on this thread.

My very great appreciation to this site, to its authors, and to its exceptionally thoughtful and articulate commenters.

DW

DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 10:20

I appreciate this author's perspective, research, and optimism.

Clearly, the young ARE far more open to embracing a future less warlike and hegemonic, while far too many of my generation are wedded to childish myth and fantasy around U$ driven mayhem.

However, I would suggest that vision be broadened beyond opposition to war, which opposition, while important, must be expanded to opposition to the larger issue of imperialism, itself.

Imperialism is not merely war, it includes economic warfare, both sanctions, internationally, and predatory debt loads, domestically, in very many nations of the world, as well as privatization of the commons (which must be understood to include all resources necessary to human existence).

Perpetual war, which profits only the few, is driven by precisely the same aims as pitting workers against each other, worldwide, in a "game" of "race to the bottom", creating "credit" rather than raising wages, thus creating life-long indebtedness of the many, which only benefits monopolized corporate interests, as does corporate ownership of such necessities as water, food production, and most channels of communication, which permits corporations to easily shape public perception toward whatever ends suit corporate purposes while also ensuring that deeper awareness of what is actually occurring is effectively stifled, deplatformed, or smeared as dangerous foreign fake news or as hidden, or even as blatant, racial or religious hatred.

Above all, it is critically important that all these interrelated aspects of deliberate domination, control, and diminishment, ARE talked about, openly, that we all may have better grasp of who really aligns with creating serious systemic change, especially as traditionally assumed "tendencies" are shifting, quickly and even profoundly.

For example, as many here point out, the Democrats are now as much a war party as the Republicans, "traditionally" have been, even as there is clear evidence that the Republican "base" is becoming less willing to go to war than are the Democratic "base", as CNN and MSNBC media outlets strive to incite a new Cold War and champion and applaud aggression in Syria, Iran, and North Korea.

It is the elite Democratic "leadership" and most Democratic Presidential hopefuls who now preach or excuse war and aggression, with few actual exceptions, and none of them, including Tulsi Gabbard, have come anywhere near openly discussing or embracing, the end of U$ imperialism.

Both neoliberal and neocon philosophies are absolutely dedicated to imperialism in all its destructive, even terminal, manifestations.

Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:16

Exactly!

Gabbard has spoken out against sanctions. She understands that they're just another form of war.

The younger generations won't be able to financially support imperialist activities. And, they won't be, as the statements to their enlistment numbers suggest, able to "man the guns." I'm thinking that TPTB are aware of this (which is why a lot of drone and other automation of war machinery has been stepped up).

The recent alliance of Soros and Charles Koch, the Quincy Institute, is, I believe, a KEY turning point. Pretty much everything Gabbard is saying/calling for is this institute's mission statement: and people ought to note that Gabbard has been in Charles Koch's circle- might very well be that Gabbard has already influenced things in a positive way.

I also believe that all the great independent journalists, publishers (Assange taking the title here) and whistleblowers (Manning taking the title here) have made a HUGE impact. Bless them all.

O Society , July 3, 2019 at 09:48

The US government consistently uses psychological operations on its own citizens to manufacture consent to kill anyone and everyone. Meaningless propaganda phrases such as "Support Our Troops" and "National Security" and "War on Terror" are thrown around to justify genocides and sieges and distract us from murder. There is no left wing or in American politics and there has not been one since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. All we have is neoconservatives and neoliberals representing the business party for four decades. Killing is our business and business is good. Men are as monkeys with guns when it comes to politics and religion.

http://osociety.org/2019/07/03/the-science-of-influencing-people-six-ways-to-win-an-argument/

jmg , July 3, 2019 at 13:55

Seen on the street:

Support Our Troops
BRING THEM HOME NOW

https://media.salon.com/2003/03/the_billboard_bush_cant_see.jpg

Bob Van Noy , July 3, 2019 at 08:39

New

Bob Van Noy , July 3, 2019 at 08:42

New and better link here:
https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/_cache/files/7/e/7ebd2b61-aa29-49ac-9991-53a53da6a57f/3163D991E047042C0F52C929A2F60231.israel-syria-letter-5-21.pdf

Gregory Herr , July 3, 2019 at 21:40

One might be hard-pressed to find more outright perversions of reality in a mere two pages of text. Congratulations Congress, you have indeed surpassed yourself.

So it's those dastardly Russians and Iranians who are responsible for the destabilization of the Middle East, "complicating Israel's ability to defend itself from hostile action emanating from Syria." And apparently, it's the "ungoverned space" in Syria that has "allowed" for the rise of terrorist factions in Syria, that (we must be reminded) are ever poised to attack "Western targets, our allies and partners, and the U.S. homeland."

Good grief.

Bob Van Noy , July 3, 2019 at 08:29

Thank you Joe Lauria and Consortiumnews.

There is much wisdom and a good deal of personal experience being expressed on these pages. I especially want to thank IvyMike and Dao Gen. Ivy Mike you're so right about our troops in Vietnam from 1965 to 1968, draftees and volunteers, they fought what was clearly an internal civil war fought valiantly, beyond that point, Vietnam was a political mess for all involved. And Dao Gen all of your points are accurate.

As for our legislators, please read the linked Foreign Affairs press release signed by over 400 leglislators On May 20th., 2019 that address "threats to Syria" including the Russia threat. Clearly it will take action by the People and Peace candidates to end this travesty of a foreign policy.

https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/2019/5/nearly-400-lawmakers-call-on-trump-to-address-threats-in-syria

Is your legislator a signee of this list? All of mine are

James Clooney , July 3, 2019 at 10:11

Vietnam a war triggered by the prevention of a mandated election by the USA which Ho Chi Minh was likely to win, who had already recently been Premier of a unified Vietnam.

Sorry, being courageous in a vicious cause is not honorable.

Speaking a true history and responsibility is honorable.

Bob Van Noy , July 3, 2019 at 11:07

No need to be sorry James Clooney. I did not mention honor in my comment, I mentioned valiant (courage and determination). American troupes ultimately fight honorably for each other not necessarily for country. This was the message and evaluation of Captain Hal Moore To General Westmorland And Robert McNamera after the initial engagement of US troops and NVA and can be viewed as a special feature of the largely inaccurate DVD "We Were Soldiers And Young).

Karen , July 3, 2019 at 07:59

The veterans group About Face is doing remarkable work against the imperial militarization that threatens to consume our country and possibly the world. This threat includes militarization of US police, a growing nuclear arms race, and so-called humanitarian wars. About Face is also working to train ordinary people as medics to take these skills into their communities whose members are on the front lines of police brutality.
Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate with a strong, enlightened understanding of the costs of our many imperial wars Costs to ourselves in the US and costs to the people we invade in order to "save" them. I voted for McGovern in 1972. I would vote for Tuldi's Gabbard in 2020 if given the chance.

Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:35

Vote for her now by supporting her*! One cannot wait until the DNC (or other party) picks the candidate FOR us. Anyone serious about peace ought to support her, and do it now and far into the future. I have always supported candidates who are champions for peace, no matter their "party" or whatever: I did not, though I wish that I had, support Walter Jones -of Freedom Fries fame- after he did a 180 (Gabbard knew Jones, and respected him); it took a lot of guts for him to do this, but his honest (like Ron Paul proved) was proven and his voters accepted him (and likely shifted their views along with him).

* Yeah, one has to register giving money, but for a lousy $1 She has yet to qualify for the third debate (need 130k unique donations): and yet Yang has! (nothing against him, but come on, he is not "Commander in Chief" material [and at this time it is, as Gabbard repeats, the single most important part of being president]).

Mary Jones-Giampalo , July 4, 2019 at 00:43

Strongly agree Only Tulsi

triekc , July 3, 2019 at 07:14

Not surprising there was little or no antiwar sentiment in the newfound civic engagement after Trump's election, since the majority of those participating were supporters of the war criminals Obama, Clinton, and their corporate, war mongering DEM party. Those same people today, support Obama-chaperone Biden, or one of the other vetted corporate DEMs, including socialist-in-name-only Sanders, who signed the DEM loyalty oath promising to continue austerity for the poor, socialism for rich, deregulation, militarism, and global war hegemony. The only party with an antiwar blank was the Green Party, which captured >2% of the ~130 million votes in the rigged election- even though Stein is as competent as Clinton, certainly more competent than Trump, and the Green platform, unlike Sanders', explained how to pay for social and environmental programs by ending illegal wars in at least 7 countries, closing 1000 military command posts located all over earth, removing air craft carrier task forces from every ocean, cutting defense spending.

James Clooney , July 3, 2019 at 10:22

I believe the CIA operation "CARWASH" was under Obama, which gave us Ultra fascism in one of the largest economies in the world, Brazil.

DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 12:02

Superb comment, trieke, and I especially appreciate your mention of Jill Stein and the Green Party.

It is unfortunate that the the Green New Deal, championed by AOC is such a pale and intentionally pusillanimous copy of the Green New Deal articulated by Stein, which pointedly made clear that blind and blythe economic expansion must cease, that realistic natural constraints and carrying capacity be accepted and profligate energy squandering come to an end.

That a sane, humane, and sustainable economic system, wholly compatible with ecological responsibility can provide neaningful endeavor, justly compensated, for all, as was coherently addressed and explained to any who cared to examine the substance of that, actual, and realistic, original, GND.

Such a vision must be part of successfully challenging, and ending, U$ imperialism.

Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:53

And Trump likely signed a GOP pledge. It's all superficial crap, nothing that is really written in stone.

I LOVE Stein. But for the sake of the planet we have little time to wait on getting the Green Party up to speed (to the clasp the levers of power). Unless Gabbard comes out on top (well, the ultimate, and my favorite, long-shot would be Gravel, but reality is something that I have to accept) it can only really be Sanders. I see a Sanders nomination as being the next best thing (and, really, the last hope as it all falls WAY off the cliff after that). He would most certainly have Gabbard along (if not as VP, which is the best strategy for winning, then as some other high-ranking, and meaningful cabinet member). Also, there are a lot of folks that would be coming in on his coattails. It is THESE people that will make the most difference: although he's got his flaws, Ro Kana would be a good top official. And, there are all the supporters who would help push. Sanders is WAY better than HRC (Obama and, of course, Trump). He isn't my favorite, but he has enough lean in him to allow others to help him push the door open: I'll accept him if that's what it take to get Gabbard into all of this.

Sometimes you DO have to infiltrate. Sanders is an infiltrator (not a Dem), though he treads lightly. Gabbard has already proven her intentions: directly confronted the DNC and the HRC machine (and her direct attack on the MIC is made very clear); and, she is indirectly endorsed by some of the best people out there who have run for POTUS: Jill Stein; Ron Paul; Mike Gravel. We cannot wait for the Dems (and the MIC) to disarm. We need to get inside "the building" and disarm. IF Sanders or Gabbard (and no Gravel) don't get the nomination THEN it is time to open up direct "warfare" and attack from the "outside" (at this time there should be enough big defectors to start swinging the tide).

Eddie S , July 3, 2019 at 23:34

Yes trieke, I voted for Stein in 2016, and I plan on voting Green Party again in 2020. I see too many fellow progressives/liberals/leftists (whatever the hell we want to call ourselves) agonizing about which compromised Democrat to vote-for, trying to weigh their different liabilities, etc. I've come to believe that my duty as a voter is to vote for the POTUS candidate/party whose stances/platform are closest to my views, and that's unequivocally the Green Party. My duty as a voter does NOT entail 'voting for a winner', that's just part of the two-party-con that the Dems & Reps run.

jmg , July 3, 2019 at 07:06

The big difference is that, during the Vietnam years, people could *see* the war. People talked a lot about "photographs that ended the Vietnam war", such as the napalm girl, etc.

The government noticed this. There were enormous pressures on the press, even a ban on returning coffin photos. Now, since the two Iraq wars, people *don't see* the reality of war. The TV and press don't show Afghanistan, don't show Yemen, didn't show the real Iraq excepting for Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who are in prison because of this.

And the wars go on:

"The US government and military are preventing the public from seeing photographs that depict the true horror of the Iraq war."

Dan Kennedy: Censorship of graphic Iraq war photographs -- 29 Jul 2008
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jul/29/iraqandthemedia.usa

jmg , July 3, 2019 at 18:36

For example, we all know that mainstream media is war propaganda now, itself at war on truth and, apart from some convenient false flags to justify attacks, they very rarely let the very people suffering wars be heard to wake viewers up, and don't often even show this uncensored reality of war anymore, not like the true images of this old, powerful video:

Happy Xmas (War Is Over! If You Want It)

So this is Xmas
And what have you done
-- John Lennon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY7gPcDFwQc

Dao Gen , July 3, 2019 at 05:20

mbob -- thank you -- has already put this very well, but it is above all the Dems, especially Obama and the Clintons, who killed the antiwar movement. Obama was a fake, and his foreign policy became even more hawkish after Hillary resigned as SoS. His reduction of Libya, the richest state in Africa, to a feudal chaotic zone in which slavery is once more prominent and his attempt to demonize Syria, which has more semi-democracy and women's rights than any of the Islamic kingdoms the US supports as its allies, and turn Syria into a jihadi terrorist hell, as well as Obama's bombing of other nations and his sanctions on still other nations such as Venezuela, injured and killed at least as many people as did GW Bush's invasion of Iraq. Yet where was the antiwar movement? In the 21st century the US antiwar movement has gained most of its strength from anti-Repub hatred. The current uptick of antiwar feeling is probably due mostly to hatred of Trump. Yet Trump is the first president since Carter not to invade or make a major attack on a foreign country. As a businessman, his policy is to use economic warfare instead of military warfare.

I am not a Trump supporter, and strong sanctions are a war crime, and Trump is also slow to reduce some of Obama's overseas bombing and other campaigns, yet ironically he is surely closer to being a "peace president" than Obama. Moreover, a major reason Trump won in 2016 was that Hillary was regarded as the war and foreign intervention candidate, and in fact if Hillary had won, she probably would have invaded Syria to set up her infamous "no-fly zone" there, and she might have bombed Iran by now. We might even be in a war with Russia now. At the same time, under Trump the Dem leadership and the Dem-leaning MSM have pursued an unabashedly neocon policy of attacking from the right Trumps attempts at detente with Russia and scorning his attempts to negotiate a treaty with N Korea and to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan. The main reason why Trump chose dangerous neocons like Bolton and Pompeo as advisors was probably to shield himself a little from the incessant and sometimes xenophobic attacks from the Dem leadership and the MSM. The Dem leadership seems motivated not only by hatred of Trump but also, and probably more importantly, by a desire to get donations from the military-industrial complex and a desire to ingratiate itself with the Intel Community and the surveillance state in order to get various favors. Look, for example, at Adam Schiff, cheerleader-in-chief for the IC. The system of massive collusion between the Dem party elite and the US deep state was not as advanced during the Vietnam War era as it is now. 2003 changed a lot of things.

The only Dem presidential candidates who are philosophically and securely antiwar are Gabbard and Gravel. Even Bernie (and even more so, Warren) can't be trusted to stand up to the deep state if elected, and anyway, Bernie's support for the Russiagate hoax by itself disqualifies him as an antiwar politician, while the Yemen bill he sponsored had a fatal loophole in it, as Bernie well knew. I love Bernie, but he is neither antiwar nor anti-empire. As for Seth Moulton, mentioned in the article, he is my Rep, and he makes some mild criticisms of the military, but he is a rabid hawk on Syria and Iran, and he recently voted for a Repub amendment that would have punished Americans who donate to BDS organizations. And as for the younger generation of Dems, they are not as antiwar as the article suggests. For every AOC among the newly elected Dems in 2018, there were almost two new Dems who are military vets or who formerly worked for intel agencies. This does not bode well. As long at the deep state, the Dem elite, and the MSM are tightly intertwined, there will be no major peace movement in the near future, even if a Dem becomes president. In fact, a Dem president might hinder the formation of a true antiwar movement. Perhaps when China becomes more powerful in ten or twenty years, the unipolar US empire and permanent war state will no longer look like a very good idea to a large number of Americans, and the idea of a peace movement will once again become realistic. The media have a major role to play in spreading truthful news about how the current US empire is hurting domestic living standards. Rather than hopey-hope wish lists, no-holds-barred reporting will surely play a big role.

DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 12:05

Absolutely superb comment, Dao Gen.

DW

Seer , July 3, 2019 at 15:07

Another fine example of why I think there is hope! (some very sharp commentators!)

A strong leader can make all the difference. The example gets set from the top: not that this is my preference, just that it's the reality we have today. MLK Jr. was such a leader, though it was MANY great people that were in his movement/orbit that were the primary architects. I suppose you could say it's a "rally around the flag" kind of deal. Just as Trump stunned the System, I believe that it can be stunned from the "left" (the ultimate stunning would be from a Gravel win, but I'm thinking that Gabbard would be the one that has what it takes to slip past).

I really wish that people would start asking candidates who they think have been good cabinet members for various positions. This could help give an idea of the most important facet of an administration: who the POTUS selects as key cabinet members tells pretty much everything you need to know. Sadly, Trump had a shot at selecting Gabbard and passed on her: as much as I detest Trump, I gave him room in which to work away from the noecon/neolib death squads (to his credit he's mostly just stalemated them- for a rookie politician you could say that this has been an impressive feat; he's tried to instigate new wars but has, so far, "failed" [by design?]).

geeyp , July 3, 2019 at 01:19

"We saved more money today for the American people ." – Elijah Cummings. Yea? Well then, give it to us!! You owe us a return of our money that you have wasted for years.

mark , July 3, 2019 at 00:17

Same old, same old, same old, same old. Prospective candidates spewing out the same tired old hot air about how, this time, it really, really, really, really will be different. There won't be any more crazy multitrillion wars for Israel.
Honest. Just like Dubya. Just like Obomber. Just like the Orange Baboon. Whilst simultaneously begging for shekels from Adelson, Saban, Singer, Marcus.

And this is the "new anti war movement." Yeah.

Tom Kath , July 3, 2019 at 00:04

Every extreme elicits an extreme response. Our current western pacifist obsession is no exception. By prohibiting argument, disagreement, verbal conflict, and the occasional playground "dust up" on a personal level, you seem to make the seemingly less personal war inevitable.

Life on earth is simply not possible without "a bit of biff".

James Clooney , July 3, 2019 at 09:38

An aware person may not react extremely to a extreme. USA slaughtered 5 to 10 million Vietnamese for no apparent reason other than projection of power yet the Vietnamese trade with the USA today.

Who prohibits argument? Certainly not those with little power; it's the militarily and politically powerful that crush dissent, (Tinamen Square , Occupy Wall Street). How much dissent does the military allow? Why is Assange being persecuted?

I believe even the most militant pacifist would welcome a lively debate on murder, death and genocide, as a channel for education and edification.

Antonio Costa , July 2, 2019 at 20:53

Weak essay. AOC hops from cause to cause. She rarely/ever says anything about US regime change wars, and the bombing of children. She's demonstrated no anti-war bona fides.

Only Tulsi Gabbard has forthright called for an end to regime change wars, the warmongers and reduction in our military.

The power is with the powerful. We'll not see an end to war, nor Medicare for All or much of anything regarding student debt. These are deep systemic problems calling for systemic solutions beginning with how we live on the planet(GND is a red herring), the GDP must become null and void if we are to behave as if plundering the planet is part of "progress". It needs to be replaced to some that focuses on quality of life as the key to prosperity. The geopolitics of the world have to simply STOP IT. It's not about coalitions between Russia and China and India to off-set the US imperialists. That's an old game for an empty planet. The planet is full and exceeding it capacity and is on fire. Our geopolitics must end!

Not one of these candidates come close to focusing on the systemic problem(s) except Gabbard's focus on war because it attacks the heart of the American Imperial Empire.

Maxime , July 3, 2019 at 09:24

I agree with you that you americans will probably not see the end of your system and the end of your problems any time soon.

BUT I disagree on that you seems to think it's inevitable. I'm not american, I'm french, and reading you saying you think medicare for all, no student debt and end to endless wars are systemic problems linked to GDP and the current economic system is well, amusing. We have medicare for all, in fact even better than your medicare, we have no student cost for our educating system, and still in both cases often better results than yours, even if we are behind some of our northern neighbors, but they don't pay for these either. And we don't wage endless wars, even if we have ourselves our own big war problems, after all we were in Lybia, we are in Syria, we are in Mali and other parts of Africa.

We also have a big militaro-industrial complex, in fact very alike the american one. But we made clear since much longer than we would not accept as much wars, in part because the lesson we got from WW2 and Cold War was to learn to live together with our hated neighbor. You know, the one the other side of the Rhine. Today France is a diplomatic superpower, often the head of the european spear onthe subject, we got feared elite military, and we are proud of that, but we would not even accept more money (in proportion) given to our military complex.

And you know the best news (for the americans)? we have an history of warmongering going back millenias. We learn to love Caesar and the "Guerre des Gaules", his invasion of Gauls. We learn how Franks invaded their neighbors and built the first post-roman Empire. We learn how crusaders were called Franks, how we built our nation and his pride on ashes of european continental english hopes and german holy empire aspirations. We learn how Napolean nearly achieved to built a new continental Empire, how we never let them passed at Verdun, and how we rose in the face of a tyran in 1944.

All of this is still in our history books, and we're still proud of it. But today, if most of us were to be asked what we were proud about recent wars France got into, it would be how our president vetoed USA when they tried to got UN into Irak and forced them to invade illegally, and without us.
I think my country's revelation was Algeria's independance war. One bloody and largely filled with war crimes and crimes against humanity. We're ashamed of it, and I think we, as a nation, learned from it that stopping wars on our soil wasn't enough. I still don't understand how americans can still wage wars after Vietnam, but I am not american. Still, even the most warmongering nation can learn. Let's hope you will be quicker than us, because we got millennias of bloody history before even the birth of USA.

Eddie S , July 3, 2019 at 23:15

Thanks Maxime for a foreign perspective! I'm often curious what people in foreign countries think of our current politics in the US,especially when I read analysis/commentaries by US writers (even ones I respect) who say "Oh most of our allies think this or that" -- - maybe they're right or maybe they're wrong or somewhere in-between, but it's interesting getting a DIRECT opinion from a fellow left-of-center citizen from a foreign state.

I agree with your points that European countries like France almost all have their own bloody history including an imperial period, but the two big World Wars that killed SO many people and destroyed so many cities in Europe were so tragic and wasteful that I suspect they DO continue to act as a significant deterrent to the saber-rattling that the US war mongers are able to engage-in. For too many US citizens 'war' is just something that's mentioned & sometimes displayed on a screen, just like a movie/TV program/video-game, and there's a non-reality to it because it's so far away and seldom directly affects them. Geography has famously isolated us from the major death & destruction of war and enables too many armchair warriors to talk boldly and vote for politicians who pander to those conceits. In a not-so-subtle way, the US IS the younger offspring of Europe, where Europe has grown-up due to some hard lessons, while the US is going through its own destructive stage of 'lesson-learning'. Hopefully this learning stage will be over soon and won't involve a world war.

DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 12:48

Tulsi Gabbard is, indeed,pointing at part of a major organ of imperialism, Antonio Costa, yet habeas corpus, having the whole body of imperialism produced is necessary for the considered judgement of a people long terrorized by fictitious "monsters" and "demons", if they are to understand that shooting warfate is but one part of the heart, while the other is economic warfare. Both brutally destructive, even if the second is hidden from public awareness or dismissed as "a price worth paying". Imperialism pays no price (except "blow-back", which is merely "religious extremism" as explained by a fully complicit MSM).

And the "brain" behind it all?

That is corporate/military/political/deep state/media greed – and their desperate need/ambition for total, and absolute, control.

Only seeing the whole body may reveal the true size of the threat and the vicious nature of the real danger.

Some may argue that it is "too soon", "too early", or "too costly", politically, for Gabbard, even if she, herself, might see imperialism as the real monster and demon, to dare describe the whole beast.

Frankly, this time, Tulsi's candidacy, her "run" for President, is not likely to see her become the Dem nominee, most likely that will be Kamala Harris (who will happily do the bidding of brute power), rather, it is to lay the firm and solid foundation of actual difference, of rational perspective, and thoughtful, diplomatic international behavior.

To expose the whole, especially the role of the MSM, in furthering all the rest of the lumbering body of Zombie imperialism, would be far more effective in creating an substantial "opening" for alternative possibilities, even a new political party, next time.

Seer , July 3, 2019 at 15:31

I'm figuring that Warren and Harris will take one another out. Climbing to the top requires this. But, Gabbard doesn't stop fighting, and if there's a fighter out there it is her: mentally and physically she is the total package.

Sanders' 2016 campaign was ignored, he wasn't supposed to go anywhere, but if not for the DNC's meddling he would be POTUS right now (I have zero doubt over that). So too was Obama's climb from nowhere: of course, Obama was pushed up by the System, the System that is NOT behind Gabbard. And then there's the clown at the helm (Trump). I refuse to ignore this history.

Gababard is by no means out. Let's not speak of such things, especially when her campaign, and message, is just starting to burst out: the MSM is the last to admit the state of things unfavorable to the wealthy, but out on the Internet Gabbard is very much alive. She is the best candidate (with the best platform of visibility) for peace. She has all the pieces. One comment I read out on the internet (someone, I believe, not in the US) was that Gabbard was a gift to the Americans. Yes, I believe this to be the case: if you really look closely you'll see exactly how this is correct. I believe that we cannot afford to treat this gift with other than the utmost appreciation. Her sincerity when she says that she was/is willing to die for her fellow soldiers (in reference to LBGT folks, though ALL apply) is total. She is totally committed to this battle: as a warrior in politics she's proven herself with her support, the loyalty, for Sanders (at risk to her political career- and now look, she's running for POTUS, she continues to come out on top!).

IvyMike , July 2, 2019 at 20:14

I burned my draft card, grew my hair out, and smoked pot and was anti war as heck. But the peace demonstrations (and riots) in the 60's and 70's did not have much effect on how the U.S. Government prosecuted the Vietnam War. It is little recognized how hard American troops fought from 1965 to 1968. Our air mobile troops in particular made a great slaughter of NVA and VC while also taking heavy casualties.

We were having such success that no one in the military thought the enemy could keep up the fight. Then, the Tet offensive with the beaten enemy attacking every city in the South.

Then the politicians and Generals knew, given the super power politics surrounding the war, that we had lost. We had failed to recognize that we had not intervened in a Civil War, in truth Vietnam as a whole was fighting for freedom from Imperialism and we had no friends in the South, just a corrupt puppet government. Instead of getting out, Nixon made the unforgivable choice to slowly wind the war down until he could get out without losing, Peace With Honor the ultimate triumph of ego over humanity. Americans had a chance to choose a peace candidate in 1972, instead Nixon won with a big majority.

The military has never been able to admit they were defeated on the battlefield by North Vietnam, blaming it instead on the Liberal Media and the Anti War movement. Believing that lie they continue to fight unwinnable wars in which we have no national interest at stake. The media and the people no longer fight against war, but it never really made a difference when we did.

Realist , July 3, 2019 at 05:17

I too hoped for a miracle and voted for George. But then I always voted for the loser in whatever state I happened to be living in at the particular time. I think Carter was a rare winning pick by me but only once. I got disgusted with voting and sat out the Clinton campaigns, only returning to vote against the Bush juggernaut. In retrospect, Perot should have won to make a real difference. I sided with the winner in Obama, but the loser turned out to be America getting saddled with that two-faced hypocrite. Nobel Peace Prize winner indeed! (What did he spend the money on?) When you listen to their campaign promises be aware they are telegraphing how they plan to betray you.

triekc , July 3, 2019 at 07:45

American people in mass need to hit reset button. A yellow vest-like movement made up of tens of millions of woke people, who understand the democrats and republicans are the left and right wing of the oligarch party,

US elections have been and continue to be rigged, and the US constitution was written to protect the property (such as slaves) of oligarchs from the people, the founding oligarchs feared real democracy, evident by all the safeguards they built into our government to protect against it, that remain in tact today.

We need a new 21st century constitution. Global capitalism needs to be greatly curtailed, or ended out right, replaced by ecosocialism, conservation, restoration of earth focussed society

Seer , July 3, 2019 at 15:38

And just think that back then there was also Mike Gravel. The CIA did their work in the 60s to kill the anti-war movement: killing all the great social leaders.

Why wars are "lost" is because hardly is there a time when there's an actual "mission statement" on what the end of a given war will look like. Tulsi Gabbard has made it clear that she would NOT engage in any wars unless there was a clear objective, a clear outcome lined out, and, of course, it was authorized by THE PEOPLE (Congress).

All wars are about resources. We cannot, however, admit this: the ruling capitalists won't allow that to be known/understood lest they lose their power.

Realist , July 3, 2019 at 04:59

Ya got all that right, especially the part about the analysts essentially declaring the war lost after Tet. I remember that offered a lot of hope on the campuses that the war would soon end (even though we lost), especially to those of us near graduation and facing loss of that precious 2S deferment. Yet the big fool marched on, getting my generation needlessly slaughtered for four or five more years.

And, yes, the 2 or 3 million dead Vietnamese did matter, to those with a conscience. Such a price to keep Vietnam out of Russia's and China's orbit. Meanwhile they set an independent course after kicking us out of their land and even fought a war with China. We should still be paying reparations for the levels of death and destruction we brought to a country half a world away with absolutely no means or desire to threaten the United States. All our wars of choice, starting with Korea, have been similar crimes against humanity. Turkey shoots against third world societies with no way to do us any harm. But every one of them fought ferociously to the death to defend their land and their people. Inevitably, every occupier is sent packing as their empire crumbles. Obviously, Americans have been too thick to learn this from mere history books. We will only learn from our tragic mistakes. I see a lot of lessons on the upcoming schedule.

James Clooney , July 3, 2019 at 08:36

USA did not "intervene" in a civil war. USA paid France to continue it's imperial war and then took over when France fled defeated. USA prevented a mandated election Ho Chi Minh would win and then continued western imperial warfare against the Vietnamese ( even though Vietnamese was/is bulwark against China's territorial expansion).

mauisurfer , July 2, 2019 at 20:12

The Watson study says: "Indeed, the DOD is the world's largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world.4"

This is a gross UNDERcount of emissions. It includes ONLY petroleum burned.
It does NOT count explosions from bombs, missiles, rockets, rifles, etc.

Perhaps someone could provide an estimate of this contribution to greenhouse gases???

triekc , July 3, 2019 at 07:25

US military contribution to ecocide: https://climateandcapitalism.com/2015/02/08/pentagon-pollution-7-military-assault-global-climate/

Seer , July 3, 2019 at 16:35

Don't worry, Elizabeth Warren has a plan to operate the military on renewables! (she can continue to make sure her constituency, which is Raytheon, is well served)

From https://www.mintpressnews.com/shes-hot-and-shes-cold-elizabeth-warren-and-the-military-industrial-complex/253542/

Raytheon, one of the biggest employers in Warren's state, where it's headquartered, "has a positive relationship with Sen. Warren, and we interact with her and her staff regularly," Michael Doble, a spokesman for the company, said.

jo6pac , July 2, 2019 at 20:12

This awful news for the merchants of death and I'm sure they're working overtime to stop silliness;-). I do hope this isn't killed by those that love the endless wars.

Thanks AH

mbob , July 2, 2019 at 20:10

Perhaps there is no open anti-war movement because the Democratic party is now pro-war. Rather than support President Trump's efforts to end the Korean War, to reduce our involvement in the Middle East and to pursue a more peaceful path with Russia, the Democratic party (with very, very few exceptions) is opposed to all these things.

The Democratic party places its hatred for Trump above its professed love of peace.

President Obama, the Nobel peace prize winner, started a war with Libya, which had neither attacked nor threatened the US and which, by many accounts, was trying to improve relations with the US. GW Bush unnecessarily attacked Iraq and Clinton destroyed Haiti and bombed Yugoslavia, among other actions.

From a peace perspective, Trump looks comparatively great (provided he doesn't attack Iraq or invade Venezuela). But, since it's impossible to recognize Trump for anything positive, or to support him in any way, it's now impossible for Democrats to promote peace. Doing so might help Trump. It would, of necessity, require acknowledging Trump's uniqueness among recent US Presidents in not starting new wars.

Realist , July 3, 2019 at 03:28

I agree. mbob makes perfect sense in his analysis.

The Democrats must be brought back to reality with a sound repudiation by the voters, otherwise they are of no use to America and will have no long-term future.

James Clooney , July 3, 2019 at 09:56

Obama escalated Afghanistan when he had a popular mandate to withdraw. He facilitated the the Syrian rebellion in conjunction with ISIS funding Saudi Arabia and Qatar. He instigated the Zalaya (primarily Hillary) and the Ukraine rebellion.

Trump supports the Yemeni genocide.

But yes citizens have been directed to hate Trump the man/symptom rather than the enduring Imperial predatory capitalistic system.

James Clooney , July 3, 2019 at 10:02

Opps sorry; so many interventions and invasions, under Obama, special forces trained Malian general overthrew the democratically elected president of Mali, result, more war,death and destruction.

Robert , July 3, 2019 at 10:48

You are correct in your analysis. Allegra Harpootlian is searching for the peace lobby among Democrat supporters, where it no longer resides.

As a result of corporate-controlled mainstream media and their support for Democrat elites, Democrat supporters have largely been brainwashed into hatred for Donald Trump and everything he stands for. This hatred blinds them to the far more important issue of peace.

Strangely, there is huge US support to remove troops from the ME, but this support resides with the overwhelming majority of Donald Trump voters. Unfortunately, these are not individuals who typically go to peace demonstrations, but they are sincere in bringing all US troops home from the ME. Donald Trump himself lobbied on this, and with the exceptions of his anti-Iranian / pro-Israel / pro-Saudi Arabia stance and withdrawal from JCPOA, he has not only backed down from military adventurism, but is the first President since Eisenhower to raise the issue of the influence of the military-industrial complex.

In the face of strong opposition, he is the first President ever to enter North Korea and meet with Kim Jong Un to discuss nuclear weapons. Mainstream media continues its war-mongering rhetoric, attacking Trump for his "weakness" in not retaliating against Iran, or in meeting "secretly" with Putin.

Opposition to Trump's peace efforts are not limited to MSM, however, but are entrenched in Democrat and Republican elites, who attack any orders he gives to withdraw from the ME. It was not Trump, but Democrat and Republican elites who invited NATO's Stoltenberg to speak to Congress in an attempt to spite Trump.

In essence, you have President Trump and most of his supporters trying to withdraw from military engagements, with active opposition from Democrats like Adam Schiff, and Republican elites, actively promoting war and military spending.

DJT is like a less-likeable Inspector Clouseau. Sometimes ineptitude is a blessing. You also have a few Republicans, like journalist Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and Democrats, like Tulsi Gabbard, actively pushing the message of peace.

Erelis , July 3, 2019 at 20:45

I think you got it. The author is right in the sense that there is an anti-war movement, but that movement is in many ways hidden. As bizarre as it may seen counter to CW wisdom, and in some way ironically crazy, one of the biggest segments of anti-war sentiment are Trump supporters. After Trump's decision not to attack Iran, I went to various right wing commentators who attacked Trump, and the reaction against these major right wing war mongers was to support Trump. And with right wing commentators who supported Trump, absolute agreement. These is of course based on my objective reading reading and totally subjective. But I believe I am right.

This made me realize there is an untapped anti-war sentiment on the right which is being totally missed. And a lack of imagination and Trump derangment syndrome which blocks many on the anti-war Left to see it and use it for an anti-war movement. There was an article in The Intercept that looked research on the correlation between military deaths and voting preference. Here is the article:

STUDY FINDS RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HIGH MILITARY CASUALTIES AND VOTES FOR TRUMP OVER CLINTON
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/10/study-finds-relationship-between-high-military-casualties-and-votes-for-trump-over-clinton/

And the thing is that Trump was in many ways the anti-war candidate. And those areas that had high military death rates voted for Trump. I understand the tribal nature of political affiliation, but it seems what I have read and this article, there may be indeed an untapped anti-war stance with Trump supporters.

And it really just challenges my own beliefs that the major obstacle to the war mongers are Trump supporters.

Helga I. Fellay , July 3, 2019 at 11:09

mbob – I couldn't have said it better myself. Except to add that in addition to destroying Libya, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama, ably assisted by Hillary Clinton, also destroyed Honduras and the Ukraine.

Anarcissie , July 3, 2019 at 11:55

Historically, the Democratic Party has been pro-war and pro-imperialism at least since Wilson. The hatred for Trump on their part seems to be based entirely on cultural issues -- he is not subservient enough to their gods.

But as for antiwar demonstrations, it's been proved in the streets that they don't accomplish anything. There were huge demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, but it ground on until conservatives got tired of it. At least half a million people demonstrated against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and no one important cared. Evidently more fundamental issues than the war of the moment are involved and I think that is where a lot of people are turning now. The ruling class will find this a lot harder to deal with because it's decentralized and widely distributed. Hence the panic about Trump and the seething hatred of Sanders.

mbob , July 3, 2019 at 18:15

I attempted to make three points in my post. First, Democrats are now pro-war. Second, solely regarding peace, Trump looks better than all other recent Presidents because he hasn't started any new wars. Third, the inability of Democrats (or the public as a whole) to give Trump the benefit of a doubt, or to support him in any way, is contrary to the cause of peace.

Democrats should, without reservation, support Trump's effort to end the Korean War. They should support Trump's desire to improve relations with Russia. They don't do either of those things. Why? Because it might hurt them politically.

Your comment does not challenge the first two points and reinforces the third.

As for Yemen, yes, Trump is wrong. Democrats rightly oppose him on Yemen -- but remarkably tepidly. Trump is wrong about a lot of things. I don't like him. I didn't vote for him. But I will vote for him if Democrats nominate someone worse than him, which they seem inclined to do. (Gabbard is better than Trump. Sanders probably. Maybe Warren. Of the three, only Warren receives positive press. That makes me skeptical of her.)

Trump stood up to his advisors, Bolton and Pompeo, regarding both Iran and Venezuela. Obama, on the other hand, did not. He followed the advice of his advisors, with disastrous consequences.

Piotr Berman , July 4, 2019 at 07:02

Trump standing up to his nominees:

>>In addition to Tuesday's sanctions, the Treasury Department issued an advisory to maritime shipping companies, warning them off transporting oil to Syria or risking their property and money seized if kept with financial institutions that follow U.S. sanctions law.

"The United States will aggressively seek to impose sanctions against any party involved in shipping oil to Syria, or seeking to evade our sanctions on Iranian oil," said Sigal Mandelker, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, in a release. "Shipping companies, insurers, vessel owners, managers, and operators should all be aware of the grave consequences of engaging in sanctionable conduct involving Iranian oil shipments."<<

Today British marines seized a tanker near Gibraltar for the crime of transporting oil to Syria. And Trumpian peaceful military seized Syrian oil fields. Traditional war is increasingly augmented by piracy, which is less bloody, but trades outright carnage for deprivation of civilians. Giving "measured praise" for that makes me barf.

[Jul 05, 2019] Who Won the Debate? Tulsi Gabbard let the anti-war genie out of the bottle by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
The problem here is that the US population is too brainwashing with jingoism and Exceptionalism to value Tulsi message. The US army is mercenary army and unlike situation with the draft people generally do not care much when mercenaries die. That makes any anti-war candidate vulnerable to "Russiagate" smear.
He/she need to have a strong domestic program to appeal to voters, So far Warren is in better position in this area then Tulsi.
Notable quotes:
"... The Drudge Report website had its poll running while the debate was going on and it registered overwhelmingly in favor of Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Likewise, the Washington Examiner , a right-wing paper, opined that Gabbard had won by a knockout based on its own polling. Google's search engine reportedly saw a surge in searches linked to Tulsi Gabbard both during and after the debate. ..."
"... On the following day traditional conservative Pat Buchanan produced an article entitled "Memo for Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi," similar to a comment made by Republican consultant Frank Luntz "She's a long-shot to win the presidency, but Tulsi Gabbard is sounding like a prime candidate for Secretary of Defense." ..."
"... In response to a comment by neoliberal Congressman Tim Ryan who said that the U.S. has to remain "engaged" in places like Afghanistan, she referred to two American soldiers who had been killed that very day, saying "Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable." ..."
"... Tulsi also declared war on the Washington Establishment, saying that "For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end." ..."
"... Blunt words, but it was a statement that few Americans whose livelihoods are not linked to "defense" or to the shamelessly corrupt U.S. Congress and media could disagree with, as it is clear that Washington is at the bottom of a deep hole and persists in digging ..."
"... In the collective judgment of America's Establishment, Tulsi Gabbard and anyone like her must be destroyed. She would not be the first victim of the political process shutting out undesirable opinions. One can go all the way back to Eugene McCarthy and his opposition to the Vietnam War back in 1968. ..."
"... And the beat goes on. In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, fixed the nomination process so that Bernie Sanders, a peace candidate, would be marginalized and super hawk Hillary Clinton would be selected. Fortunately, the odor emanating from anything having to do with the Clintons kept her from being elected or we would already be at war with Russia and possibly also with China. ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard has let the genie of "end the forever wars" out of the bottle and it will be difficult to force it back in. She just might shake up the Democratic Party's priorities, leading to more questions about just what has been wrong with U.S. foreign policy over the past twenty years. ..."
"... Yes, to some critics, Tulsi Gabbard is not a perfect candidate . On most domestic issues she appears to be a typical liberal Democrat and is also conventional in terms of her accommodation with Jewish power, but she also breaks with the Democratic Party establishment with her pledge to pardon Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. ..."
"... She also has more of a moral compass than Elizabeth Warren, who cleverly evades the whole issue of Middle East policy, or a Joe Biden who would kiss Benjamin Netanyahu's ass without any hesitation at all. Gabbard has openly criticized Netanyahu and she has also condemned Israel's killing of "unarmed civilians" in Gaza. As a Hindu, her view of Muslims is somewhat complicated based on the historical interaction of the two groups, but she has moderated her views recently. ..."
"... To be sure, Americans have heard much of the same before, much of it from out of the mouth of a gentleman named Donald Trump, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years. ..."
Jul 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

Last Wednesday’s debate among half of the announced Democratic Party candidates to become their party’s nominee for president in 2020 was notable for its lack of drama. Many of those called on to speak had little to say apart from the usual liberal bromides about health care, jobs, education and how the United States is a country of immigrants. On the following day the mainstream media anointed Elizabeth Warren as the winner based on the coherency of her message even though she said little that differed from what was being presented by most of the others on the stage. She just said it better, more articulately.

The New York Times’ coverage was typical, praising Warren for her grasp of the issues and her ability to present the same clearly and concisely, and citing a comment "They could teach classes in how Warren talks about a problem and weaves in answers into a story. She's not just wonk and stats." It then went on to lump most of the other candidates together, describing their performances as "ha[ving] one or two strong answers, but none of them had the electric, campaign-launching moment they were hoping for."

Inevitably, however, there was some disagreement on who had actually done best based on viewer reactions as well as the perceptions of some of the media that might not exactly be described as mainstream. The Drudge Report website had its poll running while the debate was going on and it registered overwhelmingly in favor of Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Likewise, the Washington Examiner , a right-wing paper, opined that Gabbard had won by a knockout based on its own polling. Google's search engine reportedly saw a surge in searches linked to Tulsi Gabbard both during and after the debate.

On the following day traditional conservative Pat Buchanan produced an article entitled "Memo for Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi," similar to a comment made by Republican consultant Frank Luntz "She's a long-shot to win the presidency, but Tulsi Gabbard is sounding like a prime candidate for Secretary of Defense."

Tulsi, campaigning on her anti-war credentials, was indeed not like the other candidates, confronting directly the issue of war and peace which the other potential candidates studiously avoided. In response to a comment by neoliberal Congressman Tim Ryan who said that the U.S. has to remain "engaged" in places like Afghanistan, she referred to two American soldiers who had been killed that very day, saying "Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable."

At another point she expanded on her thinking about America's wars, saying "Let's deal with the situation where we are, where this president and his chickenhawk cabinet have led us to the brink of war with Iran. I served in the war in Iraq at the height of the war in 2005, a war that took over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniforms' lives. The American people need to understand that this war with Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly than anything that we ever saw in Iraq. It would take many more lives. It would exacerbate the refugee crisis. And it wouldn't be just contained within Iran. This would turn into a regional war. This is why it's so important that every one of us, every single American, stand up and say no war with Iran."

Tulsi also declared war on the Washington Establishment, saying that "For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end."

Blunt words, but it was a statement that few Americans whose livelihoods are not linked to "defense" or to the shamelessly corrupt U.S. Congress and media could disagree with, as it is clear that Washington is at the bottom of a deep hole and persists in digging. So why was there such a difference between what ordinary Americans and the Establishment punditry were seeing on their television screens? The difference was not so much in perception as in the desire to see a certain outcome. Anti-war takes away a lot of people's rice bowls, be they directly employed on "defense" or part of the vast army of lobbyists and think tank parasites that keep the money flowing out of the taxpayers' pockets and into the pockets of Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Lockheed Martin like a perpetual motion machine.

In the collective judgment of America's Establishment, Tulsi Gabbard and anyone like her must be destroyed. She would not be the first victim of the political process shutting out undesirable opinions. One can go all the way back to Eugene McCarthy and his opposition to the Vietnam War back in 1968. McCarthy was right and Lyndon Johnson and the rest of the Democratic Party were wrong. More recently, Congressman Ron Paul tried twice to bring some sanity to the Republican Party. He too was marginalized deliberately by the GOP party apparatus working hand-in-hand with the media, to include the final insult of his being denied any opportunity to speak or have his delegates recognized at the 2012 nominating convention.

And the beat goes on. In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, fixed the nomination process so that Bernie Sanders, a peace candidate, would be marginalized and super hawk Hillary Clinton would be selected. Fortunately, the odor emanating from anything having to do with the Clintons kept her from being elected or we would already be at war with Russia and possibly also with China.

Tulsi Gabbard has let the genie of "end the forever wars" out of the bottle and it will be difficult to force it back in. She just might shake up the Democratic Party's priorities, leading to more questions about just what has been wrong with U.S. foreign policy over the past twenty years. To qualify for the second round of debates she has to gain a couple of points in her approval rating or bring in more donations, either of which is definitely possible based on her performance. It is to be hoped that that will occur and that there will be no Debbie Wasserman Schultz hiding somewhere in the process who will finagle the polling results.

Yes, to some critics, Tulsi Gabbard is not a perfect candidate . On most domestic issues she appears to be a typical liberal Democrat and is also conventional in terms of her accommodation with Jewish power, but she also breaks with the Democratic Party establishment with her pledge to pardon Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

She also has more of a moral compass than Elizabeth Warren, who cleverly evades the whole issue of Middle East policy, or a Joe Biden who would kiss Benjamin Netanyahu's ass without any hesitation at all. Gabbard has openly criticized Netanyahu and she has also condemned Israel's killing of "unarmed civilians" in Gaza. As a Hindu, her view of Muslims is somewhat complicated based on the historical interaction of the two groups, but she has moderated her views recently.

To be sure, Americans have heard much of the same before, much of it from out of the mouth of a gentleman named Donald Trump, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years. It is essential that we Americans who are concerned about the future of our country should listen to what she has to say very carefully and to respond accordingly.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

[Jul 05, 2019] Who Won the Debate? Tulsi Gabbard let the anti-war genie out of the bottle by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
The problem here is that the US population is too brainwashing with jingoism and Exceptionalism to value Tulsi message. The US army is mercenary army and unlike situation with the draft people generally do not care much when mercenaries die. That makes any anti-war candidate vulnerable to "Russiagate" smear.
He/she need to have a strong domestic program to appeal to voters, So far Warren is in better position in this area then Tulsi.
Notable quotes:
"... The Drudge Report website had its poll running while the debate was going on and it registered overwhelmingly in favor of Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Likewise, the Washington Examiner , a right-wing paper, opined that Gabbard had won by a knockout based on its own polling. Google's search engine reportedly saw a surge in searches linked to Tulsi Gabbard both during and after the debate. ..."
"... On the following day traditional conservative Pat Buchanan produced an article entitled "Memo for Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi," similar to a comment made by Republican consultant Frank Luntz "She's a long-shot to win the presidency, but Tulsi Gabbard is sounding like a prime candidate for Secretary of Defense." ..."
"... In response to a comment by neoliberal Congressman Tim Ryan who said that the U.S. has to remain "engaged" in places like Afghanistan, she referred to two American soldiers who had been killed that very day, saying "Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable." ..."
"... Tulsi also declared war on the Washington Establishment, saying that "For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end." ..."
"... Blunt words, but it was a statement that few Americans whose livelihoods are not linked to "defense" or to the shamelessly corrupt U.S. Congress and media could disagree with, as it is clear that Washington is at the bottom of a deep hole and persists in digging ..."
"... In the collective judgment of America's Establishment, Tulsi Gabbard and anyone like her must be destroyed. She would not be the first victim of the political process shutting out undesirable opinions. One can go all the way back to Eugene McCarthy and his opposition to the Vietnam War back in 1968. ..."
"... And the beat goes on. In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, fixed the nomination process so that Bernie Sanders, a peace candidate, would be marginalized and super hawk Hillary Clinton would be selected. Fortunately, the odor emanating from anything having to do with the Clintons kept her from being elected or we would already be at war with Russia and possibly also with China. ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard has let the genie of "end the forever wars" out of the bottle and it will be difficult to force it back in. She just might shake up the Democratic Party's priorities, leading to more questions about just what has been wrong with U.S. foreign policy over the past twenty years. ..."
"... Yes, to some critics, Tulsi Gabbard is not a perfect candidate . On most domestic issues she appears to be a typical liberal Democrat and is also conventional in terms of her accommodation with Jewish power, but she also breaks with the Democratic Party establishment with her pledge to pardon Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. ..."
"... She also has more of a moral compass than Elizabeth Warren, who cleverly evades the whole issue of Middle East policy, or a Joe Biden who would kiss Benjamin Netanyahu's ass without any hesitation at all. Gabbard has openly criticized Netanyahu and she has also condemned Israel's killing of "unarmed civilians" in Gaza. As a Hindu, her view of Muslims is somewhat complicated based on the historical interaction of the two groups, but she has moderated her views recently. ..."
"... To be sure, Americans have heard much of the same before, much of it from out of the mouth of a gentleman named Donald Trump, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years. ..."
Jul 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

Last Wednesday’s debate among half of the announced Democratic Party candidates to become their party’s nominee for president in 2020 was notable for its lack of drama. Many of those called on to speak had little to say apart from the usual liberal bromides about health care, jobs, education and how the United States is a country of immigrants. On the following day the mainstream media anointed Elizabeth Warren as the winner based on the coherency of her message even though she said little that differed from what was being presented by most of the others on the stage. She just said it better, more articulately.

The New York Times’ coverage was typical, praising Warren for her grasp of the issues and her ability to present the same clearly and concisely, and citing a comment "They could teach classes in how Warren talks about a problem and weaves in answers into a story. She's not just wonk and stats." It then went on to lump most of the other candidates together, describing their performances as "ha[ving] one or two strong answers, but none of them had the electric, campaign-launching moment they were hoping for."

Inevitably, however, there was some disagreement on who had actually done best based on viewer reactions as well as the perceptions of some of the media that might not exactly be described as mainstream. The Drudge Report website had its poll running while the debate was going on and it registered overwhelmingly in favor of Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Likewise, the Washington Examiner , a right-wing paper, opined that Gabbard had won by a knockout based on its own polling. Google's search engine reportedly saw a surge in searches linked to Tulsi Gabbard both during and after the debate.

On the following day traditional conservative Pat Buchanan produced an article entitled "Memo for Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi," similar to a comment made by Republican consultant Frank Luntz "She's a long-shot to win the presidency, but Tulsi Gabbard is sounding like a prime candidate for Secretary of Defense."

Tulsi, campaigning on her anti-war credentials, was indeed not like the other candidates, confronting directly the issue of war and peace which the other potential candidates studiously avoided. In response to a comment by neoliberal Congressman Tim Ryan who said that the U.S. has to remain "engaged" in places like Afghanistan, she referred to two American soldiers who had been killed that very day, saying "Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable."

At another point she expanded on her thinking about America's wars, saying "Let's deal with the situation where we are, where this president and his chickenhawk cabinet have led us to the brink of war with Iran. I served in the war in Iraq at the height of the war in 2005, a war that took over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniforms' lives. The American people need to understand that this war with Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly than anything that we ever saw in Iraq. It would take many more lives. It would exacerbate the refugee crisis. And it wouldn't be just contained within Iran. This would turn into a regional war. This is why it's so important that every one of us, every single American, stand up and say no war with Iran."

Tulsi also declared war on the Washington Establishment, saying that "For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end."

Blunt words, but it was a statement that few Americans whose livelihoods are not linked to "defense" or to the shamelessly corrupt U.S. Congress and media could disagree with, as it is clear that Washington is at the bottom of a deep hole and persists in digging. So why was there such a difference between what ordinary Americans and the Establishment punditry were seeing on their television screens? The difference was not so much in perception as in the desire to see a certain outcome. Anti-war takes away a lot of people's rice bowls, be they directly employed on "defense" or part of the vast army of lobbyists and think tank parasites that keep the money flowing out of the taxpayers' pockets and into the pockets of Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Lockheed Martin like a perpetual motion machine.

In the collective judgment of America's Establishment, Tulsi Gabbard and anyone like her must be destroyed. She would not be the first victim of the political process shutting out undesirable opinions. One can go all the way back to Eugene McCarthy and his opposition to the Vietnam War back in 1968. McCarthy was right and Lyndon Johnson and the rest of the Democratic Party were wrong. More recently, Congressman Ron Paul tried twice to bring some sanity to the Republican Party. He too was marginalized deliberately by the GOP party apparatus working hand-in-hand with the media, to include the final insult of his being denied any opportunity to speak or have his delegates recognized at the 2012 nominating convention.

And the beat goes on. In 2016, Debbie Wasserman Shultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, fixed the nomination process so that Bernie Sanders, a peace candidate, would be marginalized and super hawk Hillary Clinton would be selected. Fortunately, the odor emanating from anything having to do with the Clintons kept her from being elected or we would already be at war with Russia and possibly also with China.

Tulsi Gabbard has let the genie of "end the forever wars" out of the bottle and it will be difficult to force it back in. She just might shake up the Democratic Party's priorities, leading to more questions about just what has been wrong with U.S. foreign policy over the past twenty years. To qualify for the second round of debates she has to gain a couple of points in her approval rating or bring in more donations, either of which is definitely possible based on her performance. It is to be hoped that that will occur and that there will be no Debbie Wasserman Schultz hiding somewhere in the process who will finagle the polling results.

Yes, to some critics, Tulsi Gabbard is not a perfect candidate . On most domestic issues she appears to be a typical liberal Democrat and is also conventional in terms of her accommodation with Jewish power, but she also breaks with the Democratic Party establishment with her pledge to pardon Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

She also has more of a moral compass than Elizabeth Warren, who cleverly evades the whole issue of Middle East policy, or a Joe Biden who would kiss Benjamin Netanyahu's ass without any hesitation at all. Gabbard has openly criticized Netanyahu and she has also condemned Israel's killing of "unarmed civilians" in Gaza. As a Hindu, her view of Muslims is somewhat complicated based on the historical interaction of the two groups, but she has moderated her views recently.

To be sure, Americans have heard much of the same before, much of it from out of the mouth of a gentleman named Donald Trump, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years. It is essential that we Americans who are concerned about the future of our country should listen to what she has to say very carefully and to respond accordingly.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

[Jul 05, 2019] Political and media elites had been captured by unshored corporate money. Our voices had become irrelevant.

Notable quotes:
"... Brand's fast-talking, plain-speaking criticism of the existing political order, calling it discredited, unaccountable and unrepresentative, was greeted with smirking condescension by the political and media establishment. Nonetheless, in an era before Donald Trump had become president of the United States, the British media were happy to indulge Brand for a while, seemingly believing he or his ideas might prove a ratings winner with younger audiences. ..."
"... Then he overstepped the mark. ..."
"... Instead of simply criticising the political system, Brand argued that it was in fact so rigged by the powerful, by corporate interests, that western democracy had become a charade. Elections were pointless . Our votes were simply a fig-leaf, concealing the fact that our political leaders were there to represent not us but the interests of globe-spanning corporations. Political and media elites had been captured by unshored corporate money. Our voices had become irrelevant. ..."
"... But just as Brand's rejection of the old politics began to articulate a wider mood, it was stopped in its tracks. ..."
"... These "New Labour" MPs were there, just as Brand had noted, to represent the interests of a corporate class, not ordinary people. ..."
"... It wasn't that Corbyn's election had shown Britain's political system was representative and accountable. It was simply evidence that corporate power had made itself vulnerable to a potential accident by preferring to work out of sight, in the shadows, to maintain the illusion of democracy. Corbyn was that accident. ..."
"... The system was still in place and it still had a chokehold on the political and media establishments that exist to uphold its interests. Which is why it has been mobilising these forces endlessly to damage Corbyn and avert the risk of a further, even more disastrous "accident", such as his becoming prime minister. ..."
"... Listing the ways the state-corporate media have sought to undermine Corbyn would sound preposterous to anyone not deeply immersed in these media-constructed narratives. But almost all of us have been exposed to this kind of " brainwashing under freedom " since birth. ..."
"... The initial attacks on Corbyn were for being poorly dressed, sexist, unstatesmanlike, a national security threat, a Communist spy – relentless, unsubstantiated smears the like of which no other party leader had ever faced. But over time the allegations became even more outrageously propagandistic as the campaign to undermine him not only failed but backfired – not least, because Labour membership rocketed under Corbyn to make the party the largest in Europe. ..."
"... As the establishment's need to keep him away from power has grown more urgent and desperate so has the nature of the attacks. ..."
Jul 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

Originally from The plot to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of power, by Jonathan Cook - The Unz Review

... ... ...

In the preceding two years, it was hard to avoid on TV the figure of Russell Brand, a comedian and minor film star who had reinvented himself, after years of battling addiction, as a spiritual guru-cum-political revolutionary.

Brand's fast-talking, plain-speaking criticism of the existing political order, calling it discredited, unaccountable and unrepresentative, was greeted with smirking condescension by the political and media establishment. Nonetheless, in an era before Donald Trump had become president of the United States, the British media were happy to indulge Brand for a while, seemingly believing he or his ideas might prove a ratings winner with younger audiences.

But Brand started to look rather more impressive than anyone could have imagined. He took on supposed media heavyweights like the BBC's Jeremy Paxman and Channel 4's Jon Snow and charmed and shamed them into submission – both with his compassion and his thoughtful radicalism. Even in the gladiatorial-style battle of wits so beloved of modern TV, he made these titans of the political interview look mediocre, shallow and out of touch. Videos of these head-to-heads went viral, and Brand won hundreds of thousands of new followers.

Then he overstepped the mark.

Democracy as charade

Instead of simply criticising the political system, Brand argued that it was in fact so rigged by the powerful, by corporate interests, that western democracy had become a charade. Elections were pointless . Our votes were simply a fig-leaf, concealing the fact that our political leaders were there to represent not us but the interests of globe-spanning corporations. Political and media elites had been captured by unshored corporate money. Our voices had become irrelevant.

Brand didn't just talk the talk. He started committing to direct action. He shamed our do-nothing politicians and corporate media – the devastating Grenfell Tower fire had yet to happen – by helping to gain attention for a group of poor tenants in London who were taking on the might of a corporation that had become their landlord and wanted to evict them to develop their homes for a much richer clientele. Brand's revolutionary words had turned into revolutionary action.

But just as Brand's rejection of the old politics began to articulate a wider mood, it was stopped in its tracks. After Corbyn was unexpectedly elected Labour leader, offering for the first time in living memory a politics that listened to people before money, Brand's style of rejectionism looked a little too cynical, or at least premature.

While Corbyn's victory marked a sea-change, it is worth recalling, however, that it occurred only because of a mistake. Or perhaps two.

The Corbyn accident

First, a handful of Labour MPs agreed to nominate Corbyn for the leadership contest, scraping him past the threshold needed to get on the ballot paper. Most backed him only because they wanted to give the impression of an election that was fair and open. After his victory, some loudly regretted having assisted him. None had thought a representative of the tiny and besieged left wing of the parliamentary party stood a chance of winning – not after Tony Blair and his acolytes had spent more than two decades remaking Labour, using their own version of entryism to eradicate any vestiges of socialism in the party. These "New Labour" MPs were there, just as Brand had noted, to represent the interests of a corporate class, not ordinary people.

Corbyn had very different ideas from most of his colleagues. Over the years he had broken with the consensus of the dominant Blairite faction time and again in parliamentary votes, consistently taking a minority view that later proved to be on the right side of history . He alone among the leadership contenders spoke unequivocally against austerity, regarding it as a way to leech away more public money to enrich the corporations and banks that had already pocketed vast sums from the public coffers – so much so that by 2008 they had nearly bankrupted the entire western economic system.

And second, Corbyn won because of a recent change in the party's rulebook – one now much regretted by party managers. A new internal balloting system gave more weight to the votes of ordinary members than the parliamentary party. The members, unlike the party machine, wanted Corbyn.

Corbyn's success didn't really prove Brand wrong. Even the best designed systems have flaws, especially when the maintenance of the system's image as benevolent is considered vitally important. It wasn't that Corbyn's election had shown Britain's political system was representative and accountable. It was simply evidence that corporate power had made itself vulnerable to a potential accident by preferring to work out of sight, in the shadows, to maintain the illusion of democracy. Corbyn was that accident.

'Brainwashing under freedom'

Corbyn's success also wasn't evidence that the power structure he challenged had weakened. The system was still in place and it still had a chokehold on the political and media establishments that exist to uphold its interests. Which is why it has been mobilising these forces endlessly to damage Corbyn and avert the risk of a further, even more disastrous "accident", such as his becoming prime minister.

Listing the ways the state-corporate media have sought to undermine Corbyn would sound preposterous to anyone not deeply immersed in these media-constructed narratives. But almost all of us have been exposed to this kind of " brainwashing under freedom " since birth.

The initial attacks on Corbyn were for being poorly dressed, sexist, unstatesmanlike, a national security threat, a Communist spy – relentless, unsubstantiated smears the like of which no other party leader had ever faced. But over time the allegations became even more outrageously propagandistic as the campaign to undermine him not only failed but backfired – not least, because Labour membership rocketed under Corbyn to make the party the largest in Europe.

As the establishment's need to keep him away from power has grown more urgent and desperate so has the nature of the attacks.

Jake , says: July 5, 2019 at 11:43 am GMT

What is the last refuge of the scoundrel in the Anglo-Zionist Empire?

Smearing decent people, people who see things we are not supposed to see, as anti-Semites.

Jake , says: July 5, 2019 at 12:03 pm GMT
@Ordinary Brit

There were no Jews anywhere around most native Britons. And yet the Empire was banked most importantly by Jews back to at least the post-Glorious Revolution closing the 17th century, and that pattern of Jewish bankers being indispensable to the UK and the Brit WASP Empire goes back to Oliver Cromwell.

... ... ...

[Jul 05, 2019] They bet on you do nothing and dependent on the fake elections.

Jul 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

J. Gutierrez says: July 2, 2019 at 6:30 pm GMT 200 Words @gsjackson

You guys don't need a peace candidate you need a War Consigliere like the Godfather had! You people are being attacked from all angles and you are evaluating which Dem or Rep is going to fix the problems you face. Remember Bush Senior, (Iraq, Granada, Panama and CIA drug trafficking), Clinton, (Oklahoma City, Waco, Yugoslavia, Mena, AR Drug Money Laundering), Bush Junior, (9-11, Iraq, Afghanistan), Obama (Syria, Libya and Fast & Furious), Trump (Yet to be seen).

What does that tell you people? They are all the same! ...

They tell you what they are going to do, (conspiracy theories, movies and fake news). They bet on you do nothing and dependent on the fake elections.

AnonFromTN , says: July 2, 2019 at 6:57 pm GMT

Tulsi was the only participant who said something sensible. Which means that she won't be a presidential candidate from any of the two main parties. Deep State won't let it happen.

Harold Smith , says: July 2, 2019 at 7:31 pm GMT
@J. Gutierrez

"They are all the same!"

Was LBJ the same as JFK? Was Nixon the same as Carter? Was Bush II the same as Reagan? Was Bush I the same as Gerald Ford?

No.

Why did Obama go through all the trouble of the JCPOA with Iran only to have orange clown trash it?
Why didn't Obama deliver Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine? Why didn't the Jerusalem Boys Choir sing praises to Obama?

I'll tell you why: Because they're NOT all the same. And as we get closer and closer to planetary extinction, those differences become very significant.

[Jul 05, 2019] Sweden sought Assange for 8 or 9 years to arrest him. This is the reason he spent 7 years in the embassy. Now he was arrested but Sweden doesn't want him (at least until now).

Jul 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

UncommonGround says: July 5, 2019 at 11:02 am GMT 400 Words

It is also rigged to silence real journalists like Julian Assange who are trying to overturn the access journalism prized by the corporate media – with its reliance on official sources and insiders for stories – to divulge the secrets of the national security states we live in.

His case is really Kafaesque. Sweden wanted his extradition to Sweden and issued an European arrest warrant for him to be arrested and taken to Sweden. He sought asyl in the embassy of Ecuador. People kept saying for years that he was a criminal evading justice because of that. The British police kept the embassy under surveillance for seven years without interruptions in order to arrest him and send him to Sweden.

Finally after seven years he was forced to leave the embassy. He should have been sent immediately to Sweden. After all, this was the reason why the British had initially arrested him, had limited his movements, had sought to arrest him after he went to the embassy. Everything happened because of an allegued crime in Sweden. But when he was arrested Sweden didn't care to demand that he be taken to Sweden. They had issued an European arrest warrant and this means that they should have a case against him that would justify him being arrested in England. The material against him should be ready and they should send it again to England. But they haven't done that until now.

I'm not sure of the details but I think that the first time that they issued an arrest warrant, this was done by the Swedish prosecuting attorney and not by a judge. Many people complained that this was not legal, but it was said that the French version of European agreements would allow this to happen. Now, the Swedish prosecuting attorney would like to reopen the case against Assange, but this time apparently the case has to be assessed by a judge and some months after Assange was arrested the Swedes haven't yet demanded that he be taken to Sweden. Sweden sought Assange for 8 or 9 years to arrest him. This is the reason he spent 7 years in the embassy. Now he was arrested but Sweden doesn't want him (at least until now).

[Jul 04, 2019] Tulsi as the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable

Notable quotes:
"... Her courage and convictions were hardened in the burning cauldron of an unjust war. Call it burning resentment if you prefer. It's real and it's what makes her tick. ..."
"... by Al Qaeda. For that unrecanted heresy she was vilified by Republicans and Democrats alike. ..."
"... In the Democratic Party debates, she cut that posturing hypocrite Tim Ryan off at the knees in a matter of seconds. A few home truths about U.S. soldiers dying for no good reason was all it took to dispatch him and his mealy-mouthed platitudes. ..."
"... Watch her do the same to DJT if she gets the nomination and he continues to pander to the neocons. ..."
Jul 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

alley cat says: July 2, 2019 at 1:39 am GMT 200 Words

Yes, to some critics, Tulsi Gabbard is not a perfect candidate.

Tulsi is a candidate for political office, not sainthood. Much like Trump in 2016, being patently less cynical than her rivals makes her the obvious choice.

the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable

Operative word in the above sentence: "genuine."

Her courage and convictions were hardened in the burning cauldron of an unjust war. Call it burning resentment if you prefer. It's real and it's what makes her tick.

She went to Syria and proclaimed that rule by Assad was better for Syrians than rule by Al Qaeda. For that unrecanted heresy she was vilified by Republicans and Democrats alike.

In the Democratic Party debates, she cut that posturing hypocrite Tim Ryan off at the knees in a matter of seconds. A few home truths about U.S. soldiers dying for no good reason was all it took to dispatch him and his mealy-mouthed platitudes.

What was Ryan going to do? Tell Tulsi she didn't know what she was talking about?

Watch her do the same to DJT if she gets the nomination and he continues to pander to the neocons.

renfro , says: July 2, 2019 at 4:21 am GMT

Gabbard did well but if I had to vote tomorrow it would be for Elizabeth Warren ..she's got the real intelligence firepower combined with some old fashioned common sense. None of them are going to directly attack the jew lobby during the campaign .why bring on smear jobs and fake stories when it doesnt matter what they say, only what they do when elected.
Would never vote for Joe "I am Zionist" Biden, he's just a paler shade of Trump .or to be even clearer Biden is the DC establishment whereas Trump is the NJ Mafia,

[Jul 04, 2019] Voice of Tulsi supporters at unz.com

The moderator-filtered t "debate" showed viewers the level of selective-issue political control. The fact that Tulsi was able to overcome this control and discuss the issue of neoliberal wars for the
Jul 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

alexander says: July 2, 2019 at 11:48 am GMT 100 Words

Let's be honest,Phil

Tulsi did not "win" the debate ..

SHE WAS THE DEBATE !

How many Americans aren't so thoroughly disgusted with our entire D.N.C. by now , they have to pin their nose (to avoid the stink) while sitting through one more . Establishment Elite, corporate " con job " debate ?

How many , Phil ?

Like just about EVERYBODY .

How many Americans aren't so thoroughly disgusted with NBC . and all its LIES . that even if the broadcasters PAID them, tomorrow , they would STILL refuse to watch their network ?.

Like just about EVERYBODY .

Tulsi is not simply the ONLY candidate who MATTERS .she is the only candidate, alive, who has a shot in rescuing our country from its descent into corporatist "warmongering" hell .

Tulsi is IT !

May God bless her . and keep her safe.

Commentator Mike , says: July 2, 2019 at 12:00 pm GMT

@Brabantian lectorate has been fooled so many times before, no big harm in getting fooled again, although not very smart (as Einstein once remarked about repeating same same while expecting a different result).

Hopefully by a "peace" or pseudo-peace candidate to at least keep that narrative going in the general population even if once elected the new president turns around and betrays the pre-election promises. Now if there were some way to make those politicians pay for dishonouring their word.

But as I may have asked in another comment, could the electorate be as cynical and hypocritical as these politicians they cast votes for?

Moi , says: July 2, 2019 at 12:26 pm GMT
@Bragadocious

Bingo! For a smart dude, PG should know (and I am sure he does) that the problem is systemic. No candidate, if s/he expects to get anywhere, is going to call out Aipac or bring up the issue of Jewish influence and power.

Fool's Paradise , says: July 2, 2019 at 12:41 pm GMT

On Tucker Carlson, Tulsi named Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia as the main pushers for war with Iran. No, she isn't perfect. No American politician dare say more. But she's the best we have and deserves our support. If she does gain a large following, as Bernie Sanders did, and is cheated out of the nomination, as Bernie was, I hope she has the guts, as Bernie didn't, to form a third, Peace Party, and run on it. So she splits the Democrats and they lose? So what! What difference does it make what Democrat or Republican Zio-whore becomes President?

Sick of Orcs , says: July 2, 2019 at 1:35 pm GMT

Trump was a roaring lion for America First, right up until his inauguration. President Tulsi will also "see the light" about how Israel is our most important ally. Ever see the photo of the 10 rabbis flanking Trump's desk in the Oval office? It could just as easily been a scene out of The Sopranos, with the family forcing some schmuck to "legally" sign over his business.

follyofwar , says: July 2, 2019 at 1:53 pm GMT
@Ghali

As Giraldi wrote, there is no such thing as a perfect candidate. But who can compare with her in this moribund democrat field? Politics is the art of the possible. When Trump first announced in 2015, no pundit outside of Ann Coulter said he had a chance. And look how he demolished that republican field consisting of 16 brain dead neocons. If given half a chance, Tulsi could do the same. And the fact that she is a veteran works in her favor. Just because she was in Iraq, does not mean that she supported the US aggression. Like thousands of other vets, she obviously did not.

macilrae , says: July 2, 2019 at 2:08 pm GMT
@Commentator Mike ou're right but consider the obstacles she has to overcome – her desperate need to bypass the hostile media in order to make her point to the American masses who will care little or nothing about a few hundreds of thousands of dead foreigners but, when it comes to American dead, they are rather more receptive.

Same thing is true on Israel – if she is to have any chance she has to grit her teeth and stay pretty mum on that topic. They already know where she stands after her remarks about Netanyahu; her meeting with Assad and her wish for better relations with Russia – they will do everything in their power to destroy her.

Agent76 , says: July 2, 2019 at 2:26 pm GMT

The two private club parties will *Never* allow our freedom from the plantation.

Jul 28, 2016 How Did The U.S. End Up With A Two-Party System?

Democrats and Republicans dominate the American political system, leaving third parties behind. So why is there a two party system?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/u7JBXja7SAY?feature=oembed

Jun 6, 2013 How Ron Paul Was Cheated Out Of Presidency

A compilation of footage that shows how the establishment used illegal tactics to get Ron Paul out of the presidential running.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/5ouBoyu9gGY?feature=oembed

JackOH , says: July 2, 2019 at 2:40 pm GMT

My Congressman, Tim Ryan, was up there. He's a likeable guy, and he plays ball, probably because he has to after succeeding Jim Traficant, who was expelled from Congress. He's criticized locally for not bringing back more pork, and his local cliche-ridden talks sound as though they were scripted by the Democrat Central Committee. I'll give him credit for avoiding misconduct that could lead to indictment, no small achievement in this preternaturally corrupt area. I think he's reasonably honest, but just not a firebrand.

There's unsubstantiated speculation here he's been positioning himself for hire as a lobbyist.

RobinG , says: July 2, 2019 at 3:01 pm GMT
@Fool's Paradise

If she does gain a large following, as Bernie Sanders did, and is cheated out of the nomination, as Bernie was, I hope she has the guts, as Bernie didn't, to form a third, Peace Party, and run on it.

Yes. My question, when to start preparing for an outside run? If she's making steady progress, she won't move until after the convention. Would threatening an independent run help or hurt her before then?

Fool's Paradise , says: July 2, 2019 at 3:17 pm GMT
@TKK

to TKK:
I've never had a female boss so I can't comment on your question. No, Tulsi can't win the Presidency, it'd be a miracle if she did, but I'm saying that if she does get a huge following, gets cheated out of the nomination, and has the guts to form a Third Party, she'd shake up the rotten rigged system and give us some hope.

TKK , says: July 2, 2019 at 3:34 pm GMT
@Fool's Paradise

Perhaps!

Women who have children are more vulnerable to threats of harm. ( If they are good mothers)

I sometimes believe that when elected leaders do want to shake things up, they are threatened by various shadow organizations, when bribes don't work.

I detest George Clooney and his tranny wife, but the movie Michael Clayton lays it out well.

[Jul 04, 2019] Why not support someone who appears to be genuinely opposed to the wars?

Notable quotes:
"... why can't Tulsi Gabbard pretend to be "one of them" (e.g., by taking money from Raytheon, being a member of the CFR, claiming that al-Qaeda did 9/11, etc.) but then actually oppose the self-destructive wars and risky provocations? ..."
"... If orange clown can be honest about his feelings of animosity toward Iran during his campaign, why can't Tulsi Gabbard be honest about her feelings about pointless and self-destructive wars? ..."
"... If Ed Snowden and Chelsea Manning can betray the "deep state" why can't Tulsi Gabbard? ..."
"... somebody is going to be president anyway, whether we like it or not, and the wars – especially the looming WW3 – is the biggest threat ..."
Jul 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

Harold Smith says: July 2, 2019 at 6:28 pm GMT 100 Words

If orange clown can pretend to be one of "us" and then immediately turn around and enthusiastically stab "us" in the back, why can't Tulsi Gabbard pretend to be "one of them" (e.g., by taking money from Raytheon, being a member of the CFR, claiming that al-Qaeda did 9/11, etc.) but then actually oppose the self-destructive wars and risky provocations?

If orange clown can be honest about his feelings of animosity toward Iran during his campaign, why can't Tulsi Gabbard be honest about her feelings about pointless and self-destructive wars?

If Ed Snowden and Chelsea Manning can betray the "deep state" why can't Tulsi Gabbard?

The cynicism I see in some of the comments here disparaging Gabbard is "over the top" IMO; somebody is going to be president anyway, whether we like it or not, and the wars – especially the looming WW3 – is the biggest threat. So why not support someone who appears to be genuinely opposed to the wars?

[Jul 04, 2019] MSM are going to largely ignore Tulsi or even demonise her, because it is the Praetorian Media who now decide who will be the the American President.

Notable quotes:
"... To mis-paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the candidate you don't have. ..."
"... it is the Praetorian Media who now decide who will be the the American President. ..."
Jul 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

The Alarmist , says: July 2, 2019 at 8:56 am GMT

Tulsi Gabbard is not a perfect candidate.

To mis-paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the candidate you don't have.

Unless Ms. Gabbard can figure out some way to raise and cycle a billion dollars through media ads in the MSM, they're going to largely ignore her or even demonise her, because it is the Praetorian Media who now decide who will be the the American President.

[Jul 04, 2019] Neoliberal MSM seem to use against Tulsi the Russia smear

Jul 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

LondonBob says: July 2, 2019 at 6:52 am GMT 100 Words @Twodees Partain

I've seen Tulsi call out Netanyahu a few times, I guess personalising it makes sense.

Very clear hasbara campaign against her, they seem to be going with the Russia! smear.

Good luck to her, she is a long shot but just voicing her opinions on a major platform can have an impact.

Realist , says: July 2, 2019 at 11:13 am GMT

@LondonBob

Good luck to her, she is a long shot but just voicing her opinions on a major platform can have an impact.

No it won't, but I agree with her about war.

[Jul 04, 2019] Looks like Trump lost anti-war right

Notable quotes:
"... I won't be voting Trump again and fall for that sting. Will vote Tulsi whether she's on ballot or not. ..."
Jul 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

freedom-cat says: July 2, 2019 at 2:52 pm GMT 100 Words

Presidential elections are a joke. It's best to vote for 3rd candidate to express your opposition to the Status quo: I won't be voting Trump again and fall for that sting. Will vote Tulsi whether she's on ballot or not.

She will never make it as she is too honest about foreign policy and the USA lies.

[Jul 04, 2019] The armed forces are just a bunch of heavily entrenched welfare recipients who get uniforms, guns, bombs etc. , and are always angling for more money

Jul 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

onebornfree says: Website July 2, 2019 at 3:49 pm GMT 100 Words @Your connection is not secure

Your connection is not secure says: "Wake up people. The military works for the evil masters. They don't really want war of course, they want peace – particularly between your ears."

It's all about welfare- welfare specifically for the military industrial complex , that is.

The armed forces are just a bunch of heavily entrenched welfare recipients who get uniforms, guns, bombs etc. , and are always angling for more money so that they to get more uniforms, guns, bombs etc., to be happily provided by the "private" inc. sycophants, otherwise collectively known as "weapons manufacturers".

Welfare/warfare, don't you just love it?

Regards, onebornfree

Pancho Perico , says: July 2, 2019 at 4:12 pm GMT

Council on Foreign Relations Tulsi Gabbard U.S. President? You have to be very gullible, to say the least, to believe that she is going to end America's endless wars.

Jacques Sheete , says: July 2, 2019 at 4:12 pm GMT
@Realist

Yes, indeed. The Deep State will only be beaten by force.

I vote for rotting from within. Not as dramatic as force, but more effective and long lasting. I'll enjoy the show when they start, Cronus-like, knocking one another off though.

[Jul 04, 2019] Bush Sr. and his CIA drug dealing

Jul 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

J. Gutierrez says: July 2, 2019 at 9:36 pm GMT 500 Words @Harold Smith

With all due respect Mr. Smith things have really gone down hill after Bush Sr. I'm talking about direct attacks on the rights of American citizens. Bush Sr. (R) with his CIA drug dealing with the help of Noriega. He purchased weapons with the proceeds to arm terrorist guerrilla groups in Nicaragua. Bill Clinton (D) helped Bush Sr. as governor of Arkansas by covering up any investigation targeting the operation and laundering their money through a state owned bank. Bush Jr. (R) secured lands in Afghanistan in order to restart athe heroine trade by growing poppy fields to process and ship back to the US. Obama (R) made sure the Mexican drug cartels were well armed in order to launch a drug war that supported the Merida Initiative, which allowed armed DEA, CIA and Mercenaries into Mexican territory. Trump (R) will be the clean up hitter that will usher in the dollar collapse.

Mr. Smith do you really believe it is a coincidence that Rep 8 yrs, Dem 8yrs, Rep 8yrs, Dem 8yrs, Rep 3 yrs are voted in? Please sir, don't fool yourself because in the next election I will bet money the orange fool will be president for another 4 years unless the owners don't want him there. But we can safely say that history tells us he will. All I'm saying that people like you, waiting for someone to throw you a rope because you've fallen into deep water are waiting on a rescue boat that doesn't care if you drown.

Your best bet for change was thrown away when Dr. Ron Paul failed to be nominated. Us dumb asses in Mexico didn't need another election fraud this time around! The people started YouTube channels that reported the "real" news (Chapucero – Quesadillas de Verdades – Charro Politico – Sin Censura, etc.). Those channels made a big difference, countering the negative reporting by Mexican and US MSM that the Presidential Candidate for MORENA as "Leftist", "Communist", "Socialist", "Like Hugo Chavez", "Dangerous", etc.

With all of the US propaganda, Mexican propaganda, the negative MSM and Elite financing, Mexicans knew they had to get out and vote in record numbers and they did! Otherwise a close election was seen as another loss and the end of Mexico as a country. People were ready to fight and die if necessary. They had seen the Energy Reforms forced down our throat by the corrupt PRI/PAN parties (Mex version o DEM/REP), with the help of Hillary Clinton and the US State Department. They drafting the changes needed to the Mexican Constitution to allow a vote. Totally against the Law in Mexico and I'm sure the laws of the US.

There is a saying that goes something like, "If you're not ready to die for Freedom, take it out of your Vocabulary"!

We were!!!

[Jul 04, 2019] any and all individuals who conspired to defraud the United States into illegal war of aggression should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law

Wars are necessary for the maintaining and expanding the US controlled neoliberal empire. Wars is the health of military industrial complex.
The Deep State will bury any candidate who will try to change the USA forign policy. Looks what happened to Trump. He got Russiagate just for vey modest proposal of detente with Russia (of course not only for that, but still...)
Notable quotes:
"... The first is "The War Fraud Accountability Act of 2020″ Retroactive to 2002, it states that any and all individuals who conspired to defraud the United States into illegal war of aggression should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, any and all assets owned by these individuals shall be made forfeit . to pay down the cost of the wars they lied us into. ..."
Jul 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

alexander says: July 2, 2019 at 8:57 pm GMT 400 Words

Those are interesting proposals but wishful thinking: wars are necessary for Electing Tulsi Gabbard as our next Commander in Chief will not solve our biggest problems alone.

Her candidacy, I believe , must be augmented by two new laws which should be demanded by the taxpayer and enforced by her administration on "day one".

The first is "The War Fraud Accountability Act of 2020″ Retroactive to 2002, it states that any and all individuals who conspired to defraud the United States into illegal war of aggression should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, any and all assets owned by these individuals shall be made forfeit . to pay down the cost of the wars they lied us into.

If they lied us into war .they pay for it NOT the US taxpayer.

The second is " The Terror Fraud Accountability Act of 2020″ also retroactive to 2001, it states that any and all individuals found to have engaged in plotting, planning, or staging "false terror events" will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, any and all of the assets owned by these individuals shall be made forfeit to pay down the cost of our War on Terror.

Americans should not have to sacrifice one cent of their tax dollars to pay for their own defrauding by "staged" or "phony" terror events.

I believe that were Tulsi to be elected, she should set up two new task forces designed especially for these reasons, Try to think of them as the " Office of Special Plans" IN REVERSO.!.

Moreover she should hold weekly press briefings to notify the taxpayer of her progress, and also how much of our 23 trillion in losses , FROM THEIR LIES, she has been able to recoup.

Getting these two initiatives up and running is the most potent force the taxpayers have in cleaning out the fraud and larceny in DC, .ending our illegal wars overseas .. and (finally)holding our "establishment elite " accountable for "LYING US INTO THEM"

It is way overdue for the American Taxpayer to take back control of our government from those who ALMOST BANKRUPTED OUR ENTIRE NATION BY LYING US INTO ILLEGAL WARS.

It is not enough any more just to complain or "kvetch" about our problems .put on your thinking caps .and start coming up with solutions and initiatives .start fighting for your freedom, your finances and your future.

Elect the leaders YOU WANT and tell them exactly what you want them to do!

Tulsi has promised us all "SERVICE OVER SELF"

There you go !

I say that means not only ENDING our ILLEGAL, CRIMINAL WARS .but GETTING AS MUCH OF OUR MONEY BACK from those who lied us into them !

ACCOUNTABILITY FOR WAR FRAUD it is $23,000,000,000,000.00. in "heinous debt" .overdue!

OORAH !

[Jul 02, 2019] A lot of wanderers in the US political desert recognize that all the two party duopoly can offer is a choice of mirages

Jan 02, 2019 | caucus99percent.co

--

A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages.

Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.

-- lotlizard

[Jul 02, 2019] A lot of wanderers in the US political desert recognize that all the two party duopoly can offer is a choice of mirages

Jan 02, 2019 | caucus99percent.co

--

A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages.

Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.

-- lotlizard

[Jul 01, 2019] NYT is totally subservant to MIC and intelligence agencies and it shows

Notable quotes:
"... Somehow, I think Kevin's being too generous saying NY Times is moderate when it comes to political views. IMO, reactionary is more appropriate given its editorial stances and what it's championed over its history. ..."
Jul 01, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jun 30, 2019 6:33:24 PM | 54

Interesting observation of NY Times attitude after first D-Party debate noted by Kevin Gosztola:

"'Moderates' seems to be the New York Times media company's euphemism for itself. Liberals at the Democratic presidential debate made the Times company 'anxious.'"

Somehow, I think Kevin's being too generous saying NY Times is moderate when it comes to political views. IMO, reactionary is more appropriate given its editorial stances and what it's championed over its history.

[Jul 01, 2019] We must end these interventionist wars as they suck the life blood out of doing the positive things that must be done to benefit Americans.

Notable quotes:
"... So, the two biggest issues in US politics--Forever Wars and the utter strangulation of politics by Big Money are what she wants to take on. And on those two issues alone, I've decided to work for her campaign! ..."
Jul 01, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jun 30, 2019 8:00:10 PM | 73

Doing Due Diligence on Tulsi Gabbard by watching the 1:20 long interview by Jimmy Dore of which the first 20 minutes are excellent. At the 21 minute mark, Dore asks how can we end these endless wars. Paraphrasing Gabbard: Failure is not an option: We must end these interventionist wars as they suck the life blood out of doing the positive things that must be done to benefit Americans.

Prior to the above, Dore as an aside mentions that Howard Dean, the Podestas, Clintons, and others are all about keeping the flow of Big Money into politics at the expense of everything else--that's their absolute #1 concern, to which you'll hear Gabbard agree!

So, the two biggest issues in US politics--Forever Wars and the utter strangulation of politics by Big Money are what she wants to take on. And on those two issues alone, I've decided to work for her campaign!

Grieved , Jun 30, 2019 10:25:50 PM | 94

@74 karlof1 - " I've decided to work for [Tulsi Gabbard's] campaign"

This is excellent. As someone who has never had any national experience in politics, I would be interested to know how one offers this kind of support - if you ever have time to say, but don't break a leg over it.

One sees in politics how good moral character gets compromised by involvement in the system. But we also know that one's own contribution to universal sanity can never be known or measured - or discounted! Therefore, we do what we can. Who knows, perhaps your involvement is the final butterfly-wing stroke that keeps her honest and upright and making a difference.

Well done. And thank you.

~~

ps..please don't worry that people are not taking up your links or comments, just because you don't see feedback here. Keep it all coming as well as you can, but please don't limit your contributions to feedback. Many of the pieces you post are so friggin' long that it takes the rest of the night to absorb them all ;)

I'm glad you donate the time of your retirement to offer all the things you do. I still work, and it's a struggle to keep up with things. Your reading list overlaps mine very nicely, and I ride on your coat-tails a lot - you along with many commenters here save me a lot of time in pinpointing articles of value.

In fact, beyond b's superlative work - which he keeps producing even though we all appreciate it so intently that we usually forget to praise him for it - I'd say the offering of links from the top analysts and journalists, combined with the gems from the left field, are a signature mark of this forum.

So please keep the summaries coming, and never lose heart or doubt that people are reading them and placing value on them.

[Jul 01, 2019] NYT is totally subservant to MIC and intelligence agencies and it shows

Notable quotes:
"... Somehow, I think Kevin's being too generous saying NY Times is moderate when it comes to political views. IMO, reactionary is more appropriate given its editorial stances and what it's championed over its history. ..."
Jul 01, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jun 30, 2019 6:33:24 PM | 54

Interesting observation of NY Times attitude after first D-Party debate noted by Kevin Gosztola:

"'Moderates' seems to be the New York Times media company's euphemism for itself. Liberals at the Democratic presidential debate made the Times company 'anxious.'"

Somehow, I think Kevin's being too generous saying NY Times is moderate when it comes to political views. IMO, reactionary is more appropriate given its editorial stances and what it's championed over its history.

[Jul 01, 2019] The Return of Sammy Glick by Martin Sieff

Notable quotes:
"... As I documented on March 9 on this platform in my article " What Makes Gavin Run ?" Williamson knows no shame or integrity and is the living embodiment of the repulsive, two-faced backstabber, intriguer and liar Sammy Glick in the great writer Budd Schulberg's legendary 1941 novel of Hollywood "What Makes Sammy Run?" So he is a natural fit for Johnson, whose entire career has been dictated by similar shameless, reckless lies, opportunism and crass incompetence. ..."
"... According to many UK media reports – which Williamson understandably denies – his most effective weapons are bullying, bluster and threats. These are patterns of behavior which those who have worked for him or who have bothered following his career over the years find extremely convincing and in character (or, rather, lack of it). ..."
"... Putting Williamson in charge of such a delicate, nervously balanced and ultra-sensitive province is like appointing a Sith Lord as head of the Jedi Knights in "Star Wars" or putting the late Boston underworld mass murderer Whitey Bulger in charge of the FBI. ..."
"... Because like attracts like, competent honorable people in any country and culture seek to promote and advance others with the same qualities and empty, shallow sociopaths and confidence tricksters similarly admire and advance people exactly like themselves. ..."
Jun 30, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

As I documented on March 9 on this platform in my article " What Makes Gavin Run ?" Williamson knows no shame or integrity and is the living embodiment of the repulsive, two-faced backstabber, intriguer and liar Sammy Glick in the great writer Budd Schulberg's legendary 1941 novel of Hollywood "What Makes Sammy Run?" So he is a natural fit for Johnson, whose entire career has been dictated by similar shameless, reckless lies, opportunism and crass incompetence.

No one gets every, or usually most, professional predictions right, and in the news business sensible people make the best of their brilliant insights – or lucky guesses – when they can. But I have seldom hit a hole-in-one prediction that came true as quickly as my column on Williamson did.

On March 9, Williamson, after only a decade in the UK main chamber of parliament, the ancient House of Commons was still riding high and making a fool of himself insulting major nations from Russia to China and also the UK's badly-needed European allies as the most incompetent defense chief in the modern history of his nation.

On May 1, less than two months after my article appeared – and with no causality that I could see – Williamson was humiliatingly sacked by his benefactor, Prime Minister Theresa May after being accused of leaking highly confidential national security information to the media.

Williamson immediately turned on his long-time benefactor Mrs. May savagely and helped drive her from office – which was admittedly long overdue. She resigned on June 7, just over a single month after sacking him.

Williamson then joined May's arch-enemy, former foreign secretary Boris Johnson, who had relentlessly schemed to topple her for years and joined Johnson's own campaign to win the leadership of the rapidly disintegrating Conservative Party and thence become prime minister.

At the time of writing, Johnson remains far in the lead in the contest to replace May as prime minister despite repeated attacks on his character, utter lack of political consistency, convictions or achievement and his entertainingly squalid private life.

Johnson is twice divorced with neither marriage lasting longer than five years and he is now being accused of screaming rows with his 20-years-younger girl friend that may or may not have involved him hitting her, which he naturally denies.

Through all this Williamson, who like Johnson himself does not lack for energy in the service of his own ambition, has been rounding up support for his new master among Conservative Party Members of Parliament.

According to many UK media reports – which Williamson understandably denies – his most effective weapons are bullying, bluster and threats. These are patterns of behavior which those who have worked for him or who have bothered following his career over the years find extremely convincing and in character (or, rather, lack of it).

Reports are also circulating in the UK media – which are usually well-connected and informed on such matters – that Williamson is holding out to be reappointed as the UK's defense chief or as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland is my native land and is tiny in size. But over the past century and more it has repeatedly displayed an infinite capacity for generating wars, embarrassment and catastrophe for both Ireland and the UK, which otherwise get along easily and well.

Putting Williamson in charge of such a delicate, nervously balanced and ultra-sensitive province is like appointing a Sith Lord as head of the Jedi Knights in "Star Wars" or putting the late Boston underworld mass murderer Whitey Bulger in charge of the FBI.

Therefore it will probably happen.

Because like attracts like, competent honorable people in any country and culture seek to promote and advance others with the same qualities and empty, shallow sociopaths and confidence tricksters similarly admire and advance people exactly like themselves.

On Monday, June 24, without mentioning Williamson once, one of the UK's most experienced and respected journalists, war correspondents and historians, Sir Max Hastings wrote a scathing article in the liberal "Guardian" newspaper entitled "I was Boris Johnson's boss: he is utterly unfitted to be prime minister."

Therefore Johnson will re-elevate Williamson, either to drive Northern Ireland back into civil war or destroy the remaining security of the entire UK as defense secretary once again. And Williamson will remain loyal, until he in his turn sees the chance to stab Johnson in the back and briefly rule as prime minister until he in his own turn is politically knifed and toppled by one of his own hand-picked sociopaths.

And Sammy Glick will rise again – on the suffering and smashed lives of everyone else.

[Jul 01, 2019] Tulsi on Bill Maher (video)

People who run "debates" are the same people (the DNC and the MSM and the USA MIC who controls both) who have charged that our "democracy" was compromised by Russian interference via Facebook posts and the publishing of DNC documents that no one has disputed the validity thereof.
As pathetic as Dems "debate" format is, it does give people an actual look at the candidates, in many cases for the first time. It does change some minds and move the numbers. After all, Tulsi was the person who introduced Bernie at the DNC convention in 2016. She's the person who left the DNC because she saw what scumbags they were.
For a candidate speaking out about the endless wars but the MSM and associates are performing their marginalization magic.
More exposure for Gabbard can only help her. She did a fine job in her debate, I'm sure her numbers will climb a bit.
Jul 01, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

EdMass on Sun, 06/30/2019 - 9:52am

Strong to the hoop Tulsi! And this will reach a whole lot of people.

Tulsi Gabbard | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

UntimelyRippd on Sat, 06/29/2019 - 4:04pm

man, 130k donors 14 months out from the national

election is a mighty high bar. she needs about 750 new donors a day, every day, if indeed the cutoff date is 60ish days from now.

i wonder how many will make it? for that matter, i wonder how many already have? Biden, O'Rourke, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Buttigieg for sure. Booker, Castro, Gillibrand probably. Klobuchar maybe?

most of the rest are just taking up space, as far as I can tell -- they're contributing nothing to the debate at all, and they have no hope of winning substantial support.

meanwhile, i wouldn't be surprised if both Biden and O'Rourke are done and out before the next debate, destroyed by their own negatives. on the other hand, ego is a powerful thing, and even the ones whose stars are declining may insist on sticking it out through New Hampshire at least, in which case there could be a dozen or more still in the race come September, hopefully including TG.

[Jun 30, 2019] USG's Bizarre Change of Position in the Roger Stone Case by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Given these facts you would think it would be easy for Robert Mueller to explain how the Russians got their hands on the DNC emails and then passed them on to Wikileaks. But it is not easy because the foundation of the case against the Russians rests on assumptions and beliefs. No solid facts. ..."
"... To reiterate a point I have raised in previous posts, the only entity to have forensic access to the DNC computers, i.e. CrowdStrike, is on the record in the person of the CrowdStrike CEO, Dimitri Alperovitch admitting they don't know how the Russians got access. ..."
"... CrowdStrike is not sure how the hackers got in. The firm suspects they may have targeted DNC employees with "spearphishing" emails. These are communications that appear legitimate -- often made to look like they came from a colleague or someone trusted -- but that contain links or attachments that when clicked on deploy malicious software that enables a hacker to gain access to a computer. " But we don't have hard evidence ," Alperovitch said. ..."
"... If CrowdStrike actually had conducted a legitimate forensic examination of the DNC server/servers then they absolutely would have had "hard evidence." ..."
"... The government produced the CrowdStrike reports because the Indictment in this case referenced, as background, CrowdStrike's statements about the DNC hack. Stone's statement that the government has no other evidence is not only irrelevant to this proceeding but is also mistaken. ..."
"... It is a horrible irony that Stone is being persecuted with prosecution based on an even bigger lie -- i.e., the Russians hacked the DNC. Russia did not hack the DNC. Let's hope that Stone's lawyers get a chance to demand the US Government put up the evidence or shut up. ..."
Jun 30, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

There is zero forensic evidence in the public arena that supports the US Government's assertion that the Russian Government hacked the DNC. In fact, the forensic computer evidence that is available indicates that the emails from the DNC were downloaded onto something like a thumb drive.

There also is zero forensic evidence in the public arena that the Russians passed/delivered the DNC emails to Julian Assange/Wikileaks. There are only two ways to get DNC emails into the hands of Wiki people--an electronic transfer or a physical/human transfer. That's it.

And here is what we know for certain. First, since Edward Snowden absconded with the NSA's family jewels with the help of Wikileaks, U.S. and British intelligence assets have been monitoring every single electronic communication to and from Wikileaks/Julian Assange. They also have been conducting surveillance on all personal contacts with Assange and other key members of the Wikileaks staff.

Given these facts you would think it would be easy for Robert Mueller to explain how the Russians got their hands on the DNC emails and then passed them on to Wikileaks. But it is not easy because the foundation of the case against the Russians rests on assumptions and beliefs. No solid facts.

To reiterate a point I have raised in previous posts, the only entity to have forensic access to the DNC computers, i.e. CrowdStrike, is on the record in the person of the CrowdStrike CEO, Dimitri Alperovitch admitting they don't know how the Russians got access. Alperovitch told Washington Post Reporter Ellen Nakashima on June 14, 2016 the following :

CrowdStrike is not sure how the hackers got in. The firm suspects they may have targeted DNC employees with "spearphishing" emails. These are communications that appear legitimate -- often made to look like they came from a colleague or someone trusted -- but that contain links or attachments that when clicked on deploy malicious software that enables a hacker to gain access to a computer. " But we don't have hard evidence ," Alperovitch said.

If CrowdStrike actually had conducted a legitimate forensic examination of the DNC server/servers then they absolutely would have had "hard evidence."

Then, 13 months later, we have FBI Director Jim Comey admitting that the FBI relied on CrowdStrike for its "evidence." Jim Comey testified to the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017 and stated the following :

"we never got direct access to the machines themselves. The DNC in the spring of 2016 hired a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the system."

Now take a look at a very significant reversal of the US Government's position in the case against Roger Stone. On 20 June 2019, US Attorney Jessie Liu filed a motion attempting to rebut the argument presented by Stone's attorneys that there was no supporting evidence for the claim that Russia hacked the DNC. Here are the key snippets from her filing:

As the government has argued (Doc. 122, at 6, 9, 14), Russia's role in the DNC hack is not material to the eighteen findings of probable cause that Stone appears to be challenging. . . . The government produced the CrowdStrike reports because the Indictment in this case referenced, as background, CrowdStrike's statements about the DNC hack. Stone's statement that the government has no other evidence is not only irrelevant to this proceeding but is also mistaken.

Yet, when you read the original indictment, Roger Stone was put in the cross hairs because he was allegedly communicating with Wikileaks/Julian Assange about the DNC emails. And those emails are identified in the indictment as "stolen." The Government is hoping to nail Stone on the charge of "lying" to Congress. Good luck with that.

It is a horrible irony that Stone is being persecuted with prosecution based on an even bigger lie -- i.e., the Russians hacked the DNC. Russia did not hack the DNC. Let's hope that Stone's lawyers get a chance to demand the US Government put up the evidence or shut up.

[Jun 30, 2019] USG's Bizarre Change of Position in the Roger Stone Case by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Given these facts you would think it would be easy for Robert Mueller to explain how the Russians got their hands on the DNC emails and then passed them on to Wikileaks. But it is not easy because the foundation of the case against the Russians rests on assumptions and beliefs. No solid facts. ..."
"... To reiterate a point I have raised in previous posts, the only entity to have forensic access to the DNC computers, i.e. CrowdStrike, is on the record in the person of the CrowdStrike CEO, Dimitri Alperovitch admitting they don't know how the Russians got access. ..."
"... CrowdStrike is not sure how the hackers got in. The firm suspects they may have targeted DNC employees with "spearphishing" emails. These are communications that appear legitimate -- often made to look like they came from a colleague or someone trusted -- but that contain links or attachments that when clicked on deploy malicious software that enables a hacker to gain access to a computer. " But we don't have hard evidence ," Alperovitch said. ..."
"... If CrowdStrike actually had conducted a legitimate forensic examination of the DNC server/servers then they absolutely would have had "hard evidence." ..."
"... The government produced the CrowdStrike reports because the Indictment in this case referenced, as background, CrowdStrike's statements about the DNC hack. Stone's statement that the government has no other evidence is not only irrelevant to this proceeding but is also mistaken. ..."
"... It is a horrible irony that Stone is being persecuted with prosecution based on an even bigger lie -- i.e., the Russians hacked the DNC. Russia did not hack the DNC. Let's hope that Stone's lawyers get a chance to demand the US Government put up the evidence or shut up. ..."
Jun 30, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

There is zero forensic evidence in the public arena that supports the US Government's assertion that the Russian Government hacked the DNC. In fact, the forensic computer evidence that is available indicates that the emails from the DNC were downloaded onto something like a thumb drive.

There also is zero forensic evidence in the public arena that the Russians passed/delivered the DNC emails to Julian Assange/Wikileaks. There are only two ways to get DNC emails into the hands of Wiki people--an electronic transfer or a physical/human transfer. That's it.

And here is what we know for certain. First, since Edward Snowden absconded with the NSA's family jewels with the help of Wikileaks, U.S. and British intelligence assets have been monitoring every single electronic communication to and from Wikileaks/Julian Assange. They also have been conducting surveillance on all personal contacts with Assange and other key members of the Wikileaks staff.

Given these facts you would think it would be easy for Robert Mueller to explain how the Russians got their hands on the DNC emails and then passed them on to Wikileaks. But it is not easy because the foundation of the case against the Russians rests on assumptions and beliefs. No solid facts.

To reiterate a point I have raised in previous posts, the only entity to have forensic access to the DNC computers, i.e. CrowdStrike, is on the record in the person of the CrowdStrike CEO, Dimitri Alperovitch admitting they don't know how the Russians got access. Alperovitch told Washington Post Reporter Ellen Nakashima on June 14, 2016 the following :

CrowdStrike is not sure how the hackers got in. The firm suspects they may have targeted DNC employees with "spearphishing" emails. These are communications that appear legitimate -- often made to look like they came from a colleague or someone trusted -- but that contain links or attachments that when clicked on deploy malicious software that enables a hacker to gain access to a computer. " But we don't have hard evidence ," Alperovitch said.

If CrowdStrike actually had conducted a legitimate forensic examination of the DNC server/servers then they absolutely would have had "hard evidence."

Then, 13 months later, we have FBI Director Jim Comey admitting that the FBI relied on CrowdStrike for its "evidence." Jim Comey testified to the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017 and stated the following :

"we never got direct access to the machines themselves. The DNC in the spring of 2016 hired a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the system."

Now take a look at a very significant reversal of the US Government's position in the case against Roger Stone. On 20 June 2019, US Attorney Jessie Liu filed a motion attempting to rebut the argument presented by Stone's attorneys that there was no supporting evidence for the claim that Russia hacked the DNC. Here are the key snippets from her filing:

As the government has argued (Doc. 122, at 6, 9, 14), Russia's role in the DNC hack is not material to the eighteen findings of probable cause that Stone appears to be challenging. . . . The government produced the CrowdStrike reports because the Indictment in this case referenced, as background, CrowdStrike's statements about the DNC hack. Stone's statement that the government has no other evidence is not only irrelevant to this proceeding but is also mistaken.

Yet, when you read the original indictment, Roger Stone was put in the cross hairs because he was allegedly communicating with Wikileaks/Julian Assange about the DNC emails. And those emails are identified in the indictment as "stolen." The Government is hoping to nail Stone on the charge of "lying" to Congress. Good luck with that.

It is a horrible irony that Stone is being persecuted with prosecution based on an even bigger lie -- i.e., the Russians hacked the DNC. Russia did not hack the DNC. Let's hope that Stone's lawyers get a chance to demand the US Government put up the evidence or shut up.

[Jun 30, 2019] Two cheers for chickenhawks

Notable quotes:
"... And how many congresspeople served in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan? How many presidential candidates had boots on the ground in combat theaters? The answer is one. Here is the moral decay of America's ruling elites boiled down to a single word. ..."
Jun 30, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

And how many congresspeople served in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan? How many presidential candidates had boots on the ground in combat theaters? The answer is one. Here is the moral decay of America's ruling elites boiled down to a single word.

Giant Meteor , 5 hours ago link

Moral leaders, lead. There is your moral decay.

44_shooter , 5 hours ago link

It didn't matter when they did. McStain fought, and absolutely LOVED war. Plenty of the Hawks served and fought, it's like frat boys who were hazed, carrying on the hazing.

[Jun 30, 2019] First Democratic debate Demagogy on social issues, silence on war by Patrick Martin

This is WSWS with their outdated dreams of "working class dictatorship" but some points and observation are very apt and to the point.
Notable quotes:
"... The fraud of a "progressive" Democratic Party and presidential candidate was summed up in the near-universal declaration of the media that Senator Kamala Harris had emerged as the clear winner, part of a coordinated effort to promote her candidacy ..."
"... Harris climbed to the Senate by serving for years in the Bay Area of California as a law-and-order district attorney and state attorney general, defending police killers and bankers engaged in foreclosure fraud, including Trump's current treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin. A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she has been among the most rabid of Democrats in attacking Trump as a stooge of Russian President Putin. In Thursday's debate, her main foray into foreign policy was to denounce Trump for being soft on Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. ..."
"... She is being promoted most enthusiastically by those sections of the ruling class, whose views are promoted by the New York Times ..."
"... The Obama administration also deported more immigrants than any other, a fact that was raised in a question to Vice President Biden, who confined himself to empty declarations of sympathy for the victims of Trump's persecution, while denying any comparison between Trump and Obama. ..."
"... If these ladies and gentlemen decide not to engage on foreign policy, the reason is clear: the Democrats know that the American people are adamantly opposed to new military interventions. They therefore seek to conceal the preparations of American imperialism for major wars, whether regional conflicts with Iran, North Korea or Venezuela, or conflicts with nuclear-armed global rivals like China and Russia. ..."
"... On the first night, Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, asked to name the greatest global security threat, replied, "The greatest threat that we face is the fact we are at a greater risk of nuclear war today than ever before in history." This remarkable declaration was passed over in silence by the moderators and the other candidates, and the subject was not raised on the second night at all, including by Bernie Sanders. ..."
Jun 29, 2019 | www.wsws.org

Four hours of nationally televised debates Wednesday and Thursday among 20 Democratic presidential candidates demonstrated the gigantic disconnect between the claims of this pro-war, pro-corporate party to be driven by concerns for the well-being of working people and the reality of poverty and oppression in America, for which the Democratic Party is no less responsible than the Republicans.

The stage-managed spectacle mounted by NBC marked the formal beginning of an electoral process dominated by big money and thoroughly manipulated by the corporate-controlled media.

The attempt to contain the growing left-wing opposition in the working class and channel it behind the second oldest capitalist party in the world necessarily assumed the form of lies and demagogy. For the most part, the vying politicians, all of them in the top 10 percent on the income ladder, made promises to provide healthcare, jobs, decent schools, tuition-free college and a clean environment for all, knowing full well they had no intention of carrying them out.

No one -- neither the millionaire media talking heads asking the questions nor the candidates -- dared to mention the fact that that Democratic Party has just voted to give Trump an additional $4.9 billion to round up, detain and torture hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including children, in the growing network of concentration camps being set up within the US. Facts, as they say, are stubborn things, and this one demonstrates the complicity of the Democratic Party in the fascistic policies of the Trump administration.

The second night of the debate featured the front-runners, former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Biden has a long record of reactionary politics, including in the Obama administration. Sanders is continuing in this election his role in 2016 of channeling growing support for socialism into the framework of a right-wing party.

The fraud of a "progressive" Democratic Party and presidential candidate was summed up in the near-universal declaration of the media that Senator Kamala Harris had emerged as the clear winner, part of a coordinated effort to promote her candidacy. The African-American senator was lauded for attacking Biden for statements boasting of his ability in the past to collaborate with segregationist senators and his past opposition to busing for school integration.

It was Harris who adopted the most transparently bogus posture of left-radicalism in Thursday night's debate, repeatedly declaring her agreement with Bernie Sanders and raising her hand, along with Sanders, to support the abolition of private health insurance in favor of a single-payer system. By Friday morning, however, she had reversed that stand, claiming she had "misheard" the question and declaring her support for the continuation of private insurance.

Harris climbed to the Senate by serving for years in the Bay Area of California as a law-and-order district attorney and state attorney general, defending police killers and bankers engaged in foreclosure fraud, including Trump's current treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin. A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she has been among the most rabid of Democrats in attacking Trump as a stooge of Russian President Putin. In Thursday's debate, her main foray into foreign policy was to denounce Trump for being soft on Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

She is being promoted most enthusiastically by those sections of the ruling class, whose views are promoted by the New York Times , who want the Democratic campaign to be dominated by racial and gender politics so as to mobilize the party's wealthy upper-middle class base and divert and divide the mass working class anger over social inequality.

Many of the candidates fondly recalled the Obama administration. But those eight years saw the greatest transfer of wealth from working people to the super-rich in American history. The pace was set by the initial $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, which was expanded to uncounted trillions in the course of 2009, combined with the bailout of the auto companies at the expense of the autoworkers, who suffered massive cuts in benefits and a 50 percent cut in pay for new hires, rubber-stamped by the United Auto Workers.

The Obama administration also deported more immigrants than any other, a fact that was raised in a question to Vice President Biden, who confined himself to empty declarations of sympathy for the victims of Trump's persecution, while denying any comparison between Trump and Obama.

Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado attacked Biden for claiming credit for a bipartisan budget deal in 2011 with Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Far from a genuine compromise, he said, the deal "was a complete victory for the Tea Party. It extended the Bush tax cuts permanently," as well as putting in place major cuts in social spending which continue to this day. Bennet neglected to mention that he had voted for the deal himself when it passed the Senate by a huge majority.

It was remarkable, under conditions where President Trump himself declared that the United States was only 10 minutes away from launching a major assault on Iran earlier this month, that the 20 Democratic candidates spent almost no time discussing foreign policy.

In the course of four hours, there were only a few minutes devoted to the world outside the United States. The silence on the rest of the world cannot be dismissed as mere parochialism.

Many of the Democratic presidential candidates are deeply implicated in either the policy-making or combat operations of US imperialism. The 20 candidates include two who were deployed as military officers to Iraq and Afghanistan, Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard; Biden, vice president for eight years and the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and five senators who are members of high-profile national security committees: Harris and Bennet on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand on the Armed Services Committee, and Cory Booker on the Foreign Relations Committee.

If these ladies and gentlemen decide not to engage on foreign policy, the reason is clear: the Democrats know that the American people are adamantly opposed to new military interventions. They therefore seek to conceal the preparations of American imperialism for major wars, whether regional conflicts with Iran, North Korea or Venezuela, or conflicts with nuclear-armed global rivals like China and Russia.

In the handful of comments that were made on foreign policy, the Democratic candidates struck a belligerent note. On Wednesday, four of the ten candidates declared the main global threat to the United States to be China, while New York Mayor Bill de Blasio opted for Russia. Many candidates referred to the need to combat Russian interference in the US election -- recycling the phony claims that Russian "meddling" helped Trump into the White House in 2016.

On the first night, Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, asked to name the greatest global security threat, replied, "The greatest threat that we face is the fact we are at a greater risk of nuclear war today than ever before in history." This remarkable declaration was passed over in silence by the moderators and the other candidates, and the subject was not raised on the second night at all, including by Bernie Sanders.

[Jun 30, 2019] New York Times exploits Parkland tragedy to escalate anti-Russian campaign by Andre Damon

Feb 21, 2018 | www.wsws.org

Less than four days after the Parkland school shooting, the New York Times has found a way to turn a national tragedy that claimed the lives of 17 high school students into an opportunity to escalate its unrelenting campaign of anti-Russian propaganda, involving the continuous bombardment of the public with reactionary lies and warmongering.

Against the backdrop of a major escalation of military tensions between the two countries, the Times seized upon the Justice Department indictment of Russian nationals over the weekend to claim that Russia is at "war" with the United States. Now, the Times has widened this claim into an argument that Russia somehow bears responsibility for social divisions over the latest mass shooting in America.

Its lead headline Tuesday morning blared: "SHOTS ARE FIRED, AND BOTS SWARM TO SOCIAL DIVIDES - Florida School Shooting Draws an Army Ready to Spread Discord"

According to the Times , Russian "bots," or automated social media accounts, sought "to widen the divide" on issues of gun control and mental illness, in order to "make compromise even more difficult." Russia sought to exploit "the issue of mental illness in the gun control debate," and "propagated the notion that Nikolas Cruz, the suspected gunman" was "mentally ill."

The absurd claim that Russia is responsible for the existence of social divisions in America is belied by the shooting itself, which is a testament to the fact that American society is riven by antagonisms that express themselves, in the absence of a progressive outlet, in outpourings of mass violence.

The aim of this campaign is to target anyone who would criticize the underlying social causes of the shooting -- the violence of American society, the nonexistence of mental health services, or even the social psychology that gives rise to mass shootings -- as a "Russian agent" seeking to "sow divisions" in American society.

The Times lead is based entirely on a "dashboard" called Hamilton 68 created by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy, whose lead spokesman is Clint Watts, the former US intelligence agent and censorship advocate who declared in November that social media companies must "silence" sources of "rebellion."

Without naming any of the accounts it follows, Hamilton 68 claims to track content tweeted by "Russian bots and trolls." But most of the trends leading the dashboard are news stories, many posted by Russia Today and Sputnik News , that are identical with the trending topics followed by any other news agency. Thus, Hamilton 68 provides an instant New York Times headline generator: Any major news story can be presented as the result of "Russian bots."

The New York Times is making its claims about "Russian meddling" with what is known in the law as "unclean hands." That is, the Times practices the very actions of which it accuses others.

Here is not the place to deal with the long and bloody history of American destabilization campaigns and their horrific consequences in Latin America and the Middle East, or to review the fact that many American journalists serving abroad had dual functions -- as reporters and as agents.

But it is worth noting that, particularly in recent decades, and under the auspices of Editorial Page editor James Bennet, there has been a remarkable integration of the Times with the major operations of the US intelligence agencies.

This is particularly true with regard to Russia, in regard to which the Times acts as an instrument of US foreign policy misinformation, practicing exactly what it accuse the Kremlin of.

Take, for example, the so-called political "dissident" Aleksei Navalny. This proponent of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, with deep ties to Russia's fascistic right, and extensive connections to US intelligence agencies, has been championed by the Times as the voice of social dissent in Russia. Despite his miniscule support within Russia, Navalny's activities generate front-page headlines in the Times , which has mentioned him in over 400 separate articles.

Another example is the Times ' promotion of the "feminist" rock band Pussy Riot, which makes a habit of getting themselves arrested by taking their clothes off in Russian Orthodox churches, and whose fate the Times holds up as a horrific example of Russian oppression. The very name "Pussy Riot," which in typical usage is not even translated into Russian, expresses the fact that this operation aims to influence American, and not Russian, public opinion.

In 2014, the Times met with members of Pussy Riot at their editorial offices, and have since extensively promoted the group, having mentioned it in over 400 articles. The term "anti-Putin opposition" is mentioned in another 600 articles.

The logic of the Times ' campaign was expressed most clearly by its columnist Thomas Friedman, the personification of the pundit as state intelligence mouthpiece whose career was aptly summed up in a biography titled Imperial Messenger . In a column published on February 18 ("Whatever Trump is Hiding is Hurting All of US Now"), Friedman declares a "code red" threat to the integrity of American democracy.

"At a time when the special prosecutor Robert Mueller -- leveraging several years of intelligence gathering by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. -- has brought indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups -- all linked in some way to the Kremlin -- for interfering with the 2016 U.S. elections," Friedman writes, "America needs a president who will lead our nation's defense against this attack on the integrity of our electoral democracy."

This "defense," according to Friedman, would include "bring[ing] together our intelligence and military experts to mount an effective offense against Putin -- the best defense of all." In other words, war.

The task of all war propaganda is to divert internal social tensions outwards, and the Times ' campaign is no different. Its aim is to take the anger that millions of people feel at a society riven by social inequality, mass alienation, police violence, and endless war, and pin it on some shady foreign adversary.

The New York Times ' claims of Russian "meddling" in the Parkland shooting set the tone for even more hysterical coverage in the broadcast evening news. NBC News cited Jonathan Morgan, another collaborator on the Hamilton 68 project, who declared that Russia is "really interested in sowing discord amongst Americans. That way we're not focused on putting a unified front out to foreign adversaries."

The goal of the ruling class and its media accomplices is to put on "a unified front" through the suppression of social opposition within the United States. Along these Lines, NBC added, "Researchers tell us it's not just Russia deploying these attacks on social media," adding "many small independent groups are trying to divide Americans and create chaos."

Who are these "small independent groups" seeking to "create chaos"? By this, they no doubt mean any news or political organization that dares question the official line that everything is fine in America, and that argues that the horrendous levels of violence that pervade American society are somehow related to social inequality and the wars supported and justified by the entire US political establishment.

It is worth noting that these claims were made on the same day that Fox News ran a story alleging that Michael Moore, the director of Bowling for Columbine , a film that related the 1999 Columbine High School massacre to US wars abroad, had attended an anti-Trump demonstration allegedly set up by Russia.

As the World Socialist Web Site has repeatedly warned, the targets of this campaign are left-wing, antiwar and progressive web sites, political organizations, and news outlets, and, by extension, the freedom of the press and freedom of expression of the entire American public. In the name of providing a "unified front" to "foreign adversaries," the conditions are being created for the criminalization and banning of political dissent.

Andre Damon

[Jun 30, 2019] Paradigms Flip as Trump and Tulsi Emerge as the Winners of the Democratic Party Debate -- Strategic Culture

Notable quotes:
"... Connected to Trump as the 'winner', it was Tulsi Gabbard who stood out from the rest of the candidates. Interestingly, reliable polling data just out from the Drudge Report shows that Gabbard emerged as the winner of the debate on ideas and policies overall. She won some 40% of the vote, and when compared to the candidates whom the other 60% was divided, it was a landslide. ..."
"... Before anyone dismisses Gabbard, it's critical to understand that mainstream media lost most of its credibility over the lat election. This is the age of underdogs and dark horses ..."
"... When the subject moved to Afghanistan and occupation, Gabbard was on confident and really on fire. This is significant because while historically Gabbard's anti-imperialist line on occupation would be associated with (normally later broken) Democratic Party talking points, it was here that Trump defeated Clinton at the polls, when Trump won the anti-war vote in 2016. ..."
"... Gabbard destroyed Ryan on Afghanistan, and Booker's attempt to attack Gabbard fell tremendously short and felt very artificial, saying that Gabbard's position on LGBTQ 'isn't enough', but then switching incoherently to the subject of African Americans, Jim Crow, and lynchings – a misfire and very much off-topic. ..."
"... Trump's hardline on Cuba and Venezuela is appealing to the Florida wing of the Latino constituency (to the extent we can speak of a single constituency), and this is where the Democratic Party understands it needs to fight in order to win Florida. ..."
"... There hasn't been a Republican candidate to win the Presidency without winning Florida in many generations, and the Republican victory of Rick Scott in the state's most expensive senatorial race against Democrat incumbent Bill Nelson in 2018 shows that Republicans are aiming to win Florida in 2020. The Democratic Party concern is palpable and well founded. ..."
"... At face value, Trump and Democrats seem to be 6's and 7's over immigration. But when we really look at what the real deal is, we find yet another alignment of the Democrat's position to that of Trump's. How can this be? ..."
"... To understand this is to understand the overall trajectory now that the US empire is all but finished. Its historical aim now is to be able to disentangle from the Mid-East, a prominent Trump position which used to be Obama's until it wasn't, and on the Democratic side today is only being carried forward by Tulsi Gabbard. The so-called neo-isolationism of the US isn't so much that, as it is a return to the Monroe Doctrine. This author has written about this several years before Trump took office, in the article ' From Pax Americana to Pan Americana '. Here this author argued that the US must transform from a Sea Power into a Land Power. This isn't isolationism, but a right-sized regional hegemon, a regional hegemon for the Americas. ..."
"... Trump's rhetoric on the immigration question and Mexico has never failed to mention that the mid-to-long term solution is not only that Mexico enforces its own borders to its south, but that the Mexican economy grows – and this requires investment. ..."
"... While Trump is nominally strict on immigration, it was under Obama that the US deported the most migrants in history. This is a fact that Democrats ignore in their talking points and attacks on Trump's 'inhuman policy' that tears families apart. And so in a strange departure from what might otherwise occur to us, it was Obama's policy that was worse by the numbers for pro-migration advocates, and it's been Trump who has openly called for investment into Latin America with a named reason being to stem the migration 'crisis'. ..."
"... But this Marshall Plan for Latin America was already introduced by none other than Mexican President AMLO himself, in talks with Trump. ..."
"... What Tulsi Gabbard, the clear winner of the debate, will do next is to appropriate Julian Castro's 'Marshall Plan' line on Mexico and Central America. It dog-whistles numerous Trump talking points in relation to Mexico, as well as taking a 'less migration is good migration' approach to what is no doubt a real problem, without engaging in reactionary attacks on the migrants themselves. To get 'to the source' of the problem, as Castro explains, requires investment into Latin America. ..."
"... Gabbard is the dark horse, and along with Yang (in the second night's debate) will no doubt pull ahead of the conventionally pre-selected winners that were supposed to be Booker, Sanders, Warren and especially Biden. We will see much more focus on Gabbard now in virtual spaces, even while the mainstream media will continue to wrongly focus on Biden and Booker. Booker played his left-most game in the debate, but as prospective voters sort him on questions as far and ranging as Palestine, war, and labor (economy) – they will find him sorely lacking. ..."
"... With 60% of American generally supporting Trump's approach to the economy, these are his highest approval ratings, and ones which Americans care about and highly prioritize. Gabbard would be wise to approach the question of distribution, winners and losers of the economic boom, and focus on the 1% vs. the 99%. Doing so will help her move beyond her initial base of support as the anti-war candidate. ..."
Jun 30, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

The single truth that many mainstream Democrats will have a very difficult time acknowledging coming out of the June 26 th Democratic Party Presidential Debate, is that Donald Trump's positions on China and Latin America have become a Democratic Party line. Is this is a mere matter of pandering to the polling data on questions like Latin America and China? Even if just that, it would be a Trump success in and of itself.

But it also raises whether Trump has indeed accomplished more – a tectonic shift, a sea-change in elite policy formation focus from Russia and the Mid-east over to China and Latin America. The ties between the DNC and China still appear too strong, and so the reality would seem to tend to rotate around a pandering to the polling data.

From China to solving the migration problem through a 'Marshall Plan' for Latin America and more, Trump's nominal views on these questions found expression as dominating themes in the debate.

In the war of positions, this is a victory for Trump.

The June 26th Democratic Party Presidential Debate was astounding in its representation of a major paradigm shift in the United States.

TULSI GABBARD COMES AWAY THE WINNER

Connected to Trump as the 'winner', it was Tulsi Gabbard who stood out from the rest of the candidates. Interestingly, reliable polling data just out from the Drudge Report shows that Gabbard emerged as the winner of the debate on ideas and policies overall. She won some 40% of the vote, and when compared to the candidates whom the other 60% was divided, it was a landslide.

Before anyone dismisses Gabbard, it's critical to understand that mainstream media lost most of its credibility over the lat election. This is the age of underdogs and dark horses

When the subject moved to Afghanistan and occupation, Gabbard was on confident and really on fire. This is significant because while historically Gabbard's anti-imperialist line on occupation would be associated with (normally later broken) Democratic Party talking points, it was here that Trump defeated Clinton at the polls, when Trump won the anti-war vote in 2016.

Worth noting as well as that in the aftermath of the debate last night, Gabbard's new social media campaign on Twitter features her name scrolling across the bottom of the screen in undeniable Trump 2016 campaign font. Coincidence? Nothing in politics is coincidental – nothing.

Gabbard destroyed Ryan on Afghanistan, and Booker's attempt to attack Gabbard fell tremendously short and felt very artificial, saying that Gabbard's position on LGBTQ 'isn't enough', but then switching incoherently to the subject of African Americans, Jim Crow, and lynchings – a misfire and very much off-topic.

CHINA

Of the ten candidates debating, four responded that China was the primary threat to the US – but this was the single-most consistent answer. Delaney, Klobuchar, Castro, and Ryan all answered this way.

This was a win for Trump's entire line for the last thirty something years.

De Blasio stood out as the lone Russiagater, definitely representing the mindset of his New York City electorate and the coastal media establishment.

Gabbard, meanwhile, was wise to name ecological threats as this helped her maintain her position as an anti-war candidate.

The pivot to a focus on China is much less dangerous than the focus on Russia. TheUS does not really believe it can challenge China in a military sense, and their anti-Chinese rhetoric, while full of sword rattling and imperial bravado, amounts to noise and little more. There is some hope in American quarters about curtailing China's economic strength, but the focus on China appears more as a question of a state requiring the spectre of an anthropomorphized threat in the abstract, in order to justify the existence of a state and a military budget, and to make a foreigner responsible for matters of wealth disparity and a lack of employment opportunities in the US – a prominent tactic and talking point in market-driven societies based in private property norms.

But the pivot to a focus on China was tremendous and not expected, given the relationship historically between China and the Democratic Party – a friendly one.

Until now, it's been just the conservative corners of the alt-light in the US-centric internet who view the 'rising Chinese threat' as a serious concern for the US. This trope was primarily focused on the twin threat of Chinese rising military prowess and its population size, along with the US practice of outsourcing American jobs to China – a policy that saw short term consumer savings, and mid-to-long term slashes to US wages and employment. It created a trade imbalance which the US can only resolving by defaulting on and then drawing its guns to force a new deal.

Taken all together, this means that whoever Trump gets into the big race with, it will not be a question of 'whether' China is a threat, but how to 'best contain' the Chinese threat. This is a victory from 'go' for Trump.

LATIN AMERICA

Here is another major subject where Trump's influence on the entire discourse has prevailed, though it's a little less obvious and requires a minor bifurcation to reveal.

We are of course obliged to mention that the location of the debate in Miami Florida was strategic given its representation of Latinos in the US – traditionally Cuban and more recently Venezuelan Republicans as hardline anti-communists and cold-warriors, who see their children increasingly becoming more 'center-left' as they have Americanized and become 'Latinos' in the US. They are still at odds geopolitically with Latinos, primarily Mexican-Americans from the American southwest, who tend to be friendlier to socialist ideas and have represented the far-left of the Democratic Party on economic issues as well as anti-imperialism, even if sharing with Cuban-Americans some more socially conservative values. This communitarian axis of Latinos in the US, however, has grown and become a real force of its own.

Trump's hardline on Cuba and Venezuela is appealing to the Florida wing of the Latino constituency (to the extent we can speak of a single constituency), and this is where the Democratic Party understands it needs to fight in order to win Florida.

There hasn't been a Republican candidate to win the Presidency without winning Florida in many generations, and the Republican victory of Rick Scott in the state's most expensive senatorial race against Democrat incumbent Bill Nelson in 2018 shows that Republicans are aiming to win Florida in 2020. The Democratic Party concern is palpable and well founded.

So we find the extraordinary focus on Latinos was represented in the ultimately surprising display of whole Spanish language answers from both Beto O'Rourke and Cory Booker, and a few questions wholly or partly in Spanish from the moderators. The entire debate was brought to viewers not just by NBC but also by Spanish language network Telemundo.

At face value, Trump and Democrats seem to be 6's and 7's over immigration. But when we really look at what the real deal is, we find yet another alignment of the Democrat's position to that of Trump's. How can this be?

To understand this is to understand the overall trajectory now that the US empire is all but finished. Its historical aim now is to be able to disentangle from the Mid-East, a prominent Trump position which used to be Obama's until it wasn't, and on the Democratic side today is only being carried forward by Tulsi Gabbard. The so-called neo-isolationism of the US isn't so much that, as it is a return to the Monroe Doctrine. This author has written about this several years before Trump took office, in the article ' From Pax Americana to Pan Americana '. Here this author argued that the US must transform from a Sea Power into a Land Power. This isn't isolationism, but a right-sized regional hegemon, a regional hegemon for the Americas.

Trump's rhetoric on the immigration question and Mexico has never failed to mention that the mid-to-long term solution is not only that Mexico enforces its own borders to its south, but that the Mexican economy grows – and this requires investment.

The trade-offs are several fold. For one, the US goes back to its China position, and wants Latin American countries to agree to reduce the Chinese influence in exchange for real industrial capital investments from the United States into Latin America.

This is not to say that the Democratic Party has ignored Latin America to date, far from it. It was under Obama's two terms that the US worked the most to reverse the Pink Tide in Latin America, and this came with a few 'own goals' when the ultimate consequence of the regime-change operation in Honduras was to stoke a human wave migration crisis. This was, in short, the American version of the Libya scenario.

While Trump is nominally strict on immigration, it was under Obama that the US deported the most migrants in history. This is a fact that Democrats ignore in their talking points and attacks on Trump's 'inhuman policy' that tears families apart. And so in a strange departure from what might otherwise occur to us, it was Obama's policy that was worse by the numbers for pro-migration advocates, and it's been Trump who has openly called for investment into Latin America with a named reason being to stem the migration 'crisis'.

And it's this exact talking point that numerous Democratic Party candidates picked up on, and a very telling term was introduced by Julian Castro – a Marshall Plan for Latin America. Cory Booker stood beside and nodded in apparent agreement, and that the words came from the token Latino (no, not Beto), Castro was both intentional and symbolically telling.

While Bolton and Pompeo have operated under the 'Monroe Doctrine' term, this is so entirely distasteful for all of Latin America that it offends anyone and everyone, even the US's own lackeys, puppets, and proxies in the region.

But this Marshall Plan for Latin America was already introduced by none other than Mexican President AMLO himself, in talks with Trump.

"Why it matters: AMLO has worked energetically since taking office to sell the White House on a "Marshall Plan" of support to address the region's growing migrant crisis. The US commitment is a preliminary sign that he's at least being heard

While he campaigned as a compassionate voice on immigration, Mexico's new left-wing leader spied the need for a grand solution. The US funding will contribute to a $30 billion aid package envisioned by AMLO

AMLO even dangled the prospect of Chinese investment to bring Trump to the table, according to the NY Times -- reasoning that the US might be more willing to pay up if it feared that China might try to expand its influence in the region by opening its wallet."

Since them, numerous articles have popped up describing Trump's potential 'Marshall Plan' for Central America.

WHAT NEXT? CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

What Tulsi Gabbard, the clear winner of the debate, will do next is to appropriate Julian Castro's 'Marshall Plan' line on Mexico and Central America. It dog-whistles numerous Trump talking points in relation to Mexico, as well as taking a 'less migration is good migration' approach to what is no doubt a real problem, without engaging in reactionary attacks on the migrants themselves. To get 'to the source' of the problem, as Castro explains, requires investment into Latin America.

Gabbard will be well positioned to nominally attack Trump's policy implementation along human rights grounds, while not being specific on anything except getting 'to the source of the problem'.

Gabbard is the dark horse, and along with Yang (in the second night's debate) will no doubt pull ahead of the conventionally pre-selected winners that were supposed to be Booker, Sanders, Warren and especially Biden. We will see much more focus on Gabbard now in virtual spaces, even while the mainstream media will continue to wrongly focus on Biden and Booker. Booker played his left-most game in the debate, but as prospective voters sort him on questions as far and ranging as Palestine, war, and labor (economy) – they will find him sorely lacking.

With 60% of American generally supporting Trump's approach to the economy, these are his highest approval ratings, and ones which Americans care about and highly prioritize. Gabbard would be wise to approach the question of distribution, winners and losers of the economic boom, and focus on the 1% vs. the 99%. Doing so will help her move beyond her initial base of support as the anti-war candidate.

This will angle the populist line, and position her well not only against all other Democrats, but even against Trump himself should she win the nomination. It's a long shot, but remember indeed: this is the age of underdogs and dark horses.

[Jun 30, 2019] Barak and CIA

Jun 30, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org

You have probably seen the bumper sticker that says: "Shit Happens." Some people are just lucky, I suppose, and odd coincidences mark their lives.

When he was just out of Columbia College and working for a reputed CIA front company, Business International Corporation, Barack Obama had a chance encounter with a young woman, Genevieve Cook, with whom he had a 1-2 year relationship.

Like Obama and at about the same time, Cook just happened to have lived in Indonesia with her father, Michael Cook, who just happened to become Australia's top spook, the director-general of the Office of National Assessments, and also the Ambassador to Washington.

Of course, Obama's mother, as is well-known, just happened to be living in Indonesia with Barack and Obama's step-father, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian military officer, who had been called back to Indonesia by the CIA supported General Suharto three months before the CIA coup against President Sukarno. Suharto subsequently slaughtered over a million Indonesian Communists and Indonesian-Chinese.

As is also well-known, it just so happened that Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, trained in the Russian language, after teaching English in the US Embassy in Jakarta that housed one of the largest CIA stations in Asia, did her "anthropological" work in Indonesia and Southeast Asia financed by the well-known CIA conduits, USAID and the Ford Foundation.

Then there is Cook's stepfather, Philip C. Jessup, who just happened to be in Indonesia at the same time, doing nickel-mining deals with the genocidal Suharto government.

Anyway, "shit happens." You never know whom you might meet along the way of life.

[Jun 30, 2019] Eisenhower called it the 'military-industrial complex.' It's vastly bigger now.

Notable quotes:
"... Daniel Wirls is professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of several books, including " Irrational Security: The Politics of Defense from Reagan to Obama " (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) . https://outline.com/DGG3zD Read & annotate articles ..."
Jun 26, 2019 | Washington Post

When two giant Pentagon contractors -- Raytheon and United Technologies -- proposed to merge into Raytheon Technologies, it hit the headlines. President Trump said he was "a little bit concerned" that the merger would dampen competition in the defense industry. Coincidentally, Congress was at the same time debating the administration's request for substantial increases in military spending -- particularly in weapons procurement and research and development.

We used to call the nexus of private interests and national defense the "military-industrial complex." But that Cold War term no longer fits. "Industrial" does not capture the breadth of the activities involved. And "military" fails to describe the range of government policies and interests implicated. Over the past two decades we've seen transformations that include new government reliance on private security firms, revolutions in digital technology, a post-9/11 surge in the number of veterans, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). What we have now could be called a "National Security Corporate Complex."

Here are four things you need to know about this transformation.

1. President Dwight Eisenhower coined the term, and it stuck

In the heyday of the Cold War, with corporate giants bending metal for the Pentagon in its titanic competition with the Soviet Union, President Dwight Eisenhower coined the phrase as part of a famous warning about the unprecedented "conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry."

Eisenhower was concerned about the potential influence of industry over government policy and budgets. Since then, analysts and pundits have used the term to suggest that arms manufacturers unduly influence lawmakers in voting on the size and nature of military spending, including decisions about war and peace.

2. 9/11 changed the business of national security

Before September 11, 2001 and the resulting military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, the Department of Energy (DOE) was the only executive branch department other than the Pentagon with major military contracts. DOE was involved because it built and dismantled nuclear warheads.

We can see how, post-9/11, more agencies got involved in national security contracting. I used federal contracting data to measure the changes from 1981 to 2018.

As you can see, much of the jump in post-9/11 spending comes from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in late 2002 and early 2003 . Before DHS was created, some of that contracting was already being done by the agencies brought together to form the new department, particularly the Coast Guard. But the scope and amount of DHS contracting increased dramatically -- averaging nearly $14 billion a year from 2005 onward.

But two other departments also expanded their contracting substantially after 9/11. In the 1990s, the State Department had an average of under $700 million in contracts per year in national security related matters. From 2009 onward, that average jumped to $8.4 billion a year.

But the most stunning increases in both overall budgets and contracting came from VA. Few Americans would guess that from 2001 to 2011, VA budget grew faster than the Pentagon's -- 271 percent compared to 240 percent -- even if the Pentagon includes its extra spending for the wars. Part of VA's growth came in contracting. In the 1990s, VA had contracted out under $2.4 billion in work per year in the 1990s. From 2009 onward, VA contracted out nearly $20 billion of work each year.

3. Defense contracting extends far beyond the purchase of weapons

As national security contracting has ramped up across government agencies, we've also seen a change in the focus of these contracts. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a great deal of media attention focused on contracts with private security firms like Blackwater and logistics firms like Halliburton. Such "privatization" of military force continues, but it is only part of the story.

The government also expanded its outsourcing of military and veterans' health care. Three of the top 15 Pentagon contractors were health care corporations, including two that were in the top five for VA.

National security departments further expanded their contracting in information technology, for tasks ranging from the prosaic, like bookkeeping, to the exotic, including cyberwarfare and artificial intelligence. That work went both to traditional arms-making giants such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, and also enterprises such as Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC that specialize in such work.

[ The Senate and the intelligence community rebuked Trump on national security. Here's why that matters -- a lot. ]

4. A web of bigger contractors with broader reach

As a result of the government's expanded spending on national security, many corporations now have sizable contracts with more than one federal agency. Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics -- and perhaps the new Raytheon Technologies -- have become diversified "Walmarts of war," as some researchers call them, delivering a wide range of goods and services to various parts of the federal government. The Pentagon's top contractor, Lockheed Martin, has been a major contractor for VA and DHS. General Dynamics was fourth among Pentagon contractors, second for DHS, and third for the Department of State.

Large IT specialists also contract across departments. Booz Allen Hamilton, for example, was the government's 14th largest contractor in 2018, ranking 19th for the Pentagon, 7th for VA, and 32nd for DHS. Engineering giant Fluor Corporation was in the top 15 for Defense, DOE, and DHS. Other examples include CACI, Jacobs Engineering, and Leidos Holdings. And of course, several health care companies do business with VA and Pentagon.

What does all this mean?

Some observers argue that the general decline in overall military spending and weapons procurement after the peak of the recent wars -- before the Trump administration increased that spending -- meant the U.S. no longer had to worry about the influence of a military-industrial complex.

But focusing narrowly on weapons procurement misses the bigger picture. Since 9/11, an increasingly diverse array of firms have a significant stake in federal national security spending. Those funds now flow from a large portion of the federal government and into many sectors of the U.S. economy. If anything, Eisenhower's complex has become more complex and potentially influential.

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Daniel Wirls is professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of several books, including " Irrational Security: The Politics of Defense from Reagan to Obama " (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) .

https://outline.com/DGG3zD Read & annotate articles

[Jun 30, 2019] Two cheers for chickenhawks

Notable quotes:
"... And how many congresspeople served in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan? How many presidential candidates had boots on the ground in combat theaters? The answer is one. Here is the moral decay of America's ruling elites boiled down to a single word. ..."
Jun 30, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

And how many congresspeople served in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan? How many presidential candidates had boots on the ground in combat theaters? The answer is one. Here is the moral decay of America's ruling elites boiled down to a single word.

Giant Meteor , 5 hours ago link

Moral leaders, lead. There is your moral decay.

44_shooter , 5 hours ago link

It didn't matter when they did. McStain fought, and absolutely LOVED war. Plenty of the Hawks served and fought, it's like frat boys who were hazed, carrying on the hazing.

[Jun 30, 2019] Following In Rome's Footsteps Moral Decay, Rising Inequality by Charles Hugh Smith

Notable quotes:
"... And how many congresspeople served in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan? How many presidential candidates had boots on the ground in combat theaters? The answer is one. Here is the moral decay of America's ruling elites boiled down to a single word. ..."
Jun 30, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Here is the moral decay of America's ruling elites boiled down to a single word.

There are many reasons why Imperial Rome declined, but two primary causes that get relatively little attention are moral decay and soaring wealth inequality. The two are of course intimately connected: once the morals of the ruling Elites degrade, what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine, too.

I've previously covered two other key characteristics of an empire in terminal decline: complacency and intellectual sclerosis, what I have termed a failure of imagination.

Michael Grant described these causes of decline in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire , a short book I have been recommending since 2009:

There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all.

A lengthier book by Adrian Goldsworthy How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower addresses the same issues from a slightly different perspective.

Glenn Stehle, commenting on a thread in the excellent website peakoilbarrel.com (operated by the estimable Ron Patterson) made a number of excellent points that I am taking the liberty of excerpting: (with thanks to correspondent Paul S.)

The set of values developed by the early Romans called mos maiorum, Peter Turchin explains in War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires , was gradually replaced by one of personal greed and pursuit of self-interest.

"Probably the most important value was virtus (virtue), which derived from the word vir (man) and embodied all the qualities of a true man as a member of society," explains Turchin.

"Virtus included the ability to distinguish between good and evil and to act in ways that promoted good, and especially the common good. Unlike Greeks, Romans did not stress individual prowess, as exhibited by Homeric heroes or Olympic champions. The ideal of hero was one whose courage, wisdom, and self-sacrifice saved his country in time of peril," Turchin adds.

And as Turchin goes on to explain:

"Unlike the selfish elites of the later periods, the aristocracy of the early Republic did not spare its blood or treasure in the service of the common interest. When 50,000 Romans, a staggering one fifth of Rome's total manpower, perished in the battle of Cannae, as mentioned previously, the senate lost almost one third of its membership. This suggests that the senatorial aristocracy was more likely to be killed in wars than the average citizen...

The wealthy classes were also the first to volunteer extra taxes when they were needed A graduated scale was used in which the senators paid the most, followed by the knights, and then other citizens. In addition, officers and centurions (but not common soldiers!) served without pay, saving the state 20 percent of the legion's payroll...

The richest 1 percent of the Romans during the early Republic was only 10 to 20 times as wealthy as an average Roman citizen."

Now compare that to the situation in Late Antiquity when

"an average Roman noble of senatorial class had property valued in the neighborhood of 20,000 Roman pounds of gold. There was no 'middle class' comparable to the small landholders of the third century B.C.; the huge majority of the population was made up of landless peasants working land that belonged to nobles. These peasants had hardly any property at all, but if we estimate it (very generously) at one tenth of a pound of gold, the wealth differential would be 200,000! Inequality grew both as a result of the rich getting richer (late imperial senators were 100 times wealthier than their Republican predecessors) and those of the middling wealth becoming poor."

Do you see any similarities with the present-day realities depicted in these charts?

And how many congresspeople served in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan? How many presidential candidates had boots on the ground in combat theaters? The answer is one. Here is the moral decay of America's ruling elites boiled down to a single word.

* * *

Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($6.95 ebook, $12 print, $13.08 audiobook ): Read the first section for free in PDF format. My new mystery The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake is a ridiculously affordable $1.29 (Kindle) or $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF) . My book Money and Work Unchained is now $6.95 for the Kindle ebook and $15 for the print edition. Read the first section for free in PDF format. If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com . New benefit for subscribers/patrons: a monthly Q&A where I respond to your questions/topics.

[Jun 30, 2019] What if the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement

Jun 30, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org

The banal, 1967 hit song, "San Francisco" (Be sure to wear flowers in your hair), which was influential in enticing young people to come to San Francisco for the Summer of Love, was written by "Papa" John Philips, who attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis and whose father was a Marine Corps Captain. "Papa" John's wife had worked at the Pentagon and her father was involved in covert intelligence work in Vietnam. His neighbor and Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles) buddy was Jim Morrison of Doors fame, whose father US Navy Admiral George Morrison commanded U.S. warships in Vietnam's Tonkin Gulf during the "Tonkin Gulf Incident."

Frank Zappa, the father figure of Laurel Canyon's many musicians who just happened to converge in one place at the same time where a covert military film studio operated, had a father who was a chemical warfare specialist at Edgewood Arsenal.

Stephen Stills, David Crosby and many other soon to be famous musicians all came from military and intelligence backgrounds and frolicked in Laurel Canyon. Although they were draft age, none of them was drafted as they played music, dropped acid, and created the folk-rock movement whose music was catchy but innocuous and posed no threat to the establishment. But "shit happens."

In his disturbing book, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon , David McGowan raises the question: "what if the musicians themselves (and various other leaders and founders of the 'movement') were every bit as much a part of the intelligence community as the people who were supposedly harassing them?

What if, in other words, the entire youth culture of the 1960s was created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray . What if, in reality, they were pretty much all playing on the same team?"

[Jun 30, 2019] Aggressive US Lies and Misleads to Justify War on Iran by William Boardman

Notable quotes:
"... The secretary of state delivered this appallingly Orwellian official assessment of the US government within hours of the five explosions on two tankers, well before any credible investigation establishing more than minimal facts could be carried out. As is his habit, Mike Pompeo flatly lied about whatever might be real in the Gulf of Oman, and most American media ran with the lies as if they were or might be true. There is almost no chance that Mike Pompeo and the US government are telling the truth about this event, as widespread domestic and international skepticism attests. ..."
"... Pompeo's official assessment was false even in its staging. For most of his four-minute appearance, Pompeo stood framed by two pictures behind him, each showing a tanker with a fire amidships. This was a deliberate visual lie. The two pictures showed the same tanker, the Norwegian-owned Front Altair , from different angles. The other tanker, Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous , did not catch fire and was not shown. ..."
"... Pompeo did not identify the unnamed intelligence entities, if any, within the government who made this assessment. He offered no evidence to support the assessment. He did offer something of an argument that began: ..."
"... He didn't say what intelligence. He didn't say whose intelligence. American intelligence assets and technology are all over the region generating reams of intelligence day in, day out. Then there are the intelligence agencies of the Arab police states bordering the Persian Gulf. They, too, are busy collecting intelligence 24/7, although they are sometimes loath to share. Pompeo didn't mention it, but according to CNN an unnamed US official admitted that the US had a Reaper Drone in the air near the two tankers before they were attacked. He also claimed that Iran had fired a missile at the drone, but missed. As CNN inanely spins it, "it is the first claim that the US has information of Iranian movements prior to the attack." As if the US doesn't have information on Iranian movements all the time . More accurately, this is the first admission that the US had operational weaponry in the area prior to the attack. ..."
"... Pompeo did not name a single weapon used. Early reporting claimed the attackers used torpedoes or mines, a claim that became inoperative as it became clear that all the damage to the tankers was well above the waterline. There is little reason to believe Pompeo had any actual knowledge of what weapons were used, unless one was a Reaper Drone. ..."
"... There are NO confirmed "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," and even if there were, they would prove nothing. Pompeo's embarrassingly irrelevant list that follows includes six examples, only one of which involved a shipping attack ..."
"... Instead of "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," Pompeo offers Iran's decades-old threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (which it's never done), together with three attacks by the Houthis on Saudi Arabia, an unattributed rocket attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad, and an unattributed car bomb in Afghanistan. Seriously, if that's all he's got, he's got nothing. But he's not done with the disinformation exercise: ..."
"... The US is stumbling down a path toward war with no justification ..."
Jun 26, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org

It is the assessment of the United States Government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for the attacks that occurred in the Gulf of Oman today. This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high degree of sophistication.

This is only the latest in a series of attacks instigated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its surrogates against American and allied interests, and they should be understood in the context of 40 years of unprovoked aggression against freedom-loving nations.

-- US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announcement , June 13, 2013

The secretary of state delivered this appallingly Orwellian official assessment of the US government within hours of the five explosions on two tankers, well before any credible investigation establishing more than minimal facts could be carried out. As is his habit, Mike Pompeo flatly lied about whatever might be real in the Gulf of Oman, and most American media ran with the lies as if they were or might be true. There is almost no chance that Mike Pompeo and the US government are telling the truth about this event, as widespread domestic and international skepticism attests.

Pompeo's official assessment was false even in its staging. For most of his four-minute appearance, Pompeo stood framed by two pictures behind him, each showing a tanker with a fire amidships. This was a deliberate visual lie. The two pictures showed the same tanker, the Norwegian-owned Front Altair , from different angles. The other tanker, Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous , did not catch fire and was not shown.

First, what actually happened, as best we can tell five days later? In the early morning of June 13, two unrelated tankers were heading south out of the Strait of Hormuz, sailing in open water in the Gulf of Oman, roughly 20 miles off the south coast of Iran. The tankers were most likely outside Iran's territorial waters, but within Iran's contiguous zone as defined by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea . At different times, some 30 miles apart, the two tankers were attacked by weapons unknown, launched by parties unknown, for reasons unknown. The first reported distress call was 6:12 a.m. local time. No one has yet claimed responsibility for either attack. The crew of each tanker abandoned ship soon after the explosions and were rescued by ships in the area, including Iranian naval vessels, who took the Front Altair crew to an Iranian port.

Even this much was not certain in the early afternoon of June 13 when Mike Pompeo came to the lectern at the State Department to deliver his verdict:

It is the assessment of the United States Government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for the attacks that occurred in the Gulf of Oman today.

Pompeo did not identify the unnamed intelligence entities, if any, within the government who made this assessment. He offered no evidence to support the assessment. He did offer something of an argument that began:

This assessment is based on intelligence .

He didn't say what intelligence. He didn't say whose intelligence. American intelligence assets and technology are all over the region generating reams of intelligence day in, day out. Then there are the intelligence agencies of the Arab police states bordering the Persian Gulf. They, too, are busy collecting intelligence 24/7, although they are sometimes loath to share. Pompeo didn't mention it, but according to CNN an unnamed US official admitted that the US had a Reaper Drone in the air near the two tankers before they were attacked. He also claimed that Iran had fired a missile at the drone, but missed. As CNN inanely spins it, "it is the first claim that the US has information of Iranian movements prior to the attack." As if the US doesn't have information on Iranian movements all the time . More accurately, this is the first admission that the US had operational weaponry in the area prior to the attack. After intelligence, Pompeo continued:

This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used .

Pompeo did not name a single weapon used. Early reporting claimed the attackers used torpedoes or mines, a claim that became inoperative as it became clear that all the damage to the tankers was well above the waterline. There is little reason to believe Pompeo had any actual knowledge of what weapons were used, unless one was a Reaper Drone. He went on:

This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation

The "level of expertise needed" to carry out these attacks on a pair of sitting duck tankers does not appear to be that great. Yes, the Iranian military probably has the expertise, as do the militaries of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Israel, or others with a stake in provoking a crisis in the region. And those who lack the expertise still have the money with which to hire expert surrogates. The number of credible suspects, known and unknown, with an interest in doing harm to Iran is easily in double figures. Leading any serious list should be the US. That's perfectly logical, so Pompeo tried to divert attention from the obvious:

This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping .

There are NO confirmed "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," and even if there were, they would prove nothing. Pompeo's embarrassingly irrelevant list that follows includes six examples, only one of which involved a shipping attack. The one example was the May 12, 2019, attack on four ships at anchor in the deep water port of Fujairah. Even the multinational investigation organized by the UAE could not determine who did it. The UAE reported to the UN Security Council that the perpetrator was likely some unnamed "state actor." The logical suspects and their surrogates are the same as those for the most recent attack.

Instead of "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," Pompeo offers Iran's decades-old threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (which it's never done), together with three attacks by the Houthis on Saudi Arabia, an unattributed rocket attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad, and an unattributed car bomb in Afghanistan. Seriously, if that's all he's got, he's got nothing. But he's not done with the disinformation exercise:

This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high degree of sophistication.

The whole proxy group thing is redundant, covered by "the level of expertise needed" mentioned earlier. Pompeo doesn't name any proxy group here, he doesn't explain how he could know there's no proxy group that could carry out such an attack, and he just throws word garbage at the wall and hopes something sticks that will make you believe – no evidence necessary – that Iran is evil beyond redemption:

Taken as a whole, these unprovoked attacks present a clear threat to international peace and security, a blatant assault on the freedom of navigation, and an unacceptable campaign of escalating tension by Iran.

The attacks in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all been provoked by the US and its allies. The US has long been a clear threat to international peace and security, except when the US was actually trashing peace and security, as it did in Iraq, as it seems to want to do in Iran. There is, indeed, "an unacceptable campaign of escalating tension," but it's a campaign by the US. The current phase began when the Trump administration pulled out of the multinational nuclear deal with Iran. The US wages economic warfare on Iran even though Iran continues to abide by the Trump-trashed treaty. All the other signatories and inspectors confirm that Iran has abided by the agreement. But Iran is approaching a point of violation, which it has been warning about for some time. The other signatories allow the US to bully them into enforcing US sanctions at their own cost against a country in compliance with its promises. China, Russia, France, GB, Germany, and the EU are all craven in the face of US threats. That's what the US wants from Iran.

Lately, Trump and Pompeo and their ilk have been whining about not wanting war and claiming they want to negotiate, while doing nothing to make negotiation more possible. Iran has observed US actions and has rejected negotiating with an imperial power with a decades-long record of bad faith. Lacking any serious act of good faith by the US, does Iran have any other rational choice? Pompeo makes absolutely clear just how irrational, how dishonest, how implacable and untrustworthy the US is when he accuses Iran of:

40 years of unprovoked aggression against freedom-loving nations.

This is Big Lie country. Forty years ago, the Iranians committed their original sin – they overthrew one of the world's most brutal dictatorships, imposed on them by the US. Then they took Americans hostage, and the US has been playing the victim ever since, out of all proportion to reality or justice. But the Pompeos of this world still milk it for all it's worth. What about "unprovoked aggression," who does that? The US list is long and criminal, including its support of Saddam Hussein's war of aggression against Iran. Iran's list of "unprovoked aggressions" is pretty much zero, unless you go back to the Persian Empire. No wonder Pompeo took no question on his statement. The Big Lie is supposed to be enough.

The US is stumbling down a path toward war with no justification. Democrats should have objected forcefully and continuously long since. Democrats in the House should have put peace with Iran on the table as soon as they came into the majority. They should do it now. Democratic presidential candidates should join Tulsi Gabbard and Elizabeth Warren in forthrightly opposing war with Iran. Leading a huge public outcry may not keep the president from lying us into war with Iran any more than it kept the president from lying us into war with Iraq. But an absence of outcry will just make it easier for this rogue nation to commit a whole new set of war crimes.

Intellectually, the case for normal relations with Iran is easy. There is literally no good reason to maintain hostility, not even the possibility, remote as it is, of an Iranian nuclear weapon (especially now that Trump is helping the Saudis go nuclear). But politically, the case for normal relations with Iran is hard, especially because forty years of propaganda demonizing Iran has deep roots. To make a sane case on Iran takes real courage: one has to speak truth to a nation that believes its lies to itself.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. This article was first published in Reader Supported News . Read other articles by William .

[Jun 30, 2019] Mainstream Media Outraged! That US Missiles Are In Unknown Libyan Rebel Hands

Jun 30, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

The New York Times is outraged, just outraged! -- that US anti-tank missiles have been found in "unknown" Libyan rebel hands . Of course, when tons of American military hardware was covertly sent to al-Qaeda linked "rebels" fighting to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and when those same weapons were later transferred to the anti-Assad insurgency in Syria , many of them no doubt used by ISIS and al-Nusra Front, the mainstream media didn't find much to complain about. But now the "scandal" is being uncovered in 2019?

Currently, it's the UN-backed government in Tripoli which finds itself on the receiving end of deadly accurate high-tech US-made weapons systems, according to the Times :

Libyan government fighters discovered a cache of powerful American missiles , usually sold only to close American allies, at a captured rebel base in the mountains south of Tripoli this week.

The four Javelin anti-tank missiles, which cost more than $170,000 each, had ended up bolstering the arsenal of Gen. Khalifa Hifter , whose forces are waging a military campaign to take over Libya and overthrow a government the United States supports.

Markings on the missiles' shipping containers indicate that they were originally sold to the United Arab Emirates, an important American partner, in 2008.

... ... ...

The Times report noted further, "If the Emirates transferred the weapons to General Hifter, it would likely violate the sales agreement with the United States as well as a United Nations arms embargo ."

Gen. Haftar -- who solidified control of Eastern Libya over the past two years and swept through the south early this year, has sought to capture Tripoli and seize military control of the entire country, with the support of countries like the UAE and France, but is strongly opposed by Turkey and most European countries.

Haftar has long been described by many analysts as "the CIA's man in Libya" -- given he spent a couple decades living in exile a mere few minutes from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia during Gaddafi's rule.

He was inserted back onto the Libyan battlefield before Gaddafi's eventual capture and field execution at the hands of NATO supported Islamist fighters in 2011. The NYT offered further details of the US weapons recovered this week as follows :

Markings on the missile crates identify their joint manufacturer, the arms giants Raytheon and Lockheed Martin , and a contract number that corresponds with a $115 million order for Javelin missiles that was placed by the United Arab Emirates and Oman in 2008.

Again, isn't it a little late for the mainstream media to somehow only now discover and care about the "scandal" of major US weapons systems in "unknown rebel hands" ?

For a trip down memory lane, and to review just what Obama and Hillary's original Libya war has wrought, see Dan Sanchez's 2015 essay, "Where Does ISIS Get Those Wonderful Toys?"

VZ58 , 12 minutes ago link

The CIA knows where these weapons are. All POTUS' know where these weapons are. The Israelis know where these weapons are. The Saudis and UK know where these weapons are. What is the problem?

ardent , 15 minutes ago link

"It does not take a genius to figure out that the United States...

has no vital interests at stake in places like Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq.

Who is driving the process and benefiting? Israel is clearly the intended

beneficiary... " – Philip Giraldi, Former CIA officer.

TheNeosNeo , 1 hour ago link

" "We take all allegations of misuse of U.S. origin defense articles very seriously," a State Department official said in a statement following the Javelin anti-tank missile recovery.

"We are aware of these reports and are seeking additional information. We expect all recipients of U.S. origin defense equipment to abide by their end-use obligations," the statement continued. "

Hilarious. Do they expect the "unknown" rebels to just return them? If they're unknown, how do tehy know they're rebels?

AriusArmenian , 1 hour ago link

The US is supplying Haftar through its vassals and proxies in the Middle East.

And remember that Haftar is a CIA asset.

madashellron , 1 hour ago link

But i guess they're not worried under Obama thousands of these missiles were supplied to Islamic Terrorists in Syria. And now Trump gave the green light to supply more missiles to Turkish Islamic Terrorists in Syria. That are slaughtering Thousands of Syrian soldiers with these missiles.

[Jun 29, 2019] The Forever War Is So Normalized That Opposing It Is Isolationism by Caitlin Johnstone

Notable quotes:
"... More importantly, Ryan's campaign using the word "isolationism" to describe the simple common sense impulse to withdraw from a costly, deadly military occupation which isn't accomplishing anything highlights an increasingly common tactic of tarring anything other than endless military expansionism as strange and aberrant instead of normal and good. ..."
"... Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism. This removal of a desirable opposite of war from the establishment-authorised lexicon causes war to always be the desirable option. ..."
"... A few months after Bush's address, Antiwar 's Rich Rubino wrote an article titled " Non-Interventionism is Not Isolationism ", explaining the difference between a nation which withdraws entirely from the world and a nation which simply resists the temptation to use military aggression except in self defense. ..."
"... "Isolationism dictates that a country should have no relations with the rest of the world," Rubino explained. "In its purest form this would mean that ambassadors would not be shared with other nations, communications with foreign governments would be mainly perfunctory, and commercial relations would be non-existent." ..."
"... "A non-interventionist supports commercial relations," Rubino contrasted. "In fact, in terms of trade, many non-interventionists share libertarian proclivities and would unilaterally obliterate all tariffs and custom duties, and would be open to trade with all willing nations. In addition, non-interventionists welcome cultural exchanges and the exchange of ambassadors with all willing nations." ..."
"... "A non-interventionist believes that the U.S. should not intercede in conflicts between other nations or conflicts within nations," wrote Rubino. "In recent history, non-interventionists have proved prophetic in warning of the dangers of the U.S. entangling itself in alliances. The U.S. has suffered deleterious effects and effectuated enmity among other governments, citizenries, and non-state actors as a result of its overseas interventions. The U.S. interventions in both Iran and Iraq have led to cataclysmic consequences." ..."
"... Calling an aversion to endless military violence "isolationism" is the same as calling an aversion to mugging people "agoraphobia". ..."
"... Another dishonest label you'll get thrown at you when debating the forever war is "pacifism". "Some wars are bad, but I'm not a pacifist; sometimes war is necessary," supporters of a given interventionist military action will tell you. They'll say this while defending Trump's potentially catastrophic Iran warmongering or promoting a moronic regime change invasion of Syria, or defending disastrous US military interventions in the past like Iraq. ..."
"... All Wars Are Evil. Period. "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." – Henry Kissinger ..."
"... Can you imagine Jesus firing a machine gun at a group of people? Can you picture Jesus in an F-16 lobbing missiles at innocents? ..."
"... instead of getting us out of Syria, Trump got us further in. Trump is driving us to ww3. ..."
"... funny how people, fresh from the broken promises "build that wall" etc, quickly forget all that and begin IMMEDIATELY projecting trustworthiness on yet ANOTHER candidate. I'Il vote for Tulsi when she says no more Israeli wars for America. ..."
"... if there's even a small chance Tulsi can get us out of the forever wars i will be compelled to vote for her, as Trump clearly has no intention on doing so. yes, it is that important ..."
"... As for this next election? Is Ron Paul running as an independent? No? Well then, 'fool me once...' Don't get me wrong: I hope Gabbard is genuine and she's absolutely right to push non-interventionism...but the rest of her platform sucks. There's also the fact that she's a CFR member ..."
"... Just as they did with Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Pat Buchanan, the MSM and the swamp have already effectively buried Gabbard. It's unlikely that she'll make the next debate cut as the DNC and MSM will toss her out. ..."
"... All the MSM is talking about post-debates, even on Faux Noise, is Harris's race-baiting of old senile Biden. ..."
Jun 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

After getting curb stomped on the debate stage by Tulsi Gabbard, the campaign for Tim "Who the fuck is Tim Ryan?" Ryan posted a statement decrying the Hawaii congresswoman's desire to end a pointless 18-year military occupation as "isolationism".

"While making a point as to why America can't cede its international leadership and retreat from around the world, Tim was interrupted by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard," the statement reads.

"When he tried to answer her, she contorted a factual point Tim was making  --  about the Taliban being complicit in the 9/11 attacks by providing training, bases and refuge for Al Qaeda and its leaders. The characterization that Tim Ryan doesn't know who is responsible for the attacks on 9/11 is simply unfair reporting. Further, we continue to reject Gabbard's isolationism and her misguided beliefs on foreign policy . We refuse to be lectured by someone who thinks it's ok to dine with murderous dictators like Syria's Bashar Al-Assad who used chemical weapons on his own people."

Ryan's campaign is lying. During an exchange that was explicitly about the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ryan plainly said "When we weren't in there, they started flying planes into our buildings." At best, Ryan can argue that when he said "they" he had suddenly shifted from talking about the Taliban to talking about Al Qaeda without bothering to say so, in which case he obviously can't legitimately claim that Gabbard "contorted" anything he had said. At worst, he was simply unaware at the time of the very clear distinction between the Afghan military and political body called the Taliban and the multinational extremist organization called Al Qaeda.

More importantly, Ryan's campaign using the word "isolationism" to describe the simple common sense impulse to withdraw from a costly, deadly military occupation which isn't accomplishing anything highlights an increasingly common tactic of tarring anything other than endless military expansionism as strange and aberrant instead of normal and good.

Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism. This removal of a desirable opposite of war from the establishment-authorised lexicon causes war to always be the desirable option.

This is entirely by design. This bit of word magic has been employed for a long time to tar any idea which deviates from the neoconservative agenda of total global unipolarity via violent imperialism as something freakish and dangerous. In his farewell address to the nation , war criminal George W Bush said the following:

"In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led."

A few months after Bush's address, Antiwar 's Rich Rubino wrote an article titled " Non-Interventionism is Not Isolationism ", explaining the difference between a nation which withdraws entirely from the world and a nation which simply resists the temptation to use military aggression except in self defense.

"Isolationism dictates that a country should have no relations with the rest of the world," Rubino explained. "In its purest form this would mean that ambassadors would not be shared with other nations, communications with foreign governments would be mainly perfunctory, and commercial relations would be non-existent."

"A non-interventionist supports commercial relations," Rubino contrasted. "In fact, in terms of trade, many non-interventionists share libertarian proclivities and would unilaterally obliterate all tariffs and custom duties, and would be open to trade with all willing nations. In addition, non-interventionists welcome cultural exchanges and the exchange of ambassadors with all willing nations."

"A non-interventionist believes that the U.S. should not intercede in conflicts between other nations or conflicts within nations," wrote Rubino. "In recent history, non-interventionists have proved prophetic in warning of the dangers of the U.S. entangling itself in alliances. The U.S. has suffered deleterious effects and effectuated enmity among other governments, citizenries, and non-state actors as a result of its overseas interventions. The U.S. interventions in both Iran and Iraq have led to cataclysmic consequences."

Calling an aversion to endless military violence "isolationism" is the same as calling an aversion to mugging people "agoraphobia". Yet you'll see this ridiculous label applied to both Gabbard and Trump, neither of whom are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists. Gabbard supports most US military alliances and continues to voice full support for the bogus "war on terror" implemented by the Bush administration which serves no purpose other than to facilitate endless military expansionism; Trump is openly pushing regime change interventionism in both Venezuela and Iran while declining to make good on his promises to withdraw the US military from Syria and Afghanistan.

Another dishonest label you'll get thrown at you when debating the forever war is "pacifism". "Some wars are bad, but I'm not a pacifist; sometimes war is necessary," supporters of a given interventionist military action will tell you. They'll say this while defending Trump's potentially catastrophic Iran warmongering or promoting a moronic regime change invasion of Syria, or defending disastrous US military interventions in the past like Iraq.

This is bullshit for a couple of reasons. Firstly, virtually no one is a pure pacifist who opposes war under any and all possible circumstances; anyone who claims that they can't imagine any possible scenario in which they'd support using some kind of coordinated violence either hasn't imagined very hard or is fooling themselves. If your loved ones were going to be raped, tortured and killed by hostile forces unless an opposing group took up arms to defend them, for example, you would support that. Hell, you would probably join in. Secondly, equating opposition to US-led regime change interventionism, which is literally always disastrous and literally never helpful, is not even a tiny bit remotely like opposing all war under any possible circumstance.

Another common distortion you'll see is the specious argument that a given opponent of US interventionism "isn't anti-war" because they don't oppose all war under any and all circumstances. This tweet by The Intercept 's Mehdi Hasan is a perfect example, claiming that Gabbard is not anti-war because she supports Syria's sovereign right to defend itself with the help of its allies from the violent extremist factions which overran the country with western backing. Again, virtually no one is opposed to all war under any and all circumstances; if a coalition of foreign governments had helped flood Hasan's own country of Britain with extremist militias who'd been murdering their way across the UK with the ultimate goal of toppling London, both Tulsi Gabbard and Hasan would support fighting back against those militias.

The label "anti-war" can for these reasons be a little misleading. The term anti-interventionist or non-interventionist comes closest to describing the value system of most people who oppose the warmongering of the western empire, because they understand that calls for military interventionism which go mainstream in today's environment are almost universally based on imperialist agendas grabbing at power, profit, and global hegemony. The label "isolationist" comes nowhere close.

It all comes down to sovereignty. An anti-interventionist believes that a country has the right to defend itself, but it doesn't have the right to conquer, capture, infiltrate or overthrow other nations whether covertly or overtly. At the "end" of colonialism we all agreed we were done with that, except that the nationless manipulators have found far trickier ways to seize a country's will and resources without actually planting a flag there. We need to get clearer on these distinctions and get louder about defending them as the only sane, coherent way to run foreign policy.

* * *

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Vitor , 31 minutes ago link

It's like someone being labeled anti-social for stopping to bully and pick up fights.

Aussiekiwi , 49 minutes ago link

"If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led."

Fascinating belief, has he been to Libya lately, perhaps attended an open air slave Market in a country that was very developed before the US decided to 'free' it.

Quivering Lip , 57 minutes ago link

Until Tulsi pimp slapped that Ryan guy I never heard of him. I would imagine I'll never here about him in another 2 months.

Toshie , 1 hour ago link

yeah , keep at it US Govt ;- keep fighting those wars overseas on behalf the 5th foreign column.

Keep wasting precious lives ,and the country's wealth while foreign rising powers like China are laughing all the way to the bank.

may you live in interesting times !

onasip123 , 1 hour ago link

War forever and ever, Amen.

Dr Anon , 1 hour ago link

When we weren't there, they flew planes into our buildings?

Excuse me mutant, but I believe we paid Israel our jewtax that year like all the others and they still flew planes into our buildings. And then danced in the streets about it. Sick people.

thisguyoverhere , 1 hour ago link

All Wars Are Evil. Period. "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." – Henry Kissinger

Picture if you will Jesus. Seriously? Can you imagine Jesus firing a machine gun at a group of people? Can you picture Jesus in an F-16 lobbing missiles at innocents?

Do you see Jesus piloting a drone and killing Muslims, other non-believers, or anyone for that matter? Can you picture Jesus as a sniper?

Impossible.

Dougs Decks , 2 hours ago link

Soooo,,, If my favorite evening activity, is to sit on the front porch steps, while the dog and the cats run around, with my shotgun leaning up next to me,,, Is that Isolationist, or Protectionist,,,

Brazen Heist II , 2 hours ago link

You know the system is completely broken when they want to silence/kill/smear anybody talking sense and peace.

vienna_proxy , 2 hours ago link

and isis are referred to as freedom fighters

Herdee , 2 hours ago link

The CIA and MI6 staged all the fake chemical incidents in Syria as well as the recent one in England. False Flags.

ardent , 2 hours ago link

What America needs is to get rid of all those Jewish Zionist Neocons leading us into those forever wars.

ALL MidEast terrorism and warmongering are for APARTHEID Israhell.

vienna_proxy , 2 hours ago link

instead of getting us out of Syria, Trump got us further in. Trump is driving us to ww3. we can't do **** if we're glazed over in a nuclear holocaust. maybe Tulsi is lying through her teeth, but i am so pissed Trump went full neocon

Wild Bill Steamcock , 2 hours ago link

"Won't Get Fooled Again"- The Who

JD Rock , 2 hours ago link

funny how people, fresh from the broken promises "build that wall" etc, quickly forget all that and begin IMMEDIATELY projecting trustworthiness on yet ANOTHER candidate. I'Il vote for Tulsi when she says no more Israeli wars for America.

vienna_proxy , 2 hours ago link

she did slam Netanyahu

WillyGroper , 2 hours ago link

saying & doing are different animals. she's powerless. more hope n chains.

KnightsofNee , 2 hours ago link

www.tulsigabbard.org

If you read her positions on various issues, a quick survey shows that she supports the New Green Deal, more gun control (ban on assault rifles, etc.), Medicare for all. Stopped reading at that point.

White Nat , 2 hours ago link

We refuse to be lectured by someone who thinks it's ok to dine with murderous dictators like Syria's Bashar Al-Assad who used chemical weapons on his own people.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. ~ Joseph Goebbels

New_Meat , 2 hours ago link

- Edward Bernays, relative of Sigmund Fraud, propagandist for Woodrow Wilson.

Back then, being a "propagandist" held no stigma nor antipathy.

fify

Debt Slave , 1 hour ago link

The better educated among us know exactly as to who Goebblels was referring to. Even a dullard should be able to figure out who benefits from all of our Middle East adventures.

LOL123 , 3 hours ago link

"Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism. "

Under military might WAS the old world order... Under the new world order the strength is in cyber warfare .

If under technology the profiteers can control the masses through crowd control ( which they can-" Department of Defense has developed a non-lethal crowd control device called the Active Denial System (ADS) . The ADS works by firing a high-powered beam of 95 GHz waves at a target that is, millimeter wavelengths. Anyone caught in the beam will feel like their skin is burning.) your spending power ( they can through e- commetce and digital banking) and isolation cells called homes ( they can through directed microwaves from GWEN stations).... We already are isolated and exposed at the same time.

That war is an exceptable means of engagement as a solution to world power is a confirmation of the psychological warfare imposed on us since the creation of our Nation.

Either we reel it in and back now or we destroy ourselves from within.

"

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Abraham Lincoln

vienna_proxy , 2 hours ago link

if there's even a small chance Tulsi can get us out of the forever wars i will be compelled to vote for her, as Trump clearly has no intention on doing so. yes, it is that important

metachron , 2 hours ago link

Idiot, Tulsi is a sovereign nationalist on the left. You have just never seen one before. If you were truly anti-globalist you'd would realize left and right are invented to divide us. The politics are global and national, so wake the **** up

Hurricane Baby , 3 hours ago link

Actually, I don't see where a few decades of US isolationism would be all that bad.

Fred box , 3 hours ago link

""War Is the U.S. Racket!"" They are not good at it, there "great at it". My entire life 63yrs,they been fighting someone or something. When times where rough in the 1800s,Hell! they fought themselves(Civil War. As I said b4 No one seems to ask, Where does the gold go of the vanquished foe? Truly Is A Well Practiced Racket.

Malleus Maleficarum , 3 hours ago link

Good article with several salient points, thought I would ask "what's wrong with a little isolationism?" Peace through internal strength is desirable, but good fences make good neighbors and charity begins at home!

The gradual twisting of language really is one of most insidious tactics employed by the NWO Luciferians. I think we'd all like to see the traitorous Neocons gone for good. Better yet, strip them of their American citizenship and ill-gotten wealth and banish them to Israel. Let them earn their citizenship serving in a front-line IDF rifle company.

As for this next election? Is Ron Paul running as an independent? No? Well then, 'fool me once...' Don't get me wrong: I hope Gabbard is genuine and she's absolutely right to push non-interventionism...but the rest of her platform sucks. There's also the fact that she's a CFR member and avowed gun-grabber, to boot. Two HUGE red flags!

She almost strikes me as a half-assed 'Manchurian Candidate.' So, if she's elected (a big 'if' at this point) I ask myself 'what happens after the next (probably nuclear) false flag?' How quickly will she disavow her present stance on non-interventionism? How quickly and viciously will the 2nd Amendment be raped? Besides, I'm not foolish enough to believe that one person can turn the SS Deep State away from it's final disastrous course.

dunlin , 2 hours ago link

What's cfr? Duck duck gives lots of law firms.

tardpill , 2 hours ago link

council on foreign relations

tardpill , 2 hours ago link

the whos who of globalist satanists..

Sinophile , 32 minutes ago link

Mal, she is NOT a CFR member. You are misinformed.

Justapleb , 3 hours ago link

These word games were already in use looong ago. Tulsi Gabbard is using Obama's line about fighting the wrong war. She would have taken out Al Qaeda, captured Bin Laden, and put a dog leash on him. So that she could make a green economy, a new century of virtue signalling tyranny. No thanks.

Smi1ey , 3 hours ago link

Great article.

Go Tusli!

Go Caitlin!

I am Groot , 3 hours ago link

You beat me to that. Thanks for saving my breath.

Rule #1 All politcians lie

Rule #2 See Rule #1

Boogity , 3 hours ago link

Just as they did with Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Pat Buchanan, the MSM and the swamp have already effectively buried Gabbard. It's unlikely that she'll make the next debate cut as the DNC and MSM will toss her out.

All the MSM is talking about post-debates, even on Faux Noise, is Harris's race-baiting of old senile Biden.

I went to some of the so-called liberal websites and blogs and the only mention of Gabbard is in the context of her being a Putin stooge. This combined with the fact that virtually all establishment Republicans are eager to fight any war for Israel clearly shows that it will take something other than the ballot box to end Uncle Scam's endless wars.

[Jun 29, 2019] Have You Heard Of The CIA s Iran Mission Center by Vijay Prashad

Notable quotes:
"... To head the Iran Mission Center, the CIA appointed Michael D'Andrea. D'Andrea was central to the post-9/11 interrogation program, and he ran the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Assassinations and torture were central to his approach. ..."
"... What is germane to his post at the Iran Mission Center is that D'Andrea is close to the Gulf Arabs, a former CIA analyst told me. The Gulf Arabs have been pushing hard for action against Iran, a view shared by D'Andrea and parts of his team. For his hard-nosed attitude toward Iran, D'Andrea is known -- ironically -- as "Ayatollah Mike." ..."
"... D'Andrea and people like Bolton are part of an ecosystem of men who have a visceral hatred for Iran and who are close to the worldview of the Saudi royal family . These are men who are reckless with violence, willing to do anything if it means provoking a war against Iran. Nothing should be put past them. ..."
"... D'Andrea's twin outside the White House is Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire who set up two groups that are blindingly for regime change in Iran. The two groups are United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and Counter Extremism Project. There is nothing subtle here. These groups -- and Kaplan himself -- promote an agenda of great disparagement of Muslims in general and of Iran in particular. ..."
"... It is fitting that Kaplan's anti-Iran groups bring together the CIA and money. The head of UANI is Mark Wallace, who is the chief executive of Kaplan's Tigris Financial Group, a financial firm with investments -- which it admits -- would benefit from "instability in the Middle East." Working with UANI and the Counter Extremism Project is Norman Roule, a former national intelligence manager for Iran in the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. ..."
"... These men -- Kaplan and Bolton, D'Andrea and Shihabi -- are eager to use the full force of the U.S. military to further the dangerous goals of the Gulf Arab royals (of both Saudi Arabia and of the UAE). When Pompeo walked before cameras, he carried their water for them. These are men on a mission. They want war against Iran. ..."
Jun 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Vijay Prashad via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

In 2017, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created a special unit -- the Iran Mission Center -- to focus attention on the U.S. plans against Iran . The initiative for this unit came from CIA director John Brennan, who left his post as the Trump administration came into office. Brennan believed that the CIA needed to focus attention on what the United States sees as problem areas -- North Korea and Iran, for instance. This predated the Trump administration.

Brennan's successor -- Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director for just over a year (until he was appointed U.S. Secretary of State) -- continued this policy. The CIA's Iran-related activity had been conducted in the Iran Operations Division (Persia House). This was a section with Iran specialists who built up knowledge about political and economic developments inside Iran and in the Iranian diaspora.

It bothered the hawks in Washington -- as one official told me -- that Persia House was filled with Iran specialists who had no special focus on regime change in Iran. Some of them, due to their long concentration on Iran, had developed sensitivity to the country.

Trump's people wanted a much more focused and belligerent group that would provide the kind of intelligence that tickled the fancy of his National Security Adviser John Bolton .

To head the Iran Mission Center, the CIA appointed Michael D'Andrea. D'Andrea was central to the post-9/11 interrogation program, and he ran the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. Assassinations and torture were central to his approach.

It was D'Andrea who expanded the CIA's drone strike program, in particular the signature strike. The signature strike is a particularly controversial instrument. The CIA was given the allowance to kill anyone who fit a certain profile -- a man of a certain age, for instance, with a phone that had been used to call someone on a list. The dark arts of the CIA are precisely those of D'Andrea.

What is germane to his post at the Iran Mission Center is that D'Andrea is close to the Gulf Arabs, a former CIA analyst told me. The Gulf Arabs have been pushing hard for action against Iran, a view shared by D'Andrea and parts of his team. For his hard-nosed attitude toward Iran, D'Andrea is known -- ironically -- as "Ayatollah Mike."

D'Andrea and people like Bolton are part of an ecosystem of men who have a visceral hatred for Iran and who are close to the worldview of the Saudi royal family . These are men who are reckless with violence, willing to do anything if it means provoking a war against Iran. Nothing should be put past them.

The initiative for this unit came from CIA director John Brennan, who left his post as the Trump administration came into office. Getty Image.

D'Andrea and the hawks edged out several Iran experts from the Iran Mission Center, people like Margaret Stromecki -- who had been head of analysis. Others who want to offer an alternative to the Pompeo-Bolton view of things either have also moved on or remain silent. There is no space in the Trump administration, a former official told me, for dissent on the Iran policy.

Saudi Arabia's War

D'Andrea's twin outside the White House is Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire who set up two groups that are blindingly for regime change in Iran. The two groups are United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and Counter Extremism Project. There is nothing subtle here. These groups -- and Kaplan himself -- promote an agenda of great disparagement of Muslims in general and of Iran in particular.

Kaplan blamed Iran for the creation of ISIS, for it was Iran -- Kaplan said -- that "used a terrible Sunni movement" to expand its reach from "Persia to the Mediterranean." Such absurdity followed from a fundamental misreading of Shia concepts such as taqiya, which means prudence and not -- as Kaplan and others argue -- deceit. Kaplan, bizarrely, shares more with ISIS than Iran does with that group -- since both Kaplan and ISIS are driven by their hatred of those who follow the Shia traditions of Islam.

It is fitting that Kaplan's anti-Iran groups bring together the CIA and money. The head of UANI is Mark Wallace, who is the chief executive of Kaplan's Tigris Financial Group, a financial firm with investments -- which it admits -- would benefit from "instability in the Middle East." Working with UANI and the Counter Extremism Project is Norman Roule, a former national intelligence manager for Iran in the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Roule has offered his support to the efforts of the Arabia Foundation, run by Ali Shihabi -- a man with close links to the Saudi monarchy. The Arabia Foundation was set up to do more effective public relations work for the Saudis than the Saudi diplomats are capable of doing. Shihabi is the son of one of Saudi Arabia's most well-regarded diplomats, Samir al-Shihabi, who played an important role as Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Pakistan during the war that created al-Qaeda.

These men -- Kaplan and Bolton, D'Andrea and Shihabi -- are eager to use the full force of the U.S. military to further the dangerous goals of the Gulf Arab royals (of both Saudi Arabia and of the UAE). When Pompeo walked before cameras, he carried their water for them. These are men on a mission. They want war against Iran.

Evidence, reason. None of this is important to them. They will not stop until the U.S. bombers deposit their deadly payload on Tehran and Qom, Isfahan and Shiraz. They will do anything to make that our terrible reality.

This article was produced by Globetrotter , a project of the Independent Media Institute.

[Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton

Highly recommended!
Jun 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

Chris Mallory , says: June 28, 2019 at 2:04 am GMT

Miss Gabbard just served two tours in the ME, one as enlisted in the HI National Guard.

Brave Mr. Bolton kept the dirty communists from endangering the US supply of Chesapeake crab while serving in the Maryland Guard. Rumor also has it that he helped Tompall Glaser write the song Streets of Baltimore. Some say they saw Mr. Bolton single handily defending Memorial Stadium from a combined VC/NVA attack during an Orioles game. The Cubans would have conquered the Pimlico Race Course if not for the combat skill of PFC Bolton.

[Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton

Highly recommended!
Jun 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

Chris Mallory , says: June 28, 2019 at 2:04 am GMT

Miss Gabbard just served two tours in the ME, one as enlisted in the HI National Guard.

Brave Mr. Bolton kept the dirty communists from endangering the US supply of Chesapeake crab while serving in the Maryland Guard. Rumor also has it that he helped Tompall Glaser write the song Streets of Baltimore. Some say they saw Mr. Bolton single handily defending Memorial Stadium from a combined VC/NVA attack during an Orioles game. The Cubans would have conquered the Pimlico Race Course if not for the combat skill of PFC Bolton.

[Jun 28, 2019] Neoliberal MSM proposed set of debate questions for Bernie Sanders

Jun 27, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Chris , June 27, 2019 at 7:56 pm

Let's see if they can keep Bernie in the same cage they put Tulsi in. I can't imagine they'll be helpful or even polite to him. I expect "debate" questions such as:

[Jun 28, 2019] Bolton Gets Ready to Kill New START by Daniel Larison

Jun 27, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
If Bolton gets his way, New START is not long for this world :

At the same time, the administration has signaled in recent days that it plans to let the New Start treaty, negotiated by Barack Obama, expire in February 2021 rather than renew it for another five years. John R. Bolton, the president's national security adviser, who met with his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, in Jerusalem this week, said before leaving Washington that "there's no decision, but I think it's unlikely" the treaty would be renewed.

Mr. Bolton, a longtime skeptic of arms control agreements, said that New Start was flawed because it did not cover short-range tactical nuclear weapons or new Russian delivery systems. "So to extend for five years and not take these new delivery system threats into account would be malpractice," he told The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet.

Like all of his complaints about arms control agreements, Bolton's criticisms of New START are made in bad faith. Opponents of New START have long pretended that they oppose the treaty because it did not cover everything imaginable, including tactical nuclear weapons, but this has always been an excuse for them to reject a treaty that they have never wanted ratified in the first place. If the concern about negotiating a treaty that covered tactical nuclear weapons were genuine, the smart thing to do would be to extend New START and then begin negotiations for a more comprehensive arms control agreement. Faulting New START for failing to include things that are by definition not going to be included in a strategic arms reduction treaty gives the game away. This is what die-hard opponents of the treaty have been doing for almost ten years, and they do it because they want to dismantle the last vestiges of arms control. The proposal to include China as part of a new treaty is another tell that the Trump administration just wants the treaty to die.

The article concludes:

Some experts suspect talk of a three-way accord is merely a feint to get rid of the New Start treaty. "If a trilateral deal is meant as a substitute or prerequisite for extending New Start, it is a poison pill, no ifs, ands or buts," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. "If the president is seeking a trilateral deal as a follow-on to New Start, that's a different thing."

Knowing Bolton, it has to be a poison pill. Just as Bolton is ideologically opposed to making any deal with Iran, he is ideologically opposed to any arms control agreement that places limits on the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The "flaws" he identifies aren't really flaws that he wants to fix (and they may not be flaws at all), but excuses for trashing the agreement. He will make noises about how the current deal or treaty doesn't go far enough, but the truth is that he doesn't want any agreements to exist. In Bolton's worldview, nonproliferation and arms control agreements either give the other government too much or hamper the U.S. too much, and so he wants to destroy them all. He has had a lot of success at killing agreements and treaties that have been in the U.S. interest. Bolton has had a hand in blowing up the Agreed Framework with North Korea, abandoning the ABM Treaty, killing the INF Treaty, and reneging on the JCPOA. Unless the president can be persuaded to ignore or fire Bolton, New START will be his next victim.

If New START dies, it will be a loss for both the U.S. and Russia, it will make the world less secure, and it will make U.S.-Russian relations even worse. The stability that these treaties have provided has been important for U.S. security for almost fifty years. New START is the last of the treaties that constrain the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, and when it is gone there will be nothing to replace it for a long time. The collapse of arms control almost certainly means that the top two nuclear weapons states will expand their arsenals and put us back on the path of an insane and unwinnable arms race. Killing New START is irrational and purely destructive, and it needs to be opposed.

Taras77 • a day ago

bolton is opposed to any treaty, to any agreement, whereby the other side can expect to obtain equally favorable terms-he wants the other side on their knees permanently without any expectation of compromise by the empire.
Sid Finster • a day ago
I wonder how long it will take for Trump to finally figure out that Bolton and Pompeo regard him as expendable.

Whether Trump wins or loses in 2020 will not matter, as long as the neocons get what they want.

Tony • 9 hours ago
John Bolton will not be satisfied until he has got us all killed.
He is an extremely dangerous man.

[Jun 28, 2019] On Chosen-mess by Gilad Atzmon

Notable quotes:
"... Jeffrey Epstein's story is similarly abusive. The convicted sex offender prostituted dozens of underage girls and should have spent the rest of his life in jail. Again this is no 'one-off' abuse of an underage child, he was a serial sex predator. ..."
"... According to Joseph Recarey, the lead Palm Beach detective on the case, Epstein was essentially operating a "sexual pyramid scheme." ..."
"... The Vox writes that the girls and women who reported abuse by Epstein, meanwhile, were markedly powerless. Most of them "came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care, Many of the girls were one step away from homelessness." ..."
Jun 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

Jeffrey Epstein's story is similarly abusive. The convicted sex offender prostituted dozens of underage girls and should have spent the rest of his life in jail. Again this is no 'one-off' abuse of an underage child, he was a serial sex predator.

According to Joseph Recarey, the lead Palm Beach detective on the case, Epstein was essentially operating a "sexual pyramid scheme."

The Vox writes that the girls and women who reported abuse by Epstein, meanwhile, were markedly powerless. Most of them "came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care, Many of the girls were one step away from homelessness."

In November 2017 the genius comedian Larry David was criticized in the Jewish press for admitting on Saturday Night Live that many of those accused of sexual harassment in Hollywood are Jewish.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/G0eeNijdv3I?feature=oembed

... Alan Dershowitz , who was a member of Epstein's legal team and was later accused by one of the victims' lawyers of himself participating in the sex trafficking ring .

[Jun 28, 2019] Pathetic, the whole debate were pathetic

Here’s a transcript.
We’ll see how neoliberal MSM will spin this, but I would say Sanders emerged unscathed, Harris attacked and "wounded" Biden, Biden sounded like a lightweight, Gillibrand seems to be a very unpleasant person although different form Harris...
Notable quotes:
"... as if polling on donald trump and stuff is just so interesting ..."
"... Kamala Harris got more floor time than anyone else. Harris ended Biden's campaign. The debate is rigged against Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... Did Harris get the debate questions in advance? ..."
"... Her manner of speaking is like someone who doesn’t care, doesn’t take the whole thing seriously. It’s like someone who is cheaply casually condescending on the whole thing, on her having to be there. That’s what I perceived. It is deeply disqualifying from any leadership position. “Food fight”? We at that level now? That makes her cool? My god, what garbage. ..."
"... Harris will alienate The Deplorables, the military, the White Working Class or even black people, who know her as Kamala The Cop. ..."
Jun 28, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

zagonostra, June 27, 2019 at 9:58 pm

Pathetic, the whole scene is pathetic. What a way to run a putative democracy, bring back the league of women voters to run the debates and that idiot with the graphs during commercial breaks while watching this online, I want to break his freaking head sorry.

Carey, June 27, 2019 at 10:19 pm

Fully agree. And WTF was with that gesticulating moron at the break?

WheresOurTeddy, June 27, 2019 at 11:29 pm

his sleeves were rolled up, so you know he is a hardworking guy just like you, and can thus be trusted

jrs, June 28, 2019 at 1:54 am

+1

Yea online and a bunch of polling graphs, as if polling on donald trump and stuff is just so interesting

anon in so cal, June 27, 2019 at 10:31 pm

Twitter consensus:

Kamala Harris got more floor time than anyone else. Harris ended Biden's campaign. The debate is rigged against Bernie Sanders.

Twitter questions:

Did Harris get the debate questions in advance?

deeplyrad , June 28, 2019 at 4:43 am

C’mon Lambert, seriously, a joint with Harris?

I had the idea that your sensibilities were rather more refined than that, knowing anything about or not.

Her manner of speaking is like someone who doesn’t care, doesn’t take the whole thing seriously. It’s like someone who is cheaply casually condescending on the whole thing, on her having to be there. That’s what I perceived. It is deeply disqualifying from any leadership position. “Food fight”? We at that level now? That makes her cool? My god, what garbage.

FWIW, Boot Edge Edge’s prehensile sincerity was masterful in my view – shows some real talent.

I’m just observing this out of academic interest and hope we’ll all have a chance to vote for Bernie in the general. But from tonight, Boot Edge Edge to me stood out as a talent – and everyone else (besides Bernie who was reliably on message and will keep going more or less the same after this) was garbage or unnecessary (Biden is a disgrace), and the first debate was better.

Cal2, June 27, 2019 at 11:19 pm

In that case, Donald Trump gets our votes, as well as keeping all the potential crossovers, who had supported Trump last time, and would have voted for Sanders-Gabbard.

Harris will alienate The Deplorables, the military, the White Working Class or even black people, who know her as Kamala The Cop.

Sanders-Harris would be political suicide for the Democrats.

Sanders-Gabbard would be a winner against Trump.

[Jun 28, 2019] The Tulsi Effect Forcing War Onto the Democratic Agenda by Danny Sjursen

Notable quotes:
"... She is the only candidate who has made ending the wars a centerpiece of her campaign, which will likely lead to her undoing ..."
"... The only bright spot in the second debate was Senator Bernie Sanders's single mention of the word Yemen -- specifically ending U.S. support for that war and shifting war powers back where they belong -- with Congress. Still, most of the candidates had just about nothing to say on this or other war-related topics. Their silence was instructive. ..."
"... Ironically, then, two more American soldiers were killed in another meaningless firefight in the long meaningless war in Afghanistan on the day of the first Democratic presidential primary debate. Indeed, were it not for this horrendous event -- the deaths of the 3,550th and 3,551st coalition troops in an 18-year-old war -- Afghanistan might not have ever made it onto Rachel Maddow's debate questions list. ..."
"... Maddow's question on the first night was one of precious few posed on the subject of foreign policy at all. Moreover, it spurred the most interesting, engaging, and enlightening exchange of either evening -- between Gabbard and Ohio Representative Tim Ryan. ..."
"... Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable. We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan We have spent so much money. Money that's coming out of every one of our pockets We are no better off in Afghanistan today than we were when this war began. This is why it is so important to have a president -- commander in chief who knows the cost of war and is ready to do the job on day one. ..."
"... In a few tight sentences, Gabbard distilled decades' worth of antiwar critique and summarized what I've been writing for years -- only I've killed many trees composing more than 20,000 words on the topic. The brevity of her terse comment, coupled with her unique platform as a veteran, only added to its power. Bravo, Tulsi, bravo! ..."
"... Gabbard, shamefully, is the only one among an absurdly large field of candidates who has put foreign policy, specifically ending the forever wars, at the top of her presidential campaign agenda. Well, unlike just about all of her opponents, she did fight in those very conflicts. The pity is that with an electorate so utterly apathetic about war, her priorities, while noble, might just doom her campaign before it even really starts. That's instructive, if pitiful. ..."
Jun 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

She is the only candidate who has made ending the wars a centerpiece of her campaign, which will likely lead to her undoing

Tim Ryan and Tulsi Gabbard during the first night of the the Democratic debate. (YouTube/NBC News/screenshot) Democrats, liberals, progressives -- call them what you will -- don't really do foreign policy. Sure, if cornered, they'll spout a few choice talking points, and probably find a way to make them all about bashing President Donald Trump -- ignoring the uncomfortable fact that their very own Barack Obama led and expanded America's countless wars for eight long years.

This was ever so apparent in the first two nights of Democratic primary debates this week. Foreign policy hardly registered for these candidates with one noteworthy exception: Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard -- herself an (anti-war) combat veteran and army officer.

Now primary debates are more show than substance; this has long been the case. Still, to watch the first night's Democratic primary debates, it was possible to forget that the United States remains mired in several air and ground wars from West Africa to Central Asia. In a two-hour long debate, with 10 would-be nominees plus the moderators, the word Afghanistan was uttered just nine times -- you know, once for every two years American troops have been killing and dying there. Iraq was uttered just twice -- both times by Gabbard. Syria, where Americans have died and still fight, was mentioned not once. Yemen, the world's worst humanitarian disaster, courtesy of a U.S.-supported Saudi terror campaign didn't get mentioned a single time, either.

Night two was mostly worse! Afghanistan was uttered just three times, and there was no question specifically related to the war. Biden did say, in passing, that he doesn't think there should be "combat troops" in Afghanistan -- but notice the qualifier "combat." That's a cop-out that allows him to keep advisers and "support" troops in the country indefinitely. These are the games most Democrats play. And by the way, all those supposedly non-combat troops, well, they can and do get killed too.

The only bright spot in the second debate was Senator Bernie Sanders's single mention of the word Yemen -- specifically ending U.S. support for that war and shifting war powers back where they belong -- with Congress. Still, most of the candidates had just about nothing to say on this or other war-related topics. Their silence was instructive.

Ironically, then, two more American soldiers were killed in another meaningless firefight in the long meaningless war in Afghanistan on the day of the first Democratic presidential primary debate. Indeed, were it not for this horrendous event -- the deaths of the 3,550th and 3,551st coalition troops in an 18-year-old war -- Afghanistan might not have ever made it onto Rachel Maddow's debate questions list.

I mourn each and every service-member's death in that unwinnable war; to say nothing of the far more numerous Afghan civilian fatalities. Still, in a macabre sort of way, I was glad the topic came up, even under such dismal circumstances. After all, Maddow's question on the first night was one of precious few posed on the subject of foreign policy at all. Moreover, it spurred the most interesting, engaging, and enlightening exchange of either evening -- between Gabbard and Ohio Representative Tim Ryan.

Reminding the audience of the recent troop deaths in the country, Maddow asked Ryan, "Why isn't [the Afghanistan war] over? Why can't presidents of very different parties and very different temperaments get us out of there? And how could you?" Ryan had a ready, if wholly conventional and obtuse, answer: "The lesson" of these many years of wars is clear, he opined; the United States must stay "engaged," "completely engaged," in fact, even if "no one likes" it and it's "tedious." I heard this, vomited a bit into my mouth, and thought "spare me!"

Ryan's platitudes didn't answer the question, for starters, and hardly engaged with American goals, interests, exit strategies, or a basic cost-benefit analysis in the war. In the space of a single sentence, Ryan proved himself just another neoliberal militarist, you know, the "reluctant" Democratic imperialist type. He made it clear he's Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer rolled into one, except instead of cynically voting for the 2003 Iraq war, he was defending an off-the-rails Afghanistan war in its 18th year.

Gabbard pounced, and delivered the finest foreign policy screed of the night. And more power to her. Interrupting Ryan, she poignantly asked:

Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? Well, we just have to be engaged? As a soldier, I will tell you that answer is unacceptable. We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan We have spent so much money. Money that's coming out of every one of our pockets We are no better off in Afghanistan today than we were when this war began. This is why it is so important to have a president -- commander in chief who knows the cost of war and is ready to do the job on day one.

In a few tight sentences, Gabbard distilled decades' worth of antiwar critique and summarized what I've been writing for years -- only I've killed many trees composing more than 20,000 words on the topic. The brevity of her terse comment, coupled with her unique platform as a veteran, only added to its power. Bravo, Tulsi, bravo!

Ryan was visibly shaken and felt compelled to retort with a standard series of worn out tropes. And Gabbard was ready for each one, almost as though she'd heard them all before (and probably has). The U.S. military has to stay, Ryan pleaded, because: "if the United States isn't engaged the Taliban will grow and they will have bigger, bolder terrorist acts." Gabbard cut him right off. "The Taliban was there long before we came in. They'll be there long [after] we leave," she thundered.

But because we didn't "squash them," before 9/11 Ryan complained, "they started flying planes into our buildings." This, of course, is the recycled and easily refuted safe haven myth -- the notion that the Taliban would again host transnational terrorists the moment our paltry 14,500 troops head back to Milwaukee. It's ridiculous. There's no evidence to support this desperate claim and it fails to explain why the United States doesn't station several thousand troops in the dozens of global locales with a more serious al-Qaeda or ISIS presence than Afghanistan does. Gabbard would have none of it. "The Taliban didn't attack us on 9/11," she reminded Ryan, "al-Qaeda did." It's an important distinction, lost on mainstream interventionist Democrats and Republicans alike.

Ryan couldn't possibly open his mind to such complexity, nuance, and, ultimately, realism. He clearly worships at the temple of war inertia; his worldview hostage to the absurd notion that the U.S. military has little choice but to fight everywhere, anywhere, because, well, that's what it's always done. Which leads us to what should be an obvious conclusion: Ryan, and all who think like him, should be immediately disqualified by true progressives and libertarians alike. His time has past. Ryan and his ilk have left a scorched region and a shaken American republic for the rest of us.

Still, there was one more interesting query for the first night's candidates. What is the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States today, asked Maddow. All 10 Democratic hopefuls took a crack at it, though almost none followed directions and kept their answers to a single word or phrase. For the most part, the answers were ridiculous, outdated, or elementary, spanning Russia, China, even Trump. But none of the debaters listed terrorism as the biggest threat -- a huge sea change from answers that candidates undoubtedly would have given just four or eight years ago.

Which begs the question: why, if terrorism isn't the priority, do far too many of these presidential aspirants seem willing to continue America's fruitless, forever fight for the Greater Middle East? It's a mystery, partly explained by the overwhelming power of the America's military-industrial-congressional-media complex. Good old President Dwight D. Eisenhower is rolling in his grave, I assure you.

Gabbard, shamefully, is the only one among an absurdly large field of candidates who has put foreign policy, specifically ending the forever wars, at the top of her presidential campaign agenda. Well, unlike just about all of her opponents, she did fight in those very conflicts. The pity is that with an electorate so utterly apathetic about war, her priorities, while noble, might just doom her campaign before it even really starts. That's instructive, if pitiful.

I, too, served in a series of unwinnable, unnecessary, unethical wars. Like her, I've chosen to publicly dissent in not just strategic, but in moral, language. I join her in her rejection of U.S. militarism, imperialism, and the flimsy justifications for the Afghanistan war -- America's longest war in its history.

As for the other candidates, when one of them (likely) wins, let's hope they are prepared the question Tulsi so powerfully posed to Ryan: what will they tell the parents of the next soldier that dies in America's hopeless Afghanistan war?

Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major and regular contributor to The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in Harper's, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation , Tom Dispatch, The Huffington Post, Truthdig and The Hill . He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . He co-hosts the progressive veterans' podcast " Fortress on a Hill ." Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet .

[Jun 28, 2019] A strain of foreign policy restraint may be emerging in the Democratic party

Jun 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

It wasn't surprising that Hawaii's Representative Tulsi Gabbard, an outspoken advocate of realism in foreign policy, exploited every opportunity to highlight her opposition to what she considers America's promiscuous warmaking policies of recent decades. She decried the country "going from one regime-change war to the next. This insanity must end." But other Democrats also echoed that sentiment, particularly with regard to the growing tensions between the Trump administration and Iran. Bill de Blasio said he would oppose another Mideast war unless it is authorized by Congress. He added, "We learned a lesson in Vietnam that we seem to have forgotten." Sanders also decried the possible drift to war with Iran as well as America's involvement in the civil war in Yemen. He expressed pride in his opposition to the Iraq war and chided Biden for supporting that 2003 invasion.

Three candidates -- Klobuchar, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, and Gabbard -- criticized Trump for getting out of the Iran nuclear deal. "I would sign back on," said Gabbard, saying a war with Iran would quickly ignite the entire region and would be "far more devastating and costly" than the Iraq war. When Ryan suggested we must remain engaged in the Middle East, Gabbard called that "unacceptable" and added the United States has nothing to show for its 18-year mililtary campaign in Afghanistan. At the conclusion of the debate, Gabbard became the most searched candidate on Google, according to a report on Fox News that cited Google Trends data. Could this mean a gap persists between the foreign policy sentiments of many Americans and the foreign policy activities of their government in Washington?

[Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard was interviewed by Tucker Carlson after the debate

Jun 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

ADKC , Jun 28, 2019 7:35:27 AM | 163

Tulsi Gabbard being interviewed by Tucker Carlson after the debate. During the debate, Tulsi made clear she was against war with Iran and getting back to the JCPOA deal. In the interview with Carlson, she makes clear that she opposes the sanctions on Iran.

Tulsi Gabbard being interviewed by Tucker Carlson after the debate

[Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi punched well above her weight

Jun 28, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

shinola , June 27, 2019 at 8:51 pm

In spite of the short time they gave her, I think Tulsi punched well above her weight.
I was pleasantly surprised.

Suppose any of tonights "no names" can do as well?

[Jun 28, 2019] Neoliberal wing of Democratic Pary (Coinines) are about power and money. Sanders and Gabbard rock the boat and the party establishment will never forgive them for that.

Jun 28, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Inode_buddha , June 27, 2019 at 9:13 pm

The reason why is simple: the party is not about politics, nor is it about the will of the people or anything else. It is about power and money. It is about keeping the donors happy. It is ethically bankrupt. That is what their true purpose is. Sanders and Gabbard rock the boat and the party establishment will never forgive them for that.

cripes , June 27, 2019 at 9:12 pm

Gillebrand:
Capitalism is Okey-Dokey, but greed is bad?

Keynes:
"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all."

[Jun 28, 2019] Memo to Trump Trade Bolton for Tulsi by Pat Buchanan

Will neoliberal MSM "Ron Paul" Tulsi ? "Merchants of death" control Washington and they will fiercely attack anybody who attempt to change the current neocon policies even one bit. Looks at color revolution launched against Trump despite the fact that he folded three month after inauguration.
Notable quotes:
"... Nope. That denunciation of John Bolton interventionism came from Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii during Wednesday night's Democratic debate. At 38, she was the youngest candidate on stage. ..."
"... Gabbard proceeded to rip both the "president and his chickenhawk cabinet (who) have led us to the brink of war with Iran." ..."
"... "The Taliban didn't attack us on 9/11," Gabbard replied, "Al-Qaida attacked us on 9/11. That's why I and so many other people joined the military, to go after al-Qaida, not the Taliban." ..."
"... By debate's end, Gabbard was the runaway winner in both the Drudge Report and Washington Examiner polls and was far in front among all the Democratic candidates whose names were being searched on Google. ..."
"... If she can rise a few points above her 1-2% in the polls, she could be assured a spot in the second round of debates. ..."
"... If she makes it into the second round, Gabbard could become the catalyst for the kind of globalist vs. nationalist debate that broke out between Trump and Bush Republicans in 2016, a debate that contributed to Trump's victory at the Cleveland convention and in November. ..."
"... Given more airtime, she will present problems for the GOP as well. For the foreign policy Tulsi Gabbard is calling for is not far off from the foreign policy Donald Trump promised in 2016 but has since failed to deliver. ..."
"... Rather than engaging Russia as Trump promised, we have been sanctioning Russia, arming Ukraine, sending warships into the Black Sea, beefing up NATO in the Baltic and trashing arms control treaties Ronald Reagan and other presidents negotiated in the Cold War ..."
"... At the end of the Cold War, we were the lone superpower. Who forfeited our preeminence? Who bled us of 7,000 U.S. lives and $6 trillion in endless Middle East wars? Who got us into this Cold War II? ..."
"... They're already trying to 'Ron Paul' her, which means we should support her, CFR, and Zionist associations notwithstanding. She's the only one saying 'Enough!' to the insanity of Eternal War, as America's infrastructure crumbles, and our progeny are enslaved to trillions of un-payable debt. ..."
"... Does Pat Buchanan know? During a radio interview he assured me that his friend Dick Cheney wouldn't do something like that. I asked Pat's friend Paul Craig Roberts what he thought. Craig said Pat just can't go there or he'll never appear in the MSM again. Then Pat got purged anyway. https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2012/02/20/pat-buchanan-avoids-911-truth-gets-fired-anyway/ ..."
"... Hi Kevin. I am a big fan of yours but I think that you should market your beliefs about Israel's role in 911 a bit more modestly. While the evidence is compelling, it is not air-tight. ..."
"... This also applies to the Zio-Judaic role in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. You posit (in your otherwise excellent article on the Raptors' proposed visit Israel) that the Zions basically killed both Kennedys. While this position may be correct, it is an allegation that, at present, cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Your confidence therefore seems excessive. This weakness might therefore turn off average folks to your otherwise astute insights. ..."
"... The media is so terrified of Tulsi that they digitally added a zit to her face during the debate while she was discussing foreign policy to try to subliminally turn people off to her anti-war message. Here's an article on it showing videos of it happening: ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard's foreign policy ideas are anathema to the war-prone Washington establishment and the media class, not to speak of the Israel firster. The anti-Gabbard slur is already underway. ..."
Jun 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

"For too long our leaders have failed us, taking us into one regime change war after the next, leading us into a new Cold War and arms race, costing us trillions of our hard-earned tax payer dollars and countless lives. This insanity must end."

Donald Trump, circa 2016?

Nope. That denunciation of John Bolton interventionism came from Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii during Wednesday night's Democratic debate. At 38, she was the youngest candidate on stage.

Gabbard proceeded to rip both the "president and his chickenhawk cabinet (who) have led us to the brink of war with Iran."

In a fiery exchange, Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio countered that America cannot disengage from Afghanistan: "When we weren't in there they started flying planes into our buildings."

"The Taliban didn't attack us on 9/11," Gabbard replied, "Al-Qaida attacked us on 9/11. That's why I and so many other people joined the military, to go after al-Qaida, not the Taliban."

When Ryan insisted we must stay engaged, Gabbard shot back:

"Is that what you will tell the parents of those two soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan? 'Well, we just have to be engaged.' As a solider, I will tell you, that answer is unacceptable. We are no better off in Afghanistan that we were when this war began."

By debate's end, Gabbard was the runaway winner in both the Drudge Report and Washington Examiner polls and was far in front among all the Democratic candidates whose names were being searched on Google.

Though given less than seven minutes of speaking time in a two-hour debate, she could not have used that time more effectively. And her performance may shake up the Democratic race.

If she can rise a few points above her 1-2% in the polls, she could be assured a spot in the second round of debates.

If she is, moderators will now go to her with questions of foreign policy issues that would not have been raised without her presence, and these questions will expose the hidden divisions in the Democratic Party.

Leading Democratic candidates could be asked to declare what U.S. policy should be -- not only toward Afghanistan but Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jared Kushner's "Deal of the Century," and Trump's seeming rejection of the two-state solution.

If she makes it into the second round, Gabbard could become the catalyst for the kind of globalist vs. nationalist debate that broke out between Trump and Bush Republicans in 2016, a debate that contributed to Trump's victory at the Cleveland convention and in November.

The problem Gabbard presents for Democrats is that, as was shown in the joust with Ryan, she takes positions that split her party, while her rivals prefer to talk about what unites the party, like the terribleness of Trump, free college tuition and soaking the rich.

Given more airtime, she will present problems for the GOP as well. For the foreign policy Tulsi Gabbard is calling for is not far off from the foreign policy Donald Trump promised in 2016 but has since failed to deliver.

We still have 2,000 troops in Syria, 5,000 in Iraq, 14,000 in Afghanistan. We just moved an aircraft carrier task force, B-52s and 1,000 troops to the Persian Gulf to confront Iran. We are about to impose sanctions on the Iranian foreign minister with whom we would need to negotiate to avoid a war.

Jared Kushner is talking up a U.S.-led consortium to raise $50 billion for the Palestinians in return for their forfeiture of sovereignty and an end to their dream of a nation-state on the West Bank and Gaza with Jerusalem as its capital.

John Bolton is talking of regime change in Caracas and confronting the "troika of tyranny" in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Rather than engaging Russia as Trump promised, we have been sanctioning Russia, arming Ukraine, sending warships into the Black Sea, beefing up NATO in the Baltic and trashing arms control treaties Ronald Reagan and other presidents negotiated in the Cold War

U.S. policy has managed to push our great adversaries, Russia and China, together as they have not been since the first Stalin-Mao decade of the Cold War.

This June, Vladimir Putin traveled to Beijing where he and Xi Jinping met in the Great Hall of the People to warn that in this time of "growing global instability and uncertainty," Russia and China will "deepen their consultations on strategic stability issues."

Xi presented Putin with China's new Friendship Medal. Putin responded: "Cooperation with China is one of Russia's top priorities and it has reached an unprecedented level."

At the end of the Cold War, we were the lone superpower. Who forfeited our preeminence? Who bled us of 7,000 U.S. lives and $6 trillion in endless Middle East wars? Who got us into this Cold War II?

Was all this the doing of those damnable isolationists again?

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."

Copyright 2019 Creators.com.

Rurik , says: June 28, 2019 at 12:48 am GMT

They're already trying to 'Ron Paul' her, which means we should support her, CFR, and Zionist associations notwithstanding. She's the only one saying 'Enough!' to the insanity of Eternal War, as America's infrastructure crumbles, and our progeny are enslaved to trillions of un-payable debt.

Perhaps there's no way we can dislodge the Zionist fiend slurping from America's jugular, but at least we can use our voice to say 'no' to it. And support the only person who's willing to strike at the root, the Eternal Wars for Israel.

Biff , says: June 28, 2019 at 4:21 am GMT

By debate's end, Gabbard was the runaway winner in both the Drudge Report and Washington Examiner polls and was far in front among all the Democratic candidates whose names were being searched on Google.

Which got the MIC to paint a giant target on her. The Atlantic Council is not going to be happy with this kind of anti war shtick entering the debates, and their patrons own the media.

Kevin Barrett , says: Website June 28, 2019 at 4:24 am GMT
Does Tulsi know she's lying when she says "al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11"? I suspect she does, and that her disgust with the big lie behind the 9/11-wars-for-Israel has something to do with her anti-interventionism.

Does Pat Buchanan know? During a radio interview he assured me that his friend Dick Cheney wouldn't do something like that. I asked Pat's friend Paul Craig Roberts what he thought. Craig said Pat just can't go there or he'll never appear in the MSM again. Then Pat got purged anyway. https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2012/02/20/pat-buchanan-avoids-911-truth-gets-fired-anyway/

When you get punished for telling half-truths, why not just go all the way and tell the whole truth?

renfro , says: June 28, 2019 at 4:55 am GMT
I would hope Gabbard has more sense than to accept any position in Trumps administration. Trump is the kiss of death for any decent person who works for or with him.
mark green , says: June 28, 2019 at 5:21 am GMT
@Kevin Barrett

Hi Kevin. I am a big fan of yours but I think that you should market your beliefs about Israel's role in 911 a bit more modestly. While the evidence is compelling, it is not air-tight.

This also applies to the Zio-Judaic role in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. You posit (in your otherwise excellent article on the Raptors' proposed visit Israel) that the Zions basically killed both Kennedys. While this position may be correct, it is an allegation that, at present, cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Your confidence therefore seems excessive. This weakness might therefore turn off average folks to your otherwise astute insights.

As for Tulsi Gabbard, who you suggest is "lying" about her belief in what/who caused 911, I bet that she (like myself) rejects the Official 911 report but is unsure of what/who did exactly what on Sept. 11, 2001. Mysteries remain. The puzzle is incomplete.

Allow me to respectfully advise you to stick with what you know for certain, as you do it quite well.

As for the mysteries concerning 911 and Israel's role, it may be more fruitful to concede that the evidence has not only been partially destroyed but that a coverup has occurred. And yes, there's overwhelming evidence pointing to Israeli involvement. And no honest person can deny that.

Junior , says: June 28, 2019 at 6:04 am GMT
The media is so terrified of Tulsi that they digitally added a zit to her face during the debate while she was discussing foreign policy to try to subliminally turn people off to her anti-war message. Here's an article on it showing videos of it happening:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/06/msm-mean-girls-msnbc-accused-of-putting-a-fake-pimple-on-rep-tulsi-gabbard-during-dem-debate/

And here's Tulsi discussing it: https://www.youtube.com/embed/WioGoTvBoZ4?feature=oembed

Wally , says: June 28, 2019 at 6:26 am GMT
@Robert Dolan As if Hillary 'War with Russia' Clinton would have been different.

Trumps foreign policies in obedience to 'that shitty little country' are disgusting, no doubt, but we would still have all of that and much worse under Hillary.

Ludwig Watzal , says: Website June 28, 2019 at 6:30 am GMT
It's a charming idea; Pat Buchanan is ventilating. Tulsi Gabbard as Trump's national security adviser; what a treat! But poor Tulsi, she wouldn't survive very long in the Zionist environment, which dominates Trump's White House.

Tulsi Gabbard's foreign policy ideas are anathema to the war-prone Washington establishment and the media class, not to speak of the Israel firster. The anti-Gabbard slur is already underway.

Tulsi Gabbard was half right by saying that the Taliban didn't do 9/11, but Al-Qaida did, which is false. None of them committed the murderous attack. Everybody with a clear mind can see of the web of lies and inconsistencies that the 9/11 Commission Report has solidified. The American people have to come to grips with the fact that it was an inside job, and those responsible are still all alive and kicking. The problem with the whole truth is that nobody can afford to tell it, because it would be his or her political death.

So, Tulsi Gabbard was wise sticking to the half-truth.

For more information, read "The Betrayal of America." https://betweenthelines-ludwigwatzal.com/2019/05/21/the-betrayal-of-america/#more-1468

Tom Welsh , says: June 28, 2019 at 9:09 am GMT
@Kevin Barrett 'Does Tulsi know she's lying when she says "al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11"?'

She has been showing signs of hedging since her campaign began. I can't make up my mind how bad that is. If she went on telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth – such as that Mr Assad has done little or nothing to deserve the abuse heaped on him – she might simply be ruling herself out as a candidate.

On the other hand, once a candidate starts telling herself, "Oh, it's worth one or two little white lies to get myself elected, because I can do so much good then", it's the start of a long slippery slope.

That specific statement can be justified, to my mind, with a little Jesuitical equivocation. Because no one has ever really pinned down who or what "Al Qaeda" is – or even whether such an organization exists at all.

If she said, "No one can be certain who was responsible for 9/11, but it's time we had a really thorough, impartial investigation", she would alienate a huge section of the voters.

anonymous [340] Disclaimer , says: June 28, 2019 at 9:39 am GMT
".. our great adversaries, Russia and China"

There's almost always something like this tucked into Mr. Buchanan's columns. The other day, he was still celebrating Uncle Sam's rescue of medical students from the "Marxist thugs" in Grenada. That little "our" is the key. Pronoun propaganda is one of the ways that this website's "Mr. Paleoconservative" helps to keep Americans identifying with Uncle Sam.

Another fundamental way that Mr. Buchanan actually supports the Establishment is by channeling and harmlessly blowing off dissent through "Red v Blue" politics. Enjoy columns like this one in the meantime, but keep in mind that he's also going to tell you to believe the puppet show and vote (almost certainly GOP) in November 2020. Even if someone who says things like Ms. Gabbard is elected, there will be ample drama in and about Washington to excuse the lack of meaningful change and fire people up for the next Most Important Election Ever in 2022.

And note this:

"For the foreign policy Tulsi Gabbard is calling for is not far off from the foreign policy Donald Trump promised in 2016 but has since failed to deliver."

Oh, a mere logistical problem due to people like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Elliot Abrams somehow crashing the MAGA party? Mr. Buchanan should have written "the foreign policy Donald Trump lied about in 2016." But that might lead people to doubt the system.

KenH , says: June 28, 2019 at 10:38 am GMT

If she can rise a few points above her 1-2% in the polls, she could be assured a spot in the second round of debates.

Oi Vey! If Tulsi starts to rise in the polls then then (((they'll))) create a new dossier and claim she's colluding with Russia or the Taliban to steal the 2020 election. I wouldn't be surprised if elements of Trump's administration did the very same things to Tulsi as Obongo's did to Trump.

Was all this the doing of those damnable isolationists again?

Pat knows (((who))) but has lost the will to say it. But we know. The goyim know.

Bardon Kaldian , says: June 28, 2019 at 10:41 am GMT
@mark green We, we all have our opinions. I think you're most charitable to Mr. Barrett's fictions. Zio-terrorists (I'm not using the word Zionist, since I am Zionist – sort of -because I support the idea of Jewish nation-state as a democratic country) may have contributed (just freely associating), say, max 30% to 9/11, while the possibility of their involvement in the assassination of JFK is way below 5%.

After all, weird Golda Meir transcripts are something not to be ignored: https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-golda-meir-had-doubts-on-kennedy-death-1.5292291

[Jun 28, 2019] Bolton Gets Ready to Kill New START by Daniel Larison

Jun 27, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
If Bolton gets his way, New START is not long for this world :

At the same time, the administration has signaled in recent days that it plans to let the New Start treaty, negotiated by Barack Obama, expire in February 2021 rather than renew it for another five years. John R. Bolton, the president's national security adviser, who met with his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, in Jerusalem this week, said before leaving Washington that "there's no decision, but I think it's unlikely" the treaty would be renewed.

Mr. Bolton, a longtime skeptic of arms control agreements, said that New Start was flawed because it did not cover short-range tactical nuclear weapons or new Russian delivery systems. "So to extend for five years and not take these new delivery system threats into account would be malpractice," he told The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet.

Like all of his complaints about arms control agreements, Bolton's criticisms of New START are made in bad faith. Opponents of New START have long pretended that they oppose the treaty because it did not cover everything imaginable, including tactical nuclear weapons, but this has always been an excuse for them to reject a treaty that they have never wanted ratified in the first place. If the concern about negotiating a treaty that covered tactical nuclear weapons were genuine, the smart thing to do would be to extend New START and then begin negotiations for a more comprehensive arms control agreement. Faulting New START for failing to include things that are by definition not going to be included in a strategic arms reduction treaty gives the game away. This is what die-hard opponents of the treaty have been doing for almost ten years, and they do it because they want to dismantle the last vestiges of arms control. The proposal to include China as part of a new treaty is another tell that the Trump administration just wants the treaty to die.

The article concludes:

Some experts suspect talk of a three-way accord is merely a feint to get rid of the New Start treaty. "If a trilateral deal is meant as a substitute or prerequisite for extending New Start, it is a poison pill, no ifs, ands or buts," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. "If the president is seeking a trilateral deal as a follow-on to New Start, that's a different thing."

Knowing Bolton, it has to be a poison pill. Just as Bolton is ideologically opposed to making any deal with Iran, he is ideologically opposed to any arms control agreement that places limits on the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The "flaws" he identifies aren't really flaws that he wants to fix (and they may not be flaws at all), but excuses for trashing the agreement. He will make noises about how the current deal or treaty doesn't go far enough, but the truth is that he doesn't want any agreements to exist. In Bolton's worldview, nonproliferation and arms control agreements either give the other government too much or hamper the U.S. too much, and so he wants to destroy them all. He has had a lot of success at killing agreements and treaties that have been in the U.S. interest. Bolton has had a hand in blowing up the Agreed Framework with North Korea, abandoning the ABM Treaty, killing the INF Treaty, and reneging on the JCPOA. Unless the president can be persuaded to ignore or fire Bolton, New START will be his next victim.

If New START dies, it will be a loss for both the U.S. and Russia, it will make the world less secure, and it will make U.S.-Russian relations even worse. The stability that these treaties have provided has been important for U.S. security for almost fifty years. New START is the last of the treaties that constrain the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, and when it is gone there will be nothing to replace it for a long time. The collapse of arms control almost certainly means that the top two nuclear weapons states will expand their arsenals and put us back on the path of an insane and unwinnable arms race. Killing New START is irrational and purely destructive, and it needs to be opposed.

Taras77 • a day ago

bolton is opposed to any treaty, to any agreement, whereby the other side can expect to obtain equally favorable terms-he wants the other side on their knees permanently without any expectation of compromise by the empire.
Sid Finster • a day ago
I wonder how long it will take for Trump to finally figure out that Bolton and Pompeo regard him as expendable.

Whether Trump wins or loses in 2020 will not matter, as long as the neocons get what they want.

Tony • 9 hours ago
John Bolton will not be satisfied until he has got us all killed.
He is an extremely dangerous man.

[Jun 28, 2019] How Russia's President Putin Explains The End Of The '[neo]liberal' Order

You can read the transcript without firewall at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60836
From Unz comment: "Tangentially related, but check out this great interview with Putin: https://www.ft.com/content/878d2344-98f0-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36 The man's intelligence and seriousness is always impressive. The contrast with the nauseating rubbish that comes out of Western politicians could not be more striking, no wonder they hate the guy."
Notable quotes:
"... "One of the things we must do in Russia is never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a better future ." ..."
"... Putin has recognized the influence of our "regime change" wars on the immigrant problem in Europe. He addressed it forcefully in his UN General Assembly speech in 2015 where he asks NATO "Do you know what you've done?" with regards to creating the immigration problems in Europe. Watch here https://youtu.be/q13yzl6k6w0. ..."
"... From Putin's 2007 Munich speech to this 2015 UN speech and many interviews along the way, I've learned to pay attention to what Putin says. He seems to have an extremely good handle on world events and where they are leading. ..."
"... The neoliberal economic plan is to suck the wealth out of the working class and funnel it up to the top 10%, especially the 1%. How to keep the working class from noticing the theft? ..."
"... neo-liberalism (aka "crony capitalism") is about compromising the state and the society that it protects in favor of wealthy, powerful interests. Thus, at it's core, it's against the people. ..."
"... Look at the whine ass, crying, warmongering. narcissist psychopathic bullies we get. I am envious of the Russians having a leader they can be proud of. ..."
"... Been about 60 years since I have had a president to be proud of, back when America WAS great,,, and they killed him. ..."
Jun 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

How Russia's President Putin Explains The End Of The '[neo]Liberal' Order

Today the Financial Times published a long and wide ranging interview with the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin.

A full transcript is currently available through this link .

The talk is making some waves:

From the last link:

Putin said in an interview with the Financial Times Friday that the "[neo]liberal idea has become obsolete," and referred to Germany's decision to welcome more than one million refugees -- many fleeing savage urban warfare in Syria -- as a "cardinal mistake."

It is only the last part of the very long interview, where Putin indeed speaks of the 'obsolesce' of the '[neo]liberal idea', that seems to be of interest to the media. Most of the interview is in fact about other issues. The media also do not capture how his 'obsolete' argument is ingrained in the worldview Putin developed, and how it reflects in many of his answers.

Here are excerpts that show that the gist of Putin's 'obsolete' argument is not against the '[neo]liberal idea', but against what may be best called 'international (neo-)[liberalism'.

Putin explains why U.S. President Donald Trump was elected:

Has anyone ever given a thought to who actually benefited and what benefits were gained from globalisation, the development of which we have been observing and participating in over the past 25 years, since the 1990s?

China has made use of globalisation, in particular, to pull millions of Chinese out of poverty.

What happened in the US, and how did it happen? In the US, the leading US companies -- the companies, their managers, shareholders and partners -- made use of these benefits. [..] The middle class in the US has not benefited from globalisation; it was left out when this pie was divided up.

The Trump team sensed this very keenly and clearly, and they used this in the election campaign. It is where you should look for reasons behind Trump's victory, rather than in any alleged foreign interference.

On Syria:

Primarily, this concerns Syria, we have managed to preserve Syrian statehood, no matter what, and we have prevented Libya-style chaos there. And a worst-case scenario would spell out negative consequences for Russia.
...
I believe that the Syrian people should be free to choose their own future.
...
When we discussed this matter only recently with the previous US administration, we said, suppose Assad steps down today, what will happen tomorrow?

Your colleague did well to laugh, because the answer we got was very amusing. You cannot even imagine how funny it was. They said, "We don't know." But when you do not know what happens tomorrow, why shoot from the hip today? This may sound primitive, but this is how it is.

On 'western' interventionism and 'democracy promotion':

Incidentally, the president of France said recently that the American democratic model differs greatly from the European model. So there are no common democratic standards. And do you, well, not you, but our Western partners, want a region such as Libya to have the same democratic standards as Europe and the US? The region has only monarchies or countries with a system similar to the one that existed in Libya.

But I am sure that, as a historian, you will agree with me at heart. I do not know whether you will publicly agree with this or not, but it is impossible to impose current and viable French or Swiss democratic standards on North African residents who have never lived in conditions of French or Swiss democratic institutions. Impossible, isn't it? And they tried to impose something like that on them. Or they tried to impose something that they had never known or even heard of. All this led to conflict and intertribal discord. In fact, a war continues in Libya.

So why should we do the same in Venezuela? ...

Asked about the turn towards nationalism and more rightwing policies in the U.S. and many European countries, Putin names immigration as the primary problem:

What is happening in the West? What is the reason for the Trump phenomenon, as you said, in the US? What is happening in Europe as well? The ruling elites have broken away from the people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elites and the overwhelming majority of the people .

Of course, we must always bear this in mind. One of the things we must do in Russia is never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a better future.

There is also the so-called [neo]liberal idea, which has outlived its purpose. Our Western partners have admitted that some elements of the [neo]liberal idea, such as multiculturalism, are no longer tenable.

When the migration problem came to a head, many people admitted that the policy of multiculturalism is not effective and that the interests of the core population should be considered. Although those who have run into difficulties because of political problems in their home countries need our assistance as well. That is great, but what about the interests of their own population when the number of migrants heading to Western Europe is not just a handful of people but thousands or hundreds of thousands?
...
What am I driving at? Those who are concerned about this, ordinary Americans, they look at this and say, Good for [Trump], at least he is doing something, suggesting ideas and looking for a solution.

As for the [neo]liberal idea, its proponents are not doing anything. They say that all is well, that everything is as it should be. But is it? They are sitting in their cosy offices, while those who are facing the problem every day in Texas or Florida are not happy, they will soon have problems of their own. Does anyone think about them?

The same is happening in Europe. I discussed this with many of my colleagues, but nobody has the answer. The say they cannot pursue a hardline policy for various reasons. Why exactly? Just because. We have the law, they say. Well, then change the law!

We have quite a few problems of our own in this sphere as well.
...
In other words, the situation is not simple in Russia either, but we have started working to improve it. Whereas the [neo]liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. The migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected. What rights are these? Every crime must have its punishment.

So, the [neo]liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population. Or take the traditional values. I am not trying to insult anyone, because we have been condemned for our alleged homophobia as it is. But we have no problems with LGBT persons. God forbid, let them live as they wish. But some things do appear excessive to us.

They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles. I cannot even say exactly what genders these are, I have no notion. Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.

While Putin says that [neo]liberalism is 'obsolete' he does not declare it dead. He sees it as part of a spectrum, but says that it should not have a leading role:

You know, it seems to me that purely [neo]liberal or purely traditional ideas have never existed. Probably, they did once exist in the history of humankind, but everything very quickly ends in a deadlock if there is no diversity. Everything starts to become extreme one way or another.

Various ideas and various opinions should have a chance to exist and manifest themselves, but at the same time interests of the general public, those millions of people and their lives, should never be forgotten. This is something that should not be overlooked.

Then, it seems to me, we would be able to avoid major political upheavals and troubles. This applies to the [neo]liberal idea as well. It does not mean (I think, this is ceasing to be a dominating factor) that it must be immediately destroyed. This point of view, this position should also be treated with respect.

They cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades. Diktat can be seen everywhere: both in the media and in real life. It is deemed unbecoming even to mention some topics. But why?

For this reason, I am not a fan of quickly shutting, tying, closing, disbanding everything, arresting everybody or dispersing everybody. Of course, not. The [neo]liberal idea cannot be destroyed either; it has the right to exist and it should even be supported in some things. But you should not think that it has the right to be the absolute dominating factor. That is the point. Please.

There is much more in the interview - about Russia's relations with China, North Korea, the Skripal incident, the Russian economy, orthodoxy and the [neo]liberal attack on the Catholic church, multilateralism, arms control and the G-20 summit happening today.

But most '[neo]liberal' media will only point to the 'obsolete' part and condemn Putin for his rallying against immigration. They will paint him as being in an alt-right corner. But even the Dalai Lama, held up as an icon by many [neo]liberals, says that "Europe is for Europeans" and that immigrants should go back to their own countries.

Moreover, as Leonid Bershidsky points out , Putin himself is, with regards to the economy and immigration, a staunch [neo]liberal:

Putin's cultural conservatism is consistent and sincere.
...
On immigration, however, Putin is, in practice, more [neo]liberal than most European leaders. He has consistently resisted calls to impose visa requirements on Central Asian countries, an important source of migrant labor. Given Russia's shrinking working-age population and shortage of manual workers, Putin isn't about to stem that flow, even though Central Asians are Muslims – the kind of immigrants Merkel's opponents, including Trump, distrust and fear the most.

What Putin is aiming at, says Bershidsky, is the larger picture:

[W]hat Putin believes has outlived its usefulness isn't the [neo]liberal approach to migration or gender, nor is it [neo]liberal economics – even though Russia has, in recent months, seen something of a shift toward central planning. It is the [neo]liberal world order. Putin wants to keep any talk of values out of international politics and forge pragmatic relationships based on specific interests.
...
Putin's drive to put global politics on a more transactional basis isn't easy to defeat; it's a siren song, and the anti-immigrant, culturally conservative rhetoric is merely part of the music.

There is in my view no 'siren-song' there and nothing that has to be defeated. It is just that Putin is more willing to listen to the people than most of the western wannabe 'elite'.

The people's interest is simply not served well by globalization, [neo]liberal internationalism and interventionism. A transactional approach to international policies, with respect for basic human decency, is in almost every case better for them.

Politicians who want the people's votes should listen to them, and to Vladimir Putin.

Posted by b on June 28, 2019 at 01:50 PM | Permalink

pretzelattack , Jun 28, 2019 2:05:48 PM | 1

he makes a lot of sense on neo]liberalism. i guess this makes me a Russian agent.
ROBERT SYKES , Jun 28, 2019 2:15:18 PM | 2
It is hard to exaggerate Putin's accomplishments. He almost single-handedly saved Russia from the chaos of the Yeltsin era and near collapse. He has reestablished Russia as a major power. In the face of the American world rampage, he has helped stabilize MENA. By merging Russia's Eurasian Union with China's OBOR, he has helped to set Eurasia on a road to peaceful economic development. He has even managed to get China, India, and Pakistan talking to one another and cooperating in a variety of Eurasian projects.

I doubt he has more than 10 years left as a Russian leader, and maybe not even that. When he finally passes, he will be remembered as another Churchill or Bismarck.

Barovsky , Jun 28, 2019 2:16:21 PM | 3
Hmmm... Putin says the problem is 'multi-culturalism', 'migrants'? What kind of bullshit is this?

Putin doesn't mention that the migrant crisis was caused by Western resource wars, in Syria, Libya and elsewhere. That neoliberalism's impact on the poor countries has led to the vast exodus into Europe and N. America.

I have a feeling that Putin is playing the 'RT game', targeting those disaffected people, who have, in turn been the target of racist, islamaphobic propaganda by Western states, states that for obvious reasons (self-incrimination) won't state the real reasons for the exodus.

Alexander P , Jun 28, 2019 2:17:47 PM | 4
The page on [neo]liberalism in the classic sense the way it was envisioned in the late 18th and 19th century has long been passed. [neo]liberalism as in nurturing the human soul and intellect and allowing each individual to draw on their qualities and contribute to society with their fullest potential has been supplanted by material and physical liberties alone (Gender, Sexuality, Free Trade, Free Migration aka Free Movement of Slave Labor etc). What today is called [neo]liberalism, which I like to equate with neo-[neo]liberalism and social 'progressivism', are both parts of post-modernism, a societal model that is falling and failing under its own weight of hubris and inconsistencies.

The 'Do as thou wilt' mindset pushed on the people by the elites is deliberate with the only end goal of creating their 'ideal' world. A world not based on morality, spirituality and absolute truths, but relativism, materialism, loss of basic notions such as gender, family, belonging, in short loss of identity and purpose for mankind to obtain ever greater control over the masses. People are beginning to notice it, however, even if only subconsciously and start to push back against it. Putin knows this, and that is what he is laying out in his interview.

robjira , Jun 28, 2019 2:20:55 PM | 5
It is just that Putin is more willing to listen to the people than most of the western wannabe 'elite'.
Right on target, b; many thanks again. I'll be sure to read the entire transcript.
Joe Nobody , Jun 28, 2019 2:23:07 PM | 6
"They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles. I cannot even say exactly what genders these are, I have no notion. Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.'

It has become la la land in the West in regards to gender...if a person wants to be gay, be gay, but let's not force everyone else to pretend reality is not reality..nature choose (dichotomy) for you to be male or female, sucks if that doesn't match your preferences but better luck next life...accept the reality you are in and let's not force everyone one else to pander to your delusions..

See also:

'Sex change' is biologically impossible," said McHugh. "People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder."

https://newspunch.com/john-hopkins-transgenderism-mental-illness/

karlof1 , Jun 28, 2019 2:27:19 PM | 7
I'm reading the Kremlin's transcript I linked to at the Gabbard thread where I posted a very short excerpt. I continue to read it but stopped to post another very short excerpt IMO is very important:

"One of the things we must do in Russia is never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a better future ." [My Emphasis]

Back to reading!

pretzelattack , Jun 28, 2019 2:27:47 PM | 8
@ 3--remind me who was fighting the west in syria, again?
vk , Jun 28, 2019 2:30:47 PM | 9
Here are excerpts that show that the gist of Putin's 'obsolete' argument is not against the '[neo]liberal idea', but against what may be best called 'international (neo-)liberalism'.

Just a matter of academic rigour: liberalism is extinct; neoliberalism is literally the "new liberalism", it's successor doctrine. Therefore, when we speak of "liberalism" after 1945, we're automatically referring to neoliberalism.

neoliberalism was created at Mont Pelerin in the 1930s, and its founding narrative states that everything that happened between/since the death of liberalism (1914-1918) and their own hegemony (1974-75) was an abortion of History and should've never happened. Hence the name "neoliberalism": the new liberalism (adapted to the system of fiat currency instead of the gold standard); the revival of liberalism; the return of liberalism (the [neo]liberals).

It's also important to highlight that neoliberalism is not an ideology, but a doctrine (which encompass mainly policies, but may also encompass ideals). It is wrong, for example, to compare socialism with neoliberalism (socialism as anti-neoliberalism): socialism is a scientific theory, and, as a social theory, encompasses a new socioeconomic system, a new set of ideologies, a new set of cultures and a new set of political doctrines.

Neoliberalism, therefore, is just one aspect with which the capitalist elites engage against socialism historically (in the doctrinal "front").

Zachary Smith , Jun 28, 2019 2:40:29 PM | 10
Generic question: How many of the 2020 candidates for US President could hold up their end of an interview with such knowledge and style?

Personally I was impressed by Putin's bluntness in stating Merkel had made a "cardinal mistake" when she opened the borders to the hundreds of thousands of illegals. And also this:

And we set ourselves a goal, a task -- which, I am certain, will be achieved -- to adjust pensions by a percentage that is above the inflation rate.

Compare that to the deliberate US policy if doing the exact opposite.

Alan McLemore , Jun 28, 2019 2:44:48 PM | 11
Can you imagine Trump writing like this? Or Obama, for that matter? Or Bush the Dimmer, or Clinton, or Bush the Spook, or Reagan, or Carter...Hell, you'd have to go back to JFK to find this sort of skill with language and deep analysis. And maybe not then. "They" say you get the leaders you deserve. In that case the Russians have been nice and we Americans have been very, very naughty.
dh , Jun 28, 2019 2:45:31 PM | 12
So now we wait for MSM 'analysts' to accuse Putin of disrupting the status quo and fomenting revolution.
lgfocus , Jun 28, 2019 2:47:56 PM | 13
Barovsky @3

Putin has recognized the influence of our "regime change" wars on the immigrant problem in Europe. He addressed it forcefully in his UN General Assembly speech in 2015 where he asks NATO "Do you know what you've done?" with regards to creating the immigration problems in Europe. Watch here https://youtu.be/q13yzl6k6w0.

From Putin's 2007 Munich speech to this 2015 UN speech and many interviews along the way, I've learned to pay attention to what Putin says. He seems to have an extremely good handle on world events and where they are leading.

Sally Snyder , Jun 28, 2019 2:48:51 PM | 14
If we really want to know who is interfering in the world's politics, particularly in Russia, we need look no further than this:

https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-national-endowment-for-democracy.html

American-style bought-and-paid-for democracy is not what the world needs.

JDL , Jun 28, 2019 2:53:21 PM | 15
In the west our governments call Mr Putin a thug, a gangster. But, I've never seen any of our politicians sit down and frankly and comprehensively lay out there views, goals, thoughts and musings. To be a good leader or politician you have do have vision, but in the west here i just see talking heads and soundbites, no soul.
wagelaborer , Jun 28, 2019 3:00:50 PM | 16
Oh, yeah, the "[neo]liberals" are indignant over his pointing out that mass migration causes social disruption.

He racist!

The neoliberal economic plan is to suck the wealth out of the working class and funnel it up to the top 10%, especially the 1%. How to keep the working class from noticing the theft?

How about divide and conquer? That seems to work. Take the native working class and divide it any way that works in that society. In the US, traditionally, it was race, but they added sex a couple of decades ago, then opened the doors to immigration and threw in national origin, and now, just for kicks and giggles, everybody gets to define their own gender and sexual preferences. Awesome. The US is now divided into 243,000,000 separate categories of specialness. And if you don't accept everything someone else tells you as gospel, you are a bigot of some sort (depending on their self identification. It varies.)

They divided up Yemen and Libya by tribes, Iraq and Yugoslavia by religion, it works the same in every country. When the US blows, it's going to be spectacular.

Norbert Salamon , Jun 28, 2019 3:03:51 PM | 17
You can read the transcript without firewall at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60836
karlof1 , Jun 28, 2019 3:08:13 PM | 18
I'm always impressed with Putin's grasp and breadth a la Chirac, whom he admires and emulates.

I posted a few excerpts I felt very important to this and the Gabbard threads; and at the latter I now insist this interview be read, not just suggested. That BigLie Media chose to pounce on Putin's critique of the [neo]liberal Idea displays its agenda and its extremely sorry attempt to discredit/smear Putin yet again. IMO, such media smeared itself. The give-and-take was very productive and informative, containing many lessons, a few of which I pointed to.

Putin's now at the G-20 and has already had one bilateral meeting with TrumpCo.

Sputnik offers this recap that includes links to its additional articles published during the day. Much has occurred, and Trump has yet to storm out. Some of the photos are priceless, the May/Putin handshake perhaps being the most telling.

AriusArmenian , Jun 28, 2019 3:10:18 PM | 19
That there is a Putin that today leads a great country like Russia seems like a miracle and he appeared at the very moment that Russia needed him.

Part of the West elite hate of Putin is that compared to them he gives off an aura of honesty and truthfulness that is absent from leaders in the West.

anon , Jun 28, 2019 3:17:57 PM | 20
The "multi-cultural" issue, to the extent that it is an issue, is only an issue as an effect of the actual problem. It is effectively a scapegoat. No one would care about "multiculturalism" if there was a fair economic order in which living standards were increasing.

The problem is that western capitalism wants it both ways, it sees the demographic problem it faces and it wants the labor of migrants but it does not want to improve society, it wants to keep its slice of the pie. Hence things will get economically worse while migrants will be an easy "cause" at which to point for the unthinking person. In that sense it becomes a problem insofar as it contributes to fascism, nothing else changing.

Putin is right about China utilizing globalization to the benefit of society while the west is only interested in globalization insofar as it opens markets and creates profit for those who own social production. But of course Marx predicted this all long ago, so it is not perhaps surprising that the Chinese Communist Party would be more intelligent here. There is nothing more symptomatic or demonstrative here than the fact that, while western countries debate over a few tens of thousands of immigrants being "too many", China is capable of such feats as eradicating poverty and building incredible and modern infrastructure while being a land of over a billion people.

wagelaborer , Jun 28, 2019 3:18:53 PM | 21
Reading over the Gabbard comments, I was reminded of another big divide in the US by party. Americans treat their parties like their tribes and viciously attack heretics of other tribes. The media fans the flames and keeps the "elections" going for years, without a break.

Meanwhile, our ruling overlords pick their next puppet, let us all "vote" on computerized machines, and then the talking heads announce the "winner".
And it all starts over.

Jackrabbit , Jun 28, 2019 3:26:44 PM | 22
neo-liberalism (aka "crony capitalism") is about compromising the state and the society that it protects in favor of wealthy, powerful interests. Thus, at it's core, it's against the people.

To compensate and distract from this corruption, the people are presented with the 'fruits' of a [neo]liberal society: quasi"-freedoms" like gender rights, civil rights, and human rights. I say "quasi-" because these rights are abridged by the powerful elite as they see fit (witness rendition and torture, pervasive surveillance, and Assange).

We fight among ourselves about walls and bathrooms as elites destroy the Commons. In this way, they pick our pockets and kneecap our ability to fight back at the same time.

DM , Jun 28, 2019 3:28:20 PM | 23
Generic question: How many of the 2020 candidates for US President could hold up their end of an interview with such knowledge and style?

You beat me to the punch. And the answer to your rhetorical question is, of course, NONE! Luckily for Americans, Ignorance is Bliss.

ken , Jun 28, 2019 3:31:05 PM | 24
Boy did Russia luck out. Yeltsin was smart picking this man.... Look at the whine ass, crying, warmongering. narcissist psychopathic bullies we get. I am envious of the Russians having a leader they can be proud of.

Been about 60 years since I have had a president to be proud of, back when America WAS great,,, and they killed him.

[Jun 28, 2019] Neoliberal MSM proposed set of debate questions for Bernie Sanders

Jun 27, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Chris , June 27, 2019 at 7:56 pm

Let's see if they can keep Bernie in the same cage they put Tulsi in. I can't imagine they'll be helpful or even polite to him. I expect "debate" questions such as:

[Jun 28, 2019] CIA role from the Dulles Brothers onwardst is to protect and support all members of the Oligarchy of Money from the 1% to Big Oil to Big Finance from that pesky Democratic Government and the troublesome Rule of Law.

Jun 28, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Chris , June 27, 2019 at 8:49 pm

I don't know either. But it's been the main stream party line for a while now. "Bernie should drop out because he's old, white, male, and his opinions are not unique. He's not even a real Democrat. And he doesn't support the party. So why is he running for president as a Democrat and picking fights with Biden/Warren/Beto?"

The one that gets me is Bernie the Bomber. Somehow when the pundit class talks about Bernie and Tulsi, it's only to mention how they coddle dictators.

Geo , June 27, 2019 at 9:02 pm

Coddle (the wrong) dictators. Real Dems coddle our CIA approved dictators. Bernie and Tulsi coddle those filthy democratically elected "dictators" that want to retain natural resources for the benefit of their own nations and not for the enrichment of multinationals. They're monsters!

Seriously though, only the Dems would have a superstar like Bernie and put all their efforts into sabotaging him. Even the RNC and right wing media was willing to suck it up and get behind Trump when it was clear he was going to win and had a huge base of support. But, as is said often now, "the Dems would rather lose to a Republican than win with a progressive".

rowlf , June 27, 2019 at 9:49 pm

Is the CIA's purpose to protect national security or financial security? They seem confused at times on their purpose and if they were disbanded would the country notice? Doesn't the Defense Intelligence Agency do most of the heavy security lifting?

[email protected] , June 27, 2019 at 10:32 pm

Protecting Big Finance is only the latest thing.

Looking at the CIA actions from the Dulles Brothers onwards, I would say that it is to protect and support all members of the Oligarchy of Money from the 1% to Big Oil to Big Finance from that pesky Democratic Government and the troublesome Rule of Law.

Actually protecting the United States and never mind Americans themselves is like #47 on its to-do list.

Bill Carson , June 27, 2019 at 11:52 pm

Did you notice the shift in Bernie's message tonight? He said they needed to have the guts to take on Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, and Big Pharma. I didn't hear him complain about big banks. I think he's been compromised!

EricT , June 28, 2019 at 6:00 am

He said Wall Street too. I think banks fit under that umbrella.

[Jun 27, 2019] Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens

Highly recommended!
Jun 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens JOHN CHUCKMAN , Jun 26, 2019 2:10:12 PM | 23

Yesterday the news agencies Associated Press and Reuters mistranslated a speech by Iran's President Hassan Rouhani. They made it sound as if Rouhani insulted U.S. President Donald Trump as 'mentally retarded'. Rouhani never said that.

The agencies previously made a similar 'mistake'.

A 2005 speech by then President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was famously misquoted. Israel should be wiped off map, says Iran's president headlined the Guardian at that time. Others used similar headlines. The New York Times wrote :

Iran's conservative new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Wednesday that Israel must be "wiped off the map" and that attacks by Palestinians would destroy it, the ISNA press agency reported.
...
Referring to comments by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad said, "As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."

The statement was used by the G.W. Bush administration and others to whip up hostility against Iran :

Ever since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news agencies at the time, it was that Israel "should be wiped off the map." Iran's nuclear program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to the infamous map remark.

Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, recently: "Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or should live with a nuclear Iran."

However Ahmedinejad never used those words :

"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian," remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted. "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse." Since Iran has not "attacked another country aggressively for over a century," he said in an e-mail exchange, "I smell the whiff of war propaganda."

Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently laid out the case this way: "The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that 'this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,' just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The 'page of time' phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon."

Despite the above and other explanations the false "wipe Israel off the map" translation never died. Years later it still reappeared in Guardian pieces which required it to issue multiple corrections and clarifications.

Now, as the Trump administration is pushing for war on Iran, a similar mistranslation miraculously happened. It were again 'western' news agencies who lightened the fire:

The Associated Press @AP - 7:52 utc - 25 Jun 2019

BREAKING: Iran's President Rouhani mocks President Trump, says the White House is "afflicted by mental retardation."

Farsi speakers pointed out that the Rouhani never used the Farsi word for "retarded":

Sina Toossi @SinaToossi - 13:49 utc - 25 Jun 2019

A lot of Western media is reporting that Iranian President Rouhani called Trump "mentally retarded." This is inaccurate.
Regarding Trump, he just said "no wise person would take such an action [the new sanctions imposed]."

Reza H. Akbari @rezahakbari - 15:58 utc - 25 Jun 2019

Absolutely incorrect. There is a word for "retarded" in Persian & Rouhani didn't use it. Prior to him saying "mental disability" he even prefaced his comment by saying "mental weakness." Those who speak Persian can listen & judge for themselves. Here is a video clip of Rouhani's comment: link

But the damage was already done:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump - 14:42 utc - 25 Jun 2019

Iran leadership doesn't understand the words "nice" or "compassion," they never have. Sadly, the thing they do understand is Strength and Power, and the USA is by far the most powerful Military Force in the world, with 1.5 Trillion Dollars invested over the last two years alone..

....The wonderful Iranian people are suffering, and for no reason at all. Their leadership spends all of its money on Terror, and little on anything else. The U.S. has not forgotten Iran's use of IED's & EFP's (bombs), which killed 2000 Americans, and wounded many more...

.... Iran's very ignorant and insulting statement , put out today, only shows that they do not understand reality. Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration. No more John Kerry & Obama!

Reuters , which also peddled the mistranslation, gleefully connected the dots :

Cont. reading: Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens

Excellent summary of how malevolence works in many subtle ways.

Jonathan Gillispie , Jun 26, 2019 1:11:48 PM | 4

Trump was right more than he realizes that the press is the enemy of the people. They goad nations into unnecessary and bloody war.

Don Wiscacho , Jun 26, 2019 1:32:54 PM | 13
This follows in the footsteps of a rich history of mistranslating and obfuscating which is rarely, if ever, corrected by our Guardians of Truth. I will not hold my breath for AP to pull its tweet out issue any sort of correction. The war machine is revving up, truth be damned.

To add a few obfuscations to the list of mistranslations: the Palestinian intifada. Sounds scary, no? Violence against the benevolent Israelis. Because what does intifada actually mean? Uprising, which by its nature suggests oppression, something which just 'can't' be happening in Palestine, hence the need for intifada.
Or take jihad, 'a pillor' of Islam. Again, very scary, as jihad 'means' suicide bombs and killing infidels. What the Guardians of Truth never mention is that jihad in Islam is a very, very broad term that includes such things as helping the poor or less fortunate, educating oneself, quiet reflection, and prayer. Jihad as meaning 'holy war' was a sense meaning derived much later than the founding of the religion, as a reaction to very real threats to believers of the time, the Crusades and Mongol invasions. That this specific sense meaning was essentially confined to history afterward, only to be revived by Wahhabists and takfiris, and one not believed in by the vast majority of Muslims, is never explained. 'Cause all them crazy Muslims believe in jihad!

In all cases where the boogeyman of the day needs concocting, rest assured the 'mainstream' press, with AP in the lead, will be there to build a gleaming edifice mistruths, omissions, and lies.

Uncle Jon , Jun 26, 2019 1:36:27 PM | 14
Ahmadinejad's true and correct translation reads: "Zionism should be wiped from the pages of history."

Now who can argue with that.

jared , Jun 26, 2019 1:43:18 PM | 17
In approximately 17 months, the american public can make strides to fix this mess.
I guess that is a long time for the iranians, but still maybe best option.
dh , Jun 26, 2019 1:51:03 PM | 18
Just in case there is any doubt in American minds here is the Israeli Ambassador to the UN. He thinks the sanctions are working well. Iran is panicking.

Good job guys. Keep squeezing.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/israeli-ambassador-iran-panicking-increased-us-sanctions

wagelaborer , Jun 26, 2019 2:43:01 PM | 31
They mistranslate Trump all the time, or they spin what he says. It is amazing to watch.

For instance, at the Helsinki meeting, where he met with Putin and they discussed multiple topics, but the press ignored any topic but demanding that Trump denounce Putin and "admit" that Putin helped him steal the election, and that he was therefore not the legitimate president.

Obviously, Trump was not going to say that, so he said that he was the legitimate president, and the mockingbird media spun that into "the president is a traitor to America because he said that 17 national intelligence agencies are lying".

michaelj72 , Jun 26, 2019 4:02:36 PM | 40
.....The ministers lie, the professors lie, the television lies,
the priests lie .
These lies mean that the country wants to die.
Lie after lie starts out into the prairie grass,
like enormous caravans of Conestoga wagons .

And a long desire for death flows out, guiding the
enormous caravans from beneath,
stringing together the vague and foolish words.
It is a desire to eat death,
to gobble it down,
to rush on it like a cobra with mouth open
It's a desire to take death inside,
to feel it burning inside, pushing out velvety hairs,
like a clothes brush in the intestines --
This is the thrill that leads the President on to lie....


Robert Bly, The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, originally published by City Lights books 1970

Virgile , Jun 26, 2019 5:10:59 PM | 48
Maybe the translation is inacurate but the message had the expected reaction from Trump: Tweet furor.
It is good that Trump realizes that he does not have the monopole of insulting leaders.
The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war. How could it give a lesson to Iran who won a 8 years war against Iraq despite the support that the USA, the Gulf countries and Western countries gave to Iraq.
Loud noise and indecisive actions: The disaster of the USA foreign policy
Abx , Jun 26, 2019 5:20:42 PM | 49
I remember watching CNN translate Khamenei's "Nuclear Power" to "Nuclear Weapons" right on live TV in 2013. This is not new.
/div> Virgile "The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war". The US won a war against Grenada [population 95,000] I would go so far as to say they whupped ass. True there were only 64 Cuban soldiers there [security guards] All members of the US armed forces were involved and 5,000 medals were given out. Ra Ra USA.

Posted by: Harry Law , Jun 26, 2019 5:29:37 PM | 50

Virgile "The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war". The US won a war against Grenada [population 95,000] I would go so far as to say they whupped ass. True there were only 64 Cuban soldiers there [security guards] All members of the US armed forces were involved and 5,000 medals were given out. Ra Ra USA.

Posted by: Harry Law | Jun 26, 2019 5:29:37 PM | 50

Kooshy , Jun 26, 2019 5:45:20 PM | 53
b-
I am a Persian speaker and is true that president Rouhani never said Trump is retarded, we now have way passed the point that insults can matte. Nevertheless it was better if President Rouhani would have called Trump and the rest of the ruling US regime like what the whole world has now come to understand, a true and unique collection of retards on a shining hill.
0use4msm , Jun 26, 2019 6:24:08 PM | 57
Reminds me of when Nikita Khruschev attempted to explain in 1956 his view that that capitalism would destroy itself from within by quoting Marx: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers." This was notoriously mistranslated into English as "We will bury you", as if the Soviets were out to kill all westerners themselves. Of course this mistranslated was quoted time and time again in western media, fueling Cold War paranoia for years to come.
juandonjuan , Jun 26, 2019 6:31:20 PM | 59
blue @ 19 The news media are wedded to the state which is wedded to the banking system which are all subsidiaries of global capitalism. They don't need to correct themselves. They may have the occasional family feud, but they're all on the same team. They will admit to "mistakes" being made, but only long after it makes no difference.
We have a FREE PRESS in America-Pravda on the Potomac, Izvestia on the Hudson.
Have a look sometime at the Venn Diagrams that portray the overlapping/interlocking memberships of the regulatory/financial/corporate leadership class.
But more than that, whatever the idea of a free press once meant, with the rise of digital corporate networking "platforms", not subject to any accountability, the barriers to entry of any competing narratives to the mainstream discourse are nearly insurmountable. Except maybe through subversion?
What is missing is a true public 'Marketplace of Ideas'
ADKC , Jun 26, 2019 7:00:39 PM | 63
The deliberate mis-translations of non-english speaking "adversaries" of the US is common in the msm. Putin is frequently and deliberately mis-translated to make him appear dictatorial and aggressive.
pj , Jun 26, 2019 7:11:03 PM | 65
I listened to Rohani's speech. He said that if JCPOA is bad, it is bad for all parties; and if it is good, it is good for all parties. They cannot expect for JCPOA to be bad for them and good for us. They withdrew from the JCPOA and expect us to stay with the agreement. This is what he meant when he said: White house has been affected by mental inability and mental disability.
Peter AU 1 , Jun 26, 2019 7:26:38 PM | 72
ADKC
Iran is at war. US and gang are trying to destroy Iran as a nation. The biggest asset in times of war is deception. Used by both the attacker and the attacked.
karlof1 , Jun 26, 2019 7:39:51 PM | 75
Khamenei has Tweeted a series of tweets, and his scribe has posted what he tweeted along with other words at his website in English so there's no mistranslation. Here's one of the series of 6:

"The graceful Iranian nation has been accused & insulted by world's most vicious regime, the U.S., which is a source of wars, conflicts & plunder. Iranian nation won't give up over such insults. Iranians have been wronged by oppressive sanctions but not weakened & remain powerful."

They were made 14+ hours ago, yet I'm the first to post notice of them here?!

goldhoarder , Jun 26, 2019 8:39:33 PM | 80
The USA government excels at propaganda. It always has. Doesn't matter if it babies and incubators, mistranslated leaders of targeted countries, or supposed mass graves. BTW... what ever happened to all those mass graves in Iraq? HRW was going to dig them all up and document them. Hundreds of thousands. Most Americans I talk to still believe in this. Was it true? Saddam himself had claimed it wasn't true. That it was Kurdish propaganda to gain sympathy. He claimed the Anfal campaign was only to push the Kurds off the border so he could control arms smuggling and that casualties were minimal. Looking into the search. They are graves with a few hundred here and there but where are the rest of the bodies? If you google Iraq mass graves there are more articles about ISIS mass graves than the Anfal campaign. There were people killed in the South during the Shia uprising after the first gulf war than there was for the Anfal campaign. Was that a lie too? Nearly every American believes it still.

PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor

Sat 17 Jul 2004 19.35 EDT First published on Sat 17 Jul 2004 19.35 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/jul/18/iraq.iraq1

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'

Arata , Jun 26, 2019 10:40:53 PM | 98
Anyone who can undestand Farsi ( Persian language) can litsen Rouhani's speech. He did not name "Trump", he said " White House".
I have been watching CNN news channel who said that Rouhani made a personal attack on Trump! That was not true.

There was no personal attack on Rouhani's speech.
Importantly, the context of the speech and conclusion is diffent from western media reports and western translations.

I would like give few links of some Iranian news agencies, reporting Rouhani's speech for International use, as reference here:

1) FrasNews Agency

Rouhani said:

"These days, we see the White House in confusion and we are witnessing undue and ridiculous words and adoption of a scandalous policy,"

..."The US sanctions are crime against humanity. The US recent measures indicate their ultimate failure. The new US measures are the result of their frustration and confusion over Iran. The White House has mental disability,"


http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13980405000859

2) ISNA English

"They are having mental problems and today, the White House has become mentally paralysed and don't know what to do".
https://en.isna.ir/news/98040402431/Sanctioning-Supreme-leader-of-Iran-ridiculous-President-Rouhani

ISAN French

Le président iranien, affirmant que les États-Unis, malgré de nombreuses tentatives de pression exercées par divers leviers sur l'Iran, ont échoué dans leurs objectifs, a poursuivi : "Une étrange frustration et une grande confusion règnent au sein du Corps dirigeant de la Maison Blanche. Ils se sentent déçus car ils n'ont obtenu aucun résultat, ils s'attendaient à voir l'Iran brisé dans l'espace de quelques mois, mais ils ont fini par constater que les Iraniens agissent de plus en plus fermement, de manière plus créative que jamais ".

https://fr.isna.ir/news/98040402385/Les-actions-américaines-sont-inhumaines-Rohani

3) TasnimNews

The president also decried the new US sanctions against Iran, saying the White House has been thrown into confusion as its officials are making "inappropriate and ridiculous" comments and adopting the policy of disgrace.

https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2019/06/26/2041386/iran-urges-us-europe-to-return-to-jcpoa

Paora , Jun 26, 2019 11:18:41 PM | 101
0use4msm @54

Wow that's amazing! Probably the best known Khrushchev 'quote', presented as evidence of his boorish nature, is an intentional mistranslation. And the Marx quote is not exactly obscure, it's from Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto for eff sake! At least it makes a change from the 'lets just make things up' cottage industry of Lenin & Stalin 'quotes'.

Hoarsewhisperer , Jun 26, 2019 11:23:51 PM | 102
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
Mark Twain (or some other student of wisdom)
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotations.html
Apr 26, 2017 - Mark Twain is one of many who gets credit for famous quotations he never wrote or said. ... credited with saying "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes" ... Proverbial wisdom, in which a quotation is elevated to the status of a proverb because its source is unknown;.
Circe , Jun 27, 2019 10:19:52 AM | 136 Noirette , Jun 27, 2019 10:50:17 AM | 137
Mistranslations are a classical cheap n easy way to sway opinion.

Interesting that the examples b quotes, and most of those promoted currently by the US-uk-eu, afaik, understand, are intended to project into the voice of Iranians, Russians, Syrians, utterances, declarations, to be labelled insults, slander, threats, impropriety, even rage, coming from these parties, as

there is nothing much else to display!

(Spanish is too comprehensible > does not apply to Mexico, Cuba, S. America.)

Often cultural matters play a role, but are ignored. Ahmadinejad was endlessly vilified and mocked by the W-MSM for saying what was translated as there are no homosexuals in Iran (no idea what the original formulation was) - which 'obviously' can't be 'true.'

Besides homosexuality being unacceptable in conservative rule-books, Iran is, or was (to 2010) above (or with) Thailand the no. 1. practitioner / destination for sex change operations. Iran had super educated docs, great hospitals, etc.

Ahmadinejad was relying on a kind of fundamentalist principle where the 'soul' or the 'essential quality' of a person is what is tantamount, what counts above all. The physical manifestation, here the human body, can be transformed to be in harmony with the deep-felt or 'innately' ascribed orientation or 'spirit.' So, no homosexuals in Iran, or only a few who are in 'transition.' (Not denying real suffering of gays in Iran, other story.)

The W, in first place the US, is doing precisely the same with its 'gender change' promotion, as applied to children and young teens. Here too, 'feelings' and 'identity' override 'nature' : the physical can be overturned, overcome, fixed.

Such cultural issues play a role in mis-translations, deliberate or not. It may appear that I wandered far off topic, I just picked a topical comprehensible ex. Sharia law is more complex..

[Jun 27, 2019] Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens

Highly recommended!
Jun 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens JOHN CHUCKMAN , Jun 26, 2019 2:10:12 PM | 23

Yesterday the news agencies Associated Press and Reuters mistranslated a speech by Iran's President Hassan Rouhani. They made it sound as if Rouhani insulted U.S. President Donald Trump as 'mentally retarded'. Rouhani never said that.

The agencies previously made a similar 'mistake'.

A 2005 speech by then President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was famously misquoted. Israel should be wiped off map, says Iran's president headlined the Guardian at that time. Others used similar headlines. The New York Times wrote :

Iran's conservative new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Wednesday that Israel must be "wiped off the map" and that attacks by Palestinians would destroy it, the ISNA press agency reported.
...
Referring to comments by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad said, "As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."

The statement was used by the G.W. Bush administration and others to whip up hostility against Iran :

Ever since he spoke at an anti-Zionism conference in Tehran last October, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has been known for one statement above all. As translated by news agencies at the time, it was that Israel "should be wiped off the map." Iran's nuclear program and sponsorship of militant Muslim groups are rarely mentioned without reference to the infamous map remark.

Here, for example, is R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, recently: "Given the radical nature of Iran under Ahmadinejad and its stated wish to wipe Israel off the map of the world, it is entirely unconvincing that we could or should live with a nuclear Iran."

However Ahmedinejad never used those words :

"Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to wipe Israel off the map because no such idiom exists in Persian," remarked Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan and critic of American policy who has argued that the Iranian president was misquoted. "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse." Since Iran has not "attacked another country aggressively for over a century," he said in an e-mail exchange, "I smell the whiff of war propaganda."

Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently laid out the case this way: "The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that 'this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,' just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The 'page of time' phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon."

Despite the above and other explanations the false "wipe Israel off the map" translation never died. Years later it still reappeared in Guardian pieces which required it to issue multiple corrections and clarifications.

Now, as the Trump administration is pushing for war on Iran, a similar mistranslation miraculously happened. It were again 'western' news agencies who lightened the fire:

The Associated Press @AP - 7:52 utc - 25 Jun 2019

BREAKING: Iran's President Rouhani mocks President Trump, says the White House is "afflicted by mental retardation."

Farsi speakers pointed out that the Rouhani never used the Farsi word for "retarded":

Sina Toossi @SinaToossi - 13:49 utc - 25 Jun 2019

A lot of Western media is reporting that Iranian President Rouhani called Trump "mentally retarded." This is inaccurate.
Regarding Trump, he just said "no wise person would take such an action [the new sanctions imposed]."

Reza H. Akbari @rezahakbari - 15:58 utc - 25 Jun 2019

Absolutely incorrect. There is a word for "retarded" in Persian & Rouhani didn't use it. Prior to him saying "mental disability" he even prefaced his comment by saying "mental weakness." Those who speak Persian can listen & judge for themselves. Here is a video clip of Rouhani's comment: link

But the damage was already done:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump - 14:42 utc - 25 Jun 2019

Iran leadership doesn't understand the words "nice" or "compassion," they never have. Sadly, the thing they do understand is Strength and Power, and the USA is by far the most powerful Military Force in the world, with 1.5 Trillion Dollars invested over the last two years alone..

....The wonderful Iranian people are suffering, and for no reason at all. Their leadership spends all of its money on Terror, and little on anything else. The U.S. has not forgotten Iran's use of IED's & EFP's (bombs), which killed 2000 Americans, and wounded many more...

.... Iran's very ignorant and insulting statement , put out today, only shows that they do not understand reality. Any attack by Iran on anything American will be met with great and overwhelming force. In some areas, overwhelming will mean obliteration. No more John Kerry & Obama!

Reuters , which also peddled the mistranslation, gleefully connected the dots :

Cont. reading: Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens

Excellent summary of how malevolence works in many subtle ways.

Jonathan Gillispie , Jun 26, 2019 1:11:48 PM | 4

Trump was right more than he realizes that the press is the enemy of the people. They goad nations into unnecessary and bloody war.

Don Wiscacho , Jun 26, 2019 1:32:54 PM | 13
This follows in the footsteps of a rich history of mistranslating and obfuscating which is rarely, if ever, corrected by our Guardians of Truth. I will not hold my breath for AP to pull its tweet out issue any sort of correction. The war machine is revving up, truth be damned.

To add a few obfuscations to the list of mistranslations: the Palestinian intifada. Sounds scary, no? Violence against the benevolent Israelis. Because what does intifada actually mean? Uprising, which by its nature suggests oppression, something which just 'can't' be happening in Palestine, hence the need for intifada.
Or take jihad, 'a pillor' of Islam. Again, very scary, as jihad 'means' suicide bombs and killing infidels. What the Guardians of Truth never mention is that jihad in Islam is a very, very broad term that includes such things as helping the poor or less fortunate, educating oneself, quiet reflection, and prayer. Jihad as meaning 'holy war' was a sense meaning derived much later than the founding of the religion, as a reaction to very real threats to believers of the time, the Crusades and Mongol invasions. That this specific sense meaning was essentially confined to history afterward, only to be revived by Wahhabists and takfiris, and one not believed in by the vast majority of Muslims, is never explained. 'Cause all them crazy Muslims believe in jihad!

In all cases where the boogeyman of the day needs concocting, rest assured the 'mainstream' press, with AP in the lead, will be there to build a gleaming edifice mistruths, omissions, and lies.

Uncle Jon , Jun 26, 2019 1:36:27 PM | 14
Ahmadinejad's true and correct translation reads: "Zionism should be wiped from the pages of history."

Now who can argue with that.

jared , Jun 26, 2019 1:43:18 PM | 17
In approximately 17 months, the american public can make strides to fix this mess.
I guess that is a long time for the iranians, but still maybe best option.
dh , Jun 26, 2019 1:51:03 PM | 18
Just in case there is any doubt in American minds here is the Israeli Ambassador to the UN. He thinks the sanctions are working well. Iran is panicking.

Good job guys. Keep squeezing.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/israeli-ambassador-iran-panicking-increased-us-sanctions

wagelaborer , Jun 26, 2019 2:43:01 PM | 31
They mistranslate Trump all the time, or they spin what he says. It is amazing to watch.

For instance, at the Helsinki meeting, where he met with Putin and they discussed multiple topics, but the press ignored any topic but demanding that Trump denounce Putin and "admit" that Putin helped him steal the election, and that he was therefore not the legitimate president.

Obviously, Trump was not going to say that, so he said that he was the legitimate president, and the mockingbird media spun that into "the president is a traitor to America because he said that 17 national intelligence agencies are lying".

michaelj72 , Jun 26, 2019 4:02:36 PM | 40
.....The ministers lie, the professors lie, the television lies,
the priests lie .
These lies mean that the country wants to die.
Lie after lie starts out into the prairie grass,
like enormous caravans of Conestoga wagons .

And a long desire for death flows out, guiding the
enormous caravans from beneath,
stringing together the vague and foolish words.
It is a desire to eat death,
to gobble it down,
to rush on it like a cobra with mouth open
It's a desire to take death inside,
to feel it burning inside, pushing out velvety hairs,
like a clothes brush in the intestines --
This is the thrill that leads the President on to lie....


Robert Bly, The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, originally published by City Lights books 1970

Virgile , Jun 26, 2019 5:10:59 PM | 48
Maybe the translation is inacurate but the message had the expected reaction from Trump: Tweet furor.
It is good that Trump realizes that he does not have the monopole of insulting leaders.
The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war. How could it give a lesson to Iran who won a 8 years war against Iraq despite the support that the USA, the Gulf countries and Western countries gave to Iraq.
Loud noise and indecisive actions: The disaster of the USA foreign policy
Abx , Jun 26, 2019 5:20:42 PM | 49
I remember watching CNN translate Khamenei's "Nuclear Power" to "Nuclear Weapons" right on live TV in 2013. This is not new.
/div> Virgile "The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war". The US won a war against Grenada [population 95,000] I would go so far as to say they whupped ass. True there were only 64 Cuban soldiers there [security guards] All members of the US armed forces were involved and 5,000 medals were given out. Ra Ra USA.

Posted by: Harry Law , Jun 26, 2019 5:29:37 PM | 50

Virgile "The USA is a country that since WWII has never won any war". The US won a war against Grenada [population 95,000] I would go so far as to say they whupped ass. True there were only 64 Cuban soldiers there [security guards] All members of the US armed forces were involved and 5,000 medals were given out. Ra Ra USA.

Posted by: Harry Law | Jun 26, 2019 5:29:37 PM | 50

Kooshy , Jun 26, 2019 5:45:20 PM | 53
b-
I am a Persian speaker and is true that president Rouhani never said Trump is retarded, we now have way passed the point that insults can matte. Nevertheless it was better if President Rouhani would have called Trump and the rest of the ruling US regime like what the whole world has now come to understand, a true and unique collection of retards on a shining hill.
0use4msm , Jun 26, 2019 6:24:08 PM | 57
Reminds me of when Nikita Khruschev attempted to explain in 1956 his view that that capitalism would destroy itself from within by quoting Marx: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers." This was notoriously mistranslated into English as "We will bury you", as if the Soviets were out to kill all westerners themselves. Of course this mistranslated was quoted time and time again in western media, fueling Cold War paranoia for years to come.
juandonjuan , Jun 26, 2019 6:31:20 PM | 59
blue @ 19 The news media are wedded to the state which is wedded to the banking system which are all subsidiaries of global capitalism. They don't need to correct themselves. They may have the occasional family feud, but they're all on the same team. They will admit to "mistakes" being made, but only long after it makes no difference.
We have a FREE PRESS in America-Pravda on the Potomac, Izvestia on the Hudson.
Have a look sometime at the Venn Diagrams that portray the overlapping/interlocking memberships of the regulatory/financial/corporate leadership class.
But more than that, whatever the idea of a free press once meant, with the rise of digital corporate networking "platforms", not subject to any accountability, the barriers to entry of any competing narratives to the mainstream discourse are nearly insurmountable. Except maybe through subversion?
What is missing is a true public 'Marketplace of Ideas'
ADKC , Jun 26, 2019 7:00:39 PM | 63
The deliberate mis-translations of non-english speaking "adversaries" of the US is common in the msm. Putin is frequently and deliberately mis-translated to make him appear dictatorial and aggressive.
pj , Jun 26, 2019 7:11:03 PM | 65
I listened to Rohani's speech. He said that if JCPOA is bad, it is bad for all parties; and if it is good, it is good for all parties. They cannot expect for JCPOA to be bad for them and good for us. They withdrew from the JCPOA and expect us to stay with the agreement. This is what he meant when he said: White house has been affected by mental inability and mental disability.
Peter AU 1 , Jun 26, 2019 7:26:38 PM | 72
ADKC
Iran is at war. US and gang are trying to destroy Iran as a nation. The biggest asset in times of war is deception. Used by both the attacker and the attacked.
karlof1 , Jun 26, 2019 7:39:51 PM | 75
Khamenei has Tweeted a series of tweets, and his scribe has posted what he tweeted along with other words at his website in English so there's no mistranslation. Here's one of the series of 6:

"The graceful Iranian nation has been accused & insulted by world's most vicious regime, the U.S., which is a source of wars, conflicts & plunder. Iranian nation won't give up over such insults. Iranians have been wronged by oppressive sanctions but not weakened & remain powerful."

They were made 14+ hours ago, yet I'm the first to post notice of them here?!

goldhoarder , Jun 26, 2019 8:39:33 PM | 80
The USA government excels at propaganda. It always has. Doesn't matter if it babies and incubators, mistranslated leaders of targeted countries, or supposed mass graves. BTW... what ever happened to all those mass graves in Iraq? HRW was going to dig them all up and document them. Hundreds of thousands. Most Americans I talk to still believe in this. Was it true? Saddam himself had claimed it wasn't true. That it was Kurdish propaganda to gain sympathy. He claimed the Anfal campaign was only to push the Kurds off the border so he could control arms smuggling and that casualties were minimal. Looking into the search. They are graves with a few hundred here and there but where are the rest of the bodies? If you google Iraq mass graves there are more articles about ISIS mass graves than the Anfal campaign. There were people killed in the South during the Shia uprising after the first gulf war than there was for the Anfal campaign. Was that a lie too? Nearly every American believes it still.

PM admits graves claim 'untrue'
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor

Sat 17 Jul 2004 19.35 EDT First published on Sat 17 Jul 2004 19.35 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/jul/18/iraq.iraq1

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that '400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves' is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq's mass graves.

In that publication - Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: 'We've already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.'

Arata , Jun 26, 2019 10:40:53 PM | 98
Anyone who can undestand Farsi ( Persian language) can litsen Rouhani's speech. He did not name "Trump", he said " White House".
I have been watching CNN news channel who said that Rouhani made a personal attack on Trump! That was not true.

There was no personal attack on Rouhani's speech.
Importantly, the context of the speech and conclusion is diffent from western media reports and western translations.

I would like give few links of some Iranian news agencies, reporting Rouhani's speech for International use, as reference here:

1) FrasNews Agency

Rouhani said:

"These days, we see the White House in confusion and we are witnessing undue and ridiculous words and adoption of a scandalous policy,"

..."The US sanctions are crime against humanity. The US recent measures indicate their ultimate failure. The new US measures are the result of their frustration and confusion over Iran. The White House has mental disability,"


http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13980405000859

2) ISNA English

"They are having mental problems and today, the White House has become mentally paralysed and don't know what to do".
https://en.isna.ir/news/98040402431/Sanctioning-Supreme-leader-of-Iran-ridiculous-President-Rouhani

ISAN French

Le président iranien, affirmant que les États-Unis, malgré de nombreuses tentatives de pression exercées par divers leviers sur l'Iran, ont échoué dans leurs objectifs, a poursuivi : "Une étrange frustration et une grande confusion règnent au sein du Corps dirigeant de la Maison Blanche. Ils se sentent déçus car ils n'ont obtenu aucun résultat, ils s'attendaient à voir l'Iran brisé dans l'espace de quelques mois, mais ils ont fini par constater que les Iraniens agissent de plus en plus fermement, de manière plus créative que jamais ".

https://fr.isna.ir/news/98040402385/Les-actions-américaines-sont-inhumaines-Rohani

3) TasnimNews

The president also decried the new US sanctions against Iran, saying the White House has been thrown into confusion as its officials are making "inappropriate and ridiculous" comments and adopting the policy of disgrace.

https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2019/06/26/2041386/iran-urges-us-europe-to-return-to-jcpoa

Paora , Jun 26, 2019 11:18:41 PM | 101
0use4msm @54

Wow that's amazing! Probably the best known Khrushchev 'quote', presented as evidence of his boorish nature, is an intentional mistranslation. And the Marx quote is not exactly obscure, it's from Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto for eff sake! At least it makes a change from the 'lets just make things up' cottage industry of Lenin & Stalin 'quotes'.

Hoarsewhisperer , Jun 26, 2019 11:23:51 PM | 102
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
Mark Twain (or some other student of wisdom)
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotations.html
Apr 26, 2017 - Mark Twain is one of many who gets credit for famous quotations he never wrote or said. ... credited with saying "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes" ... Proverbial wisdom, in which a quotation is elevated to the status of a proverb because its source is unknown;.
Circe , Jun 27, 2019 10:19:52 AM | 136 Noirette , Jun 27, 2019 10:50:17 AM | 137
Mistranslations are a classical cheap n easy way to sway opinion.

Interesting that the examples b quotes, and most of those promoted currently by the US-uk-eu, afaik, understand, are intended to project into the voice of Iranians, Russians, Syrians, utterances, declarations, to be labelled insults, slander, threats, impropriety, even rage, coming from these parties, as

there is nothing much else to display!

(Spanish is too comprehensible > does not apply to Mexico, Cuba, S. America.)

Often cultural matters play a role, but are ignored. Ahmadinejad was endlessly vilified and mocked by the W-MSM for saying what was translated as there are no homosexuals in Iran (no idea what the original formulation was) - which 'obviously' can't be 'true.'

Besides homosexuality being unacceptable in conservative rule-books, Iran is, or was (to 2010) above (or with) Thailand the no. 1. practitioner / destination for sex change operations. Iran had super educated docs, great hospitals, etc.

Ahmadinejad was relying on a kind of fundamentalist principle where the 'soul' or the 'essential quality' of a person is what is tantamount, what counts above all. The physical manifestation, here the human body, can be transformed to be in harmony with the deep-felt or 'innately' ascribed orientation or 'spirit.' So, no homosexuals in Iran, or only a few who are in 'transition.' (Not denying real suffering of gays in Iran, other story.)

The W, in first place the US, is doing precisely the same with its 'gender change' promotion, as applied to children and young teens. Here too, 'feelings' and 'identity' override 'nature' : the physical can be overturned, overcome, fixed.

Such cultural issues play a role in mis-translations, deliberate or not. It may appear that I wandered far off topic, I just picked a topical comprehensible ex. Sharia law is more complex..

[Jun 27, 2019] Consistency in the US Presidents betrayal of their voters is simply remarable

Trump is the same "betrayer in chief" as Obama was. They both are variations of Bush II
Jun 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Josh , Jun 26, 2019 1:54:18 PM | 19
This dude (Trump) has spent more than two years, and a ton of money, trying to pull the undercurrent of dissent in the American population into his camp and under his wing.

In all of his 'fighting with the establishment' he has managed to change exactly nothing and bring exactly nobody to justice. He has gathered the entirety of the Bush/Rumsfeld faction directly into his tent, while miraculously failing to so much as arrest a single member of the Clinton faction. And to top it off he just ordered an armed attack on an independent nation (which failed in spectacular fashion as thr first targeting drone was vaporized while he was watching the livestream). Come on dude.

[Jun 27, 2019] Guardian attacks Tulsi

Jun 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jen , Jun 27, 2019 9:38:39 PM | 115

Elsewhere, British military intelligence ... erm, sorry, its mouthpiece The Fraudian attacks Tulsi Gabbard over her supposed overlap with the Republican Party and her level of wokeness which, not surprisingly, The Fraudian finds low and therefore starts worrying like a dried-up dog mummy with teeth bites already all over it.

Who is Tulsi Gabbard? The progressive 2020 hopeful praised by Bannon and the right

[Jun 27, 2019] Book review: Dealing with the Russians

Notable quotes:
"... Obviously , Russia is a threat to the US of A -- see the 1992 "Wolfowitz doctrine", where it stated directly. Consequently, Russia is also a threat to the major protectorates of the US, euphemistically described as "Euro-Atlantic community". The rest is propaganda, and demonizing the enemy is a trivial matter. ..."
"... The call to look for the root causes is very laudable, but often more than not is carried out in "7 blind men and an elephant" fashion. "Blind men" are also "biased men", some of whom, using their other senses instead of sight (e.g., olfactory organs) deliberately position themselves at poor elephant's derrière , perform (time and again – to the thunderous applause and approval of the Enlightened Western Public ™) an act of amateur colonoscopy and proclaim: "Behold! That's the essence of the Elephant!". ..."
"... Sometimes, the Elephants becomes annoyed – or enraged and tries to stomp on the irritant. Biased Blind Men promptly call for help from the professionals whose job is to kill all sorts of animals for fun and profit. That's my allegory to the Western Russia analysis. ..."
"... I will not pretend for a second that the Russians are either passive or angelic. However, since as the book you review and others have pointed out a lot of Western concepts are projected onto Russian thinking and actions that don't have much basis in how the Russians actually think, perhaps we also project some of our thinking onto them. In particular with what is happening in Iran and Venezuela, these seem to be actions very much in line with what we accuse the Russians of doing. ..."
"... Finally, I should also note that I think a huge factor in lowering the quality of Russia experts is exemplified by a Soviet joke "What is the difference between western Russia experts and western China experts? The China experts love China!" I myself was motivated to study Russia for what you might loosely call Military Industrial Complex reasons, but I conceived of the Russians less as an enemy to be feared and loathed and rather a country and people to be studied in its own right, and I also was moved by a profound respect for the people and the Army that saved Europe from the night of fascism. ..."
Jun 27, 2019 | irrussianality.wordpress.com

June 25, 2019 PaulR 14 Comments 'How do you deal with a problem like the Russians?' It's a question which seems to dominate public discourse nowadays, with the Russian Federation elevated to the status of Enemy Number One in much of the Western world. Oxford University's Andrew Monaghan has an answer – 'not like we've done so far'. In his last book, The New Politics of Russia , he attacked the mainstream Western view of Russia as 'narrow, simplistic, and repetitive'. Now, in a new book Dealing with the Russians , he lambasts the Euro-Atlantic security community for its approach to the 'Russia challenge'. 'The problem Russia poses is being misdiagnosed and the responses, therefore, poorly framed,' he argues. It is time for the 'retirement of the worn-out and out-of-date repetitions, and the tired clichés and template phrases that currently dominate the public policy lexicon.' What we need, says Monaghan, is 'fresh thinking.'

To make his case, Monaghan frames the book's problem in two parts: first, how to interpret its nature (is Russia a threat? and if so, how big, and of what sort?); and second, how to respond to it (dialogue or deterrence?). He then rounds this off with a discussion of what he thinks needs to be done to improve matters. This last section is directed primarily at a British audience, but most of what Monaghan says could apply equally to other major Western states.

As far as the first of these issues is concerned, Monaghan is clear that, 'Russia poses a major challenge to the Euro-Atlantic community.' He claims, however, that the nature of that challenge is misunderstood – 'The challenge is based, though, not on an expansive, aggressive Russian plan, but instead on a series of contemporary (if long running) policy disagreements that are emphasized by different understandings of today's international environment.'

Clearly, the responses required to combat an 'expansive, aggressive Russian plan' are rather different to those required to resolve 'different understandings of the international environment.' Interpreting the problem correctly is thus a matter of some significance. Unfortunately, says Monaghan, most Western analyses of the 'Russia challenge' get it badly wrong. 'Thinking about Russia is stuck in the twentieth century,' he writes. It is founded on outdated analogies of the Cold War and Munich/Hitler, but these are entirely inappropriate for understanding the contemporary international environment. We need to start thinking about the world today, says Monaghan, not the world of yesterday.

Another problem is that 'Russia is conceptualized through 'buzzwords and abstract labels'. As an example, Monaghan discusses the idea of 'Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD)', an idea which, he says, has 'crossed the buzzword threshold'. A2/AD refers to efforts to 'prevent or constrain the deployment of opposing forces into a given theater of operations and reduce their freedom of maneuver once in a theater,' and it is often claimed that the Russian military has been expanding its A2/AD capabilities in the Baltic region so as to prevent NATO from deploying forces there in case of war. This supposedly seriously threatens European security. The problem with this idea, says Monaghan, is that 'Russia has no new concept or doctrine that would correspond to Western understandings of A2/AD A2/AD is a concept that is foreign to them. Thinking in these terms imposes a Western operational thought process onto the Russian one.'

Similarly, Monaghan denounces the entire industry which has developed in the past five years devoted to hyping the threat of Russia 'hybrid war'. 'Hybrid war' is another baseless buzzword, he says ; it 'does not relate to Russian concepts. [It] is not a Russian construction – there is not a " Russian hybrid war" in the way it is conceived'. Talk of hybrid war produces 'an inaccurate view of Russian defence and security thinking', and 'magnifies Russian capabilities, effectively asserting the omniscience and omnipotence of the Russian leadership' (which, I suspect, is precisely the point!).

All in all, therefore, Monaghan concludes that thinking about the Russian threat 'is in the grip of exhausted metaphorical shorthand introducing shibboleths and myths – not to say fantasies – to the debate. . This shorthand has thus introduced rigidity and dogma'. This is pretty stern stuff. One has to agree with Monaghan that we need some new thinking about the nature of the threat.

The same applies to thinking about how the West should respond to the Russian challenge. Too often this is reduced to a choice of two options – dialogue or deterrence. Both have their limitations. Given the depth of the disagreements between Russia and the West, Monaghan believes that it is very unlikely that dialogue will produce meaningful results. That leaves deterrence. But to deter effectively one has to know what it is one is deterring. That means having a proper understanding of the threat – i.e. of Russian intentions and capabilities. Unfortunately, instead of being analysed realistically, the threat is generally 'framed as Russian foreign policy adventurism, an unprovoked strike from a clear blue sky'. Deterring fantasies isn't of much value, but that's what we seem intent on doing.

Monaghan concludes that 'Neither dialogue nor deterrence is an end in itself.' What is needed is a 'broader strategy'. For that, 'there is a need to develop a better understanding of Russian defence and security thinking.' And that brings us to Monaghan's main point of what we have to do to 'deal with the Russians' – we have to understand them better. And that requires us to open our minds to alternative points of view. He argues that the experience of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 showed the dangers of groupthink and the need for 'real diversity of thought rather than shades of mainstream thinking'. Unfortunately at present,

Thinking about Russia fails to understand the social, economic, political and cultural factors on the ground in Russia. Instead, as we have seen, there is a narrow, abstract and clichéd view of Russia. This has driven a narrative about Russia that has been impervious to reasonable challenge. important sections of established Russia expertise are largely ignored.

From this, Monaghan concludes that the West needs 'a coherent, sustained and thorough reinvigoration of Russia expertise The point is that there is too little sophisticated expertise on Russia and that which does exist is overwhelmed by simplistic and misguided jingoism.'

This is all very true. Monaghan's critiques of Western perceptions of Russia are very apt. He deserves a lot of credit for having the courage to say all this, especially as in the current climate anybody who says this kind of thing is liable to find himself denounced as an 'agent of influence', 'Russian proxy', or ' Kremlin Trojan Horse'. But while Monaghan's attacks on current Western thinking and policy are bang on the nail, his recommendations of what needs to be done instead are a little thin – strategy rather than tactics; and more investment in Russia expertise. The first is valid in any situation; the second, in my view, is somewhat problematic. Monaghan made the same recommendation in his last book. In my review , I cast doubt on it, noting that, 'the problems we have in understanding Russia today appear to have more to do with the quality of analysis than the quantity of experts.' I still think that's a valid criticism. Simply churning out more Russia 'experts' won't necessarily improve the quality of analysis, especially if education in things Russian is driven by demand from the military industrial complex. Furthermore, even if better analysis does result, that won't necessarily produce better policy. There are already plenty of people in academia, business, and so on, who know Russia well and have balanced, sensible views about it, whom governments could consult if they wanted to. They don't want to. Take a look at the list of witnesses to the relevant parliamentary select committees, and you'll understand this soon enough. You can have more and better experts, but if they're saying something politically unwelcome, it probably won't make much difference.

In a sense, therefore, this book would be better titled How not to deal with the Russians since it's stronger as a critique of existing policy than as a set of positive recommendations for a new one. I don't want to make that sound too negative. The critique is excellent, and I'm well aware that this blog is guilty of much the same thing – lots of carping about all the nonsense which people are saying, but not much by way of positive proposals. There's a good reason for that – the prevailing narrative is so strong that until something is done to demolish it, alternative policies are never going to get a hearing. At some point, though, we're going to have go one step further.

To be fair to Monaghan, though, he says upfront at the start of his book that it aims 'not so much to make specific policy recommendations about how to "deal with the Russians" but to step back to make a bigger argument for a broader shift in terms of conceiving the nature of the challenge Russia poses.' He achieves his aim, and for that we must thank him. It's a shift which is long overdue.

Mao Cheng Ji says: June 26, 2019 at 3:26 am
It seems to me, everything is much simpler.

Obviously , Russia is a threat to the US of A -- see the 1992 "Wolfowitz doctrine", where it stated directly. Consequently, Russia is also a threat to the major protectorates of the US, euphemistically described as "Euro-Atlantic community". The rest is propaganda, and demonizing the enemy is a trivial matter.

If he wants a different approach, better understanding, peace, love, harmony and bubble gum, then what he needs to question are the underlying assumptions, the root cause. For the US, it's the basic imperial strategies a-la "Wolfowitz doctrine", and for the "Euro-Atlantic community" it's their acceptance of American domination.

Lyttenburgh says: June 26, 2019 at 1:54 pm
In his final paragraphs Professor approaches dangerously close to the heart of the matter, but then, naturally, rushes back from the precipice of the Abyss, which proximity alone began to sap his ideological resolve and sunny Western liberal disposish. Mao Cheng Ji writes all right and obvious things, but commits a mortal unhandshakable sin of mentioning the Wolfowitz doctrine – meaning that he will be ignored by "proper people".

The call to look for the root causes is very laudable, but often more than not is carried out in "7 blind men and an elephant" fashion. "Blind men" are also "biased men", some of whom, using their other senses instead of sight (e.g., olfactory organs) deliberately position themselves at poor elephant's derrière , perform (time and again – to the thunderous applause and approval of the Enlightened Western Public ™) an act of amateur colonoscopy and proclaim: "Behold! That's the essence of the Elephant!".

Sometimes, the Elephants becomes annoyed – or enraged and tries to stomp on the irritant. Biased Blind Men promptly call for help from the professionals whose job is to kill all sorts of animals for fun and profit. That's my allegory to the Western Russia analysis.

No, instead of biased talk about "root causes" or "how to deal with [Outsiders X/Y/Z]", these authors in their books should finally start asking the ur-question – how to deal with ourselves?

Professor Robinson writes:

"Simply churning out more Russia 'experts' won't necessarily improve the quality of analysis, especially if education in things Russian is driven by demand from the military industrial complex . Furthermore, even if better analysis does result, that won't necessarily produce better policy. There are already plenty of people in academia, business, and so on, who know Russia well and have balanced, sensible views about it, whom governments could consult if they wanted to. They don't want to You can have more and better experts, but if they're saying something politically unwelcome, it probably won't make much difference."

He also wrote in the same blogpost:

"At some point, though, we're going to have go one step further."

^This. You said "A", Professor – how about saying "B" and then the rest of the alphabet? Okay, here's a hint. Try to answer the question – "who are you?". Who is Monaghan? Who are these "experts" and "Russia studying academia?". Here's another hint:

"The evidence suggests that foreign policymakers do not seek insight from scholars, but rather support for what they already want to do . As Desch quotes a World War II U.S. Navy anthropologist, " the administrator uses social science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination ." Scholars' disinclination to be used in this way helps explain more of the distance.

It also explains the rise of think tanks , which are more pliant than academics but provide similar marketing support. As Benjamin Friedman and I wrote in a 2015 article on the subject, think tanks undertake research with an operational mindset: that is, "the approach of a passenger riding shotgun who studies the map to find the ideal route, adjusts the engine if need be, and always accepts the destination without protest ."

As former senator Olympia Snowe once put it, "you can find a think tank to buttress any view or position, and then you give it the aura of legitimacy and credibility by referring to their report." Or consider the view of Rory Stewart, now a member of parliament in the UK, but once an expert on Afghanistan who was consulted on the Afghan surge but opposed it:

"It's like they're coming in and saying to you, "I'm going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?" And you say, "I don't think you should drive your car off the cliff." And they say, "No, no, that bit's already been decided -- the question is whether to wear a seatbelt." And you say, "Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt." And then they say, "We've consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart, and he says "

Or look at how policymakers themselves define relevance. Stephen Krasner, an academic who became a policymaker, lamented the uselessness of much academic security studies literature because "[e]ven the most convincing empirical findings may be of no practical use because they do not include factors that policy makers can manipulate."

The explicit claim here is that for scholarship to be of any practical use, it must include factors that policymakers can manipulate. This reflects a strong bias toward action, even in relatively restrained presidencies."
– Justin Logan, " Cult of the Irrelevant: National Security Eggheads and Academics "

I remember when you posted your presentation and the following Q&A session on the topic of the history of Russian conservative thought, professor. The questions being asked amounted to

a) Present day hot-button issues (aka "how Russia is baaaaad")

and

b) To what degree these conservative thinkers influence modern Russia (aka "How Russia has always been baaaaad")

None (NO ONE) of them, precious gentle students in the heartland of the West, ever thought that you just did what any scientist have to do – carried out a research to further humanity's collective body of knowledge about us and the universe. No – they, these precious children, want the real life application from the "Russian studies", i.e. it must help them wage the War. You, in this regard, thoroughly failed them – and other, full grown, and even old and senile children that more often than not call all the shots.

Or, screw it, TL;DR version – Professor, why can't you just admit that you as a member of intelligentsia belong to the strata whose function is to serve the ruling class? That, despite all the illusions of the privilege and self-importance, no, you, white-collar Western intellectual mass, are not "the power" – you are hired workers, hired to deliver a preset result. Maybe after developing a certain conscience about yourself and your real status, you might then proceed to talk about how the policymaking really works or how you (general "you") have so little impact on it despite your shiny Ivory Towers and data stuffed brains.

P.S. Btw, case in study. Did Boris answer your letter? Do you plan to write another one to him soon?

dewittbourchier says: June 26, 2019 at 4:35 pm
Thank you for the review professor.

I remember that Roger McDermott wrote that the idea 'hybrid warfare' is alien to Russian defence thinking.

Another thing I think that maybe is missing – a bit adventuresome and without proof from the words of very high ranking policy makers but with some from lower ranking persons – is that perhaps some of our thinking about Russia is us projecting our aggressive and plotting tendencies onto the Russians.

I will not pretend for a second that the Russians are either passive or angelic. However, since as the book you review and others have pointed out a lot of Western concepts are projected onto Russian thinking and actions that don't have much basis in how the Russians actually think, perhaps we also project some of our thinking onto them. In particular with what is happening in Iran and Venezuela, these seem to be actions very much in line with what we accuse the Russians of doing.

Finally, I should also note that I think a huge factor in lowering the quality of Russia experts is exemplified by a Soviet joke "What is the difference between western Russia experts and western China experts? The China experts love China!" I myself was motivated to study Russia for what you might loosely call Military Industrial Complex reasons, but I conceived of the Russians less as an enemy to be feared and loathed and rather a country and people to be studied in its own right, and I also was moved by a profound respect for the people and the Army that saved Europe from the night of fascism.

And as I read people like Herspring and Glantz while comparing them to others such as Anthony Beevor or any number of German officers writing about the Soviet Army, I realized much of the popular history, even taught history – which is what most politicians will be aware of to the extent they are aware of history – was riddled with Patrick Armstrong wrote in THE FIRE BELOW "a series of memes."

To conclude this overly long comment, one example will do. One the one hand the Russians and Russian defense policymakers have a perverse pride in the number of dead of WWII. To both William Odom and Herspring Russian military interviewees said a variation of "the value of human life is not as high in Russia as it is in the West." One the other hand, post-Stalin Soviet Armed Forces doctrine aimed to use firepower and materiel to cut down on casualties as far as possible, and the Soviet Army invested a lot in its medical infrastructure. In the Afghan War the 40th Army was supplied with improved body armour to reduce fatalities. These are not actions consistent with a set of policymakers utterly indifferent or uncaring to human life.

Lyttenburgh says: June 27, 2019 at 2:31 am
"On the one hand the Russians and Russian defense policymakers have a perverse pride in the number of dead of WWII."

We are not. Stop your gratitious Russophobia masquerading as "respect", dewittbourchier.

"On the other hand, post-Stalin Soviet Armed Forces doctrine aimed to use firepower and materiel to cut down on casualties as far as possible, and the Soviet Army invested a lot in its medical infrastructure."

Fucking bullshit in lieu of "Stalin drowned the [racially superior proper European] enemy in [subhuman Asiatic] corpses" narrative. One has just to analyze Red and then Soviet Army battle doctire, after action reports and results of various engagement during the war.

It's just that other countries facing Hitler on their soil (with some rare exceptions) did not have to fight for their survavial as human species, opting for a comfortable civilized occupation instead. Thus idea to sacrifice – continiously – their own people in order for the rest to stay alive had never faced them. E.g. – Soviet Army's Posnan's offensive operation or, even earlier, near complete annihilation of 40-50 "Panthers" taskforce sent to relieve of Ternopol's siege – all with minimal casualties to own side. Or just one phrase – "Kessel von Halbe".

dewittbourchier says: June 27, 2019 at 3:56 pm
My comment as is stands. One of these reasons Khrushchev dismissed Zhukov was that Khrushchev believed Zhukov was too willing to accept casualties in a future war, and Khrushchev wanted a Marshal who would focus more on developing a doctrine designed to minimise casualties as far as possible without compromising the overall operational and strategic effectiveness of the Soviet Armed Forces.

Also I would highly recommend you consider things such as the Ardeatine Massacre and Oradour Sur Glane before you call German occupations civilized. They were anything but, they were deeply traumatic for the occupied countries and in places like France and Italy resistance grew and grew. In both countries rations the Germans gave out were barely above the levels they gave to Poles. This is hardly 'civilised.' It is barbarous.

It just means that what they did in the Soviet Union was so much worse.

[Jun 27, 2019] Some Tulsi Gabbard quotes from the debate

Notable quotes:
"... "[We need] a Commander in Chief [who will stop] these failed interventionist wars of regime change that have cost our country so much in human lives, untold suffering, and trillions of dollars." ..."
"... "Trump Nikki Haley...Mike Pompeo... The people around John Bolton. These people are advocating for strengthening our economy, and if the only way they can do that is by building that economy based on building and selling weapons to countries that are using them to slaughter and murder innocent people, then we need new leaders in this country. The American people deserve better than that." ..."
Jun 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Robert Snefjella , Jun 27, 2019 1:49:39 PM | 26

Some Tulsi Gabbard quotes:

"Sadly, the system in this country is rigged in favor of wealthy elites who have purchased tremendous influence in our government."

"We have to put an end to the culture of selfishness and corruption that allows greedy Wall Street banks and executives to rip off working people without any consequences."

"[We need] a Commander in Chief [who will stop] these failed interventionist wars of regime change that have cost our country so much in human lives, untold suffering, and trillions of dollars."

"Will you stand for the humanity of the Yemeni people? Will you stand against Saudi Arabia's genocidal war? Or will you continue to support this war that has caused 22 million Yemeni people to be in desperate need of humanitarian aid? To cause these 85,000 children to have died from starvation, to have caused the dropping of U.S.-made bombs on innocent civilians, killing tens of thousands of people. This is such an urgent action that must be taken by the United States Congress to assert its authority and end United States support for this genocidal war in Yemen."

"Trump Nikki Haley...Mike Pompeo... The people around John Bolton. These people are advocating for strengthening our economy, and if the only way they can do that is by building that economy based on building and selling weapons to countries that are using them to slaughter and murder innocent people, then we need new leaders in this country. The American people deserve better than that."

Robert Snefjella , Jun 27, 2019 1:53:37 PM | 29
More Tulsi quotes:

"I don't smoke marijuana. I never have... But I believe firmly in every person's freedom to make their own choices, and that people should not be thrown in jail and incarcerated or made into criminals for choosing to smoke marijuana whether it be for medicinal and non-medicinal purposes.

There's no question that this overall war on drugs has not only been a failure, it has created and exacerbated a number of other problems that continue to afflict people in this country..."

Quoted in: For Tulsi Gabbard, Marijuana Sits At Nexus Of Good Policy And Smart Politics, Forbes, nu Tom Angell (7 March 2019)

"We are in a situation today where we, here in the United States and the world, are at a greater risk of nuclear catastrophe than ever before in history.
My commitment in fighting to end these counterproductive regime change wars is based on these experiences and my understanding [of] the cost of war and who pays the price.

Yes, it is our service members. It is our troops. It is our military families. It is the people in these countries, where these wars are waged, whose suffering ends up far worse after we launch these regime change wars... The skepticism, and the questions that I raised, were very specific around incidents that the Trump administration was trying to use as an excuse to launch a U.S. military attack in Syria.

I served in a war in Iraq, a war that was launched based on lies and a war that was launched without evidence. And so the American people were duped... As a soldier, as an American, as a member of Congress, it is my duty and my responsibility to exercise skepticism any time anyone tries to send our service members into harm's way or use our military to go in and start a new war."

Quoted by Kevin Gosztola in CNN Foreign Policy Gatekeepers Vilify Tulsi Gabbard for Her Anti-Intervention Dissent, Mintpress News (13 March 2019)

[Jun 27, 2019] Media And Public Disagree On Tulsi Gabbard's Debate Performance

Notable quotes:
"... Thanks for the posting b about how manipulated the public is by the MSM. ..."
"... Bravo Tulsi ! The msm will hit hard on you, as they will be forced to take the numbers into account. Consider it as stripes... ..."
"... It is interesting how the NYTimes has now gone full in for Warren. They had at least three positive opinion columns for her yesterday, plus a front page spread that could have been written by the Warren campaign itself. This while having many negative Biden pieces, the last few days. The neoliberals really wanted Biden, but see he is unelectable so have gotten behind the next Obama. Looks like Wall Street is expecting a crash and want to make sure they are bailed out and not put in jail again. ..."
"... What do you expect from the Warshington Post. ..."
"... Tulsi served in the Anbar province. She understands the difference between Sunni and Shia which is why she is against war with Iran, Syria, and Libya. She also understands the corrupt nature of the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and speaks out against it. ..."
"... This is a big big NO NO in DC. Saudi Arabia is seen as part of the empire. Al Qaeda and ISIS serve their purpose as shock troops for the US empire. ..."
"... Richard Shultz, a professor of international politics at Tufts who's long been a key national security state intellectual, wrote in 2004 that "A very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist strikes characterized as 'a small price to pay for being a superpower.'" ..."
"... It is pretty clear to me that Tulsi doesn't believe this. This is why she is so hated by the MSM. She is former military and largely believes in military spending and fighting Sunni extremists including distancing the US from their sponsor Saudi Arabia and throwing out the US traitors who also support them. I don't believe in US military spending myself but Tulsi is the only honest person running. The rest of them are all completely corrupt. I do believe she would change US foreign policy for the better. Of course this is why she won't be allowed in office. ..."
"... I forget the exact details, but I remember that in the last election, a TV network was asked why it did not give more coverage to Bernie Sanders. The reply was that Sanders was not a real contender because he had almost no chance of winning. Well that's a self-fulfilling prophecy if it's made by those in control of the media (let's forget for a moment that his own party also conspired against him). ..."
"... It will be interesting to see if Tulsi Gabbard can attract enough support that she cannot be dismissed that easily. Funnily enough, by blocking the more centrist candidates like Sanders, the Democrat leadership has made room for Gabbard who is much more radical (by American standards). ..."
"... her first point was that we are spending enormous amounts of our tax dollars on unnecessary wars. Of course the media wanted instead to hear about what new boondoggle programs they might propose, not something as mundane (and unprofitable for some) as reducing military budget to reduce taxation and free up money for other programs. ..."
"... This morning I saw the clip of Gabbard taking apart Ryan and felt that she did pretty well overall. I'm hopeful that interest in her will grow as I think she is one of very few in Washington who are trustworthy. ..."
"... I am sickened by the neocon chicken hawks, laptop bombardiers, armchair generals and admirals who thank war veterans for their service while glorifying legalized murder and mayhem at the same time. ..."
"... I will eagerly vote for the first candidate to observe that U.S. lawmaking and U.S. elections are hopelessly corrupt and worthless, and can't be used to fix themsleves or any other issue. ..."
"... Maybe you should have a look at Tulsi Gabbards voting record. She is literally one of the very few who constantly votes against military funding. ..."
"... "Tulsi believes the United States would be far better off spending the trillions of dollars wasted in interventionist wars on more pressing domestic issues in America, like infrastructure, college debt, healthcare, etc." ..."
"... When Gabbard is forthright and hits hard with well-informed, well-thought out positions; delivered calmly and with composure; regardless of how far from the mainstream they fall; she scores. This is a boxer who can win. But Gabbard has to resist the temptation to fall in line with political weaseling. ..."
"... I have been watching Gabbard for a long time now. As you mentioned there is no perfect candidate. But she is the lesser evil at this point. The elephant in the room is as usual Israel. Did she sign that pledge when she got into office? How much money has she received from AIPAC. Being a CFR member is a problem as well. Where does she stand with respect to the Palestinians? ..."
"... While I agree with those who state that it is all a sham and that she doesn't have a chance, I still think that she is a test to show the extent to which the yankee populace has been suborned into the structure's propaganda bullshit. ..."
Jun 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

The mainstream media seem to judge the Democratic primary debate last night quite differently than the general public.

Quartz cites multiple polls which show that Tulsi Gabbard won the debate :

[T]wo candidates seemed to pique a lot of interest among US voters, at least when judged by who Americans searched for on Google: New Jersey senator Cory Booker and Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

A poll by the right-leaning Drudge Report also found Gabbard to be the breakout of the debate with 38% of the vote, well ahead of Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren in second place. Gabbard also topped polls by local news sites including NJ.com and the Washington Examiner .

Now contrast that with the mainstream media.

The Washington Post discusses winners and losers of the debate and puts Gabbard in the second category:

Gabbard was lost for much of the debate. That may not have been her fault -- she wasn't asked many questions -- ....

Duh!

The New York Times main piece about the debate mentions Gabbard only once - in paragraph 32 of the 45 paragraphs long piece. It does not reveal anything about her actual political position:

There was little discussion of foreign policy until near the end of the debate when two little-known House lawmakers, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Tim Ryan of Ohio, clashed over how aggressively to target the Taliban.

The New York Times also has some 'experts' discussing winners and losers. Gabbard is only mentioned at the very end, and by a Republican pollster, as a potential candidate for Secretary of Defense.

CNN also discusses winners and losers . Gabbard is not mentioned at all.

NBC News ranks the candidates' performance. It puts Gabbard on place 8 and inserts a snide:

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii: Seized an opportunity to highlight her military experience in Afghanistan and her signature anti-intervention foreign policy views, without being tainted by her past sympathetic comments on Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Most of the above media have long avoided to mention Gabbard and to discuss her political positions. It is quite evident that the mainstream media do not like her anti-regime-change views and are afraid of even writing about them.

Tulsi Gabbard's campaign posted a video of her parts of the debate. She received some good applause.

Posted by b on June 27, 2019 at 11:19 AM | Permalink

DG , Jun 27, 2019 11:35:52 AM | 1

"Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii: Seized an opportunity to highlight her military experience in Afghanistan"

Afghanistan or Iraq? I'm confused ...

Mike Maloney , Jun 27, 2019 11:41:30 AM | 2
She humiliated Tim Ryan when he asserted that the Taliban attacked the U.S. on 9/11, pointing out that it was Al Qaeda. Ryan responded that the Taliban protected Al Qaeda. Gabbard then said something to the effect, "Try Saudi Arabia."

I thought it was hypocritical that none of the other candidates thanked Gabbard for her service because you know if it had been some guy who is a Major in the National Guard with a bunch of commendations people would be elbowing each other out of the way to lick his boots.

psychohistorian , Jun 27, 2019 11:42:32 AM | 3
Thanks for the posting b about how manipulated the public is by the MSM.

Better watch it though or you will be accused of trying to influence the US election process.....grin

alain , Jun 27, 2019 12:03:06 PM | 4
Bravo Tulsi ! The msm will hit hard on you, as they will be forced to take the numbers into account. Consider it as stripes...
Stever , Jun 27, 2019 12:07:32 PM | 5
Tulsi - "You know who is protecting al-Qaeda right now? It's Saudi Arabia"

MSNBC time given to each candidate:
#1 Booker: 9.68 minutes
#3 Warren: 8.35 minutes
#7 Gabbard: 5.35 minutes

Tulsi was the only candidate to get a negative question directed at her, though she handled it very well.

MSDNC also framed a trick question who is for the elimination of ALL private healthcare. Tulsi didn't raise her hand because she is for private insurance for supplemental surgery such as plastic surgery, like Bernie. Tulsi and Bernie are the only ones for true Medicare for All. Warren raised her hand but previously has stated she would be for something like combining a public option and medicare for all, so she is now for cosmetic elective plastic surgery being covered under Medicare for All?

It is interesting how the NYTimes has now gone full in for Warren. They had at least three positive opinion columns for her yesterday, plus a front page spread that could have been written by the Warren campaign itself. This while having many negative Biden pieces, the last few days. The neoliberals really wanted Biden, but see he is unelectable so have gotten behind the next Obama. Looks like Wall Street is expecting a crash and want to make sure they are bailed out and not put in jail again.

--

Tulsi served two tours of duty in the Middle East (Iraq / Kuwait)

willie , Jun 27, 2019 12:18:20 PM | 7
In France main newspaper le Figaro, their Washington correspondent said it was Warren who won the debate, and he only mentiones Tulsi Gabbard once, she stood out because of her red vest, he wrote, nothing about content. So there you are.
Capn Mike , Jun 27, 2019 12:22:42 PM | 8
We've seen this before in the Ron Paul campaigns. Same ol'. (sigh)
Jackrabbit , Jun 27, 2019 12:27:59 PM | 9
Tulsi is against "regime change war" which she defines as essentially wars that USA lose. If Tulsi were a serious anti-war candidate, she would be talking about significant reductions in the military budget. She's not.

Tulsi has drunk the Kool-Aid about Russian interference in US elections. Her nominally anti-war stance helps her to "sell" neo-McCarthyism to those that think her anti-regime change war is "courageous".

Furthermore, she is very passive and "reasonable" about her views, making it easy for MSM to ignore her because every candidate will say that they are for peace and against dumb wars.

<> <> <> <> <>

Anyone looking to any duopoly candidate for salvation is deluded.

bjd , Jun 27, 2019 12:28:17 PM | 10
What do you expect from the Warshington Post.
Cesare , Jun 27, 2019 12:42:04 PM | 11
This blog is now Russian interference promoting isolationist leftism. I have already contacted PropOrNot. /s
notlurking , Jun 27, 2019 12:55:42 PM | 12
Tulsi the real deal Gabbard.....you go girl...
Zachary Smith , Jun 27, 2019 12:57:22 PM | 13
@ Stever | Jun 27, 2019 12:07:32 PM #5

What Went Down On Night One Of The First Democratic Debates

At this link is a breakdown of the talking time of all concerned. Notice one of the moderators hogged the microphone, and ended up in 4th place.

Noirette , Jun 27, 2019 1:00:57 PM | 14
Tulsi Gabbard is allowed some brief MSM exposure. To demonstrate that plurality of opinion is alive and well and going strong - toot toot! rah rah! - in the Dem party. A show, a charade. She may be quite genuine and believe what she states, which seems like common sense, ok. And she is good at it. Her opinions - tagged with Xtreme hopiness - will be shown to be inconguent with the majority, etc.

In any case she can't win the nomination, she is an 'actor extra' on the fringes. From her promo site:

In this new century, everyone has clean water to drink, clean air to breathe and access to nourishing food; everyone receives the medical care they need, has a roof over their head, receives the education they need and is able to find good paying, fulfilling work. People have financial security and don't have to worry about making ends meet in their old age.

Our children, and children for generations to come, never worry again about nuclear war and no parent has to wonder where they will hide their children when the missiles strike. Our economy is not dependent on war, but is driven instead by innovation, green technology and renewable industries.

https://www.tulsi2020.com/vision

Hmm. There are no pol. proposals whatsoever, please read it. An EXtreme version of hopi-changi.

Zachary Smith , Jun 27, 2019 1:01:12 PM | 15
@ Jackrabbit | Jun 27, 2019 12:27:59 PM #9
If Tulsi were a serious anti-war candidate, she would be talking about significant reductions in the military budget. She's not.

Fair enough. So who is a better choice in that regard?

goldhoarder , Jun 27, 2019 1:05:17 PM | 16
Tulsi served in the Anbar province. She understands the difference between Sunni and Shia which is why she is against war with Iran, Syria, and Libya. She also understands the corrupt nature of the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and speaks out against it.

This is a big big NO NO in DC. Saudi Arabia is seen as part of the empire. Al Qaeda and ISIS serve their purpose as shock troops for the US empire.

If a few buildings have to come down and a few thousand people killed that is a small price to pay for the US being a global hegemonic empire... from counterpunch... Richard Shultz, a professor of international politics at Tufts who's long been a key national security state intellectual, wrote in 2004 that "A very senior [Special Operations Forces] officer who had served on the Joint Staff in the 1990s told me that more than once he heard terrorist strikes characterized as 'a small price to pay for being a superpower.'"

It is pretty clear to me that Tulsi doesn't believe this. This is why she is so hated by the MSM. She is former military and largely believes in military spending and fighting Sunni extremists including distancing the US from their sponsor Saudi Arabia and throwing out the US traitors who also support them. I don't believe in US military spending myself but Tulsi is the only honest person running. The rest of them are all completely corrupt. I do believe she would change US foreign policy for the better. Of course this is why she won't be allowed in office.

Brendan , Jun 27, 2019 1:05:53 PM | 17
I forget the exact details, but I remember that in the last election, a TV network was asked why it did not give more coverage to Bernie Sanders. The reply was that Sanders was not a real contender because he had almost no chance of winning. Well that's a self-fulfilling prophecy if it's made by those in control of the media (let's forget for a moment that his own party also conspired against him).

It will be interesting to see if Tulsi Gabbard can attract enough support that she cannot be dismissed that easily. Funnily enough, by blocking the more centrist candidates like Sanders, the Democrat leadership has made room for Gabbard who is much more radical (by American standards).

jared , Jun 27, 2019 1:10:13 PM | 18
I cringed when Tulsi launched into patriotic spiel about her service and could not bear to watch as they went on to over-look her.

But then I realized that she had carefully considered the possibility that she may only be asked one question and that that if there was one point to make that that was it - she unlike most of the others has been willing to put herself at risk do do what she thought was the right thing, serving her country at disadvantage to herself (though there may have been some politics in it, but never mind) as opposed to say "pocahontes" lady for example. She's pretty sharp and would represent us well I think.

jared , Jun 27, 2019 1:14:46 PM | 19
@Posted by: Zachary Smith | Jun 27, 2019 1:01:12 PM | 15

Excellent point Zachary. In the first question they asked her about what she might do to improve the economy for the benefit of the un-rich, her first point was that we are spending enormous amounts of our tax dollars on unnecessary wars. Of course the media wanted instead to hear about what new boondoggle programs they might propose, not something as mundane (and unprofitable for some) as reducing military budget to reduce taxation and free up money for other programs.

SlapHappy , Jun 27, 2019 1:19:55 PM | 20
We're not allowed to consider candidates who would endeavor to make things better for the majority at the expense of the minority, which is why Tulsi Gabbard will never be allowed to the the nominee, regardless of how much her policy positions would resonate with voters were they to actually be exposed to them.
Virgile , Jun 27, 2019 1:27:56 PM | 21
The democrats are as as polluted as the republicans. They refuse to see that Warren is far too hysterical to have any chance in a face to face with Trump while Tulsi Gabbard will knock him Trump off. The dems have been stupid enough to support Clinton that everybody disliked, now they will redo the same mistake and lose again
Left I on the News , Jun 27, 2019 1:34:17 PM | 22
@ Jackrabbit | Jun 27, 2019 12:27:59 PM #9

If Tulsi were a serious anti-war candidate, she would be talking about significant reductions in the military budget. She's not.

This is absurd. The things she talks about ALL THE TIME is how we're spending trillions on regime change wars and how that money could be better used paying for health care, education, the environment, etc. That is the entire focus of her campaign. And, by the way, she is the *only* candidate to speak out against sanctions on Venezuela (and one of maybe two or three to speak out against the US coup), saying that Venezuelans should determine their own future without outside interference.

michael , Jun 27, 2019 1:44:28 PM | 23
My first take on Tulsi's performance (the first hour) was not positive. I thought her early spiel sounded too pro "soldier" and thus pro military, I was wishing she or someone would dig deeper into the "border crisis" and explain the U.S. role in central America especially in the 1980s, naming names (Abrams, North, etc)and telling the American people that most of the refugees are coming from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, not Mexico.
This morning I saw the clip of Gabbard taking apart Ryan and felt that she did pretty well overall. I'm hopeful that interest in her will grow as I think she is one of very few in Washington who are trustworthy.
Sally Snyder , Jun 27, 2019 1:45:48 PM | 24
America - the best democracy that money can buy.
michael , Jun 27, 2019 1:49:07 PM | 25
Gabbard knows the primary race is rigged yet she stays in it and is remarkably measured as she is both attacked and shunned by the "popular people". If the primary race bogs and she stays in she could gain. I hope she is talking to Sanders.
GeorgeV , Jun 27, 2019 1:49:56 PM | 27
As a Vietnam war veteran I found Tulsi Gabbard's antiwar war stance on target and thoroughly refreshing. The only thing I am dismayed over was the short time she was given to make her point.

I am sickened by the neocon chicken hawks, laptop bombardiers, armchair generals and admirals who thank war veterans for their service while glorifying legalized murder and mayhem at the same time.

There is a nauseating stench about war that cannot be dismissed nor forgotten by anyone who has seen it and experienced it up close. Gabbard knows this from her own tours of duty in Iraq and Kuwait. Nations do not become great by filling up their cemeteries with the corpses of its potentially best and brightest.

PavewayIV , Jun 27, 2019 1:51:25 PM | 28
I will eagerly vote for the first candidate to observe that U.S. lawmaking and U.S. elections are hopelessly corrupt and worthless, and can't be used to fix themsleves or any other issue.

Unfortunately Tulsi Gabbard isn't that person, but she could not be ignored by the Democrat oligarchs if she kept traveling and talking to foreign leaders, especially 'enemy' ones. I hope she realizes that her 'Evil Assad lover' meeting is a gift that keeps on giving to her. I doubt if I would even recognize her name today if that had never happened.

Can you imagine the heads that would explode if she went to China or Russia? Or went to North and South Korea? And [sigh] Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel? Venezuela? She doesn't have to do ANYTHING there. Just have a nice cup of tea with the leader and/or evil dictator and listen for about half-an-hour, and then leave. Then come back and tell the NYT and WaPo that she had a MOST interesting conversation with the leader but she would prefer not to discuss details with the press. She would get instant 24x7 hate coverage by the MSM. Even Trump would have to tweet about her.

Sometimes you just have to go guerilla in order to take on the 800 lb. swamp gorilla.

Russ , Jun 27, 2019 1:54:56 PM | 30
Posted by: Zachary Smith | Jun 27, 2019 1:01:12 PM | 15

"Fair enough. So who is a better choice in that regard?"

There you go again. The universe doesn't owe you an acceptable choice, and in these fake elections you'll never get one.

stevelaudig , Jun 27, 2019 2:03:27 PM | 31
How would a media owned by munitions manufacturers behave any differently to someone whose position threatens them making money off death and destruction? The 'national' media is owned by the war industry, nothing more, nothing less.
D , Jun 27, 2019 2:04:07 PM | 32
@Jackrabbit #9
If Tulsi were a serious anti-war candidate, she would be talking about significant reductions in the military budget. She's not.

Maybe you should have a look at Tulsi Gabbards voting record. She is literally one of the very few who constantly votes against military funding.

https://votesmart.org/candidate/key-votes/129306/tulsi-gabbard/22/defense →

ADKC , Jun 27, 2019 2:15:34 PM | 33
USA Today had the winners as:

Julian Castro, repeal of the federal law that makes "illegal entry"

Amy Klobuchar bashed Trump for saying he would bring down drug prices, something she said the president has yet to do. "That's what we call at home all foam and no beer," Klobuchar said.

Tulsi Gabbard, During a heated exchanged with Ryan, Gabbard pointed out that the Taliban did not attack the World Trade Center on 9/11. "That's why I and other people joined the military," she continued, "to go after Al Qaeda. Not the Taliban."

...and the losers, as:

Elizabeth Warren, seemed to disappear in the second half of the debate.

Tim Ryan, ran into Tulsi Gabbard

Beto O'Rourke, lacked substance in his answers.

----

Listened to the debate, too many issues that just allowed posturing without needing a real policy response.

I like the part where Tulsi said that we can't say to the parents of the two US service-men that had just been killed by the Taliban that we should just stay engaged, we need to bring the troops home and, instead, spend the money on building up America.

-----

What is the biggest geo-politic threat facing America (framed as a specific foreign policy question):

Delaney = China & Nuclear Weapons (no cheer)
Inslee = Donald Trump (biggest cheer)
Gabbard = Greatest risk of Nuclear War than ever before (no cheer)
Klobuchar = China & Iran (no cheer)
O'Rourke = Climate Change (modest cheer)
Warren = Climate Change (no cheer)
Booker = Nuclear proliferation & Climate Change (no cheer)
Castro = China & Climate Change (no cheer)
Ryan = China (half-hearted attempted applause)
De Blasio = Russia (2nd biggest cheer)

I think, Klobuchar noticed the response De Basio got and started to bash Russia later in the debate.

-----

Closing statements:

-----

I think Delaney and Ryan are toast. Unfortunately, De Blasio could go far on the anti-Russia dog whistle.

-----

Jackrabbit has a point about what can you expect from a single person being elected.

But he is wrong about Tulsi Gabbard's policy on military spending:

"Tulsi believes the United States would be far better off spending the trillions of dollars wasted in interventionist wars on more pressing domestic issues in America, like infrastructure, college debt, healthcare, etc."

The US is engaged in more conflicts than at any time since the end of WWII, at the same time its military is beginning to fail, and its economy is on a precipice. There is no real political movement anywhere in the US that is effectively addressing these issues.

I don't see Americans organising to take control of their government, to stop the wars or anything like that.

The only hope that American's have is to send a message that the wars have got to stop, to vote for a candidate that is committed and best able to stop those wars, and for those voters to hold that candidate to account.

The only candidate that fits that bill is Tulsi Gabbard.

If you wish to opt-out, then organise, rise up and take control.....ehh, what's that?....I thought not!

If all you are going to do is watch the TV, eat chips, drink beer and moan, then the very least thing that you can do is vote for Tulsi Gabbard!

Trailer Trash , Jun 27, 2019 2:23:01 PM | 35
More Breadless Circus.

Tulsi Gabbard volunteered to go kill brown people on the other side of the world. If she renounces her service to the Empire and regrets her part in mass murder, that would get my attention.

But it doesn't matter. If she doesn't play ball she will get the Dennis Kucinich treatment. Anybody remember him, or has he fallen down the memory hole? He loudly opposed Uncle Sam's foreign policy and even introduced an impeachment bill against W Bush after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Empire struck back by re-drawing congressional districts. That forced him to run against another Dummycrat congressional incumbent in the primary, and he lost. All politicians are required to get with the program; they are either co-opted or shoved out.

The only exception I can think of is Eleanor Holmes Norton, the non-voting delegate in Congress who represents the District of Columbia. The establishment can afford to ignore her because her vote doesn't count, just like all the other D.C. residents.

"If voting counting, they wouldn't let us do it."

bjd , Jun 27, 2019 2:40:57 PM | 40
The thirty-odd reactions here to Tulsi Gabbard are a perfect example of how & why the left is so hopelessly fragmented. People, for the umptieth time, it is impossible to ever find 100 point zero zero zero percent overlap or coverage with any candidate for any office, ever. But that fact does not justify throwing them all at the stake. You are burning to ashes your own chances of ever seeing a society that even remotely resembles your ideals.
Trailer Trash , Jun 27, 2019 2:47:36 PM | 42
Gotta love living in a Dollar Democracy where one dollar = one vote. Voting only legitimizes an illegitimate regime. "None of the above" would be an interesting ballot option, and about as realistic as retiring at age 55, which we were promised decades ago.
Linda Hagge , Jun 27, 2019 3:14:41 PM | 48
Hey, Trailer Trash. She was a medic. She did not volunteer to go kill people. Also, to the claim that she has no policy positions: good grief, are you capable of navigating a site? She has tons of clearly worded policy positions.

Finally, the VoteSmart site is clearly compromised if that's what it is saying about Gabbard. Her positions are vastly different from those stated.

Trailer Trash , Jun 27, 2019 3:27:40 PM | 53
>She was a medic. She did not volunteer to go kill people.
> Posted by: Linda Hagge | Jun 27, 2019 3:14:41 PM | 48

The entire purpose of US War Department is to kill people and break things when vassals refuse to obey. Everybody who signs up understands and accepts that basic fact. My nephew actually stated to me that he signed up for the Marines so he could kill people legally.

People who want to patch up the sick and wounded sign up for Médecins Sans Frontières or similar, not Uncle Sam's mass murder machine.

Rob , Jun 27, 2019 4:03:54 PM | 56
@Virgile (21) If you think that Sen. Warren is "hysterical" and would not have a chance facing off against Trump, then I can only assume that you have not seen her in action. She is incredibly well-informed, quick on her feet and unflappable. She would make Trump look like the clown that he is.
Krollchem , Jun 27, 2019 4:16:37 PM | 59
For more on her laudable opposition to wars of neo-colonial aggression see:

"Tulsi Gabbard Pushes No War Agenda – and the Media Is out to Kill Her Chances"
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/06/06/tulsi-gabbard-pushes-no-war-agenda-and-the-media-is-out-to-kill-her-chances/

IMO, Biden has already been selected by the Democratic party machine. He has the additional advantage of opposing higher taxes on the super rich who will now "invest' in their future. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/06/25/why-biden-is-wrong-about-the-rich/

Biden represents the stay the course elite who get rich from foreign conflicts, just ask his son who was kicked out of the US Navy for his cocaine habit and now is getting rich from the Ukraine coup. https://washingtonsblog.com/2018/11/america-is-one-dollar-one-vote-not-really-one-person-one-vote.html

I recommend that all Americans actually visit a party caucus at the county of district level to see how the party bosses "select" their presidential candidate. It is a sobering but depressing experience.

As for those who are waiting for the perfect leader - remember that such a leader would likely be murdered by those who have money in the game.

lysias , Jun 27, 2019 4:30:39 PM | 60
They can't do to Gabbard what they did to Kucinich (redistrict him out of any chance of keeping his seat), because Hawaii has only two House seats.

By the way, something else Gabbard has notably done is to oppose prosecuting Assange.

paul , Jun 27, 2019 5:06:10 PM | 63
When Gabbard is forthright and hits hard with well-informed, well-thought out positions; delivered calmly and with composure; regardless of how far from the mainstream they fall; she scores. This is a boxer who can win. But Gabbard has to resist the temptation to fall in line with political weaseling.

Politicians are told that they must go where the voters' are, triangulating so as not to offend, trying to cover all the bases, trying to confirm voters' biases (heavily propagandized and managed biases, via media, etc., so that it becomes an easy game for those in on the game): a real leader speaks to where he or she knows that the people need to go, relying on the people to catch up, relying on some kind of faith to keep going when that takes a while to happen.

The forthright and courageous Tulsi Gabbard wins minds and hearts.

I think she should wear less makeup.

Seamus Padraig , Jun 27, 2019 5:14:38 PM | 64
I would without doubt prefer Tulsi over any of the other candidates on that stage, but I still don't know how seriously to take her. Sure, she talks a good game about ending régime-change wars, but she also seems to think that the 'War on Terra' (as Pepe Escobar used to call it) is an actual thing, when in fact, it's just a big psy-op . We all know that 9/11 was a false-flag that was staged to justify the serial destruction of all the mid-east countries that refuse to bow down before Tel Aviv and Washington; and that 'Al Qaeda' is really just a Saudi-funded, CIA-trained dupe-group used either to justify our presence in the ME, or else to directly attack countries like Syria.

Does Tulsi really not know this? If she doesn't, then she's stupid. And if she does and she's choosing to keep quiet about it for some reason, then who's she fooling? The neocons? Or us?

So that's what bothers me about Tulsi. Still, I think she'd be preferable to four more years of Zion Don (though I realize that isn't saying much).

Uncle Jon , Jun 27, 2019 5:15:59 PM | 65
@karlof1 50

I have been watching Gabbard for a long time now. As you mentioned there is no perfect candidate. But she is the lesser evil at this point. The elephant in the room is as usual Israel. Did she sign that pledge when she got into office? How much money has she received from AIPAC. Being a CFR member is a problem as well. Where does she stand with respect to the Palestinians?

Once she repeats the line of "Israel has a right to defend itself" nonsense, it's all downhill from there. You cannot make a new foreign policy direction once you signed that pledge. You have to continue with the master plan. Obama was told that, so was Trump. That has been proven and it's not up for debate.

Sadly, I still believe this is all a show for the masses. Nothing will change. The country is doomed and the Empire will take its direction either good or bad, without any inputs from the rest of us.

karlof1 , Jun 27, 2019 5:56:22 PM | 72
On Voting:

Several years ago, we placed on the ballot a referendum to stop Big Timber from indiscriminately using helicopters or other contrivances to spray insecticides onto us, all we own and our natural surround. Big Timber outspent us @10,000:1 and employed the usual campaign of corporate lies to get us to vote against our health and other interests, which included editorials in favor of Big Timber by the leading Oregon newspapers. At least we had the opportunity to vote on the issue. When living in Santa Clara County, California during the 1970s, we had no choice and got sprayed daily with Malathion insecticide to try and destroy drosophila--the common fruit fly--which we all knew was an impossible task and would have lost if put to a vote. We won at the ballot box and preserved our health and that of our communities and the visitors we need to attract to survive in our tourism heavy economy.

The bottom line is voting matters! Arguments to the contrary only serve the interests of the Current Oligarchy. And I grow oh so weary of reading that crap on this site, which makes the people writing such tripe to have the appearance of Trolls!

Don Bacon , Jun 27, 2019 6:11:40 PM | 75
More on Gabbard

Drudge poll shock: Tulsi Gabbard runaway winner of first Democratic debate

Tulsi Gabbard was a surprise breakout in first Democratic debate

Curiosity about Tulsi Gabbard spiked during last night's debate. And it was already simmering leading up to it.

Don Bacon , Jun 27, 2019 6:18:12 PM | 76
sorry, I see my links are a b repeat -- but hey she deserves the headlines
exiled off mainstree , Jun 27, 2019 6:43:32 PM | 83
While I agree with those who state that it is all a sham and that she doesn't have a chance, I still think that she is a test to show the extent to which the yankee populace has been suborned into the structure's propaganda bullshit.

I think that if they do sideline her she should stand as a third party candidate. I also suspect that the more people actually see her and that the more intelligent element will support her. The better she does, the more difficult it will be for the structure to maintain absolute power. After all there is little significant difference between corporate democrats and corporate republicans.

Aloha , Jun 27, 2019 7:02:10 PM | 87
I wanted Tulsi to be genuine but in doing some research I am sharing just a little of what I found: she is a current member of the Counsel on Foreign Relations ...
ADKC , Jun 27, 2019 7:38:20 PM | 94
Aloha @87

If you want to know about and understand US foreign policy or have any hope of influencing that policy you need to take an interest in the Council of Foreign Affairs.

I have frequently read and sought out articles on their journal, I would imagine b and many commentators here have done so.

If you want a President that can deal with foreign affairs then they have to engage with the foreign affairs establishment and do it before you become President otherwise you don't stand a chance.

Tulsi Gabbard Answers To Her CFR (Council On Foreign Relations) Association/Concerns

Uncle Jon , Jun 27, 2019 8:05:35 PM | 98
From Jerusalem Post:

"She stressed that she co-sponsored a House resolution reaffirming US commitment to "a negotiated settlement leading to a sustainable two-state solution that re-affirms Israel's right to exist as a democratic, Jewish state and establishes a demilitarized democratic Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace and security."

That resolution also reaffirmed the US commitment to Israel and the US policy of vetoing one-sided or anti-Israel UN Security Council resolutions, and condemned boycott and divestment campaigns that target Israel."

Although she has condemned settlement activity, but sponsoring a bill to condemn BDS is a nonstarter in my book. Too bad.

[Jun 27, 2019] Neoliberal MSM try to denigrate Tulsi success in the first Democratic debate

Notable quotes:
"... I thought she would stand out from the field as she is the only candidate who seems to GENUINELY think our "interventionist" foreign policy is madness, and beyond counterproductive. ..."
"... Now Ron Paul once stood out from the field in presidential debates, and also won all of these Drudge Report polls. At some point, the Powers that Be decided enough with that and succeeded in re-labeling him a kook, racist, pacifist, Russia lover, isolationist and traitor. ..."
Jun 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Of course, the left immediately jumped, blaming the Russians for Gabbard's surge in search interest...

Finally, in a post-debate spin-room exchange with Breitbart News editor-at-large Joel Pollak, Gabbard explained why she is "the most qualified" to become commander-in-chief...

"Of all the candidates who are running for president, I'm the one who is most qualified to fulfill that responsibility to walk into the Oval Office and serve as commander-in-chief.

And I think you heard tonight some of the reasons why those who lack the experience, lack the understanding, and conviction would, unfortunately, put our country in a place where we'd end up waging more wars, costing us more lives and tax-payer dollars .

This is why I'm running for president, to be that person, to be that change in our foreign policy and those regime-change wars, new cold wars nuclear arms races and invest our precious dollars into serving the needs of our people. "

Give Me Some Truth , 1 minute ago link

Tulsi is off to a great start. Good deal, Lucile!

I thought she would stand out from the field as she is the only candidate who seems to GENUINELY think our "interventionist" foreign policy is madness, and beyond counterproductive.

She also seems to not be backing down from her positions and appears capable of defending her position in easy-to-understand and grasp sentences.

Now Ron Paul once stood out from the field in presidential debates, and also won all of these Drudge Report polls. At some point, the Powers that Be decided enough with that and succeeded in re-labeling him a kook, racist, pacifist, Russia lover, isolationist and traitor.

So Tulsi better be ready.

Animal Mother , 4 minutes ago link

The Most Qualified to be Prezzy would be the first of these cockbags to admit that Obobo weaponized the government against his opponents. But none of them will. And by ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the room, they ALL prove that none of them are even close to "qualified" to lead anything.

[Jun 27, 2019] 2020 Democrats Must Address Our Addiction to Military Spending by Katrina vanden Heuvel

Notable quotes:
"... This month, the House Armed Services Committee advanced a $733 billion defense budget on a mostly party-line vote ..."
Jun 25, 2019 | www.thenation.com
As they take the stage for the first Democratic debates of the 2020 presidential campaign, the 20 participating candidates should be ready for one frequently asked question: How will you pay for it? Democrats often pledge to finance their most ambitious plans -- Medicare for All, debt-free college, a Green New Deal -- with tax increases on the wealthy and corporations. That is both sensible and fair. But candidates hoping to distinguish themselves in the limited time they will be allotted should also consider taking a stand against the United States' bloated defense budget.

This month, the House Armed Services Committee advanced a $733 billion defense budget on a mostly party-line vote. According to Defense News , the lack of Republican support for the bill illustrated "the stark divide in defense policy between the two parties." Yet that divide is far narrower than you might think. The bill's price tag is just $17 billion less than the $750 billion that President Trump requested ; it still was, as Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) boasted, the "largest" defense budget in history. There remains a near-universal commitment in both parties to massive defense spending -- a case of Washington bipartisanship that the country would be better off without.

A timely new report from the Center for International Policy's Sustainable Defense Task Force offers an alternative path forward. In the report, "A Sustainable Defense: More Security, Less Spending," the nonpartisan group of military and budget experts outlines a strategy that it says would save $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years without harming national-security interests. In fact, through a sober reassessment of the biggest threats to the United States in the 21st century, including climate change and cyberattacks, the proposal would keep the country safer than an outdated approach that relies on perpetual spending increases.

Read the full text of Katrina's column here .

[Jun 27, 2019] The Real Winner Of Last Night's Democratic Debate

One more century of warfare like the 20th century, and the USA might be bankrupt
Notable quotes:
"... So her sell point of getting rid USA from useless wars off shore seems on pint but we all know that ain't gonna realized except takes a hike in her time, if she got a chance of course ..."
"... She can talk to her heart's content, but American forces won't go home as long as dollar is the world's favourite currency. ..."
"... If Gabbard can stay with the brain-dead false narrative that 'Crazed Arabs' took down the towers and building 7 in perfect free fall without taking months to plant and wire the bombs, then maybe the Zio-Cons may let her live. ..."
Jun 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

While it would appear that the mainstream media has crowned Senator Elizabeth Warren the winner of last night's first Democratic primary debate, on a more quantitative and objective level, it would seem there was another female candidate that stood out to the American audience.

Before the debate, Warren was indeed the 'most-searched' Democratic candidate on Google...

But as the debate began and the clown-show escalated, one candidate dominated the search...

As Fox News reports, Tulsi Gabbard, an Army National Guard veteran who served in Iraq, grabbed the attention of the viewers every time she spoke about foreign policy and the military.

During the debate, she called for scaling back of U.S. military presence abroad and accused "this president and his chicken hawk cabinet have led us to the brink of war with Iran."

Gabbard's military experience gave her authority in a harsh exchange with Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who said the U.S. must maintain forces in Afghanistan to ensure the Taliban is kept in check.

"When we weren't in there, they started flying planes into our buildings," Ryan said.

"The Taliban didn't attack us on 9/11, Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11," Gabbard replied.

The data show that the moment that generated the most search traffic for Gabbard was when she was making her closing argument .

As @Abu_Faris noted so succinctly :

"Assuming the Google "trend" isn't a manifestation of their algorithms then it appears that most adults are interested in a calm, stoic, but non-clown like candidate"

africoman , 7 minutes ago link

Tulsi got some agenda correct 90% others 10% among 99 problems, you can't compromise one after another nor give away your gun right for some hotchpotch noises

They promise big and bigger in campaign times yes?

So her sell point of getting rid USA from useless wars off shore seems on pint but we all know that ain't gonna realized except takes a hike in her time, if she got a chance of course

Carey Wedler On Tulsi Gabbard's Hope And Change

Voting is where mericans got screwed, in fact all

East Indian , 12 minutes ago link

She can talk to her heart's content, but American forces won't go home as long as dollar is the world's favourite currency.

moman , 13 minutes ago link

If Gabbard can stay with the brain-dead false narrative that 'Crazed Arabs' took down the towers and building 7 in perfect free fall without taking months to plant and wire the bombs, then maybe the Zio-Cons may let her live.

Her mentioning the Saudis, (Israels secret partner) however, was a little risky, unless the Zionists are getting ready to throw the Saudis under the bus?

Quyatburp , 8 minutes ago link

While I fully agree with the idea, heck, FACT, that it wasn't a bunch of Bedouins in street clothes that took down the towers it also has to be taken into account that the CIA uses proxies all the time. I upvoted you, though. The 9/11 story is a truly fascinating one.

moman , 2 minutes ago link

the CIA uses proxies all the time' ....... agree, but nothing hit building '7' the 47 story Solomon building , so who were the proxies for that free fall controlled demo?

[Jun 27, 2019] The Hijacking of American Nationalism

Notable quotes:
"... Just recently, John Judis, undisguisedly a political commentator of the Left, made an important argument in favor of nationalism. "Nationalist sentiment," he writes in his book The Nationalist Revival , "is an essential ingredient of a democracy, which is based on the assumptions of a common identity, and of a welfare state, which is based on the acceptance by citizens of their financial responsibility for people whom they may not know at all, and who may have widely different backgrounds from theirs." ..."
"... Of course, nationalism can be "the basis of social generosity or of bigoted exclusion." It is therefore important, according to Judis, that enlightened state leaders push nationalism in the proper direction. ..."
"... The presence of Daniel Pipes and other neoconservatives at this gathering also suggests that at least some of the panelists will be offering two approved concepts of nationalism: propositional nationhood for the United States and solidarity with Israeli nationalism. In both cases, however, the nationalism being advocated ends up tied to an aggressive foreign policy. ..."
"... The nationalist label has now fallen into the hands of the neocon establishment, which has managed to identify it with international meddling and a creedal nation. In other words, it's been appropriated by those who already wielded power. ..."
"... But what makes American nationalism even more unpalatable now than when Robert Nisbet famously denounced it in The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America is its rhetorical availability. It serves different agendas, depending on which power bloc appeals to it. ..."
"... Until recently, nationalism had portentous associations for much of the political class. It signified, rightly or wrongly, ethnocentricity and dislike for outsiders. Now that's all changing. Those in power have tamed the concept and are recycling it for their own purposes. Stay tuned. ..."
Jun 27, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Just recently, John Judis, undisguisedly a political commentator of the Left, made an important argument in favor of nationalism. "Nationalist sentiment," he writes in his book The Nationalist Revival , "is an essential ingredient of a democracy, which is based on the assumptions of a common identity, and of a welfare state, which is based on the acceptance by citizens of their financial responsibility for people whom they may not know at all, and who may have widely different backgrounds from theirs."

Of course, nationalism can be "the basis of social generosity or of bigoted exclusion." It is therefore important, according to Judis, that enlightened state leaders push nationalism in the proper direction.

Judis points out that while "globalism" is a force that nationalists understandably oppose, "internationalism" need not clash with nationalist sentiment. In a op-ed in The New York Times last October, Judis praised his kind of nationalism as being beneficial to a successful and growing welfare state and a happier world. It can also be, he said, a stepping stone that leads beyond itself to international cooperation .

For those who study European socialism, it is clear that Judis is reprising the position of French sociologist Pierre Bordieu , who argued for decades that a socialist regime must create some kind of social glue to hold its subjects together. Judis is now transferring Bordieu's view to the American political scene.

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Now, a conference on "conservative nationalism," which will take place in Washington in July , may be pushing a "nationalism" that is at least as adaptable as Judis's. One featured speaker , Claire Lehmann, the founder of Quillette, will be talking about how nationalism "is the antidote to racism." Presumably the more inclusive the operative term, the less likely will be the Left's attack on those wielding it.

The presence of Daniel Pipes and other neoconservatives at this gathering also suggests that at least some of the panelists will be offering two approved concepts of nationalism: propositional nationhood for the United States and solidarity with Israeli nationalism. In both cases, however, the nationalism being advocated ends up tied to an aggressive foreign policy.

Nationalism, in any case, means different things for different peoples. It doesn't hold the same meaning for Estonians or Hungarians, who belong to ethnic, historic communities, as it does for a pluralistic country with hundreds of millions of people and a constantly expanding immigrant population.

In the latest issue of the Rassemblement National monthly L'Incorrect , Steve Bannon speaks of the natural fit between European nationalism and the nationalist movement that he has been promoting in the United States. Both these ideologies, Bannon says, derive from the same national principle. In an interview with me in the same publication, I treated Bannon's contention as wishful thinking. The United States has become too diverse and too culturally disunited to fit a traditional national model. Our use of nationalism will likely lead to something less quaint and less organic but more explosive than what comes from the Baltic nationalists or Viktor Orbán.

The Nationalist Delusion The New Nationalism Won't Save the Right

The nationalist label has now fallen into the hands of the neocon establishment, which has managed to identify it with international meddling and a creedal nation. In other words, it's been appropriated by those who already wielded power.

The same protean label is also likely to wander onto the Left, given the nontraditional and very pliable nature of our "nationalism." John Judis may in fact be the harbinger of a new American Left that celebrates nationalism, provided that Left is allowed to define that term for the rest of us. Indeed, it may be possible to frame LGBT rights and reparations for blacks as "nationalist" issues. Nationalism also need not hinder us from letting in lots of undocumented immigrants who are only trying to join our team and learn our values.

Men and women of the interwar Right, down to such later figures as Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, were understandably critical of American nationalism. They identified it with social engineering and centralized government and preferred localism and regionalism to any justification for an expansionist administrative state.

But what makes American nationalism even more unpalatable now than when Robert Nisbet famously denounced it in The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America is its rhetorical availability. It serves different agendas, depending on which power bloc appeals to it. The hope once entertained by Pat Buchanan that a nationalist cause would help slow down immigration and preserve America's traditional moral and cultural identity has not worked out as planned. Those who control our politics and culture determine the meaning of terms, which is as true of nationalism as it is of other political labels like "freedom" and "equality."

Until recently, nationalism had portentous associations for much of the political class. It signified, rightly or wrongly, ethnocentricity and dislike for outsiders. Now that's all changing. Those in power have tamed the concept and are recycling it for their own purposes. Stay tuned.

Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents .

[Jun 27, 2019] Crisis of neoliberalism hits the US military industrial complex by Matt Stoller and Lucas Kunce

Notable quotes:
"... This story of lost American leadership and production is not unique. In fact, the destruction of America's once vibrant military and commercial industrial capacity in many sectors has become the single biggest unacknowledged threat to our national security. Because of public policies focused on finance instead of production, the United States increasingly cannot produce or maintain vital systems upon which our economy, our military, and our allies rely. Huawei is just a particularly prominent example. ..."
"... Higher budgets would seem to make sense. According to the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the United States is shifting away from armed conflicts in the Middle East to "great power" competition with China and Russia, which have technological parity in many areas with the United States. As part of his case for higher budgets, Mattis told Congress that "our military remains capable, but our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare -- air, land, sea, space, and cyber." ..."
"... And yet, the U.S. military budget, even at stalled levels, is still larger than the next nine countries' budgets combined. So there's a second natural follow-up question: is the defense budget the primary reason our military advantage is slipping away, or is it something deeper? ..."
"... The loss of manufacturing capacity has been devastating for American research capacity. "Innovation doesn't just hover above the Great Plains," Mottl said. "It is built on steady incremental changes and knowledge learned out of basic manufacturing." Telecommunications equipment is dual use, meaning it can be used for both commercial and military purposes. The loss of an industrial base in telecom equipment meant that the American national security apparatus lost military capacity. ..."
"... "The middle-class Americans who did the manufacturing work, all that capability, machine tools, knowledge, it just became worthless, driven by the stock price," he said. "The national ability to produce is a national treasure. If you can't produce you won't consume, and you can't defend yourself." ..."
"... In the commercial sector, rebuilding the industrial base will require an aggressive national mobilization strategy. This means aggressive investment by government to rebuild manufacturing capacity, selective tariffs to protect against Chinese or foreign predation, regulation to stop financial predation by Wall Street, and anti-monopoly enforcement to block the exploitation of market power. ..."
Jun 27, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Wall Street's short-term incentives have decimated our defense industrial base and undermined our national security.

Early this year, U.S. authorities filed criminal charges -- including bank fraud, obstruction of justice, and theft of technology -- against the largest maker of telecommunications equipment in the world, a Chinese giant named Huawei. Chinese dominance in telecom equipment has created a crisis among Western espionage agencies, who, fearful of Chinese spying, are attempting to prevent the spread of Huawei equipment worldwide, especially
in the critical 5G next-generation mobile networking space.

In response to the campaign to block the purchase of Huawei equipment, the company has engaged in a public relations offensive. The company's CEO, Ren Zhengfei, portrayed Western fears as an advertisement for its products, which are, he said, "so good that the U.S. government is scared." There's little question the Chinese government is interested in using equipment to spy. What is surprising is Zhengfei is right about the products. Huawei, a relatively new company in the telecom equipment space, has amassed top market share because its equipment -- espionage vulnerabilities aside -- is the best value on the market.

In historical terms, this is a shocking turnaround. Americans invented the telephone business and until recently dominated production and research. But in the last 20 years, every single American producer of key telecommunication equipment sectors is gone. Today, only two European makers -- Ericsson and Nokia -- are left to compete with Huawei and another Chinese competitor, ZTE.

This story of lost American leadership and production is not unique. In fact, the destruction of America's once vibrant military and commercial industrial capacity in many sectors has become the single biggest unacknowledged threat to our national security. Because of public policies focused on finance instead of production, the United States increasingly cannot produce or maintain vital systems upon which our economy, our military, and our allies rely. Huawei is just a particularly prominent example.

When national security specialists consider preparedness, they usually think in terms of the amount of money spent on the Pentagon. One of President Donald Trump's key campaign promises was to aggressively raise the military budget, which he, along with Congress, started doing in 2017. The reaction was instant. "I'm heartened that Congress recognizes the sobering effect of budgetary uncertainty on America's military and on the men and women who provide for our nation's defense," then-defense secretary Jim Mattis said. Budgets have gone up every year since.

Higher budgets would seem to make sense. According to the 2018 National Defense Strategy, the United States is shifting away from armed conflicts in the Middle East to "great power" competition with China and Russia, which have technological parity in many areas with the United States. As part of his case for higher budgets, Mattis told Congress that "our military remains capable, but our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare -- air, land, sea, space, and cyber."

In some cases, our competitive edge has not just been eroded, but is at risk of being -- or already is -- surpassed. The Chinese surge in 5G telecom equipment, which has dual civilian and military uses, is one example. China is making key investments in artificial intelligence, another area of competition. They even seem to be able to mount a rail gun on a naval ship , an important next generation weapons technology that the U.S. Navy has yet to incorporate.

And yet, the U.S. military budget, even at stalled levels, is still larger than the next nine countries' budgets combined. So there's a second natural follow-up question: is the defense budget the primary reason our military advantage is slipping away, or is it something deeper?

Why the Regulators Went Soft on Monopolies The Conservative Case for Antitrust

The story of Huawei, and many others, suggests the latter.

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For over a century, America led the world in producing telecommunications equipment. The American telecom industry, according to Zach Mottl of Atlas Tool Works, a subcontractor in the industry, used to be a "crown jewel of American manufacturing." Mottl's company had been a manufacturing supplier to AT&T and its Bell Labs from the early 1900s until the early 2000s. "The radar system was invented here. The transistor came out of Bell Labs. The laser. I mean all of these high-tech inventions that have both commercial and military applications were funded out of the research," Mottl told TAC . More than just the sexy inventions, there was a domestic industrial sector which could make the equipment. Now, in a strategic coup for our adversaries, that capability is gone.

Yet it wasn't one of those adversaries that killed our telecommunications capacity, but one of our own institutions, Wall Street, and its pressure on executives to make decisions designed to impress financial markets, rather than for the long-term health of their companies. In 1996, AT&T spun off Bell Labs into a telecom equipment company, Lucent Technologies, to take advantage of investors' appetite for an independent player selling high-tech telecom gear after Congress deregulated the telecommuncations space. At the time, it was the biggest initial public offering in history, and became the foundation of a relationship with financial markets that led to its eventual collapse.

The focus on stock price at Lucent was systematic. The stock price was posted daily to encourage everyone to focus on the company's relationship with short-term oriented financial markets. All employees got a small number of "Founder's Grant Share Options," with executives offered much larger slugs of stock to solidify the connection. When Richard McGinn became CEO in 1997, he focused on financial markets.

Lucent began to buy up companies. According to two scholars , "The perceived need to compete for acquisitions became a 'strategic' justification for keeping stock prices high. This in turn demanded meeting or exceeding quarterly revenue and earnings targets, objectives with which Lucent top executives, led by the hard-driving McGinn, became obsessed."

Lucent got even more aggressive. McGinn's subordinate, an executive named Carly Fiorina, juiced returns with a strategy based on lending money to risky startups who would then turn around and buy Lucent equipment. Fiorina collected $65 million in compensation as the stock soared. And then, when the dot-com boom turned to bust, the company, beset by accounting scandals designed to impress shareholders and the financial markets, embarked on massive layoffs. CEO McGinn was among those laid off, but with a $12.5 million severance package -- royal compensation for taking one of America's strategic industrial assets down the road toward total destruction.

In the early 2000s, the telecom equipment market began to recover from the recession. Lucent's new strategy, as Mottl put it, was to seek "margin" by offshoring production to China, continuing layoffs of American workers and hiring abroad. At first, it was the simpler parts of the telecom equipment, the boxes and assembly, but soon contract manufacturers in China were making virtually all of it. American telecom capacity would never return.

Lucent didn't recover its former position. Chinese entrants, subsidized heavily by the Chinese state and using Western technology, underpriced Western companies. American policymakers, unconcerned with industrial capacity, allowed Chinese companies to capture market share despite the predatory subsidies and stolen technology. In 2006, French telecom equipment maker Alcatel bought Lucent, signifying the end of American control of Bell Labs. Today, Huawei, with state backing, dominates the market.

The erosion of much of the American industrial and defense industrial base proceeded like Lucent. First, in the 1980s and 1990s, Wall Street financiers focused on short-term profits, market power, and executive pay-outs over core competencies like research and production, often rolling an industry up into a monopoly producer. Then, in the 2000s, they offshored production to the lowest cost producer. This finance-centric approach opened the door to the Chinese government's ability to strategically pick off industrial capacity by subsidizing its producers. Hand over cash to Wall Street, and China could get the American crown jewels.

The loss of manufacturing capacity has been devastating for American research capacity. "Innovation doesn't just hover above the Great Plains," Mottl said. "It is built on steady incremental changes and knowledge learned out of basic manufacturing." Telecommunications equipment is dual use, meaning it can be used for both commercial and military purposes. The loss of an industrial base in telecom equipment meant that the American national security apparatus lost military capacity.

This loss goes well beyond telecom equipment. Talking to small manufacturers and distributors who operate in the guts of our industrial systems offers a perspective on the danger of this process of financial predation and offshoring. Bill Hickey, who headed his family's metal distributor, processor, and fabricator, has been watching the collapse for decades. Hickey sells to "everyone who uses steel," from truck, car, and agricultural equipment manufacturers to stadiums and the military.

Hickey, like many manufacturers, has watched the rise of China with alarm for decades. "Everyone's upset about the China 2025 plan," he told TAC , referencing the current Chinese plan causing alarm among national security thinkers in Washington. "Well there was a China 2020 plan, 2016 plan, 2012 plan." The United States has, for instance, lost much of its fasteners and casting industries, which are key inputs to virtually every industrial product. It has lost much of its capacity in grain oriented flat-rolled electrical steel, a specialized metal required for highly efficient electrical motors. Aluminum that goes into American aircraft carriers now often comes from China.

Hickey told a story of how the United States is even losing its submarine fleet. He had a conversation with an admiral in charge of the U.S. sub fleet at the commissioning of the USS Illinois , a Virginia-class attack submarine, who complained that the United States was retiring three worn-out boats a year, but could only build one and a half in that time. The Trump military budget has boosted funding to build two a year, but the United States no longer has the capacity to do high quality castings to build any more than that. The supply chain that could support such surge production should be in the commercial world, but it has been offshored to China. "You can't run a really high-end casting business on making three submarines a year," Hickey said. "You just can't do it." This shift happened because Wall Street, or "the LBO (leveraged buy-out) guys" as Hickey put it, bought up manufacturing facilities in the 1990s and moved them to China.

"The middle-class Americans who did the manufacturing work, all that capability, machine tools, knowledge, it just became worthless, driven by the stock price," he said. "The national ability to produce is a national treasure. If you can't produce you won't consume, and you can't defend yourself."

The Loss of the Defense Industrial Base

But it's not just the dual-use commercial manufacturing base that is collapsing. Our policy empowering Wall Street and offshoring has also damaged the more specialized defense base, which directly produces weaponry and equipment for the military.

How pervasive is the loss of such capacity? In September 2018, the Department of Defense released findings of its analysis into its supply chain. The results highlighted how fragile our ability to supply our own military has become.

The report listed dozens of militarily significant items and inputs with only one or two domestic producers, or even none at all. Many production facilities are owned by companies that are financially vulnerable and at high risk of being shut down. Some of the risk comes from limited production capability. Mortar tubes, for example, are made on just one production line, and some Marine aircraft parts are made by just one company -- one which recently filed for bankruptcy.

At risk is everything from chaff to flares to high voltage cable, fittings for ships, valves, key inputs for satellites and missiles, and even material for tents. As Americans no longer work in key industrial fields, the engineering and production skills evaporate as the legacy workforce retires.

Even more unsettling is the reliance on foreign, and often adversarial, manufacturing and supplies. The report found that "China is the single or sole supplier for a number of specialty chemicals used in munitions and missiles . A sudden and catastrophic loss of supply would disrupt DoD missile, satellite, space launch, and other defense manufacturing programs. In many cases, there are no substitutes readily available." Other examples of foreign reliance included circuit boards, night vision systems, batteries, and space sensors.

The story here is similar. When Wall Street targeted the commercial industrial base in the 1990s, the same financial trends shifted the defense industry. Well before any of the more recent conflicts, financial pressure led to a change in focus for many in the defense industry -- from technological engineering to balance sheet engineering. The result is that some of the biggest names in the industry have never created any defense product. Instead of innovating new technology to support our national security, they innovate new ways of creating monopolies to take advantage of it.

A good example is a company called TransDigm. While TransDigm presents itself as a designer and producer of aerospace products, it can more accurately be described as a designer of monopolies. TransDigm began as a private equity firm, a type of investment business, in 1993. Its mission, per its earnings call , is to give "private equity-like returns" to shareholders, returns that are much higher than the stock market or other standard investment vehicles.

It achieves these returns for its shareholders by buying up companies that are sole or single-source suppliers of obscure airplane parts that the government needs, and then increasing prices by as much as eight times the original amount . If the government balks at paying, TransDigm has no qualms daring the military to risk its mission and its crew by not buying the parts. The military, held hostage, often pays the ransom. TransDigm's gross profit margins using this model to gouge the U.S. government are a robust 54.5 percent. To put that into perspective, Boeing and Lockheed's profit margins are listed at 13.6 percent and 10.91 percent. In many ways, TransDigm is like the pharmaceutical company run by Martin Shkreli, which bought rare treatments and then price gouged those who could not do without the product. Earlier this year, TransDigm recently bought the remaining supplier of chaff and one of two suppliers of flares, products identified in the Defense Department's supply chain fragility report.

TransDigm was caught manipulating the parts market by the Department of Defense Inspector General in 2006 , again in 2008 , and finally again this year. It is currently facing yet another investigation by the Government Accountability Office .

Yet, Trandigm's stock price thrives because Wall Street loves monopolies, regardless of who they are taking advantage of. Take this analysis from TheStreet from March 2019, published after the latest Inspector General report and directly citing many of the concerning facts from the report as pure positives for the investor:

The company is now the sole supplier for 80% of the end markets it serves. And 90% of the items in the supply chain are proprietary to TransDigm. In other words, the company is operating a monopoly for parts needed to operate aircraft that will typically be in service for 30 years . Managers are uniquely motivated to increase shareholder value and they have an enviable record, with shares up 2,503% since 2009.

Fleecing the Defense Department is big business. Its executive chairman W. Nicholas Howley, skewered by Democrats and Republicans alike in a May 2019 House Oversight hearing for making up to 4,000 percent excess profit on some parts and stealing from the American taxpayer, received total compensation of over $64 million in 2013 , the fifth most among all CEOs, and over $13 million in 2018 , making him one of the most highly compensated CEOs no one has ever heard of . Shortly after May's hearing, the company agreed to voluntarily return $16 million in overcharges to the Pentagon, but the share price is at near record highs.

L3 Technologies, created in 1997, has taken a different, but also damaging, approach to monopolizing Defense Department contracts. Originally, it sought to become "the Home Depot of the defense industry" by going on an acquisition binge, according to its former CEO Frank Lanza. Today, L3 uses its size, its connections within the government, and its willingness to offer federal employees good-paying jobs at L3, to muscle out competitors and win contracts, even if the competitor has more innovative and better priced products . This practice attracted the ire of two Republican congressmen from North Carolina, Ted Budd and the late Walter Jones, who found in 2017 that L3 succeeds, in part, due to "blatant corruption and obvious disregard of American foreign interest in the name of personal economic profit."

Like TransDigm, this isn't L3's first brush with trouble. It was temporarily suspended from U.S. government contracting for using "extremely sensitive and classified information" from a government system to help its international business interests. It was the subject of a scathing Senate Armed Services Committee investigation for failing to notify the Defense Department that it supplied faulty Chinese counterfeit parts for some of its aircraft displays. And it agreed to pay a $25.6 million settlement to the U.S. government for knowingly providing defective weapon sights for years to soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet, also like TransDigm, L3 has thrived despite its troubles. When the company was granted an open-ended contract to update the Air Force's electronics jamming airplane in 2017, Lieutenant General Arnold Bunch outlined the Air Force's logic at a House Armed Services Subcommittee meeting. L3, he said, is the only company that can do the job. "They have all the tooling, they have all the existing knowledge, and they have the modeling and all the information to do that work," he said.

In other words, because L3 has a monopoly, there was no one else to pick. The system -- a system designed by the financial industry that rewards monopoly and consolidation at the expense of innovation and national security -- essentially made the pick for him. It is no wonder our military capacities are ebbing, despite the large budget outlays -- the money isn't going to defense.

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In fact, in some ways, our own defense budgets are being used against us when potential adversaries use Wall Street to take control of our own Pentagon-developed technologies.

There's no better example than China's takeover of the rare earth metal industry, which is key to both defense and electronics. The issue has frequently made the front page during the recent trade war, but the seldom-discussed background to our dependence on China for rare earths is that, just like with telecom equipment, the United States used to be the world leader in the industry until the financial sector shipped the whole thing to China.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Defense Department invested in the development of a technology to use what are known as rare-earth magnets. The investment was so successful that General Motors engineers, using Pentagon grants, succeeded in creating a rare earth magnet that is now essential for nearly every high-tech piece of military equipment in the U.S. inventory, from smart bombs and fighter jets to lasers and communications devices. The benefit of DARPA's investment wasn't restricted to the military. The magnets make cell phones and modern commercial electronics possible.

China recognized the value of these magnets early on. Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping famously said in 1992 that "The Middle East has oil, China has rare earth," to underscore the importance of a rare earth strategy he adopted for China. Part of that strategy was to take control of the industry by manipulating the motivations of Wall Street.

Two of Xiaoping's sons-in-law approached investment banker Archibald Cox, Jr. in the mid-1990s to use his hedge fund as a front for their companies to buy the U.S. rare-earth magnet enterprise. They were successful, purchasing and then moving the factory, the Indiana jobs, the patents, and the expertise to China. This was not the only big move, as Cox later moved into a $12 million luxury New York residence . The result is remarkably similar to Huawei: the United States has entirely divested of a technology and market it created and dominated just 30 years ago. China has a near-complete monopoly on rare earth elements, and the U.S. military, according to U.S. government studies, is now 100 percent reliant upon China for the resources to produce its advanced weapon systems.

Wall Street's outsized control over defense contracting and industry means that every place a foreign adversary can insert itself into American financial institutions, it can insert itself into our defense industry.

At an Armed Services Committee hearing in 2018, Representative Carol Shea-Porter talked about how constant the conflict between financial concentration and patriotism had been in her six years on the committee. She recounted a CEO once telling her, in response to her concern about the outsourcing of defense industry parts, that he "[has] to answer to stockholders."

Who are these stockholders that CEOs are so compelled to answer to? Oftentimes, China. Jennifer M. Harris , an expert in global markets with experience at the U.S. State Department and the U.S. National Intelligence Council, researched a recent explosion of Chinese strategic investment in American technology companies. She found that China has systematically targeted U.S. greenfield investments, "technology goods (especially semiconductors), R&D networks, and advanced manufacturing."

The trend accelerated, until the recent flare-up of tensions between the United States and China. "China's foreign direct investment (FDI) stock in the U.S. increased some 800% between 2009 and 2015," she wrote. Then, from 2015 to 2017, "Chinese FDI in the U.S. climbed nearly four-fold, reaching roughly $45.6 billion in 2016 , up from just $12.8 billion in 2014."

This investment runs right through Wall Street, the key lobbying group trying to ratchet down Trump's tough negotiating posture with the Chinese. Rather than showing concern about the increasing influence of a foreign power in our commerce and industry, Wall Street banks have repeatedly followed Archie Cox down the path of easy returns.

In 2016, J.P. Morgan Chase agreed to pay a $264 million bribery settlement to the U.S. government for creating a program, called "Sons and Daughters," to gain access to Chinese money by selectively hiring the unqualified offspring of high-ranking Communist Party officials and other Chinese elites. Several other banks are under investigation for similar practices, including Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, who, not coincidentally, hired the son of China's commerce minister. It appears to have worked out for them. In 2017, Goldman Sachs partnered with the Chinese government's sovereign wealth fund to invest $5 billion Chinese government dollars in American industry.

In short, China is becoming a significant shareholder in U.S. industries, and is selectively targeting those with strategic implications. Congresswoman Shea-Porter's discovery that defense industry CEOs aren't able to worry about national security because they "[have] to answer to shareholders" was disturbing enough. But the fact that it potentially translates as CEOs not being able to worry about national security because they have to answer to the Chinese should elevate the issue to the top of our national security discussion. This nexus of China, Wall Street, and our defense industrial base may be the answer to why our military advantage is ebbing. Even when American ingenuity can thrive, too often the fruits go to the Chinese.

In short, the financial industry, with its emphasis on short-term profit and monopoly , and its willingness to ignore national security for profit, has warped our very ability to defend ourselves.

How Did We Get Here?

Believe it or not, America has been here before. In the 1920s and 1930s, the American defense industrial base was being similarly manipulated by domestic financiers for their own purposes, retarding innovation and damaging the nation's ability to defend itself. And American military readiness was ebbing in the midst of an increasingly dangerous world full of rising autocracies.

Today it might be artificial intelligence or drones, but in the 1930s the key military technology was the airplane. And as with much digital technology today, while Americans invented the airplane, many of the fruits went elsewhere. The reason was similar to the problem of Wall Street today. The American aerospace industry in the 1930s was undermined by fights among bankers over who got to profit from associated patent rights.

In 1935, Brigadier General William Mitchell told Congress that the United States didn't have a single plane that could go against a "first-class power." "It is a disgraceful situation and is due," he said, "for one thing, to this pool of patents." The lack of aerospace capacity reflected a broader industrial problem. Monopolists refused to invest in factories to produce enough steel, aluminum, and magnesium for adequate military readiness, for fear of losing control over prices.

New Dealers investigated, and by the time war broke out, the Roosevelt administration was in the midst of a sustained anti-monopoly campaign. The Nazi war machine, like China today, gave added impetus to the problem of monopoly in key technology-heavy industries. In 1941, an assistant attorney general for the antitrust division, Norman Littell, gave a speech to the Indiana State Bar Association about what he called "The German Invasion of American Business."

The Nazis, he argued, used legal techniques, like patent laws, stock ownership, dummy corporations, and cartel arrangements, to extend their power into the United States. "The distinction between bombing a vital plant out of existence from an airplane and preventing that plant from coming into existence in the first place [through cartel arrangements]," he said, "is largely a difference in the amount of noise involved."

Nazis used their American subsidiary corporations to spy on U.S. industrial capacity and steal technology, such as walkie-talkies, intertank and ground-air radio communication systems, and shortwave sets developed by the U.S. Army and Navy. They used patents or cartel arrangements to restrict the production of stainless steel, tungsten-carbide, and fuel injection equipment. According to the U.S. military after the war, I.G. Farben, the Nazi chemical monopoly, had influence over American production of "synthetic gas and oils, dyestuffs, explosives, synthetic rubber ('Buna'), menthol, cellophane, and other products," and sought to keep the United States "entirely dependent" on Germany for certain types of electrical equipment.

The Nazis took advantage of an industrial system that was, like the current one, organized along short-term objectives. But seeing the danger, New Dealers attacked the power of financiers through direct financing of factories, excess profits taxes, and the breaking of the power of the Rockefeller, Dupont, and Mellon empires through bank regulation and antitrust suits. They separated the makers of airplanes from airlines, a sort of Glass Steagall for aerospace. During the war itself, antitrust chief Thurman Arnold, and those he influenced, sought to end international cartels and loosen patent rules in part because they allowed control over American industry by the Nazis.

After the war, the link between global cartels and national security vulnerabilities was a key driver of American trade and military strategy. America pursued globalization, but with two differences from the form we have today. First, strategists sought to prevent the recurrence of global cartels and monopolies. Second, they sought to become industrially intertwined with allies, not rivals. While multinational corporations stretched across the West, they did not locate production or technology development in Moscow or among strategic rivals, as we do today in China.

Domestically, anti-profiteering institutions and rules protected against corruption, especially important when the defense budget comprised a large chunk of overall American research and development. The Defense Department's procurement agency -- the Defense Logistics Agency -- was enormously powerful and oversaw procurement and supply challenges. The Pentagon had the power to force suppliers of sole source products -- contractors that had monopolies -- to reveal cost information to the government. The financial health of defense contractors mattered, but so did value to the taxpayer, a skilled defense industrial workforce, and the ability to deliver quality products to aid in national defense.

A fragmented base of contractors and subcontractors ensured redundancy and competition, and a powerful federal apparatus with thousands of employees with expertise in pricing and negotiation kept prices reasonable. The Defense Department could even take ownership of specialized tooling rights to create competition in monopolistic markets with specialized spare part needs -- which is precisely where TransDigm specializes. This authority and expertise had been carefully cultivated over decades to provide the material necessary to equip American soldiers for World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the first Gulf war.

In the 1980s, while Ronald Reagan allowed Wall Street free rein elsewhere in the economy, he mostly kept Wall Street from going after the defense base. But scholars began debating whether it made sense to have such a large and expensive negotiating apparatus to deal with contractors, or if a more "cooperative" approach should be taken. Business consultants argued that the Pentagon could save money if it would simply be "a better customer, by being less adversarial and more trusting" of defense contractors.

With the end of the Cold War, these arguments found new resonance. Bill Clinton took the philosophical change that Reagan had pushed on the civilian economy, and moved it into the defense base. In 1993, Defense Department official William Perry gathered CEOs of top defense contractors and told them that they would have to merge into larger entities because of reduced Cold War spending. "Consolidate or evaporate," he said at what became known as "The Last Supper" in military lore. Former secretary of the Navy John Lehman noted, "industry leaders took the warning to heart." They reduced the number of prime contractors from 16 to six; subcontractor mergers quadrupled from 1990 to 1998. They also loosened rules on sole source -- i.e. monopoly -- contracts, and slashed the Defense Logistics Agency, resulting in thousands of employees with deep knowledge of defense contracting leaving the public sector.

Contractors increasingly dictated procurement rules. The Clinton administration approved laws changing procurement, which, as the Los Angeles Times put it, got rid of the government's traditional goals of ensuring "fair competition and low prices." They reversed what the New Dealers had done to insulate American military power from financiers.

The administration also pushed Congress to allow foreign imports into American weapons through waivers of the Buy America Act, and demanded procurement officers stop asking for cost data. Mass offshoring took place, and businesses could increase prices radically.

This environment attracted private-equity shops, and swaths of the defense industry shifted their focus from aerospace engineering to balance sheet engineering. From 1993 to 2000, despite dramatic declines in Cold War military spending and declines in the number of workers in the defense industrial base and within the military, defense stocks outperformed the S&P.

Today, the American defense establishment quietly finds itself in the same predicament it did in the 1930s. Despite spending large amounts of money on weapons systems, it often gets substandard equipment. It is dependent for key sources of supply on business arrangements with potentially hostile powers. The problem is so big, so toxic, and so difficult that few lawmakers even want to take it on. But the increasingly obvious danger of Chinese power means we can no longer ignore it.

The Fix

Fortunately, this is fixable. Huawei's predatory pricing success has shown policymakers all over the world what happens when we don't protect our vital industrial capacity. Last year, Congress strengthened the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the committee that reviews foreign investment and mergers. The Trump tariffs have begun forcing a long-overdue conversation across the globe about Chinese steel and aluminum overcapacity, and Democrats like Representative Dan Lipinski are focused on reconstituting domestic manufacturing ability.

Within the defense base itself, every example -- from TransDigm to L3 to Chinese infiltration of American business -- has drawn the attention of members of Congress. Representatives Ted Budd and Paul Cook are Republicans and Representatives Jackie Speier and Ro Khanna are Democrats. They are not alone. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Tim Ryan have joined Khanna's demand for a TransDigm investigation.

Moreover, focus on production is bipartisan. One of the most ardent opponents of consolidation in the 1990s is current presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who in 1996 passed an amendment to block Pentagon subsidies for defense mergers, or what he called "Payoffs for Layoffs." On the other end of the spectrum, Trump has refocused national security and trade officials on the importance of domestic manufacturing.

Defense officials have also become acutely aware of the problem. In a 2015 briefing at the Pentagon, in response to questions about Lockheed's acquisition of Sikorsky, then secretary of defense Ash Carter emphasized the importance of not having "excessive consolidation," including so-called vertical integration, in the defense industry because it is "[not] good for the defense marketplace, and therefore, for the taxpayer and warfighter in the long run." Carter's acquisition chief, Frank Kendall, also noted the "significant policy concerns" posed by the "continuing march toward greater consolidation in the defense industry at the prime contractor level" and the effect it has on innovation.

American policymakers in the 1990s lost the ability to recognize the value of production capacity. Today, many of the problems highlighted here are still seen in isolation, perhaps as instances of corruption or reduced capacity. But the problems -- diminished innovation, marginal quality, higher prices, less redundancy, dependence on overseas supply chains, a lack of defense industry competition, and reduced investment in research and development -- are not independent. They are the result of the financialization of industry and of monopoly. It's time for a new strategic posture, one that puts a premium not just on spending the right amount on military budgets, but also on ensuring that financial actors don't capture what we do spend. We must begin once again to recognize that private industrial capacity is a vital national security asset that we can no longer allow Wall Street to pillage. By seeing the problem in its totality, we can attack the power of finance within the commercial and defense base and restore our national security capacity once again.

There are many levers we can use to reorder our national priorities. The Defense Department, along with its new higher budgets, should have more authority to promote competition, break up defense conglomerates, restrict excess defense contractor profits, empower contracting officers to get cost information, and block private equity takeovers of suppliers. Congress could reinstate the authority of the Defense Department to simply take ownership of specialized tooling rights to create competition in monopolistic markets with specialized spare part needs, a power it once had.

In the commercial sector, rebuilding the industrial base will require an aggressive national mobilization strategy. This means aggressive investment by government to rebuild manufacturing capacity, selective tariffs to protect against Chinese or foreign predation, regulation to stop financial predation by Wall Street, and anti-monopoly enforcement to block the exploitation of market power.

Policymakers must recognize that industrial capacity is a public good and short-term actors on Wall Street have become a serious national security vulnerability. While private businesses are essential to our common defense, the public sector must once again structure how we organize our national defense and protect our defense industrial base from predatory finance. For several decades, Wall Street has been organizing not just the financing of defense contractors, but the capabilities of our very defense posture. That experiment has been a failure. It is time to wake up, before it's too late.

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute. His book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, is due out this fall from Simon & Schuster. Lucas Kunce spent 12 years in the United States Marine Corps, and is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The views presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or its components. This article was supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors.

polistra24 • 13 hours ago

Best article of the century. Gets everything right, in full detail.

But I doubt that the problem is fixable. It could have been fixable if we turned around in 1980, but all the factories and SKILLS are gone now.

kouroi • 15 hours ago
Sobering read. However, it is likely that only a major war will spur legislators and administrators into action. Until then Wall Street will reign and the US administrations will keep threatening countries with sanctions if they buy equipment that prevents the US to conduct an easy bombing campaign on them.
chris chuba kouroi • 8 hours ago
I've heard similar stories about the imminent collapse of the Russian Defense sector, they can't make their own parts, they lack diversity of suppliers, there is a huge brain drain, no customers (somewhat true since we practice extortion).

I'm not dismissing the author, actually quite the opposite and I am agreeing with you. The secret ingredient is an actual sense of danger. The Russians are terrified, we pretend to be terrified but know it's all threat inflation. If we had honest people in Congress proposing targeted budgets for real needs rather than 'freedom of navigation' when we know it's power projection then the fear of God might return to our habits. The author brought up the 20/30's I bet WW2 gave us that fear again.

MontDLaw • 6 hours ago
Dude, your government stopped being able to do anything this complicated somewhere around 1995. Your infrastructure is in shambles and diabetics are dying because of an insulin monopoly that forces them to ration medication. The rope remark resembles you.
soliton • 7 hours ago
No need to worry about L3. They were acquired by Harris, making another monster.
vpurto • 12 hours ago • edited
This is the longest litany about demise of American prowess in technology that I've ever read in TAC so far. The story of destruction of Bell Labs, described in details by Matt Stoller is very accurate: I have been eyewitness to it from 1983 and up to its gruesome end. Carly Fiorina, one of the runners for President in 2016, delivered American icon coup-the-grace. She even justified her claim on presidency on business experience: destruction of another icon of American high-tech – Hewlett-Packard. Alas, there is the most fundamental reason for the current situation in the 21-st century USA, was formulated 100+ years ago by Vladimir Lenin: "For profit capitalists will be eager to sell us rope, with which we'll hung them" .

Would anybody protest today that profit IS the Nature of capitalism ? And more: those who substitute Reality with their wet dreams might be cured by watching Democratic 2020 debates.

soliton vpurto • 6 hours ago
CF pretty much destroyed the best test equipment house in the world to make printers PCs.
Steve Smith • 16 hours ago
Great piece. There are lots of good articles here but not that many that tell something I really didn't already know. Great perspective on the whole China issue. Amazing how sick our financialized economy really is when you look under the hood.

This is excellent information. Hope folks on the Hill are reading this.

Kessler • 11 hours ago
The Wall Street and finance industry depend on US military, long-term this is a disaster, but they care only for short-term profits. Whoever thought that principles of free market apply internationally, where other goverments are free to influence "free trade" in any way they wish, while US goverment will do nothing is an idiot.

[Jun 27, 2019] Consistency in the US Presidents betrayal of their voters is simply remarable

Trump is the same "betrayer in chief" as Obama was. They both are variations of Bush II
Jun 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Josh , Jun 26, 2019 1:54:18 PM | 19
This dude (Trump) has spent more than two years, and a ton of money, trying to pull the undercurrent of dissent in the American population into his camp and under his wing.

In all of his 'fighting with the establishment' he has managed to change exactly nothing and bring exactly nobody to justice. He has gathered the entirety of the Bush/Rumsfeld faction directly into his tent, while miraculously failing to so much as arrest a single member of the Clinton faction. And to top it off he just ordered an armed attack on an independent nation (which failed in spectacular fashion as thr first targeting drone was vaporized while he was watching the livestream). Come on dude.

[Jun 27, 2019] The Myth of Russian Media Influence by Larry C Johnson

The accusation played important role in unleashing neo-McCartyism campaign in the USA. So "The Moor has done his duty. The Moor can go ...."
Notable quotes:
"... Russian information troll farm the Internet Research Agency spent just 0.05 percent as much on Facebook ads as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's campaigns combined in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, yet still reached a massive audience. While there might have been other Russian disinformation groups, the IRA spent $46,000 on pre-election day Facebook ads compared to $81 million spent by Clinton and Trump together, discluding political action committees who could have spent even more than that on the campaigns' behalf. ..."
"... So, the Lilliputian Russians, spending a pittance compared to the Goliaths of the Clinton and Trump campaigns, was the deciding factor in 2016? Bullshit. ..."
"... The pathetic and laughable U.S. intelligence community (aka IC) did not do a state-by-state breakdown of how these various social media campaigns operated in those states that swung the election to Trump. ..."
"... the IC is completely silent on the efforts of other countries, such as China and Israel. ..."
"... I had my own experience with Russian media influence, or the lack of such influence to be more precise. I was interviewed on Russia Today aka RT on March 4, 2017 to comment on Donald Trump's claim that the FBI had wiretapped Trump Towers. During that interview I noted that the Brits, not the FBI, were ones doing electronic surveillance of Trump. And how did the public and the media react to that bomb shell pronouncement by me? Crickets. No reaction. ..."
"... The crazy insistence that Russia grossly interfered in our 2016 election is a canard. Too bad the vast majority of America has bought into this absurd nonsense. Yes, there were groups linked to the Russian government that were pushing stories on social media. ..."
"... I think Iran/Contra was the watershed moment. The CIA became very politicized and the quality of analysis and spy trade craft declined significantly. John Brennan turned the place into a freak show. When you have "Dykes on Bikes" day at CIA Headquarters you know you have lost your way. ..."
"... Not only is the IC community discredited but so should most of the Democratic media operations and campaign advisors. ..."
Jun 27, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Republicans and Democrats, along with almost all of the media, have accepted the lie that the Russians engaged in unprecedented "interference" in the 2016 Presidential election. It is a ridiculous proposition and is based on a presumption rather than actual evidence. The Intel Community said it is true so, by definition, it must be true.

Let's focus on the actual numbers. How much money did the Russians spend? According to Robert Mueller, $1.25 million per month . If you start that money clock in May of 2016, that means those pesky Rookies spent $8.75 million. But let us be generous and add on the previous four months, essentially starting the clock in January 2016 before the first primary votes. That brings the total to $13 million.

Hillary and Donald, by contrast, spent over $81 million on Facebook alone . According to TechCrunch:

Russian information troll farm the Internet Research Agency spent just 0.05 percent as much on Facebook ads as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump's campaigns combined in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, yet still reached a massive audience. While there might have been other Russian disinformation groups, the IRA spent $46,000 on pre-election day Facebook ads compared to $81 million spent by Clinton and Trump together, discluding political action committees who could have spent even more than that on the campaigns' behalf.

Trump and Clinton, when you factor in their various political action committees, spent millions more.

A fuller analysis of the spending on the major social media platforms was provided by Medium.com :

Surprisingly, Clinton's campaign was overall more active on Twitter and on Facebook than Trump's , generating 19 percent more messages (11,475 messages by Clinton to 9,390 by Trump). On Facebook, Clinton generated 500 more messages than Trump. While Trump's tweets seemed to garner more news coverage, Clinton's campaign was actually substantially more active on social media, generating 25 messages a day on average to Trump's 20.

Yet, Trump's social media following was larger than Clinton's . In November 2015, Clinton had 1.7 million followers on Facebook. By Election Day that had grown to 8.4 million, a 394 percent increase. Trump had 4.2 million Followers on Facebook in November 2015. By Election Day, that number jumped to 12.35 million, a 194 percent increase. So, while Clinton saw a greater increase, Trump still had nearly 4 million more followers. . . .

All of this suggests that while Clinton's campaign was overall more active on its social media accounts, it did not receive the same amount of attention and support on social media as compared with Donald Trump. . . .

In the last months of the campaign, generally the focus shifted to voter registration and then get-out-the vote efforts. Social media can be a useful starting place for helping give supporters events and activities to do to be part of the campaign and to help with the effort of winning the election. Although both campaigns, indeed, increased their calls-to-action in the last two months of the campaign, Clinton beat Trump in volume of such messages on Facebook and Twitter, producing a third more call-to-action type messages (See Figure 17). If we only look at Facebook, however, Trump's campaign produced as many call-to-action type message as Clinton in October.

When it came to asking people to vote, the Clinton campaign produced more than twice as many messages asking for people to vote on election day on the two platforms (See Figure 18), but most of that was on Twitter. On Facebook, both campaigns urged people to vote at the same rate, but on Twitter, Clinton's campaign produces three times more appeals for votes than does Trump.

So, the Lilliputian Russians, spending a pittance compared to the Goliaths of the Clinton and Trump campaigns, was the deciding factor in 2016? Bullshit.

The pathetic and laughable U.S. intelligence community (aka IC) did not do a state-by-state breakdown of how these various social media campaigns operated in those states that swung the election to Trump. Nor did the IC look back at the Russian and Soviet Union covert propaganda efforts over the previous 90 years. If you are going to do a comparison you need to have a benchmark. This is what we know for certain--Russia and its predecessor, the USSR, ran comprehensive and continuous information operations in the United States, including computer network operations.

No one can say with any degree of certainty that what Russia did in 2016 was qualitatively and quantitatively different. Also, the IC is completely silent on the efforts of other countries, such as China and Israel. Nope, just accept on faith that the Russians committed an attack worse than Pearl Harbor.

I had my own experience with Russian media influence, or the lack of such influence to be more precise. I was interviewed on Russia Today aka RT on March 4, 2017 to comment on Donald Trump's claim that the FBI had wiretapped Trump Towers. During that interview I noted that the Brits, not the FBI, were ones doing electronic surveillance of Trump. And how did the public and the media react to that bomb shell pronouncement by me? Crickets. No reaction.

The crazy insistence that Russia grossly interfered in our 2016 election is a canard. Too bad the vast majority of America has bought into this absurd nonsense. Yes, there were groups linked to the Russian government that were pushing stories on social media. The Chinese did the same thing. So did the Israelis and the Brits. I am sure there are other countries who were pushing their own agenda as well. But that is a truth American is too damn lazy to grasp.

Posted at 08:04 AM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink

joanna , 27 June 2019 at 08:21 AM

The pathetic and laughable U.S. intelligence community (aka IC)

yes, when exactly did they get laughable? After you left with a solid pension, I would assume, or a long time before?

Larry Johnson , 27 June 2019 at 09:57 AM
Well, you're dead ass wrong. Shocker. I did not "leave" with a solid pension. I stayed four years. No pension. But I did maintain clearances and continued to work with CIA, DIA and NSA over the ensuing 25 years. My criticism is grounded in experience. I think Iran/Contra was the watershed moment. The CIA became very politicized and the quality of analysis and spy trade craft declined significantly. John Brennan turned the place into a freak show. When you have "Dykes on Bikes" day at CIA Headquarters you know you have lost your way.
Fred , 27 June 2019 at 09:57 AM
"...did not do a state-by-state breakdown of how these various social media campaigns operated in those states that swung the election to Trump. "
Hilary's campaign staff didn't do this level of work when directing their own media efforts either. At some point she, being the head of the campaign, should have been able to get answers to the questions "what is the return for each advertising effort" and "what does that do to the electoral vote count." Not only is the IC community discredited but so should most of the Democratic media operations and campaign advisors.

[Jun 26, 2019] Opinion - NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Risen detailed how his editors had been "quite willing to cooperate with the government." In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, "How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?" ..."
"... Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had "secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency." ..."
"... Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune. ..."
"... However, he added, "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc." ..."
"... These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government -- or at least for the US national security state. ..."
Jun 26, 2019 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

The New York Times casually acknowledged that it sends major scoops to the US government before publication, to make sure "national security officials" have "no concerns."

By Ben Norton

June 25, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from "national security officials" before publication.

This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don't want made public.

On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia's power grid . According to the article, "the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively," as part of a larger "digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow."

In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article "a virtual act of Treason."

The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.

"Accusing the press of treason is dangerous," the Times communications team said. "We described the article to the government before publication."

"As our story notes, President Trump's own national security officials said there were no concerns," the Times added.

NY Times editors 'quite willing to cooperate with the government'

The symbiotic relationship between the US corporate media and the government has been known for some time. American intelligence agencies play the press like a musical instrument, using it it to selectively leak information at opportune moments to push US soft power and advance Washington's interests.

But rarely is this symbiotic relationship so casually and publicly acknowledged.

In 2018, former New York Times reporter James Risen published a 15,000-word article in The Intercept providing further insight into how this unspoken alliance operates.

Risen detailed how his editors had been "quite willing to cooperate with the government." In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, "How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?"

There is an "informal arrangement" between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials "regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories."

"At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations," the former New York Times reported said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.

"He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan," Risen said. "I agreed."

Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. "If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden," he wrote. "That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously."

This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories. "And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times," he said.

"After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began asking the press to kill stories more frequently," Risen continued. "They did it so often that I became convinced the administration was invoking national security to quash stories that were merely politically embarrassing." In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently "clashed" with Times editors because he raised questions about the US government's lies. But his stories "stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration's claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether."

The Times' executive editor Howell Raines "was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war," Risen said.

In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.

Risen said Rice told him "to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone."

"The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories," Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the "war on the press."

CIA media infiltration and manufacturing consent

In their renowned study of US media, " Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media," Edward S. Herman and Chomsky articulated a "propaganda model," showing how "the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them," through "the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution's policy."

But in some cases, the relationship between US intelligence agencies and the corporate media is not just one of mere ideological policing, indirect pressure, or friendship, but rather one of employment.

In the 1950s, the CIA launched a covert operation called Project Mockingbird, in which it surveilled, influenced, and manipulated American journalists and media coverage, explicitly in order to direct public opinion against the Soviet Union, China, and the growing international communist movement.

Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled " The CIA and the Media : How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up."

Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had "secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency."

Bernstein wrote:

"Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services -- from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading news organizations."

Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune.

However, he added, "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc."

These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government -- or at least for the US national security state.

Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com , and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton .

This article was originally published by " Grayzone "

[Jun 26, 2019] Opinion - NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Risen detailed how his editors had been "quite willing to cooperate with the government." In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, "How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?" ..."
"... Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had "secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency." ..."
"... Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune. ..."
"... However, he added, "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc." ..."
"... These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government -- or at least for the US national security state. ..."
Jun 26, 2019 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

The New York Times casually acknowledged that it sends major scoops to the US government before publication, to make sure "national security officials" have "no concerns."

By Ben Norton

June 25, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from "national security officials" before publication.

This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don't want made public.

On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia's power grid . According to the article, "the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively," as part of a larger "digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow."

In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article "a virtual act of Treason."

The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.

"Accusing the press of treason is dangerous," the Times communications team said. "We described the article to the government before publication."

"As our story notes, President Trump's own national security officials said there were no concerns," the Times added.

NY Times editors 'quite willing to cooperate with the government'

The symbiotic relationship between the US corporate media and the government has been known for some time. American intelligence agencies play the press like a musical instrument, using it it to selectively leak information at opportune moments to push US soft power and advance Washington's interests.

But rarely is this symbiotic relationship so casually and publicly acknowledged.

In 2018, former New York Times reporter James Risen published a 15,000-word article in The Intercept providing further insight into how this unspoken alliance operates.

Risen detailed how his editors had been "quite willing to cooperate with the government." In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, "How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?"

There is an "informal arrangement" between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials "regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories."

"At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations," the former New York Times reported said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.

"He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan," Risen said. "I agreed."

Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. "If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden," he wrote. "That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously."

This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories. "And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times," he said.

"After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began asking the press to kill stories more frequently," Risen continued. "They did it so often that I became convinced the administration was invoking national security to quash stories that were merely politically embarrassing." In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently "clashed" with Times editors because he raised questions about the US government's lies. But his stories "stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration's claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether."

The Times' executive editor Howell Raines "was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war," Risen said.

In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.

Risen said Rice told him "to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone."

"The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories," Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the "war on the press."

CIA media infiltration and manufacturing consent

In their renowned study of US media, " Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media," Edward S. Herman and Chomsky articulated a "propaganda model," showing how "the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them," through "the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution's policy."

But in some cases, the relationship between US intelligence agencies and the corporate media is not just one of mere ideological policing, indirect pressure, or friendship, but rather one of employment.

In the 1950s, the CIA launched a covert operation called Project Mockingbird, in which it surveilled, influenced, and manipulated American journalists and media coverage, explicitly in order to direct public opinion against the Soviet Union, China, and the growing international communist movement.

Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled " The CIA and the Media : How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up."

Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had "secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency."

Bernstein wrote:

"Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services -- from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading news organizations."

Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune.

However, he added, "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc."

These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government -- or at least for the US national security state.

Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com , and he tweets at @ BenjaminNorton .

This article was originally published by " Grayzone "

[Jun 26, 2019] Arms Dealers and Lobbyists Get Rich as Yemen Burns by Barbara Boland

Jun 25, 2019 | theamericanconservative.com

Arms Dealers and Lobbyists Get Rich as Yemen Burns See the Top 4 U.S. contractors' profits explode, all while their weapons have been used against civilian targets for years. • June 25, 2019

And make no mistake: U.S. defense contractors and their lobbyists and supporters in government are getting rich in the process. "Our role is not to make policy, our role is to comply with it," John Harris, CEO of defense contractor Raytheon International, said to CNBC in February. But his statement vastly understates the role that defense contractors and lobbyists play in Washington's halls of power, where their influence on policy directly impacts their bottom lines. Since 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have waged war against Yemen, killing and injuring thousands of Yemeni civilians. An estimated 90,000 people have been killed, according to one international tracker.

By December 2017, the number of cholera cases in Yemen had surged past one million , the largest such outbreak in modern history. An estimated 113,000 children have died since April 2018 from war-related starvation and disease. The United Nations calls the situation in Yemen the largest humanitarian crisis on earth, as over 14 million face starvation. The majority of the 6,872 Yemeni civilians killed and 10,768 wounded have been victims of Saudi-led coalition airstrikes, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) .

Nearly 90 coalition airstrikes have hit homes , schools, markets, hospitals, and mosques since 2015, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2018, the coalition bombed a wedding, killing 22 people, including eight children. Another strike hit a bus , killing at least 26 children.

American-origin munitions produced by companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon were identified at the site of over two dozen attacks throughout Yemen. Indeed, the United States is the single largest arms supplier to the Middle East and has been for decades, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service. From 2014 to 2018, the United States supplied 68 percent of Saudi Arabia's arms imports, 64 percent of the UAE's imports, and 65 percent of Qatar's imports. Some of this weaponry was subsequently stolen or sold to al-Qaeda linked groups in the Arabian Peninsula , where they could be used against the U.S. military, according to reports . The Saudi use of U.S.-made jets, bombs, and missiles against Yemeni civilian centers constitutes a war crime. It was an American laser-guided MK-82 bomb that killed the children on the bus; Raytheon's technology killed the 22 people attending the wedding in 2018 as well as a family traveling in their car; and another American-made MK-82 bomb ended the lives of at least 80 men, women, and children in a Yemeni marketplace in March 2016. Yet American defense contractors continue to spend millions of dollars to lobby Washington to maintain the flow of arms to these countries.

"Companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and other defense contractors see countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE as huge potential markets," Stephen Miles, director of Win Without War , told TAC . "They see them as massive opportunities to make a lot of money; that's why they're investing billions and billions of dollars. This is a huge revenue stream to these companies." Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics have all highlighted business with Saudi Arabia in their shareholder reports.

"Operations and maintenance have become a very profitable niche market for U.S. corporations," said Richard Aboulafia, a vice president at Teal Group. He added that defense contractors can make as much as 150 percent more profit off of operations and maintenance than from the original arms sale. U.S. weapons supply 57 percent of the military aircraft used by the Royal Saudi Air Force, and mechanics and technicians hired by American companies repair and maintain their fighter jets and helicopters. In 2018 alone, the United States made $4.5 billion worth of arms deals to Saudi Arabia and $1.2 billion to the United Arab Emirates , a report by William Hartung and Christina Arabia found.

From the report : "Lockheed Martin was involved in deals worth $25 billion; Boeing, $7.1 billion in deals; Raytheon, $5.5 billion in deals; Northrop Grumman had one deal worth $2.5 billion; and BAE systems had a $1.3 billion deal." "Because of the nature of U.S. arms control law, most of these sales have to get government approval, and we've absolutely seen lobbyists weighing in heavily on this," Miles said. "The last time I saw the numbers, the arms industry had nearly 1,000 registered lobbyists.

They're not on the Hill lobbying Congress about how many schools we should open next year. They're lobbying for defense contractors. The past 18 years of endless wars have been incredibly lucrative for the arms industry, and they have a vested industry in seeing these wars continue, and not curtailing the cash cow that has been for them." The defense industry spent $125 million on lobbying in 2018. Of that, Boeing spent $15 million on lobbyists, Lockheed Martin spent $13.2 million , General Dynamics $11.9 million , and Raytheon $4.4 million , according to the Lobbying Disclosure Act website. Writes Ben Freeman:

According to a new report firms registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act have reported receiving more than $40 million from Saudi Arabia in 2017 and 2018. Saudi lobbyists and public relations professionals have contacted Congress, the executive branch, media outlets and think tanks more than 4,000 times. Much of this work has been focused on ensuring that sales of U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia continue unabated and blocking congressional actions that would end U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Lobbyists, lawyers and public relations firms working for the Saudis have also reported doling out more than $4.5 million in campaign contributions in the past two years, including at least $6,000 to Trump. In many cases, these contributions have gone to members of Congress they've contacted regarding the Yemen war. In fact, some contributions have gone to members of Congress on the exact same day they were contacted by Saudi lobbyists, and some were made to key members just before, and even on the day of, important Yemen votes.
Over a dozen lobbying firms employed by defense contractors have also been working on behalf of the Saudi or Emiratis, efficiently lobbying for both the arms buyers and sellers in one fell swoop .

One of these lobbying firms, the McKeon Group, led by former Republican congressman and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Howard McKeon, represents both Saudi Arabia and the American defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK, MBDA, and L3 Technologies. Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman are the biggest suppliers of arms to Saudi Arabia. In 2018, the McKeon Group took $1,697,000 from 10 defense contractors " to, among other objectives, continue the flow of arms to Saudi Arabia," reports National Memo. Freeman details multiple examples where lobbyists working on behalf of the Saudis met with a senator's staff and then made a substantial contribution to that senator's campaign within days of a key vote to keep the United States in the Yemen war.

American Defense International (ADI) represents the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia's coalition partner in the war against Yemen, as well as several American defense contractors, including General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, L3 Technologies, and General Atomics.

Not to be outdone by the McKeon Group, ADI's lobbyists have also aggressively pursued possible swing votes in the U.S. Senate for the hefty sum of $45,000 a month, paid for by the UAE . ADI lobbyists discussed the "situation in Yemen" and the "Paveway sale to the UAE," the same bomb used in the deadly wedding strike, with the office of Senator Martin Heinrich, a member of the Armed Services Committee, according to FARA reports .

ADI's lobbyists also met with Congressman Steve Scalise's legislative director to advise his office to vote against the congressional resolution on Yemen.

For their lobbying, Raytheon paid ADI $120,000 in 2018. In addition to the overt influence exercised by lobbyists for the defense industry, many former arms industry executives are embedded in influential posts throughout the Trump administration: from former Airbus, Huntington Ingalls, and Raytheon lobbyist Charles Faulkner at the State Department, who pushed Mike Pompeo to support arms sales in the Yemen war ; to former Boeing executive and erstwhile head of the Department of Defense Patrick Shanahan; to his interim replacement Mark Esper, secretary of the Army and another former lobbyist for Raytheon.

The war in Yemen has been good for American defense contractors' bottom lines. Since the conflict began, General Dynamics' stock price has risen from about $135 to $169 per share, Raytheon's from about $108 to more than $180, and Boeing's from about $150 to $360, according to In These Times. Their analysis found that those four companies have had at least $30.1 billion in Saudi military contracts approved by the State Department over the last 10 years. In April, President Donald Trump vetoed a resolution that would have ended American support for the Saudi-UAE coalition war against Yemen. Such efforts have failed to meet the 60-vote veto-proof threshold needed in the Senate. There are a few senators who didn't vote for the War Powers resolution "that will probably vote for the Raytheon sales," Brittany Benowitz, a lawyer and former adviser to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told TAC. "I think you'll continue to see horrific bombings and as the famine rages on, people will start to ask, 'Why are we a part of this war?' Unfortunately, I don't think that will start to happen anytime soon." Barbara Boland is TAC's foreign policy and national security reporter. Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC

chris chuba • a day ago

Yes indeed, we are the #1 arms exporter and very proud about it. Meanwhile, Rubio, Pompeo, et. al. are also proud about how they are finally clamping down on the nefarious arrangement that Venezuela and Cuba have to prop up their regimes.

Venezuela gives Cuba low cost oil and Cuba sends them about 25,000 doctors for free medical care to help prop up Maduro. Hmm ... sounds like one is exporting medical services in return for energy, pure, unabridged evil. Our second best export is misinformation and lies.

I know, someone will give the State Dept line that the doctors are underpaid and the oil is below market price. The point is that both countries export what they have more of in order to get what they need. This is the basics of any trade relationship. Both countries are better off after the transaction and now both countries are suffering because of our benighted intervention.

I keep wondering when God is going to punish us for our appalling arrogance, pride, and our unwavering faith in our own righteousness. God is certainly punishing me. I wish I was one of the blissfully ignorant.

Fran Macadam • 2 days ago
The biggest business of America is war. The symptom of how all pervasive this has become is there is a new definition of defeat: the only war that is lost, is one that ends. The new victory is now war without end.
EliteCommInc. • 2 days ago
If the Saudis have not yet routed the Houthis, I am doubt they ever will. Without invading the country and holding ground, I am unclear of the point of constantly bombing.

The Houthis won their civil conflict, best allow them to constitute a government and deal with it.

Sid Finster EliteCommInc. • a day ago
The Saudis have invaded Yemen, but they and their mercenaries keep getting ambushed and ganked. The Yemeni tribes have a very long and successful history of guerrilla warfare.

Admittedly, it's mostly the mercenaries, as the Saudis don't like a centralized military in particular and don't like fighting opponents who can shoot back in general.

Nelson • a day ago
"Such efforts have failed to meet the 60-vote veto-proof threshold needed in the Senate."

A veto override requires 2/3 of the votes, which is 67 in the Senate.

polistra24 • a day ago
Not surprising. Dow = genocide, both internally and externally. Every added point on the Dow is built on a massive pile of carcasses.
LFC • 18 hours ago
"Our role is not to make policy, our role is to comply with it," John Harris, CEO of defense contractor Raytheon International, said to CNBC in February.

Yeah and Wells Fargo were just practicing "innovation" that the financial companies have told us they need to do.

Lily Sandoz • a day ago
The Republic is a total failure. It cares nothing for the Constitution the representatives are sworn to uphold and abide by. It's all about the symbiosis of power in gov. and money in business. Those two factions exchange what they other needs to gain more power and money at the expense of the taxpayers and countries abroad being destroyed. It's pretty simple if you ask 'cui bono' and then follow the money. This time following the money may take the USA/world to thermo-nuclear war which psychos like Bolton, Pompeo, Pence, Netanyahu, the MIC and all the other neo-cons want. Currently the war policy against Iran seems to be tied up in Christian-Zionist eschatology to bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ. Does it get any more loony than this? Metaphysics driving political and foreign policy is really a recipe for a disaster and may actually bring about loosing the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse on the world, but that's OK I guess because Wash. sees the 'big picture.'
Doom Incarnate • a day ago
Seriously people.

Buy the stocks of those companies.

Sure what your government is doing is wrong. It should do something else. But in the meantime, there's no reason for you not to profit.

This is America after all and warfighting is good business.

Boo yaa!!!!

EliteCommInc. • 2 days ago
Ohhh Here's my short response . . . .

https://247wallst.com/speci...

[Jun 26, 2019] Trump's jingoism can hurt his chances for re-election. Can it ?

Notable quotes:
"... Trump plays politics by trying to appease two camps, the AngloZionists, as well as Americans that bought into his 'Middle East' wars were a mistake. ..."
"... There has never been a war won by air power alone, If Trump bombs Iran, they will fight back and it will take a ground invasion to subdue them. While that war will compete with Bush’s invasion of Iraq as being America’s stupidest war ever, it will be much more costly in American blood and treasure and could easily turn into WWIII. ..."
"... Yeah, sorry Trump, I support you but you are not going to sell me on war with Iran....HORRIBLE idea. HORRIBLE. One of the worst things you could do as president. ..."
"... Fix the potholes first. ..."
"... Sorry I voted for Trumpster. He Flip-Flopped on almost everything he campaigned on. Now he is DEEP STATE. SA sponsors most the terrorism but gets a pass. ..."
Jun 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

ThirteenthFloor , 56 seconds ago link

Trump basically acknowledges Bolton as warmonger on NBC, that has hawks and doves in his administration 'likes to hear both sides'.

So here Trump plays politics by trying to appease two camps, the AngloZionists, as well as Americans that bought into his 'Middle East' wars were a mistake.

Trump has become pure politician no longer the outsider, he's dancing on both sides when he needs to like now in a re-election mode.

https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/trump-if-it-was-up-to-john-bolton-he-d-take-on-the-whole-world-62521413517

Tulsi Gabbard clearly sees through this in her recent TV ad.. telling Trump to swallow his pride a carefully crafted script here.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O2JahCIEiV0

TimmyB , 24 minutes ago link

There has never been a war won by air power alone, If Trump bombs Iran, they will fight back and it will take a ground invasion to subdue them. While that war will compete with Bush’s invasion of Iraq as being America’s stupidest war ever, it will be much more costly in American blood and treasure and could easily turn into WWIII.

Instead of starting a war no one wants over Iran merely acting like a sovereign nation, we should remove all the sanctions and just leave them alone. Our meddling everywhere needs to stop.

The Herdsman , 25 minutes ago link

Yeah, sorry Trump, I support you but you are not going to sell me on war with Iran....HORRIBLE idea. HORRIBLE. One of the worst things you could do as president.

Rusty Pipes , 18 minutes ago link

Fix the potholes first.

ThanksIwillHaveAnother , 25 minutes ago link

Sorry I voted for Trumpster. He Flip-Flopped on almost everything he campaigned on. Now he is DEEP STATE. SA sponsors most the terrorism but gets a pass.

[Jun 25, 2019] Tulsi on Iraq war and Trump administration and some interesting information about Bolton

With minor comment editions for clarity...
Looks like Bolton is dyed-in-the-wool imperialist. He believes the United States can do what wants without regard to international law, treaties or the роlitical commitments of previous administrations.
Notable quotes:
"... Israel is an Anglo American aircraft carrier to control the Eastern Mediterranean ..."
Jun 25, 2019 | www.unz.com

J. Gutierrez says: June 24, 2019 at 5:37 pm GMT 300 Words

...Look at this man's video and remember he is a pervert, warmonger and a coward!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/hs35O_TBbbU

Ma Laoshi , says: June 24, 2019 at 11:56 pm GMT

@J. Gutierrez

...Zionists know what they want, are willing to work together towards their goals, and put their money where their mouth is. In contrast, for a few pennies the goyim will renounce any principle they pretend to cherish, and go on happily proclaiming the opposite even if a short while down the road it'll get their own children killed.

The real sad part about this notion of the goy as a mere beast in human form is maybe not that it got codified for eternity in the Talmud, but rather that there may be some truth to it? Another way of saying this is raising the question whether the goyim deserve better, given what we see around us.

Saka Arya , says: June 25, 2019 at 7:02 am GMT
@Malla

Israel is an Anglo American aircraft carrier to control the Eastern Mediterranean and prevent a Turko Egyptian and possibly Persian invasion of Greece & the West

[Jun 25, 2019] Tulsi No More Presidential Wars Act

Jun 25, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

John Smith , Jun 24, 2019 5:01:54 PM | 63

Tulsi Gabbard :

We must not let President Trump, John Bolton or any member of the State Department pull us into war with Iran. Now, I've introduced a bill called the "No More Presidential Wars Act" to stop Trump -- and all Presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike -- from pulling us into a war without approval from Congress.

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1142835332083326977
https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard/status/1143136692934758401

[Jun 25, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Receives Amazing Welcome and Cheers from South Carolina Democratic Convention

Jun 25, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Stever , Jun 23, 2019 1:43:15 PM | 50

Tulsi Gabbard Receives Amazing Welcome and Cheers from South Carolina Democratic Convention

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i65Ki7iiL1k

Looks like Tulsi's message of investing our trillions spent on regime change wars towards the people is resonating. Very inspiring video.

[Jun 25, 2019] Tulsi on Iraq war and Trump administration and some interesting information about Bolton

With minor comment editions for clarity...
Looks like Bolton is dyed-in-the-wool imperialist. He believes the United States can do what wants without regard to international law, treaties or the роlitical commitments of previous administrations.
Notable quotes:
"... Israel is an Anglo American aircraft carrier to control the Eastern Mediterranean ..."
Jun 25, 2019 | www.unz.com

J. Gutierrez says: June 24, 2019 at 5:37 pm GMT 300 Words

...Look at this man's video and remember he is a pervert, warmonger and a coward!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/hs35O_TBbbU

Ma Laoshi , says: June 24, 2019 at 11:56 pm GMT

@J. Gutierrez

...Zionists know what they want, are willing to work together towards their goals, and put their money where their mouth is. In contrast, for a few pennies the goyim will renounce any principle they pretend to cherish, and go on happily proclaiming the opposite even if a short while down the road it'll get their own children killed.

The real sad part about this notion of the goy as a mere beast in human form is maybe not that it got codified for eternity in the Talmud, but rather that there may be some truth to it? Another way of saying this is raising the question whether the goyim deserve better, given what we see around us.

Saka Arya , says: June 25, 2019 at 7:02 am GMT
@Malla

Israel is an Anglo American aircraft carrier to control the Eastern Mediterranean and prevent a Turko Egyptian and possibly Persian invasion of Greece & the West

[Jun 25, 2019] What Explains the Ferocity of the Attack Against Donald Trump by Robert W. Merry

Notable quotes:
"... Standards of evidence have gone out the window when it comes to attacking President Trump. ..."
"... Asked if Trump was a Russian asset, as former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe had suggested was possible, Clapper said, "I completely agree with the way Andy characterized it." He added a "caveat" that it could have been "witting or unwitting." ..."
"... Here we get to a fundamental element of McCarthyism, which can be illustrated by an exploration of the real McCarthy and his followers back in the early 1950s. These days we often see, in Hollywood movies and intellectual history, a view of the Wisconsin senator as coming out of the blue, roiling a serene nation with utterly false and brutal accusations of communist activity when there was no such threat at all. ..."
Jun 14, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

Standards of evidence have gone out the window when it comes to attacking President Trump.

TO WHAT extent does the two-year political investigation into Donald Trump and his top aides and family members, based on suspicions of treacherous "collusion" with the Russian government, represent a kind of McCarthyism? Most people involved in that investigation no doubt would be aghast at the question. After all, they might say, they were only trying to save the country from an obviously bad man who had both motive and opportunity to scheme with the Russians for his own nefarious purposes. Even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller made clear that his two-year investigation could find no evidence of collusion to justify any legal action, many on the anti-Trump Left continued to insist that it had happened and they would continue the assault.

But Mueller's finding of no collusion does raise questions about the propriety of an inquiry based on suspicions and fragments of evidence that never added up to any serious proof of such cravenness. That was a frequent complaint about McCarthyism back in the days of its greatest menacing influence. And, just as Senator Joseph McCarthy sought to leverage his allegations of communist collusion into partisan political advantage, so too did Trump's accusers seek to bring down a president and curtail his range of executive action.

TO EXPLORE the issue further, it's helpful to explore what is meant by McCarthyism. Webster's defines it as "the use of indiscriminate, often unfounded, accusations, sensationalism, inquisitorial investigative methods, etc., ostensibly in suppression of communism."

The motive of suppressing communism no longer applies, of course, as the primary sources of anticommunist anxiety in McCarthy's day -- the expansionist Soviet empire and its Chinese counterpart -- no longer exist. But today's obsession with Russia as a threat, although it represents hardly a fragment of the old postwar capacity for menace, could be considered a stand-in for the anti-Soviet obsession of old.

What about "indiscriminate, often unfounded, accusations"? The Russia collusion episode certainly qualifies on that count. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee (now chairman), said he had "plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy" -- and, he added, this was "more than circumstantial evidence." Given Mueller's ultimate conclusion on the same question, with all of the investigative resources at his command, one has to wonder what evidence Schiff was talking about. Meanwhile, another California Democrat, Eric Swalwell, accused Trump of being an "agent" of Russia. He added, by way of elaboration, "he certainly acts on Russia's behalf."

These accusations also comport with Webster's definitional element of "sensationalism." But it's even more sensational and damaging when coming from former top-level intelligence officials, such as James Clapper and John Brennan. Brennan said that "Watergate pales really, in my view, compared to what we're confronting now." He described Trump's claim of no collusion as "hogwash," which was a roundabout accusation of treason. He dispensed with the circumlocution when he called Trump's performance in Helsinki, Finland, following a summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin, "nothing short of treasonous."

Clapper, meanwhile, invoked the constitutional definition of treason when he said Trump was "essentially aiding and abetting the Russians" though he later said he used the term "only in a...colloquial sense," whatever that means. Asked if Trump was a Russian asset, as former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe had suggested was possible, Clapper said, "I completely agree with the way Andy characterized it." He added a "caveat" that it could have been "witting or unwitting."

Here we get to a fundamental element of McCarthyism, which can be illustrated by an exploration of the real McCarthy and his followers back in the early 1950s. These days we often see, in Hollywood movies and intellectual history, a view of the Wisconsin senator as coming out of the blue, roiling a serene nation with utterly false and brutal accusations of communist activity when there was no such threat at all.

Not so. A couple weeks before McCarthy's first anticommunism rant, Alger Hiss, accused of passing secret U.S. documents to a Soviet spy when he was a high-level government official, was convicted of perjury. It was a signal victory for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the communist-hunting panel of Congress, and a great embarrassment for members of the country's Northeastern elite who had testified on behalf of Hiss' integrity and patriotism. Two weeks later, the government reported that Klaus Fuchs, a British physicist who had worked at the Los Alamos atomic-weapons facility during the war, had been arrested as a Soviet spy. This was powerful stuff when most Americans believed, correctly, that the U.S. nuclear monopoly had been the margin of security in saving Western Europe from being overrun by the Soviets.

[Jun 25, 2019] Read THIS Before Cheering the Next War Zero Hedge

Jun 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

by George Washington Fri, 06/21/2019 - 23:05 18 SHARES Truth Is the First Casualty of War

Over two thousand years ago, the Greek writer Aeschylus said :

In war, truth is the first casualty.

That quote could be read to mean that - once a war starts - then truth goes out the window ...

In reality, however, wars are often planned for political reasons (having to do with money , resources or other goals which may have nothing to do with directly protecting one's country or people) and then false intelligence is created to "justify" the start of the war.

Britain's MI5 intelligence service explained about the claimed justifications for the Iraq War:

The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

9/11 Commission Co-Chair and 34-year veteran Congressman Lee Hamilton, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, said :

My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence.

Or as newsman Tom Brokaw put it :

All wars are based on propaganda.

Because war not only kills, maims and displaces a lot of innocent people, but is also bad for the economy and destroys the environment (and puts out a lot of carbon dioxide ), we passionately believe that people need to understand a little history so that the same mistakes are not repeated, and disastrous wars are avoided when they are not necessary to actually defend ourselves.

And because we believe that the Constitutional right to peacefully assemble and speak out is a large part of what makes us great, we will also put a spotlight on those who are trying to shut down our First Amendment rights ... and how they're doing it.

False Pretenses

Scores of officials throughout the world have admitted (either orally, in writing, or through recordings, photographs or videos) to carrying out, seriously proposing, or faking attacks which they blamed on others as a way to falsely start wars or shut down free speech:

(1) A Native American from one tribe (Pomunkey) murdered a white Englishwoman living in Virginia in 1697 and then falsely blamed it on second tribe (Piscataway). But he later admitted in court that he was not really Piscataway, and that he had been paid by a provocateur from a third tribe (Iroquois) to kill the woman as a way to start a war between the English and the Piscataway, thus protecting the profitable Iroquois monopoly in trade with the English.

(2) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the "Mukden Incident" or the "Manchurian Incident". The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found : "Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the 'Incident' was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ." And see this , this and this.

(3) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked several attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland. The staged attacks included :

The details of the Gleiwitz radio station incident include :

On the night of 31 August 1939, a small group of German operatives dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks seized the Gleiwitz station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish (sources vary on the content of the message). The Germans' goal was to make the attack and the broadcast look like the work of anti-German Polish saboteurs.

To make the attack seem more convincing, the Germans used human corpses to pass them off as Polish attackers. They murdered Franciszek Honiok, a 43-year-old unmarried German Silesian Catholic farmer known for sympathizing with the Poles. He had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo. He was dressed to look like a saboteur, then killed by lethal injection, given gunshot wounds, and left dead at the scene so that he appeared to have been killed while attacking the station. His corpse was subsequently presented to the police and press as proof of the attack.

(4) The minutes of the high command of the Italian government - subsequently approved by Mussolini himself - admitted that violence on the Greek-Albanian border was carried out by Italians and falsely blamed on the Greeks, as an excuse for Italy's 1940 invasion of Greece.

(5) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.

(6) Goering also said:

"Why of course the people don't want war But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked , and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

And Adolph Hitler said:

" Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death".

(7) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union's Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the "Winter War" against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.

(8) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.

(9) Stalin also said:

"The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened".

(10) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews who were Holocaust survivors attempting to flee to safety in Palestine right after World War II, set up a fake group called "Defenders of Arab Palestine", and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see this , this and this ).

(11) In the 1950s, Israeli Prime Moshe Sharett admitted in his diary:

I have been meditating on the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented , and on the many clashes we have provoked which cost us so much blood ....

(The U.S. Army's School of Advanced Military Studies would later say of Mossad - Israel's intelligence service - "Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act").

(12) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(13) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind "evidence" implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed) (and see this and this).

(14) The Turkish Prime Minister admitted that the Turkish government carried out the 1955 bombing on a Turkish consulate in Greece – also damaging the nearby birthplace of the founder of modern Turkey – and blamed it on Greece, for the purpose of inciting and justifying anti-Greek violence.

The Economist notes :

Starting in the 1950s Turkey's deep state sponsored killings, engineered riots, colluded with drug traffickers, staged "false flag" attacks and organised massacres of trade unionists. Thousands died in the chaos it fomented.

(15) The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change.

(16) Leo Strauss - the father of the Neo-Conservative movement , who counted many military policymakers of recent American administrations, including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Cambone, Elliot Abrams, and Adam Shulsky as students in his University of Chicago classes - taught in the 1950s and 1960s that "if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured" (the quote is by one of Strauss' main biographers ).

(17) The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people's support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism .

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: "You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security" so that "a state of emergency could be declared, so people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security" (and see this ) (Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). And watch this BBC special . They also allegedly carried out terror attacks in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK , and other countries.

The CIA also stressed to the head of the Italian program that Italy needed to use the program to control internal uprisings .

False flag attacks carried out pursuant to this program include – by way of example only:

(18) In 1960, American Senator George Smathers suggested that the U.S. launch "a false attack made on Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to go in and [overthrow Castro]".

(19) Official State Department documents show that, in 1961, the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. The plans were not carried out, but they were all discussed as serious proposals.

(20) As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil , and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report ; the official documents ; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. This plan was subsequently admitted again in other declassified government documents.

Provocations considered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff included :

Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims ....

***

3. A "Remember the Maine" incident could be arranged in several forms:

a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.

b. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. We could arrange to cause such incident in the vicinity of Havana or Santiago as a spectacular result of Cuban attack from the air or sea, or both. The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack. The nearness to Havana or Santiago would add credibility especially to those people that might have heard the blast or have seen the fire. The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to "evacuate" remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.

4. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.

The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.

***

6. Use of MIG type aircraft by US pilots could provide additional provocation. Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions. An F-86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG, especially if the pilot of the transport were to announce such fact. The primary drawback to this suggestion appears to be the security risk inherent in obtaining or modifying an aircraft. However, reasonable copies of the MIG could be produced from US resources in about three months.

***

8. it is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban-aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba, The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

b. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being transmitting on the inter-national distress frequency a "MAY DAY" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to "tell" the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to "sell" the incident.

9. It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.

a. Approximately 4 or 5 F-101 aircraft-will be dispatched in trail from Homestead AFB, Florida, to the vicinity of Cuba. Their mission will be to reverse course and simulate fakir aircraft for an air defense exercise in southern Florida. These aircraft would conduct variations of these flights at frequent intervals. Crews would be briefed to remain at least 12 miles off the Cuban coast; however, they would be required to carry live ammunition in the event that hostile actions were taken by the Cuban MiGs.

b. On One such flight, a pre-briefed pilot would fly tail-end Charley at considerable interval between aircraft. While near the Cuban Island this pilot would broadcast that he had been Jumped by MIGs and was going down. No other calls would be made. The pilot would then fly directly west at extremely low altitude and land at a secure base, an Eglin auxiliary. The aircraft would be met by the proper people, quickly stored and given a new tail number. The pilot who had performed the mission under an alias, would resume his proper identity and return to his normal place of business. The pilot and aircraft would then have disappeared.

c. At precisely the same time that the aircraft was presumably shot down a submarine or small surface craft would disburse F-101 parts, parachute, etc., at approximately 15 to 20 miles off the Cuban coast and depart.

U.S. government documents declassified in October 2017 admitted that a very high-level 1962 meeting of U.S. government officials - separate from the Joint Chiefs of Staff - also discussed:

The possibility of U.S. manufacture or acquisition of Soviet aircraft .... There is a possibility that such aircraft could be used in a deception operation designed to confuse enemy planes in the air, to launch a surprise attack against enemy installations or in a provocation operation in which Soviet aircraft would appear to attack U.S. or friendly installations in order to provide an excuse for U.S. intervention .

And see this .

(21) In 1963, the U.S. Department of Defense wrote a paper promoting attacks on nations within the Organization of American States – such as Trinidad-Tobago or Jamaica – and then falsely blaming them on Cuba.

(22) The NSA admits that it lied about what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 manipulating data to make it look like North Vietnamese boats fired on a U.S. ship so as to create a false justification for the Vietnam war.

(23) The U.S. Department of Defense also suggested covertly paying a person in the Castro government to attack the United States: "The only area remaining for consideration then would be to bribe one of Castro's subordinate commanders to initiate an attack on Guantanamo."

(24) A U.S. Congressional committee admitted that – as part of its "Cointelpro" campaign – the FBI had used many provocateurs in the 1950s through 1970s to carry out violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists.

(25) A top Turkish general admitted that Turkish forces burned down a mosque on Cyprus in the 1970s and blamed it on their enemy. He explained : "In Special War, certain acts of sabotage are staged and blamed on the enemy to increase public resistance. We did this on Cyprus; we even burnt down a mosque." In response to the surprised correspondent's incredulous look the general said, "I am giving an example".

(26) In 1971, the New York Times reported :

The bulk of the nation's undercover work is done by local police officers or outsiders hired by the state, county or city police, according to the campus reports. Probably the best known undercover man in the United States, M. L. Singkata Thomas Tongyai, known at Hobart College in Canandaigua, N.Y., as "Tommy the Traveler," was one of these.

He was hired by the local sheriff's office and, according to an Ontario County grand jury, "advocated violent forms of protest" among student radicals. He took part in a police drug raid on the Hobart campus last June 5.

The Times reported the next year:

Thomas Tongyai, or Tommy the Traveler, for example, provided bombs and rifles for the students at Hobart College and recruited the secretary of the local R.O.T.C. unit to help destroy its files. Tongyai apparently was being paid by both the local sheriff's office and a Federal agency

The Ontario County Sheriff admitted that Tommy was an employee, and said that Tommy also worked for the FBI.

(27) Former police informer and undercover operative Charles Grimm - paid by both the FBI and the Tuscaloosa Police Department - admitted that , in 1970, he used Molotov cocktails to burn Dressler Hall at Kent State University to disrupt protests. The fire was blamed on dissenters and served as cause to declare campus protests "unlawful assemblies".

(28) A declassified 1973 CIA document reveals a program to train foreign police and troops on how to make booby traps, pretending that they were training them on how to investigate terrorist acts:

The Agency maintains liaison in varying degrees with foreign police/security organizations through its field stations .

[CIA provides training sessions as follows:]

a. Providing trainees with basic knowledge in the uses of commercial and military demolitions and incendiaries as they may be applied in terrorism and industrial sabotage operations.

b. Introducing the trainees to commercially available materials and home laboratory techniques , likely to he used in the manufacture of explosives and incendiaries by terrorists or saboteurs.

c. Familiarizing the trainees with the concept of target analysis and operational planning that a saboteur or terrorist must employ.

d. Introducing the trainees to booby trapping devices and techniques giving practical experience with both manufactured and improvised devices through actual fabrication .

***

The program provides the trainees with ample opportunity to develop basic familiarity and use proficiently through handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques .

(29) The German government admitted (and see this ) that, in 1978, the German secret service detonated a bomb in the outer wall of a prison and planted "escape tools" on a prisoner – a member of the Red Army Faction – which the secret service wished to frame the bombing on.

(30) In the late 1970s, a Major General in the IDF (Israeli military) admitted that a top Israeli general "was mining roads taken by IDF troops, to make it look as if the PLO was behind it."

(31) The head of Israel's Northern Command staff admitted that, during the late 1970's and early 80's, numerous terror attacks were carried out under the fake name "Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners" by Israelis "to cause chaos amongst the Palestinians and Syrians in Lebanon, without leaving an Israeli fingerprint, to give them the feeling that they were constantly under attack and to instill them with a sense of insecurity." In order to cast blame elsewhere, the Israelis recruited Lebanese locals, Christians, and Shiite Muslims, to carry out series of targeted killings and sabotage operations in southern Lebanon.

(32) A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddaffi's compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddaffi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter.

(33) The South African Truth and Reconciliation Council found that, in 1989, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (a covert branch of the South African Defense Force) approached an explosives expert and asked him "to participate in an operation aimed at discrediting the ANC [the African National Congress] by bombing the police vehicle of the investigating officer into the murder incident", thus framing the ANC for the bombing.

(34) An Algerian diplomat and several officers in the Algerian army admit that, in the 1990s, the Algerian army frequently massacred Algerian civilians and then blamed Islamic militants for the killings (and see this video ; and see Agence France-Presse, 9/27/2002, French Court Dismisses Algerian Defamation Suit Against Author ).

(35) A police officer admitted on National Public Radio:

In the '90s, we turned to a different tactic .... And you can see how successful that was in places like, you know, the Republican National Conventions in both New York City and Minneapolis, where we even got people to - you know, we were able to encourage people to do things like, you know, do acts of violence, which then would make it possible for us to come in and sweep the streets and bring in large amounts of SWAT team tactical police. It was really effective .

( This cartoon sums up the way which provocateurs distract attention from the real messages behind peaceful protests.)

(36) One of the central lies used to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq after Iraq invaded Kuwait was the false statement by a young Kuwaiti girl that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies in hospitals. Her statement was arranged by a Congressman who admitted that he knew that she was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S. - who was desperately trying to lobby the U.S. to enter the war - but the Congressman hid that fact from the public and from Congress

(37) In 1993, a bomb in Northern Ireland killed 9 civilians. Official documents from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (i.e. the British government) show that the mastermind of the bombing was a British agent, and that the bombing was designed to inflame sectarian tensions. And see this and this .

(38) The United States Army's 1994 publication Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces – updated in 2004 – recommends employing terrorists and using false flag operations to destabilize leftist regimes in Latin America. False flag terrorist attacks were carried out in Latin America and other regions as part of the CIA's " Dirty Wars ". And see this .

(39) Similarly, a CIA "psychological operations" manual prepared by a CIA contractor for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels noted the value of assassinating someone on your own side to create a "martyr" for the cause. The manual was authenticated by the U.S. government. The manual received so much publicity from Associated Press, Washington Post and other news coverage that – during the 1984 presidential debate – President Reagan was confronted with the following question on national television:

At this moment, we are confronted with the extraordinary story of a CIA guerrilla manual for the anti-Sandinista contras whom we are backing, which advocates not only assassinations of Sandinistas but the hiring of criminals to assassinate the guerrillas we are supporting in order to create martyrs.

(40) Official German intelligence service documents admitted (original German ) that, in 1994, the German intelligence services planted plutonium on an airplane coming from Russia, as a way to frame Russia for exporting dangerous radioactive materials which could end up in the hands of terrorists and criminals. This frame-up job was so successful at whipping up fear that it got German Chancellor Kohl re-elected, and the U.S. used it as an excuse to "help" secure Russia's nuclear facilities, as a way to get access to Russian nuclear secrets.

(41) A Rwandan government inquiry admitted that the 1994 shootdown and murder of the Rwandan president, who was from the Hutu tribe - a murder blamed by the Hutus on the rival Tutsi tribe, and which led to the massacre of more than 800,000 Tutsis by Hutus - was committed by Hutu soldiers and falsely blamed on the Tutis.

(42) An Indonesian government fact-finding team investigated violent riots which occurred in 1998, and determined that " elements of the military had been involved in the riots, some of which were deliberately provoked ".

(43) Senior Russian Senior military and intelligence officers admit that the KGB blew up Russian apartment buildings in 1999 and falsely blamed it on Chechens, in order to justify an invasion of Chechnya (and see this report and this discussion ).

(44) As reported by the New York Times , BBC and Associated Press , Macedonian officials admit that in 2001, the government murdered 7 innocent immigrants in cold blood and pretended that they were Al Qaeda soldiers attempting to assassinate Macedonian police, in order to join the "war on terror". They lured foreign migrants into the country, executed them in a staged gun battle, and then claimed they were a unit backed by Al Qaeda intent on attacking Western embassies". Specifically, Macedonian authorities had lured the immigrants into the country, and then - after killing them - posed the victims with planted evidence – "bags of uniforms and semiautomatic weapons at their side" – to show Western diplomats.

(45) At the July 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy, black-clad thugs were videotaped getting out of police cars, and were seen by an Italian MP carrying "iron bars inside the police station". Subsequently, senior police officials in Genoa admitted that police planted two Molotov cocktails and faked the stabbing of a police officer at the G8 Summit, in order to justify a violent crackdown against protesters. And see this .

(46) The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is "overwhelming" that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein's regime, that Cheney "probably" had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not 'doing their homework' in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that hat the Iraq war was really for oil or to protect Israel not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

Despite previous "lone wolf" claims, many U.S. government officials now say that 9/11 was state-sponsored terror; but Iraq was not the state which backed the hijackers. (Many U.S. officials have alleged that 9/11 was a false flag operation by rogue elements of the U.S. government; but such a claim is beyond the scope of this discussion. The key point is that the U.S. falsely blamed it on Iraq, when it knew Iraq had nothing to do with it.).

(Additionally, the same judge who has shielded the Saudis for any liability for funding 9/11 has awarded a default judgment against Iran for $10.5 billion for carrying out 9/11 ... even though no one seriously believes that Iran had any part in 9/11.)

(47) Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually TOLD to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like ). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this .

(48) Many high-level American and British officials admitted that Iraq didn't have WMDs before the Bush administration publicly claimed it did ... and before it launched the Iraq War in 2003. For example, a CIA official insists the Bush administration was made aware some time before the State of the Union address that the claims that Iraq was trying to purchase yellow case uranium from Niger was false.

(49) The U.S. Senate and government officials admitted that the Bush administration used specific, Communist torture techniques specifically crafted to produce false confessions , in order to falsely link Iraq and 9/11. One of the main sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ . The 9/11 Commission Report was largely based on a third-hand account of what tortured detainees said, with two of the three parties in the communication being government employees .

(50) According to the Washington Post , Indonesian police admit that the Indonesian military killed American teachers in Papua in 2002 and blamed the murders on a Papuan separatist group in order to get that group listed as a terrorist organization.

(51) The well-respected former Indonesian president also admits that the government probably had a role in the Bali bombings.

(52) Police outside of a 2003 European Union summit in Greece were filmed planting Molotov cocktails on a peaceful protester .

(53) In 2003, the U.S. Secretary of Defense admitted that interrogators were authorized to use the following method:

False Flag: Convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him.

While not a traditional false flag attack , this deception could lead to former detainees - many of whom were tortured - attacking the country falsely blamed for the interrogation and torture.

(54) Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having "our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization . It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda's ranks, causing operatives to doubt others' identities and to question the validity of communications."

(55) Similarly, in 2005, Professor John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School – a renowned US defense analyst credited with developing the concept of 'netwar' – called for western intelligence services to create new "pseudo gang" terrorist groups , as a way of undermining "real" terror networks. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, Arquilla's 'pseudo-gang' strategy was, Hersh reported, already being implemented by the Pentagon:

"Under Rumsfeld's new approach, I was told, US military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls 'action teams' in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. 'Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?' the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. 'We founded them and we financed them,' he said. 'The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it.' A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon's commando capabilities, said, 'We're going to be riding with the bad boys.'"

(56) United Press International reported in June 2005:

U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.

(57) In 2005, British soldiers dressed as Arabs were caught by Iraqi police after a shootout against the police. The British soldiers shot two Iraqi policemen, killing one . The soldiers apparently possessed explosives , and were accused of attempting to set off bombs . While none of the soldiers admitted that they were carrying out attacks, British soldiers and a column of 10 British tanks stormed the jail they were held in, broke down a wall of the jail, and busted them out . The extreme measures used to free the soldiers - rather than have them face questions and potentially stand trial - could be considered an admission.

(58) Undercover Israeli soldiers admitted in 2005 to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians, as an excuse to crack down on peaceful protests by the Palestinians.

(59) A very high-level French counterterrorism official, Paul Barril, admits that French, US and UK intelligence services worked together to poison Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium in 2006 in order to frame and discredit Russia. And see this .

(60) Quebec police admitted that, in 2007, thugs carrying rocks to a peaceful protest were actually undercover Quebec police officers (and see this ).

(61) A 2008 US Army special operations field manual recommends that the U.S. military use surrogate non-state groups such as "paramilitary forces, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistant or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members , black marketers, and other social or political 'undesirables.'" The manual specifically acknowledged that U.S. special operations can involve both counterterrorism and "terrorism" (as well as "transnational criminal activities, including narco-trafficking, illicit arms-dealing, and illegal financial transactions.")

(62) The former Italian Prime Minister, President, and head of Secret Services (Francesco Cossiga) advised the 2008 minister in charge of the police, on how to deal with protests from teachers and students:

He should do what I did when I was Minister of the Interior infiltrate the movement with agents provocateurs inclined to do anything . And after that, with the strength of the gained population consent, beat them for blood and beat for blood also those teachers that incite them. Especially the teachers. Not the elderly, of course, but the girl teachers yes.

(63) An undercover officer admitted that he infiltrated environmental, leftwing and anti-fascist groups in 22 countries. Germany's federal police chief admitted that - while the undercover officer worked for the German police - he acted illegally during a G8 protest in Germany in 2007 and committed arson by setting fire during a subsequent demonstration in Berlin. The undercover officer spent many years living with violent "Black Bloc" anarchists.

(64) Denver police admitted that uniformed officers deployed in 2008 to an area where alleged "anarchists" had planned to wreak havoc outside the Democratic National Convention ended up getting into a melee with two undercover policemen. The uniformed officers didn't know the undercover officers were cops.

(65) At the G20 protests in London in 2009, a British member of parliament saw plain clothes police officers attempting to incite the crowd to violence.

(66) The oversight agency for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police admitted that - at the G20 protests in Toronto in 2010 - undercover police officers were arrested with a group of protesters. Videos and photos (see this and this , for example) show that violent protesters wore very similar boots and other gear as the police, and carried police batons. The Globe and Mail reports that the undercover officers planned the targets for violent attack, and the police failed to stop the attacks.

(67) Egyptian politicians admitted (and see this ) that government employees looted priceless museum artifacts 2011 to try to discredit the protesters.

(68) In 2011, a Hindu "holy man" admitted that he and other Hindu extremists had carried out a series of bombings between 2006 and 2008 which killed well over 100 people, and was blamed on Muslims.

(69) Austin police admit that 3 officers infiltrated the Occupy protests in that city. Prosecutors admit that one of the undercover officers purchased and constructed illegal "lock boxes" which ended up getting many protesters arrested.

(70) In 2011, a Colombian colonel admitted that he and his soldiers had lured 57 innocent civilians and killed them – after dressing many of them in uniforms – as part of a scheme to claim that Columbia was eradicating left-wing terrorists. And see this .

(71) Rioters who discredited the peaceful protests against the swearing in of the Mexican president in 2012 admitted that they were paid 300 pesos each to destroy everything in their path. According to Wikipedia, photos also show the vandals waiting in groups behind police lines prior to the violence.

(72) On November 20, 2014, Mexican agent provocateurs were transported by army vehicles to participate in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping protests, as was shown by videos and pictures distributed via social networks.

(73) The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – recently admitted that the Saudi government controls "Chechen" terrorists.

(74) In 2014, a leaked telephone recording captured 4 high-level Turkish officials discussing a false flag attack to be blamed on the Syrians. The Washington Post reported :

The leaked audio appeared to feature Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, National Intelligence Organization (MİT) Undersecretary Hakan Fidan, Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioğlu and Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Yaşar Güler discussing possible intervention in Syria.

***

"Justification can be created," one voice says in the recording, appearing to reference a "false flag" attack. "The matter is to create the will."

The Wall Street Journal wrote :

A leaked recording published anonymously on the platform purported to reveal a conversation in which Turkey's foreign minister, spy chief and a top general appear to discuss how to create a pretext for a possible Turkish attack within Syria.

And the New York Times noted :

The officials were heard discussing a plot to establish a justification for military strikes in Syria. One option that is said to have been discussed was orchestrating an attack on the Tomb of Suleyman Shah ....

Suleiman Shah Tomb is an important Turkish landmark, being the burial place of the founder of the Ottoman Empire.

For example, the Turkish officials said :

Ahmet Davutolu: "Prime Minister said that in current conjuncture, this attack (on Suleiman Shah Tomb) must be seen as an opportunity for us."

Hakan Fidan: "I'll send 4 men from Syria, if that's what it takes. I'll make up a cause of war by ordering a missile attack on Turkey ; we can also prepare an attack on Suleiman Shah Tomb if necessary ."

Feridun Sinirliolu: "Our national security has become a common, cheap domestic policy outfit ."

Turkish officials confirmed that the leaked recording was authentic , and Turkish leader shut down Youtube to stop its spread online.

(75) In 2014, two members of the Turkish Parliament admitted that the Turkish government carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government. High-level American sources have more or less confirmed this.

(76) The former Director of the NSA and other American government officials admit said that the U.S. is a huge supporter of terrorism. Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted on CNN that the U.S. organized and supported Bin Laden and the other originators of "Al Qaeda" in the 1970s to fight the Soviets. The U.S. and its allies have been supporting Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups for many decades, and providing them arms, money and logistical support in Libya , Syria , Mali , Bosnia , Chechnya , Iran , and many other countries . U.S. allies are also directly responsible for creating and supplying ISIS.

It's gotten so ridiculous that a U.S. Senator has introduced a " Stop Arming Terrorists Act" , and a U.S. Congresswoman - who introduced a similar bill in the House - says : "For years, the U.S. government has been supporting armed militant groups working directly with and often under the command of terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government."

(77) Government officials on both sides of the conflict, as well as the snipers who actually pulled the trigger, all admit that shots were fired on both sides - killing both government officials and anti-government protesters in Ukraine - to create maximum chaos and destabilization.

(78) Speaking of snipers, in a secret recording, Venezuelan generals admit that they will deploy snipers to shoot protesters, but keep the marksmen well-hidden from demonstrator and the reporters covering the events so others would be blamed for the deaths.

(79) Burmese government officials admitted that Burma (renamed Myanmar) used false flag attacks against Muslim and Buddhist groups within the country to stir up hatred between the two groups, to prevent democracy from spreading.

(80) Israeli police were again filmed in 2015 dressing up as Arabs and throwing stones, then turning over Palestinian protesters to Israeli soldiers.

(81) Britain's spy agency has admitted (and see this ) that it carries out "digital false flag" attacks on targets, framing people by writing offensive or unlawful material and blaming it on the target.

(82) The CIA has admitted that it uses viruses and malware from Russia and other countries to carry out cyberattacks and blame other countries.

(83) U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then "drop" automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants.

(84) German prosecutors admit that a German soldier disguised himself as a Syrian refugee and planned to shoot people so that the attack would be blamed on asylum seekers.

(85) Police frame innocent people for crimes they didn't commit. The practice is so well-known that the New York Times noted in 1981:

In police jargon, a throwdown is a weapon planted on a victim.

Newsweek reported in 1999:

Perez, himself a former [Los Angeles Police Department] cop, was caught stealing eight pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. After pleading guilty in September, he bargained for a lighter sentence by telling an appalling story of attempted murder and a "throwdown"–police slang for a weapon planted by cops to make a shooting legally justifiable . Perez said he and his partner, Officer Nino Durden, shot an unarmed 18th Street Gang member named Javier Ovando, then planted a semiautomatic rifle on the unconscious suspect and claimed that Ovando had tried to shoot them during a stakeout.

Wikipedia notes :

As part of his plea bargain, Pérez implicated scores of officers from the Rampart Division's anti-gang unit, describing routinely beating gang members, planting evidence on suspects, falsifying reports and covering up unprovoked shootings .

(Police have been busted framing innocent people in many other ways , as well.)

(86) A former U.S. intelligence officer alleged :

Most terrorists are false flag terrorists or are created by our own security services.

He has himself admitted to carrying out a false flag attack.

(87) The head and special agent in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles office said that most terror attacks are committed by the CIA and FBI as false flags.

(88) The Director of Analytics at the interagency Global Engagement Center housed at the U.S. Department of State, also an adjunct professor at George Mason University, where he teaches the graduate course National Security Challenges in the Department of Information Sciences and Technology, a former branch chief in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, and an intelligence advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security (J.D. Maddox) notes :

Provocation is one of the most basic, but confounding, aspects of warfare. Despite its sometimes obvious use, it has succeeded consistently against audiences around the world, for millennia, to compel war . A well-constructed provocation narrative mutes even the most vocal opposition.

***

The culmination of a strategic provocation operation invariably reflects a narrative of victimhood: we are the victims of the enemy's unforgivable atrocities .

***

In the case of strategic provocation the deaths of an aggressor's own personnel are a core tactic of the provocation .

***

The persistent use of strategic provocation over centuries – and its apparent importance to war planners – begs the question of its likely use by the US and other states in the near term.

(89) In 2019, Israeli soldiers blamed Palestinians for intentionally lighting fires. But a video shows that it was Israeli settlers who lit the fires.

doctor10 , 4 hours ago link

War has become a mechanism for "laundering debt"

Ethan Allen Hawley , 5 hours ago link

So war is a racket? Who knew?

TheEndIsNear , 15 hours ago link

No mention of USS Liberty.

George Washington , 4 hours ago link

No Israeli has ADMITTED that it was a false flag, so it hasn't met the high standards for this essay.

But I've written extensively about it .

Swamidon , 19 hours ago link

I lived in Bangkok during the run up to the Iraq WMD war. During that time the Free Publications and Newspapers around the world, including the Bangkok Post, were screaming the Truth and warning the world about the folly of America's planned invasion. But when I returned to America on vacation just before the War started NOBODY had any idea, or the slightest suspicion, of being conned into a needless war, or recognized another Gulf of Tonkin False Flag in the making either. The govt and the press had convinced America they were Heroes.

Mustahattu , 20 hours ago link

We all know about false flags. But how about correcting the history books?

Not much chance of that happening as historical revisionism is seen antisemitic. And we can't have that can we!

https://rutube.ru/video/48a9f5dd89260e67f6f19bef4db240bf/
David Cole interviews Dr Franciszek Piper

GRDguy , 21 hours ago link

War is simply the way sociopathic bloodlines kill off non-sociopathic bloodlines in order to perpetuate their own, and the non-sociopaths let them. Seems no one ever wants to discuss how the financial and political sociopaths finance, organize and pull-off this blood-letting every so often.

The Gladiator , 22 hours ago link

Gulf of Tonkin mentioned, but nothing about the USS Liberty. I guess that would be anti-semitic.

bevansthehypocrite , 1 day ago link


Britain badly wanted the rich Babylonian Jews of Iraq to leave their palatial mansions in Iraq to help those not-so-rich British Jews to found the fledgling nation of Israel. But Iraqi Jews refused to budge like the present day Iranian Jews.

So, Britain started working. The modus operandi was to send British Indian soldiers dressed as Iraqi Moslems to create explosions in the Jewish quarters of Baghdad. The puppet Iraqi king helplessly watched.

To drag USA into the mess, Britain even bombed a cafeteria frequented by American and Jewish professors and students of the American University of Baghdad.

Then the British hanged the richest Jewish merchant in Baghdad, an American car dealer, IN PUBLIC as a traitor. The puppet King of Iraq again kept silent as otherwise the British would kill him.

Yes, finally the Babylonian Jews' resolve was broken and the exodus began only to find that while they lived in palatial mansions in Iraq, the jealous British Jews put them in tents in Israel, so most of them escaped to USA.

Here in USA, our administration and courts sided with British Jews and the voice of Iraqi Jews were suppressed and silenced. And we Americans are still paying a heavy price for that blunder!

All this happened right before the eyes of present day elderly Iranian Jews, so they and their children refuse to leave Iran NOW.

ASIDE:
To the disappointment of British oversmartness, the Iraqi hospital doctors found a wounded guy from that Cafeteria bombing with major burns and WITH A NEPALESE GORKA KNIFE hanging from his belt. Soon, The British commander came running to the hospital, ignored doctor's pleadings and carried away that hapless, heavily charred guy to his death - to belatedly cover up British responsibility for the bombings. Yes, that bomber was a soldier in the BRITISH GORKA REGIMENT!

So, each time UK encourages USA in its Wars, this story comes to my mind.

[Jun 24, 2019] Tony Blair was accused of the crime of aggression but the Judges said he could not be prosecuted

Notable quotes:
"... The Supreme Court Treason related to the 2000 election penned by the late Vincent T. Bugliosi, The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President, and his The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, provoke similar ire. ..."
Jun 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Harry Law , Jun 23, 2019 7:17:47 PM | 147

Karlof1@136

"The UNSC veto doesn't make the UN Charter null and void. Actions that violate it are still illegal/unconstitutional and able to be challenged in domestic courts". I agree it does not make the charter null and void, the question is how can aggressors be brought to book, Tony Blair was accused of the crime of aggression but the Judges said he could not be prosecuted see below. Thanks for the link to the Uniting for Peace resolution, I will read it tomorrow.
"Tony Blair should not face prosecution for his role in the 2003 Iraq war, the high court has ruled.

The lord chief justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and another senior judge, Mr Justice Ouseley, said on Monday that there was no crime of aggression in English law under which the former prime minister could be charged.

The decision blocks an attempt by a former Iraqi general, Abdulwaheed al-Rabbat, to bring a private war crimes prosecution against the former Labour leader.
The two judges recognised that a crime of aggression had recently been incorporated into international law, but said it did not apply retroactively". https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/31/tony-blair-prosecution-over-iraq-war-blocked-by-judges

karlof1 | Jun 23, 2019 8:19:37 PM | 156

Harry Law @149--

Thanks for your reply! I recall what an absolutely incensed Craig Murray wrote about that decision about Tony Blair--well beyond a travesty as it's a Capital Crime and not subject to statutes of limitation. The Supreme Court Treason related to the 2000 election penned by the late Vincent T. Bugliosi, The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President, and his The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, provoke similar ire.

Going on 3 decades now, one of my primary questions is How to contain the Outlaw US Empire and make it into a law-abiding nation without blowing up the world. I've always recognized that it would take a global coalition to arrive at a genuine confrontation.

IMO, we're very close to that point; the G-20 will indicate just how close.

But even more importantly than the global coalition is the requirement for a political force within the Empire asking and acting on my question. The Maximum Pressure must come from internal and external sources for any positive outcome to be achieved. Since 2012, I've seen 2020 as THE inflection point. It seems I'm not alone.

[Jun 23, 2019] How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx by George Monbiot

Highly recommended!
George Monbiot is right: Rand was probably a female sociopath...
Notable quotes:
"... Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax. ..."
"... Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year. ..."
"... the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress. ..."
"... It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments. ..."
"... the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan , former head of the US Federal Reserve. ..."
"... As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system". ..."
"... Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history. ..."
Mar 05, 2012 | www.theguardian.com
Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats Comments 1,227 Illustration by Daniel Pudles I t has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand , who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.

Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.

Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers. The millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with the result that the nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and selfishness, by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt .

The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and their own sloth and fecklessness. Those who try to help them are gassed. In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife "who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing".

Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.

Ignoring Rand's evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.

Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people who have never read it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new demands to remove the 50p tax band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering, jeering bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking compassion and empathy, attacking efforts to make the word a kinder place.

It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.

It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires' doormats. I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.

But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy: as Adam Curtis's BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan , former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal . Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as "the 'greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking is the unexcelled protector of the consumer". As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system".

Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history.

Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous admission that it was Rand who persuaded him that "capitalism is not only efficient and practical but also moral", he mentioned her in his memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion – and this, it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful evidence that even today Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having renounced his partial admission of failure to Congress.

Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.

Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com

[Jun 23, 2019] How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx by George Monbiot

Highly recommended!
George Monbiot is right: Rand was probably a female sociopath...
Notable quotes:
"... Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax. ..."
"... Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year. ..."
"... the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress. ..."
"... It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments. ..."
"... the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan , former head of the US Federal Reserve. ..."
"... As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system". ..."
"... Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history. ..."
Mar 05, 2012 | www.theguardian.com
Her psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats Comments 1,227 Illustration by Daniel Pudles I t has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand , who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.

Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse" and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.

Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers. The millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with the result that the nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and selfishness, by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt .

The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and their own sloth and fecklessness. Those who try to help them are gassed. In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife "who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing".

Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.

Ignoring Rand's evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.

Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people who have never read it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new demands to remove the 50p tax band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering, jeering bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking compassion and empathy, attacking efforts to make the word a kinder place.

It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.

It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires' doormats. I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.

But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy: as Adam Curtis's BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan , former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal . Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as "the 'greed' of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking is the unexcelled protector of the consumer". As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system".

Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history.

Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous admission that it was Rand who persuaded him that "capitalism is not only efficient and practical but also moral", he mentioned her in his memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion – and this, it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful evidence that even today Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having renounced his partial admission of failure to Congress.

Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.

Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com

[Jun 23, 2019] I have no idea how Rand became the poster child for the libertarian movement

Notable quotes:
"... I can only assume that, as with so many of their other ideas, the internet / radio hosts promoting her ideas as the solution to the worlds problems have never actually read anything she said, or did, or possibly if they had, they have not understood it. ..."
"... Usually, with philosophers, you can see how it is not their words, but that someone has interpreted them for their own ends (Nietzsche etc), but in the case of Rand, no mis-interpretation is required, unless you are trying to portray her views as anything other than deeply misanthropic. ..."
Jun 23, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

Rhiaden , 6 Mar 2012 09:24

I always view Ayn Rand as someone who most right wing dictators would place themselves somewhere to the left of.

I have no idea how she became the poster child for the libertarian movement, I can only assume that, as with so many of their other ideas, the internet / radio hosts promoting her ideas as the solution to the worlds problems have never actually read anything she said, or did, or possibly if they had, they have not understood it.

Usually, with philosophers, you can see how it is not their words, but that someone has interpreted them for their own ends (Nietzsche etc), but in the case of Rand, no mis-interpretation is required, unless you are trying to portray her views as anything other than deeply misanthropic.

[Jun 23, 2019] It's erroneous to think state capitalism = soviet russia style dictatorships.

Mar 06, 2012 | discussion.theguardian.com

UnknownGunman -> johncj , 6 Mar 2012 05:42

The degree of statism in a country's political system, is the degree to which it breaks up the country into rival gangs and sets men against one another. When individual rights are abrogated, there is no way to determine who is entitled to what; there is no way to determine the justice of anyone's claims, desires, or interests. The criterion, therefore, reverts to the tribal concept of: one's wishes are limited only by the power of one's gang.

Such a black and white view of reality. This is the entire problem with Rand's worldview, reality is far too complex. Here, you talk about the level of "statism" - there are many different methods of using the state to achieve goals which help improve your life and those in the society around you.

For example, in Scandanavian countries, and other northern European ones, the state is used to make up for distribution deficiencies in the market system - that is, to reign in those at either end of the socio-economic scale to make the distribution more equal, which has been scientifically shown to reduce all manner of social ills caused by a large amount of economic inequality.

They do this whilst minimising the impact on economic freedom.

So it's erroneous to think statism = soviet russia style dictatorships.

As for individual rights - well, these are clearly important, but certainly not as a blanket ideology behind society. Negative sides to individual rights are things like:

• Educational freedom - 2 + 2 can equal 5!
• Parenting - society has to deal with bad parenting as the child reaches adulthood, so society deserves an equal say: I don't have to vaccinate my kids! (recent MMR jab a prime example)
• I'm free to pollute the environment, make excessive noise because the government has no place stopping me.

As a society, a balance needs to be maintained. A balance between a person's individual liberty and the impact on the society around them. This is the main area where Rand's philosophy fails - she simply does not acknowledge the very complex relationship humans have with each other, with society as a whole, and the world around them.

[Jun 23, 2019] The basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a self-owner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body and property. But without the means to protect, defend and preserve these things that one "owns", provided by the state, it amounts to very little.

Notable quotes:
"... This is the reduction ad absurdum that libertarianism is always reduced to. A subscription police force is an an idiocy, a bit like a subscription fire service. ..."
"... Even by the 18th Century, people had figured out that made no sense. How on earth could it work? A private police force would be beholden to its paymasters and no one else. ..."
"... As I have said many times, a pure libertarian society would be a warlord society, with the feeble or non-existent state unable to restrain the richest and most powerful people in that society. Truly a hell on earth. ..."
Mar 06, 2012 | discussion.theguardian.com

HarryTheHorse , 6 Mar 2012 10:41

The basic axiom of libertarian political theory holds that every man is a self-owner, having absolute jurisdiction over his own body. In effect, this means that no one else may justly invade, or aggress against, another's person. It follows then that each person justly owns whatever previously unowned resources he appropriates or 'mixes his labor with'. From these twin axioms -- self-ownership and 'homesteading' -- stem the justification for the entire system of property rights titles in a free market society."

That's all very well, but without the means to protect, defend and preserve these things that one "owns", it amounts to very little. And that is where collectivisation comes in. For what is the law but a series of codes that we collectively as a society agree to abide by. Without the rule of law to protect me, whatever I own will soon be taken by someone stronger and more aggressive that me. Individuals cannot assert their rights as individuals, for they are not strong enough to do so. The irony, which is lost on libertarians, is that for individual rights to be preserved we must sacrifice a little of our individualism to collectively band together to defend those rights.

HarryTheHorse -> johncj , 6 Mar 2012 10:33

Then don't pay if you don't want to, that's my point. If you want police pay a subscription. I suppose this is floating away from objectivism and more into libertarianism. The principle is the same how ever.

This is the reduction ad absurdum that libertarianism is always reduced to. A subscription police force is an an idiocy, a bit like a subscription fire service.

Even by the 18th Century, people had figured out that made no sense. How on earth could it work? A private police force would be beholden to its paymasters and no one else.

Presumably there would be multiple such police forces - for free-market competition, of course. These police forces would become de facto private armies. And from where would they derive their authority? From he who pays them the most?

As I have said many times, a pure libertarian society would be a warlord society, with the feeble or non-existent state unable to restrain the richest and most powerful people in that society. Truly a hell on earth.

[Jun 23, 2019] Many Anarchists have a libertarian mindset, and seek cooperation (rather than a competition in who can break the most windows), but reject the dominance and structures of the elite, which are usually completely undemocratic.

Jun 23, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

totemic , 6 Mar 2012 14:16

While there is certainly an element of Paul supporters, in my experience here in the Bay/Central Coast is that it is predominantly Dems, liberals, progressives, socialists and a surprising number of anarchists (many of which are not the typical window-breaking stereotype).

I would guess its all of us who are suspicious of hierarchical state capitalism - whether of the left or the right. Many Anarchists have a libertarian mindset, and seek cooperation (rather than a competition in who can break the most windows), but reject the dominance and structures of the elite, which are usually completely undemocratic.

[Jun 23, 2019] No, that is not anarchy. That is a load of selfish bastards claiming to be anarchists and using this as a justification for their being selfish bastards.

Apr 11, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

BeenThereDunThat -> apacheman , 11 Apr 2019 05:16

People think of anarchy as equating with lawless selfishness because that's how it works in real life.

No, that is not anarchy. That is a load of selfish bastards claiming to be anarchists and using this as a justification for their being selfish bastards. I remember only too well the cry of no small number of the trendy fashion-punk-anarchists of the 1980's to justify their hedonism and lack of responsibility " I'm an Anarchist, me: I can do anything! ".And my response to them? " Are you fuck!!! ".

Sadly, however, many like yourself choose to take the definition of anarchy which is a total misrepresentation of it equating to chaos and disorder, and which as I noted in my earlier comment, has been deliberately promulgated and used by the State and its supportive media. And in doing so, you do the philosophy a disservice, as you only help spread this representation, which eventually becomes the accepted understanding. And this is what the State and the oligarchs desire most, as it keeps people away from those most dangerous of thoughts, about actually trying to control their own lives.

[Jun 23, 2019] As former right-wing operative Allen Raymond famously said: "this is not about morality, this is about winning"

Jun 23, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

1Byron , 5 Mar 2012 17:44

It's no wonder the US is so screwed up these days. Somehow the NeoCons, before and after stealing the 2,000 election for Bush, with the help of abundance of Liars 4 Hire think tanks like CATO, CEI, AEI, Heritage Foundation blah, blah, blah, bankrolled by the likes of the Koch Bros, The Scaifes, Exxon, Monsanto, Dow, Dupont the Nuke Industry etc. were, and are still able to convince low intelligence people that wrong is right, bad is good, meanness is "compassion" and abuse is "tough love".

But it only works if those being duped are already predisposed to hateful philosophy, and that they got in spades with careful conditioning (brainwashing) from bastards like Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch, people with no moral scruples whatsoever.

Thus the right today (actually for a long while now) is no more than a collection of racists and bigots, pathological liars and scammers, charlatans and greedmeisters.

It's why they care nothing for the poor, nothing for protection the environment, nothing for anyone or anything but themselves. They are the cult of mean.

As former right-wing operative Allen Raymond famously said: "this is not about morality, this is about winning"

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/8/how_to_rig_an_election_convicted

[Jun 23, 2019] Argentina s Economic Misery Could Bring Populism Back to the Country by Peter S. Goodman

Notable quotes:
"... Mr. Macri has slashed subsidies for electricity, fuel and transportation, causing prices to skyrocket, and recently prompting Ms. Genovesi, 48, to cut off her gas service, rendering her stove lifeless. Like most of her neighbors, she illegally taps into the power lines that run along the rutted dirt streets. ..."
"... "It's a neoliberal government," she says. "It's a government that does not favor the people." ..."
"... The tribulations playing out under the disintegrating roofs of the poor are a predictable dimension of Mr. Macri's turn away from left-wing populism. He vowed to shrink Argentina's monumental deficits by diminishing the largess of the state. The trouble is that Argentines have yet to collect on the other element the president promised: the economic revival that was supposed to follow the pain. ..."
"... But as Mr. Macri seeks re-election this year, Argentines increasingly lament that they are absorbing all strife and no progress. Even businesses that have benefited from his reforms complain that he has botched the execution, leaving the nation to confront the same concoction of misery that has plagued it for decades. The economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and joblessness is stuck above 9 percent ..."
"... Poverty afflicts a third of the population, and the figure is climbing. ..."
"... Mr. Macri sold his administration as an evolved form of governance for these times, a crucial dose of market forces tempered by social programs. ..."
"... In the most generous reading, the medicine has yet to take effect. But in the view of beleaguered Argentines, the country has merely slipped back into the rut that has framed national life for as long as most people can remember. ..."
"... "We live patching things up," said Roberto Nicoli, 62, who runs a silverware company outside the capital, Buenos Aires. "We never fix things. I always say, 'Whenever we start doing better, I will start getting ready for the next crisis.'" ..."
"... "When our president Cristina was here, they sent people to help us," she says. "Now, if there's problems, nobody helps us. Poor people feel abandoned." ..."
May 10, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

On the ragged streets of the shantytown across the road, where stinking outhouses sit alongside shacks fashioned from rusted sheets of tin, families have surrendered hopes that sewage lines will ever reach them.

They do not struggle to fashion an explanation for their declining fortunes: Since taking office more than three years ago, President Mauricio Macri has broken with the budget-busting populism that has dominated Argentina for much of the past century, embracing the grim arithmetic of economic orthodoxy.

Mr. Macri has slashed subsidies for electricity, fuel and transportation, causing prices to skyrocket, and recently prompting Ms. Genovesi, 48, to cut off her gas service, rendering her stove lifeless. Like most of her neighbors, she illegally taps into the power lines that run along the rutted dirt streets.

"It's a neoliberal government," she says. "It's a government that does not favor the people."

The tribulations playing out under the disintegrating roofs of the poor are a predictable dimension of Mr. Macri's turn away from left-wing populism. He vowed to shrink Argentina's monumental deficits by diminishing the largess of the state. The trouble is that Argentines have yet to collect on the other element the president promised: the economic revival that was supposed to follow the pain.

Mr. Macri's supporters heralded his 2015 election as a miraculous outbreak of normalcy in a country with a well-earned reputation for histrionics. He would cease the reckless spending that had brought Argentina infamy for defaulting on its debts eight times. Sober-minded austerity would win the trust of international financiers, bringing investment that would yield jobs and fresh opportunities.

But as Mr. Macri seeks re-election this year, Argentines increasingly lament that they are absorbing all strife and no progress. Even businesses that have benefited from his reforms complain that he has botched the execution, leaving the nation to confront the same concoction of misery that has plagued it for decades. The economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and joblessness is stuck above 9 percent.

Poverty afflicts a third of the population, and the figure is climbing.

Far beyond this country of 44 million people, Mr. Macri's tenure is testing ideas that will shape economic policy in an age of recrimination over widening inequality. His presidency was supposed to offer an escape from the wreckage of profligate spending while laying down an alternative path for countries grappling with the worldwide rise of populism. Now, his presidency threatens to become a gateway back to populism. The Argentine economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and joblessness is stuck above 9 percent. Poverty afflicts a third of the population. Credit Sarah Pabst for The New York Times

Image
The Argentine economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and joblessness is stuck above 9 percent. Poverty afflicts a third of the population. Credit Sarah Pabst for The New York Times

As the October election approaches, Mr. Macri is contending with the growing prospect of a challenge from the president he succeeded, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who faces a series of criminal indictments for corruption . Her unbridled spending helped deliver the crisis that Mr. Macri inherited. Her return would resonate as a rebuke of his market-oriented reforms while potentially yanking Argentina back to its accustomed preserve: left-wing populism, in uncomfortable proximity to insolvency.

The Argentine peso lost half of its value against the dollar last year, prompting the central bank to lift interest rates to a commerce-suffocating level above 60 percent. Argentina was forced to secure a $57 billion rescue from the International Monetary Fund , a profound indignity given that the fund is widely despised here for the austerity it imposed in the late 1990s, turning an economic downturn into a depression.

For Mr. Macri, time does not appear to be in abundant supply. The spending cuts he delivered hit the populace immediately. The promised benefits of his reforms -- a stable currency, tamer inflation, fresh investment and jobs -- could take years to materialize, leaving Argentines angry and yearning for the past.

In much of South America, left-wing governments have taken power in recent decades as an angry corrective to dogmatic prescriptions from Washington, where the Treasury and the I.M.F. have focused on the confidence of global investors as the key to development.

Left-wing populism has aimed to redistribute the gains from the wealthy to everyone else. It has aided the poor, while generating its own woes -- corruption and depression in Brazil , runaway inflation and financial ruin in Argentina. In Venezuela, uninhibited spending has turned the country with the world's largest proven oil reserves into a land where children starve .

Mr. Macri sold his administration as an evolved form of governance for these times, a crucial dose of market forces tempered by social programs.

In the most generous reading, the medicine has yet to take effect. But in the view of beleaguered Argentines, the country has merely slipped back into the rut that has framed national life for as long as most people can remember.

"We live patching things up," said Roberto Nicoli, 62, who runs a silverware company outside the capital, Buenos Aires. "We never fix things. I always say, 'Whenever we start doing better, I will start getting ready for the next crisis.'"

Cultivating wealth

... ... ...

In the beginning, there was Juan Domingo Perón, the charismatic Army general who was president from 1946 to 1955, and then again from 1973 to 1974. He employed an authoritarian hand and muscular state power to champion the poor. He and his wife, Eva Duarte -- widely known by her nickname, Evita -- would dominate political life long after they died, inspiring politicians across the ideological spectrum to claim their mantle.

Among the most ardent Peronists were Néstor Kirchner, the president from 2003 to 2007, and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who took office in 2007, remaining until Mr. Macri was elected in 2015.

Their version of Peronism -- what became known as Kirchnerism -- was decidedly left-wing, disdaining global trade as a malevolent force. They expanded cash grants to the poor and imposed taxes on farm exports in a bid to keep Argentine food prices low.

As the country's farmers tell it, Kirchnerism is just a fancy term for the confiscation of their wealth and the scattering of the spoils to the unproductive masses. They point to Ms. Kirchner's 35 percent tax on soybean exports.

"We had a saying," Mr. Tropini says. "'For every three trucks that went to the port, one was for Cristina Kirchner.'"

reduction in export taxes.

"You could breathe finally," Mr. Tropini, the farmer, says.

He was free of the Kirchners, yet stuck with nature. Floods in 2016 wiped out more than half of his crops. A drought last year wreaked even more havoc.

"This harvest, this year," he says, "is a gift from God."

But if the heavens are now cooperating, and if the people running Buenos Aires represent change, Mr. Tropini is critical of Mr. Macri's failure to overcome the economic crisis.

A weaker currency makes Argentine soybeans more competitive, but it also increases the cost of the diesel fuel Mr. Tropini needs to run his machinery. High interest rates make it impossible for him to buy another combine, which would allow him to expand his farm.

In September, faced with a plunge in government revenues, Mr. Macri reinstated some export taxes .

... ... ...

What went wrong?

... ... ...

In the first years of Mr. Macri's administration, the government lifted controls on the value of the peso while relaxing export taxes. The masters of international finance delivered a surge of investment. The economy expanded by nearly 3 percent in 2017, and then accelerated in the first months of last year.

But as investors grew wary of Argentina's deficits, they fled, sending the peso plunging and inflation soaring. As the rout continued last year, the central bank mounted a futile effort to support the currency, selling its stash of dollars to try to halt the peso's descent. As the reserves dwindled, investors absorbed the spectacle of a government failing to restore order. The exodus of money intensified, and another potential default loomed, leading a chastened Mr. Macri to accept a rescue from the dreaded IMF.

Administration officials described the unraveling as akin to a natural disaster: unforeseeable and unavoidable. The drought hurt agriculture. Money was flowing out of developing countries as the Federal Reserve continued to lift interest rates in the United States, making the American dollar a more attractive investment.

But the impact of the Fed's tightening had been widely anticipated. Economists fault the government for mishaps and complacency that left the country especially vulnerable.

.... ... ...

Among the most consequential errors was the government's decision to include Argentina's central bank in a December 2017 announcement that it was raising its inflation target. The markets took that as a signal that the government was surrendering its war on inflation while opting for a traditional gambit: printing money rather than cutting spending.

... ... ...

The government insists that better days are ahead. The spending cuts have dropped the budget deficit to a manageable 3 percent of annual economic output. Argentina is again integrated into the global economy.

"We haven't improved, but the foundations of the economy and society are much healthier," said Miguel Braun, secretary of economic policy at the Treasury Ministry. "Argentina is in a better place to generate a couple of decades of growth."

... ... ...

Their television flashes dire warnings, like "Danger of Hyper Inflation." Throughout the neighborhood, people decry the sense that they have been forsaken by the government.

Trucks used to come to castrate male dogs to control the packs of feral animals running loose. Not anymore. Health programs for children are less accessible than they were before, they said.

Daisy Quiroz, 71, a retired maid, lives in a house that regularly floods in the rainy season.

"When our president Cristina was here, they sent people to help us," she says. "Now, if there's problems, nobody helps us. Poor people feel abandoned."

... ... ...

Daniel Politi contributed reporting from Buenos Aires. Peter S. Goodman is a London-based European economics correspondent. He was previously a national economic correspondent in New York. He has also worked at The Washington Post as a China correspondent, and was global editor in chief of the International Business Times. @ petersgoodman

[Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow

Highly recommended!
Bolton is just Albright of different sex. The same aggressive stupidity.
Notable quotes:
"... Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob... ..."
"... How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate. ..."
"... Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity. ..."
"... Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela. ..."
"... "If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." ..."
"... Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe. ..."
"... Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states. ..."
"... Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. ..."
"... The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more. ..."
"... At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia. ..."
"... Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders. ..."
"... When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." ..."
"... For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob. ..."
Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Doug Bandow via National Interest,

Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob...

How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate.

Since 9/11, Washington has been extraordinarily active militarily -- invading two nations, bombing and droning several others, deploying special operations forces in yet more countries, and applying sanctions against many. Tragically, the threat of Islamist violence and terrorism only have metastasized. Although Al Qaeda lost its effectiveness in directly plotting attacks, it continues to inspire national offshoots. Moreover, while losing its physical "caliphate" the Islamic State added further terrorism to its portfolio.

Three successive administrations have ever more deeply ensnared the United States in the Middle East. War with Iran appears to be frighteningly possible. Ever-wealthier allies are ever-more dependent on America. Russia is actively hostile to the United States and Europe. Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity.

Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela.

U.S. foreign policy suffers from systematic flaws in the thinking of the informal policy collective which former Obama aide Ben Rhodes dismissed as "The Blob." Perhaps no official better articulated The Blob's defective precepts than Madeleine Albright, United Nations ambassador and Secretary of State.

First is overweening hubris. In 1998 Secretary of State Albright declared that

"If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."

Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe.

U.S. officials rarely were prepared for events that occurred in the next week or month, let alone years later. Americans did no better than the French in Vietnam. Americans managed events in Africa no better than the British, French, and Portuguese colonial overlords. Washington made more than its share of bad, even awful decisions in dealing with other nations around the globe.

Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states.

The U.S. record since September 11 has been uniquely counterproductive. Rather than minimize hostility toward America, Washington adopted a policy -- highlighted by launching new wars, killing more civilians, and ravaging additional societies -- guaranteed to create enemies, exacerbate radicalism, and spread terrorism. Blowback is everywhere. Among the worst examples: Iraqi insurgents mutated into ISIS, which wreaked military havoc throughout the Middle East and turned to terrorism.

Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. When queried 1996 about her justification for sanctions against Iraq which had killed a half million babies -- notably, she did not dispute the accuracy of that estimate -- she responded that "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Exactly who "we" were she did not say. Most likely she meant those Americans admitted to the foreign policy priesthood, empowered to make foreign policy and take the practical steps necessary to enforce it. (She later stated of her reply: "I never should have made it. It was stupid." It was, but it reflected her mindset.)

In any normal country, such a claim would be shocking -- a few people sitting in another capital deciding who lived and died. Foreign elites, a world away from the hardship that they imposed, deciding the value of those dying versus the purported interests being promoted. Those paying the price had no voice in the decision, no way to hold their persecutors accountable.

The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more.

This mindset is reinforced by contempt toward even those being aided by Washington. Although American diplomats had termed the Kosovo Liberation Army as "terrorist," the Clinton Administration decided to use the growing insurgency as an opportunity to expand Washington's influence. At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia.

However, initially the KLA, determined on independence, refused to sign Albright's agreement. She exploded. One of her officials anonymously complained: "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothingballs to do something entirely in their own interest -- which is to say yes to an interim agreement -- and they stiff us." Someone described as "a close associate" observed: "She is so stung by what happened. She's angry at everyone -- the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO." For Albright, the determination of others to achieve their own goals, even at risk to their lives, was an insult to America and her.

Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders.

As Albright famously asked Colin Powell in 1992:

"What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" To her, American military personnel apparently were but gambit pawns in a global chess game, to be sacrificed for the interest and convenience of those playing. No wonder then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's reaction stated in his autobiography was: "I thought I would have an aneurysm."

When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." Although sixty-five years had passed, she admitted that "my mindset is Munich," a unique circumstance and threat without even plausible parallel today.

Such a philosophy explains a 1997 comment by a cabinet member, likely Albright, to General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event -- something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough -- and slow enough -- so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?" He responded sure, as soon as she qualified to fly the plane.

For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob.

Anyone of these comments could be dismissed as a careless aside. Taken together, however, they reflect an attitude dangerous for Americans and foreigners alike. Unfortunately, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy suggest that this mindset is not limited to any one person. Any president serious about taking a new foreign-policy direction must do more than drain the swamp. He or she must sideline The Blob.

* * *

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .

[Jun 22, 2019] Use of science by the US politicians: they uses science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "the administrator uses social science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination." Scholars' disinclination to be used in this way helps explain more of the distance. ..."
Jun 16, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The evidence suggests that foreign policymakers do not seek insight from scholars, but rather support for what they already want to do.

As Desch quotes a World War II U.S. Navy anthropologist, "the administrator uses social science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination." Scholars' disinclination to be used in this way helps explain more of the distance.

[Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow

Highly recommended!
Bolton is just Albright of different sex. The same aggressive stupidity.
Notable quotes:
"... Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob... ..."
"... How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate. ..."
"... Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity. ..."
"... Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela. ..."
"... "If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." ..."
"... Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe. ..."
"... Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states. ..."
"... Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. ..."
"... The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more. ..."
"... At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia. ..."
"... Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders. ..."
"... When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." ..."
"... For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob. ..."
Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Doug Bandow via National Interest,

Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob...

How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate.

Since 9/11, Washington has been extraordinarily active militarily -- invading two nations, bombing and droning several others, deploying special operations forces in yet more countries, and applying sanctions against many. Tragically, the threat of Islamist violence and terrorism only have metastasized. Although Al Qaeda lost its effectiveness in directly plotting attacks, it continues to inspire national offshoots. Moreover, while losing its physical "caliphate" the Islamic State added further terrorism to its portfolio.

Three successive administrations have ever more deeply ensnared the United States in the Middle East. War with Iran appears to be frighteningly possible. Ever-wealthier allies are ever-more dependent on America. Russia is actively hostile to the United States and Europe. Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity.

Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela.

U.S. foreign policy suffers from systematic flaws in the thinking of the informal policy collective which former Obama aide Ben Rhodes dismissed as "The Blob." Perhaps no official better articulated The Blob's defective precepts than Madeleine Albright, United Nations ambassador and Secretary of State.

First is overweening hubris. In 1998 Secretary of State Albright declared that

"If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."

Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe.

U.S. officials rarely were prepared for events that occurred in the next week or month, let alone years later. Americans did no better than the French in Vietnam. Americans managed events in Africa no better than the British, French, and Portuguese colonial overlords. Washington made more than its share of bad, even awful decisions in dealing with other nations around the globe.

Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states.

The U.S. record since September 11 has been uniquely counterproductive. Rather than minimize hostility toward America, Washington adopted a policy -- highlighted by launching new wars, killing more civilians, and ravaging additional societies -- guaranteed to create enemies, exacerbate radicalism, and spread terrorism. Blowback is everywhere. Among the worst examples: Iraqi insurgents mutated into ISIS, which wreaked military havoc throughout the Middle East and turned to terrorism.

Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. When queried 1996 about her justification for sanctions against Iraq which had killed a half million babies -- notably, she did not dispute the accuracy of that estimate -- she responded that "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Exactly who "we" were she did not say. Most likely she meant those Americans admitted to the foreign policy priesthood, empowered to make foreign policy and take the practical steps necessary to enforce it. (She later stated of her reply: "I never should have made it. It was stupid." It was, but it reflected her mindset.)

In any normal country, such a claim would be shocking -- a few people sitting in another capital deciding who lived and died. Foreign elites, a world away from the hardship that they imposed, deciding the value of those dying versus the purported interests being promoted. Those paying the price had no voice in the decision, no way to hold their persecutors accountable.

The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more.

This mindset is reinforced by contempt toward even those being aided by Washington. Although American diplomats had termed the Kosovo Liberation Army as "terrorist," the Clinton Administration decided to use the growing insurgency as an opportunity to expand Washington's influence. At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia.

However, initially the KLA, determined on independence, refused to sign Albright's agreement. She exploded. One of her officials anonymously complained: "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothingballs to do something entirely in their own interest -- which is to say yes to an interim agreement -- and they stiff us." Someone described as "a close associate" observed: "She is so stung by what happened. She's angry at everyone -- the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO." For Albright, the determination of others to achieve their own goals, even at risk to their lives, was an insult to America and her.

Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders.

As Albright famously asked Colin Powell in 1992:

"What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" To her, American military personnel apparently were but gambit pawns in a global chess game, to be sacrificed for the interest and convenience of those playing. No wonder then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's reaction stated in his autobiography was: "I thought I would have an aneurysm."

When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." Although sixty-five years had passed, she admitted that "my mindset is Munich," a unique circumstance and threat without even plausible parallel today.

Such a philosophy explains a 1997 comment by a cabinet member, likely Albright, to General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event -- something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough -- and slow enough -- so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?" He responded sure, as soon as she qualified to fly the plane.

For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob.

Anyone of these comments could be dismissed as a careless aside. Taken together, however, they reflect an attitude dangerous for Americans and foreigners alike. Unfortunately, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy suggest that this mindset is not limited to any one person. Any president serious about taking a new foreign-policy direction must do more than drain the swamp. He or she must sideline The Blob.

* * *

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .

[Jun 22, 2019] How Madeleine Albright Got the War the U.S. Wanted by Gregory Elich

Notable quotes:
"... Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war. ..."
"... U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia. ..."
"... It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations were saying in private. ..."
"... "Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'" Šainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii] ..."
"... As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern. ..."
"... Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states: ..."
"... Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region. ..."
"... Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii] ..."
"... The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air. ..."
"... The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii] ..."
"... Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise. ..."
"... Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich ..."
May 13, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

Region: Europe , USA Theme: History , US NATO War Agenda

Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war.

The talks opened on February 6, 1999, in Rambouillet, France. Officially, the negotiations were led by a Contact Group comprised of U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill , European Union envoy Wolfgang Petritsch , and Russian diplomat Boris Mayorsky . All decisions were supposed to be jointly agreed upon by all three members of the Contact Group. In actual practice, the U.S. ran the show all the way and routinely bypassed Petritsch and Mayorsky on essential matters.

Ibrahim Rugova , an ethnic Albanian activist who advocated nonviolence, was expected to play a major role in the Albanian secessionist delegation. Joining him at Rambouillet was Fehmi Agani , a fellow member of Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright regularly sidelined Rugova, however, preferring to rely on delegation members from the hardline Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had routinely murdered Serbs, Roma, and Albanians in Kosovo who worked for the government or opposed separatism. Only a few months before the conference, KLA spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled out his organization's vision of a future Kosovo as separate and ethnically pure:

"The independence of Kosovo is the only solution We cannot live together. That is excluded." [i]

Rugova had at one time engaged in fairly productive talks with Yugoslav officials, and his willingness to negotiate was no doubt precisely the reason Albright relegated him to a background role. Yugoslav Minister of Information Milan Komnenić accompanied the Yugoslav delegation to Rambouillet. He recalls,

"With Rugova and Fehmi Agani it was possible to talk; they were flexible. In Rambouillet, [KLA leader Hashim] Thaçi appears instead of Rugova. A beast." [ii]

There was no love between Thaçi and Rugova, whose party members were the targets of threats and assassination attempts at the hands of the KLA. Rugova himself would survive an assassination attempt six years later.

The composition of the Yugoslav delegation reflected its position that many ethnic groups resided in Kosovo, and any agreement arrived at should take into account the interests of all parties. All of Kosovo's major ethnic groups were represented in the delegation. Faik Jashari , one of the Albanian members in the Yugoslav delegation, was president of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative and an official in the Provisional Executive Council, which was Yugoslavia's government in Kosovo. Jashari observed that Albright was startled when she saw the composition of the Yugoslav delegation, apparently because it went against the U.S. propaganda narrative. [iii] Throughout the talks, Albright displayed a dismissive attitude towards the delegation's Albanian, Roma, Egyptian, Goran, Turkish, and Slavic Muslim members.

U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia.

After arriving at Rambouillet, the secessionist Albanian delegation informed U.S. diplomats that it did not want to meet with the Yugoslav side. Aside from a brief ceremonial meeting, there was no direct contact between the two groups. The Yugoslav and Albanian delegations were placed on two different floors to eliminate nearly all contact. U.S. mediators Richard Holbrooke and Christopher Hill ran from one delegation to the other, conveying notes and verbal messages between the two sides but mostly trying to coerce the Yugoslav delegation. [iv]

Luan Koka, a Roma member of the Yugoslav delegation, noted that the U.S. was operating an electronic jamming device.

"We knew exactly when Madeleine Albright was coming. Connections on our mobile phones were breaking up and going crazy." [v]

It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations were saying in private.

Albright, Jashari said, would not listen to anyone.

"She had her task, and she saw only that task. You couldn't say anything to her. She didn't want to talk with us and didn't want to listen to our arguments." [vi]

One day it was Koka's birthday, and the Yugoslav delegation wanted to encourage a more relaxed atmosphere with U.S. mediators, inviting them to a cocktail party to mark the occasion.

"It was a slightly more pleasant atmosphere, and I was singing," Koka recalled. "I remember Madeleine Albright saying: 'I really like partisan songs. But if you don't accept this, the bombs will fall.'" [vii]

According to delegation member Nikola Šainović ,

"Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'" Šainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii]

From the beginning of the conference, U.S. mediator Christopher Hill "decided that what we really needed was an Albanian approval of a document, and a Serb refusal. If both refused, there could be no further action by NATO or any other organization for that matter." [ix] It was not peace that the U.S. team was seeking, but war.

As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern.

On the second day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the Yugoslav delegation with the framework text of a provisional agreement for peace and self-rule in Kosovo, but it was missing some of the annexes. The Yugoslavs requested a copy of the complete document. As delegation head Ratko Marković pointed out,

"Any objections to the text of the agreement could be made only after an insight into the text as a whole had been obtained."

Nearly one week passed before the group received one of the missing annexes. That came on the day the conference had originally been set to end. The deadline was extended, and two days later a second missing annex was provided to the Yugoslav delegation.[x]

When the Yugoslavs next met with the Contact Group, they were assured that all elements of the text had now been given to them. Several more days passed and at 7:00 PM on February 22, the penultimate day of the conference, the Contact Group presented three new annexes, which the Yugoslavs had never seen before. According to Marković, "Russian Ambassador Boris Mayorsky informed our delegation that Annexes 2 and 7 had not been discussed or approved by the Contact Group and that they were not the texts drafted by the Contact Group but by certain Contact Group members, while Annex 5 was discussed, but no decision was made on it at the Contact Group meeting." The Yugoslav delegation refused to accept the new annexes, as their introduction had violated the process whereby all proposals had to be agreed upon by the three Contact Group members. [xi]

At 9:30 AM on February 23, the final day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the full text of the proposal, containing yet more provisions that were being communicated for the first time. The accompanying note identified the package as the definitive text while adding that Russia did not support two of the articles. The letter demanded the Yugoslav delegation's decision by 1:00 PM that same day.[xii] There was barely time enough to carefully read the text, let alone negotiate. In essence, it was an ultimatum.

Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states:

"The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles."

Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region.

Twitter and the Smearing of Corbyn and Assange: A Research Note on the "Integrity Initiative"

The document called for a Western-led Joint Commission including local representatives to monitor and coordinate the implementation of the plan. However, if commission members failed to reach consensus on a matter, the Western-appointed Chair would have the power to impose his decision unilaterally. [xiv] Local representatives would serve as little more than window-dressing for Western dictate, as they could adopt no measure that went against the Chair's wishes.

The Chair of the Implementation Mission was authorized to "recommend" the "removal and appointment of officials and the curtailment of operations of existing institutions in Kosovo." If the Chair's command was not obeyed "in the time requested, the Joint Commission may decide to take the recommended action," and since the Chair had the authority to impose his will on the Joint Commission, there was no check on his power. He could remove elected and appointed officials at will and replace them with handpicked lackeys. The Chair was also authorized to order the "curtailment of operations of existing institutions." [xv]Any organization that failed to bend to U.S. demands could be shut down.

Chapter 7 of the plan called for the parties to "invite NATO to constitute and lead a military force" in Kosovo. [xvi]The choice of words was interesting. In language reminiscent of gangsters, Yugoslavia was told to "invite" NATO to take over the province of Kosovo or suffer the consequences.

Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii]

The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air.

The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii]

The agreement guaranteed that NATO would have "complete and unimpeded freedom of movement by ground, air, and water into and throughout Kosovo." Furthermore, NATO personnel could not be held "liable for any damages to public or private property." [xxiii] NATO as a whole would also be "immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal," regardless of its actions anywhere on the territory of Yugoslavia. [xxiv]Nor could NATO personnel be arrested, detained, or investigated. [xxv]

Acceptance of the plan would have brought NATO troops swarming throughout Yugoslavia and interfering in every institution.

There were several other objectionable elements in the plan, but one that stood out was the call for an "international" (meaning, Western-led) meeting to be held after three years "to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo."[xxvi] It was no mystery to the Yugoslav delegation what conclusion Western officials would arrive at in that meeting. The intent was clearly to redraw Yugoslavia's borders to further break apart the nation.

U.S. officials knew the Yugoslav delegation could not possibly accept such a plan.

"We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept," Madeleine Albright confided to a group of journalists, "because they needed a little bombing." [xxvii]

At a meeting in Belgrade on March 5, the Yugoslav delegation issued a statement which declared:

"A great deceit was looming, orchestrated by the United States. They demanded that the agreement be signed, even though much of this agreement, that is, over 56 pages, had never been discussed, either within the Contact Group or during the negotiations." [xxviii]

Serbian President Milan Milutinović announced at a press conference that in Rambouillet the Yugoslav delegation had "proposed solutions meeting the demands of the Contact Group for broad autonomy within Serbia, advocating full equality of all national communities." But "agreement was not what they were after." Instead, Western officials engaged in "open aggression," and this was a game "about troops and troops alone." [xxix]

While U.S. officials were working assiduously to avoid a peaceful resolution, they needed the Albanians to agree to the plan so that they could accuse the Yugoslav delegation of being the stumbling block to peace. U.S. mainstream media could be counted on to unquestioningly repeat the government's line and overlook who the real architects of failure were. U.S. officials knew the media would act in their customary role as cheerleaders for war, which indeed, they did.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook revealed the nature of the message Western officials were conveying to the Albanian delegation when he said,

"We are certainly saying to the Kosovo Albanians that if you don't sign up to these texts, it's extremely difficult to see how NATO could then take action against Belgrade." [xxx]

Western officials were practically begging the secessionists to sign the plan. According to inside sources, the Americans assured the Albanian delegation that disarmament of the KLA would be merely symbolic and that it could keep the bulk of its weaponry so long as it was concealed. [xxxi]

Albright spent hours trying to convince Thaçi to change his mind, telling him:

"If you say yes and the Serbs say no, NATO will strike and go on striking until the Serb forces are out and NATO can go in. You will have security. And you will be able to govern yourselves." [xxxii]

That was a clear enough signal that the intent was to rip the province away from Yugoslavia and create an artificial state. Despite such assurances, Thaçi feared the wrath of fellow KLA members if he were to sign a document that did not explicitly call for separation. When U.S. negotiators asked Thaçi why he would not sign, he responded:

"If I agree to this, I will go home and they will kill me." [xxxiii]

This was not hyperbole. The KLA had threatened and murdered a great many Albanians who in its eyes fell short of full-throated support for its policy of violent secession and ethnic exclusion.

Even NATO Commander Wesley Clark , who flew in from Belgium, was unable to change Thaçi's mind. [xxxiv] U.S. officials were exasperated with the Albanian delegation, and its recalcitrance threatened to capsize plans for war.

"Rambouillet was supposed to be about putting the screws to Belgrade," a senior U.S. official said. "But it went off the rails because of the miscalculation we made about the Albanians." [xxxv]

On the last day at Rambouillet, it was agreed that the Albanian delegation would return to Kosovo for discussions with fellow KLA leaders on the need to sign the document. In the days that followed, Western officials paid repeated visits to Kosovo to encourage the Albanians to sign.

So-called "negotiations" reconvened in Paris on March 15. Upon its arrival, the Yugoslav delegation objected that it was "incomprehensible" that "no direct talks between the two delegations had been facilitated." In response to the Yugoslavs' proposal for modifications to the plan, the Contact Group informed them that no changes would be accepted. The document must be accepted as a whole. [xxxvi]

The Yugoslav position, delegation head Ratko Marković maintained, was that "first one needs to determine what is to be implemented, and only then to determine the methods of implementation." [xxxvii]The delegation asked the Americans what there was to talk about regarding implementation "when there was no agreement because the Albanians did not accept anything." U.S. officials responded that the Yugoslav delegation "cannot negotiate," adding that it would only be allowed to make grammatical changes to the text. [xxxviii]

From the U.S. perspective, the presence of the Yugoslav delegation in Paris was irrelevant other than to maintain the pretense that negotiations were taking place. Not permitted to negotiate, there was little the Yugoslavs could do but await the inevitable result, which soon came. The moment U.S. officials obtained the Albanian delegation's signatures to the plan on March 18, they aborted the Paris Conference. There was no reason to continue engaging with the Yugoslav delegation, as the U.S. had what it needed: a pretext for war.

On the day after the U.S. pulled the plug on the Paris talks, Milan Milutinović held a press conference in the Yugoslav embassy, condemning the Paris meeting as "a kind of show," which was meant "to deceive public opinion in the whole world." [xxxix]

While the United States and its NATO allies prepared for war, Yugoslavia was making last-ditch efforts to stave off attack, including reaching out to intermediaries. Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos contacted Madeleine Albright and told her that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević had offered to engage in further negotiations. But Albright told him that the decision to bomb had already been made. "In fact," Pangalos reported, "she told me to 'desist, you're just being a nuisance.'" [xl] In a final act of desperation to save the people from bombing, Milutinović contacted Christopher Hill and made an extraordinary offer: Yugoslavia would join NATO if the United States would allow Yugoslavia to remain whole, including the province of Kosovo. Hill responded that this was not a topic for discussion and he would not talk about it. [xli]

Madeleine Albright got her war, which brought death, destruction, and misery to Yugoslavia. But NATO had a new role, and the United States further extended its hegemony over the Balkans.

In the years following the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, NATO was intent on redefining its mission. The absence of the socialist bloc presented NATO not only with the need to construct a new rationale for existence but also with the opportunity to expand Western domination over other nations.

Bosnia offered the first opportunity for NATO to begin its transformation, as it took part in a war that presented no threat to member nations.

Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise.

*

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Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich

[Jun 22, 2019] The Myopia of Interventionists by Daniel Lariso

Feb 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Andrew Bacevich recalls Madeleine Albright's infamous statement about American indispensability, and notes how poorly it has held up over the last twenty-one years:

Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."

In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping.

Albright's statement is even more damning for her and her fellow interventionists when we consider that the context of her remarks was a discussion of the supposed threat from Iraq. The full sentence went like this: "We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." Albright was making a general claim about our supposed superiority to other nations when it came to looking into the future, but she was also specifically warning against a "danger" from Iraq that she claimed threatened "all of us." She answered one of Matt Lauer's questions with this assertion:

I think that we know what we have to do, and that is help enforce the UN Security Council resolutions, which demand that Saddam Hussein abide by those resolutions, and get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, and allow the inspectors to have unfettered and unconditional access.

Albright's rhetoric from 1998 is a grim reminder that policymakers from both parties accepted the existence of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" as a given and never seriously questioned a policy aimed at eliminating something that did not exist. American hawks couldn't see further in the future. They weren't even perceiving the present correctly, and tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis would suffer because they insisted that they saw something that wasn't there.

A little more than five years after she uttered these words, the same wild threat inflation that Albright was engaged in led to the invasion of Iraq, the greatest blunder and one of the worst crimes in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy . Not only did Albright and other later war supporters not see what was coming, but their deluded belief in being able to anticipate future threats caused them to buy into and promote a bogus case for a war that was completely unnecessary and should never have been fought.

[Jun 22, 2019] Americans hardly care who dies wherever as long as they can find themselves shoping goods they do not need with the money they do not have

Jun 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

Amused , says: June 19, 2019 at 2:50 pm GMT

It is a very lightly written article but it touches on a very sensitive nerve rather hard. I liked the entire premise of this story and have ome to agree with the writer that Americans hardly care who dies wherever as long as they can find themselves shoping goods they dont need with the money they don't have and stuffing their mouth with food they don't deserve.

[Jun 22, 2019] That's why we are safe :-)

Aug 01, 2014 | discussion.theguardian.com

The1eyedman , 1 Aug 2014 10:11

...The CIA and security services have every right to know who is who on all and every politician and their staff. That's why we are safe. :-)
freeandfair -> Woodby69 , 1 Aug 2014 10:04

...They are so brave, they are pathologically afraid of everyone. And want to be "protected".

[Jun 22, 2019] A new policy issued by the United States Department of Defense, in conjunction with online platforms like Twitter and Facebook, will automatically enlist you to fight in a foreign war if you post your support for attacking another country.

Jun 22, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

interlocutor , Jun 21, 2019 6:13:43 PM | 186

The Babylon Bee: Report: Internet Users Who Call For Attacking Other Countries Will Now Be Enlisted In The Military Automatically

https://babylonbee.com/img/articles/article-4404-1.jpg

U.S. -- A new policy issued by the United States Department of Defense, in conjunction with online platforms like Twitter and Facebook, will automatically enlist you to fight in a foreign war if you post your support for attacking another country.

People who bravely post about how the U.S. needs to invade some country in the Middle East or Asia or outer space will get a pop-up notice indicating they've been enlisted in the military. A recruiter will then show up at their house and whisk them away to fight in the foreign war they wanted to happen so badly.

"Frankly, recruitment numbers are down, and we needed some way to find people who are really enthusiastic about fighting wars," said a DOD official. "Then it hit us like a drone strike: there are plenty of people who argue vehemently for foreign intervention. It doesn't matter what war we're trying to create: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China---these people are always reliable supporters of any invasion abroad. So why not get them there on the frontlines?"

"After all, we want people who are passionate about occupying foreign lands, not grunts who are just there for the paycheck," he added.

Strangely, as soon as the policy was implemented, 99% of saber-rattling suddenly ceased.

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[Jun 22, 2019] Use of science by the US politicians: they uses science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "the administrator uses social science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination." Scholars' disinclination to be used in this way helps explain more of the distance. ..."
Jun 16, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The evidence suggests that foreign policymakers do not seek insight from scholars, but rather support for what they already want to do.

As Desch quotes a World War II U.S. Navy anthropologist, "the administrator uses social science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination." Scholars' disinclination to be used in this way helps explain more of the distance.

[Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow

Highly recommended!
Bolton is just Albright of different sex. The same aggressive stupidity.
Notable quotes:
"... Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob... ..."
"... How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate. ..."
"... Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity. ..."
"... Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela. ..."
"... "If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." ..."
"... Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe. ..."
"... Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states. ..."
"... Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. ..."
"... The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more. ..."
"... At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia. ..."
"... Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders. ..."
"... When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." ..."
"... For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob. ..."
Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Doug Bandow via National Interest,

Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob...

How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate.

Since 9/11, Washington has been extraordinarily active militarily -- invading two nations, bombing and droning several others, deploying special operations forces in yet more countries, and applying sanctions against many. Tragically, the threat of Islamist violence and terrorism only have metastasized. Although Al Qaeda lost its effectiveness in directly plotting attacks, it continues to inspire national offshoots. Moreover, while losing its physical "caliphate" the Islamic State added further terrorism to its portfolio.

Three successive administrations have ever more deeply ensnared the United States in the Middle East. War with Iran appears to be frighteningly possible. Ever-wealthier allies are ever-more dependent on America. Russia is actively hostile to the United States and Europe. Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity.

Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela.

U.S. foreign policy suffers from systematic flaws in the thinking of the informal policy collective which former Obama aide Ben Rhodes dismissed as "The Blob." Perhaps no official better articulated The Blob's defective precepts than Madeleine Albright, United Nations ambassador and Secretary of State.

First is overweening hubris. In 1998 Secretary of State Albright declared that

"If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."

Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe.

U.S. officials rarely were prepared for events that occurred in the next week or month, let alone years later. Americans did no better than the French in Vietnam. Americans managed events in Africa no better than the British, French, and Portuguese colonial overlords. Washington made more than its share of bad, even awful decisions in dealing with other nations around the globe.

Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states.

The U.S. record since September 11 has been uniquely counterproductive. Rather than minimize hostility toward America, Washington adopted a policy -- highlighted by launching new wars, killing more civilians, and ravaging additional societies -- guaranteed to create enemies, exacerbate radicalism, and spread terrorism. Blowback is everywhere. Among the worst examples: Iraqi insurgents mutated into ISIS, which wreaked military havoc throughout the Middle East and turned to terrorism.

Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. When queried 1996 about her justification for sanctions against Iraq which had killed a half million babies -- notably, she did not dispute the accuracy of that estimate -- she responded that "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Exactly who "we" were she did not say. Most likely she meant those Americans admitted to the foreign policy priesthood, empowered to make foreign policy and take the practical steps necessary to enforce it. (She later stated of her reply: "I never should have made it. It was stupid." It was, but it reflected her mindset.)

In any normal country, such a claim would be shocking -- a few people sitting in another capital deciding who lived and died. Foreign elites, a world away from the hardship that they imposed, deciding the value of those dying versus the purported interests being promoted. Those paying the price had no voice in the decision, no way to hold their persecutors accountable.

The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more.

This mindset is reinforced by contempt toward even those being aided by Washington. Although American diplomats had termed the Kosovo Liberation Army as "terrorist," the Clinton Administration decided to use the growing insurgency as an opportunity to expand Washington's influence. At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia.

However, initially the KLA, determined on independence, refused to sign Albright's agreement. She exploded. One of her officials anonymously complained: "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothingballs to do something entirely in their own interest -- which is to say yes to an interim agreement -- and they stiff us." Someone described as "a close associate" observed: "She is so stung by what happened. She's angry at everyone -- the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO." For Albright, the determination of others to achieve their own goals, even at risk to their lives, was an insult to America and her.

Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders.

As Albright famously asked Colin Powell in 1992:

"What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" To her, American military personnel apparently were but gambit pawns in a global chess game, to be sacrificed for the interest and convenience of those playing. No wonder then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's reaction stated in his autobiography was: "I thought I would have an aneurysm."

When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." Although sixty-five years had passed, she admitted that "my mindset is Munich," a unique circumstance and threat without even plausible parallel today.

Such a philosophy explains a 1997 comment by a cabinet member, likely Albright, to General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event -- something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough -- and slow enough -- so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?" He responded sure, as soon as she qualified to fly the plane.

For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob.

Anyone of these comments could be dismissed as a careless aside. Taken together, however, they reflect an attitude dangerous for Americans and foreigners alike. Unfortunately, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy suggest that this mindset is not limited to any one person. Any president serious about taking a new foreign-policy direction must do more than drain the swamp. He or she must sideline The Blob.

* * *

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire .

[Jun 22, 2019] That's why we are safe :-)

Aug 01, 2014 | discussion.theguardian.com

The1eyedman , 1 Aug 2014 10:11

...The CIA and security services have every right to know who is who on all and every politician and their staff. That's why we are safe. :-)
freeandfair -> Woodby69 , 1 Aug 2014 10:04

...They are so brave, they are pathologically afraid of everyone. And want to be "protected".

[Jun 22, 2019] Americans hardly care who dies wherever as long as they can find themselves shoping goods they do not need with the money they do not have

Jun 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

Amused , says: June 19, 2019 at 2:50 pm GMT

It is a very lightly written article but it touches on a very sensitive nerve rather hard. I liked the entire premise of this story and have ome to agree with the writer that Americans hardly care who dies wherever as long as they can find themselves shoping goods they dont need with the money they don't have and stuffing their mouth with food they don't deserve.

[Jun 22, 2019] How Madeleine Albright Got the War the U.S. Wanted by Gregory Elich

Notable quotes:
"... Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war. ..."
"... U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia. ..."
"... It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations were saying in private. ..."
"... "Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'" Šainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii] ..."
"... As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern. ..."
"... Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states: ..."
"... Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region. ..."
"... Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii] ..."
"... The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air. ..."
"... The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii] ..."
"... Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise. ..."
"... Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich ..."
May 13, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

Region: Europe , USA Theme: History , US NATO War Agenda

Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war.

The talks opened on February 6, 1999, in Rambouillet, France. Officially, the negotiations were led by a Contact Group comprised of U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill , European Union envoy Wolfgang Petritsch , and Russian diplomat Boris Mayorsky . All decisions were supposed to be jointly agreed upon by all three members of the Contact Group. In actual practice, the U.S. ran the show all the way and routinely bypassed Petritsch and Mayorsky on essential matters.

Ibrahim Rugova , an ethnic Albanian activist who advocated nonviolence, was expected to play a major role in the Albanian secessionist delegation. Joining him at Rambouillet was Fehmi Agani , a fellow member of Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright regularly sidelined Rugova, however, preferring to rely on delegation members from the hardline Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had routinely murdered Serbs, Roma, and Albanians in Kosovo who worked for the government or opposed separatism. Only a few months before the conference, KLA spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled out his organization's vision of a future Kosovo as separate and ethnically pure:

"The independence of Kosovo is the only solution We cannot live together. That is excluded." [i]

Rugova had at one time engaged in fairly productive talks with Yugoslav officials, and his willingness to negotiate was no doubt precisely the reason Albright relegated him to a background role. Yugoslav Minister of Information Milan Komnenić accompanied the Yugoslav delegation to Rambouillet. He recalls,

"With Rugova and Fehmi Agani it was possible to talk; they were flexible. In Rambouillet, [KLA leader Hashim] Thaçi appears instead of Rugova. A beast." [ii]

There was no love between Thaçi and Rugova, whose party members were the targets of threats and assassination attempts at the hands of the KLA. Rugova himself would survive an assassination attempt six years later.

The composition of the Yugoslav delegation reflected its position that many ethnic groups resided in Kosovo, and any agreement arrived at should take into account the interests of all parties. All of Kosovo's major ethnic groups were represented in the delegation. Faik Jashari , one of the Albanian members in the Yugoslav delegation, was president of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative and an official in the Provisional Executive Council, which was Yugoslavia's government in Kosovo. Jashari observed that Albright was startled when she saw the composition of the Yugoslav delegation, apparently because it went against the U.S. propaganda narrative. [iii] Throughout the talks, Albright displayed a dismissive attitude towards the delegation's Albanian, Roma, Egyptian, Goran, Turkish, and Slavic Muslim members.

U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia.

After arriving at Rambouillet, the secessionist Albanian delegation informed U.S. diplomats that it did not want to meet with the Yugoslav side. Aside from a brief ceremonial meeting, there was no direct contact between the two groups. The Yugoslav and Albanian delegations were placed on two different floors to eliminate nearly all contact. U.S. mediators Richard Holbrooke and Christopher Hill ran from one delegation to the other, conveying notes and verbal messages between the two sides but mostly trying to coerce the Yugoslav delegation. [iv]

Luan Koka, a Roma member of the Yugoslav delegation, noted that the U.S. was operating an electronic jamming device.

"We knew exactly when Madeleine Albright was coming. Connections on our mobile phones were breaking up and going crazy." [v]

It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations were saying in private.

Albright, Jashari said, would not listen to anyone.

"She had her task, and she saw only that task. You couldn't say anything to her. She didn't want to talk with us and didn't want to listen to our arguments." [vi]

One day it was Koka's birthday, and the Yugoslav delegation wanted to encourage a more relaxed atmosphere with U.S. mediators, inviting them to a cocktail party to mark the occasion.

"It was a slightly more pleasant atmosphere, and I was singing," Koka recalled. "I remember Madeleine Albright saying: 'I really like partisan songs. But if you don't accept this, the bombs will fall.'" [vii]

According to delegation member Nikola Šainović ,

"Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'" Šainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii]

From the beginning of the conference, U.S. mediator Christopher Hill "decided that what we really needed was an Albanian approval of a document, and a Serb refusal. If both refused, there could be no further action by NATO or any other organization for that matter." [ix] It was not peace that the U.S. team was seeking, but war.

As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern.

On the second day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the Yugoslav delegation with the framework text of a provisional agreement for peace and self-rule in Kosovo, but it was missing some of the annexes. The Yugoslavs requested a copy of the complete document. As delegation head Ratko Marković pointed out,

"Any objections to the text of the agreement could be made only after an insight into the text as a whole had been obtained."

Nearly one week passed before the group received one of the missing annexes. That came on the day the conference had originally been set to end. The deadline was extended, and two days later a second missing annex was provided to the Yugoslav delegation.[x]

When the Yugoslavs next met with the Contact Group, they were assured that all elements of the text had now been given to them. Several more days passed and at 7:00 PM on February 22, the penultimate day of the conference, the Contact Group presented three new annexes, which the Yugoslavs had never seen before. According to Marković, "Russian Ambassador Boris Mayorsky informed our delegation that Annexes 2 and 7 had not been discussed or approved by the Contact Group and that they were not the texts drafted by the Contact Group but by certain Contact Group members, while Annex 5 was discussed, but no decision was made on it at the Contact Group meeting." The Yugoslav delegation refused to accept the new annexes, as their introduction had violated the process whereby all proposals had to be agreed upon by the three Contact Group members. [xi]

At 9:30 AM on February 23, the final day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the full text of the proposal, containing yet more provisions that were being communicated for the first time. The accompanying note identified the package as the definitive text while adding that Russia did not support two of the articles. The letter demanded the Yugoslav delegation's decision by 1:00 PM that same day.[xii] There was barely time enough to carefully read the text, let alone negotiate. In essence, it was an ultimatum.

Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states:

"The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles."

Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region.

Twitter and the Smearing of Corbyn and Assange: A Research Note on the "Integrity Initiative"

The document called for a Western-led Joint Commission including local representatives to monitor and coordinate the implementation of the plan. However, if commission members failed to reach consensus on a matter, the Western-appointed Chair would have the power to impose his decision unilaterally. [xiv] Local representatives would serve as little more than window-dressing for Western dictate, as they could adopt no measure that went against the Chair's wishes.

The Chair of the Implementation Mission was authorized to "recommend" the "removal and appointment of officials and the curtailment of operations of existing institutions in Kosovo." If the Chair's command was not obeyed "in the time requested, the Joint Commission may decide to take the recommended action," and since the Chair had the authority to impose his will on the Joint Commission, there was no check on his power. He could remove elected and appointed officials at will and replace them with handpicked lackeys. The Chair was also authorized to order the "curtailment of operations of existing institutions." [xv]Any organization that failed to bend to U.S. demands could be shut down.

Chapter 7 of the plan called for the parties to "invite NATO to constitute and lead a military force" in Kosovo. [xvi]The choice of words was interesting. In language reminiscent of gangsters, Yugoslavia was told to "invite" NATO to take over the province of Kosovo or suffer the consequences.

Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii]

The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air.

The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii]

The agreement guaranteed that NATO would have "complete and unimpeded freedom of movement by ground, air, and water into and throughout Kosovo." Furthermore, NATO personnel could not be held "liable for any damages to public or private property." [xxiii] NATO as a whole would also be "immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal," regardless of its actions anywhere on the territory of Yugoslavia. [xxiv]Nor could NATO personnel be arrested, detained, or investigated. [xxv]

Acceptance of the plan would have brought NATO troops swarming throughout Yugoslavia and interfering in every institution.

There were several other objectionable elements in the plan, but one that stood out was the call for an "international" (meaning, Western-led) meeting to be held after three years "to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo."[xxvi] It was no mystery to the Yugoslav delegation what conclusion Western officials would arrive at in that meeting. The intent was clearly to redraw Yugoslavia's borders to further break apart the nation.

U.S. officials knew the Yugoslav delegation could not possibly accept such a plan.

"We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept," Madeleine Albright confided to a group of journalists, "because they needed a little bombing." [xxvii]

At a meeting in Belgrade on March 5, the Yugoslav delegation issued a statement which declared:

"A great deceit was looming, orchestrated by the United States. They demanded that the agreement be signed, even though much of this agreement, that is, over 56 pages, had never been discussed, either within the Contact Group or during the negotiations." [xxviii]

Serbian President Milan Milutinović announced at a press conference that in Rambouillet the Yugoslav delegation had "proposed solutions meeting the demands of the Contact Group for broad autonomy within Serbia, advocating full equality of all national communities." But "agreement was not what they were after." Instead, Western officials engaged in "open aggression," and this was a game "about troops and troops alone." [xxix]

While U.S. officials were working assiduously to avoid a peaceful resolution, they needed the Albanians to agree to the plan so that they could accuse the Yugoslav delegation of being the stumbling block to peace. U.S. mainstream media could be counted on to unquestioningly repeat the government's line and overlook who the real architects of failure were. U.S. officials knew the media would act in their customary role as cheerleaders for war, which indeed, they did.

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook revealed the nature of the message Western officials were conveying to the Albanian delegation when he said,

"We are certainly saying to the Kosovo Albanians that if you don't sign up to these texts, it's extremely difficult to see how NATO could then take action against Belgrade." [xxx]

Western officials were practically begging the secessionists to sign the plan. According to inside sources, the Americans assured the Albanian delegation that disarmament of the KLA would be merely symbolic and that it could keep the bulk of its weaponry so long as it was concealed. [xxxi]

Albright spent hours trying to convince Thaçi to change his mind, telling him:

"If you say yes and the Serbs say no, NATO will strike and go on striking until the Serb forces are out and NATO can go in. You will have security. And you will be able to govern yourselves." [xxxii]

That was a clear enough signal that the intent was to rip the province away from Yugoslavia and create an artificial state. Despite such assurances, Thaçi feared the wrath of fellow KLA members if he were to sign a document that did not explicitly call for separation. When U.S. negotiators asked Thaçi why he would not sign, he responded:

"If I agree to this, I will go home and they will kill me." [xxxiii]

This was not hyperbole. The KLA had threatened and murdered a great many Albanians who in its eyes fell short of full-throated support for its policy of violent secession and ethnic exclusion.

Even NATO Commander Wesley Clark , who flew in from Belgium, was unable to change Thaçi's mind. [xxxiv] U.S. officials were exasperated with the Albanian delegation, and its recalcitrance threatened to capsize plans for war.

"Rambouillet was supposed to be about putting the screws to Belgrade," a senior U.S. official said. "But it went off the rails because of the miscalculation we made about the Albanians." [xxxv]

On the last day at Rambouillet, it was agreed that the Albanian delegation would return to Kosovo for discussions with fellow KLA leaders on the need to sign the document. In the days that followed, Western officials paid repeated visits to Kosovo to encourage the Albanians to sign.

So-called "negotiations" reconvened in Paris on March 15. Upon its arrival, the Yugoslav delegation objected that it was "incomprehensible" that "no direct talks between the two delegations had been facilitated." In response to the Yugoslavs' proposal for modifications to the plan, the Contact Group informed them that no changes would be accepted. The document must be accepted as a whole. [xxxvi]

The Yugoslav position, delegation head Ratko Marković maintained, was that "first one needs to determine what is to be implemented, and only then to determine the methods of implementation." [xxxvii]The delegation asked the Americans what there was to talk about regarding implementation "when there was no agreement because the Albanians did not accept anything." U.S. officials responded that the Yugoslav delegation "cannot negotiate," adding that it would only be allowed to make grammatical changes to the text. [xxxviii]

From the U.S. perspective, the presence of the Yugoslav delegation in Paris was irrelevant other than to maintain the pretense that negotiations were taking place. Not permitted to negotiate, there was little the Yugoslavs could do but await the inevitable result, which soon came. The moment U.S. officials obtained the Albanian delegation's signatures to the plan on March 18, they aborted the Paris Conference. There was no reason to continue engaging with the Yugoslav delegation, as the U.S. had what it needed: a pretext for war.

On the day after the U.S. pulled the plug on the Paris talks, Milan Milutinović held a press conference in the Yugoslav embassy, condemning the Paris meeting as "a kind of show," which was meant "to deceive public opinion in the whole world." [xxxix]

While the United States and its NATO allies prepared for war, Yugoslavia was making last-ditch efforts to stave off attack, including reaching out to intermediaries. Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos contacted Madeleine Albright and told her that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević had offered to engage in further negotiations. But Albright told him that the decision to bomb had already been made. "In fact," Pangalos reported, "she told me to 'desist, you're just being a nuisance.'" [xl] In a final act of desperation to save the people from bombing, Milutinović contacted Christopher Hill and made an extraordinary offer: Yugoslavia would join NATO if the United States would allow Yugoslavia to remain whole, including the province of Kosovo. Hill responded that this was not a topic for discussion and he would not talk about it. [xli]

Madeleine Albright got her war, which brought death, destruction, and misery to Yugoslavia. But NATO had a new role, and the United States further extended its hegemony over the Balkans.

In the years following the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, NATO was intent on redefining its mission. The absence of the socialist bloc presented NATO not only with the need to construct a new rationale for existence but also with the opportunity to expand Western domination over other nations.

Bosnia offered the first opportunity for NATO to begin its transformation, as it took part in a war that presented no threat to member nations.

Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise.

*

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Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich

[Jun 22, 2019] The Myopia of Interventionists by Daniel Lariso

Feb 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Andrew Bacevich recalls Madeleine Albright's infamous statement about American indispensability, and notes how poorly it has held up over the last twenty-one years:

Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."

In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping.

Albright's statement is even more damning for her and her fellow interventionists when we consider that the context of her remarks was a discussion of the supposed threat from Iraq. The full sentence went like this: "We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." Albright was making a general claim about our supposed superiority to other nations when it came to looking into the future, but she was also specifically warning against a "danger" from Iraq that she claimed threatened "all of us." She answered one of Matt Lauer's questions with this assertion:

I think that we know what we have to do, and that is help enforce the UN Security Council resolutions, which demand that Saddam Hussein abide by those resolutions, and get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, and allow the inspectors to have unfettered and unconditional access.

Albright's rhetoric from 1998 is a grim reminder that policymakers from both parties accepted the existence of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" as a given and never seriously questioned a policy aimed at eliminating something that did not exist. American hawks couldn't see further in the future. They weren't even perceiving the present correctly, and tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis would suffer because they insisted that they saw something that wasn't there.

A little more than five years after she uttered these words, the same wild threat inflation that Albright was engaged in led to the invasion of Iraq, the greatest blunder and one of the worst crimes in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy . Not only did Albright and other later war supporters not see what was coming, but their deluded belief in being able to anticipate future threats caused them to buy into and promote a bogus case for a war that was completely unnecessary and should never have been fought.

[Jun 22, 2019] The Myopia of Interventionists by Daniel Lariso

Feb 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Andrew Bacevich recalls Madeleine Albright's infamous statement about American indispensability, and notes how poorly it has held up over the last twenty-one years:

Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."

In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping.

Albright's statement is even more damning for her and her fellow interventionists when we consider that the context of her remarks was a discussion of the supposed threat from Iraq. The full sentence went like this: "We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." Albright was making a general claim about our supposed superiority to other nations when it came to looking into the future, but she was also specifically warning against a "danger" from Iraq that she claimed threatened "all of us." She answered one of Matt Lauer's questions with this assertion:

I think that we know what we have to do, and that is help enforce the UN Security Council resolutions, which demand that Saddam Hussein abide by those resolutions, and get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, and allow the inspectors to have unfettered and unconditional access.

Albright's rhetoric from 1998 is a grim reminder that policymakers from both parties accepted the existence of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" as a given and never seriously questioned a policy aimed at eliminating something that did not exist. American hawks couldn't see further in the future. They weren't even perceiving the present correctly, and tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis would suffer because they insisted that they saw something that wasn't there.

A little more than five years after she uttered these words, the same wild threat inflation that Albright was engaged in led to the invasion of Iraq, the greatest blunder and one of the worst crimes in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy . Not only did Albright and other later war supporters not see what was coming, but their deluded belief in being able to anticipate future threats caused them to buy into and promote a bogus case for a war that was completely unnecessary and should never have been fought.

[Jun 21, 2019] Disgraced Vice President of Walt Disney Convicted of Child Rape, Gets 6 Years by Matt Agorist

Jun 21, 2019 | thefreethoughtproject.com

Portland, OR -- A former top level Walt Disney executive was sentenced to prison this month for nearly seven years for child rape. Michael Laney, 73, who was the Vice President of Walt Disney was found guilty of four counts of first-degree sexual abuse and sentenced to 81 months in prison.

After the sentencing, Laney's attorneys pleaded with the judge to suspend the sentence, claiming that Laney's wife would suffer if her husband goes to jail.

According to Oregon Live , Laney's wife's doctor, Blain Crandell, submitted a letter on Laney's behalf, saying his wife "could be expected to suffer serious consequences to her health and well-being" without an in-home caregiver, a role her husband had been filling.

Thankfully, the judge and district attorney did not see it that way. In response to this request, Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Charles Mickley called the claims "peculiarly offensive and insulting."

"Defendant wholly ignores the compelling evidence of his guilt presented at trial, including the evidence of his longstanding sexual interest in children," Mickley wrote.

Laney will also have to serve an additional 120 months of probation after prison, pay a $4,000 fine, and register as a sex offender.

... ... ...

This article originally appeared on The Free Thought Project .

Matt Agorist Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter , Steemit , and now on Minds.

[Jun 20, 2019] Trump Says DOJ Investigating Whether Obama Tapped His Phone

Jun 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Why won't Obama live in Chicago?

JD Rock , 2 hours ago link

too much diversity...

[Jun 20, 2019] False Flags The Process of False Flagging the World towards War. The CIA Weaponizes Hollywood by Larry Chin

Jun 18, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca
This article was first published by GR in December 2014

Almost all wars begin with false flag operations.

The coming conflicts in North Korea and Russia are no exception.

Mass public hysteria is being manufactured to justify aggression against Moscow and Pyongyang, in retaliation for acts attributed to the North Korean and Russian governments, but orchestrated and carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon.

The false flagging of North Korea: CIA weaponizes Hollywood

The campaign of aggression against North Korea, from the hacking of Sony and the crescendo of noise over the film, The Interview, bears all the markings of a CIA false flag operation.

The hacking and alleged threats to moviegoers has been blamed entirely on North Korea, without a shred of credible evidence beyond unsubstantiated accusations by the FBI. Pyongyang's responsibility has not been proven. But it has already been officially endorsed, and publicly embraced as fact.

The idea of "America under attack by North Korea" is a lie.

The actual individuals of the mysterious group responsible for the hacking remain conveniently unidentified. A multitude of possibilities -- Sony insiders, hackers-for-hire, generic Internet vandalism -- have not been explored in earnest. The more plausible involvement of US spying agencies -- the CIA, the NSA, etc. , their overwhelming technological capability and their peerless hacking and surveillance powers -- remains studiously ignored.

Who benefits? It is illogical for Pyongyang to have done it. Isolated, impoverished North Korea, which has wanted improved relations with the United States for years (to no avail), gains nothing by cyberattacking the United States with its relatively weak capabilities, and face the certainty of overwhelming cyber and military response. On the other hand, Washington benefits greatly from any action that leads to regime change in North Korea.

But discussion about Pyongyang's involvement -- or lack of -- risks missing the larger point.

This project, from the creation of The Interview to the well-orchestrated international incident, has been guided by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the State Department from the start. It is propaganda. It is a weapon of psychological warfare. It is an especially perverted example of military-intelligence manipulation of popular culture for the purpose of war.

There is nothing funny about any of it. The Interview was made with the direct and open involvement of CIA and Rand Corporation operatives for the express purpose of destabilizing North Korea. Star and co-director Seth Rogen has admitted that he worked "directly with people who work in the government as consultants, who I'm convinced are in the CIA". Originally conceived to be a plot taking place in an "unnamed country", Sony Pictures co-chairman Michael Lynton, who also sits on the board of the Rand Corporation, encouraged the film makers to make the movie overtly about murdering Kim Jong-Un. Bruce Bennett, the Rand Corporation's North Korean specialist, also had an active role, expressing enthusiasm that the film would assist regime change and spark South Korean action against Pyongyang. Other government figures from the State Department, even operatives connected to Hillary Clinton, read the script.

The infantile, imbecilic, tasteless, reckless idiots involved with The Interview, including the tasteless Rogen and co-director Evan Goldberg, worked with these military-intelligence thugs for months. "Hung out" with them. They do not seem to have had any problem being the political whores for these Langley death merchants. In fact, they had fun doing it. They seem not to give a damn, or even half a damn, that the CIA and the Pentagon have used them, and co-opted the film for an agenda far bigger than the stupid movie itself. All they seem to care about was that they are getting publicity, and more publicity, and got to make a stupid movie. Idiots.

The CIA has now succeeded in setting off a wave of anti-North Korea war hysteria across America. Witness the ignorant squeals and cries from ignorant Americans about how "we can't let North Korea blackmail us", "we can't let Kim take away our free speech". Listen to the ridiculous debate over whether Sony has the "courage" to release the film to "stand up to the evil North Koreans" who would "blackmail America" and "violate the rights" of idiot filmgoers, who now see it as a "patriotic duty" to see the film.

These mental midgets -- their worldviews shaped by the CIA culture ministry with its endorsed pro-war entertainment, violent video games, and gung-ho shoot 'em ups -- are hopelessly brain-curdled, irretrievably lost. Nihilistic and soulless, as well as stupid, most Americans have no problem seeing Kim Jong-Un killed, on screen or in reality. This slice of ugly America is the CIA's finest post-9/11 army: violent, hate-filled, easily manipulated, eager to obey sheeple who march to whatever drumbeat they set.

And then there are the truly dumb, fools who are oblivious to most of reality, who would say "hey lighten up, it's only a comedy" and "it's only a movie". Naïve, entitled, exceptionalist Americans think the business of the war -- the murderous agenda they and their movie are helping the CIA carry out -- is all just a game.

The CIA's business is death, and that there are actual assassination plans in the files of the CIA, targeting heads of state. Kim Jong-Un is undoubtedly on a real assassination list. This is no funny, either. The Modus Operandi of Imperialist Propaganda The real act of war

The provocative, hostile diplomatic stance of the Obama administration speaks for itself. Washington wanted to spark an international incident. It wants regime change in Pyongyang, does not care what North Korea or China think, and does not fear anything North Korea will do about it.

On the other hand, imagine if a film were about the assassination of Benjamin Netanyahu and the toppling of the government in Tel Aviv. Such a film, if it would ever be permitted even in script form, would be stopped cold. If it made it through censors that "magically" never slowed down The Interview (and yes, there is censorship in America, a lot of it) Obama would personally fly to Tel Aviv to apologize. At the very least, Washington would issue statements distancing themselves from the film and its content.

Not so in the case of The Interview. Because American elites actually want the Kim family murdered.

Despite providing no proof of North Korean involvement, President Barack Obama promised a "proportional response". Promptly, North Korea's Internet was mysteriously shut down for a day.

Unless one is naïve to believe in this coincidence, all signs point to US spy agencies (CIA, NSA, etc.) or hackers working on behalf of Washington and Langley.

Given the likelihood that North Korea had nothing to do with either the hacking of Sony, the initial pulling of the movie (a big part of the publicity stunt, that was not surprisingly reversed) or the "blackmailing" of moviegoers, the shutting down of North Korea's Internet was therefore a unilateral, unprovoked act of war. Washington has not officially taken responsibility. For reasons of plausible denial, it never will.

Perhaps it was a dry run. A message. The US got to test how easily it can take down North Korea's grid. As we witnessed, given overwhelming technological advantage, it was very easy. And when a war against Pyongyang begins in earnest, American forces will know exactly what they will do.

The US is flexing its Asia-Pacific muscles, sending a message not only to Pyongyang, but to China, a big future target. Some of the other muscle-flexing in recent months included the anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong (assisted by the CIA and the US State Department), ongoing provocations in the South China Sea over disputed oil, and new defense agreements that place new anti-missile systems and missile-guided naval vessels to the region. The bottom line is that America has once again been mobilized into supporting a new war that could take place soon. The CIA and Sony have successfully weaponized a stupid movie, making it into a cause and a battle cry.

If and when bombs fall on North Korea, blood will be on the hands of the makers of The Interview, every single executive who allowed it to be made, and the hordes who paid to see it.

If America were a decent, sane society, The Interview would be exposed, roundly denounced, boycotted and shunned. Instead it is celebrated.

The CIA should be condemned. Instead, Seth Rogen hangs out with them. America, increasingly dysfunctional, loves them. Obeys them.

The false flagging of Russia

Regarding The Interview, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich issued a statement in sympathy with North Korea, correctly calling the film's concept aggressive and scandalous, and decried the US retaliatory response as counterproductive and dangerous to international relations.

Of course. Washington has no interest in improved international relations.

The Russians should know.

Like Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin has been vilified, demonized and false-flagged, incessantly. If Kim is today's object of ridicule, Putin is Evil Incarnate.

Consider the hysterical, desperate provocations by Washington in recent months.

A US-NATO coup, engineered by the CIA, toppled the government of Ukraine, planting a pro-US neo-Nazi criminal apparatus on Russia's doorstep. The CIA and its worldwide network of propagandists pinned the blame on Putin and Russia for aggression, and for obstructing "democracy".

The MH-17 jetliner is downed by Ukrainian operatives, with the support of the CIA, Mi-6, etc. etc. This false flag operation was blamed on Russia -- "Putin's Missile". The US and NATO are still trying to pin these murders on Putin.

The war against the Islamic State -- a massive CIA false flag operation -- seeks to topple with the the Assad government as well as to militarily counter Russia. The ongoing Anglo-American conquest of regional oil and gas supplies, and energy transport routes is also aimed at checkmating Russia and China across the region. The US and NATO have attacked the Russian federation with sanctions. The US and Saudi Arabia have collapsed oil prices, to further destroy the Russian economy. Full-scale military escalations are being planned. The US Congress is pushing new legislation tantamount to an open declaration of war against Russia.

What next? Perhaps it is time for the CIA to produce a Seth Rogen-James Franco movie about assassinating Putin. Another "parody". Or how about a movie about killing Assad, or anyone else the United States wants to make into a Public Enemy? Don't think Langley isn't working on it.

The return of the Bushes (who were never gone)

In the midst of all escalating war hysteria comes news that Jeb Bush is "actively exploring" running for president in 2016. The long predicted return of the Bush family, the kings of terrorism, the emperors of the false flag operation, back to the White House appears imminent.

The CIA will have its favorite family back in the Oval Office, with true CIA scion to manage the apocalyptic wars are likely to be launched in earnest in the next two years: Russia/Ukraine, North Korea, the Middle East.

Jeb Bush will "finish the job".

The 2016 presidential "contest" will be a charade. It is likely to put forth two corrupt establishment political "friends" posing as adversaries, when in fact, they are longtime comrades and conspirators. On one side, Hillary (and Bill) Clinton. On the other side, Jeb Bush, with George H.W., George W. and all of the Bush cronies crawling back out of the rotten woodwork. The fact is that the Clintons and Bushes, and their intertwined networks, have run the country since the 1980s, their respective camps taking turns in power, with Obama as transitional figurehead (his administration has always been run by neoliberal elites connected to the Clintonistas, including Hillary Clinton herself).

The collective history of the Bushes stretches back to the very founding of the American intelligence state. It is the very history of modern war criminality. The resume is George H.W. Bush -- the CIA operative and CIA Director -- is long and bloody, and littered with cocaine dust. The entire Bush family ran the Iran-Contra/CIA drug apparatus, with the Clintons among the Bush network's full partners in the massive drug/weapons/banking frauds of that era, the effects of which still resonate today. And we need not remind that the Bush clan and 9/11 are responsible for the world of terror and false flag foreign policy and deception that we suffer today.

While it remains too early to know which way the Establishment will go with their selection (and it depends on how world war shakes out between now and 2016), it is highly likely that Jeb

Bush would be the pick.

Hillary Clinton has already been scandalized -- "Benghazi-ed". Jeb Bush, on the other hand, has ideal Establishment/CIA pedigree. He has waited years for the stupid American public to forget the horrors that his family -- Georges H.W. and W. -- brought humanity. And now Americans , with their ultra-short memories, have indeed forgotten, if they had ever understood it in the first place.

And the American public does not know who Jeb Bush is, beyond the last name. Jeb Bush, whom Barbara Bush always said was the "smart one", has been involved in Bush narco-criminal business since Iran-Contra. His criminal activities in Florida, his connection with anti-Castro Cuban terrorists and other connections are there, for those who bother to investigate them. His Latin American connections -- including his ability to speak fluent Spanish, a Latin wife and a half-Latin son (George P. Bush, the next up and coming political Bush) -- conveniently appeals to the fastest-growing demographic, as well as those in the southern hemisphere drug trade. Recent Obama overtures towards the Latino demographic -- immigration, Cuba -- appear to be a Democratic Party move to counter Jeb Bush's known strengths in the same demographic.

Today, in the collective American mind, Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin are "the bad guys". But the mass murdering war criminal Bushes are saints. "Nice guys".

A Jeb Bush presidency will be a pure war presidency, one that promises terror, more unspeakable than we are experiencing now, lording it over a world engulfed in holocaust.

This is not a movie. The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Larry Chin , Global Research, 2019

[Jun 20, 2019] Bias, Lies Videotape Doubts Dog Confirmed Syria Chemical Attacks

Jun 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Bias, Lies & Videotape: Doubts Dog 'Confirmed' Syria Chemical Attacks Disturbing new evidence suggests 2018 incident might've been staged, putting everything else, including U.S. retaliation, into question. By Scott Ritter • June 20, 2019

(By Mikhail Semenov /Shutterstock) Thanks to an explosive internal memo, there is no reason to believe the claims put forward by the Syrian opposition that President Bashar al-Assad's government used chemical weapons against innocent civilians in Douma back in April. This is a scenario I have questioned from the beginning.

It also calls into question all the other conclusions and reports by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) , which was assigned in 2014 "to establish facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic."

As you recall, the Trump administration initiated a coordinated bombing of Syrian government facilities with the UK and France within days of the Douma incident and before a full investigation of the scene could be completed, charging Assad with the "barbaric act" of using "banned chemical weapons" to kill dozens of people on the scene. Bomb first, ask questions later.

The OPCW began their investigation days after the strikes . The group drew on witness testimonies, environmental and biomedical sample analysis results, and additional digital information from witnesses (i.e. video and still photography), as well as toxicological and ballistic analyses. In July 2018, the OPCW released an interim report on Douma that said "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties," but that chlorine, which is not a banned chemical weapon, was detected there.

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The report cited ballistic tests that indicated that the canisters found at two locations on the scene were dropped from the air (witnesses blamed Assad's forces), but investigations were ongoing. The final report in March reiterated the ballistics data, and the conclusions were just as underwhelming, saying that all of the evidence gathered there provides "reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place," due in part to traces of chlorine and explosives at the impact sites.

Now, the leaked internal report apparently suppressed by the OPCW says there is a "high probability" that a pair of chlorine gas cylinders that had been claimed as the source of the toxic chemical had been planted there by hand and not dropped by aircraft. This was based on extensive engineering assessments and computer modeling as well as all of the evidence previously afforded to the OPCW.

What does this mean? To my mind, the canisters were planted by the opposition in an effort to frame the Syrian government.

The OPCW has confirmed with the validity of this shocking document and has offered statements to reporters, including Peter Hitchens, who published the organization's response to him on May 16.

The ramifications of this turn of events extend far beyond simply disproving the allegations concerning the events in April 2018. The credibility of the OPCW itself and every report and conclusion it has released concerning allegations of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government are now suspect. The extent to which the OPCW has, almost exclusively, relied upon the same Syrian opposition sources who are now suspected of fabricating the Douma events raises serious questions about both the methodology and motivation of an organization that had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 for "its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons."

In a response to Agence France-Presse (AFP) , OPCW director general Fernando Arias acknowledged there is an internal probe into the memo leak but that he continues to "stand by the impartial and professional conclusions" of the group's original report. He played down the role of the memo's author, Ian Henderson, and said his alternative hypotheses were not included in the final OPCW report because they "pointed at possible attribution" and were therefore outside the scope of the OPCW's fact finding mission in Syria.

Self-produced videos and witness statements provided by the pro-opposition Violations Documentation Center, Syrian Civil Defense (also known as the White Helmets), and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) , a non-profit organization that operates hospitals in opposition-controlled Syria, represented the heart and soul of the case against the Syrian government regarding the events in Douma. To my mind, the internal memo now suggests that these actors were engaging in a systemic effort to disseminate disinformation that would facilitate Western military intervention with the goal of removing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power.

This theory has been advanced by pro-Assad forces and their Russian partners for some time. But independent reporting on the ground since the Douma incident has sussed out many of the same concerns. From James Harkin, director of the Center for Investigative Journalism and a fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, who traveled to the site of the attacks and reported for The Intercept in February of this year:

The imperative to grab the fleeting attention of an international audience certainly seems to have influenced the presentation of the evidence. In the videos and photos that appeared that evening, most analysts and observers agree that there were some signs that the bodies and gas canisters had been moved or tampered with after the event for maximum impact. The Syrian media activists who'd arrived at the apartment block with the dead people weren't the first to arrive on the scene; they'd heard about the deaths from White Helmet workers and doctors at the hospital.

The relationship between the OPCW and the Syrian opposition can be traced back to 2013. That was when the OPCW was given the responsibility of eliminating Syria's declared arsenal of chemical weapons; this task was largely completed by 2014. However, the Syrian opposition began making persistent allegations of chemical weapon attacks by the Syrian government in which chlorine, a substance not covered by Syria's obligation to be disarmed of chemical weapons, was used. In response, the OPCW established the Fact Finding Mission (FFM) in 2014 "to establish facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic."

The priority of effort for the FFM early on was to investigate allegations of the use of chlorine as a weapon. Since, according to its May 2014 summary, "all reported incidents took place at locations that the Syrian Government considers to be outside its effective control," the FFM determined that the success of its mission was contingent upon "identification of key actors, such as local authorities and/or representatives of armed opposition groups in charge of the territories in which these locations are situated; the establishment of contacts with these groups in an atmosphere of mutual trust and confidence that allows the mandate and objectives of the FFM to be communicated."

So from its very inception, the FFM had to rely on the anti-Assad opposition and its supporters for nearly everything. The document that governed the conduct of the FFM's work in Syria was premised on the fact that the mission would be dependent in part upon "opposition representatives" to coordinate, along with the United Nations, the "security, logistical and operational aspects of the OPCW FFM," including liaising "for the purposes of making available persons for interviews."

One could sense the bias resulting from such an arrangement when, acting on information provided to it by the opposition regarding an "alleged attack with chlorine" on the towns of Kafr Zeyta and Al-Lataminah, the FFM changed its original plans to investigate an alleged chlorine attack on the town of Harasta. This decision, the FFM reported, "was welcomed by the opposition." When the FFM attempted to inspect Kafr Zeyta, however, it was attacked by opposition forces, with one of its vehicles destroyed by a roadside bomb, one inspector wounded, and several inspectors detained by opposition fighters.

The inability to go to Kafr Zeyta precluded the group from "presenting definitive conclusions," according to the report. But that did not stop the FFM from saying that the information given to them from these opposition sources, "including treating physicians with whom the FFM was able to establish contact," and public domain material, "lends credence to the view that toxic chemicals, most likely pulmonary irritating agents such as chlorine, have been used in a systematic manner in a number of attacks" against Kafr Zeyta.

So the conclusion/non-conclusion was based not on any onsite investigation, but rather videos produced by the opposition and subsequently released via social media and interviews also likely set up by opposition groups (White Helmets, SAMS, etc.), which we know, according to their own documents, served as the key liaisons for the FFM on the ground.

All of this is worrisome. It is unclear at this point how many Syrian chemical attacks have been truly confirmed since the start of the war. In February of this year, the Global Policy Institute released a report saying there were 336 such reports, but they were broken down into "confirmed," "credibly substantiated," and "comprehensively confirmed." Out of the total, 111 were given the rigorous "comprehensively confirmed" tag, which, according to the group, meant the incidents were "were investigated and confirmed by competent international bodies or backed up by at least three highly reliable independent sources of evidence."

They do not go into further detail about those bodies and sources, but are sure to thank the White Helmets and their "implementing partner" Mayday Rescue and Violations Documentation Center, among other groups, as "friends and partners" in the study. So it becomes clear, looking at the Kafr Zeytan inspection and beyond, that the same opposition sources that are informing the now-dubious OPCW reports are also delivering data and "assistance" to outside groups reaching international audiences, too.

The role of the OPCW in sustaining the claims made by the obviously biased Syrian opposition sources cannot be understated -- by confirming the allegations of chemical weapons use in Douma, the OPCW lent credibility to claims that otherwise should not -- and indeed would not -- have been granted, and in doing so violated the very operating procedures that had been put in place by the OPCW to protect the credibility of the organization and its findings.

There is an old prosecutorial rule -- one lie, all lies -- that comes into play in this case. With the leaked internal report out there, suggesting that the sources in the Douma investigation were agenda-driven and dishonest, all information ever provided to the OPCW by the White Helmets, SAMS, and other Syrian opposition groups must now, in my mind, be viewed as tainted and therefore unusable.

Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

JPH • 8 hours ago

The OPCW reaction clearly considering the investigation into the leak instead of apologizing for not publishing this report is revealing its bias.

There has been a push from 'the West' to have the OPCW also attributing responsibility. Given the bias already on display this will further politicize the OPCW.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk...

As soon as such organizations become propaganda tools their credibility goes into the wind.

Given what we know of the Skripal hoax and the Tories attitude to the truth with their government funded 'Integrity Initiative' through the Institute of Statecraft' that exactly what the British Intelligence intended.

https://medium.com/@tomseck...

One may note the specific personal links through Orbis/Steele/Miller between the 'Integrity Initiative' and the fake 'Trump Dossier' and one ought to be alarmed by 'services' of a British intelligence out of control, but given the FBI/CIA involvement and exploitation of that fake 'Trump Dossier' it looks that the US has a quite similar problem.

john • 11 hours ago
Our government lied to start a war! When has that always happened.

[Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... You might think the Democratic Party would be horrified at this result, which one conservative analyst calls: "one of the greatest self-defeating acts in history." You might think Democrats would now move quickly and decisively toward a strategy of offering a substantive political alternative, and abandon this awful own-goal Mueller/Russiagate tack that has already helped Trump immensely (and which they are not going to turn their way). That is obviously what would happen if the Democrats' main goal was to defeat Trump. But it isn't. ..."
"... As discussed above, the Democratic establishment's' main goal throughout this was not to "get" Trump, but to channel its own voters' disgust with him into support for some halcyon, liberal, status quo ante-Trump, and away from left demands for a radical change to the social, economic, and political conditions that produced him and his clueless establishment opponent in 2016. The Democrats' goal was, and is, not to defeat Trump, but to stave off the left. ..."
"... The Democrats' main goal in all this is not to impeach, or stop the re-election of, Donald Trump; it's to prevent the nomination and election of Bernie Sanders, or anyone like him. ..."
"... You mean the five million people who voted for Obama in 2012, in the 90% of counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012, but would not vote for Hillary in 2019, aren’t streaming back into—are indeed still streaming out of—the Democratic Party, despite all the Mueller investigation has done for them? Imagine that. ..."
"... What has Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation wrought? It’s either a shrewd political gambit sure to take down Trump, or it’s ridiculous political theater leading Democrats, and the country, over another cliff. Double-down or leave that table? ..."
Apr 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org
So the Mueller investigation is over. The official "Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election" has been written, and is in the hands of Attorney General William Barr, who has issued a summary of its findings. On the core mandate of the investigation, given to Special Counsel Mueller by Rod Rosenstein as Acting Attorney General in May of 2017 -- to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump" -- the takeaway conclusion stated in the Mueller report, as quoted in the Barr summary, is that "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.1"

In the footnote indicated at the end of that sentence, Barr further clarifies the comprehensive meaning of that conclusion, again quoting the Report's own words: "In assessing potential conspiracy charges, the Special Counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign 'coordinated' with Russian election interference activities. The Special Counsel defined 'coordination' as an 'agreement -- tacit or express -- between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference'."

Barr restates the point of the cited conclusion from the Mueller Report a number of times: "The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election the Special Counsel did not find that any U.S. person or Trump campaign official or associate conspired or knowingly coordinated with the IRA [Internet Research Agency, the indicted Russian clickbait operation] in its efforts."

Thus, the Mueller investigation found no "conspiracy," no "coordination," -- i.e., no "collusion" -- "tacit or express" between the Trump campaign or any U.S. person and the Russian government. The Mueller investigation did not make, seal, or recommend any indictment for any U.S. person for any such crime.

This is as clear and forceful a repudiation as one can get of the "collusion" narrative that has been insistently shoved down our throats by the Democratic Party, its McResistance, its allied media, and its allied intelligence and national security agencies and officials. Whatever one wants to say about any other aspect of this investigation -- campaign finance violations, obstruction of justice, etc. -- they were not the main saga for the past two+ years as spun by the Russiagaters. The core narrative was that Donald Trump was some kind of Russian agent or asset, arguably guilty of treason and taking orders from his handler/blackmailer Vladimir Putin, who conspired with him to steal the 2016 election, and, furthermore, that Saint Mueller and his investigation team of patriotic FBI/CIA agents were going to find the goods that would have the Donald taken out of the White House in handcuffs for that.

Keith Olbermann's spectacular rant in January 2017 defined the core narrative and exemplified the Trump Derangement Syndrome that powered it: an emotional, visceral hatred of Donald Trump wrapped in the fantasy -- insisted upon as "elemental, existential fact" -- that he was "put in power by Vladimir Putin." A projection and deflection, I would say, of liberals' self-hatred for creating the conditions -- eight years of war and wealth transfer capped off by a despised and entitled candidate -- that allowed a vapid clown like Trump to be elected. It couldn't be our fault! It must have been Putin who arranged it!

Here's a highlight of Keith's delusional discourse. But, please watch the whole six-minute video below. They may have been a bit calmer, but this is the fundamental lunacy that was exuding from the rhetorical pores of Rachel, Chris, and Co. day after day for two+ years:

The military apparatus of this country is about to be handed over to scum, who are beholden to scum, Russian scum! As things are today January 20th will not be an inauguration but rather the end of the United States as an independent country. Donald John Trump is not a president; he is a puppet, put in power by Vladimir Putin. Those who ignore these elemental, existential facts -- Democrats or Republicans -- are traitors to this country. [Emphases in original. Really, watch it.]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/IAFxPXGDH4E

This -- Trump's secret, treasonous collusion with Putin, and not hush money or campaign finance violations or "obstruction of justice" or his obvious overall sleaziness -- was Russiagate.

Russiagate is Dead! Long Live Russiagate!

And it still is. Here's the demonstration in New York last Thursday, convened by the MoveOn/Maddow #Resistance, singing from "the hymnal" about how Trump is a "Russian whore" who is "busy blowing Vladimir":

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9YZ9kiJ88LM

This is delusional lunacy.

Here are the three lines of excuse and denial currently being fired off by diehard Russiagaters in their fighting retreat, and my responses to them.

1. The Mueller Report is irrelevant, anyhow. 'Cause either A) Per Congressional blowhard Adam Schiff: There already "is direct evidence" proving Trump-Russia collusion, dating from before the Mueller Investigation, so who cares what that doesn't find; or B) (My personal favorite) Per former prosecutor and CNN legal expert Renato Mariotti: Of course there is no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, and it's "your fault" for letting Trump fool you into thinking Mueller's job was to find it. (The Mueller "collusion" investigation was a red herring orchestrated/promoted by Trump! I cannot make this up.)

Mueller's report will almost certainly disappoint you, and it's not his fault. It's your fault for buying into Trump's false narrative that it is Mueller's' job to prove "collusion," a nearly impossible bar for any prosecutor to clear.

My piece in @TIME : https://t.co/VQ2WhhC996

-- Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) March 1, 2019

This is, of course, the weakest volley. It's absurd, patent bad faith, for Russiagaters to pretend that they knew, thought, or suggested the Mueller investigation was irrelevant. It is they who have been insisting that the integrity and super-sleuthiness of the "revered" Robert Mueller himself was the thing that would nail Donald Trump for Russian collusion. To now deny that any of that was important only acknowledges how thoroughly they have been fooling the American people and/or themselves for two years. Either Adam Schiff had the goods on Trump's traitorous Russian collusion two years ago, in which case he's got a lot of explaining to do about why he's been stringing us along with Mueller, or Schiff is just bluffing. Place your bets.

Russiagaters in 2017: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT MUELLER KNOWS
Russiagaters in 2018: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT MUELLER KNOWS
Russiagaters in 2019: Shut up Mueller, what would you know.

-- Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) March 22, 2019

2. The Mueller Report didn't exonerate Trump entirely. It was agnostic about whether Trump was guilty of "obstruction of justice," and there are probably many nasty things in the report that may not be provably criminal, but nonetheless demonstrate what a slimeball Trump is.

No, Russiagaters will not get away with denying that the core purpose of the Mueller investigation was to prove Trump's traitorous relation to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, which helped him win the 2016 election. They will not get away with denying that, if the Mueller investigation failed to prove that, it failed in its main purpose, as they constantly defined and reinforced it, with table-pounding, hyperventilating, and -- a few days ago! -- disco-dancing to "the hymnal."

They will not get away with trying to appropriate, as if it were their point all along, what the left critics of Russiagate have been saying for two+ years -- that Donald Trump is a slimeball grifter whose culpability for politically substantive and probably legally actionable crimes and misdemeanors should not be hard to establish, without reverting to the absurd accusation that he's a Russian agent.

These are the left critics of Russiagate and Trump, whom Russiagaters deliberately excluded from all their media platforms, in order to make it seem that only right-wing Trump supporters could be skeptical of Russiagate -- the left critics Russiagaters then excoriated as "Trump enablers" and "Putin apologists" for speaking on the only media platforms that would host them. Among them, Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté (who just deservedly won the I.F. Stone prize for his Russiagate coverage) were the most prominent, but many others, including me, made this point week after week (Brian Becker, Dave Lindorff, Dan Kovalik, Daniel Lazare, Ted Rall, to name a few). As I put it in an essay last year: "There are a thousand reasons to criticize Donald Trump That Donald Trump is a Russian agent is not one of them. There are a number of very good justifications for seeking his impeachment That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them."

So, it's a particularly slimy for Russiagaters to slip into the position that we Russiagate skeptics have been enunciating, and they have been excluding, for two years, without acknowledging that we were right and they were wrong and accounting for their effort to edit us out.

3. But we haven't seen the whole Mueller Report! Barr may be fooling us! Mueller's own team says so! You are now doing what you accused us of doing for two years -- abandoning proper skepticism about Republicans like Barr and even Mueller (Yup. He's a suspicious Republican now!), and assuming a final result we have not yet seen.

This is the one the Russiagaters like the most. Gotcha with your own logic!

Well, let's first of all thank those who are saying this for, again, recognizing that we Russiagate critics had the right attitude toward such an investigation: cautious skepticism as opposed to false certainty. And let's linger for a moment or more on how belated that recognition is and what its delay cost.

But let's also recognize that what's being expressed here is the last-minute hope on the part of the Russiagaters that the Mueller report actually does contain dispositive evidence of Trump's treasonous Russian collusion. Because, again, that is the core accusation that hopeful Russiagaters are still singing about, and nobody ever argued that evidence of other hijinks was unlikely.

Well, that hope can only be realized if one or both of the following are true: 1) Barr's quotes from the report exonerating Trump of collusion are complete fabrications, or 2) Mueller both wrote those words even though they contradict the substance of his own report and declined to indict a single U.S. person for such "collusion" even though he could have.

Sure, in the abstract, one or both of those conditions could be true. But there is no evidence, none, that either is. The New York Times (NYT) report that set everyone aflutter about the "concern" from "some members of Mr. Mueller's team" is anonymous, unspecified, and second-hand. Read it carefully: The NYT did not report what any member of Mueller's team said, but what "government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations" said. Those "officials and others interviewed [not members of the Mueller team itself] declined to flesh out" to the NYT what "some of the special counsel's investigators" were unhappy about. To that empty hearsay, the NYT appends the phrase "although the report is believed to examine Mr. Trump's efforts to thwart the investigation" -- suggesting, but not stating, that obstruction of justice issues are the reasons for the investigators' "vexation." The NYT cannot state, because it does not know, anything. It is reporting empty hearsay that is evidence of nothing, but is meant to keep hope alive.

"[T]he report is believed to examine" is a particularly strange locution. Is the NYT suggesting that the Mueller report might not have examined obstruction of justice possibilities? Or is it just getting tangled up in its attempt to suggest this or that? Hey, it could just as well be true that Barr's characterization of what the Mueller Report says about "obstruction of justice" is a misleading fabrication. Maybe Mueller actually exonerated Trump of that. If you mistrust Barr's version of what the Mueller Report says about collusion, why not equally mistrust what it says about obstruction of justice?

There is no evidence that Barr's summary is radically misleading about the core collusion conclusion of the Mueller Report. The walls are closing in, alright, on that story. The I'm just being as cautious now as you were before! line is the opposite of the reasonable skepticism is claims to be; it's Russiagaters clinging to a wish and a belief that something they want to be true is, despite the determinate lack of any evidence.

It's not just the words; it's the melody, and the desperation in the voices. The core Trump-blowing-Vladimir collusion song that #Resisters are still singing is a fantastical fiction and the people still singing it are the pathetic choir on the Russiagate Titanic. And while they're singing as they sink, Trump is escaping in the lifeboat they have provided him. The single most definite and undeniable effect of the Mueller investigation on American politics has been to hand Donald Trump a potent political weapon for his 2020 re-election campaign. A real bombshell.

It would be funny, if it weren't so funny:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qjUvfZj-Fm0

But it's worse than that. The falsity of the Trump-as-a-Russian-agent narrative does not depend on any confidence in Mueller and his report or Barr and his summary. The truth is there was no Russiagate investigation, in the sense of a serious attempt to find out whether Donald Trump was taking orders from, or "coordinating" with, Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.

No person in their right mind could believe that. Robert Mueller doesn't believe it. Nancy Pelosi doesn't believe it. Adam Schiff doesn't believe it. John Brennan, James Clapper, and the heads of intelligence agencies do not believe it. Not for a second. No knowledgeable international affairs journalist or academic who thinks about it for two minutes believes it. Sure, some politicians and media pundits did work themselves up into a state where they internalized and projected a belief in the narrative, but few of them really believed it. They were serving the Kool-Aid. Only the most gullible sectors of their target audience drank it.

With some exceptions, to be sure (Donald Trump among them), the people in the highest echelons of the state-media-academic apparatus are just not that stupid. And, most obvious and important, Vladimir Putin is not that stupid, and they know he is not. Vladimir Putin would never rely on Donald Trump to be his operative in a complex operation that required shrewdly playing and evading the US intelligence and media apparatuses. Nobody is that stupid. Thinking about it that way for a second dissipates the entire ridiculous idea. (Not to mention that Trump ended up enacting a number of policies -- many more than Obama! -- contrary to Russian interests.)

The obvious, which many people in the independent media and none in the mainstream media (because it is so obvious, and would have blown their game) have pointed out, is that any real investigation of Russiagate would have sought to talk with the principals who had direct knowledge of who is responsible for leaking the infamous DNC documents: Julian Assange and former British ambassador Craig Murray ("I know who leaked them. I've met the person who leaked them."). They were essentially two undisputed eyewitnesses to the crime Mueller was supposed to be investigating, and he made no effort to talk to either of them. Ipso facto, it was not really an investigation, not a project whole purpose was to find the truth about whatever the thing called "Russiagate" is supposed to be.

The Eternal Witch-hunt

It was a theater of discipline. Its purpose, which it achieved, was to discipline Trump, the Democratic electorate, and the media. Its method was fishing around in the muck of Washington consultants, lobbyists, and influence peddlers to generate indictments and plea bargains for crimes irrelevant to the core mandate. Not hard, in a carceral state where prosecutors can pin three felonies a day on anyone.

The US establishment, especially its national security arm, was genuinely shocked that their anointed candidate, Hillary, who was, as Glen Ford puts it "'all in' with the global military offensive" that Obama had run through Libya, Syria, and the coup in Ukraine, was defeated by a nitwit candidate who was making impermissibly non-aggressive noises about things like Russia and NATO, and who actually wanted to lose. For their part, the Democrats were horrified, and did not want to face the necessary reckoning about the complete failure of their candidate, and the best-of-all-possible-liberaloid-worlds strategy she personified.

So, "within 24 hours of her concession speech" Hillary's campaign team (Robby Mook and John Podesta) created a "script they would pitch to the press and the public" to explain why she lost. "Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument." A few months later, a coalition of congressional Democrats,, establishment Republicans, and intelligence/natsec professionals pressured Trump (who, we can now see clearly, is putty in the hands of the latter) to initiate a Special Counsel investigation. Its ostensible goal was to investigate Russian collusion, but its real goals were:

1) To discipline Trump, preventing any backpedaling on NATO/imperialist war-mongering against Russia or any other target. Frankly, I think this was unnecessary. Trump never had any depth of principle in his remarks about de-escalating with Russia and Syria. He was always a staunch American exceptionalist and Zionist. Nobody has forced him (that's a right-wing fantasy) to attack Syria, appoint John Bolton, recognize Israeli authority over Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, or threaten Iran and Venezuela. But the natsec deep state actors did (and do) not trust Trump's impulsiveness. They probably also thought it would be useful to "send a message" to Russia, which, in their arrogance, they think they can, but they cannot, "discipline," as I've discussed in a previous essay.

2) To discipline the media, making "Russian collusion," as Off-Guardian journalist Kit Knightly says, "a concept that keeps everyone in check." Thus, a Russophobia-related McCarthyite hysteria was engendered that defined any strong anti-interventionist or anti-establishment sentiment as Russian-sown "divisiveness" and "Putin apologetics." This discipline was eagerly accepted by the mainstream media, which joined in the related drive to demand new forms of censorship for independent and internet media. The epitome of this is the mainstream media's execrable, tacit and sometimes explicit acceptance of the US government's campaign to prosecute Julian Assange.

3) To discipline and corral the Democratic constituency. Establishment Dems riled up outraged progressives with deceptive implied promises to take Trump down based on the collusion fiction, which excused Hillary and diverted their attention from the real egregious failures and crimes that led their party to political ruin, and culminated in the election of Trump in the first place. This discipline also instituted a #Resistance to Trump that involved the party doing nothing substantively progressive in policy -- indeed, it allowed embracing Trump's most egregious militarism and promoting an alliance with, a positive reverence for, the most deceptive and reactionary institutions of the state.

Finally, incorporating point 2, perhaps the main point of this discipline -- indeed of the whole Mueller enterprise -- was to stigmatize the leftists and socialists in and around the party, who were questioning the collusion fiction and calling critical attention to the party's failures, as crypto-fascist "Trump enablers" or "Putin's useful idiots." It's all about fencing out the left and corralling the base.

Note the point regarding the deceptive implications about taking down Trump. Though they gave the opposite impression to rile up their constituents, Democratic Congressional leaders, for the reasons given above and others I laid out in a previous essay, did not think for a second they were going to impeach Trump. They were never really after impeaching Trump; they were and are after stringing along their dissatisfied progressive-minded voters. They, not Trump, were and are the target of the foolery.

We should recognize that Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation achieved all of these goals, and was therefore a great success. That's the case whatever part of the Mueller Report is summarized and released, and whoever interprets it. The whole report with all of the underlying evidence cannot legally be released to the public, and the Democrats know that. So, even if the House gets it, the public will only ever see portions doled out by various interested parties.

Thus, it will continue to be a great success. There will be endless leaks, and interpretations of leaks, and arguments about the interpretations of leaks based on speculation about what's still hidden. The Mueller Investigation has morphed into the Mueller Report, a hermeneutical exercise that will go on forever.
The Mueller Investigation never happened and will never end.

It wasn't an investigation. It was/is an act of political theater, staged in an ongoing dramatic festival where, increasingly, litigation substitutes for politics. Neither party has anything of real, lasting, positive political substance to offer, and each finds itself in power only because it conned the electorate into thinking it offered something new. That results in every politician being vulnerable, but to a politically vacuous opposition that can only mount its attacks on largely politically irrelevant, often impossible to adjudicate, legalistic or moralistic grounds. Prosecutorial inquiry becomes a substitute for substantive political challenge.

It's the template that was established by the Republicans against Bill Clinton, has been adapted by the Democrats for Trump and Russiagate, and will be ceaselessly repeated. What's coming next, already hinted at in William Barr's congressional testimony, will be an investigation of FISAGate -- an inquiry into whether the FISA warrants for spying on the Trump campaign and administration were obtained legally ("adequately predicated"). And/or UkraineGate, about the evidence "Ukrainian law enforcement officials believe they have of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes," involving Tony Podesta (who worked right alongside Paul Manafort in Ukraine), Hillary Clinton's campaign, Joe Biden and his son, et. al. And/or CampaignGate, the lawsuit claiming that Hillary's national campaign illegally took $84 million of "straw man" contributions made to state Democratic campaigns. And/or CraigGate, involving powerful Democratic fixer and Obama White House Counsel, Gregory Craig, who has already been referred to federal prosecutors by Mueller, and whose law firm has already paid a $4.6 million-dollar fine for making false statement and failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act -- for work he did in Ukraine with -- who else? -- Paul Manafort.

There are Gates galore. If you haven't heard about any of these simmering scandals in the way you've heard incessantly about, you know, Paul Manafort, perhaps that's because they didn't fit into the "get Trump" theme of the Mueller Investigation/Russiagate political theater. Rest assured the Republicans have, and will likely make sure that you do. If you think the Republicans do not have at least as much of a chance to make a serious case with some of these as Mueller did with Trump, you are wrong. If you think the Republicans will pursue any of these investigations because they have the same principled concern as the Democrats about foreign collusion in US elections, or the legality of campaign contributions or surveillance warrants, you are right. They have none. Like the Democrats, they have zero concern for the ostensible issues of principle, and infinite enthusiasm for mounting "gotcha" political theater.

Neither party really wants, or knows how, to engage in a sustained, principled debate on substantive political issues -- things like universal-coverage, single-payer health insurance, a job guarantee, a radical reduction of the military budget, an end to imperialist intervention, increasing taxes on the wealthy and lowering them for working people, a break from the "overwhelming" and destructive influence of Zionism, to name a few of the policies the Democratic congressional leadership could have insisted on "investigating" over the last two years..

Instead, both parties' political campaigns rely on otherizing appeals based on superficial identity politics (white-affirmative on the one hand, POC-affirmative on the other) and, mainly, on bashing the other party for all the problems it ignored or exacerbated, and all the terrible policies it enacted, when it was in power -- and for the version of superficial, otherizing identity politics it supposedly based those policies on (the real determinants of class power remaining invisible). What both parties know how and will continue to do is mount hypocritical legalistic and moralistic "investigations" of illegal campaign contributions, support from foreign governments, teenage make-out sessions, personal-space violations, et. al., that they are just "shocked, shocked" about.

It's Investigation Nation. Fake politics in the simulacrum of a democratic polity. Indeed, someone, of some political perspicuity, might just notice, if only for a flash, that the people who do pretty well politically are often the ones who frankly don't give a crap about all that. Maybe because they're talking to people who don't give a crap about all that. But we wouldn't want to confuse ourselves thinking on that for too long.

Which brings us to the last point about Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation mentioned above. It may not (or may!) have been an intended goal, but it has been its most definite political effect: The Mueller Investigation has been a great political gift to Donald Trump. #Resisters and Russiagaters can wriggle around that all they want. They can insist that, once we get the whole Report, we'll turn the corner, the bombshell will explode, the walls will close in -- for real, this time. Sure.

But even they can't deny that's the case right now. Trump is saying the Mueller investigation was a political counterattack against the result of the election, masquerading as a disinterested judicial investigation; that it was based on a flimsy fiction and designed to dig around in every corner of his closets to find nasty and incriminating things that were entirely irrelevant to the ostensible mandate of the investigation and to any substantive, upfront political critique -- a "witchhunt," a "fishing expedition." And he is right. And too many people in the country know he's right. At this point, even most Russiagaters themselves know it -- though they don't care, and will never admit it.

So now Trump, who could have been attacked for two years politically on substance for betraying most of the promises that got him elected -- more aggressive war, more tax cuts for the wealthy, threatening Medicare and Social Security -- has instead been handed, by the Democrats, the strongest arrow he now has in his political quiver. As Matt Taibbi says: "Trump couldn't have asked for a juicier campaign issue, and an easier way to argue that 'elites' don't respect the democratic choices of flyover voters. It's hard to imagine what could look worse."

You might think the Democratic Party would be horrified at this result, which one conservative analyst calls: "one of the greatest self-defeating acts in history." You might think Democrats would now move quickly and decisively toward a strategy of offering a substantive political alternative, and abandon this awful own-goal Mueller/Russiagate tack that has already helped Trump immensely (and which they are not going to turn their way). That is obviously what would happen if the Democrats' main goal was to defeat Trump. But it isn't.

As discussed above, the Democratic establishment's' main goal throughout this was not to "get" Trump, but to channel its own voters' disgust with him into support for some halcyon, liberal, status quo ante-Trump, and away from left demands for a radical change to the social, economic, and political conditions that produced him and his clueless establishment opponent in 2016. The Democrats' goal was, and is, not to defeat Trump, but to stave off the left.

What they are doing with the Mueller Investigation/Russiagate is what they did in the primaries in 2016: Then, they deliberately promoted Trump as an opponent, while working assiduously to cheat their own leftist candidate; now, they gin up a fictional spy story whose inevitable collapse helps Trump, but on which they will double down, in order to continue branding "divisive" leftists who challenge any return to their version of status-quo normalcy as the Kremlin's "useful idiots."

The Democrats' main goal in all this is not to impeach, or stop the re-election of, Donald Trump; it's to prevent the nomination and election of Bernie Sanders, or anyone like him.

Russiagate Forever

Here's Tim Ryan's presidential campaign kickoff speech in Youngstown, Ohio, a poster city of late American capitalist deindustrialization, explaining to the voters what is causing the destruction of their lives and towns. After complaining that "We have politicians and leaders today that want to divide us. They want to put us in one box or the other. You know, you can't be for business and for labor," he elaborates:

Yup, it’s those Russians, you see, sowing division through certain “politicians and leaders,” who are preventing us from fixing our healthcare, education, economic and government systems. This—doubling down on Russiagate—is the centrist Democrats’ idea of a winning political appeal. I consider it utterly delusional.

I heard last week from a friend in Western Pennsylvania, not too far from Youngstown. She’s a good person who is trying to organize Democrats in the area to beat Trump in 2020, and, pleading for advice, she expressed her exasperation: “They’re leaving the party!”

You mean the five million people who voted for Obama in 2012, in the 90% of counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012, but would not vote for Hillary in 2019, aren’t streaming back into—are indeed still streaming out of—the Democratic Party, despite all the Mueller investigation has done for them? Imagine that.

What has Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation wrought? It’s either a shrewd political gambit sure to take down Trump, or it’s ridiculous political theater leading Democrats, and the country, over another cliff. Double-down or leave that table?

Place your bets.

[Jun 19, 2019] Bias bias the inclination to accuse people of bias by James Thompson

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Early in any psychology course, students are taught to be very cautious about accepting people's reports. A simple trick is to stage some sort of interruption to the lecture by confederates, and later ask the students to write down what they witnessed. Typically, they will misremember the events, sequences and even the number of people who staged the tableaux. Don't trust witnesses, is the message. ..."
"... The three assumptions -- lack of rationality, stubbornness, and costs -- imply that there is slim chance that people can ever learn or be educated out of their biases; ..."
"... So, are we as hopeless as some psychologists claim we are? In fact, probably not. Not all the initial claims have been substantiated. For example, it seems we are not as loss averse as previously claimed. Does our susceptibility to printed visual illusions show that we lack judgement in real life? ..."
"... Well the sad fact is that there's nobody in the position to protect "governments" from their own biases, and "scientists" from theirs ..."
"... Long ago a lawyer acquaintance, referring to a specific judge, told me that the judge seemed to "make shit up as he was going along". I have long held psychiatry fits that statement very well. ..."
"... Here we have a real scientist fighting the nonsense spreading from (neoclassical) economics into other realms of science/academia. ..."
"... Behavioral economics is a sideline by-product of neoclassical micro-economic theory. It tries to cope with experimental data that is inconsistent with that theory. ..."
"... Everything in neoclassical economics is a travesty. "Rational choice theory" and its application in "micro economics" is false from the ground up. It basically assumes that people are gobbling up resources without plan, meaning or relevant circumstances. Neoclassical micro economic theory is so false and illogical that I would not know where to start in a comment, so I should like to refer to a whole book about it: Keen, Steve: "Debunking economics". ..."
"... As the theory is totally wrong it is really not surprising that countless experiments show that people do not behave the way neoclassical theory predicts. How do economists react to this? Of course they assume that people are "irrational" because they do not behave according to their studied theory. (Why would you ever change your basic theory because of some tedious facts?) ..."
"... The title of the 1st ed. of Keen's book was "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences" which was simply a perfect title. ..."
Jun 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

Early in any psychology course, students are taught to be very cautious about accepting people's reports. A simple trick is to stage some sort of interruption to the lecture by confederates, and later ask the students to write down what they witnessed. Typically, they will misremember the events, sequences and even the number of people who staged the tableaux. Don't trust witnesses, is the message.

Another approach is to show visual illusions, such as getting estimates of line lengths in the Muller-Lyer illusion, or studying simple line lengths under social pressure, as in the Asch experiment, or trying to solve the Peter Wason logic problems, or the puzzles set by Kahneman and Tversky. All these appear to show severe limitations of human judgment. Psychology is full of cautionary tales about the foibles of common folk.

As a consequence of this softening up, psychology students come to regard themselves and most people as fallible, malleable, unreliable, biased and generally irrational. No wonder psychologists feel superior to the average citizen, since they understand human limitations and, with their superior training, hope to rise above such lowly superstitions.

However, society still functions, people overcome errors and many things work well most of the time. Have psychologists, for one reason or another, misunderstood people, and been too quick to assume that they are incapable of rational thought?

Gerd Gigerenzer thinks so.

https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/OpenAccessDownload/RBE-0092

He is particularly interested in the economic consequences of apparent irrationality, and whether our presumed biases really result in us making bad economic decisions. If so, some argue we need a benign force, say a government, to protect us from our lack of capacity. Perhaps we need a tattoo on our forehead: Diminished Responsibility.

The argument leading from cognitive biases to governmental paternalism -- in short, the irrationality argument -- consists of three assumptions and one conclusion:

1. Lack of rationality. Experiments have shown that people's intuitions are systematically biased.

2. Stubbornness. Like visual illusions, biases are persistent and hardly corrigible by education.

3. Substantial costs. Biases may incur substantial welfare-relevant costs such as lower wealth, health, or happiness.

4. Biases justify governmental paternalism. To protect people from theirbiases, governments should "nudge" the public toward better behavior.

The three assumptions -- lack of rationality, stubbornness, and costs -- imply that there is slim chance that people can ever learn or be educated out of their biases; instead governments need to step in with a policy called libertarian paternalism (Thaler and Sunstein, 2003).

So, are we as hopeless as some psychologists claim we are? In fact, probably not. Not all the initial claims have been substantiated. For example, it seems we are not as loss averse as previously claimed. Does our susceptibility to printed visual illusions show that we lack judgement in real life?

In Shepard's (1990) words, "to fool a visual system that has a full binocular and freely mobile view of a well-illuminated scene is next to impossible" (p. 122). Thus, in psychology, the visual system is seen more as a genius than a fool in making intelligent inferences, and inferences, after all, are necessary for making sense of the images on the retina.

Most crucially, can people make probability judgements? Let us see. Try solving this one:

A disease has a base rate of .1, and a test is performed that has a hit rate of .9 (the conditional probability of a positive test given disease) and a false positive rate of .1 (the conditional probability of a positive test given no disease). What is the probability that a random person with a positive test result actually has the disease?

Most people fail this test, including 79% of gynaecologists giving breast screening tests. Some researchers have drawn the conclusion that people are fundamentally unable to deal with conditional probabilities. On the contrary, there is a way of laying out the problem such that most people have no difficulty with it. Watch what it looks like when presented as natural frequencies:

Among every 100 people, 10 are expected to have a disease. Among those 10, nine are expected to correctly test positive. Among the 90 people without the disease, nine are expected to falsely test positive. What proportion of those who test positive actually have the disease?

In this format the positive test result gives us 9 people with the disease and 9 people without the disease, so the chance that a positive test result shows a real disease is 50/50. Only 13% of gynaecologists fail this presentation.

Summing up the virtues of natural frequencies, Gigerenzer says:

When college students were given a 2-hour course in natural frequencies, the number of correct Bayesian inferences increased from 10% to 90%; most important, this 90% rate was maintained 3 months after training (Sedlmeier and Gigerenzer, 2001). Meta-analyses have also documented the "de-biasing" effect, and natural frequencies are now a technical term in evidence-based medicine (Akiet al., 2011; McDowell and Jacobs, 2017). These results are consistent with a long literature on techniques for successfully teaching statistical reasoning (e.g., Fonget al., 1986). In sum, humans can learn Bayesian inference quickly if the information is presented in natural frequencies.

If the problem is set out in a simple format, almost all of us can all do conditional probabilities.

I taught my medical students about the base rate screening problem in the late 1970s, based on: Robyn Dawes (1962) "A note on base rates and psychometric efficiency". Decades later, alarmed by the positive scan detection of an unexplained mass, I confided my fears to a psychiatrist friend. He did a quick differential diagnosis on bowel cancer, showing I had no relevant symptoms, and reminded me I had lectured him as a student on base rates decades before, so I ought to relax. Indeed, it was false positive.

Here are the relevant figures, set out in terms of natural frequencies

Every test has a false positive rate (every step is being taken to reduce these), and when screening is used for entire populations many patients have to undergo further investigations, sometimes including surgery.

Setting out frequencies in a logical sequence can often prevent misunderstandings. Say a man on trial for having murdered his spouse has previously physically abused her. Should his previous history of abuse not be raised in Court because only 1 woman in 2500 cases of abuse is murdered by her abuser? Of course, whatever a defence lawyer may argue and a Court may accept, this is back to front. OJ Simpson was not on trial for spousal abuse, but for the murder of his former partner. The relevant question is: what is the probability that a man murdered his partner, given that she has been murdered and that he previously battered her.

Accepting the figures used by the defence lawyer, if 1 in 2500 women are murdered every year by their abusive male partners, how many women are murdered by men who did not previously abuse them? Using government figures that 5 women in 100,000 are murdered every year then putting everything onto the same 100,000 population, the frequencies look like this:

So, 40 to 5, it is 8 times more probable that abused women are murdered by their abuser. A relevant issue to raise in Court about the past history of an accused man.

Are people's presumed biases costly, in the sense of making them vulnerable to exploitation, such that they can be turned into a money pump, or is it a case of "once bitten, twice shy"? In fact, there is no evidence that these apparently persistent logical errors actually result in people continually making costly errors. That presumption turns out to be a bias bias.

Gigerenzer goes on to show that people are in fact correct in their understanding of the randomness of short sequences of coin tosses, and Kahneman and Tversky wrong. Elegantly, he also shows that the "hot hand" of successful players in basketball is a real phenomenon, and not a stubborn illusion as claimed.

With equal elegance he disposes of a result I had depended upon since Slovic (1982), which is that people over-estimate the frequency of rare risks and under-estimate the frequency of common risks. This finding has led to the belief that people are no good at estimating risk. Who could doubt that a TV series about Chernobyl will lead citizens to have an exaggerated fear of nuclear power stations?

The original Slovic study was based on 39 college students, not exactly a fair sample of humanity. The conceit of psychologists knows no bounds. Gigerenzer looks at the data and shows that it is yet another example of regression to the mean. This is an apparent effect which arises whenever the predictor is less than perfect (the most common case), an unsystematic error effect, which is already evident when you calculate the correlation coefficient. Parental height and their children's heights are positively but not perfectly correlated at about r = 0.5. Predictions made in either direction will under-predict in either direction, simply because they are not perfect, and do not capture all the variation. Try drawing out the correlation as an ellipse to see the effect of regression, compared to the perfect case of the straight line of r= 1.0

What diminishes in the presence of noise is the variability of the estimates, both the estimates of the height of the sons based on that of their fathers, and vice versa. Regression toward the mean is a result of unsystematic, not systematic error (Stigler,1999).

Gigerenzer also looks at the supposed finding that people are over-confidence in predictions, and finds that it is another regression to the mean problem.

Gigerenzer then goes on to consider that old favourite, that most people think they are better than average, which supposedly cannot be the case, because average people are average.

Consider the finding that most drivers think they drive better than average. If better driving is interpreted as meaning fewer accidents, then most drivers' beliefs are actually true. The number of accidents per person has a skewed distribution, and an analysis of U.S. accident statistics showed that some 80% of drivers have fewer accidents than the average number of accidents (Mousavi and Gigerenzer, 2011)

Then he looks at the classical demonstration of framing, that is to say, the way people appear to be easily swayed by how the same facts are "framed" or presented to the person who has to make a decision.

A patient suffering from a serious heart disease considers high-risk surgery and asks a doctor about its prospects.

The doctor can frame the answer in two ways:

Positive Frame: Five years after surgery, 90% of patients are alive.
Negative Frame: Five years after surgery, 10% of patients are dead.

Should the patient listen to how the doctor frames the answer? Behavioral economists say no because both frames are logically equivalent (Kahneman, 2011). Nevertheless, people do listen. More are willing to agree to a medical procedure if the doctor uses positive framing (90% alive) than if negative framing is used (10% dead) (Moxeyet al., 2003). Framing effects challenge the assumption of stable preferences, leading to preference reversals. Thaler and Sunstein (2008) who presented the above surgery problem, concluded that "framing works because people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive decisionmakers" (p. 40)

Gigerenzer points out that in this particular example, subjects are having to make their judgements without knowing a key fact: how many survive without surgery. If you know that you have a datum which is more influential. These are the sorts of questions patients will often ask about, and discuss with other patients, or with several doctors. Furthermore, you don't have to spin a statistic. You could simply say: "Five years after surgery, 90% of patients are alive and 10% are dead".

Gigerenzer gives an explanation which is very relevant to current discussions about the meaning of intelligence, and about the power of intelligence tests:

In sum, the principle of logical equivalence or "description invariance" is a poor guide to understanding how human intelligence deals with an uncertain world where not everything is stated explicitly. It misses the very nature of intelligence, the ability to go beyond the information given (Bruner, 1973)

The key is to take uncertainty seriously, take heuristics seriously, and beware of the bias bias.

One important conclusion I draw from this entire paper is that the logical puzzles enjoyed by Kahneman, Tversky, Stanovich and others are rightly rejected by psychometricians as usually being poor indicators of real ability. They fail because they are designed to lead people up the garden path, and depend on idiosyncratic interpretations.

For more detail: http://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-tricky-question-of-rationality/

Critics of examinations of either intellectual ability or scholastic attainment are fond of claiming that the items are "arbitrary". Not really. Scholastic tests have to be close to the curriculum in question, but still need to a have question forms which are simple to understand so that the stress lies in how students formulate the answer, not in how they decipher the structure of the question.

Intellectual tests have to avoid particular curricula and restrict themselves to the common ground of what most people in a community understand. Questions have to be super-simple, so that the correct answer follows easily from the question, with minimal ambiguity. Furthermore, in the case of national scholastic tests, and particularly in the case of intelligence tests, legal authorities will pore over the test, looking at each item for suspected biases of a sexual, racial or socio-economic nature. Designing an intelligence test is a difficult and expensive matter. Many putative new tests of intelligence never even get to the legal hurdle, because they flounder on matters of reliability and validity, and reveal themselves to be little better than the current range of assessments.

In conclusion, both in psychology and behavioural economics, some researchers have probably been too keen to allege bias in cases where there are unsystematic errors, or no errors at all. The corrective is to learn about base rates, and to use natural frequencies as a guide to good decision-making.

Don't bother boosting your IQ. Boost your understanding of natural frequencies.

res , says: June 17, 2019 at 3:29 pm GMT

Good concrete advice. Perhaps even more useful for those who need to explain things like this to others than for those seeking to understand for themselves.
ThreeCranes , says: June 17, 2019 at 3:34 pm GMT
"intelligence deals with an uncertain world where not everything is stated explicitly. It misses the very nature of intelligence, the ability to go beyond the information given (Bruner, 1973)"

"The key is to take uncertainty seriously, take heuristics seriously, and beware of the bias bias."

Why I come to Unz.

Tom Welsh , says: June 18, 2019 at 8:36 am GMT
@Cortes Sounds fishy to me.

Actually I think this is an example of an increasingly common genre of malapropism, where the writer gropes for the right word, finds one that is similar, and settles for that. The worst of it is that readers intuitively understand what was intended, and then adopt the marginally incorrect usage themselves. That's perhaps how the world and his dog came to say "literally" when they mean "figuratively". Maybe a topic for a future article?

Biff , says: June 18, 2019 at 10:16 am GMT
In 2009 Google finished engineering a reverse search engine to find out what kind of searches people did most often. Seth Davidowitz and Steven Pinker wrote a very fascinating/entertaining book using the tool called Everybody Lies

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28512671-everybody-lies

Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender, and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn't vote for Barack Obama because he's black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives, and who's more self-conscious about sex, men or women?

Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential – revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our health – both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data every day, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.

dearieme , says: June 18, 2019 at 11:25 am GMT
I shall treat this posting (for which many thanks, doc) as an invitation to sing a much-loved song: everybody should read Gigerenzer's Reckoning with Risk. With great clarity it teaches what everyone ought to know about probability.

(It could also serve as a model for writing in English about technical subjects. Americans and Britons should study the English of this German – he knows how, you know.)

Inspired by "The original Slovic study was based on 39 college students" I shall also sing another favorite song. Much of Psychology is based on what small numbers of American undergraduates report they think they think.

Anon [410] • Disclaimer , says: June 18, 2019 at 3:47 pm GMT
" Gigerenzer points out that in this particular example, subjects are having to make their judgements without knowing a key fact: how many survive without surgery. "

This one reminds of the false dichotomy. The patient has additional options! Like changing diet, and behaviours such as exercise, elimination of occupational stress , etc.

The statistical outcomes for a person change when the person changes their circumstances/conditions.

Cortes , says: June 18, 2019 at 4:14 pm GMT
@Tom Welsh A disposition (conveyance) of an awkwardly shaped chunk out of a vast estate contained reference to "the slither of ground bounded on or towards the north east and extending two hundred and twenty four meters or thereby along a chain link fence " Not poor clients (either side) nor cheap lawyers. And who never erred?

Better than deliberately inserting "errors" to guarantee a stream of tidy up work (not unknown in the "professional" world) in future.

Tom Fix , says: June 18, 2019 at 4:25 pm GMT
Good article. 79% of gynaecologists fail a simple conditional probability test?! Many if not most medical research papers use advanced statistics. Medical doctors must read these papers to fully understand their field. So, if medical doctors don't fully understand them, they are not properly doing their job. Those papers use mathematical expressions, not English. Converting them to another form of English, instead of using the mathematical expressions isn't a solution.
SafeNow , says: June 18, 2019 at 5:49 pm GMT
Regarding witnesses: When that jet crashed into Rockaway several years ago, a high percentage of witnesses said that they saw smoke before the crash. But there was actually no smoke. The witnesses were adjusting what they saw to conform to their past experience of seeing movie and newsreel footage of planes smoking in the air before a crash. Children actually make very good witnesses.

Regarding the chart. Missing, up there in the vicinity of cancer and heart disease. The third-leading cause of death. 250,000 per year, according to a 2016 Hopkins study. Medical negligence.

Anon [724] • Disclaimer , says: June 18, 2019 at 9:48 pm GMT

1. Lack of rationality. Experiments have shown that people's intuitions are systematically biased.

2. Stubbornness. Like visual illusions, biases are persistent and hardly corrigible by education.

3. Substantial costs. Biases may incur substantial welfare-relevant costs such as lower wealth, health, or happiness.

4. Biases justify governmental paternalism. To protect people from theirbiases, governments should "nudge" the public toward better behavior.

Well the sad fact is that there's nobody in the position to protect "governments" from their own biases, and "scientists" from theirs.

So, behind the smoke of all words and rationalisations, the law is unchanged: everyone strives to gain and exert as much power as possible over as many others as possible. Most do that without writing papers to say it is right, others write papers, others books. Anyway, the fundamental law would stay as it is even if all this writing labour was spared, wouldn't it? But then another fundamental law, the law of framing all one's drives as moral and beneffective comes into play the papers and the books are useful, after all.

Curmudgeon , says: June 19, 2019 at 1:42 am GMT
An interesting article. However, I think that the only thing we have to know about how illogical psychiatry is this:

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality to be a mental disorder. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain it.

The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with "sexual orientation disturbance" for people "in conflict with" their sexual orientation. Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM.

(source https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder )

The article makes no mention of the fact that no "new science" was brought to support the resolution.

It appears that the psychiatrists were voting based on feelings rather than science. Since that time, the now 50+ genders have been accepted as "normal" by the APA. My family has had members in multiple generations suffering from mental illness. None were "cured". I know others with the same circumstances.

How does one conclude that being repulsed by the prime directive of every living organism – reproduce yourself – is "normal"? That is not to say these people are horrible or evil, just not normal. How can someone, who thinks (s)he is a cat be mentally ill, but a grown man thinking he is a female child is not?

Long ago a lawyer acquaintance, referring to a specific judge, told me that the judge seemed to "make shit up as he was going along". I have long held psychiatry fits that statement very well.

Paul2 , says: June 19, 2019 at 8:08 am GMT
Thank you for this article. I find the information about the interpretation of statistical data very interesting. My take on the background of the article is this:

Here we have a real scientist fighting the nonsense spreading from (neoclassical) economics into other realms of science/academia.

Behavioral economics is a sideline by-product of neoclassical micro-economic theory. It tries to cope with experimental data that is inconsistent with that theory.

Everything in neoclassical economics is a travesty. "Rational choice theory" and its application in "micro economics" is false from the ground up. It basically assumes that people are gobbling up resources without plan, meaning or relevant circumstances. Neoclassical micro economic theory is so false and illogical that I would not know where to start in a comment, so I should like to refer to a whole book about it:
Keen, Steve: "Debunking economics".

As the theory is totally wrong it is really not surprising that countless experiments show that people do not behave the way neoclassical theory predicts. How do economists react to this? Of course they assume that people are "irrational" because they do not behave according to their studied theory. (Why would you ever change your basic theory because of some tedious facts?)

We live in a strange world in which such people have control over university faculties, journals, famous prizes. But at least we have some scientists who defend their area of knowledge against the spreading nonsense produced by economists.

The title of the 1st ed. of Keen's book was "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences" which was simply a perfect title.

Dieter Kief , says: June 19, 2019 at 8:22 am GMT
@Curmudgeon Could it be that you expect psychiatrists in the past to be as rational as you are now?

Would the result have been any different, if members of a 1973 convention of physicists or surgeons would have been asked?

[Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... You might think the Democratic Party would be horrified at this result, which one conservative analyst calls: "one of the greatest self-defeating acts in history." You might think Democrats would now move quickly and decisively toward a strategy of offering a substantive political alternative, and abandon this awful own-goal Mueller/Russiagate tack that has already helped Trump immensely (and which they are not going to turn their way). That is obviously what would happen if the Democrats' main goal was to defeat Trump. But it isn't. ..."
"... As discussed above, the Democratic establishment's' main goal throughout this was not to "get" Trump, but to channel its own voters' disgust with him into support for some halcyon, liberal, status quo ante-Trump, and away from left demands for a radical change to the social, economic, and political conditions that produced him and his clueless establishment opponent in 2016. The Democrats' goal was, and is, not to defeat Trump, but to stave off the left. ..."
"... The Democrats' main goal in all this is not to impeach, or stop the re-election of, Donald Trump; it's to prevent the nomination and election of Bernie Sanders, or anyone like him. ..."
"... You mean the five million people who voted for Obama in 2012, in the 90% of counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012, but would not vote for Hillary in 2019, aren’t streaming back into—are indeed still streaming out of—the Democratic Party, despite all the Mueller investigation has done for them? Imagine that. ..."
"... What has Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation wrought? It’s either a shrewd political gambit sure to take down Trump, or it’s ridiculous political theater leading Democrats, and the country, over another cliff. Double-down or leave that table? ..."
Apr 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org
So the Mueller investigation is over. The official "Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election" has been written, and is in the hands of Attorney General William Barr, who has issued a summary of its findings. On the core mandate of the investigation, given to Special Counsel Mueller by Rod Rosenstein as Acting Attorney General in May of 2017 -- to investigate "any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump" -- the takeaway conclusion stated in the Mueller report, as quoted in the Barr summary, is that "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.1"

In the footnote indicated at the end of that sentence, Barr further clarifies the comprehensive meaning of that conclusion, again quoting the Report's own words: "In assessing potential conspiracy charges, the Special Counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign 'coordinated' with Russian election interference activities. The Special Counsel defined 'coordination' as an 'agreement -- tacit or express -- between the Trump Campaign and the Russian government on election interference'."

Barr restates the point of the cited conclusion from the Mueller Report a number of times: "The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election the Special Counsel did not find that any U.S. person or Trump campaign official or associate conspired or knowingly coordinated with the IRA [Internet Research Agency, the indicted Russian clickbait operation] in its efforts."

Thus, the Mueller investigation found no "conspiracy," no "coordination," -- i.e., no "collusion" -- "tacit or express" between the Trump campaign or any U.S. person and the Russian government. The Mueller investigation did not make, seal, or recommend any indictment for any U.S. person for any such crime.

This is as clear and forceful a repudiation as one can get of the "collusion" narrative that has been insistently shoved down our throats by the Democratic Party, its McResistance, its allied media, and its allied intelligence and national security agencies and officials. Whatever one wants to say about any other aspect of this investigation -- campaign finance violations, obstruction of justice, etc. -- they were not the main saga for the past two+ years as spun by the Russiagaters. The core narrative was that Donald Trump was some kind of Russian agent or asset, arguably guilty of treason and taking orders from his handler/blackmailer Vladimir Putin, who conspired with him to steal the 2016 election, and, furthermore, that Saint Mueller and his investigation team of patriotic FBI/CIA agents were going to find the goods that would have the Donald taken out of the White House in handcuffs for that.

Keith Olbermann's spectacular rant in January 2017 defined the core narrative and exemplified the Trump Derangement Syndrome that powered it: an emotional, visceral hatred of Donald Trump wrapped in the fantasy -- insisted upon as "elemental, existential fact" -- that he was "put in power by Vladimir Putin." A projection and deflection, I would say, of liberals' self-hatred for creating the conditions -- eight years of war and wealth transfer capped off by a despised and entitled candidate -- that allowed a vapid clown like Trump to be elected. It couldn't be our fault! It must have been Putin who arranged it!

Here's a highlight of Keith's delusional discourse. But, please watch the whole six-minute video below. They may have been a bit calmer, but this is the fundamental lunacy that was exuding from the rhetorical pores of Rachel, Chris, and Co. day after day for two+ years:

The military apparatus of this country is about to be handed over to scum, who are beholden to scum, Russian scum! As things are today January 20th will not be an inauguration but rather the end of the United States as an independent country. Donald John Trump is not a president; he is a puppet, put in power by Vladimir Putin. Those who ignore these elemental, existential facts -- Democrats or Republicans -- are traitors to this country. [Emphases in original. Really, watch it.]

https://www.youtube.com/embed/IAFxPXGDH4E

This -- Trump's secret, treasonous collusion with Putin, and not hush money or campaign finance violations or "obstruction of justice" or his obvious overall sleaziness -- was Russiagate.

Russiagate is Dead! Long Live Russiagate!

And it still is. Here's the demonstration in New York last Thursday, convened by the MoveOn/Maddow #Resistance, singing from "the hymnal" about how Trump is a "Russian whore" who is "busy blowing Vladimir":

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9YZ9kiJ88LM

This is delusional lunacy.

Here are the three lines of excuse and denial currently being fired off by diehard Russiagaters in their fighting retreat, and my responses to them.

1. The Mueller Report is irrelevant, anyhow. 'Cause either A) Per Congressional blowhard Adam Schiff: There already "is direct evidence" proving Trump-Russia collusion, dating from before the Mueller Investigation, so who cares what that doesn't find; or B) (My personal favorite) Per former prosecutor and CNN legal expert Renato Mariotti: Of course there is no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, and it's "your fault" for letting Trump fool you into thinking Mueller's job was to find it. (The Mueller "collusion" investigation was a red herring orchestrated/promoted by Trump! I cannot make this up.)

Mueller's report will almost certainly disappoint you, and it's not his fault. It's your fault for buying into Trump's false narrative that it is Mueller's' job to prove "collusion," a nearly impossible bar for any prosecutor to clear.

My piece in @TIME : https://t.co/VQ2WhhC996

-- Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) March 1, 2019

This is, of course, the weakest volley. It's absurd, patent bad faith, for Russiagaters to pretend that they knew, thought, or suggested the Mueller investigation was irrelevant. It is they who have been insisting that the integrity and super-sleuthiness of the "revered" Robert Mueller himself was the thing that would nail Donald Trump for Russian collusion. To now deny that any of that was important only acknowledges how thoroughly they have been fooling the American people and/or themselves for two years. Either Adam Schiff had the goods on Trump's traitorous Russian collusion two years ago, in which case he's got a lot of explaining to do about why he's been stringing us along with Mueller, or Schiff is just bluffing. Place your bets.

Russiagaters in 2017: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT MUELLER KNOWS
Russiagaters in 2018: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT MUELLER KNOWS
Russiagaters in 2019: Shut up Mueller, what would you know.

-- Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) March 22, 2019

2. The Mueller Report didn't exonerate Trump entirely. It was agnostic about whether Trump was guilty of "obstruction of justice," and there are probably many nasty things in the report that may not be provably criminal, but nonetheless demonstrate what a slimeball Trump is.

No, Russiagaters will not get away with denying that the core purpose of the Mueller investigation was to prove Trump's traitorous relation to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, which helped him win the 2016 election. They will not get away with denying that, if the Mueller investigation failed to prove that, it failed in its main purpose, as they constantly defined and reinforced it, with table-pounding, hyperventilating, and -- a few days ago! -- disco-dancing to "the hymnal."

They will not get away with trying to appropriate, as if it were their point all along, what the left critics of Russiagate have been saying for two+ years -- that Donald Trump is a slimeball grifter whose culpability for politically substantive and probably legally actionable crimes and misdemeanors should not be hard to establish, without reverting to the absurd accusation that he's a Russian agent.

These are the left critics of Russiagate and Trump, whom Russiagaters deliberately excluded from all their media platforms, in order to make it seem that only right-wing Trump supporters could be skeptical of Russiagate -- the left critics Russiagaters then excoriated as "Trump enablers" and "Putin apologists" for speaking on the only media platforms that would host them. Among them, Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Maté (who just deservedly won the I.F. Stone prize for his Russiagate coverage) were the most prominent, but many others, including me, made this point week after week (Brian Becker, Dave Lindorff, Dan Kovalik, Daniel Lazare, Ted Rall, to name a few). As I put it in an essay last year: "There are a thousand reasons to criticize Donald Trump That Donald Trump is a Russian agent is not one of them. There are a number of very good justifications for seeking his impeachment That he is a Kremlin agent is not one of them."

So, it's a particularly slimy for Russiagaters to slip into the position that we Russiagate skeptics have been enunciating, and they have been excluding, for two years, without acknowledging that we were right and they were wrong and accounting for their effort to edit us out.

3. But we haven't seen the whole Mueller Report! Barr may be fooling us! Mueller's own team says so! You are now doing what you accused us of doing for two years -- abandoning proper skepticism about Republicans like Barr and even Mueller (Yup. He's a suspicious Republican now!), and assuming a final result we have not yet seen.

This is the one the Russiagaters like the most. Gotcha with your own logic!

Well, let's first of all thank those who are saying this for, again, recognizing that we Russiagate critics had the right attitude toward such an investigation: cautious skepticism as opposed to false certainty. And let's linger for a moment or more on how belated that recognition is and what its delay cost.

But let's also recognize that what's being expressed here is the last-minute hope on the part of the Russiagaters that the Mueller report actually does contain dispositive evidence of Trump's treasonous Russian collusion. Because, again, that is the core accusation that hopeful Russiagaters are still singing about, and nobody ever argued that evidence of other hijinks was unlikely.

Well, that hope can only be realized if one or both of the following are true: 1) Barr's quotes from the report exonerating Trump of collusion are complete fabrications, or 2) Mueller both wrote those words even though they contradict the substance of his own report and declined to indict a single U.S. person for such "collusion" even though he could have.

Sure, in the abstract, one or both of those conditions could be true. But there is no evidence, none, that either is. The New York Times (NYT) report that set everyone aflutter about the "concern" from "some members of Mr. Mueller's team" is anonymous, unspecified, and second-hand. Read it carefully: The NYT did not report what any member of Mueller's team said, but what "government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations" said. Those "officials and others interviewed [not members of the Mueller team itself] declined to flesh out" to the NYT what "some of the special counsel's investigators" were unhappy about. To that empty hearsay, the NYT appends the phrase "although the report is believed to examine Mr. Trump's efforts to thwart the investigation" -- suggesting, but not stating, that obstruction of justice issues are the reasons for the investigators' "vexation." The NYT cannot state, because it does not know, anything. It is reporting empty hearsay that is evidence of nothing, but is meant to keep hope alive.

"[T]he report is believed to examine" is a particularly strange locution. Is the NYT suggesting that the Mueller report might not have examined obstruction of justice possibilities? Or is it just getting tangled up in its attempt to suggest this or that? Hey, it could just as well be true that Barr's characterization of what the Mueller Report says about "obstruction of justice" is a misleading fabrication. Maybe Mueller actually exonerated Trump of that. If you mistrust Barr's version of what the Mueller Report says about collusion, why not equally mistrust what it says about obstruction of justice?

There is no evidence that Barr's summary is radically misleading about the core collusion conclusion of the Mueller Report. The walls are closing in, alright, on that story. The I'm just being as cautious now as you were before! line is the opposite of the reasonable skepticism is claims to be; it's Russiagaters clinging to a wish and a belief that something they want to be true is, despite the determinate lack of any evidence.

It's not just the words; it's the melody, and the desperation in the voices. The core Trump-blowing-Vladimir collusion song that #Resisters are still singing is a fantastical fiction and the people still singing it are the pathetic choir on the Russiagate Titanic. And while they're singing as they sink, Trump is escaping in the lifeboat they have provided him. The single most definite and undeniable effect of the Mueller investigation on American politics has been to hand Donald Trump a potent political weapon for his 2020 re-election campaign. A real bombshell.

It would be funny, if it weren't so funny:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/qjUvfZj-Fm0

But it's worse than that. The falsity of the Trump-as-a-Russian-agent narrative does not depend on any confidence in Mueller and his report or Barr and his summary. The truth is there was no Russiagate investigation, in the sense of a serious attempt to find out whether Donald Trump was taking orders from, or "coordinating" with, Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.

No person in their right mind could believe that. Robert Mueller doesn't believe it. Nancy Pelosi doesn't believe it. Adam Schiff doesn't believe it. John Brennan, James Clapper, and the heads of intelligence agencies do not believe it. Not for a second. No knowledgeable international affairs journalist or academic who thinks about it for two minutes believes it. Sure, some politicians and media pundits did work themselves up into a state where they internalized and projected a belief in the narrative, but few of them really believed it. They were serving the Kool-Aid. Only the most gullible sectors of their target audience drank it.

With some exceptions, to be sure (Donald Trump among them), the people in the highest echelons of the state-media-academic apparatus are just not that stupid. And, most obvious and important, Vladimir Putin is not that stupid, and they know he is not. Vladimir Putin would never rely on Donald Trump to be his operative in a complex operation that required shrewdly playing and evading the US intelligence and media apparatuses. Nobody is that stupid. Thinking about it that way for a second dissipates the entire ridiculous idea. (Not to mention that Trump ended up enacting a number of policies -- many more than Obama! -- contrary to Russian interests.)

The obvious, which many people in the independent media and none in the mainstream media (because it is so obvious, and would have blown their game) have pointed out, is that any real investigation of Russiagate would have sought to talk with the principals who had direct knowledge of who is responsible for leaking the infamous DNC documents: Julian Assange and former British ambassador Craig Murray ("I know who leaked them. I've met the person who leaked them."). They were essentially two undisputed eyewitnesses to the crime Mueller was supposed to be investigating, and he made no effort to talk to either of them. Ipso facto, it was not really an investigation, not a project whole purpose was to find the truth about whatever the thing called "Russiagate" is supposed to be.

The Eternal Witch-hunt

It was a theater of discipline. Its purpose, which it achieved, was to discipline Trump, the Democratic electorate, and the media. Its method was fishing around in the muck of Washington consultants, lobbyists, and influence peddlers to generate indictments and plea bargains for crimes irrelevant to the core mandate. Not hard, in a carceral state where prosecutors can pin three felonies a day on anyone.

The US establishment, especially its national security arm, was genuinely shocked that their anointed candidate, Hillary, who was, as Glen Ford puts it "'all in' with the global military offensive" that Obama had run through Libya, Syria, and the coup in Ukraine, was defeated by a nitwit candidate who was making impermissibly non-aggressive noises about things like Russia and NATO, and who actually wanted to lose. For their part, the Democrats were horrified, and did not want to face the necessary reckoning about the complete failure of their candidate, and the best-of-all-possible-liberaloid-worlds strategy she personified.

So, "within 24 hours of her concession speech" Hillary's campaign team (Robby Mook and John Podesta) created a "script they would pitch to the press and the public" to explain why she lost. "Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument." A few months later, a coalition of congressional Democrats,, establishment Republicans, and intelligence/natsec professionals pressured Trump (who, we can now see clearly, is putty in the hands of the latter) to initiate a Special Counsel investigation. Its ostensible goal was to investigate Russian collusion, but its real goals were:

1) To discipline Trump, preventing any backpedaling on NATO/imperialist war-mongering against Russia or any other target. Frankly, I think this was unnecessary. Trump never had any depth of principle in his remarks about de-escalating with Russia and Syria. He was always a staunch American exceptionalist and Zionist. Nobody has forced him (that's a right-wing fantasy) to attack Syria, appoint John Bolton, recognize Israeli authority over Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, or threaten Iran and Venezuela. But the natsec deep state actors did (and do) not trust Trump's impulsiveness. They probably also thought it would be useful to "send a message" to Russia, which, in their arrogance, they think they can, but they cannot, "discipline," as I've discussed in a previous essay.

2) To discipline the media, making "Russian collusion," as Off-Guardian journalist Kit Knightly says, "a concept that keeps everyone in check." Thus, a Russophobia-related McCarthyite hysteria was engendered that defined any strong anti-interventionist or anti-establishment sentiment as Russian-sown "divisiveness" and "Putin apologetics." This discipline was eagerly accepted by the mainstream media, which joined in the related drive to demand new forms of censorship for independent and internet media. The epitome of this is the mainstream media's execrable, tacit and sometimes explicit acceptance of the US government's campaign to prosecute Julian Assange.

3) To discipline and corral the Democratic constituency. Establishment Dems riled up outraged progressives with deceptive implied promises to take Trump down based on the collusion fiction, which excused Hillary and diverted their attention from the real egregious failures and crimes that led their party to political ruin, and culminated in the election of Trump in the first place. This discipline also instituted a #Resistance to Trump that involved the party doing nothing substantively progressive in policy -- indeed, it allowed embracing Trump's most egregious militarism and promoting an alliance with, a positive reverence for, the most deceptive and reactionary institutions of the state.

Finally, incorporating point 2, perhaps the main point of this discipline -- indeed of the whole Mueller enterprise -- was to stigmatize the leftists and socialists in and around the party, who were questioning the collusion fiction and calling critical attention to the party's failures, as crypto-fascist "Trump enablers" or "Putin's useful idiots." It's all about fencing out the left and corralling the base.

Note the point regarding the deceptive implications about taking down Trump. Though they gave the opposite impression to rile up their constituents, Democratic Congressional leaders, for the reasons given above and others I laid out in a previous essay, did not think for a second they were going to impeach Trump. They were never really after impeaching Trump; they were and are after stringing along their dissatisfied progressive-minded voters. They, not Trump, were and are the target of the foolery.

We should recognize that Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation achieved all of these goals, and was therefore a great success. That's the case whatever part of the Mueller Report is summarized and released, and whoever interprets it. The whole report with all of the underlying evidence cannot legally be released to the public, and the Democrats know that. So, even if the House gets it, the public will only ever see portions doled out by various interested parties.

Thus, it will continue to be a great success. There will be endless leaks, and interpretations of leaks, and arguments about the interpretations of leaks based on speculation about what's still hidden. The Mueller Investigation has morphed into the Mueller Report, a hermeneutical exercise that will go on forever.
The Mueller Investigation never happened and will never end.

It wasn't an investigation. It was/is an act of political theater, staged in an ongoing dramatic festival where, increasingly, litigation substitutes for politics. Neither party has anything of real, lasting, positive political substance to offer, and each finds itself in power only because it conned the electorate into thinking it offered something new. That results in every politician being vulnerable, but to a politically vacuous opposition that can only mount its attacks on largely politically irrelevant, often impossible to adjudicate, legalistic or moralistic grounds. Prosecutorial inquiry becomes a substitute for substantive political challenge.

It's the template that was established by the Republicans against Bill Clinton, has been adapted by the Democrats for Trump and Russiagate, and will be ceaselessly repeated. What's coming next, already hinted at in William Barr's congressional testimony, will be an investigation of FISAGate -- an inquiry into whether the FISA warrants for spying on the Trump campaign and administration were obtained legally ("adequately predicated"). And/or UkraineGate, about the evidence "Ukrainian law enforcement officials believe they have of wrongdoing by American Democrats and their allies in Kiev, ranging from 2016 election interference to obstructing criminal probes," involving Tony Podesta (who worked right alongside Paul Manafort in Ukraine), Hillary Clinton's campaign, Joe Biden and his son, et. al. And/or CampaignGate, the lawsuit claiming that Hillary's national campaign illegally took $84 million of "straw man" contributions made to state Democratic campaigns. And/or CraigGate, involving powerful Democratic fixer and Obama White House Counsel, Gregory Craig, who has already been referred to federal prosecutors by Mueller, and whose law firm has already paid a $4.6 million-dollar fine for making false statement and failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act -- for work he did in Ukraine with -- who else? -- Paul Manafort.

There are Gates galore. If you haven't heard about any of these simmering scandals in the way you've heard incessantly about, you know, Paul Manafort, perhaps that's because they didn't fit into the "get Trump" theme of the Mueller Investigation/Russiagate political theater. Rest assured the Republicans have, and will likely make sure that you do. If you think the Republicans do not have at least as much of a chance to make a serious case with some of these as Mueller did with Trump, you are wrong. If you think the Republicans will pursue any of these investigations because they have the same principled concern as the Democrats about foreign collusion in US elections, or the legality of campaign contributions or surveillance warrants, you are right. They have none. Like the Democrats, they have zero concern for the ostensible issues of principle, and infinite enthusiasm for mounting "gotcha" political theater.

Neither party really wants, or knows how, to engage in a sustained, principled debate on substantive political issues -- things like universal-coverage, single-payer health insurance, a job guarantee, a radical reduction of the military budget, an end to imperialist intervention, increasing taxes on the wealthy and lowering them for working people, a break from the "overwhelming" and destructive influence of Zionism, to name a few of the policies the Democratic congressional leadership could have insisted on "investigating" over the last two years..

Instead, both parties' political campaigns rely on otherizing appeals based on superficial identity politics (white-affirmative on the one hand, POC-affirmative on the other) and, mainly, on bashing the other party for all the problems it ignored or exacerbated, and all the terrible policies it enacted, when it was in power -- and for the version of superficial, otherizing identity politics it supposedly based those policies on (the real determinants of class power remaining invisible). What both parties know how and will continue to do is mount hypocritical legalistic and moralistic "investigations" of illegal campaign contributions, support from foreign governments, teenage make-out sessions, personal-space violations, et. al., that they are just "shocked, shocked" about.

It's Investigation Nation. Fake politics in the simulacrum of a democratic polity. Indeed, someone, of some political perspicuity, might just notice, if only for a flash, that the people who do pretty well politically are often the ones who frankly don't give a crap about all that. Maybe because they're talking to people who don't give a crap about all that. But we wouldn't want to confuse ourselves thinking on that for too long.

Which brings us to the last point about Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation mentioned above. It may not (or may!) have been an intended goal, but it has been its most definite political effect: The Mueller Investigation has been a great political gift to Donald Trump. #Resisters and Russiagaters can wriggle around that all they want. They can insist that, once we get the whole Report, we'll turn the corner, the bombshell will explode, the walls will close in -- for real, this time. Sure.

But even they can't deny that's the case right now. Trump is saying the Mueller investigation was a political counterattack against the result of the election, masquerading as a disinterested judicial investigation; that it was based on a flimsy fiction and designed to dig around in every corner of his closets to find nasty and incriminating things that were entirely irrelevant to the ostensible mandate of the investigation and to any substantive, upfront political critique -- a "witchhunt," a "fishing expedition." And he is right. And too many people in the country know he's right. At this point, even most Russiagaters themselves know it -- though they don't care, and will never admit it.

So now Trump, who could have been attacked for two years politically on substance for betraying most of the promises that got him elected -- more aggressive war, more tax cuts for the wealthy, threatening Medicare and Social Security -- has instead been handed, by the Democrats, the strongest arrow he now has in his political quiver. As Matt Taibbi says: "Trump couldn't have asked for a juicier campaign issue, and an easier way to argue that 'elites' don't respect the democratic choices of flyover voters. It's hard to imagine what could look worse."

You might think the Democratic Party would be horrified at this result, which one conservative analyst calls: "one of the greatest self-defeating acts in history." You might think Democrats would now move quickly and decisively toward a strategy of offering a substantive political alternative, and abandon this awful own-goal Mueller/Russiagate tack that has already helped Trump immensely (and which they are not going to turn their way). That is obviously what would happen if the Democrats' main goal was to defeat Trump. But it isn't.

As discussed above, the Democratic establishment's' main goal throughout this was not to "get" Trump, but to channel its own voters' disgust with him into support for some halcyon, liberal, status quo ante-Trump, and away from left demands for a radical change to the social, economic, and political conditions that produced him and his clueless establishment opponent in 2016. The Democrats' goal was, and is, not to defeat Trump, but to stave off the left.

What they are doing with the Mueller Investigation/Russiagate is what they did in the primaries in 2016: Then, they deliberately promoted Trump as an opponent, while working assiduously to cheat their own leftist candidate; now, they gin up a fictional spy story whose inevitable collapse helps Trump, but on which they will double down, in order to continue branding "divisive" leftists who challenge any return to their version of status-quo normalcy as the Kremlin's "useful idiots."

The Democrats' main goal in all this is not to impeach, or stop the re-election of, Donald Trump; it's to prevent the nomination and election of Bernie Sanders, or anyone like him.

Russiagate Forever

Here's Tim Ryan's presidential campaign kickoff speech in Youngstown, Ohio, a poster city of late American capitalist deindustrialization, explaining to the voters what is causing the destruction of their lives and towns. After complaining that "We have politicians and leaders today that want to divide us. They want to put us in one box or the other. You know, you can't be for business and for labor," he elaborates:

Yup, it’s those Russians, you see, sowing division through certain “politicians and leaders,” who are preventing us from fixing our healthcare, education, economic and government systems. This—doubling down on Russiagate—is the centrist Democrats’ idea of a winning political appeal. I consider it utterly delusional.

I heard last week from a friend in Western Pennsylvania, not too far from Youngstown. She’s a good person who is trying to organize Democrats in the area to beat Trump in 2020, and, pleading for advice, she expressed her exasperation: “They’re leaving the party!”

You mean the five million people who voted for Obama in 2012, in the 90% of counties that voted for Obama either in 2008 or 2012, but would not vote for Hillary in 2019, aren’t streaming back into—are indeed still streaming out of—the Democratic Party, despite all the Mueller investigation has done for them? Imagine that.

What has Russiagate/The Mueller Investigation wrought? It’s either a shrewd political gambit sure to take down Trump, or it’s ridiculous political theater leading Democrats, and the country, over another cliff. Double-down or leave that table?

Place your bets.

[Jun 19, 2019] Bias bias the inclination to accuse people of bias by James Thompson

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Early in any psychology course, students are taught to be very cautious about accepting people's reports. A simple trick is to stage some sort of interruption to the lecture by confederates, and later ask the students to write down what they witnessed. Typically, they will misremember the events, sequences and even the number of people who staged the tableaux. Don't trust witnesses, is the message. ..."
"... The three assumptions -- lack of rationality, stubbornness, and costs -- imply that there is slim chance that people can ever learn or be educated out of their biases; ..."
"... So, are we as hopeless as some psychologists claim we are? In fact, probably not. Not all the initial claims have been substantiated. For example, it seems we are not as loss averse as previously claimed. Does our susceptibility to printed visual illusions show that we lack judgement in real life? ..."
"... Well the sad fact is that there's nobody in the position to protect "governments" from their own biases, and "scientists" from theirs ..."
"... Long ago a lawyer acquaintance, referring to a specific judge, told me that the judge seemed to "make shit up as he was going along". I have long held psychiatry fits that statement very well. ..."
"... Here we have a real scientist fighting the nonsense spreading from (neoclassical) economics into other realms of science/academia. ..."
"... Behavioral economics is a sideline by-product of neoclassical micro-economic theory. It tries to cope with experimental data that is inconsistent with that theory. ..."
"... Everything in neoclassical economics is a travesty. "Rational choice theory" and its application in "micro economics" is false from the ground up. It basically assumes that people are gobbling up resources without plan, meaning or relevant circumstances. Neoclassical micro economic theory is so false and illogical that I would not know where to start in a comment, so I should like to refer to a whole book about it: Keen, Steve: "Debunking economics". ..."
"... As the theory is totally wrong it is really not surprising that countless experiments show that people do not behave the way neoclassical theory predicts. How do economists react to this? Of course they assume that people are "irrational" because they do not behave according to their studied theory. (Why would you ever change your basic theory because of some tedious facts?) ..."
"... The title of the 1st ed. of Keen's book was "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences" which was simply a perfect title. ..."
Jun 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

Early in any psychology course, students are taught to be very cautious about accepting people's reports. A simple trick is to stage some sort of interruption to the lecture by confederates, and later ask the students to write down what they witnessed. Typically, they will misremember the events, sequences and even the number of people who staged the tableaux. Don't trust witnesses, is the message.

Another approach is to show visual illusions, such as getting estimates of line lengths in the Muller-Lyer illusion, or studying simple line lengths under social pressure, as in the Asch experiment, or trying to solve the Peter Wason logic problems, or the puzzles set by Kahneman and Tversky. All these appear to show severe limitations of human judgment. Psychology is full of cautionary tales about the foibles of common folk.

As a consequence of this softening up, psychology students come to regard themselves and most people as fallible, malleable, unreliable, biased and generally irrational. No wonder psychologists feel superior to the average citizen, since they understand human limitations and, with their superior training, hope to rise above such lowly superstitions.

However, society still functions, people overcome errors and many things work well most of the time. Have psychologists, for one reason or another, misunderstood people, and been too quick to assume that they are incapable of rational thought?

Gerd Gigerenzer thinks so.

https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/OpenAccessDownload/RBE-0092

He is particularly interested in the economic consequences of apparent irrationality, and whether our presumed biases really result in us making bad economic decisions. If so, some argue we need a benign force, say a government, to protect us from our lack of capacity. Perhaps we need a tattoo on our forehead: Diminished Responsibility.

The argument leading from cognitive biases to governmental paternalism -- in short, the irrationality argument -- consists of three assumptions and one conclusion:

1. Lack of rationality. Experiments have shown that people's intuitions are systematically biased.

2. Stubbornness. Like visual illusions, biases are persistent and hardly corrigible by education.

3. Substantial costs. Biases may incur substantial welfare-relevant costs such as lower wealth, health, or happiness.

4. Biases justify governmental paternalism. To protect people from theirbiases, governments should "nudge" the public toward better behavior.

The three assumptions -- lack of rationality, stubbornness, and costs -- imply that there is slim chance that people can ever learn or be educated out of their biases; instead governments need to step in with a policy called libertarian paternalism (Thaler and Sunstein, 2003).

So, are we as hopeless as some psychologists claim we are? In fact, probably not. Not all the initial claims have been substantiated. For example, it seems we are not as loss averse as previously claimed. Does our susceptibility to printed visual illusions show that we lack judgement in real life?

In Shepard's (1990) words, "to fool a visual system that has a full binocular and freely mobile view of a well-illuminated scene is next to impossible" (p. 122). Thus, in psychology, the visual system is seen more as a genius than a fool in making intelligent inferences, and inferences, after all, are necessary for making sense of the images on the retina.

Most crucially, can people make probability judgements? Let us see. Try solving this one:

A disease has a base rate of .1, and a test is performed that has a hit rate of .9 (the conditional probability of a positive test given disease) and a false positive rate of .1 (the conditional probability of a positive test given no disease). What is the probability that a random person with a positive test result actually has the disease?

Most people fail this test, including 79% of gynaecologists giving breast screening tests. Some researchers have drawn the conclusion that people are fundamentally unable to deal with conditional probabilities. On the contrary, there is a way of laying out the problem such that most people have no difficulty with it. Watch what it looks like when presented as natural frequencies:

Among every 100 people, 10 are expected to have a disease. Among those 10, nine are expected to correctly test positive. Among the 90 people without the disease, nine are expected to falsely test positive. What proportion of those who test positive actually have the disease?

In this format the positive test result gives us 9 people with the disease and 9 people without the disease, so the chance that a positive test result shows a real disease is 50/50. Only 13% of gynaecologists fail this presentation.

Summing up the virtues of natural frequencies, Gigerenzer says:

When college students were given a 2-hour course in natural frequencies, the number of correct Bayesian inferences increased from 10% to 90%; most important, this 90% rate was maintained 3 months after training (Sedlmeier and Gigerenzer, 2001). Meta-analyses have also documented the "de-biasing" effect, and natural frequencies are now a technical term in evidence-based medicine (Akiet al., 2011; McDowell and Jacobs, 2017). These results are consistent with a long literature on techniques for successfully teaching statistical reasoning (e.g., Fonget al., 1986). In sum, humans can learn Bayesian inference quickly if the information is presented in natural frequencies.

If the problem is set out in a simple format, almost all of us can all do conditional probabilities.

I taught my medical students about the base rate screening problem in the late 1970s, based on: Robyn Dawes (1962) "A note on base rates and psychometric efficiency". Decades later, alarmed by the positive scan detection of an unexplained mass, I confided my fears to a psychiatrist friend. He did a quick differential diagnosis on bowel cancer, showing I had no relevant symptoms, and reminded me I had lectured him as a student on base rates decades before, so I ought to relax. Indeed, it was false positive.

Here are the relevant figures, set out in terms of natural frequencies

Every test has a false positive rate (every step is being taken to reduce these), and when screening is used for entire populations many patients have to undergo further investigations, sometimes including surgery.

Setting out frequencies in a logical sequence can often prevent misunderstandings. Say a man on trial for having murdered his spouse has previously physically abused her. Should his previous history of abuse not be raised in Court because only 1 woman in 2500 cases of abuse is murdered by her abuser? Of course, whatever a defence lawyer may argue and a Court may accept, this is back to front. OJ Simpson was not on trial for spousal abuse, but for the murder of his former partner. The relevant question is: what is the probability that a man murdered his partner, given that she has been murdered and that he previously battered her.

Accepting the figures used by the defence lawyer, if 1 in 2500 women are murdered every year by their abusive male partners, how many women are murdered by men who did not previously abuse them? Using government figures that 5 women in 100,000 are murdered every year then putting everything onto the same 100,000 population, the frequencies look like this:

So, 40 to 5, it is 8 times more probable that abused women are murdered by their abuser. A relevant issue to raise in Court about the past history of an accused man.

Are people's presumed biases costly, in the sense of making them vulnerable to exploitation, such that they can be turned into a money pump, or is it a case of "once bitten, twice shy"? In fact, there is no evidence that these apparently persistent logical errors actually result in people continually making costly errors. That presumption turns out to be a bias bias.

Gigerenzer goes on to show that people are in fact correct in their understanding of the randomness of short sequences of coin tosses, and Kahneman and Tversky wrong. Elegantly, he also shows that the "hot hand" of successful players in basketball is a real phenomenon, and not a stubborn illusion as claimed.

With equal elegance he disposes of a result I had depended upon since Slovic (1982), which is that people over-estimate the frequency of rare risks and under-estimate the frequency of common risks. This finding has led to the belief that people are no good at estimating risk. Who could doubt that a TV series about Chernobyl will lead citizens to have an exaggerated fear of nuclear power stations?

The original Slovic study was based on 39 college students, not exactly a fair sample of humanity. The conceit of psychologists knows no bounds. Gigerenzer looks at the data and shows that it is yet another example of regression to the mean. This is an apparent effect which arises whenever the predictor is less than perfect (the most common case), an unsystematic error effect, which is already evident when you calculate the correlation coefficient. Parental height and their children's heights are positively but not perfectly correlated at about r = 0.5. Predictions made in either direction will under-predict in either direction, simply because they are not perfect, and do not capture all the variation. Try drawing out the correlation as an ellipse to see the effect of regression, compared to the perfect case of the straight line of r= 1.0

What diminishes in the presence of noise is the variability of the estimates, both the estimates of the height of the sons based on that of their fathers, and vice versa. Regression toward the mean is a result of unsystematic, not systematic error (Stigler,1999).

Gigerenzer also looks at the supposed finding that people are over-confidence in predictions, and finds that it is another regression to the mean problem.

Gigerenzer then goes on to consider that old favourite, that most people think they are better than average, which supposedly cannot be the case, because average people are average.

Consider the finding that most drivers think they drive better than average. If better driving is interpreted as meaning fewer accidents, then most drivers' beliefs are actually true. The number of accidents per person has a skewed distribution, and an analysis of U.S. accident statistics showed that some 80% of drivers have fewer accidents than the average number of accidents (Mousavi and Gigerenzer, 2011)

Then he looks at the classical demonstration of framing, that is to say, the way people appear to be easily swayed by how the same facts are "framed" or presented to the person who has to make a decision.

A patient suffering from a serious heart disease considers high-risk surgery and asks a doctor about its prospects.

The doctor can frame the answer in two ways:

Positive Frame: Five years after surgery, 90% of patients are alive.
Negative Frame: Five years after surgery, 10% of patients are dead.

Should the patient listen to how the doctor frames the answer? Behavioral economists say no because both frames are logically equivalent (Kahneman, 2011). Nevertheless, people do listen. More are willing to agree to a medical procedure if the doctor uses positive framing (90% alive) than if negative framing is used (10% dead) (Moxeyet al., 2003). Framing effects challenge the assumption of stable preferences, leading to preference reversals. Thaler and Sunstein (2008) who presented the above surgery problem, concluded that "framing works because people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive decisionmakers" (p. 40)

Gigerenzer points out that in this particular example, subjects are having to make their judgements without knowing a key fact: how many survive without surgery. If you know that you have a datum which is more influential. These are the sorts of questions patients will often ask about, and discuss with other patients, or with several doctors. Furthermore, you don't have to spin a statistic. You could simply say: "Five years after surgery, 90% of patients are alive and 10% are dead".

Gigerenzer gives an explanation which is very relevant to current discussions about the meaning of intelligence, and about the power of intelligence tests:

In sum, the principle of logical equivalence or "description invariance" is a poor guide to understanding how human intelligence deals with an uncertain world where not everything is stated explicitly. It misses the very nature of intelligence, the ability to go beyond the information given (Bruner, 1973)

The key is to take uncertainty seriously, take heuristics seriously, and beware of the bias bias.

One important conclusion I draw from this entire paper is that the logical puzzles enjoyed by Kahneman, Tversky, Stanovich and others are rightly rejected by psychometricians as usually being poor indicators of real ability. They fail because they are designed to lead people up the garden path, and depend on idiosyncratic interpretations.

For more detail: http://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-tricky-question-of-rationality/

Critics of examinations of either intellectual ability or scholastic attainment are fond of claiming that the items are "arbitrary". Not really. Scholastic tests have to be close to the curriculum in question, but still need to a have question forms which are simple to understand so that the stress lies in how students formulate the answer, not in how they decipher the structure of the question.

Intellectual tests have to avoid particular curricula and restrict themselves to the common ground of what most people in a community understand. Questions have to be super-simple, so that the correct answer follows easily from the question, with minimal ambiguity. Furthermore, in the case of national scholastic tests, and particularly in the case of intelligence tests, legal authorities will pore over the test, looking at each item for suspected biases of a sexual, racial or socio-economic nature. Designing an intelligence test is a difficult and expensive matter. Many putative new tests of intelligence never even get to the legal hurdle, because they flounder on matters of reliability and validity, and reveal themselves to be little better than the current range of assessments.

In conclusion, both in psychology and behavioural economics, some researchers have probably been too keen to allege bias in cases where there are unsystematic errors, or no errors at all. The corrective is to learn about base rates, and to use natural frequencies as a guide to good decision-making.

Don't bother boosting your IQ. Boost your understanding of natural frequencies.

res , says: June 17, 2019 at 3:29 pm GMT

Good concrete advice. Perhaps even more useful for those who need to explain things like this to others than for those seeking to understand for themselves.
ThreeCranes , says: June 17, 2019 at 3:34 pm GMT
"intelligence deals with an uncertain world where not everything is stated explicitly. It misses the very nature of intelligence, the ability to go beyond the information given (Bruner, 1973)"

"The key is to take uncertainty seriously, take heuristics seriously, and beware of the bias bias."

Why I come to Unz.

Tom Welsh , says: June 18, 2019 at 8:36 am GMT
@Cortes Sounds fishy to me.

Actually I think this is an example of an increasingly common genre of malapropism, where the writer gropes for the right word, finds one that is similar, and settles for that. The worst of it is that readers intuitively understand what was intended, and then adopt the marginally incorrect usage themselves. That's perhaps how the world and his dog came to say "literally" when they mean "figuratively". Maybe a topic for a future article?

Biff , says: June 18, 2019 at 10:16 am GMT
In 2009 Google finished engineering a reverse search engine to find out what kind of searches people did most often. Seth Davidowitz and Steven Pinker wrote a very fascinating/entertaining book using the tool called Everybody Lies

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28512671-everybody-lies

Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender, and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn't vote for Barack Obama because he's black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives, and who's more self-conscious about sex, men or women?

Investigating these questions and a host of others, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz offers revelations that can help us understand ourselves and our lives better. Drawing on studies and experiments on how we really live and think, he demonstrates in fascinating and often funny ways the extent to which all the world is indeed a lab. With conclusions ranging from strange-but-true to thought-provoking to disturbing, he explores the power of this digital truth serum and its deeper potential – revealing biases deeply embedded within us, information we can use to change our culture, and the questions we're afraid to ask that might be essential to our health – both emotional and physical. All of us are touched by big data every day, and its influence is multiplying. Everybody Lies challenges us to think differently about how we see it and the world.

dearieme , says: June 18, 2019 at 11:25 am GMT
I shall treat this posting (for which many thanks, doc) as an invitation to sing a much-loved song: everybody should read Gigerenzer's Reckoning with Risk. With great clarity it teaches what everyone ought to know about probability.

(It could also serve as a model for writing in English about technical subjects. Americans and Britons should study the English of this German – he knows how, you know.)

Inspired by "The original Slovic study was based on 39 college students" I shall also sing another favorite song. Much of Psychology is based on what small numbers of American undergraduates report they think they think.

Anon [410] • Disclaimer , says: June 18, 2019 at 3:47 pm GMT
" Gigerenzer points out that in this particular example, subjects are having to make their judgements without knowing a key fact: how many survive without surgery. "

This one reminds of the false dichotomy. The patient has additional options! Like changing diet, and behaviours such as exercise, elimination of occupational stress , etc.

The statistical outcomes for a person change when the person changes their circumstances/conditions.

Cortes , says: June 18, 2019 at 4:14 pm GMT
@Tom Welsh A disposition (conveyance) of an awkwardly shaped chunk out of a vast estate contained reference to "the slither of ground bounded on or towards the north east and extending two hundred and twenty four meters or thereby along a chain link fence " Not poor clients (either side) nor cheap lawyers. And who never erred?

Better than deliberately inserting "errors" to guarantee a stream of tidy up work (not unknown in the "professional" world) in future.

Tom Fix , says: June 18, 2019 at 4:25 pm GMT
Good article. 79% of gynaecologists fail a simple conditional probability test?! Many if not most medical research papers use advanced statistics. Medical doctors must read these papers to fully understand their field. So, if medical doctors don't fully understand them, they are not properly doing their job. Those papers use mathematical expressions, not English. Converting them to another form of English, instead of using the mathematical expressions isn't a solution.
SafeNow , says: June 18, 2019 at 5:49 pm GMT
Regarding witnesses: When that jet crashed into Rockaway several years ago, a high percentage of witnesses said that they saw smoke before the crash. But there was actually no smoke. The witnesses were adjusting what they saw to conform to their past experience of seeing movie and newsreel footage of planes smoking in the air before a crash. Children actually make very good witnesses.

Regarding the chart. Missing, up there in the vicinity of cancer and heart disease. The third-leading cause of death. 250,000 per year, according to a 2016 Hopkins study. Medical negligence.

Anon [724] • Disclaimer , says: June 18, 2019 at 9:48 pm GMT

1. Lack of rationality. Experiments have shown that people's intuitions are systematically biased.

2. Stubbornness. Like visual illusions, biases are persistent and hardly corrigible by education.

3. Substantial costs. Biases may incur substantial welfare-relevant costs such as lower wealth, health, or happiness.

4. Biases justify governmental paternalism. To protect people from theirbiases, governments should "nudge" the public toward better behavior.

Well the sad fact is that there's nobody in the position to protect "governments" from their own biases, and "scientists" from theirs.

So, behind the smoke of all words and rationalisations, the law is unchanged: everyone strives to gain and exert as much power as possible over as many others as possible. Most do that without writing papers to say it is right, others write papers, others books. Anyway, the fundamental law would stay as it is even if all this writing labour was spared, wouldn't it? But then another fundamental law, the law of framing all one's drives as moral and beneffective comes into play the papers and the books are useful, after all.

Curmudgeon , says: June 19, 2019 at 1:42 am GMT
An interesting article. However, I think that the only thing we have to know about how illogical psychiatry is this:

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asked all members attending its convention to vote on whether they believed homosexuality to be a mental disorder. 5,854 psychiatrists voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, and 3,810 to retain it.

The APA then compromised, removing homosexuality from the DSM but replacing it, in effect, with "sexual orientation disturbance" for people "in conflict with" their sexual orientation. Not until 1987 did homosexuality completely fall out of the DSM.

(source https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder )

The article makes no mention of the fact that no "new science" was brought to support the resolution.

It appears that the psychiatrists were voting based on feelings rather than science. Since that time, the now 50+ genders have been accepted as "normal" by the APA. My family has had members in multiple generations suffering from mental illness. None were "cured". I know others with the same circumstances.

How does one conclude that being repulsed by the prime directive of every living organism – reproduce yourself – is "normal"? That is not to say these people are horrible or evil, just not normal. How can someone, who thinks (s)he is a cat be mentally ill, but a grown man thinking he is a female child is not?

Long ago a lawyer acquaintance, referring to a specific judge, told me that the judge seemed to "make shit up as he was going along". I have long held psychiatry fits that statement very well.

Paul2 , says: June 19, 2019 at 8:08 am GMT
Thank you for this article. I find the information about the interpretation of statistical data very interesting. My take on the background of the article is this:

Here we have a real scientist fighting the nonsense spreading from (neoclassical) economics into other realms of science/academia.

Behavioral economics is a sideline by-product of neoclassical micro-economic theory. It tries to cope with experimental data that is inconsistent with that theory.

Everything in neoclassical economics is a travesty. "Rational choice theory" and its application in "micro economics" is false from the ground up. It basically assumes that people are gobbling up resources without plan, meaning or relevant circumstances. Neoclassical micro economic theory is so false and illogical that I would not know where to start in a comment, so I should like to refer to a whole book about it:
Keen, Steve: "Debunking economics".

As the theory is totally wrong it is really not surprising that countless experiments show that people do not behave the way neoclassical theory predicts. How do economists react to this? Of course they assume that people are "irrational" because they do not behave according to their studied theory. (Why would you ever change your basic theory because of some tedious facts?)

We live in a strange world in which such people have control over university faculties, journals, famous prizes. But at least we have some scientists who defend their area of knowledge against the spreading nonsense produced by economists.

The title of the 1st ed. of Keen's book was "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences" which was simply a perfect title.

Dieter Kief , says: June 19, 2019 at 8:22 am GMT
@Curmudgeon Could it be that you expect psychiatrists in the past to be as rational as you are now?

Would the result have been any different, if members of a 1973 convention of physicists or surgeons would have been asked?

[Jun 19, 2019] Trump has drained the swamp right into his administration

Notable quotes:
"... I suppose we deserve this but it doesn't do well for my blood pressure. ..."
Jun 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

ken , Jun 19, 2019 3:57:37 PM | 23

..Trump HAS drained the swamp,,, right into his administration.

Look at what we in the US have to look forward to,,, tyrants on the left,,, tyrants on the right. I suppose we deserve this but it doesn't do well for my blood pressure.

[Jun 19, 2019] Just for shits and giggles, a brief reminder of some of US "evidence" and false flags (all lies) in service of these "endeavors" previously

Notable quotes:
"... - Collin Powell's "clear and convincing" evidence of Sadam's mobile missile lauchers (aka mobile weather balloons). And the GWB admin's attempts to literally destroy Hans Blix' reputation, and as it turned out Blix was right about everything. ..."
"... - "Incubator baby" lies to US Senate, swaying Desert Storm I approval by 1 vote (many senators said that fabrication was the difference in their vote). And this after Sadam's incursion into Kuwait was after 18 months of US vetoing Iraq UN resolutions seeking to condemn Kuwait's angle drilling into Iraq's largest southern oil fields. ..."
Jun 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

jdmckay , Jun 19, 2019 4:46:20 PM | 34

murgen23 @ Jun 19, 2019 3:56:40 PM:
May be the intention was never to sink the tanker - but just to draw attention with some heavy smoke. The limpet mines may exists in various size, so they may have intentionaly used a small one for this.

As B (and many other media ) pointed out: the crew of the Japanese tanker all said the ship was hit by an air borne projectile. This was not a mine. Seems obvious if US was interested in the truth, they would recover and identify the projectile.

Just for shits and giggles, a brief reminder of some of US "evidence" and false flags (all lies) in service of these "endeavors" previously:

- reading the several excellent books and released CIA docs of the CIA engineered Mosaddegh coup, among other things was CIA bombs set off in Mosques (this was before the Ayatollahs were political), then flooding media with "accesssments" Mosaddegh was responsable. Kermit Roosevelt literally boasted about this.

- Collin Powell's "clear and convincing" evidence of Sadam's mobile missile lauchers (aka mobile weather balloons). And the GWB admin's attempts to literally destroy Hans Blix' reputation, and as it turned out Blix was right about everything.

- Fake Satellite photos of Sadam's troops on Saudi border.

- "Incubator baby" lies to US Senate, swaying Desert Storm I approval by 1 vote (many senators said that fabrication was the difference in their vote). And this after Sadam's incursion into Kuwait was after 18 months of US vetoing Iraq UN resolutions seeking to condemn Kuwait's angle drilling into Iraq's largest southern oil fields.

That's just a few from memory. At what point do US lawmakers finally put all this together (especially given Bolton's association with those who drove GWB's Iraq invasion) and refuse to even consider the non persuasive evidence (not to mention contradictory... aka crew says air borne attack), remind their colleagues and America of the cost of these lies just in last 20 years, and DEMAND proof that can be verified with THEIR OWN EYES.

The surreal, Orwellian fog is descending again.

[Jun 19, 2019] The Warm War Russiamania at the Boiling Point by Jim Kavanagh

Notable quotes:
"... Theresa May's immediate conclusion that the Russian government bears certain and sole responsibility for the nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals is logically, scientifically, and forensically impossible. ..."
"... Teresa May is lying, everyone who seconds her assertion of false certainty is lying, they all know they are lying, and the Russians know that they know they are lying. ..."
"... "War" is what they seem to want it to be. For the past 18 to 24 months, we've also been inundated with Morgan Freeman and Rob Reiner's ominous "We have been attacked. We are at war," video, as well as the bipartisan ( Hillary Clinton , John McCain ) insistence that alleged Russian election meddling should be considered an "act of war" equivalent to Pearl Harbor . Indeed, Trump's new National Security advisor, the warmongering lunatic John Bolton, calls it , explicitly "a casus belli , a true act of war." ..."
"... Even the military is getting in on the act. The nerve-agent accusation has been followed up by General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, accusing Russia of arming the Taliban! It's noteworthy that this senior American military general casually refers to Russia as "the enemy": "We've had stories written by the Taliban that have appeared in the media about financial support provided by the enemy." ..."
"... The economic war against Russian is being waged through a series of sanctions that seem impossible to reverse, because their expressed goal is to extract confession, repentance, and restitution for crimes ascribed to Russia that Russia has not committed, or has not been proven to have committed, or are entirely fictional and have not been committed by anyone at all. We will only stop taking your bank accounts and consulates and let you play games with us if you confess and repent every crime we accuse you of. No questions permitted. ..."
Apr 02, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org
Is it war yet?

Yes, in too many respects.

It's a relentless economic, diplomatic, and ideological war, spiced with (so far) just a dash of military war, and the strong scent of more to come.

I mean war with Russia, of course, although Russia is the point target for a constellation of emerging adversaries the US is desperate to entame before any one or combination of them becomes too strong to defeat. These include countries like Iran and China, which are developing forces capable of resisting American military aggression against their own territory and on a regional level, and have shown quite too much uppitiness about staying in their previously-assigned geopolitical cages.

But Russia is the only country that has put its military forces in the way of a U.S. program of regime change -- indirectly in Ukraine, where Russia would not get out of the way, and directly in Syria, where Russia actively got in the way. So Russia is the focus of attack, the prime target for an exemplary comeuppance.

Is it, then, a new Cold War, even more dangerous than the old one, as Stephen F. Cohen says ?

That terminology was apt even a few months ago, but the speed, ferocity, and coordination of the West/NATO's reaction to the alleged nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals, as well as the formation of a War Cabinet in Washington, indicates to me that we've moved to another level of aggression.

It's beyond Cold. Call it the Warm War. And the temperature's rising.

The Nerve of Them

There are two underlying presumptions that, combined, make present situation more dangerous than a Cold War.

One is the presumption of guilt -- or, more precisely, the presumption that the presumption of Russian guilt can always be made, and made to stick in the Western mind.

The confected furor over the alleged nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals demonstrates this dramatically.

Theresa May's immediate conclusion that the Russian government bears certain and sole responsibility for the nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals is logically, scientifically, and forensically impossible.

False certainty is the ultimate fake news. It is just not true that, as she says: "There is no alternative conclusion other than the Russian state is culpable." This falsity of this statement has been demonstrated by a slew of sources -- including the developers of the alleged "Novichok" agent themselves, a thorough analysis by a former UN inspector in Iraq who worked on the destruction of chemical weapons, establishment Western scientific outlets like New Scientist (" Other countries could have made 'Russian' nerve agent "), and the British government's own mealy-mouthed, effective-but-unacknowledged disavowal of that conclusion. In its own words, The British government found: "a nerve agent or related compound," " of a type developed by Russia." So, it's absolutely, positively, certainly, without a doubt, Russian-government-produced "Novichok" .or something else.

Teresa May is lying, everyone who seconds her assertion of false certainty is lying, they all know they are lying, and the Russians know that they know they are lying. It's a

https://www.youtube.com/embed/lErlHLCNM_s?autoplay=0list=WL

It boggles the -- or at least, my -- mind how, in the face of all this, anyone could take seriously her ultimatum, ignoring the procedures of the Chemical Weapons Convention , gave Russia 24 hours to "explain" -- i.e., confess and beg forgiveness for -- this alleged crime.

Indeed, it's noteworthy that France initially, and rather sharply, refused to assume Russian guilt, with a government spokesman saying, "We don't do fantasy politics. Once the elements are proven, then the time will come for decisions to be made." But the whip was cracked -- and surely not by the weak hand of Whitehall -- demanding EU/NATO unity in the condemnation of Russia. So, in an extraordinary show of discipline that could only be ordered and orchestrated by the imperial center, France joined the United States and 20 other countries in the largest mass expulsion of Russian diplomats ever.

Western governments and their compliant media have mandated that Russian government guilt for the " first offensive use of a nerve agent " in Europe since World War II is to be taken as flat fact. Anyone -- like Jeremy Corbyn or Craig Murray -- who dares to interrupt the "Sentence first! Verdict afterwards!" chorus to ask for, uh, evidence, is treated to a storm of obloquy .

At this point, Western accusers don't seem to care how blatantly unfounded, if not ludicrous, an accusation is. The presumption of Russian guilt, along with the shaming of anyone who questions it, has become an unquestionable standard of Western/American political and media discourse.

Old Cold War McCarthyism has become new Warm War fantasy politics.

Helled in Contempt

This declaration of diplomatic war over the Skripal incident is the culmination of an ongoing drumbeat of ideological warfare, demonizing Russia and Putin personally in the most predictable and inflammatory terms.

For the past couple of years, we've been told by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Marco Rubio, and Boris Johnson that Putin is the new Hitler. That's a particularly galling analogy for the Russians. Soviet Russia, after all, was Hitler's main enemy, that defeated the Nazi army at the cost of 20+ million of its people -- while the British Royal Family was not un-smitten with the charms of Hitlerian fascism , and British footballers had a poignant moment in 1938 Berlin saluting the Fuhre.:

"War" is what they seem to want it to be. For the past 18 to 24 months, we've also been inundated with Morgan Freeman and Rob Reiner's ominous "We have been attacked. We are at war," video, as well as the bipartisan ( Hillary Clinton , John McCain ) insistence that alleged Russian election meddling should be considered an "act of war" equivalent to Pearl Harbor . Indeed, Trump's new National Security advisor, the warmongering lunatic John Bolton, calls it , explicitly "a casus belli , a true act of war."

Even the military is getting in on the act. The nerve-agent accusation has been followed up by General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, accusing Russia of arming the Taliban! It's noteworthy that this senior American military general casually refers to Russia as "the enemy": "We've had stories written by the Taliban that have appeared in the media about financial support provided by the enemy."

Which is strange, because, since the Taliban emerged from the American-jihadi war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and the Taliban and Russia have "enduring enmity" towards each other, as Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network puts it . Furthermore, the sixteen-year-long American war against the Taliban has depended on Russia allowing the U.S. to move supplies through its territory, and being "the principal source of fuel for the alliance's needs in Afghanistan."

So the general has to admit that this alleged Russian "destabilising activity" is a new thing: "This activity really picked up in the last 18 to 24 months When you look at the timing it roughly correlates to when things started to heat up in Syria. So it's interesting to note the timing of the whole thing."

Yes, it is.

The economic war against Russian is being waged through a series of sanctions that seem impossible to reverse, because their expressed goal is to extract confession, repentance, and restitution for crimes ascribed to Russia that Russia has not committed, or has not been proven to have committed, or are entirely fictional and have not been committed by anyone at all. We will only stop taking your bank accounts and consulates and let you play games with us if you confess and repent every crime we accuse you of. No questions permitted.

This is not a serious framework for respectful international relations between two sovereign nations. It's downright childish. It paints everyone, including the party trying to impose it, into an impossible corner. Is Russia ever going to abandon Crimea, confess that it shot down the Malaysian jet, tricked us into electing Donald Trump, murdered the Skripals, is secretly arming the Taliban, et. al .? Is the U.S. ever going to say: "Never mind"? What's the next step? It's the predicament of the bully.

This is not, either, an approach that really seeks to address any of the "crimes" charged. As Victoria Nuland (a Clintonite John Bolton) put it on NPR, it's about, "sending a message" to Russia. Well, as Russia's ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov said , with this latest mass expulsion of diplomats, the United States is, "Destroying what little remained of US-Russian ties." He got the message.

All of this looks like a coordinated campaign that began in response to Russia's interruption of American regime-change projects in Ukraine and especially Syria, that was harmonized -- over the last 18 to 24 months -- with various elite and popular motifs of discontent over the 2016 election, and that has reached a crescendo in the last few weeks with ubiquitous and unconstrained " enemization " [1] of Russia. It's hard to describe it as anything other than war propaganda -- manufacturing the citizenry's consent for a military confrontation.

Destroying the possibility of normal, non-conflictual, state-to-state relations and constituting Russia as "the enemy" is exactly what this campaign is about. That is its "message" and its effect -- for the American people as much as for the Russia government. The heightened danger, I think, is that Russia, which has for a long time been reluctant to accept that America wasn't interested in "partnership", has now heard and understood this message, while the American people have only heard but do not understand it.

It's hard to see where this can go that doesn't involve military conflict. This is especially the case with the appointments of Mike Pompeo, Gina Haspel, and John Bolton -- a veritable murderers' row that many see as the core of a Trump War Cabinet. Bolton, who does not need Senate confirmation, is a particularly dangerous fanatic, who tried to get the Israelis to attack Iran before even they wanted to, and has promised regime change in Iran by 2019. As mentioned, he considers that Russia has already given him a " casus belli. " Even the staid New York Times warns that, with these appointments, "the odds of taking military action will rise dramatically."

The second presumption in the American mindset today makes military confrontation more likely than it was during the Cold War: Not only is there a presumption of guilt, there is a presumption of weakness . The presumption of guilt is something the American imperial managers are confident they can induce and maintain in the Western world; the presumption of weakness is one they -- or, I fear, too many of them -- have all-too blithely internalized.

This is an aspect of the American self-image among policymakers whose careers matured in a post-Soviet world. During the Cold War, Americans held themselves in check by the assumption, that, militarily, the Soviet Union was a peer adversary, a country that could and would defend certain territories and interests against direct American military aggression -- "spheres of interest" that should not be attacked. The fundamental antagonism was managed with grudging mutual respect.

There was, after all, a shared recent history of alliance against fascism. And there was an awareness that the Soviet Union, in however distorted a way, both represented the possibility of a post-capitalist future and supported post-colonial national liberation movements, which gave it considerable stature in the world.

American leadership might have hated the Soviet Union, but it was not contemptuous of it. No American leader would have called the Soviet Union, as John McCain called Russia, just "a gas station masquerading as a country." And no senior American or British leader would have told the Soviet Union what British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson told Russia last week: to "go away and shut up."

This is a discourse that assumes its own righteousness, authority, and superior power, even as it betrays its own weakness. It's the discourse of a frustrated child. Or bully. Russia isn't shutting up and going away, and the British are not -- and know they're not -- going to make it. But they may think the Big Daddy backing them up can and will. And daddy may think so himself.

Like all bullies, the people enmeshed in this arrogant discourse don't seem to understand that it is not frightening Russia. It's only insulting the country, and leading it to conclude that there is indeed nothing remaining of productive, non-conflictual, US-Russian "partnership" ties. The post-Skripal worldwide diplomatic expulsions, which seem deliberately and desperately excessive, may have finally convinced Russia that there is no longer any use trying. Those who should be frightened of this are the American people.

The enemy of my enemy is me.

The United States is only succeeding in turning itself into an enemy for Russians. Americans would do well to understand how thoroughly their hypocritical and contemptuous stance has alienated the Russian people and strengthened Vladimir Putin's leadership -- as many of Putin's critics warned them it would. The fantasy of stoking a "liberal" movement in Russia that will install some nouveau-Yeltsin-ish figure is dissipated in the cold light of a 77% election day. Putin is widely and firmly supported in Russia because he represents the resistance to any such scheme.

Americans who want to understand that dynamic, and what America itself has wrought in Russia, should heed the passion, anger, and disappointment in this statement about Putin's election from a self-described "liberal" (using the word, I think, in the intellectual tradition, not the American political, sense), Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT TV (errors in translation by another person):

Essentially, the West should be horrified not because 76% of Russians voted for Putin, but because this elections have demonstrated that 95% of Russia's population supports conservative-patriotic, communist and nationalist ideas. That means that liberal ideas are barely surviving among measly 5% of population.

And that's your fault, my Western friends. It was you who pushed us into "Russians never surrender" mode

[W]ith all your injustice and cruelty, inquisitorial hypocrisy and lies you forced us to stop respecting you. You and your so called "values."

We don't want to live like you live, anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we wanted to live like you, but not any longer.

We have no more respect for you, and for those amongst us that you support, and for all those people who support you.

For that you only have yourself to blame.

In meantime, you've pushed us to rally around your enemy. Immediately, after you declared him an enemy, we united around him .

It was you who imposed an opposition between patriotism and liberalism. Although, they shouldn't be mutually exclusive notions. This false dilemma, created by you, made us to chose patriotism.

Even though, many of us are really liberals, myself included.

Get cleaned up, now. You don't have much time left.

In fact, the whole "uprising"/color revolution strategy throughout the world is over. It's been fatally discredited by its own purported successes. Everybody in the Middle East has seen how that worked out for Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and the Russians have seen how it worked out for Ukraine and for Russia itself . In neither Russia nor Iran (nor anywhere else of importance) are the Americans, with their sanctions and their NGOs and their cookies ,going to stoke a popular uprising that turns a country into a fractured client of the Washington Consensus. More fantasy politics.

The old new world Washington wants won't be born without a military midwife. The U.S. wants a compliant Russia ( and "international community") back, and it thinks it can force it into being.

Fear Knot

Consider this quote from The Saker , a defense analyst who was born in Switzerland to a Russian military family, "studied Russian and Soviet military affairs all [his] life," and lived for 20 years in the United States. He's been one of the sharpest analysts of Russia and Syria over the last few years. This was his take a year ago, after Trump's cruise missile attack on Syria's Al Shayrat airfield -- another instant punishment for an absolutely, positively, proven-in-a day, chemical crime:

For one thing, there is no US policy on anything.

The Russians expressed their total disgust and outrage at this attack and openly began saying that the Americans were "недоговороспособны". What that word means is literally "not-agreement-capable" or unable to make and then abide by an agreement. While polite, this expression is also extremely strong as it implies not so much a deliberate deception as the lack of the very ability to make a deal and abide by it. But to say that a nuclear world superpower is "not-agreement-capable" is a terrible and extreme diagnostic.

This means that the Russians have basically given up on the notion of having an adult, sober and mentally sane partner to have a dialog with.

In all my years of training and work as a military analyst I have always had to assume that everybody involved was what we called a "rational actor". The Soviets sure where. As were the Americans.

Not only do I find the Trump administration "not agreement-capable", I find it completely detached from reality. Delusional in other words.

Alas, just like Obama before him, Trump seems to think that he can win a game of nuclear chicken against Russia. But he can't. Let me be clear here: if pushed into a corner the Russian will fight, even if that means nuclear war.

There is a reason for this American delusion. The present generation of American leadership was spoiled and addled by the blissful post-Soviet decades of American impunity.

The problem is not exactly that the U.S. wants full-on war with Russia, it's that America does not fear it. [2]

Why should it? It hasn't had to for twenty years during which the US assumed it could bully Russia to stay out of its imperial way anywhere it wanted to intervene.

After the Soviet Union broke up (and only because the Soviet Union disappeared) the United States was free to use its military power with impunity. For some time, the U.S. had its drunken stooge, Yeltsin, running Russia and keeping it out of America's military way. There was nary a peep when Bill Clinton effectively conferred on NATO (meaning the U.S. itself) the authority to decide what military interventions were necessary and legitimate. For about twenty years -- from the Yugoslavia through the Libya intervention -- no nation had the military power or politico-diplomatic will to resist this.

But that situation has changed. Even the Pentagon recognizes that the American Empire is in a "post-primacy" phase -- certainly "fraying," and maybe even "collapsing." The world has seen America's social and economic strength dissipate, and its pretense of legitimacy disappear entirely. The world has seen American military overreach everywhere while winning nothing of stable value anywhere. Sixteen years, and the mighty U.S. Army cannot defeat the Taliban. Now, that's Russia's fault!

Meanwhile, a number of countries in key areas have gained the military confidence and political will to refuse the presumptions of American arrogance -- China in the Pacific, Iran in the Middle East, and Russia in Europe and, surprisingly, the Middle East as well. In a familiar pattern, America's resultant anxiety about waning power increases its compensatory aggression. And, as mentioned, since it was Russia that most effectively demonstrated that new military confidence, it's Russia that has to be dealt with first.

The incessant wave of sanctions and expulsions is the bully in the schoolyard clenching his fist to scare the new kid away. OK, everyone's got the message now. Unclench or punch?

Let's be clear about who is the world's bully. As is evident to any half-conscious person, Russia is not going to attack the United States or Europe. Russia doesn't have scores of military bases, combat ships and aircraft up on America's borders. It doesn't have almost a thousand military bases around the world. Russia does not have the military forces to rampage around the world as America does, and it doesn't want or need to. That's not because of Russia's or Vladimir Putin's pacifism, but because Russia, as presently situated in the political economy of the world, has nothing to gain from it.

Nor does Russia need some huge troll-farm offensive to "destabilize" and sow division in Western Europe and the United States. Inequality, austerity, waves of immigrants from regime-change wars, and trigger-happy cops are doing a fine job of that. Russia isn't responsible for American problems with Black Lives Matter or with the Taliban.

All of this is fantasy politics.

It's the United States, with its fraying empire, that has a problem requiring military aggression. What other tools does the U.S. have left to put the upstarts, Russia first, back in their places?

It must be hard for folks who have had their way with country after country for twenty years not to think they can push Russia out of the way with some really, really scary threats, or maybe one or two "bloody nose" punches. Some finite number of discrete little escalations. There's already been some shoving -- that cruise missile attack, Turkey's downing of a Russian jet, American attacks on Russian personnel (ostensibly private mercenaries) in Syria -- and, look, Ma, no big war. But sometimes you learn the hard way the truth of the reverse Mike Tyson rule: "Everyone has a game plan until they smack the other guy in the face."

Consider one concrete risk of escalation that every informed observer is, and every American should be, aware of.

The place where the United States and Russia are literally, geographically, closest to confrontation is Syria. As mentioned, the U.S. and its NATO ally, Turkey, have already attacked and killed Russians in Syria, and the U.S. and its NATO allies have a far larger military force than Russia in Syria and the surrounding area. On the other hand, Russia has made very effective use of its forces, including what Reuters calls "advanced cruise missiles" launched from planes, ships , and submarines that hit ISIS targets with high precision from 1000 kilometers.

Russia is also operating in accordance with international law, while the U.S. is not. Russia is fighting with Syria for the defeat of jihadi forces and the unification of the Syrian state. The United States is fighting with its jihadi clients for the overthrow of the Syrian government and the division of the country. Russia intervened in Syria after Obama announced that the U.S. would attack Syrian army troops, effectively declaring war. If neither side accepts defeat and goes home, it is quite possible there will be some direct confrontation over this. In fact, it's hard to imagine that there won't.

A couple of weeks ago Syria and Russia said the U.S. was planning a major offensive against the Syrian government, including bombing the government quarter in Damascus. Valery Gerasimov, head of Russia's General Staff, warned: "In the event of a threat to the lives of our servicemen, Russia's armed forces will take retaliatory measures against the missiles and launchers used." In this context, "launchers" means American ships in the Mediterranean.

Also a couple of weeks ago, Russia announced a number of new, highly-advanced weapons systems. There's discussion about whether some of the yet-to-be-deployed weapons announced may or may not be a bluff, but one that has already been deployed, called Dagger ( Kinzhal, not the missiles mentioned above), is an air-launched hypersonic cruise missile that files at 5-7,000 miles per hour, with a range of 1200 miles. Analyst Andrei Martyanov claims that: "no modern or perspective air-defense system deployed today by any NATO fleet can intercept even a single missile with such characteristics. A salvo of 5-6 such missiles guarantees the destruction of any Carrier Battle Group or any other surface group, for that matter." Air-launched. From anywhere.

The U.S. attack has not (yet) happened, for whatever reason (Sputnik reporter Suliman Mulhem, citing "a military monitor," claims that's because of the Russian warnings). Great. But given the current state of America's anxiously aggressive "post-primacy" policy -- including the Russiamania, the Zionist-driven need to destroy Syria and Iran, and the War Cabinet -- how unlikely is that the U.S. will, in the near future, make some such attack on some such target that Russia considers crucial to defend?

And Syria is just one theater where, unless one side accepts defeat and goes home, military conflict with Russia is highly likely. Is Russia going to abandon the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass if they're attacked by fascist Kiev forces backed by the U.S.? Is it going to sit back and watch passively if American and Israeli forces attack Iran? Which one is going to give up and accept a loss: John Bolton or Vladimir Putin?

Which brings us to the pointed question: What will the U.S. do if Russia sinks an American ship? How many steps before that goes full-scale, even nuclear? Or maybe American planners (and you, dear reader) are absolutely, positively sure that will never happen, because the U.S. has cool weapons, too, and a lot more of them, and the Russians will probably lose all their ships in the Mediterranean immediately, if not something worse, and they'll put up with anything rather than go one more step. The Russians, like everybody, must know the Americans always win.

Happy with that, are we? Snug in our homeland rug? 'Cause Russians won't fight, but the Taliban will.

This is exactly what is meant by Americans not fearing war with Russia (or war in general for that matter). Nothing but contempt.

The Skripal opera, directed by the United States, with the whole of Europe and the entire Western media apparatus singing in harmony, makes it clear that the American producers have no speaking role for Russia in their staging of the world. And that contempt makes war much more likely. Here's The Saker again, on how dangerous the isolation the U.S. and its European clients are so carelessly imposing on Russia and themselves is for everybody:

Right now they are expelling Russian diplomats en mass e and they are feeling very strong and manly.

The truth is that this is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. In reality, crucial expert-level consultations, which are so vitally important between nuclear superpowers, have all but stopped a long time ago. We are down to top level telephone calls. That kind of stuff happens when two sides are about to go to war. For many months now Russia and NATO have made preparations for war in Europe. Very rapidly the real action will be left to the USA and Russia. Thus any conflict will go nuclear very fast. And, for the first time in history, the USA will be hit very, very hard, not only in Europe, the Middle-East or Asia, but also on the continental US.

Mass diplomatic expulsions, economic warfare, lockstep propaganda, no interest whatsoever in respectfully addressing or hearing from the other side. What we've been seeing over the past few months is the "kind of stuff that happens when two sides are about to go to war."

The less Americans fear war, the less they respect the possibility of it, the more likely they are to get it.

Ready or Not

The Saker makes a diptych of a point that gets to the heart of the matter. We'd do well to read and think on it carefully:

1/ The Russians are afraid of war. The Americans are not.

2/ The Russians are ready for war. The Americans are not.

Russia is afraid of war. More than twenty million Soviet citizens were killed in WWII, about half of them civilians. That was more than twenty times the number of Americans and British casualties combined. The entire country was devastated. Millions died in the 872-day siege of Leningrad alone, including Vladimir Putin's brother. The city's population was decimated by disease and starvation, with some reduced to cannibalism. Wikileaks calls it "one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history [and] possibly the costliest in casualties." Another million-plus died in the nine-month siege of Stalingrad.

Every Russian knows this history. Millions of Russian families have suffered from it. Of course, there was mythification of the struggle and its heroes, but the Russians, viscerally, know war and know it can happen to them . They do not want to go through it again. They will do almost anything to avoid it. Russians are not flippant about war. They fear it. They respect it.

The Americans are not (afraid of war). Americans have never experienced anything remotely as devastating as this. About 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War, 150 years ago. (And we're still entangled in that!) The American mainland has not been attacked by a significant military force since the War of 1812. Since then, the worst attacks on American territory are two one-off incidents (Pearl Harbor and 9/11), separated by seventy years, totaling about six-thousand casualties. These are the iconic moments of America Under Siege.

For the American populace, wars are "over there," fought by a small group of Americans who go away and either come back or don't. The death, destruction, and aroma of warfare -- which the United States visits on people around the world incessantly -- is unseen and unexperienced at home. Americans do not, cannot, believe, in any but the most abstract intellectual sense, that war can happen here , to them. For the general populace, talk of war is just more political background noise, Morgan Freeman competing for attention with Stormy Daniels and the Kardashians.

Americans are supremely insouciant about war: They threaten countries with it incessantly, the government routinely sells it with lies, and the political parties promote it opportunistically to defeat their opponents -- and nobody cares. For Americans, war is part of a game. They do not fear it. They do not respect it.

The Russians are ready for war. The Nazi onslaught was defeated -- in Soviet Russia, by Soviet Citizens and the Red Army -- because the mass of people stood and fought together for a victory they understood was important. They could not have withstood horrific sieges and defeated the Nazis any other way. Russians understand, in other words, that war is a crisis of death and destruction visited on the whole of society, which can only be won by a massive and difficult effort grounded in social solidarity. If the Russians feel they have to fight, if they feel besieged, they know they will have to stand together, take the hits that come, and fight to the finish. They will not again permit war to be brought to their cities while their attacker stays snug. There will be a world of hurt. They will develop and use any weapon they can. And their toughest weapon is not a hypersonic missile; it's that solidarity, implied by that 77%. (Did you read that Simonyan statement?) They may not be seeking it, but, insofar as anybody can be, they are ready to fight.

Americans are not (ready for war): Americans experience the horror of wars as a series of discrete tragedies visited upon families of fallen soldiers, reported in human-interest vignettes at the end of the nightly news. Individual tragedies, not a social disaster.

It's hard to imagine the social devastation of war in any case, but American culture wants no part of thinking about that concretely. The social imagination of war is deflected into fantastic scenarios of a super-hero universe or a zombie apocalypse. The alien death-ray may blow up the Empire State Building, but the hero and his family (now including his or her gender-ambivalent teenager, and, of course, the dog) will survive and triumph. Cartoon villains, cartoon heroes, and a cartoon society.

One reason for this, we have to recognize, is the victory of the Thatcherite/libertarian-capitalist "no such thing as society" ideology. Congratulations, Ayn Rand, there is no such thing as American society now. It's every incipient entrepreneur for him or herself. This does not a comradely, fighting band of brothers and sisters make.

Furthermore, though America is constantly at war, nobody understands the purpose of it. That's because the real purpose can never be explained, and must be hidden behind some facile abstraction -- "democracy," "our freedoms," etc. This kind of discourse can get some of the people motivated for some of the time, but it loses its charm the minute someone gets smacked in the face.

Once they take a moment, everybody can see that there is nobody with an army threatening to attack and destroy the United States, and if they take a few moments, everybody can see how phony the "democracy and freedom" stuff is and remember how often they've been lied to before. There's just too much information out there. (Which is why the Imperial High Command wants to control the internet.) Why the hell am I fighting? What in hell are we fighting for? These are questions everybody will ask after, and too many people are now asking before, they get smacked in the face.

This lack of social understanding and lack of political support translates into the impossibility of fighting a major, sustained war that requires taking heavy casualties -- even "over there," but certainly in the snug. American culture might be all gung-ho about Seal Team Six kicking ass, but the minute American homes start blowing up and American bodies start falling, Hoo-hah becomes Uh-oh , and it's going to be Outta here .

Americans are ready for Hoo-hah and the Shark Tank and the Zombie Apocalypse. They are not ready for war.

You Get What You Play For

"Russiagate," which started quite banally in the presidential campaign as a Democratic arrow to take down Trump, is now Russiamania -- a battery of weapons wielded by various sectors of the state, aimed at an array of targets deemed even potentially resistant to imperial militarism. Trump himself -- still, and for as long as he's deemed unreliable -- is targeted by a legal prosecution of infinite reach (whose likeliest threat is to take him down for something that has nothing to do with Russia). Russia itself is now targeted in full force by economic, diplomatic, ideological -- and, tentatively, military -- weapons of the state. Perhaps most importantly, American and European people, especially dissidents, are targeted by a unified media barrage that attacks any expression of radical critique, anything that "sows division" -- from Black Lives Matter, to the Sanders campaign, to "But other countries could have made it" -- as Russian treachery.

The stunning success of that last offensive is crucial to making a war more likely, and must be fought. To increase the risk of war with a nuclear power in order to score points against Donald Trump or Jill Stein -- well, only those who neither respect, fear, nor are ready for war would do such a stupid and dangerous thing.

It's impossible to predict with certainty whether, when, or with whom a major hot war will be started. The same chaotic disarray and impulsiveness of the Trump administration that increases the danger of war might also work to prevent it. John Bolton may be fired before he trims his moustache. But it's a pressure-cooker, and the temperature has spiked drastically.

In a previous essay , I said that Venezuela was a likely first target for military attack, precisely because it would make for an easy victory that didn't risk military confrontation with Russia. That's still a good possibility. As we saw with Iraq Wars 1 (which helped to end the "Vietnam Syndrome") and 2 (which somewhat resurrected it), the imperial high command needs to inure the American public with a virtually American-casualty-free victory and in order to lure them into taking on a war that's going to hurt.

But the new War Cabinet may be pumped for the main event -- an attack on Iran. Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton are all rabid proponents of regime-change in Iran. We can be certain that the Iran nuclear deal will be scrapped, and everyone will work hard to implement the secret agreement the Trump administration already has with Israel to "to deal with Iran's nuclear drive, its missile programs and its other threatening activities" -- or, as Trump himself expresses it: "cripple the [Iranian] regime and bring it to collapse." (That agreement, by the way, was negotiated and signed by the previous, supposedly not-so-belligerent National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster.)

Still, as I also said in the previous essay, an attack on Iran means the Americans must either make sure Russia doesn't get in the way or make clear that they don't care if it does. So, threatening moves -- not excluding probing military moves -- against Russia will increase, whether Russia is the preferred direct target or not.

The siege is on.

Americans who want to continue playing with this fire would do well to pay some respectful attention to the target whose face they want to smack. Russia did not boast or brag or threaten or Hoo-Hah about sending military forces to Syria. When it was deemed necessary -- when the United States declared its intention to attack the Syrian Army -- it just did it. And American10-dimensional-chess players have been squirming around trying to deal with the implications of that ever since. They're working hard on finding the right mix of threats, bluffs, sanctions, expulsions, "Shut up and go away!" insults, military forces on the border, and "bloody nose" attacks to force a capitulation. They should be listening to their target, who has not tired of asking for a "partnership," who has clearly stated what his country would do in reaction to previous moves (e.g., the abrogation of the ABM Treaty and stationing of ABM bases in Eastern Europe), whose country and family have suffered from wartime devastation Americans cannot imagine, who therefore respects, fears, and is ready for war in ways Americans are not, and who is not playing their game:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9QxWYIAtCMU

Notes.

[1] Ironically, given current drivers of Russiamania, this is a reference to remarks by Janet Napolitano. " The Enemization of Everything or an American Story of Empathy & Healing? "

[2] Though it's ridiculous that it needs to be said: I'm not talking here about the phony fear engendered by the media presentation of the "strongman," "brutal dictator" Vladimir Putin. This is part and parcel of comic-book politics -- conjuring a super-villain, who, we all know, is destined to be defeated. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Jim Kavanagh

Jim Kavanagh edits The Polemicist .

[Jun 18, 2019] I think i know who killed Jesus

Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

TheLastMan , 1 hour ago link

I think i know who killed Jesus

lobro , 1 hour ago link

yes, Pontius Pilates passport was found under the cross.

[Jun 18, 2019] I think i know who killed Jesus

Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

TheLastMan , 1 hour ago link

I think i know who killed Jesus

lobro , 1 hour ago link

yes, Pontius Pilates passport was found under the cross.

[Jun 18, 2019] Wikileaks CIA Stole Russian Malware, Uses It to Misdirect Attribution of Cyber Attacks

Notable quotes:
"... So perhaps the DNC was hacked by the CIA and it was blamed on the Russians. ..."
"... How can we trust any investigation when the investigation can be doctored to scapegoat Russia? This is embarrassing. ..."
"... Clapper is a known perjurer. ..."
"... Of course it was the Obama CIA, pros like the Russians or Chinese, never leave behind "fingerprints" they are smart enough to cover their tracks. As a cyber analyst I can tell you that when you see "fingerprints or breadcrumbs" leading to a source, it's usually deceptive and intentional. Let that sink in! ..."
Jun 12, 2019 | russia-insider.com

From the Wikileaks "Year Zero" dump:

The CIA's Remote Devices Branch 's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.

UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.

Everyone knew it. Now we have proof. "Fingerprints" are meaningless. It's now clear that the CIA is able to "pose" as "Russian hackers" whenever it so chooses. Just something to think about. All allegations of "digital fingerprints" left behind by Russian hackers must now be dismissed as either fake or meaningless

ChasMoDee • 2 years ago ,

So perhaps the DNC was hacked by the CIA and it was blamed on the Russians.

Disco Obama ChasMoDee • 2 years ago ,

How can we trust any investigation when the investigation can be doctored to scapegoat Russia? This is embarrassing.

disqus_ayvQwhvS6h Disco Obama • 2 years ago ,

Since 2002. You sheep have had the wool pulled over since 2002. It's been 15 years. Imagine how much you won't find out til the next 15.

Tom • 2 years ago ,

So the CIA obtained FISA Warrants for the millions of devices hacked? Guess we now know how Trump Tower was wiretapped when DNI Clapper said there was no such order given.

JackBootedThug✓ Tom • 2 years ago ,

Clapper is a known perjurer.

American Freeman • 2 years ago ,

Now we know how Obama's administration got through the FISA Court to tape Trump.

4ever&anon • 2 years ago ,

So! It now becomes clear what Obama and the Democrats were planning for the Trump Administration. They could hack away at anything and everything and leave Russian "fingerprints" to make it appear that the Russians did it. It's really no telling what is already planted. Thst's why some Democrat's seem so supremely confident that Trump will be impeached.

I don't think that it's really sunk in for most people that this was a plan for World Domination by a force more evil than the average person could ever imagine. We're still in grave danger but thank Heaven for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Not only have they saved America but perhaps the whole world from domination that heretofore couldn't even be imagined except in science fiction.

Our problem will now be how to build enough gallows to accomodate the traitors and seditionists who have participated in this dark plan.

Mike John Elissen • 2 years ago ,

Hysteria in Oceania. The same goons blaming Russia for robbing the local candy store (without producing evidence) are robbing the candy factory 24/7. All of a sudden, the MSM has found issues and terms like `non-verified documents` and `non-verifiable, anonymous sources` to be of the utmost importance, in contrast to when they were copy-pasting the ` information` about Russian hacking. I wonder how much time it takes for the Ministries of Information and their docile press-clowns to (again) turn the story around and blame WikiLeaks for being a `Russian tool` to discard their own obvious crimes.

Elevator2TheTop • 2 years ago ,

This whole Russian hacking thing is sounding more and more like the anti-Muslim video that sparked the Benghazi attacks.

Bad Hombre • 2 years ago ,

They wiretapped the entire Trump team thinking they would come up with an October surprise...and found NOTHING. If they had ANYTHING, it would have been used prior to the election. And, since Hillary was supposed to win, the illegal wire taps would never have been disclosed.

Now Trump has exposed the Obama admin and democrats are hyperventilating over Russia to deflect from the crimes they committed.

ruadh Bad Hombre • 2 years ago ,

We always knew that, were told we were crazy, now we have proof. The MSM has been gas-lighting us. I wonder how many red pills you have to swallow to get to the other side of this Rabbit Hole?

middleclasstaxpayer • 2 years ago ,

It seems our government really is the most corrupt entity on this planet.

lou Guest • 2 years ago ,

Well BO moved to Washington so it will be easy for the Press to shout these questions at him at his home or a restaurant or a ballgame. We need answers BO, and right now. No BS. anymore. Or go back to Indonesia and hide out.

Peter Shoobridge ن ruadh • 2 years ago ,

It's really not fun. The intelligence agencies are unaccountable and cloak their criminality with the secrecy of national security. They're not going to back down. They're ruthless. And they kill people for sport. This will not end well unless the military is called in to round them up, which has huge risks of its own...

TGFD • 2 years ago ,

TGFD here.
As far as I'm concerned. death becomes anyone in the effing CIA. Same goes for their parasitic family members. Death's image would look good on them.
There is NO secret in the CIA that I would not expose if I could.

I never heard of the term, "Deep State" prior to 2 months ago, and I don't like what I hear, either. I pray that somehow, God will enable TRUMP to vanquish all the filth in the deep state.

William Dickerson • 2 years ago ,

I knew it - the documents I looked over, the IP addresses I checked, the supposed "malware" that the US said "was the same as we know Russia had used" and more - and it just did not add up.

Now to be sure the American population is dumb when it comes to technology - and they usually blindly believe what the CIA, and media, tells them. But me - being in IT for some decades and having worked with Russian people for 6 years (in an electronics engineering company founded by a Russian immigrant to the U.S.) and being a network security administrator for a small government agency, something smelled odd.

The IP addresses - hahaha - really? Try again - up until the spring of 2016 American company Verizon routed 1 million stolen IP addresses - used by cyber-criminals in the USA........ so guess where some of those IP addresses REALLY belonged. Further, the "CIA" and other spooks included - honestly? TOR exit node addresses. If you use TOR browser, you will find some of those same addresses in your own logs (unless you are smart and either purge or don't log, etc.)
So try again, U.S. spooks - the malware? HAHA - what a JOKE. Really. I mean older software that John Q. Public can download for FREE? Sorry, Russians are far far smarter and they'd not use OLD software that works on WordPress based on PHP servers when the target isn't based on blogging software.

Sorry, silly Americans - including and especially McCain and others in our congress who are, say what? members of INTELLIGENCE committees? Really?

You help guide the intelligence and security operations of a major country and you fall for the BS that was presented to you? Did you not ask questions? I did - I did my own research and I guess that proves I'm as smart or smarter than any member of and house or Senate intelligence committee. Do these people even know where the power button is on their computer? Smart - they hire unvetted IT people to take care of congressional computers....... and some of the equipment ends up missing, and these people have full free access as admins to computers used by congressional members of armed services committees and more!

That's how smart our U.S. congress is. Hire your brother-in-laws IT geek, give 'em full admin access, let them come and go freely........... and fall for intelligence reports about Russian hacking...... all the while our own CIA is doing MORE and WORSE.

While this topic is still fresh (thanks to the Democrats) - election interference - Election or campaign interference scores according to political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University: Russia - 36 times, U.S.A - 81 times

The USA's score number doesn't include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S. didn't like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala and Chile. Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such as election monitoring.

So who exactly is it that interferes or "Helps" with elections? Yeah, I thought so.

President Vladimir Putin must go home each night shaking his head in disbelief at how gullible we are here.

By the way - Podesta was NOT HACKED. He fell for a simple phishing scam. Yes, the email wasn't even very well done. It appeared more like it came out of Nigeria than any professional group, it was lame, didn't even look real, didn't sound real and the URL or link was so obvious, geesh, a fool could have seen it was phishing. Oh, wait, we're talking Podesta here. The man gave away his password (which for a while was indeed 'password'. Worse - he used what for his campaign work? Did you say GMAIL? You have to be kidding! A free consumer email, based in the cloud, and not only that, at least 3 others had account access to his Gmail. He kept documents, calendar, task lists and more in it. The phishing scammer got access to his Gmail inbox, sent items, attachments, calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, you name it! No hacking needed since this is CLOUD BASED. No one had to touch his computer or iPad.

I really laughed when I found in those emails the admin credentials for his Wi-Fi, and even more funny - the admin credentials for his building security system. Yes, all that in his cloud-based Gmail account. As Bugs Bunny would say- what a maroon!

No wonder he's mad and trying to blame everyone else. He has to know he was scammed and he fell for it and it was all HIS FAULT, no one else but him. Using Gmail for such important work is STUPID as it is - but then to fall for phishing. He got what he deserved, and if it was Russians, tell those teenagers congratulations! That's all it took to phish Podesta - the skill set of KIDS in their early teens.

I could go on about the stupidity involved in all of this, but won't (I hear a collective sigh of relief!)

rayg • 2 years ago ,

So, did the Russians hack the election? Or did the Obama CIA hack the election and just did a pizz-poor job of it? Or perhaps Obama really did not want Hillary to win.

This might make those congressional investigations into the alleged hacking of the election by Russians a lot more interesting. That is, of course, assuming that the investigations are really about finding the truth.

Michael K rayg • 2 years ago ,

Obama Hates Hillary but could not openly control her. With Trump elected he could work openly to damage his administration, and with the help of MSM demonize him, and make him look like a tool of the Russians as well as his appointees. Notice, there was no talk of Russian hacking prior to the election. The "intelligence" agencies waited for the election results to come out with their charges.

Use delaying tactics to prevent approval of appointees, attack and possibly remove approved appointees eroding confidence in the current government. With the help of RINOs delay legislation. Pay protestors to protest everything Trump does using labels such as sexist, racist, Nazi, etc.

Obama's and DNC's goal: Prevent any progress till the mid term elections and try and overturn the balance in Congress to get the liberal agenda back on track. Get poised for the 2020 election and run a more palatable candidate than Hillary.

Gonzogal Michael K • 2 years ago ,

"Obama's and DNC's goal: Prevent any progress till the mid term elections and try and overturn the balance in Congress to get the liberal agenda back on track. Get poised for the 2020 election and run a more palatable candidate than Hillary."

Or, according to Obomber's club make it so that Trump "either resigns or is impeached"
http://www.zerohedge.com/ne...
http://www.zerohedge.com/ne...

Geoff Caldwell • 2 years ago ,

Let's unpack this. All those rumors about the Obama's hating the Clinton's? TRUE BUT, he couldn't let DOJ go through with indictment so instead gets Clapper, Brennan and the boys to use Russian fingerprints to hack and then sits back and watches the chaos unfold. When you go back to how he got his start in Chicago its exactly how he operates.

Marsha Moore • 2 years ago ,

I am furious. I read the original re CIA attempting to influence French elections. But this is CLEAR TREASON by Obama Administration. I NEVER trusted Brennen. violation for CIA to operate inside US.

rlqretired • 2 years ago ,

Looks like this is an example of Obama/CIA preparation for Treason?

The thing that really pisses me off is that the factual basis for all of this criminal and treasonous activity by the Obama Administration, that is being exposed today, remains covered-up by everyone in a position of responsibility to expose it. That factual basis is that every identification document Obama has presented to prove he is a citizen of the USA is a forgery. Based upon the totality of his record as president he is an agent of foreign Islamic allegiance and everything he has done in the Middle East always ends up in favor of radical Islam and refuses to even acknowledge radical Islamic terrorism exists. The same goes for his refusal to acknowledge domestic Islamic terrorism exists.

Factual answers for these three questions will clear up why we are having this treasonous activity. (1) Why does Obama have and need a forged birth certificate as he posted on his POTUS website? (2) Why does Obama's first officially issued copy of his Selective Service Registration Card have a forged 2 digit postal stamp? (3) Why is Obama using a SS# that was first issued to someone else? These three questions must be answered by Congress as the researched information verifying forgery is readily available and will expose the basis of this treason.

Play Hide
Spyplane • 2 years ago ,

Let's not forget that logging into an email server because of a weak password and getting a copy of emails does not scream CIA. Also John Podesta's email password was extremely weak. So it did not take a covert CIA hacking program to initiate. We keep hearing Russia hacked our election. Yet have ZERO proof! First the majority of election machines are decentralized and not connected to internet. There was not a single instance where vote the count was effected. This was also immediately stated by Obamas DNI. Claiming they ran a propaganda attack on Hillary Clinton is pathetic. They are claiming the American people did not see who Hillary Clinton truly was. The opposite is true.

Hillary Clinton had made her own propaganda against herself. She is who the American people see. Not what the Russians programmed Us to see. The American people made a choice based on her actions no one else's. The liberals continually attacking someone with false claims without proof is a standard Liberal / Alyinsky strategy. It requires no proof if all liberal extremist continually repeat the same attack which is then amplified by the Liberal propaganda media (CNN, MSNBC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, etc)

The Russian collusion claim is the exact same scenario. Make the claim which we already knew the Trump campaign speaks with Russian diplomats. Most people in politics interact with all countries diplomat and ambassadors. So instantly the claim is impossible to debunk. The Liberal party has become a party willing to use any and all tactics to avoid listening to the American people. This whole Russian drama is created to go against what the American people voted for. The democrat party is as much a threat to The United States as Communism ever was. It has been said if fascism ever comes back to the United States it will come in the form of liberalism. So the American people have a choice.

Use common sense and stop the liberal extremist party from destroying our democracy or deal with the consequences of America becoming ineffective and divided. The majority of the Democrat party and it's supporters have become so ideologically perverted they have lost sight of morality and what America stands for.

The Russians have not hypnotized Americans to vote for Donald Trump. It wasn't possible for the Russians to manipulate voter data and yes the Trump campaign speaks with Russian diplomats.

But it was the same Russian ambassador that Obama left in the country while expelling all others. The same Russian ambassador Obama scheduled meetings with for Jeff sessions. The same rushing ambassador that all Democrat spend time with. Make a claim that's true then find a way to turn it negative.

Typical Saul Alinsky. Everyone needs to remember anything the Liberals attack someone for the opposite is true.

Today Is The Day We Get Trump Spyplane • 2 years ago ,

The point of the Wikileaks is that "proof" is easily manufactured.

DanJR • 2 years ago ,

And now you know that the CIA (via Obama's orders or tacit approval) was the one that created the ruse of Trump emailing a Russian bank as a pretext to persuade FISA judges to sign off on the warrants to keep surveillance on him and his contacts.

If I were Obama I'd be seeking the nearest airport and fly to any country offering asylum... it's good night, good riddance for him and the rest of the Deep State Globalists.

seanster5977 • 2 years ago ,

Kind of funny where this started. Remember Hillary stole a server from the government secure server facility and set it up in her basement without proper security software and monitoring for hacking. Proven. And she had idiots in her staff so stupid they used passwords like "p@ssword". Proven. So any 11 year old computer expert could have hacked that server.

And she lied about the content of the messages being transferred. Top secret and classified info was lost due to her illegal actions. But Comey gave the pig a pass.

LH • 2 years ago ,

Of course it was the Obama CIA, pros like the Russians or Chinese, never leave behind "fingerprints" they are smart enough to cover their tracks. As a cyber analyst I can tell you that when you see "fingerprints or breadcrumbs" leading to a source, it's usually deceptive and intentional. Let that sink in!

[Jun 18, 2019] Every empire is a dictatorship. No nation can be a democracy that s either heading an empire, or a vassal-state of one by Eric Zuesse

Notable quotes:
"... The actual Deep State are always the aristocrats, themselves, the people who run the revolving door between 'the private sector' (the aristocracy's corporations) and the government. ..."
"... All of the well-financed candidates for the top offices are actually the Deep State's representatives, and virtually none are the representatives of the public, because the voters have been deceived, and were given choices between two or more candidates, none of whom will represent the public if and when elected. ..."
"... Is that Democratic Party initiative anything else than insincere political theater, lying to their own gullible voters, just being phonies who manipulate voters to vote for them instead of who are actually serving them? ..."
"... Is that what democracy is, now: insincere political theater? Is that "democracy"? America's voters are trapped, by liars, so it's instead mere 'democracy'. It's just the new form of dictatorship. But it's actually as ancient as is any empire. ..."
"... Trump's Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, was just as evil, and just as insincere, as Trump, but only a far more skillful liar, who deceived his voters to think that he would fight corruption , work to improve relations with Russia , provide a public option in his health-insurance plan , and otherwise work to reduce economic inequality , to improve the economic situation for disadvantaged Americans , and to prosecute banksters . ..."
"... If the UK elect Jeremy Corbyn all bets are off, he will expose ALL corrupt politicians media and foreign powers. Why do you think there is such a concerted effort to prevent him gaining office, even Pompeo has said "the US will prevent him becoming PM" ..."
"... But they won't LET you decentralize, Annie. It doesn't suit them. Millions of others do indeed share your concern, but merely imagining a better system doesn't make it happen. It doesn't get through the layers and layers of entrenched investment in the current system, or through the layers and layers of ruthless militarism protecting it. Our enemy will never step aside and voluntarily make way for something worthy of the name, "society". ..."
"... By all measures: capitalism is due another crisis Taleb's Black Swan is in clear view we can expect the unexpected. No one can predict the timing or severity: but the debt hangover from GFC 1 makes GFC 2 look potentially worse. ..."
"... Trumps promises before the election about the trillions wasted in futile wars, and promising to redirect those trillions into US infrastructure etc, turned out to be outrageous lies. Here are some quotes from HL Mencken which in my opinion sum up the passengers in the out of control US clown car, Trump, Bolton, Pence and Pompeo. ..."
"... The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. ..."
Jun 10, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Every empire is a dictatorship. No nation can be a democracy that's either heading an empire, or a vassal-state of one. Obviously, in order to be a vassal-state within an empire, that nation is dictated-to by the nation of which it is a colony.

By contrast, 'enemy' nations are ones that the imperial power has placed onto its priority-list of nations that are yet to become conquered. There are two main reasons to conquer a nation. One is in order to be enabled to extract, from the colony, oil, or gold, or some other valuable commodity. The other is in order to control it so as to be enabled to use that land as a passageway for exporting, from a vassal-nation, to other nations, that vassal-nation's products.

International trade is the basis for any empire, and the billionaires who own controlling blocs of stock in a nation's international corporations are the actual rulers of it, the beneficiaries of empire, the recipients of the wealth that is being extracted from the colonies and from the domestic subjects. The idea of an empire is that the imperial nation's rulers, its aristocracy, extract from the colonies their products, and they impose upon their domestic subjects the financial and military burdens of imposing their international dictatorship upon the foreign subjects.

Some authors say that there is a "Deep State" and that it consists of (some undefined elements within) the intelligence services, and of the military, and of the diplomatic corps, of any given dictatorship; but, actually, those employees of the State are merely employees, not the actual governing authority, over that dictatorship.

The actual Deep State are always the aristocrats, themselves, the people who run the revolving door between 'the private sector' (the aristocracy's corporations) and the government. In former times, many of the aristocrats were themselves governing officials (the titled 'nobility'), but this is no longer common. Nowadays, the aristocracy are the individuals who own controlling blocs of stock in international corporations (especially weapons-making firms such as Lockheed Martin and BAE, because the only markets for those corporations are the corporation's own government and its vassal states or 'allies'); and such individuals are usually the nation's billionaires, and, perhaps, a few of the mere centi-millionaires.

A small number, typically less than 100, of these extremely wealthy individuals, are the biggest donors to politicians, and to think tanks, and to other non-profits (these latter being also tax-write-offs to their donors, and so are tax-drains to the general public) that are involved in the formation of the national government's policies.

Of course, they also are owners of and/or advertisers in the propaganda-media, which sell the aristocracy's core or most-essential viewpoints to the nation's subjects in order to persuade those voters to vote only for the aristocracy's selected candidates and not for any who oppose the aristocracy. These few, mainly billionaires, are the actual Deep State -- the bosses over the dictatorship, the ultimate beneficiaries in any empire. In order to maintain this system, of international dictatorship or empire, the most essential tool is deceit, of the electorate, by the aristocracy. The method of control is: the bought agents of the Deep State lie to the public about what their polices will be if they win, in order to be able to win power; and, then, once they have won power, they do the opposite, which is what they have always been paid by the Deep State (the aristocracy) to help them to do. Thereby, elections aren't "democratic" but 'democratic': they are mere formalities of democracy, without the substance of democracy.

All of the well-financed candidates for the top offices are actually the Deep State's representatives, and virtually none are the representatives of the public, because the voters have been deceived, and were given choices between two or more candidates, none of whom will represent the public if and when elected. Here are some recent examples of this system -- the imperial system, international dictatorship, in action: During Donald Trump's Presidential campaign, he said :

The approach of fighting Assad and ISIS simultaneously was madness, and idiocy. They're fighting each other and yet we're fighting both of them. You know, we were fighting both of them. I think that our far bigger problem than Assad is ISIS, I've always felt that. Assad is, you know I'm not saying Assad is a good man, 'cause he's not, but our far greater problem is not Assad, it's ISIS. I think, you can't be fighting two people that are fighting each other, and fighting them together. You have to pick one or the other."
Assad is allied with Russia against the Saudis (who are the chief ally of the U.S. aristocracy), so the U.S. (in accord with a policy that George Herbert Walker Bush had initiated on 24 February 1990 and which has been carried out by all subsequent U.S. Presidents) was determined to overthrow Assad, but Trump said that he was strongly opposed to that policy. Months before that, Trump had said :
I think Assad is a bad guy, a very bad guy, all right? Lots of people killed. I think we are backing people we have no idea who they are. The rebels, we call them the rebels, the patriotic rebels. We have no idea. A lot of people think, Hugh, that they are ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can't be fighting ISIS and fighting Assad. Assad is fighting ISIS. He is fighting ISIS. Russia is fighting now ISIS. And Iran is fighting ISIS. We have to do one thing at a time. We can't go -- and I watched Lindsey Graham, he said, I have been here for 10 years fighting. Well, he will be there with that thinking for another 50 years. He won't be able to solve the problem. We have to get rid of ISIS first. After we get rid of ISIS, we'll start thinking about it. But we can't be fighting Assad. And when you're fighting Assad, you are fighting Russia, you're fighting -- you're fighting a lot of different groups. But we can't be fighting everybody at one time."
In that same debate (15 December 2015) he also said:
In my opinion, we've spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could've spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we've had, we would've been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now. We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we've done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It's not like we had victory. It's a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart."
Did he do that? No. Did he instead intensify what Obama had been trying to do in Syria -- overthrow Assad -- yes.

As the U.S. President, after having won the 2016 Presidential campaign, has Trump followed through on his criticism there, against the super-hawk, neoconservative, Republican U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham? No. Did he instead encircle himself with precisely such super-hawks, such neoconservatives? Yes.

Did he intensify the overthrow-Assad effort as Graham and those others had advocated? Yes.

Did America's war against Syria succeed? No.

Did he constantly lie to the voters? Yes, without a doubt.

Should that be grounds for impeaching him? A prior question to that one is actually: Would a President Mike Pence be any different or maybe even worse than Trump? Yes.

So: what, then, would be achieved by removing Trump from office? Maybe it would actually make things a lot worse. But how likely would the U.S. Senate be to remove Trump from office if the House did impeach Trump?

Two-thirds of the U.S. Senate would need to vote to remove the President in order for a President to be removed after being impeached by the House. A majority of U.S. Senators, 53, are Republicans. If just 33 of them vote not to convict the President, then Trump won't be removed. In order to remove him, not only would all 47 of the Democrats and Independents have to vote to convict, but 20 of the 53 Republicans would need to join them. That's nearly 40% of the Republican Senators.

How likely is that? Almost impossible.

What would their voters who had elected them back home think of their doing such a thing? How likely would such Senators face successful re-election challenges that would remove those Senators from office? Would 20 of the 53 be likely to take that personal risk?

Why, then, are so many Democrats in the House pressing for Trump's impeachment, since Trump's being forced out of the White House this way is practically impossible and would only install a President Pence, even if it could succeed? Is that Democratic Party initiative anything else than insincere political theater, lying to their own gullible voters, just being phonies who manipulate voters to vote for them instead of who are actually serving them?

Is that what democracy is, now: insincere political theater? Is that "democracy"? America's voters are trapped, by liars, so it's instead mere 'democracy'. It's just the new form of dictatorship. But it's actually as ancient as is any empire.

There's nothing new about this -- except one thing: the U.S. regime is aiming to be the ultimate, the last, the final, empire, the ruler over the entire world; so, it is trying especially hard, 'to defend freedom, democracy and human rights throughout the world', as Big Brother might say.

Trump's Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, was just as evil, and just as insincere, as Trump, but only a far more skillful liar, who deceived his voters to think that he would fight corruption , work to improve relations with Russia , provide a public option in his health-insurance plan , and otherwise work to reduce economic inequality , to improve the economic situation for disadvantaged Americans , and to prosecute banksters .

He abandoned each one of those stated objectives as soon as he won against John McCain, on 4 November 2008, and then yet more when he defeated Mitt Romney in 2012.

And aren't some of those promises the same ones that candidate Trump had also advocated and then abandoned as soon as he too was (s)elected ? THE THREAT TO THE EMPIRE The heroic fighters for the freedom of everyone in the world are the whistleblowers, who report to the public the corruption and evil that they see perpetrated by their superiors, their bosses, and perpetrated by people who are on the public payroll or otherwise obtaining increased income by virtue of being selected by the government to become government contractors to serve an allegedly public function.

All liars with power hate whistleblowers and want to make special examples of any part of the press that publishes their truths, their facts, their stolen documents. These documents are stolen because that's the only way for them to become public and thereby known to the voters so that the voters can vote on the basis of truths as in a democracy, instead of be deceived as in a dictatorship.

Even if the truth is stolen from the liars, instead of being kept private ("Confidential") for them, are the whistleblowers doing wrong to steal the truth from the liars? Or, instead, are the whistleblowers heroes: are they the authentic guardians of democracy and the precariously thin wall that separates democracy from dictatorship?

They are the latter: they are the heroes. Unfortunately, the vast majority of such heroes are also martyrs -- martyrs for truth, against lies. Every dictatorship seeks to destroy its whistleblowers. That's because any whistleblower constitutes a threat to The System -- the system of control. In all of U.S. history, the two Presidents who pursued whistleblowers and their publishers the most relentlessly have been Trump and Obama.

The public are fooled to think that this is being done for 'national security' reasons instead of to hide the government's crimes and criminality. However, not a single one of the Democratic Party's many U.S. Presidential candidates is bringing this issue, of the U.S. government's many crimes and constant lying, forward as being the central thing that must be criminalized above all else, as constituting "treason."

None of them is proposing legislation saying that it is treason, against the public -- against the nation. Every aristocracy tries to deceive its public in order to control its public; and every aristocracy uses divide-and-rule in order to do this. But it's not only to divide the public against each other (such as between Republicans versus Democrats, both of which are actually controlled by the aristocracy), but also to divide between nations, such as between 'allies' versus 'enemies' -- even when a given 'enemy' (such as Iraq in 2003) has never threatened, nor invaded, the United States (or whatever the given imperial 'us' may happen to be), and thus clearly this was aggressive war and an international war-crime, though unpunished as such.

The public need to fear and hate some 'enemy' which is the 'other' or 'alien', in order not to fear and loathe the aristocracy itself -- the actual source of (and winner from) the systemic exploitation, of the public, by the aristocracy.

The pinnacle of the U.S. regime's totalitarianism is its ceaseless assault against Julian Assange, who is the uber-whistleblower, the strongest protector for whistleblowers, the safest publisher for the evidence that they steal from their employers and from their employers' government. He hides the identity of the whistleblowers even at the risk of his own continued existence.

... ... ...

On 20 May 2019, former British Ambassador Craig Murray (who had quit so that he could blow the whistle) headlined "The Missing Step" and argued that the only chance that Assange now has is if Sweden refuses to extradite Assange to the US in the event that Britain honors the Swedish request to extradite him to Sweden instead of to the US (The decision on that will now probably be made by the US agent Boris Johnson instead of by the regular Tory Theresa May.)

How can it reasonably be denied that the US is, in fact (though not nominally) a dictatorship ?

All of its allies are thus vassal-nations in its empire. This means acquiescence (if not joining) in some of the US regime's frequent foreign coups and invasions; and this means their assisting in the spread of the US regime's control beyond themselves, to include additional other countries.

It reduces the freedom, and the democracy, throughout the world; it spreads the US dictatorship internationally. That is what is evil about what in America is called "neoconservatism" and in other countries is called simply "imperialism." Under American reign, it is now a spreading curse, a political plague, to peoples throughout the world. Even an American whistleblower about Ukraine who lives in the former Ukraine is being targeted by the US regime .

This is how the freedom of everyone is severely threatened, by the US empire -- the most deceitful empire that the world has ever experienced. The martyrs to its lies are the canaries in its coal mine. They are the first to be eliminated.

Looking again at that rank-ordered list of 23 countries, one sees the US and eight of its main allies (or vassal-nations), in order: US, UK, Canada, Poland, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Japan, France, Indonesia. These are countries where the subjects are already well-controlled by the empire. They already are vassals, and so are ordained as being 'allies'.

At the opposite end, starting with the most anti-US-regime, are: S. Africa, India, Russia, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, S. Korea, Turkey. These are countries where the subjects are not yet well-controlled by the empire, even though the current government in some of them is trying to change its subjects' minds so that the country will accept US rule.

Wherever the subjects reject US rule, there exists a strong possibility that the nation will become placed on the US regime's list of 'enemies'. Consequently, wherever the residents are the most opposed to US rule, the likelihood of an American coup or invasion is real. The first step toward a coup or invasion is the imposition of sanctions against the nation. Any such nation that is already subject to them is therefore already in danger.

Any such nation that refuses to cooperate with the US regime's existing sanctions -- such as against trading with Russia, China, Iran, or Venezuela -- is in danger of becoming itself a US-sanctioned nation, and therefore officially an 'enemy'. And this is why freedom and democracy are ending. Unless and until the US regime itself becomes conquered -- either domestically by a second successful American Revolution (this one to eliminate the domestic aristocracy instead of to eliminate a foreign one), or else by a World War III in which the US regime becomes destroyed even worse than the opposing alliance will -- the existing insatiable empire will continue to be on the war-path to impose its dictatorship to everyone on this planet.

ANDREW CLEMENTS

This should be taught in schools'
I will get my coat
Ramdan
"Our only hope is to organize the overthrow of the corporate state that vomited up Trump. Our democratic institutions, including the legislative bodies, the courts and the media, are hostage to corporate power. They are no longer democratic. We must, like liberation movements of the past, engage in acts of sustained mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, liberals, feminists, gays and others. We give people an alternative to a Democratic Party that refuses to confront the corporate forces of oppression and cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society. If we fail to embrace this militancy, which alone has the ability to destroy cult leaders, we will continue the march toward tyranny." Chris Hedges
Andrew Paul
Surely, as well as some billionaires and centi-millionaires, there are other perhaps more institutionalised individuals with power to dispose of much even more clandestine wealth hidden in black budgets operated by and for the interests of unaccountable military and intelligence services in the putative empire, and there is also 'organised crime' and there are wealthy religious organisations, and these too can strongly influence politicians and the public opinion-forming 'narrative' shaping this false 'democracy' in the name of an elitist, highly hierarchical, socially as well as environmentally destructive global empire under full spectrum dominance.

At the global level the most viable alternative to this, I suggest, and barring destructive world war (but perhaps following a US and even a UK civil war, unfortunately), will be a world federation or confederation with a high council at which all cultures and social interest-groups, great and small, of this world are properly, and preferably directly democratically, represented.

Many thanks for the food for thought here.

Yarkob
"So: what, then, would be achieved by removing Trump from office? Maybe it would actually make things a lot worse."

See: Saddam Hussein

mark
We could get President Pocahontas or President Buttplug instead.
ANDREW CLEMENTS
President silence of the pestilent
Wilmers31
We see a merger today between Raytheon and United Technologies. Here one para from 0hedge:

"Of course, there is a simpler way to boost profit margins that avoids cutting costs – just boost revenue, which of course would require war. Luckily, the Trump admin's neocon hawks are doing everything in their power to make sure that that's precisely what happens as the stock of the combined company will continue its relentless levitation."

Don't let them use you – don't enlist. Freedom might still be ended, but less profitable for them.

mark
As another man at another time asked, "What is to be done?"

The power of the billionaires, their bought and paid for politicians, and their servile media need to be broken.

In living memory, tax rates in the UK and US reached 98% and 91% respectively. There's no need to go back anywhere near those confiscatory levels, just ensure those people do actually pay SOME taxes. Last year, Amazon and Netflix should have paid over $16 billion in taxes. They paid nothing – they were actually given rebates of over $4 billion. Boeing hasn't paid a cent in taxes for 15 years. The same applies to a rogues' gallery of all the big boys, Google, Starbucks, General Electric, Boots, to name but a few. Profits are made to disappear and turned into losses by financial sleight of hand. An inflated level of debt is incurred to finance share buy backs instead of R&D, reinvestment and training. Trillions are salted away illegally in tax havens. The working and middle classes, 99.9% of the population, endure decades of austerity, declining wages, salaries and benefits, disappearing pensions, endemic insecurity. Rocketing house prices, £500,000 for a crappy one bed London flat. Children unable to leave home. Education and health privatised or becoming so. All public services or formerly public services declining to third world standards. A level of inequality not seen since Dickensian times. A financialised, spiv and shyster economy. A parasitic financial elite bleeding productive businesses dry, committing crime with impunity, and looting the public Treasury of untold trillions. Criminal wars of aggression abroad, taking the lives and destroying the future of tens of millions.

All this and much more needs to be changed.
But how?
Easier said than done. But is it?

We have seen what happens when anger and outrage are mobilised into an irresistible force.
This can happen surprisingly easily.
Things like the MPs expenses scandal, the Gilets Jaunes in France, Brexit in the UK, Trump in the US, political chaos in the EU. whatever you think of those developments, one way or another. The elites have a very tenuous grip on power, which can be broken quite easily.
All of the above characteristics of our present system can be changed by public pressure. It can be done.
Tax avoidance and tax havens can be closed down. If the big boys can't see which way the wind is blowing, they will do after a few of them are jailed. Anything that works against the public interest targeted for radical change. Public utilities and rail companies that fail to clean up their act properly regulated and if necessary nationalised. Housing and health treated as human needs and human rights. The NHS and a massive post war social housing programme went ahead though the country was completely bankrupt. It is a question of will and priorities. All this can be done. It is doable. All it needs is the mobilisation of sufficient outrage. And there are many recent examples of this.

Frank Poster
"The elites have a very tenuous grip on power, which can be broken quite easily.
All of the above characteristics of our present system can be changed by public pressure. It can be done."

Easily? Sorry Mark, I agree with your sentiments but there's nothing easy about it whatsoever, and you must be living on a different planet to me, sorry to say – let's examine each of your examples –

MPs expenses scandal : minimal effect, the buggers carry on, and with a self-appointed overseer.

Gilets Jaunes : smashed, sadly.

Brexit : this is not democracy, it's a US / neocon hijack of Britain.

Trump : Enriching the rich even more.

Political chaos in the EU : it's a US tactic to "shake the tree" and knock the confidence in the EU, it became too strong a competitor for the US. Divide and conquer is their game with the EU. Tariffs will follow, and they are doing exactly the same to China, and indeed Russia.

It's sad that the most common social purpose in European modern history is being attacked not only by the right wing nutters, but also the blinkered Trotskyists on the left.

mark
You're right about some of the outcomes. The point I was trying to make is that it's not possible to paper over the cracks any more. People realise that they have been lied to and the system does not work for them, if it ever did. This may sound nebulous, but it has an effect. The credibility and influence of the MSM has been shredded by its own mendacity and lack of integrity. This has far reaching consequences which may not be readily apparent on a day to day basis. But it is important. The same applies to all the institutions and organs of the state. The world is becoming increasingly turbulent and unstable, and support for elites and the systems they represent is dwindling rapidly. The whole economic and financial system is like a house of cards. At such times, change that had previously been inconceivable becomes inevitable. Of course, there is no guarantee that these changes will be positive, like Russia in 1917 or Germany in 1933.
Frank Poster
Pfff, what happened to the new OffG function to be able to edit one's posts, it's disappeared!
OffG
It vanished during our DoS attack – we haven't managed to get it back yet. Infuriating, I know.
Gezzah Potts
Clearly explained analysis of the deep shit we're all in. Unfortunately tho I don't see a second American revolution breaking out anytime soon. I think the large majority have been too crushed by the system; many working 2 or 3 jobs just to survive, many a couple paychecks away from being homeless, many living in cars or under bridges, and sadly, the large large majority lap up the propaganda spewed out by the stenographers. And believe it. Which leaves us with the next option for stopping this evil blood drenched Empire. And that is probably where we're heading. Scary times Eric.
mark
You may be right, GP. When I lived in America I was quite shocked by the low standard of living of very many people. Working 2 or 3 jobs, unable to run a car, health care completely out of their reach, living in houses like wooden shacks. Even buying food a problem. Completely ignorant of the outside world.

Half a million are now homeless, with third world shanty towns next to the gated developments of the rich, the streets covered with human faeces, TB, typhoid and tapeworm becoming major problems.

What I see is this becoming worse and forming a critical mass, when it can no longer be ignored. As such, there are grounds for optimism. Things becoming so bad that they can no longer be tolerated. Perhaps that is unrealistic, I don't know.

George
"Working 2 or 3 jobs, unable to run a car, health care completely out of their reach, living in houses like wooden shacks. Even buying food a problem. Completely ignorant of the outside world."

Hey – but haven't you heard? That's FREEDOM!

Gezzah Potts
Appreciate both your comments Mark, and yes, the Gilets Jaunes are probably the best current example of people fighting back against the system and saying Enough. I've never been to the UK so can't really judge from first hand experience, know the situation in United States by a fair bit of reading on the levels of poverty and precariousness state many live in, tho here in Australia the levels of cognitive dissonance, apathy and groupthink (derived from mainstream media) seem very high, and I speak to lots of people while out selling The Big Issue mag. About the angriest people get here is griping about Aussie politicians. I don't get any sense of anger or disgust at the Actual economic system.
wardropper
"Things becoming so bad that they can no longer be tolerated" ?
Nothing a couple more wars couldn't fix, Mark
mark
You may be right, but the outcome of any wars that are currently being threatened, Iran, Venezuela, DPRK, Russia, China, would be the final nail in the coffin of the AngloZionist Empire.
wardropper
My greatest worry is that this AngloZionist Empire doesn't care about anything at all – not even the nails in their own coffin.
They fondly imagine some kind of capitalistic "rapture" is going to whisk them off to "Money Heaven" and we will be left with their crap and their puke all over our planet.
I no longer think it's exaggerated to talk of demonic beings here, and if they are not demonic, then why are they acting as if they were?
nwwoods
FWIW, Tulsi Gabbard uttered a full-throated defense of both Assange and Manning.
Steve
It has to be remembered that Assange is an Australian and Manning was born in West Wales to a UK mother. These countries must stand up for their citizens.
nwwoods
Given the recent federal police raids on Australian journalists, it seems unlikely that Australia will be coming to the aid of Julian Assange any time soon.
Tutisicecream
Yes this is true. Tulsi Gabbard is the real deal and a bellwether of the current corrupt system and its stupefying echo chambers. She has no chance at the moment, but that's not the point. She exposes the corruption of the aristocracies and their corrupt system and shills.

As we are here. Take the Fruadian Tulsi ticks all their supposed PC boxes and yet their is no mention of her anywhere. But "Creepy Joe" Biden who epitomises the corrupt entitlement the system offers is reported on add nauseum.

As the Fraud, can't attack her it appears they can't report on her either. So her good campaign work is reported on the alt media, you know where the fake stuff is!

So there you have it, a perfect example of a faux feedback loop

Oh, and excellent article by Eric as well.

Frank Poster
She won't last long then, unfortunately.
nwwoods
No, I am hoping that the DNC doesn't change the rules in order to block her from at least the first round of televised debate. But I'm not holding my breath.

BTW, I read somewhere that DNC intends to split the first (D) debate into two groups, ostensibly because of the ridiculous number of candidates, which stands at 24, last I looked.
DNC is going to make certain that only centrist liberals are on the same debate stage with Joe Biden, "the only real progressive in the race" (in his own words).
Bernie and Tulsi will probably be dining at the kids table, if at all.

Ramdan

Frank Poster

Good point, I agree with you.
der einzige
If these sentences of Mr. Eric are true

Of course, they also are owners of and/or advertisers in the propaganda-media, which sell the aristocracy's core or most-essential viewpoints to the nation's subjects in order to persuade those voters to vote only for the aristocracy's selected candidates and not for any who oppose the aristocracy.

These few, mainly billionaires, are the actual Deep State -- the bosses over the dictatorship, the ultimate beneficiaries in any empire.

the rest of Assange is a lie

What Mr. Mossange did in these media which promoted him? Who he worked for? for Arab Springs? for Rothschilds? What he did on tea in The Economics, Guardian, NYT, The Bild etc.? What?

Einstein
Excellent piece.
DunGroanin
JA is a thorn in their side.
JC is a stake through their heart.

The v'empires fear is palpable.

Neither the throwing of the book or the kitchen sinks full of shit at their nemesises is working, as these polls demonstrate.

Hillarious. Bring on the much delayed GE.

wardropper
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but, frankly, it's been a long time since a GE fixed anything
Elections, as I think George Carlin said, are only there to make us think we have a voice.
Steve
If the UK elect Jeremy Corbyn all bets are off, he will expose ALL corrupt politicians media and foreign powers. Why do you think there is such a concerted effort to prevent him gaining office, even Pompeo has said "the US will prevent him becoming PM"
wardropper
I think there is a misunderstanding here, Steve. I couldn't agree with you more, especially about the concerted efforts (which I noticed a long time ago) to prevent Corbyn from gaining office.

My "wet-blanket" point is really only connected with your last quote from Pompeo, "The US will prevent him becoming PM". Surely no one today is under any illusions as to whether Pompeo means what he says, much as I would love to throw a spanner in his works.

Nothing would please me more, either, than to learn that I had been overly pessimistic. But I still have no doubts that Pompeo could and would fix any election that suited him. He has already admitted, in another context, to lying, cheating, stealing and killing.

Rhisiart Gwilym
Pompous Hippo, TIGW – The Insane Geriatric Walrus, Donny Les Tweets, Elliott Demon, Veryfew Pence and the rest of the delusional criminal inadequates of the DCSwamp may be against JC and wish to stop him, but – judging by their steadily-increasing ineffectualness on the world stage (how're those regime changes in Syria and Venezuela going? how's the bankrupting-Russia-with-sanctions going?) – they may not be too effective at preventing his entry to Downing Street.
wardropper
I pray you're right. Those dull-witted thugs may indeed be increasingly ineffectual, but the fact that they are still committed to their insane agenda continues to cost the world a great deal of suffering.
different frank
People will be the good sheeple that the establishment want them to be.
They will vote who they are told to vote for.
Hate who they are told to hate.
Fear who they are told to fear.

Devoid of all independent thought. Forever sleeping. Always conforming. Always consuming. The sheeple serve their establishment masters well. maybe a crumb will fall from the big table. They can fight each other for that. good sheep. baaa

kevin morris
We're all sheeple!
wardropper
Assange isn't.
Annie Besant
I will first quote the final passage from your tract which reads "Unless and until the US regime itself becomes conquered -- either domestically by a second successful American Revolution (this one to eliminate the domestic aristocracy instead of to eliminate a foreign one), or else by a World War III in which the US regime becomes destroyed even worse than the opposing alliance will -- the existing insatiable empire will continue to be on the war-path to impose its dictatorship to everyone on this planet." Whist it has not yet sunk in to the heads of the faceless perpetrators within the Hegemon, it is true to say that a much greater proportion, the greater percentage of humanity are now enlightened to the truth that should a global nuclear conflict break out, either by accident or design, there would be no living person remaining to gloat over the spoils.

This is where "American Exceptionalism" meets its nemesis, for at that moment all their power, influence, wealth, and vanity would evanesce as the towers of Mammon are reduced to rubble. Even their nuclear bunkers would provide no safe haven and there would be even less time for them to come to their senses, for we are contemplating the total extinction of the human species here.

Even in the face of an almost overwhelming resignation to fate, I am well aware that I am not alone in the belief that our planet will survive until that time when our sun ceases to exist. Perhaps we can share Mr Zuess's suggestion that the key to our survival here is by "domestic revolution" whereby within national limits, any country can create a groundswell of solidarity working to find a humane fix for the broken socio-economic system which thrives on the incompetence of dysfunctional leaders. This can be brought about by de-centralisation in matters of how our citizens are governed, rather than the current situation where our citizens are controlled and monitored, both in public and in private.

Localised government, informed by local people, can address all the issues in respect of which there are many who currently feel disempowered and thereby render themselves vulnerable to the general apathy and malaise that is fertile ground for the mischief of authority. This is a matter of systemic transformation and it is taking place right now with innumerable (largely unreported) peace, education, economic and apolitical bodies. Working together on a global basis, realising the interconnectedness of our lives, we will replicate the chain reaction of an atomic device. However, in our case it will be the gradual acceleration of our energies, all directed towards the betterment of all our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters on this planet who ask for one thing, and one thing only – that being an end to all this narcissism, cowardice, arrogance and greed, that are the dramatic personae for this litany of misery which has been inflicted by devilish forces upon the masses of humanity over centuries. No matter how small or insignificant my personal effort is here, I am now convinced that there are millions of others who feel the same. This is why the movement is growing at such a pace. When all our creative, and positively directed energies eventually coalesce we will approach the point of critical mass. At that time we will see the brainwashed troops of the military hegemon suddenly attain enlightenment and throw down their weapons – and the cowards who have previously been in control will flee to exile on some nice sunny beach. This is going to happen because I have already seen it.

wardropper

But they won't LET you decentralize, Annie. It doesn't suit them. Millions of others do indeed share your concern, but merely imagining a better system doesn't make it happen. It doesn't get through the layers and layers of entrenched investment in the current system, or through the layers and layers of ruthless militarism protecting it. Our enemy will never step aside and voluntarily make way for something worthy of the name, "society".

Somebody, somewhere, sometime, is going to have to insist.

BigB
Annie is absolutely right: I think we need to start looking ahead. Neoliberal capitalism is dead: it cannot be revived because there are neither the mineral or energy primary resource assets left for permanent expansionism. Monetizing debt is short term firefighting – fighting fire with fire, debt with debt. We need to stop thinking like capitalists: assessing consciousness and wellbeing against fake GDP and monetized debt prosperity and start thinking as humanists. Like Annie.

By all measures: capitalism is due another crisis Taleb's Black Swan is in clear view we can expect the unexpected. No one can predict the timing or severity: but the debt hangover from GFC 1 makes GFC 2 look potentially worse.

Then capitalism has one more shot of adrenaline (more easing; ZIRPS; savings 'haircuts'; going cashless; potentially a change in reserve) then what? Fascism or socialism. Angry people make for fascism. Peaceful people make for socialism. Materialism won't be that much of an option: apart from the grotesque levels of conspicuous ersatz wealth that will build up in the meantime.

Capitalism is time-limited and finite: humanism is time-independent and limitless. We chose to measure our wealth and happiness in terms of finite resources that were bound to run short. Perhaps now we can turn to the one non-finite resource we have overlooked – ourselves?

wardropper
Philosophically, I'm with you 100%, BigB.

But it's also the crux of your own matter as to where the mechanisms for choosing either fascism or socialism really are in our current system.
Many of us here want to know what to DO, rather than merely pass judgment on what is wrong.

For example, by nature, I am very inclined to follow Annie's path, but we have to know exactly what is the nature of the colossal resistance we will definitely encounter. Will we be stuck in jail, or even "permanently disappeared", because we can think for ourselves?

Or will the media simply keep up their current assault on our intelligence and education until, after a decade or two, nobody is left who could rub two coherent sentences together?

harry law
Trumps promises before the election about the trillions wasted in futile wars, and promising to redirect those trillions into US infrastructure etc, turned out to be outrageous lies. Here are some quotes from HL Mencken which in my opinion sum up the passengers in the out of control US clown car, Trump, Bolton, Pence and Pompeo.

[Jun 18, 2019] Have the neoliberal ruling elite gotten lazy or stupid

Notable quotes:
"... The Gulf of Credibility - I really cannot begin to fathom how stupid you would have to be to believe that Iran would attack a Japanese oil tanker at the very moment that the Japanese Prime Minister was sitting down to friendly, US-disapproved talks in https://t.co/P1wE1Y886i ..."
"... When the ruling elite wanted a war with Iraq they invented incubator babies and WMD programs that didn't exist. Their inventions were far fetched, but not unbelievable. However, the idea that the paranoid dictator Saddam was just going to hand over his most powerful weapons to religious fanatics that hated his guts, was laughably stupid. ..."
"... When the ruling elite wanted a war with Libya they invented a genocidal, Viagra-fueled, rape army. Their invention was far fetched, and bit lazy, but you could be forgiven for believing that the Mandarins believed it. ..."
"... This latest anti-Iran warmongering is just plain stupid. It's as if they don't really care if anyone believes the lies they are telling. For starters, look at the shameless liar who is telling these lies. ..."
"... Looking at this incident/narrative from any/every angle leaves one to conclude "false flag". ..."
"... As for the "most obvious culprit is usually responsible for the crime" that also happens to be "bazaar-level conspiracy theories involving a false-flag operation by Israel's Mossad". Because Mossad actually does that. ..."
"... If El Trumpo was going to drain the swamp, why did he take these cretins, Bolton, Pompeo, Haspel, Abrams into his cabinet? Is the tail, wagging the dog as usual? ..."
"... The elite are both lazy and stupid. Even the Orange Man will not be sucked into another Douma style false flag operation. The reasons why this is a basic false flag is obvious. If anybody reading about this doesn't understand the culprits responsible weren't Iranian, then they should be interviewed for mental competency. ..."
"... But Pompous Mike and Bolt-on Bolt-off need to be removed from any semblance of governmental authority. I could go on but this whole affair is making me tired...I'm going back to my swamp. ..."
Jun 14, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

gjohnsit on Fri, 06/14/2019 - 5:42pm

The Gulf of Credibility - I really cannot begin to fathom how stupid you would have to be to believe that Iran would attack a Japanese oil tanker at the very moment that the Japanese Prime Minister was sitting down to friendly, US-disapproved talks in https://t.co/P1wE1Y886i

-- Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) June 14, 2019

When the ruling elite wanted a war with Iraq they invented incubator babies and WMD programs that didn't exist. Their inventions were far fetched, but not unbelievable. However, the idea that the paranoid dictator Saddam was just going to hand over his most powerful weapons to religious fanatics that hated his guts, was laughably stupid.

When the ruling elite wanted a war with Libya they invented a genocidal, Viagra-fueled, rape army. Their invention was far fetched, and bit lazy, but you could be forgiven for believing that the Mandarins believed it.

This latest anti-Iran warmongering is just plain stupid. It's as if they don't really care if anyone believes the lies they are telling. For starters, look at the shameless liar who is telling these lies.

You mean "Mr. We Lied, We Cheated, We Stole"? What a disgraceful character... pic.twitter.com/pMtAgKaZcG

-- Brave New World (@ClubBayern) June 13, 2019

Then there are the many problems of their "proof".

Where is the video of the Iranians PLACING explosives & detonating them? Removal would be prudent by any Navy/CG. Also location of explosives is VERY high off waterline ...Weird. It's not a limpet mine, it's a demo charge. Had to be put on by fairly high boat w/ a long gaff/pole https://t.co/3qzB7TrrYv

-- Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) June 14, 2019

The distress call went out at 6 am. So, according to CENTCOM's analysis of this video, they're suggesting that 10 hours after the tanker was hit, the IRGC just casually pulled up to the tanker to remove unexploded limpet mine in broad daylight?!

-- Rosalind Rogers راز (@Rrogerian) June 14, 2019

BREAKING: Owner says Kokuka Courageous tanker crew saw "flying objects" before attack, suggesting ship wasn't damaged by mines.

-- The Associated Press (@AP) June 14, 2019

The Japanese company that owns the ship has refused to cooperate in this false flag mission.

But in remarks to Japanese media, the president of the company that owns the ship said the vessel wasn't damaged by a mine. "A mine doesn't damage a ship above sea level," said Yutaka Katada, president of Kokuka Sangyo, the owner and operator of the vessel. "We aren't sure exactly what hit, but it was something flying towards the ship," he said.

When the propaganda begins to fall apart and @realDonaldTrump tries to find another way to start a war to win an election. pic.twitter.com/r8Cp7BNQ7z

-- Bamboozll (@bamboozll) June 14, 2019

Looking at this incident/narrative from any/every angle leaves one to conclude "false flag".

Finally, there is the question of "why"?

What would Iran hope to accomplish by this? I found one establishment source that tried to rationalize.

Iran denied responsibility, with Foreign Minister Javad Zarif descending to bazaar-level conspiracy theories involving a false-flag operation by Israel's Mossad.

If you're not inclined to believe the Trump administration – and such skepticism is entirely reasonable – most detectives would still tell you that the most obvious culprit is usually responsible for the crime.

To those seeking logic behind the attacks, though, it may be hard to see why Iran would do this – but that assumes that the regime in Tehran is a rational actor.

The Gulf of Oman attacks are especially hard to explain: targeting Japanese shipping on the very day that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was meeting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on a well-publicized peace mission would seem extraordinarily counterproductive, even for a regime with an almost fanatical commitment to self-harm.

Have you ever noticed that everyone that we want to start a war with is crazy? Regimes that stand solid for generations under hostile conditions are always run by maniacs. You'd think that insanity would prevent them from taking power in the first place, but that seems to only be true with our allies.

As for the "most obvious culprit is usually responsible for the crime" that also happens to be "bazaar-level conspiracy theories involving a false-flag operation by Israel's Mossad". Because Mossad actually does that.

Since the U.S.'s tightening of sanctions has squeezed Iranian oil exports, nobody else's should be allowed to pass through waters within reach of the IRGC.

The Iranians know that these threats, if repeated, can lose their power if not followed with action. The attacks on the tankers, then, can be explained as a demonstration that Khamenei's attack dogs have some teeth.

There is another rationale. If Iran does eventually agree to negotiate with the U.S., it will want to bring some bargaining chips to the table – something it can exchange for the removal of sanctions. In the negotiations over the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran was able to offer the suspension of its nuclear program. It doesn't have that particular chip now, although Tehran has recently threatened to crank up the centrifuges again.

Meanwhile, the regime may have calculated that the only way to secure some kind of negotiating position is blackmail: End the sanctions, or we take out some more tankers, and send oil prices surging.

This almost sounds logical, except for one thing: Iran tried that in 1988 and it didn't work. It only caused the one thing the U.S. was itching for: to kill some Iranians.
Do you think that they've forgotten? Or that the U.S. is less warlike? Oh wait. Iranians are crazy and can't be reasoned with, amirite?

US public radio @NPR does not mention it was Iranians who saved the crew. That's how terrible they are at journalism

-- boomerWithaLandline (@Irene34799239) June 14, 2019

The only real question is, why such a transparent lie? Has the ruling elite gotten lazy or stupid? Or do they think that we are that lazy and stupid? I have an alternative theory .

For the last two years, as you've probably noticed, the corporate media have been not so subtly alternating between manufacturing Russia hysteria and Nazi hysteria, and sometimes whipping up both at once. Thus, I've dubbed the new Official Enemy of Freedom "the Putin-Nazis." They don't really make any sense, rationally, but let's not get all hung up on that. Official enemies don't have to make sense. The important thing is, they're coming to get us, and to kill the Jews and destroy democracy and something about Stalin, if memory serves. Putin is their leader, of course. Trump is his diabolical puppet. Julian Assange is well, Goebbels, or something. Glenn Greenwald is also on the payroll, as are countless "useful idiots" like myself, whose job it is to sow division, discord, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-capitalism, anti-Hillaryism, collusion rejectionism, ontological skepticism, and any other horrible thing you can think of.

Their bullsh*t lies have gotten lazy and stupid because real effort isn't required to start a war and kill a lot of people.

WoodsDweller on Fri, 06/14/2019 - 6:18pm

I'm going to go with "desperate"

Something's happening to move up the time table, and it isn't the election, we're already in plenty of wars, another one won't help El Trumpo.

Sirena on Fri, 06/14/2019 - 6:31pm
Who is playing who?

That is the question, I ask thee? If El Trumpo was going to drain the swamp, why did he take these cretins, Bolton, Pompeo, Haspel, Abrams into his cabinet? Is the tail, wagging the dog as usual?

TheOtherMaven on Fri, 06/14/2019 - 6:31pm
All of the above

Lazy, stupid, and desperate.

Alligator Ed on Fri, 06/14/2019 - 6:33pm
The answer to your title is YES

The elite are both lazy and stupid. Even the Orange Man will not be sucked into another Douma style false flag operation. The reasons why this is a basic false flag is obvious. If anybody reading about this doesn't understand the culprits responsible weren't Iranian, then they should be interviewed for mental competency.

My money, the little that I have, is on either the Saudis or the Israelis; maybe even both.

But Pompous Mike and Bolt-on Bolt-off need to be removed from any semblance of governmental authority. I could go on but this whole affair is making me tired...I'm going back to my swamp.

[Jun 18, 2019] The people in the USA are as good as anywhere, but only as trained as their culture tells them to be. Perhaps the future holds some spark of brightness for the people.

Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

Grieved on April 17, 2019 , · at 1:36 am EST/EDT

... ... ..

The US was always the way Orlov describes its future. It only ever belonged to those who could keep their heads above water. You go under, and you're gone forever, and very quickly forgotten. I don't recommend it as a social system, but that's the system.

But the people, within that system. the people are great people, with remarkable moral fiber, in situations they understand. Those who are breathing air and not water can rightfully enjoy the company of these others, even though many of those others might lately be breathing an air-water mixture – and perhaps even oneself.

It's a poignant thing, these United States. The people are as good as anywhere, but only as trained as their culture tells them to be. Perhaps the future holds some spark of brightness for the people. They were always a transcendent bunch, actually, in a culture founded on spiritual independence – despite all the overlay of consumerist crap. Somehow they uniquely evolved the means of ignoring that crap – playing the TV in the background, for example, while reading college studies – in order to live decent lives.

It's possible this long-remote karma of spiritual longing might still hold some embers. Perhaps the people of the US might rediscover the power of sincere prayer? The power of sincerity? Time alone will tell.

[Jun 18, 2019] MIC vs FIRE sector

They are actually a single sector
Jun 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Lochearn , Jun 18, 2019 8:29:55 AM | 98
@ 71 b4real
"Do you really believe those bankers with their terminals and wingtip shoes are telling the boys with the billion dollars of weaponry what to do?"

Simple answer: Yes. US weapons sales in 2018 were worth $192 billion. Total miltary budget in 2018 was $650 billion. That does not add up to even a trillion which is a paltry sum when compared to about $30 trillion sloshing around US banks and fund management companies.

Let's take the example of the world's biggest arms producer – Lockhead Martin. The State Street Corporation (fund management) holds 16.6% of the shares of Lockhead Martin, Capital World Investors (California) hold 7.7%, Vanguard Group 7% and BlackRock Inc. 6.7%. That means 4 fund management companies own 38% of the stock of Lockead Martin. These guys with the wingtip shoes can fire the entire management team of Lockhead Martin at the drop of a hat.

The finance, insurance and real estate sector accounted for 20% of US GDP in 2016 (Forbes), which means approximately $18 trillion. You may argue that real estate has little to do with bankers but every sale needs a mortgage and private equity has moved into real estate in a big way over the last decade.

It should also be recalled that the man who created the CIA and ran it for over a decade - Allen Dulles - was a Wall Street lawyer.


[Jun 18, 2019] America's Managerial Elite Has Failed, But We Can't Get Rid of Them

Jun 19, 2019 | www.oftwominds.com

The system is broken, and the managerial elite will keep it broken because it serves their interests to keep it broken.

America's managerial elite came to do good and stayed to do well--at the expense of everyone beneath them. Now that they've entrenched themselves at the top of the status quo, there's no way to dislodge them, even as their failure to address what's broken, much less actually fix what's broken, insures systemic breakdown.

In government, the managerial elite is known as The Deep State : those who remain in power regardless of who's in elected office. In local government, managerial elites often shift positions, moving from elected office to a plum position in the bureaucracy where they can draw a big paycheck out of sight until they retire.

In Corporate America, managerial elites also move around, leaving sinking ships (that they may well have helped sink) as needed, and moving to think tanks or academia if their failures start multiplying.

Changing elected officials does nothing to dislodge our managerial elite overlords. The new mayor, governor or president comes and goes, and all the major institutions--education, higher education, healthcare, national defense, critical infrastructure--continue down the same path of enriching entrenched insiders while the institution fails its core missions.

If you think this chart of soaring student loan debt is a sign of "success," you are 1) delusional 2) protected from the dire consequences of this failure 3) getting your paycheck from this failed system. That in a nutshell is the state of the nation: those who are protected from the consequences of failure are loyal to the Establishment, as are the millions drawing a paycheck from systems they know are irredeemable failures.

Let's review the central institutions of the nation:

  1. Healthcare: a failed system doomed to bankrupt the nation.
  2. Defense: a failed system of cartels and Pentagon fiefdoms that have saddled the nation with enormously costly failed weapons systems like the F-35 and the LCS.
  3. Higher Education: a bloated, failed system that is bankrupting an entire generation while mis-educating them for productive roles in the emerging economy. (I cover this in depth in The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy .)
  4. Foreign policy: Iraq: a disaster. Afghanistan: a disaster. Libya: a disaster. Syria: a disaster. Need I go on?
  5. Political governance: a corrupt system of self-serving elites, lobbyists, pay-to-play, corporate puppet-masters, and sociopaths who see themselves as above the law.

In Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform , I explain why the only possible output of these systems is failure .

The sole output of America's managerial elite is self-serving hubris.

In an open market, failed leadership has consequences. Customers vanish and the enterprise goes bankrupt, or shareholders and employees rally to fire the failed leadership.

In our state-cartel system, failed leadership only tightens its grip on the nation's throat. The Deep State can't be fired, nor does it ever stand for election. The two political parties are interchangeable, as are the politicos who race from fund-raiser to fund-raiser.

It's tempting to blame the individuals who inhale the wealth and power of our failed system, but it's the system, not the individuals , though a more corrupt, craven, self-serving lot cannot easily be assembled.

Centralized hierarchies concentrate power at the top of the pyramid. That power is a magnet for everyone who seeks to wield power and enrich themselves in the process.

In the financial system, this concentration of power is visible in the chart below: the super-rich have become immensely richer in the past few decades of central banks' vast expansion of credit and financialization.

As systems become more complex, the need for a professional class to manage the overwhelming complexity grows. This class excels at appearing to manage complexity while ignoring the larger dynamics driving the system over the cliff.

And so we have endless meetings of highly paid people over trivial issues while the entire system careens toward meltdown. "Stakeholders" multiply in endless profusion, dooming every project to a glacial process that increases the sums paid to manage the glacial process and pushes the final cost to the moon.

The self-serving managerial elite always has one answer for every problem: give us more money. If the budget expands by 10% and nothing actually changes for the better, then the "solution" is a 25% increase in funding.

Budgets expand by leaps and bounds, but none of the systemic problems are ever resolved.

It's not hard to figure out why: look at the system's incentives. If systems were radically simplified and made more efficient, the need for an ever-expanding class of permanent managers would diminish. And so the solution is always more fodder for the managerial elite: more complexity, more meetings, more accumulation of power, more managers and always, more money.

Thus it is no surprise that the calls for "free" college and "Medicare for All" are rising: the managerial elite that has bankrupted higher education and healthcare while enriching themselves desperately needs to be bailed out, lest the systems they've steered toward the fiscal cliff deservedly go broke.

In a similar set of incentives, few weapons systems ever come in under budget when the Pentagon can always come up with another $10 or $20 billion for cost over-runs.

The system is broken, and the managerial elite will keep it broken because it serves their interests to keep it broken. Unfortunately we'll all suffer when the managerial elite is no longer able to stave off the dire fiscal consequences of their self-serving leadership.

[Jun 18, 2019] Are Microsoft The Pentagon Quietly Hijacking US Elections

Presence of two opposing parties during counting of votes and communicating the results up is the necessary prerequsite. Paper ballots should be mandatory. Internet translation of voting like they do in Russia is helpful. So voting can easily be improved and make tampering proof.
The real problem is the selection of candidates for which you votes (two in two-party system). Here we have a real problem because this process is controlled by ruing oligarchy.
Notable quotes:
"... The ruling elite have no interest in making sure our voices are heard ..."
"... If they sought to have our voices heard, we would have paper ballots, ranked choice voting, real exit polls and a president who doesn't look and act like an over-cooked ham-and-cheese sandwich. ..."
"... It's time to demand real elections. ..."
"... Paper ballots should be mandatory, in triplicate, with the voter depositing copy A in the ballot box, mailing copy B to one of any approved secondary processing centers, chosen by the voters, retaining copy C for ones records and online verification that copies A and B remain true. ..."
Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Election forensics analyst Jonathan Simon said , "The great irony, and tragedy, here is that we could easily go the opposite direction and quickly solve all the problems of election security if we got the computers out of the process and were willing to invest the modicum of effort needed for humans to count votes observably in public as they once did."

Jonathan Simon, god bless him, has used 55 words to say 11: We could easily fix our fraudulent election system, but we won't.

The answer is not to hand it over to Microsoft and the Pentagon and the ass clowns who make robotic death machines. The Pentagon can't keep track of $21 TRILLION DOLLARS over the past 20 years -- what makes us think they can keep track of hundreds of millions of votes?

The ruling elite have no interest in making sure our voices are heard. They want that as much as they want nunchucks to the balls. If they sought to have our voices heard, we would have paper ballots, ranked choice voting, real exit polls and a president who doesn't look and act like an over-cooked ham-and-cheese sandwich.

It's time to demand real elections.

SybilDefense , 1 hour ago link

I thought George Soros owns (controlling interest) %56 of all voting machines

Soros linked to voting machine mfrs

Now with Microsoft providing the lib-genda software...what could go wrong?

All this whiz bang gadgetry for unimportant things, like elections but when the Gov really wants info it's "fill this out in triplicate Mr Smith"!

Paper ballots should be mandatory, in triplicate, with the voter depositing copy A in the ballot box, mailing copy B to one of any approved secondary processing centers, chosen by the voters, retaining copy C for ones records and online verification that copies A and B remain true.

I see no reason why states couldn't swap ballots, allowing state 2 to "grade state 1's homework". At the end of the day, the state 1 opens a lottery drawn code telling them who will be grading their papers. For Example, at poll close, CA opens the supersecret envelope (reminiscient of Karnac the Great on Johnny Carson), revealing that TX will be in charge of processing CAs validation count. If it's off by a statistical significance...no fed money for the offending state until corrected)

There has to be a better way, and Microsoft/Soros/DARPA isn't going to enstill the confidence this country needs to survive. A #2 pencil, a few black dots and independent verification with (voter retained) proof is so simple it just may work. If the voter isn't intelligent enough to color the circle, they shouldn't be voting.

Ballot box computers should be reserved for researching the candidates, not for harboring the only copy of your choices...

Here's hoping Brenda Snipes isn't in charge of counting your 2020 Trump vote!

darktideac , 1 hour ago link

Yep, the US election system is the most stupid system I know. Why not just use paper votes or block-chain voting over the internet?

schroedingersrat , 2 hours ago link

The funny thing is.. even if they tamper with elections. Your vote never mattered anyway!

Yars Revenge , 5 hours ago link

Now we know the deep state purpose of "Russian meddling" and "interfering in our elections.

Its to justify installing security software on voting machines to "protect us."

platitudipus , 5 hours ago link

If you think the 2016 elections were a ****-show, wait until you see the fireworks we have planned for 2020.

emmanuelthoreau , 6 hours ago link

Technology is destroying most if not all of western civilization's institutions, and replacing them with nothing but mobocracy. The feedback effect means that every 3-4 years the power of the loudest and most popular -- and hence the lowest common denominator -- gets amped up another few degrees. It is not abating. The phones are everywhere, everywhere , in public. Necks bent over everywhere. When they can get these things synced up to eye movement on a headset or pair of glasses for mass consumption (meaning, really, really easy to use), look out. Silence, baby. Human race goes under.

If you were raised in an oddball environment before computers -- and then smartphones -- infested every corner of the human imagination, it's obvious what's happened. 40 years ago people didn't behave this way. They had tons of problems, sure, and those were fucked up times, but at least there was still some fight left in them. I just see a bitter, aggrieved, very small-minded set of people out there now, absorbed in themselves, their genitalia/identity/skin color, who have nothing to offer this planet except destruction. I have come to believe they will succeed. I could walk away from all this tech tomorrow and wouldn't blink an eye. But I realize that for many, that would be an event akin to becoming a quadruple amputee.

We've always been cynical about how much a single vote can mean, but for the most part, people have believed that their vote showed up somewhere, numerically, in a digit in a column in a newspaper every other November. If nothing else. Once that belief goes out the window, forget it. What, then, will tie you to the land or the people around you? The law? Ha. Only force, and that means outright tyranny. Which is what democracy, Socrates argued in The Republic, always leads to.

And all to serve these ******* computers instead of ourselves.

Overdrawn , 7 hours ago link

In UK we have paper ballot papers and postal voting, both have been abused recently by the Labour Party.

One man boasted on Twitter than he burnt over 1,000 votes for the Brexit Party, so effectively they would have won the election had this crime against democracy not been committed.

Police Investigating Mystery Man Who Claims He 'BURNED' Brexit Party Votes

https://www.politicalite.com/peterborough-by-election/exclusive-police-investigating-mystery-man-who-claims-he-burned-brexit-party-votes/

Fraud, Convicts, And Ethnic Exploitation – How Peterborough Was REALLY Won

https://www.politicalite.com/election-2019/exclusive-fraud-convicts-and-ethnic-exploitation-how-peterborough-was-really-won/

stopEUSSR , 7 hours ago link

Why bother hijacking an election, when the deep state choose both candidates? And just because you use paper ballots doesn't mean it still can't be rigged. We use paper ballots in the UK, but elections can be rigged through the postal voting system amoungst other things.

CosineCosineCosine , 7 hours ago link

Now THIS is cathartic journalism :))

Why do we need an answer? Well, our election system is... how do you say... a festering rancid corrupt needlessly complex rigged rotten infected putrid pus-covered diseased dog pile of stinking, dying cockroach-filled rat **** smelling like Mitch McConnell under a vat of pig farts. And that's a quote from The Lancet medical journal (I think).

But have no fear: The most trustworthy of corporations recently announced it is going to selflessly and patriotically secure our elections. It's a small company run by vegans and powered by love. It goes by the name "Microsoft." (You're forgiven for never having heard of it.)

😊

Also - unless these voting machines are Faraday caged AND have Mu metal layers, they could be monitored or interfered with in real time, even if air gapped.

E.g. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/a-faraday-cage-or-air-gap-cant-protect-your-device-data-from-these-two-cyberattacks/

Know the basics of this and you're already a 1 in 100,000 tech red piller ;)

Passport ID, Paper system with a duplicate receipt ... ironically like Venezuela's system (the one thing they got right it seems) and monitoring of voting areas and counting streamed to the net of every polling station (ironically like the newish Russian system) make it close to foolproof and certainly verifiable if questioned and accountable.

runningman18 , 7 hours ago link

The elites hijacked elections a long time ago using the false left/right paradigm. Just look at the banksters in Trump's cabinet to see the proof.

Baron Samedi , 7 hours ago link

Auditable paper ballots for voters with verifiable identity - preferably with receipts - and dye-marking the hands of the voters.

We are a long way from secure elections. Our (((oligarchy))) wouldn't have it any other way!

Remember the old refrains: "If voting could change anything it'd be illegal." -- Emma Goldman, and "The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do." -- Joseph Stalin

wkirkpa , 7 hours ago link

Wow. Dude just climbed out from under his favourite rock and met the reality gnome. Good for him.

I'm good with technology. I wasted whole moments of my life pondering electronic elections. Here's the thing. There is NO manner of electronic election process that does not forfeit one, or more, mandatory elements required of a free and fair election process. None. At all. Can't be done.

Mike Rotsch , 7 hours ago link

Meanwhile, as we approach election time, we have cyber-operations taking place without Trump's knowledge.

He–Mene Mox Mox , 8 hours ago link

This article is nuts and full of BS! The Pentagon could care less who is president, since they only have to worry about congress funding them. Also, Microsoft is more worried about profits than people. Just ask anyone who works there.

The hijacking of American elections has been going on for 165 years. That is why almost every state has Ballot Access Laws, and why practically every district in the U.S. are gerrymandered by the two parties. And, you never had any truly free elections either, since the parties chose the candidates for you in the primaries, and all you do is ratify their selections. Your vote is rather meaningless.

GreatUncle , 8 hours ago link

I went to bed after having voted for BREXIT and through all the propaganda thought BREMAIN had won. I woke up the next morning and BREXIT had won. Those in tears were all BREMAIN as they thought they would win because the propaganda was so complete against the people.

SO NOW THEY ARE GOING TO FIX THE RESULT TO MAKE THE VOTES REFLECT THE PROPAGANDA.

One more step put in place the next step has to be to close down all channels of objection or certainly throttle it back to prevent people discussing it - the scrutiny of those being fit for public office removed.

[Jun 18, 2019] The American Cult of Bombing and Endless War

Notable quotes:
"... Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. "boots on the ground" and so American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington's many conflicts. ..."
"... Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required). ..."
"... Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America's wars are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What's driving this process? ..."
"... In a bizarre fashion, you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and missile count replaced the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress . Using data supplied by the U.S. military, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that the U.S. dropped at least 26,172 bombs in seven countries in 2016, the bulk of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, ISIS's "capital," the U.S. and its allies dropped more than 20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city to literal rubble . Combined with artillery fire, the bombing of Raqqa killed more than 1,600 civilians, according to Amnesty International . ..."
"... U.S. air campaigns today, deadly as they are, pale in comparison to past ones like the Tokyo firebombing of 1945, which killed more than 100,000 civilians; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year (roughly 250,000); the death toll against German civilians in World War II (at least 600,000); or civilians in the Vietnam War. (Estimates vary, but when napalm and the long-term effects of cluster munitions and defoliants like Agent Orange are added to conventional high-explosive bombs, the death toll in Southeast Asia may well have exceeded one million.) ..."
"... the U.S. may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn't led to ultimate success. In the case of Afghanistan, weapons like the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB (the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military's arsenal), have been celebrated as game changers even when they change nothing. (Indeed, the Taliban only continues to grow stronger , as does the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory, nor closure of any sort; only to yet more destruction. ..."
"... Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with relative impunity doesn't mean that they should. Given the history of air power since World War II, ease of access should never be mistaken for efficacious results. ..."
"... Bombing alone will never be the key to victory. If that were true, the U.S. would have easily won in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. ..."
"... Despite total air supremacy, the recent Iraq War was a disaster even as the Afghan War staggers on into its 18th catastrophic year. ..."
"... No matter how much it's advertised as "precise," "discriminate," and "measured," bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk ) rarely is. The deaths of innocents are guaranteed. Air power and those deaths are joined at the hip, while such killings only generate anger and blowback, thereby prolonging the wars they are meant to end. ..."
"... A paradox emerges from almost 18 years of the war on terror: the imprecision of air power only leads to repetitious cycles of violence and, even when air strikes prove precise, there always turn out to be fresh targets, fresh terrorists, fresh insurgents to strike. ..."
"... Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely works. If it did, the U.S. would have swept to victory in Vietnam. In Lyndon Johnson's presidency, for instance, Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-1968), a graduated campaign of bombing, was meant to, but didn't, convince the North Vietnamese to give up their goal of expelling the foreign invaders -- us -- from South Vietnam. ..."
"... Air power is enormously expensive. Spending on aircraft, helicopters, and their munitions accounted for roughly half the cost of the Vietnam War. ..."
"... Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading. Command of the high ground is not synonymous with god-like "total situational awareness ." ..."
"... Air power is inherently offensive. That means it's more consistent with imperial power projection than with national defense ..."
"... Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens wars rather than shortening them. ..."
"... Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact over time. The enemy, lacking it, nonetheless learns to adapt by developing countermeasures -- both active (like missiles) and passive (like camouflage and dispersion), even as those being bombed become more resilient and resolute. ..."
"... Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war. ..."
"... all the happy talk about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results. ..."
"... War's inherent nature -- its unpredictability, horrors, and tendency to outlast its original causes and goals -- isn't changed when the bombs and missiles are guided by GPS. Washington's enemies in its war on terror, moreover, have learned to adapt to air power in a grimly Darwinian fashion and have the advantage of fighting on their own turf. ..."
Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by William Astore via TomDispatch.com,

The American Cult of Bombing and Endless War

From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet. Its stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance and bombing -- and yet more bombing.

Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. "boots on the ground" and so American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington's many conflicts.

Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required).

Its reality for various foreign peoples: a steady diet of " Made in USA " bombs and missiles bursting here, there, and everywhere.

Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America's wars are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What's driving this process?

For many of America's decision-makers, air power has clearly become something of an abstraction. After all, except for the 9/11 attacks by those four hijacked commercial airliners, Americans haven't been the target of such strikes since World War II. On Washington's battlefields across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, air power is always almost literally a one-way affair. There are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses. The skies are the exclusive property of the U.S. Air Force (and allied air forces), which means that we're no longer talking about "war" in the normal sense. No wonder Washington policymakers and military officials see it as our strong suit, our asymmetrical advantage , our way of settling scores with evildoers, real and imagined.

Bombs away!

In a bizarre fashion, you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and missile count replaced the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress . Using data supplied by the U.S. military, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that the U.S. dropped at least 26,172 bombs in seven countries in 2016, the bulk of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, ISIS's "capital," the U.S. and its allies dropped more than 20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city to literal rubble . Combined with artillery fire, the bombing of Raqqa killed more than 1,600 civilians, according to Amnesty International .

Meanwhile, since Donald Trump has become president, after claiming that he would get us out of our various never-ending wars, U.S. bombing has surged, not only against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq but in Afghanistan as well. It has driven up the civilian death toll there even as "friendly" Afghan forces are sometimes mistaken for the enemy and killed , too. Air strikes from Somalia to Yemen have also been on the rise under Trump, while civilian casualties due to U.S. bombing continue to be underreported in the American media and downplayed by the Trump administration.

U.S. air campaigns today, deadly as they are, pale in comparison to past ones like the Tokyo firebombing of 1945, which killed more than 100,000 civilians; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year (roughly 250,000); the death toll against German civilians in World War II (at least 600,000); or civilians in the Vietnam War. (Estimates vary, but when napalm and the long-term effects of cluster munitions and defoliants like Agent Orange are added to conventional high-explosive bombs, the death toll in Southeast Asia may well have exceeded one million.) Today's air strikes are more limited than in those past campaigns and may be more accurate, but never confuse a 500-pound bomb with a surgeon's scalpel, even rhetorically. When " surgical " is applied to bombing in today's age of lasers, GPS, and other precision-guidance technologies, it only obscures the very real human carnage being produced by all these American-made bombs and missiles.

This country's propensity for believing that its ability to rain hellfire from the sky provides a winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age. Whether in Korea in the early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, or more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the U.S. may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn't led to ultimate success. In the case of Afghanistan, weapons like the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB (the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military's arsenal), have been celebrated as game changers even when they change nothing. (Indeed, the Taliban only continues to grow stronger , as does the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory, nor closure of any sort; only to yet more destruction.

Such results are contrary to the rationale for air power that I absorbed in a career spent in the U.S. Air Force. (I retired in 2005.) The fundamental tenets of air power that I learned, which are still taught today, speak of decisiveness. They promise that air power, defined as "flexible and versatile," will have "synergistic effects" with other military operations. When bombing is "concentrated," "persistent," and "executed" properly (meaning not micro-managed by know-nothing politicians), air power should be fundamental to ultimate victory. As we used to insist, putting bombs on target is really what it's all about. End of story -- and of thought.

Given the banality and vacuity of those official Air Force tenets, given the twenty-first-century history of air power gone to hell and back, and based on my own experience teaching such history and strategy in and outside the military, I'd like to offer some air power tenets of my own. These are the ones the Air Force didn't teach me, but that our leaders might consider before launching their next "decisive" air campaign.

Ten Cautionary Tenets About Air Power

1. Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with relative impunity doesn't mean that they should. Given the history of air power since World War II, ease of access should never be mistaken for efficacious results.

2. Bombing alone will never be the key to victory. If that were true, the U.S. would have easily won in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. American air power pulverized both North Korea and Vietnam (not to speak of neighboring Laos and Cambodia ), yet the Korean War ended in a stalemate and the Vietnam War in defeat. (It tells you the world about such thinking that air power enthusiasts, reconsidering the Vietnam debacle, tend to argue the U.S. should have bombed even more -- lots more .) Despite total air supremacy, the recent Iraq War was a disaster even as the Afghan War staggers on into its 18th catastrophic year.

3. No matter how much it's advertised as "precise," "discriminate," and "measured," bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk ) rarely is. The deaths of innocents are guaranteed. Air power and those deaths are joined at the hip, while such killings only generate anger and blowback, thereby prolonging the wars they are meant to end.

Consider, for instance, the "decapitation" strikes launched against Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and his top officials in the opening moments of the Bush administration's invasion of 2003. Despite the hype about that being the beginning of the most precise air campaign in all of history, 50 of those attacks, supposedly based on the best intelligence around, failed to take out Saddam or a single one of his targeted officials. They did, however, cause "dozens" of civilian deaths. Think of it as a monstrous repeat of the precision air attacks launched on Belgrade in 1999 against Slobodan Milosevic and his regime that hit the Chinese embassy instead, killing three journalists.

Here, then, is the question of the day: Why is it that, despite all the "precision" talk about it, air power so regularly proves at best a blunt instrument of destruction? As a start, intelligence is often faulty. Then bombs and missiles, even "smart" ones, do go astray. And even when U.S. forces actually kill high-value targets (HVTs), there are always more HVTs out there. A paradox emerges from almost 18 years of the war on terror: the imprecision of air power only leads to repetitious cycles of violence and, even when air strikes prove precise, there always turn out to be fresh targets, fresh terrorists, fresh insurgents to strike.

4. Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely works. If it did, the U.S. would have swept to victory in Vietnam. In Lyndon Johnson's presidency, for instance, Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-1968), a graduated campaign of bombing, was meant to, but didn't, convince the North Vietnamese to give up their goal of expelling the foreign invaders -- us -- from South Vietnam. Fast-forward to our era and consider recent signals sent to North Korea and Iran by the Trump administration via B-52 bomber deployments, among other military "messages." There's no evidence that either country modified its behavior significantly in the face of the menace of those baby-boomer-era airplanes.

5. Air power is enormously expensive. Spending on aircraft, helicopters, and their munitions accounted for roughly half the cost of the Vietnam War. Similarly, in the present moment, making operational and then maintaining Lockheed Martin's boondoggle of a jet fighter, the F-35, is expected to cost at least $1.45 trillion over its lifetime. The new B-21 stealth bomber will cost more than $100 billion simply to buy. Naval air wings on aircraft carriers cost billions each year to maintain and operate. These days, when the sky's the limit for the Pentagon budget, such costs may be (barely) tolerable. When the money finally begins to run out, however, the military will likely suffer a serious hangover from its wildly extravagant spending on air power.

6. Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading. Command of the high ground is not synonymous with god-like "total situational awareness ." It can instead prove to be a kind of delusion, while war practiced in its spirit often becomes little more than an exercise in destruction. You simply can't negotiate a truce or take prisoners or foster other options when you're high above a potential battlefield and your main recourse is blowing up people and things.

7. Air power is inherently offensive. That means it's more consistent with imperial power projection than with national defense . As such, it fuels imperial ventures, while fostering the kind of " global reach, global power " thinking that has in these years had Air Force generals in its grip.

8. Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens wars rather than shortening them. Consider Vietnam again. In the early 1960s, the Air Force argued that it alone could resolve that conflict at the lowest cost (mainly in American bodies). With enough bombs, napalm, and defoliants, victory was a sure thing and U.S. ground troops a kind of afterthought. (Initially, they were sent in mainly to protect the airfields from which those planes took off.) But bombing solved nothing and then the Army and the Marines decided that, if the Air Force couldn't win, they sure as hell could. The result was escalation and disaster that left in the dust the original vision of a war won quickly and on the cheap due to American air supremacy.

9. Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact over time. The enemy, lacking it, nonetheless learns to adapt by developing countermeasures -- both active (like missiles) and passive (like camouflage and dispersion), even as those being bombed become more resilient and resolute.

10. Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war.

The Road to Perdition

If I had to reduce these tenets to a single maxim, it would be this: all the happy talk about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results.

For this reason, precision warfare is truly an oxymoron. War isn't precise. It's nasty, bloody, and murderous. War's inherent nature -- its unpredictability, horrors, and tendency to outlast its original causes and goals -- isn't changed when the bombs and missiles are guided by GPS. Washington's enemies in its war on terror, moreover, have learned to adapt to air power in a grimly Darwinian fashion and have the advantage of fighting on their own turf.

Who doesn't know the old riddle: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Here's a twenty-first-century air power variant on it: If foreign children die from American bombs but no U.S. media outlets report their deaths, will anyone grieve? Far too often, the answer here in the U.S. is no and so our wars go on into an endless future of global destruction.

In reality, this country might do better to simply ground its many fighter planes, bombers, and drones. Paradoxically, instead of gaining the high ground, they are keeping us on a low road to perdition.

Joiningupthedots , 11 minutes ago link

All off that may be true BUT.......

The myth of Tomahawk has already been dispelled

Countries with reasonable to excellent A2D2 are seriously avoided.

The solution is for Russia to sell equipment and training packages of A2D2 to any country that wants then at BE prices.

Thousands of decoys with spoof emitters and......

Planes take like 3 years to build and pilots take at least 5-6 years to train.

Do the math!

107cicero , 17 minutes ago link

From a marketing/profit perspective , BOMBS are the perfect product.

Insanely expensive, used once.

Rinse and repeat.

Theedrich , 1 hour ago link

In December of 2017, Daniel Ellsberg published a book, "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" . Among many other things, he revealed the actual Strangelovian nature of our military establishment. Most enlightening is his revelation that many in the high command of our nuclear triggers do not trust, or even have contempt for, civilian oversight and control of the military. They covertly regard the presidential leadership as naïve and inept, though it would be professional suicide to admit such an attitude openly.

Comes now 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕹𝖊𝖜 𝖄𝖔𝖗𝖐 𝕿𝖎𝖒𝖊𝖘 with the revelation that the Pentagon's Cyber Command has attacked Russia's power grid with software "implants" designed to destroy that grid the instant a mouse click is given, thereby possibly initiating global war. Most alarmingly, the details of this secret action were kept from the President, lest he countermand the operation or leak it to the Russians.

So now we have a general staff that is conducting critical international military operations on its own, with no civilian input, permission or hindrances of any kind. A formula for national suicide, executed by a tiny junta of unelected officers who decide to play nuclear Russian roulette.

We seem to be ineluctably and irreversibly trapped in a state of national dementia.

He–Mene Mox Mox , 2 hours ago link

Just remember this: The U.S. had the technological advantage in Viet Nam, and blasted that country, along with Cambodia, and Laos, with 7.5 million tons of bombs, (more than the entire WWII campaign of 2.25 million tons), and the Vietnamese were still able to kick our *** out of the country by 1975.

Uskatex , 2 hours ago link

There is a 11th tenet: air force operations need airports or aircraft carriers, and these are very vulnerable to modern, high precision missiles. If the enemy has plenty of missiles, your fighters and bombers can be impeded to take off and land, or even be destroyed. Modern aircrafts need very sophisticated and working infrastructures to be operational.

In the case of a full war with Iran, I see all hostile bases and airports destroyed or damaged by Iranian, Hezbollah and Syrian missiles. They have tens of thousand of them - it is 30 years they have been accumulating missiles in prevision of a possible forthcoming war.

Groundround , 44 minutes ago link

You are right. Also, there are many nations with subs and probably more countries have acquired nukes than are willing to admit. I strongly suspect Iran already has nukes. If North Korea has them, I see no reason that Iran wouldn't be even further ahead. They have been under threat of US attacks for my entire lifetime. Anyway, I would not put it past some other countries to hit US coastal cities and then deny any knowledge about who did it. There are many capable and many people have been made enemies by our foreign policy. Surely these people have treaties to help each other should be attack. And why would they make these treaties public and antagonize the US military further. I'm sure there are many well kept secrets out there. We must evolve, or the US and Israel could find it is us against the world.

Wantoknow , 3 hours ago link

War is hell. It has always been so. The failure here is that since World War II all US wars have been fatuously political. Actions have not been taken to win but to posture about moral greatness and the ability to force the enemy to deal without destroying his capacity to resist.

How can you say the US lost in Vietnam when the entire country could have been removed from the face of the Earth? Yes the price of such removal would have been very high but it could have been done. Do such considerations mean that if one withdraws one has lost?

The US won the war in the Pacific but it is now considered an excessive use of force that the US used nuclear weapons to conclude the war. Perhaps the US did not use enough force then to successfully conclude the Vietnam war? Perhaps, it failed to field the right kind of force?

The definition of lost is an interesting one. The practical answer is that the US did lose in many places because it was unwilling to pay the price of victory as publicly expressed. Yet it could have won if it paid the price.

So an interesting question for military types is to ask how to lower the price. What kind of weapons would have been needed to quickly sweep the enemy into oblivion in Vietnam let us say, given the limits of the war? Could the war have been won without ground troops and choppers but with half a million computer controlled drones armed with machine guns and grenades flying in swarms close to the ground?

The factories to produce those weapons could have been located in Thailand or Taiwan or Japan and the product shipped to Vietnam. Since only machines would be destroyed and the drones are obviously meant to substitute for ground troops then how about a million or two million of the drones in place of the half a million ground troops? Could the US, with anachronistic technology to be sure, have won the war for a price that would have been acceptable to the US?

The idea here is that one constructs an army, robot or otherwise, than can destroy the enemy it is going to fight at a price which is acceptable. This is actually a form of asymmetric warfare which requires a thorough understanding of the enemy and his capabilities. The US did not enter Vietnam with such an army but with one not meant to serve in Vietnam and whose losses would be deeply resented at home. The price of victory was too high.

But this does not mean that the US cannot win. It only means that the commitment to win in a poorly thought out war must be great enough to pay the price of victory. This may be a stupid thing to do but it does not mean that it cannot be done. One cannot assume that the US will never again show sufficient commitment to win.

wildfry , 5 hours ago link

Victory means you get to write your own ******** version of history.The most devastating civilian bombing campaign in human history is not even mentioned in this article. The US fire bombing of 30 major cities in Korea with the death toll estimated at between 1.2 million and 1.6 million. I bet most US citizens aren't even aware of this atrocity or that the military requested Truman to authorize the use of nuclear warheads which he, thankfully, declined to do.

herbivore , 5 hours ago link

What does the word "victory" mean? It means whatever the rulers want it to mean. In this case, "victory" is synonymous with prolongation and expansion of warmaking around the world. Victory does not mean an end to combat. In fact, victory, in the classic sense, means defeat, at least from the standpoint of those who profit from war. If someone were to come up with a cure for cancer, it would mean a huge defeat for the cancer industry. Millions would lose their jobs. CEO's would lose their fat pay packages. Therefore, we need to be clearheaded about this, and recognize that victory is not what you think it is.

sonoftx , 5 hours ago link

Talked with a guy recently. He is a pilot. He flies planes over Afghanistan. He is a private contractor.

The program began under the Air Force. It then was taken over by the Army. It is now a private contractor.

There are approx 400 pilots in country at a time with 3 rotations. He told me what he gets paid. $200,000 and up.

They go up with a NSA agent running the equipment in back. He state that the dumbass really does not know what the plane is capable of. They collect all video, audio, infrared, and more? (You have to sense when to stop asking questions)

I just wanted to know the logistics of the info gathered.

So, the info is gathered. The NSA officer then gets with the CIA and the State Dept to see what they can release to the end user. The end user is the SOCOM. After it has been through review then the info is released to SOCOM.

So with all of this info on "goatherders" we still cannot pinpoint and defeat the "enemy"? No. Too many avenues of profit and deceit and infighting. It will always be. May justice here and abroad win in the end.

Concentrate on the true enemies. It is not your black, or Jewish, or brown, or Muslim neighbor. It is the owners of the Fed, Dow chemical, the Rockefellers, McDonnel Douglas and on and on and on and on and on and on..............

ardent , 6 hours ago link

The ROAD to perdition passes through APARTHEID Israhell.

"It does not take a genius to figure out that the United States... has no vital interests at stake in places like Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq. Who is driving the process and benefiting? Israel is clearly the intended beneficiary... " – Philip Giraldi, Former CIA officer.

Boogity , 6 hours ago link

As Dubya famously said they hate us for our freedoms not because we've been dropping bombs on 'em for a couple of decades.

HideTheWeenie , 6 hours ago link

Bombing and war tech looks pretty cool in movies and controlled demonstrations. On reality, it doesn't get you too far. Never has.

Boots on the ground is what wins wars and all the generals know that. So do our enemy combatants.

On the ground, your chances of dying are 5-10% of your chances of getting maimed or permanently disabled, which are pretty high.

Maybe that's why we're letting in all the illegals, so they can fight our next war(s).

[Jun 18, 2019] Gina Haspel What to Know About the New Director of the CIA

May 08, 2019 | fortune.com
Gina Haspel is facing a Congressional grilling as her confirmation hearings for the CIA director's position get underway.

Should she overcome it, she'll be the first woman to hold the director's job. It's a high profile position, but Haspel has been a pretty low profile person up until this point. So who is Trump's nominee to run the government's spy agency?

Haspel, who would replace new secretary of state Mike Pompeo , has been with the agency since 1985, spending much of her career undercover. She has received several awards, including the George H. W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism and the Presidential Rank Award, the highest award in the federal civil service. She also has overseen the torture of some terror suspects , which is what critics and former ambassadors are worried about.

A 2017 New York Times report says Haspel, in 2002, oversaw the torture of two suspects at a secret prison in Thailand and later was involved in the destruction of videotapes documenting that torture.

One of those prisoners was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, had his head repeatedly slammed into walls , and endured other harsh methods before interrogators decided he had no useful information to provide, says the Times .

As a result of such torture, she was shifted out of her role as head of the CIA's clandestine service.

Haspel was picked to run the CIA's clandestine operations unit in 2013, but Senator Dianne Feinstein , who was the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time, blocked the promotion because of Haspel's history of torture.

Within the agency, though, Haspel is reportedly widely respected – and has support from members of both the Bush and Obama administrations. Where she stands personally on issues such as extreme interrogation techniques is an unknown, as she has not offered any public comments on policy, as you would expect for an undercover officer.

And that's what Senators are hoping to learn more about as their questioning gets underway.

[Jun 18, 2019] More NSA Documents Released

May 07, 2019 | rightoftheright.com

By ROTR Team 6 Comments

Declassified documents show President John Kennedy in 1963 warned Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol that U.S. support for the young country would be "seriously jeopardized" if Israel did not allow the United States periodic inspections of Israel's nuclear reactor to make sure Israel was not manufacturing weapons-grade nuclear material :

A telegram from Kennedy dated July 4, 1963, congratulates Eshkol on assuming the prime ministership after Ben Gurion's resignation and recounts talks between Kennedy and Ben Gurion about inspections at the reactor in Dimona.

"As I wrote Mr. Ben Gurion, this government's commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized if it should be thought that we were unable to obtain reliable information on a subject as vital to peace as Israel's effort in the nuclear field," the telegram said.

The telegram was declassified in the 1990s but was not widely available until last week when the National Security Archives, a project affiliated with George Washington University, posted it on its website.

Kennedy who was otherwise close to Israel was furious with its ostensible nuclear weapons program, fearing that the Soviet Union could use it as leverage to maintain its influence in the Middle East.

Eshkol, caught off guard by the tone of the telegram, took seven weeks to assent, and the twice-yearly inspections continued until 1969 when President Richard Nixon ended them.

Also revealed in the trove of documents the NSA posted is the origin of Israel's oft-repeated credo that it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons -- a deliberately ambiguous statement that left Israel room to develop the weapons, but not arm them.

Shimon Peres, then the deputy defense minister who later would lead the country as prime minister for two stints and then become president, improvised the statement when he was surprised by Kennedy during a meeting Peres had scheduled with Kennedy's adviser, Myer Feldman, who also functioned as the administration's liaison to Israel and the U.S. Jewish community . Unbeknownst to Peres, Kennedy and Feldman had planned the "surprise" encounter.

According to a Hebrew-language Foreign Ministry of Israel account of the April 2 meeting, Kennedy asked Peres into the Oval Office for 30 minutes and questioned him on Israel's nuclear capacity.

"You know that we follow very closely the discovery of any nuclear development in the region," Kennedy said. "This could create a very dangerous situation. For this reason, we monitor your nuclear effort. What could you tell me about this?"

Peres improvised, "I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first."

[Jun 18, 2019] The people in the USA are as good as anywhere, but only as trained as their culture tells them to be. Perhaps the future holds some spark of brightness for the people.

Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

Grieved on April 17, 2019 , · at 1:36 am EST/EDT

... ... ..

The US was always the way Orlov describes its future. It only ever belonged to those who could keep their heads above water. You go under, and you're gone forever, and very quickly forgotten. I don't recommend it as a social system, but that's the system.

But the people, within that system. the people are great people, with remarkable moral fiber, in situations they understand. Those who are breathing air and not water can rightfully enjoy the company of these others, even though many of those others might lately be breathing an air-water mixture – and perhaps even oneself.

It's a poignant thing, these United States. The people are as good as anywhere, but only as trained as their culture tells them to be. Perhaps the future holds some spark of brightness for the people. They were always a transcendent bunch, actually, in a culture founded on spiritual independence – despite all the overlay of consumerist crap. Somehow they uniquely evolved the means of ignoring that crap – playing the TV in the background, for example, while reading college studies – in order to live decent lives.

It's possible this long-remote karma of spiritual longing might still hold some embers. Perhaps the people of the US might rediscover the power of sincere prayer? The power of sincerity? Time alone will tell.

[Jun 17, 2019] America's Legacy of Regime Change by Stephen Kinzer

Notable quotes:
"... For the United States, as for all warlike nations, military power has traditionally been the decisive factor determining whether it wins or loses its campaigns to capture or subdue other countries. World War II was the climax of that bloody history. ..."
"... It was not only the Dulles brothers, however, who brought the United States into the regime-change era in the early 1950s. Eisenhower himself was a fervent advocate of covert action. Officially his defense and security policy, which he called the "New Look," rested on two foundations, a smaller army and an increased nuclear arsenal. In reality, the "New Look" had a third foundation: covert action. Eisenhower may have been the last president to believe that no one would ever discover what he sent the CIA to do. With a soldier's commitment to keeping secrets, he never admitted that he had ordered covert regime-change operations, much less explained why he favored them. ..."
Jun 10, 2019 | www.fff.org

Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War by Lindsey A. O'Rourke (Cornell University Press, 2018); 330 pages.

For most of history, seizing another country or territory was a straightforward proposition. You assembled an army and ordered it to invade. Combat determined the victor. The toll in death and suffering was usually horrific, but it was all done in the open. That is how Alexander overran Persia and how countless conquerors since have bent weaker nations to their will. Invasion is the old-fashioned way.

When the United States joined the race for empire at the end of the 19th century, that was the tactic it used. It sent a large expeditionary force to the Philippines to crush an independence movement, ultimately killing some 200,000 Filipinos. At the other end of the carnage spectrum, it seized Guam without the loss of a single life and Puerto Rico with few casualties. Every time, though, U.S. victory was the result of superior military power. In the few cases when the United States failed, as in its attempt to defend a client regime by suppressing Augusto Cesar Sandino's nationalist rebellion in Nicaragua during the 1920s and 30s, the failure was also the product of military confrontation. For the United States, as for all warlike nations, military power has traditionally been the decisive factor determining whether it wins or loses its campaigns to capture or subdue other countries. World War II was the climax of that bloody history.

After that war, however, something important changed. The United States no longer felt free to land troops on every foreign shore that was ruled by a government it disliked or considered threatening. Suddenly there was a new constraint: the Red Army. If American troops invaded a country and overthrew its government, the Soviets might respond in kind. Combat between American and Soviet forces could easily escalate into nuclear holocaust, so it had to be avoided at all costs. Yet during the Cold War, the United States remained determined to shape the world according to its liking -- perhaps more determined than ever. The United States needed a new weapon. The search led to covert action.

A news agency

During World War II the United States used a covert agency, the Office of Strategic Services, to carry out clandestine actions across Europe and Asia. As soon as the war ended, to the shock of many OSS agents, Harry Truman abolished it. He believed there was no need for such an agency during peacetime. In 1947 he changed his mind and signed the National Security Act, under which the Central Intelligence Agency was established. That marked the beginning of a new era. Covert action replaced overt action as the principal means of projecting American power around the world.

Truman later insisted that he had intended the CIA to serve as a kind of private global news service. "It was not intended as a 'Cloak & Dagger Outfit!'" he wrote. "It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President informed on what was going on in the world [not] to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized." Nonetheless he did not hesitate to use the new CIA for covert action. Its first major campaign, aimed at influencing the 1948 Italian election to ensure that pro-American Christian Democrats would defeat their Communist rivals, was vast in scale and ultimately successful -- setting the pattern for CIA intervention in every Italian election for the next two decades. Yet Truman drew the line at covert action to overthrow governments.

The CIA's covert-action chief, Allen Dulles, twice proposed such projects. In both cases, the target he chose was a government that had inflicted harm on corporations that he and his brother, John Foster Dulles, had represented during their years as partners at the globally powerful Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. In 1952 he proposed that the CIA overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, whose government was carrying out land reform that affected the interests of United Fruit. By one account, State Department officials "hit the roof" when they heard his proposal, and the diplomat David Bruce told him that the Department "disapproves of the entire deal." Then Dulles proposed an operation to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, who had nationalized his country's oil industry. Secretary of State Dean Acheson flatly rejected it.

White House resistance to covert regime-change operations dissolved when Dwight Eisenhower succeeded Truman at the beginning of 1953. Part of the new administration's enthusiasm came from Allen Dulles, Washington's most relentless advocate of such operations, whom Eisenhower named to head the CIA. The fact that he named Dulles's brother as secretary of State ensured that covert operations would have all the necessary diplomatic cover from the State Department. During the Dulles brothers' long careers at Sullivan & Cromwell, they had not only learned the techniques of covert regime change but practiced them. They were masters at marshaling hidden power in the service of their corporate clients overseas. Now they could do the same with all the worldwide resources of the CIA.

It was not only the Dulles brothers, however, who brought the United States into the regime-change era in the early 1950s. Eisenhower himself was a fervent advocate of covert action. Officially his defense and security policy, which he called the "New Look," rested on two foundations, a smaller army and an increased nuclear arsenal. In reality, the "New Look" had a third foundation: covert action. Eisenhower may have been the last president to believe that no one would ever discover what he sent the CIA to do. With a soldier's commitment to keeping secrets, he never admitted that he had ordered covert regime-change operations, much less explained why he favored them. He would, however, have had at least two reasons.

Since Eisenhower had commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II, he was aware of the role that covert operations such as breaking Nazi codes had played in the war victory -- something few other people knew at the time. That would have given him an appreciation for how important and effective such operations could be. His second reason was even more powerful. In Europe he had had the grim responsibility of sending thousands of young men out to die. That must have weighed on him. He saw covert action as a kind of peace project. After all, if the CIA could overthrow a government with the loss of just a few lives, wasn't that preferable to war? Like most Americans, Eisenhower saw a world of threats. He also understood that the threat of nuclear war made overt invasions all but unthinkable. Covert action was his answer. Within a year and a half of his inauguration, the CIA had deposed the governments of both Guatemala and Iran. It went on to other regime-change operations from Albania to Cuba to Indonesia. Successive presidents followed his lead.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was once again free to launch direct military invasions. When it found a leader it didn't like -- such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi -- it deposed him not through covert action, but by returning to the approach it had used before World War II: the force of arms. Covert efforts to overthrow governments have hardly ceased, as any Iranian or Venezuelan could attest. The era when covert action was America's principal weapon in world affairs, however, is over. That makes this a good time to look back.

Metrics for covert action

Books about the Cold War heyday of covert action era are a mini-genre. Lindsey A. O'Rourke's contribution is especially valuable. Unlike many other books built around accounts of CIA plots, Covert Regime Change takes a scholarly and quantitative approach. It provides charts, graphs, and data sets. Meticulous analysis makes this not the quickest read of any book on the subject, but certainly one of the best informed. Chapters on the disastrous effort to overthrow communist rule in Eastern Europe, which cost the lives of hundreds of deceived partisans, and on the covert-action aspects of America's doomed campaign in Vietnam are especially trenchant.

O'Rourke identifies three kinds of covert operations that are aimed at securing perceived friends in power and keeping perceived enemies out: offensive operations to overthrow governments, preventive operations aimed at preserving the status quo, and hegemonic operations aimed at keeping a foreign nation subservient. From 1947 to 1989, by her count, the United States launched 64 covert regime-change operations, while using the overt tool -- war -- just six times. She traces the motivations behind these operations, the means by which they were carried out, and their effects. Her text is based on meticulous analysis of individual operations. Some other books about covert action are rip-roaring yarns. This one injects a dose of
rigorous analysis into a debate that is often based on emotion. That rigor lends credence to her conclusions:

Although these conclusions are not new, they have rarely if ever been presented as the result of such persuasive statistical evidence. Yet even this evidence seems unlikely to force a reassessment of covert action as a way to influence or depose governments. It is an American "addiction." The reasons are many and varied, but one of the simplest is that covert action seems so easy. Changing an unfriendly country's behavior through diplomacy is a long, complex, multi-faceted project. It takes careful thought and planning. Often it requires compromise. Sending the CIA to overthrow a "bad guy" is far more tempting. It's the cheap and easy way out. History shows that it often produces terrible results for both the target country and the United States. To a military and security elite as contemptuous of history as America's, however, that is no obstacle.

Although covert regime-change operations remain a major part of American foreign policy, they are not as effective as they once were. The first victims of CIA overthrows, Prime Minister Mossadegh and President Arbenz, did not understand the tools the CIA had at its disposal and so were easy targets. They were also democratic, meaning that they allowed open societies in which the press, political parties, and civic groups functioned freely -- making them easy for the CIA to penetrate. Later generations of leaders learned from their ignorance. They paid closer attention to their own security, and imposed tightly controlled regimes in which there were few independent power centers that the CIA could manipulate.

If Eisenhower could come back to life, he would see the havoc that his regime-change operations wreaked. After his overthrow of Mossadegh, Iran fell under royal dictatorship that lasted a quarter-century and was followed by decades of rule by repressive mullahs who have worked relentlessly to undermine American interests around the world. The operation he ordered in Guatemala led to a civil war that killed 200,000 people, turning a promising young democracy into a charnel house and inflicting a blow on Central America from which it has never recovered. His campaign against Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, which included the fabrication of a poison kit in a CIA laboratory, helped turn that country into one of the most violent places on Earth.

How would Eisenhower respond to the long-term disasters that followed his covert action victories? He might well have come up with a highly convincing way to excuse himself. It's now clear, he could argue, that covert action to overthrow governments usually has terrible long-term results -- but that was not clear in the 1950s. Eisenhower had no way of knowing that even covert regime-change operations that seem successful at the time could have devastating results decades later.

We today, however, do know that. The careful analysis that is at the center of Covert Regime Change makes clearer than ever that when America sets out to change the world covertly, it usually does more harm than good -- to itself as well as others. O'Rourke contributes to the growing body of literature that clearly explains this sad fact of geopolitics. The intellectual leadership for a national movement against regime-change operations -- overt or covert -- is coalescing. The next step is to take this growing body of knowledge into the political arena. Washington remains the province of those who believe not only that the United States should try to reconfigure the world into an immense American sphere of influence, but that that is an achievable goal. In the Beltway morass of pro-intervention think tanks, members of Congress, and op-ed columnists, America's role in the world is usually not up for debate. Now, as a presidential campaign unfolds and intriguing new currents surge through the American body politic, is an ideal moment for that debate to re-emerge. If it does, we may be surprised to see how many voters are ready to abandon the dogma of regime change and wonder, with George Washington, "Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?"

This article was originally published in the June 2019 edition of Future of Freedom .

This post was written by: Stephen Kinzer Stephen Kinzer is an author and newspaper reporter. He is a veteran New York Times correspondent who has reported from more than 50 countries on five continents. His books include "Overthrow" and "All the Shah's Men".

[Jun 16, 2019] When false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it becomes almost impossible to correct lies.

Jun 16, 2019 | www.politico.com

Leda Cosmides at the University of California, Santa Barbara, points to her work with her colleague John Tooby on the use of outrage to mobilize people: "The campaign was more about outrage than about policies," she says. And when a politician can create a sense of moral outrage, truth ceases to matter. People will go along with the emotion, support the cause and retrench into their own core group identities. The actual substance stops being of any relevance.

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University who studies false beliefs, has found that when false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it becomes almost impossible to correct lies.

... ... ...

As the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain put it, “The great master fallacy of the human mind is believing too much.” False beliefs, once established, are incredibly tricky to correct. A leader who lies constantly creates a new landscape, and a citizenry whose sense of reality may end up swaying far more than they think possible.

[Jun 16, 2019] Cover-Ups and Truth Tellers

Notable quotes:
"... Of course, being cover-ups by the government may make them appear acceptable, at least to a naive public. Many of them are rationalized as necessary for the sake of national "security." And, of course, everyone wants to be "secure," accepting the notion that "people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." ..."
Jun 16, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

In a May, 22, 2019 appearance in the White House Rose Garden, President Donald Trump declared that "I don't do cover-ups ." Various news outlets immediately started to enumerate a long list of bona fide cover-ups associated with the president.

... ... ...

Unfortunately, Trump's behavior is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cover-ups. One can surmise that just by virtue of being the head of the U.S. government, the president -- any president -- must be directly or indirectly associated with hundreds of such evasions. That is because, it can be argued without much paranoia, that every major division of the government is hiding something -- particularly when it comes to foreign activities.

Of course, being cover-ups by the government may make them appear acceptable, at least to a naive public. Many of them are rationalized as necessary for the sake of national "security." And, of course, everyone wants to be "secure," accepting the notion that "people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

The fact that much of this violence is done to other innocent people trying to get a peaceful night's rest is "classified" information. So woe be it to the truth tellers who defy these rationalizations and sound off. For they shall be cast out of our democratic heaven into one of the pits of hell that pass for a U.S. prison -- or, if they are fleet-footed, chased into exile.

[Jun 16, 2019] Trump s Lies vs. Your Brain by Maria Konnikova

Notable quotes:
"... But Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent. ..."
"... Those who have followed Trump's career say his lying isn't just a tactic, but an ingrained habit. ..."
"... Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream ..."
"... In politics, false information has a special power. If false information comports with preexisting beliefs -- something that is often true in partisan arguments -- attempts to refute it can actually backfire , planting it even more firmly in a person's mind. ..."
"... Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University who studies false beliefs, has found that when false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it becomes almost impossible to correct lies. ..."
Jun 16, 2019 | www.politico.com

Maria Konnikova is a contributing writer at the New Yorker and author, most recently, of The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It Every Time .

All presidents lie. Richard Nixon said he was not a crook, yet he orchestrated the most shamelessly crooked act in the modern presidency. Ronald Reagan said he wasn't aware of the Iran-Contra deal; there's evidence he was. Bill Clinton said he did not have sex with that woman; he did, or close enough. Lying in politics transcends political party and era. It is, in some ways, an inherent part of the profession of politicking.

But Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were protecting their reputations; Trump seems to lie for the pure joy of it. A whopping 70 percent of Trump's statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true. (Compare that to the politician Trump dubbed "crooked," Hillary Clinton: Just 26 percent of her statements were deemed false.)

Those who have followed Trump's career say his lying isn't just a tactic, but an ingrained habit. New York tabloid writers who covered Trump as a mogul on the rise in the 1980s and '90s found him categorically different from the other self-promoting celebrities in just how often, and pointlessly, he would lie to them. In his own autobiography, Trump used the phrase "truthful hyperbole," a term coined by his ghostwriter referring to the flagrant truth-stretching that Trump employed, over and over, to help close sales. Trump apparently loved the wording, and went on to adopt it as his own.

On January 20, Trump's truthful hyperboles will no longer be relegated to the world of dealmaking or campaigning. Donald Trump will become the chief executive of the most powerful nation in the world, the man charged with representing that nation globally -- and, most importantly, telling the story of America back to Americans. He has the megaphone of the White House press office, his popular Twitter account and a loyal new right-wing media army that will not just parrot his version of the truth but actively argue against attempts to knock it down with verifiable facts. Unless Trump dramatically transforms himself, Americans are going to start living in a new reality, one in which their leader is a manifestly unreliable source.

What does this mean for the country -- and for the Americans on the receiving end of Trump's constantly twisting version of reality? It's both a cultural question and a psychological one. For decades, researchers have been wrestling with the nature of falsehood: How does it arise? How does it affect our brains? Can we choose to combat it? The answers aren't encouraging for those who worry about the national impact of a reign of untruth over the next four, or eight, years. Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people's sense of themselves, which Trump's clearly do.

***

What happens when a lie hits your brain? The now-standard model was first proposed by Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert more than 20 years ago. Gilbert argues that people see the world in two steps. First, even just briefly, we hold the lie as true: We must accept something in order to understand it. For instance, if someone were to tell us -- hypothetically, of course -- that there had been serious voter fraud in Virginia during the presidential election, we must for a fraction of a second accept that fraud did, in fact, take place. Only then do we take the second step, either completing the mental certification process (yes, fraud!) or rejecting it (what? no way). Unfortunately, while the first step is a natural part of thinking -- it happens automatically and effortlessly -- the second step can be easily disrupted. It takes work: We must actively choose to accept or reject each statement we hear. In certain circumstances, that verification simply fails to take place.

As Gilbert writes, human minds, "when faced with shortages of time, energy, or conclusive evidence, may fail to unaccept the ideas that they involuntarily accept during comprehension."

When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything.

Our brains are particularly ill-equipped to deal with lies when they come not singly but in a constant stream...

... ... ...

In politics, false information has a special power. If false information comports with preexisting beliefs -- something that is often true in partisan arguments -- attempts to refute it can actually backfire , planting it even more firmly in a person's mind. Trump won over Republican voters, as well as alienated Democrats, by declaring himself opposed to "Washington," "the establishment" and "political correctness," and by stoking fears about the Islamic State, immigrants and crime. Leda Cosmides at the University of California, Santa Barbara, points to her work with her colleague John Tooby on the use of outrage to mobilize people:

"The campaign was more about outrage than about policies," she says. And when a politician can create a sense of moral outrage, truth ceases to matter. People will go along with the emotion, support the cause and retrench into their own core group identities. The actual substance stops being of any relevance.

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University who studies false beliefs, has found that when false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it becomes almost impossible to correct lies. When people read an article beginning with George W. Bush's assertion that Iraq may pass weapons to terrorist networks, which later contained the fact that Iraq didn't actually possess any WMDs at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the initial misperception persisted among Republicans -- and, indeed, was frequently strengthened.

In the face of a seeming assault on their identity, they didn't change their minds to conform with the truth: Instead, amazingly, they doubled down on the exact views that were explained to be wrong.

It's easy enough to correct minor false facts if they aren't crucial to your sense of self. Alas, nothing political fits into that bucket.

With regard to Trump specifically, Nyhan points out that claims related to ethno-nationalism -- Trump's declaration early in the campaign that Mexico was sending "rapists" across the border, for instance -- get at the very core of who we are as humans, which "may make people less willing or able to evaluate the statement empirically." If you already believe immigrants put your job at risk, who's to say the chastity of your daughters isn't in danger, too? Or as Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, once Trump makes that emotional connection, "He could say what he wants, and they'll follow him."

... ... ...

[Jun 16, 2019] Cult of the Irrelevant -- National Security Eggheads Academics

Jun 16, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

It also explains the rise of think tanks, which are more pliant than academics but provide similar marketing support. As Benjamin Friedman and I wrote in a 2015 article on the subject, think tanks undertake research with an operational mindset: that is, "the approach of a passenger riding shotgun who studies the map to find the ideal route, adjusts the engine if need be, and always accepts the destination without protest."

As former senator Olympia Snowe once put it, "you can find a think tank to buttress any view or position, and then you give it the aura of legitimacy and credibility by referring to their report." Or consider the view of Rory Stewart, now a member of parliament in the UK, but once an expert on Afghanistan who was consulted on the Afghan surge but opposed it:

It's like they're coming in and saying to you, "I'm going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?" And you say, "I don't think you should drive your car off the cliff." And they say, "No, no, that bit's already been decided -- the question is whether to wear a seatbelt." And you say, "Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt." And then they say, "We've consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart, and he says "

Or look at how policymakers themselves define relevance. Stephen Krasner, an academic who became a policymaker, lamented the uselessness of much academic security studies literature because "[e]ven the most convincing empirical findings may be of no practical use because they do not include factors that policy makers can manipulate."

The explicit claim here is that for scholarship to be of any practical use, it must include factors that policymakers can manipulate. This reflects a strong bias toward action, even in relatively restrained presidencies.

To take two recent examples, the Obama administration blew past voluminous academic literature suggesting the Libya intervention was likely to disappoint. President Barack Obama himself asked the CIA to analyze success in arming insurgencies before making a decision over what to do in Syria. The CIA replied with a study showing that arming and financing insurgencies rarely works. Shortly thereafter, Obama launched a billion-dollar effort to arm and finance insurgents in Syria.

♦♦♦

As Desch tracks the influence of scholars on foreign policy across the 20th century, a pattern becomes clear: where scholars agree with policy, they are relevant. Where they do not, they are not.

In several of the cases Desch identifies where scholars disagreed with policy, they were right and the policymakers were tragically, awfully wrong. In the instances where scholars differed with policy at high levels, Desch blames their "unrealistic expectations" for causing "wartime social scientists to overlook the more modest, but real, contribution they actually made" to policy. But why would we want scholars to trim their sails in this way? And why should social scientists want to be junior partners in doomed enterprises?

Social scientists have produced reams of qualitative and historically focused research with direct relevance to policy. They publish blog posts, tweets, excerpts, op-eds, and video encapsulations of their work. The only thing left for them to do is to convey their findings via interpretive dance, and a plan for doing that is probably in the works already. In the meantime, it should be simultaneously heartening and discouraging for policy-inclined scholars to realize that It's Not Us, It's Them.

In a country as powerful and secure as the United States, elites can make policy built on shaky foundations. Eventually, the whole thing may collapse. Scholars should focus on pointing out these fundamental flaws -- and thinking about how they might help rebuild.

Justin Logan is director of programs and a research associate at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University.

Oleg Gark June 11, 2019 at 9:03 pm

[Karl Rove] said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

Experts, shmexperts! Who needs realism when you're creating your own reality.

EliteCommInc. , says: June 12, 2019 at 3:56 am
I was thinking -- the academics involved in policy are in think tanks and then

"It also explains the rise of think tanks, which are more pliant than academics but provide similar marketing support."

but what I found intriguing is the assessment concerning most of the research being faulty or dead wrong in various ways.

Given that and the real world success of the think tank players who develop foreign policy Dr. Desch should consider the matter a wash --

Those on the field aren't scoring any big points. in fact they seem intend on handing the ball over to the opposing team repeatedly.

trying to predict and then replicate human behavior is a very dicey proposition.

enjoyed the reference to the ongoing debate quantative analysis verses qualitative.

EliteCommInc. , says: June 12, 2019 at 4:05 am
Sadly when the numbers quantative research ruled they could really be abusive in stating what the data meant.

Nowhere is this more evident than with crime stats.

polistra , says: June 12, 2019 at 8:23 am
Excellent article.

Another question occurs to me: Who are the executives or politicians trying to impress when they bring in captive consultants or scholars? Ordinary people (customers or voters) don't care. Customers just want a good product, and voters just want sane policies.

Competing leaders know the game and don't bother to listen.

So who's the audience for the "thinkers"?

JohnT , says: June 12, 2019 at 9:01 am
In so much of the world's leadership today it is not science that is being ignored and corrupted so much as rational thought and a personal insight mature enough to find indisputable the need for the opinion of others.
But, to this post's point, I once had a statistician with a doctorate in his profession casually state their numbers predicted Stalin would fail. In response, my thought was when in the history of the known galaxy did putting a soulless person in charge ever not fail? Compassion alone would predict that outcome.
Taras 77 , says: June 12, 2019 at 12:14 pm
The absolute most corrupting influence in current foreign policy discussion is the growth of the mis-named growth of "think" tanks. One can discern immediately the message when determining author and organization.

Moar war, russia, iran, et al are threats, moar military spending, support israel at all costs, etc, etc.

These 'think' tanks are extremely well funded by oligarchs and foreign money so the bottom line is directed towards pre-selected objectives. Even the state dept is getting into the act to atk pro-Iran activists.

Where is the level playing field?

Kouros , says: June 12, 2019 at 3:20 pm
While the academics might be deemed irrelevant when views differ, the government in-house analysts might even loose their jobs if their positions differ from those of the decision makers. I know I lost mine, and it wasn't even in foreign policy or national security
Christian J Chuba , says: June 13, 2019 at 7:13 am
It's the mentality of forever war that considers diversity subversive.

The purpose of Think Tanks and foreign policy experts (misnamed) is to rally the troops against our enemies list, not to improve our interaction with the rest of the world but to defeat them. To them, it is always WW2. Yemen must die because we can connect them to Iran; they are Dresden.

BTW I know the author was talking about actual experts. They have all been purged and dismissed as Arabist or enemy sympathizers. Track records don't matter, to them we are at war and will always be so.

C. L. H. Daniels , says: June 13, 2019 at 1:26 pm
President Barack Obama himself asked the CIA to analyze success in arming insurgencies before making a decision over what to do in Syria. The CIA replied with a study showing that arming and financing insurgencies rarely works. Shortly thereafter, Obama launched a billion-dollar effort to arm and finance insurgents in Syria.

*Silently screams in frustration*

And this is why I ended up ultimately disappointed with Obama. The man was utterly incapable of standing up to what passes for conventional wisdom inside the Beltway. "Hope and change," my butt. The hoped for change never did arrive in the end.

Say what you will about Trump, he surely doesn't give a flying fart about wisdom, conventional or otherwise. Instead of driving the car off a cliff, he just sets it on fire from the get go to save on gas.

Dr. Diprospan , says: June 14, 2019 at 4:06 pm
I liked the article.
A good reminder that if people did not heed the divine warning in Paradise,
but chose the disastrous advice of the serpent, then what can we expect
from modern politicians? Wrong, dangerous behavior seems to be inherent
in the human mentality, otherwise who would smelt metals, descend into mines,
discover America, study radiation?
Cult of the Irrelevant reminds me of the 80 and 20 statistical, empirical principle,
where out of 100 things, articles, words, recommendations, 20% are useful,
80% are useless. However for 20 useful percent to form, you need a statistical
pressure of 80 useless.
"Practice is the criterion of truth." Having eaten the forbidden apple, people were driven out of paradise, but instead they learned to distinguish between good and evil.
Without this property, it would be impossible to recognize "the effective treatments"significantly exaggerated by dishonest pharmacologists..

[Jun 15, 2019] The queen of RussiaGate is going to be asking questions at the debates

MadCow disease of neoliberal MSM is spreading...
Jun 15, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

snoopydawg on Tue, 06/11/2019 - 5:01pm

@skod

So a flaming Russia conspiracist is going to moderate the first Democratic presidential debates. What a joke https://t.co/6QWPrS2cZk

-- Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 11, 2019

Pluto's Republic on Tue, 06/11/2019 - 5:25pm
Scenes we'd like to see:

@snoopydawg

Anyone want to bet that she will ask someone a question about what they will do to keep Russia from interfering with the election again?

I would love to see that. All answers will be the wrong answer.

[Jun 15, 2019] False flags here, false flags there, false flags everywhere. All too further the aims of the masters of the universe

Jun 15, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Milton

Interesting that this Israeli-First traitor Clawson mentions Lincoln and Ft. Sumter. He finally admits what genuine historians of the Civil War long knew: Lincoln was a warmonger and tyrant, not an emancipator. The Civil war was fought to eliminate true freedom and equality in this country and it has been downhill ever since. The working class and soldier-class in America today are slaves in every sense of the word. Slaves to Zion. No wonder the certified warmonger and racist Lincoln is worshiped equally by Left and Right today, whilst genuine American patriots like Robert E. Lee have their legacy torn down. Lincoln was the proto-Neocon. Tom Dilorenzo summed up the real Lincoln when he wrote in Lincoln Unmasked:

"Imagine that California seceded from the union and an American president responded with the carpet bombing of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco that destroyed 90 percent of those cities. Such was the case with General Sherman's bombardment of Atlanta; a naval blockade; a blocking off of virtually all trade; the eviction of thousands of residents from their homes (as occurred in Atlanta in 1864); the destruction of most industries and farms; massive looting of private property by a marauding army; and the killing of one out of four males of military age while maiming for life more than double that number. Would such an American president be considered a 'great statesman' or a war criminal? The answer is obvious.

A statesman would have recognized the state's right to secede, as enshrined in the Tenth Amendment, among other places, and then worked diligently to persuade the seceded state that a reunion was in its best interest. Agreat statesman, or even a modest one, would not have impulsively plunged the entire nation into a bloody war.

Lincoln's warmongering belligerence and his invasion of all the Southern states in response to Fort Sumter (where no one was harmed or killed) caused the upper South -- Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas -- to secede after originally voting to remain in the Union. He refused to meet with Confederate commissioners to discuss peace and even declined a meeting with Napoleon III of France, who offered to broker a peace agreement. No genuine statesman would have behaved in such a way.

After Fort Sumter, Lincoln thanked naval commander Gustavus Fox for assisting him in manipulating the South Carolinians into firing at Fort Sumter. A great statesman does not manipulate his own people into starting one of the bloodiest wars in human history."

mathias alexand
Here's a man who holds a press conference to announce a secret plan. Only in America.
Gezzah Potts
False flags here, false flags there, false flags everywhere. All too further the aims of the 'masters of the universe'. We know who was responsible for the tanker attacks. Who are the 3 countries absolutely desperate to take Iran down and install a completely pliant puppet regime answerable to Washington, Tel Aviv and to a lesser extent Riyadh. And creatures like Clawson, and all the other vermin can only see $$$$. Thats all they care about. Opening up more markets to further enrich themselves. I echo the other commenters also. The evil men stoop to for greed, power and control. Psychopaths.
harry law
The Foreign Office issued a statement saying: "It is almost certain that a branch of the Iranian military – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – attacked the two tankers on 13 June. No other state or non-state actor could plausibly have been responsible."
Unbelievable, The UK vassal will use this to as one more reason to evade their responsibilities in implementing the JCPOA.
Gezzah Potts
Well they would say that, wouldn't they. The UK vassal state will spout any peice of crap in their assigned role as vassal state. Australia is just as gushingly sycophantic and cravenly jellified.
mark
Maybe it's "highly likely."
Gezzah Potts
Like an apple is green? They must think we're complete amoeba's to believe this. Sigh.
William HBonney
A Riyadh/Tel Aviv conspiracy. Genius!
Gezzah Potts
Er . just a rough guess Bill going on the belligerent foaming at the mouth by people in those places along with the likes of Bolton and Pompeo. In fact, you can probably go all the way back to about 1980 or so.
mark
I think the real giveaway was when all three rogue states openly stated their intention of doing this 1,000 times over the past 10 years. That was the crucial clue Sherlock Holmes was looking for.
Wilmers31
And who funds the Washington Institute? Last time I looked the International Crisis Group existed thanks to Soros and is usually treated like a serious organisation.

Many Europeans are not in love with the idea of war with Iran, just to achieve obedience to the US. 90 million people is bigger than Germany.

wardropper
These are the shysters, the spivs and the con men of bygone times. They are the ones who lurked at street corners, waiting for someone to come along who was gullible enough to buy the Moon from them.
But, for some reason, they are all in politics today.
Now how could that be?

Only because there are people whom it currently suits to use shysters, spivs and con men in order to create enough chaos for us to want to give up and just let those people have their way.

I agree with Rhys below. There is no more disgusting example of sub-humanity to be found on earth than these warmongers.
To deal with them, however, we will have to realize that their "philosophy", if you can call it that, runs very deep. It didn't just enter their heads last week.
They are reared and trained in it.

It will be a tough battle.

wardropper
I should add that, in bygone times, the police and the law were usually able to deal with the shysters, spivs and con men, since their lack of conscience often gave them away.
The modern version, however, which has moved into politics, was shrewd enough to use a few decades of bribery and threats in order to build around itself a nice little shell, through which the law simply cannot penetrate, except on special occasions, mainly for show.
Rhys Jaggar
There is a big cabal of warmongers who stoke the fuel but never see action. I find those people more disgusting than anyone on earth.

Draft dodgers, academics, 'historians' etc etc.

Ball-less pricks is what I call them .

mark
All fully paid up members of the Bill Clinton Light Infantry.
William HBonney
Yeah, well I'm not a great fan of those who would appease Assad, Putin, Hussein, Gaddafi

You must be so proud.

andyoldlabour
The appeasers would include the US who fully supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, who provided him with chemical weapons and logistical help in using those weapons, which killed around 50,000 Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians.
The same appeasers armed and funded the Taliban (Mujahideen) against the Soviets.
The US are the single largest force for terrorism the World has ever seen.
William HBonney
The easiest, and perhaps best metric by which to judge a country, is 'do people aspire to live there? '.

I see you admire the Soviet Union, but at its dissolution, people were queuing to leave. And yet the US, and the UK, according to you, iniquitous places of tyranny, are oversubscribed. Could it be, that for all your implied erudition, you are merely a bellend?

axisofoil
You must be a big fan of CNN and the NYT. Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?
BigB
Well, even as a pacifist: if that is his sentiment – I hope he has sons or daughters in the military stationed in CENTCOM in Qatar. I bet he hasn't, though.
Rhisiart Gwilym
He should be right there on the frontline himself. That would straighten the disgusting creep's ideas out about the 'usefulness' of deliberately provoking war

[Jun 15, 2019] Overfill Crowds in NYC for Tulsi Town Halls

Notable quotes:
"... Well I saw/heard Tulsi on Joe Rogan too and was very impressed, her heart is in the right place and she is anti war. However what worries me most is that Israel is only waiting for one more surgical strike on it's enemies per Israel's shopping list revealed by Gen. Wesley Clark and we all know that is Iran. The US will probably have to sacrifice a warship to Mossad in October to kick this one off. ..."
Jun 15, 2019 | www.unz.com

Fabius , says: June 14, 2019 at 9:52 pm GMT

Overfill Crowds in NYC for Tulsi Town Halls

youtube.com

Well I saw/heard Tulsi on Joe Rogan too and was very impressed, her heart is in the right place and she is anti war. However what worries me most is that Israel is only waiting for one more surgical strike on it's enemies per Israel's shopping list revealed by Gen. Wesley Clark and we all know that is Iran. The US will probably have to sacrifice a warship to Mossad in October to kick this one off.

Tulsi in all liklihood will be swept away by events and I have a sneaky suspicion she is the 'wildcard candidate' insurance for the 'kingmakers' after all she has kissed the AIPAC arse is member of CFR etc – she was after all on the fast track before she cried 'foul'.

She is far more honest than most but sadly is still compromised and there is no getting around that one. She owes them and they never forget. My 'outside choice' is the formidably 'loose cannon' Robert David Steele and his partnering with Cynthia McKinney.

The Zionists are in open war with them both. If they can wake up the black voters en masse to who runs America now it could cause the biggest shock to the US system since the McCarthy purge. Steele is appealing to 'Truthers', independents, and Alt Right Constitutionalists and McKinney to the working class and Black vote.

Trump is trying to exploit the same groups but next time around they will be wiser. The problem now is the Evangelist 'Christian Zionist' rump. Kushner/Trump and Netanyahu have got them all at fever pitch for the 2nd coming.

[Jun 15, 2019] 7 Reasons to Doubt US Version of Gulf-of-Oman Incident Consortiumnews

Jun 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

June 14, 2019 • 16 Comments

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

<img src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/caitlin-johnstone-130x130.jpeg" alt="" width="100" height="100" /> I n a move that surprised exactly zero people, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has wasted no time scrambling to blame Iran for damage done to two sea vessels in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, citing exactly zero evidence.

"This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high-degree of sophistication," Pompeo told the press in a statement .

"The United States will defend its forces, interests, and stand with our partners and allies to safeguard global commerce and regional stability. And we call upon all nations threatened by Iran's provocative acts to join us in that endeavor," Pompeo concluded before hastily shambling off, taking exactly zero questions .

me title=

Here are seven reasons to be extremely skeptical of everything Pompeo said:

No. 1: Pompeo is a known liar, especially when it comes to Iran.

Pompeo has a well-established history of circulating blatant lies about Iran. He recently told an audience at Texas A&M University that when he was leading the CIA, "We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/DPt-zXn05ac?feature=oembed

No. 2: The US empire is known to use lies and false flags to start wars.

The U.S.-centralized power alliance has an extensive and well-documented history of advancing preexisting military agendas using lies, false flags and psyops to make targeted governments appear to be the aggressors. This is such a well-established pattern that "Gulf of Tonkin" briefly trended on Twitter after the Gulf of Oman incident. Any number of government agencies could have been involved from any number of the nations in this alliance, including the U.S., the U.K., Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Israel.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yw0-ASR4sr8?feature=oembed

No. 3: John Bolton has openly endorsed lying to advance military agendas.

I wrote an article about this last month because the Trump administration had already begun rapidly escalating against Iran in ways that happen to align perfectly with the longtime agendas of Trump's psychopathic Iran hawk National security adviser. At that time people were so aware of the possibility that Bolton might involve himself in staging yet another Middle Eastern war based on lies that The Onion was already spoofing it .

On a December 2010 episode of Fox News' "Freedom Watch," Bolton and the show's host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications , and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.

"Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that's appropriate," Bolton said . "You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies."

"Do you really believe that?" asked an incredulous Napolitano.

"Absolutely," Bolton replied.

"You would lie in order to preserve the truth?"

"If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it," Bolton answered.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/MbVtROU9J_E?feature=oembed

This would be the same John Bolton who has been paid exorbitant speaking fees by the pro-regime change MEK terror cult , promising the cult in a 2017 speech that they'd be celebrating regime change in Tehran together before 2019. This would also be the same John Bolton who once threatened to murder an OPCW official's children if he didn't stop getting in the way of his Iraq war agenda.

No. 4: Using false flags to start a war with Iran is already an established idea in the DC swamp.

Back in 2012 at a forum for the Washington Institute of Near East Policy think tank, the group's Director of Research Patrick Clawson openly talked about the possibility of using a false flag to provoke a war with Iran, citing the various ways the U.S. has done exactly that with its previous wars.

"I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it's very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to war with Iran," Clawson began .

https://www.youtube.com/embed/PfoaLbbAix0?feature=oembed

"Which leads me to conclude that if in fact compromise is not coming, that the traditional way that America gets to war is what would be best for U.S. interests," Clawson added. "Some people might think that Mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us into the war you may recall we had to wait for Pearl Harbor. Some people might think that Mr. Wilson wanted to get us into World War One; you may recall we had to wait for the Lusitania episode. Some people might think that Mr. Johnson wanted to get us into Vietnam; you may recall we had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin episode. We didn't go to war with Spain until the USS Maine exploded. And may I point out that Mr. Lincoln did not feel that he could call out the Army until Fort Sumter was attacked, which is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which the South Carolinians said would cause an attack."

"So if, in fact, the Iranians aren't going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the war," Clawson continued. "One can combine other means of pressure with sanctions. I mentioned that explosion on August 17th. We could step up the pressure. I mean look people, Iranian submarines periodically go down. Some day, one of them might not come up. Who would know why? [Smattering of sociopathic laughter from the crowd.] We can do a variety of things, if we wish to increase the pressure (I'm not advocating that) but I'm just suggesting that this is not an either/or proposition -- just sanctions have to succeed or other things. We are in the game of using covert means against the Iranians. We could get nastier at that."

No. 5: The US State Department has already been running psyops to manipulate the public Iran narrative.

State Department officials admitted to congressional staff at a closed-door meeting on Monday that a $1.5 million troll farm had gone "beyond the scope of its mandate" by aggressively smearing American critics of the Trump administration's Iran policy as propagandists for the Iranian government, according to a new report from The Independent . That "mandate" had reportedly consisted of "countering propaganda from Iran," also known as conducting anti-Iran propaganda.

"Critics in Washington have gone further, saying that the programme resembled the type of troll farms used by autocratic regimes abroad," says The Independent .

"One woman behind the harassment campaign, a longtime Iranian-American activist, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the State Department over the years to promote 'freedom of expression and free access to information,'" the report reads.

No. 6: The Gulf of Oman narrative makes no sense.

One of the ships damaged in the attacks was Japanese-owned, and the other was bound for Japan . This happened just as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Tehran attempting to negotiate a de-escalation between the U.S. and Iran with Trump's blessing, and just after Iran had released a prisoner accused of conducting espionage for the U.S. in what many took to be a gesture of good faith.

Iran has been conducting itself with remarkable restraint in the face of relentless sanctions and provocations from the U.S. and its allies. It wouldn't make much sense for it to suddenly abandon that restraint with attacks on sea vessels, then rescue their crew , then deny perpetrating the attacks , during a time of diplomatic exchanges and while trying to preserve the nuclear deal with Europe. If Tehran did perpetrate the attacks in order to send a strong message to the Americans, it would have been a very mixed message sent in a very weird way with very odd timing.

No. 7: Even if Iran did perpetrate the attack, Pompeo would still be lying.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q4G8USEdhuY?feature=oembed

Pompeo's statement uses the words "unprovoked" twice and "Iran's provocative acts" once, explicitly claiming that the U.S. empire was just minding its own business leaving Iran alone when it was attacked out of the blue by a violent aggressor. Sometimes the things put out by the U.S. State Department feel like they're conducting experiments on us, just to test the limits of our stupidity.

As noted in this article by Moon of Alabama and this discussion on the Ron Paul Liberty Report , the U.S. has been provoking Iran with extremely aggressive and steadily tightening sanctions, which means that even if Tehran is behind the attacks, it would not be the aggressor and the attacks would most certainly not have been "unprovoked." Economic sanctions are an act of war ; if China were to do to America's economy what America is doing to Iran's, the U.S. would be in a hot war with China immediately. It could technically be possible that Iran is pushing back on U.S. aggressions and provocations, albeit in a strange and neoconservatively convenient fashion.

Either way, we have seen exactly zero evidence supporting Pompeo's claims, so anyone you see hastening to blame Iran for the Gulf of Oman incident is either a war whore or a slobbering moron, or both. Knowing what we know about the U.S.-centralized empire and its pre-existing regime change agenda against Iran , there is no reason to believe Pompeo and many reasons not to.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/FNt7s_Wed_4?feature=oembed

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium . Follow her work on Facebook , Twitter , or her website . She has a podcast and a new book " Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers ." This article was re-published with permission.

Allan Millard , June 15, 2019 at 01:51

Caitlin Johnstone could have added several more reasons to doubt. For example, there is no evidence that the regime in Iran is now or ever has been suicidal. Another might be that weighing what Pompeo says against what his Iranian counterpart says on any given day about the same subject leads to invidious conclusions about Pompeo. And yet another might be to recall that Iran has about 200 years of not attacking others. And the USA?

bob , June 15, 2019 at 01:46

I hate amerika

Tom Kath , June 15, 2019 at 00:44

My father grew up in nazi Germany and taught us 3 basic rules about how to interpret the news media. – Always ask yourself
1/ Why this? (of all the millions of happenings in the world)
2/ Why now? (There is always some strategic reason that you are being focused on this at this time)
3/ Why in this way? (Any occurrence can be presented to make someone appear favourably or unfavourably)

The nazi press was no better than our MSM at teaching us this.

Joe S. , June 15, 2019 at 00:19

I don't know how they expect us to buy the narrative of Iran wishing to bomb a Japanese tanker as Japan is attempting to overstep US's ridiculous sanctions and develop business ties with Iran.

This makes me believe they were not only attempting a false flag, but also sending Japan a message in the process.

dasit , June 15, 2019 at 00:08

fire your proofreader
it's spelled "gulf of tonkin"

Don Bacon , June 15, 2019 at 00:05

One reason to accept Pompeo's view.
Johnstone
The U.S. has been provoking Iran with extremely aggressive and steadily tightening sanctions, which means that even if Tehran is behind the attacks, it would not be the aggressor and the attacks would most certainly not have been "unprovoked."

Economic sanctions are an act of war; if China were to do to America's economy what America is doing to Iran's, the U.S. would be in a hot war with China immediately. It could technically be possible that Iran is pushing back on U.S. aggressions and provocations, albeit in a strange and neoconservatively convenient fashion.

So it possible (and likely, in my view) that Iran is reacting against US aggression, and who can blame them. Iran has said it will react, and it has. There may well be more, asymmetric Iran warfare against the Great Satan who will be powerless to react effectively.

Joe , June 15, 2019 at 00:22

Why would they take it out on a country that seems willing to overstep US's ridiculous sanctions (Japan)? Makes absolutely no sense to attack a country willing to give the US the middle finger.

Tom Kath , June 15, 2019 at 00:51

Mr Shakespeare, you missed Caitlin's point – "Even If" (Iran was responsible), "Pompeo would still be lying".

Linda Lewis , June 14, 2019 at 23:44

Quote: "This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high-degree of sophistication," Pompeo told the press in a statement.

Apparently, they using the same assessment boilerplate used to justify attacking Syria over alleged (and now discredited) sarin attacks.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/politics/us-syria-strike-sarin-certainty/index.html

Laura Mueller , June 14, 2019 at 23:15

CNN reports tonight at 10:45 p.m. that before the tanker attack, Iranians fired a missile at a US MQ-9 Reaper Drone. So why wasn't this the actual source of the flying ordinance that the Japanese tanker owner said struck his tanker?

Just wondering, what was the mission of that US drone?

"The Reaper has a 950-shaft-horsepower (712 kW) turboprop engine [that] allows the Reaper to carry 15 times more ordnance payload and cruise at about three times the speed of the MQ-1.[6] The aircraft is monitored and controlled by aircrew in the Ground Control Station (GCS), including weapons employment." [Wikipedia]

Piotr Berman , June 14, 2019 at 23:15

"This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high-degree of sophistication," does Pompeo admit that his "assessment" is baseless?

intelligence -- to paraphrase Ghandi, "it would be an excellent idea"

the weapons use -- so far, there is no clarity what weapons were used, US Navy suspect "limpet mines", the crew member talked about "flying objects" which is highly non-specific, but most probably it would be drones

expertise needed to execute the operation, as drones seem to be most probable, Gulfie proxies in Syria used drones many times, Americans and allies obviously have drone expertise, Hoothi have them -- basically, if your reference point is clerical personnel, such expertise would be baffling, but ME warriors of all sorts know how to use it, particularly against large slowly moving targets with no air defenses

recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping -- number one, ascribing the attacks in Fujaira to Iran is debatable, number two, limpet mines were used at that time, which explains why US Navy makes torturous arguments that they were used in this case too

too sophisticated for the dim bulbs living on the southern shores of the Gulf or other putative black flaggers -- now, is Pompeo insulting Mossad, intelligence of KSA and UAE and so on?

too sophisticated for the moro

old geezer , June 14, 2019 at 22:17

an interesting thought experiment ; let the iranians close the straight of hormuz.

i wonder how long before ms johnstone et all would whine about the obscene profits of american oil producers.

Kevin Schmidt , June 14, 2019 at 22:44

I wonder how long it took you to build that whiny thought experiment strawman.

Joe S , June 15, 2019 at 00:26

I can see the paid shills are working overtime. Have to clean up the sloppiness of the war oligarchs because they have ran out of ideas on how to gain support. It is actually kind of funny watching them make a fool of themselves. It is also funny to watch you shills stumble for things to say. The only thing you can think of is saying "strawman" but offer no explanation. Smart dude. I'm sur they will take it out of your pay.

CitizenOne , June 14, 2019 at 21:53

I agree. There is a common theme here and this administration seems to be covert actions on steroids. It is not Trump but he has been persuaded to let these neocons in the room and run wild and free with power disruptions, riots, coups and assassination attempts in Venezuela and all sorts of threats to Iran.

Isn't it odd that the US government should be enraged about the two primary nationalized oil companies. Iran and Venezuela.

If there is a war, it will be a war purely about oil and nothing else. Perhaps when we come through the ashes of our greedy war for oil we will abandon our addiction to fossil fuel.

Nah, who am I kidding. It will be Mad Max World on the toxic dying planet. Planet of the Apes.

mike k , June 14, 2019 at 21:40

The best reason for disbelieving Pompeo is his record of lying, war mongering, and blind support for Israel. This man has utter disregard and contempt for the truth.

[Jun 15, 2019] The Democrats engineered another win for Trump. Now why is that?

Notable quotes:
"... This is why it wouldn't matter even if we got Sanders/Gabbard by some miracle. If we got a Sanders/Gabbard presidency, you can be sure congress would start doing everything they can to make sure absolutely nothing happened to change the status quo. It would be like what the Rs did to Obama, but it would be both Ds and Rs pushing back and nothing would change. ..."
Jun 15, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Yep @Pluto's Republic

The Democrats engineered another win for Trump. Now why is that?

The why is because the democrats are not really against the things he is doing. Oh sure they will give some speeches about how they don't like what he is doing, but so far enough democrats have voted with republicans on almost every bill that has come up. The only one that they didn't vote for was to rescind the ACA. Deregulation of the banks? Yup. More unconstitutional spying on us? Yup. The military budget? Yup. Confirming his horrible cabinet picks? Yup again except for DeVos. Warren voted for Ben Carson. Why? She said that she was afraid that Trump would pick someone worse. How about just keep voting no until he chose someone qualified? His horrible right wing judges? Yup. Schumer continues to make deals with McConnell to get them done. DiFi and of course Manchin and other blue dawgs are right there voting with them. I don't remember which democrat told McConnell that he should have let all of congress in on the tax bill because he could have gotten 70 or more votes on it.

This after McConnell refused to let Obama's judges get a vote and then there's Garland and the kabuki confirmation hearing for Kavanaugh.

Democrats are passing bills to keep Trump from pulling the troops out of Afghanistan and Syria and we saw what happened when he tried to pull them out of Syria. And made nice with Kim and Vlad.

So yeah if ByeDone or Warren doesn't get the nod then they will be just fine with Trump again. And since ByeDone's latest gaffes they are now pushing Warren as coming from behind. I think Harris was supposed to be the nominee, but she isn't going anywhere.

This is their world, after all. They're fighting for the future, and they have more of it to fight for.

At the same time, I've noticed a flurry of anti-centrist and Biden-warning articles coming from all directions.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/06/08/joe-biden-democratic-n...

What I know for sure, is that at this point Trump is set to win in 2020 and the backlash from the Russia Hoax is just getting started. I don't think it matters which way Barr decides to play it. The establishment is going to take the hit. There is an army of potential voters out there who will not vote for more of the same, and that includes Trump. Nor will they waste their votes on the established third party slush pile. Only a bold vision from an uncompromising candidate will bring this army forward, and many voters will join them. There are only a few candidates who can bring it. But they all pretended to fall for the Russia Hoax. Or, maybe they are just that dumb.

There are enough Millennial votes to carry the win, and the Left will provide back-up. Who knows with the so-called Progressives? In Congress, they'll vote for anything with a back-end pay-off that keeps them in DC. On the street, they may be genuine and will vote with the uncompromised. Tulsi Gabbard can carry this off. She is the first Millennial presidential candidate -- if she can get past the media black-out.

Bottom line: The Democrats engineered another win for Trump. Now why is that?

up 32 users have voted. --

America is a pathetic nation; a fascist state fueled by the greed, malice, and stupidity of her own people.
- strife delivery

Pluto's Republic on Tue, 06/11/2019 - 12:35am

Watching them run around with the goalposts

@snoopydawg

...eliminating candidates will be very instructive.

But it's a sad and pathetic state of affairs. Very sad.

Jen on Tue, 06/11/2019 - 9:34am
No way out

@snoopydawg

Democrats are passing bills to keep Trump from pulling the troops out of Afghanistan and Syria and we saw what happened when he tried to pull them out of Syria.

This is why it wouldn't matter even if we got Sanders/Gabbard by some miracle. If we got a Sanders/Gabbard presidency, you can be sure congress would start doing everything they can to make sure absolutely nothing happened to change the status quo. It would be like what the Rs did to Obama, but it would be both Ds and Rs pushing back and nothing would change.

Pluto's Republic on Tue, 06/11/2019 - 4:19pm
She has walked the razor's edge

@wendy davis

...which she must. She's been smeared for being a skeptic, on one hand.

And smeared for buying into RussiaGate.

https://twitter.com/tulsigabbard/status/918167316654903297

I give her and the Left a pass on that grey area. Tulsi has never embraced the Russia Hoax to the extent that Sanders and Warren have -- and still do. One thing I don't need is a purity pledge from members of the Left who try to climb on the political stage with the American duopoly, who in turn throw every lie and ugly smear they can at them.

The Russia Hoax is falling apart on its own. The Democrats have been deeply stained by it. Americans grow increasingly shocked and disgusted with the media monopolies. They have all lost the trust of the American people. The candidates are trying to evolve as fast as they can on this issue. It will come up in the debates. Answer wrong and watch out, but that will change week by week as the public begins to realize what happened in 2016.

wendy davis on Tue, 06/11/2019 - 4:25pm
i appreciate your

@Pluto's Republic

bringing the evidence, but my stars, the hundreds of subtweeters gave her an education. okay, it's a grey area for you, as likely is her voting to sanction russia for stealing crimea, sanctioning north korea for...whatever.

wokkamile on Tue, 06/11/2019 - 7:49pm
One of the fiercest critics of

@Pluto's Republic Russiagate from early on, Prof Stephen Cohen, is a backer and contributor to Tulsi Gabbard. If she's good enough for the Prof on this issue, she's good enough for me.

She might be alone among candidates in calling for a substantial pullback in the hostility directed at Russia by the US, a thawing of the new cold war. And how many of the Ds running for prez have explicitly called out the undue influence of the MIC?

I see her overall as a young pol, still in her 30s, evolving in the right direction in a number of areas. I wish she had been perfect on this issue from the get go, but I must take my candidate with all her flaws.

[Jun 15, 2019] The queen of RussiaGate is going to be asking questions at the debates

MadCow disease of neoliberal MSM is spreading...
Jun 15, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

snoopydawg on Tue, 06/11/2019 - 5:01pm

@skod

So a flaming Russia conspiracist is going to moderate the first Democratic presidential debates. What a joke https://t.co/6QWPrS2cZk

-- Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 11, 2019

Pluto's Republic on Tue, 06/11/2019 - 5:25pm
Scenes we'd like to see:

@snoopydawg

Anyone want to bet that she will ask someone a question about what they will do to keep Russia from interfering with the election again?

I would love to see that. All answers will be the wrong answer.

[Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite

Highly recommended!
Jun 14, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al June 8, 2019 at 1:35 am

More good stuff at the link, inc.

Facebook's new public policy manager for Ukraine is nationalist hawk who volunteered with fascist party during US-backed coup

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/04/facebook-public-policy-manager-ukraine-kateryna-kruk/

&

With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/05/28/with-russiagate-we-soviet-immigrants-were-finally-forced-to-reckon-with-the-bigotry-of-americas-elite/

We never knew what it was like to have the country's media and political class brand people like us a possible threat. Until now.

By Yasha Levine

Mark Chapman June 8, 2019 at 10:38 am
You can adopt a lot of things about society as given; people will always defend those they know against those they don't. They will always defend their own even when they suspect or even know they are in the wrong. People will mostly help those who are in trouble if it costs them little or nothing to lend their support. And so on – people are mostly predictable as examples of collective will.

And people will often champion the elevation to positions of power of radicals, so long as that person's radical beliefs and policies further their own aims. Going beyond requires that we examine that society for cynicism and naivete. A naive society assumes that once the radical's aims have been achieved – in this case, the joining of the European Union and NATO by Ukraine – the radical will be satisfied, and will become a peaceful and productive servant of freedom and democracy rather than a fierce adherent to his or her own radical policies, but now within European society, where they might not be so welcome. The cynic assumes the radical will be used as long as he or she is useful to reaching the goals the cynics have set for the country, and then shunted aside or otherwise marginalized if he or she is no longer useful.

Which is it, do you think? I vote for cynicism, and I base that judgment on how smoothly the west transitioned from Nadya Savchenko the heroic martyr to Nadya Savchenko the radical anarchist who wanted to blow up the Rada.

moscowexile June 8, 2019 at 8:49 pm
Wonder if Yasha Levine has ever thought of discussing the points he raises in his above linked article with his erstwhile and also present-day fellow country persons Maria Gessen and Yulia "I-can-pronounce-Шереметьево" Ioffe?

[I absolutely refuse to call Gessen "Masha" (Molly)! She's not my pal!]

yalensis June 9, 2019 at 5:26 am
Yasha should not kvetch so much, the current anti-Russian witch hunt won't reach the likes of him. I know some Jewish Russian émigré families in the U.S., they can still skate by on their former "victimhood": They were required to whine about Soviet anti-Semitism, now all that is needed is a supplementary "I hate Putin, Yankee Doodle Dandy", and they're good to go.

These are the ones I actually despise the most, because they are ungrateful wretches. The Soviet Union saved their collective asses from Hitler, and look how they repayed the debt
I don't begrudge them emigrating to the U.S. if they did so for career reasons, maybe they could find better job opportunities, better conditions to raise their kids, etc. They could do that, but nobody really forced them to slime their former country as viciously as they did. And taught their kids to hate everything Russian. Ingrates!

[Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite

Highly recommended!
Jun 14, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al June 8, 2019 at 1:35 am

More good stuff at the link, inc.

Facebook's new public policy manager for Ukraine is nationalist hawk who volunteered with fascist party during US-backed coup

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/04/facebook-public-policy-manager-ukraine-kateryna-kruk/

&

With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/05/28/with-russiagate-we-soviet-immigrants-were-finally-forced-to-reckon-with-the-bigotry-of-americas-elite/

We never knew what it was like to have the country's media and political class brand people like us a possible threat. Until now.

By Yasha Levine

Mark Chapman June 8, 2019 at 10:38 am
You can adopt a lot of things about society as given; people will always defend those they know against those they don't. They will always defend their own even when they suspect or even know they are in the wrong. People will mostly help those who are in trouble if it costs them little or nothing to lend their support. And so on – people are mostly predictable as examples of collective will.

And people will often champion the elevation to positions of power of radicals, so long as that person's radical beliefs and policies further their own aims. Going beyond requires that we examine that society for cynicism and naivete. A naive society assumes that once the radical's aims have been achieved – in this case, the joining of the European Union and NATO by Ukraine – the radical will be satisfied, and will become a peaceful and productive servant of freedom and democracy rather than a fierce adherent to his or her own radical policies, but now within European society, where they might not be so welcome. The cynic assumes the radical will be used as long as he or she is useful to reaching the goals the cynics have set for the country, and then shunted aside or otherwise marginalized if he or she is no longer useful.

Which is it, do you think? I vote for cynicism, and I base that judgment on how smoothly the west transitioned from Nadya Savchenko the heroic martyr to Nadya Savchenko the radical anarchist who wanted to blow up the Rada.

moscowexile June 8, 2019 at 8:49 pm
Wonder if Yasha Levine has ever thought of discussing the points he raises in his above linked article with his erstwhile and also present-day fellow country persons Maria Gessen and Yulia "I-can-pronounce-Шереметьево" Ioffe?

[I absolutely refuse to call Gessen "Masha" (Molly)! She's not my pal!]

yalensis June 9, 2019 at 5:26 am
Yasha should not kvetch so much, the current anti-Russian witch hunt won't reach the likes of him. I know some Jewish Russian émigré families in the U.S., they can still skate by on their former "victimhood": They were required to whine about Soviet anti-Semitism, now all that is needed is a supplementary "I hate Putin, Yankee Doodle Dandy", and they're good to go.

These are the ones I actually despise the most, because they are ungrateful wretches. The Soviet Union saved their collective asses from Hitler, and look how they repayed the debt
I don't begrudge them emigrating to the U.S. if they did so for career reasons, maybe they could find better job opportunities, better conditions to raise their kids, etc. They could do that, but nobody really forced them to slime their former country as viciously as they did. And taught their kids to hate everything Russian. Ingrates!

[Jun 14, 2019] It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of fake news.

Notable quotes:
"... "The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy's 'Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,' February 20, 2017. But what is more extraordinary is the uniformity with which the paper's regular columnists accept as a given the CIA's assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and 'non-partisan' investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this 'fake news' threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery. ..."
"... "The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post's piece by Craig Timberg, 'Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say,' which featured a report by a group of anonymous "experts" entity called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were 'routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.' While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance toward U.S. foreign policy, the 'experts' refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being 'targeted by legions of skilled hackers.' As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, 'You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to your claims? Take a hike.' ..."
"... But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.) ..."
"... "The success of the war party's campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically clear in the Trump administration's speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did not require evidence of Assad's guilt beyond their government's claims. The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served the rebels well. ..."
Jun 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Abe , June 14, 2019 at 15:15

"It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of 'fake news.' These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate power.

"An important form of mainstream media fake news is that which is presented while suppressing information that calls the preferred news into question. [ ]

"The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy's 'Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,' February 20, 2017. But what is more extraordinary is the uniformity with which the paper's regular columnists accept as a given the CIA's assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and 'non-partisan' investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this 'fake news' threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery.

"The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post's piece by Craig Timberg, 'Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say,' which featured a report by a group of anonymous "experts" entity called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were 'routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.' While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance toward U.S. foreign policy, the 'experts' refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being 'targeted by legions of skilled hackers.' As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, 'You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to your claims? Take a hike.'

But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.)

"On December 23, 2016, President Obama signed the Portman-Murphy Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which will supposedly allow the United States to more effectively combat foreign (namely Russian and Chinese) propaganda and disinformation. It will encourage more government counter-propaganda efforts, and provide funding to non-government entities to help in this enterprise. It is clearly a follow-on to the claims of Russian hacking and propaganda, and shares the spirit of the listing of two hundred tools of Moscow featured in the Washington Post. (Perhaps PropOrNot will qualify for a subsidy and be able to enlarge its list.)

Liberals have been quiet on this new threat to freedom of speech, undoubtedly influenced by their fears of Russian-based fake news and propaganda. But they may yet take notice, even if belatedly, when Trump or one of his successors puts it to work on their own notions of fake news and propaganda.

"The success of the war party's campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically clear in the Trump administration's speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did not require evidence of Assad's guilt beyond their government's claims. The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served the rebels well.

"But the mainstream media never ask cui bono? in cases like this. In 2013, a similar charge against Assad, which brought the United States to the brink of a full-scale bombing war in Syria, turned out to be a false flag operation, and some authorities believe the current case is equally problematic. Nevertheless, Trump moved quickly (and illegally), dealing a blow to any further rapprochement between the United States and Russia. The CIA, the Pentagon, leading Democrats, and the rest of the war party had won an important skirmish in the struggle over permanent war."

Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017

By Edward S. Herman

https://monthlyreview.org/2017/07/01/fake-news-on-russia-and-other-official-enemies/

[Jun 14, 2019] Russiagate is an institutional initiative of CIA. Current DCI Gina Haspel was in London marshalling the foreign intelligence cutouts for the anti-Russian war propaganda that got repackaged for publication as Dem oppo research.

Jun 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Cmon , June 13, 2019 at 17:46

Articles like this are what make Ray McGovern sound like the limited-hangout artist of the century, this era's Ellsberg.

You've got Barr, who functioned as DCI Bush's mob lip ever since Iran/Contra, who calls in Durham, renowned for CIA's CAT-illegal torture whitewash. No sane professional expects anything but a moist and well-consolidated sigmoid coil of exculpation. Ray is not nearly stupid enough to believe this is for real. Ray himself has said there are two CIAs. These guys are from the criminal one, and Ray knows it.

Russiagate is not the fever dream of lone bad apple Brennan. Russiagate is an institutional initiative of CIA. Current DCI Gina Haspel was in London marshalling the foreign intelligence cutouts for the anti-Russian war propaganda that got repackaged for publication as Dem oppo research.

Ray has brass balls. But wake me up when he goes up against the CIA DO like he went up against DoS or Israeli navy pussies.

hetro , June 13, 2019 at 20:23

Yeah but this flagrant in your face we're-going-to-fuck-with-you people (again), and now with this particular fantasy, is rapidly un-entangling for all to see (and who can resist the naked lady in the sky?):

they used their intelligence assets to frame the whole thing, starting with Brennan's fixation on the juicy Steele thing. And why? A little more on why? What's beyond their repugnance for Trump, in the money angle? Is that coming out too?

Imagery of these people in prison garb behind bars sends a shiver through me.

David Otness , June 13, 2019 at 17:36

"Our long national nightmare is finally over ?"

For those too young, that was for Nixon finally having abdicated after a quite similar in national intrigue episode, his own imperial Presidency caught up short in impeachment. The difference being here, albeit from a scenario contrived for impeachment, it is the prosecutors of a sitting President who are in the spotlight, if not the crosshairs, for having contrived the plot to impeach.
The image of a meddling foreign power, the ultimate "other" as manifested in the decades-now-long demonizing of anything Putin from the CIA -- his Slavic-Asian features, a 'thug,' 'his oligarchs,' (versus our billionaire and quite as lawless 'tycoon/plutocrats') and the ludicrous Russian 'territorial expansion ambitions' (that from the by-far world's largest country and "Pssst, you're thinking of Israel) makes this transition back into the land of approximate reality of 2019 a different kettle of fish.

Meaning the U.S./CIA's easily ginned-up exploitable Cold War 2.0 recidivism is going to be a tenacious monkey to shake from the country's collective back. It's been drilled in -- intentionally -- hard and deep. And that isolates and nullifies the Dem true-believers who won't let go of it. And they continue to show they don't want to.
They are likely the leading edge of the Biden-Believers too; stuck in an unimaginative world that craves the Obama era even as its worse (liberal-approved) elements come back to haunt with these brooding personages like Brennan and the predatory Clapper-Thing foremost. Why does that matter? Because they both committed public perjury under oath. And walked. Unscathed. What does that say about the rule of law? And what does that say about those who lionize them, all the while knowing of that perjury?

Most people in the U.S. despised Nixon in 1974, and the D and R political parties had not reached the unconscionable and corrupt nadir at which we now find them in the pig-sty they have wrought for themselves and drug us into. And despising Trump is something most find easy enough, but his defenders are in the right on this if Brennan is exposed for such infamy. "And such a beautiful fantasy Rachel Maddow had woven for us. Why did it ever have to end ?"
If Dems had been honest with themselves, had critically-thought for themselves, had not fallen for the cheapest of tricks and been lucid-enough to see they were but foils in a mass psy-op they'd be well assured of regaining the Presidency almost by default.
But, as Mark Twain rightfully observed: "It's much easer to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled."

To have observed so many 'leftish' Dems claiming-to-be-progressives lionizing the likes of Brennan, Comey, and Clapper in their televised role-playing as saviors was hard enough to take, but then we come to the specter of Mueller who kept up the act in the face of knowing he had nothing from the get-go, but did his best to obfuscate for 2 years; likely all the while knowing this was Brennan's Brains' 'love child.'

Now even as the msm/House aspersions and egging-on continue post-Mueller report, these same plotters have only further-enfurled themselves in the flag and beckon for the Dem party faithful to drench themselves in further delusions; anything but confront the fact they've been so thoroughly used and abused already by Clinton Inc and its wholly-owned DNC. Silly humans. Mendacious masochists too.

And what of the nation as it spirals ever-downward to the drain ?
Bush would tell you to go shopping.
Obama would lay one of his patented "folks" on you. And tell you to never forget how "exceptional" you really are. It's your 'participation' trophy, mah fellow Americans. You swept the Apathy and Complacency divisions! Congratulations!

Jeff B , June 13, 2019 at 17:09

What the government (Deep State) values more than the truth or global stability is faith in government. They cannot afford to have the reality of this attempted coup come to light because normal, everyday citizens will be more appalled that this could happen more than it was revealed. The investigation may reach the grass roots reality of what transpired but I doubt the public will ever know. Even the hint of a conniving, dishonest Deep State will cause ripples even the media can gloss over. (Have you seen any of the network news programs do any story on the fabrication of WMD intelligence?)

Abe , June 13, 2019 at 17:00

"John Brennan has always been a failure as an intelligence officer even as he successfully climbed the promotion ladder. He was the CIA's Chief of Station (COS) in Saudi Arabia when the Khobar Towers were bombed, killing 19 Americans, a disaster which he incorrectly blamed on the Iranians. He was deputy executive director on 9/11 and was complicit in that intelligence failure. He subsequently served as CIA chief of staff when his boss George Tenet concocted phony stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He also approved of the Agency torture and rendition programs and was complicit in the destruction of Libya as well as the attempt to do the same to Syria.

"Barack Obama wanted Brennan to be his CIA Director but his record with the Agency torture and rendition programs made approval by the Senate problematical. Instead, he became the president's homeland security advisor and deputy national security advisor for counterterrorism, where he did even more damage, expanding the parameters of the death by drone operations and sitting down with the POTUS for the Tuesday morning counterterrorism sessions spent refining the kill list of American citizens.

"After Obama was re-elected in 2012, he was able to overcome objections and appoint Brennan CIA Director. Conniving as ever, Brennan then ordered the Agency to read the communications of the congressional committee then engaged in investigating CIA torture, the very program that he had been complicit in. Brennan then denied to Congress under oath that any such intramural spying had occurred, afterwards apologizing when the truth came out."

Will the Real John Brennan Please Stand Up?
By Philip Giraldi
http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/will-the-real-john-brennan-please-stand-up/

CJ sazdad , June 13, 2019 at 16:57

They're after Kim Dot Com too as he openly admits to communicating with Seth Rich.

[Jun 14, 2019] How NeoCon Billionaire Paul Singer Is Driving the Outsourcing of US Tech Jobs to Israel

Notable quotes:
"... With nearly 6 million Americans unemployed and regular bouts of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, major American tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation are nonetheless moving key operations, billions in investments, and thousands of jobs to Israel -- a trend that has largely escaped media attention or concern from even "America first" politicians. The fact that this massive transfer of investment and jobs has been so overlooked is particularly striking given that it is largely the work of a single leading neoconservative Republican donor who has given millions of dollars to President Donald Trump. ..."
"... In this report, MintPress identifies dozens of former members of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit who now hold top positions at Microsoft, Google and Facebook. ..."
"... Yet, some of these tech giants, particularly those based in the U.S., are heavily investing in their Israeli branches while laying off thousands of American employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers. ..."
"... Particularly troubling is the fact that, since SUNC's founding, the number of former Unit 8200 members in top positions in American tech companies has skyrocketed. Based on a non-exhaustive analysis conducted by Mintpress of over 200 LinkedIn accounts of former Israeli military intelligence and intelligence officers in three major tech companies, numerous former Unit 8200 alumni were found to currently hold top managerial or executive positions in Microsoft, Google and Facebook. ..."
"... Similarly, at Google, 28 former Unit 8200 members at the company were identified from their LinkedIn accounts. Among them are Google's Engineering Director, its strategic partner manager, two growth marketing leads, its lead technical manager, and six product and program managers, including Google's manager for trust and safety search. ..."
"... Netanyahu further outlined this policy at the 2019 Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that Israel's emergence as one of the top five "cyber powers" had "required allowing this combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place" and that this further required allowing "our graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners." The direct tie-ins of SUNC to Netanyahu and the fact that Paul Singer has also been a long-time political donor and backer of Netanyahu suggest that SUNC is a key part of Netanyahu's policy of placing former military intelligence and intelligence operatives in strategic positions in major technology companies. ..."
"... This concern is further exacerbated by the deep ties connecting top tech companies like Microsoft and Google to the U.S. military. Microsoft and Google are both key military contractors -- Microsoft in particular, given that it is set to win a lucrative contract for the Pentagon's cloud management and has partnered with the Department of Defense to produce a "secure" election system known as ElectionGuard that is set to be implemented in some U.S. states for the 2020 general election. ..."
Jun 13, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

Several U.S. tech giants including Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation have filled top positions with former members of Israeli military intelligence and are heavily investing in their Israeli branches while laying off thousands of American employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers.

With nearly 6 million Americans unemployed and regular bouts of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, major American tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation are nonetheless moving key operations, billions in investments, and thousands of jobs to Israel -- a trend that has largely escaped media attention or concern from even "America first" politicians. The fact that this massive transfer of investment and jobs has been so overlooked is particularly striking given that it is largely the work of a single leading neoconservative Republican donor who has given millions of dollars to President Donald Trump.

To make matters worse, many of these top tech companies shifting investment and jobs to Israel at record rates continue to collect sizable U.S. government subsidies for their operations while they move critical aspects of their business abroad, continue to layoff thousands of American workers, and struggle to house their growing company branches in Israel. This is particularly troubling in light of the importance of the tech sector to the overall U.S. economy, as it accounts for 7.1 percent of total GDP and 11.6 percent of total private-sector payroll.

Furthermore, many of these companies are hiring members of controversial Israeli companies -- known to have spied on Americans, American companies, and U.S. federal agencies -- as well as numerous members of Israeli military intelligence as top managers and executives.

This massive transfer of the American tech industry has largely been the work of one leading Republican donor -- billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who also funds the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Islamophobic and hawkish think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), and also funded the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).

Singer's project to bolster Israel's tech economy at the U.S.' expense is known as Start-Up Nation Central, which he founded in response to the global Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply with international law in relation to its treatment of Palestinians.

This project is directly linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in recent years has publicly mentioned that it has been his "deliberate policy" to have former members of Israel's "military and intelligence units merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners" in order to make it all but impossible for major corporations and foreign governments to boycott Israel.

In this report, MintPress identifies dozens of former members of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit who now hold top positions at Microsoft, Google and Facebook.

Singer's nonprofit organization has acted as the vehicle through which Netanyahu's policy has been realized, via the group's close connections to the Israeli PM and Singer's long-time support for Netanyahu and the Likud Party. With deep ties to Netanyahu, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and controversial tech companies -- like Amdocs -- that spied on the American government, this Singer-funded organization has formed a nexus of connections between the public and private sectors of both the American and Israeli economies with the single goal of making Israel the new technology superpower, largely at the expense of the American economy and government, which currently gives $3.2 billion in aid to Israel annually.

Researched and developed in Israel

In recent years, the top U.S. tech companies have been shifting many of their most critical operations, particularly research and development, to one country: Israel. A 2016 report in Business Insider noted that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple had all opened up research and development (R&D) centers in recent years, with some of them having as many as three such centers in Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey. Other major tech companies that have also opened key operation and research centers in Israel include Sandisk, Nvidia, PayPal, Palantir and Dell. Forbes noted last year that the world's top 10 tech companies were now "doing mission-critical work in Israel that's core to their businesses back at HQ."

Yet, some of these tech giants, particularly those based in the U.S., are heavily investing in their Israeli branches while laying off thousands of American employees, all while receiving millions of dollars in U.S. government subsidies funded by American taxpayers.

For example, Intel Corporation, which is the world's second largest manufacturer of semiconductor computer chips and is headquartered in California, has long been a major employer in Israel, with over 10,000 employees in the Jewish state. However, earlier this year, Intel announced that it would be investing $11 billion in a new factory in Israel and would receive around $1 billion in an Israeli government grant for that investment. Just a matter of months after Intel announced its major new investment in Israel, it announced a new round of layoffs in the United States.

Yet this is just one recent example of what has become a trend for Intel. In 2018, Intel made public its plan to invest $5 billion in one of its Israeli factories and had invested an additional $15 billion in Israeli-created autonomous driving technology a year prior, creating thousands of Intel jobs in Israel. Notably, over that same time frame, Intel has cut nearly 12,000 jobs in the United States. While this great transfer of investment and jobs was undermining the U.S. economy and hurting American workers, particularly in the tech sector, Intel received over $25 million dollars in subsidies from the U.S. federal government.

A similar phenomenon has been occurring at another U.S.-based tech giant, Microsoft. Beginning in 2014 and continuing into 2018, Microsoft has laid off well over 20,000 employees , most of them Americans, in several different rounds of staff cuts. Over that same time period, Microsoft has been on a hiring spree in Israel, building new campuses and investing billions of dollars annually in its Israel-based research and development center and in other Israeli start-up companies , creating thousands of jobs abroad. In addition, Microsoft has been pumping millions of dollars into technology programs at Israeli universities and institutes, such as the Technion Institute . Over this same time frame, Microsoft has received nearly $197 million in subsidies from the state governments of Washington, Iowa and Virginia.

Though Israeli politicians and tech company executives have praised this dramatic shift as the result of Israel's tech prowess and growing reputation as a technological innovation hub, much of this dramatic shift has been the work of the Netanyahu-tied Singer's effort to counter a global movement aimed at boycotting Israel and to make Israel a global "cyber power."

Start-Up Nation Central and the Neocons

In 2009, a book titled Start Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle , written by American neoconservative Dan Senor and Jerusalem Post journalist Saul Singer (unrelated to Paul), quickly rose to the New York Times bestseller list for its depiction of Israel as the tech start-up capital of the world. The book -- published by the Council on Foreign Relations, where Senor was then serving as Adjunct Senior Fellow -- asserts that Israel's success in producing so many start-up companies resulted from the combination of its liberal immigration laws and its "leverage of the business talents of young people with military experience."

"The West needs innovation; Israel's got it," wrote Senor and Singer. In a post-publication interview with the blog Freakonomics , Senor asserted that service in the Israeli military was crucial to Israel's tech sector success, stating that:

"Certain units have become technology boot camps, where 18- to 22-year-olds get thrown projects and missions that would make the heads spin of their counterparts in universities or the private sector anywhere else in the world. The Israelis come out of the military not just with hands-on exposure to next-gen technology, but with training in teamwork, mission orientation, leadership, and a desire to continue serving their country by contributing to its tech sector -- a source of pride for just about every Israeli."

The book, in addition to the many accolades it received from the mainstream press, left a lasting impact on top Republican donor Paul Singer, known for funding the most influential neoconservative think tanks in America, as noted above. Paul Singer was so inspired by Senor and Singer's book that he decided to spend $20 million to fund and create an organization with a similar name. He created the Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC) just three years after the book's release in 2012 .

To achieve his vision, Singer – who is also a top donor to the Republican Party and Trump – tapped Israeli economist Eugene Kandel, who served as Netanyahu's national economic adviser and chaired the Israeli National Economic Council from 2009 to 2015.

Senor was likely directly involved in the creation of SUNC, as he was then employed by Paul Singer and, with neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, co-founded the FPI, which Singer had long funded before it closed in 2017. In addition, Dan Senor's sister, Wendy Singer (unrelated to either Paul or Saul), long-time director of Israel's AIPAC office, became the organization's executive director.

SUNC's management team, in addition to Eugene Kandel and Wendy Singer, includes Guy Hilton as the organization's general manager. Hilton is a long-time marketing executive at Israeli telecommunications company Amdocs, where he "transformed" the company's marketing organization. Amdocs was once highly controversial in the United States after it was revealed by a 2001 Fox News investigation that numerous federal agencies had investigated the company, which then had contracts with the 25 largest telephone companies in the country, for its alleged role in an aggressive espionage operation that targeted the U.S. government. Hilton worked at Microsoft prior to joining Amdocs.

Beyond the management team, SUNC's board of directors includes Paul Singer, Dan Senor and Terry Kassel -- who work for Singer at his hedge fund, Elliott Management -- and Rapheal Ouzan. Ouzan was an officer in the elite foreign military intelligence unit of Israel, Unit 8200, who co-founded BillGuard the day after he left that unit, which is often compared to the U.S.' National Security Agency (NSA). Within five months of its founding, BillGuard was backed by funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. Ouzan is also connected to U.S. tech companies that have greatly expanded their Israeli branches since SUNC's founding -- such as Microsoft, Google, PayPal and Intel, all of which support Ouzan's non-profit Israel Tech Challenge.

According to reports from the time published in Haaretz and Bloomberg , SUNC was explicitly founded to serve as " a foreign ministry for Israel's tech industry " and " to strength Israel's economy " while also aiming to counter the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use a nonviolent boycott to end the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Israeli apartheid, as well as the growth of illegal Jewish-only settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

Since its founding, SUNC has sought to transfer tech jobs from foreign companies to Israel by developing connections and influence with foreign governments and companies so that they "deepen their relationship with Israel's tech industry." Though SUNC has since expanded to include other sectors of the Israeli "start-up" economy, its focus has long remained on Israel's tech, specifically its cybersecurity industry. Foreign investment in this single Israeli industry has grown from $227 million in 2014 to $815 million in 2018.

In addition to its own activities, SUNC appears to be closely linked to a similar organization, sponsored by Coca Cola and Daimler Mercedes Benz, called The Bridge , which also seeks to connect Israeli start-up companies with large international corporations. Indeed, SUNC, according to its website , was actually responsible for Daimler Mercedes Benz's decision to join The Bridge, thanks to a delegation from the company that SUNC hosted in Israel and the connections made during that visit.

Teaming up with Israel's Unit 8200

Members of Israel's signals intelligence Unit 8200 work under a Saudi flag. Photo | Moti Milrod

Notably, SUNC has deep ties to Israel's military intelligence unit known as Unit 8200 and, true to Start Up Nation' s praise of IDF service as key to Israel's success, has been instrumental in connecting Unit 8200 alumni with key roles in foreign companies, particularly American tech companies. For instance, Maty Zwaig , a former lieutenant colonel in Unit 8200, is SUNC's current director of human capital programs, and SUNC's current manager of strategic programs, Tamar Weiss , is also a former member of the unit.

One particularly glaring connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 can be seen in Inbal Arieli , who served as SUNC's Vice President of Strategic Partnerships from 2014 to 2017 and continues to serve as a senior adviser to the organization. Arieli, a former lieutenant in Unit 8200, is the founder and head of the 8200 Entrepreneurship and Innovation Support Program (EISP), which was the first start-up accelerator in Israel aimed at harnessing "the vast network and entrepreneurial DNA of [Unit] 8200 alumni" and is currently one of the top company accelerators in Israel. Arieli was the top executive at 8200 EISP while working at SUNC.

Another key connection between SUNC and Unit 8200 is SUNC's promotion of Team8, a company-creation platform whose CEO and co-founder is Nadav Zafrir, former commander of Unit 8200. In addition to prominently featuring Team8 and Zafrir on the cybersecurity section of its website, SUNC also sponsored a talk by Zafrir and an Israeli government economist at the World Economic Forum, often referred to as "Davos," that was attended personally by Paul Singer.

Team8's investors include Google's Eric Schmidt, Microsoft , and Walmart -- and it recently hired former head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, retired Admiral Mike Rogers. Team8 described the decision to hire Rogers as being "instrumental in helping strategize" Team8's expansion in the United States. However, Jake Williams, a veteran of NSA's Tailored Access Operations hacking unit, told CyberScoop :

"Rogers is not being brought into this role because of his technical experience. It's purely because of his knowledge of classified operations and his ability to influence many in the U.S. government and private-sector contractors."

In addition to connections to Unit 8200-linked groups like Team8 and 8200 EISP, SUNC also directly collaborates with the IDF in an initiative aimed at preparing young Israeli women to serve in Unit 8200. That initiative, called the CyberGirlz Club , is jointly funded by Israel's Defense Ministry, SUNC and the Rashi Foundation, the philanthropic organization set up by the Leven family of Perrier-brand water, which has close ties to the Israeli government and IDF.

"Our aim is to bring the girls to this process already skilled, with the knowledge needed to pass the exams for Unit 8200 and serve in the military as programmers," Zwaig told Israel National News .

Seeding American tech

The connections between SUNC and Unit 8200 are troubling for more than a few reasons, one of which being that Unit 8200, often likened to the U.S.' NSA, closely coordinates with Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, and is responsible for 90 percent of the intelligence material obtained by the Israeli government, according to its former commander Yair Cohen. Cohen told Forbes in 2016, that "there isn't a major operation, from the Mossad or any intelligence security agency, that 8200 is not involved in." For obvious reasons, the fact that an organization founded by an American billionaire is actively promoting the presence of former military intelligence officers in foreign companies, specifically American companies, while also promoting the transfer of jobs and investment to that same country, is very troubling indeed.

Particularly troubling is the fact that, since SUNC's founding, the number of former Unit 8200 members in top positions in American tech companies has skyrocketed. Based on a non-exhaustive analysis conducted by Mintpress of over 200 LinkedIn accounts of former Israeli military intelligence and intelligence officers in three major tech companies, numerous former Unit 8200 alumni were found to currently hold top managerial or executive positions in Microsoft, Google and Facebook.

At Microsoft, managers for at least 15 of the company's products and programs -- including Microsoft's lead managers for engineering, product strategy, threat analytics and cloud business intelligence -- publicly listed their affiliation with Unit 8200 on their LinkedIn accounts. In addition, the general manager of Microsoft's Israeli Research and Development Center is also a former member of Unit 8200. In total, of the 200 accounts analyzed, 50 of them currently worked for Microsoft.

Similarly, at Google, 28 former Unit 8200 members at the company were identified from their LinkedIn accounts. Among them are Google's Engineering Director, its strategic partner manager, two growth marketing leads, its lead technical manager, and six product and program managers, including Google's manager for trust and safety search.

Facebook also has several Unit 8200 members in prominent positions, though fewer than Google and Microsoft. MintPress identified at least 13 Unit 8200 alumni working for Facebook, including its director of engineering, lead manager for express wi-fi, and technical program manager. Notably, Facebook has spent the last several years collaborating with Israel's government to censor Israel's critics.

Of course, there is likely much more influence of Unit 8200 on these companies than this non-exhaustive analysis revealed, given that many of these companies acquired several Israeli start-ups run by and staffed by many Unit 8200 alumni who subsequently went on to found new companies and start-ups a few years or shortly after acquisition. Furthermore, due to the limitations of LinkedIn's set-up, MintPress was not able to access the complete list of Unit 8200 alumni at these three tech companies, meaning that the eye-opening numbers found were generated by a relatively small sample.

This jump in Unit 8200 members in top positions in tech companies of global importance is actually a policy long promoted by Netanyahu, whose long-time economic adviser is the chief executive at SUNC. During an interview with Fox News last year, Netanyahu was asked by Fox News host Mark Levin if the large growth seen in recent years in Israel's technology sector was part of Netanyahu's plan. Netanyahu responded, "That's very much my plan It's a very deliberate policy." He later added that "Israel had technology because the military, especially military intelligence, produced a lot of capabilities. These incredibly gifted young men and women who come out of the military or the Mossad, they want to start their start-ups."

Netanyahu further outlined this policy at the 2019 Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that Israel's emergence as one of the top five "cyber powers" had "required allowing this combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place" and that this further required allowing "our graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners." The direct tie-ins of SUNC to Netanyahu and the fact that Paul Singer has also been a long-time political donor and backer of Netanyahu suggest that SUNC is a key part of Netanyahu's policy of placing former military intelligence and intelligence operatives in strategic positions in major technology companies.

Notably, just as SUNC was founded to counter the BDS movement, Netanyahu has asserted that this policy of ensuring Israel's role as a "cyber power" is aimed at increasing its diplomatic power and specifically undermining BDS as well as the United Nations, which has repeatedly condemned Israel's government for war crimes and violations of international law in relation to the Palestinians.

Building the bi-national surveillance state

Top U.S. tech companies have filled top positions with former members of Israeli military intelligence and moved strategic and critical operations to Israel, boosting Israel's economy at the expense of America's, and SUNC's role in this marked shift merits scrutiny.

A powerful American billionaire has built an influential organization with deep connections to the U.S.-Israel lobby (AIPAC), an Israeli company that has been repeatedly investigated for spying on the U.S. government (Amdocs), and the elite Israeli military intelligence unit (Unit 8200) that has used its influential connections to the U.S. government and the U.S. private sector to dramatically shift the operations and make-up of major companies in a critical sector of the U.S. economy.

Further consider that U.S. government documents leaked by Edward Snowden have flagged Israel as "leading threat" to the infrastructure of U.S. financial and banking institutions, which use much of the software produced by these top tech companies, and have also flagged Israel as a top espionage threat. One U.S. government document cited Israel as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the U.S. behind Russia and China. Thus, Paul Singer's pet project in Start-Up Nation Central has undermined not only the U.S. economy but arguably U.S. national security as well.

This concern is further exacerbated by the deep ties connecting top tech companies like Microsoft and Google to the U.S. military. Microsoft and Google are both key military contractors -- Microsoft in particular, given that it is set to win a lucrative contract for the Pentagon's cloud management and has partnered with the Department of Defense to produce a "secure" election system known as ElectionGuard that is set to be implemented in some U.S. states for the 2020 general election.

mintpressnews.com

[Jun 14, 2019] It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of fake news.

Notable quotes:
"... "The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy's 'Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,' February 20, 2017. But what is more extraordinary is the uniformity with which the paper's regular columnists accept as a given the CIA's assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and 'non-partisan' investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this 'fake news' threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery. ..."
"... "The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post's piece by Craig Timberg, 'Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say,' which featured a report by a group of anonymous "experts" entity called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were 'routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.' While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance toward U.S. foreign policy, the 'experts' refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being 'targeted by legions of skilled hackers.' As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, 'You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to your claims? Take a hike.' ..."
"... But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.) ..."
"... "The success of the war party's campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically clear in the Trump administration's speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did not require evidence of Assad's guilt beyond their government's claims. The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served the rebels well. ..."
Jun 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Abe , June 14, 2019 at 15:15

"It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of 'fake news.' These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate power.

"An important form of mainstream media fake news is that which is presented while suppressing information that calls the preferred news into question. [ ]

"The Times has run neck-and-neck with the Washington Post in stirring up fears of the Russian information war and illicit involvement with Trump. The Times now easily conflates fake news with any criticism of established institutions, as in Mark Scott and Melissa Eddy's 'Europe Combats a New Foe of Political Stability: Fake News,' February 20, 2017. But what is more extraordinary is the uniformity with which the paper's regular columnists accept as a given the CIA's assessment of the Russian hacking and transmission to WikiLeaks, the possibility or likelihood that Trump is a Putin puppet, and the urgent need of a congressional and 'non-partisan' investigation of these claims. This swallowing of a new war-party line has extended widely in the liberal media. Both the Times and Washington Post have lent tacit support to the idea that this 'fake news' threat needs to be curbed, possibly by some form of voluntary media-organized censorship or government intervention that would at least expose the fakery.

"The most remarkable media episode in this anti-influence-campaign was the Post's piece by Craig Timberg, 'Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say,' which featured a report by a group of anonymous "experts" entity called PropOrNot that claimed to have identified two hundred websites that, wittingly or not, were 'routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.' While smearing these websites, many of them independent news outlets whose only shared trait was their critical stance toward U.S. foreign policy, the 'experts' refused to identify themselves, allegedly out of fear of being 'targeted by legions of skilled hackers.' As journalist Matt Taibbi wrote, 'You want to blacklist hundreds of people, but you won't put your name to your claims? Take a hike.'

But the Post welcomed and promoted this McCarthyite effort, which might well be a product of Pentagon or CIA information warfare. (And these entities are themselves well-funded and heavily into the propaganda business.)

"On December 23, 2016, President Obama signed the Portman-Murphy Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, which will supposedly allow the United States to more effectively combat foreign (namely Russian and Chinese) propaganda and disinformation. It will encourage more government counter-propaganda efforts, and provide funding to non-government entities to help in this enterprise. It is clearly a follow-on to the claims of Russian hacking and propaganda, and shares the spirit of the listing of two hundred tools of Moscow featured in the Washington Post. (Perhaps PropOrNot will qualify for a subsidy and be able to enlarge its list.)

Liberals have been quiet on this new threat to freedom of speech, undoubtedly influenced by their fears of Russian-based fake news and propaganda. But they may yet take notice, even if belatedly, when Trump or one of his successors puts it to work on their own notions of fake news and propaganda.

"The success of the war party's campaign to contain or reverse any tendency to ease tensions with Russia was made dramatically clear in the Trump administration's speedy bombing response to the April 4, 2017, Syrian chemical weapons deaths. The Times and other mainstream media editors and journalists greeted this aggressive move with almost uniform enthusiasm, and once again did not require evidence of Assad's guilt beyond their government's claims. The action was damaging to Assad and Russia, but served the rebels well.

"But the mainstream media never ask cui bono? in cases like this. In 2013, a similar charge against Assad, which brought the United States to the brink of a full-scale bombing war in Syria, turned out to be a false flag operation, and some authorities believe the current case is equally problematic. Nevertheless, Trump moved quickly (and illegally), dealing a blow to any further rapprochement between the United States and Russia. The CIA, the Pentagon, leading Democrats, and the rest of the war party had won an important skirmish in the struggle over permanent war."

Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017

By Edward S. Herman

https://monthlyreview.org/2017/07/01/fake-news-on-russia-and-other-official-enemies/

[Jun 14, 2019] Total control of narrative means total control of population

Notable quotes:
"... I agree with the premise, that the NARRATIVE is the means by which oligarchy rules the masses. ..."
"... As Mencken stated (approx) "the common man avoids the truth [because] it is dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn't pay." ..."
"... Americans are propagandized from childhood, and it's very hard for most to break free, even if they want to. In my case, a rather abusive childhood made me disinclined to accept conventional wisdom. ..."
"... The proverbial man in the street is well aware that capitalism/politics is a racket and openly say so. ..."
"... The falling numbers in the 'democracies' who now bother to vote is an indication of this, as is the growing political unrest in the heartlands of the Anglo-Zionist empire. It is not possible to 'fool all of the people all of the time'. Whether they do anything about it is another matter. ..."
"... These are dangerous times, but that is the usual condition when the structure of any social and political order is beginning to crumble. Ultimately, the Anglo-Zionist empire is, to use Lenin's description 'A colossus with feet of clay.' No empire lasts forever, and the US is not exceptional in this respect. The real problem is that the demise of the US hegemonic project will taken down the rest of the planet with it. ..."
Jun 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

AnneR , June 14, 2019 at 09:35

Thank you Caitlin for this piece. Depressing but not unexpectedly so. And if my late husband's FB friends (as I've mentioned on here before) are anything to go by, the overwhelmingly bourgeois crowd will continue to be *willingly* propagandized with the Russophobic, Sinophobic and Iranophobic lies of commission and omission that regale them via MSDNC, NPR, PBS, BBC and the so-called "progressive" press (e.g. The guardian, Jacobin, the NYT).

These friends post pro-Demrat, pro-Russiagate, consider the choice to be between Warren and Klobuchar (?), and concentrate their minds on *progressive* ideations: sexual preference/"gender" identity/racial/ethnic identity and now and then a little on climate change (especially via the "green ND" – saving capitalism being all consuming or ignored). Never a word about income inequality, about the ongoing slaughter in Yemen, of the ongoing, never-ending nightmare of Palestinian life, of what we have done to Libya, Iraq or Afghanistan or are doing to Syria. Not a word about the immorality, illegality of our economic sanctions against NK, VZ, Iran nooo. Nary a peep about what we (US-UK-AU) are doing to Assange .

These really existing realities as lived by "others" whether the poor within these borders or the darker hued folks far from these shores do *not* matter one iota, certainly not by comparison with being able to vacation in this or that place, buy a bigger house, more clothes, demonstrate one's *Progressiveness.*

Lee Anderson , June 14, 2019 at 09:30

I agree with the premise, that the NARRATIVE is the means by which oligarchy rules the masses.

For example, we are now being inundated with the NARRATIVE that Iran is attacking Japanese oil tankers. Pure nonsense, but the media is an adjunct of the bankster/military/oil industrial complex.

Politicians are merely puppets doing the bidding of their pay masters.

Sam F , June 14, 2019 at 05:46

Yes, money control of mass media is the problem. Such articles may help some with doubts to formulate an awareness that leads to admission of the problem. The major factor in admissions is the rare direct experience, which may include a story close to home, a personal loss due to narrative control. Of course the majority seek the mass media narrative because it directs them to safety and profit in their social and economic dependent relationships. Our unregulated market economy encourages the selfishness that enslaves the people to money power. As Mencken stated (approx) "the common man avoids the truth [because] it is dangerous, no good can come of it, and it doesn't pay."

I hope to set up a college of policy debate CPD constituted to protect all points of view, and to conduct moderated text-only debate among experts of several disciplines, of the status and possibilities of each world region, and the policy options. Debate summaries commented by all sides are to be made available for public study and comment. The CPD would bring the knowledge of society into public debate, educate the electorate, discourage propaganda, and expose the wrongs of society and the corruption of government that desperately needs reform.

The debates will require a higher standard of argument in foreign and domestic policy on both right and left, ensure that all points of view are heard, and require all challenges to be answered. This would have much reduced the group-think that led to our mad wars since WWII. Extreme and naïve politicians will be easier to expose, and media commentators will have a starting point and a standard for investigation and analysis.

Zhu , June 14, 2019 at 04:14

Americans are propagandized from childhood, and it's very hard for most to break free, even if they want to. In my case, a rather abusive childhood made me disinclined to accept conventional wisdom.

Donald Duck , June 14, 2019 at 03:18

"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." I have forgotten who actually said this but it seems appropriate for our age. I think the mass of people are very well aware of what is going on. The proverbial man in the street is well aware that capitalism/politics is a racket and openly say so.

The falling numbers in the 'democracies' who now bother to vote is an indication of this, as is the growing political unrest in the heartlands of the Anglo-Zionist empire. It is not possible to 'fool all of the people all of the time'. Whether they do anything about it is another matter.

If note is taken of the David Icke phenomenon it is possible to identify a growing awareness of the of ordinary people to the crimes of the rich and powerful.

These are dangerous times, but that is the usual condition when the structure of any social and political order is beginning to crumble. Ultimately, the Anglo-Zionist empire is, to use Lenin's description 'A colossus with feet of clay.' No empire lasts forever, and the US is not exceptional in this respect. The real problem is that the demise of the US hegemonic project will taken down the rest of the planet with it.

Zhu , June 14, 2019 at 04:21

"Quiet desperation" is ftom Thoreau. The colossus with the feet of clay is the Biblical book of Daniel, the dream of Nebuchadnezzar.

Neither Reptilans nor Zionists make us Americans commit the crimes and follies we do. We oirselves are responsible.

T.J , June 14, 2019 at 02:43

Caitlin Johnstone has concisely and precisely, in this article, provided a compendium of ideas and sources to explain how the powerful through it's control of propaganda corrupts democracy to the core. Laziness, ignorance and acceptance of the status quo prevents the vast majority from acknowledging this to be the case. As Caitlin states it takes courage to reject the "narrative control matrix " of the powerful and that can only be achieved by changing our relationship with that narrative. This, of course, takes time and effort but is liberating nonetheless.

[Jun 14, 2019] They won't need to talk about Gabbard after the first debates, unless she can get polling over 2% there will be no more for her.

Jun 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

jrs , June 13, 2019 at 10:55 am

They won't need to talk about Gabbard after the first debates, unless she can get polling over 2% there will be no more for her. Like all the other 20 she will get her maybe broken 10 minutes of fame in the first debate, it won't be enough to really make a rational case for anything probably. The Dems aren't generous like R's in having second tier debates, they cull fast. Sanders yea he'll be around.

The problem with Warren's definition of capitalism, is when she describes herself as capitalist, she pretends she literally has no idea what capitalism is. The ingenue! In her description: it's about individuals trading, or corporations trading, or individuals trading with corporations. When back in the world we live in it's about power and raw power relations. Her definition of capitalism IS WAY WAY WAY more inaccurate than any definition Bernie has of socialism which does approach some definitions of socialism. It's just zero correspondence with reality for Warren.

[Jun 14, 2019] When FiveThirtyEight asked 60 Democratic Party activists whom they didn't want to win, Tulsi Gabbard came in first out of 17 candidates

So the corrupt neoliberal bottomfeeders hate Tulsi. Good ! So we need to support her...
Jun 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Cal2 , June 12, 2019 at 4:29 pm

"When FiveThirtyEight asked 60 Democratic Party activists whom they didn't want to win, Tulsi Gabbard came in first out of 17 candidates."

Absolutely a fine reason to support her and advocate for her being Bernie Sanders vice presidential pick.

The corporate 'democrats are the enemy of the American worker, more so than the the cheap labor republicans.

Joe Biden's "we'll cure cancer", "but on a few will be able to afford it, if they do not have student loans outstanding."

[Jun 14, 2019] Sanders-Gabbard: cannot say it often enough especially as Tulsi appears to terrify the democratic nomenklatura.

Jun 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

John , June 12, 2019 at 6:29 pm

Sanders-Gabbard: cannot say it often enough especially as Tulsi appears to terrify the democratic nomenklatura.

OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL , June 12, 2019 at 7:46 pm

Tucker Carlson asked whether someone can be elected if Google and Facebook don't want them to be. His answer was No.

I think a similar question can be asked: "Can someone be elected if the DNC don't want them to be?". Unfortunately for this election cycle I think the answer will also be No.

But it will set the stage for something bigger, and worse (from the PTB point of view). Those who make gradual change impossible make revolutionary change inevitable" JFK

So if we haven't all been Raptured Up, 2024 is Year Zero for our New Thermidor.

pjay , June 12, 2019 at 8:14 pm

Indeed she does. That New York Mag article was quite an accomplished hit-piece; now Tulsi is possibly a Manchurian candidate from a twisted Krishna cult! Aside from the accurate quote on the Blob cited by Lambert, this is perhaps the most disgusting piece of s**t on Gabbard I've read yet -- and that's saying something. The reason is that it is so detailed and skilled; it really demonstrates your point that they want to destroy her. The article *pretends* to be sympathetic to her anti-interventionist stance in places (thus the Blob quote), but the author actually draws selectively from her life -- mainly from past acquaintances and relatives (who seem antagonistic) and almost nothing from Gabbard herself -- to paint a picture of a strange and perhaps unstable character unknown to the general public. Some of the questions raised might be legitimate, but that was not the purpose here. Rather, bits and pieces of her life were selected to construct a finely crafted narrative designed to destroy whatever credibility her anti-war position might have had among educated liberal readers.

For those who want to know about Gabbard, watch the Joe Rogan interviews. For those who want to deconstruct a first-rate character assassination, I highly recommend this article. You are right, John. The nomenklatura are pulling out all the stops.

JCC , June 12, 2019 at 10:52 pm

I agree, this article had "hit job" written all over it. The author spent as much time discussing her father's guru as it did her from what I could tell. A piss-poor, and obvious, attempt at Guilt By Association.

I actually went into "skim mode" after this leading paragraph statement,

Here are the details: Bashar al-Assad is a depraved dictator best known for his willingness to murder his own people, including many children, with chemical weapons.

It was pretty obvious to me that the rest of the article would carry as much lie as this statement so clearly did. It's too unfortunate that too many will fall for all this tripe.

[Jun 14, 2019] Molly McKew, the information-warfare goddess

Jun 14, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

The Mueller Report, recently released, tried its best to imply that there was collusion even as it stated baldly that the investigation had yielded no evidence of collusion. But what struck me with the most force was the manner in which the Democrats – and the entire crowd which has so much invested in having had an illegitimate president foisted upon them by the Godless Russians – simply shook its head, took a deep breath and went right on blathering the same lunatic narrative. The Russians interfered with our democracy. Nothing is safe. Russia is the enemy of democracy, and will not suffer a democracy to live. Get the kids and pack up enough food for traveling, Mabel; we're headed for the mountains – it's "Red Dawn", babycakes.

Amazing as it will sound, America has learned nothing.

Part of it, of course, is America's belief in its own omnipotence; if something came out differently from the way it was planned to come out, then America was tricked. Hoodwinked, by unscrupulous actors. It cannot be that America is subject to the same vagaries and pressures and caprices as the rest of the world; America decides, and so it shall be. Part of it is the diligent pick-and-shovel work that America's political forces do to preserve that illusion; that America is an unstoppable force, so much more than just a big rich country.

So, the premise endures. Russian trolls, acting on the personal orders of Vladimir Putin, generated a storm of hateful social-media messages on race relations in America, in a coordinated strike which included Russian release of Hillary Clinton's personal emails, and America faltered. It scratched its head in doubt, and Donald Trump slipped past the worthy – and oh, so wronged – Mrs. Clinton to seize the presidency with his soiled hands.

Matt Taibbi did some excellent work on the subject , which I admit grudgingly, as I hoped to get something out on America's inability to learn from its mistakes before the heavyweights. Taibbi's writing will make you wonder whether you should laugh or cry, as you wonder how an influential country could survive the embarrassment of the past couple of years, encapsulated by a journalistic mantra which holds that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Russia is guilty as sin, and you can take that to the bank, so the very fact that Mueller will not leak any proof to us must mean that his findings are so devastating, so jaw-dropping, so "shut up !!" that they would break the media. The one possibility which was not considered a possibility at all was that there was nothing, and that the accusations had been fabrication and desperate damage control from the first.

But the frustrated narrative of Russian collusion is the only component which has been discredited to the point that Democrats and Russophobes of all political persuasions must admit there is no happy ending to the promise that Donald Trump was going to be fired so high he would need to go on oxygen. Mueller – probably deliberately – continued to hint that Russia had 'meddled' in the 2016 election, and that the effect had been important enough that democracy is under attack. No longer listening to anyone outside the party-faithful echo chamber, the Democrats now insist that US Attorney-General William Barr resign , for 'misleading the American people about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia".

"Barr's news conference ultimately did nothing to help Trump, because the public has eyes. Americans could read the damning evidence of obstruction of justice and communications with Russians for themselves and make their own judgements."

Democrats continue to try to make up in volume and intensity for the fact that there is no evidence at all of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, nor of obstruction of justice by Trump. The Republicans shout that the Democrats are on a senseless witch hunt, that the report makes clear there was no collusion between Trump and the Russians but are perfectly happy to agree that Russia meddled in the election. For his part, Mueller is happy to drop hints that both obstruction and collusion probably took place – he just couldn't find any proof.

All are loony. Russia did not interfere in the 2016 election at all, at least no further than Europe did. A lengthy list of European political leaders and former leaders publicly expressed their support for Mrs. Clinton's election to the office of President of the United States. In 2008, just one is recorded as having done so ; Mona Sahlin, leader of Sweden's Social Democrats. Interestingly, in the same list of endorsements of Mrs. Clinton in 2008 – right after "Adult Entertainment Artists" – is this one: under "Well-Known Individuals", "Businessman and television personality, Future Presidential Candidate & Rival for the United States presidential election 2016, future President of the United States Donald Trump" .

There's gratitude for you.

The Presidents of Taiwan, Chile, France and Ukraine, the former Presidents of Mexico, France, Kosovo and Ecuador, the Prime Ministers of the Czech Republic, France, Italy, New Zealand and Sweden and former Prime Ministers of Sweden, the UK, Canada, Australia and France all openly expressed their hope that Mrs. Clinton would be elected President of the United States. None of this was considered meddling. I don't recall any official endorsement from Russia, although the international English-speaking media helpfully informed us that Putin hoped Trump would win, because he felt Trump would be more approachable for concessions and because he disliked Mrs. Clinton. When Trump did win, despite wrong guesses by just about every political analyst on the planet, it was considered 'additional evidence' that meddling had taken place, instigated by you-know-who.

Perhaps, in highlighting just how stupid America is making itself look with this painfully stubborn insistence that Russia rolled it in 2016, it would be useful to take another look at what American partisans claimed to already know, and could prove as easily as demonstrating that if you put your hand on a hot stove, you will burn it.

One of my favourite American partisans is the Duchess of Displacement, the Baroness of Bulk, Molly McKew . We took a look at her work a long time ago , on the old blog – just before Trump commenced his term, in fact – or perhaps I should say his first term, since the barking madness of the political landscape in today's America makes it entirely possible he will serve a second, unbelievable as that may sound. In that article, we closed out like this; "Look, we're getting close to the end of this, and it's time for plain speaking. Americans are confused and don't know fact from fiction because their own government feeds them bullshit with a side of spin day in, day out, and you're part of it. There was no Russian interference in the American elections, and you know it." My take on what happened has not changed a bit.

McKew is still regarded – highly, I should imagine, by her feeble-minded peers – as an 'information-warfare expert'. Hardly amazing that she sees information-warfare attacks everywhere. Here's what she claimed to know about Russian election interference and general friggin' in the riggin', a little over a year ago. She bases her conclusions on Mueller's Grand Jury indictment, which was issued more than a year in advance of his report – an indictment in which Mueller claimed the Defendants (a variety of Russian advertising and research agencies operating both in Russia and the United States) " knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other (and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury) to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016."

You know the old quote about how easy it is to get a Grand Jury to indict someone or something.

Something McKew claims is now – meaning as of early 2018 – "undeniable" is that Russia had, and has "a broad, sophisticated system that can influence American opinion, which cost tens of millions of dollars spent over several years to build." She must be talking about RT , although I suggest her cost estimate is a little low. RT, which the west considers a 'propaganda network', cost $30 million to set up, in 2005. Its operating costs now are in the hundreds of millions annually, although 80% of the costs are incurred outside Russia, paying for partner networks who distribute its channels.

We kind of have to give her that one, because it is true that RT's coverage is often at odds with the bullshit du jour that CNN and NBC and FOX are spreading. Bullshit, for example, like CNN's non-stop yammering about the collusion that Mueller could find no evidence ever occurred, and said so. Bullshit like NBC News anchor Brian Williams' recollections about his helicopter being shot down in Iraq – echoes of Hillary 'sniper fire' Clinton – , which never happened . Williams is not a nobody; he was the nation's longest-serving and top-rated news anchor.

I submit, however, that the American people are not subjected to RT's 'propaganda and disinformation' about American propaganda and disinformation against their will; there is a button on the remote called "On/Off" that will free the American enslaved from malign Kremlin influence. Alternatively, they can switch to another channel. I would just point out, though, that if they switch to a popular US news channel, they are very likely to be listening to a broadcast which has been curated by its corporate owners, and who " are unlikely to report news that is broadly hostile to corporate capitalism and the American elite ." That's according to a report entitled "Corporate Control of the Media" (in the USA), printed in 2009.

Warming to her subject, McKew goes on to claim "The Russian efforts described in the indictment focused on establishing deep, authenticated, long-term identities for individuals and groups within specific communities. This was underlaid by the establishment of servers and VPNs based in the US to mask the location of the individuals involved. US-based email accounts linked to fake or stolen US identity documents (driver licenses, social security numbers, and more) were used to back the online identities. These identities were also used to launder payments through PayPal and cryptocurrency accounts. All of this deception was designed to make it appear that these activities were being carried out by Americans."

This might be a good point at which to suggest there is every reason to believe 'these activities' were carried out by Americans. Americans working for national intelligence agencies.

In March 2017, The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima had an article published which was entitled "WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations." It detailed, among other things, a cyber tool called "Marble Framework" . This could be used, it was claimed, to re-assign attribution of material posted on the internet so that it appeared, for forensic purposes, to have originated from a different source. Test samples, it was reported, were included in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi.

The report which encouraged President Trump to ask his CIA Director – Mike Pompeo, at the time, who is currently the National Security Advisor – what he knew about this was co-authored by Skip Folden, who for 25 years was the IT Program Manager for IBM. I think it is safe to say he has some credibility in the field of cyber-forensics. The authors of the report contended that the 'hack' of the DNC's server was not actually a hack at all, but the at-source copying of data directly from the server using a storage device, probably a thumb drive. The data transfer rate, the authors claimed, was far too rapid to have occurred over the internet.

Since then I have seen a couple of 'rebuttals' which claimed that under certain conditions – like if nobody else was using the internet during that time – such copying from a remote source was possible. I never saw anything like proof. Like someone demonstrating how it could be done. Much like the old 'clean pee swap' the completely-discredited McLaren Report claimed the Russians performed on athletes' urine samples; he claimed to know how it was done, but never demonstrated it, and appeared to be unable to do so, as it would have strongly supported his allegations.

Having taken us such an eye-blurring distance on the blarney rollercoaster, Molly at last falls apart. "So anyone trying to tell you there was little impact on political views from the tools the Russians used doesn't know. Because none of us knows. No one has looked . Social media companies don't want us to know, and they obfuscate and drag their feet rather than disclosing information. The analytical tools to quantify the impact don't readily exist. But we know what we see, and what we heard -- and the narratives pushed by the Russian information operation made it to all of our ears and eyes" , she tells us.

So if you saw advertising by Black Lives Matter, or perhaps some other civil-rights organization, pushing a false narrative that blacks are second-class citizens in their own country, then you were exposed to Kremlin propaganda. And it affected how you voted, if you're an American. How much? Nobody knows. What everybody does know, or should, is that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, although not the determinate vote in the electoral college – quite a trick for the Russians to manage.

Let's summarize. Americans were supposedly pushed into voting for Donald Trump by the misuse of stolen data which was all true. The DNC did conspire to rig the primary so that Clinton was the Democratic candidate rather than Bernie Sanders; the Chair of the DNC resigned in disgrace because of the revelations which came to light. Her replacement, Donna Brazile, admitted to having fed the primary debate questions to Clinton in advance , giving her an advantage over Sanders, who was unaware of them as he should have been. At its very core, the Democratic party is as corrupt as the Nigerian prince who keeps e-mailing me to help him hide his ill-gotten fortune. American intelligence and technical professionals with no discernible benefit in making their country look bad insist that no hacking of the DNC's server took place, and that the stolen information which kicked the Democrats' feet out from under them on the eve of the election was not hacked, but stolen by direct physical transfer from the server using a portable storage device. Wikileaks insisted the information it released did not come from the Russians. The serving American intelligence services at the time of the 2016 election had a secret program which was capable of mimicking the origin of posted information on social media so that forensic investigation would find traces of Russian authorship, or other non-American authorship. The CIA has vigorously denied any involvement whatsoever in various international events at the time they occurred, only to admit much later – when it would be pointless to punish it – that they did in fact play an influential role. Data from 2014 established that at that time, 27% of black Americans lived below the poverty line , compared with 11% of all Americans; 38% of black children lived in poverty compared with 22% of all American children. I have seen no compelling evidence that this situation has improved. According to the perfidious Kremlin mouthpiece RT, citing American sources, American blacks are incarcerated at a rate six times as high as the national average .

Molly McKew, the information-warfare goddess, tells us that it is 'undeniable' that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, by making Americans doubt the integrity of their political candidates. In the case of the Democrats – which is by no means intended to spare the Republicans – they were demonstrated by their own repeatedly-verified and admitted shenanigans to understand 'integrity' about as well as the average crab fisherman understands how to calculate the mass of the sun. Everything they were accused of doing, they did. Candidate Hillary Clinton unambiguously lied – as she has done on other occasions – about the security classification of her 'private' emails and completely fabricated consent of the State Department for her to maintain a private email server for the sending and receiving of official message traffic. America does have an uneven scale of justice, law enforcement and standard of living based on race. There is no proof at all which has so far been made public that any of those situations were reported, compelled, exacerbated or invented by Russia, or by anyone from Russia. According to persistent revelations from Kiev, the American Democratic party energetically sought dirt on candidate Trump from Ukrainian sources , not Russian. McKew closes her soliloquy on election interference by maintaining that while it is undeniable that Russian interference occurred, nobody knows the extent to which it influenced the vote, which resulted in a popular win for the candidate who lost the election.

Let me posit another reality. Russia played no part at all in the outcome of the 2016 election, although it certainly was a surprise to most. There is no proof even offered that there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials of any description, and no proof which could not have been fabricated that any coherent social-media campaign originating with Russian operatives took place, or that any such imaginary social-media campaign had anything to do with Trump's victory. The Democrats, by sticking to their ridiculous and incredible narrative of Russian masterminds warping American democracy, are setting themselves up for having their headlights sucked out again by the passing Trump juggernaut in the next election, when they will be totally out of excuses if they do not wake up and do some serious retrenching.

But we are probably going to have to wait for history to teach that lesson to Americans.

[Jun 13, 2019] A loyal servant of empire -- Crowdstrike CEO -- is well-rewarded for his role in creating Russiagate hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone

Notable quotes:
"... Never mind that to this day the DNC servers have not been examined by the FBI, nor indeed were they examined by the Special Counsel of Robert " Iraq has WMD " Mueller, preferring instead to go with the analyses of this extremely shady outfit with extensive and well-documented ties with the oligarchic leaders of the US-centralized empire. ..."
"... When the Romanian REAL Guccifer got Podesta password (password) by phishing, exposing his pizza and walnut sauce perversions, the US had him jailed. When WikiLeaks made a DNC dump, CrowdStrike concocted Guccifer 2.0, then more leaks Fancy Bear, and more leaks Cozy Bear. All these CrowdStrike fabrications used CIA Vault 7 fingerprints to frame Russia. It is time to execute our ruling demonic warlords. ..."
Jun 13, 2019 | caitlinjohnstone.com

A new article by Forbes reports that the CEO of Crowdstrike, the extremely shady cybersecurity corporation which was foundational in the construction of the official CIA/CNN Russian hacking narrative, is now a billionaire. George Kurtz ascended to the billionaire rankings on the back of soaring stocks immediately after the company went public, carried no doubt on the winds of the international fame it gained from its central protagonistic role in the most well-known hacking news story of all time.

A loyal servant of empire well-rewarded. Never mind that US government insiders like Hillary Clinton had been prepping for escalations against Russia well in advance of the 2016 elections, and that their preexisting agendas to shove a geostrategic obstacle off the world stage benefitted from the hacking narrative as much as George Kurtz did.

Never mind that Crowdstrike is tied to the NATO narrative management firm known as the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO, Gulf states and powerful international oligarchs. Never mind either that Crowdstrike was financed with a whopping $100 million from Google , which has had a cozy relationship with US intelligence agencies since its very inception .

Never mind that to this day the DNC servers have not been examined by the FBI, nor indeed were they examined by the Special Counsel of Robert " Iraq has WMD " Mueller, preferring instead to go with the analyses of this extremely shady outfit with extensive and well-documented ties with the oligarchic leaders of the US-centralized empire.

Also never mind that the Crowdstrike analyst who led forensics on those DNC servers had in fact worked for and was promoted by Robert Mueller while the two were in the FBI.

The CEO of the Atlantic Council-tied Crowdstrike, which formed the foundation of the official CIA/CNN Russian hacking narrative, is now a billionaire. I'm telling you, the real underlying currency of this world is narrative and the ability to control it. https://t.co/XsBCvkIDzJ -- Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) June 12, 2019
As I never tire of saying, the real underlying currency in our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even raw military might.

The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it.

As soon as you really grok this dynamic, you start noticing it everywhere.

George Kurtz is one clear example today of narrative control's central role in the maintenance and expansion of existing power structures, as well as an illustration of how the empire is wired to reward those who advance pro-empire narratives and punish those who damage them...

... ... ...

Joseph Olson / June 13, 2019
When the Romanian REAL Guccifer got Podesta password (password) by phishing, exposing his pizza and walnut sauce perversions, the US had him jailed. When WikiLeaks made a DNC dump, CrowdStrike concocted Guccifer 2.0, then more leaks Fancy Bear, and more leaks Cozy Bear. All these CrowdStrike fabrications used CIA Vault 7 fingerprints to frame Russia. It is time to execute our ruling demonic warlords.

[Jun 13, 2019] The most obvious obstacle for Tulsi is DC's foreign-policy Establishment (aka The Blob) -- the think-tankers and politicians and media personalities and intelligence professionals and defense-company contractors who determine the bounds of acceptable thinking on war and peace.

Jun 13, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Gabbard (D)(1): "Tulsi Gabbard Had a Very Strange Childhood" [ New York Magazine ]. " A Hindu veteran and millennial congresswoman of Samoan descent hailing from Hawaii, [Gabbard] brings together disparate constituencies: most noticeably, Bernie Sanders fans who love that she resigned from the Democratic National Committee to endorse him in 2016, but also libertarians who appreciate her noninterventionism, Indian-Americans taken by her professed Hinduism, veterans attracted to her credibility on issues of war and peace, and racists who interpret various statements she has made to be promising indications of Islamophobia.

That she is polling at one percent, sandwiched between Andrew Yang and Amy Klobuchar, suggests that bringing together these constituencies is not nearly enough, but the intensity of emotion she provokes on all sides sets her apart. When FiveThirtyEight asked 60 Democratic Party activists whom they didn't want to win, Tulsi Gabbard came in first out of 17 candidates." • Also, Gabbard is a self-described introvert (a plus in my book). And then there's this:

The most obvious obstacle between any noninterventionist candidate and mainstream success is D.C.'s foreign-policy Establishment -- the think-tankers and politicians and media personalities and intelligence professionals and defense-company contractors and, very often, intelligence professionals turned defense-company contractors who determine the bounds of acceptable thinking on war and peace. In parts of D.C., this Establishment is called "the Blob," and to stray beyond its edges is to risk being deemed "unserious," which as a woman candidate one must be very careful not to be.

The Blob may in 2019 acknowledge that past American wars of regime change for which it enthusiastically advocated have been disastrous, but it somehow maintains faith in the tantalizing possibilities presented by new ones.

The Blob loves to "stand for" things, especially "leadership" and "democracy." The Blob loves to assign moral blame, loves signaling virtue while failing to follow up on civilian deaths, and definitely needs you to be clear on "who the enemy is" -- a kind of obsessive deontological approach in which naming things is more important than cataloguing the effects of any particular policy.

It's fair to say that whoever The Blob is for -- ***cough*** Hillary Clinton ***cough*** -- should be approached with a hermaneutic of suspicion.

[Jun 13, 2019] 'Completely baseless' Tulsi slams US media smears against her campaign

Jun 13, 2019 | www.rt.com

Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard took the media to task for what she called biased and misleading coverage of her campaign, arguing the facts no longer matter to some outlets. Speaking at an event in New York recently, Tulsi said the press had given up on any semblance of balanced or accurate reporting, replacing news coverage with panels of jabbering pundits.

Instead of factual reporting, she said: "We see opinions, we see panels of people on all the news channels – I don't care which one you watch – sharing their opinions."

tulsi mocking george stephanopoulos is one of the greatest things you'll hear from any of the candidates pic.twitter.com/aIBxWyZ5t1

-- Starrchild (@hexen220) June 9, 2019

The 2020 hopeful also described what she said were intentional smear efforts against her campaign in the media.

"Me and my campaign have been on the receiving end of very intentional smear efforts trying to undermine our campaign coming through, you know, NBC News quoting articles that are completely baseless," Gabbard said.

She referred to a recent interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, wherein the pundit echoed the suggestion that Gabbard's campaign was boosted by "Putin apologists."

"Well, you know, this article in the Daily Beast says Putin supports your campaign," she said, imitating Stephanopolous's question in the interview.

An article "based on what?" she asked the audience in New York rhetorically. "Nothing. Really, nothing."

The story in question intimated that Gabbard's presidential bid was backed by "Kremlin sympathizers," such as the Nation magazine's Stephen F. Cohen, an expert in international relations who argues for better ties between the US and Russia.

Also on rt.com Democrat Tulsi Gabbard fends off 'fake news' accusations of Russian support

Gabbard has come under fire for her foreign policy positions, such as her call for detente between the US and other nuclear-armed states like Russia. Tulsi's opposition to US regime change policies have also made her a target in some quarters. After refusing to endorse American efforts to topple the Syrian government, she was branded as an 'apologist' for Syria's President Bashar Assad.

[Jun 12, 2019] Trump Threatens Merkel With Pipeline Sanctions, US Troop Cut by Josh Wingrove

This is a typical Trump. He understands that "protection of Germany" is a profitable "protection racket" for the USA, but still lies.
Notable quotes:
"... U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said during a visit to Ukraine in May that he expected Congress to prepare legislation to sanction companies involved in the pipeline's construction. ..."
Jun 12, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

Trump Threatens Merkel With Pipeline Sanctions, U.S. Troop Cut - Bloomberg ‎June‎ ‎12‎, ‎2019‎ ‎12‎:‎34‎ ‎PM

'Germany Is Making a Tremendous Mistake by Relying on Pipeline,' says Trump 'Germany Is Making a Tremendous Mistake by Relying on Pipeline,' says Trump Close Share

Donald Trump upped his criticism of Germany on Wednesday as he threatened sanctions over Angela Merkel's continued support for a gas pipeline from Russia and warned that he could shift troops away from the NATO ally over its defense spending.

Echoing previous threats about German support for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Trump said he's looking at sanctions to block the project he's warned would leave Berlin "captive" to Moscow. The U.S. also hopes to export its own liquefied natural gas to Germany.

"We're protecting Germany from Russia, and Russia is getting billions and billions of dollars in money from Germany" for its gas, Trump told reporters at the White House during a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda.

The comments were the latest sign of how U.S.-German ties have eroded in recent years. The U.S. president has repeatedly rebuked Merkel's government over the pipeline project, trade policies and defense spending. Germany, in turn, has criticized Trump's moves to abandon international agreements, including on climate change and Iran.

Though he didn't say which companies or governments could potentially face sanctions, Trump's comments about the pipeline generated a swift response from Moscow, which said the American president was engaging in "nothing other than blackmail and a form of unfair competition," according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

Merkel and Trump met most recently last week during anniversary celebrations of the 1944 D-Day invasion. That gathering came days after the EU's longest-serving leader took Trump to task at a commencement address at Harvard University, urging students to "tear down walls" and not to treat "lies as truth." Without naming the U.S. leader, Merkel left little doubt as to whom she might mean to a crowd who cheered her on.

QuickTake: Why World Worries About Russia's Natural Gas Pipeline

U.S. opposition to the gas pipeline is bipartisan, out of concern that Russia could use its supplies of natural gas to exert pressure on Western European nations dependent on the fuel. U.S. lawmakers also fear that with an added northern pipeline for its gas, Russia could more easily cut off fuel to Ukraine, which is now a key transit country to Europe.

"Germany is making a tremendous mistake" by relying on the pipeline from Russia, Trump said during a joint news conference with Duda.

Regardless of the political controversy, the Nord Stream 2 project has faced delays and may not be ready to transport gas until the second half of 2020, according to a report made public by Denmark's Energy Agency.

Nord Stream 2 organizers argue a new pipeline is needed to guarantee supplies will continue to flow in the coming decades as EU domestic reserves shrink and import needs rise. Opponents of the project say it hurts the bloc's cohesion and weakens its Energy Union strategy aimed at integrating the region's gas and power markets, diversifying energy supplies and improving security.

Uniper SE, Engie SA, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, OMV AG and BASF SE's Wintershall are European partners of Russia's Gazprom PJSC in financing the project to expand Nord Stream by 55 billion cubic meters a year. Russia supplies a third of Europe's gas and has no plans to give up its share to the expanding list of competitors from Norway to the U.S.

Trump, speaking during the news conference Wednesday, said that Poland signed a contract to purchase an additional $8 billion of liquefied natural gas from U.S. companies, on top of $25 billion already under contract.

Trump said he'll meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Japan at the end of the month, though its not clear the pipeline project will be on their agenda.

Who's Dependent on Russian Gas?

About a third of Europe's gas comes from Russia

https://www.bloomberg.com/toaster/v2/charts/17e9f70fa0444d53a0445e199c57eb22.html?brand=politics&webTheme=politics&web=true&hideTitles=true

2016 data. Source: Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said during a visit to Ukraine in May that he expected Congress to prepare legislation to sanction companies involved in the pipeline's construction.

Senators Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, have drafted a bill that would target U.S. sanctions at vessels laying the pipeline and deny U.S. visas to executives from companies linked to the ships. The legislation would also block transactions in U.S.-based property or interests belonging to those individuals and would penalize entities that provide insurance to the project.

In the latest sign of Trump's frustration over German defense spending, the president said he's discussed sending as many as 2,000 more U.S. troops to Poland -- and might take them from Germany since he believes Berlin isn't spending enough on defense as a partner in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. There are more than 30,000 U.S. troops in Germany.

Under an agreement reached during the Obama administration, NATO members committed to spending 2% of GDP on defense by the mid-2020s, a level only seven nations were estimated to have reached in 2018.

"Germany's at 1%, they should be at 2%," Trump said. According to NATO documents, spent about 1.2 percent of GDP on defense in 2018.

The U.S. already has a few thousand troops in Poland as part of its role in NATO. Trump's move, if carried out, would add to that, but it wasn't clear if the forces would be permanently based there or just rotated through.

-- With assistance by Daryna Krasnolutska, Nick Wadhams, Daniel Flatley, Stepan Kravchenko, Ewa Krukowska, and Vanessa Dezem

[Jun 11, 2019] A Word From Joe the Angry Hawaiian

Highly recommended!
Jun 11, 2019 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

Word From Joe the Angry Hawaiian

This just in from the Big Island. The natives seem restless.

"Imagine if you will, in a few short years, that information on current events will only be available from a narrow band of sources sanctioned by the government/corporate media. And this Orwellian future will be embraced by the majority of people because it provides security, both ideological and emotional.

Any dissension, criticism, whistle-blowing, anti-exceptionalism coming from critical voices will be labeled extremist. And this has been embraced by the two monopoly political parties.

I just received a questionnaire from the Democrats posing the question, "What's the most important issue in the upcoming election?"

The very first multiple choice answer to pick from was - "Russian aggression and increasing global influence" Russia, a country with a small population and an economy that is a fraction of the US or Europe is our dire threat? Let's just ignore the expansion of NATO onto Russia's borders, or that the US State Dept. spent 5 billion dollar to change the politics of Ukraine.

Second most important issue asked on the questionnaire, "Protecting America from foreign cyber attacks" Let's ignore the fact that the NSA is spying on all Internet traffic, that the CIA has misinformation programs like, "Operation Mockingbird" and many other covert activities to influence perceptions domestically.

The third Democratic Party priority question is "China's increasing economic and military strength" China's state controlled mercantile success lies directly on the twin shoulders of the US Government and it's multi-national corporations. The US granted China, Most Favored Nation status in 1979, which gave it exposure to US markets with low tariffs. Almost immediately, corporations went to China and invested in factories because of the cheap Chinese labor while abandoning the US worker. And in May 2000 Bill Clinton backed a bipartisan effort to grant China permanent normal trade relations, effectively backing its bid to join the WTO.

We live in a country whereby the US Government has made it possible for corporations to pay little or no taxes, to be deregulated from government laws designed to protect the public, and allow corporate crimes to go unpunished while maintaining vast influence over the political system through campaign contributions and corporate ownership of the mass media.

This US Government/corporate partnership smells a lot like Fascism. Instead of Mussolini we have Trumpolini. And so our time's brand of corporatism has descended over the eroding infrastructure of America."

Joe the Angry Hawaiian

[Jun 11, 2019] A Word From Joe the Angry Hawaiian

Highly recommended!
Jun 11, 2019 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

Word From Joe the Angry Hawaiian

This just in from the Big Island. The natives seem restless.

"Imagine if you will, in a few short years, that information on current events will only be available from a narrow band of sources sanctioned by the government/corporate media. And this Orwellian future will be embraced by the majority of people because it provides security, both ideological and emotional.

Any dissension, criticism, whistle-blowing, anti-exceptionalism coming from critical voices will be labeled extremist. And this has been embraced by the two monopoly political parties.

I just received a questionnaire from the Democrats posing the question, "What's the most important issue in the upcoming election?"

The very first multiple choice answer to pick from was - "Russian aggression and increasing global influence" Russia, a country with a small population and an economy that is a fraction of the US or Europe is our dire threat? Let's just ignore the expansion of NATO onto Russia's borders, or that the US State Dept. spent 5 billion dollar to change the politics of Ukraine.

Second most important issue asked on the questionnaire, "Protecting America from foreign cyber attacks" Let's ignore the fact that the NSA is spying on all Internet traffic, that the CIA has misinformation programs like, "Operation Mockingbird" and many other covert activities to influence perceptions domestically.

The third Democratic Party priority question is "China's increasing economic and military strength" China's state controlled mercantile success lies directly on the twin shoulders of the US Government and it's multi-national corporations. The US granted China, Most Favored Nation status in 1979, which gave it exposure to US markets with low tariffs. Almost immediately, corporations went to China and invested in factories because of the cheap Chinese labor while abandoning the US worker. And in May 2000 Bill Clinton backed a bipartisan effort to grant China permanent normal trade relations, effectively backing its bid to join the WTO.

We live in a country whereby the US Government has made it possible for corporations to pay little or no taxes, to be deregulated from government laws designed to protect the public, and allow corporate crimes to go unpunished while maintaining vast influence over the political system through campaign contributions and corporate ownership of the mass media.

This US Government/corporate partnership smells a lot like Fascism. Instead of Mussolini we have Trumpolini. And so our time's brand of corporatism has descended over the eroding infrastructure of America."

Joe the Angry Hawaiian

[Jun 11, 2019] Cult of personality as integral feature of neofascism

Jun 11, 2019 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

"Cult leaders [demagogues] arise from decayed communities and societies in which people have been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered, infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who appear omnipotent and promise a return to a mythical golden age.

The cult leaders vow to crush the forces, embodied in demonized groups and individuals, that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity.

Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders demand a God-like power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will save them."

Chris Hedges, Cult of Trump

"Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation."

Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion

"We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster. In this we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government.

Franklin Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address

"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the [corporatist] government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent."

Dean Baker

[Jun 11, 2019] Where exactly Peter Strzok (22 years in the FBI) learned that he had a right to interfere in a U.S. election to damage a candidate that he opposed

It is not even clear the Mr.Strok is an employee of FBI. He might well be employee of CIA working at FBI. If so what is so suprizing that he pursued Mr.Brannan policy with the usual zeal ?
Notable quotes:
"... And why would an Andrew McCabe (over 21 years in the FBI) think he had the duty to formulate an "insurance policy" to take out a presidential candidate? Or why would he even consider overseeing an FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's improper use of emails when his wife had been a recent recipient of Clinton-related PAC money? ..."
"... In sum, why did so many top FBI officials, some with long experience in the FBI, exhibit such bad judgment and display such unethical behavior, characterized by arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and a belief that they were above both the law and the Constitution itself? Were they really just rogue agents, lawyers, and administrators, or are they emblematic of an FBI culture sorely gone wrong? ..."
"... The FBI culture of corruption was started by Mueller when he ran the place for many years and continued by Comey. These dirty agents grew up in the culture they created. ..."
"... Having watched the Comey testimony, I can only surmise that he is a certified psychopath, who could lie through his teeth, AND pass a polygraph test without registering a single "blip". ..."
Jun 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
The FBI Tragedy: Elites Above The Law

by Tyler Durden Tue, 06/11/2019 - 22:25 0 SHARES Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via NationalReview.com,

After decades in the FBI, the top brass came to believe they could flout the law and pursue their own political agendas.

One of the media and beltway orthodoxies we constantly hear is that just a few bad apples under James Comey at the FBI explain why so many FBI elites have been fired, resigned, reassigned, demoted, or retired -- o r just left for unexplained reasons. The list is long and includes director James Comey himself, deputy director Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, attorney Lisa Page, chief of staff James Rybicki, general counsel James Baker, assistant director for public affairs Mike Kortan, Comey's special assistant Josh Campbell, executive assistant director James Turgal, assistant director for office of congressional affairs Greg Bower, executive assistant director Michael Steinbach, and executive assistant director John Giacalone . In short, in about every growing scandal of the past two years -- FISA, illegal leaking, spying on a presidential candidate, lying under oath, obstructing justice -- someone in the FBI is involved.

We are told, however, that the FBI's culture and institutions are exempt from the widespread wrongdoing at the top. Such caution is a fine and fitting thing, given the FBI's more than a century of public service. Nonetheless, many of those caught up in the controversies over the Russian-collusion hoax were not recent career appointees. Rather, many came up through the ranks of the FBI. And that raises the question, for example, of where exactly Peter Strzok (22 years in the FBI) learned that he had a right to interfere in a U.S. election to damage a candidate that he opposed.

And why would an Andrew McCabe (over 21 years in the FBI) think he had the duty to formulate an "insurance policy" to take out a presidential candidate? Or why would he even consider overseeing an FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's improper use of emails when his wife had been a recent recipient of Clinton-related PAC money?

And why would McCabe contemplate leaking confidential FBI information to the press or even dream of setting up some sort of operation to remove a sitting president under the 25th Amendment? And how did someone like the old FBI vet Peter Strozk ever end up at the center of the entire mess -- opening up the snooping on the Trump campaign while hiding that fact and while briefing the candidate on Russian interference in the election, interviewing Michael Flynn, preening as a top FBI investigator for Robert Mueller's dream team, right-hand man of "Andy" McCabe, convincing Comey to change the wording of his writ in the Clinton-email-scandal investigation, softball coddling of Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, instrumental in the Papadopoulos investigation con -- all the while conducting an affair with fellow FBI investigator and attorney Lisa Page and bragging about his assurance that the supposedly odious Trump would be prevented from being elected. If a group of Trump zealots were to call up the FBI tomorrow and allege that a member of Joe Biden's family has had unethical ties with the Ukrainian or Chinese government, would that gambit "alarm" the FBI enough to prompt an investigation of Biden and his campaign? How many career-professional Peter Strozks are still at the agency?

In sum, why did so many top FBI officials, some with long experience in the FBI, exhibit such bad judgment and display such unethical behavior, characterized by arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and a belief that they were above both the law and the Constitution itself? Were they really just rogue agents, lawyers, and administrators, or are they emblematic of an FBI culture sorely gone wrong?

How and why would James Comey believe that as a private citizen he had the right to leak classified memos of presidential conversations that he had recorded on FBI time and on FBI machines?

Does the FBI inculcate behavior that prompts its officials to repeatedly testify under oath that they either don't know or can't remember - in a fashion that would earn an indictment for most similarly interrogated private citizens? Was Strozk's testimony to the Congress emblematic of a career FBI agent in his full? Was Comey's? Was McCabe's?

To answer those questions, perhaps we can turn to an analogous example of special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller. We are always advised something to the effect that the admirable Vietnam War veteran and career DOJ and FBI administrator Bob Mueller has a sterling reputation, and thus we were to assume that his special-counsel investigation would be free from political bias. To suggest otherwise was to be slapped down as a rank demagogue of the worse kind.

But how true were those beltway narratives? Mueller himself had a long checkered prosecutorial and investigative career, involving questionable decisions about the use of FBI informants in Boston, and overseeing absolutely false FBI accusations against an innocent suspect in the sensationalized anthrax case that began shortly after 9/11.

The entire Mueller investigation did not reflect highly either on Mueller or the number of former and current DOJ and FBI personnel he brought on to his team. In a politically charged climate, Mueller foolishly hired an inordinate number of political partisans, some of whom had donated to the Clinton campaign, while others had legally defended the Clinton Foundation or various Clinton and Obama aides. Mueller's point-man Andrew Weissman was a known Clinton zealot with his own past record of suspect prosecutorial overreach.

Mueller did not initially disclose why FBI employees Lisa Page and Peter Strozk were taken off his investigative team, and he staggered their departures to suggest that their reassignments were normal rather than a consequence of the couple's unprofessional personal behavior and their textual record of rank Trump hatred. Mueller's very appointment was finessed by former FBI director and Mueller friend James Comey and was largely due to the hysteria caused by Comey's likely felonious leaks of confidential and classified FBI memos -- a fact of no interest to Mueller's soon-to-be-expanded investigation.

During the investigation, Mueller was quite willing to examine peripheral issues such as the scoundrelly behavior of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and the inside lobbying of Paul Manafort for foreign governments. Fine. But Mueller was curiously more discriminating in his non-interest in crimes far closer to the allegations of Russian collusion. That is, he was certainly uninterested about how and when the basis for his entire investigation arose -- the unverified and fallacious Steele dossier that had been deliberately seeded among the FBI, CIA, and DOJ to achieve official imprimaturs so it could then be leaked to the press to ruin the campaign, transition, and presidency of Donald Trump.

Mueller's team also deliberately edited a phone message from Trump counsel John Dowd to Robert Kelner, General Michael Flynn's lawyer, to make it appear incriminating and possibly unethical or illegal. Only after a federal judge ordered the full release of the transcript did the public learn the extent of Mueller's selective and misleading cut-and-paste of Dowd's message.

Mueller's own explanations about the extent to which he was guided by the precedent of presidential exemption from indictment are at odds with his own prior statements and in conflict with what Attorney General Barr has reported from a meeting with Mueller and others. In those meetings, Mueller assured that he was after the truth and did not regard prior legal opinions about the illegality of indicting a sitting president as relevant to his own investigations. But when he essentially discovered he had no finding of collusion, he then mysteriously retreated to the previously rejected notion that he was powerless to indict Trump on a possible obstruction charge.

Mueller displayed further contortions when he recited a number of alleged Trump wrongdoings but then backed off by concluding that, while such evidence for a variety of different reasons did not justify an indictment of Trump, nonetheless Trump should not be exonerated of obstruction of justice.

Mueller thereby established a new but lunatic precedent in American jurisprudence in which a prosecutor who fails to find sufficient cause to indict a suspect nonetheless releases supposedly incriminating evidence, with a wink that the now-besmirched suspect cannot be exonerated of the alleged crimes. Think what Mueller's precedent of not-not-guilty would do to the American criminal-justice system, as zealous prosecutors might fish for just enough dirt on a suspect to ruin his reputation, but not find enough for an indictment, thereby exonerating their own prosecutorial failure by defaming a "guilty until proven innocent" suspect.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Mueller's team knew early on in their investigation that his lead investigators Peter Strzok and Lisa Page had been correct in their belief that there was "no there there" in the charges of collusion -- again the raison d'être of their entire investigation.

Yet Mueller's team continued the investigation, aggregating more than 200 pages of unverified or uncorroborated news accounts, online essays, and testimonies describing all sorts of alleged unethical behavior and infelicities by Trump and his associates, apparently in hopes of compiling their own version of something like the Steele dossier. Mueller sought to publish a compendium of Trump bad behavior that fell below the standard of criminal offense but that would nonetheless provide useful fodder for media sensationalism and congressional partisan efforts to impeach the now supposedly not-not guilty president.

Note again, at no time did Muller ever investigate the Steele dossier that had helped to create his existence as special counsel, much less whether members of the FBI and DOJ had misled a FISA court by hiding critical information about the dossier to obtain wiretaps of American citizens, texts that Mueller himself would then use in his effort to find criminal culpability.

We were told throughout the 22-month investigation that "Bob Mueller does not leak." But almost on a weekly schedule, left-wing cable news serially announced in formulaic fashion that "the walls were closing in on" and the "noose was tightening around" Trump as another "bombshell" disclosure was anticipated, according to "sources close to the Mueller investigation," "unnamed sources," and "sources who chose to remain unidentified." On one occasion, CNN reporters mysteriously showed up in advance at the home of a Mueller target, to capture on camera the arrival of paramilitary-like arresting officers.

When it is established beyond a doubt that foreign surveillance of and contact with George Papadopoulos was used to entrap a minor Trump aide as a means of providing an ex post facto justification for the earlier illegal FBI and CIA surveillance of the Trump campaign, and when it is shown without doubt that Steele had little if any corroborating evidence for his dirty dossier, Mueller's reputation unfortunately will be further eroded.

Yet the question is not merely whether a Comey, McCabe, or Mueller is atypical of the FBI. Rather, where in the world, if not from the culture of the FBI, did these elite legal investigators absorb the dangerous idea that FBI lawyers and investigators could flout the law and in such arrogant fashion use their vast powers of the government to pursue their own political agendas? And why was there no internal pushback at a supercilious leadership that demonstrably had gone rogue? Certainly, the vast corpus of the Strzok-Page correspondence does reflect a unprofessional, out-of-control culture at the FBI.

Just imagine: If an agent Peter Strozk interviewed you and overstepped his purview, would you, the aggrieved, then appeal to his boss, Andrew McCabe? And if Andrew McCabe ignored your complaint, would you, the wronged, then seek higher justice from a James Comey, who in turn might rely on a legal opinion from a Lisa Page or a brief from a James Baker? And failing that, might a Robert Mueller as an outside auditor rectify prior FBI misconduct?

Fairly or not, the current FBI tragedy is that an American citizen should be duly worried about his constitutional rights any time he is approached by such senior FBI officials. That is not a slur on the rank and file, but the legacy of the supposed best and brightest of the agency and their distortions of the bureau's once professional creed.

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More-Cowbell , 2 minutes ago link

As if this is something new. J Edgar held incriminating files on anyone of importance in DC and used them to get what he wanted from CONgress.

He virtually owned and ran the politihos like a pimp runs his stable.

Reaper , 3 minutes ago link

The rot is institutional. It starts with the Form 302 interviews, where the content is not recorded, but remembered days or months later in its written form. Any intelligent person knows humans cannot remember exact spoken words in an extensive interview. Plus, the incentive for moving up in the FBI provides an incentive for fabrications.

wee-weed up , 8 minutes ago link

"Why did so many top FBI officials exhibit such bad judgment, unethical behavior, and belief they were above both the law itself? Were they really just rogue agents, or are they emblematic of an FBI gone wrong?"

Simple answer...

They were working for the lawless Admin of Obozo... The most corrupt president in American history! And trying to see that it would continue under... The even more lawless... Hitlery Clinton!

lulu34 , 13 minutes ago link

What a ******** "question". FBI , rotten to the core. as has always been the case. I speak with first hand knowledge.

Teeter , 13 minutes ago link

The FBI culture of corruption was started by Mueller when he ran the place for many years and continued by Comey. These dirty agents grew up in the culture they created.

Mike Rotsch , 15 minutes ago link

Remember how they tried to get the Jessie Smollett case transferred to the FBI? It was supposed to be behind the curtain, but then someone leaked that effort, and it was all over the press.

For 1 or 2 days. Then you never heard about it again. And the effort was spoiled and stopped dead in its tracks. And the case continued as normal.

So how else can you get that case over to the FBI anyway, even after you've been caught? Easy. Just let him walk in a show of such blatant bias, that it forces the FBI to involve itself . In the end, the case went to the FBI, and placed in one of its deepest, darkest holes, never to be heard about again.

Every leftist freak who wants to get off scott-free, wants the FBI to handle their case.

skippy9 , 19 minutes ago link

Great article. But why keep exonerating the 99% who kept a closed eye to what their superiors were doing? The FBI is kaput. No one will believe anything they bring forth. The agency needs to be abolishedd and a new national police force established under close scrutiny.

I am Groot , 12 minutes ago link

Why do we need a national police force ? No we don't. Why can't the resources they consume just be divided up to the states themselves. Feds always come in to takeover investigations from local police and they don't ever have a clue what's going on.

The concept of the FBI has been replaced by having a centralized law enforcement database of information that can be shared at all level of law enforcement. There is no legitimate reason for the FBI.

We have so many known and unknown 3 letter agencies now all doing god knows what, and totally unchecked, with totally black budgets and classified missions. there is virtually no way to have accountability for these agencies. If they are incorporated into the states, budgets would become a lot more transparent.

Proud-Christian-White-American-Man , 19 minutes ago link

Where.. "did these elite legal investigators absorb the dangerous idea that FBI lawyers and investigators could flout the law and in such arrogant fashion use their vast powers of the government to pursue their own political agendas? "

a) The Clinton Crime family

b) Globalist traitors

c) Deep State Obama carryovers

d) Lack of prosecution of similar illegal actions since Nov 1963

fersur , 20 minutes ago link

The end result is No matter how much 'Damage Control' Begged for the last 30 months, it did Not work, No One Trusts the FBI, C_A and the like, or' at least Not until the first Arrest, followed by many, then follow-up punishment must be of the upmost severity allowed ( Times Square Hangings, preferably ) or the mistrust will trickle down to a War on authority !

I love your wife , 21 minutes ago link

They all think so highly of themselves. We should have never seen Comey on TV. Your job never required a direct audience with the American people, unless you thought a face to face would make it easier for us to swallow the lie.

end times prophet , 5 minutes ago link

" the current FBI tragedy is that an American citizen should be duly worried about his constitutional rights any time he is approached by such senior FBI officials. That is not a slur on the rank and file"

The rank and file enabled this just as much as the leaders. They prepared the reports, filed the paperwork and took notes at the meetings. The whole thing is corrupt...let it burn

bilbert , 7 minutes ago link

Having watched the Comey testimony, I can only surmise that he is a certified psychopath, who could lie through his teeth, AND pass a polygraph test without registering a single "blip".

The man is without ethics, whatsoever, and if Comey doesn't see FIVE years in jail, I fear the worst for the USA.

I am Groot , 22 minutes ago link

I keep saying that we need a million man armed march on D.C. If Black men can do it, We The People can do it to take our nation back.

We remove and suspend the FBI, the CIA, the FED, the SES and Congress. We also need to remove and suspend all local politicians guilty of treason and sedition. Any resistance to removal will be met with deadly force.

Every able Patriot should muster with arms, a first aid kit and 3-5 days of field rations.

Gen. Ripper's Ghost , 25 minutes ago link

Both the executive and legislative branchs of the federal government should be pared down to no more than 10,000 employees.

gpeter , 26 minutes ago link

Federal Bureau of Idiots. Power hungry, fascist, corrupt, loser idiots. Disband the fuckery of the FBI and the Central Lack of Intelligence immediately.

Passes to Gitmo for everyone. No exceptions.

2banana , 33 minutes ago link

Why isn't Jon Corzine in jail? Why isn't Hillary Clinton in jail? Why isn't Eric Holder in jail? Seems to be a pattern...

Sphira , 33 minutes ago link

Here is American Justus . Intelligence Assessment with Kevin Shipp Whistleblowers Roundtable with Bill Binney & John Kiriakou

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ_XSd1SXXk

Chupacabra-322 , 37 minutes ago link

It's absolute, complete, open in our Faces Tyrannical Lawlessness and absolutely NO ONE of highly compartmentalized levels of the FBI, DOJ, CIA Clinton, Obama, Clapper, Brennan & others will be Indicted.

EVER.

Only low hanging fruit will be Indicted to give the Slaves the illusion of a Justice System.

TBT or not TBT , 24 minutes ago link

Mueller was playing God decades before his recent foray to make his own justice, for example letting 4 men die in prison for crimes.he knew they were framed for, to protect an FBI "source" who was playing both ends and making fools of the FBI.

[Jun 11, 2019] Rachel Maddow Is Among the Moderators of the First Democratic Debate

So Russiagater was not fired. Madcow was promoted to more freely spead her "Madcow desease" (Neo-McCarthysim actually) into unsuspecting public ...
Notable quotes:
"... Almost none of the "celebrity" tv journalists have earned one sniff of their regard by having a sufficient amount of smarts, insight, and humility it requires to deliver the news. Especially in trying times like these. ..."
"... She's a borderline conspiracy theorist and more of a star than a newswoman. ..."
"... In what alternate universe does Maddow even have a hint of non-bias? She is not a journalist. ..."
"... maddow is all about opinion, hers, and the one given out to msm by the dem party everyday. aka : the meme of the day. maddow is an partisan idiot. always was, always will be ..."
Jun 11, 2019 | www.thecut.com

On Tuesday, NBC announced that its lineup of moderators will include Rachel Maddow of MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show , Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News and Dateline NBC, José Diaz-Balart of Noticias Telemundo and NBC Nightly News Saturday , Savannah Guthrie of Today , and Chuck Todd of Meet the Press .

... ... ...

UltraViolet Action co-founder and executive director Shaunna Thomas praised the moderator decision to the Cut. "NBC's decision to ensure that four out of the five moderators for the first Democratic presidential primary debate are women or people of color is a huge win for representation at the debates and a welcome change from the status quo," Thomas said in a statement. She also stated that she hopes other networks follow suit.

Cags

Almost none of the "celebrity" tv journalists have earned one sniff of their regard by having a sufficient amount of smarts, insight, and humility it requires to deliver the news. Especially in trying times like these.

joaniesausquoi, 3 hours ago

Whattya got against Rachel, Cags?

Cags, 2 hours ago

She's a borderline conspiracy theorist and more of a star than a newswoman.

Daxter , 6 hours ago (Edited)

In what alternate universe does Maddow even have a hint of non-bias? She is not a journalist.

Having Rachel Maddow moderate is like having Sean Hannity moderate.

indigo710, 5 hours ago

maddow is all about opinion, hers, and the one given out to msm by the dem party everyday. aka : the meme of the day. maddow is an partisan idiot. always was, always will be . "lawer" is spelled "lawyer".

[Jun 11, 2019] One of the older male anchors on financial TV today noted, in a very condescending tone, that for some reason Elizabeth Warren has an attitude when it comes to corporations

Notable quotes:
"... "When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise -- to deny the political character of the modern corporation -- is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error." ..."
Jun 11, 2019 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

Lies Owe a Debt to the Truth

"There was time when average Americans could be counted upon to know correctly whether the country was going up or down, because in those days when America prospered, the American people prospered as well. These days things are different.

Let's look at it in a statistical sense. If you look at it from the middle of the 1930's (the Depression) up until the year 1980, the lower 90 percent of the population of this country, what you might call the American people, that group took home 70 percent of the growth in the country's income. If you look at the same numbers from 1997 up until now, from the height of the great Dot Com bubble up to the present, you will find that this same group, the American people, pocketed none of this country's income growth at all.

Our share of these great good times was zero, folks. The upper ten percent of the population, by which we mean our country's financiers and managers and professionals, consumed the entire thing. To be a young person in America these days is to understand instinctively the downward slope that so many of us are on."

Thomas Frank, Kansas City Missouri, 6 April 2017

"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise -- to deny the political character of the modern corporation -- is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error."

John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the older male anchors on financial TV today noted, in a very condescending tone, that for some reason Elizabeth Warren 'has an attitude' when it comes to corporations.

I hope she and some of her like minded fellows get their opportunity to extend the hand of equal justice to these smug serial felons, pampered polecats, and corporatist clowns. It has been a long time coming.

[Jun 11, 2019] Hillary Clinton's Russia collusion IOU The answers she owes America

I think it is oversimplification. It was the intelligence agencies that controlled Hillary, not vise versa. The interests of intelligence agencies and Hillary campaign coincided, that's why she got as much support form CIA and FBI: Trump represented a central danger to flow of funds to "national security parasites" so their reaction was predictable reaction of any large bureaucracy of the possibility of losing power -- they circle the wagons.
Notable quotes:
"... But Steele's first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI's imagination. So the Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr -- whose wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion -- to push his Trump dirt to the top of the FBI. ..."
"... Nellie Ohr likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele's dossier to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump dirt at the FBI, too. ..."
"... In short, the Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure -- and bad intel -- until an investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the time, James Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as then-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. ..."
"... The Clinton team's dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out its political hit job on Trump. ..."
"... After two years of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, it's time for the house to call in its IOU. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton owes us answers -- lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while doing many high-profile media interviews. ..."
"... Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said Friday night on Fox News that it's time for Clinton to answer what she knew and when she knew it. ..."
"... John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports . ..."
Jun 11, 2019 | thehill.com

During the combined two decades she served as a U.S. senator and secretary of State, Hillary Clinton 's patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had official business pending before America's most powerful political woman.

The pattern of political IOUs paid to the Clinton Foundation was so pernicious that the State Department even tried to execute a special agreement with the charity to avoid the overt appearance of "pay-to-play" policy.

Still, the money continued to flow by the millions of dollars, from foreigners and Americans alike who were perceived to be indebted to the Clinton machine or in need of its help.

It's time for the American public to call in their own IOU on political transparency.

The reason? Never before -- until 2016 -- had the apparatus of a U.S. presidential candidate managed to sic the weight of the FBI and U.S. intelligence community on a rival nominee during an election, and by using a foreign-fed, uncorroborated political opposition research document.

But Clinton's campaign, in concert with the Democratic Party and through their shared law firm, funded Christopher Steele's unverified dossier which, it turns out, falsely portrayed Republican Donald Trump as a treasonous asset colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin to hijack the U.S. election.

Steele went to the FBI to get an investigation started and then leaked the existence of the investigation, with the hope of sinking Trump's presidential aspirations.

On its face, it is arguably the most devious political dirty trick in American history and one of the most overt intrusions of a foreigner into a U.S. election.

It appears the Clinton machine knew that what it was doing was controversial. That's why it did backflips to disguise the operation from Congress and the public, and in its Federal Election Commission (FEC) spending reports.

Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) used the law firm of Perkins Coie to hire Glenn Simpson's research firm, Fusion GPS, which then hired Steele -- several layers that obfuscated transparency, kept the operation off the campaign's public FEC reports and gave the Clintons plausible deniability.

But Steele's first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI's imagination. So the Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr -- whose wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion -- to push his Trump dirt to the top of the FBI.

Nellie Ohr likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele's dossier to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump dirt at the FBI, too.

Then Steele and, separately, longtime Clinton protégé Cody Shearer went to the State Department to get the story out, increasing pressure on the FBI.

In short, the Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure -- and bad intel -- until an investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the time, James Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as then-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

To finish the mission, Simpson and Steele leaked the existence of the FBI investigation to the news media to ensure it would hurt Trump politically. Simpson even called the leaks a "hail Mary" that failed.

Trump won, however. And now, thanks to special counsel Robert Mueller, we know the Russia-collusion allegations relentlessly peddled by Team Clinton were bogus. But not before the FBI used the Clinton-funded, foreign-created research to get a total of four warrants to spy on the Trump campaign , transition and presidency from October 2016 through the following autumn.

The Clinton team's dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out its political hit job on Trump.

After two years of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, it's time for the house to call in its IOU.

Hillary Clinton owes us answers -- lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while doing many high-profile media interviews.

I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said Friday night on Fox News that it's time for Clinton to answer what she knew and when she knew it.

Here are 10 essential questions:

Please identify each person in your campaign, including Perkins Coie lawyers, who were aware that Steele provided information to the FBI or State Department, and when they learned it.

Describe any information you and your campaign staff received, or were briefed on, before Election Day that was derived from the work of Simpson, Steele, Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr or Perkins Coie and that tried to connect Trump, his campaign or his business empire with Russia.

Please describe all contacts your campaign had before Election Day with or about the following individuals: Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, former foreign policy scholar Stefan Halper and Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud.

Did you or any senior members of your campaign, including lawyers such as Michael Sussmann, have any contact with the CIA, its former Director John Brennan, current Director Gina Haspel, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe?

Describe all contacts your campaign had with Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal concerning Trump, Russia and Ukraine.

Describe all contacts you and your campaign had with DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukraine government, the Ukraine Embassy in the United States or the U.S. Embassy in Kiev concerning Trump, Russia or former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Why did your campaign and the Democratic Party make a concerted effort to portray Trump as a Russian asset?

Given that investigations by a House committee, a Senate committee and a special prosecutor all have concluded there isn't evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, do you regret the actions by your campaign and by Steele, Simpson and Sussmann to inject these unfounded allegations into the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and the news media?

Hillary Clinton owes us answers to each of these questions. She should skip the lawyer-speak and answer them with the candor worthy of an elder American stateswoman.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports .

[Jun 11, 2019] Luke Harding is back with one of his bullshit exclusives in the Guardian.

This is "Integrity Initiative" at work...
Jun 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Ghost Ship , Jun 11, 2019 11:01:51 AM | 134
That arsehole Luke Harding is back with one of his bullshit exclusives in the Guardian .
Leaked documents reveal Russian effort to exert influence in Africa
Exclusive: Kremlin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin leading push to turn continent into strategic hub, documents show
by Luke Harding and Jason Burke
The only thing you really need to know about the exposé:
The leaked documents were obtained by the Dossier Center, an investigative unit based in London. The centre is funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian businessman and exiled Kremlin critic.
The Guardian obviously has no shame for publishing such an article but then it has never explained the claims of Manafort meeting with Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. As for the article, my reaction was "so fucking what?".

The British French and Americans have fucked up large parts of Africa while the Soviet Union/Russia was indirectly responsible for eradicating that cancerous growth, the apartheid state of South Africa, a single act that was better than all the good things that the United Kingdom, France and the United States have ever done in Africa

[Jun 10, 2019] John Brennan 'Pathological Deceiver' Trump 'Rankles Me to No End'

Notable quotes:
"... Despite special counsel Robert Mueller clearing Trump of collusion with Russia in 2016, Brennan still maintains the counterintelligence operation against the Republican nominee's campaign was more than justified. ..."
"... "I was there in the summer of '16 and it was very well predicated," the former intelligence official told MSNBC's Deadline host Nicole Wallace last month. "To launch this counterintelligence investigation about what the Russians were doing to interfere in our election and how among American citizens might have been working with them." ..."
"... Eventually 0bama will be asked when he authorized the spying on the 2012 election, and you can bet 0bama will toss Brennan under that proverbial bus. 0bama will have to answer the question, because there is a massive paper trail of evidence. ..."
"... President Trump weathered the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax storm. Those slow-moving wheels of real justice are finally starting to turn. ..."
Jun 10, 2019 | www.breitbart.com

Former CIA Director John Brennan has once against spoken out against President Donald Trump, describing him in a recent interview as a "pathological deceiver" who "rankles" him "to no end."

Speaking to the Irish Times over the weekend, Brennan discussed what he claims is the root of his harsh and repeated criticism of President Trump. The longtime Deep Stater's attacks, he claims, aren't driven as much by president's policy prescriptions but by his character.

"So my beef with Donald Trump is not because he has done some very foolish things – like reneging on the Iran nuclear deal, or how he has handled the North Korea situation – I find that many of his policies are deeply flawed and are purely tactical to give him a political bounce," he told interviewer Suzanne Lynch, the Times' Washington Correspondent.

"But if that was the only problem I had with him, I would be silent. What really just rankles me to no end is his dishonesty, his lack of ethics and principles and character, the way he demeans and degrades and denigrates individuals or institutions of government, what he has done and said about the FBI and CIA and the former leadership, the fact that he wilfully misleads not just the American people but the world," the former Obama spy chief continued .

Brennan concluded his thoughts on Trump by stating : "He is a pathological deceiver and that lack of ethical, principled behaviour is something that I never thought I would see in the president of the United States who is the most powerful person in the world, who should serve as a role model to all Americans.

Brennan's remarks come as his conduct during the U.S. government's Russia investigation is under review by the Department of Justice. Last month, President Trump directed several federal departments and agencies to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr's examination of the Russia probe's origins, as well as the declassification of intelligence related to it.

Despite special counsel Robert Mueller clearing Trump of collusion with Russia in 2016, Brennan still maintains the counterintelligence operation against the Republican nominee's campaign was more than justified.

"I was there in the summer of '16 and it was very well predicated," the former intelligence official told MSNBC's Deadline host Nicole Wallace last month. "To launch this counterintelligence investigation about what the Russians were doing to interfere in our election and how among American citizens might have been working with them."

Skeptical Shazaam • 6 hours ago

Brennan is worried about what President Trump is doing with the metric-tons of #Spygate & #Obamagate evidence.

Eventually 0bama will be asked when he authorized the spying on the 2012 election, and you can bet 0bama will toss Brennan under that proverbial bus. 0bama will have to answer the question, because there is a massive paper trail of evidence.

They never thought Hillary could lose. Mueller's special counsel, was only a temporary cover-up. President Trump weathered the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax storm. Those slow-moving wheels of real justice are finally starting to turn.

[Jun 10, 2019] Pompeo s promise to intervene against Corbyn should surprise no one by Catte Black

Jun 10, 2019 | off-guardian.org

alt media-verse is currently on fire with the news that the US State Dept's answer to Al Capone, Mike Pompeo, has been caught promising "Jewish leaders" to send the boys round to Jeremy Corbyn if he should get elected and subsequently prove to be uppity and out of line. According to the WaPo , who broke the story:

The remarks, which are contained in audio of a private meeting leaked to The Washington Post, make Pompeo the second senior U.S. official to comment on Britain's turbulent leadership succession in the past week.

During his meeting with Jewish leaders in New York, Pompeo was asked if Corbyn "is elected, would you be willing to work with us to take on actions if life becomes very difficult for Jews in the U.K.?"

In response, Pompeo said, "It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gantlet and get elected. It's possible. You should know, we won't wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best," he said to fervent applause from attendees.

"It's too risky and too important and too hard once it's already happened," he said.

Of course the idea the "Jewish leaders" harbor any real fear that Jeremy Corbyn (Jeremy Corbyn!) is going to make life "difficult" for British Jews if elected is simply risible. They know, just as every moderately informed person knows, that that's absurd. They know Corbyn has no wish to make life difficult for anybody – except possibly the uber wealthy and the profiteer class.

They know the "antisemitism" fear is just a cover for the very very real fear that a Corbyn government will break the unwritten rules of modern western governance and reject the agenda of austerity, exploitation and perpetual war that has been creating huge profits and ideological thrills for the blessed few over the last twenty years.

They know that what Pompeo is promising is action to prevent this possibility coming about.

People are up in arms about this, and some seem quite shocked. Apparently the idea the neoliberal elites would try regime change or regime-control on a relatively prosperous western country was something they didn't previously think possible.

Unfortunately it's more than possible. The state apparatus of the different western nations are a tight bond of mutual regard and interest, just as likely to foment regime change on their own or their allies' elected representatives as on those of impoverished or "developing" countries, if they believe those representatives threaten the perceived interests of the state. Of course it isn't too often necessary, since the same western state apparatus also works to ensure that only governments that don't threaten perceived state interests manage to get elected. But, when the unthinkable happens, MI5 and the CIA are quite happy to step up to the plate and throw their own or their allies' democratic governments out the window. It's happened – or nearly happened – at least twice in the last fifty years.

In the 1960s the UK security agencies, senior military and members of the royal family were apparently contemplating a fullblown coup against Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.

In 1975 it was Australia's turn , when democratically elected reforming prime minister Gough Whitlam was overthrown in a bloodless constitutional coup organised jointly by the US and UK .

The old empire and the new have form in this regard, and this means no one should take Pompeo's words (spoken in private let's not forget) lightly.

It's also interesting to look at how the WaPo frames the revelation. There's no sense of outrage or surprise there. In fact it's an almost matter-of-fact piece, written with no awareness of its potential impact. Even those in the comments who object in some form are mostly doing it within the permissible current language of dissent – blaming Trump , because in these identity politics-saturated times, your morality resides in who or what you are NOT in what you do.

To the WaPo – and many of its readers – there's nothing intrinsically either wrong or surprising in the idea a US secretary of state should be overtly promising to interfere in the democratic governance of another country.

It's just what they do when they need to.

Barovsky

See Caitlin Johnson’s piece: https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/06/10/uh-what-did-pompeo-mean-when-he-vowed-to-push-back-against-corbyn/

[Jun 10, 2019] The key to prosecuting Assange has always been to punish him without again embarrassing the powerful figures made mockeries by his disclosures by Eric Zuesse

Looks like PP damage the USA will sustain from prosecuting Assange will be comparable if not greater that initial damage from WikiLeaks. This also might stimulate "revenge disclosures"
Notable quotes:
"... CNN never mentioned that Clapper was accused of perjury in denying the existence of the National Security Agency surveillance program and was personally implicated in the scandal that WikiLeaks triggered. ..."
"... this is Washington and people like Clapper are untouchable ..."
Jun 10, 2019 | off-guardian.org

Right now, the U.S. regime is raising to a fever-pitch and twisting beyond recognition not only U.S. laws but the U.S. Constitution, so as to impose its will against him. President Trump is supported in this effort by the corrupt U.S. Congress, to either end Assange's life, or else lock him up for the rest of his heroic life in a dungeon having no communication with the world outside, until he does finally die, in isolation, punishment for his heroic last-ditch fight for the public's freedom and for democracy -- his fight, actually, against our 1984 regime.

What Jesus of Nazareth was locally for the Roman regime in his region, Assange is for the U.S. regime throughout the world: an example to terrify anyone else who might come forth effectively to challenge the Emperor's authority.

A key country in this operation is Ecuador, which is ruled by the dictator Lenin Moreno, who stole office by lying to the public and pretending to be a progressive who backed his democratically elected predecessor, Rafael Correa, but then as soon as he won power, he reversed Correa's progressive initiatives, including, above all, his protection of Assange, who had sought refuge in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.

On 11 April 2019, RT headlined "Who is Lenin Moreno and why did he hand Assange over to British police?" and reported that: Following his 2017 election, Moreno quickly moved away from his election platform after taking office. He reversed several key pieces of legislation passed under his predecessor which targeted the wealthy and the banks. He also reversed a referendum decision on indefinite re-election while simultaneously blocking any potential for Correa to return. He effectively purged many of Correa's appointments to key positions in Ecuador's judiciary and National Electoral Council via the CPCCS-T council which boasts supra-constitutional powers.

Moreno has also cozied up to the US, with whom Ecuador had a strained relationship under Correa. Following a visit from Vice President Mike Pence in June 2018, Ecuador bolstered its security cooperation with the US, including major arms deals, training exercises and intelligence sharing. Following Assange's arrest Correa, who granted Assange asylum in the first place, described Moreno as the "greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history" saying he was guilty of a "crime that humanity will never forget."

Despite his overwhelming power and influence, however, Moreno and his family are the subject of a sweeping corruption probe in the country, as he faces down accusations of money laundering in offshore accounts and shell companies in Panama, including the INA Investment Corp, which is owned by Moreno's brother.

Damning images, purportedly hacked from Moreno's phone, have irreparably damaged both his attempts at establishing himself as an anti-corruption champion as well as his relationship with Assange, whom he accused of coordinating the hacking efforts.

On 14 April 2019, Denis Rogatyuk at The Gray Zone headlined: "Sell Out: How Corruption, Voter Fraud and a Neoliberal Turn Led Ecuador's Lenin to Give Up Assange Desperate to ingratiate his government with Washington and distract the public from his mounting scandals, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno has sacrificed Julian Assange – and his country's independence" , and he described some of the documentation for the accusations that Moreno is corrupt. On 12 April 2019, Zero Hedge headlined "Facebook Removes Page Of Ecuador's Former President On Same Day As Assange's Arrest" , and opened: "Facebook has unpublished the page of Ecuador's former president, Rafael Correa, the social media giant confirmed on Thursday, claiming that the popular leftist leader violated the company's security policies."

On 16 April 2019, Jonathan Turley bannered "'He Is Our Property': The D.C. Establishment Awaits Assange With A Glee And Grudge" , and opened: They will punish Assange for their sins The key to prosecuting Assange has always been to punish him without again embarrassing the powerful figures made mockeries by his disclosures. That means to keep him from discussing how the U.S. government concealed alleged war crimes and huge civilian losses, the type of disclosures that were made in the famous Pentagon Papers case.

He cannot discuss how Democratic and Republican members either were complicit or incompetent in their oversight. He cannot discuss how the public was lied to about the program. A glimpse of that artificial scope was seen within minutes of the arrest. CNN brought on its national security analyst, James Clapper, former director of national intelligence.

CNN never mentioned that Clapper was accused of perjury in denying the existence of the National Security Agency surveillance program and was personally implicated in the scandal that WikiLeaks triggered. Clapper was asked directly before Congress, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper responded, "No, sir. Not wittingly." Later, Clapper said his testimony was "the least untruthful" statement he could make.

That would still make it a lie, of course, but this is Washington and people like Clapper are untouchable. In the view of the establishment, Assange is the problem.

On 11 April 2019, the YouGov polling organization headlined "53% of Americans say Julian Assange should be extradited to America" . On 13 April 2019, I headlined "What Public Opinion on Assange Tells Us About the US Government Direction", and reported the only international poll that had ever been done of opinions about Assange, and its findings demonstrated that, out of the 23 nations which were surveyed, U.S. was the only one where the public are anti-Assange, and that the difference between the U.S. and all of the others was enormous and stark.

The report opened: The only extensive poll of public opinion regarding Julian Assange or Wikileaks was Reuters/Ipsos on 26 April 2011, "WikiLeaks' Julian Assange is not a criminal: global poll" , and it sampled around a thousand individuals in each of 23 countries -- a total of 18,829 respondents. The Reuters news-report was vague, and not linked to any detailed presentation of the poll-findings, but it did say that "US respondents had a far more critical view" against Wikileaks than in any other country, and that the view by Americans was 69% "believing Assange should be charged and 61 percent opposing WikiLeaks' mission."

Buried elsewhere on the Web was this detailed presentation of Ipsos's findings in that poll : Oppose Wikileaks: 61% US 38% UK 33% Canada 32% Poland 32% Belgium 31% Saudi Arabia 30% Japan 30% France 27% Indonesia 26% Italy 25% Germany 24% Sweden 24% Australia 22% Hungary 22% Brazil 21% Turkey 21% S. Korea 16% Mexico 16% Argentina 15% Spain 15% Russia 15% India 12% S. Africa

Is the US a democracy if the regime is so effective in gripping the minds of its public as to make them hostile to the strongest fighter for their freedom and democracy?

On 13 April 2019, washingtonsblog headlined "4 Myths About Julian Assange DEBUNKED" , and here was one of them: Myth #2: Assange Will Get a Fair Trial In the US 14-year CIA officer John Kiriakou notes:

Assange has been charged in the Eastern District of Virginia -- the so-called "Espionage Court." That is just what many of us have feared. Remember, no national security defendant has ever been found not guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia. The Eastern District is also known as the "rocket docket" for the swiftness with which cases are heard and decided. Not ready to mount a defense? Need more time? Haven't received all of your discovery? Tough luck. See you in court. I have long predicted that Assange would face Judge Leonie Brinkema were he to be charged in the Eastern District. Brinkema handled my case, as well as CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling's. She also has reserved the Ed Snowden case for herself. Brinkema is a hanging judge.

[Jun 09, 2019] Donald Trump isn't Mussolini or Hitler yet - but he's not far off by Patrick Cockburn

Jun 09, 2019 | www.unz.com

Is Donald Trump a fascist? The question is usually posed as an insult rather than as a serious inquiry. A common response is that "he is not as bad as Hitler", but this rather dodges the issue. Hitler was one hideous exponent of fascism , which comes in different flavours but he was by no means the only one.

The answer is that fascist leaders and fascism in the 1920s and 1930s were similar in many respects to Trump and Trumpism. But they had additional toxic characteristics, born out of a different era and a historic experience different from the United States.

What are the most important features of fascism? They include ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism; the demonisation and persecution of minorities; a cult of the leader; a demagogic appeal to the "ignored" masses and against a "treacherous" establishment; contempt for parliamentary institutions; disregard for the law while standing on a law and order platform; control of the media and the crushing of criticism; slogans promising everything to everybody; a promotion of force as a means to an end leading to violence, militarism and war.

The list could go on to include less significant traits such as a liking for public displays of strength and popularity at rallies and parades; a liking also for gigantic building projects as the physical embodiment of power.

Hitler and Mussolini ticked all these boxes and Trump ticks most of them, though with some important exceptions. German and Italian fascism was characterised above all else by aggressive and ultimately disastrous wars. Trump, on the contrary, is a genuine "isolationist" who has not started a single war in the two-and-a-half years he has been in the White House.

It is not that Trump abjures force, but he prefers it to be commercial and economic rather than military, and he is deploying it against numerous countries from China to Mexico and Iran. As a strategy this is astute, avoiding the bear traps that American military intervention fell into in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is an approach which weakens the targeted state economically, but it does not produce decisive victories or unconditional surrenders.

It is a policy more dangerous than it looks: Trump may not want a war, but the same is not true of Mike Pompeo, his secretary of state, or his national security adviser John Bolton. And it is even less true of US allies like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have been pushing Washington towards war with Iran long before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took control in Riyadh in 2015.

Trump's aversion to military intervention jibes with these other influences, but it is erratic because it depends on the latest tweet from the White House. A weakness, not just of fascist leaders but of all dictatorial regimes, is their exaggerated dependence on the decisions of a single individual with God-like confidence in their own judgement. Nothing can be decided without their fiat and they must never be proved wrong or be seen to fail.

Trump has modes of operating rather than sustained policies that are consequently shallow and confused. One ambassador in Washington confides privately that he has successfully engaged with the most senior officials in the administration, but this was not doing him a lot of good because they had no idea of what was happening. The result of this Louis XIV approach to government is institutionalised muddle: Trump may not want a war in the Middle East but he could very easily blunder into one.

Of course, Trump is not alone in this: populist nationalist authoritarian leaders on the rise all over the world win and hold power in ways very similar to the fascists of the inter-war period. What is there in these two eras almost a century apart that would explain this common political trajectory?

Fears and hatreds born out of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression propelled the fascists towards power. When old allegiances and beliefs were shattered and discredited, people naturally looked to new creeds and saviours. "The more pathological the situation the less important is the intrinsic worth of the idol," wrote the great British historian Lewis Namier in 1947. "His feet may be of clay and his face may be blank: it is the frenzy of the worshippers which imparts to him meaning and power."

Is the same thing happening again? Fascism was the product of a cataclysmic period in the first half of the 20th century that is very different from today. The US failed to get its way in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but these were small-scale conflicts in no way comparable to the First World War. The recession that followed the 2008 crash was a blip compared to the Thirties.

Many of the better off reassure themselves with such thoughts. But they underestimate the destructiveness of de-industrialisation and technological change for great numbers across the globe. Inequality has vastly increased. Economies expand, but the benefits are skewed towards the wealthy. Metropolitan centres plugged into the global economy flourished, but not their periphery.

The distinction between winners and losers varies from country to country but governments everywhere underestimated the unhappiness caused by social and economic upheaval. Beneficiaries of the status quo invariably downplay the significance of fault lines that populists are swift to identify and exploit.

Philip Hammond, the British chancellor of the exchequer, contemptuously dismisses claims by the UN that great number of people in Britain were living in "dire poverty" and saying that, in so far as deprivation existed, the government was acting effectively to address the problem. The new wave of Trump-like leaders springing up all over the globe do not have to do very much to do better than this.

Such overconfidence on the part of the powers-that-be is becoming rarer. Democrats who had convinced themselves that Trumpism would be exposed and discredited as a conspiracy wished on America by the dark powers in the Kremlin have seen their fantasy evaporate.

But there is probably worse to come: experience shows that populist authoritarian nationalism – what Namier called "Caesarian democracy" – is not a static phenomenon. It may not begin with all the fascist characterisation listed above, but its trajectory is always in their direction. Regimes become more nationalistic, authoritarian, demagogic, shifting from intolerance of criticism or opposition to a determination to extinguish it entirely.

A case study of this process is Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is reinforcing his one-man rule by overturning an opposition victory in the election to choose the mayor of Istanbul. Many Americans deny that the same process is happening in the US, but they tend to be the same people who did not believe that Trump could be elected in the first place.

peter mcloughlin , says: June 8, 2019 at 1:09 pm GMT

'Trump may not want a war in the Middle East but he could very easily blunder into one.'
Nations blunder into the very war they are trying to avoid – abject defeat. The US president, encouraged by his counselors, might launch an attack on Iran, not realizing the consequences. He wouldn't be alone in history for doing that, so it cannot be held against him. Regional conflicts today are so interconnected that a localized dispute could drag in the major nuclear powers in multiple theaters. That is what happens if vital interests clash. It is the pattern of history. And there is nothing to suggest it has changed.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
plantman , says: June 8, 2019 at 1:38 pm GMT
Let me get this straight: Cockburn identifies the central problem as the widening inequality that emerged following the Great Recession of 2008, but then he blames Trump for being Trump.

WTF!

Here's Cockburn: " Inequality has vastly increased. Economies expand, but the benefits are skewed towards the wealthy. Metropolitan centres plugged into the global economy flourished, but not their periphery."

Anon [762] Disclaimer , says: June 8, 2019 at 1:43 pm GMT
Trumps a ceo which is dictatorial hardly as dangerous as your FDR WILSON TEDDY LINCOLN ETC.

FASISM is the death throes of democracy as it tries to resist its inevitable slide into further extremes of Mobism it tries to put a bit of lipstick on the pig with fascism. It tries to recover a bit of order with authority and a bit of lawfulness by reigning in a bit of the elite looting Democracy leads to cultural degeneracy and so there's often a lowbrow attempt at restoring the culture the elite highbrows having led the degeneracy spiral only the middle is available to try and save the culture.

G , says: June 8, 2019 at 1:46 pm GMT
I am yet to read a convincing argument how the most hardline Zionist president in US history, who had his campaign run by the AIPAC guy Michael Glassner, influenced by Jared Kushner and proud Christian Zionist Steve Bannon, who hired Jewish Goldman Sachs bankers Mnuchin and Cohen right from the start, made the Jewish olgarchy of the Kushners and others into Jewish aristocracy in the white house, has most to all his children married or dating Jews, is an obscene, vulgar and tasteless vessel for the wishes of the Jewish Casino Godfather Sheldon Adelson, filled his government with Neocons, has his power base in Zionist Evangelical Christians, has somehow anything remotely to do with with Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini. -- This one isn't.

Neither are Boomerisms about what "fascism" is or isn't. And the downright idiotic habbit of Anglosphere journalists and intellectuals to label totalitarianism as "fascist" brings already a fundamental misinformation in the term itself. And I can only explain it from a necessity of the Anglosphere commentators, who are drenched in post WW2 mythology, to obfuscate the fact that one was allied to a certain Stalin and produced the rise of communist China starting under Mao himself. The greatest mass murderer in human history who did have near total control over his subjects and their minds. Unlike Mussolini and Hitler or even Stalin.

What are the most important features of fascism? They include ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism

As ultra-nationalistic as Churchill or Roosevelt, as authoritarian as Stalin and Mao.

the demonisation and persecution of minorities

Tibetans, Uyghurs, Palestinians – ah yes, and concentration camps for the Boer!

a cult of the leader

Echnaton, Caesar himself is actually a weaker example, Mao, Stalin, again Churchill, then Truman; or John F. Kennedy for that matter: The enshrined patron-saint of US democracy and its tragedy and crucifixion, his mythological rise to almost sainthood like Lincoln, or until recently MLK jr. Nevermind that Hillary Clinton was the absolute and total cult leader figure for the US establishment and Angela Merkel was crowned leader of the free world in a detestable act of disinformation and lies, almost on the level of Stalinist lies. A woman who has turned German parliamentary politics into a GDR like one party coalition of leftist neo-liberal imperialism on her own people.

a demagogic appeal to the "ignored" masses and against a "treacherous" establishment

The masses are ignored. Want Anglosphere examples? Brexit. And as Charles Murray noted: the peoples have – for generations! – voted against more immigration, the establishment has also for generations ignored them. There is also something to be said about the victims of Rotherham and how they were ignored, for over a decade crimes comitted against them systematically covered up.

And when it comes to a treacherous establishment, look no further than to the Ziocons, Merkel, May and unfortunately Trump himself now. How utterly rotten and morally bankrupt, for example, the establishment of Britain is shows the case of again Rotherham and Jimmy Savile.

contempt for parliamentary institutions

And for good reason! Politicians are mindless and usually incompetent drones to be bought by foreign and corporate lobbies, pushed by manipulative and deceptive mass media and to be used as pawns for foreign policy of unelected deep state actors.

disregard for the law while standing on a law and order platform

Ah yes! There is something about the acts of the declared "leader of the free world" Angela Merkel breaking the German constitution and European law while ordering a stand down to the German border police who was ready to close the German borders, to allow in a million illegals against the strong wishes of at least a significant minority. This crypto-communist also leads the "conservative" party of "stability" who loves to talk about democracy, toleranz and openness and the dangers of undemocratic Russia.

control of the media and the crushing of criticism

ADL, SPLC, overwhelming control over the old media corporations and near monopoly control over the internet and social media platforms of a certain group that shall not be named. But it's certainly not better when the government itself directly controls the media as in Europe. Is the author seriously trying to make the claim that today the dangers in this regard come from new right populists? Or that this was something singular and a defining characteristic of fascism?

slogans promising everything to everybody

"Wir schaffen das!", "Stadt für alle!", "Land für alle!", "Diversity is our strength!" , "Globalism brings more wealth for everyone involved!", "Free trade is good for everybody!", "Workers of the world unite! All you have to lose is your chains!"

a promotion of force as a means to an end leading to violence, militarism and war.

Ah yes such a true forces for peace and democracy and the freedom of all peoples of the world the British Empire was and the USA are! The peoples of Vietnam, Serbia, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine and Germany can sing a song about it. The USA are such a peaceful hegemon! Dedicated to spreading human rights, democracy and freedom globally. -- But they are also nothing special in this regard. Indeed this point is typical for basically all forms of government. Haven't you people read your Machiavelli?

What did derail the Trump movement and turned MAGA into MIGA and a continuation of the status quo and its lobbies, were not the populist grassroots support for Trump – across the entire West, even globally, or the hopes and wishes of the indeed ignored masses of the USA, or the populist supporters in the West who saw him as a beacon of their own hopes and wishes. It was the 'deep state' which by all means is just the functional reality of representative, parliamentary democracy in the age of mass media, a global financial system and corporations.

The claim that tree of life recipient Donald Trump and life long supporter and friend of Israel is a "fascist" is even more bizarre and ridiculous than calling Saddam Hussein or Muammar al-Gaddaffi Adolf Hitler. And do I really need to quote all the things Trump said about Israel and Netanyahu, or after the synagogue shootings..?

But the idea that he is a true isolationist who doesn't want war, is absurd. The Syria strikes speak volumes about his intellect, judgement, foreign policy independence and also about his willingness to do anything what Bibi and Adelson want. Just as the embassy move to Jerusalem, just as the Golan Heights and so much more.
The USA simply cannot start a war with Iran. Because they don't have the sufficient access to execute a major ground invasion of Iran through Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan or a D-Day like operation from the Sea. The USA also cannot do it, because the overwhelming majority of the people in Europe, globally and even a majority in the USA itself would condemn another war of aggression by the USA. This has nothing to do with the wishes of the Kushner, Bolton, Pompeo Trump government and its shadow puppeteers Netanyahu and Adelson. The same is true for Venezuela and Syria.

The Anglosphere, with the USA as its hegemonic leader, is caught in its own life-long delusions, its own mythology from the British Empire to WW2, its decade spanning structural and fundamental mistakes and errors and flaws. It's not the first Empire to be in this situation and it won't be the last Empire who will have its own downfall accelerated by it all.

Liberal democracy is a failed, a false and a falsified political model turned into a post-political ideology of an increasingly undemocratic establishment. The Europeans do not want it, the Africans do not want it, the Asians do not want it and increasingly the citizens of the USA and Great Britain do not want it. Trump and Brexit are indeed indicators for this.
Because people are communal, they do not wish to be atomized individuals. And nobody wants social-democracy either for that matter. They do not solve problems, they do not provide people with what they need and they have no truly inspiring visions to offer either. And that's why the future lies in nations and peoples. Not because there is a threat of "fascism". And I think when it comes to the erosion of the rule of law and democracy being a means for the demos, the establishment has done absolutely everything itself to make this the reality for the citizens in the USA and EU.

A123 , says: June 8, 2019 at 2:10 pm GMT
@dearieme The false claims about Trump are intended to deflect from the Truth.

dasFuherer Obama started down the road to Facism directing the SS/FBI to conduct surveillance and enforce political orthodoxy. If the transfer of power to dasFuherer H. Clinton had taken place successfully we would be living in a Facist nation by this point.

Authoritarian Left National Socialism (Nazism), also known as Globalism, is a threat to the Christian Citizens of the U.S. The Democratic party openly embraces these National Socialist / Globalist goals. The Facist Stormtroopers of Antifa are their version of the Hitler Youth.

Alfa158 , says: June 8, 2019 at 4:39 pm GMT
@Paul "control of the media and the crushing of criticism; slogans promising everything to everybody; a promotion of force as a means to an end leading to violence, militarism and war.

The list could go on to include less significant traits such as a liking for public displays of strength and popularity at rallies and parades; a liking also for gigantic building projects as the physical embodiment of power."

More of those fit Obama than Trump...

Carlton Meyer , says: Website June 8, 2019 at 4:56 pm GMT
Trump hasn't conquered any nations, while Emperor Obama conquered Honduras, Libya, Somalia, Ukraine, and tried to conquer Yemen, Turkey, and Syria. Obama also expanded the drone assassination campaign, to include US citizens. Obama restarted the Cold war by demonizing Russia and dispatching American troops to Russia's borders with new military bases in the Baltic states.

Control of the media? Trump has none, while the media cheered Obama all the time, even when he imprisoned journalists. They want to impeach Trump, but have no specific reason. I can list a dozens reasons to impeach any of our past Presidents. Finally, whenever Trump tries to ease tensions with Russia and North Korea, or pull troops from Syria, he is attacked by the media and Democrats.

Trump is no saint, but this article is absurdly biased; typical of a corporate media figure.

Priss Factor , says: Website June 8, 2019 at 5:23 pm GMT
He's more like Abbas. A cuck puppet of Jewish Power.
Brad Smith , says: June 8, 2019 at 5:28 pm GMT
Fascism (A police state created by the wedding of corporate and state powers) has been coming to America along various lines for quite some time but it's not the "nationalism" that we need to worry about. In fact our tendencies to run fascistic have moved quickest while nationalism evaporated.

The US is a divided nation, there is barely a "nation" here anymore, so we can stop worrying about nationalism. We are no longer a single nation and haven't been for some time. Trump isn't going to change that. LOL We are more in danger from increasing polarity ripping us apart than we are nationalism uniting us into some new Reich.

Trump has at best hit 40% approval ratings in the polls, he barely holds onto power and in fact lost the house. That's not a dictator in the making. There is zero danger that he will unite the country either, that isn't going to happen.

As for socially that one is really a joke. There has never been a nation on Earth that is less "Socially" fascist, NEVER. How a nation like ours, where you can literally self identify as any thing you want, would be socially fascist is beyond me, yet that is actually what is being described.

The fascism I'm worried about comes in the form of Crony Capitalism spawning endless wars for profit while cracking down on liberty at home with the Patriot act and all the rest. That's the creeping fascism we all should be worried about and many of us were. We voted for Trump as the only alternative to that very problem.

TG , says: June 8, 2019 at 7:30 pm GMT
No, no, no, missing the point. A 'Fascist' is someone saying something that the rich and powerful don't want said.

So when Donald Trump said that he wanted to stop us from wasting trillions of dollars on pointless winless foreign wars that serve only to enrich politically-connected defense contractors, that was Fascist and Rascist and Literally Hitler.

Trump got beaten down, and without consulting Congress, launched a completely unjustified and stupid missile attack on Syria, and suddenly he was 'presidential.' So you see, a leader taking power into his own hands and running roughshod over the rule of law, that's 'Democracy' – as long as he's doing what the rich want done.

Bottom line: now that Trump has morphed into "Swamp Thing," there will be political theater and screaming and howling, but it's all for show. It's a circus.

Mulegino1 , says: June 9, 2019 at 2:06 am GMT
Trumpism is a mixture of kosher Americana and an apotheosis of the sharp vulgarian businessman as politician as opposed to the hero or the visionary leader as statesman. It is a kind of halfhearted bourgeoisie reaction to the extreme cultural Marxism and social engineering, as well as a slavish adherence to Zionism. Its so called "national spirit" may be more exemplified by a hexagram or skull cap on top of its figurehead leader, as opposed to a legionary's helmet, Fuehrer's cap or Latin Cross. It is almost the polar opposite of the eponymous Fascism of Mussolini, in which the Fascist Council dictated to the cartels, not vice versa, and Il Duce was in charge and not a boardroom of soulless corporate internationalists . Fascism can cut both ways- it can be used by an authoritarian leader to unify the state and nation or it can be used by corporate oligarchs and their figurehead to destroy the nation and its people.

Trumpism is even further removed from National Socialism and the Fuehrer. A man of the people arose from humble origins on his own merits and reputation for courage under fire and engineered both the greatest economic recovery and most spectacular renaissance of national pride and dignity in recorded history. Hitler was not driven by personal vanity to see the "H" of his name in lights, nor was he a crooked vulgarian beholden to casino pimps and subterranean international Jews. Had National Socialism been allowed to flourish and had not been destroyed by the world Sanhedrin and its shabbos goyim camp followers, Europe would in all likelihood be a far cleaner, culturally vibrant and thriving culturally radiant center of power for the entire world and especially its own far flung diaspora.

Trump could have been a true, independent nationalist leader but he scorned that role and has largely turned on his base. While he is still the lesser of the two evils compared to most of the Democratic automaton and pervert contenders, he certainly knows on which side his shekels are buttered.

[Jun 08, 2019] Neoliberal MSM are out to kill Tulsi chances by Philip Giraldi

Notable quotes:
"... The one glaring example of how the media can deep six a political candidate is the story of Ron Paul's presidential run in 2012. After tying for first place in the Iowa Straw Poll with Michelle Bachman he was disappeared from the media completely . His name was never mention again, and the RNC stole his delegates. He became persona non grata. This is probably Tulsi's future. ..."
"... Moreover,our Neocon Warmongers eighteen year assault on the federal balance sheet , has been so massive, so larcenous and so protracted it has all but eviscerated the credit worthiness of the Nation. They have QUADRUPLED our ENTIRE NATIONAL DEBT in a mere 18 years. IT IS BEYOND BELIEF. ..."
"... All while he sends more troops to the ME but not to our border. As a wag on ZeroHedge observed, Trump has spent more time at the Wailing Wall than on our southern border. ..."
"... Tulsi is my preferred candidate. That said, I'm disappointed that she "served" in Iraq, a country which we invaded and devastated on a total lie that it had nukes. Also, I believe now she has distanced herself from ring-wing US Hindu groups who are strong supporters of the genocidal Indian prime minster Modi. ..."
"... That said, I admire Tulsi for going against the grain of our Zionist-run Congress and our crypto Jewish prez. ..."
"... The war party has many tentacles. The mainstream media and cable are fundamentally just their propaganda service. Fellow corporatists supporting each other's revenue stream. Then RT comes along, and does journalism -- demonstrates some journalistic integrity -- and the world is turned upside down. All of a sudden the truth -- mostly -- is declared Russian propaganda. ..."
"... Not just Trump and O, but Clinton and Bush II as well. I recall Bush II's tag line of a "more humble foreign policy." How'd that work out? ..."
"... I remember in 2011, I believe it was, he was leading in the polls and I heard a radio talking head opining: "I think we can all stipulate that Ron Paul is not a viable candidate for the nomination, but " For a moment there I wondered why we could all stipulate that, and then it occurred to me to notice the commentator's last name. He was using the royal we, as in we the Chosen. RP not an Israel lickspittle? End of story. ..."
"... However, Sanders had always been anti-immigration until he started running against Hillary in 2016. He was both anti illegal immigration and anti H1b. The problem is, DNC candidates have to pander to the far left to win nomination ..."
"... Tucker said he supports Elizabeth Warren's national economic plan of bringing back manufacturing jobs to save the heartland, as Trump is trying to do. Warren also wants maximum legal immigration like Trump. What good are bringing back these jobs if we are just going to import more foreign workers to work in them? ..."
"... "Both Obama and Trump were elected as anti-war candidates, and look what happened?" ..."
"... As for Trump, war in fact has not "happened". Beside the silly nothing attack on an essentially unstaffed Syrian runway that was warned ahead of time, Trump has attacked no one. He talks a lot to placate Jews, but talk is not action. Obama? A true war monger who bombed & bombed, & bombed. ..."
Jun 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

Brooklyn Dave , says: June 6, 2019 at 5:03 pm GMT

Probably the only honest Democrat out there. OK Demo-dunces, when Dem primary comes around, here is a candidate you can vote for without normal people saying What? Are you nuts? Dems are honestly going to push for Feelsy Weelsy Biden, unless the Hildabeast thinks she can give it another try.
Tired of Not Winning , says: June 6, 2019 at 6:07 pm GMT
Tulsi Gabbard needs to add one more thing to her campaign and she will win: promise a drastic cut on immigration in favor of American workers.

America is hungry for a candidate who will actually deliver on the no-more-wars and no-more-immigration pledge. Trump campaigned on that but has turned out to be a total fraud who failed on both counts.

We need Tulsi to step into the void. Not only will she win over a lot of Trump voters, but she will also win over a lot of those on the left who are sick of wars and not particularly pro immigration.

Sako , says: June 6, 2019 at 6:11 pm GMT
Hilariously, the MSM trumpeted the message last time around that we simply MUST have a female president, that it was long past time a woman was in charge, and that anyone reluctant to vote for Hillary was an evil misogynist. Before that, we were told that we simply HAD to have a noble Person of Color in the White House, that it was everyone's duty to vote for Obama and not some old white guy.

Despite Gabbard ticking off both those boxes, wouldn't you know It? Suddenly the importance of having a non-White or female President mysteriously vanishes! Suddenly it's our duty to have the lecherous, creepy old white dude in office! Suddenly the importance of Diversity ("diversity is our strength" don't you know?) vanishes into the ether when Tulsi comes up.

I think she should use this to her advantage. Not resort to identity politics or faux feminism, but simply point out the hypocrisy, draw attention to the inconsistency and get the general public asking themselves why all this diversity / Girl Power shit suddenly gets memory holed by the media when it's Tulsi, or any anti establishment figure, in the spotlight.

JimDandy , says: June 6, 2019 at 6:12 pm GMT
@Brooklyn Dave A beautiful, young, intelligent, Progressive, decorated-veteran woman-of-color, and the MSM isn't giving her the 2007 Obama treatment?

Case closed. Giraldi's dead right.

Diversity Heretic , says: June 6, 2019 at 6:24 pm GMT
I mat switch party registration just so I can vote for her in a primary. I wonder, however, if once in office, she could implement her program against the Deep State
Mike Zwick , says: June 6, 2019 at 6:52 pm GMT
According to Wikipedia:

After Gabbard announced her (2020) campaign, the Russian government owned RT, Sputnik News and Russia Insider together ran about 20 stories favorable to her. NBC News reported that these websites were the same that were involved in Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, called the report by NBC a "transparent hit piece". In The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald wrote that what he found "particularly unethical about the NBC report is that it tries to bolster the credentials of this group [New Knowledge] while concealing from its audience the fraud that this firm's CEO just got caught perpetrating on the public on behalf of the Democratic Party."

follyofwar , says: June 6, 2019 at 9:15 pm GMT
@Tired of Not Winning Totally agree. To those who saw it, that's what Tucker's monologue was all about last night. Anti-war with America-first anti-immigration is the winning ticket. Unfortunately, from what I've been able to gather, take away her principled anti-war stance and Tulsi's just another bleeding-heart liberal democrat. She did back Sanders after all. Maybe Tucker, who has often had her on his show, can straighten Tulsi out.
WorkingClass , says: June 6, 2019 at 9:30 pm GMT
Gabbard should switch parties and challenge Trump. I would vote for her. She has no chance at all as a Democrat. Obviously she cannot be allowed to participate in the Democratic debates.

But her reasons for running probably do not include winning the nomination. I wish her well. But I will never support a Democrat. Not even one I respect. I'm a white man. It's not about the POC. My fear and loathing pertains to the white liberals.

follyofwar , says: June 6, 2019 at 9:31 pm GMT
@Diversity Heretic That's the $64,000 question, isn't it? Both Obama and Trump were elected as anti-war candidates, and look what happened? The Deep State, i.e. the Permanent Government, is probably more powerful than any elected president, who will be there for at most 8 years. But who else out there beside Tulsi has the guts to take on the Hegemon? I think she means what she says, while Obama and Trump did not.
Carroll Price , says: June 6, 2019 at 10:26 pm GMT
We'll know she's being taken serious when, like Donald Trump in 2016, AIPAC summons her to appear before the Learned Elders of Zion to pledge fealty to Israel and the holohoax.
Toxik , says: June 6, 2019 at 10:33 pm GMT
All Tulsi has to say to those warmongers: I went to war. Did you? I saw my brothers and sisters die and be maimed. Did you?
Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website June 6, 2019 at 10:46 pm GMT
@follyofwar follyofwar -- Tulsi in her own words :

● 'Immigration is a tremendous economic benefit for Hawai'i and our country as a whole.'
● 'Trump's comments on immigrants fly in the face of aloha spirit, American values.'

Robert Dolan , says: June 6, 2019 at 11:09 pm GMT
She has no chance and isn't going to go against immigration.

It doesn't really matter what they say anyway, because it's just lies to get elected.

Once elected they do what the nose tells them to do.

If she's CFR, she's an open borders globalist.

Trump was adamantly anti-war during his campaign, and then the nose stepped in and fixed it.

I read that everything Trump said, all of those lies, all of those promises, were the result of analytics.

I was dubious at first, but now I think it's true. He quite literally just mouthed what we wanted to hear, and then did what the nose told him to do.

Obama got the peace prize and did more drone strikes than Bush.

Tulsi would be anti-war right up to her inauguration, then the reality that the nose OWNS her entire party would sink in and she'd realize who's the boss.

Lot , says: June 6, 2019 at 11:54 pm GMT
Tucker promotes Tulsi because she divides and embarrasses the Democrats. I agree with him doing this.
Lot , says: June 6, 2019 at 11:57 pm GMT
@Johnny Rottenborough Thanks.

Giraldi and his fans here are cool with mass Third World migration to the USA if it means finally electing out and proud anti-Israel politicians like Ilhan Omar and the other Congressmuslima.

renfro , says: June 7, 2019 at 1:43 am GMT
@Sako

Despite Gabbard ticking off both those boxes, wouldn't you know It? Suddenly the importance of having a non-White or female President mysteriously vanishes! Suddenly it's our duty to have the lecherous, creepy old white dude in office! Suddenly the importance of Diversity ("diversity is our strength" don't you know?) vanishes into the ether when Tulsi comes up.

Exactly you nailed it.

renfro , says: June 7, 2019 at 1:46 am GMT
@WorkingClass

But I will never support a Democrat. Not even one I respect. I'm a white man. It's not about the POC. My fear and loathing pertains to the white liberals.

Well that's dumb.

anonymous [151] Disclaimer , says: June 7, 2019 at 2:12 am GMT
This woman is a proud Hindu Nationalist, even if she tries to deny it now.

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/05/tulsi-gabbard-2020-hindu-nationalist-modi/

... ... ...

nickels , says: June 7, 2019 at 2:42 am GMT
I like Tulsi a lot. We've almost forgotten what a serious person looks like, and she is one of the 3 or 4 in Washington.
Her Democrat satanic baggage poisons the well, but she is still an inspiring figure, in my view.
nickels , says: June 7, 2019 at 2:45 am GMT
@follyofwar Yep and yep.
Voting is basically irrelevant, but its still fun to play to thought game.
Biff , says: June 7, 2019 at 5:04 am GMT
The one glaring example of how the media can deep six a political candidate is the story of Ron Paul's presidential run in 2012. After tying for first place in the Iowa Straw Poll with Michelle Bachman he was disappeared from the media completely . His name was never mention again, and the RNC stole his delegates. He became persona non grata. This is probably Tulsi's future.
alexander , says: June 7, 2019 at 10:59 am GMT
Dear Phil,

Right now, Tulsi is the only candidate who matters.

I hope she wins the nomination by a landslide.

The United States, due to the abysmal stewardship of our neocon oligarchs , is in a wholly unprecedented and catastrophic situation.

They know it, I know it, and the majority of Americans are fast waking up to it.

Never before in US history, has so much taxpayer solvency been squandered through acts of wanton criminal war.

The utter decimation being wrought upon countries around the world . which never attacked us, AT ALL, is beyond human imagination.

Moreover,our Neocon Warmongers eighteen year assault on the federal balance sheet , has been so massive, so larcenous and so protracted it has all but eviscerated the credit worthiness of the Nation. They have QUADRUPLED our ENTIRE NATIONAL DEBT in a mere 18 years. IT IS BEYOND BELIEF.

Even as I write this, steps are being taken by all the major world powers to eject the US dollar as the worlds reserve currency.

If this happens, nobody will continue to buy our currency ..or our bonds.

The heinous 22 trillion dollar debt, created by our neocon warmongers, will not be underwritten anymore, anywhere.

The US will have to turn "inward" to deal with this fiscal abomination , and dare I say that when this happens a "solvency holocaust" will truly be upon us.

The greatest nation on earth, turned belly up, in a mere twenty years .all due to pernicious .. Neocon ..War Fraud.

Shameful.

Realist , says: June 7, 2019 at 11:59 am GMT
I agree with Gabbard's anti-war policy, but she is a one trick pony .albeit very good at her one trick.
RVBlake , says: June 7, 2019 at 1:05 pm GMT
@Realist Agreed (Last "Agree" was not long enough ago)
Ace , says: June 7, 2019 at 1:20 pm GMT
@Tired of Not Winning Total fraud is correct. He refuses to characterize the illegals as invaders and to anchor any action in response in his responsibility under Art. IV, Sect. 4 to repel invasion. He insists on pretending that his authority to act is founded in legislation pertaining to "emergencies" of which we possess an infinite supply.

All while he sends more troops to the ME but not to our border. As a wag on ZeroHedge observed, Trump has spent more time at the Wailing Wall than on our southern border.

And while every month 100,000 invaders are released into the interior of the US.

Moi , says: June 7, 2019 at 1:31 pm GMT
@Brooklyn Dave

Tulsi is my preferred candidate. That said, I'm disappointed that she "served" in Iraq, a country which we invaded and devastated on a total lie that it had nukes. Also, I believe now she has distanced herself from ring-wing US Hindu groups who are strong supporters of the genocidal Indian prime minster Modi.

That said, I admire Tulsi for going against the grain of our Zionist-run Congress and our crypto Jewish prez.

Ace , says: June 7, 2019 at 1:32 pm GMT
@follyofwar Her ultra-leftism is off-putting. I can only think she could not be elected in Hawaii if she didn't mouth the sacred truisms.
Moi , says: June 7, 2019 at 1:39 pm GMT
@Lot So what's wrong with Ilhan Omar? Is that she's Muslim? Two people in Congress I admire are AOC (who's to young of run for prez) and Omar. Both have cojones.
Moi , says: June 7, 2019 at 1:43 pm GMT
@anonymous India is a polluted shit-hole run by a genocidal, Hindu nationalist PM, with almost half of parliament members under some kind of criminal charge.
dvorak , says: June 7, 2019 at 2:29 pm GMT
@follyofwar

take away her principled anti-war stance and Tulsi's just another bleeding-heart liberal democrat

Worse than that, she's a Hindu nationalist. She wants as many Hindus as Whites in the U.S., if not more.

Jeff Davis , says: June 7, 2019 at 3:17 pm GMT
@Mike Zwick

The war party has many tentacles. The mainstream media and cable are fundamentally just their propaganda service. Fellow corporatists supporting each other's revenue stream. Then RT comes along, and does journalism -- demonstrates some journalistic integrity -- and the world is turned upside down. All of a sudden the truth -- mostly -- is declared Russian propaganda.

Awakening from the bad dream of neoliberal servitude will cause cognitive dissonance, confusion, and distress. Learning the truth, even a little bit of Truth, is almost like poison when, for a lifetime, you've been fed nothing but lies.

c matt , says: June 7, 2019 at 3:46 pm GMT
@Tired of Not Winning Agree, but . . . even if elected, she would run into the same AIPAC and pro-cheap labor lobbies that have stymied Trump (assuming Trump wanted to do anything about these issues). Even if she wanted to do something about War and Immigrants, she would up against a united establishment from both parties. Having a D after her name would not count for much.
c matt , says: June 7, 2019 at 3:50 pm GMT
@follyofwar Not just Trump and O, but Clinton and Bush II as well. I recall Bush II's tag line of a "more humble foreign policy." How'd that work out?
c matt , says: June 7, 2019 at 4:04 pm GMT
@Moi I appreciate Omar's anti-AIPAC stand, but her and AOC's gibmedats and immigration policies would destroy us.

Both may have cojones; neither have brains. You need both.

Cloak And Dagger , says: June 7, 2019 at 4:29 pm GMT
As long as she doesn't grab zio funding, I am in. I just sent a check to her campaign.
renfro , says: June 7, 2019 at 4:40 pm GMT
@c matt You've already been destroyed. Omar and AOC had both the brains and the balls to identify your real enemy. Your ass is owned buddy, lock, stock and barrel ..and it took two women to say it .not a sign of a man with any balls in congress.

Florida's Governor just signed a bill that will censor criticism of Israel throughout the state's public schools
News
Michael Arria on June 6, 2019 23 Comments

U.S. Congressman Ron DeSantis of Florida speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

[MORE]

On May 31, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that prohibits anti-Semitism in public schools and universities throughout the state. However, the legislation also equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, effectively censoring the advocacy of Palestinian rights.

Two days before DeSantis officially signed HB 741 into law in Florida, he carried out a symbolic signing during a ceremonial state cabinet meeting in Israel. The session featured a variety of Israeli speakers and culminated with Florida lawmakers issuing a declaration of support for the country. "Since we're in Jerusalem, we may actually get some interest in our Cabinet meetings for a change, which would be great," joked DeSantis during the meeting. A number of news organizations filed a lawsuit against the state's government, claiming that the meeting violated Florida's transparency law, as it took place in a foreign country and wasn't made publicly accessible to journalists. Although they weren't officially listed as members of DeSantis' delegation, he was accompanied by pro-Israel megadonors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.

HB 741 states that, "A public K-20 educational institution must treat discrimination by students or employees or resulting from institutional policies motivated by anti-Semitic intent in an identical manner to discrimination motivated by race." The bill identifies anti-Semitism as calls for violence against Jews, Holocaust denial, or the promotion of conspiracy theories that target Jewish people, but it also contains an entire section that equates Israel critcism with the prohibited anti-Semitism. This includes, "applying a double standard to Israel by requiring behavior of Israel that is not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation." According to the bill's text, criticism of Israel is always anti-Semitic unless it is "similar to criticism toward any other country."

"We know what could happen in Florida from the chilling effects we've already seen elsewhere: human rights defenders will be smeared as antisemites, investigated by schools, and in some cases punished. Events will be cancelled, or censored via bureaucratic harassment. Theses will not be written. Debates in class will not take place. And many activists will self-censor out of pure exhaustion," Palestine Legal's senior staff attorney Meera Shah told Mondoweiss, "All of this profoundly diminishes Florida's ability to educate students to be leaders in a global economy."

The House version of HB 741 was sponsored by State Representative Randy Fine, a rabidly pro-Israel lawmaker who has held office since 2016. In April, after Sen. Audrey Gibson voted against HB 741's companion bill and called it "divisive", Fine denounced the Senate Democratic Leader and called on Democrats to "hold her accountable." "It is sad that in the world propagated by Washington Democrats like Congresswomen Ihlan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Tallahassee Democrats like Audrey Gibson, fighting anti-Semitism is 'divisive', said Fine, "In this time of rising anti-Semitism around both the country and globe, it is unconscionable that the most powerful Democrat in the Florida Senate would vote against banning discrimination based on anti-Semitism."

That same month, Fine made headlines for referring to a Jewish constituent as "Judenrat", a term used to describe Jews who collaborated with the Nazis during World War 2. Fine used the word in reference to Paul Halpern, a Palm Bay resident who organized a panel discussion regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict. Fine took to Facebook to criticize the panel for being anti-Semitic. "First, there is no 'Palestine,'" Fine wrote, "Second, having a bunch of speakers who advocate for the destruction of Israel but promise that this one time they won't, is a joke. We should not engage these bigots. We crush them." After Halpern pushed back on this assertion and pointed out that the majority of the panelists were Jewish, Fine responded, ″#JudenratDontCount..I know that Judenrat liked to keep tabs on all the Jews in order to report back to the Nazis back in that time, but no one is making you continue that tradition today."

"In my mind, Judenrat is the worst thing that you can call a Jewish person," Halpern told the Huffington Post, "He's despicable as a representative and a person."

Governor DeSantis is a close ally of the President and some believe that the Israel trip could help deliver Florida for Trump in 2020. "For a lot of Jewish voters, this trip puts an exclamation point on the Republican Party's commitment to Israel and to Jewish people," the Republican Jewish Coalition's Neil Strauss recently proclaimed, "We saw a nice rise in support for Gov. DeSantis and we want to keep that going. Florida is the best example of where if Republicans gain Jewish voters, it can make a real difference."

gsjackson , says: June 7, 2019 at 7:13 pm GMT
@Biff

I remember in 2011, I believe it was, he was leading in the polls and I heard a radio talking head opining: "I think we can all stipulate that Ron Paul is not a viable candidate for the nomination, but " For a moment there I wondered why we could all stipulate that, and then it occurred to me to notice the commentator's last name. He was using the royal we, as in we the Chosen. RP not an Israel lickspittle? End of story.

FB , says: Website June 7, 2019 at 10:34 pm GMT
Well a lot of the comments here are ridiculous it's like the guy who has cancer and somebody comes along with a cure, but he says 'fuck it' because it doesn't involve ice cream

Yet these same morons support Trump who has only done things for Israel's benefit so far and even though Trump supports legal immigration

Speaking of which why don't all these immigration zealots take up the issue with the real bosses on the matter corporate America ?

It's the plutocracy that WANTS immigration at any and all cost because it creates a surplus labor pool and drives wages down while driving shareholder profits up the same reason is why industry is offshored, along with the jobs that go with it it's called labor arbitrage

In other words this is what CAPITALISM is about yet here these monkeys are screaming about 'leftist' Tulsi because she wants Medicare for all, instead of a ripoff system that enriches a few corporate parasites while we foot the bill

How much do the endless, unnecessary wars cost the taxpayer ? [they don't cost the billionaire class anything because they don't pay taxes ]

How much does corporate welfare cost the taxpayer ? ask King Bezos how many billions he's been gifted in 'tax holidays' and other such freebies

Tulsi's entire approach is a major win-win for ordinary folks right up to and including high earning professionals

Anybody with half a brain would be overjoyed that we even have such a person in our midst as if we don't have enough completely briandead zombies that are going to vote for Gore or that gay guy, or that fake 'socialist' Bernie

Titus , says: June 7, 2019 at 11:29 pm GMT
Tulsi is just another Zionist puppet.
Icy Blast , says: June 7, 2019 at 11:54 pm GMT
@Sako Sako, yours is one of the best posts ever on this site. I am tempted to volunteer for Tulsi's campaign on the basis of her anti-war position alone. I did about fourteen years of active duty in the Army, and when I hear her refer to soldiers as her "brothers and sisters," I actually get teary-eyed. I have to restrain myself from adoring her completely.
Twodees Partain , says: June 8, 2019 at 12:03 am GMT
@JimDandy Beautiful? There's no accounting for taste, I suppose. "Progressive woman of color" doesn't matter to anyone other than a democrat.
Sam F2 , says: June 8, 2019 at 12:14 am GMT
Excellent expose by Philip Giraldi, for one of our best candidates Tulsi Gabbard. Indeed the enemy is "the band of oligarchs and traitors that run the United States."
Colin Wright , says: Website June 8, 2019 at 1:07 am GMT
@Lot 'Tucker promotes Tulsi because she divides and embarrasses the Democrats. I agree with him doing this.'

If Tulsi makes Lot nervous, she must be a pretty good choice.

Sane Left Libertarian , says: June 8, 2019 at 1:13 am GMT
@Tired of Not Winning Like me. Hopefully she is still in it when super Tuesday gets here. I'm sick of the alt right (and their tangerine leader) and sicker of blm/reparations/open borders. I now know why non voters don't vote.
Haole , says: June 8, 2019 at 2:19 am GMT
Tulsi is a Hawaii democrat, a very corrupt group. Tell her to comment on the kealohas, the police chief of Honolulu and his wife are being tried for corruption and drug dealing by the feds. She and all the other dems here will not comment. She likes to rock the boat about war at the federal level but no comment on her state evolving into a third world dump.

I think the local dems want her out, Mufi wants revenge.

Biff , says: June 8, 2019 at 4:23 am GMT
@renfro

.not a sign of a man with any balls in congress.

Balls are weak and sensitive, if you want to be tough get a vagina, those things can take a pounding.

Tired of Not Winning , says: June 8, 2019 at 5:16 am GMT
@follyofwar Yep, it is a big if. She is pretty far to the left on immigration, which is unfortunate. But I appreciate her being honest. We don't need another lying scum like Trump.

However, Sanders had always been anti-immigration until he started running against Hillary in 2016. He was both anti illegal immigration and anti H1b. The problem is, DNC candidates have to pander to the far left to win nomination. I'm holding out hope that he would revert back to those pre 2016 immigration positions after winning nomination. He recently came out and railed against the border invasion.

A Sanders-Gabbard ticket might be the winning ticket.

Tired of Not Winning , says: June 8, 2019 at 5:30 am GMT
@c matt

(assuming Trump wanted to do anything about these issues).

That's just the problem. I don't think Trump ever really wanted to reduce legal immigration. He has said more than once that he wants to let "the largest number ever" of immigrants come in because "we" need these workers as we have "all these jobs coming back", i.e. employers need their cheap labor, except instead of keeping the cheap labor offshore, he wants to bring millions of them to the US like the tech sector.

Tucker said he supports Elizabeth Warren's national economic plan of bringing back manufacturing jobs to save the heartland, as Trump is trying to do. Warren also wants maximum legal immigration like Trump. What good are bringing back these jobs if we are just going to import more foreign workers to work in them?

In the end the rich will just get richer, while the rest of us have to put up with even more immigration, more congestion, overcrowded schools, crime, poverty, unemployment, underemployment, failed schools I say no thank you! Let's just send all the immigrants packing. We already have plenty of jobs in America, they are just all going to foreigners.

The only job program we need is one that calls for drastic cuts in immigration. Anything else is bullshit.

Wally , says: June 8, 2019 at 6:15 am GMT
@follyofwar

"Both Obama and Trump were elected as anti-war candidates, and look what happened?"

As for Trump, war in fact has not "happened". Beside the silly nothing attack on an essentially unstaffed Syrian runway that was warned ahead of time, Trump has attacked no one. He talks a lot to placate Jews, but talk is not action. Obama? A true war monger who bombed & bombed, & bombed.

Biff , says: June 8, 2019 at 7:40 am GMT
@gsjackson The royal We is in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/keWX55SpYmU?feature=oembed

Digital Samizdat , says: June 8, 2019 at 7:53 am GMT
@FB

yet here these monkeys are screaming about 'leftist' Tulsi because she wants Medicare for all, instead of a ripoff system that enriches a few corporate parasites while we foot the bill

Sorry, I haven't seen anyone on this thread complain about Medicare-for-all. You must have this website confused with Conservative Treehouse or something.

utu , says: June 8, 2019 at 7:54 am GMT
Her position on immigration disqualifies her. Her loyalty to Hinduism and Indian nationalism is very problematic.
War for Blair Mountain , says: June 8, 2019 at 8:41 am GMT
@Tired of Not Winning Tulsi Gabbard won't because She is waging Democratic Party race war against the Historic Native Born White American Working Class Majority .Tulsi Gabbard would massively increase the H1b L1b Visa Program .she is already courting the Hindu "American" Democratic Party Voting Bloc ..
War for Blair Mountain , says: June 8, 2019 at 9:05 am GMT
Increasing the scale of nonwhite LEGAL IMMIGRANTS=increasing the scale of antipathy towards Christian Russia within the borders of America ..

Tulsa Gabbard: "I want to massively increase the scale of nonwhite LEGAL IMMIGRANTS within the borders of America ."

Ronnie , says: June 8, 2019 at 10:15 am GMT
She is not an irrational supporter of Israel therefore the """MSM""" do not support her.
OEMIKITLOB , says: June 8, 2019 at 10:16 am GMT
@Robert Dolan I believe you've summed it up well. I haven't voted in a "national" election since W's first term because the ballot-box is a non-answer to the dilemma.
Ruiner! , says: June 8, 2019 at 10:35 am GMT
nope!!

https://digitalcitizen.info/2019/02/13/is-tulsi-gabbard-really-anti-war-no-shes-pro-drone-and-for-surgical-strikes/

KenH , says: June 8, 2019 at 10:58 am GMT
@Johnny Rottenborough Her positions on immigration disqualify her from consideration regardless of how strong her foreing policy might be at this stage. Plus, she's made woke statements on other social issues so in a lot of ways she's perhaps only slightly to the right of Barack Obama with a non-interventionist foreign policy.

[Jun 08, 2019] Sanders burns Bill Kristol over 'foolish' pushing for Iraq war, asks where his apology is

May 28, 2019 | www.rt.com
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders took a swipe at neoconservative Bill Kristol for his "foolish advocacy of the Iraq war," and questioned whether he had apologized to the country for it yet. Sanders was responding to a tweet Kristol sent that said, "#Never Sanders," and linked to a New York Times article about the longtime Vermont senator's opposition to war.

"Have you apologized to the nation for your foolish advocacy of the Iraq war?" Sanders tweeted , adding he makes "no apologies for opposing it."

Sanders' record of opposing wars like Vietnam and Iraq, and US meddling in Nicaragua, has recently been highlighted by the media as the 2020 presidential primaries approach.

pic.twitter.com/yZj2fC8xRB

-- #WithTheseHands 🙌🏻🙌🏼🙌🏽🙌🏾 Eowyn (@WestCoastGadfly) May 26, 2019

Has Biden apologized for his support of that war and so many others? Please answer my poll: https://t.co/Xxsa70K56o

-- (𝕊𝕠𝕔𝕚𝕒𝕝) 𝔻𝕖𝕞𝕠𝕔𝕣𝕒𝕔𝕪 ℕ𝕠𝕨! 🇺🇸 (@IStandWithIlhan) May 25, 2019

Feel the Bern, Bill. pic.twitter.com/LcouTg1XdG

-- Meghan McCain's Tears™ (@Smedley_Butler) May 25, 2019

NBC's Meet the Press came under fire last week for tweeting , "Sanders said he won't apologize for supporting anti-Vietnam War efforts and voting against the war in Iraq," which sparked ridicule among social media users and inspired Sanders to release a video in which he stood by his anti-war stance and promised to do everything to prevent a war with Iran.

I was right about Vietnam.

I was right about Iraq.

I will do everything in my power to prevent a war with Iran.

I apologize to no one. pic.twitter.com/Lna3oBZMKB

-- Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 24, 2019

Kristol tweeted his 'never Sanders' diss after the former Burlington mayor introduced a petition to prevent "military action against Iran without congressional approval," something that likely upset Kristol, who has been calling for regime change in Iran for over 13 years.

Kristol refused to apologize over his comments, instead calling on Sanders to engage in a "real debate on US foreign policy."

Nope. I dislike quasi-Stalinist demands for apologies. I've defended and will defend my views on Iraq, and Syria, and Milosevic, and the Soviet Union, and more, as you defend yours. How about a real debate on U.S. foreign policy--I'll ask for no apologies!--on a campus this fall? https://t.co/AdC0CelINz

-- Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 26, 2019

A co-founder of the neoconservative think tank the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), Kristol called for regime change in Iraq in 1998 in a series of articles and a letter to then-President Bill Clinton. Following 9/11, PNAC encouraged the George W. Bush administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Kristol ardently supported the war in Iraq, which he claimed would be a "two-month war" and repeatedly argued for sending more troops there to rectify the failing invasion.

During the 2006 Lebanon war, Kristol suggested the US take the opportunity to strike Iran's nuclear facilities, asking, "Why wait?"

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[Jun 08, 2019] JFK went against the flow of the good old boys and their networks

Jun 08, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

Originally from: CIA admits to spying on Senate staffers Page 5 of 11 Discussion The Guardian

cashedupbogan -> fringe_perception , 31 Jul 2014 19:15

Scandal?
JFK went against the flow of the good old boys and their networks.
'Bay of Pigs' was a disaster but did JFK really have that much input into the planning of that mess?
He stopped it, eventually, probably because he thought it might escalate into a full blown war with Russia.
He did some amazing stuff during the Cuban crises.
He kept his rabid war hawks at bay until a resolution was worked out with Russia.
Khrushchev did should be thanked too by keeping his military maniacs leashed too.
What's with the tea baggers redefining history?
You guys have started burning books over there yet? and

[Jun 07, 2019] How can you have any faith or trust in a government when CIA is completely out of control?

Notable quotes:
"... Other than it is against the law for CIA to spy in the US. It is FBI's job. And Brennan lied to Congress under oath, a crime for which Clinton was impeached. And the fact that if they are coneding this crime, they must've been caught on something even bigger. ..."
"... They are way out of control. They need to take a step back and reevaluate their reason for being and their goals. You can't protect the people if you see them as the enemy. ..."
"... The intelligence agencies are civil servants who need to be reigned in whenever they exceed the instructions given to them by their civilian bosses. ..."
"... And the CIA torture? ..."
"... Who ever was over the hacking of the Senator's computer and the Senator's staffers computers should be invited to leave. If that extends all the way up to Brennan, so be it. ..."
"... Unfortunately, that corrective action has to come from those who are perpetrating these crimes in order for it to be legal. It's the classic Catch-22 of political corruption. ..."
"... "They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace." ― Tacitus (AD56 to after AD117) The Agricola and the Germania ..."
"... The problem with political power is that it proves to be a magnet to those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and they are easily corrupted. ..."
"... Back in the day, the people of Russia knew that what they were being fed was propaganda, in the US and the UK we thought it was news. ..."
"... Intelligence Agencies have their own Agenda. The CIA spy on everyone including the Senate it seems. Meanwhile the Israeli Intelligence Agencies spy on many people Including the USA,the very people who give them the money... ..."
"... If the CIA are Spying on the Senate you have to ask the Question who are they working for ? ..."
Jun 07, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

panamadave , 1 Aug 2014 10:54

There should be no discussion about this! However just like Mockingbird, National Students Ass., Tailwind, PBSUCCESS,and so many others, they will stall until they get it dropped from the media and we will forget again.

Get Smart Amarica

williamdonovan , 1 Aug 2014 10:45
John Brennan's next job should be in a orange jump suit earning pennies and hour. But we all know that this will never happen. Brennan is the right hand of the commander and chief of death, destruction and torture. and has been for a long time. This is the work of evil, plain and simple.
Timelooper , 1 Aug 2014 10:41
How can you have any faith or trust in a government like this? It's one damn thing after another. The Executive branch, the Congress, the high courts, the Justice Dept. are all corrupt. Laws are broken, constitutional protections are laughed at, we are constantly being spied on. No charges are brought. Nobody goes to jail.

But Snowden is a traitor for revealing the truth.

The1eyedman , 1 Aug 2014 10:11
A minor detail? The CIA and security services have every right to know who is who on all and every politician and their staff. That's why we are safe. :-)
freeandfair -> Woodby69 , 1 Aug 2014 10:04
And the brave.

They are so brave, they are patologically afraid of everyone. And want to be "protected".

freeandfair -> whatdidyouexpect , 1 Aug 2014 10:03
Other than it is against the law for CIA to spy in the US. It is FBI's job. And Brennan lied to Congress under oath, a crime for which Clinton was impeached. And the fact that if they are coneding this crime, they must've been caught on something even bigger.

Sure, everything else is just fine. As far as we know, that is.

J. Alberto Perez Zacarias , 1 Aug 2014 09:40
They are way out of control. They need to take a step back and reevaluate their reason for being and their goals. You can't protect the people if you see them as the enemy.
rickmcq , 1 Aug 2014 09:38
So it appears that some in Congress will get upset if a Executive agency misuses its powers? Are these the same folks who seem to be okay with the IRS focus on Conservative 501(c)(3) applicants?
rickmcq -> Trevor Alfred , 1 Aug 2014 09:35
Um, no, Trevor Alfred, "the REAL terrorists" are still the folks who deliberately bomb civilians in areas where peace is supposed to exist.

The intelligence agencies are civil servants who need to be reigned in whenever they exceed the instructions given to them by their civilian bosses.

altoclef , 1 Aug 2014 09:28
And the CIA torture?
hhhobbit , 1 Aug 2014 09:03
Who ever was over the hacking of the Senator's computer and the Senator's staffers computers should be invited to leave. If that extends all the way up to Brennan, so be it.
MuppetPilferR -> PJKatz , 1 Aug 2014 08:38
Unfortunately, that corrective action has to come from those who are perpetrating these crimes in order for it to be legal. It's the classic Catch-22 of political corruption.
DaoTe , 1 Aug 2014 08:28
Don't fire Brennan. Arrest him and charge him violating the prohibition against domestic surveillance, lying under oath and, arguably, treason. Maybe there is space in Guantanamo for him to reflect upon the meaning of the Constitution and the rule of law.
DhammaRider -> Texascelt , 1 Aug 2014 08:10
And the reason that we never hear of these supposed 'facts' is what? That we're all too dumb to know? Dumbing down America is getting mighty costly of late, n'est-pas?
DhammaRider , 1 Aug 2014 08:06
Just because they say you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Remember: America is not a democracy. That's a sideshow. It's an oligarchy and don't you forget it.
magzie01950 , 1 Aug 2014 08:05
We need less government with less power. They are parasites sucking off there host, us!
heleninc , 1 Aug 2014 07:40
You can always trust some govts/agencies/people to always take the wrong path/back door. It would simply never occur to them to take the right one. This is who they are.
Nad Gough -> TomG , 1 Aug 2014 07:32
"What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?"

scared sh&#less?

Nad Gough , 1 Aug 2014 07:30
Don't worry it wasn't official, just "staff". lol

Staffs carry out directives. I'm not buying that staff had cause to go looking otherwise.

Feinstein has problems with being spied on, yet heads the Intelligence Committee who for several years has been authorizing spying on - well, everybody.

Feinstein shouldn't worry about spying, unless she's doing something wrong. Isn't that the proposition?

Markenstein -> Piet Van Der Riet , 1 Aug 2014 07:28
They certainly are most transparent to the 'Company'!
TomG , 1 Aug 2014 07:08
So why is it scandalous for public officials in our supposed western liberal democracies to spy on officials in other agencies, and deserving of an apology, but it's Okay for officials to spy on fellow citizens?

What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?

Perhaps we all need to stop making sense.

Texascelt , 1 Aug 2014 06:54
I would like to point out that beyond what is touted in the press as "the story" the nature of these sorts of things can remain hidden for many years. Recent events in Germany and in Washington, if viewed from a different perspective may be connected. In the past when such revelations come to light it is resultant from security issues that are of such magnitude that those tasked with intelligence responsibilities remain in power because they are simply doing their job and are doing so at the command of elected officials, who when made aware of covert matters go all quiet and allow the chips to fall as they may. Seldom does the public ever hear of the actual facts in a timely way, and by the time that does happens they have long since moved on to more pressing matters.
diddoit , 1 Aug 2014 06:50
Has any politician asked them to explain why they spied, in terms of their motivations ? It seems the 'why' is surely more damaging than the act of spying itself?
Trevor Alfred -> Hottentot , 1 Aug 2014 06:38
What else is new!...Corruption / deceit / fraud / theft, at the highest level of tax payers money is being conducted..War criminals being sponsored by their own corrupt government ministers / agencies, to create carnage, by divide & rule tactics...Its a fatal backfiring failure / disaster which is causing their downfall.
Trevor Alfred , 1 Aug 2014 06:19
Not surprising...All these out of control "rogue agencies" I.E. CIA / NSA / MI5 / MI6 / GCHG / MOSAD, must be brought to book for their corrupt / deceitful / fraudulent workings...Their most senior officers are involved in a worldwide cover up into illegal involvement of creating criminal wars around the world, by using spying techniques upon government institutions & citizens...The recent scandal of phone tapping / voice mail / email interception, goes to show the lengths they are prepared to conduct / cover up their own war criminality acts. They are the REAL terrorists !!
NhaNghi , 1 Aug 2014 06:14
I'm American but I live in a communist country. I hate these security thugs no matter what country they live in. They're all the same.
BarrieJ -> worldperspective , 1 Aug 2014 05:48
"They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace." ― Tacitus (AD56 to after AD117) The Agricola and the Germania

He could have been writing today.
David Garrison , 1 Aug 2014 05:41
I kid you not, In the start menu, I typed "bullshit" , pressed enter and got Milton Friedman.
Bardamux -> CornsilkSW , 1 Aug 2014 05:37
Which US-President was any better ?
padatharasuresh , 1 Aug 2014 05:36
Wow! It will be easier for them to say who they did not spy on.
donkiddick , 1 Aug 2014 05:36
They'll even eat their own... How this behaviour doesn't equate to criminal actions is part of the disgrace. The US government have morphed in to a dystopian movement.
BarrieJ -> freeandfair , 1 Aug 2014 05:34
So true. At least the people of Russia knew they were under a yoke, American citizens were led to believe they lived in the land of the free.
BarrieJ -> Darius Las , 1 Aug 2014 05:26
At least the Chinese know what they've got and know that it's dangerous to discuss it.
NhaNghi , 1 Aug 2014 05:22
But they're such kind, gentle people . . .
BarrieJ -> pa2013 , 1 Aug 2014 05:21
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA by Webster Griffin Tarpley (ISBN: 9780930852375) another good read and makes a plausible case for a coup carried out on America.
BarrieJ -> orwellrollsinhisgrav , 1 Aug 2014 05:17
Less than 10%?
BarrieJ -> fringe_perception , 1 Aug 2014 05:16
Us Brits have led the field for centuries.

In the reign of Elizabeth 1st a blacksmith was executed for treason because he was overhead saying that he believed the uncrowned King Edward V was still alive.

A quick search on Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's Secretary of State will reveal for just how long and how sophisticated state spying on state has been.

BarrieJ -> eldudeabides , 1 Aug 2014 05:03
Yes, they don't like others to be in a position to know of their venality, their sexual deviances and assorted other human failings. Else that knowledge be used to control them...............
BarrieJ -> consciouslyinformed , 1 Aug 2014 04:58
The problem of how the rest of the world views the actions of the US is exacerbated by the seeming inability or disinterest of its citizens in doing anything about it. Admittedly, a frustration shared by many citizens/subjects in Western countries, that pretend to be functioning democracies but are in fact anything but.

The problem with political power is that it proves to be a magnet to those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and they are easily corrupted.

We are politically and economically very poorly educated and are daily fed propaganda and mind filling mush by media that are 'on message'.

The media ownership needs to be broken up but politicians, corporations and the media are one self serving body and would resist that and have the power to do so.

Back in the day, the people of Russia knew that what they were being fed was propaganda, in the US and the UK we thought it was news.

fireangel , 1 Aug 2014 04:51
Intelligence Agencies have their own Agenda. The CIA spy on everyone including the Senate it seems. Meanwhile the Israeli Intelligence Agencies spy on many people Including the USA,the very people who give them the money...
(Out of Control is the thought that springs to mind)
SteveBiko187 -> EndersShadow , 1 Aug 2014 04:27
Whereas in reality it's only the whistleblowers who lose their job and pension.
spartacute , 1 Aug 2014 04:26
If the CIA are Spying on the Senate you have to ask the Question who are they working for ? Is it the American Government ? Is it the American Military? Is it The American Citizen ? Or are we seeing the henchmen of the illuminati in action here !
Their fingers seem to be in every pie and no one seems to be able to control them .
BarrieJ -> David Egan , 1 Aug 2014 04:24
You've just about hit the nail on the head but what to do about it?
DaniJV , 1 Aug 2014 04:22
US democracy is simply a joke.

[Jun 07, 2019] The CIA is completely out of control. This begs the question, as to why do, or should, American citizen vote for candidates when those candidates are effectively being managed by the CIA

Notable quotes:
"... A sincere question: who is running the CIA and on whose behalf? ..."
"... They consider us the people, their enemy. We are the 'enemy within', because as we become increasingly aware of our politicians' criminality any action we take may threaten the status quo. ..."
"... Just because Americans don't tend to care about anything that happens beyond their own borders doesn't mean the rest of the world can live with the same blissful ignorance. ..."
"... The NSA scandal has made us realize that the US regards us as second-rated citizens who are nondeserving of the 'special protections' that Anglo-speaking countries do. ..."
"... This is extremely telling about Obama's continued failure to discern good character in his aides and cabinet. His administration has been a shambles largely due to his inability to surround himself with good people. ..."
"... I guess so, as we all know that the CIA always tried to silent war opponents. This had been largely documented about Vietnam opponents to the War on US soil. ..."
"... The CIA is now a discredited organization run by proven liars. When will Congress do something about it? Answer -- never. They are all being blackmailed. ..."
"... The CIA is completely out of control. This begs the question, as to why do, or should, American citizen vote for candidates when those candidates are effectively being 'managed' and spied on by people in the CIA. Senators in both houses are not making 'decisions' the CIA is. ..."
"... Yes and the only politician who has called for the abolition of the CIA is Ron Paul. ..."
"... The NSA isn't hindering your movements as you are not a danger to the status quo. You can keep getting blasted at your BBQ's and coming online to defend the indefensible, you're not a threat. But it's not about you. It's about the people who are in a position to challenge the system. This can include anti-war activists, judges, politicians and journalists. ..."
Jun 07, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

BarrieJ -> fringe_perception , 1 Aug 2014 04:21

Yeah and let's take a look at the CIA's backing for Operation Gladio in post WW2 Europe.

Yeah, you Americans were there but you certainly weren't saving lives or making the aftermath bearable for the victims.

BarrieJ -> johhnybgood , 1 Aug 2014 04:10
A sincere question: who is running the CIA and on whose behalf?
BarrieJ -> jma123 , 1 Aug 2014 04:08
They consider us the people, their enemy. We are the 'enemy within', because as we become increasingly aware of our politicians' criminality any action we take may threaten the status quo.
Alex Robinson , 1 Aug 2014 03:45
They should rename the CIA the KGB or the Gestapo
SelfServingShite -> cashedupbogan , 1 Aug 2014 03:44
leaders haven't been voted into office for a while now - they're rigged into office - from the lowly dog catcher to the president - and its happening all over the world.
lsfischer -> Kaitain , 1 Aug 2014 03:29
If you take the easy way now, you will take the easy way in the future. This not a sandlot baseball game here. These are high- powered people , who are responsible for matters extremely operant to the people of our country, and it must be admitted, the world.

To simply brush off these serious breaches of Government procedure (law) would serve to perpetuate the Executive Branch intrusions into the business of the Legislative Branch.

Separation of the powers is a time-honored method of setting up a government that has kept us 'moving along' for quite awhile now. Most of its problems stem from the populace placing too much trust in their elected officials .

It is everyone's responsibility to collectively maintain our government. It was never the intention of our founders that our leaders become reclusive despots: from today's vantage point, we can see this. It is a short walk to realize where the blame should be laid. Up and on your way to no future.

Dutchgirl88 -> fringe_perception , 1 Aug 2014 03:28
Just because Americans don't tend to care about anything that happens beyond their own borders doesn't mean the rest of the world can live with the same blissful ignorance.

The NSA scandal has made us realize that the US regards us as second-rated citizens who are nondeserving of the 'special protections' that Anglo-speaking countries do.

I find it absolutely shocking that this guy's dismissal is still debatable. Should be a no-brainer is any democracy

justAcomment , 1 Aug 2014 03:14

The three technicians "demonstrated a lack of candor about their activities during interviews."

You mean they lied through their teeth? But of course they were acting on their own initiative ha ha ha ha

jma123 , 1 Aug 2014 02:53
In the UK and USA these spooks backed by politicians and civil servants are getting way out of hand. Having the technology to do things doesn't provide the need or right to do such things. They are getting to the point where they are "protecting" us from the very people and system they have become.
CornsilkSW , 1 Aug 2014 02:48

although the White House indicated its support for a man who has been one of Barack Obama's most trusted security aides.

This is extremely telling about Obama's continued failure to discern good character in his aides and cabinet. His administration has been a shambles largely due to his inability to surround himself with good people.

gab2201 -> killerontheroad , 1 Aug 2014 02:46
I guess so, as we all know that the CIA always tried to silent war opponents. This had been largely documented about Vietnam opponents to the War on US soil.
paramed1 , 1 Aug 2014 02:41
They're all fuc@#$g rogue. Power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who polices the police? No one apparently. They and all their UK counterparts will walk away from this unscathed. If the heat gets a little too warm just play your joker, 'Terrorism'.
carolusmagnus , 1 Aug 2014 02:32

CIA admits to spying on Senate staffers

They have yet to admit they also spy on their President and ex-Presidents. When there is no morality, everyone is an enemy.

johhnybgood , 1 Aug 2014 02:26
The CIA is now a discredited organization run by proven liars. When will Congress do something about it? Answer -- never. They are all being blackmailed.
chuck nasmith , 1 Aug 2014 01:34
Phuck you Brennan. My family worked for the CIA, NSA etc. when they were not the corporate MIC, NSA Zionist mob. Go to jail or Gitmo.
NikMitev -> StrategicVoice213 , 1 Aug 2014 01:33
Your state can imprison anyone it wants, for as long as it wants, without having to justify it in any way... hell they are not even required to let relatives know. That is a police state. The US is operating what effectively are concentration camps all over the place, Guantanamo being the flagship.
Woodby69 , 1 Aug 2014 01:29
America - the land of the free...
Hottentot , 1 Aug 2014 01:22
The CIA is completely out of control. This begs the question, as to why do, or should, American citizen vote for candidates when those candidates are effectively being 'managed' and spied on by people in the CIA. Senators in both houses are not making 'decisions' the CIA is.

Quite how the CIA, White House or any other government body think that they have any credibility regarding any matter, is amazing.

whatdidyouexpect , 1 Aug 2014 01:04
If I was using a program set up by the CIA, I would assume it would monitor my activity. Just like Amazon does. Just like the Guardian does.

I don't see a problem, apart from the naivete of the complainants.

jcamcaldasca , 1 Aug 2014 00:54
'... that's just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do,"' Allies, on the other hand, fall within that scope.

'demonstrated a lack of candor' has the same ring to it as being 'economical with the truth'.

Anthony Russell , 1 Aug 2014 00:39
I JUST PUT A LIST OF QUESTIONS ON MY TIME LINE THIS SHOULD KEEP THE SPY NETWORK BUSY FOR A WHILE ! BUT THEY NEVER DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES SENSE ANYWAY ; THEY ONLY HAVE A 30 BILLION DOLLAR BUDGET ; BUT CANNOT TELL US WHAT HAPPENED TO MH370 MALAYSIAN AIRPLANE ! WOW ! SOME SPY NETWORK ! IT 'S EASY FOR THEM TO SCREW WITH US ; BECAUSE WE ARE EVERYDAY MARKS !
majid akram -> Malkatrinho , 1 Aug 2014 00:38
They will never admit until its proven
marmite99 , 1 Aug 2014 00:35
Feinstein couldn't care less about you and me being spied on, but complains when she is spied on. Just like Angela Merkel.
samwoods77 , 1 Aug 2014 00:33
Obama still hasn't fired this turd. Maybe he doesn't want to interrupt his endless rounds of $33k/plate fund raisers to attend to running the country.
marmite99 -> StrategicVoice213 , 1 Aug 2014 00:33
@strategicvoice: More people are imprisoned in the US than in China (on a per capita basis).
sacco -> SummerLulstice , 1 Aug 2014 00:28

People like Feinstein are chosen to oversee mass surveillance for the simple reason that they are old, completely technologically illiterates

See also: M. Rifkind, et al.

FFS, Jacqui f@&%ing Smith use to be Home Secretary ...

Could they really not make it any more obvious that there is absolutely nothing even vaguely resembling effective oversight?

marmite99 -> traidep , 1 Aug 2014 00:28
Yes and the only politician who has called for the abolition of the CIA is Ron Paul.
BaronGrovelville , 1 Aug 2014 00:23
When criminal methods are used expect criminals to use them. John Brennan and Jose Rodriguez are criminals.
SummerLulstice -> inabster , 31 Jul 2014 23:54
The entire Republican and Democrat parties are puppets.
SummerLulstice -> inabster , 31 Jul 2014 23:47
If the United States government doesn't even govern by popular mandate, it certainly won't give a fuck about anyone's respect, dear fellow internet commentator.
DrKropotkin -> jrhaddock , 31 Jul 2014 23:47
The penalties for lying under oath are quite strict and can include up to 5 years of prison time. But nobody is willing to go after these guys, they have too much information on too many people. The day the US congress voted for the patriot act was the last day of their democracy.
SummerLulstice -> madmonty , 31 Jul 2014 23:43
The death penalty in California and Virginia is done by lethal injection. Assuming Diane Feinstein and John Brennan weren't above the law.
error418 -> Therevolt , 31 Jul 2014 23:38
What exactly does a CIA member have to do to get arrested, prosecuted and convicted for an action inside the USA? It is not spying on Congress. It it spying on the Supreme court, or killing a Senator? Do they walk away free after assassinating their own president? Do they need to do more?
DrKropotkin -> StrategicVoice213 , 31 Jul 2014 23:37
The NSA isn't hindering your movements as you are not a danger to the status quo. You can keep getting blasted at your BBQ's and coming online to defend the indefensible, you're not a threat. But it's not about you. It's about the people who are in a position to challenge the system. This can include anti-war activists, judges, politicians and journalists.

Everyone who matters can be kept inline with blackmail and for public figures it can be the smallest thing. Recently, during a primary, a candidate lost as questions were raised about the fact he had checked in the a mental care facility. He probably had a breakdown and needed to be observed for a couple of days. This piece of information would be easy to pick up with the various NSA programmes.

If this candidate had the same views as you, this little fact would not have been released but I believe he was a defender of your constitution and that could cause problems for the criminal regime you now live under.

Snooping is poison in a democracy. Your system was built so that it had self correction and could hence adapt to new situations and constantly improve. This served Americans well for many years, but it has ended.

Enduroman -> James J Pitcherella , 31 Jul 2014 23:32
Come on, is not like they sold 2 ounces of marijuana.
SummerLulstice -> Joshua Jeffery , 31 Jul 2014 23:30
Feinstein and the word "hope" do not belong in one and the same sentence. She along with her fellow conspirators in the intelligence committee are the ones that have been green-lighting this fascism for years. It's like expecting John McCain to repeal the Patriot Act.

People like Feinstein are chosen to oversee mass surveillance for the simple reason that they are old, completely technologically illiterates who can be easily fooled or if need be blackmailed through their extensive business empires .

[Jun 07, 2019] The CIA and security services have every right to know who is who on all and every politician and their staff

Yeah and let's take a look at the CIA's backing for Operation Gladio in post WW2 Europe. Yeah, you Americans were there but you certainly weren't saving lives or making the aftermath bearable for the victims.
Notable quotes:
"... Don't fire Brennan. Arrest him and charge him violating the prohibition against domestic surveillance, lying under oath and, arguably, treason. Maybe there is space in Guantanamo for him to reflect upon the meaning of the Constitution and the rule of law. ..."
"... "What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?" ..."
Aug 01, 2014 | www.theguardian.com

panamadave , 1 Aug 2014 10:54

There should be no discussion about this! However just like Mockingbird, National Students Ass., Tailwind, PBSUCCESS,and so many others, they will stall until they get it dropped from the media and we will forget again.
Get Smart Amarica
Timelooper , 1 Aug 2014 10:41
How can you have any faith or trust in a government like this? It's one damn thing after another. The Executive branch, the Congress, the high courts, the Justice Dept. are all corrupt. Laws are broken, constitutional protections are laughed at, we are constantly being spied on. No charges are brought. Nobody goes to jail. But Snowden is a traitor for revealing the truth.
The1eyedman , 1 Aug 2014 10:11
A minor detail? The CIA and security services have every right to know who is who on all and every politician and their staff.
That's why we are safe. :-)
freeandfair -> Woodby69 , 1 Aug 2014 10:04
And the brave. They are so brave, they are pathologically afraid of everyone. And want to be "protected".
freeandfair -> whatdidyouexpect , 1 Aug 2014 10:03
Other than it is against the law for CIA to spy in the US. It is FBI's job. And Brennan lied to Congress under oath, a crime for which Clinton was impeached. And the fact that if they are coneding this crime, they must've been caught on something even bigger. Sure, everything else is just fine. As far as we know, that is.
J. Alberto Perez Zacarias , 1 Aug 2014 09:40
They are way out of control. They need to take a step back and reevaluate their reason for being and their goals. You can't protect the people if you see them as the enemy.
rickmcq , 1 Aug 2014 09:38
So it appears that some in Congress will get upset if a Executive agency misuses its powers? Are these the same folks who seem to be okay with the IRS focus on Conservative 501(c)(3) applicants?
rickmcq -> rickmcq , 1 Aug 2014 09:36
(Sorry, that should have been "reined in" above.)
rickmcq -> Trevor Alfred , 1 Aug 2014 09:35
Um, no, Trevor Alfred, "the REAL terrorists" are still the folks who deliberately bomb civilians in areas where peace is supposed to exist. The intelligence agencies are civil servants who need to be reigned in whenever they exceed the instructions given to them by their civilian bosses.
hhhobbit , 1 Aug 2014 09:03
Who ever was over the hacking of the Senator's computer and the Senator's staffers computers should be invited to leave. If that extends all the way up to Brennan, so be it.
MuppetPilferR -> PJKatz , 1 Aug 2014 08:38
Unfortunately, that corrective action has to come from those who are perpetrating these crimes in order for it to be legal. It's the classic Catch-22 of political corruption.
DaoTe , 1 Aug 2014 08:28
Don't fire Brennan. Arrest him and charge him violating the prohibition against domestic surveillance, lying under oath and, arguably, treason. Maybe there is space in Guantanamo for him to reflect upon the meaning of the Constitution and the rule of law.
DhammaRider -> Texascelt , 1 Aug 2014 08:10
And the reason that we never hear of these supposed 'facts' is what? That we're all too dumb to know? Dumbing down America is getting mighty costly of late, n'est-pas?
DhammaRider , 1 Aug 2014 08:06
Just because they say you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Remember: America is not a democracy. That's a sideshow. It's an oligarchy and don't you forget it.
heleninc , 1 Aug 2014 07:40
You can always trust some govts/agencies/people to always take the wrong path/back door. It would simply never occur to them to take the right one. This is who they are.
Nad Gough -> TomG , 1 Aug 2014 07:32

"What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?"

scared sh&#less?

Nad Gough , 1 Aug 2014 07:30
Don't worry it wasn't official, just "staff". lol

Staffs carry out directives. I'm not buying that staff had cause to go looking otherwise.

Feinstein has problems with being spied on, yet heads the Intelligence Committee who for several years has been authorizing spying on - well, everybody.

Feinstein shouldn't worry about spying, unless she's doing something wrong. Isn't that the proposition?

Markenstein -> Piet Van Der Riet , 1 Aug 2014 07:28
They certainly are most transparent to the 'Company'!
TomG , 1 Aug 2014 07:08
So why is it scandalous for public officials in our supposed western liberal democracies to spy on officials in other agencies, and deserving of an apology, but it's Okay for officials to spy on fellow citizens?

What might a government of the people that does not trust the people it governs be properly called?

Perhaps we all need to stop making sense.

Texascelt , 1 Aug 2014 06:54
I would like to point out that beyond what is touted in the press as "the story" the nature of these sorts of things can remain hidden for many years. Recent events in Germany and in Washington, if viewed from a different perspective may be connected. In the past when such revelations come to light it is resultant from security issues that are of such magnitude that those tasked with intelligence responsibilities remain in power because they are simply doing their job and are doing so at the command of elected officials, who when made aware of covert matters go all quiet and allow the chips to fall as they may. Seldom does the public ever hear of the actual facts in a timely way, and by the time that does happens they have long since moved on to more pressing matters.
diddoit , 1 Aug 2014 06:50
Has any politician asked them to explain why they spied, in terms of their motivations ? It seems the 'why' is surely more damaging than the act of spying itself?
Trevor Alfred -> Hottentot , 1 Aug 2014 06:38
What else is new!...Corruption / deceit / fraud / theft, at the highest level of tax payers money is being conducted..War criminals being sponsored by their own corrupt government ministers / agencies, to create carnage, by divide & rule tactics...Its a fatal backfiring failure / disaster which is causing their downfall.
Trevor Alfred , 1 Aug 2014 06:19
Not surprising...All these out of control "rogue agencies" I.E. CIA / NSA / MI5 / MI6 / GCHG / MOSAD, must be brought to book for their corrupt / deceitful / fraudulent workings...Their most senior officers are involved in a worldwide cover up into illegal involvement of creating criminal wars around the world, by using spying techniques upon government institutions & citizens...The recent scandal of phone tapping / voice mail / email interception, goes to show the lengths they are prepared to conduct / cover up their own war criminality acts. They are the REAL terrorists !!
BarrieJ -> worldperspective , 1 Aug 2014 05:48
"They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace."
― Tacitus (AD56 to after AD117) The Agricola and the Germania

He could have been writing today.
Bardamux -> CornsilkSW , 1 Aug 2014 05:37
Which US-President was any better ?
donkiddick , 1 Aug 2014 05:36
They'll even eat their own... How this behaviour doesn't equate to criminal actions is part of the disgrace. The US government have morphed in to a dystopian movement.
BarrieJ -> freeandfair , 1 Aug 2014 05:34
So true. At least the people of Russia knew they were under a yoke, American citizens were led to believe they lived in the land of the free.
BarrieJ -> Darius Las , 1 Aug 2014 05:26
At least the Chinese know what they've got and know that it's dangerous to discuss it.
BarrieJ -> pa2013 , 1 Aug 2014 05:21
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA by Webster Griffin Tarpley (ISBN: 9780930852375) another good read and makes a plausible case for a coup carried out on America.
BarrieJ -> fringe_perception , 1 Aug 2014 05:16
Us Brits have led the field for centuries.

In the reign of Elizabeth 1st a blacksmith was executed for treason because he was overhead saying that he believed the uncrowned King Edward V was still alive.

A quick search on Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's Secretary of State will reveal for just how long and how sophisticated state spying on state has been.

BarrieJ -> eldudeabides , 1 Aug 2014 05:03
Yes, they don't like others to be in a position to know of their venality, their sexual deviances and assorted other human failings.

Else that knowledge be used to control them...............

BarrieJ -> consciouslyinformed , 1 Aug 2014 04:58
The problem of how the rest of the world views the actions of the US is exacerbated by the seeming inability or disinterest of its citizens in doing anything about it. Admittedly, a frustration shared by many citizens/subjects in Western countries, that pretend to be functioning democracies but are in fact anything but.

The problem with political power is that it proves to be a magnet to those with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and they are easily corrupted.

We are politically and economically very poorly educated and are daily fed propaganda and mind filling mush by media that are 'on message'.

The media ownership needs to be broken up but politicians, corporations and the media are one self serving body and would resist that and have the power to do so.

Back in the day, the people of Russia knew that what they were being fed was propaganda, in the US and the UK we thought it was news.

fireangel , 1 Aug 2014 04:51
Intelligence Agencies have their own Agenda. The CIA spy on everyone including the Senate it seems. Meanwhile the Israeli Intelligence Agencies spy on many people Including the USA, the very people who give them the money... (Out of Control is the thought that springs to mind)
SteveBiko187 -> EndersShadow , 1 Aug 2014 04:27
Whereas in reality it's only the whistleblowers who lose their job and pension.
spartacute , 1 Aug 2014 04:26
If the CIA are Spying on the Senate you have to ask the Question who are they working for ? Is it the American Government ? Is it the American Military? Is it The American Citizen ? Or are we seeing the henchmen of the illuminati in action here !
Their fingers seem to be in every pie and no one seems to be able to control them .
BarrieJ -> David Egan , 1 Aug 2014 04:24
You've just about hit the nail on the head but what to do about it?
DaniJV , 1 Aug 2014 04:22
US democracy is simply a joke.

[Jun 07, 2019] The power of neoliberal brainwashing by Jason Holland

Jun 01, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org

If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life.

-- Michel de Montaigne, Complete Book of Essays , Book 11, Essay 12, Page 543

For your consideration, the modern idiot in a habitat of prime viral fecundity; after centuries of western civilization spreading toxic oppressive imperialism through contrived financial schemes and brutish warfare the dream of global neoliberalism has come to full fruition where all personal responsibility for actions of selfish business interests has been discretely removed from the profiteers and accountability placed upon all powerful implacable nation states. As a result what has been set into motion is the perfect bewildering breeding ground for the whims of the idiot mind to thrive. Complexity is artificially created in financial systems, legalese, and bureaucratic nomenclature to obfuscate the deceptions and allow the idiots in charge to more deftly carry out their scams on the general public..

What is before us now are the death throes of capitalism, which is oddly enough also capitalism at its apogee with a precipitous descent ahead due to its profound unsustainability. A common analogy of our times is referencing going off a cliff of some kind to describe the present trajectory of this idiot society, e.g. an unstoppable train with no brakes going over a cliff, or Wile E. Coyote having already gone over the cliff and simply hasn't bothered to look down yet to notice he's run out of terra-firma. Whatever variation of the analogy chosen, the point is that we know the cliff is there, but the collective state of our idiocy doesn't seem to care too much. It has other idiot priorities it deems more necessary to care about, so it plows ahead despite knowing it has run out of track.

This state of being has of course been intentionally manufactured by the idiots in charge. The direct derivation of widespread capitalist ideology creates faux democracies run by political stooges who are sycophantic to corporate power amounting to an orchestrated production of bureaucratic theater where everyone affected by the reach of this system catches the virus of idiocy and finds themselves at various stages of recovery. Each person inculcated into the cult of the idiot via institutional systems is ensnared by the traps set by boardroom bandits who conspire to break the will of the people by attempting to normalize that which isn't normal, and comport the natural better intentions of the masses to enrich the loosely formed global capitalist state.

Their scheme is simplistic yet highly effective; engineer a society based on a need for money issued from a central source and then see to it that money is always in scarce supply for all but an elite class. The effect on the common person is a state of perpetual fear and desperation which allows for the masses to be easily controlled, always servile to the money. The idiotic mind is then molded by saturating the senses in a simulacrum overlay of reality which obscures our real values, uses our love against us, and reforms us into the idiot that the idiots in charge wish us to be so we may be easily exploited once the will is broken, hence the average human animal won't put up much resistance when they are asked to do the cruel and often ecologically ruinous labor for an elite class. After the institutional indoctrination the hope for a better world becomes a futile prospect with the specter of our own conscious/cognitive deficiencies looming large over our collective actions. And certainly any would-be paradise or substantially better world for all, which theoretically could come into being, will never emerge so long as the agenda of the idiot prevails over higher wisdom.

A melancholic realization of our predicament is to understand we are trapped in a death spiral under idiotic reign where some horrific form of collapse is nearly inevitable due to our own inability to change the compulsory-destructive- unsustainable-status quo. We are damned to this present state because the idiots learned long ago that all it takes to control a herd of humans to create a self reinforcing system of subservience. This system is instantiated by fostering dependency in a hierarchical social system where a cadre of idiots seize control and installs safeguards to protect their system making it intractable with feedback loops of rewards and punishments, and each time the people begin to wise up to the plots of the idiots in charge they are slapped back into depraved imbecility unless they want to endure more of the whip which power will see to it is all that lies before them if they attempt to stray too much from the desired course of the idiots in charge.

The idiot is inherently an idiot because they are motivated by idiotic whims. At the core of the idiot are misplaced values leading to misplaced priorities that lead them to take up activities and belief systems which are antithetical to their own contentment, and typically not only are these types of activities a path to nowhere for them but also have added externalities which make their actions corrosive to all life as well. Inevitably their facile search for greater pleasure, status, and legacy damns not only them to their own personal hell, but has the potential to damn all others impacted by their decisions chasing after shallow endeavors.

The idiot mind argues their positions with a barrage of overlapping nested logical fallacies couched in reductionism and baked down to simplistic one liners which buries the truth so far down it takes an hour to fully unpack a single sentence. "Everything is a cycle", "Communism has killed 100 million people", "Capitalism has led to the greatest increase in quality of life", "Guns don't kill people, people do" – twisted distractive arguments ignoring a compendium of logical antecedents all purposed to defend capitalist propaganda people have either conveniently or unwittingly absorbed and requires time and a calm dialectical conversation to break apart the conflated lies. However the conditioned idiot mind isn't really interested in hearing the counterarguments to these claims. They only want a simple reassurance that their previously held positions are correct because admitting one is wrong is painful and requires a degree of humility, a virtue which the idiot has in short supply. And if one attempts to fully explain the full breadth of the argument the more hardened idiots will proclaim that if one cannot manufacture the counterargument in an equally terse and trite statement it must be wrong. The idiot mind will ultimately dismiss the opposing arguments with laconic stupidity and they'll quickly come to rest on the premise that we can "agree to disagree", or they'll claim on any point in which they might potentially be wrong is simply that the truth may be in the middle somewhere, or they'll suddenly become spurious epistemological philosophers and question what can truly ever be known?

To be glib and facile is a common feature of the idiot and entails not thinking about arguments in proper scope or with valid supporting warrants, or to casually perhaps conveniently misattribute the root of a problem which in fact may be be a product of a deeper problem(s). The idiot sees before them only what they desire, and their desire so often blinds them. The idiot is jealous, competitive and desires material stuff and power while sometimes not even questioning why they want what they believe they want. Like why do idiots care so much about immigrants? If they had their border wall built and actually were able to keep out 100% of illegal immigration their lives would not appreciable improve in any manner, there would be no sudden spike in their pay or offering of jobs. There's a long line of issues people think they care about that if corrected would not make much of a difference, and some of them being symptoms of deeper problems.

A rich entitled idiot will spend countless hours trying to think of ways to make more money and for what? More sexual partners? A new boat? Bigger house? A private jet? What exactly is gained and why is that worthwhile? And a war-mongering bureaucrat like Trump's national security advisor John Bolton, does anyone think he actually cares so much about the security of the US that he feels it necessary to try to attack Iran and Venezuela, and what would be accomplished when they are toppled? Even if he admitted the true reason he wants to attack these countries, for economic neoliberal expansion and to plunder their resources, what is gained even then? What is the end game there? Why do any of these folk who already are much wealthier than the common person and also nearing the end of their lives feel it so absolutely necessary to impose their will violently on others? The results will only end like every military conflict does, with throngs of innocent people dead and the world no more peaceful or better off than it was when they started the conflict.

And what exactly is gained if an already wealthy US gains more wealth? What happens? Who is happier? Who is better off? Almost nobody. Why they do what they do is an insanity and spreads discord throughout the world, as Hans Koning stated in his book Columbus: His Enterprise regarding the Spanish empire's plundering of the Americas:

For all the gold and silver stolen and shipped to Spain did not make the Spanish people richer. It gave their kings an edge in the balance of power for a time, a chance to hire more mercenary soldiers for their wars. They ended up losing those wars anyway, and all that was left was a deadly inflation, a starving population, the rich richer, the poor poorer, and a ruined peasant class.

This is the typical result of imperialism. Always has been. Thus the elites imposing their selfish will on others doesn't do anything of value and never has. This realization doesn't stop the present idiots in charge from doing their nefarious deeds or cause a hint self introspection, the idiot mind is a busied mind supremely confident they are correct. And once they have a head of steam in a direction they will most always barrel on forward out of nothing more than foolish pride reassuring themselves that whatever minor gains they may receive from any heinous act they take up is worth it, while often taking the shortest, most brutish path, to acquire more of what they desire but don't need in any conceivable way. They don't bother to think of the ramifications or the pain they cause; they just do because they feel they have the power to do so, consequences be damned.

And the facile machinations of the modern idiot in western countries doesn't seem to want to stop doing even the most frivolous of activities in order to stop the bleeding of mother Gaia. Any capitalist desire is of utmost importance to be maintained to the idiots in charge. They feel like it's their right in their ostensibly free market to use their money to engage in whatever spectacle or peculiarity they wish no matter the consequence and won't budge or go without one less triviality, not one less light buzzing over Times Square. Not a single casino can be sacrificed. It would be a tragedy if there was one less assault rifle rolling off an assembly line. An impossibility to go with one less cruise ship, or one less all you can eat buffet, not one less computer server warehouse storing useless surveillance information, not one less gaming console, or Hollywood car crash scene, or all night convenience store or fast food restaurant Not a thing they will do to impede what their idiot facile minds believe is freedom. To the idiot it's somehow all a worthwhile endeavor despite if it means inducing abrupt climate change or killing off the majority of the flora and fauna on the planet. The idiots simply won't stop being idiots until some force greater than them makes them.

And to diminish the rapid onset of climate change the idiot mind speaks of the money needed to do so. As if human will was solely reliant on convincing the idiots in charge to create more currency for the most pressing issue humans have perhaps ever faced. The idiot ignores history of Native Americans who primarily used a gift economy for likely thousands of years in comparative peace and were more advanced than most modern idiots give them credit, certainly leaps and bounds more advanced socially. But in modernity and throughout the history of western civilization money has been a tool of power and created through loans and enslaving people into debt in the billions of dollars everyday for the most absurd reasons. But debate in the public sphere continually revolves around the idea of how can we afford to maintain our highly destructive system in the face of anthropogenic Armageddon. They insist it's an impossibility that a bunch of corrupt bankers can't create the money as they do all the time and an equally impossible idea that perhaps we free ourselves entirely from these shackles and abandon the concept of money altogether to do what is necessary through the bonds of trust and lessen the damage to our environment so we have a habitat to live in while also freeing ourselves from cycle of imperial idiocy created through the use of currency. Truly the reasons for which we are destroying this planet are idiotic, and the things that are stopping the people from fully revolting against the idiots in charge are also idiotic considering what is on the line.

Our cultural heritage in western civilization is rooted in idiocy, driven by elite idiots in charge with an agenda to make the inability to discern the difference between a higher truth and an outright lie a widespread epidemic so they can convince the masses to do the stupid things the idiots in charge desire. Through tyranny and manipulation the idiot powers that be have manufactured a world which has planted seeds of doubt in otherwise unassailable truths. And perhaps this is why so many people in the west have sought out wisdom within eastern philosophy and shamanistic societies. They seek to find truth that is shunned by the modern western mind, and to understand truth one must disengage from this toxic culture so they can remember once again what the truth looks like.

The idiocy is compounded by an ironic competitive pride in their intellectual abilities where one idiot proclaims to be smarter and more qualified than another based on idiotic criteria. Like the spurious intelligence in being able to out maneuver another capitalist through underhanded means, or exhibiting the callousness to exploit employees more than their competitors. Or the supposed craftiness in brown-nosing up to one's superiors in a place of work and appearing more subservient than coworkers as to be awarded a promotion. These are not acts of intelligence but acts of one who is making an obsequious race to the bottom and proclaiming themselves champions for their willingness to sink to lower levels of deception to achieve their so called success. However there is no success when the entire ecology of our world is recklessly destroyed so their ideas of success can be had. There is no success when needless wars and mass human suffering are imposed so their ill conceived goals can be achieved. The idiot's idea of success is in actuality grand treachery.

Examples of the idiot's falsely contrived ideas of success are everywhere. The unemployment rate is seemingly quite low at 3.6%, but what does this mean when so many are excluded out of the equation once they haven't had any employment for a long enough amount of time, and further, what is considered employment in many cases doesn't provide the ability to afford a roof over your head. And who cares if the unemployment number is low when the end product of these jobs also makes species extinction and climate change worse. What good are these jobs when they create so much human misery that lives have little value to all those who are stuck in the labor. And who cares if a metric like the GDP goes up if it is achieved through barbarous imperialism, or grossly overcharging for medical care/housing/education, or by creating slave like conditions for people thousands of miles away so corporations can glean more profits? This is again is not success, it is but the apex of disdainful human treachery.

The idiot is constantly seeking validation externally from others and never generates their own validation through self acceptance. Thus they are ravenous attention seekers, and will inevitably sniff out all things that garner attention for them so they create awards shows, diplomas with haughty ceremonies, important sounding titles of all sorts to manufacture the facade of their worth. If an action is harmful to others in their trek for external validation it's not of any great importance to the idiot, the worthiness of action is again determined by if it's beneficial to them and exclusionary society comprised of other idiots so it compliments their high sense of themselves which their ego assures them is valid.

The idiot believes all things are impossible except what currently exists. They are exceptional at meeting the criteria for the definition for insanity. They do the same thing over and over and expect different results. The idiot does not understand history even when they read it since cultural and self reinforced myopia has rotted away the plasticity of thought in their minds so what they take away from the reading of history is only what is convenient to their present system of thought. The idiot believes in social systems like representative democracies, centralized government in nation states, courts, and prisons that cannot cure the simplest of society's ailments over thousands of years of use, but to the idiot just one more election is going to make all the difference. One more go around the installed idiotic system with idiotic desires at the root is going to change course and suddenly become wise. They believe by just replacing the current idiots in charge they will be able to cause the change that is so desperately needed, but like a hiker refusing to admit they are lost and continuing down the trail out of hubris they are only further compounding the problem by insisting they aren't lost. And our society is most certainly lost, and it's a long way back to the trail that leads to redemption and a place we actually want to be, which we get further away from each day we stay on our present course.

And after all our idiotic overcomplicated plots and schemes, they are but to mask simple truths the idiot facade tries so desperately to avoid; the inner torments of being afraid of not being good enough, not measuring up to our peers, not meeting arbitrary expectations we either accept from others or set for ourselves, or quite simply feeling like we are not worthy of love. So we play these pointless high stakes games which have a rewards as meaningless and worthless as a plastic trophy just to prove our worth. The idiot is a temporal state of being, although many are finer long term examples of displaying the behaviors of the idiot; however none of us are the perfect idiot. To avoid the affectations of being in an idiotic state it takes conscious effort to live our lives moment to moment with authenticity, to be in a state of awareness of our actions, to always be willing to suffer for something worthwhile and to be consistently well reasoned examiners of what constitutes something worthwhile.

Jason Holland is a writer and a proponent of peaceful revolution. He can be reached at [email protected] or follow him on twitter @ReasonBowl. Youtube content at Reason Bowl Radio. Read other articles by Jason , or visit Jason's website .

This article was posted on Saturday, June 1st, 2019 at 10:13pm and is filed under Capitalism , Classism , Imperialism , Neoliberalism .

[Jun 07, 2019] CIA admits to spying on Senate staffers by Spencer Ackerman

Brennan as a long history of illegal spying...
Notable quotes:
"... The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials. ..."
"... Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on a CIA network, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture. ..."
"... CIA spokesman Dean Boyd acknowledged that agency staff had improperly monitored the computers of committee staff members, who were using a network the agency had set up, called RDINet. "Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between [the committee] and the CIA in 2009 regarding access to the RDINet," he said. ..."
"... If its considered 'extraordinary' that a man apologize for his actions, then that man is either a sociopath, a criminal, or both. ..."
"... The CIA has now clearly suborned the executive. Obama now works for the CIA. He's spineless, Obama. He is craven, before the very same intelligence agencies that are supposed to work for him. ..."
"... You people are so deluded. You think it matter who you vote for. Newsflash - the CIA killed JFK. The CIA runs America. ..."
"... American foreign policy is the same no matter which party is in power. They are all screwing you six ways from Sunday. ..."
"... If America was a just state, that would happen. But America is a neo-fascist - or more properly, corporatist - state. ..."
"... The NSA/CIA in recent hearings forcefully explained to the Judiciary Committee in Congress that they only spy on foreigners and not US citizens. I guess Congressmen/women are not US citizens and must be terrorists. ..."
"... 'The CIA spying on the people supposedly in charge of the CIA' sounds as if they are reaping what they sowed... ..."
Jun 07, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

CIA director apologises for improper conduct of agency staff One senator calls on John Brennan to resign in wake of scandal

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, issued an extraordinary apology to leaders of the US Senate intelligence committee on Thursday, conceding that the agency employees spied on committee staff and reversing months of furious and public denials.

Brennan acknowledged that an internal investigation had found agency security personnel transgressed a firewall set up on a CIA network, which allowed Senate committee investigators to review agency documents for their landmark inquiry into CIA torture.

Among other things, it was revealed that agency officials conducted keyword searches and email searches on committee staff while they used the network.

The admission brings Brennan's already rocky tenure at the head of the CIA under renewed question. One senator on the panel said he had lost confidence in the director, although the White House indicated its support for a man who has been one of Barack Obama's most trusted security aides.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd acknowledged that agency staff had improperly monitored the computers of committee staff members, who were using a network the agency had set up, called RDINet. "Some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding reached between [the committee] and the CIA in 2009 regarding access to the RDINet," he said.

Asked if Brennan had or would offer his resignation, a different CIA spokesman, Ryan Trapani, replied: "No."

In March, the committee chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, accused the agency of violating constitutional boundaries by spying on the Senate.

Feinstein said the vindication, from CIA inspector general David Buckley, and Brennan's apology were "positive first steps," suggesting that the director had further work to do before she would consider the matter closed.

She stopped short of calling for Brennan's resignation. But her committee colleague, Democrat Mark Udall of Colorado, said Brennan should go. "I have no choice but to call for the resignation of CIA director John Brennan," Udall said after a briefing on the inspector general's findings.

"The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate intelligence committee computers. This grave misconduct is not only illegal, but it violates the US constitution's requirement of separation of powers. These offenses, along with other errors in judgment by some at the CIA, demonstrate a tremendous failure of leadership, and there must be consequences.

Mark Udall (@MarkUdall)

. @CIA IG rprt shows John Brennan misled public, whose interests I have championed. I will fight for change at the CIA: http://t.co/uQVsvV43nB

July 31, 2014

Boyd, the CIA spokesman, said Brennan has asked a former committee member, Evan Bayh, a former Indiana Democratic senator, to lead an "accountability board" reviewing Buckley's report and to advise Brennan on next steps.

That advice, Boyd said, "could include potential disciplinary measures and/or steps to address systemic issues."

Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, a longtime observer of the CIA, called its Thursday statement a "conciliatory gesture" to the committee's leaders. "If Senator Feinstein is satisfied with the apology then the affair is effectively over. If she contends there was a fundamental breach that cannot be corrected with a mere apology then some further action might be needed," Aftergood said.

McClatchy first reported the apology on Thursday.

Feinstein, in her dramatic speech on the Senate floor in March, said the agency breached the firewall to obstruct the committee's investigation of the agency's torture of post-9/11 terrorism detainees, a years-long effort expected to be partially declassified in the coming days or weeks. That investigation was itself prompted by a different coverup: the destruction of videotapes of brutal interrogations by a senior official, Jose Rodriguez.

Newt Othis -> 2crudedudes , 3 Aug 2014 12:07

That's true. The only two parties in America are the elites and the peasants.
Newt Othis , 3 Aug 2014 12:04
"In March, the committee chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, accused the agency of violating constitutional boundaries by spying on the Senate."

Aahahahhahhhhahaaa. What a hypocrite hag. She must have something to hide if she doesn't like being spied on. I think that there should be a full investigation into what Dianne...if that is even her real name, has been hiding and bring it to the light of day.

2crudedudes -> FrankBarry , 3 Aug 2014 04:23
The entire government is corrupt and has been corrupt for decades.
2crudedudes , 3 Aug 2014 04:09
I love this. Feinstein is a champion of the 4th amendment and Constitutional rights all of a sudden. B­i­tc­h a­s­s.
awoolf14 , 3 Aug 2014 01:37
If its considered 'extraordinary' that a man apologize for his actions, then that man is either a sociopath, a criminal, or both.
yadayada2 -> freeandfair , 2 Aug 2014 13:26
Good point, but wrong way round imho. The CIA has now clearly suborned the executive. Obama now works for the CIA. He's spineless, Obama. He is craven, before the very same intelligence agencies that are supposed to work for him.

Just imagine how the laugh at him, speak about him, behind his back. No wonder Putin treats him like a fool.

Griffon79 -> Arnet Ramming , 2 Aug 2014 12:42
You people are so deluded. You think it matter who you vote for. Newsflash - the CIA killed JFK. The CIA runs America.
Richard Bittner -> William W Haywood , 2 Aug 2014 12:36
It is time to put all the DemPublicanCFR basterds in prison for life. From the BUSH II (The torturer) to bill clinton who initiated the covert torture operation. The clearest signal that we are not living in a self governing democracy is that; excluding Watergate, the DemPublicanCFR ruling elite do not go to prison, there is rarely any real investigation of their crimes; as in the recent largest public swindle in human history....the DemPublicanCFR, Wall st/Rating Company Swindle that was orchestrated by the "boys" from the bohemian grove.The level of corruption in this Country exceeds that of ancient Rome.The best way to combat "terrorism" is to get the hell out of other peoples countries.and imprison the DemPublicanCFR members who intentionally mislead this Country into a fossil fuel War in Iraq. George Bush II ( the coward draft dodger) is a moron on an epic scale comparable to the Roman Emperor who named his horse a general. We are confronted with a monumental environmental emergency and these idiot myopic assholes debate carbon emission controls instead of leading the way to a fossil fuel nuclear free world.by initiating the largest public works program in human history....a massive energy conversion program funded by cutting the military budget in half.The conversion program will also be funded by the profits made by all the fossil fuel and nuclear power companies. Just imagine all the AMERICAN JOBS WILL BE CREATED. We need leaders who put the interests of the Americam people first and who do not march to the drumb beat of the Rockefucker internationalist DemPublicanCFR elite. It is time to send David Rockyfucker to Iran to stand trial for the crimes he has committed against the Iranian people....We are living in a state of environmental crisis and it is time for true American patriots to rise and confront our Enemy within who, thanks to the great American patriot Edward Snowden, we now know for certain has all or electronic communications under 24 hour surveillance. The DemPublicanCFR ruling elite must be held to pay for their crimes or I fear the planet that our childen, grand children and great grandchildren will be living in is doomed to cataclysmic events that we have yet to even imagine...
Arnet Ramming , 2 Aug 2014 11:03
Boy, once you spy on a Democrat it becomes an issue. Lying seems to be what Obama and his appointees due best as there are no consequences for lying, even under oath as Eric Holder has done several times. So let's just move along here as this is just another day under Obama.
TeeJayzed Addy -> muttley79 , 2 Aug 2014 04:50

if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear

And a justification for refusal to release the report would be that if you have nothing to read then you have nothing to fear.

William W Haywood , 2 Aug 2014 04:00
Agency security personnel had transgressed? And just what is that some kind of creepy code for? We, the bigwigs, did it, but we have language that allows us to blame it on our innocent underlings...of course. This is the height of mental illness and corruption! Just a simple excuse used to placate a supposedly mind dead public already hypnotized by their main stream media and under their almost absolute control. That's you and I, of course...sound familiar? Well, I will be totally under their control when they come and kill me, and not before that! "Agency staff had improperly monitored the computers of committee staff members", well who in the hell is agency staff if not Brennan? Considering how far Obama has fallen since he stated how good he was at killing, I do not see how any of us in a sound state of mind can see Mr. Brennan as anything other than a criminal and a traitor to the American people. Same as our present president, supreme court, congress, and many more.
Griffon79 -> spacetimeloops , 2 Aug 2014 00:15
Yes, we could dispense with elected officials, and instead use direct democracy. But first, revolution will be required, and that means war.

Unfortunately, unless something is done our children will live Orwell's prophecy of the future: a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

Griffon79 -> inabster , 2 Aug 2014 00:12
As long as you persist in your long held delusion that there are differences between democrats and republicans - differences that matter - nothing will change.

Open you eyes. American foreign policy is the same no matter which party is in power. They are all screwing you six ways from Sunday.

Griffon79 -> chuck nasmith , 2 Aug 2014 00:11
If America was a just state, that would happen. But America is a neo-fascist - or more properly, corporatist - state.

Democrats and republicans are two sides of the same coin. Political theater for the plebs to fight over while the real power brokers hide in the shadows.

Griffon79 -> error418 , 2 Aug 2014 00:08
Do they walk away free after assassinating their own president?

You could ask Kennedy..oh, wait..

Griffon79 , 2 Aug 2014 00:02
The free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism.

Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

Mmmoke , 1 Aug 2014 22:07
The NSA/CIA in recent hearings forcefully explained to the Judiciary Committee in Congress that they only spy on foreigners and not US citizens. I guess Congressmen/women are not US citizens and must be terrorists.
Ziontrain , 1 Aug 2014 19:35
Nothing will change in America until someone actually starts losing their job, being forced to resign or go to jail - both politicians and so called "leaders" in the agencies committing these horrific crimes.
FrankBarry -> Trevor Alfred , 1 Aug 2014 18:00
Trevor, thank you.

You've won the HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD award.
But you did forget the DHS who also has a Prius type
program for surveillance. The name starts with a C
but I cannot remember off the top of my head. I do
recall that Boeing's employees were involved in doing
training of technicians.

Things are "out of hand". I fear the US government will
be using contracted mercenaries to keep us in line before
too much longer. Those guys will be coming home and
taking jobs in our local police departments.

Follow the Blackwater money. Erik Prince, and cohorts.
Names may change many times, but it is still all there.

Ivor Fairney , 1 Aug 2014 17:25
It does not seem to be doing the US any good. Their army would seem to be a complete failure. Their so called intelligence seems to know nothing about anything that matters. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan many trillions of dollars and abject failure and we see a nation that brakes every law of decency.
FrankBarry -> Charleyzencat , 1 Aug 2014 17:19
Charleyzencat
Propaganda is not necessary.

Example,
The CIA agent who shot in the back 2 Pakistani men, and then
after reloading once, he fired 10 times. This occurred during the
day on a busy street in Lahore, Pakistan. He claimed first to be
a US Embassy Staff Member. He was ransomed by Kerry, who
was not yet Secretary of State, but was sent by Obama to do so.
2 other CIA agents, the killer's roommates, who the killer had called
for help, ran over a Pakistani bystander with their jeep on the way
to aid the killer, and killed the poor man. They were immediately airlifted out of Pakistan and returned to the United States, never to
be heard of since, nor reported by the media.

But, this CIA killer just couldn't stop there. He has been arrested by Sheriff's Deputies, inside a Colorado bar for being involved in a knife fight. This CIA killer and his wife own a United States contracted spy agency in Las Vegas.

These are the Agents who represent our United States of America.

Who can forget Obama's Secret Servicemen, one of which, while
a guest of a South American city, tried to rip off a Whore by short-
changing her. That hit the newspapers around the world.

These are the Agents who represent our United States of America.

Philip Leung , 1 Aug 2014 17:17
Don't forget this is the same agency that enabled the capture and imprisonment of Mandela, and that only scratches the surface of some of the stuff they've been up to.

The CIA is beyond reform now, it's no longer a matter of changing who heads it.

FrankBarry -> danielpfeiffer , 1 Aug 2014 16:37
Feinstein is too old and senile to get the job accomplished. Erik Holder is still a slave to Obama. He prosecutes no one who counts.

The leadership of America is in the hands of the Devil. It has been openly corrupt for more than 20 years. Americans are waking to that fact.

FrankBarry -> WayneYoung , 1 Aug 2014 16:33
There are places in the world where these people would be put on a wall and quickly dispensed with.

Spies and Surveillers hide the truth from us all, and the United States Congress pays them to do so.

Voters need to Turn Out the Incumbents. Everyone of them. Along with their Staffers. 100,000 lobbyists need to be
stripped of their licenses, and their political connections.

It is long past time for revolution or revolt.
It is time to clean house.

I have the Tar, bring feathers.

FrankBarry -> Susan Bolson Griffiths , 1 Aug 2014 16:25
Susan, thank you. Seeing is believing. In the US Intelligence Agencies, including the Military, there are 850,000 men and women employees who hold Top Secret clearances and more. That is a lot of Secrets to hide. Only a few come freely forward to report corruption to the public at large. Only a couple have had the guts to paper the world with these corrupt agency's offal.
FrankBarry , 1 Aug 2014 16:19
Cut off the heads, and the tails. The United States Intelligence Agencies are corrupted. They are killers of innocent human beings.

Will Erik Holder send any of them to Prison? He did not prosecute any of the people responsible for our nation's debacle. Not a one of
them went to prison. He and his boss Obama are also corrupted. They both are killers of innocent human beings.

Every man of integrity who works for the United States government should, when he sees corruption, report it to the media 1st, and to
his superior officers 2nd. Not to do so, is a criminal act itself.

We have to wonder if there are any besides Edward Snowden, who work for the United States government, and have the guts to let us
know when they see corruption.

Susan Bolson Griffiths -> Charleyzencat , 1 Aug 2014 15:50
'The CIA spying on the people supposedly in charge of the CIA' sounds as if they are reaping what they sowed...
Susan Bolson Griffiths , 1 Aug 2014 15:39
Great to see truth coming out in the wash.. Also brilliant to hear on the radio,whistleblowers in the UK are going to be protected, there's progress now....
WayneYoung , 1 Aug 2014 14:04
It seems to appear the spying business is a new democratic industry where money, power, and control are prime. Words like decency and morality are flying out the windows. The head of a spy ring can retire to form a new enterprise to charge half million to one million dollars for spy protection...
danielpfeiffer , 1 Aug 2014 13:28
Flagrant Violations of U.S. Constitution & International Law Continue Unabated as CIA/Feinstein Row Over Senate Spying Lands on Front Page and Elite Politely Decline to Prosecute Peers' Crimes
truthspeaker -> EndersShadow , 1 Aug 2014 13:17

I don't know if the 9/11 panic has caused the relaxation of the LAW

The law was relaxed as soon as the Church Committee wrapped up. The CIA was offended at the very idea of having to obey the law, and their allies in Congress, and the White House after Reagan was elected, obliged them.

mirageseekr -> Malkatrinho , 1 Aug 2014 13:16
Who cares about what they admit to that we all already suspected. Who is getting charged and going to jail? Of course the answer is nobody because they are either all complicit or congress is intimidated by what other information they may know about them. Time to purge the whole system.
eldudeabides -> BarrieJ , 1 Aug 2014 13:06
absolutely, Barrie.

one has to wonder how many politicians across the Five Eyes nations (US, UK, Canada, Australia and Canada), are being blackmailed, co-erced and manipulated, by big business/government.

Many of the decisions (and statements from some politicians) that I witness in first world government, make no sense.

for example, is there even one investigatory committee in Westminster or Washington, that has/is not been hacked and controlled by outsiders (big business often in cahoots with senior govt/intelligence people).

look at the antics of the disgraced News of the Wooorld, deliberately targetting members of the sub-committee investigating their hacking.

EarthyByNature -> frispk , 1 Aug 2014 12:31
For all the abuses by powerful men in history there are those, including American Presidents, who have demonstrated both leadership and courage in the face of obstruction, opposition.

But hey, thanks for adding bluster and hot air to the debate. I guess you'd have us all pack up and go home.

OpineOpiner -> Charleyzencat , 1 Aug 2014 12:29
The CIA spying on the people supposedly in charge of the CIA has nothing to do with fighting 'terrorism' and everything to do with the CIA protecting itself from any such namby-pamby libtard delusions such as integrity, accountability, congressional oversight, responsibility, and other such pesky nuisances.
Piet Van Der Riet , 1 Aug 2014 11:57
To paraphrase Hitler: " Is it not fortunate for politicians that the general public do not think ..."
babymamaboy , 1 Aug 2014 11:39
Want a good salary, higher prestige than elected leaders, and less accountability than a welfare recipient? Check out employment postings at the CIA!
Charleyzencat , 1 Aug 2014 11:38
But isn't spying what the CIA is supposed to do? And isn't this what we supported for so many years during the Cold War because of "the threat of communism"?

There are certainly still threats out there (Al Queda and Boko Haram come to mind) but is the CIA geared to handle intelligence in terrorist organizations or are they still fighting the Communists? Revamp the Agency to make it more adapted to the new reality of terrorist threats world wide but don't fault somebody if they're just trying to do their job. Give them some direction or don't complain when things go awry. Maybe they're just looking for something to do. Let's be sure to keep them busy fighting terrorists not the US Senate.

[Jun 07, 2019] Brennan: I'm Still Waiting For Republican Rats To Realize The Trump Ship Is Sinking

I think now Brennan sings a different song...
May 01, 2019 | www.realclearpolitics.com

Former CIA Director John Brennan warned Republicans who support President Trump that they are on a sinking ship, in an appearance Wednesday morning on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

"I'm waiting for the Republicans to realize that the Trump ship is a sinking one," he said.

"There are still rats on that ship, and there are individuals who are not going to separate themselves from Trump. They do so at their own peril. They need to fulfill their obligations, irrespective of their political affiliations. This is now the presidency and institutions of government we rely on to keep us safe and secure."

MIKE BARNICLE: Last week, there was another continued swipe ordered by the president of the United States, who whatever he says is a megaphone and resonates throughout the country because of the way it is carried, in which he basically said that people like you and several other people in the intelligence community were responsible for trying to participate in a coup, to undermine the presidency of the United States and to remove the president of the United States. What does it do -- nevermind to you personally -- what does it do to institutions like the NSA, the CIA, the FBI.

JOHN BRENNAN: It continues to show Mr. Trump's disdain for the intelligence and law enforcement communities, who are trying to do their jobs irrespective of political winds that might be blowing in Washington. It really is demoralizing for Mr. Trump to continue to say there is this "deep state" that tried to launch a coup, and that he is trying to "clean the swamp," while in fact, it is those professionals within the intelligence community, law enforcement community, who are trying to carry out their duties and responsibilities to the American people. Mr. Trump just continues to go down this road. I think it is having a very damaging impact.

WILLIE GEIST: What do you think, Director Brennan, happens from here? I think people watching want to know. They say, okay, Mueller didn't like how the report was characterized by the attorney general. Fine, on the issue of obstruction of justice. Now, what? Is it Mueller sitting before the Senate and answering specific questions about what is inside the report? What is the outcome of this?

JOHN BRENNAN: Barr has to be interrogated.

WILLIE GEIST: That starts this morning at 10:00.

JOHN BRENNAN: And then Bob Mueller has to get in front of Congress, then Congress has to do its job.

And I'm still waiting for the Republicans to realize that the Trump ship is a sinking one. There are still rats on that ship, and there are individuals who are not going to separate themselves from Trump. But they do so at their own peril. And they need to fulfill their obligations, irrespective of their political affiliations. And to do it now rather than to allow this continued sinking of not just the presidency, but of these institutions of government that we rely on to keep us safe and secure.

[Jun 07, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Pushes No War Agenda – and the Media Is out to Kill Her Chances by Philip Giraldi

Trump betrayed anti-war votes. So he will not get the same voting blocks that he got in 2016.
Notable quotes:
"... Tulsi's own military experience notwithstanding, she gives every indication of being honestly anti-war. In the speech announcing her candidacy she pledged "focus on the issue of war and peace" to "end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda." She referred to the danger posed by blundering into a possible nuclear war and indicated her dismay over what appears to be a re-emergence of the Cold War. ..."
"... In a recent interview with Fox News's Tucker Carlson, Gabbard doubled down on her anti-war credentials, telling the host that war with Iran would be "devastating, " adding that "I know where this path leads us and I'm concerned because the American people don't seem to be prepared for how devastating and costly such a war would be So, what we are facing is, essentially, a war that has no frontlines, total chaos, engulfs the whole region, is not contained within Iran or Iraq but would extend to Syria and Lebanon and Israel across the region, setting us up in a situation where, in Iraq, we lost over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniform. A war with Iran would take far more American lives, it would cost more civilian lives across the region Not to speak of the fact that this would cost trillions of taxpayer dollars coming out of our pockets to go and pay for this endless war that begs the question as a soldier, what are we fighting for? What does victory look like? What is the mission?" ..."
"... Gabbard, and also Carlson, did not hesitate to name names among those pushing for war, one of which begins with B-O-L-T-O-N. She then asked "How does a war with Iran serve the best interest of the American people of the United States? And the fact is it does not," Gabbard said. "It better serves the interest of people like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Bibi Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia who are trying to push us into this war with Iran." ..."
"... In 2015, Gabbard supported President Barack Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran and in 2016 she backed Bernie Sanders' antiwar candidacy. More recently, she has criticized President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Last May, she criticized Israel for shooting "unarmed protesters" in Gaza, a very bold step indeed given the power of the Israel Lobby. ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years, and that is why the war party is out to get her. Two weeks ago, the Daily Beast displayed a headline : "Tulsi Gabbard's Campaign Is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists." The article also had a sub-headline: "The Hawaii congresswoman is quickly becoming the top candidate for Democrats who think the Russian leader is misunderstood." ..."
"... Tulsi responded "Stephanopoulos shamelessly implied that because I oppose going to war with Russia, I'm not a loyal American, but a Putin puppet. It just shows what absurd lengths warmongers in the media will go, to try to destroy the reputation of anyone who dares oppose their warmongering." ..."
"... ASD was set up in 2017 by the usual neocon crowd with funding from The Atlanticist and anti-Russian German Marshall Fund. It is loaded with a full complement of Zionists and interventionists/globalists, to include Michael Chertoff, Michael McFaul, Michael Morell, Kori Schake and Bill Kristol. It claims, innocently, to be a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group that seeks to identify and counter efforts by Russia to undermine democracies in the United States and Europe but it is actually itself a major source of disinformation. ..."
"... for the moment, she seems to be the "real thing," a genuine anti-war candidate who is determined to run on that platform. It might just resonate with the majority of Americans who have grown tired of perpetual warfare to "spread democracy" and other related frauds perpetrated by the band of oligarchs and traitors that run the United States ..."
Jun 06, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

Voters looking ahead to 2020 are being bombarded with soundbites from the twenty plus Democratic would-be candidates. That Joe Biden is apparently leading the pack according to opinion polls should come as no surprise as he stands for nothing apart from being the Establishment favorite who will tirelessly work to support the status quo.

The most interesting candidate is undoubtedly Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who is a fourth term Congresswoman from Hawaii, where she was born and raised. She is also the real deal on national security, having been-there and done-it through service as an officer with the Hawaiian National Guard on a combat deployment in Iraq. Though in Congress full time, she still performs her Guard duty.

Tulsi's own military experience notwithstanding, she gives every indication of being honestly anti-war. In the speech announcing her candidacy she pledged "focus on the issue of war and peace" to "end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda." She referred to the danger posed by blundering into a possible nuclear war and indicated her dismay over what appears to be a re-emergence of the Cold War.

In a recent interview with Fox News's Tucker Carlson, Gabbard doubled down on her anti-war credentials, telling the host that war with Iran would be "devastating, " adding that "I know where this path leads us and I'm concerned because the American people don't seem to be prepared for how devastating and costly such a war would be So, what we are facing is, essentially, a war that has no frontlines, total chaos, engulfs the whole region, is not contained within Iran or Iraq but would extend to Syria and Lebanon and Israel across the region, setting us up in a situation where, in Iraq, we lost over 4,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniform. A war with Iran would take far more American lives, it would cost more civilian lives across the region Not to speak of the fact that this would cost trillions of taxpayer dollars coming out of our pockets to go and pay for this endless war that begs the question as a soldier, what are we fighting for? What does victory look like? What is the mission?"

Gabbard, and also Carlson, did not hesitate to name names among those pushing for war, one of which begins with B-O-L-T-O-N. She then asked "How does a war with Iran serve the best interest of the American people of the United States? And the fact is it does not," Gabbard said. "It better serves the interest of people like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Bibi Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia who are trying to push us into this war with Iran."

Clearly not afraid to challenge the full gamut establishment politics, Tulsi Gabbard had previously called for an end to the "illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government," also observing that "the war to overthrow Assad is counter-productive because it actually helps ISIS and other Islamic extremists achieve their goal of overthrowing the Syrian government of Assad and taking control of all of Syria – which will simply increase human suffering in the region, exacerbate the refugee crisis, and pose a greater threat to the world." She then backed up her words with action by secretly arranging for a personal trip to Damascus in 2017 to meet with President Bashar al-Assad, saying it was important to meet adversaries "if you are serious about pursuing peace." She made her own assessment of the situation in Syria and now favors pulling US troops out of the country as well as ending American interventions for "regime change" in the region.

In 2015, Gabbard supported President Barack Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran and in 2016 she backed Bernie Sanders' antiwar candidacy. More recently, she has criticized President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. Last May, she criticized Israel for shooting "unarmed protesters" in Gaza, a very bold step indeed given the power of the Israel Lobby.

Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years, and that is why the war party is out to get her. Two weeks ago, the Daily Beast displayed a headline : "Tulsi Gabbard's Campaign Is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists." The article also had a sub-headline: "The Hawaii congresswoman is quickly becoming the top candidate for Democrats who think the Russian leader is misunderstood."

The obvious smear job was picked by ABC's George Stephanopoulos, television's best known Hillary Clinton clone, who brought it up in an interview with Gabbard shortly thereafter. He asked whether Gabbard was "softer" on Putin than were some of the other candidates. Gabbard answered: "It's unfortunate that you're citing that article, George, because it's a whole lot of fake news." Politico the reported the exchange and wrote: "'Fake news' is a favorite phrase of President Donald Trump ," putting the ball back in Tulsi's court rather than criticizing Stephanopoulos's pointless question. Soon thereafter CNN produced its own version of Tulsi the Russophile , observing that Gabbard was using a Trump expression to "attack the credibility of negative coverage."

Tulsi responded "Stephanopoulos shamelessly implied that because I oppose going to war with Russia, I'm not a loyal American, but a Putin puppet. It just shows what absurd lengths warmongers in the media will go, to try to destroy the reputation of anyone who dares oppose their warmongering."

Tulsi Gabbard had attracted other enemies prior to the Stephanopoulos attack. Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept described how NBC news published a widely distributed story on February 1 st , claiming that "experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard."

But the expert cited by NBC turned out to be a firm New Knowledge, which was exposed by no less than The New York Times for falsifying Russian troll accounts for the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to suggest that the Kremlin was interfering in that election. According to Greenwald, the group ultimately behind this attack on Gabbard is The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), which sponsors a tool called Hamilton 68 , a news "intelligence net checker" that claims to track Russian efforts to disseminate disinformation. The ASD website advises that "Securing Democracy is a Global Necessity."

ASD was set up in 2017 by the usual neocon crowd with funding from The Atlanticist and anti-Russian German Marshall Fund. It is loaded with a full complement of Zionists and interventionists/globalists, to include Michael Chertoff, Michael McFaul, Michael Morell, Kori Schake and Bill Kristol. It claims, innocently, to be a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group that seeks to identify and counter efforts by Russia to undermine democracies in the United States and Europe but it is actually itself a major source of disinformation.

No doubt stories headlined "Tulsi Gabbard Communist Stooge" are in the works somewhere in the mainstream media. The Establishment politicians and their media component have difficulty in understanding just how much they are despised for their mendacity and unwillingness to support policies that would truly benefit the American people but they are well able to dominate press coverage.

Given the flood of contrived negativity towards her campaign, it is not clear if Tulsi Gabbard will ever be able to get her message across.

But, for the moment, she seems to be the "real thing," a genuine anti-war candidate who is determined to run on that platform. It might just resonate with the majority of Americans who have grown tired of perpetual warfare to "spread democracy" and other related frauds perpetrated by the band of oligarchs and traitors that run the United States

[Jun 07, 2019] Plutocracy needs Neo-McCarthysim to survive

Jun 07, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org

Demonizing Workers and the Left

Capitalists, with media in tow, demonized communists and anarchists. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 aimed to preserve the status quo. Japanese-Americans were interred. Communists were targeted.

The FBI was involved. Edgar Hoover had leftists monitored and surveilled by tactics including wiretaps and break-ins. The anti-leftism was so extreme that a section of corporate America supported fascism. The fascists supported Nazi Germany in WWII. 1

Post-WWII the top income tax rate was 91% until 1964. One-third of workers belonged to a union. From 1940 to 1967 real wages doubled. Living standards doubled.

However, the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 would attack workers, banning many types of strikes, closed union shops, union political contributions, communists and radicals in union leadership, and the compelled payment of union dues. The Supreme Court upheld Taft-Hartley, and it remains in force today.

The film also examines McCarthyism, a witch hunt against communists or communist-leaning types, as a psychological attack against Americans. No one was safe. Blacklisting was in vogue and among the first blacklisted were the so-called Hollywood 10 for either communist sympathies or refusal to aid Congress' House Un-American Activities Committee investigations into the Communist party or having fought for the rights of Blacks and workers. The list expanded much past 10. One celebrity given in-depth prominence in Subterranean Fire was singer Paul Robeson who refused to back down before Congress, stated he was for Negro and worker rights, and accused Congress of neo-fascism.

McCarthyism hit hysterical heights as exemplified by Texas proposing the death penalty for communist membership and Indiana calling for the banning of Robin Hood.

McCarthyism was foiled when it bit off more than it could chew. When McCarthyism took on the establishment, in particular the military, its impetus ground to an inglorious halt. The Alien Registration Act was ruled unconstitutional, and the First Amendment right to political beliefs was upheld.

Subterranean Fire notes that the damage to the labor movement was already done. A permanent war economy was established: overtly through the military and covertly through the CIA. Come 2001, union membership had dropped to 13.5%. Radicals were disconnected from their communities; union democracy was subverted by a top-down leadership which avoided the tactic of striking for collective bargaining; the court system was heavily backlogged with labor-management issues, which usually were ruled in favor of management.

Some outcomes noted in the film,

In the early 21st century, Americans took on the dubious distinction of working more hours than any other country .

There is no single county in America where a minimum wage earner can support a family.

The Rise

Grotesque income and wealth disparity signifies the current state of neoliberalism. Yet Subterranean Fire finds glimmers of change for working men and women.

Despite relating the historical trampling of the working class, the film concludes on a sanguine note. Union strength appears to be on the rebound with solidarity being a linchpin. Labor strikes were on the upswing in the US, with teachers leading the way. Fast-food workers are fighting for a decent wage. Labor, which has seen real wages stagnate in the age of neoliberalism, is fighting back worldwide. Autoworkers in Matamoros, Mexico are striking and colleagues in Detroit, Michigan have expressed support for their sisters and brothers. The Gilet Jaunes in France have been joined by labor. A huge general strike took place in India. The uptick of resistance was not just pro-labor but anti-global warming in Manchester, UK; Tokyo, Japan; Cape Town, South Africa; Helsinki, Finland; Genoa, Italy; and, Nelson, Aotearoa (New Zealand).

All this, however, must be considered through the lens of the current political context. A virulent anti-socialist president and his hawkish administration occupy the White House in Washington. Despite the nationwide strike actions, the right-wing BJP and prime minister Narendra Modi won a recent huge re-election in India. The purportedly centrist Liberal Party in Canada, rhetoric aside, has been, in large part, in virtual lockstep with the US administration. 2

The Importance of Metanoia Films

Today, people with access to the internet have little excuse for continuing to depend on state-corporate media sources. Why would anyone willingly subject himself to disinformation and propaganda? Not too mention paying for access to such unreliable information and the soul-sapping advertisements that accompany it.

It is important that we be cognizant of the search engine manipulations of Google, the biased opinions parlayed by moneyed corporate media, and the censorship of social media data-mining sites. The corporate-state media nexus wants to limit and shape what we know. The current war on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is proof positive of this. Assange and WikiLeaks exposed horrific war crimes. It is a no-brainer that a person should be congratulated for bringing such evil perpetrated by the state to the public awareness. Instead the establishment seeks to destroy WikiLeaks, the publisher Assange, and Chelsea Manning who is accused of providing the information to WikiLeaks.

Given the corporate-state power structure's ideological opposition to WikiLeaks and freedom on information as well as the preponderance of disinformation that emanates from monopoly media, it seems eminently responsible that people seek out credible independent sources of information. Metanoia Films stands out as a credible source.

There are plenty of independent news and information sites that provide analysis that treat the reader/viewer with respect by substantiating information provided in reports and articles with evidence, logic, and even morality. The reader/viewer who seeks veracity has an obligation to consider the facts, sources, and reasoning offered and arrive at her own conclusions.

Metanoia documentaries lay out a historical context that helps us understand how we arrived at the state of affairs we find ourselves in today. It is an understanding that is crucial to come up with solutions for a world in which far too many languish in poverty, suffer in war zones, and are degraded by the cruelties of inequality. It is an understanding that is crucial for communicating, planning, and organizing the establishment of new societies in which all may flourish and of which all may be proud.

Independent media is meant for independent thinkers and those who aspire to a better world. Watch Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire and the first four parts in the Plutocracy series and become informed. Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be reached at: [email protected] . Twitter: @kimpetersen . Read other articles by Kim .

This article was posted on Tuesday, June 4th, 2019 at 9:41pm and is filed under Anarchism , Communism/Marxism/Maoism , Film , Film Review , Labor , Poverty , Racism , Unions .

[Jun 07, 2019] Tucker It wasn't 'spying,' it was 'investigating'

If Barr represent different faction of CIA then Brennan, Brannan might pay with his head for his artistic inventions in fomenting Russiagate color revolution and Steele dossier. Not very likely, though...
Jun 07, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Rob Crz , 1 week ago

Geez!!! Obama is awfully quiet lately🤔🤔🤔🤔....."?????

sion7111 , 1 week ago

Tucker is the best journo in cable television news rigth now

P Pumpkin , 1 week ago

When the FBI was "investigating" thousands of individuals in the 60's the press called it spying.

Monkeywrench542 , 1 week ago

declassify it all. anyone in the federal government shown to be breaking the law should be charged and vigorously prosecuted.

Liddy G , 1 week ago

They spied on Trump because they thought it was a guaranteed win and Hillary could cover it up. They started the witch hunt to make it look like it was a legit investigation.

TominBach , 1 week ago (edited)

"Surveillance". Would you buy a used car from Jim Comey?. Time for issuing a number of orange jumpsuits and for the ones at the top?. A sharp drop and a sudden stop.

Maryland Bass Hunter , 1 week ago

James Comey is basically screaming I'M GUILTY! You can tell this man is scared about whats to come. The rats are not sleeping well at night.

Shade Tree Solar , 1 week ago

All Security Clearances for all bureaucrats should be immediately revoked up termination of service

Edson Silva , 1 week ago

Who is loving Trump's Presidency like 👇🏻

Mezmerized4Life Jay , 1 week ago (edited)

My fav part is watching the globalists turn on each other 😂

David Sanders , 1 week ago

Time for sunlight to cleanse these dark agencies political partisanship!

Tom Korte , 1 week ago

Please keep the MSNBC clips a bit shorter. They're painful to watch and I almost didn't make it through that one.

bahamabrz , 1 week ago

I wasn't robbing that bank. I was just having a discussion with the bank teller with a gun in my hand.

Rob Crz , 1 week ago

Geez!!! Obama is awfully quiet lately🤔🤔🤔🤔....."?????

sion7111 , 1 week ago

Tucker is the best journo in cable television news rigth now

P Pumpkin , 1 week ago

When the FBI was "investigating" thousands of individuals in the 60's the press called it spying.

Monkeywrench542 , 1 week ago

declassify it all. anyone in the federal government shown to be breaking the law should be charged and vigorously prosecuted.

Daniel Cunningham , 1 week ago

Tucker, you are a MINORITY in the news these days. Keep on telling the TRUTH.

Liddy G , 1 week ago

They spied on Trump because they thought it was a guaranteed win and Hillary could cover it up. They started the witch hunt to make it look like it was a legit investigation.

TominBach , 1 week ago (edited)

"Surveillance". Would you buy a used car from Jim Comey?. Time for issuing a number of orange jumpsuits and for the ones at the top?. A sharp drop and a sudden stop.

James Mana , 1 week ago

Spying Work for a government or other organization by secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors. investigating Carry out a systematic or formal inquiry to discover and examine the facts of (an incident, allegation, etc.) so as to establish the truth. What a bunch of idiots

In CogNito , 1 week ago

If you have to make up reasons to investigate, it becomes spying. With this logic, we can investigate anyone! As long as we make sure to cover our tracks in lies! Perfect!

Markus Rodriguez , 1 week ago

How dare they! How dare they! How dare our "government" turn tail like this They at this point are nothing more then dirty DIRTY smear merchant's!

monkeygraborange , 1 week ago

Of course it was spying! Weasel Comey is just clutching at whatever straws he can to try to avoid prison.

Maria Farfan , 1 week ago

Prayers,prayers, Venezuela,and AMERICA 🌹 🌹🌹 🌹🙌 🙌🏼 Prayers

Chuck Haney , 1 week ago

"Finding out about me is irresponsible." - Brennan

bill fupps , 1 week ago

Keep pushing Trump. These demons are screaming louder. What you're doing is working

R. Mercado , 1 week ago

Another outstanding commentary. Bravo Zulu. Semper Fi

Maryland Bass Hunter , 1 week ago

James Comey is basically screaming I'M GUILTY! You can tell this man is scared about whats to come. The rats are not sleeping well at night.

Kohoko , 1 week ago

I will check with Guy Smiley of Sesame Street News before I go to MSNBC....Guy Smiley's got way more street cred!

Leesa Gomez , 1 week ago

And those EVIL DARK SECRETS, Will soon be Revealed. It's different when those things come to light

MsDebbiepolak , 1 week ago

Thank you Tucker for all your truth!!! You and Tom. Fitton rock!!

leslie franssen , 1 week ago

Dirty birds Dems get Wright with the people. Just tell the truth it will set you free🤢🐍🕸🕸🦎🐸Swamp things

LEILE S , 1 week ago

So he admits they spied, I mean investigated Trumps campaign? 🤔

BlueFox94 , 1 week ago

Tucker's "okay" has been a legendary put-down for some time now. ^_^

Gmonkey , 1 week ago

shine the light on the roaches Trumpy. God Bless USA from UK.

Shade Tree Solar , 1 week ago

All Security Clearances for all bureaucrats should be immediately revoked up termination of service

Cid Sapient , 1 week ago

this is my fave part lol 1:20 i laughed out loud towards the end

Rick Care , 1 week ago

If you take away I.C.E . : then You'll have Globle Warming!!••¿¿□●°°!!!

knowTRUTH2013 , 1 week ago

the deep state kabal is covering themselves, including 99% of all politicans and 100% of all the lib media.

Phil Bingham , 1 week ago

THE BUCK STOPS WITH BARR - THAT'S THE BEST SOLUTION

sullyz girl89 , 1 week ago

Investigating a non crime. Show me the man and I'll find a crime

Cooter Campbell , 1 week ago

Chris Hayes, and Rachel Maddow are the same person.

kyle wolfe , 1 week ago

"aiding the Enemy" should come to your mind.... And your Right, It IS Treason.

beo wulf , 1 week ago

YA KNOW ... IF THESE POLITICOS WERE IN THE WORK PLACE THEY WOULD BE BROKE! MORONS EVERY ONE!

Bella Biesel , 1 week ago

This should be mandatory viewing by EVERY U.S. citizen.

Just Me , 1 week ago

It's to protect, and shield the multiple treason committing Obama. PERIOD.

Happy Tripper , 1 week ago (edited)

When you make up lies to trick a judge into letting you watch your political opponents, that is SPYING. You cannot talk your way out of this Comey.

TotPYsera , 1 week ago

Why does John Brennan look like every Bond villain's henchman?

Jonathan Sterling , 1 week ago

That's Judicial Watch's definition of the Deep State! It's not just a few politicians and judges, it's almost all of Washington and many in government around the country. The Deep State will just take its time, put it off, forget about it, make mistakes implementing it, and so on and so forth.

[Jun 06, 2019] Odd NYT 'Correction' Exculpates British Government And CIA From Manipulating Trump Over Skripal Novichok Incident

Notable quotes:
"... Julian E. Barnes is obviously a long-term intelligence asset and his stories are not based on independent research but are just a repetition of the yarn that the CIA want to spin. Julian E. Barnes and the CIA obviously think Americans and other westerners are DAF. ..."
"... And should we be surprised that such false information about Gina Haspel and Donald Trump puts Trump in a bad light and somehow humanises a CIA director with a reputation for torturing prisoners? ..."
"... A week or 3 ago, a Barnes co-reported "article" flat out stated that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. This was done by pretending to quote someone in the the US Defense establishment as saying "we believe Iran will redouble its work on nuclear weapons". ..."
"... Julian Barnes is a well established liar. Sort of akin to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon. ..."
"... Now the Washington post's narrative is quite colorful too. So Trump really was concerned how many Russians Germany or France expelled? Why was he angry? The vassals did not follow his example as they should have? ..."
"... The CIA and MI6 boys must have blanked out to let this one slip through the cracks. We pay them billions to run false flag and cover-up operations. This makes those of us that believe their lying narratives look stupid. I guess we need to add more billions to their annual budgets. ..."
"... More believable that Julian Barnes performs no cross-referencing and zero research. Investigative reporting (or asking questions) is not the job of the modern MSM stenographer. His job - pushing the war machine agenda. He simply writes that which he is instructed to write. Probably emails all of his articles to his CIA liason for approval prior to publication. ..."
"... In the Skripnal psyop one can readily assess that the only truly "dead ducks" are the MSM journalists and the Western politicians who peddled this incredible slapstick nonsense story in order to further the "demonization of Russia" narrative of Western oligarchy. That these same media "dead ducks" appear to have not even the very slightest interest whatsoever in the current whereabouts or safety of said Skripnals speaks volumes about the true nature of this intelligence operation. ..."
"... both versions of the story expose Gina as a untrustworthy ratfucker ..."
"... At the moment the UK is run by MI6 which sees itself as the real political directorate of the CIA and the Deep State in the US. It seriously believes that it is on the verge of establishing global hegemony. ..."
"... Please note, everyone, that not all of these sad excuses for "journalists" are on the CIA payroll. In fact, very few of them are. Most work with the CIA out of warped senses of patriotism and duty to the empire. Most would never think of themselves as intelligence agency assets, and no small number of them probably think their relationships with the CIA are unique. They think that they are special and that their contacts on the inside at the CIA are unusual. Few would guess that they are just another propaganda mule in the CIA's stable, and that friendly guy who "leaks" to them is actually their handler; their "operator" in spook-speak. ..."
"... CIA did not control many of the Vietnam era journalists that had their pieces printed in mainstream media of the day. Not many left now and perhaps since the nineties they could no longer get their articles published. Regan brought in perception management which eventually brought all MSM 100% under US -CIA control. ..."
"... If you're a CIA guy, you get the editor and the ombudsman on the payroll and he will make certain that the desired propaganda gets published. If he's a Zionist, he's on the same page from the start, anyway. ..."
"... What a strange construction. Doesn't the CIA have PR staff? A decent PR team would review every item referencing their boss and issue clarifications and/or demand corrections immediately. There should have been no need for Julian E. Barnes to figure anything out as the CIA should have pointed out his mistake very quickly. This explanation/exculpation is utter bullshit! ..."
"... I doubt that Trump asked questions about how those ducks and kids were doing. More likely that MI5 was annoyed that they were exposed as the providers of the duck snuff pictures, and put pressure on the NY Times. ..."
"... Those who advocated the strong response to Russia are the intellectual authors of "Russia Gate" to thwart detente with Russia. ..."
Jun 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

A piece in the New York Times showed how in March 2018 Trump was manipulated by the CIA and MI6 into expelling 60 Russian diplomats. Eight weeks after it was published the New York Times 'corrects' that narrative and exculpates the CIA and MI6 of that manipulation. Its explanation for the correction makes little sense.

On April 16 the New York Times published a report by Julian E. Barnes and Adam Goldman about the relation between CIA Director Gina Haspal and President Donald Trump.

Gina Haspel Relies on Spy Skills to Connect With Trump. He Doesn't Always Listen.

The piece described a scene in the White House shortly after the contentious Skripal/Novichok incident in Britain. It originally said (emphasis added):

During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.

To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the only victims of Russia's attack.

Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.

The 60 Russian diplomats were expelled on March 26 2018. Other countries only expelled a handful of diplomats over the Skripal incident. On April 15 2018 the Washington Post reported that Trump was furious about this:

The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials -- far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on. The President, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.
...
Growing angrier, Trump insisted that his aides had misled him about the magnitude of the expulsions. 'There were curse words,' the official said, 'a lot of curse words.

In that context the 2019 NYT report about Haspel showing Trump dead duck pictures provided by the Brits made sense. Trump was, as he himself claimed, manipulated into the large expulsion.

The NYT report created some waves. On April 18 2019 the Guardian headlined:

No children or ducks harmed by novichok, say health officials
Wiltshire council clarification follows claims Donald Trump was shown images to contrary

The report of the dead duck pictures in the New York Times was a problem for the CIA and the British government. Not only did it say that they manipulated Trump by providing him with false pictures, but the non-dead ducks also demonstrated that the official narrative of the allegedly poisoning of the Skripals has some huge holes. As Rob Slane of the BlogMire noted :

In addition to the extraordinary nature of this revelation, there is also a huge irony here. Along with many others, I have long felt that the duck feed is one of the many achilles heels of the whole story we've been presented with about what happened in Salisbury on 4th March 2018. And the reason for this is precisely because if it were true, there would indeed have been dead ducks and sick children .

According to the official story, Mr Skripal and his daughter became contaminated with "Novichok" by touching the handle of his front door at some point between 13:00 and 13:30 that afternoon. A few minutes later (13:45), they were filmed on CCTV camera feeding ducks, and handing bread to three local boys, one of whom ate a piece . After this they went to Zizzis, where they apparently so contaminated the table they sat at, that it had to be incinerated.

You see the problem? According to the official story, ducks should have died. According to the official story children should have become contaminated and ended up in hospital. Yet as it happens, no ducks died, and no boys got sick (all that happened was that the boys' parents were contacted two weeks later by police, the boys were sent for tests, and they were given the all clear).

After the NYT story was published the CIA and the British government had to remove the problematic narrative from the record. Yesterday they finally succeeded. Nearly eight weeks after the original publishing of the White House scene the NYT recanted and issued a correction (emphasis. added):

Correction: June 5, 2019

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the photos that Gina Haspel showed to President Trump during a discussion about responding to the nerve agent attack in Britain on a former Russian intelligence officer. Ms. Haspel displayed pictures illustrating the consequences of nerve agent attacks, not images specific to the chemical attack in Britain. This correction was delayed because of the time needed for research.

The original paragraphs quoted above were changed into this:

During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.

To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials including Ms. Haspel tried to demonstrate the dangers of using a nerve agent like Novichok in a populated area. Ms. Haspel showed pictures from other nerve agent attacks that showed their effects on people.

The British government had told Trump administration officials about early intelligence reports that said children were sickened and ducks were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.

The information was based on early reporting, and Trump administration officials had requested more details about the children and ducks, a person familiar with the intelligence said, though Ms. Haspel did not present that information to the president. After this article was published, local health officials in Britain said that no children were harmed.

So instead of pictures of dead ducks in Salisbury the CIA director showed pictures of some random dead ducks or hospitalized children or whatever to illustrate the effects consequences of nerve agent incidents?

That the children were taken to hospital but unharmed was already reported in British media on March 24 2018, before the Russian diplomats were expelled, not only after the NYT piece was published in April 2019.

Yesterday the author of the NYT piece, Julian E. Barnes, turned to Twitter to issue a lengthy 'apology':

Julian E. Barnes @julianbarnes - 14:52 utc - 5 Jun 2019

I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to figure out where I went wrong. Here is the correction: 1/9

[...]

The intelligence about the ducks and children were based on an early intelligence report, according to people familiar with the matter. The intelligence was presented to the US in an effort to share all that was known, not to deceive the Trump administration. 7/9

This correction was delayed because conducting the research to figure out what I got wrong, how I got it wrong and what was the correct information took time. 8/9

I regret the error and offer my apology. I strive to get information right the first time. That is what subscribers pay for. But when I get something wrong, I fix it. 9/9

Barnes covers national security and intelligence issues for the Times Washington bureau. His job depends on good access to 'sources' in those circles.

It is remarkable that the CIA spokesperson never came out to deny the original NYT report. There was zero visible push back against its narrative. It is also remarkable that the correction comes just as Trump is on a state visit in Britain.

The original report was sourced on 'people briefed on the conversation'. The corrected version is also based on 'people briefed on the conversation' but adds 'a person familiar with the intelligence'. Do the originally cited 'people' now tell a different story? Are we to trust a single 'person familiar with the intelligence' more than those multiple 'people'? What kind of 'research' did the reporter do to correct what he then and now claims was told to him by 'people'? Why did this 'research' take eight weeks?

That the 'paper of the record' now corrects said 'record' solves a big problem for Gina Haspel, the CIA/MI6 and the British government. They can no longer be accused of manipulating Trump (even as we can be quite sure that such manipulations happen all the time).

In the end it is for the reader to decide if the original report makes more sense than the corrected one.

---
This is a Moon of Alabama fundraising week. Please consider to support our work .

Posted by b on June 6, 2019 at 06:12 AM | Permalink

ADKC , Jun 6, 2019 7:14:50 AM | 2
Julian E. Barnes is obviously a long-term intelligence asset and his stories are not based on independent research but are just a repetition of the yarn that the CIA want to spin. Julian E. Barnes and the CIA obviously think Americans and other westerners are DAF.
John Doe , Jun 6, 2019 7:26:00 AM | 3
Rob Slane, June 5, 2019: The New York Times Tries to Get Itself Out of the Duckgate Hole Using a Spade
Jen , Jun 6, 2019 7:32:17 AM | 4
Surely the time and effort Julian Barnes needed to check what information he had got wrong and how he got it wrong should not have been as major as he makes out. Animals dying and children falling sick to a toxin that could have killed them are incidents that should have stuck out like sore thumbs and warranted careful checks with different and independent sources before reporting that Gina Haspel apparently showed the US President pictures of dead ducks and sick boys in Salisbury.

No wonder Barnes got such a roasting on Twitter after making his abject apology.

And should we be surprised that such false information about Gina Haspel and Donald Trump puts Trump in a bad light and somehow humanises a CIA director with a reputation for torturing prisoners?

John Smith , Jun 6, 2019 7:48:46 AM | 6
J'Accuse News @NewsAccuse:

During years I researched articles published in @nytimes we fact-checked BEFORE publication. Here it comes AFTER bloggers, officials et al point out fatal flaws. That no children were poisoned, and no ducks killed, by #novichok in #Salisbury + was known in Spring 2018. #propaganda

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D8WfKNPUwAAGGWT.jpg

Jay , Jun 6, 2019 8:37:49 AM | 8
A week or 3 ago, a Barnes co-reported "article" flat out stated that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. This was done by pretending to quote someone in the the US Defense establishment as saying "we believe Iran will redouble its work on nuclear weapons".

Except in the Barnes construction it wasn't a quotation, or anything like a phrasing that made clear that the Pentagon source was guessing, not stating, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

This was NOT corrected.

Eric Schmitt was the other NY Times "reporter" who signed the article.

Here's the article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/world/middleeast/us-military-plans-iran.html

And here's what the two liars reported, pretending that an Iranian nuclear weapons program is a real thing, first paragraph:

"Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated
military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the
Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on
nuclear weapons, administration officials said."

So Julian Barnes is a well established liar. Sort of akin to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon.

ger , Jun 6, 2019 8:44:10 AM | 9
Barnes provides the truth then provides a lie about the truth....par for the course at NYT. (Remember Judith Miller?) A fake news organization spreading fake news with revised fake news.
joanna , Jun 6, 2019 9:01:26 AM | 10
can't really get excited by the fact that not everything in this type of creative writing is taken serious. Did anyone expect otherwise?

During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.

To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the only victims of Russia's attack.

It's pretty obvious that his/their narrative necessarily must be cobbled together by a lot of sources. Some by phone. Those may not even share the same idea what image of the president or Haspel they should convey. I always wonder with this type of newspaper reporting. Maybe both writers should write novels.

Now the Washington post's narrative is quite colorful too. So Trump really was concerned how many Russians Germany or France expelled? Why was he angry? The vassals did not follow his example as they should have?

SharonM , Jun 6, 2019 9:08:20 AM | 11
Superb analysis! Been coming here for 11 years now, and I just have to say that "b" is the best propaganda analyst in the English language. He is the sturdiest anchor in these stormy seas:)
AriusArmenian , Jun 6, 2019 9:42:07 AM | 12
The CIA and MI6 boys must have blanked out to let this one slip through the cracks. We pay them billions to run false flag and cover-up operations. This makes those of us that believe their lying narratives look stupid. I guess we need to add more billions to their annual budgets.

Sarcasm is just about the last pleasure one can get from watching the horrific antics of these morons.

fastfreddy , Jun 6, 2019 10:07:19 AM | 13
More believable that Julian Barnes performs no cross-referencing and zero research. Investigative reporting (or asking questions) is not the job of the modern MSM stenographer. His job - pushing the war machine agenda. He simply writes that which he is instructed to write. Probably emails all of his articles to his CIA liason for approval prior to publication.

Perhaps, the liason can see what this fool types in real time. Who knows?

As the story of the dead ducks and sick children unraveled and fell apart, a sloppy patch up had to be made. Now its fixed. Like a Boeing 737 MAX.

librul , Jun 6, 2019 10:09:17 AM | 14
BoTh vErSioNs of the story (I checked with the "Wayback Machine") still include this paragraph (6th paragraph of story):

Unusually for a president, Mr. Trump has publicly rejected not
only intelligence agencies' analysis, but also the facts they have gathered.
And that has created a perilous situation for the C.I.A.

As usual for the NYT, they did not publicly reject the intelligence agencies' analysis, but also the facts they had gathered. That, of course, would have created a perilous situation for the NYT.

Gary Weglarz , Jun 6, 2019 10:30:32 AM | 16
As the saying goes: "if it looks like a false-flag, walks like a false-flag, and talks like a false-flag, it just might be a "duck."

In the Skripnal psyop one can readily assess that the only truly "dead ducks" are the MSM journalists and the Western politicians who peddled this incredible slapstick nonsense story in order to further the "demonization of Russia" narrative of Western oligarchy. That these same media "dead ducks" appear to have not even the very slightest interest whatsoever in the current whereabouts or safety of said Skripnals speaks volumes about the true nature of this intelligence operation.

Harry Law , Jun 6, 2019 10:36:53 AM | 17
"I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to figure out where I went wrong". It was only when I found the horses head next to me in bed when I woke up, that I realized what a stupid mistake I had made.
aspnaz , Jun 6, 2019 11:04:23 AM | 20
Gina Haspel has to be as dumb and incompetent as I suspected: someone is paying good money to make her look like an ordinary sociopath, not a depraved tart who sucked cock to climb to the head of the organisation.
Noirette , Jun 6, 2019 11:31:31 AM | 22
Slane is ++ on the Skirpals. One 'fact' that emerged early on, made public by Slane, is that the proposed 'official' time-line ( > press, Gvmt between the lines) of the Skripal movements - trivial as in a town, drinkies, lunch, feeding ducks, etc. -- was never reported correctly, obfuscated.

Idk the reasons, but it is a vital point.
___________________________________

Trump, we see, is treated like the zombie public, flashed random photos, sold tearful narratives about babies, children, recall incubator babies, horrific bio-weapons threats...

The PTB loathes him, Pres. are supposed to be complicit like Obama - or at least keep their resistance toned down, be ready to compromise. .. Obama objected to, and refused to act on, at least two engineered / fake Syria chem. 'attacks.' (Just looked on Goog and can't find links to support.)

The only EU figure who stated there is no evidence that the Russkies novichoked Sergei and Yulia was Macron, afaik. He didn't get the memo in time (the Elysée is inefficient, lots of screw-ups there) but soon caught up! and expelled the minimum. -- I have heard, hush hush, one in F was a receptionist - gofer (an excellent + extremely highly paid position) who is now at the Emb. in Washington! Most likely merely emblematic story (see telephone game) .. but telling.

Hoarsewhisperer , Jun 6, 2019 11:52:33 AM | 24
I like this story. It makes Trump look like a naif which wouldn't bother President Teflon in the least. On the other hand, both versions of the story expose Gina as a untrustworthy ratfucker. I'm hoping she said "cross my heart and hope to die" when he queried her advice...
Zachary Smith , Jun 6, 2019 12:01:15 PM | 25
@ Jay | Jun 6, 2019 8:37:49 AM @8
So Julian Barnes is a well established liar.

I'm glad I checked to see if anyone had mentioned this hack's article about Russia restarting nuclear testing. Using his name as one search item I tried a number of current issues. Like the fellows at local intersections holding up signs "will work for money", Barnes might as well have a tattoo saying "I'll write anything if the price is right. That it took so long to come up with a half-assed "explanation" shows he's not the brightest bulb in the lamp. I suppose people whose jobs consist of slightly re-writing Deep State dictation don't have to be especially clever.

PrairieBear , Jun 6, 2019 12:25:01 PM | 26
That "apology" by Barnes is completely nonsensical. How would you know that there was something wrong with your story, that there was an error in it, without knowing what it was? If the CIA, various bloggers, commenters, etc., alerted him to the errors, it's unlikely they would say, "There's something wrong in this story but I'm not going to say what it is. You'll have to re-research they whole thing to figure it out." I don't think that's how people usually point out errors.
bevin , Jun 6, 2019 12:34:34 PM | 27
"Which narrative is unraveling and which is gathering momentum?"psychohistorian@19

One thing that seems to be unravelling is the tight political cartel that controls Foreign Policy in the UK.

If it does unravel and Labour turns to an independent foreign policy while it reverses the disaster of 'austerity' and neo-liberalism, cases such as that of Assange and the Skripal affair, both products of extremists within the Establishment who regard themselves as privileged members of the DC Beltway, are going to be re-opened.

At the moment the UK is run by MI6 which sees itself as the real political directorate of the CIA and the Deep State in the US. It seriously believes that it is on the verge of establishing global hegemony. And this at a time when the UK is falling apart and its population teeters on the brink of economic disaster. It has fallen into this delusion over the years as it has been able to offer the CIA services which it is afraid to initiate itself. Hence, most recently, the entire Russiagate nonsense which has British fingerprints all over it. Hence too the new aggressiveness in DC towards Assange. Hence the disappearance, without explanation, of the Skripals.
goldhoarder , Jun 6, 2019 12:44:22 PM | 28
Julian Barnes is like Winston Smith without the intellectual curiosity. He quote happily goes about his work. lol. What is the matter with you people? You are supposed to embrace the new narrative!

From wikidpeida... A memory hole is any mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, such as from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.[1][2] The concept was first popularized by George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party's Ministry of Truth systematically re-created all potentially embarrassing historical documents, in effect, re-writing all of history to match the often-changing state propaganda. These changes were complete and undetectable.

frances , Jun 6, 2019 12:48:13 PM | 30
I think the"Why now?" answer was Trump is in the UK and asking questions, lots of questions, can't have that.
james , Jun 6, 2019 12:49:34 PM | 31
@37 bevin... maybe they will do with assange what they have done with the skripals... the uk is more then pathetic at this point in time.. craig murray had more to say on the assange case yesterday - A Swedish Court Injects Some Sense
bjd , Jun 6, 2019 1:32:38 PM | 32
Julian E. Barnes' humble confession (a self-incrimination) sounds like one made in a Gulag.
failure of imaginati , Jun 6, 2019 2:23:10 PM | 35
Further down the memory hole is the side tale of the daughter of Brutish Army Chief Nurse helping Skirpals and getting an award without contaminating the news. Was the girl's father Pablo Miller,(of Orbis Dossier MFG) and a pal of Skirpal? There's debunk in their poor narrative. The public has a photogenic memory.
lysias , Jun 6, 2019 2:28:23 PM | 36
Speaking of MI6, Julian Barnes is a very English-looking name. Do we know anything about his biography?
tuyzentfloot , Jun 6, 2019 2:56:36 PM | 37
There are 2 Julian Barneses (at the very least!), one is an English writer, the other has mostly been writing for the WSJ ( https://www.wsj.com/news/author/julian-e.-barnes) but since recently again for the NYTimes .
fastfreddy , Jun 6, 2019 3:10:32 PM | 38
30

Trump is a drug-addled, brain-damaged, hollowed-out shell of the dull con man he once was.

But, he perceives himself to be a brilliant mastermind - a stable genius. So, he might indeed, be prone to making inquiries (generally these would induce the toadies around him to stifle their laughter).

It makes sense that he might ask, while in GB, about the Skirpal incident, since he pulled 60 people from their posts and he remembered the fantasy he was lead to believe about sick children and dead ducks.

The fact that he overreacted without sufficient evidence, may have inspired a tiny amount of self-reflection simply because it may have embarrassed him to have been caught on his back foot. He was lead to believe that his contemporaries intended to react in equal measure. They did not. Therefore - he was "fooled" or tricked.

This is the only way to embarrass the buffoon. That is to have someone fool him personally. And to make him look stupid.

He doesn't mind that he is a fat oaf, a greed head and a pig, but that is the stuff of his own doing. He is comfortable in this. Money is the end-all, etc.

He bought Mar A Lago, making it his own club, because the Palm Beach Club and its elite snobs would not let him join.

Trump was betrayed by Gina Haskell, the CIA and the NYT.

What is he gonna do about it?

joebattista , Jun 6, 2019 3:22:02 PM | 40
All of Western media has been compromised by the CIA and friends since at least the 50s. Remember what late CIA director William Casey said in 1981; "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the US public believes is false".
They 'CIA' controls every talking head you can name. Believe no one. Sad isn't it.
William Gruff , Jun 6, 2019 3:56:52 PM | 41
Please note, everyone, that not all of these sad excuses for "journalists" are on the CIA payroll. In fact, very few of them are. Most work with the CIA out of warped senses of patriotism and duty to the empire. Most would never think of themselves as intelligence agency assets, and no small number of them probably think their relationships with the CIA are unique. They think that they are special and that their contacts on the inside at the CIA are unusual. Few would guess that they are just another propaganda mule in the CIA's stable, and that friendly guy who "leaks" to them is actually their handler; their "operator" in spook-speak.

Of course, there is also the incentive provided by just having to take the story their CIA "friend" gives them, edit it a little to fit their employer's style guidelines, and then submit it as their own. A whole day's worth of work and they can have it finished in half an hour. What's not to like about that?

Peter AU 1 , Jun 6, 2019 4:11:22 PM | 42
40

CIA did not control many of the Vietnam era journalists that had their pieces printed in mainstream media of the day. Not many left now and perhaps since the nineties they could no longer get their articles published. Regan brought in perception management which eventually brought all MSM 100% under US -CIA control.

fastfreddy , Jun 6, 2019 4:45:29 PM | 43
41

If you're a CIA guy, you get the editor and the ombudsman on the payroll and he will make certain that the desired propaganda gets published. If he's a Zionist, he's on the same page from the start, anyway.

The self-important "journalists" are controlled and in fact, they are flattered by their special relationships with informants and the owner/managers. After one has sucked his or her way to the upper level, kissing up and kicking down... Laziness is a bonus.

Jay , Jun 6, 2019 4:47:28 PM | 44
@Zachary Smith:

Barnes' CV has US News and World Report on it. That's big spewer of lies, especially over the last 25 years.

Ghost Ship , Jun 6, 2019 5:35:07 PM | 46
I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to figure out where I went wrong.

What a strange construction. Doesn't the CIA have PR staff? A decent PR team would review every item referencing their boss and issue clarifications and/or demand corrections immediately. There should have been no need for Julian E. Barnes to figure anything out as the CIA should have pointed out his mistake very quickly. This explanation/exculpation is utter bullshit!

wagelaborer , Jun 6, 2019 5:40:19 PM | 47
Every day when I turn on my computer, I am enticed with offers to "see how the Brady Bunch kids look today" or "what do the stars of the 80s look like today?". Apparently, there is quite a demand for updates on celebrities and their current well being. So why would Julian Barnes do an article about the Skirpals without showing us how they look today? And just where are they living? Enquiring minds want to know!

I doubt that Trump asked questions about how those ducks and kids were doing. More likely that MI5 was annoyed that they were exposed as the providers of the duck snuff pictures, and put pressure on the NY Times.

Featherless , Jun 6, 2019 5:49:29 PM | 48
Whatever happened with the Skripals since ? It's like they fell off the face of the planet.
John Sanguinetti , Jun 6, 2019 6:37:46 PM | 50
Could this be referred to as a good old fashioned SNAFU ?
Jen , Jun 6, 2019 6:44:26 PM | 51
SteveK9 @ 49:

Using ducks is easier. Gina Haspel could always ask one of the bottom-feeding subordinates to nip down the road to one of those Chinese BBQ shops and photograph the display of roast ducks hanging in the shop window . The photos can be uploaded and altered to remove the background of the chef and the cashier and then the actual ducks can be altered or colored appropriately before the pictures are sent to Haspel. Anyone looking at the altered pictures would never guess their actual provenance.

:-)

I'm not sure where Haspel can find hippos or any other large animals that might topple on top of someone (with dire consequences) were s/he to apply a whiff of nerve agent.

Jen , Jun 6, 2019 6:49:22 PM | 52
SteveK9 @ 49:

Oops the link @ 51 isn't working so I'd better link to this instead.

El Cid , Jun 6, 2019 8:10:06 PM | 53
Those who advocated the strong response to Russia are the intellectual authors of "Russia Gate" to thwart detente with Russia.
uncle tungsten , Jun 6, 2019 8:12:21 PM | 54
Thanks b for a good laugh at Barnes and Goldman's expense. I note Goldman is silent and I guess that is because he would likely get his apology wrong and contradict Barnes BS.

[Jun 05, 2019] Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In reality intelligence agencies control the nomination. ..."
"... Russiagate and the DNC hacking scandal were the attempts to reverse the presidential election. Essentially Russiagate was created to tame Trump, although I am not sure that such drastic measures were needed and I might be wrong. He betrayed his election promises with such an ease that Russiagate now looks like a paranoid overreaction of the USA intelligence agencies (and former FBI director Mueller of 9/11 and anthrax investigation fame) Which figuratively speaking moved tanks to capture the unnamed native village. ..."
"... Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers. And if the society preaches militarism it is outright impossible: any politician deviation from militaristic policies will be met with the counterattack of intelligence agencies which are intimately interested in maintaining the status quo. ..."
Apr 27, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

likbez 04.27.19 at 5:21 am 99

In reality intelligence agencies control the nomination.

Pics or it didn't happen.

I am very sorry and sincerely apologize. Please view this as a plausible hypothesis ;-)

Some considerations (neoliberals and neocons usually interpret those facts differently so this is a view from paleoconservative universe; you are warned):

1. Exoneration of Hillary deprived Sanders of chances to lead Democratic ticket in 2016. This is as close to the proven fact as we can get.

2. Russiagate and the DNC hacking scandal were the attempts to reverse the presidential election. Essentially Russiagate was created to tame Trump, although I am not sure that such drastic measures were needed and I might be wrong. He betrayed his election promises with such an ease that Russiagate now looks like a paranoid overreaction of the USA intelligence agencies (and former FBI director Mueller of 9/11 and anthrax investigation fame) Which figuratively speaking moved tanks to capture the unnamed native village.

3. JFK and then Robert Kennedy assassination. The key role of the CIA in the JFK assassination now is broadly accepted in the USA.

3. Obama connection to CIA was subject of many articles, especially in the alt-right press. He definitely was raised in a family of CIA operatives.

4. Brennan spied on Congress and was not fired, which means that the CIA hieratically is above the Congress. Proven fact.

In short, nothing in the power structure of democratic societies prevents intelligence agencies from becoming key political actors, the Pretorian guard which selects the Presidents by keeping dirt on politicians and controls the press (see Church commission). They have both motivation (preservation and enhancement of their status as any large bureaucracy), means (weakly controlled, oversized budget; access to shadow funds from arms and narcotics trading) and skills (covert operations, disinformation, sabotage. This triad is inherent in their status as the legalized mafia which operates above the law. As Pompeo recently said in a recent speech at Texas A&M University CIA operatives lie and cheat and steal.

When intelligence agencies control MSM that alone gives them considerable power to influence the political process. For example, in the case of Russiagate, we saw well organized and timed series of leaks. So, in fact, they can be viewed as the "Inner Party" in terms of Orwell dystopia 1984.

And the fact of media control is a proven fact. And not only via Church commission. Dr. Ulfkotte went on public television stating that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job.

Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers. And if the society preaches militarism it is outright impossible: any politician deviation from militaristic policies will be met with the counterattack of intelligence agencies which are intimately interested in maintaining the status quo.

In any case, the problem of "the tail wagging the dog" is a problem for any country, not only for the USA. The fact that both Brennan and Clapper become 'talking heads' after retirement tells something about the trend. Such things would be impossible 20 years ago.

Some insights into the problem can be obtained by reading the article about the politicization of intelligence agencies in other countries. For example:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/12/18/challenges-of-civilian-control-over-intelligence-agencies-in-pakistan-pub-62278

Ultimately, making the intelligence agencies accountable amounts to a broader reevaluation of the larger framework of civil-military relations. As a result, not only is intelligence reform an almost intractable political issue, but it also requires a complete change of mentality for the actors involved. Reigning in the intelligence agencies is a problem of a deeper political culture, one that requires a systemic change in the psychology of the organizations.

the lack of civilian oversight of intelligence agencies is a byproduct of the political imbalance between civilian and military actors, a power structure that favors the latter.

As long as the military can get its way through seemingly constitutional means, the importance of the intelligence agencies will remain relatively limited. Their role, however, becomes essential whenever the military meets some resistance

the military's domestic political power "has always derived from [its] ability to mediate confrontations among feuding political leaders, parties or state institutions, invariably presented as threats to the political order and stability. The military [is] of course the only institution empowered to judge whether such threats existed based on the assumption that a polity in turmoil cannot sustain a professional military" (Rizvi 1998: 100). Yet whenever necessary, the military has not hesitated to generate problems itself if it believes its institutional interests would be better served by a weak and divided polity. This is where the intelligence agencies come into play.

the link between journalists and the intelligence agencies is a complex one, and cannot be reduced to a simple power dynamic in which the journalists are merely the victim. Journalists need information, and thus have an interest in maintaining a good relationship with intelligence agencies. In return, journalists are often asked to provide information themselves to intelligence agencies.

[Jun 05, 2019] Do Spies Run the World by Israel Shamir

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Within America, the alphabet agencies from NSA to CIA to FBI had betrayed their country as obviously as Figuera did, though they didn't run away, yet. Our colleagues Mike Whitney and Philip Giraldi described the conspiracy organised by John Brennan of CIA with active participation of FBI's James Comey, to regime-change the US. ..."
"... The CIA spies in England and passes the results to the British Intelligence. MI6 spies in the US and passes the results to CIA. They became integrated to unbelievable extent in the worldwide network of spies. ..."
"... It is not the Deep State anymore; it is world spooks who had united against their legitimate masters. Instead of staying loyal to their country, the spooks betrayed their countries. They are not only strictly-for-cash – they think they know better what is good for you. In a way, they are a new incarnation of the Cecil Rhodes Society . Democratically-elected politicians and statesmen have to obey them or meet their displeasure, as Corbyn and Trump did. ..."
"... Everywhere, in the US, the UK, and Russia, the spooks became too powerful to handle. The CIA stood behind assassination of JFK and tried to take down Trump. The British Intelligence undermined Jeremy Corbyn, after assisting the CIA in pushing for the Iraq war. They created the Steele Dossier, invented the Skripal hoax and had brought Russia and the West to the brink of nuclear war. ..."
"... In the Ukraine, the heads of their state security, SBU had plotted against the last legitimate president Mr Victor Yanukovych. They helped to organise and run the Maidan 2014 manifestations and misled their President, until he was forced to escape abroad. The Maidan manifestations could be compared with the Yellow Vests movement; however, Macron, an appointee of the Network, had support of his spies, and stayed in power, while Yanukovych had been betrayed and overthrown. ..."
"... You'd ask me, were they so stupid that they believed their own propaganda of inevitable Clinton's victory? Yes, they were and are stupid. They are no sages, evil or benevolent. My main objection to the conspiracy theorists is that they usually view the plotters as omniscient and all-powerful. They are too greedy to be all-powerful, and they are too silly to be omniscient. ..."
"... Now, however, the secret services' cohesion and integration increased to the next level, making it difficult to deal with them. ..."
"... People are fickle and not always know what is good for them; there are many demagogues to mislead the crowd. And still, elected legitimate officials should have precedence in governing, while non-elected ones should obey – and it means the Network spooks and media men should know their place. ..."
"... How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy? ..."
"... These characters have indulged in an orgy of highly conspicuous partisan political meddling and ranting that has created the strong public impression that they engaged in an attempted coup to overthrow a sitting American president on the basis of a frame-up that was largely fueled by Russian disinformation. ..."
"... Brennan in particular: can you imagine any previous CIA director comporting himself in this manner? Throwing all caution to the winds? Inconceivable. Brennan, Comey and Clapper have inflicted serious damage on the reputation of the CIA, FBI and ODNI. ..."
"... It's not just illegal surveillance and blackmail that gives the spies power, it's impunity for even the gravest crimes. If you don't get the message of blackmail you can be tortured or shot, with a bullet like JFK and RFK and Reagan, or with illegal biological weapons like Daschel and Leahy. Institutionalized impunity stares us in the face from US state papers. ..."
"... It's not that CIA and other neo-Gestapos escaped control. They were designed from inception for totalitarian control. The one poor bastard in Congress who pointed that out, Tydings, had McCarthy sicced on him for his cheek. CIA is not out of control; it's firmly IN control. ..."
"... It was funny during the Cold war (the original one) – whenever each side unveiled that a spy from the other side has defected to them – they would say it was because of ideology – i.e. the spy defected to them because he "believed" in "democracy" or socialism – depending on the case. ..."
"... And in order to discredit their own spies when they defected to the other side – they would say that they did it for money, because they were greedy and that they betrayed "democracy" or socialism ..."
"... The other crucial role that spies usually play is that they allow the adversaries to keep technological balance via industrial espionage. By transferring top military secrets, they don't allow any side to gain crucial strategic advantage that might encourage them to do something foolish – like start a nuclear war. Prime example of this were probably the Rosenbergs – who helped USSR close the nuclear weapons gap with US and kept the world in a shaky nuclear arms balance. ..."
"... Profound analysis by Mr. Shamir. It confirms that one of the important reasons for the decline of freemasonry is the monopolization of political conspiracy by the intelligence services. Who needs the lodge when you have the CIA. ..."
"... Spooks are everywhere, from secretaries "losing" important communications to CNN news anchors roleplaying with crisis actors, but they are at their most powerful when they are appointed to powerful positions. President Trump's National Security Advisor is a spook and he does what he wants. ..."
"... John le Carre described it perfectly in "A Perfect Spy". The spooks form their own country. They are only loyal to themselves. ..."
"... A global supra-powerful, organized and united, privately directed, publicly backed society of high technology robin hood_mercenary_spooks who conduct sub-legal "scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back [in the nation of the other] routines"; who ignore duty to country, its constitutions, its laws and human rights. The are evil, global acting, high technology nomads with a monopoly on extortion and terror. ..."
"... Your statement "spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other countries than to their fellow citizens" fails makes clear the importance of containment-of-citizen access to information. Nation states are armed, rule making structures that invent propaganda and control access to information. Information containment and filtering is the essence of the political and economic power of a national leader and it is more import to the evil your article addresses. ..."
"... Control of the media is 50 times more important than control of the government? Nearly all actions of consequence are intended to drain the governed masses and such efforts can only be successful if the lobbying, false-misleading mind controlling privately owned (92% own by just 6 entities) centrally directed media can effectively control the all information environments. ..."
"... While understanding the mechanics is helpful don't neglect the purpose. Why is more important than how. The why is control. They don't care what you believe, but only what you do. You can be on the left, right, mainstream, or fringe and they won't care as long as you eat what they serve. Take a minute to think about what they want you to do and strongly consider not doing it. ..."
May 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

Conspiratorially-minded writers envisaged the Shadow World Government as a board of evil sages surrounded by the financiers and cinema moguls. That would be bad enough; in infinitely worse reality, our world is run by the Junior Ganymede that went berserk. It is not a government, but a network, like freemasonry of old, and it consists chiefly of treacherous spies and pens-for-hire, two kinds of service personnel, that collected a lot of data and tools of influence, and instead of serving their masters loyally, had decided to lead the world in the direction they prefer.

German Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the last head of the Abwehr, Hitler's Military Intelligence, had been such a spy with political ambitions. He supported Hitler as the mighty enemy of Communism; on a certain stage he came to conclusion that the US will do the job better and switched to the Anglo-American side. He was uncovered and executed for treason. His colleague General Reinhard Gehlen also betrayed his Führer and had switched to the American side. After the war, he continued his war against Soviet Russia, this time for CIA instead of Abwehr.

The spies are treacherous by their nature. They contact people who betrayed their countries; they work under cover, pretending to be somebody else; for them the switch of loyalty is as usual and normal as the gender change operation for a Moroccan doctor who is doing that 8 to 5 every day. They mix with foreign spies, they kill people with impunity; they break every law, human or divine. They are extremely dangerous if they do it for their own country. They are infinitely more dangerous if they work for themselves and still keep their institutional capabilities and international network.

Recently we had a painful reminding of their treacherous nature. Venezuela's top spy, the former director of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin), Manuel Cristopher Figuera , had switched sides during the last coup attempt and escaped abroad as the coup failed. He discovered that his membership on the Junior Ganymede of the spooks is more important for him than his duty to his country and its constitution.

Within America, the alphabet agencies from NSA to CIA to FBI had betrayed their country as obviously as Figuera did, though they didn't run away, yet. Our colleagues Mike Whitney and Philip Giraldi described the conspiracy organised by John Brennan of CIA with active participation of FBI's James Comey, to regime-change the US. In the conspiracy, foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, played an important role. As by law, these spies aren't allowed to operate on their home ground, they go into you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back routine. The CIA spies in England and passes the results to the British Intelligence. MI6 spies in the US and passes the results to CIA. They became integrated to unbelievable extent in the worldwide network of spies.

It is not the Deep State anymore; it is world spooks who had united against their legitimate masters. Instead of staying loyal to their country, the spooks betrayed their countries. They are not only strictly-for-cash – they think they know better what is good for you. In a way, they are a new incarnation of the Cecil Rhodes Society . Democratically-elected politicians and statesmen have to obey them or meet their displeasure, as Corbyn and Trump did.

Everywhere, in the US, the UK, and Russia, the spooks became too powerful to handle. The CIA stood behind assassination of JFK and tried to take down Trump. The British Intelligence undermined Jeremy Corbyn, after assisting the CIA in pushing for the Iraq war. They created the Steele Dossier, invented the Skripal hoax and had brought Russia and the West to the brink of nuclear war.

Russian spooks are in a special relations mode with the global network – for many years. In Russia, persistent rumours claim the perilous Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev had been designed and initiated by the KGB chief (1967 – 1982) Yuri Andropov . He and his appointees dismantled the socialist state and prepared the takeover of 1991 in the interests of the One World project.

Andropov (who had stepped into Brezhnev's shoes in 1982 and died in 1984) had advanced Gorbachev and his architect of glasnost, Alexander Yakovlev . Andropov also promoted the arch-traitor KGB General Oleg Kalugin to head its counter-intelligence. Later, Kalugin betrayed his country, escaped to the US and delivered all Russian spies he knew of to the FBI hands.

In late 1980s-early 1990s, the KGB, originally the guarding dog of the Russian working class, had betrayed its Communist masters and switched to work for the Network. But for their betrayal, Gorbachev would not be able to destroy his country so fast: the KGB neutralised or misinformed the Communist leadership.

They allowed Chernobyl to explode; they permitted a German pilot to land on the Red Square – this was used by Gorbachev as an excuse to sack the whole lot of patriotic generals. The KGB people were active in subverting other socialist states, too. They executed the Romanian leader Ceausescu and his wife; they brought down the GDR, the socialist Germany; they plotted with Yeltsin against Gorbachev and with Gorbachev against Romanov. As the result of their plotting, the USSR fell apart.

The KGB plotters of 1991 had thought that post-Communist Russia would be treated by the West like the prodigal son, with a fattened calf being slaughtered for the welcome feast. To their disappointment, the stupid bastards discovered that their country was to play the part of the fattened calf at the feast, and they were turned from unseen rulers into billionaires' bodyguards. Years later, Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia with the blessing of the world spooks and bankers, but being too independent a man to submit, he took his country into its present nationalist course, trying to regain some lost ground. The dissatisfied spooks supported him.

Only recently Putin began to trim the wild growth of his own intelligence service, the FSB. It is possible the cautious president had been alerted by the surprising insistence of the Western media that the alleged attempt on Skripal and other visible cases had been attributed to the GRU, the relatively small Russian Military Intelligence, while the much bigger FSB had been forgotten. The head of FSB cybercrime department had been arrested and sentenced for lengthy term of imprisonment, and two FSB colonels had been arrested as the search of their premises revealed immense amounts of cash , both Russian and foreign currency. Such piles of roubles and dollars could be assembled only for an attempt to change the regime, as it was demanded by the Network.

In the Ukraine, the heads of their state security, SBU had plotted against the last legitimate president Mr Victor Yanukovych. They helped to organise and run the Maidan 2014 manifestations and misled their President, until he was forced to escape abroad. The Maidan manifestations could be compared with the Yellow Vests movement; however, Macron, an appointee of the Network, had support of his spies, and stayed in power, while Yanukovych had been betrayed and overthrown.

In the US, the spooks allowed Donald Trump to become the leading Republican candidate, for they thought he would certainly lose to Mme Clinton. Surprisingly, he had won, and since then, this man who was advanced as an easy prey, as a buffoon, had been hunted by the spooks-and-scribes freemasonry.

You'd ask me, were they so stupid that they believed their own propaganda of inevitable Clinton's victory? Yes, they were and are stupid. They are no sages, evil or benevolent. My main objection to the conspiracy theorists is that they usually view the plotters as omniscient and all-powerful. They are too greedy to be all-powerful, and they are too silly to be omniscient.

Their knowledge of official leaders' faults gives them their feeling of power, but this knowledge can be translated into actual control only for weak-minded men. Strong leaders do not submit easily. Putin has had his quota of imprudent or outright criminal acts in his past, but he never allowed the blackmailers to dictate him their agenda. Netanyahu, another strong man of modern politics, also had managed to survive blackmail. Meanwhile, Trump defeated all attempts to unseat him, though his enemies had used his alleged lack of delicacy in relation to women, blacks and Jews to its utmost. He waded through the deep pond of Russiagate like Gulliver. But he has to purge the alphabet agencies to reach safety.

In Russia, the problem is acute. Many Russian spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other countries than to their fellow citizens. There is a freemasonic quality in their camaraderie. Such a quality could be commendable in soldiers after the war is over, but here the war is going on. Russian spooks are particularly besotted with their declared enemies; apparently it is the Christian quality of the Russian soul, but a very annoying one.

When Snowden reached Moscow after his daring escape from Hong Kong, the Russian TV screened a discussion that I participated in, among journalists, members of parliament and ex-spies. The Russian spooks said that Snowden is a traitor; a person who betrayed his agency can't be trusted and should be sent to the US in shackles. They felt they belong to the Spy World, with its inner bond, while their loyalty to Russia was a distant second.

During recent visit of Mike Pompeo to Sochi, the head of SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Mr Sergey Naryshkin proposed the State Secretary Mike Pompeo, the ex-CIA director, to expand contacts between Russian and US special services at a higher level. He clarified that he actively interacted with Pompeo during the period when he was the head of the CIA. Why would he need contacts with his adversary? It would be much better to avoid contacts altogether.

Even president Putin, who is first of all a Russian nationalist (or a patriot, as they say), who has granted Snowden asylum in Moscow at a high price of seriously worsening relations with Obama's administration, even Putin has told Stone that Snowden shouldn't have leaked the documents the way he did. "If he didn't like anything at his work he should have simply resigned, but he went further", a response proving he didn't completely freed himself from the spooks' freemasonry.

While the spooks plot, the scribes justify their plots. Media is also a weapon, and a mighty one. In Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin , the protagonist is defeated by the smear campaign in the media. Despite his miraculous arrival, despite his glorious victory, the evil witch succeeds to poison minds of the hero's wife and of the court. The pen can counter the sword. When the two are integrated, as in the union of spooks and scribes, it is too dangerous tool to leave intact.

In many countries of Europe, editorial international policies had been outsourced to the spooky Atlantic Council, the Washington-based think tank. The Atlantic Council is strongly connected with NATO alliance and with Brussels bureaucracy, the tools of control over Europe. Another tool is The Integrity Initiative , where the difference between spies and journalists is blurred . And so is the difference between the left and the right. The left and the right-wing media use different arguments, surprisingly leading to the same bottom line, because both are tools of warfare for the same Network.

In 1930s, they were divided. The German and the British agents pulled and pushed in the opposite directions. The Russian military became so friendly with the Germans, that at a certain time, Hitler believed the Russian generals would side with him against their own leader. The Russian spooks were befriended by the Brits, and had tried to push Russia to confront Hitler. The cautious Marshal Stalin had purged the Red Army's pro-German Generals, and the NKVD's pro-British spooks, and delayed the outbreak of hostilities as much as he could. Now, however, the secret services' cohesion and integration increased to the next level, making it difficult to deal with them.

If they are so powerful, integrated and united, shouldn't we throw a towel in the ring and surrender? Hell, no! Their success is their undoing. They plot, but Allah is the best plotter, – our Muslim friends say. Indeed, when they succeed to suborn a party, the people vote with their feet. The Brexit is the case to consider. The Network wanted to undermine the Brexit; so they neutralised Corbyn by the antisemitism pursuit while May had made all she could to sabotage the Brexit while calling for it in public. Awfully clever of them – but the British voter responded with dropping both established parties. So their clever plot misfired.

People are fickle and not always know what is good for them; there are many demagogues to mislead the crowd. And still, elected legitimate officials should have precedence in governing, while non-elected ones should obey – and it means the Network spooks and media men should know their place.

Sean McBride , says: May 21, 2019 at 3:18 pm GMT

Side note:

How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy?

Spymasters are usually renowned for their inscrutability and for playing their cards close to their vests.

These characters have indulged in an orgy of highly conspicuous partisan political meddling and ranting that has created the strong public impression that they engaged in an attempted coup to overthrow a sitting American president on the basis of a frame-up that was largely fueled by Russian disinformation.

Brennan in particular: can you imagine any previous CIA director comporting himself in this manner? Throwing all caution to the winds? Inconceivable. Brennan, Comey and Clapper have inflicted serious damage on the reputation of the CIA, FBI and ODNI.

Forthcoming books will no doubt get into all the remarkable and bizarre details.

Donald Trump has demonstrated the ability to troll and goad many of his opponents into a state of imbecility. It's a negotiating tactic -- knock them off balance, provoke them to lose control. No matter how smart they are, some people take the bait.

Ding ding ding , says: May 21, 2019 at 4:04 pm GMT
I am sitting here pointing to my nose. Spies run the world – contemporary history in a nutshell. A few provisos:

– It's not just illegal surveillance and blackmail that gives the spies power, it's impunity for even the gravest crimes. If you don't get the message of blackmail you can be tortured or shot, with a bullet like JFK and RFK and Reagan, or with illegal biological weapons like Daschel and Leahy. Institutionalized impunity stares us in the face from US state papers.

– It's not that CIA and other neo-Gestapos escaped control. They were designed from inception for totalitarian control. The one poor bastard in Congress who pointed that out, Tydings, had McCarthy sicced on him for his cheek. CIA is not out of control; it's firmly IN control.

– There is a crucial difference between US and Russian spies. Russians can go over the head of their government to the world. That's the only effective check on state criminal enterprise like CIA. Article 17 of the Russian Constitution says "in the Russian Federation rights and freedoms of person and citizen are recognized and guaranteed pursuant to the generally recognized principles and norms of international law and in accordance with this Constitution." Article 18 states that rights and freedoms of the person and citizen are directly applicable, which prevents the kind of bad-faith tricks the USA pulls, like declaring "non-self executing" treaties, or making legally void reservations, declarations, understandings, and provisos to screw you out of your rights. Article 46(3) guarantees citizens a constitutional right to appeal to inter-State bodies for the protection of human rights and freedoms if internal legal redress has been exhausted. Ratified international treaties including the ICCPR supersede any domestic legislation stipulating otherwise.

Endgame Napoleon , says: May 21, 2019 at 6:14 pm GMT
Isn't it just collusion that holds certain elite groups together, including in some businesses where a lot of chicanery goes on. The most important thing is to be in on it as one of them, not as a person who can be trusted not to say anything, but as one of the gang. It's exactly how absenteeism-friendly offices full of crony parents with crony-parent managers work.

The only problem for the guy at the tippy top is what would happen if such a tight group turned on him / her? Maybe, some leaders see the value in protecting a few brave individuals, like Snowden, letting any coup-stirring spooks know that some people are watching the Establishment's rights violators, too. Those with technical knowledge have more capacity than most to do it or, at least, to understand how it works.

In a country founded on individual liberties, including Fourth Amendment privacy rights that were protected by less greedy generations, the US should have elected leaders that put the US Constitution first, but that is too much to ask in an era when the top dogs in business & government are all colluding for money.

Digital Samizdat , says: May 21, 2019 at 6:40 pm GMT

In Russia, persistent rumours claim the perilous Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev had been designed and initiated by the KGB chief (1967 – 1982) Yuri Andropov.

FWIW, I have heard the exact same thing from Russian commenters myself. Some have insisted that, if Andropov had lived long enough, he would have carried glasnost and perestroika himself.

Cyrano , says: May 21, 2019 at 7:09 pm GMT
Spies are loathsome bunch, with questionable loyalties and personal integrity. But I believe that overall they play a positive role. They play a positive role because they help adversaries gain insight into their adversary's activities.

If it wasn't for the spies, paranoia about what the other side is doing can get out of hand and cause wrong actions to take place. The problem with the spies is also that no one knows how much they can be trusted and on whose side they are really on.

It was funny during the Cold war (the original one) – whenever each side unveiled that a spy from the other side has defected to them – they would say it was because of ideology – i.e. the spy defected to them because he "believed" in "democracy" or socialism – depending on the case.

And in order to discredit their own spies when they defected to the other side – they would say that they did it for money, because they were greedy and that they betrayed "democracy" or socialism.

The other crucial role that spies usually play is that they allow the adversaries to keep technological balance via industrial espionage. By transferring top military secrets, they don't allow any side to gain crucial strategic advantage that might encourage them to do something foolish – like start a nuclear war. Prime example of this were probably the Rosenbergs – who helped USSR close the nuclear weapons gap with US and kept the world in a shaky nuclear arms balance.

Kirt , says: May 21, 2019 at 10:01 pm GMT
Profound analysis by Mr. Shamir. It confirms that one of the important reasons for the decline of freemasonry is the monopolization of political conspiracy by the intelligence services. Who needs the lodge when you have the CIA.

An aspect of the rule of spies that Mr. Shamir does not touch on is the legitimization of this rule through popular culture. This started with the James Bond novels and movies and by now has become ubiquitous. Spies and assassins are the heroes of the masses. While secrecy is still needed for tactical reasons in the case of specific operations, overall secrecy is not needed nor even desirable. So you have thugs like Pompeo actually boasting of their villainy before audiences of college students at Texas A&M and you have the Mossad supporting the publication of the book Rise and Kill First which is an extensive account of their world-wide assassination policy. They have the power; now they want the perks that go with it, including being treated like rock stars.

israel shamir , says: May 22, 2019 at 4:06 am GMT
@Kirt

Who needs the lodge when you have the CIA

Good explanation of freemasonry's decline, Kirt! As for popular culture – almost all latest cinema characters are spies – like Avengers))

anno nimus , says: May 22, 2019 at 4:44 am GMT
dear mr Shamir, the criminals are not only stupid but also utterly wicked. they will be stricken down in the twinkling of the eye and will cry out why God? all the righteous will shout for joy and give thanks to the Almighty for judging Babylon. woe unto them! they will have no place to hide or run to.

Ezekiel 9 (NKJV)
The Wicked Are Slain
9 Then He called out in my hearing with a loud voice, saying, "Let those who have charge over the city draw near, each with a deadly weapon in his hand." 2 And suddenly six men came from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, each with his battle-ax in his hand. One man among them was clothed with linen and had a writer's inkhorn at his side. They went in and stood beside the bronze altar.

3 Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub, where it had been, to the threshold of the temple. And He called to the man clothed with linen, who had the writer's inkhorn at his side; 4 and the Lord said to him, "Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and cry over all the abominations that are done within it."

5 To the others He said in my hearing, "Go after him through the city and kill; do not let your eye spare, nor have any pity. 6 Utterly slay old and young men, maidens and little children and women; but do not come near anyone on whom is the mark; and begin at My sanctuary." So they began with the elders who were before the temple. 7 Then He said to them, "Defile the temple, and fill the courts with the slain. Go out!" And they went out and killed in the city.

8 So it was, that while they were killing them, I was left alone; and I fell on my face and cried out, and said, "Ah, Lord God! Will You destroy all the remnant of Israel in pouring out Your fury on Jerusalem?"

9 Then He said to me, "The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great, and the land is full of bloodshed, and the city full of perversity; for they say, 'The Lord has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see!' 10 And as for Me also, My eye will neither spare, nor will I have pity, but I will recompense their deeds on their own head."

11 Just then, the man clothed with linen, who had the inkhorn at his side, reported back and said, "I have done as You commanded me."

Antares , says: May 22, 2019 at 5:01 am GMT
Espionage depends on contra-espionage. We will never get that hold on Jewish spies as they can have on our spies.
Paul Bennett , says: May 22, 2019 at 5:38 am GMT
Great article.

E Michael Jones was just warning President Trump about the possibility of this in the Straits of Hormuz. https://youtu.be/iIm3WuJAVEE?t=272

Spooks are everywhere, from secretaries "losing" important communications to CNN news anchors roleplaying with crisis actors, but they are at their most powerful when they are appointed to powerful positions. President Trump's National Security Advisor is a spook and he does what he wants.

John le Carre described it perfectly in "A Perfect Spy". The spooks form their own country. They are only loyal to themselves.

Yarkob , says: May 22, 2019 at 7:52 am GMT
@Antares that's because the Mossad isn't like "our" spy agencies. it's closer to the old paradigm of the hashishim or true assassins. Mossad "agents" don't gad around wearing dark glasses and tapping phones; they run proper deep cover operations. "sleepers" is a term used in the USA. they have jobs. they look "normal". They integrate
MarkU , says: May 22, 2019 at 8:45 am GMT
Do spies run the world? No not really, bankers run the world.

Bankers constitute most of the deep state in the US/UK in particular and most of Europe. It is the bankers/deep state which control the intelligence agencies. The ethnicity of a hefty proportion of said bankers is plain to see for anyone with functioning critical faculties. How else can a tiny country in the middle east have such influence in the US? How else do we explain why 2/3 of the UK parliament are "friends of Israel" How come financial institutions can commit felonies and no one does jail time? why is Israel allowed to commit war crimes and break international law with total impunity? who got bailed out of their gambling debts at the expense of inflicting "austerity" on most of the western world?

I am open to any sensible alternative hypothesis.

Realist , says: May 22, 2019 at 8:48 am GMT
@Sean McBride

How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy?

Shit floats.

Sally , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:06 am GMT
A global supra-powerful, organized and united, privately directed, publicly backed society of high technology robin hood_mercenary_spooks who conduct sub-legal "scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back [in the nation of the other] routines"; who ignore duty to country, its constitutions, its laws and human rights. The are evil, global acting, high technology nomads with a monopoly on extortion and terror.

Since winning, Trump has been hunted by the spooks-and-scribes freemasonry. <fallacy is that Trump could have gained the assistence of every American, had Trump just used his powers to declassify all secret information and make it available to the public, instead he chases Assange, and continues to conduct the affairs of his office in secret.

Propaganda preys on belief.. it is more powerful than an atomic weapon.. when the facts are hidden or when the facts are changed, distorted or destroyed.

Your statement "spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other countries than to their fellow citizens" fails makes clear the importance of containment-of-citizen access to information. Nation states are armed, rule making structures that invent propaganda and control access to information. Information containment and filtering is the essence of the political and economic power of a national leader and it is more import to the evil your article addresses.

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/08/josh-gottheimer-democrats-yemen/ <i wrote IRT to the article, that contents appearing in private media supported monopoly powered corporations and distributed to the public, direct the use of military and the willingness of soldiers of 22 different countries.

Control of the media is 50 times more important than control of the government? Nearly all actions of consequence are intended to drain the governed masses and such efforts can only be successful if the lobbying, false-misleading mind controlling privately owned (92% own by just 6 entities) centrally directed media can effectively control the all information environments.

I am bothered by you article because it looks to be Trumped weighted and failes to make clear it is these secret apolitical, human rights abusers, that direct the contents of the media distributed articles that appear in the privately owmed, media distributed to the public. Also not explained is how the cost of advertising is shared by the monopoly powered corporations, and it is that advertising that is the source of support that keeps the fake news in business, the nation state propaganda in line, and the support of robin -hood terror.

Monopoly powered global corporation advertising funds the fake and misleading private media, that is why the open internet has been shut in tight. In order for the evil, global acting, high technology nomads to continue their extortion and terror activities they need the media, its their only real weapon. I have never meet a member of any of the twenty two agencies that was not a trained, certified mental case terrorist.

Anon [295] Disclaimer , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:08 am GMT
I think the interplay between the spooks and scribes warrants a deeper explanation. Covert action refers to anything in which the author can disclaim his responsibility, ie it looks like someone else or something else. The handler in a political operation cannot abuse his agent because the agent is the actor. The handler in an intelligence gathering operation can abuse his agent because the agent merely enables action.

The political operations in this case are propaganda. The Congress of Cultural Freedom is the most clearly described one to date. Propaganda is necessary in any mass society to ensure that voters care about the right issues, the right way, at the right time. Propaganda can be true, false, or a mix of the two. Black propaganda deals in falsehoods, ie the Steele Dossier. Black propaganda works best when it enables a pre-planned operation, but it pollutes the intelligence gathering process with disinformation.

Intelligence gathering is colloquially called investigative reporting. If anyone knows about Gary Webb, Alan Frankovich, or Michael Hastings they know you can't really do that job well for very long. So how do the old timers last so long? It's a back and forth. The reporter brings all of his information on a subject to his intelligence source (handler). The source then says, "print this, print that, sit on that, and since you've been a good boy here's a little something you didn't know." The true role of the investigative reporter is to conduct counterintelligence and package it as a limited hangout.

While understanding the mechanics is helpful don't neglect the purpose. Why is more important than how. The why is control. They don't care what you believe, but only what you do. You can be on the left, right, mainstream, or fringe and they won't care as long as you eat what they serve. Take a minute to think about what they want you to do and strongly consider not doing it.

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propaganda-network-built-by-the-cia-a-worldwide-network.html

http://danwismar.com/uploads/Bernstein%20-%20CIA%20and%20Media.htm

joeshittheragman , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:29 am GMT
Do Spies Run the World?
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
If they're Jewish spies – then yes.
Vojkan , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:45 am GMT
Not usually a big fan of Israel Shamir's pieces but this one on spooks is truly excellent. The article is spot on.
9/11 Inside job , says: May 22, 2019 at 10:37 am GMT
Spies do not run the world , they are merely agents of the "families" who use them to retain and increase their control ,power and wealth .
cowherd , says: May 22, 2019 at 10:46 am GMT
@Sean McBride And now Trump should have then all rounded up and hung from the trees in the front of the Whitehouse. Anything less should be seen as encouragement.
atlantis_dweller , says: May 22, 2019 at 11:26 am GMT
Don't agree.

[Should don't agree, agree, troll, and lol "buttons" for columns be added? I think it would be a nice extra].

mike k , says: May 22, 2019 at 11:49 am GMT
The worst among us rule over the rest of us. As Plato said, this needs to change. How to do that? We don't know, but we desperately need to find out ..
Anon [421] Disclaimer , says: May 22, 2019 at 12:41 pm GMT
@Sean McBride

Obama was a very effective promoter of what might be called the "globalist" agenda. He of course didn't invent it but did appoint those three.

Wayne Madsen gave a convincing account in his speculation that both Obama's parent's were CIA operatives. So it's "all the family" and in the details one might conclude with the author that indeed "spies run the world."

[Jun 05, 2019] Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers.

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In reality intelligence agencies control the nomination. ..."
"... Russiagate and the DNC hacking scandal were the attempts to reverse the presidential election. Essentially Russiagate was created to tame Trump, although I am not sure that such drastic measures were needed and I might be wrong. He betrayed his election promises with such an ease that Russiagate now looks like a paranoid overreaction of the USA intelligence agencies (and former FBI director Mueller of 9/11 and anthrax investigation fame) Which figuratively speaking moved tanks to capture the unnamed native village. ..."
"... Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers. And if the society preaches militarism it is outright impossible: any politician deviation from militaristic policies will be met with the counterattack of intelligence agencies which are intimately interested in maintaining the status quo. ..."
Apr 27, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

likbez 04.27.19 at 5:21 am 99

In reality intelligence agencies control the nomination.

Pics or it didn't happen.

I am very sorry and sincerely apologize. Please view this as a plausible hypothesis ;-)

Some considerations (neoliberals and neocons usually interpret those facts differently so this is a view from paleoconservative universe; you are warned):

1. Exoneration of Hillary deprived Sanders of chances to lead Democratic ticket in 2016. This is as close to the proven fact as we can get.

2. Russiagate and the DNC hacking scandal were the attempts to reverse the presidential election. Essentially Russiagate was created to tame Trump, although I am not sure that such drastic measures were needed and I might be wrong. He betrayed his election promises with such an ease that Russiagate now looks like a paranoid overreaction of the USA intelligence agencies (and former FBI director Mueller of 9/11 and anthrax investigation fame) Which figuratively speaking moved tanks to capture the unnamed native village.

3. JFK and then Robert Kennedy assassination. The key role of the CIA in the JFK assassination now is broadly accepted in the USA.

3. Obama connection to CIA was subject of many articles, especially in the alt-right press. He definitely was raised in a family of CIA operatives.

4. Brennan spied on Congress and was not fired, which means that the CIA hieratically is above the Congress. Proven fact.

In short, nothing in the power structure of democratic societies prevents intelligence agencies from becoming key political actors, the Pretorian guard which selects the Presidents by keeping dirt on politicians and controls the press (see Church commission). They have both motivation (preservation and enhancement of their status as any large bureaucracy), means (weakly controlled, oversized budget; access to shadow funds from arms and narcotics trading) and skills (covert operations, disinformation, sabotage. This triad is inherent in their status as the legalized mafia which operates above the law. As Pompeo recently said in a recent speech at Texas A&M University CIA operatives lie and cheat and steal.

When intelligence agencies control MSM that alone gives them considerable power to influence the political process. For example, in the case of Russiagate, we saw well organized and timed series of leaks. So, in fact, they can be viewed as the "Inner Party" in terms of Orwell dystopia 1984.

And the fact of media control is a proven fact. And not only via Church commission. Dr. Ulfkotte went on public television stating that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job.

Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers. And if the society preaches militarism it is outright impossible: any politician deviation from militaristic policies will be met with the counterattack of intelligence agencies which are intimately interested in maintaining the status quo.

In any case, the problem of "the tail wagging the dog" is a problem for any country, not only for the USA. The fact that both Brennan and Clapper become 'talking heads' after retirement tells something about the trend. Such things would be impossible 20 years ago.

Some insights into the problem can be obtained by reading the article about the politicization of intelligence agencies in other countries. For example:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/12/18/challenges-of-civilian-control-over-intelligence-agencies-in-pakistan-pub-62278

Ultimately, making the intelligence agencies accountable amounts to a broader reevaluation of the larger framework of civil-military relations. As a result, not only is intelligence reform an almost intractable political issue, but it also requires a complete change of mentality for the actors involved. Reigning in the intelligence agencies is a problem of a deeper political culture, one that requires a systemic change in the psychology of the organizations.

the lack of civilian oversight of intelligence agencies is a byproduct of the political imbalance between civilian and military actors, a power structure that favors the latter.

As long as the military can get its way through seemingly constitutional means, the importance of the intelligence agencies will remain relatively limited. Their role, however, becomes essential whenever the military meets some resistance

the military's domestic political power "has always derived from [its] ability to mediate confrontations among feuding political leaders, parties or state institutions, invariably presented as threats to the political order and stability. The military [is] of course the only institution empowered to judge whether such threats existed based on the assumption that a polity in turmoil cannot sustain a professional military" (Rizvi 1998: 100). Yet whenever necessary, the military has not hesitated to generate problems itself if it believes its institutional interests would be better served by a weak and divided polity. This is where the intelligence agencies come into play.

the link between journalists and the intelligence agencies is a complex one, and cannot be reduced to a simple power dynamic in which the journalists are merely the victim. Journalists need information, and thus have an interest in maintaining a good relationship with intelligence agencies. In return, journalists are often asked to provide information themselves to intelligence agencies.

[Jun 05, 2019] Do Spies Run the World by Israel Shamir

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Within America, the alphabet agencies from NSA to CIA to FBI had betrayed their country as obviously as Figuera did, though they didn't run away, yet. Our colleagues Mike Whitney and Philip Giraldi described the conspiracy organised by John Brennan of CIA with active participation of FBI's James Comey, to regime-change the US. ..."
"... The CIA spies in England and passes the results to the British Intelligence. MI6 spies in the US and passes the results to CIA. They became integrated to unbelievable extent in the worldwide network of spies. ..."
"... It is not the Deep State anymore; it is world spooks who had united against their legitimate masters. Instead of staying loyal to their country, the spooks betrayed their countries. They are not only strictly-for-cash – they think they know better what is good for you. In a way, they are a new incarnation of the Cecil Rhodes Society . Democratically-elected politicians and statesmen have to obey them or meet their displeasure, as Corbyn and Trump did. ..."
"... Everywhere, in the US, the UK, and Russia, the spooks became too powerful to handle. The CIA stood behind assassination of JFK and tried to take down Trump. The British Intelligence undermined Jeremy Corbyn, after assisting the CIA in pushing for the Iraq war. They created the Steele Dossier, invented the Skripal hoax and had brought Russia and the West to the brink of nuclear war. ..."
"... In the Ukraine, the heads of their state security, SBU had plotted against the last legitimate president Mr Victor Yanukovych. They helped to organise and run the Maidan 2014 manifestations and misled their President, until he was forced to escape abroad. The Maidan manifestations could be compared with the Yellow Vests movement; however, Macron, an appointee of the Network, had support of his spies, and stayed in power, while Yanukovych had been betrayed and overthrown. ..."
"... You'd ask me, were they so stupid that they believed their own propaganda of inevitable Clinton's victory? Yes, they were and are stupid. They are no sages, evil or benevolent. My main objection to the conspiracy theorists is that they usually view the plotters as omniscient and all-powerful. They are too greedy to be all-powerful, and they are too silly to be omniscient. ..."
"... Now, however, the secret services' cohesion and integration increased to the next level, making it difficult to deal with them. ..."
"... People are fickle and not always know what is good for them; there are many demagogues to mislead the crowd. And still, elected legitimate officials should have precedence in governing, while non-elected ones should obey – and it means the Network spooks and media men should know their place. ..."
"... How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy? ..."
"... These characters have indulged in an orgy of highly conspicuous partisan political meddling and ranting that has created the strong public impression that they engaged in an attempted coup to overthrow a sitting American president on the basis of a frame-up that was largely fueled by Russian disinformation. ..."
"... Brennan in particular: can you imagine any previous CIA director comporting himself in this manner? Throwing all caution to the winds? Inconceivable. Brennan, Comey and Clapper have inflicted serious damage on the reputation of the CIA, FBI and ODNI. ..."
"... It's not just illegal surveillance and blackmail that gives the spies power, it's impunity for even the gravest crimes. If you don't get the message of blackmail you can be tortured or shot, with a bullet like JFK and RFK and Reagan, or with illegal biological weapons like Daschel and Leahy. Institutionalized impunity stares us in the face from US state papers. ..."
"... It's not that CIA and other neo-Gestapos escaped control. They were designed from inception for totalitarian control. The one poor bastard in Congress who pointed that out, Tydings, had McCarthy sicced on him for his cheek. CIA is not out of control; it's firmly IN control. ..."
"... It was funny during the Cold war (the original one) – whenever each side unveiled that a spy from the other side has defected to them – they would say it was because of ideology – i.e. the spy defected to them because he "believed" in "democracy" or socialism – depending on the case. ..."
"... And in order to discredit their own spies when they defected to the other side – they would say that they did it for money, because they were greedy and that they betrayed "democracy" or socialism ..."
"... The other crucial role that spies usually play is that they allow the adversaries to keep technological balance via industrial espionage. By transferring top military secrets, they don't allow any side to gain crucial strategic advantage that might encourage them to do something foolish – like start a nuclear war. Prime example of this were probably the Rosenbergs – who helped USSR close the nuclear weapons gap with US and kept the world in a shaky nuclear arms balance. ..."
"... Profound analysis by Mr. Shamir. It confirms that one of the important reasons for the decline of freemasonry is the monopolization of political conspiracy by the intelligence services. Who needs the lodge when you have the CIA. ..."
"... Spooks are everywhere, from secretaries "losing" important communications to CNN news anchors roleplaying with crisis actors, but they are at their most powerful when they are appointed to powerful positions. President Trump's National Security Advisor is a spook and he does what he wants. ..."
"... John le Carre described it perfectly in "A Perfect Spy". The spooks form their own country. They are only loyal to themselves. ..."
"... A global supra-powerful, organized and united, privately directed, publicly backed society of high technology robin hood_mercenary_spooks who conduct sub-legal "scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back [in the nation of the other] routines"; who ignore duty to country, its constitutions, its laws and human rights. The are evil, global acting, high technology nomads with a monopoly on extortion and terror. ..."
"... Your statement "spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other countries than to their fellow citizens" fails makes clear the importance of containment-of-citizen access to information. Nation states are armed, rule making structures that invent propaganda and control access to information. Information containment and filtering is the essence of the political and economic power of a national leader and it is more import to the evil your article addresses. ..."
"... Control of the media is 50 times more important than control of the government? Nearly all actions of consequence are intended to drain the governed masses and such efforts can only be successful if the lobbying, false-misleading mind controlling privately owned (92% own by just 6 entities) centrally directed media can effectively control the all information environments. ..."
"... While understanding the mechanics is helpful don't neglect the purpose. Why is more important than how. The why is control. They don't care what you believe, but only what you do. You can be on the left, right, mainstream, or fringe and they won't care as long as you eat what they serve. Take a minute to think about what they want you to do and strongly consider not doing it. ..."
May 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

Conspiratorially-minded writers envisaged the Shadow World Government as a board of evil sages surrounded by the financiers and cinema moguls. That would be bad enough; in infinitely worse reality, our world is run by the Junior Ganymede that went berserk. It is not a government, but a network, like freemasonry of old, and it consists chiefly of treacherous spies and pens-for-hire, two kinds of service personnel, that collected a lot of data and tools of influence, and instead of serving their masters loyally, had decided to lead the world in the direction they prefer.

German Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the last head of the Abwehr, Hitler's Military Intelligence, had been such a spy with political ambitions. He supported Hitler as the mighty enemy of Communism; on a certain stage he came to conclusion that the US will do the job better and switched to the Anglo-American side. He was uncovered and executed for treason. His colleague General Reinhard Gehlen also betrayed his Führer and had switched to the American side. After the war, he continued his war against Soviet Russia, this time for CIA instead of Abwehr.

The spies are treacherous by their nature. They contact people who betrayed their countries; they work under cover, pretending to be somebody else; for them the switch of loyalty is as usual and normal as the gender change operation for a Moroccan doctor who is doing that 8 to 5 every day. They mix with foreign spies, they kill people with impunity; they break every law, human or divine. They are extremely dangerous if they do it for their own country. They are infinitely more dangerous if they work for themselves and still keep their institutional capabilities and international network.

Recently we had a painful reminding of their treacherous nature. Venezuela's top spy, the former director of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin), Manuel Cristopher Figuera , had switched sides during the last coup attempt and escaped abroad as the coup failed. He discovered that his membership on the Junior Ganymede of the spooks is more important for him than his duty to his country and its constitution.

Within America, the alphabet agencies from NSA to CIA to FBI had betrayed their country as obviously as Figuera did, though they didn't run away, yet. Our colleagues Mike Whitney and Philip Giraldi described the conspiracy organised by John Brennan of CIA with active participation of FBI's James Comey, to regime-change the US. In the conspiracy, foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, played an important role. As by law, these spies aren't allowed to operate on their home ground, they go into you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back routine. The CIA spies in England and passes the results to the British Intelligence. MI6 spies in the US and passes the results to CIA. They became integrated to unbelievable extent in the worldwide network of spies.

It is not the Deep State anymore; it is world spooks who had united against their legitimate masters. Instead of staying loyal to their country, the spooks betrayed their countries. They are not only strictly-for-cash – they think they know better what is good for you. In a way, they are a new incarnation of the Cecil Rhodes Society . Democratically-elected politicians and statesmen have to obey them or meet their displeasure, as Corbyn and Trump did.

Everywhere, in the US, the UK, and Russia, the spooks became too powerful to handle. The CIA stood behind assassination of JFK and tried to take down Trump. The British Intelligence undermined Jeremy Corbyn, after assisting the CIA in pushing for the Iraq war. They created the Steele Dossier, invented the Skripal hoax and had brought Russia and the West to the brink of nuclear war.

Russian spooks are in a special relations mode with the global network – for many years. In Russia, persistent rumours claim the perilous Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev had been designed and initiated by the KGB chief (1967 – 1982) Yuri Andropov . He and his appointees dismantled the socialist state and prepared the takeover of 1991 in the interests of the One World project.

Andropov (who had stepped into Brezhnev's shoes in 1982 and died in 1984) had advanced Gorbachev and his architect of glasnost, Alexander Yakovlev . Andropov also promoted the arch-traitor KGB General Oleg Kalugin to head its counter-intelligence. Later, Kalugin betrayed his country, escaped to the US and delivered all Russian spies he knew of to the FBI hands.

In late 1980s-early 1990s, the KGB, originally the guarding dog of the Russian working class, had betrayed its Communist masters and switched to work for the Network. But for their betrayal, Gorbachev would not be able to destroy his country so fast: the KGB neutralised or misinformed the Communist leadership.

They allowed Chernobyl to explode; they permitted a German pilot to land on the Red Square – this was used by Gorbachev as an excuse to sack the whole lot of patriotic generals. The KGB people were active in subverting other socialist states, too. They executed the Romanian leader Ceausescu and his wife; they brought down the GDR, the socialist Germany; they plotted with Yeltsin against Gorbachev and with Gorbachev against Romanov. As the result of their plotting, the USSR fell apart.

The KGB plotters of 1991 had thought that post-Communist Russia would be treated by the West like the prodigal son, with a fattened calf being slaughtered for the welcome feast. To their disappointment, the stupid bastards discovered that their country was to play the part of the fattened calf at the feast, and they were turned from unseen rulers into billionaires' bodyguards. Years later, Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia with the blessing of the world spooks and bankers, but being too independent a man to submit, he took his country into its present nationalist course, trying to regain some lost ground. The dissatisfied spooks supported him.

Only recently Putin began to trim the wild growth of his own intelligence service, the FSB. It is possible the cautious president had been alerted by the surprising insistence of the Western media that the alleged attempt on Skripal and other visible cases had been attributed to the GRU, the relatively small Russian Military Intelligence, while the much bigger FSB had been forgotten. The head of FSB cybercrime department had been arrested and sentenced for lengthy term of imprisonment, and two FSB colonels had been arrested as the search of their premises revealed immense amounts of cash , both Russian and foreign currency. Such piles of roubles and dollars could be assembled only for an attempt to change the regime, as it was demanded by the Network.

In the Ukraine, the heads of their state security, SBU had plotted against the last legitimate president Mr Victor Yanukovych. They helped to organise and run the Maidan 2014 manifestations and misled their President, until he was forced to escape abroad. The Maidan manifestations could be compared with the Yellow Vests movement; however, Macron, an appointee of the Network, had support of his spies, and stayed in power, while Yanukovych had been betrayed and overthrown.

In the US, the spooks allowed Donald Trump to become the leading Republican candidate, for they thought he would certainly lose to Mme Clinton. Surprisingly, he had won, and since then, this man who was advanced as an easy prey, as a buffoon, had been hunted by the spooks-and-scribes freemasonry.

You'd ask me, were they so stupid that they believed their own propaganda of inevitable Clinton's victory? Yes, they were and are stupid. They are no sages, evil or benevolent. My main objection to the conspiracy theorists is that they usually view the plotters as omniscient and all-powerful. They are too greedy to be all-powerful, and they are too silly to be omniscient.

Their knowledge of official leaders' faults gives them their feeling of power, but this knowledge can be translated into actual control only for weak-minded men. Strong leaders do not submit easily. Putin has had his quota of imprudent or outright criminal acts in his past, but he never allowed the blackmailers to dictate him their agenda. Netanyahu, another strong man of modern politics, also had managed to survive blackmail. Meanwhile, Trump defeated all attempts to unseat him, though his enemies had used his alleged lack of delicacy in relation to women, blacks and Jews to its utmost. He waded through the deep pond of Russiagate like Gulliver. But he has to purge the alphabet agencies to reach safety.

In Russia, the problem is acute. Many Russian spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other countries than to their fellow citizens. There is a freemasonic quality in their camaraderie. Such a quality could be commendable in soldiers after the war is over, but here the war is going on. Russian spooks are particularly besotted with their declared enemies; apparently it is the Christian quality of the Russian soul, but a very annoying one.

When Snowden reached Moscow after his daring escape from Hong Kong, the Russian TV screened a discussion that I participated in, among journalists, members of parliament and ex-spies. The Russian spooks said that Snowden is a traitor; a person who betrayed his agency can't be trusted and should be sent to the US in shackles. They felt they belong to the Spy World, with its inner bond, while their loyalty to Russia was a distant second.

During recent visit of Mike Pompeo to Sochi, the head of SVR, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Mr Sergey Naryshkin proposed the State Secretary Mike Pompeo, the ex-CIA director, to expand contacts between Russian and US special services at a higher level. He clarified that he actively interacted with Pompeo during the period when he was the head of the CIA. Why would he need contacts with his adversary? It would be much better to avoid contacts altogether.

Even president Putin, who is first of all a Russian nationalist (or a patriot, as they say), who has granted Snowden asylum in Moscow at a high price of seriously worsening relations with Obama's administration, even Putin has told Stone that Snowden shouldn't have leaked the documents the way he did. "If he didn't like anything at his work he should have simply resigned, but he went further", a response proving he didn't completely freed himself from the spooks' freemasonry.

While the spooks plot, the scribes justify their plots. Media is also a weapon, and a mighty one. In Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin , the protagonist is defeated by the smear campaign in the media. Despite his miraculous arrival, despite his glorious victory, the evil witch succeeds to poison minds of the hero's wife and of the court. The pen can counter the sword. When the two are integrated, as in the union of spooks and scribes, it is too dangerous tool to leave intact.

In many countries of Europe, editorial international policies had been outsourced to the spooky Atlantic Council, the Washington-based think tank. The Atlantic Council is strongly connected with NATO alliance and with Brussels bureaucracy, the tools of control over Europe. Another tool is The Integrity Initiative , where the difference between spies and journalists is blurred . And so is the difference between the left and the right. The left and the right-wing media use different arguments, surprisingly leading to the same bottom line, because both are tools of warfare for the same Network.

In 1930s, they were divided. The German and the British agents pulled and pushed in the opposite directions. The Russian military became so friendly with the Germans, that at a certain time, Hitler believed the Russian generals would side with him against their own leader. The Russian spooks were befriended by the Brits, and had tried to push Russia to confront Hitler. The cautious Marshal Stalin had purged the Red Army's pro-German Generals, and the NKVD's pro-British spooks, and delayed the outbreak of hostilities as much as he could. Now, however, the secret services' cohesion and integration increased to the next level, making it difficult to deal with them.

If they are so powerful, integrated and united, shouldn't we throw a towel in the ring and surrender? Hell, no! Their success is their undoing. They plot, but Allah is the best plotter, – our Muslim friends say. Indeed, when they succeed to suborn a party, the people vote with their feet. The Brexit is the case to consider. The Network wanted to undermine the Brexit; so they neutralised Corbyn by the antisemitism pursuit while May had made all she could to sabotage the Brexit while calling for it in public. Awfully clever of them – but the British voter responded with dropping both established parties. So their clever plot misfired.

People are fickle and not always know what is good for them; there are many demagogues to mislead the crowd. And still, elected legitimate officials should have precedence in governing, while non-elected ones should obey – and it means the Network spooks and media men should know their place.

Sean McBride , says: May 21, 2019 at 3:18 pm GMT

Side note:

How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy?

Spymasters are usually renowned for their inscrutability and for playing their cards close to their vests.

These characters have indulged in an orgy of highly conspicuous partisan political meddling and ranting that has created the strong public impression that they engaged in an attempted coup to overthrow a sitting American president on the basis of a frame-up that was largely fueled by Russian disinformation.

Brennan in particular: can you imagine any previous CIA director comporting himself in this manner? Throwing all caution to the winds? Inconceivable. Brennan, Comey and Clapper have inflicted serious damage on the reputation of the CIA, FBI and ODNI.

Forthcoming books will no doubt get into all the remarkable and bizarre details.

Donald Trump has demonstrated the ability to troll and goad many of his opponents into a state of imbecility. It's a negotiating tactic -- knock them off balance, provoke them to lose control. No matter how smart they are, some people take the bait.

Ding ding ding , says: May 21, 2019 at 4:04 pm GMT
I am sitting here pointing to my nose. Spies run the world – contemporary history in a nutshell. A few provisos:

– It's not just illegal surveillance and blackmail that gives the spies power, it's impunity for even the gravest crimes. If you don't get the message of blackmail you can be tortured or shot, with a bullet like JFK and RFK and Reagan, or with illegal biological weapons like Daschel and Leahy. Institutionalized impunity stares us in the face from US state papers.

– It's not that CIA and other neo-Gestapos escaped control. They were designed from inception for totalitarian control. The one poor bastard in Congress who pointed that out, Tydings, had McCarthy sicced on him for his cheek. CIA is not out of control; it's firmly IN control.

– There is a crucial difference between US and Russian spies. Russians can go over the head of their government to the world. That's the only effective check on state criminal enterprise like CIA. Article 17 of the Russian Constitution says "in the Russian Federation rights and freedoms of person and citizen are recognized and guaranteed pursuant to the generally recognized principles and norms of international law and in accordance with this Constitution." Article 18 states that rights and freedoms of the person and citizen are directly applicable, which prevents the kind of bad-faith tricks the USA pulls, like declaring "non-self executing" treaties, or making legally void reservations, declarations, understandings, and provisos to screw you out of your rights. Article 46(3) guarantees citizens a constitutional right to appeal to inter-State bodies for the protection of human rights and freedoms if internal legal redress has been exhausted. Ratified international treaties including the ICCPR supersede any domestic legislation stipulating otherwise.

Endgame Napoleon , says: May 21, 2019 at 6:14 pm GMT
Isn't it just collusion that holds certain elite groups together, including in some businesses where a lot of chicanery goes on. The most important thing is to be in on it as one of them, not as a person who can be trusted not to say anything, but as one of the gang. It's exactly how absenteeism-friendly offices full of crony parents with crony-parent managers work.

The only problem for the guy at the tippy top is what would happen if such a tight group turned on him / her? Maybe, some leaders see the value in protecting a few brave individuals, like Snowden, letting any coup-stirring spooks know that some people are watching the Establishment's rights violators, too. Those with technical knowledge have more capacity than most to do it or, at least, to understand how it works.

In a country founded on individual liberties, including Fourth Amendment privacy rights that were protected by less greedy generations, the US should have elected leaders that put the US Constitution first, but that is too much to ask in an era when the top dogs in business & government are all colluding for money.

Digital Samizdat , says: May 21, 2019 at 6:40 pm GMT

In Russia, persistent rumours claim the perilous Perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev had been designed and initiated by the KGB chief (1967 – 1982) Yuri Andropov.

FWIW, I have heard the exact same thing from Russian commenters myself. Some have insisted that, if Andropov had lived long enough, he would have carried glasnost and perestroika himself.

Cyrano , says: May 21, 2019 at 7:09 pm GMT
Spies are loathsome bunch, with questionable loyalties and personal integrity. But I believe that overall they play a positive role. They play a positive role because they help adversaries gain insight into their adversary's activities.

If it wasn't for the spies, paranoia about what the other side is doing can get out of hand and cause wrong actions to take place. The problem with the spies is also that no one knows how much they can be trusted and on whose side they are really on.

It was funny during the Cold war (the original one) – whenever each side unveiled that a spy from the other side has defected to them – they would say it was because of ideology – i.e. the spy defected to them because he "believed" in "democracy" or socialism – depending on the case.

And in order to discredit their own spies when they defected to the other side – they would say that they did it for money, because they were greedy and that they betrayed "democracy" or socialism.

The other crucial role that spies usually play is that they allow the adversaries to keep technological balance via industrial espionage. By transferring top military secrets, they don't allow any side to gain crucial strategic advantage that might encourage them to do something foolish – like start a nuclear war. Prime example of this were probably the Rosenbergs – who helped USSR close the nuclear weapons gap with US and kept the world in a shaky nuclear arms balance.

Kirt , says: May 21, 2019 at 10:01 pm GMT
Profound analysis by Mr. Shamir. It confirms that one of the important reasons for the decline of freemasonry is the monopolization of political conspiracy by the intelligence services. Who needs the lodge when you have the CIA.

An aspect of the rule of spies that Mr. Shamir does not touch on is the legitimization of this rule through popular culture. This started with the James Bond novels and movies and by now has become ubiquitous. Spies and assassins are the heroes of the masses. While secrecy is still needed for tactical reasons in the case of specific operations, overall secrecy is not needed nor even desirable. So you have thugs like Pompeo actually boasting of their villainy before audiences of college students at Texas A&M and you have the Mossad supporting the publication of the book Rise and Kill First which is an extensive account of their world-wide assassination policy. They have the power; now they want the perks that go with it, including being treated like rock stars.

israel shamir , says: May 22, 2019 at 4:06 am GMT
@Kirt

Who needs the lodge when you have the CIA

Good explanation of freemasonry's decline, Kirt! As for popular culture – almost all latest cinema characters are spies – like Avengers))

anno nimus , says: May 22, 2019 at 4:44 am GMT
dear mr Shamir, the criminals are not only stupid but also utterly wicked. they will be stricken down in the twinkling of the eye and will cry out why God? all the righteous will shout for joy and give thanks to the Almighty for judging Babylon. woe unto them! they will have no place to hide or run to.

Ezekiel 9 (NKJV)
The Wicked Are Slain
9 Then He called out in my hearing with a loud voice, saying, "Let those who have charge over the city draw near, each with a deadly weapon in his hand." 2 And suddenly six men came from the direction of the upper gate, which faces north, each with his battle-ax in his hand. One man among them was clothed with linen and had a writer's inkhorn at his side. They went in and stood beside the bronze altar.

3 Now the glory of the God of Israel had gone up from the cherub, where it had been, to the threshold of the temple. And He called to the man clothed with linen, who had the writer's inkhorn at his side; 4 and the Lord said to him, "Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and cry over all the abominations that are done within it."

5 To the others He said in my hearing, "Go after him through the city and kill; do not let your eye spare, nor have any pity. 6 Utterly slay old and young men, maidens and little children and women; but do not come near anyone on whom is the mark; and begin at My sanctuary." So they began with the elders who were before the temple. 7 Then He said to them, "Defile the temple, and fill the courts with the slain. Go out!" And they went out and killed in the city.

8 So it was, that while they were killing them, I was left alone; and I fell on my face and cried out, and said, "Ah, Lord God! Will You destroy all the remnant of Israel in pouring out Your fury on Jerusalem?"

9 Then He said to me, "The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great, and the land is full of bloodshed, and the city full of perversity; for they say, 'The Lord has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see!' 10 And as for Me also, My eye will neither spare, nor will I have pity, but I will recompense their deeds on their own head."

11 Just then, the man clothed with linen, who had the inkhorn at his side, reported back and said, "I have done as You commanded me."

Antares , says: May 22, 2019 at 5:01 am GMT
Espionage depends on contra-espionage. We will never get that hold on Jewish spies as they can have on our spies.
Paul Bennett , says: May 22, 2019 at 5:38 am GMT
Great article.

E Michael Jones was just warning President Trump about the possibility of this in the Straits of Hormuz. https://youtu.be/iIm3WuJAVEE?t=272

Spooks are everywhere, from secretaries "losing" important communications to CNN news anchors roleplaying with crisis actors, but they are at their most powerful when they are appointed to powerful positions. President Trump's National Security Advisor is a spook and he does what he wants.

John le Carre described it perfectly in "A Perfect Spy". The spooks form their own country. They are only loyal to themselves.

Yarkob , says: May 22, 2019 at 7:52 am GMT
@Antares that's because the Mossad isn't like "our" spy agencies. it's closer to the old paradigm of the hashishim or true assassins. Mossad "agents" don't gad around wearing dark glasses and tapping phones; they run proper deep cover operations. "sleepers" is a term used in the USA. they have jobs. they look "normal". They integrate
MarkU , says: May 22, 2019 at 8:45 am GMT
Do spies run the world? No not really, bankers run the world.

Bankers constitute most of the deep state in the US/UK in particular and most of Europe. It is the bankers/deep state which control the intelligence agencies. The ethnicity of a hefty proportion of said bankers is plain to see for anyone with functioning critical faculties. How else can a tiny country in the middle east have such influence in the US? How else do we explain why 2/3 of the UK parliament are "friends of Israel" How come financial institutions can commit felonies and no one does jail time? why is Israel allowed to commit war crimes and break international law with total impunity? who got bailed out of their gambling debts at the expense of inflicting "austerity" on most of the western world?

I am open to any sensible alternative hypothesis.

Realist , says: May 22, 2019 at 8:48 am GMT
@Sean McBride

How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy?

Shit floats.

Sally , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:06 am GMT
A global supra-powerful, organized and united, privately directed, publicly backed society of high technology robin hood_mercenary_spooks who conduct sub-legal "scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-your-back [in the nation of the other] routines"; who ignore duty to country, its constitutions, its laws and human rights. The are evil, global acting, high technology nomads with a monopoly on extortion and terror.

Since winning, Trump has been hunted by the spooks-and-scribes freemasonry. <fallacy is that Trump could have gained the assistence of every American, had Trump just used his powers to declassify all secret information and make it available to the public, instead he chases Assange, and continues to conduct the affairs of his office in secret.

Propaganda preys on belief.. it is more powerful than an atomic weapon.. when the facts are hidden or when the facts are changed, distorted or destroyed.

Your statement "spooks and ex-spooks feel more proximity to their enemies and colleagues in other countries than to their fellow citizens" fails makes clear the importance of containment-of-citizen access to information. Nation states are armed, rule making structures that invent propaganda and control access to information. Information containment and filtering is the essence of the political and economic power of a national leader and it is more import to the evil your article addresses.

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/08/josh-gottheimer-democrats-yemen/ <i wrote IRT to the article, that contents appearing in private media supported monopoly powered corporations and distributed to the public, direct the use of military and the willingness of soldiers of 22 different countries.

Control of the media is 50 times more important than control of the government? Nearly all actions of consequence are intended to drain the governed masses and such efforts can only be successful if the lobbying, false-misleading mind controlling privately owned (92% own by just 6 entities) centrally directed media can effectively control the all information environments.

I am bothered by you article because it looks to be Trumped weighted and failes to make clear it is these secret apolitical, human rights abusers, that direct the contents of the media distributed articles that appear in the privately owmed, media distributed to the public. Also not explained is how the cost of advertising is shared by the monopoly powered corporations, and it is that advertising that is the source of support that keeps the fake news in business, the nation state propaganda in line, and the support of robin -hood terror.

Monopoly powered global corporation advertising funds the fake and misleading private media, that is why the open internet has been shut in tight. In order for the evil, global acting, high technology nomads to continue their extortion and terror activities they need the media, its their only real weapon. I have never meet a member of any of the twenty two agencies that was not a trained, certified mental case terrorist.

Anon [295] Disclaimer , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:08 am GMT
I think the interplay between the spooks and scribes warrants a deeper explanation. Covert action refers to anything in which the author can disclaim his responsibility, ie it looks like someone else or something else. The handler in a political operation cannot abuse his agent because the agent is the actor. The handler in an intelligence gathering operation can abuse his agent because the agent merely enables action.

The political operations in this case are propaganda. The Congress of Cultural Freedom is the most clearly described one to date. Propaganda is necessary in any mass society to ensure that voters care about the right issues, the right way, at the right time. Propaganda can be true, false, or a mix of the two. Black propaganda deals in falsehoods, ie the Steele Dossier. Black propaganda works best when it enables a pre-planned operation, but it pollutes the intelligence gathering process with disinformation.

Intelligence gathering is colloquially called investigative reporting. If anyone knows about Gary Webb, Alan Frankovich, or Michael Hastings they know you can't really do that job well for very long. So how do the old timers last so long? It's a back and forth. The reporter brings all of his information on a subject to his intelligence source (handler). The source then says, "print this, print that, sit on that, and since you've been a good boy here's a little something you didn't know." The true role of the investigative reporter is to conduct counterintelligence and package it as a limited hangout.

While understanding the mechanics is helpful don't neglect the purpose. Why is more important than how. The why is control. They don't care what you believe, but only what you do. You can be on the left, right, mainstream, or fringe and they won't care as long as you eat what they serve. Take a minute to think about what they want you to do and strongly consider not doing it.

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propaganda-network-built-by-the-cia-a-worldwide-network.html

http://danwismar.com/uploads/Bernstein%20-%20CIA%20and%20Media.htm

joeshittheragman , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:29 am GMT
Do Spies Run the World?
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
If they're Jewish spies – then yes.
Vojkan , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:45 am GMT
Not usually a big fan of Israel Shamir's pieces but this one on spooks is truly excellent. The article is spot on.
9/11 Inside job , says: May 22, 2019 at 10:37 am GMT
Spies do not run the world , they are merely agents of the "families" who use them to retain and increase their control ,power and wealth .
cowherd , says: May 22, 2019 at 10:46 am GMT
@Sean McBride And now Trump should have then all rounded up and hung from the trees in the front of the Whitehouse. Anything less should be seen as encouragement.
atlantis_dweller , says: May 22, 2019 at 11:26 am GMT
Don't agree.

[Should don't agree, agree, troll, and lol "buttons" for columns be added? I think it would be a nice extra].

mike k , says: May 22, 2019 at 11:49 am GMT
The worst among us rule over the rest of us. As Plato said, this needs to change. How to do that? We don't know, but we desperately need to find out ..
Anon [421] Disclaimer , says: May 22, 2019 at 12:41 pm GMT
@Sean McBride

Obama was a very effective promoter of what might be called the "globalist" agenda. He of course didn't invent it but did appoint those three.

Wayne Madsen gave a convincing account in his speculation that both Obama's parent's were CIA operatives. So it's "all the family" and in the details one might conclude with the author that indeed "spies run the world."

[Jun 05, 2019] Trumpies should bear in mind that Gallagher's own fellow Seals testified against him that's how depraved this guy Trump is pardoning is.

Notable quotes:
"... Trump's eunuchs are still guarding and serving their master I see. And their master is a psychopath who is getting ready to pardon the tough guy kind of psychopath he admires. Of course the Orange psychopath doesn't consider the fact that this kind of thing , just like the Iraqi prison tortures , incentivizes the commission of war crimes by our opponents and allies, and in doing so puts US service members at greater risk. ..."
May 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

renfro, says: May 20, 2019 at 7:02 am GMT

@Peter Akuleyev

Trump's eunuchs are still guarding and serving their master I see. And their master is a psychopath who is getting ready to pardon the tough guy kind of psychopath he admires. Of course the Orange psychopath doesn't consider the fact that this kind of thing , just like the Iraqi prison tortures , incentivizes the commission of war crimes by our opponents and allies, and in doing so puts US service members at greater risk.

Here's Trump's hero ..

"One day, from his sniper nest, Chief Gallagher shot a girl in a flower-print hijab who was walking w/ other girls on the riverbank. She dropped, clutching her stomach, & the other girls dragged her away."

A mass murderer according to Senior Seals: "Would order needless risks, to fire rockets at houses for no apparent reason. He routinely parked an armored truck on a Tigris River bridge & emptied the truck's heavy machine gun into neighborhoods on twith no discernible targets."

"Platoon members said he spent much of his time in a hidden perch with a sniper rifle, firing three or four times as often as other platoon snipers. They said he boasted about the number of people he had killed, including women."

Two other snipers said, the chief shot an unarmed man in a white robe with a wispy white beard. They said the man fell, a red blotch spreading on his back."

Gallagher ordered a hatchet & a hunting knife" before 2017 deployment. He texted the man who made them (a Navy Seal veteran) shortly after arriving in Iraq: "I'll try and dig that knife or hatchet on someone's skull!"

May 2017, a SEAL medic was treating a wounded 15 y/o Islamic State fighter. "He's mine," Gallagher said. "Gallagher walked up without a word and stabbed the wounded teenager several times in the neck and once in the chest with his hunting knife, killing him."

He didn't even try to hide the murder of the 15 y/o. He brought other seals around minutes later & took a photo over the body. Later, he texted the photo to a fellow SEAL in California: "Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/us/navy-seals-crimes-of-war.html

Now Trumpies bear in mind that Gallagher's own fellow Seals testified against him that's how depraved this guy Trump is pardoning is.

Here's Gallagher if you live in a stand your ground state and run into him shoot the bastard, he'll have his hunting knife on him so you can claim self defense.

. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D64_hykW4AEqObU.jpg

[Jun 05, 2019] 'Unlimited reach, no safeguards' Snowden warns of greatest social control scheme in history

Jun 05, 2019 | www.rt.com

The US government has a tendency to hijack and weaponize revolutionary innovations, Edward Snowden said, noting that the natural human desire to communicate with others is now being exploited on an unprecedented scale. "Our utopian vision for the future is never guaranteed to be realized," Snowden told the audience in Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada via live stream from Moscow this week, stressing that the US government "corrupted our knowledge... towards a military purpose."

They took our nuclear capability and transformed it into the most horrible weapon that the world had ever witnessed. And we're seeing an atomic moment of computer science... Its reach is unlimited... but its safeguards are not!

Also on rt.com You've been warned: Widespread US face surveillance is 'imminent reality', says tech privacy report

The whistleblower, who in 2013 leaked a trove of highly classified information about global spying operations by the National Security Agency, argued that, armed with modern technology and with the help of social media and tech giants, governments are becoming "all-powerful" in their ability to monitor, analyze, and influence behavior.

It's through the use of new platforms and algorithms that are built on and around these capabilities that they are able to shift our behavior. In some cases, they are able to predict our decisions and also nudge them to different outcomes.

Also on rt.com Privacy? What's that? Facebook lawyer argues users have none

The natural human need for "belonging" is being exploited and users voluntarily consent to surrender virtually all of their data by signing carefully drafted user agreements that no one bothers to read. "Everything has hundreds and hundreds of pages of legal jargon that we're not qualified to read and assess and yet they are considered binding upon us," Snowden said.

And now these institutions, which are both commercial and governmental... have structuralized and entrenched it to where it has become now the most effective means of social control in the history of our species.

WATCH Edward Snowden's full speech:

[Jun 05, 2019] Military Intelligence? by Hugh O'Neill

Notable quotes:
"... " nothing to address poverty, homelessness, healthcare, low income, incarceration; nor does it address climate change Military spending diverts resources. If we want genuine socio-economic and climate justice, new thinking is essential" ..."
"... 'failure to do his utmost' ..."
Jun 05, 2019 | off-guardian.org
For no important reason, I was thinking about the Royal Navy's new aircraft carrier, HMS "Queen Elizabeth II". This ship has been in the news, but for all the wrong reasons: her commander was recently removed by helicopter whilst anchored in the Forth, accused of having used the ship's car for personal use whilst in the US (maybe he should have used a helicopter?).

Even Lord West of Spithead (former head of the RN) expressed his bemusement at the style of management. But if this really is a question of misuse of public money, then it seems but a drop in several oceans compared with the bigger pictures – firstly of defence spending, secondly of defence strategy, and lastly of man-management.

Firstly, the cost to build these two 65,000T aircraft carriers is currently about $10 Billion (when it comes to such eye-watering amounts of money, the figures always expand because defence spending is notoriously adrift). This is however a bargain compared with US super-carriers (100,000T) which are nuclear-powered, cost about $15 Billion to build (and $3 Billion to de-commission).

The US fields about 10 such ships: they are quite defenceless (thus have to be escorted by various surface escorts and submarines) thus 5-6,000 men. The 2013 cost of clothing, training, feeding, paying such numbers put the daily running costs to USD $6.5 Million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-class_aircraft_carrier). If the Royal Navy deems her Captain over-used the ship's car, then money must be tight.

But what of the aircraft the ship was built to carry? QEII is supposed to carry 36 F-35Bs (designed for US Marines) built by US firm, Lockheed-Martin.

The F-35 programme was 7 years behind schedule and $150 Billion over-budget (perfectly acceptable in defence spending!). Lockheed-Martin are not Boeing – and any reference to their 737 Max would be inappropriate – but when half remain grounded for lack of spares, then one (for-the-price-of-two) costs $300 million.

The 72 aircraft for two ships adds $11 Billion. (N.B. these are their off-the-shelf price, not their whole-of-life cost).

Secondly, QE II apparently now has 12 F-35Bs and will be attached to the US Marines. British taxpayers' money has not been well spent. I don't know how much a supersonic missile or torpedo costs, nor indeed a swarm of plastic drones, but such an expensive ship makes for a very juicy target.

The first aircraft carrier HMS Hermes, was launched in 1919 and technology has changed in 100 years, but not strategy. Carriers' vulnerability puts a serious counterweight to any 'prestige' they might bring to erstwhile superpowers; indeed, the UK's prostrated serfitude to the US destroys any last pretence of British Sovereignty.

All empires fall: losing one may be a misfortune, but to lose two is pure incompetence. Australia, Canada and NZ cling on like drowning men, weighed-down by oxymoronic military intelligence and misplaced political allegiance. Peace benefits Humanity. Wars profit Bankers.

As per the latest NZ Budget, our military will spend $5 Billion, doing " nothing to address poverty, homelessness, healthcare, low income, incarceration; nor does it address climate change Military spending diverts resources. If we want genuine socio-economic and climate justice, new thinking is essential".

Finally, man-management: the Royal Navy in 1757 executed Admiral Byng for 'failure to do his utmost'. Voltaire considered that this was the British way "pour encorager les autres". Is it likely that the removed commander will ever again do his utmost for King & Country?

British Secretary of Defense (Stupid Boy, Gavin Williamson) has walked the plank for breaching Cabinet duplicity, and PM May has been given a seat on the next helicopter. Napoleon said: Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake.

andyoldlabour

Aircraft carrier = very large target.
Sink the carrier after it launches aircraft and where are the aircraft going to land?
Modern missile technology has made large ships obsolete.
William HBonney
Anti missile technology is devastatingly effective. If carriers are sitting ducks, you'd struggle to name the last one sunk.
harry law
An MIT security expert says that Israel's famed Iron Dome missile defense system is flawed, with a success rate of under five percent.

During the November 2012 conflict, a detailed review of a large number of photographs of Iron Dome interceptor contrails revealed that the rocket-defense system's success rate was very low -- as low as 5 percent or, perhaps, even less. A variety of media outlets have attributed the low casualty number to the supposed effectiveness of the Iron Dome system, quoting Israeli officials as saying it has destroyed 90 percent of the Hamas rockets it targeted. But close study of photographic and video imagery of Iron Dome engagements with Hamas rockets -- both in the current conflict and in the 2012 hostilities -- shows that the low casualties in Israel from artillery rocket attacks can be ascribed to Israeli civil defense efforts, rather than the performance of the Iron Dome missile defense system.
https://thebulletin.org/2014/07/the-evidence-that-shows-iron-dome-is-not-working/
Note this against Hamas 'Roman candles' not against ballistic missiles travelling at mach 10 [7,500 MPH]

mark
The last major naval engagement where US fleet carriers were under any serious threat was the invasion of the Philippines in 1944. Of course the Japanese were not equipped with anti ship missiles at the time. There were many instances of damage from aircraft in suicide attacks, but a single hit would not sink a fleet carrier. From memory I believe at least one smaller escort carrier was sunk in 1945.

I think several British carriers were sunk, one by a submarine early in the war, one off Norway in 1940 and the Ark Royal in 1941. There may have been others. Some scort carriers were also lost. Germany introduced the first anti ship missiles in 1943, the Fritz X and Henschel 293. They were very effective in a number of attacks off Italy, damaging the battleship Warspite and sinking a cruiser and a number of other targets, as well as the Italian battleship Roma as it was on its way to surrender.

In Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, opposing naval forces were so weak as to be virtually non existent. Anti ship missiles were used by Argentine forces in 1982 to sink two large vessels, the Coventry and Atlantic Conveyor, a merchant ship converted into a makeshift aircraft carrier. The last case occurred in 2006, when Hezbollah severely damaged and nearly sank a large Israeli warship. It appears that the missile actually failed to explode.

Countries like Iran and DPRK are now equipped with a large number of anti ship missiles of far greater sophistication than any previously employed in battle. There are surprises in every war, and no one can accurately predict what will occur until battle is joined. Experienced and competent commanders expected cavalry to play an important part in WW1. Many others doubted that armoured and mechanised forces would be effective in WW2, because of problems of supply and command and control, or that aircraft would be capable of sinking heavily armoured warships. But it seems reasonable to draw attention to the increasing vulnerability of large aircraft carriers.

Yarkob
I'd also struggle to name the last conflict in which a CVG was put under any threat at all, ..the new gen of AM (lasers) will be the nuts, but I'd still not like to be on board a ship these days in a "real" conflict.
andyoldlabour
The Japanese had 20 aircraft carriers sunk in WW", including the "unsinkable" Shinano. The US had 12 carriers sunk in that war, and the UK lost 8.
The last aircraft carrier to be sunk, was the IJN Amagi in Kure Harbour in July 1945.
William HBonney
So, seventy four years ago

Island nations need carriers, the threat is always from the sea.

Tim Jenkins
I think you'll find that Jamaica has more jet skis, than aircraft carriers . . .

Regardless, the biggest threats from the seas, were always the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, False Flag Pirates and good ole' Uncle $ham's navy,
on the hunt for corporate resources to thieve . . .

Perhaps you would like to stress your brain, (rather than arguing some mathematical stupidity) and give us all just one example of when Aircraft Carriers were used defensively, William ? Additionally, Bill, even friendly fire and silly lil' accidents with old munitions can immobilise an aircraft carrier, to the point where somebody like John McCain jumps ship ASAP, for example on the USS Forrestal

"I'm an old Navy pilot. I know when a crisis calls for all hands on deck,"
Sen. McCain said >>> records show otherwise !

Show some respect for others' intelligence.

mark
McCain had to be flown off the Forrestal. He was in serious danger of being lynched by his crewmates after his negligence caused around 130 dead.
William HBonney
I have great respect for the intelligence of others, but I fear my country could become a satellite of Russia.

The UK isn't Jamaica. It has more people, and a tradition of invention which has elevated its position in the world.

As to aircraft carriers, they are an offensive weapon (attack being the better part of defence) , but always part of a carrier group. The defense of the vessel dependent on the air power of her aircraft, and to a lesser extent the accompanying fleet.

The world is a dangerous place, don't take the freedoms we have in the UK for granted. If you doubt that, live in an undemocratic country. I do, and it makes me love my country more.

John
"My country had become a stale lite off Russia" fuck right off you're a puppet nation as it is you MSM led sissy
mark
The UK already is a satellite. It is a US satellite. It is more of a US satellite than the old GDR ever was of the Soviet Union.

The world certainly is a dangerous place. I'm sure that most Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Yemenis, Palestinians, Iranians and Venezuelans would fully agree with you. It is a dangerous place largely because of the homicidal antics and military adventures of rogue terrorist regimes like the USA and its satellites like the UK as they rampage across the planet slaughtering, starving and immiserating tens of millions, like Nazi Germany on steroids. Which even now are simultaneously threatening further criminal wars of aggression against three of those countries.

You're certainly wise not to take freedoms for granted. They are ancient history. In the UK as in the USA, stringent censorship is being imposed and civil liberties are being shredded. Whistleblowers and dissidents who reveal evidence of numerous war crimes and atrocities are increasingly subject to persecution and intimidation by a corrupt and politicised judicial system, with a growing number of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. We are all subject to an Orwellian system of state snooping and surveillance. Torture has bee normalised, and we have a "Leader of the Free World" who is an enthusiastic advocate of torture, inheriting a long established global Gulag of concentration camps, torture chambers and secret prisons in a score of countries, including UK territory, where thousands of unfortunates have been and are being tortured and murdered on an industrial scale.

I agree with you that you live in an undemocratic country. If that makes you love your country more, good luck to you.

UreKismet
I dunno why they still bother with carriers, I realise the fleet bossfella likes to hang out on one, but if the navy is still any use for escorts or carrying troops etc which it likely isn't as sea is slow and planes do most of that stuff now, but anyway if the navy does need it's own aeroplanes for anything more than empire building I woulda thought it would be smarter to do what my old man did in ww2.

He flew an avengerMk2 in the english fleet air arm as escort for convoys up to Murmansk. They didn't use aircraft carriers I dunno why, prolly just not wanting to waste resources on commies, truth be told. Instead he and his cobbers were launched into the air by steam catapult off the foredeck of freighters.

They flew patrol looking out for nazis then landed their plane (which had floats) beside the 'mothership' and got craned aboard.
That would seem to me to be smarter as it doesn't require putting all yer eggs in one basket. As far as the old bastard was concerned it was better too, since the english navy appears to have learned bugger all from the battle of Jutland in the first half of the 20th century euro war where the english navy lost lost 3 battlecruisers, 3 armored cruisers, and 8 destroyers off the coast of Denmark in 1916.

Navy architects appear to have done nothing about protecting the cordite magazines from flash explosion in the 20+ year interregnum between the two blues, cause the HMS Hood had exactly the same design flaw of a bottleneck with inboard cordite distribution causing lax safety practices as the boats in the Jutland debacle, resulting in the 'mighty hood' going down a coupla minutes after first being hit by a german shell. The magazine blew up, 3 men survived and more than 1300 crew did not.

Then the ark royal, the one boat the old bugger did fly off early on in his ww2 gig, was sunk thanks to incredible stupidity and incompetence by its leadership.
No wonder all the kiwi pilots were only too happy to take the 'shit detail' the english navy offered of flying off freighters in the North Sea.

Building vast floating targets seems to me to have been more about admirals' penis envy than sensible strategic planning. Useful for a handful of years in the thousands of years old arseholes have been getting young men to kill each other, by the end of ww2 aircraft carriers had become surplus to needs and nothing has happened since then to alter that.
Same same goes for huge nuke subs, no matter how many kazillions is spent on making them invisible, the edge is lost in a matter of months and within a short time even small non-superpower navies know where all the genocidal, population-killing, nuke subs are. If USuk ever do decide in a fit of lunacy to attack Iran, I betcha the Iranians will knock off most of the big stuff (aircraft carriers, battleships and nuke subs) with a flotilla of craftily utilised inflatables in the first few days.

All that money literally billions every year, which could be used employing citizens to do constructive stuff within their communities gets blown in bribes, boats and bombs just so that scummy politicians and brainless navy bosses get to show off in the most facile dick measuring contest since Churchill needed a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers to try and meet Uncle Joe's challenge way back when. lol.

andyoldlabour
I have to correct you about no aircraft carriers being used on the Russian convoy operation, there were several.
They were mostly converted merchant ships, with decks around 500 feet long, and carried Hurricanes, Swordfish and Martlets.
I know this because my late uncle served on HMS Avenger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Avenger_(D14)

http://www.royalnavyresearcharchive.org.uk/ESCORT/ACTIVITY.htm#.XPdqqo97mUk

http://www.royalnavyresearcharchive.org.uk/ESCORT/TRACKER.htm#.XPdr7I97mUk

UreKismet
Fair enough, my knowledge is confined to what the old man said. He was always whining about his back getting permanently buggered by the catapult.
In defense I will say that after checking the links that the so called aircraft carriers used on the Murmansk run all appear to be freighters converted into 'carriers' rather than purpose built ships.
I have a brother who lapped all that war stuff up who would most likely know more, the little I know was when in some sort of weird post his karking it curiosity I bought (but never actually put together ) a model of a fleet arm avenger Mk2 as far as I can work out he was in either 851 or 855 squadron but am not even sure of that.
William HBonney
Salisbury (military action by an antagonistic foreign power using WMD's), demonstrates what happens if a country is not resolute about its defence.

Sometimes that means building weapons systems capable of taking the consequences right up to the enemies coastline.

A carrier is only a 'sitting duck' if one considers it as a single vessel, but no navy would use them like that. They are an integrated weapons system, and kept well out of harms way. Typically, a carrier group would destroy the means to wage war on it long before any missiles were launched at it.

John
Well we spotted the liberal shill who believes every MSM story printed. Are you antonym in his new Jew profile? Probably
mark
Salisbury (false flag operation by out of control Spook Agencies) demonstrates what happens when we are ruled by half wits concocting transparent provocations as a pretext for aggression.
Yarkob
"Salisbury (military action by an antagonistic foreign power using WMD's), demonstrates what happens if a country is not resolute about its defence."

LOL

sorry, that's all your comment warranted. For a proper response, see: OffG, Craig Murray, MoA et al..

again, LOL

Northern
For a start, you're on the wrong website if you think your first statement won't go unchallenged.

All the Salisbury incident 'demonstrated' was that Cold War spy games are still very much a part of our psychopathic leader's toolbox. Everything else beyond that is unsubstantiated speculation of which we'll likely never know the truth and you'd have to be either a simpleton, or a blatant liar to suggest otherwise.

I won't bother with the rest of your post because arguing the pros and cons of a Carrier's military capabilities and application means I have to implicitly accept the terminological trick (pulled by both yourself above, our governments and the companies that build these things) that an aircraft carrier somehow qualifies as a 'defensive' weapon.

Tutisicecream
Ah "When I was a lad"

Be careful to be guided by this golden rule. Stick close to your desks and never go to sea, and you all may be rulers of the Queen's Navee!

When you realise how much money is poured into these HMS Sitting Ducks you realise just how far we have been duped when told there is never enough money for the NHS.

Hugh O'Neill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGQ-wgPGTp8
Tut, your last paragraph reminded me of Eisenhower's "Humanity hanging from a cross of iron" speech from 1953. Things shave got steadily worse since then.
Not if but when
Military Intelligence?

I would argue, yes, there is a lot of intelligence, because one cannot be dumb stupid idiot when able to appropriate vast amount of vital resources to build plain criminal evil destructive instruments of death.

Not if but when

.. put the daily running costs to USD $6.5 Million

The ship broadside, if in Australia, can be used to promote/advertise racing and gambling.

Grafter
Why are we allowing this shit to happen ?
John
Because Brits are cowards and have had decades of being told to do a Gandhi aka fuck all in regards to getting change. Voting never changed a thing you asked for violence on the other hand does. Do you think our leaders would listen if they knew they had a good chance of having no head left?
Not if but when
.. what power(s) do 'we' have to prevent shit from -- any shit -- from happening?
harry law
This from the 'war nerd' describing how new missiles have made the carriers obsolete
"Every single change in technology in the past half a century has had "Stop building carriers!" written all over it. And nobody in the navy brass paid any attention.
The lesson here is the same one all of you suckers should have learned from watching the financial news this year: the people at the top are just as dumb as you are, just meaner and greedier. And that goes for the ones running the US surface fleet as much as it does for the GM or Chrysler honchos. "The purpose of the Navy," Vice Admiral John Bird, commander of the Seventh Fleet, tells me, "is not to fight." The mere presence of the Navy should suffice, he argues, to dissuade any attack or attempt to destabilize the region. From Yokosuka, Guam, and Honolulu
That's the kind of story people are still writing. It's so stupid, that first line, I won't even bother with it: "The purpose of the Navy is not to fight." No kidding. The Seventh Fleet covers the area included in that 2000 km range for the new Chinese anti-ship weapons, so I guess it's a good thing they're not there to fight". http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/all/1/
Hugh O'Neill
Harry, thanks for the superb link: the war nerd takes no prisoners.
mark
In the next war, carriers will be more vulnerable to missile attack than battleships were to air attack in WW2. Imagine a 100,000 ton carrier sinking with its air group and 5-6,000 crew, its crippled nuclear reactors poisoning the ocean.
nwwoods
I understand that Japan recently committed to purchasing a fleet of F-35s, perhaps because they are by default optimized for kamikaze ops.
Hugh O'Neill
Nwwoods – Great response: financial kamikaze. Divine flatulence
mark
Perhaps they could supply the captain with a bicycle instead, painted the appropriate shade of navy blue, and save a bit of money.

These 65k ton carriers are the biggest ships ever operated by the Navy. Its battleships and fleet carriers of WW2 were 35,000 and 25,000 tons respectively. They might as well have been named HMS White Elephant I and II. One will be mothballed immediately (maybe they could sell it to the Chinese?) The other may operate with a much reduced complement of a handful of aircraft (if the F35s ever work.)

This is a ludicrous prestige project that will be seen as a national embarrassment as time goes by, like the scrapped Nimrod AEW. It reflects the delusions of our ruling elite ("What if we want to bomb North Korea?") and those of people like Admiral West.

To operate, aircraft carriers require an escort of 5-6 frigates and destroyers and a submarine, for anti aircraft and anti submarine defence. These won't be available. Britain has a grand total of 17 frigates and destroyers, 5 – 6 of which are out of commission undergoing refits at any one time. British frigates and destroyers are less well equipped than their foreign counterparts. Crewing even one of these ships will be a major headache. The personnel strength of the Navy is currently 29,000. Even the cost of fuel for operations is prohibitive. The US carriers have nuclear reactors which only require refuelling around once every fourteen years.

It would have made much more sense to buy a few extra frigates and destroyers instead. Maybe the odd small aircraft carrier of around 20,000 tons like the Invincible class, if they really wanted. Though most people think in any future wars large aircraft carriers against a half competent enemy would be little more than floating coffins, very vulnerable to the new class of anti ship missiles like the Yakhonts/ Sunburn. In recent times, they have only been used in modern colonial style warfare against the present day equivalent of the Zulus and the Fuzzy Wuzzies. Brave but not terribly well equipped fighting men who don't have so much as an Airfix model Spitfire for air defence. Aircraft carriers would be terribly vulnerable if used even against countries like Iran or North Korea.

And then there are the aircraft. I think the actual unit cost of the F35 comes in at something around $400 million a pop all in. Whether it will ever work is open to question. America has problems building aircraft that don't work. This thing has problems with its engines, which keep conking out in mid flight, with the oxygen system, which keeps failing with rather unfortunate consequences for the pilot, and the cannon, which won't fire because its computer won't work. It has wings which are too small for a good fighter, and it can't bomb anything if it faces any stronger opposition than a few tribesmen with AK47s. Apart from that, it's okay, though we probably can't afford more than a dozen of them. The previous F22 was a similar failure. The production line was closed down after 100 – odd of them had been made, though they were supposed to produce 1,000.

America used to produce some very good aircraft, like the F14/15/16/18. The F35 is supposed to replace them, but the new aircraft is grossly inferior to them all. They are talking about putting the F18 and A10 back into production. This is eerily reminiscent of the Luftwaffe in WW2, whose new aircraft projects like the Messerschmitt 210 and Heinkel 177 were flying death traps. They were forced to put obsolete aircraft like the Junkers 87 and the Heinkel 111 back into production till the end of the war, so that they had something to fight with, however inadequate.

Still, so long as Lockheed's profits are okay, I suppose that's the main thing. And Gavin Pugwash Williamson, or his successor, can posture and preen about how Britain rules the waves with HMS White Elephant and its dozen Flying Turkeys, even if they can't scrape a crew together for it. Why should England tremble?

Rhys Jaggar
HMS White Elephant was an electoral bung of Gordon Brown. Whose constituency built the damn thing?

Real warfare now is about blasting the ionosphere to create awful weather in enemy territory. It is releasing super pests onto other contitenrs to infest agricultural crops. It is engineering viruses to be more harmful and releasing them abroad. It is crashing global stock markets to wipe competitors out.

Aircraft carriers had their day. In about 1945 .

I do not want proxy wars either. Not in Ukraine, not in Syria, not in North Korea, not in Venezuela.

But all our corrupt officials and representatives think wasting trillions of our money on archaic overpriced ersatz masturbation toys is just fine and dandy.

It is not ok to sell their daughters into foreign prostitution though.

Oh no .

Mucho
By my estimations, the only way out of this mess is to buckle the machine and arrange mass withdrawal of labour. Crash the whole rotten lot of it
Maggie
Fantastic idea, however I think you will find that many workers don't even know what or who they are working for.
Pity we can't post a list of companies?
mark
The only problem with that is that they don't need the labour any more. The proles are surplus to requirements and can now be culled, as the Davos/ Bilderberg crew have decided. They aren't needed any more to dig coal, smelt steel ingots, or hammer rivets in shipyards.
Mucho
it's the only weapon we have, either that, or we remain eternally enslaved by the forces of evil
Mucho
Here is a link to a CIA document showing details of the effects of millimeter waves on biological structures. It is a translation of the original Soviet files from research done in 1977, declassified in 2012. This comes from the Fullerton Informer, who, by my estimation, is a truly great person, a beacon of light. 5G equals permanent exposure to this man made radiation, 24/7. This is an enormous threat to you and your family, wherever you are. TIME TO START TAKING ACTION AGAINST THIS EVIL
https://thefullertoninformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/cia-millimeter-waves-1.pdf
wardropper
Re: aircraft carriers in general:
I sometimes feel that I could show up somewhere in the corridors of the Pentagon with a plan to recycle people's shirts and underwear cheaply into some sort of instant camouflage in the event of an "enemy" guided-missile attack upon one of "our" aircraft carriers, and there would be a high-ranking official there daft enough to fund me to the tune of billions of dollars to develop it.
Certifiable insanity is no stranger to the military environment of modern western government.
Ramdan
"When the Way governs the world, the proud stallions drag dung carriages. When the Way is lost to the world, war horses are bred outside the city."

"Weapons are ominous tools. They are abhorred by all creatures. Anyone who follows the Way shuns them."

"Those who advice the ruler on the Way, do not want the world subdued with weapons."
Tao Te Ching

We live in society that grew accustomed to war and violence as the sole mean to "solve" its conflicts. The irony of this is that now there is a hughe issue with bullying and cyber-bullying and people are still 'wondering' how was this ever possible in a, so called, civilized society.
A 'civilized society' that still debates what's the best (more economic and efficient) way to go to war, that is, the more efficient way to manslaughter .

wardropper
I think our main problem is that most people are, essentially, decent, whereas politicians are not.
And it's the politicians who make the decisions
Mucho
Welcome to the Age of the Stupid – we know virtually all the answers to our problems, but do the opposite for the benefit of a few thousand of Satan's agents
wardropper
That is extremely well-said.
And I am, myself, probably sometimes guilty of what you say too, although I do try not to be.
DiggerUK
With missile capabilities at the level they have now reached, aircraft carriers are as useless as WW2 battleships turned out to be in the 1940's.

Russia recently demonstrated the maximum tactical use they can be put to, when they sent their one remaining carrier to Syria. Against a smaller power they give you the advantage of air superiority when deployed as a 'pop up airfield', but against another major power they would be useless. The recent US sabre waving in the Gulf may impress the gormless, but even Iran has the missile capability to make them worthless.

As to the racket that is war, Major General Smedley Butler published this pamphlet in 1935 based on an after dinner speech he made. Not the finest writing, but well worth a read _
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.pdf

SO.
The AK's not a carrier in the conventional sense so you shouldn't really consider it as such.

Whilst it's original function might have been considered to be a nuclear launch platform (there were 500kT nukes under it's deck) it's real purpose was as an area denial system designed to kill aircraft within it's engagement envelope.

As such, somewhat ironically the ancient old soviet aircraft carrier is probably the only thing afloat that could withstand a modern missile attack by itself.

mark
The AK also served another useful purpose, generating hysteria in the media, with Sid Scurvy, Ace Reporter of the Daily Bugle, warning how Putin was about to murder us all in our beds when it came within a couple of hundred of miles of the UJK coastline. Whilst simultaneously running pieces about how the thing was so clapped out it was about to sink.
DunGroanin
The Anglo-Imperialists (self loving white peoples) are prepared to go down fighting.. if they can't have it, neither can anyone else.

Time that the non- brain dead 5-eyes morons realused that we didn't win the second world war by outselves. There were many millions of Sub-continentals, Africans and Afro-Caribbeans as well Afro-Americans, Native Americans etc. AND the millions and millions of Russians, military and civilians, who actually stopped the Anglo-Imperialists proxy Nazi mercenaries and wiped out their military strength. Only than did the 'Allies' make a token effort at invasion.

Aircraft carriers are totally useless in modern warfare. They are visible from the sky and vulnerable to missiles – hypersonic and ballistic, never mind frogmen with limpets.

John
Can tell you Gott two thumbs down for the use of her word 'white'. Fucking skin colour pussies are to easy to scare
Jen
Let me be the first to say it!

Military intelligence? Does that even exist in the context of the British armed forces?

" Finally, man-management: the Royal Navy in 1757 executed Admiral Byng for 'failure to do his utmost' "

Yes, doing his utmost meant he should have arranged with the enemy to execute him.

Paul
Byng was the victim of politicians and the Admirality who were actually responsible for the failure to stop the French taking Menorca by sending his fleet late and ill- equipped. It was embarrassingly obvious to most involved that it was an unjust, vindictive and low life response. He was shot on the deck of his own ship. It was a typically British way of doing things, when in trouble, blame somebody else and punish them. Nobody at the top is ever to blame in Britain; it's a tradition that is still well maintained
mark
The powers that be seemed determined to uphold these traditions by treating Julian Assange as a latter day Admiral Byng.
mark
Then, as now, shit flows downhill.
Fair dinkum
Proof.
That humans are headed for extinction.
wardropper
Unless, of course, those who believe in the human spirit are right, and further evolution lies in that direction
It looks indeed as if our physical existence at least is headed nowhere – in its current form at any rate
Maggie
So Wardropper – It appears that Brave New World was actually predictive programming? And all these years I thought it was a fiction.
wardropper
I think we can safely relax, Maggie – somewhat.
It is certainly fiction.
So we have our fiction on one side, and our personal experience on the other.
What kind of cocktail we make of that is up to us, I reckon.

[Jun 04, 2019] Attkisson 10 Questions I d Ask Robert Mueller (If I Were Allowed)

Highly recommended!
Jun 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Attkisson: 10 Questions I'd Ask Robert Mueller (If I Were Allowed)

by Tyler Durden Tue, 06/04/2019 - 11:05 0 SHARES Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print Authored by Sharyl Attkisson, op-ed via The Hill,

Most of now-former special counsel Robert Mueller 's public statement to the press last week seemed to fall under the category of "Fair enough." After all, the man did nearly two years of work, he kept largely silent throughout, and he alternately was called a hero or a dog.

So the day Mueller resigns, he chooses to make a fairly brief statement putting a button on all of it, and at the same time declining to take any questions, before gliding back into private life.

But there's at least one comment Mueller made that nags at me. It's when he said, "If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so."

Mueller must have had his reasons for shading his commentary in that way rather than in the other direction: If they'd found adequate evidence to implicate Trump in a crime, or even "collusion," they would have said that, too.

The statement Mueller chose to give carries with it an implication that his team looked for evidence of President Trump 's innocence but simply could not find it. With that in mind, I thought of a short list of questions I'd like to ask Mueller, if ever permitted to do so:

  1. What witnesses did you interview and what evidence did you collect in an attempt to exonerate Trump or prove him not guilty? (I believe the answer would be, "None. It's not the job of a special counsel or prosecutor to do so." Therefore, was Mueller's comment appropriate?)
  2. Does it concern you that the FBI claimed " collection tool failure " in stating that 19,000 text messages between former FBI employees Lisa Page and Peter Strozk had been deleted and were unavailable for review by the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general? Is it worth investigating how the inspector general was able to recover the messages , when the FBI said it could not? Does the FBI lack the technical expertise, or the will? Isn't it a serious issue that should be addressed, either way?
  3. Along the same lines, do you think it strange or inappropriate that the DOJ wiped text messages between Strzok and Page from their special counsel cell phones? The deletions happened shortly after they were ejected from the team and before the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General could review them -- at a time when all had been informed that their actions were under review. Did technicians attempt to recover the messages? Were the circumstances of the deletions thoroughly investigated?
  4. When did you first learn that the FBI and DOJ signed off on and presented unverified, anti-Trump political opposition research to a court to get wiretaps on an innocent U.S. citizen? Doesn't this violate the strict procedures enacted while you were FBI director, intended to ensure that only verified information is seen by the court? Who will be held accountable for any lapses in this arena?
  5. Do these issues point to larger problems within our intelligence community, in terms of how officials operate? Does that put you in a position where there's a conflict of interest since you were in charge of the FBI when prior surveillance abuses were identified by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court? Did you consider disclosing this potential conflict and stepping aside, or referring any issues that overlap with your interests?
  6. What steps did you take after Strzok and Page were exposed, to try to learn if other investigators on your team likewise were conflicted? Did you take action to segregate the work of these agents and any potential biases they injected into your investigation and team? Wasn't their behavior a beacon to call you to follow an investigative trail in another direction?
  7. Did you become concerned about foreign influence beyond Russia when you learned that a foreign national, Christopher Steele, claimed to have obtained opposition research from Russian officials connected to Putin -- and that the FBI and DOJ presented this material to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain wiretap approvals?
  8. Were you aware that some Democratic Party officials acknowledged coordinating with Ukraine in 2016 to undermine Trump and his associates and to leak disparaging information to the news media?
  9. Is it true that you applied for the job as FBI director but Trump rejected you, the day before then-Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed you as special counsel to investigate Trump? Does that put you in a potentially conflicted position?
  10. Do you think Donald Trump is guilty of a crime? If so, then do you believe he is perhaps the most clever criminal of our time since he was able to conceal the evidence despite all the government wiretaps, investigations, informants, surveillance and hundreds of interviews spanning several years?

Clearly, Robert Mueller hopes he has closed the book on his public statements about his investigation. If he has his way, he will not discuss the case further on the record. But his parting shot raised plenty of questions.

ATM , 4 hours ago link

11. Where any of the transcripts of conversations, emails, etc., altered by your office and then those alterations included in your official report??

commiebastid , 5 hours ago link

Mueller reveals his mental gymnastics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvapuwssM8E

lowscorewins , 6 hours ago link

My questions for Mueller would be these:

1) You said DoJ policy prevented you from indicting a sitting president. Did anything prevent you from indicting any co-conspirators in any obstruction efforts the president may have taken? Did anything prevent you from naming the president as an unindicted co-conspirator if there were any obstruction?

2) You said that if you had found clear evidence the president was innocent of collusion or obstruction you would have said so in the report. Would you have done the same if you found clear evidence the president did collude or obstruct even though you were barred from indicting him?

3) Your report says Russian intelligence hacked into DNC servers and stole emails and then leaked the stolen emails through Wikileaks in order to influence the election. Did your investigators ever examine the DNC servers? Did FBI investigators ever examine the DNC servers? Did employess of any other government agency examin the servers? Did anybody other than a firm hired by the DNC do a forensic examination of the DNC servers? What evidence do you have that the DNC servers were hacked? And what evidence do you have that it was by Russian intelligence? How can you be certain that Wikileaks source was not Seth Rich or some other disgruntled DNC employee?

4) Would you like to talk about Whitey Bulger you slimy son of a bitch?

Right Wing-Nut , 7 hours ago link

Mueller merely threw "Innocent until proven guilty" out the window. He handed House Democrats the Impeachment football. Will they fumble?

Lord Raglan , 8 hours ago link

Not the greatest questions in my view.

She ignored the two most important questions of all: (1) that Mueller never confirmed that "Russians" hacked the DNC server because they never looked at it and instead relied on CrowdStrike to tell them it was "Russians" and (2) that Mueller never confirmed that "Russians" uploaded HillDog's, the DNC's and Podesta's emails to Wikileaks. Yet Mueller reaches these 2 conclusions in his Report.

The Report is a total farce when it reaches the foregoing two conclusions as the basis for "the Russians interfering in our elections" absent any evidentiary proof of the same admissible in a court of law. Would be hearsay if they tried to introduce those two facts into evidence at a trial.

VWAndy , 8 hours ago link

Its all for show folks. Bread and circus. And Trump is playing right along too. Sorry.

No perp walks. Nothing of substance declassified. No bodies washing up. None of the things one should expect in a swamp draining.

Willie the Pimp , 8 hours ago link

Muleface the Criminal. How I'd love to get him alone in a room. He belongs at the end of a rope.

Amy G. Dala , 8 hours ago link

One of the oldest legal tactics, force your adversary to prove a negative, prove an event did not occur, prove a crime was not committed. Won't work at bench trials, but in front of a jury of "peers" it stands a chance. Especially when you have the dem congress/MSM-industrial complex willing to parrot the story.

In a different time, Mueller would be shredded in the editorials: two years, unlimited resources, and all you produce is an insinuation? FU, bob.

Everybodys All American , 8 hours ago link

1. Are you aware what the punishment is for treason?

2. Are you aware that Hillary Clinton bought and paid for the Steele Dossier?

3. Are you aware the damage you have done to the US intelligence agencies is far worse than you have accused the Russians of doing?

4. When did you realize that the Trump administration did not collude with the Russians?

5. Why did you not have the DNC server forensically looked at if this was the source of the hack/leaks to the Russians?

6. Does the content in the Clinton/Podesta/DNC emails signal underlying crimes that they are involved in?

7. Why did you not interview Julian Assange?

8. Which government operation killed Seth Rich?

BobEore , 6 hours ago link

  1. Yes. Judge Sullivan alluded to it at the time of the Flynn sentencing. Since Muellers' hands were deliberately tied from investigating the actual crimes of a treasonous nature - vis a vis the laundered money from the turco-talmudic gangsters - he could not bring that element of the serious and flagrant abuses both pre and post election into the proceedings.
  2. The "Steele Dossier" was a joint effort of Uk/USA intelligence operatives who colluded with several parties - including the Clintons, to muddy the waters according to the plans of Urusalem.
  3. Rhetorical. Ignore
  4. When it became clear that the "Russian" government as such operates as a network of mafiyas doing for.... and receiving from the state... favors which are more often than not part of the strategy of a criminal network known as Chabad. That later party is the partner in 'collusion'... which took place in the interests of Urusalem.
  5. Peripheral to the investigation.
  6. Crimes have been committed by both Democrat and Republican operatives. Only those which are part of the specific mandate of the SC were investigated.
  7. Certain specific persons were placed "off limits" to the investigators. All of whom share in common a degree of allegiance to/control by Urusalem
  8. Seth Rich is alive and well, living in a small beacon of democracy in the middle east. The investigation was tasked with investigating false flag operations staged by parties whose names can never be mentioned.
admin user , 8 hours ago link

answers are obvious. it's the question that drives us: what is the deep state?

name_the_user , 8 hours ago link

Folks, the fact that FISA courts are even "legal" on the books is so far outside the boundaries of fair play I don't even know where to start. How is this not a civil war starting offense? We're fucked folks.

JustPastPeacefield , 8 hours ago link

I'd add two more questions, if slightly off topic.

Why did you let 4 men rot in prison for murders they did not commit when you had evidence exonerating them and implicating corrupt FBI agents. I guess that question answers itself.

Why did Whitey Bulger get transferred to a new Federal prison and conveniently murdered - out of the camera's view - just as Rep. Lynch was seeking to expose the FBI's corrupt handling of informants. I guess that question answers itself too.

Washington DC is a sewer of corruption.

notfeelinthebern , 9 hours ago link

These questions are just a start. I would also include: "What sort of punishment should people who try to sponsor a coup to overthrow a duly elected President be subject to?".

[Jun 04, 2019] Attkisson 10 Questions I d Ask Robert Mueller (If I Were Allowed)

Highly recommended!
Jun 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Attkisson: 10 Questions I'd Ask Robert Mueller (If I Were Allowed)

by Tyler Durden Tue, 06/04/2019 - 11:05 0 SHARES Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print Authored by Sharyl Attkisson, op-ed via The Hill,

Most of now-former special counsel Robert Mueller 's public statement to the press last week seemed to fall under the category of "Fair enough." After all, the man did nearly two years of work, he kept largely silent throughout, and he alternately was called a hero or a dog.

So the day Mueller resigns, he chooses to make a fairly brief statement putting a button on all of it, and at the same time declining to take any questions, before gliding back into private life.

But there's at least one comment Mueller made that nags at me. It's when he said, "If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so."

Mueller must have had his reasons for shading his commentary in that way rather than in the other direction: If they'd found adequate evidence to implicate Trump in a crime, or even "collusion," they would have said that, too.

The statement Mueller chose to give carries with it an implication that his team looked for evidence of President Trump 's innocence but simply could not find it. With that in mind, I thought of a short list of questions I'd like to ask Mueller, if ever permitted to do so:

  1. What witnesses did you interview and what evidence did you collect in an attempt to exonerate Trump or prove him not guilty? (I believe the answer would be, "None. It's not the job of a special counsel or prosecutor to do so." Therefore, was Mueller's comment appropriate?)
  2. Does it concern you that the FBI claimed " collection tool failure " in stating that 19,000 text messages between former FBI employees Lisa Page and Peter Strozk had been deleted and were unavailable for review by the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general? Is it worth investigating how the inspector general was able to recover the messages , when the FBI said it could not? Does the FBI lack the technical expertise, or the will? Isn't it a serious issue that should be addressed, either way?
  3. Along the same lines, do you think it strange or inappropriate that the DOJ wiped text messages between Strzok and Page from their special counsel cell phones? The deletions happened shortly after they were ejected from the team and before the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General could review them -- at a time when all had been informed that their actions were under review. Did technicians attempt to recover the messages? Were the circumstances of the deletions thoroughly investigated?
  4. When did you first learn that the FBI and DOJ signed off on and presented unverified, anti-Trump political opposition research to a court to get wiretaps on an innocent U.S. citizen? Doesn't this violate the strict procedures enacted while you were FBI director, intended to ensure that only verified information is seen by the court? Who will be held accountable for any lapses in this arena?
  5. Do these issues point to larger problems within our intelligence community, in terms of how officials operate? Does that put you in a position where there's a conflict of interest since you were in charge of the FBI when prior surveillance abuses were identified by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court? Did you consider disclosing this potential conflict and stepping aside, or referring any issues that overlap with your interests?
  6. What steps did you take after Strzok and Page were exposed, to try to learn if other investigators on your team likewise were conflicted? Did you take action to segregate the work of these agents and any potential biases they injected into your investigation and team? Wasn't their behavior a beacon to call you to follow an investigative trail in another direction?
  7. Did you become concerned about foreign influence beyond Russia when you learned that a foreign national, Christopher Steele, claimed to have obtained opposition research from Russian officials connected to Putin -- and that the FBI and DOJ presented this material to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain wiretap approvals?
  8. Were you aware that some Democratic Party officials acknowledged coordinating with Ukraine in 2016 to undermine Trump and his associates and to leak disparaging information to the news media?
  9. Is it true that you applied for the job as FBI director but Trump rejected you, the day before then-Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed you as special counsel to investigate Trump? Does that put you in a potentially conflicted position?
  10. Do you think Donald Trump is guilty of a crime? If so, then do you believe he is perhaps the most clever criminal of our time since he was able to conceal the evidence despite all the government wiretaps, investigations, informants, surveillance and hundreds of interviews spanning several years?

Clearly, Robert Mueller hopes he has closed the book on his public statements about his investigation. If he has his way, he will not discuss the case further on the record. But his parting shot raised plenty of questions.

ATM , 4 hours ago link

11. Where any of the transcripts of conversations, emails, etc., altered by your office and then those alterations included in your official report??

commiebastid , 5 hours ago link

Mueller reveals his mental gymnastics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvapuwssM8E

lowscorewins , 6 hours ago link

My questions for Mueller would be these:

1) You said DoJ policy prevented you from indicting a sitting president. Did anything prevent you from indicting any co-conspirators in any obstruction efforts the president may have taken? Did anything prevent you from naming the president as an unindicted co-conspirator if there were any obstruction?

2) You said that if you had found clear evidence the president was innocent of collusion or obstruction you would have said so in the report. Would you have done the same if you found clear evidence the president did collude or obstruct even though you were barred from indicting him?

3) Your report says Russian intelligence hacked into DNC servers and stole emails and then leaked the stolen emails through Wikileaks in order to influence the election. Did your investigators ever examine the DNC servers? Did FBI investigators ever examine the DNC servers? Did employess of any other government agency examin the servers? Did anybody other than a firm hired by the DNC do a forensic examination of the DNC servers? What evidence do you have that the DNC servers were hacked? And what evidence do you have that it was by Russian intelligence? How can you be certain that Wikileaks source was not Seth Rich or some other disgruntled DNC employee?

4) Would you like to talk about Whitey Bulger you slimy son of a bitch?

Right Wing-Nut , 7 hours ago link

Mueller merely threw "Innocent until proven guilty" out the window. He handed House Democrats the Impeachment football. Will they fumble?

Lord Raglan , 8 hours ago link

Not the greatest questions in my view.

She ignored the two most important questions of all: (1) that Mueller never confirmed that "Russians" hacked the DNC server because they never looked at it and instead relied on CrowdStrike to tell them it was "Russians" and (2) that Mueller never confirmed that "Russians" uploaded HillDog's, the DNC's and Podesta's emails to Wikileaks. Yet Mueller reaches these 2 conclusions in his Report.

The Report is a total farce when it reaches the foregoing two conclusions as the basis for "the Russians interfering in our elections" absent any evidentiary proof of the same admissible in a court of law. Would be hearsay if they tried to introduce those two facts into evidence at a trial.

VWAndy , 8 hours ago link

Its all for show folks. Bread and circus. And Trump is playing right along too. Sorry.

No perp walks. Nothing of substance declassified. No bodies washing up. None of the things one should expect in a swamp draining.

Willie the Pimp , 8 hours ago link

Muleface the Criminal. How I'd love to get him alone in a room. He belongs at the end of a rope.

Amy G. Dala , 8 hours ago link

One of the oldest legal tactics, force your adversary to prove a negative, prove an event did not occur, prove a crime was not committed. Won't work at bench trials, but in front of a jury of "peers" it stands a chance. Especially when you have the dem congress/MSM-industrial complex willing to parrot the story.

In a different time, Mueller would be shredded in the editorials: two years, unlimited resources, and all you produce is an insinuation? FU, bob.

Everybodys All American , 8 hours ago link

1. Are you aware what the punishment is for treason?

2. Are you aware that Hillary Clinton bought and paid for the Steele Dossier?

3. Are you aware the damage you have done to the US intelligence agencies is far worse than you have accused the Russians of doing?

4. When did you realize that the Trump administration did not collude with the Russians?

5. Why did you not have the DNC server forensically looked at if this was the source of the hack/leaks to the Russians?

6. Does the content in the Clinton/Podesta/DNC emails signal underlying crimes that they are involved in?

7. Why did you not interview Julian Assange?

8. Which government operation killed Seth Rich?

BobEore , 6 hours ago link

  1. Yes. Judge Sullivan alluded to it at the time of the Flynn sentencing. Since Muellers' hands were deliberately tied from investigating the actual crimes of a treasonous nature - vis a vis the laundered money from the turco-talmudic gangsters - he could not bring that element of the serious and flagrant abuses both pre and post election into the proceedings.
  2. The "Steele Dossier" was a joint effort of Uk/USA intelligence operatives who colluded with several parties - including the Clintons, to muddy the waters according to the plans of Urusalem.
  3. Rhetorical. Ignore
  4. When it became clear that the "Russian" government as such operates as a network of mafiyas doing for.... and receiving from the state... favors which are more often than not part of the strategy of a criminal network known as Chabad. That later party is the partner in 'collusion'... which took place in the interests of Urusalem.
  5. Peripheral to the investigation.
  6. Crimes have been committed by both Democrat and Republican operatives. Only those which are part of the specific mandate of the SC were investigated.
  7. Certain specific persons were placed "off limits" to the investigators. All of whom share in common a degree of allegiance to/control by Urusalem
  8. Seth Rich is alive and well, living in a small beacon of democracy in the middle east. The investigation was tasked with investigating false flag operations staged by parties whose names can never be mentioned.
admin user , 8 hours ago link

answers are obvious. it's the question that drives us: what is the deep state?

name_the_user , 8 hours ago link

Folks, the fact that FISA courts are even "legal" on the books is so far outside the boundaries of fair play I don't even know where to start. How is this not a civil war starting offense? We're fucked folks.

JustPastPeacefield , 8 hours ago link

I'd add two more questions, if slightly off topic.

Why did you let 4 men rot in prison for murders they did not commit when you had evidence exonerating them and implicating corrupt FBI agents. I guess that question answers itself.

Why did Whitey Bulger get transferred to a new Federal prison and conveniently murdered - out of the camera's view - just as Rep. Lynch was seeking to expose the FBI's corrupt handling of informants. I guess that question answers itself too.

Washington DC is a sewer of corruption.

notfeelinthebern , 9 hours ago link

These questions are just a start. I would also include: "What sort of punishment should people who try to sponsor a coup to overthrow a duly elected President be subject to?".

[Jun 03, 2019] DNC changing the rules of the debates

Jun 03, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

DNC changing the rules of the debates

gjohnsit on Mon, 06/03/2019 - 2:40pm

OK. Maybe this rules change isn't aimed directly at Tulsi Gabbard, but it certainly looks like she's in danger of being it's biggest victim.

Presidential candidates looking to participate in the Democratic National Committee's sanctioned primary debates initially had to meet one of two thresholds to be eligible: achieving at least 1% in three separate DNC approved polls or obtaining at least 65,000 donations with minimum of 200 donors from at least 20 states.
...
To appear at the recently-announced third set of debates in September, candidates must achieve 2% in at least four DNC-approved polls and double the minimum of number of donors to 130,000. That quickly became a death sentence for candidates who for months have not even cracked the first donor threshold.

To make this clear, the requirements for the THIRD debate went from "at least 1% in three separate DNC approved polls or obtaining at least 65,000 donations" to " 2% support in four national or early voting state polls AND 130,000 unique donors to their campaign, including 400 unique donors from at least 20 states".
For most of the candidates, unless they really score in the first two debates, they won't be in any more debates.

To help put this into context, consider what the DNC has been up to recently.
They chose Chris Korge as the new finance chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez went on a hair-on-fire rant about Russiagate.

"We are at war right now with the Russians -- it is a cyber war -- [and] our commander-in-chief is compromised," Perez said. "We should be able to rely on the federal government for help from this. ... It is unconscionable that this administration has paid such little attention to what Mueller acknowledged today, [which is] Russian interference. "

Yes, the DNC is busy looking out for what is important to you.

[Jun 03, 2019] The growth of the USA is going to depend on the ability of the people in government to disband the CIA which is similar to a dictator with absolute power and no accountability

The problem is more complex than just CIA. The Deep state encompass more players and it replaced elected officials (surface state) while elections now provide mostly function of legitimizing the rule of the Deep State
Notable quotes:
"... The truth is as the world's economy becomes free of the US and its think-tanks, the world gets richer but those of us in the USA who make our living by working and getting paid will become poorer. Our money will not be able to cover for a good lifestyle. ..."
"... Its sad to see the disastrous policies of the CIA's economic unit has to be paid by the hard working US citizens who only want a good life like everyone else. We did not ask for the CIA, the CIA imposed itself on us, making the decisions without our consent. Now we pay for their disastrous policies by becoming a third world country. ..."
Jun 03, 2019 | russia-insider.com

John Tosh JimB • 2 months ago ,

The growth of the USA is going to depend on the ability of the people in government to disband the Central Intelligence Agency which has become a bottleneck in the progress of the USA. The USA cannot grow as long as you have such a powerful bottleneck similar to a dictator with absolute power.

The truth is as the world's economy becomes free of the US and its think-tanks, the world gets richer but those of us in the USA who make our living by working and getting paid will become poorer. Our money will not be able to cover for a good lifestyle.

Its sad to see the disastrous policies of the CIA's economic unit has to be paid by the hard working US citizens who only want a good life like everyone else. We did not ask for the CIA, the CIA imposed itself on us, making the decisions without our consent. Now we pay for their disastrous policies by becoming a third world country.

We are being left behind .... China is going to keep growing... there is nothing the USA can do to stop her now. If war is used, the USA will lose, if economics of scale is compared the USA loses. China is a giant with an almost monolithic population of over one billion. Can you imagine what an educated country with over one billion people can do???

The USA has a lot of blacks, hispanics, asians, Arabs etc, we are not a single group of people. While diversity is a good thing when you have a lot of money to keep everyone happy, poverty will be the enermy of diversity. People will be at each other's jugulars fighting for the little scraps of wealth left behind after the big and powerful grab all they can.

We are into a very hard future in the USA.... no thanks to the silly Central Intelligence Agency. For heavens sake, cant the CIA learn from Chinese or Russian intelligence???? How do the intelligence agencies of the Chinese or Russians operate? Learn instead of sitting on the silly high horse thinking US intelligence is anything but primitive and third rate!

Now the entire USA has to pay for the silly inteliigence agencies which keep expanding with acronyms like rats!

[Jun 03, 2019] Who Shot Down Flight MH17 over Eastern Ukraine in 2014

Notable quotes:
"... Tulsi: "While I agree that Russia is both directly and indirectly responsible for this downed plane shot down by the separatists, we've got to look at this in the bigger picture. We've got to look at Russia's incursion into Ukraine, Ukraine's sovereignty " ..."
"... "Not a single anti-aircraft missile system of the Russian Armed Forces has ever crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border," ..."
"... "the determination of the Dutch-led investigation to justifying its conclusions by solely using images from social networks that have been expertly altered with computer graphic editing tools." ..."
"... had been previously displayed by the infamous British online investigative activist group, Bellingcat. ..."
"... "the 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade based in Kursk in Russia". ..."
"... "the Dutch investigators completely ignore and reject the testimony of eyewitnesses from the nearby Ukrainian communities", according to the Defense Ministry. The testimonies, however, provided essential information "indicating the launch of a missile was carried out from a territory controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces." ..."
"... "comprehensive" ..."
"... "clearly indicate the involvement of the Ukrainian Buk anti-aircraft system units" ..."
Jun 03, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Who Shot Down Flight MH17 over Eastern Ukraine in 2014?

span ted by wendy davis on Sun, 06/02/2019 - 11:19am

Well of course it was the Evil Russians! Didn't Russians also shoot Roger Rabbit? We'd been discussing this 2014 interview with Tulsi Gabbard on my post ' analyses of the leaked 'Deal of the Century' I/P peace plan ' that I'd found that day and posted in comments, mainly wanting to feature her anti-Palestinian Hasbara. As I remember it, this 'blame' started the horrific sanctions on Russia.

☭ Nova🌱Shpakova ☭@NovaShpakova

Replying to @BrianBeckerDC

Tulsi says she doesn't want it, but her past record in #Obama/#Biden's Admin tells a different story. Let's rewind to the very words Tulsi said just a few yrs ago. #Tulsi betrays herself as a flatout #Zionist apologist & avid supporter of fascist #Ukraine. http://www.msnbc.com/taking-the-hill/watch/should-us-be-involved-in-ukraine-conflict--312796739629

10

Should US be involved in Ukraine conflict?

Foreign Affairs Committee member Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, joins to discuss hot spots around the world that are seeing conflict.

msnbc.com

19 people are talking about this

Tulsi: "While I agree that Russia is both directly and indirectly responsible for this downed plane shot down by the separatists, we've got to look at this in the bigger picture. We've got to look at Russia's incursion into Ukraine, Ukraine's sovereignty "

TravelerXXX had bookmarked this Eric Zuesse exposé that I'd vaguely recalled and brought it in:

'MH17 Turnabout: Ukraine's Guilt Now Proven', December 31, 2018, strategic-culture.org

It's about nine yards long with zillions of hyperlinks, so long I don't even guess I'd ever finished it, which makes it hard to figure out what, if any, nuggets to feature, but he did link to this:

'MH-17: the untold story', 22 Oct, 2014, RT.com, including a 27-minute video documentary.

"Three months after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was brought down over Ukraine, there are still no definitive answers about what caused the tragedy. Civil conflict in the area prevented international experts from conducting a full and thorough investigation. The wreckage should have been collected and scrupulously re-assembled to identify all the damage, but this standard investigative procedure was never carried out. Until that's done, evidence can only be gleaned from pictures of the debris, the flight recorders (black boxes) and eye-witnesses testimonies. This may be enough to help build a picture of what really happened to the aircraft, whether a rocket fired from the ground or a military jet fired on the doomed plane."

I'd later added to that thread, including some photos of a beaming Netanyahu holding a map of the Golan Heights that Herr Trump had signed with his approval (indicating the leaked plan just may be The Real Deal) when Up Jumped the Devil:

'Where is the evidence?' Malaysian PM says attempts to pin MH17 downing on Russia lack proof', 30 May, 2019, RT.com

"Malaysia has accepted the Dutch report that a 'Russian-made' missile shot down its civilian airliner MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, but has yet to see evidence it was fired by Russia, said Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

"They are accusing Russia but where is the evidence?" Mahathir told reporters at the Japanese Foreign Correspondents Club (FCCJ) in Tokyo on Thursday.

"You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians," the prime minister went on, according to the Malaysian state news agency Bernama. "It could be by the rebels in Ukraine; it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile."

"Mahathir was skeptical that anyone involved with the Russian military could have launched the missile that struck the plane, however, arguing that it would have been clear to professionals that the target was a civilian airliner.

"I don't think a very highly disciplined party is responsible for launching the missile," he said.

The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT), whose report last year blamed Moscow for shooting down MH17, barred Russia from participating in the investigation, but involved the government of Ukraine. Although Malaysia is also a member of JIT,Mahathir revealed that his country's officials have been blocked from examining the plane's flight recorders.

"For some reason, Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened," he said. "We don't know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it."

"This is not a neutral kind of examination," Mahathir added.

Rejecting the JIT accusations, Russia made public the evidence the Dutch-led researchers refused to look into, including the serial number of the missile that allegedly struck MH17, showing that it was manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1986 and was in the arsenal of the Ukrainian army at the time of the tragedy."

b of Moon of Alabama offered this whopping 55 minute press conference video with Malaysian PM Mahathir on Twitter on May 31.

But aha! RT had later provided on the left sidebar:

May 24, 2018: 'No Russian missile system ever crossed into Ukraine: MoD rejects Dutch MH17 claims', RT.com

"The Russian Defense Ministry has rejected new claims that flight MH17 over Ukraine was downed by a missile from a Russian unit, urging the Dutch-led probe to focus on studying hard facts instead of social media images.

"Not a single anti-aircraft missile system of the Russian Armed Forces has ever crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border," the defense ministry said in statement.

The Russian military raised eyebrows over "the determination of the Dutch-led investigation to justifying its conclusions by solely using images from social networks that have been expertly altered with computer graphic editing tools."

The ministry pointed out that the images used in the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) press conference on Thursday were provided by the Ukrainian special services and had been previously displayed by the infamous British online investigative activist group, Bellingcat.

The Dutch-led probe announced that the missile that downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in July 2014 came from a Russian military Buk system that crossed into Ukraine and then returned to its base in western Russia.

Investigators claim the missile system involved came from "the 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade based in Kursk in Russia". The JIT essentially just repeated the conclusion made by Bellingcat a year ago.

The alarming part in the JIT probe is that "the Dutch investigators completely ignore and reject the testimony of eyewitnesses from the nearby Ukrainian communities", according to the Defense Ministry. The testimonies, however, provided essential information "indicating the launch of a missile was carried out from a territory controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces."

The Russian side said that it provided the international probe with "comprehensive"evidence, including field tests, which "clearly indicate the involvement of the Ukrainian Buk anti-aircraft system units" in the destruction of the plane with 283 passengers and 15 crew members onboard."

This video that Eric Zuesse had up may be part of the referenced eye witness testimony.

... ... ...

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)

[Jun 02, 2019] Somer highlights of Snowden spreach at Dalhousie University

Highly recommended!
An interesting method of monitoring access to the particular WEB site or page by intercepting pages at the router and inserting reference to the "snooping" site for example one pixel image) which collects IPs of devices which accessed particular page. Does not require breaking into the particular Web site 00 just the control of provider router is is enough. That makes it more understandable the attack on Huawei.
Notable quotes:
"... Said Mr. Snowden was at risk for extra ordinary rendition.. qualified him for application under refuge law. Said to claim refugee status Art. 33 of the refugee humanitarian grounds application is Intl Refuge Law, that those in control of governments are working to eliminate this long standing intl understanding. ..."
"... said we are experiencing the greatest and fastest and most pervasive redistribution of power since the Industrial revolution.Highly concerned that very few are going to benefit. ..."
"... Talked about Conspiracy , a group called 5 eyes (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, and UK) and prism.. explained how it worked. basically a collaboration between big corporations and government ..."
"... Explained how these corporations and government (mostly government) could intercept web page request between user at home or in office and the target server, and replace generate a blank page that has surveillance hidden in the page, then blend hidden with the legitimate page delivered by the innocent server to the unknowing user. said it goes beyond collaboration and moves to proactive surveillance. ..."
"... Said law is needed to criminalize companies and governments that make useful network devices that people buy, into evil spyware. mentioned the NSO group can remember why?. .. classified "trade in hidden exploits". as evil relayed story about how such devices were used in Mexico to defeat political opposition ..."
Jun 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

snake , Jun 2, 2019 3:41:49 PM | 8

https://www.rt.com/news/460854-snowden-surveillance-social-control/ <=Snowden at Dalhousie University..
Robert Thibault, Att, HK Canada, (I think) Snowden's lawyer explained the law protecting whistle blowers.

Describes the incredible pressure governments are applying on anyone who steps forward to help a whistle blower.

Said Mr. Snowden was at risk for extra ordinary rendition.. qualified him for application under refuge law. Said to claim refugee status Art. 33 of the refugee humanitarian grounds application is Intl Refuge Law, that those in control of governments are working to eliminate this long standing intl understanding.

Explained the constitution of Equador was the most complex constitution on planet its due process rights solid due process safeguard, has a very high threshold but. Morales decision was arbitrary to strip Mr. Assange of his asylum. Said HK angry at Germany over two whistle blowers

Snowden then speaks .. excellent talk..

1st point.. progress in science has been unprecedented, especially nuclear science, but the nation states are using that new knowledge to make nuclear weapons.. called the progress an "Atomic Moment" in Science evolution. .

said we are experiencing the greatest and fastest and most pervasive redistribution of power since the Industrial revolution.Highly concerned that very few are going to benefit.

2nd point Platforms and Algorithms are being used by those in power to "shift our behaviors" accomplished covertly by user contracts people are required to sign when joining something on line (<=he said no one reads these things, but they are dangerous

Talked about Conspiracy , a group called 5 eyes (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, and UK) and prism.. explained how it worked. basically a collaboration between big corporations and government

Explained how these corporations and government (mostly government) could intercept web page request between user at home or in office and the target server, and replace generate a blank page that has surveillance hidden in the page, then blend hidden with the legitimate page delivered by the innocent server to the unknowing user. said it goes beyond collaboration and moves to proactive surveillance.

said the legal means to spy on the populations existed long before 9/11, but it could not find daylight to be adopted until 9/11. Basically the government and massive in size corporations have all of the data on every single person on the earth because they gather it everywhere all of the time. discussed warrant_less wire tap, explained why whistle blower fair trial in he USA not likely, Said everything single call or electronic communication made by citizens is captured suggested monitoring calls was a felony many corporations committed before the FISA Act was enacted to protect the listener.

Mentioned Signal by Open Whisper <= for encryption??

Said law is needed to criminalize companies and governments that make useful network devices that people buy, into evil spyware. mentioned the NSO group can remember why?. .. classified "trade in hidden exploits". as evil relayed story about how such devices were used in Mexico to defeat political opposition.

But the big thing I got out of it, was how website contract agreements are not innocent. Such agreements prey on human desire to [interact, connect, share and cooperate] these desires have been modelled into a platform that allows government or private commercial enterprises to manipulate, exploit and prey-on any human "interacting with a such websites.

Questions and answers.

[Jun 02, 2019] Somer highlights of Snowden spreach at Dalhousie University

Highly recommended!
An interesting method of monitoring access to the particular WEB site or page by intercepting pages at the router and inserting reference to the "snooping" site for example one pixel image) which collects IPs of devices which accessed particular page. Does not require breaking into the particular Web site 00 just the control of provider router is is enough. That makes it more understandable the attack on Huawei.
Notable quotes:
"... Said Mr. Snowden was at risk for extra ordinary rendition.. qualified him for application under refuge law. Said to claim refugee status Art. 33 of the refugee humanitarian grounds application is Intl Refuge Law, that those in control of governments are working to eliminate this long standing intl understanding. ..."
"... said we are experiencing the greatest and fastest and most pervasive redistribution of power since the Industrial revolution.Highly concerned that very few are going to benefit. ..."
"... Talked about Conspiracy , a group called 5 eyes (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, and UK) and prism.. explained how it worked. basically a collaboration between big corporations and government ..."
"... Explained how these corporations and government (mostly government) could intercept web page request between user at home or in office and the target server, and replace generate a blank page that has surveillance hidden in the page, then blend hidden with the legitimate page delivered by the innocent server to the unknowing user. said it goes beyond collaboration and moves to proactive surveillance. ..."
"... Said law is needed to criminalize companies and governments that make useful network devices that people buy, into evil spyware. mentioned the NSO group can remember why?. .. classified "trade in hidden exploits". as evil relayed story about how such devices were used in Mexico to defeat political opposition ..."
Jun 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

snake , Jun 2, 2019 3:41:49 PM | 8

https://www.rt.com/news/460854-snowden-surveillance-social-control/ <=Snowden at Dalhousie University..
Robert Thibault, Att, HK Canada, (I think) Snowden's lawyer explained the law protecting whistle blowers.

Describes the incredible pressure governments are applying on anyone who steps forward to help a whistle blower.

Said Mr. Snowden was at risk for extra ordinary rendition.. qualified him for application under refuge law. Said to claim refugee status Art. 33 of the refugee humanitarian grounds application is Intl Refuge Law, that those in control of governments are working to eliminate this long standing intl understanding.

Explained the constitution of Equador was the most complex constitution on planet its due process rights solid due process safeguard, has a very high threshold but. Morales decision was arbitrary to strip Mr. Assange of his asylum. Said HK angry at Germany over two whistle blowers

Snowden then speaks .. excellent talk..

1st point.. progress in science has been unprecedented, especially nuclear science, but the nation states are using that new knowledge to make nuclear weapons.. called the progress an "Atomic Moment" in Science evolution. .

said we are experiencing the greatest and fastest and most pervasive redistribution of power since the Industrial revolution.Highly concerned that very few are going to benefit.

2nd point Platforms and Algorithms are being used by those in power to "shift our behaviors" accomplished covertly by user contracts people are required to sign when joining something on line (<=he said no one reads these things, but they are dangerous

Talked about Conspiracy , a group called 5 eyes (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ, and UK) and prism.. explained how it worked. basically a collaboration between big corporations and government

Explained how these corporations and government (mostly government) could intercept web page request between user at home or in office and the target server, and replace generate a blank page that has surveillance hidden in the page, then blend hidden with the legitimate page delivered by the innocent server to the unknowing user. said it goes beyond collaboration and moves to proactive surveillance.

said the legal means to spy on the populations existed long before 9/11, but it could not find daylight to be adopted until 9/11. Basically the government and massive in size corporations have all of the data on every single person on the earth because they gather it everywhere all of the time. discussed warrant_less wire tap, explained why whistle blower fair trial in he USA not likely, Said everything single call or electronic communication made by citizens is captured suggested monitoring calls was a felony many corporations committed before the FISA Act was enacted to protect the listener.

Mentioned Signal by Open Whisper <= for encryption??

Said law is needed to criminalize companies and governments that make useful network devices that people buy, into evil spyware. mentioned the NSO group can remember why?. .. classified "trade in hidden exploits". as evil relayed story about how such devices were used in Mexico to defeat political opposition.

But the big thing I got out of it, was how website contract agreements are not innocent. Such agreements prey on human desire to [interact, connect, share and cooperate] these desires have been modelled into a platform that allows government or private commercial enterprises to manipulate, exploit and prey-on any human "interacting with a such websites.

Questions and answers.

[Jun 02, 2019] GOP Targets Comey And Brennan As Investigations Heat Up -

Jun 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Volga German , 24 minutes ago

How do I volunteer to be a member of the firing squad...anyone????

whatafmess , 23 minutes ago

firing squad is too civilized for those two, should go medieval on them...

Volga German , 18 minutes ago

But I'm too old to wield a headsman's axe!

[Jun 02, 2019] Snowden Most Effective Means Of Social Control In The History Of Our Species Now In Place

He didn't mention Obama's "Hammer" database
Notable quotes:
"... Institutions can "monitor and record private activities of people on a scale that's broad enough that we can say it's close to all-powerful," said Snowden. They do this through "new platforms and algorithms," through which "they're able to shift our behavior. In some cases they're able to predict our decisions -- and also nudge them -- to different outcomes. And they do this by exploiting the human need for belonging ." ..."
"... "We don't sign up for this," he added, dismissing the notion that people know exactly what they are getting into with social media platforms like Facebook. ..."
"... That means that a company, community or country that uses Huawei technology is protecting itself from the US-led international system of surveillance and possible control. And the threats and demands that they stop using Huawei products is more about keeping US control, not so much about blocking Chinese control ..."
Jun 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said Thursday that people in systems of power have exploited the human desire to connect in order to create systems of mass surveillance .

Snowden appeared at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia via livestream from Moscow to give a keynote address for the Canadian university's Open Dialogue Series.

Right now, he said, humanity is in a sort of "atomic moment" in the field of computer science. "We're in the midst of the greatest redistribution of power since the Industrial Revolution, and this is happening because technology has provided a new capability," Snowden said.

"It's related to influence that reaches everyone in every place," he said. "It has no regard for borders. Its reach is unlimited, if you will, but its safeguards are not." Without such defenses, technology is able to affect human behavior.

Institutions can "monitor and record private activities of people on a scale that's broad enough that we can say it's close to all-powerful," said Snowden. They do this through "new platforms and algorithms," through which "they're able to shift our behavior. In some cases they're able to predict our decisions -- and also nudge them -- to different outcomes. And they do this by exploiting the human need for belonging ."

"We don't sign up for this," he added, dismissing the notion that people know exactly what they are getting into with social media platforms like Facebook.

... ... ...

mrliberty , 2 hours ago link

Snowden focuses on the common-knowledge stuff to keep our attention away from mass Signals Interference (spoofing and blocking messages, calls, and emails) and other shady programs.

cynicalskeptic , 6 hours ago link

Huxley's 'Ultimate Revolution' - a scientific dictatorship where the masses willingly submit to their own enslavement - is here.

His 1962 UC Berkeley speech sums it all up. Orwell's 1984 depended on terror and force to maintain control. Much easier with A Brave New World where the control is psychological and people 'know their place' in the world and willingly accept it.

NoBigDeal , 6 hours ago link

Mass surveillance is useless if you can't organise such a huge data set into meaningful information, and what's meaningful is always a matter of opinion. Those who paid the bazillions to build this thing must be starting to scratch their heads.

The real threat of a system like this is when some low level user with access exploits it for their personal advantage. Some neighbor or co-worker who doesn't like you.

AI has a long way to go and in this case it just sounds like a poor excuse to keep feeding the big white elephant.

Craven Moorehead , 7 hours ago link

10 to 15 yrs from now, security services and police will intercept any person walking in a public place without some form of smart device to identify who they are, and it is all being implemented by stealth, right before our eyes

Smart identification devices will become mandatory, everything in your life will be tracked, your travel, your spending, your political affiliations, people will willingly give up their freedoms to the illusory safety of the security state, call it slavery

Harry Lightning , 8 hours ago link

I don't know but at least as it pertains to me, I think all the scare tactics aboput Artificial Inteligence is way overblown.

I don't even read the ads on the internet, and if I do happen to spend more than a nanosecond viewing them, its usually only to getg the name of the company so I make sure NOTG to buy anything from them for invading my space.

SoI reallhydon't \care if some algorithm says I am likely to buy a certain kind of product, because they can bombard me with ads all day and all night and it won't make a rat's *** bit of difference in whagt I decide to do. Same with politics...there's nothing they can pipe intop my computer that will make me more or less likely to vote for a candidate. I have voted all over the ballot in any election I ever voted in, and my selections were based on reading what the candidates said at debates or in campaign speeches. Political advertising is a waste of money when itg comes to my voting.

In terms of spying, yes, I can understand how and why tech companies and the government engage in that kind of activity. I surely don't like it, but it really doesn't bother me because I would never portray anything I do to an internet full of anonymous people who may be collecting information. Most people are law abiding and the things they do that come close to criminal occur so infrequently and are for such a relatively small amount of money compared to a criminal enterprise that the government probably doesn't have time to bother with them. If you have nothing to hide than you have nothing to fear, and for the most part, most people have nothing to hide.

In terms of drones surveilling everyone, I think they are great target practice. How often do you get the chance to fire atga moving target outside of skeet shooting ? So if the government or some ahole company wants to spy on you with drones, have fun shooting them out of the air. If enough people take this route, the practice will end because the cost of all those shot up drones will be too expensive for the Peeping Toms to afford. And the government does not have the resources to prosecute a hundred million people all shooting at drones.

Another point : when it comes to election time, go to the local Meet The Candidate forums where you live and ask the candidates who has the balls to state they will vote against any government spying without warrants based on unimpeachable reasonable causes ? Only vote for the politicians who make such pledges, and if they break their promises vote them out of office the next time they try to get elected. Democracy works when the people are willing to use it. So use it.

brokebackbuck , 7 hours ago link

i disagree, democracy does not work because most people are too dumb to choose correctly. This negatively impacts the most intelligent

Karl Marxist , 7 hours ago link

Then get off your dead *** and work to save what power the people have left. Are you that lazy physically and intellectually? TV people own you enough to cave into deep apathy? The I hope you get FEMA camped in one form or another because that's where this **** is headed unless you take to heart the previous poster.

fackbankz , 5 hours ago link

I would have agreed with you 20 years ago. We're way past the point where voting matters. All politicians on both sides are the worst pieces of **** you can imagine. They all support mass surveillance, slavery through fake Fed money, war, GMOs, vaccines and any other evil **** their masters are trying to force on us.

I hope the voting rate in America goes under 10 percent so that 90 percent of us can say, "**** you! I didn't vote for that" and have it be true. Because when it comes to all the important stuff, you did vote for that if you voted for one of these vile wastes of protoplasm in DC.

reader2010 , 8 hours ago link

"As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats."

- Jean Baudrillard, 1990

smacker , 8 hours ago link

I agree with Snowden's assessment of the human need to socially connect with others which is being exploited and morphed into mass surveillance.

But .gov cannot be trusted to take any effective action against the likes of Faceache or Goolag because these outfits are in bed with government (see recent ZH article on this very subject). Thus, government is a prime beneficiary of the mass surveillance data being collected.

Anonymous IX , 3 hours ago link

I actually disagree with Snowden. I think social media, from what people describe and what I observe, strokes people's egos and self-esteem. The tragedy here is that social connection becomes redefined rather narrowly within the confines of ego and self-esteem. I note, e.g., the strident and self-righteous tones in some of the posts throughout ZH here today. Along with the hyper-massaging of ego/self-esteem comes hyper-emotionalism. Everything is cataclysmic. You're the "good guy," and everybody and anybody who opposes you are the "bad guys." Stark, vivid black and white thinking propelled by emotions on steroids. Combine ego massage with steroidal emotions, and you get people wearing the equivalent of horse blinders. People who are easily duped.

WhyWait , 9 hours ago link

I was struck by Snowden's remarks about Huawei technology. He makes the claim that in the past 6 years our best minds with unlimited resources had been unable to find Huawei back doors or kill switches, because otherwise we would know, they would have announced it to the world

On the other hand we can assume that American servers and the software they use do have back doors and maybe kill switches

That means that a company, community or country that uses Huawei technology is protecting itself from the US-led international system of surveillance and possible control. And the threats and demands that they stop using Huawei products is more about keeping US control, not so much about blocking Chinese control

This reminds me of the urgency with which the US demands that countries buy Patriot missile systems, not S400's.

my new username , 9 hours ago link

STASI was privatized - now, people volunteer their information, and the CIA-funded ABC and FaceBook aggregate and sell the data back to Big Government.

Groundround , 9 hours ago link

He is right. When myspace, then facebook came out I thought, Cool, I can keep in touch with all these people. Then, when I became obvious that is was being used to spy on everyone and sell their info, I was pissed at myself for being so naive to think that an honest company could exist without stabbing everyone in the back and becoming a tool for for the same intelligence groups that have been standing on our necks for a couple hundred years now. Today it is too much to ask for an honest company and a government that does not victimize its citizens in about every way it can imagine. We can have a better world. It won't come by voting. They locked that **** down. It is time for the rope.

NiggaPleeze , 9 hours ago link

I get the surveillance part, but the social control part is still in the wings. China's social credit system and US' "terrorism" databases are all but inklings of what is to come: constant and ubiquitous 24/7 monitoring with AI drone "enforcement". So far the powers that be feel constrained in using all the data they collect in criminal court - in part because there are not enough prisons, and in part because they don't want a revolt. But: once AI, data collection and drone automation reach the tipping point (not far off), those constraints will be gone: there will be no ability to revolt as the drones will wipe out the "seditionists", and prison won't be a problem because they will use other means (no food, no transportation, or corporal punishment, all administered by integrated sales, transportation and drone systems).

Mr. Kwikky , 10 hours ago link

Watch the testimonies of high level former NSA employee William Binney on yt

https://youtu.be/KQpTofvZJWU

[Jun 02, 2019] Russiagate Is The #1 Threat To US National Security, Cohen

Jun 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

The systemwide US Russophobia that reached its nadir with Russiagate has created a "catastrophe" for both domestic politics and foreign relations that threatens the future of the American system, professor Stephen Cohen tells RT.

War with Russia could easily break out if the US insists on pursuing the policy of " demonization " that birthed Russiagate instead of returning to detente and cooperation, New York University professor emeritus of Russian history Stephen Cohen argues on Chris Hedges' On Contact. While NATO deliberately antagonized post-Soviet Russia by expanding up to its borders, the US deployed missile defense systems along those borders after scrapping an arms treaty, leaving President Vladimir Putin devoid of " illusions " about the goodwill of the West – but armed with " nuclear missiles that can evade and elude any missile defense system ."

" Now is the time for a serious, new arms control agreement. What do we get? Russiagate instead ."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-wc94DRFCik

Cohen believes the conspiracy theory – which remains front-page news in US media despite being thoroughly discredited, both by independent investigators and last month by special counsel Robert Mueller's report – is the work of the CIA and its former director, John Brennan, who are dead set against any kind of cooperation with Russia. Attorney General William Barr, who is investigating the FBI over how the 2016 counterintelligence probe began, should take a look at Brennan and his agency, Cohen says.

" If our intelligence services are off the reservation to the point that they can first try to destroy a presidential candidate and then a president we need to know it ," Cohen says.

" This is the worst scandal in American history. It's the worst, at least, since the Civil War ."

And the damage wrought by this " catastrophe " hasn't stopped at the US border.

The idea that Trump is a Russian agent has been devastating to " our own institutions, to the presidency, to our electoral system, to Congress, to the American mainstream media, not to mention the damage it's done to American-Russian relations, the damage it has done to the way Russians, both elite Russians and young Russians, look at America today , " Cohen declares.

"Russiagate is one of the greatest new threats to national security. I have five listed in the book. Russia and China aren't on there. Russiagate is number one."

And the potential damage it could still cause is enormous.

Source:RT

Im4truth4all , 48 minutes ago link

Amazing, 30 million dollars spent for an investigation that produced nothing and some believe that Russiagate is still reality. This paranoia is unbelievable except for a psychotic public - pathetic.

Dickweed Wang , 2 hours ago link

If the neo-con/Nazi assholes embedded in the M.I.C. and the US government continue down this road of demonizing and antagonizing Russia it is not going to end well for the people of the US. Putin and the rest of the Russian leadership have made it crystal clear that they are only going to be pushed so far. The problem is when Russia snaps they are going to do their damdest to try to cut the head of the snake off in one shot. There's a good chance they could actually pull that off.

Snout the First , 2 hours ago link

Just exactly what did Russia do to "meddle" in our election?

- Did Russia hack the voting machines and change votes?

- Did Russia make illegal campaign contributions to Republicans?

- Did Russia facilitate people voting who weren't eligible to vote?

What exactly did Russia do?

[May 31, 2019] Satire is no longer possible with the US neoliberal MSM constantly moving uyp the upper limits of stupidity

May 31, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

NUGGETS FROM THE STUPIDITY MINE.

A Beluga whale that hangs around people ; exactly the behaviour you'd expect from one of Putin's spy whales ! The NYT, welded to the lie, opines that Barr's inquiry might expose a "person close to Mr. Putin" . Oops!

NYT, you just did (shows that they don't even read the handouts they re-type). English needs a new vocabulary for the concept of "stupid".

[May 31, 2019] Comments on Official Response by OPCW to the Engineering Assessment on Douma

OPSW proved to be a gang of a despicable, completely bought by the USA bottomfeeders. Looks like they are now a part of "Intergity Initiative"
At this point credibility of the USA and UK experts on the topic is not zero, it is negative: they systematically generate false flags.
Truth be told after Skripals affair the level of credibility of the UK government and expects is far below zero in any case. This is just a gang of despicable warmongers.
Notable quotes:
"... If SST readers are confused by OPCW's constantly shifting explanations for why the Final Report on the Douma incident excluded the Engineering Assessment, they're not the only ones. ..."
"... Unfortunately for whoever thought up this defence, it is explicitly contradicted by both the Interim Report (published last July) and the Final Report, which state that the objective of the engineering studies was to evaluate how the cylinders arrived in position. ..."
May 29, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Comments on official response to the release of the Engineering Assessment of the Douma cylinders Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason, Piers Robinson

Members of Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media 1 Introduction

This post comments on the response to our release of the Executive Summary of the Engineering Assessment of the Douma cylinders on 13 May 2018. All emphases in quoted passages are added by us. After OPCW had confirmed the document to be genuine, the story was covered extensively by Russian media.

An informed commentary by Professor Hiroyuki Aoyama in Tokyo has been published on Yahoo News's Japanese site. The only coverage in western corporate media has been by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday , Robert Fisk in the Independent and Tucker Carlson on Fox .

Other journalists who have been in touch with us have told us that their stories were spiked by editors. As expected, the story has reached much larger numbers through websites and videos that have disseminated it.

2 OPCW's response to the release of the document

2.1 Official response

In an email dated 11 May and shown to us, Deepti Choubey, the head of OPCW Public Affairs, wrote:

Thank you for reaching out to us. It is exclusively through the Fact-Finding Mission, set up in 2014, that the OPCW establishes facts surrounding allegations of use of toxic chemicals for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic. On 1 March 2019, the OPCW has issued its final and only valid official report, signed by the Director-General, regarding the incident that took place in Douma, Syrian Arab Republic, on 7 April 2018. The document you shared with us is not part of any of the material produced by the FFM. The individual mentioned in the document has never been a member of the FFM .

A subsequent email on 16 May stated:

The OPCW establishes facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic through the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM), which was set up in 2014. The OPCW Technical Secretariat reaffirms that the FFM complies with established methodologies and practices to ensure the integrity of its findings. The FFM takes into account all available, relevant, and reliable information and analysis within the scope of its mandate to determine its findings. Per standard practice, the FFM draws expertise from different divisions across the Technical Secretariat as needed. All information was taken into account, deliberated, and weighed when formulating the final report regarding the incident in Douma, Syrian Arab Republic, on 7 April 2018. On 1 March 2019, the OPCW issued its final report on this incident, signed by the Director-General.

Per OPCW rules and regulations, and in order to ensure the privacy, safety, and security of personnel, the OPCW does not provide information about individual staff members of the Technical Secretariat. Pursuant to its established policies and practices, the OPCW Technical Secretariat is conducting an internal investigation about the unauthorised release of the document in question. At this time, there is no further public information on this matter and the OPCW is unable to accommodate requests for interviews.

This was taken as confirmation that the document was genuine.

2.2 Unofficial briefings

Following OPCW's confirmation on 16 May that the document we had released was genuine, two individuals in the UK whose communications have supported UK government policy on Syria favoring regime change – Professor Scott Lucas of Birmingham University, and the former Guardian journalist Brian Whitaker – began reporting that they had inside information on how the Engineering Assessment had been excluded from the Final Report.

2.2.1 Lucas

On 16 May Lucas reported that:

Henderson was writing what was, in effect, a dissenting assessment from that of most of the OPCW's team and consultant experts. His findings were considered but were a minority opinion as final report was written.

He followed this with a remarkably indiscreet tweet asserting that "I know how OPCW review process was conducted and what place Henderson's assessment had in it." When challenged to explain his connection to OPCW, Lucas did not answer. Hitchens reported on 24 May that OPCW Public Affairs had refused to comment on whether Lucas was receiving authorised briefings from OPCW.

2.2.2 Whitaker

Whitaker was at first more circumspect about his sources, reporting on 16 May that:

One story circulating in the chemical weapons community (though not confirmed) is that Henderson had wanted to join the FFM and got rebuffed but was then given permission to do some investigating on the sidelines of the FFM.

Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat extended Whitaker's version with:

This reporting by @Brian_Whit on the leaked Douma report that the conspiracy theorists and chemical weapon denialists are so excited about is consistent with what I'm hearing . Looks like they all got played by a disgruntled OPCW employee.

In an article posted on 24 May, Whitaker was more explicit in reporting the spin of "an informed source" on the Engineering Assessment.

an informed source has now shed some light on it. The key point here is the FFM's terms of reference. Its basic role was to establish facts about the alleged attack, and it was not allowed to apportion blame -- that is the job of the OPCW's newly-created Investigation and Identification Team (IIT). Although the FFM determined that the cylinders were probably dropped from the air, the published report (in line with its mandate) omitted any mention of the obvious implication that they had been dropped by regime aircraft. According to the informed source, when Henderson's assessment was reviewed there were concerns that it came too close to attributing responsibility, and thus fell outside the scope of the FFM's mandate. Whether or not that was the right decision, there was no doubt that Henderson's assessment did fall within the mandate of the new Investigation and Identification Team. For that reason, according to the source, he was advised to pass it to the IIT instead -- and he did so.

Unless this account was entirely fabricated, it could only have come from someone with close knowledge of how the Final Report had been prepared. A subsequent tweet from Whitaker on 25 May, presumably channelling the same source, confirmed that "Henderson and others" had been in Douma:

Henderson and others did go to Douma to provide temporary support to the FFM, but they were not official members of the FFM.

2.3 What the channelling of off-the-record briefings tells us

It is likely that (at least on this occasion) Lucas and Whitaker are telling the truth, and that they have been briefed by someone with close knowledge of how the FFM Final Report was prepared. If these briefings had not been authorised, OPCW Public Affairs could easily have responded to Hitchens's question with a standard statement reiterating that "there is no further public information on this matter" and that this extended to off-the-record briefings. We would expect OPCW press officers to be reluctant to issue further statements that could subsequently be shown to be false.

Like cellular biologists who perturb a complex system and measure its outputs, we can infer from these observations the existence of a pathway. This pathway connects the production of OPCW reports on alleged chemical attacks in Syria with a network of communicators in the UK who in different ways have promoted the cause of regime change in Syria since 2012. It is evident that Lucas and Whitaker are output nodes of this pathway. From August 2012, Whitaker as the Guardian's Middle East editor promoted Higgins from obscure beginnings as a blogger to become a widely-cited source on the Syrian conflict. Whitaker was the first journalist to devote an article to attacking the Working Group, in February 2018 when its only collective output had been a brief blog post.

It is of course possible that OPCW management for some procedural reason was unable to provide further information on the record, and sought to disseminate an accurate version of events via off-the-record briefings. But the choice of such highly partisan commentators as Lucas and Whitaker as channels inevitably calls into question the good faith of whoever provided these briefings, and undermines any remaining pretence to impartiality on the part of OPCW management.

2.4 Discrepancies between versions of OPCW's response

An established method in investigative journalism is to compare official versions and to infer from discrepancies what they are trying to hide. On 11 May OPCW Public Affairs stated that "The document you shared with us is not part of any of the material produced by the FFM. The individual mentioned in the document has never been a member of the FFM". After we pointed out that these two statements were provably false – the external collaboration on the engineering assessment of the Douma cylinders must have been authorised by OPCW, and Henderson could hardly have been in Damascus on a tourist visa – they were not repeated on the record. By 16 May OPCW Public Affairs had formulated a new policy: "Per OPCW rules and regulations the OPCW does not provide information about individual staff members of the Technical Secretariat." A more subtle version of Henderson's role was then channelled through Lucas and Whitaker: "minority opinion", "on the sidelines" and elaborated by Higgins as "disgruntled OPCW employee"'. Between 16 May and 25 May the story channelled through Whitaker changed from "Henderson had wanted to join the FFM and got rebuffed but was then given permission to do some investigating on the sidelines of the FFM." to admitting that "Henderson and others" were in Douma "to provide temporary support to the FFM".

On 24 May Whitaker's informed source admits that "Henderson's assessment was reviewed" for the Final Report, no longer attempting to maintain that the Engineering Assessment was not part of the FFM's process. If we strip away the flannel from this latest story, it appears to be accurate. The "informed source" tells us that the Engineering Assessment was excluded from the Final Report not because its technical analysis had been rebutted, but because the conclusion that the cylinders had been placed in position rather than dropped from the air would necessarily have attributed responsibility for the incident to the opposition .

The argument that the mandate of the FFM prevented it from endorsing the Engineering Assessment's conclusion is easily refuted as a matter of logic. Announcing the release of the Final Report, OPCW stated that "The FFM's mandate is to determine whether chemical weapons or toxic chemicals as weapons have been used in Syria." In Douma this could be reduced to deciding between two alternatives: (1) the gas cylinders were dropped from the air, implying that they were used as chemical weapons; (2) the cylinders were placed in position, implying that the incident was staged and that no chemical attack had occurred. Although to conclude that alternative (2) was correct would implicate the opposition, this would not be attribution of blame for a chemical attack but rather a determination that chemical weapons had not been used.

Clearly a verdict that the alleged chemical attack had been staged would have been unacceptable to the French government, which had joined in the US-led missile attack on 14 April 2018. We can surmise that the Chief of Cabinet of OPCW, Sébastien Braha, who (according to his Linkedin profile ) is still in post as a French diplomat, would have been in a difficult position if he had allowed the FFM to release a report that reached this conclusion. He would be in an even more difficult position if he were to allow the newly-established Investigation and Identification Team (IIT), which also reports to him, to overturn the conclusions of the Final Report and report that the alleged chemical attack was staged. Even if Braha's failure to update his online profile with the date of leaving his diplomatic post is an oversight, this would still be a conflict of interest based on the OECD definition of what "a reasonable person, knowing the relevant facts, would conclude". As we have noted, OPCW appears to have no arrangements for managing conflicts of interest. Until the governance and working practices of OPCW are radically reformed, it is hard to see how neutral observers can have confidence in the impartiality of the FFM or the IIT.

3 Government responses to an alleged chlorine attack on 19 May 3.1 Reports of the alleged attack

Possible allusions to the release of the Engineering Assessment on 13 May can be discerned in government responses to a report of an alleged chlorine attack in Idlib on 19 May. The earliest report , mentioning three missiles or shells loaded with chlorine was from an Arabic-language website named ebaa.news at 11.01 am Syrian time. The location was given as Kubina Hill in Kabbana village, on the border with Lattakia. At 12.46 am Syrian time Hamish de Bretton-Gordon (HdBG) tweeted

Appears to be a chlorine attack from Regime artillery shells in Jose Al Shugour village - 4 casualties being evacuated for treatment

"Jose Al Shugour village" is presumably the town of Jisr Al-Shughour. Rami Abdulrahman's Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on 22 May that four fighters were treated in hospital after they "suffocated in the intense and violent shelling by the regime forces, within caves and trenches" but did not endorse the claims of a chlorine attack, noting that the source of this story was "the Media platform of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham". The story was elaborated in a Fox News report on 23 May that quoted a "Dr Ahmad" from Idlib, who reported that he had treated the casualties. Fox News also quoted Nidal Shikhani of the Chemical Violations Documentation Centre Syria (CVDCS).

A possible match for the identity of "Dr Ahmad" is Dr Ahmad al-Dbis, quoted by Reuters on 4 May 2019 as Safety and Security Manager for the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organisations (UOSSM), describing airstrikes on Idlib and northern Hama. Since 2016 both HdBG and the CBRN Task Force that he set up in 2013 have been affiliated to UOSSM. A report from 2014 quotes a "Dr Ahmad" described as a medic trained by HdBG for the CBRN Task Force. CVDCS is an NGO that has worked closely with the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission since 2015 to provide purported eyewitnesses for interview in Syria, originally established in 2012 as the Office of Documentation of the Chemical File in Syria , and later registered in Brussels as a non-profit company named Same Justice. This company never complied with the legal requirement to file accounts, and went into liquidation on 27 February 2019.

The ebaa.news site appears to be closely linked to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), frequently quoting HTS spokesmen and sometimes reporting exclusive stories obtained from HTS. On 31 May 2018 HTS was designated by the US Department of State as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. The Coordinator for Counterterrorism noted that this designation "serves notice that the United States is not fooled by this al-Qa'ida affiliate's attempt to rebrand itself." In conclusion, the provenance of this story of a chemical attack on 19 May is dubious, and the extent to which the sources are independent of one another is not clear.

3.2 UK response

On 22 May John Woodcock MP asked at Prime Minister's Questions :

British experts are this morning investigating a suspected chlorine attack by al-Assad in Idlib. If it is proved, will she lead the international response against the return of this indiscriminate evil?

As expected, the Prime Minister gave a bellicose answer, but made no reference to OPCW.

We of course acted in Syria, with France and the United States, when we saw chemical weapons being used there. We are in close contact with the United States and are monitoring the situation closely, and if any use of chemical weapons is confirmed, we will respond appropriately.

Woodcock's "British experts" appear to have included HdBG, who had suggested in a tweet the day before that Woodcock should ask the Prime Minister about Idlib, though not about a chemical attack. In a subsequent tweet Woodcock stated that his experts were "on the ground in Syria".

3.3 French response

The daily press from the French foreign ministry on 22 May responded to a question on the alleged chemical attack on 19 May with:

We have noted with concern these allegations which must be investigated. We have full confidence in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons .

3.4 US response

A press statement from State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus on 21 May dealt with the alleged chemical attack two days earlier:

Unfortunately, we continue to see signs that the Assad regime may be renewing its use of chemical weapons, including an alleged chlorine attack in northwest Syria on the morning of May 19, 2019. We are still gathering information on this incident, but we repeat our warning that if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons, the United States and our allies will respond quickly and appropriately.

She mentioned a " continuing disinformation campaign " to "create the false narrative that others are to blame for chemical weapons attacks that the Assad regime itself is conducting". The following day Mr James Jeffrey, the State Department's special representative to Syria, testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that "So far we cannot confirm [the reports of chemical weapons use] but we're watching it". The New York Times reported this to be a "carefully worded recalibration" of the announcement by Morgan Ortagus the day before, and that American military officials had "expressed surprise over the State Department's strong statement". 4 Comparison of the Engineering Assessment with the published Final Report

A comparison of the Engineering Assessment and the Final Report have been reported in outline form by McIntyre . As Larson has noted , there are indications in the Final Report that whoever drafted it had access to an earlier version of the Engineering Assessment (the released version dated 27 February 2019 is marked Rev 1) and was attempting to rebut it without overtly mentioning it. For instance the Engineering Assessment lists five points supporting the opinion of experts that the crater at location 2 had been created by a the explosion of a mortar round or artillery rocket rather than an impact from a falling object. These points included:

"an (unusually elevated, but possible) fragmentation pattern on upper walls"

"(whilst it was observed that a fire had been created in the corner of the room) black scorching on the crater underside and ceiling."

The Final Report states falsely that a fragmentation pattern, visible in open-source images, was absent:

The FFM analysed the damage on the rooftop terrace and below the crater in order to determine if it had been created by an explosive device. However, this hypothesis is unlikely given the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristic of an explosion that may have created the crater and the damage surrounding it.

This is followed by a paragraph that notes the blackening of the ceiling and attributes it to the fire set in the room. The Final Report's allusion to the possibility of an explosive device, with mention of fragmentation pattern and the setting of a fire in the room appears to be an attempt to explain away the argument made in the Engineering Assessment.

We note that several of the key findings of the Engineering Assessment are based only on examination of the cylinders. For instance the Engineering Assessment reports that the cylinder at Location 2 bears no markings that would be consistent with the frame with fins (lying on the balcony) ever having been attached to it, let alone the markings that would be expected if the frame had been stripped off by impact. The Final Report records that the Syrian government insisted on retaining custody of the cylinders for criminal investigation purposes. Accordingly:

On 4 June, FFM team members tagged and sealed the cylinders from Locations 2 and 4, and documented the procedure.

A useful way to take forward the investigation of the Douma incident would now be for the Syrian government to invite an international team of neutral experts to examine the cylinders, to assess whether the observations support the findings of the Engineering Assessment or the conclusions of the published FFM Final Report, and to publish their findings in a form that allows peer review and reproducibility of results from data. The next step would be a criminal investigation of this incident, focusing on where, how and by whom were the 35 victims seen in images at Location 2 killed.

Posted at 02:37 AM in government , History , Syria , The Military Art , weapons | Permalink

Castellio , 29 May 2019 at 12:05 PM

Thank you for pursuing this issue in depth and with rigour.

Paul McKeigue , 29 May 2019 at 12:05 PM

If SST readers are confused by OPCW's constantly shifting explanations for why the Final Report on the Douma incident excluded the Engineering Assessment, they're not the only ones.

Yesterday OPCW released its official response (dated 21 May) to Russian criticisms (dated 26 April) of the Final Report of the Fact-Finding Mission on the Douma incident. In this response OPCW made, officially and on the record, the same argument as that made by Whitaker's "informed source: that to assess how the cylinders arrived in their positions was outside the mandate of the FFM.

Unfortunately for whoever thought up this defence, it is explicitly contradicted by both the Interim Report (published last July) and the Final Report, which state that the objective of the engineering studies was to evaluate how the cylinders arrived in position.

Peter Hitchens is on the case, and has listed these contradictions and requested an explanation from OPCW.

https://t.co/siF2D4yita

[May 31, 2019] Satire is no longer possible with the US neoliberal MSM constantly moving uyp the upper limits of stupidity

May 31, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

NUGGETS FROM THE STUPIDITY MINE.

A Beluga whale that hangs around people ; exactly the behaviour you'd expect from one of Putin's spy whales ! The NYT, welded to the lie, opines that Barr's inquiry might expose a "person close to Mr. Putin" . Oops!

NYT, you just did (shows that they don't even read the handouts they re-type). English needs a new vocabulary for the concept of "stupid".

[May 31, 2019] Threats to the neoliberal world order to be discussed at Bilderberg meeting

That means implicit acknowledgement from Bilderberg group that neoliberalism is under threat... Essentially trade war with China is destroying neoliberalism as we speak because "national neoliberalism" -- neoliberalism without globalization is just a flavor of neofascism, not a new social system.
May 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
Anne Jaclard , May 30, 2019 7:33:37 PM | 31

Bilderberg 2019 Meeting Information Revealed

Stacey Abrams, Eric Schmidt, Mike Pompeo, and Mattel Renzi, among others, will be attending the top-secret Bilderberh meetings from today through the weekend.

Topics to be discussed include the weaponisation of social media, the future of capitalism, Brexit, China, and threats to the neoliberal world order.

Held since 1954, Bilderberg has acted as a meeting point for high-level establishment politicians and corporate elites to promote the interests of Atlanticism and global corporations.

Many attendees of Bilderberg have gone on to play major roles in their countries' politics, including Angela Merkel and Barack Obama.

The presence of Abrams at the event is another sign that she may act as a vice-presidential candidate for Joe Biden, who himself has attended corporate-linked summits including Davos and the Munich Security Conference this year and who has seen his narratives bolstered by think tanks such as More in Common and the Trilateral Commission.

Abrams is herself a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has pursued a neoliberal agenda while in office.

https://bilderbergmeetings.org/meetings/meeting-2019/press-release-2019

[May 30, 2019] Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "All political analysis which favors either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is inherently worthless, because both parties are made of swamp and exist in service of the swamp. If you can't see that the entire system is one unified block of corruption and that ordinary people need to come together and unite against it, then you really don't understand what you're looking at." ..."
May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
ben , May 29, 2019 10:45:47 PM | 2

SteveK9 , May 29, 2019 6:54:20 PM | 0

Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth. I recommend listening to the two-part interview of George Papadopoulos with Mark Steyn, where he describes the convoluted plot to use him to bring down Trump.

What they did to this guy is truly disgusting. Brennan belongs in a prison cell, and he should be sharing it with Mueller. Papadopoulos also has written a book about his experiences called 'Deep State Target, How I got caught in the crosshairs of the plot to bring down President Trump.

And, a final comment. Hillary Clinton proved beyond all doubt that she and not Trump was not fit to be President. To engage in this scheme and then to raise tensions through the roof with a nuclear superpower, which can destroy this country, is about as low and selfish as it is possible to be.

As I stated on the open thread, to paraphrase Muller;

I don't give a s###. figure it out yourself, Im f***ing outta' here.

The whole point of impeachment, is to have a show trial, not actually impeach. If the thing is on TV, the American people may watch it, and that would be interesting.

Not to worry though, Pelosi and Schumer won't let that happen. Appeasing their donors,is all they care about.

psycho @ 2 quoting C. Johnston stated;

"All political analysis which favors either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is inherently worthless, because both parties are made of swamp and exist in service of the swamp. If you can't see that the entire system is one unified block of corruption and that ordinary people need to come together and unite against it, then you really don't understand what you're looking at."

That, my friends, is the clearest truth of all..

[May 30, 2019] Everyone here at moa is saying much the same: the CIA is running the usa at this point.. Mueller is ex CIA... So, basically the mueller investigation a cover up and BS for the lemmings... It seems to have worked to a limited degree..

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... IMO it also became more apparent when the Deep State f*cked up by no bringing Russia on-side after the end of the Cold War while continuing to assist China's "peaceful rise". That caused the dislocation known as Trump. There's gonna be some turbulence when you turn a massive entity like USA. ..."
May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Full Spectrum Domino , May 29, 2019 5:38:15 PM | 2

Mueller plays his criminal hand of innuendo until the end. Were he ever to submit to questions in a Congressional setting, Mueller would be out-Giancana-ing Sam on taking the Fifth. The Special Counsel format is at this stage a superseded footnote. The ball's now in Barr/Durham's court now and the theme is Hunt for Red Predicates.


Breaking news. The Russia Collusion time-zero may in fact lead to Rome as all roads are wont to do. Italy is not a Five Eyes member. However that did not prevent Obama and Brennan from treating it like one. Both spent a lot of time there at opportune moments.

As it turns out the oft-cited, oft-profaned Steele Dossier was the barest of predicates that was always meant to be hopped over anyway. The Mother of all Predicates was a a failed effort on the the part of Italian intelligence and the FBI to frame Trump in a stolen (Clinton) email scandal. How did the Italians get hold of these emails and who thwarted the frame-up attempt? Hmm.

Just when you think the transnational plot is thick enough, it gets thickerer, and if Obama's Milan itinerary's any indication, it may well reach the tippy-top.

Nine Days in May (2017) is where 90% of the action is.

brian , May 29, 2019 6:00:26 PM | 3

notice no US president or advisor has ever been sent to prison over war crimes..the impeachment circus is not going anywhere
james , May 29, 2019 6:07:34 PM | 5
@29 bruce... everyone here at moa is saying much the same which is why some of us are saying the cia is running the usa at this point.. that and a confluence of other interests... mueller - ex cia... so, basically the mueller investigation was more cover up and b.s. for the masses... it seems to have worked to a limited degree..
Jackrabbit , May 29, 2019 6:34:42 PM | 6
james @36 cia is running the usa"

Some think the CIA has been running the show since the Kennedy assassination. But with the rise of the neocons and the end of the Cold War, it became more apparent.

IMO it also became more apparent when the Deep State f*cked up by no bringing Russia on-side after the end of the Cold War while continuing to assist China's "peaceful rise". That caused the dislocation known as Trump. There's gonna be some turbulence when you turn a massive entity like USA.

Last thing that as become 'apparent' is this: the vast majority of people in the West (including many smart people in alt-media) can't dislodge their thinking from the MSM narratives. Despite being skeptical of MSM and USA, they just can't bring themselves to see the degree of manipulation that leads to the logical conclusion: "cia is running the usa".

Jackrabbit , May 29, 2019 6:35:30 PM | 7
james @36: cia is running the usa

Some think the CIA has been running the show since the Kennedy assassination. But with the rise of the neocons and the end of the Cold War, it became more apparent.

IMO it also became more apparent when the Deep State f*cked up by no bringing Russia on-side after the end of the Cold War while continuing to assist China's "peaceful rise". That caused the dislocation known as Trump. There's gonna be some turbulence when you turn a massive entity like USA.

Last thing that as become 'apparent' is this: the vast majority of people in the West (including many smart people in alt-media) can't dislodge their thinking from the MSM narratives. Despite being skeptical of MSM and USA, they just can't bring themselves to see the degree of manipulation that leads to the logical conclusion: "cia is running the usa" .

[May 30, 2019] Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "All political analysis which favors either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is inherently worthless, because both parties are made of swamp and exist in service of the swamp. If you can't see that the entire system is one unified block of corruption and that ordinary people need to come together and unite against it, then you really don't understand what you're looking at." ..."
May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
ben , May 29, 2019 10:45:47 PM | 2

SteveK9 , May 29, 2019 6:54:20 PM | 0

Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth. I recommend listening to the two-part interview of George Papadopoulos with Mark Steyn, where he describes the convoluted plot to use him to bring down Trump.

What they did to this guy is truly disgusting. Brennan belongs in a prison cell, and he should be sharing it with Mueller. Papadopoulos also has written a book about his experiences called 'Deep State Target, How I got caught in the crosshairs of the plot to bring down President Trump.

And, a final comment. Hillary Clinton proved beyond all doubt that she and not Trump was not fit to be President. To engage in this scheme and then to raise tensions through the roof with a nuclear superpower, which can destroy this country, is about as low and selfish as it is possible to be.

As I stated on the open thread, to paraphrase Muller;

I don't give a s###. figure it out yourself, Im f***ing outta' here.

The whole point of impeachment, is to have a show trial, not actually impeach. If the thing is on TV, the American people may watch it, and that would be interesting.

Not to worry though, Pelosi and Schumer won't let that happen. Appeasing their donors,is all they care about.

psycho @ 2 quoting C. Johnston stated;

"All political analysis which favors either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party is inherently worthless, because both parties are made of swamp and exist in service of the swamp. If you can't see that the entire system is one unified block of corruption and that ordinary people need to come together and unite against it, then you really don't understand what you're looking at."

That, my friends, is the clearest truth of all..

[May 30, 2019] Everyone here at moa is saying much the same: the CIA is running the usa at this point.. Mueller is ex CIA... So, basically the mueller investigation a cover up and BS for the lemmings... It seems to have worked to a limited degree..

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... IMO it also became more apparent when the Deep State f*cked up by no bringing Russia on-side after the end of the Cold War while continuing to assist China's "peaceful rise". That caused the dislocation known as Trump. There's gonna be some turbulence when you turn a massive entity like USA. ..."
May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Full Spectrum Domino , May 29, 2019 5:38:15 PM | 2

Mueller plays his criminal hand of innuendo until the end. Were he ever to submit to questions in a Congressional setting, Mueller would be out-Giancana-ing Sam on taking the Fifth. The Special Counsel format is at this stage a superseded footnote. The ball's now in Barr/Durham's court now and the theme is Hunt for Red Predicates.


Breaking news. The Russia Collusion time-zero may in fact lead to Rome as all roads are wont to do. Italy is not a Five Eyes member. However that did not prevent Obama and Brennan from treating it like one. Both spent a lot of time there at opportune moments.

As it turns out the oft-cited, oft-profaned Steele Dossier was the barest of predicates that was always meant to be hopped over anyway. The Mother of all Predicates was a a failed effort on the the part of Italian intelligence and the FBI to frame Trump in a stolen (Clinton) email scandal. How did the Italians get hold of these emails and who thwarted the frame-up attempt? Hmm.

Just when you think the transnational plot is thick enough, it gets thickerer, and if Obama's Milan itinerary's any indication, it may well reach the tippy-top.

Nine Days in May (2017) is where 90% of the action is.

brian , May 29, 2019 6:00:26 PM | 3

notice no US president or advisor has ever been sent to prison over war crimes..the impeachment circus is not going anywhere
james , May 29, 2019 6:07:34 PM | 5
@29 bruce... everyone here at moa is saying much the same which is why some of us are saying the cia is running the usa at this point.. that and a confluence of other interests... mueller - ex cia... so, basically the mueller investigation was more cover up and b.s. for the masses... it seems to have worked to a limited degree..
Jackrabbit , May 29, 2019 6:34:42 PM | 6
james @36 cia is running the usa"

Some think the CIA has been running the show since the Kennedy assassination. But with the rise of the neocons and the end of the Cold War, it became more apparent.

IMO it also became more apparent when the Deep State f*cked up by no bringing Russia on-side after the end of the Cold War while continuing to assist China's "peaceful rise". That caused the dislocation known as Trump. There's gonna be some turbulence when you turn a massive entity like USA.

Last thing that as become 'apparent' is this: the vast majority of people in the West (including many smart people in alt-media) can't dislodge their thinking from the MSM narratives. Despite being skeptical of MSM and USA, they just can't bring themselves to see the degree of manipulation that leads to the logical conclusion: "cia is running the usa".

Jackrabbit , May 29, 2019 6:35:30 PM | 7
james @36: cia is running the usa

Some think the CIA has been running the show since the Kennedy assassination. But with the rise of the neocons and the end of the Cold War, it became more apparent.

IMO it also became more apparent when the Deep State f*cked up by no bringing Russia on-side after the end of the Cold War while continuing to assist China's "peaceful rise". That caused the dislocation known as Trump. There's gonna be some turbulence when you turn a massive entity like USA.

Last thing that as become 'apparent' is this: the vast majority of people in the West (including many smart people in alt-media) can't dislodge their thinking from the MSM narratives. Despite being skeptical of MSM and USA, they just can't bring themselves to see the degree of manipulation that leads to the logical conclusion: "cia is running the usa" .

[May 30, 2019] Tulsi is charismatic, as well as calm and collected.

May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

psychohistorian , May 29, 2019 5:34:06 PM | 0

Bart Hansen , May 29, 2019 5:37:10 PM | 1

Impeachment indeed would be a mistake. The Dems have been denigrating trump from the beginning and what has that got them?

Also, remember Trey Gowdy and his endless investigations? Adam Shiff is nearly as repugnant and should turn to other work in Congress.

Yes, SharonM, Tulsi is charismatic, as well as calm and collected. So far, though, she is being ignored by the D.C. pundits. We should keep an eye on her positioning with respect to the new DNC debate thresholds.

[May 30, 2019] >The Real Bob Mueller

Notable quotes:
"... Although these Hoover successors, now occupying center stage in the investigation of President Trump, have been hailed for their impeccable character by much of Official Washington, the truth is, as top law enforcement officials of the George W. Bush Administration (Mueller as FBI Director and James Comey as Deputy Attorney General), both presided over post-9/11 cover-ups and secret abuses of the Constitution, enabled Bush-Cheney fabrications used to launch wrongful wars, and exhibited plain vanilla incompetence. ..."
"... Worse, Bush and Cheney used that post 9/11 period of obfuscation to "roll out" their misbegotten "war on terror," which only served to exponentially increase worldwide terrorism . ..."
"... A few months later, when it appeared he was acceding to Bush-Cheney's ginning up intelligence to launch the unjustified, counterproductive and illegal war on Iraq, I took Mueller up on his offer, emailing him my concerns in late February 2003. Mueller knew, for instance, that Vice President Dick Cheney's claims connecting 9/11 to Iraq were bogus yet he remained quiet. He also never responded to my email. ..."
"... Beyond ignoring politicized intelligence, Mueller bent to other political pressures. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mueller directed the " post 9/11 round-up " of about 1,000 immigrants who mostly happened to be in the wrong place (the New York City area) at the wrong time. FBI Headquarters encouraged more and more detentions for what seemed to be essentially P.R. purposes. Field offices were required to report daily the number of detentions in order to supply grist for FBI press releases about FBI "progress" in fighting terrorism. Consequently, some of the detainees were brutalized and jailed for up to a year despite the fact that none turned out to be terrorists . ..."
"... Long before he became FBI Director, serious questions existed about Mueller's role as Acting U.S. Attorney in Boston in effectively enabling decades of corruption and covering up of the FBI's illicit deals with mobster Whitey Bulger and other "top echelon" informants who committed numerous murders and crimes. When the truth was finally uncovered through intrepid investigative reporting and persistent, honest judges, U.S. taxpayers footed a $100 million court award to the four men framed for murders committed by (the FBI-operated) Bulger gang. ..."
"... Current media applause omits the fact that former FBI Director Mueller was the top official in charge of the Anthrax terror fiasco investigation into those 2001 murders , which targeted an innocent man (Steven Hatfil l) whose lawsuit eventually forced the FBI to pay $5 million in compensation. Mueller's FBI was also severely criticized by Department of Justice Inspector Generals finding the FBI overstepped the law improperly serving hundreds of thousands of "national security letters" to obtain private (and irrelevant) metadata on citizens, and for infiltrating nonviolent anti-war groups under the guise of investigating "terrorism." ..."
"... Up to the March 2004 night in Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital room, both Comey and Mueller were complicit with implementing a form of martial law, perpetrated via secret Office of Legal Counsel memos mainly written by John Yoo and predicated upon Yoo's singular theories of absolute "imperial" or "war presidency" powers, and requiring Ashcroft every 90 days to renew certification of a "state of emergency." ..."
"... Mueller was even okay with the CIA conducting torture programs after his own agents warned against participation. Agents were simply instructed not to document such torture, and any "war crimes files" were made to disappear. Not only did "collect it all" surveillance and torture programs continue, but Mueller's (and then Comey's) FBI later worked to prosecute NSA and CIA whistleblowers who revealed these illegalities. ..."
"... Neither Comey nor Mueller -- who are reported to be " joined at the hip " -- deserve their current lionization among politicians and mainstream media. Instead of Jimmy Stewart-like "G-men" with reputations for principled integrity, the two close confidants and collaborators merely proved themselves, along with former CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, reliably politicized sycophants, enmeshing themselves in a series of wrongful abuses of power along with official incompetence. ..."
"... It seems clear that based on his history and close "partnership" with Comey, called "one of the closest working relationships the top ranks of the Justice Department have ever seen," Mueller was chosen as Special Counsel not because he has integrity but because he will do what the powerful want him to do. ..."
"... Mueller didn't speak the truth about a war he knew to be unjustified. He didn't speak out against torture. He didn't speak out against unconstitutional surveillance. And he didn't tell the truth about 9/11. He is just "their man." ..."
"... The anthrax attacks of 2001 were the double-tap to follow the events of 9/11, and were crucial to the successful passage of the Patriot Act. ..."
"... Some history: Robert Swan Mueller III married his childhood sweetheart Ann Cabell Standish in 1966, three years after the JFK assassination. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, was second in command at the CIA during the Bay of Pigs failure and was fired, along with Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, for lying to him about the mission, which had been doomed to failure before its start. Her great uncle, Earle Cabell Jr. was the mayor of Dallas when it hosted the JFK assassination in 1963. Documents declassified in the last few years revealed that Earle Cabell was himself a "CIA asset" as well. Before anyone thinks that Mueller married into the CIA, his own great uncle was the aforementioned Richard Bissell. ..."
"... A closer review, here, shows Mueller's career covering up CIA criminal activities, to include Pan Am 103, the prosecution of Manuel Noriega, BCCI, 9/11 et al. He was promoted to handle those cases by former CIA Director GHW Bush. A week before 9/11 he took over as Director of the FBI, appointed by the son of the CIA Director, George W Bush. ..."
"... Joseph Misfud, a former ambassador for Malta, has been identified in Mueller's report as a Russian agent without proof. In fact, Misfud's career and allegiance has been to western intelligence. Mueller offers no proof to the contrary. But if in fact Misfud is an agent of Russia shouldn't he have made an attempt to interview him. Or interview Assange, who actually received the information? Or interview Craig Murray who claims to know about how the information was transferred from the DNC to Wikileaks? Or to William Binney? ..."
"... Robert Mueller is just doing what he's always done: cover up for the CIA. ..."
May 29, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Special Counsel Robert Mueller Wednesday implied that he would have indicted Donald Trump if he could have, resurrecting his saint-like status among Democrats who will now likely go for impeachment. But who is the real Bob Mueller?, asked ex-FBI official Coleen Rowley on June 6, 2017.

By Coleen Rowley
Special to Consortium News
 June 6, 2017

Mainstream commentators display amnesia when they describe former FBI Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey as stellar and credible law enforcement figures. Perhaps if they included J. Edgar Hoover, such fulsome praise could be put into proper perspective.

Although these Hoover successors, now occupying center stage in the investigation of President Trump, have been hailed for their impeccable character by much of Official Washington, the truth is, as top law enforcement officials of the George W. Bush Administration (Mueller as FBI Director and James Comey as Deputy Attorney General), both presided over post-9/11 cover-ups and secret abuses of the Constitution, enabled Bush-Cheney fabrications used to launch wrongful wars, and exhibited plain vanilla incompetence.

TIME Magazine would probably have not called my own disclosures a " bombshell memo " to the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry in May 2002 if it had not been for Mueller's having so misled everyone after 9/11. Although he bore no personal responsibility for intelligence failures before the attack, since he only became FBI Director a week before, Mueller denied or downplayed the significance of warnings that had poured in yet were all ignored or mishandled during the Spring and Summer of 2001.

Bush Administration officials had circled the wagons and refused to publicly own up to what the 9/11 Commission eventually concluded, "that the system had been blinking red ." Failures to read, share or act upon important intelligence, which a FBI agent witness termed " criminal negligence " in later trial testimony, were therefore not fixed in a timely manner. (Some failures were never fixed at all.)

Worse, Bush and Cheney used that post 9/11 period of obfuscation to "roll out" their misbegotten "war on terror," which only served to exponentially increase worldwide terrorism .

Unfulfilled Promise

I wanted to believe Director Mueller when he expressed some regret in our personal meeting the night before we both testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He told me he was seeking improvements and that I should not hesitate to contact him if I ever witnessed a similar situation to what was behind the FBI's pre 9/11 failures.

Some of the original detainees jailed at the Guantanamo Bay prison, as put on display by the U.S. military.

A few months later, when it appeared he was acceding to Bush-Cheney's ginning up intelligence to launch the unjustified, counterproductive and illegal war on Iraq, I took Mueller up on his offer, emailing him my concerns in late February 2003. Mueller knew, for instance, that Vice President Dick Cheney's claims connecting 9/11 to Iraq were bogus yet he remained quiet. He also never responded to my email.

Beyond ignoring politicized intelligence, Mueller bent to other political pressures. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mueller directed the " post 9/11 round-up " of about 1,000 immigrants who mostly happened to be in the wrong place (the New York City area) at the wrong time. FBI Headquarters encouraged more and more detentions for what seemed to be essentially P.R. purposes. Field offices were required to report daily the number of detentions in order to supply grist for FBI press releases about FBI "progress" in fighting terrorism. Consequently, some of the detainees were brutalized and jailed for up to a year despite the fact that none turned out to be terrorists .

A History of Failure

Long before he became FBI Director, serious questions existed about Mueller's role as Acting U.S. Attorney in Boston in effectively enabling decades of corruption and covering up of the FBI's illicit deals with mobster Whitey Bulger and other "top echelon" informants who committed numerous murders and crimes. When the truth was finally uncovered through intrepid investigative reporting and persistent, honest judges, U.S. taxpayers footed a $100 million court award to the four men framed for murders committed by (the FBI-operated) Bulger gang.

Current media applause omits the fact that former FBI Director Mueller was the top official in charge of the Anthrax terror fiasco investigation into those 2001 murders , which targeted an innocent man (Steven Hatfil l) whose lawsuit eventually forced the FBI to pay $5 million in compensation. Mueller's FBI was also severely criticized by Department of Justice Inspector Generals finding the FBI overstepped the law improperly serving hundreds of thousands of "national security letters" to obtain private (and irrelevant) metadata on citizens, and for infiltrating nonviolent anti-war groups under the guise of investigating "terrorism."

For his part, Deputy Attorney General James Comey , too, went along with the abuses of Bush and Cheney after 9/11 and signed off on a number of highly illegal programs including warrantless surveillance of Americans and torture of captives . Comey also defended the Bush Administration's three-year-long detention of an American citizen without charges or right to counsel.

Up to the March 2004 night in Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital room, both Comey and Mueller were complicit with implementing a form of martial law, perpetrated via secret Office of Legal Counsel memos mainly written by John Yoo and predicated upon Yoo's singular theories of absolute "imperial" or "war presidency" powers, and requiring Ashcroft every 90 days to renew certification of a "state of emergency."

The Comey/Mueller Myth

What's not well understood is that Comey's and Mueller's joint intervention to stop Bush's men from forcing the sick Attorney General to sign the certification that night was a short-lived moment. A few days later, they all simply went back to the drawing board to draft new legal loopholes to continue the same (unconstitutional) surveillance of Americans.

The mythology of this episode, repeated endlessly throughout the press, is that Comey and Mueller did something significant and lasting in that hospital room. They didn't. Only the legal rationale for their unconstitutional actions was tweaked.

Mueller was even okay with the CIA conducting torture programs after his own agents warned against participation. Agents were simply instructed not to document such torture, and any "war crimes files" were made to disappear. Not only did "collect it all" surveillance and torture programs continue, but Mueller's (and then Comey's) FBI later worked to prosecute NSA and CIA whistleblowers who revealed these illegalities.

Neither Comey nor Mueller -- who are reported to be " joined at the hip " -- deserve their current lionization among politicians and mainstream media. Instead of Jimmy Stewart-like "G-men" with reputations for principled integrity, the two close confidants and collaborators merely proved themselves, along with former CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, reliably politicized sycophants, enmeshing themselves in a series of wrongful abuses of power along with official incompetence.

It seems clear that based on his history and close "partnership" with Comey, called "one of the closest working relationships the top ranks of the Justice Department have ever seen," Mueller was chosen as Special Counsel not because he has integrity but because he will do what the powerful want him to do.

Mueller didn't speak the truth about a war he knew to be unjustified. He didn't speak out against torture. He didn't speak out against unconstitutional surveillance. And he didn't tell the truth about 9/11. He is just "their man."

Coleen Rowley, a retired FBI special agent and division legal counsel whose May 2002 memo to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller exposed some of the FBI's pre-9/11 failures, was named one of TIME magazine's "Persons of the Year" in 2002. Her 2003 letter to Robert Mueller in opposition to launching the Iraq War is archived in full text on the NYT and her 2013 op-ed entitled " Questions for the FBI Nominee " was published on the day of James Comey's confirmation hearing. This piece will also be cross-posted on Rowley's Huffington Post page.)

Relevant links:

jaycee , May 30, 2019 at 21:10

The anthrax attacks of 2001 were the double-tap to follow the events of 9/11, and were crucial to the successful passage of the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act effectively cancelled the privacy protections of the U.S. Constitution, and reversed the onus of a presumption of innocence in U.S. legal practice. The failure of the FBI, under the leadership of Mueller, to provide or uncover an adequate explanation for the anthrax attacks is a signature black mark in the FBI's history, if not the history of the republic.

Raymond Comeau , May 30, 2019 at 14:14

Mueller is another spook dredged up from the bowels of Hell, in order to fool the honest citizens and ensure Deep State and its useful idiots continue on their way to Oblivion.

Bob In Portland , May 30, 2019 at 12:40

Some history: Robert Swan Mueller III married his childhood sweetheart Ann Cabell Standish in 1966, three years after the JFK assassination. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, was second in command at the CIA during the Bay of Pigs failure and was fired, along with Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, for lying to him about the mission, which had been doomed to failure before its start. Her great uncle, Earle Cabell Jr. was the mayor of Dallas when it hosted the JFK assassination in 1963. Documents declassified in the last few years revealed that Earle Cabell was himself a "CIA asset" as well. Before anyone thinks that Mueller married into the CIA, his own great uncle was the aforementioned Richard Bissell.

A closer review, here, shows Mueller's career covering up CIA criminal activities, to include Pan Am 103, the prosecution of Manuel Noriega, BCCI, 9/11 et al. He was promoted to handle those cases by former CIA Director GHW Bush. A week before 9/11 he took over as Director of the FBI, appointed by the son of the CIA Director, George W Bush.

Another key player in our current political show is William Barr. While Barr was getting his law degree he was employed by the CIA. Surprise surprise. One of the main figures in Russiagate is Paul Manafort, whose career consists of him working with world leaders who were either put into power by the CIA, kept in power by the CIA, removed from power by the CIA or murdered by the CIA. It should not be surprising to anyone willing to look that the current maneuvering appears to many to be an attempt to remove Trump from office.

Joseph Misfud, a former ambassador for Malta, has been identified in Mueller's report as a Russian agent without proof. In fact, Misfud's career and allegiance has been to western intelligence. Mueller offers no proof to the contrary. But if in fact Misfud is an agent of Russia shouldn't he have made an attempt to interview him. Or interview Assange, who actually received the information? Or interview Craig Murray who claims to know about how the information was transferred from the DNC to Wikileaks? Or to William Binney?

Robert Mueller is just doing what he's always done: cover up for the CIA.

https://caucus99percent.com/content/what-mueller-wont-find

Bob Van Noy , May 30, 2019 at 21:26

Many Thanks Bob In Portland. I was an 18 year old soldier in the 101st. Airborne on alert for the invasion of Cuba so I share you lifetime of frustration.

To the extent that there is "Continuity In Government", this is it. Great research and information

Drew Hunkins , May 30, 2019 at 10:15

Mueller's proven himself to be just another mouthpiece for power and the "respected" establishment. He's been championing the very dangerous lie that the Kremlin interfered in the '16 election, even though there has never been one piece of credible evidence proving that Moscow did any such thing.

As this canard gets repeated over and over it's sinking in to the public consciousness that the Putin administration is something to be feared.

exiled off mainstreet , May 30, 2019 at 00:00

This reveals the deplorable record of Mueller and Comey as lackeys for a corrupt authoritarian regime.

Doggrotter , May 29, 2019 at 23:50

Can I share this article I just found. I typed into google "is Mueller a psychopath?" and up popped this. I know next to nothing about the site or author. Will explore a bit.

https://nationalvanguard.org/2018/12/robert-mueller-the-quintessential-psychopath/

Doggrotter , May 29, 2019 at 23:02

Coleen. I can't thank you enough for the article. So many abuses to the system. Yet" St Muller this and Saint Muller that". They are the kind of people that nobody with a right would approach with barge pole. Muller and Comie are the rabid rottweilers of the State, just hidden away behind expensive suits and effected gravitas. They need to be chained up in their cages to keep the world safe.
Treatment of Julian Assange.
Entrapment of hapless young men in terrorist stings and their incarceration.
The malicious and failed prosecution of Nor Salman.
Taking illegally obtained surveillance
To Crown it all "Parallel Construction" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Andrew Nichols , May 29, 2019 at 22:47

Failures to read, share or act upon important intelligence, which a FBI agent witness termed "criminal negligence" in later trial testimony, were therefore not fixed in a timely manner. (Some failures were never fixed at all.) Deliberate failures

Scott , May 29, 2019 at 21:56

In a few weeks, there could be a very Special hearing, and Mr. Comey will be on the block, but yet he is or was very comfortable during the questioning on the other day.
In short:
Bob Mueller should be sent to maximum security prisons like:
https://theinmatesearch.org/prison-facility/Arkansas-DOC-(ADC) -- Maximum-Security-Unit/413/

Going back, to the other guy, again would you trust him knowing that he is and has been so close to Comey as it's being tolk and as it's coming out, be it EVER so slow, but as we go deeper into this mess, ALL of these "OUTSTANDING Federal Law Officers", their histories WILL, or at the very least START to show!"

Tom , May 29, 2019 at 21:20

Isn't this the same Robert Mueller who prosecuted Lyndon LaRouche in the late eighties?

robert , June 19, 2017 at 20:43

Colleen's article or op ed here seems to be a straight forward, fact based account that the mainstream media would do well to study and consider [of course they generally wouldnt]. I wonder what all the links she has posted in support show?

I am glad to say I voted for Jill Stein last Nov. She has proven to be too decent for America, I suppose.

If Americans expected or wanted something better, why did 40% or so last Nov. sit back and refuse to vote, and those that did vote vote for obvious bums like Trump and Hilary? ?

Rob Roy , May 30, 2019 at 14:41

Thanks, robert, your letter says exactly what I would write. It's not that good people don't run for office, but the Powers That Be will not allow them to get air time and the MSM goes along with the exclusion, in fact, strongly supports it. War is the business of the USA and must not be stopped. Tulsi Gabbard is the one candidate that opposes war she will be shoved aside, destroyed by lies and ignored by the MSM. I have come to realize Americans are stupid politically and it's not going to stop. It's not just Americans people in Europe have good candidates, but, like here, those good candidates will not be allowed to win important positions. Corbyn comes to mind.

juventus drakt , June 12, 2017 at 08:43

juventus drakt

I used to be suggested this website by means of my cousin.
I am not certain whether this post is written through him as no one else realize such designated about my trouble.
You are wonderful! Thanks!

Vincent Marcantelli , June 9, 2017 at 17:15

Well, Mr. Comey, should be felling rather safe about now. Why, [you ask] well he is in GOOD hands, his old friend is going to be working the case. they both were Big Shots in the FBI and in the Justice Department. And, just like in any other "secret" unit or outfit, those who are or were in will ALL-WAYS be IN! Mr. Comey, came off as being VERY confident in his questioning, what is it that he is so confident about?

In a few weeks their could be a very Special hearing, and Mr. Comey will be on the block, but yet he is or was very comfortable during the questioning on the other day. I, do think, that this is going to be another "white wash" of the facts, and the Left, then walks away saying ."See, we knew that the GOP was doing this and or that". Mr. Comey and his old time friend need to be watched!

Vincent Marcantelli , June 9, 2017 at 17:01

Hate to say such a thing ..Both of these men, as [honest as they have been portrayed to be], getting them both together, one "against" the other, all that means is "look, were BROTHERS together, were both Good Guys, were both former FBI, were of that brotherhood". Folk's that's something, that is just about as thick as Blood, visa Water. If, someone is NOT watching, President Trump, will be in some serious crap. Would you, want to talk to Comey about ANYTHING, knowing that he is so political, and can "turn on a dime"?. Going back, to the other guy, again would you trust him knowing that he is and has been so close to Comey as it's being tolk and as it's coming out, be it EVER so slow, but as we go deeper into this mess, ALL of these "OUTSTANDING Federal Law Officers", their histories WILL, or at the very least START to show!"

rm , June 8, 2017 at 05:24

Mueller was 911 'speed of deceit' cover-up man. All he had to do was follow the forensics. A safe pair of hands,

mike k , June 8, 2017 at 12:25

Voting in the US is a scam to keep people under control, and stupid. People who have an addiction to voting remind of the old joke about the guy who was informed that the wheel of fortune game he was losing his money on was rigged.

Asked why he continued to play the crooked wheel, he replied, :Because it's the only game in town." <img alt='' src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/2dc772f58128a9b167ed2c99e9913eb1?s=60&#038;d=identicon&#038;r=pg' srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/2dc772f58128a9b167ed2c99e9913eb1?s=120&#038;d=identicon&#038;r=pg 2x' class='avatar avatar-60 photo' height='60' width='60' />

Michael Morrissey , June 7, 2017 at 12:51

Mythical heroes and real criminals. I know that Coleen was much more the hero herself in trying to do her job at the FBI (see her Wiki) and now -- much more so -- as an activist and member (along with Ray McGovern et al.) of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, but

Well, I respect her a lot, and I would not like to offend her, but I would love to see how she would react in a detailed discussion of what is actually known about 9/11 (which for me is collected in the work of David Ray Griffin). Ditto for Ray McGovern, though I believe he is somewhat more receptive to what let's call for lack of a better term the "inside job" theory. (I hope we are past the notion that the govt's laughable conspiracy theory is in any respect less "speculative" than the solid presentation of facts and argumentation by David Griffin -- whose work is of course based on that of many others.)

It won't happen, I know. We will all go to our graves, and maybe our children and grandchildren will too, before the NYT or its equivalent says, "Yes, the US govt perpetrated 9/11 in order to scare the crap out of us and make us do everything we have done since."

Still, Coleen Rowley and Ray McGovern and a few more are way, way ahead of the NYT, their former employers, and I suppose the majority of the US population, and I am glad to be counted as among their supporters and admirers.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell , June 7, 2017 at 10:17

It takes only two things to keep people in chains: The ignorance of the oppressed and the treachery of their leaders. ( https://mythfighter.com/2017/06/05/here-we-go-again-more-privatization-scam/ )

Tomk , June 7, 2017 at 21:49

I think he will, I am not kidding . I really believe we are going to see some unbelievably nasty, nasty knives out full out war ., go back to that speech he gave on the Inauguration Day and HOW VERY INAPPROPRIATE it was viewed by all the "in" crowd sitting there, all the "in" group, all the Bohemian Grovers like Obama was (an attendee he was, already groomed to be President years before, so says Zachary King the ex-high Satanist priest who was there yearly and ran into him and was told his future .) and so many of the others CFR, Trilateral Commission etc. part of the Luciferian loony globalist creeps who truly believe they run the show and watch out if you are not on their "team" and don't tell me when you watched that -- that there was no doubt Trump knew he was throwing it right at them, he knows who and what they are–many on here do too from the comments I have seen –I just don't think Trump got the fact then of how well they have the corporate media totally in the bag and how even with a blatant lie like "Russia did it", that any idiot knows is bs, they will keep on going and going, I think that threw him a good bit but if that Inauguration speech is not enough of a signal that he will go to war here shortly–How about this? -- Secretary of State Tillerson in the last day or so saying he is going forward with making things better with Russia? If Trump was on board now believing he could make peace with the Deep Staters –No way that statement is made by Tillerson, that is a statement of "back at ya" No, Trump is a guy who "gets even" and he is not going to roll for them, he may head fake that way, but he doesn't roll that way, he gets even .and why? Just because LOL, because literally his Father growing up you to say "You're the King" and he is that guy lol this is going to go nuclear between him and the Obama/Bush/Deep Staters .He is still getting a feel for what is up 6 months in, I think he now basically has the picture that regardless of what he does they, the Deep State and the corporate media and the loony left that is clueless but buys into what they are fed, plan to skin him alive, pour salt on him, and hang him out as a trophy -- warning any future non-insider to get their message THIS IS WHAT WE DO TO OUTSIDERS! -- much like all future insiders got their message when JFK was shot down by them like a dog in the street and a "lone nut" was the laughable patsy, no one believes that err except the NYTs lol .Trump now knows there is NO MERCY coming his way, none nada, that this is bloodsport, why do you think he is yelling at Sessions? Sessions–what a horrible choice that was and Trump knows it now decided to recuse himself out of the war lol the "ethics" don't you know and brought in the guy as number 2 who put a hatchet in Trump's back bringing in the cleaner -- Mueller -- Mueller the professional hatchet man who had no problem screwing the country as to 911, "joined at the hip" to Comey the Deep State stooge, intends to seek out anything possible to gut and clean Trump for dinner (check out the "team" Mueller has in place–as if going after Al Capone in a case where everyone knows there is nothing "there" as to Russian "collusion" by Trump -- they are planning to roll Trump so incredibly badly–no way Trump doesn't know this now thus the screaming at Sessions who now, having rolled over with his "recusal" LOL , offers to resign like that will reverse the damage he's done .) and destroy him completely, taxes, investments, businesses–Trump's entire life will be microscoped for anything, ANYTHING, they can hang on him and every lying disgruntled ex-employee and adversary will be heard from, amplified, and leaked to the globalist corporate media that loathes him–all of which will have nothing to do with the "Russia" collusion lie that Podesta's 2015 emails show he came up with to attack Trump bc he was sanely suggesting that not having a war with Russia was a good idea .If you look at Trump's history, again, he IS NOT, definitely NOT, a nice guy and he has played in the nasty, nasty league of the big money chase almost all his life and he is, do not forget, a billionaire several times over who has his own private security force around him at all times and, despite what the media portrays, he has many, many allies .The country will never be the same again by the time this is "over"–if it ever really ends fireworks are coming beyond our imagination Trump is not going to limp off into the night and they are not going to let him even if he wanted to he is a cornered Wolverine get some popcorn this is going to be a wild ride .

Dave P. , June 8, 2017 at 12:31

Tomk: Well done, your analysis is breathtaking. I had flashes in my mind of some of these things coming. I hope this dirty business of Clinton/Bush/Obama also gets aired out in Public View, and the Whole World to look at. It blows my mind watching how "The Deep State" is going after Trump – for almost a year now – who was duly elected President by the U.S. Citizens. Their only vendetta against him is that he wanted to get along with Russia. A child can tell that this whole "Russia Gate" is utterly a Fabrication by the Ruling Establishment. Going on for a year now, these Evil Forces have turned the Country into almost a Lunatic Asylum.

Obama is all over hatching new plots. He was with Merkel, and a few days back seen with Justin Trudeau. What a useful tool of the Ruling Establishment Obama is. I bet Trump is watching all this. He is not that naive as some people think of him . It seems like, either he is going to submit and leave the scene with guarantees of not bothering him afterwards. or He is going to fight a fight not seen before in U.S. History. It is hard to tell how it will end.

Sleepless In Mars , June 7, 2017 at 07:31

"Let me come back again to the waking state. I have no choice but to consider it a phenomenon of interference. Not only does the mind display, in this state, a strange tendency to lose its bearings (as evidenced by the slips and mistakes the secrets of which are just beginning to be revealed to us), but, what is more, it does not appear that, when the mind is functioning normally, it really responds to anything but the suggestions which come to it from the depths of that dark night to which I commend it." Agent Breton

The White House wants to silence the media and press. They've lost their bearings. The OCB case is expanding. McPike won't let go. We won't be fooled again.

Pft , June 7, 2017 at 01:03

Baghdad Bob was more credible and believable than anyone in the MSM today. Its loony tunes. Maybe that Anthrax did the trick and scares them into submission.

Drew Hunkins , June 6, 2017 at 23:20

Beyond absurdity that an ostensible hustler who ran cover for years for Boston's ultra-violent Winter Hill Gang now has the authority to overturn the election of the president of the United States. (Albeit a president as flawed as he is, and NOT due to anything involving "RUSSIA!")

Tomk , June 6, 2017 at 21:51

Mueller the hatchet man for the Deep State (911 was ok by him it seems, no need to investigate .) has one purpose and that is to take out Trump as his favorable statements as to ending the new Cold War with Russia made him an enemy of those who believe they run the country and who look to profit incredibly by the money they can make from an "enemy" like Russia–much better than the "terrorism" one they created for us .Appointing Sessions AG was a really terrible mistake by Trump given his foreseeable recusal on the most important issue facing Trump (the phony "Russia did it" Trojan Horse to get a Mueller to go fishing to find, or create, ANYTHING to get rid of him .) Sessions is a loser all around igniting a new war on drugs – an incredibly unpopular issue Trump did not even run on and although the cries of "Racist" might be unfair Sessions said some stupid "jokes" that also should have sidelined him given all the enemies Trump knew he had coming in and what he needed at AG–an unimpeachable ally .Trump has to know what is up and it is not his nature to sit back and be harpooned, which is what his enemies do plan ., so this will be a fascinating year to see what he does to stop them from doing him Don't forget Trump is not a particularly nice guy and given he is getting some feel for what he is dealing with, and the incredible gravity of what he is up against, I guarantee we will see some moves coming in response to his enemies that we have never seen, or had anyone even consider, before .

Stephen J, , June 6, 2017 at 17:02

I believe this is what happens:

When gangsters are in control, endless wars slaughter millions of souls
And countries are destroyed by the hit men of the gangster ghouls
The unethical money changers finance their dirty depredations
And corporate cannibals profit from the bloody confrontations

Government by gangsters is now "the rule of law"
And "justice" is in the hands of criminals and outlaws
The language is twisted and debased
To suit these evil demons of the "human race"

Fancy titles and Houses of ill repute
Is where these villains consort and debut
Making "laws" to screw the masses
Yet, people continue to vote for these asses

If there really was "law and order"
These gangsters would be charged with genocide and murder
Instead these war criminals parade on the world stage
When they should be in a big enormous prison cage
[read more at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2017/01/when-gangsters-are-in-control.html

backwardsevolution , June 6, 2017 at 16:14

And President Woodrow Wilson being blackmailed to the tune of $40,000.00 over some love letters he had sent to a colleague's wife. Mr. Samuel Untermeyer agreed to pay the blackmail money in return for Wilson appointing Judge Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, which he did.

"Justice Brandeis volunteered his opinion to President Wilson that the sinking of the S.S. Sussex by a German submarine in the English Channel with the loss of lives of United States citizens justified the declaration of war against Germany by the United States. Relying to a great extent upon the legal opinion of Justice Brandeis, President Wilson addressed both houses of Congress on April 2, 1917. He appealed to Congress to declare war against Germany and they did on April 7, 1917."

Blackmail and threats still work. Comey always strikes me as being very matter-of-fact and cavalier in his answers, as if nothing could ever touch him. I mean, even I would have known not to let Clinton off. He acts as if a mafia-type organization has got his back and he doesn't have to worry, which is probably the case.

mike k , June 6, 2017 at 17:50

Yes. The chance of the lying, corrupt cowards "representing" us really calling Comey out on his record are nil. And Trump started a fight with the "intelligence" guys that he now knows he can't finish, so his lawyers will treat Comey very carefully. (In my fantasy Trump's lawyers tear Comey apart, and bring up all his rotten record, reducing him to a blubbering mess ..) Yes I have a fantasy life, but I try not to get it mixed up too much with our so-called reality.

backwardsevolution , June 6, 2017 at 20:22

mike k – an interesting thing about that Woodrow Wilson blackmailing (in my above post) is that these guys, with the blackmail knowledge in hand, bankrolled and helped Wilson get into the White House, and then they blackmailed him AFTER he got there. Of course, this way they ensured that they had their man all sewn up. They got him there, he owed them, and they had the damning information. They and they alone end up owning you.

Trump was bankrolled by a few powerful people. I just wonder if the same thing isn't happening with Trump, some old pictures. Whatever it is, I'm quite sure something happened.

Joe Tedesky , June 6, 2017 at 22:57

In our family we have a lawyer (now retired) who once worked under Peter Rodino during the Watergate Hearings. I'll never forget how when I asked my cousin if Nixon would serve time, she said never, because all the politicians who stood in judgement of Nixon had their own skeletons in the closet to hide. D.C. is a nest of degenerates, and charlatan fraudsters, but history proves that this is nothing original. The best 'we the people' can hope for, is when these masters and mistresses of ours decide it is time to feed us, because maybe they need our votes. Who knows? Yes blackmail will insure a trustworthy employee every time. John Lennon had it right, everybody's got something to hide, except for me and my monkey.

evelync , June 6, 2017 at 16:13

sorry, May 2002 not 2001 (above)

evelync , June 6, 2017 at 14:44

I am so grateful to Colleen Rowley who has been my heroine, too, since 2001 when she publicly felt, thank goodness, that she must speak out. Rowley stood up with courage, spunk, honor, strength of character, respect for the truth, fearless determination to stand alone, if necessary, in defiance of corruption and lies. Her loyalty was to truth, the constitution and the people of this country, most of whom toil under challenging circumstances, get sent to trumped up wars, get ripped off by big banks and after a lifetime of work are still struggling. Rowley gives us strength and hope that there's something better.

I suspect Colleen Rowley unlike some of the show boaters is herself a modest person and is just doing what's "necessary" and it's part of who she is.

Thank you, Colleen. I hate being confused by these people who lie to us and serve their own self interests instead of the public interest.
And how else would we know?
Some of them are pretty good at taking credit and are not as obviously horrific to us as, say, a Dick Cheney or a Donald Rumsfeld who seem to be more cartoonish characters than people.
Thank you.

Oz , June 6, 2017 at 14:39

It should also be noted that Mueller was a key figure during the 1980s in the government's campaign to frame and silence Lyndon LaRouche and his movement, a campaign which former AG Ramsey Clark described as the most appalling campaign of its sort that he had seen (and combatting such campaigns is his specialty.)

F. G. Sanford , June 6, 2017 at 14:00

Jedgar, as comedienne Lily Tomlin called him, was a career blackmailer, eavesdropper, extortionist and enabler of organized crime dynasties. It's not a coincidence that, in her comedic vehicle as a telephone operator, her routine suggested "listening in" as an extracurricular activity perhaps not disdained by Jedgar himself. Sure, a warrant was needed to use evidence gained by wiretapping in a court of law. But if the motive was blackmail, who needs a warrant? Apparently, this reality is lost on the American public. We should certainly realize that every phone conversation is now retrievable by electronic means. All the FISA Court mumbo jumbo and its purported "checks and balances" is a farce designed to create a veneer of legitimacy. What does anybody think Jedgar bothered getting a warrant to bug Martin Luther King – then subsequently revealed the playbacks and suggested that King commit suicide? Anyone who has spent even a modicum of time looking onto the fraudulent Warren Commission Report must realize that Jedgar was completely complicit. On the ballistics evidence alone, he could have blown the case wide open. At best, he was a criminal coconspirator in a massive coverup. At worst, he ranks among the most vile traitors in our nation's history. This, then, is the legacy of the organization to which the two coconspirators in the present article appertain. On November 22, 1963, our government was hijacked by "deep state" militarists, and a system of permanent war economy was installed. We have descended deeper into that abyss with each passing year. The elected government now serves as a mere facade. I'd suggest that doubters read Vince Salandria's book, especially the recently added chapter on Ruth and Michael Paine at the end. Check the contents – you'll find it. It's free online, and can be accessed from several internet addresses. Unless this sentinel crime is addressed, there is no hope for American democracy. We're done.
ratical . org/FalseMystery
ratical . org/falsemystery
ratical . org/FM
ratical . org/fm
Take out the spaces on either side of the dots to use the links. And, I'd advise, don't be fooled by "leaks" which bolster the "deep state" agenda, even if they arrest the leaker.

BannanaBoat , June 6, 2017 at 14:33

The Postal service states it photographs every piece of mail.

backwardsevolution , June 6, 2017 at 15:26

F.G. Sanford – thank you for the links. This is going to be excellent reading. That Vince Salandria is quite the guy:

"Only by the war production of World War II were we brought out of the great depression. It was not difficult to discern that we were artfully thrust into the war. I can recall that at the time of Pearl Harbor I was in the 8th grade of Vare Junior High School in Philadelphia. On December 8, 1941, in my math class, our teacher, Miss Wogan, suggested that rather than do our math we should discuss current events.

I went to the front of the classroom and informed my classmates that I could not accept as plausible President Roosevelt's assertion that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise, sneak attack. I pointed out that all of us had known for months about the tension between the U.S. and Japan. I asked how, in light of those months of crisis and tautly strained relations between the two countries, could the battleships at Pearl Harbor have been lined up so closely together, presenting perfect targets for the Japanese? How could the planes I saw in the newspapers burning on our airfields have been positioned wing-tip to wing-tip?

I reminded the class that President Roosevelt had promised that he would not send our troops into a foreign war. I then offered my conclusion that inviting the Pearl Harbor attack was President Roosevelt's duplicitous device to eliminate the powerful neutralist sentiment in our country while thrusting us into the war."

Very smart for Grade 8!

backwardsevolution , June 6, 2017 at 15:41

"On November 23, 1963 I discussed the assassination with my then brother-in-law, Harold Feldman. I told him that we should keep our eyes focused on what if anything would happen to the suspected assassin that weekend. I said that if the suspect was killed during the weekend, then we would have to consider Oswald's role to be that of a possible intelligence agent and patsy. I told him if such happened, the assassination would have to be considered as the work of the very center of U.S. power. [ ]

When Oswald was served up on camera as disposable Dealey Plaza flotsam and jetsam and was killed by Jack Ruby I saw a subtle signal of a high level conspiracy. There is every reason to think that intelligence agencies, when they choose a killer to dispose of a patsy, make that choice by exercising the same degree of care that they employ in selecting the patsy. Their choice of Jack Ruby much later would – by providing a fall-back position for the government – serve the interests of the assassins. As the Warren Report would unravel, a deceased Ruby's past connections to the Mafia produced a false candidate for governmental apologists to designate as the power behind the killing.

Immediately following the assassination I began to collect news items about Lee Harvey Oswald. A pattern began to emerge. Oswald's alleged defection to the Soviets, his alleged Castro leanings as the sole member of a Fair Play for Cuba chapter in New Orleans, his posing with a rifle and a Trotskyist newspaper, his writings to the Communist Party USA, his study of the Russian language while in the Marine Corps, told me that he was not a genuine leftist, but rather was a U.S. intelligence agent."

Oswald was set up from the get-go. Poor kid, he didn't realize he was playing with fire.

The Kennedy assassination, 9/11, the other false flags, color revolutions, coups are all the work of those who possess a psychopathic mind.

Abe , June 6, 2017 at 17:03

"Yes, it does sound rather un-American, doesn't it?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0l9fE2RAj8
[Video minutes 3:15-6:25]

mike k , June 6, 2017 at 13:16

Until one understands that the US government is a criminal enterprise, and that everyone involved in it is a criminal, with extremely few exceptions – you will not understand what goes on there. The same holds true for the main stream media, these are criminal, lying propaganda outlets for the rich and powerful who own them. Also the US Military is a vicious criminal enterprise pure and simple.

If you are inclined to cut any of these actors any slack whatever, and forget who they really are, you will simply become a victim of their lies and criminal activities. Regardless of the unceasing barrage of positive images and ideas we are soaked in from childhood, we need to constantly remind ourselves of who these evil people really are, and the horrendous crimes they are responsible for. The idea that James Comey, the head of the secret police is some kind of role model is outrageous. This man deserves to be imprisoned for the rest of his life.

Dave P. , June 6, 2017 at 13:57

mike K : Excellent. Complete rendering of Truth.

backwardsevolution , June 6, 2017 at 14:00

mike k – yep, it truly is a den of vipers and thieves, a well-oiled machine at this point. Many are ignorant of this fact, and many are willing to turn a blind eye so long as they get what they want.

"Hell is empty and all the devils are here."

Dave P. , June 6, 2017 at 15:50

The irony of all this is that America could be a great positive force for good and beneficial change on the planet. It's location, between two great Oceans, it's physical beauty, and it's resources – America has it all. There is nothing like America on this Planet. [It makes me feel sad about American Indians, who lost it all during the last three or four centuries]. And now, for the last five decades or so, all the best and the brightest from top schools in India, now China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere (and Iran too !) come to U.S. Universities, and work here. One of the major engines of our high tech sector boom – and leadership in the World – has been due to this foreign born talent. And this talent has contributed a lot in other sectors as well.

And from all what I have read, after the collapse of Communism, the World was and is willing to accept American leadership. If you watch Putin's speeches at Valdai International Discussion Club, he acknowledges America's leadership, but not complete subservience to U.S.

Would big countries and ancient civilizations like China and India, or big countries like Brazil, South Africa agree to be completely subservient to U.S.? Should these countries (and the other countries of the World) become U.S.'s vassal states. It is preposterous to think of it. What happened to this idea of Freedom, which is drilled into masses here 24/7 by the Media and the Ruling Establishment. As we want to live free, don't these countries would like to live free.

And we are waging wars on the Nations to bring freedom and democracy – and American values. What a hypocrisy?

And we are discussing about Comey and Mueller here! It is hard to comprehend to what lower depths the country has sunk to.
Trump was not wrong when he was saying during the campaign that the whole place ( Washington) is a swamp. The country was ready for a Populist. Unfortunately, Trump was not the right one.

I do not have much hope that the upper echelons in this country will learn some wisdom to change their course.

backwardsevolution , June 6, 2017 at 17:18

Dave P. – good points. I don't think Trump was the "perfect" one, but I think he could have been the "right" one, had they laid off him, but he's had everything but the kitchen sink thrown at him (the pussy hats, the Berkeley rioters, the media, the Democrats, his own Republican Party). The Deep State has gone after him like crazy because they're fighting for their very survival, and Trump was going to end it.

I think he WOULD have ended the wars, cut back on NATO, brought affordable healthcare, enforced the border laws (without which you don't have a country, at least not for long), brought jobs back from China/Asia, rebuilt infrastructure, and protected the citizens.

It appears people don't want that. Go figure.

Dave P. , June 6, 2017 at 17:40

backwardsevolution, I agree with you. I think Trump meant to do all these things you mentioned. What I meant to say was that, he did not have any clue of what was to come. Trump does not have any communication skills like Obama, and Clinton, and is not well read or any thing like that. And I think that they – the Deep State – have a very thick dossier on his business deals, and all that. I sometimes feel sorry for him – the guy is caught in the nest of scorpions. When I watch him on TV sometimes, he seems like he is scared, and will do any thing they will ask him to do. <img alt='' src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/4ac6f9611bbc79c79ee101b1a19b95ed?s=60&#038;d=identicon&#038;r=pg' srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/4ac6f9611bbc79c79ee101b1a19b95ed?s=120&#038;d=identicon&#038;r=pg 2x' class='avatar avatar-60 photo' height='60' width='60' />

backwardsevolution , June 6, 2017 at 19:41

Dave P. – re your "nest of scorpions" comment. Yes, I agree that Trump had no idea what he'd be stepping into. We probably don't know the half of it. Could be death threats against himself (or maybe his family) or blackmail. Something happened because all of a sudden Trump and Tillerson both changed, seemingly overnight, and you're right, Trump has a scared look in his eyes.

If a thick-skinned braggart like Trump can't go up against these guys, then who can? <img alt='' src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e8c9fa7352dc19c959f94ff2df0e0d95?s=60&#038;d=identicon&#038;r=pg' srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/e8c9fa7352dc19c959f94ff2df0e0d95?s=120&#038;d=identicon&#038;r=pg 2x' class='avatar avatar-60 photo' height='60' width='60' />

Stephen J, , June 6, 2017 at 12:58

I believe the "system" is totally corrupted. We are prisoners in a so-called "democracy."

The Prisoners of the System
By Stephen J. Gray

The prisoners of the system thought they were free
After all, they lived in a "democracy?"
Every few years they were allowed to vote
Then they got punished by the winning lot

Oh well, at least the masses are allowed to go on holiday
At the airports they are patted down and groped in the name of security
Still, their governments were keeping them all safe
As they spy on them and all the human race.

Big Brother and Big Sister are now in charge
And Orwell's "1984" is now here and at large
Computers are monitored and cell phones too
Fridges are bugged and smart meters knew

[read more at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2012/05/prisoners-of-system.html

mike k , June 6, 2017 at 17:16

Good one Stephen. Keep 'em coming ..

Bill Bodden , June 6, 2017 at 12:52

I will very likely go to my grave with the strong suspicion that the alleged Christmas Bomber (2010) in Portland, Oregon was a case of entrapment. Assuming that kid really did have intentions of setting off a bomb, the FBI agents should have educated him as to why setting off a bomb as a Christmas tree lighting ceremony was a very bad thing to do instead of going through some ritual of simulations. Of course, the FBI agents claim they gave him chances to back out, but I suspect he was like most teenagers who didn't want to be considered as "chicken." – http://theweek.com/articles/488966/portland-bomb-plot-entrapment

backwardsevolution , June 6, 2017 at 13:41

Bill – using entrapment in order to move public opinion in a certain direction, steer the herd, influence their thinking, allowing them then to engage in what they want carried out. Sickening. Heat coming down on Israel a little too much? Just create an incident, elicit sympathy, and the whole thing blows over.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-helped-along-by-the-fbi.html

Bill Bodden , June 6, 2017 at 12:26

To paraphrase Shakespeare: Age has not withered Coleen Rowley nor custom faded her infinite courage.

Bill Bodden , June 6, 2017 at 12:22

Beyond ignoring politicized intelligence, Mueller bent to other political pressures.

Bending to political and other pressures is one of the rules for "success" in Washington and Wall Street. There must be very few people who have made it to the upper echelons butting heads with the oligarchs running the show. Lewis Lapham, a national treasure of an essayist and author, frequently skewered the "rules of success" and those who played by them.

D5-5 , June 6, 2017 at 12:13

Mike Whitney chimes in here:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/47117.htm

[May 30, 2019] Mueller is the master of cover up at service of the Depp State

Notable quotes:
"... He basically said in so many words "Russians hacked Hillary & I didn't find Trump didn't collude with them, I just came up short on proof, and I never said he didn't obstruct my probe, just that I wasn't allowed to charge it. However, Congress can charge him thru impeachment" ..."
"... Russian spin is the key to maintaining Russia as a fake enemy and using their fake involvement in the election to get support to suppress alt media and censor social media. This is a bipartisan agenda. Impeachment just serves to divide and distract, exactly what they want. ..."
"... Russia like China is a fake enemy. Fake conflict with the US serves them just as well as it does with the US. The people must have an enemy lest they focus attention on the government. So they all play along. ..."
"... we get the opportunity to vote for one clown or another, two max, is a mainstay (about the only one) of our "democratic" nation. And the wrong clown won! Damned Russians. ..."
May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Pft , May 29, 2019 8:25:11 PM | 9

What do you expect from the master of coverup himself?

He basically said in so many words "Russians hacked Hillary & I didn't find Trump didn't collude with them, I just came up short on proof, and I never said he didn't obstruct my probe, just that I wasn't allowed to charge it. However, Congress can charge him thru impeachment"

Except for the Russian involvement that's the truth. But the Russian spin is the key to maintaining Russia as a fake enemy and using their fake involvement in the election to get support to suppress alt media and censor social media. This is a bipartisan agenda. Impeachment just serves to divide and distract, exactly what they want.

Russia like China is a fake enemy. Fake conflict with the US serves them just as well as it does with the US. The people must have an enemy lest they focus attention on the government. So they all play along.

No wonder hollywood is producing crap now and messed up GOT finale. All the good writers are engaged in scripting our reality under the guidance of the Deep State. Trumps nothing more than an actor following a script.

Don Bacon , May 29, 2019 10:27:50 PM | 0

The Dems can't believe Hillary lost all on her own. It must have been the Russians who threatened US democracy and it's too bad we don't have the truth b/c Trump obstructed the patriotic and sacred investigation according to a powerful person.
. . .Nancy Pelosi --
"The Special Counsel's report revealed that the President's campaign welcomed Russian interference in the election, and laid out eleven instances of the President's obstruction of the investigation. The Congress holds sacred its constitutional responsibility to investigate and hold the President accountable for his abuse of power.

"The Congress will continue to investigate and legislate to protect our elections and secure our democracy. The American people must have the truth. We call upon the Senate to pass H.R. 1, the For The People Act, to protect our election systems.

"We salute Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team for his patriotic duty to seek the truth." . . . here

After all, the quadrennial presidential election, when we get the opportunity to vote for one clown or another, two max, is a mainstay (about the only one) of our "democratic" nation. And the wrong clown won! Damned Russians.
imo , May 30, 2019 10:50:08 AM | 101

Mass distraction on behalf of the Deep State according to ...

"Sneaky Mueller tries to distract attention away from corrupt Deep State & towards Russia"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3dBbkjszPU&feature=youtu.be

[May 30, 2019] Russiagate is yet another proof that the CIA is running the USA and they pay well

May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

john , May 30, 2019 6:44:32 AM | 93

all of this talk about the 'true' spirit of the Constitution is quaint, very picturesque

meanwhile pretty much every president in living memory has gotten away with treason

but, as james says, the CIA is running the USA, it's actually fairly obvious and they pay well .

[May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Immigrant life was tough -- especially for the adults. People struggled to make ends meet and to fit into a totally new society ..."
"... Life was hard and integration was difficult. ..."
"... We were mostly Jewish and mostly seen as white. And we had a special, glorified place in American political culture: We were victims of Soviet repression and antisemitism, saved by an altruistic America. We were paraded around as a living example of American superiority and a symbol a Soviet barbarism. ..."
"... For nearly four years now, Soviet and Russian immigrants have watched America's liberal political elite shift the blame for their country's domestic political problems away from themselves and onto a fictitious, inscrutable foreign enemy: a xenophobic campaign that put people like us -- "the Russians" -- at the center of everything that's gone wrong in America. We've watched as this panic grew from a fear of the Russian government to an all-encompassing, irrational racist conspiracy theory that put a cloud over not just Russian nationals or Russian government officials, but anyone from the lands of the former Soviet union. ..."
"... Immigrants turned on the TV to see top American security officials, politicians, respected journalists, analysts, and pundits tell national viewers that they were right to be afraid of us: Russians are devious, untrustworthy, wired to hate democracy , and genetically driven to lie and cheat. People like us pose a threat. We are a possible fifth column -- whether we know it it or not, and that includes Russian pensioners and infants. In the words of Keith Olbermann, we were "Russian scum." ..."
"... In all of this, "Russian" has been a mutable category, flexible enough rope in Russian-Jews, Ukrainian-Jews, ethnic Russians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians and all sorts of other ethnicities. Any one of those could fit, depending on the need of the constantly evolving conspiracy theory. In America, this added up to something like three million people. ..."
"... This bigoted campaign has gone on non-stop for nearly four years -- and it's come from the very top: primed by American security services and pumped out by respectable liberal media institutions. To Soviet immigrants, it's been disorienting and confusing. It's the first time since coming to America that we have found ourselves targeted this way. ..."
"... And that's the funny thing about this Russia panic. For years, a huge chunk of America's political class has been screeching that "the Russians" are undermining trust in American institutions. But to many Soviet immigrants here in America, it's precisely this xenophobic panic that's been doing the undermining. ..."
"... Soviet immigrants have always had an implicit belief in the superiority of American institutions. It's been a religious thing for them. But seeing themselves get swept up and demonized in this way has bred disillusionment and revulsion with American politics on a level I have never seen. In that sense, Russiagate has been a coming of age moment: it has undermined their naive fresh-off-the-boat faith and gave them a personal glimpse into an America that's paranoid, venal, and unapologetically xenophobic. ..."
May 28, 2019 | thegrayzone.com

This article was originally published at Yasha Levine's Influence Ops . Subscribe to Yasha's work here .

I was talking recently to a Russian acquaintance of mine who lives in the New York area. Years ago, he had studied engineering in Moscow and later transferred to a university here in the states. He told me that not long after moved, he got an unexpected visit from a couple of FBI agents who tried to recruit him. They came right to his apartment and seemed to know everything about him. They had a detailed file which, among other things, included every application he had submitted to American universities. They also had a dossier on his old academic advisor back in Moscow containing intel about the research the professor was doing and the contracts he had with the Russian military. They wanted to know what he knew about this military work and then asked him to identify photographs of various equipment and instruments. He was stunned by their sudden appearance and spooked by their efficiency and competence. He was also smitten with the female agent. "She was gorgeous. I would have told her anything," he told me. But he didn't have anything to tell. Back in Moscow he had been a nerdy kid studying engineering. He had no idea about any of the stuff they were asking. After a while, the FBI agents left. They never contacted him again. But the message was clear: they were watching, and they could pop in at any time again. His story is not unique. The FBI does this kind of stuff on a regular basis. By some estimates, at least a third of all international students get a similar visit from a friendly pair of agents.

And given the national security panic about China and Russia being whipped up right now, I wouldn't be surprised if that number is a helluva lot higher. Just the other week, the New York Times reported that the FBI has ramped up its surveillance, intimidation and deportation of Chinese academics in America. As FBI director Christopher Wray explained, America's security apparatus isn't just worried about the Chinese government. To them, all Chinese are suspect -- they pose a "whole-of-society threat." Even progressive political strategists believe China is an existential threat to America and are helping fan a bipartisan sinophobic campaign that's ensnared people I know .

With Russia and China convulsing our body politic, my buddy's "unremarkable" story got me thinking about how easily and naturally xenophobic panics fit into American political culture -- and how, until fairly recently, Russian and Soviet immigrants like me had never really felt the brunt of these campaigns. From my earliest days as Soviet immigrant kid in America, I've been primed to see this country as a unique beacon of tolerance -- a place where bigotry and racism, if they exist at all, are banished to the far dark edges of society. It was a truism to us that unlike the Soviet Union -- which was "closed," "bigoted," "paranoid," and "repressive" -- America was "open," "tolerant" and "accepting." Later as an adult, I came to understand just much how bigotry and systemic racism and exclusion are engrained in the politics and culture of modern America. Working as a journalist and reporting on the darkest recesses of America, it was impossible not to.

But growing up in an insular, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant community in sleepy San Francisco, it was easy to believe in an idealized, whitewashed vision of the country that took us in. Immigrant life was tough -- especially for the adults. People struggled to make ends meet and to fit into a totally new society. There was the usual petty crime and a bit of violence. People hustled to make money -- some succeeded, others failed and suffered. Life was hard and integration was difficult. But compared to other immigrant and minority groups, we were a relatively privileged bunch.

We were mostly Jewish and mostly seen as white. And we had a special, glorified place in American political culture: We were victims of Soviet repression and antisemitism, saved by an altruistic America. We were paraded around as a living example of American superiority and a symbol a Soviet barbarism. For most the 20th century, American lawmakers had crafted laws to specifically keep Jews out. We were "rats," according to Wisconsin Senator Alexander Wiley, who helped craft a 1948 law to prevent victims of the Holocaust from immigrating to America. But with us it was different. Americans protested outside Soviet embassies on our behalf. Lobbyists and lawmakers from Washington DC championed our cause and put together sanctions to secure our release. We were a bipartisan project -- supported by the might of the American empire.

Yasha Levine, Judeo-Bolshevik infiltrator. San Francisco, 1999

My immigrant community was privileged in that way. And because of that, we never really worried about mass immigration raids. We weren't punitively targeted by cops just because of the color of our skin. We weren't seen as a terrorist threat and targeted for infiltration and entrapment by the FBI. We never turned on the TV to see ourselves dehumanized or branded as a threat from within -- as enemies of the American way of life. Looking back on all the petty -- and not so petty -- crime we got into as kids, I'm amazed by how leniently the cops dealt with us.

We occupied a special spot in the immigrant pyramid. And because of it, we had never been in the crosshairs of a good ol' traditional American xenophobic panic. The anti-Russian hysteria of the early 20th century and the Red Scare of the Cold War was a distant past that few us even were even aware existed. We never knew what it was like to have the country's media and political class brand people like you a possible threat. In fact, watching other minority and immigrant groups get demonized only reinforced my community's feeling of superiority. My fellow Soviet immigrants have never been known for their progressive racial politics -- well, when you get down to it, quite a few are generic, down-the-line bigots. And so the general sense was, "We're not like them. We're different. And anyway, if some ethnic groups are being targeted, there must a good reason for it. America is a nation of laws, after all. People here aren't hounded for bigoted political reasons like they are in repressive authoritarian countries."

But this belief in the infallibility of American institutions started taking a big nose dive right around Donald Trump won the election.

For nearly four years now, Soviet and Russian immigrants have watched America's liberal political elite shift the blame for their country's domestic political problems away from themselves and onto a fictitious, inscrutable foreign enemy: a xenophobic campaign that put people like us -- "the Russians" -- at the center of everything that's gone wrong in America. We've watched as this panic grew from a fear of the Russian government to an all-encompassing, irrational racist conspiracy theory that put a cloud over not just Russian nationals or Russian government officials, but anyone from the lands of the former Soviet union.

Immigrants turned on the TV to see top American security officials, politicians, respected journalists, analysts, and pundits tell national viewers that they were right to be afraid of us: Russians are devious, untrustworthy, wired to hate democracy , and genetically driven to lie and cheat. People like us pose a threat. We are a possible fifth column -- whether we know it it or not, and that includes Russian pensioners and infants. In the words of Keith Olbermann, we were "Russian scum."

In all of this, "Russian" has been a mutable category, flexible enough rope in Russian-Jews, Ukrainian-Jews, ethnic Russians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians and all sorts of other ethnicities. Any one of those could fit, depending on the need of the constantly evolving conspiracy theory. In America, this added up to something like three million people.

Putin's anchor babies, a ticking demographic time bomb that will blow up American democracy.

This bigoted campaign has gone on non-stop for nearly four years -- and it's come from the very top: primed by American security services and pumped out by respectable liberal media institutions. To Soviet immigrants, it's been disorienting and confusing. It's the first time since coming to America that we have found ourselves targeted this way.

At first it seemed like a joke. People laughed at it and mocked it. We were sure that this weird bigoted panic would pass. But when it didn't, when it continued to grow and seep into ever corner of our liberal media, we stopped being sure of what to do. We cycled through various modes: from dismissive to angry to depressed, to repressing it altogether. But talking to people about this, I get the sense that for many of us one feeling has stayed pretty much constant: a growing contempt for America's hallowed institutions: its press, its politicians, its national security elite.

And that's the funny thing about this Russia panic. For years, a huge chunk of America's political class has been screeching that "the Russians" are undermining trust in American institutions. But to many Soviet immigrants here in America, it's precisely this xenophobic panic that's been doing the undermining.

Soviet immigrants have always had an implicit belief in the superiority of American institutions. It's been a religious thing for them. But seeing themselves get swept up and demonized in this way has bred disillusionment and revulsion with American politics on a level I have never seen. In that sense, Russiagate has been a coming of age moment: it has undermined their naive fresh-off-the-boat faith and gave them a personal glimpse into an America that's paranoid, venal, and unapologetically xenophobic.

Is this coming of age a good thing? Well, I guess it had to happen at some point. But the way this disenchantment has unfolded -- driven by America's liberal ruling class -- has pretty much ensured that most Soviet immigrants will come out the other end even more reactionary than they were before. And who knew that was even possible?

Yasha Levine is an investigative journalist and a founding editor of The eXiled Online. His latest book is "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet." https://surveillancevalley.com/

[May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Immigrant life was tough -- especially for the adults. People struggled to make ends meet and to fit into a totally new society ..."
"... Life was hard and integration was difficult. ..."
"... We were mostly Jewish and mostly seen as white. And we had a special, glorified place in American political culture: We were victims of Soviet repression and antisemitism, saved by an altruistic America. We were paraded around as a living example of American superiority and a symbol a Soviet barbarism. ..."
"... For nearly four years now, Soviet and Russian immigrants have watched America's liberal political elite shift the blame for their country's domestic political problems away from themselves and onto a fictitious, inscrutable foreign enemy: a xenophobic campaign that put people like us -- "the Russians" -- at the center of everything that's gone wrong in America. We've watched as this panic grew from a fear of the Russian government to an all-encompassing, irrational racist conspiracy theory that put a cloud over not just Russian nationals or Russian government officials, but anyone from the lands of the former Soviet union. ..."
"... Immigrants turned on the TV to see top American security officials, politicians, respected journalists, analysts, and pundits tell national viewers that they were right to be afraid of us: Russians are devious, untrustworthy, wired to hate democracy , and genetically driven to lie and cheat. People like us pose a threat. We are a possible fifth column -- whether we know it it or not, and that includes Russian pensioners and infants. In the words of Keith Olbermann, we were "Russian scum." ..."
"... In all of this, "Russian" has been a mutable category, flexible enough rope in Russian-Jews, Ukrainian-Jews, ethnic Russians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians and all sorts of other ethnicities. Any one of those could fit, depending on the need of the constantly evolving conspiracy theory. In America, this added up to something like three million people. ..."
"... This bigoted campaign has gone on non-stop for nearly four years -- and it's come from the very top: primed by American security services and pumped out by respectable liberal media institutions. To Soviet immigrants, it's been disorienting and confusing. It's the first time since coming to America that we have found ourselves targeted this way. ..."
"... And that's the funny thing about this Russia panic. For years, a huge chunk of America's political class has been screeching that "the Russians" are undermining trust in American institutions. But to many Soviet immigrants here in America, it's precisely this xenophobic panic that's been doing the undermining. ..."
"... Soviet immigrants have always had an implicit belief in the superiority of American institutions. It's been a religious thing for them. But seeing themselves get swept up and demonized in this way has bred disillusionment and revulsion with American politics on a level I have never seen. In that sense, Russiagate has been a coming of age moment: it has undermined their naive fresh-off-the-boat faith and gave them a personal glimpse into an America that's paranoid, venal, and unapologetically xenophobic. ..."
May 28, 2019 | thegrayzone.com

This article was originally published at Yasha Levine's Influence Ops . Subscribe to Yasha's work here .

I was talking recently to a Russian acquaintance of mine who lives in the New York area. Years ago, he had studied engineering in Moscow and later transferred to a university here in the states. He told me that not long after moved, he got an unexpected visit from a couple of FBI agents who tried to recruit him. They came right to his apartment and seemed to know everything about him. They had a detailed file which, among other things, included every application he had submitted to American universities. They also had a dossier on his old academic advisor back in Moscow containing intel about the research the professor was doing and the contracts he had with the Russian military. They wanted to know what he knew about this military work and then asked him to identify photographs of various equipment and instruments. He was stunned by their sudden appearance and spooked by their efficiency and competence. He was also smitten with the female agent. "She was gorgeous. I would have told her anything," he told me. But he didn't have anything to tell. Back in Moscow he had been a nerdy kid studying engineering. He had no idea about any of the stuff they were asking. After a while, the FBI agents left. They never contacted him again. But the message was clear: they were watching, and they could pop in at any time again. His story is not unique. The FBI does this kind of stuff on a regular basis. By some estimates, at least a third of all international students get a similar visit from a friendly pair of agents.

And given the national security panic about China and Russia being whipped up right now, I wouldn't be surprised if that number is a helluva lot higher. Just the other week, the New York Times reported that the FBI has ramped up its surveillance, intimidation and deportation of Chinese academics in America. As FBI director Christopher Wray explained, America's security apparatus isn't just worried about the Chinese government. To them, all Chinese are suspect -- they pose a "whole-of-society threat." Even progressive political strategists believe China is an existential threat to America and are helping fan a bipartisan sinophobic campaign that's ensnared people I know .

With Russia and China convulsing our body politic, my buddy's "unremarkable" story got me thinking about how easily and naturally xenophobic panics fit into American political culture -- and how, until fairly recently, Russian and Soviet immigrants like me had never really felt the brunt of these campaigns. From my earliest days as Soviet immigrant kid in America, I've been primed to see this country as a unique beacon of tolerance -- a place where bigotry and racism, if they exist at all, are banished to the far dark edges of society. It was a truism to us that unlike the Soviet Union -- which was "closed," "bigoted," "paranoid," and "repressive" -- America was "open," "tolerant" and "accepting." Later as an adult, I came to understand just much how bigotry and systemic racism and exclusion are engrained in the politics and culture of modern America. Working as a journalist and reporting on the darkest recesses of America, it was impossible not to.

But growing up in an insular, fresh-off-the-boat immigrant community in sleepy San Francisco, it was easy to believe in an idealized, whitewashed vision of the country that took us in. Immigrant life was tough -- especially for the adults. People struggled to make ends meet and to fit into a totally new society. There was the usual petty crime and a bit of violence. People hustled to make money -- some succeeded, others failed and suffered. Life was hard and integration was difficult. But compared to other immigrant and minority groups, we were a relatively privileged bunch.

We were mostly Jewish and mostly seen as white. And we had a special, glorified place in American political culture: We were victims of Soviet repression and antisemitism, saved by an altruistic America. We were paraded around as a living example of American superiority and a symbol a Soviet barbarism. For most the 20th century, American lawmakers had crafted laws to specifically keep Jews out. We were "rats," according to Wisconsin Senator Alexander Wiley, who helped craft a 1948 law to prevent victims of the Holocaust from immigrating to America. But with us it was different. Americans protested outside Soviet embassies on our behalf. Lobbyists and lawmakers from Washington DC championed our cause and put together sanctions to secure our release. We were a bipartisan project -- supported by the might of the American empire.

Yasha Levine, Judeo-Bolshevik infiltrator. San Francisco, 1999

My immigrant community was privileged in that way. And because of that, we never really worried about mass immigration raids. We weren't punitively targeted by cops just because of the color of our skin. We weren't seen as a terrorist threat and targeted for infiltration and entrapment by the FBI. We never turned on the TV to see ourselves dehumanized or branded as a threat from within -- as enemies of the American way of life. Looking back on all the petty -- and not so petty -- crime we got into as kids, I'm amazed by how leniently the cops dealt with us.

We occupied a special spot in the immigrant pyramid. And because of it, we had never been in the crosshairs of a good ol' traditional American xenophobic panic. The anti-Russian hysteria of the early 20th century and the Red Scare of the Cold War was a distant past that few us even were even aware existed. We never knew what it was like to have the country's media and political class brand people like you a possible threat. In fact, watching other minority and immigrant groups get demonized only reinforced my community's feeling of superiority. My fellow Soviet immigrants have never been known for their progressive racial politics -- well, when you get down to it, quite a few are generic, down-the-line bigots. And so the general sense was, "We're not like them. We're different. And anyway, if some ethnic groups are being targeted, there must a good reason for it. America is a nation of laws, after all. People here aren't hounded for bigoted political reasons like they are in repressive authoritarian countries."

But this belief in the infallibility of American institutions started taking a big nose dive right around Donald Trump won the election.

For nearly four years now, Soviet and Russian immigrants have watched America's liberal political elite shift the blame for their country's domestic political problems away from themselves and onto a fictitious, inscrutable foreign enemy: a xenophobic campaign that put people like us -- "the Russians" -- at the center of everything that's gone wrong in America. We've watched as this panic grew from a fear of the Russian government to an all-encompassing, irrational racist conspiracy theory that put a cloud over not just Russian nationals or Russian government officials, but anyone from the lands of the former Soviet union.

Immigrants turned on the TV to see top American security officials, politicians, respected journalists, analysts, and pundits tell national viewers that they were right to be afraid of us: Russians are devious, untrustworthy, wired to hate democracy , and genetically driven to lie and cheat. People like us pose a threat. We are a possible fifth column -- whether we know it it or not, and that includes Russian pensioners and infants. In the words of Keith Olbermann, we were "Russian scum."

In all of this, "Russian" has been a mutable category, flexible enough rope in Russian-Jews, Ukrainian-Jews, ethnic Russians, Azerbaijanis, Ukrainians and all sorts of other ethnicities. Any one of those could fit, depending on the need of the constantly evolving conspiracy theory. In America, this added up to something like three million people.

Putin's anchor babies, a ticking demographic time bomb that will blow up American democracy.

This bigoted campaign has gone on non-stop for nearly four years -- and it's come from the very top: primed by American security services and pumped out by respectable liberal media institutions. To Soviet immigrants, it's been disorienting and confusing. It's the first time since coming to America that we have found ourselves targeted this way.

At first it seemed like a joke. People laughed at it and mocked it. We were sure that this weird bigoted panic would pass. But when it didn't, when it continued to grow and seep into ever corner of our liberal media, we stopped being sure of what to do. We cycled through various modes: from dismissive to angry to depressed, to repressing it altogether. But talking to people about this, I get the sense that for many of us one feeling has stayed pretty much constant: a growing contempt for America's hallowed institutions: its press, its politicians, its national security elite.

And that's the funny thing about this Russia panic. For years, a huge chunk of America's political class has been screeching that "the Russians" are undermining trust in American institutions. But to many Soviet immigrants here in America, it's precisely this xenophobic panic that's been doing the undermining.

Soviet immigrants have always had an implicit belief in the superiority of American institutions. It's been a religious thing for them. But seeing themselves get swept up and demonized in this way has bred disillusionment and revulsion with American politics on a level I have never seen. In that sense, Russiagate has been a coming of age moment: it has undermined their naive fresh-off-the-boat faith and gave them a personal glimpse into an America that's paranoid, venal, and unapologetically xenophobic.

Is this coming of age a good thing? Well, I guess it had to happen at some point. But the way this disenchantment has unfolded -- driven by America's liberal ruling class -- has pretty much ensured that most Soviet immigrants will come out the other end even more reactionary than they were before. And who knew that was even possible?

Yasha Levine is an investigative journalist and a founding editor of The eXiled Online. His latest book is "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet." https://surveillancevalley.com/

[May 29, 2019] Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied

May 29, 2019 | news.sky.com

GCHQ has dismissed fresh allegations that it spied on Donald Trump's presidential campaign - describing the claims as "utterly ridiculous".

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst, has accused the British intelligence agency of helping Barack Obama by spying on the billionaire businessman during the 2016 race.

The US president tweeted about the rumours on Wednesday after they were highlighted in a report on the right-wing One America News Network.

Mr Trump wrote: "'Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson accuses United Kingdom Intelligence of helping Obama Administration Spy on the 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign.' @OANN WOW!

"It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be a beauty!"

[May 29, 2019] Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied

May 29, 2019 | news.sky.com

GCHQ has dismissed fresh allegations that it spied on Donald Trump's presidential campaign - describing the claims as "utterly ridiculous".

Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst, has accused the British intelligence agency of helping Barack Obama by spying on the billionaire businessman during the 2016 race.

The US president tweeted about the rumours on Wednesday after they were highlighted in a report on the right-wing One America News Network.

Mr Trump wrote: "'Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson accuses United Kingdom Intelligence of helping Obama Administration Spy on the 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign.' @OANN WOW!

"It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be a beauty!"

[May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

Highly recommended!
May 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Sid Finster says: May 23, 2019 at 11:06 am

Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word "Jew" for "Russian" and "International Jewry" for "Russia" and re-read.

If the revised article would not look out of place in Der Stuermer, that should tell you something.

[May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

Highly recommended!
May 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Sid Finster says: May 23, 2019 at 11:06 am

Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word "Jew" for "Russian" and "International Jewry" for "Russia" and re-read.

If the revised article would not look out of place in Der Stuermer, that should tell you something.

[May 28, 2019] New York Times Supports False Trump Claims About An Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program That Does Not Exist

May 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

During a press conference in Japan U.S. President Donald Trump today said ( video ):

And I'm not looking to hurt Iran at all. I'm looking to have Iran say, "No nuclear weapons." We have enough problems in this world right now with nuclear weapons. No nuclear weapons for Iran.

And I think we'll make a deal.

Iran said: "No nuclear weapons." It said that several times. It continues to say that.

Iran does not have the intent to make nuclear weapons. It has no nuclear weapons program.

But Trump may be confused because the U.S. 'paper of the record', the New York Times, recently again began to falsely assert that Iran has such a program.

A May 4 editorial in the Times claimed that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps was running such a nuclear weapons program. After a loud public outrage the Times corrected the editorial. Iran's UN office wrote a letter to the Times which was published on May 6:

In an early version of "Trump Dials Up the Pressure on Iran" (editorial, nytimes.com, May 4), now corrected, you referred to a nuclear weapons program in describing the reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
...
The editorial is correct in criticizing the punishing aspects of the Trump administration policy toward Iran -- one that has brought only suffering to the Iranian people and one that will not result in any change in Iran's policies. But it was wrong to refer to a weapons program -- a dangerous assertion that could lead to a great misunderstanding among the public .

Unfortunately that did not help. The NYT continues with the "dangerous assertion".

On May 13 the NYT reporters Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes wrote in White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War :

At a meeting of President Trump's top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons , administration officials said.

One can not accelerate one's car, if one does not have one. The phrase "accelerate work on nuclear weapons" implies that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. It may that the White House falsely claimed that but the authors use the phrase and never debunk it.

A May 14 NYT piece by Helene Cooper and Edward Wong repeats the false claim without pointing out that it is wrong:

The Trump administration is looking at plans to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons , The New York Times reported.

Also on May 14 the NYT 's editorial cartoon was published under the caption Will Iran Revive Its Nuclear Program? The caption of the orientalist cartoon falsely asserted that Iran had enriched Uranium to weapons grade. And no, Iran does not have a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapons program in its freezer.


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On May 16, after another public outcry, a correction was added to the cartoon:

An earlier version of a caption with this cartoon erroneously attributed a distinction to Iran's nuclear program. Iran has not produced highly enriched uranium.

After this onslaught of false New York Times claims about Iran NYT critic Belen Fernandez asked: Has the New York Times declared war on Iran? She lists other claims made by the Times about Iran that are far from the truth.

Three days later, on May 25, Palko Karasz reported in the New York Times on Iran's reaction to Trump's tiny troop buildup in the Persian Gulf region. Again the obviously false "accelerate" phrase was used:

Under White House plans revised after pressure from hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, the president's national security adviser, if Iran were to accelerate work on nuclear weapons , defense officials envision sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East.

Iran does not have a nuclear program. It can not "accelerate" one. The U.S. claims that Iran once had such a program but also says that it was ended in 2003. The standard formulation that Reuters uses in its Iran reporting is thereby appropriate:

The United States and the U.N. nuclear watchdog believe Iran had a nuclear weapons program that it abandoned. Tehran denies ever having had one.


On July 1 1968 Iran signed and later ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear-weapon party. Article II of the treaty says:

Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transfer or whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

With that Iran said "No nuclear weapons". Iran also accepted the nuclear safeguards demand in Article III of the treaty in form of routine inspections by the treaty's nuclear watchdog organization IAEA.

Article IV of the NPT gives all non-nuclear-weapon state parties like Iran the "inalienable right" to "develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination." After signing the NPT Iran launched several civil nuclear projects. These started under the Shah in 1970s and continued after the 1979 revolution in Iran.


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Ever since the Iranian revolution the U.S. expressed explicit hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It instigated the President Saddam Hussein of Iraq to launch a war against the Islamic Republic and actively supported him throughout. It attempted and continues to attempt to hobble Iran's development, nuclear and non-nuclear, by all possible means.

Under U.S. President George W. Bush the U.S. government claimed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. The Islamic Republic Iran rejected that claim and in 2004 signed the Additional Protocol to the NPT which allows the IAEA to do more rigorous, short-notice inspections at declared and undeclared nuclear facilities to look for secret nuclear activities.

With that the Islamic Republic of Iran said: "No nuclear weapons".

In a 2006 New York Times op-ed Javid Zarif, then the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, wrote :

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, has issued a decree against the development, production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons.

With that Iran's highest political and religious leader said: "No nuclear weapons".

Not only did Iran sign the NPT and its Additional Protocol but its political leadership outright rejects the development and ownership of nuclear weapons.

Zarif also pointed out that the IAEA found that Iran had missed to declare some nuclear activities but also confirmed that it never had the nuclear weapons program the Bush administration claimed it had:

In November 2003, for example, the agency confirmed that "to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities were related to a nuclear weapons program."

During the "previously undeclared nuclear material and activities" which the IAEA investigated, some Iranian scientists worked on a 'plan for a plan' towards nuclear weapons. They seem to have discussed what steps Iran would have to take, what materials, and what kind of organization it would need to launch a nuclear weapons program. The work was not officially sanctioned and no actual nuclear weapons program was ever launched. It is believed that the Iranian scientists worked on a 'plan for a plan' because they were concerned that Iran's then arch enemy Saddam Hussein, who had bombarded Iranian cities with chemical weapons, was working towards nuclear weapons. In 2003, after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that concern proved to be unfounded and the 'plan for a plan' project was shut down.

In December 2007 all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed the shut down:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.
...
[T]he new [National Intelligence Estimate] declares with "high confidence" that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt "was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure."

The National Intelligence Estimate ended efforts by the Bush administration to threaten Iran with war. But the U.S. government, under Bush and then under President Obama, continued its effort to deny Iran its "inalienable right" to civil nuclear programs.

Obama waged a campaign of ever increasing sanctions on Iran. But the country did not give in. It countered by accelerating its civil nuclear programs. It enriched more Uranium to civil use levels and developed more efficiant enrichment centrifuges. It was the Obama administration that finally gave up on its escalatory course. It conceded that Iran has the "inalienable right" to run its civil nuclear programs including Uranium enrichment. It was this concession, not the sanctions, that brought Iran to the table for talks about its nuclear programs.

The result of those talks was the The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which was endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, adopted on July 20, 2015.

The JCPOA gives the IAEA additional tools to inspect facilities in Iran. It restricts Iran's civil nuclear program to certain limits which will terminate in October 2025. The JCPOA also reaffirms that Iran has full rights under the NPT. The IAEA since regularly inspects facilities in Iran and consistently reaffirms in its reports that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.


The Trump administrations hostility to Iran has nothing to do with anything nuclear. The U.S. wants hegemony over the Persian Gulf region. Iran rejects such imperial desires. The U.S. wants to control the flow of hydrocarbon resources to its competitors, primarily China. Iran does not allow such controls over its exports. The U.S. wants that all hydrocarbon sales are made in U.S. dollars. Iran demands payments in other currencies. Israel, which has significant influence within the Trump administration, uses claims of a non existing Iranian nuclear weapons program to manipulate the U.S. public and to divert from its racist apartheid policies in Palestine.

Trump's talk - "I'm looking to have Iran say, "No nuclear weapons."" - is simply bullshit. Iran said so several times and continues to say so. But Trump obviously believes that he can get away with making such idiotic claims.

The New York Times proves him right. It is again slipping into the role that it played during the propaganda run-up to the war on Iraq in 2002/2003. False claims made by members of the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were reported by the Times as true, even while diligent reporters at other outlets debunked those claims again and again. The Times later apologized and fired Judith Miller, one of its reporters who wrote several of the pieces that supported the false claims.

But it was never a problem of one reporter who channeled false claims by anonymous administration officials into her reports. It was the editorial decision by the Times , taken long before the war on Iraq began, to use its power to support such a war. That editorial decision made it possible that those false claims appeared in the paper.

This month alone one NYT editorial, one editorial cartoon and at least five reporters in three pieces published in the New York Times made false claims about an Iranian nuclear weapons program that, as all the relevant official institutions confirm, does not exist. This does not happen by chance.

It it is now obvious that the Times again decided to support false claims by an administration that is pushing the U.S. towards another war in the Middle East.

[May 28, 2019] Iran Won't Reward Trump's Aggression by DANIEL LARISON

Trump is sign of degeneration of the US political elite. Much like Pompeo and Bolton.
But his hostility to Iran is just desire to please people who control him and finance his re-election bid .
Notable quotes:
"... ran sees no prospect of negotiations with the United States, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Tuesday ..."
"... Iranian officials have repeatedly stated that there won't be any talks with the U.S. until our government rejoins the JCPOA. ..."
"... I don't see how Iranians could view Trump as anything other than a menace when one of his first acts as president was to declare all of them to be potential security threats with the unnecessary and cruel travel ban. His hostility to and contempt for Iran and its people have been intense and consistent for more than two years. ..."
"... When the president veers between "genocidal tweets" and disingenuous offers to talk, this doesn't come across as the work of a master negotiator but rather the impulsive babbling of a leader who can be easily enraged by the smallest and most inconsequential things that he happens to see on television ..."
"... Trump is not talking to Iran but his lackies in the U.S. MSM. They are seeing Iran as being fanatic and unreasonable in refusing to talk. This will be one of the justifications for war and permanent hostilities. ..."
"... I think you're wrong here. Trump doesn't hate or have contempt for Iranians. He's supremely indifferent to them. The hostility and contempt he has shown Iran and Iranians is meant to keep his major Israel and Saudi Arabia donors happy. That's been true from the beginning. Scores of millions in campaign contributions are riding on it. ..."
"... Increasingly, Donaldius Iohannes Trumpius reminds me of some latter day Roman emperor like Caligula or Nero. Absolute power, depravity, insatiable appetites for everything from power to money and women, a pathological lack of empathy, fawning courtiers – it's all there. ..."
May 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

In case there was any doubt, the Iranian government made clear that they were not interested in talking to Trump:

I ran sees no prospect of negotiations with the United States, a foreign ministry spokesman said on Tuesday , a day after U.S. President Donald Trump said a deal with Tehran on its nuclear program was possible.

Iranian officials have repeatedly stated that there won't be any talks with the U.S. until our government rejoins the JCPOA. That definitely won't happen under the current administration, so there has never been a realistic chance of starting up U.S.-Iranian negotiations in the near term. Everyone understands that, and that makes the president's random "offers" to talk all the more ridiculous. Iran has already been burned by Trump's decision to renege on the nuclear deal and wage economic war on the entire country, so there would have to be a major effort on the U.S. side to regain Iranian trust. The Trump administration would have to reverse course and undo every anti-Iranian thing that it has done over the last two years, and even then that would barely get the U.S. and Iran back to where they had been in 2017. Trump wouldn't ever do that because it would require him to admit being completely wrong.

Najmeh Bozorgmehr reports on how Iranians are adapting to life under U.S. economic warfare against them:

Iranian analysts tell me the US made one big mistake this time. It used almost all its non-military leverage against Iran over the wrong issue, because the country was not violating the 2015 nuclear accord. Iranians may despise their rulers but they are aware that the US is not righteous, either. How can they see Mr Trump as a saviour when he calls Iran "a nation of terror" and promises "the official end of Iran"?

I don't see how Iranians could view Trump as anything other than a menace when one of his first acts as president was to declare all of them to be potential security threats with the unnecessary and cruel travel ban. His hostility to and contempt for Iran and its people have been intense and consistent for more than two years. The complete lack of respect that Trump has shown to Iranian leaders and the Iranian people alike stands in sharp contrast to his fawning praise for the North Korean leader, and they cannot help but take that as an insult. It also isn't lost on the people being strangled by Trump's sanctions that they are being punished for abiding by an international agreement backed by the world's major powers while North Korea is celebrated after successfully defying the rest of the world by building up their nuclear arsenal and long-range missiles. Iran is being penalized because they trusted the U.S., and Trump has proven to them that this was a foolish thing for them to do. Why would they reward Trump's aggression and make the same mistake twice?

When the president veers between "genocidal tweets" and disingenuous offers to talk, this doesn't come across as the work of a master negotiator but rather the impulsive babbling of a leader who can be easily enraged by the smallest and most inconsequential things that he happens to see on television . As the North Koreans have also learned, no one can successfully negotiate with a person as unreliable and moody as Trump. No one in Iran's government is going to go out on a limb and take the political risk of engaging with the U.S. again after the last effort blew up in their faces, and Trump's mercurial instability guarantees that it would be a waste of everyone's time.

Sid Finster, says: May 28, 2019 at 12:00 pm

Why should Iran, when the United States will not abide by its agreements?

Christian J Chuba , says: May 28, 2019 at 1:20 pm

Trump is not talking to Iran but his lackies in the U.S. MSM. They are seeing Iran as being fanatic and unreasonable in refusing to talk. This will be one of the justifications for war and permanent hostilities.

Our own acts of aggression are completely ignored.

Horn City , says: May 28, 2019 at 1:57 pm

"His hostility to and contempt for Iran and its people have been intense and consistent for more than two years. "

I think you're wrong here. Trump doesn't hate or have contempt for Iranians. He's supremely indifferent to them. The hostility and contempt he has shown Iran and Iranians is meant to keep his major Israel and Saudi Arabia donors happy. That's been true from the beginning. Scores of millions in campaign contributions are riding on it.

Janwaar Bibi , says: May 28, 2019 at 2:18 pm

Increasingly, Donaldius Iohannes Trumpius reminds me of some latter day Roman emperor like Caligula or Nero. Absolute power, depravity, insatiable appetites for everything from power to money and women, a pathological lack of empathy, fawning courtiers – it's all there.

[May 28, 2019] Comey Slams Trump's FBI Probe 'There Was No Coup, These Are Lies, Dumb Lies'

May 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Comey Slams Trump's FBI Probe: 'There Was No Coup, These Are Lies, Dumb Lies'

by Tyler Durden Tue, 05/28/2019 - 19:25 3 SHARES Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print While Trump's Attorney General William Barr oversees a probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, in which the Obama-era intelligence community has been accused of gross violations of the law - including spying and possible entrapment , fired FBI Director James Comey has been on the defensive, claiming to have "no idea what the heck" people like Barr are talking about in regards to allegations of malfeasance.

Comey's latest attempt to untarnish his image comes in the form of a Tuesday afternoon op-ed in the Washington Post , responding to Thursday allegations by the President that Comey, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and former FBI agent Peter Strock had "unsuccessfully tried to take down the wrong person."

"That's treason, Trump said at a White House event. "They couldn't win the election, and that's what happened."

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Trump's comments were backed by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who said on Sunday that statements by FBI agents investigating Trump sounded "an awful lot like a coup, and it could well be treason."

Nonsense, insists Comey - who writes of Trump in his op-ed: " We must call out his lies that the FBI was corrupt and committed treason , that we spied on the Trump campaign, and tried to defeat Donald Trump. We must constantly return to the stubborn facts."

Comey continues: " We investigated . We didn't gather information about the campaign's strategy. We didn't "spy" on anyone's campaign . We investigated to see whether it was true that Americans associated with the campaign had taken the Russians up on any offer of help."

The 'investigating' - as we now know, included the FBI sending in longtime spook Stefan Halper and an FBI agent posing as Halper's assistant, who gained the trust of Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos under false pretenses. Months earlier, Papadopoulos had been seeded with the rumor that Russia had negative information on Hillary Clinton by a self-described member of the Clinton Foundation.

In the words of the CIA's former counterintelligence chief James Olson " I'd call that spying. "

In the words of former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, " It was entrapment. "

Comey continues in his op-ed:

By late October, the investigators thought they had probable cause to get a federal court order to conduct electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page . Page was no longer with the campaign, but there was reason to believe he was acting as an agent of the Russian government. We asked a federal judge for permission to surveil him and then we did it, all without revealing our work, despite the fact that it was late October and a leak would have been very harmful to candidate Trump. Worst deep-state conspiracy ever .

But wait, the conspiracy idea gets dumber. On Oct. 28 , after agonizing deliberation over two terrible options, I concluded I had no choice but to inform Congress that we had reopened the Clinton email investigation . I judged that hiding that fact -- after having told Congress repeatedly and under oath that the case was finished -- would be worse than telling Congress the truth. It was a decision William Barr praised and Hillary Clinton blamed for her loss 11 days later. Strzok, alleged architect of the treasonous plot to stop Trump, drafted the letter I sent Congress.

And there's still more to the dumbness of the conspiracy allegation. At the center of the alleged FBI "corruption" we hear so much about was the conclusion that Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied to internal investigators about a disclosure to the press in late October 2016. McCabe was fired over it . And what was that disclosure? Some stop-Trump election-eve screed? No. McCabe authorized a disclosure that revealed the FBI was actively investigating the Clinton Foundation , a disclosure that was harmful to Clinton. -James Comey

Of course, McCabe reportedly authorized the self-serving leak in response to media pressure that he had gone easy on Clinton - not to harm her campaign. Meanwhile according to McCabe, a senior Obama DOJ official called him and was "very pissed off" that the FBI was still pursuing the Clinton Foundation when the DOJ had considered the case dormant.

https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-33/html/container.html

In closing, Comey writes: "But go ahead, investigate the investigators, if you must. When those investigations are over, they will find the work was done appropriately and focused only on discerning the truth of very serious allegations. There was no corruption. There was no treason. There was no attempted coup. Those are lies, and dumb lies at that. There were just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances. "

migra , 3 minutes ago link

Funny how he never addresses the fact that candidate Trump was never informed of the investigation the way Senator Feinstein was informed that she had a spy working for her. But then again, that wouldn't support his fabrication.

San Pedro , 4 minutes ago link

The Election of Trump has pulled the curtain back on The Administrative State (deep state) ...Greatly points to the fact the we don't have a "Justice" system. We have a "Just Us" system. I no longer trust any of the alphabet Law Enforcement Agencies including the IRS or the Courts. The whole thing is rigged and corrupt beyond repair. Everybody knows this.Democrats are now a adversary of the U.S. and like any enemy of the U.S. they care nothing about National Security and Public Safety..

dogbert8 , 4 minutes ago link

Sure sounds like desperation to me. Good thing he made a few million on his book deal; he may need it (though I continue to maintain the NO ONE involved in illegal spying, whether or not evidence supports this conclusion, will EVER be held accountable - look at Hillary-clearly a Federal criminal walking free).

Captain Nemo de Erehwon , 9 minutes ago link

But go ahead, investigate the investigators, if you must. When those investigations are over, they will find the work was done appropriately and focused only on discerning the truth of very serious allegations. There was no corruption. There was no treason. There was no attempted coup. Those are lies, and dumb lies at that. There were just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances. "

And then Comey would be charged with obstruction for trying to put pressure on the investigators and discourage them via public statements?

hooligan2009 , 20 minutes ago link

oh look... comey doesn't like reciprocation...let's recast the headline

Trump Slams Comey's FBI Probe: 'There Was No Russian Collusion, These Are Lies, Dumb Lies'

SirBarksAlot , 22 minutes ago link

We "investigated," based on a "dossier" that Hillary Clinton paid for.

We "investigated," based on information we knew was fabricated.

Joiningupthedots , 22 minutes ago link

" The lady doth protest too much, methinks " : William Shakespeare

I bet Comey never saw this coming LOL

GunnyG , 25 minutes ago link

In the end I'm betting that Comey dimes out everyone that he can in order to get a better deal. If I were him I'd RUN to the U.S. Marshals and beg for WitSec in return for my testimony.

alamac , 25 minutes ago link

"Comey Slams Trump's FBI Probe: 'There Was No Coup, These Are Lies, Dumb Lies'" No.

"Comey Slams Trump's FBI Probe: 'Please, No, I'd Look Terrible in an Orange Jumpsuit'" There. FIFY

silverwolf888 , 25 minutes ago link

This Comey, he was at the center of the FBI coverup of 9-11, and the subsequent anthrax mailings. Comey very likely was involved in the anthrax mailings, which went out to various people in Washington who were privately questioning the official narrative.

IRC162 , 51 minutes ago link

The language employed in Comey's op-ed suggest the lawyer wrote this for low-IQ am talk show crowd. Food

[May 28, 2019] Fake Dossier -Creator Steele Refuses To Cooperate With AG Barr s Probe

May 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Having been practically a recluse since since the 'fake dossier' alleging links between Donald Trump and Russia that he produced was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017, Christophe Steele has reportedly refused to cooperate with AG Barr's probes

Reuters reports that , according to a source with knowledge of the situation, Steele, a former Russia expert for the British spy agency MI6, will not answer questions from prosecutor John Durham , named by Barr to examine the origins of the investigations into Trump and his campaign team.

However, buried deep in Reuters story is the same source claiming that Steele might cooperate with a parallel inquiry by the Justice Department's Inspector General into how U.S. law enforcement agencies handled pre-election investigations into both Trump and Clinton.

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In the past Steele has cooperated, willingly being interviewed twice in the special counsel's investigation, and submitting answers in writing to the Senate Intelligence Committee, but apparently this time he is not willing.

With Steel refusing to cooperate, Joe DiGenova, former U.S. Attorney warned Monday on WMAL radio's Mornings on the Mall radio show,

"this is full scale war," adding that "we are heading toward a gigantic, gigantic fight...

The intelligence community, which includes the FBI, is in full resistance to disclosing what they did during the presidential campaign ."

Sara Carter reports that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to release his report on the FBI's handling of the investigation into Trump within weeks.

These investigation will hold those in the intelligence and law enforcement community accountable, depending on what evidence is discovered. This reporter is hearing from sources that it will be scathing. Those who abused their power and weaponized the tools meant to target America's enemies against a political opponents should be held accountable . Tags Politics Law Crime

Joiningupthedots , just now link

It seems reasonable to demand Steele's extradition to America to explain his part in the conspiracy.

I mean is being a party to the conspiracy, attempted treason and sedition of the attempted overthrow of an elected President not at least as important as Julian Assange who only made public some documents that someone else removed?

Whats the phrase again.........SLAM DUNK?

ufos8mycow , 2 minutes ago link

Steele might cooperate with a parallel inquiry by the Justice Department's Inspector General

Because the IG doesn't have prosecutorial power.

takeaction , 4 minutes ago link

Oh these fuckers are scared to death. Comey lashing out at Trump...on and on. This is going to be great...and Trump will play it perfect right into the election. And BIDEN was part of all of it. What a great next 6 years.

...never forget SETH.

Finally...is Ruth Ginsburg still alive?

Meat Hammer , 4 minutes ago link

If you haz nussing to hide you haz nussing to feah.

LordMaster , 7 minutes ago link

Funny, I was recently de-platformed on Twitter for tweeting to GCHQ (British Intelligence) that the UK's sordid involvement in spying on the Trump campaign would be exposed and "no amount of British bluster could refute it...".

JCW Industries , 7 minutes ago link

He'll talk to (((Horowitz))), but not Barr. Another reason not to trust the IG whitewash. Sure seems like Obstruction of Justice to me.

Fedaykinx , 7 minutes ago link

Wait, wasn't he willing to cooperate with a different investigation? I wonder what's changed, Mr. Steele?

Cman5000 , 9 minutes ago link

Poster boy for rendition!

DarkPurpleHaze , 5 minutes ago link

He's lucky to still be walking around given his extensive knowledge of how this went down.

Maybe he'll cooperate and go into a witness protection program of sorts or simply just disappear.

[May 28, 2019] PODCAST Michael Brenner on Trump-Russia It's about the Russian mob, not the Russian government -- but Mueller won't go there

May 23, 2019 | www.unz.com

Truth Jihad / Kevin Barrett May 23, 2019 9 Comments Reply

Will Trump's organized crime activity be buried by a bipartisan coverup?

International Affairs professor Michael Brenner writes:

"Mueller supposedly has forwarded some material to federal and New York State prosecutors who have clear legal authority in those domains. It has been known for at least two years, though, that substantial grounds (and evidence) already existed to bring several cases to a grand jury.

That suggests that serious action never will be taken. For one things, a number of prominent people would be exposed: e.g. Bibi Netanyahu, the heads of the Russo-Israeli mafias, Felix Sater, the twice convicted felon and Trump 'counsellor' who avoided a second prison term by agreeing to inform for the FBI and CIA but in fact worked both sides of the street, and God knows who else.

Just as the Panama Papers scandal disappeared over the horizon, and the big 5 financial families got away with massive money-laundering for the drug cartels, and Deutsche Bank was granted immunity by Angela Merkel despite their multiple criminal activities, so will the Trump affair die out in obscurity."

In this interview we discuss Trump-Russia and the deep state, disagree about 9/11, but agree that high-level corruption is out of control.

Michael Brenner is Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh; a Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, SAIS-Johns Hopkins (Washington, D.C.), contributor to research and consulting projects on Euro-American security and economic issues. He publishes and teaches in the fields of American foreign policy, Euro-American relations, and the European Union.

Haxo Angmark , says: Website May 23, 2019 at 9:22 pm GMT

see if you can figure out why this movie got no (((theatre distribution))):

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HSf_lgV3KYw?feature=oembed

Curmudgeon , says: May 24, 2019 at 6:01 pm GMT
The Russian Mafia isn't Russian, it's (((Russian))), just as it is in the US. They just use Russians (or Italians in the US) as front men.
anon26_ , says: May 25, 2019 at 3:13 am GMT
@Haxo Angmark Anything specific, other than the fact that the Russian mob is mostly ((()))?
The scalpel , says: Website May 26, 2019 at 2:38 am GMT
@Haxo Angmark I just watched the movie. Its good! That's probably why it wasn't seen in theatres lol.
Sean , says: May 26, 2019 at 9:34 am GMT
Trump did business with cement companies run by mafioso thugs because they also controlled the unions and would call strikes if crossed. He was basically a target for shakedowns, and Trump knew those people were not anyone to profitably do business with. I am sure Russian-Israeli organised crime would be the same.

Anything to do with the Mafia back in the days of Gotti was massively investigated Trump is too wary and careful with his money to get burned that way.

As Halifax observed, men often mistake themselves but they never forget themselves, so I would think it is neither conspiracy as Barrett says or the incompetence which Brenner suggests.

You did not need to be in the CIA to have an inkling. In fact the whole plan was virtually public knowledge beforehand. It was broadcast on the BBC well before 9/11 that mullahs in London mosques were advocating the highjacking of airplanes and crashing them into American skyscrapers. This fact was subsequently alluded to by BBC reporters in the aftermath of 9/11.

I think it is becoming clear that a disproportionate amount of FBI and NY DA's resources were put into chasing the Mafia instead of Muslim terrorism.

Giuliani made such a reputation on the back of prosecuting the Mafia, and then the FBI had a household name like Gotti to go after, that the careerists in law enforcement doubled down on a bunch of low level racketeers, even after the first WTC attack.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/al-qaeda-and-the-mob-how_b_34336

The belief that somehow the Mafia was more of a threat to New York than al Qaeda -- that caused the FBI to let their guard down on the bin Laden threat. [ ]

There is now little doubt that if the Feds had devoted as much energy to a surveillance of Sphinx as they had to the Ravenite Social Club, they would have been in the middle of the 9/11 plot months before Black Tuesday. Because in July of 2001, Khalid al-Midhar and Salem al-Hazmi got their fake I.D.'s delivered to them in a mailbox at the identical location the FBI had been onto in the decade since El Sayyid Nosair had killed Meier Kahane. The man who supplied those fake ID's that allowed al-Midhar and al-Hazmi to board A.A. Flight #77 that hit the Pentagon, was none other than Mohammed El-Attriss the co-incorporator of Sphinx with Waleed al-Noor – whom Patrick Fitzgerald had put on the unindicted co-conspirators list along with bin Laden and Ali Mohamed in 1995.

Haxo Angmark , says: Website May 26, 2019 at 9:16 pm GMT
@anon26_ that, and the fact that it's race-realist throughout. Note, for instance, the early juxtaposition of the 2 rich "Russian" mafia Jew sisters (played to the hilt by 2 Jewesses, Gal Gadot and Kate Winslett) reading to the half-'groid kid (while getting their feet manicured) with the elementally poor-but-good, White cop's wife reading to their White kid. It's full of subtle stuff like this, but you have to see it a few times to pick it all out. I also like the way they got actual spic 'bangers playing spic 'bangers. That worked.
restless94110 , says: May 28, 2019 at 12:03 am GMT
@Haxo Angmark I saw this film a year ago and I can tell you exectly why it got no distribution:

It was a shitty, mean-spirited story of horrible people robbing, stealing, killing for no good reasons. Yeah there were reasons but none of them were good ones.

Furthermore the tragic ending made absoutely no sense and was just a stupid contrivance. Despite good acting from Gal Gadot, Woody and Alfeck, nothing could save this movie.

I needed to shower and scrub myself 10 times after watching this horrible nonsense.

Horrible in every respect.

I know that wasn't what you were expecting. It's because of the Jews. Ugh. Had nothing to do with that, but a lot to do with how the movie tested and it tested poorly because if you watch it, you hate humanity and yourself just from this movie.

Highly unrecommended.

[May 28, 2019] New York Times Supports False Trump Claims About An Iranian Nuclear Weapons Program That Does Not Exist

May 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

During a press conference in Japan U.S. President Donald Trump today said ( video ):

And I'm not looking to hurt Iran at all. I'm looking to have Iran say, "No nuclear weapons." We have enough problems in this world right now with nuclear weapons. No nuclear weapons for Iran.

And I think we'll make a deal.

Iran said: "No nuclear weapons." It said that several times. It continues to say that.

Iran does not have the intent to make nuclear weapons. It has no nuclear weapons program.

But Trump may be confused because the U.S. 'paper of the record', the New York Times, recently again began to falsely assert that Iran has such a program.

A May 4 editorial in the Times claimed that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps was running such a nuclear weapons program. After a loud public outrage the Times corrected the editorial. Iran's UN office wrote a letter to the Times which was published on May 6:

In an early version of "Trump Dials Up the Pressure on Iran" (editorial, nytimes.com, May 4), now corrected, you referred to a nuclear weapons program in describing the reach of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
...
The editorial is correct in criticizing the punishing aspects of the Trump administration policy toward Iran -- one that has brought only suffering to the Iranian people and one that will not result in any change in Iran's policies. But it was wrong to refer to a weapons program -- a dangerous assertion that could lead to a great misunderstanding among the public .

Unfortunately that did not help. The NYT continues with the "dangerous assertion".

On May 13 the NYT reporters Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes wrote in White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War :

At a meeting of President Trump's top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons , administration officials said.

One can not accelerate one's car, if one does not have one. The phrase "accelerate work on nuclear weapons" implies that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. It may that the White House falsely claimed that but the authors use the phrase and never debunk it.

A May 14 NYT piece by Helene Cooper and Edward Wong repeats the false claim without pointing out that it is wrong:

The Trump administration is looking at plans to send as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons , The New York Times reported.

Also on May 14 the NYT 's editorial cartoon was published under the caption Will Iran Revive Its Nuclear Program? The caption of the orientalist cartoon falsely asserted that Iran had enriched Uranium to weapons grade. And no, Iran does not have a nuclear weapon or a nuclear weapons program in its freezer.


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On May 16, after another public outcry, a correction was added to the cartoon:

An earlier version of a caption with this cartoon erroneously attributed a distinction to Iran's nuclear program. Iran has not produced highly enriched uranium.

After this onslaught of false New York Times claims about Iran NYT critic Belen Fernandez asked: Has the New York Times declared war on Iran? She lists other claims made by the Times about Iran that are far from the truth.

Three days later, on May 25, Palko Karasz reported in the New York Times on Iran's reaction to Trump's tiny troop buildup in the Persian Gulf region. Again the obviously false "accelerate" phrase was used:

Under White House plans revised after pressure from hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, the president's national security adviser, if Iran were to accelerate work on nuclear weapons , defense officials envision sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East.

Iran does not have a nuclear program. It can not "accelerate" one. The U.S. claims that Iran once had such a program but also says that it was ended in 2003. The standard formulation that Reuters uses in its Iran reporting is thereby appropriate:

The United States and the U.N. nuclear watchdog believe Iran had a nuclear weapons program that it abandoned. Tehran denies ever having had one.


On July 1 1968 Iran signed and later ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear-weapon party. Article II of the treaty says:

Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transfer or whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.

With that Iran said "No nuclear weapons". Iran also accepted the nuclear safeguards demand in Article III of the treaty in form of routine inspections by the treaty's nuclear watchdog organization IAEA.

Article IV of the NPT gives all non-nuclear-weapon state parties like Iran the "inalienable right" to "develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination." After signing the NPT Iran launched several civil nuclear projects. These started under the Shah in 1970s and continued after the 1979 revolution in Iran.


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Ever since the Iranian revolution the U.S. expressed explicit hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It instigated the President Saddam Hussein of Iraq to launch a war against the Islamic Republic and actively supported him throughout. It attempted and continues to attempt to hobble Iran's development, nuclear and non-nuclear, by all possible means.

Under U.S. President George W. Bush the U.S. government claimed that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. The Islamic Republic Iran rejected that claim and in 2004 signed the Additional Protocol to the NPT which allows the IAEA to do more rigorous, short-notice inspections at declared and undeclared nuclear facilities to look for secret nuclear activities.

With that the Islamic Republic of Iran said: "No nuclear weapons".

In a 2006 New York Times op-ed Javid Zarif, then the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, wrote :

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic, has issued a decree against the development, production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons.

With that Iran's highest political and religious leader said: "No nuclear weapons".

Not only did Iran sign the NPT and its Additional Protocol but its political leadership outright rejects the development and ownership of nuclear weapons.

Zarif also pointed out that the IAEA found that Iran had missed to declare some nuclear activities but also confirmed that it never had the nuclear weapons program the Bush administration claimed it had:

In November 2003, for example, the agency confirmed that "to date, there is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities were related to a nuclear weapons program."

During the "previously undeclared nuclear material and activities" which the IAEA investigated, some Iranian scientists worked on a 'plan for a plan' towards nuclear weapons. They seem to have discussed what steps Iran would have to take, what materials, and what kind of organization it would need to launch a nuclear weapons program. The work was not officially sanctioned and no actual nuclear weapons program was ever launched. It is believed that the Iranian scientists worked on a 'plan for a plan' because they were concerned that Iran's then arch enemy Saddam Hussein, who had bombarded Iranian cities with chemical weapons, was working towards nuclear weapons. In 2003, after the U.S. invaded Iraq, that concern proved to be unfounded and the 'plan for a plan' project was shut down.

In December 2007 all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed the shut down:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.
...
[T]he new [National Intelligence Estimate] declares with "high confidence" that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt "was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure."

The National Intelligence Estimate ended efforts by the Bush administration to threaten Iran with war. But the U.S. government, under Bush and then under President Obama, continued its effort to deny Iran its "inalienable right" to civil nuclear programs.

Obama waged a campaign of ever increasing sanctions on Iran. But the country did not give in. It countered by accelerating its civil nuclear programs. It enriched more Uranium to civil use levels and developed more efficiant enrichment centrifuges. It was the Obama administration that finally gave up on its escalatory course. It conceded that Iran has the "inalienable right" to run its civil nuclear programs including Uranium enrichment. It was this concession, not the sanctions, that brought Iran to the table for talks about its nuclear programs.

The result of those talks was the The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which was endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231, adopted on July 20, 2015.

The JCPOA gives the IAEA additional tools to inspect facilities in Iran. It restricts Iran's civil nuclear program to certain limits which will terminate in October 2025. The JCPOA also reaffirms that Iran has full rights under the NPT. The IAEA since regularly inspects facilities in Iran and consistently reaffirms in its reports that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.


The Trump administrations hostility to Iran has nothing to do with anything nuclear. The U.S. wants hegemony over the Persian Gulf region. Iran rejects such imperial desires. The U.S. wants to control the flow of hydrocarbon resources to its competitors, primarily China. Iran does not allow such controls over its exports. The U.S. wants that all hydrocarbon sales are made in U.S. dollars. Iran demands payments in other currencies. Israel, which has significant influence within the Trump administration, uses claims of a non existing Iranian nuclear weapons program to manipulate the U.S. public and to divert from its racist apartheid policies in Palestine.

Trump's talk - "I'm looking to have Iran say, "No nuclear weapons."" - is simply bullshit. Iran said so several times and continues to say so. But Trump obviously believes that he can get away with making such idiotic claims.

The New York Times proves him right. It is again slipping into the role that it played during the propaganda run-up to the war on Iraq in 2002/2003. False claims made by members of the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were reported by the Times as true, even while diligent reporters at other outlets debunked those claims again and again. The Times later apologized and fired Judith Miller, one of its reporters who wrote several of the pieces that supported the false claims.

But it was never a problem of one reporter who channeled false claims by anonymous administration officials into her reports. It was the editorial decision by the Times , taken long before the war on Iraq began, to use its power to support such a war. That editorial decision made it possible that those false claims appeared in the paper.

This month alone one NYT editorial, one editorial cartoon and at least five reporters in three pieces published in the New York Times made false claims about an Iranian nuclear weapons program that, as all the relevant official institutions confirm, does not exist. This does not happen by chance.

It it is now obvious that the Times again decided to support false claims by an administration that is pushing the U.S. towards another war in the Middle East.

[May 27, 2019] The Pathology of John Bolton by Joe Lauria

In short Bolton is a neofascist.
Notable quotes:
"... Most diplomats, officials, and journalists were shocked that Bolton (evading confirmation with a recess appointment) had actually become the U.S. representative, given his long, public disdain for the UN ..."
"... It's been the strategy of Republican administrations to appoint the fiercest critic to head an agency or institution in order to weaken it, perhaps even fatally. ..."
"... Bolton possesses an abiding self-righteousness rooted in what seems a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness, mixed with deep personal failings hidden from public view. ..."
"... It is more than an ideology. It's fanaticism. Bolton believes America is exceptional and indispensible and superior to all other nations and isn't afraid to say so. ..."
"... Bolton's all too willing to make his bullying personal on behalf of the state. He implicitly threatened the children of José Bustani, who Vice President Dick Cheney wanted out of his job as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons because Bustani had gotten Iraq to agree to join the chemical weapons protocol, thereby making it harder for the U.S. to invade Iraq. ..."
"... We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views. If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn't support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it." ..."
"... Bolton is no fan of democracy if things don't go his way. He is a vociferous instigator of the so-far failed U.S. coup in Venezuela and of course Bolton organized the "Brooks Brothers riot" that disrupted the recounting of votes in Florida in the disputed 2000 presidential election ..."
"... This is a common ruling class tactic in the U.S. to portray disobedient leaders ripe for overthrow as Hitler. Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler. It is a false revival of U.S. glory from World War II to paint foreign adventures as moral crusades, rather than naked aggression in pursuit of profits and power. ..."
"... Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. He is unique only in the purity of this pathology. ..."
"... Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the six-nation deal that has seen Tehran curtail its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for relaxation of U.S. and international sanctions. ..."
"... Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, lacking the military firepower of the United States, have long tried to get the U.S. to fight its wars, and one no more important than against its common enemy. ..."
"... It is the typical provocation of a bully: threaten someone with a cruise missile and the moment they pick up a knife in self-defense you attack, conveniently leaving the initial threat out of the story. It then becomes: "Iran picked up a knife. We have to blow them away with cruise missiles." ..."
"... The New York Times that day reported : "Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing an unsuspecting Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States on a course to war before the president realizes it." ..."
"... Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's quite possible that Iran was behind" the attacks. ..."
"... But also last Sunday he told Fox News that the "military-industrial complex" is real and "they do like war" and they "went nuts" when he said he wanted to withdraw troops from Syria. Trump said he didn't want war with Iran, here possibly reflecting Israel's views. ..."
"... Joe, nice piece of work covering the psycho-pathology of America's leading nazi! ..."
"... To correct one of your statements: Trump DID NOT appoint him National Security Adviser, but Adelson and Mercer did. Trump is a brain-dead, blackmailed puppet who fancies himself as POTUS ..."
"... Everybody I know who is following the Washington Beltway histrionics of Trump et al know full-well that a certain intelligence agency of a small Middle East domiciled country have THE definitive dossier on Trump and have been building it for the last five decades. ..."
"... The Bolton-Pompeo-Pence presidency is destined to go down in history as one of infamy and treason. Trump? dead-man walking, more than likely by a stroke-heart attack when he's popping out one of his idiotic and manic tweets! ..."
"... John Bolton is a psychopath, He should be dismissed immediately, but I think that he should be institutionalized. ..."
"... Yeah Joe, it wasn't just you and other reporters who were stunned by Bolton's recess appt to the UN by W -- - many of us were staggered by the jaw-dropping inappropriateness of it, ..."
"... But, as you accurately mentioned, the Republicans had long-ago (I recall first hearing about it during Nixon's reign, with Earl Butz) used that gambit to effectively sabotage regulatory agencies & depts. Rather than try to dissolve an agency that most people want, they can neutralize it by appointing some hack or lobbyist for the entity being regulated so that nothing meaningful gets done, AND it has the 'beneficial' effect of discrediting the agency involved, and government in general, which is what many libertarian-inclined Republicans like. ..."
"... Israel doesnt want the US to attack Iran Well that is BS! Israel and its Fifth Column in the US have agitated for the US to attack Iran for years .we've all seen and heard it .and now they want to try to wipe our memories of their war mongering with their typical hasbara in the NYT and Netanyahu claiming .'oh we have nothing to do with it." ..."
"... Bolton is a psychopath but he is Sheldon Adelson's errand boy .who Bolton met with in Las Vegas the week before Trump appointed him and Adelson is the Orange carnival barker's 100 million dollar donor. ..."
"... Trump's incoherent mixture of neoconservative & isolationism almost make him a Bush! ..."
"... I assume Trump knows what a 'neocon' but is so indebted to Israel and intoxicated by Islamophobic rhetoric that he cannot free himself from his addiction to surrounding himself with more neo-cons ..."
"... The progression from Flynn to McMaster to Bolton was just selecting between neocon flavors for his National Security Advisers. What a joke of a nation! ..."
"... I appreciate the article, but it doesn't mention Israel, which is the fountainhead of the agenda to take out Iran, Iraq, and Syria. ..."
"... "Overall, 28 sitting senators have received sizable contributions from John Bolton PAC during the election cycle, as have nine representatives on the House defense, foreign affairs, and homeland security subcommittees." ..."
"... Don't forget who told Donald Trump to hire John Bolton. It was Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes. ..."
"... They like Bolton because he is "incapable of empathy and good on Israel." ..."
"... The NYT has indeed supported wars but it is not alone nor is this a recent trend. There is a very old trend of the commercial news establishments becoming war hawks and regurtitators of official propaganda whenever the USA wants to pick a fight. It goes back to the period after the establishment of the nation when expansionism set its roots down and what grew out of that is pretty much the same kind of nationalistic propaganda we see today. ..."
May 23, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Special to Consortium News 129 Comments

John Bolton has been saying for years he wants the Iranian government overthrown, and now he's made his move. But this time he may have gone too far, writes Joe Lauria.

I knew John Bolton and interacted with him on a nearly daily basis with my colleagues in the press corps at United Nations headquarters in New York when Bolton was the United States ambassador there from August 2005 to December 2006.

Most diplomats, officials, and journalists were shocked that Bolton (evading confirmation with a recess appointment) had actually become the U.S. representative, given his long, public disdain for the UN. But that turned out to be the point. It's been the strategy of Republican administrations to appoint the fiercest critic to head an agency or institution in order to weaken it, perhaps even fatally.

Bolton's most infamous quote about the UN followed him into the building. In 1994 he had said : "The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

But a more telling comment in that same 1994 conference was when he said that no matter what the UN decides the U.S. will do whatever it wants:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/VOINBs8eOdk?feature=oembed

Bolton sees such frank admissions as signs of strength, not alarm.

He is a humorless man, who at the UN at least, seemed to always think he was the smartest person in the room. He once gave a lecture in 2006 at the U.S. mission to UN correspondents, replete with a chalk board, on how nuclear enrichment worked. His aim, of course, was to convince us that Iran was close to a bomb, even though a 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate being prepared at the time said Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

I thought I'd challenge him one day at the press stakeout outside the Security Council chamber, where Bolton often stopped to lecture journalists on what they should write. "If the United States and Britain had not overthrown a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 would the United States be today faced with a revolutionary government enriching uranium?' I asked him.

"That's an interesting question," he told me, "but for another time and another place." It was a time and a place, of course, that never came.

More Than an Ideology

Bolton possesses an abiding self-righteousness rooted in what seems a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness, mixed with deep personal failings hidden from public view.

He seemed perpetually angry and it wasn't clear whether it was over some personal or diplomatic feud. He seems to take personally nations standing up to America, binding his sense of personal power with that of the United States.

It is more than an ideology. It's fanaticism. Bolton believes America is exceptional and indispensible and superior to all other nations and isn't afraid to say so. He'd have been better off perhaps in the McKinley administration, before the days of PR-sugarcoating of imperial aggression. He's not your typical passive-aggressive government official. He's aggressive-aggressive.

And now Bolton is ordering 120,000 troops to get ready and an aircraft carrier to steam towards Iran.

Bolton's all too willing to make his bullying personal on behalf of the state. He implicitly threatened the children of José Bustani, who Vice President Dick Cheney wanted out of his job as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons because Bustani had gotten Iraq to agree to join the chemical weapons protocol, thereby making it harder for the U.S. to invade Iraq.

After Bolton's failed 2005 confirmation hearings, Tony Blinken, the then staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told The New Yorker 's Dexter Filkins:

"We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views. If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn't support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it."

Bolton is no fan of democracy if things don't go his way. He is a vociferous instigator of the so-far failed U.S. coup in Venezuela and of course Bolton organized the "Brooks Brothers riot" that disrupted the recounting of votes in Florida in the disputed 2000 presidential election.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/MbVtROU9J_E?feature=oembed

What is alarming about the above video is not so much that he justifies lying, but the example he gives: lying to cover up military plans like the invasion of Normandy. This is a common ruling class tactic in the U.S. to portray disobedient leaders ripe for overthrow as Hitler. Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler. It is a false revival of U.S. glory from World War II to paint foreign adventures as moral crusades, rather than naked aggression in pursuit of profits and power.

Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. He is unique only in the purity of this pathology.

Regime Change for Iran

The U.S. national security adviser has been saying for years he wants the Iranian government overthrown, and now he's made his move. But this time John Bolton may have flown too high.

He was chosen for his post by a president with limited understanding of international affairs -- if real estate is not involved -- and one who loves to be sucked up to. Trump is Bolton's perfect cover.

But hubris may have finally bested Bolton. He had never before maneuvered himself into such a position of power, though he'd left a trail of chaos at lower levels of government. Sitting opposite the Resolute desk on a daily basis has presented a chance to implement his plans.

At the top of that agenda has been Bolton's stated aim for years: to bomb and topple the Iranian government.

Thus Bolton was the driving force to get a carrier strike force sent to the Persian Gulf and, according to The New York Times, on May 14 , it was he who "ordered" a Pentagon plan to prepare 120,000 U.S. troops for the Gulf. These were to be deployed "if Iran attacked American forces or accelerated its work on nuclear weapons."

Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the six-nation deal that has seen Tehran curtail its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for relaxation of U.S. and international sanctions.

At the time of Bolton's appointment in April 2018, Tom Countryman, who had been undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, as had Bolton, predicted to The Intercept that if Iran resumed enrichment after the U.S. left the deal, it "would be the kind of excuse that a person like Bolton would look to to create a military provocation or direct attack on Iran."

In response to ever tightening sanctions, Iran said on May 5 (May 6 in Tehran) that it would indeed restart partial nuclear enrichment. On the same day, Bolton announced the carrier strike group was headed to the Gulf.

Bolton Faces Resistance

If this were a normally functioning White House, in which imperial moves are normally made, a president would order military action, and not a national security adviser.

"I don't think Trump is smart enough to realize what Bolton and [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo are doing to him,"

former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel told RT's Afshin Rattansi this week.

"They have manipulated him. When you get the national security adviser who claims that he ordered an aircraft carrier flotilla to go into the Persian Gulf, we've never seen that. In the days of Henry Kissinger, who really brought sway, he never ordered this, and if it was ordered it was done behind closed doors."

Bolton claimed he acted on intelligence that Iran was poised to attack U.S. interests close to Iran.

Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, lacking the military firepower of the United States, have long tried to get the U.S. to fight its wars, and one no more important than against its common enemy. An editorial on May 16 in the Saudi English-language news outlet, Arab News , called for a U.S. "surgical strike" on Iran. But The New York Times reported on the same day that though Israel was behind Bolton's "intelligence" about an Iranian threat, Israel does not want the U.S. to attack Iran causing a full-scale war.

The intelligence alleged Iran was fitting missiles on fishing boats in the Gulf. Imagine a government targeted by the most powerful military force in history wanting to defend itself in its own waters.

Bolton also said Iran was threatening Western interests in Iraq, which led eventually to non-essential U.S. diplomatic staff leaving Baghdad and Erbil.

It is the typical provocation of a bully: threaten someone with a cruise missile and the moment they pick up a knife in self-defense you attack, conveniently leaving the initial threat out of the story. It then becomes: "Iran picked up a knife. We have to blow them away with cruise missiles."

But this time the bully is being challenged. Federica Mogherini, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, resisted the U.S. on Iran when she met Pompeo in Brussels on May 13.

"It's always better to talk, rather than not to, and especially when tensions arise Mike Pompeo heard that very clearly today from us," said Mogherini. "We are living in a crucial, delicate moment where the most relevant attitude to take – the most responsible attitude to take – is and we believe should be, that of maximum restraint and avoiding any escalation on the military side."

The New York Times that day reported : "Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing an unsuspecting Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States on a course to war before the president realizes it."

Ghika: No new threat from Iran. (YouTube)

British Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika then said on May 14: "There has been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq or Syria." Ghika was rebuked by U.S. Central Command, whose spokesman said, "Recent comments from OIR's Deputy Commander run counter to the identified credible threats available to intelligence from U.S. and allies regarding Iranian-backed forces in the region."

A day later it was Trump himself, however, who was said to be resisting Bolton. On May 15 The Washington Post reported:

"President Trump is frustrated with some of his top advisers, who he thinks could rush the United States into a military confrontation with Iran and shatter his long-standing pledge to withdraw from costly foreign wars, according to several U.S. officials. Trump prefers a diplomatic approach to resolving tensions and wants to speak directly with Iran's leaders."

The Times reported the next day:

"President Trump has told his acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, that he does not want to go to war with Iran, according to several administration officials, in a message to his hawkish aides that an intensifying American pressure campaign against the clerical-led government in Tehran must not escalate into open conflict."

Then it was the Democrats who stood up to Bolton. On Tuesday Pompeo and Shanahan briefed senators and representatives behind closed doors on Capitol Hill regarding the administration's case for confronting Iran.

"Are they (Iran) reacting to us, or are we doing these things in reaction to them? That is a major question I have, that I still have," Sen. Angus King told reporters after the briefing. "What we view as defensive, they view as provocative. Or vice versa."

Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego told reporters after the briefing: "I believe there is a certain level of escalation of both sides that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The feedback loop tells us they're escalating for war, but they could just be escalating because we're escalating."

Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's quite possible that Iran was behind" the attacks.

Bolton was conspicuously absent from the closed-door briefing.

It's Up to Trump

Trump has pinballed all over the place on Iran. He called the Times and Post stories about him resisting Bolton "fake news."

"The Fake News Media is hurting our Country with its fraudulent and highly inaccurate coverage of Iran. It is scattershot, poorly sourced (made up), and DANGEROUS. At least Iran doesn't know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good thing!" Trump tweeted on May 17.

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

The Fake News Media is hurting our Country with its fraudulent and highly inaccurate coverage of Iran. It is scattershot, poorly sourced (made up), and DANGEROUS. At least Iran doesn't know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good thing!

77.7K 9:44 AM - May 17, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy
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Then he threatened what could be construed as genocide against Iran. "If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!" he tweeted on Sunday.

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!

239K 4:25 PM - May 19, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy
128K people are talking about this

But also last Sunday he told Fox News that the "military-industrial complex" is real and "they do like war" and they "went nuts" when he said he wanted to withdraw troops from Syria. Trump said he didn't want war with Iran, here possibly reflecting Israel's views.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vc4vYWJfJnE?feature=oembed

On Monday he implied that the crisis has been drummed up to get Iran to negotiate.

"The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up a negotiation with Iran. This is a false report ."

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up a negotiation with Iran. This is a false report....

80.8K 1:30 PM - May 20, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy
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John Bolton must be stopped before he gets his war. It is beyond troubling that the man we have to count on to do it is Donald Trump.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe .

Jym Allyn , May 26, 2019 at 19:27

Or as Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is US." As in the lies that created the Vietnam war and the waste of 58,000 American soldiers and thousand of Vietnamese. Or the lie that Iran is our enemy when we funded and encouraged Saddam to attack them and destroyed their attempt to have a secular government.

Or the lie of the WMD's and the 9/11 attack which was funded by Saudi Arabia, and run by Saudis and NOT Iraq.

Or the lies of Afghanistan which was economically and culturally better off when it was controlled by the USSR...

John Hawk , May 26, 2019 at 16:56

Joe, nice piece of work covering the psycho-pathology of America's leading nazi!

To correct one of your statements: Trump DID NOT appoint him National Security Adviser, but Adelson and Mercer did. Trump is a brain-dead, blackmailed puppet who fancies himself as POTUS.

It can't get any more delusional than this. Everybody I know who is following the Washington Beltway histrionics of Trump et al know full-well that a certain intelligence agency of a small Middle East domiciled country have THE definitive dossier on Trump and have been building it for the last five decades.

After all, deception is their game and they use it liberally, like feeding their agenda to Bolton as 'intelligence' info of the highest order. The Bolton-Pompeo-Pence presidency is destined to go down in history as one of infamy and treason. Trump? dead-man walking, more than likely by a stroke-heart attack when he's popping out one of his idiotic and manic tweets!

Zhu , May 26, 2019 at 03:20

If Bolton were struck by lightning tomorrow morning, would anything change much? I doubt it. We Americans are as warlike as the ancient Assyrian. We've been slaughtering Indians, Koreans, SE Asians, Central Americans, and multiple Middle Eastern people for a looong time. It is flattering to blame this individual or th t country, but no. We, as a community, are all responsible to some degree. Even me, on the far side of the world.

Alex , May 25, 2019 at 21:50

Bolton's choosing destroyed IRAN but staying friends with Saudi Arabia it's so contradicting, and so obvious that he is influenced to behave this way is because Israelies influence. Saudy Kingdom using Bolton to get IRAN so Saudy will be only country promote Extreme version of Wahhabi Islam which is didn't existed In Islam's history.

So Bolton's obsession with destruction of Iran is ignorance as its best. September 11th suspects were most of them Saudy nationals, yet nobody wanted to talk about it, because there is irony that, George W Bush was and probably still doing business with Saudy. So how can you explain that to American people? No you can not.

Perhaps collectively hypnotism !

OlyaPola , May 26, 2019 at 02:58

" So how can you explain that to American people?"

Given that useful fools are useful, why would you want to?

" No you can not."

An illustration of the benefits of dumbing down do not accrue solely to those actively engaged in dumbing down, facilitating the minimising of blowback during implementation of strategies based on "How to drown a drowning man with the minimum of blowback", given that many believe that critical mass is a function of linear notions of 50% +1 and above; a further conflation of quantity with quality to which the opponents are prone.

William , May 25, 2019 at 19:06

John Bolton is a psychopath, He should be dismissed immediately, but I think that he should be institutionalized. Put him in a strait jacket and keep him in a padded cell. He poses a threat to millions of people.

Eddie S , May 25, 2019 at 11:26

Yeah Joe, it wasn't just you and other reporters who were stunned by Bolton's recess appt to the UN by W -- - many of us were staggered by the jaw-dropping inappropriateness of it, IF it was assessed from a pro-peace perspective.

But, as you accurately mentioned, the Republicans had long-ago (I recall first hearing about it during Nixon's reign, with Earl Butz) used that gambit to effectively sabotage regulatory agencies & depts. Rather than try to dissolve an agency that most people want, they can neutralize it by appointing some hack or lobbyist for the entity being regulated so that nothing meaningful gets done, AND it has the 'beneficial' effect of discrediting the agency involved, and government in general, which is what many libertarian-inclined Republicans like.

Good article about a reprehensible politician.

renfro , May 25, 2019 at 11:18

"But The New York Times reported on the same day that though Israel was behind Bolton's "intelligence" about an Iranian threat, Israel does not want the U.S. to attack Iran causing a full-scale war. "
________________________________

Israel doesnt want the US to attack Iran Well that is BS!
Israel and its Fifth Column in the US have agitated for the US to attack Iran for years .we've all seen and heard it .and now they want to try to wipe our memories of their war mongering with their typical hasbara in the NYT and Netanyahu claiming .'oh we have nothing to do with it."

Bolton is a psychopath but he is Sheldon Adelson's errand boy .who Bolton met with in Las Vegas the week before Trump appointed him and Adelson is the Orange carnival barker's 100 million dollar donor.

Seriously, how stupid do they think we are? If we attack Iran it will be for the Zionist and Saudis and we all know it.

Luther Bliss , May 25, 2019 at 10:57

Trump's incoherent mixture of neoconservative & isolationism almost make him a Bush!

Remember it wasn't until Bush JR's second term that he asked his father, "What's A Neocon?" to which Pappy Bush replied, "Israel."

I assume Trump knows what a 'neocon' but is so indebted to Israel and intoxicated by Islamophobic rhetoric that he cannot free himself from his addiction to surrounding himself with more neo-cons.

The progression from Flynn to McMaster to Bolton was just selecting between neocon flavors for his National Security Advisers. What a joke of a nation!

Mark , May 25, 2019 at 02:30

I appreciate the article, but it doesn't mention Israel, which is the fountainhead of the agenda to take out Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Bolton stands out for his extremity among extremists, but he's a means rather than the end. The agenda is something into which he bought, passionately by all indications, but which a paucity of other people created strictly to advance their own, tiny, exclusive clan, not for the benefit of the United States.

Hank , May 25, 2019 at 09:43

To think that this administration campaigned on a promise to restrict future wasteful and needless interventions and then hired this dinosaur of a warmonger makes my blood curl! Everyone with half a brain knows what Bolton's agenda is yet here he is leading the USA into a war at the behest of a foreign nation led by a felon and terrorist! The American people who want peace and their tax dollars invested into improving the USA have once again been stabbed in the back by a conniving administration. Will this cycle of non-democracy ever end? Until it does, future administrations will continue on just like previous ones- kowtowing to special interests, in particular the military/industrial mafia and the apartheid criminal state of Israel! All this massive business of holding "elections" in the USA, all the talk about "Russian collusion" and the REAL collusion is right there in front of us all- the US administration has once again COLLUDED to go back on a campaign promise and once again open the money trough for the military/industrialist pigs!

Mark , May 26, 2019 at 05:31

I get the idea, but it's necessary to look 'behind' back-stabbing, conniving, colluding administrations, and Bolton, and the military/industrial complex, and to bring Israel and some barely known U.S. history, at least back to World War I, explicitly to the fore for public scrutiny. That's a monumental task, to say the least, owing to American attention spans and the contrary interests of the powers that be.

Taras77 , May 24, 2019 at 20:24

Bolton has his own well funded PAC, from which he is free to "contribute" (bribe) sychophant congress individuals. What a situation for the fix for war.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/05/interests-pushing-for-hard-line-against-iran/

"Overall, 28 sitting senators have received sizable contributions from John Bolton PAC during the election cycle, as have nine representatives on the House defense, foreign affairs, and homeland security subcommittees."

ricardo2000 , May 24, 2019 at 17:29

By far the most productive, and most verifiable, way to eliminate weapons is at a negotiating table. The easiest way to start a war is with ignorant blather.

O Society , May 24, 2019 at 16:09

Don't forget who told Donald Trump to hire John Bolton. It was Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes.

They like Bolton because he is "incapable of empathy and good on Israel."

Trump initially declined on Bolton because "he doesn't like Bolton's moustache."

Kool Aid drinkers and idiots. We're being lead by a cult of morons who worship the bombs, money, and a white separatist state.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html?gtm=bottom

Truth First , May 24, 2019 at 11:40

They don't call him, 'Bonkers' Bolton for nothin'.

Pedro Masculino Ghirotti , May 24, 2019 at 10:53

Nice piece Joe, but you just forgot to mention who Bolton actually works for, the Israelis.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , May 24, 2019 at 07:11

"Pathology." That's exactly the right word. But I think it has a wider application. See:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/john-chuckman-comment-why-trump-doesnt-rein-in-bolton-dismal-bolton-pompeo-and-abrams-are-part-of-the-price-trump-paid-for-political-support-against-threats-he-felt-and-getting-a-big-pile-of-ca/

old geezer , May 26, 2019 at 13:08

an accurate, concise review.

i doubt the iranians will test a nuke until after djt is out of office. after that you might wake up one morning and everything you knew before becomes quite obsolete.

my guess is israel has stealth cruise missiles with h bombs. it would be very foolish of them to not have them. those descendants of egyptian slaves are anything but foolish.

Sam , May 27, 2019 at 00:33

@ CitizenOne: Thank you for your long comment. I agree with much of what you wrote, but would like to know why you claimed, "Iran is surely guilty of vowing the destruction of Israel " . According to what I've read, Iran has not initiated hostilities with any nation for over a century – a clear, peaceful contrast to the rogue states of Israel & the U.S. Are you referring to the long-ago-debunked claim that Iran claimed to 'wipe Israel off the map'?
(See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/14/post155 ? "So there we have it. Starting with Juan Cole, and going via the New York Times' experts through MEMRI to the BBC's monitors, the consensus is that Ahmadinejad did not talk about any maps. He was, as I insisted in my original piece, offering a vague wish for the future.

"A very last point. The fact that he compared his desired option – the elimination of "the regime occupying Jerusalem" – with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran makes it crystal clear that he is talking about regime change, not the end of Israel. ")

Or perhaps you're referring to Revolutionary Guard deputy leader Hossein Salami's warning that if Israel starts an aggressive war against Iran, it 'will end with {Israel's} elimination from the global political map'? IMHO, warning an extremely aggressive, self-obsessed, Apartheid-practicing rogue state against trying to attack your nation is wise ;-) .

I look forward to your response. Thanks very much.

Sam F , May 27, 2019 at 06:12

Sam: please use an identifier initial as I do, to prevent confusion.
I have asked you twice before; perhaps not the same person.
It is unfair to expect others to make the clarification, and easy to prevent.

O Society , May 23, 2019 at 21:15

Neoconservative war pigs riding the bomb and the belligerence of Empire

http://opensociet.org/2019/05/23/the-belligerence-of-empire/

mike k , May 23, 2019 at 18:55

How is it that crazies like Bolton can end up high in our government hierarchy? It is because the whole damned government is crazy through and through

Joe , May 23, 2019 at 20:48

His Dad probably made a huge donation to Yale just like Bush's Dad. That's what happens when the system is gamed.

Art Thomas , May 25, 2019 at 09:22

Yes, in my opinion. The state stripped of patriotic rhetoric and other obfuscations that keep us devoted to it is nothing more than a criminal gang that hides behind the law.

Some basic examples. 1. The law: taxation, the crime: theft. 2. The law: monetary credit expansion, i.e. debt financing, the crime: counterfeiting, i.e. creating money out of thin air. 3. The invasion of countries not a threat to the invading state. Etc. etc.

Tiu , May 23, 2019 at 18:30

If the US "political establishment" was working for America's benefit, things would look very different.
They are instead working on the "globalist" agenda, which will, if successful, destroy all nations as we know them today and what remains will be ruled over by a bunch of sociopaths who are the same group that has inflicted John Bolton on the world.
Bolton's a tool, a bit like a hammer, to get their project done. The Democrats have equivalent tools e.g. H R Clinton.

Mark Thomason , May 23, 2019 at 18:04

The problem is if he hasn't gone too far. If he gets his war.

Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:53

John Bolton should get to ride the missile in the remake of Dr. Strangelove.

evelync , May 23, 2019 at 19:53

hah hah hah

I loved that movie :)

and yes Bolton is a perfect caricature of Slim Pickens AKA Dr Strangelove.

I also refer to him as Yosemite Sam

one difference for our current real life war monger is that the movie character was simply insane and didn't justify his craziness with explanations.

Bolton, OTOH, blames "national Security" and "the national interests" of this country .say what????

if we look at the horrific human costs and the enormous financial costs of the wars that were fought for U.S. "national interests" one would want to ask, once the rubble had cleared, what "interests" were actually served and whose "security" did they actually improve?
The answers always take us back to Eisenhower's MIC and Ray McGovern's MICIMATT (maybe I got a couple of these letters wrong?).
Whoever profited from the mayhem don't represent either our "national interest' or our "national security" IMO and yet those two phrases are used to shut down any discussion or criticism in the lead up .

whew

Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:20

Strictly about the movie – Slim Pickens plays the ranking officer on the B-52 (I think?) which is actually dropping the bomb. Dr Strangelove is a totally different character, one of a few played by Peter Sellers in that movie, and is a (mostly!) wheelchair-bound German scientist.

Jym Allyn , May 26, 2019 at 19:17

And the wheelchair bound psychopathic scientist of Dr. Strangelove was inspired by Kubrick meeting Henry Kissinger at a cocktail party and recognizing that Kissinger was the most evil person on this planet because he looked and sounded so responsible and rational.
Now that Saddam, bin Laden, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler are dead, Kissinger holds the record of the person still alive who has needlessly killed more people, both Americans and non-Americans, than any other person on this planet.
Hillary's idea of destabilizing Libya and creating a political vacuum there was from her training when working for Kissinger.

Abe , May 23, 2019 at 16:51

The Pathology:

John Bolton
Senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Chairman of Gatestone Institute (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Former board member of Project for the New American Century (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Former Adviser to Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/john-bolton/

Richard Goldberg – Aide to John Bolton at NSC (2019 – )
Former Senior Adviser at Foundation for Defense of Democracies (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/richard-goldberg/

Frederick Fleitz – Bolton's Former Chief of Staff at NSC (2018)
CEO of Center for Security Policy ( (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/frederick-fleitz/

Abe , May 23, 2019 at 19:32

The Pathology, Part Duh:

Mike Pompeo
Christian Zionist: "We will continue to fight these battles, it is a never ending struggle until the Rapture."
Associate of Center for Security Policy (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Sponsor of ACT! for America (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/mike-pompeo/

Sam , May 27, 2019 at 00:38

@ Abe: Thanks for the info!

Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:42

John Bolton is obviously a very sick puppy.
This is patently obvious to any observer with the least desgree of psyhological sophistication and insight.
If he lived on your block and made such statements about his neighbors, or a woman living nearby, he would be looking at restraining orders.
He is an out-of-control abusive pig who belongs in an institution where a course of shock therapy might actually help him. I reckon any basic psychological test would find that he has a least borderline personality and at worst is actually insane and incapable of taking responsibility for the consequences of his action.
Bolton has permanent termporary insanity.
Letting this tortured, psychopathic individual run the military is itself an enormous crime, one of murderous negligence, one for which Trump truly should and could be impeached. Congress must take all possible steps to get this man out of the Executive Branch.

Threaten Trump with impeachment if he doesn't fire Bolton.
His appointment of Bolton is reckless negligence and endangers this country.

James , May 23, 2019 at 19:09

I wonder how good American politicians of the past, if there were any, would react to the appointment of this psychopath as what he is now. Whom should be blamed for it? Donald Trump? The pro-Israeli lobbies? Or the American nation? A glance at the man's face is enough to realize that he is deeply sick. To me, he doesn't look like a human being at all! He looks like a monkey out of a stuffy room. Why don't psychotherapists do anything about him? Shouldn't he be hospitalized for the safety/security of the world population? By the way, I wonder where Netanyahu, the psychopath's provoker, is. He has been very quiet for about a month or so. Maybe he is waiting for the war to ignite without getting himself directly involved in it. Let Americans and Iranians kill one another while he waits to pick up the fruit in the end.

Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:27

Where does the blame lie? Who hired him? Who's the chief of the executive branch? Who's a person who could actually fire him (as he's so famous for doing on reality TV shows) instead of wringing his hands on friendly TV networks declaring he doesn't want to actually go to war, but if he's 'forced' to, he'll erase Iran from the map?

Druid , May 26, 2019 at 03:16

He would have to get permission from Adelson and the Mercers first.

CitizenOne , May 24, 2019 at 20:52

Bolton and Pompeo are the only things keeping him from impeachment. As long as Trump satisfies the bloodthirsty war mongers and the insatiable appetite of the MIC and the Pro Israel lobby and the Oil Lobby or Koch Industries he cannot lose. So far Trump is bangin on all cylinders. I really think he knows what he needs to do to survive. All this impeachment talk is just fantasy by the left dreaming about getting him out of office "somehow".

bjd , May 23, 2019 at 16:13

That the mono-maniacal psychopath Bolton is a walking exhibit of the Dunning–Kruger effect is no surprise to me. It is extra frightening though.

Realist , May 23, 2019 at 16:00

What was Bolton's day job before he started mucking around in politics and foreign policy? Master waterboarder or testicular electrificator in extraordinary renditions for the CIA? He seems the sort to have spent much time at Abu Ghraib, and not just to take notes. Honestly, his major goals seem to be the eradication of entire cultures and societies, which will somehow redound to the magnificence of the United States of America. Clearly a sociopathic personality. A lot in common with Cheney.

Jimmy G , May 23, 2019 at 15:57

Again the panic is stirred by .. The NYT! (The source of such good info regarding Russia gate) .
The statement regarding Bolton " ordering" anything is just one more example of the media and the intel bureaucrats trying to put the President in a jam politically . (Remember how a month ago we were invading Venezuela?)

Bolton is doing nothing more than getting enough rope to hang himself, and the military intelligence service, congressional and media Trumpophobes are willing to stir this to the very edge, and we all know Congress could (if it could act in good Constitutional faith, rather than pretending to be the judicial branch) unite for the good of this country and Trump would be amenable to whatever they came up with. Trump is far less of a warmonger than any POTUS we've had in a very long time.

Realist , May 23, 2019 at 16:18

If Congress is the only branch of government with the constitutional power to declare a war, surely it has the power to FORBID the executive branch from fomenting such a war against their judgement.

In fact, wasn't the Boland Amendment such a legislative act passed with the intent of preventing the Reagan administration from pursuing military action in Central America, most notably Nicaragua and El Salvador?

What's to prevent the Congress, if it were so inclined (which I doubt it is) to instruct the president (especially if he seems trigger-happy) to refrain from initiating any unprovoked attacks upon Iran, Venezuela, North Korea or any other country, for that matter?

Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:56

Ollie North worked for Reagan, didn't he?

RnM , May 25, 2019 at 17:27

Trump is very aware that 'Stache Bolton and Mike "Mumbles" Pompeo are significant threats to his re-election. Would not be surprised to see them removed before January.

CitizenOne , May 25, 2019 at 21:02

The NYT has indeed supported wars but it is not alone nor is this a recent trend. There is a very old trend of the commercial news establishments becoming war hawks and regurtitators of official propaganda whenever the USA wants to pick a fight. It goes back to the period after the establishment of the nation when expansionism set its roots down and what grew out of that is pretty much the same kind of nationalistic propaganda we see today.

I agree with your statement that Trump is far less vulnerable based on his history but I am sure that the war planners are always concocting special information diets that are carefully prepared to appeal to the particular tastes of the leader of the day. Whatever Trumps opinion is he will be surrounded by the hand picked lunatics of the day who will entice and enjoin him to agree with plans for war based on their carefully prepared menu of propaganda specifically designed to be appealing to the palate of whoever is in charge.

It is less certain that Trump's long history of opposing military action will have real staying power as he is served up courses of a sumptuous meal prepared specially for his palate designed to engage him in support for military action all over the World.

Trump is particularly susceptible to flattery and appeals to his greatness and his very stable genius. He wants to be the great leader and for that he needs a plan to deal with the geopolitical situation in many countries.

Trump is a man who knows what to do too.

He advised Germany that it was a puppet of Russia until he didn't
He advised Teresa May how to do Brexit the right way until he didn't
He announced to the World he had forged deep connections with North Korea until he didn't
He had high hopes for an alliance with Russia until he didn't.
He specified the right type of fire fighting to be used to fight the Notre Dame Cathedral fire until he didn't
He wanted to walk away from the fight in Syria until he didn't
He wanted to walk away from the war in Syria again until he didn't
He wanted to cut the military budget until he didn't

Ordinarily if we were in the middle of a democratic presidency the press would be raising the "flip flopper" argument every second of their available airtime.

Democrats are the flip floppers but never a republican even when he is. It all depends on the way the flips and the flops land. If they land on conservative positions then a flop or a flip never occurred. With republicans, flip flopping is just a corrective action to realign the president on the correct course. If it is a democrat then their hypocrisy and flip flopping are broadcast 24/7 and are portrayed a fundamentally disqualifying events which demonstrate a fundamental lack of principles and weakness of character deserving of condemnation. When errant republicans flip flop over to the "correct" vision they are welcomed with open arms into the fold.

Trump wants to be accepted so badly that the democrats hounding him are in fact herding him into the fold of the conservatives who will shelter him and support him at all costs and the media will never ever ever never call this flip flopping.

In short, if a political candidate shifts to the left his integrity will be destroyed as his character will be portrayed as weak and built on shifting sands. He will be deemed not to be trusted like some loose cannon.

On the other hand, if a political candidate shifts to the right he will be greeted as a prodigal son returning to the fold and will be welcomed with open arms.

So I am not as sure as you that Trump's background will be any indicator of his future ideas about how to succeed in the environment he is in where both democrats by their antagonism and republicans by their defense of him both push him over to the right.

He may once have been far less of a war hawk but politicians on both sides of the aisle are pushing him further to the right every day.

Consortium News editor Joe Lauria may wish to contribute a follow up series of articles detailing the purity of pro-Israel Lobby pathology exemplified by Bolton, Pompeo, and the beyond troubling Trump preferably before the next war.

Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 19:33

"the wider extent of pro-Israel Lobby pathology in the US government. "

That's it in a nutshell.

KiwiAntz , May 24, 2019 at 18:46

Thanks Joe for the great article. Bolton (aka the moustache) truly is a humourless, warmongering, depraved psycho? This is a cowardly man who dodged the Vietnam draft as he didn't want to die in some foreign patty field! But this lunatic has no qualms to send other peoples sons & daughters into a Iranian war zone as cannon fodder to satisfy his deluded & perverted bloodlust to destroy Iran? If "the moustache" wants a War with Iran he should be forced to fight on the frontlines with his troops along with POTUS Bonespurs Trump, another cowardly draft dodger? Let the moustache & the Dotard make a stand, like Jon Snow in the Battle of the bastards, sword in hand, facing down the so called Iranian, bogeyman enemy, but this would never happen as cowards & bastards like Bolton & Trump don't personally fight in the battles they start, they hide in safety in a Washington situation room, as far away from any War zone as possible! If Bolton gets his War with Iran, Trump will pay the price for this suicide mission because he would be blamed for the fallout of any Military defeat! America's already sorry record of Military humiliation & defeat in Regime change operations around the Globe would reach a crescendo if they ever dared to try to attack & overthrow Iran as it would be the endgame of the US Empire!

mark , May 23, 2019 at 22:28

Trump is just Israel's bitch.

incontinent reader , May 24, 2019 at 01:08

Good comment, Abe. We've missed you. Keep posting more of the same.

Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:37

We Americans were bloodthirsty long before Israel existed.

anon , May 25, 2019 at 06:35

What an absurd zionist troll post. Try it with someone dumb, Zhu.

Michael Steger , May 23, 2019 at 15:17

First Joe, McKinley did not implement American submission to British Imperialism, though it began with the end of Grant's administration as with the twice elected Groucher Cleveland, but it's confirmation as US policy began with Teddy Roosevelt. The Roosevelt Corollary destroyed JQA's Community of Principle in the Americas which should be known as the true Monroe Doctrine, contrary to popular opinion today which has incorrectly replaced the Monroe Doctrine with the Roosevelt Corollary (as Bolton is especially want to do). TR signalled the end of the Lincoln Era of American industrial development and global cooperation, which was best represented by Grant, the most overlooked of great Presidents (and perhaps we see similarities of Grant to Trump today). Bolton indeed is Captain Kangaroo, presiding over his Court as the Queen of No Hearts would in Alice's confrontation with British rule once she penetrates behind the facade of British Lockean empiricism. With insight only equalled to Lincoln's, who said "We can't fight two wars at once, so first the Confederacy and then the British," Trump has identified the fascist nexus within our government as that same British foe, a nexus led by Brennan, Rice, Clapper, Jarrett, et al, which works on behalf of what Eisenhower (another overlooked great President and General) called the Military Industrial Complex. The MIC is a British Intelligence deployment to fundamentally undermine our Constitution and put the US into a state of perpetual war and police surveillance. It is now over 70 years in the making, and is enforcing a new Cold War and attempted coup of our elected Government, and yet, it may have finally found its match, not just in Trump, but in Trump's intended cooperation with Putin of Russia and Xi of China. These three nations, along with Modi of India (just reelected) are a true threat to this rotten British system, from Fabian liberals to Bolton chickenhawks, the true enemy is this British System. If we move on that effectively, we may just have a chance to win this revolutionary moment now unfolding throughout the trans-Atlantic world. Let us return to JQA's community of principle for the entire world. Let us work with Trump to end this fascist British nexus. Let us celebrate our true heritage as Americans!

Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:51

Your comments read with interesting and well taken.
BUT: The bottom line is that Trump hired Bolton (and Pompeo) and has wound him up and set him loose goosewalking across the globe.
Why?
The buck for Bolton's suicidal buffonery stops with Trump.
So, I can't see him as a genuine foe of the Deep State-MIC as you describe.

Michael Steger , May 23, 2019 at 18:10

Bolton is loyal to Trump, even though he is a failed chickenhawk. Look at McMaster, at the leaking, and outright betrayal of the President. Same with Tillerson, betrayal. Pompeo and Bolton have ridiculous views and bloated war rhetoric, but they're personally loyal, perhaps opportunistically, and even temporarily, but nonetheless right now they are, and when they're not, I bet they're gone. But Trump does control the policy. Look at North Korea, any war? Media said there would be, then worked to undermine a deal. Venezuela, war? They're talking in Norway now, how'd that happen? Syria, troops out? MIC, Dems and Media opposed, and Trump called them out for the first time since Eisenhower! Pompeo to Sochi to see Putin, progress. How'd that happen? Trump is fighting the MIC and too many good Americans are spinning so fast from the propaganda machine they can't see straight.

anon4d2 , May 24, 2019 at 18:40

Interesting, but it is easy for a president to fight the MIC: simply fire and arrest anyone who acts against efforts to control them. He could send any federal enforcement agency, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, reserves, national guard, or even the Coast Guard, Secret Service, DC police, or private guards to arrest them and prosecute any resisters as traitors. It is not one man against the MIC.

And they cannot assassinate him once he has announced that intention, without exposing their hand and unleashing a generation of purges and strict controls. If he is surrounded by traitors, he has only to say that and fire the lot of them. He could leak that anonymously to Wikileaks or tweet it and they would be terrified.

Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:48

Bolton has been working DC bureaucracy like a pro for decades. He's using Trump like a marionette while he runs circles around the amateur. He was helping orchestrate foreign wars of choice back when Trump was still playing a pretend boss on TV. Bolton has no loyalty except as a facade for those he needs to suck up to.

Your examples of non-wars are terrific. Trump is amazing! – because he's running the government so badly that the State Dept doesn't know what the Pentagon is doing doesn't know and vice versa. He chose to ignore the Iran nuclear deal, which had prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons. So now, the Iranians declare (out of self defense) that they're now going to pursue nuclear weapons. Trump then says that he doesn't want to attack Iran, but they must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. This is a circular argument exactly of the type the MIC uses to engage in war. Pompeo then indicates that laughable, ineffectual attempts at sabotage are most likely Iranian. This grave threat to our nation can't even do enough damage to an oil tanker to make it take on water.

Just because someone fails to do something doesn't mean that they were against it the whole time. Maybe they're just awful at it. Sure, Trump says some things that are heartening to the anti-war and anti-interventionist crowd. But the next day he'll say something heartening to rabid neocons. He needs to grow a spine, but it's far too late. He's a dandy, a spoiled rich kid fop who's never had to answer for his mishaps, because why, when you have inherited money and a stout legal team?

anon4d2 , May 24, 2019 at 19:06

The idea that "the MIC is a British Intelligence deployment" is fantastical, as the US MIC is several times the size of UK's entire MIC, and such a secret could never be kept. The US MIC has engaged UK secret agencies to subvert the US Constitution by serving as agents to pass intercepted US communications back to the US to pretend that the MIC didn't do it, or that it was foreign intel. But that is a long way from UK controlling the US MIC.

There are certainly confluences of interests between the US and UK oligarchies, but I see no basis for the contention that "American submission to British Imperialism began with the end of Grant's administration" when the US prosecuted Britain for building the Alabama etc. to break the Union blockade, and was outraged that Britain considered recognition of the Confederacy until it lost at Gettysburg. The US under TR was not submitting to anyone when it sent the Great White Fleet on tour, or when it seized Cuba and the Philippines. Nor under Wilson when it stayed out of WWI until very late in the war, despite the Lusitania loss. Nor under FDR when it stayed out of WWII until attacked, despite the passionate pleas of Churchill.

Some detailed argument with credible references would be needed to support those assertions.

Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:44

Scapegoating is real popular with lefties & rughties alike. American Exceptionalism forbids we ever accept respobility for what we've done.

Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:45

No, the rest of humanity is not any better.

anon4d2 , May 25, 2019 at 06:48

The commenter was searching for causes, and some UK conspiracy is simply too far from any available evidence. In fact it much appears to be a wild attempt to distract from the obvious causes including zionism, which you pretend is "scapegoating." No, zionism is a principle corrupting factor in US politics, especially foreign policy.

If you don't see that, you must start learning the evidence, rather than relying on the presumption that it is mere scapegoating. Otherwise you are serving their wrongful and racist tribal purposes, and others will presume that you know that.

Oscar Shank , May 26, 2019 at 07:24

Zhu knows it.

Vera Gottlieb , May 23, 2019 at 14:56

How much more peaceful the life on our entire planet would be if the Americans weren't around.

Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:58

Extend that to all humans, and the head of PETA would support the project.

David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 17:16

I doubt that. Nature hates a void.

Bethany , May 24, 2019 at 17:50

Exactly. Very well put.

Abe , May 23, 2019 at 14:19

Brazilian diplomat Jose Bustani, the first director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), only served about one year of his second term.

Bustani was forced out by the U.S. government in April 2002 because he wanted international chemical weapons monitors inside Iraq and thus was seen as impeding the US push for war against Iraq. The US accused Bustani of "advocacy of inappropriate roles for the OPCW".

Since 2011, the United Nations has stood by a US-Saudi-Israeli Axis financed and armed the mercenary terrorist forces attacked Syria. In addition to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, major support for terrorist mercenaries has provided via NATO-member state Turkey, as well as Jordan. Israel has launched repeated air attacks and provided direct support for terrorist forces in Syria.

From July 2010 to 2018, the Director-General of the OPCW was Turkish career diplomat Ahmet Uzumcu. Uzumcu served ambassador to Israel from 1999 to 2002, and as the Permanent Representative of Turkey to NATO between 2002 and 2004.

Turkey has been the primary channel for mercenary terrorist forces assaulting the Syrian state. The remaining terrorist forces in the Idlib Governorate continue to be supplied through Syria.

Since Uzumcu announced the creation of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria on 29 April 2014, not a single OPCW report has acknowledged these basic facts concerning the conflict in Syria.

Following a consensus recommendation by the OPCW Executive Council in October 2017. Spanish career diplomat Fernando Arias was appointed to replace Uzumcu as Director-General of the OPCW. Previously, Arias served as Ambassador of Spain to the Netherlands and the Permanent Representative of Spain to the OPCW. He also has served as Permanent Representative of Spain to the United Nations in New York.

Uzumcu, and now Bustani, obviously understand that the appropriate role of the OPCW is to provide propaganda support for "regime change" operations, and to say nothing contrary to the "narrative" endorsed by the US-Saudi-Israeli Axis.

David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 17:52

The OPCW has certainly disgraced themselves in Syria. What a sham.

Randal Marlin , May 23, 2019 at 13:48

John Bolton's questioner in the second clip should have made the distinction between deception used to lead the country into war, and deception used to pursue a war already constitutionally declared and already underway.
In the first case there is a violation of democratic principle. When the people are the ultimate sovereign, they need to be properly informed. They can agree to deception, like where and when D-Day will occur, during war; but not in the case of leading the people into war. Lying to Congress is always unacceptable, and those who do lie to Congress should be made to suffer serious penalties.

zhenry , May 24, 2019 at 02:13

I read a report that the aircraft carrier strike force and preparation of 120,000 US troops, to Persian Gulf was ordered sometime ago and that Bolton took advantage of that fact to make it look that 'Bolton ordered it'?

vinnieoh , May 24, 2019 at 10:54

What I'd read is that the carrier strike force and bomber detachment were previously scheduled: there had been a previous drawdown and this deployment represents a return to a level similar to the end of the Iraq war, and that does sound like Bolton/Pompeo opportunism. The 120,000 troops plan sounds like something Bolton prodded pentagon scribes to produce. How to interpret when Bolton says that then Trump denies it, and then a new troop deployment (1% of the previous) is announced/suggested/leaked? I see it as Trump taking his dogs out for a walk to snarl at the neighbors.

David G , May 23, 2019 at 13:07

"Thus Bolton was the driving force to get a carrier strike force sent to the Persian Gulf and, according to The New York Times, on May 14, it was he who 'ordered' a Pentagon plan to prepare 120,000 U.S. troops for the Gulf."

That the National Security Advisor, irrespective of whether the job is currently held by a lunatic like Bolton, may be giving such orders should in and of itself be a subject of serious inquiry by Congress and the media.

The National Security Advisor is, as the title states, merely an advisor – not confirmed by the Senate, and therefore not, in constitutional terms, an "officer of the United States" with the authority to carry out the policy of the government. Other than his assistant fetching him lunch, nobody in government should be following Bolton's orders at all while he holds this job.

But this is nothing new. I had the same concern, on an even larger scale, during the first Bush Jr. administration when Cheney was running around reshaping the government in his own warped image. Despite the Vice President's elected status, he has no executive power under the Constitution – no power at all, in fact, except when sitting as President of the Senate. There was a time when everyone knew that.

With all the perennial crowing we see about the greatness of the Constitution, and the mewling about how Trump is degrading it, it would be nice if Congress and the media could spare a moment to care about whether the people giving orders to the world's largest military and covert/intelligence apparatus are legally empowered to do so.

Ash , May 23, 2019 at 17:17

> That the National Security Advisor, irrespective of whether the job is currently held by a lunatic like Bolton,
> may be giving such orders should in and of itself be a subject of serious inquiry by Congress and the media.

It does kind of have an Alexander Haig flavor to it, doesn't it?

David G , May 23, 2019 at 22:08

When Bolton gets up and says "I'm in control here", I'm definitely finding a rock to hide under.

Zenobia van Dongen , May 23, 2019 at 13:06

The question that Joe Lauria asked of John Bolton, i.e. "If the United States and Britain had not overthrown a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 would the United States be today faced with a revolutionary government enriching uranium?" seems to imply that Iran seeks revenge against the US for the CIA's 1953 coup d'état against prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq.
However the current leaders of Iran are not entitled to consider themselves the heirs of Mossadeq, nor are they morally justified in avenging him, since the CIA coup relied largely on support from the very same clerical establishment that now rules Iran. As a matter of fact in the 1950s and 60s Shia clerics in Iran were routinely considered CIA agents. Consequently the Iranian elite's pretense of carrying on Mossadeq's anti-imperialist struggle is profoundly hypocritical. I grant that the current reactionary clique that governs Iran defends Iran's sovereignty against US imperialism as Mossadeq did. But the underlying concept of the Iranian nation is profoundly different. The present régime has no respect for the principles of democracy and popular sovereignty that pervaded Iran's anti-imperialist struggle in the 1950s and was derived from the democratic ideals of the Persian constitutionalist revolution of 1909.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Constitutional_Revolution
Indeed, Iran has no hesitation in crushing underfoot the aspirations to independence of other nations. It ruthlessly conducts ethnic cleansing in Syria, commits assassinations in South America, and in general behaves with imperialist ruthlessness that is moreover unmitigated by any concern for human rights or international law.

vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 14:27

As to your last paragraph please provide proof for your allegations. As to your second paragraph you assume to know the meaning behind the question Mr. Lauria asked. Could it be possible (this I believe is more likely) that what Mr. Lauria meant or realizes that absent the '53 coup would there now be an Islamic theocracy ruling Iran?

Again making the disclaimer that I'm no expert on the region or Iran particularly I have followed many leads of reading and investigation to understand the ramifications of that seminal event (the '53 coup.) What I believe I've understood is that Iran prior to and until the '53 coup was on its own unique trajectory of reclaiming its sovereignty and rejecting its status as a (UK) colonial vassal. There seemed to be a somewhat fluid acceptance of the rising democratic movement of Mosaddeq et. al., a fading nod to the former royal house, and an acceptance of Shiite religiosity of some considerable social legitimacy.

So, three centers of power and influence working its unique way to an unique Iranian future.

With the US/UK engineered coup the imperialists destroyed the legitimate democratic evolution happening there. With the re-installation of the Shah Reza Pahlavi as the puppet ruler of the US, that traditional center of power and legitimacy was likewise forever delegitimized in the eyes of most Iranians. That sentiment was cemented with the creation of SAVAK by the US, UK, and Israel to be the iron fist of the Shah and his new imperial master.

That left only one center of power or authority which retained legitimacy in the eyes of Iranians – the Shiite theocrats, and that is why when Iranians kicked the US out it was the Islamic theocracy doing the booting. You are correct that there was at least one Shiite cleric (I've forgotten his name,) jealous and fearful of the rising influence of democratic governance, who is a known and recorded collaborator with the US/UK machinations of the coup. Without the help of the US/UK his part in the affair would probably have been inconsequential.

It is not Iran that is funding and establishing Islamic madrasses in Pakistan, India, China, Indonesia, Africa and elsewhere. It is the Wahhabist Sunnis and they preach intolerance and violent jihad. Furthermore, of the total global population of adherents of Islam, 75% are Sunni affiliated, and 25% are Shiite affiliated. Those percentages hold true in the immediate region of the ME as well. The repeated claims of Iranian desires of empire are a shibboleth emanating from KSA and UAE.

Nick , May 23, 2019 at 15:36

The leaders of the Islamic Revolution used Mossadegh's image to help get people on board against the Shah, The National Front was allowed to be a party again for a short time, and a Street in Tehran was renamed post-revolution for Mohammad Mossadegh. This was a cynical ploy by the Mullahs to get people on board with their revolution and make people believe that they were indeed the true heirs of Mossadegh and committed to democracy. It was all a sham. The National Front was made illegal again at some point in the 80s, and the street named for Mossadegh was renamed around the same time. These people are the heirs of the Shah whether they like it or not.

anon4d2 , May 23, 2019 at 16:59

Joe's question points out that, had the US not overthrown Mossadegh, there would have been a secular democratic government. That is true throughout the Mideast, where in the 1950s-70s the US supported radical Islamic movements that suppressed secular movements and overthrew secular governments, pretending that the USSR was moving in. There was no evidence of USSR interest there, as it was preoccupied with such factions in its central Asian republics, and apparently only some arms from the USSR in Egypt were ever found as "evidence."

Similar US actions have continued to date, almost 30 years after the collapse of the USSR, the US always supporting fanatics against moderates like Assad and Ghaddafi, and pretending to support "democracy."

Compare the US support of Saudi Arabia, a fanatical fundamentalist monarchy engaged in terrorism throughout the region, including against their only neighbor that defends minority rights, Syria. Again falsely claiming the need to protect oil supply, which it can buy anywhere without bombing anyone, like any other oil buyer. Again falsely claiming to support democracy which it overthrows everywhere at the pleasure of its own oligarchy, always to "protect Israel" or attack socialism, which is always to get political bribes.

There is no evidence of any "ethnic cleansing" by Iran in Syria or elsewhere. Where do you get that idea? Iran is majority Shiah, defending the majority Sunni population of Syria from Sunni fundamentalists. You certainly have no evidence that Iran "commits assassinations in South America" or opposes "aspirations to independence of other nations" and made that up to deceive others. Your comments on this site have been knowingly false.

zhenry , May 24, 2019 at 03:44

The above, re the current Iranian religious govt, very informative, thankyou.
Re Joe's article I cannot take seriously that Trump is against war and the Deep State.
If Trumps rhetoric during his electioneering, supporting the middle class (deeply deprived after the US corporations abandoned them for low paid Chinese labour) was in any way honest he would not have chosen the cabinet he did (and keeps on choosing).
Trump has not chosen one cabinet member that would support that supposed sympathy for the middle class.
Reporting that assumes Trump is fighting for moderation (against his own cabinet) and to establish policies in the direction of that sympathy, is without evidence, it seems to me, regardless of what he might suggest to Fox News.

Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 17:00

"The present régime has no respect for the principles of democracy and popular sovereignty that pervaded Iran's anti-imperialist struggle in the 1950s and was derived from the democratic ideals of the Persian constitutionalist revolution of 1909."
And the American government has equal respect for the Constitution.

David , May 23, 2019 at 12:56

Bolton didn't order a carrier group to the Persian Gulf. He doesn't have the authority. The carrier group left because of the deployment was already planned. Bolton does not have the power that has been ascribed to him. He is a grandiose clown who knows how to play the press. I don't think he will have his job six months from now.

David G , May 23, 2019 at 12:16

"At the time of Bolton's appointment in April 2018, Tom Countryman predicted to The Intercept that if Iran resumed enrichment after the U.S. left the deal, it 'would be the kind of excuse that a person like Bolton would look to to create a military provocation or direct attack on Iran.' In response to ever tightening sanctions, Iran said that it would indeed restart partial nuclear enrichment."

Two problems with this part of the article:

• The link in the main text here goes to an Intercept article about Bolton, but it has no mention of Tom Countryman, or even of Iran.

• It isn't accurate to say that Iran may now, or is saying it will, "resume" or "restart" nuclear enrichment, since it never ceased, nor did it ever commit to cease, such activity. The JCPOA merely imposed strict *limits* and monitoring on nuclear enrichment and stockpiling, some of which Iran is saying it will now depart from.

I also disagree with the imputation elsewhere in the article that Donald Trump has a good understanding of real estate. His disastrous, decades-long record in that business suggests otherwise. But I suppose some people will always believe what they see on TV.

lou e , May 23, 2019 at 12:06

Creeping fascism works like fishing with a rod and reel. You hook the fish and it runs off 100 ft of line . You reel in 50 ft and the fish takes 30 feet back. Do the Math! Some times burning down the village IS the only way to get rid of the infestation. Bit hard on the USSA, but as Ben Franklin put it you have a democratic republic IF ypu can Keep It.

Herman , May 23, 2019 at 11:56

Remember at an earlier time with Bolton, someone described him as a kiss up kick down kind of guy, i.e., a real jerk. I defended Trump against Russiagate because it was a threat to the office of the president. Unless, he gets his head straight, his "political" moves in the Middle East and Southwest Asia can spin out of control. He is not negotiating a new deal with some city to build another hotel, and his rhetoric makes him sound like that is the way he thinks he should act with other countries.

One can defend him by saying maybe it will work, but then maybe not and it is not a matter of your target taking his papers and leaving the room.

Great article, Mr. Lauria. Have you posted your resume on your site? Interested in your confrontation with Bolton.

Trump wants to be reelected more that being the President but in his defense we know what he will face if he decides to enter into honest negotiations. He's going to have a heck of a time finding people to cover his back. He can count on one presidential aspirant, Tulsi Gabbard but she's on the other side.

Jeff Harrison , May 23, 2019 at 11:42

If we have to rely on Thump for anything other than social controls, we're screwed.

David G , May 23, 2019 at 11:40

These personal reminiscences of Bolton at the U.N. by Joe Lauria unfortunately only confirm the man's very public record. The fact that such a creature has been accepted for so long in the heart of U.S. foreign "policy" is yet more evidence that the country's crisis of political culture started long before Trump came on the scene.

I don't quite accept the slight comfort implied in the formulations here that this time Bolton has "gone too far", or "flown too high", since to me they imply that there is some moral or rational bedrock that he has struck beneath which the establishment is not willing to go.

I don't think that's true, as a general proposition. For example, the U.S. continues less noisily but inexorably on its long-term collision course with China, which will be even more catastrophic than war with Iran, not to mention the ultimate one with the planet's environmental limits.

For me it's enough that, for a number of contingent reasons, Bolton's (and MBS's and Netanyahu's) lunge at Iran has fallen flat with both U.S. and European policy and media elites – for now, and I hope forever.

jessika , May 23, 2019 at 11:26

I just called WH 202-456-1111 to tell President Trump that Bolton should be fired; had to wait 8 min to talk. Trump certainly has lots of problems, but he'll have plenty more if he starts a war! Pox Americana!

Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:58

Great idea.
I'll do the same.

vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 11:04

Thank you Mr. Lauria. I'm tending to believe that not only has Bolton flown too high, but Trump's predictable method of trying to get what he wants was completely miscalculated wrt Iran. There is no better treaty or deal to be had concerning keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. The failures of the JCPOA that Trump is probably griping about all have to do with matters of Iran's necessary and legitimate right to security and self-defense. No sane nation would willingly give in to this bullying. Thanks again.

vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 11:44

Also, wrt Trump's predictable patterns, note that little if anything has changed regarding the US and the DPRK, so if he is a crafty and effective negotiator I'm having a hard time seeing it.

David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 18:22

Good example Vinnieoh. NK and SK are reaching out and (more importantly) shoving out the US. More winning.

I love Trump. He is useful. Fascism, NAFTA, generic racism you name it, he really shines a light on issues.

Here again. (Currently) SA, GAZA, Israel, Syria and of course Iran. Hell, the entire region. What a train wreck he is.

What about the dollar? The EU? Yikes.

By gosh this man could single handedly take down an empire! MAGA!

O Society , May 23, 2019 at 10:47

Well done, Joe Lauria. Of course our dilemma is Donald Trump says one thing and contradicts himself 5 minutes later. You could say he "changes his mind" but I do not think his mind is stable to begin with. He's far too nuts to put any faith in for "doing the right thing,"

Bolton and his neoconservative pox on the world serve the interests of the war machine and fossil fuel corporations. When will be rid of them? When We the People grow a set of testicles and throw them all into prison. Trump isn't going to save us, but he might let Bolton get us all killed.

Time for the people to rise.

http://opensociet.org/2019/05/19/the-interlocking-crises-of-war-climate-chaos

Piotr Berman , May 23, 2019 at 11:31

Seems that Trump is so small minded that what we observe cannot be explained mechanistically, we need quantum mechanics. Rather that a particular state of mind we have a stochastic distribution, wave patterns and spin.

Marc R Hapke , May 23, 2019 at 14:34

Great analogy

O Society , May 23, 2019 at 12:39

The expert says what's going on in Trump's mind is solipsism and I agree with him:

https://opensociet.org/2018/07/07/assault-on-reality-solipsism-whats-wrong-with-donald-trump-part-1/

Sam F , May 23, 2019 at 13:12

Yes, Joe Lauria has presented the problem very well.

A major factor is certainly the persuasiveness of the NSC and other MIC entities which surround the president, and comprise much of official DC. Try persuading anyone in the MIC that war is ever inappropriate: they are all full of extreme scorn and false accusations, and have endless "evidence" of threats behind every tree, and rationales to attack this or at least that, just to make "statements" and "warnings" to invisible foreign monsters. The MIC is a completely and permanently logic-proof subculture of bullying, which bullies every member of its own tribe to line up behind tyrants like Bolton and a million other puerile bullies devoid of humanity.

No doubt you know that this was all well understood by the founders of the US, who restricted federal military powers to repelling invasions and knew that any standing military was a threat to democracy. The Federalist Papers should be required reading in the US. All of those understandings were gradually lost after the War of 1812 and the 1820s, as the founders died off. As the US became confident that it could repel any invasion, it lost the sense of the necessity of unity and cooperation of regions, and Congress degenerated into a battle of intransigent factions leading to the completely unnecessary Civil War. With the ebullient emergence of the middle class, no effort was made to correct the defects of the Constitution in failing to protect the institutions of democracy from the rising power of economic concentrations. With WWI and WWII, the power of oligarchy over mass media was consolidated, and by WWII the oligarchy and MIC effectively controlled elections, mass media, and the judiciary, the tools of democracy. Democracy has been a facade ever since.

The US has zero security problems that the MIC has not created, and could at any time re-purpose 80% of the MIC to developing infrastructure in the poorest nations with positive effects upon its security. Had it done so since WWII, we would have rescued the poorest half of humanity from poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, and disease, and would have had a true American Century. Instead we have killed over 20 million innocents and mortgaged the lives of our children to serve the infantile psychopaths of the MIC.

The solution is not only to eliminate the 2000-member NSC, cut the military by at least 80 percent, prohibit acts of war or surveillance by the executive branch, tax the rich so that no one has income above upper middle class, and demand amendments to the Constitution restricting funding of the mass media and elections to limited and registered individual donations. We also desperately need a fourth branch of federal government, which I am calling the College of Policy Debate, to conduct moderated textual debates of policy issues in all regions, protecting and representing every viewpoint, in which all views are challenged and must respond, and all parties must come to common terms. The CPD should produce commented debate summaries available to the public with mini-quizzes and discussion groups. Without that rational analysis and access to the core debates, we do not have a democracy at all, we are all no more than the fools and pawns of these oligarchy scammers, who must be actively excluded from all government capacities.

Sorry for the lecture.

Linda Wood , May 24, 2019 at 01:59

Please don't apologize, Sam F. Your brilliant and humane words give me hope at a time in which I am in shock at the blatancy of fascism in our government.

Doggrotter , May 23, 2019 at 10:33

Where is a drone strike when you need one?

OlyaPola , May 23, 2019 at 10:23

" seemed to always think he was the smartest person in the room."

Useful fools are often most useful when they are believers that they are not fools.

Once upon a time there was a discussion of which of the opponents' should be proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize – the list being relatively long.

After extensive analysis and discussion the short-list consisted of two opponents in alphabetical order Mr. John Bolton and Mr. Karl Rove.

However in light of the notion "Do you think your opponents are as stupid as you are? " the proposal question was left in abeyance, not only as a function of decorum but also through understanding that "Useful fools are often most useful when they are believers that they are not fools." and that even small dogs can seem tall when you are lying on your stomach.

OlyaPola , May 24, 2019 at 17:33

Since omniscience can't exist perhaps Mr. Bolton was/is subject to misrepresentation and misunderstanding?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l6vqPUM_FE&list=RDXIOSOlqMaj8&index=17

bobzz , May 23, 2019 at 10:12

"Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's quite possible that Iran was behind" the attacks."

What possible advantage could accrue to Iran from putting a few dents in the ships? Smells of another false flag.

Piotr Berman , May 23, 2019 at 11:46

I would not be so sure. A delicate signal that Iran has more capabilities concerning stopping in-out-Gulf traffic than naive people like Bolton realize has a sobering potential. By the way of contrast, what kind of black flag it is if it is instantly put in doubt, "we do not know" etc. When there were "chemical incidents" in Syria, no one in Washington claimed the need for more facts, uncertainty etc.

Instead, UAE initially denied that it happened at all, subsequently, together with KSA, they did not have any "certain knowledge". Somehow no government appears to promote the incident. Even USA.

BTW, the allegation that Iran is placing missiles on fishing boats staggers the mind. First of all, "missile boats" of which Iran has plenty are small ships, BUT NOT VERY small, ca. 500-800 tons, which are fast, 40 kt, but not as fast as their predecessors, torpedo boats (200-300 tons, 50-60 kt). They are still faster than any of the larger naval vessels, can trail them, and attack from small distance in the case of start of hostilities. That Iran places missiles on such boats can be learned from videos proudly provided by PressTV.ir.

Using "fishing boats" for that purpose is dubious, and the largest question mark would be: WHY? The reason that missile boats are larger and heavier than torpedo boats is that you need more stability to launch missiles than torpedoes. Then you need a radar etc. Placing missiles on fishing boats would be a waste of missiles. Hardly an escalation.

OlyaPola , May 23, 2019 at 12:47

"Hardly an escalation."

Perhaps you are being deflected by framing?

One of the escalations is the escalation of belief in, requirement of, and resort to, the dumbed-downess of the "target audience".

One of the salient questions being deflected is why, and as ever investigation requires some knowledge of Mr. Heisenberg and his principles.

mark , May 23, 2019 at 22:34

Perhaps the Iranians are putting missiles on fishing boats to stun the fish and catch them that way. Fishing boats aren't exactly very fast.

Thomas , May 23, 2019 at 12:21

Anyone who actually believes the oil tanker incidents were carried by Iran should seek an immediate consultation with their doctor. These blatant false flags clearly are the work of fools and Iranians are not fools.

Brian , May 23, 2019 at 17:22

Exactly. According navel personnel, Iran has been using fishing boats to transfer rockets from land to it's vessels for years, supposedly because the gulf is too shallow. I don't have hydrographic maps of the area, anyone know if this is true?

Piotr Berman , May 23, 2019 at 23:33

Clearly, Persian Gulf has routes for the largest ships on Earth, but the supply bases for missiles may be away from ports, and it would make sense to place them so they are not easily accessible to a big ship navy, and in general, to disperse them.

Tim , May 26, 2019 at 06:43

"Thomas"

> These blatant false flags clearly are the work of fools

Since neither you nor I know who did it, and there are a whole slew of plausible suspects, we don't know why they did it, either. So it is silly to claim they are fools.

Since the Saudis and UAE are in the midst of waging war on Yemen, the most obvious suspects are their enemies there, al-Ansara.

(And by the way, contrary to what another commentator claimed, it was not a "few dents", but a gaping hole in the hull just below the waterline. And since the local authorities spoke of an impact by an unidentified object, these were presumably torpedo strikes.)

OlyaPola , May 26, 2019 at 07:58

"What possible advantage could accrue to Iran from putting a few dents in the ships?"

Quite a few including but not limited to further data on the opponents' perception of what constitutes plausible belief for the opponents' target audience, and the opponents' increasing resort to, amplitude, scope and velocity of "misrepresentations".

As is the case with the benefits of dumbing down not accruing solely to those actively engaged in dumbing down, the benefits of creation and implementation of "false flags" do not accrue solely to those engaged in "false flags", and are enhanced when the creators and implementers of "false flags" are immersed in amalga of projection and notions of sole/prime agency, facilitating potential benefits to many others not restricted to Iran.

[May 27, 2019] Neofascists as a variety of True Believers

May 27, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

CitizenOne , May 23, 2019 at 23:42

John Bolton is a True Believer. The True Believer mindset is manifest in terrorist acts. True Believers have signed onto the ideology that dictates that True Believers must act in any way to oppose their perceived enemy. War is not a last option for the True Believer. Terrorist attacks are not beyond the possible actions of the True Believer. The True Believer has one goal which is to defeat the perceived enemy at all costs and which will use all means to do so including violent attacks on innocent persons.

Terrorists are usually members of organizations that have a True Believer mentality and can rationalize unspeakable acts of terror in order to wipe out innocents if that will further their cause.

What is the advantage of enlisting True Believers and how do they further the causes of their affiliated organizations? That is the same question that we ask about terrorist organizations that imagine and create violent acts in order to fulfill the plans of the terrorist organization.

What is the motivation of a terrorist to strap on an explosive vest and wander into a crowd of innocent people and detonate their explosives? Why are they willing to commit suicide in order to kill a whole bunch of people that they have no quarrel with?

The answer is that they are True Believers in their cause and will do anything to advance the agenda of their affiliated organizations including murder.

The problem we face today is the ideological domination of opposing forces which will absolutely send Kamikaze's to their death in order to win.

It works both ways. The US is determined to wipe out opposition to its interests even if that means that warships will rain down explosives on anyone they remotely suspect is an enemy of the ideology of the West. We are willing to go to war with our perceived enemies even if it means that millions of innocents will be killed in the process of defeating our ideologically opposed enemies.

On the other side the ideological goals of the countries we attack is also aligned to commit mass atrocities and use of illegal weapons in order to win their bid to destroy the United States or its allies notably Israel.

There are True Believers on each side that are willing to inflict mass casualties on the other in order to preserve their ideology.

Iran is surely guilty of vowing the destruction of Israel and the US is also guilty of vowing the destruction of Iran. Each ideology depends on True Believers to take the stakes to the ultimate goal of annihilation of the enemy.

We have a choice in this. We can decide whether or not the differences in ideology are worth war.

The big issue we face is whether or not we trust those opposed to our policies and actions will try diplomacy despite historical diplomatic failures on both sides leading to the clash of ideologies and ending in a military solution. I say "we trust" because we are also on the line to trust the opposition with plenty of history which has shown that diplomacy doesn't work.

The even bigger issue is the geopolitical strategy of nations which seek to control huge natural resources like oil. This issue is at the top of every national agenda of oil states and is the reason we quarrel with oil rich nations that seek to place ideological political restrictions on the free flow of oil or depend on the money provided by the sale of the resources to advance an agenda which is opposed to the West. It is the reason that Iran seeks to dominate the politics of the region and intervene when we try to interfere with their economic output with sanctions based on ideological differences that end in official US sanctions which are the economic equivalent of warfare on Iran.

We see economic sanctions on Iran as the least violent way of dissuading them from carrying out their anti western agenda especially their anti Israel agenda which includes lots of funding for the True Believers (terrorists) who are willing to die for the "Cause" to destroy Israel.

The Iranians see sanctions as a an unwarranted threat to their economy and are even more determined to fund groups that try to defeat the Western policies that include support for Israel they see as an illegal foreign power occupying Muslim lands.

It is no surprise that the tensions in the Middle East have resulted in the rise of the True Believers on both sides based equally on economic and ideological differences. Each side is steeped in the belief that the survival of their culture and their economy is at stake. There can be little doubt that these differences amount to a potential powder keg.

Layered on top of the clash is the historical realization that compromise and diplomacy have failed in the past and that the failure of diplomacy has resulted in war. Neville Chamberlain's efforts to secure "peace within our time" by capitulating to German demands are seared on everyone who has a responsibility to prevent war. It was a huge mistake to believe that Hitler would abide by a piece of paper. Huge mistake is an understatement for the millions who lost their lives.

We need to use historical facts to guide future actions. Prevention of war via diplomacy has been thoroughly debunked by historical facts such as WWII. The belief of Western nations and their content that promises of aggressors promising peace would be honored has a historical and factual basis proving that the peaceful approach and the trust in aggressors to abide with peace plans leads to World War, death, destruction etc. WWII was certainly a formative event for the West which has since forged its disdain for diplomacy based on the history of world war.

Enter Donald Trump, President of the United States of America. A tragically flawed man who is just as tragically flawed as all of the rest of us as the leader of our nation. We are so tragically flawed in so many ways we cannot count them all. We wanted a president who was first and foremost a businessman. We wanted a populist president as we always do but we got a rich and privileged president who has done his level best to support the rich which is not exactly a populist notion by filling the swamp rather than draining it. We have a president that calls all the news "fake" but who also spends his time in conversations with the right wing media never assuming that right wing views of the news of the day might just be the real fake news. Fake news to him is talk from the left.

Where does all this end up? It is anybody's guess.

[May 27, 2019] The Pathology of John Bolton by Joe Lauria

In short Bolton is a neofascist.
Notable quotes:
"... Most diplomats, officials, and journalists were shocked that Bolton (evading confirmation with a recess appointment) had actually become the U.S. representative, given his long, public disdain for the UN ..."
"... It's been the strategy of Republican administrations to appoint the fiercest critic to head an agency or institution in order to weaken it, perhaps even fatally. ..."
"... Bolton possesses an abiding self-righteousness rooted in what seems a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness, mixed with deep personal failings hidden from public view. ..."
"... It is more than an ideology. It's fanaticism. Bolton believes America is exceptional and indispensible and superior to all other nations and isn't afraid to say so. ..."
"... Bolton's all too willing to make his bullying personal on behalf of the state. He implicitly threatened the children of José Bustani, who Vice President Dick Cheney wanted out of his job as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons because Bustani had gotten Iraq to agree to join the chemical weapons protocol, thereby making it harder for the U.S. to invade Iraq. ..."
"... We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views. If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn't support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it." ..."
"... Bolton is no fan of democracy if things don't go his way. He is a vociferous instigator of the so-far failed U.S. coup in Venezuela and of course Bolton organized the "Brooks Brothers riot" that disrupted the recounting of votes in Florida in the disputed 2000 presidential election ..."
"... This is a common ruling class tactic in the U.S. to portray disobedient leaders ripe for overthrow as Hitler. Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler. It is a false revival of U.S. glory from World War II to paint foreign adventures as moral crusades, rather than naked aggression in pursuit of profits and power. ..."
"... Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. He is unique only in the purity of this pathology. ..."
"... Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the six-nation deal that has seen Tehran curtail its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for relaxation of U.S. and international sanctions. ..."
"... Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, lacking the military firepower of the United States, have long tried to get the U.S. to fight its wars, and one no more important than against its common enemy. ..."
"... It is the typical provocation of a bully: threaten someone with a cruise missile and the moment they pick up a knife in self-defense you attack, conveniently leaving the initial threat out of the story. It then becomes: "Iran picked up a knife. We have to blow them away with cruise missiles." ..."
"... The New York Times that day reported : "Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing an unsuspecting Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States on a course to war before the president realizes it." ..."
"... Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's quite possible that Iran was behind" the attacks. ..."
"... But also last Sunday he told Fox News that the "military-industrial complex" is real and "they do like war" and they "went nuts" when he said he wanted to withdraw troops from Syria. Trump said he didn't want war with Iran, here possibly reflecting Israel's views. ..."
"... Joe, nice piece of work covering the psycho-pathology of America's leading nazi! ..."
"... To correct one of your statements: Trump DID NOT appoint him National Security Adviser, but Adelson and Mercer did. Trump is a brain-dead, blackmailed puppet who fancies himself as POTUS ..."
"... Everybody I know who is following the Washington Beltway histrionics of Trump et al know full-well that a certain intelligence agency of a small Middle East domiciled country have THE definitive dossier on Trump and have been building it for the last five decades. ..."
"... The Bolton-Pompeo-Pence presidency is destined to go down in history as one of infamy and treason. Trump? dead-man walking, more than likely by a stroke-heart attack when he's popping out one of his idiotic and manic tweets! ..."
"... John Bolton is a psychopath, He should be dismissed immediately, but I think that he should be institutionalized. ..."
"... Yeah Joe, it wasn't just you and other reporters who were stunned by Bolton's recess appt to the UN by W -- - many of us were staggered by the jaw-dropping inappropriateness of it, ..."
"... But, as you accurately mentioned, the Republicans had long-ago (I recall first hearing about it during Nixon's reign, with Earl Butz) used that gambit to effectively sabotage regulatory agencies & depts. Rather than try to dissolve an agency that most people want, they can neutralize it by appointing some hack or lobbyist for the entity being regulated so that nothing meaningful gets done, AND it has the 'beneficial' effect of discrediting the agency involved, and government in general, which is what many libertarian-inclined Republicans like. ..."
"... Israel doesnt want the US to attack Iran Well that is BS! Israel and its Fifth Column in the US have agitated for the US to attack Iran for years .we've all seen and heard it .and now they want to try to wipe our memories of their war mongering with their typical hasbara in the NYT and Netanyahu claiming .'oh we have nothing to do with it." ..."
"... Bolton is a psychopath but he is Sheldon Adelson's errand boy .who Bolton met with in Las Vegas the week before Trump appointed him and Adelson is the Orange carnival barker's 100 million dollar donor. ..."
"... Trump's incoherent mixture of neoconservative & isolationism almost make him a Bush! ..."
"... I assume Trump knows what a 'neocon' but is so indebted to Israel and intoxicated by Islamophobic rhetoric that he cannot free himself from his addiction to surrounding himself with more neo-cons ..."
"... The progression from Flynn to McMaster to Bolton was just selecting between neocon flavors for his National Security Advisers. What a joke of a nation! ..."
"... I appreciate the article, but it doesn't mention Israel, which is the fountainhead of the agenda to take out Iran, Iraq, and Syria. ..."
"... "Overall, 28 sitting senators have received sizable contributions from John Bolton PAC during the election cycle, as have nine representatives on the House defense, foreign affairs, and homeland security subcommittees." ..."
"... Don't forget who told Donald Trump to hire John Bolton. It was Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes. ..."
"... They like Bolton because he is "incapable of empathy and good on Israel." ..."
"... The NYT has indeed supported wars but it is not alone nor is this a recent trend. There is a very old trend of the commercial news establishments becoming war hawks and regurtitators of official propaganda whenever the USA wants to pick a fight. It goes back to the period after the establishment of the nation when expansionism set its roots down and what grew out of that is pretty much the same kind of nationalistic propaganda we see today. ..."
May 23, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Special to Consortium News 129 Comments

John Bolton has been saying for years he wants the Iranian government overthrown, and now he's made his move. But this time he may have gone too far, writes Joe Lauria.

I knew John Bolton and interacted with him on a nearly daily basis with my colleagues in the press corps at United Nations headquarters in New York when Bolton was the United States ambassador there from August 2005 to December 2006.

Most diplomats, officials, and journalists were shocked that Bolton (evading confirmation with a recess appointment) had actually become the U.S. representative, given his long, public disdain for the UN. But that turned out to be the point. It's been the strategy of Republican administrations to appoint the fiercest critic to head an agency or institution in order to weaken it, perhaps even fatally.

Bolton's most infamous quote about the UN followed him into the building. In 1994 he had said : "The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

But a more telling comment in that same 1994 conference was when he said that no matter what the UN decides the U.S. will do whatever it wants:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/VOINBs8eOdk?feature=oembed

Bolton sees such frank admissions as signs of strength, not alarm.

He is a humorless man, who at the UN at least, seemed to always think he was the smartest person in the room. He once gave a lecture in 2006 at the U.S. mission to UN correspondents, replete with a chalk board, on how nuclear enrichment worked. His aim, of course, was to convince us that Iran was close to a bomb, even though a 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate being prepared at the time said Tehran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

I thought I'd challenge him one day at the press stakeout outside the Security Council chamber, where Bolton often stopped to lecture journalists on what they should write. "If the United States and Britain had not overthrown a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 would the United States be today faced with a revolutionary government enriching uranium?' I asked him.

"That's an interesting question," he told me, "but for another time and another place." It was a time and a place, of course, that never came.

More Than an Ideology

Bolton possesses an abiding self-righteousness rooted in what seems a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness, mixed with deep personal failings hidden from public view.

He seemed perpetually angry and it wasn't clear whether it was over some personal or diplomatic feud. He seems to take personally nations standing up to America, binding his sense of personal power with that of the United States.

It is more than an ideology. It's fanaticism. Bolton believes America is exceptional and indispensible and superior to all other nations and isn't afraid to say so. He'd have been better off perhaps in the McKinley administration, before the days of PR-sugarcoating of imperial aggression. He's not your typical passive-aggressive government official. He's aggressive-aggressive.

And now Bolton is ordering 120,000 troops to get ready and an aircraft carrier to steam towards Iran.

Bolton's all too willing to make his bullying personal on behalf of the state. He implicitly threatened the children of José Bustani, who Vice President Dick Cheney wanted out of his job as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons because Bustani had gotten Iraq to agree to join the chemical weapons protocol, thereby making it harder for the U.S. to invade Iraq.

After Bolton's failed 2005 confirmation hearings, Tony Blinken, the then staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told The New Yorker 's Dexter Filkins:

"We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views. If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn't support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it."

Bolton is no fan of democracy if things don't go his way. He is a vociferous instigator of the so-far failed U.S. coup in Venezuela and of course Bolton organized the "Brooks Brothers riot" that disrupted the recounting of votes in Florida in the disputed 2000 presidential election.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/MbVtROU9J_E?feature=oembed

What is alarming about the above video is not so much that he justifies lying, but the example he gives: lying to cover up military plans like the invasion of Normandy. This is a common ruling class tactic in the U.S. to portray disobedient leaders ripe for overthrow as Hitler. Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler. It is a false revival of U.S. glory from World War II to paint foreign adventures as moral crusades, rather than naked aggression in pursuit of profits and power.

Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. He is unique only in the purity of this pathology.

Regime Change for Iran

The U.S. national security adviser has been saying for years he wants the Iranian government overthrown, and now he's made his move. But this time John Bolton may have flown too high.

He was chosen for his post by a president with limited understanding of international affairs -- if real estate is not involved -- and one who loves to be sucked up to. Trump is Bolton's perfect cover.

But hubris may have finally bested Bolton. He had never before maneuvered himself into such a position of power, though he'd left a trail of chaos at lower levels of government. Sitting opposite the Resolute desk on a daily basis has presented a chance to implement his plans.

At the top of that agenda has been Bolton's stated aim for years: to bomb and topple the Iranian government.

Thus Bolton was the driving force to get a carrier strike force sent to the Persian Gulf and, according to The New York Times, on May 14 , it was he who "ordered" a Pentagon plan to prepare 120,000 U.S. troops for the Gulf. These were to be deployed "if Iran attacked American forces or accelerated its work on nuclear weapons."

Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the six-nation deal that has seen Tehran curtail its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for relaxation of U.S. and international sanctions.

At the time of Bolton's appointment in April 2018, Tom Countryman, who had been undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, as had Bolton, predicted to The Intercept that if Iran resumed enrichment after the U.S. left the deal, it "would be the kind of excuse that a person like Bolton would look to to create a military provocation or direct attack on Iran."

In response to ever tightening sanctions, Iran said on May 5 (May 6 in Tehran) that it would indeed restart partial nuclear enrichment. On the same day, Bolton announced the carrier strike group was headed to the Gulf.

Bolton Faces Resistance

If this were a normally functioning White House, in which imperial moves are normally made, a president would order military action, and not a national security adviser.

"I don't think Trump is smart enough to realize what Bolton and [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo are doing to him,"

former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel told RT's Afshin Rattansi this week.

"They have manipulated him. When you get the national security adviser who claims that he ordered an aircraft carrier flotilla to go into the Persian Gulf, we've never seen that. In the days of Henry Kissinger, who really brought sway, he never ordered this, and if it was ordered it was done behind closed doors."

Bolton claimed he acted on intelligence that Iran was poised to attack U.S. interests close to Iran.

Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, lacking the military firepower of the United States, have long tried to get the U.S. to fight its wars, and one no more important than against its common enemy. An editorial on May 16 in the Saudi English-language news outlet, Arab News , called for a U.S. "surgical strike" on Iran. But The New York Times reported on the same day that though Israel was behind Bolton's "intelligence" about an Iranian threat, Israel does not want the U.S. to attack Iran causing a full-scale war.

The intelligence alleged Iran was fitting missiles on fishing boats in the Gulf. Imagine a government targeted by the most powerful military force in history wanting to defend itself in its own waters.

Bolton also said Iran was threatening Western interests in Iraq, which led eventually to non-essential U.S. diplomatic staff leaving Baghdad and Erbil.

It is the typical provocation of a bully: threaten someone with a cruise missile and the moment they pick up a knife in self-defense you attack, conveniently leaving the initial threat out of the story. It then becomes: "Iran picked up a knife. We have to blow them away with cruise missiles."

But this time the bully is being challenged. Federica Mogherini, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, resisted the U.S. on Iran when she met Pompeo in Brussels on May 13.

"It's always better to talk, rather than not to, and especially when tensions arise Mike Pompeo heard that very clearly today from us," said Mogherini. "We are living in a crucial, delicate moment where the most relevant attitude to take – the most responsible attitude to take – is and we believe should be, that of maximum restraint and avoiding any escalation on the military side."

The New York Times that day reported : "Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing an unsuspecting Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States on a course to war before the president realizes it."

Ghika: No new threat from Iran. (YouTube)

British Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika then said on May 14: "There has been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq or Syria." Ghika was rebuked by U.S. Central Command, whose spokesman said, "Recent comments from OIR's Deputy Commander run counter to the identified credible threats available to intelligence from U.S. and allies regarding Iranian-backed forces in the region."

A day later it was Trump himself, however, who was said to be resisting Bolton. On May 15 The Washington Post reported:

"President Trump is frustrated with some of his top advisers, who he thinks could rush the United States into a military confrontation with Iran and shatter his long-standing pledge to withdraw from costly foreign wars, according to several U.S. officials. Trump prefers a diplomatic approach to resolving tensions and wants to speak directly with Iran's leaders."

The Times reported the next day:

"President Trump has told his acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, that he does not want to go to war with Iran, according to several administration officials, in a message to his hawkish aides that an intensifying American pressure campaign against the clerical-led government in Tehran must not escalate into open conflict."

Then it was the Democrats who stood up to Bolton. On Tuesday Pompeo and Shanahan briefed senators and representatives behind closed doors on Capitol Hill regarding the administration's case for confronting Iran.

"Are they (Iran) reacting to us, or are we doing these things in reaction to them? That is a major question I have, that I still have," Sen. Angus King told reporters after the briefing. "What we view as defensive, they view as provocative. Or vice versa."

Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego told reporters after the briefing: "I believe there is a certain level of escalation of both sides that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The feedback loop tells us they're escalating for war, but they could just be escalating because we're escalating."

Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's quite possible that Iran was behind" the attacks.

Bolton was conspicuously absent from the closed-door briefing.

It's Up to Trump

Trump has pinballed all over the place on Iran. He called the Times and Post stories about him resisting Bolton "fake news."

"The Fake News Media is hurting our Country with its fraudulent and highly inaccurate coverage of Iran. It is scattershot, poorly sourced (made up), and DANGEROUS. At least Iran doesn't know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good thing!" Trump tweeted on May 17.

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

The Fake News Media is hurting our Country with its fraudulent and highly inaccurate coverage of Iran. It is scattershot, poorly sourced (made up), and DANGEROUS. At least Iran doesn't know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good thing!

77.7K 9:44 AM - May 17, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy
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Then he threatened what could be construed as genocide against Iran. "If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!" he tweeted on Sunday.

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!

239K 4:25 PM - May 19, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy
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But also last Sunday he told Fox News that the "military-industrial complex" is real and "they do like war" and they "went nuts" when he said he wanted to withdraw troops from Syria. Trump said he didn't want war with Iran, here possibly reflecting Israel's views.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/vc4vYWJfJnE?feature=oembed

On Monday he implied that the crisis has been drummed up to get Iran to negotiate.

"The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up a negotiation with Iran. This is a false report ."

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up a negotiation with Iran. This is a false report....

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John Bolton must be stopped before he gets his war. It is beyond troubling that the man we have to count on to do it is Donald Trump.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe .

Jym Allyn , May 26, 2019 at 19:27

Or as Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is US." As in the lies that created the Vietnam war and the waste of 58,000 American soldiers and thousand of Vietnamese. Or the lie that Iran is our enemy when we funded and encouraged Saddam to attack them and destroyed their attempt to have a secular government.

Or the lie of the WMD's and the 9/11 attack which was funded by Saudi Arabia, and run by Saudis and NOT Iraq.

Or the lies of Afghanistan which was economically and culturally better off when it was controlled by the USSR...

John Hawk , May 26, 2019 at 16:56

Joe, nice piece of work covering the psycho-pathology of America's leading nazi!

To correct one of your statements: Trump DID NOT appoint him National Security Adviser, but Adelson and Mercer did. Trump is a brain-dead, blackmailed puppet who fancies himself as POTUS.

It can't get any more delusional than this. Everybody I know who is following the Washington Beltway histrionics of Trump et al know full-well that a certain intelligence agency of a small Middle East domiciled country have THE definitive dossier on Trump and have been building it for the last five decades.

After all, deception is their game and they use it liberally, like feeding their agenda to Bolton as 'intelligence' info of the highest order. The Bolton-Pompeo-Pence presidency is destined to go down in history as one of infamy and treason. Trump? dead-man walking, more than likely by a stroke-heart attack when he's popping out one of his idiotic and manic tweets!

Zhu , May 26, 2019 at 03:20

If Bolton were struck by lightning tomorrow morning, would anything change much? I doubt it. We Americans are as warlike as the ancient Assyrian. We've been slaughtering Indians, Koreans, SE Asians, Central Americans, and multiple Middle Eastern people for a looong time. It is flattering to blame this individual or th t country, but no. We, as a community, are all responsible to some degree. Even me, on the far side of the world.

Alex , May 25, 2019 at 21:50

Bolton's choosing destroyed IRAN but staying friends with Saudi Arabia it's so contradicting, and so obvious that he is influenced to behave this way is because Israelies influence. Saudy Kingdom using Bolton to get IRAN so Saudy will be only country promote Extreme version of Wahhabi Islam which is didn't existed In Islam's history.

So Bolton's obsession with destruction of Iran is ignorance as its best. September 11th suspects were most of them Saudy nationals, yet nobody wanted to talk about it, because there is irony that, George W Bush was and probably still doing business with Saudy. So how can you explain that to American people? No you can not.

Perhaps collectively hypnotism !

OlyaPola , May 26, 2019 at 02:58

" So how can you explain that to American people?"

Given that useful fools are useful, why would you want to?

" No you can not."

An illustration of the benefits of dumbing down do not accrue solely to those actively engaged in dumbing down, facilitating the minimising of blowback during implementation of strategies based on "How to drown a drowning man with the minimum of blowback", given that many believe that critical mass is a function of linear notions of 50% +1 and above; a further conflation of quantity with quality to which the opponents are prone.

William , May 25, 2019 at 19:06

John Bolton is a psychopath, He should be dismissed immediately, but I think that he should be institutionalized. Put him in a strait jacket and keep him in a padded cell. He poses a threat to millions of people.

Eddie S , May 25, 2019 at 11:26

Yeah Joe, it wasn't just you and other reporters who were stunned by Bolton's recess appt to the UN by W -- - many of us were staggered by the jaw-dropping inappropriateness of it, IF it was assessed from a pro-peace perspective.

But, as you accurately mentioned, the Republicans had long-ago (I recall first hearing about it during Nixon's reign, with Earl Butz) used that gambit to effectively sabotage regulatory agencies & depts. Rather than try to dissolve an agency that most people want, they can neutralize it by appointing some hack or lobbyist for the entity being regulated so that nothing meaningful gets done, AND it has the 'beneficial' effect of discrediting the agency involved, and government in general, which is what many libertarian-inclined Republicans like.

Good article about a reprehensible politician.

renfro , May 25, 2019 at 11:18

"But The New York Times reported on the same day that though Israel was behind Bolton's "intelligence" about an Iranian threat, Israel does not want the U.S. to attack Iran causing a full-scale war. "
________________________________

Israel doesnt want the US to attack Iran Well that is BS!
Israel and its Fifth Column in the US have agitated for the US to attack Iran for years .we've all seen and heard it .and now they want to try to wipe our memories of their war mongering with their typical hasbara in the NYT and Netanyahu claiming .'oh we have nothing to do with it."

Bolton is a psychopath but he is Sheldon Adelson's errand boy .who Bolton met with in Las Vegas the week before Trump appointed him and Adelson is the Orange carnival barker's 100 million dollar donor.

Seriously, how stupid do they think we are? If we attack Iran it will be for the Zionist and Saudis and we all know it.

Luther Bliss , May 25, 2019 at 10:57

Trump's incoherent mixture of neoconservative & isolationism almost make him a Bush!

Remember it wasn't until Bush JR's second term that he asked his father, "What's A Neocon?" to which Pappy Bush replied, "Israel."

I assume Trump knows what a 'neocon' but is so indebted to Israel and intoxicated by Islamophobic rhetoric that he cannot free himself from his addiction to surrounding himself with more neo-cons.

The progression from Flynn to McMaster to Bolton was just selecting between neocon flavors for his National Security Advisers. What a joke of a nation!

Mark , May 25, 2019 at 02:30

I appreciate the article, but it doesn't mention Israel, which is the fountainhead of the agenda to take out Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Bolton stands out for his extremity among extremists, but he's a means rather than the end. The agenda is something into which he bought, passionately by all indications, but which a paucity of other people created strictly to advance their own, tiny, exclusive clan, not for the benefit of the United States.

Hank , May 25, 2019 at 09:43

To think that this administration campaigned on a promise to restrict future wasteful and needless interventions and then hired this dinosaur of a warmonger makes my blood curl! Everyone with half a brain knows what Bolton's agenda is yet here he is leading the USA into a war at the behest of a foreign nation led by a felon and terrorist! The American people who want peace and their tax dollars invested into improving the USA have once again been stabbed in the back by a conniving administration. Will this cycle of non-democracy ever end? Until it does, future administrations will continue on just like previous ones- kowtowing to special interests, in particular the military/industrial mafia and the apartheid criminal state of Israel! All this massive business of holding "elections" in the USA, all the talk about "Russian collusion" and the REAL collusion is right there in front of us all- the US administration has once again COLLUDED to go back on a campaign promise and once again open the money trough for the military/industrialist pigs!

Mark , May 26, 2019 at 05:31

I get the idea, but it's necessary to look 'behind' back-stabbing, conniving, colluding administrations, and Bolton, and the military/industrial complex, and to bring Israel and some barely known U.S. history, at least back to World War I, explicitly to the fore for public scrutiny. That's a monumental task, to say the least, owing to American attention spans and the contrary interests of the powers that be.

Taras77 , May 24, 2019 at 20:24

Bolton has his own well funded PAC, from which he is free to "contribute" (bribe) sychophant congress individuals. What a situation for the fix for war.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/05/interests-pushing-for-hard-line-against-iran/

"Overall, 28 sitting senators have received sizable contributions from John Bolton PAC during the election cycle, as have nine representatives on the House defense, foreign affairs, and homeland security subcommittees."

ricardo2000 , May 24, 2019 at 17:29

By far the most productive, and most verifiable, way to eliminate weapons is at a negotiating table. The easiest way to start a war is with ignorant blather.

O Society , May 24, 2019 at 16:09

Don't forget who told Donald Trump to hire John Bolton. It was Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes.

They like Bolton because he is "incapable of empathy and good on Israel."

Trump initially declined on Bolton because "he doesn't like Bolton's moustache."

Kool Aid drinkers and idiots. We're being lead by a cult of morons who worship the bombs, money, and a white separatist state.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html?gtm=bottom

Truth First , May 24, 2019 at 11:40

They don't call him, 'Bonkers' Bolton for nothin'.

Pedro Masculino Ghirotti , May 24, 2019 at 10:53

Nice piece Joe, but you just forgot to mention who Bolton actually works for, the Israelis.

JOHN CHUCKMAN , May 24, 2019 at 07:11

"Pathology." That's exactly the right word. But I think it has a wider application. See:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/john-chuckman-comment-why-trump-doesnt-rein-in-bolton-dismal-bolton-pompeo-and-abrams-are-part-of-the-price-trump-paid-for-political-support-against-threats-he-felt-and-getting-a-big-pile-of-ca/

old geezer , May 26, 2019 at 13:08

an accurate, concise review.

i doubt the iranians will test a nuke until after djt is out of office. after that you might wake up one morning and everything you knew before becomes quite obsolete.

my guess is israel has stealth cruise missiles with h bombs. it would be very foolish of them to not have them. those descendants of egyptian slaves are anything but foolish.

Sam , May 27, 2019 at 00:33

@ CitizenOne: Thank you for your long comment. I agree with much of what you wrote, but would like to know why you claimed, "Iran is surely guilty of vowing the destruction of Israel " . According to what I've read, Iran has not initiated hostilities with any nation for over a century – a clear, peaceful contrast to the rogue states of Israel & the U.S. Are you referring to the long-ago-debunked claim that Iran claimed to 'wipe Israel off the map'?
(See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/14/post155 ? "So there we have it. Starting with Juan Cole, and going via the New York Times' experts through MEMRI to the BBC's monitors, the consensus is that Ahmadinejad did not talk about any maps. He was, as I insisted in my original piece, offering a vague wish for the future.

"A very last point. The fact that he compared his desired option – the elimination of "the regime occupying Jerusalem" – with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran makes it crystal clear that he is talking about regime change, not the end of Israel. ")

Or perhaps you're referring to Revolutionary Guard deputy leader Hossein Salami's warning that if Israel starts an aggressive war against Iran, it 'will end with {Israel's} elimination from the global political map'? IMHO, warning an extremely aggressive, self-obsessed, Apartheid-practicing rogue state against trying to attack your nation is wise ;-) .

I look forward to your response. Thanks very much.

Sam F , May 27, 2019 at 06:12

Sam: please use an identifier initial as I do, to prevent confusion.
I have asked you twice before; perhaps not the same person.
It is unfair to expect others to make the clarification, and easy to prevent.

O Society , May 23, 2019 at 21:15

Neoconservative war pigs riding the bomb and the belligerence of Empire

http://opensociet.org/2019/05/23/the-belligerence-of-empire/

mike k , May 23, 2019 at 18:55

How is it that crazies like Bolton can end up high in our government hierarchy? It is because the whole damned government is crazy through and through

Joe , May 23, 2019 at 20:48

His Dad probably made a huge donation to Yale just like Bush's Dad. That's what happens when the system is gamed.

Art Thomas , May 25, 2019 at 09:22

Yes, in my opinion. The state stripped of patriotic rhetoric and other obfuscations that keep us devoted to it is nothing more than a criminal gang that hides behind the law.

Some basic examples. 1. The law: taxation, the crime: theft. 2. The law: monetary credit expansion, i.e. debt financing, the crime: counterfeiting, i.e. creating money out of thin air. 3. The invasion of countries not a threat to the invading state. Etc. etc.

Tiu , May 23, 2019 at 18:30

If the US "political establishment" was working for America's benefit, things would look very different.
They are instead working on the "globalist" agenda, which will, if successful, destroy all nations as we know them today and what remains will be ruled over by a bunch of sociopaths who are the same group that has inflicted John Bolton on the world.
Bolton's a tool, a bit like a hammer, to get their project done. The Democrats have equivalent tools e.g. H R Clinton.

Mark Thomason , May 23, 2019 at 18:04

The problem is if he hasn't gone too far. If he gets his war.

Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:53

John Bolton should get to ride the missile in the remake of Dr. Strangelove.

evelync , May 23, 2019 at 19:53

hah hah hah

I loved that movie :)

and yes Bolton is a perfect caricature of Slim Pickens AKA Dr Strangelove.

I also refer to him as Yosemite Sam

one difference for our current real life war monger is that the movie character was simply insane and didn't justify his craziness with explanations.

Bolton, OTOH, blames "national Security" and "the national interests" of this country .say what????

if we look at the horrific human costs and the enormous financial costs of the wars that were fought for U.S. "national interests" one would want to ask, once the rubble had cleared, what "interests" were actually served and whose "security" did they actually improve?
The answers always take us back to Eisenhower's MIC and Ray McGovern's MICIMATT (maybe I got a couple of these letters wrong?).
Whoever profited from the mayhem don't represent either our "national interest' or our "national security" IMO and yet those two phrases are used to shut down any discussion or criticism in the lead up .

whew

Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:20

Strictly about the movie – Slim Pickens plays the ranking officer on the B-52 (I think?) which is actually dropping the bomb. Dr Strangelove is a totally different character, one of a few played by Peter Sellers in that movie, and is a (mostly!) wheelchair-bound German scientist.

Jym Allyn , May 26, 2019 at 19:17

And the wheelchair bound psychopathic scientist of Dr. Strangelove was inspired by Kubrick meeting Henry Kissinger at a cocktail party and recognizing that Kissinger was the most evil person on this planet because he looked and sounded so responsible and rational.
Now that Saddam, bin Laden, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler are dead, Kissinger holds the record of the person still alive who has needlessly killed more people, both Americans and non-Americans, than any other person on this planet.
Hillary's idea of destabilizing Libya and creating a political vacuum there was from her training when working for Kissinger.

Abe , May 23, 2019 at 16:51

The Pathology:

John Bolton
Senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Chairman of Gatestone Institute (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Former board member of Project for the New American Century (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Former Adviser to Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/john-bolton/

Richard Goldberg – Aide to John Bolton at NSC (2019 – )
Former Senior Adviser at Foundation for Defense of Democracies (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/richard-goldberg/

Frederick Fleitz – Bolton's Former Chief of Staff at NSC (2018)
CEO of Center for Security Policy ( (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/frederick-fleitz/

Abe , May 23, 2019 at 19:32

The Pathology, Part Duh:

Mike Pompeo
Christian Zionist: "We will continue to fight these battles, it is a never ending struggle until the Rapture."
Associate of Center for Security Policy (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Sponsor of ACT! for America (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/mike-pompeo/

Sam , May 27, 2019 at 00:38

@ Abe: Thanks for the info!

Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:42

John Bolton is obviously a very sick puppy.
This is patently obvious to any observer with the least desgree of psyhological sophistication and insight.
If he lived on your block and made such statements about his neighbors, or a woman living nearby, he would be looking at restraining orders.
He is an out-of-control abusive pig who belongs in an institution where a course of shock therapy might actually help him. I reckon any basic psychological test would find that he has a least borderline personality and at worst is actually insane and incapable of taking responsibility for the consequences of his action.
Bolton has permanent termporary insanity.
Letting this tortured, psychopathic individual run the military is itself an enormous crime, one of murderous negligence, one for which Trump truly should and could be impeached. Congress must take all possible steps to get this man out of the Executive Branch.

Threaten Trump with impeachment if he doesn't fire Bolton.
His appointment of Bolton is reckless negligence and endangers this country.

James , May 23, 2019 at 19:09

I wonder how good American politicians of the past, if there were any, would react to the appointment of this psychopath as what he is now. Whom should be blamed for it? Donald Trump? The pro-Israeli lobbies? Or the American nation? A glance at the man's face is enough to realize that he is deeply sick. To me, he doesn't look like a human being at all! He looks like a monkey out of a stuffy room. Why don't psychotherapists do anything about him? Shouldn't he be hospitalized for the safety/security of the world population? By the way, I wonder where Netanyahu, the psychopath's provoker, is. He has been very quiet for about a month or so. Maybe he is waiting for the war to ignite without getting himself directly involved in it. Let Americans and Iranians kill one another while he waits to pick up the fruit in the end.

Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:27

Where does the blame lie? Who hired him? Who's the chief of the executive branch? Who's a person who could actually fire him (as he's so famous for doing on reality TV shows) instead of wringing his hands on friendly TV networks declaring he doesn't want to actually go to war, but if he's 'forced' to, he'll erase Iran from the map?

Druid , May 26, 2019 at 03:16

He would have to get permission from Adelson and the Mercers first.

CitizenOne , May 24, 2019 at 20:52

Bolton and Pompeo are the only things keeping him from impeachment. As long as Trump satisfies the bloodthirsty war mongers and the insatiable appetite of the MIC and the Pro Israel lobby and the Oil Lobby or Koch Industries he cannot lose. So far Trump is bangin on all cylinders. I really think he knows what he needs to do to survive. All this impeachment talk is just fantasy by the left dreaming about getting him out of office "somehow".

bjd , May 23, 2019 at 16:13

That the mono-maniacal psychopath Bolton is a walking exhibit of the Dunning–Kruger effect is no surprise to me. It is extra frightening though.

Realist , May 23, 2019 at 16:00

What was Bolton's day job before he started mucking around in politics and foreign policy? Master waterboarder or testicular electrificator in extraordinary renditions for the CIA? He seems the sort to have spent much time at Abu Ghraib, and not just to take notes. Honestly, his major goals seem to be the eradication of entire cultures and societies, which will somehow redound to the magnificence of the United States of America. Clearly a sociopathic personality. A lot in common with Cheney.

Jimmy G , May 23, 2019 at 15:57

Again the panic is stirred by .. The NYT! (The source of such good info regarding Russia gate) .
The statement regarding Bolton " ordering" anything is just one more example of the media and the intel bureaucrats trying to put the President in a jam politically . (Remember how a month ago we were invading Venezuela?)

Bolton is doing nothing more than getting enough rope to hang himself, and the military intelligence service, congressional and media Trumpophobes are willing to stir this to the very edge, and we all know Congress could (if it could act in good Constitutional faith, rather than pretending to be the judicial branch) unite for the good of this country and Trump would be amenable to whatever they came up with. Trump is far less of a warmonger than any POTUS we've had in a very long time.

Realist , May 23, 2019 at 16:18

If Congress is the only branch of government with the constitutional power to declare a war, surely it has the power to FORBID the executive branch from fomenting such a war against their judgement.

In fact, wasn't the Boland Amendment such a legislative act passed with the intent of preventing the Reagan administration from pursuing military action in Central America, most notably Nicaragua and El Salvador?

What's to prevent the Congress, if it were so inclined (which I doubt it is) to instruct the president (especially if he seems trigger-happy) to refrain from initiating any unprovoked attacks upon Iran, Venezuela, North Korea or any other country, for that matter?

Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:56

Ollie North worked for Reagan, didn't he?

RnM , May 25, 2019 at 17:27

Trump is very aware that 'Stache Bolton and Mike "Mumbles" Pompeo are significant threats to his re-election. Would not be surprised to see them removed before January.

CitizenOne , May 25, 2019 at 21:02

The NYT has indeed supported wars but it is not alone nor is this a recent trend. There is a very old trend of the commercial news establishments becoming war hawks and regurtitators of official propaganda whenever the USA wants to pick a fight. It goes back to the period after the establishment of the nation when expansionism set its roots down and what grew out of that is pretty much the same kind of nationalistic propaganda we see today.

I agree with your statement that Trump is far less vulnerable based on his history but I am sure that the war planners are always concocting special information diets that are carefully prepared to appeal to the particular tastes of the leader of the day. Whatever Trumps opinion is he will be surrounded by the hand picked lunatics of the day who will entice and enjoin him to agree with plans for war based on their carefully prepared menu of propaganda specifically designed to be appealing to the palate of whoever is in charge.

It is less certain that Trump's long history of opposing military action will have real staying power as he is served up courses of a sumptuous meal prepared specially for his palate designed to engage him in support for military action all over the World.

Trump is particularly susceptible to flattery and appeals to his greatness and his very stable genius. He wants to be the great leader and for that he needs a plan to deal with the geopolitical situation in many countries.

Trump is a man who knows what to do too.

He advised Germany that it was a puppet of Russia until he didn't
He advised Teresa May how to do Brexit the right way until he didn't
He announced to the World he had forged deep connections with North Korea until he didn't
He had high hopes for an alliance with Russia until he didn't.
He specified the right type of fire fighting to be used to fight the Notre Dame Cathedral fire until he didn't
He wanted to walk away from the fight in Syria until he didn't
He wanted to walk away from the war in Syria again until he didn't
He wanted to cut the military budget until he didn't

Ordinarily if we were in the middle of a democratic presidency the press would be raising the "flip flopper" argument every second of their available airtime.

Democrats are the flip floppers but never a republican even when he is. It all depends on the way the flips and the flops land. If they land on conservative positions then a flop or a flip never occurred. With republicans, flip flopping is just a corrective action to realign the president on the correct course. If it is a democrat then their hypocrisy and flip flopping are broadcast 24/7 and are portrayed a fundamentally disqualifying events which demonstrate a fundamental lack of principles and weakness of character deserving of condemnation. When errant republicans flip flop over to the "correct" vision they are welcomed with open arms into the fold.

Trump wants to be accepted so badly that the democrats hounding him are in fact herding him into the fold of the conservatives who will shelter him and support him at all costs and the media will never ever ever never call this flip flopping.

In short, if a political candidate shifts to the left his integrity will be destroyed as his character will be portrayed as weak and built on shifting sands. He will be deemed not to be trusted like some loose cannon.

On the other hand, if a political candidate shifts to the right he will be greeted as a prodigal son returning to the fold and will be welcomed with open arms.

So I am not as sure as you that Trump's background will be any indicator of his future ideas about how to succeed in the environment he is in where both democrats by their antagonism and republicans by their defense of him both push him over to the right.

He may once have been far less of a war hawk but politicians on both sides of the aisle are pushing him further to the right every day.

Consortium News editor Joe Lauria may wish to contribute a follow up series of articles detailing the purity of pro-Israel Lobby pathology exemplified by Bolton, Pompeo, and the beyond troubling Trump preferably before the next war.

Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 19:33

"the wider extent of pro-Israel Lobby pathology in the US government. "

That's it in a nutshell.

KiwiAntz , May 24, 2019 at 18:46

Thanks Joe for the great article. Bolton (aka the moustache) truly is a humourless, warmongering, depraved psycho? This is a cowardly man who dodged the Vietnam draft as he didn't want to die in some foreign patty field! But this lunatic has no qualms to send other peoples sons & daughters into a Iranian war zone as cannon fodder to satisfy his deluded & perverted bloodlust to destroy Iran? If "the moustache" wants a War with Iran he should be forced to fight on the frontlines with his troops along with POTUS Bonespurs Trump, another cowardly draft dodger? Let the moustache & the Dotard make a stand, like Jon Snow in the Battle of the bastards, sword in hand, facing down the so called Iranian, bogeyman enemy, but this would never happen as cowards & bastards like Bolton & Trump don't personally fight in the battles they start, they hide in safety in a Washington situation room, as far away from any War zone as possible! If Bolton gets his War with Iran, Trump will pay the price for this suicide mission because he would be blamed for the fallout of any Military defeat! America's already sorry record of Military humiliation & defeat in Regime change operations around the Globe would reach a crescendo if they ever dared to try to attack & overthrow Iran as it would be the endgame of the US Empire!

mark , May 23, 2019 at 22:28

Trump is just Israel's bitch.

incontinent reader , May 24, 2019 at 01:08

Good comment, Abe. We've missed you. Keep posting more of the same.

Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:37

We Americans were bloodthirsty long before Israel existed.

anon , May 25, 2019 at 06:35

What an absurd zionist troll post. Try it with someone dumb, Zhu.

Michael Steger , May 23, 2019 at 15:17

First Joe, McKinley did not implement American submission to British Imperialism, though it began with the end of Grant's administration as with the twice elected Groucher Cleveland, but it's confirmation as US policy began with Teddy Roosevelt. The Roosevelt Corollary destroyed JQA's Community of Principle in the Americas which should be known as the true Monroe Doctrine, contrary to popular opinion today which has incorrectly replaced the Monroe Doctrine with the Roosevelt Corollary (as Bolton is especially want to do). TR signalled the end of the Lincoln Era of American industrial development and global cooperation, which was best represented by Grant, the most overlooked of great Presidents (and perhaps we see similarities of Grant to Trump today). Bolton indeed is Captain Kangaroo, presiding over his Court as the Queen of No Hearts would in Alice's confrontation with British rule once she penetrates behind the facade of British Lockean empiricism. With insight only equalled to Lincoln's, who said "We can't fight two wars at once, so first the Confederacy and then the British," Trump has identified the fascist nexus within our government as that same British foe, a nexus led by Brennan, Rice, Clapper, Jarrett, et al, which works on behalf of what Eisenhower (another overlooked great President and General) called the Military Industrial Complex. The MIC is a British Intelligence deployment to fundamentally undermine our Constitution and put the US into a state of perpetual war and police surveillance. It is now over 70 years in the making, and is enforcing a new Cold War and attempted coup of our elected Government, and yet, it may have finally found its match, not just in Trump, but in Trump's intended cooperation with Putin of Russia and Xi of China. These three nations, along with Modi of India (just reelected) are a true threat to this rotten British system, from Fabian liberals to Bolton chickenhawks, the true enemy is this British System. If we move on that effectively, we may just have a chance to win this revolutionary moment now unfolding throughout the trans-Atlantic world. Let us return to JQA's community of principle for the entire world. Let us work with Trump to end this fascist British nexus. Let us celebrate our true heritage as Americans!

Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:51

Your comments read with interesting and well taken.
BUT: The bottom line is that Trump hired Bolton (and Pompeo) and has wound him up and set him loose goosewalking across the globe.
Why?
The buck for Bolton's suicidal buffonery stops with Trump.
So, I can't see him as a genuine foe of the Deep State-MIC as you describe.

Michael Steger , May 23, 2019 at 18:10

Bolton is loyal to Trump, even though he is a failed chickenhawk. Look at McMaster, at the leaking, and outright betrayal of the President. Same with Tillerson, betrayal. Pompeo and Bolton have ridiculous views and bloated war rhetoric, but they're personally loyal, perhaps opportunistically, and even temporarily, but nonetheless right now they are, and when they're not, I bet they're gone. But Trump does control the policy. Look at North Korea, any war? Media said there would be, then worked to undermine a deal. Venezuela, war? They're talking in Norway now, how'd that happen? Syria, troops out? MIC, Dems and Media opposed, and Trump called them out for the first time since Eisenhower! Pompeo to Sochi to see Putin, progress. How'd that happen? Trump is fighting the MIC and too many good Americans are spinning so fast from the propaganda machine they can't see straight.

anon4d2 , May 24, 2019 at 18:40

Interesting, but it is easy for a president to fight the MIC: simply fire and arrest anyone who acts against efforts to control them. He could send any federal enforcement agency, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, reserves, national guard, or even the Coast Guard, Secret Service, DC police, or private guards to arrest them and prosecute any resisters as traitors. It is not one man against the MIC.

And they cannot assassinate him once he has announced that intention, without exposing their hand and unleashing a generation of purges and strict controls. If he is surrounded by traitors, he has only to say that and fire the lot of them. He could leak that anonymously to Wikileaks or tweet it and they would be terrified.

Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:48

Bolton has been working DC bureaucracy like a pro for decades. He's using Trump like a marionette while he runs circles around the amateur. He was helping orchestrate foreign wars of choice back when Trump was still playing a pretend boss on TV. Bolton has no loyalty except as a facade for those he needs to suck up to.

Your examples of non-wars are terrific. Trump is amazing! – because he's running the government so badly that the State Dept doesn't know what the Pentagon is doing doesn't know and vice versa. He chose to ignore the Iran nuclear deal, which had prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons. So now, the Iranians declare (out of self defense) that they're now going to pursue nuclear weapons. Trump then says that he doesn't want to attack Iran, but they must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. This is a circular argument exactly of the type the MIC uses to engage in war. Pompeo then indicates that laughable, ineffectual attempts at sabotage are most likely Iranian. This grave threat to our nation can't even do enough damage to an oil tanker to make it take on water.

Just because someone fails to do something doesn't mean that they were against it the whole time. Maybe they're just awful at it. Sure, Trump says some things that are heartening to the anti-war and anti-interventionist crowd. But the next day he'll say something heartening to rabid neocons. He needs to grow a spine, but it's far too late. He's a dandy, a spoiled rich kid fop who's never had to answer for his mishaps, because why, when you have inherited money and a stout legal team?

anon4d2 , May 24, 2019 at 19:06

The idea that "the MIC is a British Intelligence deployment" is fantastical, as the US MIC is several times the size of UK's entire MIC, and such a secret could never be kept. The US MIC has engaged UK secret agencies to subvert the US Constitution by serving as agents to pass intercepted US communications back to the US to pretend that the MIC didn't do it, or that it was foreign intel. But that is a long way from UK controlling the US MIC.

There are certainly confluences of interests between the US and UK oligarchies, but I see no basis for the contention that "American submission to British Imperialism began with the end of Grant's administration" when the US prosecuted Britain for building the Alabama etc. to break the Union blockade, and was outraged that Britain considered recognition of the Confederacy until it lost at Gettysburg. The US under TR was not submitting to anyone when it sent the Great White Fleet on tour, or when it seized Cuba and the Philippines. Nor under Wilson when it stayed out of WWI until very late in the war, despite the Lusitania loss. Nor under FDR when it stayed out of WWII until attacked, despite the passionate pleas of Churchill.

Some detailed argument with credible references would be needed to support those assertions.

Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:44

Scapegoating is real popular with lefties & rughties alike. American Exceptionalism forbids we ever accept respobility for what we've done.

Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:45

No, the rest of humanity is not any better.

anon4d2 , May 25, 2019 at 06:48

The commenter was searching for causes, and some UK conspiracy is simply too far from any available evidence. In fact it much appears to be a wild attempt to distract from the obvious causes including zionism, which you pretend is "scapegoating." No, zionism is a principle corrupting factor in US politics, especially foreign policy.

If you don't see that, you must start learning the evidence, rather than relying on the presumption that it is mere scapegoating. Otherwise you are serving their wrongful and racist tribal purposes, and others will presume that you know that.

Oscar Shank , May 26, 2019 at 07:24

Zhu knows it.

Vera Gottlieb , May 23, 2019 at 14:56

How much more peaceful the life on our entire planet would be if the Americans weren't around.

Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:58

Extend that to all humans, and the head of PETA would support the project.

David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 17:16

I doubt that. Nature hates a void.

Bethany , May 24, 2019 at 17:50

Exactly. Very well put.

Abe , May 23, 2019 at 14:19

Brazilian diplomat Jose Bustani, the first director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), only served about one year of his second term.

Bustani was forced out by the U.S. government in April 2002 because he wanted international chemical weapons monitors inside Iraq and thus was seen as impeding the US push for war against Iraq. The US accused Bustani of "advocacy of inappropriate roles for the OPCW".

Since 2011, the United Nations has stood by a US-Saudi-Israeli Axis financed and armed the mercenary terrorist forces attacked Syria. In addition to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, major support for terrorist mercenaries has provided via NATO-member state Turkey, as well as Jordan. Israel has launched repeated air attacks and provided direct support for terrorist forces in Syria.

From July 2010 to 2018, the Director-General of the OPCW was Turkish career diplomat Ahmet Uzumcu. Uzumcu served ambassador to Israel from 1999 to 2002, and as the Permanent Representative of Turkey to NATO between 2002 and 2004.

Turkey has been the primary channel for mercenary terrorist forces assaulting the Syrian state. The remaining terrorist forces in the Idlib Governorate continue to be supplied through Syria.

Since Uzumcu announced the creation of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria on 29 April 2014, not a single OPCW report has acknowledged these basic facts concerning the conflict in Syria.

Following a consensus recommendation by the OPCW Executive Council in October 2017. Spanish career diplomat Fernando Arias was appointed to replace Uzumcu as Director-General of the OPCW. Previously, Arias served as Ambassador of Spain to the Netherlands and the Permanent Representative of Spain to the OPCW. He also has served as Permanent Representative of Spain to the United Nations in New York.

Uzumcu, and now Bustani, obviously understand that the appropriate role of the OPCW is to provide propaganda support for "regime change" operations, and to say nothing contrary to the "narrative" endorsed by the US-Saudi-Israeli Axis.

David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 17:52

The OPCW has certainly disgraced themselves in Syria. What a sham.

Randal Marlin , May 23, 2019 at 13:48

John Bolton's questioner in the second clip should have made the distinction between deception used to lead the country into war, and deception used to pursue a war already constitutionally declared and already underway.
In the first case there is a violation of democratic principle. When the people are the ultimate sovereign, they need to be properly informed. They can agree to deception, like where and when D-Day will occur, during war; but not in the case of leading the people into war. Lying to Congress is always unacceptable, and those who do lie to Congress should be made to suffer serious penalties.

zhenry , May 24, 2019 at 02:13

I read a report that the aircraft carrier strike force and preparation of 120,000 US troops, to Persian Gulf was ordered sometime ago and that Bolton took advantage of that fact to make it look that 'Bolton ordered it'?

vinnieoh , May 24, 2019 at 10:54

What I'd read is that the carrier strike force and bomber detachment were previously scheduled: there had been a previous drawdown and this deployment represents a return to a level similar to the end of the Iraq war, and that does sound like Bolton/Pompeo opportunism. The 120,000 troops plan sounds like something Bolton prodded pentagon scribes to produce. How to interpret when Bolton says that then Trump denies it, and then a new troop deployment (1% of the previous) is announced/suggested/leaked? I see it as Trump taking his dogs out for a walk to snarl at the neighbors.

David G , May 23, 2019 at 13:07

"Thus Bolton was the driving force to get a carrier strike force sent to the Persian Gulf and, according to The New York Times, on May 14, it was he who 'ordered' a Pentagon plan to prepare 120,000 U.S. troops for the Gulf."

That the National Security Advisor, irrespective of whether the job is currently held by a lunatic like Bolton, may be giving such orders should in and of itself be a subject of serious inquiry by Congress and the media.

The National Security Advisor is, as the title states, merely an advisor – not confirmed by the Senate, and therefore not, in constitutional terms, an "officer of the United States" with the authority to carry out the policy of the government. Other than his assistant fetching him lunch, nobody in government should be following Bolton's orders at all while he holds this job.

But this is nothing new. I had the same concern, on an even larger scale, during the first Bush Jr. administration when Cheney was running around reshaping the government in his own warped image. Despite the Vice President's elected status, he has no executive power under the Constitution – no power at all, in fact, except when sitting as President of the Senate. There was a time when everyone knew that.

With all the perennial crowing we see about the greatness of the Constitution, and the mewling about how Trump is degrading it, it would be nice if Congress and the media could spare a moment to care about whether the people giving orders to the world's largest military and covert/intelligence apparatus are legally empowered to do so.

Ash , May 23, 2019 at 17:17

> That the National Security Advisor, irrespective of whether the job is currently held by a lunatic like Bolton,
> may be giving such orders should in and of itself be a subject of serious inquiry by Congress and the media.

It does kind of have an Alexander Haig flavor to it, doesn't it?

David G , May 23, 2019 at 22:08

When Bolton gets up and says "I'm in control here", I'm definitely finding a rock to hide under.

Zenobia van Dongen , May 23, 2019 at 13:06

The question that Joe Lauria asked of John Bolton, i.e. "If the United States and Britain had not overthrown a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953 would the United States be today faced with a revolutionary government enriching uranium?" seems to imply that Iran seeks revenge against the US for the CIA's 1953 coup d'état against prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq.
However the current leaders of Iran are not entitled to consider themselves the heirs of Mossadeq, nor are they morally justified in avenging him, since the CIA coup relied largely on support from the very same clerical establishment that now rules Iran. As a matter of fact in the 1950s and 60s Shia clerics in Iran were routinely considered CIA agents. Consequently the Iranian elite's pretense of carrying on Mossadeq's anti-imperialist struggle is profoundly hypocritical. I grant that the current reactionary clique that governs Iran defends Iran's sovereignty against US imperialism as Mossadeq did. But the underlying concept of the Iranian nation is profoundly different. The present régime has no respect for the principles of democracy and popular sovereignty that pervaded Iran's anti-imperialist struggle in the 1950s and was derived from the democratic ideals of the Persian constitutionalist revolution of 1909.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Constitutional_Revolution
Indeed, Iran has no hesitation in crushing underfoot the aspirations to independence of other nations. It ruthlessly conducts ethnic cleansing in Syria, commits assassinations in South America, and in general behaves with imperialist ruthlessness that is moreover unmitigated by any concern for human rights or international law.

vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 14:27

As to your last paragraph please provide proof for your allegations. As to your second paragraph you assume to know the meaning behind the question Mr. Lauria asked. Could it be possible (this I believe is more likely) that what Mr. Lauria meant or realizes that absent the '53 coup would there now be an Islamic theocracy ruling Iran?

Again making the disclaimer that I'm no expert on the region or Iran particularly I have followed many leads of reading and investigation to understand the ramifications of that seminal event (the '53 coup.) What I believe I've understood is that Iran prior to and until the '53 coup was on its own unique trajectory of reclaiming its sovereignty and rejecting its status as a (UK) colonial vassal. There seemed to be a somewhat fluid acceptance of the rising democratic movement of Mosaddeq et. al., a fading nod to the former royal house, and an acceptance of Shiite religiosity of some considerable social legitimacy.

So, three centers of power and influence working its unique way to an unique Iranian future.

With the US/UK engineered coup the imperialists destroyed the legitimate democratic evolution happening there. With the re-installation of the Shah Reza Pahlavi as the puppet ruler of the US, that traditional center of power and legitimacy was likewise forever delegitimized in the eyes of most Iranians. That sentiment was cemented with the creation of SAVAK by the US, UK, and Israel to be the iron fist of the Shah and his new imperial master.

That left only one center of power or authority which retained legitimacy in the eyes of Iranians – the Shiite theocrats, and that is why when Iranians kicked the US out it was the Islamic theocracy doing the booting. You are correct that there was at least one Shiite cleric (I've forgotten his name,) jealous and fearful of the rising influence of democratic governance, who is a known and recorded collaborator with the US/UK machinations of the coup. Without the help of the US/UK his part in the affair would probably have been inconsequential.

It is not Iran that is funding and establishing Islamic madrasses in Pakistan, India, China, Indonesia, Africa and elsewhere. It is the Wahhabist Sunnis and they preach intolerance and violent jihad. Furthermore, of the total global population of adherents of Islam, 75% are Sunni affiliated, and 25% are Shiite affiliated. Those percentages hold true in the immediate region of the ME as well. The repeated claims of Iranian desires of empire are a shibboleth emanating from KSA and UAE.

Nick , May 23, 2019 at 15:36

The leaders of the Islamic Revolution used Mossadegh's image to help get people on board against the Shah, The National Front was allowed to be a party again for a short time, and a Street in Tehran was renamed post-revolution for Mohammad Mossadegh. This was a cynical ploy by the Mullahs to get people on board with their revolution and make people believe that they were indeed the true heirs of Mossadegh and committed to democracy. It was all a sham. The National Front was made illegal again at some point in the 80s, and the street named for Mossadegh was renamed around the same time. These people are the heirs of the Shah whether they like it or not.

anon4d2 , May 23, 2019 at 16:59

Joe's question points out that, had the US not overthrown Mossadegh, there would have been a secular democratic government. That is true throughout the Mideast, where in the 1950s-70s the US supported radical Islamic movements that suppressed secular movements and overthrew secular governments, pretending that the USSR was moving in. There was no evidence of USSR interest there, as it was preoccupied with such factions in its central Asian republics, and apparently only some arms from the USSR in Egypt were ever found as "evidence."

Similar US actions have continued to date, almost 30 years after the collapse of the USSR, the US always supporting fanatics against moderates like Assad and Ghaddafi, and pretending to support "democracy."

Compare the US support of Saudi Arabia, a fanatical fundamentalist monarchy engaged in terrorism throughout the region, including against their only neighbor that defends minority rights, Syria. Again falsely claiming the need to protect oil supply, which it can buy anywhere without bombing anyone, like any other oil buyer. Again falsely claiming to support democracy which it overthrows everywhere at the pleasure of its own oligarchy, always to "protect Israel" or attack socialism, which is always to get political bribes.

There is no evidence of any "ethnic cleansing" by Iran in Syria or elsewhere. Where do you get that idea? Iran is majority Shiah, defending the majority Sunni population of Syria from Sunni fundamentalists. You certainly have no evidence that Iran "commits assassinations in South America" or opposes "aspirations to independence of other nations" and made that up to deceive others. Your comments on this site have been knowingly false.

zhenry , May 24, 2019 at 03:44

The above, re the current Iranian religious govt, very informative, thankyou.
Re Joe's article I cannot take seriously that Trump is against war and the Deep State.
If Trumps rhetoric during his electioneering, supporting the middle class (deeply deprived after the US corporations abandoned them for low paid Chinese labour) was in any way honest he would not have chosen the cabinet he did (and keeps on choosing).
Trump has not chosen one cabinet member that would support that supposed sympathy for the middle class.
Reporting that assumes Trump is fighting for moderation (against his own cabinet) and to establish policies in the direction of that sympathy, is without evidence, it seems to me, regardless of what he might suggest to Fox News.

Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 17:00

"The present régime has no respect for the principles of democracy and popular sovereignty that pervaded Iran's anti-imperialist struggle in the 1950s and was derived from the democratic ideals of the Persian constitutionalist revolution of 1909."
And the American government has equal respect for the Constitution.

David , May 23, 2019 at 12:56

Bolton didn't order a carrier group to the Persian Gulf. He doesn't have the authority. The carrier group left because of the deployment was already planned. Bolton does not have the power that has been ascribed to him. He is a grandiose clown who knows how to play the press. I don't think he will have his job six months from now.

David G , May 23, 2019 at 12:16

"At the time of Bolton's appointment in April 2018, Tom Countryman predicted to The Intercept that if Iran resumed enrichment after the U.S. left the deal, it 'would be the kind of excuse that a person like Bolton would look to to create a military provocation or direct attack on Iran.' In response to ever tightening sanctions, Iran said that it would indeed restart partial nuclear enrichment."

Two problems with this part of the article:

• The link in the main text here goes to an Intercept article about Bolton, but it has no mention of Tom Countryman, or even of Iran.

• It isn't accurate to say that Iran may now, or is saying it will, "resume" or "restart" nuclear enrichment, since it never ceased, nor did it ever commit to cease, such activity. The JCPOA merely imposed strict *limits* and monitoring on nuclear enrichment and stockpiling, some of which Iran is saying it will now depart from.

I also disagree with the imputation elsewhere in the article that Donald Trump has a good understanding of real estate. His disastrous, decades-long record in that business suggests otherwise. But I suppose some people will always believe what they see on TV.

lou e , May 23, 2019 at 12:06

Creeping fascism works like fishing with a rod and reel. You hook the fish and it runs off 100 ft of line . You reel in 50 ft and the fish takes 30 feet back. Do the Math! Some times burning down the village IS the only way to get rid of the infestation. Bit hard on the USSA, but as Ben Franklin put it you have a democratic republic IF ypu can Keep It.

Herman , May 23, 2019 at 11:56

Remember at an earlier time with Bolton, someone described him as a kiss up kick down kind of guy, i.e., a real jerk. I defended Trump against Russiagate because it was a threat to the office of the president. Unless, he gets his head straight, his "political" moves in the Middle East and Southwest Asia can spin out of control. He is not negotiating a new deal with some city to build another hotel, and his rhetoric makes him sound like that is the way he thinks he should act with other countries.

One can defend him by saying maybe it will work, but then maybe not and it is not a matter of your target taking his papers and leaving the room.

Great article, Mr. Lauria. Have you posted your resume on your site? Interested in your confrontation with Bolton.

Trump wants to be reelected more that being the President but in his defense we know what he will face if he decides to enter into honest negotiations. He's going to have a heck of a time finding people to cover his back. He can count on one presidential aspirant, Tulsi Gabbard but she's on the other side.

Jeff Harrison , May 23, 2019 at 11:42

If we have to rely on Thump for anything other than social controls, we're screwed.

David G , May 23, 2019 at 11:40

These personal reminiscences of Bolton at the U.N. by Joe Lauria unfortunately only confirm the man's very public record. The fact that such a creature has been accepted for so long in the heart of U.S. foreign "policy" is yet more evidence that the country's crisis of political culture started long before Trump came on the scene.

I don't quite accept the slight comfort implied in the formulations here that this time Bolton has "gone too far", or "flown too high", since to me they imply that there is some moral or rational bedrock that he has struck beneath which the establishment is not willing to go.

I don't think that's true, as a general proposition. For example, the U.S. continues less noisily but inexorably on its long-term collision course with China, which will be even more catastrophic than war with Iran, not to mention the ultimate one with the planet's environmental limits.

For me it's enough that, for a number of contingent reasons, Bolton's (and MBS's and Netanyahu's) lunge at Iran has fallen flat with both U.S. and European policy and media elites – for now, and I hope forever.

jessika , May 23, 2019 at 11:26

I just called WH 202-456-1111 to tell President Trump that Bolton should be fired; had to wait 8 min to talk. Trump certainly has lots of problems, but he'll have plenty more if he starts a war! Pox Americana!

Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:58

Great idea.
I'll do the same.

vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 11:04

Thank you Mr. Lauria. I'm tending to believe that not only has Bolton flown too high, but Trump's predictable method of trying to get what he wants was completely miscalculated wrt Iran. There is no better treaty or deal to be had concerning keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. The failures of the JCPOA that Trump is probably griping about all have to do with matters of Iran's necessary and legitimate right to security and self-defense. No sane nation would willingly give in to this bullying. Thanks again.

vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 11:44

Also, wrt Trump's predictable patterns, note that little if anything has changed regarding the US and the DPRK, so if he is a crafty and effective negotiator I'm having a hard time seeing it.

David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 18:22

Good example Vinnieoh. NK and SK are reaching out and (more importantly) shoving out the US. More winning.

I love Trump. He is useful. Fascism, NAFTA, generic racism you name it, he really shines a light on issues.

Here again. (Currently) SA, GAZA, Israel, Syria and of course Iran. Hell, the entire region. What a train wreck he is.

What about the dollar? The EU? Yikes.

By gosh this man could single handedly take down an empire! MAGA!

O Society , May 23, 2019 at 10:47

Well done, Joe Lauria. Of course our dilemma is Donald Trump says one thing and contradicts himself 5 minutes later. You could say he "changes his mind" but I do not think his mind is stable to begin with. He's far too nuts to put any faith in for "doing the right thing,"

Bolton and his neoconservative pox on the world serve the interests of the war machine and fossil fuel corporations. When will be rid of them? When We the People grow a set of testicles and throw them all into prison. Trump isn't going to save us, but he might let Bolton get us all killed.

Time for the people to rise.

http://opensociet.org/2019/05/19/the-interlocking-crises-of-war-climate-chaos

Piotr Berman , May 23, 2019 at 11:31

Seems that Trump is so small minded that what we observe cannot be explained mechanistically, we need quantum mechanics. Rather that a particular state of mind we have a stochastic distribution, wave patterns and spin.

Marc R Hapke , May 23, 2019 at 14:34

Great analogy

O Society , May 23, 2019 at 12:39

The expert says what's going on in Trump's mind is solipsism and I agree with him:

https://opensociet.org/2018/07/07/assault-on-reality-solipsism-whats-wrong-with-donald-trump-part-1/

Sam F , May 23, 2019 at 13:12

Yes, Joe Lauria has presented the problem very well.

A major factor is certainly the persuasiveness of the NSC and other MIC entities which surround the president, and comprise much of official DC. Try persuading anyone in the MIC that war is ever inappropriate: they are all full of extreme scorn and false accusations, and have endless "evidence" of threats behind every tree, and rationales to attack this or at least that, just to make "statements" and "warnings" to invisible foreign monsters. The MIC is a completely and permanently logic-proof subculture of bullying, which bullies every member of its own tribe to line up behind tyrants like Bolton and a million other puerile bullies devoid of humanity.

No doubt you know that this was all well understood by the founders of the US, who restricted federal military powers to repelling invasions and knew that any standing military was a threat to democracy. The Federalist Papers should be required reading in the US. All of those understandings were gradually lost after the War of 1812 and the 1820s, as the founders died off. As the US became confident that it could repel any invasion, it lost the sense of the necessity of unity and cooperation of regions, and Congress degenerated into a battle of intransigent factions leading to the completely unnecessary Civil War. With the ebullient emergence of the middle class, no effort was made to correct the defects of the Constitution in failing to protect the institutions of democracy from the rising power of economic concentrations. With WWI and WWII, the power of oligarchy over mass media was consolidated, and by WWII the oligarchy and MIC effectively controlled elections, mass media, and the judiciary, the tools of democracy. Democracy has been a facade ever since.

The US has zero security problems that the MIC has not created, and could at any time re-purpose 80% of the MIC to developing infrastructure in the poorest nations with positive effects upon its security. Had it done so since WWII, we would have rescued the poorest half of humanity from poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, and disease, and would have had a true American Century. Instead we have killed over 20 million innocents and mortgaged the lives of our children to serve the infantile psychopaths of the MIC.

The solution is not only to eliminate the 2000-member NSC, cut the military by at least 80 percent, prohibit acts of war or surveillance by the executive branch, tax the rich so that no one has income above upper middle class, and demand amendments to the Constitution restricting funding of the mass media and elections to limited and registered individual donations. We also desperately need a fourth branch of federal government, which I am calling the College of Policy Debate, to conduct moderated textual debates of policy issues in all regions, protecting and representing every viewpoint, in which all views are challenged and must respond, and all parties must come to common terms. The CPD should produce commented debate summaries available to the public with mini-quizzes and discussion groups. Without that rational analysis and access to the core debates, we do not have a democracy at all, we are all no more than the fools and pawns of these oligarchy scammers, who must be actively excluded from all government capacities.

Sorry for the lecture.

Linda Wood , May 24, 2019 at 01:59

Please don't apologize, Sam F. Your brilliant and humane words give me hope at a time in which I am in shock at the blatancy of fascism in our government.

Doggrotter , May 23, 2019 at 10:33

Where is a drone strike when you need one?

OlyaPola , May 23, 2019 at 10:23

" seemed to always think he was the smartest person in the room."

Useful fools are often most useful when they are believers that they are not fools.

Once upon a time there was a discussion of which of the opponents' should be proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize – the list being relatively long.

After extensive analysis and discussion the short-list consisted of two opponents in alphabetical order Mr. John Bolton and Mr. Karl Rove.

However in light of the notion "Do you think your opponents are as stupid as you are? " the proposal question was left in abeyance, not only as a function of decorum but also through understanding that "Useful fools are often most useful when they are believers that they are not fools." and that even small dogs can seem tall when you are lying on your stomach.

OlyaPola , May 24, 2019 at 17:33

Since omniscience can't exist perhaps Mr. Bolton was/is subject to misrepresentation and misunderstanding?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l6vqPUM_FE&list=RDXIOSOlqMaj8&index=17

bobzz , May 23, 2019 at 10:12

"Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's quite possible that Iran was behind" the attacks."

What possible advantage could accrue to Iran from putting a few dents in the ships? Smells of another false flag.

Piotr Berman , May 23, 2019 at 11:46

I would not be so sure. A delicate signal that Iran has more capabilities concerning stopping in-out-Gulf traffic than naive people like Bolton realize has a sobering potential. By the way of contrast, what kind of black flag it is if it is instantly put in doubt, "we do not know" etc. When there were "chemical incidents" in Syria, no one in Washington claimed the need for more facts, uncertainty etc.

Instead, UAE initially denied that it happened at all, subsequently, together with KSA, they did not have any "certain knowledge". Somehow no government appears to promote the incident. Even USA.

BTW, the allegation that Iran is placing missiles on fishing boats staggers the mind. First of all, "missile boats" of which Iran has plenty are small ships, BUT NOT VERY small, ca. 500-800 tons, which are fast, 40 kt, but not as fast as their predecessors, torpedo boats (200-300 tons, 50-60 kt). They are still faster than any of the larger naval vessels, can trail them, and attack from small distance in the case of start of hostilities. That Iran places missiles on such boats can be learned from videos proudly provided by PressTV.ir.

Using "fishing boats" for that purpose is dubious, and the largest question mark would be: WHY? The reason that missile boats are larger and heavier than torpedo boats is that you need more stability to launch missiles than torpedoes. Then you need a radar etc. Placing missiles on fishing boats would be a waste of missiles. Hardly an escalation.

OlyaPola , May 23, 2019 at 12:47

"Hardly an escalation."

Perhaps you are being deflected by framing?

One of the escalations is the escalation of belief in, requirement of, and resort to, the dumbed-downess of the "target audience".

One of the salient questions being deflected is why, and as ever investigation requires some knowledge of Mr. Heisenberg and his principles.

mark , May 23, 2019 at 22:34

Perhaps the Iranians are putting missiles on fishing boats to stun the fish and catch them that way. Fishing boats aren't exactly very fast.

Thomas , May 23, 2019 at 12:21

Anyone who actually believes the oil tanker incidents were carried by Iran should seek an immediate consultation with their doctor. These blatant false flags clearly are the work of fools and Iranians are not fools.

Brian , May 23, 2019 at 17:22

Exactly. According navel personnel, Iran has been using fishing boats to transfer rockets from land to it's vessels for years, supposedly because the gulf is too shallow. I don't have hydrographic maps of the area, anyone know if this is true?

Piotr Berman , May 23, 2019 at 23:33

Clearly, Persian Gulf has routes for the largest ships on Earth, but the supply bases for missiles may be away from ports, and it would make sense to place them so they are not easily accessible to a big ship navy, and in general, to disperse them.

Tim , May 26, 2019 at 06:43

"Thomas"

> These blatant false flags clearly are the work of fools

Since neither you nor I know who did it, and there are a whole slew of plausible suspects, we don't know why they did it, either. So it is silly to claim they are fools.

Since the Saudis and UAE are in the midst of waging war on Yemen, the most obvious suspects are their enemies there, al-Ansara.

(And by the way, contrary to what another commentator claimed, it was not a "few dents", but a gaping hole in the hull just below the waterline. And since the local authorities spoke of an impact by an unidentified object, these were presumably torpedo strikes.)

OlyaPola , May 26, 2019 at 07:58

"What possible advantage could accrue to Iran from putting a few dents in the ships?"

Quite a few including but not limited to further data on the opponents' perception of what constitutes plausible belief for the opponents' target audience, and the opponents' increasing resort to, amplitude, scope and velocity of "misrepresentations".

As is the case with the benefits of dumbing down not accruing solely to those actively engaged in dumbing down, the benefits of creation and implementation of "false flags" do not accrue solely to those engaged in "false flags", and are enhanced when the creators and implementers of "false flags" are immersed in amalga of projection and notions of sole/prime agency, facilitating potential benefits to many others not restricted to Iran.

[May 26, 2019] Global Elites Started The Russia Nonsense by Thomas Farnan

Russiagate is definitely connected to military industrial complex. But it is also connect to the attempt of neoliberal elite to cements cracks in the neoliberal facade of the US global empire by using external scapegoat. British elite was traditionally Russophobic as they competed for influence with Russia and tried to prevent alliance of Germany and Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... The British aristocracy has a condescending view of the hoi polloi who voted for Brexit, regarding them as easily manipulated Pygmalion-like by smarter people. They assumed Vladimir Putin was somehow playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who voted to reject the EU, because that's how they see the world. Among the Cambridge class, this simple prejudice renders Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting evidence". ..."
"... Unconventional candidate Donald Trump " rattled Washington " to its core in March 2016 when he wondered about NATO's continued relevance and questioned America's foreign policy in Ukraine. ..."
"... That's when this "Putin's candidate" stuff started among both Republicans and Democrats " egged on by Ukrainians " who almost certainly fed Steele the fake kompromat " in the dossier. ..."
"... Russia may be a convenient boogeyman that serves as a necessary foil to both sides in the Washington establishment. But, for once, let's fight the real enemy: the global elites who started this nonsense. ..."
May 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Thomas Farnan via Human Events,

Attorney General William Barr has turned the attention of the Russia probe to its origin. Who started this and why? The answer, as in all the best crime dramas, is probably hiding in plain sight.

On August 11, 2018" I wrote :

The British aristocracy has a condescending view of the hoi polloi who voted for Brexit, regarding them as easily manipulated Pygmalion-like by smarter people. They assumed Vladimir Putin was somehow playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who voted to reject the EU, because that's how they see the world. Among the Cambridge class, this simple prejudice renders Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting evidence".

Without supporting evidence to prove their fantastical worldview, the global elite set out to manufacture some.

...

President Eisenhower " the furthest thing from a conspiracy theorist America has ever produced " famously warned in his farewell address to beware "the military industrial complex"

The great funding pipeline that makes Washington D.C. the wealthiest region in America feeds mostly on military spending which still, nearly thirty years removed from the Cold War, requires a Russian enemy.

Unconventional candidate Donald Trump " rattled Washington " to its core in March 2016 when he wondered about NATO's continued relevance and questioned America's foreign policy in Ukraine.

That's when this "Putin's candidate" stuff started among both Republicans and Democrats " egged on by Ukrainians " who almost certainly fed Steele the fake kompromat " in the dossier.

Russia may be a convenient boogeyman that serves as a necessary foil to both sides in the Washington establishment. But, for once, let's fight the real enemy: the global elites who started this nonsense.

novictim , 41 minutes ago link

Why all the fuss about Russia? Liberal elites – who tended to love the Soviet Union – hate present day Russia, which dares to assert nationality and culture against the pieties of the one-world-order crowd.

I can confirm. This is what American Leftist Operatives who travel to Russia to organize coops, etc have told me.

novictim , 50 minutes ago link

Also note that, while Russia is the designated Villain, the real threat since the 1980s onward has actually been the Chinese. But the up until now had managed to co-opt both Parties via the doctrine of constructive engagement and NeoLiberal Free Trade.

"Make China prosperous and the factory of the world and then it will adopt Republican Democracy!", they said.

Ya. Not so much.

Russia was the excuse to build the high tech fighters but no one dared to name China for fear of losing financial support coming from industries now dependent on the good graces of the Chinese Communist Party.

Thank your lucky stars that someone had the ability and ego to step in and expose this mess for what it was.

novictim , 57 minutes ago link

military - industrial - congressional complex (MICC)

Do not leave out the USA House and Senate. We know that many of these dirt bags are just as slimy as those in the Labour or Tory parties.

King Friday the 13th , 3 hours ago link

The word "hysteria" isn't used nearly enough in analyses like these. Hysteria is almost defined by the complete absence of thought or rationality, which characterizes the useful idiots who are the target of this propaganda.

mendigo , 4 hours ago link

Our government is too easily manipulated to serve narrow interest groups (with money) rather than the interest of the nation (as constuted) or of the people (who generally dont have money). Also the legal system does not seem to be serving the law - has dispensed with the concept of intent.

Those who strive to serve and benefit from interests of industry or foreign governments should be investigated and tried for treason (where warranted)

The Bushes and Cheney and Hitlary should be tried for war crimes.

Boing, Microsoft, Google should be broken up.

[May 24, 2019] Paul R. Grenier On Natasha Bertrand's McCarthyite Hit Piece

Despicable neocons like Natasha Bertrand are cowards and attack people only because then feel the power on MIC and intelligence agencies behind their backs
In normal circumstances and normal society she would be the history the next day. But politico is a slimy rag, so what to expect of them
Notable quotes:
"... Politico's "Mueller report reveals Kushner's contacts with a 'pro-Kremlin' campaign adviser" (Politico, April 29, 2019), is dishonest, destructive, and should never have appeared in print. ..."
"... The author of the piece, Natasha Bertrand, initially refers to Dimitri Simes, CEO of the Center for the National Interest, not as an American citizen, although of course he is and has been for many years, nor as a leading representative of realist foreign policy thinking in the United States, which would have also been true. ..."
"... Instead, she initially frames him (in every sense of the word 'frame') as "a Russian willing to assist" the Trump campaign. This word choice rings, and is intended to ring, the Pavlovian bells of the Russia-gate narrative. Aside from being dishonest, her word choice smacks of racism -- a habit, to be sure, which is now widespread, as long as the object of that racism is Russia. ..."
"... 'Maybe Simes is a traitor -- although there are those who think he may not be.' If you accuse some Mr. X of being a rapist, and then add another opinion saying, 'Gosh, I don't think he is a rapist,' what is the impact on the reader? ..."
May 22, 2019 | eastwestaccord.com

Politico's "Mueller report reveals Kushner's contacts with a 'pro-Kremlin' campaign adviser" (Politico, April 29, 2019), is dishonest, destructive, and should never have appeared in print.

The author of the piece, Natasha Bertrand, initially refers to Dimitri Simes, CEO of the Center for the National Interest, not as an American citizen, although of course he is and has been for many years, nor as a leading representative of realist foreign policy thinking in the United States, which would have also been true.

Instead, she initially frames him (in every sense of the word 'frame') as "a Russian willing to assist" the Trump campaign. This word choice rings, and is intended to ring, the Pavlovian bells of the Russia-gate narrative. Aside from being dishonest, her word choice smacks of racism -- a habit, to be sure, which is now widespread, as long as the object of that racism is Russia.

If Ms. Bertrand has regularly watched the program The Great Game (Bol'shaia igra), and understands it, and if she is familiar with Simes' writings and conferences and the publications that appear in The National Interest, then she has no excuse for writing this piece in the first place. The genre to which this piece belongs is clear.

It is called a hit piece.

Bertrand deploys, of course, a few fig leaves of pretend objectivity, which may have helped assuage her conscience, but that is all that these fig leaves can do. What we have here is a list of scurrilous attacks ("he [Simes] is completely pro-Kremlin and always has been"). These attacks are then countered by opinions to the contrary, but without any suggestion as to where the preponderance of evidence lies. There is insufficient detail.

And that is the whole point, isn't it? 'Maybe Simes is a traitor -- although there are those who think he may not be.' If you accuse some Mr. X of being a rapist, and then add another opinion saying, 'Gosh, I don't think he is a rapist,' what is the impact on the reader? In the present context, the impact is this: if you take into consideration a Russian perspective in any way, shape, or form, even for the purposes of avoiding war -- and this is precisely what Simes is constantly doing, and with considerable intelligence and courage -- then you are going to get a nasty hit piece written about you by the likes of Politico and Ms. Bertrand.

I regularly watch The Great Game, which Mr. Simes co-hosts on Channel 1 with Vyacheslav Nikonov, and I have seen how he not just once, but in virtually every single program defends US interests, and disagrees when Russian colleagues try to make a one-sided case against the U.S. Simes regularly invites Atlantic Council spokespersons, or their policy equivalent, to the program, and there they have the freedom to make their case in great detail and without interruption, and inevitably they make statements that are sharply critical of the Russian government and its policies. It is Mr. Simes who sees to it that these voices from the Atlantic Council are heard by the Russian side.

As a result, Simes is carrying out vitally important work of diplomacy that allows for a two-way communication between policy elites on both sides, and he very adeptly is doing so in a way that allows both sides to actually listen and hear what is being said. If he simply screamed politically correct slogans, it would either shut this channel of communications down or turn it into another pointless circus where no one really listens.

I find it baffling that Politico wants to undermine this virtually unique remaining channel of diplomacy. For the sake of what? Would Politico prefer that there be no conversation whatsoever between the US and Russia? Why? Isn't it obviously preferable that we make an effort to understand a potential adversary's perspective, particularly when that potential adversary is the other nuclear superpower? It is astonishing -- and foolish -- that no program anything like The Great Game can be found anywhere in US media. In the US, we hear only variations on our own perspective on our big news programs. Where do we allow voices from the other side to make their case?

Simes should be thanked for his work. Instead what he gets is this hit piece. It is not only disgusting and disheartening, it is frightening.

Paul R. Grenier is a co-founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. He worked for many years as a simultaneous interpreter for the U.S. Defense and State Departments, interpreting for Gen. Tommy Franks and serving as lead interpreter for US Central Command's peacekeeping exercises with post-Soviet states.

[May 24, 2019] Theresa May Cries As She Announces June 7 Resignation

Scripals's poisoning connected Prime Minister soon will be gone for good.
Novichok has lasting effects on British PM ;-) Now it will be much easier to investigate her role in spying on Trump, British government role in creation of Steele dossier, and in launching neo-McCarthyism campaign against Russia (aka Russiagate).
Notable quotes:
"... During her tumultuous tenure as PM, May survived two no-confidence votes. ..."
"... Crying May. What a Loser. Plus, she may have well co-conspired against Trump. ..."
May 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

May, the second - but certainly not the last - female prime minister in the UK, will abandon her supremely unpopular withdrawal agreement instead of trying to force it through the Commons for the fourth time. May's decision to call for a fourth vote on the withdrawal agreement, this time packaging it in a bill that could have opened to door to a second confirmatory referendum, was more than her fellow conservatives could tolerate. One of her top cabinet ministers resigned and Graham Brady, the leader of the Tory backbenchers, effectively forced May out by rounding up the votes for a rule change that would have allowed MPs to oust her.

During her tumultuous tenure as PM, May survived two no-confidence votes.

Though May will stay on as caretaker until a new leader can be chosen, the race to succeed May begins now...odds are that a 'Brexiteer' will fill the role. Whatever happens, the contest should take a few weeks, and afterwards May will be on her way back to Maidenhead.

"It is and will always remain a deep regret for me that I was not able to deliver Brexit...I was not able to reach a consensus...that job will now fall to my successor," May said.

Between now and May's resignation, May still has work to do: President Trump will travel to the UK for a state visit, while Europe will also celebrate the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

It's fitting that May touted the virtues of her moderate approach to governance during her resignation speech, considering that her attempts to chart a middle path through Brexit ended up alienating hard-core Brexiteers and remainers alike. Her fate was effectively sealed nearly two years ago, after she called for a general election that cost the Tories their majority in Parliament and emboldened Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

The pound's reaction was relatively muted, as May's decision to step down had been telegraphed well in advance.

CheapBastard , 18 minutes ago link

Crying May. What a Loser. Plus, she may have well co-conspired against Trump.

They should lock her up in the Tower.

keep the bastards honest , 39 minutes ago link

She didn't cry for syrians when she declared bombing Syria and using the firm her husband is involved in,. They made billion, and she didn't cry over her makeover afterwards new hair clothes and big jewels and cuddles with her husband in the media.

bluecollartrader , 45 minutes ago link

She and John Boehner should start a therapy group.

There's no crying in politics.

HRClinton , 27 minutes ago link

The plan was Merkel, May and Hillary.

That's a hell of a bullet we just dodged.

Riiiight. Instead, 10,000 Pentagram "Monitors" will be dodging bullets and bombs in the ME.

"(Bibi,) you'll be so tired of winning" - Candidate Trump

Why, you didn't think that he was talking about America's Main Street, did you? Sucker !

HRClinton , 16 minutes ago link

Many women in esteemed positions are just affirmative action or window dressing to placate the masses with supposed maternal love but they end up being wicked as heck.

Perhaps, but it's worse than that:

They are part of the Divide & Conquer strategy, while (((Global-lusts))) are plundering the Wealth Of Nations and taking over the real reigns of power.

Americants are easily distracted or fooled.

ps. "...wicked as heck." Wicked? Heck? What's up with the careful avoidance of "cuss words"? It's ok, you're safe... No "ladies or preachers" (bitches or scammers) nearby. And the Tylers or NSA won't rat you out.

[May 23, 2019] Guccifer 2.0 Was Not a Russian Creation by Larry C Johnson

Notable quotes:
"... The Word documents published in June 2016 by Guccifer 2 also show a "last saved as" user id written in Cyrillic. The Anglicized name is " Felix Edmundovich ", aka "Iron Felix" (the infamous director of an early Soviet spy agency). If you are a Russian cyber spy trying to conduct a covert operation, why do you sign your document with the name of one of the most infamous leaders of Russian intelligence? Robert Mueller wants you to believe that this was just Russian audacity. ..."
"... The phrase "personal beliefs about the competence or incompetence of the Russians" catches something important. Whether it was the Russians or somebody else that did this, whoever did it was pretty sloppy. What this report describes is almost as pathetic when considered a false flag operation as it is as a sabotage operation. So any theory of who stole and published the documents has to explain a capability to access the data combined with blissful obliviousness about handling them. I know of no reason to think the Russian, US, Israeli, or other intelligence communities incapable of such a combination. All of them have brilliant dedicated people but also seemingly endless supplies of mediocre time-servers. ..."
"... Scenario? Shutdown, closing of words with documents being automatically saved? Ok, otherwise there is apparently no precise saving time stamp on Winwords latest version. How much changed since 2016? ..."
"... The Vault7 leak of CIA tools also contained information on how to select any language environment. It's really a standard practice, even for normal criminals. ..."
May 23, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Russia did not hack the DNC. This is not an opinion. It is a conclusion that flows from one very specific claim made by the Special Counsel -- i.e., Guccifer 2.0 was a fictional identity created by Russian Military Intelligence, the GRU. If Guccifer was in fact a creation or creature of the GRU, then the forensic evidence should show that this entity was operating from Russia or under the direct control of the GRU. The forensic evidence shows something quite different -- the meta data in the Guccifer 2.0 documents were manipulated deliberately to plant Russian fignerprints. This was not an accident nor an oversight due to carelessness.

What is meta data? This is the information recorded when a document is created. This data includes things such as the date and time the document was created or modified. It tells you who created the document. It is like the Wizard of Oz, it is the information behind the curtain.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's is correct in stating that Guccifer 2.0 was a "fictious online persona. " He is wrong in attributing that action to Russian Military Intelligence. While Guccifer 2.0 was a "fictious" entity, the information recorded about when, how and who created the document show that deliberate choices were made to present the info as if it was created by someone Russian.

Let us first stipulate and agree that Russia and the United States engage in cyber espionage and covert action against each other. This has been the case since computers and the internet came into existence. Within the U.S. Intelligence Community these activities generally are labeled with the acronym, CNO -- Computer Network Operations. The Russians and the United States have cadres of cyber "warriors" who sit at computer terminals and engage in operations commonly known as hacking. Other countries, such as China, Iran and Ukraine do this as well.

CNOs are classified at the highest level in the United States and normally are handled within special restricted categories commonly known as SAPs (i.e, Special Access Programs). A critical element of these kinds of operations is to avoid leaving any fingerprints or clues that would enable the activity to be traced back to the United States. But this is not unique to the United States. All professional intelligence services around the world understand and practice this principle -- leave no evidence behind that proves you were there.

The case implicating Russia in the hack of the DNC and Clinton emails, including those of her campaign Manager, John Podesta, rests on suspect forensic computer evidence -- is present in the meta data in the documents posted on line by Guccifer 2.0. According to Disobedient Media , "the files that Guccifer 2.0 initially pushed to reporters contain Russian metadata, a Russian stylesheet entry and in some cases embedded Russian error messages."

Why would the Russians make such a mistake, especially in such a high stake operation (targeting a national election with covert action most certainly is a high stake operation). Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community want you to believe that the Russians are just sloppy and careless buffoons. Those ideologically opposed to the Russians readily embrace this nonsenses. But for those who actually have dealt with Russian civilian and military intelligence operatives and operations, the Russians are sophisticated and cautious.

But we do not have to rely on our personal beliefs about the competence or incompetence of the Russians. We simply need to look at the forensic evidence contained in the documents posted by Guccifer 2.0. We will take Robert Mueller and his investigators at their word:

An examination of those documents tells a very different story. While it does not reveal who or what was Guccifer 2.0, it does undermine Mueller's claim that it was the Russians who did these dastardly deeds.

One independent forensic computer investigator, who uses the name, "The Forensicator," examined the meta data in some of the documents posted by Guccifer 2.0 and discovered the following :

Guccifer 2.0 published a file on 13 September 2016 that was originally copied on 5 July 2016 at approximately 6:45 PM Eastern time. It was copied and appeared as the "NGP VAN" 7zip file.

The estimated speed of transfer was 23 MB/s. This means that this initial data transfer could have been done remotely over the Internet. Instead, it was likely done from a computer system that had direct access to the data. "By "direct access" we mean that the individual who was collecting the data either had physical access to the computer where the data was stored, or the data was copied over a local high-speed network (LAN)."

This initial copying activity was done on a system that used Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) settings and was likely initially copied to a computer running Linux, because the file last modified times all reflect the apparent time of the copy, which is a characteristic of the Linux 'cp' command (using default options).

On September 1, 2016, a subset of the initial large collection of DNC related content (the so-called NGP/VAN data), was transferred to working directories on a system running Windows. The .rar files included in the final 7zip file were built from those working directories.

The alleged Russian fingerprints appeared in the first document "leaked" by Guccifer 2.0-- 1.doc -- which was a report on Donald Trump . A forensic examination of the documents shows thatgiven the word processor program used to create the Donald Trump Document released by Guccifer 2.0, the author consciously and purposefully used formats that deliberately inserted "Russian fingerprints" into the document. In other words, the meta-data was purposely altered, and documents were pasted into a 'Russianified' word document with Russian language settings and style headings.

Here are the key facts:

The meta data shows that Slate_-_Domestic_-_USDA_-_2008-12-20.doc was the template for creating 1.doc , 2.doc and 3.doc . This template injected "Warren Flood" as the author value and "GSA" as the company value in those first three Word documents. This template also injected the title , the watermark and header/footer fields found in the final documents (with slight modifications).

The Word documents published in June 2016 by Guccifer 2 also show a "last saved as" user id written in Cyrillic. The Anglicized name is " Felix Edmundovich ", aka "Iron Felix" (the infamous director of an early Soviet spy agency). If you are a Russian cyber spy trying to conduct a covert operation, why do you sign your document with the name of one of the most infamous leaders of Russian intelligence? Robert Mueller wants you to believe that this was just Russian audacity.

But the meta data tells a different story. When we examine The Revision Session Identifiers aka 'RSID's, in the Guccifer document, we see the same Russian style-headings in 1.doc, 2.doc and 3.doc. The document creation timestamps on docs 1, 2 and 3 also are all identical.

Given that MS word assigns a new random 'RSID' with each save when an element is added or edited (this function allows one to track changes made to a Word document), the only way to obtain identical creation timestamps means that someone either directly edited the source document or that there was one empty document open and that individual documents were copy-pasted and saved-as (1.doc), then contents deleted and new doc pasted and saved-as (2.doc), etc. This process also explains identical style-sheet RSIDs .

joanna , 22 May 2019 at 08:54 AM

The document creation timestamps on docs 1, 2 and 3 also are all identical.

Curious, no doubt. But who of us did not consider Guccifer 2 curious. Put another way, what experts considered him solid proof for Russian involvement?

Are you suggesting Winword templates were used for the metadata?

As IT nitwit, how can I save three *doc files or their 2016 word equivalent at the same time? Any way to do that? Windows doesn't seem to have a solution to that.

Again: This is a nitwit user asking a question.

*******
I admittedly am not overly motivated to read the Mueller report. I'll read your contribution again to figure out what you may suggest in or between the lines.

fredw , 22 May 2019 at 09:26 AM
The phrase "personal beliefs about the competence or incompetence of the Russians" catches something important. Whether it was the Russians or somebody else that did this, whoever did it was pretty sloppy. What this report describes is almost as pathetic when considered a false flag operation as it is as a sabotage operation. So any theory of who stole and published the documents has to explain a capability to access the data combined with blissful obliviousness about handling them. I know of no reason to think the Russian, US, Israeli, or other intelligence communities incapable of such a combination. All of them have brilliant dedicated people but also seemingly endless supplies of mediocre time-servers.

Equally interesting is the fact that this analysis has come from such a private source. Surely all the major intelligence agencies have the skill to find the same indicators. And all have comparatively endless resources to apply to the analysis. But they all seem to not want to talk about it. For me the most suspicious thing about the handling of the theft was the FBI's near complete lack of interest in examining the server. I have always assumed that such indifference reflected that they already had all they needed in order to understand what happened. Maybe even watched the theft in real time. But this report demonstrates that you didn't need any special access to blow up the official story. (Note that the official story may be "true". It is just not proven by the cited evidence.)

Yet, whatever actually happened, nobody seems interested in challenging the narrative that Russians stole data and routed it through useful idiots to influence the 2016 elections. This report indicates that a persuasive challenge would not have been hard to produce.

Perhaps the false flag was intentionally clumsy, intended to be detected. Bait for a trap that no one wants to fall into. But I don't see where that thought leads.

joanna , 22 May 2019 at 09:58 AM
https://archive.fo/2dMfC#selection-683.213-687.434

This can be discovered by looking at things called 'rsid's or Revision Session Identifiers in Guccifer's document. In order to track changes, MS word assigns a new random 'rsid' with each save upon each element added or edited. The rsids for the Russian style-headings in 1.doc, 2.doc and 3.doc are all the same (styrsid11758497 in the raw source).

Moreover, the document creation timestamps on 1,2, and 3.docs are all identical too. This might imply there was one empty document open, with individual documents being copy-pasted and saved-as (1.doc), then contents deleted and new doc pasted and saved-as (2.doc), etc. This is the only way to go about obtaining identical creation timestamps short of direct editing of the source, and would also explain identical style-sheet RSIDs.

Scenario? Shutdown, closing of words with documents being automatically saved? Ok, otherwise there is apparently no precise saving time stamp on Winwords latest version. How much changed since 2016?

Empty doc open? What would that change?

But good to see that Winword now integrated some type of automatic saving option, didn't have it when I gave it up and shifted to Open Office. On the other hand, can I trust it to not confront me with an earlier revision version? I admittedly asked myself lately. In a 200 page file, mind you.

Karen Eliot , 22 May 2019 at 10:34 AM
As someone with a little bit of experience in that area I can assure you that language metadata artifacts are practically worthless for attribution. You would mention it in a report, but from it you can only conclude that

The Vault7 leak of CIA tools also contained information on how to select any language environment. It's really a standard practice, even for normal criminals.

Attribution is really hard and usually amounts to a lot of guessing who might be interested in the target of an attack, correlating information from other campaigns, and is only rarely based on hard evidence. Big state actors probably can do a little bit better when they have access to enough network taps. But in the end one bit looks like any other, and properties of static documents can always be forged and made to look real. Or simply buy a copy of MS Office in .

joanna said in reply to Karen Eliot... , 23 May 2019 at 09:51 AM
The document creation timestamps on docs 1, 2 and 3 also are all identical.

Ok doc creation times. Could one create a WinWord Macro? That does exactly that. ok, why would one do this? True. Minor detail, I know. But I see we have experts around now.

*******
More generally. Guccifer 2.0 was a bit of an odd occurrence, not least due to US intelligence considering Guccifer one or zero, if you like.

Fred , 23 May 2019 at 11:24 AM
fredw,

"..nobody seems interested in challenging the narrative that Russians..."

That's precisely what Larry has been doing for some time.

"Equally interesting is the fact that this analysis has come from such a private source."

How dare a private citizen challenge the narrative!

"Perhaps the false flag was intentionally clumsy..."

False flag, let's discuss that idea, brought up solely by you, and not discuss Larry's analysis.

[May 23, 2019] The language metadata artifacts are practically worthless for attribution

May 23, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Karen Eliot , 22 May 2019 at 10:34 AM

As someone with a little bit of experience in that area I can assure you that language metadata artifacts are practically worthless for attribution. You would mention it in a report, but from it you can only conclude that

The Vault7 leak of CIA tools also contained information on how to select any language environment. It's really a standard practice, even for normal criminals.

Attribution is really hard and usually amounts to a lot of guessing who might be interested in the target of an attack, correlating information from other campaigns, and is only rarely based on hard evidence.

Big state actors probably can do a little bit better when they have access to enough network taps. But in the end one bit looks like any other, and properties of static documents can always be forged and made to look real. Or simply buy a copy of MS Office.

[May 23, 2019] William "Bill" Binney, former NSA technical director on how NSA track you. From the SHA2017 conference in Netherlands

Important point is that NSA interesting in unlimited growth and money like any large bureaucracy. and this is like cancer for society.
Those data constitute perfect blackmail material for any politician. So that mean that intelligence agencies control the congress and the government.
An interesting question is: why with this massive data collection organized crime still exists.
Aug 08, 2017 | youtube.com

Agent76 , says: May 23, 2019 at 2:08 pm GMT

Aug 8, 2017 How NSA Tracks You (Bill Binney)

William "Bill" Binney, former NSA technical director on how NSA track you. From the SHA2017 conference in Netherlands.

How NSA Tracks You (Bill Binney) [improved audio] - YouTube

William Schutter 1 year ago

This design of bulk data management demonstrates that they are interested in acquiring leverage over politicians and everyone else rather than analysis to block terrorist acts. Could not be clearer.

Rick Geise 11 months ago

Our government is out of control, not only are they apparently collecting everything on each of us, "Most of these terror attacks are done by government guided terrorists, so the NSA is purposely choosing not to see the terror links until after the attack." -Joel Skousen, 2-09-2018 'World Affairs Brief'.

Soul Survivor 1 year ago

It is designed to be a blackmail tool, a LOOKBACK after they have something else on you. It is so massive to keep the employees busy doing nothing in a timely manner. It isn't meant to me a human run predictive tool, they want "machine learning" to be able to work it out. Bill Binney is brilliant.

Naseem Khan 1 year ago

Who better to expose them than Bill Binney, the man who designed the system and he is doing the right thing by exposing them. I used to think that Pentagon was the largest building but three times the size and collecting bulk that they cannot even use is foolish. I cannot accredit them for anything good out of this because there is nothing good except waste of taxpayers money. There was a time when anything this size would be outdated. They should strictly be asked to provide accountability but because they don't, there is no ceiling on their spending.

PAUL ROBINSON 1 year ago

I write what I write knowing they monitor things praying one day they get a clue. I hide nothing!! Before God as they say all seeing and all knowing we can hide nothing in dark or in the light!! Weather they think they are God or not!! They think before all this admission you can't see hear or feel there tactics!! I notice every thing that tries to interfere with my devices! Phone computers electronics ect. Let them play the game, let us use same technology against them and see how it plays out!! Lol sad that don't need to one lil old me vs how many of them with all technology at their fingertips!!! Wow impressive!! Difference between me and them is they wanna manipulate and rip people off n control them and I only wish to help others and not make slaves out of them. If I had the endless funds I would more than pay people what they are worth and help the less fortunate. I could show how everyone could live better, happier and healthier lives. They don't want this they fear it cause they want all power and control!!! Very very pathetic!! Read more Show less Reply 21 22 Loading... View all 10 replies View all 10 replies Hide replies

Remote Viewer 1 11 months ago

If Binney is accurate, then they are bright enough to use Artificial Intelligence to turn the data pile into real intel. Duh. So I think Mr. Binney is allowed to share disinformation. They are operating a fullt operational battlestar.

Doublevanoz 3 months ago

I worked in the same building about a year before Snowden was there. The facility in the movie(Hawaii) looked Hi-Tech in the movie... The place was a fuckin' dump! I laughed when I saw the movie.. you could of walked in there with 1OO thumbdrives in a bag..no metal detector or scanners Read more Show less Reply 1 2

Reclusus 5 months ago (edited)

If the US is doing this, than 100% sure the Chinese and Russians and Iranians even South Africans and Arab Nations do just the same. So having an NSA as a stasi is nothing new nor different from what other nations do. Sure it is illegal...but knowing and safely assuming more nation collect our data...I don't really worry less or more when owning a hard copy at NSA. And a back up hard copy on what they own of us all...can be handy...So sure file your law suit...but I would advise the judges to say that you are right, but that there is higher reasons for doing so thank you sir...but I am not convinced living with closed eyes against open eyes...is a weak position to stand on. So either they are all brought down...or we need a version of our own. I don't think...there is a choice sir.

And sure defame leading people in this field and stating they are as bad as Darth Vader...well...I think sir...you have a fast opinion with a limit on reaching to the true facts of what is happening in internet-land. I think I don't really need your opinion when it is based and outed as simple jokes on people that try and protect our Western World. And sure crime is using NSA information too and sure people are targetted. We can do something about that...but if it is wise to stall the NSA in protecting us in overall sense is not really smart. I think we just want more control over people using this information. So maybe we need this control, but just make sure it is used for good instead of evil. Well that isn't making our days different from before this new stasi rised.

Than comment you have on Iran...smuggling dope through various internation companies...lol...my dear sir they probably got the idea from the Americans using drug money profits to fund groups in the South Americas trying to bring down foreign governments. They are not any different from what the US agencies do. So kindof hypocritic hearing that from an American. Of course they would want a lid on collected data spread, and of course also the NSA holds infiltrants and people that would misuse power. So sure they keep it as much hidden and unknown. I think that is negatively explain-able as well as positivly.

An objective conclusion is to be made. So sure..file your law suit. I think you are just saying what freightened people wish to hear,..and gaining in on profits on it? And you think that is a nice commercial expertise? Or is this all done for free...I doubt that a seat there is free of charge sir. What are you funding with it?

Chaparral7040 1 year ago

NSA Whistleblower William Binney and CIA Whistleblower Ray McGovern at Manhattan Town Hall DNC/Podesta emails were not hacked by the Russians but were an 87 second download to a thumb drive by Seth Rich, who had issues because the DNC and Hillary had stolen the Nomination from Bernie Sanders. The DNC then had to have Seth Rich murdered to sell their "the Russians did it" diversion to keep everyone from looking at the content of the DNC and Podesta emails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=4nPCBeMJpKQ simflyr1957 4 months ago George Orwell in 1984 was a prophesy for today

W N 4 months ago

Americans and permanent residents, must realize that we live in a country that the government supposedly elected, created, funded, to serve and protect the rights of the citizens and civilians within our border, has become self-supporting and prioritized their own agendas of self promotion and self preservation. The government no longer represents us. Nor serve us. We now live under a modern fascist state.

Those at the top are no even elected or can held accountable by the people. Imminent Domain, Civil forfeiture, unconstitutional spying, suspicion and persecution, blackmail, threats, and even murder. All state sponsored, and complete immunity from lawful prosecution, and retribution. And unless we accept that we're partially to blame for letting them get away with this, we will never effectively bring about justice and change.

It will be status quo, and can only get worse for our posterity. Remember, if every person in this country were in solidarity in mass focused protest.....boycotting products, refusing to sustain their economy, didn't go to work and all called in sick, didn't file our taxes, refused to vote for anyone, flood their spying databases with keywords, and photos, and phrases, Took a hiatus simultaneously from being a part of their 'machine'....it would send a shockwave like a tsunami disrupting all their infrastructure, and if in unified cooperation across the world....that disruption would be global. Recall what India was able to do in nonviolent civil unrest. It drove the invading British empire out of their country.

Chris Turnblom 5 months ago

William Binney is an absolute hero! It's only through the courageous actions of people like him, that we will end the subversion of justice and the overwhelming corruption that has plagued this nation and the world for far too long. Even if all you are capable of is to engage people in conversations over the internet, it is still a very useful tool. Ridiculing people as "keyboard worriers" is a humiliation tactic. They know it works so they are trying many approaches to manage those who would change the world through logic and reason. I encourage everyone to do everything they can to contribute to the ongoing effort and accomplishing the enormous task of ending the era of rule by psychopaths. Donate money to organizations you think would be helpful, vote, attend public meetings and protests, boycott those companies that contribute to the corruption, there's many ways to get this done. Just use your head, every little bit helps. If the "q" thing is to be believed, we have them on the run now so it's time for everyone to pitch in and end this terrible chapter in our history.

Sarge 7000 5 months ago

How is he able to display Top Secret/OBCON/NOFORM/etc? Like he stares, all this material items are in effect today! Don’t worry about the courts-that why the have those Federal Judges, in every major city, that set behind the closed and sealed doors to stop all these suits against the Fed’s. One of the reasons that no one has taken in actions, on the companies involved in these illegal companies are the political problems in the Senate and the house. If a GI dies, so what, the political system looks to the military as founder, most could care less-unless there a camera near by. This the type of man is exactly the type we need to run these type of organization, vis the polices appointee’s!! This was a great lecture, we could use a few more in several federal level. Thank God for Americans like this. Read more Show less Reply 1

Benoit Vanhees 6 months ago (edited)

NSA tracks them, CIA wacks them :0) Maybe someone should start programs to delta overload their storage capacity so much, they'll need 25 Fort Meades and at least 800 000 employees. Read more Show less Reply 1

checkmate 1 year ago

That's great information, but a salmon couldn't swim up the stream you're fighting. Remember what happened to Frank Olson? He knew too much and "jumped" out of a window. The game is rigged, and you can't beat Them. The only way to survive is to not make waves, stay out of trouble, and under the radar, so to speak. Most of us are just small fish, who They wouldn't be very interested in. There are plenty of big fish to keep Them busy. I'm getting too old to waste my time fighting a battle fueled by an endless amount of money... money always wins. If you aren't a big-time drug dealer or a terrorist, they haven't got time to waste on you. It's fucked up... I know that, but it simply is what it is.

frank brown 5 months ago

Quote:- "Give certain people power and sooner or later they will use it".......that needs modifying to "Give certain people power and sooner or later they will ABUSE it". And therein lies the solution. We must be far more careful to whom we give power. Ask the prospective candidates for council seats in your area or for national governmental positions just what they are prepared to do FOR the people, and if you don't like the answer, don't vote them into power.

TEHCONIP .A 1 year ago

The Gestapo reference is spot on.. and I'm sure there's plenty of "It's for your protection" people to keep this thing chuggin along..

MR WHO CARES , 5 months ago

This man knows sooooooo much more, like to sit down off camera and man to man talk and I'll bet it would blow our minds the stuff our sneaky governments do without warrants or anything

They just take what they want and track your moves, listen in on your calls, watching your texts and FB ECT,,, all without our knowledge or consent, this is not constitutional and it's invading our rights along with our privacy rights my private life what and where and how I do everything

it's downright unconstitutional and should be taken to the highest court in the land and terminated

Case Dismissed Guaranteed, 4 months ago

Why didn't he point out that Israel spy's on Americans and America spy for them. No direct spying because THAT's "illegal."

big Cahuna3 months ago (edited)

Laws and jail are only for the poor and ""unconnected"". How else could the crime families, bankers, church, etc. keep their wealth and power ? The commoners and serfs must be divided, controlled , conquered, brainwashed, taxed, intimidated, imprisoned, overworked , and killed when beneficial to the kings, queens, bankers, Popes, and billionaires.

[May 23, 2019] Look at their prime creation of the new millennium: Barack Obama.

May 23, 2019 | www.unz.com

Olorin , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:53 pm GMT

@Sean McBride

How did John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Christopher Steele and other Spygate principals manage to rise to the top of the intelligence bureaucracy?

Because they serve those who dispense such power. That is their job.

And those whom they serve make sure that checky/balancey oversight–say in the form of chief executive of the United States of America, or an honest Congressman or journalist–is destroyed if it threatens not to align with those masters or even questions/reveals these individuals or these structures.

Look at how they've reacted to Donald Trump's trolling both before and while in office.

They make sure that "the intelligence bureaucracy" reifies that exclusionary principle in every hire, every action, every policy. Like many bureaucracies and institutions it becomes a factory for its own viral replication rather than anything that is traditionally considered "intelligence."

Look at their prime creation of the new millennium: Barack Obama.

[May 23, 2019] Recall Julian Assange's remarks to John Pilger, that Hillary was a cogwheel in a system of gears that includes Wall Street and foreign lobbyists as well as the intelligence agencies

May 23, 2019 | www.unz.com

Mitchell Porter , says: May 23, 2019 at 1:47 am GMT

I think one has to regard the spies (or "spies and scribes") as one locus of power out of several; a locus possessing enormous power, but not always possessing the decisive vote.

Recall Julian Assange's remarks to John Pilger, that Hillary was a cogwheel in a system of gears that includes Wall Street and foreign lobbyists as well as the intelligence agencies.

Anthropologists like Malinowski have described societies as an interaction between social institutions possessing complementary functions, and this still applies under unipolar digital globalism.

[May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war." ..."
"... From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever). ..."
"... Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing. ..."
"... Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help ..."
"... There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.) ..."
"... In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR existed. ..."
"... I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA) ..."
May 21, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The Great Power Game is On and China is Winning If America wants to maintain any influence in Asia, it needs to wake up. By Robert W. Merry • May 22, 2019

President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday, November 9, 2017, in Beijing, People's Republic of China. ( Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead) From across the pond come two geopolitical analyses in two top-quality British publications that lay out in stark terms the looming struggle between the United States and China. It isn't just a trade war, says The Economist in a major cover package. "Trade is not the half of it," declares the magazine. "The United States and China are contesting every domain, from semiconductors to submarines and from blockbuster films to lunar exploration." The days when the two superpowers sought a win-win world are gone.

For its own cover, The Financial Times ' Philip Stephens produced a piece entitled, "Trade is just an opening shot in a wider US-China conflict." The subhead: "The current standoff is part of a struggle for global pre-eminence." Writes Stephens: "The trade narrative is now being subsumed into a much more alarming one. Economics has merged with geopolitics. China, you can hear on almost every corner in sight of the White House and Congress, is not just a dangerous economic competitor but a looming existential threat."

Stephens quotes from the so-called National Defense Strategy, entitled "Sharpening the American Military's Competitive Edge," released last year by President Donald Trump's Pentagon. In the South China Sea, for example, says the strategic paper, "China has mounted a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there." The broader Chinese goal, warns the Pentagon, is "Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future."

The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war."

... ... ..

Russia: Of all the developments percolating in the world today, none is more ominous than the growing prospect of an anti-American alliance involving Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran. Yet such an alliance is in the works, largely as a result of America's inability to forge a foreign policy that recognizes the legitimate geopolitical interests of other nations. If the United States is to maintain its position in Asia, this trend must be reversed.

The key is Russia, largely by dint of its geopolitical position in the Eurasian heartland. If China's global rise is to be thwarted, it must be prevented from gaining dominance over Eurasia. Only Russia can do that. But Russia has no incentive to act because it feels threatened by the West. NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries.

Given the trends that are plainly discernible in the Far East, the West must normalize relations with Russia. That means providing assurances that NATO expansion is over for good. It means the West recognizing that Georgia, Belarus, and, yes, Ukraine are within Russia's natural zone of influence. They will never be invited into NATO, and any solution to the Ukraine conundrum will have to accommodate Russian interests. Further, the West must get over Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula. It is a fait accompli -- and one that any other nation, including America, would have executed in similar circumstances.

Would Russian President Vladimir Putin spurn these overtures and maintain a posture of bellicosity toward the West? We can't be sure, but that certainly wouldn't be in his interest. And how will we ever know when it's never been tried? We now understand that allegations of Trump's campaign colluding with Russia were meritless, so it's time to determine the true nature and extent of Putin's strategic aims. That's impossible so long as America maintains its sanctions and general bellicosity.

NATO: Trump was right during the 2016 presidential campaign when he said that NATO was obsolete. He later dialed back on that, but any neutral observer can see that the circumstances that spawned NATO as an imperative of Western survival no longer exist. The Soviet Union is gone, and the 1.3 million Russian and client state troops it placed on Western Europe's doorstep are gone as well.

So what kind of threat could Russia pose to Europe and the West? The European Union's GDP is more than 12 times that of Russia's, while Russia's per capita GDP is only a fourth of Europe's. The Russian population is 144.5 million to Europe's 512 million. Does anyone seriously think that Russia poses a serious threat to Europe or that Europe needs the American big brother for survival, as in the immediate postwar years? Of course not. This is just a ruse for the maintenance of the status quo -- Europe as subservient to America, the Russian bear as menacing grizzly, America as protective slayer in the event of an attack.

This is all ridiculous. NATO shouldn't be abolished. It should be reconfigured for the realities of today. It should be European-led, not American-led. It should pay for its own defense entirely, whatever that might be (and Europe's calculation of that will inform us as to its true assessment of the Russian threat). America should be its primary ally, but not committed to intervene whenever a tiny European nation feels threatened. NATO's Article 5, committing all alliance nations to the defense of any other when attacked, should be scrapped in favor of language that calls for U.S. intervention only in the event of a true threat to Western Civilization itself.

And while a European-led NATO would find it difficult to pull back from its forward eastern positions after adding so many nations in the post-Cold War era, it should extend assurances to Russia that it has no intention of acting provocatively -- absent, of course, any Russian provocations.

... ... ...

Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century .

likbez, May 22, 2019

Great article. Thank you very much!

Pragmatic isolationalism is a better deal then the current neocon foreign policy. Which Trump is pursuing with the zeal similar to Obama (who continued all Bush II wars and started two new in Libya and Syria.) Probably this partially can be explained by his dependence of Adelson and pro-Israeli lobby.

But the problem is deeper then Trump: it is the power of MIC and American exeptionalism ( which can be viewed as a form of far right nationalism ) about which Andrew Bacevich have written a lot:

From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C.

If doubts remained on that score, the end of the Cold War removed them. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, politicians, journalists, and policy intellectuals threw themselves headlong into a competition over who could explain best just how unprecedented, how complete, and how wondrous was the global preeminence of the United States.

Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever).

"If we have to use force," Secretary of State Albright announced on morning television in February 1998, "it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."

Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."

In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the several unsuccessful wars of choice that followed offer prime examples. But so too did Washington's belated and inadequate recognition of the developments that actually endanger the wellbeing of 21st-century Americans, namely climate change, cyber threats, and the ongoing reallocation of global power prompted by the rise of China. Rather than seeing far into the future, American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week. More often than not, they get even that wrong.

Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing.

Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help.

There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.)

In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR existed.

I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA)

[May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war." ..."
"... From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever). ..."
"... Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing. ..."
"... Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help ..."
"... There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.) ..."
"... In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR existed. ..."
"... I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA) ..."
May 21, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The Great Power Game is On and China is Winning If America wants to maintain any influence in Asia, it needs to wake up. By Robert W. Merry • May 22, 2019

President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday, November 9, 2017, in Beijing, People's Republic of China. ( Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead) From across the pond come two geopolitical analyses in two top-quality British publications that lay out in stark terms the looming struggle between the United States and China. It isn't just a trade war, says The Economist in a major cover package. "Trade is not the half of it," declares the magazine. "The United States and China are contesting every domain, from semiconductors to submarines and from blockbuster films to lunar exploration." The days when the two superpowers sought a win-win world are gone.

For its own cover, The Financial Times ' Philip Stephens produced a piece entitled, "Trade is just an opening shot in a wider US-China conflict." The subhead: "The current standoff is part of a struggle for global pre-eminence." Writes Stephens: "The trade narrative is now being subsumed into a much more alarming one. Economics has merged with geopolitics. China, you can hear on almost every corner in sight of the White House and Congress, is not just a dangerous economic competitor but a looming existential threat."

Stephens quotes from the so-called National Defense Strategy, entitled "Sharpening the American Military's Competitive Edge," released last year by President Donald Trump's Pentagon. In the South China Sea, for example, says the strategic paper, "China has mounted a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there." The broader Chinese goal, warns the Pentagon, is "Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future."

The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war."

... ... ..

Russia: Of all the developments percolating in the world today, none is more ominous than the growing prospect of an anti-American alliance involving Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran. Yet such an alliance is in the works, largely as a result of America's inability to forge a foreign policy that recognizes the legitimate geopolitical interests of other nations. If the United States is to maintain its position in Asia, this trend must be reversed.

The key is Russia, largely by dint of its geopolitical position in the Eurasian heartland. If China's global rise is to be thwarted, it must be prevented from gaining dominance over Eurasia. Only Russia can do that. But Russia has no incentive to act because it feels threatened by the West. NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries.

Given the trends that are plainly discernible in the Far East, the West must normalize relations with Russia. That means providing assurances that NATO expansion is over for good. It means the West recognizing that Georgia, Belarus, and, yes, Ukraine are within Russia's natural zone of influence. They will never be invited into NATO, and any solution to the Ukraine conundrum will have to accommodate Russian interests. Further, the West must get over Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula. It is a fait accompli -- and one that any other nation, including America, would have executed in similar circumstances.

Would Russian President Vladimir Putin spurn these overtures and maintain a posture of bellicosity toward the West? We can't be sure, but that certainly wouldn't be in his interest. And how will we ever know when it's never been tried? We now understand that allegations of Trump's campaign colluding with Russia were meritless, so it's time to determine the true nature and extent of Putin's strategic aims. That's impossible so long as America maintains its sanctions and general bellicosity.

NATO: Trump was right during the 2016 presidential campaign when he said that NATO was obsolete. He later dialed back on that, but any neutral observer can see that the circumstances that spawned NATO as an imperative of Western survival no longer exist. The Soviet Union is gone, and the 1.3 million Russian and client state troops it placed on Western Europe's doorstep are gone as well.

So what kind of threat could Russia pose to Europe and the West? The European Union's GDP is more than 12 times that of Russia's, while Russia's per capita GDP is only a fourth of Europe's. The Russian population is 144.5 million to Europe's 512 million. Does anyone seriously think that Russia poses a serious threat to Europe or that Europe needs the American big brother for survival, as in the immediate postwar years? Of course not. This is just a ruse for the maintenance of the status quo -- Europe as subservient to America, the Russian bear as menacing grizzly, America as protective slayer in the event of an attack.

This is all ridiculous. NATO shouldn't be abolished. It should be reconfigured for the realities of today. It should be European-led, not American-led. It should pay for its own defense entirely, whatever that might be (and Europe's calculation of that will inform us as to its true assessment of the Russian threat). America should be its primary ally, but not committed to intervene whenever a tiny European nation feels threatened. NATO's Article 5, committing all alliance nations to the defense of any other when attacked, should be scrapped in favor of language that calls for U.S. intervention only in the event of a true threat to Western Civilization itself.

And while a European-led NATO would find it difficult to pull back from its forward eastern positions after adding so many nations in the post-Cold War era, it should extend assurances to Russia that it has no intention of acting provocatively -- absent, of course, any Russian provocations.

... ... ...

Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century .

likbez, May 22, 2019

Great article. Thank you very much!

Pragmatic isolationalism is a better deal then the current neocon foreign policy. Which Trump is pursuing with the zeal similar to Obama (who continued all Bush II wars and started two new in Libya and Syria.) Probably this partially can be explained by his dependence of Adelson and pro-Israeli lobby.

But the problem is deeper then Trump: it is the power of MIC and American exeptionalism ( which can be viewed as a form of far right nationalism ) about which Andrew Bacevich have written a lot:

From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C.

If doubts remained on that score, the end of the Cold War removed them. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, politicians, journalists, and policy intellectuals threw themselves headlong into a competition over who could explain best just how unprecedented, how complete, and how wondrous was the global preeminence of the United States.

Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever).

"If we have to use force," Secretary of State Albright announced on morning television in February 1998, "it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."

Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."

In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the several unsuccessful wars of choice that followed offer prime examples. But so too did Washington's belated and inadequate recognition of the developments that actually endanger the wellbeing of 21st-century Americans, namely climate change, cyber threats, and the ongoing reallocation of global power prompted by the rise of China. Rather than seeing far into the future, American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week. More often than not, they get even that wrong.

Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing.

Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help.

There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.)

In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR existed.

I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA)

[May 22, 2019] The Great Power Game is On and China is Winning

Notable quotes:
"... As the Pentagon's strategic paper posits, China's overriding foreign policy goal is to squeeze America out of East Asia and force it back to the Hawaiian islands as its forward position in the Pacific. Thus would Hawaii cease to be America's strategic platform for projecting power into Asia and become merely a defensive position. If this strategic retreat were to happen, it would be one of the most significant developments in international relations since the end of World War II. ..."
"... None of your suggestions is likely to happen, absent defeat. America's trump card is the fiat dollar as world currency, defended by the full faith and power of an imperial global military, with its own economic inertia to the domestic economy as well. ..."
"... The most obvious step is to forge a genuine alliance with India. America can't take on China alone (although China's ineluctable demographic decline may make the US' relative decline in fortunes short-lived), and the world's largest democracy, and soon to be most populous nation, is an obvious counterweight to China, despite its still inefficient economy. ..."
"... The US has been trying to reverse this, but our patronizing attitude towards a proud country seeking great-power status has led to modest progress at best, and their defense relationship with Russia is stronger than with us. ..."
"... There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.) ..."
"... Overlooked might be Germany's copycat foreign policy posturing too often hidden behind 'humanitarian' language. https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/projects/new-power-new-responsibility/the-paper/ ..."
"... Guess the parallel with the US 'New American Century' is not misplaced. Do you realize that Germany aims to leverage the EU for establishing its position as a 'World Player'. Do realize too that it tends to categorize other countries along the same zero sum power line of reasoning as the US "either with us or against us". ..."
"... This German foreign policy gave birth to the European Neighborhood Policy which exploited the US instigated coup to indenture Ukraine into a dependent NON-member state associated exclusively with the EU excluding normal economic relations with Russia. ..."
"... One of the most malign effects of Israeli and Saudi control of American politicians is the grotesque overemphasis on the Middle East in US foreign policy. Trump's trade fights to one side, it often seems as if we dismiss or ignore much of the rest of the world. This disproportion has been obvious and growing since the end of the last century, but at this point it's pathological. ..."
"... Well, it all depends on goals doesn't it. US foreign policy goals are to increase chaos and create international tension. Why? Because US foreign policy exists to feed military and intel contractors on the one hand and asserting power for the sake of asserting power with no overall strategy other the Great Game. ..."
May 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The Great Power Game is On and China is Winning If America wants to maintain any influence in Asia, it needs to wake up. By Robert W. Merry • May 22, 2019

President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday, November 9, 2017, in Beijing, People's Republic of China. ( Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead) From across the pond come two geopolitical analyses in two top-quality British publications that lay out in stark terms the looming struggle between the United States and China. It isn't just a trade war, says The Economist in a major cover package. "Trade is not the half of it," declares the magazine. "The United States and China are contesting every domain, from semiconductors to submarines and from blockbuster films to lunar exploration." The days when the two superpowers sought a win-win world are gone.

For its own cover, The Financial Times ' Philip Stephens produced a piece entitled, "Trade is just an opening shot in a wider US-China conflict." The subhead: "The current standoff is part of a struggle for global pre-eminence." Writes Stephens: "The trade narrative is now being subsumed into a much more alarming one. Economics has merged with geopolitics. China, you can hear on almost every corner in sight of the White House and Congress, is not just a dangerous economic competitor but a looming existential threat."

Stephens quotes from the so-called National Defense Strategy, entitled "Sharpening the American Military's Competitive Edge," released last year by President Donald Trump's Pentagon. In the South China Sea, for example, says the strategic paper, "China has mounted a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there." The broader Chinese goal, warns the Pentagon, is "Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future."

The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war."

As the Pentagon's strategic paper posits, China's overriding foreign policy goal is to squeeze America out of East Asia and force it back to the Hawaiian islands as its forward position in the Pacific. Thus would Hawaii cease to be America's strategic platform for projecting power into Asia and become merely a defensive position. If this strategic retreat were to happen, it would be one of the most significant developments in international relations since the end of World War II.

America has been projecting significant power into Asia since the 1890s, when President William McKinley acquired Hawaii through annexation, then seized Guam and the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. For good measure, he cleared the way for the construction of the Panama Canal and continued his predecessors' robust buildup of the U.S. Navy. President Theodore Roosevelt then pushed the Canal project to actual construction, accelerated the naval buildup, and sent his Great White Fleet around the world as a signal that America had arrived on the global scene -- as if anyone could have missed that obvious reality.

With the total victory over Japan in World War II, America emerged as the hegemon of Asia, with colonies, naval bases, carrier groups, and strategic alliances that made it foolhardy for any nation to even think of challenging our regional dominance. Not even the Vietnam defeat, as psychologically debilitating as that was, could undercut America's Asian preeminence.

Now China is seeking to position itself to push America back into its own hemisphere. And judging from the language of the National Defense Strategy, America doesn't intend to be pushed back. This is a clash of wills, with all the makings of an actual military conflict.

But if China represents the greatest potential threat to America's global position, making an eventual war likely (though not inevitable), why is Washington not acting like it knows this? Why is it engaging in so many silly military capers that undermine its ability to focus attention and resources on the China challenge? While the National Defense Strategy paper suggests that U.S. officials understand the threat, America's actions reveal an incapacity to grapple with this reality in any concentrated fashion.

Here's a general idea of what a U.S. foreign policy under Trump might look like if it was based on a clear recognition of the China threat:

Iran: Since the end of the Cold War, the sheer folly of Trump's Iran policy has been exceeded only by George W. Bush's Iraq invasion. Barack Obama bequeathed to his successor a rare gift in the Iran nuclear deal, which provided an opportunity to direct attention away from Tehran and toward America's position in East Asia. In no way did it serve America's national interest to stir up tensions with Iran while the far more ominous China threat loomed. A policy based on realism would have seized that opportunity and used the channels of communication forged through the nuclear deal to establish some kind of accommodation, however wary or tenuous. Instead, America under Trump has created a crisis where none need exist.

Personnel: While the Iran policy might be difficult to reverse, a reversal is imperative. And that means Trump must fire National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. While their bully boy actions on the global stage seem to mesh with Trump's own temperament, the president also appears increasingly uncomfortable with the results, particularly with regard to their maximum pressure on Iran, which has brought America closer than ever to actual hostilities. Whether Trump has the subtlety of mind to understand just how destructive these men have been to his broad foreign policy goals is an open question. And Trump certainly deserves plenty of blame for pushing America into a zone of open hostility with Iran. But he can't extricate himself from his own folly so long as he has Bolton and Pompeo pushing him toward ever more bellicosity in ever more areas of the world. He needs men around him who appreciate just how wrongheaded American foreign policy has been in the post-Cold War era -- men such as retired Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor and former Virginia senator Jim Webb. Bolton and Pompeo -- out!

Russia: Of all the developments percolating in the world today, none is more ominous than the growing prospect of an anti-American alliance involving Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran. Yet such an alliance is in the works, largely as a result of America's inability to forge a foreign policy that recognizes the legitimate geopolitical interests of other nations. If the United States is to maintain its position in Asia, this trend must be reversed.

The key is Russia, largely by dint of its geopolitical position in the Eurasian heartland. If China's global rise is to be thwarted, it must be prevented from gaining dominance over Eurasia. Only Russia can do that. But Russia has no incentive to act because it feels threatened by the West. NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries.

Given the trends that are plainly discernible in the Far East, the West must normalize relations with Russia. That means providing assurances that NATO expansion is over for good. It means the West recognizing that Georgia, Belarus, and, yes, Ukraine are within Russia's natural zone of influence. They will never be invited into NATO, and any solution to the Ukraine conundrum will have to accommodate Russian interests. Further, the West must get over Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula. It is a fait accompli -- and one that any other nation, including America, would have executed in similar circumstances.

Would Russian President Vladimir Putin spurn these overtures and maintain a posture of bellicosity toward the West? We can't be sure, but that certainly wouldn't be in his interest. And how will we ever know when it's never been tried? We now understand that allegations of Trump's campaign colluding with Russia were meritless, so it's time to determine the true nature and extent of Putin's strategic aims. That's impossible so long as America maintains its sanctions and general bellicosity.

NATO: Trump was right during the 2016 presidential campaign when he said that NATO was obsolete. He later dialed back on that, but any neutral observer can see that the circumstances that spawned NATO as an imperative of Western survival no longer exist. The Soviet Union is gone, and the 1.3 million Russian and client state troops it placed on Western Europe's doorstep are gone as well.

So what kind of threat could Russia pose to Europe and the West? The European Union's GDP is more than 12 times that of Russia's, while Russia's per capita GDP is only a fourth of Europe's. The Russian population is 144.5 million to Europe's 512 million. Does anyone seriously think that Russia poses a serious threat to Europe or that Europe needs the American big brother for survival, as in the immediate postwar years? Of course not. This is just a ruse for the maintenance of the status quo -- Europe as subservient to America, the Russian bear as menacing grizzly, America as protective slayer in the event of an attack.

This is all ridiculous. NATO shouldn't be abolished. It should be reconfigured for the realities of today. It should be European-led, not American-led. It should pay for its own defense entirely, whatever that might be (and Europe's calculation of that will inform us as to its true assessment of the Russian threat). America should be its primary ally, but not committed to intervene whenever a tiny European nation feels threatened. NATO's Article 5, committing all alliance nations to the defense of any other when attacked, should be scrapped in favor of language that calls for U.S. intervention only in the event of a true threat to Western Civilization itself.

And while a European-led NATO would find it difficult to pull back from its forward eastern positions after adding so many nations in the post-Cold War era, it should extend assurances to Russia that it has no intention of acting provocatively -- absent, of course, any Russian provocations.

The Middle East: The United States should reduce its footprint in the region on a major scale. It should get out of Afghanistan, with assurances to the Taliban that it will allow that country to go its own way, irrespective of the outcome, so long as it doesn't pose a threat to the United States or its vital interests. U.S. troops should be removed from Syria, and America should stop supporting Saudi Arabia's nasty war in Yemen. We should make clear to Israel and the world that the Jewish state is a major U.S. ally and will be protected whenever it is truly threatened. But we should also emphasize that we won't seek through military means to alter the regional balance of power based on mere perceptions of potential future threats to countries in the region, even allies. The United States won't get drawn into regional wars unrelated to its own vital interests.

Far East: Once the other regional decks are cleared, America must turn its attention to Asia. The first question: do we wish to maintain our current position there, or can we accept China's rise even if it means a U.S. retreat or partial retreat from the region? If a retreat is deemed acceptable, then America should secure the best terms possible over a long period of tough and guileful negotiations. But if we decide to maintain regional dominance, then China will have to be isolated and deterred. That will mean a long period of economic tension and even economic warfare, confrontations over China's extravagant claims of sovereignty in the South China Sea and elsewhere, strong U.S. alliances with other Asian nations nurtured through deft and measured diplomacy, soaring technological superiority, and a continual upper hand in any arms race.

In this scenario, can war be averted? History suggests that may not be likely. But either way, America won't remain an Asian power if it allows itself to be pinned down in multiple nonstrategic spats and adventures around the world. Asia is today's Great Game and China is winning. That won't be reversed unless America starts playing.

Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century . MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 27 comments 27 Responses to The Great Power Game is On and China is Winning

Fran Macadam, says: May 21, 2019 at 10:36 pm

None of your suggestions is likely to happen, absent defeat. America's trump card is the fiat dollar as world currency, defended by the full faith and power of an imperial global military, with its own economic inertia to the domestic economy as well. That allows U.S. legal decisions to have extra territorial scope as the real international power, not now irrelevant toothless international institutions like the UN.
Whine Merchant , says: May 22, 2019 at 12:02 am
Nice summary, Mr Merry. Even the most die-hard Trumpet can find something to disagree upon with their Dear Leader while supporting everything else he does, but this clear and succinct outline leaves no where for the Deplorables to hide. Coupled with the China trade war fiasco, thias is pretty grim.

Of course, come 2020, all will be forgiven by the GOP, and even one criticism with be blasted with a twitter assault.

Fazal Majid , says: May 22, 2019 at 12:22 am
The most obvious step is to forge a genuine alliance with India. America can't take on China alone (although China's ineluctable demographic decline may make the US' relative decline in fortunes short-lived), and the world's largest democracy, and soon to be most populous nation, is an obvious counterweight to China, despite its still inefficient economy.

Unfortunately our support for the treacherous Pakistanis has poisoned our relationship with India. In 1971, Nixon actually sent a carrier group in the Bay of Bengal to intimidate the Indians into stopping support for the Bangladeshis fighting a war of independence against the genocidal (West) Pakistan, and the Indians had to call on the Soviets to send nuclear submarines to deter that threat. Like all ancient nations, Indians have long memories. Ironically, that reckless action was in cahoots with China.

The US has been trying to reverse this, but our patronizing attitude towards a proud country seeking great-power status has led to modest progress at best, and their defense relationship with Russia is stronger than with us.

likbez , says: May 22, 2019 at 12:29 am
Great article. Thank you very much!

Pragmatic isolationism is a better deal then the current neocon foreign policy. Which Trump is pursuing with the zeal similar to Obama (who continued all Bush II wars and started two new in Libya and Syria.) Probably this partially can be explained by his dependence of Adelson and pro-Israeli lobby. But the problem is deeper then Trump: it is the power of MIC and American exceptionalism ( which can be viewed as a form of far right nationalism ) about which Andrew Bacevich have written a lot:

From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C.

If doubts remained on that score, the end of the Cold War removed them. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, politicians, journalists, and policy intellectuals threw themselves headlong into a competition over who could explain best just how unprecedented, how complete, and how wondrous was the global preeminence of the United States.

Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever).

"If we have to use force," Secretary of State Albright announced on morning television in February 1998, "it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."

Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."

In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the several unsuccessful wars of choice that followed offer prime examples. But so too did Washington's belated and inadequate recognition of the developments that actually endanger the wellbeing of 21st-century Americans, namely climate change, cyber threats, and the ongoing reallocation of global power prompted by the rise of China.

Rather than seeing far into the future, American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week. More often than not, they get even that wrong.

Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing.

Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant.

His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help.

There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.)

In this limited sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR used to exist.

I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA.)

Piero , says: May 22, 2019 at 2:06 am
Your current foreign policy simply seems to reflect the astonishing degree of violence that permeates your society, when observing you Americans from a place like Hong Kong or China it's really frightening, I would be more scared to visit the US than Liberia or Sierra Leone, with those innumerable ( armed ) nutcases roaming your streets, you are by now used to it, and it saddens me, thinking of how grateful we should be for all you have done in the distant past for so many countries in the world
Fayez Abedaziz , says: May 22, 2019 at 2:30 am
The blockheads advising know nothing Trump about history and geo-politics don't care a whit about the American people or what is ten years down the road. These people, Bolton, Pompeo and the joke-Kushner- are ego/power lovers and are doing the opposite of a sane policy to every part of the globe.
How the hell do you goad and threaten Russia, for example, for no good reason and how do you threaten Russia, which, like the U.S., with the push of several buttons can turn any city in the world to ashes, in minutes.

The American people are not only dumb as a wall, they don't care about foreign policy and they don't wanna know. The're looking at celebrities and looking at their smart phones for fun and weirdness. The phones are smarter than them and they pay the price when clown Trump does things like trade wars and so on.

Yeah, the average American, what prizes they are, as in they look and say,

Is that the actress there on the 'news' oh, what's she wearing is that the 'genius' athlete, what does that smelly guy say today hey, let's order food delivered so we can watch and tomorrow to the sports bar and

Kent , says: May 22, 2019 at 6:32 am
This article forgets to mention why it would be in the American people's interest to be the hegemon of East Asia. I can't think of any reason myself. Anyone?
JR , says: May 22, 2019 at 7:11 am
Thanks for this article.

Overlooked might be Germany's copycat foreign policy posturing too often hidden behind 'humanitarian' language. https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/projects/new-power-new-responsibility/the-paper/

Guess the parallel with the US 'New American Century' is not misplaced. Do you realize that Germany aims to leverage the EU for establishing its position as a 'World Player'. Do realize too that it tends to categorize other countries along the same zero sum power line of reasoning as the US "either with us or against us".

This German foreign policy gave birth to the European Neighborhood Policy which exploited the US instigated coup to indenture Ukraine into a dependent NON-member state associated exclusively with the EU excluding normal economic relations with Russia.

The result is a thoroughly corrupt indebted Ukraine disenfranchising more than 60% of its population through imposing forced 'Ukrainization'.

Cavin , says: May 22, 2019 at 7:51 am
I agree with the article, but not the title. The article acknowledges two important points, but leaves out another.

First, it correctly acknowledges that our obsession with Iran is vastly disproportionate to the threat it poses. In fact, we would do well to scale back our adventurism in the Middle East. If China is winning in the Far East, it is largely because we have chosen to devote resources elsewhere.

Second, it correctly acknowledges that continued antagonizing of Russia by the West is needless. It is time to normalize relations with Russia, recognize its legitimate interest in having some buffer against the West, and repatriate Russian nationals who have recently immigrated to the West.

Third, the article fails to acknowledge that China, like Russia, is also entitled to some sphere of influence. And there is historic precedence for certain such claims. Those claims are tenuous when it comes to Japan and the Korean peninsula. But there is little reason why American Navy ships should be sailing right up to the borders of China, just as there is little reason why Chinese Navy ships should be sailing off the coast of Oregon. We also need to understand that provoking a trade war that slows the Chinese economy merely enhances the power of President Xi. Trump has given President Xi a massive political gift, and for no good reason. The trade imbalance is evidence of the strength of our economy, not a sign that we're losing out to China.

Grits Again , says: May 22, 2019 at 8:02 am
One of the most malign effects of Israeli and Saudi control of American politicians is the grotesque overemphasis on the Middle East in US foreign policy. Trump's trade fights to one side, it often seems as if we dismiss or ignore much of the rest of the world. This disproportion has been obvious and growing since the end of the last century, but at this point it's pathological.

If we are to compete effectively with China and other global players, if we are to have a balanced and effective foreign policy in general, we need to remove the Middle East blinders, get Israel and Saudi Arabia off our back, and start seeing the world as it is, rather than as Israel and Saudi Arabia pay our politicians to see it.

Collin , says: May 22, 2019 at 8:25 am
Simple questions: Why should we care? And how does all this soft power benefit the average citizens? And for all the China fears, they appear to react very rationally and avoid military conflicts.

Ok, it is true Chinese oil buying is probably keeping Iran in a better economic situation but again this seems more of a problem of Iran hawks not the average citizen. Honestly, I wish the US had more of treasury focused foreign policy and stop worrying about US power.

Mommsen the Younger , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:26 am
Excellent. Merry has it exactly. (Note: Have reread paragraph 9 several times and believe the copy editor fell asleep here)
Chris Cosmos , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:30 am
Well, it all depends on goals doesn't it. US foreign policy goals are to increase chaos and create international tension. Why? Because US foreign policy exists to feed military and intel contractors on the one hand and asserting power for the sake of asserting power with no overall strategy other the Great Game.

Any rational analysis of the past couple of decades forces us to come to that conclusion. The reason why this whole scheme is unlikely to fail in the short and medium term is US military involvement in 150 countries has brought much of the world under Washington's control–or at least their ruling elites. The best China can do is provide an alternative to the Empire and live in some sort of harmony with it because China has not shown any intention of competing militarily with the US. Iran is a key part of the Silk Road project and that is the strategic reason for the attempt to crush or destroy Iran that is central to the strategy. The US wants to keep China and Russia out of Europe–that, if you look at policy, seems to be the main contest.

HenionJD , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:30 am
The conflict with Iran has assumed heightened importance because,at 70 years old, John Bolton has to face the possibility that he might die without having started a war somewhere.
Thaomas , says: May 22, 2019 at 9:32 am
The author misses two other two other components of of a proper China "containment" policy: Immigration and trade policy. The US should be actively trying to attract immigration of skilled young workers and entrepreneurs (including from China) and encouraging university graduates from abroad to remain. The US ought to join the TPP in order to increase our leverage in negotiating reductions in Chinese restrictions on trade and investment.
Sid Finster , says: May 22, 2019 at 10:47 am
Why would Russia want to make a deal with the United States, which cannot be trusted to keep its word, or even to act rationally in pursuit of its own interests?
TheSnark , says: May 22, 2019 at 11:20 am
Generally a good article, but it misses an important point. While China and Russia do have natural spheres of influence, the countries within those natural spheres hate being there.

Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam are naturally within China's influence, but they don't trust the Chinese at all, and surely don't want China to dominate their countries. And given they way the Chinese empire treats Tibetan and Uigurs, they have good reason for that.

Similarly in Eastern Europe, where Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic States might be in Russian sphere, but they sure don't want to be. The fact is that NATO did not aggressively seek them out for membership, those small countries begged to join NATO out of their historical fear of Russia.

While recognizing such spheres of influence, do we want to abandon friendly, democratic countries to a hostile, autocratic power? The Cold War model of Finland give some hope for a compromise, but it won't be easy to implement outside of Finland.

david , says: May 22, 2019 at 1:41 pm
This article is another vivid illustration of how disoriented and narrow-minded when a typical intelligent and well-meaning American is talking about China. For examples:

1. The author has no problem acknowledging specific geopolitical interests to accommodate Russia or even Iran, but when he comes to China, he fails completely to mention any of the legitimate interests China has in East Asia.

2. The author repeats the nonsensical China haters' allegation about China's threat to America, and China's intention to push American out of East Asia.

3. The author resorts back to a typical zero-sum or even cold-war style mentality when talking about overall China strategy, without even considering the possibilities that China and America can co-exist in a friendly manner, where all the peaceful competition between the two countries ultimately translating into net positive results that benefit the people of both countries and the world.

Unfortunately, our so-called "experts" in China are consistently failing Americans badly, because they lack the knowledge and perspective to think from the other side of the coin.

Steve , says: May 22, 2019 at 1:50 pm
I scrolled for quite a bit before finding Thaomas' comment about TPP. Leaving it will prove to be one of the Trump's admin's greatest blunders (which is saying something) and any column about China strategy that omits it is incomplete.
hooly , says: May 22, 2019 at 2:01 pm
So why exactly should Russia be accommodated and be allowed its sphere of influence and a 'defense perimeter' and not China? I don't get it. And why should the USA be allowed the fruits of its aggression in the form of an annexed and brutally conquered Hawaii? why can't Uncle Sam be satisfied with San Diego as a naval base?

The USA has the Monroe Doctrine giving it dominion over the Western Hemisphere, and China holds the Mandate of Heaven granting it hegemony over everything else. Can't the Dragon and the Eagle get along on that basis??

Ken Zaretzke , says: May 22, 2019 at 2:06 pm
In terms of geography, China vitally needs Russia in order to close off a corridor through which Muslims will flow to China. Without that cooperation from Russia, China will be seriously hobbled by unassimilable and hostile migrants in its south. At least symbolically, this will cripple its superpower claims.

The U.S. would be stupid not to seek an alliance with Russia, given Russia's geographical strengths, which also includes its proximity to the Arctic and therefore a legal claim to the oil and gas buried there.

Geography is Russia's long-term strength, and not incidentally is a reason why trying militarily to force Putin to surrender Crimea could easily lead to nuclear war, which might begin with tactical (battlefield) Russian nukes aimed at NATO garrisons in eastern Europe.

China isn't fated to win its contest with the U.S. if it must depend on Russia in order to become an unquestioned superpower. We need Russia for strategic security as much as Russia needs us for economic growth.

fabian , says: May 22, 2019 at 2:47 pm
Nice summary. In my view the US (not Trump) make a big mistake to throw Russia in the arms of China. It's not only its geopolitical situation that is the problem but the fact the it gives China unlimited access to natural resources. In a generation, if things goes the way they do now, the only saving grace for the US will be a failure of this partnership. Because if it works, by the sheer force of gravity it will swallow Europe. But betting on the adversary's failure is not a good strategy.
workingdad , says: May 22, 2019 at 3:08 pm
eh, keeping pressure on Iran keeps Saudi Arabia happy which means they stay in our sphere; as opposed to China's.

Until Venezuala wants to become part of the Oil-for-dollars system or we all drive electric cars and only oil for remote work and emergency military expeditions then we need the Saudis on our side.

Un Citoyen , says: May 22, 2019 at 3:58 pm
This kind of mentality is the reason why I think the demise of America is necessary to achieve world peace.

Why on God's green earth should America dominate East Asia? Last time I checked, America is NOT part of Asia. We are not even in the same hemisphere for crying out loud. Why can't we just leave Asia to the Asians?

When was the last time China invaded a country? Never. These are the same people who discovered Africa and America long before the Europeans, but only wanted to "do business" and trade. They already have 1.3 Billion mouths to feed, the last thing the Chinese government needs is more mouths to feed.

Meanwhile, when Washington thinks of invasion, all they think of is guns, tanks, battleships. The Chinese are already quietly invading and conquering the west -- through immigration. All along the East and West coasts, Chinese dominant cities and schools are popping up everywhere. America really is the stupidest country on earth sometimes. All brawn and no brain. We want to start wars with everybody in the name of protecting "American interests", while the rest of the world are already conquering us from within through immigration. Wake up America.

Ricardo Toledano , says: May 22, 2019 at 7:06 pm
Though Mr. Merry sees things clearly, I can't really see why people like playing these games in the age of nukes.

It's one thing trying to play Kaiser Wilhelm II and dream of containment and conquest when you actually had to send armies to defeat your enemies, It's another to do so when people can kill a few millions by pressing a button.

It's a reckless game for me.

Ricardo Toledano , says: May 22, 2019 at 7:06 pm
Though Mr. Merry sees things clearly, I can't really see why people like playing these games in the age of nukes.

It's one thing trying to play Kaiser Wilhelm II and dream of containment and conquest when you actually had to send armies to defeat your enemies, It's another to do so when people can kill a few millions by pressing a button.

It's a reckless game to me.

Tom Diebold , says: May 22, 2019 at 7:32 pm
I would assume that the US is "in" East Asia, to a significant extent, because Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have sought US security and defense guarantees. The US has not forced itself into the region. Korea has reasons to be concerned about China, due to its experiences during the Korean War, and Taiwan, which wishes to remain independent of Chinese control, is directly threatened by China.

As for other allies in the region, Philippine president Duterte's overtures, upon taking office, to China, and his especially disparaging remarks about the US while making an official visit to China, seem quite puzzling, given China's illegitimate seizing of Philippine territory in the West Philippine Sea. US relations with the Philippines needs to be reexamined in light of this development. While Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are first-level allies in the region, the Philippines is not.

[May 21, 2019] Where Lyme Disease Came From and Why It Eludes Treatment by David Swanson

May 17, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org
A new book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby adds significantly to our understanding of Lyme disease, while oddly seeming to avoid mention of what we already knew.

Newby claims (in 2019) that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him. Yet, in 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory . He appeared on several television shows to discuss the book, including on NBC's Today Show, where the book was made a Today Show Book Club selection. Lab 257 hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list soon after its publication.

Newby's book reaches the same conclusion as Carroll's, namely that the most likely source of diseased ticks is Plum Island. Newby reaches this conclusion on page 224 after mentioning Plum Island only once in passing in a list of facilities on page 47 and otherwise avoiding it throughout the book. This is bizarre, because Newby's book otherwise goes into great depth, and even chronicles extensive research efforts that lead largely to dead ends, and because there is information available about Plum Island, and because Carroll's best-selling book seems to demand comment, supportive or dismissive or otherwise.

In fact, I think that, despite the avoidance of any discussion of Plum Island, Newby's research complements Carroll's quite well, strengthens the same general conclusion, and then adds significant new understanding. So, let's look at what Carroll told us, and then at what Newby adds.

Less than 2 miles off the east end of Long Island sits Plum Island, where the U.S. government makes or at least made biological weapons, including weapons consisting of diseased insects that can be dropped from airplanes on a (presumably foreign) population. One such insect is the deer tick, pursued as a germ weapon by the Nazis, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the Americans.

Deer swim to Plum Island. Birds fly to Plum Island. The island lies in the middle of the Atlantic migration route for numerous species. "Ticks," Carroll writes, "find baby chicks irresistible."

In July of 1975 a new or very rare disease appeared in Old Lyme, Connecticut, just north of Plum Island. And what was on Plum Island? A germ warfare lab to which the U.S. government had brought former Nazi germ warfare scientists in the 1940s to work on the same evil work for a different employer. These included the head of the Nazi germ warfare program who had worked directly for Heinrich Himmler. On Plum Island was a germ warfare lab that frequently conducted its experiments out of doors . After all, it was on an island. What could go wrong? Documents record outdoor experiments with diseased ticks in the 1950s (when we know that the United States was using such weaponized life forms in North Korea ). Even Plum Island's indoors, where participants admit to experiments with ticks, was not sealed tight. And test animals mingled with wild deer, test birds with wild birds.

By the 1990s, the eastern end of Long Island had by far the greatest concentration of Lyme disease. If you drew a circle around the area of the world heavily impacted by Lyme disease, which happened to be in the Northeast United States, the center of that circle was Plum Island.

Plum Island experimented with the Lone Star tick, whose habitat at the time was confined to Texas. Yet it showed up in New York and Connecticut, infecting people with Lyme disease -- and killing them. The Lone Star tick is now endemic in New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

If Newby agrees or disagrees with any of the above, she does not inform us. But here's what she adds to it.

The outbreak of unusual tick-borne disease around Long Island Sound actually started in 1968, and it involved three diseases: Lyme arthritis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and babesiosis. A U.S. bioweapons scientist, Willy Burgdorfer, credited in 1982 with discovering the cause of Lyme disease, may have put the diseases into ticks 30 years earlier. And his report on the cause of Lyme disease may have involved a significant omission that has made it harder to diagnose or cure. The public focus on only one of the three diseases has allowed a disaster that could have been contained to become widespread.

Newby documents in detail Burgdorfer's work for the U.S. government giving diseases to ticks in large quantities to be used as weapons, as they have been in Cuba in 1962, for example. "He was growing microbes inside ticks, having the ticks feed on animals, and then harvesting the microbes from the animals that exhibited the level of illness the military had requested."

Burgdorfer published a paper in 1952 about the intentional infecting of ticks. In 2013, filmmaker Tim Grey asked him, on camera, whether the pathogen he had identified in 1982 as the cause of Lyme disease was the same one or similar or a generational mutation of the one he'd written about in 1952. Burgdorfer replied in the affirmative.

Interviewed by Newby, Burgdorfer described his efforts to create an illness that would be difficult to test for -- knowledge of which he might have shared earlier with beneficial results for those suffering.

Newby, who has herself suffered from Lyme disease, blames the profit interests of companies and the corruption of government for the poor handling of Lyme disease. But her writing suggests to me a possibility she doesn't raise, namely that those who know where Lyme disease came from have avoided properly addressing it because of where it came from.

Newby assumes throughout the book that there has to have been a particular major incident near Long Island Sound, either an accident or an experiment on the public or an attack by a foreign nation. Burgdorfer reportedly claimed to another researcher that Russia stole U.S. bioweapons. Based on that and nothing else, Newby speculates that perhaps Russia attacked the United States with diseased ticks, coincidentally right in the location where the U.S. government experimented with diseased ticks.

"What this book brings to light," Newby writes, "is that the U.S. military has conducted thousands of experiments exploring the use of ticks and tick-borne diseases as biological weapons, and in some cases, these agents escaped into the environment. The government needs to declassify the details of these open-air bioweapons tests so that we can begin to repair the damage these pathogens are inflicting on human and animals in the ecosystem."

Another product of U.S. bio-weapons tax dollars at work, of course, was the anthrax mailed to politicians in 2001. While Newby speculates that perhaps someone was trying to demonstrate the danger for our own good, I don't think we should forget that one purpose served -- whether or not intended -- by the "anthrax attacks" was a significant augmentation of the Iraq war lies. The attacks were falsely blamed on Iraq, and even if people have forgotten that, they fell for it long enough for it to matter. The one bit of truth in current public understanding of Lyme disease is that it has not been falsely blamed on some country the United States is eager to bomb. Let's keep it that way! Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: David Swanson

David Swanson wants you to declare peace at http://WorldBeyondWar.org His new book is War No More: The Case for Abolition .

[May 21, 2019] Why does Barsoomian, possibly a CIA operative, merit any mention? BECAUSE She is Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's WIFE! "

May 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

onebornfree , says: Website May 20, 2019 at 10:13 pm GMT

M. Whitney says: " .That's the question that will throw open the curtains and shed light on the suspicious ties between the DNC, the CIA, the FBI and the media, .."

SWAMPgate: You won't believe how ALL the perps are connected as in joined at the hip!

Excerpt: " ..someone out there cares so much that they've "purged" all Barsoomian court documents for her Clinton representation in Hamburg vs. Clinton in 1998 and its appeal in 1999 from the DC District and Appeals Court dockets. Someone out there cares so much that the internet has been "purged" of all information pertaining to Barsoomian. Historically, this indicates that the individual is a protected CIA operative. Additionally, Lisa Barsoomian has specialized in opposing Freedom of Information Act requests on behalf of the intelligence community.

And, although Barsoomian has been involved in hundreds of cases representing the DC Office of the US Attorney, her email address is Lisa Barsoomian at NIH gov. The NIH stands for National Institutes of Health. This is a tactic routinely used by the CIA to protect an operative by using another government organization to shield their activities.

It's a cover, so big deal, right? I mean what does one more attorney with ties to the US intelligence community really matter?

It deals with Trump and his recent tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum imports, the border wall, DACA, everything coming out of California, the Uni-party unrelenting opposition to President Trump, the Clapper leaks, the Comey leaks, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recusal and subsequent 14 month nap with occasional forays into the marijuana legalization mix.

And last but not least Mueller's never-ending investigation into collusion between the Trump team and the Russians.

Why does Barsoomian, CIA operative, merit any mention? BECAUSE She is Assistant Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's WIFE! " :

"SWAMPgate: You won't believe how ALL the perps are connected as in joined at the hip!":
http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=122755#more-122755

Regards, onebornfree

[May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth. ..."
"... There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out "legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions. The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote against a defense spending increase. ..."
"... Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus. ..."
"... When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed. ..."
"... I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. ..."
"... If the Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global recession is a certainty. ..."
"... These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the president. ..."
"... The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want to puke. ..."
May 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

"I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. "I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!"" – Bill Hicks

Anyone who frequents Twitter, Facebook, political blogs, economic blogs, or fake-news mainstream media channels knows our world is driven by the "Us versus Them" narrative. It's almost as if "they" are forcing us to choose sides and believe the other side is evil. Bill Hicks died in 1994, but his above quote is truer today then it was then. As the American Empire continues its long-term decline, the proles are manipulated through Bernaysian propaganda techniques, honed over the course of decades by the ruling oligarchs, to root for their assigned puppets.

Most people can't discern they are being manipulated and duped by the Deep State controllers. The most terrifying outcome for these Deep State controllers would be for the masses to realize it is us versus them. But they don't believe there is a chance in hell of this happening. Their arrogance is palatable.

Their hubris has reached astronomical levels as they blew up the world economy in 2008 and successfully managed to have the innocent victims bail them out to the tune of $700 billion, pillaged the wealth of the nation through their capture of the Federal Reserve (QE, ZIRP), rigged the financial markets in their favor through collusion, used the hundreds of billions in corporate tax cuts to buy back their stock and further pump the stock market, all while their corporate media mouthpieces mislead and misinform the proles.

There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out "legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions. The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote against a defense spending increase.

Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus.

When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed.

I've never been big on joining a group. I tend to believe Groucho Marx and his cynical line, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". The "Us vs. Them" narrative doesn't connect with my view of the world. As a realistic libertarian I know libertarian ideals will never proliferate in a society of government dependency, willful ignorance of the masses, thousands of laws, and a weak-kneed populace afraid of freedom and liberty. The only true libertarian politician, Ron Paul, was only able to connect with about 5% of the voting public. There is no chance a candidate with a libertarian platform will ever win a national election. This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Bill Hicks somewhat foreshadowed the last election by referencing another famous cynic.

"I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking and screaming into the White House." ― Bill Hicks

Hillary Clinton wanted to be president so badly, she colluded with Barack Obama, Jim Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch and numerous other Deep State sycophants to ensure her victory, by attempting to entrap Donald Trump in a concocted Russian collusion plot and subsequent post-election coup to cover for their traitorous plot. I wouldn't say Donald Trump was dragged kicking and screaming into the White House, but when he ascended on the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015, I'm not convinced he believed he could win the presidency.

As the greatest self-promoter of our time, I think he believed a presidential run would be good for his brand, more revenue for his properties and more interest in his reality TV ventures. He was despised by the establishment within the Republican and Democrat parties. The vested interests controlling the media and levers of power in society scorned and ridiculed this brash uncouth outsider. In an upset for the ages, Trump tapped into a vein of rage and disgruntlement in flyover country and pockets within swing states, to win the presidency over Crooked Hillary and her Deep State backers.

I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. I hadn't voted for a Republican since 2000, casting protest votes for Libertarian and Constitutional Party candidates along the way. I despise the establishment, so their hatred of Trump made me vote for him. His campaign stances against foreign wars and Federal Reserve reckless bubble blowing appealed to me. I don't worship at the altar of the cult of personality. I judge men by their actions and not their words.

Trump's first two years have been endlessly entertaining as he waged war against fake news CNN, establishment Republicans, the Deep State coup attempt, and Obama loving globalists. The Twitter in Chief has bypassed the fake news media and tweets relentlessly to his followers. He provokes outrage in his enemies and enthralls his worshipers. With millions in each camp it is difficult to find an unbiased assessment of narrative versus real accomplishments.

I'm happy he has been able to stop the relentless leftward progression of our Federal judiciary. Cutting regulations and rolling back environmental mandates has been a positive. Exiting the Paris Climate Agreement and TPP, forcing NATO members to pay their fair share, and renegotiating NAFTA were all needed. Ending the war on coal and approving pipelines will keep energy costs lower. His attempts to vet Muslims entering the country have been the right thing to do. Building a wall on our southern border is the right thing to do, but he should have gotten it done when he controlled both houses.

The use of tariffs to force China to renegotiate one sided trade deals as a negotiating tactic is a high-risk, high reward gamble. If his game of chicken is successful and he gets better terms from the Chicoms, while reversing the tariffs, it would be a huge win. If the Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global recession is a certainty. Who has the upper hand? Xi is essentially a dictator for life and doesn't have to worry about elections or popularity polls. Dissent is crushed. A global recession and stock market crash would make Trump's re-election in 2020 problematic.

I'm a big supporter of lower taxes. The Trump tax cuts were sold as beneficial to the middle class. That is a false narrative. The vast majority of the tax cut benefits went to mega-corporations and rich people. Middle class home owning families with children received little or no tax relief, as exemptions were eliminated and tax deductions capped. In many cases, taxes rose for working class Americans.

With corporate profits at all time highs, massive tax cuts put billions more into their coffers. They didn't repatriate their overseas profits to a great extent. They didn't go on a massive hiring spree. They didn't invest in new facilities. They did buy back their own stock to help drive the stock market to stratospheric heights. So corporate executives gave themselves billions in bonuses, which were taxed at a much lower rate. This is considered winning in present day America.

The "Us vs. Them" issue rears its ugly head whenever Trump is held accountable for promises unkept, blatant failures, and his own version of fake news. Holding Trump to the same standards as Obama is considered traitorous by those who only root for their home team. Their standard response is that you are a Hillary sycophant or a turncoat to the home team. If you agree with a particular viewpoint or position of a liberal then you are a bad person and accused of being a lefty by Trump fanboys. Facts don't matter to cheerleaders. Competing narratives rule the day. Truthfulness not required.

The refusal to distinguish between positive actions and negative actions when assessing the performance of what passes for our political leadership by the masses is why cynicism has become my standard response to everything I see, hear or he read. The incessant level of lies permeating our society and its acceptance as the norm has led to moral decay and rampant criminality from the White House, to the halls of Congress, to corporate boardrooms, to corporate newsrooms, to government run classrooms, to the Vatican, and to households across the land. It's interesting that one of our founding fathers reflected upon this detestable human trait over two hundred years ago.

"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." – Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine's description of how moral mischief can ruin a society was written when less than 3 million people inhabited America. Consider his accurate assessment of humanity when over 300 million occupy these lands. The staggering number of corrupt prostituted sociopaths occupying positions of power within the government, corporations, media, military, churches, and academia has created a morally bankrupt empire of debt.

These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the president.

The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them. The answer to that question will strongly impact the direction and intensity of the climactic years of this Fourth Turning. What I've noticed is the shunning of those who don't take an all or nothing position regarding Trump. If you disagree with a decision, policy, or hiring decision by the man, you are accused by the pro-Trump team of being one of them (aka liberals, lefties, Hillary lovers).

If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the Trumpeteers. I don't want to be Us or Them. I just want to be me. I will judge everyone by their actions and their results. I can agree with Trump on many issues, while also agreeing with Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul, Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on other issues. I don't prescribe to the cult of personality school of thought. I didn't believe the false narratives during the Bush or Obama years, and I won't worship at the altar of the Trump narrative now.

In Part II of this article I'll assess Trump's progress thus far and try to determine whether he can defeat the Deep State.

TerryThomas , 32 minutes ago link

"The scientific and industrial revolution of modern times represents the next giant step in the mastery over nature; and here, too, an enormous increase in man's power over nature is followed by an apocalyptic drive to subjugate man and reduce human nature to the status of nature. Even where enslavement is employed in a mighty effort to tame nature, one has the feeling that the effort is but a tactic to legitimize total subjugation. Thus, despite its spectacular achievements in science and technology, the twentieth century will probably be seen in retrospect as a century mainly preoccupied with the mastery and manipulation of men. Nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, and militarism, cartelization and unionization, propaganda and advertising are all aspects of a general relentless drive to manipulate men and neutralize the unpredictability of human nature. Here, too, the atmosphere is heavy-laden with coercion and magic." --Eric Hoffer

666D Chess , 11 minutes ago link

Divide and conquer, not a very novel idea... but very effective.

Kafir Goyim , 32 minutes ago link

If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the Trumpeteers

That's not true. When Trump kisses Israeli ***, most "Trumpeteers" are outraged. That does not mean they're going to vote for Joe "I'm a Zionist" Biden, or Honest Hillary because of it, but they're still pissed.

Rich Monk , 33 minutes ago link

These predators (((them))) need to fear the Victims, us! That is what the 2ND Amendment is for. It's coming, slowly for now, but eventually it speeds up.

yellowsub , 42 minutes ago link

Ya'll a dumb fool if you think gov't as your best interests first.

legalize , 46 minutes ago link

Citation needed.

Any piece like this better be littered with footnotes and cited sources before I'm swallowing it.

I'll say it again: this is the internet, people. There's no "shortage of column space" to include links back to primary sources for your assertions. Otherwise, how am I supposed to distinguish you from another "psy op" or "paid opposition hit piece"?

bshirley1968 , 51 minutes ago link

"The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them."

If you still ponder this question, then you are pretty frickin' thick. It is obvious at this point, that he betrayed everything he campaigned on. You don't do that and call yourself one of "us".......damn sure aren't one of "me".

If I couldn't keep my word and wouldn't do what it takes to do what is right.....then I would resign. But I would not go on playing politics in a world that needs some real leadership and not another political hack.

The real battle is between Truth and Lie. No matter the name of your "team" or the "side" you support. Truth is truth and lies are lies. We don't stand for political parties, we stand for truth. We don't stand for national pride, we take pride in a nation that is truthful and trustworthy. The minute a "side" or "team" starts lying.....and justifying it.....that is the minute they become them and not one of us.

Any thinking person in this country today knows we are being lied to by the entire complex. Until someone starts telling the truth.....we are on our own. But I be damned before I am going to support any of these lying sons of bitches......and that includes Trump.

Fish Gone Bad , 37 minutes ago link

Dark comedy. All the elections have been **** choices until the last one. Take a look at Arkancide.com and start counting the bodies.

Anyone remember the news telling us how North Korea promised to turn the US into a sea of fire?? Trump absolutely went to bat for every single American to de-escalate that situation.

bshirley1968 , 31 minutes ago link

Don't tell me about Arkancide or the Clintons. I grew up in Arkansas with that sack of **** as my governor for 12 years.

NK was never a real threat to anyone. Trump didn't do ****. NK is back to building and shooting off missiles and will be teaming up with the Russians and Chinese. You are a duped bafoon.

Kafir Goyim , 28 minutes ago link

I don't think anybody thought NK was an existential threat to the US. It has still been nice making progress on bringing them back into the world and making them less of a threat to Japan and S. Korea. Trump did that.

Giant Meteor , 9 minutes ago link

Dennis Rodman did that, or that is to say, Trump an extension thereof ..

Great theater..

Look, i thought it was great that Trump went Kim Unning. I mean after all, i had talked with a few elderly folks that get their news directly from the mainstream of mainstream, vanilla news reportage. Propaganda central casting. I remember them being extremely concerned, outright petrified about that evil menace, kim gonna launch nukes any minute now. If the news would have been announced a major troop mobilization, bombing campaigns, to begin immediately they would have been completely onboard, waving the flag.

Frankly, it is only a matter of time, and folks can speculate on the country of interest, but it is coming soon to a theater near you. So many being in the crosshairs. Iran i suspect .. that's the big prize, that makes these sociopaths cream in their panties.

Probably. In the second term .. and so far, if ones honestly evaluates the "brain trust" / current crop of dimwit opposition, and in light of their past 2 plus years of moronic posturing with their hair on fire, trump will get his second term ..

666D Chess , 15 minutes ago link

Until the last one? You are retarded, the last election was a masterpiece of Rothschilds Productions. The Illuminati was watching you at their private cinema when you were voting for Trump and they were laughing their asses off.

HoodRatKing , 55 minutes ago link

The author does not realize that everyone in America, except Native American Indians, were immigrants drawn towards the false promise of hope that is the American Dream, turned nightmare..

Owning your own home, car, & raising a family in this country is so damn expensive & risky, that you'd have be on drugs or an idiot to even fall for the lies.

I don't see an us vs them, I see the #FakeMoney printers monetized every facet of life, own everything, & it truly is RENT-A-LIFE USSA, complete with bills galore, taxes galore, laws galore, jails & prisons galore, & the worst fkn country anyone would want to live in poverty & homelessness in.

At least in many 3rd world nations there is land to live off of & joblessness does not = a financial death sentence.

bshirley1968 , 39 minutes ago link

Sure. Lets all go back to living in huts.....off the land....no cars.....no electricity.....no running water......no roads....

There is a price to pay for things and it is not always in the form of money. We have given up some of our freedom for the ease and conveniences we want.

The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want to puke.

There is a balance. Don't take the other extreme or we never find balance.

911bodysnatchers322 , 56 minutes ago link

This article is moronic. One can easily prove that Trump is not like all the others in the poster. Has this author been living under a rock for the last 2.5 yrs? The past 5 presidents represent a group that has been literally trying to assassinate Trump, ruin his family, his reputation, his buisness and his future, for the audacity to be an ousider to the power network and steal (win) the presidency from under their noses. He's kept us OUT of war. He's dissolved the treachery that was keeping us in the middle east through gaslighitng and a proxy fake war that is ISIS, the globalists' / nato / fiveys / uk's fake mercenary army

Giant Meteor , 25 minutes ago link

And yet, I'll never forget all the smiling faces at the gala wedding affair.

Happier times ..

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/us/politics/ex-ally-donald-trump-now-heaps-scorn-on-bill-clinton.html

And yes, thanks in advance for noting the link is from New York slime, but i believe the picture in this case anyway, was not photo shopped.

She is, (hillary) after all, good people, a real fighter ..

**** .. mission accomplished ..

ExPat2018 , 1 hour ago link

The greatest threat to the USA is its own dumbed down drugged up citizens who cannot compete with anyone. America is a big military powerhouse but that doens't make successful countries

You must have intelligent people

America doesn't have that anymore.

JuliaS , 1 hour ago link

Notice how modern narrative is getting manipulated. What is being reported and referenced is completely different from how things are. And knowing that we can assume that the entire history is a fabricated lie, written by the ruling class to support its status in the minds of obedient citizens.

911bodysnatchers322 , 54 minutes ago link

This article is garbage propaganda that proves that they think we aren't keeping score or paying attention. The gaslighting won't work when it relies on so much counterthink, willful ignorance, counterfacts and weaponized omissions

istt , 1 hour ago link

The reality is the de-escalation of wars, the stability of our currency and our economy, and the moral re-grounding of our culture does not occur until we do what over 100 countries have done over the centuries, beginning in Carthage in 250AD.

fersur , 1 hour ago link

There's an old saying; "Congress does 2 things well Nothing and Protest" said by Pence Live-Streamed 4 hours ago at USMCA America First speech !

Good, Bad and Ugly

The Good is President Trump works extreme daily hours trying his best !

The Bad is Haters miss every bit of whatever their President Trump does that is good !

The Ugly is Hater Reporters ignoring World events, scared of possibly shining President Trump fairly !

SHsparx , 1 hour ago link

You really are making it a bit too obvious, bro.

911bodysnatchers322 , 52 minutes ago link

The congress are statusquotarians. If they solved the problems they say they would,they'd be out of a job. and that job is sitting there acting like a naddler or toxic post turtle leprechaun with a charisma and skill level of zero. Their staff do all the work, half of them barely read, though they probably can

SHsparx , 1 hour ago link

I still think 1st and 2nd ammedment is predicated on which party rules the house. If a Dem gets into the WH, we're fucked. Kiss those Iast two dying amendments goodbye for good.

Zeusky Babarusky , 1 hour ago link

If we rely on any party to preserve the 1st or 2nd Amendments, we are already fucked. What should preserve the 1st and 2nd Amendments is the absolute fear of anyone in government even mentioning suppressing or removing them. When the very thought of doing anything to lessen the rights advocated in these two amendments, causes a politician to piss in their pants, liberty will be preserved. As it is now citizens fear the government, and as a result tyranny continues to grow and fester as a cancer.

Zoomorph , 1 hour ago link

In other words, those amendments are already lost... we're just waiting for the final dictate to come down.

Zeusky Babarusky , 1 hour ago link

You may very well be right. I still hold out hope, but upon seeing what our society is quickly morphing into, that hope seems to fade more each and every day.

SHsparx , 49 minutes ago link

@ Zeusky Babarusky

I couldn't agree with you more.

Unfortunately, it is what it is, which is why I used the word "dying."

Those two amendments are on their deathbed, and if a Dem gets in the house, that'll be the nail in the coffin.

bshirley1968 , 1 hour ago link

If you think the 1st and 2nd amendments are reliant on who is in office, then you are already done. Why don't you try growing a pair and being an American for once in your life.

I will always have a 1st and 2nd "amendment" for as long as I live. Life is meaningless without them.....as far as I am concerned. Good thing the founders didn't wait for king George to give them what they "felt" was theirs.....by the laws of Nature and Nature's God.

I hope the democrats get the power......and I hope they come for the guns......maybe then pussies like you will finally have to **** or get off the pot......for once in your life. There are worse things than dying.

Nephilim , 1 hour ago link

THEHAZELFLOCKOFCRANES

BRINDLED FOOT,

AUSTRALIAN.

caveofgoldcaveofold

Zoomorph , 1 hour ago link

"Why do we have wars?"

"Because life is war: fighting for survival, resources, and what is best in the world."

"Why do people say war is bad?"

"Because they are useful idiots who have been tricked by religion and/or weak degenerates who are too weary to participate."

delta0ne , 1 hour ago link

This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Unless we get rid of *** influencing from abroad and domestically. Getting rid of English King few hundred years ago was a joke! this would be a challenge because dual-citizens masquerading as locals.

blind_understanding , 1 hour ago link

Last revolution (1776) we targeted the WRONG ENEMY.

We targeted King George III instead of the private bankers who owned of the Bank of England and the issued of the British-pound currency.

George III was himself up to his ears in debt to them by 1776, when the bankers installed George Washington to replace George III as their middleman in the American colonies, by way of the phony revolution.

Phony because ownership of the central bank and currency (Federal-Reserve Banks, Federal-Reserve notes) we use, remains in the same banking families' hands to this day. The same parasite remains within our government.

djrichard , 1 hour ago link

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/05/16/the-gervais-principle-vi-children-of-an-absent-god/

It is this strangely incomplete calculus that creates the shifting Loser world of rifts and alliances. By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are able to manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms. The result is that the Losers end up blaming each other for their losses, seek collective emotional resolution, and fail to adequately address the balance sheet of material rewards and losses.

To succeed, this strategy requires that Losers not look too closely at the non-emotional books. This is why, as we saw last time, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while they are being manipulated.

[May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth. ..."
"... There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out "legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions. The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote against a defense spending increase. ..."
"... Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus. ..."
"... When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed. ..."
"... I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. ..."
"... If the Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global recession is a certainty. ..."
"... These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the president. ..."
"... The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want to puke. ..."
May 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

"I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. "I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!"" – Bill Hicks

Anyone who frequents Twitter, Facebook, political blogs, economic blogs, or fake-news mainstream media channels knows our world is driven by the "Us versus Them" narrative. It's almost as if "they" are forcing us to choose sides and believe the other side is evil. Bill Hicks died in 1994, but his above quote is truer today then it was then. As the American Empire continues its long-term decline, the proles are manipulated through Bernaysian propaganda techniques, honed over the course of decades by the ruling oligarchs, to root for their assigned puppets.

Most people can't discern they are being manipulated and duped by the Deep State controllers. The most terrifying outcome for these Deep State controllers would be for the masses to realize it is us versus them. But they don't believe there is a chance in hell of this happening. Their arrogance is palatable.

Their hubris has reached astronomical levels as they blew up the world economy in 2008 and successfully managed to have the innocent victims bail them out to the tune of $700 billion, pillaged the wealth of the nation through their capture of the Federal Reserve (QE, ZIRP), rigged the financial markets in their favor through collusion, used the hundreds of billions in corporate tax cuts to buy back their stock and further pump the stock market, all while their corporate media mouthpieces mislead and misinform the proles.

There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out "legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions. The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote against a defense spending increase.

Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus.

When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed.

I've never been big on joining a group. I tend to believe Groucho Marx and his cynical line, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". The "Us vs. Them" narrative doesn't connect with my view of the world. As a realistic libertarian I know libertarian ideals will never proliferate in a society of government dependency, willful ignorance of the masses, thousands of laws, and a weak-kneed populace afraid of freedom and liberty. The only true libertarian politician, Ron Paul, was only able to connect with about 5% of the voting public. There is no chance a candidate with a libertarian platform will ever win a national election. This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Bill Hicks somewhat foreshadowed the last election by referencing another famous cynic.

"I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking and screaming into the White House." ― Bill Hicks

Hillary Clinton wanted to be president so badly, she colluded with Barack Obama, Jim Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch and numerous other Deep State sycophants to ensure her victory, by attempting to entrap Donald Trump in a concocted Russian collusion plot and subsequent post-election coup to cover for their traitorous plot. I wouldn't say Donald Trump was dragged kicking and screaming into the White House, but when he ascended on the escalator at Trump Tower in June of 2015, I'm not convinced he believed he could win the presidency.

As the greatest self-promoter of our time, I think he believed a presidential run would be good for his brand, more revenue for his properties and more interest in his reality TV ventures. He was despised by the establishment within the Republican and Democrat parties. The vested interests controlling the media and levers of power in society scorned and ridiculed this brash uncouth outsider. In an upset for the ages, Trump tapped into a vein of rage and disgruntlement in flyover country and pockets within swing states, to win the presidency over Crooked Hillary and her Deep State backers.

I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. I hadn't voted for a Republican since 2000, casting protest votes for Libertarian and Constitutional Party candidates along the way. I despise the establishment, so their hatred of Trump made me vote for him. His campaign stances against foreign wars and Federal Reserve reckless bubble blowing appealed to me. I don't worship at the altar of the cult of personality. I judge men by their actions and not their words.

Trump's first two years have been endlessly entertaining as he waged war against fake news CNN, establishment Republicans, the Deep State coup attempt, and Obama loving globalists. The Twitter in Chief has bypassed the fake news media and tweets relentlessly to his followers. He provokes outrage in his enemies and enthralls his worshipers. With millions in each camp it is difficult to find an unbiased assessment of narrative versus real accomplishments.

I'm happy he has been able to stop the relentless leftward progression of our Federal judiciary. Cutting regulations and rolling back environmental mandates has been a positive. Exiting the Paris Climate Agreement and TPP, forcing NATO members to pay their fair share, and renegotiating NAFTA were all needed. Ending the war on coal and approving pipelines will keep energy costs lower. His attempts to vet Muslims entering the country have been the right thing to do. Building a wall on our southern border is the right thing to do, but he should have gotten it done when he controlled both houses.

The use of tariffs to force China to renegotiate one sided trade deals as a negotiating tactic is a high-risk, high reward gamble. If his game of chicken is successful and he gets better terms from the Chicoms, while reversing the tariffs, it would be a huge win. If the Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global recession is a certainty. Who has the upper hand? Xi is essentially a dictator for life and doesn't have to worry about elections or popularity polls. Dissent is crushed. A global recession and stock market crash would make Trump's re-election in 2020 problematic.

I'm a big supporter of lower taxes. The Trump tax cuts were sold as beneficial to the middle class. That is a false narrative. The vast majority of the tax cut benefits went to mega-corporations and rich people. Middle class home owning families with children received little or no tax relief, as exemptions were eliminated and tax deductions capped. In many cases, taxes rose for working class Americans.

With corporate profits at all time highs, massive tax cuts put billions more into their coffers. They didn't repatriate their overseas profits to a great extent. They didn't go on a massive hiring spree. They didn't invest in new facilities. They did buy back their own stock to help drive the stock market to stratospheric heights. So corporate executives gave themselves billions in bonuses, which were taxed at a much lower rate. This is considered winning in present day America.

The "Us vs. Them" issue rears its ugly head whenever Trump is held accountable for promises unkept, blatant failures, and his own version of fake news. Holding Trump to the same standards as Obama is considered traitorous by those who only root for their home team. Their standard response is that you are a Hillary sycophant or a turncoat to the home team. If you agree with a particular viewpoint or position of a liberal then you are a bad person and accused of being a lefty by Trump fanboys. Facts don't matter to cheerleaders. Competing narratives rule the day. Truthfulness not required.

The refusal to distinguish between positive actions and negative actions when assessing the performance of what passes for our political leadership by the masses is why cynicism has become my standard response to everything I see, hear or he read. The incessant level of lies permeating our society and its acceptance as the norm has led to moral decay and rampant criminality from the White House, to the halls of Congress, to corporate boardrooms, to corporate newsrooms, to government run classrooms, to the Vatican, and to households across the land. It's interesting that one of our founding fathers reflected upon this detestable human trait over two hundred years ago.

"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." – Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine's description of how moral mischief can ruin a society was written when less than 3 million people inhabited America. Consider his accurate assessment of humanity when over 300 million occupy these lands. The staggering number of corrupt prostituted sociopaths occupying positions of power within the government, corporations, media, military, churches, and academia has created a morally bankrupt empire of debt.

These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the president.

The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them. The answer to that question will strongly impact the direction and intensity of the climactic years of this Fourth Turning. What I've noticed is the shunning of those who don't take an all or nothing position regarding Trump. If you disagree with a decision, policy, or hiring decision by the man, you are accused by the pro-Trump team of being one of them (aka liberals, lefties, Hillary lovers).

If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the Trumpeteers. I don't want to be Us or Them. I just want to be me. I will judge everyone by their actions and their results. I can agree with Trump on many issues, while also agreeing with Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul, Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on other issues. I don't prescribe to the cult of personality school of thought. I didn't believe the false narratives during the Bush or Obama years, and I won't worship at the altar of the Trump narrative now.

In Part II of this article I'll assess Trump's progress thus far and try to determine whether he can defeat the Deep State.

TerryThomas , 32 minutes ago link

"The scientific and industrial revolution of modern times represents the next giant step in the mastery over nature; and here, too, an enormous increase in man's power over nature is followed by an apocalyptic drive to subjugate man and reduce human nature to the status of nature. Even where enslavement is employed in a mighty effort to tame nature, one has the feeling that the effort is but a tactic to legitimize total subjugation. Thus, despite its spectacular achievements in science and technology, the twentieth century will probably be seen in retrospect as a century mainly preoccupied with the mastery and manipulation of men. Nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, and militarism, cartelization and unionization, propaganda and advertising are all aspects of a general relentless drive to manipulate men and neutralize the unpredictability of human nature. Here, too, the atmosphere is heavy-laden with coercion and magic." --Eric Hoffer

666D Chess , 11 minutes ago link

Divide and conquer, not a very novel idea... but very effective.

Kafir Goyim , 32 minutes ago link

If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the Trumpeteers

That's not true. When Trump kisses Israeli ***, most "Trumpeteers" are outraged. That does not mean they're going to vote for Joe "I'm a Zionist" Biden, or Honest Hillary because of it, but they're still pissed.

Rich Monk , 33 minutes ago link

These predators (((them))) need to fear the Victims, us! That is what the 2ND Amendment is for. It's coming, slowly for now, but eventually it speeds up.

yellowsub , 42 minutes ago link

Ya'll a dumb fool if you think gov't as your best interests first.

legalize , 46 minutes ago link

Citation needed.

Any piece like this better be littered with footnotes and cited sources before I'm swallowing it.

I'll say it again: this is the internet, people. There's no "shortage of column space" to include links back to primary sources for your assertions. Otherwise, how am I supposed to distinguish you from another "psy op" or "paid opposition hit piece"?

bshirley1968 , 51 minutes ago link

"The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them."

If you still ponder this question, then you are pretty frickin' thick. It is obvious at this point, that he betrayed everything he campaigned on. You don't do that and call yourself one of "us".......damn sure aren't one of "me".

If I couldn't keep my word and wouldn't do what it takes to do what is right.....then I would resign. But I would not go on playing politics in a world that needs some real leadership and not another political hack.

The real battle is between Truth and Lie. No matter the name of your "team" or the "side" you support. Truth is truth and lies are lies. We don't stand for political parties, we stand for truth. We don't stand for national pride, we take pride in a nation that is truthful and trustworthy. The minute a "side" or "team" starts lying.....and justifying it.....that is the minute they become them and not one of us.

Any thinking person in this country today knows we are being lied to by the entire complex. Until someone starts telling the truth.....we are on our own. But I be damned before I am going to support any of these lying sons of bitches......and that includes Trump.

Fish Gone Bad , 37 minutes ago link

Dark comedy. All the elections have been **** choices until the last one. Take a look at Arkancide.com and start counting the bodies.

Anyone remember the news telling us how North Korea promised to turn the US into a sea of fire?? Trump absolutely went to bat for every single American to de-escalate that situation.

bshirley1968 , 31 minutes ago link

Don't tell me about Arkancide or the Clintons. I grew up in Arkansas with that sack of **** as my governor for 12 years.

NK was never a real threat to anyone. Trump didn't do ****. NK is back to building and shooting off missiles and will be teaming up with the Russians and Chinese. You are a duped bafoon.

Kafir Goyim , 28 minutes ago link

I don't think anybody thought NK was an existential threat to the US. It has still been nice making progress on bringing them back into the world and making them less of a threat to Japan and S. Korea. Trump did that.

Giant Meteor , 9 minutes ago link

Dennis Rodman did that, or that is to say, Trump an extension thereof ..

Great theater..

Look, i thought it was great that Trump went Kim Unning. I mean after all, i had talked with a few elderly folks that get their news directly from the mainstream of mainstream, vanilla news reportage. Propaganda central casting. I remember them being extremely concerned, outright petrified about that evil menace, kim gonna launch nukes any minute now. If the news would have been announced a major troop mobilization, bombing campaigns, to begin immediately they would have been completely onboard, waving the flag.

Frankly, it is only a matter of time, and folks can speculate on the country of interest, but it is coming soon to a theater near you. So many being in the crosshairs. Iran i suspect .. that's the big prize, that makes these sociopaths cream in their panties.

Probably. In the second term .. and so far, if ones honestly evaluates the "brain trust" / current crop of dimwit opposition, and in light of their past 2 plus years of moronic posturing with their hair on fire, trump will get his second term ..

666D Chess , 15 minutes ago link

Until the last one? You are retarded, the last election was a masterpiece of Rothschilds Productions. The Illuminati was watching you at their private cinema when you were voting for Trump and they were laughing their asses off.

HoodRatKing , 55 minutes ago link

The author does not realize that everyone in America, except Native American Indians, were immigrants drawn towards the false promise of hope that is the American Dream, turned nightmare..

Owning your own home, car, & raising a family in this country is so damn expensive & risky, that you'd have be on drugs or an idiot to even fall for the lies.

I don't see an us vs them, I see the #FakeMoney printers monetized every facet of life, own everything, & it truly is RENT-A-LIFE USSA, complete with bills galore, taxes galore, laws galore, jails & prisons galore, & the worst fkn country anyone would want to live in poverty & homelessness in.

At least in many 3rd world nations there is land to live off of & joblessness does not = a financial death sentence.

bshirley1968 , 39 minutes ago link

Sure. Lets all go back to living in huts.....off the land....no cars.....no electricity.....no running water......no roads....

There is a price to pay for things and it is not always in the form of money. We have given up some of our freedom for the ease and conveniences we want.

The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want to puke.

There is a balance. Don't take the other extreme or we never find balance.

911bodysnatchers322 , 56 minutes ago link

This article is moronic. One can easily prove that Trump is not like all the others in the poster. Has this author been living under a rock for the last 2.5 yrs? The past 5 presidents represent a group that has been literally trying to assassinate Trump, ruin his family, his reputation, his buisness and his future, for the audacity to be an ousider to the power network and steal (win) the presidency from under their noses. He's kept us OUT of war. He's dissolved the treachery that was keeping us in the middle east through gaslighitng and a proxy fake war that is ISIS, the globalists' / nato / fiveys / uk's fake mercenary army

Giant Meteor , 25 minutes ago link

And yet, I'll never forget all the smiling faces at the gala wedding affair.

Happier times ..

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/us/politics/ex-ally-donald-trump-now-heaps-scorn-on-bill-clinton.html

And yes, thanks in advance for noting the link is from New York slime, but i believe the picture in this case anyway, was not photo shopped.

She is, (hillary) after all, good people, a real fighter ..

**** .. mission accomplished ..

ExPat2018 , 1 hour ago link

The greatest threat to the USA is its own dumbed down drugged up citizens who cannot compete with anyone. America is a big military powerhouse but that doens't make successful countries

You must have intelligent people

America doesn't have that anymore.

JuliaS , 1 hour ago link

Notice how modern narrative is getting manipulated. What is being reported and referenced is completely different from how things are. And knowing that we can assume that the entire history is a fabricated lie, written by the ruling class to support its status in the minds of obedient citizens.

911bodysnatchers322 , 54 minutes ago link

This article is garbage propaganda that proves that they think we aren't keeping score or paying attention. The gaslighting won't work when it relies on so much counterthink, willful ignorance, counterfacts and weaponized omissions

istt , 1 hour ago link

The reality is the de-escalation of wars, the stability of our currency and our economy, and the moral re-grounding of our culture does not occur until we do what over 100 countries have done over the centuries, beginning in Carthage in 250AD.

fersur , 1 hour ago link

There's an old saying; "Congress does 2 things well Nothing and Protest" said by Pence Live-Streamed 4 hours ago at USMCA America First speech !

Good, Bad and Ugly

The Good is President Trump works extreme daily hours trying his best !

The Bad is Haters miss every bit of whatever their President Trump does that is good !

The Ugly is Hater Reporters ignoring World events, scared of possibly shining President Trump fairly !

SHsparx , 1 hour ago link

You really are making it a bit too obvious, bro.

911bodysnatchers322 , 52 minutes ago link

The congress are statusquotarians. If they solved the problems they say they would,they'd be out of a job. and that job is sitting there acting like a naddler or toxic post turtle leprechaun with a charisma and skill level of zero. Their staff do all the work, half of them barely read, though they probably can

SHsparx , 1 hour ago link

I still think 1st and 2nd ammedment is predicated on which party rules the house. If a Dem gets into the WH, we're fucked. Kiss those Iast two dying amendments goodbye for good.

Zeusky Babarusky , 1 hour ago link

If we rely on any party to preserve the 1st or 2nd Amendments, we are already fucked. What should preserve the 1st and 2nd Amendments is the absolute fear of anyone in government even mentioning suppressing or removing them. When the very thought of doing anything to lessen the rights advocated in these two amendments, causes a politician to piss in their pants, liberty will be preserved. As it is now citizens fear the government, and as a result tyranny continues to grow and fester as a cancer.

Zoomorph , 1 hour ago link

In other words, those amendments are already lost... we're just waiting for the final dictate to come down.

Zeusky Babarusky , 1 hour ago link

You may very well be right. I still hold out hope, but upon seeing what our society is quickly morphing into, that hope seems to fade more each and every day.

SHsparx , 49 minutes ago link

@ Zeusky Babarusky

I couldn't agree with you more.

Unfortunately, it is what it is, which is why I used the word "dying."

Those two amendments are on their deathbed, and if a Dem gets in the house, that'll be the nail in the coffin.

bshirley1968 , 1 hour ago link

If you think the 1st and 2nd amendments are reliant on who is in office, then you are already done. Why don't you try growing a pair and being an American for once in your life.

I will always have a 1st and 2nd "amendment" for as long as I live. Life is meaningless without them.....as far as I am concerned. Good thing the founders didn't wait for king George to give them what they "felt" was theirs.....by the laws of Nature and Nature's God.

I hope the democrats get the power......and I hope they come for the guns......maybe then pussies like you will finally have to **** or get off the pot......for once in your life. There are worse things than dying.

Nephilim , 1 hour ago link

THEHAZELFLOCKOFCRANES

BRINDLED FOOT,

AUSTRALIAN.

caveofgoldcaveofold

Zoomorph , 1 hour ago link

"Why do we have wars?"

"Because life is war: fighting for survival, resources, and what is best in the world."

"Why do people say war is bad?"

"Because they are useful idiots who have been tricked by religion and/or weak degenerates who are too weary to participate."

delta0ne , 1 hour ago link

This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Unless we get rid of *** influencing from abroad and domestically. Getting rid of English King few hundred years ago was a joke! this would be a challenge because dual-citizens masquerading as locals.

blind_understanding , 1 hour ago link

Last revolution (1776) we targeted the WRONG ENEMY.

We targeted King George III instead of the private bankers who owned of the Bank of England and the issued of the British-pound currency.

George III was himself up to his ears in debt to them by 1776, when the bankers installed George Washington to replace George III as their middleman in the American colonies, by way of the phony revolution.

Phony because ownership of the central bank and currency (Federal-Reserve Banks, Federal-Reserve notes) we use, remains in the same banking families' hands to this day. The same parasite remains within our government.

djrichard , 1 hour ago link

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/05/16/the-gervais-principle-vi-children-of-an-absent-god/

It is this strangely incomplete calculus that creates the shifting Loser world of rifts and alliances. By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are able to manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms. The result is that the Losers end up blaming each other for their losses, seek collective emotional resolution, and fail to adequately address the balance sheet of material rewards and losses.

To succeed, this strategy requires that Losers not look too closely at the non-emotional books. This is why, as we saw last time, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while they are being manipulated.

[May 20, 2019] EP.744 Presidential Candidate Mike Gravel -- Joe Biden's Conventional Wisdom is AMERICAN IMPERIALISM!

May 11, 2019 | www.youtube.com

On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to Democratic Presidential candidate Mike Gravel who discusses why he is joining the race to pull the debate to the left, the nature of his contenders such as Joe Biden, Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders, US regime change attempts in Venezuela and escalating tension with Iran, Julian Assange's imprisonment in the UK and the US' extradition request. Next we speak to Chris Williamson MP, in his first international interview since being suspended by the Labour Party.

He discusses NHS privatisation by stealth with the new GP contracts due to be signed next week, Israeli oppression of Palestinians, Trump's escalation against Iran and Julian Assange's on-going imprisonment in Belmarsh Prison.

Gary Salisbury , 1 week ago (edited)

Pompeo Finally Tells the Truth: 'We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal'" !! He makes me want to Puke !! His duplicity has no bounds !! A swamp dweller of NOTE !!

B. Greene , 1 week ago (edited)

Senator Gravel needs 100k unique contributions to qualify for the DNC debates. Help him shake things up with a $1 donation at: www.mikegravel.com

TrickyVickey , 1 week ago (edited)

Pompeo is a murderous "dictator pusher" for the military industrial complex.

harriet , 6 days ago (edited)

Love Mike gravel, honest, good, genuine person with pure heart and soul! Donate dollar to get him on the debates! Love Chris Williamson also a great men we need more people like these! This channel should have way more subs and views, great show!

Muzza Man , 1 week ago (edited)

The proven oil reserves in Venezuela are recognized as the largest in the world, totaling 297 billion barrels . They are going to be INVADED by the real world terrorists, the USA,BRITAIN, and their puppet allies !!!! Need I say more?

invisble man , 1 week ago

Joe Biden could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and sniff everybody and he would not lose any voters.

[May 20, 2019] The US must NOT go to war with Iran

Notable quotes:
"... The same old death dealers are on the march again. Not for freedom, not for stability, but for profit. ..."
"... it's one of me most Powerful messages I've ever seen on air ..."
May 16, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Trump promised to get the US out of "stupid wars." But now he and John Bolton are on the brink of launching us into a very stupid and costly war with Iran. Join me in sending a strong message to President Trump: The US must NOT go to war with Iran.

yekalf , 4 days ago

#TULSI2020 America needs you now more than ever. No more stupid wars!

Pug , 4 days ago

#Tulsi2020 No more Zio-NeoCon wars targeting the innocent.

Silva Surfa , 4 days ago

Madam President 2020 ✌ Bring On The Debates! No More Wars!

donald smeed , 4 days ago

Another strong and correct policy position from Tulsi!!! Can't wait until the debates!!!

Guo Mashi , 4 days ago

Truth and courage. Thank you! This should be everywhere all the time. US needs to hear it.

Nature Boy , 4 days ago

The same old death dealers are on the march again. Not for freedom, not for stability, but for profit.

RetireforLessCR , 4 days ago

it's one of me most Powerful messages I've ever seen on air

elijah sessom , 4 days ago

We are with you Tulsi......your truth and courage is a thing of beauty.

harriet , 4 days ago

Thank you for truth telling and calling it like it is! Tulsi 2020

Adam Albrec , 4 days ago

Yep. Iraq almost bankrupted us, and Iran is far more able to defend itself.

Katherine Garrett , 4 days ago

Thank you for your message of peace, Tulsi. 2020!☮️

Pankaj verma , 4 days ago

No More Wars! Tulsi 2020

George Washington , 4 days ago

NO WAR WITH IRAN! BRING THE TROOPS HOME!! TULSI2020

tasty rabbit , 4 days ago

I think she could be a perfect President at given times for usa. She would save a lot of American lives and will leave the white house a lot cleaner when she leaves.

Wolfking Of SI , 4 days ago

It's a tragedy that Tulsi Gabbert is not number one in the polls right now. She's the only one consistently right on all the issues. I can't wait for the debates.

WhiteKilt WhiteKilt , 4 days ago (edited)

NO More Wars! Give Peace a chance. Support Representative Tulsi Gabbard for President. A True American Patriot and Veteran, fighting for Peace. Tulsi2020.com

Donny Filkin , 4 days ago

Mike Gravel gave you big props on the tim black show last night! We love you tulsi!

Rocky Hart , 4 days ago

Tulsi Gabbard should be polling at 80% !! What the HELL is wrong with America! Let's elect Tulsi!!!

slow grow , 4 days ago

All my love and respect Tulsi.

[May 20, 2019] Tulsi Update 19 May 2019 (Rogan Bump, Oliver Stone)

Notable quotes:
"... After that interview, Tulsi's Instagram account gained 11,000 new followers and her Twitter account gained 30,000 new followers. The more people watching her on a regular basis, the better! ..."
"... Ever since the Rogan interview, the number of times her name appears in a mainstream media (MSM) headline has seen a jump. Before the interview, she was getting a maximum of 1, sometimes rarely 2 headlines per day--often zero. Since the interview she has been in the 4 or 5 per day range. Today (May 19), she is ranked number 5 for all Democratic candidate name mentions in MSM headlines. ..."
"... the embedded video are very powerful as to why Tulsi is different from every other candidate of either party. ..."
"... she's a primary target of the DNC and establishment Democrats, possibly even more so than Bernie this time. Or maybe they're tied as targets? ..."
"... She called out the DNC's unfairness to Bernie well before wikileaks showed us exactly how correct she was. ..."
"... Oliver Stone and Stephen Cohen are of course two independent types who are most concerned about our deteriorated relations with Russia, based on fake news and Russophobic media hysteria. Cohen has largely been blackballed from the MSM, with the exception of Tucker Carlson's show and the semi-sane radio conservative John Batchelor. ..."
"... It was because of the latest McCarthyite smear piece on Tulsi Gabbard in the Daily Beast that I again donated to her campaign. Unlike Bernie, she is longer than a long shot to get the nomination, but it's important that her voice on FP be heard. While I also favor Bernie and Andrew Yang, their comments on FP, sadly, are merely occasional carefully crafted footnotes designed not to attract much attention or controversy. ..."
May 20, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

apenultimate on Sun, 05/19/2019 - 11:30am

I think this ad is great!

Tulsi's 2.5 hour interview with Joe Rogan 6 days ago resulted in a solid attention bump.

The YouTube version of the video has so far garnered more than 1.6 million views, and on average his podcast downloads are about double that number.

After that interview, Tulsi's Instagram account gained 11,000 new followers and her Twitter account gained 30,000 new followers. The more people watching her on a regular basis, the better!

Ever since the Rogan interview, the number of times her name appears in a mainstream media (MSM) headline has seen a jump. Before the interview, she was getting a maximum of 1, sometimes rarely 2 headlines per day--often zero. Since the interview she has been in the 4 or 5 per day range. Today (May 19), she is ranked number 5 for all Democratic candidate name mentions in MSM headlines.

Finally, Oliver Stone has sent out a Tweet, essentially endorsing Tulsi.

www.youtube.com/embed/wVJXLlEE5bU

gulfgal98 on Sun, 05/19/2019 - 7:03pm
This one tweet and

the embedded video are very powerful as to why Tulsi is different from every other candidate of either party.

Since I was young, I knew I wanted to use my life to serve others. It's why I chose to serve as a soldier & in politics. I've never had any ambition to "be president" -- it's always been about doing my best to be of service and how I can make a greater positive impact. pic.twitter.com/NfTSUhbFXX

-- Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) May 19, 2019

bobswern on Mon, 05/20/2019 - 12:51am
I don't know what Tulsi's campaign cash coffers are like...

...as I post this comment, but I do know--from a professional/political media standpoint--that this commercial about the Iran situation is, by far and away, the best piece of political media I've seen since Bernie's "America" commercial in 2016 .

If she wants to punch through the crowd, right now (for the moment, because the Iran situation will change, one way or another, and maybe rapidly, going forward), she should push this spot early and often, as much as possible (as her campaign can afford it, and then maybe even a little more than it thinks it can afford, too).

HenryAWallace on Mon, 05/20/2019 - 5:04am
I so appreciate your keeping us updated about Tulsi.

She has become my favorite candidate on policies, but being favored by Gravel and Stone doesn't hurt, either, to say the least. Of the passengers in the Democratic clown car, I like her and Bernie most. How I will vote may depend upon what polls in my state tell me just before primary day about her and Bernie. Or, I may go ahead and vote for Tulsi, no matter what. In that respect, I am undecided at this time.

Just checked my former message board. They are attacking her right and right (sic). (Not "left and right:" Barely a leftist still posts on that board; and those who still do must watch themselves.) So, she's a primary target of the DNC and establishment Democrats, possibly even more so than Bernie this time. Or maybe they're tied as targets?

And, why not? She called out the DNC's unfairness to Bernie well before wikileaks showed us exactly how correct she was.

irishking on Mon, 05/20/2019 - 8:58am
ron paul is a fan

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ron-paul-calls-tulsi-gabbard-ver...

wokkamile on Mon, 05/20/2019 - 9:59am
Good for Joe Rogan,

a worthy podcaster who often has on interesting, independent thinkers and public figures who go against the establishment grain. (see e.g. his several interviews with author Graham Hancock) Not perfect or quite as good as I'd prefer, but far better than most.

Oliver Stone and Stephen Cohen are of course two independent types who are most concerned about our deteriorated relations with Russia, based on fake news and Russophobic media hysteria. Cohen has largely been blackballed from the MSM, with the exception of Tucker Carlson's show and the semi-sane radio conservative John Batchelor.

It was because of the latest McCarthyite smear piece on Tulsi Gabbard in the Daily Beast that I again donated to her campaign. Unlike Bernie, she is longer than a long shot to get the nomination, but it's important that her voice on FP be heard. While I also favor Bernie and Andrew Yang, their comments on FP, sadly, are merely occasional carefully crafted footnotes designed not to attract much attention or controversy.

[May 20, 2019] The Democrats just led the country on a three year-long wild goose chase. Will they apologize by Mike Whitney

This was a color revolution run by consortium of intelligence agencies and the leadership of the Democratic Party, not "wild goose chase". The key participants perfectly undersood that this is "regime change" operation.
And Russiagate was not about Trump but about profits of military industrial complex and control over US foreign policy. BTW Trump folded just in three months after inauguration.
This is a very weak article, but some comments are excellent.
Notable quotes:
"... The damage the Democrats (and their allies in the FBI and media) have done to the country is incalculable, but even worse, is the damage they've done to their own party. ..."
"... the Democrats have betrayed the trust of the people who supported their respective campaigns with the implicit understanding that they would work for the progressive reforms that improve the lives of ordinary working people and not behave like hectoring, obstructionist crybabies who refuse to respect the outcome of elections if the winner is not to their liking ..."
"... What we've seen in the last few years is not only unacceptable, it's also degraded our politics and divided the country into rival camps ..."
"... Russiagate has shed light on the cozy relationship between the Democratic party, the Intelligence Agencies, the FBI and the media. ..."
"... Their relentless, but coordinated attacks on the president strongly suggest that there may be an alliance between the various groups of which the American people are completely unaware. This suspicion seems at least partially substantiated by an article that appeared in the World Socialist Web Site titled "The CIA Democrats". ..."
"... CIA ran this whole show. Not Brennan, CIA the institution. Gina Haspel was in London marshaling the foreign intelligence cutouts, and now she's DCI. ..."
"... In this day and age nobody swallows the CIA propaganda "CIA works for the president." Don Gregg stuck that into the Pike Report after he threatened the committees with martial law. So let's stop pretending that CIA rule is man bites dog. Your government is CIA. ..."
"... Far from mourning its failure to depose Trump, the Deep State is celebrating its own prowess in leading him by the nose. The Deep State has learned to stop worrying and love the bombastic orange clown. ..."
"... Lets not pretend Russia-phobia isn't bipartisan. Even Trump went along with it by placing sanctions on Russia for imaginary "meddling". Making RT register as foreign agent. ..."
"... Lets not forget that Trump admin also expelled Russian diplomats and closed their consulate in Seattle over the bogus Skripal attack in Britain. ..."
"... Trump also launched missiles on Syria over the false flag chemical attack staged by the White Helmets (ISIS), that Trump admin. is still funding. Further poking at Russia. ..."
"... The Trump-Russia collusion scandal was the Deep State's attempt at a coup. The Mueller investigation failed to deliver so they now move on to their next coup attempt. ..."
"... In the 2018 mid-terms some 70 percent of Democratic voters, along with a high number of Independents and even Republicans believed that Trump had colluded with Russia. Yet with so many voters basing their voting decisions on fake news and misinformation, once again, the Left doesn't seemed concerned at all. ..."
"... The "Democrats" – one half of the corrupt set of American bootlicking politicians – spent three years screaming and howling and wearing Trump down until now he is governing just like Hillary Clinton would have. Endless pointless winless wars that serve only to spread chaos and enrich defense contractors, continuing subsidies of Wall Street, tax cuts for big time-plutocrats and coming soon nice juicey regressive taxes for you and me! – and of course, more legal immigration and a government-enabled invasion of our southern border by central America because the rich like cheap labor. ..."
"... That Müeller found nothing to corroborate collusion is likely the result of NSA intercepts that would disprove anything his team and the other agencies might fabricate as proof of the charge. There are a couple serious dividing lines in the national security state that have made it difficult for the coup conspirators to succeed; what will be interesting is if they do in fact get away with trying. ..."
"... Bill Clinton's telecommunication act of 1996 did a lot of damage. Clinton was a CFR agent for the parasite. ..."
"... The fourth estate centralized and came under corporate control after 1996. Those who are remotely aware know that the press organs are owned by our favorite in-group which has messianic goals. This in-group, while small in number, has goals amplified by money power. ..."
"... The neoCONs won and have Trump under control and he's hiring Bush-men as fast as he can ..."
"... it looks like Trump will run in 2020 as a WAR President, in Venezuela and/or Iran. The Bush/Trump Crime Family has been born from the ashes of the Bush/Clinton Crime Family. ..."
"... A crime of obstruction would be something like the destruction subpoenaed evidence; such as taking Bleachbit to your e-mails, or smashing your smartphones with hammers ..."
"... They just go from one lie they're more than happy to believe to another – this time its "obstruction" and the media will push that lie too ..."
"... You can legally hire or fire your maid but if your motivation -- intention in either of those acts is to bribe her or threaten her because she knows something about you that could get you in legal trouble. Then it is obstruction. ..."
May 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

For the last two and a half years, the Democrats have led the country on a wild goose chase that has been a complete waste of time and achieved absolutely nothing. The absurd conspiracy theory that the President of the United States was an agent of the Kremlin has been thoroughly debunked by the Mueller Report which states that there was neither "coordination" nor "conspiracy with the Trump campaign and Russia." Even so, congressional Democrats– still determined to destroy Trump by whatever means possible– have switched from the "collusion" allegations to vicious attacks on Attorney General William Barr and demands for Trump's tax returns.

The ease with which the Dems have shifted from their ridiculous claims that Trump was "Putin's stooge" to this new round of vitriolic accusations and mud-slinging, shows that party leaders have not only lost touch with reality, but also, that they have no interest in governing the country. The Democratic party in its current form, is less a political organization than it is a permanent inquisition led by duplicitous vipers (Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Jerry Nadler) who feel entitled to use the Justice System to pursue their own petty political vendetta against a Beltway outsider who had the audacity to win the 2016 presidential election and whose views on foreign policy do not jibe with those of their elite paymasters.

The damage the Democrats (and their allies in the FBI and media) have done to the country is incalculable, but even worse, is the damage they've done to their own party. By focusing exclusively on Donald Trump and the fictitious Russian boogieman, the Democrats have betrayed the trust of the people who supported their respective campaigns with the implicit understanding that they would work for the progressive reforms that improve the lives of ordinary working people and not behave like hectoring, obstructionist crybabies who refuse to respect the outcome of elections if the winner is not to their liking.

These are the people who have been hurt most by the Russiagate fiasco, the people who thought their Democratic candidates actually wanted to run the country, but soon discovered that those same representatives would rather spend all of their time chasing Russian ghosts down a rabbit hole.

Here's an excerpt from an article by Andrew McCarthy that helps to explain what the Russia probe was really all about:

"Russiagate has always been a political narrative masquerading as a federal investigation. Its objective, plain and simple, has been twofold: first, to hamstring Donald Trump's capacity to press the agenda on which he ran .and ultimately, to render him unelectable come autumn 2020 .

The Russia counterintelligence probe, based on the fraudulent projection of a Trump-Putin conspiracy, was always a pretext to conduct a criminal investigation despite the absence of a predicate crime. The criminal investigation, in turn, was always a pretext for congressional impeachment chatter. And the congressional impeachment chatter is a pretext for the real agenda: Making Trump an ineffective president now, and an un-reelectable president 18 months from now.

They try to make it look like law. It has always been politics." ( "Russiagate: Law in the Service of Partisan Politics" , Andrew McCarthy, National Review)

Indeed, Russiagate "has always been politics", but the quality of our politics has deteriorated significantly in the last few years, a point that's worth mulling over for a minute or two. For nearly three years we've seen one party rip up the rulebook and engage in a full-blown, scorched earth, no-holds-barred blitzkrieg on the president of the United States. At no time has there been any effort to discuss issues, ideals, policies, or competing visions of the future. Instead, every ounce of energy has been devoted to inflicting maximum damage on the man who, many Democrats think, is deserving of whatever horrendous reprisal they direct at him.

The Democrats have made no secret of their hatred for Trump or their desire to drive him from office. They have openly supported the dirty tricks, the hyper-ventilating headlines, and the relentless smear campaigns that have been aimed at him from Day 1. Through Russiagate, the Dems have tried to frame Trump as a backstabbing traitor who sold out his country to a foreign power, but now that Mueller has proved that Trump was falsely accused, the Dems have deftly switched to another line of attack altogether. This isn't how sincere liberals fight to implement a plan for progressive change. This is how unprincipled mercenaries pursue the politics of personal destruction. There's a big difference.

This isn't about Trump. Trump could be the worst president in history, and it still wouldn't excuse the contemptible way he's been treated. Is it ever acceptable to spy on a presidential campaign, to insert confidential informants who try to entrap campaign assistants to gather information that can be used to intimidate, blackmail or impeach the president? Is it ever acceptable to leak classified information to the media as part of a malignant scheme to destroy a candidate's reputation? Is it ever acceptable to enlist senior-level officials at the FBI, CIA and NSA to prevent a candidate from being elected or to engage in a stealth campaign of slanders, smears and innuendo that cast a shadow over the legitimacy of the government?

No, it's not acceptable. Never.

What we've seen in the last few years is not only unacceptable, it's also degraded our politics and divided the country into rival camps. We've come to expect that every morning will bring some new crisis centered on Trump's latest tweet followed by hours of incendiary coverage on the cable news channels, all aimed at throwing more gas on the raging fire that's engulfed the country. And, of course, no one scandal has consumed more time or been more inflammatory than the Russia probe. Here's how The Nation's Stephen Cohen sums it up in a recent article:

"Now in its third year, Russiagate is the worst, most corrosive, and most fraudulent political scandal in modern American history. these Russiagate allegations continue to inflict grave damage on fundamental institutions of American democracy. They impugn the integrity of the presidency and now the office of the attorney general. They degrade the many Democratic members of Congress who persist in clinging to the allegations and thus the Democratic Party and Congress. And they have enticed mainstream media into one of the worst episodes of journalistic malpractice in modern times.

Russiagate's unproven allegations are an aggressive malignancy spreading through America's politics to the most vital areas of national security policy." ( "Russiagate Zealotry Continues To Endanger Western National Security" , Stephen Cohen, The Nation)

Cohen's piece cuts to the heart of the matter. Russiagate has not only undermined our "fundamental institutions", it has also impacted our "national security." But I would argue that the damage caused by the Trump-Russia investigation is even greater than Cohen describes, mainly because Russiagate has shed light on the cozy relationship between the Democratic party, the Intelligence Agencies, the FBI and the media. These are the institutions that have waged war on Trump from the very beginning. Their relentless, but coordinated attacks on the president strongly suggest that there may be an alliance between the various groups of which the American people are completely unaware. This suspicion seems at least partially substantiated by an article that appeared in the World Socialist Web Site titled "The CIA Democrats". Here's an excerpt:

"An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in US political history.

If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in the lower chamber of Congress." ( "The CIA Democrats" , Patrick Martin, World Socialist Web Site)

Would anyone be surprised to find out that the CIA was taking a more activist role in domestic politics; that it's actually grooming its own candidates for elections, that it's strengthening its influence in the media and its ties with one of the main political parties, all in an effort to better control electoral outcomes and tighten its grip on power?

No, no one would be surprised at all. And although we don't yet know all the details, there are signs that the Intel agencies, the FBI, the media and high-ranking Democrats may have been working secretively for the same objectives, to either sabotage the 2016 presidential election or gather incriminating information on Trump that could be used at some later date. All of this coordinated activity hints at the emergence of a one-party political system that is guided by agents and elites who the American people don't know and never voted for.

In any event, we're going to find out alot more about these illicit connections as the Justice Department's three separate probes gain pace and reveal how "the FBI used one party's 'opposition research' as the basis to get a warrant from a secret court to spy on the other party's campaign." That is the crux of the matter. That's the question that will throw open the curtains and shed light on the suspicious ties between the DNC, the CIA, the FBI and the media, all of who may have been directly involved in the dodgy plan to depose the president of the United States.

Rational , says: May 15, 2019 at 7:15 pm GMT

THE DEMOGANGSTERS ARE THE REAL CRIMINALS; MUELLER WAS AN AGENT OF THE DEEP STATE, BUT STILL FOUND NO EVIDENCE.

Thanks, Sir. You are so right -- Russiagate is a manufactured scam to get an elected President out of office, to carry out a coup by using our criminal justice system as a criminal enterprise. And to cover up the real crimes of the real criminals, the Demogangsters like Hillary, etc.

Mueller was a member of the Deep State. If there was ANY collusion (whatever statute there is that outlaws talking to somebody in a foreign country), Mueller would have found it or invented it.

The fact that he could not shows that the the Demogangsters had no grounds whatsoever to manufacture this fake "Russiagate" scandal.

In reality, this scandal should be called Demogangstergate.

The DOJ should now investigate the real criminals, the Demogansters. Hillary and Soros are America's biggest criminals and they belongs in prison for life.

dearieme , says: May 15, 2019 at 7:28 pm GMT
Two minutes – that would let you easily quantify how tired someone is, how badly they are suffering from the flu, whether they are showing unusual intellectual decline with age,

If I were an employer I might like to learn how my staff's performance declined with longer working days, with a view to telling them not to work excessive hours. Or with a view to finding how best to intersperse the working day with breaks – for food, chat, exercise, or whatever.

I've long wondered why corporations pay large sums to, for instance, management consultants or lawyers, when much of the work will be done by novices, sobbing from exhaustion at their desks.

Digital Samizdat , says: May 15, 2019 at 11:41 pm GMT

Is it ever acceptable to spy on a presidential campaign ? Is it ever acceptable to leak classified information to the media as part of a malignant scheme to destroy a candidate's reputation? Is it ever acceptable to enlist senior-level officials at the FBI, CIA and NSA to prevent a candidate from being elected ?

No, it's not acceptable. Never.

Sure it is! If you're Anastacio Somoza, and you're running a banana republic which is, sadly, what we now are.

Reg Cæsar , says: May 16, 2019 at 1:30 am GMT

their ridiculous claims that Trump was "Putin's stooge"

If they want to pivot to portraying Netanyahu as his seeing-eye dog, there's already a Portuguese cartoon for that.

anonymous [340] Disclaimer , says: May 16, 2019 at 8:04 am GMT
@dearieme I believe that you meant to post this under Mr. Thompson's article.
ABC 123 , says: May 16, 2019 at 2:14 pm GMT
There's an odd relapse into statist indoctrination in this generally sound argument. The idea that a rigidly-controlled centralized state party can "enlist senior-level officials at the FBI, CIA and NSA" is bassackwards. CIA ran this whole show. Not Brennan, CIA the institution. Gina Haspel was in London marshaling the foreign intelligence cutouts, and now she's DCI. As for the litany of political interference in the paragraphs, CIA's been doing that for seven decades now. In this day and age nobody swallows the CIA propaganda "CIA works for the president." Don Gregg stuck that into the Pike Report after he threatened the committees with martial law. So let's stop pretending that CIA rule is man bites dog. Your government is CIA.

And outrage over casting a shadow over the 'legitimacy' of government? Pul-leeease. Legitimacy is a squishy term. Let's stick to the term of art, sovereignty. Sovereignty is responsibility. One agency, CIA, is chartered with impunity. They do anything they they want and get away with it. CIA's freedom from responsibility means the USA is not a sovereign state but a criminal enterprise. Perhaps you want to defend the legitimacy of the criminal enterprise that's got its hooks in you. Knock yourself out.

This is not to impugn your good faith. We all have to fight our way out of decades of CIA brainwashing. It's simple. CIA has multiple redundant get-out-of-jail-free cards and secret books for untrammeled power of the purse. That's the definition of arbitrary rule. The crux of the matter is CIA runs your country.

fenestol , says: May 16, 2019 at 5:49 pm GMT
Far from mourning its failure to depose Trump, the Deep State is celebrating its own prowess in leading him by the nose. The Deep State has learned to stop worrying and love the bombastic orange clown.

A worthy article.

Endgame Napoleon , says: May 16, 2019 at 9:58 pm GMT
If they apologize, it will remove their Russian Trolls decoy, the one placed carefully in the water to keep the corporate-owned media focused on just this one cluster of minor global shenanigans, not all of the others, like the Biden's involvement in Ukraine or most of the US Congress getting rich off of something It's not by building businesses than employ underemployed US citizens. In addition to their multi six-figure salaries, they're all getting rich off of placing bets on the rigged stock casino and the global-offshoring / outsourcing / welfare-rigged-mass-immigration economy.
redmudhooch , says: May 17, 2019 at 1:51 am GMT
Lets not pretend Russia-phobia isn't bipartisan. Even Trump went along with it by placing sanctions on Russia for imaginary "meddling". Making RT register as foreign agent. Its all a distraction. Might have to actually do some real work if we weren't having this replay of the red scare. People might start talking about Trumps, as well as most of DC's real owners if they stop screaming about Putin.

Not everyone went along with it, Tulsi didn't, she even introduced legislation to require paper ballots in future elections to prevent imaginary "meddling" or hacking, no one in DC is interested, which either means there is no election meddling, or they don't actually care, they just wanted to poke at Russia.

Lets not forget that Trump admin also expelled Russian diplomats and closed their consulate in Seattle over the bogus Skripal attack in Britain.

Trump expels Russians, closes consulate in response to poison attack in Great Britain
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/26/trump-expels-russians-closes-consulate-response-poison-attack/457930002/

Donald Trump's team says it is ready to block Russian election meddling this year
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/08/02/election-security-donald-trumps-team-warns-against-midterms-meddling/889539002/

The Trump administration announced sweeping new sanctions on Russians in its biggest response yet to election meddling
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-new-russia-sanctions-election-meddling-cyber-attacks-2018-3/

Trump also launched missiles on Syria over the false flag chemical attack staged by the White Helmets (ISIS), that Trump admin. is still funding. Further poking at Russia.

Mike from Jersey , says: May 17, 2019 at 11:30 pm GMT
Whitney's comment:

But I would argue that the damage caused by the Trump-Russia investigation is even greater than Cohen describes, mainly because Russiagate has shed light on the cozy relationship between the Democratic party, the Intelligence Agencies, the FBI and the media.

nails it. You cannot call this a democracy when a political party, the federal police, the intelligence agencies and the media all collude to invalidate an election. You can call it a lot of things, but you can't call it democracy.

animalogic , says: May 19, 2019 at 12:52 pm GMT
"You can call it a lot of things, but you can't call it democracy."

Correct. I'll call it a snowballing blob of degeneracy -- from A to Z. We, the world, are in so much trouble.

tanabear , says: May 20, 2019 at 4:27 am GMT
The Trump-Russia collusion scandal was the Deep State's attempt at a coup. The Mueller investigation failed to deliver so they now move on to their next coup attempt.

We know that the Left and the Democrats are insincere when they say they are outraged by Trump colluding with Russia. They aren't. If it is treason to get "dirt" on your political opponent from Russia then why isn't the Left and Democrats outraged by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and Fusion GPS. The Steele dossier which was used to get a FISA warrant to spy on Carter Page and the Trump campaign came in part from Russian sources. So paid for political opposition, with Russian sub-sources, was used to go after Trump and interfere in an election. Yet they aren't the slightest bit bothered by any of this. In the 2018 mid-terms some 70 percent of Democratic voters, along with a high number of Independents and even Republicans believed that Trump had colluded with Russia. Yet with so many voters basing their voting decisions on fake news and misinformation, once again, the Left doesn't seemed concerned at all.

The Trump-Russia collusion narrative was just a pretext to start an investigation to hamstring the Trump Presidency. It is the same story all over again. Why did we invade Iraq in 2003? Was it because of Weapons of Mass Destruction(WMD) and links to Al-Qaeda? No, that was just the pretext to start the war. The real reasons for the Iraq war and the Russian Collusion conspiracy can never be stated publically.

renfro , says: May 20, 2019 at 5:04 am GMT
Oh barf good repubs, bad dems ! Grow up little Mikey ..they are both sheep herders and you are their sheep
TG , says: May 20, 2019 at 5:23 am GMT
Completely missing the point.

The "Democrats" – one half of the corrupt set of American bootlicking politicians – spent three years screaming and howling and wearing Trump down until now he is governing just like Hillary Clinton would have. Endless pointless winless wars that serve only to spread chaos and enrich defense contractors, continuing subsidies of Wall Street, tax cuts for big time-plutocrats and coming soon nice juicey regressive taxes for you and me! – and of course, more legal immigration and a government-enabled invasion of our southern border by central America because the rich like cheap labor.

The "Democrats" do not exist as a coherent ideology, they are a collection of whores who will do whatever they are paid to do. They have served their purpose in whipping up mindless hysteria – really, wanting to save trillions by not fighting pointless foreign wars and spending that on ourselves, that's racism and fascism and Literally Hitler? Really?

So I would say that, operationally, mission accomplished.

Anonymous [151] Disclaimer , says: May 20, 2019 at 5:25 am GMT
CIA ran this whole show. maybe, but I think it was all of the intelligence agencies.. British M-16, Israeli Mossad, and the Saudi Arabian groups..French, and even the Egyptian.. .. Turkey too.. they operate the functional parts of government everywhere.

... ... ...

The Alarmist , says: May 20, 2019 at 8:38 am GMT
That Müeller found nothing to corroborate collusion is likely the result of NSA intercepts that would disprove anything his team and the other agencies might fabricate as proof of the charge. There are a couple serious dividing lines in the national security state that have made it difficult for the coup conspirators to succeed; what will be interesting is if they do in fact get away with trying.
SafeNow , says: May 20, 2019 at 9:01 am GMT
The essay's ending – we will: "find out a lot more" "reveal" "throw open the curtain" "shed light". That's it??? Maybe this a deliberately subtle way of saying: there will be no real consequences; and so all is lost; banana Republic, soft dictatorship. In fact, if it's merely an opened-up curtain, the result in the MSM will be plaudits for the actors' patriotism.
Squarebeard , says: May 20, 2019 at 9:17 am GMT
@TG

The "Democrats" do not exist as a coherent ideology, they are a collection of whores who will do whatever they are paid to do. They have served their purpose in whipping up mindless hysteria – really, wanting to save trillions by not fighting pointless foreign wars and spending that on ourselves, that's racism and fascism and Literally Hitler? Really?

They think as a group and take their "lifestyle" cues from the likes of Rachel MadCow, HRC, the Obamas and "their" opinion on foreign policy comes from 3 letter agency people who "warn" them about treasonous Trump and foreign super villains. They wring their hands and clutch their pearls over the laws of the land being enforced at the southern border and the "Muslim ban" but nothing brings out the preemptive smelling salts quicker than Trump's refusal to adhere to liberal speech codes and middle class fake politeness.

When Trump and his neocon attack dogs threaten war on multiple fronts, drone Muslim wedding parties and goat herders, aid and abet the KSA and UAE war against Yemen, use sanctions as a weapon of war against countries that present no threat to America and prioritize Israel's interests over our own, the liberals breathe a secret sigh of relief and commend "literally Hitler" for finally acting presidential. All the righteous "concern" about POC, transfags and other "traditionally" oppressed groups is fake and a way for them to soothe the cognitive dissonance between their own self-image as "caring" and fair minded people and the reality that they don't care how many foreigners get killed by DC's foreign policy or how many of their own countrymen are left to suffer in despair from the fallout of their livelihoods being offshored.

What they do care about is their own material comfort and the illusion/delusion that they are good, morally upright people who deserve all the good things life has to offer because they work hard and are on the "right side of history." They have discovered that letting Democrat propagandists and liberal celebrities do their thinking for them is a good way for them to maintain their delusional world view and avoid thinking about the mind-boggling hypocrisies and double-standards they unquestioningly accept.

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of people on the political right who are just as crazy (e.g. the dedicated race warriors who take the 'war' part literally) but everyone knows this and few people take them seriously. It is old news that mainstream Republicans and Democrats are pretty much in lockstep when it comes to terrible foreign policy the ideological space between neocons like Bolton and Pompeo and neoliberal Democrats like Clinton and Biden is slim and right now there is more pushback against them coming from the conservatives side.

The disconcerting thing about deluded libtards is their unmatched ability to believe their own bullshit and the global reach this bullshit has via the mainstream media. It is ironic that the same people who made their "self-identities" as morally pure humanitarians and protectors of the weak and downtrodden a status marker have turned out to be some of the most arrogant, vapid and destructive hypocrites around, but it shouldn't be that surprising. In my experience people who go out of their way to highlight their own do-goodery and moral superiority sooner or later out themselves as virtue signalling bullshitters and hypocrites who are just following a trend. If these people had no real influence they would be a minor annoyance unfortunately they have quite a bit of influence. Not as much as they used to, hence their panic, but still enough to cause all kinds of trouble.

DESERT FOX , says: May 20, 2019 at 12:29 pm GMT
This Russia collusion scam proved that ... the CIA and the FBI and the Justice dept. are all corrupt as hell and all of these and more are under zionist control and there is no justice in America, justice is gone with the wind!

... ... ...

RVBlake , says: May 20, 2019 at 12:34 pm GMT
Regarding Cohen's assertion that the MSM was "enticed" into one of the worst journalistic malpractices of modern times, I am heartily skeptical of the portrayal of the MSM as being seduced into acting like the whores they are.
C3H8NO5P , says: May 20, 2019 at 1:22 pm GMT
You have to love the imaginations of these hoax writers. The CIA doesn't have time on their various networks and news websites to post any truth. They have so many lies scripted for so many years in advance the producers would lose it if someone tried to slip in a couple of minutes of truth.
DESERT FOX , says: May 20, 2019 at 1:34 pm GMT
@C3H8NO5P Agree, see the book The Secret Team, the CIA and its allies in control of America and the world, by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, this is the most accurate book ever written about the chain dogs who guard the world for their zionist masters!
Johnny Walker Read , says: May 20, 2019 at 1:36 pm GMT
Funny how neither wing of the same bird will dare name the real controllers of America.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ad7EYjIWK0U?feature=oembed

MEFOBILLS , says: May 20, 2019 at 1:43 pm GMT
Bill Clinton's telecommunication act of 1996 did a lot of damage. Clinton was a CFR agent for the parasite.

The fourth estate centralized and came under corporate control after 1996. Those who are remotely aware know that the press organs are owned by our favorite in-group which has messianic goals. This in-group, while small in number, has goals amplified by money power.

The parasite operates on multiple fronts. 1) Own the power to create bank credit as money 2) Collect interest on credit issued 3) Use debt slavery (expanding claims of debts) to make populations servile 4) Buy out and own the press (see #2) 5) Push a narrative good for your in-group. (see#4) 6) Messianic religion, where the people become their own god. An Oligarchy is then sanctioned because after all – we are our own gods.

Meanwhile, false narrative and twisted scripture has created Zionist Christians, who do the bidding of their masters.

The parasite is an evolutionary construct, with methods honed through the ages. His weakness is the falsity of his claims, which require a tower of lies to maintain. The other weakness is money power, which also relies on deception. The founders gave Congress the money power, hence it was to be under control of the law (and the people), but through deception the money power transferred to a private money trust in 1913.

A parasite needs fuel from the host, and this fuel is derived as usury from money power. Funding then allows issuance of narrative and hypnosis (including towering lies) to control the host.

The construct of secret services being part of control matrix goes back to Bank of England in 1694 becoming first debt spreading bank, which soon put its population into debts, and gained control over parliament. British East Indies company had its own mercenary soldiers and was fore-runner to MI6. In other words, MI6 was patterned on East Indies Company, and MI6 was grandfather to CIA.

It should be no surprise at all that Zionist World Government emanates from London, Wall Street, and Tel Aviv.

Returning the money power to law, is a simple law change. But, since Congress and Parliaments are owned, it is an uphill battle.

http://www.sovereignmoney.eu

Patrikios Stetsonis , says: May 20, 2019 at 2:08 pm GMT
@Rational I agree 'Rational', but one question.

Say, the Russians and Putin DID mess with our elections. So, what is the big deal?

We get involved messing with other Nations interior affairs, since the 18th century, if not earlier. So, why these "ethical" bastards (dems and some republicans) are crying about?

Plus, WHO holds the license to determine WHO is our friend and WHO is our enemy? CNN? CNBC? ABC? FOX?

I guess, I 'll come back to the phrase: It's ALL about Benjamins, baby.

P.S.
And NO: Hillary and Soros, ARE criminals but The REAL CRIMINALS and TRAITORS of the USA, are Israel and it supporters.

Sunshine , says: May 20, 2019 at 2:09 pm GMT
@Squarebeard Yeah there's totally no race war going on, at all. Only crazy people would think such a thing. It's not like the entire ruling class is in lockstep regarding laws and policies that cripple and destroy whites.

They don't allow non whites to attack whites, with little to no accountability, they don't bring them in by the millions, to swamp whites and "breed us out". They don't churn out endless anti white propaganda, showing whites as weak, submissive, old, and needing strong and vibrant non whites to "save" them from their own evil racism. They certainly don't shout it from their official positions and gloat about how whites are soon to be minorities in their own lands. They don't push endless race mixing propaganda, that somehow only shows "white + non white", and rarely ever something like "black + Asian". They don't mock and belittle whites every chance they get. They don't use "white" as a slur and a synonym for "uncool, hopeless, nerdy, weak". They don't refuse to allow whites to have racially based groups and institutions, while actively encouraging non whites to do just that. They don't give preferential treatment in every walk of life, to non whites at the expense of the better qualified and more intelligent whites.

They don't institute draconian and repressive "hate crime" laws designed to harshly punish whites for any "wrong thought" or imagined transgression against a holy and sainted oppressed non white. They certainly don't let non whites get away with racially targeted attacks (Rotherham, etc), and force the police to ignore it and prosecute the victims and their families when they seek justice.

If you don't think there's a race war happening, I can see that. Because really, only one side is fighting. The other side is too busy pretending it isn't happening, or enthusiastically groveling at the feet of the non whites, hoping to expiate their evil sin of whiteness.

Ignoring reality isn't going to spare you from the consequences of ignoring reality. All you have to do is look around whatever white country you're living in. It's not a secret.

TellTheTruth-2 , says: May 20, 2019 at 2:22 pm GMT
Major Mueller Report Omissions Suggest Incompetence Or A Coverup (right click) https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-06/major-mueller-report-omissions-suggest-hes-incompetent-or-covering-major-crimes

.. and .. Robert Mueller Is in Serious Legal Trouble – Here's Why (right click) https://russia-insider.com/en/robert-mueller-serious-legal-trouble-heres-why/ri27002

.. and .. The Real Muellergate Scandal (right click) https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/05/the-real-muellergate-scandal/

.. and .. Major Report Omission Shows Mueller Was Either Incompetent Or A Political Hack .. (right click) https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/06/major-report-omission-shows-mueller-either-incompetent-political-hack/

Will Julian Assange 'Team up' With Trump to Bury Russiagate – and Just Maybe the Deep State – Once and for All? (right click) https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/24/will-julian-assange-team-up-with-trump-to-bury-russiagate-and-just-maybe-the-deep-state-once-and-for-all/

mike k , says: May 20, 2019 at 3:02 pm GMT
@ABC 123 You got that dead right ABC 123. The evil group in the shadows that really runs the government is called "the intelligence community." Some community! More like a giant Mafia.
Anon [405] Disclaimer , says: May 20, 2019 at 3:08 pm GMT
Mike Whitney,

The CIA needs reform and oversight. It should be divided into pieces that cannot communicate with each other, but only through oversight that is legally forbidden to ever become part of or get paid by CIA. I would suggest a section for each continent, or maybe even each country. Is have these sections in different buildings in different cities in America.

They should be allowed zero media infiltration in the United States.

If that reform failed, Id build a rival CIA and slowly give it the CIAs current workload, forcing the current brass into retirement. The new intel agency could be restricted from hiring any current CIA management, only hiring active spooks.

TellTheTruth-2 , says: May 20, 2019 at 3:36 pm GMT
@mike k The neoCONs won and have Trump under control and he's hiring Bush-men as fast as he can. NOTE: Both the new Attorney General and the newly announced Assistant Attorney General are both Bush-men, and even worse, they're Bush Sr. Bush-men. So it looks like Trump will run in 2020 as a WAR President, in Venezuela and/or Iran. The Bush/Trump Crime Family has been born from the ashes of the Bush/Clinton Crime Family.
Robert Dolan , says: May 20, 2019 at 4:18 pm GMT
@TellTheTruth-2 The President's name is Jeb Kushner.
DESERT FOX , says: May 20, 2019 at 4:42 pm GMT
@TellTheTruth-2 The zio/cons have always won since the zionists had JFK shot!
One Tribe , says: May 20, 2019 at 5:07 pm GMT
Thank you for bringing these facts, and the artful assembly of them, to public scrutiny.

The damage the Democrats (and their allies in the FBI and media) have done to the country is incalculable, but even worse, is the damage they've done to their own party.

We're still discussing these things, and others, on the overall degradation of social infrastructures, almost as if they are unrelated, but, these breakdowns have startling similarities, and even superficial inspection suggests a pattern and affiliation between the key controlling interests.

Is it " The FBI ", or an elite controlling faction, having hijacked the FBI?
Is it " The Democratic Party ", or an elite controlling faction, having hijacked the Democratic Party?

Regardless, it will be the reputation/credibility of the entire FBI and Democratic Party, which takes the hit, not the specific agent-provokateurs , in fact, " The Media ", will never get around to figuring it out, and airing them out, let alone, drawing similarities between these agent-provokateurs and those agent-provokateurs

Oh and BTW, just who, precisely, is " The Media "?

And while the discussion about the " The Democrats " is liberal, the discussion about " The Republicans Party ", is a bit on the conservative side.

But ultimately, what's the difference? Both these parties are dedicated to the 0.1% socio-economic elite , and their traditional hanger-ons/henchmen.

In fact, much of the artificial delineations of people, are controlled by the same people! They are effectively different " brandings " of bullshit-artistry , to baffle the minds of the 99%, and the first grift is that there is actually choice between two meaningfully different options.

... ... ...

Royce Orville , says: May 20, 2019 at 5:23 pm GMT
Trumps biggest achievements in the past 30 days:

Moron Whitney seems to think political parties matter. Why do the lower classes think any difference exists between the scum that rules over them? Only the slow minded see a difference between the republicans and the democrats. Trump supporters openly want a police state with a giant military and more and more cops, so the Russian thing was a great diversion. Obama supporters pretended they don't want the same, but voted for it anyway also promoting fear, obedience and the Russian thing.

Simon Tugmutton , says: May 20, 2019 at 5:43 pm GMT
This is a classic case of Betteridge's Law of Headlines: "an adage that states: 'Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

Alden , says: May 20, 2019 at 7:22 pm GMT
@Peter Akuleyev It's obvious you haven't read the report Peter. Exactly what crimes did Trump commit.? And don't repeat what every ignorant liberal moron has been chanting for the last 3 years, "obstruction of justice"

Please note, a crime must be committed before any suspect, victim, witness anyone obstructs justice also known as obstruction of the investigation of the alleged crime that may or may not have been committed. The FBI investigated and investigated and investigated Trump and found nothing to investigate.

Since he was plotting away in New York and the District of Columbia, you might want to read the pertinent laws regarding obstruction of justice. No crime, no obstruction.

mcohen , says: May 20, 2019 at 9:12 pm GMT
The demo's need to chill like you know man.not going to make 2020 because the carpet is ready for a woman.madam president erect ek se.soft power.in like a banana out like a pineapple.
Anon [332] Disclaimer , says: May 20, 2019 at 10:29 pm GMT
They don't need to apologize.

They need to go to prison for attempting to undemocratically overturn an election using an invented narrative.

The press as well as the individuals associated with the special interest groups and government who were involved in this effort must face severe consequences. We'll be waiting until that happens, and we will not forget.

That's what they've created with this. A simmering nation awaiting justice.

Curmudgeon , says: May 20, 2019 at 10:40 pm GMT
@renfro So what's your point? The prosecutor "ultimately concludes one isn't guilty of crime X" actually proves Alden's point: a prosecutor would have to identify "crime X". Since "crime X" was fabricated, there was nothing to be guilty of, and since Trump knew that, there could be no obstruction.

As for Mueller's report, it was a political document. All of the hearsay about what Trump was thinking about means jackshit. Thinking about doing something isn't a crime – yet. All of the bogus "conspiracy to commit " trials, when no illegal action was taken, are Stalinist show trials – just like the Democrats and never Trumpers were hoping Mueller could produce for them.

tanabear , says: May 20, 2019 at 10:48 pm GMT
@renfro

You can obstruct justice even if a prosecutor ultimately finds you were not guilty of committing the crime that was the focus of the underlying investigation

Yes, but you still must commit a crime of obstruction. A crime of obstruction would be something like the destruction subpoenaed evidence; such as taking Bleachbit to your e-mails, or smashing your smartphones with hammers. However, the firing James Comey is completely legal and allowed by the Executive. A prosecutor cannot event a crime of obstruction when the action was perfectly legal. This is in effect what the Democrats and the Left are arguing for, the invention of new crimes to impeach Trump.

Carolyn Yeager , says: Website May 20, 2019 at 11:31 pm GMT
Excellent article. I'm glad I read it. Secret intelligence gathering agencies with huge budgets "to keep us safe" are a problem. Always have been, always will be. Trump should be given credit for causing all this to be brought to light.
anon [273] Disclaimer , says: May 21, 2019 at 2:34 am GMT

The Democrats Just Led the Country on a Three Year-Long Wild Goose Chase. Will They Apologize?

Of course not. They just go from one lie they're more than happy to believe to another – this time its "obstruction" and the media will push that lie too

renfro , says: May 21, 2019 at 2:51 am GMT
@tanabear

However, the firing James Comey is completely legal and allowed by the Executive. A prosecutor cannot event a crime of obstruction when the action was perfectly legal

Wrong again ..its obvious none of you know how to find the legal cites on the elements of obstruction. Whether Trump can 'legally' fire someone or not is immaterial .the court (and the law) looks at the INTENT behind the act. Period.

You can legally hire or fire your maid but if your motivation -- intention in either of those acts is to bribe her or threaten her because she knows something about you that could get you in legal trouble. Then it is obstruction.

[May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... What he said is, 'I Donald Trump am going to be a champion of the working class I know you are working longer hours for lower wages, seeing your jobs going to China, can't afford childcare, can't afford to send your kids to college. I Donald Trump alone can solve these problems.' What you have is a guy who utilized the media, manipulated the media very well. He is an entertainer, he is a professional at that. But I will tell you that I think there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business. It is not good enough to have a liberal elite. I come from the white working class and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from." ..."
"... when the Clinton team first learned that Wikileaks was going to release damaging Democratic National Party emails in June 2016, they "brought in outside consultants to plot a PR strategy for handling the news of the hack the story would advance a narrative that benefited the Clinton campaign and the Democrats: The Russians were interfering in the US election, presumably to assist Trump." ..."
"... After losing the election, Team Clinton doubled down on this PR strategy. As described in the book Shattered (p. 395) the day after the election campaign managers assembled the communication team "to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up and up . they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument." ..."
"... A progressive team produced a very different analysis titled Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis . They did this because "the (Democratic) party's national leadership has shown scant interest in addressing many of the key factors that led to electoral disaster." The report analyzes why the party turnout was less than expected and why traditional Democratic Party supporters are declining. ..."
"... Since the 2016 election there has been little public discussion of the process whereby Hillary Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee. It's apparent she was pre-ordained by the Democratic Party elite. As exposed in the DNC emails, there was bias and violations of the party obligations at the highest levels. On top of that, it should now be clear that the pundits, pollsters and election experts were out of touch, made poor predictions and decisions. ..."
"... The 2016 election is highly relevant today. Already we see the same pattern of establishment bias and "horse race" journalism which focuses on fund-raising, polls and elite-biased "electability" instead of dealing with real issues, who has solutions, who has appeal to which groups. ..."
"... The establishment bias for Biden is matched by the bias against Democratic Party candidates who directly challenge Wall Street and US foreign policy. On Wall Street, that would be Bernie Sanders. On foreign policy, that is Tulsi Gabbard. With a military background Tulsi Gabbard has broad appeal, an inclusive message and a uniquely sharp critique of US "regime change" foreign policy. ..."
"... Blaming an outside power is a good way to prevent self analysis and positive change. It's gone on far too long. ..."
May 19, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org
An honest and accurate analysis of the 2016 election is not just an academic exercise. It is very relevant to the current election campaign. Yet over the past two years, Russiagate has dominated media and political debate and largely replaced a serious analysis of the factors leading to Trump's victory. The public has been flooded with the various elements of the story that Russia intervened and Trump colluded with them. The latter accusation was negated by the Mueller Report but elements of the Democratic Party and media refuse to move on. Now it's the lofty but vague accusations of "obstruction of justice" along with renewed dirt digging. To some it is a "constitutional crisis", but to many it looks like more partisan fighting.

Russiagate has distracted from pressing issues

Russiagate has distracted attention and energy away from crucial and pressing issues such as income inequality, the housing and homeless crisis, inadequate healthcare, militarized police, over-priced college education, impossible student loans and deteriorating infrastructure. The tax structure was changed to benefit wealthy individuals and corporations with little opposition. The Trump administration has undermined environmental laws, civil rights, national parks and women's equality while directing ever more money to military contractors. Working class Americans are struggling with rising living costs, low wages, student debt, and racism. They constitute the bulk of the military which is spread all over the world, sustaining continuing occupations in war zones including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and parts of Africa. While all this has been going on, the Democratic establishment and much of the media have been focused on Russiagate, the Mueller Report, and related issues.

Immediately after the 2016 Election

In the immediate wake of the 2016 election there was some forthright analysis. Bernie Sanders said , "What Trump did very effectively is tap the angst and the anger and the hurt and pain that millions of working class people are feeling. What he said is, 'I Donald Trump am going to be a champion of the working class I know you are working longer hours for lower wages, seeing your jobs going to China, can't afford childcare, can't afford to send your kids to college. I Donald Trump alone can solve these problems.' What you have is a guy who utilized the media, manipulated the media very well. He is an entertainer, he is a professional at that. But I will tell you that I think there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business. It is not good enough to have a liberal elite. I come from the white working class and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from."

Days after the election, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled " Hillary Clinton Lost. Bernie Sanders could have won. We chose the wrong candidate ." The author analyzed the results saying , "Donald Trump's stunning victory is less surprising when we remember a simple fact: Hillary Clinton is a deeply unpopular politician." The writer analyzed why Sanders would have prevailed against Trump and predicted "there will be years of recriminations."

Russiagate replaced Recrimination

But instead of analysis, the media and Democrats have emphasized foreign interference. There is an element of self-interest in this narrative. As reported in "Russian Roulette" (p127), when the Clinton team first learned that Wikileaks was going to release damaging Democratic National Party emails in June 2016, they "brought in outside consultants to plot a PR strategy for handling the news of the hack the story would advance a narrative that benefited the Clinton campaign and the Democrats: The Russians were interfering in the US election, presumably to assist Trump."

After losing the election, Team Clinton doubled down on this PR strategy. As described in the book Shattered (p. 395) the day after the election campaign managers assembled the communication team "to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up and up . they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

This narrative has been remarkably effective in supplanting critical review of the election.

One Year After the Election

The Center for American Progress (CAP) was founded by John Podesta and is closely aligned with the Democratic Party. In November 2017 they produced an analysis titled " Voter Trends in 2016: A Final Examination ". Interestingly, there is not a single reference to Russia. Key conclusions are that "it is critical for Democrats to attract more support from the white non-college-educated voting bloc" and "Democrats must go beyond the 'identity politics' versus 'economic populism' debate to create a genuine cross-racial, cross-class coalition " It suggests that Wall Street has the same interests as Main Street and the working class.

A progressive team produced a very different analysis titled Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis . They did this because "the (Democratic) party's national leadership has shown scant interest in addressing many of the key factors that led to electoral disaster." The report analyzes why the party turnout was less than expected and why traditional Democratic Party supporters are declining. It includes recommendations to end the party's undemocratic practices, expand voting rights and counter voter suppression. The report contains details and specific recommendations lacking in the CAP report. It includes an overall analysis which says "The Democratic Party should disentangle itself – ideologically and financially – from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and other corporate interests that put profits ahead of public needs."

Two Years After the Election

In October 2018, the progressive team produced a follow-up report titled " Autopsy: One Year Later ". It says, "The Democratic Party has implemented modest reforms, but corporate power continues to dominate the party."

In a recent phone interview, the editor of that report, Norman Solomon, said it appears some in the Democratic Party establishment would rather lose the next election to Republicans than give up control of the party.

What really happened in 2016?

Beyond the initial critiques and "Autopsy" research, there has been little discussion, debate or lessons learned about the 2016 election. Politics has been dominated by Russiagate.

Why did so many working class voters switch from Obama to Trump? A major reason is because Hillary Clinton is associated with Wall Street and the economic policies of her husband President Bill Clinton. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), promoted by Bill Clinton, resulted in huge decline in manufacturing jobs in swing states such as Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Of course, this would influence their thinking and votes. Hillary Clinton's support for the Trans Pacific Partnership was another indication of her policies.

What about the low turnout from the African American community? Again, the lack of enthusiasm is rooted in objective reality. Hillary Clinton is associated with "welfare reform" promoted by her husband. According to this study from the University of Michigan, "As of the beginning of 2011, about 1.46 million U.S. households with about 2.8 million children were surviving on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month The prevalence of extreme poverty rose sharply between 1996 and 2011. This growth has been concentrated among those groups that were most affected by the 1996 welfare reform. "

Over the past several decades there has been a huge increase in prison incarceration due to increasingly strict punishments and mandatory prison sentences. Since the poor and working class have been the primary victims of welfare and criminal justice "reforms" initiated or sustained through the Clinton presidency, it's understandable why they were not keen on Hillary Clinton. The notion that low turnout was due to African Americans being unduly influenced by Russian Facebook posts is seen as "bigoted paternalism" by blogger Teodrose Fikremanian who says, "The corporate recorders at the NY Times would have us believe that the reason African-Americans did not uniformly vote for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats is because they were too dimwitted to think for themselves and were subsequently manipulated by foreign agents. This yellow press drivel is nothing more than propaganda that could have been written by George Wallace."

How Clinton became the Nominee

Since the 2016 election there has been little public discussion of the process whereby Hillary Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee. It's apparent she was pre-ordained by the Democratic Party elite. As exposed in the DNC emails, there was bias and violations of the party obligations at the highest levels. On top of that, it should now be clear that the pundits, pollsters and election experts were out of touch, made poor predictions and decisions.

Bernie Sanders would have been a much stronger candidate. He would have won the same party loyalists who voted for Clinton. His message attacking Wall Street would have resonated with significant sections of the working class and poor who were unenthusiastic (to say the least) about Clinton. An indication is that in critical swing states such as Wisconsin and Michigan Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary race.

Clinton had no response for Trump's attacks on multinational trade agreements and his false promises of serving the working class. Sanders would have had vastly more appeal to working class and minorities. His primary campaign showed his huge appeal to youth and third party voters. In short, it's likely that Sanders would have trounced Trump. Where is the accountability for how Clinton ended up as the Democratic Party candidate?

The Relevance of 2016 to 2020

The 2016 election is highly relevant today. Already we see the same pattern of establishment bias and "horse race" journalism which focuses on fund-raising, polls and elite-biased "electability" instead of dealing with real issues, who has solutions, who has appeal to which groups.

Mainstream media and pundits are already promoting Joe Biden. Syndicated columnist EJ Dionne, a Democratic establishment favorite, is indicative. In his article " Can Biden be the helmsman who gets us past the storm? " Dionne speaks of the "strength he (Biden) brings" and the "comfort he creates". In the same vein, Andrew Sullivan pushes Biden in his article " Why Joe Biden Might be the Best to Beat Trump ". Sullivan thinks that Biden has appeal in the working class because he joked about claims he is too 'hands on'. But while Biden may be tight with AFL-CIO leadership, he is closely associated with highly unpopular neoliberal trade deals which have resulted in manufacturing decline.

The establishment bias for Biden is matched by the bias against Democratic Party candidates who directly challenge Wall Street and US foreign policy. On Wall Street, that would be Bernie Sanders. On foreign policy, that is Tulsi Gabbard. With a military background Tulsi Gabbard has broad appeal, an inclusive message and a uniquely sharp critique of US "regime change" foreign policy. She calls out media pundits like Fareed Zakaria for goading Trump to invade Venezuela. In contrast with Rachel Maddow taunting John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to be MORE aggressive, Tulsi Gabbard has been denouncing Trump's collusion with Saudi Arabia and Israel's Netanyahu, saying it's not in US interests. Gabbard's anti-interventionist anti-occupation perspective has significant support from US troops. A recent poll indicates that military families want complete withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria. It seems conservatives have become more anti-war than liberals.

This points to another important yet under-discussed lesson from 2016: a factor in Trump's victory was that he campaigned as an anti-war candidate against the hawkish Hillary Clinton. As pointed out here , "Donald Trump won more votes from communities with high military casualties than from similar communities which suffered fewer casualties."

Instead of pointing out that Trump has betrayed his anti-war campaign promises, corporate media (and some Democratic Party outlets) seem to be undermining the candidate with the strongest anti-war message. An article at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) says, " Corporate media target Gabbard for her Anti-Interventionism, a word they can barely pronounce ."

Russiagate has distracted most Democrats from analyzing how they lost in 2016. It has given them the dubious belief that it was because of foreign interference. They have failed to analyze or take stock of the consequences of DNC bias, the preference for Wall Street over working class concerns, and the failure to challenge the military industrial complex and foreign policy based on 'regime change' interventions.

There needs to be more analysis and lessons learned from the 2016 election to avoid a repeat of that disaster. As indicated in the Autopsy , there needs to be a transparent and fair campaign for nominee based on more than establishment and Wall Street favoritism. There also needs to be consideration of which candidates reach beyond the partisan divide and can energize and advance the interests of the majority of Americans rather than the elite. The most crucial issues and especially US military and foreign policy need to be seriously debated.

Blaming an outside power is a good way to prevent self analysis and positive change. It's gone on far too long.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who grew up in Canada but currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. He can be reached at [email protected] . Read other articles by Rick .

[May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers. ..."
"... the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people. ..."
May 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Couple of factors not mentioned. one is Israel and the other is more sinister still and tied to the conclusions to be drawn from the Mueller report.

it may be true that Skripal helped Steele with some elements of the dossier compiled by Steele, via SKripals handler Pablo Miller. It may be true that Skripal went "stir crazy" and an attempt was made to silence him and his daughter - permanently, because they simply cold not be trusted. a similar motivation could be drawn up against Russia - with the two Russians visiting Salisbury used as diversionary "stool pigeons". It may be true that the "poisoning" was self inflicted and was in fact a murder/suicide attempt as a result of depression along the ines "what's the point of it all".

what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers.

what ought to be apparent is

- the same tactics used by the special prosecutor to investigate the "Russia collusion" smoke screen erected by the howler monkeys in the US intel agencies (aided and abetter by howler monkeys in UK intel agencies) to stymie the US executive branch (Trump) are likely to be used by the the UK government and some more as well - in true Le Carre fashion, but with much dumber and less principled actors than Smiley's people.

these tactics prevented (and continue to prevent) investigation and prosecution of heinous corruption within the obama administration of the previous 8 years - these howler monkey intelligence agency tactics include(d) entrapment, honeypots, racketeering, blackmail, de facto kidnapping (in the case of Skripals), bribery, wire fraud, unauthorized wire-tapping, breach of authorized intel agency activities (like the FBI operating overseas and the CIA operating domestically in the US, false and unverified claims in FISA warrants, NSA providing unauthorized information to the CIA and FBI etc)

- given the howler monkey activities of the alphabet soup, it is not beyond the imagination to draw parallels with the CIA's reporting and analysis of situations on the ground wherever they operate to provide intel ahead of military activity. the DOD has already proved complicit by hiring Halper (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to assist with the entrapment of Trump operative Papadopoulos. Mifsud is likely a CIA, not a Russian, asset.

- given that we have ample evidence of the howler monkeys in the alphabet soup seeking to facilitate a coup against a sitting US president, it is certainly plausible that - as with the US goverment sponsoring the mujaheedin, isis and al qaeda in afghanistan to fight the russians in late 80's early 90's, Iraq yellow cake and WMD - that the howler monkeys paid the white helmets to ovethrow assad and foment civil war in Syria - thus causing the migration of some 5 million syrians into europe, iraq, turkey, jordan, turkey and lebanon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Helmets_(Syrian_Civil_War)

so , the case is that howler monkey activity in intel agencies of the UK and US (add (F)rance to get FUKUS) are guilty of the manufacture of human conflict by fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing shitty analysis (howler monkeys are only good at swinging in trees and flinging ****) and generally operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity.

this can only be brought into sharp relief if howler monkey activities were instead shown to be powers for good rather than the geo-political risks that persist in Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Yemen, Libya and so on and so forth.

Never mind how much past conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on relied on evidence and analysis thrown at us by the howler monkeys in the tree tops, how much of what we we are doing now is a fabrication causing needless suffering by civilian (not politicians or military engaged in conflict) populations?

the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people.

there are equivalents of strzok, page, ohr right throughout the US and UK government "machines" operating overseas. think about that. crimes exposed by Barr et al in the US - against a sitting president - are replicated wherever howler monkeys operate overseas as well.

[May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... What he said is, 'I Donald Trump am going to be a champion of the working class I know you are working longer hours for lower wages, seeing your jobs going to China, can't afford childcare, can't afford to send your kids to college. I Donald Trump alone can solve these problems.' What you have is a guy who utilized the media, manipulated the media very well. He is an entertainer, he is a professional at that. But I will tell you that I think there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business. It is not good enough to have a liberal elite. I come from the white working class and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from." ..."
"... when the Clinton team first learned that Wikileaks was going to release damaging Democratic National Party emails in June 2016, they "brought in outside consultants to plot a PR strategy for handling the news of the hack the story would advance a narrative that benefited the Clinton campaign and the Democrats: The Russians were interfering in the US election, presumably to assist Trump." ..."
"... After losing the election, Team Clinton doubled down on this PR strategy. As described in the book Shattered (p. 395) the day after the election campaign managers assembled the communication team "to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up and up . they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument." ..."
"... A progressive team produced a very different analysis titled Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis . They did this because "the (Democratic) party's national leadership has shown scant interest in addressing many of the key factors that led to electoral disaster." The report analyzes why the party turnout was less than expected and why traditional Democratic Party supporters are declining. ..."
"... Since the 2016 election there has been little public discussion of the process whereby Hillary Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee. It's apparent she was pre-ordained by the Democratic Party elite. As exposed in the DNC emails, there was bias and violations of the party obligations at the highest levels. On top of that, it should now be clear that the pundits, pollsters and election experts were out of touch, made poor predictions and decisions. ..."
"... The 2016 election is highly relevant today. Already we see the same pattern of establishment bias and "horse race" journalism which focuses on fund-raising, polls and elite-biased "electability" instead of dealing with real issues, who has solutions, who has appeal to which groups. ..."
"... The establishment bias for Biden is matched by the bias against Democratic Party candidates who directly challenge Wall Street and US foreign policy. On Wall Street, that would be Bernie Sanders. On foreign policy, that is Tulsi Gabbard. With a military background Tulsi Gabbard has broad appeal, an inclusive message and a uniquely sharp critique of US "regime change" foreign policy. ..."
"... Blaming an outside power is a good way to prevent self analysis and positive change. It's gone on far too long. ..."
May 19, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org
An honest and accurate analysis of the 2016 election is not just an academic exercise. It is very relevant to the current election campaign. Yet over the past two years, Russiagate has dominated media and political debate and largely replaced a serious analysis of the factors leading to Trump's victory. The public has been flooded with the various elements of the story that Russia intervened and Trump colluded with them. The latter accusation was negated by the Mueller Report but elements of the Democratic Party and media refuse to move on. Now it's the lofty but vague accusations of "obstruction of justice" along with renewed dirt digging. To some it is a "constitutional crisis", but to many it looks like more partisan fighting.

Russiagate has distracted from pressing issues

Russiagate has distracted attention and energy away from crucial and pressing issues such as income inequality, the housing and homeless crisis, inadequate healthcare, militarized police, over-priced college education, impossible student loans and deteriorating infrastructure. The tax structure was changed to benefit wealthy individuals and corporations with little opposition. The Trump administration has undermined environmental laws, civil rights, national parks and women's equality while directing ever more money to military contractors. Working class Americans are struggling with rising living costs, low wages, student debt, and racism. They constitute the bulk of the military which is spread all over the world, sustaining continuing occupations in war zones including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and parts of Africa. While all this has been going on, the Democratic establishment and much of the media have been focused on Russiagate, the Mueller Report, and related issues.

Immediately after the 2016 Election

In the immediate wake of the 2016 election there was some forthright analysis. Bernie Sanders said , "What Trump did very effectively is tap the angst and the anger and the hurt and pain that millions of working class people are feeling. What he said is, 'I Donald Trump am going to be a champion of the working class I know you are working longer hours for lower wages, seeing your jobs going to China, can't afford childcare, can't afford to send your kids to college. I Donald Trump alone can solve these problems.' What you have is a guy who utilized the media, manipulated the media very well. He is an entertainer, he is a professional at that. But I will tell you that I think there needs to be a profound change in the way the Democratic Party does business. It is not good enough to have a liberal elite. I come from the white working class and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from."

Days after the election, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled " Hillary Clinton Lost. Bernie Sanders could have won. We chose the wrong candidate ." The author analyzed the results saying , "Donald Trump's stunning victory is less surprising when we remember a simple fact: Hillary Clinton is a deeply unpopular politician." The writer analyzed why Sanders would have prevailed against Trump and predicted "there will be years of recriminations."

Russiagate replaced Recrimination

But instead of analysis, the media and Democrats have emphasized foreign interference. There is an element of self-interest in this narrative. As reported in "Russian Roulette" (p127), when the Clinton team first learned that Wikileaks was going to release damaging Democratic National Party emails in June 2016, they "brought in outside consultants to plot a PR strategy for handling the news of the hack the story would advance a narrative that benefited the Clinton campaign and the Democrats: The Russians were interfering in the US election, presumably to assist Trump."

After losing the election, Team Clinton doubled down on this PR strategy. As described in the book Shattered (p. 395) the day after the election campaign managers assembled the communication team "to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up and up . they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument."

This narrative has been remarkably effective in supplanting critical review of the election.

One Year After the Election

The Center for American Progress (CAP) was founded by John Podesta and is closely aligned with the Democratic Party. In November 2017 they produced an analysis titled " Voter Trends in 2016: A Final Examination ". Interestingly, there is not a single reference to Russia. Key conclusions are that "it is critical for Democrats to attract more support from the white non-college-educated voting bloc" and "Democrats must go beyond the 'identity politics' versus 'economic populism' debate to create a genuine cross-racial, cross-class coalition " It suggests that Wall Street has the same interests as Main Street and the working class.

A progressive team produced a very different analysis titled Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis . They did this because "the (Democratic) party's national leadership has shown scant interest in addressing many of the key factors that led to electoral disaster." The report analyzes why the party turnout was less than expected and why traditional Democratic Party supporters are declining. It includes recommendations to end the party's undemocratic practices, expand voting rights and counter voter suppression. The report contains details and specific recommendations lacking in the CAP report. It includes an overall analysis which says "The Democratic Party should disentangle itself – ideologically and financially – from Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and other corporate interests that put profits ahead of public needs."

Two Years After the Election

In October 2018, the progressive team produced a follow-up report titled " Autopsy: One Year Later ". It says, "The Democratic Party has implemented modest reforms, but corporate power continues to dominate the party."

In a recent phone interview, the editor of that report, Norman Solomon, said it appears some in the Democratic Party establishment would rather lose the next election to Republicans than give up control of the party.

What really happened in 2016?

Beyond the initial critiques and "Autopsy" research, there has been little discussion, debate or lessons learned about the 2016 election. Politics has been dominated by Russiagate.

Why did so many working class voters switch from Obama to Trump? A major reason is because Hillary Clinton is associated with Wall Street and the economic policies of her husband President Bill Clinton. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), promoted by Bill Clinton, resulted in huge decline in manufacturing jobs in swing states such as Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Of course, this would influence their thinking and votes. Hillary Clinton's support for the Trans Pacific Partnership was another indication of her policies.

What about the low turnout from the African American community? Again, the lack of enthusiasm is rooted in objective reality. Hillary Clinton is associated with "welfare reform" promoted by her husband. According to this study from the University of Michigan, "As of the beginning of 2011, about 1.46 million U.S. households with about 2.8 million children were surviving on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month The prevalence of extreme poverty rose sharply between 1996 and 2011. This growth has been concentrated among those groups that were most affected by the 1996 welfare reform. "

Over the past several decades there has been a huge increase in prison incarceration due to increasingly strict punishments and mandatory prison sentences. Since the poor and working class have been the primary victims of welfare and criminal justice "reforms" initiated or sustained through the Clinton presidency, it's understandable why they were not keen on Hillary Clinton. The notion that low turnout was due to African Americans being unduly influenced by Russian Facebook posts is seen as "bigoted paternalism" by blogger Teodrose Fikremanian who says, "The corporate recorders at the NY Times would have us believe that the reason African-Americans did not uniformly vote for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats is because they were too dimwitted to think for themselves and were subsequently manipulated by foreign agents. This yellow press drivel is nothing more than propaganda that could have been written by George Wallace."

How Clinton became the Nominee

Since the 2016 election there has been little public discussion of the process whereby Hillary Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee. It's apparent she was pre-ordained by the Democratic Party elite. As exposed in the DNC emails, there was bias and violations of the party obligations at the highest levels. On top of that, it should now be clear that the pundits, pollsters and election experts were out of touch, made poor predictions and decisions.

Bernie Sanders would have been a much stronger candidate. He would have won the same party loyalists who voted for Clinton. His message attacking Wall Street would have resonated with significant sections of the working class and poor who were unenthusiastic (to say the least) about Clinton. An indication is that in critical swing states such as Wisconsin and Michigan Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary race.

Clinton had no response for Trump's attacks on multinational trade agreements and his false promises of serving the working class. Sanders would have had vastly more appeal to working class and minorities. His primary campaign showed his huge appeal to youth and third party voters. In short, it's likely that Sanders would have trounced Trump. Where is the accountability for how Clinton ended up as the Democratic Party candidate?

The Relevance of 2016 to 2020

The 2016 election is highly relevant today. Already we see the same pattern of establishment bias and "horse race" journalism which focuses on fund-raising, polls and elite-biased "electability" instead of dealing with real issues, who has solutions, who has appeal to which groups.

Mainstream media and pundits are already promoting Joe Biden. Syndicated columnist EJ Dionne, a Democratic establishment favorite, is indicative. In his article " Can Biden be the helmsman who gets us past the storm? " Dionne speaks of the "strength he (Biden) brings" and the "comfort he creates". In the same vein, Andrew Sullivan pushes Biden in his article " Why Joe Biden Might be the Best to Beat Trump ". Sullivan thinks that Biden has appeal in the working class because he joked about claims he is too 'hands on'. But while Biden may be tight with AFL-CIO leadership, he is closely associated with highly unpopular neoliberal trade deals which have resulted in manufacturing decline.

The establishment bias for Biden is matched by the bias against Democratic Party candidates who directly challenge Wall Street and US foreign policy. On Wall Street, that would be Bernie Sanders. On foreign policy, that is Tulsi Gabbard. With a military background Tulsi Gabbard has broad appeal, an inclusive message and a uniquely sharp critique of US "regime change" foreign policy. She calls out media pundits like Fareed Zakaria for goading Trump to invade Venezuela. In contrast with Rachel Maddow taunting John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to be MORE aggressive, Tulsi Gabbard has been denouncing Trump's collusion with Saudi Arabia and Israel's Netanyahu, saying it's not in US interests. Gabbard's anti-interventionist anti-occupation perspective has significant support from US troops. A recent poll indicates that military families want complete withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria. It seems conservatives have become more anti-war than liberals.

This points to another important yet under-discussed lesson from 2016: a factor in Trump's victory was that he campaigned as an anti-war candidate against the hawkish Hillary Clinton. As pointed out here , "Donald Trump won more votes from communities with high military casualties than from similar communities which suffered fewer casualties."

Instead of pointing out that Trump has betrayed his anti-war campaign promises, corporate media (and some Democratic Party outlets) seem to be undermining the candidate with the strongest anti-war message. An article at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) says, " Corporate media target Gabbard for her Anti-Interventionism, a word they can barely pronounce ."

Russiagate has distracted most Democrats from analyzing how they lost in 2016. It has given them the dubious belief that it was because of foreign interference. They have failed to analyze or take stock of the consequences of DNC bias, the preference for Wall Street over working class concerns, and the failure to challenge the military industrial complex and foreign policy based on 'regime change' interventions.

There needs to be more analysis and lessons learned from the 2016 election to avoid a repeat of that disaster. As indicated in the Autopsy , there needs to be a transparent and fair campaign for nominee based on more than establishment and Wall Street favoritism. There also needs to be consideration of which candidates reach beyond the partisan divide and can energize and advance the interests of the majority of Americans rather than the elite. The most crucial issues and especially US military and foreign policy need to be seriously debated.

Blaming an outside power is a good way to prevent self analysis and positive change. It's gone on far too long.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who grew up in Canada but currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. He can be reached at [email protected] . Read other articles by Rick .

[May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers. ..."
"... the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people. ..."
May 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Couple of factors not mentioned. one is Israel and the other is more sinister still and tied to the conclusions to be drawn from the Mueller report.

it may be true that Skripal helped Steele with some elements of the dossier compiled by Steele, via SKripals handler Pablo Miller. It may be true that Skripal went "stir crazy" and an attempt was made to silence him and his daughter - permanently, because they simply cold not be trusted. a similar motivation could be drawn up against Russia - with the two Russians visiting Salisbury used as diversionary "stool pigeons". It may be true that the "poisoning" was self inflicted and was in fact a murder/suicide attempt as a result of depression along the ines "what's the point of it all".

what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers.

what ought to be apparent is

- the same tactics used by the special prosecutor to investigate the "Russia collusion" smoke screen erected by the howler monkeys in the US intel agencies (aided and abetter by howler monkeys in UK intel agencies) to stymie the US executive branch (Trump) are likely to be used by the the UK government and some more as well - in true Le Carre fashion, but with much dumber and less principled actors than Smiley's people.

these tactics prevented (and continue to prevent) investigation and prosecution of heinous corruption within the obama administration of the previous 8 years - these howler monkey intelligence agency tactics include(d) entrapment, honeypots, racketeering, blackmail, de facto kidnapping (in the case of Skripals), bribery, wire fraud, unauthorized wire-tapping, breach of authorized intel agency activities (like the FBI operating overseas and the CIA operating domestically in the US, false and unverified claims in FISA warrants, NSA providing unauthorized information to the CIA and FBI etc)

- given the howler monkey activities of the alphabet soup, it is not beyond the imagination to draw parallels with the CIA's reporting and analysis of situations on the ground wherever they operate to provide intel ahead of military activity. the DOD has already proved complicit by hiring Halper (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to assist with the entrapment of Trump operative Papadopoulos. Mifsud is likely a CIA, not a Russian, asset.

- given that we have ample evidence of the howler monkeys in the alphabet soup seeking to facilitate a coup against a sitting US president, it is certainly plausible that - as with the US goverment sponsoring the mujaheedin, isis and al qaeda in afghanistan to fight the russians in late 80's early 90's, Iraq yellow cake and WMD - that the howler monkeys paid the white helmets to ovethrow assad and foment civil war in Syria - thus causing the migration of some 5 million syrians into europe, iraq, turkey, jordan, turkey and lebanon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Helmets_(Syrian_Civil_War)

so , the case is that howler monkey activity in intel agencies of the UK and US (add (F)rance to get FUKUS) are guilty of the manufacture of human conflict by fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing shitty analysis (howler monkeys are only good at swinging in trees and flinging ****) and generally operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity.

this can only be brought into sharp relief if howler monkey activities were instead shown to be powers for good rather than the geo-political risks that persist in Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Yemen, Libya and so on and so forth.

Never mind how much past conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on relied on evidence and analysis thrown at us by the howler monkeys in the tree tops, how much of what we we are doing now is a fabrication causing needless suffering by civilian (not politicians or military engaged in conflict) populations?

the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people.

there are equivalents of strzok, page, ohr right throughout the US and UK government "machines" operating overseas. think about that. crimes exposed by Barr et al in the US - against a sitting president - are replicated wherever howler monkeys operate overseas as well.

[May 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Says Boost From Putin Fans Is Fake News

May 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
2 SHARES

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) said on Sunday that reports claiming pro-putin Russophiles giving her 2020 presidential campaign a boost is "fake news," though she added that conflict with the Kremlin is not productive.

Speaking to ABC' s George Stephanopoulos, Gabbard said that deteriorating relationships with nuclear-armed countries such as Russia and China "has brought us to a very dangerous point," reports The Hill . She added that, if elected, she would "end these counterproductive and wasteful regime change wars ," and would " work to end this new Cold War and nuclear arms race. "

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On Friday, the Daily Beast published a story claiming that Gabbard "is quickly becoming the top candidate for Democrats who think the Russian leader is misunderstood," based on people who had donated to her campaign. (We somehow missed the Daily Beast article on Hillary's alleged Saudi donors in 2016, but we digress).

Donors to her campaign in the first quarter of the year included: Stephen F. Cohen, a Russian studies professor at New York University and prominent Kremlin sympathizer; Sharon Tennison, a vocal Putin supporter who nonetheless found herself detained by Russian authorities in 2016; and an employee of the Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT, who appears to have donated under the alias "Goofy Grapes." - Daily Beast

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On Sunday, Stephanopoulos asked Gabbard about the Beast article, and noted that she met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as well as her defense of Russia's military presence in Syria, and her comments suggesting that Russian election interference was on par with American election meddling around the world.

"Is Putin a threat to national security?" he asked.

"You now it's unfortunately you're citing that article, George, because it's a whole lot of fake news . What I'm focused on is what's in the best interest of the American people? What's in the best interest of national security? Keeping American people safe," said Gabbard. "And what I'm pointing out consistently, time and time again, is our continued wasteful regime change wars have been counterproductive to the interests of the American people and the approach this administration has taken in essentially choosing conflict ... has been counterproductive

BarkingCat , 39 minutes ago link

I had donated to her. I want to see her in the democratic debates.

Yes my only reason for doing so is because she is anti-was and wants to improve relations with Russia.

There is nothing beneficial about the current aggressive posture towards Russia and most other countries.

It will be very revealing how the other democrats deal with her position.

Greg , 31 minutes ago link

I continue to support her for that same reason. If there are like minded people here on ZH consider donating just $1 as that donation will help get her on stage where her anti-war thoughts can be heard.

samuraitrader , 19 minutes ago link

ditto. Trump said in the debates that "I want to be friends with everyone, including Russia." The rest is history. The USA wehrmacht is going after Tulsi now. We cannot have peace.

wadalt , 59 minutes ago link

regime change wars have been counterproductive to the interests of the American people...

... but very good for APARTHEID Israhell.

Son of Captain Nemo , 1 hour ago link

Hey Tulsi.

Have an idea for you on how to show true leadership and finish what the Orange "six-sided star" liar said he would pick up ( https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/11/14/trump-im-reopening-911-investigation/ ) when he began his presidency and then... well... lied to become a treasonous bag of **** just like the ones that preceded him!...

Even Vlad Putin and the rest of the Russian Federation refuse to "touch it". And if you did. You would be the only representative in the U.S. House and Senate let alone the U.S. Federal, State and local government(s) for that matter to do so.

All you would have to say is "we need an understanding why 2 planes demolished 3 building(s) at "Ground Zero" more then 18 years ago, and why the 9/11 Commission never mentioned the Solomon Brothers Building 7 in it's official report?... I (Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard) certainly want to know!... Especially wearing the uniform for what I believed was the reason I was given for invading Afghanistan and Iraq and murdering over 3 million people?... And I want to tell the American people ultimately "why" Building 7 was omitted along with too many other details that Robert Mueller famously dismissed by saying only that " mistakes were made " ...

I've written to you several times about showing the courage to be the only politician since Senator Wellstone to pick up where he left off and support the 13 year endeavors of this organization ( https://www.ae911truth.org/ ) to demand an investigation of the fact(s) now that has the backing of a Grand Jury by signing it's petition!...

But you won't. Because you are like every other "200lbs of ****" in a 100lbs bag that walks the halls of the Longworth carrying the water for the "Tribe"!

Keep telling yourself surfer **** that the job will get both easier and better by lying about that day and what it's done in it's wake to every institution and business in the United States of America let alone the laws of the land just like your mentor the Langley Bath House "boy"!...

dunlin , 1 hour ago link

Yes, Putin knows that an island of sanity and decency in a cesspit of bigotry and firearms is bound to be blown to pieces before she has a chance to deliver. I fear for Tulsi even now.

spoonful , 1 hour ago link

She sounds like the Trump of the 2020 campaign

Benito_Camela , 1 hour ago link

Yes, the Russia nonsense is FAKE NEWS. So why is Trump allowing the Israelis, a country that hates the United States, and which has attacked us at least twice (USS Liberty, 9/11/2001), to dictate our foreign policy? Israel is the real enemy!!

Let's look at a quote from one of the former employees of the Mossad front operation "Urban Moving Systems" (likely also the same people who planted the explosives at WTC) had to say about his time there:

In addition to the strange nature of some of the Israelis' possessions in the van and on their person, the company that employed them -- Urban Moving Systems -- was of special interest to the FBI, which concluded that the company was likely a "fraudulent operation." Upon a search of the company's premises, the FBI noted that "little evidence of a legitimate business operation was found." The FBI report also noted that there were an "unusually large number of computers relative to the number of employees for such a fairly small business" and that "further investigation identified several pseudo-names or aliases associated with Urban Moving Systems and its operations."

The FBI presence at the Urban Moving Systems search site drew the attention of the local media and was later reported on both television and in the local press. A former Urban Moving Systems employee later contacted the Newark Division with information indicating that he had quit his employment with Urban Moving Systems as a result of the high amount of anti-American sentiment present among Urban's employees. The former employee stated that an Israeli employee of Urban had even once remarked, "Give us twenty years and we'll take over your media and destroy your country" (page 37 of the FBI report ).

This kind of thing makes one kind of hope for a war in which Israel is bombed back to the stone age, which is clearly where these evil, psychopathic Zionist filth belong!

This is a long article, but read it all the way through. It's proof that Israel was indeed behind 9/11 and that they had numerous operatives in the country who were gleeful about it, having set up video cameras and celebrated the day before by taking a photo of one of the operatives holding a lit cigarette lighter up to the horizon....right in front of the still-standing WTC twin towers.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/newly-released-fbi-docs-shed-light-on-apparent-mossad-foreknowledge-of-9-11-attacks/258581/

For further reference:

https://www.scribd.com/document/409691150/FOIA-Release-of-9-11-Dancing-Israelis-thru-the-FBI

https://www.scribd.com/document/46173840/Dancing-Israelis-Police-Report

https://web.archive.org/web/20020802194310/http://abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/DailyNews/2020_whitevan_020621.html

Benito_Camela , 1 hour ago link

And look at this. You won't see this in the MSM any time soon:

In addition to Urban Moving Systems, another moving company, Classic International Movers, became of interest in connection with the investigation into the "Dancing Israelis," which led to the arrest and detention of four Israeli nationals who worked for this separate moving company. The FBI's Miami Division had alerted the Newark Division that Classic International Movers was believed to have been used by one of the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers before the attack, and one of the "Dancing Israelis" had the number for Classic International Movers written in a notebook that was seized at the time of his arrest. The report further states that one of the Israelis of Classic International Movers who was arrested "was visibly disturbed by the Agents' questioning regarding his personal email account."

[May 19, 2019] Lawrence Wilkerson Warns The US Is Driving Down A Highway To War With China

Notable quotes:
"... More broadly, Wilkerson pegs the ramping up of confrontation with China as "all about keeping the [military-industrial] complex alive" that Wilkerson explains "the military was scared to death would disappear as we began to pay the American people back" a peace dividend at the end of the cold war. US government efforts against terrorism, explains Wilkerson, have also been used to ensure the money keeps flowing. ..."
May 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Former Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell in the George W. Bush administration, warns in a new The Real News interview with host Sharmini Peries that the United States government is driving down a "highway to war" with China -- a war for which Wilkerson sees no sound justification.

The drive toward war is not undertaken in response to a real threat posed by China to the people of America. Instead, argues Wilkerson, the US government is moving toward war for reasons related to money for both the military and the broader military-industrial complex, as well to advance President Donald Trump's domestic political goals.

Wilkerson, who is a member of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity's Academic Board, elaborates on the US military's money-seeking motivation to advance the new China scare, stating:

All of this right now, first and foremost, is a budget ploy. They want more money.

And that's largely because their personnel costs are just eating their lunch. And, second, it's an attempt to develop - and this has something to do with money too of course - another threat, another cold war, another feeding system .

The military just hooks up like it is hooking up to an intravenous, you know, an IV system and the money just pours out-slush fund money, appropriated money, everything else.

More broadly, Wilkerson pegs the ramping up of confrontation with China as "all about keeping the [military-industrial] complex alive" that Wilkerson explains "the military was scared to death would disappear as we began to pay the American people back" a peace dividend at the end of the cold war. US government efforts against terrorism, explains Wilkerson, have also been used to ensure the money keeps flowing.

Watch Wilkerson's complete interview here:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/42LauiK_rbY

* * *

Please donate to the Ron Paul Institute

[May 19, 2019] Why The Takedown Of Heinz-Christian Strache Will Strengthen The Right

Notable quotes:
"... In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire, who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts. ..."
"... Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones. ..."
"... The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy. ..."
"... Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was thought to be now. ..."
"... The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami. It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions. ..."
"... The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through austerity to make up for the loss of money. ..."
May 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

During the last days a right wing politician in Austria was taken down by using an elaborate sting. Until Friday Heinz-Christian Strache was leader of the far right (but not fascist) Freedom Party of Austria (FPOe) and the Vice Chancellor of the country. On Friday morning two German papers, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegel published (German) reports (English) about an old video that was made to take Strache down.

The FPOe has good connections with United Russia, the party of the Russian President Putin, and to other right-wing parties in east Europe. It's pro-Russian position has led to verbal attacks on and defamation of the party from NATO supporting and neoliberal circles.

In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire, who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts.

Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones.


A scene from the video. Source: Der Falter (vid, German)

During the six hour long party several schemes get proposed by the "Russian" and are discussed. Strache rejects most of them. He insists several times that everything they plan or do must be legal and conform to the law. He says that a large donation could probably be funneled through an endowment that would then support his party. It is a gray area under Austrian party financing laws. They also discuss if the "Russian" could buy the Kronen Zeitung , Austria's powerful tabloid, and use it to prop up his party.

The evening goes on with several bottles of vodka on the table. Starche gets a bit drunk and boosts in front of the "oligarch daughter" about all his connections to rich and powerful people. He does not actually have these.

Strache says that, in exchange for help for his party, the "Russian" could get public contracts for highway building and repair. Currently most of such contracts in Austria go to the large Austrian company, STRABAG, that is owned by a neoliberal billionaire who opposes the FPOe. At that time Strache was not yet in the government and had no way to decide about such contracts.

At one point Strache seems to understand that the whole thing is a setup. But his right hand man calms him down and vouches for the "Russian". The sting ends with Strache and his companion leaving the place. The never again see the "Russian" and her co-plotter. Nothing they talked about will ever come to fruition.

Three month later Strache and his party win more than 20% in the Austrian election and form a coalition government with the conservative party OeVP led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Even while the FPOe controls several ministries, it does not achieve much politically. It lacks a real program and the government's policies are mostly run by the conservatives.

Nearly two years after the evening on Ibiza, ten days before the European parliament election in which Strache's party is predicted to achieve good results, a video of the evening on Ibiza is handed to two German papers which are known to be have strong transatlanticist leanings and have previously been used for other shady 'leaks'. The papers do not hesitate to take part in the plot and publish extensive reports about the video.

After the reports appeared Strache immediately stepped down and the conservatives ended the coalition with his party. Austria will now have new elections.

On Bloomberg Leonid Bershidsky opines on the case:

Strache's discussion with the Russian oligarch's fake niece shows a propensity for dirty dealing that has nothing to do with idealistic nationalism. Nationalist populists often agitate against entrenched, corrupt elites and pledge to drain various swamps. In the videos, however, Strache and Gudenus behave like true swamp creatures, savoring rumors of drug and sex scandals in Austrian politics and discussing how to create an authoritarian media machine like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's.

I do not believe that the people who voted for the FPOe (and similar parties in other countries) will subscribe to that view. The politics of the main stream parties in Austria have for decades been notoriously corrupt. Compared to them Strache and his party are astonishingly clean. In the video he insists several times that everything must stay within the legal realm. Whenever the "Russian" puts forward a likely illegal scheme, Starche emphatically rejects it.

Bershidsky continues:

Strache, as one of the few nationalist populists in government in the European Union's wealthier member states, was an important member of the movement Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been trying to cobble together ahead of the European Parliament election that will take place next week. On Saturday, he was supposed to attend a Salvini-led rally in Milan with other like-minded politicians from across Europe. Instead, he was in Vienna apologizing to his wife and to Kurz and protesting pitifully that he'd been the victim of a "political assassination" -- a poisonous rain on the Italian right-winger's parade.
...
This leaves the European far right in disarray and plays into the hands of centrist and leftist forces ahead of next week's election. Salvini's unifying effort has been thoroughly undermined, ...

This is also a misreading of the case. The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy.

Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was thought to be now.

But that Strache stepped down after the sudden media assault only makes him more convincing. The right-wing all over Europe will see him as a martyr who was politically assassinated because he worked for their cause. The issue will increase the right-wingers hate against the 'liberal' establishment. It will further motivate them: "They attack us because we are right and winning." The new far-right block Natteo Salvini will setup in the European Parliament will likely receive a record share of votes.

Establishment writers notoriously misinterpret the new right wing parties and their followers. This stand-offish sentence in the Spiegel story about Strache's party demonstrates the problem:

In the last election, the party drew significant support from the working class, in part because of his ability to simplify even the most complicated of issues and play the common man, even in his role as vice chancellor.

The implicit thesis, that the working class is too dumb to understand the "most complicated of issues", is not only incredibly snobbish but utterly false. The working class understands very well what the establishment parties have done to it and continue to do. The increasing vote share of the far-right is a direct consequence of the behavior of the neoliberal center and of the lack of real left alternatives.

Last week, before the Strache video appeared, Craig Murray put his finger on the wound:

The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami. It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions.

...

The rejection of the political class manifests itself in different ways and has been diverted down a number of entirely blind alleys giving unfulfilled promise of a fresh start – Brexit, Trump, Macron. As the vote share of the established political parties – and public engagement with established political institutions – falls everywhere, the chattering classes deride the political symptoms of status quo rejection by the people as "populism". It is not populism to make sophisticated arguments that undermine the received political wisdom and take on the entire weight of established media opinion.

If one wants to take down the far right one has to do so with arguments and good politics for the working class. Most people, especially working class people, have a strong sense for justice. The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through austerity to make up for the loss of money.

While I consider myself to be a strong leftist who opposes the right wherever possible, I believe to understand why people vote for Strache's FBOe and similar parties. When one talks to these people issues of injustice and inequality always come up. The new 'populist' parties at least claim to fight against the injustice done to the common men. Unlike most of the establishment parties they seem to be still mostly clean and not yet corrupted.

In the early 1990s Strache actually flirted with violent fascists but he rejected their way. While he has far-right opinions, he and his like are no danger to our societies. If we can not accept that Strache and his followers have some legitimate causes, we will soon find us confronted with way more extreme people. The neoliberal establishment seems to do its best to achieve that.

Posted by b on May 19, 2019 at 01:10 PM | Permalink

[May 19, 2019] French researchers have completed their Map of Neoconservative Networks. It's interactive and gives links to each neocon/neocon group.

May 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Blooming Barricade , May 17, 2019 3:32:07 PM | link

A bit off topic, I thought b and barflies would find it in their wheelhouse...

French researchers have completed their Map of Neoconservative Networks. It's interactive and gives links to each neocon/neocon group. Most of who you would expect feature prominently: Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, BHL, but it also connects neoconservatives to the Great Replacement theorists showing strong links between them and fascists.
https://anticons.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/anticons9.pdf

Along similar lines, Swiss Propaganda Research released the Media Navagator earlier this year. b will be happy to know that MoA ranks in the hard anti-establishment camp alongside MintPress and the WSWS. There is also a European version

https://swprs.org/media-navigator/
https://swprs.org/medien-navigator/

[May 19, 2019] The OPCW, Douma, The Skripals

Notable quotes:
"... The neocon faction in the US is usually (and reasonably) regarded as the motivator behind much of the western aggression in the Middle East. ..."
"... Granted the US has been looking for excuses to intervene ever more overtly in Syria since 2013, and in that sense this Douma "initiative" is a continuation of their longterm policy. It's also true Russia was warning just such a false flag would be attempted in early March. But in the intervening month the situation on the ground has changed so radically that such an attempt no longer made any sense. ..."
"... A false flag in early March, while pockets of the US proxy army were still holding ground in Ghouta would have enabled a possible offensive in their support which would prevent Ghouta falling entirely into government hands and thereby also maintain the pressure on Damascus. A false flag in early April is all but useless because the US proxy army in the region was completely vanquished and nothing would be gained by an offensive in that place at that time. ..."
"... The US media has been similarly, and uncharacteristically divided and apparently unsure. Tucker Carlson railed against the stupidity of attacking Syria. Commentators on MSNBC were also expressing intense scepticism of the US intent and fear about possible escalation. ..."
"... The official story is a hot mess of proven falsehoods, contradictions, implausible conspiracy theories, more falsehoods and inexplicable silences were cricket chirps tell us all we need to know. ..."
"... The UK government has lied and evaded on every key aspect. ..."
"... Indeed if current claims by Russian FM Lavrov turn out to be true, a "novichok" (whatever that precisely means in this case) may not have been the only substance found in those samples, and a compound called "BZ", a non-lethal agent developed in Europe and America, has been discovered and suppressed in the OPCW report (more about that later). ..."
"... The Skripals themselves were announced to be alive and out of danger mere days after claims they were all but certain to die. Yulia, soon thereafter, apparently called her cousin Viktoria only to subsequently announce, indirectly through the helpful agency of the Metropolitan Police, that she didn't want to talk to her cousin – or anyone else – at all. ..."
"... She is now allegedly discharged from hospital and has "specially trained officers helping to take care of" her in an undisclosed location. A form or words so creepily sinister it's hard to imagine how they were ever permitted the light of day. ..."
"... If a false flag chemical attack had taken place in Syria at the time Russia predicted, just a week or two after the Skripal poisoning, a lot of the attention that's been paid to the Skripals over the last month would likely have been diverted. Many of the questions being asked by Russia and in the alt media may never have been asked as the focus of the world turned to a possible superpower stand-off in the Middle East. ..."
"... So, could it be the Skripal event was never intended to last so long in the public eye? Could it be that it was indeed a false flag, or a fake event, as many have alleged, planned as a sketchy prelude to, or warm up act for a bigger chemical attack in Syria, scheduled for a week or so later in mid-March – just around the time Russia was warning of such a possibility? ..."
"... This would explain why the UK may have been pushing for the false flag to happen (as claimed by Russia) even after it could no longer serve much useful purpose on the ground, and why the Douma "attack" seems to have been so sketchily done by a gang on the run. The UK needed the second part to happen in order to distract from the first. ..."
"... If this is true, Theresa May and her cabinet are currently way out on a limb even by cynical UK standards. Not only have they lied about the Skripal event, but in order to cover up that lie they have promoted a false flag in Syria, and "responded" to it by a flagrant breach of international and domestic law. Worst of all, if the Russians aren't bluffing, they have some evidence to prove some of the most egregious parts of this. ..."
"... But even if some or all of our speculation proves false, and even if the Russian claims of UK collusion with terrorists in Syria prove unfounded, May is still guilty of multiple lies and has still waged war without parliamentary approval. ..."
"... The UK were the most vocal about Syria, and desperately tried to drum up support over Skripal, but it all came to nothing much in the end. ..."
"... Theresa May's political career still hangs by a thread, and her "Falklands moment", at best, staved off the inevitable for a few months. A washout in the EU elections, a very real threat from Farage's Brexit party, and rumblings inside her own party, make her position as unstable as ever. ..."
"... In the US, generally speaking, it seems that the Trump admin – or at least whichever interested parties currently have control of the wheels of government – have called time on war in Syria. Instead, they've moved on to projects in Venezuela and North Korea, and even war with Iran. ..."
"... The failure of the Douma false flag to cause the war it was meant to cause, and the vast collection of evidence that suggests it was a false flag, should be spread far and wide. Not just because it's a truth which vindicates the smeared minority in the alternate media. ..."
May 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Via Off-Guardian.org,

In view of the latest revelations from the leaked report, which seem to prove that at least some elements of the Douma "chemical attack" were entirely staged, we want to take look back at the chaotic events of Spring 2018.

The following is an extract from an article by Catte originally published April 14th last year, which takes on a greater weight in light of certain evidence – not only that the Douma attack was faked, but that the OPCW is compromised.

You can read the whole article here .

* * *

PRIMARILY UK INITIATIVE?

The neocon faction in the US is usually (and reasonably) regarded as the motivator behind much of the western aggression in the Middle East.

Since at least 2001 and the launch of the "War on Terror" the US has led the way in finding or creating facile excuses to fight oil wars and hegemonic wars and proxy wars in the region. But this time the dynamics look a little different.

This time it really looks as if the UK has been setting the pace of the "response".

The fact (as stated above) that Mattis was apparently telegraphing his own private doubts a)about the verifiability of the attacks, and b)about the dangers of a military response suggests he was a far from enthusiastic partaker in this adventure.

Trump's attitude is harder to gauge. His tweets veered wildly between unhinged threats and apparent efforts at conciliation. But he must have known he would lose (and seemingly has lost) a great part of his natural voter base (who elected him on a no-more-war mandate) by an act of open aggression that threatened confrontation with Russia on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Granted the US has been looking for excuses to intervene ever more overtly in Syria since 2013, and in that sense this Douma "initiative" is a continuation of their longterm policy. It's also true Russia was warning just such a false flag would be attempted in early March. But in the intervening month the situation on the ground has changed so radically that such an attempt no longer made any sense.

A false flag in early March, while pockets of the US proxy army were still holding ground in Ghouta would have enabled a possible offensive in their support which would prevent Ghouta falling entirely into government hands and thereby also maintain the pressure on Damascus. A false flag in early April is all but useless because the US proxy army in the region was completely vanquished and nothing would be gained by an offensive in that place at that time.

You can see why Mattis and others in the administration might be reluctant to take part in the false flag/punitive air strike narrative if they saw nothing currently to be gained to repay the risk. They may have preferred to wait for developments and plan for a more productive way of playing the R2P card in the future.

The US media has been similarly, and uncharacteristically divided and apparently unsure. Tucker Carlson railed against the stupidity of attacking Syria. Commentators on MSNBC were also expressing intense scepticism of the US intent and fear about possible escalation.

The UK govt and media on the other hand has been much more homogeneous in advocating for action. No doubts of the type expressed by Mattis have been heard from the lips of an UK government minister. Even May, a cowardly PM, has been (under how much pressure?) voicing sterling certitude in public that action HAD to be taken.

Couple this with the – as yet unverified – claims by Russia of direct UK involvement in arranging the Douma "attack", and the claims by Syria that the perps are in their custody, and a tentative storyline emerges. It's possible this time there were other considerations in the mix beside the usual need to "be seen to do something" and Trump's perpetual requirement to appease the liberal Russiagaters and lunatic warmongers at home. Maybe this time it was also about helping the UK out of a sticky problem.

THE SKRIPAL CONSIDERATION

Probably the only thing we can all broadly agree on about the Skripal narrative is that it manifestly did not go according to plan. However it was intended to play out, it wasn't this way. Since some time in mid to late March it's been clear the entire thing has become little more than an exercise in damage-limitation, leak-plugging and general containment.

The official story is a hot mess of proven falsehoods, contradictions, implausible conspiracy theories, more falsehoods and inexplicable silences were cricket chirps tell us all we need to know.

The UK government has lied and evaded on every key aspect.

  1. It lied again and again about the information Porton Down had given it
  2. Its lawyers all but lied to Mr Justice Robinson about whether or not the Skripals had relatives in Russia in an unscrupulous attempt to maintain total control of them, or at least of the narrative.
  3. It is not publishing the OPCW report on the chemical analyses, and the summary of that report reads like an exercise in allusion and weasel-wording. Even the name of the "toxic substance" found in the Skripals' blood is omitted, and the only thing tying it to the UK government's public claims of "novichok" is association by inference and proximity.

Indeed if current claims by Russian FM Lavrov turn out to be true, a "novichok" (whatever that precisely means in this case) may not have been the only substance found in those samples, and a compound called "BZ", a non-lethal agent developed in Europe and America, has been discovered and suppressed in the OPCW report (more about that later).

None of the alleged victims of this alleged attack has been seen in public even in passing since the event. There is no film or photographs of DS Bailey leaving the hospital, no film or photographs of his wife or family members doing the same. No interviews with Bailey, no interviews with his wife, family, distant relatives, work colleagues.

The Skripals themselves were announced to be alive and out of danger mere days after claims they were all but certain to die. Yulia, soon thereafter, apparently called her cousin Viktoria only to subsequently announce, indirectly through the helpful agency of the Metropolitan Police, that she didn't want to talk to her cousin – or anyone else – at all.

She is now allegedly discharged from hospital and has "specially trained officers helping to take care of" her in an undisclosed location. A form or words so creepily sinister it's hard to imagine how they were ever permitted the light of day.

Very little of this bizarre, self-defeating, embarrassing, hysterical story makes any sense other than as a random narrative, snaking wildly in response to events the narrative-makers can't completely control.

Why? What went wrong? Why has the UK government got itself into this mess? And how much did the Douma "gas attack" and subsequent drive for a concerted western "response" have to do with trying to fix that?

IS THIS WHAT HAPPENED?

If a false flag chemical attack had taken place in Syria at the time Russia predicted, just a week or two after the Skripal poisoning, a lot of the attention that's been paid to the Skripals over the last month would likely have been diverted. Many of the questions being asked by Russia and in the alt media may never have been asked as the focus of the world turned to a possible superpower stand-off in the Middle East.

So, could it be the Skripal event was never intended to last so long in the public eye? Could it be that it was indeed a false flag, or a fake event, as many have alleged, planned as a sketchy prelude to, or warm up act for a bigger chemical attack in Syria, scheduled for a week or so later in mid-March – just around the time Russia was warning of such a possibility?

Could it be this planned event was unexpectedly canceled by the leading players in the drama (the US) when the Russians called them out and the rapid and unexpected fall of Ghouta meant any such intervention became pointless at least for the moment?

Did this cancelation leave the UK swinging in the wind, with a fantastical story that was never intended to withstand close scrutiny, and no second act for distraction?

So, did they push on with the now virtually useless "chemical attack", botch it (again), leaving a clear evidence trail leading back to them? Did they then further insist on an allied "response" to their botched false flag in order to provide yet more distraction and hopefully destroy some of that evidence?

This would explain why the UK may have been pushing for the false flag to happen (as claimed by Russia) even after it could no longer serve much useful purpose on the ground, and why the Douma "attack" seems to have been so sketchily done by a gang on the run. The UK needed the second part to happen in order to distract from the first.

It would explain why the US has been less than enthused by the idea of reprisals. Because while killing Syrians to further geo-strategic interests is not a problem, killing Syrians (and risking escalation with Russia) in order to rescue an embarrassed UK government is less appealing.

And it would explain why the "reprisals" when they came were so half-hearted.

If this is true, Theresa May and her cabinet are currently way out on a limb even by cynical UK standards. Not only have they lied about the Skripal event, but in order to cover up that lie they have promoted a false flag in Syria, and "responded" to it by a flagrant breach of international and domestic law. Worst of all, if the Russians aren't bluffing, they have some evidence to prove some of the most egregious parts of this.

This is very bad.

But even if some or all of our speculation proves false, and even if the Russian claims of UK collusion with terrorists in Syria prove unfounded, May is still guilty of multiple lies and has still waged war without parliamentary approval.

This is a major issue. She and her government should resign. But it's unlikely that will happen.

So what next? There is a sense this is a watershed for many of the parties involved and for the citizens of the countries drawn into this.

Will the usual suspects try to avoid paying for their crimes and misadventures by more rhetoric, more false flags, more "reprisals"? Or will this signal some other change in direction?

We'll all know soon enough.

* * *

Back to today...

...and while things have moved on, we're still puzzling over all the same issues.

All these questions stand, and are important, but more important than all of that is the lesson: They tried it before, and just because it didn't work doesn't mean they won't try it again.

Last spring, the Western powers showed they will deploy a false flag if they need too, for domestic or international motives. And they have the motives right now.

The UK were the most vocal about Syria, and desperately tried to drum up support over Skripal, but it all came to nothing much in the end.

Theresa May's political career still hangs by a thread, and her "Falklands moment", at best, staved off the inevitable for a few months. A washout in the EU elections, a very real threat from Farage's Brexit party, and rumblings inside her own party, make her position as unstable as ever.

Britain had the most to gain, of all NATO countries, and that is still true. We don't know what they might do.

This time they might even receive greater support from France this time around – since Macron is facing a revolution at home and would kill (possibly literally) for a nice international distraction.

In the US, generally speaking, it seems that the Trump admin – or at least whichever interested parties currently have control of the wheels of government – have called time on war in Syria. Instead, they've moved on to projects in Venezuela and North Korea, and even war with Iran.

That's not to say Syria is safe, far from it. They are always just one carefully place false-flag away from all-out war. Last year, Mattis (or whoever) decided war with Syria was not an option – that it was too risky or complicated. That might not happen next time.

Clearly, the US hasn't totally seen sense in terms of stoking conflict with Russia – as seen by the decision to pull out of the INF Treaty late last year. And further demonstrated by their attempts to overthrow Russia's ally Nicolas Maduro. Another ripe candidate for a false flag.

The failure of the Douma false flag to cause the war it was meant to cause, and the vast collection of evidence that suggests it was a false flag, should be spread far and wide. Not just because it's a truth which vindicates the smeared minority in the alternate media.

But because recognising what they were trying to do last time , is the best defense when they try it again next time .

[May 18, 2019] Democracy works in the USA is you abstract from such minor things as the level of connection of past US presidents to CIA, money in politics, pervasive propaganda and so on

May 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , May 17, 2019 8:54:11 PM | link

lysias: A president doesn't have to obey the orders of the powers that be ...

Well, that's why they select the President beforehand to ensure there are no inconvenient difficulties with a new President.

In fact, our President's have generally had a connection to CIA: Bush Sr. was CIA, Clinton is said to allowed their flights into Arkansas, GW Bush was son of CIA, Obama is said to have come from a CIA family (grandfather and probably mother) , and some have pointed to Trump's first casino deal as a possible CIA tie (related to money laundering of CIA drug money)

Pretending otherwise furthers the democracy works! narrative. Isn't it already clear that the West is feudal and Empire First (aka globalist) - despite Trump's faux populist pretense? US foreign policy has been remarkably consistent for over 20 years. US congressmen takes oaths to Israel. Western propaganda sing the Deep State tune.

Welcome to the rabbithole.

Jackrabbit , May 17, 2019 9:26:14 PM | link
dltravers @53: hope Trump loses [the elections] and the policy is reversed

In other words: democracy works!

Just ignore:

  • money in politics;
  • pervasive propaganda;
  • things you CAN'T vote for (absolute support for Israel and military adventures);
  • CIA connections to past Presidents;
  • loyalty oaths to Israel;
  • jailing of Assange (after unprecedented break of asylum protection);
  • the lies of past Presidents;
  • Cold War imperatives;
  • Sanders sheep-dogging;
  • dirty tricks against protest movements like Gillet Jeune and Occupy.
Welcome to the rabbit hole/

[May 18, 2019] 'US already spying on public, Huawei threat unproven' Swann

Trump is a bully and he does not have any methods of diplomacy other then bulling.
May 16, 2019 | www.youtube.com

US President Donald Trump declared a national emergency over Huawei, which he has deemed a national security threat. His new executive order makes it more difficult for US companies to do business with the Chinese tech giant. RT America's Manila Chan chats with investigative journalist Ben Swann, who says no evidence exists for the Trump administration's claim. #RTAmerica #InQuestionRT #QuestionMore

US Of Zion , 2 days ago

What US bans I will buy. Huawei has profited from Trump's tweets. 😂😂😂

riva2003 , 2 days ago

National emergency against one single company? What a promotion for HUAWEI! They must have paid US government a looooot of money! LOOOOOL

E Walker , 2 days ago (edited)

U.S. cannot spy via Chinese made technology products. That is the problem. When did competition against American technology get to be a national security threat? It is about creating a monopoly of only certain products in America. I hope American companies fight back. Prices in American stores have already started to rise. Monopolies mean high prices.

BTV-Channel , 2 days ago div

In the age of technology...any country who doesn't SPY on other countries or their own citizens is LYING thru their teeth! USA is NO DIFFERENT than CHINA.....they both are rogue nations, competing for the same thing, TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP! The problem is....HUAWEI just got the upper hand in 5G technology before the US can compete...so as such, the US threatens other countries with scare tactics until the US can develop and deploy 5G technology to compete with CHINA. It's all about MONEY and BUSINESS.

OGASI , 2 days ago

USA has dishonestly gathered more data on it's own civilians than it can access or understand in several lifetimes, they have the gaul to attack others without proof? UNREAL

[May 18, 2019] WaPo confirmed today that Tulsi is one of the 11 guaranteed a debate spot

May 16, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Skip Scott , May 16, 2019 at 06:26

Great plan! From your mouth to Tulsi's ears! She needs to make a dramatic exit from the Dems, preferably on national TV, with the message "stop the senseless regime change wars!" That alone would make her a contender.

Rob Roy , May 16, 2019 at 17:09

Skip, notice that Tulsi scares the hell out of the MSM. Therefore, she will be vilified, lied about, left out of poll line-ups, shoved to the side in debates, accused of being Putin's or Assad's puppet and God knows what else by the major newspapers, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN etc., and this will spread even overseas. You can't be against war, corruption and US Monroe Doctrine as our foreign policy and expect to get fair coverage. Personally, I will counter the propaganda wherever I can.

Skip Scott , May 17, 2019 at 08:22

I had a "back and forth" with dailykos about not listing Tulsi on their straw polls with her being the only candidate against "regime change" wars. I shamed them a bit by calling them a bunch of latte-sippers who reek of the arrogance of privilege while our MIC goes all around the planet killing poor people. Maybe I am giving myself too much credit, but they did in fact include her name on the last poll.

John on Kauai , May 17, 2019 at 13:53

I can't reply to skip about his argument with KOS so it's here. There is nothing to be gained by arguing with KOS other than to be banned from their website as I was.

They are supporting a National Guard pilot to run against her in the 2020 HI-2 election. I would not be surprised to find that they were instrumental in producing tulsigabbard.guru, a site that has been recently taken down but which repeated (and I think originated) many slurs against Tulsi that have now been picked up by the media.

I encourage you and everyone to publicize tulsigabbard.org which goes into great detail on her positions on almost anything. Also, the Jimmy Dore and Joe Rogan interviews with Tulsi that are available on YouTube.

Tulsi is my congresswoman. She is wildly popular here.

The HSTA (hawaii state teachers association) hates her. When challenged they repeat the lies that are on the .guru site that was taken down. When you point out that they are lies, they cover their ears and chant "nah, nah, nah".

b.grand , May 17, 2019 at 16:29

Skip. this is re. to your re. to Rob Roy.

WaPo confirmed today that Tulsi is one of the 11 guaranteed a debate spot. She's making solid progress, including major bumps from the Joe Rogan interviews. If she has hopes of actually getting the Dem nomination, of course there will be no dramatic exit until that's been decided. OTOH, an outside call for her to run as an Indy would be authentic, but also a threat to the Dems, give her fair play OR ELSE !

So, maybe the movement for an independent run has to start at the bottom? I'd like to bounce this off people who know more about politics than I do. There's also the implied question, how could an Independent function if elected. Would there be support in Congress? Would new ["Coalition"] candidates arise?

People talk about the populist movement in Mexico as represented by MORENA, however the coalition was actually Juntos Haremos Historia ("Together We'll Make History"), which included right wing evangelicals as well as leftists. Pretty remarkable, but a similar cooperation has arisen in Unity4J (for Julian Assange) where journalists with radically different ideologies focus on a single unifying principle.

Any thoughts?

John Zwiebel , May 17, 2019 at 18:19

Ask Nick Branna. He says "yes"

b.grand , May 17, 2019 at 21:10

John Z. –

Are you already familiar with Branna and the People's Party? Are they backing specific candidates? What do you think I should ask him? Would he and the PP join a coalition? Or do I misunderstand your suggestion?

All of the endorsers are leftists. The platform is all about wages and healthcare, but war isn't mentioned. Maybe it's there, but it's not on the front page.

Here's what they say: "Together we're building a coalition of working people, unions, and progressive groups for a nationally viable people's party."

Also, "We are working to build a coalition of groups on the left in order to create a new party for working people."

This just seems like typical 'Progressives' who are fed up with Dems. Some of the endorsers – Sheehan, Hedges, Martin and others – are known to be anti-war, but it's concerning that peace and FP aren't prominent. Besides, we need to build bigger bridges than "groups on the left." There are many – surprisingly many – on the right who oppose constant militarism. And what about the center? There's a vast untapped demographic, whether apathetic or genuinely discouraged by evidence that it makes no difference who you vote for, the Deep State wins. Why approach them from a left-only perspective? Would you like to clarify?

[May 18, 2019] Is Trump a double dealer. Why Trump Administration Withholds Information That Could Debunk Russian Interference Claims

May 16, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

tom , May 16, 2019 at 15:23

Trump Administration Withholds Information That Could Debunk Russian Interference Claims

Lavrov responded first to the question. He said that there is no evidence that shows any Russian interference in the U.S. elections. He continued:

Speaking about the most recent US presidential campaign in particular, we have had in place an information exchange channel about potential unintended risks arising in cyberspace since 2013. From October 2016 (when the US Democratic Administration first raised this issue) until January 2017 (before Donald Trump's inauguration), this channel was used to handle requests and responses. Not so long ago, when the attacks on Russia in connection with the alleged interference in the elections reached their high point, we proposed publishing this exchange of messages between these two entities, which engage in staving off cyberspace incidents. I reminded Mr Pompeo about this today. The administration, now led by President Trump, refused to do so. I'm not sure who was behind this decision, but the idea to publish this data was blocked by the United States. However, we believe that publishing it would remove many currently circulating fabrications. Of course, we will not unilaterally make these exchanges public, but I would still like to make this fact known.

The communication channel about cyber issues did indeed exist. In June 2013 the Presidents of the United States and Russia issued a Joint Statement about "Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs)". The parties agreed to establishing communication channels between each other computer emergency response teams, to use the direct communication link of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers for cyber issue exchanges, and to have direct communication links between high-level officials in the White House and Kremlin for such matter. A Fact Sheet published by the Obama White House detailed the implementation of these three channels.

One inference from Lavrov's statement is that the "fundamental understanding on this matter" between the two presidents that has "not been fully implemented" is the release of the communications about cyberspace incidents. The Russians clearly think that a release of the communications with the Obama administration would exculpate them. That would also exculpate Trump from any further collusion allegations. Why then does the Trump administration reject the release? Who is blocking it?

Cont. reading: Trump Administration Withholds Information That Could Debunk Russian Interference Claims

https://www.moonofalabama.org/

[May 17, 2019] Lavrov to Pompeo: And what's the US doing in the Eastern Hemisphere

May 17, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

That brings to mind the recent Arctic Council summit. Both Lavrov and Pompeo were there. Here's a significant exchange:

Lavrov: I believe you don't represent the South American region, do you?

Pompeo: We represent the entire hemisphere.

Lavrov: Oh, the hemisphere. Then what's the US doing in the Eastern Hemisphere, in Ukraine, for instance?

There was no response from Pompeo.

[May 17, 2019] Bob Goldstone letter

Looks like a clear attempt to entrup Trump Jr
May 17, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

On Jun 3, 2016, at 10:36 AM, Rob Goldstone wrote:

Good morning

Emin just called and asked me to contact you with something very interesting.

The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.

This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump - helped along by Aras and Emin.

What do you think is the best way to handle this information and would you be able to speak to Emin about it directly?

I can also send this info to your father via Rhona, but it is ultra sensitive so wanted to send to you first.

Best

Rob Goldstone

On Jun 3, 2016, at 10:53, Donald Trump Jr. wrote:

Thanks Rob I appreciate that. I am on the road at the moment but perhaps I just speak to Emin first. Seems we have some time and if it's what you say I love it especially later in the summer. Could we do a call first thing next week when I am back?

Best,

Don

[May 17, 2019] Texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page AG Lynch knew how the Clinton email case would end

Jan 21, 2018 | hotair.com
The Associated Press is reporting that the Department of Justice has given congressional investigators additional text messages between FBI investigator Peter Strzok and his girlfriend Lisa Page. The FBI also told investigators that five months worth of text messages, between December 2016 and May 2017, are unavailable because of a technical glitch .

See Also: Gillibrand: We need to "take action" against Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they go back on their word and strike down Roe

New text messages highlighted in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray by Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, are from the spring and summer of 2016 and involve discussion of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. They reference Attorney General Loretta Lynch's decision to accept the FBI's conclusion in that case and a draft statement that former FBI Director James Comey had prepared in anticipation of closing out the Clinton investigation without criminal charges

In addition to the communications already made public, the Justice Department on Friday provided Johnson's committee with 384 pages of text messages, according to a letter from the Wisconsin lawmaker that was obtained by The Associated Press.

But, according to the letter, the FBI told the department that its system for retaining text messages sent and received on bureau phones had failed to preserve communications between Strzok and Page over a five-month period between Dec. 14, 2016, and May 7, 2017. The explanation for the gap was "misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI's collection capabilities."

Technical glitches obviously do happen but I can't help getting a bit of a Lois Lerner flashback upon hearing that five months of messages are missing from the time right after Trump was elected until 10 days before Robert Mueller was appointed as Special Counsel. So if you were hoping for any follow up on that comment about an insurance policy, it looks like you can forget it. That's a well-timed glitch.

Gillibrand: We need to "take action" against Gorsuch and Kavanaugh if they go back on their word and strike down Roe

But it seems the DOJ did turn over some additional texts that are worth considering. One involves an early draft of the Comey memo clearing Hillary Clinton. Originally the draft pointed out that Clinton had exchanged emails with President Obama while she was "on the territory" of a hostile power. Eventually, Obama's name was scrubbed from the document and finally all reference to the incident was removed. So that's one more example of the statement being watered down over time. And finally there is this :

In another exchange, the two express displeasure about the timing of Lynch's announcement that she would defer to the FBI's judgment on the Clinton investigation. That announcement came days after it was revealed that the attorney general and former President Bill Clinton had an impromptu meeting aboard her plane in Phoenix, though both sides said the email investigation was never discussed.

Strzok said in a July 1 text message that the timing of Lynch's announcement "looks like hell." And Page appears to mockingly refer to Lynch's decision to accept the FBI's conclusion in the case as a "real profile in courag(e) since she knows no charges will be brought."

Lynch never did recuse herself from the investigation, but because of the tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton, she did announce on July 1st that she would accept the decision of the FBI. Comey would make his statement clearing Hillary of any criminal wrongdoing on July 5th. But based on this text, it sounds as if Lynch was already aware what the FBI Director's conclusion was going to be. Comey himself had suggested Lynch appeared biased in the email probe and that he felt the need to act independently from her. From the NY Times :

"The Clinton campaign, at the time, was using all kind of euphemisms -- security review, matters, things like that, for what was going on," Mr. Comey said on Thursday. "We were getting to a place where the attorney general and I were both going to have to testify and talk publicly about. And I wanted to know, was she going to authorize us to confirm we had an investigation?

"And she said, 'Yes, but don't call it that, call it a matter,'" Mr. Comey continued. "And I said, 'Why would I do that?' And she said, 'Just call it a matter.'"

Mr. Comey said the "conclusive" episode that persuaded him to make his own announcement in the Clinton investigation rather than leave it to Ms. Lynch came last June, when former President Bill Clinton spontaneously boarded her plane on a tarmac and sat down to talk with her.

"That was the thing that capped it for me, that I had to do something separately to protect the credibility of the investigation, which meant both the F.B.I. and the Justice Department," Mr. Comey said.

So the story was that Lynch was biased (she was) but that Comey acted to protect the independence of the investigation. In fact, Lynch knew what Comey was going to say days before he said it. So what was the point of her offer to respect his decision, an offer that seems designed to make it appear she had no idea what he might decide? There might be some innocent explanation of all this but the whole story features a lot of die-hard Clinton cronies who seem to be doing their best to protect Hillary beneath a thin veneer of impartiality. In fact, what happened at the FBI looks more and more like what happened at the DNC.

Paul F Jordan technical glitch? the lying never stops Like · Reply ·

33 · 1y

Kent Walker Webb This is rather damning stuff. Its too bad the media is so focused on the shut down and DACA and whatever weekly crisis of the century that they will never get around to covering it until they can claim its "old news".. Like · Reply ·

3 · 1y

Kathy Ozanne Psst....the codeword for the sham Hillary Clinton investigation was MYE, or mid year exam. Was referred to in the texts. Finishing the MYE meant get Hillary cleared before the elections. Text sent right around the time Cruz dropped out.

You can see the text here:
https://twitter.com/DaveNYviii/status/955194797991563264 Like · Reply ·

14 · 1y · Edited

Kevin Burke Technical glitch? Really?

One question: Why, at this point, should we believe ANYTHING at all that these people say?

Given everything that we know so far, it appears entirely possible that not only did these people - at DOJ and FBI - attempted to influence a US election (far more than the Russians could ever hope to), but that they also attempted to implement a "Plan B" post-election in order to overturn the results. And all we're getting from them is lies, stonewalling, and half-baked excuses when asked to supply information that should be readily available.

These people have flushed the credibility of their Department and agency down the toiled - credibility which took decades to carefully craft, and one election cycle to destroy.

If these people don't end up fired and in handcuffs at the end of this then they need to rename their Department. Like · Reply ·

32 · 1y · Edited

Michael Woiwood Because AP will accuse you of attacking the FBI and DOJ if you say anything about Strzok, Page, Ohr, Baker, McCabe, Comey...... Like · Reply ·

8 · 1y

Jerry Wright AP has made it perfectly clear where his loyalties lie. He will not forgive President Trump and a great many others for making him look like a fool. Like · Reply ·

7 · 1y

James Myers Jerry Wright The other fools are the people like me that defended the POS Allahpundit when everyone else already was what a traitor he was. There's a ton of people with every right to tell me I told you so.

But once you see the idiot for what he is, it makes you wonder why anyone ever thought he was a conservative. Like · Reply ·

3 · 1y Show 1 more reply in this thread

Scott Phillips No honest investigation has a determination of guilt or innocence prior to it's completion.
This was all Comey/Lynch kabuki from day one.

[May 17, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard's Campaign Is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists by Lachlan Markay, Sam Stein

Nice hatchet job from pro-Clinton web site
May 17, 2019 | www.thedailybeast.com

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is being underwritten by some of the nation's leading Russophiles.

Donors to her campaign in the first quarter of the year included: Stephen F. Cohen, a Russian studies professor at New York University and prominent Kremlin sympathizer; Sharon Tennison, a vocal Putin supporter who nonetheless found herself detained by Russian authorities in 2016; and an employee of the Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT, who appears to have donated under the alias "Goofy Grapes."

Gabbard is one of her party's more Russia-friendly voices in an era of deep Democratic suspicion of the country over its efforts to tip the 2016 election in favor of President Donald Trump. Her financial support from prominent pro-Russian voices in the U.S. is a small portion of the total she's raised. But it still illustrates the degree to which she deviates from her party's mainstream on such a contentious and high-profile issue.

Data on Gabbard's financial supporters only covers the first three months of the year. In that time, her campaign received just over $1,000 from Cohen, arguably the nation's leading intellectual apologist for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Tennison donated to Gabbard no fewer than five times, eventually reaching the per-cycle individual contribution limit in mid-March. Tennison and her group, the Center for Citizen Initiatives, have long worked to improve U.S.-Russia relations, in part by organizing junkets to the nation both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. She's also been an outspoken Putin supporter, dubbing him a "straightforward, reliable and exceptionally inventive man" in a column last year. Tennison wrote that column in spite of her detention in Russia two years earlier, when she was accused of attempting to covertly advance U.S. foreign policy interests in the country.

Gabbard also got a $1,000 contribution from "Goofy Grapes," who listed his or her occupation as "comedian" and employer as Redacted Tonight, a current events comedy show on Russian state-backed broadcaster RT. That show's host, comedian Lee Camp, told The Daily Beast that the person who made the donation "is no longer an active member of Redacted Tonight. And separately, it is company policy to not donate to political campaigns."

Camp, for his part, routinely promotes the Russian government line on major world affairs, most notably the invasion of Ukraine, political unrest in Venezuela, and the Syrian civil war.

To the extent that those donors toe the Kremlin line on issues such as Syria, they're more squarely in line with Gabbard's own views than those of any other Democratic presidential candidate. As a member of Congress, she has personally met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and cast doubt on widely accepted reports that he deployed nerve gas weapons against his own people.

Gabbard has also been one of the few prominent Democrats in the country to downplay the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 election. The report found no evidence of a conspiracy by the Trump campaign to support that meddling. But it did provide extensive details of that malicious influence campaign, and of the Trump administration's efforts to impede the special counsel's investigation.

But while her House colleagues ramp up their own investigations, in part based on those findings, Gabbard has called for the country -- and her party -- to move on. "The conclusion that came from that Mueller report was that no collusion took place," she told Fox News last month. "Now is the time for us to come together as a country to put the issues and the interests and the concerns that the American people have at the forefront, to take action to bring about real solutions for them."

That reflects the attitude of a small set of the American left wing, a non-interventionist faction that eyed collusion allegations with suspicion. And that's very much the school of thought from which Cohen and other Gabbard donors hail.

But the list of controversial donors to Gabbard, as detailed by her filings with the Federal Election Committee, doesn't end there.

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Susan Sarandon, the famous actress who earned the enduring wrath of Democrats for her support of Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2016 election, gave Gabbard $500.

Ali Amin, the president of Primex International, wrote two checks of $2,800 to Gabbard's campaign. Amin, who runs the international food distribution company, pleaded guilty in 2015 to charges that he'd transferred more than $17 million between Iran and the United States as part of an unlicensed business transaction.

After being asked about those donations, Cullen Tiernan, a spokesperson for Gabbard, said the campaign would be returning them. Tiernan also noted that Amin had given to fellow 2020 contender Sen. Kamala Harris' (D-CA) Senate campaign in 2018. Ian Sams, a spokesman for Harris, said the Senator refunded Amin's donation in July 2018.

Gabbard's campaign did not return a request for comment. Her election effort raised nearly $4.5 million in the first quarter of 2019, but that included hefty transfers from her House campaign committee. She has used that money to mount a rather unorthodox bid for the Democratic nomination. Gabbard had only one paid staffer during that same three month period, choosing instead to hire consultants for key posts on her campaign -- a staffing decision that seemed likely done to avoid making hefty payments for things like health care coverage and payroll taxes.

Gabbard's media strategy has also been counterintuitive for a national Democrat. She has made several appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which, while being one of the most popular platforms on that medium, is a haven for Trump-supporting guests. Gabbard also is among the few Democrats who has a captive audience on Fox News, owed largely to her willingness to criticize Barack Obama, as well as her party's planks on both Russia and foreign policy in general. Tucker Carlson, a primetime host on that network, has publicly defended her.

Though she has not courted their support, some prominent figures in the white nationalist community have flocked in Gabbard's direction. David Duke, the former KKK leader, has heaped praise on her. And on several occasions, Richard Spencer, the avowed white supremacist, has tweeted favorably about her, including once again this week.

me frameborder=

I can't imagine Tulsi Gabbard wants this endorsement. pic.twitter.com/mXoIiEFavZ

-- Alex Thomas (@AlexThomasDC) May 14, 2019

[May 17, 2019] What Putin And Pompeo Did Not Talk About

May 17, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

I Am Jack's Macroaggression , 44 minutes ago link

US foreign policy under President Trump is remarkably similar to what it would have been under Hillary...

except even she wouldnt have put a Chabad Orthodox *** in charge of a mideast 'peace' plan, let alone a 'solution' for the illegal immigration crisis which Trump did nothing about when the GOP controlled both House and Senate

haruspicio , 1 hour ago link

I do not think Putin is an idiot...he has consistently made good decisions and judgements and outsmarted both Obama and Trump on every occasion. For some reason I am worried that he is palling up to the wrong guy. Trump and the US cannot be trusted to observe any agreement or treaty and have displayed this over and over again.

Putin should be aligning with China who can be trusted to honour deals made. A military alliance between Russia and China with mutual aid of attacked by a third party would make the best strategic sense. If Putin doesn't;t do this he will get weakened economically and then when he is weak, the US will invade.

admin user , 1 hour ago link

there have been secret talks among the three pillars of Eurasian integration – Russia, China and Iran – about Chinese and Russian guarantees

" We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia ." - Nineteen Eighty-Four

not dead yet , 2 hours ago link

As quoted by the Moon Of Alabama Lavrov claimed there were back channels between the US and Russia from 2013 to Trumps taking office. Lavov claims these communications would shed lots of light on the Russians not interfering in the election and other stuff the Russians have been falsely accused of. Russia wants to release these communications and will only do so if the US agrees which they have not. Pompeo was silent.

chunga , 2 hours ago link

Quite a contrast to what their DC counterparts would do; that's smear it all over fake news in a dishonest, sensational effort to malign.

[May 17, 2019] Lavrov to Pompeo: And what's the US doing in the Eastern Hemisphere

May 17, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

That brings to mind the recent Arctic Council summit. Both Lavrov and Pompeo were there. Here's a significant exchange:

Lavrov: I believe you don't represent the South American region, do you?

Pompeo: We represent the entire hemisphere.

Lavrov: Oh, the hemisphere. Then what's the US doing in the Eastern Hemisphere, in Ukraine, for instance?

There was no response from Pompeo.

[May 17, 2019] US military complex is a 'malignant virus' that's evolved to defend itself

May 17, 2019 | www.unz.com

annamaria , says: Next New Comment May 16, 2019 at 10:51 pm GMT

@9/11 Inside job Andrew Cockburn: "US military complex is a 'malignant virus' that's evolved to defend itself" https://www.rt.com/usa/459505-us-military-industrial-virus/

"The MIC is embedded in our society to such a degree that it cannot be dislodged, and also that it could be said to be concerned, exclusively, with self-preservation and expansion, like a giant, malignant virus."

The system has evolved to be very good at defending itself – while leaving the country, "in reality so poorly defended".

One Tribe , says: May 16, 2019 at 11:10 pm GMT
Thanks again CJH for all the chuckles. It is time all 'real' people acknowledged that

The NYT is the " Propagandist of Record ".

Nothing more. And it's been like that for quite a while. While it would be logical to identify the systemic bend, and blindness that it has, it is probably against the law, like all discussions about [redacted]

A pattern that has played out consistently for over 2000 years, and can be seen for what it is in reviewing the Pale (of Settlements) and the conditions for those not included in the [redacted]. But really, it's beyond the pale, isn't it. People, slowly but surely, are building immunity to the perception management programs, even with the wildly amplified volume and frequency , we see the early adapters adapting, and opting for the red pill .

Just a co-incidence that while the psychotic ' leaders ' of a small colonial ' government ' squatting on expropriated land, committing escalating genocidal programs against the indigenous population, and actively conflating it with anti-[redacted], while the co-affiliates resident in the empire's other nation-states keep quiet, there seems to be an epidemic of anti-[redacted]?!

" It's a trick, and we use it a lot. "
he, he, aren't we so clever!

This ruse is coming to an end soon
and all of those people working in the desert somewhere, writing stuff online, are going to have to get real jobs.

[May 16, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard for President - Stephen Lendman

Highly recommended!
It's sad to know that Tulsi bought Russiagate nonsense hook line and sinker. In a sense, she is also a compromise candidate as her domestic platform is weak and inconsistent. She shines in foreign policy issues only. But this compromise might still make sense. At least she is much better then Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... A consumer rights champion in name only, she did nothing to oversee predatory banking practices responsibly, nothing to urge prosecution of Wall Street crooks as Obama's interim Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP) head. ..."
"... "If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the US government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government." ..."
"... "The CIA has also been funneling weapons and money through Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and others who provide direct and indirect support to groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda." ..."
"... She may be the only congressional member boldly stating the above remarks publicly to her credit. ..."
"... She considers US wars not authorized by Congress impeachable high crimes. ..."
"... The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CATSA) illegally imposed sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. It passed the House and Senate near-unanimously – shameful legislation demanding opposition, not support. ..."
"... Hold the cheers on Gabbard and all other Republican and Dem presidential aspirants with a chance to be party standard bearers. The bottom line on them all is simple, no exceptions. If nominated and elected, either go along with the dirty system or be replaced by someone else who will – by impeachment or something more sinister. ..."
"... No matter who's elected president and to key congressional posts, dirty business as usual always wins. ..."
May 16, 2019 | stephenlendman.org

( stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman ) Tulsi 2020 is the official website of her candidacy for US president – so far with no information other than saying: "When we stand united, motivated by our love for each other and for our country, there is no challenge we cannot overcome. Will you stand with me?" On Friday, she said "I have decided to run and will be making a formal announcement within the next week," adding:

"There are a lot of reasons for me to make this decision. There are a lot of challenges that are facing the American people that I'm concerned about and that I want to help solve."
Besides access to healthcare for all Americans, criminal justice reform, and climate change, (t)here is one main issue that is central to the rest, and that is the issue of war and peace," she stressed. More on this below.
"I look forward to being able to get into this and to talk about it in depth when we make our announcement."
Gabbard's record is mixed at best, things to like, others of concern, including her Dem affiliation. She formerly served as DNC vice chair, resigning in February 2016 to support Russophobe undemocratic Dem Bernie Sanders over Hillary. Throughout his political career, he's been progressive in name only, his rhetoric and voting record most often at odds with each other. He'll likely run again in 2020. After Hillary used dirty tricks in primary elections to steal the Dem nomination, Gabbard supported her candidacy – a figure I called the most ruthlessly dangerous presidential aspirant in US history, backing it up with cold, hard facts about her deplorable record as first lady, US senator and secretary of state. Elizabeth Warren already announced her 2020 candidacy. She's con man Sanders clone with a gender difference.

A consumer rights champion in name only, she did nothing to oversee predatory banking practices responsibly, nothing to urge prosecution of Wall Street crooks as Obama's interim Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP) head.

She failed to criticize his wars on humanity at home and abroad, terror-bombing seven countries in eight years, force-feeding neoliberal harshness on America's most disadvantaged, letting protracted main street Depression conditions fester – supporting what demanded condemnation. She one-sidedly supports Israel, failing to denounce its apartheid ruthlessness, its Gaza wars on defenseless civilians.

Like Sanders and other undemocratic Dems, she considers naked aggression humanitarian intervention and democracy building. Her agenda is all about perpetuating dirty business as usual – based on going along with the imperial, neoliberal GOP and Dem agenda, supported by the vast majority of officials in Washington.

Gore Vidal explained how the dirty system works, saying no one gets to be presidential material unless they've "been bought over 10 times." The same goes for top congressional posts. Gabbard is suspect for similar reasons, voting along party lines too often since elected to represent Hawaii's 2nd congressional district in November 2012.

After the Obama regime's coup in Ukraine, replacing democratic governance with fascist tyranny, she supported supplying the illegitimate, Nazi-infested, putschist regime with military assistance, shamefully saying America can't stand "idly by while Russia continues to degrade the territorial integrity of Ukraine." No "Russian aggression" existed then or now. Yet Gabbard disgracefully claimed otherwise, urging "more painful economic sanctions" on Moscow, pretending the regime in Kiev is a "peaceful, sovereign neighbor." In July 2017, she unjustifiably supported legislation imposing illegal unilateral US sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. She's for US phony war on terrorism, the scourge Republicans and most Dems support while claiming otherwise.

She's against what she called "counterproductive wars of regime change," including in Syria. She earlier said targeting Bashar al-Assad for regime change was "a thinly veiled attempt to use the rationale of 'humanitarianism' as a justification to escalate our illegal, counterproductive war," adding: "Under US law, it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaeda, ISIS or other terrorist groups."

"If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the US government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government."

"The CIA has also been funneling weapons and money through Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and others who provide direct and indirect support to groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda."

She may be the only congressional member boldly stating the above remarks publicly to her credit.

In January 2017, she met with Assad in Damascus, toured parts of Syria, seeing firsthand how US aggression harmed millions of civilians. She called all anti-government forces terrorists, saying so-called moderate rebels don't exist, stressing "(t)hat is a fact," on return home expressing "even greater resolve to end our illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government."

She considers US wars not authorized by Congress impeachable high crimes. She should have explained that only Security Council members may authorize war by one or more countries on other sovereign states – not US presidents, Congress or the courts. That's the law of the land under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause (Article 6, Clause 2). All treaties, conventions, and other international agreements to which the US is a signatory automatically become binding US law.

To her credit in October 2017, Gabbard opposed reimposing sanctions on Iran, at the time saying the Islamic Republic is fully complying with JCPOA provisions. At the same time, she co-sponsored legislation opposing Iran's legitimate ballistic missile program, imposing illegal sanctions on the country,

In 2015, she supported legislation endorsing extreme vetting of Syrian and Iraqi war refugees, designed to deny them refugee status. The measure failed to get enough Senate support for passage.

She opposed the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2019, 2018, and earlier, opposed reforming US border security and immigration, opposed a proposed constitutional balanced budget amendment, opposed the GOP great tax cut heist, supported CATSA.

The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CATSA) illegally imposed sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. It passed the House and Senate near-unanimously – shameful legislation demanding opposition, not support.

Hold the cheers on Gabbard and all other Republican and Dem presidential aspirants with a chance to be party standard bearers. The bottom line on them all is simple, no exceptions. If nominated and elected, either go along with the dirty system or be replaced by someone else who will – by impeachment or something more sinister.

Washington's deeply corrupted system is too debauched to fix. The only solution is popular revolution, voting a waste of time.

No matter who's elected president and to key congressional posts, dirty business as usual always wins.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org ( Home – Stephen Lendman ). Contact at [email protected] . My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III." www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Stephen Lendman

Stephen Lendman was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999.

Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed.

Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient.

[May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I don' know what are the revenues of NYT or The Guardian, but I know that the US government spends 750 million a year on the Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors). If you think US or France is under attack by warmongers, you can't imagine how many propagandists are these 750 million hiring in low-COL places like Serbia, Burma, Venezuela. ..."
"... The situation is even worse today as the CIA and Pentagon have massive propaganda budgets and have infiltrated the media at every level , the public is unaware that each day they are brainwashed by the MSM to support the agenda of the "deep State' and the MIC. ..."
"... No mention of the journalists as CIA assets who publish planted stories? Isn't Dr Udo Ulfkotte one who did that, repented, told all in his best-seller Bought Journalists, and as a warning to others unselfishly dropped dead of a heart attack within a couple of years? ..."
"... The best sentence was the one expressing the Establishment's collective faux shock that anything other than Russian spybots could be responsible for the serfs' rejection of the "two centrist parties" that have sponged up lobbyist money for 3 decades, cashing in on the globalist-Neoliberal economy, as rents rose and wages fell. ..."
"... Not too sure about the US even remaining important as a continent wide farm.. The aquifers in the West and Midwest are being inexorably drawn down to sustain the current rate of farming, so it's possible North America's value would primarily be as a source of pockets of human talent in the sciences and technologies. ..."
May 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

paraglider , says: May 15, 2019 at 3:39 pm GMT

the hysteria emanating from the nyt, cnn and the rest of the msm is the result of a conscious or subconscious grasp that socialism dying worldwide. the great ponzi scam of forcing future generations to pay for the cookies and ice cream of the present generation has hit the math of the complete dearth of unencumbered assets from which to emit more unpayable debt, insufficient economic growth upon which to pretend the debt can be serviced forget about repayment and the simple fact demographichs throughout the west are so negative the government and public pension scheme blowup in the several years

the more intelligent members of the establishment know in their bones the jig is up. hence the great and urgent need to turn up .lets over throw sovereign nations so the plunder model ..venezuela, syria, russia, china et al.can find more unencumbered assets to be brought into the nyc, london orbit of banks from which new debt can be emitted.

the west is staring at its last decade of global rule, a rule that began 500 years ago. by the 2030's finance, manufacturing and all the global power and prestige that goes with it moves from ny, london to shanghai and moscow.

if the united states is lucky and remains intact, a giant IF, we may wind up as continent size farm with a smidgen of non competitive industry here and there.

the west has only disinformation with which to go to war against the rising east. the weapons of the west are powerful ONLY in their quantity. Russian weapons already are many years beyond anything the pentagon has in the field and the gap is only increasing, ergo the us treasury is forced to fight the battle using sanctions and other forms of restrictions, a long term losing strategy irrespective of any short terms gains.

so, cj worry not, the disinformation campaign is backed by nothing but hot air and the rage from being thwarted by china and russia as well as brave pipsqueakes like iran and venezuela.

see it for what it is, transparent sound and fury signifying nothing

Anon [232] Disclaimer , says: May 15, 2019 at 5:59 pm GMT
I don' know what are the revenues of NYT or The Guardian, but I know that the US government spends 750 million a year on the Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors). If you think US or France is under attack by warmongers, you can't imagine how many propagandists are these 750 million hiring in low-COL places like Serbia, Burma, Venezuela.
Gordo , says: May 15, 2019 at 9:16 pm GMT
@Anon

I don' know what are the revenues of NYT or The Guardian, but I know that the US government spends 750 million a year on the Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors). If you think US or France is under attack by warmongers, you can't imagine how many propagandists are these 750 million hiring in low-COL places like Serbia, Burma, Venezuela.

The UK gov't covertly subsidizes the Guardian.

9/11 Inside job , says: May 16, 2019 at 1:11 am GMT
In 1917 US Congressman Calloway informed Congress that J.P. Morgan interests had purchased 25 of the nations leading newspapers and replaced their editors in order to control the mass media for the benefit of the plutocrats/money interests who ran the country and who still do . The situation is even worse today as the CIA and Pentagon have massive propaganda budgets and have infiltrated the media at every level , the public is unaware that each day they are brainwashed by the MSM to support the agenda of the "deep State' and the MIC.
obwandiyag , says: May 16, 2019 at 3:18 am GMT
See, half a century after McCarthy, wingers got their noses into some (not all) Soviet files, and got to scream, nonstop and to this day, "See!@@#$% McCarthy was RIGHT!"

Betya in a half century, if we're still around, the same type people are going to get nosing in some files somewhere and find incontrovertible evidence that: "See!@#%$%^^ The New York Times was RIGHT!"

Same kind of people. They never change.

OEMIKITLOB , says: May 16, 2019 at 4:13 am GMT
@9/11 Inside job There is a virus-free link to a declassified CIA memo at the end of the article. It's interesting.

https://www.spyculture.com/cia-memos-on-task-force-on-greater-openness/

Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: Website May 16, 2019 at 4:37 am GMT

And then there's the evil Russian spywhale, which the disinformationists want us to believe is just a harmless "therapy Beluga" for kids, but which has clearly been strapped with some sort of monstrous, mind-controlling apparatus that enables the Kremlin to remotely implant a host of dangerous "populist" ideas in the brains of defenseless Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist Viking berserkers who will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in Brussels smelling of akvavit and fermented shark.

You had me doing a cartoon spit-take with this beaut!

Giuseppe , says: May 16, 2019 at 4:42 am GMT

these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and think tanks, and research institutes, to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative

No mention of the journalists as CIA assets who publish planted stories? Isn't Dr Udo Ulfkotte one who did that, repented, told all in his best-seller Bought Journalists, and as a warning to others unselfishly dropped dead of a heart attack within a couple of years?

" that enables the Kremlin to remotely implant a host of dangerous "populist" ideas in the brains of defenseless Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist Viking berserkers who will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in Brussels smelling of akvavit and fermented shark "

It isn't the akvavit that does it, but you can't do it without the akvavit.

Biff , says: May 16, 2019 at 4:45 am GMT

And then there's the evil Russian spywhale, which the disinformationists want us to believe is just a harmless "therapy Beluga" for kids, but which has clearly been strapped with some sort of monstrous, mind-controlling apparatus that enables the Kremlin to remotely implant a host of dangerous "populist" ideas in the brains of defenseless Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist Viking berserkers who will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in Brussels smelling of akvavit and fermented shark.

I had a good laugh at the Spy Whale schtick. One look at the thing, and you get the idea it should've been in a Pink Panther movie.

Made up shit that only a mind of a child could believe.

Endgame Napoleon , says: May 16, 2019 at 4:56 am GMT
The best sentence was the one expressing the Establishment's collective faux shock that anything other than Russian spybots could be responsible for the serfs' rejection of the "two centrist parties" that have sponged up lobbyist money for 3 decades, cashing in on the globalist-Neoliberal economy, as rents rose and wages fell.

The serfs have to love that. How could they not embrace it? Only spybots beaming up doom-and-gloom messages from halfway around the globe could persuade the thick-headed serfs that the part-time / churn / gig economy is anything but nirvana.

Alfa158 , says: May 16, 2019 at 5:18 am GMT
@paraglider I think you're probably right about the inevitable collapse of the West as the dominant global power.

Not too sure about the US even remaining important as a continent wide farm.. The aquifers in the West and Midwest are being inexorably drawn down to sustain the current rate of farming, so it's possible North America's value would primarily be as a source of pockets of human talent in the sciences and technologies.

Also Russia has been making some progress, but unless that continues it may not reach the level of competitiveness in science, industry and domestic product to be any more than a junior partner to China.

Whatever happens, a sea change in history seems unavoidable and it won't be what our present rulers think it will. I don't pretend to think I can reliably predict what is coming.

unit472 , says: May 16, 2019 at 5:19 am GMT
I used to know Russian disinformation when I saw it because it was obvious when it came from the USSR. Then the MSM peddled it as authentic as when, in response to Soviet deployment of IRBM in Europe, pinkos magically appeared to protest the American deployment of similar weapons. It was well funded too as Brezhnev had serious oil revenues to finance both his military and his disinformation campaigns and the USSR had 125% of America's population and a satellite Eastern Europe to boot.

Now I am to believe a motheaten "Russia' with less than half the US population, a hostile Ukraine and no Eastern European satrapies is able to exert more 'influence' in the West than the mighty USSR. Yet those same 'pinkos' would have me believe a castrated Russia is an existential threat. Come on!

[May 16, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard for President - Stephen Lendman

Highly recommended!
It's sad to know that Tulsi bought Russiagate nonsense hook line and sinker. In a sense, she is also a compromise candidate as her domestic platform is weak and inconsistent. She shines in foreign policy issues only. But this compromise might still make sense. At least she is much better then Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... A consumer rights champion in name only, she did nothing to oversee predatory banking practices responsibly, nothing to urge prosecution of Wall Street crooks as Obama's interim Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP) head. ..."
"... "If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the US government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government." ..."
"... "The CIA has also been funneling weapons and money through Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and others who provide direct and indirect support to groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda." ..."
"... She may be the only congressional member boldly stating the above remarks publicly to her credit. ..."
"... She considers US wars not authorized by Congress impeachable high crimes. ..."
"... The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CATSA) illegally imposed sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. It passed the House and Senate near-unanimously – shameful legislation demanding opposition, not support. ..."
"... Hold the cheers on Gabbard and all other Republican and Dem presidential aspirants with a chance to be party standard bearers. The bottom line on them all is simple, no exceptions. If nominated and elected, either go along with the dirty system or be replaced by someone else who will – by impeachment or something more sinister. ..."
"... No matter who's elected president and to key congressional posts, dirty business as usual always wins. ..."
May 16, 2019 | stephenlendman.org

( stephenlendman.org – Home – Stephen Lendman ) Tulsi 2020 is the official website of her candidacy for US president – so far with no information other than saying: "When we stand united, motivated by our love for each other and for our country, there is no challenge we cannot overcome. Will you stand with me?" On Friday, she said "I have decided to run and will be making a formal announcement within the next week," adding:

"There are a lot of reasons for me to make this decision. There are a lot of challenges that are facing the American people that I'm concerned about and that I want to help solve."
Besides access to healthcare for all Americans, criminal justice reform, and climate change, (t)here is one main issue that is central to the rest, and that is the issue of war and peace," she stressed. More on this below.
"I look forward to being able to get into this and to talk about it in depth when we make our announcement."
Gabbard's record is mixed at best, things to like, others of concern, including her Dem affiliation. She formerly served as DNC vice chair, resigning in February 2016 to support Russophobe undemocratic Dem Bernie Sanders over Hillary. Throughout his political career, he's been progressive in name only, his rhetoric and voting record most often at odds with each other. He'll likely run again in 2020. After Hillary used dirty tricks in primary elections to steal the Dem nomination, Gabbard supported her candidacy – a figure I called the most ruthlessly dangerous presidential aspirant in US history, backing it up with cold, hard facts about her deplorable record as first lady, US senator and secretary of state. Elizabeth Warren already announced her 2020 candidacy. She's con man Sanders clone with a gender difference.

A consumer rights champion in name only, she did nothing to oversee predatory banking practices responsibly, nothing to urge prosecution of Wall Street crooks as Obama's interim Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (BCFP) head.

She failed to criticize his wars on humanity at home and abroad, terror-bombing seven countries in eight years, force-feeding neoliberal harshness on America's most disadvantaged, letting protracted main street Depression conditions fester – supporting what demanded condemnation. She one-sidedly supports Israel, failing to denounce its apartheid ruthlessness, its Gaza wars on defenseless civilians.

Like Sanders and other undemocratic Dems, she considers naked aggression humanitarian intervention and democracy building. Her agenda is all about perpetuating dirty business as usual – based on going along with the imperial, neoliberal GOP and Dem agenda, supported by the vast majority of officials in Washington.

Gore Vidal explained how the dirty system works, saying no one gets to be presidential material unless they've "been bought over 10 times." The same goes for top congressional posts. Gabbard is suspect for similar reasons, voting along party lines too often since elected to represent Hawaii's 2nd congressional district in November 2012.

After the Obama regime's coup in Ukraine, replacing democratic governance with fascist tyranny, she supported supplying the illegitimate, Nazi-infested, putschist regime with military assistance, shamefully saying America can't stand "idly by while Russia continues to degrade the territorial integrity of Ukraine." No "Russian aggression" existed then or now. Yet Gabbard disgracefully claimed otherwise, urging "more painful economic sanctions" on Moscow, pretending the regime in Kiev is a "peaceful, sovereign neighbor." In July 2017, she unjustifiably supported legislation imposing illegal unilateral US sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. She's for US phony war on terrorism, the scourge Republicans and most Dems support while claiming otherwise.

She's against what she called "counterproductive wars of regime change," including in Syria. She earlier said targeting Bashar al-Assad for regime change was "a thinly veiled attempt to use the rationale of 'humanitarianism' as a justification to escalate our illegal, counterproductive war," adding: "Under US law, it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaeda, ISIS or other terrorist groups."

"If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the US government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government."

"The CIA has also been funneling weapons and money through Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and others who provide direct and indirect support to groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda."

She may be the only congressional member boldly stating the above remarks publicly to her credit.

In January 2017, she met with Assad in Damascus, toured parts of Syria, seeing firsthand how US aggression harmed millions of civilians. She called all anti-government forces terrorists, saying so-called moderate rebels don't exist, stressing "(t)hat is a fact," on return home expressing "even greater resolve to end our illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government."

She considers US wars not authorized by Congress impeachable high crimes. She should have explained that only Security Council members may authorize war by one or more countries on other sovereign states – not US presidents, Congress or the courts. That's the law of the land under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause (Article 6, Clause 2). All treaties, conventions, and other international agreements to which the US is a signatory automatically become binding US law.

To her credit in October 2017, Gabbard opposed reimposing sanctions on Iran, at the time saying the Islamic Republic is fully complying with JCPOA provisions. At the same time, she co-sponsored legislation opposing Iran's legitimate ballistic missile program, imposing illegal sanctions on the country,

In 2015, she supported legislation endorsing extreme vetting of Syrian and Iraqi war refugees, designed to deny them refugee status. The measure failed to get enough Senate support for passage.

She opposed the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2019, 2018, and earlier, opposed reforming US border security and immigration, opposed a proposed constitutional balanced budget amendment, opposed the GOP great tax cut heist, supported CATSA.

The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CATSA) illegally imposed sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea. It passed the House and Senate near-unanimously – shameful legislation demanding opposition, not support.

Hold the cheers on Gabbard and all other Republican and Dem presidential aspirants with a chance to be party standard bearers. The bottom line on them all is simple, no exceptions. If nominated and elected, either go along with the dirty system or be replaced by someone else who will – by impeachment or something more sinister.

Washington's deeply corrupted system is too debauched to fix. The only solution is popular revolution, voting a waste of time.

No matter who's elected president and to key congressional posts, dirty business as usual always wins.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org ( Home – Stephen Lendman ). Contact at [email protected] . My newest book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III." www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Stephen Lendman

Stephen Lendman was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999.

Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed.

Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly. Distinguished guests are featured. Listen live or archived. Major world and national issues are discussed. Lendman is a 2008 Project Censored winner and 2011 Mexican Journalists Club international journalism award recipient.

[May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I don' know what are the revenues of NYT or The Guardian, but I know that the US government spends 750 million a year on the Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors). If you think US or France is under attack by warmongers, you can't imagine how many propagandists are these 750 million hiring in low-COL places like Serbia, Burma, Venezuela. ..."
"... The situation is even worse today as the CIA and Pentagon have massive propaganda budgets and have infiltrated the media at every level , the public is unaware that each day they are brainwashed by the MSM to support the agenda of the "deep State' and the MIC. ..."
"... No mention of the journalists as CIA assets who publish planted stories? Isn't Dr Udo Ulfkotte one who did that, repented, told all in his best-seller Bought Journalists, and as a warning to others unselfishly dropped dead of a heart attack within a couple of years? ..."
"... The best sentence was the one expressing the Establishment's collective faux shock that anything other than Russian spybots could be responsible for the serfs' rejection of the "two centrist parties" that have sponged up lobbyist money for 3 decades, cashing in on the globalist-Neoliberal economy, as rents rose and wages fell. ..."
"... Not too sure about the US even remaining important as a continent wide farm.. The aquifers in the West and Midwest are being inexorably drawn down to sustain the current rate of farming, so it's possible North America's value would primarily be as a source of pockets of human talent in the sciences and technologies. ..."
May 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

paraglider , says: May 15, 2019 at 3:39 pm GMT

the hysteria emanating from the nyt, cnn and the rest of the msm is the result of a conscious or subconscious grasp that socialism dying worldwide. the great ponzi scam of forcing future generations to pay for the cookies and ice cream of the present generation has hit the math of the complete dearth of unencumbered assets from which to emit more unpayable debt, insufficient economic growth upon which to pretend the debt can be serviced forget about repayment and the simple fact demographichs throughout the west are so negative the government and public pension scheme blowup in the several years

the more intelligent members of the establishment know in their bones the jig is up. hence the great and urgent need to turn up .lets over throw sovereign nations so the plunder model ..venezuela, syria, russia, china et al.can find more unencumbered assets to be brought into the nyc, london orbit of banks from which new debt can be emitted.

the west is staring at its last decade of global rule, a rule that began 500 years ago. by the 2030's finance, manufacturing and all the global power and prestige that goes with it moves from ny, london to shanghai and moscow.

if the united states is lucky and remains intact, a giant IF, we may wind up as continent size farm with a smidgen of non competitive industry here and there.

the west has only disinformation with which to go to war against the rising east. the weapons of the west are powerful ONLY in their quantity. Russian weapons already are many years beyond anything the pentagon has in the field and the gap is only increasing, ergo the us treasury is forced to fight the battle using sanctions and other forms of restrictions, a long term losing strategy irrespective of any short terms gains.

so, cj worry not, the disinformation campaign is backed by nothing but hot air and the rage from being thwarted by china and russia as well as brave pipsqueakes like iran and venezuela.

see it for what it is, transparent sound and fury signifying nothing

Anon [232] Disclaimer , says: May 15, 2019 at 5:59 pm GMT
I don' know what are the revenues of NYT or The Guardian, but I know that the US government spends 750 million a year on the Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors). If you think US or France is under attack by warmongers, you can't imagine how many propagandists are these 750 million hiring in low-COL places like Serbia, Burma, Venezuela.
Gordo , says: May 15, 2019 at 9:16 pm GMT
@Anon

I don' know what are the revenues of NYT or The Guardian, but I know that the US government spends 750 million a year on the Agency for Global Media (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors). If you think US or France is under attack by warmongers, you can't imagine how many propagandists are these 750 million hiring in low-COL places like Serbia, Burma, Venezuela.

The UK gov't covertly subsidizes the Guardian.

9/11 Inside job , says: May 16, 2019 at 1:11 am GMT
In 1917 US Congressman Calloway informed Congress that J.P. Morgan interests had purchased 25 of the nations leading newspapers and replaced their editors in order to control the mass media for the benefit of the plutocrats/money interests who ran the country and who still do . The situation is even worse today as the CIA and Pentagon have massive propaganda budgets and have infiltrated the media at every level , the public is unaware that each day they are brainwashed by the MSM to support the agenda of the "deep State' and the MIC.
obwandiyag , says: May 16, 2019 at 3:18 am GMT
See, half a century after McCarthy, wingers got their noses into some (not all) Soviet files, and got to scream, nonstop and to this day, "See!@@#$% McCarthy was RIGHT!"

Betya in a half century, if we're still around, the same type people are going to get nosing in some files somewhere and find incontrovertible evidence that: "See!@#%$%^^ The New York Times was RIGHT!"

Same kind of people. They never change.

OEMIKITLOB , says: May 16, 2019 at 4:13 am GMT
@9/11 Inside job There is a virus-free link to a declassified CIA memo at the end of the article. It's interesting.

https://www.spyculture.com/cia-memos-on-task-force-on-greater-openness/

Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: Website May 16, 2019 at 4:37 am GMT

And then there's the evil Russian spywhale, which the disinformationists want us to believe is just a harmless "therapy Beluga" for kids, but which has clearly been strapped with some sort of monstrous, mind-controlling apparatus that enables the Kremlin to remotely implant a host of dangerous "populist" ideas in the brains of defenseless Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist Viking berserkers who will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in Brussels smelling of akvavit and fermented shark.

You had me doing a cartoon spit-take with this beaut!

Giuseppe , says: May 16, 2019 at 4:42 am GMT

these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and think tanks, and research institutes, to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative

No mention of the journalists as CIA assets who publish planted stories? Isn't Dr Udo Ulfkotte one who did that, repented, told all in his best-seller Bought Journalists, and as a warning to others unselfishly dropped dead of a heart attack within a couple of years?

" that enables the Kremlin to remotely implant a host of dangerous "populist" ideas in the brains of defenseless Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist Viking berserkers who will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in Brussels smelling of akvavit and fermented shark "

It isn't the akvavit that does it, but you can't do it without the akvavit.

Biff , says: May 16, 2019 at 4:45 am GMT

And then there's the evil Russian spywhale, which the disinformationists want us to believe is just a harmless "therapy Beluga" for kids, but which has clearly been strapped with some sort of monstrous, mind-controlling apparatus that enables the Kremlin to remotely implant a host of dangerous "populist" ideas in the brains of defenseless Norwegian fishermen, weaponizing them into a horde of neo-Odinist Viking berserkers who will scream down out of Scandinavia and storm the EU Parliament in Brussels smelling of akvavit and fermented shark.

I had a good laugh at the Spy Whale schtick. One look at the thing, and you get the idea it should've been in a Pink Panther movie.

Made up shit that only a mind of a child could believe.

Endgame Napoleon , says: May 16, 2019 at 4:56 am GMT
The best sentence was the one expressing the Establishment's collective faux shock that anything other than Russian spybots could be responsible for the serfs' rejection of the "two centrist parties" that have sponged up lobbyist money for 3 decades, cashing in on the globalist-Neoliberal economy, as rents rose and wages fell.

The serfs have to love that. How could they not embrace it? Only spybots beaming up doom-and-gloom messages from halfway around the globe could persuade the thick-headed serfs that the part-time / churn / gig economy is anything but nirvana.

Alfa158 , says: May 16, 2019 at 5:18 am GMT
@paraglider I think you're probably right about the inevitable collapse of the West as the dominant global power.

Not too sure about the US even remaining important as a continent wide farm.. The aquifers in the West and Midwest are being inexorably drawn down to sustain the current rate of farming, so it's possible North America's value would primarily be as a source of pockets of human talent in the sciences and technologies.

Also Russia has been making some progress, but unless that continues it may not reach the level of competitiveness in science, industry and domestic product to be any more than a junior partner to China.

Whatever happens, a sea change in history seems unavoidable and it won't be what our present rulers think it will. I don't pretend to think I can reliably predict what is coming.

unit472 , says: May 16, 2019 at 5:19 am GMT
I used to know Russian disinformation when I saw it because it was obvious when it came from the USSR. Then the MSM peddled it as authentic as when, in response to Soviet deployment of IRBM in Europe, pinkos magically appeared to protest the American deployment of similar weapons. It was well funded too as Brezhnev had serious oil revenues to finance both his military and his disinformation campaigns and the USSR had 125% of America's population and a satellite Eastern Europe to boot.

Now I am to believe a motheaten "Russia' with less than half the US population, a hostile Ukraine and no Eastern European satrapies is able to exert more 'influence' in the West than the mighty USSR. Yet those same 'pinkos' would have me believe a castrated Russia is an existential threat. Come on!

[May 16, 2019] What motive would they possibly have, these enormous corporate media conglomerates to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative that allows them to systematically eliminate any type of speech they deem to be Russian disinformation, or extremist content, or a conspiracy theory, or simply too dangerous, divisive, or confusing to circulate among the general public?

May 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

The Disinformationists, by C.J. Hopkins - The Unz Review

...what motive would they possibly have, these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and think tanks, and research institutes, to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative that allows them to systematically stigmatize, marginalize, criminalize, deplatform, demonetize, and otherwise eliminate any type of speech they deem to be "Russian disinformation," or "extremist content," or a "conspiracy theory," or simply too "dangerous," "divisive," or "confusing" to circulate among the general public?

No see? That makes no sense. That's just an example of the type of fascist disinformation these Putin-Nazi disinformationists are trying to spread to confuse us to the point where we can't even concentrate long enough to think anymore, or parse the meaningless jargon-laden nonsense they're trying to deceive us with, and just devolve into these Pavlovian imbeciles conditioned to respond to specific trigger words, like "extremist," "terrorist," "fascist," "populist," "anti-Semitic," "Russians," "hackers," and whatever other emotional stimuli we are being trained to instantly recognize and robotically react to like circus animals.

Or I don't know, maybe it isn't. I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say. Probably they've already got to me. I'd better get back down into my anti-disinformation bunker, pull up The Guardian , or The Washington Post , or Der Spiegel on my child-proof computer, and immerse myself in some objective journalism, before the Putin-Nazi spywhale makes its way up the Landwehrkanal, takes control of what's left of my mind, and forces me into going out and trying to vote for Hitler or something.

I recommend you do the same, and I'll see you when this nightmare over.

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

[May 16, 2019] A Polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of self-selected elite. The rest of the population is to be fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting. That's it.

Notable quotes:
"... United States is neither a Republic and even less Socialistic. US, in the technical literature, is called a Polyarchy (state capitalism). Polyarchy (state capitalism) idea is old, it goes back to James Madison and the foundation of the US Constitution. A Polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the nation. The educated and responsible class of men. The rest of the population is to be fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting. That's it. The population have little choice among the educated and responsible men they are voting for. ..."
"... Polyarchy (state capitalism) it is a system where small group actually rules on behalf of capital, and majority's decision making is confined to choosing among selective number of elites within tightly controlled elective process. It is a form of consensual domination made possible by the structural domination of the global capital which allowed concentration of political powers. ..."
May 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Uh, no, Tom, she won't be collecting a lot of voters, well, at least not near enough. Biden has already been "chosen" like Hillary was over Bernie last time. You should know by now Tom, we don't select our candidates, they're chosen for us for our own good. 2 hours ago

This is going to take a long time. You just can't turn this ship around overnight.

US Political System:

United States is neither a Republic and even less Socialistic. US, in the technical literature, is called a Polyarchy (state capitalism). Polyarchy (state capitalism) idea is old, it goes back to James Madison and the foundation of the US Constitution. A Polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the nation. The educated and responsible class of men. The rest of the population is to be fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting. That's it. The population have little choice among the educated and responsible men they are voting for.

This is not an accident. America was founded on the principle, explained by the Founding Father that the primary goal of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. That is how the US Constitution was designed sort of ensuring that there will be a lot of struggle. US is not as the same as it were two centuries ago but that remains the elites ideal.

Polyarchy (state capitalism) it is a system where small group actually rules on behalf of capital, and majority's decision making is confined to choosing among selective number of elites within tightly controlled elective process. It is a form of consensual domination made possible by the structural domination of the global capital which allowed concentration of political powers.

A republic is SUBORDINATE to democracy. Polyarchy can't be subordinated to any form of Democracy. 2 hours ago Is the author, to use an English term, daft? Tulsi Gabbard won't get out of the primaries, much less defeat Sanders or Biden. Farage achieved his goal (Brexit), then found out (SHOCK!) that the will of the people doesn't mean anything anymore.

If Luongo had wanted to talk about the people's uprising, he should've mentioned the Tea Party. 3 hours ago Gabbard appears to have some moral fibre and half a backbone, at least for a politician, regardless of their views, Farage is a slimy charlatan opportunistic populist shill 3 hours ago (Edited) I like Tulsi Gabbard on MIC stuff (and as a surfer in my youth - still dream about that almost endless pipeline at Jeffreys Bay in August), but...

On everything else?

She votes along party lines no matter what bollocks legislation the Democrats put in front of Congress. And anyone standing full-square behind Saunders on his socialist/marxist agenda?

Do me a favour. 1 hour ago (Edited) Farage left because he saw what UKIP was becoming...a zionazi party.

Also Gabbard is a CFR member. 3 hours ago Gold, Goats and Guns? Certainly not guns under President Gabbard! Here's her idea of "common sense gun control:"

https://www.votetulsi.com/node/25028

I'm totally against warmongering, but I have to ask - what good is it to stop foreign warmongering, only to turn around and incite civil war here by further raping the 2nd Amendment? The CFR ties are disturbing as hell, too. And to compare Gabbard to Ron Paul? No, just...no! 3 hours ago Always been a fan of Bernie, but I hope Gabbard becomes president. The world would breathe a huge sigh of relief (before the assassination). 4 hours ago By this time in his 1st term, Obama had started the US Wars in Syria and Libya and has restarted the Iraq War.

Thus far Trump has ended the War in Syria, pledged not to get us dragged into Libya's civil wars and started a peace process with North Korea.

Venezuela and Iran look scary. We don't know what Gabbard would actually do when faced with the same events. Obama talked peace too.

[May 16, 2019] A Polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of self-selected elite. The rest of the population is to be fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting. That's it.

Notable quotes:
"... United States is neither a Republic and even less Socialistic. US, in the technical literature, is called a Polyarchy (state capitalism). Polyarchy (state capitalism) idea is old, it goes back to James Madison and the foundation of the US Constitution. A Polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the nation. The educated and responsible class of men. The rest of the population is to be fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting. That's it. The population have little choice among the educated and responsible men they are voting for. ..."
"... Polyarchy (state capitalism) it is a system where small group actually rules on behalf of capital, and majority's decision making is confined to choosing among selective number of elites within tightly controlled elective process. It is a form of consensual domination made possible by the structural domination of the global capital which allowed concentration of political powers. ..."
May 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Uh, no, Tom, she won't be collecting a lot of voters, well, at least not near enough. Biden has already been "chosen" like Hillary was over Bernie last time. You should know by now Tom, we don't select our candidates, they're chosen for us for our own good. 2 hours ago

This is going to take a long time. You just can't turn this ship around overnight.

US Political System:

United States is neither a Republic and even less Socialistic. US, in the technical literature, is called a Polyarchy (state capitalism). Polyarchy (state capitalism) idea is old, it goes back to James Madison and the foundation of the US Constitution. A Polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the nation. The educated and responsible class of men. The rest of the population is to be fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting. That's it. The population have little choice among the educated and responsible men they are voting for.

This is not an accident. America was founded on the principle, explained by the Founding Father that the primary goal of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. That is how the US Constitution was designed sort of ensuring that there will be a lot of struggle. US is not as the same as it were two centuries ago but that remains the elites ideal.

Polyarchy (state capitalism) it is a system where small group actually rules on behalf of capital, and majority's decision making is confined to choosing among selective number of elites within tightly controlled elective process. It is a form of consensual domination made possible by the structural domination of the global capital which allowed concentration of political powers.

A republic is SUBORDINATE to democracy. Polyarchy can't be subordinated to any form of Democracy. 2 hours ago Is the author, to use an English term, daft? Tulsi Gabbard won't get out of the primaries, much less defeat Sanders or Biden. Farage achieved his goal (Brexit), then found out (SHOCK!) that the will of the people doesn't mean anything anymore.

If Luongo had wanted to talk about the people's uprising, he should've mentioned the Tea Party. 3 hours ago Gabbard appears to have some moral fibre and half a backbone, at least for a politician, regardless of their views, Farage is a slimy charlatan opportunistic populist shill 3 hours ago (Edited) I like Tulsi Gabbard on MIC stuff (and as a surfer in my youth - still dream about that almost endless pipeline at Jeffreys Bay in August), but...

On everything else?

She votes along party lines no matter what bollocks legislation the Democrats put in front of Congress. And anyone standing full-square behind Saunders on his socialist/marxist agenda?

Do me a favour. 1 hour ago (Edited) Farage left because he saw what UKIP was becoming...a zionazi party.

Also Gabbard is a CFR member. 3 hours ago Gold, Goats and Guns? Certainly not guns under President Gabbard! Here's her idea of "common sense gun control:"

https://www.votetulsi.com/node/25028

I'm totally against warmongering, but I have to ask - what good is it to stop foreign warmongering, only to turn around and incite civil war here by further raping the 2nd Amendment? The CFR ties are disturbing as hell, too. And to compare Gabbard to Ron Paul? No, just...no! 3 hours ago Always been a fan of Bernie, but I hope Gabbard becomes president. The world would breathe a huge sigh of relief (before the assassination). 4 hours ago By this time in his 1st term, Obama had started the US Wars in Syria and Libya and has restarted the Iraq War.

Thus far Trump has ended the War in Syria, pledged not to get us dragged into Libya's civil wars and started a peace process with North Korea.

Venezuela and Iran look scary. We don't know what Gabbard would actually do when faced with the same events. Obama talked peace too.

[May 16, 2019] FBI-CIA Dispute Erupts Over Whether Comey Or Brennan Pushed Steele Dossier

Notable quotes:
"... BREAKING: A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report... Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP. ..."
"... As one example, in its FISA application, the bureau repeatedly and incorrectly assured the court in a footnote that it "does not believe" British ex-spy Christopher Steele was the direct source for a Yahoo News article implicating Page in Russian collusion, and instead asserted that the Yahoo article provided an independent basis to believe Steele. - Fox News ..."
"... Graham noted a report by The Hill 's John Solomon that the FBI was specifically told that Steele was "keen" to leak his salacious dossier for the purpose of influencing the 2016 US election . The agency also knew that the document's claims were either unverified or disproven , yet it was used anyway against Trump and his campaign. ..."
"... Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are now blaming Loretta Lynch for the botched Hillary/email investigation. ..."
May 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

FBI-CIA Dispute Erupts Over Whether Comey Or Brennan Pushed Steele Dossier

by Tyler Durden Thu, 05/16/2019 - 10:25 0 SHARES Twitter Facebook Reddit Email Print A dispute has erupted over whether former FBI Director James Comey or his CIA counterpart, John Brennan, promoted the unverified Steele dossier as the Obama-era intelligence community targeted the Trump campaign.

According to Fox News , an email chain exists which indicates that Comey told bureau subordinates that Brennan insisted on the dossier's inclusion in the intelligence community assessment (ICA) on Russian interference . Also interesting is that the dossier was referred to as "crown material" in the emails - a possible reference to the fact that Steele is a former British spy.

In a statement to Fox, however, a former CIA official "put the blame squarely on Comey ."

"Former Director Brennan, along with former [Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper, are the ones who opposed James Comey's recommendation that the Steele Dossier be included in the intelligence report," said the official.

"They opposed this because the dossier was in no way used to develop the ICA," the official continued. "The intelligence analysts didn't include it when they were doing their work because it wasn't corroborated intelligence, therefore it wasn't used and it wasn't included. Brennan and Clapper prevented it from being added into the official assessment. James Comey then decided on his own to brief Trump about the document. "

James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan are starting to publicly argue who was pushing the dossier that ended up in the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference. The RATS are beginning to turn on each other.

I'm sure AG Barr is taking notes!

-- thebradfordfile™ (@thebradfordfile) May 15, 2019

Former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy - a longtime defender of the FBI - told Fox News ' Martha MacCallum on Tuesday night that "Comey has a better argument than Brennan, based on what I've seen."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/A9lI-lUyjlc

In March, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) suggested over Twitter that Brennan had "insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier" be included in the January 2017 ICA .

BREAKING: A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report... Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP.

-- Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 27, 2019

The dossier was ultimately not included in the ICA according to previous testimony by Clapper. Meanwhile, word that Comey had briefed President Trump personally on the dossier - "because he understood reporters already had that information and it could become public soon if journalists had a "news hook," according to the Associated Press . And as it so happens - the fact that Comey briefed Trump is what CNN and Buzzfeed caim legitimized their decision to publicly release the salacious and unverified dossier.

Whether the FBI acted appropriately in obtaining the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to Trump campaign aide Carter Page is now the subject not only of U.S. Attorney John Durham's new probe, but also the ongoing review by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber has been conducting his own investigation separately, although details of his progress were unclear.

As one example, in its FISA application, the bureau repeatedly and incorrectly assured the court in a footnote that it "does not believe" British ex-spy Christopher Steele was the direct source for a Yahoo News article implicating Page in Russian collusion, and instead asserted that the Yahoo article provided an independent basis to believe Steele. - Fox News

On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox News that he was pushing to declassify documents which would expose the FBI's dismal efforts to verify the claims within the dossier.

"There's a document that's classified that I'm gonna try to get unclassified that takes the dossier -- all the pages of it -- and it has verification to one side," said Graham. "There really is no verification, other than media reports that were generated by reporters that received the dossier."

Graham noted a report by The Hill 's John Solomon that the FBI was specifically told that Steele was "keen" to leak his salacious dossier for the purpose of influencing the 2016 US election . The agency also knew that the document's claims were either unverified or disproven , yet it was used anyway against Trump and his campaign.

LEEPERMAX , 26 seconds ago link

Whoa Nellie!!!

"I'm deleting these emails now"

https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-nellie-ohr-deleted-emails-exchanged-with-doj-husband-bruce-ohr/

LEEPERMAX , 8 minutes ago link

"SPYGATE" FALLOUT? – ITALIAN PRIME MINISTER GIUSEPPE CONTÉ REQUESTS RESIGNATION OF INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS

https://aim4truth.org/2019/05/16/cat-report-32/

847328_3527 , 11 minutes ago link

Ben Shapiro tears a new one for far left BBC's leftie Andrew Neil - BBC News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E

Ben makes a fool of the BBC and their pawn.

LEEPERMAX , 13 minutes ago link

As Rosenstein Departs, the Battlefield Is Now Ready: https://youtu.be/rhQhfmXLrl4

Teamtc321 , 21 minutes ago link

Italy has flipped on Brennan, turning over Joseph Mifsud

George Papadopoulos@GeorgePapa19

The Italian prime minister has suddenly requested resignations from 6 deputy directors of Italian intelligence agencies: DIS, AISI and AISE. This was all after I outed Mifsud in Rome and the president called the Italian prime minister. Italy has flipped and are giving up Brennan.

2:03 PM - May 16, 2019

The Italian prime minister has suddenly requested resignations from 6 deputy directors of Italian intelligence agencies: DIS, AISI and AISE. This was all after I outed Mifsud in Rome and the president called the Italian prime minister. Italy has flipped and are giving up Brennan.

https://www.citizenfreepress.com/breaking/italy-has-flipped-on-brennan-turning-over-joseph-mifsusd/

deus ex machina , 22 minutes ago link

Hang. Then draw and quarter all three POFS. Problem solved.

LEEPERMAX , 30 minutes ago link

What Was Obama's Roll in the Attempted Coup Of Donald Trump ???

https://youtu.be/yUT9Vb6Hc8c

Baron von Bud , 33 minutes ago link

These agency heads are all underlings. The directive came from above. This dossier job was approved by Obama and Hillary ran the plan. It's obvious.

Giant Meteor , 26 minutes ago link

But they are always insulated, protected, no? They know, and we know, that they know .. Everybody knows .,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8IfmiKnZi3E

Koba the Dread , 43 minutes ago link

U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber has been on the job for some months yet narry a peep out of him. There's not even any indication that he gets out of bed in the morning.

He's a member of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, I imagine that should he ever get out of bed, he will whitewash whichever agency has the most Mormons who might be affected by this scandal.

Back in the sixties, Jack Anderson, a serious investigative journalist and Mormon, noted that to Mormons the US Constitution is a sacred document given to the founding fathers by God himself. Let's hope Huber honors this Mormon tradition.

I love your wife , 57 minutes ago link

Comey was going to blackmail Trump and be the white knight he thinks he is. Even if it were true (which it isn't) Trump didn't give a ****. Especially after all the lies after lies of trash the Dems have sunk to (like with Kavanaugh). Never be ashamed of **** you do, and you will be blackmail proof....except for the pedophiles in DC. We know they are there, and when we find out who they are we will kill them. Comey's a douche.

Koba the Dread , 12 minutes ago link

If you kill all the pedophile in and associated with Washington, the streets will run with blood.

Imagine you or me. If we have a little sexual kink--even a little one--there is little we can do about it but fantasize or find an occasional person/animal/or vegetable to accommodate us. But if you hold great power or are super-rich, you don't need to fantasize. You can act out your little kink with impunity. If you hold great power or are super-rich and you have a very, very evil kink, you can exercise it with impunity. I often thought of that looking at **** Cheney's eyes. They're the eyes of a madman. He could have sliced and diced a man, woman, child or beast a day and gotten away with it. President Trump can grab them by the ***** (adult women) and why not. It's just a very personal way of shaking hands. But I see no insanity in his eyes at all. Hillary's eyes remind me of Norman Bates on a bad day. And Biden. . . . Wow! A pervert of the first water but also a complete coward. Thank God! One less sex monster in action.

Ban KKiller , 1 hour ago link

Sly **** show! Spy vs. Spy! Who done it?

Everyone knows that FBI, CIA, NSA etc., are all in the business of being in business. Helps that insider trading is not illegal for Congress. Corporate America directs intelligence outfits. My opinion...well, ok, my chickens told me.

I Am Jack's Macroaggression , 1 hour ago link

Trump is NOT Putin's Puppet

https://seriousguy.donclasen.com/trump-is-not-putins-puppet/

JBLight , 1 hour ago link

The hits just keep coming. It's not just Comey vs. Brennan. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are now blaming Loretta Lynch for the botched Hillary/email investigation. Bruce Ohr is blaming DOJ and FBI officials for ignoring his "warnings" about Christopher Steele and the dossier.

Comey is bashing Strzok, Page, and now Rosenstein. Rosenstein is firing back at Comey. Andrew McCabe is attacking anyone pretty much with a pulse.

Popcorn is sold out!

JBLight , 1 hour ago link

She's trying to protect herself. She already testified and spilled the beans about herself and her husband. And they threw a criminal referral at her anyway. MARK MEADOWS REFERS NELLIE OHR TO DOJ FOR INVESTIGATION

https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/02/mark-meadows-nellie-ohr-doj/

On top of all that, this came out today:

Nellie Ohr deleted emails sent from husband's DOJ account

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/nellie-ohr-deleted-emails-sent-from-husbands-doj-account

JBLight , 1 hour ago link

This just gets juicier and juicier. Adm. Rogers of the NSA had found that FBI contractors were overusing the NSA database to run searches/spying so he shut them down. In April 2016! Friends, Fusion GPS wasn't hired just to fabricate dirt on Trump, they were hired to create cover for the spying that was already happening when they knew they got caught by Rogers. They were terrified of what Rogers would do. Enter Fusion/Steele/dossier/European & Australian intelligence. The cover-up will be the death of them. Wait until we find out who else they were spying on during this time.

Admiral Michael S. Rogers is a hero. He has everything. He knows exactly who was being spied on and when.

EDIT: So who the hell approved the original spying? We know Brennan pushed the dossier but who pushed Brennan? I smell Barry.

[May 16, 2019] Farage Gabbard - Lions Of The Great Realignment

Neoliberal "International for financial oligarchy" start showing cracks. Davos crowd no longer can control ordinary people. Both Trump and Brexit are just symptoms of the large problem -- the crisis of neoliberalism.
Notable quotes:
"... Tulsi Gabbard will collect a lot of voters sick to death of our foreign policy destroying the lives of millions, draining our spirit and emptying our pockets. ..."
"... As long as the political class maintains 1) the illusion of choice as to who are leaders are and 2) keep things running smoothly a small minority of us will complain, simmer and stew but we won't be able to convince anyone else it's worth upsetting the status quo. ..."
"... We'll stay below critical mass, until we don't. ..."
"... The original Brexit vote was that opportunity for the power elite to get it through their thick skulls that Britons didn't want to go where the EU was headed. ..."
"... Theresa May, Dominic Grieve and the rest of those in the Westminster bubble refused to accept that they no longer had control over the situation. Theresa May like an autistic monkey keeps putting forth vote after vote to get her Withdrawal Treaty past a parliament that has no business still presiding over the country ..."
"... French Poodle Emmanuel Macron cannot get control of the Yellow Vest Protests in France. And the EU itself cannot get control over Matteo Salvini in Italy. ..."
"... Trump is compromised because of his vanity and his weakness. There is not much hope going into 2020 unless Tulsi Gabbard catches fire soon and begins taking out contenders one by one. ..."
"... More likely she is, like Ron Paul, setting the table for 2024 and a post-Trump world. I fear however it will be far too late for the U.S. by then. Both she and Farage, along with Salvini and many others across Europe, represent the push towards authenticity that will change the political landscape across the west for decades to come. ..."
"... Polyarchy (state capitalism) it is a system where small group actually rules on behalf of capital, and majority’s decision making is confined to choosing among selective number of elites within tightly controlled elective process. It is a form of consensual domination made possible by the structural domination of the global capital which allowed concentration of political powers. ..."
May 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Tom Luongo,

There is a realignment coming in electoral politics. It began with Ron Paul in 2008 and has been building for more than a decade. We know this story well.

That realignment will be about restoring not just national sovereignty but also personal autonomy in a world the rulers of which are desperate to clamp down their control over.

The thing is I don't think we've quite come to terms with the rapidity with which change comes. It builds slowly, simmering below the surface and then one day just explodes into a maelstrom of chaos.

This is where things stand in Britain with the betrayal of Brexit. It is also where things stand with Trump's daily betrayal of his pledge to end the needless wars and regime change operations.

Tulsi Gabbard will collect a lot of voters sick to death of our foreign policy destroying the lives of millions, draining our spirit and emptying our pockets.

You can see it happening, slowly and then all at once.

The signs of the chaos as we approach next week's European Parliamentary elections were there if we were willing to look closely. More often than not, our being distracted or, worse, our normalcy bias keeps us ignorant of what's happening.

Raising goats I've unfortunately witnessed this first hand and in a devastating way. Their entire digestive tracts are simply big fermentation vessels, chocked full of different bacteria working on what they've eaten.

When they're healthy, it's all good. The good bacteria digests the food, they absorb it and they are vibrant, alert and annoying.

But, if one of those other bacteria begin to get out of control, they can go from healthy to frothing at the mouth and dying overnight. The goat is the Taoist symbol for 'strong on the outside, fragile on the inside.' Our political system is definitely a goat at this point.

Which brings me back to politics.

As long as the political class maintains 1) the illusion of choice as to who are leaders are and 2) keep things running smoothly a small minority of us will complain, simmer and stew but we won't be able to convince anyone else it's worth upsetting the status quo.

We'll stay below critical mass, until we don't. And the important point here is that, like my goats, they can can act and vote perfectly normally one day and then in open revolt the next and you have a very small window of time to make the right decisions to save the situation.

The original Brexit vote was that opportunity for the power elite to get it through their thick skulls that Britons didn't want to go where the EU was headed.

Theresa May, Dominic Grieve and the rest of those in the Westminster bubble refused to accept that they no longer had control over the situation. Theresa May like an autistic monkey keeps putting forth vote after vote to get her Withdrawal Treaty past a parliament that has no business still presiding over the country .

She hopes by making her treaty legal it will stop Farage's revolution. I have news for her and the technocrats in Brussels. If Farage wins the next General Election he will nullify her treaty under Article 62 of the Vienna Conventions on the Laws of Treaties.

French Poodle Emmanuel Macron cannot get control of the Yellow Vest Protests in France. And the EU itself cannot get control over Matteo Salvini in Italy.

And they will only get it through their heads after Nigel Farage and the Brexit party unite the left and the right to throw them all out in the EP elections but also the General one as well.

The same thing happened in 2016 here in the U.S., both on the left and the right.

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were the vessels for our deep dissatisfaction with the D.C. corruption. The realignment was staring us in the face in 2016.

The Davos Crowd haven't gotten the message. And they won't listen until we force them to.

Trump is compromised because of his vanity and his weakness. There is not much hope going into 2020 unless Tulsi Gabbard catches fire soon and begins taking out contenders one by one.

More likely she is, like Ron Paul, setting the table for 2024 and a post-Trump world. I fear however it will be far too late for the U.S. by then. Both she and Farage, along with Salvini and many others across Europe, represent the push towards authenticity that will change the political landscape across the west for decades to come.

And that is what the great realignment I see happening is. It isn't about party or even principles. It is about coming together to fix the broken political system first and then working on solutions to specific problems later.

Here's hoping Trump doesn't destroy the world by mistake first.

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

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ZIRPY , 47 minutes ago link

Trump has been limited by the Deep State bogus Russia collusion investigations aided by MSM propaganda. If this author thinks Bernie or Tulsi Gabbard will not face special prosecutors if they try and Rock the boat then he is naive.

Bernie rolled over and supported Hillary after it was proven she rigged the nomination process, so to believe he could take on the swamp to any degree is laughable.

And Tulsi doesn't have the deep pockets like Trump to hire the lawyers needed to wage war against The Swamp.

madam , 40 minutes ago link

Tuslsi all the way

EcoJoker , 51 minutes ago link

There is no peaceful solution.. Globalist elites must be purged. Bankers, Zuckerbergs, Dorseys, Bezos, Blankfeins, Dimons, then politicians, etc.

from_the_ashes , 54 minutes ago link

Note to ZH, Should have published this individual instead of Tom Luongo.

An excellent summary of Gabbard which is why no one should even remotely consider her for an public office.

https://stephenlendman.org/2019/01/tulsi-gabbard-for-president/

from_the_ashes , 1 hour ago link

Nice to see Tom Luongo can't research worth ****.

2014

https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/rep-tulsi-gabbard-russia-must-face-consequences-continued-aggression-ukraine

Fast forward to today...

https://www.tulsigabbard.org/tulsi-gabbard-on-russia

Elect a woman to be President or a country's leader? How did that work out for the people of New Zealand?

Yeah-Right , 31 minutes ago link

Voting for a woman because "it's time" or because she's a woman etc., has become a thing. Those reasons seem stupid but that's the "logic." I see a lot of dem women jumping on the bandwagon, trying to get lucky.

rodocostarica , 1 hour ago link

Tulsi to me is like Ron Paul was in 08. A sane voice pointing out the stupidity of US foreign policy.

She aint no Ron Paul for sure but is at least the only one this cycle who supports as her main position getting the US out of foreign entanglements.

She is never going to win just like rp coud never win. But Im sending her a few bucks every month just to keep the message going.

xxx, 1 hour ago

"Tulsi Gabbard will collect a lot of voters sick to death of our foreign policy destroying the lives of millions, draining our spirit and emptying our pockets."

Uh, no, Tom, she won't be collecting a lot of voters, well, at least not near enough. Biden has already been "chosen" like Hillary was over Bernie last time. You should know by now Tom, we don't select our candidates, they're chosen for us for our own good.

yyy, 2 hours ago

This is going to take a long time. You just can't turn this ship around overnight.

US Political System:

United States is neither a Republic and even less Socialistic. US, in the technical literature, is called a Polyarchy (state capitalism). Polyarchy (state capitalism) idea is old, it goes back to James Madison and the foundation of the US Constitution. A Polyarchy is a system in which power resides in the hands of those who Madison called the wealth of the nation. The educated and responsible class of men. The rest of the population is to be fragmented and distracted. They are allowed to participate every couple of years by voting. That’s it. The population have little choice among the educated and responsible men they are voting for.

This is not an accident. America was founded on the principle, explained by the Founding Father that the primary goal of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. That is how the US Constitution was designed sort of ensuring that there will be a lot of struggle. US is not as the same as it were two centuries ago but that remains the elites ideal.

Polyarchy (state capitalism) it is a system where small group actually rules on behalf of capital, and majority’s decision making is confined to choosing among selective number of elites within tightly controlled elective process. It is a form of consensual domination made possible by the structural domination of the global capital which allowed concentration of political powers.

A republic is SUBORDINATE to democracy. Polyarchy can’t be subordinated to any form of Democracy.

zzz, 2 hours ago

Is the author, to use an English term, daft? Tulsi Gabbard won't get out of the primaries, much less defeat Sanders or Biden. Farage achieved his goal (Brexit), then found out (SHOCK!) that the will of the people doesn't mean anything anymore.

If Luongo had wanted to talk about the people's uprising, he should've mentioned the Tea Party.

bbb, 3 hours ago

Gabbard appears to have some moral fibre and half a backbone, at least for a politician, regardless of their views, Farage is a slimy charlatan opportunistic populist shill
ccc, 3 hours ago (Edited)
I like Tulsi Gabbard on MIC stuff (and as a surfer in my youth - still dream about that almost endless pipeline at Jeffreys Bay in August), but...

On everything else?

She votes along party lines no matter what bollocks legislation the Democrats put in front of Congress. And anyone standing full-square behind Saunders on his socialist/marxist agenda?

Do me a favour.

ddd, 1 hour ago (Edited)

Farage left because he saw what UKIP was becoming...a zionazi party.

Also Gabbard is a CFR member.

eee, 3 hours ago

Gold, Goats and Guns? Certainly not guns under President Gabbard! Here's her idea of "common sense gun control:"

https://www.votetulsi.com/node/25028

I'm totally against warmongering, but I have to ask - what good is it to stop foreign warmongering, only to turn around and incite civil war here by further raping the 2nd Amendment? The CFR ties are disturbing as hell, too. And to compare Gabbard to Ron Paul? No, just...no!

fff, 3 hours ago

Always been a fan of Bernie, but I hope Gabbard becomes president. The world would breathe a huge sigh of relief (before the assassination).

ggg, 4 hours ago
By this time in his 1st term, Obama had started the US Wars in Syria and Libya and has restarted the Iraq War.

Thus far Trump has ended the War in Syria, pledged not to get us dragged into Libya’s civil wars and started a peace process with North Korea.

Venezuela and Iran look scary. We don’t know what Gabbard would actually do when faced with the same events. Obama talked peace too.

[May 16, 2019] Rep. Tulsi Gabbard Russia Must Face Consequences for Continued Aggression in Ukraine Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard

So in the past she was Obama style warmonger. Interesting... She is not stupid enough not to understand that this was a US sponsored color revolution.
Does this mean that she is a fake like Obama was?
Notable quotes:
"... "We cannot stand by while Russia unilaterally degrades Ukraine's territorial integrity. We must offer direct military assistance -- defensive weapons, military supplies and training -- to ensure Ukraine has adequate resources to respond to Russia's aggressions and defend themselves. We cannot view Ukraine as an isolated incident. If we do not take seriously the threat of thinly veiled Russian aggression, and commit to aiding the people of Ukraine immediately, we will find ourselves in a more dangerous, expensive and disastrous situation in the future." ..."
Mar 17, 2014 | gabbard.house.gov
Press Release Calls for U.S. to offer weapons, military training assistance

Washington, DC – Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) today released the following statement after the President's announcement of expanded sanctions against Russian officials:

"Russia has violated the sovereignty and independence of the Ukrainian people, in direct contravention of its own treaty obligations and international law," said Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, an Army combat veteran and member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "I support the sanctions announced today, and I strongly urge the President to go further and consider a broader range of consequences. If Russia is allowed to continue its aggressive push for control in Ukraine, there will be long-term, serious, and costly security risks for the United States and Europe. Russia must face serious consequences for their actions; the U.S. must consider options that truly isolate Russia economically and diplomatically -- not just sanction a handful of oligarchs -- and send a message of unity and strength from the international community.

"We cannot stand by while Russia unilaterally degrades Ukraine's territorial integrity. We must offer direct military assistance -- defensive weapons, military supplies and training -- to ensure Ukraine has adequate resources to respond to Russia's aggressions and defend themselves. We cannot view Ukraine as an isolated incident. If we do not take seriously the threat of thinly veiled Russian aggression, and commit to aiding the people of Ukraine immediately, we will find ourselves in a more dangerous, expensive and disastrous situation in the future."

In a House Foreign Affairs Committee mark-up of H.Res. 499 recently, the congresswoman gained unanimous approval on including amendments on anti-corruption, and protection of civil and political rights throughout Ukraine. She also supported the House passage of H.R. 4152, which authorized loan guarantees for Ukraine.

[May 16, 2019] I have never seen such transparently obvious bullshit from UK elite befores"

May 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

Tsigantes , says: May 9, 2019 at 5:14 pm GMT

@MarkU Bravo!

As to their "cleverness", there was a time when UK politicians were known for their slippery qualities and subtlety, but those days are long gone. What we have now is barefaced lies, relying purely on repetition and monolithic corporate media ownership. They are not winning arguments because they are clever, I have never seen such transparently obvious bullshit before.

'Clever is as clever does' – once said with a snort – is a compliment too far for the deeply corrupted, vulgar, mediocre nobodies who comprise the self-styled 'elites'. In this group 'cleverness' simply means the lies they are paid to say repeated loudly and often. And because they have the reins on power, the non-compliant are punished by thugs.

[May 16, 2019] What motive would they possibly have, these enormous corporate media conglomerates to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative that allows them to systematically eliminate any type of speech they deem to be Russian disinformation, or extremist content, or a conspiracy theory, or simply too dangerous, divisive, or confusing to circulate among the general public?

May 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

The Disinformationists, by C.J. Hopkins - The Unz Review

...what motive would they possibly have, these enormous corporate media conglomerates, and the transnational corporations that own them, and these intelligence agencies, and their fronts and cutouts, and corporate lobbyists and PR firms, and councils, and think tanks, and research institutes, to disinform the Western masses, or to manufacture an official narrative that allows them to systematically stigmatize, marginalize, criminalize, deplatform, demonetize, and otherwise eliminate any type of speech they deem to be "Russian disinformation," or "extremist content," or a "conspiracy theory," or simply too "dangerous," "divisive," or "confusing" to circulate among the general public?

No see? That makes no sense. That's just an example of the type of fascist disinformation these Putin-Nazi disinformationists are trying to spread to confuse us to the point where we can't even concentrate long enough to think anymore, or parse the meaningless jargon-laden nonsense they're trying to deceive us with, and just devolve into these Pavlovian imbeciles conditioned to respond to specific trigger words, like "extremist," "terrorist," "fascist," "populist," "anti-Semitic," "Russians," "hackers," and whatever other emotional stimuli we are being trained to instantly recognize and robotically react to like circus animals.

Or I don't know, maybe it isn't. I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say. Probably they've already got to me. I'd better get back down into my anti-disinformation bunker, pull up The Guardian , or The Washington Post , or Der Spiegel on my child-proof computer, and immerse myself in some objective journalism, before the Putin-Nazi spywhale makes its way up the Landwehrkanal, takes control of what's left of my mind, and forces me into going out and trying to vote for Hitler or something.

I recommend you do the same, and I'll see you when this nightmare over.

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

[May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "Instead," McConnell went on, "the previous administration sent the Kremlin a signal they could get away with almost anything, almost anything. So is it surprising that we got the brazen interference detailed in special counsel Mueller's report?" ..."
"... Yes, Russia kicked most US NGOs out of the country. With good reason. Most of them were deliberately undermining the host country (this is not limited to Russia, they do that in most of their host countries, especially those we want to mess with). The National Endowment for Democracy is a classic case in point. The counter point here isn't RT. It's a news outlet that has proven to be far more reliable than the US corporate media. Does Russia send NGOs around the world to infest other countries with their vision of government? ..."
"... It is exactly as Mr. Lazare says, Americans think that their country can do no wrong. ..."
"... Several of my late husband's FB friends fall well into these categories and they really believe, wholeheartedly, the propaganda against Russia (and to some extent against China – Huawei, 5G, and so on), almost to the point of paranoia. The Demrat politicos and their corporate-capitalist-imperialist funders together with the despicable, groupthinking Orwellian media have done a real number on these people – usually the ones who *vote.* ..."
"... Most are Democrats who embrace the 'neoliberal groupthink' you referred to. There was a time I believed one of the conclusions of a famous study on authoritarian personalities that claimed the vast majority of authoritarians (active and passive) were Republicans. Just as the Democratic Party has morphed into the 80's Republican Party, so too have these liberals. Their cognitive dissonance is more powerful than any I have encountered in my lifetime. Their core belief system now includes incrementalism, lesser-evilism and an overwhelming sense of goodness that at least they are 'doing something positive' by supporting all Democrats at all costs. ..."
"... I don't get why, supposedly intelligent, informed people are wondering why Russia is being blamed for so much. Let me remind you that the extremely powerful Israel Lobby is VERY BUSY supporting the agenda of the right wing Likud government in Israel. ..."
"... One of the goals of Likud is the Zionist agenda that includes Greater Israel which requires Israel to acquire more water and land in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Iran is a very strong supporter of the Palestinians and Syrian President Assad and Iraqi independence from US domination. ..."
"... Why, on this good earth, does anyone pay any attention to Schumer and Schiff and McConnell? Shills, do nothing crackpots and traitors to this nation; when you see that's what they are, you have to ignore them. ..."
May 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Russia-gate has shed any premise of being about Russian interference, writes Daniel Lazare, but the idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable.

By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News

Americans used to think that Russia-gate was about a plot to hack the 2016 election. They were wrong. Russia-gate is really about an immense conspiracy to do four things:

This was the takeaway from Mitch McConnell's devastating " case closed " speech last week in which the Senate majority leader jeered at President Barack Obama for mocking Mitt Romney's claim (seven years ago now) that Russia was America's "number one geopolitical foe ." As Obama famously replied during that presidential debate: "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War's been over for 20 years."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/N0IWe11RWOM?feature=oembed

But that was so 2012. Now, says McConnell, it looks like Romney was right:

"We'd have been better off if the administration hadn't swept [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's invasion and occupation of Georgia under the rug or looked away as Russia forced out western NGO's and cracked down on civil society. If President Obama hadn't let Assad trample his red line in Syria or embraced Putin's fake deal on chemical weapons, if the Obama administration had responded firmly to Putin's invasion and occupation of Ukraine in 2014, to the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, and to Russia intervention in Syria -- maybe stronger leadership would have left the Kremlin less emboldened, maybe tampering with our democracy wouldn't have seemed so very tempting.

"Instead," McConnell went on, "the previous administration sent the Kremlin a signal they could get away with almost anything, almost anything. So is it surprising that we got the brazen interference detailed in special counsel Mueller's report?"

Lies and Distortions

Like so much out of Congress these days, this was a farrago of lies and distortions. It wasn't Moscow that started the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, but Tbilisi . While Russia has indeed cracked down on U.S.-backed NGO's, Washington has done the same by forcing Russia's highly successful news agency RT to register as a foreign agent and by sentencing Maria Butina, a Russian national studying at American University, to 18 months in prison for the crime of hobnobbing with members of the National Rifle Association. The charge that Syrian President Bashar al Assad "trampled" Obama's red line by using chemical weapons is hardly as clear-cut as imperial propagandists like to believe – to say the least – while the agreement between Putin and former Secretary of State John Kerry to rid Syria of chemical weapons was not fake at all, but an example, increasingly rare unfortunately, of diplomacy being used to prevent an international crisis from getting out of hand.

And so on ad nauseum . But what could Democrats say in response given that they've spent the last three years trying to out-hawk the GOP? Answer: nothing. All they could do was try to turn tables on McConnell by charging him with not being anti-Russian enough. Thus, New York's Sen. Chuck Schumer accused him of " aiding and abetting " Moscow while Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin accused him of running interference for Putin because he "feels the Russians were on the side of the Republicans in 2016 and just might be again in 2020."

Democrats Feed the Super Hawks

The result: a Democratic consensus that Russia can't be trusted and that America must put itself on a war footing to prevent Putin from "toppl[ing] the mighty oak that has been our republic for two hundred years," as Schumer put it. It's an across-the-board agreement that the long-awaited Mueller report has only strengthened by regurgitating the intelligence-community line that "[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" and then cherry-picking the facts to fit its preconceived thesis. (See " Top Ten Questions About the Mueller Report ," May 6.)

Democrats claim to oppose National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, but the anti-Russian hysteria they promote strengthens the hand of such super-hawks. It makes military conflict more likely, if not with Russia then with perceived Russian surrogates such as Venezuela or Iran.

Schiff increasingly unhinged.

Simultaneously, it backfires on Democrats by making them look weak and foolish as they argue that even though the Mueller report says "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government," somehow "significant evidence of collusion" still exists, as an increasingly unhinged Rep. Adam Schiff maintains . In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of congressional Democrats, no evidence does not mean no evidence. In fact, it means the opposite.

Voters are unmoved. Ten times more Americans – 80 versus 8 percent – care about healthcare than about Russia according to a recent survey . When CNN pollsters asked a thousand people in mid-March to name the issues that matter most, not one mentioned Russia or the Mueller probe . If they didn't care when collusion was still an open question, they care even less now that the only issue is obstruction plus a phony constitutional crisis that desperate Democrats have conjured up out of thin air.

Trump the Chief Beneficiary

Besides Fox News – whose ratings have soared while Russia-obsessed CNN's have plummeted – the chief beneficiary is Trump. Post-Mueller, the man has the wind in his sails. Come 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders could cut through his phony populism with ease. But if Jeff Bezos's Washington Post succeeds in tarring him with Russia the same way it tried to tar Trump, then the Democratic nominee will be a bland centrist whom the incumbent will happily bludgeon. Former Vice President Joe Biden – the John McCain-loving , speech-slurring , child-fondler who was for a wall along the Mexican border before he was against it – will end up as a bug splat on the Orange One's windshield.

Trump ready to take on challengers. (Caricature/DonkeyHotey via Flickr)

Beto O'Rourke, the rich-kid airhead who declared shortly before the Mueller report was released that Trump, "beyond the shadow of a doubt, sought to collude with the Russian government," will not fare much better. Sen. Elizabeth Warren meanwhile seems to be tripping over her own two feet as she predicts one moment that Trump is heading to jail , declares the next that voters don't care about the Mueller report because they're too concerned with bread-and-butter issues, and then calls for dragging Congress into the impeachment morass regardless.

Such "logic" is lost on voters, so it seems to be a safe bet that enough will stay home next Election Day to allow the rough beast to slouch towards Bethlehem yet again.

Assange Convicted in Eyes of Press

Then there's Julian Assange, currently serving a 50-week sentence in a supermax prison outside of London after being ejected from the Ecuadorian Embassy. By claiming that the WikiLeaks founder was "dissembling" by denying that Russia was the source of the mammoth Democratic National Committee leak in July 2016, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has effectively convicted him in the eyes of Congress and the press.

The New York Times thus reports that Mueller has " revealed " that Russian intelligence was the source while, in a venomous piece by Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger, The Washington Post declared that Assange "is neither whistleblower nor journalist," but someone who helped Russian intelligence interfere in "the American electoral process."

Schumer thus greeted Assange's April 11 arrest by tweeting his "hope [that] he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government," while, in a truly chilling statement , Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia declared that "[i]t will be really good to get him back on United States soil [so] we can get the facts and the truth from him."

Now that Julian Assange has been arrested, I hope he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government.

-- Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 11, 2019

Assange is guiltier than ever. If Washington gets its hands on him, he'll no doubt be hauled before some sort of Star Chamber and then clapped in a dungeon somewhere until he confesses that Russian intelligence made him do it, even though a careful reading of the Mueller report strongly suggests the opposite. (See " The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report ," April 18.)

Assange languishing behind bars, war breaking out in Latin America or the Persian Gulf, Trump in the Oval Office for four years more – it's the worst of all possible worlds, and the Democratic Party's bizarre fixation with Vladimir Putin is what's pushing it.

Ultimately, Russia-gate is yet a variation on the tired old theme of American innocence. If something goes wrong, it can't be the fault of decent Americans who, as we all know, are too good for our deeply flawed world. Rather, it must be the fault of dastardly foreigners trying to hack our democracy. It's a deep-rooted form of xenophobia that has fueled everything from the criminalization of marijuana (smuggled in by evil Mexicans) to the 1950s Red Scare (a reaction to Communism smuggled in by evil Russians), and the war on terrorism (the work of evil Muslims). The idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable.

But Russia-gate may be the greatest delusion of all. After decades of celebrating Donald Trump as the essence of American flash and hustle, the corporate media have decided that the only way he could have gotten into the White House is if Putin put him there. The upshot is a giant conspiracy to force Americans to turn their back on reality, an effort that can only end in disaster for all concerned, Democrats first and foremost.

Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com .

Tick Tock , May 15, 2019 at 11:30

Sorry Folks but both Mr Lazare's text and the majority of the comments here clearly illustrate that the major problem for America and its Citizens is that they are way too full of themselves and easily manipulated because of that. Seriously, the vast majority of the Worlds population Could Not Give a Rat's Ass about America except when they are being attacked either with Real Bombs or Economically.

No normal Human Being wants to be Israel's Stooge. You have to think you are are really important for someone in another Country to want to select your leaders. Oh yes that is what the US Deep State does and now it's been clearly exposed it does the same thing at home.. Of course if your motto is that "You are god's chosen people!", it could get you into trouble now and then with the rest of God's People. Like Bob Dylan wrote a few years ago, "I used to care!" Only a fool would care now.

Jeff Harrison , May 15, 2019 at 11:23

This is where we learn the importance of an objective press and one that can bring all the threads of a story together. And it's also most likely to be a disaster.

Yes, Russia kicked most US NGOs out of the country. With good reason. Most of them were deliberately undermining the host country (this is not limited to Russia, they do that in most of their host countries, especially those we want to mess with). The National Endowment for Democracy is a classic case in point. The counter point here isn't RT. It's a news outlet that has proven to be far more reliable than the US corporate media. Does Russia send NGOs around the world to infest other countries with their vision of government?

The US/EU fomented the coup in Ukraine that resulted in Crimea deciding they didn't want to be associated with Ukraine any longer. Did the US press tell the truth here? No. They made it sound as if Crimea was a part of Ukraine when, in fact, the Turkic Muslims of Crimea were never a part of the Christian Slavs of Ukraine. They also didn't explain the terms by which Khrushchev administratively slapped the two together in 1957 which give the Crimeans the ability to opt out.

It is exactly as Mr. Lazare says, Americans think that their country can do no wrong. We don't see the coups we foist on other countries. We don't see the lies and fake news we spread in other countries we wish to undermine. They don't see the consequences of our abuse of our economic power. The myopia is powerful in this one as my representatives tried to tell me that Venezuela was a prosperous and happy country before Chavez and that their current travails are as a result of the socialism and not two coup attempts and a long string of sanctions from the US. We are remarkably good at blaming the victim.

There's a good chance that this will rise up and bite us in the ass and the American people will have no idea why ..

AnneR , May 15, 2019 at 08:52

Mr Lazare, while I would certainly agree with much you have written, on one point at least I am much less certain: that most Americans care less about Russia than about health care.

While this might be true for the majority of the population who are in the lower middle, working classes and poor, I am much less certain about the "well" educated, comfortably off, well health insured, middling and upper bourgeoisie. The sort who, even when on Medicare, are on the upper rungs of it (paying extra for better and more expansive treatment; and I do mean Medicare here). The sort who frequently have been privately educated.

Several of my late husband's FB friends fall well into these categories and they really believe, wholeheartedly, the propaganda against Russia (and to some extent against China – Huawei, 5G, and so on), almost to the point of paranoia. The Demrat politicos and their corporate-capitalist-imperialist funders together with the despicable, groupthinking Orwellian media have done a real number on these people – usually the ones who *vote.*

These same people evince absolutely, and I mean absolutely, NO concern or interest in the constant war-making and warmongering, the illegal invasions, electoral meddling/coups/"regime" changes, destruction of peoples that this country (and its allies) engage in. Not happening here, therefore not anything to do with "us."

I know that my late husband would be utterly devastated knowing that some of his students, with whom he worked assiduously to develop real critical thinking (via much difficult reading in historiography, sociology and philosophy, discussion and writing), have fallen hook, line and sinker for the neoliberal groupthink supporting the corporate-capitalist-imperialist (and of course, orientalist) line. One can only imagine that they were already well primed for this mindset.

MattZ , May 15, 2019 at 11:43

Anne -- your post resonates deeply with me. I would guess you and I are of similar ages and have similar friends and acquaintances. We certainly share the exact same experiences with these people. They are proud 'liberals' (lately donning the 'progressive' robe with equal exuberance). None are members of the elite one-percenters, but all belong to what Nader refers to as the 'contented class', that 9% buffer zone between the elite and the increasingly miserable lower 90%-ers.

Most are Democrats who embrace the 'neoliberal groupthink' you referred to. There was a time I believed one of the conclusions of a famous study on authoritarian personalities that claimed the vast majority of authoritarians (active and passive) were Republicans. Just as the Democratic Party has morphed into the 80's Republican Party, so too have these liberals. Their cognitive dissonance is more powerful than any I have encountered in my lifetime. Their core belief system now includes incrementalism, lesser-evilism and an overwhelming sense of goodness that at least they are 'doing something positive' by supporting all Democrats at all costs.

Appallingly, their new heroes are historically-proven liars, psychopaths and Deep State organizations like the CIA and FBI. Their Trump Derangement Syndrome has destroyed all ability to think critically or accept transparent and obvious truths. They accept no criticism of their actions and attack those who question them. To them, the 'end' of removing Trump justifies any evil.
Gaia help us all.

Skip Scott , May 15, 2019 at 08:04

The root of the Democrats problem is they feed from the same trough as the GOP. They can't do anything substantial about health care or the declining middle class because they'd piss off their donors. Since they can't stand for "the working man" any longer, they are trying to cobble together "Identity Politics" and "Political Correctness" to eke out a majority. Good luck with that! They can give us non gender specific restrooms with our Forever War! Why aren't we feeling the love?

I think the time has never been more ripe for a serious third party challenge than 2020.

Realist , May 15, 2019 at 10:42

Perfect thumbnail obituary for the Democratic Party, Skip. It got hijacked by corporatists who saw an opportunity to push the GOP agenda from both directions. Maybe that's what Hillary meant by "stronger together."

Herrman , May 15, 2019 at 07:56

If you want to be entertained and titillated turn on the national evening news shows. The 2020 election circus has already begun. Don't watch that, switch channels and watch the obstruction of justice infotainment. Want news, read between the lines of the major newspapers. Go to PBS to be rescued, good luck.

Has it always been thus. Maybe, but it's a much better show today.

Shock and awe. Can't wait for the next one.

O Society , May 15, 2019 at 04:52

https://opensociet.org/2018/10/20/the-real-danger-of-russiagate-always-has-been-the-martyrdom-of-trump/

If I could figure out long ago Russia-gate was going to lead to Trump's reelection (see above link), you would think Brennan/ Clinton/ Pelosi could figure it out too. Which begs the questions:

Is Trump good for business for the Democratic party financial patrons? Do they really want him impeached? Did the Pied Piper strategy ever end? Does Bernie Sanders scare them so much they'd rather promote Trump than have Sanders in the Oval Office?

Realist , May 15, 2019 at 10:35

Your last explanation is the one that Jimmy Dore seems to favor. The party string pullers are obviously desperate when they back one near-octogenarian (Crazy Joe Biden) for the nomination against another near-octogenarian (Sanders). Counter move by the GOPers may be to run Tricky Dick Nixon's head-in-a-bottle for the office, like in Futurama.

Realist , May 15, 2019 at 02:05

Wow, gotta hand it to McConnell. That man can shamelessly pack multiple whoppers into every single sentence uttered in his public speaking. Quite a tour de force of pure undiluted bullshit by the turtle. With his rhetorical skills to deliver talking points at a newly realised zenith, there's sure to be a job for him on Madison Avenue when he's finally kicked to the curb as happens to every politician when a better snake oil salesman inevitably comes along.

John Sanguinetti , May 15, 2019 at 00:05

I don't get why, supposedly intelligent, informed people are wondering why Russia is being blamed for so much. Let me remind you that the extremely powerful Israel Lobby is VERY BUSY supporting the agenda of the right wing Likud government in Israel.

One of the goals of Likud is the Zionist agenda that includes Greater Israel which requires Israel to acquire more water and land in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Iran is a very strong supporter of the Palestinians and Syrian President Assad and Iraqi independence from US domination.

Russia, with it's very effective support for Assad and collaboration with Iran is blocking progress on the Zionist agenda. So, putting pressure on Russia is a way of trying to force them to back off from their support for Syria and Iran or at least to scare them with the power of our military and a crazy unpredictable leader who might do anything. Israel has besides it's VERY STRONG and active lobbies in the US and UK a large and VERY Active 5th column that spends a LOT of money and effort influencing the people who run our government.

CitizenOne , May 14, 2019 at 23:43

I believe it but with some editing of the authors original four things. I have deleted the case against Assange as a sideshow that does nor resonate with Americans any more than the nightly rumor mill about celebrities. Here goes.

Americans used to think that Russia-gate was about a plot to hack the 2016 election. They were wrong. Russia-gate is really about an immense conspiracy to do four things:

No. 1: Ratchet up tensions with Russia to ever more dangerous levels;

No. 2: Show that Democrats are even more useless than people imagined;

No. 3: Win the 2020 elections and reelect Trump and preserve the republican majority in the Senate and win back the democrat controlled House

No. 4: Wage wars in oil rich nations being Iran and Venezuela to fulfill the agenda of the energy companies via military action.

While McConnell rails against Obama for his weaknesses we have the historical record that Obama declared Venezuela as a national security threat, levied massive sanctions against Russia for their presumed invasion of Ukraine, launched a war against the Syrian government, preserved and supported our wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

We see today that Chuck Schumer is still committed to the theory that Russia is the single reason that the democrats lost the last election which is absurd and is rejected by not only a significant number of liberal journalists but also by a majority of Americans. Why do the democrats continue to promote conspiracy theories that the majority of Americans reject as nonsense?

The republicans have the democrats over a barrel and will push it over and watch the democrats wallow in the mud with much amusement.

This could not have have happened to the democrats without a complete lack of foresight or even a slightest attempt to rely on the truth to guide them.

From day one after the election, the democrats swallowed the bait hook line and sinker and now the hook is buried deep in their gullets and they still insist that they are free swimming fish on a mission to prove Russia was responsible for the last election. With every gulp they swallow the hook deeper apparently unaware that they are about to be reeled in and captured by their unfounded beliefs that the bait is is a real meal they can sustain themselves on. Just like a fooled fish they are on the hook.

The announcement that the AG is launching an investigation led by republicans to investigate the Russia Gate investigation will most certainly tarnish democrats and stain their efforts that will be seen as even more dull as the tarnish they try to put on Trump. Even uninformed citizens will ask what is up with the democrats who are trying to bring down Trump even though their reliable news sources tell them that Russia Gate is all a lie.

Meanwhile the democrats who have declared come up not only short on ideas but appear to be suicidal.

Elisabeth Warren has declared war on monopolies in an era where unlimited spending by corporations is legally protected as free speech. How can she hope to win by pledging to breakup monopolies that are well equipped to outspend her in their bid for survival?

The democrats have failed to do the math and their strategies for appealing to the masses will be shot down by the right wing controlled "free press". It is not a liberal press. It is the enemy of liberals controlled by wealthy liberal hating, libertarian loving billionaires. Public vows by democrats who pledge to destroy it will be met with the full force of their arsenal which includes complete control over the microphone that steers debate and is the chief influence of elections. As Mark Twain put it, " It is unwise to wage a war of words against men who buy ink by the barrel".

Howard Dean met his end when the major media outlets conspired to elevate "The Dean Scream" to levels questioning his sanity. The nearly constant barrage of over 4,000 replays of the Dean Scream leading up to the democratic primaries effectively put an end to his bid for nomination.

But why did all of the the major media outlets conspire to conduct a character assassination of the Howard Dean movement? Just two weeks before the Dean Scream was endlessly broadcasted by the media with news commentators chiming in that he was likely an insane man who must be exposed and stopped in his tracks he made a fatal flaw. He made a campaign speech where he said that if he was elected he would impose regulations on the media. Boom Boom out went the lights.

How can any democrat win when they oppose corporations that include the media corporations in America? How can Elisabeth Warren wither the name calling that she will suffer as Trump claims she has a Pocahontas syndrome while also alienating the largest campaign contributors with her pledge to destroy them? How will her insistence that she has Indian blood possibly win her fans when the majority of Americans will mock her. They have been honed on the strop of right wing money into believing that everything they hear and see is factual even though it is not factual or real. Such is the suicidal gamble of the soon to be defeated democratic party.

Why they continue to go down the path toward blind alleys where they will be trapped and defeated baffles me.

geeyp , May 15, 2019 at 11:32

Why, on this good earth, does anyone pay any attention to Schumer and Schiff and McConnell? Shills, do nothing crackpots and traitors to this nation; when you see that's what they are, you have to ignore them.

jmg , May 14, 2019 at 19:57

Daniel Lazare: "( ) it must be the fault of dastardly foreigners trying to hack our democracy. It's a deep-rooted form of xenophobia that has fueled everything ( ) The idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable."

Yes, that's the way it is. About WikiLeaks, as they have repeated many times:

"Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims 'bullshit', adding: 'They are absolutely making it up.'

"'I know who leaked them,' Murray said. 'I've met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it's an insider. It's a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.'"

-- The Guardian, 2016-12-10
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/10/cia-concludes-russia-interfered-to-help-trump-win-election-report

[May 15, 2019] Ron Paul on Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I have high respect for Dr Paul especially on his foreign policies and I'm so glad that he has recognized Tulsi stances on ending these regime change wars and over stepping our bounds constitutional overseas. Please keep spreading the word on Tulsi our Republic depends on it. ..."
"... It doesn't surprise me in the least that Ron Paul feels well about Tulsi Gabbard - mostly in regards to her foreign policy. Tulsi can expect considerable support from Libertarians. ..."
Apr 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

In this clip from PRIMO NUTMEG #170, former Congressman Ron Paul gives his thoughts on 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.

Ortho Tech , 3 weeks ago

Supported Ron Paul in both 08 and 12, supporting Tulsi in 2020.

harriet , 3 weeks ago

I love BOTH Ron Paul and Tulsi Gabbard! We need more people like these in general!

chickendinner2012 , 3 weeks ago

Great to see anti-war solidarity! #EndTheWars

Gordo Bjorn , 3 weeks ago

I have high respect for Dr Paul especially on his foreign policies and I'm so glad that he has recognized Tulsi stances on ending these regime change wars and over stepping our bounds constitutional overseas. Please keep spreading the word on Tulsi our Republic depends on it.

Robert Thorpe , 3 weeks ago

It doesn't surprise me in the least that Ron Paul feels well about Tulsi Gabbard - mostly in regards to her foreign policy. Tulsi can expect considerable support from Libertarians.

Kariakas , 3 weeks ago

Ron Paul is Libertarian and Tulsi is to the left but they both speak common sense.

EL.NANNA , 3 weeks ago

I'd love to see these 2 together. So much respect for both. No surprise Dr Paul senses the real deal.

George Kraft , 3 weeks ago

Rep Paul, I don't agree with a lot of your ideas, but about Tulsi I agree 100%!

Skylark Myself , 3 weeks ago

Yes Tulsi and Ron Paul Aloha 2020 POTUS

[May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... "Instead," McConnell went on, "the previous administration sent the Kremlin a signal they could get away with almost anything, almost anything. So is it surprising that we got the brazen interference detailed in special counsel Mueller's report?" ..."
"... Yes, Russia kicked most US NGOs out of the country. With good reason. Most of them were deliberately undermining the host country (this is not limited to Russia, they do that in most of their host countries, especially those we want to mess with). The National Endowment for Democracy is a classic case in point. The counter point here isn't RT. It's a news outlet that has proven to be far more reliable than the US corporate media. Does Russia send NGOs around the world to infest other countries with their vision of government? ..."
"... It is exactly as Mr. Lazare says, Americans think that their country can do no wrong. ..."
"... Several of my late husband's FB friends fall well into these categories and they really believe, wholeheartedly, the propaganda against Russia (and to some extent against China – Huawei, 5G, and so on), almost to the point of paranoia. The Demrat politicos and their corporate-capitalist-imperialist funders together with the despicable, groupthinking Orwellian media have done a real number on these people – usually the ones who *vote.* ..."
"... Most are Democrats who embrace the 'neoliberal groupthink' you referred to. There was a time I believed one of the conclusions of a famous study on authoritarian personalities that claimed the vast majority of authoritarians (active and passive) were Republicans. Just as the Democratic Party has morphed into the 80's Republican Party, so too have these liberals. Their cognitive dissonance is more powerful than any I have encountered in my lifetime. Their core belief system now includes incrementalism, lesser-evilism and an overwhelming sense of goodness that at least they are 'doing something positive' by supporting all Democrats at all costs. ..."
"... I don't get why, supposedly intelligent, informed people are wondering why Russia is being blamed for so much. Let me remind you that the extremely powerful Israel Lobby is VERY BUSY supporting the agenda of the right wing Likud government in Israel. ..."
"... One of the goals of Likud is the Zionist agenda that includes Greater Israel which requires Israel to acquire more water and land in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Iran is a very strong supporter of the Palestinians and Syrian President Assad and Iraqi independence from US domination. ..."
"... Why, on this good earth, does anyone pay any attention to Schumer and Schiff and McConnell? Shills, do nothing crackpots and traitors to this nation; when you see that's what they are, you have to ignore them. ..."
May 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Russia-gate has shed any premise of being about Russian interference, writes Daniel Lazare, but the idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable.

By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News

Americans used to think that Russia-gate was about a plot to hack the 2016 election. They were wrong. Russia-gate is really about an immense conspiracy to do four things:

This was the takeaway from Mitch McConnell's devastating " case closed " speech last week in which the Senate majority leader jeered at President Barack Obama for mocking Mitt Romney's claim (seven years ago now) that Russia was America's "number one geopolitical foe ." As Obama famously replied during that presidential debate: "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War's been over for 20 years."

https://www.youtube.com/embed/N0IWe11RWOM?feature=oembed

But that was so 2012. Now, says McConnell, it looks like Romney was right:

"We'd have been better off if the administration hadn't swept [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's invasion and occupation of Georgia under the rug or looked away as Russia forced out western NGO's and cracked down on civil society. If President Obama hadn't let Assad trample his red line in Syria or embraced Putin's fake deal on chemical weapons, if the Obama administration had responded firmly to Putin's invasion and occupation of Ukraine in 2014, to the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, and to Russia intervention in Syria -- maybe stronger leadership would have left the Kremlin less emboldened, maybe tampering with our democracy wouldn't have seemed so very tempting.

"Instead," McConnell went on, "the previous administration sent the Kremlin a signal they could get away with almost anything, almost anything. So is it surprising that we got the brazen interference detailed in special counsel Mueller's report?"

Lies and Distortions

Like so much out of Congress these days, this was a farrago of lies and distortions. It wasn't Moscow that started the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, but Tbilisi . While Russia has indeed cracked down on U.S.-backed NGO's, Washington has done the same by forcing Russia's highly successful news agency RT to register as a foreign agent and by sentencing Maria Butina, a Russian national studying at American University, to 18 months in prison for the crime of hobnobbing with members of the National Rifle Association. The charge that Syrian President Bashar al Assad "trampled" Obama's red line by using chemical weapons is hardly as clear-cut as imperial propagandists like to believe – to say the least – while the agreement between Putin and former Secretary of State John Kerry to rid Syria of chemical weapons was not fake at all, but an example, increasingly rare unfortunately, of diplomacy being used to prevent an international crisis from getting out of hand.

And so on ad nauseum . But what could Democrats say in response given that they've spent the last three years trying to out-hawk the GOP? Answer: nothing. All they could do was try to turn tables on McConnell by charging him with not being anti-Russian enough. Thus, New York's Sen. Chuck Schumer accused him of " aiding and abetting " Moscow while Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin accused him of running interference for Putin because he "feels the Russians were on the side of the Republicans in 2016 and just might be again in 2020."

Democrats Feed the Super Hawks

The result: a Democratic consensus that Russia can't be trusted and that America must put itself on a war footing to prevent Putin from "toppl[ing] the mighty oak that has been our republic for two hundred years," as Schumer put it. It's an across-the-board agreement that the long-awaited Mueller report has only strengthened by regurgitating the intelligence-community line that "[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion" and then cherry-picking the facts to fit its preconceived thesis. (See " Top Ten Questions About the Mueller Report ," May 6.)

Democrats claim to oppose National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, but the anti-Russian hysteria they promote strengthens the hand of such super-hawks. It makes military conflict more likely, if not with Russia then with perceived Russian surrogates such as Venezuela or Iran.

Schiff increasingly unhinged.

Simultaneously, it backfires on Democrats by making them look weak and foolish as they argue that even though the Mueller report says "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government," somehow "significant evidence of collusion" still exists, as an increasingly unhinged Rep. Adam Schiff maintains . In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of congressional Democrats, no evidence does not mean no evidence. In fact, it means the opposite.

Voters are unmoved. Ten times more Americans – 80 versus 8 percent – care about healthcare than about Russia according to a recent survey . When CNN pollsters asked a thousand people in mid-March to name the issues that matter most, not one mentioned Russia or the Mueller probe . If they didn't care when collusion was still an open question, they care even less now that the only issue is obstruction plus a phony constitutional crisis that desperate Democrats have conjured up out of thin air.

Trump the Chief Beneficiary

Besides Fox News – whose ratings have soared while Russia-obsessed CNN's have plummeted – the chief beneficiary is Trump. Post-Mueller, the man has the wind in his sails. Come 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders could cut through his phony populism with ease. But if Jeff Bezos's Washington Post succeeds in tarring him with Russia the same way it tried to tar Trump, then the Democratic nominee will be a bland centrist whom the incumbent will happily bludgeon. Former Vice President Joe Biden – the John McCain-loving , speech-slurring , child-fondler who was for a wall along the Mexican border before he was against it – will end up as a bug splat on the Orange One's windshield.

Trump ready to take on challengers. (Caricature/DonkeyHotey via Flickr)

Beto O'Rourke, the rich-kid airhead who declared shortly before the Mueller report was released that Trump, "beyond the shadow of a doubt, sought to collude with the Russian government," will not fare much better. Sen. Elizabeth Warren meanwhile seems to be tripping over her own two feet as she predicts one moment that Trump is heading to jail , declares the next that voters don't care about the Mueller report because they're too concerned with bread-and-butter issues, and then calls for dragging Congress into the impeachment morass regardless.

Such "logic" is lost on voters, so it seems to be a safe bet that enough will stay home next Election Day to allow the rough beast to slouch towards Bethlehem yet again.

Assange Convicted in Eyes of Press

Then there's Julian Assange, currently serving a 50-week sentence in a supermax prison outside of London after being ejected from the Ecuadorian Embassy. By claiming that the WikiLeaks founder was "dissembling" by denying that Russia was the source of the mammoth Democratic National Committee leak in July 2016, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has effectively convicted him in the eyes of Congress and the press.

The New York Times thus reports that Mueller has " revealed " that Russian intelligence was the source while, in a venomous piece by Middlebury College professor Allison Stanger, The Washington Post declared that Assange "is neither whistleblower nor journalist," but someone who helped Russian intelligence interfere in "the American electoral process."

Schumer thus greeted Assange's April 11 arrest by tweeting his "hope [that] he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government," while, in a truly chilling statement , Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia declared that "[i]t will be really good to get him back on United States soil [so] we can get the facts and the truth from him."

Now that Julian Assange has been arrested, I hope he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government.

-- Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) April 11, 2019

Assange is guiltier than ever. If Washington gets its hands on him, he'll no doubt be hauled before some sort of Star Chamber and then clapped in a dungeon somewhere until he confesses that Russian intelligence made him do it, even though a careful reading of the Mueller report strongly suggests the opposite. (See " The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report ," April 18.)

Assange languishing behind bars, war breaking out in Latin America or the Persian Gulf, Trump in the Oval Office for four years more – it's the worst of all possible worlds, and the Democratic Party's bizarre fixation with Vladimir Putin is what's pushing it.

Ultimately, Russia-gate is yet a variation on the tired old theme of American innocence. If something goes wrong, it can't be the fault of decent Americans who, as we all know, are too good for our deeply flawed world. Rather, it must be the fault of dastardly foreigners trying to hack our democracy. It's a deep-rooted form of xenophobia that has fueled everything from the criminalization of marijuana (smuggled in by evil Mexicans) to the 1950s Red Scare (a reaction to Communism smuggled in by evil Russians), and the war on terrorism (the work of evil Muslims). The idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable.

But Russia-gate may be the greatest delusion of all. After decades of celebrating Donald Trump as the essence of American flash and hustle, the corporate media have decided that the only way he could have gotten into the White House is if Putin put him there. The upshot is a giant conspiracy to force Americans to turn their back on reality, an effort that can only end in disaster for all concerned, Democrats first and foremost.

Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com .

Tick Tock , May 15, 2019 at 11:30

Sorry Folks but both Mr Lazare's text and the majority of the comments here clearly illustrate that the major problem for America and its Citizens is that they are way too full of themselves and easily manipulated because of that. Seriously, the vast majority of the Worlds population Could Not Give a Rat's Ass about America except when they are being attacked either with Real Bombs or Economically.

No normal Human Being wants to be Israel's Stooge. You have to think you are are really important for someone in another Country to want to select your leaders. Oh yes that is what the US Deep State does and now it's been clearly exposed it does the same thing at home.. Of course if your motto is that "You are god's chosen people!", it could get you into trouble now and then with the rest of God's People. Like Bob Dylan wrote a few years ago, "I used to care!" Only a fool would care now.

Jeff Harrison , May 15, 2019 at 11:23

This is where we learn the importance of an objective press and one that can bring all the threads of a story together. And it's also most likely to be a disaster.

Yes, Russia kicked most US NGOs out of the country. With good reason. Most of them were deliberately undermining the host country (this is not limited to Russia, they do that in most of their host countries, especially those we want to mess with). The National Endowment for Democracy is a classic case in point. The counter point here isn't RT. It's a news outlet that has proven to be far more reliable than the US corporate media. Does Russia send NGOs around the world to infest other countries with their vision of government?

The US/EU fomented the coup in Ukraine that resulted in Crimea deciding they didn't want to be associated with Ukraine any longer. Did the US press tell the truth here? No. They made it sound as if Crimea was a part of Ukraine when, in fact, the Turkic Muslims of Crimea were never a part of the Christian Slavs of Ukraine. They also didn't explain the terms by which Khrushchev administratively slapped the two together in 1957 which give the Crimeans the ability to opt out.

It is exactly as Mr. Lazare says, Americans think that their country can do no wrong. We don't see the coups we foist on other countries. We don't see the lies and fake news we spread in other countries we wish to undermine. They don't see the consequences of our abuse of our economic power. The myopia is powerful in this one as my representatives tried to tell me that Venezuela was a prosperous and happy country before Chavez and that their current travails are as a result of the socialism and not two coup attempts and a long string of sanctions from the US. We are remarkably good at blaming the victim.

There's a good chance that this will rise up and bite us in the ass and the American people will have no idea why ..

AnneR , May 15, 2019 at 08:52

Mr Lazare, while I would certainly agree with much you have written, on one point at least I am much less certain: that most Americans care less about Russia than about health care.

While this might be true for the majority of the population who are in the lower middle, working classes and poor, I am much less certain about the "well" educated, comfortably off, well health insured, middling and upper bourgeoisie. The sort who, even when on Medicare, are on the upper rungs of it (paying extra for better and more expansive treatment; and I do mean Medicare here). The sort who frequently have been privately educated.

Several of my late husband's FB friends fall well into these categories and they really believe, wholeheartedly, the propaganda against Russia (and to some extent against China – Huawei, 5G, and so on), almost to the point of paranoia. The Demrat politicos and their corporate-capitalist-imperialist funders together with the despicable, groupthinking Orwellian media have done a real number on these people – usually the ones who *vote.*

These same people evince absolutely, and I mean absolutely, NO concern or interest in the constant war-making and warmongering, the illegal invasions, electoral meddling/coups/"regime" changes, destruction of peoples that this country (and its allies) engage in. Not happening here, therefore not anything to do with "us."

I know that my late husband would be utterly devastated knowing that some of his students, with whom he worked assiduously to develop real critical thinking (via much difficult reading in historiography, sociology and philosophy, discussion and writing), have fallen hook, line and sinker for the neoliberal groupthink supporting the corporate-capitalist-imperialist (and of course, orientalist) line. One can only imagine that they were already well primed for this mindset.

MattZ , May 15, 2019 at 11:43

Anne -- your post resonates deeply with me. I would guess you and I are of similar ages and have similar friends and acquaintances. We certainly share the exact same experiences with these people. They are proud 'liberals' (lately donning the 'progressive' robe with equal exuberance). None are members of the elite one-percenters, but all belong to what Nader refers to as the 'contented class', that 9% buffer zone between the elite and the increasingly miserable lower 90%-ers.

Most are Democrats who embrace the 'neoliberal groupthink' you referred to. There was a time I believed one of the conclusions of a famous study on authoritarian personalities that claimed the vast majority of authoritarians (active and passive) were Republicans. Just as the Democratic Party has morphed into the 80's Republican Party, so too have these liberals. Their cognitive dissonance is more powerful than any I have encountered in my lifetime. Their core belief system now includes incrementalism, lesser-evilism and an overwhelming sense of goodness that at least they are 'doing something positive' by supporting all Democrats at all costs.

Appallingly, their new heroes are historically-proven liars, psychopaths and Deep State organizations like the CIA and FBI. Their Trump Derangement Syndrome has destroyed all ability to think critically or accept transparent and obvious truths. They accept no criticism of their actions and attack those who question them. To them, the 'end' of removing Trump justifies any evil.
Gaia help us all.

Skip Scott , May 15, 2019 at 08:04

The root of the Democrats problem is they feed from the same trough as the GOP. They can't do anything substantial about health care or the declining middle class because they'd piss off their donors. Since they can't stand for "the working man" any longer, they are trying to cobble together "Identity Politics" and "Political Correctness" to eke out a majority. Good luck with that! They can give us non gender specific restrooms with our Forever War! Why aren't we feeling the love?

I think the time has never been more ripe for a serious third party challenge than 2020.

Realist , May 15, 2019 at 10:42

Perfect thumbnail obituary for the Democratic Party, Skip. It got hijacked by corporatists who saw an opportunity to push the GOP agenda from both directions. Maybe that's what Hillary meant by "stronger together."

Herrman , May 15, 2019 at 07:56

If you want to be entertained and titillated turn on the national evening news shows. The 2020 election circus has already begun. Don't watch that, switch channels and watch the obstruction of justice infotainment. Want news, read between the lines of the major newspapers. Go to PBS to be rescued, good luck.

Has it always been thus. Maybe, but it's a much better show today.

Shock and awe. Can't wait for the next one.

O Society , May 15, 2019 at 04:52

https://opensociet.org/2018/10/20/the-real-danger-of-russiagate-always-has-been-the-martyrdom-of-trump/

If I could figure out long ago Russia-gate was going to lead to Trump's reelection (see above link), you would think Brennan/ Clinton/ Pelosi could figure it out too. Which begs the questions:

Is Trump good for business for the Democratic party financial patrons? Do they really want him impeached? Did the Pied Piper strategy ever end? Does Bernie Sanders scare them so much they'd rather promote Trump than have Sanders in the Oval Office?

Realist , May 15, 2019 at 10:35

Your last explanation is the one that Jimmy Dore seems to favor. The party string pullers are obviously desperate when they back one near-octogenarian (Crazy Joe Biden) for the nomination against another near-octogenarian (Sanders). Counter move by the GOPers may be to run Tricky Dick Nixon's head-in-a-bottle for the office, like in Futurama.

Realist , May 15, 2019 at 02:05

Wow, gotta hand it to McConnell. That man can shamelessly pack multiple whoppers into every single sentence uttered in his public speaking. Quite a tour de force of pure undiluted bullshit by the turtle. With his rhetorical skills to deliver talking points at a newly realised zenith, there's sure to be a job for him on Madison Avenue when he's finally kicked to the curb as happens to every politician when a better snake oil salesman inevitably comes along.

John Sanguinetti , May 15, 2019 at 00:05

I don't get why, supposedly intelligent, informed people are wondering why Russia is being blamed for so much. Let me remind you that the extremely powerful Israel Lobby is VERY BUSY supporting the agenda of the right wing Likud government in Israel.

One of the goals of Likud is the Zionist agenda that includes Greater Israel which requires Israel to acquire more water and land in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Iran is a very strong supporter of the Palestinians and Syrian President Assad and Iraqi independence from US domination.

Russia, with it's very effective support for Assad and collaboration with Iran is blocking progress on the Zionist agenda. So, putting pressure on Russia is a way of trying to force them to back off from their support for Syria and Iran or at least to scare them with the power of our military and a crazy unpredictable leader who might do anything. Israel has besides it's VERY STRONG and active lobbies in the US and UK a large and VERY Active 5th column that spends a LOT of money and effort influencing the people who run our government.

CitizenOne , May 14, 2019 at 23:43

I believe it but with some editing of the authors original four things. I have deleted the case against Assange as a sideshow that does nor resonate with Americans any more than the nightly rumor mill about celebrities. Here goes.

Americans used to think that Russia-gate was about a plot to hack the 2016 election. They were wrong. Russia-gate is really about an immense conspiracy to do four things:

No. 1: Ratchet up tensions with Russia to ever more dangerous levels;

No. 2: Show that Democrats are even more useless than people imagined;

No. 3: Win the 2020 elections and reelect Trump and preserve the republican majority in the Senate and win back the democrat controlled House

No. 4: Wage wars in oil rich nations being Iran and Venezuela to fulfill the agenda of the energy companies via military action.

While McConnell rails against Obama for his weaknesses we have the historical record that Obama declared Venezuela as a national security threat, levied massive sanctions against Russia for their presumed invasion of Ukraine, launched a war against the Syrian government, preserved and supported our wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

We see today that Chuck Schumer is still committed to the theory that Russia is the single reason that the democrats lost the last election which is absurd and is rejected by not only a significant number of liberal journalists but also by a majority of Americans. Why do the democrats continue to promote conspiracy theories that the majority of Americans reject as nonsense?

The republicans have the democrats over a barrel and will push it over and watch the democrats wallow in the mud with much amusement.

This could not have have happened to the democrats without a complete lack of foresight or even a slightest attempt to rely on the truth to guide them.

From day one after the election, the democrats swallowed the bait hook line and sinker and now the hook is buried deep in their gullets and they still insist that they are free swimming fish on a mission to prove Russia was responsible for the last election. With every gulp they swallow the hook deeper apparently unaware that they are about to be reeled in and captured by their unfounded beliefs that the bait is is a real meal they can sustain themselves on. Just like a fooled fish they are on the hook.

The announcement that the AG is launching an investigation led by republicans to investigate the Russia Gate investigation will most certainly tarnish democrats and stain their efforts that will be seen as even more dull as the tarnish they try to put on Trump. Even uninformed citizens will ask what is up with the democrats who are trying to bring down Trump even though their reliable news sources tell them that Russia Gate is all a lie.

Meanwhile the democrats who have declared come up not only short on ideas but appear to be suicidal.

Elisabeth Warren has declared war on monopolies in an era where unlimited spending by corporations is legally protected as free speech. How can she hope to win by pledging to breakup monopolies that are well equipped to outspend her in their bid for survival?

The democrats have failed to do the math and their strategies for appealing to the masses will be shot down by the right wing controlled "free press". It is not a liberal press. It is the enemy of liberals controlled by wealthy liberal hating, libertarian loving billionaires. Public vows by democrats who pledge to destroy it will be met with the full force of their arsenal which includes complete control over the microphone that steers debate and is the chief influence of elections. As Mark Twain put it, " It is unwise to wage a war of words against men who buy ink by the barrel".

Howard Dean met his end when the major media outlets conspired to elevate "The Dean Scream" to levels questioning his sanity. The nearly constant barrage of over 4,000 replays of the Dean Scream leading up to the democratic primaries effectively put an end to his bid for nomination.

But why did all of the the major media outlets conspire to conduct a character assassination of the Howard Dean movement? Just two weeks before the Dean Scream was endlessly broadcasted by the media with news commentators chiming in that he was likely an insane man who must be exposed and stopped in his tracks he made a fatal flaw. He made a campaign speech where he said that if he was elected he would impose regulations on the media. Boom Boom out went the lights.

How can any democrat win when they oppose corporations that include the media corporations in America? How can Elisabeth Warren wither the name calling that she will suffer as Trump claims she has a Pocahontas syndrome while also alienating the largest campaign contributors with her pledge to destroy them? How will her insistence that she has Indian blood possibly win her fans when the majority of Americans will mock her. They have been honed on the strop of right wing money into believing that everything they hear and see is factual even though it is not factual or real. Such is the suicidal gamble of the soon to be defeated democratic party.

Why they continue to go down the path toward blind alleys where they will be trapped and defeated baffles me.

geeyp , May 15, 2019 at 11:32

Why, on this good earth, does anyone pay any attention to Schumer and Schiff and McConnell? Shills, do nothing crackpots and traitors to this nation; when you see that's what they are, you have to ignore them.

jmg , May 14, 2019 at 19:57

Daniel Lazare: "( ) it must be the fault of dastardly foreigners trying to hack our democracy. It's a deep-rooted form of xenophobia that has fueled everything ( ) The idea that America may in anyway be responsible for its own fate is of course unthinkable."

Yes, that's the way it is. About WikiLeaks, as they have repeated many times:

"Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims 'bullshit', adding: 'They are absolutely making it up.'

"'I know who leaked them,' Murray said. 'I've met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it's an insider. It's a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.'"

-- The Guardian, 2016-12-10
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/10/cia-concludes-russia-interfered-to-help-trump-win-election-report

[May 15, 2019] Ron Paul on Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... I have high respect for Dr Paul especially on his foreign policies and I'm so glad that he has recognized Tulsi stances on ending these regime change wars and over stepping our bounds constitutional overseas. Please keep spreading the word on Tulsi our Republic depends on it. ..."
"... It doesn't surprise me in the least that Ron Paul feels well about Tulsi Gabbard - mostly in regards to her foreign policy. Tulsi can expect considerable support from Libertarians. ..."
Apr 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

In this clip from PRIMO NUTMEG #170, former Congressman Ron Paul gives his thoughts on 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.

Ortho Tech , 3 weeks ago

Supported Ron Paul in both 08 and 12, supporting Tulsi in 2020.

harriet , 3 weeks ago

I love BOTH Ron Paul and Tulsi Gabbard! We need more people like these in general!

chickendinner2012 , 3 weeks ago

Great to see anti-war solidarity! #EndTheWars

Gordo Bjorn , 3 weeks ago

I have high respect for Dr Paul especially on his foreign policies and I'm so glad that he has recognized Tulsi stances on ending these regime change wars and over stepping our bounds constitutional overseas. Please keep spreading the word on Tulsi our Republic depends on it.

Robert Thorpe , 3 weeks ago

It doesn't surprise me in the least that Ron Paul feels well about Tulsi Gabbard - mostly in regards to her foreign policy. Tulsi can expect considerable support from Libertarians.

Kariakas , 3 weeks ago

Ron Paul is Libertarian and Tulsi is to the left but they both speak common sense.

EL.NANNA , 3 weeks ago

I'd love to see these 2 together. So much respect for both. No surprise Dr Paul senses the real deal.

George Kraft , 3 weeks ago

Rep Paul, I don't agree with a lot of your ideas, but about Tulsi I agree 100%!

Skylark Myself , 3 weeks ago

Yes Tulsi and Ron Paul Aloha 2020 POTUS

[May 15, 2019] They can't even say it

May 15, 2019 | twitter.com

gjohnsit on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:46pm

The Hill forgot Tulsi again

It's #IgnoreTulsiTime again. @thehill pic.twitter.com/rVe306gXxx

-- K. Rosef (@kayrosef) May 10, 2019

they can't even say it

CBS News (2/4/19) briefly interviewed Honolulu Civil Beats reporter Nick Grube regarding Gabbard's campaign announcement. The anchors had clearly never encountered the term anti-interventionism before, struggling to even pronounce the word, then laughing and saying it "doesn't roll off the tongue."

[May 15, 2019] They hate us for our freedom 2.0

Neocons and neolibs control the USA foreign policy. That's given. NYT just reflects foreign policy establishment talking points.
Links between Daniel Jones and Steele are really interesting and new information
Notable quotes:
"... "The goal here is bigger than any one election," said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities. ..."
"... According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received "significant funding" from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a street address with The Democracy Integrity Project. ..."
"... That's because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing "Russia Narrative" drama in Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. ..."
"... The NYT is very much invested in the post Cold War status quo. ..."
"... That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968. In fact, I believe this is the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump: the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years. ..."
"... told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay is about. ..."
"... Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked. ..."
"... So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days. ..."
"... Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding power. ..."
"... A few months ago, I made a comment to someone that it's like we're supposed to hate them (Russia) for their freedoms. ..."
May 15, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

"They hate us for our freedom" 2.0

gjohnsit on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:32pm The NY Times just posted one of the most atrocious pieces of journalistic malpractice I have ever read.

Less than two weeks before pivotal elections for the European Parliament, a constellation of websites and social media accounts linked to Russia or far-right groups is spreading disinformation, encouraging discord and amplifying distrust in the centrist parties that have governed for decades.

European Union investigators, academics and advocacy groups say the new disinformation efforts share many of the same digital fingerprints or tactics used in previous Russian attacks, including the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

That's a powerful statement. There's just one problem: the article doesn't present a single bit of proof. Just anecdotes. In fact, it doesn't even quote anyone to back up these claims, but for one single exception.

"The goal here is bigger than any one election," said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities.

"It is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself. They're working to destroy everything that was built post-World War II."

Russia is why people are losing faith in our government institutions. Not because they are owned by oligarchs. If you listen closely you can hear President Bush.
So who is Daniel Jones and Advance Democracy? That's an interesting story .

According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received "significant funding" from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a street address with The Democracy Integrity Project.

That's because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing "Russia Narrative" drama in Washington, D.C.

Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. That's because TDIP, which receives significant funding from George Soros, funneled some of that money toward Steele's research for Fusion GPS that led to the infamous dossier on President Donald Trump.

However, as Ross reports today: "Mystery surrounds both of Jones's operations. The identities of both groups' donors have largely been kept secret, as Jones has avoided revealing his backers.

Nothing to see here. Just two sketchy political organizations sharing the same street address. Perfectly normal.

"The election has yet to come, and we are already suspected of doing something wrong?" the Russian prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said in March. "Suspecting someone of an event that has not yet happened is a bunch of paranoid nonsense."

It's not nonsense. It's scapegoating. There's a difference.

gjohnsit on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:46pm

The Hill forgot Tulsi again

It's #IgnoreTulsiTime again. @thehill pic.twitter.com/rVe306gXxx

-- K. Rosef (@kayrosef) May 10, 2019

they can't even say it

CBS News (2/4/19) briefly interviewed Honolulu Civil Beats reporter Nick Grube regarding Gabbard's campaign announcement. The anchors had clearly never encountered the term anti-interventionism before, struggling to even pronounce the word, then laughing and saying it "doesn't roll off the tongue."
UntimelyRippd on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:59pm
If you have trouble pronouncing "anti-interventionism",

@gjohnsit @gjohnsit
you lack one of perhaps three must-have skills for being a TV reporter.

Centaurea on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 6:49pm
The other skills being

@UntimelyRippd a perky voice and a lack of critical thinking ability? And for women, blonde hair.

Bollox Ref on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 6:14pm
I assume that the meteoric rise of Farage's Brexit party

over the last couple of weeks, is all down to Putin/bots/funding. The NYT is very much invested in the post Cold War status quo.

Centaurea on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 6:44pm
Once again, NYT gets the facts wrong

They're [the Kremlin] working to destroy everything that was built post-World War II.

That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968. In fact, I believe this is the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump: the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years.

It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on. To do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.

I heard someone recently say "We have to elect a Dem or else our post-War advantages will disappear."

Got to wonder where he's been for the past 40 years. That horse left the barn a long time ago.

snoopydawg on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 7:12pm
Unfortunately people really believe everything they have been

@Centaurea

told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay is about.

Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked.

People say that Mueller has put to rest the fact that Russia indeed interfered with the election, but all he showed was the FBIs "belief' that they did and that some Russians will ties to Vlad hacked the DNC computers. He didn't interview anyone involved with that as laid out in my recent essay.

I've even seen people who were once against our invasions being okay with them and repeating the party line. Unfuckingbelievable!

TheOtherMaven on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 7:28pm
I wonder how much of this is residual Millennial Mania

@snoopydawg

The Year 2000 was not that long ago, and we were bombarded for two decades beforehand with talk of all the dreadful things that might happen, could happen, and some people firmly believed would happen - and then didn't happen. (As it turned out, the most obvious sign of "Y2K" was the "19100" bug that plagued Web pages for months afterward. It was cosmetic and harmless, but annoying.)

I expected it to take about ten years for sanity to return - but it looks like being more like fifty. And there will probably be some cultists who construct their own "reality" around what didn't happen, like the 1840s Millerites (who spun off the still-extant Seventh Day Adventists).

snoopydawg on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 1:33am
It might be longer

@TheOtherMaven

The NYT and WaPoo have new articles out about how bad the dastardly Russians are still interfering with the whole dang country now. And WaPoo had some university do a study on how Russia tried to get people to vote for Bernie and blah, blah,...

I read an article last year saying that Bernie needs to knock off being with the Russia Gaters because he is going to be accused of being in Vlad's pockets anyway. But he's still saying that Trump is under Russia's thumb and that Russia is doing all kinds of bad stuff.

Then there's all the websites like DK, emptyhead, democratic underground and others saying that Mueller confirmed Russia did bad things and maybe if the democrats work harder on their investigations they will find stuff that Mueller missed. I think 10 years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take its going to be too long.

travelerxxx on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 3:10am
A lit fuse with nothing to stop it

@snoopydawg

I think 10 years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take it's going to be too long.

Consider how long it took for Cold War I to finally start to ebb. It took at least a decade, and that was with the memory of a horrendous world war fresh on most minds. Now, we're so insulated from the reality of war, not even allowed reports from the battlefields, much less accurate information and numbers, that we have lost touch with the horror. Evil men such as Bolton spend every minute of every day trying to embroil us in deadly excursions and foreign entanglements. Our "intelligence" agencies are no more than modern versions of the NAZI era Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.

thanatokephaloides on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 8:12pm
the Russians

@travelerxxx

So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.

Fortunately for us ordinary Americans, the Russians really do love their children too.....

//www.youtube.com/embed/wHylQRVN2Qs?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

Jen on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 9:02am
If Bernie is the nominee

@snoopydawg Are they going to say they're both (Bernie and Trump) working with Russia? That would be amusing. I wonder if it would cause any of them to vote third party or not vote at all.

Hawkfish on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 7:14pm
As someone in the industry...

@TheOtherMaven

...who was a software development consultant at the time, the reason nothing much happened was that's lot of people worked their butts off for several years. COBOL programmers were dragged out of retirement and all kinds of goofy OS and library hacks were implemented to reduce the amount of work and risk.

Sometimes freaking out gets the job done!

SnappleBC on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 10:03pm
It did not come easy for me anyway

@Centaurea

It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on. To do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.

I spent several years grappling with my fall down the rabbit hole. I started freeing myself from the matrix during #Occupy and towards the end of Obama's first term I was starting to really get it... at least get it enough to know I wasn't voting for him a second time. Then Bernie arrived on the scene and it was music to my ears. That pretty much completed the process for me but it STILL took time and I STILL have places where I "don't believe they are that evil" (twin towers anyone) yet I suspect that in the fullness of time I may yet find that they are in fact that evil.

I have a lot of sympathy for those still caught in the matrix. It's a really good trap. That doesn't change the fact that I see them as my enemy and the enemy of all mankind but I at least understand.

UntimelyRippd on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 10:50pm
I've always been clear on one thing:

@SnappleBC
Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding power.

travelerxxx on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 10:58pm
I need to focus better

@UntimelyRippd

I believe he would have fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels ...

I had to go back and re-read your comment, as I had subconsciously read President Security Advisor John Bolton rather than what you wrote -- Cheney .

I mean, you were talking about evil men ...

snoopydawg on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 1:44am
They really are that evil

@SnappleBC

Just this century this country has killed a million Iraqis and who knows how many people in the other countries we've invaded? 40,000 Venezuelans died last year because of our sanctions and no matter how many people in Yemen die every day because of the Saudis we will continue supporting them.

Then there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki as aliasalias stated. Oh hell yes they are that evil.

Not Henry Kissinger on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 3:01am
After all the millions of people...

@snoopydawg @snoopydawg

killed and displaced around the Globe by the Empire in just this century alone, so many still can't believe this same government could murder 3000 on 9/11.

Cognitive dissidence doesn't even start to explain it.

Pluto's Republic on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 7:41pm
Well, the key issue here

...is the intense access that these privatized propagandists have to the New York Times . And certainly the Times should explain why it freely publishes radical divisive stories that cannot be verified from compromised sources that have previously been exposed as disreputable. This is what Russia is accused of doing, sewing confusion and fear in the US, based on misinformation. Now the New York Times is doing it for them. The fact that a US media outlet is deliberately sabotaging the domestic tranquility with alarming lies is exactly what congress should be investigating. But any congressperson that did so would see their careers destroyed. Congress surrendered to the media monopolies a long time ago.

What we can do is confirm for Americans that they must never trust anything they read in the New York Times and the Washington Post . Remind them of the tragic facts in recent history. The lies that endangers people's lives and disables their intelligence are written between the lines.

snoopydawg on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 1:46am
Ayup

@Pluto's Republic

The NYT and WaPoo and other media are continuing to come up with new stories every day telling us something new that Russia is doing. This is not going away any time soon. Unfortunately.

aliasalias on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 10:36pm
I can't forget those commercials nor the school drills

@Lookout @Lookout with us all getting under our desks or along the walls if we are in the hallway and I don't think any one of us didn't treat this as something critical for us to learn in order to survive.
As a kid that loved riding a bicycle one Public Service announcement I paid careful attention to was the instruction to do if I saw that bright flash which was to throw the bike down and curl up along the curb, I even thought about that problem on unpaved streets.

I remember bomb shelters were advertised a lot and I remember some tv dramas were about people fleeing to their bomb shelter and the dilemma of being only fit to hold a small group but had neighbors, friends and strangers pleading to be let in.

The 'Twilight Zone' series even had one episode where a very wealthy man with a shelter picked certain important people in his life, his school teacher, Priest and others were offered shelter only if they will apologize for things he'd caught criticism for his behavior in his past. Trivial stuff, but he had a screen for them to watch the destruction live.

Long story short, they'd rather die than spend the rest of their lives with him. Especially with all their friends and family gone, so he is alone, goes crazy, runs outside and is found by a policemen to be crying and babbling at a city fountain, in a city that had not been bombed, but for him it had happened and all he could see was destruction around him.

All that aside considering we'd already dropped 'the' bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki those behind all the public warnings and information that was needed in order for people to know how to survive couldn't really believe that nonsense.

Unless they could believe all those dead Japanese would've likely survived if they had ducked under their desks or curled up along a curb, and if that were true they were as loony as the 'Twilight Zone' character.
Yeah if only all those schoolchildren had jumped under their desk before the building and everything around it was obliterated.

...if you see a light brighter than the sun. (1 min)

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==

aliasalias on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 10:51pm
Today I'm watching the NY Yankees vs Tampa Bay and

in the top of the ninth the screen goes black, the live stream has stopped because the electrical grid the Tropicana had shut down and the stadium was without power for the lights, scoreboard, broadcast, etc. were down.

It took about forty-five minutes for power to be restored but right when it happened I thought it was the stream I was watching so I clicked on other streaming sites and it was on a couple of them I read why all broadcasts were off.

But in the chat box I really couldn't tell if a few were joking or not when they blamed it on the Russians. One in particular didn't look like they were joking as that person repeated the claim a few times. No kidding, and one lamented that (paraphrasing) 'now the Russians are messing with our National sport'.

THIS is what mainstream media has wrought.

travelerxxx on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 11:02pm
Worse yet

@aliasalias

THIS is what mainstream media has wrought.

I'd offer that this is what a mainstream media controlled by handful of corporations, reading from a script, has wrought.

snoopydawg on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 1:41am
Bingo

@aliasalias

Any time something happens now people will willingly accept that Russia did something that caused it. See the tweet I posted above. Secret service agents and police are doing nothing as the Guaido goons keeps people from delivering food and stuff to the embassy sitters. One goon tried taking the bag out of a guy's hands and they just watched. One person tried to throw a cucumber and the cops pounced on him, pushed him to the ground and bloodied him up. But Russia is the one who put the embassy sitters into the embassy and is supporting them. SMDH!

Not Henry Kissinger on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 2:57am
Love the projection...

Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities."It is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself.

An organization that reports undesirable speech to law enforcement is worried about the undermining of democracy. Got it.

Jen on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 9:09am
It's the other way around this time

A few months ago, I made a comment to someone that it's like we're supposed to hate them (Russia) for their freedoms.

[May 15, 2019] CNN MSNBC Caught Meddling in US Democracy by Joe Giambrone

Images deleted
Notable quotes:
"... How could it not? Comcast owns NBC. ..."
"... MSNBC is also that bastion of journalistic integrity that hired an exposed CIA mole, Ken Dilanian, to feed its viewers propaganda about "national security ..."
"... Now, the parties truly "meddling in America's democracy" should be very clear, although I can only scratch the surface here concerning the long history of media corruption and outright lies broadcast all the time. ..."
"... The criminal behaviour continues unabated. Lies and fraud abound. American behaviour worldwide is an embarrassment to any free thinking individual. They are a danger to all of us. ..."
"... Organisations like the BBC and all the rest of the corporate media are a greater threat to democracy than any foreign army or terrorist organisation. ..."
"... As Trump might say, 'Fake News!' ..."
May 15, 2019 | off-guardian.org

CNN rigged a poll to censor out nearly everyone under 45 years of age. Based on this nonsensical false sampling they claim Biden is now in the lead.

MSNBC was caught making up false numbers to report, increasing Biden from an actual 25% approval to a magical 28%, just enough to edge out Bernie Sanders. But this is a fraud, deliberate journalistic malfeasance at the highest levels. How could such a thing happen?

How could it not? Comcast owns NBC.

Comcast executive to host Joe Biden fundraiser"
CBS News 24/04/19

MSNBC is also that bastion of journalistic integrity that hired an exposed CIA mole, Ken Dilanian, to feed its viewers propaganda about "national security."

MSNBC also made hysterical, highly dangerous, and false claims about the Russians' ability and intention to shut down America's electrical grid, a completely false story that was retracted as soon as it went out by the Washington Post. This kind of unhinged war propaganda could lead the world straight to Armageddon.

Now, the parties truly "meddling in America's democracy" should be very clear, although I can only scratch the surface here concerning the long history of media corruption and outright lies broadcast all the time.

Grafter

The criminal behaviour continues unabated. Lies and fraud abound. American behaviour worldwide is an embarrassment to any free thinking individual. They are a danger to all of us. We can start by removing them from Europe along with their so called "allies". Here in the disunited UK T.May and her little gang of Tory millionaires should be top priority for political oblivion. People worldwide urgently need to wake up to the sick joke that goes under the name of "American democracy".

mark

Organisations like the BBC and all the rest of the corporate media are a greater threat to democracy than any foreign army or terrorist organisation.

They need to be constantly exposed for what they are rather than actually suppressed or controlled. They can be safely left to wither on the vine and decline into irrelevance. Social media and sites like this are a powerful antidote.

Seamus Padraig

As Trump might say, 'Fake News!'

[May 15, 2019] THIS IS ILLEGAL!! Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard's BRILLIANT Takedown of Trump's Illegal War in Syria

Notable quotes:
"... Tulsi Gabbard for first female president 2020. ..."
"... She is my hero! What a courageous, well spoken, thoughtful, articulate, woman. I would sleep well at night with her behind the wheel. ..."
"... Here we are again dropping bombs on another country that didn't attack us, some things never change. ..."
"... Only congress women i respect. ..."
"... Tulsi is the only sane voice in a group of madmen who have egos that would end the World if their Coffee did not have enough sugar. ..."
Apr 14, 2018 | www.youtube.com

Days before Trump's escalation of his illegal war in Syria, Congresswoman & war veteran Tulsi Gabbard confronts Defense Secretary James Mattis on the unconstitutionality of such missile strikes!

BUY TRUMP TOILET PAPER ON AMAZON! http://amzn.to/2Fe08tb (Affiliate Link)

AbraCadabra▼ , 1 year ago

Tulsi Gabbard for first female president 2020.

Sandra Jacobson , 1 year ago

She is my hero! What a courageous, well spoken, thoughtful, articulate, woman. I would sleep well at night with her behind the wheel.

Andrei Kohler , 2 months ago

Love Tulsi's logic and her support to stop our illegal wars.

Mikael Stenlund , 1 year ago

This Woman, whent against Hillary-establishement, Dems, She is smart & strong, I want her running for Presidency, even some Republicans, would support Her, Right?? :-)

Karen Schumer , 1 year ago

She is so brilliant, and so cool! You know what, if Tulsi ran for president I would vote for her!

Martin Anderson , 1 year ago

This lady has the brains and the looks, i must say. We need a genuine anti-war movement in this country, we need more people like Tulsi.

Thrashaero , 1 year ago

she's got bigger balls than that pencilneck next to her.

Adam Bridges , 1 year ago

Here we are again dropping bombs on another country that didn't attack us, some things never change.

angela bluebird60 , 1 year ago

We need Tulsi Gabbard to work with and for the People FOREVER !

H2SO4BLACK BLACKWATER , 1 year ago (edited)

Why my money is used for killing innocent children in Syria 🇸🇾 I am not agreed for missile attack !

Tarlok Sason , 1 year ago

Only congress women i respect.

alchemistoxford , 2 months ago

A brilliant statement by Tulsi Gabbard. Beto O'Rourke appears bored, unconcerned and vaguely gormless when he rocks back and forth, bites his nails and extends his lower lip.

Andy Roo , 1 year ago

Tulsi is the only sane voice in a group of madmen who have egos that would end the World if their Coffee did not have enough sugar.

jennifer spicer , 1 year ago

the complex situation, Mattis, is that you are committing treason.

Memorandom , 1 year ago

Does the guy next to her think he's in a bloody rocking chair? :P

Justin Norton , 1 year ago

How is bombing Syria protecting America? Mattis should just say, "We just want to drop bombs and kill people."

[May 15, 2019] BREAKING Tulsi Gabbard Receives Another Major Endorsement (Ron Paul)

Trump lost Ron Paul support...
Notable quotes:
"... Tulsi continues to stack up very reputable endorsements. This time from a three time Presidential Candidate. ..."
"... Tulsi's momentum is going for critical mass, Its time for a true maverick! #Rogue2020 ..."
"... Ron Paul's endorsement is surprising and interesting, in that it seems sincere. Most repubs give bad-faith assessments of the dem candidates. ..."
"... It really should be seen as a general election endorsement if it came down to a run between Tulsi and Trump, why the hell there was not a follow up question asking Dr Paul who he would endorse Tulsi and Trump I am sure Paul would endorse Tulsi. ..."
May 06, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Tulsi continues to stack up very reputable endorsements. This time from a three time Presidential Candidate.

ishant 7 , 1 week ago

I am a conservative myself but i would vote for her in a heartbeat

Job Applicant , 1 week ago (edited)

Tulsi's momentum is going for critical mass, Its time for a true maverick! #Rogue2020

Jayanti Ramiah , 1 week ago (edited)

Ron Paul's endorsement is surprising and interesting, in that it seems sincere. Most repubs give bad-faith assessments of the dem candidates.

Citizen Harrison , 1 week ago

My first vote when I was 17 in the Republican primary in 2012. Glad Ron is on board.

Karlo Ve , 1 week ago

Last election I voted for Trump (because he is not a politician) but this time I might vote for Tulsi 2020

Constable 1976 , 1 week ago (edited)

I'm a conservative and might not vote for her, but I love that Major Gabbard is an Army MP! God Bless her for her service...

Ned Pjevac , 1 week ago

I am as unlikely to vote republican as anybody but I admired Ron Paul's honesty when he ran for the presidency. Admired enough that I actually voted for him although his economic policies and gold standard kept me asking more questions than getting answers. I am stoked that my favorite republican voice gives his support to Tulsi. It is yet another confirmation of my choice for 2020.

dobsonimages , 1 week ago

It really should be seen as a general election endorsement if it came down to a run between Tulsi and Trump, why the hell there was not a follow up question asking Dr Paul who he would endorse Tulsi and Trump I am sure Paul would endorse Tulsi. At any rate this is a big deal a lot of people respect Dr Paul and this endorsement will help Tulsi.

George Washington , 1 week ago

YES!!!! RON PAUL!!!!

[May 15, 2019] Chris Hedges Fascism in the Age of Trump

I hope that might be interesting to Tulsi supporters.
In this interesting speech "Fascism in the Age of Trump" Chris Hedges predicts 20 years to the US empire. So somewhere around 2040 or when the age of "cheap oil" approximately ends and/or come under considerable stress.
He does not understands neoliberal social system well and does not use the term "neoliberarism" in his speak (which is detrimental to its value) , but he manages to provide a set of interesting arguments, although the speech is full of exaggerations and inconsistencies.
It also can explains the current Trump stance toward China as "Hail Mary" attempt top preserve the global hegemony by suppressing China even at considerable cost for the USA population.
May 15, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Alex K. , 1 year ago

Chris Hedges is a rare breed. Doesn't care about left/right, liberal/conservative, just dropping truth bombs.

Archvaldor's Warcraft Hacks , 1 year ago

I really feel for Chris Hedges on a personal level. Unlike say Blyth, or Chomsky, whom seem to revel in being intellectual bad boys, Hedges seems to be at heart a very conservative man in the true sense of the word, driven to the extremes by the rabid greed and sociopathic nature of mainstream politics. The corruption of it seems to visibly torture him. It takes a special kind of courage to take an unpopular stand like he does.

TIM BROWN , 1 year ago

President Eisenhower stated that the largest threat to our Democracy was/is the Military Industrial Complex. He quickly terminated the Korean War that he inherited then kept us out of foreign conflict. He believed in a strong Middle Class and promoted our economy with a massive highway system. He kept the highest progressive tax rate at 90% discouraging CEO's from massively overpaying themselves.

김선달봉이 , 1 year ago

A great and courageous man. A very lonely voice in this crazy world.

Jonathan Cook , 1 year ago

Wow, that was awesome, this guy is on a par with our great historical orators.

LiberaLib , 1 year ago

Iceberg. Dead ahead.

Ruth Rivera , 1 year ago

Thank you Chris Hedges. You speak profound truth. I'm listening.

Chris Mclean , 1 year ago

Epic speech. Thank you Chris!

sprite fallen , 1 year ago

Weird hearing someone speak truth

[May 15, 2019] Tucker vs critic who calls him cheerleader for Russia

Notable quotes:
"... Fox News contributor Ralph Peters suggested Tucker was like a Nazi sympathizer for wondering whether Russia and the US should work together against ISIS. Another critic mostly agrees with Peters - and Tucker takes him on ..."
"... Max Boot is an example of someone who takes himself so seriously that they become a joke. ..."
"... Max Boot is never right! He had so many idiotic opinions! A man who wants to intervene in every part of the world and sod the consequences! He's a real neo con extremist! Dangerous! ..."
Jul 12, 2017 | www.youtube.com

Fox News contributor Ralph Peters suggested Tucker was like a Nazi sympathizer for wondering whether Russia and the US should work together against ISIS. Another critic mostly agrees with Peters - and Tucker takes him on

James Lamoureux , 2 weeks ago

The "empire" Reagan warned us about was the Obama admin.

Elijah Sims , 2 months ago

Max Boot is an example of someone who takes himself so seriously that they become a joke.

Jordan Smith , 5 months ago

I love tucker❤️

TD TOPPDAWG , 1 month ago

Wasn't it Ronald Reagan who said "if fascism comes it will come in the name of liberalism"

Joseph Duplaga , 2 months ago

Keep up the good work Tucker a voice of reason in a room full of lunatics .

jeroliver , 3 weeks ago

Who in their right mind would take advice about ANYTHING from Max Boot?

Maverick Watch Reviews , 8 months ago

Tucker sure gave Max the boot in that segment.

Geoff M , 2 months ago

Max Boot is never right! He had so many idiotic opinions! A man who wants to intervene in every part of the world and sod the consequences! He's a real neo con extremist! Dangerous!

Gdurant , 2 months ago

These idiots want us to go and start more wars?

Francis Wargirai , 2 months ago

Selling insurance, house painting, something you're good at. Hahaha.. Gold..

dagmastr , 3 weeks ago

One thing is Tucker is excellent in a debate. He just made max look very stupid.

jućub 111 , 5 months ago

Tucker rest of world love and support you...keep rollin 💪💪 regards from Serbia 🇷🇸

omar rashid , 2 months ago

Good God, you can feel the anger off this guy.

Leonardo Espino , 1 week ago

I have to say that... dam ... I love tucker and he's a good tv anchor and he's hilarious when he takes any opponent

D Redacted , 3 weeks ago

Max debates like a spoilt child.... Remind me of the Kurt Echinwald interview

Vani Vasil , 1 week ago

who the hell established this guy as a foreign policy expert ??

Jermano Mayfield , 1 week ago

Tucker Rocks! Gets them triggered so THE TRUTH can come out

Kay Scott , 1 week ago

Flakes like this Boot guy has destroyed our foreign policy

James Burton , 2 days ago

I WOULD LIKE TO JUST KNOCK HELL OUTTA THAT BALD HEADED SUMBITCH.

William Miller , 2 days ago

When you don't have an answer, just attack the person asking the question. Nice goin' Max, you fool.

[May 15, 2019] Op-Ed-O-Matic Write Doomsday Screeds Like the Pros by Peter Van Buren

Notable quotes:
"... You know the ones: articles predicting whatever the news of the day will be The End of Democracy. Alongside The New York Times and The Washington Post , whose op-ed pages are pretty much a daily End of Days, practitioners include Chicken Little regulars Rachel Maddow , Lawrence Tribe, Malcolm Nance, David Corn, Benjamin Wittes, Charles Pierce, Bob Cesca, and Marcy Wheeler. ..."
"... We've gone from thinking the president is literally a Russian agent (since 1987, the last year your mom and dad dated!) to worrying the attorney general is trying to obstruct a House committee from investigating a completed investigation into obstruction by writing a summary not everyone liked of a report already released. But the actual content is irrelevant. What matters is there is another crisis to write about! The op-ed industry can't keep up with all the Republic-ending stuff Trump and his henchworld are up to. ..."
"... All persons with Russian-sounding names are Kremlin Agents(tm) *except* the alleged sources for The Dossier(tm). Those anonymous Russians can be trusted implicitly. ..."
"... Matt Tiabbi has a book out on hate, Hate Inc, and has done an excellent interview with Chris Hedges on RT. ..."
"... Rep. Eric Swalwell (D, California), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, before Mueller finished his investigation, on Hardball on MSNBC, Jan. 2019: ..."
"... Matthews: "Do you believe the president, right now, has been an agent of the Russians?" Swalwell: "Yes, I think there's more evidence that he is-" Matthews: "Agent?" Swalwell: "Yes. and I think all the arrows point in that direction, and I haven't seen a single piece of evidence that he's not." Matthews: "An agent like in the 1940s where you had people who were 'reds,' to use an old term, like that? In other words, working for a foreign power?" Swalwell: "He's working on behalf of the Russians, yes." ..."
"... One of the best things to come from Trump's election has been the lengths some of his opponents will go to discredit themselves in the court of public opinion: Brennan, Clapper, Clinton, Comey, McCabe, the list goes on and on, often merely to make a buck. Even Watergate figures like Carl Bernstein and John Dean have demolished their own reputations, or what was left of them to begin with. If they only knew, or cared, how badly they look in hindsight. ..."
"... @MM: >>One of the best things to come from Trump's election has been the lengths some of his opponents will go to discredit themselves in the court of public opinion << ..."
"... These people don't care about "public opinion." They operate inside a circle-jerk echo chamber whose membership includes the powers dominating the culture, the media (both mainstream and social), the government, and, increasingly, the major corporations. In short, the bulk of what some call the Ruling Class. ..."
"... Facts, evidence, and truth have nothing to do with it. So an investigation, rigged though it was, nonetheless clears Trump of conspiring with Moscow, but the story becomes how Trump is guilty anyway. Orwell, a man well ahead of his time, had the whole thing figured out long ago. ..."
"... "Now tell me again it's all 'sound and fury, signifying nothing.'" On the issue of Trump/Russia collusion, it is, and always was, because we now know it started with the Clinton campaign and a now-discredited dossier. ..."
"... These are the people who we elect to "govern" us. If one looks back upon the 230 years or so during which this thing of ours has been in existence, the overwhelming majority of our elected officials (federal, state and local) have probably been, to one degree or another, narcissistic, mendacious and just generally dishonest incompetents. ..."
"... Lynch, Holder, Obama as silent as church mice. i:e who gave Comey his marching orders ? ..."
"... What "illegal things" were revealed in the Mueller report? Trump was trying to obstruct an INJUSTICE, i.e. the "soft coup" done by the anti-American, lawless leftist Dems. ..."
"... On the Big Ugly Lie*, what's their excuse? * Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election, an attack on par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. ..."
May 13, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

You know the ones: articles predicting whatever the news of the day will be The End of Democracy. Alongside The New York Times and The Washington Post , whose op-ed pages are pretty much a daily End of Days, practitioners include Chicken Little regulars Rachel Maddow , Lawrence Tribe, Malcolm Nance, David Corn, Benjamin Wittes, Charles Pierce, Bob Cesca, and Marcy Wheeler.

You'd have thought after almost three years of wrong predictions (no new wars, no economic collapse, no Russiagate) this industry would have slam shut faster than a Rust Belt union hall. You would have especially thought these kinds of articles would have tapered off with the release of the Mueller Report. It turned out to be the opposite -- while Mueller found no conspiracy and charged no obstruction, the dang report turns out to be chock-a-block with hidden messages, secret road maps, and voices speaking in tongues (albeit only to Democrats) about obstruction.

We've gone from thinking the president is literally a Russian agent (since 1987, the last year your mom and dad dated!) to worrying the attorney general is trying to obstruct a House committee from investigating a completed investigation into obstruction by writing a summary not everyone liked of a report already released. But the actual content is irrelevant. What matters is there is another crisis to write about! The op-ed industry can't keep up with all the Republic-ending stuff Trump and his henchworld are up to.

Help has arrived. Now anyone can write their own fear-mongering article, using this handy tool, the op-ed-o-Matic. The GoFundMe for the AI-driven app version will be up soon, but for now, simply follow these simple steps to punditry!

Start with a terrifying cliche. Here are some to choose from: There is a clear and present danger; Dark clouds gather, the center cannot hold; It is unclear the Republic will survive; Democracy itself is under attack; We face a profound/unique/existential threat/crisis/turning point/test. Also, that "First they came for " poem is good. Be creative; The Washington Post calls the present state of things "constitutional nihilism." Snappy!

Be philosophical and slightly weary in tone, such as "I am in despair as I have never been before about the future of our experiment in self-rule." Say you're sad for the state of the nation. Claim time is short, but there just may be a chance to stop this. Add " by any means necessary."

Then choose a follow-on quote to reinforce the danger, maybe from: The Federalist Papers, especially Madison on tyranny; Lincoln, pretty much anything about "the people, government, test for our great nation, blah blah;" the Jack Nicholson character about not being able to handle the truth; something from the neocons like Bill Kristol or Max Boot who now hate Trump. Start with "even" as in " even arch conservative Jennifer Rubin now says "

After all that to get the blood up, explain the current bad thing Trump did. Label it "a high crime or misdemeanor if there ever was one." Use some legalese, such as proffer, colorable argument, inter alia, sinecure, duly-authorized, perjurious, and that little law book squiggly thingy (18 USC § 1513.) Be sure to say "no one is above the law," then a dramatic hyphen, then "even the president." Law school is overrated; you and Google know as much as anyone about emoluments, perjury, campaign finance regulations, contempt, tax law, subpoenas, obstruction, or whatever the day's thing is, and it changes a lot. But whatever, the bastard is obviously guilty. Your standard is tabloid-level , so just make it too good to be true.

Next, find an old Trump tweet where he criticized someone for doing just what he is doing. That never gets old! Reference burning the Reichstag. If the crisis you're writing about deals with immigration or white supremacy (meh, basically the same thing, right?), refer to Kristallnacht.

Include every bad thing Trump ever did as examples of why whatever you're talking about must be true. Swing for the fence with lines like "seeks to destroy decades of LGBTQIXYZ progress" or "built concentration camps to murder children." Cite Trump accepting Putin's word over the findings of "our" intelligence community, his "very fine people" support for Nazi cosplayers, the magic list of 10,000 lies, how Trump has blood on his hands for endangering the press as the enemy of the people, and how Trump caused the hurricane in Puerto Rico.

And Nixon. Always bring up Nixon. The context or details don't matter. In case Wikipedia is down, he was one of the presidents before Trump your grandpa liked for awhile and then didn't like after Robert Redford showed he was a clear and present danger to Saturday Night Live, or the Saturday Night Massacre, it doesn't matter, we all agree Nixon.

Focus on the villain, who must be unhinged, off the rails, over the edge, diseased, out of control, a danger to himself and others, straight-up diagnosed mentally ill , or under Trump/Putin's spell. Barr is currently the Vader-du-jour. The New York Times characterized him as "The transformation of William Barr from respected establishment lawyer to evil genius outplaying and undermining his old friend Robert Mueller is a Grand Guignol spectacle." James Comey went as far as describing Trump people as having had their souls eaten by the president. That's not hyperbole, it's journalism!

But also hold out for a hero, the Neo one inside Trumpworld who will rise, flip, or leak to save us. Forget past nominees like the pee tape, Comey, Clapper, Flynn, Page, Papadopoulos, Manafort, Cohen, Mattis, Kelly, Barr, Linda Sarsour (replace with Ilhan Omar,) Avenatti, and Omarosa to focus on McGahn. He's gonna be the one!

Then call for everyone else bad to resign, be impeached, go to jail, have their old statues torn down, delete their accounts, be referred to the SDNY, be smited by the 25th Amendment, or have their last election delegitimized by the Night King. Draw your rationale from either the most obscure corner of the Founding Founders' work ("the rough draft, subsection IIXX of the Articles of Confederation addendum, Spanish language edition, makes clear Trump is unfit for office") or go broad as in "his oath requires him to uphold the Constitution, which he clearly is not doing." Like Nancy Pelosi, mention how Trump seems unlikely to voluntarily cede power if he loses in 2020.

Cultural references are important. Out of fashion: Godfather memes especially about who is going to be Fredo, 'bots, weaponize, Pussy Hats, the Parkland Kids, Putin homophobe themes, incest "jokes" about Ivanka, the phrases the walls are closing in, tick tock, take to the streets, adult in the room, just wait for Mueller Time, and let that sink in.

Things you can still use: abyss, grifter, crime family, not who we are, follow the money. Also you may make breaking news out of Twitter typos. Stylistically anyone with a Russian-sounding name must be either an oligarch, friend of Putin, or have ties to the Kremlin. Same for anyone who has done business with Trump or used the ATM in the Deutsche Bank lobby in New York. Mention Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez somewhere because every article has to mention AOC somewhere now.

Finally, your op-ed should end either with this House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler faux Kennedy-esque quote, "The choice is simple: We can stand up to this president in defense of the country and the Constitution and the liberty we love, or we can let the moment pass us by. History will judge us for how we face this challenge" or, if you want to go old school, this one from Hillary Clinton saying, "I really believe that we are in a crisis, a constitutional crisis. We are in a crisis of confidence and a crisis over the rule of law and the institutions that have weathered a lot of problems over so many years. And it is something that, regardless of where you stand in the political spectrum, should give real heartburn to everybody. Because this is a test for our country."

Crisis. Test. Judgment of history. Readers love that stuff, because it equates Trump's dumb tweets with Lincoln pulling the Union together after a literal civil war that killed millions of Americans in brother-to-brother conflict. As long as the rubes believe the world is coming to an end, you might as well make a buck writing about it.

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People , Hooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan , and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99% .

See also

Fran Macadam , says: May 13, 2019 at 2:48 am

Good rules for your wayward commenters Peter, themselves nattering nabobs of negativism. (Oops, there I go again.)

Can I mention how Hilarious still seems unlikely to voluntarily cede power since she lost in 2016?

Uncle Billy , says: May 13, 2019 at 6:41 am
Liberal journalists seem to think that Trump is either an ignorant oaf or an evil genius. These views are oppositional, but many liberal journalists seem to hold both of them.
mrscracker , says: May 13, 2019 at 6:58 am
I pretty much lost all respect for the Washington Post during the last election. Each WaPo anti-Trump op ed became increasingly apocalyptic until you imagined that the universe would implode should he be elected. It was that silly.

But other media promote "end of the world as we know it "scenarios also. TAC included.

Seriously, if I read one more article about how flyover America is a drug infested, impoverished wasteland inhabited by those not intelligent or ambitious enough to move to the coasts. Drama draws readers and online traffic. I guess it's up to the reader to sift through the competing narratives for the truth.

Gerard , says: May 13, 2019 at 10:11 am
On the one hand, I agree that it's laughable and ridiculous -- this flood of apocalyptic predictions and articles, wherein Trump, a juvenile buffoon who in fact does not even control the government he nominally heads, is depicted as some kind of unprecedented threat to democracy and Everything We Hold Dear.

I mean, OK, the judgment of the libs and neocons writing this stuff is clearly addled by their irrational and rabid hatred for Trump. Still, are they really that stupid or is it just that they are hopelessly dishonest? I lean toward the latter explanation.

That said, the abiding irony is that there is in fact a deepening crisis in this country. It's about an increasingly dysfunctional democracy, a bitterly alienated and divided citizenry, a set of ruling elites who despise a large percentage of their countrymen and have contrived an economic and political system that enriches themselves while consigning the despised percentage to permanent struggling status, a cultural establishment that rejects the traditional Judeo-Christian values that built Western civilization and, Jacobin-style, is busily overturning and replacing those values with their own would-be New Moral Order.

And so forth.

So yeah, there most definitely is a crisis and it might even be apocalyptic in dimension and character. (Heck, it put Trump in the White House.) But the actual crisis is not the one the fools are writing about. In fact, not only are they not writing about it -- they're in large part responsible for it.

Like I said: an abiding irony. One for the history books.

Scott in MD , says: May 13, 2019 at 10:13 am
Astroturf campaigns have been around since at least the 90's, surely you aren't just discovering them now
Sid Finster , says: May 13, 2019 at 10:18 am
All persons with Russian-sounding names are Kremlin Agents(tm) *except* the alleged sources for The Dossier(tm). Those anonymous Russians can be trusted implicitly.
Taras 77 , says: May 13, 2019 at 11:08 am
FWIW:

Matt Tiabbi has a book out on hate, Hate Inc, and has done an excellent interview with Chris Hedges on RT.

Jhawk , says: May 13, 2019 at 1:16 pm
Van Buren has apparently chosen to forget the apocalyptic rants from the right during the Obama administration. As for today's alarmists, as I write this the Dow is down over 700 points due to Trump's foolish trade war, his administration is ignoring two centuries of tradition by stonewalling Congress' legitimate oversight authority and John Bolton is trying to provoke a war with Iran. Now tell me again it's all "sound and fury, signifying nothing."
MM , says: May 13, 2019 at 1:42 pm
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D, California), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, before Mueller finished his investigation, on Hardball on MSNBC, Jan. 2019:

Matthews: "Do you believe the president, right now, has been an agent of the Russians?"
Swalwell: "Yes, I think there's more evidence that he is-"
Matthews: "Agent?"
Swalwell: "Yes. and I think all the arrows point in that direction, and I haven't seen a single piece of evidence that he's not."
Matthews: "An agent like in the 1940s where you had people who were 'reds,' to use an old term, like that? In other words, working for a foreign power?"
Swalwell: "He's working on behalf of the Russians, yes."

The same congressman, who makes Joseph McCarthy look moderate, after Mueller completed his investigation, on Fox News, Mar. 2019:

Cavuto: "Would you say the president is not a Russian agent?"
Swalwell: "The president acts on Russia's behalf, I don't need to see the Mueller report for that."

And this month, after he had annouced his presidential bid, on Face the Nation:

Brennan: "But I know you have been talking because you are also in an intelligence role on that House committee saying a number of things that I want to quote back to you. Up until this point you said when you were asked in January, 'do you believe the president right now has been an agent of the Russians?' You said, 'yes,' you were asked again at the end of that month by a questioner, 'I'm still not hearing any evidence that he's an agent of Russia.' And you said, 'Yeah I think it's pretty clear it's almost hiding in plain sight.' The Mueller report did not substantiate any conspiracy or coordination with Russia. Do you regret prejudging the outcome?"

Swalwell: "No, actually I- I- I think I should have been louder."

And people say Denin Nunes politicized the House Intelligence Committee?

One of the best things to come from Trump's election has been the lengths some of his opponents will go to discredit themselves in the court of public opinion: Brennan, Clapper, Clinton, Comey, McCabe, the list goes on and on, often merely to make a buck. Even Watergate figures like Carl Bernstein and John Dean have demolished their own reputations, or what was left of them to begin with. If they only knew, or cared, how badly they look in hindsight.

Gene Smolko , says: May 13, 2019 at 1:54 pm
Uncle Billy

"Liberal journalists seem to think that Trump is either an ignorant oaf or an evil genius."

You're missing the point, it's Trump's ignorance, his extreme sense of entitlement and limitless ego that are a danger to our democracy. He doesn't understand the norms of democracy, otherwise known as American principles. All he understands is what he wants and his notion of American greatness, which has nothing to do with true American principles.

Gerard , says: May 13, 2019 at 2:16 pm
@MM: >>One of the best things to come from Trump's election has been the lengths some of his opponents will go to discredit themselves in the court of public opinion <<

These people don't care about "public opinion." They operate inside a circle-jerk echo chamber whose membership includes the powers dominating the culture, the media (both mainstream and social), the government, and, increasingly, the major corporations. In short, the bulk of what some call the Ruling Class.

In their minds, public opinion can be suppressed or at least controlled by their near monopoly on major media. The stories they want told will get told. The stories they don't want told will not get told. Except at more or less isolated right-wing websites and such whose audience and reach are limited.

Facts, evidence, and truth have nothing to do with it. So an investigation, rigged though it was, nonetheless clears Trump of conspiring with Moscow, but the story becomes how Trump is guilty anyway. Orwell, a man well ahead of his time, had the whole thing figured out long ago.

MM , says: May 13, 2019 at 2:51 pm
jhawk: "As I write this the Dow is down over 700 points."

This is the same Dow Jones that, even with today's drop is still 40% higher than it was right before the 2016 election, correct?

"Now tell me again it's all 'sound and fury, signifying nothing.'" On the issue of Trump/Russia collusion, it is, and always was, because we now know it started with the Clinton campaign and a now-discredited dossier.

Connecticut Farmer , says: May 13, 2019 at 3:36 pm
@MM

These are the people who we elect to "govern" us. If one looks back upon the 230 years or so during which this thing of ours has been in existence, the overwhelming majority of our elected officials (federal, state and local) have probably been, to one degree or another, narcissistic, mendacious and just generally dishonest incompetents. It seems that it's only when we hit rock bottom and the country's very survival is at stake that the cream rises to the top and the very best step to the plate, so given what we have in Washington now, maybe we haven't reached that point–at least not yet.

Dan Green , says: May 13, 2019 at 5:58 pm
Lynch, Holder, Obama as silent as church mice. i:e who gave Comey his marching orders ?
JohnT , says: May 13, 2019 at 8:16 pm
This is a hoot. Little Pettie strikes again! Projecting his own myopia as always! His Greater Leader, The Trumpster, and the sycophants who worship him daily (for a fee, of course) daily tweets or shouts from a podium the impending doom of our nations due to hoards of the "other" spreading disease and violence nationwide while supported by the great love of Evangelical "Christians" who faith not merely predicts but yearns for the end of the world!!!
Can't quite tell. It is hypocrisy or grand delusions blooming brightly at TAC!
MM , says: May 13, 2019 at 11:08 pm
CT Farmer: "If one looks back upon the 230 years or so during which this thing of ours has been in existence, the overwhelming majority of our elected officials have probably been, to one degree or another, narcissistic, mendacious and just generally dishonest incompetents."

No doubt, I only picked on him because he represents the crappiest district in the Bay Area, which I have personal experience on, and he's running for president on the "Trump is a Russian agent" platform, which even Joseph McCarthy was too timid to attempt.

That's either saying something, or it's nothing. I could've quoted another presidential candidate who's claimed that law enforcement and criminal justice in America is racist from top to bottom and front to back. Or I could've quoted a different presidential candidate who's stated unequivocally that every human being, not just American citizen, is entitled to free education and health care, without regard to cost or need.

Pick your poison

Cat , says: May 14, 2019 at 3:21 am
Just a few thoughts about comments above: Who "yearns for the end of the world"?? Give names please, stop slandering. What "illegal things" were revealed in the Mueller report? Trump was trying to obstruct an INJUSTICE, i.e. the "soft coup" done by the anti-American, lawless leftist Dems. The fact is that we are a nation of laws and illegals (no matter where they are from, Mars, Supitor; whether they are green, purple, whatever color) are a threat to our country. I heard report that about a third of the crimes in the USA are done by illegals, at a cost of billions. Well, more crap from brain washed boobs above, but I'm done trying to point them out ..
mrscracker , says: May 14, 2019 at 9:55 am
Rick Steven D.:

"Uh, have you met Rod-sky-is-falling-Dreher?"

***************
Yes, I met him at a very nice crawfish boil last year.
It's good to read your comments, too. I hope you've been well!

mrscracker , says: May 14, 2019 at 10:03 am
James from Durham:

" you know, we're all at it, breathing apocalyptic fire and brimstone, left and right. No point throwing stones at each other on this subject."

**************
My thoughts, too. It's difficult to sift through the hype on all sides & find anything solid. Outrage generates traffic, thoughtful discussion-not so much. So we end up with clickbait & tabloids.

David Smith , says: May 14, 2019 at 10:28 am
Maybe the Dems and their supporters should spend more time trying to understand why they lost and less time complaining about it. But then that's not nearly as much fun.
Patricus , says: May 14, 2019 at 11:17 am
Thanks for the voice of reason. A couple of complaints on Trump: he hasn't accomplished much on the border; budgets continue to bleed red ink. He at least could have vetoed the budgets.
Sean Nuttall , says: May 14, 2019 at 3:07 pm
Isn't it a bit rich to suggest that the outrage media started in 2016? How long have Limbaugh, Coulter, Ingraham, Levin, Hannity, .. been milking the Republican multiverse.
MM , says: May 14, 2019 at 5:38 pm
Sean: "Isn't it a bit rich to suggest that the outrage media started in 2016?"

That's a bit like saying because my neighbor ran over my dog, I'll then bulldoze his house. Besides, the left and the press are supposed to be superior to the right and the unwashed masses. They always fact-based, logical, reasonable, non-ideological, and consistent.

On the Big Ugly Lie*, what's their excuse?
* Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election, an attack on par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

[May 15, 2019] Bernie Sanders on trade with China, health care and student debt

Good domestic policy suggestions and debate skills. Horrible understanding of foreign policy (he completely subscribes to the Russiagate hoax)
His capitulation to Hillary in 2016 still linger behind his back despite all bravado. he betrayed his followers, many of who put money of this while being far from rich. he betrayed them all. As such he does not deserve to run.
Warren and Tulsi are definitely better options then Sanders for 2020.
May 07, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., became a household name in 2016 when he ran a progressive campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination -- and came close to securing it. He's back in the 2020 race, but this time up against more than 20 other candidates. Sanders sits down with Judy Woodruff to discuss trade with China, health care, student debt, Russian election interference and more.

[May 15, 2019] They can't even say it

May 15, 2019 | twitter.com

gjohnsit on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:46pm

The Hill forgot Tulsi again

It's #IgnoreTulsiTime again. @thehill pic.twitter.com/rVe306gXxx

-- K. Rosef (@kayrosef) May 10, 2019

they can't even say it

CBS News (2/4/19) briefly interviewed Honolulu Civil Beats reporter Nick Grube regarding Gabbard's campaign announcement. The anchors had clearly never encountered the term anti-interventionism before, struggling to even pronounce the word, then laughing and saying it "doesn't roll off the tongue."

[May 15, 2019] They hate us for our freedom 2.0

Neocons and neolibs control the USA foreign policy. That's given. NYT just reflects foreign policy establishment talking points.
Links between Daniel Jones and Steele are really interesting and new information
Notable quotes:
"... "The goal here is bigger than any one election," said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities. ..."
"... According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received "significant funding" from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a street address with The Democracy Integrity Project. ..."
"... That's because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing "Russia Narrative" drama in Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. ..."
"... The NYT is very much invested in the post Cold War status quo. ..."
"... That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968. In fact, I believe this is the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump: the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years. ..."
"... told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay is about. ..."
"... Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked. ..."
"... So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days. ..."
"... Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding power. ..."
"... A few months ago, I made a comment to someone that it's like we're supposed to hate them (Russia) for their freedoms. ..."
May 15, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

"They hate us for our freedom" 2.0

gjohnsit on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:32pm The NY Times just posted one of the most atrocious pieces of journalistic malpractice I have ever read.

Less than two weeks before pivotal elections for the European Parliament, a constellation of websites and social media accounts linked to Russia or far-right groups is spreading disinformation, encouraging discord and amplifying distrust in the centrist parties that have governed for decades.

European Union investigators, academics and advocacy groups say the new disinformation efforts share many of the same digital fingerprints or tactics used in previous Russian attacks, including the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

That's a powerful statement. There's just one problem: the article doesn't present a single bit of proof. Just anecdotes. In fact, it doesn't even quote anyone to back up these claims, but for one single exception.

"The goal here is bigger than any one election," said Daniel Jones, a former F.B.I. analyst and Senate investigator whose nonprofit group, Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities.

"It is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself. They're working to destroy everything that was built post-World War II."

Russia is why people are losing faith in our government institutions. Not because they are owned by oligarchs. If you listen closely you can hear President Bush.
So who is Daniel Jones and Advance Democracy? That's an interesting story .

According to a report published this morning, he notes that the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which has received "significant funding" from technology billionaires, funneled $500,000 to the non-profit group Advance Democracy. That organization shares a street address with The Democracy Integrity Project.

That's because both organizations were founded by former Senate Intel staffer Daniel Jones, who at that time worked for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who hails from just down the road from Silicon Valley in San Francisco. As TruNews has previously reported, those connections to the Senate Intel Committee have played a significant role in the ongoing "Russia Narrative" drama in Washington, D.C.

Jones has been previously identified as a central figure in the investigation who served as potential go-between with the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, and former MI6 agent Christopher Steele. That's because TDIP, which receives significant funding from George Soros, funneled some of that money toward Steele's research for Fusion GPS that led to the infamous dossier on President Donald Trump.

However, as Ross reports today: "Mystery surrounds both of Jones's operations. The identities of both groups' donors have largely been kept secret, as Jones has avoided revealing his backers.

Nothing to see here. Just two sketchy political organizations sharing the same street address. Perfectly normal.

"The election has yet to come, and we are already suspected of doing something wrong?" the Russian prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said in March. "Suspecting someone of an event that has not yet happened is a bunch of paranoid nonsense."

It's not nonsense. It's scapegoating. There's a difference.

gjohnsit on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:46pm

The Hill forgot Tulsi again

It's #IgnoreTulsiTime again. @thehill pic.twitter.com/rVe306gXxx

-- K. Rosef (@kayrosef) May 10, 2019

they can't even say it

CBS News (2/4/19) briefly interviewed Honolulu Civil Beats reporter Nick Grube regarding Gabbard's campaign announcement. The anchors had clearly never encountered the term anti-interventionism before, struggling to even pronounce the word, then laughing and saying it "doesn't roll off the tongue."
UntimelyRippd on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 5:59pm
If you have trouble pronouncing "anti-interventionism",

@gjohnsit @gjohnsit
you lack one of perhaps three must-have skills for being a TV reporter.

Centaurea on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 6:49pm
The other skills being

@UntimelyRippd a perky voice and a lack of critical thinking ability? And for women, blonde hair.

Bollox Ref on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 6:14pm
I assume that the meteoric rise of Farage's Brexit party

over the last couple of weeks, is all down to Putin/bots/funding. The NYT is very much invested in the post Cold War status quo.

Centaurea on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 6:44pm
Once again, NYT gets the facts wrong

They're [the Kremlin] working to destroy everything that was built post-World War II.

That would be the Clintons and the Bushes. Both political parties and every POTUS since 1968. In fact, I believe this is the main reason why the Dems created and are pushing Russiagate so hard. They don't want us looking at what really gave us Trump: the neoliberal neoconservative fiasco of the past 40+ years.

It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on. To do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.

I heard someone recently say "We have to elect a Dem or else our post-War advantages will disappear."

Got to wonder where he's been for the past 40 years. That horse left the barn a long time ago.

snoopydawg on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 7:12pm
Unfortunately people really believe everything they have been

@Centaurea

told about Russia and that they interfered with not only our elections, but in so many other countries too. I remember a time when people would insist on seeing the evidence on stuff the intelligence agencies tell them, but ever since Her lost the election they lost their minds. I'll see references to articles that say something, but offer no evidence. Like the one this essay is about.

Plus they tried to kill the Skripals. And the GOP are also under Vlad's thumb. This is why Russia Gate has to be debunked.

People say that Mueller has put to rest the fact that Russia indeed interfered with the election, but all he showed was the FBIs "belief' that they did and that some Russians will ties to Vlad hacked the DNC computers. He didn't interview anyone involved with that as laid out in my recent essay.

I've even seen people who were once against our invasions being okay with them and repeating the party line. Unfuckingbelievable!

TheOtherMaven on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 7:28pm
I wonder how much of this is residual Millennial Mania

@snoopydawg

The Year 2000 was not that long ago, and we were bombarded for two decades beforehand with talk of all the dreadful things that might happen, could happen, and some people firmly believed would happen - and then didn't happen. (As it turned out, the most obvious sign of "Y2K" was the "19100" bug that plagued Web pages for months afterward. It was cosmetic and harmless, but annoying.)

I expected it to take about ten years for sanity to return - but it looks like being more like fifty. And there will probably be some cultists who construct their own "reality" around what didn't happen, like the 1840s Millerites (who spun off the still-extant Seventh Day Adventists).

snoopydawg on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 1:33am
It might be longer

@TheOtherMaven

The NYT and WaPoo have new articles out about how bad the dastardly Russians are still interfering with the whole dang country now. And WaPoo had some university do a study on how Russia tried to get people to vote for Bernie and blah, blah,...

I read an article last year saying that Bernie needs to knock off being with the Russia Gaters because he is going to be accused of being in Vlad's pockets anyway. But he's still saying that Trump is under Russia's thumb and that Russia is doing all kinds of bad stuff.

Then there's all the websites like DK, emptyhead, democratic underground and others saying that Mueller confirmed Russia did bad things and maybe if the democrats work harder on their investigations they will find stuff that Mueller missed. I think 10 years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take its going to be too long.

travelerxxx on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 3:10am
A lit fuse with nothing to stop it

@snoopydawg

I think 10 years is optimistic, but however long it's going to take it's going to be too long.

Consider how long it took for Cold War I to finally start to ebb. It took at least a decade, and that was with the memory of a horrendous world war fresh on most minds. Now, we're so insulated from the reality of war, not even allowed reports from the battlefields, much less accurate information and numbers, that we have lost touch with the horror. Evil men such as Bolton spend every minute of every day trying to embroil us in deadly excursions and foreign entanglements. Our "intelligence" agencies are no more than modern versions of the NAZI era Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.

thanatokephaloides on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 8:12pm
the Russians

@travelerxxx

So, yes, it's going to take too long. Short of a miracle, I'm starting to think we're all going to be radioactive ash before Cold War II ends. There was a modicum of restraint with Cold War I; some people had enough sense to realize the end result was nuclear war. That type of sense seems nowhere to be found in Washington, D.C., these days.

Fortunately for us ordinary Americans, the Russians really do love their children too.....

//www.youtube.com/embed/wHylQRVN2Qs?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

Jen on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 9:02am
If Bernie is the nominee

@snoopydawg Are they going to say they're both (Bernie and Trump) working with Russia? That would be amusing. I wonder if it would cause any of them to vote third party or not vote at all.

Hawkfish on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 7:14pm
As someone in the industry...

@TheOtherMaven

...who was a software development consultant at the time, the reason nothing much happened was that's lot of people worked their butts off for several years. COBOL programmers were dragged out of retirement and all kinds of goofy OS and library hacks were implemented to reduce the amount of work and risk.

Sometimes freaking out gets the job done!

SnappleBC on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 10:03pm
It did not come easy for me anyway

@Centaurea

It's also why so many people of my generation (over 60) are having trouble understanding and accepting what's going on. To do so will require letting go of everything they thought was true. That kind of change does not come easy to many people.

I spent several years grappling with my fall down the rabbit hole. I started freeing myself from the matrix during #Occupy and towards the end of Obama's first term I was starting to really get it... at least get it enough to know I wasn't voting for him a second time. Then Bernie arrived on the scene and it was music to my ears. That pretty much completed the process for me but it STILL took time and I STILL have places where I "don't believe they are that evil" (twin towers anyone) yet I suspect that in the fullness of time I may yet find that they are in fact that evil.

I have a lot of sympathy for those still caught in the matrix. It's a really good trap. That doesn't change the fact that I see them as my enemy and the enemy of all mankind but I at least understand.

UntimelyRippd on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 10:50pm
I've always been clear on one thing:

@SnappleBC
Dick Cheney is as evil as any human being I've ever heard of. I doubt whether he's done everything some folks believe he's done -- but not because he isn't evil enough, only because he lacked either the guts or the necessity. I believe he would have fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels, and he would enthusiastically embraced their approach to getting and wielding power.

travelerxxx on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 10:58pm
I need to focus better

@UntimelyRippd

I believe he would have fit in perfectly well with Himmler and Goebbels ...

I had to go back and re-read your comment, as I had subconsciously read President Security Advisor John Bolton rather than what you wrote -- Cheney .

I mean, you were talking about evil men ...

snoopydawg on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 1:44am
They really are that evil

@SnappleBC

Just this century this country has killed a million Iraqis and who knows how many people in the other countries we've invaded? 40,000 Venezuelans died last year because of our sanctions and no matter how many people in Yemen die every day because of the Saudis we will continue supporting them.

Then there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki as aliasalias stated. Oh hell yes they are that evil.

Not Henry Kissinger on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 3:01am
After all the millions of people...

@snoopydawg @snoopydawg

killed and displaced around the Globe by the Empire in just this century alone, so many still can't believe this same government could murder 3000 on 9/11.

Cognitive dissidence doesn't even start to explain it.

Pluto's Republic on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 7:41pm
Well, the key issue here

...is the intense access that these privatized propagandists have to the New York Times . And certainly the Times should explain why it freely publishes radical divisive stories that cannot be verified from compromised sources that have previously been exposed as disreputable. This is what Russia is accused of doing, sewing confusion and fear in the US, based on misinformation. Now the New York Times is doing it for them. The fact that a US media outlet is deliberately sabotaging the domestic tranquility with alarming lies is exactly what congress should be investigating. But any congressperson that did so would see their careers destroyed. Congress surrendered to the media monopolies a long time ago.

What we can do is confirm for Americans that they must never trust anything they read in the New York Times and the Washington Post . Remind them of the tragic facts in recent history. The lies that endangers people's lives and disables their intelligence are written between the lines.

snoopydawg on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 1:46am
Ayup

@Pluto's Republic

The NYT and WaPoo and other media are continuing to come up with new stories every day telling us something new that Russia is doing. This is not going away any time soon. Unfortunately.

aliasalias on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 10:36pm
I can't forget those commercials nor the school drills

@Lookout @Lookout with us all getting under our desks or along the walls if we are in the hallway and I don't think any one of us didn't treat this as something critical for us to learn in order to survive.
As a kid that loved riding a bicycle one Public Service announcement I paid careful attention to was the instruction to do if I saw that bright flash which was to throw the bike down and curl up along the curb, I even thought about that problem on unpaved streets.

I remember bomb shelters were advertised a lot and I remember some tv dramas were about people fleeing to their bomb shelter and the dilemma of being only fit to hold a small group but had neighbors, friends and strangers pleading to be let in.

The 'Twilight Zone' series even had one episode where a very wealthy man with a shelter picked certain important people in his life, his school teacher, Priest and others were offered shelter only if they will apologize for things he'd caught criticism for his behavior in his past. Trivial stuff, but he had a screen for them to watch the destruction live.

Long story short, they'd rather die than spend the rest of their lives with him. Especially with all their friends and family gone, so he is alone, goes crazy, runs outside and is found by a policemen to be crying and babbling at a city fountain, in a city that had not been bombed, but for him it had happened and all he could see was destruction around him.

All that aside considering we'd already dropped 'the' bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki those behind all the public warnings and information that was needed in order for people to know how to survive couldn't really believe that nonsense.

Unless they could believe all those dead Japanese would've likely survived if they had ducked under their desks or curled up along a curb, and if that were true they were as loony as the 'Twilight Zone' character.
Yeah if only all those schoolchildren had jumped under their desk before the building and everything around it was obliterated.

...if you see a light brighter than the sun. (1 min)

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==

aliasalias on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 10:51pm
Today I'm watching the NY Yankees vs Tampa Bay and

in the top of the ninth the screen goes black, the live stream has stopped because the electrical grid the Tropicana had shut down and the stadium was without power for the lights, scoreboard, broadcast, etc. were down.

It took about forty-five minutes for power to be restored but right when it happened I thought it was the stream I was watching so I clicked on other streaming sites and it was on a couple of them I read why all broadcasts were off.

But in the chat box I really couldn't tell if a few were joking or not when they blamed it on the Russians. One in particular didn't look like they were joking as that person repeated the claim a few times. No kidding, and one lamented that (paraphrasing) 'now the Russians are messing with our National sport'.

THIS is what mainstream media has wrought.

travelerxxx on Sun, 05/12/2019 - 11:02pm
Worse yet

@aliasalias

THIS is what mainstream media has wrought.

I'd offer that this is what a mainstream media controlled by handful of corporations, reading from a script, has wrought.

snoopydawg on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 1:41am
Bingo

@aliasalias

Any time something happens now people will willingly accept that Russia did something that caused it. See the tweet I posted above. Secret service agents and police are doing nothing as the Guaido goons keeps people from delivering food and stuff to the embassy sitters. One goon tried taking the bag out of a guy's hands and they just watched. One person tried to throw a cucumber and the cops pounced on him, pushed him to the ground and bloodied him up. But Russia is the one who put the embassy sitters into the embassy and is supporting them. SMDH!

Not Henry Kissinger on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 2:57am
Love the projection...

Advance Democracy, recently flagged a number of suspicious websites and social media accounts to law enforcement authorities."It is to constantly divide, increase distrust and undermine our faith in institutions and democracy itself.

An organization that reports undesirable speech to law enforcement is worried about the undermining of democracy. Got it.

Jen on Mon, 05/13/2019 - 9:09am
It's the other way around this time

A few months ago, I made a comment to someone that it's like we're supposed to hate them (Russia) for their freedoms.

[May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics

Highly recommended!
Images omitted.
Important article that shed some light on the methods of disinformation in foreign events used by neoliberal MSM
Notable quotes:
"... However, there is a simple reason why the global agencies, despite their importance, are virtually unknown to the general public. To quote a Swiss media professor: "Radio and television usually do not name their sources, and only specialists can decipher references in magazines." (Blum 1995, P. 9) The motive for this discretion, however, should be clear: news outlets are not particularly keen to let readers know that they haven't researched most of their contributions themselves. ..."
"... Much of our media does not have own foreign correspondents, so they have no choice but to rely completely on global agencies for foreign news. But what about the big daily newspapers and TV stations that have their own international correspondents? In German-speaking countries, for example, these include newspapers such NZZ, FAZ, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Welt, and public broadcasters. ..."
"... Moreover, in war zones, correspondents rarely venture out. On the Syria war, for example, many journalists "reported" from cities such as Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo or even from Cyprus. In addition, many journalists lack the language skills to understand local people and media. ..."
"... How do correspondents under such circumstances know what the "news" is in their region of the world? The main answer is once again: from global agencies. The Dutch Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk has impressively described how correspondents work and how they depend on the world agencies in his book "People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East" : ..."
"... The central role of news agencies also explains why, in geopolitical conflicts, most media use the same original sources. In the Syrian war, for example, the "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" – a dubious one-man organization based in London – featured prominently. The media rarely inquired directly at this "Observatory", as its operator was in fact difficult to reach, even for journalists. ..."
"... Ulrich Tilgner, a veteran Middle East correspondent for German and Swiss television, warned in 2003, shortly after the Iraq war, of acts of deception by the military and the role played by the media: ..."
"... What is known to the US military, would not be foreign to US intelligence services. In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts: ..."
"... "In all press systems, the news media are instruments of those who exercise political and economic power. Newspapers, periodicals, radio and television stations do not act independently, although they have the possibility of independent exercise of power." (Altschull 1984/1995, p. 298) ..."
Jun 01, 2016 | www.globalresearch.ca

By Swiss Propaganda Research Global Research, May 14, 2019 Swiss Propaganda Research Region: Europe , USA Theme: Media Disinformation

This study was originally published in 2016.

Introduction: "Something strange"

"How does the newspaper know what it knows?" The answer to this question is likely to surprise some newspaper readers: "The main source of information is stories from news agencies. The almost anonymously operating news agencies are in a way the key to world events. So what are the names of these agencies, how do they work and who finances them? To judge how well one is informed about events in East and West, one should know the answers to these questions." (Höhne 1977, p. 11)

A Swiss media researcher points out:

"The news agencies are the most important suppliers of material to mass media. No daily media outlet can manage without them. () So the news agencies influence our image of the world; above all, we get to know what they have selected." (Blum 1995, p. 9)

In view of their essential importance, it is all the more astonishing that these agencies are hardly known to the public:

"A large part of society is unaware that news agencies exist at all In fact, they play an enormously important role in the media market. But despite this great importance, little attention has been paid to them in the past." (Schulten-Jaspers 2013, p. 13)

Even the head of a news agency noted:

"There is something strange about news agencies. They are little known to the public. Unlike a newspaper, their activity is not so much in the spotlight, yet they can always be found at the source of the story." (Segbers 2007, p. 9)

"The Invisible Nerve Center of the Media System"

So what are the names of these agencies that are "always at the source of the story"? There are now only three global agencies left:

  1. The American Associated Press ( AP ) with over 4000 employees worldwide. The AP belongs to US media companies and has its main editorial office in New York. AP news is used by around 12,000 international media outlets, reaching more than half of the world's population every day.
  2. The quasi-governmental French Agence France-Presse ( AFP ) based in Paris and with around 4000 employees. The AFP sends over 3000 stories and photos every day to media all over the world.
  3. The British agency Reuters in London, which is privately owned and employs just over 3000 people. Reuters was acquired in 2008 by Canadian media entrepreneur Thomson – one of the 25 richest people in the world – and merged into Thomson Reuters , headquartered in New York.

In addition, many countries run their own news agencies. However, when it comes to international news, these usually rely on the three global agencies and simply copy and translate their reports.

The three global news agencies Reuters, AFP and AP, and the three national agencies of the German-speaking countries of Austria (APA), Germany (DPA) and Switzerland (SDA).

Wolfgang Vyslozil, former managing director of the Austrian APA, described the key role of news agencies with these words:

"News agencies are rarely in the public eye. Yet they are one of the most influential and at the same time one of the least known media types. They are key institutions of substantial importance to any media system. They are the invisible nerve center that connects all parts of this system." (Segbers 2007, p.10)

Small abbreviation, great effect

However, there is a simple reason why the global agencies, despite their importance, are virtually unknown to the general public. To quote a Swiss media professor: "Radio and television usually do not name their sources, and only specialists can decipher references in magazines." (Blum 1995, P. 9) The motive for this discretion, however, should be clear: news outlets are not particularly keen to let readers know that they haven't researched most of their contributions themselves.

The following figure shows some examples of source tagging in popular German-language newspapers. Next to the agency abbreviations we find the initials of editors who have edited the respective agency report.

News agencies as sources in newspaper articles

Occasionally, newspapers use agency material but do not label it at all. A study in 2011 from the Swiss Research Institute for the Public Sphere and Society at the University of Zurich came to the following conclusions (FOEG 2011):

"Agency contributions are exploited integrally without labeling them, or they are partially rewritten to make them appear as an editorial contribution. In addition, there is a practice of 'spicing up' agency reports with little effort; for example, visualization techniques are used: unpublished agency reports are enriched with images and graphics and presented as comprehensive reports."

The agencies play a prominent role not only in the press, but also in private and public broadcasting. This is confirmed by Volker Braeutigam, who worked for the German state broadcaster ARD for ten years and views the dominance of these agencies critically:

"One fundamental problem is that the newsroom at ARD sources its information mainly from three sources: the news agencies DPA/AP, Reuters and AFP: one German/American, one British and one French. () The editor working on a news topic only needs to select a few text passages on the screen that he considers essential, rearrange them and glue them together with a few flourishes."

Swiss Radio and Television (SRF), too, largely bases itself on reports from these agencies. Asked by viewers why a peace march in Ukraine was not reported, the editors said : "To date, we have not received a single report of this march from the independent agencies Reuters, AP and AFP."

In fact, not only the text, but also the images, sound and video recordings that we encounter in our media every day, are mostly from the very same agencies. What the uninitiated audience might think of as contributions from their local newspaper or TV station, are actually copied reports from New York, London and Paris.

Some media have even gone a step further and have, for lack of resources, outsourced their entire foreign editorial office to an agency. Moreover, it is well known that many news portals on the internet mostly publish agency reports (see e.g., Paterson 2007, Johnston 2011, MacGregor 2013).

In the end, this dependency on the global agencies creates a striking similarity in international reporting: from Vienna to Washington, our media often report the same topics, using many of the same phrases – a phenomenon that would otherwise rather be associated with "controlled media" in authoritarian states.

The following graphic shows some examples from German and international publications. As you can see, despite the claimed objectivity, a slight (geo-)political bias sometimes creeps in.

"Putin threatens", "Iran provokes", "NATO concerned", "Assad stronghold": Similarities in content and wording due to reports by global news agencies.

The role of correspondents

Much of our media does not have own foreign correspondents, so they have no choice but to rely completely on global agencies for foreign news. But what about the big daily newspapers and TV stations that have their own international correspondents? In German-speaking countries, for example, these include newspapers such NZZ, FAZ, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Welt, and public broadcasters.

First of all, the size ratios should be kept in mind: while the global agencies have several thousand employees worldwide, even the Swiss newspaper NZZ, known for its international reporting, maintains only 35 foreign correspondents (including their business correspondents). In huge countries such as China or India, only one correspondent is stationed; all of South America is covered by only two journalists, while in even larger Africa no-one is on the ground permanently.

Moreover, in war zones, correspondents rarely venture out. On the Syria war, for example, many journalists "reported" from cities such as Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo or even from Cyprus. In addition, many journalists lack the language skills to understand local people and media.

How do correspondents under such circumstances know what the "news" is in their region of the world? The main answer is once again: from global agencies. The Dutch Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk has impressively described how correspondents work and how they depend on the world agencies in his book "People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East" :

"I'd imagined correspondents to be historians-of-the-moment. When something important happened, they'd go after it, find out what was going on, and report on it. But I didn't go off to find out what was going on; that had been done long before. I went along to present an on-the-spot report. ()

The editors in the Netherlands called when something happened, they faxed or emailed the press releases, and I'd retell them in my own words on the radio, or rework them into an article for the newspaper. This was the reason my editors found it more important that I could be reached in the place itself than that I knew what was going on. The news agencies provided enough information for you to be able to write or talk you way through any crisis or summit meeting.

That's why you often come across the same images and stories if you leaf through a few different newspapers or click the news channels.

Our men and women in London, Paris, Berlin and Washington bureaus – all thought that wrong topics were dominating the news and that we were following the standards of the news agencies too slavishly. ()

The common idea about correspondents is that they 'have the story', () but the reality is that the news is a conveyor belt in a bread factory. The correspondents stand at the end of the conveyor belt, pretending we've baked that white loaf ourselves, while in fact all we've done is put it in its wrapping. ()

Afterwards, a friend asked me how I'd managed to answer all the questions during those cross-talks, every hour and without hesitation. When I told him that, like on the TV-news, you knew all the questions in advance, his e-mailed response came packed with expletives. My friend had relalized that, for decades, what he'd been watching and listening to on the news was pure theatre." (Luyendjik 2009, p. 20-22, 76, 189)

In other words, the typical correspondent is in general not able to do independent research, but rather deals with and reinforces those topics that are already prescribed by the news agencies – the notorious "mainstream effect".

In addition, for cost-saving reasons many media outlets nowadays have to share their few foreign correspondents, and within individual media groups, foreign reports are often used by several publications – none of which contributes to diversity in reporting.

"What the agency does not report, does not take place"

The central role of news agencies also explains why, in geopolitical conflicts, most media use the same original sources. In the Syrian war, for example, the "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" – a dubious one-man organization based in London – featured prominently. The media rarely inquired directly at this "Observatory", as its operator was in fact difficult to reach, even for journalists.

Rather, the "Observatory" delivered its stories to global agencies, which then forwarded them to thousands of media outlets, which in turn "informed" hundreds of millions of readers and viewers worldwide. The reason why the agencies, of all places, referred to this strange "Observatory" in their reporting – and who really financed it – is a question that was rarely asked.

The former chief editor of the German news agency DPA, Manfred Steffens, therefore states in his book "The Business of News":

"A news story does not become more correct simply because one is able to provide a source for it. It is indeed rather questionable to trust a news story more just because a source is cited. () Behind the protective shield such a 'source' means for a news story, some people are quite inclined to spread rather adventurous things, even if they themselves have legitimate doubts about their correctness; the responsibility, at least morally, can always be attributed to the cited source." (Steffens 1969, p. 106)

Dependence on global agencies is also a major reason why media coverage of geopolitical conflicts is often superficial and erratic, while historic relationships and background are fragmented or altogether absent. As put by Steffens:

"News agencies receive their impulses almost exclusively from current events and are therefore by their very nature ahistoric. They are reluctant to add any more context than is strictly required." (Steffens 1969, p. 32)

Finally, the dominance of global agencies explains why certain geopolitical issues and events – which often do not fit very well into the US/NATO narrative or are too "unimportant" – are not mentioned in our media at all: if the agencies do not report on something, then most Western media will not be aware of it. As pointed out on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the German DPA: "What the agency does not report, does not take place." (Wilke 2000, p. 1)

America's "Righteous" Russia-gate Censorship. "Russia Bashing All the Time"

"Adding questionable stories"

While some topics do not appear at all in our media, other topics are very prominent – even though they shouldn't actually be: "Often the mass media do not report on reality, but on a constructed or staged reality. () Several studies have shown that the mass media are predominantly determined by PR activities and that passive, receptive attitudes outweigh active-researching ones." (Blum 1995, p. 16)

In fact, due to the rather low journalistic performance of our media and their high dependence on a few news agencies, it is easy for interested parties to spread propaganda and disinformation in a supposedly respectable format to a worldwide audience. DPA editor Steffens warned of this danger:

"The critical sense gets more lulled the more respected the news agency or newspaper is. Someone who wants to introduce a questionable story into the world press only needs to try to put his story in a reasonably reputable agency, to be sure that it then appears a little later in the others. Sometimes it happens that a hoax passes from agency to agency and becomes ever more credible." (Steffens 1969, p. 234)

Among the most active actors in "injecting" questionable geopolitical news are the military and defense ministries. For example, in 2009, the head of the American news agency AP, Tom Curley, made public that the Pentagon employs more than 27,000 PR specialists who, with a budget of nearly $ 5 billion a year, are working the media and circulating targeted manipulations. In addition, high-ranking US generals had threatened that they would "ruin" the AP and him if the journalists reported too critically on the US military.

Despite – or because of? – such threats our media regularly publish dubious stories sourced to some unnamed "informants" from "US defense circles".

Ulrich Tilgner, a veteran Middle East correspondent for German and Swiss television, warned in 2003, shortly after the Iraq war, of acts of deception by the military and the role played by the media:

"With the help of the media, the military determine the public perception and use it for their plans. They manage to stir expectations and spread scenarios and deceptions. In this new kind of war, the PR strategists of the US administration fulfill a similar function as the bomber pilots. The special departments for public relations in the Pentagon and in the secret services have become combatants in the information war. () The US military specifically uses the lack of transparency in media coverage for their deception maneuvers. The way they spread information, which is then picked up and distributed by newspapers and broadcasters, makes it impossible for readers, listeners or viewers to trace the original source. Thus, the audience will fail to recognize the actual intention of the military." (Tilgner 2003, p. 132)

What is known to the US military, would not be foreign to US intelligence services. In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts:

Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Stockwell said of his work in the Angolan war,

"The basic theme was to make it look like an [enemy] aggression in Angola. So any kind of story that you could write and get into the media anywhere in the world, that pushed that line, we did. One third of my staff in this task force were covert action, were propagandists, whose professional career job was to make up stories and finding ways of getting them into the press. () The editors in most Western newspapers are not too skeptical of messages that conform to general views and prejudices. () So we came up with another story, and it was kept going for weeks. () [But] it was all fiction."

Fred Bridgland looked back on his work as a war correspondent for the Reuters agency: "We based our reports on official communications. It was not until years later that I learned a little CIA disinformation expert had sat in the US embassy, in Lusaka and composed that communiqué, and it bore no relation at all to truth. () Basically, and to put it very crudely, you can publish any old crap and it will get newspaper room."

And former CIA analyst David MacMichael described his work in the Contra War in Nicaragua with these words:

"They said our intelligence of Nicaragua was so good that we could even register when someone flushed a toilet. But I had the feeling that the stories we were giving to the press came straight out of the toilet." (Hird 1985)

Of course, the intelligence services also have a large number of direct contacts in our media, which can be "leaked" information to if necessary. But without the central role of the global news agencies, the worldwide synchronization of propaganda and disinformation would never be so efficient.

Through this "propaganda multiplier", dubious stories from PR experts working for governments, military and intelligence services reach the general public more or less unchecked and unfiltered. The journalists refer to the news agencies and the news agencies refer to their sources. Although they often attempt to point out uncertainties with terms such as "apparent", "alleged" and the like – by then the rumor has long been spread to the world and its effect taken place.

The Propaganda Multiplier: Governments, military and intelligence services using global news agencies to disseminate their messages to a worldwide audience.

As the New York Times reported

In addition to global news agencies, there is another source that is often used by media outlets around the world to report on geopolitical conflicts, namely the major publications in Great Britain and the US.

For example, news outlets like the New York Times or BBC have up to 100 foreign correspondents and other external employees. However, Middle East correspondent Luyendijk points out:

"Dutch news teams, me included, fed on the selection of news made by quality media like CNN, the BBC, and the New York Times . We did that on the assumption that their correspondents understood the Arab world and commanded a view of it – but many of them turned out not to speak Arabic, or at least not enough to be able to have a conversation in it or to follow the local media. Many of the top dogs at CNN, the BBC, the Independent, the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the NYT were more often than not dependent on assistants and translators." (Luyendijk p. 47)

In addition, the sources of these media outlets are often not easy to verify ("military circles", "anonymous government officials", "intelligence officials" and the like) and can therefore also be used for the dissemination of propaganda. In any case, the widespread orientation towards the Anglo-Saxon publications leads to a further convergence in the geopolitical coverage in our media.

The following figure shows some examples of such citation based on the Syria coverage of the largest daily newspaper in Switzerland, Tages-Anzeiger. The articles are all from the first days of October 2015, when Russia for the first time intervened directly in the Syrian war (US/UK sources are highlighted):

Frequent citation of British and US media, exemplified by the Syria war coverage of Swiss daily newspaper Tages-Anzeiger in October 2015.

The desired narrative

But why do journalists in our media not simply try to research and report independently of the global agencies and the Anglo-Saxon media? Middle East correspondent Luyendijk describes his experiences:

"You might suggest that I should have looked for sources I could trust. I did try, but whenever I wanted to write a story without using news agencies, the main Anglo-Saxon media, or talking heads, it fell apart. () Obviously I, as a correspondent, could tell very different stories about one and the same situation. But the media could only present one of them, and often enough, that was exactly the story that confirmed the prevailing image." (Luyendijk p.54ff)

Media researcher Noam Chomsky has described this effect in his essay "What makes the mainstream media mainstream" as follows: "If you leave the official line, if you produce dissenting reports, then you will soon feel this. () There are many ways to get you back in line quickly. If you don't follow the guidelines, you will not keep your job long. This system works pretty well, and it reflects established power structures." (Chomsky 1997)

Nevertheless, some of the leading journalists continue to believe that nobody can tell them what to write. How does this add up? Media researcher Chomsky clarifies the apparent contradiction:

"[T]he point is that they wouldn't be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. () They have been through the socialization system." (Chomsky 1997)

Ultimately, this "socialization process" leads to a journalism that generally no longer independently researches and critically reports on geopolitical conflicts (and some other topics), but seeks to consolidate the desired narrative through appropriate editorials, commentary, and interviewees.

Conclusion: The "First Law of Journalism"

Former AP journalist Herbert Altschull called it the First Law of Journalism:

"In all press systems, the news media are instruments of those who exercise political and economic power. Newspapers, periodicals, radio and television stations do not act independently, although they have the possibility of independent exercise of power." (Altschull 1984/1995, p. 298)

In that sense, it is logical that our traditional media – which are predominantly financed by advertising or the state – represent the geopolitical interests of the transatlantic alliance, given that both the advertising corporations as well as the states themselves are dependent on the US dominated transatlantic economic and security architecture.

In addition, our leading media and their key people are – in the spirit of Chomsky's "socialization" – often themselves part of the networks of the transatlantic elite. Some of the most important institutions in this regard include the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission (see in-depth study of these networks ).

Indeed, most well-known publications basically may be seen as "establishment media". This is because, in the past, the freedom of the press was rather theoretical, given significant entry barriers such as broadcasting licenses, frequency slots, requirements for financing and technical infrastructure, limited sales channels, dependence on advertising, and other restrictions.

It was only due to the Internet that Altschull's First Law has been broken to some extent. Thus, in recent years a high-quality, reader-funded journalism has emerged, often outperforming traditional media in terms of critical reporting. Some of these "alternative" publications already reach a very large audience, showing that the „mass" does not have to be a problem for the quality of a media outlet.

Nevertheless, up to now the traditional media has been able to attract a solid majority of online visitors, too. This, in turn, is closely linked to the hidden role of news agencies, whose up-to-the-minute reports form the backbone of most news portals.

Will "political and economic power", according to Altschull's Law, retain control over the news, or will "uncontrolled" news change the political and economic power structure? The coming years will show.

Case study: Syria war coverage

As part of a case study, the Syria war coverage of nine leading daily newspapers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland were examined for plurality of viewpoints and reliance on news agencies. The following newspapers were selected:

The investigation period was defined as October 1 to 15, 2015, i.e. the first two weeks after Russia's direct intervention in the Syrian conflict. The entire print and online coverage of these newspapers was taken into account. Any Sunday editions were not taken into account, as not all of the newspapers examined have such. In total, 381 newspaper articles met the stated criteria.

In a first step, the articles were classified according to their properties into the following groups:

  1. Agencies : Reports from news agencies (with agency code)
  2. Mixed : Simple reports (with author names) that are based in whole or in part on agency reports
  3. Reports : Editorial background reports and analyzes
  4. Opinions/Comments : Opinions and guest comments
  5. Interviews : interviews with experts, politicians etc.
  6. Investigative : Investigative research that reveals new information or context

The following Figure 1 shows the composition of the articles for the nine newspapers analyzed in total. As can be seen, 55% of articles were news agency reports; 23% editorial reports based on agency material; 9% background reports; 10% opinions and guest comments; 2% interviews; and 0% based on investigative research.

Figure 1: Types of articles (total; n=381)

The pure agency texts – from short notices to the detailed reports – were mostly on the Internet pages of the daily newspapers: on the one hand, the pressure for breaking news is higher than in the printed edition, on the other hand, there are no space restrictions. Most other types of articles were found in both the online and printed editions; some exclusive interviews and background reports were found only in the printed editions. All items were collected only once for the investigation.

The following Figure 2 shows the same classification on a per newspaper basis. During the observation period (two weeks), most newspapers published between 40 and 50 articles on the Syrian conflict (print and online). In the German newspaper Die Welt there were more (58), in the Basler Zeitung and the Austrian Kurier , however, significantly less (29 or 33).

Depending on which newspaper, the share of agency reports is almost 50% (Welt, Süddeutsche, NZZ, Basler Zeitung), just under 60% (FAZ, Tagesanzeiger), and 60 to 70% (Presse, Standard, Kurier). Together with the agency-based reports, the proportion in most newspapers is between approx. 70% and 80%. These proportions are consistent with previous media studies (e.g., Blum 1995, Johnston 2011, MacGregor 2013, Paterson 2007).

In the background reports, the Swiss newspapers were leading (five to six pieces), followed by Welt , Süddeutsche and Standard (four each) and the other newspapers (one to three). The background reports and analyzes were in particular devoted to the situation and development in the Middle East, as well as to the motives and interests of individual actors (for example Russia, Turkey, the Islamic State).

However, most of the commentaries were to be found in the German newspapers (seven comments each), followed by Standard (five), NZZ and Tagesanzeiger (four each). Basler Zeitung did not publish any commentaries during the observation period, but two interviews. Other interviews were conducted by Standard (three) and Kurier and Presse (one each). Investigative research, however, could not be found in any of the newspapers.

In particular, in the case of the three German newspapers, a journalistically problematic blending of opinion pieces and reports was noted. Reports contained strong expressions of opinion even though they were not marked as commentary. The present study was in any case based on the article labeling by the newspaper.

Figure 2: Types of articles per newspaper

The following Figure 3 shows the breakdown of agency stories (by agency abbreviation) for each news agency, in total and per country. The 211 agency reports carried a total of 277 agency codes (a story may consist of material from more than one agency). In total, 24% of agency reports came from the AFP; about 20% each by the DPA, APA and Reuters; 9% of the SDA; 6% of the AP; and 11% were unknown (no labeling or blanket term "agencies").

In Germany, the DPA, AFP and Reuters each have a share of about one third of the news stories. In Switzerland, the SDA and the AFP are in the lead, and in Austria, the APA and Reuters.

In fact, the shares of the global agencies AFP, AP and Reuters are likely to be even higher, as the Swiss SDA and the Austrian APA obtain their international reports mainly from the global agencies and the German DPA cooperates closely with the American AP.

It should also be noted that, for historical reasons, the global agencies are represented differently in different regions of the world. For events in Asia, Ukraine or Africa, the share of each agency will therefore be different than from events in the Middle East.

Figure 3: Share of news agencies, total (n=277) and per country

In the next step, central statements were used to rate the orientation of editorial opinions (28), guest comments (10) and interview partners (7) (a total of 45 articles). As Figure 4 shows, 82% of the contributions were generally US/NATO friendly, 16% neutral or balanced, and 2% predominantly US/NATO critical.

The only predominantly US/NATO-critical contribution was an op-ed in the Austrian Standard on October 2, 2015, titled: "The strategy of regime change has failed. A distinction between ‚good' and ‚bad' terrorist groups in Syria makes the Western policy untrustworthy."

Figure 4: Orientation of editorial opinions, guest comments, and interviewees (total; n=45).

The following Figure 5 shows the orientation of the contributions, guest comments and interviewees, in turn broken down by individual newspapers. As can be seen, Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, NZZ, Zürcher Tagesanzeiger and the Austrian newspaper Kurier presented exclusively US/NATO-friendly opinion and guest contributions; this goes for FAZ too, with the exception of one neutral/balanced contribution. The Standard brought four US/NATO friendly, three balanced/neutral, as well as the already mentioned US/NATO critical opinion contributions.

Presse was the only one of the examined newspapers to predominantly publish neutral/balanced opinions and guest contributions. The Basler Zeitung published one US/NATO-friendly and one balanced contribution. Shortly after the observation period (October 16, 2015), Basler Zeitung also published an interview with the President of the Russian Parliament. This would of course have been counted as a contribution critical of the US/NATO.

Figure 5: Basic orientation of opinion pieces and interviewees per newspaper

In a further analysis, a full-text keyword search for "propaganda" (and word combinations thereof) was used to investigate in which cases the newspapers themselves identified propaganda in one of the two geopolitical conflict sides, USA/NATO or Russia (the participant "IS/ISIS" was not considered). In total, twenty such cases were identified. Figure 6 shows the result: in 85% of the cases, propaganda was identified on the Russian side of the conflict, in 15% the identification was neutral or unstated, and in 0% of the cases propaganda was identified on the USA/NATO side of the conflict.

It should be noted that about half of the cases (nine) were in the Swiss NZZ , which spoke of Russian propaganda quite frequently ("Kremlin propaganda", "Moscow propaganda machine", "propaganda stories", "Russian propaganda apparatus" etc.), followed by German FAZ (three), Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung (two each) and the Austrian newspaper Kurier (one). The other newspapers did not mention propaganda, or only in a neutral context (or in the context of IS).

Figure 6: Attribution of propaganda to conflict parties (total; n=20).

Conclusion

In this case study, the geopolitical coverage in nine leading daily newspapers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland was examined for diversity and journalistic performance using the example of the Syrian war.

The results confirm the high dependence on the global news agencies (63 to 90%, excluding commentaries and interviews) and the lack of own investigative research, as well as the rather biased commenting on events in favor of the US/NATO side (82% positive; 2% negative), whose stories were not checked by the newspapers for any propaganda.

*

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English translation provided by Terje Maloy.

[May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena. ..."
"... Jewish writer David Cole recently questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism. He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters ..."
"... In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations. ..."
May 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

Despite the Jewish domination of the American Left in the post-War period, Mendes notes that "most Americans do not appear to have adhered to the same anti-Semitic assumptions about Jewish links with communism that dominated public opinion in parts of Europe." [80] Ibid ., 229.
(Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (Melbourne, Victoria; Palgrave MacMillian, 2014), 250.) As evidence of this, Mendes cites the decidedly muted public response to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Despite the recognizably Jewish identity of the couple (given their name) and of all of their co-conspirators (David Greenglass, Ruth Greenglass, and Morton Sobell), and the fact the Rosenberg spy network consisted almost exclusively of Jews from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the case "provoked remarkably little overt anti-Semitism." [81] Ibid ., 230.
Nor, he observes, did the "significant number of Jews -- including teachers and Hollywood actors -- who were victims of anti-communist purges" and the prominence of Jews amongst those subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, lead to a significant reaction. All public opinion polls conducted during this period showed a consistent decline in "anti-Semitism," and only a small minority of those surveyed (about 5 percent) identified Jews with communism. [82] Ibid .

The lack of any real backlash to Jewish prominence in the New Left is ascribed to various factors: that many members of the public were not aware of the Jewish background of many of the radical leaders; that these Jewish radicals were ostensibly "not campaigning about any specifically Jewish issues that would have focused attention on Jews per se;" and to the "general decline in anti-Semitism since World War Two." [83] Ibid ., 257. This latter shift in public opinion (unsurprisingly) coincided with the Jewish seizure of the commanding heights of American (and Western) culture in the 1960s, and the growing emergence of the culture of "the Holocaust." The combined effect was to banish overt critical discussion of Jewish power to the margins of public discourse. While Americans rejected communist activities during the Cold War, unlike in Europe, they did not widely equate communism with Jews (at least publicly), or view Jewish participation in leftist politics with particular concern.

Neoconservatism

Neoconservative leaders were among those who feared that the Jewish prominence in the New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s would fuel a conservative backlash against Jewish radicalism. For example, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, attacked leading Jewish leftists as alleged self-hating Jews and completely unrepresentative of the Jewish community. [84] Ibid ., 22.

Mendes ascribes the defection of many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism in the 1970s to a growing misalignment between modern Leftist politics and Jewish ethnic interests: the key factor being "the creation of the State of Israel which transformed Jewish dependence from international to national forces." [85] Ibid ., viii.
With the advent of the state of Israel, Jewish interests were no longer exclusively represented by the universalistic agendas of the Left. According to Mendes: "Most Jews have lost their faith in universalistic causes because they do not perceive the Left as supportive of Jewish interests, and have turned instead to nationalist solutions." [86] Ibid ., 235.

The creation of a Jewish national entity featuring (thanks to US taxpayers) a strong and powerful army meant that Jews all over the world could look to the Zionist state to safeguard their interests, rather than depending on internationalist movements and ideologies (i.e. communism and the Soviet Union) which had often proven to be unreliable allies. Even many left-wing Jews, who might have been anti-Zionist prior to World War Two, shifted their position after the birth of Israel. For example, the long-time Austrian Jewish leftist Jean Amery commented in 1976:

There is a very deep tie and existential bond between every Jew and the State of Israel Jews feel bound to the fortunes and misfortunes of Israel, whether they are religious Jews or not, whether they adhere to Zionism or reject it, whether they are newly arrived in their host countries or deeply rooted there The Jewish State has taught all the Jews of the world to walk with their head high once more Israel is the virtual shelter for all of the insulted and injured Jews of the earth. [87] Ibid ., 236-37

The perceived anti-Zionism of the New Left from the 1967 onwards served to alienate many Jews and confirm their commitment to nationalist, rather than internationalist solutions. An additional factor was the 1967 Six Day War in the Middle East, which provoked fears of "another Holocaust," and galvanized even non-Zionist Jews in support of Israel. There were rallies in support of Israel throughout the Western world accompanied by large donations. American Jews held massive fundraising campaigns and reportedly raised 180 million dollars. Numerous volunteers travelled to Israel to support the Jewish State. In Australia, more than 20 per cent of a total Jewish population of 34,000 in Melbourne -- attended a public rally to express their support for Israel, and 2500 attended a youth rally. 750 young Jews volunteered to go to Israel. According to Taft,

there was a widespread, almost universal, absorption in the Middle East Crisis of June among the Jews of Melbourne. This absorption took the form of extreme concern about the safety of Israel, emotional upsets, obsessive seeking of news, constant discussion of events and taking spontaneous actions to support Israel's cause. [88] Ibid ., 238.

The rise of left-wing anti-Zionism after the Six Day War furthered alienated sections of Western Jewry from the social democratic Left. Another factor that pushed American Jews in a neoconservative direction, identified by Mendes, was the decline in Black–Jewish relations. The emergence of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s led to the removal of Jews from the leadership of organizations like the NAACP. Black hostility was viewed by some Jews as evidence of the failure of the strategy of courting non-White groups to advance Jewish interests. This ostensible failure prompted many Jews to concentrate on a narrower ethnic self-interest in the future. [89] Ibid ., 243.

This, in turn, contributed to the creation of "pragmatic alliances" with conservative political parties such as the Republicans and evangelical groups such as Christians United for Israel which "have been consistent supporters of Israel in the USA." An associated factor was that pro-Israel perspectives within Western countries increasingly emanated from mainstream conservatives, rather than from the moderate or radical Left. This occurred despite "many in these groups hold socially conservative views on issues such as abortion, homosexuality, the environment, multiculturalism, state support for the poor and disadvantaged, and refugees, which are anathema to many Jews." [90] Ibid ., 287.

Mendes makes the point that "These alliances were based solely on the latter's position of support for Israel, irrespective of their conservative views on social issues such as abortion, homosexuality and the welfare state, which were often sharply at odds with the more liberal opinions of most Jews." [91] Ibid ., 239.

Despite the defection on many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism, the great majority of American Jews still see their ethnic interests as basically aligning with the Democratic Party. Their willingness to prioritize their ethnic interests over their personal economic interests is reflected in the fact that "high numbers of affluent Jews compared to others of the same socioeconomic status still vote for moderate left parties that do not seem to favor their economic interests." Today, the structural factors which historically drew many Jews to the Left no longer exist. Most Jews sit comfortably in middle- or even higher-income categories. This "middle-classing" of Jews throughout the West has meant that the "Jewish proletariat that motivated Jewish identification with left-wing beliefs no longer exists." [92] Ibid ., 239. Consequently, "the specific link between Jewish experience of class oppression and adherence to left-wing ideology has ended." [93] Ibid ., 241.

Most Western Jews still support parties on the Left

Despite the widespread break with the radical Left over support for Israel, Jews nevertheless remain a “massively significant presence” in the Left in terms of their numbers and fundraising, their organizational capacity, and their impact on popular culture.[94]Ibid., 287. It was estimated that about a quarter of the world’s leading Marxist and radical intellectuals in the 1980s were still Jews, including Ernest Mandel, Nathan Weinstock, Maxime Rodinson, Noam Chomsky, Marcel Liebman, Ralph Miliband, and the founder of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida. Despite continuing to comprise much of the intellectual and financial backbone of the Left, today’s Jews, “an influential and sometimes powerful group, with substantial access to politics, academia and the media,” no longer must “rely on the Left to defend their interests and wellbeing.”[95]Ibid., 286.

The primary reason most Western Jews still vote overwhelmingly for parties on the left is the perceived threat posed by the “social conservatism” of parties further to the right of the political spectrum in nations whose majorities are European-derived and nominally at least Christian:

With the possible exception of ultra-orthodox groups, Jews seem to prefer social liberal positions on issues such as religious pluralism, abortion, feminism, illicit drugs, same-sex marriage, the science of climate change and euthanasia. Another significant factor is the long history of Christian anti-Semitism has led Jews to remain suspicious of any attempts by Christian religious groups to undermine the separation of church and state. This fear of organized religion [and of the White people who practice it] seems to explain the continued strong support of American Jews for the Democratic Party in presidential elections. A further complicating factor is the growing universalization of Jewish teachings and values, including the lessons of the Holocaust, in support of social liberal perspectives. … For example, Berman (2006) presents evidence that the younger Jewish generation in Australia have been influenced by the experience of the Holocaust into taking a strong stand against any forms of racial or religious discrimination. Many are active in campaigns for indigenous rights, and to support refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, and Middle Eastern countries seeking asylum in Australia.[96]Ibid., 288-89.

This advocacy is, of course, entirely hypocritical and cynical. While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena.

The ideological preoccupations of organized Jewry today are reflected in comments by Boston Globe writer, S.I. Rosenbaum, who insisted the main lesson of “the Holocaust” is “that white supremacy could turn on us at any moment,” and the strategy of appealing to the White majority “has never worked for us. It didn’t protect us in Spain, or England, or France, or Germany. There’s no reason to think it will work now.” The central question of Jewish political engagement in Western societies, she insists, is “how we survive as a minority population,” where the one great advantage American Jewry enjoys is that “unlike other places where ethno-nationalism has flourished, the U.S. is fast approaching a plurality of minorities.” Presiding over a coalition of non-Whites groups to actively oppose White interests is the Jewish ethno-political imperative: “If Jews are going to survive in the future, we will have to stand with people of color for our mutual benefit.”

Jewish writer David Cole recently questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism. He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters:

For decades, leftist Jews have been flooding the West with Third World immigrants, “Hey here’s a plan—lets dump a hundred thousand Somalis in the whitest parts of the U.S. That’ll save us from Fargo Hitler!” Inundating the West with non-White immigrants is seen by Jews as an insurance policy against “white supremacy.” The idea is that these immigrants will act as a wedge, diluting “white power” while remaining small enough to be manageable.

Jews have done this everywhere—playing two groups against each other as a way of assuring Jewish security. Let’s play Hamas against the Palestinian authority. Let’s play ISIS against Assad. … But today we live in a world in which even the lowliest bark-eater in the Kalahari can have internet access. It’s not as easy to fool entire groups anymore (individuals, sure, but not an entire race, ethnicity or faction). …

And now we Jews, so worried that Minnesota might become the Frozen Fourth Reich if left in the hands of evil whites, have created for ourselves a good old-fashioned golem in Ilhan Omar (and a bunch of the other Third World freshman congressthingies). Yeah, Omar hates whites. Yeah, she thinks white supremacy lurks behind every glass of milk and “OK” finger sign. But she hates Jews a hell of a lot more…

In a perfect world, the Rabbinical Rain Men would finally get the fuck over the Holocaust and end their war of hostility against the West. They’d see that whites are no longer the enemy, but indeed the opposite. They’d see that importing foreign mud to mold golem in traditionally white regions of the U.S is bad strategy.

Here Cole vividly restates Kevin MacDonald’s point in Culture of Critique that: “Although multiculturalist ideology was invented by Jewish intellectuals to rationalize the continuation of separatism and minority-group ethnocentrism in a modern Western state, several of the recent instantiations of multiculturalism may eventually produce a monster with negative consequences for Judaism.”[97]Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements, (Westport, CT: Praeger, Revised Paperback edition, 2001), 313. The creation of this “monster” is ostensibly regarded by Jewish leaders and activists as a risk worth taking to demographically, politically and culturally weaken threatening White populations.

In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations.

Conclusion

While Jews and the Left offers a useful catalogue of Jewish involvement in radical political movements throughout the world over the last two centuries, it recycles many of the same apologetic tropes that permeate the work of other Jewish historians and intellectuals. Mendes mischaracterizes the Jewish identity and affiliations of important Jewish communist leaders (like Lazar Kaganovich), and offers no examination of their often-murderous actions. He provides feeble apologies for the Jewish practices that engendered hostility among the native peasantry in the Pale of Settlement. The inherent weakness of his position necessitates specious argumentation and desperate resort to that evergreen of Jewish apologetic historiography: the innate irrationality and malevolence of the European mind and character. This is the invariable fallback position in any quest to exculpate Jews from responsibility for the crimes of communism in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe. Though less inclined than Brossat and Klingberg in Revolutionary Yiddishland to glorify Jewish communist militants, Mendes is equally keen to evade, whitewash and excuse disproportionate Jewish involvement in some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century.

[May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

Highly recommended!
Trump provided to be another Obama -- master of "bait and switch". His promise to disengage from foreign wars remains an unfulfilled promise. Due to thefact that he is owned by pro-Israel lobby he broung into his administrations such rabid neocons as chickenhawk Bolton and smug ruthless careerist masquerading as far-right zealot as Pompeo (and before them Haley). His promises to raise the standard of living of middles class (which is impossible without cutting the military budget) remains fake. He is a fake. The second fake after obama -- Republican Obama.
Notable quotes:
"... While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April 2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come. ..."
"... According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid. ..."
"... In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$ 45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to 4 percent in five years. ..."
Apr 10, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April 2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come.

According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid.

The Trump budget finds vast billions for militarization, while it cuts "smaller" poverty alleviation projects and other programs, claiming the goal is to save money.

Rutherford Institute's founder and director John W. WhiteHead writes in his institute's website that the American nation is being preyed upon by a military industrial complex that is propped up by war profiteers, corrupt politicians and foreign governments. He remarks:

"Don't be fooled into thinking that your hard-earned tax dollars are being used for national security and urgent military needs".

He writes "you know what happens to tax dollars that are left over at the end of the government's fiscal year? Government agencies – including the Department of Defense – go on a 'use it or lose it' spending spree so they can justify asking for money in the next fiscal year".

"We are talking about $97 billion worth of wasteful spending"

He maintains that the nation's educational system is pathetic, the infrastructure is antiquated and growing more outdated by the day and the health system is overpriced and inaccessible to those who need it most.

The tax cuts on super-rich, outflow of huge sums in interest payment for debt and more spending are plunging the US economy into a new crisis, according to many authors. The US economy faces a deficit which means the spending especially on military and defence is far exceeding the tax revenues.

In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$ 45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to 4 percent in five years.

According to a study regarding world powers' overseas military bases

In other words, the US possesses up to 95 per cent of the world's military bases . The Department of Defense says that its locations include 164 countries. Put another way, it has a military presence of some sort in approximately 84 percent of the nations on this planet.

The US Military Bases Abroad Are Disrupting the World Order

The annual cost of deploying US military personnel overseas, as well as maintaining and running those foreign bases, tops out at an estimated US$ 150 billion annually. The US bases abroad cost upwards of US$ 50 billion only for building and maintenance, which is enough to address pressing needs at home in education, health care, housing and infrastructure.

In 2017 and 2018, the world's largest military spenders were the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India. The UK took over France as sixth largest spender in 2018 while Japan and Germany stood at eighth and ninth positions.

In early 2018, Pentagon released a report saying that Afghan war costs US$ 45 billion to taxpayers in the preceding year. Of this amount, US$ 5 billion has been spent on Afghan forces, US$ 13 billion towards US forces in Afghanistan and the rest on economic aid.

But these costs are far lower than the time when the US military was highly engaged in Afghanistan. With nearly 100,000 soldiers in the country from 2010 to 2012, the price for American taxpayers surpassed US$ 100 billion each year. For now, there are around 16,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into Afghanistan, the US admits it failed in war against militants in Afghanistan.

In November 2018, another study published by CNBC reported that America has spent US$ 5.9 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001 including in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The study also reveals that more than 500,000 people have been killed in the wars and nearly 10 million people have been displaced due to violence.

The US has reportedly spent US$ 1.07 trillion in Afghanistan since 2001 which include Overseas Contingency Operations funds dedicated to Afghanistan, costs on the base budget of the Department of Defense and increase to the budget of the Department of Veteran Affairs.

In Afghanistan, the US costs of war in 2001 commenced with US$ 37.3 billion that soared to US$ 57.3 billion in 2007 and US$ 100 billion in 2009. The year with record spending was 2010 with US$ 112.7 billion that slightly plummeted to US$ 110.4 billion in 2011 but took downwards trend in the later years.

Due to skyrocketing military costs on the US government, Trump Administration recently decided to pack up some of its military bases in Afghanistan and Middle East to diminish expenditures, though it doesn't mean the wars would end at all.

According to Afghanistan Analysts Network, the US Congress has appropriated more than US$ 126 billion in aid for Afghanistan since financial year 2002, with almost 63 percent for security and 28 percent for development and the remainder for civilian operations, mostly budgetary assistance and humanitarian aid. Alongside the US aid, many world countries have pumped millions of dollars in development aids, but what is evident for insiders and outsiders is that a trickle of those funds has actually gone into Afghanistan's reconstruction.

With eighteen years into Afghan war, the security is deteriorating; Afghan air force is ill-equipped; poppy cultivation is on the rise; roads and highways are dilapidated or unconstructed; no mediocre hospital and health care has been established; weekly conflict causalities hit 150-250; electricity is still imported from Central Asian countries; economy remains dependent upon imports; unemployment rate is at its peak; more than three quarters of population live under poverty line and many, many more miseries persist or aggravate.

The US boasts of being the largest multi-billion dollar donor for Afghanistan, but if one takes a deeper look at the living standards of majority and the overall conditions, it can be immediately grasped that less than half of that exaggerated fund has been consumed. The US-made government of Afghanistan has deliberately been left behind to rank as the first corrupt country in the world. Thanks to the same unaddressed pervasive corruption, a hefty amount of that fund has been either directed back to the US hands or embezzled by senior Afghan officials.

Afghanistan's new Living Conditions Survey shows that poverty is more widespread today than it was immediately after the fall of Taliban regime, or in other words, in the early days of US invasion.

Next month, Kabul will host a Consultative Loya Jirga attended by around 2,000 representatives from Afghanistan which will cost the Afghan Ministry of Finance AF 369 million (equivalent to five million US$). Even as the past has proved that these events are only symbolic and further complicating the achievement of peace, a country with great majority under poverty line doesn't deserve to organize such costly gatherings.

*

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Masud Wadan is a geopolitical analyst based in Kabul. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Salon.com

The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Masud Wadan , Global Research, 2019

[May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics

Highly recommended!
Images omitted.
Important article that shed some light on the methods of disinformation in foreign events used by neoliberal MSM
Notable quotes:
"... However, there is a simple reason why the global agencies, despite their importance, are virtually unknown to the general public. To quote a Swiss media professor: "Radio and television usually do not name their sources, and only specialists can decipher references in magazines." (Blum 1995, P. 9) The motive for this discretion, however, should be clear: news outlets are not particularly keen to let readers know that they haven't researched most of their contributions themselves. ..."
"... Much of our media does not have own foreign correspondents, so they have no choice but to rely completely on global agencies for foreign news. But what about the big daily newspapers and TV stations that have their own international correspondents? In German-speaking countries, for example, these include newspapers such NZZ, FAZ, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Welt, and public broadcasters. ..."
"... Moreover, in war zones, correspondents rarely venture out. On the Syria war, for example, many journalists "reported" from cities such as Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo or even from Cyprus. In addition, many journalists lack the language skills to understand local people and media. ..."
"... How do correspondents under such circumstances know what the "news" is in their region of the world? The main answer is once again: from global agencies. The Dutch Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk has impressively described how correspondents work and how they depend on the world agencies in his book "People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East" : ..."
"... The central role of news agencies also explains why, in geopolitical conflicts, most media use the same original sources. In the Syrian war, for example, the "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" – a dubious one-man organization based in London – featured prominently. The media rarely inquired directly at this "Observatory", as its operator was in fact difficult to reach, even for journalists. ..."
"... Ulrich Tilgner, a veteran Middle East correspondent for German and Swiss television, warned in 2003, shortly after the Iraq war, of acts of deception by the military and the role played by the media: ..."
"... What is known to the US military, would not be foreign to US intelligence services. In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts: ..."
"... "In all press systems, the news media are instruments of those who exercise political and economic power. Newspapers, periodicals, radio and television stations do not act independently, although they have the possibility of independent exercise of power." (Altschull 1984/1995, p. 298) ..."
Jun 01, 2016 | www.globalresearch.ca

By Swiss Propaganda Research Global Research, May 14, 2019 Swiss Propaganda Research Region: Europe , USA Theme: Media Disinformation

This study was originally published in 2016.

Introduction: "Something strange"

"How does the newspaper know what it knows?" The answer to this question is likely to surprise some newspaper readers: "The main source of information is stories from news agencies. The almost anonymously operating news agencies are in a way the key to world events. So what are the names of these agencies, how do they work and who finances them? To judge how well one is informed about events in East and West, one should know the answers to these questions." (Höhne 1977, p. 11)

A Swiss media researcher points out:

"The news agencies are the most important suppliers of material to mass media. No daily media outlet can manage without them. () So the news agencies influence our image of the world; above all, we get to know what they have selected." (Blum 1995, p. 9)

In view of their essential importance, it is all the more astonishing that these agencies are hardly known to the public:

"A large part of society is unaware that news agencies exist at all In fact, they play an enormously important role in the media market. But despite this great importance, little attention has been paid to them in the past." (Schulten-Jaspers 2013, p. 13)

Even the head of a news agency noted:

"There is something strange about news agencies. They are little known to the public. Unlike a newspaper, their activity is not so much in the spotlight, yet they can always be found at the source of the story." (Segbers 2007, p. 9)

"The Invisible Nerve Center of the Media System"

So what are the names of these agencies that are "always at the source of the story"? There are now only three global agencies left:

  1. The American Associated Press ( AP ) with over 4000 employees worldwide. The AP belongs to US media companies and has its main editorial office in New York. AP news is used by around 12,000 international media outlets, reaching more than half of the world's population every day.
  2. The quasi-governmental French Agence France-Presse ( AFP ) based in Paris and with around 4000 employees. The AFP sends over 3000 stories and photos every day to media all over the world.
  3. The British agency Reuters in London, which is privately owned and employs just over 3000 people. Reuters was acquired in 2008 by Canadian media entrepreneur Thomson – one of the 25 richest people in the world – and merged into Thomson Reuters , headquartered in New York.

In addition, many countries run their own news agencies. However, when it comes to international news, these usually rely on the three global agencies and simply copy and translate their reports.

The three global news agencies Reuters, AFP and AP, and the three national agencies of the German-speaking countries of Austria (APA), Germany (DPA) and Switzerland (SDA).

Wolfgang Vyslozil, former managing director of the Austrian APA, described the key role of news agencies with these words:

"News agencies are rarely in the public eye. Yet they are one of the most influential and at the same time one of the least known media types. They are key institutions of substantial importance to any media system. They are the invisible nerve center that connects all parts of this system." (Segbers 2007, p.10)

Small abbreviation, great effect

However, there is a simple reason why the global agencies, despite their importance, are virtually unknown to the general public. To quote a Swiss media professor: "Radio and television usually do not name their sources, and only specialists can decipher references in magazines." (Blum 1995, P. 9) The motive for this discretion, however, should be clear: news outlets are not particularly keen to let readers know that they haven't researched most of their contributions themselves.

The following figure shows some examples of source tagging in popular German-language newspapers. Next to the agency abbreviations we find the initials of editors who have edited the respective agency report.

News agencies as sources in newspaper articles

Occasionally, newspapers use agency material but do not label it at all. A study in 2011 from the Swiss Research Institute for the Public Sphere and Society at the University of Zurich came to the following conclusions (FOEG 2011):

"Agency contributions are exploited integrally without labeling them, or they are partially rewritten to make them appear as an editorial contribution. In addition, there is a practice of 'spicing up' agency reports with little effort; for example, visualization techniques are used: unpublished agency reports are enriched with images and graphics and presented as comprehensive reports."

The agencies play a prominent role not only in the press, but also in private and public broadcasting. This is confirmed by Volker Braeutigam, who worked for the German state broadcaster ARD for ten years and views the dominance of these agencies critically:

"One fundamental problem is that the newsroom at ARD sources its information mainly from three sources: the news agencies DPA/AP, Reuters and AFP: one German/American, one British and one French. () The editor working on a news topic only needs to select a few text passages on the screen that he considers essential, rearrange them and glue them together with a few flourishes."

Swiss Radio and Television (SRF), too, largely bases itself on reports from these agencies. Asked by viewers why a peace march in Ukraine was not reported, the editors said : "To date, we have not received a single report of this march from the independent agencies Reuters, AP and AFP."

In fact, not only the text, but also the images, sound and video recordings that we encounter in our media every day, are mostly from the very same agencies. What the uninitiated audience might think of as contributions from their local newspaper or TV station, are actually copied reports from New York, London and Paris.

Some media have even gone a step further and have, for lack of resources, outsourced their entire foreign editorial office to an agency. Moreover, it is well known that many news portals on the internet mostly publish agency reports (see e.g., Paterson 2007, Johnston 2011, MacGregor 2013).

In the end, this dependency on the global agencies creates a striking similarity in international reporting: from Vienna to Washington, our media often report the same topics, using many of the same phrases – a phenomenon that would otherwise rather be associated with "controlled media" in authoritarian states.

The following graphic shows some examples from German and international publications. As you can see, despite the claimed objectivity, a slight (geo-)political bias sometimes creeps in.

"Putin threatens", "Iran provokes", "NATO concerned", "Assad stronghold": Similarities in content and wording due to reports by global news agencies.

The role of correspondents

Much of our media does not have own foreign correspondents, so they have no choice but to rely completely on global agencies for foreign news. But what about the big daily newspapers and TV stations that have their own international correspondents? In German-speaking countries, for example, these include newspapers such NZZ, FAZ, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Welt, and public broadcasters.

First of all, the size ratios should be kept in mind: while the global agencies have several thousand employees worldwide, even the Swiss newspaper NZZ, known for its international reporting, maintains only 35 foreign correspondents (including their business correspondents). In huge countries such as China or India, only one correspondent is stationed; all of South America is covered by only two journalists, while in even larger Africa no-one is on the ground permanently.

Moreover, in war zones, correspondents rarely venture out. On the Syria war, for example, many journalists "reported" from cities such as Istanbul, Beirut, Cairo or even from Cyprus. In addition, many journalists lack the language skills to understand local people and media.

How do correspondents under such circumstances know what the "news" is in their region of the world? The main answer is once again: from global agencies. The Dutch Middle East correspondent Joris Luyendijk has impressively described how correspondents work and how they depend on the world agencies in his book "People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East" :

"I'd imagined correspondents to be historians-of-the-moment. When something important happened, they'd go after it, find out what was going on, and report on it. But I didn't go off to find out what was going on; that had been done long before. I went along to present an on-the-spot report. ()

The editors in the Netherlands called when something happened, they faxed or emailed the press releases, and I'd retell them in my own words on the radio, or rework them into an article for the newspaper. This was the reason my editors found it more important that I could be reached in the place itself than that I knew what was going on. The news agencies provided enough information for you to be able to write or talk you way through any crisis or summit meeting.

That's why you often come across the same images and stories if you leaf through a few different newspapers or click the news channels.

Our men and women in London, Paris, Berlin and Washington bureaus – all thought that wrong topics were dominating the news and that we were following the standards of the news agencies too slavishly. ()

The common idea about correspondents is that they 'have the story', () but the reality is that the news is a conveyor belt in a bread factory. The correspondents stand at the end of the conveyor belt, pretending we've baked that white loaf ourselves, while in fact all we've done is put it in its wrapping. ()

Afterwards, a friend asked me how I'd managed to answer all the questions during those cross-talks, every hour and without hesitation. When I told him that, like on the TV-news, you knew all the questions in advance, his e-mailed response came packed with expletives. My friend had relalized that, for decades, what he'd been watching and listening to on the news was pure theatre." (Luyendjik 2009, p. 20-22, 76, 189)

In other words, the typical correspondent is in general not able to do independent research, but rather deals with and reinforces those topics that are already prescribed by the news agencies – the notorious "mainstream effect".

In addition, for cost-saving reasons many media outlets nowadays have to share their few foreign correspondents, and within individual media groups, foreign reports are often used by several publications – none of which contributes to diversity in reporting.

"What the agency does not report, does not take place"

The central role of news agencies also explains why, in geopolitical conflicts, most media use the same original sources. In the Syrian war, for example, the "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" – a dubious one-man organization based in London – featured prominently. The media rarely inquired directly at this "Observatory", as its operator was in fact difficult to reach, even for journalists.

Rather, the "Observatory" delivered its stories to global agencies, which then forwarded them to thousands of media outlets, which in turn "informed" hundreds of millions of readers and viewers worldwide. The reason why the agencies, of all places, referred to this strange "Observatory" in their reporting – and who really financed it – is a question that was rarely asked.

The former chief editor of the German news agency DPA, Manfred Steffens, therefore states in his book "The Business of News":

"A news story does not become more correct simply because one is able to provide a source for it. It is indeed rather questionable to trust a news story more just because a source is cited. () Behind the protective shield such a 'source' means for a news story, some people are quite inclined to spread rather adventurous things, even if they themselves have legitimate doubts about their correctness; the responsibility, at least morally, can always be attributed to the cited source." (Steffens 1969, p. 106)

Dependence on global agencies is also a major reason why media coverage of geopolitical conflicts is often superficial and erratic, while historic relationships and background are fragmented or altogether absent. As put by Steffens:

"News agencies receive their impulses almost exclusively from current events and are therefore by their very nature ahistoric. They are reluctant to add any more context than is strictly required." (Steffens 1969, p. 32)

Finally, the dominance of global agencies explains why certain geopolitical issues and events – which often do not fit very well into the US/NATO narrative or are too "unimportant" – are not mentioned in our media at all: if the agencies do not report on something, then most Western media will not be aware of it. As pointed out on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the German DPA: "What the agency does not report, does not take place." (Wilke 2000, p. 1)

America's "Righteous" Russia-gate Censorship. "Russia Bashing All the Time"

"Adding questionable stories"

While some topics do not appear at all in our media, other topics are very prominent – even though they shouldn't actually be: "Often the mass media do not report on reality, but on a constructed or staged reality. () Several studies have shown that the mass media are predominantly determined by PR activities and that passive, receptive attitudes outweigh active-researching ones." (Blum 1995, p. 16)

In fact, due to the rather low journalistic performance of our media and their high dependence on a few news agencies, it is easy for interested parties to spread propaganda and disinformation in a supposedly respectable format to a worldwide audience. DPA editor Steffens warned of this danger:

"The critical sense gets more lulled the more respected the news agency or newspaper is. Someone who wants to introduce a questionable story into the world press only needs to try to put his story in a reasonably reputable agency, to be sure that it then appears a little later in the others. Sometimes it happens that a hoax passes from agency to agency and becomes ever more credible." (Steffens 1969, p. 234)

Among the most active actors in "injecting" questionable geopolitical news are the military and defense ministries. For example, in 2009, the head of the American news agency AP, Tom Curley, made public that the Pentagon employs more than 27,000 PR specialists who, with a budget of nearly $ 5 billion a year, are working the media and circulating targeted manipulations. In addition, high-ranking US generals had threatened that they would "ruin" the AP and him if the journalists reported too critically on the US military.

Despite – or because of? – such threats our media regularly publish dubious stories sourced to some unnamed "informants" from "US defense circles".

Ulrich Tilgner, a veteran Middle East correspondent for German and Swiss television, warned in 2003, shortly after the Iraq war, of acts of deception by the military and the role played by the media:

"With the help of the media, the military determine the public perception and use it for their plans. They manage to stir expectations and spread scenarios and deceptions. In this new kind of war, the PR strategists of the US administration fulfill a similar function as the bomber pilots. The special departments for public relations in the Pentagon and in the secret services have become combatants in the information war. () The US military specifically uses the lack of transparency in media coverage for their deception maneuvers. The way they spread information, which is then picked up and distributed by newspapers and broadcasters, makes it impossible for readers, listeners or viewers to trace the original source. Thus, the audience will fail to recognize the actual intention of the military." (Tilgner 2003, p. 132)

What is known to the US military, would not be foreign to US intelligence services. In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts:

Former CIA officer and whistleblower John Stockwell said of his work in the Angolan war,

"The basic theme was to make it look like an [enemy] aggression in Angola. So any kind of story that you could write and get into the media anywhere in the world, that pushed that line, we did. One third of my staff in this task force were covert action, were propagandists, whose professional career job was to make up stories and finding ways of getting them into the press. () The editors in most Western newspapers are not too skeptical of messages that conform to general views and prejudices. () So we came up with another story, and it was kept going for weeks. () [But] it was all fiction."

Fred Bridgland looked back on his work as a war correspondent for the Reuters agency: "We based our reports on official communications. It was not until years later that I learned a little CIA disinformation expert had sat in the US embassy, in Lusaka and composed that communiqué, and it bore no relation at all to truth. () Basically, and to put it very crudely, you can publish any old crap and it will get newspaper room."

And former CIA analyst David MacMichael described his work in the Contra War in Nicaragua with these words:

"They said our intelligence of Nicaragua was so good that we could even register when someone flushed a toilet. But I had the feeling that the stories we were giving to the press came straight out of the toilet." (Hird 1985)

Of course, the intelligence services also have a large number of direct contacts in our media, which can be "leaked" information to if necessary. But without the central role of the global news agencies, the worldwide synchronization of propaganda and disinformation would never be so efficient.

Through this "propaganda multiplier", dubious stories from PR experts working for governments, military and intelligence services reach the general public more or less unchecked and unfiltered. The journalists refer to the news agencies and the news agencies refer to their sources. Although they often attempt to point out uncertainties with terms such as "apparent", "alleged" and the like – by then the rumor has long been spread to the world and its effect taken place.

The Propaganda Multiplier: Governments, military and intelligence services using global news agencies to disseminate their messages to a worldwide audience.

As the New York Times reported

In addition to global news agencies, there is another source that is often used by media outlets around the world to report on geopolitical conflicts, namely the major publications in Great Britain and the US.

For example, news outlets like the New York Times or BBC have up to 100 foreign correspondents and other external employees. However, Middle East correspondent Luyendijk points out:

"Dutch news teams, me included, fed on the selection of news made by quality media like CNN, the BBC, and the New York Times . We did that on the assumption that their correspondents understood the Arab world and commanded a view of it – but many of them turned out not to speak Arabic, or at least not enough to be able to have a conversation in it or to follow the local media. Many of the top dogs at CNN, the BBC, the Independent, the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the NYT were more often than not dependent on assistants and translators." (Luyendijk p. 47)

In addition, the sources of these media outlets are often not easy to verify ("military circles", "anonymous government officials", "intelligence officials" and the like) and can therefore also be used for the dissemination of propaganda. In any case, the widespread orientation towards the Anglo-Saxon publications leads to a further convergence in the geopolitical coverage in our media.

The following figure shows some examples of such citation based on the Syria coverage of the largest daily newspaper in Switzerland, Tages-Anzeiger. The articles are all from the first days of October 2015, when Russia for the first time intervened directly in the Syrian war (US/UK sources are highlighted):

Frequent citation of British and US media, exemplified by the Syria war coverage of Swiss daily newspaper Tages-Anzeiger in October 2015.

The desired narrative

But why do journalists in our media not simply try to research and report independently of the global agencies and the Anglo-Saxon media? Middle East correspondent Luyendijk describes his experiences:

"You might suggest that I should have looked for sources I could trust. I did try, but whenever I wanted to write a story without using news agencies, the main Anglo-Saxon media, or talking heads, it fell apart. () Obviously I, as a correspondent, could tell very different stories about one and the same situation. But the media could only present one of them, and often enough, that was exactly the story that confirmed the prevailing image." (Luyendijk p.54ff)

Media researcher Noam Chomsky has described this effect in his essay "What makes the mainstream media mainstream" as follows: "If you leave the official line, if you produce dissenting reports, then you will soon feel this. () There are many ways to get you back in line quickly. If you don't follow the guidelines, you will not keep your job long. This system works pretty well, and it reflects established power structures." (Chomsky 1997)

Nevertheless, some of the leading journalists continue to believe that nobody can tell them what to write. How does this add up? Media researcher Chomsky clarifies the apparent contradiction:

"[T]he point is that they wouldn't be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. () They have been through the socialization system." (Chomsky 1997)

Ultimately, this "socialization process" leads to a journalism that generally no longer independently researches and critically reports on geopolitical conflicts (and some other topics), but seeks to consolidate the desired narrative through appropriate editorials, commentary, and interviewees.

Conclusion: The "First Law of Journalism"

Former AP journalist Herbert Altschull called it the First Law of Journalism:

"In all press systems, the news media are instruments of those who exercise political and economic power. Newspapers, periodicals, radio and television stations do not act independently, although they have the possibility of independent exercise of power." (Altschull 1984/1995, p. 298)

In that sense, it is logical that our traditional media – which are predominantly financed by advertising or the state – represent the geopolitical interests of the transatlantic alliance, given that both the advertising corporations as well as the states themselves are dependent on the US dominated transatlantic economic and security architecture.

In addition, our leading media and their key people are – in the spirit of Chomsky's "socialization" – often themselves part of the networks of the transatlantic elite. Some of the most important institutions in this regard include the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission (see in-depth study of these networks ).

Indeed, most well-known publications basically may be seen as "establishment media". This is because, in the past, the freedom of the press was rather theoretical, given significant entry barriers such as broadcasting licenses, frequency slots, requirements for financing and technical infrastructure, limited sales channels, dependence on advertising, and other restrictions.

It was only due to the Internet that Altschull's First Law has been broken to some extent. Thus, in recent years a high-quality, reader-funded journalism has emerged, often outperforming traditional media in terms of critical reporting. Some of these "alternative" publications already reach a very large audience, showing that the „mass" does not have to be a problem for the quality of a media outlet.

Nevertheless, up to now the traditional media has been able to attract a solid majority of online visitors, too. This, in turn, is closely linked to the hidden role of news agencies, whose up-to-the-minute reports form the backbone of most news portals.

Will "political and economic power", according to Altschull's Law, retain control over the news, or will "uncontrolled" news change the political and economic power structure? The coming years will show.

Case study: Syria war coverage

As part of a case study, the Syria war coverage of nine leading daily newspapers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland were examined for plurality of viewpoints and reliance on news agencies. The following newspapers were selected:

The investigation period was defined as October 1 to 15, 2015, i.e. the first two weeks after Russia's direct intervention in the Syrian conflict. The entire print and online coverage of these newspapers was taken into account. Any Sunday editions were not taken into account, as not all of the newspapers examined have such. In total, 381 newspaper articles met the stated criteria.

In a first step, the articles were classified according to their properties into the following groups:

  1. Agencies : Reports from news agencies (with agency code)
  2. Mixed : Simple reports (with author names) that are based in whole or in part on agency reports
  3. Reports : Editorial background reports and analyzes
  4. Opinions/Comments : Opinions and guest comments
  5. Interviews : interviews with experts, politicians etc.
  6. Investigative : Investigative research that reveals new information or context

The following Figure 1 shows the composition of the articles for the nine newspapers analyzed in total. As can be seen, 55% of articles were news agency reports; 23% editorial reports based on agency material; 9% background reports; 10% opinions and guest comments; 2% interviews; and 0% based on investigative research.

Figure 1: Types of articles (total; n=381)

The pure agency texts – from short notices to the detailed reports – were mostly on the Internet pages of the daily newspapers: on the one hand, the pressure for breaking news is higher than in the printed edition, on the other hand, there are no space restrictions. Most other types of articles were found in both the online and printed editions; some exclusive interviews and background reports were found only in the printed editions. All items were collected only once for the investigation.

The following Figure 2 shows the same classification on a per newspaper basis. During the observation period (two weeks), most newspapers published between 40 and 50 articles on the Syrian conflict (print and online). In the German newspaper Die Welt there were more (58), in the Basler Zeitung and the Austrian Kurier , however, significantly less (29 or 33).

Depending on which newspaper, the share of agency reports is almost 50% (Welt, Süddeutsche, NZZ, Basler Zeitung), just under 60% (FAZ, Tagesanzeiger), and 60 to 70% (Presse, Standard, Kurier). Together with the agency-based reports, the proportion in most newspapers is between approx. 70% and 80%. These proportions are consistent with previous media studies (e.g., Blum 1995, Johnston 2011, MacGregor 2013, Paterson 2007).

In the background reports, the Swiss newspapers were leading (five to six pieces), followed by Welt , Süddeutsche and Standard (four each) and the other newspapers (one to three). The background reports and analyzes were in particular devoted to the situation and development in the Middle East, as well as to the motives and interests of individual actors (for example Russia, Turkey, the Islamic State).

However, most of the commentaries were to be found in the German newspapers (seven comments each), followed by Standard (five), NZZ and Tagesanzeiger (four each). Basler Zeitung did not publish any commentaries during the observation period, but two interviews. Other interviews were conducted by Standard (three) and Kurier and Presse (one each). Investigative research, however, could not be found in any of the newspapers.

In particular, in the case of the three German newspapers, a journalistically problematic blending of opinion pieces and reports was noted. Reports contained strong expressions of opinion even though they were not marked as commentary. The present study was in any case based on the article labeling by the newspaper.

Figure 2: Types of articles per newspaper

The following Figure 3 shows the breakdown of agency stories (by agency abbreviation) for each news agency, in total and per country. The 211 agency reports carried a total of 277 agency codes (a story may consist of material from more than one agency). In total, 24% of agency reports came from the AFP; about 20% each by the DPA, APA and Reuters; 9% of the SDA; 6% of the AP; and 11% were unknown (no labeling or blanket term "agencies").

In Germany, the DPA, AFP and Reuters each have a share of about one third of the news stories. In Switzerland, the SDA and the AFP are in the lead, and in Austria, the APA and Reuters.

In fact, the shares of the global agencies AFP, AP and Reuters are likely to be even higher, as the Swiss SDA and the Austrian APA obtain their international reports mainly from the global agencies and the German DPA cooperates closely with the American AP.

It should also be noted that, for historical reasons, the global agencies are represented differently in different regions of the world. For events in Asia, Ukraine or Africa, the share of each agency will therefore be different than from events in the Middle East.

Figure 3: Share of news agencies, total (n=277) and per country

In the next step, central statements were used to rate the orientation of editorial opinions (28), guest comments (10) and interview partners (7) (a total of 45 articles). As Figure 4 shows, 82% of the contributions were generally US/NATO friendly, 16% neutral or balanced, and 2% predominantly US/NATO critical.

The only predominantly US/NATO-critical contribution was an op-ed in the Austrian Standard on October 2, 2015, titled: "The strategy of regime change has failed. A distinction between ‚good' and ‚bad' terrorist groups in Syria makes the Western policy untrustworthy."

Figure 4: Orientation of editorial opinions, guest comments, and interviewees (total; n=45).

The following Figure 5 shows the orientation of the contributions, guest comments and interviewees, in turn broken down by individual newspapers. As can be seen, Welt, Süddeutsche Zeitung, NZZ, Zürcher Tagesanzeiger and the Austrian newspaper Kurier presented exclusively US/NATO-friendly opinion and guest contributions; this goes for FAZ too, with the exception of one neutral/balanced contribution. The Standard brought four US/NATO friendly, three balanced/neutral, as well as the already mentioned US/NATO critical opinion contributions.

Presse was the only one of the examined newspapers to predominantly publish neutral/balanced opinions and guest contributions. The Basler Zeitung published one US/NATO-friendly and one balanced contribution. Shortly after the observation period (October 16, 2015), Basler Zeitung also published an interview with the President of the Russian Parliament. This would of course have been counted as a contribution critical of the US/NATO.

Figure 5: Basic orientation of opinion pieces and interviewees per newspaper

In a further analysis, a full-text keyword search for "propaganda" (and word combinations thereof) was used to investigate in which cases the newspapers themselves identified propaganda in one of the two geopolitical conflict sides, USA/NATO or Russia (the participant "IS/ISIS" was not considered). In total, twenty such cases were identified. Figure 6 shows the result: in 85% of the cases, propaganda was identified on the Russian side of the conflict, in 15% the identification was neutral or unstated, and in 0% of the cases propaganda was identified on the USA/NATO side of the conflict.

It should be noted that about half of the cases (nine) were in the Swiss NZZ , which spoke of Russian propaganda quite frequently ("Kremlin propaganda", "Moscow propaganda machine", "propaganda stories", "Russian propaganda apparatus" etc.), followed by German FAZ (three), Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung (two each) and the Austrian newspaper Kurier (one). The other newspapers did not mention propaganda, or only in a neutral context (or in the context of IS).

Figure 6: Attribution of propaganda to conflict parties (total; n=20).

Conclusion

In this case study, the geopolitical coverage in nine leading daily newspapers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland was examined for diversity and journalistic performance using the example of the Syrian war.

The results confirm the high dependence on the global news agencies (63 to 90%, excluding commentaries and interviews) and the lack of own investigative research, as well as the rather biased commenting on events in favor of the US/NATO side (82% positive; 2% negative), whose stories were not checked by the newspapers for any propaganda.

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English translation provided by Terje Maloy.

[May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena. ..."
"... Jewish writer David Cole recently questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism. He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters ..."
"... In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations. ..."
May 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

Despite the Jewish domination of the American Left in the post-War period, Mendes notes that "most Americans do not appear to have adhered to the same anti-Semitic assumptions about Jewish links with communism that dominated public opinion in parts of Europe." [80] Ibid ., 229.
(Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (Melbourne, Victoria; Palgrave MacMillian, 2014), 250.) As evidence of this, Mendes cites the decidedly muted public response to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Despite the recognizably Jewish identity of the couple (given their name) and of all of their co-conspirators (David Greenglass, Ruth Greenglass, and Morton Sobell), and the fact the Rosenberg spy network consisted almost exclusively of Jews from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the case "provoked remarkably little overt anti-Semitism." [81] Ibid ., 230.
Nor, he observes, did the "significant number of Jews -- including teachers and Hollywood actors -- who were victims of anti-communist purges" and the prominence of Jews amongst those subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, lead to a significant reaction. All public opinion polls conducted during this period showed a consistent decline in "anti-Semitism," and only a small minority of those surveyed (about 5 percent) identified Jews with communism. [82] Ibid .

The lack of any real backlash to Jewish prominence in the New Left is ascribed to various factors: that many members of the public were not aware of the Jewish background of many of the radical leaders; that these Jewish radicals were ostensibly "not campaigning about any specifically Jewish issues that would have focused attention on Jews per se;" and to the "general decline in anti-Semitism since World War Two." [83] Ibid ., 257. This latter shift in public opinion (unsurprisingly) coincided with the Jewish seizure of the commanding heights of American (and Western) culture in the 1960s, and the growing emergence of the culture of "the Holocaust." The combined effect was to banish overt critical discussion of Jewish power to the margins of public discourse. While Americans rejected communist activities during the Cold War, unlike in Europe, they did not widely equate communism with Jews (at least publicly), or view Jewish participation in leftist politics with particular concern.

Neoconservatism

Neoconservative leaders were among those who feared that the Jewish prominence in the New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s would fuel a conservative backlash against Jewish radicalism. For example, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, attacked leading Jewish leftists as alleged self-hating Jews and completely unrepresentative of the Jewish community. [84] Ibid ., 22.

Mendes ascribes the defection of many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism in the 1970s to a growing misalignment between modern Leftist politics and Jewish ethnic interests: the key factor being "the creation of the State of Israel which transformed Jewish dependence from international to national forces." [85] Ibid ., viii.
With the advent of the state of Israel, Jewish interests were no longer exclusively represented by the universalistic agendas of the Left. According to Mendes: "Most Jews have lost their faith in universalistic causes because they do not perceive the Left as supportive of Jewish interests, and have turned instead to nationalist solutions." [86] Ibid ., 235.

The creation of a Jewish national entity featuring (thanks to US taxpayers) a strong and powerful army meant that Jews all over the world could look to the Zionist state to safeguard their interests, rather than depending on internationalist movements and ideologies (i.e. communism and the Soviet Union) which had often proven to be unreliable allies. Even many left-wing Jews, who might have been anti-Zionist prior to World War Two, shifted their position after the birth of Israel. For example, the long-time Austrian Jewish leftist Jean Amery commented in 1976:

There is a very deep tie and existential bond between every Jew and the State of Israel Jews feel bound to the fortunes and misfortunes of Israel, whether they are religious Jews or not, whether they adhere to Zionism or reject it, whether they are newly arrived in their host countries or deeply rooted there The Jewish State has taught all the Jews of the world to walk with their head high once more Israel is the virtual shelter for all of the insulted and injured Jews of the earth. [87] Ibid ., 236-37

The perceived anti-Zionism of the New Left from the 1967 onwards served to alienate many Jews and confirm their commitment to nationalist, rather than internationalist solutions. An additional factor was the 1967 Six Day War in the Middle East, which provoked fears of "another Holocaust," and galvanized even non-Zionist Jews in support of Israel. There were rallies in support of Israel throughout the Western world accompanied by large donations. American Jews held massive fundraising campaigns and reportedly raised 180 million dollars. Numerous volunteers travelled to Israel to support the Jewish State. In Australia, more than 20 per cent of a total Jewish population of 34,000 in Melbourne -- attended a public rally to express their support for Israel, and 2500 attended a youth rally. 750 young Jews volunteered to go to Israel. According to Taft,

there was a widespread, almost universal, absorption in the Middle East Crisis of June among the Jews of Melbourne. This absorption took the form of extreme concern about the safety of Israel, emotional upsets, obsessive seeking of news, constant discussion of events and taking spontaneous actions to support Israel's cause. [88] Ibid ., 238.

The rise of left-wing anti-Zionism after the Six Day War furthered alienated sections of Western Jewry from the social democratic Left. Another factor that pushed American Jews in a neoconservative direction, identified by Mendes, was the decline in Black–Jewish relations. The emergence of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s led to the removal of Jews from the leadership of organizations like the NAACP. Black hostility was viewed by some Jews as evidence of the failure of the strategy of courting non-White groups to advance Jewish interests. This ostensible failure prompted many Jews to concentrate on a narrower ethnic self-interest in the future. [89] Ibid ., 243.

This, in turn, contributed to the creation of "pragmatic alliances" with conservative political parties such as the Republicans and evangelical groups such as Christians United for Israel which "have been consistent supporters of Israel in the USA." An associated factor was that pro-Israel perspectives within Western countries increasingly emanated from mainstream conservatives, rather than from the moderate or radical Left. This occurred despite "many in these groups hold socially conservative views on issues such as abortion, homosexuality, the environment, multiculturalism, state support for the poor and disadvantaged, and refugees, which are anathema to many Jews." [90] Ibid ., 287.

Mendes makes the point that "These alliances were based solely on the latter's position of support for Israel, irrespective of their conservative views on social issues such as abortion, homosexuality and the welfare state, which were often sharply at odds with the more liberal opinions of most Jews." [91] Ibid ., 239.

Despite the defection on many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism, the great majority of American Jews still see their ethnic interests as basically aligning with the Democratic Party. Their willingness to prioritize their ethnic interests over their personal economic interests is reflected in the fact that "high numbers of affluent Jews compared to others of the same socioeconomic status still vote for moderate left parties that do not seem to favor their economic interests." Today, the structural factors which historically drew many Jews to the Left no longer exist. Most Jews sit comfortably in middle- or even higher-income categories. This "middle-classing" of Jews throughout the West has meant that the "Jewish proletariat that motivated Jewish identification with left-wing beliefs no longer exists." [92] Ibid ., 239. Consequently, "the specific link between Jewish experience of class oppression and adherence to left-wing ideology has ended." [93] Ibid ., 241.

Most Western Jews still support parties on the Left

Despite the widespread break with the radical Left over support for Israel, Jews nevertheless remain a “massively significant presence” in the Left in terms of their numbers and fundraising, their organizational capacity, and their impact on popular culture.[94]Ibid., 287. It was estimated that about a quarter of the world’s leading Marxist and radical intellectuals in the 1980s were still Jews, including Ernest Mandel, Nathan Weinstock, Maxime Rodinson, Noam Chomsky, Marcel Liebman, Ralph Miliband, and the founder of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida. Despite continuing to comprise much of the intellectual and financial backbone of the Left, today’s Jews, “an influential and sometimes powerful group, with substantial access to politics, academia and the media,” no longer must “rely on the Left to defend their interests and wellbeing.”[95]Ibid., 286.

The primary reason most Western Jews still vote overwhelmingly for parties on the left is the perceived threat posed by the “social conservatism” of parties further to the right of the political spectrum in nations whose majorities are European-derived and nominally at least Christian:

With the possible exception of ultra-orthodox groups, Jews seem to prefer social liberal positions on issues such as religious pluralism, abortion, feminism, illicit drugs, same-sex marriage, the science of climate change and euthanasia. Another significant factor is the long history of Christian anti-Semitism has led Jews to remain suspicious of any attempts by Christian religious groups to undermine the separation of church and state. This fear of organized religion [and of the White people who practice it] seems to explain the continued strong support of American Jews for the Democratic Party in presidential elections. A further complicating factor is the growing universalization of Jewish teachings and values, including the lessons of the Holocaust, in support of social liberal perspectives. … For example, Berman (2006) presents evidence that the younger Jewish generation in Australia have been influenced by the experience of the Holocaust into taking a strong stand against any forms of racial or religious discrimination. Many are active in campaigns for indigenous rights, and to support refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, and Middle Eastern countries seeking asylum in Australia.[96]Ibid., 288-89.

This advocacy is, of course, entirely hypocritical and cynical. While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena.

The ideological preoccupations of organized Jewry today are reflected in comments by Boston Globe writer, S.I. Rosenbaum, who insisted the main lesson of “the Holocaust” is “that white supremacy could turn on us at any moment,” and the strategy of appealing to the White majority “has never worked for us. It didn’t protect us in Spain, or England, or France, or Germany. There’s no reason to think it will work now.” The central question of Jewish political engagement in Western societies, she insists, is “how we survive as a minority population,” where the one great advantage American Jewry enjoys is that “unlike other places where ethno-nationalism has flourished, the U.S. is fast approaching a plurality of minorities.” Presiding over a coalition of non-Whites groups to actively oppose White interests is the Jewish ethno-political imperative: “If Jews are going to survive in the future, we will have to stand with people of color for our mutual benefit.”

Jewish writer David Cole recently questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism. He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters:

For decades, leftist Jews have been flooding the West with Third World immigrants, “Hey here’s a plan—lets dump a hundred thousand Somalis in the whitest parts of the U.S. That’ll save us from Fargo Hitler!” Inundating the West with non-White immigrants is seen by Jews as an insurance policy against “white supremacy.” The idea is that these immigrants will act as a wedge, diluting “white power” while remaining small enough to be manageable.

Jews have done this everywhere—playing two groups against each other as a way of assuring Jewish security. Let’s play Hamas against the Palestinian authority. Let’s play ISIS against Assad. … But today we live in a world in which even the lowliest bark-eater in the Kalahari can have internet access. It’s not as easy to fool entire groups anymore (individuals, sure, but not an entire race, ethnicity or faction). …

And now we Jews, so worried that Minnesota might become the Frozen Fourth Reich if left in the hands of evil whites, have created for ourselves a good old-fashioned golem in Ilhan Omar (and a bunch of the other Third World freshman congressthingies). Yeah, Omar hates whites. Yeah, she thinks white supremacy lurks behind every glass of milk and “OK” finger sign. But she hates Jews a hell of a lot more…

In a perfect world, the Rabbinical Rain Men would finally get the fuck over the Holocaust and end their war of hostility against the West. They’d see that whites are no longer the enemy, but indeed the opposite. They’d see that importing foreign mud to mold golem in traditionally white regions of the U.S is bad strategy.

Here Cole vividly restates Kevin MacDonald’s point in Culture of Critique that: “Although multiculturalist ideology was invented by Jewish intellectuals to rationalize the continuation of separatism and minority-group ethnocentrism in a modern Western state, several of the recent instantiations of multiculturalism may eventually produce a monster with negative consequences for Judaism.”[97]Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth‑Century Intellectual and Political Movements, (Westport, CT: Praeger, Revised Paperback edition, 2001), 313. The creation of this “monster” is ostensibly regarded by Jewish leaders and activists as a risk worth taking to demographically, politically and culturally weaken threatening White populations.

In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations.

Conclusion

While Jews and the Left offers a useful catalogue of Jewish involvement in radical political movements throughout the world over the last two centuries, it recycles many of the same apologetic tropes that permeate the work of other Jewish historians and intellectuals. Mendes mischaracterizes the Jewish identity and affiliations of important Jewish communist leaders (like Lazar Kaganovich), and offers no examination of their often-murderous actions. He provides feeble apologies for the Jewish practices that engendered hostility among the native peasantry in the Pale of Settlement. The inherent weakness of his position necessitates specious argumentation and desperate resort to that evergreen of Jewish apologetic historiography: the innate irrationality and malevolence of the European mind and character. This is the invariable fallback position in any quest to exculpate Jews from responsibility for the crimes of communism in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe. Though less inclined than Brossat and Klingberg in Revolutionary Yiddishland to glorify Jewish communist militants, Mendes is equally keen to evade, whitewash and excuse disproportionate Jewish involvement in some of the worst crimes of the twentieth century.

[May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

Highly recommended!
Trump provided to be another Obama -- master of "bait and switch". His promise to disengage from foreign wars remains an unfulfilled promise. Due to thefact that he is owned by pro-Israel lobby he broung into his administrations such rabid neocons as chickenhawk Bolton and smug ruthless careerist masquerading as far-right zealot as Pompeo (and before them Haley). His promises to raise the standard of living of middles class (which is impossible without cutting the military budget) remains fake. He is a fake. The second fake after obama -- Republican Obama.
Notable quotes:
"... While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April 2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come. ..."
"... According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid. ..."
"... In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$ 45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to 4 percent in five years. ..."
Apr 10, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April 2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come.

According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid.

The Trump budget finds vast billions for militarization, while it cuts "smaller" poverty alleviation projects and other programs, claiming the goal is to save money.

Rutherford Institute's founder and director John W. WhiteHead writes in his institute's website that the American nation is being preyed upon by a military industrial complex that is propped up by war profiteers, corrupt politicians and foreign governments. He remarks:

"Don't be fooled into thinking that your hard-earned tax dollars are being used for national security and urgent military needs".

He writes "you know what happens to tax dollars that are left over at the end of the government's fiscal year? Government agencies – including the Department of Defense – go on a 'use it or lose it' spending spree so they can justify asking for money in the next fiscal year".

"We are talking about $97 billion worth of wasteful spending"

He maintains that the nation's educational system is pathetic, the infrastructure is antiquated and growing more outdated by the day and the health system is overpriced and inaccessible to those who need it most.

The tax cuts on super-rich, outflow of huge sums in interest payment for debt and more spending are plunging the US economy into a new crisis, according to many authors. The US economy faces a deficit which means the spending especially on military and defence is far exceeding the tax revenues.

In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$ 45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to 4 percent in five years.

According to a study regarding world powers' overseas military bases

In other words, the US possesses up to 95 per cent of the world's military bases . The Department of Defense says that its locations include 164 countries. Put another way, it has a military presence of some sort in approximately 84 percent of the nations on this planet.

The US Military Bases Abroad Are Disrupting the World Order

The annual cost of deploying US military personnel overseas, as well as maintaining and running those foreign bases, tops out at an estimated US$ 150 billion annually. The US bases abroad cost upwards of US$ 50 billion only for building and maintenance, which is enough to address pressing needs at home in education, health care, housing and infrastructure.

In 2017 and 2018, the world's largest military spenders were the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India. The UK took over France as sixth largest spender in 2018 while Japan and Germany stood at eighth and ninth positions.

In early 2018, Pentagon released a report saying that Afghan war costs US$ 45 billion to taxpayers in the preceding year. Of this amount, US$ 5 billion has been spent on Afghan forces, US$ 13 billion towards US forces in Afghanistan and the rest on economic aid.

But these costs are far lower than the time when the US military was highly engaged in Afghanistan. With nearly 100,000 soldiers in the country from 2010 to 2012, the price for American taxpayers surpassed US$ 100 billion each year. For now, there are around 16,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into Afghanistan, the US admits it failed in war against militants in Afghanistan.

In November 2018, another study published by CNBC reported that America has spent US$ 5.9 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001 including in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The study also reveals that more than 500,000 people have been killed in the wars and nearly 10 million people have been displaced due to violence.

The US has reportedly spent US$ 1.07 trillion in Afghanistan since 2001 which include Overseas Contingency Operations funds dedicated to Afghanistan, costs on the base budget of the Department of Defense and increase to the budget of the Department of Veteran Affairs.

In Afghanistan, the US costs of war in 2001 commenced with US$ 37.3 billion that soared to US$ 57.3 billion in 2007 and US$ 100 billion in 2009. The year with record spending was 2010 with US$ 112.7 billion that slightly plummeted to US$ 110.4 billion in 2011 but took downwards trend in the later years.

Due to skyrocketing military costs on the US government, Trump Administration recently decided to pack up some of its military bases in Afghanistan and Middle East to diminish expenditures, though it doesn't mean the wars would end at all.

According to Afghanistan Analysts Network, the US Congress has appropriated more than US$ 126 billion in aid for Afghanistan since financial year 2002, with almost 63 percent for security and 28 percent for development and the remainder for civilian operations, mostly budgetary assistance and humanitarian aid. Alongside the US aid, many world countries have pumped millions of dollars in development aids, but what is evident for insiders and outsiders is that a trickle of those funds has actually gone into Afghanistan's reconstruction.

With eighteen years into Afghan war, the security is deteriorating; Afghan air force is ill-equipped; poppy cultivation is on the rise; roads and highways are dilapidated or unconstructed; no mediocre hospital and health care has been established; weekly conflict causalities hit 150-250; electricity is still imported from Central Asian countries; economy remains dependent upon imports; unemployment rate is at its peak; more than three quarters of population live under poverty line and many, many more miseries persist or aggravate.

The US boasts of being the largest multi-billion dollar donor for Afghanistan, but if one takes a deeper look at the living standards of majority and the overall conditions, it can be immediately grasped that less than half of that exaggerated fund has been consumed. The US-made government of Afghanistan has deliberately been left behind to rank as the first corrupt country in the world. Thanks to the same unaddressed pervasive corruption, a hefty amount of that fund has been either directed back to the US hands or embezzled by senior Afghan officials.

Afghanistan's new Living Conditions Survey shows that poverty is more widespread today than it was immediately after the fall of Taliban regime, or in other words, in the early days of US invasion.

Next month, Kabul will host a Consultative Loya Jirga attended by around 2,000 representatives from Afghanistan which will cost the Afghan Ministry of Finance AF 369 million (equivalent to five million US$). Even as the past has proved that these events are only symbolic and further complicating the achievement of peace, a country with great majority under poverty line doesn't deserve to organize such costly gatherings.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Masud Wadan is a geopolitical analyst based in Kabul. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Salon.com

The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Masud Wadan , Global Research, 2019

[May 14, 2019] Gabbard Says She'd Drop All Charges Against Assange And Snowden

May 14, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

In the midst of an interesting and wide-ranging discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience , Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said that if elected president she would drop all charges against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

"What would you do about Julian Assange? What would you do about Edward Snowden?" Rogan asked in the latter part of the episode.

"As far as dropping the charges?" Gabbard asked.

"If you're president of the world right now, what do you do?"

"Yeah, dropping the charges," Gabbard replied.

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Rogan noted that Sweden's preliminary investigation of rape allegations has just been re-opened , saying the US government can't stop that, and Gabbard said as president she'd drop the US charges leveled against Assange by the Trump administration.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/fNuZWQgkgc4

"Yeah," Gabbard said when asked to clarify if she was also saying that she'd give Edward Snowden a presidential pardon, adding,

"And I think we've got to address why he did things the way that he did them. And you hear the same thing from Chelsea Manning, how there is not an actual channel for whistleblowers like them to bring forward information that exposes egregious abuses of our constitutional rights and liberties. Period. There was not a channel for that to happen in a real way, and that's why they ended up taking the path that they did, and suffering the consequences."

This came at the end of a lengthy discussion about WikiLeaks and the dangerous legal precedent that the Trump administration is setting for press freedoms by prosecuting Assange, as well as the revelations about NSA surveillance and what can be done to roll back those unchecked surveillance powers.

https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4855

"What happened with [Assange's] arrest and all the stuff that just went down I think poses a great threat to our freedom of the press and to our freedom of speech," Gabbard said.

"We look at what happened under the previous administration, under Obama. You know, they were trying to find ways to go after Assange and WikiLeaks, but ultimately they chose not to seek to extradite him or charge him, because they recognized what a slippery slope that begins when you have a government in a position to levy criminal charges and consequences against someone who's publishing information or saying things that the government doesn't want you to say , and sharing information the government doesn't want you to share. And so the fact that the Trump administration has chosen to ignore that fact, to ignore how important it is that we uphold our freedoms, freedom of the press and freedom of speech, and go after him, it has a very chilling effect on both journalists and publishers. And you can look to those in traditional media and also those in new media, and also every one of us as Americans. It was a kind of a warning call, saying Look what happened to this guy. It could happen to you. It could happen to any one of us."

Gabbard discussed Mike Pompeo's arbitrary designation of WikiLeaks as a hostile non-state intelligence service, the fact that James Clapper lied to Congress about NSA surveillance as Director of National Intelligence yet suffered no consequences and remains a respected TV pundit, and the opaque and unaccountable nature of FISA warrants.

Some other noteworthy parts of Gabbard's JRE appearance for people who don't have time to watch the whole thing, with hyperlinks to the times in the video:

I honestly think the entire American political system would be better off if the phoney debate stage format were completely abandoned and presidential candidates just talked one-on-one with Joe Rogan for two and a half hours instead. Cut through all the vapid posturing and the fake questions about nonsense nobody cares about and get them to go deep with a normal human being who smokes pot and curses and does sports commentary for cage fighting. Rogan asked Gabbard a bunch of questions that real people are interested in, in a format where she was encouraged to relax out of her standard politician's posture and discuss significant ideas sincerely and spontaneously. It was a good discussion with an interesting political figure and I'm glad it's already racked up hundreds of thousands of views.

* * *

Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I've written) in any way they like free of charge. My work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I'm trying to do with this platform, click here .

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[May 14, 2019] Why Everyone in the U.S. Who Counts Wants Julian Assange Dead naked capitalism

Notable quotes:
"... The film also shows war crimes that implicate the entire structure of the U.S. military, as everyone involved was acting under orders, seeking permission to fire, waiting, then getting it before once more blasting away. The publication of this video, plus all the Wikileaks publications that followed, comprise the whole reason everyone in the U.S. who matters, everyone with power, wants Julian Assange dead. They also want him hated. Generating that hate is the process we're watching today. ..."
"... "Everyone" in this case includes every major newspaper that published and received awards for publishing Wikileaks material; all major U.S. televised media outlets; and all "respectable" U.S. politicians -- including, of course, Hillary Clinton, who was rumored (though unverifiably) to have said, "Can't we just drone this guy?" ..."
"... Please watch it. The footage shows not only murder, but bloodlust and conscienceless brutality, so much of it in fact that this became one of the main reasons Chelsea Manning leaked it in the first place. As she said at her court-martial : "The most alarming aspect of the video for me, was the seemingly delight of bloodlust they [the pilots] appeared to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging with, and seemed to not value human life in referring to them as 'dead bastards,' and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers." ..."
May 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. Even though this post covers known territory, it seems worthwhile to encourage those of you who haven't watched the "Collateral Murder" footage to view the full version. It's important not only to keep the public (and that includes people in your personal circle) focused on what Assange's true hanging crime is in the eyes of the officialdom .and it ain't RussiaGate. That serves as a convenient diversion from his real offense. That effort has a secondary benefit of having more people watch the video.

By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at DownWithTyranny!

Before and after images of the van that came to pick up the bodies of eleven men shot to death by circling American helicopters in Iraq in 2007. Both children in the van were wounded. "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids to a battle," said one of the pilots. "That's right," replies another. From the video Collateral Murder .

Below is a full video version of Collateral Murder , the 2007 war footage that was leaked in 2010 to Wikileaks by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning. This version was posted to the Wikileaks YouTube channel with subtitles. It will only take about 15 minutes of your life to view it.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HfvFpT-iypw

It's brutal to watch, but I challenge you to do it anyway. It shows not just murder, but a special kind of murder -- murder from the safety of the air, murder by men with heavy machine guns slowly circling their targets in helicopters like hunters with shotguns who walk the edges of a trout pond, shooting at will, waiting, walking, then shooting again, till all the fish are dead.

The film also shows war crimes that implicate the entire structure of the U.S. military, as everyone involved was acting under orders, seeking permission to fire, waiting, then getting it before once more blasting away. The publication of this video, plus all the Wikileaks publications that followed, comprise the whole reason everyone in the U.S. who matters, everyone with power, wants Julian Assange dead. They also want him hated. Generating that hate is the process we're watching today.

"Everyone" in this case includes every major newspaper that published and received awards for publishing Wikileaks material; all major U.S. televised media outlets; and all "respectable" U.S. politicians -- including, of course, Hillary Clinton, who was rumored (though unverifiably) to have said, "Can't we just drone this guy?"

Yes, Julian Assange the person can be a giant douche even to his supporters, as this exchange reported by Intercept writer Micah Lee attests. Nevertheless, it's not for being a douche that the Establishment state wants him dead; that state breeds, harbors and honors douches everywhere in the world . They want him dead for publishing videos like these.

Please watch it. The footage shows not only murder, but bloodlust and conscienceless brutality, so much of it in fact that this became one of the main reasons Chelsea Manning leaked it in the first place. As she said at her court-martial : "The most alarming aspect of the video for me, was the seemingly delight of bloodlust they [the pilots] appeared to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging with, and seemed to not value human life in referring to them as 'dead bastards,' and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers."

The Wikileaks page for the video is here . A transcript is here .

This was done in our name, to "keep us safe." This continues to be done every day that we and our allies are at "war" in the Middle East.

Bodies pile on bodies as this continues. The least we can do, literally the least, is to witness and acknowledge their deaths.

[May 14, 2019] Tulsi Brings Lefty Foreign Policy To Righty Audience -- It Works

Important interview with Tucker (this video contain a large fragment) and an interesting discussions.
Notable quotes:
"... Left or Right, you cannot question Gabbard's patriotism and intelligence and in-depth knowledge on war issues. Great candidate. ..."
"... She is an amazing diplomat - I support her 100% ..."
"... The way she conducts herself is an inspiration. I really like her. ..."
"... Just donated to Tulsi. We need her anti-imperialism on the mainstream debate stage. ..."
"... Tulsi Gabbard is the only one I have seen who isn't an overly hyberbolic shill. She embodies the concept of "speak softly and carry a big stick". ..."
"... Holly shit, I've never seen anyone on Fox News let their guest talk as much this? Especially Tucker being so calm, this makes me feel good. It must be Tulsi's vibe, someone as diplomatic and disciplined as her must be running the White House. ..."
Mar 5, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Evil Loch Ness , 2 months ago

Tulsi seems incredibly sincere, tempered and presidential.

Prakash Man Shrestha , 1 month ago

I am not an American. ... I see a glimmer of light in Tulsi.

Smegead , 2 months ago

A worthy first female president.

Dragonblazzer969 , 2 months ago

Left or Right, you cannot question Gabbard's patriotism and intelligence and in-depth knowledge on war issues. Great candidate.

NOAH WEIKERT , 1 month ago

As republican I would vote for Tulsi Gabbard, so won me over after the Joe Rogan podcast.

PaleGhost69 , 2 months ago (edited)

Sanders/Gabbard 2020 Edit: To those who say Gabbard/Sanders, you forget what the point of the vice president is.

RainFurRent 24/7 , 2 months ago

I didn't think anyone could take my vote from Bernie but I was wrong. Tulsi 2020 for me.

Charles Roberts , 2 months ago

Wow!! The sound of the voice of common sense & truth, for a change. I don't care if she is Democrat or Republican ... this lady is voicing what the majority of people actually think & believe.

Ken Baker , 1 month ago (edited)

A Democrat who makes sense. It's refreshing. Why do they try to keep her out of sight? Be cause she is anti war? Tells you alot about the swamp.

roselassi , 2 months ago

She is an amazing diplomat - I support her 100%

Proper Gander , 2 months ago

It ain't just left, it's common sense

Prateek , 1 month ago

The way she conducts herself is an inspiration. I really like her.

Bpinator , 2 months ago

Just donated to Tulsi. We need her anti-imperialism on the mainstream debate stage.

Kevin Benderman , 2 weeks ago

Tulsi Gabbard is the only one I have seen who isn't an overly hyberbolic shill. She embodies the concept of "speak softly and carry a big stick".

Spiritual Humanist , 2 months ago

Tulsi Gabbard 2020☮️ donate to Tulsi ❤️

ooPROTOTYPE1oo , 2 months ago

Tulsi doesn't really care about Republican or Democratic party. What she cares about are the American people.

Brah , 1 month ago (edited)

Tulsi Gabbard could bring the Democratic Party back to the days of JFK.

Cesar , 1 month ago (edited)

Holly shit, I've never seen anyone on Fox News let their guest talk as much this? Especially Tucker being so calm, this makes me feel good. It must be Tulsi's vibe, someone as diplomatic and disciplined as her must be running the White House.

Kevin Malone , 2 months ago

It just feels so good seeing a politician actually answer questions. Instead of talking but not saying anything of actual substance.

Miss Kimberly , 1 month ago

We need a candidate who can float between both sides, and stick with a Progressive agenda. This is outstanding.

[May 13, 2019] Not Just Ukraine; Biden May Have A Serious China Problem As Schweizer Exposes Hunter s $1bn Deal

Highly recommended!
Neoliberal corruption in full display. As we see forms of nepotism evolve with time...
Notable quotes:
"... Two years of investigations by journalist Peter Schweizer has revealed that Joe Biden may now have a serious China problem. And just like his Ukraine scandal , it involves actions which helped his son Hunter, who was making hand over fist in both countries. ..."
"... Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now Secret Empires discovered that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which expanded to $1.5 billion, according to an article by Schweizer's in the New York Post . ..."
"... Hunter Biden and his partners created several LLCs involved in multibillion-dollar private equity deals with Chinese government-owned entities. ..."
"... Perhaps most damning in terms of timing and optics, just twelve days after Hunter and Joe Biden flew on Air Force Two to Beijing, Hunter's company signed a "historic deal with the Bank of China ," described by Schweizer as "the state-owned financial behemoth often used as a tool of the Chinese government." To accommodate the deal, the Bank of China created a unique type of investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). According to BHR, Rosemont Seneca Partners is a founding partner ..."
"... It was an unprecedented arrangement: the government of one of America's fiercest competitors going into business with the son of one of America's most powerful decisionmakers . ..."
"... It doesn't stop there. While Hunter Biden had "no experience in China, and little in private equity," the Chinese government for some reason thought it would be a great idea to give his firm business opportunities instead of established global banks such as Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. ..."
"... The following August, Rosemont Realty, another sister company of Rosemont Seneca, announced that Gemini Investments was buying a 75 percent stake in the company. The terms of the deal included a $3 billion commitment from the Chinese, who were eager to purchase new US properties. Shortly after the sale, Rosemont Realty was rechristened Gemini Rosemont. ..."
"... "We see great opportunities to continue acquiring high-quality real estate in the US market," said one company executive, who added: "The possibilities for this venture are tremendous." ..."
"... Then, in 2015, BHR partnered with a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned military aviation contractor Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) in order to purchase American precision-parts maker Henniges - a transaction which required approval from the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the same rubber-stamp committee that approved the Uranium One deal. ..."
"... The vice president was bringing with him highly welcomed terms of a United States Agency for International Development program to assist the Ukrainian natural-gas industry and promises of more US financial assistance and loans. Soon the United States and the International Monetary Fund would be pumping more than $1 billion into the Ukrainian economy. ..."
"... The next day, there was a public announcement that Archer had been asked to join the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company. Three weeks after that, on May 13, it was announced that Hunter Biden would join, too. Neither Biden nor Archer had any background or experience in the energy sector. - New York Post ..."
"... Then Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees to Ukraine unless President Petro Poroshenko fired his head prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin, who was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into natural gas firm Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... Biden bragged about the threat last year, telling an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations: "I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko. ..."
"... As we head into the 2020 elections, it will be interesting to see how Joe Biden dances around his son's lucrative - and very potentially daddy-assisted deals around the world. ..."
May 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Mon, 05/13/2019 - 14:30 111 SHARES

Two years of investigations by journalist Peter Schweizer has revealed that Joe Biden may now have a serious China problem. And just like his Ukraine scandal , it involves actions which helped his son Hunter, who was making hand over fist in both countries.

Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now Secret Empires discovered that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which expanded to $1.5 billion, according to an article by Schweizer's in the New York Post .

" If it sounds shocking that a vice president would shape US-China policy as his son -- who has scant experience in private equity -- clinched a coveted billion-dollar deal with an arm of the Chinese government, that's because it is " - Peter Schweizer

Perhaps this is why Joe Biden - now on the 2020 campaign trail - said last week that China wasn't a threat.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/sD9d3TUYHNo

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a shot at Biden's comment during a speech at the Claremont Institute's 40th anniversary gala, saying "Look how both parties now are on guard against the threat that China presents to America -- maybe except Joe Biden."

Back to Hunter...

Schweizer connects the dots, writing that "without the aid of subpoena power, here's what we know :"

It was an unprecedented arrangement: the government of one of America's fiercest competitors going into business with the son of one of America's most powerful decisionmakers .

Chris Heinz claims neither he nor Rosemont Seneca Partners, the firm he had part ownership of, had any role in the deal with Bohai Harvest. Nonetheless, Biden, Archer and the Rosemont name became increasingly involved with China.

Archer became the vice chairman of Bohai Harvest, helping oversee some of the fund's investments. - New York Post

National Security implications

As Schweizer also notes, BHR became an "anchor investor" in the IPO of China General Nuclear Power Corp (CGN) in December 2014. The state-owned energy company is involved with the construction of nuclear reactors.

In April 2016, CGN was charged by the US Justice Department with stealing nuclear secrets from the United States , which prosecutors warned could cause "significant damage to our national security." CNG was interested in sensitive, American-made nuclear components that resembled those used on US nuclear submarines, according to experts.

More China dealings

It doesn't stop there. While Hunter Biden had "no experience in China, and little in private equity," the Chinese government for some reason thought it would be a great idea to give his firm business opportunities instead of established global banks such as Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs.

Also in December 2014, a Chinese state-backed conglomerate called Gemini Investments Limited was negotiating and sealing deals with Hunter Biden's Rosemont on several fronts. That month, it made a $34 million investment into a fund managed by Rosemont.

The following August, Rosemont Realty, another sister company of Rosemont Seneca, announced that Gemini Investments was buying a 75 percent stake in the company. The terms of the deal included a $3 billion commitment from the Chinese, who were eager to purchase new US properties. Shortly after the sale, Rosemont Realty was rechristened Gemini Rosemont.

Chinese executives lauded the deal. - New York Post

"Rosemont, with its comprehensive real-estate platform and superior performance history, was precisely the investment opportunity Gemini Investments was looking for in order to invest in the US real estate market," said Li Ming, chairman of Sino-Ocean Land Holdings Limited and Gemini Investments. "We look forward to a strong and successful partnership."

That partnership planned to use Chinese money to scoop up US properties.

"We see great opportunities to continue acquiring high-quality real estate in the US market," said one company executive, who added: "The possibilities for this venture are tremendous."

Then, in 2015, BHR partnered with a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned military aviation contractor Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) in order to purchase American precision-parts maker Henniges - a transaction which required approval from the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the same rubber-stamp committee that approved the Uranium One deal.

Tying it back to Ukraine

While we have previously reported on the Bidens' adventures in Ukraine, Schweizer connects the dots rather well here ...

Consider the facts. On April 16, 2014, White House records show that Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's business partner in the Rosemont Seneca deals, made a private visit to the White House for a meeting with Vice President Biden. Five days later, on April 21, Joe Biden landed in Kiev for a series of high-level meetings with Ukrainian officials . The vice president was bringing with him highly welcomed terms of a United States Agency for International Development program to assist the Ukrainian natural-gas industry and promises of more US financial assistance and loans. Soon the United States and the International Monetary Fund would be pumping more than $1 billion into the Ukrainian economy.

The next day, there was a public announcement that Archer had been asked to join the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company. Three weeks after that, on May 13, it was announced that Hunter Biden would join, too. Neither Biden nor Archer had any background or experience in the energy sector. - New York Post

Hunter was paid as much as $50,000 per month while Burisma was under investigation by officials in both Ukraine and elsewhere.

Then Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees to Ukraine unless President Petro Poroshenko fired his head prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin, who was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into natural gas firm Burisma Holdings.

Biden bragged about the threat last year, telling an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations: "I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko.

" Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time."

Joe Biden says that he had no idea Hunter was on the board of Burisma (for two years after he joined), and that the two never spoke about the Burisma investigation. The former VP claims that Shokin's removal was required due to his mishandling of several cases in Ukraine.

As we head into the 2020 elections, it will be interesting to see how Joe Biden dances around his son's lucrative - and very potentially daddy-assisted deals around the world.

Bastiat , 2 minutes ago link

Stick a fork in Creepy Uncle Sniffy.

Feel it Reel it , 8 minutes ago link

Biden is another scumbag Democrat Lawyer who's the original 'pay for play' politician...A 40+ year history in Political Office with Zero accomplishments except enriching himself and his family...A complete fraud and hypocrite liar.....Lawyers should have never been allowed to run for Office at any level.....Look at all the corruption that has been and is being exposed at the different bureaucracies...Virtually all the corruption has been willfully committed by Lawyers....Pathetic....

LOL123 , 16 minutes ago link

Interesting.... I put: "The Steele Dossier has so many British agents involved it sounds like a British failed coup to overthrow an elected President because he stands in " the way of "profiting goals of " international goals" of global monopoly run by unelected councils and retired instigators as facilitators of discord.

But came out:The Steele Dossier has so many British agents involved it sounds like a British failed coup to overthrow an elected President because he stands in the profiting goals of " international goals" of global monopoly run by unelected councils and retired instigators as facilitators of discord.

To make it sound as if it is Trump profiting.... By no means is that true... Its the " long term" Washington officals that have been profiting. Not a possible 8 year President.

My phone also wont let me thumbs up people i would like to but only a few and also replying is " verboten".

These algorhythms and blocks and censorship is an abuse of constitutional rights which is bad enough, but even worse is that these rights got monopolized by various corporations who bought stock in facebook/ googles options that was stolen from Leader technologies source code ( which Mark zukerberg couldnt write on a good day... He is a front guy and again we have British privy council involed with Clegg head of facebook now voice for Mark... Because Mark is a cut out).

This whole social media internet thing has been hijacked and weaponized by Washingtons same people as Dossier scandel... James Chandeler attorney and backstaber of Leader technology.

See leader technology vs facebook..... But i digress.

We have lost control of the internet.

https://www.fbcoverup.com/docs/library/Michael-T-McKibben-AFI-backgrounder.html

Michael T. McKibben's career spans two phases: international Christian music ministry, and technology innovation. In 2006, he was awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,139,761 for what is now called "social networking."

Psadie , 21 minutes ago link

Biden & Kerry aren't the only ones with a China problem. "Secret Empires" also listed Mitch McConnell having a huge China problem through his wife's shipping company. I bet he doesn't run for re-election. Winning.

Bricker , 23 minutes ago link

Biden thinks he knows something about trade. If thats the case how did America get here?

We got here from career politicians selling America for votes.

#FuckBiden

cleg , 46 minutes ago link

China owns the Clintonista mob.

onewayticket2 , 43 minutes ago link

they all own one another - that's the essence of the problem in politics. and why they have tried so hard to get that outsider, trump, out of the country club.

Koba the Dread , 30 minutes ago link

China funded Bill Clinton's election campaigns through James Riady, an Indonesian Chinese man involved in hard drug smuggling and arms trafficking. The money was laundered through Little Rock banks and corporations. (See Victor Thorn's Hillary and Bill , all three volumes.)

JamcaicanMeAfraid , 48 minutes ago link

"Come on man! This is a joke! He's my son and he's a great buddy. I mean yeah he was drummed out of the Naval Reserve because of his cocaine habit, but come on man, you know, everybody does it! Just ask my good friend Barack, he's a clean, good looking darkie whose done his share of blow. And yeah Hunter fucked his dead brother's widow, but come on man! Have you seen her **** and ***. I might have made a move on her myself, but hey man I'm married."

Joe Biden, From the endless Fear and Mongering Presidential campaign of 2020.

JibjeResearch , 49 minutes ago link

How can a deal of such magnitude escape the Treasury FINCEN?

Get on it ... you IRS/SEC/FBI people!

Koba the Dread , 25 minutes ago link

IRS/SEC/FBI are not investigatory agencies. They are barrier agencies. They protect the anointed, letting them do as they wish, and stomp on anyone else who tries to get in on the gravy train.

Rico , 55 minutes ago link

ah, sociopaths in action...from an earlier post:

//

Sociopaths are the reason all governments, regardless of the particular 'ism', eventually fail...

Looking at human history, fascism is the most common form of government for humans. At least it is the most honest - that the sociopaths are ******* everyone else.... These days we try to hide it by lofty idealism that is incompatible with a predator/prey real world.....

Representative democracy, socialism and communism all fail and all fail for the same reason - sociopaths...

We should be honest with ourselves that there is a small, but statistically significant percentage of the human population that are sociopaths (and more are being born every generation). We can call them predators and we are the prey...any concentration of power attracts sociopaths regardless of the fancy label we put on the political system. Within a short time the system is inundated with sociopaths who invariably game the system to death for their own individual benefit....

Don't like the reality in which you find yourself? Stop voting for sociopaths, stop giving them power...

What political party or system even acknowledge the sociopath problem? That's right, none...so don't expect anything to change after the reset...the pleubs will chose a new sociopath for their leader, who will **** them, and things will go on as they always have...

Only way to combat this is to decentralize power as much as possible...this doesn't solve the sociopath problem, but it does spread them out and keeps them from ganging up together to **** over the peasants...but I won't hold my breath....

Fish Gone Bad , 1 hour ago link

I bet Hunter's tax records must be VERY interesting. Someone really needs to step up and show those bad boys.

pilager , 1 hour ago link

Yes, selling America out again.

TeethVillage88s , 52 minutes ago link

Is this a good time to take a look at 1) Front Men 2) Front Companies 3) Shell Companies 4) Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV/SPE) 5) Offshore Accounts, Offshore Donations, Offshore Campaign or PAC or Party Contributions, Paradise Papers, Panama Papers 6) USA as Tax Haven for foreign accounts 7) USA as an Empire 8) The Rise Of The Fourth Reich notes in book by Jim Marrs

[May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Historians will study this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington. ..."
"... Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' ( 8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts. ..."
"... This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia. Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but by the Obama administration? ..."
"... Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute to Montenegro, NATO's newest member. ..."
"... At this stage, it doesn't matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own conclusions. ..."
May 10, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

... ... ...

Trump was after a good deal from Russia. A new partnership would have reversed deteriorating relations between the powers by encouraging their alliance against ISIS and recognising the importance of Ukraine to Russia's security. Current US paranoia about everything Kremlin-related has encouraged amnesia about what President Barack Obama said in 2016, after the annexation of the Crimea and Russia's direct intervention in Syria. He too put the danger posed by President Vladimir Putin into perspective: the interventions in Ukraine and the Middle East were, Obama said, improvised 'in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp' ( 5 ).

Obama went on: 'The Russians can't change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country, they are a weaker country, their economy doesn't produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms.' What he feared most about Putin was the sympathy he inspired in Trump and his supporters: '37% of Republican voters approve of Putin, the former head of the KGB. Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave' ( 6 ).

By January 2017, Reagan's eternal rest was no longer threatened. 'Presidents come and go but the policy never changes,' Putin concluded ( 7 ). Historians will study this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington.

Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' ( 8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts.

The media, especially the New York Times and Washington Post, eagerly sought a new Watergate scandal and knew their middle-class, urban, educated readers loathe Trump for his vulgarity, affection for the far right, violence and lack of culture ( 9 ). So they were searching for any information or rumour that could cause his removal or force a resignation. As in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, everyone had his particular motive for striking the same victim.

The intrigue developed quickly as these four areas have fairly porous boundaries. The understanding between Republican hawks such as John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the military-industrial complex was a given. The architects of recent US imperial adventures, especially Iraq, had not enjoyed the 2016 campaign or Trump's jibes about their expertise. During the campaign, some 50 intellectuals and officials announced that, despite being Republicans, they would not support Trump because he 'would put at risk our country's national security and wellbeing.' Some went so far as to vote for Clinton ( 10 ).

Ambitions of a 'deep state'?

The press feared that Trump's incompetence would threaten the US-dominated international order. It had no problem with military crusades, especially when emblazoned with grand humanitarian, internationalist or progressive principles. According to the press criteria, Putin and his predilection for rightwing nationalists were obvious culprits. But so were Saudi Arabia or Israel, though that did not prevent the Saudis being able to count on the ferociously anti-Russian Wall Street Journal, or Israel enjoying the support of almost all US media, despite having a far-right element in its government.

Just over a week before Trump took office, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden story that revealed the mass surveillance programmes run by the National Security Agency, warned of the direction of travel. He observed that the US media had become the intelligence services' 'most valuable instrument, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials.' This at a time when 'Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing -- eager -- to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging those behaviours might be' ( 11 ).

The anti-Russian coalition hadn't then achieved all its objectives, but Greenwald already discerned the ambitions of a 'deep state'. 'There really is, at this point,' he said 'obvious open warfare between this unelected but very powerful faction that resides in Washington and sees presidents come and go, on the one hand, and the person that the American democracy elected to be the president on the other.' One suspicion, fed by the intelligence services, galvanised all Trump's enemies: Moscow had compromising secrets about Trump -- financial, electoral, sexual -- capable of paralysing him should a crisis between the two countries occur ( 12 ).

Covert opposition to Trump

The suspicion of such a murky understanding, summed up by the pro-Clinton economist Paul Krugman as a 'Trump-Putin ticket', has transformed the anti-Russian activity into a domestic political weapon against a president increasingly hated outside the ultraconservative bloc. It is no longer unusual to hear leftwing activists turn FBI or CIA apologists, since these agencies became a home for a covert opposition to Trump and the source of many leaks.

This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia. Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but by the Obama administration?

The silence was once broken when the Republican representative for North Carolina, Tom Tillis, questioned former CIA director James Clapper in January: 'The United States has been involved in one way or another in 81 different elections since World War II. That doesn't include coups or the regime changes, some tangible evidence where we have tried to affect an outcome to our purpose. Russia has done it some 36 times.' This perspective rarely disturbs the New York Times 's fulminations against Moscow's trickery.

The Times also failed to inform younger readers that Russia's president Boris Yeltsin, who picked Putin as his successor in 1999, had been re-elected in 1996, though seriously ill and often drunk, in a fraudulent election conducted with the assistance of US advisers and the overt support of President Bill Clinton. The Times hailed the result as 'a victory for Russian democracy' and declared that 'the forces of democracy and reform won a vital but not definitive victory in Russia yesterday For the first time in history, a free Russia has freely chosen its leader.'

Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute to Montenegro, NATO's newest member.

No longer getting his way

But the Times, far from worrying about these provocative gestures coinciding with heightened tensions between great powers (trade sanctions against Russia, Moscow's expulsion of US diplomats), poured oil on the fire. On 2 August it praised the reaffirmation of 'America's commitment to defend democratic nations against those countries that would undermine them' and regretted that Mike Pence's views 'aren't as eagerly embraced and celebrated by the man he works for back in the White House.'

At this stage, it doesn't matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own conclusions.

... ... ...

[May 13, 2019] Not Just Ukraine; Biden May Have A Serious China Problem As Schweizer Exposes Hunter s $1bn Deal

Highly recommended!
Neoliberal corruption in full display. As we see forms of nepotism evolve with time...
Notable quotes:
"... Two years of investigations by journalist Peter Schweizer has revealed that Joe Biden may now have a serious China problem. And just like his Ukraine scandal , it involves actions which helped his son Hunter, who was making hand over fist in both countries. ..."
"... Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now Secret Empires discovered that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which expanded to $1.5 billion, according to an article by Schweizer's in the New York Post . ..."
"... Hunter Biden and his partners created several LLCs involved in multibillion-dollar private equity deals with Chinese government-owned entities. ..."
"... Perhaps most damning in terms of timing and optics, just twelve days after Hunter and Joe Biden flew on Air Force Two to Beijing, Hunter's company signed a "historic deal with the Bank of China ," described by Schweizer as "the state-owned financial behemoth often used as a tool of the Chinese government." To accommodate the deal, the Bank of China created a unique type of investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). According to BHR, Rosemont Seneca Partners is a founding partner ..."
"... It was an unprecedented arrangement: the government of one of America's fiercest competitors going into business with the son of one of America's most powerful decisionmakers . ..."
"... It doesn't stop there. While Hunter Biden had "no experience in China, and little in private equity," the Chinese government for some reason thought it would be a great idea to give his firm business opportunities instead of established global banks such as Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. ..."
"... The following August, Rosemont Realty, another sister company of Rosemont Seneca, announced that Gemini Investments was buying a 75 percent stake in the company. The terms of the deal included a $3 billion commitment from the Chinese, who were eager to purchase new US properties. Shortly after the sale, Rosemont Realty was rechristened Gemini Rosemont. ..."
"... "We see great opportunities to continue acquiring high-quality real estate in the US market," said one company executive, who added: "The possibilities for this venture are tremendous." ..."
"... Then, in 2015, BHR partnered with a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned military aviation contractor Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) in order to purchase American precision-parts maker Henniges - a transaction which required approval from the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the same rubber-stamp committee that approved the Uranium One deal. ..."
"... The vice president was bringing with him highly welcomed terms of a United States Agency for International Development program to assist the Ukrainian natural-gas industry and promises of more US financial assistance and loans. Soon the United States and the International Monetary Fund would be pumping more than $1 billion into the Ukrainian economy. ..."
"... The next day, there was a public announcement that Archer had been asked to join the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company. Three weeks after that, on May 13, it was announced that Hunter Biden would join, too. Neither Biden nor Archer had any background or experience in the energy sector. - New York Post ..."
"... Then Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees to Ukraine unless President Petro Poroshenko fired his head prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin, who was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into natural gas firm Burisma Holdings. ..."
"... Biden bragged about the threat last year, telling an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations: "I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko. ..."
"... As we head into the 2020 elections, it will be interesting to see how Joe Biden dances around his son's lucrative - and very potentially daddy-assisted deals around the world. ..."
May 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden Mon, 05/13/2019 - 14:30 111 SHARES

Two years of investigations by journalist Peter Schweizer has revealed that Joe Biden may now have a serious China problem. And just like his Ukraine scandal , it involves actions which helped his son Hunter, who was making hand over fist in both countries.

Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now Secret Empires discovered that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which expanded to $1.5 billion, according to an article by Schweizer's in the New York Post .

" If it sounds shocking that a vice president would shape US-China policy as his son -- who has scant experience in private equity -- clinched a coveted billion-dollar deal with an arm of the Chinese government, that's because it is " - Peter Schweizer

Perhaps this is why Joe Biden - now on the 2020 campaign trail - said last week that China wasn't a threat.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/sD9d3TUYHNo

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took a shot at Biden's comment during a speech at the Claremont Institute's 40th anniversary gala, saying "Look how both parties now are on guard against the threat that China presents to America -- maybe except Joe Biden."

Back to Hunter...

Schweizer connects the dots, writing that "without the aid of subpoena power, here's what we know :"

It was an unprecedented arrangement: the government of one of America's fiercest competitors going into business with the son of one of America's most powerful decisionmakers .

Chris Heinz claims neither he nor Rosemont Seneca Partners, the firm he had part ownership of, had any role in the deal with Bohai Harvest. Nonetheless, Biden, Archer and the Rosemont name became increasingly involved with China.

Archer became the vice chairman of Bohai Harvest, helping oversee some of the fund's investments. - New York Post

National Security implications

As Schweizer also notes, BHR became an "anchor investor" in the IPO of China General Nuclear Power Corp (CGN) in December 2014. The state-owned energy company is involved with the construction of nuclear reactors.

In April 2016, CGN was charged by the US Justice Department with stealing nuclear secrets from the United States , which prosecutors warned could cause "significant damage to our national security." CNG was interested in sensitive, American-made nuclear components that resembled those used on US nuclear submarines, according to experts.

More China dealings

It doesn't stop there. While Hunter Biden had "no experience in China, and little in private equity," the Chinese government for some reason thought it would be a great idea to give his firm business opportunities instead of established global banks such as Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs.

Also in December 2014, a Chinese state-backed conglomerate called Gemini Investments Limited was negotiating and sealing deals with Hunter Biden's Rosemont on several fronts. That month, it made a $34 million investment into a fund managed by Rosemont.

The following August, Rosemont Realty, another sister company of Rosemont Seneca, announced that Gemini Investments was buying a 75 percent stake in the company. The terms of the deal included a $3 billion commitment from the Chinese, who were eager to purchase new US properties. Shortly after the sale, Rosemont Realty was rechristened Gemini Rosemont.

Chinese executives lauded the deal. - New York Post

"Rosemont, with its comprehensive real-estate platform and superior performance history, was precisely the investment opportunity Gemini Investments was looking for in order to invest in the US real estate market," said Li Ming, chairman of Sino-Ocean Land Holdings Limited and Gemini Investments. "We look forward to a strong and successful partnership."

That partnership planned to use Chinese money to scoop up US properties.

"We see great opportunities to continue acquiring high-quality real estate in the US market," said one company executive, who added: "The possibilities for this venture are tremendous."

Then, in 2015, BHR partnered with a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned military aviation contractor Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) in order to purchase American precision-parts maker Henniges - a transaction which required approval from the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the same rubber-stamp committee that approved the Uranium One deal.

Tying it back to Ukraine

While we have previously reported on the Bidens' adventures in Ukraine, Schweizer connects the dots rather well here ...

Consider the facts. On April 16, 2014, White House records show that Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's business partner in the Rosemont Seneca deals, made a private visit to the White House for a meeting with Vice President Biden. Five days later, on April 21, Joe Biden landed in Kiev for a series of high-level meetings with Ukrainian officials . The vice president was bringing with him highly welcomed terms of a United States Agency for International Development program to assist the Ukrainian natural-gas industry and promises of more US financial assistance and loans. Soon the United States and the International Monetary Fund would be pumping more than $1 billion into the Ukrainian economy.

The next day, there was a public announcement that Archer had been asked to join the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company. Three weeks after that, on May 13, it was announced that Hunter Biden would join, too. Neither Biden nor Archer had any background or experience in the energy sector. - New York Post

Hunter was paid as much as $50,000 per month while Burisma was under investigation by officials in both Ukraine and elsewhere.

Then Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees to Ukraine unless President Petro Poroshenko fired his head prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin, who was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into natural gas firm Burisma Holdings.

Biden bragged about the threat last year, telling an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations: "I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko.

" Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time."

Joe Biden says that he had no idea Hunter was on the board of Burisma (for two years after he joined), and that the two never spoke about the Burisma investigation. The former VP claims that Shokin's removal was required due to his mishandling of several cases in Ukraine.

As we head into the 2020 elections, it will be interesting to see how Joe Biden dances around his son's lucrative - and very potentially daddy-assisted deals around the world.

Bastiat , 2 minutes ago link

Stick a fork in Creepy Uncle Sniffy.

Feel it Reel it , 8 minutes ago link

Biden is another scumbag Democrat Lawyer who's the original 'pay for play' politician...A 40+ year history in Political Office with Zero accomplishments except enriching himself and his family...A complete fraud and hypocrite liar.....Lawyers should have never been allowed to run for Office at any level.....Look at all the corruption that has been and is being exposed at the different bureaucracies...Virtually all the corruption has been willfully committed by Lawyers....Pathetic....

LOL123 , 16 minutes ago link

Interesting.... I put: "The Steele Dossier has so many British agents involved it sounds like a British failed coup to overthrow an elected President because he stands in " the way of "profiting goals of " international goals" of global monopoly run by unelected councils and retired instigators as facilitators of discord.

But came out:The Steele Dossier has so many British agents involved it sounds like a British failed coup to overthrow an elected President because he stands in the profiting goals of " international goals" of global monopoly run by unelected councils and retired instigators as facilitators of discord.

To make it sound as if it is Trump profiting.... By no means is that true... Its the " long term" Washington officals that have been profiting. Not a possible 8 year President.

My phone also wont let me thumbs up people i would like to but only a few and also replying is " verboten".

These algorhythms and blocks and censorship is an abuse of constitutional rights which is bad enough, but even worse is that these rights got monopolized by various corporations who bought stock in facebook/ googles options that was stolen from Leader technologies source code ( which Mark zukerberg couldnt write on a good day... He is a front guy and again we have British privy council involed with Clegg head of facebook now voice for Mark... Because Mark is a cut out).

This whole social media internet thing has been hijacked and weaponized by Washingtons same people as Dossier scandel... James Chandeler attorney and backstaber of Leader technology.

See leader technology vs facebook..... But i digress.

We have lost control of the internet.

https://www.fbcoverup.com/docs/library/Michael-T-McKibben-AFI-backgrounder.html

Michael T. McKibben's career spans two phases: international Christian music ministry, and technology innovation. In 2006, he was awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,139,761 for what is now called "social networking."

Psadie , 21 minutes ago link

Biden & Kerry aren't the only ones with a China problem. "Secret Empires" also listed Mitch McConnell having a huge China problem through his wife's shipping company. I bet he doesn't run for re-election. Winning.

Bricker , 23 minutes ago link

Biden thinks he knows something about trade. If thats the case how did America get here?

We got here from career politicians selling America for votes.

#FuckBiden

cleg , 46 minutes ago link

China owns the Clintonista mob.

onewayticket2 , 43 minutes ago link

they all own one another - that's the essence of the problem in politics. and why they have tried so hard to get that outsider, trump, out of the country club.

Koba the Dread , 30 minutes ago link

China funded Bill Clinton's election campaigns through James Riady, an Indonesian Chinese man involved in hard drug smuggling and arms trafficking. The money was laundered through Little Rock banks and corporations. (See Victor Thorn's Hillary and Bill , all three volumes.)

JamcaicanMeAfraid , 48 minutes ago link

"Come on man! This is a joke! He's my son and he's a great buddy. I mean yeah he was drummed out of the Naval Reserve because of his cocaine habit, but come on man, you know, everybody does it! Just ask my good friend Barack, he's a clean, good looking darkie whose done his share of blow. And yeah Hunter fucked his dead brother's widow, but come on man! Have you seen her **** and ***. I might have made a move on her myself, but hey man I'm married."

Joe Biden, From the endless Fear and Mongering Presidential campaign of 2020.

JibjeResearch , 49 minutes ago link

How can a deal of such magnitude escape the Treasury FINCEN?

Get on it ... you IRS/SEC/FBI people!

Koba the Dread , 25 minutes ago link

IRS/SEC/FBI are not investigatory agencies. They are barrier agencies. They protect the anointed, letting them do as they wish, and stomp on anyone else who tries to get in on the gravy train.

Rico , 55 minutes ago link

ah, sociopaths in action...from an earlier post:

//

Sociopaths are the reason all governments, regardless of the particular 'ism', eventually fail...

Looking at human history, fascism is the most common form of government for humans. At least it is the most honest - that the sociopaths are ******* everyone else.... These days we try to hide it by lofty idealism that is incompatible with a predator/prey real world.....

Representative democracy, socialism and communism all fail and all fail for the same reason - sociopaths...

We should be honest with ourselves that there is a small, but statistically significant percentage of the human population that are sociopaths (and more are being born every generation). We can call them predators and we are the prey...any concentration of power attracts sociopaths regardless of the fancy label we put on the political system. Within a short time the system is inundated with sociopaths who invariably game the system to death for their own individual benefit....

Don't like the reality in which you find yourself? Stop voting for sociopaths, stop giving them power...

What political party or system even acknowledge the sociopath problem? That's right, none...so don't expect anything to change after the reset...the pleubs will chose a new sociopath for their leader, who will **** them, and things will go on as they always have...

Only way to combat this is to decentralize power as much as possible...this doesn't solve the sociopath problem, but it does spread them out and keeps them from ganging up together to **** over the peasants...but I won't hold my breath....

Fish Gone Bad , 1 hour ago link

I bet Hunter's tax records must be VERY interesting. Someone really needs to step up and show those bad boys.

pilager , 1 hour ago link

Yes, selling America out again.

TeethVillage88s , 52 minutes ago link

Is this a good time to take a look at 1) Front Men 2) Front Companies 3) Shell Companies 4) Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV/SPE) 5) Offshore Accounts, Offshore Donations, Offshore Campaign or PAC or Party Contributions, Paradise Papers, Panama Papers 6) USA as Tax Haven for foreign accounts 7) USA as an Empire 8) The Rise Of The Fourth Reich notes in book by Jim Marrs

[May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Historians will study this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington. ..."
"... Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' ( 8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts. ..."
"... This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia. Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but by the Obama administration? ..."
"... Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute to Montenegro, NATO's newest member. ..."
"... At this stage, it doesn't matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own conclusions. ..."
May 10, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

... ... ...

Trump was after a good deal from Russia. A new partnership would have reversed deteriorating relations between the powers by encouraging their alliance against ISIS and recognising the importance of Ukraine to Russia's security. Current US paranoia about everything Kremlin-related has encouraged amnesia about what President Barack Obama said in 2016, after the annexation of the Crimea and Russia's direct intervention in Syria. He too put the danger posed by President Vladimir Putin into perspective: the interventions in Ukraine and the Middle East were, Obama said, improvised 'in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp' ( 5 ).

Obama went on: 'The Russians can't change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country, they are a weaker country, their economy doesn't produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms.' What he feared most about Putin was the sympathy he inspired in Trump and his supporters: '37% of Republican voters approve of Putin, the former head of the KGB. Ronald Reagan would roll over in his grave' ( 6 ).

By January 2017, Reagan's eternal rest was no longer threatened. 'Presidents come and go but the policy never changes,' Putin concluded ( 7 ). Historians will study this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington.

Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' ( 8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts.

The media, especially the New York Times and Washington Post, eagerly sought a new Watergate scandal and knew their middle-class, urban, educated readers loathe Trump for his vulgarity, affection for the far right, violence and lack of culture ( 9 ). So they were searching for any information or rumour that could cause his removal or force a resignation. As in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, everyone had his particular motive for striking the same victim.

The intrigue developed quickly as these four areas have fairly porous boundaries. The understanding between Republican hawks such as John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the military-industrial complex was a given. The architects of recent US imperial adventures, especially Iraq, had not enjoyed the 2016 campaign or Trump's jibes about their expertise. During the campaign, some 50 intellectuals and officials announced that, despite being Republicans, they would not support Trump because he 'would put at risk our country's national security and wellbeing.' Some went so far as to vote for Clinton ( 10 ).

Ambitions of a 'deep state'?

The press feared that Trump's incompetence would threaten the US-dominated international order. It had no problem with military crusades, especially when emblazoned with grand humanitarian, internationalist or progressive principles. According to the press criteria, Putin and his predilection for rightwing nationalists were obvious culprits. But so were Saudi Arabia or Israel, though that did not prevent the Saudis being able to count on the ferociously anti-Russian Wall Street Journal, or Israel enjoying the support of almost all US media, despite having a far-right element in its government.

Just over a week before Trump took office, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden story that revealed the mass surveillance programmes run by the National Security Agency, warned of the direction of travel. He observed that the US media had become the intelligence services' 'most valuable instrument, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials.' This at a time when 'Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing -- eager -- to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging those behaviours might be' ( 11 ).

The anti-Russian coalition hadn't then achieved all its objectives, but Greenwald already discerned the ambitions of a 'deep state'. 'There really is, at this point,' he said 'obvious open warfare between this unelected but very powerful faction that resides in Washington and sees presidents come and go, on the one hand, and the person that the American democracy elected to be the president on the other.' One suspicion, fed by the intelligence services, galvanised all Trump's enemies: Moscow had compromising secrets about Trump -- financial, electoral, sexual -- capable of paralysing him should a crisis between the two countries occur ( 12 ).

Covert opposition to Trump

The suspicion of such a murky understanding, summed up by the pro-Clinton economist Paul Krugman as a 'Trump-Putin ticket', has transformed the anti-Russian activity into a domestic political weapon against a president increasingly hated outside the ultraconservative bloc. It is no longer unusual to hear leftwing activists turn FBI or CIA apologists, since these agencies became a home for a covert opposition to Trump and the source of many leaks.

This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia. Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but by the Obama administration?

The silence was once broken when the Republican representative for North Carolina, Tom Tillis, questioned former CIA director James Clapper in January: 'The United States has been involved in one way or another in 81 different elections since World War II. That doesn't include coups or the regime changes, some tangible evidence where we have tried to affect an outcome to our purpose. Russia has done it some 36 times.' This perspective rarely disturbs the New York Times 's fulminations against Moscow's trickery.

The Times also failed to inform younger readers that Russia's president Boris Yeltsin, who picked Putin as his successor in 1999, had been re-elected in 1996, though seriously ill and often drunk, in a fraudulent election conducted with the assistance of US advisers and the overt support of President Bill Clinton. The Times hailed the result as 'a victory for Russian democracy' and declared that 'the forces of democracy and reform won a vital but not definitive victory in Russia yesterday For the first time in history, a free Russia has freely chosen its leader.'

Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute to Montenegro, NATO's newest member.

No longer getting his way

But the Times, far from worrying about these provocative gestures coinciding with heightened tensions between great powers (trade sanctions against Russia, Moscow's expulsion of US diplomats), poured oil on the fire. On 2 August it praised the reaffirmation of 'America's commitment to defend democratic nations against those countries that would undermine them' and regretted that Mike Pence's views 'aren't as eagerly embraced and celebrated by the man he works for back in the White House.'

At this stage, it doesn't matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own conclusions.

... ... ...

[May 13, 2019] Glenn Greenwald Interviews Rep. Tulsi Gabbard About Foreign Policy and Her 2020 Campaign - YouTube

Tulsi found an interesting way to stress he foreign policy credential -- The US President is the Commander in Chief of the Nation.
Notable quotes:
"... Gabbard's transformation from cherished party asset to party critic and outcast was rapid, and was due almost entirely to her insistence on following her own belief system and evolving ideology rather than party dogma and the long-standing rules for Washington advancement. ..."
"... I'm a 70+ veteran who has never voted for a Democrat in my life. Tulsi Gabbard is the best, most qualified, most eloquent and thoughtful presidential candidate of my lifetime. She will catch on, and the MSM which hates her (they all get tons of money and support from war industry, Big Pharma, Big Ag, etc.), will try to ignore her or smear her, but in the end they will fail. She makes sense, and they don't. Regime change wars must end. Tulsi will be the shining light that makes it happen. ..."
May 09, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Ever since Tulsi Gabbard was first elected to Congress in 2012, she has been assertively independent, heterodox, unpredictable, and polarizing. Viewed at first as a loyal Democrat and guaranteed future star by party leaders -- due to her status as an Iraq War veteran, a telegenic and dynamic young woman, and the first Hindu and Samoan American ever elected to Congress -- she has instead become a thorn in the side, and frequent critic, of those same party leaders that quickly anointed her as the future face of the party.

Gabbard's transformation from cherished party asset to party critic and outcast was rapid, and was due almost entirely to her insistence on following her own belief system and evolving ideology rather than party dogma and the long-standing rules for Washington advancement.

Glenn Greenwald sat down with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard to discuss a wide range of issues, including the reasons she is running for president, her views on Trump's electoral appeal and what is necessary to defeat it, the rise of right-wing populism internationally, the Trump/Russia investigation, criticisms she has received regarding her views of Islam and certain repressive leaders, and her unique foreign policy viewpoints.

This interview is intended to be the first in a series of in-depth interviews with influential and interesting U.S. political figures, including but not limited to 2020 presidential candidates, designed to enable deeper examinations than the standard cable or network news format permits.

For more, read Glenn Greenwald's full article: https://theintercept.com/2019/05/09/w...

Hans Marheim , 4 days ago

I am Norwegian. I want to interfere in the next american presidential election. I want Tulsi Gabbard as the next president of the USA. Love from Norway!

thinkabout , 3 days ago

TULSI is a strong intelligent candidate WE NEED TO HEAR MORE FROM HER thanks

Jacques Peterson , 4 days ago

We need to support her. Boots on the ground. I'm Australian but I have introduced her to all my American friends online.

Happy30Too , 4 days ago

I'm a 70+ veteran who has never voted for a Democrat in my life. Tulsi Gabbard is the best, most qualified, most eloquent and thoughtful presidential candidate of my lifetime. She will catch on, and the MSM which hates her (they all get tons of money and support from war industry, Big Pharma, Big Ag, etc.), will try to ignore her or smear her, but in the end they will fail. She makes sense, and they don't. Regime change wars must end. Tulsi will be the shining light that makes it happen.

MrLarryQ , 4 days ago

The only problem with this interview is that it's too short. Tough but fair questioning, all too rare these days.

Jazz Ecuador , 4 days ago

Genn is the most credible spokesman for The Intercept and Tulsi is the most credible candidate.

John E , 3 days ago

Glenn, I'm a combat veteran of the US war against Viet-Nam. Thank you for this fair, impartial interview with Tulsi.

Christopher Thomas , 4 days ago

Wow she's... normal! A normal person! Donating now.

chuckuc , 4 days ago

A great interview with the best POTUS candidate I've seen since JFK. Thank you Glenn

Sumerian Hero , 3 days ago (edited)

There's a president we would be lucky to have

fabribeijing , 4 days ago

My favourite US journalist interviewing my favourite US Presidential Candidate

Nathan Shirley , 3 days ago

How many presidential candidates have the guts to sit down for an interview with Glenn Greenwald? Only one. Tulsi Gabbard. Excellent (and very challenging) questions from Greenwald -- great responses from Gabbard.

Notmi Relnam , 3 days ago

Any candidate the Intercept finds worth interviewing is worth my time to look into. Still a bit nervous about her glorification of military service but overall...

Jeremy , 4 days ago

Great interview! Asked many questions I wanted to hear answers to. Gives a great sense of Tulsi and where she stands on many issues with emphasis on foreign policy that seems to be ignored everywhere else. Thank you Glenn.

Avalaw 19 , 4 days ago

I only hope we can have her as our commander and chief in 2020.. In 2024 or 2028 it might be to late..TULSI2020

jenny hansen , 4 days ago

I heard she'll be back on Joe Rogan next week!

Anthony e , 4 days ago

She is so truthful, no BS like other politician's running.. she has no fear and more strength then anyone else including trump.

Captain Jax , 3 days ago

That was a great interview by Glenn Greenwald, he's one of my few top 3 journalist, which i've been following in recent month!

Gabby Hyman , 4 days ago

You go Tulsi. Amazing to listen to someone with ethics without sound bites and dog whistles.

I- , 4 days ago

Thank you for asking the tough questions Glenn. I really like Tulsi but the Modi questions had been long in the waiting. I'm glad she answered them the way she did.

[May 13, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard's Perfect Solution To Trump-Russia Collusion Allegations

Tulsi is one in a generation natural born diplomat !!! She found an interesting way to stress the value of her foreign policy credentials (which in general are not valued much by the US voters, who concentrate on internal problems) -- The US President is the Commander in Chief of the Nation.
For the majority of Americans Tulsi stands out. There's no one coming even close. Bernie is a good talker, but totally untrustworthy against DNC (folded in 2016 without a fight) as well as Israel's military aid and wars in ME.
Tulsi represents profiles in courage. She makes establishment candidate like Kamala look wanting. Of course the have support of neoliberal MSM, while Tulsi is ignored. Even Democratic establishment (read neocons) are hostile toward Tulsi. Implicitly they behave like "we don't want her muddying the waters".
Unfortunately there is a strong possibility that Tulsi will not be given a fair chance, the DNC under chairman Perez will stick to party hierarchy even if he claims otherwise....
Notable quotes:
"... Tulsi is the only candidate in my lifetime who has had an actual demeanor worthy of global leadership. ..."
"... I LOVE her demeanor. She handles herself so well. She is calm & wise & fair. She will run circles @ the debates & not break a sweat! ..."
"... i am 76 and have never seen a politician of her caliber! ..."
"... So much capital was wasted on RussiaGate, but a totally legit SaudiGate scandal went ignored. 😔 ..."
"... TuIsi is in a league of her own. We are blessed. ..."
Apr 22, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Guo Mashi , 3 weeks ago

Tulsi is the only candidate in my lifetime who has had an actual demeanor worthy of global leadership.

Dionora Ferrantino , 3 weeks ago

I LOVE her demeanor. She handles herself so well. She is calm & wise & fair. She will run circles @ the debates & not break a sweat!

dlee johnson , 3 weeks ago

i am 76 and have never seen a politician of her caliber!

MrFunnyGuy015 , 3 weeks ago

So much capital was wasted on RussiaGate, but a totally legit SaudiGate scandal went ignored. 😔

Captain Jax , 3 weeks ago

She's a rock start when it comes to stay on point with all these Fox News & other MSM pundits :)

JamesThomas , 3 weeks ago

She meditates every morning, and appears to have really taken it to heart. She's very grounded and does not allow the monkey-mind to run amuck.

AR Frances , 2 weeks ago

She gave a strong speech today at Brown University, good Q & A. Find it on Youtube!

Kristen 777 , 3 weeks ago

Democrats don't want auditable elections because they're in on election fraud in the districts of the party elites. Wasserman-Schultz is the queen of the sleazes.

Sarah Rose , 3 weeks ago

Niko- I have a line of questions I'm hoping you will address with Kulinski tomorrow & if it doesn't align with your perspective I respect that it's not something you want to ask & I'd be interested in hearing from you directly why you view it differently: I'm increasingly concerned over the weak opposition by many Sanders supporters over many of his positions these last few years.

It appears to me that Medicare for All has taken precedent over fighting the military industrial complex & the millions of lives abroad affected by it. This is not a trade-off for voters like me. It is true that he is better than most & he has a strong background but he used to push for 3rd parties. This has changed along with many other issues & I think anyone being honest with themselves know this to be true.

Beyond the excuses for his endorsement of Kissinger's proTPP Clinton, he has whitewashed Bush/Cheney, called Mad Dog Mattis "the adult in the room", gone along with Russiagate & even suggested some of his followers on Facebook were Russian trolls, given lipservice to the Venezuelan "humanitarian aid", been silent on Assange, & repeatedly ignored his base on all of the above. My questions are: How can progressives like this honestly trust Sanders to fight for truth on these fronts?

Why is getting Medicare for All more important than fighting against endless war? Is it possible that progressive media has done a disservice to electoral progress by framing it as Sanders being cheated in 2016 & not emphasizing that it was a greater betrayal of the VOTERS who were cheated? Saying that they will continue to push back on him in these areas where he is wrong strikes me as completely baseless given their inability to sway him these last few years. I'm tired of excuses & hoping for better answers than "it's his turn", "he had to tow the line", or "that's for Tulsi as VP/Secretary of State to do". Please & thank you!

Akbar, Allard Freichmann , 3 weeks ago

Tulsi and Bernie 2020. The Green New Deal for all.

Desecration , 2 weeks ago

Do a 1 to 2 minute setup, show the main piece/clip, then pontificate/summarize. I got so bored I left the PC, made coffee, came back and you still hadn't got to the point of the video 5 mins in. If you're doing a long-form stream then go with whatever. For these shorter topical videos you need a shorter intro or need to cut out the filler in the edit process. The long setup and unnecessary dramatic effect pauses will only irritate people that just want the important part of what you're presenting.

Rodney Mills , 3 weeks ago (edited)

I think support for Tulsi and Bernie can (and should) be congruent, especially since ideally for me, they are both on that ticket. Not gonna lie, I want him on the helm of it, but that's because then she gets a shot at a 10-year presidency. We need them both in that admin ASAP. Their policies are complimentary, not juxtaposed. They only make each other stronger. It's not a binary. I would be emphatic to vote for either one of them.

If she is still competitive on super Tuesday, she has my vote. Otherwise, I think if she does not carry the torch to the end, we need to be prepared to aggressively throw our weight behind Bernie Sanders in a stronger way than 2016. (I also like Marianne Williamson, but I don't think that's gonna happen.She got my dollar.)

We cannot roll over again. If they nominate Beto or Kamala or Booker, we have to walk. In droves. Bearing in mind 4 more years of Trump is better than 40 more years of being exploited by the democratic party for votes while not being heard. It's effectively (and literally) taxation without representation. It's aristocracy. It's bullshit. And if they nominate a moderate, we're gonna know they didn't fucking get it before.

Big G Haywood , 2 weeks ago

Commentators like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson appeal to people who don't have the intellectual capacity to know that they're being lied to by pseudo-intellectuals. I knew Jordan Peterson was one of these, when I first heard his analysis of Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground," one of my favorite novels.

Rebecca Brown , 2 weeks ago

TuIsi is in a league of her own. We are blessed.

Adam Reed , 1 week ago

I love your show brother. I found #Tulsi2020 because of Bari smearing her on jre. That led me to your show. Thanks for the help! Keep up the hard work. #Tulsi2020

[May 13, 2019] Bringing Soldiers Values to the White House - YouTube

May 13, 2019 | www.youtube.com

John Doe 1 day ago What a true patriotic compassionate leader. Easily has my vote

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View 15 replies Hide replies John Doe 1 day ago She can show the world how to lead. Tulsi 2020!!!!

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View reply Hide replies Merwin ARTist 1 day ago Tulsi is awesome .. appreciate what she has to say about stopping these foolish regime change wars! Respect!!! Tulsi2020

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View reply Hide replies Fellow Citizen 1 day ago They are terrified of Tulsi because they know that if people hear her they will automatically vote for her. Tulsi: "...honour, respect, and integrity..." "Journalists": "[clears throat at the prospect of competing on a fair playing-field]"

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View 10 replies Hide replies Freedom Tribe 1 day ago Time is running out. We need this woman to lead us into the next epoch.

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View reply Hide replies MR BOSTON 1 day ago I voted for trump but I would vote for her in a heart beat

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View 6 replies Hide replies MoMo Bronx 1 day ago You just don't get more real than Tulsi I hope she win,the world need real Leadership

31 32 Peace Harmony 1 day ago Tulsi is one of the few Democrats who isn't too scared to go on FOX News. And she is a great candidate! A true patriot.

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View 2 replies Hide replies Jraymiami 1 day ago Tulsi 2020🌺❤️ 🗳

34 35 Matthew James Bromley 1 day ago Sounds great. I think this is exactly what we need. Got my vote.

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View 13 replies Hide replies Kedaar Iyer 1 day ago Make sure to get her to 100,000 individual donors so that she can be on the debate stage! www.tulsi2020.com

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View 2 replies Hide replies lendallpitts 1 day ago Tulsi Gabbard is the most presidential of all of the candidates.

11 12 John Doe 1 day ago (edited) I love the compassion in the comments. That's what we're talking about. Service to others, learn to love thy neighbor

12 13 Kostas K 1 day ago Honour Integrity and respect, qualities that the White House has never experienced so far in it's history.

14 15 OTR Trucker 1 day ago (edited) Thanks for running Tulsi. If we look at history it's Presidents without a military background that get us into the biggest disasters. Veterans still get us into wars sometimes but they are wars that are limited in scope and "winnable". Every open ended catastrophe we've been in was from a non vet.

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View 4 replies Hide replies Jeremy Chase 1 day ago I was speaking with an older couple yesterday. They obviously had a lot of MSM on the brain. The woman said, I would like to see a woman in The White House. I said, Tulsi Gabbard is your woman! Don't let the media lie to you about her. They just want their senseless wars. You go, Tulsi! ✌

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View reply Hide replies Michael Dob 1 day ago What a concept. Serve American interest instead of corporations and foreign governments.

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View 2 replies Hide replies Freedom Tribe 1 day ago TULSI🌈2020

23 24 Ghostz 1 day ago TULSI GABBARD IS TOTALLY RIGHT! She got my vote 🗳

6 7 Rocky Hart 1 day ago 10 likes but 0 views?? Great interview!

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[May 13, 2019] Crappy little countries

This was true about Iraq war. This is true about Venezuela and Syria.
Notable quotes:
"... In a rather odd article in the London Review of Books , Perry Anderson argued that there wasn't, and wondered aloud why the U.S. war on Iraq had excited such unprecedented worldwide opposition - even, in all places, within the U.S. - when earlier episodes of imperial violence hadn't. ..."
"... Lots of people, in the U.S. and abroad, recognize that and are alarmed. And lots also recognize that the Bush regime represents an intensification of imperial ambition. ..."
"... Why? The answers aren't self-evident. Certainly the war on Iraq had little to do with its public justifications. Iraq was clearly a threat to no one, and the weapons of mass destruction have proved elusive. The war did nothing for the fight against terrorism. Only ideologues believe that Baghdad had anything to do with al Qaeda - and if the Bush administration were really worried about "homeland security," it'd be funding the defense of ports, nuclear reactors, and chemical plants rather than starting imperial wars and alienating people by the billions. Sure, Saddam's regime was monstrous - which is one of the reasons Washington supported it up until the invasion of Kuwait. The Ba'ath Party loved to kill Communists - as many as 150,000 according to some estimates - and the CIA's relationship with Saddam goes back to 1959 . ..."
"... Iraq has lots of oil , and there's little doubt that that's why it was at the first pole of the axis of evil to get hit. (Iran does too, but it's a much tougher nut to crack - four times as big, and not weakened by war and sanctions.) ..."
Apr 30, 2003 | www.leftbusinessobserver.com

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small c rappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
- Michael Ledeen , holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute

Actually, the U.S. had been beating Iraq's head against the wall for a dozen years, with sanctions and bombing. The sanctions alone killed over a million Iraqis, far more than have been done in by weapons of mass destruction throughout history. But Ledeen's indiscreet remark, delivered at an AEI conference and reported by Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online , does capture some of what the war on Iraq is about.

And what is this "business" Ledeen says we mean? Oil, of course, of which more in a bit. Ditto construction contracts for Bechtel. But it's more than that - nothing less than the desire, often expressed with little shame nor euphemism, to run the world. Is there anything new about that?

The answer is, of course, yes and no. In a rather odd article in the London Review of Books , Perry Anderson argued that there wasn't, and wondered aloud why the U.S. war on Iraq had excited such unprecedented worldwide opposition - even, in all places, within the U.S. - when earlier episodes of imperial violence hadn't. Anderson, who's edited New Left Review for years, but who has almost no connection to actual politics attributed this strange explosion not to a popular outburst of anti-imperialism, but to a cultural antipathy to the Bush administration.

Presumably that antipathy belongs to the realm of the " merely cultural ," and is of no great political significance to Anderson. But it should be. U.S. culture has long been afflicted with a brutally reactionary and self-righteous version of Christian fundamentalism, but it's never had such influence over the state. The president thinks himself on a mission from God, the Attorney General opens the business day with a prayer meeting, and the Pentagon's idea of a Good Friday service is to invite Franklin Graham , who's pronounced Islam a "wicked and evil religion," to deliver the homily, in which he promised that Jesus was returning soon. For the hard core, the Iraq war is a sign of the end times, and the hard core are in power.

Lots of people, in the U.S. and abroad, recognize that and are alarmed. And lots also recognize that the Bush regime represents an intensification of imperial ambition. Though the administration has been discreet, many of its private sector intellectuals have been using the words "imperialism" and " empire " openly and with glee. Not everyone of the millions who marched against the war in the months before it started was a conscious anti-imperialist, but they all sensed the intensification, and were further alarmed.

While itself avoiding the difficult word "empire," the Bush administration has been rather clear about its long-term aims. According to their official national security strategy and the documents published by the Project for a New American Century (which served as an administration-in-waiting during the Clinton years) their goal is to assure U.S. dominance and prevent the emergence of any rival powers. First step in that agenda is the remaking of the Middle East - and they're quite open about this as well. We all know the countries that are on the list; the only remaining issues are sequence and strategy. But that's not the whole of the agenda. They're essentially promising a permanent state of war, some overt, some covert, but one that could take decades.

Imperial returns?

Why? The answers aren't self-evident. Certainly the war on Iraq had little to do with its public justifications. Iraq was clearly a threat to no one, and the weapons of mass destruction have proved elusive. The war did nothing for the fight against terrorism. Only ideologues believe that Baghdad had anything to do with al Qaeda - and if the Bush administration were really worried about "homeland security," it'd be funding the defense of ports, nuclear reactors, and chemical plants rather than starting imperial wars and alienating people by the billions. Sure, Saddam's regime was monstrous - which is one of the reasons Washington supported it up until the invasion of Kuwait. The Ba'ath Party loved to kill Communists - as many as 150,000 according to some estimates - and the CIA's relationship with Saddam goes back to 1959 .

Iraq has lots of oil , and there's little doubt that that's why it was at the first pole of the axis of evil to get hit. (Iran does too, but it's a much tougher nut to crack - four times as big, and not weakened by war and sanctions.)

It now looks fairly certain that the U.S. will, in some form, claim some large piece of Iraq's oil. The details need to be worked out; clarifying the legal situation could be very complicated, given the rampantly illegal nature of the regime change. Rebuilding Iraq's oil industry will be very expensive and could take years. There could be some nice profits down the line for big oil companies - billions a year - but the broader economic benefits for the U.S. aren't so clear. A U.S.-dominated Iraq could pump heavily and undermine OPEC, but too low an oil price would wreck the domestic U.S. oil industry, something the Bush gang presumably cares about. Mexico would be driven into penury, which could mean another debt crisis and lots of human traffic heading north over the Rio Grande. Lower oil prices would be a boon to most industrial economies, but they'd give the U.S. no special advantage over its principal economic rivals.

It's sometimes said that U.S. dominance of the Middle East gives Washington a chokehold over oil supplies to Europe and Japan. But how might that work? Deep production cutbacks and price spikes would hurt everyone. Targeted sales restrictions would be the equivalent of acts of war, and if the U.S. is willing to take that route, a blockade would be a lot more efficient. The world oil market is gigantic and complex, and it's not clear how a tap could be turned in Kirkuk that would shut down the gas pumps in Kyoto or Milan.

Writers like David Harvey argue that the U.S. is trying to compensate for its eroding economic power by asserting its military dominance. Maybe. It's certainly fascinating that Bush's unilateralism has to be financed by gobs of foreign money - and he gets his tax cuts, he'll have to order up even bigger gobs. But it's hard to see what rival threatens the U.S. economically; neither the EU nor Japan is thriving. Nor is there any evidence that the Bush administration is thinking seriously about economic policy, domestic or international, or even thinking at all. The economic staff is mostly dim and marginal. What really seems to excite this gang of supposed conservatives is the exercise of raw state power.

Jealous rivals

And while the Bushies want to prevent the emergence of imperial rivals , they may only be encouraging that. Sure, the EU is badly divided within itself; it has a hard enough time picking a top central banker , let alone deciding on a common foreign policy. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is already semi-apologizing to Bush for his intemperate language in criticizing the war - not that Bush has started taking his calls. But over the longer term, some kind of political unification is Europe's only hope for acting like a remotely credible world power. It's tempting to read French and German objections to the Iraq war as emerging not from principle, but from the wounded narcissism of former imperial powers rendered marginal by American might. Separately, they'll surely hang. But a politically united Europe could, with time, come to challenge U.S. power, just as the euro is beginning to look like a credible rival to the dollar.

(Speaking of the euro, there's a theory circulating on the net that the U.S. went to war because Iraq wanted to price its oil in euros, not dollars. That's grossly overheated speculation. More on this and related issues when LBO begins an investigation of the political economy of oil in the next issue.)

An even more interesting rivalry scenario would involve an alliance of the EU and Russia. Russia is no longer the wreck it was for most of the 1990s. The economy has been growing and the mildly authoritarian Putin has imposed political stability. Russia, which has substantial oil interests in Iraq that are threatened by U.S. control, strongly opposed the war, and at least factions within the Russian intelligence agency were reportedly feeding information unfriendly to the U.S. to the website Iraqwar.ru . There's a lot recommending an EU-Russia alliance; Europe could supply technology and finance, and Russia could supply energy, and together they could constitute at least an embryonic counterweight to U.S. power.

So the U.S. may not get out of Iraq what the Bush administration is hoping for. It certainly can't want democracy in Iraq or the rest of the region, since free votes could well lead to nationalist and Islamist governments who don't view ExxonMobil as the divine agent that Bush seems to. A New York Times piece celebrated the outbreak of democracy in Basra, while conceding that the mayor is a former Iraqi admiral appointed by the British. The lead writers of the new constitution are likely to be American law professors; Iraqis, of course, aren't up to the task themselves.

Certainly the appointment of Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner (Ret.) - one of the few superannuated brass not to have enjoyed a consulting contract with a major TV network - to be the top civilian official guiding the postwar reconstruction of Iraq speaks volumes. A retired general is barely a civilian, and Garner's most recent job was as president of SY Technology , a military contractor that worked with Israeli security in developing the Arrow antimissile system. He loves antimissile systems; after the first Gulf War, he enthused about the Patriot's performance with claims that turned out to be nonsense. He's on record as having praised Israel's handling of the intifada. If that's his model of how to handle restive subject populations, there's lots of trouble ahead.

lightness

In the early days of the war, when things weren't going so well for the "coalition," it was said that the force was too light. But after the sandstorm cleared and the snipers were mowed down, that alleged lightness became a widely praised virtue. But that force was light only by American standards: 300,000 troops; an endless rain of Tomahawks, JDAMs, and MOABs; thousands of vehicles, from Humvees to Abrams tanks; hundreds of aircraft, from Apaches to B-1s; several flotillas of naval support - and enormous quantities of expensive petroleum products. It takes five gallons of fuel just to start an Abrams tank, and after that it gets a mile per gallon. And filling one up is no bargain. Though the military buys fuel at a wholesale price of 84¢ a gallon, after all the expenses of getting it to the front lines are added in, the final cost is about $150 a gallon. That's a steal compared to Afghanistan, where fuel is helicoptered in, pushing the cost to $600/gallon. Rummy's "lightness" is of the sort that only a $10 trillion economy can afford.

The Bush gang doesn't even try to keep up appearances, handing out contracts for Iraq's reconstruction to U.S. firms even before the shooting stopped, and guarding only the oil and interior ministries against looters. If Washington gets its way, Iraq will be rebuilt according to the fondest dreams of the Heritage Foundation staff, with the educational system reworked by an American contractor, the TV programmed by the Pentagon, the ports run by a rabidly antiunion firm, the police run by the Texas-based military contractor Dyncorp , and the oil taken out of state hands and appropriately privatized.

That's the way they'd like it to be. But the sailing may not be so smooth. It looks like Iraqis are viewing the Americans as occupiers, not liberators. It's going to be hard enough to remake Iraq that taking on Syria or Iran may be a bit premature. But that doesn't mean they won't try. It's a cliché of trade negotiations that liberalization is like riding a bicycle - you have to keep riding forward or else you'll fall over. The same could be said of an imperial agenda: if you want to remake the world, or a big chunk of it, there's little time to pause and catch your breath, since doubt or opposition could gain the upper hand. Which makes stoking that opposition more urgent than ever.

Losing it all

There's a feeling around that Bush is now politically invulnerable . Certainly the atmosphere is one of almost coercive patriotism. That mood was nicely illustrated by an incident in Houston in mid-March. A teenager attending a rodeo failed to stand along with the rest of the crowd during a playing of Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American," a dreadful country song that has become a kind of private-sector national anthem for the yahoo demographic, thanks to its truculent unthinking jingoism. A patriot standing behind the defiantly seated teen started taunting him, tugging on his ear as an additional provocation. The two ended up in a fight, and then under arrest.

There's a lot of that going around, for sure. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins get disinvited from events, websites nominate traitors for trial by military tribunal, and talk radio hosts organize CD-smashings. But things aren't hopeless. A close analysis of Greenwood's text might suggest why. The song's core argument is contained in its two most famous lines: "I'm proud to be an American/where at least I know I'm free." But the oft-overlooked opening reads: "If tomorrow all the things were gone/I'd worked for all my life," the singer would still be a grateful patriot. That's precisely the condition lots of Americans find themselves in. More than two million jobs have disappeared in the last two years. Millions of Americans have seen their retirement savings wiped out by the bear market, and over a million filed for bankruptcy last year. Most states and cities are experiencing their worst fiscal crises since the 1930s, with massive service cuts and layoffs imminent. In the song, such loss doesn't matter, but reality is often less accommodating than a song.

As the nearby graphs show, W's ratings are much lower than his father's at the end of Gulf War I, and his disapproval ratings much higher. Their theocratic and repressive agenda is deeply unpopular with large parts of the U.S. population. Spending scores of billions on destroying and rebuilding Iraq while at home health clinics are closing and teachers working without pay is potentially incendiary. Foreign adventures have never been popular with the American public (much to the distress of the ruling elite). An peace movement that could draw the links among warmongering, austerity, and repression has great political potential. Just a month or two ago, hundreds of thousands were marching in American streets to protest the imminent war. Though that movement now looks a bit dispirited and demobilized, it's unlikely that that kind of energy will just disappear into the ether.

[May 13, 2019] 'Politically motivated' Butina verdict a 'shameful stain' on US justice Russian Foreign Ministry -- RT World News

May 13, 2019 | www.rt.com

The Russian Foreign Ministry called the 18-month prison sentence for student Maria Butina a "politically motivated" decision "in the spirit of McCarthyism," adding that her only crime was being a Russian citizen in the US. "From the moment of her arrest we have pointed out that the accusations against her of attempting to influence internal American political processes were completely contrived and fabricated, " the ministry said in a statement on Friday. " Her confession, which was coerced through harsh imprisonment conditions and threats of a lengthy sentence, changes nothing."

Butina was sentenced on Friday to 18 months in prison and deportation from the US by a federal judge in Washington, DC. She was arrested by the FBI in June last year and charged with being an unregistered foreign agent. The nine months she has already spent in jail – much of it in solitary confinement – will count towards her sentence.

Also on rt.com 'Politically motivated' Butina verdict a 'shameful stain' on US justice – Russian Foreign Ministry

The American University graduate who sought to make connections with the National Rifle Association ended up pleading guilty in December to failing to register as an agent of the Russian government. Moscow has repeatedly said it had nothing to do with Butina, who prior to her studies in the US campaigned for American-style gun laws in Russia.

" Our compatriot's only crime was being a citizen of Russia. She became a victim of a bitter battle between political forces inside the US, and an unbridled anti-Russian campaign in the spirit of McCarthyism," the Foreign Ministry said on Friday, describing Butina's sentence as a "shameful stain on the American judicial system " that put itself in the service of a blatantly political agenda.

Butina's arrest came at the height of 'Russiagate' hysteria, as special counsel Robert Mueller investigated claims by Democrats that President Donald Trump and his campaign "colluded" with Russia during the 2016 US presidential election. Mueller's report, made public last week, found no collusion, but claimed – without evidence – that Russia did interfere in the election. Butina was not mentioned anywhere in its 448 pages .

Breathless media reports about Butina's indictment smeared her as a spy who traded sex for influence in order to embed herself into the US political establishment. That allegation persisted in the media even after prosecutors quietly dropped it and apologized for misreading one of her text messages.

[May 13, 2019] Although NSA discovered irregularities in the Spring, they didn't get aired until October? Maybe because he reports to the President?

May 13, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , May 11, 2019 5:21:12 PM | link

< Full Spectrum Domino @49>

Good info. Very interesting. I was aware of Mike Rogers role but I discounted it because:

1) It came too late (October 2016) and got little real media attention before the election.

2) Although NSA discovered irregularities in the Spring, they didn't get aired until October? Maybe because he reports to the President?

3) It is said that Rogers informed Trump. Yet Trump didn't little if anything as a result.


In the end, "Russiagate" continued despite Rogers info. Almost as though the Deep State consensus was to initiate a new McCarthyism - which has been my operating theory for months.

<> <> <> <> <> <> <>

Will anyone be prosecuted for "Russiagate"? I doubt it. Everyone involve will say they were doing their jobs. Their "intent" based on patriotic duty.

[May 13, 2019] How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election by Larry C. Johnson

Notable quotes:
"... The entire Mueller investigation is a smoke screen for the crimes of a cabal of people (of which Clinton, Biden and even possibly Obama by association are a part) that engaged in "pay to play" over many, many years. The Mueller report could have been completed in 6 months, instead it took 22 months and was released, after Barr's appointment and AFTER the mid-terms, when its conclusions would have supported the Republican vote. This is not a coincidence, the report is a political document that walked the tightrope between DNC interests and those of "fair play" to the POTUS. ..."
May 07, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

Deniz, May 10, 2019 at 09:13

I highly recommend this interview by former Intel Officer Tony Shaffer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITvnDtuRIgM

Bob Van Noy, May 10, 2019 at 08:11

This discussion wouldn't be complete without a Craig Murray link and his commentary is as excellent as it is here.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/05/the-real-muellergate-scandal/

Anon, May 10, 2019 at 05:52

Papadopoulos was first targeted when he worked for the Carson campaign. The spying was obviously much broader. Bongino is killing it on his podcast.

Paul Surovell, May 10, 2019 at 01:08

Two corrections:

Carter Page in his testimony before the House Intelligence committee said he had never met Igor Sechin. He said that he saw Dmitry Peskov in an RT studio and "nodded" at him, but never spoke or otherwise interacted with him.

Regula, May 9, 2019 at 21:09

Great reporting, thank you.

There is one facet in this entire dirty scheme that gets overlooked: a number of the actions by the Dems and the FBI served for the exclusive purpose to force Trump to fire his best campaign managers and secretary of defense and other persons in his campaign and presidency:

The Dems were afraid Trump would win with Manafort as his campaign manager, and acted to force Trump to fire him just as earlier, one of his managers who turned out to be effective, was besmeared by a reporter of having forced her to fall when she clearly didn't, just to besmear Trump as being a mysogenist.

The same was done to Flynn, who was in favor of good relations with Russia. Flynn really didn't do anything wrong other than to endanger the Dem's agenda to topple Putin. In the same vein, Bannon and two other of the more populist advisors who wanted a more peaceful conduct for the US, got eliminated by the earlier chief of staff Kelly until he got fired himself.

The same repeated with AG Barr, who is clearly a threat to the entire Dem cabal, but hasn't been successfully far despite shameful congressional inquiries during Barr's testimony.

Looked at in tandem with the Russiagate accusations and Mueller's investigations, it is obvious that this entire web of lies and repeated attempts at entrapment of Trump employees was constructed by Clinton in complicity with not just the FBI and CIA, but with the DNC and the entire deep state, to either oust, impeach or incarcerate Trump and, if that didn't work, to force him and corner him into continuing Obama/Bush's agenda against Russia.

Sadly, Trump fell for it and the US policies which he pursues are the same now as always: hegemony with regime change wars to keep the MIC in control of the entire US economy.

O Society, May 8, 2019 at 18:48

Excellent interview here with Aaron Mate and his father Gabor on the psychology of the mass hallucination we call Russiagate. Same as Consortium News, Aaron was out in front of the propaganda snow machine calling the hoax like it is from its inception.

http://opensociet.org/2019/05/08/america-in-denial-aaron-and-gabor-mate-on-the-psychology-of-russiagate/

Eileen Kuch, May 8, 2019 at 15:47

The truth about American and foreign Intelligence agencies did, indeed, interfere in both the 2016 Presidential election and the Mid-term Congressional elections just last November. Russia's Intelligence agencies never interfered, but Britain's did.

Fortunately, MI5 and MI6 failed to get Hillary Clinton into the White House in the 2016 elections. Had Hillary won, the world would've been totally destroyed in a 3rd World War with China, Russia, and Iran.

Both of these British Intelligence agencies are hostile to POTUS Donald J. Trump, and they don't hide it. They can't control him like they could his predecessors going back to LBJ.

Peter Halligan, May 8, 2019 at 15:06

The entire Mueller investigation is a smoke screen for the crimes of a cabal of people (of which Clinton, Biden and even possibly Obama by association are a part) that engaged in "pay to play" over many, many years. The Mueller report could have been completed in 6 months, instead it took 22 months and was released, after Barr's appointment and AFTER the mid-terms, when its conclusions would have supported the Republican vote. This is not a coincidence, the report is a political document that walked the tightrope between DNC interests and those of "fair play" to the POTUS.

The "smoke screen" has diverted attention from the criminality of the cabal that engaged in all sorts of nefarious activity during the DNC infiltration of important federal agencies, from State, through Justice and housing etc. You need only to think about why Clinton instructed Bleachbit to violate a subpoena instructing the the persevration of all State emails by using "a cloth", to now that soemthing is seriously wrong. Factor in the activities of Wasserman-Schuz and the Awan brothers ad then factor in ACTUAL collusion with Russia by Obama and Clinton and the DNC cabal is guilty of collusion and obstruction of justice (remember also how Bill got half a million for a short speect in an event in Moscow sponsored by a Kremlin owned bank and, of course, his tarmac antics). The smoke screen consisted of the classic tactic of "projection" of a criminals crimes onto his rival. Hopefully, those guilty of starting the smoke screen are not the last to face the consequences of breaing the law and the activities of the crime cabal over the prior 10-15 years are also investigated, before we all get bored with the confirmation of political criminality. Just because a poltical party has control of the DoJ and DoS, does not mean that these agencies become the tools for organized crime.

Pablo Diablo, May 8, 2019 at 15:03

Trump is a "loose cannon". This whole Mueller investigation was an attempt to "control" him. It worked. Got the Neocons back in power and fed The War Machine very well.

[May 13, 2019] EXPLOSIVE FOIA Documents Show Evidence of Weissmann/Mueller Entrapment Scheme

Notable quotes:
"... Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by the special counsel ; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed { Go Deep } where George Papadopoulos was approached by a known CIA operative named Charles Tawil. ..."
"... In interviews Papadopoulos said he was uncomfortable with the way the encounters had taken place. He became suspect of Tawil's motives; something didn't feel right. Instead of keeping the cash, Papadopoulos gave the money to an attorney in Greece before traveling back to the U.S. on July 27th, 2017. ..."
"... Upon arrival at Dulles airport on July 27th, 2017, Robert Mueller had FBI agents waiting. Papadopoulos was stopped and his bags were searched; however, he did not have the cash because he smartly left it in Greece with his lawyer. Papadopoulos was detained overnight by FBI agents, and questioned. ..."
"... [W]hen he was arrested [detained] at Dulles Airport on July 27 after coming off a flight from Munich, prosecutors had no warrant for him and no indictment or criminal complaint . The complaint would be filed the following morning and approved by Howell in Washington. ..."
"... All of it suggests something of a scramble, rather than a carefully prepared plan to take Papadopoulos into custody. ( more ) ..."
"... Papadopoulos has stated the special counsel threatened him with charges of acting as a unregistered agent for Israel. There's a clear picture here . ..."
"... #1) Papadopoulos was lured to Israel and paid in Israel to give the outline of a FARA premise (ie. Papadopoulos is an agent of Israel). #2) Bringing $10,000 (or more) in cash into the U.S., without reporting, is a violation of U.S. treasury laws. Add into that aspect the FARA violation and the money can be compounded into #3) laundering charges. ..."
"... Andrew Weissmann was conducting an entrapment scheme that would have ended up with three violations of law: (1) Treasury violation; (2) FARA violation; (3) Money laundering . All it needed was Papadopoulos to carry the undeclared cash into the U.S. ..."
"... Lastly, to repeat, this entire scenario was constructed by the DOJ/FBI team operation in 2017. The members of the Special Counsel were running the entrapment operation; the FBI agents were participating in the operation. This is not *investigating* criminal conduct; this is manufacturing criminal conduct. ..."
"... Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was in charge of the Mueller Special Counsel. ..."
"... The only way DAG Rosenstein and Robert Mueller didn't know about the operation is if they both claim that Andrew Weissmann was completely rogue and in control over the FBI agents. ..."
May 11, 2019 | theconservativetreehouse.com

Recently release FOIA documents into the special counsel team of Robert Mueller reveal the remarkable trail of a 2017 entrapment scheme conducted by Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann to target George Papadopoulos.

[Hat Tip to Undercover Huber and Rosie Memos who have been reviewing documents .]

Before digging into the details it is important to note this is a DOJ/FBI entrapment operation being conducted in 2017 by the special counsel ; this is not prior to the 2016 election. The detail surrounds a series of events previously discussed { Go Deep } where George Papadopoulos was approached by a known CIA operative named Charles Tawil.

In 2017 George Papadopoulos and his wife Simona were approached in Greece by a known CIA/FBI operative , Charles Tawil. Mr. Tawil enlisted George as a business consultant, under the auspices of energy development interests, and invited him to Israel.

On June 8th, 2017, in Israel under very suspicious circumstances, where Papadopoulos felt very unnerved, Mr. Tawil hands him $10,000 in cash for future consultancy based on a $10k/month retainer .

On June 9th, 2017, according to his book, Papadopoulos and Tawil fly back to Cyprus.

... ... ...

In interviews Papadopoulos said he was uncomfortable with the way the encounters had taken place. He became suspect of Tawil's motives; something didn't feel right. Instead of keeping the cash, Papadopoulos gave the money to an attorney in Greece before traveling back to the U.S. on July 27th, 2017.

Upon arrival at Dulles airport on July 27th, 2017, Robert Mueller had FBI agents waiting. Papadopoulos was stopped and his bags were searched; however, he did not have the cash because he smartly left it in Greece with his lawyer. Papadopoulos was detained overnight by FBI agents, and questioned.

[ ] Stanley said Papadopoulos arrived on a Lufthansa flight from Munich that touched down at about 7 p.m . on July 27, and the FBI intercepted him as soon as he got off the plane.

"He was arrested [detained] before he got to Customs and he was then held at the airport before being brought to a law enforcement office," Stanley recalled. ( link )

According to Politico :

[W]hen he was arrested [detained] at Dulles Airport on July 27 after coming off a flight from Munich, prosecutors had no warrant for him and no indictment or criminal complaint . The complaint would be filed the following morning and approved by Howell in Washington.

And when prosecutors filed the complaint the next day they got a spoken order from Howell to seal it, but followed up with a written request that they could take to the magistrate in Alexandria, where they showed up almost an hour later than she expected.

All of it suggests something of a scramble, rather than a carefully prepared plan to take Papadopoulos into custody. ( more )

Here's where the recent revelations come in. According to Andrew Weissmann's schedule on June 13th, 2017, he was in conversations surrounding the basis of a Cyprus Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT):

(Page #5 of FOIA pdf)

So overlaying the timeline:

6/8/17 US intelligence asset Charles Tawil gives George $10K cash in Israel 6/9/17 George Papadopoulos flies to Cyprus w $10K 6/13/17 Andrew Weissmann starts series of "Cyprus MLAT" meetings with FBI 6/13/17 Andrew Weissmann phone call w/ FBI Money Laundering and Asset Recovery "MLARS" section of FBI.

It would appear Weissmann was well aware of the Cyprus "Tawil operation" and engaged in communication regarding Cyprus. Additionally, he was discussing "Money Laundering and Asset Recovery" w/ FBI. [MLARS Link ]

Taken in combination with hindsight of the search for the cash, and lack of a pre-existing warrant at the airport, this is clear evidence of a coordinated operation to entrap Papadopoulos.

Remember, the preferred approach toward targeting Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn and George Papadopoulos surrounded FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act) lobbying violations. Papadopoulos has stated the special counsel threatened him with charges of acting as a unregistered agent for Israel. There's a clear picture here .

#1) Papadopoulos was lured to Israel and paid in Israel to give the outline of a FARA premise (ie. Papadopoulos is an agent of Israel). #2) Bringing $10,000 (or more) in cash into the U.S., without reporting, is a violation of U.S. treasury laws. Add into that aspect the FARA violation and the money can be compounded into #3) laundering charges.

[A "laundering" charge applies if the money is illegally obtained. The FARA violation would be the *illegal* aspect making the treasury charges heavier. Note: the use of the airport baggage-check avoids the need for a search warrant.]

Andrew Weissmann was conducting an entrapment scheme that would have ended up with three violations of law: (1) Treasury violation; (2) FARA violation; (3) Money laundering . All it needed was Papadopoulos to carry the undeclared cash into the U.S.

However, because Papadopoulos suspected something, and left the money in Greece with his lawyers, upon arrival at the airport the operation collapsed in reverse . No money means no treasury violation, no laundering and no evidence of the consultancy agreement (which would have been repurposed in the DOJ filing to mean lobbying for Israel via Mr. Tawil who would have become a confidential informant and witness).

That operational collapse is why the FBI agents were "scrambling" at the airport and why they had no pre-existing criminal complaint. The entrapment's success was contingent upon the cash.

Lastly, to repeat, this entire scenario was constructed by the DOJ/FBI team operation in 2017. The members of the Special Counsel were running the entrapment operation; the FBI agents were participating in the operation. This is not *investigating* criminal conduct; this is manufacturing criminal conduct.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was in charge of the Mueller Special Counsel.

The only way DAG Rosenstein and Robert Mueller didn't know about the operation is if they both claim that Andrew Weissmann was completely rogue and in control over the FBI agents.

Oh, wait, what does the Mueller report say about the FBI agents and their chain-of-legal guidance and command?

... ... ...

With events happening in June/July 2017 Rod Rosenstein, Robert Mueller, former FBI legal counsel Jim Baker, former Deputy FBI Director McCabe, together with current FBI legal counsel Dana Boente and current FBI Director Wray were what? Hoodwinked?

Yeah, ok. Sure.

I digress.

[May 13, 2019] Brennan has no vision or compass or pronciples. Like a dog, he will hunt and maul anything that is approved by the Power

It might well be that Trump treatment of 9/11 as unsolved investigation was one of the red flag for establishment (and personally Brennan) which led to launching of Russiagate.
Notable quotes:
"... But why was Brennan so anti-Syria and anti-Ukraine? What personal motives did he have? ..."
"... Can someone please explain what it was about Donald Trump at the time that this all began, that Brennan would set all of this in motion? ..."
"... For one thing, Trump, early in his campaign stated that he had suspicions regarding official explanations of 9/11. ..."
May 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

Priss Factor , says: Website May 11, 2019 at 2:12 pm GMT

But why was Brennan so anti-Syria and anti-Ukraine? What personal motives did he have? Why target two regimes esp hated by Jews?

It seems he's like McCain. A mean nasty son of a bitch who likes to play world politics. It's his bullying nature. But he has no vision or compass. Like a dog, he will hunt and maul anything that is approved by the Power. And that Power is Jewish.

Dogs love to hunt but only get to hunt what the master orders it to. If the master orders the dog to love rabbits and hunt raccoon, it will do just that. If the master orders it to love raccoon and hunt rabbits, it will do that. In the end, the dog doesn't care what it hunts as long as it's given a chance to hunt something.

Same with these goy cuck dogs. Their lives feel fulfilled only in Big Power bully mode. They need to beat up on something. But they have no vision or compass, no agency. They look over their shoulders to the Power to tell them what to love(Israel and Saudis) and what to hate(Iran and Syria and Russia).

Dogs growl at dogs, not at their masters. When Trump came around, Brennan didn't see him as the new master but as a bad dog(or even wolf) displeasing his master, the Jews. Like McCain, a very loyal dog. Also, a dog feels jealousy that the master may take to a new dog over him.

Alas, Trump has been neutered and tamed by Jews.

R Boyd , says: May 11, 2019 at 4:45 pm GMT
Can someone please explain what it was about Donald Trump at the time that this all began, that Brennan would set all of this in motion?
Carroll Price , says: May 12, 2019 at 12:26 pm GMT
@R Boyd For one thing, Trump, early in his campaign stated that he had suspicions regarding official explanations of 9/11.
Digital Samizdat , says: May 11, 2019 at 9:40 pm GMT
@R Boyd Why? Because of Trump's stated desire to pull out of Syria and to work for a détente with Russia, for openers.
Cassander , says: May 11, 2019 at 10:58 pm GMT
"The real architect of the Trump-Russia treachery was the boss-man at the nation's premier intelligence agency, the CIA."

–Which begs the question whether the 'real architect' was authorized by his superior in the WH. How could he not have been?

FB , says: Website May 12, 2019 at 4:44 am GMT
Excellent hard nosed article by Mike

I have to think that the pyramid goes higher still Brennan working for Hillary and Hillary working for the combined plutocratic imperialist elite that make up the core of the Clinton Foundation's billions these scumbags will never be touched for buying Killary, but maybe Killary will end up in an orange jumpsuit, right beside her gopher Brennan

And maybe Trump finally has his hands untied to start doing the things he promised time will tell

anon [354] Disclaimer , says: May 12, 2019 at 4:55 am GMT

Mike Whitney:

But evidence of wrongdoing is not proof that Comey was the ringleader, he was just the hapless sad sack who was left holding the bag. The truth is, Comey was just a reluctant follower. The real architect of the Trump-Russia treachery was the boss-man at the nation's premier intelligence agency, the CIA.

suspect you are correct

Brennan seems like the real evil, Comey just a doofus

The Scalpel , says: Website May 12, 2019 at 5:33 am GMT
@R Boyd "Can someone please explain what it was about Donald Trump at the time that this all began, that Brennan would set all of this in motion?"

He was not truly compromised thus controlled by the spooks. So they were trying to achieve that, and it appears based on Trump's behavior, that they did achieve that

[May 13, 2019] Still voting for Big Brother You might be a low-information voter

Great video. https://www.youtube.com/embed/0vvvPZd6_D8 If it does not remind you something I can't help
May 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Still voting for Big Brother? You might be a low-information voter.

by hedgeless_horseman Fri, 05/10/2019 - 12:31 1 SHARES

In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Two Minutes' Hate is a daily period in which Party members of the society of Oceania must watch a film depicting the Party's enemies (notably Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers) and express their hatred for them.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0vvvPZd6_D8

In case anyone is interested, here is what Goldstein actually says in that scene (you can't make it out, cause the crowd is shouting over it, but that's what he says according to the subtitles)

"Nothing the Party says is true. Nothing the Party does is good. Even the war itself isn't real. The Party wants you to believe we are at war so as to channel your aggression away from their rightful target: the Party. Big Brother is not real. He is pure fiction, created by the Party. The real rulers of the State are unknown, faceless manipulators who, because they are not known are able to wield power without let or hindrance. People of Oceania, you are being duped. The Party doesn't serve the people -- it serves itself. We are not at war with Eurasia. You are being made into obedient, stupid slaves of the Party. Open your eyes. See the evil that is happening to you. The Party drops bombs on its own citizens. It is the Party, not the Eurasians, who are our enemies."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vvvPZd6_D8

... ... ...

samuraitrader , 1 day ago link

a good watch, Oliver Stone's Untold History of the USA

http://www.untoldhistory.com/

great article HH

Oldwood , 1 day ago link

Don't underestimate the power of progressive self hate indoctrination reinforced by decades of corruption.

There are no "good guys" but those professing our allegiance to empathy are voting for suicide.

Yes it is important to understand the motivations of those who would do us harm, but empathy suggests that we substitute the interests of others over our own.

If we are to understand anything, it is that humanity has been studied longer than anything else on the planet, and as such, there are no alternatives not anticipated and planned for.

From off the grid prepper to the head of Goldman Sachs, each plays a role.

This is a Matrix, but not by AI but by multigenerational planning, and a thorough understanding of human behavior, as they would with every variety of plant and animal on the planet.

Scipio Africanuz , 1 day ago link

Conservatives were accomplices too, cheers...

STONEHILLADY , 1 day ago link

CIA chief from the 80s William Casey said, "We know our job is complete when all the information the American people get is 100% lies."

The only truth in this world comes from the Bible, which tells right from the get go how the Earth was made, it's a special FIXED place, no where does it say we are a spinning ball, everything spins around us. There is water above the firmament which are the heavens where god lives and there are waters under the firmament on the Earth where man lives. The Antarctic surrounds the flat plane and it is approx. 67,000 miles all the way around and the north pole and Polaris are the center. In the 50s they tried to blast thru the firmament and failed, with their rockets and all this NASA stuff is just another way to drain money from you and you can never go to the moon, what you saw was made in a Hollywood basement. The evil in this world wants to take you away from God because Lucifer was jealous God made you in his imagine and he wants to prove you are no good and will take down as many of us as he can just prove his point.

[May 12, 2019] Is rabid warmonger, neocon chickenhawk Bolton a swinger? That is a mental picture that s deeply disturbing yet funny at the same time

Highly recommended!
In this case he looks like Bill Clinton impersonalization ;-) That's probably how Adelson controls Bolton ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Larry Flint had offered a Million dollars to anyone who had proof of republican sexual exploits. He was quickly fingered by someone who attended those clubs. He was forced to accept a temporary position and quietly resigned after a few months so as to avoid facing questions. ..."
May 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

FB , says: Website May 11, 2019 at 4:46 pm GMT

@J. Gutierrez Thanks for putting together this commentary J

Bolton a swinger ? LOL that's a mental picture that's deeply disturbing yet funny at the same time

J. Gutierrez , says: May 11, 2019 at 10:42 pm GMT

@FB Yeah brother, that POS was called out during his confirmation hearings during baby Bush's presidency. Larry Flint had offered a Million dollars to anyone who had proof of republican sexual exploits. He was quickly fingered by someone who attended those clubs. He was forced to accept a temporary position and quietly resigned after a few months so as to avoid facing questions.

Someone said they saw him proposition a teenage girl outside one of the swinger clubs he frequented.

Glad you enjoyed the piece take care brother.

[May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

Highly recommended!
A really interesting discussion. the problem with discussion on new direction of the USA foreign policy is that forces that control the current forign policy will not allow any changes. Russiagate was in part a paranoid reaction of the Deep State to the possibility of detente with Russia and also questioning "neoliberal sacred truth" like who did 9/11 (to suggest that Bush is guilty was a clear "Red Flag") and critical attribute to forrign wars which feed so many Imperial servants.
BTW Trump completely disappointed his supporters in the foreign policy is continuing to accelerate that direction
May 10, 2019 | www.youtube.com

darren alevi 2 months ago

Here is how you chart a Progressive foreign policy stop treating the US intelligence agencies of the CIA and FBI as orgs of integrity. Ban all foreign lobbying so no foreign government can influence foreign policy.

Disband the Veto powers that the US holds over the UN security council. Prosecute former Presidents and Government officials for the illegal regime change wars.

Connect with other progressive politicians around the world such as Jeremy Corbyn, Jean Luc Melenchon and Moon Jae In. End the arms race and begin a peaceful space race to colonize the moon diverting funds from the military industrial complex into something fulfilling.

Peter Knopfler 2 months ago

What BULL while world under the fog of Berlin wall down, USA VP Bush attacks Panama 8000 Marines kills 3500 panamanians , gives the banks to CIA, therefore Panama papers. Another coup in Latin America. When V.P. Bush "we had to get over the Vietnam Syndrome". So Killing 3500 people , to get over the loser spirit, suicidal influence from Vietnam. SHAME USA more hate for Americans. And Now Venezuela, more Shame and Hate for Americans. Yankee go home, Gringo stay home is chanted once more.

Ron Widelec 2 months ago

We need an Anti-imperialist league like 100 ago. And an anti-war caucus in congress!

Michael 26CD 2 months ago

The audio is a little off especially for a couple speakers but this discussion is great. Trump ran on a non-interventionist platform, but in his typical dishonest fashion, he appointed people who are developing usable nukes like characters out of Dr. Strangelove. Nuclear weapons and climate change are both existential threats that all the world needs to act together to address.

asbeautifulasasunset 2 months ago

17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6 trillion wars and the $750 billion annual Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the debate between Democratic presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the primary issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states. Thanks for anything you can do.

Jim R2 months ago

President Eisenhower's farewell address warned us of the very thing that is happening today with the industrial military complex and the power and influence that that entity weilds.

chickendinner2012, 2 months ago

End the wars, no more imperialism, instead have fair trade prioritizing countries that have a living wage and aren't waging war etc. No more supporting massive human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE etc. and we need to get three of the most aggressive countries the F UK US coalition that constantly invades and bombs everyone they want to steal from to stop doing war, stop coups, stop covert sabotage, stop sanctions.

asbeautifulasasunset, 2 months ago

17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6 trillion wars and the $750 billion annual Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the debate between Democratic presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the primary issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states. Thanks for anything you can do.

carol wagner sudol2 months ago

Israel today has become a nazi like state. period. That says it all. This is heart-breaking. Gaza is simply a concentration camp.

Tom Hall, 2 months ago

All our post WWII foreign policy has been about securing maintaining and enhancing corporate commercial interests. What would seem to progressives as catastrophic failures are in fact monumental achievements of wealth creation and concentration. The billions spent on think tanks to develop policy are mostly about how to develop grand narratives that conceal the true beneficiaries of US foreign policy and create fear, uncertainty and insecurity at home and abroad.

[May 12, 2019] Is rabid warmonger, neocon chickenhawk Bolton a swinger? That is a mental picture that s deeply disturbing yet funny at the same time

Highly recommended!
In this case he looks like Bill Clinton impersonalization ;-) That's probably how Adelson controls Bolton ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Larry Flint had offered a Million dollars to anyone who had proof of republican sexual exploits. He was quickly fingered by someone who attended those clubs. He was forced to accept a temporary position and quietly resigned after a few months so as to avoid facing questions. ..."
May 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

FB , says: Website May 11, 2019 at 4:46 pm GMT

@J. Gutierrez Thanks for putting together this commentary J

Bolton a swinger ? LOL that's a mental picture that's deeply disturbing yet funny at the same time

J. Gutierrez , says: May 11, 2019 at 10:42 pm GMT

@FB Yeah brother, that POS was called out during his confirmation hearings during baby Bush's presidency. Larry Flint had offered a Million dollars to anyone who had proof of republican sexual exploits. He was quickly fingered by someone who attended those clubs. He was forced to accept a temporary position and quietly resigned after a few months so as to avoid facing questions.

Someone said they saw him proposition a teenage girl outside one of the swinger clubs he frequented.

Glad you enjoyed the piece take care brother.

[May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

Highly recommended!
A really interesting discussion. the problem with discussion on new direction of the USA foreign policy is that forces that control the current forign policy will not allow any changes. Russiagate was in part a paranoid reaction of the Deep State to the possibility of detente with Russia and also questioning "neoliberal sacred truth" like who did 9/11 (to suggest that Bush is guilty was a clear "Red Flag") and critical attribute to forrign wars which feed so many Imperial servants.
BTW Trump completely disappointed his supporters in the foreign policy is continuing to accelerate that direction
May 10, 2019 | www.youtube.com

darren alevi 2 months ago

Here is how you chart a Progressive foreign policy stop treating the US intelligence agencies of the CIA and FBI as orgs of integrity. Ban all foreign lobbying so no foreign government can influence foreign policy.

Disband the Veto powers that the US holds over the UN security council. Prosecute former Presidents and Government officials for the illegal regime change wars.

Connect with other progressive politicians around the world such as Jeremy Corbyn, Jean Luc Melenchon and Moon Jae In. End the arms race and begin a peaceful space race to colonize the moon diverting funds from the military industrial complex into something fulfilling.

Peter Knopfler 2 months ago

What BULL while world under the fog of Berlin wall down, USA VP Bush attacks Panama 8000 Marines kills 3500 panamanians , gives the banks to CIA, therefore Panama papers. Another coup in Latin America. When V.P. Bush "we had to get over the Vietnam Syndrome". So Killing 3500 people , to get over the loser spirit, suicidal influence from Vietnam. SHAME USA more hate for Americans. And Now Venezuela, more Shame and Hate for Americans. Yankee go home, Gringo stay home is chanted once more.

Ron Widelec 2 months ago

We need an Anti-imperialist league like 100 ago. And an anti-war caucus in congress!

Michael 26CD 2 months ago

The audio is a little off especially for a couple speakers but this discussion is great. Trump ran on a non-interventionist platform, but in his typical dishonest fashion, he appointed people who are developing usable nukes like characters out of Dr. Strangelove. Nuclear weapons and climate change are both existential threats that all the world needs to act together to address.

asbeautifulasasunset 2 months ago

17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6 trillion wars and the $750 billion annual Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the debate between Democratic presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the primary issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states. Thanks for anything you can do.

Jim R2 months ago

President Eisenhower's farewell address warned us of the very thing that is happening today with the industrial military complex and the power and influence that that entity weilds.

chickendinner2012, 2 months ago

End the wars, no more imperialism, instead have fair trade prioritizing countries that have a living wage and aren't waging war etc. No more supporting massive human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE etc. and we need to get three of the most aggressive countries the F UK US coalition that constantly invades and bombs everyone they want to steal from to stop doing war, stop coups, stop covert sabotage, stop sanctions.

asbeautifulasasunset, 2 months ago

17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6 trillion wars and the $750 billion annual Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the debate between Democratic presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the primary issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states. Thanks for anything you can do.

carol wagner sudol2 months ago

Israel today has become a nazi like state. period. That says it all. This is heart-breaking. Gaza is simply a concentration camp.

Tom Hall, 2 months ago

All our post WWII foreign policy has been about securing maintaining and enhancing corporate commercial interests. What would seem to progressives as catastrophic failures are in fact monumental achievements of wealth creation and concentration. The billions spent on think tanks to develop policy are mostly about how to develop grand narratives that conceal the true beneficiaries of US foreign policy and create fear, uncertainty and insecurity at home and abroad.

[May 12, 2019] Fox Host Tries to Get Tulsi Gabbard to Attack Bernie -- She Doesn't Take the Bait

Tulsi is really natural born diplomat of high class.
May 12, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Kira Knudsen , 3 weeks ago

Would love a Sanders/Gabbard ticket.

Matt Ides , 3 weeks ago

Tulsi also wipes out the age issue as Bernie VP and that can set her up for future Prez run again.

AboxoroxRoxursox , 3 weeks ago

Make sure to donate to Tulsi and Bernie.

[May 12, 2019] The Trans-Pacific Partnership, stopping Brexit, and abandoning an Atlanticist foreign policy were opposed by a CIA and corporate political establishment, who created the fake Steele dossier to bring down Trump

Apr 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

George Papadopoulos's story on why he thinks that the RussiaGate probe was started is something out of The Parallax View but, alas, rings true: the Trans-Pacific Partnership, stopping Brexit, and abandoning an Atlanticist foreign policy were opposed by a CIA and corporate political establishment, who created the fake Steele dossier to bring down Trump (the TPP, and also Brexit, I believe, were in the dossier as reasons why "Putin" wanted Trump to win)

Anne Jaclard | Apr 18, 2019 4:33:48 PM | link

Michael Tracey has a long interview with George Papadopoulos at Patreon .

Don't like Papadopoulos but it's worth listening to.

[May 12, 2019] Brennan and 9/11

May 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

librul , May 11, 2019 6:47:57 PM | link

Saudi "Nawaf Al-Hamzi, one of the 9/11 hijackers," as mentioned by b above,
arrived in the US in January of 2000.

The CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was there in Saudi Arabia during what
would have been the early planning stages for 9/11.

He left this position and traveled back to the US to become chief of staff
to CIA director George Tenet in 1999. This was just before the 9/11 hijackers
themselves began arriving.

I have not been able to locate a time table. Was it days, weeks or months
before Nawaf Al-Hamzi arrived in the US that John Brennan, CIA station chief
in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, relocated to the US?
**Anyone have John Brennan's arrival date in 1999?**

[May 12, 2019] Judgment Day For John Brennan by Mike Whitney

Notable quotes:
"... "The evidence is plain–there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments, to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia. The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the US and UK and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign." ( "How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election" , Larry C. Johnson, Consortium News) ..."
"... "Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve several requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the British and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan was able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the concerns about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped. And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee." ( "The Conspiracy Against Trump" , Philip Giraldi) ..."
"... According to a report in The Guardian (where the story first appeared.): "GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters) played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016. One source called the British eavesdropping agency the "principal whistleblower". ("British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia ", The Guardian) ..."
"... Okay, so Brennan twisted a few arms and got his foreign Intel buddies to make uncorroborated claims that got the investigative ball rolling, but then what? If there was any meat to Brennan's foreign intel, then Mueller would have dug it up and used it in his report, right? But he didn't. Why? ..."
"... Because there was nothing there, the whole thing was a sham from the get go. Brennan probably "sexed up" the intelligence so it would sound like something it really wasn't. (Think: WMD) Again, if there was even a scintilla of hard evidence that Trump's campaign assistants were in bed with Russia, Mueller would have shrieked it from every mountaintop across America. But he didn't, because there wasn't any. There was no cooperation, no conspiracy and no collusion. Trump was falsely accused. End of story. ..."
May 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

Sometime in the next 4 weeks, the Justice Department's inspector general will release an internal review that will reveal the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Among other matters, the IG's report is expected to determine "whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place." Critics of the Trump-collusion probe believe that there was never probable cause that a crime had been committed, therefore, there was no legal basis for launching the investigation. The findings of the Mueller report– that there was no cooperation or collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign– seem to underscore this broader point and suggest that the fictitious Trump-Russia connection was merely a pretext for spying on the campaign of a Beltway outsider whose political views clashed with those of the foreign policy establishment. In any event, the upcoming release of the Horowitz report will formally end the the first phase of the long-running Russiagate scandal and mark the beginning of Phase 2, in which high-profile officials from the previous administration face criminal prosecution for their role in what looks to be a botched attempt at a coup d'etat.

Here's a brief summary from political analyst, Larry C. Johnson, who previously worked at the CIA and U.S. State Department:

"The evidence is plain–there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments, to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia. The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the US and UK and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign." ( "How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election" , Larry C. Johnson, Consortium News)

Bingo. Attorney General William Barr has already stated his belief that spying on the Trump campaign "did occur" and that, in his mind, it is "a big deal". He also reiterated his commitment to thoroughly investigate the matter in order to find out whether the spying was adequately "predicated", that is, whether the FBI followed the required protocols for such spying, or not. Barr already knows the answer to this question as he is fully aware of the fact that the FBI used information that they knew was false to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Having no hard evidence of cooperation with the Kremlin, senior-level FBI officials and their counterparts at the Obama Justice Department used parts of an "opposition research" document (The Trump Dossier) that they knew was unreliable to procure warrants that allowed them to treat a presidential campaign the same way the intelligence agencies treat foreign enemies; using electronic surveillance, wiretapping, confidential informants and "honey trap" schemes designed to gather embarrassing or incriminating information on their target. Barr knows all of this already which is why the Democrats are doing everything in their power to discredit him and have him removed from office. His determination to "get to the bottom of this" is not just a threat to the FBI, it's a threat to multiple agencies that may have had a hand in this expansive domestic espionage operation including the CIA, the NSA, the DOJ, the State Department and, perhaps, even the Obama White House. No one knows yet how far up the political food-chain the skulduggery actually goes, but Barr appears to be serious about finding out.

Here's Barr again: "Many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single confidential informant .I would like to find out whether that is in fact true. It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence effort designed to stop the threat as it's being represented."

In other words, Barr knows that the Trump campaign was riddled with spies and he is going to do his damnedest to find out what happened. He also knows that the FISA warrants were improperly obtained using the shabby disinformation from an opposition research "hit piece" (The Steele Dossier) that was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, just like he knows that government agents had concocted a strategy for leaking classified information to the media to fuel the public hysteria. Barr knows most of what happened already. It's just a matter of compiling the research in the proper format and delivering it in a way that helps to emphasize how trusted government agents abused their power by pursuing a vicious partisan plot to either destroy the president's reputation or force him from office. Like Barr said, that's a "big deal".

The name that seems to feature larger than all others in the ongoing Trump-Russia saga, is James Comey, the former FBI Director who oversaw the spying operations that are now under investigation at the DOJ. But was Comey really the central figure in these felonious hi-jinks or was he a mere lieutenant following directives from someone more powerful than himself? While the preponderance of new evidence suggests that the FBI was deeply involved, it does not answer this crucial question. For example, just this week, a report by veteran journalist John Solomon, showed that former British spy Christopher Steele admitted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec that his "Trump Dossier" was "political research", implying that the contents couldn't be trusted because they were shaped by Steele's political bias. Kavalec passed along this information to the FBI which shrugged it off and then, just days later, used the dossier to obtain warrants to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Think about that for a minute. The FBI had "written proof . that Steele had a political motive", but went ahead and used the dossier to procure the warrants anyway. That's what I'd call a premeditated felony.

But evidence of wrongdoing is not proof that Comey was the ringleader, he was just the hapless sad sack who was left holding the bag. The truth is, Comey was just a reluctant follower. The real architect of the Trump-Russia treachery was the boss-man at the nation's premier intelligence agency, the CIA. That's where the headwaters of this shameful burlesque are located, in Langley. More on that in a minute, but first check out this excerpt from an article at The Hill which sums up Comey's role fairly well:

(There) "will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what's causing the 360-degree head spin.

"There are early indicators that troubling behaviors may have occurred in all three scenarios. Barr will want to zero in on a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA director.

In addition, the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources ("assets," in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious "government investigator" posing as Halper's assistant and cited in The New York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence case." ( "James Comey is in trouble and he knows it" , The Hill)

Why is the Inspector General so curious as to whether Comey "was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director? And why did Comey draw from "a cast of characters " . that "all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources"??

Could it be that Comey was just an unwitting pawn in a domestic regime change operation launched by former CIA Director John Brennan, the one public figure who has expressed greater personal animus towards Trump than all the others combined? Could Trump's promise to normalize relations with Russia have intensified Brennan's visceral hatred of him given the fact that Russia had frustrated Brennan's strategic plans in Ukraine and Syria? Keep in mind, the CIA had been arming, training and providing logistical support to the Sunni militants who were trying to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al Assad. Putin's intervention crushed the jihadist militias delivering a humiliating defeat to Generalissimo Brennan who, soon after, left office in disgrace. Isn't this at least part of the reason why Brennan hates Trump?

Regular readers of this column know that I have always thought that Brennan was the central figure in the Trump-Russia charade. It was Brennan who first referred the case to Comey, just as it was Brennan who "hand-picked" the analysts who stitched together the dodgy Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which said that "Putin and the Russian government aspired to help Trump's election chances.") It was also Brennan who persuaded Harry Reid to petition Comey to open an investigation in the first place. Brennan was chief instigator of the Trump-Russia fiasco, the omniscient puppet-master who persuaded Clapper and Comey to do his bidding while still-unidentified agents strategically leaked stories to the media to inflame passions and sow social unrest. At every turn, Brennan was there guiding the perfidious project along. According to journalist Philip Giraldi, the CIA may have even assisted in the obtaining of FISA warrants on Trump campaign aids as this excerpt from an article at The Unz Review indicates:

"Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve several requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the British and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan was able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the concerns about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped. And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee." ( "The Conspiracy Against Trump" , Philip Giraldi)

Can you see how important this is? The FBI was having trouble getting warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, so Brennan helped them out by persuading his foreign intelligence allies (the British and other European intelligence services) to come up with bogus "intercepted communications linked to American sources," which helped to secure the FISA warrants. We have no idea of what these foreign agents heard on these alleged intercepted communications, all we know is that they were effectively used to achieve Brennan's ultimate objective, which was to acquire the means of taking down Trump via a relentless and expansive surveillance campaign.

According to a report in The Guardian (where the story first appeared.): "GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters) played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016. One source called the British eavesdropping agency the "principal whistleblower". ("British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia ", The Guardian)

Okay, so Brennan twisted a few arms and got his foreign Intel buddies to make uncorroborated claims that got the investigative ball rolling, but then what? If there was any meat to Brennan's foreign intel, then Mueller would have dug it up and used it in his report, right? But he didn't. Why?

Because there was nothing there, the whole thing was a sham from the get go. Brennan probably "sexed up" the intelligence so it would sound like something it really wasn't. (Think: WMD) Again, if there was even a scintilla of hard evidence that Trump's campaign assistants were in bed with Russia, Mueller would have shrieked it from every mountaintop across America. But he didn't, because there wasn't any. There was no cooperation, no conspiracy and no collusion. Trump was falsely accused. End of story.

Here's more from the same article:

"The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team and Moscow ahead of the US election." (Guardian)

"The extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team and Moscow"???

Really? This is precisely the type of hyperventilating journalism that fueled the absurd conspiracy theory that the president of the United States was a Russian agent. It's hard to believe that we're even discussing the matter at this point.

There was an interesting aside in John Solomon's article that suggests that he might be thinking along the same lines. He says: "One legal justification cited for redacting the Oct. 13, 2016, email is the National Security Act of 1947, which can be used to shield communications involving the CIA or the White House National Security Council."

Why would Solomon draw attention to "to shielding communications involving the CIA or the White House", after all, the bulk of his article focused on the State Department and the FBI? Is he suggesting that the CIA and Obama White House may have been involved in these spying shenanigans, is that why Kavalec's damning notes (which stated that Steele's dossier could not be trusted.) have been retroactively classified?

Take a look at this email from the FBI's chief investigator in the Russia collusion probe, Peter Strzok, to his fellow agents in April 2017.

"I'm beginning to think the agency (CIA) got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn't shared it completely with us. Might explain all those weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as source of some leaks." -Peter Strzok.

Ha! So even the FBI's chief investigator was in the dark about the CIA's shadowy machinations behind the scenes. Clearly, Brennan wanted to prevent the other junta leaders from fully knowing what he was up to.

All of this is bound to come out in the inspector general's report sometime in the next month or so. Both Attorney General William Barr and IG Horowitz appear to be fully committed to revealing the criminal leaks, the illegal electronic surveillance, the improperly obtained FISA warrants, and the multiple confidential human sources (spies) that were placed in the Trump campaign. They are going to face withering criticism for their efforts, but they are resolutely moving forward all the same. Bravo, for that.

Bottom line: The agents and officials who conducted this seditious attack on the presidency never thought they'd be held accountable for their crimes. But they were wrong, and now their day of reckoning is fast approaching. The main players in this palace coup are about to be exposed, criminally charged and prosecuted. Some of them will probably wind up in jail.

"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine."

[May 12, 2019] Neoconservativsm is a distinct ideology brought into being by U of Chicago professor Leo Strauss and his ex-Trotskyist acolytes. It is American exceptionalism on steroids and its core tenet is that American society needs elite rulers to guide the retarded masses who are too stupid to know what their best interests are.

May 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Daniel , May 12, 2019 5:03:44 AM | link

< @82 Don Bacon>

Neoconservativsm is a distinct ideology brought into being by U of Chicago professor Leo Strauss and his ex-Trotskyist acolytes. It is American exceptionalism on steroids and its core tenet is that American society needs elite rulers to guide the retarded masses who are too stupid to know what their best interests are.

To keep them in line the masses need to be fed grandiose myths they can believe in and rally around.

This is where America the Good as the shining beacon on the hill, slaying evil wherever it is found to make the world safe for freedom comes in.

George H.W. Bush, Dubya's daddy, called them "the crazies in the basement."

somebody , May 12, 2019 7:21:19 AM | link

The Shia fellas
First, the neocons and some Israeli strategists had long seen the Shia as "outsiders" opposed to the mainstream Arab (read: Sunni) nationalist current, and over decades had developed an affinity for the Shia as potential allies in the region, much as they saw the Lebanese Maronite Christians and other minorities in the Arab world.

"There existed a supercilious 'Shiaphilia' among certain academics, Iraqi political exiles, policy wonks and policymakers linked to the Bush administration," wrote Ahmed Hashim, author of Insurgency and Counter-insurgency in Iraq and a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College. At the American Enterprise Institute and among partisans of Chalabi's INC, it was routine to speak of "de-Arabizing" Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, a favorite theme of the INC's favored intellectual, Kanan Makiya.

Second, the neocons had been seduced by Chalabi, who convinced them that Iraq's Shia leaders would abandon their ties to Iran and rush to embrace a secular, pro-American political culture. Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival and a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, attributes this to the neocons' "reading of the Israeli experience in the invasion of south Lebanon in 1982. That's why they had this vocabulary of 'They're going to greet us with flowers,' because that's what happened in south Lebanon -- the Israeli army was greeted by Shia villagers with flowers and rice."

Third, the neocons believed that moderate, nonpolitical Shia in Iraq would establish Najaf, the Iraqi shrine city that is the holiest place in Shia Islam, as a new center of gravity that would overpower Qom, the clerical powerhouse city in Iran. They believed that the "good Shia," supposedly "quietist" ayatollahs such as Ali al-Sistani, would emerge to present a frontal challenge to Iran's militant "bad Shia," followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A leading proponent of this theory was David Wurmser, a radical neocon who is currently Vice President Cheney's top Middle East adviser. "They deluded themselves into thinking that these links operated only one way -- with Najaf undermining Qom," says Nasr. "They assumed that it was Iraq that would influence Iran, not that Iran would influence Iraq."

[May 12, 2019] The Brainwashing Of A Nation

May 12, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Unlike Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate, brainwashing does not turn people into hypnotized zombies who would be ready to kill a presidential candidate at a command. Instead, it transforms them into the sort of people who would be willing to kill someone for political reasons.

The distinction is why so few people understand the sources of political radicalism and violence.

Brainwashing isn't magic, but it can look like magic. The sleight of hand that causes us to think so is our firm belief in our reason and free will. It's easier to believe in changing minds through hypnotism and drugs, than to understand, what the successful practitioners of brainwashing do, that the human mind is more malleable than we like to think, and that the subconscious is more powerful than the conscious.

The art and science of brainwashing is well known. We don't know it because we choose not to.

Brainwashing happens every day. It doesn't have to mean a complete transformation of identity. On the simplest level, it means compelling someone to believe something that isn't true.

It's as simple as two cops browbeating an innocent suspect into believing that he's guilty. The officers and the suspect won't see their interaction as brainwashing. The officers can honestly believe in his guilt. And, at the end of the process, the suspect will also believe that he committed the crime. He will even be able to describe in great detail how he committed it. That's common, everyday brainwashing.

The key elements of brainwashing are present in that cold room with the peeling paint on the walls. Those three elements are control, crisis and emotional resonance. To successfully brainwash someone, you have to control their environment, force a crisis on them, and then tap into core emotions, fear, love, guilt, hate, shame, and guide them through the crisis by accepting and internalizing a new belief.

The belief can be anything, but the pseudo-religious ritual taps into an emotional core requiring them to believe that they were bad people, and that by accepting this new belief, they are now good people.

This false conversion is the essence of brainwashing and of leftist political awakening narratives.

The human mind, like the human body, adapts to a crisis with a fight-or-flight response. Brainwashing forces the mind into a flight response. Once in flight mode, the mind can rationalize a new belief as a protective behavior that will keep it safe. Even when, as in the case of the suspect, the new belief will actually destroy his life. Fight or flight mode inhibits long term thinking. In panic mode, destructive and suicidal behaviors seem like solutions because they offer an escape from unbearable chemical stresses.

There's a good biological reason for that. Our minds stop us from thinking too much in a crisis so that we can take urgent action, like running into a fire or at a gunman, that our rational minds might not allow us to do. But that same function can be 'hacked' by artificially putting people into fight-or-flight mode to break them down and shortcut their higher reasoning functions. Decisions reached subconsciously in fight-or-flight mode will then be rationalized and internalized after the initial crisis has passed.

When that internalization happens, then the brainwashing is real.

Almost anyone can be compelled to say anything under enough stress. Many can be forced to believe it. The acid test of brainwashing is whether they will retain that belief once fight-or-flight mode passes.

Cults, abusive relationships and totalitarian movements maintain 'total crisis', shutting down higher reasoning, creating a permanent state of stress by triggering fight-or-flight responses unpredictably. This leads to Stockholm Syndrome, where the captive tries to control their fate through total emotional identification with their captor, pack behavior, loss of identity and will, and eventually suicide or death.

Total crisis leads to burnout, emotional exhaustion, detachment from friends and family, and violence.

How do you brainwash a nation?

Control the national environment, force a crisis on the country, and tap into their fear and guilt...

... ... ...

The panic over Trump is a micro-crisis of the sort that leftists detonate in the political opposition, but the fear, anger, terror, stress and violence on display are typical of the crisis mode of fight-or-flight.

The "Resistance" isn't a political movement. It's a political cult whose crisis was the 2016 election. Its irrational belief that Trump is a Russian agent is typical of the conspiratorial mindset of cults. Its inability to understand that its convictions are completely irrational show how brainwashing works.

The 2016 election inflicted on its members a loss of control. Trump became the crisis embodying their loss of control. Their fear, guilt and anger induced stress that altered their behavior and beliefs.

And, within the very recent past, millions came to believe that Trump was really working for Moscow.

This is brainwashing on a timescale so immediate that we can easily recall it. Yet most of us have trouble understanding how it works and why it works. And that lack of understanding is holding us back.

How can smart people fall for minor variations of the same lie in generation after generation?

Smart people make the best brainwashing targets. Cults recruit bright students on college campuses, they target aspiring executives looking for leadership training, and dissatisfied professionals searching for meaning. Cults are rarely made up of stupid people. They're made up of smart, vulnerable people.

Human beings don't behave rationally. We rationalize our behavior.

The more people rationalize, the more they can be brainwashed. Your old Casio digital watch can't be hacked. Even if it were hacked, there's not much it could be made to do. Your smartphone can be hacked and made to do more. Your desktop can be hacked and made to do even more. Intelligence doesn't make us less vulnerable to being manipulated, it leaves us much more vulnerable.

The political brainwashing campaign in this country targets the upper class and the middle class. The best subjects for brainwashing are intelligent and emotionally vulnerable. They're easier to manipulate by using the gap between their emotions and their reason, and their emotional instability makes it easier to force them into crisis mode. The ideal subjects are in their teens and their early twenties. In modern times, that's a period in which identity is still developing, and can be fractured and remade.

... ... ...

The techniques aren't new. They're as evil and old as time itself.

... ... ...

A Sentinel , 1 hour ago link

Why leave out facts?

project mockingbird is real. Started by Dulles or another Frankfurt school communist type, they had many goals, none good.

Zh commenters have picked up on the neocon agenda it promulgated. It did that and worse.

Peter Smithhhh , 2 hours ago link

Great Article.

The targets do have things in common, even curiosity, but I believe the brainwashed have some social needs that are handily exploited and money could be one of them. The mode for communist brainwashing is rage for the enemies, acceptance into a new just group, small operations at first that guarantee success, then the big sell that usually gets the activist committing a felony and if unlucky in prison. Then once in prison, you have a soldier that works for no other cause. What do you think is playing over those expensive headphones we see every day, nursery rhymes?

OAW , 2 hours ago link

It appears to my simple mind that, left could be replace by right and nothing else would be different!

Peter Smithhhh , 2 hours ago link

Yep, it doesn't matter what side of the fence a person is on, in fact, there are going to be people that let us down. We just get back up and keep on going.

beemasters , 2 hours ago link

TV combines audio and visual components to render a very effective method of brainwashing. It also doesn't provide the audience much time to analyze a message before they are bombarded with the next series of information. The presenters' personas are usually appealing for target messages to be absorbed and accepted by the masses.

medium giraffe , 2 hours ago link

'The left!' 'The left!'

And yet representatives from both sides agree that the Pentagon should receive plenty of funding, do plenty of murdering, and undergo no audits (despite a $20T 'accounting error').

Brainwashing is not confined to the left it seems.

A Sentinel , 2 hours ago link

Corruption is not related to either side but one side is ruled far more by emotion, right? They're the ones who are most easily sent into spasms of negative emotion that a "savior" like Obama is to fix.

they called him that, remember?

VideoEng_NC , 3 hours ago link

Pretty lengthy article to explain that even though "fly over" country may have their "hold my beer" moments, large swaths of urban America are dumb Schiffs.

TAALR Swift , 3 hours ago link

For those who missed it, this dovetails nicely yesterday's article by Hedgeless Horseman:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-10/voting-big-brother-you-might-be-low-information-voter

Another classic from HH, worth adding to one's archives.

CatInTheHat , 3 hours ago link

That works both ways, as both parties are systems of brainwashing that manifests itself into the divisions and cult like behavior in the country that we see now.

That there are two distinct parties is an illusion, the greatest sleight of hand and the elite know it and that's why they exploit both 2 party cult followers in the way that they do with racism, bigotry, xenophobia, identity politics, etc, that keep followers at each other's throats.

The 2016 election was traumatic for many people. The Democratic party fooled millions in exploiting their hope that change was at hand through Bernie Sanders. His betrayal of millions who followed him gave him million of dollars to be their voice, turned out to be a complete fake and fraud. A shepherd for the very candidate they HATED and would otherwise never vote for. Blaming Russia was too convenient. Those millions of US who knew that the primary had been rigged by Clinton & the DNC who had the GALL to cast blame on a foreign power for the outright rejection of the DNC anointed one, DemExited in the millions and refused to be brainwashed into believing the blatant absurdity that in order to buy this ******** Russiagate narrative you had to believe that Russia influenced our vote, MY VOTE. Think about that a minute. Did Russia influence the idiots who voted for Clinton? Even I didn't believe that. But that is indeed what you had to swallow if you remained within the confines of the party of cult persuasion. Russiagate itself IS a cult.

Those of us that knew Clinton/DNC rigged the primary against Sanders yet who suspected Sanders was also in on it when he threw voters under the bus for Clinton at the Convention in the most malicious way, could not be brainwashed. We understood the source of the trauma, keeping our heads clear through crisis.

I see the same in Trump followers. His ability to exploit racism and bigotry keeps Trumptards enthralled. But Trump has broken ever promise and is a SWINDLER. This Zionist stooge betrayal of his base in such a profound way has them all clinging to him MORE hoping that this round of 64735D chess is going to be the one where he is the DC outsider he pretended to be. Just like Bernie but in a different way.

To be clear means seeing you've been swindled. Admitting you're vulnerable to exploitation is hard, especially when that vulnerability lies in hate, through racism and bigotry or when it simply stands to make you feel a damned fool.

Personally I tend to admire people who can admit they were taken. The same happened to me with Prez Hopey Changey and again in believing in Bernie.

Brainwashing can't work when you admit you were taken by a psychopath or two. Doing so just leads to more growth I think. 100 million did not vote in 2016, the majority vote. They didn't much care for the lesser of two evils level of brainwashing that keeps people subservient to the 2 party cult like system

I take comfort in that.

King Friday the 13th , 3 hours ago link

Good article however there is no connection between IQ and susceptibility to propaganda. The idea that smarter people are more susceptible is absurd. In college the radical leftists always tended to be the stupidest. While highly intelligent people are indeed brainwashed every day, the idea that being stupid protects you is contrary to my entire life experience and to basic common sense. For example, if only those with IQ's above 140 were allowed to vote, the result would be a much freer republic because no amount of propaganda can convince smart people that they are better off being government slaves. It's the brainwashed dummies that crave big brother ****.

[May 12, 2019] Jimmy Dore The US is a MAFIA STATE! - YouTube

Red baiting is very profitable. That's why it now imprinted in most common US citizens brains and that's why we have on trillion (if counted from all sources)
May 12, 2019 | www.youtube.com
sneezer 1 month ago Jimmy is great, hopefully they dont suicide him. Narratives of Old 1 month ago (edited) mafia state...?? ridiculous.. in a 1000 years the mafia could not kill as many people the US killed in Iraq in few years .. we are beyond redemption.....

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View 3 replies Hide replies Gypsy Jiver 1 week ago As George Carlin said the US is a oil company with a army. Ruly Tores 1 week ago You are right. The USA is a Criminal State, War Dependent Economy Carl Hopkinson 5 days ago Wow!! George Carlin would be proud of you, Jimmy Dore !!!! Premed1981 1 month ago HOLY SHIT Ive never seen jimmy spitting so much fire and truth even on his own show world peace 1 week ago Jimmy Dore is the greatest. God bless this man for his honesty and bravery. Chloe Lin 1 week ago (edited) Jimmy Dore a great and patriotic American who wants to save the nation! 👍👍👍 globalman 1 week ago Afshins becomes a bit uncomfortable when Jimmy includes former Prime Minister Tony Blair in his list of war criminals. I salute Dore for the light shed on Obama. He was just another tool of the Shadow government and I lament how so many were duped into believing that Obama was a new hope. They played the black man card and the usamericans fell for it wanting to show themselves as beyond racism. Another fallacy as racism is alive and well in the usa. There have been NO legitimate presidential leaders since Eisenhower and JFK. They were the last .... all the rest have been pawns and then to puppets. Just wish Jimmy was not quite so shrill and hysterical because that tends to turn off those who would otherwise be in total agreement. I understand his personality and character but too many people judge the superficial first leaving them deaf to important content. The reference to the Mafia is very accurate. The USA secret agencies learned most of what they know to carry out their clandestine and criminal activities from two main sources. The Nazis and the 3 Mafia branches in the USA. That is, the Mafia was the Italian families, Murder Inc. were the Jewish version and the Irish Mob. The very close contact and raids, interrogations, torture of these men taught the government agencies all they needed to know. The CIA has been training terrorists to overthrow governments since many, many decades for the USA's own self serving desires. They never change their game plan even when those very CIA trained terrorists turn around and bite the hands that fed them and become enemies of the USA as we see around the globe. Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and numerous other places. Googazon Twitterberg 5 days ago Jimmy's the only remotely sane progressive. Anne Wood 2 days ago (edited) Absolute truth spoken by Jimmy Dore and most people of the US and UK are in total agreement. I can tell you as a Brit Tony Blair is known as a war criminal by the people in the UK. multiplexed 2 days ago Corporatism at it's best... even the democrats don't realize they're corporatists. Pasha Pasovski 1 week ago Mafia used to have honor, US never did!

2 3 ArdaSu2008 1 month ago (edited) I totally agree with Jimmy on his critics about corrupt US and European governments, intelligence services and MSM. They all, both right and social democrats, have been serving to the military industrial complex and big corporations and headed to a total destruction of economy and the environment globally. Their failure is also the main reason to those uprising ultra right wing populistic parties all over the Europe. Fucking bastards, liers and disgusting puppets are all of them! Politis aziminas alétheia 1 week ago Jimmy Dore at his best! The arrogant and criminal U.S.-empire-rulers and their corporate-news-media are in a process of disintegration! And Jimmy is right, "it's also the European Union"! CandC68 1 month ago (edited) So, Jimmy, how do you really feel? Our country has gone insane. Politics is a beauty pageant. Business is organized crime. News (MSM) is disinformation. Comedians are the best source for information. Our leaders want education to be eliminated so we are incapable of thinking. What's not to like. Mrs Miggins 2 days ago Jimmy mentioned some very good journalists who are on his progressive wavelength, but he didn't mention some of the serious conservative investigative reporters like John Solomon, Sara Carter, Kimberly Strassel, Chuck Ross, Paul Sperry, Judicial Watch and Dan Bongino, all of whom have done the hard work necessary to piece together names, places, dates, documentation that exposes the RussiaRussiaRussia hoax. We owe all of these people respect for putting themselves on the line to try and inform the public. AniishAu 1 month ago That's the best Jimmy Dore I've heard! He needs an extra to breath for him.

1 2 Mark El 1 month ago Oligarchs used us veterans & continue to use service members as their "mafia muscle."

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View reply Hide replies Rossboe1 1 month ago (edited) Jeremy Scahill , Mehdi Hassan and Matt Taibbi also great journalists.

[May 12, 2019] Bernie seems to lack the spine. Tulsi on the other hand is a tough cookie -- but could she ever find adequate military and DOJ support?

May 12, 2019 | caucus99percent.com
@dfarrah

The real story behind this or any other presidency is Who could stand up to the deep state/neocons?

Trump is an outsider who is up against powerful, entrenched forces who apparently do whatever they want to do. (and they would be the same had Bernie won the presidency).

Bernie seems to lack the spine. Tulsi on the other hand is a tough cookie--but could she ever find adequate military and DOJ support?

[May 12, 2019] Trump about to dump Bolton caucus99percent

May 12, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Speaking of getting led around by the nose, we come to one Gina Haspel's great deceptions. This deception plays directly into the hands of Russiagaters. This woman, supposedly brought into CIA leadership in order to demolish the agency, is proving quite adept in perpetuating its reign of terror. Again, we have a neocon undermining Trump's prestige and authority.

[May 12, 2019] Gina Haspel Conned Trump with British Lies into Expelling Russian Diplomats over Skripal Case

Apr 17, 2019 | larouchepub.com

(EIRNS) -- The New York Times ran a story yesterday titled, "Gina Haspel Relies on Spy Skills To Connect with Trump. He Doesn't Always Listen." Based on interviews with former and current CIA agents who worked with CIA Director Haspel (but not interviewing her), the Times praises her skills and attempts to denigrate Trump, but they also retail a story about her and Trump which could cost Haspel deeply.

Following the March 2018 breaking of the Skripal poisoning story in England, the Times writes, Trump had initially "written off the poisoning as part of legitimate spy games, distasteful but within the bounds of espionage." Haspel, on the other hand, was backing London's demand for Trump to blame Russia immediately and expel dozens of Russian diplomats.

Writes the Times:

"During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy CIA director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the President that the 'strong option' was to expel 60 diplomats.

"To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the only victims of Russia's attack.

"Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives."

This appeal reportedly swayed Trump to go along with Haspel's advice.

If it sounds like the British "White Helmet" terrorists in Syria faking pictures of children being hit with chemical weapons to convince Trump to bomb Syrian targets, it is indeed precisely the same.

Former British Ambassador Craig Murray, an outspoken critic of these British imperial lies and atrocities, posted a response today to the Times garbage on his blog. He states first that yet another truth behind the Skripal lies was revealed recently by police, acknowledging that "the perfume bottle Charlie Rowley found was sealed and could not have been the container used on the Skripals." He goes on: "It took nine months for us to learn that, by a truly wonderful coincidence, the first person to find the Skripals ill on the bench was the Chief Nurse of the British Army."

But on the Haspel story in the Times, Murray is furious. "The problem is," he writes,

"there were no hospitalized children. No children have been reported as becoming ill following their duck feeding with the Skripals. We have heard from one of the parents that they were shown by the police extremely clear [closed-circuit surveillance] CCTV footage of the duck feeding, which has never been made public. Surely if the child had been hospitalized, the parent would have mentioned it?"

He quotes Dr. Stephen Davies of Salisbury Hospital, who wrote to the New York Times on March 14 stating clearly that no children had been hospitalized, and that every person who came to the hospital fearing they had been contaminated had no symptoms and tests turned out negative. Murray states:

"We also know that the duck feeding was the time that Boshirov and Petrov [the alleged Russian culprits] were physically closest to the Skripals. But this is the first time there has ever been any mention of any harm to the ducks. Dead ducks would have been noticed by the public."

It appears that the British Empire is the dead duck in this myth.

[May 11, 2019] Whitney Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan

Highly recommended!
May 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Whitney: Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan

by Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2019 - 11:05 48 SHARES Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,

Sometime in the next 4 weeks, the Justice Department's inspector general will release an internal review that will reveal the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Among other matters, the IG's report is expected to determine "whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place." Critics of the Trump-collusion probe believe that there was never probable cause that a crime had been committed, therefore, there was no legal basis for launching the investigation.

The findings of the Mueller report– that there was no cooperation or collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign– seem to underscore this broader point and suggest that the fictitious Trump-Russia connection was merely a pretext for spying on the campaign of a Beltway outsider whose political views clashed with those of the foreign policy establishment.

In any event, the upcoming release of the Horowitz report will formally end the the first phase of the long-running Russiagate scandal and mark the beginning of Phase 2, in which high-profile officials from the previous administration face criminal prosecution for their role in what looks to be a botched attempt at a coup d'etat.

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Here's a brief summary from political analyst, Larry C. Johnson, who previously worked at the CIA and U.S. State Department:

" The evidence is plain–there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments, to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia. The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the US and UK and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign." ( "How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election" , Larry C. Johnson, Consortium News)

Bingo. Attorney General William Barr has already stated his belief that spying on the Trump campaign "did occur" and that, in his mind, it is "a big deal". He also reiterated his commitment to thoroughly investigate the matter in order to find out whether the spying was adequately "predicated", that is, whether the FBI followed the required protocols for such spying, or not. Barr already knows the answer to this question as he is fully aware of the fact that the FBI used information that they knew was false to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Having no hard evidence of cooperation with the Kremlin, senior-level FBI officials and their counterparts at the Obama Justice Department used parts of an "opposition research" document (The Trump Dossier) that they knew was unreliable to procure warrants that allowed them to treat a presidential campaign the same way the intelligence agencies treat foreign enemies; using electronic surveillance, wiretapping, confidential informants and "honey trap" schemes designed to gather embarrassing or incriminating information on their target. Barr knows all of this already which is why the Democrats are doing everything in their power to discredit him and have him removed from office.

https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4855

His determination to "get to the bottom of this" is not just a threat to the FBI, it's a threat to multiple agencies that may have had a hand in this expansive domestic espionage operation including the CIA, the NSA, the DOJ, the State Department and, perhaps, even the Obama White House. No one knows yet how far up the political food-chain the skulduggery actually goes, but Barr appears to be serious about finding out.

Here's Barr again:

"Many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single confidential informant .I would like to find out whether that is in fact true. It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence effort designed to stop the threat as it's being represented."

In other words, Barr knows that the Trump campaign was riddled with spies and he is going to do his damnedest to find out what happened. He also knows that the FISA warrants were improperly obtained using the shabby disinformation from an opposition research "hit piece" (The Steele Dossier) that was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, just like he knows that government agents had concocted a strategy for leaking classified information to the media to fuel the public hysteria. Barr knows most of what happened already. It's just a matter of compiling the research in the proper format and delivering it in a way that helps to emphasize how trusted government agents abused their power by pursuing a vicious partisan plot to either destroy the president's reputation or force him from office. Like Barr said, that's a "big deal".

The name that seems to feature larger than all others in the ongoing Trump-Russia saga, is James Comey, the former FBI Director who oversaw the spying operations that are now under investigation at the DOJ. But was Comey really the central figure in these felonious hi-jinks or was he a mere lieutenant following directives from someone more powerful than himself? While the preponderance of new evidence suggests that the FBI was deeply involved, it does not answer this crucial question. For example, just this week, a report by veteran journalist John Solomon, showed that former British spy Christopher Steele admitted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec that his "Trump Dossier" was "political research", implying that the contents couldn't be trusted because they were shaped by Steele's political bias. Kavalec passed along this information to the FBI which shrugged it off and then, just days later, used the dossier to obtain warrants to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Think about that for a minute. The FBI had "written proof . that Steele had a political motive", but went ahead and used the dossier to procure the warrants anyway. That's what I'd call a premeditated felony.

But evidence of wrongdoing is not proof that Comey was the ringleader, he was just the hapless sad sack who was left holding the bag. The truth is, Comey was just a reluctant follower. The real architect of the Trump-Russia treachery was the boss-man at the nation's premier intelligence agency, the CIA. That's where the headwaters of this shameful burlesque are located, in Langley. More on that in a minute, but first check out this excerpt from an article at The Hill which sums up Comey's role fairly well:

(There) "will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what's causing the 360-degree head spin.

"There are early indicators that troubling behaviors may have occurred in all three scenarios. Barr will want to zero in on a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA director.

In addition, the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources ("assets," in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious "government investigator" posing as Halper's assistant and cited in The New York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence case." ( "James Comey is in trouble and he knows it" , The Hill)

Why is the Inspector General so curious as to whether Comey "was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director? And why did Comey draw from "a cast of characters " . that "all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources"??

Could it be that Comey was just an unwitting pawn in a domestic regime change operation launched by former CIA Director John Brennan, the one public figure who has expressed greater personal animus towards Trump than all the others combined? Could Trump's promise to normalize relations with Russia have intensified Brennan's visceral hatred of him given the fact that Russia had frustrated Brennan's strategic plans in Ukraine and Syria? Keep in mind, the CIA had been arming, training and providing logistical support to the Sunni militants who were trying to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al Assad. Putin's intervention crushed the jihadist militias delivering a humiliating defeat to Generalissimo Brennan who, soon after, left office in disgrace. Isn't this at least part of the reason why Brennan hates Trump?

Regular readers of this column know that I have always thought that Brennan was the central figure in the Trump-Russia charade. It was Brennan who first referred the case to Comey, just as it was Brennan who "hand-picked" the analysts who stitched together the dodgy Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which said that "Putin and the Russian government aspired to help Trump's election chances.") It was also Brennan who persuaded Harry Reid to petition Comey to open an investigation in the first place. Brennan was chief instigator of the Trump-Russia fiasco, the omniscient puppet-master who persuaded Clapper and Comey to do his bidding while still-unidentified agents strategically leaked stories to the media to inflame passions and sow social unrest. At every turn, Brennan was there guiding the perfidious project along. According to journalist Philip Giraldi, the CIA may have even assisted in the obtaining of FISA warrants on Trump campaign aids as this excerpt from an article at The Unz Review indicates:

"Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve several requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the British and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan was able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the concerns about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped. And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee." ( "The Conspiracy Against Trump" , Philip Giraldi)

Can you see how important this is? The FBI was having trouble getting warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, so Brennan helped them out by persuading his foreign intelligence allies (the British and other European intelligence services) to come up with bogus "intercepted communications linked to American sources," which helped to secure the FISA warrants. We have no idea of what these foreign agents heard on these alleged intercepted communications, all we know is that they were effectively used to achieve Brennan's ultimate objective, which was to acquire the means of taking down Trump via a relentless and expansive surveillance campaign.

According to a report in The Guardian (where the story first appeared.):

"GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters) played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016. One source called the British eavesdropping agency the "principal whistleblower". ("British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia ", The Guardian)

Okay, so Brennan twisted a few arms and got his foreign Intel buddies to make uncorroborated claims that got the investigative ball rolling, but then what? If there was any meat to Brennan's foreign intel, then Mueller would have dug it up and used it in his report, right? But he didn't. Why?

Because there was nothing there, the whole thing was a sham from the get go. Brennan probably "sexed up" the intelligence so it would sound like something it really wasn't. (Think: WMD) Again, if there was even a scintilla of hard evidence that Trump's campaign assistants were in bed with Russia, Mueller would have shrieked it from every mountaintop across America. But he didn't, because there wasn't any. There was no cooperation, no conspiracy and no collusion. Trump was falsely accused. End of story.

Here's more from the same article:

"The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team and Moscow ahead of the US election." (Guardian)

"The extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team and Moscow"???

Really? This is precisely the type of hyperventilating journalism that fueled the absurd conspiracy theory that the president of the United States was a Russian agent. It's hard to believe that we're even discussing the matter at this point.

There was an interesting aside in John Solomon's article that suggests that he might be thinking along the same lines. He says: "One legal justification cited for redacting the Oct. 13, 2016, email is the National Security Act of 1947, which can be used to shield communications involving the CIA or the White House National Security Council."

Why would Solomon draw attention to "to shielding communications involving the CIA or the White House", after all, the bulk of his article focused on the State Department and the FBI? Is he suggesting that the CIA and Obama White House may have been involved in these spying shenanigans, is that why Kavalec's damning notes (which stated that Steele's dossier could not be trusted.) have been retroactively classified?

Take a look at this email from the FBI's chief investigator in the Russia collusion probe, Peter Strzok, to his fellow agents in April 2017.

"I'm beginning to think the agency (CIA) got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn't shared it completely with us. Might explain all those weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as source of some leaks." -Peter Strzok.

Ha! So even the FBI's chief investigator was in the dark about the CIA's shadowy machinations behind the scenes. Clearly, Brennan wanted to prevent the other junta leaders from fully knowing what he was up to.

All of this is bound to come out in the inspector general's report sometime in the next month or so. Both Attorney General William Barr and IG Horowitz appear to be fully committed to revealing the criminal leaks, the illegal electronic surveillance, the improperly obtained FISA warrants, and the multiple confidential human sources (spies) that were placed in the Trump campaign. They are going to face withering criticism for their efforts, but they are resolutely moving forward all the same. Bravo, for that.

Bottom line : The agents and officials who conducted this seditious attack on the presidency never thought they'd be held accountable for their crimes. But they were wrong, and now their day of reckoning is fast approaching. The main players in this palace coup are about to be exposed, criminally charged and prosecuted. Some of them will probably wind up in jail.

"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine."

DocBerg , just now link

Please wake me up from my hibernation if any of these cretins are actually prosecuted effectively, much less punished, as they richly deserve.

JCW Industries , 3 minutes ago link

Nothing will happen. IG report will show nothing. Look who's doing it. (((Horowitz))).....the DS protects its own

notfeelinthebern , 18 minutes ago link

So we should probably be sanctioning GB, instead of Russia? It would be the right thing to do? No?

Gonzogal , 6 minutes ago link

There is ZERO evidence that Russia played ANY role in the 2016 USSA election and yet are sanctioned to the max, threatened with war etc. HOWEVER there IS proof of the UK/GCHQ involvement.

I am waiting to see if Trump still goes to the UK in June or if he tells them he is "busy with more important things at home" aka F...off.

Amy G. Dala , 2 minutes ago link

Remember when Gowdy asked Brennan for evidence, and Brennan does reply with a straight face:

"We don't deal in evidence."

Mister Brennan, thou has dost protest too loudly, for too long . . .

Idaho potato head , 19 minutes ago link

Apocalypse, I would say that word describes it pretty well.

Middle English Apocalipse "Revelation (the New Testament book)," borrowed from Anglo-French, borrowed from Late Latin apocalypsis "revelation, the Book of Revelation," borrowed from Greek apokálypsis "uncovering, disclosure, revelation," from apokalyp-, stem of apokalýptein "to uncover, disclose, reveal" (from apo- APO- + kalýptein "to cover, protect, conceal," of uncertain origin) + -sis -SIS

Joebloinvestor , 24 minutes ago link

Anyone notice NO ******* COMMENT from UK intelligence about their ex-spies being involved in a US election?

I kind of expected one "throwaway" to be found with a hole behind his ear.

Idaho potato head , 13 minutes ago link

'highly likely'. would be typical english understatement.

bh2 , 30 minutes ago link

"No one knows yet how far up the political food-chain the skulduggery actually goes"

Too kind. We all know it is impossible that Susan Rice did not know -- she would have to authorize the FBI to conduct any foreign spying operations.

And if Susan Rice knew, it is impossible that Barack Obama didn't know. And approved of it, if only by not putting a stop to it.

The string that hasn't been pulled yet is the role of British intelligence. Brennan is obviously not a very bright man. He's a post-turtle, so how a dull-witted former communist ended up as head of the CIA is yet another story that needs looking into.

Was he actually a British mole?

The intersection of British establishment political goals and donated assets in the operation of this plot is nakedly obvious. It will be for Barr to expose that "angle", with the distinct possibility the ultimate origin of this scheme was the Blairite UK civil service who wished to eliminate a potentially powerful political actor who repeatedly and strongly indicated his unreserved support for Brexit.

Philthy_Stacker , 45 minutes ago link

All the things you mentioned were obfuscated by Clinton, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Cheney, several Generals, heads of state, foreign intelligence. Do you think someone just snaps a finger and the MIC disappears?

You conflate 'past' leadership with the current. The deep state is crumbling. We need to keep digging and indicting until Rothschild takes a one way rocket off planet Earth.

It will only end when treasonous traitor hang by their necks. I'm still hoping and informing others.

joego1 , 36 minutes ago link

Only the wheels that grind the sheeple work right now.

wadalt , 50 minutes ago link

"I've talked to the members of the Israeli government at the highest levels. I know who they want elected here. It's not Hillary Clinton." – Former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani

The TRUMP Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Israhell.

But NO ONE will investigate that.

M.A.G.A. is out

K.A.K.A. is in (Keep America Kabalah Again)

http://cufpa.wordpress.com/2018/01/07/trumps-jewish-agenda/

KJWqonfo7 , 34 minutes ago link

It's difficult to look at him with that repugnant grin on his rat face.

boring_man , 54 minutes ago link

"Some of them will probably wind up in jail."

"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine."

"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all."

Henry Wadsworth Longellow

Patience is an integral part of of those interested in true "justice"

man will fail, and at times shirk his duty to God and each other,,,,,,,,,,,,,our Great Judge misses no thing,,,,,,,

- now there's yer dinner -

boring

Dumpster Elite , 1 hour ago link

I know what occurred...it was a coup attempt.

I won't believe that ANYTHING will be done about it. Prove me wrong, Barr. I remain a non-believer that anything bad happens to the Deep State.

Pa Kettle , 1 hour ago link

The definitive exposé:

"CIA Crimes: How John Brennan Weaponized the CIA and FBI, and Conspired with Russia and Harry Reid to Frame Trump"

PART A
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=1362

PART B
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=1443

PART C
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=1525

PART D
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=2241

PART E
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=2423

PART F
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=2463

Philthy_Stacker , 52 minutes ago link

Sorry Ashton, Dan Bongino figured it out 2 years ago. Your book is weak.
https://www.amazon.com/Spygate-Attempted-Sabotage-Donald-Trump/dp/1642930989
Ashton is a day late and a dollar short. Hats off to Dan Bongino, the real 'exposer'.
Investigative reporting by:
John Solomon and Sara Carter.

[May 11, 2019] Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Breaking news today, courtesy of the New York Times , is that a man with a long history of working with the CIA and a female FBI Informant, traveled to London in September of 2016 and tried unsuccessfully to entrap George Papadopolous. The biggest curiosity is that US intelligence or law enforcement officials fully briefed British intelligence on what they were up to. ..."
"... The FBI disingenuously claims they ran Azra Turk at Papadopolous because they were alarmed ostensibly by Russia's attempts to disrupt the 2016 election. But Papadopolous was not seeking out Russian contacts. He was being baited. It was Mifsud and others tied to British and US intelligence who were bringing up the "opportunity" to work with the Russians. ..."
"... The boomerang from the Democratic Party's failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia's 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow's pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton . ..."
"... In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort 's dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress. ..."
"... It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey* interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg ..."
"... Neoliberals and neoconservatives (ie zionists) were behind it and continue to push it. Trump ran to the left of Clinton on both domestic and foreign policy. That's why he won, and why the establishment must present his election as de facto illegitimate, because otherwise they would be forced to admit that the bipartisan convergence around both finance driven economic policy and war on terror interventionism that has described elite politics since Clinton has been a disaster for most ordinary Americans -- of all types and political persuasions -- and needs to be destroyed root and branch. ..."
"... What's the likelihood that Carter Page was a plant in the Trump campaign? After all, he had a history with the US IC and was used as bait in an FBI case to prove Russian operatives' recruiting efforts. It's thought he's the Under Cover Employee alluded to in this case, which resulted in the successful prosecution of Russian spies: ..."
"... Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources (including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were employed by the bureau in this operation: ..."
May 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson

The preponderance of evidence makes this very simple--there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments, to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia.

The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign.

Breaking news today, courtesy of the New York Times, is that a man with a long history of working with the CIA and a female FBI Informant, traveled to London in September of 2016 and tried unsuccessfully to entrap George Papadopolous. The biggest curiosity is that US intelligence or law enforcement officials fully briefed British intelligence on what they were up to. Quite understandable given what we now know about British spying on the Trump Campaign.

The Mueller investigation of Trump "collusion" with Russia prior to the 2016 Presidential election focused on eight cases:

  1. Proposed Trump Tower Project in Moscow
  2. George Papadopolous --
  3. Carter Page --
  4. Dimitri Simes --
  5. Veselnetskya Meeting at Trump Tower (June 16, 2016)
  6. Events at Republican Convention
  7. Post-Convention Contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak
  8. Paul Manafort

One simple fact emerges--of the eight cases or incidents of alleged Trump Campaign interaction with the Russians investigated by the Mueller team, the proposals to interact with the Russian Government or Putin originated with FBI informants, MI-6 assets or people paid by Fusion GPS, not Trump or his people. There is not a single instance where Donald Trump or any member of his campaign team initiated contact with the Russians for the purpose of gaining derogatory information on Hillary or obtaining support to boost the Trump campaign. Not one.

Simply put, Trump and his campaign were the target of an elaborate, wide ranging covert action designed to entrap him and members of his team as an agent of Russia.

Let's look in detail at each of the cases.

THE PROPOSED TRUMP TOWER PROJECT IN MOSCOW, according to Mueller's report, originated with an FBI Informant--Felix Sater.

Here's what the Mueller Report states:

In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov.

Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).

Mueller, as I have noted previously , is downright dishonest in failing to identify Sater as an FBI informant. Sater was not just a private entrepreneur looking to make some coin. He was a fully signed up FBI informant. Sater's status as an FBI snitch was first exposed in 2012. Sater also was a boyhood chum of Michael Cohen, the target being baited in this operation. Another inconvenient fact excluded from the Mueller report is that one of Mueller's Chief Prosecutors, Andrew Weissman, signed the deal with Felix Sater in December 1998 that put Sater into the FBI Informant business .

All suggestions for meeting with the Russian Government, including Putin, originated with Felix Sater. The use of Sater on this particular project started in September 2015.

[For more on Sater please see my previous posts, Felix Sater--The Rosetta Stone for the FBI/CIA Conspiracy Against Trump? , Felix Sater and the Steele Dossier .]

GEORGE PAPADOPOLOUS

Papadopolous was targeted by British and U.S. intelligence starting in late December 2015, when he is offered out of the blue a job with the London Centre of International Law and Practice Limited (LCILP) . The LCILP has all of the hallmarks of an intelligence front company. LCILP began as an offshoot from another company  --  EN Education Group Limited  --  which describes itself as "a global education consultancy, facilitating links between students, education providers and organisations with an interest in education worldwide".

EN Education and LCILP are owned and run by Nagi Khalid Idris, a 48-year-old British citizen of Sudanese origin. For no apparent reason Idris offers Papadopolous a job as the Director of the LCILP's International Energy and Natural Resources Division. Then in March of 2016, Idris and Arvinder Sambei (who acted as an attorney for the FBI on a 9-11 extradition case in the UK), insist on introducing Joseph Mifsud to Papadopolous.

It is Joseph Mifsud who introduces the idea of meeting Putin following a lunch in London:

"The lunch is booked for March 24 at the Grange Holborn Hotel,. . . . "When I get there, Mifsud is waiting for me in the lobby with an attractive, fashionably dressed young woman with dirty blonde hair at his side. He introduces her as Olga Vinogradova." (p. 76)

"Mifsud sells her hard. "Olga is going to be your inside woman to Moscow. She knows everyone." He tells me she was a former official at the Russian Ministry of Trade. Then he waxes on about introducing me to the Russian ambassador in London." (p. 77)

"On April 12, "Olga" writes: "I have already alerted my personal links to our conversation and your request. The embassy in London is very much aware of this. As mentioned, we are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump. The Russian Federation would love to welcome him once his candidature would be officially announced."

And it is Mifsud who raises the possibility of getting dirt on Hillary:

"Then Mifsud returns from the Valdai conference. On April 26 we meet for breakfast at the Andaz Hotel, near Liverpool Street Station, one of the busiest train stations in London. He's in an excellent mood and claims he met with high-level Russian government officials. But once again, he's very short on specifics. This is becoming a real pattern with Mifsud. He hasn't offered any names besides Timofeev. Then, he leans across the table in a conspiratorial manner. The Russians have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, he tells me. "Emails of Clinton," he says. "They have thousands of emails."

Here again we encounter the lying and obfuscation of the Mueller team. They falsely characterize Mifsud as an agent of Russia. In fact, he has close and longstanding ties to both British and US intelligence ( Disobedient Media lays out the Mifsud mystery in detail ).

Mifsud was not alone. The FBI and the CIA also were in the game of trying to entrap Papadopolous. In September of 2016, Papadopolous was being wined and dined by Halper (who has longstanding ties to the US intelligence community) and Azra Turk, an FBI Informant/researcher ( see NY Times ).

The FBI disingenuously claims they ran Azra Turk at Papadopolous because they were alarmed ostensibly by Russia's attempts to disrupt the 2016 election. But Papadopolous was not seeking out Russian contacts. He was being baited. It was Mifsud and others tied to British and US intelligence who were bringing up the "opportunity" to work with the Russians.

CARTER PAGE

The section of the Mueller report that deals with Carter Page is a total travesty. Mueller and his team, for example, initially misrepresent Page's status with the Trump campaign--he is described as "working" for the campaign, which implies a paid position, when he was in fact only a volunteer foreign policy advisor. Mueller also paints Page's prior experience and work in Russia as evidence that Page was being used by Russian intelligence, but says nothing about the fact that Page was being regularly debriefed by the CIA and the FBI during the same period. In other words, Page was cooperating with US intelligence and law enforcement. But this fact is omitted in the Mueller report.

Mueller eventually accurately describes Page's role in the Trump campaign as follows:

In January 2016, Page began volunteering on an informal, unpaid basis for the Trump Campaign after Ed Cox, a state Republican Party official, introduced Page to Trump Campaign officials. Page told the Office that his goal in working on the Campaign was to help candidate Trump improve relations with Russia. To that end, Page emailed Campaign officials offering his thoughts on U.S.-Russia relations, prepared talking points and briefing memos on Russia, and proposed that candidate Trump meet with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

In communications with Campaign officials, Page also repeatedly touted his high-level contacts in Russia and his ability to forge connections between candidate Trump and senior Russian governmental officials. For example, on January 30, 2016, Page sent an email to senior Campaign officials stating that he had "spent the past week in Europe and had been in discussions with some individuals with close ties to the Kremlin" who recognized that Trump could have a "game-changing effect . .. in bringing the end of the new Cold War. The email stated that " [t]hrough [his] discussions with these high level contacts," Page believed that "a direct meeting in Moscow between Mr. Trump and Putin could be arranged.

The Mueller presentation portrays Carter Page in a nefarious, negative light. His contacts with Russia are characterized as inappropriate and unjustified. Longstanding business experience in a particular country is not proof of wrong doing. No consideration is given at all to Page's legitimate concerns raising about the dismal state of US/Russia relations following the US backed coup in the Ukraine and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia.

Page's association with the Trump campaign was quite brief--he lasted seven months, being removed as a foreign policy advisor on 24 September. Page was not identified publicly as a Trump foreign policy advisor until March of 2016, but the evidence presented in the Mueller report clearly indicates that Page was already a target of intelligence agencies, in the US and abroad, long before the FISA warrant of October 2016.

While serving on the foreign policy team Page continued his business and social contacts in Russia, but was never tasked by the Trump team to pursue or promote contacts with Putin and his team. In fact, Page's proposals, suggestions and recommendations were either ignored or directly rebuffed.

The timeline reported in the Mueller report regarding Page's trip to Russia in early July raises questions about the intel collected on that trip and the so-called "intel" revealed in the Steele Dossier with respect to Page. Carter admits to meeting with individuals, such as Dmitry Peskov and Igor Sechin, who appear in the Steele Dossier. Page's meetings in Moscow turned out to be innocuous and uneventful. Nothing he did resembled clandestine activity. Yet, the Steele report on that visit suggested just the opposite and used the tactic of guilt by association to imply that Page was up to something dirty.

The bottomline for Mueller is that Page did not do anything wrong and no one in the Trump Campaign embraced his proposals for closer ties with Russia.

DMITRI SIMES

The targeting and investigation of Dmitri Simes is disgusting and an abuse of law enforcement authority. Full disclosure. I know Dmitri. For awhile, in the 2002-2003 time period, I was a regular participant at Nixon Center events. For example, I was at a round table in December 2002 on the imminent invasion of Iraq. Colonel Pat Lang sat on one side of me and Ambassador Joe Wilson on the other. Directly across the table was Charles Krauthammer. Dmitri ran an honest seminar.

The entire section on Dmitri Simes, under other circumstances, could be viewed as something bizarre and amusing. But the mere idea that Simes was somehow an agent of Putin and a vehicle for helping Trump work with the Russians to steal the 2016 election is crazy and idiotic. Those in the FBI who were so stupid as to buy into this nonsense should have their badges and guns taken away. They are too dumb to work in law enforcement.

Dmitri's only sin was to speak calmly, intelligently and rationally about foreign policy dealings with Russia. We now know that in this new hysteria of the 21st Century Russian scare that qualities such as reason and rationality are proof of one's willingness to act as a puppet of Vladimir Putin.

TRUMP TOWER MEETING (JUNE 9, 2016)

This is the clearest example of a plant designed to entrap the Trump team. Mueller, once again, presents a very disingenuous account:

On June 9, 2016, senior representatives of the Trump Campaign met in Trump Tower with a Russian attorney expecting to receive derogatory information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. The meeting was proposed to Donald Trump Jr. in an email from Robert Goldstone, at the request of his then-client Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian real-estate developer Aras Agalarov. Goldstone relayed to Trump Jr. that the "Crown prosecutor of Russia ... offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia" as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr. immediately responded that "if it's what you say I love it," and arranged the meeting through a series of emails and telephone calls.

The meeting was with a Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

The Russian attorney who spoke at the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had previously worked for the Russian government and maintained a relationship with that government throughout this period oftime. She claimed that funds derived from illegal activities in Russia were provided to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. Trump Jr. requested evidence to support those claims, but Veselnitskaya did not provide such information.

Ignore for a moment that no information on Hillary was passed or provided (and doing such a thing is not illegal). The real problem is with what Mueller does not say and did not investigate. Mueller conveniently declines to mention the fact that Veselnitskaya was working closely with the firm Hillary Clinton hired to produce the Steele Dossier. NBC News reported on Veselnitskaya:

The information that a Russian lawyer brought with her when she met Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 stemmed from research conducted by Fusion GPS, the same firm that compiled the infamous Trump dossier, according to the lawyer and a source familiar with the matter.

In an interview with NBC News, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya says she first received the supposedly incriminating information she brought to Trump Tower -- describing alleged tax evasion and donations to Democrats -- from Glenn Simpson , the Fusion GPS owner, who had been hired to conduct research in a New York federal court case.

Even a mediocre investigator would recognize the problem of the relationship between the lawyer claiming to have dirty, damning info on Hillary with the firm Hillary hired to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. This was another botched set up and the Trump folks did not take the bait.

EVENTS AT THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION

This portion of the Mueller report is complete farce. Foreign Ambassdors, including the Russian (and the Chinese) attend Republican and Democrat Conventions. Presidential candidates and their advisors speak to those Ambassadors. So, where is the beef? Answer. There isn't any. That this "event" was considered something worthy of a counter intelligence investigation is just one more piece of evidence that law enforcement and intelligence were weaponized against the Trump campaign.

POST-CONVENTION CONTACTS WITH RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR KISLYAK

Ditto. As noted in the previous paragraph, trying to criminalize normal diplomatic contacts, especially with a country where we share important, vital national security interests, is but further evidence of the crazy anti-Russian hysteria that has infected the anti-Trumpers. Pathetic.

MANAFORT

If Paul Manafort had rebuffed Trump's offer to run his campaign, he would be walking free today and still buying expensive suits and evading taxes along with his Clinton buddy, Greg Craig. Instead, he became another target for DOJ and intel community and the DNC, which were desperate to portray Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. Thanks to John Solomon of The Hill, we now know the impetus to target Manafort came from the DNC :

The boomerang from the Democratic Party's failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia's 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow's pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton .

In its most detailed account yet, Ukraine's embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump's campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.

In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort 's dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.

Manafort was not colluding, but the Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration most certainly were.

Take these eight events as a whole a very clear picture emerges--US and foreign intelligence (especially the UK) and US law enforcement collaborated in a broad effort to bait the Trump team with ostensible Russian entreaties in order to paint Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. That effort is now being exposed and those culpable will hopefully face justice. This should sicken and alarm every American regardless of political party. Will justice be served?

notlurking , 03 May 2019 at 08:16 AM

we're not in Kansas anymore.....
Joe100 , 03 May 2019 at 08:43 AM
Great work!

I just read the following about special visas approved for some of the FBI "operatives" (from SD at CTH): "It wasn't just the CIA that was using spies to "dirty up" Trump associates. The FBI was doing it too. There was the infamous Natalia Veselnitskaya who is known for her part in the Trump Tower meeting. She had been banned from the country but got a special visa signed off by Preet Bahara of the FBI, Southern District of New York. Henry Greenburg, the known FBI informant who tried to entrap Roger Stone, also got a special visa. And I'm sure there are many more "

Gerard M , 03 May 2019 at 09:06 AM
IMO, there is no coming back from this. Apart from this Deep State coup attempt, we have seen that democracy is a shame, it's all theater. The Establishment (which includes GOP) is constantly working to undermine Trump and thwart his plans to do what the American people want and elected him for. What I've found quite disturbing is that the controlling puppet masters have not let up in trying to remove or neutralize Trump. As if they can't wait even 4 years to again fully stack the deck and regain total control. They are not willing to concede that 2016 was a political black swan event involving a celebrity billionaire American icon. And conceding and allowing this fluke to be rectified I'm 4 short years is worse than their pushback exposing the political system as a rigged game.

The events of the last 2.5 years have radically altered my views. I no longer have any faith in democracy (voting), the government, the federal courts, law enforcement, et al. And I can't see me regaining any faith in them. What I have seen in the past 2.5 years is kind of like finding out my wife of decades, whom I idolized, has been cheating with my friend from childhood, whom I would've laid down my life for. And all the other people close to me not telling me.

I now only have faith in only God and beagles.

Fred -> Gerard M... , 03 May 2019 at 10:40 AM
It's not the black swan event that concerns the guilty but the fear of just retribution by those who see just how black hearted the left has become.
Gerard M said in reply to Fred ... , 03 May 2019 at 12:25 PM
It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey* interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg

*Tracey, btw, is on the left. But like Glenn Greenwald and others on the left he is an honest journalist interested in the truth.

Ligurio said in reply to Fred ... , 03 May 2019 at 02:16 PM
The "left" was not behind and does not buy into this Russia psyop. Neoliberals and neoconservatives (ie zionists) were behind it and continue to push it. Trump ran to the left of Clinton on both domestic and foreign policy. That's why he won, and why the establishment must present his election as de facto illegitimate, because otherwise they would be forced to admit that the bipartisan convergence around both finance driven economic policy and war on terror interventionism that has described elite politics since Clinton has been a disaster for most ordinary Americans -- of all types and political persuasions -- and needs to be destroyed root and branch.

To see how and why the "left" differs from corporate identity-politicking liberals in the above regard consider how it is that Tulsi Gabbard is both the Dem candidate most respected by principled Trump supporters on this site and others and the Dem candidate most reviled, ignored, and slandered by DNC liberals and neocons alike.

The enemy to principled conservatives and the left in this country is the bipartisan establishment corporate neoliberalism of the RNC and DNC alike.

Fred -> Ligurio... , 03 May 2019 at 08:53 PM
That's as convenient a lie as any other.
akaPatience , 03 May 2019 at 11:56 AM
What's the likelihood that Carter Page was a plant in the Trump campaign? After all, he had a history with the US IC and was used as bait in an FBI case to prove Russian operatives' recruiting efforts. It's thought he's the Under Cover Employee alluded to in this case, which resulted in the successful prosecution of Russian spies:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/evgeny-buryakov-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-connection-conspiracy-work

Anonymous said in reply to akaPatience ... , 03 May 2019 at 04:05 PM
Page is just a goofball grifter. He's not a plant. That is silly. When they saw names like Page and Manafort the Democrats pounced because they knew the could cast aspersions.

I'm not sure about Mifsud. I think it would be hard for Mueller to knowingly indict Papadop if Mifsud were an asset of the US (or even known to be an asset of allies). I think it is more likely Mifsud was a free agent.

All these guys Mifsud, Page, Papadop were grifters, not doing real work. Just running around trying to make a buck by claiming to facilitate meetings. It's a shame it bit them and not a crime to do what they did. At the same time, I can't help but see some kharmic justice. GET A JOB, you poly sci lightweights!

walrus said in reply to Anonymous... , 03 May 2019 at 06:11 PM
This anonymous commentator has never spent time in senior levels of business or government. There is a whole class of people who do not see themselves as Grifters but more as "ideas men".

The best offer valuable perspectives on the world, can really open doors and otherwise add value. At the other end of the spectrum are con men. Political campaigns and large corporations of any sort attract these people in droves. The skill in management is to sort the wheat from the chaff. Trump is good at that.

akaPatience -> Anonymous... , 03 May 2019 at 06:56 PM
Yes, Page often comes off as a bit crazy and incoherent. But he may be crazy like a fox. In the end he was never charged with ANYTHING and it's my understanding he represented himself legally throughout the investigation, opting not to hire counsel. I find it odd that others were prosecuted for process crimes but he escaped even THAT fate.

His participation in the Trump campaign, limited as it was, was nevertheless KEY in finally obtaining a FISA warrant after other attempts failed.

Consider it silly if you want. I view him at least worthy of suspicion. His hapless demeanor could be his schtick , when his education, experience and IC connections are taken into consideration.

Anonymous said in reply to akaPatience ... , 04 May 2019 at 06:09 PM
Page represents himself poorly even when he knows a lot is on the line. Look at how frustrated Gowdy got with him. Clearly Page didn't learn much from plebe year in terms of 5 basic responses. Compare the difference with Barr for instance.

While the Trident program is a big deal, every now and then USNA has mids that are diligent about getting good grades but not very smart. I knew one my year. Page is clearly in that vein. Don't miss that he didn't get into any elite program after graduation (SWO is the default). And that he was a poly sci major. The saying is "poly sci, QPR high" (QPR is quality point rating or GPA). Of course this is not to say there aren't some good SWOs or poly sci majors. But there's a definite correlation I'm noting. It fits with what his reputation is.

Furthermore, the guy has had an uneventful career, bouncing around. He went to a lower bulge bracket (not Goldman) and didn't seem to stick. And his Russian colleagues said he was an idiot and a boaster. We're not talking i-banker smart. Wouldn't trust him to do an NPV or other economic analysis. And then after that we have the grifting and the shmoozing.

Kid is a lightweight. A slightly less coffee-boy coffee boy.

catherine said in reply to Bill H ... , 03 May 2019 at 07:02 PM
''They cannot convict based on a law that was passed after the act was committed''

Money laundering has always been against the law of course....the NY law just firmed up the due diligence that is suppose to be done in transactions. I don't think there is a statute of limitations on things like fraud, tax evasion and money laundering but I will check it out to see

walrus said in reply to catherine... , 03 May 2019 at 04:37 PM
Catherine, in current PC thinking, merely passing the salt to a Russian guest at a dinner party makes you "an unregistered foreign agent" of Russia bent on implementing Putin's evil plans.

As for certifying real estate deals, the same crowd would view buying someone a MacDonalds hamburger as attempted bribery.

catherine said in reply to walrus ... , 03 May 2019 at 07:34 PM
''As for certifying real estate deals, the same crowd would view buying someone a MacDonalds hamburger as attempted bribery.''

Hardly. 7 million dollar cash deals for a condo thru a shell company is a red flag however..as is buying property for 1 million and selling it unimproved the next year for 2 million...or buying a house in LA 11 million and selling it 9 months later for 8 million. That 'in between money" is someone's pay off....that's how it works.

Money laundering is epidemic in the US and Europe....Israeli mafia, Russian oligarchs, African dictators looting their country's treasury and running it through a real estate washing machine deal. Far be from me to sweep the fairy dust out of Trump supporters eyes but, as I said, Trump's troubles are far from over. We will see what comes out in the future.

VietnamVet , 03 May 2019 at 05:40 PM
The soft coup against Donald Trump failed. He has to run hard and sure to win in 2020 to avoid an indictment in NY State when he leaves the Presidency. Corporate Democrats will do their damnedst again to put forth their weakest pro war candidate like the aged, apparently demented, Joe Biden. This fiasco and the recent coup attempt in Venezuela make the Keystone Cops appear competent.

I put this all down to Washington DC being completely isolated inside their credentialed bubble. It is just like corporate CEOs, who think they know exactly what they are doing. But, in reality, they are destroying the stabilizing middle class by extracting and hording wealth and turning mid-America into their colony. Globalist and nationalist oligarchs are after each other's throat over who controls the flow of money.

We live on a very finite world dependent on one sun in an expanding universe. Just like Boeing, Bayer or Volkswagen, the splintering world is starting to crash all around them. Even as they deny it, this is a multi-polar world now. It is not going back without a world war which would destroy civilization and could make the world uninhabitable for humans.

Bill H -> VietnamVet... , 04 May 2019 at 01:26 AM
And the best that our government can do is warn us not to wash our chicken before cooking it because washing merely spreads the salmonella that our food industry is unable to prevent from infecting it.
English Outsider -> VietnamVet... , 04 May 2019 at 01:15 PM
The trouble is that those CEO's do know exactly what they are doing. Making money the only way possible in a business environment in which outsourcing can sometimes be the only thing that pays.

The idea was that Trump was going to change that environment. Bannon calls its "economic nationalism" but in truth it's now just economic survival. Survival for those whose jobs are outsourced. Survival for the country as a whole, ultimately. That was Trump's core programme. It was the programme that made him different from all other Western politicians, "populist" or status quo. Do you see any sign that it's being implemented, or has that programme too got bogged down in the swamp?

Mad Max_22 , 03 May 2019 at 06:44 PM
Will justice be served? A good question.

If we are speaking about criminal justice, there is some chance that we will see persons such as Jim Comey, who persists in his smug higher calling act, prosecuted for what was a clear cut violation in divulging classified material through a lawyer intermediary to the NYT. I suspect the higher calling bit has been prompted in part because he knows that he screwed up both on the facts and in law and he is justifying his screw up to himself, and possibly also rehearsing his defense, with the rationale that he was only trying to do the right thing. Yeah, he may have had the facts all wrong, the Russians, etc, etc, but the worst that can be said is that he had been competent, there was no intent. That defense doesn't do much for the FBI's once held reputation for competence, but that appears to be gone anyway.

With regard to what will be turned up concerning the actual roots of the travesty, the heavily politicized faux investigation into the Clinton e mails and targeting of the Trump campaign on a predicate that is somewhere between nebulous and non existant, I think a criminal prosecution arising from that investigation, even if it is serious, is unlikely for two main reasons. First, what will be the charged violations? As best I can see right now, they will have to entail some imaginative application of fraud statutes, defrauding the FISC, defrauding the US, informants and assets lying to their handlers, or process crimes like Bob Mueller's partisan posse relied upon (ugly); and second, something like the Comey defense will interpenetrate all the individuals and entities involved: we may have been incredible bunglers, but that is the worst of it. We really believed these charlatans who conned us into this debacle. Sorry, but we thought we were doing the right thing.

Now if we are talking about seeing some kind of political or moral justice, I'm not too optimistic we will get much satisfaction there either and we will probably have to wait for history. The reason is that Barr will conduct this investigation by the rule book. That means that what we see developed through the process, indictment, prosecution, etc, is likely all,that we will ever see. Barr is very unlikely to produce a politcized manifesto to be employed as a smear weapon like the once reputable Mueller did.

Anyway, until we see a special FGJ empanelled, some search warrants executed, some tactical immunities offered, everything is on the come.

Jack , 03 May 2019 at 08:26 PM
All,

What probability do you assign that any top official will be indicted and prosecuted? I mean Brennan, Clapper, Comey & Lynch.

Second, what probability do you assign that Trump will declassify the relevant documents and communications like the FISA application,the originating EC, the tasking orders for FBI/CIA spying, etc.

blue peacock said in reply to Jack... , 04 May 2019 at 12:27 PM
Jack,

The question really comes down to Trump. Does he really want to expose the Swamp and pay the price or just use it for rhetorical & political purposes? When considering probabilities and looking at his track record in office on foreign policy relative to his campaign stance, I would say the probability is less than 30% that Brennan & Clapper will be indicted.

David Habakkuk -> blue peacock... , 04 May 2019 at 03:07 PM
bp,

The question is only very partly what Trump wants, in some abstract sense. Situations like this commonly have a strong escalatory logic. So one needs to ask whether or not he has rational reason to believe that unless he can destroy those who have shown themselves prepared to stop at nothing to destroy him, they will eventually succeed.

If the answer is yes - and while I think it may very well be, I am not prejudging the issue - then a key question becomes whether Trump will conclude that his most promising loption is to go after the conspirators by every means possible.

Involved here are questions about who he is listening to, and how competent they are.

But the escalatory processes are not simply to do with what Trump decides. In particular, a whole range of legal proceedings are involved. The referral in relation to Nellie Ohr is likely to be the fist of a good few. In addition, Ed Butowsky's lawsuits, and those against Steele, have unpredictable potentialities.

blue peacock said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 May 2019 at 07:11 PM
David

The intelligence & law enforcement apparatus in collusion with the media and the establishment of both parties went after him hard. As Larry notes here, they went to considerable effort to entrap those related to his campaign to impugn him. Mueller spent $35 million trying to find an angle. Even after the Mueller report stated there was no collusion they're sill after him. So that's not going to end any time soon.

Trump may have good instincts but his judgment of people so far to staff his administration is not very inspiring. He had Jeff Sessions as his AG and he let him hang in there for nearly two years while Mueller ran riot. He's surrounded himself with neocons on foreign policy. It seems his only real advisor is Jared. Everyone else he's got around him are from the same establishment that's going after him. He hasn't taken advise from Devin Nunes, who has done more to uncover the sedition than anyone else. If he had he would have by now declassified all the documents & communications. The impression I have is his primary motivation is building his brand & less about governance and wielding power. Take for example his order to withdraw from Syria. Bolton & the Pentagon are thumbing their noses at him.

Well, there have been several criminal referrals prior to the recent one on Nellie Ohr. There's the McCabe referral and the 8 referrals by Devin Nunes. I've not read any report of the empaneling of a grand jury yet. I agree with you that these law suits have the potential for great embarrassment, however to hold those responsible for the sedition accountable will require iron will & intense focus on the part of Trump to get his AG to assign prosecutors who don't have the axe to "protect" the "institution" and to create an opportunity for public awareness of the extent that law enforcement & intelligence became a 4th branch of government. My opinion is that his skill is in his instinctual understanding of the current political zeitgeist and his ability to manipulate the media including social media to project his brand. He's not an operational leader making sure his team executes his vision & strategy.

akaPatience , 04 May 2019 at 07:11 PM
Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources (including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were employed by the bureau in this operation:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/fbi-official-testimony-surveillance-trump-campaign/

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
A foreign intelligence asset was used to justify surveillance of Trump[ and some of his associates
Notable quotes:
"... What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent? ..."
"... The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant"). ..."
"... The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale. ..."
"... Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power. ..."
"... I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors. ..."
"... if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know? ..."
"... Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost. ..."
"... Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance. ..."
"... From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. ..."
"... He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI. ..."
"... its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered. ..."
"... Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this? ..."
"... A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies. ..."
"... It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries ..."
"... If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary. ..."
"... An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him ..."
"... A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination ..."
"... 'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.' ..."
"... I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief. ..."
"... Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it. ..."
"... Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs. ..."
"... Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly: ..."
"... Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. ..."
"... One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...? ..."
"... What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this? ..."
"... Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun? ..."
"... British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy. ..."
"... British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion. ..."
"... Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people. ..."
"... still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources ..."
"... I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia. ..."
"... Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are. ..."
"... It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things ..."
Aug 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The revelations from US Government records about the FBI/Intel Community plot to take out Donald Trump continue to flow thanks to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch. The latest nugget came last Friday with the release of FBI records detailing their recruitment and management of Britain's ostensibly retired Intelligence Officer, Christopher Steele. He was an officially recruited FBI source and received at least 11 payments during the 9 month period that he was signed up as a Confidential Human Source.

You may find it strange that we can glean so much information from a document dump that is almost entirely redacted . The key is to look at the report forms; there are three types--FD-1023 (Source Reports), FD-209a (Contact Reports) and FD-794b (Payment Requests). There are 15 different 1023s, 13 209a reports and 11 794b payment requests covering the period from 2 February 2016 thru 1 November 2016. That is a total of nine months.

These reports totally destroy the existing meme that Steele only came into contact with the FBI sometime in July 2016. It is important for you to understand that a 1023 Source Report is filled out each time that the FBI source handler has contact with the source. This can be an in person meeting or a phone call. Each report lists the name of the Case Agent; the date, time and location of the meeting; any other people attending the meeting; and a summary of what was discussed.

What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent?

richardstevenhack , a day ago

Indeed we do need more information.

The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant").

We can be pretty sure this predates any alleged Russian "hacking" (unless it occurred as a result of alleged Russian hacking of the DNC in 2015).

This needs to be pinned down if anyone is to be successfully prosecuted for creating this treasonous hoax.

chris chuba , 5 hours ago
A very closely related topic, Victor Davis Hanson is onto something but it is darker than he suggests, https://www.nationalreview.... Paraphrasing, he gives the typical, rally around the flag we must stop the Russians intro but then documents how govt flaks abused their power to influence our elections and then makes the point, 'this is why the public is skeptical of their claims'.

The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale.

Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power.

I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors.

Leonardo Facchin , 20 hours ago
Thanks for the explanation.

What I can't figure out is: if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know?

Publius Tacitus -> Leonardo Facchin , 17 hours ago
Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost.
blue peacock -> Leonardo Facchin , 13 hours ago
Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance.

From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. And of course the media narrative that Rep. Nunes, Goodlatte and others were endangering "national security" by casting aspersions on the "patriotic" law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Paul M -> Leonardo Facchin , 16 hours ago
He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI.

Of course, he had most likely already done so and its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered.

David Habakkuk , 4 hours ago
PT,

Fascinating.

Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this?

The point is not merely a quibble. A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies.

It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries.

Another related matter has to do with the termination of Steele as a 'Confidential Human Source.'

It has long seemed to me that it was more than possible that this was not to be taken at face value. If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary.

An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him.

A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination.

(See http://thehill.com/person/d... .)

When on 31 January 2017 – well after the publication of the dossier by BuzzFeed – Ohr provided reassurance that he could continue to help feed information to the FBI, Steele texted back:

"If you end up out though, I really need another (bureau?) contact point/number who is briefed. We can't allow our guy to be forced to go back home. It would be disastrous."

At that point, Solomon tells us that 'Investigators are trying to determine who Steele was referring to.' This seems to me a rather important question. It would seem likely, although not certain, that he is talking about another Brit. If he is, would it have been someone else employed by Orbis? Or someone currently working for British intelligence? What is the precise significance of 'forced to go back home', and why would this have been 'disastrous'?

Another crucial paragraph:

'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.'

The earlier contacts may be of little interest, but there again they may not be.

As it happens, it was following Berezovsky's arrival in London in October 2001 that the 'information operations' network he created began to move into high gear. It is moreover clear that this was always a transatlantic operation, and also fragments of evidence suggest that the FBI may have had some involvement from early on.

I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief.

The original attempt came in a radio programme broadcast by the BBC – which was to become known to some of us as the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – on 16 December 2006, presented by Tom Mangold, a familiar 'trusty' for the intelligence services.

(A transcript sent out from the Cabinet Office at the time is available on the archived 'Evidence' page for the Inquiry, at http://webarchive.nationala... , as HMG000513. There is an interesting and rather important question as to whether those who sent it out, and those who received it, knew that it was more or less BS from start to finish.)

The programme was wholly devoted to claims made by the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets, who was presented as an independent 'due diligence' expert, without any mention of the rather major role he had played in the original 'Orange Revolution.'

Back-up was provided by his supposed collaborator in 'due diligence', the former FBI operative Robert 'Bobby' Levinson. No mention was made of the fact that he had been, in the 'Nineties, a, if not the lead FBI investigator into the notorious Ukrainian Jewish mobster Semyon Mogilevich.

The following March Levinson would disappear on the Iranian island of Kish, on what we now know was a covert mission on behalf of elements in the CIA.

Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it.

Jack -> David Habakkuk , 2 hours ago
David

Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs.

Keith Harbaugh , 19 hours ago
Thanks for this informative article.

Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly:

Seems rather surprising to me. Anyone have any comment on this?

TTG , an hour ago
Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. His initial contact with old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crime Task Force is awfully similar to his contacting these same friends in 2016 after deciding his initial Trump research was potentially bigger than mere opposition research.
FB , 3 hours ago
One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...?

Even worse is that the FBI was using this same foreign agent that a presidential candidate had hired to get dirt on an opponent... Even knowing nothing about legalities this just doesn't look very good...

Wally Courie , 4 hours ago
Stupid question? As the Col. has explained, the President can declassify any document he pleases. So, why doesn't Donaldo unredact the redacted portions of these bullcrap docs? What is he afraid of? That the Intel community will get mad and be out to get him? Isn't time for him to show some cojones?
blue peacock , 16 hours ago
What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this?
akaPatience , 19 hours ago
Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun?
Navstéva يزور 🐐 -> akaPatience , 17 hours ago
British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy.
unmitigatedaudacity -> Navstéva يزور 🐐 , 16 hours ago
British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion.
Bryn Nykrson -> Navstéva يزور 🐐 , 14 hours ago
Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? And therefore without having to mess about with any formal FISA warrant thingy's ... But, then use what might be found (or plausibly alleged) to try to get a proper FISA warrant later on (July 2016)? 'Parallel Discovery' of sorts; with Fusion GPS also a leaky cut-out: channelling media reports to be used as confirmation of Steele's "raw intelligence" in the formal FISA application(s)?
Biggee Mikeee -> akaPatience , 17 hours ago
Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates,

" Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, "

That's a good question, could it legally enable an end run around the FISC until enough evidence was gathered for a FISC surveillance authorization?.

richardstevenhack -> Biggee Mikeee , 13 hours ago
I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people.

Only a matter of time until someone figured out the same method could be used to "meddle" in national affairs.

akaPatience -> Biggee Mikeee , 15 hours ago
I understand, but still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources such as Steele about a very high profile American citizen and businessman -- aren't our intelligence services competent enough to have known and discovered as much if not more about Trump than other countries' intelligence services? I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia.
DianaLC -> akaPatience , 4 hours ago
Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are.

It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things.

[May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

Highly recommended!
This "shadowy Russian" might well be Sergey Skripal. This suggests that Steele dossier was CIA operation with British MI6 as transfer mechanism and Steele as a cover. And implicates Brennan. So this is next level of leaks after "Stormy Daniel"...
Another NYT leak out of a set of well coordinated leans from anonymous intelligence officials ;-) Poor Melania...
Notable quotes:
"... But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times. ..."
"... If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries. ..."
"... More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what. ..."
"... Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down. ..."
"... the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy ..."
"... How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind ..."
"... You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS? ..."
"... "U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds. ..."
"... Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it... ..."
"... Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us. ..."
"... 'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot. ..."
"... i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump. ..."
"... Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth." ..."
"... And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works ..."
"... So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw? ..."
Feb 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Chuck Ross of Daily Caller

When they said "Russian collusion", few expected it to be between the CIA and a "shadowy Russian operative." And yet, according to a blockbuster NYT report, that's precisely what happened.

* * *

The CIA paid $100,000 last year to a Russian operative who claimed to have derogatory information about President Trump, including a video tape of the Republican engaged with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. If the video showed Trump, it would support claims made in the infamous Steele dossier, the salacious opposition research report financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times.

American spies made contact with the Russia early in 2017 after he offered to sell the Trump material along with cyber hacking tools that were stolen from the NSA that year, according to The Times. U.S. intelligence officials told The Times they were so desperate to retrieve those tools that they negotiated with the operative for months despite several red flags, including indications that he was working in concert with Russian intelligence.

Another red flag was the Russian's financial request. He initially sought $10 million for the information but dropped the asking price to $1 million.

After months of negotiations, American spies handed over $100,000 in cash in a brief case to the Russian during a meeting in Berlin in September.

The operative also offered documents and emails that purported to implicate other Trump associates, including former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But The Times viewed the documents and reported that they were mostly information that is already in the public domain.

The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers, showed the video purported to be Trump to a Berlin-based American businessman who served as his intermediary to the CIA. But according to the Times, the footage and the location of the viewing raised questions about its authenticity.

The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump, and there was no audio. The Russian also showed the video to his American partner at the Russian embassy in Berlin, a sign that the operative had ties to Russian intelligence.

The Russian stonewalled the production of the cyber tools, and U.S. officials eventually cut ties, according to The Times. After the payout in Berlin, the man provided information about Trump and his associates of questionable veracity.

The Americans gave him an ultimatum earlier in 2018 to either play ball, leave Western Europe, or face criminal charges. He left, according to The Times, which interviewed U.S. officials, the American intermediary and the Russian for its article.

The Times' U.S. sources -- who appear to paint the American side in a positive light -- said that they were reluctant to purchase information because they did not want to be seen buying dirt on the president.

The officials also expressed concern that the Russian operative was planting disinformation on behalf of the Russian government. U.S. officials were worried that the Russian government has sought to sow discord between U.S. intelligence agencies and Trump. The revelation that the CIA purchased dirt on him would likely do the trick.

The Times report also has other new details.

Four other Russians with ties to the spy world have surfaced over the past year offering to sell dirt on Trump that closely mirrors allegations made in the dossier, according to the article. But officials have reason to believe that some of sellers have ties to Russian intelligence agencies.

The Times also provides new details on Cody Shearer, a notorious operative close to the Clintons. Shearer was recently revealed to have shopped around a so-called "second dossier" prior to the campaign which mirrored the sex allegations of the Steele report.

According to The Times, he has criss-crossed Europe over the past six months in an attempt to find video footage of Trump from the Moscow hotel room. Shearer claimed to have information from the FSB, Russia's spy service, that a video existed of Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.

He shared a memo making the allegations with his friend and fellow Clinton fixer, Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal in turn passed the memo to his friend, Jonathan Winer, a Department of State official. Winer then gave the information to Steele who provided it to the FBI in October 2016.

Steele also provided information to Winer, who wrote up a two-page memo that was circulated within the State Department.

Trump has denied allegations that he used prostitutes in Moscow. He has called the dossier a "hoax" and "crap."

* * *

On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted that "according to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony secrets on "Trump" to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be paid over time. I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Of course, if Trump really wants to "drain the swamp", any such decision would have originate with him. Tags Politics Commercial Banks

InjectTheVenom -> Global Hunter Feb 10, 2018 11:47 AM Permalink

DRAIN. THE. SWAMP.

Billy the Poet -> InjectTheVenom Feb 10, 2018 12:04 PM Permalink

Release the pee pee video now! No one pee peed in the $100,000 video in question. The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump, and there was no audio. And how can anyone be more fascinated by the prospect of pee pee than by the fact that US intelligence agencies were buying bad information from extremely shady foreigners in an attempt to overthrow the President of the United States?

caconhma -> Billy the Poet Feb 10, 2018 12:42 PM Permalink

Trump is the swamp. If zio-Banking Mafia did not have enough dirt of Trump, he would not be elected.

gatorengineer -> caconhma Feb 10, 2018 1:05 PM Permalink

Trump is starting to assume that the people are dumber than Obowel did. Earth to Don, you sir have the drain pump, you sir have surrounded yourself with Swamp creatures.... You sir are.............

Arrowflinger -> InjectTheVenom Feb 10, 2018 12:18 PM Permalink

According to this, the Russians stole the hacking tools needed to cut through the Swamp levee, which were developed by the NSA, and now the CIA cannot buy them back. Now, since the USA wanted its Swamp, the Russians are more than happy to let the USA drown in its swamp.

What a country!

gatorengineer -> Arrowflinger Feb 10, 2018 1:06 PM Permalink

Anyone have a link for the Qanon posts. I haven't seen them in a couple of weeks since he left 8chan where he was posting. I don't want the Youtube BS, I just want the link... anyone got one. Its strangely not googleable... LOLZ.

El Oregonian -> Global Hunter Feb 10, 2018 11:53 AM Permalink

If you think that the CIA is a U.S. intelligence agency working on the best interests of the United States, you better wake up and smell the treason. They only work for the best interests of themselves.

Bula_Vinaka -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:10 PM Permalink

They are parasites and nothing more.

BurningFuld -> Bula_Vinaka Feb 10, 2018 12:40 PM Permalink

Here is a question. Why does the CIA not come out and clear the air re: Trump?

I mean they were even paying people to come up with dirt. He is now your president and the country is a fucking mess. Should the CIA not come out and say we tried but we got nothing? They do have the ability to fix all this Trump shit and yet crickets.

Ahmeexnal -> caconhma Feb 10, 2018 1:03 PM Permalink

CIA is the covert dirty dealing arm of the VATICAN.

MarshalJimDuncan -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:12 PM Permalink

ooohh... they release this questionable information for all to hear and paid a lot of money for it too. this fucking government is a joke

Posa -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:56 PM Permalink

And the best interests of clients. The CIA started out is the muscle for the Dulles Brothers clients who were being booted out of various countries they were super-exploiting. The Agency hasn't looked back since.

Alfred -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:59 PM Permalink

Seems wrong to call them 'intelligence' agencies. There must be a more descriptive name we can use... Anyone?

Guitarilla -> Global Hunter Feb 10, 2018 12:35 PM Permalink

Nobody got whizzed on. That lurid fantasy came soley out of the head of Hillary Clinton, given to Blumenthal, passed around and made to look like it came from Russia.

DownWithYogaPants -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 11:47 AM Permalink

CIA killed Kennedy. This pretty much removes all doubt. They are willing to do anything.

Killtruck -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 12:51 PM Permalink

"Oswald killed Kennedy. That's it."

It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist passports floating gently down from the sky.

It sure is remarkable.
#letsroll

possible band name
OswaldandtheMagicBullets

Able Ape -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 12:57 PM Permalink

What was Oswald's reason to kill JFK? And yeah, he picked the very building he worked at to commit the crime. He wasn't THAT stupid!...

Posa -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 1:05 PM Permalink

RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn Monroe.

The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b) in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the Cold War...

Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit stationary targets reliably.

mobius8curve -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 11:49 AM Permalink

If there is a video you can be sure it was manufactured using these tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Nx404VLzw

Lawlessness is arising exponentially:

https://sumofthyword.com/2017/01/18/the-mystery-of-lawlessness/

oDumbo -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 12:19 PM Permalink

Drain the swamp! Townsquare justice for Odumbo and Hitlery! George Soros to bathe in the Amazon River with 1 million Piranha Fish until it completely disappears. Drain the evil Dumorat swamp. Drain the banana republic CIA and FBI. Our tax dollars and constitution did not pay for this shit.

Kelley -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 12:34 PM Permalink

With today's technology, the CIA is most likely working on a fake video for you right now. They might release it on Vimeo or Netflix to cover the costs and give themselves plausible deniability. To add a finishing touch they will make a fake video of Julian Assange claiming he is releasing it. You'll be in hog heaven. Which is where folks like you go just before being slaughtered by your owners and turned into spam.

shovelhead -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 12:55 PM Permalink

10 Million...

1 million...

Ok, How about $9.99

algol_dog Feb 10, 2018 11:38 AM Permalink

Move along. Nothing to see here ...

DosZap -> algol_dog Feb 10, 2018 11:40 AM Permalink

What a load of camel dung, if there was a sex tape of Trump w/Russian hookers, it would have been out while he was RUNNING for the job, FAKE NEWS.

SRV -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 11:54 AM Permalink

Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...

And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!

vulcanraven -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 12:08 PM Permalink

No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.

So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency? You can't have it both ways.

We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all day, where would we be without them?

silvermail -> algol_dog Feb 10, 2018 11:55 AM Permalink

I propose impeachment to any US president for eating, drinking and visiting toilets!

TheWholeYearInn Feb 10, 2018 11:38 AM Permalink

What's the difference between prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room, or prostitutes in the FBI/DOJ?

Global Hunter -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 11:47 AM Permalink

I can't confirm price, so I will go with hotter (can't really confirm that either but Slavic chicks usually seem hot to me).

SRV -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 11:54 AM Permalink

Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...

And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!

turkey george palmer -> SRV Feb 10, 2018 1:09 PM Permalink

Fuckin eh right. That's probably the closest thing .

A Sentinel -> SRV Feb 10, 2018 1:21 PM Permalink

Damn good point. And the dates are off too. A 6+/- month zh article about the dark web had the nsa software downloadable long before 2017.

Gee. Why would someone date that hack into 2017? What was different between 2016 and 2017?

SMH Trying to figure that out.

vulcanraven -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 12:08 PM Permalink

No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.

So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency? You can't have it both ways.

We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all day, where would we be without them?

Winston Churchill -> buzzsaw99 Feb 10, 2018 12:02 PM Permalink

More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what.

Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down.

H-O-W Feb 10, 2018 11:46 AM Permalink

The more we learn,

The more it looks like the Russians set this up perfectly.

They know these scumbags better than we do!

buzzsaw99 Feb 10, 2018 11:48 AM Permalink

the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy.

Give Me Some Truth Feb 10, 2018 11:49 AM Permalink

Good point in the last sentence. If someone is going to "drain the swamp" it is going to have to be the president of the United States. I think I'm correct that he can fire anyone that works in the executive department for cause. He can also order investigations or hire people who will launch real investigations.

Mr. President, if you want to "drain the swamp," drain it.

P.S. You can start with an audit of The Fed.

desertboy -> Give Me Some Truth Feb 10, 2018 12:16 PM Permalink

That last sentence assumes a rather critical fantasy.

Anunnaki -> Thordoom Feb 10, 2018 12:24 PM Permalink

The Tripod of Evil

  1. Deep State
  2. Presstitutes
  3. Corporate Democrats
Dre4dwolf Feb 10, 2018 12:11 PM Permalink

If there was a video it would of been leaked during the election, they have nothing that sticks on the guy.

All the evidence thus far states

Obama Hillary the FBI, DNC, CIA all spied on Trump and colluded with foreign governments (U.K. , Ukraine , Russia) to try and dig up dirt to use against Trump (and they more or less failed).

They turned over every rock they could, look at that stupid hot-mic video in the bus, how many hours of video did they have to go through to dig up that crumb? they went back searching through 30+ years of content and thats all they could come up with.... some locker room talk lol

People have to just face it.

Your government was and still is corrupt and its a weaponized system of control, Your government colluded with the enemy in a desperate attempt to stop Trump from becoming president. Your government started a sham "Russia investigation" to cover up its own crimes. Your government applied a different standard of justice to the clintons than it would have to you or anyone else.

To date ZERO evidence has been brought forward that Trump or anyone in his campaign did anything wrong, and the only people that have done anything wrong so far were picked by "the swamp" to fill positions..... all the others fell into petty perjury Traps on meaningless topics and insignificant factoids.

Lord Raglan Feb 10, 2018 12:12 PM Permalink

How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind buying this and thus, Obama and Hillary?

navy62802 -> Lord Raglan Feb 10, 2018 12:16 PM Permalink

You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS?

Kelley Feb 10, 2018 12:16 PM Permalink

Isn't it lovely to find out that your money and mine is being used by government agents to give us the government they want?

It's sort of like a thug robbing you and using part of your money to pay another thug to rough you up from time time to time if you ask any questions with the thugs believing it's for our own good.

Thanks, Hillary, for looking out for us. You and your best buds are the best. Such bighearted givers! Meanwhile, give our regards to your partner in slime Obama, although it must pain you to have been bested by 'Beavis' who thinks so much of himself to balance out how little he impresses anyone who knows him.

desertboy Feb 10, 2018 12:20 PM Permalink

"U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds.

Consuelo Feb 10, 2018 12:22 PM Permalink

Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it...

Kelley Feb 10, 2018 1:05 PM Permalink

As taxpayers can we sue the CIA for misusing our funds? Pretty sure that buying sex videos for commercial release isn't part of the CIA's lawful mandate even at bargain prices.

indaknow Feb 10, 2018 1:13 PM Permalink

Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us.

It's not going to work.

hooligan2009 Feb 10, 2018 11:49 AM Permalink

my sauces tell me that pink pussyhat wearing hollywood types have been called in because they have a doppelganger for trump and access to 30,000 sexually abused victims that can act as Russian prostitutes for just ten bucks each. snapchat has a trump emoji that can be transplanted onto any porn video star - male or female - thus confirming that trump is a serial (serious?) user of ladies of the night

my sauces also tell me that the CIA offers a reward of 100,000 bucks (or 10 BTC) for every photo-shopped (snap-shopped or porn-shopped) material.

of course, the CIA already owns many many porn movie studios and films, but it would prefer third "party" movies - not from epstein's island where its operatives choose to rela with a pizza.

the CIA "pink" budget for such movies is limited to just 5,000 clips or 5 billion of taxpayers funds, whichever is the higher.

awesome sauce hey?

MusicIsYou Feb 10, 2018 1:14 PM Permalink

For only $100,000 that's all? Now I know it's probably not true.

Robert A. Heinlein Feb 10, 2018 1:17 PM Permalink

'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot.

hannah Feb 10, 2018 1:33 PM Permalink

i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump.

i call bullshit.

RKae -> hannah Feb 10, 2018 1:47 PM Permalink

Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth."

And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works.

Quantify Feb 10, 2018 1:38 PM Permalink

The CIA is at the head of the shadow government.

RKae Feb 10, 2018 1:39 PM Permalink

So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw?

I mean if they're so concerned about Trump and a couple of hookers... Better put some ice on that, CIA.

vofreason Feb 10, 2018 1:39 PM Permalink

You all are so ridiculous and fooled with your "drain the swamp" bs. It's a great idea but Trump doing it is a joke, I mean just look at who he has hired, what's wrong with you all are you blind?!!

He can't even fill 1/3 of the government positions he's supposed to and the ones he has have no business holding the positions given to them and are so incompetent, downright criminal or just personally horrendous humans that they can't stay in office more than a few months. All their blatant and moronically concocted lies are backing them into corners every day that they just try and lie out of again. America is over if we really have gotten to the point that a group like Trump's has support, it's just astonishing.

[May 11, 2019] Whitney Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan

Highly recommended!
May 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Whitney: Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan

by Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2019 - 11:05 48 SHARES Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,

Sometime in the next 4 weeks, the Justice Department's inspector general will release an internal review that will reveal the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. Among other matters, the IG's report is expected to determine "whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place." Critics of the Trump-collusion probe believe that there was never probable cause that a crime had been committed, therefore, there was no legal basis for launching the investigation.

The findings of the Mueller report– that there was no cooperation or collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign– seem to underscore this broader point and suggest that the fictitious Trump-Russia connection was merely a pretext for spying on the campaign of a Beltway outsider whose political views clashed with those of the foreign policy establishment.

In any event, the upcoming release of the Horowitz report will formally end the the first phase of the long-running Russiagate scandal and mark the beginning of Phase 2, in which high-profile officials from the previous administration face criminal prosecution for their role in what looks to be a botched attempt at a coup d'etat.

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Here's a brief summary from political analyst, Larry C. Johnson, who previously worked at the CIA and U.S. State Department:

" The evidence is plain–there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments, to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia. The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the US and UK and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign." ( "How US and Foreign Intel Agencies Interfered in a US Election" , Larry C. Johnson, Consortium News)

Bingo. Attorney General William Barr has already stated his belief that spying on the Trump campaign "did occur" and that, in his mind, it is "a big deal". He also reiterated his commitment to thoroughly investigate the matter in order to find out whether the spying was adequately "predicated", that is, whether the FBI followed the required protocols for such spying, or not. Barr already knows the answer to this question as he is fully aware of the fact that the FBI used information that they knew was false to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Having no hard evidence of cooperation with the Kremlin, senior-level FBI officials and their counterparts at the Obama Justice Department used parts of an "opposition research" document (The Trump Dossier) that they knew was unreliable to procure warrants that allowed them to treat a presidential campaign the same way the intelligence agencies treat foreign enemies; using electronic surveillance, wiretapping, confidential informants and "honey trap" schemes designed to gather embarrassing or incriminating information on their target. Barr knows all of this already which is why the Democrats are doing everything in their power to discredit him and have him removed from office.

https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4855

His determination to "get to the bottom of this" is not just a threat to the FBI, it's a threat to multiple agencies that may have had a hand in this expansive domestic espionage operation including the CIA, the NSA, the DOJ, the State Department and, perhaps, even the Obama White House. No one knows yet how far up the political food-chain the skulduggery actually goes, but Barr appears to be serious about finding out.

Here's Barr again:

"Many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single confidential informant .I would like to find out whether that is in fact true. It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence effort designed to stop the threat as it's being represented."

In other words, Barr knows that the Trump campaign was riddled with spies and he is going to do his damnedest to find out what happened. He also knows that the FISA warrants were improperly obtained using the shabby disinformation from an opposition research "hit piece" (The Steele Dossier) that was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, just like he knows that government agents had concocted a strategy for leaking classified information to the media to fuel the public hysteria. Barr knows most of what happened already. It's just a matter of compiling the research in the proper format and delivering it in a way that helps to emphasize how trusted government agents abused their power by pursuing a vicious partisan plot to either destroy the president's reputation or force him from office. Like Barr said, that's a "big deal".

The name that seems to feature larger than all others in the ongoing Trump-Russia saga, is James Comey, the former FBI Director who oversaw the spying operations that are now under investigation at the DOJ. But was Comey really the central figure in these felonious hi-jinks or was he a mere lieutenant following directives from someone more powerful than himself? While the preponderance of new evidence suggests that the FBI was deeply involved, it does not answer this crucial question. For example, just this week, a report by veteran journalist John Solomon, showed that former British spy Christopher Steele admitted to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec that his "Trump Dossier" was "political research", implying that the contents couldn't be trusted because they were shaped by Steele's political bias. Kavalec passed along this information to the FBI which shrugged it off and then, just days later, used the dossier to obtain warrants to spy on members of the Trump campaign. Think about that for a minute. The FBI had "written proof . that Steele had a political motive", but went ahead and used the dossier to procure the warrants anyway. That's what I'd call a premeditated felony.

But evidence of wrongdoing is not proof that Comey was the ringleader, he was just the hapless sad sack who was left holding the bag. The truth is, Comey was just a reluctant follower. The real architect of the Trump-Russia treachery was the boss-man at the nation's premier intelligence agency, the CIA. That's where the headwaters of this shameful burlesque are located, in Langley. More on that in a minute, but first check out this excerpt from an article at The Hill which sums up Comey's role fairly well:

(There) "will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what's causing the 360-degree head spin.

"There are early indicators that troubling behaviors may have occurred in all three scenarios. Barr will want to zero in on a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA director.

In addition, the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources ("assets," in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious "government investigator" posing as Halper's assistant and cited in The New York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence case." ( "James Comey is in trouble and he knows it" , The Hill)

Why is the Inspector General so curious as to whether Comey "was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director? And why did Comey draw from "a cast of characters " . that "all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources"??

Could it be that Comey was just an unwitting pawn in a domestic regime change operation launched by former CIA Director John Brennan, the one public figure who has expressed greater personal animus towards Trump than all the others combined? Could Trump's promise to normalize relations with Russia have intensified Brennan's visceral hatred of him given the fact that Russia had frustrated Brennan's strategic plans in Ukraine and Syria? Keep in mind, the CIA had been arming, training and providing logistical support to the Sunni militants who were trying to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al Assad. Putin's intervention crushed the jihadist militias delivering a humiliating defeat to Generalissimo Brennan who, soon after, left office in disgrace. Isn't this at least part of the reason why Brennan hates Trump?

Regular readers of this column know that I have always thought that Brennan was the central figure in the Trump-Russia charade. It was Brennan who first referred the case to Comey, just as it was Brennan who "hand-picked" the analysts who stitched together the dodgy Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) (which said that "Putin and the Russian government aspired to help Trump's election chances.") It was also Brennan who persuaded Harry Reid to petition Comey to open an investigation in the first place. Brennan was chief instigator of the Trump-Russia fiasco, the omniscient puppet-master who persuaded Clapper and Comey to do his bidding while still-unidentified agents strategically leaked stories to the media to inflame passions and sow social unrest. At every turn, Brennan was there guiding the perfidious project along. According to journalist Philip Giraldi, the CIA may have even assisted in the obtaining of FISA warrants on Trump campaign aids as this excerpt from an article at The Unz Review indicates:

"Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve several requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the British and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan was able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the concerns about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped. And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee." ( "The Conspiracy Against Trump" , Philip Giraldi)

Can you see how important this is? The FBI was having trouble getting warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, so Brennan helped them out by persuading his foreign intelligence allies (the British and other European intelligence services) to come up with bogus "intercepted communications linked to American sources," which helped to secure the FISA warrants. We have no idea of what these foreign agents heard on these alleged intercepted communications, all we know is that they were effectively used to achieve Brennan's ultimate objective, which was to acquire the means of taking down Trump via a relentless and expansive surveillance campaign.

According to a report in The Guardian (where the story first appeared.):

"GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters) played an early, prominent role in kickstarting the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016. One source called the British eavesdropping agency the "principal whistleblower". ("British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia ", The Guardian)

Okay, so Brennan twisted a few arms and got his foreign Intel buddies to make uncorroborated claims that got the investigative ball rolling, but then what? If there was any meat to Brennan's foreign intel, then Mueller would have dug it up and used it in his report, right? But he didn't. Why?

Because there was nothing there, the whole thing was a sham from the get go. Brennan probably "sexed up" the intelligence so it would sound like something it really wasn't. (Think: WMD) Again, if there was even a scintilla of hard evidence that Trump's campaign assistants were in bed with Russia, Mueller would have shrieked it from every mountaintop across America. But he didn't, because there wasn't any. There was no cooperation, no conspiracy and no collusion. Trump was falsely accused. End of story.

Here's more from the same article:

"The Guardian has been told the FBI and the CIA were slow to appreciate the extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team and Moscow ahead of the US election." (Guardian)

"The extensive nature of contacts between Trump's team and Moscow"???

Really? This is precisely the type of hyperventilating journalism that fueled the absurd conspiracy theory that the president of the United States was a Russian agent. It's hard to believe that we're even discussing the matter at this point.

There was an interesting aside in John Solomon's article that suggests that he might be thinking along the same lines. He says: "One legal justification cited for redacting the Oct. 13, 2016, email is the National Security Act of 1947, which can be used to shield communications involving the CIA or the White House National Security Council."

Why would Solomon draw attention to "to shielding communications involving the CIA or the White House", after all, the bulk of his article focused on the State Department and the FBI? Is he suggesting that the CIA and Obama White House may have been involved in these spying shenanigans, is that why Kavalec's damning notes (which stated that Steele's dossier could not be trusted.) have been retroactively classified?

Take a look at this email from the FBI's chief investigator in the Russia collusion probe, Peter Strzok, to his fellow agents in April 2017.

"I'm beginning to think the agency (CIA) got info a lot earlier than we thought and hasn't shared it completely with us. Might explain all those weird/seemingly incorrect leads all these media folks have. Would also highlight agency as source of some leaks." -Peter Strzok.

Ha! So even the FBI's chief investigator was in the dark about the CIA's shadowy machinations behind the scenes. Clearly, Brennan wanted to prevent the other junta leaders from fully knowing what he was up to.

All of this is bound to come out in the inspector general's report sometime in the next month or so. Both Attorney General William Barr and IG Horowitz appear to be fully committed to revealing the criminal leaks, the illegal electronic surveillance, the improperly obtained FISA warrants, and the multiple confidential human sources (spies) that were placed in the Trump campaign. They are going to face withering criticism for their efforts, but they are resolutely moving forward all the same. Bravo, for that.

Bottom line : The agents and officials who conducted this seditious attack on the presidency never thought they'd be held accountable for their crimes. But they were wrong, and now their day of reckoning is fast approaching. The main players in this palace coup are about to be exposed, criminally charged and prosecuted. Some of them will probably wind up in jail.

"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine."

DocBerg , just now link

Please wake me up from my hibernation if any of these cretins are actually prosecuted effectively, much less punished, as they richly deserve.

JCW Industries , 3 minutes ago link

Nothing will happen. IG report will show nothing. Look who's doing it. (((Horowitz))).....the DS protects its own

notfeelinthebern , 18 minutes ago link

So we should probably be sanctioning GB, instead of Russia? It would be the right thing to do? No?

Gonzogal , 6 minutes ago link

There is ZERO evidence that Russia played ANY role in the 2016 USSA election and yet are sanctioned to the max, threatened with war etc. HOWEVER there IS proof of the UK/GCHQ involvement.

I am waiting to see if Trump still goes to the UK in June or if he tells them he is "busy with more important things at home" aka F...off.

Amy G. Dala , 2 minutes ago link

Remember when Gowdy asked Brennan for evidence, and Brennan does reply with a straight face:

"We don't deal in evidence."

Mister Brennan, thou has dost protest too loudly, for too long . . .

Idaho potato head , 19 minutes ago link

Apocalypse, I would say that word describes it pretty well.

Middle English Apocalipse "Revelation (the New Testament book)," borrowed from Anglo-French, borrowed from Late Latin apocalypsis "revelation, the Book of Revelation," borrowed from Greek apokálypsis "uncovering, disclosure, revelation," from apokalyp-, stem of apokalýptein "to uncover, disclose, reveal" (from apo- APO- + kalýptein "to cover, protect, conceal," of uncertain origin) + -sis -SIS

Joebloinvestor , 24 minutes ago link

Anyone notice NO ******* COMMENT from UK intelligence about their ex-spies being involved in a US election?

I kind of expected one "throwaway" to be found with a hole behind his ear.

Idaho potato head , 13 minutes ago link

'highly likely'. would be typical english understatement.

bh2 , 30 minutes ago link

"No one knows yet how far up the political food-chain the skulduggery actually goes"

Too kind. We all know it is impossible that Susan Rice did not know -- she would have to authorize the FBI to conduct any foreign spying operations.

And if Susan Rice knew, it is impossible that Barack Obama didn't know. And approved of it, if only by not putting a stop to it.

The string that hasn't been pulled yet is the role of British intelligence. Brennan is obviously not a very bright man. He's a post-turtle, so how a dull-witted former communist ended up as head of the CIA is yet another story that needs looking into.

Was he actually a British mole?

The intersection of British establishment political goals and donated assets in the operation of this plot is nakedly obvious. It will be for Barr to expose that "angle", with the distinct possibility the ultimate origin of this scheme was the Blairite UK civil service who wished to eliminate a potentially powerful political actor who repeatedly and strongly indicated his unreserved support for Brexit.

Philthy_Stacker , 45 minutes ago link

All the things you mentioned were obfuscated by Clinton, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Cheney, several Generals, heads of state, foreign intelligence. Do you think someone just snaps a finger and the MIC disappears?

You conflate 'past' leadership with the current. The deep state is crumbling. We need to keep digging and indicting until Rothschild takes a one way rocket off planet Earth.

It will only end when treasonous traitor hang by their necks. I'm still hoping and informing others.

joego1 , 36 minutes ago link

Only the wheels that grind the sheeple work right now.

wadalt , 50 minutes ago link

"I've talked to the members of the Israeli government at the highest levels. I know who they want elected here. It's not Hillary Clinton." – Former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani

The TRUMP Collusion wasn't with the Russians , but with APARTHEID Israhell.

But NO ONE will investigate that.

M.A.G.A. is out

K.A.K.A. is in (Keep America Kabalah Again)

http://cufpa.wordpress.com/2018/01/07/trumps-jewish-agenda/

KJWqonfo7 , 34 minutes ago link

It's difficult to look at him with that repugnant grin on his rat face.

boring_man , 54 minutes ago link

"Some of them will probably wind up in jail."

"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine."

"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all."

Henry Wadsworth Longellow

Patience is an integral part of of those interested in true "justice"

man will fail, and at times shirk his duty to God and each other,,,,,,,,,,,,,our Great Judge misses no thing,,,,,,,

- now there's yer dinner -

boring

Dumpster Elite , 1 hour ago link

I know what occurred...it was a coup attempt.

I won't believe that ANYTHING will be done about it. Prove me wrong, Barr. I remain a non-believer that anything bad happens to the Deep State.

Pa Kettle , 1 hour ago link

The definitive exposé:

"CIA Crimes: How John Brennan Weaponized the CIA and FBI, and Conspired with Russia and Harry Reid to Frame Trump"

PART A
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=1362

PART B
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=1443

PART C
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=1525

PART D
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=2241

PART E
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=2423

PART F
https://chaletbooks.com/chaletreports/?p=2463

Philthy_Stacker , 52 minutes ago link

Sorry Ashton, Dan Bongino figured it out 2 years ago. Your book is weak.
https://www.amazon.com/Spygate-Attempted-Sabotage-Donald-Trump/dp/1642930989
Ashton is a day late and a dollar short. Hats off to Dan Bongino, the real 'exposer'.
Investigative reporting by:
John Solomon and Sara Carter.

[May 11, 2019] Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Breaking news today, courtesy of the New York Times , is that a man with a long history of working with the CIA and a female FBI Informant, traveled to London in September of 2016 and tried unsuccessfully to entrap George Papadopolous. The biggest curiosity is that US intelligence or law enforcement officials fully briefed British intelligence on what they were up to. ..."
"... The FBI disingenuously claims they ran Azra Turk at Papadopolous because they were alarmed ostensibly by Russia's attempts to disrupt the 2016 election. But Papadopolous was not seeking out Russian contacts. He was being baited. It was Mifsud and others tied to British and US intelligence who were bringing up the "opportunity" to work with the Russians. ..."
"... The boomerang from the Democratic Party's failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia's 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow's pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton . ..."
"... In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort 's dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress. ..."
"... It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey* interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg ..."
"... Neoliberals and neoconservatives (ie zionists) were behind it and continue to push it. Trump ran to the left of Clinton on both domestic and foreign policy. That's why he won, and why the establishment must present his election as de facto illegitimate, because otherwise they would be forced to admit that the bipartisan convergence around both finance driven economic policy and war on terror interventionism that has described elite politics since Clinton has been a disaster for most ordinary Americans -- of all types and political persuasions -- and needs to be destroyed root and branch. ..."
"... What's the likelihood that Carter Page was a plant in the Trump campaign? After all, he had a history with the US IC and was used as bait in an FBI case to prove Russian operatives' recruiting efforts. It's thought he's the Under Cover Employee alluded to in this case, which resulted in the successful prosecution of Russian spies: ..."
"... Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources (including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were employed by the bureau in this operation: ..."
May 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson

The preponderance of evidence makes this very simple--there was a broad, coordinated effort by the Obama Administration, with the help of foreign governments, to target Donald Trump and paint him as a stooge of Russia.

The Mueller Report provides irrefutable evidence that the so-called Russian collusion case against Donald Trump was a deliberate fabrication by intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom and organizations aligned with the Clinton Campaign.

Breaking news today, courtesy of the New York Times, is that a man with a long history of working with the CIA and a female FBI Informant, traveled to London in September of 2016 and tried unsuccessfully to entrap George Papadopolous. The biggest curiosity is that US intelligence or law enforcement officials fully briefed British intelligence on what they were up to. Quite understandable given what we now know about British spying on the Trump Campaign.

The Mueller investigation of Trump "collusion" with Russia prior to the 2016 Presidential election focused on eight cases:

  1. Proposed Trump Tower Project in Moscow
  2. George Papadopolous --
  3. Carter Page --
  4. Dimitri Simes --
  5. Veselnetskya Meeting at Trump Tower (June 16, 2016)
  6. Events at Republican Convention
  7. Post-Convention Contacts with Russian Ambassador Kislyak
  8. Paul Manafort

One simple fact emerges--of the eight cases or incidents of alleged Trump Campaign interaction with the Russians investigated by the Mueller team, the proposals to interact with the Russian Government or Putin originated with FBI informants, MI-6 assets or people paid by Fusion GPS, not Trump or his people. There is not a single instance where Donald Trump or any member of his campaign team initiated contact with the Russians for the purpose of gaining derogatory information on Hillary or obtaining support to boost the Trump campaign. Not one.

Simply put, Trump and his campaign were the target of an elaborate, wide ranging covert action designed to entrap him and members of his team as an agent of Russia.

Let's look in detail at each of the cases.

THE PROPOSED TRUMP TOWER PROJECT IN MOSCOW, according to Mueller's report, originated with an FBI Informant--Felix Sater.

Here's what the Mueller Report states:

In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov.

Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).

Mueller, as I have noted previously , is downright dishonest in failing to identify Sater as an FBI informant. Sater was not just a private entrepreneur looking to make some coin. He was a fully signed up FBI informant. Sater's status as an FBI snitch was first exposed in 2012. Sater also was a boyhood chum of Michael Cohen, the target being baited in this operation. Another inconvenient fact excluded from the Mueller report is that one of Mueller's Chief Prosecutors, Andrew Weissman, signed the deal with Felix Sater in December 1998 that put Sater into the FBI Informant business .

All suggestions for meeting with the Russian Government, including Putin, originated with Felix Sater. The use of Sater on this particular project started in September 2015.

[For more on Sater please see my previous posts, Felix Sater--The Rosetta Stone for the FBI/CIA Conspiracy Against Trump? , Felix Sater and the Steele Dossier .]

GEORGE PAPADOPOLOUS

Papadopolous was targeted by British and U.S. intelligence starting in late December 2015, when he is offered out of the blue a job with the London Centre of International Law and Practice Limited (LCILP) . The LCILP has all of the hallmarks of an intelligence front company. LCILP began as an offshoot from another company  --  EN Education Group Limited  --  which describes itself as "a global education consultancy, facilitating links between students, education providers and organisations with an interest in education worldwide".

EN Education and LCILP are owned and run by Nagi Khalid Idris, a 48-year-old British citizen of Sudanese origin. For no apparent reason Idris offers Papadopolous a job as the Director of the LCILP's International Energy and Natural Resources Division. Then in March of 2016, Idris and Arvinder Sambei (who acted as an attorney for the FBI on a 9-11 extradition case in the UK), insist on introducing Joseph Mifsud to Papadopolous.

It is Joseph Mifsud who introduces the idea of meeting Putin following a lunch in London:

"The lunch is booked for March 24 at the Grange Holborn Hotel,. . . . "When I get there, Mifsud is waiting for me in the lobby with an attractive, fashionably dressed young woman with dirty blonde hair at his side. He introduces her as Olga Vinogradova." (p. 76)

"Mifsud sells her hard. "Olga is going to be your inside woman to Moscow. She knows everyone." He tells me she was a former official at the Russian Ministry of Trade. Then he waxes on about introducing me to the Russian ambassador in London." (p. 77)

"On April 12, "Olga" writes: "I have already alerted my personal links to our conversation and your request. The embassy in London is very much aware of this. As mentioned, we are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump. The Russian Federation would love to welcome him once his candidature would be officially announced."

And it is Mifsud who raises the possibility of getting dirt on Hillary:

"Then Mifsud returns from the Valdai conference. On April 26 we meet for breakfast at the Andaz Hotel, near Liverpool Street Station, one of the busiest train stations in London. He's in an excellent mood and claims he met with high-level Russian government officials. But once again, he's very short on specifics. This is becoming a real pattern with Mifsud. He hasn't offered any names besides Timofeev. Then, he leans across the table in a conspiratorial manner. The Russians have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, he tells me. "Emails of Clinton," he says. "They have thousands of emails."

Here again we encounter the lying and obfuscation of the Mueller team. They falsely characterize Mifsud as an agent of Russia. In fact, he has close and longstanding ties to both British and US intelligence ( Disobedient Media lays out the Mifsud mystery in detail ).

Mifsud was not alone. The FBI and the CIA also were in the game of trying to entrap Papadopolous. In September of 2016, Papadopolous was being wined and dined by Halper (who has longstanding ties to the US intelligence community) and Azra Turk, an FBI Informant/researcher ( see NY Times ).

The FBI disingenuously claims they ran Azra Turk at Papadopolous because they were alarmed ostensibly by Russia's attempts to disrupt the 2016 election. But Papadopolous was not seeking out Russian contacts. He was being baited. It was Mifsud and others tied to British and US intelligence who were bringing up the "opportunity" to work with the Russians.

CARTER PAGE

The section of the Mueller report that deals with Carter Page is a total travesty. Mueller and his team, for example, initially misrepresent Page's status with the Trump campaign--he is described as "working" for the campaign, which implies a paid position, when he was in fact only a volunteer foreign policy advisor. Mueller also paints Page's prior experience and work in Russia as evidence that Page was being used by Russian intelligence, but says nothing about the fact that Page was being regularly debriefed by the CIA and the FBI during the same period. In other words, Page was cooperating with US intelligence and law enforcement. But this fact is omitted in the Mueller report.

Mueller eventually accurately describes Page's role in the Trump campaign as follows:

In January 2016, Page began volunteering on an informal, unpaid basis for the Trump Campaign after Ed Cox, a state Republican Party official, introduced Page to Trump Campaign officials. Page told the Office that his goal in working on the Campaign was to help candidate Trump improve relations with Russia. To that end, Page emailed Campaign officials offering his thoughts on U.S.-Russia relations, prepared talking points and briefing memos on Russia, and proposed that candidate Trump meet with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

In communications with Campaign officials, Page also repeatedly touted his high-level contacts in Russia and his ability to forge connections between candidate Trump and senior Russian governmental officials. For example, on January 30, 2016, Page sent an email to senior Campaign officials stating that he had "spent the past week in Europe and had been in discussions with some individuals with close ties to the Kremlin" who recognized that Trump could have a "game-changing effect . .. in bringing the end of the new Cold War. The email stated that " [t]hrough [his] discussions with these high level contacts," Page believed that "a direct meeting in Moscow between Mr. Trump and Putin could be arranged.

The Mueller presentation portrays Carter Page in a nefarious, negative light. His contacts with Russia are characterized as inappropriate and unjustified. Longstanding business experience in a particular country is not proof of wrong doing. No consideration is given at all to Page's legitimate concerns raising about the dismal state of US/Russia relations following the US backed coup in the Ukraine and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia.

Page's association with the Trump campaign was quite brief--he lasted seven months, being removed as a foreign policy advisor on 24 September. Page was not identified publicly as a Trump foreign policy advisor until March of 2016, but the evidence presented in the Mueller report clearly indicates that Page was already a target of intelligence agencies, in the US and abroad, long before the FISA warrant of October 2016.

While serving on the foreign policy team Page continued his business and social contacts in Russia, but was never tasked by the Trump team to pursue or promote contacts with Putin and his team. In fact, Page's proposals, suggestions and recommendations were either ignored or directly rebuffed.

The timeline reported in the Mueller report regarding Page's trip to Russia in early July raises questions about the intel collected on that trip and the so-called "intel" revealed in the Steele Dossier with respect to Page. Carter admits to meeting with individuals, such as Dmitry Peskov and Igor Sechin, who appear in the Steele Dossier. Page's meetings in Moscow turned out to be innocuous and uneventful. Nothing he did resembled clandestine activity. Yet, the Steele report on that visit suggested just the opposite and used the tactic of guilt by association to imply that Page was up to something dirty.

The bottomline for Mueller is that Page did not do anything wrong and no one in the Trump Campaign embraced his proposals for closer ties with Russia.

DMITRI SIMES

The targeting and investigation of Dmitri Simes is disgusting and an abuse of law enforcement authority. Full disclosure. I know Dmitri. For awhile, in the 2002-2003 time period, I was a regular participant at Nixon Center events. For example, I was at a round table in December 2002 on the imminent invasion of Iraq. Colonel Pat Lang sat on one side of me and Ambassador Joe Wilson on the other. Directly across the table was Charles Krauthammer. Dmitri ran an honest seminar.

The entire section on Dmitri Simes, under other circumstances, could be viewed as something bizarre and amusing. But the mere idea that Simes was somehow an agent of Putin and a vehicle for helping Trump work with the Russians to steal the 2016 election is crazy and idiotic. Those in the FBI who were so stupid as to buy into this nonsense should have their badges and guns taken away. They are too dumb to work in law enforcement.

Dmitri's only sin was to speak calmly, intelligently and rationally about foreign policy dealings with Russia. We now know that in this new hysteria of the 21st Century Russian scare that qualities such as reason and rationality are proof of one's willingness to act as a puppet of Vladimir Putin.

TRUMP TOWER MEETING (JUNE 9, 2016)

This is the clearest example of a plant designed to entrap the Trump team. Mueller, once again, presents a very disingenuous account:

On June 9, 2016, senior representatives of the Trump Campaign met in Trump Tower with a Russian attorney expecting to receive derogatory information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. The meeting was proposed to Donald Trump Jr. in an email from Robert Goldstone, at the request of his then-client Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian real-estate developer Aras Agalarov. Goldstone relayed to Trump Jr. that the "Crown prosecutor of Russia ... offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia" as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." Trump Jr. immediately responded that "if it's what you say I love it," and arranged the meeting through a series of emails and telephone calls.

The meeting was with a Russian attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya.

The Russian attorney who spoke at the meeting, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had previously worked for the Russian government and maintained a relationship with that government throughout this period oftime. She claimed that funds derived from illegal activities in Russia were provided to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats. Trump Jr. requested evidence to support those claims, but Veselnitskaya did not provide such information.

Ignore for a moment that no information on Hillary was passed or provided (and doing such a thing is not illegal). The real problem is with what Mueller does not say and did not investigate. Mueller conveniently declines to mention the fact that Veselnitskaya was working closely with the firm Hillary Clinton hired to produce the Steele Dossier. NBC News reported on Veselnitskaya:

The information that a Russian lawyer brought with her when she met Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 stemmed from research conducted by Fusion GPS, the same firm that compiled the infamous Trump dossier, according to the lawyer and a source familiar with the matter.

In an interview with NBC News, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya says she first received the supposedly incriminating information she brought to Trump Tower -- describing alleged tax evasion and donations to Democrats -- from Glenn Simpson , the Fusion GPS owner, who had been hired to conduct research in a New York federal court case.

Even a mediocre investigator would recognize the problem of the relationship between the lawyer claiming to have dirty, damning info on Hillary with the firm Hillary hired to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. This was another botched set up and the Trump folks did not take the bait.

EVENTS AT THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION

This portion of the Mueller report is complete farce. Foreign Ambassdors, including the Russian (and the Chinese) attend Republican and Democrat Conventions. Presidential candidates and their advisors speak to those Ambassadors. So, where is the beef? Answer. There isn't any. That this "event" was considered something worthy of a counter intelligence investigation is just one more piece of evidence that law enforcement and intelligence were weaponized against the Trump campaign.

POST-CONVENTION CONTACTS WITH RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR KISLYAK

Ditto. As noted in the previous paragraph, trying to criminalize normal diplomatic contacts, especially with a country where we share important, vital national security interests, is but further evidence of the crazy anti-Russian hysteria that has infected the anti-Trumpers. Pathetic.

MANAFORT

If Paul Manafort had rebuffed Trump's offer to run his campaign, he would be walking free today and still buying expensive suits and evading taxes along with his Clinton buddy, Greg Craig. Instead, he became another target for DOJ and intel community and the DNC, which were desperate to portray Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. Thanks to John Solomon of The Hill, we now know the impetus to target Manafort came from the DNC :

The boomerang from the Democratic Party's failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia's 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow's pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton .

In its most detailed account yet, Ukraine's embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump's campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.

In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly's office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort 's dealings inside the country, in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.

Manafort was not colluding, but the Clinton campaign and the Obama Administration most certainly were.

Take these eight events as a whole a very clear picture emerges--US and foreign intelligence (especially the UK) and US law enforcement collaborated in a broad effort to bait the Trump team with ostensible Russian entreaties in order to paint Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. That effort is now being exposed and those culpable will hopefully face justice. This should sicken and alarm every American regardless of political party. Will justice be served?

notlurking , 03 May 2019 at 08:16 AM

we're not in Kansas anymore.....
Joe100 , 03 May 2019 at 08:43 AM
Great work!

I just read the following about special visas approved for some of the FBI "operatives" (from SD at CTH): "It wasn't just the CIA that was using spies to "dirty up" Trump associates. The FBI was doing it too. There was the infamous Natalia Veselnitskaya who is known for her part in the Trump Tower meeting. She had been banned from the country but got a special visa signed off by Preet Bahara of the FBI, Southern District of New York. Henry Greenburg, the known FBI informant who tried to entrap Roger Stone, also got a special visa. And I'm sure there are many more "

Gerard M , 03 May 2019 at 09:06 AM
IMO, there is no coming back from this. Apart from this Deep State coup attempt, we have seen that democracy is a shame, it's all theater. The Establishment (which includes GOP) is constantly working to undermine Trump and thwart his plans to do what the American people want and elected him for. What I've found quite disturbing is that the controlling puppet masters have not let up in trying to remove or neutralize Trump. As if they can't wait even 4 years to again fully stack the deck and regain total control. They are not willing to concede that 2016 was a political black swan event involving a celebrity billionaire American icon. And conceding and allowing this fluke to be rectified I'm 4 short years is worse than their pushback exposing the political system as a rigged game.

The events of the last 2.5 years have radically altered my views. I no longer have any faith in democracy (voting), the government, the federal courts, law enforcement, et al. And I can't see me regaining any faith in them. What I have seen in the past 2.5 years is kind of like finding out my wife of decades, whom I idolized, has been cheating with my friend from childhood, whom I would've laid down my life for. And all the other people close to me not telling me.

I now only have faith in only God and beagles.

Fred -> Gerard M... , 03 May 2019 at 10:40 AM
It's not the black swan event that concerns the guilty but the fear of just retribution by those who see just how black hearted the left has become.
Gerard M said in reply to Fred ... , 03 May 2019 at 12:25 PM
It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey* interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg

*Tracey, btw, is on the left. But like Glenn Greenwald and others on the left he is an honest journalist interested in the truth.

Ligurio said in reply to Fred ... , 03 May 2019 at 02:16 PM
The "left" was not behind and does not buy into this Russia psyop. Neoliberals and neoconservatives (ie zionists) were behind it and continue to push it. Trump ran to the left of Clinton on both domestic and foreign policy. That's why he won, and why the establishment must present his election as de facto illegitimate, because otherwise they would be forced to admit that the bipartisan convergence around both finance driven economic policy and war on terror interventionism that has described elite politics since Clinton has been a disaster for most ordinary Americans -- of all types and political persuasions -- and needs to be destroyed root and branch.

To see how and why the "left" differs from corporate identity-politicking liberals in the above regard consider how it is that Tulsi Gabbard is both the Dem candidate most respected by principled Trump supporters on this site and others and the Dem candidate most reviled, ignored, and slandered by DNC liberals and neocons alike.

The enemy to principled conservatives and the left in this country is the bipartisan establishment corporate neoliberalism of the RNC and DNC alike.

Fred -> Ligurio... , 03 May 2019 at 08:53 PM
That's as convenient a lie as any other.
akaPatience , 03 May 2019 at 11:56 AM
What's the likelihood that Carter Page was a plant in the Trump campaign? After all, he had a history with the US IC and was used as bait in an FBI case to prove Russian operatives' recruiting efforts. It's thought he's the Under Cover Employee alluded to in this case, which resulted in the successful prosecution of Russian spies:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/evgeny-buryakov-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-connection-conspiracy-work

Anonymous said in reply to akaPatience ... , 03 May 2019 at 04:05 PM
Page is just a goofball grifter. He's not a plant. That is silly. When they saw names like Page and Manafort the Democrats pounced because they knew the could cast aspersions.

I'm not sure about Mifsud. I think it would be hard for Mueller to knowingly indict Papadop if Mifsud were an asset of the US (or even known to be an asset of allies). I think it is more likely Mifsud was a free agent.

All these guys Mifsud, Page, Papadop were grifters, not doing real work. Just running around trying to make a buck by claiming to facilitate meetings. It's a shame it bit them and not a crime to do what they did. At the same time, I can't help but see some kharmic justice. GET A JOB, you poly sci lightweights!

walrus said in reply to Anonymous... , 03 May 2019 at 06:11 PM
This anonymous commentator has never spent time in senior levels of business or government. There is a whole class of people who do not see themselves as Grifters but more as "ideas men".

The best offer valuable perspectives on the world, can really open doors and otherwise add value. At the other end of the spectrum are con men. Political campaigns and large corporations of any sort attract these people in droves. The skill in management is to sort the wheat from the chaff. Trump is good at that.

akaPatience -> Anonymous... , 03 May 2019 at 06:56 PM
Yes, Page often comes off as a bit crazy and incoherent. But he may be crazy like a fox. In the end he was never charged with ANYTHING and it's my understanding he represented himself legally throughout the investigation, opting not to hire counsel. I find it odd that others were prosecuted for process crimes but he escaped even THAT fate.

His participation in the Trump campaign, limited as it was, was nevertheless KEY in finally obtaining a FISA warrant after other attempts failed.

Consider it silly if you want. I view him at least worthy of suspicion. His hapless demeanor could be his schtick , when his education, experience and IC connections are taken into consideration.

Anonymous said in reply to akaPatience ... , 04 May 2019 at 06:09 PM
Page represents himself poorly even when he knows a lot is on the line. Look at how frustrated Gowdy got with him. Clearly Page didn't learn much from plebe year in terms of 5 basic responses. Compare the difference with Barr for instance.

While the Trident program is a big deal, every now and then USNA has mids that are diligent about getting good grades but not very smart. I knew one my year. Page is clearly in that vein. Don't miss that he didn't get into any elite program after graduation (SWO is the default). And that he was a poly sci major. The saying is "poly sci, QPR high" (QPR is quality point rating or GPA). Of course this is not to say there aren't some good SWOs or poly sci majors. But there's a definite correlation I'm noting. It fits with what his reputation is.

Furthermore, the guy has had an uneventful career, bouncing around. He went to a lower bulge bracket (not Goldman) and didn't seem to stick. And his Russian colleagues said he was an idiot and a boaster. We're not talking i-banker smart. Wouldn't trust him to do an NPV or other economic analysis. And then after that we have the grifting and the shmoozing.

Kid is a lightweight. A slightly less coffee-boy coffee boy.

catherine said in reply to Bill H ... , 03 May 2019 at 07:02 PM
''They cannot convict based on a law that was passed after the act was committed''

Money laundering has always been against the law of course....the NY law just firmed up the due diligence that is suppose to be done in transactions. I don't think there is a statute of limitations on things like fraud, tax evasion and money laundering but I will check it out to see

walrus said in reply to catherine... , 03 May 2019 at 04:37 PM
Catherine, in current PC thinking, merely passing the salt to a Russian guest at a dinner party makes you "an unregistered foreign agent" of Russia bent on implementing Putin's evil plans.

As for certifying real estate deals, the same crowd would view buying someone a MacDonalds hamburger as attempted bribery.

catherine said in reply to walrus ... , 03 May 2019 at 07:34 PM
''As for certifying real estate deals, the same crowd would view buying someone a MacDonalds hamburger as attempted bribery.''

Hardly. 7 million dollar cash deals for a condo thru a shell company is a red flag however..as is buying property for 1 million and selling it unimproved the next year for 2 million...or buying a house in LA 11 million and selling it 9 months later for 8 million. That 'in between money" is someone's pay off....that's how it works.

Money laundering is epidemic in the US and Europe....Israeli mafia, Russian oligarchs, African dictators looting their country's treasury and running it through a real estate washing machine deal. Far be from me to sweep the fairy dust out of Trump supporters eyes but, as I said, Trump's troubles are far from over. We will see what comes out in the future.

VietnamVet , 03 May 2019 at 05:40 PM
The soft coup against Donald Trump failed. He has to run hard and sure to win in 2020 to avoid an indictment in NY State when he leaves the Presidency. Corporate Democrats will do their damnedst again to put forth their weakest pro war candidate like the aged, apparently demented, Joe Biden. This fiasco and the recent coup attempt in Venezuela make the Keystone Cops appear competent.

I put this all down to Washington DC being completely isolated inside their credentialed bubble. It is just like corporate CEOs, who think they know exactly what they are doing. But, in reality, they are destroying the stabilizing middle class by extracting and hording wealth and turning mid-America into their colony. Globalist and nationalist oligarchs are after each other's throat over who controls the flow of money.

We live on a very finite world dependent on one sun in an expanding universe. Just like Boeing, Bayer or Volkswagen, the splintering world is starting to crash all around them. Even as they deny it, this is a multi-polar world now. It is not going back without a world war which would destroy civilization and could make the world uninhabitable for humans.

Bill H -> VietnamVet... , 04 May 2019 at 01:26 AM
And the best that our government can do is warn us not to wash our chicken before cooking it because washing merely spreads the salmonella that our food industry is unable to prevent from infecting it.
English Outsider -> VietnamVet... , 04 May 2019 at 01:15 PM
The trouble is that those CEO's do know exactly what they are doing. Making money the only way possible in a business environment in which outsourcing can sometimes be the only thing that pays.

The idea was that Trump was going to change that environment. Bannon calls its "economic nationalism" but in truth it's now just economic survival. Survival for those whose jobs are outsourced. Survival for the country as a whole, ultimately. That was Trump's core programme. It was the programme that made him different from all other Western politicians, "populist" or status quo. Do you see any sign that it's being implemented, or has that programme too got bogged down in the swamp?

Mad Max_22 , 03 May 2019 at 06:44 PM
Will justice be served? A good question.

If we are speaking about criminal justice, there is some chance that we will see persons such as Jim Comey, who persists in his smug higher calling act, prosecuted for what was a clear cut violation in divulging classified material through a lawyer intermediary to the NYT. I suspect the higher calling bit has been prompted in part because he knows that he screwed up both on the facts and in law and he is justifying his screw up to himself, and possibly also rehearsing his defense, with the rationale that he was only trying to do the right thing. Yeah, he may have had the facts all wrong, the Russians, etc, etc, but the worst that can be said is that he had been competent, there was no intent. That defense doesn't do much for the FBI's once held reputation for competence, but that appears to be gone anyway.

With regard to what will be turned up concerning the actual roots of the travesty, the heavily politicized faux investigation into the Clinton e mails and targeting of the Trump campaign on a predicate that is somewhere between nebulous and non existant, I think a criminal prosecution arising from that investigation, even if it is serious, is unlikely for two main reasons. First, what will be the charged violations? As best I can see right now, they will have to entail some imaginative application of fraud statutes, defrauding the FISC, defrauding the US, informants and assets lying to their handlers, or process crimes like Bob Mueller's partisan posse relied upon (ugly); and second, something like the Comey defense will interpenetrate all the individuals and entities involved: we may have been incredible bunglers, but that is the worst of it. We really believed these charlatans who conned us into this debacle. Sorry, but we thought we were doing the right thing.

Now if we are talking about seeing some kind of political or moral justice, I'm not too optimistic we will get much satisfaction there either and we will probably have to wait for history. The reason is that Barr will conduct this investigation by the rule book. That means that what we see developed through the process, indictment, prosecution, etc, is likely all,that we will ever see. Barr is very unlikely to produce a politcized manifesto to be employed as a smear weapon like the once reputable Mueller did.

Anyway, until we see a special FGJ empanelled, some search warrants executed, some tactical immunities offered, everything is on the come.

Jack , 03 May 2019 at 08:26 PM
All,

What probability do you assign that any top official will be indicted and prosecuted? I mean Brennan, Clapper, Comey & Lynch.

Second, what probability do you assign that Trump will declassify the relevant documents and communications like the FISA application,the originating EC, the tasking orders for FBI/CIA spying, etc.

blue peacock said in reply to Jack... , 04 May 2019 at 12:27 PM
Jack,

The question really comes down to Trump. Does he really want to expose the Swamp and pay the price or just use it for rhetorical & political purposes? When considering probabilities and looking at his track record in office on foreign policy relative to his campaign stance, I would say the probability is less than 30% that Brennan & Clapper will be indicted.

David Habakkuk -> blue peacock... , 04 May 2019 at 03:07 PM
bp,

The question is only very partly what Trump wants, in some abstract sense. Situations like this commonly have a strong escalatory logic. So one needs to ask whether or not he has rational reason to believe that unless he can destroy those who have shown themselves prepared to stop at nothing to destroy him, they will eventually succeed.

If the answer is yes - and while I think it may very well be, I am not prejudging the issue - then a key question becomes whether Trump will conclude that his most promising loption is to go after the conspirators by every means possible.

Involved here are questions about who he is listening to, and how competent they are.

But the escalatory processes are not simply to do with what Trump decides. In particular, a whole range of legal proceedings are involved. The referral in relation to Nellie Ohr is likely to be the fist of a good few. In addition, Ed Butowsky's lawsuits, and those against Steele, have unpredictable potentialities.

blue peacock said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 May 2019 at 07:11 PM
David

The intelligence & law enforcement apparatus in collusion with the media and the establishment of both parties went after him hard. As Larry notes here, they went to considerable effort to entrap those related to his campaign to impugn him. Mueller spent $35 million trying to find an angle. Even after the Mueller report stated there was no collusion they're sill after him. So that's not going to end any time soon.

Trump may have good instincts but his judgment of people so far to staff his administration is not very inspiring. He had Jeff Sessions as his AG and he let him hang in there for nearly two years while Mueller ran riot. He's surrounded himself with neocons on foreign policy. It seems his only real advisor is Jared. Everyone else he's got around him are from the same establishment that's going after him. He hasn't taken advise from Devin Nunes, who has done more to uncover the sedition than anyone else. If he had he would have by now declassified all the documents & communications. The impression I have is his primary motivation is building his brand & less about governance and wielding power. Take for example his order to withdraw from Syria. Bolton & the Pentagon are thumbing their noses at him.

Well, there have been several criminal referrals prior to the recent one on Nellie Ohr. There's the McCabe referral and the 8 referrals by Devin Nunes. I've not read any report of the empaneling of a grand jury yet. I agree with you that these law suits have the potential for great embarrassment, however to hold those responsible for the sedition accountable will require iron will & intense focus on the part of Trump to get his AG to assign prosecutors who don't have the axe to "protect" the "institution" and to create an opportunity for public awareness of the extent that law enforcement & intelligence became a 4th branch of government. My opinion is that his skill is in his instinctual understanding of the current political zeitgeist and his ability to manipulate the media including social media to project his brand. He's not an operational leader making sure his team executes his vision & strategy.

akaPatience , 04 May 2019 at 07:11 PM
Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources (including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were employed by the bureau in this operation:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/fbi-official-testimony-surveillance-trump-campaign/

[May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

Highly recommended!
A foreign intelligence asset was used to justify surveillance of Trump[ and some of his associates
Notable quotes:
"... What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent? ..."
"... The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant"). ..."
"... The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale. ..."
"... Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power. ..."
"... I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors. ..."
"... if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know? ..."
"... Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost. ..."
"... Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance. ..."
"... From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. ..."
"... He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI. ..."
"... its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered. ..."
"... Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this? ..."
"... A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies. ..."
"... It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries ..."
"... If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary. ..."
"... An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him ..."
"... A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination ..."
"... 'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.' ..."
"... I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief. ..."
"... Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it. ..."
"... Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs. ..."
"... Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly: ..."
"... Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. ..."
"... One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...? ..."
"... What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this? ..."
"... Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun? ..."
"... British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy. ..."
"... British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion. ..."
"... Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people. ..."
"... still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources ..."
"... I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia. ..."
"... Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are. ..."
"... It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things ..."
Aug 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

The revelations from US Government records about the FBI/Intel Community plot to take out Donald Trump continue to flow thanks to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch. The latest nugget came last Friday with the release of FBI records detailing their recruitment and management of Britain's ostensibly retired Intelligence Officer, Christopher Steele. He was an officially recruited FBI source and received at least 11 payments during the 9 month period that he was signed up as a Confidential Human Source.

You may find it strange that we can glean so much information from a document dump that is almost entirely redacted . The key is to look at the report forms; there are three types--FD-1023 (Source Reports), FD-209a (Contact Reports) and FD-794b (Payment Requests). There are 15 different 1023s, 13 209a reports and 11 794b payment requests covering the period from 2 February 2016 thru 1 November 2016. That is a total of nine months.

These reports totally destroy the existing meme that Steele only came into contact with the FBI sometime in July 2016. It is important for you to understand that a 1023 Source Report is filled out each time that the FBI source handler has contact with the source. This can be an in person meeting or a phone call. Each report lists the name of the Case Agent; the date, time and location of the meeting; any other people attending the meeting; and a summary of what was discussed.

What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent?

richardstevenhack , a day ago

Indeed we do need more information.

The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant").

We can be pretty sure this predates any alleged Russian "hacking" (unless it occurred as a result of alleged Russian hacking of the DNC in 2015).

This needs to be pinned down if anyone is to be successfully prosecuted for creating this treasonous hoax.

chris chuba , 5 hours ago
A very closely related topic, Victor Davis Hanson is onto something but it is darker than he suggests, https://www.nationalreview.... Paraphrasing, he gives the typical, rally around the flag we must stop the Russians intro but then documents how govt flaks abused their power to influence our elections and then makes the point, 'this is why the public is skeptical of their claims'.

The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale.

Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power.

I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors.

Leonardo Facchin , 20 hours ago
Thanks for the explanation.

What I can't figure out is: if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know?

Publius Tacitus -> Leonardo Facchin , 17 hours ago
Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost.
blue peacock -> Leonardo Facchin , 13 hours ago
Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance.

From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. And of course the media narrative that Rep. Nunes, Goodlatte and others were endangering "national security" by casting aspersions on the "patriotic" law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Paul M -> Leonardo Facchin , 16 hours ago
He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI.

Of course, he had most likely already done so and its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered.

David Habakkuk , 4 hours ago
PT,

Fascinating.

Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this?

The point is not merely a quibble. A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies.

It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries.

Another related matter has to do with the termination of Steele as a 'Confidential Human Source.'

It has long seemed to me that it was more than possible that this was not to be taken at face value. If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary.

An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him.

A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination.

(See http://thehill.com/person/d... .)

When on 31 January 2017 – well after the publication of the dossier by BuzzFeed – Ohr provided reassurance that he could continue to help feed information to the FBI, Steele texted back:

"If you end up out though, I really need another (bureau?) contact point/number who is briefed. We can't allow our guy to be forced to go back home. It would be disastrous."

At that point, Solomon tells us that 'Investigators are trying to determine who Steele was referring to.' This seems to me a rather important question. It would seem likely, although not certain, that he is talking about another Brit. If he is, would it have been someone else employed by Orbis? Or someone currently working for British intelligence? What is the precise significance of 'forced to go back home', and why would this have been 'disastrous'?

Another crucial paragraph:

'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.'

The earlier contacts may be of little interest, but there again they may not be.

As it happens, it was following Berezovsky's arrival in London in October 2001 that the 'information operations' network he created began to move into high gear. It is moreover clear that this was always a transatlantic operation, and also fragments of evidence suggest that the FBI may have had some involvement from early on.

I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief.

The original attempt came in a radio programme broadcast by the BBC – which was to become known to some of us as the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – on 16 December 2006, presented by Tom Mangold, a familiar 'trusty' for the intelligence services.

(A transcript sent out from the Cabinet Office at the time is available on the archived 'Evidence' page for the Inquiry, at http://webarchive.nationala... , as HMG000513. There is an interesting and rather important question as to whether those who sent it out, and those who received it, knew that it was more or less BS from start to finish.)

The programme was wholly devoted to claims made by the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets, who was presented as an independent 'due diligence' expert, without any mention of the rather major role he had played in the original 'Orange Revolution.'

Back-up was provided by his supposed collaborator in 'due diligence', the former FBI operative Robert 'Bobby' Levinson. No mention was made of the fact that he had been, in the 'Nineties, a, if not the lead FBI investigator into the notorious Ukrainian Jewish mobster Semyon Mogilevich.

The following March Levinson would disappear on the Iranian island of Kish, on what we now know was a covert mission on behalf of elements in the CIA.

Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it.

Jack -> David Habakkuk , 2 hours ago
David

Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs.

Keith Harbaugh , 19 hours ago
Thanks for this informative article.

Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly:

Seems rather surprising to me. Anyone have any comment on this?

TTG , an hour ago
Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. His initial contact with old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crime Task Force is awfully similar to his contacting these same friends in 2016 after deciding his initial Trump research was potentially bigger than mere opposition research.
FB , 3 hours ago
One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...?

Even worse is that the FBI was using this same foreign agent that a presidential candidate had hired to get dirt on an opponent... Even knowing nothing about legalities this just doesn't look very good...

Wally Courie , 4 hours ago
Stupid question? As the Col. has explained, the President can declassify any document he pleases. So, why doesn't Donaldo unredact the redacted portions of these bullcrap docs? What is he afraid of? That the Intel community will get mad and be out to get him? Isn't time for him to show some cojones?
blue peacock , 16 hours ago
What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this?
akaPatience , 19 hours ago
Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun?
Navstéva يزور 🐐 -> akaPatience , 17 hours ago
British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy.
unmitigatedaudacity -> Navstéva يزور 🐐 , 16 hours ago
British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion.
Bryn Nykrson -> Navstéva يزور 🐐 , 14 hours ago
Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? And therefore without having to mess about with any formal FISA warrant thingy's ... But, then use what might be found (or plausibly alleged) to try to get a proper FISA warrant later on (July 2016)? 'Parallel Discovery' of sorts; with Fusion GPS also a leaky cut-out: channelling media reports to be used as confirmation of Steele's "raw intelligence" in the formal FISA application(s)?
Biggee Mikeee -> akaPatience , 17 hours ago
Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates,

" Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, "

That's a good question, could it legally enable an end run around the FISC until enough evidence was gathered for a FISC surveillance authorization?.

richardstevenhack -> Biggee Mikeee , 13 hours ago
I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people.

Only a matter of time until someone figured out the same method could be used to "meddle" in national affairs.

akaPatience -> Biggee Mikeee , 15 hours ago
I understand, but still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources such as Steele about a very high profile American citizen and businessman -- aren't our intelligence services competent enough to have known and discovered as much if not more about Trump than other countries' intelligence services? I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia.
DianaLC -> akaPatience , 4 hours ago
Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are.

It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things.

[May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

Highly recommended!
This "shadowy Russian" might well be Sergey Skripal. This suggests that Steele dossier was CIA operation with British MI6 as transfer mechanism and Steele as a cover. And implicates Brennan. So this is next level of leaks after "Stormy Daniel"...
Another NYT leak out of a set of well coordinated leans from anonymous intelligence officials ;-) Poor Melania...
Notable quotes:
"... But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times. ..."
"... If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries. ..."
"... More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what. ..."
"... Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down. ..."
"... the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy ..."
"... How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind ..."
"... You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS? ..."
"... "U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds. ..."
"... Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it... ..."
"... Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us. ..."
"... 'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot. ..."
"... i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump. ..."
"... Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth." ..."
"... And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works ..."
"... So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw? ..."
Feb 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

by Chuck Ross of Daily Caller

When they said "Russian collusion", few expected it to be between the CIA and a "shadowy Russian operative." And yet, according to a blockbuster NYT report, that's precisely what happened.

* * *

The CIA paid $100,000 last year to a Russian operative who claimed to have derogatory information about President Trump, including a video tape of the Republican engaged with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. If the video showed Trump, it would support claims made in the infamous Steele dossier, the salacious opposition research report financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times.

American spies made contact with the Russia early in 2017 after he offered to sell the Trump material along with cyber hacking tools that were stolen from the NSA that year, according to The Times. U.S. intelligence officials told The Times they were so desperate to retrieve those tools that they negotiated with the operative for months despite several red flags, including indications that he was working in concert with Russian intelligence.

Another red flag was the Russian's financial request. He initially sought $10 million for the information but dropped the asking price to $1 million.

After months of negotiations, American spies handed over $100,000 in cash in a brief case to the Russian during a meeting in Berlin in September.

The operative also offered documents and emails that purported to implicate other Trump associates, including former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But The Times viewed the documents and reported that they were mostly information that is already in the public domain.

The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers, showed the video purported to be Trump to a Berlin-based American businessman who served as his intermediary to the CIA. But according to the Times, the footage and the location of the viewing raised questions about its authenticity.

The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump, and there was no audio. The Russian also showed the video to his American partner at the Russian embassy in Berlin, a sign that the operative had ties to Russian intelligence.

The Russian stonewalled the production of the cyber tools, and U.S. officials eventually cut ties, according to The Times. After the payout in Berlin, the man provided information about Trump and his associates of questionable veracity.

The Americans gave him an ultimatum earlier in 2018 to either play ball, leave Western Europe, or face criminal charges. He left, according to The Times, which interviewed U.S. officials, the American intermediary and the Russian for its article.

The Times' U.S. sources -- who appear to paint the American side in a positive light -- said that they were reluctant to purchase information because they did not want to be seen buying dirt on the president.

The officials also expressed concern that the Russian operative was planting disinformation on behalf of the Russian government. U.S. officials were worried that the Russian government has sought to sow discord between U.S. intelligence agencies and Trump. The revelation that the CIA purchased dirt on him would likely do the trick.

The Times report also has other new details.

Four other Russians with ties to the spy world have surfaced over the past year offering to sell dirt on Trump that closely mirrors allegations made in the dossier, according to the article. But officials have reason to believe that some of sellers have ties to Russian intelligence agencies.

The Times also provides new details on Cody Shearer, a notorious operative close to the Clintons. Shearer was recently revealed to have shopped around a so-called "second dossier" prior to the campaign which mirrored the sex allegations of the Steele report.

According to The Times, he has criss-crossed Europe over the past six months in an attempt to find video footage of Trump from the Moscow hotel room. Shearer claimed to have information from the FSB, Russia's spy service, that a video existed of Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.

He shared a memo making the allegations with his friend and fellow Clinton fixer, Sidney Blumenthal. Blumenthal in turn passed the memo to his friend, Jonathan Winer, a Department of State official. Winer then gave the information to Steele who provided it to the FBI in October 2016.

Steele also provided information to Winer, who wrote up a two-page memo that was circulated within the State Department.

Trump has denied allegations that he used prostitutes in Moscow. He has called the dossier a "hoax" and "crap."

* * *

On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted that "according to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony secrets on "Trump" to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be paid over time. I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Of course, if Trump really wants to "drain the swamp", any such decision would have originate with him. Tags Politics Commercial Banks

InjectTheVenom -> Global Hunter Feb 10, 2018 11:47 AM Permalink

DRAIN. THE. SWAMP.

Billy the Poet -> InjectTheVenom Feb 10, 2018 12:04 PM Permalink

Release the pee pee video now! No one pee peed in the $100,000 video in question. The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump, and there was no audio. And how can anyone be more fascinated by the prospect of pee pee than by the fact that US intelligence agencies were buying bad information from extremely shady foreigners in an attempt to overthrow the President of the United States?

caconhma -> Billy the Poet Feb 10, 2018 12:42 PM Permalink

Trump is the swamp. If zio-Banking Mafia did not have enough dirt of Trump, he would not be elected.

gatorengineer -> caconhma Feb 10, 2018 1:05 PM Permalink

Trump is starting to assume that the people are dumber than Obowel did. Earth to Don, you sir have the drain pump, you sir have surrounded yourself with Swamp creatures.... You sir are.............

Arrowflinger -> InjectTheVenom Feb 10, 2018 12:18 PM Permalink

According to this, the Russians stole the hacking tools needed to cut through the Swamp levee, which were developed by the NSA, and now the CIA cannot buy them back. Now, since the USA wanted its Swamp, the Russians are more than happy to let the USA drown in its swamp.

What a country!

gatorengineer -> Arrowflinger Feb 10, 2018 1:06 PM Permalink

Anyone have a link for the Qanon posts. I haven't seen them in a couple of weeks since he left 8chan where he was posting. I don't want the Youtube BS, I just want the link... anyone got one. Its strangely not googleable... LOLZ.

El Oregonian -> Global Hunter Feb 10, 2018 11:53 AM Permalink

If you think that the CIA is a U.S. intelligence agency working on the best interests of the United States, you better wake up and smell the treason. They only work for the best interests of themselves.

Bula_Vinaka -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:10 PM Permalink

They are parasites and nothing more.

BurningFuld -> Bula_Vinaka Feb 10, 2018 12:40 PM Permalink

Here is a question. Why does the CIA not come out and clear the air re: Trump?

I mean they were even paying people to come up with dirt. He is now your president and the country is a fucking mess. Should the CIA not come out and say we tried but we got nothing? They do have the ability to fix all this Trump shit and yet crickets.

Ahmeexnal -> caconhma Feb 10, 2018 1:03 PM Permalink

CIA is the covert dirty dealing arm of the VATICAN.

MarshalJimDuncan -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:12 PM Permalink

ooohh... they release this questionable information for all to hear and paid a lot of money for it too. this fucking government is a joke

Posa -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:56 PM Permalink

And the best interests of clients. The CIA started out is the muscle for the Dulles Brothers clients who were being booted out of various countries they were super-exploiting. The Agency hasn't looked back since.

Alfred -> El Oregonian Feb 10, 2018 12:59 PM Permalink

Seems wrong to call them 'intelligence' agencies. There must be a more descriptive name we can use... Anyone?

Guitarilla -> Global Hunter Feb 10, 2018 12:35 PM Permalink

Nobody got whizzed on. That lurid fantasy came soley out of the head of Hillary Clinton, given to Blumenthal, passed around and made to look like it came from Russia.

DownWithYogaPants -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 11:47 AM Permalink

CIA killed Kennedy. This pretty much removes all doubt. They are willing to do anything.

Killtruck -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 12:51 PM Permalink

"Oswald killed Kennedy. That's it."

It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist passports floating gently down from the sky.

It sure is remarkable.
#letsroll

possible band name
OswaldandtheMagicBullets

Able Ape -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 12:57 PM Permalink

What was Oswald's reason to kill JFK? And yeah, he picked the very building he worked at to commit the crime. He wasn't THAT stupid!...

Posa -> shimmy Feb 10, 2018 1:05 PM Permalink

RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn Monroe.

The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b) in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the Cold War...

Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit stationary targets reliably.

mobius8curve -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 11:49 AM Permalink

If there is a video you can be sure it was manufactured using these tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Nx404VLzw

Lawlessness is arising exponentially:

https://sumofthyword.com/2017/01/18/the-mystery-of-lawlessness/

oDumbo -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 12:19 PM Permalink

Drain the swamp! Townsquare justice for Odumbo and Hitlery! George Soros to bathe in the Amazon River with 1 million Piranha Fish until it completely disappears. Drain the evil Dumorat swamp. Drain the banana republic CIA and FBI. Our tax dollars and constitution did not pay for this shit.

Kelley -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 12:34 PM Permalink

With today's technology, the CIA is most likely working on a fake video for you right now. They might release it on Vimeo or Netflix to cover the costs and give themselves plausible deniability. To add a finishing touch they will make a fake video of Julian Assange claiming he is releasing it. You'll be in hog heaven. Which is where folks like you go just before being slaughtered by your owners and turned into spam.

shovelhead -> Dr. Acula Feb 10, 2018 12:55 PM Permalink

10 Million...

1 million...

Ok, How about $9.99

algol_dog Feb 10, 2018 11:38 AM Permalink

Move along. Nothing to see here ...

DosZap -> algol_dog Feb 10, 2018 11:40 AM Permalink

What a load of camel dung, if there was a sex tape of Trump w/Russian hookers, it would have been out while he was RUNNING for the job, FAKE NEWS.

SRV -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 11:54 AM Permalink

Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...

And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!

vulcanraven -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 12:08 PM Permalink

No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.

So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency? You can't have it both ways.

We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all day, where would we be without them?

silvermail -> algol_dog Feb 10, 2018 11:55 AM Permalink

I propose impeachment to any US president for eating, drinking and visiting toilets!

TheWholeYearInn Feb 10, 2018 11:38 AM Permalink

What's the difference between prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room, or prostitutes in the FBI/DOJ?

Global Hunter -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 11:47 AM Permalink

I can't confirm price, so I will go with hotter (can't really confirm that either but Slavic chicks usually seem hot to me).

SRV -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 11:54 AM Permalink

Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...

And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!

turkey george palmer -> SRV Feb 10, 2018 1:09 PM Permalink

Fuckin eh right. That's probably the closest thing .

A Sentinel -> SRV Feb 10, 2018 1:21 PM Permalink

Damn good point. And the dates are off too. A 6+/- month zh article about the dark web had the nsa software downloadable long before 2017.

Gee. Why would someone date that hack into 2017? What was different between 2016 and 2017?

SMH Trying to figure that out.

vulcanraven -> DosZap Feb 10, 2018 12:08 PM Permalink

No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.

So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency? You can't have it both ways.

We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all day, where would we be without them?

Winston Churchill -> buzzsaw99 Feb 10, 2018 12:02 PM Permalink

More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what.

Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down.

H-O-W Feb 10, 2018 11:46 AM Permalink

The more we learn,

The more it looks like the Russians set this up perfectly.

They know these scumbags better than we do!

buzzsaw99 Feb 10, 2018 11:48 AM Permalink

the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy.

Give Me Some Truth Feb 10, 2018 11:49 AM Permalink

Good point in the last sentence. If someone is going to "drain the swamp" it is going to have to be the president of the United States. I think I'm correct that he can fire anyone that works in the executive department for cause. He can also order investigations or hire people who will launch real investigations.

Mr. President, if you want to "drain the swamp," drain it.

P.S. You can start with an audit of The Fed.

desertboy -> Give Me Some Truth Feb 10, 2018 12:16 PM Permalink

That last sentence assumes a rather critical fantasy.

Anunnaki -> Thordoom Feb 10, 2018 12:24 PM Permalink

The Tripod of Evil

  1. Deep State
  2. Presstitutes
  3. Corporate Democrats
Dre4dwolf Feb 10, 2018 12:11 PM Permalink

If there was a video it would of been leaked during the election, they have nothing that sticks on the guy.

All the evidence thus far states

Obama Hillary the FBI, DNC, CIA all spied on Trump and colluded with foreign governments (U.K. , Ukraine , Russia) to try and dig up dirt to use against Trump (and they more or less failed).

They turned over every rock they could, look at that stupid hot-mic video in the bus, how many hours of video did they have to go through to dig up that crumb? they went back searching through 30+ years of content and thats all they could come up with.... some locker room talk lol

People have to just face it.

Your government was and still is corrupt and its a weaponized system of control, Your government colluded with the enemy in a desperate attempt to stop Trump from becoming president. Your government started a sham "Russia investigation" to cover up its own crimes. Your government applied a different standard of justice to the clintons than it would have to you or anyone else.

To date ZERO evidence has been brought forward that Trump or anyone in his campaign did anything wrong, and the only people that have done anything wrong so far were picked by "the swamp" to fill positions..... all the others fell into petty perjury Traps on meaningless topics and insignificant factoids.

Lord Raglan Feb 10, 2018 12:12 PM Permalink

How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind buying this and thus, Obama and Hillary?

navy62802 -> Lord Raglan Feb 10, 2018 12:16 PM Permalink

You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS?

Kelley Feb 10, 2018 12:16 PM Permalink

Isn't it lovely to find out that your money and mine is being used by government agents to give us the government they want?

It's sort of like a thug robbing you and using part of your money to pay another thug to rough you up from time time to time if you ask any questions with the thugs believing it's for our own good.

Thanks, Hillary, for looking out for us. You and your best buds are the best. Such bighearted givers! Meanwhile, give our regards to your partner in slime Obama, although it must pain you to have been bested by 'Beavis' who thinks so much of himself to balance out how little he impresses anyone who knows him.

desertboy Feb 10, 2018 12:20 PM Permalink

"U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds.

Consuelo Feb 10, 2018 12:22 PM Permalink

Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it...

Kelley Feb 10, 2018 1:05 PM Permalink

As taxpayers can we sue the CIA for misusing our funds? Pretty sure that buying sex videos for commercial release isn't part of the CIA's lawful mandate even at bargain prices.

indaknow Feb 10, 2018 1:13 PM Permalink

Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us.

It's not going to work.

hooligan2009 Feb 10, 2018 11:49 AM Permalink

my sauces tell me that pink pussyhat wearing hollywood types have been called in because they have a doppelganger for trump and access to 30,000 sexually abused victims that can act as Russian prostitutes for just ten bucks each. snapchat has a trump emoji that can be transplanted onto any porn video star - male or female - thus confirming that trump is a serial (serious?) user of ladies of the night

my sauces also tell me that the CIA offers a reward of 100,000 bucks (or 10 BTC) for every photo-shopped (snap-shopped or porn-shopped) material.

of course, the CIA already owns many many porn movie studios and films, but it would prefer third "party" movies - not from epstein's island where its operatives choose to rela with a pizza.

the CIA "pink" budget for such movies is limited to just 5,000 clips or 5 billion of taxpayers funds, whichever is the higher.

awesome sauce hey?

MusicIsYou Feb 10, 2018 1:14 PM Permalink

For only $100,000 that's all? Now I know it's probably not true.

Robert A. Heinlein Feb 10, 2018 1:17 PM Permalink

'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot.

hannah Feb 10, 2018 1:33 PM Permalink

i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump.

i call bullshit.

RKae -> hannah Feb 10, 2018 1:47 PM Permalink

Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth."

And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works.

Quantify Feb 10, 2018 1:38 PM Permalink

The CIA is at the head of the shadow government.

RKae Feb 10, 2018 1:39 PM Permalink

So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw?

I mean if they're so concerned about Trump and a couple of hookers... Better put some ice on that, CIA.

vofreason Feb 10, 2018 1:39 PM Permalink

You all are so ridiculous and fooled with your "drain the swamp" bs. It's a great idea but Trump doing it is a joke, I mean just look at who he has hired, what's wrong with you all are you blind?!!

He can't even fill 1/3 of the government positions he's supposed to and the ones he has have no business holding the positions given to them and are so incompetent, downright criminal or just personally horrendous humans that they can't stay in office more than a few months. All their blatant and moronically concocted lies are backing them into corners every day that they just try and lie out of again. America is over if we really have gotten to the point that a group like Trump's has support, it's just astonishing.

[May 11, 2019] Russiagaters now represent an interesting new supported by intelligence agencies "for profit" sect. That's why Mueller report can't shake their convictions, it just increase their zeal

If prophecy does not happen, Russiagaters like typical members of "Doomsday cults" just became more bound to their sect as admitting this means destroying self-respect.
Notable quotes:
"... What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues? ..."
"... I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one. ..."
"... Now, you may think that's a good thing to do. I'm not arguing about that. I'm not arguing politics. All I'm saying is projection is when we project onto somebody else the things that we do ourselves, and we refuse to deal with the implications of it. So there's denial and then there's projection. ..."
"... And I think there was this huge element of victimhood in this Russiagate process. ..."
"... ("The Resistance With Keith Olbermann", GQ, December 2016) ..."
"... ("The Rachel Maddow Show", MSNBC, March 2017) ..."
"... ("All In With Chris Hayes", MSNBC, February 2018) ..."
"... ("AM Joy", MSNBC, February 2018) ..."
"... GABOR MATÉ : And the assumption, that even if you take all the things that Russia was charged with in this whole Russiagate narrative over the last two and a half years, and if you multiply it by a hundred times, even then, you could not have possibly destroyed the United States. Even then, what is our self image if we think we're that weak, that that kind of external interference could undermine everything that you believed this country has built over the last few centuries?' ..."
"... (FBI Director Robert Mueller, Congressional Testimony, February 2003) ..."
"... ROBERT MUELLER : As Director Tenet has pointed out, Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction and willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological material. ..."
"... GABOR MATÉ : So given the line supported by Mueller led to the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqi people and thousands of Americans, and has incurred costs that we all are fully aware of in terms of rise in terrorism and embroilment in multiple wars and situations, it takes an act of powerful historical amnesia for people to believe that this man is going to be our savior. That's the first point. Just incredible historical amnesia number one. ..."
"... ooking at how under the Bushes and under Obama, there was this massive transfer of wealth upwards. Instead of asking why Barack Obama gets $400,000 for an hour speech to Wall Street, which means that maybe our faith in how our system operates needs to be shaken a bit so we can actually look at what's really going on, let's just put our attention on some foreign devil again. ..."
"... How did the Democratic elite deliberately try to marginalize the progressive candidate? ..."
"... Like if he lacks discretion, let's assume that Russia did leak those Democratic e mails. Let's assume that. We don't know that they did. But we don't know that they didn't either. Let's assume that they did. Which is the greater assault on American democracy? The fact that the Russians leaked the document? Or that the American national Democratic leadership deliberately tried to marginalize one of their own candidates? ..."
"... We screwed up. We actually tried to undemocratically interfere with the Democratic nomination. We didn't pay attention to the people that were really hurting in the society because of our policies. We as the press gave this man all kinds of attention that he never deserved and never merited because he was interesting news and sold copies. ..."
"... AARON MATÉ: And there's a material incentive to do it. Because as you've talked about, if you're the Democrats and you look at the lessons of the election, you saw that people rejected your neoliberal economic legacy, that means you have to start challenging the powerful corporate sectors that you've been representing for a long time, actually posing real alternative policies to Donald Trump. ..."
"... If you do that, though, you risk losing your privileged status within the power structure. And the same thing if you're in the media and you identify with that faction of the power structure. ..."
May 08, 2019 | opensociet.org
AARON MATÉ : So we've just been through this two-year ordeal with Russiagate. It's in a new phase now with Robert Mueller rejecting the outcome that so many were expecting, that there would be a Trump-Russia conspiracy. Your sense of how this whole thing has gone?

GABOR MATÉ : What's interesting is that in the aftermath of the Mueller thunderbolt of no proof of collusion, there were articles about how people are disappointed about this finding.

Now, disappointment means that you're expecting something and you wanted something to happen, and it didn't happen. So that means that some people wanted Mueller to find evidence of collusion, which means that emotionally they were invested in it. It wasn't just that they wanted to know the truth. They actually wanted the truth to look a certain way. And wherever we want the truth to look a certain way, there's some reason that has to do with their own emotional needs and not just with the concern for reality.

And in politics in general, we think that people make decisions on intellectual grounds based on facts and beliefs. Very often, actually, people's dynamics are driven by emotional forces that they're not even aware of in themselves. And I, really, as I observed this whole Russiagate phenomenon from the beginning, it really seemed to me that there was a lot of emotionality in it that had little to do with the actual facts of the case.

... ... ...

What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?

... ... ...

I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.

... ... ...

GABOR MATÉ : So even if it's true what the Russians have even if it's the worst thing that's alleged about the Russians is true, it's not even on miniscule proportion of what America has publicly acknowledged it has done all around the world. And so this rage that we project, then, and this bad guy image that we project onto the Russians, it's simply a mirror a very inadequate mirror of what America publicly and openly and repeatedly does all around the world.

Now, you may think that's a good thing to do. I'm not arguing about that. I'm not arguing politics. All I'm saying is projection is when we project onto somebody else the things that we do ourselves, and we refuse to deal with the implications of it. So there's denial and then there's projection.

And then, there's just something in people. I can tell you well, your mother can tell you this that in relationships it's always easier to see ourselves as the victims than as the perpetrators. So there's something comforting about seeing oneself as the victim of somebody else. Nobody likes to be a victim. But people like to see themselves as victims because it means they don't have to take responsibility for what we do ourselves.

AARON MATÉ : I can relate to that, too.

GABOR MATÉ : Yeah. I'm just saying the effect of somebody else. So this functions beautifully in politics. And populist politicians and xenophobic politicians around the world use this dynamic all the time. That whether it's Great Britain, or whether it's France with their vast colonial empires, they're always the victims of everybody else. The United States is always the victim of everybody else. All these enemies that are threatening us. It's the most powerful nation on earth, a nation that could single handedly destroy the earth a billion times over with the weapons that are at its disposal, and it's always the victim.

So this victimhood, there is something comforting about it because, again, it allows us not to look at ourselves. And I think there was this huge element of victimhood in this Russiagate process.

VIDEO CLIPS

https://www.youtube.com/embed/x6qk01yq-dY

Noam Chomsky on Mass Media Obsession with Russia & the Stories Not Being Covered in the Trump Era

("The Resistance With Keith Olbermann", GQ, December 2016)

KEITH OLBERMANN : The nation and all of our freedoms hang by a thread. And the military apparatus of this country is about to be handed over to scum who are beholden to scum, Russian scum. As things are today, January 20th will not be an inauguration but rather the end of the United States as an independent country

("The Rachel Maddow Show", MSNBC, March 2017)

RACHEL MADDOW : But the important thing here is that that Bernie Sanders lovers page run out of Albania, it's still there. Still running. Still operating. Still churning this stuff out. Now. This is not part of American politics. This is not, you know, partisan warfare between Republicans and Democrats. This is international warfare against our country.

("All In With Chris Hayes", MSNBC, February 2018)

JERROLD NADLER : Imagine if FDR had denied that the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor and didn't react, that's the equivalent.

CHRIS HAYES : Well, it's a bit of a different thing. I mean --

JERROLD NADLER : No, it's not.

CHRIS HAYES : They didn't kill anyone.

JERROLD NADLER : They didn't kill anyone, but they're destroying our country, our democratic process.

CHRIS HAYES : Do you really think it's on par?

JERROLD NADLER : Not in the amount of violence, but I think in the seriousness it is very much on par. This country exists to have a democratic system with a small D, that's what the country's all about, and this is an attempt to destroy that.

("AM Joy", MSNBC, February 2018)

ROB REINER : We have been invaded in such a subtle way because we don't see planes hitting the buildings. We don't see bombs dropping in Pearl Harbor. But we have been invaded as Malcolm [Nance] points out. We are under attack, but we don't feel it. But it's like walking around with high blood pressure and then all of a sudden you're not aware of it and you drop dead.

So it's insidious, and it has affected our blood stream. And if we don't do something about it – and that's why, guys like John Brennan and James Clapper are running around with their hair on fire because they're trying to wake people up to tell them: We have to do something about it. We have to protect ourselves and if we don't, our 241 years of democracy and self-governance will start to collapse.

GABOR MATÉ : And the assumption, that even if you take all the things that Russia was charged with in this whole Russiagate narrative over the last two and a half years, and if you multiply it by a hundred times, even then, you could not have possibly destroyed the United States. Even then, what is our self image if we think we're that weak, that that kind of external interference could undermine everything that you believed this country has built over the last few centuries?'

So it shows to me a real shock reaction. And what has been shocked here is our beliefs in what this country is about.

And again, as I said before, it's in a sense more comforting. It's frightening, but at the same time more comforting to see the problem as coming from the outside than to search for it with amongst ourselves and within ourselves.

AARON MATÉ : How about then the aspect of this that puts so much hope into Robert Mueller? Because Robert Mueller was supposed to be our savior.

GABOR MATÉ : First of all, if we actually look at who Mueller is, who is he?

He's a man who, amongst many others, was 100 percent convinced that Iraq had weapons of mass discussion.

VIDEO CLIP

(FBI Director Robert Mueller, Congressional Testimony, February 2003)

ROBERT MUELLER : As Director Tenet has pointed out, Secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction and willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological material.

GABOR MATÉ : So given the line supported by Mueller led to the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqi people and thousands of Americans, and has incurred costs that we all are fully aware of in terms of rise in terrorism and embroilment in multiple wars and situations, it takes an act of powerful historical amnesia for people to believe that this man is going to be our savior. That's the first point. Just incredible historical amnesia number one.

Number two, America, if you can judge by its TV shows, is very much addicted to the good guy/bad guy scenario. So that reality is not complex. And it's not subtle. And it's not a build up of multiple dynamics, internal and external. But, basically, there's evil and there's good. And evil is going to be cut out by the good and destroyed by it. And that's really how the American narrative very often is presented.

Now, the same thing is projected into politics. So now if there's a bad guy called Putin and his puppet called Trump, then there has to be a good guy that is going to save us from it. Some guy on a white charger that's going to move in here, and is silver haired, patrician looking man who's going to find the truth and rescue us all, which again is a projection of people's hopes for truth outside of themselves onto some kind of a benevolent savior figure.

Needless to say, when that savior figure doesn't deliver, then we have to argue that maybe he was bought off or corrupt or stupid himself or insufficient himself. Or that there's something secret that has yet to be uncovered that some day will come to the surface that Mueller himself was unable to discover for himself.

But, again, this projection of hope onto some savior figure. Rather than saying, okay, there's a big problem here. We've elected a highly traumatized grandiose, intellectually unstable, emotionally unstable, misogynist, self aggrandizer to power. Something in our society made that happen. And let's look at what that was. And let's clear up those issues if we can. And let's look at the people on the liberal side who, instead of challenging all those issues, put all their energies into this foreign conspiracy explanation. Because to have challenged those issues would have meant looking at their own policies, which tended in the same direction.

Rather than looking at how under the Clinton, they've jailed hundreds of thousands of people who should never have been in jail. L ooking at how under the Bushes and under Obama, there was this massive transfer of wealth upwards. Instead of asking why Barack Obama gets $400,000 for an hour speech to Wall Street, which means that maybe our faith in how our system operates needs to be shaken a bit so we can actually look at what's really going on, let's just put our attention on some foreign devil again.

... ... ...

GABOR MATÉ : .... How did the Democratic elite deliberately try to marginalize the progressive candidate?

Like if he lacks discretion, let's assume that Russia did leak those Democratic e mails. Let's assume that. We don't know that they did. But we don't know that they didn't either. Let's assume that they did. Which is the greater assault on American democracy? The fact that the Russians leaked the document? Or that the American national Democratic leadership deliberately tried to marginalize one of their own candidates?

... ... ...

GABOR MATÉ : Let me just interrupt to say that if I were those people, then, then quite apart from the shock defense that we've already talked about, it'd be so much more convenient for me to go to the Russia narrative than to say publicly, you know what? We screwed up. We actually tried to undemocratically interfere with the Democratic nomination. We didn't pay attention to the people that were really hurting in the society because of our policies. We as the press gave this man all kinds of attention that he never deserved and never merited because he was interesting news and sold copies.

... ... ...

AARON MATÉ: And there's a material incentive to do it. Because as you've talked about, if you're the Democrats and you look at the lessons of the election, you saw that people rejected your neoliberal economic legacy, that means you have to start challenging the powerful corporate sectors that you've been representing for a long time, actually posing real alternative policies to Donald Trump.

If you do that, though, you risk losing your privileged status within the power structure. And the same thing if you're in the media and you identify with that faction of the power structure.

... ... ...

[May 11, 2019] Russiagate is Dead, Long Live Russiagate.

Notable quotes:
"... What is Russiagate? Is it when a foreign country interferes in our elections? Or is it Really Hillarygate? a Clinton campaign ploy to deflect from her own shortcomings (emails revelations, her own collusion, her loss to Donald Trump). ..."
"... Russiagate and it's associated delusional bullshit is a way for the establishment to avoid dealing with actual issues ..."
"... It's just another form of the xenophobia behind the cold war and the war on terrorism, used to distract the public and destroy those who would attempt to inform the public of what is really going on (you know, the endless looting of the Treasury and the poisoning of people and planets in the name of shareholder returns). ..."
"... It's antisemitism for 'enlightened' people. ..."
"... Darn it, I forgot the big kahuna in my list of disasters caused by Russiagate: Trump's possible re-election. My sense is that once Mueller files his report sans collusion charges, the Republicans are going to come after the "fake news" press, the Never-Trumpers, and the Dem conspiracy theorists with far more force than they are now. ..."
"... When that happens, all of Trump's endless stream of lies and stupidity will become nothing but confetti in his ticker-tape parade. He and his allies can crow loudly, and rightly, about the press being 100% biased against him, and being given to ridiculous conspiracy theories, which neutralizes the MSM's very accurate assessment of his endless lying (on matters other than Russiagate). ..."
"... Russiagate may have been the most successful dirty trick in American history for 2-1/2 years, but it may well explode into the biggest backfire in U.S. history, too. ..."
"... Mind you, the MSM will never concede they were absurdly, grossly, disgustingly wrong about the whole thing. They will vainly cling to their fantasy. Too big to fail. But I think the Trump people will gain a lot of leverage over swing voters when everyone realizes Russiagate was bullshit from the word go. ..."
"... Russiagate: Democrat's own version of Birthergate. ..."
"... Except that the Birthers had less FISA abuse. Although, funny story, it was started by Clinton toady, Sidney Blumenthal, as a dirty trick to hurt Obama in South Carolina. ..."
"... And RussiaRussiaRussiagate started by... Clinton ops to deflect from her own scandals and shortcomings. Jeez, it’s almost like Hillary Clinton is an incredibly poisonous and corrosive influrnce on American politics. ..."
"... So what if there are now more oligarchs than Communists in Russia these days? The name Russia still conjures up "enemy?" writ large. And then, there are all those US fellow travelers, meaning anyone to the right of Senator Graham--and sometimes even he is a little too left for my taste. ..."
"... Need to assess the massive damage of what was likely the biggest and most successful dirty political trick in U.S. history. (1) turned Democrats into shills for the CIA and FBI; (2) created a new Cold War; (3) pushed Trump into the arms of Bolton and Pompeo, partly because he had to prove he wasn't a Russian agent or dupe; (4) triggered a vast and largely unreported censorship campaign that is aimed mostly at progressive outlets and progressive social media, though purporting to be primarily against things like Infowars; (5) encouraged Trump to send lethal arms to Ukraine (again, to prove himself a patriot); (6) encouraged Trump to abandon the INF; (7) encouraged Trump to discuss abandoning SALT; (8) turned Dems into a pro-Syrian occupation party (any talk of leaving is dismissed as serving Putin); helped turn Dems into a pro-Venezuela putsch party (again, because not overthrowing Maduro would ostensibly be serving Putin); turned a huge chunk of the party more dramatically against anti-war Dems like Sanders and Gabbard, who are "Putin dupes"; made progressive news outlets hawkish, e.g., Democracy Now, which picked Marcy Wheeler from all the other kooks and grifters to be their expert on Russiagate; and of course turned MSNBC, NBC, CNN, the WaPo, the NYT, and other legacy media into conspiracy theory cesspools that made HUGE HUGE HUGE money on Russiagate grifting. ..."
"... as if Russiagate was a Shadow Hillary Clinton Government. ..."
May 11, 2019 | www.reddit.com

That phrase has been swirling around my head all morning after watching MSNBC admit that there was no evidence of collusion as they hedged and tried to keep the question of collusion open a little longer. I won't expect Rachel-RussiaRussia-Maddow to retreat anytime time soon either.

I'm a bit confused as to what the statement above really means because I'm not quite sure what Russiagate means for everyone else. If you search DuckDuckGo, you come up with different result and meanings.

What is Russiagate? Is it when a foreign country interferes in our elections? Or is it Really Hillarygate? a Clinton campaign ploy to deflect from her own shortcomings (emails revelations, her own collusion, her loss to Donald Trump).

People seem to define Russiagate differently. In it's simplest form, -gate denotes scandal, so which one? What would the statement above mean?

So if I said Russiagate is Dead, Long Live Russiagate would mean...

A: Collusion with Russia has been debunked, Long live the real collusion with Israel

B: One Clinton campaign ploy fizzles, and yet another on comes in 2020

C: MSNBC has admitted they were wrong, but will keep on it anyway.

D: Russia is going to keep colluding in our 2020 elections

What does the statement above mean for you? See where I'm going here?

jbbrwcky 5 points 6 points 7 points 2 months ago (0 children)

Russiagate is a Potemkin village where Democrats are victims of a dastardly enemy because they're better, or even somehow different, from Republicans.
HillaryBrokeTheLaw Long live dead poets 6 points 7 points 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)
Russiagate and it's associated delusional bullshit is a way for the establishment to avoid dealing with actual issues, like the death of the natural world, for starters. It's just another form of the xenophobia behind the cold war and the war on terrorism, used to distract the public and destroy those who would attempt to inform the public of what is really going on (you know, the endless looting of the Treasury and the poisoning of people and planets in the name of shareholder returns).

Anybody with any notion of equality before the law know that Clinton and Trump are guilty of multiple crimes that any of us lesser mortals would be doing hard time for. The delusion we are supposed to buy into is that neither is or was a criminal or guilty of criminal acts and/or misconduct when the opposite is patently true. Furthermore we are supposed to believe that the criminality on display is due solely to Russian malfeasance. One of the key elements of brainwashing (ala 1984) is making you believe that the lie is truth. Things like "billionaires EARNED their billions" is the same kind brainwashing. And fucking advertising.

FThumb Bernie or Bust isn't a demand, it's a prophecy 5 points 6 points 7 points 2 months ago (0 children)

It's just another form of the xenophobia behind the cold war and the war on terrorism

It's antisemitism for 'enlightened' people.

NirnaethArnodiad 9 points 10 points 11 points 2 months ago (0 children)
And the death of Seth Rich...
jobu3 3 points 4 points 5 points 2 months ago (0 children)
There is no RussiaGate.... ​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAXtO5dMqEI

docdurango Lapidarian 13 points 14 points 15 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Darn it, I forgot the big kahuna in my list of disasters caused by Russiagate: Trump's possible re-election. My sense is that once Mueller files his report sans collusion charges, the Republicans are going to come after the "fake news" press, the Never-Trumpers, and the Dem conspiracy theorists with far more force than they are now.

To some extent, Trump's allies have held their fire hitherto, in part because a lot of them weren't completely sure whether there was something to the charges. But also, I think, they've held their fire (to an extent) because nothing they say will have traction until after Mueller reports.

When that happens, all of Trump's endless stream of lies and stupidity will become nothing but confetti in his ticker-tape parade. He and his allies can crow loudly, and rightly, about the press being 100% biased against him, and being given to ridiculous conspiracy theories, which neutralizes the MSM's very accurate assessment of his endless lying (on matters other than Russiagate).

The press comes out the loser here. So does the Democratic Party. So do Never-Trump Republicans. So do progressives, for the reasons I gave in my previous comment.

And who comes out the possible winner is Donald Trump, who, after Mueller files, will be in a much stronger position to get re-elected. Republicans, moreover, may well recover much of the ground lost in the 2018 "blue wave."

Russiagate may have been the most successful dirty trick in American history for 2-1/2 years, but it may well explode into the biggest backfire in U.S. history, too.

Mind you, the MSM will never concede they were absurdly, grossly, disgustingly wrong about the whole thing. They will vainly cling to their fantasy. Too big to fail. But I think the Trump people will gain a lot of leverage over swing voters when everyone realizes Russiagate was bullshit from the word go.

gamer_jacksman 10 points 11 points 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)
Russiagate: Democrat's own version of Birthergate.
Blackhalo Purity pony: Российский бот 14 points 15 points 16 points 2 months ago (1 child)
Except that the Birthers had less FISA abuse. Although, funny story, it was started by Clinton toady, Sidney Blumenthal, as a dirty trick to hurt Obama in South Carolina.
suboptiml 5 points 6 points 7 points 2 months ago (0 children)
And RussiaRussiaRussiagate started by... Clinton ops to deflect from her own scandals and shortcomings. Jeez, it’s almost like Hillary Clinton is an incredibly poisonous and corrosive influrnce on American politics.
redditrisi 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Listen up, Citizen.

This country's fight against socialism began in the later 1800s and pivoted to this country's fight against Communism/RUSSIA as soon as the American Communist Party formed, if not sooner. That's almost 150 years and untold trillions of dollars, plus a cold war and several hot ones invested in fighting the socialist/Communist/Russian/red menace. You cannot expect America to waste all that investment.

So what if there are now more oligarchs than Communists in Russia these days? The name Russia still conjures up "enemy?" writ large. And then, there are all those US fellow travelers, meaning anyone to the right of Senator Graham--and sometimes even he is a little too left for my taste.

/s

docdurango Lapidarian 16 points 17 points 18 points 2 months ago (7 children)
Need to assess the massive damage of what was likely the biggest and most successful dirty political trick in U.S. history. (1) turned Democrats into shills for the CIA and FBI; (2) created a new Cold War; (3) pushed Trump into the arms of Bolton and Pompeo, partly because he had to prove he wasn't a Russian agent or dupe; (4) triggered a vast and largely unreported censorship campaign that is aimed mostly at progressive outlets and progressive social media, though purporting to be primarily against things like Infowars; (5) encouraged Trump to send lethal arms to Ukraine (again, to prove himself a patriot); (6) encouraged Trump to abandon the INF; (7) encouraged Trump to discuss abandoning SALT; (8) turned Dems into a pro-Syrian occupation party (any talk of leaving is dismissed as serving Putin); helped turn Dems into a pro-Venezuela putsch party (again, because not overthrowing Maduro would ostensibly be serving Putin); turned a huge chunk of the party more dramatically against anti-war Dems like Sanders and Gabbard, who are "Putin dupes"; made progressive news outlets hawkish, e.g., Democracy Now, which picked Marcy Wheeler from all the other kooks and grifters to be their expert on Russiagate; and of course turned MSNBC, NBC, CNN, the WaPo, the NYT, and other legacy media into conspiracy theory cesspools that made HUGE HUGE HUGE money on Russiagate grifting.

What else? I'm sure there's more.

rommelo [ S ] 6 points 7 points 8 points 2 months ago (0 children)
as if Russiagate was a Shadow Hillary Clinton Government.
Blackhalo Purity pony: Российский бот 11 points 12 points 13 points 2 months ago (4 children)
Hey @Bloomingdales, this isn’t funny or fashionable. It further delegitimizes hard working journalists who bring REAL news to their communties.

The Press Needs More Than A Super Bowl Ad To Fix Its Plunging Credibility

Pushing An Agenda

The poll found that more than two-thirds of the public (69%) think the news media "is more concerned with advancing its points of view rather than reporting all the facts." Only 29% of the public disagrees with that statement.

"Russia!"

No way should Rachel Maddow have a job after this plays out.

JoshuaKevinPerry 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (0 children)
You can literally call for the murder of white people(Al Sharpton, multiple times) in sermons, demand gays get killed or hispanic-Americans tossed out(Joy Reid)on a blog and keep your job at MSNBC.
docdurango Lapidarian 8 points 9 points 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)
Yeah, that WaPo ad stands at the dizzying height of arrogance and hypocrisy. Democracy dies in darkness, and the Post has helped created it.

And yes, Maddow should be forever banned from reporting, but she has too many admirers for that to happen. She has made mountains of money for MSNBC; they love her. She'll just cling to the fantasy of collusion no matter how much evidence comes out, and millions will stand by her.

JoshuaKevinPerry 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)
It's not that a few million stand by her, it's that a few million believe her.
docdurango Lapidarian 0 points 1 point 2 points 2 months ago (0 children)
True, that.
Sandernista2 Red Pill Supply Store 8 points 9 points 10 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Nice list.....
Blackhalo Purity pony: Российский бот 11 points 12 points 13 points 2 months ago (1 child)
Let the roasting commence!

Did you know that Russia has one of the highest literacy rates in the world? Scary stuff. Tune in tonight and I'll connect the dots.

I hear they have 100% healthcare coverage too!

redditrisi 5 points 6 points 7 points 2 months ago (0 children)
And Arkansas, under Bill Clinton, had one of the lowest literacy rates in the US.

altneoliberalcons lose again.

thatguy4243 2 points 3 points 4 points 2 months ago (8 children)
They really need to move on to something new, like blaming San Marino for all of our problems.
redditrisi 6 points 7 points 8 points 2 months ago (7 children)
Figures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared_(film)

3andfro 5 points 6 points 7 points 2 months ago (5 children)
Exactly what I was thinking. :)
redditrisi 6 points 7 points 8 points 2 months ago (4 children)
Peter Sellers was so genius.
3andfro 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)
Dr. Strangelove: https://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2016/jul/26/dr-strangelove-peter-sellers-stanley-kubrick-masterpiece-video
redditrisi 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)
Sellers in a wheelchair was exactly the mental image I had when I made my prior post.
3andfro 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (0 children)
"great minds think alike" ;D
Blackhalo Purity pony: Российский бот 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (0 children)
My precious purity of essence!
WikiTextBot 3 points 4 points 5 points 2 months ago (0 children)
The Mouse That Roared (film)

The Mouse That Roared is a 1959 British satirical Eastman Color comedy film based on Leonard Wibberley's novel The Mouse That Roared (1955). It stars Peter Sellers in three roles: Duchess Gloriana XII; Count Rupert Mountjoy, the Prime Minister; and Tully Bascomb, the military leader; and co-stars Jean Seberg. The film was directed by Jack Arnold, and the screenplay was written by Roger MacDougall and Stanley Mann.

[ PM | Exclude me | Exclude from subreddit | FAQ / Information | Source ] Downvote to remove | v0.28

probably_pointless 21 points 22 points 23 points 2 months ago * (7 children)
When I say Russiagate I mean the conspiracy theory that Russia meddled in the 2016 election in a meaningful way. It has varying levels of craziness, as the goal post has moved:
  1. It started as "Russia hacked the DNC server and you should distrust the emails because the messenger is a bad actor", followed closely by "you should distrust the emails because they may have been tampered with", or even "we won't say if the emails are real and we'll let the media imply that they may be fiction."
  2. It progressed to Russia colluded with Trump to swing the election. This is apparently the holy grail. Find evidence of this and Trump is finished. Or something. Apparently, Trump is a mastermind and if Russia wanted to meddle they'd need his permission or his help or something.
  3. It progressed to Russia swung the election in close states by manipulating social media. In fact, they did manipulate social media. What's missing from this narrative is the scope ($100K on facebook ads, only half of it before the election, and $4700 in google ads) and motive (the indictment itself says the purpose of the effort seems to have been to gain viewership for ads, to earn money) and even the truth of the premise (by money spent, they didn't target swing states at all).

In its current state, Russiagate is all and it is none of the above. None of it has gone anywhere, so now the plan is to simply mention Russia or call people Putin puppets or bots, and let the viewer conclude any of the above. It has been reduced to lying by implication. Let the well-trained viewer lie to themselves when they are triggered by the right words.

​

JoshuaKevinPerry 2 points 3 points 4 points 2 months ago (0 children)
You forgot, if you read the e-mails you are breaking the law, Chris Cuomo, CNN.
3andfro 9 points 10 points 11 points 2 months ago (0 children)
"Russia" has become like an implanted word to cue posthypnotic suggestion behaviors.
FThumb Bernie or Bust isn't a demand, it's a prophecy 10 points 11 points 12 points 2 months ago (4 children)
It's the very definition of a MacGuffin.
3andfro 2 points 3 points 4 points 2 months ago (0 children)
So glad you tossed that in here so more people will look it up and get the reference. Keep at it.
probably_pointless 6 points 7 points 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

MacGuffin

Had to look that up.

3andfro 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (0 children)
And now you see how perfectly it fits.
Inuma I take the headspace of idiots 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (0 children)
You have never had to go through TV Tropes have you?
expletivdeleted will shill for rubles. Also, Bernie would have won 10 points 11 points 12 points 2 months ago (1 child)
Russiagate is really a cross between a shell game and Kabuki theatre. The real Russiagate is U1 and CF.
redditrisi 7 points 8 points 9 points 2 months ago (0 children)
The real Russiagate is USgate.

"We have met the enemy and, as usual, they is us."

Grizzly_Madams 14 points 15 points 16 points 2 months ago (15 children)
Very close. We should have the final written report by late 2019. But based on zero indictments/convictions related to collusion, zero evidence of collusion and the Senate investigation finding no collusion we can safely say this whole thing was a witch-hunt. I strongly dislike Trump as a person and the terrible direction he's taken this country in but Russiagate was 100% a political witch-hunt. But just because Trump/Russia collusion is dead doesn't mean the tactic is. It'll just be used against the left now.
redditrisi 5 points 6 points 7 points 2 months ago (1 child)
now? The US government has been witch hunting the left since the Civil War ended, if not before. (I need to brush up on US history from 1790 to 1860.)
Grizzly_Madams 3 points 4 points 5 points 2 months ago (0 children)
You're not wrong!
Blackhalo Purity pony: Российский бот 5 points 6 points 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

late 2019

It's going to take six moths to write a report that contains absolutely zero related to the initial premise of the Russia investigation?

jbbrwcky 1 point 2 points 3 points 2 months ago (0 children)
We've had experts in the field exploring different and less transparent ways to say zero, but the best we've been able to come up with is just producing a report that's so long and boring and obtuse that nobody will ever read it. Then people can insinuate that it contains whatever they want it to contain.
Grizzly_Madams 3 points 4 points 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)
Apparently. At least that's the number I've heard being thrown around.
redditrisi 5 points 6 points 7 points 2 months ago (0 children)
I would not be a bit surprised if the date did not slip until after the 2020 election.
sophie-cat 0 points 1 point 2 points 2 months ago (8 children)
what about all the blokes they arrested in relation and charged?
Roy_Blakeley 6 points 7 points 8 points 2 months ago (1 child)
You can indict anyone. As the saying goes, you can indict a turnip. The Internet Research Agency indictments, which Mueller trotted out, were not actually the result of the FBI investigation. The information was publicly available and was published by a Russian investigative news team. The IRA was the company responsible for the Google and Facebook buys. What is not usually mentioned is that the IRA is a clickbait factory that makes money by getting people to click on links that show news, etc. and adds. Clinton and Trump are clickbait. The posts were not all pro-Trump and, as mentioned, many were well after the election. It is an open question to me as to whether there was small and lame attempt to influence the election, or just an attempt to make a few rubles (or both) by getting people to click on anti-Trump or anti-Clinton items (or pro-Trump or pro-Clinton for that matter). I read one of the indictments the other day and it was ridiculous. There was a lot of preamble, trying to make the IRA effort seem sinister, but if one continued to read, it was obvious that she was essentially being accused of being an accountant that might have been involved in money transfers that were used for add buys. The FBI has depended on the fact that these people will not come to the US to stand trial and, therefore, the FBI will not have to produce any real evidence.
jbbrwcky 1 point 2 points 3 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Also, these indictments against Russians, with whom we have no extradition treaty were 'safe', in that nobody would actually face charges, so they'd never have to make their pathetic case. When some US lawyers showed up on behalf of one group of defendents demanding discovery, Meuller panicked, tried to claim national security, delayed and finally handed the case off to some lower profile lawyers who will suffocate the whole case quietly with a pillow as soon as the 18 month American memory has lapsed.
Blackhalo Purity pony: Российский бот 6 points 7 points 8 points 2 months ago (1 child)
The only arrests and pleas were for lying to the FBI on unrelated matters, acting as an unregistered lobbyist for Ukraine and the troll farm where the charges will be quickly dropped as the "evidence" won't stand up in court.
Inuma I take the headspace of idiots 8 points 9 points 10 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Even lying to the FBI is a stretch when they lost the paperwork and manipulated and deleted evidence to collude with their narrative...
Grizzly_Madams 7 points 8 points 9 points 2 months ago (1 child)
So um... nobody has been arrested for colluding with Russia... What are you referencing?
sophie-cat -2 points -1 points 0 points 2 months ago (0 children)
the lawyers, the guy the fbi raided a few weeks ago
FThumb Bernie or Bust isn't a demand, it's a prophecy 11 points 12 points 13 points 2 months ago (0 children)

“Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

~ Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, head of Stalin’s secret police

Irony dies.

probably_pointless 15 points 16 points 17 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Process crimes, financial crimes. So far, no collusion.
astitious2 8 points 9 points 10 points 2 months ago (3 children)
I think that Dem morons are now rabidly anti-Russia. It is time to flip the script and get the Rep morons to hate Russia because of collusion between Putin and the Clinton campaign. Russia will continue to offer western critics of empire a platform, and war-loving westerners will continue their tantrums over getting facts from outside of the propaganda bubble.
Blackhalo Purity pony: Российский бот 10 points 11 points 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

collusion between Putin and the Clinton campaign.

Podesta was literally acting as a foreign lobbyist for Russian toady Yanukovych

Yanukovych: PR firms and nice suits hide authoritarian intentions

An example of this is the Podesta Group’s $200,000 contract with an entity called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. Podesta Group is an American lobbying firm run by Tony Podesta. And the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine? That just happens to be an operation controlled by Yanukovych, according to Ukrainska Pravda.

astitious2 11 points 12 points 13 points 2 months ago (1 child)
Yeah the case for Clinton/Russia collusion around Uranium One and the election is a million times stronger than trying to claim Trump colluded because he wanted oppo research. We at least have the Steele Dossier which was provided mostly by Russia to Trump's opponents.

Nobody has ever shown any credible evidence Russia did any of the hacking, or that Saddam killed babies or had WMD, or that we were attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.

rommelo [ S ] 7 points 8 points 9 points 2 months ago (0 children)
or the Douma chemical attacks and the whole idea that Guaido is legitimate.

​

E46_M3 26 points 27 points 28 points 2 months ago (14 children)
Russiagate is a psyop and there never was any evidence to begin with or even an alleged crime. So us not finding evidence doesn’t end it because these guys are desperate for this to be real. They have become fully propagandized and useful idiots of the permanent state.
Inuma I take the headspace of idiots 7 points 8 points 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)
How many times have the walls been closing in?
Rev_Fred_Ghurkin Troll Shredder, Emeritus. 5 points 6 points 7 points 2 months ago (1 child)
It's a bombshell!
Blackhalo Purity pony: Российский бот 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Big, if true!
NirnaethArnodiad 9 points 10 points 11 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Mueller is a career hit man lawyer with insider ties to the FBI/CIA as well as the Bush Administration.

Ya gotta ask yourself, Who does Russiagate benefit? From every possible angle it benefits the establishment in both parties. It checks off every box on the wishlist, distracts from their bought off immorality, election rigging, and fraud, while propping up aggressive war and military spending.

E46_M3 12 points 13 points 14 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Here you go doofus guy since you think there is evidence. Even the SENATE doesn’t have any. You’ve been propagandized by the media lmao

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-has-uncovered-no-direct-evidence-conspiracy-between-trump-campaign-n970536

astitious2 7 points 8 points 9 points 2 months ago * (7 children)
I didn't think echo chambers worse than The_Donald/politics could exist until I looked in that subreddit ( /r/the_mueller ) of brainwashed idiots.
unagisongs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJtrLKGZZFg 2 points 3 points 4 points 2 months ago (0 children)
When the MSM has turned on you. It's time to give it up.
redditrisi -2 points -1 points 0 points 2 months ago (4 children)
Thank God Almighty you never have to subject yourself to this sub again. Come to think of it, you never had to subject yourself to it at all, did you, troll?
astitious2 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)
I am not knocking wotb. I am commenting on the_mueller. I only troll Clintonistas and other capitalists subverting the left.
FThumb Bernie or Bust isn't a demand, it's a prophecy 1 point 2 points 3 points 2 months ago (0 children)

I am commenting on the_mueller.

I got it.

redditrisi 4 points 5 points 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)
Sincere apologies. I am too accustomed to people posting here to complain about this sub; and I skimmed too quickly. Mea maxima culpa.
astitious2 2 points 3 points 4 points 2 months ago (0 children)
No worries.
probably_pointless 7 points 8 points 9 points 2 months ago (0 children)
I don't think ratings or money have anything to do with it anymore. I leave as evidence that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post without researching its market or its financials, and he spent just 1/400th of his wealth to acquire it.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos signed the $250 million Washington Post deal with no due diligence

Do you think that with so little money at stake (to him), and without even knowing if there was money to be earned, that he bought it to make money with it?

News media is no longer about making money. Not directly, anyway. It's now about control.

It's handy that Trump is earning them money, but that's not what's going on. Trump wasn't supposed to win. It was a mistake. They are trying to eject him. They are exercising their control to rid the system of an untrusted president. They are exercising their control to make sure a progressive doesn't replace him. The financials are secondary.

j3utton 28 points 29 points 30 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Or is it Really Hillarygate? a Clinton campaign ploy to deflect from her own shortcomings (emails revelations, her own collusion, her loss to Donald Trump).

Its been this since the morning after the election, and it's only been this.

docdurango Lapidarian 10 points 11 points 12 points 2 months ago (1 child)
It was that long before the morning after the election. They cooked it up probably in like March 2016, even before the DNC announced they were hacked. The Clinton campaign thought its greatest weakness was her coziness with Russia (one of the Podesta emails released by Wikileaks put this as their #1 weakness). Knowing that Trump also had tons of connections with Russians, they hired Cody Shearer and Sid Blumenthal to put together dossiers charging Trump with being a Russian agent. They later got Fusion GPS to hire Steele to give the final product more heft and authenticity, since he was an actual retired MI6 spook. Then then they made the rounds with media outlets and Deep State agencies, trying to get them to open an investigation, and to report on it. The effort wasn't hugely successful at first, but they did get Brennan and Clapper to buy it, then Comey, and also David Corn of Mother Jones, and Michael Isikoff.

Biggest and most successful dirty political trick in all U.S. history.

Except it may backfire in the end, since Trump now can credibly charge the media with "fake news" and bias against him. I think the Republicans are just waiting for Mueller to file his report before making a huge stink about the whole thing, as they should.

A huge disaster for the American people and for progressives especially, even though it worked as a political trick, at least for 2-1/2 years.

Roy_Blakeley 7 points 8 points 9 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Don't forget the Veselnitskaya meeting with Trump Jr. It was set up by Fusion GPS and the co-founder of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, met with her before and after the Trump tower meeting. She was suddenly granted a special visa to allow her to enter the country. The meeting was useless to Trump because Veselnitskaya only wanted to talk about the Magnitsky act. It was a total set up to provide ammunition so that security agencies could go to the FISA court and get permission to spy on the Trump campaign.
EvilPhd666 "The Spoiler" Führer Twinkle Gypsy / межразмерная контрразведка 37 points 38 points 39 points 2 months ago (2 children)
The next phase of Russiagate is to go directly after the anti war movement. Leftist, progressives, non interventionist conservatives are going to get painted as "influenced by Russia" or agents of the Kremlin.
era--vulgaris Remember Kids, Dissent = Russian Propaganda! 16 points 17 points 18 points 2 months ago (0 children)
Bingo. Tulsi's experience is the canary in the coal mine.

Trump is irrelevant. What matters is that through Russiagate, we now have a huge swath of "progressive" liberals, including many public intellectuals, celebrities, and others with good reputations in society- who are completely inoculated with cold war era propaganda and paranoia, and most critically the authoritarian mindset (listen to authority, questioning is treason, consensus is truth, etc).

Conservatives are already susceptible to that mindset, so there's plenty of them (the anti-trump and/or pro-war factions) that are ready to swallow whatever they're told as well.

To put it simply, we have a giant cross-section of the populace that cuts across ideological lines and is completely prepped for authoritarianism.

Naturally, the people who gravitate towards this will be the more comfortable among us, because they aren't faced with social decay every day. Less fortunate people have a harder time maintaining the contradiction of a perfect society ruined by foreign interference, but the petty bourgeois and above have no such issue.

We're seeing open declarations that any attempt to reduce American empire, or head off further expansion- even when it's solely about helping Americans rather than justice for victims of imperialism- must be a foreign plot. Why?

Well (X foreign rival) clearly would rather we don't run the whole world, so obviously, any attempt to prevent us from doing so- even if it's just so we don't bankrupt ourselves and fall apart from within- is a plot by the Kremlin or Beijing or (insert foreign rival here).

j3utton 20 points 21 points 22 points 2 months ago (0 children)

All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

rommelo [ S ] 20 points 21 points 22 points 2 months ago (0 children)
In light of these revelations, I've become more active in calling out and engaging facebook friends for posting russiagate bs - like stupid memes about russian collusion, telling them it is a dangerous game and we in Europe don't want to be the next Cuban Missile Crisis.

[May 11, 2019] From Russiagate to Gunboat Diplomacy by Branko Marcetic

Notable quotes:
"... Particularly shameless was Florida Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, who went on Tucker Carlson's show to peddle half-baked innuendo as brazen as anything claimed in the lead up to the Iraq War. If Maduro's government survived, he claimed, it would be "a green light, an open door for the Russians and for the Chinese and for others to increase their activity against our national security interest right here in our hemisphere." ..."
May 11, 2019 | jacobinmag.com

Russiagate hysteria is already being used to push Trump into an act of armed aggression against Venezuela. It's a disastrous result of a pointless delusion.

One of the things Russiagate skeptics found unsettling about the frenzy over supposed "collusion" was that it made war more likely. Not only did the now-debunked conspiracy theories and resulting political climate push officials into a more aggressive posture toward Russia, but once the Kremlin was returned to its status as the foreign policy elite's Big Bad, it was easy to imagine a situation where the threat of a Russian bogeyman could be used to justify any number of unrelated foreign adventures. This appears to be exactly what's happening with Venezuela right now.

First there was Fareed Zakaria, who two months ago tried to goad Trump into attacking Venezuela by pointing to Russia's support for Maduro. "Putin's efforts seem designed to taunt the United States," he said (it might also have something to do with the billions of dollars Russia sank into the country), making reference to the Monroe Doctrine. He asked if Washington would "allow Moscow to make a mockery of another American red line," warning that "if Washington does not back its words with deeds" the country could become another Syria. Zakaria concluded: "will Venezuela finally be the moment when Trump finally ends his appeasement?"

More recently, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo charged that Russia had "invaded" Venezuela before claiming the Kremlin had dissuaded Maduro from fleeing the country at the last moment, something Pompeo has provided no evidence for but much of the media has treated as fact since.

National Security Advisor John Bolton has said that "this is our hemisphere" and "not where the Russians ought to be interfering." Democratic Sen. Doug Jones echoed this sentiment on CNN, praising the Trump administration for saying "all options are on the table" to deal with Venezuela, something he suggested may have to be acted on "if there is some more intervention [by] Russia."

The national press, taking a break from warning about Trump being a dangerous authoritarian, has been demanding to know why he hasn't been more aggressive toward the country over this.

Particularly shameless was Florida Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, who went on Tucker Carlson's show to peddle half-baked innuendo as brazen as anything claimed in the lead up to the Iraq War. If Maduro's government survived, he claimed, it would be "a green light, an open door for the Russians and for the Chinese and for others to increase their activity against our national security interest right here in our hemisphere."

He went on to claim that Russia had already placed nuclear missiles in the country, and that it could lead to a Cuban missile crisis-like conflict. There is no evidence this is true, and Díaz-Balart didn't provide any.

Of course, no coverage of the Trump administration's relations with Russia would be complete without a trip into Rachel Maddow's fractured psyche. After Trump repeated Putin's personal assurances that he wasn't interested in getting involved in Venezuela -- contradicting Pompeo and Bolton -- Maddow addressed the two officials :

Hey John Bolton, hey Mike Pompeo, are you guys enjoying your jobs right now? You each thought your job this week was to name and shame and threaten and counter Russian government involvement in Venezuela while saber-rattling about how everybody else better get out of the way because the US is really mad about it. Guys, turns out your actual job is figuring out how and why you work for a president who says whatever Vladimir Putin tells him.

Maddow went on to express her sympathy for one of the most unhinged warmongers in a city teeming with them ("I mean, John Bolton, God bless you"), and again seemed to suggest that Bolton's "job" of "push[ing] Russia back because of what they're doing in Venezuela" was the correct course of action.

It's now clear there is nothing -- not Trump's years-long belligerence toward Russia's Venezuelan ally, not his near-constant bellicosity toward Russia since taking office, not Robert Mueller's failure to indict a single person for conspiring with Russia, not even his report's explicit and implicit denial that any such conspiracy existed -- that will make these people give up the talking point that Trump is secretly in bed with Putin. If Mueller himself denied it, they would claim he was a Russian in disguise. It's simply too convenient an attack line, and too professionally embarrassing to admit otherwise.

There is also an Orwellian level of doublethink going on here. Russia, a Venezuelan ally, has sent personnel and equipment to the country with the consent of its government at a time when it's being threatened by multiple hostile regional powers. Meanwhile the US, one of those hostile powers, has for years been laying siege to the country and killing its people, trying to destabilize and oust its leadership, and even threatening to invade it.

Yet according to the media and political class, it's Russia's actions that are an unacceptable intrusion into another country's affairs -- an "invasion," even. They are holding up four fingers to your face and telling you you're seeing five.

Meanwhile, these same quarters, after spending close to three years hyperventilating about Russia's meddling in domestic US affairs -- an "act of war," in some minds -- have now seamlessly pivoted to cheering Trump as he attempts to engineer a change of Venezuela's government, even calling for him to possibly attack the country. This is glaringly hypocritical, but the Russiagate frenzy was never about principled outrage or any sort of moral consistency.

Lastly and most significantly, the rhetoric around Venezuela is now taking on an explicitly imperialistic character, in the most literal sense of that word. Zakaria invoked the Monroe Doctrine to urge Trump to intervene in Venezuela; National Security Advisor John Bolton "proudly proclaim[ed]" upon launching a fresh round of sanctions that "the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well," and one MSNBC guest insisted the Trump administration was "right in being completely flabbergasted" at Russia's presence in the country because "this is our hemisphere," echoing Bolton .

When these figures talk about "our hemisphere," they don't mean the hemisphere in which the US happens to be located; they mean this is literally their hemisphere. The US is the imperial power with dominion over this part of the world, and only it has the right to interfere in the countries that populate it.

Their objection is not that an outside power is involving itself in a Latin American country's business, but that this outside power isn't the one in Washington. The fact that the US has been doing this very thing for years in Russia's part of the world -- expanding NATO right up to its border, sending weapons to Ukraine -- goes conveniently unmentioned.

Russiagate skeptics were criticized for being hyperbolic in comparing that scandal to the bogus WMD tale that led to the Iraq War; the latter, after all, killed hundreds of thousands and destabilized an entire region. But the full consequences of Russiagate will not be felt immediately; they will unfold over time. And while floating the specter of Russia might not work this time, expect it to be used over and over in the coming years to justify all manner of military aggression .

[May 11, 2019] Spygate (aka Russiagate) was a program to entrap and smear Trump as a Putin stooge by top officials in the Obama administration, directly interfering in a presidential election.

May 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

blue peacock , 11 May 2019 at 02:05 AM

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

― Upton Sinclair

As more evidence is being uncovered like the the Kathy Kavalec contemporaneous notes & email to FBI on her meeting with Steele, it is getting more & more apparent that there was a program to entrap and smear Trump as a Putin stooge by top officials in the Obama administration, directly interfering in a presidential election.

Mueller was conflicted right from the very beginning. The fact that Strzok, Page & Weisman were on his initial staff points to that conflict. Considering the inherent bias it should be instructive that they could not find any evidence and had to conclude that the Trump campaign did not collude with agents of the Russian government.

[May 11, 2019] Rachel Maddow s Craziest Russia Video Ever!

Rachel's the MSM poster child for aggressive and dedicated stupidity.
Notable quotes:
"... Funny how these people push Russiagate and then support regime change everywhere and most recently Venezuela. ..."
"... Rachel Maddow is an establishment "TOADIE." Is that right? ..."
"... As George Carlin said, "bipartisanship means a larger than usual deception is going on." ..."
"... What would happen if Zionists took the control of US Government? ... O, wait... ..."
"... Rachel's the MSM poster child for aggressive and dedicated stupidity. ..."
"... Maddow, like every other MSM propaganda bullhorn, is "manufacturing consent" for the neocon wars to come. ..."
"... Should Madame Walking Corruption decide to run again, Rachel is the perfect choice for VP. ..."
"... She's the neo lib version of Glen Beck ..."
"... Rachel Maddow is the Alex Jones of the left - Nothing but a controlled CIA tool. ..."
"... "The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five." ― Carl Sagan ..."
"... This Maddow segment will be referenced by future historians as "end-stage Russia-gate." ..."
"... Madcow disease is contagious. ..."
"... Maddow has lost her ever loving mind. She's the neolib answer to Alex Jones. ..."
"... If I was American, i would take any of these Russian scare stories as an assault of my intellect. These MSM clowns are basically saying their audience are a dumb as planks. ..."
Feb 04, 2019 | www.youtube.com

The Jimmy Dore Show

James , 3 months ago

Funny how these people push Russiagate and then support regime change everywhere and most recently Venezuela.

btf , 3 months ago

"what would you do if you lost heat, indefinitely, as the act of a foreign power" - i don't know , let's ask Iraqi's what they did

radiofriendly , 3 months ago

Humor is the only response to Rachel's insanity!

Richard Couch , 3 months ago

Rachel Maddow is an establishment "TOADIE." Is that right?

Robert Cox , 3 months ago

As George Carlin said, "bipartisanship means a larger than usual deception is going on."

Matt Chew , 3 months ago

What if Russia turned off all of our corporate "news"? We would actually find out what's going on in the world.

Mike Wilson , 3 months ago

Thank you for exposing Maddow's mind control show.

mochawitch , 3 months ago

The power grid in this country is more likely to be jeopardized because it's out of date and woefully neglected by the scare-mongering, Russia-baiting idiots in charge; more concerned with dominating the planet than keeping our infrastructure maintained. Maddow could mention that, but I guess then she'd piss her bosses(the fuel industry &MIC) off.

Dj Dorcol , 3 months ago

What would happen if Zionists took the control of US Government? ... O, wait...

Amy , 3 months ago

There actually was a story about there being a fire at a prison in NY and the inmates going without heat during the polar vortex. Needless to say, it wasn't Russia but good ol' American disregard for people who see as worthless and so they are dragging their feet in fixing the problem, plus they are pepper spraying the families of the inmates who are protesting the conditions inside the prison. We don't need to make out Russia to be the boogey man when we are better at being that for our own citizens.

IMAX Andy , 3 months ago

I LOVE Russia THEY NEVER DID ANYTHING TO USA THATS TRUTH

B T , 3 months ago

Rachel, all these "what if" questions are a sign of generalized anxiety. Get a psychologist.

PHILMKD1995 , 3 months ago

So Vladimir Putin is Mr Freeze? lol XD

Jocko Adams , 3 months ago

Hey Rachael, Mitt Romney called and he wants his 1980's foreign policy back.

Hoohoosistik , 3 months ago (edited)

Rachel's the MSM poster child for aggressive and dedicated stupidity.

impossiblemission4ce , 3 months ago

My phone is almost out of battery right now. What if Russia took my charging cable!?

PapaMagnum , 3 months ago

Rachel Maddow is the biggest disappointment at MSNBC over the last 4 years

Ben L , 2 months ago

Ya know, I do remember when Maddow wasn't complete trash. Thought I was getting in on something great. What a spectacularly disgusting switch

Andrew Cowan , 3 months ago

Damn it Jimmy, run for congress already! :D

Michael Pilz , 3 months ago

If Rachel keeps this up Jimmy will have a stroke on stage.

slickbricknick123 , 3 months ago

I remember what George Carlin told me to do when I can't allow this shit to drive me crazy anymore, I became a spectator.

Scrabble Eddie , 3 months ago (edited)

Maddow, like every other MSM propaganda bullhorn, is "manufacturing consent" for the neocon wars to come.

Alex Silver , 3 months ago

Omg so funny! You guys made my night. People like you give me hope that we can avoid the catastrophe. As a Russian, I want to say, let's not kill each other.

Mark Wazowski , 3 months ago

NBC/Universal owns GE which is one of the largest defence contractors. Of course the want war.

Michael , 3 months ago (edited)

She being a Rhodes Scholar, I often wonder if she wasn't recruited early on by the CIA. That's an investigation about collusion between US corporate media and the deep state to influence US elections I'd like to see.

MegaDont , 3 months ago

Maddow: "This is clearly a Siberian invasion."

Lisa Pierra , 3 months ago

What if the Lucky Charm leprechaun breaks into my house and eats my magically delicious stars and moons and leaves just the cereal? What will happen then?

inesxenia , 3 months ago

"Putin despises the West and US..." Seriously, who doesn't? Kinda hard not to after what you have been doing all these years and are doing still.

seha alturk , 3 months ago

Should Madame Walking Corruption decide to run again, Rachel is the perfect choice for VP.

JR 14 , 3 months ago

You know What else Russia has? The country of crony capitalist oligarchs? Universal healthcare, that's what they have.

B T , 3 months ago

How is she what she saying any different than conspiracies? She sounds like a flat eather who spent too much time clocking hours in the crazy part of YouTube.

Angel Gd , 2 days ago

You hear less about Russia on Russia Today, frankly you get better news.

red dwarf , 3 months ago

Seriously who watches that dude from msnbc? Makes for some great comic relief material. Cheers to all.

Syncopator , 3 months ago (edited)

So who was it that said, "The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over"? Some guy named "Joseph"?

hashbrown77 , 3 months ago

"Russia-gate has officially jumped the shark" rofl

4TH WORLD WILDERNESS , 3 months ago (edited)

If it's hot outside, blame cowfarts If it's cold outside, blame cowfarts and russia

TurdFurgeson571 , 3 months ago

Master plan was we will make American have cold soapy eyes. Damn you Rachel. Always spoiling plan. ~ The Russians

monkee5th , 3 months ago (edited)

Americans have become more xenophobic.... because Russia. Xenophobia Warrior Princess Starring Rachel Maddcow

clifford maxwell , 3 months ago

Rachel Maddow is a perfect example of what happens when you entrench yourself on the wrong side of the issues snuggling up to those big corporate advertisers like big oil or Boeing before you know it you have painted yourself into a corner just like fox news hosts as you make a complete fool of yourself sounding like a blithering idiot totally devoid of any shred of journalistic integrity she is the old washed up sorcerer that has lost her power all she has left is a few old pieces of magic corn. she may well indeed have the highest ratings but I don't believe the people are buying what she is trying to sell them!

Mat S , 3 months ago

someone should send Rachel a Russian flag.. her head will explode

unab84 , 2 months ago

Amaaaazing vid Jimmy! Best thing since George Carlin

Eric Erickson , 2 days ago

She's the neo lib version of Glen Beck

Harry Kiralfy Broe , 3 months ago

Rachel Maddow is the Alex Jones of the left - Nothing but a controlled CIA tool.

Osama Number5 , 3 months ago

"The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five." ― Carl Sagan

Greg Shane , 3 months ago

This Maddow segment will be referenced by future historians as "end-stage Russia-gate."

Erik S , 2 months ago (edited)

"RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!" It's the DemCorp version of "Thanks Obama!" If the Russians cut our power, we'd cut theirs...

American_Warrior , 2 weeks ago

8:23 Mueller is a WMD guy too.. look it up.. he was fbi director at the time🖕

Fats Hernandez , 3 months ago (edited)

How long until Jimmy Dore gets deplatformed? Anyone who rooted against Alex Jones is short-sighted. He was against the iraq and afghan wars. He was the 1st to report the false flag in syria. He cried when Trump dropped that MOAB. Support Alex Jones!

MySpartapictures kitty , 2 months ago

Russian want global warming they said it would be good for them.🙄 They did.

D. Martin , 3 months ago (edited)

Putin's sides are aching. She could tour Russia billed as a comic and just read from her nightly manuscript. It would keep them in stitches.

Richard Sanders , 1 week ago

New drinking game...everytime she says Russia, putin, soviet, or communist...you gotta take a shot! ;-)

James Burns , 2 days ago

Please get rid of that Graham dude he's just annoying

nywvblue , 3 months ago

AND YET we share the ISS and all related research and technology with...the Russians! hahaha what a ruse!

abbreviation of time , 3 months ago

It's only a matter of time before she blames 9/11 on Russia

CB B , 3 months ago

This is great. Good to see Lee Camp there with Jimmy. Good comedy chemistry with this group.

It doesn't matter who we are, what matters is our plan. , 3 months ago

She doesn't have anything else prepared because Russians ate her homework.

Jocko Adams , 3 months ago (edited)

"What if I just reported what we knew to be true and nothing else?" --Rachel Maddow, Never.

realoldschoooollover , 3 months ago

It's not like the people in the "Flyover Country" wouldn't know how to help themselves 😂. Folks, they aren't cityslickers 😂

Short Cipher , 3 months ago

Madcow disease is contagious.

flashfloodarea3 , 3 months ago

Reminds me of Monty Python's "Brezhnev and Kosygin are in my wife's jam!". Nothing has changed. We are still at war with Eurasia.

Roy Grimaldi , 1 week ago

We have homeless situation in our city. Dam Russians!!!!!!!

peter wright , 1 week ago

I'm from the UK and I haven't laughed so much in ages. Thank you.

I Dream Memes , 3 months ago

Jimmy: Brilliant on Russiagate. Dim on AOC. Confuses me, but hilarious all the same.

Panzer Faust , 3 months ago

Hence her nickname "Rachel Madcow".

Pete McJames , 3 months ago (edited)

"Can cut sections of the power grid at will". Head's up- they're telling you what they are going to do and then blame Russia for.

Okolele Ekelolo , 3 months ago

This msnbc news is just how much American mainstream media are pure joke with zero credit😂. In the end, these "journalists" owe their job to Russia, what would they do without it since they always talk about it😂😂😂😂😂

Mr K , 2 months ago

13:27 That's Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, 'Jay' Rockefeller. The Rockefeller family owns the world's biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, the Amoco in BP-Amoco all came from the companies created after the breakup of John D. Rockefellers' Standard Oil Trust.

Dire Straitz , 2 months ago

I just figured out who/how they got to her: "Her paternal grandfather was from a family of Eastern European Jews (the original family surname being "Medwedof")" Amazing how much that sounds like "Madoff", isn't it?

J.P.M. , 3 months ago

Fear Russian fear mongering goes "Off Rails!". It would shocking though if Russia were paying Jimmy Dore!!! /watch?v=Fw_9qCZP9-4

Dronestar1 , 3 months ago

One of the funniest ones I seen yet.. #russia lololol 🤦🏿‍♂️🤦🏿‍♂️🤦🏿‍♂️

mailill , 2 months ago

Stef hade some good ones here! LOL!

cjhwngtkt 63 , 3 months ago

Julien Assange is a hero.

J. Vonhögen , 3 months ago

The huge elephant in the room is of course global weather engineering. None of our efforts to cut emissions will stop the current climate collapse, until all weather-/geo-engineering programs have been terminated worldwide. We need to stop weather warfare now.

Sunder Sidhai , 1 month ago

This is one insane American. There are many, many more.

TX Rider , 3 months ago

What would happen? An army of privileged entitled white men would go out in the 50 below weather and work 24/7 in deadly conditions to fix it and have the power back up in hours, like they do every winter.. Just like the white men who put on wetsuits and dive into literal lakes of shit and piss to clear the tampons and pads out of the grates and pumps in the sewer treatment plants so the toilets of people like Maddow continue to function.. The people who are completely invisible to morons like Maddow.

Tony 1 , 1 month ago

Jimmy I love you, Trump shot you forward.

LadyYvaJ , 3 months ago

Maddow has lost her ever loving mind. She's the neolib answer to Alex Jones.

Peter Wilson , 3 months ago

Way to go, your honorable, passionate delivery is reminiscent of Bill Hicks.

Ernesto Ybarra , 3 months ago

Our little boy Rachel Maddow still Russia-ing it! World's still waiting for Trump's taxes from our little boy! Maybe we could ask her man Susan Mikula LAUD HAM MERCY 😲

Anotherthez , 3 months ago

Yeah, Rachel Madcow is Alex Jones... Doing well, Muricaca... Your "news people" are great..... Have you seen A. Cooper with AOC?? Ridiculous..!

Gary Parris , 3 months ago

damn i hope Trump doesnt watch maddow. i hope trump doesnt watch the movies "wargames" or "die hard 4.0" those russions ;O)

desterflan , 3 months ago

They're putting chemicals in the air that turns the weather gay!!

Gerald Parker , 3 months ago

Ottawa is the second coldest national capital city in the world (after first place coldes Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia). Moscow is NOT so cold as Ottawa is, guys!

T.M. Warren , 3 months ago

European tour 'Jimmy,Steff & Co...Get your arses over to *London*!! You'll sell out a number of dates up & down the UK !💯 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

Patrick McCormack , 3 months ago

Did Rachel Maddow say Russia or RUSH?

DaveLH , 3 months ago

How can Maddow let that guy continue to call it "The Soviet Empire" when the USSR collapsed almost 30 years ago!?

Braden E Nelson , 3 months ago

Keep calm, blame Russia. 😉

DJ Fermi , 3 months ago

Im a conservative but i really like jimmy dore. Keep it up.

A S , 3 months ago

Jimmy adore, is awesome, I love it when he kicks off!

Connor Kost , 1 month ago

"What if Russia cut the power while you were watching porn right before you came, and then you had blue balls forever?" That line was the funniest in this whole video. Another one that had me laughing so hard was this: "So what's the purple area?"

william willie , 3 months ago

If we are worried about the electrical grid. We should prepare it for a Carrington type event

WhatistheMatrix? , 3 months ago

What if you had a salad and you needed dressing but Putin took all of them away except Russian?😟 Can you imagine that?

GenerationXT , 1 month ago

Quote ("These are all jokes") So's Rachael Moscow .

Aquatic Borealis , 3 months ago

Jimmy Dore: "I try to discredit Russian aggression at every opportunity!"

Mr Egusi , 3 months ago (edited)

If I was American, i would take any of these Russian scare stories as an assault of my intellect. These MSM clowns are basically saying their audience are a dumb as planks.

Jason Collins , 3 months ago (edited)

Jimmy, I love your show and, even though I'm essentially conservative and think Trump is exactly the wrench needed to throw into the works of the globalists who I believe almost took complete control of everything in 2016, I agree with you quite often and share many of your videos with both far-leftist and right-wing nuts. That said, the fact of the matter is that a single international ballistic missle loaded with a "nuclear" EMP device, exploded a couple hundred miles over the middle of our country, would totally destroy the power infrastructure across our country and quite literally leave us in the dark ages for months. If this happened, our country would be thrown total chaos and takeover by invasion would be very easy for any semi-powerful country who could get here: Russia and China are basically it. I can't stand Rachel Maddow, but I have a feeling she may have been referring to this extremely serious problem which, by the way, would cost very little to fix. Why we haven't fixed it, but continue to spend more than what the fix would cost to stay Afghanistan every single month is beyond anything even resembling rational thought.

Rocky Hart , 3 months ago

Hey MSNBC? We are not that stupid. Period

Gerald Trudeau , 2 months ago

Jimmy, we need you.Please don't have a stroke.

alex west , 3 months ago (edited)

did you know north pole moving into Russian territory ? privet from Russia!!!!!!!

Tom Pappalardo , 3 months ago (edited)

Lee Camp and Jimmy Dore on the same stage e is like having Babe Ruth and Lou Gehirg batting 3rd and 4th in your favorite baseball team's lineup.

audi presley , 2 months ago

I wouldn't be surprised if Rachel Maddow were exposing a pre-programming agenda that OUR government is plotting -- not the goddamn Russians. Remember: The Freemasons believe in "Order Out Of Chaos."

mailill , 2 months ago

What a rant, Jimmy! Keep'em coming! (But careful with your heart )

Kevin Parsley , 2 months ago

1 flaw in your discourse.. the power grid is taken out just before a nuclear strike...

Seth Marks , 3 months ago

Jimmy, you should start each show with that mashup, it's gold!

G Kuljian , 3 months ago

What would happen if Rachel Maddow had integrity?

TheJustina102085 , 2 months ago

Jimmy Dore = hilarious. Peanut Gallery = not funny.

Patrick Schaefer , 3 months ago

This was glorious. Come to Minneapolis some day!

passdasalt , 3 months ago

What if we decentralized the power grid by implimenting solar power and batteries on homes? Maddow - The Russians would go house to house with wire cutters.

Vincent Rivera , 3 months ago

I'm gonna live my life within the parameters of my control. Act accordingly. Charity comes from the individual, not from the state. Atlas Shrugged.

Newscruiser Spearhead , 3 months ago

Killer rant Jimmy D!!!

Porco Rosso , 1 week ago

THE SLAVS ARE RUNNING THE WORLD!

Randy Potter , 3 months ago

Northam/racism = the new face of the democrat party.

Krymz , 3 months ago

8:30 to 10:30 You should do public speeches, with a lutrin and all, like old school union leaders.

14zer0zer0 , 2 months ago (edited)

I'm from MN, you wouldn't believe how often I'm accused of being a Russian bot by coastal idiots. Note: Not everyone on the coast is an idiot obviously but the idiots who say this always seem to live in CA or NY.

toketeeman1016 , 3 months ago (edited)

Luv your live-show excerpts. They're the best.

future1983 , 2 months ago

> mccarthyite smears McCarthy was right BTW.

Bobby Digital , 3 months ago

Is Jimmy really poking steph?

yeah , 3 months ago

Holy crap this was savage

rippingtons60 , 3 months ago

This is really same woman who made the awesome documentary "Hubris: selling the Iraq War", and "Why We Did IT", she has fallen so far.

Porco Rosso , 1 week ago

THE SLAVS ARE CONTROLING THE WORLD!

J P , 2 months ago

THIS IS RUSSIAN WEATHER!!! Damn you Putin!

324cmac , 3 months ago

Rachel probably accidentally calls her partner, Russia.

Driver X , 3 months ago

Are they SCREAMING to seem funny or is that the only way #MAGA know how to communicate? This is like that Guntfeld show on Fox but without a budget. Are we sure @jimmy_dore isn't actually @maddow in drag?

David George , 3 months ago

Lee camp!

Big Brother , 3 months ago

Oh hey, it's great to have Lee on the show!

Paul Zozak , 3 months ago (edited)

Goddamned Jimmy Dore. Cant say enough good about him 👍🏾😉

jaysper , 6 days ago

Holy cow this woman is insane.

NewtonDynamics , 3 months ago

Is this funny? Or are these rehersing a tape for a Fox News interview?

TCt83067695 , 3 months ago

No one is commenting on Stef's perfect timing on that joke

themardybum08 , 3 months ago

My favourite lefty. Even though he's a spitter. Spitting is not acceptable, even for Alex Jones.

Nicholas Mwangangi , 3 months ago

Lee from Redacted Tonight was here. Wow I missed out

tym 2016 , 2 months ago

Hang on, is the miserable Liberal actually Jimmy Dore's wife?

Elle Pepper , 3 months ago

Come to Columbus Ohio please, me +3 at any show you do here! We love you and Stef 💜

Dizzi Mor , 3 months ago (edited)

When was she ever on the rails?? hahaa - Thank you for pointing out just how insane the propaganda is, Jimmy!

Rod Glad , 3 months ago

Rachel Maddow is the left's Glenn Beck. That's gotta hurt!

Kevin Parsley , 2 months ago

this would be a lot better if that guy w the long hair and goatee said about 1/3 of everything he said..

Dr. Dingle Dorff , 3 months ago

Jimmy on fire! (worried Russia will actually set Jimmy on fire tho)

Peace Dove , 3 months ago

Why can't everyone pay attention to JIMMY ....Thanks JIMMY much love✌💖

HeresyTalk , 3 months ago

Glenn Maddow Vs Rachel Beck

ProNorden Agrarian-Nationalism , 2 months ago (edited)

#JimmyDore and #LeeCamp are now maybe the best at topical/satirical humor. Better even than #BarryCrimmins used to be.

Paul Walpole , 1 week ago

That WP article is still up. Has a caveat saying the computer hacked wasn't connected to the grid, article goes on to mention Russia 20 times.

pishi me , 3 months ago

LOVE YOU SHOW YOUR THE BEST JOURNALIST ! YOU RE DOING COMIC BUT YOU DO A JURNALISTIC JOB WHO WE DONT HEAR IT ANYMORE THANK YOU SIR

Henry Soto , 2 months ago

After Mueller shoots down the Russia collusion theory and Trump, MSNBC has taken steps to put Maddow on a suicide watch.

[May 11, 2019] A Texan Looks At Lyndon: A Study In Illegitimate Power

May 31, 2003 | www.amazon.com

Kurt Harding

A Devastating Diatribe, May 31, 2003

It would be an understatement to say that author Haley does not like Lyndon Baines Johnson. And despite the fact that his book is an unrelenting tirade against all things Lyndon, it provides a useful service in reminding the reader of how Johnson trampled and double-crossed friend and foe alike in his single-minded lust for power.

I am fairly conservative politically, but I am open-minded enough to recognize and oppose corruption whether practiced by liberals or conservatives. In my lifetime, Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton have been shining examples of the worst impulses in American presidential politics in which greed and lust for either power or money ended up overshadowing any of their real achievements.

Haley shows that Johnson was a man of few real principles, neither liberal nor conservative, but rather a man who usually always wanted to know which way the wind was blowing before taking a stand on any important issue. Johnson was a man who used all his powers of persuasion and veiled threats to get what he wanted and woe unto anyone who stood in his way.

He was a man who knew and used the old adage "It's not what you know, but who you know" to Machiavellian extremes.

But he was also a man of sometimes great political courage who would rarely give an inch once he took a stand. He hated those who opposed him, nursed resentments, and wreaked revenge on those who crossed him in the least as most of his enemies and many of his friends learned to their sorrow. From the earliest days, he was involved with corrupt Texas politicians from the local to the state level and swam in the seas of corporate corruption with the likes of the infamous swindler Billy Sol Estes and others of his stripe.

Admittedly, the conservatism of the author is the conservatism of a bygone age and the reader will recognize that the book is meant to be a partisan attack on Johnson. Some of the attacks on Johnson are made solely for political reasons as Johnson was clever enough to outmaneuver Haley's ideological brothers and sisters. But Johnson surrounded himself with enough scummy characters and got involved in so many underhanded political AND business deals that he deserves the rough treatment given him in Haley's devastating diatribe.

No matter your political leanings, your eyes will be opened when you read A Texan Looks At Lyndon. The book is well-written and often riveting in its allegations and revelations, but it loses one star for occasional hysteria. If US or Texas politics interests you, then I highly recommend this.

Randall Ivey

You have been warned, July 31, 2000

Haley wrote this book (and published it himself) in 1964 basically as a campaign tract for Barry Goldwater. In the intervening years it has become a classic of its kind, a philippic, to use M.E. Bradford's term, tracing the illegitimate rise to power of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

If you're politically naive, this book will grown hair on your chest. It's an unblinking, fearless portrait of Johnson's wheeling dealing and underhanded methods to achieve the power, prestige, and money he craved all his life.

Haley names all the names and lays out facts and figures for the reader to make up his mind. And the reader winds up shaking his head in utter astonishment. The best part of the book is that detailing Johnson's eventual election to the U.S. Senate in a contest with former Gov. Coke Stevenson.

The election was clearly Stevenson's, but through the machinations of George Parr, the notorious Duke of Duval County, the results were turned around in LBJ's favor. Investigators later found that among those voting in the primary were people who didn't live in the county anymore and people who weren't alive at all. But the results stood.

(An interesting and amusing aside: when Haley ran for Texas governor in 1956, he approached Parr and said, "I'm Evetts Haley. I'm running for governor, and if I win, it will be my privilege to put you in jail."

Parr's reply: "I believe you will." Parr, the Artful Dodger of Texas politics for years, eventually killed himself.)

At times the book grows tiresome, especially in the Bobby Baker and Billie Sol Estes scandals, where Haley turns a virtual torrent of names and numbers on the reader as to be sometimes confusing.

[May 11, 2019] Report How Fusion GPS and the Obama Administration Weaponized the Trump Dossier by Kristina Wong

Brennan role in weaponizing dossier now became more clear.
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, Fusion GPS hiring of Nellie Ohr -- the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr -- also shows that Steele's role in producing the dossier may be exaggerated. Ohr is a Stanford Ph.D. whose expertise is Russia and she appears to be fluent in Russian. She may have conducted interviews or written parts of the dossier. ..."
"... The dossier, however, only has Steele's name on it -- helping to credential the research as an "intelligence product." ..."
"... A Democratic consultant and Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra Chalupa, told the Clinton campaign about Manafort's work for Yanukovich. "I flagged for the DNC the significance of his hire," Chalupa told CNN in July of this year. ..."
"... Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS in April, shortly after Trump hired Manafort. Manafort's role now allowed Simpson to highlight corruption that he already knew to exist, from his reporting. A line from the dossier states: ..."
"... Steele -- it notes -- had not lived or worked in Russia for nearly 25 years, but his name "at a minimum" would be useful in marketing whatever his firm pulled together. Plus, Steele had a good relationship with the FBI and could "spill secrets" to journalists. ..."
"... it is likely that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook cited Fusion GPS's work in a July 22 interview after embarrassing leaks of Democratic National Committee emails. He told ABC News's George Stephanopoulos that "some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump." ..."
"... The FBI did launch an investigation into possible collusion, however, known by "only a dozen or so people at the FBI," including then-director James Comey and Peter Strzok, who was chosen to supervise the investigation. ..."
"... She said by August 2016, the CIA had "verified the key finding of the dossier" to the point that it was having "eyes only" top secret meetings with President Obama about it. ..."
"... CIA Director John Brennan had also briefed top lawmakers on Russian efforts to help Trump last summer and had said the CIA had limited legal ability to investigate Russian connections to Trump, prompting Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) to write a public letter to the FBI -- which collects domestic intelligence -- about the threat of Russian interference. ..."
"... It appears that Brennan was briefing Reid on the Steele dossier. ..."
"... Brennan apparently sent the dossier to the White House, prompting the "eyes only" meetings. ..."
"... The Post also writes that the "material was so sensitive that CIA Director John O. Brennan kept it out of the president's daily brief, concerned that even that restricted report's distribution was too broad." ..."
"... But as Tablet asks, "if the material was so sensitive that it had to be kept out of the PDB and withheld from the Senate majority leader, why was someone telling The Washington Post about it?" ..."
Dec 24, 2017 | www.breitbart.com

Did the Obama administration launch an investigation into the Trump campaign based solely off of unverified political opposition research? And was that "research" dressed up and given more credibility than it should have? It appears that way based on an investigation of open-source information by Tablet.

The outlet's investigation begins with a June 24, 2017, Facebook post by Mary Jacoby, the wife of Glenn Simpson, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who started Fusion GPS, the firm behind the dossier.

Jacoby, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who once shared bylines with Simpson, bragged how her husband was not getting the credit he deserved for the dossier.

"It's come to my attention that some people still don't realize what Glenn's role was in exposing Putin's control of Donald Trump," she wrote on Facebook. "Let's be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn."

Until this day, the dossier is often referred to as the "Steele dossier," named after the former British spy Christopher Steele who is believed to have authored the document.

Steele's background has been used by collusion-believers to argue that the document is credible. But Jacoby's post suggests that Steele might not have played as big of a role in the dossier as he is given credit.

Indeed, Fusion GPS hiring of Nellie Ohr -- the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr -- also shows that Steele's role in producing the dossier may be exaggerated. Ohr is a Stanford Ph.D. whose expertise is Russia and she appears to be fluent in Russian. She may have conducted interviews or written parts of the dossier.

The dossier, however, only has Steele's name on it -- helping to credential the research as an "intelligence product."

Tablet also took a look at Simpson and Jacoby's work for the WSJ . In April 2007 -- in the lead-up to the 2008 election -- they co-wrote a story about Republican links to Russians.

In that story, titled "How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington," they detail how prominent Republicans helped open doors for "Kremlin-affiliated oligarchs and other friends of Vladimir Putin."

They reported on Viktor Yanukovich, who had paid political fixer Paul Manafort to introduce Yanukovich to powerful Washington, DC, figures. They later reported on May 14, 2008, that Manafort's lobbying firm was escorting Yanukovich around Washington. Yanukovich would later become president of Ukraine in 2010.

Tablet explains how their reporting may have been the origins of the Trump dossier:

So when the Trump campaign named Paul Manafort as its campaign convention manager on March 28, 2016, you can bet that Simpson and Jacoby's eyes lit up. And as it happened, at the exact same time that Trump hired Manafort, Fusion GPS was in negotiations with Perkins Coie, the law firm representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, to see if there was interest in the firm continuing the opposition research on the Trump campaign they had started for the Washington Free Beacon. In addition to whatever sales pitch Simpson might have offered about Manafort, the Clinton campaign had independent reason to believe that research into Manafort's connections might pay some real political dividends: A Democratic consultant and Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra Chalupa, told the Clinton campaign about Manafort's work for Yanukovich. "I flagged for the DNC the significance of his hire," Chalupa told CNN in July of this year.

Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS in April, shortly after Trump hired Manafort. Manafort's role now allowed Simpson to highlight corruption that he already knew to exist, from his reporting. A line from the dossier states:

Ex-Ukrainian President YANUKOVYCH confides directly to PUTIN that he authorised (sic) kick-back payments to MANAFORT, as alleged in western media Assures Russian President however there is no documentary evidence/trail.

Tablet notes that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would later find corruption by Manafort related to money laundering (before he joined the Trump campaign). It also points out that Tony Podesta -- Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta's brother -- worked for Manafort at the time he represented Yanukovich. (The Podesta Group disbanded this year after those connections were made public, and the special counsel is reportedly investigating Podesta too.)

Tablet notes that while Simpson had begun working on the dossier on Trump collusion with Russia, he was also working for a Russian lawyer to undermine an American law called the Magnitsky Act and that Steele may have been hired to disguise that contradiction.

Steele -- it notes -- had not lived or worked in Russia for nearly 25 years, but his name "at a minimum" would be useful in marketing whatever his firm pulled together. Plus, Steele had a good relationship with the FBI and could "spill secrets" to journalists.

Ohr -- Simpson's next hire -- also hadn't lived in Russia for decades and was "not a spy, or even a journalist." "In this world, she was definitely an amateur," Tablet writes.

"Presumably, as a result of all the above, much of the reporting in the dossier is recognizably the kind of patter that locals in closed or semi-closed societies engage in to impress expats -- the kind of thing you hear in a bar, or on the cab ride from the airport to the hotel," it says.

Tablet then goes into the bad shape of U.S. intelligence on Russia -- likely making officials less skeptical of the dossier even though, to date, they have not been able to confirm any of its allegations on collusion.

And Tablet notes that it is likely that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook cited Fusion GPS's work in a July 22 interview after embarrassing leaks of Democratic National Committee emails. He told ABC News's George Stephanopoulos that "some experts are now telling us that this was done by the Russians for the purpose of helping Donald Trump."

At that point, a tech firm had attributed the leaks to Russia but was not able to explain why. The FBI was looking at the leak but had not yet publicly determined political motivation.

"But the DNC and Clinton campaign did have an oppo-research firm under contract that was in the middle of putting together a file that would claim that the Russians were trying to get Trump elected," Tablet notes.

The FBI did launch an investigation into possible collusion, however, known by "only a dozen or so people at the FBI," including then-director James Comey and Peter Strzok, who was chosen to supervise the investigation.

But by late October, they had not yet found any evidence that showed Russia was working to elect Trump. So, ten days before the election, angry Clinton supporters and unnamed intelligence officials spoke to the New York Times in an October 31, 2016, story about what the investigation had found so far.

Jacoby would post that story in her June 24 Facebook post, slamming the FBI and accusing it of "ineptitude," while the CIA "hopped to and immediately worked to verify" the dossier.

She said by August 2016, the CIA had "verified the key finding of the dossier" to the point that it was having "eyes only" top secret meetings with President Obama about it.

Thus, while the document could not be verified and was not used in any intelligence assessment because of its inability to be verified, it was now the topic of meetings with the president.

CIA Director John Brennan had also briefed top lawmakers on Russian efforts to help Trump last summer and had said the CIA had limited legal ability to investigate Russian connections to Trump, prompting Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) to write a public letter to the FBI -- which collects domestic intelligence -- about the threat of Russian interference.

Reid then wrote another letter to Comey after he reopened the investigation into Clinton's emails -- accusing him of letting Trump slide.

"It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers, and the Russian government -- a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity," he wrote.

"I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public and yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information."

That "information" Reid was referring to was the dossier, according to Tablet:

According to David Corn's Oct. 31, 2016, article in Mother Jones , the Nevada lawmaker was referencing the findings of "a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence."

Corn now explains that the "former Western intelligence officer -- who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a U.S. firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients" is Christopher Steele. According to Corn, Steele said that "in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump."

It appears that Brennan was briefing Reid on the Steele dossier.

Brennan apparently sent the dossier to the White House, prompting the "eyes only" meetings.

"An envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried 'eyes only' instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides," the Washington Post reported on June 23, 2017.

"So was the Steele dossier in the envelope?" Tablet asks.

The Post writes that inside that envelope "was an intelligence bombshell" -- a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detained Putin's direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the presidential race, defeat or at least damage Hillary Clinton, and help elect Donald Trump.

The Post also writes that the "material was so sensitive that CIA Director John O. Brennan kept it out of the president's daily brief, concerned that even that restricted report's distribution was too broad."

But as Tablet asks, "if the material was so sensitive that it had to be kept out of the PDB and withheld from the Senate majority leader, why was someone telling The Washington Post about it?"

Tablet writes:

Sources and methods are the crown jewels of the American intelligence community. And yet someone has just told a major American newspaper about a "report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that captured Putin's specific instructions." If the CIA had a human intelligence source that close to Putin, publication of the Post article could have exposed that source -- doing incalculable damage to American national security. He and many of his loved ones would then have presumably died horrible deaths.

Or, as Mary Jacoby surmised, it was her husband's handiwork that landed on the president's desk.

[May 11, 2019] Paul Craig Roberts Warns A CIA-led Coup Against American Democracy Is Unfolding Before Our Eyes by Paul Craig Roberts

The article is two years old now. Looks like Paul Craig Roberts was right. A very strange thing is that Trump proved to be very good for weapon industry and not so bad for neocons. Still the coup is continuing.
Notable quotes:
"... There is an "elite" coup attempt underway against the U.S. President-elect Trump. ..."
"... The coup is orchestrated by the camp of Hillary Clinton in association with the CIA and neoconservative powers in Congress. ..."
"... The plan is to use the CIA's "Russia made Trump the winner" nonsense to swing the electoral college against him. The case would then be bumped up to Congress. Major neocon and warmonger parts of the Republicans could then move the presidency to Clinton or, if that fails, put Trump's vice president-elect Mike Pence onto the throne. The regular bipartisan war business, which a Trump presidency threatens to interrupt, could continue. ..."
"... The institutional Trump enemies are: ..."
"... The weapons industry which could lose its enormous sales to its major customers in the Persian Gulf should a President Trump reduce U.S. interference in the Middle East and elsewhere. ..."
"... The neoconservatives and Likudniks who want the U.S. as Israel's weapon to strong arm the Middle East to the Zionists' benefit. ..."
"... The general war hawks, military and "humanitarian interventionists" to whom any reduction of the U.S. role as primary power in the world is anathema to their believes. ..."
"... The CIA-controlled European media, the politicians in Washington's European vassal states, NATO officials, and the brainwashed European peoples will support the coup against Trump. ..."
"... PCR has gone senile. Trump IS the elite ..."
"... And Trump will continue the MidEast wars. He made it clear. ..."
"... The CIA, along with Boeing and all the other contractors, banks, insurers, and rabble of the Wall Street machine are the Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... Andrea Chalupa ‏@AndreaChalupa Dec 11 ..."
"... 1.) Electoral College meets Dec. 19. If Electors ignore #StateOfEmergency we're in, & Trump gets elected, we can stop him Jan. 6 in Congress ..."
"... 2.) If any objections to Electoral College vote are made, they must be submitted in writing, signed by at least 1 House member & 1 Senator ..."
"... 3.) If objections are presented, House & Senate withdraw to their chambers to consider their merits under procedures set out in federal law. ..."
Dec 17, 2016 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

This article by Moon of Alabama is not conspiracy theory : Read it carefully. Check out the links.

The below theses are thus far only a general outlay...

No general plan has been published. The scheme though is pretty obvious by now. However, the following contains some speculation.

The priority aim is to deny Trump the presidency. He is too independent and a danger for several power centers within the ruling U.S. power circles. The selection of Tillerson as new Secretary of State only reinforces this (Prediction: Bolton will not get the Deputy position.) Tillerson is for profitable stability, not for regime change adventures.

The institutional Trump enemies are:

Read more here...

The article is a documented and accurate description of a coup that is underway. The extraordinary lies that are being perpetrated by the media and by members of the US government have as their obvious purpose the prevention of a Donald Trump presidency. There is no other reason for the extraordinary blatant lies for which there is not a shred of evidence. Indeed, there is massive real evidence to the contrary. Yet the coup proceeds and gathers steam.

President Eisenhower warned us more than a half century ago of the danger that the military/security complex presents to US democracy. In the decades since Eisenhower's warning, the military/security complex has become more powerful than the American people and is demonstrating its power by overturning a presidential election.

Will the coup succeed?

In my opinion, former and present members of the US government and the media would not dare to so obviously and openly participate in a coup against democracy and an elected president unless they expect the coup to succeed.

It is an easy matter for the ruling interests to bribe electors to vote differently than their states. The cost of the bribes is miniscule compared to the wealth and income streams that a trillion dollar annual budget provides to the military/security complex. The fake news of a Putin/Trump election-stealing plot generated by unsupported allegations of present and former members of US intelligence, the lame-duck President Obama, and the presstitute media provide the cover for electors to break with precedent "in order to save America from a Russian stooge."

The CIA-controlled European media, the politicians in Washington's European vassal states, NATO officials, and the brainwashed European peoples will support the coup against Trump.

The only ones speaking against the coup are the voters who elected Trump-all of whom are alleged to have been deceived by Russian fake news -- the Russian government, and the 200 websites falsely described by the Washington Post and the secret organization PropOrNot as Russian agents.

In other words, those objecting to the coup are the ones described by the coup leaders as those who made the coup necessary.

I do not know that the coup will succeed, but looking at the commitment so many high level people have made to the coup, I conclude that those bringing the coup expect it to succeed.

Therefore, we should take very seriously the expectation of success that those who control levers of power are demonstrating.?

abyssinian , Dec 17, 2016 10:17 PM
CIA? You mean Bush?
Mano-A-Mano -> abyssinian , Dec 17, 2016 10:20 PM
PCR has gone senile. Trump IS the elite.
stizazz -> Mano-A-Mano , Dec 17, 2016 10:21 PM
And Trump will continue the MidEast wars. He made it clear.
lock-stock -> stizazz , Dec 17, 2016 10:22 PM
Yes he did. It's right there. http://bit.ly/2flWnRK
Save_America1st -> Moe Hamhead , Dec 17, 2016 10:59 PM
As usual, Paul Craig Roberts is dead-on correct. Just wish Mr. T. would hook him up in some way in the new admin as an economic adivosor of some sorts. He could make a yuuuuuuuge difference.
Mr. Universe -> Save_America1st , Dec 17, 2016 11:33 PM
Above and beyond what is going on behind the scenes they are pushing for all out civil war. If the electors vote for Trump then it's on to Jan.20 where multiple sources are calling out for an outright riot. Michael Moore is calling for a not a protest but a revolution. In response, Trump supporters are now being encouraged to be 2nd amendment patriots to defend against a left wing radical takeover. No matter what happens you can sure you won't hear the truth on the MSM. In fact TPTB are making sure right now they shut down the "alt- right" lest any more muppets awaken.
Perimetr -> techies-r-us , Dec 17, 2016 10:48 PM
A whole group of trolls has been assigned to denigrate PCR's warning, which underlines its importance.

Read also this warning https://www.abqjournal.com/910202/just-who-is-undermining-election-russians-or-cia.html

and this, too http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/12/17/only-a-counter-coup-can-save-...

Paul Kersey -> Perimetr , Dec 17, 2016 10:57 PM
"A whole group of trolls has been assigned to denigrate PCR's warning, which underlines its importance."

Count me in as one of those trolls, because I find PCR to be a sensationalist. In less than two weeks, limp-dick Obama won't have another word to say about the "Russian hack", aka bullshit, and nothing Hillbilery has to say about anything will make any more noise than a goose flying backwards and farting in a thunderstorm.

DaveyJones -> DownWithYogaPants , Dec 17, 2016 11:08 PM
The whole Russian Routine is ALMOST this silly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWWRbn4zG0

We should all be taking another look at this movie. It's pretty funy and the satire was not only historically planted, it was prescient

when these murderous thieving assholes piss me off, I remember the power of the artist and their license to peel away the absurdity of political power

Déjà view -> Perimetr , Dec 17, 2016 11:01 PM
"In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war"

"If there is no sufficient reason for war, the war party will make war on one pretext, then invent another"

"Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly".

"Every nation has its war party... It is commercial, imperialistic, ruthless. It tolerates no opposition"

~ Robert M. la Follette Sr.

http://www.azquotes.com/author/25317-Robert_M_La_Follette_Sr

ebworthen -> LetThemEatRand , Dec 17, 2016 10:46 PM
The CIA, along with Boeing and all the other contractors, banks, insurers, and rabble of the Wall Street machine are the Military Industrial Complex.

The Imperial City (D.C.) of Isengard and Mordor (Wall Street) want fresh bodies and blood to enrich themselves. No more pointless wars! No more body bags for blood money!

When the hell will the U.S. Military cut off the head of the beast and restore the Republic?

We can hope Trump can hack his way there, but if not, step up soldiers!

This may be the last chance, tipping point is here.

Blankone -> ebworthen , Dec 17, 2016 11:10 PM
And China keeps buying Boeing planes by the truck load. Why?
Xena fobe -> Blankone , Dec 17, 2016 11:34 PM
They were contracted for already and are partially assembled in China.
adanata -> sysin3 , Dec 17, 2016 10:32 PM

I have believed PCR is controlled opposition for a while now. I also believe the electors will, like the American People, deliver Trump to the Oval Office. I also believe this whole mess is mainly aimed at undermining Trump's mandate from the People so repugs in CONgress can give him a hard time. That won't work either because they'll be inundated with demands from their constituencies. Screw 'em.

natxlaw -> adanata , Dec 18, 2016 12:17 AM
That and convincing Democrat donors not to jump like rats from the sinking ship.
LetThemEatRand , Dec 17, 2016 10:20 PM
I agree with the premise of this article, but disagree that the deep state expects to succeed in a coup via the Electors. Using the tired metaphor, the deep state plays chess. They are merely laying the groundwork for something later.
Mustafa Kemal -> LetThemEatRand , Dec 17, 2016 10:43 PM
Yes, thinking long term, setting a narrative
GracchusBrothers , Dec 17, 2016 10:33 PM

Paul Craig Roberts...the Armed Forces are with Trump. The CIA are a bunch of effete college girly-boys that should be outed and either be arrested or die for crimes against the state.

FUCK THE CIA and their contractors. Whores for sale to the highest bidder. Enemies of the Republic. Death to them all!

DarthVaderMentor , Dec 17, 2016 10:40 PM
If the Defense-Industrial Complex does overturn the election, their victory will be their pyrrhic last stand and it will be the end of its dominance. The American people will totally destroy it.
Right Wing-Nut , Dec 17, 2016 10:49 PM
"Nothing has been published..." and . .. "it's only speculation..." so up to now it's a John LeCarre' novel!
El_Puerco , Dec 17, 2016 10:49 PM
HEY!...people!...are you aware how important is this if is a true story

{ https://youtu.be/wGZds4W1nEs }

I hope its a fake news, just passing through...

A comment:
C/P:

what the United States and NATO are doing on Russia's western frontier is similar to what the German Wehrmacht did in preparation for Operation Barbarossa.

I really hope this is "a Fake NEWS"...

Saludos...

ChaoKrungThep -> SillySalesmanQuestion , Dec 17, 2016 11:00 PM
...but we lost because every POTUS since JFK is a show pony or he goes to the glue factory (and he knows it). The establishment won again so we wait in the shadows for the aging angry beast to die...
King Tut , Dec 17, 2016 10:51 PM
Eisenhower was a SOB and oversaw the genocide of millions of German women, children and elderly at the end of WW2
dexter_morgan , Dec 17, 2016 10:52 PM
So, all indications are that he will receive > 270 electoral votes on 12/19, so the next day of action for this cabal is Jan. 6th when they can again attempt to overturn?

So we will have a lot of propaganda thrown at us yet again trying to influence that, but a) how many people actually pay attention to this crap expecially over the holiday season, and b) how many people pay attention to the MSM anymore anyhow.

That is a large part of their angst - nobody seems to be listening to their bullshit.

Joe A -> dexter_morgan , Dec 17, 2016 11:35 PM
I am not familiar with the American process leading up to the inauguration. What is on Jan. 6th?
dexter_morgan -> Joe A, Dec 17, 2016 11:46 PM
I think that's when the House actual gives there nihil obstat and impramatur to the electoral college votes, and so members can attempt to hang the process up there as per this below which was in the original article.

Andrea Chalupa ‏@AndreaChalupa Dec 11

1.) Electoral College meets Dec. 19. If Electors ignore #StateOfEmergency we're in, & Trump gets elected, we can stop him Jan. 6 in Congress

2.) If any objections to Electoral College vote are made, they must be submitted in writing, signed by at least 1 House member & 1 Senator

3.) If objections are presented, House & Senate withdraw to their chambers to consider their merits under procedures set out in federal law.
...

yellowsub , Dec 17, 2016 10:54 PM
What about Jefferson's warning about the bankers controlling the money supply?
RightLineBacker -> yellowsub, Dec 17, 2016 11:42 PM
Jefferson was right.
DarkPurpleHaze , Dec 17, 2016 10:55 PM
Once Trump gets in office the resultant corruption probe afterwards should be epic! We'll know by Monday if the electoral college stays the course or steers the country towards anarchy.
G-R-U-N-T , Dec 17, 2016 10:56 PM
Seems to me the CIA and the POTUS has made a complete mess of the world. Do the people really have a desire for them to solve the problem when they caused the problem??? I think not!
Atomizer , Dec 17, 2016 11:00 PM
An old book published in 1992. It's called, Snow Crash . Advise you read it.

" Snow Crash " Trailer - YouTube

Clever kids creating their aspersions of book.

DuneCreature , Dec 17, 2016 11:13 PM
I have CIA contacts. They are freaked. .. It is even affecting some of them in the physical health department. (Not enough of them. IMHO.)

Now is NOT the time to fold to intimidation or threats. Now is the time to double down and make them back up threats and/or expose themselves and show exactly which side they are on.

They DO NOT have enough manpower or assets in the states (or anywhere) to silence everyone.

If the Satanic Witch or other Ass Wipes Inc puppet other than Donald Trump (I'm not 100% sure about him but he is the best shot we have, IMO.) gets put into office, shaking off these assholes will be much harder or impossible all together.

And BTW, in case you think you can just close your eyes and tuck back in a hole until the battle is over they have plans well under way to kill you and your family anyway. .. I'm sure if you have read any of my previous posts you know what some of those ways are.

That's my field report and firm recommendations for 12/17/16.

Live Hard, The CIA / CeyeA Are Not The Good Guys Here, Not Even Close, Die Free

~ DC v4.0

samsara , Dec 17, 2016 11:07 PM
I notice Trump has more than a few ex military people around him. A few generals. I wonder if the would call to active military to stand down? Or to counter a coup?
RightLineBacker -> samsara, Dec 17, 2016 11:30 PM
My first thoughts after Trump selected the Generals was to organize a Military-lead counter coup. He has also aligned a massive amount of wealth by his other appointments. I pray & hope I am correct.
Kina , Dec 17, 2016 11:29 PM
The Republican electors their families and the GOP have way too much to lose. Republicans will never get elected again...and all their lives would be in danger. Plus you would get domestic terror groups spring up across the country. Remember Trump won most of the counties so his support is strong and getting stronger.

The soros and clintons of the world will not be able to control the backlash as they think..and you really would then see russia and china stiring up big trouble in america.

luna_man , Dec 17, 2016 11:28 PM
Donald Trump, doesn't strike me as the type of person, that would lay down for such criminality... and if he puts up a fight, like I think he will, anyone that supports him will fight with him. You can count me in that fighting group!

[May 11, 2019] US Army Colonel Pentagon's Latest China Report A Budget Ploy To Bleed The Taxpayer

May 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4777 More ridiculous Civil Asset Forfeiture shenanigans by TDB - May 10, 2019 1:46 pm Chicago police run a vehicle impound racket

"A Little Fear" Makes for an Exciting Week in Gold and Silver by Sprott Money - May 10, 2019 11:45 am Trade Wars, Tariffs, and Volatility. Oh my! US Army Colonel: Pentagon's Latest China Report A "Budget Ploy" To Bleed The Taxpayer

by Tyler Durden Fri, 05/10/2019 - 21:45 2 SHARES

A former US Army Colonel has blasted Department of Defense's (DOD) latest report on China's military capabilities as a "budget ploy" .

"You're looking at a situation where the only thing [the DOD] can ask for, in terms of fixing any of this, is money -- more and more money " retired Colonel Lawrence "Larry" Wilkerson said of the DoD's annual report prepared for Congress entitled, "Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China 2019".

US Navy in the Pacific Ocean, via US Navy/Reuters

Wilkerson, who served as former chief of staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, described in an interview with The Real News that hyping the China threat taps into a well-trodden American pastime of fear-mongering in order to squeeze more precious taxpayer dollars towards inflated budgets .

The Pentagon report focused heavily on President Xi's plans for rapid modernization of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), especially China's ambitious plans for the region's "largest navy" -- which has lately included ongoing construction of the country's third aircraft carrier (the first full-sized one), with plans for seven total by 2025.

Watch the interview with Army Col. (ret.) Larry Wilkerson below.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/42LauiK_rbY?start=60

Col. Wilkerson dismissed the idea that China's aircraft carrier or latest much reported naval modernization initiatives were real causes for concern:

We've got a dozen [aircraft carriers]. They've got one at sea, one about to come out, and another one perhaps, and ours are so far ahead of theirs that it's 10, 15, 20 years before they even achieve the kind of capacity we have .

He explained that "aircraft carriers are extraordinarily vulnerable and we're going to find that out when one of them with 5,000 hands and $14bn worth of taxpayer money is sunk in less than 30 minutes, whenever we get engaged in something real."

Now a military analyst who teaches at The College of William & Mary in Virginia, Wilkerson addressed the familiar Pentagon cycle of threat inflation in the interview:

The [US] army could not expand; it could not take on a real enemy today without massive conscription and full mobilization . And I wonder if the nation could even stand that today. And so, you're looking at a situation where the only thing [the DOD] can ask for, in terms of fixing any of this, is money -- more and more money.

However, he did warn that the heightened rhetoric and blustering amidst a trade war could serve to paint both sides into a corner, resulting in a scenario of blindly bumbling toward war, as other analysts have described of the so-called "Thucydides Trap".

Wilkerson said an increasingly aggressive US posture toward Beijing could create a "self-fulfilling prophecy," wherein each minor escalation based on inflating threats begins "demarcating the highway to war with China," - according to the interview.

[May 10, 2019] Mueller Report - Expensive Estimations And Elusive Evidence by Adam Carter

Highly recommended!
Looks more and more like Crowdstrike conducted false flag operation to implicate Russians, not a real investigation.
I always assumed that #Guccifer2 was either a Crowdstryke construction at DNC request (that's probably why it was so badly, incompetently done) or a NSA construction (then, we somehow need to explain, why it was so badly done?). In both cases the goal was to implicate Russia in a DNC 'hack' ...
Craig Murray has stated he received the DNC files in Wash DC from a leaker. Mueller failed to interview him, which suggest the Mueller and his team were the part of cover-up, not the part of investigation.
Notable quotes:
"... We are told the GRU obtained files from the DNC network on April 22, 2016, (this is a little different to the Netyksho indictment that states the files were archived on April 22, 2016 and extracted later): ..."
"... The malware samples provided by CrowdStrike show that the earliest compile date of Fancy Bear malware reportedly discovered at the DNC was April 25, 2016 . ..."
"... Whoever was controlling the Guccifer 2.0 persona went out of their way to be perceived as Russian and made specious claims about having already sent WikiLeaks documents, even claiming that WikiLeaks would release them soon (all before Mueller records any initial contact between the parties) . ..."
"... The Special Counsel seems to have been impervious to critical pieces of countervailing evidence (some of which demonstrates that Guccifer 2.0 deliberately manufactured Russian breadcrumbs) and they have failed to accurately account for the acquisition of WikiLeaks' DNC emails (missing the date on which approximately 70% of them were collected) , which is, in itself, a stunning failure for a supposedly thorough investigation costing US taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. ..."
"... There should have been a proper, thorough, independent and impartial investigation into the Guccifer 2.0 persona. The Special Counsel certainly hasn't done that job and, in retrospect, looks to have been ill-equipped (and perhaps somewhat reluctant) to do so from the outset. ..."
May 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of Robert Mueller's report on "RussiaGate" related activities was released to the public.

This article focuses on Volume I Part III titled "Russian Hacking & Dumping Operations" and provides details of the errors made, critical omissions, lack of conclusive evidence and reliance on assumptions and speculation.

We will also look at problems relating to attribution methods used, countervailing evidence that has clearly been disregarded and other problems that are likely to have affected the quality of the investigation and the report.

The Mueller Report: Context & Contradiction

We start with a read-through of this section of the report, highlighting missing context, contradictions and errors.

Page 36

[To minimize repetition, we'll deal with statements made in this introduction where the basis is explained or details are provided on other pages ahead.]

Page 36

While the Netyksho indictment does provide details of intrusions and infrastructure used, it's still unclear how the infrastructure has been attributed back to individuals in the GRU and no conclusive evidence has been presented to support that in the indictment or the report.

Page 37

Some of the claims relating to state boards of elections are contradicted by the Department of Homeland Security , we'll return to this where it's covered in more detail later in the report.

Page 37

Whatever the sources are the GRU did their "learning" from they seem to have been outdated as many of the phishing emails were bounced due to being for individuals that were not involved in Clinton's 2016 campaign and that no longer had mailboxes on the relevant domains (they were involved in earlier campaigns in previous years) .

Page 39

In the Netyksho indictment it is stated that the "middle-servers" are overseas:

So, what was the point in having a US-based AMS Panel if you're using overseas servers as proxies?

This seems to be a needlessly noisy setup that somewhat defeats the purpose of having a US-based server for the AMS panel.

This setup makes the assets allegedly used by GRU officers subject to US laws, subject to Internet monitoring by US intelligence agencies and prone to being physically seized.

With the GRU using middle-servers, as alleged, there would have been absolutely no reason to have the AMS panel hosted on a server within the US and every reason to have it hosted elsewhere.

It almost seems like they wanted to get caught!

Page 40

We are told the GRU obtained files from the DNC network on April 22, 2016, (this is a little different to the Netyksho indictment that states the files were archived on April 22, 2016 and extracted later):

The problem with this is that it suggests the GRU had their implant on the DNC network earlier than what the available evidence supports.

The malware samples provided by CrowdStrike show that the earliest compile date of Fancy Bear malware reportedly discovered at the DNC was April 25, 2016 .

Perhaps they didn't discover all the malware until later? (Though, with their flagship product installed across the network, one would think they'd have detected all the malware present by the time they reported on discoveries).

Regarding the stolen opposition research, we've only seen the document as an attachment to one of Podesta's emails and a deliberately tainted version of the same document released by Guccifer 2.0.

The implication that this was stolen from the DNC is questionable due to this.

Going further, the story surrounding this changed in November 2017 when the Associated Press published a story titled " How Russians hacked the Democrats' emails " in which they cite an anonymous former DNC official who asserts that Guccifer 2.0's first document (the Trump opposition report) did not originate in the DNC as initially reported.

Another interesting point relating to this is the "HRC_pass.zip" archive released by Guccifer 2.0 on June 21, 2016 ( which also provided another US central timezone indication ) contained files with last modification dates of April 26, 2016. While this fits within the above timeframe, the transfer of the files individually, the apparent transfer speeds involved and the presence of FAT-like 2-second rounding artifacts ( noted elsewhere in Guccifer 2.0's releases ) when the files came from an NTFS system (and the ZIP implementation was not the cause) does not correlate well with what the report outlines.

In spite of its name ("HRC_pass.zip") this archive appears to contain files that can be sourced to the DNC. Out of 200 files, only one showed up as an attachment (in the Podesta emails) .

Regarding the May 25 - June 1 timeframe cited, this seems to exclude the date on which approximately 70% of the DNC's emails published on WikiLeaks' website were acquired (May 23, 2016)

What makes this interesting is that this is apparently being evaluated on evidence that was very likely to have been provided by CrowdStrike:

Page 40

How did Crowdstrike's evidence not inform the FBI and Special Counsel of the real initial acquisition date of WikiLeaks' DNC emails?

Was the May 23, 2016 activity not recorded?

Going back to the Netyksho indictment , we have also been told that Yermakov was searching for Powershell commands between the May 25 - June 1st period:

However, we know 70% of the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks had already been acquired prior to that time, before Yermakov had allegedly researched how to access and manage the Exchange server.

Page 41

We can tell from the use of "appear" here that the Special Counsel does not have conclusive evidence to demonstrate this.

Page 41

While the overlap between reported phishing victims and the output of DCLeaks cannot be denied, it is still unclear how bitcoin pools or leased infrastructure have been definitively tied back to any GRU officers or the GRU itself.

This isn't to say that there isn't evidence of it (I would assume there is some evidence or intelligence that supports the premise to some degree, at the very least) but we have no idea what that could be and there is no explanation of how associations to individual GRU officers were made (perhaps to protect HUMINT but this still leaves us completely in the dark as to how attributions were made) .

We know already that things are assumed by the Special Counsel on the basis of circumstantial evidence, so there is good reason to question whether the attributions made are based on conclusive evidence.

Page 42

This is the first point at which to recall Assange's announcement on 12 June that WikiLeaks was working on a release of "emails related to Hillary Clinton" - two days before the DNC goes public about being hacked by Russians, and three days before the appearance of Guccifer 2.0.

It's also approximately one month before Mueller says Guccifer 2.0 first successfully sent anything to WikiLeaks.

Whoever was controlling the Guccifer 2.0 persona went out of their way to be perceived as Russian and made specious claims about having already sent WikiLeaks documents, even claiming that WikiLeaks would release them soon (all before Mueller records any initial contact between the parties) .

While WikiLeaks did mention this via their Twitter feed on June 16, 2016, they were clearly skeptical of his claims to be a hacker and although they cite his claim about sending material to WikiLeaks, they don't confirm it:

It also seems a little odd that the GRU would do searches for already translated phrases (using Google translate to get English translations would be more understandable) and if it's Guccifer 2.0 doing it why did he not use the VPN he used for his other activities throughout the same day?

Why does the Mueller report not report on the IP address of the Moscow-based server from which searches occurred? It wouldn't really expose sources and methods to disclose it and it's unclear how it was determined to have been used and managed by a unit of the GRU. (Citation #146 references the Netyksho indictment, however, that fails to provide evidence or explanation of this too.)

Also, Guccifer 2.0 did not attribute the hack to a Romanian hacker in his first blog post , he didn't mention nationality until a week later (after he'd already gone out of his way to leave Russian breadcrumbs behind ) .

Page 43

The version of the opposition research document Guccifer 2.0 released was built using a prepared "Russian-tainted" template document .

The template was made by taking an attachment from one of John Podesta's emails (a document originally authored by Warren Flood in 2008) , stripping out the content, adding in Russian language stylesheet entries , altering "Confidential Draft" in the background of the document to "Confidential", altering the footer and then stripping out the body content.

The body content of a Trump Opposition research document (originally authored by Lauren Dillon) that was attached to another of Podesta's emails was then copied into the template document.

The document was saved (with a Russian author name), its body content cleared and this was then re-used to produce two further "Russia-tainted" documents.

It was no accident that led to the documents being tainted in the way that they were and it looks like Guccifer 2.0's version of the Trump opposition research didn't really come from the DNC.

Page 43

The email sent to The Smoking Gun revealed that Guccifer 2.0 appeared to be operating from somewhere in the central (US) time zone . It is one of several inexplicable examples of US timezone indications from Guccifer 2.0.

Page 43

It should be noted that the data referenced above was also unrelated to the general election and didn't have any noticeable impact on it (the 2.5Gb of data Guccifer 2.0 provided to Aaron Nevins was unlikely to have hurt the Clinton campaign or affect the outcome of the general election) .

In the states that the data related to, general election results didn't flip between the time of the publication of the documents and the election:

Page 43

Interesting to note that Guccifer 2.0 lied about DCLeaks being a "sub project" of WikiLeaks.

Page 44

The only materials Mueller alleges that WikiLeaks confirmed receipt of was a "1gb or so" archive, for which, instructions to access were communicated in an attached message (none-too-discreetly titled "wk dnc link1.txt.gpg") and sent by Guccifer 2 via unencrypted email.

It is an assumption that this was an archive of DNC emails (it could have contained other files Guccifer 2.0 subsequently released elsewhere).

We don't even know for sure whether WikiLeaks released what had been sent to them by either entity.

Even if, theoretically, the archive contained the emails, it couldn't have been the whole collection because the whole collection, when compressed, exceeds 2Gb of data .

This, of course, doesn't rule out the possibility of it being a portion of the overall collection but what the persona had sent to WikiLeaks could also easily have been other material relating to the DNC that we know Guccifer 2.0 later released or shared with other parties.

Page 45

This is the second point at which to recall Assange's 12 June TV announcement of upcoming "emails related to Hillary Clinton", coming two days before Guccifer 2.0's colleagues at DCLeaks reach out to WikiLeaks via unencrypted means on 14 June 2016 to offer "sensitive information" on Clinton.

Then, seven days after Guccifer 2 had already claimed to have sent material to WikiLeaks and stated that they'd soon release it (which made it sound as though he'd had confirmation back), we see that WikiLeaks reaches out to Guccifer 2.0 and suggests he sends material to them (as though there's never been any prior contact or provision of materials previously discussed) .

Page 45

How is it "clear" that both the DNC and Podesta documents were transferred from the GRU to WikiLeaks when there is only around a gigabyte of data acknowledged as received (and we don't even know what that data is) and little is known about the rest (and the report just speculates at possibilities) ?

Page 46

We aren't provided the full dialogue between WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0. Instead we have just a few words selected from the communication that could easily be out of context. The Netyksho indictment did exactly the same thing. Neither the indictment nor the report provide the full DM conversation in context.

(It certainly wouldn't harm HUMINT resources or expose methods if this evidence was released in full context.)

Would the GRU really engage in internal communications (eg GRU Guccifer 2.0 to GRU DCLeaks) via Twitter DMs? Maybe, but it seems insanely sloppy with regards to operational security of a clandestine organization communicating between its own staff.

The statement that concludes on the following page (see below) also seems a little bizarre. Would WikiLeaks really ask Guccifer 2.0 to DM DCLeaks to pass on such a message on their behalf?

Why doesn't Mueller provide the comms evidence of WikiLeaks asking Guccifer 2.0 for assistance in contacting DCLeaks?

As written, we are expected to take the words of Guccifer 2.0 (stating that the media organisation wished to talk to DCLeaks) at face value.

The problem with this is that we are talking about a persona who lied publicly about when he first sent material to WikiLeaks ( claiming to have done so already on the day appeared ) , lied about the relationship between WikiLeaks and DCLeaks and who had gone to a great deal of trouble to leave false Russian fingerprints in his work output.

Page 47

It was actually the last-modification date, not the creation date that was recorded as 19 September, 2016.

This wasn't necessarily the creation date and is only indicative of the last recorded write/copy operation (unless last modification date is preserved when copying but there's no way to determine that based on the available evidence) .

The gap between email file timestamps and attachment timestamps may simply be explained by WikiLeaks extracting the attachments from the EML files at a later stage. With the DNC emails we observed last-modifications dates as far back as May 23, 2016 but the attachments had last-modification dates that were much later (eg. July 21, 2016).

The wording is also worth noting: "Based on information about Assange's computer and its possible operating system" [emphasis mine] does not sound like it's based on reliable and factual information, it sounds like this is based on assessment/estimation. This also seems to be relying on an assumption that the only person handling files for WikiLeaks is Assange.

How have the Special Counsel cited WikiLeaks metadata for evidence where it's suited them yet, somehow, have managed to miss the May 23, 2016 date on which the DNC emails were initially being collected?

Going further, the report, based on speculation, suggests that the GRU staged releases in July (for DNC emails) and September (for Podesta emails). However, going off the same logic as the Special Counsel, with last-modification dates indicating when the email files are "staged", the evidence would theoretically point to the DNC emails being "staged" in May 2016).

It doesn't seem so reliable when the rule is applied multilaterally.

Of course, if both assumptions about staging dates are true, then we're left wondering what Julian Assange could have been talking about on June 12, 2016 when mentioning having emails relating to Hillary Clinton.

The speculation in the final paragraph of the above section also shows us that the Special Counsel lacks certainty on sources.

Page 48

Really, this correlation of dates (March 21, 2016 and the reported phishing incident relating to March 19, 2016) is one of the best arguments for saying that emails published by WikiLeaks were acquired through phishing or hacking incidents reported.

However, this merely suggests the method of acquisition, it says nothing of how the material got to WikiLeaks. We can make assumptions, but that's all we can do because the available evidence is circumstantial rather than conclusive.

Page 48

Far from "discredit[ing] WikiLeaks' claims about the source of the material it posted", the file transfer evidence doesn't conclusively demonstrate that WikiLeaks published anything sent to it by Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks.

Although there are hints that what was sent by Guccifer 2.0 related to the DNC, we don't know if this contained DNC emails or the other DNC related content he later released and shared with others.

"The statements about Seth Rich implied falsely that he had been the source of the stolen DNC emails" is itself a false statement. The reason Assange gave for offering a reward for information leading to the conviction of Seth Rich's killers was "Our sources take risks and they become concerned when they see things occurring like that [the death of DNC worker Seth Rich]... We have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States" ( source ) .

This implies WikiLeaks is offering the reward for info about Seth Rich at the behest of its actual source/s.

Page 49

By the time Trump had made the statements cited above, it was already assumed that Hillary had been hacked by the Russians, so Trump saying he hoped the Russians would find the emails seems more likely to have been in reference to what he assumed was already in their possession.

Finding those 30,000 emails also wouldn't be achieved through hacking at that point in time as the emails had already been deleted by Hillary Clinton's IT consultants in March 2015 .

Page 50

What is being described here is, to a considerable extent, just common exploit scanning on web services, scanning that will almost certainly have come from other nodes based in other nations too .

These scans are typically done via compromised machines, often with machines that are in nations completely separate to the nationality of those running the scanning effort.

The Department of Homeland Security threw cold water on this a long time ago.

DHS would not characterize these efforts as attacks, only "simple scanning ... which occurs all the time".

Page 51

There was no alteration of ballots or results at all anywhere as of a testimony by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson on June 21 2017 nor since that time, according to Brian Krebs, to the date of a hearing on November 27, 2017 .

The remaining pages in this section of the report include a lot of redactions and mostly cover the actions of individuals in the US in relation to communications they had with or in relation to WikiLeaks. As this article is about the technical claims made in relation to hacking and so much is redacted, we'll only look at those really relevant to this.

Page 52

By the time Assange made the announcement referenced above, the Hillary Clinton emails obtained through FOIA had already been published by WikiLeaks.

Considering what WikiLeaks subsequently published, it would seem that Assange was making a reference to at least one of the upcoming leaks.

At this time, there was no record of contact between WikiLeaks and either of the parties alleged to be the GRU.

Page 58

Regarding the timing of the leaks and the Access Hollywood tape, it's important to note that journalist Stefani Maurizi, who had worked with WikiLeaks on the Podesta leaks, has stated publicly that she knew of WikiLeaks intention to publish on that date on the evening prior to it .

WikiLeaks stated the "timing conspiracy theory" was the other way round: " The [Access Hollywood] tape was moved forward to the day of our release, which WikiLeaks had been teasing " and was " well-documented ".

[The remaining pages in this section have little relevance to the technical aspects of this section of the report and/or acquisition of materials that this article is intended to cover.]

Circumstantial Evidence & Understandable Assumptions

While the above does show numerous issues with the report, it's important not to fall into the trap of outright dismissing as false anything for which evidence is lacking or assuming there is no evidence at all to support assertions.

However, without knowing what evidence exists we're left to make assumptions about whether it's conclusive or circumstantial, we don't know if the source of evidence is dependable and it's clear in the report that the Special Counsel has relied on assumptions and made numerous statements on the basis of presuppositions.

There is also a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence that, although it doesn't conclusively prove what the report tries to convince us of, it does at least raise questions about relationships between different entities, especially with regards to any overlaps in resources and infrastructure used.

For example, based on the cited evidence, it is perfectly understandable that people will assume Guccifer 2.0 provided DNC emails to WikiLeaks and will also assume that WikiLeaks published whatever it was that Guccifer 2.0 had sent them (especially with Mueller presenting that conversation in the form of a couple of words devoid of all context) .

The apparent overlap between a VPN service used by Guccifer 2.0 and by DCLeaks does suggest the two could be associated beyond Guccifer 2.0 just being a source of leaks for them.

Also, DCLeaks publishing some DNC emails that later appeared in the DNC email collection (though not necessarily from the same mailboxes) also suggests that DCLeaks and WikiLeaks could have had access to some of the same material and/or sources.

The same is true for Guccifer 2.0 releasing Podesta and DNC email attachments before WikiLeaks released both collections. Unless given good reason to consider any ulterior motive, the implied explanation, on the surface, seems to be that it was this persona that was a source for those emails. If nothing else, that's how it appears based on the little information typically made available to us by the mainstream press.

However, despite all of this, we still have not seen conclusive evidence showing that either of the entities was really controlled by the GRU and, when the countervailing evidence (which seems to have been completely ignored by the Special Counsel's investigation) is considered, there is reason to give consideration to Guccifer 2.0's efforts to not just associate himself with WikiLeaks and DCLeaks but also to associate third parties with each other through false claims.

The Mystery Of The May 23, 2016 Omission

One of the most notable omissions is the date on which emails from several mailboxes (including Luis Miranda's) were originally collected.

We know, from analysis of metadata of files hosted by WikiLeaks that this was May 23, 2016.

Not only is this prior to the May 25, 2016 - June 1, 2016 timeframe given for the DNC's exchange server being hacked, this activity is unmentioned throughout the entire report.

How has this failed to come to the surface when it should have been apparent in evidence CrowdStrike provided to the FBI and also apparent based on the WikiLeaks metadata? How is it the Special Counsel can cite some of the metadata in relation to WikiLeaks releases yet somehow manage to miss this?

Countervailing Evidence

What the Special Counsel's investigation also seems to have completely disregarded is the volume of countervailing evidence that has been discovered by several independent researchers in relation to the Guccifer 2.0 persona.

It's worth considering what evidence the Special Counsel has brought to the surface and comparing it with the evidence that has come to the surface as a result of discoveries being made by independent researchers over the past two years and the differences between the two sets of evidence (especially with regards to falsifiability and verifiability of evidence) .

Some excellent examples are covered in the following articles:

Reliability Of Attribution Methods

Skip Folden (who introduced me to VIPS members and has been a good friend ever since) recently shared with me his assessment of problems with the current attribution methods being relied on by the Special Counsel and others.

It covered several important points and was far more concise than anything I would have written, so, with his permission, I'm publishing his comments on this topic:

No basis whatsoever

APT28, aka Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Strontium, Pawn Storm, Sednit, etc., and APT29, aka Cozy Bear, Cozy Duke, Monkeys, CozyCar,The Dukes, etc., are used as 'proof' of Russia 'hacking' by Russian Intelligence agencies GRU and FSB respectively.

There is no basis whatsoever to attribute the use of known intrusion elements to Russia, not even if they were once reverse routed to Russia, which claim has never been made by NSA or any other of our IC.

On June 15, 2016 Dmitri Alperovitch himself, in an Atlantic Council article, gave only "medium-level of confidence that Fancy Bear is GRU" and "low-level of confidence that Cozy Bear is FSB." These assessments, from the main source himself, that either APT is Russian intelligence, averages 37%-38% [(50 + 25) / 2].

Exclusivity :

None of the technical indicators, e.g., intrusion tools (such as X-Agent, X-Tunnel), facilities, tactics, techniques, or procedures, etc., of the 28 and 29 APTs can be uniquely attributed to Russia, even if one or more had ever been trace routed to Russia. Once an element of a set of intrusion tools is used in the public domain it can be reverse-engineered and used by other groups which precludes the assumption of exclusivity in future use. The proof that any of these tools have never been reverse engineered and used by others is left to the student - or prosecutor.

Using targets

Also, targets have been used as basis for attributing intrusions to Russia, and that is pure nonsense. Both many state and non-state players have deep interests in the same targets and have the technical expertise to launch intrusions. In Grizzly Steppe, page 2, second paragraph, beginning with, "Both groups have historically targeted ...," is there anything in that paragraph which can be claimed as unique to Russia or which excludes all other major state players in the world or any of the non-state organizations? No.

Key Logger Consideration

On the subject of naming specific GRU officers initiating specific actions on GRU Russian facilities on certain dates / times, other than via implanted ID chips under the finger tips of these named GRU officers, the logical assumption would be by installed key logger capabilities, physical or malware, on one or more GRU Russian computers.

The GRU is a highly advanced Russian intelligence unit. It would be very surprising were the GRU open to any method used to install key logger capabilities. It would be even more surprising, if not beyond comprehension that the GRU did not scan all systems upon start-up and in real time, including key logger protection and anomalies of performance degradation and data transmissions.

Foreign intelligence source

Other option would be via a foreign intelligence unit source with local GRU access. Any such would be quite anti-Russian and be another nail in the coffin of any chain of evidence / custody validity at Russian site.

Chain Of Custody - Without An Anchor There Is No Chain

Another big problem with the whole RussiaGate investigation is the reliance on a private firm, hired by the DNC, to be the source of evidence.

As I don't have a good understanding of US law and processes surrounding evidence collection and handling, I will, again, defer to something that my aforementioned contact shared:

Chain of Evidence / Custody at US end, i.e., DNC and related computing facilities

Summary: There is no US end Chain of Evidence / Custody

The anchor of any chain of evidence custody is the on-site crime scene investigation of a jurisdictional law enforcement agency and neutral jurisdictional forensic team which investigate, discover, identify where possible, log, mark, package, seal, or takes images there of, of all identified elements of potential evidence as discovered at the scene of a crime by the authorized teams. The chain of this anchor is then the careful, documented movement of each element of captured evidence from crime scene to court.

In the case of the alleged series of intrusions into the DNC computing facilities, there is no anchor to any chain of evidence / custody.

There has been no claim that any jurisdictional law enforcement agency was allowed access to the DNC computing facilities. The FBI was denied access to DNC facilities, thereby supposedly denying the FBI the ability to conduct any on-site investigation of the alleged crime scene for discovery or collection of evidence.

Nor did the FBI exercise its authority to investigate the crime scene of a purported federal crime. Since when does the FBI need permission to investigate an alleged crime site where it is claimed a foreign government's intelligence attacked political files in order to interfere in a US presidential election?

Instead, the FBI accepted images of purported crime scene evidence from a contractor hired by and, therefore, working for the DNC. On July 05, 2017 a Crowdstrike statement said that they had provided "... forensic images of the DNC system to the FBI." It was not stated when these images were provided. Crowdstrike was working for the DNC as a contractor at the time.

This scenario is analogous to an employee of a crime scene owner telling law enforcement, "Trust me; I have examined the crime scene for you and here's what I've found. It's not necessary for you to see the crime scene."

Crowdstrike cannot be accepted as a neutral forensic organization. It was working for and being paid by the DNC. It is neither a law enforcement agency nor a federal forensic organization. Further Crowdstrike has serious conflicts of interest when it comes to any investigation of Russia.

Crowdstrike co-founder and Director of Technology, Dimitri Alperovitch, is a Nonresident Senior Fellow, Cyber Statecraft Initiative, of the Atlantic Council. Alperovitch has made it clear of his dislike of the government of Putin, and The Atlantic Council can not be considered neutral to Russia, receiving funding from many very staunch and outspoken enemies of Russia.

Summary: Not only was no federal jurisdictional law enforcement agency allowed to investigate the alleged crime scene, but the organization which allegedly collected and provided the 'evidence' was not neutral by being employed by the owner of the alleged crime scene, but seriously compromised by strong anti-Russian links.

This issue of this substitute for an anchor then leads us to our next problem: an apparent conflict of interest from the investigation's outset.

Conflict of Interest Inherent In The Investigation?

Would it seem like a conflict of interest if the person in charge of an investigation were friends with a witness and source of critical evidence relied upon by that investigation?

This is effectively the situation we have with the Special Counsel investigation because Robert Mueller and CrowdStrike's CSO (and President) Shawn Henry are former colleagues and friends.

Their history at the FBI is well known and their continued association after Henry had left the agency ( having dinner together at an executive retreat ) has been noted.

If nothing else, it's understandable for people to feel that the Special Counsel would have struggled to be truly impartial due to such relationships.

Conclusion

The Special Counsel seems to have been impervious to critical pieces of countervailing evidence (some of which demonstrates that Guccifer 2.0 deliberately manufactured Russian breadcrumbs) and they have failed to accurately account for the acquisition of WikiLeaks' DNC emails (missing the date on which approximately 70% of them were collected) , which is, in itself, a stunning failure for a supposedly thorough investigation costing US taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

There should have been a proper, thorough, independent and impartial investigation into the Guccifer 2.0 persona. The Special Counsel certainly hasn't done that job and, in retrospect, looks to have been ill-equipped (and perhaps somewhat reluctant) to do so from the outset.

This article may be republished/reproduced in part or in full on condition that content above is unaltered and that the author is credited (or, alternatively, that a link to the full article is included).

[May 10, 2019] Obama administration raced to obtain FICA warrant on Carter Page before Rogers investigation closes on them and that was definitely an obstruction of justice and interference with the ongoing investigation

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the Office of the Inspector General and associated FISA abuse to the FISA Court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702 compliance review. ..."
"... The following day, on Sept. 27, 2016, Carlin announced his resignation, effective Oct. 15, 2016. ..."
"... After receiving a briefing by the NSA compliance officer on Oct. 20, 2016, detailing numerous "about query" violations from the 702 NSA compliance audit, Rogers shut down all "about query" activity the next day and reported his findings to the DOJ. "About queries" are searches based on communications containing a reference "about" a surveillance target but that are not "to" or "from" the target. ..."
"... On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally informed the FISA Court of his findings. On Oct. 26, 2016, Rogers appeared formally before the FISA Court and presented the written findings of his audit. ..."
"... Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications in order to avoid raising suspicions at the FISA Court ahead of receiving the Page FISA warrant. ..."
"... The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page. ..."
"... While all this was transpiring, DNI James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter submitted a recommendation that Rogers be removed from his post as NSA director. ..."
May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Originally from: Spygate The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] by Jeff Carlson ( October 12, 2018 Updated: May 3, 2019 )

FISA Abuse

Admiral Mike Rogers, while director of the NSA, was personally responsible for uncovering an unprecedented level of FISA abuse that would later be documented in a 99-page unsealed FISA court ruling . As the FISA court noted in the April 26, 2017, ruling, the abuses had been occurring since at least November 2015:

"The FBI had disclosed raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information, to private contractors.

"Private contractors had access to raw FISA information on FBI storage systems.

"Contractors had access to raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI's requests."

The FISA Court report is particularly focused on the FBI:

"The Court is concerned about the FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported."

The FISA Court disclosed that illegal NSA database searches were endemic. Private contractors, employed by the FBI, were given full access to the NSA database. Once in the contractors' possession, the data couldn't be traced.

In April 2016, after Rogers became aware of improper contractor access to raw FISA data on March 9, 2016, he directed the NSA's Office of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702."

On April 18, 2016, Rogers shut down all outside contractor access to raw FISA information -- specifically outside contractors working for the FBI.

DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the Office of the Inspector General and associated FISA abuse to the FISA Court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702 compliance review.

The following day, on Sept. 27, 2016, Carlin announced his resignation, effective Oct. 15, 2016.

After receiving a briefing by the NSA compliance officer on Oct. 20, 2016, detailing numerous "about query" violations from the 702 NSA compliance audit, Rogers shut down all "about query" activity the next day and reported his findings to the DOJ. "About queries" are searches based on communications containing a reference "about" a surveillance target but that are not "to" or "from" the target.

On Oct. 21, 2016, the DOJ and the FBI sought and received a Title I FISA probable-cause order authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISA Court.

At this point, the FISA Court was still unaware of the Section 702 violations.

On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally informed the FISA Court of his findings. On Oct. 26, 2016, Rogers appeared formally before the FISA Court and presented the written findings of his audit.

The FISA Court had been unaware of the query violations until they were presented to the court by Rogers.

Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications in order to avoid raising suspicions at the FISA Court ahead of receiving the Page FISA warrant.

The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

While all this was transpiring, DNI James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter submitted a recommendation that Rogers be removed from his post as NSA director.

The move to fire Rogers, which ultimately failed, originated sometime in mid-October 2016 -- exactly when Rogers was preparing to present his findings to the FISA Court.

Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.

[May 10, 2019] What was the meaning of the term "insurance policy" in Stzok messages to Lisa Page

Highly recommended!
The insurance policy was the false flag operation directed at establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. The key part was the appointment of Special Prosecutor in which McCabe played an important if not the decisive role.
Notable quotes:
"... The insurance policy was the actual process of establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. It encompassed actions undertaken in late 2016 and early 2017, including the leaking of the Steele dossier and James Clapper's leaks of James Comey's briefing to President Trump. The intent behind these actions was simple. The legitimization of the investigation into the Trump campaign. ..."
"... The strategy involved the recusal of Trump officials with the intent that Andrew McCabe would end up running the investigation. ..."
May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Originally from: Spygate The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] by Jeff Carlson ( October 12, 2018 Updated: May 3, 2019 )

The Insurance Policy

Ever since the release of FBI text messages revealing the existence of an "insurance policy," the term has been the subject of wide speculation.

Some observers have suggested that the insurance policy was the FISA spy warrant used to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and, by extension, other members of the Trump campaign. This interpretation is too narrow and fails to capture the underlying meaning of the text.

The insurance policy was the actual process of establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. It encompassed actions undertaken in late 2016 and early 2017, including the leaking of the Steele dossier and James Clapper's leaks of James Comey's briefing to President Trump. The intent behind these actions was simple. The legitimization of the investigation into the Trump campaign.

The strategy involved the recusal of Trump officials with the intent that Andrew McCabe would end up running the investigation.

The Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the foundation for the Russia narrative.

The intelligence community, led by CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper, used the dossier as a launching pad for creating their Intelligence Community assessment.

This report, which was presented to Obama in December 2016, despite NSA Director Mike Rogers having only moderate confidence in its assessment, became one of the core pieces of the narrative that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections.

Through intelligence community leaks, and in collusion with willing media outlets, the narrative that Russia helped Trump win the elections was aggressively pushed throughout 2017.

Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.

[May 10, 2019] The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... On July 28, 2017, McCabe lied to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while under oath regarding authorization of the leaking to The Wall Street Journal. At this point, Horowitz knew McCabe was lying, but did not yet know of the May 9 INSD interview with McCabe. ..."
May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Originally from: Spygate The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] by Jeff Carlson ( October 12, 2018 Updated: May 3, 2019 )

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe held a pivotal role in what has become known as "Spygate." He directed the activities of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and was involved in all aspects of the Russia investigation. He was also mentioned in the infamous "insurance policy" text message.

McCabe was a major component of the insurance policy.

On April 26, 2017, Rosenstein found himself appointed as the new deputy attorney general. He was placed into a somewhat chaotic situation, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recluses himself from the ongoing Russia investigation a little less than two months earlier, on March 2, 2017. This effectively meant that no one in the Trump administration had any oversight of the ongoing investigation being conducted by the FBI and the DOJ.

Additionally, the leadership of then-FBI Director James Comey was coming under increased scrutiny as the result of actions taken leading up to and following the election, particularly Comey's handling of the Clinton email investigation.

On May 9, 2017, Rosenstein wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be fired. The subject of the memo was "Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI." Comey was fired that day.

McCabe was now the acting director of the FBI and was immediately under consideration for the permanent position.

On the same day Comey was fired, McCabe would lie during an interview with agents from the FBI's Inspection Division (INSD) regarding apparent leaks that were used in an Oct. 30, 2016, Wall Street Journal article, "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe" by Devlin Barrett. This would later be disclosed in the inspector general report, "A Report of Investigation of Certain Allegations Relating to Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe."

At the time, nobody, including the INSD agents, knew that McCabe had lied, nor were the darker aspects of McCabe's role in Spygate fully known.

In late April or early May 2016, McCabe opened a federal criminal investigation on Sessions, regarding potential lack of candor before Congress in relation to Sessions's contacts with Russians. Sessions was unaware of the investigation.

Sessions would later be cleared of any wrongdoing by special counsel Robert Mueller.

On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein reportedly suggested to McCabe that he secretly record President Trump. This remark was reported in a New York Times article that was sourced from memos from the now-fired McCabe, along with testimony taken from former FBI general counsel James Baker, who relayed a conversation he had with McCabe about the occurrence. Rosenstein issued a statement denying the accusations.

The alleged comments by Rosenstein occurred at a meeting where McCabe was "pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation into the president."

An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post, framed the conversation somewhat differently, noting Rosenstein responded sarcastically to McCabe, saying, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"

Later, on the same day that Rosenstein had his meetings with McCabe, President Trump met with Mueller, reportedly as an interview for the FBI director job.

On May 17, 2017, the day after President Trump's meeting with Mueller -- and the day after Rosenstein's encounters with McCabe -- Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel.

The May 17 appointment of Mueller in effect shifted control of the Russia investigation from the FBI and McCabe to Mueller. Rosenstein would retain ultimate authority for the probe and any expansion of Mueller's investigation required authorization from Rosenstein.

Interestingly, without Comey's memo leaks, a special counsel might not have been appointed -- the FBI, and possibly McCabe, would have remained in charge of the Russia investigation. McCabe was probably not going to become the permanent FBI director, but he was reportedly under consideration. Regardless, without Comey's leak, McCabe would have retained direct involvement and the FBI would have retained control.

On July 28, 2017, McCabe lied to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while under oath regarding authorization of the leaking to The Wall Street Journal. At this point, Horowitz knew McCabe was lying, but did not yet know of the May 9 INSD interview with McCabe.

On Aug. 2, 2017, Rosenstein secretly issued Mueller a revised memo on "the scope of investigation and definition of authority" that remains heavily redacted. The full purpose of this memo remains unknown. On this same day, Christopher Wray was named as the new FBI director.

Two days later, on Aug. 4, 2017, Sessions announced that the FBI had created a new leaks investigation unit. Rosenstein and Wray were tasked with overseeing all leak investigations.

That Aug. 2 memo from Rosenstein to Mueller may have been specifically designed to remove any residual FBI influence -- specifically that of McCabe -- from the Russia investigation. The appointment of Wray as FBI director helped cement this. McCabe was finally completely neutralized.

On March 16, 2018, McCabe was fired for lying under oath at least three different times and is currently the subject of a grand jury investigation.

[May 10, 2019] Mueller Report - Expensive Estimations And Elusive Evidence by Adam Carter

Highly recommended!
Looks more and more like Crowdstrike conducted false flag operation to implicate Russians, not a real investigation.
I always assumed that #Guccifer2 was either a Crowdstryke construction at DNC request (that's probably why it was so badly, incompetently done) or a NSA construction (then, we somehow need to explain, why it was so badly done?). In both cases the goal was to implicate Russia in a DNC 'hack' ...
Craig Murray has stated he received the DNC files in Wash DC from a leaker. Mueller failed to interview him, which suggest the Mueller and his team were the part of cover-up, not the part of investigation.
Notable quotes:
"... We are told the GRU obtained files from the DNC network on April 22, 2016, (this is a little different to the Netyksho indictment that states the files were archived on April 22, 2016 and extracted later): ..."
"... The malware samples provided by CrowdStrike show that the earliest compile date of Fancy Bear malware reportedly discovered at the DNC was April 25, 2016 . ..."
"... Whoever was controlling the Guccifer 2.0 persona went out of their way to be perceived as Russian and made specious claims about having already sent WikiLeaks documents, even claiming that WikiLeaks would release them soon (all before Mueller records any initial contact between the parties) . ..."
"... The Special Counsel seems to have been impervious to critical pieces of countervailing evidence (some of which demonstrates that Guccifer 2.0 deliberately manufactured Russian breadcrumbs) and they have failed to accurately account for the acquisition of WikiLeaks' DNC emails (missing the date on which approximately 70% of them were collected) , which is, in itself, a stunning failure for a supposedly thorough investigation costing US taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. ..."
"... There should have been a proper, thorough, independent and impartial investigation into the Guccifer 2.0 persona. The Special Counsel certainly hasn't done that job and, in retrospect, looks to have been ill-equipped (and perhaps somewhat reluctant) to do so from the outset. ..."
May 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of Robert Mueller's report on "RussiaGate" related activities was released to the public.

This article focuses on Volume I Part III titled "Russian Hacking & Dumping Operations" and provides details of the errors made, critical omissions, lack of conclusive evidence and reliance on assumptions and speculation.

We will also look at problems relating to attribution methods used, countervailing evidence that has clearly been disregarded and other problems that are likely to have affected the quality of the investigation and the report.

The Mueller Report: Context & Contradiction

We start with a read-through of this section of the report, highlighting missing context, contradictions and errors.

Page 36

[To minimize repetition, we'll deal with statements made in this introduction where the basis is explained or details are provided on other pages ahead.]

Page 36

While the Netyksho indictment does provide details of intrusions and infrastructure used, it's still unclear how the infrastructure has been attributed back to individuals in the GRU and no conclusive evidence has been presented to support that in the indictment or the report.

Page 37

Some of the claims relating to state boards of elections are contradicted by the Department of Homeland Security , we'll return to this where it's covered in more detail later in the report.

Page 37

Whatever the sources are the GRU did their "learning" from they seem to have been outdated as many of the phishing emails were bounced due to being for individuals that were not involved in Clinton's 2016 campaign and that no longer had mailboxes on the relevant domains (they were involved in earlier campaigns in previous years) .

Page 39

In the Netyksho indictment it is stated that the "middle-servers" are overseas:

So, what was the point in having a US-based AMS Panel if you're using overseas servers as proxies?

This seems to be a needlessly noisy setup that somewhat defeats the purpose of having a US-based server for the AMS panel.

This setup makes the assets allegedly used by GRU officers subject to US laws, subject to Internet monitoring by US intelligence agencies and prone to being physically seized.

With the GRU using middle-servers, as alleged, there would have been absolutely no reason to have the AMS panel hosted on a server within the US and every reason to have it hosted elsewhere.

It almost seems like they wanted to get caught!

Page 40

We are told the GRU obtained files from the DNC network on April 22, 2016, (this is a little different to the Netyksho indictment that states the files were archived on April 22, 2016 and extracted later):

The problem with this is that it suggests the GRU had their implant on the DNC network earlier than what the available evidence supports.

The malware samples provided by CrowdStrike show that the earliest compile date of Fancy Bear malware reportedly discovered at the DNC was April 25, 2016 .

Perhaps they didn't discover all the malware until later? (Though, with their flagship product installed across the network, one would think they'd have detected all the malware present by the time they reported on discoveries).

Regarding the stolen opposition research, we've only seen the document as an attachment to one of Podesta's emails and a deliberately tainted version of the same document released by Guccifer 2.0.

The implication that this was stolen from the DNC is questionable due to this.

Going further, the story surrounding this changed in November 2017 when the Associated Press published a story titled " How Russians hacked the Democrats' emails " in which they cite an anonymous former DNC official who asserts that Guccifer 2.0's first document (the Trump opposition report) did not originate in the DNC as initially reported.

Another interesting point relating to this is the "HRC_pass.zip" archive released by Guccifer 2.0 on June 21, 2016 ( which also provided another US central timezone indication ) contained files with last modification dates of April 26, 2016. While this fits within the above timeframe, the transfer of the files individually, the apparent transfer speeds involved and the presence of FAT-like 2-second rounding artifacts ( noted elsewhere in Guccifer 2.0's releases ) when the files came from an NTFS system (and the ZIP implementation was not the cause) does not correlate well with what the report outlines.

In spite of its name ("HRC_pass.zip") this archive appears to contain files that can be sourced to the DNC. Out of 200 files, only one showed up as an attachment (in the Podesta emails) .

Regarding the May 25 - June 1 timeframe cited, this seems to exclude the date on which approximately 70% of the DNC's emails published on WikiLeaks' website were acquired (May 23, 2016)

What makes this interesting is that this is apparently being evaluated on evidence that was very likely to have been provided by CrowdStrike:

Page 40

How did Crowdstrike's evidence not inform the FBI and Special Counsel of the real initial acquisition date of WikiLeaks' DNC emails?

Was the May 23, 2016 activity not recorded?

Going back to the Netyksho indictment , we have also been told that Yermakov was searching for Powershell commands between the May 25 - June 1st period:

However, we know 70% of the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks had already been acquired prior to that time, before Yermakov had allegedly researched how to access and manage the Exchange server.

Page 41

We can tell from the use of "appear" here that the Special Counsel does not have conclusive evidence to demonstrate this.

Page 41

While the overlap between reported phishing victims and the output of DCLeaks cannot be denied, it is still unclear how bitcoin pools or leased infrastructure have been definitively tied back to any GRU officers or the GRU itself.

This isn't to say that there isn't evidence of it (I would assume there is some evidence or intelligence that supports the premise to some degree, at the very least) but we have no idea what that could be and there is no explanation of how associations to individual GRU officers were made (perhaps to protect HUMINT but this still leaves us completely in the dark as to how attributions were made) .

We know already that things are assumed by the Special Counsel on the basis of circumstantial evidence, so there is good reason to question whether the attributions made are based on conclusive evidence.

Page 42

This is the first point at which to recall Assange's announcement on 12 June that WikiLeaks was working on a release of "emails related to Hillary Clinton" - two days before the DNC goes public about being hacked by Russians, and three days before the appearance of Guccifer 2.0.

It's also approximately one month before Mueller says Guccifer 2.0 first successfully sent anything to WikiLeaks.

Whoever was controlling the Guccifer 2.0 persona went out of their way to be perceived as Russian and made specious claims about having already sent WikiLeaks documents, even claiming that WikiLeaks would release them soon (all before Mueller records any initial contact between the parties) .

While WikiLeaks did mention this via their Twitter feed on June 16, 2016, they were clearly skeptical of his claims to be a hacker and although they cite his claim about sending material to WikiLeaks, they don't confirm it:

It also seems a little odd that the GRU would do searches for already translated phrases (using Google translate to get English translations would be more understandable) and if it's Guccifer 2.0 doing it why did he not use the VPN he used for his other activities throughout the same day?

Why does the Mueller report not report on the IP address of the Moscow-based server from which searches occurred? It wouldn't really expose sources and methods to disclose it and it's unclear how it was determined to have been used and managed by a unit of the GRU. (Citation #146 references the Netyksho indictment, however, that fails to provide evidence or explanation of this too.)

Also, Guccifer 2.0 did not attribute the hack to a Romanian hacker in his first blog post , he didn't mention nationality until a week later (after he'd already gone out of his way to leave Russian breadcrumbs behind ) .

Page 43

The version of the opposition research document Guccifer 2.0 released was built using a prepared "Russian-tainted" template document .

The template was made by taking an attachment from one of John Podesta's emails (a document originally authored by Warren Flood in 2008) , stripping out the content, adding in Russian language stylesheet entries , altering "Confidential Draft" in the background of the document to "Confidential", altering the footer and then stripping out the body content.

The body content of a Trump Opposition research document (originally authored by Lauren Dillon) that was attached to another of Podesta's emails was then copied into the template document.

The document was saved (with a Russian author name), its body content cleared and this was then re-used to produce two further "Russia-tainted" documents.

It was no accident that led to the documents being tainted in the way that they were and it looks like Guccifer 2.0's version of the Trump opposition research didn't really come from the DNC.

Page 43

The email sent to The Smoking Gun revealed that Guccifer 2.0 appeared to be operating from somewhere in the central (US) time zone . It is one of several inexplicable examples of US timezone indications from Guccifer 2.0.

Page 43

It should be noted that the data referenced above was also unrelated to the general election and didn't have any noticeable impact on it (the 2.5Gb of data Guccifer 2.0 provided to Aaron Nevins was unlikely to have hurt the Clinton campaign or affect the outcome of the general election) .

In the states that the data related to, general election results didn't flip between the time of the publication of the documents and the election:

Page 43

Interesting to note that Guccifer 2.0 lied about DCLeaks being a "sub project" of WikiLeaks.

Page 44

The only materials Mueller alleges that WikiLeaks confirmed receipt of was a "1gb or so" archive, for which, instructions to access were communicated in an attached message (none-too-discreetly titled "wk dnc link1.txt.gpg") and sent by Guccifer 2 via unencrypted email.

It is an assumption that this was an archive of DNC emails (it could have contained other files Guccifer 2.0 subsequently released elsewhere).

We don't even know for sure whether WikiLeaks released what had been sent to them by either entity.

Even if, theoretically, the archive contained the emails, it couldn't have been the whole collection because the whole collection, when compressed, exceeds 2Gb of data .

This, of course, doesn't rule out the possibility of it being a portion of the overall collection but what the persona had sent to WikiLeaks could also easily have been other material relating to the DNC that we know Guccifer 2.0 later released or shared with other parties.

Page 45

This is the second point at which to recall Assange's 12 June TV announcement of upcoming "emails related to Hillary Clinton", coming two days before Guccifer 2.0's colleagues at DCLeaks reach out to WikiLeaks via unencrypted means on 14 June 2016 to offer "sensitive information" on Clinton.

Then, seven days after Guccifer 2 had already claimed to have sent material to WikiLeaks and stated that they'd soon release it (which made it sound as though he'd had confirmation back), we see that WikiLeaks reaches out to Guccifer 2.0 and suggests he sends material to them (as though there's never been any prior contact or provision of materials previously discussed) .

Page 45

How is it "clear" that both the DNC and Podesta documents were transferred from the GRU to WikiLeaks when there is only around a gigabyte of data acknowledged as received (and we don't even know what that data is) and little is known about the rest (and the report just speculates at possibilities) ?

Page 46

We aren't provided the full dialogue between WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0. Instead we have just a few words selected from the communication that could easily be out of context. The Netyksho indictment did exactly the same thing. Neither the indictment nor the report provide the full DM conversation in context.

(It certainly wouldn't harm HUMINT resources or expose methods if this evidence was released in full context.)

Would the GRU really engage in internal communications (eg GRU Guccifer 2.0 to GRU DCLeaks) via Twitter DMs? Maybe, but it seems insanely sloppy with regards to operational security of a clandestine organization communicating between its own staff.

The statement that concludes on the following page (see below) also seems a little bizarre. Would WikiLeaks really ask Guccifer 2.0 to DM DCLeaks to pass on such a message on their behalf?

Why doesn't Mueller provide the comms evidence of WikiLeaks asking Guccifer 2.0 for assistance in contacting DCLeaks?

As written, we are expected to take the words of Guccifer 2.0 (stating that the media organisation wished to talk to DCLeaks) at face value.

The problem with this is that we are talking about a persona who lied publicly about when he first sent material to WikiLeaks ( claiming to have done so already on the day appeared ) , lied about the relationship between WikiLeaks and DCLeaks and who had gone to a great deal of trouble to leave false Russian fingerprints in his work output.

Page 47

It was actually the last-modification date, not the creation date that was recorded as 19 September, 2016.

This wasn't necessarily the creation date and is only indicative of the last recorded write/copy operation (unless last modification date is preserved when copying but there's no way to determine that based on the available evidence) .

The gap between email file timestamps and attachment timestamps may simply be explained by WikiLeaks extracting the attachments from the EML files at a later stage. With the DNC emails we observed last-modifications dates as far back as May 23, 2016 but the attachments had last-modification dates that were much later (eg. July 21, 2016).

The wording is also worth noting: "Based on information about Assange's computer and its possible operating system" [emphasis mine] does not sound like it's based on reliable and factual information, it sounds like this is based on assessment/estimation. This also seems to be relying on an assumption that the only person handling files for WikiLeaks is Assange.

How have the Special Counsel cited WikiLeaks metadata for evidence where it's suited them yet, somehow, have managed to miss the May 23, 2016 date on which the DNC emails were initially being collected?

Going further, the report, based on speculation, suggests that the GRU staged releases in July (for DNC emails) and September (for Podesta emails). However, going off the same logic as the Special Counsel, with last-modification dates indicating when the email files are "staged", the evidence would theoretically point to the DNC emails being "staged" in May 2016).

It doesn't seem so reliable when the rule is applied multilaterally.

Of course, if both assumptions about staging dates are true, then we're left wondering what Julian Assange could have been talking about on June 12, 2016 when mentioning having emails relating to Hillary Clinton.

The speculation in the final paragraph of the above section also shows us that the Special Counsel lacks certainty on sources.

Page 48

Really, this correlation of dates (March 21, 2016 and the reported phishing incident relating to March 19, 2016) is one of the best arguments for saying that emails published by WikiLeaks were acquired through phishing or hacking incidents reported.

However, this merely suggests the method of acquisition, it says nothing of how the material got to WikiLeaks. We can make assumptions, but that's all we can do because the available evidence is circumstantial rather than conclusive.

Page 48

Far from "discredit[ing] WikiLeaks' claims about the source of the material it posted", the file transfer evidence doesn't conclusively demonstrate that WikiLeaks published anything sent to it by Guccifer 2.0 or DCLeaks.

Although there are hints that what was sent by Guccifer 2.0 related to the DNC, we don't know if this contained DNC emails or the other DNC related content he later released and shared with others.

"The statements about Seth Rich implied falsely that he had been the source of the stolen DNC emails" is itself a false statement. The reason Assange gave for offering a reward for information leading to the conviction of Seth Rich's killers was "Our sources take risks and they become concerned when they see things occurring like that [the death of DNC worker Seth Rich]... We have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States" ( source ) .

This implies WikiLeaks is offering the reward for info about Seth Rich at the behest of its actual source/s.

Page 49

By the time Trump had made the statements cited above, it was already assumed that Hillary had been hacked by the Russians, so Trump saying he hoped the Russians would find the emails seems more likely to have been in reference to what he assumed was already in their possession.

Finding those 30,000 emails also wouldn't be achieved through hacking at that point in time as the emails had already been deleted by Hillary Clinton's IT consultants in March 2015 .

Page 50

What is being described here is, to a considerable extent, just common exploit scanning on web services, scanning that will almost certainly have come from other nodes based in other nations too .

These scans are typically done via compromised machines, often with machines that are in nations completely separate to the nationality of those running the scanning effort.

The Department of Homeland Security threw cold water on this a long time ago.

DHS would not characterize these efforts as attacks, only "simple scanning ... which occurs all the time".

Page 51

There was no alteration of ballots or results at all anywhere as of a testimony by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson on June 21 2017 nor since that time, according to Brian Krebs, to the date of a hearing on November 27, 2017 .

The remaining pages in this section of the report include a lot of redactions and mostly cover the actions of individuals in the US in relation to communications they had with or in relation to WikiLeaks. As this article is about the technical claims made in relation to hacking and so much is redacted, we'll only look at those really relevant to this.

Page 52

By the time Assange made the announcement referenced above, the Hillary Clinton emails obtained through FOIA had already been published by WikiLeaks.

Considering what WikiLeaks subsequently published, it would seem that Assange was making a reference to at least one of the upcoming leaks.

At this time, there was no record of contact between WikiLeaks and either of the parties alleged to be the GRU.

Page 58

Regarding the timing of the leaks and the Access Hollywood tape, it's important to note that journalist Stefani Maurizi, who had worked with WikiLeaks on the Podesta leaks, has stated publicly that she knew of WikiLeaks intention to publish on that date on the evening prior to it .

WikiLeaks stated the "timing conspiracy theory" was the other way round: " The [Access Hollywood] tape was moved forward to the day of our release, which WikiLeaks had been teasing " and was " well-documented ".

[The remaining pages in this section have little relevance to the technical aspects of this section of the report and/or acquisition of materials that this article is intended to cover.]

Circumstantial Evidence & Understandable Assumptions

While the above does show numerous issues with the report, it's important not to fall into the trap of outright dismissing as false anything for which evidence is lacking or assuming there is no evidence at all to support assertions.

However, without knowing what evidence exists we're left to make assumptions about whether it's conclusive or circumstantial, we don't know if the source of evidence is dependable and it's clear in the report that the Special Counsel has relied on assumptions and made numerous statements on the basis of presuppositions.

There is also a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence that, although it doesn't conclusively prove what the report tries to convince us of, it does at least raise questions about relationships between different entities, especially with regards to any overlaps in resources and infrastructure used.

For example, based on the cited evidence, it is perfectly understandable that people will assume Guccifer 2.0 provided DNC emails to WikiLeaks and will also assume that WikiLeaks published whatever it was that Guccifer 2.0 had sent them (especially with Mueller presenting that conversation in the form of a couple of words devoid of all context) .

The apparent overlap between a VPN service used by Guccifer 2.0 and by DCLeaks does suggest the two could be associated beyond Guccifer 2.0 just being a source of leaks for them.

Also, DCLeaks publishing some DNC emails that later appeared in the DNC email collection (though not necessarily from the same mailboxes) also suggests that DCLeaks and WikiLeaks could have had access to some of the same material and/or sources.

The same is true for Guccifer 2.0 releasing Podesta and DNC email attachments before WikiLeaks released both collections. Unless given good reason to consider any ulterior motive, the implied explanation, on the surface, seems to be that it was this persona that was a source for those emails. If nothing else, that's how it appears based on the little information typically made available to us by the mainstream press.

However, despite all of this, we still have not seen conclusive evidence showing that either of the entities was really controlled by the GRU and, when the countervailing evidence (which seems to have been completely ignored by the Special Counsel's investigation) is considered, there is reason to give consideration to Guccifer 2.0's efforts to not just associate himself with WikiLeaks and DCLeaks but also to associate third parties with each other through false claims.

The Mystery Of The May 23, 2016 Omission

One of the most notable omissions is the date on which emails from several mailboxes (including Luis Miranda's) were originally collected.

We know, from analysis of metadata of files hosted by WikiLeaks that this was May 23, 2016.

Not only is this prior to the May 25, 2016 - June 1, 2016 timeframe given for the DNC's exchange server being hacked, this activity is unmentioned throughout the entire report.

How has this failed to come to the surface when it should have been apparent in evidence CrowdStrike provided to the FBI and also apparent based on the WikiLeaks metadata? How is it the Special Counsel can cite some of the metadata in relation to WikiLeaks releases yet somehow manage to miss this?

Countervailing Evidence

What the Special Counsel's investigation also seems to have completely disregarded is the volume of countervailing evidence that has been discovered by several independent researchers in relation to the Guccifer 2.0 persona.

It's worth considering what evidence the Special Counsel has brought to the surface and comparing it with the evidence that has come to the surface as a result of discoveries being made by independent researchers over the past two years and the differences between the two sets of evidence (especially with regards to falsifiability and verifiability of evidence) .

Some excellent examples are covered in the following articles:

Reliability Of Attribution Methods

Skip Folden (who introduced me to VIPS members and has been a good friend ever since) recently shared with me his assessment of problems with the current attribution methods being relied on by the Special Counsel and others.

It covered several important points and was far more concise than anything I would have written, so, with his permission, I'm publishing his comments on this topic:

No basis whatsoever

APT28, aka Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Strontium, Pawn Storm, Sednit, etc., and APT29, aka Cozy Bear, Cozy Duke, Monkeys, CozyCar,The Dukes, etc., are used as 'proof' of Russia 'hacking' by Russian Intelligence agencies GRU and FSB respectively.

There is no basis whatsoever to attribute the use of known intrusion elements to Russia, not even if they were once reverse routed to Russia, which claim has never been made by NSA or any other of our IC.

On June 15, 2016 Dmitri Alperovitch himself, in an Atlantic Council article, gave only "medium-level of confidence that Fancy Bear is GRU" and "low-level of confidence that Cozy Bear is FSB." These assessments, from the main source himself, that either APT is Russian intelligence, averages 37%-38% [(50 + 25) / 2].

Exclusivity :

None of the technical indicators, e.g., intrusion tools (such as X-Agent, X-Tunnel), facilities, tactics, techniques, or procedures, etc., of the 28 and 29 APTs can be uniquely attributed to Russia, even if one or more had ever been trace routed to Russia. Once an element of a set of intrusion tools is used in the public domain it can be reverse-engineered and used by other groups which precludes the assumption of exclusivity in future use. The proof that any of these tools have never been reverse engineered and used by others is left to the student - or prosecutor.

Using targets

Also, targets have been used as basis for attributing intrusions to Russia, and that is pure nonsense. Both many state and non-state players have deep interests in the same targets and have the technical expertise to launch intrusions. In Grizzly Steppe, page 2, second paragraph, beginning with, "Both groups have historically targeted ...," is there anything in that paragraph which can be claimed as unique to Russia or which excludes all other major state players in the world or any of the non-state organizations? No.

Key Logger Consideration

On the subject of naming specific GRU officers initiating specific actions on GRU Russian facilities on certain dates / times, other than via implanted ID chips under the finger tips of these named GRU officers, the logical assumption would be by installed key logger capabilities, physical or malware, on one or more GRU Russian computers.

The GRU is a highly advanced Russian intelligence unit. It would be very surprising were the GRU open to any method used to install key logger capabilities. It would be even more surprising, if not beyond comprehension that the GRU did not scan all systems upon start-up and in real time, including key logger protection and anomalies of performance degradation and data transmissions.

Foreign intelligence source

Other option would be via a foreign intelligence unit source with local GRU access. Any such would be quite anti-Russian and be another nail in the coffin of any chain of evidence / custody validity at Russian site.

Chain Of Custody - Without An Anchor There Is No Chain

Another big problem with the whole RussiaGate investigation is the reliance on a private firm, hired by the DNC, to be the source of evidence.

As I don't have a good understanding of US law and processes surrounding evidence collection and handling, I will, again, defer to something that my aforementioned contact shared:

Chain of Evidence / Custody at US end, i.e., DNC and related computing facilities

Summary: There is no US end Chain of Evidence / Custody

The anchor of any chain of evidence custody is the on-site crime scene investigation of a jurisdictional law enforcement agency and neutral jurisdictional forensic team which investigate, discover, identify where possible, log, mark, package, seal, or takes images there of, of all identified elements of potential evidence as discovered at the scene of a crime by the authorized teams. The chain of this anchor is then the careful, documented movement of each element of captured evidence from crime scene to court.

In the case of the alleged series of intrusions into the DNC computing facilities, there is no anchor to any chain of evidence / custody.

There has been no claim that any jurisdictional law enforcement agency was allowed access to the DNC computing facilities. The FBI was denied access to DNC facilities, thereby supposedly denying the FBI the ability to conduct any on-site investigation of the alleged crime scene for discovery or collection of evidence.

Nor did the FBI exercise its authority to investigate the crime scene of a purported federal crime. Since when does the FBI need permission to investigate an alleged crime site where it is claimed a foreign government's intelligence attacked political files in order to interfere in a US presidential election?

Instead, the FBI accepted images of purported crime scene evidence from a contractor hired by and, therefore, working for the DNC. On July 05, 2017 a Crowdstrike statement said that they had provided "... forensic images of the DNC system to the FBI." It was not stated when these images were provided. Crowdstrike was working for the DNC as a contractor at the time.

This scenario is analogous to an employee of a crime scene owner telling law enforcement, "Trust me; I have examined the crime scene for you and here's what I've found. It's not necessary for you to see the crime scene."

Crowdstrike cannot be accepted as a neutral forensic organization. It was working for and being paid by the DNC. It is neither a law enforcement agency nor a federal forensic organization. Further Crowdstrike has serious conflicts of interest when it comes to any investigation of Russia.

Crowdstrike co-founder and Director of Technology, Dimitri Alperovitch, is a Nonresident Senior Fellow, Cyber Statecraft Initiative, of the Atlantic Council. Alperovitch has made it clear of his dislike of the government of Putin, and The Atlantic Council can not be considered neutral to Russia, receiving funding from many very staunch and outspoken enemies of Russia.

Summary: Not only was no federal jurisdictional law enforcement agency allowed to investigate the alleged crime scene, but the organization which allegedly collected and provided the 'evidence' was not neutral by being employed by the owner of the alleged crime scene, but seriously compromised by strong anti-Russian links.

This issue of this substitute for an anchor then leads us to our next problem: an apparent conflict of interest from the investigation's outset.

Conflict of Interest Inherent In The Investigation?

Would it seem like a conflict of interest if the person in charge of an investigation were friends with a witness and source of critical evidence relied upon by that investigation?

This is effectively the situation we have with the Special Counsel investigation because Robert Mueller and CrowdStrike's CSO (and President) Shawn Henry are former colleagues and friends.

Their history at the FBI is well known and their continued association after Henry had left the agency ( having dinner together at an executive retreat ) has been noted.

If nothing else, it's understandable for people to feel that the Special Counsel would have struggled to be truly impartial due to such relationships.

Conclusion

The Special Counsel seems to have been impervious to critical pieces of countervailing evidence (some of which demonstrates that Guccifer 2.0 deliberately manufactured Russian breadcrumbs) and they have failed to accurately account for the acquisition of WikiLeaks' DNC emails (missing the date on which approximately 70% of them were collected) , which is, in itself, a stunning failure for a supposedly thorough investigation costing US taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

There should have been a proper, thorough, independent and impartial investigation into the Guccifer 2.0 persona. The Special Counsel certainly hasn't done that job and, in retrospect, looks to have been ill-equipped (and perhaps somewhat reluctant) to do so from the outset.

This article may be republished/reproduced in part or in full on condition that content above is unaltered and that the author is credited (or, alternatively, that a link to the full article is included).

[May 10, 2019] Obama administration raced to obtain FICA warrant on Carter Page before Rogers investigation closes on them and that was definitely an obstruction of justice and interference with the ongoing investigation

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the Office of the Inspector General and associated FISA abuse to the FISA Court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702 compliance review. ..."
"... The following day, on Sept. 27, 2016, Carlin announced his resignation, effective Oct. 15, 2016. ..."
"... After receiving a briefing by the NSA compliance officer on Oct. 20, 2016, detailing numerous "about query" violations from the 702 NSA compliance audit, Rogers shut down all "about query" activity the next day and reported his findings to the DOJ. "About queries" are searches based on communications containing a reference "about" a surveillance target but that are not "to" or "from" the target. ..."
"... On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally informed the FISA Court of his findings. On Oct. 26, 2016, Rogers appeared formally before the FISA Court and presented the written findings of his audit. ..."
"... Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications in order to avoid raising suspicions at the FISA Court ahead of receiving the Page FISA warrant. ..."
"... The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page. ..."
"... While all this was transpiring, DNI James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter submitted a recommendation that Rogers be removed from his post as NSA director. ..."
May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Originally from: Spygate The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] by Jeff Carlson ( October 12, 2018 Updated: May 3, 2019 )

FISA Abuse

Admiral Mike Rogers, while director of the NSA, was personally responsible for uncovering an unprecedented level of FISA abuse that would later be documented in a 99-page unsealed FISA court ruling . As the FISA court noted in the April 26, 2017, ruling, the abuses had been occurring since at least November 2015:

"The FBI had disclosed raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information, to private contractors.

"Private contractors had access to raw FISA information on FBI storage systems.

"Contractors had access to raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI's requests."

The FISA Court report is particularly focused on the FBI:

"The Court is concerned about the FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported."

The FISA Court disclosed that illegal NSA database searches were endemic. Private contractors, employed by the FBI, were given full access to the NSA database. Once in the contractors' possession, the data couldn't be traced.

In April 2016, after Rogers became aware of improper contractor access to raw FISA data on March 9, 2016, he directed the NSA's Office of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702."

On April 18, 2016, Rogers shut down all outside contractor access to raw FISA information -- specifically outside contractors working for the FBI.

DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the Office of the Inspector General and associated FISA abuse to the FISA Court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702 compliance review.

The following day, on Sept. 27, 2016, Carlin announced his resignation, effective Oct. 15, 2016.

After receiving a briefing by the NSA compliance officer on Oct. 20, 2016, detailing numerous "about query" violations from the 702 NSA compliance audit, Rogers shut down all "about query" activity the next day and reported his findings to the DOJ. "About queries" are searches based on communications containing a reference "about" a surveillance target but that are not "to" or "from" the target.

On Oct. 21, 2016, the DOJ and the FBI sought and received a Title I FISA probable-cause order authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISA Court.

At this point, the FISA Court was still unaware of the Section 702 violations.

On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally informed the FISA Court of his findings. On Oct. 26, 2016, Rogers appeared formally before the FISA Court and presented the written findings of his audit.

The FISA Court had been unaware of the query violations until they were presented to the court by Rogers.

Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications in order to avoid raising suspicions at the FISA Court ahead of receiving the Page FISA warrant.

The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

While all this was transpiring, DNI James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter submitted a recommendation that Rogers be removed from his post as NSA director.

The move to fire Rogers, which ultimately failed, originated sometime in mid-October 2016 -- exactly when Rogers was preparing to present his findings to the FISA Court.

Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.

[May 10, 2019] What was the meaning of the term "insurance policy" in Stzok messages to Lisa Page

Highly recommended!
The insurance policy was the false flag operation directed at establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. The key part was the appointment of Special Prosecutor in which McCabe played an important if not the decisive role.
Notable quotes:
"... The insurance policy was the actual process of establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. It encompassed actions undertaken in late 2016 and early 2017, including the leaking of the Steele dossier and James Clapper's leaks of James Comey's briefing to President Trump. The intent behind these actions was simple. The legitimization of the investigation into the Trump campaign. ..."
"... The strategy involved the recusal of Trump officials with the intent that Andrew McCabe would end up running the investigation. ..."
May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Originally from: Spygate The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] by Jeff Carlson ( October 12, 2018 Updated: May 3, 2019 )

The Insurance Policy

Ever since the release of FBI text messages revealing the existence of an "insurance policy," the term has been the subject of wide speculation.

Some observers have suggested that the insurance policy was the FISA spy warrant used to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and, by extension, other members of the Trump campaign. This interpretation is too narrow and fails to capture the underlying meaning of the text.

The insurance policy was the actual process of establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. It encompassed actions undertaken in late 2016 and early 2017, including the leaking of the Steele dossier and James Clapper's leaks of James Comey's briefing to President Trump. The intent behind these actions was simple. The legitimization of the investigation into the Trump campaign.

The strategy involved the recusal of Trump officials with the intent that Andrew McCabe would end up running the investigation.

The Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the foundation for the Russia narrative.

The intelligence community, led by CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper, used the dossier as a launching pad for creating their Intelligence Community assessment.

This report, which was presented to Obama in December 2016, despite NSA Director Mike Rogers having only moderate confidence in its assessment, became one of the core pieces of the narrative that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections.

Through intelligence community leaks, and in collusion with willing media outlets, the narrative that Russia helped Trump win the elections was aggressively pushed throughout 2017.

Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.

[May 10, 2019] The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... On July 28, 2017, McCabe lied to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while under oath regarding authorization of the leaking to The Wall Street Journal. At this point, Horowitz knew McCabe was lying, but did not yet know of the May 9 INSD interview with McCabe. ..."
May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Originally from: Spygate The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] by Jeff Carlson ( October 12, 2018 Updated: May 3, 2019 )

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe held a pivotal role in what has become known as "Spygate." He directed the activities of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and was involved in all aspects of the Russia investigation. He was also mentioned in the infamous "insurance policy" text message.

McCabe was a major component of the insurance policy.

On April 26, 2017, Rosenstein found himself appointed as the new deputy attorney general. He was placed into a somewhat chaotic situation, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recluses himself from the ongoing Russia investigation a little less than two months earlier, on March 2, 2017. This effectively meant that no one in the Trump administration had any oversight of the ongoing investigation being conducted by the FBI and the DOJ.

Additionally, the leadership of then-FBI Director James Comey was coming under increased scrutiny as the result of actions taken leading up to and following the election, particularly Comey's handling of the Clinton email investigation.

On May 9, 2017, Rosenstein wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be fired. The subject of the memo was "Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI." Comey was fired that day.

McCabe was now the acting director of the FBI and was immediately under consideration for the permanent position.

On the same day Comey was fired, McCabe would lie during an interview with agents from the FBI's Inspection Division (INSD) regarding apparent leaks that were used in an Oct. 30, 2016, Wall Street Journal article, "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe" by Devlin Barrett. This would later be disclosed in the inspector general report, "A Report of Investigation of Certain Allegations Relating to Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe."

At the time, nobody, including the INSD agents, knew that McCabe had lied, nor were the darker aspects of McCabe's role in Spygate fully known.

In late April or early May 2016, McCabe opened a federal criminal investigation on Sessions, regarding potential lack of candor before Congress in relation to Sessions's contacts with Russians. Sessions was unaware of the investigation.

Sessions would later be cleared of any wrongdoing by special counsel Robert Mueller.

On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein reportedly suggested to McCabe that he secretly record President Trump. This remark was reported in a New York Times article that was sourced from memos from the now-fired McCabe, along with testimony taken from former FBI general counsel James Baker, who relayed a conversation he had with McCabe about the occurrence. Rosenstein issued a statement denying the accusations.

The alleged comments by Rosenstein occurred at a meeting where McCabe was "pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation into the president."

An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post, framed the conversation somewhat differently, noting Rosenstein responded sarcastically to McCabe, saying, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"

Later, on the same day that Rosenstein had his meetings with McCabe, President Trump met with Mueller, reportedly as an interview for the FBI director job.

On May 17, 2017, the day after President Trump's meeting with Mueller -- and the day after Rosenstein's encounters with McCabe -- Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel.

The May 17 appointment of Mueller in effect shifted control of the Russia investigation from the FBI and McCabe to Mueller. Rosenstein would retain ultimate authority for the probe and any expansion of Mueller's investigation required authorization from Rosenstein.

Interestingly, without Comey's memo leaks, a special counsel might not have been appointed -- the FBI, and possibly McCabe, would have remained in charge of the Russia investigation. McCabe was probably not going to become the permanent FBI director, but he was reportedly under consideration. Regardless, without Comey's leak, McCabe would have retained direct involvement and the FBI would have retained control.

On July 28, 2017, McCabe lied to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while under oath regarding authorization of the leaking to The Wall Street Journal. At this point, Horowitz knew McCabe was lying, but did not yet know of the May 9 INSD interview with McCabe.

On Aug. 2, 2017, Rosenstein secretly issued Mueller a revised memo on "the scope of investigation and definition of authority" that remains heavily redacted. The full purpose of this memo remains unknown. On this same day, Christopher Wray was named as the new FBI director.

Two days later, on Aug. 4, 2017, Sessions announced that the FBI had created a new leaks investigation unit. Rosenstein and Wray were tasked with overseeing all leak investigations.

That Aug. 2 memo from Rosenstein to Mueller may have been specifically designed to remove any residual FBI influence -- specifically that of McCabe -- from the Russia investigation. The appointment of Wray as FBI director helped cement this. McCabe was finally completely neutralized.

On March 16, 2018, McCabe was fired for lying under oath at least three different times and is currently the subject of a grand jury investigation.

[May 10, 2019] Flailing Fox Host Smears Tulsi To Her Face In Bizarre Segment

Look how Tulsi deal with really hostile interviewers. A real nasty attack dog.
Notable quotes:
"... That was absolutely disgusting. He didn't say should we "pull our forces out around the world." He said should we "take our boot off their necks." Warmongering imperialist. ..."
"... So rude he won't let her talk, Tulsi is awesome this guy is a joke he doesn't know history. ..."
Apr 22, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Zero Divisor , 2 weeks ago (edited)

That was absolutely disgusting. He didn't say should we "pull our forces out around the world." He said should we "take our boot off their necks." Warmongering imperialist.

Mike Hunt , 3 weeks ago

Saudi Arabia has cracked down on Wahhabism?

Cordula Backhaus , 1 week ago

This FAUX host is a horrible listener. But Tulsi came across very well. My full respect for her. #Tulsi2020

Zoe Simza , 2 weeks ago

"The Saudis have cracked down on Wahhabism in a pretty serious way." Boiiiiii the Saudis ARE Wahhabi.

P Tim Sina , 2 weeks ago

Damn, Tulsi totally smashed him. Now, his supporters gonna have a second thought as they got a short taste of truth/facts on Saudi. Tulsi can easily defeat Trump.

Ordinary Human, 2 weeks ago

Intelligent, calm, speaks clearly qualities you look for in a leader.

Timothy Lavoie, 2 weeks ago

So rude he won't let her talk, Tulsi is awesome this guy is a joke he doesn't know history.

[May 10, 2019] The key role of British intelligence in Spydate (aka Russiagate)

Notable quotes:
"... Hannigan's meeting was noteworthy because Brennan wasn't Hannigan's counterpart. That position belonged to NSA Director Mike Rogers. In the following year, Hannigan abruptly announced his retirement on Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration. ..."
"... Christopher Steele, who authored the dossier on Trump, was an MI6 agent while the agency was headed by Sir Richard Dearlove. Steele retains close ties with Dearlove. ..."
"... Dearlove has ties to most of the parties mentioned. It was he who advised Steele and his business partner, Chris Burrows, to work with a top British government official to pass along information to the FBI in the fall of 2016. He also was a speaker at the July 2016 Cambridge symposium that Halper invited Carter Page to attend. ..."
"... Dearlove knows Halper through their mutual association at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. Dearlove also knows Sir Iain Lobban, a former head of GCHQ, who is an advisory board member at British strategic intelligence and advisory firm Hakluyt , which was founded by former MI6 members and retains close ties to UK intelligence services. ..."
"... Halper has historical connections to Hakluyt through Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has co-authored two books. ..."
"... Downer, who met Papadopoulos in a May 2016 meeting established through a chain of two intermediaries, served on the advisory board of Hakluyt from 2008 to 2014. He reportedly still maintains contact with Hakluyt officials. Information from his meeting with Papadopoulos was later used by the FBI to establish the bureau's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. Downer has changed his version of events multiple times. ..."
"... Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations -- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia. ..."
"... Stefan Halper met with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page's July 2016 Moscow trip. As noted previously, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove was a speaker at the symposium. Halper and Dearlove have known each other for years and maintain several mutual associations. ..."
"... Page was already known to the FBI. The Page FISA warrant application references the Buryakov spy case and an FBI interview with Page. Current information suggests there was only one meeting between Page and the FBI in 2016. It happened on March 2, 2016. It was in relation to Victor Podobnyy, who was named in the Buryakov case. ..."
"... Page, who cooperated with the FBI on the case, almost certainly was providing testimony or details against Podobnyy. Page had been contacted by Podobnyy in 2013 and had previously provided information to the FBI. Buryakov pleaded guilty on March 11, 2016 -- nine days after Page met with the FBI on the case -- and was sentenced to 30 months in prison on May 25, 2016. On April 5, 2017, Buryakov was granted early release and was deported to Russia. ..."
"... House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said in August that exculpatory evidence on Page exists that wasn't included by the DOJ and the FBI in the FISA application and subsequent renewals. The exculpatory evidence likely relates specifically to Page's role in the Buryakov case. ..."
"... If the FBI failed to disclose Page's cooperation with the bureau or materially misrepresented his involvement in its application to the FISA Court, it means that the FBI's Woods procedures, which govern FISA applications, were violated. ..."
May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Originally from: Spygate The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] by Jeff Carlson ( October 12, 2018 Updated: May 3, 2019 )

Intelligence

UK and Australian intelligence agencies also played meaningful roles during the 2016 presidential election.

Britain's GCHQ was involved in collecting information regarding then-candidate Trump and transmitting it to the United States. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, the head of GCHQ, flew from London to meet personally with then-CIA Director John Brennan, The Guardian reported.

Hannigan's meeting was noteworthy because Brennan wasn't Hannigan's counterpart. That position belonged to NSA Director Mike Rogers. In the following year, Hannigan abruptly announced his retirement on Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration.

As GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly so.

Christopher Steele, who authored the dossier on Trump, was an MI6 agent while the agency was headed by Sir Richard Dearlove. Steele retains close ties with Dearlove.

Dearlove has ties to most of the parties mentioned. It was he who advised Steele and his business partner, Chris Burrows, to work with a top British government official to pass along information to the FBI in the fall of 2016. He also was a speaker at the July 2016 Cambridge symposium that Halper invited Carter Page to attend.

Dearlove knows Halper through their mutual association at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. Dearlove also knows Sir Iain Lobban, a former head of GCHQ, who is an advisory board member at British strategic intelligence and advisory firm Hakluyt , which was founded by former MI6 members and retains close ties to UK intelligence services.

Halper has historical connections to Hakluyt through Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has co-authored two books.

Downer, who met Papadopoulos in a May 2016 meeting established through a chain of two intermediaries, served on the advisory board of Hakluyt from 2008 to 2014. He reportedly still maintains contact with Hakluyt officials. Information from his meeting with Papadopoulos was later used by the FBI to establish the bureau's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. Downer has changed his version of events multiple times.

The Steele dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources. One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood later relayed information regarding the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who dispatched David Kramer, a fellow at the McCain Institute, to London to meet with Steele in November 2016. McCain would later admit in a Jan. 11, 2017, statement that he had personally passed on the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey.

Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations -- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia.

In a Twitter post , Trump wrote that the "key Allies called to ask not to release" the documents.

Questions to be asked are why is it that two of our allies would find themselves so opposed to the release of these classified documents that a coordinated plea would be made directly to the president? And why would these same allies have even the slightest idea of what was contained in these classified U.S. documents?

Britain and Australia appear to know full well what those documents contain, and their attempt to prevent their public release appears to be because they don't want their role in events surrounding the 2016 presidential election to be made public.

Fusion GPS/Orbis/Christopher Steele

Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is co-founder of Fusion GPS, along with Peter Fritsch and Tom Catan. Fusion was hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign through law firm Perkins Coie to produce and disseminate the Steele dossier used against Trump. The dossier would later be the primary evidence used to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page on Oct. 21, 2016.

<img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2018/10/10/Glenn-Simpson.jpg" alt="" width="185" height="220" /> Glenn Simpson, co-founder of Fusion GPS. The company was hired by the Clinton campaign and the DNC–through law firm Perkins Coie–to produce the dossier on Trump.

Christopher Steele, who retains close ties to UK intelligence, worked for MI6 from 1987 until his retirement in 2009, when he and his partner, Chris Burrows, founded Orbis Intelligence. Steele maintains contact with British intelligence, Sir Richard Dearlove , and UK intelligence firm Hakluyt.

Steele appears to have been represented by lawyer Adam Waldman, who also represented Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. We know this from texts sent by Waldman. On April 10, 2017, Waldman sent this to Sen. Mark Warner:

"Hi. Steele: would like to get a bi partisan letter from the committee; Assange: I convinced him to make serious and important concessions and am discussing those w DOJ; Deripaska: willing to testify to congress but interested in state of play w Manafort. I will be with him next tuesday for a week."

Steele also appears to have lobbied on behalf of Deripaska, who was discussed in emails between Bruce Ohr and Steele that were recently disclosed by the Washington Examiner:

"Steele said he was 'circulating some recent sensitive Orbis reporting' on Deripaska that suggested Deripaska was not a 'tool' of the Kremlin. Steele said he would send the reporting to a name that is redacted in the email."

Fusion GPS was also employed by Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in a previous case. Veselnitskaya was involved in litigation pitting Russian firm Prevezon Holdings against British-American financier William Browder. Veselnitskaya hired U.S. law firm BakerHostetler, who, in turn, hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Browder. Veselnitskaya was one of the participants at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, at which she discussed the Magnitsky Act .

Fox News reported on Nov. 9, 2017, that Simpson met with Veselnitskaya immediately before and after the Trump Tower meeting.

A declassified top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report released on April 26, 2017, revealed that government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and NSA, had improperly accessed Americans' communications. The FBI specifically provided outside contractors with access to raw surveillance data on American citizens without proper oversight.

Communications and other data of members of the Trump campaign may have been accessed in this way.

Nellie Ohr
<img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2018/10/10/Nellie-Ohr-.jpg" alt="Nellie Ohr" width="185" height="252" />
Nellie Ohr, the wife of high-ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr, was hired by Fusion GPS to work on the dossier on Trump.

Bruce and Nellie Ohr have known Simpson since at least 2010 and have known Steele since at least 2006. The Ohrs and Simpson worked together on a DOJ report in 2010 . In that report, Nellie Ohr's biography lists her as working for Open Source Works, which is part of the CIA. Simpson met with Bruce Ohr before and after the 2016 election.

Bruce Ohr had been in contact repeatedly with Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign -- while Steele was constructing his dossier. Ohr later actively shared information he received from Steele with the FBI, after the agency had terminated Steele as a source. Interactions between Ohr and Steele stretched for months into the first year of Trump's presidency and were documented in a number of FD-302s -- memos that summarize interviews with him by the FBI.

Spy Traps

In an effort to put forth evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it appears that several different spy traps were set, with varying degrees of success. Many of these efforts appear to center around Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and involve London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, who has ties to Western intelligence, particularly in the UK.

Papadopoulos and Mifsud both worked at the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP). Mifsud appears to have joined LCILP around November 2015 . Papadopoulos reportedly joined LCILP sometime in late February 2016 after leaving Ben Carson's presidential campaign. However, some reports indicate Papadopoulos joined LCILP in November or December of 2015. Mifsud and Papadopoulos reportedly never crossed paths until March 14, 2016, in Italy.

Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to several Russians, including Olga Polonskaya, whom Mifsud introduced as "Putin's niece," and Ivan Timofeev, an official at a state-sponsored think tank called the Russian International Affairs Council. Both Papadopoulos and Mifsud were interviewed by the FBI. Papadopoulos was ultimately charged with a process crime and was recently sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying to the FBI. Mifsud was never charged by the FBI.

Throughout this period, Papadopoulos continuously pushed for meetings between Trump campaign officials and Russian contacts but was ultimately unsuccessful in establishing any meetings.

Papadopoulos met with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer on May 10, 2016. The Papadopoulos–Downer meeting has been portrayed as a chance encounter in a bar. That does not appear to be the case.

Papadopoulos was introduced to Downer through a chain of two intermediaries who said Downer wanted to meet with Papadopoulos. Another individual happened to be in London at exactly the same time: the FBI's head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap. The purpose of Priestap's visit remains unknown.

The Papadopoulos–Downer meeting was later used to establish the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. It was repeatedly reported that Papadopoulos told Downer that Russia had Hillary Clinton's emails. This is incorrect.

George Papadopoulos
<img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2018/10/10/George-Papadopoulos-1028769226-1200x1497.jpg" alt="George Papadopoulos" width="187" height="234" /> Foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign was approached by several individuals with ties to UK and U.S. intelligence agencies. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

According to Downer, Papadopoulos at some point mentioned the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

"During that conversation, he [Papadopoulos] mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging,'' Downer told The Australian about the Papadopoulos meeting in an April 2018 article. "He didn't say dirt, he said material that could be damaging to her. No, he said it would be damaging. He didn't say what it was."

Downer, while serving as Australia's foreign minister, was responsible for one of the largest foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation: $25 million from the Australian government.

Unconfirmed media reports, including a Jan. 12, 2017, BBC article , have suggested that the FBI attempted to obtain two FISA warrants in June and July 2016 that were denied by the FISA court. It's likely that Papadopoulos was an intended target of these failed FISAs.

Interestingly, there is no mention of Papadopoulos in the Steele dossier. Paul Manafort, Carter Page, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Gen. Michael Flynn, and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski are all listed in the Steele dossier.

Papadopoulos may have started out assisting the FBI or CIA and later discovered that he was being set up for surveillance himself.

After failing to obtain a spy warrant on the Trump campaign using Papadopoulos, the FBI set its sights on campaign volunteer Carter Page. By this time, the counterintelligence investigation was in the process of being established, and we know now that it was formalized with no official intelligence. The FBI needed some sort of legal cover. They needed a retroactive warrant. And they got one on Oct. 21, 2016. The Page FISA warrant would be renewed three times and remain in force until September 2017.

Stefan Halper met with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page's July 2016 Moscow trip. As noted previously, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove was a speaker at the symposium. Halper and Dearlove have known each other for years and maintain several mutual associations.

Page was already known to the FBI. The Page FISA warrant application references the Buryakov spy case and an FBI interview with Page. Current information suggests there was only one meeting between Page and the FBI in 2016. It happened on March 2, 2016. It was in relation to Victor Podobnyy, who was named in the Buryakov case.

Page, who cooperated with the FBI on the case, almost certainly was providing testimony or details against Podobnyy. Page had been contacted by Podobnyy in 2013 and had previously provided information to the FBI. Buryakov pleaded guilty on March 11, 2016 -- nine days after Page met with the FBI on the case -- and was sentenced to 30 months in prison on May 25, 2016. On April 5, 2017, Buryakov was granted early release and was deported to Russia.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said in August that exculpatory evidence on Page exists that wasn't included by the DOJ and the FBI in the FISA application and subsequent renewals. The exculpatory evidence likely relates specifically to Page's role in the Buryakov case.

If the FBI failed to disclose Page's cooperation with the bureau or materially misrepresented his involvement in its application to the FISA Court, it means that the FBI's Woods procedures, which govern FISA applications, were violated.

Page has not been arrested or charged with any crime related to the investigation.

Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.

[May 10, 2019] The Three Purposes of Russiagate by Paul Craig Roberts

Notable quotes:
"... As Kunstler puts it, "The Special Prosecutor's main bit of mischief, of course, was his refusal to reach a conclusion on the obstruction of justice charge. What the media refuses to accept and make clear is that a prosecutor's failure to reach a conclusion is exactly the same thing as an inability to make a case, and it was a breach of Mr. Mueller's duty to dishonestly present that failure as anything but that in his report -- and possibly an act of criminal prosecutorial misconduct" on Mueller's part. ..."
"... But this is not the only dishonesty in Mueller's report. Although Mueller's report clearly obliterates the Russiagate conspiracy theory peddled by the military/security complex, the Democrats, and the presstitutes, Mueller's report takes for granted that Russia interfered in the election but not in collusion with Trump or Trump officials. Mueller states this interference as if it were a fact without providing one drop of evidence. Indeed, nowhere in the report, or anywhere else, is there any evidence of Russian interference. ..."
"... Mueller simply takes Russian interference for granted as if endless repeating by a bunch of presstitutes makes it so. For example, the Mueller report says that the Russians hacked the DNC emails, a claim for which no evidence exists. Moreover, it is a claim that is contradicted by the known evidence. William Binney and other experts have demonstrated that the DNC emails were, according to their time stamps, downloaded much more quickly than is possible over the Internet. This fact has been carefully ignored by Mueller, the Democrats and the presstitutes ..."
"... Indictments do not require evidence, and Mueller had none. Moreover, Mueller could not possibly know the identities of the Russian intelligence agents who allegedly did the hacking. This was of no concern to Mueller. He knew he needed no evidence, because he knew there would be no trial. The indictment was political propaganda, not real. ..."
"... The myth of Russian interference is so well established that even Glenn Greenwald in his otherwise careful and correct exposition of the Russiagate hoax buys into Russian interference as if it were a fact. Indeed, many if not most of Trump's supporters are ready to blame Russia for trying, but failing, to ensnare their man Trump. ..."
"... The falsity of Russiagate and the political purposes of the hoax are completely obvious, but even Trump supporters tip their hats to the falsehood of Russian interference so that they do not look guilty of excessive support for Trump. In other words, Russiagate has succeeded in constraining how far Trump's supporters can go in defending him, especially if he has any remaining intent to reduce tensions with Russia. ..."
"... Russiagate has succeeded in criminalizing in the American mind any contact with Russia. Thus has the military/security complex guaranteed that its budget and power will not be threatened by any move toward peace between nuclear powers. ..."
"... Just as Mueller indicted Russian intelligence agents without evidence, he could have indicted Trump without evidence, but a case against a president that is without evidence is not one a prosecutor wants to take to court as it is obviously an act of sedition. ..."
"... That the Democrats and the presstitutes want Trump indicted for obstructing a crime that did not occur shows how insane they have been driven by their hatred of Trump. What is operating in the Democratic Party and in the American media is insanity and hatred. Nothing else. ..."
"... Journalists who lie for the Establishment have no need of the First Amendment. Perhaps this is why they have no concern that Washington's attack on Julian Assange will destroy the First Amendment. They are helping Washington destroy Assange so that their self-esteem will no longer be threatened by the fact that there is a real journalist out there doing real journalism. Mueller Report ..."
Apr 01, 2023 | ahtribune.com

Russiagate has three purposes.

  1. One is to prevent President Trump from endangering the vast budget and power of the military/security complex by normalizing relations with Russia.
  2. Another, in the words of James Howard Kunstler, is "to conceal the criminal conduct of US government officials meddling in the 2016 election in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign," by focusing all public and political attention on a hoax distraction.
  3. The third is to obstruct Trump's campaign and distract him from his agenda when he won the election.

Despite the inability of Mueller to find any evidence that Trump or Trump officials colluded with Russia to steal the US presidential election, and the inability of Mueller to find evidence with which to accuse Trump of obstruction of justice, Russiagate has achieved all of its purposes.

Trump has been locked into a hostile relationship with Russia. Neoconservatives have succeeded in worsening this hostile relationship by manipulating Trump into a blatant criminal attempt to overthrow in broad daylight the Venezuelan government.

Hillary's criminal conduct and the criminal conduct of the CIA, FBI, and Obama Justice (sic) Department that resulted in a variety of felonies, including the FBI obtaining spy warrants for partisan political purposes on false pretexts from the FISA court, were swept out of sight by the Russiagate hoax.

The Mueller report was written in such a way that despite the absence of any evidence supporting any indictment of Trump, the report refused to clear Trump of obstruction and passed the buck to the Attorney General. In other words, Mueller in the absence of any evidence kept the controversy going by setting up Attorney General Barr for cover-up charges.

It is evidence of Mueller's corruption that he does not explain just how it is possible for Trump to possibly have obstructed justice when Mueller states in his report that the crime he was empowered to investigate could not be found. How does one obstruct the investigation of a crime that did not occur?

As Kunstler puts it, "The Special Prosecutor's main bit of mischief, of course, was his refusal to reach a conclusion on the obstruction of justice charge. What the media refuses to accept and make clear is that a prosecutor's failure to reach a conclusion is exactly the same thing as an inability to make a case, and it was a breach of Mr. Mueller's duty to dishonestly present that failure as anything but that in his report -- and possibly an act of criminal prosecutorial misconduct" on Mueller's part.

But this is not the only dishonesty in Mueller's report. Although Mueller's report clearly obliterates the Russiagate conspiracy theory peddled by the military/security complex, the Democrats, and the presstitutes, Mueller's report takes for granted that Russia interfered in the election but not in collusion with Trump or Trump officials. Mueller states this interference as if it were a fact without providing one drop of evidence. Indeed, nowhere in the report, or anywhere else, is there any evidence of Russian interference.

Mueller simply takes Russian interference for granted as if endless repeating by a bunch of presstitutes makes it so. For example, the Mueller report says that the Russians hacked the DNC emails, a claim for which no evidence exists. Moreover, it is a claim that is contradicted by the known evidence. William Binney and other experts have demonstrated that the DNC emails were, according to their time stamps, downloaded much more quickly than is possible over the Internet. This fact has been carefully ignored by Mueller, the Democrats and the presstitutes.

One reason for ignoring this undisputed fact is that they all want to get Julian Assange, and the public case concocted against Assange is that Assange is in cahoots with the Russians who allegedly gave him the hacked emails. As there is no evidence that Russia hacked the emails and as Assange has said Russia is not the source, what is Mueller's evidence? Apparently, Mueller's evidence is his own political indictment of Russian individuals who Mueller alleged hacked the DNC computers. This false indictment for which there is no evidence was designed by Mueller to poison the Helsinki meeting between Trump and Putin and announced on the eve of the meeting.

Indictments do not require evidence, and Mueller had none. Moreover, Mueller could not possibly know the identities of the Russian intelligence agents who allegedly did the hacking. This was of no concern to Mueller. He knew he needed no evidence, because he knew there would be no trial. The indictment was political propaganda, not real.

The myth of Russian interference is so well established that even Glenn Greenwald in his otherwise careful and correct exposition of the Russiagate hoax buys into Russian interference as if it were a fact. Indeed, many if not most of Trump's supporters are ready to blame Russia for trying, but failing, to ensnare their man Trump.

The falsity of Russiagate and the political purposes of the hoax are completely obvious, but even Trump supporters tip their hats to the falsehood of Russian interference so that they do not look guilty of excessive support for Trump. In other words, Russiagate has succeeded in constraining how far Trump's supporters can go in defending him, especially if he has any remaining intent to reduce tensions with Russia.

Russiagate has succeeded in criminalizing in the American mind any contact with Russia. Thus has the military/security complex guaranteed that its budget and power will not be threatened by any move toward peace between nuclear powers.

The Democratic Party and the presstitutes cannot be bothered by facts. They are committed to getting Trump regardless of the facts. And so is Mueller, and Brennan, and Comey, and a slew of other corrupt public officials.

A good example of journalistic misconduct is James Risen writing in Glenn Greenwald's Intercept of all places, "WILLIAM BARR MISLED EVERYONE ABOUT THE MUELLER REPORT. NOW DEMOCRATS ARE CALLING FOR HIS RESIGNATION." Quoting the same posse of "hang Trump high" Democrats, Risen, without questioning their disproven lies, lets the Democrats build a case that Mueller's report proves Trump's guilt. Then Risen himself misrepresents the report in support of the Democrats. He says there is a huge difference between Barr's memo on the report and the report itself as if Barr would misrepresent a report that he is about to release.

Length is the only difference between the memo and the report. This doesn't stop Risen from writing: "In fact, the Mueller report makes it clear that a key reason Mueller did not seek to prosecute Trump for obstruction was a longstanding Justice Department legal opinion saying that the Justice Department can't indict a sitting president." This is something Mueller threw in after saying he didn't have the evidence to indict Trump. It is yet another reason for not indicting, not the reason. Risen then backs up his misreport with that of a partisan Democrat, Renato Mariotti who claims that Mueller could have indicted Trump except it is against US Justice Department policy. Again, there is no explanation from Risen, Mariotti, or anyone else how Mueller could have indicted Trump for obstructing what Mueller concludes was a crime that did not happen.

Just as Mueller indicted Russian intelligence agents without evidence, he could have indicted Trump without evidence, but a case against a president that is without evidence is not one a prosecutor wants to take to court as it is obviously an act of sedition.

That the Democrats and the presstitutes want Trump indicted for obstructing a crime that did not occur shows how insane they have been driven by their hatred of Trump. What is operating in the Democratic Party and in the American media is insanity and hatred. Nothing else.

Risen also alleges that the unproven Russian hacks were passed over by Barr in his memo on the report. Not only is this incorrect, but also Risen apparently has forgot that the investigation was about Trump's collusion with Russia to do something illegal and the investigation found that no such thing occurred. Risen, like the rest of the presstitutes and even Greenwald himself, takes for granted that the unproven Russian hacks happened. Again we see that the longer a lie is repeated the more it becomes true. Not even Greenwald can detect that he has been bamboozled.

At one time James Risen was an honest reporter. He won a Pulitzer prize, and he was threatened with prison by the Department of Justice when he refused to reveal his source for his reporting on illegal actions of the CIA. But Risen discovered that in the new world of journalism, telling the truth is punished while lying is rewarded. Risen, like all the others, decided that his income was more important than the truth.

Journalists who lie for the Establishment have no need of the First Amendment. Perhaps this is why they have no concern that Washington's attack on Julian Assange will destroy the First Amendment. They are helping Washington destroy Assange so that their self-esteem will no longer be threatened by the fact that there is a real journalist out there doing real journalism. Mueller Report

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Paul Craig Roberts has had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service, and business. He is chairman of The Institute for Political Economy.

[May 10, 2019] In some respects, the neoliberal MSMs has played the most disingenuous of roles is Spygate (aka Russiagate)

May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Originally from: Spygate The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] by Jeff Carlson ( October 12, 2018 Updated: May 3, 2019 )

Media

In some respects, the media has played the most disingenuous of roles. Areas of investigation that historically would have proven irresistible to reporters of the past have been steadfastly ignored. False narratives have been all-too-willingly promoted and facts ignored. Fusion GPS personally made a series of payments to several as-of-yet- unnamed reporters .

The majority of the mainstream media has represented positions of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

Steele met with members of certain media with relative frequency. In September 2016 , he met with a number of U.S. journalists for "The New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN," according to The Guardian. It was during this period that Steele met with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News.

In mid-October 2016, Steele returned to New York and met with reporters again. Toward the end of October, Steele spoke via Skype with Mother Jones reporter David Corn.

Leaking, including felony leaking of classified information, has been widespread. The Carter Page FISA warrant -- likely the unredacted version -- has been in the possession of The Washington Post and The New York Times since March 2017. Traditionally, the intelligence community leaked to The Washington Post while the DOJ leaked to sources within The New York Times. This was a historical pattern that stood until this election. The leaking became so widespread, even this tradition was broken.

On April 3, 2017, BuzzFeed reporter Ali Watkins wrote the article " A Former Trump Adviser Met With a Russian Spy ." In the article, she identified "Male-1," referred to in court documents relating to the case of Russian spy Evgeny Buryakov, as Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who had provided the FBI with assistance in the case. Just over a week later, on April 11, 2017, a Washington Post article, " FBI Obtained FISA Warrant to Monitor Former Trump Adviser Carter Page ," confirmed the existence of the October 2016 Page FISA warrant.

The information contained within both articles likely came via felony leaks from James Wolfe, former director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who was arrested on June 7, 2018, and charged with one count of lying to the FBI. Wolfe's indictment alleges that he was leaking classified information to multiple reporters over an extended period of time.

Reporter Ali Watkins likely received the undredacted FISA application on Carter Page from James Wolfe.

It appears probable that Wolfe leaked unredacted copies of the Page FISA application.

According to the indictment , Wolfe exchanged 82 text messages with Watkins on March 17, 2017. That same evening they engaged in a 28-minute phone call.

The original Page FISA application is 83 pages long, including one final signatory page.

In the public version of the application, there are 37 fully redacted pages. In addition to that, several other pages have redactions for all but the header. There are only two pages in the entire document that contain no redactions.

Why would Wolfe bother to send 37 pages of complete redactions? It seems more than plausible that Wolfe took pictures of the original unredacted FISA application and sent them by text to Watkins.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has repeatedly stated that evidence within the FISA application shows the counterintelligence agencies were abused by the Obama administration. Most of the mainstream media has known this.

Despite this, most major news organizations for over two years have promoted the Russia-collusion narrative. Despite ample evidence having come out to the contrary, they have not admitted they were wrong, likely because doing so would mean they would have to admit their complicity.

Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.

[May 10, 2019] The role of Obama administration in spygate (aka Russiagate)

May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

Originally from: Spygate The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] by Jeff Carlson ( October 12, 2018 Updated: May 3, 2019 )

Obama Administration

The Obama administration provided a simultaneous layer of protection and facilitation for the entire effort. One example is provided by Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333 , also known as Obama's data-sharing order . With the passage of the order, agencies and individuals were able to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that was useful to a particular mission.

Section 2.3 had been expected to be finalized by early to mid-2016. Instead, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn't sign off on Section 2.3 until Dec. 15, 2016. The order was finalized when Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed it on Jan. 3, 2017.

The reason for the delay could relate to the fact that while the executive order made it easier to share intelligence between agencies, it also limited certain types of information from going to the White House.

An example of this was provided by Evelyn Farkas during a March 2, 2017, MSNBC interview , where she detailed how the Obama administration gathered and disseminated intelligence on the Trump team:

"I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill 'Get as much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.'

"The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, [they] would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. That's why you have the leaking."

Many of the Obama administration's efforts appear to have been structural in nature, such as establishing new procedures or creating impediments to oversight that enabled much of the surveillance abuse to occur.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was appointed by Obama in 2011. From the very start, he found his duties throttled by the attorney general's office. According to congressional testimony by Horowitz:

"We got access to information up to 2010 in all of these categories. No law changed in 2010. No policy changed. It was simply a decision by the General Counsel's Office in 2010 that they viewed, now, the law differently. And as a result, they weren't going to give us that information."

These new restrictions were put in place by Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole.

On Aug. 5, 2014, Horowitz and other inspectors general sent a letter to Congress asking for unimpeded access to all records. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates responded on July 20, 2015, with a 58-page memorandum . The memo specifically denied the inspector general access to any information collected under Title III -- including intercepted communications and national security letters.

The New York Times recently disclosed that national security letters were used in the surveillance of the Trump campaign.

At other times, the Obama administration's efforts were more direct. The Intelligence Community assessment was released internally on Jan. 5, 2017. On this same day, Obama held an undisclosed White House meeting to discuss the dossier with national security adviser Susan Rice, FBI Director James Comey, and Yates. Rice would later send herself an email documenting the meeting.

The following day, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they gave Obama. Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey, Brennan, and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the Intelligence Community assessment and the Steele dossier.

Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview why:

"Because that was the part that the leaders of the Intelligence Community agreed he needed to be told about."

Shortly after Comey's meeting with Trump, both the Trump–Comey meeting and the existence of the dossier were leaked to CNN. The significance of the meeting was material, as Comey noted in a Jan. 7 memo he wrote:

"Media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material."

The media had widely dismissed the dossier as unsubstantiated and, therefore, unreportable. It was only after learning that Comey briefed Trump that CNN reported on the dossier. It was later revealed that DNI James Clapper personally leaked Comey's meeting with Trump to CNN.

The Obama administration also directly participated in a series of intelligence unmaskings , the process whereby a U.S. citizen's identity is revealed from collected surveillance. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power reportedly engaged in hundreds of unmasking requests. Rice has admitted to doing the same.

The Obama administration engaged in the ultimately successful effort to oust Trump's newly appointed national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn. Yates, along with Mary McCord, head of the DOJ's National Security Division, led that effort .

Executive Order 13762

President Barack Obama issued a last-minute executive order on Jan. 13, 2017, that altered the line of succession within the DOJ. The action was not done in consultation with the incoming Trump administration.

Acting Attorney General Sally Yates was fired on Jan. 30, 2017, by a newly inaugurated President Trump for refusing to uphold the president's executive order limiting travel from certain terror-prone countries. Yates was initially supposed to serve in her position until Jeff Sessions was confirmed as attorney general.

Obama's executive order placed the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia next in line behind the department's senior leadership. The attorney at the time was Channing Phillips.

Phillips was first hired by former Attorney General Eric Holder in 1994 for a position in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office. Phillips, after serving as a senior adviser to Holder, stayed on after he was replaced by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

It appears the Obama administration was hoping the Russia investigation would default to Channing in the event Sessions was forced to recuse himself from the investigation. Sessions, whose confirmation hearings began three days before the order, was already coming under intense scrutiny.

The implementation of the order may also tie into Yates's efforts to remove Gen. Michael Flynn over his call with the Russian ambassador.

Trump ignored the succession order, as he is legally allowed to do, and instead appointed Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, as acting attorney general on Jan. 30, 2017, the same day Yates was fired.

Trump issued a new executive order on Feb. 9, 2017, the same day Sessions was sworn in, reversing Obama's prior order.

On March 10, 2017, Trump fired 46 Obama-era U.S. attorneys, including Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. These firings appear to have been unexpected.

Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.

[May 10, 2019] Muellergate and the Discreet Lies of the Bourgeoisie by Craig Murray

Apr 06, 2019 | ahtribune.com

This cartoon seems to me very apposite. The capacity of the mainstream media repeatedly to promote the myth that Russia caused Clinton's defeat, while never mentioning what the information was that had been so damaging to Hillary, should be alarming to anybody under the illusion that we have a working "free media". There are literally hundreds of thousands of mainstream media articles and broadcasts, from every single one of the very biggest names in the Western media, which were predicated on the complete nonsense that Russia had conspired to install Donald Trump as President of the United States.

I genuinely have never quite understood whether the journalists who wrote this guff believed it, whether they were cynically pumping out propaganda and taking their pay cheque, or whether they just did their "job" and chose to avoid asking themselves whether they were producing truth or lies.

I suspect the answer varies from journalist to journalist. At the Guardian, for example, I get the impression that Carole Cadwalladr is sufficiently divorced from reality to believe all that she writes. Having done a very good job in investigating the nasty right wing British Establishment tool that was Cambridge Analytica, Cadwalladr became deluded by her own fame and self-importance and decided that her discovery was the key to understanding all of world politics. In her head it explained all the disappointments of Clintonites and Blairites everywhere. She is not so high-minded however as to have refused the blandishments of the Integrity Initiative.

Luke Harding is in a different category. Harding has become so malleable a tool of the security services it is impossible to believe he is not willingly being used. It would be embarrassing to have written a bestseller called "Collusion", the entire premiss for which has now been disproven, had Harding not made so much money out of it.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zvwcPOn5Iws

Harding's interview with Aaron Mate of The Real News was a truly enlightening moment. The August elite of the mainstream media virtually never meet anybody who subjects their narrative to critical intellectual scrutiny. Harding's utter inability to deal with unanticipated scepticism descends from hilarious to toe-curlingly embarrassing.

In general, since the Mueller report confirmed that $50 million worth of investigation had been unable to uncover any evidence of Russiagate collusion, the media has been astonishingly unrepentant about the absolute rubbish they have been churning out for years.

Harding and the Guardian's story about Manafort repeatedly calling on Assange in the Ecuador Embassy is one of the most blatant and malicious fabrications in modern media history. It has been widely ridiculed, no evidence of any kind has ever been produced to substantiate it, and the story has been repeatedly edited on the Guardian website to introduce further qualifications and acknowledgments of dubious attribution, not present as originally published. But still neither Editor Katherine Viner nor author Luke Harding has either retracted or apologised, something which calls the fundamental honesty of both into question.

Manafort is now in prison, because as with many others interviewed, the Mueller investigation found he had been involved in several incidences of wrongdoing. Right up until Mueller finalised his report, media articles and broadcasts repeatedly, again and again and again every single day, presented these convictions as proving that there had been collusion with Russia. The media very seldom pointed out that none of the convictions related to collusion. In fact for the most part they related to totally extraneous events, like unrelated tax frauds or Trump's hush-money to (very All-American) prostitutes. The "Russians" that Manafort was convicted of lobbying for without declaration, were Ukrainian and the offences occurred ten years ago and had no connection to Trump of any kind. Rather similarly the lies of which Roger Stone stands accused relate to his invention, for personal gain, of a non-existent relationship with Wikileaks.

The truth is that, if proper and detailed investigation were done into any group of wealthy politicos in Washington, numerous crimes would be uncovered, especially in the fields of tax and lobbying. Rich political operatives are very sleazy. This is hardly news, and if those around Clinton had been investigated there would be just as many convictions and of similar kinds. it is a pity there is not more of this type of work, all the time. But the Russophobic motive behind the Mueller Inquiry was not forwarded by any of the evidence obtained.

My analysis of the Steele dossier, written before I was aware that Sergei Skripal probably had a hand in it, has stood the test of time very well. It is a confection of fantasy concocted for money by a charlatan.

We should not forget at this stage to mention the unfortunate political prisoner Maria Butina, whose offence is to be Russian and very marginally involved in American politics at the moment when there was a massive witchhunt for Russian spies in progress, that makes The Crucible look like a study in calm rationality. Ms Butina was attempting to make her way in the US political world, no doubt, and she had at least one patron in Moscow who was assisting her with a view to increasing their own political influence. But nothing Butina did was covert or sinister. Her efforts to win favour within the NRA were notable chiefly because of the irony that the NRA has been historically responsible for many more American deaths than Russia.

Any narrative of which the Establishment does not approve is decried as conspiracy theory. Yet the "Russiagate" conspiracy theory – which truly is Fake News – has been promoted massively by the entire weight of western corporate and state media. "Russiagate", a breathtaking plot in which Russia and a high profile US TV personality collude together to take control of the most militarily powerful country in the world, knocks "The Manchurian Candidate" into a cocked hat. A Google "news search" restricts results to mainstream media outlets. Such a search for the term "Russiagate" brings 230,000 results. That is almost a quarter of a million incidents of the mainstream media not only reporting the fake "Russiagate" story, but specifically using that term to describe it.

Compare that with a story which is not an outlandish fake conspiracy theory, but a very real conspiracy.

If, by contrast, you do a Google "news search" for the term "Integrity Initiative", the UK government's covert multi million pound programme to pay senior mainstream media journalists to pump out anti-Russian propaganda worldwide, you only get one eighth of the results you get for "Russiagate". Because the mainstream media have been enthusiastically promoting the fake conspiracy story, and deliberately suppressing the very real conspiracy in which many of their own luminaries are personally implicated.

... ... ...

Furthermore – and this is a truly tremendous irony, which relates back to the cartoon at the start – only two of the top ten news results for "Integrity Initiative" come from the Western corporate media.

And this next fact comes nearly into the "too good to be true" category for my argument. Those two MSM mentions, from Sky News and the Guardian, do not complain of the covert anti-Russian propaganda campaign that is the Integrity Initiative. They rather complain that it was an alleged "Russian hack" that made the wrongdoing public!! You could not make it up, you really could not.

According to the mainstream media, it is not Hillary Clinton's fault for conspiring with the DNC to cheat Bernie out of the nomination, it is Russia's fault for allegedly helping to reveal it. It is not the British government's, or their media collaborators', fault for running a covert propaganda scheme to dupe the public of the UK and many other countries, it is the Russians' fault for allegedly helping to reveal it!

Which brings us full circle to the DNC leak that sparked Muellergate and the claims that it was the Russians who lost Hillary the election. Robert Mueller repeats the assertion from the US security services that it was Russian hackers who obtained the DNC emails and passed them on to Wikileaks. I am telling you from my personal knowledge that this is not true.

Neither Mueller's team, not the FBI, nor the NSA, nor any US Intelligence agency, has ever carried out any forensic analysis on the DNC's servers. The DNC consistently refused to make them available. The allegation against Russia is based purely on information from the DNC's own consultants, Crowdstrike.

William Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA (America's US$40 billion a year communications intercept organisation), has proven beyond argument that it is a technical impossibility for the DNC emails to have been transmitted by an external hack – they were rather downloaded locally, probably on to a memory stick. Binney's analysis is fully endorsed by former NSA systems expert Ed Loomis. There simply are no two people on the planet more technically qualified to make this judgement. Yet, astonishingly, Mueller refused to call Binney or Loomis (or me) to testify. Compare this, for example, with his calling to testify my friend Randy Credico, who had no involvement whatsoever in the matter, but Mueller's team hoped to finger as a Trump/Assange link.

The DNC servers have never been examined by intelligence agencies, law enforcement or by Mueller's team. Binney and Loomis have written that it is impossible this was an external hack. Wikileaks have consistently stressed no state actor was involved. No evidence whatsoever has been produced of the transfer of the material from the "Russians" to Wikileaks. Wikileaks Vault 7 release of CIA documents shows that the planting of false Russian hacking "fingerprints" is an established CIA practice . Yet none of this is reflected at all by Mueller nor by the mainstream media.

"Collusion" may be dead, but the "Russiagate" false narrative limps on.

I should add it seems to me very probable Russia did make some efforts to influence the US election. I worked a a British diplomat for 20 years and spent a lot of time trying to influence political outcomes in the country in which I was posted, in Eastern Europe and in Africa. It is part of the geopolitical game. The United States is of course the world leader by a long way in attempting to influence elections abroad, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to that effect in countries including Ukraine, Georgia, Ecuador and Venezuela recently, and pretty well everywhere in Africa. It is a part of normal diplomatic life.

Mueller uncovered some high level influence-broking meetings. This is what states do. He uncovered some sleazy deals. This is what rich people do. He uncovered some US $110,000 of Facebook ad spending from Russia targeted on the USA, some of which promoted sex toys, some of which was post-election, but some of which was apparently trying to assist Trump against Clinton. Compared to the amount the USA pumps into similar arms length assistance to Putin opponents in Russia alone, it was negligible. That this tiny bit of Facebook advertising crucially impacted the US $13,000,000,000 PR campaigns of the candidates is a ludicrous proposition.

That every country stay out of every other country's politics is arguably desirable. It is not however the status quo, and the United States is in the worst position of all to complain.

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*This article was originally published on craigmurray blog.

[May 10, 2019] Neoliberal pressititutes can not scream "Mexican scum" or "Chinese scum" or "Indian scum." Russian bigotry is, is the only "politially correct" bigotry among the neoliberal media

May 10, 2019 | ahtribune.com

Stop fear-mongering and engaging in "acceptable" bigotry. -- Jimmy Dore , comedian, host of the Jimmy Dore Show

When Keith Olbermann pounded his fist on his table, screaming, "SCUM! RUSSIAN SCUM!!!" I couldn't help but thinking, that's the only nationality he could insert there and get away with it. He couldn't scream "Mexican scum" or "Chinese scum" or "Indian scum." Russian bigotry is, I think, the only acceptable bigotry among the liberal media. Totally acceptable to the liberal media.

Rachel Maddow telling her audience in the middle of a polar vortex that Russia controls their power grid and could freeze them all to death at a moment's notice was by far the most egregious example of fear-mongering. But that's not the only bad thing the media's done. They're currently pushing regime-change wars in Syria and Venezuela.

The corporate news will never regain my trust or redeem itself, because they are owned and funded by the people they're supposed to be investigating and exposing, like the richest man in the world, for instance, Jeff Bezos. He controls 51 percent of all the internet sales in the United States, sits on a Pentagon board and has a $600 million deal with the CIA. That's the guy running the news!

[May 10, 2019] The Russian Menace has been a very lucrative racket for the caste of Imperial Servants and MIC -- paying the mortgages, car loans, kids' college tuitions, for thousands of think-tankers, military contractors, academics and journalists

May 10, 2019 | ahtribune.com

Stop spreading Russophobic paranoia. -- Yasha Levine , journalist, S.H.A.M.E. Project

The thing is that America's media obsession with the Russian menace -- this idea that Russia is the greatest threat to liberal civilization -- predates the Mueller investigation. It predates the 2016 election, and it predates Trump. So this wasn't a sudden mistake about a single investigation, but something that America's been moving towards for over a decade. The Russian Menace has been a lucrative racket -- paying the mortgages, car loans, kids' college tuitions, for thousands of think-tankers, military contractors, academics and journalists.

After Trump, the Russia hysteria hit a new level of paranoia and bigotry. There was a need to blame America's domestic political turmoil, and the failure of its political establishment, on someone or something -- to deflect responsibility for what happened. So suddenly liberal media began to see "the Russians" everywhere -- part of a shadowy foreign conspiracy to undermine America from within.

They weren't just threatening Europe and NATO. They were in the White House, in American voting machines, in American electrical grids, in American children's cartoons. They were hacking people's minds. They were controlling both the international left and the international right -- against the respectable political center. That's how sneaky and devious and cynical they are. That's how much they want to destroy America's liberal democracy.

The Mueller report may provide us some much-needed respite from this insanity for a few weeks or months, but this focus on the Russian menace isn't going away any time soon. You can already see Joe Biden's creepy behavior with women being blamed on a devious Russian plot to help elect Bernie. So as we get closer to the election, this kind of stuff is gonna fire up again big time.

To treat this issue as a media problem that we "can solve" and "get right" in the future is a bit too optimistic, in my opinion. It assumes that our political and media establishment wants to actually "get it right." What does getting it right mean, when they are the problem that needs to be corrected? To "get it right," they'd have to admit that they've been wrong -- not just about Mueller, but about the decades of bankrupt neoliberal politics they've been complicit in pushing on America and around the world. To get it right, our political and media elite would have to voluntarily deplatform itself. And I don't see that happening anytime soon.

4. Talk to people with an actual understanding of history and Russia, not fake experts and uninformed pundits.
-- Carl Beijer , writer

It's remarkable how often the problems of Russiagate coverage came down to simple ignorance. From references to Russia as a "Communist" nation to basic translation errors, we've seen prominent pundits make mistakes that would embarrass a grade-school Muscovite.

This was in part a problem of people exaggerating their own credentials, but it was also a problem of the media deciding that no real expertise was needed. I don't want to call for academic entry exams, but I think it's clear that the media needs to move in the direction of treating Russian studies as a field of knowledge like any other. Do you speak the language? Have you spent more than a few weeks in the country? What and where have you published? Do you have a directly relevant professional background?

There are so many people who could give extraordinary answers to all of these questions, so it says everything about Russiagate when you look at who we heard from instead. From overt operatives to media hacks, corporate news is now overrun by pundits who function as PR professionals for the major parties. All of their professional and social incentives compel them to carry water for their party; if they happen to be right about a given issue, it's purely by accident.

And with Russiagate, we saw the worst-case scenario play out: Republicans, who will defend Trump over anything, ended up being right -- while Democrats, desperate to believe they had caught him in an impeachable crime, got it wrong. The only way around this problem, as far as I can tell, is to talk to pundits who are acting against their own political interests.

In this case, there were plenty of people in liberal-left media who clearly want to see Trump fail, but who were nevertheless Russiagate skeptics. Some of those voices were just being contrarians, of course, but some of them were acting from a place of conviction.

5. Don't manipulate the truth to justify war. -- Rania Khalek , journalist, host of In the Now

From the start, we were warning people that pushing this evidence-free conspiracy theory was ultimately going to empower Trump. But even worse, it actually made the world a more dangerous place. In order to prove he wasn't in bed with the Russians, the Trump administration pushed some of the most anti-Russia policies in the post Cold War-era, moving us closer to nuclear war and increasing the likelihood of more violence in places like Syria, Venezuela and Ukraine, all to prove that Trump isn't Putin's puppet.

This entire affair has also resurrected the careers of the neocons, who, until Trump came along, were largely disgraced for the horrors they inflicted on Iraq. Now they've been embraced by liberals for being anti-Trump, and they have more influence than ever. Not to mention the new McCarthyism that frames everything, from the NRA to white nationalism to even progressive advocacy groups that challenge the Democratic Party, as agents of the Kremlin, distorting everyone's understanding of what's going on today.

The Russiagate narrative has been a disaster, and it's going to continue to be a disaster, because, despite being proven to be a sham, the corporate media and the corporate Democrats are still pushing it, distracting everyone from the real reasons for our miserable status quo.

[May 09, 2019] James Comey Donald Trump indictment possible after presidency by Victor Morton

May 09, 2019 | m.washingtontimes.com

- The Washington Times
Updated: 8:38 p.m. on Thursday, May 9, 2019

Former FBI director James Comey said Thursday that he thinks President Trump likely has committed crimes that could be cause for indictment once he leaves office and, were he not president, likely would already have been.

In a CNN town-hall-style meeting, Mr. Comey was asked by host Anderson Cooper whether Mr. Trump acted with corrupt intent to interfere with an ongoing investigation.

"It sure looks that way," Mr. Comey replied, saying he based that judgment on his reading of special counsel Robert Mueller's report and leaning most heavily on Mr. Trump's order to White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire Mr. Mueller.

[May 09, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard just pushed back on the Harris/Hirono war on the K of C.

May 09, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

DobermanBoston January 9, 2019 at 1:22 pm

FYI Tulsi Gabbard just pushed back on the Harris/Hirono war on the K of C.

http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2019/01/09/tensions-rise-between-hawaiis-congressional-leaders-over-religious-bigotry-comments/

[May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program. ..."
"... One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely. ..."
"... I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. ..."
"... Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant. ..."
"... That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, ..."
"... Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ..."
"... Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking " ..."
"... I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported. ..."
"... Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive: ..."
"... I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government? ..."
"... Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution. ..."
"... Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front. ..."
"... So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal. ..."
May 08, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Do not focus on July 2016 as the so-called start of the counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump. That is a lie. We know, thanks to the work of Judicial Watch, that the FBI had signed up Christopher Steele as a Confidential Human Source (aka CHS) by February of 2016. It is incumbent on Attorney General Barr to examine the contact reports filed by Steele's FBI handler (those reports are known as FD-1023s). He also, as I have noted in a previous post, needs to look at the FD-1023s for Felix Sater and Henry Greenberg. But these will only tell a small part of the story. There is a massive intelligence side to this story.

The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.

One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely.

This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel and the people they were communicating with overseas. You don't have to have access to intelligence information to understand this. For example, you simply have to ask the question, "how did George Papadopoulos get on the radar." I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. We also know that Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann), initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow. Don't take my word for it, that's what Robert Mueller reported:

In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).

Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant.

By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign Manager John Podesta's email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:

" That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, " Budowski replies, later adding: " Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ."

The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway. This was more the opposition research. This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets-- Hakluyt: there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against Donald Trump.

Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co. , founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations pay huge sums. . . .

Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking "

I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported.

Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive:

But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.

His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.

Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain--there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

Posted at 05:33 AM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink | Comments (9)

turcopolier , 07 May 2019 at 09:53 AM

Having watched interviews of Papadopoulos on TeeVee I would say that this creature would be easy to manipulate. His ego is so enormous that a minimal effort would be required.
blue peacock said in reply to turcopolier ... , 07 May 2019 at 11:19 AM
Col. Lang

I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government?

David Habakkuk -> blue peacock... , 07 May 2019 at 01:31 PM
bp,

The guts of the matter was well expressed by Judge T.S. Ellis when he made the distinction between different results which can be expected from exerting pressures on witnesses: they may 'sing' - which is, commonly, in the interests of justice - but, there again, they may 'compose', which is not.

Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution.

Alcatraz, perhaps?

blue peacock said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 08 May 2019 at 12:17 AM
David,

Yes, indeed, many a composition have been elicited by prosecutors in criminal cases. The issue is there is no penalty for prosecutorial misconduct while the advancement points ratchet up with each conviction. The incentives are aligned perfectly for the "institution" to run rough shod on ordinary Americans. Only those wealthy enough to fight the unlimited funds of the government have a chance. But of course in matters relating to national security there is the added twist of state secrets that protects government malfeasance.

I don't know how the national security state we continue to build ever gets rolled back. A small victory would be for Trump to declassify all documents and communications relating to the multifaceted spying on his campaign and as Larry so eloquently writes to frame him as a Manchurian Candidate. At least the public will learn about what their grandchildren are paying for. But it seems that Trump prefers tweeting to taking any kind of action. Not that it would matter much as half the country will still believe that Trump deserves it until the tables are turned on their team. While most Americans will say to use Ben Hunt's phrasing Yay! Constitution. Yay! Liberty. they sure don't care as the state oligarchy tighten their chokehold.

https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/

akaPatience -> turcopolier ... , 07 May 2019 at 05:27 PM
Yes, he seems young and ambitious enough to be easy (and willing) prey. Having been involved in some local political campaigns though, I've observed that more and more than before, young people like him are hyper-concerned with networking. Papadopoulos' ego aside, of course he and many people who sign on hope to make self-serving connections. Not only that, it's also been my observation that casual sexual hook-ups go with the territory, and not only among young, single guys like him. I have to say I've been shocked a few times by how risky and cavalier some liaisons have been that've come to my attention, considering "public figures" are involved. No doubt that's why a "honeypot" was dispatched to try to help entrap Papadopoulos.
Rick Merlotti , 07 May 2019 at 12:14 PM
Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front.
O'Shawnessey , 07 May 2019 at 02:44 PM
So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal.
sandra adie , 07 May 2019 at 03:01 PM
Papadopolos was very young hence the nativity getting sucked in. The ego helped for sure. Probably exciting to be part of something important probably for the first time since he started working for Trump campaign
akaPatience , 07 May 2019 at 03:01 PM
One thing that's always concerned me about Larry's informative and insightful essays on these matters is how can we be assured that the IC documentation mentioned has been filled out honestly and accurately -- or that the forms even still exist and haven't been conveniently "lost" or surreptitiously destroyed?

[May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program. ..."
"... One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely. ..."
"... I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. ..."
"... Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant. ..."
"... That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, ..."
"... Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ..."
"... Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking " ..."
"... I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported. ..."
"... Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive: ..."
"... I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government? ..."
"... Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution. ..."
"... Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front. ..."
"... So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal. ..."
May 08, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Do not focus on July 2016 as the so-called start of the counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump. That is a lie. We know, thanks to the work of Judicial Watch, that the FBI had signed up Christopher Steele as a Confidential Human Source (aka CHS) by February of 2016. It is incumbent on Attorney General Barr to examine the contact reports filed by Steele's FBI handler (those reports are known as FD-1023s). He also, as I have noted in a previous post, needs to look at the FD-1023s for Felix Sater and Henry Greenberg. But these will only tell a small part of the story. There is a massive intelligence side to this story.

The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.

One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely.

This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel and the people they were communicating with overseas. You don't have to have access to intelligence information to understand this. For example, you simply have to ask the question, "how did George Papadopoulos get on the radar." I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. We also know that Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann), initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow. Don't take my word for it, that's what Robert Mueller reported:

In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).

Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant.

By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign Manager John Podesta's email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:

" That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, " Budowski replies, later adding: " Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ."

The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway. This was more the opposition research. This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets-- Hakluyt: there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against Donald Trump.

Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co. , founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations pay huge sums. . . .

Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking "

I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported.

Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive:

But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.

His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.

Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain--there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

Posted at 05:33 AM in Larry Johnson , Russiagate | Permalink | Comments (9)

turcopolier , 07 May 2019 at 09:53 AM

Having watched interviews of Papadopoulos on TeeVee I would say that this creature would be easy to manipulate. His ego is so enormous that a minimal effort would be required.
blue peacock said in reply to turcopolier ... , 07 May 2019 at 11:19 AM
Col. Lang

I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government?

David Habakkuk -> blue peacock... , 07 May 2019 at 01:31 PM
bp,

The guts of the matter was well expressed by Judge T.S. Ellis when he made the distinction between different results which can be expected from exerting pressures on witnesses: they may 'sing' - which is, commonly, in the interests of justice - but, there again, they may 'compose', which is not.

Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution.

Alcatraz, perhaps?

blue peacock said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 08 May 2019 at 12:17 AM
David,

Yes, indeed, many a composition have been elicited by prosecutors in criminal cases. The issue is there is no penalty for prosecutorial misconduct while the advancement points ratchet up with each conviction. The incentives are aligned perfectly for the "institution" to run rough shod on ordinary Americans. Only those wealthy enough to fight the unlimited funds of the government have a chance. But of course in matters relating to national security there is the added twist of state secrets that protects government malfeasance.

I don't know how the national security state we continue to build ever gets rolled back. A small victory would be for Trump to declassify all documents and communications relating to the multifaceted spying on his campaign and as Larry so eloquently writes to frame him as a Manchurian Candidate. At least the public will learn about what their grandchildren are paying for. But it seems that Trump prefers tweeting to taking any kind of action. Not that it would matter much as half the country will still believe that Trump deserves it until the tables are turned on their team. While most Americans will say to use Ben Hunt's phrasing Yay! Constitution. Yay! Liberty. they sure don't care as the state oligarchy tighten their chokehold.

https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/

akaPatience -> turcopolier ... , 07 May 2019 at 05:27 PM
Yes, he seems young and ambitious enough to be easy (and willing) prey. Having been involved in some local political campaigns though, I've observed that more and more than before, young people like him are hyper-concerned with networking. Papadopoulos' ego aside, of course he and many people who sign on hope to make self-serving connections. Not only that, it's also been my observation that casual sexual hook-ups go with the territory, and not only among young, single guys like him. I have to say I've been shocked a few times by how risky and cavalier some liaisons have been that've come to my attention, considering "public figures" are involved. No doubt that's why a "honeypot" was dispatched to try to help entrap Papadopoulos.
Rick Merlotti , 07 May 2019 at 12:14 PM
Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front.
O'Shawnessey , 07 May 2019 at 02:44 PM
So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal.
sandra adie , 07 May 2019 at 03:01 PM
Papadopolos was very young hence the nativity getting sucked in. The ego helped for sure. Probably exciting to be part of something important probably for the first time since he started working for Trump campaign
akaPatience , 07 May 2019 at 03:01 PM
One thing that's always concerned me about Larry's informative and insightful essays on these matters is how can we be assured that the IC documentation mentioned has been filled out honestly and accurately -- or that the forms even still exist and haven't been conveniently "lost" or surreptitiously destroyed?

[May 08, 2019] Tulsi said the US basically needs to let Venezuelans handle their own internal political affairs.

May 08, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

John Law Lives , 1 minute ago link

Tulsi Gabbard does have guts. I saw her in a recent interview with Shannon Bream. She said the US basically needs to let Venezuelans handle their own internal political affairs. I agree. She appears to be firmly opposed to US military intervention there.

[May 08, 2019] Huawei Hypocrisy by Craig Murray

Notable quotes:
"... I don't think the US government should use operating systems made in China for the same reason that most governments shouldn't use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them. ..."
"... All the major western tech companies cooperate with the western security services. In Murder in Samarkand I gave the first public revelation that the government can and does listen through your mobile phone microphone even when the phone is ostensibly switched off, a fact that got almost no traction until Edward Snowden released documents confirming it six years later. China is full of western devices with backdoors that are exploited by western intelligence. That the tables turn as Chinese technology advances is scarcely surprising. ..."
May 08, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Craig Murray,

Theresa May almost certainly sacked Gavin Williamson not just on the basis of a telephone billing record showing he had a phone call with a Telegraph journalist, but on the basis of a recording of the conversation itself.

It astonishes me that still, after Snowden and his PRISM revelations, after Wikileaks Vault 7 releases , and after numerous other sources including my own humble contribution, people still manage to avoid the cognitive dissonance that goes with really understanding how much we are surveilled and listened to. Even Cabinet Ministers manage to pretend to themselves it is not happening.

The budget of the NSA, which does nothing else but communications intercept, is US $14.2 billion this year. Think about that enormous sum, devoted to just communications surveillance, and what it can achieve. The budget of the UK equivalent, GCHQ, is £1.2 billion, of which about 10% is paid by the NSA. Domestic surveillance in the UK has been vastly expanded and many taboos broken. But the bedrock of the system with regard to domestic intercepts is still that legal restrictions are dodged, as the USA's NSA spies on UK citizens while the UK's GCHQ spies on US citizens, and then the information is swapped. It was thus probably the NSA that harvested Williamson's phone call, passing the details on. Given official US opposition to the UK employing Huawei technology, Williamson's call would have been a "legitimate" NSA target.

Mass surveillance works on electronic harvesting. Targeted phone numbers apart, millions of essentially random calls are listened to electronically using voice recognition technology and certain key words trigger an escalation of the call. Williamson's call discussing Huawei, China, the intelligence services, and backdoors would certainly have triggered recording and been marked up to a human listener, even if his phone was not specifically targeted by the Americans – which it almost certainly was.

Williamson of course is relying on the security services' secrecy about their methods to maintain his protests of innocence, secure in the knowledge that the recording of him would not be produced. The existence of the recording – of which I am extremely confident – is the only possible explanation for May's degree of certainty and swift action against one of her very few loyal allies.

All of which of course throws into stark relief the stunning hypocrisy of those who are worried that Huawei will be used for electronic eavesdropping, when they are up to their ears in electronic eavesdropping themselves. One of my heroes is the great Richard Stallman, who put it this way six years ago:

RMS: Well, it's perfectly reasonable suspicion to me. I don't think the US government should use operating systems made in China for the same reason that most governments shouldn't use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them.

RSS: I was just going to bring this up exactly, so I was saying that the NSA recently received notifications about the zero-day holes in advance and [incomprehensible] the NSA and the CIA to just crack PCs abroad for espionage purposes.

RMS: Now, [incomprehensible] that this proves my point, which is that you have to be nuts if you were some other country and using Windows on your computers. But, you know, given that Windows has a universal back door in it, Microsoft would hardly need to tell the NSA about any bugs, it can tell the NSA about the mal-feature of the universal back door and that would be enough for the NSA to attack any computer running Windows, which unfortunately is a large fraction of them.

All the major western tech companies cooperate with the western security services. In Murder in Samarkand I gave the first public revelation that the government can and does listen through your mobile phone microphone even when the phone is ostensibly switched off, a fact that got almost no traction until Edward Snowden released documents confirming it six years later. China is full of western devices with backdoors that are exploited by western intelligence. That the tables turn as Chinese technology advances is scarcely surprising.

Personally I do not want the Chinese, Americans, Russians or British eavesdropping on me, or on each other, and I wish that they would stop. The spy games will of course continue, as they make money for a lot of well-connected people. But for any side to claim moral superiority in all of this is just nonsense.

* * *

Subscriptions to keep Craig Murray's blog going, gratefully received .

[May 08, 2019] It is the ultimate irony that how the old Soviet Union's judiciary used to function is now becoming standing operating procedure in the United States

Notable quotes:
"... Why are Chalupa and Podesta not in prison? ..."
"... Our courts are totally corrupt. There's a prosecutor/FBI/judge cabal which convicts 98+% of its victims at trials. ..."
"... They lie to be promoted. ..."
"... "the FBI will be watching you." 'In America, FBI watch everyone.' ..."
May 08, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

gcjohns1971 , 8 months ago link

"It is the ultimate irony that how the old Soviet Union's judiciary used to function is now becoming standing operating procedure in the United States."

When you consider how many of today's Democrat luminaries were self described as dedicated Communists in the 60's, 70's, and 80's it is not surprising at all.

mc888 , 8 months ago link

Why are Chalupa and Podesta not in prison?

SergeA.Storms , 8 months ago link

If, the information in this article is true, I feel bad for this young lady getting hemmed up in international shenanigans.

If a person loves her country (her home), wants the opportunity for fellow citizens to be free with a right to bare arms, and seeks out the assistance of the USA both as a model for having the 2nd Amendment, and an organization that leads in advocating for personal firearms ownership, the NRA, how is she committing any crime? She should not be locked up for pursuing God given, inalienable rights for her fellow countrymen. She should be encouraged and sponsored by Pro2A groups and manufacturers. Again, if the information as presented is true.

dday1944 , 8 months ago link

Thank you DOJ. There's no need for guns in Russia. These people intoxicated by the alcohol and hard drugs will kill one another by the thousands. I feel for Masha Butina, but as far away she is from Russia, as better for this poor country. Luckily she is in US and even better in prison. Thank you Russophobes, warmongers and sheep that neocons will send to the slaughterhouse, you can not do any better.

Reaper , 8 months ago link

Our courts are totally corrupt. There's a prosecutor/FBI/judge cabal which convicts 98+% of its victims at trials. The excessive long sentences are used to convince the large majority unable to afford a slightly possible defense to bargain a plea. The Exceptional morons selected for juries think, why would the FBI lie. They lie to be promoted. What do you think happens to an agent whose testimony aids the defense?

Kangaroo courts would be more honest in their convictions.

ToSoft4Truth , 8 months ago link

"the FBI will be watching you." 'In America, FBI watch everyone.'

Herdee , 8 months ago link

The Russians are coming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bReGtDxF1Oo

WW_II , 8 months ago link

"Why is Maria Butina in prison?"

https://garygindler.com/2018/08/05/why-is-maria-butina-in-prison

bh2 , 8 months ago link

"a plausible case for an indictment"

If a case is merely "plausible", that's not enough to indict.

Based on that thread-bare criterion, the FBI could probably come up with "plausible" cause to indict half the US population for something or other. Never mind Russians, all of whom might "plausibly" be suspected as secret agents for the Kremlin because they know other Russians.

This is absurd.

navy62802 , 8 months ago link

The true criminals are attempting to cover their tracks through diversion. The magnitude of the scheme they are executing now is commensurate with the magnitude of their own crimes against the United States.

IridiumRebel , 8 months ago link

I swear these stories are pushed for social media consumption so my faggy lib "friends" can bitch.

SergeA.Storms , 8 months ago link

I agree, it was much more scary in the 80's hiding under our desks at school and learning each week how many times one country could blow up the world, multiple times over. Now, so many people around the world call ********, not because MAD doesn't exist, but everyone realized no matter the quality of your bunker and fortitude of cement, those things only mean you die slower than those outside near the big flash. Hypersonic weapons seem like a step backwards in the whole 'my missile is bigger than your missile' game of Coldwar 2.0.

tmosley , 8 months ago link

Extremely important information there.

McCarthy did nothing wrong.

Yog Soggoth , 8 months ago link

Exactly, he was anti Bolshevik. There was an active campaign against a strong America.

MozartIII , 8 months ago link

McCarthy was right! I do my homework!! The fuckers are still in our government!!!

[May 08, 2019] America's Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think

May 08, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

America's Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think

by Tyler Durden Tue, 05/07/2019 - 18:50 3 SHARES Authored by William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger via TomDispatch.com,

Each year, Congress approves hundreds of billions of dollars for the US defense budget... but the real number exceeds $1 trillion.

In its latest budget request, the Trump administration is asking for a near-record $750 billion for the Pentagon and related defense activities -- an astonishing figure by any measure. If passed by Congress, it will be one of the largest military budgets in American history, topping peak levels reached during the Korean and Vietnam wars. And keep one thing in mind: That $750 billion represents only part of the actual annual cost of our national security state.

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There are at least 10 separate pots of money dedicated to fighting wars, preparing for yet more wars, and dealing with the consequences of wars already fought. So the next time a president , a general , a secretary of defense , or a hawkish member of Congress insists that the US military is woefully underfunded, think twice. A careful look at US defense expenditures offers a healthy corrective to such wildly inaccurate claims.

Now, let's take a brief dollar-by-dollar tour of the US national security state of 2019, tallying the sums as we go, and see just where we finally land (or perhaps the word should be "soar"), financially speaking.

The Pentagon's base budget: The Pentagon's regular, or base, budget is slated to be $544.5 billion in fiscal year 2020 -- a healthy sum but only a modest down payment on total military spending.

As you might imagine, that base budget provides basic operating funds for the Department of Defense, much of which will be squandered on preparations for ongoing wars never authorized by Congress, overpriced weapons systems that aren't actually needed, or outright waste, an expansive category that includes everything from cost overruns to unnecessary bureaucracy. That $544.5 billion is the amount publicly reported by the Pentagon for its essential expenses and includes $9.6 billion in mandatory spending that goes toward items like military retirement.

https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4855

Among those basic expenses, let's start with waste, a category even the biggest boosters of Pentagon spending can't defend. The Pentagon's own Defense Business Board found that cutting unnecessary overhead, including a bloated bureaucracy and a startlingly large shadow workforce of private contractors, would save $125 billion over five years. Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that the board's proposal has done little to quiet calls for more money. Instead, from the highest reaches of the Pentagon (and the president himself) came a proposal to create a Space Force, a sixth military service that's all but guaranteed to further bloat its bureaucracy and duplicate work being done by the other services. Even Pentagon planners estimate that the future Space Force will cost $13 billion over the next five years (and that's undoubtedly a low-ball figure).

In addition, the Defense Department employs an army of private contractors -- more than 600,000 of them -- many doing jobs that could be done far more cheaply by civilian government employees. Cutting the private contractor work force by 15 percent to a mere half-million people would promptly save more than $20 billion per year . And don't forget the cost overruns on major weapons programs like the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent -- the Pentagon's unwieldy name for the Air Force's new intercontinental ballistic missile -- and routine overpayments for even minor spare parts (like $8,000 for a helicopter gear worth less than $500 -- a markup of 1,500 percent).

Then there are the overpriced weapons systems the military can't even afford to operate, like a $13 billion aircraft carrier, 200 nuclear bombers at $564 million a pop, and the F-35 combat aircraft, the most expensive weapons system in history, at a price tag of at least $1.4 trillion over the lifetime of the program. The Project on Government Oversight has found -- and the Government Accountability Office recently substantiated -- that, despite years of work and staggering costs, the F-35 may never perform as advertised.

And don't forget the Pentagon's recent push for long-range strike weapons and new reconnaissance systems designed for future wars with a nuclear-armed Russia or China, the kind of conflicts that could easily escalate into World War III, in which such weaponry would be beside the point. Imagine if any of that money were devoted to figuring out how to prevent such conflicts rather than hatching yet more schemes for how to fight them.

BASE BUDGET TOTAL: $554.1 BILLION

The war budget: As if its regular budget weren't enough, the Pentagon also maintains its very own slush fund, formally known as the Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO. In theory, the fund is meant to pay for the War on Terrorism -- that is, the US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere across the Middle East and Africa. In practice, it does that and so much more.

After a fight over shutting down the government led to the formation of a bipartisan commission on deficit reduction -- known as Simpson-Bowles after its co-chairs, former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican senator Alan Simpson -- Congress passed the Budget Control Act of 2011. It put caps on both military and domestic spending that were supposed to save a total of $2 trillion over 10 years. Half that figure was to come from the Pentagon, as well as from nuclear-weapons spending at the Department of Energy. As it happened, though, there was a huge loophole: The war budget was exempt from the caps. The Pentagon promptly began to put tens of billions of dollars into it for pet projects that had nothing whatsoever to do with current wars (and the process has not stopped). The level of abuse of this fund remained largely secret for years, with the Pentagon admitting only in 2016 that just half the money in the OCO went to actual wars, prompting critics and numerous members of Congress -- including then-Representative Mick Mulvaney, now President Donald Trump's latest chief of staff -- to dub it a "slush fund."

This year's budget proposal supersizes the slush in that fund to a figure that would likely be considered absurd if it weren't part of the Pentagon budget. Of the nearly $174 billion proposed for the war budget and "emergency" funding, only a little more than $25 billion is meant to directly pay for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. The rest will be set aside for what's termed enduring activities that would continue even if those wars ended or for routine Pentagon activities that couldn't be funded within the constraints of the budget caps. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is expected to work to alter this arrangement. Even if the House leadership has its way, however, most of its reductions in the war budget would be offset by lifting caps on the regular Pentagon budget by corresponding amounts. (It's worth noting that Trump's budget calls for someday eliminating the slush fund.)

The 2020 OCO also includes $9.2 billion in "emergency" spending for building Trump's beloved wall on the US-Mexico border, among other things. Talk about a slush fund! There is no emergency, of course. The executive branch is just seizing taxpayer dollars that Congress refused to provide. Even supporters of the president's wall should be troubled by this money grab. As 36 former Republican members of Congress recently argued , "What powers are ceded to a president whose policies you support may also be used by presidents whose policies you abhor." Of all of Trump's "security"-related proposals, this is undoubtedly the most likely to be eliminated or at least scaled back, given the congressional Democrats against it.

WAR BUDGET TOTAL: $173.8 BILLION

Running tally: $727.9 billion

The Department of Energy/nuclear budget: It may surprise you to know that work on the deadliest weapons in the US arsenal, nuclear warheads, is housed in the Department of Energy, not the Pentagon. The DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration runs a nationwide research, development, and production network for nuclear warheads and naval nuclear reactors that stretches from Livermore, California, to Albuquerque and Los Alamos, New Mexico, to Kansas City, Missouri, to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Savannah River, South Carolina. Its laboratories also have a long history of program mismanagement, with some projects coming in at nearly eight times their initial estimates.

NUCLEAR BUDGET TOTAL: $24.8 BILLION

Running tally: $752.7 billion

Defense-related activities: This category covers the $9 billion that annually goes to agencies other than the Pentagon -- the bulk of it to the FBI for homeland-security-related activities.

DEFENSE-RELATED ACTIVITIES TOTAL: $9 BILLION

Running tally: $761.7 billion

The five categories above make up the budget of what's officially known as national defense. Under the Budget Control Act, this spending should have been capped at $630 billion. The $761.7 billion proposed for the 2020 budget is, however, only the beginning of the story.

The Veterans Affairs budget: The wars of this century have resulted in a new generation of veterans. In all, over 2.7 million US military personnel have cycled through the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Many of them remain in need of substantial support to deal with the physical and mental wounds of war. As a result, the budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs has gone through the roof, more than tripling in this century to a proposed $216 billion . And this massive figure may not even be enough to provide the necessary services.

\More than 6,900 US military personnel have died in Washington's post-9/11 wars, with more than 30,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan alone. These casualties are, however, just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of thousands of returning troops suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, illnesses created by exposure to toxic burn pits, or traumatic brain injuries. The US government is committed to providing care for these veterans for the rest of their lives. An analysis by the Costs of War Project at Brown University determined that obligations to veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will total more than $1 trillion in the years to come. This cost of war is rarely considered when leaders in Washington decide to send US troops into combat.

VETERANS AFFAIRS TOTAL: $216 BILLION

Running tally: $977.7 billion

The Homeland Security budget: The Department of Homeland Security is a mega-agency created after the 9/11 attacks. At the time, it swallowed 22 existing government organizations, creating a massive department that currently has nearly a quarter of a million employees. Agencies that are now part of the DHS include the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Secret Service, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, and the Office of Intelligence and Analysis.

While some of the DHS's activities -- such as airport security and defense against the smuggling of a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb into our midst -- have a clear security rationale, many others do not. ICE -- America's deportation force -- has done far more to cause suffering among innocent people than to thwart criminals or terrorists. Other questionable DHS activities include grants to local law enforcement agencies to help them buy military-grade equipment.

HOMELAND SECURITY TOTAL: $69.2 BILLION

Running tally: $1.0469 trillion

The international-affairs budget: This includes the budgets of the State Department and the US Agency for International Development. Diplomacy is one of the most effective ways to make the United States and the world more secure, but it has been under assault in the Trump years. The Fiscal Year 2020 budget calls for a one-third cut in international affairs spending, leaving it at about one-fifteenth of the amount allocated for the Pentagon and related agencies grouped under the category of national defense. And that doesn't even account for the fact that more than 10 percent of the international affairs budget supports military aid efforts, most notably the $5.4 billion Foreign Military Financing program. The bulk of FMF goes to Israel and Egypt, but in all over a dozen countries receive funding under it, including Jordan, Lebanon, Djibouti, Tunisia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS TOTAL: $51 BILLION

Running tally: $1.0979 trillion

The intelligence budget: The United States has 17 intelligence agencies. In addition to the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis and the FBI, mentioned above, they are the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Drug Enforcement Agency's Office of National Security Intelligence, the Treasury Department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, the Office of Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence, Coast Guard Intelligence, and Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. And then there's that 17th one, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, set up to coordinate the activities of the other 16.

We know remarkably little about the nature of the nation's intelligence spending, other than its supposed total, released in a report every year. By now, it's more than $80 billion . The bulk of this funding, including for the CIA and NSA, is believed to be hidden under obscure line items in the Pentagon budget. Since intelligence spending is not a separate funding stream, it's not counted in our tally below (though, for all we know, some of it should be).

INTELLIGENCE BUDGET TOTAL: $80 BILLION

Running tally: $1.0979 trillion

Defense share of interest on the national debt: The interest on the national debt is well on its way to becoming one of the most expensive items in the federal budget. Within a decade, it is projected to exceed the Pentagon's regular budget in size. For now, of the more than $500 billion in interest taxpayers fork over to service the government's debt each year, about $156 billion can be attributed to Pentagon spending.

DEFENSE SHARE OF NATIONAL DEBT TOTAL: $156.3 BILLION

Final tally: $1.2542 trillion

So our final annual tally for war, preparations for war, and the impact of war comes to more than $1.25 trillion, more than double the Pentagon's base budget. If the average taxpayer were aware that this amount was being spent in the name of national defense -- with much of it wasted, misguided, or simply counterproductive -- it might be far harder for the national security state to consume ever-growing sums with minimal public pushback. For now, however, the gravy train is running full speed ahead, and its main beneficiaries -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing , Northrop Grumman, and their cohort -- are laughing all the way to the bank.

[May 08, 2019] Tulsi is coming back to California she will be in Malibu May 12 and Santa Monica May 13

May 08, 2019 | www.youtube.com

dobsonimages , 2 hours ago

Tulsi is coming back to California she will be in Malibu May 12 and Santa Monica May 13

Don Angel , 2 hours ago

Ol' Lunch box Joe- standing up for the working class

Leo leo , 1 hour ago (edited)

Yes Biden plsease do the moral thing and endorse TULSI Gabbard for president. TULSI 2020 !!

Joerg Meyer , 2 hours ago (edited)

Crock Bidens dignity and morality in Ukraine is vast, yes?

cornelius1241 , 53 minutes ago

Joe Biden's new nickname: The Human Parking Ticket.

Kevin Quinn , 1 hour ago

It's going too be Biden because that's who the globalists want I hope the Democrats get wiped out they deserve too be

[May 08, 2019] CNN Looks Humiliated On Russiagate While Backpedaling

Notable quotes:
"... The Jimi Dore show is what the Daily Show used to be. ..."
"... NYTimes and Washington Post won the Pulitzer prizes for "thorough coverage" of 2016 Russia collusion  ..."
"... The xenophobia towards Russia is higher than during the cold war. It's embarrassing imo. ..."
"... 14:52 Russian Troll farm: spends 15k on adds America: We lost the war we are no longer a sovereign nation ..."
"... Russiagate distracts from the very real Israelgate. #BDS ..."
"... so alex jones got banned from all platforms for being a conspiracy theorist while the MSM were pushing one for two years?! wow ..."
"... Pretty sure psychopaths will not feel embarrassment or humiliation, only rage and vengeance. ..."
"... CNN is actually a cult and It has a following. ..."
"... The funny thing about Dems claiming Trump wouldn't accept the result of the election - Cohen testified to Congress that Trump actually expected to lose and was running as a PR stunt. ..."
"... Keith Olbermann is Grandpa Maddow ..."
"... If somebody in power is after you, the feds will indict a ham sandwich... ..."
"... I kinda figured out myself that this Russia Gate was a load of lies and/or wishful thinking. Jimmy and his guests showed me that i wasn't wrong of nuts even. Thanks Jimmy, for hooking me up. ..."
"... We've known all along this has been a coup. This is not news to the informed. ..."
"... The Soviet Union moved from Russia, to the ruling class of DC and NYC. ..."
May 08, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Doctor Detroit , 1 month ago (edited)

CNN had Avanetti on 200 times last year. Let that sink in.

lordjohnson48 , 1 month ago

The Jimi Dore show is what the Daily Show used to be.

Vladimir Surkov , 1 month ago

MSM digging their own grave, thinking they're digging Trump's. All I have to say is DIG DEEPER!

Maros Bruno , 1 month ago (edited)

NYTimes and Washington Post won the Pulitzer prizes for "thorough coverage" of 2016 Russia collusion 

Mark Carlson , 1 month ago (edited)

The xenophobia towards Russia is higher than during the cold war. It's embarrassing imo.

William King , 1 month ago

Jimmy and Aaron, two great guys who had the integrity to tell the truth. Thanks for those of us who want more justice, equality and peace.

Andrew Wright , 1 month ago

Didn't AIPAC long ago end USA's sovereignty?

Oh! Mama! , 1 month ago

Just bought my Pencil neck Schiff T shirt~ thanks for exposing all the left wing globalist lies Jimmy! TRUMP 2020~

Christopher Bradley , 1 month ago

That Olberman clip is astounding. They're right, it needs to be enshrined (and also played in classrooms) as yellow journalism and propaganda.

John Moran , 1 month ago

Glenn Greenwald absolutely destroyed Russia'gater David Cay Johnston on Democracy Now today. It was brutal.

Mr Nice , 1 month ago

14:52 Russian Troll farm: spends 15k on adds America: We lost the war we are no longer a sovereign nation

Herr Kartoffelkopf , 1 month ago (edited)

I can't stand Jimmys political views but respect his honesty and delivery. Fukface!😂😁😀😂😆🎯🖒

John E , 1 month ago

I urge Aaron Mate to write the definitive book on ' 'The Russiagate Conspiracy' ' – he has been an outstanding journalist.

skyson b pei , 1 month ago

Russiagate distracts from the very real Israelgate. #BDS

Larry K , 1 month ago

Hey Keith Olbermann could go on Saturday Night Live and play a great Chuck Schumer

James James , 1 month ago

The saddest/greatest part. They are ALL complicit in handing their most hated person the 2020 election. Lulz.

Dwayne Coy , 1 month ago

Jimmy Dore, always on top of the story and has been right for over two years.

Tim Martineau , 1 day ago

Hyperbole on American media? When did this start, Jimmy?

ROXEY , 1 month ago

Flynn plead Guilty because they threatened his son and he was going bankrupt and had to sell his house.

Cambodia Joe , 1 month ago

Aaron Matte and Tulsi Gabbard should give "How to be calm" workshops.

Miles Curtin , 1 month ago

"Grown up people on news shows who sound dumber than I do drunk and high!" Can't make that stuff up.....keep up the great work Jimmy!!!! 👍

Jonathan Hill , 1 month ago

Don't be surprised if the establishment tries to blame progressives for their failure

OG Johnson , 1 month ago

But Jimmy CNN Stands for Clinton News NETWORK so that means they're honest right? LoL 😂

Mikevdog , 3 days ago

But they WANTED it to be true so they have to believe it into existence.

Jeremiah Aspy , 1 month ago

Jimmy is the most rational Democrat in the media. I don't agree on alot of his views but at least I can understand where he's coming from.

Major Major , 3 days ago

CNN really should be dismantled, and those who intentionally betrayed the American people charged as traitors.

Alexander Aronov , 1 month ago

so alex jones got banned from all platforms for being a conspiracy theorist while the MSM were pushing one for two years?! wow

Rau Kenneth , 1 month ago

Pretty sure psychopaths will not feel embarrassment or humiliation, only rage and vengeance.

jason adcock , 1 week ago

I'm a republican, but I'll be honest and say that Jimmy Dore is one of the few honest liberals that I can watch and learn the left. Great job Jimmy

Ruben Soto , 1 month ago

Fbi can charge anyone of lying just by even a wrong day or time.

Cymoon RBACpro , 1 month ago (edited)

CNN is actually a cult and It has a following.

Karl Haynes , 1 month ago

Now that Trump has agreed to go along with the war with Russia, they will back off on Trump and let him continue provoking Russia in Syria, Venezuela and by flying US planes into Russian air space. Mueller helped Bush lie America into destroying Iraq. US Empire wants military bases in more and more nations.

dogleg 1957 , 1 month ago (edited)

Mueller has just handed trump a 2nd term. CNN making sure it's a landslide

Rex Russell , 1 month ago

MSM wants to practice Kamikazi journalism......but without any real danger. Chickenshits, all of them.

Jurgen K , 1 month ago

DONATE TO TULSI 2020 NOW

Edgy Guy , 1 month ago

The funny thing about Dems claiming Trump wouldn't accept the result of the election - Cohen testified to Congress that Trump actually expected to lose and was running as a PR stunt. LOL. Can't make this stuff up. The danger here is that the what really happened was a deep state effort with mainstream media to overthrow a lawfully elected president of country. That's scarier than any thing Trump may ever do.

Rich Lester , 1 month ago

Keith Olbermann is Grandpa Maddow

dipojones , 1 month ago

The Russiagaters are unhinged lunatics who should all be sent to to an insane asylum.

James DePass , 1 month ago

Easy to "hack" emails when your password is "password". Russia sure has those hacking skills.

Pasha Pasovski , 1 month ago

But the Red background hahahaha, he sounds and looks like he came straight out of Dr. Strangelove!

Andrew Qs , 1 month ago

Poor Olberman. Now he's screaming like a deranged pastor in what looks like a cardboard box, very lonely. RUSSSIA!!

Nikhilesh Surve , 1 month ago (edited)

😂😂😂 I love the media meltdown. 13:24 😂 You've lost the war, start speaking Russian now, start with learning Cyrillic, I it starts with"A" too.

Jay Dee , 2 weeks ago

I'm a conservative and have tremendous amount of respect for Jimmy Dore and Aaron Mate'. I may not agree with them on specific policies but I know these two guys come from a sincere, honest place. I usually just blow off liberal rhetoric but I listen to what Jimmy has to say. God bless them

davidrig , 1 month ago

There is ZERO evidence, but the manipulation of the minds of the masses continues anyway!!!

Wyoming Horseman , 1 month ago

FLYNN The FBI has concluded that Michael Flynn did not have any secret relationship with Russia and has cleared the retired Lt. General of any wrongdoing. According to a U.S. intelligence official speaking with NPR, after reviewing the transcripts, FBI agents found that Michael Flynn's forced resignation could only have been orchestrated from Obama insiders operating within the White House.

Libertywritersnews.com reports: After reviewing the transcripts, the FBI found NO WRONG DOING!!

"The FBI reviewed intercepts of communications between the Russian ambassador to the United States and retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn -- national security adviser to then-President-elect Trump -- but has not found any evidence of wrongdoing or illicit ties to the Russian government, U.S. officials said."

Another current U.S Intelligence official agreed with the FBI and told NPR , "there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the transcripts of of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, The official also said there was "absolutely nothing" in the transcripts that suggests Flynn was acting under instructions "or that the trail leads higher." "I don't think [Flynn] knew he was doing anything wrong," the official said. "Flynn talked about sanctions, but no specific promises were made. Flynn was speaking more in general 'maybe we'll take a look at this going forward' terms."

So why aren't we listening to the officials who actually HEARD the calls? Don't be fooled, this isn't about Flynn discussing sanctions or anything else with Russia for that matter. This is about delegitimizing a president. There is a reason why Democrats are still determined to investigate Flynn even though he has already resigned. They are using this as a way to prove that Trump was "in with Russia" and therefore an illegitimate president. Democrats will stop at nothing to get Trump out of the White House. They don't care how many lives they have to ruin.

Carol Cohen , 1 month ago

Until we fix our rigged voting system where votes are blocked, changed, thrown out we will continue with corrupt government.

Eleven : Eleven , 1 week ago

Communists on the Left colluded with Soviet Russia for decades and infiltrated politics, academia, education, media. Now that Russia doesn't represent a threat and is now a growing Christian democracy...they hate it.

MrJoecool7890 , 1 week ago

Jimmy: they (the globalist elite) want to defeat all of us. We all (Progressives, Christians, Conservatives, people who love their country ) are on the same boat. The globalists want to destroy all of us. They are against the nation state, against people having their own culture and defending it, they are against Christians (look at the way Obama referred to Catholics who were attacked in Sri Lanka (Easter worshippers)), they are against true democracy meaning against a government that has the true interest of their citizens in mind not the interest of the elite that controls all branches of the government. I might disagree with your socialist policies and particularly what you said about Venezuela (I am from Colombia and saw the disastrous policies of Chavez and Maduro destroying that nation) but we all have a common enemy and the Right and the true Left should come together in this fight.

Lekestue , 1 month ago

Robert Mueller should be investigated for lying about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction

Cambodia Joe , 1 month ago

So happy for you Jimmy and your team. You are the BILL HICKS of now. In fact, probably gone beyond him now with respect to the man.

infinity34 , 1 month ago

0:06 - CNN finally labels someone accurately...

Patricia Branigan , 1 month ago

"Resist Peace" seems to be the motto of the warmongering Democratic Party

Nebelbalito , 1 month ago

I'm afraid Olberman may not be joking ... dude has lost his marbles all politics aside

Somerled, Islay , 2 weeks ago (edited)

Doctor Strangelove, Sterling Hayden eat your heart out ,he even sounds like him ,really.

Tony 1 , 1 month ago

Even though you spat in Alex Jones' face I still love what you got to say.

Z3R0 , 1 month ago

Because (CIA agent) Anderson "Cooper" Vanderbilt is the most trusted "NAME™" in News. Yeah, right. We already know the truth about this porky mofo. His time is coming.

Jean Navet-Envie , 4 weeks ago

It ain't funny. These zio liers will destroy america

K Mat , 1 month ago

Anderson Cooper drinks a big cup of stupidity every morning before he goes to work. The guy is a total empty shell with no common sense.

chateucaddy , 1 month ago

Remember this is the Special Counsel Investigation, the "Ultimate" Investigation. Which is also the 3rd Investigation. We already had the House & then the Senate Investigate Russia Collusion & both came up with NO Evidence. So they started as Special Counsel Investigation which has now come up with the same Conclusion as they did🤔

Vir Quisque Vir , 4 weeks ago

2:08 - "That it's hard to prove proves that it is true!!!"

Percy Plath , 1 month ago

Jimmy, you're so mean making poor Aaron listen to all that Keith Olbermann.

Sharon Flynn , 1 month ago

Network comparison is spot on and freaking SCARY!!!!!!!

John Froelich , 1 month ago

If somebody in power is after you, the feds will indict a ham sandwich...

martin austin , 1 month ago

I always believed in you when it came to Russia Jimmy. I don't agree with you on everything, but you and Kyle are definitely one of the new progressives that didn't go off the deep end with this conspiracy.

Janet DeLahr , 5 days ago

And these idiots are still wondering how Trump got elected 🙄

watchingponies , 1 month ago

And yes, exactly what Aaron says. I kinda figured out myself that this Russia Gate was a load of lies and/or wishful thinking. Jimmy and his guests showed me that i wasn't wrong of nuts even. Thanks Jimmy, for hooking me up.

Michael Rapson , 1 month ago

OK so Russia-gate was a fizzer. So now can we get back to attacking Trump's trickle-down capitalism and military pandering?

Phillip Evans , 1 month ago

It's only fair that "news journalists" start doing stand-up routines - it's your fault Jimmy for taking over the role of serious news journalism from them, was probably inevitable, LOL.

semiloaf , 4 days ago

We've known all along this has been a coup. This is not news to the informed.

Pensive , 1 month ago (edited)

"It's too hard to convict people of a crime. I know they are guilty and that's all that matters." - every authoritarian ever

Jason Sabino , 1 month ago

I love the needtoimpeach ad that plays before the clip. These asshats on the left just don't give up.

MeanGreen , 1 month ago

SCUM! We're being conquered by SCUUUUUM!

w5winston , 1 month ago

Hey, Jimmy, don't forget about SETH RICH, Mr. Conspiracy-BUSTER....??????????????????????????????? (You were really onto sumpin', bruh!)

fuzzywzhe , 1 month ago

I used to respect Keith Olberman (and Rachael Maddow as well!) when they were criticizing Bush for lying us into a war over a non existent weapons of mass destruction program. I think these living colostomy bags are promoted to their positions to undermine legitimate criticism of the criminal dirtbags that run this nation. They were right about Bush Jr, wrong about Obozo - and of course, other...

Burnya Bro , 1 month ago

The two of you are both great! I think so highly of Aaron, and the fact that he seems to have chosen Jimmy's show for his first lengthy take on the "end of Russiagate" is telling! Both of you deserve our props and thanks for helping keep us ALL sane over the past couple of years.

David Harrell , 1 month ago

The Soviet Union moved from Russia, to the ruling class of DC and NYC.

Elephant Man , 1 month ago

Jimmy, I don't agree with your political views. But DON'T stop, you're my counter balance.

C L , 1 month ago

MSM is expired and irrelevant. 😰 SAD

AndTheCorrectAnswerIs , 1 month ago

I'm sure they all still believe Trump will be indicted or impeached "any day now". These people are mentally unstable, they are the textbook example of delusional.

[May 07, 2019] Look! A whale!

Highly recommended!
May 07, 2019 | amp.theguardian.com

Hannah Ellis-Petersen

Mon 29 Apr 2019 01.55 EDT Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force.

1 week ago

The whale was the secret intermediary between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. The messages were transmitted during weekly 'Whales-R-Us' peer support sessions. It's ironic it turns up now, after Mr. Mueller's report has already been issued.

1 week ago (Edited)

I'm pretty sure "Nessie" is a mobile underwater propoganda base used by the Russians since the time of the Bolshevic revolution. Originally, it was merely a base to hide the Reds operating on the outskirts of the Capitalist capitol of London. Scotland was the perfect hiding place.

Now however, it's outfitted with the most sophisticated internet hacking equipment, AI technology so advanced it can alter your political ideology just by selling you a mailorder slavic blow-up doll.

[May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

Highly recommended!
Apr 05, 2019 | dandelionsalad.wordpress.com

RT America on Apr 3, 2019

Chris Hedges, host of "On Contact," joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the role of the Democratic establishment in the "Russiagate" media frenzy. He argues that it was an unsustainable narrative given the actions of the White House but that the Democratic elite are unable to face their own role in the economic and social crises for which they are in large part to blame. They also discuss NATO's expansionary tendencies and how profitable it is for US defense contractors.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/VkoH3l7c5cI

From the archives:

Barbara Mullin | April 7, 2019 at 10:29 AM

Years ago I kept hearing from the newsmedia that Russia was the "enemy".

Frontline had a show about "Putin's Brain". Even Free Speech TV shows like Bill Press and "The Nation" authors like Eric Alterman push the Hillary style warmongering and do nothing to expose the outright lies out there.

These are supposed to be thought outside of the corporate mainstream newsmedia. The emphasis only on Trump and Fox News is totally hypocritical.

[May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

Highly recommended!
Apr 05, 2019 | dandelionsalad.wordpress.com

RT America on Apr 3, 2019

Chris Hedges, host of "On Contact," joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the role of the Democratic establishment in the "Russiagate" media frenzy. He argues that it was an unsustainable narrative given the actions of the White House but that the Democratic elite are unable to face their own role in the economic and social crises for which they are in large part to blame. They also discuss NATO's expansionary tendencies and how profitable it is for US defense contractors.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/VkoH3l7c5cI

From the archives:

Barbara Mullin | April 7, 2019 at 10:29 AM

Years ago I kept hearing from the newsmedia that Russia was the "enemy".

Frontline had a show about "Putin's Brain". Even Free Speech TV shows like Bill Press and "The Nation" authors like Eric Alterman push the Hillary style warmongering and do nothing to expose the outright lies out there.

These are supposed to be thought outside of the corporate mainstream newsmedia. The emphasis only on Trump and Fox News is totally hypocritical.

[May 07, 2019] James Comey is in trouble and he knows it

Notable quotes:
"... This is problematic for Comey in light of Mueller's findings. There are strict guidelines governing when the FBI can task a confidential source or a government undercover operative to collect against a U.S. citizen. Normally this is restricted to a full investigation, and normally restricted to the United States, not overseas. ..."
"... There is a sense that Comey's team was not checking the boxes, did not have adequate predication, and may have tasked sources before an investigation was even officially opened. Barr should pull case files and dig in on this. ..."
"... In addition, the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources ("assets," in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious "government investigator" posing as Halper's assistant and cited in The New York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence case ..."
"... James Comey is right to be apprehensive. He himself ate away at the soul of the FBI, not in small bites but in dangerously large ones. ..."
May 07, 2019 | thehill.com

Comey adjudged the president as "amoral." He declared the attorney general to be "formidable" but "lacking inner strength" unlike -- the inference is clear -- Comey himself. A strategy of insulting the executioner right before he swings his ax is an odd one but, then, Comey has a long record of odd decisions and questionable judgment.

"Amoral leaders [referring to the president] have a way of revealing the character of those around them," wrote Comey without a hint of irony or self-awareness. Those whom the former FBI director assembled around him probably rue the day they ever met the man. Most are now fired or disgraced for appalling behaviors that Comey found easy to manipulate to advance his decisions.

ADVERTISEMENT

Then, just to make sure his op-ed was odd-salted to the max, Comey mused that the president "eats your soul in small bites." OK, let's step back for a moment: James Comey appears to be in trouble. His strange, desperate statements and behaviors betray his nervousness and apprehension. In a way, it's hard to watch.

Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber , along with Barr's promised examination, are completed, Comey's mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.

Ideally, Barr's examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.

The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr's words, "predicated." This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.

The Mueller report's conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey's own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.

The second will be whether Comey's team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.

The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what's causing the 360-degree head spins.

There are early indicators that troubling behaviors may have occurred in all three scenarios. Barr will want to zero in on a particular area of concern: the use by the FBI of confidential human sources, whether its own or those offered up by the then-CIA director.

Without diving into the weeds, it's important to understand that FBI counterintelligence investigations generally proceed sequentially from what is called a preliminary investigation or inquiry (PI) to a full investigation (FI). To move from a PI to an FI requires substantial information -- predication -- indicating investigative targets acted as agents of a foreign power.

This is problematic for Comey in light of Mueller's findings. There are strict guidelines governing when the FBI can task a confidential source or a government undercover operative to collect against a U.S. citizen. Normally this is restricted to a full investigation, and normally restricted to the United States, not overseas.

There is a sense that Comey's team was not checking the boxes, did not have adequate predication, and may have tasked sources before an investigation was even officially opened. Barr should pull case files and dig in on this.

In addition, the cast of characters leveraged by the FBI against the Trump campaign all appear to have their genesis as CIA sources ("assets," in agency vernacular) shared at times with the FBI. From Stefan Halper and possibly Joseph Mifsud, to Christopher Steele, to Carter Page himself, and now a mysterious "government investigator" posing as Halper's assistant and cited in The New York Times article, legitimate questions arise as to whether Comey was manipulated into furthering a CIA political operation more than an FBI counterintelligence case.

Some in the media have suggested that the Times article was an attempt by the FBI to justify its early confidential source actions. But current FBI Director Christopher Wray has shown that he would like to excise the cancerous tumor that grew during Comey's time and not just keep smoking. It's hard to imagine current FBI executives trying to justify past malfeasance.

James Comey is right to be apprehensive. He himself ate away at the soul of the FBI, not in small bites but in dangerously large ones. It was a dinner for one, though: His actions are not indicative of the real FBI. The attorney general's comprehensive examination is welcome and, if done honestly and dispassionately, it will protect future presidential candidates of both parties and redeem the valuable soul of the FBI.

Kevin R. Brock, former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI, was an FBI special agent for 24 years and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He is a founder and principal of NewStreet Global Solutions , which consults with private companies and public-safety agencies on strategic mission technologies.

Bryan Hinnen Guest 6 hours ago

Peter Strzok, his little girlfriend Lisa Page, Andy McCabe, John Brennan, Sally Yates & Bruce Ohr immediately come to mind. Horowitz is investigating those FISA warrant applications & Barr is investigating the origins of the Russia collusion delusion.

Investigate them, arrest them the same way Roger Stone was arrested & interrogate them the same way Michael Flynn was interrogated. Then offer them a deal.

If they flip on their lords & masters at the DNC, they get one weekend in a country club prison. If they don't flip, they get 20 years in a real prison.

The next 18 months are going to be fascinating.

  • Neal Stephen an hour ago

    This report reads, in fact, as if Trump was supposed to cooperate in his own obstruction. And because he didn’t, he’s guilty of obstruction. ‘Donald Trump attempted to obstruct our coup,’ is how this should read. ‘Donald Trump attempted to obstruct our effort to throw him out of office,’ is how this report should read.
    It’s made to order for people who want to continue running this operation to get rid of Trump. … The report itself says there was no collusion.
    We have a representative republic, and the popular vote doesn’t matter and it never has, by design. So all these are just exercises in mathematics.
    Hillary winning the popular vote by three million doesn’t mean anything, period.
    If you want to have fun and if you’ve got some time, go to YouTube or wherever you go to find videos and find election night coverage and start at 6 or 7 p.m. Eastern, any network, and watch it for a couple hours. And as you get close to 9 o’clock, you will see a 180 degree shift from an attitude of jocularity and confidence and happiness.” Because this was it, this was the glass ceiling being shattered or cracked, however you look at it, the first female president, Hillary Clinton, walking away with it in a landslide.
    But then as they get close to 9 o’clock, panic begins to settle in, and they shortly thereafter realize that it ain’t falling out the way they thought it was going to. And as they start fearing and realizing that Hillary is gonna lose, it’s one of the greatest things you can watch. Go back and relive that.
    Liberals must be defeated not convinced

    • [May 07, 2019] The DNC Debates, the MSM and Tulsi

    Tulsi is against red baiting. That means that she is will be eliminated from the race...
    Notable quotes:
    "... For an establishment democrat, those policies are like garlic to a vampire. ..."
    May 07, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    With the new CNN poll showing Joe Biden representing the fossil wing of the Democratic party with a 39% favorable rating as Bernie drops to 15%, it is eerily reminiscent of overstated polls for HRC in 2016. Thanks to CNN, additional White House contenders have qualified for the debate via the % option including former Colorado Gov John Hickenlooper who might take the opportunity to inform the public why he attended the Bilderberg meeting in 2018 .

    Given her almost totally hostile reception by every MSM outlet who deigned to interview her, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has experienced, as an opponent of regime change wars, more bad manners and outright personal antagonism than any other candidate. While Gabbard easily qualified for the debates via the $65,000 requirement and continues to attract SRO audiences in NH, Iowa, California and elsewhere, yet until the newest CNN poll, she failed to register any % of public support.

    Something here does not compute given the 'favored' polls past history of favoritism. If the Dems continue to put a brick wall around her, Jill Stein has already opened the Green Party door as a more welcoming venue for a Tulsi candidacy. The Dems, who tend to be unprincipled and vindictive, better be careful what they wish for.

    Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU's Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31

    Dimly Glimpsed

    The Democrat establishment hates Tulsi with a passion. There appear to be several factors:

    1) she opposes all the neocon wars, and opposes intervention in Venezuela.

    2) She refuses to kowtow to the bipartisan establish sacred cows (an apt metaphor for Tulsi), such as blind support for Saudi Arabia and Israel;

    3) She gave the DNC and Hillary the back of her hand when she resigned as a vice-chair of the DNC in 2016, citing the reason as unethical bias by the DNC during the primaries. In other words, she resigned because the DNC was not neutral during the primaries, and colluded with Hillary to cheat Bernie;

    4) Tulsi is very progressive, favoring single payer health care, student debt relief, the Green New Deal, etc.

    For an establishment democrat, those policies are like garlic to a vampire.

    [May 07, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard: Most Attacks I Get Are From Democrats

    May 07, 2019 | www.reddit.com

    1 week ago

    They cant let Russiagate go since they have yet to completely criminalize real journalism .....why do you think they arrested Manning again?

    Assange Exposes Democrat Fascists, Torturers & Warmongers

    https://youtu.be/tbWiPe--U3E

    Tulsi Gabbard: Most Attacks I Get Are From Democrats | Surprisingly Scorching Speech
    https://www.reddit.com/r/tulsi/comments/bi344m/tulsi_gabbard_most_attacks_i_get_are_from/

    [May 06, 2019] Trump is a Symptom of 40 years of NeoLiberalism and the Corporate Capture of the US government.

    Notable quotes:
    "... Railing against Trump only sets up the next smooth-talking stooge who will start a fresh new con. ..."
    "... Dore traces the problem primarily to Democratic Party's turning to identity politics instead of representing the working class. They sold us out. Clinton and Obama are just "Republican light" aka "Centrist" "Third Way" Democrats. "Centrist" = establishment-serving con artists. ..."
    "... "Managed democracy" or "guided democracy" : is a formally democratic government that functions as a de facto autocracy. Such governments are legitimized by elections that are free and fair, but do not change the state's policies, motives, and goals. ..."
    May 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , May 5, 2019 4:00:01 PM | 1 2 ">link

    < james @6>

    Jimmy Dore has a short video that describes the problem: Trump Is A Symptom Of A Larger Problem .

    Dore makes the same point I have: "Trump is a Symptom of 40 years of NeoLiberalism and the Corporate Capture of the U.S. government." Railing against Trump only sets up the next smooth-talking stooge who will start a fresh new con.

    Dore traces the problem primarily to Democratic Party's turning to identity politics instead of representing the working class. They sold us out. Clinton and Obama are just "Republican light" aka "Centrist" "Third Way" Democrats. "Centrist" = establishment-serving con artists.

    "Managed democracy" or "guided democracy" : is a formally democratic government that functions as a de facto autocracy. Such governments are legitimized by elections that are free and fair, but do not change the state's policies, motives, and goals.

    In other words, the government controls elections so that the people can exercise all their rights without truly changing public policy. While they follow basic democratic principles, there can be major deviations towards authoritarianism. Under managed democracy, the state's continuous use of propaganda techniques prevents the electorate from having a significant impact on policy.

    The concept of a "guided democracy" was developed in the 20th century by Walter Lippmann in his seminal work Public Opinion (1922) and by Edward Bernays in his work Crystallizing Public Opinion.

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    RT has a good video on Yellow Vest protestors (on rt.com homepage). It's kind long for the info that it provides. I suggest skipping some parts.

    [May 06, 2019] This podcast interview with Lisa Pease on her new 500-page primary-sourced book, A Lie Too Big To Fail, on the RFK assassination, is fascinating, sobering, terrifying.

    May 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    WJ , May 5, 2019 10:27:56 PM | link

    https://www.mintpressnews.com/mintcast-interviews-lisa-pease-why-revisiting-the
    -rfk-assassination-is-crucial-to-palestinian-rights-and-bds-today/258111/


    This podcast interview with Lisa Pease on her new 500-page primary-sourced book, A Lie Too Big To Fail, on the RFK assassination, is fascinating, sobering, terrifying.

    It should put to rest any notion that US elections have fundamentally mattered since 1963. Amazing the stuff the CIA pulled off in quick succession in the 60's. Also did not yet know the likely Israel connection in the RFK assassination and the convenient framing of Sirhan Sirhan as "the first Palestinian terrorist..." RFK was according to Pease going to demand that Israel register its lobbying actions, and other connections to the six-day war also noted by interviewers...

    Grieved , May 5, 2019 11:43:08 PM | link

    @49 WJ - thanks for that link.

    Laurent Guyénot has some good pieces at Unz Review on this topic. I don't think I can post a link to Unz here, but this piece covers both JFK and Bobby: "Did Israel Kill the Kennedys?" It shouldn't be hard to find over there, the search is good.

    The incentive for Israel to kill JFK was large. Bobby was running for the presidency in order to reopen the investigation. Apparently the Kennedy family has never forgotten. John F. Kennedy, Jr was grooming himself for that same presidential run. He was killed when his small plane crashed, mysteriously.

    WJ , May 6, 2019 1:10:41 AM | link

    Grieved @51,


    Thanks for that reference to the laurent guyenot piece. It holds together very well as a unified account of the JFK and RFK murders and contains several bits of info about the JFK assassination I was not aware of. It would seem to me that if we accept that Israel was behind both assassinations it must have been with *at least* the foreknowledge of and likely cooperation with certain elements within the CIA. The extent of direct CIA involvement in the RFK murder is likely (and surprisingly for most) easier to demonstrate than in the earlier JFK killing; and that makes sense, given Johnson's complicity in the murder and five-years of state cover up. By 1968, many people in the CIA had almost as much to fear as Israel did at the prospect of RFK's reinvestigating his brother's murder, so that the RFK was likely a joint operation between the two groups. At least I find it hard to imagine that the CIA was not actively involved in the latter. I also--and here perhaps I differ from Guyénot--do not believe that *if* elements of the CIA were involved in either murder it was only or largely due to these same elements having ties to Israel. Perhaps this is so; but I think it is likely not. Good ole American evil existed before foreign Zionist evil and, while
    the two have often been inextricably linked since the mid 20th-century, I do not think either finally reduces to the other. I say this not because I believe you think this, but only to try to articulate my one quibble with Guyenot's approach. Yet it is a very minor quibble and I thank you again for pointing me to her work.

    [May 06, 2019] President Trump promised to drain the swamp, and he flooded his national security team with that exact swamp

    May 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    KC , May 5, 2019 5:59:15 PM | link

    Re: my above link (you're welcome those of you who have problems with long URLs!):

    Contrast Maddow's "Trump is making John Bolton act too nice" monologue with a recent segment on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight, conducted in the aftermath of last week's attempt at a military coup by opposition leader Juan Guaido. Journalist Anya Parampil appeared on the show and delivered a scathing criticism of the Trump administration's heinous actions in Venezuela based on her findings during her recent visit to that country. She was allowed to speak uninhibited and without attack, even bringing up the Center for Economic and Policy Research study which found Trump administration sanctions responsible for the deaths of over 40,000 Venezuelans, a story that has gone completely ignored by western mainstream media.

    Carlson introduced the interview with a clip from an earlier talk he'd had with Florida Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, who supports direct military action to overthrow Maduro and whose arguments Carlson had attacked on the basis that it would cost American lives and cause a refugee crisis. Parampil said the media is lying about what's happening in Venezuela and compared Guaido's coup attempt to a scenario in which Hillary Clinton had refused to cede the election, banded together 24 US soldiers and attempted to take the White House by force.

    "I was there for a month earlier this year," Parampil said. "The opposition has no popular support. Juan Guaido proved today, once again, that he will only ride in to power on the back of a US tank. And what's more, we hear about a humanitarian crisis there, Tucker, but what we never hear is that is the intended result of US sanctions that have targeted Venezuelans since 2015, sanctions which according to a report that was released just last week by the Center for Economic and Policy Research has led to the deaths of 40,000 Venezuelans, and will lead to the death of thousands more if these sanctions aren't overturned. President Trump, if he truly cared for the Venezuelan people, and the American people for that matter, he would end this disastrous policy. He would end the sanctions, and he would look into John Bolton's eyes, into Elliott Abrams' eyes, into Mike Pompeo's eyes, and say you are fired. You are leading me down a disastrous path, another war for oil. Something the president said–he was celebrated by the American people when he said Iraq was a mistake, and now he's willing to do it again."

    "I believe in an open debate," Carlson responded. "And I'm not sure I agree with everything you've said, but I'm glad that you could say it here. And you were just there, and I don't think you'd be allowed on any other show to say that."

    "No I certainly don't," Parampil replied. "And I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity, because

    President Trump promised to drain the swamp, and he flooded his national security team with that exact swamp

    Desolation Row , May 5, 2019 5:53:56 PM | link

    @karlof1 | May 5, 2019 5:12:19 PM | 21

    speaking of Maddow...
    https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1124515176194150401

    KC , May 5, 2019 5:57:28 PM | link
    Good Caitlyn Johnstone piece on the difference between Maddow and Carlson's approach...

    HERE

    Kristan hinton , May 5, 2019 6:07:57 PM | link
    Maddow is the MSM version of a liberal. She's a DNC warmonger's warmonger - the blue flavor warmonger to counter the red flavor warmonger. This became apparent 10 years ago. She is the MSM version of a lefty. Not leftist really, just a 1969 Nixon to put up against all the late model Bush Clinton Obama Trump lunatics.
    Zachary Smith , May 5, 2019 7:18:32 PM | link
    @ KC #25

    I get paranoid real fast when unexpected URL difficulties arise. I cut/pasted your first link, then one I found myself into a word processor, and both of them had a string of numbers at the end. Different numbers! Finally learned those numbers were unnecessary and I had something which worked.

    On Venezuela, Tucker Airs Anti-Trump Ideas While Maddow Wants John Bolton To Be More Hawkish

    I can sometimes navigate the internet, but I'm aware there are people out there who can tie it in knots. Corporate meddling is becoming an issue as well. Yesterday or day before my Firefox browser suddenly had all the addons disabled. The Mozilla company must have gotten an earful, so they've half-fixed it. Now the addons are working again, but have a big warning label on each and every one of them.

    Back to Maddow. There are people who adore her, and I believe I've mentioned being taken to task by one of them. Seems I hang out at "weird" sites like this one when I could be getting ALL my news from Maddow - just as this person bragged about doing.

    KC , May 6, 2019 12:18:24 AM | link
    @Zachary:

    Here's the URL contained in my link: https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/05/05/on-venezuela-tucker-airs-anti-trump-ideas-while-maddow-wants-john-bolton-to-be-more-hawkish/%3Cbr%20/%3E

    That's all there is to it. No corporate trackers (such as FB or IG adding crap onto the end). That's as simple as they get, unfortunately, but still long enough to prompt me to shorten it for Circe and those who apparently have major issues with links.

    [May 05, 2019] Did Mueller substituted Russia for Israel in his report

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... "What if you substituted 'Israel' for 'Russia'?" (The moderator, who apparently knows me, had to look right at me with my hand raised whenever he called on someone but never called on me). ..."
    "... "Has there ever been an investigation on the scale of the Mueller investigation into possible collusion with Israel?" ..."
    "... The surprising thing about the Mueller report is that he found nothing. That’s impossible because when the government wants to find something, they find it. Why Mueller pulled the plug, I can’t say. ..."
    May 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Second hour: Journalist and TV host Ken Meyercord (also based in Washington, DC) writes:

    "I attended an event at the Brookings Institution yesterday on the Mueller Report. As is sadly customary at DC think tanks, the panelists and the moderator were all of one mind. Nevertheless, one panelist, a former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia (a court notorious for rubber-stamping any charge the government brings against those who disrupt the smooth functioning of our foreign policy apparatus), made a curious analogy, arguing that the contacts Trump and his associates had with Russians would be culpable even if the contacts were with some other, less hostile country:

    https://youtu.be/E96084YuYyE?t=812 .

    His remark got me to thinking, so in the Q & A I sought to ask him "What if you substituted 'Israel' for 'Russia'?" (The moderator, who apparently knows me, had to look right at me with my hand raised whenever he called on someone but never called on me).

    I don't know what his response would have been; but if he said it would still apply, I would have followed up with "Has there ever been an investigation on the scale of the Mueller investigation into possible collusion with Israel?"

    "The more I think about it, the more intriguing I find Mr. Rosenberg's remark. He seemed to think the sheer number of contacts by Trump folks with Russians proved culpability. It might be interesting to compare Trump's contacts with the Russians during the campaign with his contacts with Israelis. I suspect the latter were more numerous and of greater significance. Certainly, Trump's acts as President would seem to indicate he's more Netanyahu's puppet than Putin's: moving the embassy to Jerusalem, cutting off aid to the Palestinians, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Imagine if Putin proposed naming a village in Russia after Trump in appreciation, as Netanyahu has proposed doing in the Golan Heights!

    "P.S. Ueli Maurer is the President of the Swiss Confederation."

    Rational , says: May 1, 2019 at 5:02 pm GMT

    THE WHOLE MUELLER INVESTIGATION WAS A SCAM.

    The entire Western media is the enemy of the people. The Demogangsters and the mediocrats, Public Enemy #1, were angry that Trump won the election, so they fabricated a scam called contacts with Russians.

    They are saying that Trump and his people talked to the Russians as private citizens before the election, so it is illegal.

    What? Talking to Russians is illegal? Really? Says who?

    They will not tell you the law that was allegedly broken, because the law that was allegedly broken itself is illegal.

    It is the Logan Act which “criminalizes negotiations by unauthorized persons with foreign governments having a dispute with the United States.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act

    This law is a joke, because Trump never “negotiated” with any foreign govt. on behalf of the USA, and Russia is not having a dispute with the USA.

    Most importantly, the Logan Act is unconstitutional.

    That is why nobody has been prosecuted under it–for decades!

    So any American who posts on rt.com or on an Iranian website suggesting peace is technically violating the Logan Act.

    Any newspapers that publishes articles about Iran or Russia or Syria and suggesting peace or war is technically violating the Logan Act.

    So why are all they not in jail?

    Because the Logan Act is unconstitutional and it violates the first amendment.

    Go, say, “I will talk to the Russian govt. all I want and promote world peace.”

    Only in America—the criminal Democrats have investigated an innocent man for a non-existent crime of violating an unconstitutional law.

    Rational , says: May 1, 2019 at 8:51 pm GMT
    ADDENDUM: NOBODY HAS EVER BEEN CONVICTED UNDER THE LOGAN ACT.

    This is stated in the wikipedia article I put the link for above.

    In fact, the wikipedia article also talks about its unconstitutionality.

    Sin City Milla , says: May 2, 2019 at 5:11 am GMT
    @Rational

    Only in America—the criminal Democrats have investigated an innocent man for a non-existent crime of violating an unconstitutional law.

    While I would not say this happens only in America, this sort of thing is actually long-standing policy in the US. As long ago as 1944 in Wickard vs. Filburn, the Democrat Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a man for not merely raising food on his own land, but for failing to offer the food for sale, on the rationale that the non-sale affected Interstate Commerce as much as if he had offered it for sale. Since then it has been ‘constitutional’ to find federal jurisdiction over even private vegetable gardens grown exclusively for domestic consumption. Under this theory, even breathing oxygen places one under federal jurisdiction because it is followed by exhaling CO2.

    One of the most surprising things I discovered when I began to practice law was the fact that no one is ‘innocent’. I.e, there is always some law somewhere that is being ‘broken’ no matter what one does, which means that if the government wants someone, they can always convict him because the government can always find some law he has broken. I’m speaking ironically, of course. Many of these laws should be unconstitutional. Just don’t bet that SCOTUS will ever rule that way because, as Gorsuch recently pronounced, “that’s all been settled.”

    The surprising thing about the Mueller report is that he found nothing. That’s impossible because when the government wants to find something, they find it. Why Mueller pulled the plug, I can’t say.

    [May 05, 2019] Did Mueller substituted Russia for Israel in his report

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... "What if you substituted 'Israel' for 'Russia'?" (The moderator, who apparently knows me, had to look right at me with my hand raised whenever he called on someone but never called on me). ..."
    "... "Has there ever been an investigation on the scale of the Mueller investigation into possible collusion with Israel?" ..."
    "... The surprising thing about the Mueller report is that he found nothing. That’s impossible because when the government wants to find something, they find it. Why Mueller pulled the plug, I can’t say. ..."
    May 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Second hour: Journalist and TV host Ken Meyercord (also based in Washington, DC) writes:

    "I attended an event at the Brookings Institution yesterday on the Mueller Report. As is sadly customary at DC think tanks, the panelists and the moderator were all of one mind. Nevertheless, one panelist, a former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia (a court notorious for rubber-stamping any charge the government brings against those who disrupt the smooth functioning of our foreign policy apparatus), made a curious analogy, arguing that the contacts Trump and his associates had with Russians would be culpable even if the contacts were with some other, less hostile country:

    https://youtu.be/E96084YuYyE?t=812 .

    His remark got me to thinking, so in the Q & A I sought to ask him "What if you substituted 'Israel' for 'Russia'?" (The moderator, who apparently knows me, had to look right at me with my hand raised whenever he called on someone but never called on me).

    I don't know what his response would have been; but if he said it would still apply, I would have followed up with "Has there ever been an investigation on the scale of the Mueller investigation into possible collusion with Israel?"

    "The more I think about it, the more intriguing I find Mr. Rosenberg's remark. He seemed to think the sheer number of contacts by Trump folks with Russians proved culpability. It might be interesting to compare Trump's contacts with the Russians during the campaign with his contacts with Israelis. I suspect the latter were more numerous and of greater significance. Certainly, Trump's acts as President would seem to indicate he's more Netanyahu's puppet than Putin's: moving the embassy to Jerusalem, cutting off aid to the Palestinians, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Imagine if Putin proposed naming a village in Russia after Trump in appreciation, as Netanyahu has proposed doing in the Golan Heights!

    "P.S. Ueli Maurer is the President of the Swiss Confederation."

    Rational , says: May 1, 2019 at 5:02 pm GMT

    THE WHOLE MUELLER INVESTIGATION WAS A SCAM.

    The entire Western media is the enemy of the people. The Demogangsters and the mediocrats, Public Enemy #1, were angry that Trump won the election, so they fabricated a scam called contacts with Russians.

    They are saying that Trump and his people talked to the Russians as private citizens before the election, so it is illegal.

    What? Talking to Russians is illegal? Really? Says who?

    They will not tell you the law that was allegedly broken, because the law that was allegedly broken itself is illegal.

    It is the Logan Act which “criminalizes negotiations by unauthorized persons with foreign governments having a dispute with the United States.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act

    This law is a joke, because Trump never “negotiated” with any foreign govt. on behalf of the USA, and Russia is not having a dispute with the USA.

    Most importantly, the Logan Act is unconstitutional.

    That is why nobody has been prosecuted under it–for decades!

    So any American who posts on rt.com or on an Iranian website suggesting peace is technically violating the Logan Act.

    Any newspapers that publishes articles about Iran or Russia or Syria and suggesting peace or war is technically violating the Logan Act.

    So why are all they not in jail?

    Because the Logan Act is unconstitutional and it violates the first amendment.

    Go, say, “I will talk to the Russian govt. all I want and promote world peace.”

    Only in America—the criminal Democrats have investigated an innocent man for a non-existent crime of violating an unconstitutional law.

    Rational , says: May 1, 2019 at 8:51 pm GMT
    ADDENDUM: NOBODY HAS EVER BEEN CONVICTED UNDER THE LOGAN ACT.

    This is stated in the wikipedia article I put the link for above.

    In fact, the wikipedia article also talks about its unconstitutionality.

    Sin City Milla , says: May 2, 2019 at 5:11 am GMT
    @Rational

    Only in America—the criminal Democrats have investigated an innocent man for a non-existent crime of violating an unconstitutional law.

    While I would not say this happens only in America, this sort of thing is actually long-standing policy in the US. As long ago as 1944 in Wickard vs. Filburn, the Democrat Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a man for not merely raising food on his own land, but for failing to offer the food for sale, on the rationale that the non-sale affected Interstate Commerce as much as if he had offered it for sale. Since then it has been ‘constitutional’ to find federal jurisdiction over even private vegetable gardens grown exclusively for domestic consumption. Under this theory, even breathing oxygen places one under federal jurisdiction because it is followed by exhaling CO2.

    One of the most surprising things I discovered when I began to practice law was the fact that no one is ‘innocent’. I.e, there is always some law somewhere that is being ‘broken’ no matter what one does, which means that if the government wants someone, they can always convict him because the government can always find some law he has broken. I’m speaking ironically, of course. Many of these laws should be unconstitutional. Just don’t bet that SCOTUS will ever rule that way because, as Gorsuch recently pronounced, “that’s all been settled.”

    The surprising thing about the Mueller report is that he found nothing. That’s impossible because when the government wants to find something, they find it. Why Mueller pulled the plug, I can’t say.

    [May 04, 2019] Did NSA Admiral Mike Rogers Warn Trump On November 17th, 2016

    Notable quotes:
    "... Remember, historically The Washington Post is the preferred outlet for the CIA and Intelligence Community within Deep State to dump their "leaks" and stories. The State Department "leaks" to CNN for the same purposes. ..."
    Mar 06, 2017 | anamericancomment.blogspot.com
    Did NSA Admiral Mike Rogers Warn Trump On November 17th, 2016?

    Sometimes the utilization of Timelines means you have to look at the new information with a keen awareness of specific events. In hindsight, NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers may have notified Team Trump of Obama's Intelligence Community (James Clapper and John Brennan) spying on their activity. As you look at the FISA request dates below, it's important to note that NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers would be keenly aware of both the June request – Denied, and the October request – Granted. Pay specific attention to the October request.

    "October"! . June 2016: FISA request.

    The Obama administration files a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers. The request, uncharacteristically, is denied.

    October 2016: FISA request.

    The Obama administration submits a new, narrow request to the FISA court, now focused on a computer server in Trump Tower suspected of links to Russian banks. No evidence is found -- but the wiretaps continue, ostensibly for national security reasons, Andrew McCarthy at National Review later notes .

    The Obama administration is now monitoring an opposing presidential campaign using the high-tech surveillance powers of the federal intelligence services.

    ♦ On Tuesday November 8th, 2016 the election was held. Results announced Wednesday November 9th, 2016.

    ♦ On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met with President-Elect Donald Trump.

    ♦ On Friday November 18th The Washington Post reported on a recommendation in "October" that Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position: The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed. The recommendation, delivered to the White House last month , was made by Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., according to several U.S. officials familiar with the matter. [ ]

    In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers, without notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower . That caused consternation at senior levels of the administration, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters. ( link )

    Remember, historically The Washington Post is the preferred outlet for the CIA and Intelligence Community within Deep State to dump their "leaks" and stories. The State Department "leaks" to CNN for the same purposes.

    On Saturday November 19th Reuters reported on the WaPo Story and additional pressure by Defense Secretary Ash Carter and DNI James Clapper to fire Mike Rogers. [ ]

    The Washington Post reported that a decision by Rogers to travel to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday without notifying superiors caused consternation at senior levels of the administration, but the recommendation to remove him predated his visit. ( link )

    1. The Intelligence Community -at the direction of President Obama- made a request to a FISA court for the NSA to spy on Donald Trump in June 2016. It was denied.
    2. In October the Intelligence Community (NSA) -at the direction of President Obama- made a second request to the FISA court for the NSA to spy on Donald Trump. It was approved.
    3. At around the same time (October), as the second request to FISA, (Def Sec) Ash Carter and (DNI) James Clapper tell President Obama to dump NSA Director Mike Rogers.
    4. A week after the election, Mike Rogers makes a trip to Trump Tower without telling his superior, James Clapper; which brings about new calls (November media leaks to WaPo) for President Obama to dump Mike Rogers.

    Occam's Razor .

    NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers didn't want to participate in the spying scheme (Clapper, Brennan, Etc.), which was the baseline for President Obama's post presidency efforts to undermine Donald Trump and keep Trump from digging into the Obama labyrinth underlying his remaining loyalists. After the October spying operation went into effect, Rogers unknown loyalty was a risk to the Obama objective. 10 Days after the election Rogers travels to President-Elect Trump without notifying those who were involved in the intel scheme. Did NSA Director Mike Rogers wait for a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to be set up in Trump Tower, and then notify the President-elect he was being monitored by President Obama? .Seems likely.

    [May 04, 2019] Papadopoulos even talks about U.S. military attach s, DIA guys, in on this coup.

    Notable quotes:
    "... It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey* interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg ..."
    "... The question really comes down to Trump. Does he really want to expose the Swamp and pay the price or just use it for rhetorical & political purposes? When considering probabilities and looking at his track record in office on foreign policy relative to his campaign stance, I would say the probability is less than 30% that Brennan & Clapper will be indicted. ..."
    "... Situations like this commonly have a strong escalatory logic. So one needs to ask whether or not he has rational reason to believe that unless he can destroy those who have shown themselves prepared to stop at nothing to destroy him, they will eventually succeed. ..."
    "... But the escalatory processes are not simply to do with what Trump decides. In particular, a whole range of legal proceedings are involved. The referral in relation to Nellie Ohr is likely to be the fist of a good few. In addition, Ed Butowsky's lawsuits, and those against Steele, have unpredictable potentialities. ..."
    "... The intelligence & law enforcement apparatus in collusion with the media and the establishment of both parties went after him hard. As Larry notes here, they went to considerable effort to entrap those related to his campaign to impugn him. Mueller spent $35 million trying to find an angle. Even after the Mueller report stated there was no collusion they're sill after him. So that's not going to end any time soon. ..."
    "... Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources (including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were employed by the bureau in this operation: ..."
    May 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
    Gerard M , 03 May 2019 at 09:06 AM
    IMO, there is no coming back from this. Apart from this Deep State coup attempt, we have seen that democracy is a shame, it's all theater. The Establishment (which includes GOP) is constantly working to undermine Trump and thwart his plans to do what the American people want and elected him for.

    What I've found quite disturbing is that the controlling puppet masters have not let up in trying to remove or neutralize Trump. As if they can't wait even 4 years to again fully stack the deck and regain total control. They are not willing to concede that 2016 was a political black swan event involving a celebrity billionaire American icon.

    And conceding and allowing this fluke to be rectified I'm 4 short years is worse than their pushback exposing the political system as a rigged game.

    The events of the last 2.5 years have radically altered my views. I no longer have any faith in democracy (voting), the government, the federal courts, law enforcement, et al. And I can't see me regaining any faith in them. What I have seen in the past 2.5 years is kind of like finding out my wife of decades, whom I idolized, has been cheating with my friend from childhood, whom I would've laid down my life for. And all the other people close to me not telling me.

    I now only have faith in only God and beagles.

    Fred -> Gerard M... , 03 May 2019 at 10:40 AM
    It's not the black swan event that concerns the guilty but the fear of just retribution by those who see just how black hearted the left has become.
    Gerard M said in reply to Fred ... , 03 May 2019 at 12:25 PM
    It's not just the left. I listened to Michael Tracey's interview with George Papadopoulos and was stunned to learn about the web of Deep State actors and how our Five Eyes allies were intimately involved in subverting our Presidential election. Papadopoulos even talks about U.S. military attachés, DIA guys, in on this coup. Listen to this Michael Tracey* interview and you will be shaken: https://youtu.be/ZjGLCCP_lPg

    *Tracey, btw, is on the left. But like Glenn Greenwald and others on the left he is an honest journalist interested in the truth.

    Ligurio said in reply to Fred ... , 03 May 2019 at 02:16 PM
    The "left" was not behind and does not buy into this Russia psyop. Neoliberals and neoconservatives (ie zionists) were behind it and continue to push it. Trump ran to the left of Clinton on both domestic and foreign policy. That's why he won, and why the establishment must present his election as de facto illegitimate, because otherwise they would be forced to admit that the bipartisan convergence around both finance driven economic policy and war on terror interventionism that has described elite politics since Clinton has been a disaster for most ordinary Americans -- of all types and political persuasions -- and needs to be destroyed root and branch.

    To see how and why the "left" differs from corporate identity-politicking liberals in the above regard consider how it is that Tulsi Gabbard is both the Dem candidate most respected by principled Trump supporters on this site and others and the Dem candidate most reviled, ignored, and slandered by DNC liberals and neocons alike.

    The enemy to principled conservatives and the left in this country is the bipartisan establishment corporate neoliberalism of the RNC and DNC alike.

    VietnamVet , 03 May 2019 at 05:40 PM
    The soft coup against Donald Trump failed. He has to run hard and sure to win in 2020 to avoid an indictment in NY State when he leaves the Presidency. Corporate Democrats will do their damnedst again to put forth their weakest pro war candidate like the aged, apparently demented, Joe Biden. This fiasco and the recent coup attempt in Venezuela make the Keystone Cops appear competent.

    I put this all down to Washington DC being completely isolated inside their credentialed bubble. It is just like corporate CEOs, who think they know exactly what they are doing. But, in reality, they are destroying the stabilizing middle class by extracting and hording wealth and turning mid-America into their colony. Globalist and nationalist oligarchs are after each other's throat over who controls the flow of money.

    We live on a very finite world dependent on one sun in an expanding universe. Just like Boeing, Bayer or Volkswagen, the splintering world is starting to crash all around them. Even as they deny it, this is a multi-polar world now. It is not going back without a world war which would destroy civilization and could make the world uninhabitable for humans.

    English Outsider -> VietnamVet... , 04 May 2019 at 01:15 PM
    The trouble is that those CEO's do know exactly what they are doing. Making money the only way possible in a business environment in which outsourcing can sometimes be the only thing that pays.

    The idea was that Trump was going to change that environment. Bannon calls its "economic nationalism" but in truth it's now just economic survival. Survival for those whose jobs are outsourced. Survival for the country as a whole, ultimately.

    That was Trump's core programme. It was the programme that made him different from all other Western politicians, "populist" or status quo. Do you see any sign that it's being implemented, or has that programme too got bogged down in the swamp?

    Mad Max_22 , 03 May 2019 at 06:44 PM
    Will justice be served? A good question.

    If we are speaking about criminal justice, there is some chance that we will see persons such as Jim Comey, who persists in his smug higher calling act, prosecuted for what was a clear cut violation in divulging classified material through a lawyer intermediary to the NYT. I suspect the higher calling bit has been prompted in part because he knows that he screwed up both on the facts and in law and he is justifying his screw up to himself, and possibly also rehearsing his defense, with the rationale that he was only trying to do the right thing. Yeah, he may have had the facts all wrong, the Russians, etc, etc, but the worst that can be said is that he had been competent, there was no intent. That defense doesn't do much for the FBI's once held reputation for competence, but that appears to be gone anyway.

    With regard to what will be turned up concerning the actual roots of the travesty, the heavily politicized faux investigation into the Clinton e mails and targeting of the Trump campaign on a predicate that is somewhere between nebulous and non existant, I think a criminal prosecution arising from that investigation, even if it is serious, is unlikely for two main reasons. First, what will be the charged violations? As best I can see right now, they will have to entail some imaginative application of fraud statutes, defrauding the FISC, defrauding the US, informants and assets lying to their handlers, or process crimes like Bob Mueller's partisan posse relied upon (ugly); and second, something like the Comey defense will interpenetrate all the individuals and entities involved: we may have been incredible bunglers, but that is the worst of it. We really believed these charlatans who conned us into this debacle. Sorry, but we thought we were doing the right thing.

    Now if we are talking about seeing some kind of political or moral justice, I'm not too optimistic we will get much satisfaction there either and we will probably have to wait for history. The reason is that Barr will conduct this investigation by the rule book. That means that what we see developed through the process, indictment, prosecution, etc, is likely all,that we will ever see. Barr is very unlikely to produce a politcized manifesto to be employed as a smear weapon like the once reputable Mueller did.

    Anyway, until we see a special FGJ empanelled, some search warrants executed, some tactical immunities offered, everything is on the come.

    blue peacock said in reply to Jack... , 04 May 2019 at 12:27 PM
    Jack,

    The question really comes down to Trump. Does he really want to expose the Swamp and pay the price or just use it for rhetorical & political purposes? When considering probabilities and looking at his track record in office on foreign policy relative to his campaign stance, I would say the probability is less than 30% that Brennan & Clapper will be indicted.

    David Habakkuk -> blue peacock... , 04 May 2019 at 03:07 PM
    bp,

    The question is only very partly what Trump wants, in some abstract sense. Situations like this commonly have a strong escalatory logic. So one needs to ask whether or not he has rational reason to believe that unless he can destroy those who have shown themselves prepared to stop at nothing to destroy him, they will eventually succeed.

    If the answer is yes - and while I think it may very well be, I am not prejudging the issue - then a key question becomes whether Trump will conclude that his most promising loption is to go after the conspirators by every means possible.

    Involved here are questions about who he is listening to, and how competent they are.

    But the escalatory processes are not simply to do with what Trump decides. In particular, a whole range of legal proceedings are involved. The referral in relation to Nellie Ohr is likely to be the fist of a good few. In addition, Ed Butowsky's lawsuits, and those against Steele, have unpredictable potentialities.

    blue peacock said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 May 2019 at 07:11 PM
    David

    The intelligence & law enforcement apparatus in collusion with the media and the establishment of both parties went after him hard. As Larry notes here, they went to considerable effort to entrap those related to his campaign to impugn him. Mueller spent $35 million trying to find an angle. Even after the Mueller report stated there was no collusion they're sill after him. So that's not going to end any time soon.

    Trump may have good instincts but his judgment of people so far to staff his administration is not very inspiring. He had Jeff Sessions as his AG and he let him hang in there for nearly two years while Mueller ran riot. He's surrounded himself with neocons on foreign policy. It seems his only real advisor is Jared. Everyone else he's got around him are from the same establishment that's going after him. He hasn't taken advise from Devin Nunes, who has done more to uncover the sedition than anyone else. If he had he would have by now declassified all the documents & communications. The impression I have is his primary motivation is building his brand & less about governance and wielding power. Take for example his order to withdraw from Syria. Bolton & the Pentagon are thumbing their noses at him.

    Well, there have been several criminal referrals prior to the recent one on Nellie Ohr. There's the McCabe referral and the 8 referrals by Devin Nunes. I've not read any report of the empaneling of a grand jury yet. I agree with you that these law suits have the potential for great embarrassment, however to hold those responsible for the sedition accountable will require iron will & intense focus on the part of Trump to get his AG to assign prosecutors who don't have the axe to "protect" the "institution" and to create an opportunity for public awareness of the extent that law enforcement & intelligence became a 4th branch of government. My opinion is that his skill is in his instinctual understanding of the current political zeitgeist and his ability to manipulate the media including social media to project his brand. He's not an operational leader making sure his team executes his vision & strategy.

    akaPatience , 04 May 2019 at 07:11 PM
    Here's a National Review exclusive report in which a transcript of FBI's Deputy Assistant Director Jonathan Moffa's testimony reveals several Confidential Human Sources (including Christopher Steele), and more interestingly foreign "liasons" (Mifsud?) were employed by the bureau in this operation:

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/fbi-official-testimony-surveillance-trump-campaign/

    [May 04, 2019] This Was Not Spying, It Was Entrapment Bongino Spits Fire As Nunes Demands Mifsud Docs

    Notable quotes:
    "... As Bongino lays out, there are two working theories about Mifsud . The first is that he's a Russian asset who tried to bait the Trump campaign . The second is that Mifsud was working for US intelligence services and seeded Papadopoulos with the 'dirt' rumor in order to kick off the FBI's counterintelligence operation. ..."
    May 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
    For over two years, anyone who suggested that the Russia investigation was a sham was harshly ridiculed by establishment mouthpieces as a conspiracy theorist. The notion that the Obama Justice Department (led by Eric " wingman " Holder and then Loretta " tarmac " Lynch) could have conspired with other US intel agencies and foreigners to paint Donald Trump as a Russian stooge was considered beyond the pale.

    Then we found out that virtually the entire FBI's top brass absolutely hate Donald Trump and supported Hillary Clinton; the former of whom the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation against, while giving Hillary a pass despite the fact that she destroyed evidence from her homebrew basement server while under subpoena. We were asked to believe that the FBI's extreme biases played no role in their investigations, while the left insisted that special counsel Robert Mueller was going to confirm fairy tales of Russian collusion peddled by a Clinton-funded dossier.

    And then the Mueller report came out - blowing the Russian collusion narrative out of the water, while painting a damning picture that suggests the entire genesis of the FBI's counterintelligence investigation, Crossfire Hurricane , was a setup .

    One of those brave enough to risk his reputation laying out what was going on before the Mueller report dropped is conservative commentator and former US Secret Service agent Dan Bongino - who has repeatedly mentioned the suspicious role of self-described Clinton Foundation member Joseph Mifsud, who seeded the rumor that Russia had 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton to Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos on April 26, 2016 - shortly after returning from Moscow, according to the Mueller report.

    Two weeks later , Papadopoulos would be bilked for information by Australian diplomat (another Clinton ally ) Alexander Downer at a London bar, who relayed the Kremlin 'dirt' rumor to Australian authorities, which alerted the FBI (as the story goes), and operation Crossfire Hurricane was thus hatched.

    We have now pinned Peter Strzok's boss, Bill Priestap, in London the week of May 6th, 2016 and on the 9th. The day before Alexander Downer was sent to spy on me and record our meeting. Congress must release the transcripts and embarrass the deep state.

    -- George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) April 20, 2019

    Back to Mifsud...

    As Bongino lays out, there are two working theories about Mifsud . The first is that he's a Russian asset who tried to bait the Trump campaign . The second is that Mifsud was working for US intelligence services and seeded Papadopoulos with the 'dirt' rumor in order to kick off the FBI's counterintelligence operation.

    . @dbongino on why Mifsud is key in Spygate:

    "So either we have a Russian asset who's infiltrated the highest echelons of friendly Intelligence Services, or we have a friendly who was setting up @GeorgePapa19 - That's the real scandal. This was not spying, this was entrapment." pic.twitter.com/wGnV8HHur1

    -- M3thods (@M2Madness) May 4, 2019

    Bongino went into greater detail last month on Fox News - including that Mifsud's lawyer says he's connected to western, "friendly" intelligence :

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/2oNPsRGxNhg

    We know that Papadopoulos met multiple times with Mifsud in the first half of 2016:

    Note: Papadopoulos and Mifsud reportedly both worked at the London Centre of International Law Practice. - The Markets Work

    In short - based on what we know, it appears that Joseph Mifsud was part of a setup by Western intelligence services on then-candidate Donald Trump.

    Did You Know:

    A Company Whose Director Represents Joseph Mifsud Changed Its Name To "No Vichok Ltd" After The Salisbury Attack

    "Novichok" was the nerve agent used to poison fmr GRU agent Sergei Skripal when the UK govt was caught lying about the analysis from Porton Down

    -- Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) May 4, 2019

    ( it's true )

    Great claims require great evidence, however, which is why Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has requested a wide swath of documents about Mifsud from several federal agencies.

    As the Washington Examiner reports, Nunes - the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, " seeks information about who Mifsud was working for at the time and wrote in a letter that special counsel Robert Mueller "omits any mention of a wide range of contacts Mifsud had with Western political institutions and individuals" in his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election."

    As part of Mueller's Russia investigation, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Russians and served 12 days in prison late last year.

    The special counsel's sentencing memo to the District Court for the District of Columbia said Papadopoulos hindered the FBI's ability to get to Mifsud. "The defendant's lies undermined investigators' ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February 11, 2017 and he has not returned to the United States since then," the memo said.

    In his letter, Nunes says it is " still a mystery how the FBI knew to ask Papadopoulos specifically about Hillary Clinton's emails " if the bureau had not spoken with Mifsud. - Washington Examiner

    "If he is in fact a Russian agent, it would be one of the biggest intelligence scandals for not only the United States , but also our allies like the Italians and the Brits and others. Because if Mifsud is a Russian agent, he would know all kinds of our intelligence agents throughout the globe," said Nunes during a recent interview with Fox News ' Sean Hannity.

    Look deeper at the Report re: Mifsud. One interesting omission --

    Why are there zero citations to Mifsud's 302 in the Mueller Report?

    -- Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) May 4, 2019

    [May 04, 2019] The American intelligence community captures all the fiber optic communications of all people in America. This mass suspicionless surveillance is unlawful and unconstitutional

    Notable quotes:
    "... Former American spies have been complaining for years that capturing the keystrokes of all people in America 24/7 produces information overload -- too much data to sift through when searching for those trying to harm our way of life. ..."
    May 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    But the American intelligence community should have known. It captures all the fiber optic communications of all people in America. This mass suspicionless surveillance is unlawful and unconstitutional, but the leadership of our 60,000-person strong domestic spying apparatus has persuaded every president since George H.W. Bush that all this spying keeps America safe. We now know that it doesn't. It didn't find a single Russian spy bent on influencing the election.

    Former American spies have been complaining for years that capturing the keystrokes of all people in America 24/7 produces information overload -- too much data to sift through when searching for those trying to harm our way of life.

    [May 04, 2019] "Trump Was Not Just Spied Upon, It Was Entrapment"

    Notable quotes:
    "... The Senate minority leader–Deep Stater par excellence –knew whereof he spoke. But Trump somehow survived the storm, although sometimes it seemed as if he wouldn't. Now, some of the obvious parties –John K. Brennan and James Clapper with their apparatchik miens -- have suddenly found themselves in the crosshairs, as the Washington Times notes: ..."
    "... Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also leveled up highly publicized comments that President Trump could even be an "asset" of Russian President Vladimir Putin , part of a slew of remarks that critics say went far beyond the usual partisan sniping that can accompany a change of administrations. ..."
    "... More's afoot here, however, considerably more because the entire American intelligence system and the unique power referred to by Schumer are also now in those same crosshairs, as they should be. But many of the men and women involved are less overtly Stalinist in their style than Mssrs. Brennan and Clapper and slip more easily under the radar. ..."
    "... A top FBI official admitted to Congressional investigators last year that the agency had contacts within the Trump campaign as part of operation "Crossfire Hurricane," which sounds a lot like FBI "informant" Stefan Halper – a former Oxford University professor who was paid over $1 million by the Obama Department of Defense between 2012 and 2018, with nearly half of it surrounding the 2016 US election. ..."
    "... "Crossfire Hurricane," as most know, is the codename the wannabe hipsters at the FBI gave the Trump-Russia investigation. But more important is the word "before" in Ms. Cleveland's title. ..."
    "... Papadopoulos and Page are the two naifs of the most obvious sort (sorry, guys) we have all seen on television who spent the last couple of years having to defend themselves against absurd charges. Considering the timing, it's pretty obvious they were being set up (i. e. entrapped) on some level well back during the Obama administration. ..."
    "... I suggest that an attempt was being made to implant Halper in the Trump campaign, one way or another, not just for spying purposes but actually to help create this collusion of the campaign with Russia–that is, to help manufacture it. ..."
    "... Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election , in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter's foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering. ..."
    "... We need Halper, under oath and unredacted. Whether that's possible is another question. ..."
    www.youtube.com
    Apr 02, 2019 | rawconservativeopinions.com

    Authored by Roger Simon via PJMedia.com,

    It's bad enough, as has been evident for some time, that Donald Trump and his campaign were being spied upon by our own government, but it's highly likely they were also subject to literal entrapment–at least a serious attempt was made.

    I don't mean the entrapment of promulgating the salacious Steele dossier both to the public and the FISA court as if it were the truth. That was more of a smear to justify a phony investigation. I mean something more subtle and LeCarré-like coming from the depths of our intelligence communities. It raises once more the question of the power of such agencies in a free society, a conundrum with no easy answers but of great significance to our lives.

    For all his New York rough-and-tumble, Trump was an innocent abroad when he arrived in Washington. Way back in January 2017, he was warned by old-timer Chuck Schumer that "intel officials have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."

    The Senate minority leader–Deep Stater par excellence –knew whereof he spoke. But Trump somehow survived the storm, although sometimes it seemed as if he wouldn't. Now, some of the obvious parties –John K. Brennan and James Clapper with their apparatchik miens -- have suddenly found themselves in the crosshairs, as the Washington Times notes:

    Special counsel Robert Mueller's finding that there was no Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia to steal the 2016 election has unleashed a tsunami of outrage toward Obama-era intelligence chiefs, particularly former CIA Director John O. Brennan and former FBI Director James B. Comey, who are accused of pushing the allegation during congressional hearings, in social media posts and in highly charged interviews on television over the past two years.

    Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also leveled up highly publicized comments that President Trump could even be an "asset" of Russian President Vladimir Putin , part of a slew of remarks that critics say went far beyond the usual partisan sniping that can accompany a change of administrations.

    More's afoot here, however, considerably more because the entire American intelligence system and the unique power referred to by Schumer are also now in those same crosshairs, as they should be. But many of the men and women involved are less overtly Stalinist in their style than Mssrs. Brennan and Clapper and slip more easily under the radar.

    Notable among these, and perhaps able to reveal much of the McGuffin to the mystery of where this all started and how, is Stefan Halper. Mr. Halper is "an American foreign policy scholar and Senior Fellow at the University of Cambridge where he is a Life Fellow at Magdalene College and directs the Department of Politics and International Studies ." He is also a spook who worked for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, no less, and was a principle American connection to the UK's MI-6.

    Mr. Halper has (ahem) other connections :

    A top FBI official admitted to Congressional investigators last year that the agency had contacts within the Trump campaign as part of operation "Crossfire Hurricane," which sounds a lot like FBI "informant" Stefan Halper – a former Oxford University professor who was paid over $1 million by the Obama Department of Defense between 2012 and 2018, with nearly half of it surrounding the 2016 US election.

    Hmm . The perspicacious Margot Cleveland had more to say the other day at The Federalist in " Who Launched An Investigation Into Trump's Campaign Before Crossfire Hurricane. "

    "Crossfire Hurricane," as most know, is the codename the wannabe hipsters at the FBI gave the Trump-Russia investigation. But more important is the word "before" in Ms. Cleveland's title.

    The Post further noted that the academic, since identified as Stefan Halper, first met with Trump campaign advisor Carter Page "a few weeks before the opening of the investigation," and then after Crossfire Hurricane's July 31, 2016, start, he met again with Carter Page and "with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis," offering the latter his "foreign-policy expertise" for the Trump team. Then in September, Halper "reached out to George Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign-policy adviser for the campaign, inviting him to London to work on a research paper."

    Papadopoulos and Page are the two naifs of the most obvious sort (sorry, guys) we have all seen on television who spent the last couple of years having to defend themselves against absurd charges. Considering the timing, it's pretty obvious they were being set up (i. e. entrapped) on some level well back during the Obama administration.

    Who ordered it is the obvious question, but I'm not going to leave it there.

    I suggest that an attempt was being made to implant Halper in the Trump campaign, one way or another, not just for spying purposes but actually to help create this collusion of the campaign with Russia–that is, to help manufacture it.

    Putting it another way, someone or some group wanted to create -- or, more subtly, to encourage the creation -- of Trump-Russia collusion from the inside in order to destroy Trump before, or failing that, after he was elected.

    How's that for a nefarious plot? Worthy of LeCarré or maybe even Graham Greene. But is it true? I wouldn't bet against it. Something close anyway.

    By the way, if I am right, this won't be the first time for Halper. And unfortunately for Republicans, the shoe was then on the proverbial other foot. As Glenn Greenwald wrote last year:

    Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election , in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter's foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.

    Republicans can console themselves that their malfeasance was more benign, relatively. This new one was outright sedition involving a foreign power. It is a blow to the heart of our democratic republic. We need Halper, under oath and unredacted. Whether that's possible is another question.

    [May 04, 2019] Geraldo Were investigators trying to entrap Trump

    May 03, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Robert Mueller reportedly knew a year ago that there was no Russia collusion but left President Trump dangling, Geraldo Rivera says. #FoxandFriends #FoxNews

    Dion Peterson , 15 hours ago

    it was coup d'etat against America the voters the president and Constitution

    Spacecoastz , 15 hours ago

    The "Russia election interference" was an excuse to cover their spying. The real interference was the DNC, CIA, FBI, and DOJ...all weaponized agencies under Obama. The Mueller investigation knew day one there was no Trump/Russia collusion...their goal was to hide, cover, and obstruct for the Deep State. I have no doubt that trying to pin obstruction on Trump became one of their goals.

    Plutot Crever , 14 hours ago

    The FBI "meddled with our elections". Particularly the midterms. Mueller knew 19 months ago that there was no collusion. Thats almost two years. He and his team didnt tell anybody. He let Trump getting destroyed by CNN, NBC 24/7. The DNC stole the House.

    Gordon LeCroy , 15 hours ago

    Geraldo, Mueller was waiting until after the 2018 midterm election to disclose his report. In other words, Mueller interfered with the 2018 midterms and gave the Dems a huge win in Congress. When he testifies to Congress, I hope some Republicans rip him apart on this point.

    [May 03, 2019] Former high-ranking FBI officials on Andrew McCabe's alarming admissions

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Well. There you have Andrew McCabe calling Rod Rosenstein a liar. Can't wait for the Inspector General's report. Apparently some doo-doo is hitting the fan. ..."
    "... The FBI has history of sedition, how do you J. Edgar Hoover stayed in charge for long? The FBI (Deepthroat, Deputy Director Mark Felt) brought down Nixon by leaking to the Washing Post. This stuff going on now is part of a long standing tradition at the FBI. ..."
    "... McCabe and Rosenstein are enemies within! ..."
    "... When law enforcement is involved in politics that is just like banana republics and communist countries. If these people can plan to remove a Republican President they can do it to a democrat president. THAT should alarm CNN and all the democrats, but it won't. These FBI folks were acting under the orders of Obama and probably through Hillary. The FBI big-shots only work under orders they don't think on their own. ..."
    "... Mccabe is a weasel beyond a doubt, and the FBI is complicit in there doing nothing about it until the fool admits to it on primetime TV for the whole world to see!! He tarnished your agency along with comey, strozk, and the other traitors. Own it FBI he is one of yours. ..."
    "... The bureaunazis are so protected in their deep state they have no fear of admitting their collusion efforts against Trump. A special counsel needs to investigate the FBI and DOJ connections to Russia and Democrats. Nothing changes if no one goes to jail. These bureaunazis watch too much Game of Thrones and House of Cards. ..."
    "... Mueller, while FBI Director, turned the FBI into an intelligence agency from that of a crime fighting agency. Which was then used by the political class to support their positions of power. ..."
    "... Deep State poster boy. Full of hubris and entitlement. Power corrupts. ..."
    "... McCabe has totally self admited for a deep state coup attempt against a duly elected president. ..."
    "... So McCabe appointed himself the FBI, Pratorian Guard, to protect us against Russia? ..."
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Kevin Brock, former FBI assistant director for intelligence, and Terry Turchie, former deputy assistant director of the counterterrorism division, fire back at former FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

    tom p , 2 months ago (edited)

    FBI agents selling books about their sedition. Only in America.

    TradeBasedOnNaturalResourcesAndClimateNotSlaveLabor , 2 months ago

    Well. There you have Andrew McCabe calling Rod Rosenstein a liar. Can't wait for the Inspector General's report. Apparently some doo-doo is hitting the fan.

    TradeBasedOnNaturalResourcesAndClimateNotSlaveLabor , 2 months ago

    Anybody who has read the Strzok-Page text messages can see why Trump was investigated... The reason was BIAS.

    Unknown Texan , 2 months ago

    Conspiracy to overthrow a setting President and nothing will happen.

    XIEXIE , 2 months ago

    Why he didn't think the same about Hilary about all the obvious evidences! Such a embarrassment of FBI and DOJ!

    G1 Sokool , 2 months ago

    The FBI has history of sedition, how do you J. Edgar Hoover stayed in charge for long? The FBI (Deepthroat, Deputy Director Mark Felt) brought down Nixon by leaking to the Washing Post. This stuff going on now is part of a long standing tradition at the FBI.

    Master Of Darkness , 2 months ago

    HIGH TREASON !!!

    R Coyote , 2 months ago (edited)

    Bunch of narcissists in charge running a mock!

    c17360 , 2 months ago

    McCabe and Rosenstein are enemies within!

    ryvr madduck , 2 months ago (edited)

    When law enforcement is involved in politics that is just like banana republics and communist countries. If these people can plan to remove a Republican President they can do it to a democrat president. THAT should alarm CNN and all the democrats, but it won't. These FBI folks were acting under the orders of Obama and probably through Hillary. The FBI big-shots only work under orders they don't think on their own.

    Mile high P , 2 months ago

    Mccabe is a weasel beyond a doubt, and the FBI is complicit in there doing nothing about it until the fool admits to it on primetime TV for the whole world to see!! He tarnished your agency along with comey, strozk, and the other traitors. Own it FBI he is one of yours.

    SanAntonioSlim , 2 months ago (edited)

    The fix was in. The bureaunazis are so protected in their deep state they have no fear of admitting their collusion efforts against Trump. A special counsel needs to investigate the FBI and DOJ connections to Russia and Democrats. Nothing changes if no one goes to jail. These bureaunazis watch too much Game of Thrones and House of Cards.

    Keith McCormick , 2 months ago

    America's first attempted coup. Pure sedition.

    Steve Jones , 2 months ago

    Time to sweep the leg of the corruption in the FBI

    Ronald Cates , 2 months ago

    IT All LEADS BACK TO HILLARY

    MegaRudyray , 2 months ago

    When you fire the director, then tell people "I believe Putin".....yes, they are going to start investigating you.

    Phillip Sumpter , 2 months ago

    May the pendulum finally, please swing the other way into combating the true collusion happening on the Left.

    billsd13 , 2 months ago

    No questions from 60 Minutes regarding the FISA warrant and how that was a product of the Clinton campaign, and no questions along those lines.

    tmc che , 2 months ago (edited)

    Mueller, while FBI Director, turned the FBI into an intelligence agency from that of a crime fighting agency. Which was then used by the political class to support their positions of power. Mr Trump upset their world with his electoral victory. President Trump is hated by the political class because he has come as the destroyer of their world.

    MWV , 2 months ago (edited)

    Well, I believe McCabe was questioned during hearings and didn't he deny all this under oath??? How has he not been Roger Stoned yet?

    Brian P , 2 months ago

    Deep State poster boy. Full of hubris and entitlement. Power corrupts.

    James Christianson , 2 months ago

    Former deep state Berryboma crony. One of many slated for hanging. One of many. Along with Berryboma.

    noemi barrios , 2 months ago

    oh so we should believe the liar McCabe who lied to congress and is under grand jury indictment! throw him in jail with comey!

    tamimerkaz , 2 months ago

    McCabe has totally self admited for a deep state coup attempt against a duly elected president. He should be behind bars rather than selling his book on TV. Lock up McCabe, Rosenstein and the rest of the Deep State coup gang and DRAIN-THE-SWAMP.

    bigwaverider , 2 months ago

    McCabe is still at it. He's got Russian derangement syndrome.

    Otie Brown , 2 months ago

    So McCabe appointed himself the FBI, Pratorian Guard, to protect us against Russia? That is dangerous to a demoncracy. It is not legal at all.

    Tobias Forge , 2 months ago

    Just image if Hillary was able to steal the election ... We'd still have an FBI and Justice Department full of traitors to America.

    [May 03, 2019] Andrew McCabe played the key role in the appointment of the special prosecutor

    Highly recommended!
    McCabe came out of this interview as pretty capable and dangerous person
    This is a soft-gloves interview by NYT presstitute who was instrument in sustaining Russiagate color revolution.
    McCabe in this interview admits that he pushed for the appointment of the special prosecutor.
    McCabe applied double standard to Hillary investigation. Before that he run politically charges investigation of FIFA
    This can be classified as McCabe led coup d'état. See also Alan Dershowitz Talks about Andrew McCabe's 60 Minuets Interview - YouTube
    Mar 02, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Andrew McCabe intervied by NYT´s Adam Goldman After Words C-span Feb 26 2019 - YouTube

    Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe discussed his career, the FBI, and his firing from the Bureau. He was interviewed by New York Times reporter Adam Goldman.

    [May 03, 2019] Former high-ranking FBI officials on Andrew McCabe's alarming admissions

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Well. There you have Andrew McCabe calling Rod Rosenstein a liar. Can't wait for the Inspector General's report. Apparently some doo-doo is hitting the fan. ..."
    "... The FBI has history of sedition, how do you J. Edgar Hoover stayed in charge for long? The FBI (Deepthroat, Deputy Director Mark Felt) brought down Nixon by leaking to the Washing Post. This stuff going on now is part of a long standing tradition at the FBI. ..."
    "... McCabe and Rosenstein are enemies within! ..."
    "... When law enforcement is involved in politics that is just like banana republics and communist countries. If these people can plan to remove a Republican President they can do it to a democrat president. THAT should alarm CNN and all the democrats, but it won't. These FBI folks were acting under the orders of Obama and probably through Hillary. The FBI big-shots only work under orders they don't think on their own. ..."
    "... Mccabe is a weasel beyond a doubt, and the FBI is complicit in there doing nothing about it until the fool admits to it on primetime TV for the whole world to see!! He tarnished your agency along with comey, strozk, and the other traitors. Own it FBI he is one of yours. ..."
    "... The bureaunazis are so protected in their deep state they have no fear of admitting their collusion efforts against Trump. A special counsel needs to investigate the FBI and DOJ connections to Russia and Democrats. Nothing changes if no one goes to jail. These bureaunazis watch too much Game of Thrones and House of Cards. ..."
    "... Mueller, while FBI Director, turned the FBI into an intelligence agency from that of a crime fighting agency. Which was then used by the political class to support their positions of power. ..."
    "... Deep State poster boy. Full of hubris and entitlement. Power corrupts. ..."
    "... McCabe has totally self admited for a deep state coup attempt against a duly elected president. ..."
    "... So McCabe appointed himself the FBI, Pratorian Guard, to protect us against Russia? ..."
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Kevin Brock, former FBI assistant director for intelligence, and Terry Turchie, former deputy assistant director of the counterterrorism division, fire back at former FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

    tom p , 2 months ago (edited)

    FBI agents selling books about their sedition. Only in America.

    TradeBasedOnNaturalResourcesAndClimateNotSlaveLabor , 2 months ago

    Well. There you have Andrew McCabe calling Rod Rosenstein a liar. Can't wait for the Inspector General's report. Apparently some doo-doo is hitting the fan.

    TradeBasedOnNaturalResourcesAndClimateNotSlaveLabor , 2 months ago

    Anybody who has read the Strzok-Page text messages can see why Trump was investigated... The reason was BIAS.

    Unknown Texan , 2 months ago

    Conspiracy to overthrow a setting President and nothing will happen.

    XIEXIE , 2 months ago

    Why he didn't think the same about Hilary about all the obvious evidences! Such a embarrassment of FBI and DOJ!

    G1 Sokool , 2 months ago

    The FBI has history of sedition, how do you J. Edgar Hoover stayed in charge for long? The FBI (Deepthroat, Deputy Director Mark Felt) brought down Nixon by leaking to the Washing Post. This stuff going on now is part of a long standing tradition at the FBI.

    Master Of Darkness , 2 months ago

    HIGH TREASON !!!

    R Coyote , 2 months ago (edited)

    Bunch of narcissists in charge running a mock!

    c17360 , 2 months ago

    McCabe and Rosenstein are enemies within!

    ryvr madduck , 2 months ago (edited)

    When law enforcement is involved in politics that is just like banana republics and communist countries. If these people can plan to remove a Republican President they can do it to a democrat president. THAT should alarm CNN and all the democrats, but it won't. These FBI folks were acting under the orders of Obama and probably through Hillary. The FBI big-shots only work under orders they don't think on their own.

    Mile high P , 2 months ago

    Mccabe is a weasel beyond a doubt, and the FBI is complicit in there doing nothing about it until the fool admits to it on primetime TV for the whole world to see!! He tarnished your agency along with comey, strozk, and the other traitors. Own it FBI he is one of yours.

    SanAntonioSlim , 2 months ago (edited)

    The fix was in. The bureaunazis are so protected in their deep state they have no fear of admitting their collusion efforts against Trump. A special counsel needs to investigate the FBI and DOJ connections to Russia and Democrats. Nothing changes if no one goes to jail. These bureaunazis watch too much Game of Thrones and House of Cards.

    Keith McCormick , 2 months ago

    America's first attempted coup. Pure sedition.

    Steve Jones , 2 months ago

    Time to sweep the leg of the corruption in the FBI

    Ronald Cates , 2 months ago

    IT All LEADS BACK TO HILLARY

    MegaRudyray , 2 months ago

    When you fire the director, then tell people "I believe Putin".....yes, they are going to start investigating you.

    Phillip Sumpter , 2 months ago

    May the pendulum finally, please swing the other way into combating the true collusion happening on the Left.

    billsd13 , 2 months ago

    No questions from 60 Minutes regarding the FISA warrant and how that was a product of the Clinton campaign, and no questions along those lines.

    tmc che , 2 months ago (edited)

    Mueller, while FBI Director, turned the FBI into an intelligence agency from that of a crime fighting agency. Which was then used by the political class to support their positions of power. Mr Trump upset their world with his electoral victory. President Trump is hated by the political class because he has come as the destroyer of their world.

    MWV , 2 months ago (edited)

    Well, I believe McCabe was questioned during hearings and didn't he deny all this under oath??? How has he not been Roger Stoned yet?

    Brian P , 2 months ago

    Deep State poster boy. Full of hubris and entitlement. Power corrupts.

    James Christianson , 2 months ago

    Former deep state Berryboma crony. One of many slated for hanging. One of many. Along with Berryboma.

    noemi barrios , 2 months ago

    oh so we should believe the liar McCabe who lied to congress and is under grand jury indictment! throw him in jail with comey!

    tamimerkaz , 2 months ago

    McCabe has totally self admited for a deep state coup attempt against a duly elected president. He should be behind bars rather than selling his book on TV. Lock up McCabe, Rosenstein and the rest of the Deep State coup gang and DRAIN-THE-SWAMP.

    bigwaverider , 2 months ago

    McCabe is still at it. He's got Russian derangement syndrome.

    Otie Brown , 2 months ago

    So McCabe appointed himself the FBI, Pratorian Guard, to protect us against Russia? That is dangerous to a demoncracy. It is not legal at all.

    Tobias Forge , 2 months ago

    Just image if Hillary was able to steal the election ... We'd still have an FBI and Justice Department full of traitors to America.

    [May 03, 2019] Andrew McCabe played the key role in the appointment of the special prosecutor

    Highly recommended!
    McCabe came out of this interview as pretty capable and dangerous person
    This is a soft-gloves interview by NYT presstitute who was instrument in sustaining Russiagate color revolution.
    McCabe in this interview admits that he pushed for the appointment of the special prosecutor.
    McCabe applied double standard to Hillary investigation. Before that he run politically charges investigation of FIFA
    This can be classified as McCabe led coup d'état. See also Alan Dershowitz Talks about Andrew McCabe's 60 Minuets Interview - YouTube
    Mar 02, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Andrew McCabe intervied by NYT´s Adam Goldman After Words C-span Feb 26 2019 - YouTube

    Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe discussed his career, the FBI, and his firing from the Bureau. He was interviewed by New York Times reporter Adam Goldman.

    [May 03, 2019] The Russiagate Hoax -- Cutting to the Chase caucus99percent

    Notable quotes:
    "... On June 14th, the DNC, in conjunction with the Crowdstrike cybersecurity firm that they had hired, announced that its servers had been hacked, and that a file on Trump opposition research had been taken. An entity dubbed "Guccifer 2.0" popped up online a day later, claiming to be the source for the soon-to-be-released Wikileaks DNC material, and obligingly posting a file on Trump opposition research, as well as several other files. Forensic analyses have indicated that the posted documents had had their metadata intentionally altered to leave "Russian fingerprints". ..."
    "... We need to determine who created the Guccifer 2.0 hoax, and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. The "intelligence agents" who concluded "with high confidence" that Guccifer 2.0 was a Wikileaks source need to be fired or demoted. If the FBI has known all along that Seth was a Wikileaks source, those who shielded the public from this crucial information need to be unmasked. The "journalists" who have been credulously spreading the "Russia interfered" narrative 24/7 for most of a year, without making the least effort to question the veracity of these assertions, should be recognized by the public as the willing tools of lying warmongers that they are, and their future work studiously ignored. The sanctions recently implemented on Russia should be lifted, and the politicians who played the most egregious role in hyping the Russian interference narrative and pushing the sanctions should be repudiated at the polls when they come up for re-election. (I confess, however, that I will not hold my breath waiting for any of these things to happen.) ..."
    "... Why do you not see this as our intelligence agencies working with the DNC and providing them with bogus clues to work with? Doesn't the record now show that the CIA provided the premise for starting the FBI counterintelligence investigation into collusion? And doesn't the record now show that the premise was based on the activities of CIA and FBI informant actors infiltrated into the Trump campaign? ..."
    "... With new information about the "U.K. operation" using Stefan Halper (CIA asset and FBI informant); and the details of the contacts by U.S. intelligence operative Azra Turk; we can overlay the timeline and see a clear picture ..."
    May 03, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

    The Russiagate Hoax  --  Cutting to the Chase

    veganmark on Fri, 05/03/2019 - 8:00am Originally published Aug 11, 2017

    I have written a rather comprehensive debunking of the "Russia interfered in our election" narrative that has obsessed the MSM for most of a year. Since its first posting, I have been updating it; its expanded form is available here:

    https://caucus99percent.com/content/what%E2%80%99s-left-russiagate%E2%80...

    I don't pretend to be an investigative journalist  --  rather, what I have done is to assemble the findings of respected journalists, intelligence experts, and cyberanalysts who have examined the interference narrative with a critical eye. The links are the best part of my essay, and I refer you to them if you want verification for the views I express below.

    What I would like to do here is present, in summary form, my own best guess as to what actually happened, in light of the evidence and analyses I cite. Other interpretations are possible, but most of these have a Rube Goldberg-type complexity and illogic that render them quite dubious. Whereas this interpretation fits the known evidence rather straightforwardly:

    Seth Rich was the source for the DNC emails which Wikileaks published; Assange has been silently screaming this for months, both through statements and tweets, while strenuously denying that the Russian government played any role in this regard. How Seth obtained these emails, and how he conveyed them to Wikileaks, remain to be determined. If the FBI inside source which Sy Hersh discussed in his taped conversation with Ed Butowski is accurate, Seth provided them by drop box, giving Wikileaks the password. There is a recent claim that Seth had had a raucous argument with Donna Brazile regarding DNC unfairness to Bernie; this concern may have motivated Seth's leaking, though he may also have sought payment for his risky efforts.

    On June 12th of last year, Wikileaks announced that it would soon be releasing material pertinent to Hillary's campaign. Whether the DNC knew at this time that Seth was the source is unclear. What is clear is that DNC officials, who had previously been informed that their server had been hacked, quickly decided to convince our intelligence agencies, the press, and the public that Russian hackers, acting at the behest of the Russian government, were the source of the damaging material to be released  --  in that way, focusing attention on the evil machinations of the Russians, slamming Wikileaks, and detracting attention from the content of the released material.

    On June 14th, the DNC, in conjunction with the Crowdstrike cybersecurity firm that they had hired, announced that its servers had been hacked, and that a file on Trump opposition research had been taken. An entity dubbed "Guccifer 2.0" popped up online a day later, claiming to be the source for the soon-to-be-released Wikileaks DNC material, and obligingly posting a file on Trump opposition research, as well as several other files. Forensic analyses have indicated that the posted documents had had their metadata intentionally altered to leave "Russian fingerprints".

    On July 5th, Guccifer 2.0 downloaded from the DNC server a number of additional documents, some of which  --  all of them relatively innocuous  --  he subsequently posted on his own website. Forensic analysis of this download indicated that it occurred locally, most likely via USB port, and that it took place on the East Coast.

    An overview suggests that the Guccifer 2.0 persona was created by people with inside connections to the DNC. The evident intent of this charade was to trick our intelligence agencies into concluding that Guccifer 2.0 was the Wikileaks source and was acting at the behest of the Russian government. The fact that he released Trump opposition material a day after the DNC proclaimed that it had been taken by hackers strongly suggests collusion between top people in the DNC and the people concocting Guccifer 2.0. As Adam Carter notes, it is not at all clear how the DNC/Crowdstrike could have known that this particular file had been taken. Carter suspects that principals at Crowdstrike played a key role in creating Guccifer 2.0, as they would have had the expertise required to pull off such a scam. (Whether Imran Awan possesses such skill is not clear.)

    Five days later (July 10th), Seth Rich was murdered, most likely by hitmen. The DNC might have known by this point that Seth was the leaker to Wikileaks  --  and that he therefore would have been in a position to completely destroy the Russian interference hoax if he had chosen to do so.

    Crowdstrike, whose founders are known to despise the Russian government, rapidly concluded that the DNC server had been hacked by Russians affiliated with Russian intelligence. According to experts who have examined this claim, the logic behind this conclusion is unconvincing and puerile. Moreover, Crowdstrike's previous effort to implicate Russian intelligence in a hack had been shown to be bogus. Nonetheless, the FBI chose to accept the Crowdstrike conclusions, even though they had never been able to examine the DNC servers themselves because the DNC had refused to turn them over, and the FBI had failed to subpoena them.

    If Hersh's source inside the FBI is to be believed, the FBI has known for over a year that Seth Rich was a Wikileaks source, and has kept this knowledge secret. The FBI states that they have not participated in the investigation of Seth's murder  --  thereby tacitly implying, without saying so directly, that they have not examined his computer. Given that Assange, who presumably has direct knowledge on the issue, has hinted as strongly as possible that Seth was one of his sources, the FBI would be severely derelict if indeed it has not examined Seth computer(s).

    The Obama administration was soon fully on board with the "Russia interfered" narrative, which initially shielded Hillary from the full import of the Wikileaks revelations, and, after the election, provided Hillary's campaign with an excuse for its failure while enabling an ancillary "Trump colluded in the interference" narrative that could be employed to disable the Trump presidency. Despite Hillary's concocted claim about "17 intelligence agencies" verifying the Russian interference story, the Obama administration made sure that the standard appropriate process for our intelligence agencies to provide a balanced evaluation  --  a National Intelligence Assessment, entailing participation by a number of agencies and including any dissenting judgements  --  was NOT FOLLOWED. Rather, the histrionic Russophobes James Clapper and John Brennan were allowed to hand-pick a group of a couple dozen intelligence personnel from just 3 agencies. The declassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) which they drafted, free of any dissents, accused the Russian government of a conscious campaign to support the candidacy of Trump by hacking several key political websites and providing their contents to Wikileaks and other outlets. Guccifer 2.0 was specifically cited as a Wikileaks source.

    Critics immediately noted that the declassified ICA provided no hard evidence whatever to document its claims, and that over half its length was devoted to a criticism of the RT television network as a supposed propaganda outlet. In particular, no insight was provided as to how the authors of the report had concluded that the hacked documents had been transferred to Wikileaks. The conclusions of this report evidently fit seamlessly into a broader strategy of demonizing Russia, the intent being to insure that our military-industrial complex and NATO continue to receive an outrageous level of funding, and that the warped policy agendas of the neo-cons are satisfied.

    Our MSM immediately embraced the conclusions of the ICA as Gospel truth, frequently referring to "our 17 intelligence agencies" as the source for this report. They completely ignored the fact that the "assessments" of this report are in effect just "best guesses", that the preamble of the report pointed out that "assessments" should not necessarily be equated to "facts", and that the NSA  --  which, as William Binney notes, should have been able to obtain definitive proof for any actual hacking that had occurred  --  expressed only "moderate confidence" in the conclusions. This sycophantic credulity is particularly inexcusable in the context of the previous "Saddam's WMDs" hoax which they likewise had swallowed uncritically, resulting in an illegal war with utterly catastrophic consequences.

    The initial claims of Russian interference were soon embellished by media reports claiming that, according to anonymous intelligence sources, the Russian government had attempted to hack into the voter registration files of 21 states, had conducted hacking operations intended to interfere in German and French elections, and had hacked into the Qatari state news agency to plant a fake news story. The veracity of each of these unsourced claims has been called into question, and in some cases disproved, by cyberanalysts, intelligence experts, and journalists. The conclusions of the NSA document leaked by Reality Winner have likewise been shown to be purely speculative. Claims that Russian bots and paid trolls assaulted our social media in the months prior to the election are poorly documented, and, in any case, rather comical.

    Following the election, the Russian interference narrative was echoed unceasingly by the Democratic establishment, as this was the necessary concomitant of the "Trump collusion" claims that they were using to slam and cripple Trump  --  in the hopes of eventually impeaching him. (It presumably would have been hard for Trump to collude in Russian election interference if in fact there had been no Russian interference.) Hysterical attacks on Russia accelerated to the point that some pols referred to the "Russian interference" as "an act of war". This New McCarthyism ultimately led to our Congress placing severe new sanctions on Russia which also harm our European allies, and which these allies decry as illegal. In other words, we are punishing Russia for a crime they almost certainly did not commit, alienating key allies in the process, and amping up a Second Cold War, with all the expense and severe danger which this may entail.

    All because the DNC and its associates concocted an overt fraud to protect and excuse Hillary, and to use as a cudgel over Trump  --  a fraud that was readily lapped up and sold to the public by hand-picked Russophobes in our intelligence community, and by a MSM that cares far less about truth than about access and ratings.

    We need to determine who created the Guccifer 2.0 hoax, and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. The "intelligence agents" who concluded "with high confidence" that Guccifer 2.0 was a Wikileaks source need to be fired or demoted. If the FBI has known all along that Seth was a Wikileaks source, those who shielded the public from this crucial information need to be unmasked. The "journalists" who have been credulously spreading the "Russia interfered" narrative 24/7 for most of a year, without making the least effort to question the veracity of these assertions, should be recognized by the public as the willing tools of lying warmongers that they are, and their future work studiously ignored. The sanctions recently implemented on Russia should be lifted, and the politicians who played the most egregious role in hyping the Russian interference narrative and pushing the sanctions should be repudiated at the polls when they come up for re-election. (I confess, however, that I will not hold my breath waiting for any of these things to happen.)

    And let's do our best to find out who murdered Seth Rich, and why. The DNC and its media acolytes have been heaping hysterical abuse on anyone who entertains the possibility that Seth may have been a Wikileaks source, or who undertakes to investigate his murder. Donna Brazile and Seth's brother Aaron have done their best to impede the investigative efforts of Rod Wheeler. There is reason to suspect that the DC police have backed off the investigation of the murder, accepting the very dubious view that Seth's murder was just a "botched robbery". And why did Democratic operatives feel it necessary to supply the Rich family with a "crisis consultant" after Assange mentioned Seth  --  when they couldn't be bothered to offer an award for apprehension of Seth's murderer? This behavior is highly suspicious  --  if Seth was indeed the victim of random street violence, what would the DNC have to fear from further investigation? Let's get to the bottom of this!

    Linda Wood on Fri, 05/03/2019 - 10:44am
    Hello again, veganmark.

    I appreciate your presenting and thoroughly examining the facets of this issue, and I think the more we look at it the better equipped we'll be to deal with whatever happens when the Attorney General or the Republicans begin to address what happened, if they do.

    The part of your essay I question is this:

    The evident intent of this charade was to trick our intelligence agencies into concluding that Guccifer 2.0 was the Wikileaks source and was acting at the behest of the Russian government.

    Why do you not see this as our intelligence agencies working with the DNC and providing them with bogus clues to work with? Doesn't the record now show that the CIA provided the premise for starting the FBI counterintelligence investigation into collusion? And doesn't the record now show that the premise was based on the activities of CIA and FBI informant actors infiltrated into the Trump campaign?

    Linda Wood on Fri, 05/03/2019 - 11:28am
    Here are some recent

    sources of good investigative journalism on the subject, which I think you've probably read, but just to have them here:

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/spygate-the-inside-story-behind-the-allege...

    Spygate: The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump
    BY JEFF CARLSON
    March 28, 2019 Updated: April 11, 2019

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/05/02/big-puzzle-pieces-connec...

    Big Puzzle Pieces Connecting – The CIA, FBI, and 2016 Political Surveillance is Merging
    Posted on May 2, 2019 by sundance

    The admissions within the New York Times story today -outlining how President Obama's intelligence apparatus ran simultaneous intelligence operations against the Trump campaign- are starting to merge the FBI and CIA operations. CTH anticipated this.

    With new information about the "U.K. operation" using Stefan Halper (CIA asset and FBI informant); and the details of the contacts by U.S. intelligence operative Azra Turk; we can overlay the timeline and see a clear picture

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/05/02/papadopoulos-responds-to...

    Papadopoulos Responds to Admissions the FBI/CIA Ran "Operations" Against Him .
    Posted on May 2, 2019 by sundance

    Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos appears on Fox with Tucker Carlson to discuss the revelations of the FBI/CIA running spy operations against him during the 2016 election. Papadopoulos says the FBI spy wanted him to slip up and say something; however, he had no information...

    HenryAWallace on Fri, 05/03/2019 - 12:57pm
    Thank you so much for collecting and assembling all that info.

    I have not followed this as closely as others, so I greatly appreciate this review. I think Linda may have a point about our "seventeen" intelligence agencies working with the guilty. Everyone from Hillary to Morning Joe has mentioned so many times what our intelligence agencies have said about Russia. The universal repetition makes it smell coordinated and therefore fishy.

    And all America, if not the world, knows that Clapper had no compunction about lying to Congress about an unrelated subject. Nor did he need to have any compunction about it. At the very least, he should have been fired for it, if not prosecuted. Neither happened, even though he served "at the pleasure of the President."

    chuckutzman on Fri, 05/03/2019 - 2:00pm
    This was preceeded by the Obama WH illegally SPYING on

    Trump and leaking to the press. Barr says he's digging into it and the D's are in full freak-out.

    [May 03, 2019] WaPo, CNN Virtually Silent After NYT Reveals 2nd FBI Spy Sent To Infiltrate Trump Campaign

    I don't want to say # AGBarr is positively engaged on the Dem(on)rats. His mere level headed and professionalism exposed the Dem(on)rats' circus act.
    Notable quotes:
    "... You might remember that McCabe picked Goldman of all people to interview him about the use of 'Confidential Human Sources' in Operation Crossfire Hurricane - funny that! ..."
    "... Goldman's (McCabe's) argument is that the President was a national security risk because he fired Comey. "Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security." ..."
    "... 3 years and at least 33 million have been wasted in attempt to link Trump campaign to Russian intelligence ..."
    "... Brennan used any Russian talking to a U.S. person as a reason to surveillance the U.S. person. Red scare...the century old excuse used by the FBI to illegally spy on Americans. The history books won't describe his actions as honorable ..."
    "... What was it that prompted Goldman (ie McCabe) to publish his latest article on the FBI Russia investigation? Answer: Barr's criticism's of the FBI. ..."
    "... CIA/FBI helping each other out. Informally of course. Standard off the books quid pro quo. ..."
    "... The F.B.I. received the information from the Australian government on July 26, 2016, the special counsel's report said, and the bureau code-named its investigation Crossfire Hurricane . ..."
    May 03, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Both the Washington Post and CNN - which breathlessly reported on their peers' anonymously-sourced anti-Trump propaganda for two years - have somehow failed to write a single article mentioning Azra Turk . As the Times revealed on Thursday, the FBI operative who went by the name Azra Turk repeatedly flirted with Trump aide George Papadopoulos during their encounters as well as in email exchanges according to an October, 2018 Daily Caller report, confirmed by the Times.

    While in London in 2016, Ms. Turk exchanged emails with Mr. Papadopoulos, saying meeting him had been the " highlight of my trip ," according to messages provided by Mr. Papadopoulos.

    " I am excited about what the future holds for us :), " she wrote. - New York Times

    And as the Times makes clear, "the FBI sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer" to investigate the Trump campaign. Verified account @ ByronYork May 2 Follow Follow @ ByronYork Following Following @ ByronYork Unfollow Unfollow @ ByronYork Blocked Blocked @ ByronYork Unblock Unblock @ ByronYork Pending Pending follow request from @ ByronYork Cancel Cancel your follow request to @ ByronYork More

    In his House testimony, George Papadopoulos described undercover FBI informant Stefan Halper introducing him to undercover FBI informant 'Azra Turk.' pic.twitter.com/8jO4lK6Ldt

    So I get there. I get to London. And he introduces -- or he does not introduce me to, but I can't remember exactly how I came into contact with his assistant, this young lady named Azra Turk, which I think is a fake name, by the way. My --

    Mr. Meadows. Why do you believe it's a fake name?

    Mr. Papadopoulos. Reading -- reading Twitter and people saying that Azra in Turkish means pure and then Turk. So unless she has the name of pure Turk. I don't know. Maybe that's -- those are common names in Turkey. I don't know. But it just seems that it was probably a fake alias.

    Another beautiful young lady -- you know, I had many young beautiful ladies coming into my life with Joseph Mifsud and now another professor. The professors liked to introduce me to young beautiful women.

    And we're sitting there, and she didn't strike me as a Cambridge associate at all. So right away, I was suspicious that there was something not right here. She -- her English was very bad. She spoke with -- I think she was a Turkish national, but she also might have been a dual American citizen. I'm not sure. And she took me to -- out for drinks in London and was probing me a lot.

    Meanwhile, a Russian-born academic falsely accused of being a Kremlin 'honeypot' operative against Mike Flynn, Svetlana Lokhova, has an interesting theory as to why the Times published the '2nd spy' revelation in the first place.

    Svetlana Lokhova ‏ @ RealSLokhova 8h 8 hours ago More

    I am a 'veteran' of reading Adam Goldman (NYT) articles about Halper's role with the FBI so here are pointers. You always have to ask: 1) Why did he write the article? 2) When did he write the article? 3) What is the narrative he is placing? 4) What has he left out? THREAD

    Svetlana Lokhova @RealSLokhova

    Follow ) v

    2/ You might remember that McCabe picked Goldman of all people to interview him about the use of 'Confidential Human Sources' in
    Operation Crossfire Hurricane - funny that!

    Andrew McCabe intervied by NYT's Adam Goldma...

    Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe discussed his career, the FBI, and his firing from the Bureau. He was interviewed by New York Times reporter Adam Go...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPYUWZ9AF0M

    4/ Goldman's (McCabe's) argument is that the President was a national security risk because he fired Comey. "Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security."

    3 years and at least 33 million have been wasted in attempt to link Trump campaign to Russian intelligence. As I stated 2 years ago, I am not A Russian honeytrap for Gen Flynn.

    RG ‏ @ rgreader 15h 15 hours ago More

    Replying to @ RealSLokhova

    Brennan used any Russian talking to a U.S. person as a reason to surveillance the U.S. person. Red scare...the century old excuse used by the FBI to illegally spy on Americans. The history books won't describe his actions as honorable

    Svetlana Lokhova @RealSLokhova • 7h v

    7/ This is Goldman's implausible explanation for spying. The President is portrayed as nuts, nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/...

    President Trump accused the without evidence, of planting a mole inside his campaign to undermine his presidential run. But the F.B.I. in fact dispatched a confidential informant to meet with Trump campaign advisers as it began its investigation into possible links between his campaign and Russia.

    8/ What was it that prompted Goldman (ie McCabe) to publish his latest article on the FBI Russia investigation? Answer: Barr's criticism's of the FBI.

    Barr: One of the things I want to look -- there are people -- many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single confidential informant and a FISA warrant. I would like to find out whether that is, in fact, true. It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence effort designed to stop the threat as it's being represented.

    9/ The message by NYT (McCabe) is that the FBI threw their best guys at this, hence sudden reference to Operation 'Ghost Stories'.

    10/ The main message is that the Russia investigation was legally predicated,

    CNN law enforcement analyst and retired FBI agent James A. Gagliano opined on Twitter that perhaps the Times was helping the intelligence community get out in front of the upcoming Inspector General report on the FBI's conduct during the 2016 election.

    James A. Gagliano @JamesAGagliano

    Must caveat with -- would have had to have been a "CERTIFIED" FBI Undercover Agent (UCA), who had passed the UCA course, been pre-screened (psychologicals) and been handpicked by FBI HQ for a high-profile overseas assignment. Also, Legat London would've assuredly coordinated w/MI5.

    James A. Gagliano @JamesAGagliano

    Unless it was foreign intelligence service supplying the "honey trap.'' Papadopoulos argued *Azra Turk* had thick accent -- which wouldn't preclude her from FBI service, if US citizen. Some argue Agency employee. Surmise, absent heavy redaction, pending IG report lays this bare.

    James A. Gagliano @JamesAGagliano

    MAYBE this is why @nytimes helped get out in front of the news cycle that will roil following IG report that may be released this month or next.

    Yog Soggoth , 1 hour ago link

    Papadapoulos was smart enough to get pictures of her with his phone ... Right?

    malek , 1 hour ago link

    Who is Azra Turk?

    RightLineBacker , 4 minutes ago link

    An FBI spy.

    Thought Processor , 1 hour ago link

    CIA/FBI helping each other out. Informally of course. Standard off the books quid pro quo.

    11b40 , 2 hours ago link

    As I understand it, the CIA is not supposed to be involved with spying on American citizens, but the FBI has wide ranging latitude. This article says she was presumed to be FBI, but Papadoploulos says he thinks she was CIA. So, it would be a graver offense if she was CIA and busy performing illegal spying activities on an American citizen.

    If I am fuzzy on this, maybe someone can clarify who knows the rules a little better.

    surf@jm , 2 hours ago link

    New York Slimes in collusion with the CIA and FBI deepstate.......

    No **** Sherlock...........

    my new username , 2 hours ago link

    Will she disappear like Mifsud...

    C.J. , 2 hours ago link

    MSM burying the truth? Well imagine my shock. I'm surprised the likes of CNN and Facebook are still trying to hide their ban on truth and just openly claim truth is hate speech.

    HideTheWeenie , 2 hours ago link

    If you work at the CIA, do you get "honeypot" privileges ?

    They must have a lot of downtime.

    Wonder if "honeypot" is a line item in the CIA budget and how they forecast that. Do their rates decline over time, maybe with an associated depletion account set up like for petroleum reserves. Lots of questions here.

    Northbridge , 4 hours ago link

    Here's a link to the actual article.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/politics/fbi-government-investigator-trump.html?searchResultPosition=1

    [quote]

    "Mr. Barr reignited the controversy last month when he told Congress , "I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal." He backed off the charged declaration later in the same hearing, saying: "I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I'm not suggesting that it wasn't adequately predicated. But I need to explore that." "

    ......

    Mr. Barr again defended his use of the term "spying" at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, saying he wanted to know more about the F.B.I.'s investigative efforts during 2016 and explained that the early inquiry most likely went beyond the use of an informant and a court-authorized wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, who had interacted with a Russian intelligence officer.

    .....

    Weeks before Mr. Papadopoulos met with Ms. Turk and Mr. Halper, the F.B.I. had opened its investigation into the Russia effort -- based largely on information that Mr. Papadopoulos had relayed to an Australian diplomat about a Russian offer to help the Trump campaign by releasing thousands of hacked Democratic emails.

    The F.B.I. received the information from the Australian government on July 26, 2016, the special counsel's report said, and the bureau code-named its investigation Crossfire Hurricane .

    Investigators scrambled to determine whether Mr. Papadopoulos had any Russian contacts while deciding to scrutinize three additional Trump campaign aides who had concerning ties to Russia: Paul Manafort, its chairman; Michael T. Flynn, who went on to be the president's first national security adviser; and Mr. Page.

    [/quote]

    AntiLeMaire , 4 hours ago link

    His response: "I'm just going to leave it right now as a 'government investigator.' I use that wording for a reason, and I'm going to leave it at that."

    Priceless!

    Not FBI, just a 'government investigator.' and "I use that wording for a reason," and people on Twitter all trying to solve that complicated puzzle ! LOL.

    [May 03, 2019] There Was Spying NYT Admits Obama Admin Used 'Honeypot' To Spy Against Trump Campaign In 2016

    May 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    A mysterious Turkish woman who "assisted" FBI spy Stefan Halper in a London operation targeting Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos has been revealed as yet another FBI operative sent to spy on the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election, according to the New York Times .

    The woman, who went by the name Azra Turk, repeatedly flirted with Papadopoulos during their encounters as well as in email exchanges according to an October, 2018 Daily Caller report, confirmed today by the Times. "Turk," posed as Halper's assistant according to the report.

    While in London in 2016, Ms. Turk exchanged emails with Mr. Papadopoulos, saying meeting him had been the " highlight of my trip ," according to messages provided by Mr. Papadopoulos.

    " I am excited about what the future holds for us :), " she wrote. - New York Times

    And as the Times makes clear, "the FBI sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer" to investigate the Trump campaign.

    The conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the woman sitting across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked a direct question: Was the Trump campaign working with Russia?

    ...

    Ms. Turk went to London to help oversee the politically sensitive operation, working alongside a longtime informant, the Cambridge professor Stefan A. Halper. The move was a sign that the bureau wanted in place a trained investigator for a layer of oversight , as well as someone who could gather information for or serve as a credible witness in any potential prosecution that emerged from the case. - New York Times

    Halper - who was paid more than $1 million by the Pentagon while Obama was president - contacted Papadopoulos on September 2, 2016 according to The Caller - and would later fly him out to London under the guise of working on a policy paper on energy issues in Turkey, Cyprus and Israel - for which he was ultimately paid $3,000. Papadopoulos met Halper several times during his stay, "having dinner one night at the Travellers Club, and Old London gentleman's club frequented by international diplomats."

    As the Times notes, the London operation "yielded no fruitful information," while the FBI has called their activities in the months before the 2016 election as both "legal and carefully considered under extraordinary circumstances," according to the report.

    Mr. Papadopoulos was baffled. " There is no way this is a Cambridge professor's research assistant ," he recalled thinking, according to his book. In recent weeks, he has said in tweets that he believes Ms. Turk may have been working for Turkish intelligence but provided no evidence.

    The day after meeting Ms. Turk, Mr. Papadopoulos met briefly with Mr. Halper at a private London club, and Ms. Turk joined them. The two men agreed to meet again, arranging a drink at the Sofitel hotel in London's posh West End.

    During that conversation, Mr. Halper immediately asked about hacked emails and whether Russia was helping the campaign , according to Mr. Papadopoulos's book. Angry over the accusatory questions, Mr. Papadopoulos ended the meeting . - New York Times

    Also of interest, the British government was informed of the spy operation on their soil , according to the Times , however it is unclear whether they participated.

    As for the FBI, the agency's actions are now under investigation by the Justice Department's Inspector General, Michael Horowitz.

    He could make the results public in May or June, Attorney General William P. Barr has said. Some of the findings are likely to be classified.

    It is unclear whether Mr. Horowitz will find fault with the F.B.I.'s decision to have Ms. Turk, whose real name is not publicly known, meet with Mr. Papadopoulos. Mr. Horowitz has focused among other things on the activities of Mr. Halper, who accompanied Ms. Turk in one of her meetings with Mr. Papadopoulos and also met with him and other campaign aides separately. The bureau might also have seen Ms. Turk's role as essential for protecting Mr. Halper's identity as an informant if prosecutors ever needed court testimony about their activities. - New York Times

    During Congressional testimony last month, Attorney General Barr told Congress "I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal," adding "I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I'm not suggesting that it wasn't adequately predicated. But I need to explore that."

    Maybe he could explore the role of Joseph Mifsud - a Maltese professor and self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation, who reportedly seeded Papadopoulos with the rumor that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.

    It doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that Mifsud seeded the information with Papadopoulos, who was pumped for that same information during a "drunken" encounter at a London Bar with Clinton-associate and Australian diplomat Alexander Downer - who told authorities about the "dirt" rumor, which launched the FBI/DOJ counterintelligence operation that included Halper and "Azra Turk" spying on Papadopoulos .

    Mr. Barr again defended his use of the term "spying" at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, saying he wanted to know more about the F.B.I.'s investigative efforts during 2016 and explained that the early inquiry likely went beyond the use of an informant and a court-authorized wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, who had interacted with a Russian intelligence officer. - New York Times

    "Many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single confidential informant," and the warrant to surveil Carter Page, said Barr. "I would like to find out whether that is in fact true. It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence effort designed to stop the threat as it's being represented ."

    Nice hedge, Barr, but what happened appears to be anything but "fairly anemic."

    Teamtc321 , 42 minutes ago link

    BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

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

    Ukrainian embassy confirms DNC contractor solicited Trump dirt in 2016

    BY JOHN SOLOMON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR -- 05/02/19 07:00 PM EDT 397

    THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

    The boomerang from the Democratic Party's failed attempt to connect Donald Trump to Russia's 2016 election meddling is picking up speed, and its flight path crosses right through Moscow's pesky neighbor, Ukraine. That is where there is growing evidence a foreign power was asked, and in some cases tried, to help Hillary Clinton .

    In its most detailed account yet, Ukraine's embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump's campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country's president to help.

    "She said the DNC wanted to collect evidence that Trump, his organization and Manafort were Russian assets, working to hurt the U.S. and working with Putin against the U.S. interests. She indicated if we could find the evidence they would introduce it in Congress in September and try to build a case that Trump should be removed from the ballot, from the election," he recalled.

    After the meeting, Telizhenko said he became concerned about the legality of using his country's assets to help an American political party win an U.S. election. But he proceeded with his assignment.

    Telizhenko said that, as he began his research, he discovered that Fusion GPS was nosing around Ukraine, seeking similar information, and he believed they, too, worked for the Democrats.

    https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/441892-ukrainian-embassy-confirms-dnc-contractor-solicited-trump-dirt-in-2016

    gypsywoman , 1 hour ago link

    One of the biggest revelations to understanding the news related to the Trump-Russia Collusion narrative is the status of Donald J. Trump as a long-time undercover asset of the Federal Bureau of Investigation!

    Myself and my friends on Twitter have uncovered evidence showing that President Trump & the Trump organization have helped the FBI in sting operations going back to at least 1981 & probably earlier. Many scratched their heads and said it wasn't possible when I published threads on the topic almost one year ago. Fortunately, the evidence for this has continued to build with much of it based on FBI documents released under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

    More... https://butnothingshappening.com/

    gypsywoman , 1 hour ago link

    Interesting theory...

    http://butnothingshappening.com/

    General Titus , 1 hour ago link

    The illegal spying of the anti-American Obozo Admin goes all the way back to the 2012 campaign when they spied on the Globalist Neocon fraud Romney's campaign. Fire up the electric chairs! Traitor Brennen first to Ride the Lightning!

    Asoka_The_Great , 1 hour ago link

    Despite Robert Muller's (one the US DARK STATE/WAR STATE 's special Hatchet man) 2 years, 50 millions dollar extensive investigations effort, he has not uncovered any evidences that will exonerate Donald Trump, and prove his innocence, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Donald Trump did not colluded with the Russians and did not obstructed justice.

    This means undeniable complicity in Donald Trump's part, in colluding with the Russians and obstructing justice.

    Attorney General Barr should extend Special Hatchetman Robert Muller's mandate to Investigate Donald Trump's collusion with Communist Leaders to influence the 2020 Election.

    There is a vast amount of evidences that Trump has COLLUDED the communists countries such China, N. Korea, Vietnam and Russia, during his two years in Office, in order, to influence public opinions and attempt to swing the results of 2020 elections.

    Trump has frequently visited those COMMUNIST countries, and meet with North Korean Dictator Kim Jun-En for multiple times.

    Trump has dinner with the Commie Emperor/Dictator Xi, in Argentina, and talk with him on the phones many times.

    And Trump has meet in Russian Dictator Putin, many times.

    In short, the overwhelming evidences of Trump's COLLUSION with those COMMUNIST countries to influence the 2020 election, leaves NO room for doubt.

    Therefore, the IMPEACHMENT of Donald Trump must proceed, immediately, from Muller's conclusion of his investigations.

    A length JAIL TERM is appropriate for his BRUTAL BETRAYAL of THE TRUST, the American People, has placed upon him.

    And it is time to restore Hitlery as our lawfully elected POTUS, in the White House.

    * * *

    For the Trumpards, who might be too stupid, to get this post as a Satire , let me state explicitly that this a Sarcastic Satire . So no more stupid comments on my state of mind.

    Sarcastic - Someone, who is sarcastic says or does, the opposite, of what they really mean, in order, to mock or insult someone.

    Satire - a technique used by writers to expose and criticize foolishness and corruption of an individual or a society, by using humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule. It intends to improve humanity by criticizing its follies and foibles.

    Teamtc321 , 1 hour ago link

    The FISA court is their unraveling, it's already underway...............

    Here is a short take away.......

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

    Joe diGenova: John Brennan Isn't Going to Need One Lawyer, He's Going to Need Five

    In an appearance on FNC's "The Ingraham Angle" last week, former federal prosecutor Joe DiGenova claimed that evidence of widespread FISA abuse by members of the Obama administration is forthcoming and that "there are going to be indictments; there's going to be grand juries."

    Former CIA Director "John Brennan isn't going to need one lawyer, he's going to need five," diGenova said.

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/05/02/joe_digenova_john_brennan_isnt_going_to_need_one_lawyer_hes_going_to_need_five.html

    And a full report on zero hedge. Locate the podcast with Joe D. well worth the 15 minutes and all coming out now..........Just as Dan Bongino and others have been saying all along.

    Joe DiGenova Explains Where The Russia Hoax Is Headed

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-24/joe-digenova-explains-where-russia-hoax-headed

    iSage , 1 hour ago link

    this is the turk lady

    https://mobile.twitter.com/GeorgePapa19/media/grid?idx=1

    iSage , 1 hour ago link

    or

    https://mobile.twitter.com/azra_turk?p=i

    she is a blonde

    CORNWALLISTHEFIRST , 1 hour ago link

    & a natural blonde,too! So rare for a turk!

    [May 03, 2019] The Obama administration for more than four years before the 2016 election allowed four contractors working for the FBI to illegally surveil American citizens

    Notable quotes:
    "... That report is going to be a bombshell. It is going to open up the investigation on a very high note, and there are going to be criminal referrals in it. ..."
    "... The FISA court abuse is the center of this entire abuse of governmental power, and the chief judge in that court has already ruled that the FBI broke the law and that the people at the head of the justice department, Sally Yates, John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security all knew about it and lied to the FISA court about it... ..."
    "... He [Rogers] discovered the illegal spying. He went personally to the FISA court and briefed the Chief Judge and worked with her for months to uncover the people who did it. The FISA court has already told the Justice Department who lied to that court and that has been given to [Attorney General] Bill Barr already. ..."
    May 01, 2019 | www.realclearpolitics.com

    It is about the rule of law and privacy. The Obama administration for more than four years before the 2016 election allowed four contractors working for the FBI to illegally surveil American citizens -- illegally. The FISA court has already found that. There is the Horowitz report coming out in May or possibly early June. There's another report that everyone has forgotten about involving James Comey alone. That will be out in two weeks. That report is going to be a bombshell. It is going to open up the investigation on a very high note, and there are going to be criminal referrals in it.

    The FISA court abuse is the center of this entire abuse of governmental power, and the chief judge in that court has already ruled that the FBI broke the law and that the people at the head of the justice department, Sally Yates, John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security all knew about it and lied to the FISA court about it...

    There's a hero in this story and it is not a lawyer. There is a hero. His name is Admiral Mike Rogers. He was the head of the National Security Agency.

    He [Rogers] discovered the illegal spying. He went personally to the FISA court and briefed the Chief Judge and worked with her for months to uncover the people who did it. The FISA court has already told the Justice Department who lied to that court and that has been given to [Attorney General] Bill Barr already.

    [May 03, 2019] These reporters and networks have been named in the WikiLeaks to have colluded with the DNC or Hillary campaign during the 2016 election cycle

    May 03, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    GUS100CORRINA , 23 minutes ago link

    There Was Spying: NYT Admits Obama Admin Used 'Honeypot' To Spy Against Trump Campaign In 2016

    My response: Why would the MSM want to get out in front of what is coming by issuing this news story? May be they are implicated as well! Below is the list of MSM career criminals who are facing the real possibility of jail time.

    === List of MSM Career Criminals Guilty of TREASON, SEDITION and/or SUBVERSIVE activities!! ===

    These reporters and networks have been named in the WikiLeaks to have colluded with the DNC or Hillary campaign during the 2016 election cycle:

    ABC – Cecilia Vega
    ABC - David Muir
    ABC – Diane Sawyer
    ABC – George Stephanoplous
    ABC – Jon Karl
    ABC – Liz Kreutz
    AP – Julie Pace
    AP – Ken Thomas
    AP – Lisa Lerer
    AURN – April Ryan
    Bloomberg – Jennifer Epstein
    Bloomberg – John Heillman
    Bloomberg/MSNBC – Jonathan Alter
    Bloomberg – Mark Halperin
    Buzzfeed – Ben Smith
    Buzzfeed – Ruby Cramer
    CBS – Gayle King
    CBS – John Dickerson
    CBS – Norah O'Donnell
    CBS – Steve Chagaris
    CBS – Vicki Gordon
    CNBC – John Harwood
    CNN – Brianna Keilar
    CNN – Dan Merica
    CNN – David Chailan
    CNN – Erin Burnett
    CNN – Gloria Borger
    CNN – Jake Tapper
    CNN – Jeff Zeleny
    CNN - Jeff Zucker
    CNN – John Berman
    CNN – Kate Bouldan
    CNN – Maria Cardona
    CNN – Mark Preston
    CNN – Sam Feist
    Daily Beast – Jackie Kucinich
    GPG – Mike Feldman
    HuffPo – Amanda Terkel
    HuffPo – Arianna Huffington
    HuffPo – Sam Stein
    HuffPo – Whitney Snyder
    LAT – Evan Handler
    LAT – Mike Memoli
    McClatchy – Anita Kumar
    MORE – Betsy Fisher Martin
    MSNBC – Alex Seitz-Wald
    MSNBC – Alex Wagner
    MSNBC – Andrea Mitchell
    MSNBC - Beth Fouhy
    MSNBC – Ed Schultz
    MSNBC – Joe Scarborough
    MSNBC – Mika Brzezinski
    MSNBC – Phil Griffin
    MSNBC – Rachel Maddow
    MSNBC – Rachel Racusen
    MSNBC – Thomas Roberts
    National Journal – Emily Schultheis
    NBC – Chuck Todd
    NBC – Mark Murray
    NBC – Savannah Gutherie
    New Yorker – David Remnick
    New Yorker – Ryan Liza
    NPR – Mike Oreskes
    NPR – Tamara Keith
    NY Post – Geofe Earl
    NYT – Amy Chozik
    NYT – Carolyn Ryan
    NYT – Gail Collins
    NYT – John Harwoodje
    NYT – Jonathan Martin
    NYT – Maggie Haberman
    NYT – Pat Healey
    PBS – Charlie Rose
    People – Sandra Sobieraj Westfall
    Politico – Annie Karni
    Politico – Gabe Debenedetti
    Politico – Glenn Thrush
    Politico – Kenneth Vogel
    Politico – Mike Allen
    Reuters – Amanda Becker
    Tina Brown – Tina Brown
    The Hill – Amie Parnes
    Univision – Maria-Elena Salinas
    Vice – Alyssa Mastramonoco
    Vox – Jon Allen
    WaPo – Anne Gearan
    WaPo – Greg Sargent
    WSJ – Laura Meckler
    WSJ – Peter Nicholas
    WSJ – Colleen McCain Nelson
    Yahoo – Matt Bai

    [May 02, 2019] Checkmate - How President Trump s Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller by Will Chamberlain

    Highly recommended!
    May 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Will Chamberlain via HumanEvents.com,

    In June 2018, Bill Barr, then in private practice at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote a detailed legal memorandum to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. This memo came to light in December, when Barr was nominated for Attorney General.

    Reading Barr's June 2018 memo alongside the last twenty pages of the Mueller Report is a curious experience.

    Together, they read like dueling legal briefs on the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) ; the type of material one would expect to see from adversarial appellate litigators.

    So-why did Robert Mueller dedicate 20 pages of his report to a seemingly obscure question of statutory interpretation? Why did Bill Barr write a detailed legal memorandum to Rod Rosenstein about that very same statute?

    And how, exactly, did Bill Barr know that that § 1512(c)(2) was central to Mueller's obstruction theory – in June 2018, when he was still in private practice at Kirkland?

    After some consideration, I arrived at a theory that I believe answers these three questions, and others as well. For example – why was AG Jeff Sessions asked for his resignation the day after the midterms? Why was Bill Barr the only name ever seriously floated for AG? And is it merely a coincidence that six weeks after Barr's confirmation, the Mueller probe came to an end?

    ...

    This is a story about a legal chess match played for the highest stakes imaginable: Trump's Presidency – and whether it would be under the cloud of an endless special counsel investigation – hinged on the result.

    John Dowd, Ty Cobb, Jay Sekulow, and the rest of President Trump's personal legal team were on one side. Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, and the Special Counsel's office were on the other.

    The dispute was a year-long struggle over the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2).

    No judge ever ruled on who was right about the meaning of this obstruction statute. No formal decision was ever rendered.

    All the same, Trump's legal team prevailed on February 14, 2019.

    That's the day William Pelham Barr was confirmed as United States Attorney General.

    So why, exactly, was the interpretation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) so contested?

    Let's start by looking the statute, excerpted here:

    (c) Whoever corruptly --

    (1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object's integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

    (2) otherwise obstructs, influences or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so [is guilty of the crime of obstruction]. (Emphasis added).

    Why was this so important to Mueller?

    ...

    In hindsight, however, it's clear that Barr was the assassin Democrats feared.

    Within six weeks of his confirmation, the Mueller probe was over...

    Read the full story here...

    [May 02, 2019] Checkmate - How President Trump s Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller by Will Chamberlain

    Highly recommended!
    May 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Will Chamberlain via HumanEvents.com,

    In June 2018, Bill Barr, then in private practice at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote a detailed legal memorandum to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. This memo came to light in December, when Barr was nominated for Attorney General.

    Reading Barr's June 2018 memo alongside the last twenty pages of the Mueller Report is a curious experience.

    Together, they read like dueling legal briefs on the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) ; the type of material one would expect to see from adversarial appellate litigators.

    So-why did Robert Mueller dedicate 20 pages of his report to a seemingly obscure question of statutory interpretation? Why did Bill Barr write a detailed legal memorandum to Rod Rosenstein about that very same statute?

    And how, exactly, did Bill Barr know that that § 1512(c)(2) was central to Mueller's obstruction theory – in June 2018, when he was still in private practice at Kirkland?

    After some consideration, I arrived at a theory that I believe answers these three questions, and others as well. For example – why was AG Jeff Sessions asked for his resignation the day after the midterms? Why was Bill Barr the only name ever seriously floated for AG? And is it merely a coincidence that six weeks after Barr's confirmation, the Mueller probe came to an end?

    ...

    This is a story about a legal chess match played for the highest stakes imaginable: Trump's Presidency – and whether it would be under the cloud of an endless special counsel investigation – hinged on the result.

    John Dowd, Ty Cobb, Jay Sekulow, and the rest of President Trump's personal legal team were on one side. Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, and the Special Counsel's office were on the other.

    The dispute was a year-long struggle over the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2).

    No judge ever ruled on who was right about the meaning of this obstruction statute. No formal decision was ever rendered.

    All the same, Trump's legal team prevailed on February 14, 2019.

    That's the day William Pelham Barr was confirmed as United States Attorney General.

    So why, exactly, was the interpretation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) so contested?

    Let's start by looking the statute, excerpted here:

    (c) Whoever corruptly --

    (1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object's integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or

    (2) otherwise obstructs, influences or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so [is guilty of the crime of obstruction]. (Emphasis added).

    Why was this so important to Mueller?

    ...

    In hindsight, however, it's clear that Barr was the assassin Democrats feared.

    Within six weeks of his confirmation, the Mueller probe was over...

    Read the full story here...

    [May 01, 2019] Russians, Russians, Russians. Now under each bed

    May 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Asoka_The_Great , 4 minutes ago link

    Here is my take, on this entire Sh*tshow, running in Washington DC, for the last two years.

    1. All the evidences are pointing the most likely scenario that Donald Trump is a Manchurian Candidate ordered by the Kremelin to run for Office, in 2016.

    2. Then, Donald Trump COLLUDED with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service to win the Presidency of United States, with shocking easy.

    3. This was because Hitlery Clinton and Joe Biden , was bribed by Putin, through the Ukrainians, with hundred of millions of dollars, so she would purposely lose the "sure win" race, to a political nobody, Donald Trump.

    4. Then, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, produced the Steele Dossier, a political disinformation tool, in collaboration with Britain's Mi6 and CIA.

    5. Then the Russians leaked the COLLUSION story to the CIA controlled MSM such as New York Time, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, etc . . ., so they would predictably kicked a storm of controversy over the COLLUSION, and demand the DOJ to appoint a Special Prosecutor to initial an investigation.

    6. This diabolically devilish Special PsyOps by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service has succeeded in tying up Washington DC, in a Sh*tshow, for the last two years, and divided the Country in bitter controversy.

    7. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service and Chinese Communists' Intelligence Service have thoroughly infiltrated America's Department of Justice, FBI, and CIA, and NSA, and use their high levels agents, such as O'bomer, Hitlery, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Strozk, Page, and rosenstein to stirred up this COLLUSION storm, to paralyze America's political system for as long as possible.

    In Summary, the entire sh*tshow is a production of a Special PsyOps by the Russkies and ChiComs' Intelligence Services. It has nothing to do with America's dysfunctional government, called DemoCrazy .

    [May 01, 2019] It is not amazing. That's about intelligence agencies control, nothing else.

    Notable quotes:
    "... Zero Percent of Elite Commentators Oppose Regime Change in Venezuela ..."
    "... It's so frustrating to see the current lunacy in the mainstream media, and the idiotocracy at work in Washington DC, regardless of political party or who's fat ass sits in the oval office. Tulsi Gabbard is about the only sane person in DC right now on foreign affairs - forget Sanders, Warren and 'regular guy' Joe Biden ..."
    May 01, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
    michaelj72 , Apr 30, 2019 5:51:12 PM | link

    michaelj72 , Apr 30, 2019 5:41:44 PM | link

    < somewhat surprising to me at first glance, but with a little further thought, as to be expected - the US media is corporate controlled, pro-militarism, pro-interventionism, pro-armaments sales, and totally pro-regime change - anywhere in the world. All editorialists are neo-colonialists and imperialists at heart, regardless of who occupies the white house>

    https://fair.org/home/zero-percent-of-elite-commentators-oppose-regime-change-in-venezuela/

    Zero Percent of Elite Commentators Oppose Regime Change in Venezuela

    A FAIR survey of US opinion journalism on Venezuela found no voices in elite corporate media that opposed regime change in that country. Over a three-month period (1/15/19 -- 4/15/19), zero opinion pieces in the New York Times and Washington Post took an anti -- regime change or pro-Maduro/Chavista position.

    Not a single commentator on the big three Sunday morning talkshows or PBS NewsHour came out against President Nicolás Maduro stepping down from the Venezuelan government.....

    Let's make a mess of Venezuela, you know, like the US has done across the middle east/north Africa since.... well since almost forever....

    It's so frustrating to see the current lunacy in the mainstream media, and the idiotocracy at work in Washington DC, regardless of political party or who's fat ass sits in the oval office. Tulsi Gabbard is about the only sane person in DC right now on foreign affairs - forget Sanders, Warren and 'regular guy' Joe Biden


    and as Lebanese geo-political commentator Sarah Abdallah at twitter https://twitter.com/sahouraxo
    correctly notes:


    US interventions in:

    #Iraq -> Millions killed and displaced + the rise of ISIS.

    #Libya -> Thousands killed, millions displaced + slave markets.

    #Syria -> Death and destruction + millions displaced.

    But sure, US intervention in #Venezuela sounds like a totally wonderful idea.

    Barovsky , Apr 30, 2019 5:57:04 PM | link

    There's a link to this doc in the libya360 link I posted earlier but here it is. It was written in May of 2018:

    https://libya360.wordpress.com/2018/05/13/masterstroke-the-us-plan-to-overthrow-the-venezuelan-government/

    Masterstroke: The US Plan to Overthrow the Venezuelan Government
    Posted by Internationalist 360° on May 13, 2018

    By Stella Calloni

    [May 01, 2019] I think it is an exercise in self delusion when people think they can become educated voters or citizens. It is not happening.

    Such discussion would be an excellent way to teach "learned helplessness."
    May 01, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

    @lotlizard Well being a

    span y davidgmillsatty on Mon, 04/29/2019 - 7:26pm

    @lotlizard Well being a hippie myself and a staunchly anti-war advocate since the late sixties, I could finesse this and say that I got my skepticism from that era. However, truth be told it was 35 years of practicing law and all the skepticism a law practice engenders that makes me have this opinion.

    Years ago I was determined to be an educated voter, only to discover that no one wants voters to know the truth.

    When it comes to matters of war, the government just does not want you to know. Period. No matter how diligent you are, the government has no intention of letting the citizens know what is going on about matters of war. And it is pretty much the same about anything that is important.

    Lawyers are privy to a lot more government information than other citizens. And I was always frustrated trying to figure out what the government was up to.

    So I think it is an exercise in self delusion when people think they can become educated voters or citizens. It is not happening.

    Or is it just a case of a frightened passenger @Lookout
    grabbing the wheel of a car careening out of control?

    Direct Democracy, like Term Limits, assumes that politics is easy and anyone can do it without training, which is not true of lawyers, doctors, teachers, soldiers, salesmen, mechanics, even screw machine operators. Some things are easier to learn than others. Some take innate talent.

    One of the demands of XR (extinction rebellion) are citizen assemblies.

    Mike Gravel suggest citizens must have more direct democracy
    https://mikegravel.com/direct-democracy-by-mike-gravel/

    The system is no longer functional...bought and paid for by the very corporations which threaten our ecosystem and promote (nuclear) war. We have to do an end around. What if we just started citizen councils? If nothing else than to combat the mass distortion and misinformation and begin a demand for change. XR sure did well last week.
    https://rebellion.earth/2019/04/25/update-7-to-parliament-and-beyond/

    We must find the will to change.

    span y Lookout on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 12:03am
    Here in Alabama...

    @The Voice In the Wilderness

    I find myself on the other side of the river from the main stream flow...so real democracy isn't real for me. In other words people are brainwashed and don't make good decisions. People don't have assess to accurate information and don't reach rational conclusions. However I don't see our system capable of dealing with the emergency. If survival is an option, we will be forced to act without and beyond the government IMO.

    As to direct democracy...I saw through WMD and russiagate....took me a while to recognize the the Obummer con. Awoke me with the peace prize speech arguing war is peace. Most people want M4all, $15/hr, get out of war, etc. I think we would vote for those things if that was an option instead of R or D? Now getting there is the rub.

    #4
    grabbing the wheel of a car careening out of control?

    Direct Democracy, like Term Limits, assumes that politics is easy and anyone can do it without training, which is not true of lawyers, doctors, teachers, soldiers, salesmen, mechanics, even screw machine operators. Some things are easier to learn than others. Some take innate talent.

    span y The Voice In th... on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 8:38pm
    Hey, Lookout

    @Lookout
    In a few more years,I'll have two more Yankee transplant voters to join you. Look forward to gardening discussions and plant trades too.

    #4.2

    I find myself on the other side of the river from the main stream flow...so real democracy isn't real for me. In other words people are brainwashed and don't make good decisions. People don't have assess to accurate information and don't reach rational conclusions. However I don't see our system capable of dealing with the emergency. If survival is an option, we will be forced to act without and beyond the government IMO.

    As to direct democracy...I saw through WMD and russiagate....took me a while to recognize the the Obummer con. Awoke me with the peace prize speech arguing war is peace. Most people want M4all, $15/hr, get out of war, etc. I think we would vote for those things if that was an option instead of R or D? Now getting there is the rub.

    span y dfarrah on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 10:56am
    People seem to forget

    @The Voice In the Wilderness the reason the founding fathers established a bi-cameral legislature.

    It was established to protect the non-majority, too, and to give the non-majority a voice in what was going on.

    Small or non-populous states would have no voice at all had the system been direct.

    And I am glad, even with today's gridlock, that this exists. I don't want a direct democracy given the mob-like people who have no knowledge of concepts like due process, innocent until proven guilty, habeas corpus, or notions related to corruption of the blood and guilt by association.

    We have already had two great examples (Kavanaugh, Trump)of how horribly the mob would rule, had they enough power. We already know how the mob would suppress freedom of speech, now that states are having to pass laws forcing universities to allow conservative speakers.

    #4
    grabbing the wheel of a car careening out of control?

    Direct Democracy, like Term Limits, assumes that politics is easy and anyone can do it without training, which is not true of lawyers, doctors, teachers, soldiers, salesmen, mechanics, even screw machine operators. Some things are easier to learn than others. Some take innate talent.

    span y HenryAWallace on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 1:16pm
    I don't agree.

    @dfarrah

    Whether a system is bicameral (as in two houses of Congress) or unicameral (one house) doesn't seem to me to be the issue when the discussion is about direct democracy versus representative democracy. If we have direct democracy, we need zero houses.

    Claiming the minority have no voice at all in a popular vote is untrue. One person, one vote. Everyone has exactly the same amount of "voice" in a popular vote, whether they live in a sparsely-populated state or a populous states. Unpopular views , however, do get voted down, but not states and not people.

    Absent unanimity, which is a pipe dream, rule by a majority of the people is the fairest, even if extraordinary majorities are sometimes required.

    As long as allegedly elected alleged representatives to govern us, the golden rule will not change: He, she or it with most of the gold will make all of the rules for the rest of us. A few wealthy people decide everything, thanks to our bought and paid for legislators; and a vast majority of Americans have no say at all. That is the reality and it sucks scissors. Anything that gives a tiny minority of people power over the vast majority of the people is not democracy or fair or anything good.

    Moreover, a state is a political unit, best known to most of us as some lines within a map of the United States. I am fine with people in both heavily-populated states and sparsely- populated states having 100% of political power, and lines on a map having zero political power. However, less populous states do have power, no matter what. States have the power in the electoral college (just ask Hillary, the popular vote President) and in ratification of Constitutional amendments. IMO, that is more than enough power for lines on a map.

    I don't give a rat's tail how the wealthy Framers felt about it in 1789. (In those days, it was the slave states with their huge plantations that were the more sparsely-populated ones. Gee, I wonder why they feared the popular vote, what with John Adams and other Northerners recommending that the new nation be founded without slavery.)

    As far you, me, Caucus99percenters and the rest of our fellow citizens being "the mob,
    James Madison, is that you? You and your fellow citizens are a mob? As opposed to what? The corrupt, deceitful war mongers in BOTH houses of Congress who sell their souls-- and ours --to the very rich? I'd love to know why that out-of- touch, pampered, corrupt crappy, soul-less lot should have more power over our lives and the lives of our kids and grandkids than we and our fellow citizens do.

    #4.2 the reason the founding fathers established a bi-cameral legislature.

    It was established to protect the non-majority, too, and to give the non-majority a voice in what was going on.

    Small or non-populous states would have no voice at all had the system been direct.

    And I am glad, even with today's gridlock, that this exists. I don't want a direct democracy given the mob-like people who have no knowledge of concepts like due process, innocent until proven guilty, habeas corpus, or notions related to corruption of the blood and guilt by association.

    We have already had two great examples (Kavanaugh, Trump)of how horribly the mob would rule, had they enough power. We already know how the mob would suppress freedom of speech, now that states are having to pass laws forcing universities to allow conservative speakers.

    span y dfarrah on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 1:01pm
    Okay, I was not clear.

    @HenryAWallace As you probably know, the house was set up to be representative by population. The senate was set up to have 2 senators.

    You've never heard the concept of tyranny of the majority?

    You fault our past, bringing up the usual slavery issue. Do you forget that it was our system that finally gave full rights to blacks, that the US finally passed laws against various isms? Do you forget that it was our system that gave women the right to vote? Do you forget that our system allowed for the passage of laws to protect various classes of people? Do you realize that most of these changes came without ruinous violence (compared to the rest of the world), and most of the time, issues get talked about and resolved via elections? You lose, you live with the consequences until you win.

    Frankly, I can do without the constant violent changes in governments and constant warring among peoples. Do you wish to be like the Tutsis and Hutu? Or the Serbs and Bosnia? What about the Sunnis and Shiites?

    There is a reason that the US does not have similar murderous uprisings between whatever groupings of people that might exist. It is because our political system flexes and it is designed to flex.

    Currently, I have no doubt that a huge group of democrats would imprison people based on speech, wearing a MAGA hat, religion, and baseless evidence-free accusations if they had the power to do so, or that they would try to overthrow elected officials on a whim. Our current system has held, for now, against these types of actions.

    People are unhappy with the electoral college. Good luck trying to pass a constitutional amendment that does away with it; certainly the smaller and mid-size states would never pass such an amendment, and there are probably blue states that wouldn't like the idea of being run by California and New York.

    #4.2.2

    Whether a system is bicameral (as in two houses of Congress) or unicameral (one house) doesn't seem to me to be the issue when the discussion is about direct democracy versus representative democracy. If we have direct democracy, we need zero houses.

    Claiming the minority have no voice at all in a popular vote is untrue. One person, one vote. Everyone has exactly the same amount of "voice" in a popular vote, whether they live in a sparsely-populated state or a populous states. Unpopular views , however, do get voted down, but not states and not people.

    Absent unanimity, which is a pipe dream, rule by a majority of the people is the fairest, even if extraordinary majorities are sometimes required.

    As long as allegedly elected alleged representatives to govern us, the golden rule will not change: He, she or it with most of the gold will make all of the rules for the rest of us. A few wealthy people decide everything, thanks to our bought and paid for legislators; and a vast majority of Americans have no say at all. That is the reality and it sucks scissors. Anything that gives a tiny minority of people power over the vast majority of the people is not democracy or fair or anything good.

    Moreover, a state is a political unit, best known to most of us as some lines within a map of the United States. I am fine with people in both heavily-populated states and sparsely- populated states having 100% of political power, and lines on a map having zero political power. However, less populous states do have power, no matter what. States have the power in the electoral college (just ask Hillary, the popular vote President) and in ratification of Constitutional amendments. IMO, that is more than enough power for lines on a map.

    I don't give a rat's tail how the wealthy Framers felt about it in 1789. (In those days, it was the slave states with their huge plantations that were the more sparsely-populated ones. Gee, I wonder why they feared the popular vote, what with John Adams and other Northerners recommending that the new nation be founded without slavery.)

    As far you, me, Caucus99percenters and the rest of our fellow citizens being "the mob,
    James Madison, is that you? You and your fellow citizens are a mob? As opposed to what? The corrupt, deceitful war mongers in BOTH houses of Congress who sell their souls-- and ours --to the very rich? I'd love to know why that out-of- touch, pampered, corrupt crappy, soul-less lot should have more power over our lives and the lives of our kids and grandkids than we and our fellow citizens do.

    span y HenryAWallace on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 1:55pm
    .

    @dfarrah

    As you probably know, the house was set up to be representative by population. The senate was set up to have 2 senators.

    Of course. Everyone knows that. My point was that unicameral vs. bicameral is not the issue when discussing direct democracy vs. representative democracy. In a direct democracy, no houses are necessary. In a representative democracy, you can have an infinite number of houses or only one.

    You've never heard the concept of tyranny of the majority?

    Yes, of course. Mostly from rightists, though. I've also heard of the tyranny of the minority.

    You fault our past,

    Actually, that not what I did.

    bringing up the usual slavery issue.

    The "usual slavery issue?" That seems unduly dismissive. In any event, I referenced the colonies whose economies involved slaves, not out of the blue, but because they were directly relevant to the reason the Framers gave sparsely-populated states undue power.

    Do you forget that it was our system that finally gave full rights to blacks, that the US finally passed laws against various isms? Do you forget that it was our system that gave women the right to vote? Do you forget that our system allowed for the passage of laws to protect various classes of people? Do you realize that most of these changes came without ruinous violence (compared to the rest of the world), and most of the time, issues get talked about and resolved via elections? You lose, you live with the consequences until you win.

    Frankly, I can do without the constant violent changes in governments and constant warring among peoples. Do you wish to be like the Tutsis and Hutu? Or the Serbs and Bosnia? What about the Sunnis and Shiites?

    And, in your estimation, these things happened because a minority of people was allowed a veto over the majority of people Because states, lines on a map, were given power over people? If so, I strongly disagree. If anything, allowing minority rule delayed many positive changes. If that is not the reason you're bringing up these historical events, I am not understanding why you are bringing them up. And, btw, many nations effect change without either violence or giving undue power to lines on a map.

    There is a reason that the US does not have similar murderous uprisings between whatever groupings of people that might exist. It is because our political system flexes and it is designed to flex.

    I think you are vastly oversimplifying the reasons for uprisings, which are often against murderous, tyrannical regimes. Second, again, it's not allowing the minority to override the majority that makes our system either fair or flexible.

    People are unhappy with the electoral college. Good luck trying to pass a constitutional amendment that does away with it. Good luck trying to pass any constitutional amendment. However, my prior post said nothing about abolishing it. I simply cited it as one example of states--political units, lines on a map--getting to override the will of a majority of human Americans.

    #4.2.2.1 As you probably know, the house was set up to be representative by population. The senate was set up to have 2 senators.

    You've never heard the concept of tyranny of the majority?

    You fault our past, bringing up the usual slavery issue. Do you forget that it was our system that finally gave full rights to blacks, that the US finally passed laws against various isms? Do you forget that it was our system that gave women the right to vote? Do you forget that our system allowed for the passage of laws to protect various classes of people? Do you realize that most of these changes came without ruinous violence (compared to the rest of the world), and most of the time, issues get talked about and resolved via elections? You lose, you live with the consequences until you win.

    Frankly, I can do without the constant violent changes in governments and constant warring among peoples. Do you wish to be like the Tutsis and Hutu? Or the Serbs and Bosnia? What about the Sunnis and Shiites?

    There is a reason that the US does not have similar murderous uprisings between whatever groupings of people that might exist. It is because our political system flexes and it is designed to flex.

    Currently, I have no doubt that a huge group of democrats would imprison people based on speech, wearing a MAGA hat, religion, and baseless evidence-free accusations if they had the power to do so, or that they would try to overthrow elected officials on a whim. Our current system has held, for now, against these types of actions.

    People are unhappy with the electoral college. Good luck trying to pass a constitutional amendment that does away with it; certainly the smaller and mid-size states would never pass such an amendment, and there are probably blue states that wouldn't like the idea of being run by California and New York.

    span y dfarrah on Mon, 04/29/2019 - 9:40pm
    It is as if I am talking

    @HenryAWallace to someone who has no historical knowledge, yet I know you do.

    The notion of tyranny of the majority is very old, it did not arise from the 'right wing.'

    https://edsitement.neh.gov/curriculum-unit/alexis-de-tocqueville-tyranny...

    Democracy in America was written in the mid 1800's.

    Why am I dismissive toward people who knock the constitution vis-à-vis slavery and bigotry issues? Because slavery and bigotry have been around forever, amongst numerous peoples, yet our system allowed for its correction and continuous improvement. There are still countries where religious and racial bigotry are the norm (Israel, China anyone?). Instead, the US has ultimately decided against isms, as evidenced by regulations and Supreme Court decisions.

    "And, in your estimation, these things happened because a minority of people was allowed a veto over the majority of people Because states, lines on a map, were given power over people?"

    I have no idea where you reached that conclusion. People won a war of ideas and effected change.

    I just find it amusing the number of people who knock a system without even understanding how or why it arose, talking like it was a horror from which all must be destroyed. The fact is, our system adjusted, and continues to adjust, to the needs and wants of its people. And the changes are being done with pens, not violence.

    I suppose a member of one of the many aggrieved groups could have acted violently throughout the US instead of waiting for cases to wind through courts and waiting for legislation to pass. I guess MLK could have taken up arms and shot as many whites as possible. I guess women could have taken up arms and killed whole legislative bodies. Maybe gays should have bombed all of the capitols in the US instead of pushing for legislation.

    #4.2.2.1.1

    As you probably know, the house was set up to be representative by population. The senate was set up to have 2 senators.

    Of course. Everyone knows that. My point was that unicameral vs. bicameral is not the issue when discussing direct democracy vs. representative democracy. In a direct democracy, no houses are necessary. In a representative democracy, you can have an infinite number of houses or only one.

    You've never heard the concept of tyranny of the majority?

    Yes, of course. Mostly from rightists, though. I've also heard of the tyranny of the minority.

    You fault our past,

    Actually, that not what I did.

    bringing up the usual slavery issue.

    The "usual slavery issue?" That seems unduly dismissive. In any event, I referenced the colonies whose economies involved slaves, not out of the blue, but because they were directly relevant to the reason the Framers gave sparsely-populated states undue power.

    Do you forget that it was our system that finally gave full rights to blacks, that the US finally passed laws against various isms? Do you forget that it was our system that gave women the right to vote? Do you forget that our system allowed for the passage of laws to protect various classes of people? Do you realize that most of these changes came without ruinous violence (compared to the rest of the world), and most of the time, issues get talked about and resolved via elections? You lose, you live with the consequences until you win.

    Frankly, I can do without the constant violent changes in governments and constant warring among peoples. Do you wish to be like the Tutsis and Hutu? Or the Serbs and Bosnia? What about the Sunnis and Shiites?

    And, in your estimation, these things happened because a minority of people was allowed a veto over the majority of people Because states, lines on a map, were given power over people? If so, I strongly disagree. If anything, allowing minority rule delayed many positive changes. If that is not the reason you're bringing up these historical events, I am not understanding why you are bringing them up. And, btw, many nations effect change without either violence or giving undue power to lines on a map.

    There is a reason that the US does not have similar murderous uprisings between whatever groupings of people that might exist. It is because our political system flexes and it is designed to flex.

    I think you are vastly oversimplifying the reasons for uprisings, which are often against murderous, tyrannical regimes. Second, again, it's not allowing the minority to override the majority that makes our system either fair or flexible.

    People are unhappy with the electoral college. Good luck trying to pass a constitutional amendment that does away with it. Good luck trying to pass any constitutional amendment. However, my prior post said nothing about abolishing it. I simply cited it as one example of states--political units, lines on a map--getting to override the will of a majority of human Americans.

    span y mimi on Mon, 04/29/2019 - 1:30am
    I think you were pretty clear

    @dfarrah y
    some people have just difficulties to accept majorities. But imho majorities elected in a direct democratic vote are the most honest representation of what the population wants. I am rather abused by a majority than by a minority. At least it deson't make sense to me why I would accept a minority to enforce their will over a majority.

    #4.2.2.1 As you probably know, the house was set up to be representative by population. The senate was set up to have 2 senators.

    You've never heard the concept of tyranny of the majority?

    You fault our past, bringing up the usual slavery issue. Do you forget that it was our system that finally gave full rights to blacks, that the US finally passed laws against various isms? Do you forget that it was our system that gave women the right to vote? Do you forget that our system allowed for the passage of laws to protect various classes of people? Do you realize that most of these changes came without ruinous violence (compared to the rest of the world), and most of the time, issues get talked about and resolved via elections? You lose, you live with the consequences until you win.

    Frankly, I can do without the constant violent changes in governments and constant warring among peoples. Do you wish to be like the Tutsis and Hutu? Or the Serbs and Bosnia? What about the Sunnis and Shiites?

    There is a reason that the US does not have similar murderous uprisings between whatever groupings of people that might exist. It is because our political system flexes and it is designed to flex.

    Currently, I have no doubt that a huge group of democrats would imprison people based on speech, wearing a MAGA hat, religion, and baseless evidence-free accusations if they had the power to do so, or that they would try to overthrow elected officials on a whim. Our current system has held, for now, against these types of actions.

    People are unhappy with the electoral college. Good luck trying to pass a constitutional amendment that does away with it; certainly the smaller and mid-size states would never pass such an amendment, and there are probably blue states that wouldn't like the idea of being run by California and New York.

    span y dfarrah on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 1:13pm
    As to who gets elected,

    @HenryAWallace I am as mystified as anyone else why we keep electing people who support the mess you described.

    IMO, the choices are culled at local levels, so the locals in power, supported by the rich, need to be overpowered.

    Mobs to me means the women who were banging on the SC door, the people who have been mobbing repubs at dinner/movies at Maxine Waters' (Booker's, Holder's)behest, people who attack people for wearing Maga hats, people who have been mobbing conservative speakers at universities and at tables promoting conservatives or Trump.

    It is astounding to me that my side has behaved so badly and irrationally.

    #4.2.2

    Whether a system is bicameral (as in two houses of Congress) or unicameral (one house) doesn't seem to me to be the issue when the discussion is about direct democracy versus representative democracy. If we have direct democracy, we need zero houses.

    Claiming the minority have no voice at all in a popular vote is untrue. One person, one vote. Everyone has exactly the same amount of "voice" in a popular vote, whether they live in a sparsely-populated state or a populous states. Unpopular views , however, do get voted down, but not states and not people.

    Absent unanimity, which is a pipe dream, rule by a majority of the people is the fairest, even if extraordinary majorities are sometimes required.

    As long as allegedly elected alleged representatives to govern us, the golden rule will not change: He, she or it with most of the gold will make all of the rules for the rest of us. A few wealthy people decide everything, thanks to our bought and paid for legislators; and a vast majority of Americans have no say at all. That is the reality and it sucks scissors. Anything that gives a tiny minority of people power over the vast majority of the people is not democracy or fair or anything good.

    Moreover, a state is a political unit, best known to most of us as some lines within a map of the United States. I am fine with people in both heavily-populated states and sparsely- populated states having 100% of political power, and lines on a map having zero political power. However, less populous states do have power, no matter what. States have the power in the electoral college (just ask Hillary, the popular vote President) and in ratification of Constitutional amendments. IMO, that is more than enough power for lines on a map.

    I don't give a rat's tail how the wealthy Framers felt about it in 1789. (In those days, it was the slave states with their huge plantations that were the more sparsely-populated ones. Gee, I wonder why they feared the popular vote, what with John Adams and other Northerners recommending that the new nation be founded without slavery.)

    As far you, me, Caucus99percenters and the rest of our fellow citizens being "the mob,
    James Madison, is that you? You and your fellow citizens are a mob? As opposed to what? The corrupt, deceitful war mongers in BOTH houses of Congress who sell their souls-- and ours --to the very rich? I'd love to know why that out-of- touch, pampered, corrupt crappy, soul-less lot should have more power over our lives and the lives of our kids and grandkids than we and our fellow citizens do.

    span y HenryAWallace on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 2:33pm
    .

    @dfarrah

    I am as mystified as anyone else why we keep electing people who support the mess you described.

    Because the rich have always had power here, from the East India Company and George III and his colonial governors to the Koch brothers and Soros.

    IMO, the choices are culled at local levels, so the locals in power, supported by the rich, need to be overpowered.

    Of course they do. But, the system is rigged in their favor and always has been.

    Mobs to me means the women who were banging on the SC door, the people who have been mobbing repubs at dinner/movies at Maxine Waters' (Booker's, Holder's)behest, people who attack people for wearing Maga hats, people who have been mobbing conservative speakers at universities and at tables promoting conservatives or Trump.

    That is not how your prior post read. However, of course, some unruly activity exists in the US and elsewhere that is not extremely despotic. But, in a population of about 300 million, they people whom you describe constitute a miniscule minority. Your point in your prior post, however, seemed to be that direct democracy as a form of government-all citizens voting on matters like war, taxes, etc. would be mob rule. And my response was that I'd rather be governed by a majority of my fellow citizen than by "our" corrupt, deceitful, insulated, etc. selected (sic) unrepresentatives (sic).

    #4.2.2.1 I am as mystified as anyone else why we keep electing people who support the mess you described.

    IMO, the choices are culled at local levels, so the locals in power, supported by the rich, need to be overpowered.

    Mobs to me means the women who were banging on the SC door, the people who have been mobbing repubs at dinner/movies at Maxine Waters' (Booker's, Holder's)behest, people who attack people for wearing Maga hats, people who have been mobbing conservative speakers at universities and at tables promoting conservatives or Trump.

    It is astounding to me that my side has behaved so badly and irrationally.

    span y The Voice In th... on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 8:53pm
    The conflict has always been between the many and the rich

    @HenryAWallace
    Sometimes the many seize power. But they always lose it because they don't know how to hold it because they are not power drunk fanatics. The rich, the ultra-rich are psychotics that need to have more so that someone else has less. To the ordinary man having lots of money means spending it on pleasurable things. To the rich it means power and ego-enhancment. What sane man wouldn't be content with having a billion dollars and not be consumed with envy because a dozen or so men in the world have more. Who wouldn't enjoy life and have fun and help others? But just look at the world's richest men. They spend long hours consumed with envy that there is someone who has more, to become the first trillionaire. Truly obsessive sickness to cause misery and poverty to the men and women working for you just to add some meaningless zeros to your net worth. Net "worth", I hate that phrase. Gandhi and Mother Teresa had more worth than these sick deranged people.

    #4.2.2.1.2

    I am as mystified as anyone else why we keep electing people who support the mess you described.

    Because the rich have always had power here, from the East India Company and George III and his colonial governors to the Koch brothers and Soros.

    IMO, the choices are culled at local levels, so the locals in power, supported by the rich, need to be overpowered.

    Of course they do. But, the system is rigged in their favor and always has been.

    Mobs to me means the women who were banging on the SC door, the people who have been mobbing repubs at dinner/movies at Maxine Waters' (Booker's, Holder's)behest, people who attack people for wearing Maga hats, people who have been mobbing conservative speakers at universities and at tables promoting conservatives or Trump.

    That is not how your prior post read. However, of course, some unruly activity exists in the US and elsewhere that is not extremely despotic. But, in a population of about 300 million, they people whom you describe constitute a miniscule minority. Your point in your prior post, however, seemed to be that direct democracy as a form of government-all citizens voting on matters like war, taxes, etc. would be mob rule. And my response was that I'd rather be governed by a majority of my fellow citizen than by "our" corrupt, deceitful, insulated, etc. selected (sic) unrepresentatives (sic).

    span y HenryAWallace on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 2:31pm
    "It is astounding to me that my side has behaved so badly."

    @dfarrah

    If you don't agree with them, why refer to them as "my side?"

    #4.2.2.1 I am as mystified as anyone else why we keep electing people who support the mess you described.

    IMO, the choices are culled at local levels, so the locals in power, supported by the rich, need to be overpowered.

    Mobs to me means the women who were banging on the SC door, the people who have been mobbing repubs at dinner/movies at Maxine Waters' (Booker's, Holder's)behest, people who attack people for wearing Maga hats, people who have been mobbing conservative speakers at universities and at tables promoting conservatives or Trump.

    It is astounding to me that my side has behaved so badly and irrationally.

    span y The Voice In th... on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 8:56pm
    Because no man (or woman) is an island?

    @HenryAWallace

    #4.2.2.1.2

    If you don't agree with them, why refer to them as "my side?"

    span y dfarrah on Mon, 04/29/2019 - 9:45pm
    You don't think

    @HenryAWallace that Trump revealed the hypocrisy of my side?

    The dems have flipped on so many issues, it gives me whiplash.

    I don't know what side I am on now. I intensely like and dislike things about both sides, although I strongly lean Bernie overall.

    #4.2.2.1.2

    If you don't agree with them, why refer to them as "my side?"

    span y Shaheer on Mon, 04/29/2019 - 12:33am
    @HenryAWallace Like a lot of what

    @HenryAWallace Like a lot of what you say...

    #4.2.2

    Whether a system is bicameral (as in two houses of Congress) or unicameral (one house) doesn't seem to me to be the issue when the discussion is about direct democracy versus representative democracy. If we have direct democracy, we need zero houses.

    Claiming the minority have no voice at all in a popular vote is untrue. One person, one vote. Everyone has exactly the same amount of "voice" in a popular vote, whether they live in a sparsely-populated state or a populous states. Unpopular views , however, do get voted down, but not states and not people.

    Absent unanimity, which is a pipe dream, rule by a majority of the people is the fairest, even if extraordinary majorities are sometimes required.

    As long as allegedly elected alleged representatives to govern us, the golden rule will not change: He, she or it with most of the gold will make all of the rules for the rest of us. A few wealthy people decide everything, thanks to our bought and paid for legislators; and a vast majority of Americans have no say at all. That is the reality and it sucks scissors. Anything that gives a tiny minority of people power over the vast majority of the people is not democracy or fair or anything good.

    Moreover, a state is a political unit, best known to most of us as some lines within a map of the United States. I am fine with people in both heavily-populated states and sparsely- populated states having 100% of political power, and lines on a map having zero political power. However, less populous states do have power, no matter what. States have the power in the electoral college (just ask Hillary, the popular vote President) and in ratification of Constitutional amendments. IMO, that is more than enough power for lines on a map.

    I don't give a rat's tail how the wealthy Framers felt about it in 1789. (In those days, it was the slave states with their huge plantations that were the more sparsely-populated ones. Gee, I wonder why they feared the popular vote, what with John Adams and other Northerners recommending that the new nation be founded without slavery.)

    As far you, me, Caucus99percenters and the rest of our fellow citizens being "the mob,
    James Madison, is that you? You and your fellow citizens are a mob? As opposed to what? The corrupt, deceitful war mongers in BOTH houses of Congress who sell their souls-- and ours --to the very rich? I'd love to know why that out-of- touch, pampered, corrupt crappy, soul-less lot should have more power over our lives and the lives of our kids and grandkids than we and our fellow citizens do.

    span y HenryAWallace on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 12:41pm
    I think we have the will to change. The issue is whether we

    @Lookout

    have the means to change, using "means" to encompass the funding and other things. The Constitution and everything that preceded and followed it was geared to the group we now refer to as the elites. And they've had literally centuries and billions of dollars over that time to insulate themselves from us.

    One of the demands of XR (extinction rebellion) are citizen assemblies.

    Mike Gravel suggest citizens must have more direct democracy
    https://mikegravel.com/direct-democracy-by-mike-gravel/

    The system is no longer functional...bought and paid for by the very corporations which threaten our ecosystem and promote (nuclear) war. We have to do an end around. What if we just started citizen councils? If nothing else than to combat the mass distortion and misinformation and begin a demand for change. XR sure did well last week.
    https://rebellion.earth/2019/04/25/update-7-to-parliament-and-beyond/

    We must find the will to change.

    span y Lookout on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 12:04pm
    Perhaps sacrifice should have been the term

    @HenryAWallace

    The necessary change will involve sacrifice and that is what we lack the will to do. IMO if we had the will we would find a means.

    Reverse consumerism is a hard sell. especially to the corporations and wall street..our masters.

    #4

    have the means to change, using "means" to encompass the funding and other things. The Constitution and everything that preceded and followed it was geared to the group we now refer to as the elites. And they've had literally centuries and billions of dollars over that time to insulate themselves from us.

    span y edg on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 4:02pm
    The dumbing down of society...

    We liberals and progressives have to shoulder at least some of the blame for this. To ensure our progeny experienced few bumps in life, we cocooned them in classrooms where learning was secondary to political correctness, we let them participate in sports where nobody loses, and we downgraded working hard for your grades to a system of grading everyone high on the curve.

    I'm embarrassed by the ignorance of our successor generations regarding simple math (making change without a cash register telling them what to do), basic grammar and spelling skills, and fundamental knowledge of history.

    We failed our children and grandchildren.

    span y thanatokephaloides on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 6:21pm
    failed

    @edg

    We failed our children and grandchildren.

    I haven't (childless).

    We liberals and progressives have to shoulder at least some of the blame for this. To ensure our progeny experienced few bumps in life, we cocooned them in classrooms where learning was secondary to political correctness, we let them participate in sports where nobody loses, and we downgraded working hard for your grades to a system of grading everyone high on the curve.

    I'm embarrassed by the ignorance of our successor generations regarding simple math (making change without a cash register telling them what to do), basic grammar and spelling skills, and fundamental knowledge of history.

    We failed our children and grandchildren.

    span y edg on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 9:32pm
    Me, too.

    @thanatokephaloides

    Doesn't matter, though. Whether we have children or not, we still interact with and are affected by the actions and misdeeds of other people's children.

    #5

    We failed our children and grandchildren.

    I haven't (childless).

    span y Cassiodorus on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 4:33pm
    The point of electing a President is to get better policies

    So, yes, we agree there, though honestly I'm at a loss to figure out why we are focusing on "bad Presidents" here. They've all been bad, starting with Reagan, and Carter brought the trend in by promising to be bad in his losing 1980 reelection campaign. This is by design.

    It seems to me that if we want to focus upon this contingency, we ought to be promoting an activist "Plan B." What if the Democrats screw Bernie again, and set up useful idiot Joe Biden to win the convention with the help of the superdelegates? Bernie endorses Joe, and hope is once again replaced by despair. Such a contingency would be one possible fruit of the "elect a better President" strategy which appears as the first option for activism in America. What then? Perhaps we ought to be planning for this possibility?

    span y OPOL on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 4:37pm
    @Cassiodorus I don't disagree.

    @Cassiodorus I don't disagree.

    So, yes, we agree there, though honestly I'm at a loss to figure out why we are focusing on "bad Presidents" here. They've all been bad, starting with Reagan, and Carter brought the trend in by promising to be bad in his losing 1980 reelection campaign. This is by design.

    It seems to me that if we want to focus upon this contingency, we ought to be promoting an activist "Plan B." What if the Democrats screw Bernie again, and set up useful idiot Joe Biden to win the convention with the help of the superdelegates? Bernie endorses Joe, and hope is once again replaced by despair. Such a contingency would be one possible fruit of the "elect a better President" strategy which appears as the first option for activism in America. What then? Perhaps we ought to be planning for this possibility?

    span y HenryAWallace on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 4:47pm
    Would be an excellent way to teach "learned helplessness."

    @Cassiodorus

    So, yes, we agree there, though honestly I'm at a loss to figure out why we are focusing on "bad Presidents" here. They've all been bad, starting with Reagan, and Carter brought the trend in by promising to be bad in his losing 1980 reelection campaign. This is by design.

    It seems to me that if we want to focus upon this contingency, we ought to be promoting an activist "Plan B." What if the Democrats screw Bernie again, and set up useful idiot Joe Biden to win the convention with the help of the superdelegates? Bernie endorses Joe, and hope is once again replaced by despair. Such a contingency would be one possible fruit of the "elect a better President" strategy which appears as the first option for activism in America. What then? Perhaps we ought to be planning for this possibility?

    span y UntimelyRippd on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 5:26pm
    sadly, Carter was pretty bad.

    @Cassiodorus
    as I wrote in a comment the other day, Reagan ran on a platform to govern almost identically to what the Carter administration had been doing: increase defense spending, decrease regulation, reduce deficits.

    not much doubt that he's been one of the bestest ex-presidents of all time, though.

    So, yes, we agree there, though honestly I'm at a loss to figure out why we are focusing on "bad Presidents" here. They've all been bad, starting with Reagan, and Carter brought the trend in by promising to be bad in his losing 1980 reelection campaign. This is by design.

    It seems to me that if we want to focus upon this contingency, we ought to be promoting an activist "Plan B." What if the Democrats screw Bernie again, and set up useful idiot Joe Biden to win the convention with the help of the superdelegates? Bernie endorses Joe, and hope is once again replaced by despair. Such a contingency would be one possible fruit of the "elect a better President" strategy which appears as the first option for activism in America. What then? Perhaps we ought to be planning for this possibility?

    span y Alligator Ed on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 5:53pm
    Here's hoping Joe Fingers Biden ends up in a Ukranian cell with

    @Cassiodorus Hunter. Like father, like son. Will Trump smite the upper echelons of his enemies such as Killary and the empty suit?

    So, yes, we agree there, though honestly I'm at a loss to figure out why we are focusing on "bad Presidents" here. They've all been bad, starting with Reagan, and Carter brought the trend in by promising to be bad in his losing 1980 reelection campaign. This is by design.

    It seems to me that if we want to focus upon this contingency, we ought to be promoting an activist "Plan B." What if the Democrats screw Bernie again, and set up useful idiot Joe Biden to win the convention with the help of the superdelegates? Bernie endorses Joe, and hope is once again replaced by despair. Such a contingency would be one possible fruit of the "elect a better President" strategy which appears as the first option for activism in America. What then? Perhaps we ought to be planning for this possibility?

    span y bobswern on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 6:36pm
    Cass, please explain this statement...

    @Cassiodorus

    ...They've all been bad, starting with Reagan, and Carter brought the trend in by promising to be bad in his losing 1980 reelection campaign. This is by design...

    (I'm particularly interested in your comments on Carter.)

    So, yes, we agree there, though honestly I'm at a loss to figure out why we are focusing on "bad Presidents" here. They've all been bad, starting with Reagan, and Carter brought the trend in by promising to be bad in his losing 1980 reelection campaign. This is by design.

    It seems to me that if we want to focus upon this contingency, we ought to be promoting an activist "Plan B." What if the Democrats screw Bernie again, and set up useful idiot Joe Biden to win the convention with the help of the superdelegates? Bernie endorses Joe, and hope is once again replaced by despair. Such a contingency would be one possible fruit of the "elect a better President" strategy which appears as the first option for activism in America. What then? Perhaps we ought to be planning for this possibility?

    span y Cassiodorus on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 8:55pm
    Remember Carter's 1980 pledge to increase "defense" spending?

    @bobswern

    #6

    ...They've all been bad, starting with Reagan, and Carter brought the trend in by promising to be bad in his losing 1980 reelection campaign. This is by design...

    (I'm particularly interested in your comments on Carter.)

    span y The Voice In th... on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 9:11pm
    He actually did increase Navy spending

    @Cassiodorus
    Perhaps his having been a Naval officer had something to do with it. I do know that his old boss, Admiral Rickover had a big influence on him.

    #6.5

    span y bobswern on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 12:25am
    Actually, Cass, you're waaaay oversimplifying Carter's...

    @Cassiodorus

    ...position. And, while it doesn't mention it in the commentary, below , the fact of the matter is that Carter did more to bring peace to the mideast than any president, perhaps, since the formal independence of the State of Israel, in 1948. From the link, earlier in this paragraph...

    Jimmy Carter - Military policy

    Carter had inherited a wide variety of tough problems in international affairs, and in dealing with them, he was hampered by confusion and uncertainty in Congress and the nation concerning the role the nation should play in the world. A similar state of mind prevailed in the closely related area of military policy, and that state of mind affected the administration. At the beginning of his presidency, Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders and announced that American troops would be withdrawn from South Korea. He also decided against construction of the B-1 bomber as a replacement for the aging B-52, regarding the proposed airplane as costly and obsolete, and also decided to cut back on the navy's shipbuilding program. Champions of military power protested, charging that he was not sufficiently sensitive to the threat of the Soviet Union.

    In recent years, the Soviets had strengthened their forces and influence, expanding the army, developing a large navy, and increasing their arms and technicians in the Third World. As Carter's concern about these developments mounted, he alarmed critics of military spending by calling for a significant increase in the military budget for fiscal 1979, a substantial strengthening of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, and the development and deployment of a new weapon, the neutron bomb. Next, he dismayed advocates of greater military strength by first deciding that the bomb would not be built and then announcing that production would be postponed while the nation waited to see how the Soviets behaved.

    In both diplomatic and military matters, the president often found it difficult to stick with his original intentions. He made concessions to demands for more military spending and more activity in Africa and became less critical of American arms sales. He both responded to criticism of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and sought to restore its effectiveness, regarding it as an essential instrument that had been misused.

    Critics, including Henry Kissinger, Henry Jackson, and many Republican senators, found him weak and ineffective, confusing and confused. They suggested that his administration had "seen that its neat theories about the world do not fit the difficult realities" and that "it must now come to grips with the world as it is." One close observer, Meg Greenfield of Newsweek magazine, wrote in 1978 that while "many of our politicians, more traumatized than instructed by that miserable war [Vietnam], tend to see Vietnams everywhere," more and more congressmen "seem . . . to be getting bored with their own post-Vietnam bemusement," and "under great provocation from abroad, Carter himself is beginning to move."

    #6.5

    span y UntimelyRippd on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 12:56am
    It is true that Carter had a genuine interest in peace.

    @bobswern
    Unfortunately, he was more or less a true believer in neo-liberalism, before that formulation even existed. Perhaps he just had too much faith in people. I don't know. I do know that, as I've said in my other comments here, Reagan ran against him by promising to do everything that Carter was already doing -- plus tax cuts.

    Indeed, Reagan himself believed in working towards a peaceable end to the cold war, at least at some point. Years ago, I saw an astonishing clip from Firing Line, with Reagan and a couple of other Republicans. The other guys were belching a super-hard line on relations with the USSR. Reagan, speaking coherently and intelligently -- as I say, it was astonishing -- stated that the right had no business asking for people to vote for them, if they had nothing to offer but inevitable nuclear war.

    #6.5.1

    ...position. And, while it doesn't mention it in the commentary, below , the fact of the matter is that Carter did more to bring peace to the mideast than any president, perhaps, since the formal independence of the State of Israel, in 1948. From the link, earlier in this paragraph...

    Jimmy Carter - Military policy

    Carter had inherited a wide variety of tough problems in international affairs, and in dealing with them, he was hampered by confusion and uncertainty in Congress and the nation concerning the role the nation should play in the world. A similar state of mind prevailed in the closely related area of military policy, and that state of mind affected the administration. At the beginning of his presidency, Carter pardoned Vietnam War draft evaders and announced that American troops would be withdrawn from South Korea. He also decided against construction of the B-1 bomber as a replacement for the aging B-52, regarding the proposed airplane as costly and obsolete, and also decided to cut back on the navy's shipbuilding program. Champions of military power protested, charging that he was not sufficiently sensitive to the threat of the Soviet Union.

    In recent years, the Soviets had strengthened their forces and influence, expanding the army, developing a large navy, and increasing their arms and technicians in the Third World. As Carter's concern about these developments mounted, he alarmed critics of military spending by calling for a significant increase in the military budget for fiscal 1979, a substantial strengthening of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, and the development and deployment of a new weapon, the neutron bomb. Next, he dismayed advocates of greater military strength by first deciding that the bomb would not be built and then announcing that production would be postponed while the nation waited to see how the Soviets behaved.

    In both diplomatic and military matters, the president often found it difficult to stick with his original intentions. He made concessions to demands for more military spending and more activity in Africa and became less critical of American arms sales. He both responded to criticism of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and sought to restore its effectiveness, regarding it as an essential instrument that had been misused.

    Critics, including Henry Kissinger, Henry Jackson, and many Republican senators, found him weak and ineffective, confusing and confused. They suggested that his administration had "seen that its neat theories about the world do not fit the difficult realities" and that "it must now come to grips with the world as it is." One close observer, Meg Greenfield of Newsweek magazine, wrote in 1978 that while "many of our politicians, more traumatized than instructed by that miserable war [Vietnam], tend to see Vietnams everywhere," more and more congressmen "seem . . . to be getting bored with their own post-Vietnam bemusement," and "under great provocation from abroad, Carter himself is beginning to move."

    span y wokkamile on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 9:13am
    Reagan almost led us

    @UntimelyRippd into inevitable nuclear war in his first term. The admin's bellicose rhetoric directed at the Sov Union, including his FEMA director stating that we could win in a nuke exchange if people would only build enough fallout shelters in their back yard, brought the two countries to a very perilous position by 1983.

    That anti-nuke movie which Ronnie saw in the WH, The Day After, began to undermine his narrow and reckless attitude. Then the world lucked out when the reasonable, reform-minded and détente focused Gorbachov came to power in 85. Gorby wanted a complete elimination of nukes on both sides, and almost got RR to agree, but the DeepState boys intervened to block it.

    I do think Jimmy the C was very inconsistent in FP, one day listening more to his SoS Sigh Vance, mostly a moderate-liberal non-interventionist type, and his nat'l security advisor Zbig Brzezinski, a hawk's hawk who saw evil Soviet designs everywhere. JC was like a ping-pong ball being batted back and forth.

    But at least JC didn't get the US involved in any new wars during his term, and was totally screwed by the Reagan-Bush team of crooks and liars and traitors who illegally sabotaged Carter's 1980 efforts to get the hostages released. Poppy and Bill Casey, at the least, should have ended up behind bars.

    But for that October Surprise, and maybe the Carter team's failure before the one debate to get their hands on Reagan's 1962 vinyl record showing how staunchly anti-Medicare he was, Jimmy would have won another term.

    #6.5.1.2
    Unfortunately, he was more or less a true believer in neo-liberalism, before that formulation even existed. Perhaps he just had too much faith in people. I don't know. I do know that, as I've said in my other comments here, Reagan ran against him by promising to do everything that Carter was already doing -- plus tax cuts.

    Indeed, Reagan himself believed in working towards a peaceable end to the cold war, at least at some point. Years ago, I saw an astonishing clip from Firing Line, with Reagan and a couple of other Republicans. The other guys were belching a super-hard line on relations with the USSR. Reagan, speaking coherently and intelligently -- as I say, it was astonishing -- stated that the right had no business asking for people to vote for them, if they had nothing to offer but inevitable nuclear war.

    span y UntimelyRippd on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 10:02am
    Carter's campaign was badly botched.

    @wokkamile
    Reagan's team defined Carter (and his administration) as big-spending, big-guvmint, and weak-on-defense, in complete contradiction to Carter's actual record, and the Carter campaign failed to communicate any meaningful correction.

    Remember, Kennedy challenged Carter from the left.

    #6.5.1.2.1 into inevitable nuclear war in his first term. The admin's bellicose rhetoric directed at the Sov Union, including his FEMA director stating that we could win in a nuke exchange if people would only build enough fallout shelters in their back yard, brought the two countries to a very perilous position by 1983.

    That anti-nuke movie which Ronnie saw in the WH, The Day After, began to undermine his narrow and reckless attitude. Then the world lucked out when the reasonable, reform-minded and détente focused Gorbachov came to power in 85. Gorby wanted a complete elimination of nukes on both sides, and almost got RR to agree, but the DeepState boys intervened to block it.

    I do think Jimmy the C was very inconsistent in FP, one day listening more to his SoS Sigh Vance, mostly a moderate-liberal non-interventionist type, and his nat'l security advisor Zbig Brzezinski, a hawk's hawk who saw evil Soviet designs everywhere. JC was like a ping-pong ball being batted back and forth.

    But at least JC didn't get the US involved in any new wars during his term, and was totally screwed by the Reagan-Bush team of crooks and liars and traitors who illegally sabotaged Carter's 1980 efforts to get the hostages released. Poppy and Bill Casey, at the least, should have ended up behind bars.

    But for that October Surprise, and maybe the Carter team's failure before the one debate to get their hands on Reagan's 1962 vinyl record showing how staunchly anti-Medicare he was, Jimmy would have won another term.

    span y Lookout on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 11:37am
    plus the oil embarbo and hostages

    @UntimelyRippd

    didn't help jimmy's campaign. I often wonder where we would be now had we stayed on Jimmy's path of energy independence. The establishment dims worked against him too tip O'Neil...and didn't Ted Kennedy try to primary him? Maybe it was Kennedy in law Shriver.

    Plus RR had several years on the big and little screen much like Trump the unreality star.

    #6.5.1.2.1.1
    Reagan's team defined Carter (and his administration) as big-spending, big-guvmint, and weak-on-defense, in complete contradiction to Carter's actual record, and the Carter campaign failed to communicate any meaningful correction.

    Remember, Kennedy challenged Carter from the left.

    span y wokkamile on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 12:04pm
    Ted Kennedy famously

    @Lookout primaried Carter in 1980 even as many in his inner circle advised against it. Sargent Shriver ran as McGovern's VP in 1972 after George dumped his first pick Eagleton. Shriver ran for prez in 76, in a large field loaded with liberals who tended to dilute each other's votes.

    #6.5.1.2.1.1.1

    didn't help jimmy's campaign. I often wonder where we would be now had we stayed on Jimmy's path of energy independence. The establishment dims worked against him too tip O'Neil...and didn't Ted Kennedy try to primary him? Maybe it was Kennedy in law Shriver.

    Plus RR had several years on the big and little screen much like Trump the unreality star.

    span y wokkamile on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 11:46am
    Jimmy stupidly

    @UntimelyRippd insulted Ted personally early on, even before taking office, when after his victory Jimmy was really feeling his oats, thinking it was his own greatness alone that got him elected. Ted did not forget or forgive. And on policy, he was greatly dismayed at Carter's unwillingness to work for major health care reform, and a few other matters where JC was taking a center-right position. But the policy differences probably were far less important than the personal in deciding to challenge Carter.

    Jimmy also unnecessarily aggravated and insulted House Speaker Tip O'Neil early on and repeatedly, until after getting a personal ultimatum of sorts from Tip, Jimmy finally got the message. That's just stupid, insulting the two most powerful Dems in Congress. You don't need to have a PhD in Politics from Harvard in order to understand not to do that.

    The Carter admin also did lousy messaging and PR, too much on the defensive, not often enough out there effectively promoting their (definitely mixed-bag) policies. The MSM went after him consistently as of 1978 and I don't think the Carter admin was prepared to deal with it or adequate to the task. The in-bred Beltway Press treated Carter and his people from Georgia like backwoods hicks and mostly were successful in painting the portrait of a weak, incompetent presidency.

    #6.5.1.2.1.1
    Reagan's team defined Carter (and his administration) as big-spending, big-guvmint, and weak-on-defense, in complete contradiction to Carter's actual record, and the Carter campaign failed to communicate any meaningful correction.

    Remember, Kennedy challenged Carter from the left.

    span y UntimelyRippd on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 11:52am
    significantly, kennedy wanted the oil companies brought

    @wokkamile
    to heel. mobil was posting the largest profits of any corporation in american history, while people couldn't afford gasoline. an attack on Mobil was built into Kennedy's stump speech).

    #6.5.1.2.1.1.1 insulted Ted personally early on, even before taking office, when after his victory Jimmy was really feeling his oats, thinking it was his own greatness alone that got him elected. Ted did not forget or forgive. And on policy, he was greatly dismayed at Carter's unwillingness to work for major health care reform, and a few other matters where JC was taking a center-right position. But the policy differences probably were far less important than the personal in deciding to challenge Carter.

    Jimmy also unnecessarily aggravated and insulted House Speaker Tip O'Neil early on and repeatedly, until after getting a personal ultimatum of sorts from Tip, Jimmy finally got the message. That's just stupid, insulting the two most powerful Dems in Congress. You don't need to have a PhD in Politics from Harvard in order to understand not to do that.

    The Carter admin also did lousy messaging and PR, too much on the defensive, not often enough out there effectively promoting their (definitely mixed-bag) policies. The MSM went after him consistently as of 1978 and I don't think the Carter admin was prepared to deal with it or adequate to the task. The in-bred Beltway Press treated Carter and his people from Georgia like backwoods hicks and mostly were successful in painting the portrait of a weak, incompetent presidency.

    span y HenryAWallace on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 2:26pm
    Carter, among others, might beg to differ with you about

    @wokkamile

    Kennedy, Carter and health care. And Nixon and Kennedy and health care, for that matter. As to the latter, Ted Kennedy would be among those differing.

    https://caucus99percent.com/content/who-will-own-lack-good-national-heal...

    https://caucus99percent.com/content/who-will-own-lack-good-national-heal...

    #6.5.1.2.1.1.1 insulted Ted personally early on, even before taking office, when after his victory Jimmy was really feeling his oats, thinking it was his own greatness alone that got him elected. Ted did not forget or forgive. And on policy, he was greatly dismayed at Carter's unwillingness to work for major health care reform, and a few other matters where JC was taking a center-right position. But the policy differences probably were far less important than the personal in deciding to challenge Carter.

    Jimmy also unnecessarily aggravated and insulted House Speaker Tip O'Neil early on and repeatedly, until after getting a personal ultimatum of sorts from Tip, Jimmy finally got the message. That's just stupid, insulting the two most powerful Dems in Congress. You don't need to have a PhD in Politics from Harvard in order to understand not to do that.

    The Carter admin also did lousy messaging and PR, too much on the defensive, not often enough out there effectively promoting their (definitely mixed-bag) policies. The MSM went after him consistently as of 1978 and I don't think the Carter admin was prepared to deal with it or adequate to the task. The in-bred Beltway Press treated Carter and his people from Georgia like backwoods hicks and mostly were successful in painting the portrait of a weak, incompetent presidency.

    span y wokkamile on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 6:36pm
    Thx for the cites and

    @HenryAWallace I wasn't aware you had previously written extensively on the health care subject. But looking at the cites I didn't see something which definitely nailed the story on Carter v TK on health care reform, just 2 people who detested each other with differing views, and a statement supposedly from Ted, which again I didn't see a cite for, admitting fault in the Carter proposal. (I have not read his book of memoirs.) If the latter assertion is true, then it is a bit of a puzzle why Carter would blame a then-deceased TK on 60Minutes over blocking his health care proposal, when all he had to do was cite Ted's supposed confession of guilt in his memoirs. (will now go to review the video of this interview, which I've not yet seen.)

    According to this HNN article from a 3d party academic on the Carter proposal, it was indeed a weak one and only a partial and perhaps badly flawed first step, which Kennedy may well have been right to oppose as Carter didn't commit, according to the author, on specifics for a followup comprehensive plan other than Carter would propose keeping the private insurance system intact, no public option. Jimmy just offered hospital care cost cutting and continuation of private insurance.

    On the earlier Nixon proposal, Kennedy, as I recall from the literature, was opposed as the health care major reform backers linked to the AFL-CIO and other Big Labor thought Ted should wait until a better proposal came along from a Dem president, as surely they would get a good one in the 76 election in the wake of Watergate. But it might also be true that TK regretted this move and had second thoughts about not taking the bird in hand and waiting for the two in the bush. As it turned out, he got only a third of a bird by waiting with Carter.

    #6.5.1.2.1.1.1.2

    Kennedy, Carter and health care. And Nixon and Kennedy and health care, for that matter. As to the latter, Ted Kennedy would be among those differing.

    https://caucus99percent.com/content/who-will-own-lack-good-national-heal...

    https://caucus99percent.com/content/who-will-own-lack-good-national-heal...

    span y wokkamile on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 7:35pm
    That Carter 60M interview

    @wokkamile @wokkamile from 2010 -- well Jimmy sure knows how to point the finger at others for his own failures. Starts at the 1:30 mark.

    //www.youtube.com/embed/00PUmPvRENc?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

    span y The Voice In th... on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 10:49pm
    Tip O'Neill

    @wokkamile
    I forgot he was a Democrat. He was Reagan's big enabler.

    #6.5.1.2.1.1.1 insulted Ted personally early on, even before taking office, when after his victory Jimmy was really feeling his oats, thinking it was his own greatness alone that got him elected. Ted did not forget or forgive. And on policy, he was greatly dismayed at Carter's unwillingness to work for major health care reform, and a few other matters where JC was taking a center-right position. But the policy differences probably were far less important than the personal in deciding to challenge Carter.

    Jimmy also unnecessarily aggravated and insulted House Speaker Tip O'Neil early on and repeatedly, until after getting a personal ultimatum of sorts from Tip, Jimmy finally got the message. That's just stupid, insulting the two most powerful Dems in Congress. You don't need to have a PhD in Politics from Harvard in order to understand not to do that.

    The Carter admin also did lousy messaging and PR, too much on the defensive, not often enough out there effectively promoting their (definitely mixed-bag) policies. The MSM went after him consistently as of 1978 and I don't think the Carter admin was prepared to deal with it or adequate to the task. The in-bred Beltway Press treated Carter and his people from Georgia like backwoods hicks and mostly were successful in painting the portrait of a weak, incompetent presidency.

    span y dfarrah on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 11:03am
    Reagan

    @UntimelyRippd said "peace is breaking out all over."

    At that time, peace was considered good.

    Who betrayed the Russians when the US said it wouldn't tighten its military circle around Russia? Was it Obama or Bush II that broke that promise?

    #6.5.1.2
    Unfortunately, he was more or less a true believer in neo-liberalism, before that formulation even existed. Perhaps he just had too much faith in people. I don't know. I do know that, as I've said in my other comments here, Reagan ran against him by promising to do everything that Carter was already doing -- plus tax cuts.

    Indeed, Reagan himself believed in working towards a peaceable end to the cold war, at least at some point. Years ago, I saw an astonishing clip from Firing Line, with Reagan and a couple of other Republicans. The other guys were belching a super-hard line on relations with the USSR. Reagan, speaking coherently and intelligently -- as I say, it was astonishing -- stated that the right had no business asking for people to vote for them, if they had nothing to offer but inevitable nuclear war.

    span y wokkamile on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 11:55am
    Presidents breaking the promise

    @dfarrah to Gorby not to move NATO one inch eastward towards Russia, in return for the Sov Union agreeing to a reuniting of Germany, began under Bush I, Poppy, or at least the anti-Russia attitude began then, after the verbal agreement was made, and continued with all presidents thru Obama and Trump.

    #6.5.1.2.1 said "peace is breaking out all over."

    At that time, peace was considered good.

    Who betrayed the Russians when the US said it wouldn't tighten its military circle around Russia? Was it Obama or Bush II that broke that promise?

    span y dfarrah on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 12:04pm
    Thanks for the

    @wokkamile info.

    #6.5.1.2.1.2 to Gorby not to move NATO one inch eastward towards Russia, in return for the Sov Union agreeing to a reuniting of Germany, began under Bush I, Poppy, or at least the anti-Russia attitude began then, after the verbal agreement was made, and continued with all presidents thru Obama and Trump.

    span y wendy davis on Mon, 04/29/2019 - 5:25pm
    that didn't sound

    @wokkamile

    quite right as i'd sorta remember it was 1999, so i bingled 'bill clinton and nato expansion', and got a boatload of hits.

    david stockman , believe it or not.

    armscontrol.com, but part of the gist was that he hadn't wanted to seem 'like a wimp' while running against bob dole. i'm agnostic on that, but what a fucked up cold war 2.0 organization that it. now, you might be right about dubya creating one evil stepchild of nato, and he did create the neo-colonizing africom. it's motto is (or was) 'we fight chaos in african nations', while forgetting that they also use CIA agents and such to...create the chaos, then help install U-friendly puppet gummints.

    on later edit : it gets worse, if more honest. i was on black alliance for peace's twit account for my own current diary, they were protesting against africom, and one tweet led to an article on africom with these lines:

    "When AFRICOM was established in the months before Barack Obama assumed office as the first Black President of the United States, a majority of African nations -- led by the Pan-Africanist government of Libya -- rejected AFRICOM, forcing the new command to instead work out of Europe.

    But with the U.S. and NATO attack on Libya that led to the destruction of that country and the murder of its leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, corrupt African leaders began to allow AFRICOM forces to operate in their countries and establish military-to-military relations with the United States. Today, those efforts have resulted in 46 various forms of U.S. bases as well as military-to-military relations between 53 out of the 54 African countries and the United States. U.S. Special Forces troops now operate in more than a dozen African nations.

    Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, first and former deputy of AFRICOM, declared in 2008, "Protecting the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market is one of AFRICOM's guiding principles."

    We say AFRICOM is the flip side of the domestic war being waged by the same repressive state structure against Black and poor people in the United States. In the U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign, we link police violence and the domestic war waged on Black people to U.S. interventionism and militarism abroad.

    #6.5.1.2.1.2 to Gorby not to move NATO one inch eastward towards Russia, in return for the Sov Union agreeing to a reuniting of Germany, began under Bush I, Poppy, or at least the anti-Russia attitude began then, after the verbal agreement was made, and continued with all presidents thru Obama and Trump.

    span y thanatokephaloides on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 8:42pm
    where do we go from here?

    @Cassiodorus

    It seems to me that if we want to focus upon this contingency, we ought to be promoting an activist "Plan B." What if the Democrats screw Bernie again, and set up useful idiot Joe Biden to win the convention with the help of the superdelegates? Bernie endorses Joe, and hope is once again replaced by despair. Such a contingency would be one possible fruit of the "elect a better President" strategy which appears as the first option for activism in America. What then? Perhaps we ought to be planning for this possibility?

    Which does, in fact, force the question:

    Where do we go from here?

    //www.youtube.com/embed/oIlVktvZGlk?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

    span y The Voice In th... on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 9:16pm
    I'll flip a coin

    @thanatokephaloides
    Heads I vote Green again
    Tails I go get drunk on election day instead

    #6

    It seems to me that if we want to focus upon this contingency, we ought to be promoting an activist "Plan B." What if the Democrats screw Bernie again, and set up useful idiot Joe Biden to win the convention with the help of the superdelegates? Bernie endorses Joe, and hope is once again replaced by despair. Such a contingency would be one possible fruit of the "elect a better President" strategy which appears as the first option for activism in America. What then? Perhaps we ought to be planning for this possibility?

    Which does, in fact, force the question:

    Where do we go from here?

    data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==

    span y davidgmillsatty on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 9:19pm
    @The Voice In the Wilderness I voted green last

    @The Voice In the Wilderness I voted green last time.

    But voting for people who have never held office in their lives just seems pointless. It would be nice if a green actually got elected somewhere before he or she decided to run for President.

    I live in a red state, so my vote doesn't matter. I could vote for Mickey Mouse and do as much good. Maybe that is why I am so cynical about presidential elections now.

    My gut tells me that Sanders can't beat Trump in 2020 when he could have in 2016. Sanders let so many people down in 2016, that there will not be the enthusiasm this time. And Trump will have lots of never-Trumpers on board in 2020.

    #6.6
    Heads I vote Green again
    Tails I go get drunk on election day instead

    span y The Voice In th... on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 10:52pm
    It's always hard to defeat a sitting President.

    @davidgmillsatty
    But Reagan did it. The trick is make trump as reviled as Carter. but Trump is satifying his base, gun nuts and the nativists.

    #6.6.1 I voted green last time.

    But voting for people who have never held office in their lives just seems pointless. It would be nice if a green actually got elected somewhere before he or she decided to run for President.

    I live in a red state, so my vote doesn't matter. I could vote for Mickey Mouse and do as much good. Maybe that is why I am so cynical about presidential elections now.

    My gut tells me that Sanders can't beat Trump in 2020 when he could have in 2016. Sanders let so many people down in 2016, that there will not be the enthusiasm this time. And Trump will have lots of never-Trumpers on board in 2020.

    span y mimi on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 4:44pm
    OPOL, you really still believe that?

    World peace is possible and with real leadership, America could usher it into being.

    You sound really like an American President. Are you running? Sigh. I have to say considering what is going on in the world, I find that sentence pretty unconvincing, if not an attempt of misleading the sheeps.

    What matters in a Congressman and Senator, might be more important to know.

    No offense meant, it's just that the times are over when these nice words would still work.

    span y OPOL on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 4:50pm
    @mimi I know what you mean,

    @mimi I know what you mean, Mimi. I realize how unlikely it seems given the horrifying present, yet I insist that, at least in theory, it doesn't have to be this way and that with sufficient will we could reverse the hate and war. I may well be wrong, but I believe it. If we wanted peace as badly as we wanted to go to the moon or build the atomic bomb, we'd stand a good chance of getting there.

    World peace is possible and with real leadership, America could usher it into being.

    You sound really like an American President. Are you running? Sigh. I have to say considering what is going on in the world, I find that sentence pretty unconvincing, if not an attempt of misleading the sheeps.

    What matters in a Congressman and Senator, might be more important to know.

    No offense meant, it's just that the times are over when these nice words would still work.

    span y dkmich on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 7:41am
    Oh where to begin.

    Perhaps with f@ck Bill Clinton and his media consolidation - tip of the iceberg.

    Next up has to be Jane Fonda. "I guess the lesson is we shouldn't be fooled by good-looking liberals no matter how well-spoken they are."

    And following behind, this is one hell of a good question.

    Now, having seen the wreckage a horrible president can wreak on a helpless nation, I'm starting to re-question why none of the 'good' presidents ever had much impact. They had the same power to do good as he has to do evil. I'm starting to think they didn't want to change anything. Or were paid not to. (Shocking, I know.)

    I think every person running for office should have to pass a lie detector test in order to declare his/her candidacy. Questions to be written by his/her enemies. Next up, every voter must pass a current events test in order to vote. If you have no clue, you should have no vote. I'm tired of having our country's fate determined by crooks and people who don't know better and could care less.

    span y Alligator Ed on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 5:56pm
    Sociopaths don't fail lie detectors

    @dkmich Unfortunately, most of the sheeples don't realize that "honest politician" is an oxymoron.

    Perhaps with f@ck Bill Clinton and his media consolidation - tip of the iceberg.

    Next up has to be Jane Fonda. "I guess the lesson is we shouldn't be fooled by good-looking liberals no matter how well-spoken they are."

    And following behind, this is one hell of a good question.

    Now, having seen the wreckage a horrible president can wreak on a helpless nation, I'm starting to re-question why none of the 'good' presidents ever had much impact. They had the same power to do good as he has to do evil. I'm starting to think they didn't want to change anything. Or were paid not to. (Shocking, I know.)

    I think every person running for office should have to pass a lie detector test in order to declare his/her candidacy. Questions to be written by his/her enemies. Next up, every voter must pass a current events test in order to vote. If you have no clue, you should have no vote. I'm tired of having our country's fate determined by crooks and people who don't know better and could care less.

    span y davidgmillsatty on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 9:23pm
    @Alligator Ed In court, its the

    @Alligator Ed In court, its the honest people who are so scared shitless, they come across as liars.

    #8 Unfortunately, most of the sheeples don't realize that "honest politician" is an oxymoron.

    span y wendy davis on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 5:47pm
    i'd submit that

    *If* a president of this nation can bring peace about, the epic barriers to third party candidates need to be reversed (especially toward the Greens), but they won't be. the only potential peace candidate would need to both anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist (not just claim to be anti-war for some™, imo. in the duopoly, there simply isn't one, although many will claim that tulsi gabbard is.

    good diary, though opol.

    span y bobswern on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 7:40pm
    Excellent post, OPOL!

    You're always "spot-on." But, this time, you hit it out of the park!

    Wanted to turn you on to some new music...

    1.) Irish singer-songwriter Hozier , just came out with his new album "Wasteland, Baby!" (easily, one of the best, politically-oriented songwriters of the current generation):

    //www.youtube.com/embed/j2YgDua2gpk?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

    span y OPOL on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 9:28pm
    @bobswern Thanks Bob, 'preciate,

    @bobswern Thanks Bob, 'preciate, bro.

    You're always "spot-on." But, this time, you hit it out of the park!

    Wanted to turn you on to some new music...

    1.) Irish singer-songwriter Hozier , just came out with his new album "Wasteland, Baby!" (easily, one of the best, politically-oriented songwriters of the current generation):

    data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==

    span y karl pearson on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 9:16pm
    World History and War

    During my high school World History class, several of us approached our instructor to change some of the elements of the class. We were tired of memorizing dates of wars and battles. Her response was: "The history of the world is the history of war." I hope I live to see this instructor proven wrong.

    span y Sirena on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 9:59pm
    What matters in a President is

    us.

    span y Sirena on Sat, 04/27/2019 - 10:34pm
    This may sound overly simplistic

    @Sirena
    But if we can find not only someone who we believe in but someone who also believes in us, then why can we not progress?

    Who are these other entities?

    After all, there are more of us, than there are of them

    So chins up!

    If Nike says 'Just do it' then so should we!

    us.

    span y thanatokephaloides on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 5:11pm
    to answer your questions

    @Sirena

    This may sound overly simplistic

    It is, unfortunately. Solving systemic corruption is always a complex and difficult task.

    But if we can find not only someone who we believe in but someone who also believes in us, then why can we not progress?

    Because those whose continued ill-gotten gains depend on us not progressing anywhere apply their money power to make sure we do not progress.

    Exhibit A: Bernie Sanders in 2016. The moneyed power brokers wanted Hillary Clinton. And, the desire of us hoi polloi to the contrary notwithstanding, she's what we got.

    And Donald Trump bought his way into the Presidency.

    Who are these other entities?

    The ultra-wealthy, whose continued un-earned profits depend on no change occurring. The forever war industry, whose continued un-earned profits depend on no peace occurring, ever. The fossil-fuel industry, whose continued un-earned profits depend on no change occurring to how we power our lives. The mega-banks and the Wall Street Casino, which depend on all the above and others like them.

    After all, there are more of us, than there are of them

    Not where it counts (dollars under single-individual control).

    So chins up!

    If Nike says 'Just do it' then so should we!

    Do please describe how we are supposed to "just do it". I would be most interested in how you suppose we should proceed here. But I must ask a favor: please don't suggest anything which has already been tried to exhaustion. Thank you.

    #12
    But if we can find not only someone who we believe in but someone who also believes in us, then why can we not progress?

    Who are these other entities?

    After all, there are more of us, than there are of them

    So chins up!

    If Nike says 'Just do it' then so should we!

    span y Raggedy Ann on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 7:16am
    Nice essay, OPOL.

    What I see as the problem is the deep state stopping any person in the Oval Office from accomplishing progressive goals. These war-mongers have a vice grip on our government. If the person elected would have the courage to stand up for the people instead of the deep state, then I think we have a chance.

    This day will come, but it might be until the 2024 or 2028 election.

    My $.02.

    span y Eagles92 on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 11:41am
    Nice to see you writing again, OPOL.

    As always, I love your message.

    I just wish I weren't so cynical these days that I could actually agree with you.

    span y The Wizard on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 12:20pm
    Part of the problem lies in the assumption

    World peace is possible and with real leadership, America could usher it into being.

    Forget America, it will never happen. We have not had a single world class president in my lifetime. Democracy does no such thing as guarantee a better outcome, it only provides more legitimacy. Our congress critters are a bunch of spineless cheerleaders for some odd concept of patriotism in America. They would vote to nuke Cuba if they thought that it would advance their careers. The deep-state's goal is more and better lethality of the military on an ever ballooning budget. The ultra-rich and the corporations and banks control everything. What path do you see to peace and justice? The American people vote these bastards into office. This is what they want. The only good outcome I see is if the world learns to get along without the US, and sanctions the US to the bone. I have no idea where these abstract concepts of a greater purpose for the American Hegemon ever came from. They have no relationship to reality. The best that we could do is to try to return the nation to the belief in isolationism as was popular between the two world wars.

    span y thanatokephaloides on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 5:16pm
    bastards

    @The Wizard

    The ultra-rich and the corporations and banks control everything. What path do you see to peace and justice? The American people vote these bastards into office.

    False.

    The selection of non-choice (or Hobson's Choice) candidates is locked-in ages before any of us hoi polloi get to vote on anything.

    World peace is possible and with real leadership, America could usher it into being.

    Forget America, it will never happen. We have not had a single world class president in my lifetime. Democracy does no such thing as guarantee a better outcome, it only provides more legitimacy. Our congress critters are a bunch of spineless cheerleaders for some odd concept of patriotism in America. They would vote to nuke Cuba if they thought that it would advance their careers. The deep-state's goal is more and better lethality of the military on an ever ballooning budget. The ultra-rich and the corporations and banks control everything. What path do you see to peace and justice? The American people vote these bastards into office. This is what they want. The only good outcome I see is if the world learns to get along without the US, and sanctions the US to the bone. I have no idea where these abstract concepts of a greater purpose for the American Hegemon ever came from. They have no relationship to reality. The best that we could do is to try to return the nation to the belief in isolationism as was popular between the two world wars.

    span y TheOtherMaven on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 8:59pm
    What if they held an election and nobody came?

    @thanatokephaloides

    Interesting thought experiment, unlikely as it may be in real life....

    #15

    The ultra-rich and the corporations and banks control everything. What path do you see to peace and justice? The American people vote these bastards into office.

    False.

    The selection of non-choice (or Hobson's Choice) candidates is locked-in ages before any of us hoi polloi get to vote on anything.

    span y Big Al on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 9:34pm
    "Why I Won't Vote"

    @TheOtherMaven "I have no advice for others in this election. Are you voting Democratic? Well and good; all I ask is why? Are you voting for Eisenhower and his smooth team of bright ghost writers? Again, why? Will your helpless vote either way support or restore democracy to America?
    Is the refusal to vote in this phony election a counsel of despair? No, it is dogged hope. It is hope that if twenty-five million voters refrain from voting in 1956 because of their own accord and not because of a sly wink from Khrushchev, this might make the American people ask how much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest."

    Read More http://www.blackeconomicdevelopment.com/why-i-wont-vote-by-web-du-bois-t...

    How much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest? Still trying to find that out Mr. Dubois.

    #15.1

    Interesting thought experiment, unlikely as it may be in real life....

    span y snoopydawg on Sun, 04/28/2019 - 10:21pm
    Welp...

    @Big Al

    It is hope that if twenty-five million voters refrain from voting in 1956 because of their own accord and not because of a sly wink from Khrushchev, this might make the American people ask how much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest."

    More than that stayed home last election and yet here we are again getting ready to do the voting process again over a half century since Dubois said that. The funniest thing about that Russia allegation of interfering with the election is that the GOP have gerrymandered the hell out of so many states, the democrats have let them do it and democrats not only refuse to put enough voting machines in districts with heavy turnout they don't insist on using paper ballots.

    During the last primary in New York alone thousands of people were kicked off the voting rolls and had their party affiliation changed and even after the person who did that admitted it nothing was done. Next up was Brenda Snipes in Florida who destroyed lots and lots of ballots and she not only wasn't punished for doing it, she got to retire with her full pension.

    DuBois condemns both Democrats and Republicans for their indifferent positions on the influence of corporate wealth, racial inequality, arms proliferation and unaffordable health care.
    1956

    I've been bitchin about what Trump is doing with the regulatory agencies and once again I found out how badly Obama was before him... I shouldn't have been surprised huh?

    How Obama Defanged the EPA Before Trump Gutted the Agency

    #15.1.1 "I have no advice for others in this election. Are you voting Democratic? Well and good; all I ask is why? Are you voting for Eisenhower and his smooth team of bright ghost writers? Again, why? Will your helpless vote either way support or restore democracy to America?
    Is the refusal to vote in this phony election a counsel of despair? No, it is dogged hope. It is hope that if twenty-five million voters refrain from voting in 1956 because of their own accord and not because of a sly wink from Khrushchev, this might make the American people ask how much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest."

    Read More http://www.blackeconomicdevelopment.com/why-i-wont-vote-by-web-du-bois-t...

    How much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest? Still trying to find that out Mr. Dubois.

    span y mimi on Mon, 04/29/2019 - 2:00am
    If voting would be mandatory for everyone

    @Big Al
    and if it would be a direct democratic vote like in a parliamentary system, I think it would be worth voting.
    Voting in the US seems to be worthless these days.

    #15.1.1 "I have no advice for others in this election. Are you voting Democratic? Well and good; all I ask is why? Are you voting for Eisenhower and his smooth team of bright ghost writers? Again, why? Will your helpless vote either way support or restore democracy to America?
    Is the refusal to vote in this phony election a counsel of despair? No, it is dogged hope. It is hope that if twenty-five million voters refrain from voting in 1956 because of their own accord and not because of a sly wink from Khrushchev, this might make the American people ask how much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest."

    Read More http://www.blackeconomicdevelopment.com/why-i-wont-vote-by-web-du-bois-t...

    How much longer this dumb farce can proceed without even a whimper of protest? Still trying to find that out Mr. Dubois.

    [May 01, 2019] On Venezuela, America Should Check Its Regime Change Impulses at the Door

    Notable quotes:
    "... it was Russia that attacked Iraq on the basis of lies? ..."
    "... It must have been Russia that turned Libya into a failed state, complete with slave markets? ..."
    "... Instead of spinning fantasies about Maduro going into exile or being overthrown by some kind of joint (and illegal) Latin American task force, how's about we consider the very reasonable idea of Guaidó being arrested and tried for treason? ..."
    May 01, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Kurt Gayle, says: May 1, 2019 at 1:23 pm

    "Tulsi Gabbard: Say NO to the costly interventionist wars that have cost us trillions of dollars" March 12, 2019:

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

    Kouros , says: May 1, 2019 at 1:51 pm
    Please refrain in using the term "democracy" so easily. US is a republic with the surface of elected representative system, and we know exactly how that works. See the election of Truman as VP instead of Wallace in 1944 or so or very recently the election of Hillary Clinton as democratic representative.

    A true democracy is done via a sortition system that selects randomly from the roster of eligible citizens to represent the will of the people.

    Imagine that in the Second Amendment instead of "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" we would have: "A well educated Citizenry, being necessary to the security and well-being of a free, moral, and ethically sound State, the right of the people to get a sound Education in Philosophy, Ethics, Civics, Logic, Finance, and Health, shall not be infringed".

    Bah, Utopia

    Sid Finster , says: May 1, 2019 at 2:38 pm
    Javier:

    let me guess,

    1. it was Russia that attacked Iraq on the basis of lies?
    2. It is China that is gleefully assisting the Saudi tyrants to commit genocide?
    3. It must have been Russia that turned Libya into a failed state, complete with slave markets?
    4. Is China now that is frantically threatening war on Iran?
    5. Russia must have been responsible for supporting jihadists to turn Syria into another failed state, right?
    6. For that matter, is it Russia and China that are threatening war on the elected and UN recognized government of Venezuela?

    Seriously, after America's long and bloody track record of failed and bloody interventions, it baffles me that anyone could say something so ridiculous.

    cka2nd , says: May 1, 2019 at 3:57 pm
    " fearmongering about the "Yankee" empire to the north."

    What, this isn't justified?

    Instead of spinning fantasies about Maduro going into exile or being overthrown by some kind of joint (and illegal) Latin American task force, how's about we consider the very reasonable idea of Guaidó being arrested and tried for treason?

    [May 01, 2019] Russians, Russians, Russians. Now under each bed

    May 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Asoka_The_Great , 4 minutes ago link

    Here is my take, on this entire Sh*tshow, running in Washington DC, for the last two years.

    1. All the evidences are pointing the most likely scenario that Donald Trump is a Manchurian Candidate ordered by the Kremelin to run for Office, in 2016.

    2. Then, Donald Trump COLLUDED with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service to win the Presidency of United States, with shocking easy.

    3. This was because Hitlery Clinton and Joe Biden , was bribed by Putin, through the Ukrainians, with hundred of millions of dollars, so she would purposely lose the "sure win" race, to a political nobody, Donald Trump.

    4. Then, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, produced the Steele Dossier, a political disinformation tool, in collaboration with Britain's Mi6 and CIA.

    5. Then the Russians leaked the COLLUSION story to the CIA controlled MSM such as New York Time, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, etc . . ., so they would predictably kicked a storm of controversy over the COLLUSION, and demand the DOJ to appoint a Special Prosecutor to initial an investigation.

    6. This diabolically devilish Special PsyOps by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service has succeeded in tying up Washington DC, in a Sh*tshow, for the last two years, and divided the Country in bitter controversy.

    7. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service and Chinese Communists' Intelligence Service have thoroughly infiltrated America's Department of Justice, FBI, and CIA, and NSA, and use their high levels agents, such as O'bomer, Hitlery, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Strozk, Page, and rosenstein to stirred up this COLLUSION storm, to paralyze America's political system for as long as possible.

    In Summary, the entire sh*tshow is a production of a Special PsyOps by the Russkies and ChiComs' Intelligence Services. It has nothing to do with America's dysfunctional government, called DemoCrazy .

    [May 01, 2019] Tulsi Brings Lefty Foreign Policy To Righty Audience -- It Works

    Mar 5, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Dragonblazzer969 , 1 month ago

    Left or Right, you cannot question Gabbard's patriotism and intelligence and in-depth knowledge on war issues. Great candidate.

    roselassi , 1 month ago

    She is an amazing diplomat - I support her 100%

    NOAH WEIKERT , 1 month ago

    As republican I would vote for Tulsi Gabbard, so won me over after the Joe Rogan podcast.

    Bpinator, 1 month ago

    Just donated to Tulsi. We need her anti-imperialism on the mainstream debate stage.

    [Apr 30, 2019] Here's how much global military spending rose in 2018

    Apr 30, 2019 | www.defensenews.com

    WASHINGTON -- Overall military expenditures rose 2.6 percent between 2017 and 2018 , to hit a total of $1.82 trillion, according to new research from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

    The total from 2018 is 5.4 percent higher than 2009, and represents a 76 percent increase over 1998, a 20-year period.

    Sixty percent of global military spending came from five countries: The United States ($649 billion), China ($250 billion), Saudi Arabia ($67.6 billion), India ($66.5 billion) and France ($63.8 billion). Russia ($61.4 billion) and the United Kingdom ($50 billion) were the other two countries to spend $50 billion or more on defense.

    However, there are ups and downs among the biggest spenders. While the U.S. (4.6 percent, the first overall growth since 2010), China (5 percent) and India (3.1 percent) increased their respective military spending year over year, Saudi Arabia cut its spending by 6.5 percent, France by 1.4 percent and Russia by 3.5 percent.

    And overall defense spending per gross domestic product fell to 2.1 percent in 2018, representing $239 per global citizen, a 0.1 percent decrease over one year and a 0.5 percent decrease over 10 years.

    Notably, Russia ranked outside the top five for the first time since 2006. China, meanwhile, increased its military spending for the 24th consecutive year, and its spending is almost 10 times higher than it was in 1994; however, researchers warn that Chinese growth may slow in the coming year.

    "The annual rate of growth of China's military spending has slowed steadily since it reached a post-2009 high of 9.3 percent in 2013. The growth of 5.0 percent in 2018 was the lowest annual increase since 1995," the authors note. "China has followed a policy of linking growth in military spending with economic growth. With its economic growth slowing in 2018 to the lowest level in 28 years, slower rates of growth in the coming years can be expected if China continues to follow this policy."

    Mike Smith

    Cuts in DOD should start right here, given the utter absurdity and culture of entitlement that continues unchecked in DOD with the objectively preposterous $21 BILLION per year tax free monthly optional off-ship and of-base surmised "housing" allowances/handouts in our nation's all volunteer military.

    Just look at these tax free monthly handouts! They are all beyond ridiculous regardless of location and rank! And most were increased yet again for 2019!

    Upwards of $2,000-over $5,000 a month tax free for singles, the vast majority of who could and should be living in the existing and more than adequate singles quarters on the ships and bases they are assigned.

    Upwards of eye-popping ranges of $4,000-$6,000-$8,000-$10,677, yes, $10,677 a month tax free for so-called "dual married" volunteer couples. Dual marrieds are two married volunteers. There are approx. 90,000 volunteers who are dual married. And all of these couples get TWO tax free monthly handouts for their ONE family unit.

    If they have a kid, one gets the higher "with dependents" tax free rate. And the other gets the slightly lower "without dependents" rate. If no kid, then they both get the tax free monthly "without" rate. And the vast majority of these dual marrieds are already being paid from $100,000-$300,000 and more in combined annual base pays, other pays, and other tax free monthly handouts each year.

    These extremely well paid couples should be using their very generous US taxpayer provided de facto salaries to pay for their housing needs just like the taxpaying public. Or at a bare minimum means testing is more than appropriate just as other federal social welfare programs are administered.

    And the most outrageous fact concerning these patently absurd tax free monthly handouts is that no proof of any kind is needed to show that these tax free windfalls are actually being used for off base "housing" needs or expenses in the first place.

    And as a direct result of this utter lack of management control and fiscal responsibility, most volunteers gain much lower cost housing (e.g., most singles opt to roommate) so they can divert, although currently legally, hundreds and even many thousands tax free into their pockets each month and/or divert them into luxury auto purchases and other items of excess so they can live vastly premature affluent lifestyles off the backs of the U.S. taxpayers.

    And here is a sample of these ludicrous tax free monthly handouts by four cities over four ranks. Cumulatively, there are hundreds of thousands of military volunteers currently assigned throughout these four locations. And although there are many other locations with lower tax free monthly handouts, there are many others with even higher figures.

    San Diego Area:

    E-3 Singles - $1,995
    E-3 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $4,530

    E-7 Singles - $2,535
    E-7 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $5,589

    O-3 Singles - $2,880
    O-3 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $6,009

    O-6 Singles - $3,114
    O-6 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $6,936

    San Francisco Bay Area:

    E-3 Singles - $3,312
    E-3 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $7,623

    E-7 Singles - $4,308
    E-7 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $9,408

    O-3 Singles - $4,806
    O-3 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $9,990

    O-6 Singles - $5,169
    O-6 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $10,677, YES $10,677

    Honolulu/Oahu:

    E-3 Singles - $2,139
    E-3 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $4,989

    E-7 Singles - $2,856
    E-7 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $6,132

    O-3 Singles - $3,078
    O-3 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $6,660

    O-6 Singles - $3,573
    O-6 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $7,557

    Washington, DC Area

    E-3 Singles - $1,845
    E-3 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $4,200

    E-7 Singles - $2,361
    E-7 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $5,007

    O-3 Singles - $2,571
    O-3 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $5,316

    O-6 Singles - $2,730
    O-6 Dual Marrieds w/kid - $5,973

    Rank Key:

    • E-3s are typically GED or HS educated. The vast majority are 19-20 years old with less than 2 years in the military since leaving their parent's homes, literally.
    • E-7s are typically the same as above but add 10-12 years and perhaps a dubious AA or BA "e-degree" gained at full taxpayer expense during their supposed "working" hours from an open enrollment, for profit, on-line diploma mill that caters to DOD staff and relies on taxpayer funds in DOD "training" accounts for its very existence.
    • O-3s are typically twenty somethings with undergrad degrees occupying entry-level or near entry-level military pseudo management or staff positions.
    • O-6s include legions of desk-based administrative support staffers with grad degrees earned 100% off the backs of the U.S. taxpayers

    Contact your members of Congress today to help get this $21 billion per year, but little known outside of DOD tax free out of control gravy train stopped in its tracks

    [Apr 30, 2019] Is Auntie Gina just the titular head of Al-CIA?

    Notable quotes:
    "... It's the US ruling elite that are the true deplorables. ..."
    "... The war on civilization is never a failure for as long as the invader wins. Winning in this case means toppling a government, destabilizing an economy and dividing a population then leaving a country in chaos. It's not a foreign policy failure for the U.S. That is the policy working exactly as intended. All the talk later, where they claim that they had "bad intel" or they "made mistakes" or "miscalculated" is complete bullshit. They know what they're doing. If they didn't, they wouldn't keep doing it over and over in the exact same way. ..."
    "... {A titular ruler, or titular head, is a person in an official position of leadership who possesses few, if any, actual powers. Sometimes a person may inhabit a position of titular leadership and yet exercise more power than would normally be expected, as a result of their personality or experience} ? ..."
    "... They'd follow the money if they really wanted to end the terrorism. In that regard, bombing Raqqa to hell was sure convenient as USA destroyed all the evidence - or at least they can make that claim. ..."
    "... So he gets trotted out just in time to revive the "ISIS threat", and take the blame for various recent funny-smelling terrist attacks, people going to odd places like New Zealand and Sri Lanka to vent their spleens at Muslims and Christians, respectively. I have half-a-suspicion somebody is trying to get a religious war of some sort going. ..."
    "... we're talking 1 and a half million dead so far in Iraq and Afghanistan...and that's being conservative. ..."
    "... Where? Where was it published? On what platform? Is it really that hard to trace the IPs? Turkey is really determined to get those S-400s. The Empire first threatened to withhold F-35s, then to impose sanctions, then to expel Turkey from NATO, then to move its bases to Greece. Still, Turkey wouldn't budge. Time to deploy some good old terrorism, so that the Empire will be obliged to come in and "help". ..."
    "... I have long believed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually is associated either with Moss ad or the CIA. That's why he's had so many miracle escapes. That's why they never catch him and often don't even know where he is. And we know that his ISIS never, never attacks Israeli targets or fat Saudi Prince targets. ..."
    "... Those would in fact be the targets of choice for any genuine jihad movement. Not Syria or Iraq, which are two states Israel has wanted to harm or eliminate for years. ISIS has always been a fraud, a very complex and deadly one, but a fraud. ..."
    "... Many years ago, even before this character posed as a "Syrian rebel" who was photographed meeting with John McCain, he was outed as a Mossad agent by the name of Simon Elliot. ..."
    "... Al Jazeera "can't confirm the authenticity of the video." ..."
    "... A history of Wahhabism which is a problem for the globe; https://ahtribune.com/religion/155-a-history-of-wahhabism.html The KSA, whose ass the empire kisses daily, is the main funder for these clowns. ..."
    Apr 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    shaw , Apr 29, 2019 2:43:54 PM | link

    What's the Wonder my dear?
    Duh!
    He is in CIA safe house in Al-Anbar.

    ISI is looking for this CIA's "Patsy" hide out. Watch this space, he has blood of 14 Pakistani soldiers on his hands via Iran hit. We will end this MOSSAD Agent.

    Sally Snyder , Apr 29, 2019 2:45:43 PM | link

    As shown in this article, statistics show that the War on Terror has been a colossal failure:

    https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/03/global-terrorism-and-failure-of-war-on.html

    The one hundred thousand people that died in Iraq and Afghanistan due to terrorist activities would certainly agree that the trillions of dollars that have been spent on the War on Terror has done very little to remove the spectre of terrorist activities from their homes, cities and nations.

    CD Waller , Apr 29, 2019 3:06:16 PM | link
    Are we sure the man in the film is Bahgdadi?

    Sally Snyder: The war on terror is a war of terror and in that sense, though morally reprehensible and costly, has been success. Regime change and the destabilization of the Middle East has been the goal.

    It's the US ruling elite that are the true deplorables.

    Fantome , Apr 29, 2019 3:09:31 PM | link
    @Sally Snyder[2]:

    War on terror was the war on an entire civilization. Association/Replacement of the word terror was just for the public consumption. It's a simple strategy that makes the aggressors appear like the good guys who are there to defend themselves or the values they hold.

    The war on civilization is never a failure for as long as the invader wins. Winning in this case means toppling a government, destabilizing an economy and dividing a population then leaving a country in chaos. It's not a foreign policy failure for the U.S. That is the policy working exactly as intended. All the talk later, where they claim that they had "bad intel" or they "made mistakes" or "miscalculated" is complete bullshit. They know what they're doing. If they didn't, they wouldn't keep doing it over and over in the exact same way.

    War on the civilizations yields massive benefits. It's the shortcoming of the model of the western civilization that it continuously requires massive input that can't be achieved by the legal means of business and trade.

    Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 29, 2019 3:19:34 PM | link
    One wonders whose guest he is

    Auntie Gina the tit ular head of Al-CIA-duh/ Al Qaeda/ ISIS?

    {A titular ruler, or titular head, is a person in an official position of leadership who possesses few, if any, actual powers. Sometimes a person may inhabit a position of titular leadership and yet exercise more power than would normally be expected, as a result of their personality or experience} ?

    Jackrabbit , Apr 29, 2019 3:26:14 PM | link
    They'd follow the money if they really wanted to end the terrorism. In that regard, bombing Raqqa to hell was sure convenient as USA destroyed all the evidence - or at least they can make that claim.
    Bemildred , Apr 29, 2019 3:35:23 PM | link
    So he gets trotted out just in time to revive the "ISIS threat", and take the blame for various recent funny-smelling terrist attacks, people going to odd places like New Zealand and Sri Lanka to vent their spleens at Muslims and Christians, respectively. I have half-a-suspicion somebody is trying to get a religious war of some sort going.

    They don't seem to be having that much success with getting that war going, so I expect the attacks will go on.

    john , Apr 29, 2019 4:20:19 PM | link
    Sally Snyder says:

    The one hundred thousand people that died in Iraq and Afghanistan due to terrorist activities...

    look sister, we can't do much about the state of things, but we can at least relay a realistic account of the extent of the atrocity

    we're talking 1 and a half million dead so far in Iraq and Afghanistan...and that's being conservative.

    S , Apr 29, 2019 4:22:24 PM | link
    Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self declared caliph of ISIS, appeared in new video published today.

    Where? Where was it published? On what platform? Is it really that hard to trace the IPs? Turkey is really determined to get those S-400s. The Empire first threatened to withhold F-35s, then to impose sanctions, then to expel Turkey from NATO, then to move its bases to Greece. Still, Turkey wouldn't budge. Time to deploy some good old terrorism, so that the Empire will be obliged to come in and "help".

    frances , Apr 29, 2019 4:30:55 PM | link
    From zerohedge's comments, both links worth a read:

    preying mantis posted

    who's your real daddy, Baghdadi?

    Jackrabbit , Apr 29, 2019 5:06:26 PM | link
    S @17: Time to deploy some good old terrorism ...

    Erdogan knows what he's dealing with, his government used to be a member of the conspiracy.

    This move by Baghdadi could backfire in a big way.

    Got my popcorn ready.

    JOHN CHUCKMAN , Apr 29, 2019 5:09:27 PM | link

    I have long believed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually is associated either with Moss ad or the CIA. That's why he's had so many miracle escapes. That's why they never catch him and often don't even know where he is. And we know that his ISIS never, never attacks Israeli targets or fat Saudi Prince targets.

    Those would in fact be the targets of choice for any genuine jihad movement. Not Syria or Iraq, which are two states Israel has wanted to harm or eliminate for years. ISIS has always been a fraud, a very complex and deadly one, but a fraud.

    Laskarina , Apr 29, 2019 5:13:11 PM | link
    Many years ago, even before this character posed as a "Syrian rebel" who was photographed meeting with John McCain, he was outed as a Mossad agent by the name of Simon Elliot.

    The guy in recent picture looks like one of Rita Katz's actors.

    Walter , Apr 29, 2019 6:01:01 PM | link
    It is a show to threaten Turkey with the same as Sri Lanka (where they refine lots of Iranian crude...and more...look it up). Many ties to Iran/Sri Lanka....and to Turkey. Typical nazi thugs....bribes, arson, dynamite...and patsies...in this case maybe mossad actor? Why not> Cui Bono?

    As to the locus of the actor? Paramount? Warner Bros? Probably not. Does it matter?

    They're parading a ringer...don't fall for the gag. Erdo won't fall for it either.

    Curtis , Apr 29, 2019 6:08:06 PM | link
    Baghdadi has nice toys by his side and not just the AK-47 with the camo bit over the barrel. It looks like a camo case on night vision gear (or vidcam?) just below that, too. To quote the Joker: "Where does he get those wonderful toys?"

    Ahh a new game of "where in the world is ..." except instead of bin Laden (or his stand-in) the guest in Pakistan living near a military base we have Baghdadi. Maybe Baghdadi lives in that area, too. (awaiting his execution for the media and masses). I doubt it though. I'm thinking Turkey or even Saudi Arabia.

    Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 29, 2019 6:08:52 PM | link
    ...
    This move by Baghdadi could backfire in a big way.
    Got my popcorn ready.
    Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 29, 2019 5:06:26 PM | 19

    It does seem unnecessarily cheeky/ fishy. If 'they' had fiendishly brilliant plan, why wouldn't they'd just do it and leave it to the intel wonks to figure out what went wrong? It's big news in the J-C International media. Al Jazeera "can't confirm the authenticity of the video."

    ben , Apr 29, 2019 9:18:09 PM | link
    A history of Wahhabism which is a problem for the globe; https://ahtribune.com/religion/155-a-history-of-wahhabism.html The KSA, whose ass the empire kisses daily, is the main funder for these clowns.

    [Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

    Highly recommended!
    "Russiagate without Russia" actually means "Isrealgate". This individual points that he mentions below does not matter. Russiagate was a carefully planned and brilliantly executed false flag operation run by intelligences agencies (with GB agencies playing an important in some episodes decisive role) and headed probably by Obama himself via Brennan. There were two goals: (1) to exclude any possibility of detente with Russia and (2) to block any Trump attempts to change the USA foreign policy including running foreign war that enrich Pentagon contractors and justify supersized budget for intelligence agencies. As such is was a great success.
    The fact that no American was indicted and that Mueller attempt to prosecute Russian marketing agneces failed does not matter. The atmosphere is now posoned for a generation. Americans are brainwashed and residue of Russiagate will stay for a long, long time. Neocons Bolton and Pompeo now run Trump administration foreign policy with Trump performing most ceremonial role in foreign policy domain.
    In this sense Skripals poisoning was another false flag operation, which was the logical continuation of Russiagate. And Magnitsky killing (with Browder now a primary suspect) was a precursor to it. Both were run from Great Britain.
    It is actually interesting how Mueller report swiped under the carpet the role of Great Britain in unleashing the Russiagate hysteria.
    Two important foreign forces in the 2016 US Presidential elections was the Israel lobby and Great Britain. Trump proved to be a marionette not of Russia but of Israeli lobby. so sad...
    Notable quotes:
    "... Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later). ..."
    Mar 26, 2019 | outline.com

    For more than two years, leading US political and media voices promoted a narrative that Donald Trump conspired with or was compromised by the Kremlin, and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would prove it. In the process, they overlooked countervailing evidence and diverted anti-Trump energies into fervent speculation and prolonged anticipation. So long as Mueller was on the case, it was possible to believe that " The Walls Are Closing In " on the traitor / puppet / asset in the White House .

    The long-awaited completion of Mueller's probe, and the release of his redacted report, reveals this narrative -- and the expectations it fueled -- to be unfounded. No American was indicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Mueller's report does lay out extensive evidence that Trump sought to impede the investigation, but it declines to issue a verdict on obstruction. It presents no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with an alleged effort by the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton, and instead renders this conclusion: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities." As a result, Mueller's report provides the opposite of what Russiagate promoters led their audiences to expect: Rather than detailing a sinister collusion plot with Russia, it presents what amounts to an extended indictment of the conspiracy theory itself.

    1. Russiagate Without Russia

    The most fundamental element of a conspiracy is contact between the two parties doing the conspiring. Hence, on the eve of the report's release, The New York Times noted that among the "outstanding questions" that Mueller would answer were the nature of "contacts between Kremlin intermediaries and the Trump campaign."

    Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later).

    It should be no surprise, then, to learn from Mueller that, when "Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new administration" after Trump's election victory, they did not know whom to call. These powerful Russians, Mueller noted, "appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect." If top Russians did not have "preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with" the people that they supposedly conspired with, perhaps that is because they did not actually conspire.

    To borrow a phrase from Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, when it comes to the core question of contacts between Trump and the Russian government, we are left with a "Russiagate without Russia." Instead we have a series of interactions where Trump associates speak with Russian nationals, people with ties to Russian nationals, or people who claim to have ties to the Russian government. But none of these "links," "ties," or associations ever entail a member of the Trump campaign interacting with a Kremlin intermediary. Russiagate promoters have nonetheless fueled a dogged media effort to track every known instance in which someone in Trump's orbit interacted with " the Russians ," or someone who can be linked to them . There is nothing illegal or inherently suspect about speaking to a Russian national -- but there is something xenophobic about implying as much.

    2. Russiagate's Predicate Led Nowhere

    The most glaring absence of a Kremlin intermediary comes in the case that ostensibly prompted the entire Trump-Russia investigation. During an April 2016 meeting in Rome, a London-based professor named Joseph Mifsud reportedly informed Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos that "the Russians" had obtained "thousands of emails" containing "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. That information made its way to the FBI, which used it as a pretext to open the "Crossfire Hurricane" probe on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos was later indicted for lying to FBI agents about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud. The case stoked speculation that Papadopoulos acted as an intermediary between Trump and Russia .

    But Papadopoulos played no such role. And while the Mueller report says that Papadopoulos "understood Mifsud to have substantial connections to high-level Russian government officials," it never asserts that Mifsud actuall y had those connections. Since Mifsud's suspected Russian connections were the purported predicate for the FBI's initial Trump-Russia investigation, that is a conspicuous non-call. Another is the revelation from Mueller that Mifsud made false statements to FBI investigators when they interviewed him in February 2017 -- but yet, unlike Papadopoulos, Mifsud was not indicted. Thus, even the interaction that sparked the Russia-collusion probe did not reveal collusion.

    3. Sergey Kislyak Had "Brief and Non-Substantive" Interactions With the Trump Camp

    Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's conversations with Trump campaign officials and associates during and after the 2016 election were the focus of intense controversy and speculation, leading to the recusal of Jeff Sessions, then attorney general, and to the indictment of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

    After an exhaustive review, Mueller concluded that Kislyak's interactions with Trump campaign officials at public events "were brief, public, and non-substantive." As for Kislyak's much – ballyhooed meeting which Sessions in September 2016, Mueller saw no reason to dispute that it "included any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign." When Kislyak spoke with other Trump aides after the August 2016 Republican National Convention, Mueller "did not identify evidence in those interactions of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government."

    The same goes for Kislyak's post-election conversations with Flynn. Mueller indicted Flynn for making "false statements and omissions" in an interview with the FBI about his contacts with Kislyak during the transition in December 2016. The prevailing supposition was that Flynn lied in order to hide from the FBI an election-related payoff or " quid pro quo " with the Kremlin. The report punctures that thesis by reaffirming the facts in Flynn's indictment: What Flynn hid from agents was that he had "called Kislyak to request Russian restraint" in response to sanctions imposed by the outgoing Obama administration, and that Kislyak had agreed. Mueller ruled out the possibility that Flynn could have implicated Trump in anything criminal by noting the absence of evidence that Flynn "possessed information damaging to the President that would give the President a personal incentive to end the FBI's inquiry into Flynn's conduct."

    4. Trump Tower Moscow Had No Help From Moscow

    The November 2018 indictment of Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was widely seen as damning, possibly impeachment-worthy, for Trump. Cohen admitted to giving false written answers to Congress in a bid to downplay Trump's personal knowledge of his company's failed effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. To proponents of the collusion theory, Cohen's admitted lies were proof that " Trump is compromised by Russia ," " full stop ."

    But the Mueller report does not show any such compromise, and, in fact, shows there to be no Trump-Kremlin relationship. Cohen, the report notes, "requested [Kremlin] assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to build the project and with financing." The request was evidently rejected. Elena Poliakova, the personal assistant to Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov, spoke with Cohen by phone after he e-mailed her office for help. After their 20-minute call, the report says, "Cohen could not recall any direct follow-up from Poliakova or from any other representative of the Russian government, nor did the [Special Counsel's] Office identify any evidence of direct follow-up."

    5. and Trump Didn't Ask Cohen to Lie About It

    The Mueller report not only dispels the notion that Trump had secret dealings with the Kremlin over Trump Tower Moscow; it also rejects a related impeachment-level "bombshell." In January, BuzzFeed News reported that Mueller had evidence that Trump "directed" Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. But according to Mueller, "the evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen's false testimony," and that Cohen himself testified "that he and the President did not explicitly discuss whether Cohen's testimony about the Trump Tower Moscow project would be or was false." In a de-facto retraction, BuzzFeed updated its story with an acknowledgment of Mueller's conclusion .

    6. The Trump Tower Meeting Really Was Just a "Waste of Time"

    The June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower was widely dubbed the " Smoking Gun ." An e-mail chain showed that Donald Trump Jr. welcomed an offer to accept compromising information about Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." But the pitch did not come from the meeting's Russian participants, but instead from Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist acting on their behalf. Goldstone said that he invented "publicist puff" to secure the meeting, because in reality, as he told NPR , "I had no idea what I was talking about."

    Mueller noted that Trump Jr.'s response "showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist candidate Trump's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information [emphasis mine]." The report further recounts that during the meeting Jared Kushner texted then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort that it was a "waste of time," and requested that his assistants "call him to give him an excuse to leave." Accordingly, when "Veselnitskaya made additional efforts to follow up on the meeting," after the election, "the Trump Transition Team did not engage."

    7. Manafort Did Not Share Polling Data to Meddle in the US Election

    In January, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators about several matters, including sharing Trump polling data and discussing a Ukraine peace plan with a Ukrainian-Russian colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik, during the 2016 campaign. According to Mueller, the FBI "assesses" that Kilimnik has unspecified "ties to Russian intelligence." To collusion proponents, the revelation was dubbed " the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual collusion " and even the " Russian collusion smoking gun ."

    Mueller, of course, reached a different conclusion: He "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election," and, moreover, "did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian government on its election-interference efforts." Mueller noted that he "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing" the polling data, but also acknowledged (and bolstered) the explanation of his star witness, Rick Gates, that Manafort was motivated by proving his financial value to former and future clients.

    Mueller also gave us new reasons to doubt the assertions that Kilimnik himself is a Russian intelligence asset or spy. First, Mueller did not join media pundits in asserting such about Kilimnik. Second, to support his vague contention that Kilimnik has, according to the FBI, "ties to Russian intelligence," Mueller offered up a list of " pieces of the Office's Evidence" that contains no direct evidence. For his part, Kilimnik has repeatedly stated that he has no such ties, and recently told The Washington Post that Mueller never attempted to interview him.

    8. The Steele Dossier Was Fiction

    The Steele dossier -- a collection of Democratic National Committee-funded opposition research alleging a high-level Trump-Russia criminal relationship -- played a critical role in the Russiagate saga. The FBI relied on it for leads and evidentiary material in its investigation of the Trump campaign ties to Russia, and prominent politicians , pundits , and media outlets promoted it as credible .

    The Mueller report, The New York Times noted last week , has "underscored what had grown clearer for months some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove." Steele reported that low-level Trump aide Carter Page was offered a 19 percent stake in the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft if he could get Trump to lift Western sanctions. In October 2016 the FBI, citing the Steele dossier, told the FISA court that it "believes that [Russia's] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with" the Trump campaign. The Mueller report, however, could "not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."

    The Steele dossier claimed that Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet Russian agents in the summer of 2016. In April 2018, McClatchy reported to much fanfare that Mueller's team "has evidence" that placed Cohen in Prague during the period in question. Cohen later denied the claim under oath, and Mueller agreed, noting that Cohen "never traveled to Prague."

    After reports emerged in August 2016 that the Trump campaign had rejected an amendment to the Republican National Committee platform that called for arming Ukraine, Steele claimed that it was the result of a quid pro quo. The Mueller report "did not establish that" the rejection of the Ukraine amendment was "undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia."

    9. The Trump Campaign Had No Secret Channel to WikiLeaks

    In January, veteran Republican operative and conspiracy theorist Roger Stone caused a stir when he was indicted for lying to Congress about his efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks. But Mueller's indictment actually showed that Stone had no communications with WikiLeaks before the election and no privileged information about its releases . Most significantly, it revealed that Trump officials were trying to learn about the WikiLeaks releases through Stone -- a fact that underscored that the Trump campaign neither worked with WikiLeaks nor had advance knowledge of its e-mail dumps.

    Mueller's final report does nothing to alter that picture. Its sections on Stone are heavily redacted, owing to Stone's pending trial. But they do make clear that Mueller conducted an extensive search to establish a tie between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign, and Stone -- and came up empty. New reporting from The Washington Post underscores just how far their farcical efforts went. The Mueller team devoted time and energy to determine whether far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, best known for promoting the false claim that Barack Obama was born outside the United States, served as a link between Stone and WikiLeaks. Mueller's prosecutors "spent weeks coaxing, cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist, as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories," the Post reports. "At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself." It is unsurprising that this led Mueller's prosecutors to ultimately declare, according to Corsi's attorney, "We can't use any of this."

    10. There Was No Cover-Up

    The Mueller report does not just dispel the conspiracy theories that have engulfed political and media circles for two years; it puts to rest the most popular, recent one: that Attorney General William Barr engaged in a cover-up . According to the dominant narrative, Barr was somehow concealing Mueller's damning evidence , while Mueller, even more improbably, stayed silent.

    One could argue that Barr's summary downplays the obstruction findings, though it accurately relays that Mueller's report does "not exonerate" Trump. It was Mueller's decision to leave the verdict on obstruction to Barr and make clear that if Congress disagrees, it has the power to indict Trump on its own. Mueller's office assisted with Barr's redactions, which proved to be, as Barr had pledged, extremely limited. Despite containing numerous embarrassing details about Trump, no executive privilege was invoked to censor the report's contents.

    In the end, Mueller's report shows that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative embraced and evangelized by the US political and media establishments to be a work of fiction . The American public was presented with a far different picture from what was expected, because leading pundits, outlets, and politicians ignored the countervailing facts and promoted maximalist interpretations of others. Anonymous officials also leaked explosive yet uncorroborated claims, leaving behind many stories that were subsequently discredited, retracted, or remain unconfirmed to this day.

    It is too early to assess the damage that influential Russiagate promoters have done to their own reputations; to public confidence in our democratic system and media; and to the prospects of defeating Trump, who always stood to benefit if the all-consuming conspiracy theory ultimately collapsed. The scale of the wreckage, confirmed by Mueller's report, may prove to be the ultimate Russiagate scandal.

    [Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

    Highly recommended!
    "Russiagate without Russia" actually means "Isrealgate". This individual points that he mentions below does not matter. Russiagate was a carefully planned and brilliantly executed false flag operation run by intelligences agencies (with GB agencies playing an important in some episodes decisive role) and headed probably by Obama himself via Brennan. There were two goals: (1) to exclude any possibility of detente with Russia and (2) to block any Trump attempts to change the USA foreign policy including running foreign war that enrich Pentagon contractors and justify supersized budget for intelligence agencies. As such is was a great success.
    The fact that no American was indicted and that Mueller attempt to prosecute Russian marketing agneces failed does not matter. The atmosphere is now posoned for a generation. Americans are brainwashed and residue of Russiagate will stay for a long, long time. Neocons Bolton and Pompeo now run Trump administration foreign policy with Trump performing most ceremonial role in foreign policy domain.
    In this sense Skripals poisoning was another false flag operation, which was the logical continuation of Russiagate. And Magnitsky killing (with Browder now a primary suspect) was a precursor to it. Both were run from Great Britain.
    It is actually interesting how Mueller report swiped under the carpet the role of Great Britain in unleashing the Russiagate hysteria.
    Two important foreign forces in the 2016 US Presidential elections was the Israel lobby and Great Britain. Trump proved to be a marionette not of Russia but of Israeli lobby. so sad...
    Notable quotes:
    "... Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later). ..."
    Mar 26, 2019 | outline.com

    For more than two years, leading US political and media voices promoted a narrative that Donald Trump conspired with or was compromised by the Kremlin, and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would prove it. In the process, they overlooked countervailing evidence and diverted anti-Trump energies into fervent speculation and prolonged anticipation. So long as Mueller was on the case, it was possible to believe that " The Walls Are Closing In " on the traitor / puppet / asset in the White House .

    The long-awaited completion of Mueller's probe, and the release of his redacted report, reveals this narrative -- and the expectations it fueled -- to be unfounded. No American was indicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Mueller's report does lay out extensive evidence that Trump sought to impede the investigation, but it declines to issue a verdict on obstruction. It presents no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with an alleged effort by the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton, and instead renders this conclusion: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities." As a result, Mueller's report provides the opposite of what Russiagate promoters led their audiences to expect: Rather than detailing a sinister collusion plot with Russia, it presents what amounts to an extended indictment of the conspiracy theory itself.

    1. Russiagate Without Russia

    The most fundamental element of a conspiracy is contact between the two parties doing the conspiring. Hence, on the eve of the report's release, The New York Times noted that among the "outstanding questions" that Mueller would answer were the nature of "contacts between Kremlin intermediaries and the Trump campaign."

    Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later).

    It should be no surprise, then, to learn from Mueller that, when "Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen began trying to make inroads into the new administration" after Trump's election victory, they did not know whom to call. These powerful Russians, Mueller noted, "appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect." If top Russians did not have "preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with" the people that they supposedly conspired with, perhaps that is because they did not actually conspire.

    To borrow a phrase from Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, when it comes to the core question of contacts between Trump and the Russian government, we are left with a "Russiagate without Russia." Instead we have a series of interactions where Trump associates speak with Russian nationals, people with ties to Russian nationals, or people who claim to have ties to the Russian government. But none of these "links," "ties," or associations ever entail a member of the Trump campaign interacting with a Kremlin intermediary. Russiagate promoters have nonetheless fueled a dogged media effort to track every known instance in which someone in Trump's orbit interacted with " the Russians ," or someone who can be linked to them . There is nothing illegal or inherently suspect about speaking to a Russian national -- but there is something xenophobic about implying as much.

    2. Russiagate's Predicate Led Nowhere

    The most glaring absence of a Kremlin intermediary comes in the case that ostensibly prompted the entire Trump-Russia investigation. During an April 2016 meeting in Rome, a London-based professor named Joseph Mifsud reportedly informed Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos that "the Russians" had obtained "thousands of emails" containing "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. That information made its way to the FBI, which used it as a pretext to open the "Crossfire Hurricane" probe on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos was later indicted for lying to FBI agents about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud. The case stoked speculation that Papadopoulos acted as an intermediary between Trump and Russia .

    But Papadopoulos played no such role. And while the Mueller report says that Papadopoulos "understood Mifsud to have substantial connections to high-level Russian government officials," it never asserts that Mifsud actuall y had those connections. Since Mifsud's suspected Russian connections were the purported predicate for the FBI's initial Trump-Russia investigation, that is a conspicuous non-call. Another is the revelation from Mueller that Mifsud made false statements to FBI investigators when they interviewed him in February 2017 -- but yet, unlike Papadopoulos, Mifsud was not indicted. Thus, even the interaction that sparked the Russia-collusion probe did not reveal collusion.

    3. Sergey Kislyak Had "Brief and Non-Substantive" Interactions With the Trump Camp

    Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's conversations with Trump campaign officials and associates during and after the 2016 election were the focus of intense controversy and speculation, leading to the recusal of Jeff Sessions, then attorney general, and to the indictment of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

    After an exhaustive review, Mueller concluded that Kislyak's interactions with Trump campaign officials at public events "were brief, public, and non-substantive." As for Kislyak's much – ballyhooed meeting which Sessions in September 2016, Mueller saw no reason to dispute that it "included any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign." When Kislyak spoke with other Trump aides after the August 2016 Republican National Convention, Mueller "did not identify evidence in those interactions of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government."

    The same goes for Kislyak's post-election conversations with Flynn. Mueller indicted Flynn for making "false statements and omissions" in an interview with the FBI about his contacts with Kislyak during the transition in December 2016. The prevailing supposition was that Flynn lied in order to hide from the FBI an election-related payoff or " quid pro quo " with the Kremlin. The report punctures that thesis by reaffirming the facts in Flynn's indictment: What Flynn hid from agents was that he had "called Kislyak to request Russian restraint" in response to sanctions imposed by the outgoing Obama administration, and that Kislyak had agreed. Mueller ruled out the possibility that Flynn could have implicated Trump in anything criminal by noting the absence of evidence that Flynn "possessed information damaging to the President that would give the President a personal incentive to end the FBI's inquiry into Flynn's conduct."

    4. Trump Tower Moscow Had No Help From Moscow

    The November 2018 indictment of Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was widely seen as damning, possibly impeachment-worthy, for Trump. Cohen admitted to giving false written answers to Congress in a bid to downplay Trump's personal knowledge of his company's failed effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. To proponents of the collusion theory, Cohen's admitted lies were proof that " Trump is compromised by Russia ," " full stop ."

    But the Mueller report does not show any such compromise, and, in fact, shows there to be no Trump-Kremlin relationship. Cohen, the report notes, "requested [Kremlin] assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to build the project and with financing." The request was evidently rejected. Elena Poliakova, the personal assistant to Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov, spoke with Cohen by phone after he e-mailed her office for help. After their 20-minute call, the report says, "Cohen could not recall any direct follow-up from Poliakova or from any other representative of the Russian government, nor did the [Special Counsel's] Office identify any evidence of direct follow-up."

    5. and Trump Didn't Ask Cohen to Lie About It

    The Mueller report not only dispels the notion that Trump had secret dealings with the Kremlin over Trump Tower Moscow; it also rejects a related impeachment-level "bombshell." In January, BuzzFeed News reported that Mueller had evidence that Trump "directed" Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. But according to Mueller, "the evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen's false testimony," and that Cohen himself testified "that he and the President did not explicitly discuss whether Cohen's testimony about the Trump Tower Moscow project would be or was false." In a de-facto retraction, BuzzFeed updated its story with an acknowledgment of Mueller's conclusion .

    6. The Trump Tower Meeting Really Was Just a "Waste of Time"

    The June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower was widely dubbed the " Smoking Gun ." An e-mail chain showed that Donald Trump Jr. welcomed an offer to accept compromising information about Clinton as "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." But the pitch did not come from the meeting's Russian participants, but instead from Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist acting on their behalf. Goldstone said that he invented "publicist puff" to secure the meeting, because in reality, as he told NPR , "I had no idea what I was talking about."

    Mueller noted that Trump Jr.'s response "showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist candidate Trump's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information [emphasis mine]." The report further recounts that during the meeting Jared Kushner texted then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort that it was a "waste of time," and requested that his assistants "call him to give him an excuse to leave." Accordingly, when "Veselnitskaya made additional efforts to follow up on the meeting," after the election, "the Trump Transition Team did not engage."

    7. Manafort Did Not Share Polling Data to Meddle in the US Election

    In January, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators about several matters, including sharing Trump polling data and discussing a Ukraine peace plan with a Ukrainian-Russian colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik, during the 2016 campaign. According to Mueller, the FBI "assesses" that Kilimnik has unspecified "ties to Russian intelligence." To collusion proponents, the revelation was dubbed " the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual collusion " and even the " Russian collusion smoking gun ."

    Mueller, of course, reached a different conclusion: He "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election," and, moreover, "did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian government on its election-interference efforts." Mueller noted that he "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing" the polling data, but also acknowledged (and bolstered) the explanation of his star witness, Rick Gates, that Manafort was motivated by proving his financial value to former and future clients.

    Mueller also gave us new reasons to doubt the assertions that Kilimnik himself is a Russian intelligence asset or spy. First, Mueller did not join media pundits in asserting such about Kilimnik. Second, to support his vague contention that Kilimnik has, according to the FBI, "ties to Russian intelligence," Mueller offered up a list of " pieces of the Office's Evidence" that contains no direct evidence. For his part, Kilimnik has repeatedly stated that he has no such ties, and recently told The Washington Post that Mueller never attempted to interview him.

    8. The Steele Dossier Was Fiction

    The Steele dossier -- a collection of Democratic National Committee-funded opposition research alleging a high-level Trump-Russia criminal relationship -- played a critical role in the Russiagate saga. The FBI relied on it for leads and evidentiary material in its investigation of the Trump campaign ties to Russia, and prominent politicians , pundits , and media outlets promoted it as credible .

    The Mueller report, The New York Times noted last week , has "underscored what had grown clearer for months some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove." Steele reported that low-level Trump aide Carter Page was offered a 19 percent stake in the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft if he could get Trump to lift Western sanctions. In October 2016 the FBI, citing the Steele dossier, told the FISA court that it "believes that [Russia's] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with" the Trump campaign. The Mueller report, however, could "not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."

    The Steele dossier claimed that Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet Russian agents in the summer of 2016. In April 2018, McClatchy reported to much fanfare that Mueller's team "has evidence" that placed Cohen in Prague during the period in question. Cohen later denied the claim under oath, and Mueller agreed, noting that Cohen "never traveled to Prague."

    After reports emerged in August 2016 that the Trump campaign had rejected an amendment to the Republican National Committee platform that called for arming Ukraine, Steele claimed that it was the result of a quid pro quo. The Mueller report "did not establish that" the rejection of the Ukraine amendment was "undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia."

    9. The Trump Campaign Had No Secret Channel to WikiLeaks

    In January, veteran Republican operative and conspiracy theorist Roger Stone caused a stir when he was indicted for lying to Congress about his efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks. But Mueller's indictment actually showed that Stone had no communications with WikiLeaks before the election and no privileged information about its releases . Most significantly, it revealed that Trump officials were trying to learn about the WikiLeaks releases through Stone -- a fact that underscored that the Trump campaign neither worked with WikiLeaks nor had advance knowledge of its e-mail dumps.

    Mueller's final report does nothing to alter that picture. Its sections on Stone are heavily redacted, owing to Stone's pending trial. But they do make clear that Mueller conducted an extensive search to establish a tie between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign, and Stone -- and came up empty. New reporting from The Washington Post underscores just how far their farcical efforts went. The Mueller team devoted time and energy to determine whether far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, best known for promoting the false claim that Barack Obama was born outside the United States, served as a link between Stone and WikiLeaks. Mueller's prosecutors "spent weeks coaxing, cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist, as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories," the Post reports. "At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself." It is unsurprising that this led Mueller's prosecutors to ultimately declare, according to Corsi's attorney, "We can't use any of this."

    10. There Was No Cover-Up

    The Mueller report does not just dispel the conspiracy theories that have engulfed political and media circles for two years; it puts to rest the most popular, recent one: that Attorney General William Barr engaged in a cover-up . According to the dominant narrative, Barr was somehow concealing Mueller's damning evidence , while Mueller, even more improbably, stayed silent.

    One could argue that Barr's summary downplays the obstruction findings, though it accurately relays that Mueller's report does "not exonerate" Trump. It was Mueller's decision to leave the verdict on obstruction to Barr and make clear that if Congress disagrees, it has the power to indict Trump on its own. Mueller's office assisted with Barr's redactions, which proved to be, as Barr had pledged, extremely limited. Despite containing numerous embarrassing details about Trump, no executive privilege was invoked to censor the report's contents.

    In the end, Mueller's report shows that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative embraced and evangelized by the US political and media establishments to be a work of fiction . The American public was presented with a far different picture from what was expected, because leading pundits, outlets, and politicians ignored the countervailing facts and promoted maximalist interpretations of others. Anonymous officials also leaked explosive yet uncorroborated claims, leaving behind many stories that were subsequently discredited, retracted, or remain unconfirmed to this day.

    It is too early to assess the damage that influential Russiagate promoters have done to their own reputations; to public confidence in our democratic system and media; and to the prospects of defeating Trump, who always stood to benefit if the all-consuming conspiracy theory ultimately collapsed. The scale of the wreckage, confirmed by Mueller's report, may prove to be the ultimate Russiagate scandal.

    [Apr 29, 2019] DiGenova Destroys Media's Reckless Promotion Of Trump Tower Meeting As Crime

    Apr 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Leading up to the Mueller report, one of the long-promised "gotchas" peddled by the anti-Trump media is that that Donald Trump Jr. would be indicted over a June 9, 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Russian representatives who promised negative information on Hillary Clinton.

    Keep in mind, the Russian attorney who sought the discussion - Natalia Veselnitskaya - met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson before and after the Trump Tower meeting. Fusion was hired by the Clinton campaign and the DNC to produce the now-infamous "Steele Dossier."

    Also keep in mind that Trump Jr. reportedly shut down the meeting when it was obviously not going to bear fruit.

    Obvious setups aside, former US Attorney Joe diGenova has penned an Op-Ed for Fox News excoriating the media for 'recklessly' promoting an untested falsehood; that the meeting was illegal in the first place.

    Joseph diGenova via Fox News

    Don Jr. and the Trump Tower meeting -- What happens when fake news collides with zero intent. The reporting on Donald Trump, Jr.'s treatment in the Mueller report has been woefully inaccurate.

    The president's eldest son, an outspoken and unapologetic conservative, is a favorite punching bag of the left. For more than two years, liberal journalists and shrieking "#resistance" activists have salivated over the thought of seeing Don Jr. carted off in handcuffs.

    To their dismay, there is only one crucial takeaway from the Mueller report's conclusions about the utterly inconsequential "Trump Tower meeting" between Don Jr., several Russians, and others: neither Don Jr. nor anyone else involved in the meeting was charged with any crime.

    The reasons are clear. The entire theory about what was potentially illegal about the meeting was speculative and untested. What's more, even if it were illegal, the report concluded that Don Jr. didn't have the "willful" intent to break the law that would be necessary to make it a crime.

    In their disappointment, Don Jr.'s detractors have latched on to a new theory: that he was simply "too stupid" to be charged with a crime because he didn't know that his conduct was illegal.

    They hang this blatant misconstruction on these words from the report: "the Office did not obtain admissible evidence likely to meet the government's burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these individuals acted 'willfully,' i.e. with general knowledge of the illegality of their conduct."

    That's not just some minor technicality, absent which Robert Mueller's prosecutors would have had Don Jr. in shackles while revelers in cat-eared pink hats danced in the streets. It's a central element of the offense they were investigating, and they decided to clear Don Jr. because without it there is no crime.

    One often-used definition of "willful" intent states that it "requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant knew his or her conduct was unlawful and intended to do something that the law forbids; that the defendant acted with a purpose to disobey or disregard the law."

    In essence, in order to be charged with conspiring to cheat, you have to have been actually meaning to cheat. That's the law. Without intent, there is no crime. And Mueller's team, even his hand-picked Democrat attack dog Andrew Weissmann, knew they didn't have evidence to convince a jury that Don Jr. meant to circumvent election laws when he typed "I love it" in response to a tangentially-related British publicist's suggestion the Russian government might have "information that would incriminate Hillary." Don Jr. even voluntarily released his email correspondence related to that meeting.

    But even if there were the requisite intent, the Mueller report still exonerates Don Jr., stating that "the government would likely encounter difficulty proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the value of the promised information exceeded the threshold for a criminal violation."

    Did you catch that?

    For the English speakers among you, let me translate that from Weissmann-speak: "This 'crime' we thought up as a way to nail Don Jr. is so speculative and unprecedented, we don't think there's a court in the land that would let this fly."

    The entire notion of a criminal conspiracy is predicated on the idea that the federal election law's ban on campaigns taking "contributions" or "things of value" from foreign nationals also applies to "dirt" on opposing candidates.

    That's hardly an established interpretation of the law. In fact, no one has ever been convicted of something similar. If "dirt" is a "thing of value" for campaign finance purposes, that is a dangerously radical innovation with huge potential First Amendment implications.

    Personally, I think it's a completely untenable interpretation, but don't take my word it. Mueller and his team considered it, as well -- and then rejected it as too "difficult to prove" in their report.

    I wonder how many of the journalists calling Don Jr. stupid were so certain about this far-fetched legal theory. I further wonder how many of them felt the same way when foreign national Christopher Steele handed the Hillary Clinton campaign a whole dossier of "dirt" on President Trump -- at a hefty, agreed-upon price, no less.

    The whole thing is pure "#resistance" fantasy.

    It was reckless for the media to promote the Trump Tower meeting as a crime, and it was irresponsible for Mueller's report to discuss the matter using language that allows people who hate Don Jr. to continue in that delusion.

    CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM JOE DIGENOVA

    [Apr 29, 2019] Consortium News' Record on Russiagate -- How CN Covered the 'Scandal' No. 7 'Russiagate Is No Watergate or Iran-Contra' Consor

    Apr 29, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Consortium News' Record on Russiagate -- How CN Covered the 'Scandal': No. 7: 'Russiagate Is No Watergate or Iran-Contra' April 26, 2019 • 108 Comments

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    Many comparisons have been made between Russiagate and the earlier scandals of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but the similarities are at best superficial, explained Robert Parry on June 28, 2017.

    On CNN last week Carl Bernstein astonishingly said that the Mueller report uncovered a scandal bigger than Watergate. No one died in either Watergate or Russiagate. But they did in Iran-Contra, when the Reagan White House skirted Congress' decision to cut off funding for the Contras, which led to many more deaths in Nicaragua. It was a scandal uncovered by CN's founder Bob Parry for the Associated Press. Parry, who was ahead of the pack in debunking Russiagate, filed this report for CN on June 28, 2017.

    Russiagate Is No Watergate or Iran-Contra

    By Robert Parry
    Special to Consortium News

    <img src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/RobertParry-100x100.png" alt="" width="100" height="100" /> R ussia-gate, the sprawling investigation into whether Russia meddled in last year's U.S. election, is often compared to the two big political scandals of the latter half of the Twentieth Century, Watergate and Iran-Contra. Sometimes you even hear that Russia-gate is "bigger than Watergate."

    <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35506" src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Watergate-Phone-Picture-e1463156358863-400x322.jpg" alt="" width="498" height="401" srcset="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Watergate-Phone-Picture-e1463156358863-400x322.jpg 400w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Watergate-Phone-Picture-e1463156358863-768x618.jpg 768w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Watergate-Phone-Picture-e1463156358863-700x563.jpg 700w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Watergate-Phone-Picture-e1463156358863-160x129.jpg 160w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Watergate-Phone-Picture-e1463156358863.jpg 895w" sizes="(max-width: 498px) 100vw, 498px" />

    The bugged phone from the Watergate office of Democratic Party official Spencer Oliver. Placed on the phone during a May 1972 break-in, the bug was the only device that worked. A second break-in on June 17. 1972, led to the capture of Richard Nixon's Watergate burglars.

    Yet what is perhaps most remarkable about those two Twentieth Century scandals is how little Official Washington really understands them – and how these earlier scandals significantly contrast, rather than compare, with what is unfolding now.

    Although the historical record is still incomplete on Watergate and Iran-Contra, the available evidence indicates that both scandals originated in schemes by Republicans to draw foreign leaders into plots to undermine sitting Democratic presidents and thus pave the way for the elections of Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980.

    As for Russia-gate, even if you accept that the Russian government hacked into Democratic emails and publicized them via WikiLeaks, there is still no evidence that Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Kremlin to do so. By contrast, in the origins of Watergate and Iran-Contra, it appears the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, respectively, were the instigators of schemes to enlist foreign governments in blocking a Vietnam peace deal in 1968 and negotiations to free 52 American hostages in Iran in 1980.

    Though Watergate is associated directly with the 1972 campaign – when Nixon's team of burglars was caught inside the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building – Nixon's formation of that team, known as the Plumbers, was driven by his fear that he could be exposed for sabotaging President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam peace talks in 1968 in order to secure the White House that year.

    After Nixon's narrow victory over Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed Nixon that Johnson had a secret file, complete with wiretapped phone calls, detailing the Nixon campaign's backchannel messages to South Vietnamese officials convincing them to boycott Johnson's Paris peace talks. Later, Nixon learned that this incriminating file had disappeared from the White House.

    So, in 1971, after the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, which recounted the lies that had been used to justify the Vietnam War through 1967, Nixon fretted that the missing file about his peace-talk gambit in 1968 might surface, too, and would destroy him politically. Thus, he organized the Plumbers to find the file, even contemplating fire-bombing the Brookings Institution to enable a search of its safe where some aides thought the missing file might be found.

    In other words, Watergate wasn't simply a break-in at the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972, in pursuit of useful political intelligence and Nixon's ensuing cover-up; the scandal had its origins in a far worse scandal , the derailing of peace talks that could have ended the Vietnam War years earlier and saved the lives of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and possibly more than 1 million Vietnamese.

    Iran-Contra Parallels

    Similarly, the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in 1986 with revelations that President Reagan had authorized secret arms sales to Iran with some of the profits going to fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, but the evidence now indicates that the connections between Reagan's team and Iran's revolutionary regime traced back to 1980 when emissaries from Reagan's campaign worked to stymie President Jimmy Carter's negotiations to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

    <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-18921" src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/frontline-heldhostage-1028x768.jpg" alt="" width="490" height="366" srcset="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/frontline-heldhostage-1028x768.jpg 1028w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/frontline-heldhostage-300x224.jpg 300w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/frontline-heldhostage-768x574.jpg 768w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/frontline-heldhostage-160x120.jpg 160w" sizes="(max-width: 490px) 100vw, 490px" />

    PBS Frontline's 1991 documentary, entitled "The Election Held Hostage," co-written by Robert Parry

    According to multiple witnesses, including former Assistant Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs Nicholas Veliotes, the pre-election contacts led to the opening of a weapons pipeline to Iran (via Israel), after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981, which was the precise moment when Iran finally released the American hostages after 444 days.

    Some key players in the 1980 Reagan-Iran contacts reappeared four years later at the start of direct (again secret) U.S. arms shipments to Iran in 1985, which also involved Israeli middlemen. These key players included Iranian CIA operative Cyrus Hashemi, former CIA clandestine services chief Theodore Shackley, Reagan's campaign chief and then-CIA Director William Casey, and former CIA Director and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.

    In other words, the Iran-Contra weapons shipments of 1985-86 appear to have been an outgrowth of the earlier shipments dating back to 1980 and continuing under Israeli auspices until the supply line was taken over more directly by the Reagan administration in 1985-86.

    Honor the Legacy of Bob Parry with a
    Donation to Our Spring Fund Drive.

    Thus, both the Watergate scandal in 1972 and the Iran-Contra Affair in 1986 could be viewed as "sequels" to the earlier machinations driven by Republican hunger to seize the enormous powers of the U.S. presidency. However, for decades, Official Washington has been hostile to these underlying explanations of how Watergate and Iran-Contra began.

    For instance, The New York Times, the so-called "newspaper of record," treated the accumulation of evidence regarding Nixon's 1968 peace-talk gambit as nothing more than a "rumor" until earlier this year when a scholar, John A. Farrell, uncovered cryptic notes taken by Nixon's aide H.R. Haldeman, which added another piece to the mosaic and left the Times little choice but to pronounce the historical reality finally real.

    Grasping the Watergate Narrative

    Still, the Times and other major news outlets have failed to factor this belated admission into the larger Watergate narrative. If you understand that Nixon did sabotage President Johnson's Vietnam War peace talks and that Nixon was aware that Johnson's file on what LBJ called Nixon's "treason" had disappeared from the White House, the early "Watergate tapes" from 1971 suddenly make sense.

    <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-10388" src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/nixon-kissinger-1972-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="375" />

    President Richard Nixon with his then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger in 1972.

    Nixon ordered White House chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to locate the missing file but their search came up empty. Yet, some Nixon aides thought the file might be hidden at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank in Washington. So, in his desperate pursuit of the file, Nixon called for a break-in at Brookings, possibly even fire-bombing the building as a cover for his team of burglars to slip in amid the confusion and rifle the safe.

    The old explanation that Nixon simply wanted to find some file related to Johnson's 1968 pre-election Vietnam bombing halt never made sense given the extreme steps that Nixon was prepared to take.

    The relevant portions of Nixon's White House tapes include an entry on June 17, 1971, coincidentally one year to the day before the Watergate burglars were caught. Nixon summoned Haldeman and Kissinger to the Oval Office and pleaded with them again to locate the file.

    "Do we have it?" Nixon asked Haldeman. "I've asked for it. You said you didn't have it."

    Haldeman: "We can't find it."

    Kissinger: "We have nothing here, Mr. President."

    Nixon: "Well, damn-it, I asked for that because I need it."

    Kissinger: "But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together."

    Haldeman: "We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file on it."

    Nixon: "Where?"

    Haldeman: "[Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God that there's a file on it and it's at Brookings."

    Nixon: "Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston's plan [for White House-sponsored break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it."

    Kissinger: "Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents."

    Nixon: "I want it implemented. Goddamn-it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it."

    Haldeman: "They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need to "

    Kissinger: "I wouldn't be surprised if Brookings had the files."

    Haldeman: "My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn't know for sure that we don't have them around."

    But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he had ordered his national security adviser, Walt Rostow, to remove it in the final days of Johnson's presidency.

    Forming the Burglars

    On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into Brookings and "take it [the file] out." Nixon suggested using former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in.

    "You talk to Hunt," Nixon told Haldeman. "I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. You're to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. Just go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o'clock."

    Haldeman: "Make an inspection of the safe."

    Nixon: "That's right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up ."

    For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the Brookings break-in never took place (nor did the fire-bombing), but Nixon's desperation to locate Johnson's peace-talk file was an important link in the chain of events that led to the creation of Nixon's burglary unit under Hunt's supervision. Hunt later oversaw the two Watergate break-ins in May and June of 1972.

    While it's possible that Nixon was still searching for the file about his Vietnam-peace sabotage when the ill-fated Watergate break-ins occurred a year later, it's generally believed that the burglary was more broadly focused, seeking any information that might have an impact on Nixon's re-election, either defensively or offensively.

    However, if you think back on 1971 when the Vietnam War was tearing the country apart and massive antiwar demonstrations were descending on Washington, Nixon's desperation to locate the missing file suddenly doesn't seem quite so crazy. There would have been hell to pay if the public learned that Nixon had kept the war going to gain a political advantage in 1968.

    <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35507" src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Rostow-400x208.jpg" alt="" width="498" height="259" srcset="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Rostow-400x208.jpg 400w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Rostow-768x400.jpg 768w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Rostow-700x365.jpg 700w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Rostow-160x83.jpg 160w" sizes="(max-width: 498px) 100vw, 498px" />

    Walt Rostow's "'X' Envelope"

    Through 1972 – and the early days of the Watergate scandal – former President Johnson had stayed silent about Nixon's sabotage of the Paris peace talks. But the ex-President became livid when – after Nixon's reelection in 1972 – Nixon's men sought to pressure Johnson into helping them shut down the Watergate investigation, in part, by noting that Johnson, too, had deployed wiretaps against Nixon's 1968 campaign to obtain evidence about the peace-talk sabotage.

    While it's not clear whether Johnson would have finally spoken out, that threat to Nixon ended two days after Nixon's second inaugural when on Jan. 22, 1973, Johnson died of a heart attack. However, unbeknownst to Nixon, Johnson had left the missing file, called "The X-Envelope," in the care of Rostow, who – after Johnson's death – gave the file to the LBJ presidential library in Austin, Texas, with instructions that it be kept under wraps for at least 50 years. (Rostow's instructions were overturned in the 1990s, and I found the now largely declassified file at the library in 2012.)

    So, with the "The X-Envelope" squirreled away for more than two decades at the LBJ library and with the big newspapers treating the early sketchy reports of Nixon's peace-talk sabotage as only "rumors," Watergate remained a scandal limited to the 1972 campaign.

    Still, Nixon's cover-up of his campaign's role in the Watergate break-in produced enough clear-cut evidence of obstruction of justice and other offenses that Nixon was forced to resign on Aug. 9, 1974.

    A Failed Investigation

    The 1979-81 hostage confrontation with Iran was not nearly as devastating a crisis as the Vietnam War but America's humiliation during the 444-day-long ordeal became a focus of the 1980 election, too, with the first anniversary of Iran's seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran coincidentally falling on Election Day 1980.

    <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-9709" src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/carter-sadat-begin-300x204.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="340" srcset="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/carter-sadat-begin-300x204.jpg 300w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/carter-sadat-begin.jpg 605w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" />

    Carter signing Camp David peace agreement with Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin.

    President Carter's failure to gain freedom for the 52 embassy personnel turned what had been a close race into a landslide for Ronald Reagan, with Republicans also gaining control of the U.S. Senate and ousting some of the most influential Democratic senators.

    In 1984, Reagan won reelection in another landslide, but two years later ran afoul of the Iran-Contra scandal. Reagan's secret arms sales to Iran and diversion of profits to the Contras "broke" in November 1986 but focused only on Reagan's 1985-1986 arms sales and the diversion. Still, the scandal's crimes included violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the so-called Boland Act's prohibitions on arming the Contras as well as perjury and obstruction of justice. So there was the prospect of Reagan's impeachment.

    But – from the start of Iran-Contra – there was a strong pushback from Republicans who didn't want to see another GOP president driven from office. There was also resistance to the scandal from many mainstream media executives who personally liked Reagan and feared a public backlash if the press played an aggressive role similar to Watergate.

    And, moderate Democrats, such as Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana who co-chaired the congressional investigation, sought to tamp down the Iran-Contra fires and set up firebreaks to prevent the investigation from spreading to related crimes such as the Reagan administration's protection of Contra cocaine traffickers .

    "Ask about the cocaine," pleaded one protester who was dragged from the Iran-Contra hearing room, as the congressional investigators averted their eyes from such unseemly matters, focusing instead on stilted lectures about the Congress's constitutional prerogatives.

    It was not until 1990-91 that it became clear that secret U.S.-approved arms shipments to Iran did not start in 1985 as the Iran-Contra narrative claimed but traced back to 1981 with Reagan's approval of arms sales to Iran through Israel.

    Reagan's politically risky move of secretly arming Iran immediately after his inauguration and the hostage release was nearly exposed when one of the Israeli flights strayed into Soviet airspace on July 18, 1981, and crashed or was shot down.

    In a PBS interview nearly a decade later, Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan's assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, said he looked into the incident by talking to top administration officials.

    "It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment," Veliotes said.

    In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan camp's dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election. "It seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration," Veliotes said. "And I understand some contacts were made at that time."

    [Apr 29, 2019] This is why Russia Gate is never going away

    Apr 29, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

    span y snoopydawg on Mon, 04/29/2019 - 4:20pm

    You haven't heard that?

    @MrWebster

    This is why Russia Gate is never going away. People who bought into from the start will probably buy anything else that gets thrown at them. I think this smear about Russia helping him came from some of the Facebook ads. Russia was very busy during the last election and since it worked so well they're going to do it again.

    But did you notice that up to a few weeks before the midterms we heard that Russia was busy doing hanky panky, but then for some reason they stopped and let democrats take back the house. You'd think that they would want the GOP to stay in control because of reasons.... like it would have been better for Trump? But hey I guess Putin threw democrat a bone. I think.

    Seriously though you would be surprised that so many people believe that.

    #4 What in the hell does that mean? I think the Great One was just trying to associate Russians with Bernie. A harbinger of things to come.

    [Apr 29, 2019] Angry Bear " Panetta and Trump Who are You Calling Chumps

    Apr 29, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

    https://acdn.adnxs.com/ib/static/usersync/v3/async_usersync.html

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    ProGrowthLiberal | April 28, 2019 9:05 am

    Politics Panetta and Trump: Who are You Calling Chumps? Leon Panetta :

    Trump treats Americans like we're chumps

    Check out the entire interview as it was excellent. But I had to look up this old fashion word :

    a person who is easily tricked : a stupid or foolish person

    OK – Trump supporters are easily tricked. But Trump wants to pretend he is a young vigorous man! Chris Matthews did talk about young people who are more likely to check out Urban Dictionary than the old fashion Merriam-Webster dictionary:

    Someone who does not understand the basics of life on earth. Confused easily.

    Actually this is the perfect description for Trump supporters. There are more definitions at Urban Dictionary that I would submit also apply!

    ilsm , April 28, 2019 9:18 am

    Who does Panetta think is "easily tricked"?

    Those who believe that Russia had a impact on dumping Clinton are very easily tricked.

    Sad that Krugman, among the media blizzard against the presidency, is one selling the .00000001 chance that Russia effected the election as if it were truth.

    "Easily tricked" is buying Mueller's top cover for the Russia gate operation.

    https://acdn.adnxs.com/ib/static/usersync/v3/async_usersync.html

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    ProGrowthLiberal | April 28, 2019 9:05 am

    Politics Panetta and Trump: Who are You Calling Chumps? Leon Panetta :

    Trump treats Americans like we're chumps

    Check out the entire interview as it was excellent. But I had to look up this old fashion word :

    a person who is easily tricked : a stupid or foolish person

    OK – Trump supporters are easily tricked. But Trump wants to pretend he is a young vigorous man! Chris Matthews did talk about young people who are more likely to check out Urban Dictionary than the old fashion Merriam-Webster dictionary:

    Someone who does not understand the basics of life on earth. Confused easily.

    Actually this is the perfect description for Trump supporters. There are more definitions at Urban Dictionary that I would submit also apply!

    Comments (7) | Digg Facebook Twitter | Comments (7)

    ilsm , April 28, 2019 9:18 am

    Who does Panetta think is "easily tricked"?

    Those who believe that Russia had a impact on dumping Clinton are very easily tricked.

    Sad that Krugman, among the media blizzard against the presidency, is one selling the .00000001 chance that Russia effected the election as if it were truth.

    "Easily tricked" is buying Mueller's top cover for the Russia gate operation.

    [Apr 29, 2019] Russiagate vs Watergate

    Notable quotes:
    "... In the case of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser, acting Attorney General Sally Yates used the archaic Logan Act of 1799 to create a predicate for the FBI to interrogate Flynn about a Dec. 29, 2016 conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, i.e., after Trump's election but before the Inauguration. ..."
    "... Yates also concocted a bizarre argument that the discrepancies between Flynn's account of the call and the transcript left him open to Russian blackmail although how that would work – since the Russians surely assumed that Kislyak's calls would be monitored by U.S. intelligence and thus offered them no leverage with Flynn – was never explained. ..."
    "... So, perhaps the biggest similarity between Russia-gate and Watergate is that Richard Nixon and Donald Trump were both highly unpopular with the Washington establishment and thus had few influential defenders, while an important contrast with Iran-Contra was that Reagan and Bush were very well liked, especially among news executives such as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham who, by all accounts, did not care for the uncouth Nixon. Today, the senior executives of The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major news outlets have made no secret of their disdain for the buffoonish Trump and their hostility toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
    "... In other words, what is driving Russia-gate – for both the mainstream news media and the Democrats – appears to be a political agenda, i.e., the desire to remove Trump from office while also ratcheting up a New Cold War with Russia, a priority for Washington's neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks. ..."
    "... If this political drama were playing out in some other country, we would be talking about a "soft coup" in which the "oligarchy" or some other "deep state" force was using semi-constitutional means to engineer a disfavored leader's removal. ..."
    Apr 29, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Originally from: Consortium News’ Record on Russiagate—How CN Covered the ‘Scandal’ No. 7 ‘Russiagate Is No Watergate or Iran-Contra’

    ... ... ...

    Railroading Flynn

    In the case of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security adviser, acting Attorney General Sally Yates used the archaic Logan Act of 1799 to create a predicate for the FBI to interrogate Flynn about a Dec. 29, 2016 conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, i.e., after Trump's election but before the Inauguration.

    The Logan Act, which has never resulted in a prosecution in 218 years, was enacted during the period of the Alien and Sedition Acts to bar private citizens from negotiating on their own with foreign governments. It was never intended to apply to a national security adviser of an elected President, albeit before he was sworn in.

    But it became the predicate for the FBI interrogation -- and the FBI agents were armed with a transcript of the intercepted Kislyak-Flynn phone call so they could catch Flynn on any gaps in his recollection, which might have been made even hazier because he was on vacation in the Dominican Republic when Kislyak called.

    Yates also concocted a bizarre argument that the discrepancies between Flynn's account of the call and the transcript left him open to Russian blackmail although how that would work – since the Russians surely assumed that Kislyak's calls would be monitored by U.S. intelligence and thus offered them no leverage with Flynn – was never explained.

    Still, Flynn's failure to recount the phone call precisely and the controversy stirred up around it became the basis for an obstruction of justice investigation of Flynn and led to President Trump's firing Flynn on Feb. 13.

    Trump may have thought that tossing Flynn overboard to the circling sharks would calm down the sharks but the blood in the water only excited them more. According to then-FBI Director James Comey, Trump talked to him one-on-one the next day, Feb. 14, and said, "'I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go."

    Trump's "hope" and the fact that he later fired Comey have reportedly led special prosecutor Mueller to look at a possible obstruction of justice case against Trump. In other words, Trump could be accused of obstructing what appears to have been a trumped-up case against Flynn.

    Of course, there remains the possibility that evidence might surface of Trump or his campaign colluding with the Russians, but such evidence has so far not been presented. Or Mueller's investigation might turn over some rock and reveal some unrelated crime, possibly financial wrongdoing by Trump or an associate.

    (Something similar happened in the Republican investigation of the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack, a largely fruitless inquiry except that it revealed that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent and received official emails over a private server, which Comey decried during last year's campaign as "extremely careless" but not criminal.)

    Curb the Enthusiasm

    Another contrast between the earlier scandals (Watergate and Iran-Contra) and Russia-gate is the degree of enthusiasm and excitement that the U.S. mainstream media and congressional Democrats have shown today as opposed to 1972 and 1986.

    The Washington Post's Watergate team, including from left to right, publisher Katharine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Howard Simons, and executive editor Ben Bradlee.

    Though The Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein aggressively pursued the Watergate scandal, there was much less interest elsewhere in major news outlets until Nixon's criminality became obvious in 1973. Many national Democrats, including DNC Chairman Bob Strauss , were extremely hesitant to pursue the scandal if not outright against it.

    Similarly, although Brian Barger and I at The Associated Press were pursuing aspects of Iran-Contra since early 1985, the big newspapers and networks consistently gave the Reagan administration the benefit of the doubt – at least before the scandal finally burst into view in fall 1986 (when a Contra-supply plane crashed inside Nicaragua and a Lebanese newspaper revealed U.S. arms shipments to Iran).

    For several months, there was a flurry of attention to the complex Iran-Contra scandal, but the big media still ignored evidence of a White House cover-up and soon lost interest in the difficult work of unraveling the convoluted networks for arms smuggling, money laundering and cocaine trafficking.

    Congressional Democrats also shied away from a constitutional confrontation with the popular Reagan and his well-connected Vice President George H.W. Bush.

    After moving from AP to Newsweek in early 1987, I learned that the senior executives at Newsweek, then part of The Washington Post Company, didn't want "another Watergate"; they felt another such scandal was not "good for the country" and wanted Iran-Contra to go away as soon as possible. I was even told not to read the congressional Iran-Contra report when it was published in October 1987 (although I ignored that order and kept trying to keep my own investigation going in defiance of the wishes of the Newsweek brass until those repeated clashes led to my departure in June 1990).

    So, perhaps the biggest similarity between Russia-gate and Watergate is that Richard Nixon and Donald Trump were both highly unpopular with the Washington establishment and thus had few influential defenders, while an important contrast with Iran-Contra was that Reagan and Bush were very well liked, especially among news executives such as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham who, by all accounts, did not care for the uncouth Nixon. Today, the senior executives of The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major news outlets have made no secret of their disdain for the buffoonish Trump and their hostility toward Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    In other words, what is driving Russia-gate – for both the mainstream news media and the Democrats – appears to be a political agenda, i.e., the desire to remove Trump from office while also ratcheting up a New Cold War with Russia, a priority for Washington's neoconservatives and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks.

    If this political drama were playing out in some other country, we would be talking about a "soft coup" in which the "oligarchy" or some other "deep state" force was using semi-constitutional means to engineer a disfavored leader's removal.

    Of course, since the ongoing campaign to remove Trump is happening in the United States, it must be presented as a principled pursuit of truth and a righteous application of the rule of law. But the comparisons to Watergate and Iran-Contra are a stretch.

    The late investigative reporter Robert Parry, the founder of Consortium News, broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.

    [Apr 29, 2019] Deputy AG Rosenstein Submits Resignation Letter Our Nation Is Safer

    Apr 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    While long-expected, amid two chaos-ridden years as the Justice Department's No.2, the day has finally come when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has reportedly sent his resignation letter to President Donald Trump, will leave post May 11.

    "I am grateful to you for the opportunity to serve; for the courtesy and humor you often display in our personal conversations; and for the goals you set in your inaugural address: patriotism, unity, safety, education and prosperity," Mr. Rosenstein wrote in the letter, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

    ... ... ...

    wdg , 1 minute ago link

    "Our Nation Is Safer"

    Sure is now that he has resigned. But where are the indictments for traitors like Rosenstein?

    [Apr 29, 2019] Is Annexing the West Bank a 'Moral Right' by Paul Gottfried

    Note an interesting statement of a pro-Isreally lobbyist: "Jewish exceptionalism and the exceptionalist nature of Jewish civilization require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their civilization. What's good for Jewish civilization is good for humanity at large. Jewish civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected." ~ by Jason D. Hill, professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. If this not a descript on neofascist mentality I do not know what is. just replace Jewish with German.
    You will get "German exceptionalism and the exceptionalist nature of German civilization require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their civilization. What's good for German civilization is good for humanity at large. German civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected."
    Notable quotes:
    "... In his essay, Hill insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should faithfully keep his campaign promise to incorporate West Bank settlements. In fact, according to Hill, the Israeli leader has a "moral right to annex all of the West Bank for a plethora of reasons." ..."
    "... First, the Israelis were too "altruistic" in dealing with the Palestinians whom they conquered in 1967. It would been better if the Israelis had regarded the Palestinians as "enemies of the state ..."
    "... Second, he implies that Palestinian authority doesn't deserve any better ..."
    "... "Jewish exceptionalism and the exceptionalist nature of Jewish civilization require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their civilization. What's good for Jewish civilization is good for humanity at large. Jewish civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected." ..."
    "... Third, Israel has "every moral right to wage a ruthless and unrelenting war against Hamas and to re-settle the land if it ever so desires." On top of that, the United States is morally obligated to pay "political and financial reparations" to Israel, supplying it with "more advanced military capabilities" so that it can maintain its "unrivaled military status in the Middle East." ..."
    "... Finally, Hill solemnly arrives at his last point. The Palestinians have no moral authority "because they have never explicitly held a philosophy that can support freedom, the basic principles of individual rights, and a free market economy." ..."
    "... Hill's extravagant description of "Jewish civilization" in language that recalls the extreme, belligerent nationalists of an earlier age ..."
    "... Finally, I'm wondering whether any government that Hill judges to be "better" than another one has a moral right to overthrow the offending regime and then expel its inhabitants. Or is this a one-time deal only for Israelis? By the way, "reparations" are the things that the Germans paid Nazi victims, not the support a nation gives to a weaker ally. Perhaps Hill is telling us more about what should be the servile U.S. relationship to Israel than he intends. ..."
    "... This commentary has made me think of an unpleasant experience in my own life. In 1987 I lost the chance for a graduate professorship at a large university in Washington, D.C. after several noted neoconservatives called my prospective employer and insisted passionately that "I was not quite reliable on Israel." If Professor Hill has established the standard of who is "reliable on Israel," then perhaps my accusers were correct. ..."
    Apr 29, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
    published an opinion piece by Jason D. Hill, professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. As I read this commentary, I had to wonder whether it was some kind of spoof. It seems to have been written to poke fun at over-the-top Zionists; and this may indeed be the case -- or so one can hope.

    In his essay, Hill insisted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should faithfully keep his campaign promise to incorporate West Bank settlements. In fact, according to Hill, the Israeli leader has a "moral right to annex all of the West Bank for a plethora of reasons."

    This "plethora of reasons" comes down basically to four.

    First, the Israelis were too "altruistic" in dealing with the Palestinians whom they conquered in 1967. It would been better if the Israelis had regarded the Palestinians as "enemies of the state : supporters of the Fatah (Palestinian Liberation Organization) Charter, which basically calls for the end of Jewry in the region." Jewish conquerors should have immediately annexed the land and made "the people there [who should have been expelled] the responsibility of their original homeland: Jordan."

    Second, he implies that Palestinian authority doesn't deserve any better , in part because it fails to recognize the inherent inferiority of their people in relation to the Jewish masters of the West Bank: "Jewish exceptionalism and the exceptionalist nature of Jewish civilization require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their civilization. What's good for Jewish civilization is good for humanity at large. Jewish civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected."

    Third, Israel has "every moral right to wage a ruthless and unrelenting war against Hamas and to re-settle the land if it ever so desires." On top of that, the United States is morally obligated to pay "political and financial reparations" to Israel, supplying it with "more advanced military capabilities" so that it can maintain its "unrivaled military status in the Middle East."

    Finally, Hill solemnly arrives at his last point. The Palestinians have no moral authority "because they have never explicitly held a philosophy that can support freedom, the basic principles of individual rights, and a free market economy." Additionally, they vote for terrorist organizations like Hamas to represent them. In short, they are a "security threat to Israel because a core feature of their identity is a commitment to destroying Israel as a Jewish state." It is therefore immoral to accept "anti-Semitics devoted to the destruction of Israel into the domain of Jewish civilization."

    Hill does make two serious points: one, that Israelis face an immense security problem and two, that the Palestinians on the West Bank (and let's not forget Gaza) are angry because of both the cramped conditions and military control/occupation they've had to endure for decades. Right and wrong can be found on both sides of this protracted conflict: Palestinians were defeated and expelled from what is now Israel, while Israelis are being threatened by violence from the descendants of those whom they defeated and their terrorist allies.

    But Hill's extravagant description of "Jewish civilization" in language that recalls the extreme, belligerent nationalists of an earlier age does nothing to help his cause, nor for that matter, the credibility of The Federalist. And why exactly should I suppose that every Palestinian is a terrorist or theocratic fanatic? Understandably, desperate people vote for extremist parties. I too wish that West Bank Palestinians were more reasonable and more compromising but I can understand their frustration as an occupied population.

    Finally, I'm wondering whether any government that Hill judges to be "better" than another one has a moral right to overthrow the offending regime and then expel its inhabitants. Or is this a one-time deal only for Israelis? By the way, "reparations" are the things that the Germans paid Nazi victims, not the support a nation gives to a weaker ally. Perhaps Hill is telling us more about what should be the servile U.S. relationship to Israel than he intends.

    But the most childish piece of advice Hill offers, which the Israelis fortunately never took, is sending West Bank Palestinians to neighboring Jordan. Is Hill aware that Jordan has over two million Palestinians , some of whom have been there since 1948, and has taken in a total of 657,628 Syrian refugees as of early 2018 ? King Abdullah of Jordan has maintained generally friendly relations with both the United States and Israel, and the last thing he needs is the turmoil and political unrest that would result from sticking more irate Palestinians, who had been kicked out of their homes, into his country.

    This commentary has made me think of an unpleasant experience in my own life. In 1987 I lost the chance for a graduate professorship at a large university in Washington, D.C. after several noted neoconservatives called my prospective employer and insisted passionately that "I was not quite reliable on Israel." If Professor Hill has established the standard of who is "reliable on Israel," then perhaps my accusers were correct.

    Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents .

    See also

    [Apr 29, 2019] It is more probable that some patriots at NSA seeing what was going on hacked and leaked emails not wanting corrupt Hillary and criminal empire taking hold of US gov rather than Russians doing such

    Notable quotes:
    "... Americans - stop whining, that you will not help. You have a main problem with lobbyists and officials who are well able to promote the interests of lobbyists at the expense of national interests. Replace the word Russian with the word Israeli and get the exact name of the problem. ..."
    "... The Russians did not interfere more or less than any other country in U.S. elections. What interferes in the all election in the world is "Money", the great un-equalizer. Lobbyists the evil that keeps giving. F them all. ..."
    "... The whole narrative was made up propaganda by Clinton spin doctors and Obama admin to change discussion from content of emails and cover up crimes using domestic intell to illegally spy on Trump. Joke, no examination of DNC or Podesta servers, just take word of Crowdstrike hired by Perkins Coie, same people who hired and paid Fusion GPS to write dossier. ..."
    "... Better yet let's just let Israel interfere......oh wait. ..."
    "... Mueller wasn't running an investigation . . . It was a "Coverup Operation" and one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on the American people. "A complete and total fraud" ..."
    "... Except [neo]liberal f-wits that don't want to know. Might upset their fragile grip on reality. ..."
    "... I don't see (in the immortal words of G Dubya) how this sucker doesn't go down. This **** is bad, very bad .. ..."
    "... I mean, this doesn't even come as a controlled demolition anymore. It is merely shredding any and all vestige of hope of ever ( at least n my lifetime) righting the ship of state, proper. There ain't no winners in this, none .. ..."
    "... If they did, it was a blessing in disguise. Maybe the Russians didn't relish the idea of going to war with the US. I'm convinced to the marrow of my bones that Hitlery would have poked the Bear. It would not have been pretty. ..."
    "... Election interference? You wanna see some interference, watch Obama, Hillary and Merkel laser bomb Gaddafi after putting him on a "most loved dictator" list just prior. Election interference, this is some stupid **** for stupid people. Some Russians on Facebook may have...gimme a break. ..."
    "... Then...there's Kiev in 2014... ..."
    "... Somewhat related to the media's lies. They dripped/leaked damaging information for 2 years but not a word on when Mueller knew the investigation was over, what, 18 months ago? Not a single leak or drip saying Trump was innocent nor any leaked evidence. Completely complicit. ..."
    "... Given the history of lies by Blo's administration against Putin's Russia... and without hard, corroborated evidence to the contrary...it didn't happen. On the other hand, we read recently about heavy outside (western) money trying to influence the outcome of the recent Ukraine election.. ..."
    "... In court a befuddled prosecution team (who never dreamed anyone would step up to face the charges) listed the date of the supposed crimes a Russian company had committed... at the time, the company did not exist! ..."
    "... How I would love to see THIS honest headline... "Did The Israelis (AIPAC) Interfere In U.S. Elections?" The answer is as obvious as the 600-pound gorilla in the room. ..."
    "... The 600-pound gorilla headline would be killed by the third-rail, and then trampled by an elephant. If it somehow survived, it would be convicted of a hate crime for attacking the gorilla, charged with animal abuse for hurting the elephant's foot, and convicted of rape for touching the third-rail. ..."
    "... A much bigger question is, Did/does Israel interfere in U.S. elections? ..."
    Apr 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Nelbev , 36 minutes ago link

    It is more probable that some patriots at NSA seeing what was going on hacked and leaked emails not wanting corrupt Hillary and criminal empire taking hold of US gov rather than Russians doing such.

    Helg Saracen , 36 minutes ago link

    Americans - stop whining, that you will not help. You have a main problem with lobbyists and officials who are well able to promote the interests of lobbyists at the expense of national interests. Replace the word Russian with the word Israeli and get the exact name of the problem.

    AKKadian , 41 minutes ago link

    The Russians did not interfere more or less than any other country in U.S. elections. What interferes in the all election in the world is "Money", the great un-equalizer. Lobbyists the evil that keeps giving. F them all.

    Nelbev , 47 minutes ago link

    If Hillary was elected, she would have been owned. Clintons met with Putin right before Uranium 1 deal went through and Bill got his half million dollar one night speaking fee and millions to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary used unsecured communications while Secratary of State. She is the most corrupt person ever to run for POTUS. Plenty more dirt under her ***, bribery, corruption. Hey, what about husband's phone sex tape with Lewinski Russians supposedly had which is more beleiveable than made up Russian prostitute pissing on bed.

    The whole narrative was made up propaganda by Clinton spin doctors and Obama admin to change discussion from content of emails and cover up crimes using domestic intell to illegally spy on Trump. Joke, no examination of DNC or Podesta servers, just take word of Crowdstrike hired by Perkins Coie, same people who hired and paid Fusion GPS to write dossier.

    Helg Saracen , 41 minutes ago link

    Then why don't you jail this "holy family"? Here is the answer - not everyone is equal before the Law...

    Giant Meteor , 50 minutes ago link

    With all this flap, hell, let't just let the Russians vote in the next one. Then, in time, we could vote in their elections, kinda like a collusion cultural exchange program.

    I mean, stuff like this just begs the question, why not just go right to jumping the shark, and call it a day .,

    Idaho potato head , 38 minutes ago link

    Better yet let's just let Israel interfere......oh wait.

    Md4 , 1 hour ago link

    There's much more reason to believe the prog left deliberately fucked with the midterm vote in Florida last year...than there is actual evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election...

    LEEPERMAX , 1 hour ago link

    Mueller wasn't running an investigation . . . It was a "Coverup Operation" and one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on the American people. "A complete and total fraud"

    And everyone knows it

    Mouldy , 30 minutes ago link

    Except [neo]liberal f-wits that don't want to know. Might upset their fragile grip on reality.

    Hulk , 1 hour ago link

    We have been an evidence free idiocracy for 20 years now. I am hopeful that we are witnessing the end of that now. "The Trump campaign was spied upon" represented a critical turning point...

    Giant Meteor , 27 minutes ago link

    Or maybe a critical implosion point. I do not believe it is clear, meaning who will be left standing, either way. Someone, or a whole lot of someone's need's to pay for these sins, and as is painfully obvious, the ******** slinging and screeching rhetoric meter, is red lining. I don't see (in the immortal words of G Dubya) how this sucker doesn't go down. This **** is bad, very bad ..

    I mean, this doesn't even come as a controlled demolition anymore. It is merely shredding any and all vestige of hope of ever ( at least n my lifetime) righting the ship of state, proper. There ain't no winners in this, none ..

    Mairzy Doats , 1 hour ago link

    If they did, it was a blessing in disguise. Maybe the Russians didn't relish the idea of going to war with the US. I'm convinced to the marrow of my bones that Hitlery would have poked the Bear. It would not have been pretty.

    TahoeBilly2012 , 1 hour ago link

    Election interference? You wanna see some interference, watch Obama, Hillary and Merkel laser bomb Gaddafi after putting him on a "most loved dictator" list just prior. Election interference, this is some stupid **** for stupid people. Some Russians on Facebook may have...gimme a break.

    Md4 , 1 hour ago link

    Then...there's Kiev in 2014...

    JBLight , 1 hour ago link

    Somewhat related to the media's lies. They dripped/leaked damaging information for 2 years but not a word on when Mueller knew the investigation was over, what, 18 months ago? Not a single leak or drip saying Trump was innocent nor any leaked evidence. Completely complicit.

    Md4 , 1 hour ago link

    " But that assertion - is it truly backed up factually? Where is the evidence, other than largely questionable information sourced from our largely discredited intelligence agencies which, as we know, had a determined goal of overthrowing the president by any means possible?"

    Precisely.

    Given the history of lies by Blo's administration against Putin's Russia... and without hard, corroborated evidence to the contrary...it didn't happen. On the other hand, we read recently about heavy outside (western) money trying to influence the outcome of the recent Ukraine election..

    But that wouldn't be interfering...would it...

    SRV , 1 hour ago link

    In court a befuddled prosecution team (who never dreamed anyone would step up to face the charges) listed the date of the supposed crimes a Russian company had committed... at the time, the company did not exist!

    Some kind of catering business (not sure of the connection to the hacking team but the lawyer commented in court it appeared the Mueller had indeed indicted the proverbial "Ham Sandwich!"

    What a **** show...

    J S Bach , 1 hour ago link

    How I would love to see THIS honest headline... "Did The Israelis (AIPAC) Interfere In U.S. Elections?" The answer is as obvious as the 600-pound gorilla in the room.

    LetThemEatRand , 1 hour ago link

    The 600-pound gorilla headline would be killed by the third-rail, and then trampled by an elephant. If it somehow survived, it would be convicted of a hate crime for attacking the gorilla, charged with animal abuse for hurting the elephant's foot, and convicted of rape for touching the third-rail.

    Arrow4Truth , 1 hour ago link

    A much bigger question is, Did/does Israel interfere in U.S. elections?

    [Apr 29, 2019] Heritage Foundation + the War Industry What a Pair by Paul Gottfried

    Notable quotes:
    "... A 2009 Heritage Foundation report, " Maintaining the Superiority of America's Defense Industrial Base ," called for further government investment in aircraft weaponry for "ensuring a superior fighting force" and "sustaining international stability." In 2011, senior national security fellow James Carafano wrote " Five Steps to Defend America's Industrial Defense Base ," which complained about a "fifty billion dollar under-procurement by the Pentagon" for buying new weaponry. In 2016, Heritage made the case for several years of reinvestment to get the military back on "sound footing," with an increase in fiscal year 2016 described as "an encouraging start." ..."
    "... These special pleas pose a question: which came first, Heritage's heavy dependence on funds from defense giants, or the foundation's belief that unless we steadily increase our military arsenal we'll be endangering "international stability"? ..."
    "... note that from the Heritage 2015 IRS 990 submission the then president Jim DeMint was paid over a Million Bucks in total compensation. Trulio will no doubt also be living very large care of the MIC Cronies while in the Big Seat of that Think Pimp Tank ..."
    "... Heritage senior national security fellow and defense contractor stooge James Carafano was paid over $300 Grand. Not bad scratch for merely shilling for the Merchants of Death. ..."
    "... And those MIC Cronies are shrewd. It's not just Conservative Inc. They buy off EVERYBODY. ..."
    "... To demonstrate how insidious the Security State propaganda is in shaping Fake News, Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors are named contributors to ostensibly left-leaning PBS/NPR. ..."
    "... And Jeff Bezos' Amazon inked a $600M deal with CIA/NSA to provide cloud computing services, which is Amazon's actual cash cow. You think Bezos' Washington Post will go heavy on the civil liberties intrusions of the Deep State? ..."
    "... BTW, Mad Dog Mattis parachuted into the SecDef job from a BoD slot at General Dynamics. Have we heard even a peep from Mad Dog about acquisition reform since he assumed his latest perch on the Security State apparatus? ..."
    "... I wonder when Think Tanks will stop being "non-profit" and being issuing stock. ..."
    "... When Keynes suggested digging holes to spend money, he did not mean using explosives to do so, and he did not want the bulk of it go to profiteers safely contained within their inflationary "national security" bubble. ..."
    "... "In 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that 52 of the biggest defense contractors employed 2,435 former generals, senior executives and acquisition officers. Of those, 422 were in a position to work on defense contracts directly related to their former agencies and at least nine may have been working on the same contracts they previously oversaw." ..."
    Nov 30, 2017 | www.theamericanconservative.com
    Conservative think tank considers Lockheed fixture for its next president. •

    According to recent reports , the Heritage Foundation, clearly the most established and many would say politically influential conservative think tank in Washington, is considering David Trulio, Lockheed Martin vice president and longtime lobbyist for the defense industry, to be its next president. While Heritage's connection to Washington's sprawling national security industry is already well-established, naming Trulio as its president might be seen as gilding the lily.

    If anything, reading this report made me more aware of the degree to which the "conservative policy community" in Washington depends on the whims and interests of particular donors.

    And this relationship is apparently no longer something to be concealed or embarrassed by. One can now be open about being in the pocket of the defense industry. Trulio's potential elevation to Heritage president at what we can assume will be an astronomical salary, will no doubt grease the already well-oiled pipeline of funds from major contractors to this "conservative" foundation, which already operates with an annual disclosed budget of almost $100 million.

    A 2009 Heritage Foundation report, " Maintaining the Superiority of America's Defense Industrial Base ," called for further government investment in aircraft weaponry for "ensuring a superior fighting force" and "sustaining international stability." In 2011, senior national security fellow James Carafano wrote " Five Steps to Defend America's Industrial Defense Base ," which complained about a "fifty billion dollar under-procurement by the Pentagon" for buying new weaponry. In 2016, Heritage made the case for several years of reinvestment to get the military back on "sound footing," with an increase in fiscal year 2016 described as "an encouraging start."

    These special pleas pose a question: which came first, Heritage's heavy dependence on funds from defense giants, or the foundation's belief that unless we steadily increase our military arsenal we'll be endangering "international stability"? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the middle: someone who is predisposed to go in a certain direction may be more inclined to do so if he is being rewarded in return. Incidentally, the 2009 position paper seems to be directing the government to throw more taxpayer dollars to Boeing than to its competitor Lockheed. But it seems both defense giants have landed a joint contract this year to produce a new submersible for the Navy, so it may no longer be necessary to pick sides on that one at least. No doubt both corporations will continue to look after Heritage, which will predictably call for further increases, whether they be in aerospace or shipbuilding.

    Although one needn't reduce everything to dollars and cents, if we're looking at the issues Heritage and other likeminded foundations are likely to push today, it's far more probable they'll be emphasizing the national security state rather than, say, opposition to gay marriage or the defense of traditional gender roles. There's lots more money to be made advocating for the former rather than the latter. In May 2013, Heritage sponsored a formal debate between "two conservatives" and "two liberals" on the issue of defense spending, with Heritage and National Review presenting the "conservative" side. I wondered as I listened to part of this verbal battle why is was considered "conservative" to call for burdening American taxpayers with massive increases in the purchase of Pentagon weaponry and planes that take 17 years to get off the ground.

    Like American higher education, Conservatism Inc. is very big business. Whatever else it's about rates a very far second to keeping the money flowing. "Conservative" positions are often simply causes for which foundations and media enterprises that have the word "conservative" attached to them are paid to represent. It is the label carried by an institution or publication, not necessarily the position it takes, that makes what NR or Heritage advocates "conservative."

    In any event, Mr. Trulio won't have to travel far if he takes the Heritage helm. He and his corporation are already ensconced only a few miles away from Heritage's Massachusetts Avenue headquarters, if the information provided by Lockheed Martin is correct. It says: "Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 98,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services." A company like that can certainly afford to underwrite a think tank -- if the price is right.

    Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for twenty-five years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale PhD. He writes for many websites and scholarly journals and is the author of thirteen books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents. His books have been translated into multiple languages and seem to enjoy special success in Eastern Europe.

    SteveM, says: November 30, 2017 at 11:19 am

    Big Money Indeed

    Professor Gottfried, note that from the Heritage 2015 IRS 990 submission the then president Jim DeMint was paid over a Million Bucks in total compensation. Trulio will no doubt also be living very large care of the MIC Cronies while in the Big Seat of that Think Pimp Tank .

    Heritage senior national security fellow and defense contractor stooge James Carafano was paid over $300 Grand. Not bad scratch for merely shilling for the Merchants of Death.

    And those MIC Cronies are shrewd. It's not just Conservative Inc. They buy off EVERYBODY.

    To demonstrate how insidious the Security State propaganda is in shaping Fake News, Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors are named contributors to ostensibly left-leaning PBS/NPR.

    You think NPR will ever run a story on the TRILLION dollar boondoggle that is the F-35 or the other hyper-busted weapon systems catastrophes? Or in interviews, challenge the idiotic fear-mongering of the Generals used as fronts for the bankrupt U.S. Global Cop foreign policy?

    And Jeff Bezos' Amazon inked a $600M deal with CIA/NSA to provide cloud computing services, which is Amazon's actual cash cow. You think Bezos' Washington Post will go heavy on the civil liberties intrusions of the Deep State?

    When the Post was still hard-copy-centric, LockMart and the other defense contractors regularly took out expensive full-color, full-page ads in the Post. When given that Pentagon weapons acquisition is all inside baseball, those adverts had no actual marketing value. They were merely payoffs to the Post to go easy on their reporting of defense contracting pathologies

    BTW, Mad Dog Mattis parachuted into the SecDef job from a BoD slot at General Dynamics. Have we heard even a peep from Mad Dog about acquisition reform since he assumed his latest perch on the Security State apparatus?

    Nope, given the massive Military-Security State lobbying and propaganda engine that is in place, it's all over but the crying for the deluded taxpayers.

    sholto , says: November 30, 2017 at 11:26 am
    i like that they dont dare call their reports Military Industrial Complex.

    There is an interesting for arguing that these supposed non-profits should be forced to publish all donors and donations.

    One Guy , says: November 30, 2017 at 1:22 pm
    The US Military is the biggest Jobs Program/Corporate Welfare in the world. And many conservative voters are the biggest dupes in the world for not understanding that we don't need a big, expensive military to defend America.
    b. , says: November 30, 2017 at 2:12 pm
    'Which came first, Heritage's heavy dependence on funds from defense giants, or the foundation's belief that unless we steadily increase our military arsenal we'll be endangering "international stability"?'

    The chicken-egg here is contrived – the military-industrial-congressional complex in general and 9/11 specifically provide an excellent example to explain punctuated equilibrium.

    I wonder when Think Tanks will stop being "non-profit" and being issuing stock.

    Until then, there will be many players engaged in vigorous rimming the self-penetrating sinkhole of "national security spending" to extract profits from the channeling of public purse funds financed with Treasury debt backed by the promise of the full tax revenue of government of the USA – supplied by tax cuts. I could accept the tongue wagging as a particularly offensive type of performance art, if the money that goes into the hole did not have to drop as bombs out of airplanes and from drones somewhere beyond the borders to ensure that demand sustains. When Keynes suggested digging holes to spend money, he did not mean using explosives to do so, and he did not want the bulk of it go to profiteers safely contained within their inflationary "national security" bubble.

    Michael N Moore , says: November 30, 2017 at 7:32 pm
    "In 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that 52 of the biggest defense contractors employed 2,435 former generals, senior executives and acquisition officers. Of those, 422 were in a position to work on defense contracts directly related to their former agencies and at least nine may have been working on the same contracts they previously oversaw."

    – https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/12/12/trump-takes-aim-at-pentagons-revolving-door-and-lockheed-martins-400-billion-f-35-program/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_f35-1130a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

    DGJ , says: December 3, 2017 at 10:52 am
    Movement conservatism is dead, somebody should bury its' corpse because it is stinking up the room.
    EliteCommInc. , says: December 7, 2017 at 3:45 pm
    I finally broke down and started watching

    "War Machine"

    [Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks. ..."
    "... Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done. ..."
    "... President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. ..."
    "... The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence, ..."
    "... According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. ..."
    "... This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. ..."
    "... Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control. ..."
    "... In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department. ..."
    "... The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA. ..."
    "... As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. ..."
    "... Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia. ..."
    "... The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected. ..."
    "... This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest. ..."
    "... Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know: ..."
    "... War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff. ..."
    "... The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages. ..."
    "... That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers. ..."
    Apr 22, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    The British Role in 'Russiagate' Is About to Be Fully Exposed April 8, 2019 20190408-russiagate-exposed-brits.pdf The "fake news" media has now dropped its pretense of having ever had any intention of allowing the truth -- as documented in U.S. Attorney General Barr's summary of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's report, exonerating President Donald Trump of having "conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" -- to thoroughly refute the Russiagate "Big Lie." Soon, however, it is certain that the deliberate, British Intelligence-originated, military-grade disinformation campaign carried out against the United States, including to this day, will be exposed.

    The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks.

    "It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat," says the Chinese proverb. Yet, although the Mueller report was called a "nothing burger," it was not: it still presented the potentially lethal lie that twelve Russian gremlins, code-named Guccifer 2.0, hacked the DNC. Sundry media meatheads thus continue to blog and broadcast about "what else is really there."

    The false Russian hack story, still being repeated, marches on, undeterred, like the emperor without any clothes. One lame-brained variation, promoted in order to cover up the British role, states that Hillary Clinton, rather than Trump, colluded with the Russians. It is being repeated by Republicans and Democrats alike, some of them malicious, some of them confused, and all of them completely wrong. The media, such as the failed New York Times and various electronic media, must be forced to either admit the truth, or be even more thoroughly discredited than they already have been. They must stop their constant repetition of this Joseph Goebbels-like Big Lie. There must be a vigorous dissemination of the truth by all those journalists, politicians, activists and citizens that love truth more than their own assumptions, including about President Trump, or other dearly-held systems of false belief.

    Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done.

    A New Cultural Paradigm

    The world is actually on the verge of ending the military conflicts among the major world powers, such as Russia, China, the United States, and India. These four powers, and not the City of London, are the key fulcrum around which a new era in humanity's future will be decided. A new monetary and credit system brought into being through these four powers would foster the greatest physical economic growth in the history of humanity. In addition, discussions involving Italy working with China on the industrialization of the African continent (discussions which could soon also involve the United States) show that sections of Europe want to join China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and leave the dying trans-Atlantic financial empire behind.

    The recent announcement of a United States commitment to return to the Moon by 2024 can, in particular, become the basis for a proposal to other nations -- for example, China, Russia, and India, all of whom are space powers of demonstrated capability -- to resolve their differences on Earth in a higher, joint mission. As Russia's Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin said in a recent interview:

    "I am a fierce proponent of international cooperation, including with Americans, because their country is big and technologically advanced, and they can make good partners Especially since personal and professional relations between Roscosmos and NASA at the working level are great."

    There is also the possibility of ending the danger of thermonuclear war. President Trump, speaking on April 4 of the prospects for world peace, stated:

    "Between Russia, China, and us, we're all making hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is ridiculous. I think it's much better if we all got together and didn't make these weapons those three countries I think can come together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace."

    This is a statement of real importance. Such an outlook is a rejection of the "perpetual crisis/perpetual war" outlook of the Bush-Obama Administration, a four-term "war presidency" which was abruptly, unexpectedly ended in 2016. The British were not amused.

    It is to stop this new cultural paradigm, pivoted on the Pacific and the potential Four Powers alliance, that British imperial forces have deployed. The 2016 election of President Trump, and his personal friendship with President Xi Jinping and desire to work with President Putin, are an intolerable strategic threat to the eighteenth-century geopolitics of the British empire. They have repeatedly used Russiagate to disrupt the process of deliberation among Presidents Xi, Trump, and Putin, thus increasing the danger of war. Russiagate, in the interest of international security, must be ended by exposing it for the utter fraud that it is.

    The Truth Set Free

    President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free.

    The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence,

    "The history of the present Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the undermining of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."

    DOCUMENTATION

    While Robert Mueller found that there was "no collusion" between Donald Trump or the Trump Campaign and Russia, he also filed two indictments regarding alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first alleges that 12 members of Russian Military Intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta and delivered the purloined files to WikiLeaks for strategic publication before the July 2016 Democratic National Convention and in October 2016, one month before the election. The second indictment charges the Internet Research Agency, a Russian internet merchandising and marketing firm, with running social media campaigns in the U.S. in 2016 designed to impact the election. When the fuller version of the Mueller report becomes public, it is certain to recharge the claims of Russian interference based on the so-called background "evidence" supporting these indictments.

    The good news, however, is that investigations in the United States and Britain, have unearthed significant contrary evidence exposing British Intelligence, NATO, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine, as the actual foreign actors in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We provide a short summary of the main aspects of that evidence to spark further investigations of the British intelligence networks, entities, and methods at issue, internationally. More detailed accounts concerning specific aspects of what we recite here can be found on our website.

    The Russian Hack That Wasn't

    The Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an association of former U.S. intelligence officials, have demonstrated that the Russian hack of the DNC alleged by Robert Mueller, was more likely an internal leak, rather than a hack conducted over the internet. William Binney, who conducted the main investigations for the VIPS, spent 30 years at the National Security Agency, becoming Technical Director. He designed the sorts of NSA programs that would detect a Russian hack if one occurred. Binney conducted an actual forensic examination of the DNC files released by WikiLeaks, and the related files circulated by the persona Guccifer 2.0, who Robert Mueller claims is a GRU creation. Binney has demonstrated that the calculated transfer speeds and metadata characteristics of these files are consistent with downloading to a thumb drive or storage device rather than an internet-based hack. This supports the account by WikiLeaks of how it obtained the files. According to WikiLeaks and former Ambassador Craig Murray, they were obtained from a person who was not a Russian state actor of any kind, in Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks offered to tell the Justice Department all about this, and actual negotiations to this effect were proceeding in early 2017, when Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director James Comey acted to sabotage and end the negotiations.

    Further, as opposed to the hyperbole in the media and in Robert Mueller's indictment, analysis of the Internet Research Agency's alleged "weaponization" of Facebook in 2016 involved a paltry total of $46,000 in Facebook ads and $4,700 spent on Google platforms . In an election in which the major campaigns spend tens of thousands of dollars every day on these platforms, whatever the IRA thought it was doing in its amateurish and juvenile memes and tropes was like throwing a stone in the ocean. Most of these activities occurred after the election and never mentioned either candidate. The interpretation that these ads were designed to draw clicks and website traffic, rather than influence the election, must be considered.

    The "evidence" for Mueller's GRU hacking indictment was provided, in part, by CrowdStrike, the DNC vendor that originated the claims that the Russians had hacked that entity. CrowdStrike is closely associated with the Atlantic Council's Digital Research Lab (DRL), an operation jointly funded by NATO's Strategic Communications Center and the U.S. State Department, to counter Russian "hybrid warfare." CrowdStrike has been caught more than once falsely attributing hacks to the Russians and the Atlantic Council's DRL is a font of anti-Russian intelligence operations.

    The British Target Trump

    According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. The former head of the Russia Desk for MI6 and protégé of Sir Richard Dearlove, Christopher Steele, fresh from working for British Intelligence, the FBI, and U.S. State Department in the 2014 Ukraine coup, assembled in 2016 a phony dossier called Operation Charlemagne, claiming widespread Russian interference in European elections, including in the Brexit vote. By the spring of 2016, Steele was contributing to a British/U.S. intelligence task force on the Trump Campaign which had been convened at CIA headquarters under John Brennan's direction.

    This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. The personnel employed in these operations all had multiple connections to the British firm Hakluyt, to Steele's firm Orbis, and to the British military's Integrity Initiative. Sometime in the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then head of GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief John Brennan personally. Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control.

    Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were already on the radar and under investigation by the same British, Dearlove-centered intelligence network and by Christopher Steele specifically. Flynn had been defamed by Dearlove and Stefan Halper, as a possible Russian agent way back in 2014 because he spoke to Russian researcher Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner sponsored by Dearlove's Cambridge Security Forum. Or, at least that was the pretext for the targeting of Flynn, who otherwise defied British intelligence by exposing Western support for terrorist operations in Syria and sought a collaborative relationship with Russia to counter ISIS. Manafort was under FBI investigation throughout 2014 and 2015, largely in retaliation for his role in steering the Party of the Regions to political power in Ukraine.

    In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department.

    In or around June 2016, Christopher Steele began writing his dirty and bogus dossier about Trump and Russia. This is the dossier which claimed that Trump was compromised by Putin and that Putin was coordinating with Trump in the 2016 election. The main "legend" of this full-spectrum information warfare operation run from Britain, was that Donald Trump was receiving "dirt" on Hillary Clinton from Russia. The operations targeting Page and Papadopoulos consisted of multiple attempts to plant fabricated evidence on them which would reflect what Steele himself was fabricating in the dirty dossier. At the very same time, the infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower was being set up. That meeting involved the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, it was alleged in a series of bizarre emails written by British publicist Ron Goldstone to set up the meeting, could deliver "dirt" on Hillary Clinton direct from the Russian government. Veselnitskaya didn't deliver any such dirt. But the entire operation was being monitored by State Department intelligence agent Kyle Parker, an expert on Russia. Parker's emails reveal deep ties to the highest levels of British intelligence and much chatter between them about Trump and Russia.

    A now-changed version of the website for Christopher Steele's firm, Orbis, trumpeted an expertise in information warfare operations, and the networks in which Steele runs are deeply integrated into the British military's Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative is a rapid response propaganda operation using major journalists in the United States and Europe to carry out targeted defamation campaigns. Its central charge, according to documents posted by the hacking group Anonymous, is selling the United States and Western Europe on the immediate need for regime change in Russia, even if that involves war.

    Much has been made by Republicans and other lunkheads in the U.S. Congress of Steele's contacts with Russians for his dossier. They claim that such contacts resulted in a Russian disinformation operation being run through the duped Christopher Steele. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    MI6's Dirty Dossier on Donald Trump: Full-Spectrum Information Warfare

    On its face, Steele's dossier would immediately be recognized as a complete fabrication by any competent intelligence analyst. He cites some 32 sources inside the Russian government for his fabricated claims about Trump. What they allegedly told him is specific enough in time and content to identify them. To believe that the dossier is true or that actual Russians contributed to it, you must also believe that that the British government was willing to roll up this entire network, exposing them, since the intention was for the dossier's wild claims to be published as widely as possible. By all accounts, Britain and the United States together do not have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy tradecraft. Steele's fabrication also uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19% of the energy company Rosneft, (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for lifting sanctions) to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes and misdemeanors.

    Other claims in the dossier were published, publicly, in various Ukrainian publications. The famous claim that Trump directed prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama seems to be plagiarized from similarly fake 2009 British propaganda stories about Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome, "defiling" Putin's bed. According to various sources in the United States, this outrageous claim was made by Sergei Millian. George Papadopoulos has stated that he believes Millian is an FBI informant, recounting in his book how a friend of Millian's blurted this out when Millian, Papadopoulos and the friend were having coffee.

    The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA.

    Despite its obvious fake pedigree, Steele's dossier was laundered into the Justice Department repeatedly, by the CIA and State Department and the Obama White House. It was used to obtain FISA surveillance warrants turning key members of the Trump Campaign into walking microphones. It was circulated endlessly by the Clinton Campaign to a network of reporters in the U.S. known to serve as scribes for the intelligence community. John Brennan used it to conduct a special emergency briefing of the leading members of the U.S. Congress charged with intelligence responsibilities in August of 2016 and to brief Harry Reid, who was Senate Majority Leader at the time. All of this activity meant that the salacious accusation that Trump was a Putin pawn and the FBI was investigating the matter, leaked out and was used by the Clinton Campaign to defame Trump for its electoral advantage. When Trump won, Steele's nonsense received the stamp of the U.S. intelligence community and official currency in the campaign to take out the President.

    As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. The individuals involved might be named Veterans of the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, since all of them also worked on this operation. It is no accident that Victoria Nuland, the case agent for the Ukraine coup, played a major role in bolstering Steele's credentials for the purpose of selling his dirty dossier to the media and to the Justice Department. This went so far as Steele giving a full scale briefing on his fabricated dossier at the State Department in October 2016.

    Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia.

    The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected.

    This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest.

    Sign the Petition: President Trump, Declassify the Docs on the British Role in Russiagate

    Robert , April 24, 2019 at 14:35

    "in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe"

    Perhaps add mainstream media to the list of such sincere believers, they will fire their own real journalists.

    David Walters , April 24, 2019 at 13:14

    "This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies."

    Absolutely correct.

    Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the student body of Texas A&M University, my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent that dark "art".

    Eileen Kuch , April 24, 2019 at 18:13

    Right, David Walters, and see Pompous Pompeo now. The only truths he's told was to a student body of Texas A&M University – his own alma mater – the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steal.
    Even though he's left his post as CIA Director and assumed his current post of Secretary of State. Pompous Pompeo continues his CIA traits of lying, cheating, and stealing. It's in a way similar to a phrase, "A leopard never changes its spots". This is why the DPRK govt issued a Persona Non Grata on Pompous Pompeo – that he isn't a bona fide diplomat, but a CIA official.

    CWG , April 22, 2019 at 17:15

    Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.

    There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably, Putin would have favored Clinton, since she could be bought. Trump can't.

    What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT a FISA warrant. They only obtained that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.

    Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That was apparent ever after Devin Nunes did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying on him.

    Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason) they needed to cover that up as quickly as possible.

    So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying till this very day. The same lie through which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign was being pushed openly.

    The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential Election'.

    They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump through lying to the FISA Court, which again, is treason. According to the Constitution, lying to the FISA court= Treason.

    In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the Attorney General. At all costs, they needed to try and hide what really happened.

    So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire Trump campaign!'.

    'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.

    Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire story. It was only later on that Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.

    The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be able to achieve three main objectives.

    1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential Election.

    2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order to 'take them down'.

    Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a crime that had ANYTHING to with with the elections. NONE.

    They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people are willing to believe the lie'.

    So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many people as possible. 'Russian Collusion, Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia. Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..

    Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?

    Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign.

    There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the Presidential Election.

    That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama regime!!

    So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?

    He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with Russia.

    The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.

    His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude with the Russians'.

    Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.

    They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about. Yet it was not.

    The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.

    It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.

    The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.

    "Russia'.

    So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?

    A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY Russians.

    And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was only a distraction)

    B: Russians hacked the DNC.

    That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.

    Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.

    It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire regime in order to let Clinton win the Presidency.

    That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!

    In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad things.

    That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence' that Russia somehow did bad things.

    Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question 'why did Obama spy on the Trump Campaign'.

    Let's go a bit deeper still.

    Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push? The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?

    After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.

    If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP the real crime', what would happen?

    They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.

    They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing anything wrong, it would show us all THEY were the criminals.

    They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.

    That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon still don't seem to see all that.

    They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is simply not true. It's a Mueller created LIE.

    That LIE = the Insurance Policy.

    What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about preventing Trump from being elected.

    Although true, that is only A.

    They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and would find out they were illegally spying on him!

    The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected President.

    What's the punishment for Treason?

    About Assange and Seth Rich.

    Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which seems to be succesfull, the Deep State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that lie.

    Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.

    If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be exposed.

    No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for his life.

    Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48

    While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.

    Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.

    boxerwars , April 22, 2019 at 17:13

    RE: "A Russian Agent Smear"
    :::

    Was Pat Tillman Murdered?
    JUL 30, 2007

    I don't know, but it seems increasingly conceivable. Just absorb these facts:

    O'Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" again and again when he was killed, O'Neal said

    In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman's head were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
    The motive? I don't know. It's still likeliest it was an accident. But there's some mysterious testimony in the SI report about nameless snipers. A reader suggests the following interpretation:

    News this weekend said that there were "snipers" present and the witnesses didn't remember their names. I believe that's code in the Army–these guys were Delta. In the Tillman incident, these snipers weren't part of the unit and they were never mentioned publicly before. That's a key indicator that they weren't supposed to be acknowledged.

    If you've ever read Blackhawk Down, Mark Bowden explains how he grew frustrated because interviewed Rangers kept referring to "soldiers from another unit" while claiming they didn't know the unit ID or the soldiers' names. It took him months to crack the unit ID and find people from Delta who were present at the fight.

    Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, the Delta operators who earned Medals of Honor in Mogadishu, have always been identified as snipers, too.

    If my theory is correct, the Delta guys could have fired the shots – a three-round burst to the forehead from 50 yards is impossible for normal soldiers and Rangers, but is probably an easy shot for those guys. But because Delta doesn't officially exist and Tillman was a hero, nobody in the Army would want to have to explain exactly how the event went down. Easier just to claim hostile fire until the family forced them to do otherwise.
    This makes some sense to me, although we shouldn't dismiss the chance he was murdered. Tillman was a star and might have aroused jealousy or resentment. He also opposed the Iraq war and was a proud atheist. In Bush's increasingly sectarian military, that might have stirred hostility. I don't know. But I know enough to want a deeper investigation. My atheist readers will no doubt admire the way Tillman left this world, according to the man who was with him:

    As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman's side started praying. "I thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me," Sgt. Bryan O'Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. "He said something like, 'Hey, O'Neal, why are you praying? God can't help us now."'

    (Maybe the Congress can )

    ////// The USA is aghast with "smears" and "internal investigations" and promised but never produced "White Papers" 'as the world turns' and circles continents Dominated by American Military Power / Predominantly Barbarous / Uncivilized Use of Force / and Arrogantly Effective in it's use of Dominating Military Power.

    \\\\ The Poorer Peoples of the World accept their lots-in-life with some acceptance of reality vis-a-vis the "lot-in-life" they've been alleged/assigned.

    /// But How Do We Accept The Fact that our Self-Sacrificiing Hero,Pat Tillman, was slaughtered in Afghanistan,
    (WITH POSITIVE PROOF) – by his own Fellow American soldiers – ???

    !!!! What i'm say'n is, if Tillman represents the Life Surrendering "American Hero"
    WHY DID HIS FELLOW "AMERICAN SOLDIERS" ASSASSINATE & MURDER HIM ???????

    AND WHY IS THIS STORY BURIED ALONG WITH MANY OTHER SMEAR Stories
    that provide prophylactic protection for all the Trump pianist prophylaxis cover

    Up for the Right Wing theft of American Democracy under FDR
    In favor of Ayn Rand's prevalent OBJECTIVISM under Trump.

    "Capitalism and Altruism
    are incompatible
    capitalism and altruism
    cannot coexist in man,
    or in the same society".

    President Trump represents
    Stark & Total Capitalism
    Just as "Conservative Party"
    Core is in The Confederacy
    AKA; The RIGHT WING

    The Right Wing of US Gov't
    Is All About PRESERVING
    Confederate States' Laws
    Written by Thomas Jefferson

    Prior to The Constitution, which
    became the Received/Judicial
    Constitutional Law of the Land in
    The Republic of the "United States"

    Elizabeth K. Burton , April 23, 2019 at 12:50

    It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to deteriorate the more his actions and statements are attacked and countered? You know what happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them down? They get weapons and start killing people.

    There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the least being he's clearly mentally unfit. Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation". Nancy Pelosi stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda "for now". She's now making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are: noise.

    The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one issue to run on next year: getting rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters, the same ones they were positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip service to progressive policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions once the donations start coming, but the common underlying theme was and continues to be "Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."

    In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November.

    Eddie S , April 24, 2019 at 21:14

    Exactly right, EKB -- - you can't ballroom dance without a partner! Also reminds me of the couples you occasionally run into where one partner repeatedly runs-down the other, and you get the feeling that the critical partner doesn't have much going on in his/her life so they deflect that by focusing on the other partner

    Johnny Ryan S , April 22, 2019 at 13:38

    Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know:
    1)Obama Appoints CrowdStrike Officer To Admin Post Two Months Before June 2016 Report On Russia Hacking DNC
    2) CrowdStrike Co-Founder Is Fellow On Russia Hawk Group, Has Connections To George Soros, Ukrainian Billionaire
    3) DNC stayed that the FBI never asked to investigate the servers – that is a lie.
    4) CrowdStrike received $100 million in investments led by Google Capital (since re-branded as CapitalG) in 2015. CapitalG is owned by Alphabet, and Eric Schmidt, Alphabet's chairman, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. More than just supporting Clinton, leaked emails from Wikileaks in November 2016 showed that in 2014 he wanted to have an active role in the campaign.

    -daily caller and dan bongino have been bringing these points up since 2016.

    Deniz , April 22, 2019 at 12:36

    The Right is currently salivating over the tough law enforcement rhetoric coming out of Barr and Trump.

    It reminds me of when Obama was running for office in 2008 when everyone, including myself, was in awe of him. What kept slipping into his soaring anti-intervention speeches, was a commitment to the good war in Afghanistan, which seemed totally out of place with the rest of his rhetoric. The fine print was far more reflective of his administration actions as the rest of it his communications turned out to be just telling people what they wanted to hear.

    War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff.

    Herman , April 22, 2019 at 11:09

    The argument about not inserting Rich and the download is a good one as a defense strategy but doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails. We can only hope that pursuing the truth and producing it will have a cumulative effect and the illusory truth effect will include this truth.

    Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:00

    >>> ". . . doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails."

    The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages.

    Why should we much care how they were acquired and provided to the publisher?

    Lily , April 22, 2019 at 17:55

    That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers.

    All three of them are free, earning millions with their publicity whereas two brave persons who were telling the truth have been tortured and are still in jail. Reality has become like the most horrible nightmare. Everything simply seems to have turned upside down. No writer would invent such a primitive plot. And yet it is the unbelievable reality.

    Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21

    I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create.

    [Apr 28, 2019] Tit For Tat: Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook by Mike Whitney

    Highly recommended!
    It's a dog & pony show. Trump folded very quickly, in april 2017 or three moth after inauguration. He proved to be no fighter, a weakling, a marionette. Appointment of Bolton and Pompeo just added insult to injury. this is classic bait and switch similar to what was executed by Obama after then election. In a way Trump is a Republican version of Obama.
    I wonder if he did not want to fight to the death and sacrifice himself for the course, why he entered the Presidential race at all ? He is not stupid enough not to understand the he will be covered with dirt and all skeletons in his closet will be dug out for display by the US intelligence agencies, which protect that interest of Wall Street and MIC (Israel is a part of the US MIC -- its biggest lobbyist and beneficiary) , not the USA as a sovereign state.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Mueller did none of these things which simply proves that his final report was what many people had expected from the very beginning; a purely political document that twists the truth to achieve Mueller's particular objectives. But to understand what those objectives are, we need to determine what the real goals of the investigation were. ..."
    "... To help sabotage Trump's political agenda ..."
    "... To create a cloud of illegitimacy over Trump's election ..."
    "... And to prevent Trump from implementing his plan to normalize relations with Russia. ..."
    "... These were the real objectives of the investigation, to create a forth branch of government (Special Counsel) that had the power to keep Trump permanently on the defensive while the media made him out to be either an unwitting accomplice in Russian espionage or, even worse, a traitor. ..."
    "... The aim was to reign him in and keep the pressure on until a case could be made for his impeachment. Mueller played a key role in this travesty. His assignment was undermine Trump's moral authority by brandishing the cudgel of criminal indictment over his head. This is how a D.O.J. appointee, who had never held public office in his life, became the most powerful man in Washington. ..."
    "... "We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments . Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States] We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will." ..."
    "... Imagine how terrified the foreign policy establishment must have been when they heard Trump utter these words. No more regime change wars? Are you kidding me? That's what we do: Regime-Change-Is-Us., ..."
    "... Interesting, isn't it? Here's Hillary, the "liberal" Democrat, pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, stated clearly that "Right now for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia." In other words, if Hillary had been elected, she was all ready to flip the switch and start WW3 ASAP. Is it any wonder why the establishment loved her? ..."
    "... War, war and more war, that's the Hillary Doctrine in a nutshell. It was Hillary's relentless hawkishness that pushed leftists into the Trump camp, not that they ever believed that Trump was anything more than what he appeared to be, an unprincipled narcissist with an insatiable lust for power. But they did hope that his dovish comments would steer the country away from nuclear annihilation. That was the hope at least, but then everything changed. And after it changed, Mueller released his report saying: "Trump is not guilty after all!" ..."
    "... Think about it: In mid December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Syria within 30 days. But instead of withdrawal, the US has been sending hundreds of trucks with weapons to the front lines. The US has also increased its troop levels on the ground, the YPG (Kurdish militia, US proxies) are digging in on the Syria-Turkish border, and the US hasn't lifted a finger to implement its agreements with NATO-ally Turkey under the Manbij Roadmap. The US is not withdrawing from Syria. Washington is beefing up its defenses and settling in for the long-haul. But, why? Why did Trump change his mind and do a complete about-face? ..."
    "... Trump made these outrageous demands knowing that they would never be accepted. Which was the point, because the foreign policy establishment doesn't want a deal. They want regime change, they've made that perfectly clear. But wasn't Trump supposed to change all that? Wasn't Trump going to pursue "a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past"? ..."
    "... There are other signs of capitulation too; like providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi's genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and "stop toppling regimes and overthrowing governments." ' At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the warhawks he once criticized. ..."
    "... Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon, he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump "the peacemaker" is no where to be found, while Trump the 'madman with a knife' is on the loose. ..."
    "... It's a dog & pony show. ..."
    Apr 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,

    Why did Robert Mueller end the Russia investigation when he did? He could have let it drag it out for another year or so and severely hurt Trump's chances for reelection. But he didn't do that. Why?

    Of course, we're assuming that the investigation was never intended to uncover the truth. If it was, then Mueller would have interviewed Julian Assange, Craig Murray and retired members of the Intelligence Community (Ray McGovern, Bill Binney) who have shown that the Podesta emails were leaked by an insider (on a thumbdrive) not hacked by foreign agents. Mueller would have also seized the servers at DNC headquarters and done the necessary forensic investigation, which he never did.

    He also would have indicted senior-level agents at the FBI and DOJ who improperly obtained FISA warrants by withholding critical information from the FISA court. He didn't do that either.

    Mueller did none of these things which simply proves that his final report was what many people had expected from the very beginning; a purely political document that twists the truth to achieve Mueller's particular objectives. But to understand what those objectives are, we need to determine what the real goals of the investigation were. So, here they are:

    1. To help sabotage Trump's political agenda
    2. To create a cloud of illegitimacy over Trump's election
    3. And to prevent Trump from implementing his plan to normalize relations with Russia.

    These were the real objectives of the investigation, to create a forth branch of government (Special Counsel) that had the power to keep Trump permanently on the defensive while the media made him out to be either an unwitting accomplice in Russian espionage or, even worse, a traitor.

    The aim was to reign him in and keep the pressure on until a case could be made for his impeachment. Mueller played a key role in this travesty. His assignment was undermine Trump's moral authority by brandishing the cudgel of criminal indictment over his head. This is how a D.O.J. appointee, who had never held public office in his life, became the most powerful man in Washington.

    My question is simply this: Why did Mueller give up all that power when he did?

    I think I can answer that, but first, we need a little more background. Check out this quote from candidate Trump in 2016:

    "We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments . Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States] We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will."

    Imagine how terrified the foreign policy establishment must have been when they heard Trump utter these words. No more regime change wars? Are you kidding me? That's what we do: Regime-Change-Is-Us., and now this upstart, New York real estate tycoon is promising to do a complete 180 and move in another direction altogether. No more destabilizing coups, no more bloody military interventions, instead, we're going to work collaboratively with countries like Russia and China to see if we can settle regional disputes and fight terrorism together? Really?

    At the same time Trump was promising this new era of "peace, understanding, and good will," Hillary Clinton was issuing her war whoop at every opportunity. Here's candidate Hillary trying to drum up support for taking on the Russians in Syria:

    "The situation in Syria is catastrophic. And every day that goes by, we see the results of the Assad regime in partnership with the Iranians on the ground, and the Russians in the air When I was Secretary of State, I advocated and I advocate today a no-fly zone and safe zones."

    Interesting, isn't it? Here's Hillary, the "liberal" Democrat, pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, stated clearly that "Right now for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia." In other words, if Hillary had been elected, she was all ready to flip the switch and start WW3 ASAP. Is it any wonder why the establishment loved her?

    "We have to work more closely with our partners and allies on the ground," boomed Hillary, meaning that she fully supported the continued use of jihadist proxies in the fight against Assad. "I do think the use of special forces, the use of enablers and trainers in Iraq, which has had some positive effects, are very much in our interests, and so I do support what is happening."

    War, war and more war, that's the Hillary Doctrine in a nutshell. It was Hillary's relentless hawkishness that pushed leftists into the Trump camp, not that they ever believed that Trump was anything more than what he appeared to be, an unprincipled narcissist with an insatiable lust for power. But they did hope that his dovish comments would steer the country away from nuclear annihilation. That was the hope at least, but then everything changed. And after it changed, Mueller released his report saying: "Trump is not guilty after all!"

    So, what changed? Trump changed.

    Think about it: In mid December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Syria within 30 days. But instead of withdrawal, the US has been sending hundreds of trucks with weapons to the front lines. The US has also increased its troop levels on the ground, the YPG (Kurdish militia, US proxies) are digging in on the Syria-Turkish border, and the US hasn't lifted a finger to implement its agreements with NATO-ally Turkey under the Manbij Roadmap. The US is not withdrawing from Syria. Washington is beefing up its defenses and settling in for the long-haul. But, why? Why did Trump change his mind and do a complete about-face?

    The same thing happened in Korea. For a while it looked like Trump was serious about cutting a deal with Kim Jong un. But then, sometime after the first summit, he began to backpeddle. He never honored any of his commitments under the Panmunjom Declaration and he never reciprocated for Kim's cessation of all nuclear weapons and ballistic missile testing. Trump has made no effort to "build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula" or to strengthen trust between the two leaders. Then, at the Hanoi Summit, Trump blindsided Kim by making demands that had never even been previously discussed. Kim was told that the North must destroy all of its chemical and biological weapons as well as its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs before the US will take reciprocal steps. In other words, Trump demanded that Kim completely and irreversibly disarm with the feint hope that the US would eventually lift sanctions.

    Trump made these outrageous demands knowing that they would never be accepted. Which was the point, because the foreign policy establishment doesn't want a deal. They want regime change, they've made that perfectly clear. But wasn't Trump supposed to change all that? Wasn't Trump going to pursue "a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past"?

    Yes, that was Trump's campaign promise. So, what happened?

    There are other signs of capitulation too; like providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi's genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and "stop toppling regimes and overthrowing governments." ' At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the warhawks he once criticized.

    Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon, he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump "the peacemaker" is no where to be found, while Trump the 'madman with a knife' is on the loose.

    Is that why Mueller let Trump off the hook? Was there a quid pro quo: "You follow our foreign policy directives and we'll make Mueller disappear?

    It sure looks like it. play_arrow 2 Reply Report

    Ajax-1 , 24 minutes ago link

    Why? Because logical clear thinking Americans have Russia fatigue. The Deep State knows that the longer the Witch Hunt lasts, the stronger Trump gets.

    stant , 24 minutes ago link

    the report was finished last august. hed got all the juice in that squeeze. but i also guess he got a call from somebodys in the GOG mafia[continuity of .gov] deepstate after all is their little bitch

    youshallnotkill , 27 minutes ago link

    Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook? Why did Epstein only get a slap on the wrist? Why is his lawyer defending Trump on air ? Why did the MSM never look into the credible allegations against Clinton and Trump with regards to Epstein ?

    I have an inkling that the answer to these questions is all one and the same.

    PopeRatzo , 30 minutes ago link

    Donald Trump sure isn't acting like someone who's been "let off the hook".

    Francis Marx , 38 minutes ago link

    Maybe it just worked out the way it did and there is no conspiracy on Mueller's part.

    nmewn , 28 minutes ago link

    Likely.

    He had to stop before he implicated himself. For instance, still waiting on "the why" he never put Steele or McCabe or Hillary or Perkins Coie or Rosenstein or Comey etc under oath when it was...THEY... who supplied false evidence to a FISA court , "evidence gathered" (according to Steele) from...ta daaah!...Russians ;-)

    LetThemEatRand , 36 minutes ago link

    You can drive yourself crazy wondering whether it was all theater from the start, or whether they put a gun to the head of the guy who was going to expose it was theater until he started playing along. End result, theater.

    Stop buying tickets.

    Lord Raglan , 2 minutes ago link

    exactly. Just like you can wonder why Justice John Roberts turned on Obamacare and **** on conservatives. Was he sincere or did he get a 3:00 am phone call that if he didn't uphold it, his wife and kids would die in an unfortunate accident?

    Anonymous_Beneficiary , 38 minutes ago link

    If you have to ask...perhaps you're a moron. It's a dog & pony show.

    nmewn , 33 minutes ago link

    "Let Him Off The Hook?"

    Oh, I dunno...maybe because even with a crack team of demoncraft operatives, Deep State Hillary deadenders and a limitless supply of federal funding even they couldn't come up with "Russian collusion" because...none ever existed? ;-)

    [Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Tenzin Nordron , 1 week ago

    Trump's no embarrassment. He's the accurate representative of the ruthless, con-artistry of the Empire of Chaos.

    Lois Odea , 1 week ago

    Two great men. Thank you both for bringing truth.

    mistor Whiskers , 1 week ago

    I've been calling it vodkagate since day one and just watching these propagandists getting drunk on it.

    JoanneLG1960 , 1 week ago

    What a treat!

    IAM REAL , 1 week ago

    Aaron Mate and Greenwald are the best of the best.

    Larkinchance , 1 week ago

    In case after case, Maddow and others in corporate media used crafted language that was speculation designed to appear as cold hard facts to the the viewer. This was no only bad reporting, It was a conspiracy of sorts. Maddow regularly would say, "If Russia did this, it would be an attack on the US..." Leaving the viewer with the impression that "Russia did this!". Then she would go to stir the cauldron for war.. This rises to the level of a crime.

    Dan Harris , 1 week ago

    Aaron Mate is the absolute perfect foil to Jimmy when he is on the Jimmy Dore show. It is hilarious.

    real eyes realize real lies , 1 week ago

    EXCELLENT!!!!!!!

    Sandra Ellis , 1 week ago

    Perfect!!! So glad you had Aaron on.

    Larkinchance , 1 week ago

    Since when is Hilary Clinton on the left? Since when are the are e-mails of the democratic party protected government secrets? Are the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs important? Is it strange that after 18 long years of war there is no anti-war movement? Are the people reporting on Cable News real journalists? Well done Aaron and Chris!

    The One and 0nly , 1 week ago

    Israel gate

    John Harrison , 1 week ago

    I honestly am beginning to believe the Democratic leadership actually likes having Donald Trump as President

    Sandor Daroci , 1 week ago

    wow, go Aaron.

    Dan Campbell , 1 week ago

    I will try to resist the temptation to look in the comments section, while listening. If any interview warrants full attention, it's Aaron and Chris.

    ewa wyso , 1 week ago

    Yay! Aaron MatÉ !!!

    Sean , 1 week ago

    2 of my favorite journalists join to talk facts. Love it!

    Wretch Gunk , 1 week ago

    democrats would rather Turmp be president than Bernie, they will throw the election before they let Bernie create change... but then even if he is elected, it wont do much good with corporate shills in congress in senate

    robb , 1 week ago

    I enjoy listening to Aaron, a person of integrity and also a down to earth, interesting journalist who has worked hard to uncover the truth on this subject and knows it backwards and forwards. I like when he can't help but laugh at certain absurdities in mainstream media coverage of Russiagate.

    Pas Oli , 1 week ago

    Collusion? More like ConFusion GPS

    Ivette Correa , 1 week ago

    Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!

    [Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Shannon Sun/Moon Virgo , 1 week ago

    Fabulous interview! Thank you both for your extraordinary integrity & courage ❤ Free Julian Assange ✊❤

    B. Greene , 1 week ago

    More honest journalism in 28 minutes than in 3 years of MSNBC or Fox.

    MrB1923 , 1 week ago

    THIS is journalism. EVERYTHING else is propaganda.

    Steven William Bayless Parks , 1 week ago

    It 's incredible that we have to watch Russian TV to find out what's going on in the USA.

    S Douglas , 1 week ago

    It's great to see some non-propagandist journalism.

    Winston Smith in Oceania , 1 week ago

    Big fan of Aaron Maté here!

    Mike2020able , 1 week ago

    Chomsky : ' Israel, not Russia, interferes With US Election '

    J.L. Goodman , 1 week ago

    I've got to admit,I get a massive dopamine rush hearing these two sane, intelligent, critical thinkers, skillfully dissect this convoluted quadrafuck that has wasted some much of our precious time. I literally feel washed clean for a moment.

    Amy Marie , 1 week ago

    Keep up the awesome work Aaron n RT😉

    Tertiary Adjunct , 1 week ago (edited)

    RT, give Aaron a show.

    Steven Yourke , 1 week ago

    You can count the number of real journalists left in the US on two hands. Here are two of the best and the bravest. Thank you, RT, for providing us with a platform for real journalists.

    Scott Turner , 1 week ago (edited)

    Thanks for this. Aaron Maté and Chris Hedges keep many people somewhat sane in an insane media world. Depressed, but at least somewhat sane. lol

    Joy Mazumdar , 1 week ago

    as an outsider.....i view the whole thing as a smokescreen...........keeping people occupied while planning & carrying out worse things that are being done in the dark..........

    Lee Vanderheiden , 1 week ago

    Thanks, Chris. What a great interview. Aaron Mate' is an up and coming star journalist!

    Matthew Iverson , 1 week ago

    Omg I love you guys! Omg I could cry!

    Ilia Pagan , 1 week ago

    Aaron Mate's courageous stance regarding Palestinians deserves all my respect and support. His analysts of Rusiagate and all the fanfare associated with the so called investigations seems most accurate.

    Boris Tabare Ag , 1 week ago

    Aaron Maté: the man who killed Luke Harding!!!

    TheJohnswa , 1 week ago

    Maddow has zero integrity left

    Brooks Rogers , 1 week ago

    Been a long time fan of Hedges and recent fan of Mate. Great conversation between these two critical thinkers so scarce these troubled days.

    Jesse Birkett , 1 week ago

    This is one the best episodes On Contact has ever done.

    [Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks. ..."
    "... Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done. ..."
    "... President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. ..."
    "... The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence, ..."
    "... According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. ..."
    "... This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. ..."
    "... Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control. ..."
    "... In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department. ..."
    "... The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA. ..."
    "... As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. ..."
    "... Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia. ..."
    "... The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected. ..."
    "... This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest. ..."
    "... Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know: ..."
    "... War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff. ..."
    "... The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages. ..."
    "... That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers. ..."
    Apr 22, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    The British Role in 'Russiagate' Is About to Be Fully Exposed April 8, 2019 20190408-russiagate-exposed-brits.pdf The "fake news" media has now dropped its pretense of having ever had any intention of allowing the truth -- as documented in U.S. Attorney General Barr's summary of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's report, exonerating President Donald Trump of having "conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" -- to thoroughly refute the Russiagate "Big Lie." Soon, however, it is certain that the deliberate, British Intelligence-originated, military-grade disinformation campaign carried out against the United States, including to this day, will be exposed.

    The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks.

    "It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat," says the Chinese proverb. Yet, although the Mueller report was called a "nothing burger," it was not: it still presented the potentially lethal lie that twelve Russian gremlins, code-named Guccifer 2.0, hacked the DNC. Sundry media meatheads thus continue to blog and broadcast about "what else is really there."

    The false Russian hack story, still being repeated, marches on, undeterred, like the emperor without any clothes. One lame-brained variation, promoted in order to cover up the British role, states that Hillary Clinton, rather than Trump, colluded with the Russians. It is being repeated by Republicans and Democrats alike, some of them malicious, some of them confused, and all of them completely wrong. The media, such as the failed New York Times and various electronic media, must be forced to either admit the truth, or be even more thoroughly discredited than they already have been. They must stop their constant repetition of this Joseph Goebbels-like Big Lie. There must be a vigorous dissemination of the truth by all those journalists, politicians, activists and citizens that love truth more than their own assumptions, including about President Trump, or other dearly-held systems of false belief.

    Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done.

    A New Cultural Paradigm

    The world is actually on the verge of ending the military conflicts among the major world powers, such as Russia, China, the United States, and India. These four powers, and not the City of London, are the key fulcrum around which a new era in humanity's future will be decided. A new monetary and credit system brought into being through these four powers would foster the greatest physical economic growth in the history of humanity. In addition, discussions involving Italy working with China on the industrialization of the African continent (discussions which could soon also involve the United States) show that sections of Europe want to join China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and leave the dying trans-Atlantic financial empire behind.

    The recent announcement of a United States commitment to return to the Moon by 2024 can, in particular, become the basis for a proposal to other nations -- for example, China, Russia, and India, all of whom are space powers of demonstrated capability -- to resolve their differences on Earth in a higher, joint mission. As Russia's Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin said in a recent interview:

    "I am a fierce proponent of international cooperation, including with Americans, because their country is big and technologically advanced, and they can make good partners Especially since personal and professional relations between Roscosmos and NASA at the working level are great."

    There is also the possibility of ending the danger of thermonuclear war. President Trump, speaking on April 4 of the prospects for world peace, stated:

    "Between Russia, China, and us, we're all making hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is ridiculous. I think it's much better if we all got together and didn't make these weapons those three countries I think can come together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace."

    This is a statement of real importance. Such an outlook is a rejection of the "perpetual crisis/perpetual war" outlook of the Bush-Obama Administration, a four-term "war presidency" which was abruptly, unexpectedly ended in 2016. The British were not amused.

    It is to stop this new cultural paradigm, pivoted on the Pacific and the potential Four Powers alliance, that British imperial forces have deployed. The 2016 election of President Trump, and his personal friendship with President Xi Jinping and desire to work with President Putin, are an intolerable strategic threat to the eighteenth-century geopolitics of the British empire. They have repeatedly used Russiagate to disrupt the process of deliberation among Presidents Xi, Trump, and Putin, thus increasing the danger of war. Russiagate, in the interest of international security, must be ended by exposing it for the utter fraud that it is.

    The Truth Set Free

    President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free.

    The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence,

    "The history of the present Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the undermining of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."

    DOCUMENTATION

    While Robert Mueller found that there was "no collusion" between Donald Trump or the Trump Campaign and Russia, he also filed two indictments regarding alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first alleges that 12 members of Russian Military Intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta and delivered the purloined files to WikiLeaks for strategic publication before the July 2016 Democratic National Convention and in October 2016, one month before the election. The second indictment charges the Internet Research Agency, a Russian internet merchandising and marketing firm, with running social media campaigns in the U.S. in 2016 designed to impact the election. When the fuller version of the Mueller report becomes public, it is certain to recharge the claims of Russian interference based on the so-called background "evidence" supporting these indictments.

    The good news, however, is that investigations in the United States and Britain, have unearthed significant contrary evidence exposing British Intelligence, NATO, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine, as the actual foreign actors in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We provide a short summary of the main aspects of that evidence to spark further investigations of the British intelligence networks, entities, and methods at issue, internationally. More detailed accounts concerning specific aspects of what we recite here can be found on our website.

    The Russian Hack That Wasn't

    The Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an association of former U.S. intelligence officials, have demonstrated that the Russian hack of the DNC alleged by Robert Mueller, was more likely an internal leak, rather than a hack conducted over the internet. William Binney, who conducted the main investigations for the VIPS, spent 30 years at the National Security Agency, becoming Technical Director. He designed the sorts of NSA programs that would detect a Russian hack if one occurred. Binney conducted an actual forensic examination of the DNC files released by WikiLeaks, and the related files circulated by the persona Guccifer 2.0, who Robert Mueller claims is a GRU creation. Binney has demonstrated that the calculated transfer speeds and metadata characteristics of these files are consistent with downloading to a thumb drive or storage device rather than an internet-based hack. This supports the account by WikiLeaks of how it obtained the files. According to WikiLeaks and former Ambassador Craig Murray, they were obtained from a person who was not a Russian state actor of any kind, in Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks offered to tell the Justice Department all about this, and actual negotiations to this effect were proceeding in early 2017, when Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director James Comey acted to sabotage and end the negotiations.

    Further, as opposed to the hyperbole in the media and in Robert Mueller's indictment, analysis of the Internet Research Agency's alleged "weaponization" of Facebook in 2016 involved a paltry total of $46,000 in Facebook ads and $4,700 spent on Google platforms . In an election in which the major campaigns spend tens of thousands of dollars every day on these platforms, whatever the IRA thought it was doing in its amateurish and juvenile memes and tropes was like throwing a stone in the ocean. Most of these activities occurred after the election and never mentioned either candidate. The interpretation that these ads were designed to draw clicks and website traffic, rather than influence the election, must be considered.

    The "evidence" for Mueller's GRU hacking indictment was provided, in part, by CrowdStrike, the DNC vendor that originated the claims that the Russians had hacked that entity. CrowdStrike is closely associated with the Atlantic Council's Digital Research Lab (DRL), an operation jointly funded by NATO's Strategic Communications Center and the U.S. State Department, to counter Russian "hybrid warfare." CrowdStrike has been caught more than once falsely attributing hacks to the Russians and the Atlantic Council's DRL is a font of anti-Russian intelligence operations.

    The British Target Trump

    According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. The former head of the Russia Desk for MI6 and protégé of Sir Richard Dearlove, Christopher Steele, fresh from working for British Intelligence, the FBI, and U.S. State Department in the 2014 Ukraine coup, assembled in 2016 a phony dossier called Operation Charlemagne, claiming widespread Russian interference in European elections, including in the Brexit vote. By the spring of 2016, Steele was contributing to a British/U.S. intelligence task force on the Trump Campaign which had been convened at CIA headquarters under John Brennan's direction.

    This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. The personnel employed in these operations all had multiple connections to the British firm Hakluyt, to Steele's firm Orbis, and to the British military's Integrity Initiative. Sometime in the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then head of GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief John Brennan personally. Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control.

    Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were already on the radar and under investigation by the same British, Dearlove-centered intelligence network and by Christopher Steele specifically. Flynn had been defamed by Dearlove and Stefan Halper, as a possible Russian agent way back in 2014 because he spoke to Russian researcher Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner sponsored by Dearlove's Cambridge Security Forum. Or, at least that was the pretext for the targeting of Flynn, who otherwise defied British intelligence by exposing Western support for terrorist operations in Syria and sought a collaborative relationship with Russia to counter ISIS. Manafort was under FBI investigation throughout 2014 and 2015, largely in retaliation for his role in steering the Party of the Regions to political power in Ukraine.

    In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department.

    In or around June 2016, Christopher Steele began writing his dirty and bogus dossier about Trump and Russia. This is the dossier which claimed that Trump was compromised by Putin and that Putin was coordinating with Trump in the 2016 election. The main "legend" of this full-spectrum information warfare operation run from Britain, was that Donald Trump was receiving "dirt" on Hillary Clinton from Russia. The operations targeting Page and Papadopoulos consisted of multiple attempts to plant fabricated evidence on them which would reflect what Steele himself was fabricating in the dirty dossier. At the very same time, the infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower was being set up. That meeting involved the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, it was alleged in a series of bizarre emails written by British publicist Ron Goldstone to set up the meeting, could deliver "dirt" on Hillary Clinton direct from the Russian government. Veselnitskaya didn't deliver any such dirt. But the entire operation was being monitored by State Department intelligence agent Kyle Parker, an expert on Russia. Parker's emails reveal deep ties to the highest levels of British intelligence and much chatter between them about Trump and Russia.

    A now-changed version of the website for Christopher Steele's firm, Orbis, trumpeted an expertise in information warfare operations, and the networks in which Steele runs are deeply integrated into the British military's Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative is a rapid response propaganda operation using major journalists in the United States and Europe to carry out targeted defamation campaigns. Its central charge, according to documents posted by the hacking group Anonymous, is selling the United States and Western Europe on the immediate need for regime change in Russia, even if that involves war.

    Much has been made by Republicans and other lunkheads in the U.S. Congress of Steele's contacts with Russians for his dossier. They claim that such contacts resulted in a Russian disinformation operation being run through the duped Christopher Steele. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    MI6's Dirty Dossier on Donald Trump: Full-Spectrum Information Warfare

    On its face, Steele's dossier would immediately be recognized as a complete fabrication by any competent intelligence analyst. He cites some 32 sources inside the Russian government for his fabricated claims about Trump. What they allegedly told him is specific enough in time and content to identify them. To believe that the dossier is true or that actual Russians contributed to it, you must also believe that that the British government was willing to roll up this entire network, exposing them, since the intention was for the dossier's wild claims to be published as widely as possible. By all accounts, Britain and the United States together do not have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy tradecraft. Steele's fabrication also uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19% of the energy company Rosneft, (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for lifting sanctions) to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes and misdemeanors.

    Other claims in the dossier were published, publicly, in various Ukrainian publications. The famous claim that Trump directed prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama seems to be plagiarized from similarly fake 2009 British propaganda stories about Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome, "defiling" Putin's bed. According to various sources in the United States, this outrageous claim was made by Sergei Millian. George Papadopoulos has stated that he believes Millian is an FBI informant, recounting in his book how a friend of Millian's blurted this out when Millian, Papadopoulos and the friend were having coffee.

    The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA.

    Despite its obvious fake pedigree, Steele's dossier was laundered into the Justice Department repeatedly, by the CIA and State Department and the Obama White House. It was used to obtain FISA surveillance warrants turning key members of the Trump Campaign into walking microphones. It was circulated endlessly by the Clinton Campaign to a network of reporters in the U.S. known to serve as scribes for the intelligence community. John Brennan used it to conduct a special emergency briefing of the leading members of the U.S. Congress charged with intelligence responsibilities in August of 2016 and to brief Harry Reid, who was Senate Majority Leader at the time. All of this activity meant that the salacious accusation that Trump was a Putin pawn and the FBI was investigating the matter, leaked out and was used by the Clinton Campaign to defame Trump for its electoral advantage. When Trump won, Steele's nonsense received the stamp of the U.S. intelligence community and official currency in the campaign to take out the President.

    As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. The individuals involved might be named Veterans of the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, since all of them also worked on this operation. It is no accident that Victoria Nuland, the case agent for the Ukraine coup, played a major role in bolstering Steele's credentials for the purpose of selling his dirty dossier to the media and to the Justice Department. This went so far as Steele giving a full scale briefing on his fabricated dossier at the State Department in October 2016.

    Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia.

    The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected.

    This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest.

    Sign the Petition: President Trump, Declassify the Docs on the British Role in Russiagate

    Robert , April 24, 2019 at 14:35

    "in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe"

    Perhaps add mainstream media to the list of such sincere believers, they will fire their own real journalists.

    David Walters , April 24, 2019 at 13:14

    "This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies."

    Absolutely correct.

    Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the student body of Texas A&M University, my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent that dark "art".

    Eileen Kuch , April 24, 2019 at 18:13

    Right, David Walters, and see Pompous Pompeo now. The only truths he's told was to a student body of Texas A&M University – his own alma mater – the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steal.
    Even though he's left his post as CIA Director and assumed his current post of Secretary of State. Pompous Pompeo continues his CIA traits of lying, cheating, and stealing. It's in a way similar to a phrase, "A leopard never changes its spots". This is why the DPRK govt issued a Persona Non Grata on Pompous Pompeo – that he isn't a bona fide diplomat, but a CIA official.

    CWG , April 22, 2019 at 17:15

    Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.

    There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably, Putin would have favored Clinton, since she could be bought. Trump can't.

    What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT a FISA warrant. They only obtained that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.

    Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That was apparent ever after Devin Nunes did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying on him.

    Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason) they needed to cover that up as quickly as possible.

    So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying till this very day. The same lie through which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign was being pushed openly.

    The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential Election'.

    They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump through lying to the FISA Court, which again, is treason. According to the Constitution, lying to the FISA court= Treason.

    In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the Attorney General. At all costs, they needed to try and hide what really happened.

    So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire Trump campaign!'.

    'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.

    Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire story. It was only later on that Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.

    The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be able to achieve three main objectives.

    1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential Election.

    2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order to 'take them down'.

    Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a crime that had ANYTHING to with with the elections. NONE.

    They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people are willing to believe the lie'.

    So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many people as possible. 'Russian Collusion, Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia. Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..

    Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?

    Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign.

    There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the Presidential Election.

    That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama regime!!

    So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?

    He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with Russia.

    The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.

    His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude with the Russians'.

    Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.

    They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about. Yet it was not.

    The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.

    It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.

    The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.

    "Russia'.

    So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?

    A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY Russians.

    And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was only a distraction)

    B: Russians hacked the DNC.

    That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.

    Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.

    It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire regime in order to let Clinton win the Presidency.

    That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!

    In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad things.

    That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence' that Russia somehow did bad things.

    Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question 'why did Obama spy on the Trump Campaign'.

    Let's go a bit deeper still.

    Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push? The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?

    After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.

    If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP the real crime', what would happen?

    They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.

    They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing anything wrong, it would show us all THEY were the criminals.

    They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.

    That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon still don't seem to see all that.

    They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is simply not true. It's a Mueller created LIE.

    That LIE = the Insurance Policy.

    What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about preventing Trump from being elected.

    Although true, that is only A.

    They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and would find out they were illegally spying on him!

    The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected President.

    What's the punishment for Treason?

    About Assange and Seth Rich.

    Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which seems to be succesfull, the Deep State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that lie.

    Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.

    If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be exposed.

    No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for his life.

    Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48

    While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.

    Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.

    boxerwars , April 22, 2019 at 17:13

    RE: "A Russian Agent Smear"
    :::

    Was Pat Tillman Murdered?
    JUL 30, 2007

    I don't know, but it seems increasingly conceivable. Just absorb these facts:

    O'Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" again and again when he was killed, O'Neal said

    In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman's head were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
    The motive? I don't know. It's still likeliest it was an accident. But there's some mysterious testimony in the SI report about nameless snipers. A reader suggests the following interpretation:

    News this weekend said that there were "snipers" present and the witnesses didn't remember their names. I believe that's code in the Army–these guys were Delta. In the Tillman incident, these snipers weren't part of the unit and they were never mentioned publicly before. That's a key indicator that they weren't supposed to be acknowledged.

    If you've ever read Blackhawk Down, Mark Bowden explains how he grew frustrated because interviewed Rangers kept referring to "soldiers from another unit" while claiming they didn't know the unit ID or the soldiers' names. It took him months to crack the unit ID and find people from Delta who were present at the fight.

    Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, the Delta operators who earned Medals of Honor in Mogadishu, have always been identified as snipers, too.

    If my theory is correct, the Delta guys could have fired the shots – a three-round burst to the forehead from 50 yards is impossible for normal soldiers and Rangers, but is probably an easy shot for those guys. But because Delta doesn't officially exist and Tillman was a hero, nobody in the Army would want to have to explain exactly how the event went down. Easier just to claim hostile fire until the family forced them to do otherwise.
    This makes some sense to me, although we shouldn't dismiss the chance he was murdered. Tillman was a star and might have aroused jealousy or resentment. He also opposed the Iraq war and was a proud atheist. In Bush's increasingly sectarian military, that might have stirred hostility. I don't know. But I know enough to want a deeper investigation. My atheist readers will no doubt admire the way Tillman left this world, according to the man who was with him:

    As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman's side started praying. "I thought I was praying to myself, but I guess he heard me," Sgt. Bryan O'Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. "He said something like, 'Hey, O'Neal, why are you praying? God can't help us now."'

    (Maybe the Congress can )

    ////// The USA is aghast with "smears" and "internal investigations" and promised but never produced "White Papers" 'as the world turns' and circles continents Dominated by American Military Power / Predominantly Barbarous / Uncivilized Use of Force / and Arrogantly Effective in it's use of Dominating Military Power.

    \\\\ The Poorer Peoples of the World accept their lots-in-life with some acceptance of reality vis-a-vis the "lot-in-life" they've been alleged/assigned.

    /// But How Do We Accept The Fact that our Self-Sacrificiing Hero,Pat Tillman, was slaughtered in Afghanistan,
    (WITH POSITIVE PROOF) – by his own Fellow American soldiers – ???

    !!!! What i'm say'n is, if Tillman represents the Life Surrendering "American Hero"
    WHY DID HIS FELLOW "AMERICAN SOLDIERS" ASSASSINATE & MURDER HIM ???????

    AND WHY IS THIS STORY BURIED ALONG WITH MANY OTHER SMEAR Stories
    that provide prophylactic protection for all the Trump pianist prophylaxis cover

    Up for the Right Wing theft of American Democracy under FDR
    In favor of Ayn Rand's prevalent OBJECTIVISM under Trump.

    "Capitalism and Altruism
    are incompatible
    capitalism and altruism
    cannot coexist in man,
    or in the same society".

    President Trump represents
    Stark & Total Capitalism
    Just as "Conservative Party"
    Core is in The Confederacy
    AKA; The RIGHT WING

    The Right Wing of US Gov't
    Is All About PRESERVING
    Confederate States' Laws
    Written by Thomas Jefferson

    Prior to The Constitution, which
    became the Received/Judicial
    Constitutional Law of the Land in
    The Republic of the "United States"

    Elizabeth K. Burton , April 23, 2019 at 12:50

    It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to deteriorate the more his actions and statements are attacked and countered? You know what happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them down? They get weapons and start killing people.

    There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the least being he's clearly mentally unfit. Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation". Nancy Pelosi stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda "for now". She's now making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are: noise.

    The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one issue to run on next year: getting rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters, the same ones they were positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip service to progressive policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions once the donations start coming, but the common underlying theme was and continues to be "Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."

    In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November.

    Eddie S , April 24, 2019 at 21:14

    Exactly right, EKB -- - you can't ballroom dance without a partner! Also reminds me of the couples you occasionally run into where one partner repeatedly runs-down the other, and you get the feeling that the critical partner doesn't have much going on in his/her life so they deflect that by focusing on the other partner

    Johnny Ryan S , April 22, 2019 at 13:38

    Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know:
    1)Obama Appoints CrowdStrike Officer To Admin Post Two Months Before June 2016 Report On Russia Hacking DNC
    2) CrowdStrike Co-Founder Is Fellow On Russia Hawk Group, Has Connections To George Soros, Ukrainian Billionaire
    3) DNC stayed that the FBI never asked to investigate the servers – that is a lie.
    4) CrowdStrike received $100 million in investments led by Google Capital (since re-branded as CapitalG) in 2015. CapitalG is owned by Alphabet, and Eric Schmidt, Alphabet's chairman, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. More than just supporting Clinton, leaked emails from Wikileaks in November 2016 showed that in 2014 he wanted to have an active role in the campaign.

    -daily caller and dan bongino have been bringing these points up since 2016.

    Deniz , April 22, 2019 at 12:36

    The Right is currently salivating over the tough law enforcement rhetoric coming out of Barr and Trump.

    It reminds me of when Obama was running for office in 2008 when everyone, including myself, was in awe of him. What kept slipping into his soaring anti-intervention speeches, was a commitment to the good war in Afghanistan, which seemed totally out of place with the rest of his rhetoric. The fine print was far more reflective of his administration actions as the rest of it his communications turned out to be just telling people what they wanted to hear.

    War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff.

    Herman , April 22, 2019 at 11:09

    The argument about not inserting Rich and the download is a good one as a defense strategy but doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails. We can only hope that pursuing the truth and producing it will have a cumulative effect and the illusory truth effect will include this truth.

    Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:00

    >>> ". . . doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails."

    The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages.

    Why should we much care how they were acquired and provided to the publisher?

    Lily , April 22, 2019 at 17:55

    That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers.

    All three of them are free, earning millions with their publicity whereas two brave persons who were telling the truth have been tortured and are still in jail. Reality has become like the most horrible nightmare. Everything simply seems to have turned upside down. No writer would invent such a primitive plot. And yet it is the unbelievable reality.

    Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21

    I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create.

    [Apr 28, 2019] Tit For Tat: Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook by Mike Whitney

    Highly recommended!
    It's a dog & pony show. Trump folded very quickly, in april 2017 or three moth after inauguration. He proved to be no fighter, a weakling, a marionette. Appointment of Bolton and Pompeo just added insult to injury. this is classic bait and switch similar to what was executed by Obama after then election. In a way Trump is a Republican version of Obama.
    I wonder if he did not want to fight to the death and sacrifice himself for the course, why he entered the Presidential race at all ? He is not stupid enough not to understand the he will be covered with dirt and all skeletons in his closet will be dug out for display by the US intelligence agencies, which protect that interest of Wall Street and MIC (Israel is a part of the US MIC -- its biggest lobbyist and beneficiary) , not the USA as a sovereign state.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Mueller did none of these things which simply proves that his final report was what many people had expected from the very beginning; a purely political document that twists the truth to achieve Mueller's particular objectives. But to understand what those objectives are, we need to determine what the real goals of the investigation were. ..."
    "... To help sabotage Trump's political agenda ..."
    "... To create a cloud of illegitimacy over Trump's election ..."
    "... And to prevent Trump from implementing his plan to normalize relations with Russia. ..."
    "... These were the real objectives of the investigation, to create a forth branch of government (Special Counsel) that had the power to keep Trump permanently on the defensive while the media made him out to be either an unwitting accomplice in Russian espionage or, even worse, a traitor. ..."
    "... The aim was to reign him in and keep the pressure on until a case could be made for his impeachment. Mueller played a key role in this travesty. His assignment was undermine Trump's moral authority by brandishing the cudgel of criminal indictment over his head. This is how a D.O.J. appointee, who had never held public office in his life, became the most powerful man in Washington. ..."
    "... "We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments . Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States] We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will." ..."
    "... Imagine how terrified the foreign policy establishment must have been when they heard Trump utter these words. No more regime change wars? Are you kidding me? That's what we do: Regime-Change-Is-Us., ..."
    "... Interesting, isn't it? Here's Hillary, the "liberal" Democrat, pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, stated clearly that "Right now for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia." In other words, if Hillary had been elected, she was all ready to flip the switch and start WW3 ASAP. Is it any wonder why the establishment loved her? ..."
    "... War, war and more war, that's the Hillary Doctrine in a nutshell. It was Hillary's relentless hawkishness that pushed leftists into the Trump camp, not that they ever believed that Trump was anything more than what he appeared to be, an unprincipled narcissist with an insatiable lust for power. But they did hope that his dovish comments would steer the country away from nuclear annihilation. That was the hope at least, but then everything changed. And after it changed, Mueller released his report saying: "Trump is not guilty after all!" ..."
    "... Think about it: In mid December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Syria within 30 days. But instead of withdrawal, the US has been sending hundreds of trucks with weapons to the front lines. The US has also increased its troop levels on the ground, the YPG (Kurdish militia, US proxies) are digging in on the Syria-Turkish border, and the US hasn't lifted a finger to implement its agreements with NATO-ally Turkey under the Manbij Roadmap. The US is not withdrawing from Syria. Washington is beefing up its defenses and settling in for the long-haul. But, why? Why did Trump change his mind and do a complete about-face? ..."
    "... Trump made these outrageous demands knowing that they would never be accepted. Which was the point, because the foreign policy establishment doesn't want a deal. They want regime change, they've made that perfectly clear. But wasn't Trump supposed to change all that? Wasn't Trump going to pursue "a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past"? ..."
    "... There are other signs of capitulation too; like providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi's genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and "stop toppling regimes and overthrowing governments." ' At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the warhawks he once criticized. ..."
    "... Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon, he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump "the peacemaker" is no where to be found, while Trump the 'madman with a knife' is on the loose. ..."
    "... It's a dog & pony show. ..."
    Apr 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Mike Whitney via The Unz Review,

    Why did Robert Mueller end the Russia investigation when he did? He could have let it drag it out for another year or so and severely hurt Trump's chances for reelection. But he didn't do that. Why?

    Of course, we're assuming that the investigation was never intended to uncover the truth. If it was, then Mueller would have interviewed Julian Assange, Craig Murray and retired members of the Intelligence Community (Ray McGovern, Bill Binney) who have shown that the Podesta emails were leaked by an insider (on a thumbdrive) not hacked by foreign agents. Mueller would have also seized the servers at DNC headquarters and done the necessary forensic investigation, which he never did.

    He also would have indicted senior-level agents at the FBI and DOJ who improperly obtained FISA warrants by withholding critical information from the FISA court. He didn't do that either.

    Mueller did none of these things which simply proves that his final report was what many people had expected from the very beginning; a purely political document that twists the truth to achieve Mueller's particular objectives. But to understand what those objectives are, we need to determine what the real goals of the investigation were. So, here they are:

    1. To help sabotage Trump's political agenda
    2. To create a cloud of illegitimacy over Trump's election
    3. And to prevent Trump from implementing his plan to normalize relations with Russia.

    These were the real objectives of the investigation, to create a forth branch of government (Special Counsel) that had the power to keep Trump permanently on the defensive while the media made him out to be either an unwitting accomplice in Russian espionage or, even worse, a traitor.

    The aim was to reign him in and keep the pressure on until a case could be made for his impeachment. Mueller played a key role in this travesty. His assignment was undermine Trump's moral authority by brandishing the cudgel of criminal indictment over his head. This is how a D.O.J. appointee, who had never held public office in his life, became the most powerful man in Washington.

    My question is simply this: Why did Mueller give up all that power when he did?

    I think I can answer that, but first, we need a little more background. Check out this quote from candidate Trump in 2016:

    "We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments . Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States] We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will."

    Imagine how terrified the foreign policy establishment must have been when they heard Trump utter these words. No more regime change wars? Are you kidding me? That's what we do: Regime-Change-Is-Us., and now this upstart, New York real estate tycoon is promising to do a complete 180 and move in another direction altogether. No more destabilizing coups, no more bloody military interventions, instead, we're going to work collaboratively with countries like Russia and China to see if we can settle regional disputes and fight terrorism together? Really?

    At the same time Trump was promising this new era of "peace, understanding, and good will," Hillary Clinton was issuing her war whoop at every opportunity. Here's candidate Hillary trying to drum up support for taking on the Russians in Syria:

    "The situation in Syria is catastrophic. And every day that goes by, we see the results of the Assad regime in partnership with the Iranians on the ground, and the Russians in the air When I was Secretary of State, I advocated and I advocate today a no-fly zone and safe zones."

    Interesting, isn't it? Here's Hillary, the "liberal" Democrat, pushing for a no-fly zone in Syria even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, stated clearly that "Right now for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war against Syria and Russia." In other words, if Hillary had been elected, she was all ready to flip the switch and start WW3 ASAP. Is it any wonder why the establishment loved her?

    "We have to work more closely with our partners and allies on the ground," boomed Hillary, meaning that she fully supported the continued use of jihadist proxies in the fight against Assad. "I do think the use of special forces, the use of enablers and trainers in Iraq, which has had some positive effects, are very much in our interests, and so I do support what is happening."

    War, war and more war, that's the Hillary Doctrine in a nutshell. It was Hillary's relentless hawkishness that pushed leftists into the Trump camp, not that they ever believed that Trump was anything more than what he appeared to be, an unprincipled narcissist with an insatiable lust for power. But they did hope that his dovish comments would steer the country away from nuclear annihilation. That was the hope at least, but then everything changed. And after it changed, Mueller released his report saying: "Trump is not guilty after all!"

    So, what changed? Trump changed.

    Think about it: In mid December 2018, Trump announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in Syria within 30 days. But instead of withdrawal, the US has been sending hundreds of trucks with weapons to the front lines. The US has also increased its troop levels on the ground, the YPG (Kurdish militia, US proxies) are digging in on the Syria-Turkish border, and the US hasn't lifted a finger to implement its agreements with NATO-ally Turkey under the Manbij Roadmap. The US is not withdrawing from Syria. Washington is beefing up its defenses and settling in for the long-haul. But, why? Why did Trump change his mind and do a complete about-face?

    The same thing happened in Korea. For a while it looked like Trump was serious about cutting a deal with Kim Jong un. But then, sometime after the first summit, he began to backpeddle. He never honored any of his commitments under the Panmunjom Declaration and he never reciprocated for Kim's cessation of all nuclear weapons and ballistic missile testing. Trump has made no effort to "build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula" or to strengthen trust between the two leaders. Then, at the Hanoi Summit, Trump blindsided Kim by making demands that had never even been previously discussed. Kim was told that the North must destroy all of its chemical and biological weapons as well as its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs before the US will take reciprocal steps. In other words, Trump demanded that Kim completely and irreversibly disarm with the feint hope that the US would eventually lift sanctions.

    Trump made these outrageous demands knowing that they would never be accepted. Which was the point, because the foreign policy establishment doesn't want a deal. They want regime change, they've made that perfectly clear. But wasn't Trump supposed to change all that? Wasn't Trump going to pursue "a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past"?

    Yes, that was Trump's campaign promise. So, what happened?

    There are other signs of capitulation too; like providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi's genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and "stop toppling regimes and overthrowing governments." ' At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the warhawks he once criticized.

    Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon, he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump "the peacemaker" is no where to be found, while Trump the 'madman with a knife' is on the loose.

    Is that why Mueller let Trump off the hook? Was there a quid pro quo: "You follow our foreign policy directives and we'll make Mueller disappear?

    It sure looks like it. play_arrow 2 Reply Report

    Ajax-1 , 24 minutes ago link

    Why? Because logical clear thinking Americans have Russia fatigue. The Deep State knows that the longer the Witch Hunt lasts, the stronger Trump gets.

    stant , 24 minutes ago link

    the report was finished last august. hed got all the juice in that squeeze. but i also guess he got a call from somebodys in the GOG mafia[continuity of .gov] deepstate after all is their little bitch

    youshallnotkill , 27 minutes ago link

    Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook? Why did Epstein only get a slap on the wrist? Why is his lawyer defending Trump on air ? Why did the MSM never look into the credible allegations against Clinton and Trump with regards to Epstein ?

    I have an inkling that the answer to these questions is all one and the same.

    PopeRatzo , 30 minutes ago link

    Donald Trump sure isn't acting like someone who's been "let off the hook".

    Francis Marx , 38 minutes ago link

    Maybe it just worked out the way it did and there is no conspiracy on Mueller's part.

    nmewn , 28 minutes ago link

    Likely.

    He had to stop before he implicated himself. For instance, still waiting on "the why" he never put Steele or McCabe or Hillary or Perkins Coie or Rosenstein or Comey etc under oath when it was...THEY... who supplied false evidence to a FISA court , "evidence gathered" (according to Steele) from...ta daaah!...Russians ;-)

    LetThemEatRand , 36 minutes ago link

    You can drive yourself crazy wondering whether it was all theater from the start, or whether they put a gun to the head of the guy who was going to expose it was theater until he started playing along. End result, theater.

    Stop buying tickets.

    Lord Raglan , 2 minutes ago link

    exactly. Just like you can wonder why Justice John Roberts turned on Obamacare and **** on conservatives. Was he sincere or did he get a 3:00 am phone call that if he didn't uphold it, his wife and kids would die in an unfortunate accident?

    Anonymous_Beneficiary , 38 minutes ago link

    If you have to ask...perhaps you're a moron. It's a dog & pony show.

    nmewn , 33 minutes ago link

    "Let Him Off The Hook?"

    Oh, I dunno...maybe because even with a crack team of demoncraft operatives, Deep State Hillary deadenders and a limitless supply of federal funding even they couldn't come up with "Russian collusion" because...none ever existed? ;-)

    [Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Tenzin Nordron , 1 week ago

    Trump's no embarrassment. He's the accurate representative of the ruthless, con-artistry of the Empire of Chaos.

    Lois Odea , 1 week ago

    Two great men. Thank you both for bringing truth.

    mistor Whiskers , 1 week ago

    I've been calling it vodkagate since day one and just watching these propagandists getting drunk on it.

    JoanneLG1960 , 1 week ago

    What a treat!

    IAM REAL , 1 week ago

    Aaron Mate and Greenwald are the best of the best.

    Larkinchance , 1 week ago

    In case after case, Maddow and others in corporate media used crafted language that was speculation designed to appear as cold hard facts to the the viewer. This was no only bad reporting, It was a conspiracy of sorts. Maddow regularly would say, "If Russia did this, it would be an attack on the US..." Leaving the viewer with the impression that "Russia did this!". Then she would go to stir the cauldron for war.. This rises to the level of a crime.

    Dan Harris , 1 week ago

    Aaron Mate is the absolute perfect foil to Jimmy when he is on the Jimmy Dore show. It is hilarious.

    real eyes realize real lies , 1 week ago

    EXCELLENT!!!!!!!

    Sandra Ellis , 1 week ago

    Perfect!!! So glad you had Aaron on.

    Larkinchance , 1 week ago

    Since when is Hilary Clinton on the left? Since when are the are e-mails of the democratic party protected government secrets? Are the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs important? Is it strange that after 18 long years of war there is no anti-war movement? Are the people reporting on Cable News real journalists? Well done Aaron and Chris!

    The One and 0nly , 1 week ago

    Israel gate

    John Harrison , 1 week ago

    I honestly am beginning to believe the Democratic leadership actually likes having Donald Trump as President

    Sandor Daroci , 1 week ago

    wow, go Aaron.

    Dan Campbell , 1 week ago

    I will try to resist the temptation to look in the comments section, while listening. If any interview warrants full attention, it's Aaron and Chris.

    ewa wyso , 1 week ago

    Yay! Aaron MatÉ !!!

    Sean , 1 week ago

    2 of my favorite journalists join to talk facts. Love it!

    Wretch Gunk , 1 week ago

    democrats would rather Turmp be president than Bernie, they will throw the election before they let Bernie create change... but then even if he is elected, it wont do much good with corporate shills in congress in senate

    robb , 1 week ago

    I enjoy listening to Aaron, a person of integrity and also a down to earth, interesting journalist who has worked hard to uncover the truth on this subject and knows it backwards and forwards. I like when he can't help but laugh at certain absurdities in mainstream media coverage of Russiagate.

    Pas Oli , 1 week ago

    Collusion? More like ConFusion GPS

    Ivette Correa , 1 week ago

    Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!

    [Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Shannon Sun/Moon Virgo , 1 week ago

    Fabulous interview! Thank you both for your extraordinary integrity & courage ❤ Free Julian Assange ✊❤

    B. Greene , 1 week ago

    More honest journalism in 28 minutes than in 3 years of MSNBC or Fox.

    MrB1923 , 1 week ago

    THIS is journalism. EVERYTHING else is propaganda.

    Steven William Bayless Parks , 1 week ago

    It 's incredible that we have to watch Russian TV to find out what's going on in the USA.

    S Douglas , 1 week ago

    It's great to see some non-propagandist journalism.

    Winston Smith in Oceania , 1 week ago

    Big fan of Aaron Maté here!

    Mike2020able , 1 week ago

    Chomsky : ' Israel, not Russia, interferes With US Election '

    J.L. Goodman , 1 week ago

    I've got to admit,I get a massive dopamine rush hearing these two sane, intelligent, critical thinkers, skillfully dissect this convoluted quadrafuck that has wasted some much of our precious time. I literally feel washed clean for a moment.

    Amy Marie , 1 week ago

    Keep up the awesome work Aaron n RT😉

    Tertiary Adjunct , 1 week ago (edited)

    RT, give Aaron a show.

    Steven Yourke , 1 week ago

    You can count the number of real journalists left in the US on two hands. Here are two of the best and the bravest. Thank you, RT, for providing us with a platform for real journalists.

    Scott Turner , 1 week ago (edited)

    Thanks for this. Aaron Maté and Chris Hedges keep many people somewhat sane in an insane media world. Depressed, but at least somewhat sane. lol

    Joy Mazumdar , 1 week ago

    as an outsider.....i view the whole thing as a smokescreen...........keeping people occupied while planning & carrying out worse things that are being done in the dark..........

    Lee Vanderheiden , 1 week ago

    Thanks, Chris. What a great interview. Aaron Mate' is an up and coming star journalist!

    Matthew Iverson , 1 week ago

    Omg I love you guys! Omg I could cry!

    Ilia Pagan , 1 week ago

    Aaron Mate's courageous stance regarding Palestinians deserves all my respect and support. His analysts of Rusiagate and all the fanfare associated with the so called investigations seems most accurate.

    Boris Tabare Ag , 1 week ago

    Aaron Maté: the man who killed Luke Harding!!!

    TheJohnswa , 1 week ago

    Maddow has zero integrity left

    Brooks Rogers , 1 week ago

    Been a long time fan of Hedges and recent fan of Mate. Great conversation between these two critical thinkers so scarce these troubled days.

    Jesse Birkett , 1 week ago

    This is one the best episodes On Contact has ever done.

    [Apr 28, 2019] Mueller's Report Was a Media Rorschach Test

    theatlantic.com

    [Apr 28, 2019] SBS broadcast a 4 part doco called The Fourth Estate in June last year. It s about the NYT unhealthy obsession with Trump

    Apr 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 28, 2019 5:20:25 PM | link

    SBS broadcast a 4 part doco called The Fourth Estate in June last year. It's about the NYT unhealthy obsession with Trump. Episode 1 begins with his swearing in and cuts to stunned(?) NYT staffers watching the speech in which he says "For too long, our politicians have prospered while (blah blah blah) and this stops, right here, and right now."
    From then on it consists of an endless stream of huddles as various groups of staffers ponder the best way to spin various 'angles' and approaches, or solo senior staffers pontificating on all manner of hypotheticals. There are lots of opinionated people working at the NYT and none of them is 'stupid'.
    I recorded Episode 1 and my conclusion from watching it is that NOTHING the NYT publishes is accidental. I began recording Episode 2 but aborted the mission after 30 minutes or so because the repetitive self-worship and drivel was eerily similar to Episode 1.

    Wikipedia has an entry devoted to the series and it's freely available on the www. I recommend watching the first few minutes of Episode 1 just to get a feeling for the tone.

    The cartoon in question was published in an International Edition as a gloat or a public (private) joke, imo. I remain unconvinced that the Editorial Staff at the Jew York Times was blissfully unaware that the cartoon 'might' create an opportunity for the "Anti-Semitism!!?" crowd to stir up, and capitalise upon, the ensuing indignation and outrage.

    [Apr 28, 2019] Sounds like Brennan's CIA laundered information to EX-CIA Nellie Ohr when she was working for Fusion GPS who then laundered this info to Steele

    Apr 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Sam , 28 April 2019 at 04:31 PM

    While I knew about Nellie Ohr and her DOJ husband , what I didn't know was that while she worked for Fusion GPS , fusion was a FBI contractor that had access to NSA database until Admiral Rogers shut it down .

    Sounds Like Brennan's CIA laundered information to EX-CIA Nellie Ohr when she was working for Fusion GPS who then laundered this info to Steele , another person employed by Fusion who then gave this back to Bruce Ohr of DOJ who then gave it to the FBI . And they all got paid for their " research " . This then was used to deceive the FISA court . But Admiral Rogers went to this court and warned Trump of the spying and violations of constitutional rights . Shortly after Obama fired admiral Rogers . Sounds fishy to me ? what do you think ?

    [Apr 28, 2019] Fake news takedown Journalist shreds Rachel Maddow's Russiagate conspiracies -- RT USA News

    Apr 28, 2019 | www.rt.com

    Journalist Aaron Mate has eviscerated MSNBC's Rachel Maddow for peddling "Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, falsehoods & innuendo," after Maddow threw a tantrum when YouTube dared to recommend an RT video. Mate, a longtime skeptic of the mainstream media's beloved 'Russiagate' narrative, was the subject of a recent interview with RT. When MSNBC's Russiagater-in-chief Rachel Maddow found out that YouTube's algorithm had actually suggested the interview to viewers, she saw more Russian meddling and proclaimed the recommendation "death by algorithm."

    Death by algorithm. "YouTube recommended Russia Today for understanding Mueller report." https://t.co/q6McajcNo3

    -- Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) April 27, 2019

    Mate unloaded on Maddow on Sunday, systematically destroying the MSNBC host for her two years as "the leading purveyor of now debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, falsehoods & innuendo." Buckle up.

    1/ If YouTube were to recommend your show, it'd be recommending the leading purveyor of now debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, falsehoods & innuendo of the last 2+ years. Here's a sample:

    -- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019

    "Just recently you were caught in real-time lying to your audience," he began. "You claimed Barr was handling the redactions by himself. But the chyron -- on screen right below -- told viewers the truth, that Mueller was in fact 'assisting' w/ the redactions."

    2/ Just recently you were caught in real-time lying to your audience. You claimed Barr was handling the redactions by himself. But the chyron -- on screen right below -- told viewers the truth, that Mueller was in fact "assisting" w/ the redactions: pic.twitter.com/rTSAABngp2

    -- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019

    With Maddow seemingly content to lie on live television, it fell upon her show's producers to flash the truth on viewers' screens.

    Mate then recalled the time Maddow suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin would use the 'pee tape' (the most far-fetched allegation in the Democrat-commissioned, internet-sourced Steele dossier) to force Trump into withdrawing US troops stationed near Russia. Of course, this never happened, and Trump recently announced plans to ramp up deployments to Poland. A swing and a miss for Maddow.

    3/ There was that time in Jan 2017 when you speculated that Putin may use the pee tape & other kompromat to force Trump into withdrawing US troops near Russia. How did that one turn out? pic.twitter.com/XuXXagyCNb

    -- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019

    Maddow contradicted herself on the 'pee tape' only last week, telling viewers she "refused" to let herself "think about" the possibility of these tapes existing.

    4/ BTW, just last week you falsely said that "the one thing I refused to let myself think about" was that Putin had tapes of Trump -- the very prospect you had previously floated to posit that Putin may blackmail Trump into withdrawing troops. pic.twitter.com/xMC4uPrjSK

    -- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019

    "Who could forget that time this past winter when you seized on life-threatening cold temperatures to fear-monger that Russia could kill Americans by knocking out their heat?" Mate continued, mocking Maddow's claim that the Kremlin could "kill the power" and freeze Americans to death.

    5/ Who could forget that time this past winter when you seized on life-threatening cold temperatures to fear-monger that Russia could kill Americans by knocking out their heat? pic.twitter.com/deo2H4SBBQ

    -- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019

    "There was that time when you explored the scenario under which Putin 'gives orders' to his puppet Trump at an upcoming meeting," Mate continued. "Do you think Putin ordered Trump to stage a coup in Venezuela/try to kill the German-Russia gas pipeline/nix the INF treaty?"

    6/ There was that time when you explored the scenario under which Putin "gives orders" to his puppet Trump at an upcoming meeting. Do you think Putin ordered Trump to stage a coup in Venezuela/try to kill the German-Russia gas pipeline/nix the INF treaty? pic.twitter.com/cbSrGt2xR3

    -- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019

    Mate ridiculed Maddow for suggesting that the Trump campaign set aside funds to pay for the services of "Russian hackers."

    7/ How about that time when you speculated -- citing the Steele dossier -- that Cohen billed Trump $50k for "tech services" to pay off Russian hackers? It was actually to pay a US firm ( https://t.co/GGK6FQLvRJ ). pic.twitter.com/TcqdN8mC4z

    -- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019

    That Vladimir Putin installed Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State (a job Tillerson was fired from after a year).

    9/ How about the time when you speculated that Putin installed Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State? pic.twitter.com/YiUYWdxpZ5

    -- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019

    And that the existence of an Albanian Bernie Sanders fan page on Facebook was an act of "international warfare against our country."

    14/ Looking back, do you think maybe that declaring that a fake Bernie Sanders fan page run out of Albania amounted to "international warfare against our country" was perhaps a little hyperbolic? pic.twitter.com/5Meg0xLNqg

    -- Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 28, 2019

    Despite peddling baseless conspiracies and flagrant Russophobia every night, Maddow remains one of the US' most popular news anchors, and one of the best paid. The MSNBC host regularly vies with Fox News' Sean Hannity for the top spot on the cable news ratings, and earns a cool $7 million per year for her work.

    Although Maddow has been perhaps the most fervent promoter of Russiagate hysteria on television, her ratings have clumped after Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report put most of her theories to bed last month. Maddow's show slipped from its number one position after the report dropped, and lost half a million viewers in the space of a week.

    Mate, although reporting to a far smaller audience, has received an Izzy Award for his "meticulous reporting" that "challenged the way the public was being informed about the Mueller investigation."

    [Apr 28, 2019] Julian Assange is a vilified human being.

    Notable quotes:
    "... Now, conflating any individual with Russia, will always immediately result in that person becoming, in the US, in the U.K. and in other US-kept vassal nations totally tarred with all sorts of nefarious and always unexamined assumptions. ..."
    "... Mark Twain once suggested that the deity created war that USians might learn geography. Clearly, it is a laborious process and has failed to create much global geographical awareness among the millions, most of whom are content to think whatever nation is correctly being ministered to or in the sights of "everything is on the table" as simply being, vaguely, "over there". ..."
    "... Thanks to the intelligence community, the political elite, notably in the Democratic "wing" of the War Party, but with the support of the Republican wing of that party, and certain individual players aligned with the US policy "Full Spectrum Dominance" which, of course, is compassionate goodness and not to be confused with the vile aims of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and a whole host of other "bad guy" nations or amorphous groups known as "terrorists. ..."
    "... Clearly, the consensus opinion is shaped, not inside the minds of millions of people, all projecting their very worst fears or even their own worst proclivities on individuals like Putin or whoever is the "Hitler" of the convenient moment, but rather on the efforts of, let us call them "entities" who plan to benefit from a populous aroused to anxiety or even fear itself. ..."
    "... The list of beneficiaries includes the financial elites who always profit from war and "confusion", the political elites who serve those monied interests, the media, academia, the military, intelligence, weapons manufacturers, energy producers, military contractors and so on. ..."
    Apr 28, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    DW Bartoo , April 22, 2019 at 08:16

    Julian Assange is a vilified human being.

    When vilification occurs a very necessary question that critical thought must ponder is who benefits from such scapegoating?

    However, for the moment, let us ponder, again in service to actual critical thought, why aligning Assange with Russia is expected by those who will and intend to benefit from that association. Why is suggesting that Assange is "a Russian agent" expected to convince millions of USians that Assange is "a bad person"?

    Why would millions accept that assertion without questioning it at all?

    Caitlin suggest that those millions are "herd animals", implying that they are led into believing two things. The first is that Russia and the Russian people are "bad", we have even recently had a much trusted official suggest that Russians are "genetically" predisposed to badness with a malignant tendency to single out the innocent, and one indispensable nation, the United States for the most nefarious of Russian "interventions", amounting, according to a famous Hollywood actor, who occasionally portrays a certain deity in the movies, to "an attack".

    In the meager interest of context and history, stretching back a bit more than a century, some USians who are aware of that history, recognize that the US, under President Woodrow Wilson sent US military troops into Russia in order to end the rise of the Bolshevik rebellion/revolution.

    Thus began the official demonization of Russia. A demonization very convenient to the necessity of having an implacable enemy always ready to pounce on the good, moral, humanitarian, and freely enterprising United States.

    Now, conflating any individual with Russia, will always immediately result in that person becoming, in the US, in the U.K. and in other US-kept vassal nations totally tarred with all sorts of nefarious and always unexamined assumptions.

    Mark Twain once suggested that the deity created war that USians might learn geography. Clearly, it is a laborious process and has failed to create much global geographical awareness among the millions, most of whom are content to think whatever nation is correctly being ministered to or in the sights of "everything is on the table" as simply being, vaguely, "over there".

    That is why the US must strike "them" "over there" so as to avoid the frightening thought of having "them" have to be dealt with "here" in the "Homeland" of "the free and the brave".

    This suggests that the "herd" has to be led to certain conclusions.

    Unlike horses, the herd HAS to drink.

    If the herd does not consume the elixir, then it may not be willing to joyfully send the "flower of its youth" off to become cannon fodder should the Table of Everything so demand.

    I grew up in the nineteen fifties when the first Cold War was in full blossom. We school students were told and taught that Russia hated us, wanted to attack and kill us all, intended to rule the world with an iron hand and ruthless godlessness.

    Thanks to the intelligence community, the political elite, notably in the Democratic "wing" of the War Party, but with the support of the Republican wing of that party, and certain individual players aligned with the US policy "Full Spectrum Dominance" which, of course, is compassionate goodness and not to be confused with the vile aims of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and a whole host of other "bad guy" nations or amorphous groups known as "terrorists.

    Now, by tying Assange to that hodge-podge of baddies, the many may rest assured that he has been put in his proper place.

    Clearly, the consensus opinion is shaped, not inside the minds of millions of people, all projecting their very worst fears or even their own worst proclivities on individuals like Putin or whoever is the "Hitler" of the convenient moment, but rather on the efforts of, let us call them "entities" who plan to benefit from a populous aroused to anxiety or even fear itself.

    The list of beneficiaries includes the financial elites who always profit from war and "confusion", the political elites who serve those monied interests, the media, academia, the military, intelligence, weapons manufacturers, energy producers, military contractors and so on.

    Assange, to his great and everlasting credit, exposed a very large amount of this including, with the invaluable efforts
    of Chelsea Manning, actual war crimes perpetrated by the US, even beyond beginning wars based on lies.

    Fortunately, the media, having overplayed it hand in the manipulation has exposed itself to many as being but a propaganda industry.

    A very real question for those concerned with engaging critical thought processes is just how many humans are still being led, rather easily, around by the fallacious and very dangerous concoctions of the opinion "shapers" in think tanks, media echo chambers, corporate boardrooms, and academic snake pits?

    Perhaps there comes a time for humanity, if it is not to trot along in the footsteps of the dodo bird to look not where the fingers of deceit are pointing, but at those to whom the fingers are attached?

    AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 09:33

    DWB – as a USian of English birth (of about the same age, I would imagine) I am amazed at the fear the US had of the USSR back in the 1950s. When my husband told me, in the 1980s, about how he and his schoolmates had had nuclear air raid attack drills (sheltering under desks and so on!) I'm sure that I gawped, fly-catchingly. What??? Nowt remotely similar occurred in the UK during the 1950s in schools or elsewhere.

    It was only since I began studying history (late in life) that I learnt that the British ruling elites have hated the Russians for well over a hundred years. Still not quite sure why, nor yet why whatever the Russians did (Crimean War in the 1850s?) that pissed them off so royally should have any bearing on Russia-UK relations nowadays. But that could be because I'm dim. And because I've no hatred, dislike, fear of Russians (or Chinese or Iranians) at all. My fears revolve around the hubris-arrogance and determination to retain economic and more general world domination by the US and its poodles in the UK-FR-NATO and Israel (though their status as dog or leash is debatable). These are the countries to be afraid of.

    Sam F , April 22, 2019 at 20:34

    Yes, the remarkably unprovoked hatred of Russia among the UK aristocracy, regardless of era or government there, is a great wonder. They did not even have eras of invasion threats, colonial competition, or competing navies, as with France, Spain, and Portugal. Britain's 19th century invasions of Afghanistan were apparently provoked by nothing but fear, and their several lost wars there apparently did not even engage Russians. Even complete transitions of Russian government from monarchy to communism to capitalism failed to affect UK's fears. If the cause were mere cultural difference, they would have feared the orient.

    Perhaps their aristocracy was not polite enough, or those backwards Ns, upside down Rs, and Pi symbols terrified the British.

    geeyp , April 22, 2019 at 23:49

    Anne R. – For more on your second paragraph, visit Larouchepac.org The late Lyndon Larouche's site has a lot of info on this.

    Zhu , April 23, 2019 at 00:50

    Britain & Russia were rivals for empire. Both were expanding in Asia – The Great Game. Russia got Turkestan, Britain got India, both wanted China. Hence the elite's hatred, although now it's probably traditional and automatic.

    Keep studying history – it's ales ts enlightening!

    AnneR , April 23, 2019 at 09:22

    Yes Zhu – I do continue with history, although of course no historian and thus history is ever free (as with all scholars) of their personal worldview. And yes I realize that the UK, when an imperial power, viewed the world pretty much as the US does now: its domain. So obviously any and all contenders were up for vitriolic loathing and war. But it still doesn't explain the particularly vicious attitude toward Russia on the part of the British ruling elites. After all the Brits also had France, Holland and Germany (earlier Spain and Portugal) as competitors, admittedly at different time periods, and no they weren't "liked" and were often at war with each other. But there was never the same bitterness toward western European rivals as there was and continues to be toward Russia.

    That the USSR provoked deep, undying hatred among the aristos and their hangers' on does not surprise: can't have anything remotely similar happening in our cushy backyard, can't have the unwashed, ignorant, prole herd actually learning any lessons from the Soviets.

    Yet even so – no nuclear air raid drills in schools or anywhere during red-baiting season. Nothing kindred.

    O Society , April 22, 2019 at 08:07

    The truth is Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Rachel Maddow, and the rest if the Scooby Doo gang handed Agent Orange the victimhood script he needs to feed his Trumpets to win the 2020 election.

    They've also guaranteed no matter what heinous gangster scam shit he has done in the past or will do in the future, none of it will stick because he'll play the falsely accused card.

    For the idiot Americans watching White House reality TV at home, this means celebrity Trump now has immunity and can't be voted off the island this season or next.

    https://opensociet.org/2019/04/20/chomsky-by-focusing-on-russia-democrats-handed-trump-a-huge-gift-possibly-the-2020-election/

    Jay Barney , April 22, 2019 at 08:04

    You are kidding, right?

    Assange publishes hacks from Snowden, Manning, and Russia. Do they publish anything on Russia?

    Nope.

    Assange and you are tools of Russia. Obvious to anyone

    Skip Scott , April 22, 2019 at 12:01

    Ah yes, the evil Rooskies.

    From the article you obviously didn't read:

    In fact, WikiLeaks has published hundreds of thousands of documents pertaining to Russia, has made critical comments about the Russian government and defended dissident Russian activists, and in 2017 published an entire trove called the Spy Files Russia exposing Russian surveillance practices.

    wikileaks russia files:
    https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/

    I think we can tell who the "tool" is.

    OlyaPola , April 22, 2019 at 03:23

    "The only people claiming that Assange is a Russian agent are those who are unhappy with the things that WikiLeaks publications have exposed, whether that be U.S. war crimes or the corrupt manipulations of Democratic Party leaders."

    Perhaps fuller understanding would be gained by considering the following pathway.

    People who who think that "Assange is a Russian agent" is a plausible belief are the audience encouraged in the view that "Assange is a Russian agent".

    Much of this notion of plausible belief is founded on the creation of holograms consisting in large part of projections of the believer's expectations/experiences of the evaluation criteria used in choosing agents to recruit (for the public largely projected from their experience of creating resumes and attending job interviews) , what motivates an agent to be recruited, how such motivation can facilitate the purpose of the recruiter of the agent, what are the potential dangers of recruiting the agent, and most importantly what is the purpose of and reasons why the recruiter considers recruiting an agent to achieve her/his purpose.

    On projection catalysing plausible belief you will be aware that some encourage the belief that Mr. Putin is the richest man on the planet since in all societies there are assumptions/expectations on motivations.

    However in the presently self-designated "The United States of America" as functions of "exceptionalism", "we the people hold these truths to be self-evident" and lack of direct experience of foreign cultures by many, the population are particulrly prone to projection giving rise to the paradox of "exceptionalists" engaging in the them/us conflation.

    [Apr 28, 2019] The US Deep State truly exists on another plane of unreality

    That's a clear sign of degradation of the US political elite.
    Apr 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 28, 2019 11:56:12 AM | link

    That such pieces as Bugajski's article and the RAND Corporation report have appeared about the same time is in itself a suggestion that the US Deep State truly exists on another plane of unreality. I wouldn't be surprised if a third hit-piece advocating regime change in Russia were to come out soon, either in the US or in the UK, but if that happens then we'll know we're really on a path to self-destruction.
    Posted by: Jen | Apr 27, 2019 5:38:18 PM | 19

    It's easy to be mesmerised into focusing on Fink Tank drivel instead of the stuff happening outside the stale atmosphere of their unventilated tanks. The French peasants seem to have woken up to the fact that the Macron NeoLib govt has betrayed them and is only pretending to listen. It's only a matter of time until the Gillet Jaunes remember the words of jocular Neoliberal poster-boy Grover Norquist about "government small enough to drown in the bathtub."

    Of course, when funny-man Grover said that he meant govt too small to responsibly oversee and administer all of its obligations to The People, thereby necessitating the 'outsourcing' of the juiciest govt obligations to Private Profiteers. Unfortunately, when a govt becomes too small and pompous to listen and respond to the legitimate concerns of The People, it runs the risk of having its size compared with the size of the Disenchanted demographic and, eventually, drowned. Hopefully metaphorically, although History says that when the French neglect reform for too long, metaphorical solutions tend to be neglected too.
    And France is just the tip of the iceberg. Again.

    [Apr 28, 2019] SBS broadcast a 4 part doco called The Fourth Estate in June last year. It s about the NYT unhealthy obsession with Trump

    Apr 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 28, 2019 5:20:25 PM | link

    SBS broadcast a 4 part doco called The Fourth Estate in June last year. It's about the NYT unhealthy obsession with Trump. Episode 1 begins with his swearing in and cuts to stunned(?) NYT staffers watching the speech in which he says "For too long, our politicians have prospered while (blah blah blah) and this stops, right here, and right now."
    From then on it consists of an endless stream of huddles as various groups of staffers ponder the best way to spin various 'angles' and approaches, or solo senior staffers pontificating on all manner of hypotheticals. There are lots of opinionated people working at the NYT and none of them is 'stupid'.
    I recorded Episode 1 and my conclusion from watching it is that NOTHING the NYT publishes is accidental. I began recording Episode 2 but aborted the mission after 30 minutes or so because the repetitive self-worship and drivel was eerily similar to Episode 1.

    Wikipedia has an entry devoted to the series and it's freely available on the www. I recommend watching the first few minutes of Episode 1 just to get a feeling for the tone.

    The cartoon in question was published in an International Edition as a gloat or a public (private) joke, imo. I remain unconvinced that the Editorial Staff at the Jew York Times was blissfully unaware that the cartoon 'might' create an opportunity for the "Anti-Semitism!!?" crowd to stir up, and capitalise upon, the ensuing indignation and outrage.

    [Apr 28, 2019] Did The Russians Really Interfere In US Elections

    Notable quotes:
    "... Significantly, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on December 11th, 2018 that "ad accounts linked to Russia" spent about $4,700 in advertising" to politically influence Americans during the 2016 presidential election season. ..."
    Apr 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Boyd Cathey via The Unz Review,

    The Mueller Report is now public, and our Mainstream Media have filled the airways with all sorts of commentaries and interpretations. We know that - despite the very best efforts of the dedicated Leftist attorneys on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's staff - there was absolutely no coordination between members of the Trump campaign, or any of his staffers, with Russians. No additional charges have come as a result, other than accusations made earlier of "process crimes" (e.g. failure to report earnings on tax forms, failure to report lobbying work, or not telling investigators what they demanded to hear -- "crimes" that practically every politician in Washington has been guilty of at one time or another and would normally not cause much of a stir). None of these involved Russia.

    Of course, that finding has not satisfied many Democrats or the unhinged Leftist crazies in the media, who continue to have visions of "collusion" -- a kind of communications Alzheimers that has poisoned our media now for years. Thus, Representative Eric Swalwell (who is one of nearly two dozen Democrats running for president) continues to assert that there was "collusion," as does the irrepressible (and irresponsible) Adam Schiff: "it's there in plain sight," they insist, "if you just look hard enough, and maybe squint just a bit -- or maybe have those specialized 3-D Russia glasses!"

    Such political leaders -- along with those further out in the Leftist loonysphere like Representatives Maxine Waters and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes -- continue down their Primrose path of post-Marxist madness.

    But beyond the collusion/coordination issue, the past couple of weeks have been filled with a swirling controversy concerning what is called "obstruction of justice." And once again, the fundamental issues have been incredibly politicized. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had an obligation, if he and his minions discovered "obstruction of justice," that is, concerted and illegal attempts to obstruct the investigations by the president or his staff, to present charges to the Department of Justice. Yet, all he was able to do was assemble a farrago of "he said/she said" instances, none of which rose to the level of criminal activity. Apparently President Trump told a subaltern "I wish would you fire Mueller," or he wished in a speech in his joking style that "if the Russians had Hillary's emails, they would release them," or he had a private conversation with Vladimir Putin when they met (as all national leaders do!), or his son met with a Russian attorney who supposedly had some "dirt" on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which did not turn out to be the reason for the Trump Tower meeting at all).

    None of the ten or eleven cited instances came anywhere close to being actionable or criminal under settled law. In each instance cited, the president's actions (or desires) fell within his purview and authority under Article II of the Constitution. And regarding Trump's desire to fire Mueller, he was on solid legal ground; the Supreme Court in its 1997 decision, Edmonds vs. the United States , declared that "inferior" officials, including an independent counsel, could be removed by presidential action as part of his delegated powers . And, in any case, Mueller was not dismissed.

    Mueller had an obligation after examining these situations to make a finding; he did not. By so doing, by avoiding decisions and stringing out such instances in an obviously political sense, he abdicated his responsibility and did his best to impugn Donald Trump and his administration and thus offer grist for continued Democrat attacks on the president all the way through the 2020 election.

    Mueller left it up to the Attorney General William Barr and Congress to decide how to proceed. And that is where we are today.

    The one issue that both Democrats and most Republicans seem to agree on, the issue which both say is "proven conclusively" by Mueller is that the Russians "attempted to interfere and did interfere" in our 2016 election.

    Interesting, is it not, that the Republicans who zealously defend the president and attack the obviously political nature of the Mueller Report would accept, as if on faith and without question, the accusations of Russian interference, also contained in the report?

    Turn on Fox and watch, say, Martha MacCallum (e.g., "The Story," April 24, 2019) declare "we all know now without doubt that the Russians tried to interfere" in our elections, or listen to most any GOP congressman repeat that same narrative with unquestioning certitude.

    But that assertion - is it truly backed up factually? Where is the evidence, other than largely questionable information sourced from our largely discredited intelligence agencies which, as we know, had a determined goal of overthrowing the president by any means possible?

    Almost three years have passed from the first fake news that appeared in the media on the subject of "Russian collusion," a concerted effort launched to discredit at first the Donald Trump candidacy and then sabotage his presidency, including his efforts to stabilize Russian-American relations.

    As proof of Russian actions, the Mueller Report cites the indictments against twenty-five Russian citizens who were indicted for attempted "interference" (those Russians are, let us add, quite conveniently out of the country and thus not prosecutable). When those indictments were issued, Russia pointed out the flimsy, unsupported and transparently made-up nature of the charges, and demanded that American authorities provide conclusive proof. Such requests were rebuffed.

    In order to evaluate the evidence, the Russian government proposed reestablishing the bilateral expert group on information security that the Obama Administration had terminated, which could have served as a platform for conversation on these matters. The American side was also invited to send Justice Department officials to Russia to attend the proposed public questioning of the Russian citizens named by Mueller. Additionally, Russia offered to publicize the exchanges between the two countries following the publication of the accusations of cyberattacks, exchanges which were conducted through existing channels between October 2016 and January 2017.

    Our government refused every offer.

    A careful analysis, in fact, fails to show any substantial evidence of Russian cyberattacks and attempts to "subvert democracy." By some estimates, possibly $160,000 -- a paltry sum -- was spent by the Russians during 2016 on social media activities in the United States. Does anyone wish to discover and compare the amount the Chinese Communists or the Saudis would have expended during the same period, for their continued influence and power in Washington and inside-the-Beltway?

    It is helpful to examine the charges that have been made, some included in the Mueller Report and accepted blindly by most pundits and politicians, both on the Left and by establishment conservatives.

    The Russian government, via their embassy in Washington, has published a 120 page "white paper," The Russiagate Hysteria: A Case of Severe Russiaphobia , responding to the accusations made against them since 2016. Obviously, the Russian document has a particular viewpoint and very specific goal, but that should not deter us from examining it and evaluating its arguments. (I have written on Russia and its relations with the United States on a number of occasions since 2015 and had pieces published by The Unz Review , Communities Digital News , and elsewhere. On my blog , "MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey," I have authored a dozen columns addressing this question).

    Here following I list twenty-one claims made regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election and in American domestic affairs. I follow each claim with the Russian response and how others, as noted, have also responded. In most cases I retain the original text, at times with my editing, but, in every case, with all the referenced sources.

    These twenty-one claims should be examined more closely and more calmly, and the "Russophobic" hysteria we have experienced during the past several years needs to be put aside for the sake of rational investigative inquiry -- and discovering how the Managerial State and global elites have attempted a "silent coup" against what's left of our republic.

    These claims and the responses deserve respectful consideration and detailed responses:

    1. CLAIM: Russia "meddled" in the U.S. elections by conducting influence operations, including through social media.

      FACT

      All of the claims of Russian trolls that surfaced over the last few years (such as Russians using the Pokémon Go mobile game and sex toy ads to meddle in the elections – ) are so preposterous and contradictory that they virtually disprove themselves.

      Not to mention the absurdity of the whole notion of 13 persons and 3 organizations (whichever country they might represent) charged on February 16, 2018, by Robert Mueller with criminally interfering with the elections, affecting in any way electoral processes in a country of more than 300 million people.

      It is telling that when pressed about the scope of the alleged influence campaign, representatives of American social media companies give numbers, that even if they were valid (and there's no evidence of a connection to the Russian government), are so minuscule as to be basically non-existent. For example, Facebook has identified 3,000 Russia-linked ads costing a total of about $100,000. That's a miniscule number of ads and a fraction of Facebook's revenues, which totaled $28 billion. Facebook estimates that 126 million people might – the emphasis is on the word "might" – have seen this content. But this number represents just 0.004% of the content those people saw on the Facebook platform.

      Significantly, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing on December 11th, 2018 that "ad accounts linked to Russia" spent about $4,700 in advertising" to politically influence Americans during the 2016 presidential election season.

      To further cast doubt on the allegations, an American watchdog group "Campaign for Accountability" ("CFA") admitted on September 4th, 2018, that it deliberately posted propaganda materials on Google disguised as "Russian hackers from the Internet Research Agency" to check how they would be filtered for "foreign interference". Google officials then accused the CFA as having ties to a rival tech company "Oracle". In other words, corporate intrigues disguised as "Russian interference".

      As American media has admitted, out of several dozen pre-election rallies supposedly organized by Russians, Special Counsel Mueller mentions in his indictment that only a couple actually appear to have successfully attracted anyone, and those that did were sparsely attended and, almost without exception, in deep-red enclaves that would have voted for Trump anyway .

      Amidst all the hysteria about the alleged Russian meddling it is worth reading various research studies which show, quoting "The Washington Post", that it is Americans, in particular our intelligence service, that peddle disinformation and hate speech.

      According to Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, the scale and scope of domestic disinformation is much larger than any foreign influence operation. And academics from the Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy document in their study that there had been major spikes in outright fabrication and misleading information proliferating online before the 2018 U.S. election. A "significant portion" of the disinformation appeared to come from Americans, not foreigners, the Harvard researchers said.

    2. CLAIM:Russian hackers accessed computer servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and leaked materials through Wikileaks and other intermediaries

      FACT

      As President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin noted in his interview with NBC on June 5, 2017, when flatly denying any allegations of Russia interfering in internal affairs of the U.S., that today's technology is such that the final internet address can be masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one will be able to understand the origin of that address. It is possible to set up any entity that may indicate one source when, in fact, the source is completely different .

      No evidence has been presented linking Russia to leaked emails. In fact, there are credible studies arguing that DNC servers are much more likely to have been breached by someone with immediate and physical access. In 2017 a group of former officers of the U.S. intelligence community, members of the "Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity" (VIPS), met with then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo to present their findings.

      Those findings demonstrated using forensic analysis that the DNC data was copied at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack ( , , ), thus suggesting that it was more likely a removable storage device used.

      Another counterargument to the "Russian hackers" claim is that the DNC files published by Wikileaks were initially stored under the FAT (File Allocation System) method which is not related to internet transfers and can only be forwarded to an external device such as a thumb drive.

      It is also suspicious that the DNC prohibited the FBI from examining the servers. Instead, a third-party tech firm was hired, "Crowd Strike", which is known for peddling the "Russian interference" claims. And soon enough it, indeed, announced that "Russian malware" has been found, but again no solid evidence was produced.

      According to the respected former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, the indictment by the Mueller team on July 13, 2018 of the 12 supposed Russian operatives was a politically motivated fraud . As Ritter explains, Mueller seems to have borrowed his list from an organizational chart of a supposed Russian military intelligence unit, contained in a classified document from the NSA titled "Spear-Phishing Campaign TTPs Used Against U.S. And Foreign Government Political Entities", which was published by The Intercept online. As stated in that document, this is just a subjective judgement, not a known fact. Ritter concludes, that this is a far cry from the kind of incontrovertible proof that Mueller's team suggests as existing to support its indictment.

      Moreover, it is telling that the indictment was released just before the meeting between President Putin and Trump in Helsinki on July 16, 2018, seemingly as if the aim was to intentionally derail the bilateral summit.

    3. CLAIM: Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.

      FACT

      As concluded in the summary of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, the investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia

      If the Mueller team, having all the resources of the U.S. government, after 22 months of work, many millions of dollars spent , more than 2800 subpoenas issued, nearly 500 search warrants and 500 witness interviews, didn't find any evidence of "collusion", it is simply because there was never any. The whole claim of collusion was launched and peddled by the same group of Democrats, liberal-leaning media and the so-called "Never Trump Republicans", as it became clear that Donald Trump had real chances of winning the election. And later it morphed into a campaign to derail the newly-elected President agenda, including his efforts to mitigate the damage done to U.S.-Russian relations.

    4. CLAIM: Hacking of American political institutions was personally ordered by the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

      FACT

      This claim is based on nothing else but the infamous fraudulent "Steele Dossier" , paid for by political opponents [i.e., the Hilary Clinton campaign] of Donald Trump, and wild conjectures that "nothing in Russia happens without Putin's approval" .

      Needless to say, zero proof is presented. By the same logic, nothing in the U.S. happens without the President's approval. For example, is he also responsible for Edward Snowden? After all, Mr. Snowden was doing work for the U.S. intelligence services. Or the deaths of all the civilians killed abroad by U.S. drone strikes? Every minute detail approved by the President?

    5. CLAIM: Russia did not cooperate with the U.S. in tracing the source of the alleged hacking.

      FACT

      Russia has repeatedly offered to set up a professional and de-politicized dialogue on international information security only to be rebuffed by the U.S. State Department. For instance, following the discussion between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Hamburg on July 7, 2017, Russia forwarded to the U.S. a proposal to reestablish a bilateral working group on cyber threats which would have been a perfect medium to discuss American concerns. Moreover, during his meeting with Donald Trump in Helsinki on July 17, 2018, Vladimir Putin offered to allow U.S. representatives to be present at an interrogation of the Russian citizens who were previously accused by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller of being guilty of electoral interference. Furthermore, in February 2019 the Russian government suggested publishing bilateral correspondence on the subject of unsanctioned access to U.S. electronic networks, which was conducted between Washington and Moscow through the Nuclear Threat Reduction Centers in the period from October 2016 to the end of January 2017.

      Needless to say, all Russian offers were rejected. A conclusion is naturally reached that American State Department officials have little interest in hearing anything that contradicts their own narrative or the discredited version of the CIA.

    6. CLAIM: Russia is interfering in elections all over the world

      FACT

      No credible evidence has been produced not only of Russia's supposed meddling in the U.S. political processes, but to support similar allegations made by the U.S. in respect to other countries. For example, former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster insinuated that Russia was interfering in the Mexican presidential elections of 2018. However, Mexican officials, including the president of the Mexican Senate Ernesto Cordero Arroyo, and Ambassador to Russia Norma Pensado during a press conference in Moscow in February, 2018, debunked this baseless claim.

      Another example of fake news were reports saying that U.S. was increasingly convinced that Russia hacked French election on May 9, 2017. However, on June 1, 2017, the head of the French government's cyber security agency said no trace was found of the claimed Russian hacking group behind the attack. On the other hand, the history of U.S. interfering in other countries' elections is well documented by American sources (see: ).

      For example, a Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H. Levin, has scoured the historical record and found 81 examples of U.S. election influence operations from 1946- to 2000. Often cited examples include Chile in 1964, Guyana in 1968, Nicaragua in 1990, Yugoslavia in 2000, Afghanistan in 2009, Ukraine in 2014, not to mention Russia in 1996! And how else could the current situation in Ukraine and Venezuela be described, with U.S. representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker openly pressuring Ukrainian voters to support the incumbent , and Washington possibly plotting a coup in Caracas?

    7. CLAIM: The lawsuit of the Democratic National Committee against the Russian Federation related to "interference in the election" has a legal standing.

      FACT

      The DNC filed a civil lawsuit on April 20, 2018 against the Russian Federation and other entities and individuals. Named as defendants in the lawsuit are the Russian Federation; the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU); the GRU operative using the pseudonym "Guccifer 2.0"; Aras Iskenerovich Agalarov; Emin Araz Agalarov; Joseph Mifsud; WikiLeaks; Julian Assange; the Trump campaign (formally "Donald J. Trump for President, Inc."); Donald Trump, Jr.; Paul Manafort; Roger Stone; Jared Kushner; George Papadopoulos; Richard W. Gates; and unnamed defendants sued as John Does 1–10. The DNC's complaint accuses the Trump campaign of engaging in a racketeering enterprise in conjunction with Russia and WikiLeaks.

      Even irrespective of the fact that there was no "interference" in the first place, the case has no legal standing. Exercise of U.S. jurisdiction over the pending case with respect to the Russian Federation is a violation of the international law, specifically, violation of jurisdictional immunities of the Russian Federation arising from the principle of the sovereign equality of states.

    8. CLAIM: Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak was a spy.

      FACT

      In March of 2017 U.S. media began libeling Sergey Kislyak a "top spy and spy-recruiter" This preposterous claim was based on nothing but his contacts with Trump confidant Senator Jeff Sessions – carrying out work any ambassador would do. Per the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, among core diplomatic functions is ascertaining by all lawful means conditions and developments in the receiving state, and that certainly includes openly meeting leaders of Congress on Capitol Hill. Even former CIA Director John McLaughlin noted that Mr. Kislyak is an experienced diplomat, not a spy.

    9. CLAIM: Russian Embassy retreat in Maryland was an intelligence base

      FACT.

      Among the unlawful acts that U.S. administrations undertook was the expropriation of a legal Russian property in Maryland, a summer retreat near the Chesapeake Bay under the pretext it was used for intelligence gathering. But where is the supposed-treasure trove of alleged spy equipment that U.S. authorities reportedly found there? Why not show them publicly to back up the claim? After the expropriation and the claims, not a word – silence.

      The retreat, "dacha" as Russians would call it, was bought by the former Soviet Union in 1972. Since then, it was used for recreation, including hosting a children's summer camp and regularly entertaining American visitors. One of the more popular events was the stop-over during the annual Chesapeake Regatta, completed with an expansive tour of the property. Presumably U.S. intelligence services could have used this for years to inspect the property. Why was nothing ever mentioned before the Obama Administration action?

    10. CLAIM: The meeting in Trump Tower in New York on June 9, 2016 between Trump campaign officials and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was to discuss compromising materials that Russian had on Hillary Clinton.

      FACT

      According to testimony provided to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Ms. Veselnitskaya focused on explaining the illicit activities of U.S.-British investor Bill Browder, wanted in Russia for crimes, and brought attention to the adverse effects of the so-called "Magnitskiy Act", adopted by U.S. Congress in 2012 and lobbied for by Browder.

    11. CLAIM: Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, met with Russians in Prague to "collude".

      FACT

      It was reported in American media that the Justice Department special counsel had evidence that Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, secretly made a trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign to meet with Russian representatives, a fact also mentioned in the discredited "Steele Dossier". This was given as further evidence of "collusion". But Cohen vehemently denied this – under oath. Passport records indicate that he never was in Prague. He was actually on vacation with his son at the supposed time. Given that he publicly turned on his former boss and still denied the fact of ever going to Prague disproves this claim further.

    12. CLAIM: Former member of the Trump campaign team Carter Page was a Russian intelligence asset.

      FACT

      According to members of Congress and journalistic investigations, the redacted declassified documents of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, also called the FISA Court) show that the main source used by U.S. counterintelligence to justify spying on Mr. Page was the fraudulent so-called "Steele Dossier".

      Thus, Mr. Page for obvious reasons was not accused by the team of Robert Mueller of being involved in a "Russian conspiracy".

    13. CLAIM: On August 22, 2018, The Democratic National Committee filed a claim with the FBI, accusing the "Russian hackers" of infiltrating its electoral database.

      FACT

      Several days later members of the Democratic Party admitted that it was a "false alarm", as it was simply a security check-up performed at the initiative of the Democratic Party's affiliate in Michigan.

    14. CLAIM: On August 8, 2018 U.S. Senator Bill Nelson accused Russia of breaching the infrastructure of the voter registration systems in several local election offices of Florida.

      FACT

      Florida's Department of State spokesperson, Sarah Revell, stated on August 9, 2018, that Florida's government had not received any evidence from competent authorities that Florida's voting systems or election records had been compromised. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI also could not confirm in any manner the accusations.

    15. CLAIM: In September, 2017 the U.S. media, referring to the Department of Homeland Security, accused Russia of "cyberattacks" on electoral infrastructure in 21 states during the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections.

      FACT

      On September 27, 2017, Wisconsin and California authorities stated that their electoral systems were not targeted by cyberattacks. On November 12, 2017, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said in a CBS interview that the "hackers' activity" had no significant consequences and did not influence the outcome of the elections. And, indeed, the source of those attacks was not clear.

    16. CLAIM: Russia meddled in the Alabama 2017 Senate elections to help the Republican candidate.

      FACT

      Despite the initial claims , it turned out that a group of Democratic tech experts decided to imitate so-called "Russian tactics" in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate racе. Even more jarring is the fact that one participant in the "Alabama project", Jonathon Morgan, is chief executive of "New Knowledge", a cyber security firm that wrote a scathing account of Russia's social media operations in the 2016 election that was released in 2018 by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Once again, we have one of the main private sector players in hyping the Russian threat caught red-handed.

    17. CLAIM: Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's presidential campaign chairman, was a secret link to Russian intelligence.

      FACT

      Trump's former campaign chairman was hit with two indictments from Mueller's office. However, even as American media notes, both cases have nothing to do with Russia and stemmed from his years as a political consultant for the Ukrainian government and his failure to pay taxes on the millions he earned, his failure to report the foreign bank accounts he used to stash that money, and his failure to report his work to the US government. In his second case in Virginia, he was also charged with committing bank fraud to boost his assets when the Ukraine work dried up.

      In fact, serious concerns have been raised in the U.S. that it was Ukrainian officials who tried to influence the 2016 elections by leaking compromising materials on Mr. Manafort.

      The Ukrainian connection is also prevalent in the case of money transferred to accounts of American politicians. For instance, according to a "New York Times" article, Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk donated over 10 million dollars to the "Clinton Foundation while just 150 thousand dollars to the "Trump Foundation".

    18. CLAIM: Russia compromised the Vermont power grid.

      FACT

      On December 31, 2016, "The Washington Post", accused "Russian hackers" of compromising the Vermont power grid. The local company, "Burlington Electric", allegedly traced a malware code in a laptop of one of its employees. It was stated that the same "code" was used to hack the Democratic Party servers in 2016. However, the "Wordfence" cybersecurity firm checked "Burlington Electric" for hacking, and said that the malware code was openly available, for instance, on a web-site of Ukrainian hackers . The attackers were using IP-addresses from across the world. "The Washington Post" later admitted that conclusions on Russia's involvement were false.

    19. CLAIM: Russian Alfa Bank was used as a secret communication link with the Trump campaign .

      FACT

      In October 2016 a new "accusation" appeared, alleging that a message exchange between the Alfa Bank server and Trump organizations indicated a "secret" Trump – Russia communication channel.

      However, the FBI concluded the supposed messaging was marketing newsletters and/or spam .

    20. CLAIM: Russia cracked voter registration systems during the 2016 U.S. elections.

      FACT

      In July 2016 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security accused Russia of gaining unauthorized access to electronic voter registration systems in Arizona. But on April 8, 2018, "Reuters", referring to a high-ranking U.S. administration official, wrote there was no proof Russia had anything to do with the mentioned cyberattack.

    21. CLAIM: Russian Embassy bank transactions were linked to "election interference".

      FACT

      American publication "Buzzfeed" repeatedly claimed that U.S. authorities flagged Russian Embassy financial transfers as suspicious, many of them dated around the 2016 election. In reality, the media outlet, by twisting the facts and placing them out of context, made routine banking transactions – salary transfers, payments to contractors – look nefarious.

      It is not uncommon for embassy personnel to receive larger payouts, transfer or withdraw larger sums of money at the end of their work. Furthermore, leaking of confidential banking information of persons and organizations protected by diplomatic immunity raised concerns about the likely involvement of security services.

      The arrest in October 2018 of a U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network official, charged with leaking information both about the Russian Embassy accounts and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, provides further proof to the theory of political skullduggery.

    * * *

    Most of these responses have not been fully examined or addressed by major media, nor, for that matter, by Fox News, dominated as it is by an almost instinctive Neoconservative Russophobia (the one possible exception being Tucker Carlson).

    For the American Left, since the collapse of Communism and the growth of a traditionalist nationalism (under Vladimir Putin), Russia has become a convenient target. When the Soviets were in power prior to 1991, the USSR was seen as a "progressive" presence in the world, even if by the requirements of American politics the Left was forced to make ritualistic condemnations of the more extreme elements of Soviet statecraft. Now that post-Communist Russia bans same sex marriage, glorifies the traditional family, and the conservative Russian Orthodox Church occupies a special position of esteem and prominence, that admiration has turned to fear and loathing. And that Russia and its president have been viewed as favorable to the hated Donald Trump doubly confirms that hostility and targeting.

    For the dominant Neoconservatives and many Republicans, contemporary Russia is seen as "anti-democratic," "reactionary," and a threat to American world hegemony (and the refusal to bow to that hegemony, whether economically, politically, or culturally). Indeed, as a major intellectual force, Neoconservatism owes much of its origins to Eastern European and Russia Jews, many of whose ancestors were at direct odds with the old pre-1917 Tsarist state. That animus, those nightmares of pogroms and oppression, have never completely subsided. A modern traditionalist, Orthodox Russia is viewed as antithetical to their more liberal, even Leftwing ideas (e.g., increasing "conservative" acceptance of same sex marriage, "moderate" feminism, and a whole panoply of "forward looking" views on civil rights issues -- all of which are present on Fox News.)

    Memory of "the bad old days" has never disappeared.

    None of this history should prevent a close examination of the current accusations against Russia, nor our search for the truth. Much -- perhaps the future of Western civilization itself -- depends on it.

    [Apr 28, 2019] Russiagate post-mortem by Andrew Korybko

    Notable quotes:
    "... Russia, and specifically President Putin, were presented as the ultimate global bogeyman after Crimea's 2014 reunification and Moscow's 2015 anti-terrorist military intervention in Syria changed the balance of power around the world and unquestionably ushered in the multipolar era after two and a half decades of American unipolarity. ..."
    "... It was therefore thought by the ruling anti-Trump faction of the US' permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies ("deep state") at the time that they could easily convince the electorate to vote against the seemingly "anti-systemic" political insurgent by implying that he's a "Russian puppet" and then later, after that didn't work, manufacturing so-called "evidence" purporting to prove this through unverified fake news claims designed to defame him. ..."
    Apr 28, 2019 | inforos.ru

    Mueller report proved that Russiagate was one long series of hoaxes designed to discredit Trump and pave the way for his impeachment

    It's finally official -- Trump and his team didn't "collude" with Russia like the Democrats and their supporters incessantly claimed for nearly the past three years. Positive coverage of candidate Trump's promising foreign policy platform by Russian international media and truthful reporting about Clinton's aggressive one don't amount to "hacking" an election, nor do some internet researchers from Russia supposedly sharing some political memes on Facebook. It's now been revealed that Russiagate was one long series of hoaxes designed to discredit Trump and pave the way for his impeachment after it first failed to stop him from winning the presidency. Like the American leader himself has said on several occasions already, Russiagate was an unconstitutional coup attempt against the country's democratically elected leadership, which deserves to be analyzed more in depth.

    Russia, and specifically President Putin, were presented as the ultimate global bogeyman after Crimea's 2014 reunification and Moscow's 2015 anti-terrorist military intervention in Syria changed the balance of power around the world and unquestionably ushered in the multipolar era after two and a half decades of American unipolarity.

    It was therefore thought by the ruling anti-Trump faction of the US' permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies ("deep state") at the time that they could easily convince the electorate to vote against the seemingly "anti-systemic" political insurgent by implying that he's a "Russian puppet" and then later, after that didn't work, manufacturing so-called "evidence" purporting to prove this through unverified fake news claims designed to defame him.

    [Apr 28, 2019] People take this repetition as a substitute for proof due to a glitch in human psychology known as the illusory truth effect, a phenomenon which causes our brains to tend to interpret things we've heard before as known truths

    Notable quotes:
    "... The #resistence seems to fulfill people who have never accepted any religions whole-heartedly; there is something in the human psyche which demands an intuitive evidence-free, faith-based acceptance of beliefs which go beyond facts and evidence. This is a powerful dream world where their illusions are more powerful than reality. ..."
    "... Their comments have moved away from ad hominem "You are a Putin stooge!" arguments to appeals to Authority fallacies: "All our Intelligence Agencies Know that Assange worked with Russians to embarrass Hillary and cost her the Election". Religiosity is largely Authority-driven, and avoids the angst of critical thinking and putting facts together that (thanks to our Intelligence Agencies!) don't fit together. ..."
    Apr 28, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    michael , April 22, 2019 at 07:06

    "People take this repetition as a substitute for proof due to a glitch in human psychology known as the illusory truth effect, a phenomenon which causes our brains to tend to interpret things we've heard before as known truths." I think it is a deeper phenomenon than repetition of lies (which have been legal since 2014 with the 'modernization' of Smith-Mundt, our anti-propaganda law).

    The #resistence seems to fulfill people who have never accepted any religions whole-heartedly; there is something in the human psyche which demands an intuitive evidence-free, faith-based acceptance of beliefs which go beyond facts and evidence. This is a powerful dream world where their illusions are more powerful than reality.

    There is an inability to accept the fact that people in DC and NYC and Boston and San Francisco and other Financial/ MIC-driven areas were doing well relative to the bulk of Americans and life was wonderful until the 2016 Election. For these people "America Has Never Stopped Being Great!" (Similar to the "I've got mine, Jack! " attitude of Great Britain, as their labor unions lost unity with rest of the working class.)

    Their comments have moved away from ad hominem "You are a Putin stooge!" arguments to appeals to Authority fallacies: "All our Intelligence Agencies Know that Assange worked with Russians to embarrass Hillary and cost her the Election". Religiosity is largely Authority-driven, and avoids the angst of critical thinking and putting facts together that (thanks to our Intelligence Agencies!) don't fit together.

    [Apr 28, 2019] Mueller's Report Was a Media Rorschach Test

    theatlantic.com

    [Apr 27, 2019] The Noose Tightens on the British Empire

    Notable quotes:
    "... Deerlove was also directly involved in setting up several Trump Campaign operatives for fake links to Russia (George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Gen. Flynn), together with British intelligence assets Joseph Mifsud and CIA asset Stefan Halper, a close ally of Deerlove at Cambridge. ..."
    "... Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News Tuesday that he will immediately investigate three cases of suspected "set ups," efforts to create fake connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians, all directly run by British operatives: the Mifsud role with Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer in falsely connecting George Papadopoulos to Russian spies; Halper and Deerlove setting up Gen. Flynn with fake Russian connections; and the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, set up by the slimy British operative Rob Goldstone. ..."
    Apr 18, 2019 | larouchepac.com

    On Thursday morning, Attorney General William Barr is scheduled to release the Mueller report, with redactions, according to laws regarding security and the privacy of Grand Jury proceedings. While the Trump haters and conspirators are preparing various operations to keep Russiagate going, despite the report's exoneration of Trump's imagined "collusion," the reality that the British ran the entire operation, as identified from the beginning by EIR, is now bursting out into the open, and is threatening to be the subject of criminal investigations in the Department of Justice and in the Congress.

    The Daily Caller's Chuck Ross on Tuesday ran an article titled: "Former British Spymaster Has Flown Under the Radar in Russia Probe, Despite Links to Key Figures." He names Richard Deerlove, MI6 chief from 1999 to 2004, as a key operative working with fellow MI6 operative Christopher Steele, the author of the now discredited dossier on Trump's supposed collusion with Russia. Deerlove was also directly involved in setting up several Trump Campaign operatives for fake links to Russia (George Papadopolous, Carter Page, Gen. Flynn), together with British intelligence assets Joseph Mifsud and CIA asset Stefan Halper, a close ally of Deerlove at Cambridge.

    Meanwhile, Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox News Tuesday that he will immediately investigate three cases of suspected "set ups," efforts to create fake connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians, all directly run by British operatives: the Mifsud role with Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer in falsely connecting George Papadopoulos to Russian spies; Halper and Deerlove setting up Gen. Flynn with fake Russian connections; and the infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, set up by the slimy British operative Rob Goldstone.

    What's more, the VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) issued a public Memorandum for President Trump on Tuesday, called "The Fly in the Mueller Ointment," warning him that the Mueller report, despite finding no evidence of collusion, maintains the lie that the Russians hacked leading Democratic Party computers and provided their emails to Wikileaks, falsely described as a Russian front. Detailing their forensic proof that the emails were downloaded, not hacked, the VIPS warn the President that if these lies are allowed to stand, the idea that Trump was elected due to Russian "interference" in the election will remain, "and that melody will linger on for the rest of your presidency, unless you seize the moment.... You are the President, and there may be no better time than now to face them down." (see Bill Binney interview with LPAC.)

    ... ... ...

    [Apr 27, 2019] Mueller s $35 Million Gaslighting of the American People

    Notable quotes:
    "... As Attorney General Barr has pointed out, including in his testimony on Capitol Hill, investigating an American presidential candidate is "a very big deal" and the Mifsud/Papadopoulos/Australian Ambassador hearsay hardly serves as adequate justification or predication. This is particularly egregious since the FBI knew that Papadopoulos never repeated to anyone in the Trump Campaign what Mifsud told him. And Mifsud is also a British intelligence asset, not a Russian intelligence asset, as suggested by Mueller's rambling legal partisans. ..."
    "... Mueller, of course, never references the fact that Russiagate actually started way back in late 2015 when the British government started demanding Donald Trump's head because of his sane view of Russia, a fact acknowledged by Obama CIA chief John Brennan in his Congressional testimony ..."
    "... MI6's Christopher Steele's dirty dossier was the driver of Russiagate and that Steele was a joint MI6, U.S. State Department, and FBI asset dating back to collaboration on the 2014 Ukraine coup conducted jointly by the Obama State Department, CIA, and British intelligence ..."
    "... the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, were transparent British/State Department operations designed to plant and fabricate evidence, namely, Russian generated "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. ..."
    "... Mueller completely avoided the real story, despite its public availability, in order to concoct his hit job. Each of these operations involved British intelligence personnel collaborating with Obama White House, the CIA and State Department. These entrapment efforts were designed as the pretext for creating and maintaining an FBI investigation. The FBI investigation in turn made the preposterous claims in Christopher Steele's dirty dossier, that Donald Trump had been compromised by the Russians, palatable to the journalists who repeated Steele's claims both before and after the election ..."
    "... The Moscow Trump Tower project also consumes hundreds of words in Mueller's screed. It was created by long-time FBI and CIA informant Felix Sater and his childhood friend, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and was presented in emails by Sater in September of 2015 as a Russian project which would help elect Donald Trump President with Putin's assistance. ..."
    "... Instead, Mueller's argument is essentially this: "if you take all of this together, maybe it amounts to something, but I can't decide, so Congress should just stick the knife in already." There is not sufficient evidence to charge a crime, Mueller says, but Trump has also not proved his innocence. ..."
    "... Here's the CliffsNotes summary of the entire 448 pages: The President was under constant attack, including from within his own White House, in an obvious attempt to frame him up while claiming he was committing treason. He got angry and didn't sit silently by while Mueller and his minions tried to frame him up. He complained loudly. Sometimes he even asked his staff to figure out how to proclaim his innocence. Under no conceivable construction is that obstruction of justice. ..."
    "... When Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia in the waning days of his Administration, in retaliation for what his intelligence chiefs claimed was Russian "interference" in the 2016 election, the sanctions included implantation of a Stuxnet type worm in Russian state infrastructure. This might be considered by the Russians as a very hot potential act of war. ..."
    "... First, someone from a tight circle who had viewed these transcripts, leaked the classified transcripts to the Washington Post's David Ignatius who wrote a loud column about Flynn colluding with the Russians to undermine Obama. That leak was a felony. McCabe then called Flynn as the article hit, saying that he was sending over two agents to talk to him about what this was about and telling him that involving any lawyers would be an encumbrance to a relaxed conversation. ..."
    "... each time Comey met with the President he returned to compose contemporaneous memos of his conversations and to plan future encounters with a close group of associates who he characterized as a "murder board." Such activities clearly indicate that Comey was engaged in attempting to set the President up. ..."
    "... Furthermore, the firestorm following Comey's firing illuminated the level of plotting against the President at the top levels of the Department of Justice -- Rod Rosenstein seriously offered to wear a wire to record the President and participated in discussions centered on organizing the cabinet to orchestrate the President's removal. ..."
    "... Trump called White House Counsel Don McGahn and told him to raise Mueller's conflicts of interest with the Department of Justice and -- according to McGahn -- that Mueller could not be Special Counsel. ..."
    Apr 22, 2019 | larouchepac.com

    Special Counsel Robert Mueller has written a 448-page fictional novel, grounded in treason, about the British/Obama Administration intelligence hoax known as Russiagate. It is intended to preoccupy your mind for the next two years, at least through the 2020 elections. It is intended to stir your passions to support your absolutely mad Representative or Senator in enacting further sanctions and supporting the British drive to overthrow Putin's government in Russia based on fictional events which, for the most part, never happened.

    The British sponsored and oriented intelligence services that sponsored this hoax have also started a campaign to ensure that the same mad passions will destroy Donald Trump's quest for new and peaceful relationships with China. Congressional investigations based on the "road map" provided by Robert Mueller are supposed to provide, on your taxpayer dollar, possible impeachment and, at the very least, opposition research for the 2020 Presidential campaign. This would fulfill the British vow, openly set forth in the December 2018 House of Lords Report, "British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order," that Donald Trump must not have a second term.

    But, most of all, it is intended to get you to doubt what is coming next. The President's allies have promised an investigation of the investigators and a full accounting of how this sordid affair came to be. As Conrad Black explains in the National Interest , what is now known is that

    "senior intelligence and FBI and Justice Department officials lied under oath to Congress, or lied to federal officials in order to influence the result, and then reverse the result, of a presidential election. In terms of subversion of the highest constitutional process, the selection of the president and vice president of the United States, this sort of activity, that Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, former attorney general Loretta Lynch and others appear to have engaged in, is the last stop before there are tanks on the White House lawn and military control of the media outlets. Mueller, having failed to do anything to address the real crisis that threatened the country, failed altogether, and compounded his failure by his sadistic entrapment of General Michael Flynn, and hounding of Paul Manafort and others, far beyond what was necessary or excusable, in an effort to extort a false inculpation of the president."

    As most know by now, the first part of the Mueller report concludes that there was no collusion between the Russian government and Donald Trump's campaign to swing the election to Donald Trump. This conclusion occurred despite thousands upon thousands of hours of fake media claims, fed by British and American intelligence leaks, which made it an article of fanatical religious faith to many, that Donald Trump was a Putin dupe. According to Mueller's report, while the Russians tried endlessly to infiltrate and steer the Trump Campaign, they didn't succeed. Undaunted, Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared on television on April 18 to claim that Mueller found "passive collusion." That is not an unfair characterization of the McCarthyite premises of Mueller's report. According to Mueller, investigation of an American Presidential campaign was justified because Trump refused to toe the British line on Putin and Russia.

    Here is how Mueller blithely reports it:

    "On June 16, 2015 Donald J. Trump declared his intent to seek nomination as the Republican candidate for President. By early 2016, he distinguished himself among Republican candidates by speaking of closer ties with Russia, saying he would get along well with Russian President Vladimir Putin, questioning whether the NATO alliance was obsolete, and praising Putin as a 'strong leader.' The press reported that Russian political analysts and commentators perceived Trump as favorable to Russia."

    Beginning in February 2016, the Report continues, the "press" began to report the connections of various campaign figures with Russia, namely, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Carter Page. According to Mueller's report, Trump pursued WikiLeaks during the campaign regarding the timing of further releases of Clinton Campaign and State Department documents, he said that he doubted that the Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta, he falsely claimed that he had no business dealings in Russia, and the Campaign was involved in changing a plank in the Republican Party platform about providing lethal assistance to Ukraine. Contrary to this lying account by Saint Mueller, we know that the "press" were being steered by a British intelligence originated propaganda campaign aimed at preventing any U.S. accommodation with Russia.

    See Barbara Boyd's 3-Part Series on the British Role in Russiagate

    Now that we know that the President is not a traitor, can we move on to address the thousands of opioid deaths, adolescent and other suicides, flooded farmlands, and crumbling infrastructure which have been pushed aside as we were trapped within the walls of this British created delusion? Well, no, according to Mueller and his Congressional toadies, Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff. Nadler, who looks and acts like a venomous toad, stuffing himself into over-sized suits which have that oh so subtle Manhattan mafia cut, vows to spend from now until 2020 redoing the Russiagate investigation. Schiff, who has constantly propounded the most fictitious crap possible about Russiagate, is just too invested to ever be sane, if he ever was. Thus, the second part of Mueller's report attempts to seamlessly switch the anti-Trump political narrative by presenting an entirely novel theory of obstruction of justice in which the President knew he was innocent, while those investigating him, knowing he was innocent, sought to exploit Trump's emotions as they rolled a full scale coup right over him, hoping he would cross the line into illegal acts. He did not, according to both Attorney General Barr and Mueller's boss throughout this escapade, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Mueller also acknowledges this by saying he can't charge Trump with obstruction of justice. But Mueller also takes a cheap shot, designed to inflame the Congress and the public, saying he cannot "exonerate" the President either. In doing so, he impermissibly shifts the burden of proof, under our Constitution, to imply that Trump must now prove his innocence. This is, of course, reminiscent of the Star Chamber.

    When Donald Trump was informed by Jeff Sessions that a Special Counsel was being appointed, he said, according to Mueller,

    "Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked. Everyone tells me if you get one of these independent counsels it ruins your presidency. It takes years and years and I won't be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that ever happened to me."

    Perversely, this absolutely true statement by the President, borne out by months of an insane inquisition which crippled his ability to act, is cited by Robert Mueller's crew of biased prosecutors for the proposition that the President repeatedly skirted obstructing justice. On April 17, Attorney General Barr said that Donald Trump confronted an unprecedented situation at the beginning of his presidency. The President was attempting to form an administration, while his own intelligence community was investigating him as an agent of a foreign power. Barr might have added that Trump knew -- and everyone else knew -- that "collusion" nonsense was just that. They knew it all along. In such circumstances, there was never any ability, in reality, to charge obstruction of justice, which requires a corrupt intent or motive. There can be no corrupt intent or motive where a President believes, rightly, that he is innocent, that he is being framed up, and that a coup is underway. He fights back, to preserve both the Presidency and the Constitution itself, breaking the rules of what Saint Robert Mueller considers to be appropriate conduct by those he targets – don't say or do anything, just let us slice you up. All the while, the Mueller report makes clear, Trump's emotions about the coup are being recorded and/or falsely portrayed, minute by minute by those who would sell him out -- some as traitors within, others, if only to save themselves. That is the reality. It was never obstruction of justice. It was a psyop against the President attempting to drive him mad.

    The British, Not the Russians, Tried to Swing the 2016 Election

    Mueller makes three significant claims about Russian interference in the 2016 election. First, page after page of his report attempts to paint an amateurish and small bore social media campaign conducted by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian internet marketing and click bait operation, as exercising a hugely powerful lure on the American mind. Despite Mueller's indictment of the IRA, which is pending now in Washington, D.C., and despite British intelligence's five year fixation on the IRA as the essence of newfound Russian powers in hybrid warfare, this is a hoax. Aaron Maté , Gareth Porter and others have demonstrated, conclusively, that the IRA spent minimal amounts of money on Facebook and Google in 2016, for a campaign which barely mentioned either candidate. Only 11% of the IRA activity even occurred during the election period.

    The IRA effort spent a grand total of $46,000 on Facebook Ads, compared to $81 million by the Trump and Clinton campaigns combined, and $4,700 on Google platforms. Its most liked Facebook post was a gun-toting image of Yosemite Sam; its most shared Instagram post said, "Click here if you like Jesus." Another favored meme featured Jesus counseling a young man how to stop masturbating. Otherwise, the IRA's campaign was dedicated to creating revenue from themed t-shirts and LGBT positive sex toys. Mueller never explains how this ad content impacted the election in any way, nor could he.

    Mueller next focuses on the alleged Russian military intelligence hacks of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, for which he has indicted 12 Russian GRU officers, secure in the knowledge that they will never appear in a U.S. courtroom to contest the charges. The first fact lost in the sauce here is the fact that the files the Russians allegedly sent to WikiLeaks for publication demonstrated, truthfully, that Hillary Clinton was a craven tool of Wall Street and that her campaign was illegally rigging the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders's insurgent campaign. Further, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, led by former NSA Technical Director William Binney and former NSA cryptologist Ed Loomis, have exploded Mueller's entire theory that the Russians hacked the DNC. They conducted forensic studies demonstrating that what Mueller says about Guccifer 2.0 is fraudulent and that the claim that a GRU hack of the DNC computers resulted in the WikiLeaks releases does not square with any science known currently to man. The download speeds and file metadata point to a thumb drive or similar storage device and a human source, rather than a Russian cyber attack conducted over the internet.

    You might also ask why Julian Assange and/or WikiLeaks were not indicted in Mueller's grand GRU conspiracy indictment . Instead, Assange was indicted on a highly dubious charge involving the 2010 Chelsea Manning leaks which may not even survive a challenge under the statute of limitations. Obviously, Mueller's proof of his indicted Russiagate conspiracy falls short. Indicting Assange for the claimed DNC and Podesta hack conspiracy would necessarily allow Assange to prove that the Russian hack never happened, as he has long contended. It would expose how James Comey and Senator Mark Warner intervened in Assange's early 2017 negotiations with the Justice Department, to ensure that the truth would never come out. It was Comey, after all, who never secured the DNC servers for FBI forensic analysis, relying instead on the forensics provided to him by Atlantic Council's Russia-hating CrowdStrike, the unreliable vendor to the DNC and the Clinton Campaign. And it was Comey, it is reliably claimed, who relentlessly pushed the Russiagate narrative even after his lead case agent told him after months of investigation, "there is no there, there." If Mueller pursued the logic of his own indictment and included Assange in his fabricated GRU conspiracy, it would also have exposed exactly what happened after Bill Binney met with then CIA Director Mike Pompeo at Donald Trump's direction on October 24, 2017, explaining exactly how the intelligence community was lying to the American President. Binney's offer to collaborate in demonstrating what actually happened with the DNC and John Podesta has been successfully blocked to date.

    The last prong of Mueller's Russiagate plot involves all sorts of contacts with Russians who allegedly unsuccessfully reached out to the Trump campaign, in order to seduce them. Here the report just lies egregiously. We are told that Russiagate started as the result of a July 2016 report by the Australian Ambassador to London, Alexander Downer, to the FBI about a conversation he had with a 28 year old Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, in London. According to Mueller, Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor with "connections to Russia" told Papadopoulos that the Russians had thousands of Hillary Clinton's State Department emails, and Papadopoulos repeated this information in a meeting initiated by Downer. According to Mueller, when the DNC's computers were hacked, the former Australian Ambassador to London remembered his early 2016 meeting with Papadopoulos in which Papadopoulos recounted Mifsud's claim about Clinton's emails. This tidbit, according to Mueller, launched a full scale FBI counterintelligence investigation of a U.S. presidential nominee. As Attorney General Barr has pointed out, including in his testimony on Capitol Hill, investigating an American presidential candidate is "a very big deal" and the Mifsud/Papadopoulos/Australian Ambassador hearsay hardly serves as adequate justification or predication. This is particularly egregious since the FBI knew that Papadopoulos never repeated to anyone in the Trump Campaign what Mifsud told him. And Mifsud is also a British intelligence asset, not a Russian intelligence asset, as suggested by Mueller's rambling legal partisans.

    Mueller, of course, never references the fact that Russiagate actually started way back in late 2015 when the British government started demanding Donald Trump's head because of his sane view of Russia, a fact acknowledged by Obama CIA chief John Brennan in his Congressional testimony.

    Nor does Mueller reference the fact that MI6's Christopher Steele's dirty dossier was the driver of Russiagate and that Steele was a joint MI6, U.S. State Department, and FBI asset dating back to collaboration on the 2014 Ukraine coup conducted jointly by the Obama State Department, CIA, and British intelligence. The Ukraine coup began a British march toward regime change in Russia, risking nuclear war, a march which was rudely interrupted by the Brexit vote in Britain and by the candidacy and election of Donald Trump.

    The real story, the one now being promised by Trump's allies and others, is that many of the alleged Russian outreach efforts cited in Mueller's report, such as multiple entrapment efforts conducted against Papadopoulos and Carter Page, as well as the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, were transparent British/State Department operations designed to plant and fabricate evidence, namely, Russian generated "dirt" on Hillary Clinton.

    Mueller completely avoided the real story, despite its public availability, in order to concoct his hit job. Each of these operations involved British intelligence personnel collaborating with Obama White House, the CIA and State Department. These entrapment efforts were designed as the pretext for creating and maintaining an FBI investigation. The FBI investigation in turn made the preposterous claims in Christopher Steele's dirty dossier, that Donald Trump had been compromised by the Russians, palatable to the journalists who repeated Steele's claims both before and after the election.

    Like the Steele dossier itself, the dirt and allegedly Russian-sourced information about Putin and Trump did not originate with actual Russian "dirt" or with actual Russian sources. According to well-placed Congressional sources, Christopher Steele's main source for his dodgy dossier is a former Russian intelligence officer living in the United States. But, no former Russian intelligence officer lives in the United States without reporting to the CIA. That is just a simple fact. There is also evidence that the Trump Campaign was being flooded with FBI informants acting as "pretend" Russian agents as early as May. Mike Caputo has documented just such as approach by FBI informant and Russian criminal Henry Greenberg to himself and Roger Stone offering "dirt on Hillary Clinton." Papadopoulos claims that Sergei Millian, the alleged source of the infamous Ritz Hotel prostitute claim in Steele's dirty dossier, sat silently as Millian's friend told Papadopoulos that Millian was working for the FBI.

    The Moscow Trump Tower project also consumes hundreds of words in Mueller's screed. It was created by long-time FBI and CIA informant Felix Sater and his childhood friend, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and was presented in emails by Sater in September of 2015 as a Russian project which would help elect Donald Trump President with Putin's assistance. It was pushed, and pushed, and pushed by Sater, whose agreement to become an informant, was signed by none other than Andrew Weissman, Mueller's chief henchman. Former CIA and State Department analyst Larry Johnson has fully demonstrated this chain of fabrications .

    As for the last portion of Part I of Mueller's Report, portraying efforts to secure peace with Russia and in Ukraine during the transition as some sort of diabolical plot -- wow, just think about that. Can you seriously join Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller in treating efforts to establish the foundations for peace with Russia, as some form of criminal act? Or, as crazy former DNI Jim Clapper calls it, "passive collusion"? This is, of course, the same Jim Clapper who claims that Russians are genetically predisposed to attack the United States. As Professor Stephen Cohen, of NYU and Princeton, continues to reiterate, there are immense nuclear dangers in stoking hatred of Russia rather than seeking a just accommodation. Professor Cohen noted recently that in the history of election interventions by the United States into Russia, even if you accept all of Mueller's preposterous claims, what the Russians are accused of doing here is equivalent to jay-walking. Compare the publication of truthful information about Hillary Clinton rigging the Democratic primaries, a juvenile and largely ineffective social media campaign, and numerous attempts to improve U.S. Russian relations, with the $10 billion the Clinton Administration provided to re-elect Boris Yeltsin, in 1996, for example.

    Obstruction of Justice

    Mueller's 250 page plus screed about obstruction of justice focuses on 10 "episodes" where he says the President almost crossed the line into what he considers to be obstructive conduct. Mind you, he admits that as opposed to most obstruction cases, there was no underlying crime which the President was trying to cover up. There were also never ever any acts like those Hillary Clinton's crew committed, such as smashing cell phones with hammers and BleachBitting computers. In fact, the White House gave the Special Counsel everything he asked for, including notes of President Trump's discussions with White House Counsel Don McGahn, over which Executive Privilege could rightly have been claimed -- and many lawyers believe such privilege should have been exercised. Mueller interviewed just about everyone in the White House and on the Trump Campaign, with the President's blessing and his urging them to "cooperate." From this cooperation, Mueller's minions concocted a hit job, designed to portray the President as unstable and irrational and out solely to protect himself, concealing derogatory facts from the American people in statements on his Twitter account and to the press. Nowhere, however, even in this entire rabid prosecutor's screed is there any act which the courts have recognized as obstruction of justice.

    Instead, Mueller's argument is essentially this: "if you take all of this together, maybe it amounts to something, but I can't decide, so Congress should just stick the knife in already." There is not sufficient evidence to charge a crime, Mueller says, but Trump has also not proved his innocence.

    Here's the CliffsNotes summary of the entire 448 pages: The President was under constant attack, including from within his own White House, in an obvious attempt to frame him up while claiming he was committing treason. He got angry and didn't sit silently by while Mueller and his minions tried to frame him up. He complained loudly. Sometimes he even asked his staff to figure out how to proclaim his innocence. Under no conceivable construction is that obstruction of justice.

    Three incidents make the fraud in Mueller's tedious novel very clear. First, Mueller babbles on about the President's conduct concerning Michael Flynn's firing, but he never references that Michael Flynn had been targeted by the British authors of the Russiagate hoax, the circles of Sir Richard Dearlove and his friend Stefan Halper, way back in 2014. They falsely accused Flynn of a dalliance with Russian historian Svetlana Lokhova at a Cambridge event both attended. What really flipped the British out about Flynn, however, was his exposure of support for Al Qaeda and similar groups in Syria by both the U.S. and British governments. Flynn had been a target of FBI investigation and surveillance based on British demands for his head since early 2016, if not much earlier.

    When Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia in the waning days of his Administration, in retaliation for what his intelligence chiefs claimed was Russian "interference" in the 2016 election, the sanctions included implantation of a Stuxnet type worm in Russian state infrastructure. This might be considered by the Russians as a very hot potential act of war. Flynn, the incoming National Security Adviser, had conversations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak to the effect that the Russians should not overreact to Obama's sanctions, among other things. These conversations were intercepted, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and Mary McCord of the National Security Division at DOJ, along with Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, plotted how to set Flynn up for undermining Obama's dangerous threats and actions.

    First, someone from a tight circle who had viewed these transcripts, leaked the classified transcripts to the Washington Post's David Ignatius who wrote a loud column about Flynn colluding with the Russians to undermine Obama. That leak was a felony. McCabe then called Flynn as the article hit, saying that he was sending over two agents to talk to him about what this was about and telling him that involving any lawyers would be an encumbrance to a relaxed conversation. Flynn couldn't remember certain things the agents asked him about. They had the transcript of Flynn's conversation and never showed it to him. In the course of the interview, Flynn made statements at variance with what he was known to have said in the transcripts. Nonetheless, the agents themselves said that Flynn had not deliberately lied to them when they reported back to the FBI.

    After Flynn was fired for lying to Vice President Pence and others about the Kisylak conversations, FBI Director James Comey claims that President Trump pulled him aside and said he "hoped" Comey would let the Flynn thing go because Flynn was a good guy. The maniacal Comey insists that the President's "hope" was an "order." Comey, the fabricator, had previously insisted that the President's alleged request for "loyalty," at a point where all of Washington was talking about RESIST members covertly acting against the President from within his Administration, was somehow equivalent to a mafia induction ceremony. Michael Flynn was subsequently convicted by Mueller of lying to the FBI in his White House interview despite the fact that the original agents concluded that no such lying even occurred. This was part of a coerced plea deal resulting from the fact that Flynn was bankrupted by the legal fees necessary to defend himself against Mueller's inquisition, and threats by Mueller to indict Flynn's son.

    Then there is the Comey firing itself. Comey's Congressional testimony, which Mueller never mentions, lays out that each time Comey met with the President he returned to compose contemporaneous memos of his conversations and to plan future encounters with a close group of associates who he characterized as a "murder board." Such activities clearly indicate that Comey was engaged in attempting to set the President up. Comey told Congress and Trump that he was not under investigation in Russiagate but refused to tell the public that, knowing full well that the President felt it was completely hindering his ability to act, particularly with respect to Russia.

    Mueller does disclose that, from the beginning, Trump railed against Comey because he was blocking what Trump he wanted to do with Russia on trade and ISIS. In fact, Trump dictated a letter to Steven Miller firing Comey because he would not tell the public the truth about Russiagate and because it was hindering his ability to deal with Russia. Trump's letter was rejected by White House staff, including White House Counsel Don McGahn, who came up with the idea of firing Comey based on Comey's misconduct in the Clinton investigation. The President repeated the real reasons he was firing Comey publicly and almost immediately after Rod Rosenstein's letter detailing Comey's misconduct in the Clinton investigation was released, and did so again, in an oval office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and Ambassador Kislyak. This is hardly the concealment associated with obstruction of justice.

    Furthermore, the firestorm following Comey's firing illuminated the level of plotting against the President at the top levels of the Department of Justice -- Rod Rosenstein seriously offered to wear a wire to record the President and participated in discussions centered on organizing the cabinet to orchestrate the President's removal. Mueller never mentions any of this in his report. Instead he adopts, wholesale, James Comey's claim that Trump fired him to hinder the Russia investigation, despite the fact that the investigation was never hindered. Mueller also never references Comey's leaks of classified materials to a friend for media publication, in order to trigger Mueller's own appointment as Special Counsel, or that everyone already knew, at that point, that there was "no there, there" with respect to collusion with Russia.

    Instead, the game was on to frame the President, to build the case Comey had not been able to make about obstruction of justice. This proceeded through a series of calculated provocations and media leaks all designed to provoke the President into overreaction.

    One of these is found in the episode involving the so-called attempt to "fire Mueller" which the media and Congress are salivating about. According to Mueller's report, Trump called White House Counsel Don McGahn and told him to raise Mueller's conflicts of interest with the Department of Justice and -- according to McGahn -- that Mueller could not be Special Counsel.

    This call occurred soon after the Washington Post published a leak that the President himself was under investigation by Mueller for obstruction of justice. McGahn construed Trump's words as an order to fire Mueller, even though, by his own account, no such order to fire Mueller was stated. McGahn claims that he immediately decided to resign, although he never informed the President of this. No call was ever placed to the Justice Department, Mueller was not fired, and Trump never repeated what he allegedly said on one heated occasion to Don McGahn. Based on his drama queen account of this alleged aborted attempt at some undetermined act of obstruction, however, McGahn is being hailed by the anti-Trump media as a modern Sir Thomas More.

    The President denies ever saying anything like this and there is considerable evidence in the Mueller report itself demonstrating that Trump's repeatedly pronounced distrust of McGahn was fully justified. The kicker here is that even if Trump had followed through and fired Mueller, he would have been within his Constitutional powers to do so. There would have been plenty of political heat, but no obstruction of justice, despite McGahn's ridiculous fantasy that he was being asked to re-enact Nixon's Saturday night massacre. Mueller's report otherwise shows White House Counsel McGahn, a total creature of the Washington Republican establishment who attached himself to Trump early in the campaign, keeping book on the President and taking notes on everything the President allegedly said -- hardly something typical of normal lawyering.

    So, despite this weekend's huffing and puffing of the Democrats and the media about the Mueller Report, it is important to remember, first and foremost, that they suffered a bone-crushing defeat when Saint Robert Mueller's magical curtain was pulled back, revealing a tale, full of sound and fury, but signifying absolutely nothing. Attorney General Barr will conduct a seminar for the children in Congress when he testifies about the actual law shortly.

    The real story, the one about the attempted coup and treason against this President and its perpetrators is coming, and it will come fast. A big opportunity is presenting itself to crush the British apparatus which has haunted this country since the end of World War II.

    Act now, don't get confused by the heat of battle, and we can take the country back.

    This kind of reporting is only possible with support from YOU. Make a donation to LaRouchePAC today so we can fully defeat this coup against the President!

    [Apr 27, 2019] Butina case was "political and fabricated from air poisoned with Russophobia".

    Apr 27, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

    She had cast herself as a comparative innocent caught up in a massive geopolitical power game and at Friday's sentencing hearing, Butina appealed to Judge Tanya Chutkan to release her with nine months of time served.

    "My reputation is ruined, both here in the United States and abroad," she said, asking for "a chance to go home and restart my life".

    Chutkan, however, fully complied with the government's recommendation and sentenced Butina to spend an additional nine months behind bars, before being deported. The judge said the sentence was meant "to reflect the seriousness of [Butina's actions] and to promote deterrence".

    Butina's lawyers decried the judgment as overly harsh; they had characterized Butina as a naive but ambitious international affairs student who simply didn't realize her actions required her to register as an agent of a foreign government.

    The Russian embassy in Washington responded to the sentence in a Facebook post that Butina "is a political prisoner, a victim of provocations by special services and the arbitrary use of repressive US legislation. We insist on the innocence of our compatriot. We demand her immediate release. We will continue to provide her with comprehensive consular and legal assistance."

    Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the lower house of the Russian parliament, said the case was "political and fabricated from air poisoned with Russophobia".

    "It is necessary to continue the fight, to file an appeal and to do everything in our power for Maria Butina to return to Russia as soon as possible," Slutsky was quoted as saying by the state news agency Tass.

    [Apr 27, 2019] Top German Journalist Admits Mainstream Media Is Completely Fake We All Lie For The CIA

    Apr 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    03/28/2016 With the increasing propaganda wars, we thought a reminder of just how naive many Westerners are when it comes to their news-feed. As Arjun Walia, of GlobalResearch.ca, notes, Dr. Ulfkotte went on public television stating that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job.

    He recently made an appearance on RT news to share these facts:

    I've been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public.

    But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia -- this is a point of no return and I'm going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe.

    [Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts. Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and assessing." ..."
    "... Selective enforcement of FARA was, ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned. ..."
    "... Kushner reportedly aggressively pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government. ..."
    "... Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to do nothing about it. ..."
    Apr 25, 2019 | ronpaulinstitute.org
    The Mueller Special Counsel inquiry is far from over even though a final report on its findings has been issued. Although the investigation had a mandate to explore all aspects of the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, from the start the focus was on the possibility that some members of the Trump campaign had colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the election to favor the GOP candidate. Even though that could not be demonstrated, many prominent Trump critics, to include Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, are demanding that the investigation continue until Congress has discovered "the full facts of Russia's interference [to include] the ways in which that interference is continuing in anticipation of 2020, and the full story of how the president and his team welcomed, benefited from, repaid, and obstructed lawful investigation into that interference and the president's cooperation with it."

    Tribe should perhaps read the report more carefully. While it does indeed confirm some Russian meddling, it does not demonstrate that anyone in the Trump circle benefited from it or cooperated with it. The objective currently being promoted by dedicated Trump critics like Tribe is to make a case to impeach the president based on the alleged enormity of the Russian activity, which is not borne out by the facts: the Russian role was intermittent, small scale and basically ineffective.

    One interesting aspect of the Mueller inquiry and the ongoing Russophobia that it has generated is the essential hypocrisy of the Washington Establishment. It is generally agreed that whatever Russia actually did, it did not affect the outcome of the election. That the Kremlin was using intelligence resources to act against Hillary Clinton should surprise no one as she described Russian President Vladimir Putin as Hitler and also made clear that she would be taking a very hard line against Moscow.

    The anti-Russia frenzy in Washington generated by the vengeful Democrats and an Establishment fearful of a loss of privilege and entitlement claimed a number of victims. Among them was Russian citizen Maria Butina, who has a court date and will very likely be sentenced tomorrow .

    Regarding Butina, the United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe that the Kremlin sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association (NRA) by having a Russian citizen take out a life membership in the organization with the intention of corrupting it and turning it into an instrument for subverting American democracy. Maria Butina has, by the way, a long and well documented history as an advocate for gun ownership and was a co-founder in Russia of Right to Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence front organization of some kind. It is rather a genuine lobbying group with an active membership and agenda. Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can own guns but the licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to Bear Arms, modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.

    Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in a federal prison, having been charged with collusion and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. She was arrested on July 15, 2018. It is decidedly unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) , but she has not been granted bail because, as a Russian citizen, she is considered to be a "flight risk," likely to try to flee the US and return home.

    FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts. Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and assessing."

    Maria eventually pleaded guilty of not registering under FARA to mitigate any punishment, hoping that she would be allowed to return to Russia after a few months in prison on top of the nine months she has already served. She has reportedly fully cooperated the US authorities, turning over documents, answering questions and undergoing hours of interrogation by federal investigators before and after her guilty plea.

    Maria Butina basically did nothing that damaged US security and it is difficult to see where her behavior was even criminal, but the prosecution is asking for 18 months in prison for her in addition to the time served. She would be, in fact, one of only a handful of individuals ever to be imprisoned over FARA, and they all come from countries that Washington considers to be unfriendly, to include Cuba, Saddam's Iraq and Russia. Normally the failure to comply with FARA is handled with a fine and compulsory registration.

    Butina was essentially convicted of the crime of being Russian at the wrong time and in the wrong place and she is paying for it with prison. Selective enforcement of FARA was, ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned.

    Kushner reportedly aggressively pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government.

    Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to do nothing about it.

    As so often is the case, inquiries that begin by looking for foreign interference in American politics start by focusing on Washington's adversaries but then comes up with Israel. Noam Chomsky described it best "First of all, if you're interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Netanyahu goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president's policies -- what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress trying to -- calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president? And that's just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence."

    Maria Butina is in jail for doing nothing while Jared Kushner, who needed a godfathered security clearance due to his close Israeli ties, struts through the White House as senior advisor to the president in spite of the fact that he used his nepotistically obtained access to openly promote the interests of a foreign government. Mueller knows all about it but recommended nothing, as if it didn't happen. The media is silent. Congress will do nothing. As Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put it "We in Congress stand by Israel. In Congress, we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel." Indeed.

    Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation .

    [Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... How is it that the Deep State made it possible for Trump to win when it did almost everything it could to derail his chances, including the use of Obama, FBI, CIA, MI6, NSA, etc? ..."
    "... Regardless one's feelings about Trump, what was done as Whitney points out is a massive danger to the fundamental aspects of the democratic process, and that's not being shown the light-of-day by BigLie Media. ..."
    Apr 26, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    karlof1 , Apr 26, 2019 11:21:26 AM | link

    Mike Whitney writes about one aspect of Russiagate that several of us have noted--the use of the FBI and CIA to meddle in the 2016 campaign in an attempt to aid Clinton--an aspect that blows up some of the hypotheses floated here. He begins thusly:

    1. "Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign?-- Yes
    2. "Did the FBI place spies in the Trump campaign?-- Yes
    3. "Do we know the names of the spies and how they operated?-- Yes
    4. "Were the spies trying to entrap Trump campaign assistants in order to gather information on Trump?-- Yes
    5. "Did the spies try to elicit information from Trump campaign assistants in order to justify a wider investigation and more extensive surveillance?-- Yes
    6. "Were the spies placed in the Trump campaign based on improperly obtained FISA warrants?-- Yes
    7. "Did the FBI agents procure these warrants based on false or misleading information?-- Yes
    8. "Could the FBI establish 'probable cause' that Trump had committed a crime or 'colluded' with Russia?-- No
    9. "So the 'spying' was illegal?-- Yes
    10. "Have many of the people who authorized the spying, already been identified in criminal referrals presented to the Department of Justice?-- Yes
    11. "Have the media explained the importance of these criminal referrals or the impact that spying has on free elections?-- No
    12. "Is the DOJ's Inspector General currently investigating whether senior-level agents in the FBI committed crimes by improperly obtaining warrants to spy on members of the Trump team?-- Yes
    13. "Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign to give Hillary Clinton an unfair advantage in the presidential race?-- Yes
    14. "Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign to gather incriminating information on Trump that could be used to blackmail, intimidate or impeach him in the future?-- Yes
    15. "Does spying pose a threat to our elections and to our democracy?-- Yes
    16. "Do many people know that there were spies placed in the Trump campaign?-- Yes
    17. "Have these people effectively used that information to their advantage?-- No
    18. "Have they launched any type of public relations offensive that would draw more attention to the critical issue of spying on a political campaign?-- No
    19. "Have they saturated the airwaves with the truth about 'spying' the same way their rivals have spread their disinformation about 'collusion'?-- No" [Emphasis in Original]

    That's a little more than half of what Whitney lists that's quite damning as we must admit. That it's not being discussed anywhere outside of a few social media accounts means Trump could use the "precedent" set by Obama to do the same in 2020. Shouldn't we be concerned about that possibility? How is it that the Deep State made it possible for Trump to win when it did almost everything it could to derail his chances, including the use of Obama, FBI, CIA, MI6, NSA, etc?

    Regardless one's feelings about Trump, what was done as Whitney points out is a massive danger to the fundamental aspects of the democratic process, and that's not being shown the light-of-day by BigLie Media. And we can also see why Pelosi and Clinton don't want Impeachment proceedings to occur as the above information would finally become far more overt/public than it is currently.

    [Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts. Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and assessing." ..."
    "... Selective enforcement of FARA was, ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned. ..."
    "... Kushner reportedly aggressively pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government. ..."
    "... Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to do nothing about it. ..."
    Apr 25, 2019 | ronpaulinstitute.org
    The Mueller Special Counsel inquiry is far from over even though a final report on its findings has been issued. Although the investigation had a mandate to explore all aspects of the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, from the start the focus was on the possibility that some members of the Trump campaign had colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the election to favor the GOP candidate. Even though that could not be demonstrated, many prominent Trump critics, to include Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, are demanding that the investigation continue until Congress has discovered "the full facts of Russia's interference [to include] the ways in which that interference is continuing in anticipation of 2020, and the full story of how the president and his team welcomed, benefited from, repaid, and obstructed lawful investigation into that interference and the president's cooperation with it."

    Tribe should perhaps read the report more carefully. While it does indeed confirm some Russian meddling, it does not demonstrate that anyone in the Trump circle benefited from it or cooperated with it. The objective currently being promoted by dedicated Trump critics like Tribe is to make a case to impeach the president based on the alleged enormity of the Russian activity, which is not borne out by the facts: the Russian role was intermittent, small scale and basically ineffective.

    One interesting aspect of the Mueller inquiry and the ongoing Russophobia that it has generated is the essential hypocrisy of the Washington Establishment. It is generally agreed that whatever Russia actually did, it did not affect the outcome of the election. That the Kremlin was using intelligence resources to act against Hillary Clinton should surprise no one as she described Russian President Vladimir Putin as Hitler and also made clear that she would be taking a very hard line against Moscow.

    The anti-Russia frenzy in Washington generated by the vengeful Democrats and an Establishment fearful of a loss of privilege and entitlement claimed a number of victims. Among them was Russian citizen Maria Butina, who has a court date and will very likely be sentenced tomorrow .

    Regarding Butina, the United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe that the Kremlin sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association (NRA) by having a Russian citizen take out a life membership in the organization with the intention of corrupting it and turning it into an instrument for subverting American democracy. Maria Butina has, by the way, a long and well documented history as an advocate for gun ownership and was a co-founder in Russia of Right to Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence front organization of some kind. It is rather a genuine lobbying group with an active membership and agenda. Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can own guns but the licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to Bear Arms, modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.

    Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in a federal prison, having been charged with collusion and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. She was arrested on July 15, 2018. It is decidedly unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) , but she has not been granted bail because, as a Russian citizen, she is considered to be a "flight risk," likely to try to flee the US and return home.

    FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts. Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and assessing."

    Maria eventually pleaded guilty of not registering under FARA to mitigate any punishment, hoping that she would be allowed to return to Russia after a few months in prison on top of the nine months she has already served. She has reportedly fully cooperated the US authorities, turning over documents, answering questions and undergoing hours of interrogation by federal investigators before and after her guilty plea.

    Maria Butina basically did nothing that damaged US security and it is difficult to see where her behavior was even criminal, but the prosecution is asking for 18 months in prison for her in addition to the time served. She would be, in fact, one of only a handful of individuals ever to be imprisoned over FARA, and they all come from countries that Washington considers to be unfriendly, to include Cuba, Saddam's Iraq and Russia. Normally the failure to comply with FARA is handled with a fine and compulsory registration.

    Butina was essentially convicted of the crime of being Russian at the wrong time and in the wrong place and she is paying for it with prison. Selective enforcement of FARA was, ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned.

    Kushner reportedly aggressively pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government.

    Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to do nothing about it.

    As so often is the case, inquiries that begin by looking for foreign interference in American politics start by focusing on Washington's adversaries but then comes up with Israel. Noam Chomsky described it best "First of all, if you're interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Netanyahu goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president's policies -- what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress trying to -- calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president? And that's just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence."

    Maria Butina is in jail for doing nothing while Jared Kushner, who needed a godfathered security clearance due to his close Israeli ties, struts through the White House as senior advisor to the president in spite of the fact that he used his nepotistically obtained access to openly promote the interests of a foreign government. Mueller knows all about it but recommended nothing, as if it didn't happen. The media is silent. Congress will do nothing. As Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put it "We in Congress stand by Israel. In Congress, we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel." Indeed.

    Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation .

    [Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... How is it that the Deep State made it possible for Trump to win when it did almost everything it could to derail his chances, including the use of Obama, FBI, CIA, MI6, NSA, etc? ..."
    "... Regardless one's feelings about Trump, what was done as Whitney points out is a massive danger to the fundamental aspects of the democratic process, and that's not being shown the light-of-day by BigLie Media. ..."
    Apr 26, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    karlof1 , Apr 26, 2019 11:21:26 AM | link

    Mike Whitney writes about one aspect of Russiagate that several of us have noted--the use of the FBI and CIA to meddle in the 2016 campaign in an attempt to aid Clinton--an aspect that blows up some of the hypotheses floated here. He begins thusly:

    1. "Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign?-- Yes
    2. "Did the FBI place spies in the Trump campaign?-- Yes
    3. "Do we know the names of the spies and how they operated?-- Yes
    4. "Were the spies trying to entrap Trump campaign assistants in order to gather information on Trump?-- Yes
    5. "Did the spies try to elicit information from Trump campaign assistants in order to justify a wider investigation and more extensive surveillance?-- Yes
    6. "Were the spies placed in the Trump campaign based on improperly obtained FISA warrants?-- Yes
    7. "Did the FBI agents procure these warrants based on false or misleading information?-- Yes
    8. "Could the FBI establish 'probable cause' that Trump had committed a crime or 'colluded' with Russia?-- No
    9. "So the 'spying' was illegal?-- Yes
    10. "Have many of the people who authorized the spying, already been identified in criminal referrals presented to the Department of Justice?-- Yes
    11. "Have the media explained the importance of these criminal referrals or the impact that spying has on free elections?-- No
    12. "Is the DOJ's Inspector General currently investigating whether senior-level agents in the FBI committed crimes by improperly obtaining warrants to spy on members of the Trump team?-- Yes
    13. "Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign to give Hillary Clinton an unfair advantage in the presidential race?-- Yes
    14. "Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign to gather incriminating information on Trump that could be used to blackmail, intimidate or impeach him in the future?-- Yes
    15. "Does spying pose a threat to our elections and to our democracy?-- Yes
    16. "Do many people know that there were spies placed in the Trump campaign?-- Yes
    17. "Have these people effectively used that information to their advantage?-- No
    18. "Have they launched any type of public relations offensive that would draw more attention to the critical issue of spying on a political campaign?-- No
    19. "Have they saturated the airwaves with the truth about 'spying' the same way their rivals have spread their disinformation about 'collusion'?-- No" [Emphasis in Original]

    That's a little more than half of what Whitney lists that's quite damning as we must admit. That it's not being discussed anywhere outside of a few social media accounts means Trump could use the "precedent" set by Obama to do the same in 2020. Shouldn't we be concerned about that possibility? How is it that the Deep State made it possible for Trump to win when it did almost everything it could to derail his chances, including the use of Obama, FBI, CIA, MI6, NSA, etc?

    Regardless one's feelings about Trump, what was done as Whitney points out is a massive danger to the fundamental aspects of the democratic process, and that's not being shown the light-of-day by BigLie Media. And we can also see why Pelosi and Clinton don't want Impeachment proceedings to occur as the above information would finally become far more overt/public than it is currently.

    [Apr 26, 2019] How the Obama White House engaged Ukraine to give Russia collusion narrative an early boost by John Solomon

    Notable quotes:
    "... Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine's chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me he attended some but not all of the January 2016 Washington meetings and couldn't remember the specific cases, if any, that were discussed. ..."
    "... But he said he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election . Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort -- a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions -- was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the U.S.-friendly NABU, after Manafort was named Trump's campaign chairman: "Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious." ..."
    "... "I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort." ..."
    "... Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that other Western figures , such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych's party. But the Americans weren't interested: "They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else." ..."
    "... According to Telizhenko, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukraine's chief prosecutor in March 2016, as I previously reported. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut down. ..."
    "... The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on Thursday confirmed the Obama administration requested the meetings in January 2016, but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions. ..."
    "... But Telizhenko's claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort probe as the 2016 election ramped up is supported by the DOJ's own documents, including communications involving Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie, and ex-British spy Christopher Steele. ..."
    "... DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband and two DOJ prosecutors specializing in international crimes to the discovery of the "black ledger" documents that led to Manafort's prosecution. ..."
    "... The efforts eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which the FBI asked Deripaska if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. Deripaska laughed off the notion as preposterous. ..."
    "... Now we have more concrete evidence that the larger Ukrainian government also was being pressed by the Obama administration to help build the Russia collusion narrative. And that onion is only beginning to be peeled. ..."
    "... But what is already confirmed by Ukrainians looks a lot more like assertive collusion with a foreign power than anything detailed in the Mueller report . ..."
    Apr 26, 2019 | thehill.com

    As Donald Trump began his meteoric rise to the presidency, the Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington to coordinate ongoing anti-corruption efforts inside Russia's most critical neighbor.

    The January 2016 gathering, confirmed by multiple participants and contemporaneous memos, brought some of Ukraine's top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of former President Obama's National Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ).

    That makes the January 2016 meeting one of the earliest documented efforts to build the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative and one of the first to involve the Obama administration's intervention.

    Spokespeople for the NSC, DOJ and FBI declined to comment. A representative for former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice did not return emails seeking comment.

    Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine's chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me he attended some but not all of the January 2016 Washington meetings and couldn't remember the specific cases, if any, that were discussed.

    But he said he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election . Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort -- a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions -- was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the U.S.-friendly NABU, after Manafort was named Trump's campaign chairman: "Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious."

    Kholodnytskyy said he explicitly instructed NABU investigators who were working with American authorities not to share the ledger with the media. "Look, Manafort's case is one of the cases that hurt me a lot," he said.

    "I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort."

    "For me it was the first call that something was going wrong and that there is some external influence in this case. And there is some other interests in this case not in the interest of the investigation and a fair trial," he added.

    Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general's international affairs office, said that, shortly after Ukrainian authorities returned from the Washington meeting, there was a clear message about helping the Americans with the Party of the Regions case.

    "Yes, there was a lot of talking about needing help and then the ledger just appeared in public," he recalled.

    Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that other Western figures , such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych's party. But the Americans weren't interested: "They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else."

    Manafort joined Trump's campaign on March 29, 2016, and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016.

    NABU leaked the existence of the ledgers on May 29, 2016. Later that summer, it told U.S. media the ledgers showed payments to Manafort, a revelation that forced him to resign from the campaign in August 2016.

    A Ukrainian court in December concluded NABU's release of the ledger was an illegal attempt to influence the U.S. election. And a member of Ukraine's parliament has released a recording of a NABU official saying the agency released the ledger to help Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign.

    The other case raised at the January 2016 meeting, Telizhenko said, involved Burisma Holdings , a Ukrainian energy company under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was paying then-Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter as both a board member and a consultant. More than $3 million flowed from Ukraine to an American firm tied to Hunter Biden in 2014-15, bank records show .

    According to Telizhenko, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukraine's chief prosecutor in March 2016, as I previously reported. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut down.

    The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on Thursday confirmed the Obama administration requested the meetings in January 2016, but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions.

    "Unfortunately, the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., was not invited to join the DOJ and other law enforcement-sector meetings," it said. It said it had no record that the Party of Regions or Burisma cases came up in the meetings it did attend.

    Ukraine is riddled with corruption, Russian meddling and intense political conflicts, so one must carefully consider any Ukrainian accounts.

    But Telizhenko's claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort probe as the 2016 election ramped up is supported by the DOJ's own documents, including communications involving Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie, and ex-British spy Christopher Steele.

    Nellie Ohr and Steele worked in 2016 for the research firm, Fusion GPS, that was hired by Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to find Russia dirt on Trump. Steele wrote the famous dossier for Fusion that the FBI used to gain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Nellie Ohr admitted to Congress that she routed Russia dirt on Trump from Fusion to the DOJ through her husband during the election.

    DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband and two DOJ prosecutors specializing in international crimes to the discovery of the "black ledger" documents that led to Manafort's prosecution.

    "Reported Trove of documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions' Black Cashbox," Nellie Ohr wrote to her husband and federal prosecutors Lisa Holtyn and Joseph Wheatley, attaching a news article on the announcement of NABU's release of the documents.

    Bruce Ohr and Steele worked on their own effort to get dirt on Manafort from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who had a soured business relationship with him. Deripaska was "almost ready to talk" to U.S. government officials regarding the money that "Manafort stole," Bruce Ohr wrote in notes from his conversations with Steele.

    The efforts eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which the FBI asked Deripaska if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. Deripaska laughed off the notion as preposterous.

    Previously, Politico reported that the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington assisted Clinton's campaign through a DNC contractor. The Ukrainian Embassy acknowledges it got requests for assistance from the DNC staffer to find dirt on Manafort but denies it provided any improper assistance.

    Now we have more concrete evidence that the larger Ukrainian government also was being pressed by the Obama administration to help build the Russia collusion narrative. And that onion is only beginning to be peeled.

    But what is already confirmed by Ukrainians looks a lot more like assertive collusion with a foreign power than anything detailed in the Mueller report .

    John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports

    [Apr 26, 2019] Immigrant neocon class

    Apr 26, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    turcopolier , 25 April 2019 at 08:25 AM

    Zakariah is an interesting example of the immigrant neocon class. Khalilzad is another. Sebastian Gorka and Varney are others. They like the US, but, if only it were more aggressive, less federal.

    Khalizad told me once that you WASP types have no idea of the real uses of power. Etc.

    Artemesia said in reply to turcopolier ... , 26 April 2019 at 11:06 AM

    Gorka may be in the "immigrant neocon class," but as harmful to USA foreign policy as is Khalilzad, Gorka is not in his league: Gorka is a mediocre-talent, blowhard Wannabe.
    --

    re Mr. Bolan's critique of US "diplomacy" with Iran: a threshold question I ask is, By what right?
    What right has USA to demand that Iran "change its behavior."

    The response from the neocon community was voiced most recently in a discussion titled, Countering Violent Extremism https://www.c-span.org/video/?460029-1/us-institute-peace-hosts-forum-combating-violent-extremism moderated by David Ignatius and including such stellar 'diplomats' as Bushites Madeleine Albright, Michael Singh and Stephen Hadley: USA created the "international order" post-WWII and the institutions and values of that "international order" have maintained "peace, stability and prosperity" in the world ever since. The proof: "there have been no major wars between European powers since WWII." Democracy and stability are the keys to defeating "violent extremism" and maintaining the international order.
    To maintain that Pax Americana, the US is entitled undermine the sovereignty of-; destabilize - , and impoverish any and all nations that resist its stabilizing efforts.

    [Apr 26, 2019] Russiagate will scarcely matter to most voters by election time 2020. But might give some advantage to Trump playing "false victum" of the witch hunt

    Notable quotes:
    "... foreign policy scarcely moves the needle in the US electorate at large so that won't necessarily help Trump nor hinder Bernie except on the outer fringes. Americans are tired of endless wars so the Demotards should generally be favoured on this issue whether or not warranted so long as they play their cards right. ..."
    "... US Presidential elections definitely turn on the economy. A slowdown or recession before 11/2020 and Trump is toast. Also, the conversation has clearly moved left on economic inequality and healthcare. Bernie owns these issues and to the extent he can make his way through the primaries he will stand a great chance of unseating Trump. ..."
    "... Warren does too but as you stated she is not telegenic nor peronable. Her .01% Native American schtick really hurt her credibility. That was a dumb move. ..."
    "... Gabbard is certainly telegenic and hasn't been blackballed as much as she is simply not well-known. She's in the field at the moment. Her chances appear more real farther down the road so running now could be seen as a first step in the eventual process. I doubt Bernie will choose her as VP but who knows? ..."
    Apr 26, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    donkeytale , Apr 25, 2019 4:19:45 PM | link

    Russiagate will scarcely matter to most voters by election time 2020. Trump has already received whatever positives he will receive courtesy of Barr's whitewashing. It is clear among a majourity of Americans that Trump obstructed justice and the drip drip of continued information, hearings, etc will not improve his standing. May not hurt him but definitely will not help him gain voters at the margins.

    Likewise, foreign policy scarcely moves the needle in the US electorate at large so that won't necessarily help Trump nor hinder Bernie except on the outer fringes. Americans are tired of endless wars so the Demotards should generally be favoured on this issue whether or not warranted so long as they play their cards right.

    Trump may gain an advantage among more conservative-tinged independent voters if he continues to work in concert with Russia and Israel on Middle East issues in the sense that many may see these alliances as promoting strength and peace (whether warranted or not). The coming deal with China on trade will benefit Trump too...as long as the economy keeps humming along.

    US Presidential elections definitely turn on the economy. A slowdown or recession before 11/2020 and Trump is toast. Also, the conversation has clearly moved left on economic inequality and healthcare. Bernie owns these issues and to the extent he can make his way through the primaries he will stand a great chance of unseating Trump.

    Warren does too but as you stated she is not telegenic nor peronable. Her .01% Native American schtick really hurt her credibility. That was a dumb move. Are some of her problems related to gender bias? Without a doubt. However, as I have long said, the first American female president will not come from the baby boom. The first American female president will more likely be a millenial.

    Gabbard is certainly telegenic and hasn't been blackballed as much as she is simply not well-known. She's in the field at the moment. Her chances appear more real farther down the road so running now could be seen as a first step in the eventual process. I doubt Bernie will choose her as VP but who knows?

    ... ... ...

    [Apr 26, 2019] Gabbard is serious person, while Sanders ais a sheepdog for Establishment

    Apr 26, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jared , Apr 25, 2019 2:47:02 PM | link

    Sanders will rally the FSA but that will go nowhere in general election.

    Gabbard is serious person. The fact that DNC does approve is one of her strengths. Of course Wasserman will attempt a Tanya Harding but Tulsi can take her.
    I hope she would not team with Biden.
    I thing two good women might be powerful:
    Behold: Gabbard/Omar.

    Zachary Smith , Apr 25, 2019 2:54:22 PM | link

    @ Rhisiart Gwilym #3

    Sanders is already hip deep in the Deep State, and there is no denying it. In absolute terms he is an unacceptable candidate . But then a person recalls a famous Winston Churchill quote:

    "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."

    After stating the obvious fact Sanders just isn't much good, you have to ask, compared to what?

    This election cycle it looks as if the Palestinians will be screwed yet again. But I can imagine that while Sanders will be extremely protective of the Holy Cesspool, he will stop the practice of kissing Netanyahu's ass to the point of inflammation.

    As you say, if we get President Sanders we'd better not also be presented with Vice President Neocon. In that event I'd expect something or other to happen so as to suddenly have President Neocon.

    Jackrabbit , Apr 25, 2019 3:35:22 PM | link
    I agree with Rhisiart Gwilym @3 and james @4.

    Hillary and Pelosi are against impeachment - which supports Trump - as I've explained here and here .

    = = = =

    Sanders is a Democratic Party sheepdog, as I described here .

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    Sadly, I think b is caught in a mental framework, like many socialist-leaning Europeans, that prevents him from thinking critically about Sanders.

    All the more strange because everyone can see how Obama and Trump failed to live up to their rhetoric, how powerful monied interests and the Deep State conduct "managed democracy" and give us the illusion of democracy . Yet some cling to the notion that democracy works! making it possible that a socialist hero can be elected.

    Until democracy itself is made an issue (akin to the Yellow Vest protests) , we will continue to be played.

    Altai , Apr 25, 2019 4:12:38 PM | link
    Bernie Sanders may well have the best chance to beat Trump on domestic policies. But he is no progressive on foreign policy issues.

    He has gotten better on this recently but he doesn't have the strength left in him to properly challenge the lobby, particularly being Jewish his extended family/social circle is a weakness they'll attack like with Goldstone.

    Interestingly 'Beto' O'Rourke called Netanyahu a 'racist' not too long ago.
    https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/07/politics/beto-orourke-israel-netanyahu/index.html

    Presumably he calculated that the infamously spiteful man won't be in office come January 2021 and that he can join in the scape-goating of Netanyahu as the unique 'bad-man' whose policies vis-a-vis the Palestinians and other neighbours wasn't highly popular and endorsed by Israeli society and we can all forget about it when somebody more presentable takes over despite engaging in the same policies.

    dan , Apr 25, 2019 4:53:37 PM | link
    With the exception of Gabbard, the running list looks like a who's who of industry and Israel lobbyists.

    ... ... ...

    Ma Laoshi , Apr 25, 2019 4:59:43 PM | link
    Bernie Sanders has been around in Washington. He knows that his domestic plans are unaffordable in the Red Scare climate which he's been pushing himself , since all money will go to the Deep State and the Armies of Mordor. The evidence is he's OK with that. Anyway, why spend time on this old geezer; he's already lost and in the time since then, he's exposed himself as a phony and liar.
    donkeytale , Apr 25, 2019 5:33:58 PM | link
    Z Smith isnt it crystal clear by now...Jack Rabbit is working...very hard it seems...for the re-election of Donald Trump.

    The germane question: why? Is he falling back on the "same ol same ol" purity of the 3rd party gambit (the same one that has never worked throughout US history and surely has even less chance of success than ever in 2020)?

    Is he ignoring or even against the plain fact that Democrats are trending leftier, less white and more female thanks in large part to so-called "sheepdog" Bernie's 2016 campaign and "movement"? Bernie far from being a sheepdog in fact played his hand rather intelligently and with self-discipline in 2016 rather than lashing out angrily at being fucked over by the party apparatus and reacting in a manner of which JR would surely approve...such as self marginalising himself into yet another in an endless string of 3rd party losers who are now footnotes in history at best.

    There is evidence that Bernie voters stayed home or voted Trump in 2016 in those MW states with the slimmest margins for Trump. So the evidence indicates more that he fucked Hillary instead of being her sheepdog... and of course had she won Bernie would not be in the 2020 game, Obamacare would be solidified with the insurance companies, hospitals, physicians and drug companies, DLC centrist politics would rule the land and we would not be talking so loudly today about taxing the rich or advcating Medicare for all.

    In several key states -- Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan -- the number of Sanders to Trump defectors were greater than Trump's margin of victory, according to new numbers released Wednesday by UMass professor Brian Schaffner.

    Does JR simply believe electoral politics is a totally failed bit? I can grok that and agree...to a point. Problem is he offers exactly nothing as a defined alternative except...more of the same...vote 3rd party (like in, yawn, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016) or join a "movement".

    You are either for fascism or against it.

    NemesisCalling , Apr 25, 2019 7:17:53 PM | link
    think the doom and gloomers in here decrying Sanders/Gabbard chances as securing the nom are not being very sensible.

    There is no doubt in my mind that Sanders will be the nom. Whether he picks Gabbard or not will be telling.

    Gabbard, so far, has been the straight-up most respectable, classy, and well-spoken candidate hitting the media circuit. Whispers abound about her legitimacy and should not be discounted.

    And they already denied Sanders once. That was their free pass and you only get one of those. Ask the Syria-interventionists and they will say the same: "We already burned through the pass in Iraq and Afghanistan. Otherwise, Assad would have been publicly strung up and hung on MSNBC by now."

    There will be hell to pay if they deny Sanders again.

    But this is all contingent on the fact that you don't already think that TPTB are setting the table specifically for Sanders because he is already an owned man.

    Here we go again with the same ol' question for the office of POTUS: "WHO ARE YOU?"

    Jen , Apr 25, 2019 7:22:22 PM | link
    As long as Hunter Biden is still a director of Burisma Holdings (which includes at least one other unpleasant individual on the Board of Directors), there is always a chance that elements within or connected to the Ukrainian government (even under Volodymyr Zelenskiy's Presidency, when he has his back turned on his fellow politicians), the previous Poroshenko government or Poroshenko himself, and / or the Maidan Revolution - Crowdstrike, Dmitri Alperovich and Chalupa sisters, we're looking at all of you - might try to derail any or all of the Democratic Party presidential candidates in attempts to have Joe Biden declared the official Democrat presidential contender in 2020. The only question is how openly brazen these people are going to be in order to save their pet project in Kiev before Ukraine erupts in civil war (and it won't be civil war in the Donbass area) and the entire country goes down in flames.

    Maybe someone who really, really hates Biden in the Democrat camp could remind the DNC of this little episode where Biden threatened Poroshenko in 2016 that the US would pull US$1 billion in guarantees if the Porky one didn't pull his Prosecutor General.

    As for the rest of the 20 candidates, I would prefer Tulsi Gabbard out of the lot. In this respect India's general elections, already under way, are going to be important. Gabbard needs to let go of Narendra Modi and his Hindutva BJP party - her friendship with Modi and his association with Hindutva are sure to come under scrutiny as will also any connections she and her office staff have with The Science of Identity Foundation organisation.

    VietnamVet , Apr 25, 2019 9:08:24 PM | link
    I donated to Tulsi Gabbard's campaign so there would be one anti-war candidate in the Presidential debates. Having served in the first one, the restart of the Cold War is gut wrenching. Today it is far more dangerous than 40 years ago. "Détente" is archaic, Inequality in the West has reached the Gilded Age levels. The USA occupies East Syria even though its regime change campaign failed. With the estrangement of Western Allies, trade wars and economic sanctions against Russia and Iran, plus Joe Biden's trench war in Ukraine, the slightest misstep and the global economy will crash. If a conflict breaks out with Russia or China, the Trump Administration is too incompetent and arrogant to back down to avoid a nuclear war. The 2020 election may well be the last chance to save the earth.
    ben , Apr 25, 2019 9:16:53 PM | link
    Whatever Sanders and Gabbard are, remains to be seen, but I agree with b, they are the two best we've got.

    Those who feel differently, no worries, unless I miss my guess, Biden is the one the party of $ will push.

    Copeland , Apr 25, 2019 10:10:48 PM | link
    Jackrabbit:

    The accountability that is on offer in the upcoming election is to alter the structure of the Democratic Party. The deck was stacked against the progressive challenge in the last presidential election. Only a candidate who has genuine "fire-in-the-belly" has a chance to beat Trump. Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Elizabeth Warren are the only ones I see who are holding these credentials. I think you are wrong when you say that Sanders is finished evolving, --and despite his age-- he is the most dynamic, among the older people Americans seem to prefer to be president. It would do him some good and improve his chance of success, if he chose for his running mate someone whose passion was equally sincere.

    Political sour grapes and fatalism offer us no hope of coming through the next few years intact.

    Jackrabbit , Apr 25, 2019 10:17:08 PM | link
    Sanders is NOT anti-estblishment. He's just good at hiding his support for the establishment so that he can be used as foil / sheepdog / spoiler.
    "Enough with the emails" - Bernie refused to raise "character issues" about Hillary despite the fact that she would face those same issues in the general election;

    faux populist sell-out Obama campaigned for Bernie;

    Bernie admitted that Hillary "a friend of 25 years" ;

    Schumer refused to fund any Democratic Party candidate that would run against Sanders in Vermont;

    Sanders votes with the Democrats >95% of the time.


    <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    We can debate the merits of each establishment stooge until we're blue in the face but establishment plans for gaming the race are likely to have already made. It's be another good show that millions of American's tune in to watch.

    My best guess: gay Mayor Pete gets most of the primary media coverage which focuses on his oh-so-sensible agenda, Obama-like likeability, and "historic" (did I mention that he's gay?) run for the Presidency. But Pete and his running mate Biden fail to unseat Trump.

    2024: Mayor Pete loses Democratic nomination to a women (Chelsea Clinton? she'll be 44) and she wins the Presidency.

    Unless, that is, Americans wake up and demand a real democracy.

    Sigil , Apr 26, 2019 12:41:49 AM | link
    'Bernie Sanders may well have the best chance to beat Trump on domestic policies. But he is no progressive on foreign policy issues'

    He campaigned against the Vietnam war before he got elected, he later opposed the Iraq invasion, and recently led the Senate to oppose US involvement in Yemen. What is your standard for calling him a progressive? Does he have to be to the Left of Noam Chomsky (who, incidentally, says Sanders has the best policies out of any candidate)?

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/noam-chomsky-bernie-sanders-policies-election-160125180058899.html


    Jackrabbit , Apr 26, 2019 1:33:35 AM | link
    Those who cheer Sanders are ignoring both the hidden-in-plain-sight evidence for "managed democracy" (e.g. duopoly, money-based electoral system; lapdog media; and Imperial Deep State) and in-your-face lived history: Obama and Trump have both sweet-talked their 'base' but ruled as servants of the establishment and a member of the Deep State.

    What's needed for real change is a Movement that is outside duopoly politics. That is what the establishment really fears. And that's why we are being pressed to get emotionally engaged in this sh*t show 18-months before the election. Because they don't want people to think of alternatives. You enslave yourselves.

    Friar Ockham , Apr 26, 2019 2:21:34 AM | link
    Both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are clowns. They do not have a chance to win against Pres. Trump, who will be the bankrupcy president. No one else would be able to handle it and the oligarchs know it. Democracy ? It stopped being a joke.
    BM , Apr 26, 2019 11:38:54 AM | link
    As for the rest of the 20 candidates, I would prefer Tulsi Gabbard out of the lot. In this respect India's general elections, already under way, are going to be important. Gabbard needs to let go of Narendra Modi and his Hindutva BJP party - her friendship with Modi and his association with Hindutva are sure to come under scrutiny as will also any connections she and her office staff have with The Science of Identity Foundation organisation.
    Posted by: Jen | Apr 25, 2019 7:22:22 PM | 55

    I checked out Jen's link regarding the Science of Identity Foundation - it is a very skillfully written Republican hit job, complete with multiple references to Gabbard's "support for foreign dictators" Putin and Assad, to her criticism of US fake allegations of Assad chemical attacks, to her alleged Islamaphobia for arguing that genuine muslims be differentiated from islamic terrorists, and her criticism of Obama for not bombing ISIS and al-Qaida. In Part 1 the ultirior motives are relatively well hidden, but the start coming into view in Parts 2 and 3, especially in her answers to comments in Part 3.

    Interesting quote from Part 2 about Gabbard's guru Butler: "His father, the late Dr. Willis Butler, was well-known locally for his far-left political activism and his staunch opposition to U.S. involvement in foreign regime change wars, which he considered counterproductive. Dr. Butler was particularly concerned about U.S. funding of groups in Central America that he viewed as terrorists. " - sounds like at least Butler's father had his head screwed on the right way round. If that is the origin in part of Gabbard's opposition to regime change wars and US funding of terrorists then that at least was a positive influence (although implicitly painted as negative in the article!)

    Having said that, the article raises a number of important questions and is in that respect an eye opener - it's just that the misleading and tainted manner in which the article is written is dangerous without verifying the information - classic fake news.

    I agree with Jen about the dangers of her support for Modi. I can't help suspecting she sees the US (far-right) Indian-American elite as an important source of political funding for her seat, and that I see as problematic.

    [Apr 25, 2019] Ecuador President Lenin Moreno on revoking Julian Assange's asylum

    No commnets...
    Apr 11, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    "I announce that the discourteous and aggressive behaviour of Julian Assange...has led to the situation where asylum is unsustainable and no longer viable"

    [Apr 25, 2019] Trump promotes conspiracy theory that UK helped Obama administration spy on his presidential campaign

    Apr 25, 2019 | independent.co.uk

    Donald Trump has apparently accused the UK of conspiring to help the Obama administration spy on his presidential campaign, saying "when the truth comes out, it will be a beauty!".

    The US president promoted the conspiracy theory on Twitter by quoting a right-wing US news organisation's headline, which according to Mr Trump read: "Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson accuses United Kingdom Intelligence of helping Obama Administration Spy on the 2016 Trump Presidential Campaign."

    Mr Trump added: "WOW! It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be a beauty!"

    GCHQ, the UK government's chief digital spying organisation, branded the allegation "utterly ridiculous".

    "As we have previously stated, the allegations that GCHQ was asked to conduct 'wire tapping' against the then President Elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored," the agency told Reuters.

    The claim appears to stem from Mr Johnson, a former CIA analyst who is a longtime critic of US intelligence and a defender of Russia.

    Mr Johnson has previously claimed without providing evidence the CIA, and not Moscow, may have been behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, and has frequently appeared on Russian state media to reject US intelligence conclusions of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

    The Guardian reported in 2017 Britain's intelligence agencies had alerted their US counterparts to suspicious "interaction" between figures connected to the Trump campaign and Russian agents, but that it was part of a "routine exchange" of information and that CGHQ never carried out a targeted operation against Mr Trump or his team. There is no evidence the Obama administration conducted a spying operation against the Trump campaign.

    Mr Trump's tweet followed one last month in which he suggested Britain had invented Russian election interference in order to "bait" the US into taking a hard line against Moscow.

    It comes two years after GCHQ was forced to deny it "wire tapped" Trump Tower in 2016, after the White House promoted a Fox News pundit's allegation Barack Obama bypassed US intelligence by using the UK's spy centre to obtain details of Mr Trump's conversations.

    "They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored," GCHQ said at the time.

    The president, who has access to information provided by the world's most powerful intelligence agencies, later told reporters "you should be talking to Fox" when asked about the claim.

    Mr Trump's tweet comes just 40 days before he is due in the UK on a state visit.

    [Apr 25, 2019] Historical info on stolen votes in the USA: Johnson victory in Texas senator race was due to election fraud

    Apr 25, 2019 | irrussianality.wordpress.com

    . The New York Times reports how 40 years later Robert Caro tracked down Luis Salas, 'the election judge who, under oath, had certified 200 disputed votes for Johnson in the notorious Ballot Box 13.' As the Times says :

    He [Caro] knocked on the door of a mobile home near Houston, and the frail old man of 84 who answered was only too pleased to fish out from a trunk a 94-page history titled "Box 13," which described how he had switched votes from Stevenson to Johnson. He was proud of deceiving everyone. "We put L. B. Johnson as senator for Texas, and this position opened the road to reach the presidency."

    Never again would Caro have to equivocate, "No one will ever be sure if Lyndon Johnson stole it." Now, in [his book] "Working," he writes yet another definitive sentence: He stole it.

    Electoral corruption takes rather different forms nowadays. Corporate lobbying, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the like are far more common than ballot stuffing LBJ-style. But regardless of the form these abuses take, the idea that we have some type of pristine process which is pure and 'democratic' until defiled by 'foreign meddling' is rather naïve. That doesn't mean, of course, that we shouldn't be doing all we can to make matters better, or that we shouldn't be wary of things which might make them worse. But in doing the latter, we need to keep a sense of proportion and not to over-idealize existing systems or over-exaggerate the scale of the dangers.

    The likes of Timothy Snyder would have us believe that democracy is on the verge of collapsing into tyranny. In reality, the choices are between various forms of democratic imperfection. Some are better than others, but all are inevitably flawed. A little bit more imperfection here and there isn't the end of the world.

    Share this:

    [Apr 25, 2019] 'The Devils Chessboard' (by DAvid Talbot) provides a riveting account of how cold war paranoia became the engine to so much US thinking culminating in the murder of JFK

    Apr 23, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    harry stotle says Apr, 23, 2019

    The ceding of democracy to an unaccountable deep state in the US is at the heart of many of the world's woes.

    'The Devils Chessboard' (by DAvid Talbot) provides a riveting account of how cold war paranoia became the engine to so much US thinking culminating in the murder of JFK (by the CIA) once Kennedy became the first president to meaningfully challenge the authority of the security apperatus.

    The murderous policies Kennedy tried and failed to confront have only mushroomed since then so that today we have a form of cryptofascism in the US that the media are in absolute denial about.

    JFK was gunned down.
    Julian Assange will be consigned to solitary if the deep state has it's way.
    But this doesn't stop MPs like jess Phillips, hacks like Hadley Freeman or other assorted phonies in the 'liberal media' cheering them on – this is what we are up against.

    BigB says Apr, 23, 2019
    Except JFK didn't do anything of the sort: and conducted a fair few murderous policies of his own – inter alia: against Cuba and South Vietnam. But I am tired of arguing the point with actual facts. What I will say, is that this pseudo-historic construct hides the and heroifies the crimes of Empire and Unpeoples more than half the world. And normalises Armageddon as a game of nuclear brinksmanship. We won't be so lucky again following the satandardised diplomatic "13 Days" diplomacy. [That was a typo: but its staying as far more eloquent than 'standardised']. A point I have made consistently for about two years: with evidence. But opinion is averse to contradictory facticity. It would be nice to see a symmetric history emerging: one that returns the humanity to the dehumanised of the world. Not one that focuses on and normalises the murderous hagiography of the Great Men of Empire but hey, ho. Loading...
    harry stotle says Apr, 23, 2019
    What we do know is that JFK was preceived as sufficiently threating (to the interests of the deep state) that the CIA blew his brains out.

    It is this fundemental power dynamic that I am mostly alluding to – in other words the way in which the intelligence apperatus rose above the law so that by '63 even the president of the USA was not safe from their nefarious scheming.

    By comparison a whitleblower is a far more vulnerable target and it appears the CIA have been prepared to bide their time while a sham legal process goes through the motions in order to create an illusion that justice is being served when in facts it's not, because as we all know Asssange's fate has already been sealed.

    I take your point about JFKs failings but given the fascistic nature of US power it is very unlikely that an untainted politician could negotiate the many hurdles the prevent less amoral individuals from reaching such rarefied heights.

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    BigB says Apr, 23, 2019
    With all due respect, Harry, we do not know that JFK was perceived as a 'threat' at all. That is a retroactive conclusion drawn from a fabricated virtual JFK. I've shown he was not turning to peace, not withdrawing from Vietnam, the MIC was doing rather well out of him – particularly the Rand Corporation that was driving policy in Vietnam. He doubled the nuclear arsenal and ordered a whole fleet of Polaris subs, alongside massively strengthening his conventional forces – including his counterinsurgency forces that were currently raping, torturing and murdering their way round any designated 'gooks' in Vietnam. He even gave them a valedictory shoutout in his last recorded speech. And added that Vietnam would fall overnight without them.

    Millions of man hours and a trillion dollar industry have shone very little light on the why. Speculation abounds. What he did do was really piss off a whole bunch of psychopaths (my money is on Lyman Lemnitzer). The whole metaconspiracy thing seems contrived to me – especially as it does not fit the evidence.

    Points about the power structure are well made. The CIA and international intelligence agencies – not strictly limited to 'Five Eyes' or even 'Fourteen Eyes' – seem to have at least some integrated policy and are out of control.

    Any derogatory remarks about the medias alternative Labour leader – Jess Phillips – are welcome too.

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    Hugh O'Neill says Apr, 24, 2019
    BigB. Wrong again. A Washington journalist 3 weeks before the assassination wrote about the CIA being out of control in Vietnam. His highly placed source reckoned too that a coup would more likely come from the CIA before the Pentagon. The source in all likelihood was JFK. Just because you are ignorant of something doesn't mean it wasn't so. Loading...
    BigB says Apr, 24, 2019
    Well, Hugh – what can I say? You have steadfastly refused to even contemplate that the Douglass pulp fiction is tripe. I have offered to go through the key pages and cross-reference with any of Sheldon Stern's Excomm books – that show how contrived a narrative fiction it is. You will not hear it. Nor will you hear anything of the murderous policies of the Diem clan – and their forced Catholicisation and cultural genocide. Now you are countering what I have adequately referenced in the past with "a reporter said". Reporters say a lot of things: not necessarily linked to reality. Can you substantiate what this anonymous reporter said?

    His well chronicled persecution of, inter alia, the Cubans and the South Vietnamese speaks volumes to those who have ears to hear. I believe the first thing he did was sign a counterinsurgency order against North Vietnam – but I can't be bothered to check. His whole programme there was illegal, contra International Humanitarian Law, contra the Geneva Accords, contra humanity, contra life. They still have deformed children and environmental problems from the rainbow of chemical warfare defoliants used in Operation Ranch Hand – every run signed off by JFK initially. And still you defend him, denigrating the unpeopled and deformed Other because a reporter said? Get real: he is not worthy of anyone's adulation. You can't hide behind the CIA forever. He made plenty of anti-human decisions on his own. Some of which nearly precipitated Armageddon.

    Coming right back at ya: just because you are ignorant of something doesn't mean it wasn't so.

    [Apr 25, 2019] It goes without saying that Trump would covet an opportunity to settle scores with the Democratic Party over that witch hunt, which, in cahoots with the mainstream media, stalked the US leader and his administration for two painstaking years.

    Apr 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    There is also the question of Russiagate. It goes without saying that Trump would covet an opportunity to settle scores with the Democratic Party over that witch hunt, which, in cahoots with the mainstream media, stalked the US leader and his administration for two painstaking years. And even now, after the release of the Mueller Report, the Democrats refuse to throw in the towel and are plotting to interrogate the interrogator himself, Robert Mueller. This is where Julian Assange might help halt the madness, although that is not to suggest, of course, that he is necessarily predisposed to such an opportunity. Yet he may find himself with no choice in the matter. Before continuing with that line of discussion, there are some rather strange things about the Assange case that need mentioning.

    For those who may have forgotten, and it seems that many have, Rich, 27, was the Director of Voter Expansion Data at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at the time of his death. In other words, he would have been in the loop to view emails showing foul play inside of the DNC. What kind of foul play? Well, for starters, deliberate efforts to marginalize Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton, who responded to the arrest of Julian Assange with her trademark cackle before remarking, "The bottom line is that he has to answer for what he has done, at least as it has been charged." For Hillary Clinton that means wrecking her chances at the White House.

    Incidentally, it was at this time in history, in July 2016 during the release of the incriminating DNC emails, when the perennial bogeyman Russia was wheeled out as not only the source of the emails, but the kingmaker in the US election as well.

    At this point, it is important to emphasize that there is no proof to suggest that Rich had anything to with leaking the DNC emails to WikiLeaks. In fact, to merely suggest such a thing has been given the 'conspiracy theory' stamp of disapproval by the establishment. Yet that has not stopped the flow of mysteries. For example, Rod Wheeler, a private investigator hired by the Rich family to investigate the death of their son, said he had sources at the FBI who "absolutely" confirmed that there was evidence on Rich's laptop that indicates he was communicating with WikiLeaks prior to his death. However, just days after divulging this explosive information, Wheeler backtracked on his statement, calling his on-air comments a "miscommunication."

    For what it is worth, Snopes has called the claims that Rich leaked the emails as "false."

    Yet, there remains the circumstantial evidence, namely Rich's untimely death, as well as its uncanny timing. There also remains the question of his supervisory position inside of the DNC, and the assertion that the DNC emails were not discovered by hackers, but rather a leaker. In other words, an internal source at the DNC. Whether or not Mr. Rich was that source remains questionable, however, Julian Assange not only referred to Seth Rich during an interview, he offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of his killer or killers.

    "Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks," Assange said in an interview with a Dutch television station. "There's a 27-year-old who works for the DNC, who was shot in the back, murdered, just two weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington."

    When pressed for more information, he said, "I'm suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that."

    On the basis of that comment, Assange could potentially be called to testify as a witness should the authorities decide to reopen the case of Seth Rich's murder.

    This leads us to the million-dollar question: were the DNC computers hacked by the Russians or was the data leaked by an internal source at the organization and forwarded to WikiLeaks? The answer to that question would not only settle the 'Russian meddling' mystery once and for all, it would determine how the DNC/Clinton emails were compromised.

    me title=

    Many people are of the opinion it was not the Russians.

    William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower and member of Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), co-authored a report (entitled, "Why the DNC was not hacked by the Russians") that says the WikiLeaks dump was the result of a leak by "a person with physical access to the DNC's computer system."

    "The NSA had an opportunity to make it clear that there was irrefutable proof of Russian meddling, particularly with regard to the DNC hack, when it signed on to the January 2017 'Intelligence Community Assessment,'" Binney wrote.

    Instead, the NSA could only say it has "moderate confidence," which means, in intelligence speak, "we have no hard evidence," the pair concluded.

    Meanwhile, there remains the question as to how any conclusion could have been made when the DNC refused to hand over the compromised computer servers to the FBI.

    "We'd always prefer to have access hands-on ourselves if that's possible," former FBI head James Comey told lawmakers in October 2017. He added that he didn't know why the DNC refused the FBI, which was forced to rely on data provided by CrowdStrike, a private security firm hired by the DNC.

    Following the release of the Mueller Report, which failed to find any proof that Trump colluded with the Russians, there remains a glaring yet unproven accusation that needs addressed: that is the allegation that the Russians somehow fixed the election in Trump's favor.

    Although the mainstream media may be ignoring Binney's findings, that doesn't mean everyone is. In October 2017, Binney paid a visit to CIA headquarters, at the invitation of Donald Trump, where he met with then agency director Mike Pompeo, as cited by The Intercept.

    Any guesses whose name was brought up in the course of the meeting between Binney and Pompeo? Yes, that of Seth Rich. Again, whether or not that proves to be significant remains an open question.

    But make no mistake. Donald Trump would like nothing more than to remove the ugly footnote that the Democrats have tacked to his presidency that says the Russians "succeeded beyond their wildest dreams," to quote former intelligence chief James Clapper, by stealing the White House from Hillary Clinton. In other words, Trump does not deserve to be president, the Democrats continue to chant mindlessly. And even after the Mueller Report talk of impeachment continues to hang in the air. The only way to confront the insanity is to have Mr. Assange testify in the United States, possibly as the result of a plea bargain, about his knowledge of Russiagate.

    In fact, such an arrangement had been made before. In January 2017, Assange's lawyer Adam Waldman "negotiated with the Justice Department on a possible deal to get the WikiLeaks founder limited immunity and safe passage out of a London embassy to talk with U.S. officials," according to a report by The Hill.

    me title=

    Among other things, Assange would have been expected to "provide technical information to the U.S. ruling out certain suspects in the release of hacked DNC emails key to the Russia case "

    But the negotiations hit a snag and – according to a source cited by John Solomon of The Hill – James Comey told Assange's lawyer to "stand down" on the offer.

    Now, considering that many of the 'old Obama guard' – like James Comey, the fired FBI director, and Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr – are no longer steering the investigation, there remains the possibility that the Trump administration will be willing to hear what WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has to say about the greatest witch hunt in the history of US politics . Assange's testimony, should it happen, may even help solve the mystery of the Seth Rich murder.

    In other words, don't believe that Russiagate has concluded. Indeed, it may have only just begun.

    tonye , 2 minutes ago link

    Or, if the British keep holding onto him, it might be the Deep Estate and the Obola/Clinton cabals want to keep Assange on ice so that he won't put the kabosh on the Russia Gate narrative.

    Right Wing-Nut , 7 minutes ago link

    The real Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy right within the bowels of the US Government.

    And we have this from August 2017:

    Republican California Representative Dana Rohrabacher met with WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London this week.

    According to Rohrabacher, Assange "reaffirmed his aggressive denial that the Russians had anything to do with the hacking of the DNC during the election," in the meeting, adding, "He has given us a lot of information. He said there's more to come. We don't have the entire picture yet."

    Rohrabacher further claimed that the information he received would have "an earth-shattering political impact."

    https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/08/17/report-gop-rep-dana-rohrbracher-meets-julian-assange/

    archie bird , 22 minutes ago link

    I believe its been determined that the DNC emails were leaked, not hacked by Russians. According to different reports the emails were downloaded to a thumbdrive as a fantastic speed, much to fast for it to be a hack.

    PeaceForWorld , 27 minutes ago link

    I was running one of the largest Bernie Groups and I was Bernie or Bust. I really believe that Seth Reich did leak the info to Julian Assange and he was killed as a hero. DWS who is a criminal was definitely involved and I wouldn't doubt about Mossad's involvement. Mossad is very sneaky and professional in killing. All we need is DNC Fraud Lawsuit. But even Becks were threatened and the case didn't go anywhere.

    Trump is just extremely selfish and he used Wikileaks in his campaign by defending him. But he doesn't give a damn about Julian Assange.

    I Am Jack's Macroaggression , 50 minutes ago link

    Unless the Republican leader's declared intention along the campaign trail to 'drain the swamp' was mere rhetorical bombast...

    Jesus ******* Christ. 😣

    look there are people, who if Trump appointed Bill Kristol chief of staff, would still insist Trump is draining the swamp.

    these people are incorrigible morons, and should be disallowed sharp objects and plastic bags.

    Bolton, Haley, Pompeo, Abramson.... helloooo!! McFuckingFlyyyyyy!!!

    Dr. Acula , 48 minutes ago link

    The stupid... It burns

    shortingurass , 36 minutes ago link

    I agree. I'm ******* tired of dumbasses trying to paint Trump as a swamp-drainer when he has already proven he's a swamp creature himself, surrounded by zios and neocons.

    Keter , 7 minutes ago link

    The neocons are bad, but it is the failure on the border, with hundreds of thousands of visa overstays, and legal immigration increases of third world refugees, h1bs, and h2bs that most egregious of the Trump administration.

    CatInTheHat , 50 minutes ago link

    "This leads us to the million-dollar question: were the DNC computers hacked by the Russians or was the data leaked by an internal source at the organization and forwarded to WikiLeaks? The answer to that question would not only settle the 'Russian meddling' mystery once and for all, it would determine how the DNC/Clinton emails were compromised."

    This author is off his nut

    This is exactly why Julian is being shut down. Unable to see even his lawyers, being denied medical treatment and likely being tortured.

    This is why Comey sabotaged the deal..

    Russia hack = IRAQI WMD. The elite are determined to manufacture public consent for war on Russia.

    They know Julian would not only destroy this narrative but that he would create a mass back lash for all of US who knew Russiagate was ******** in the first place.

    Trump is a Zionist stooge is arming and funding the NEONAZI THUGS in Ukraine right along with Israhsll.

    He has ZERO intention of doing what the author suggest. This is pure fantasy with absolutely ZERO to back it up.

    [Apr 25, 2019] A Sign Of The Times Court Documents Indicate 7,819 Boy Scout Troop Leaders Abused 12,254 Victims

    Fish rots from the head. Neoliberal society is amoral society.
    Apr 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
    Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

    This is a very difficult article for me to write. As a young child I was a member of the Cub Scouts, and I still have very fond memories from those days. Throughout my life I always had a tremendous amount of respect for the Boy Scouts, and so it greatly saddened me to learn about the abuse that has been running rampant in that organization. Of course this is just a very small part of a much larger trend that is plaguing our society , but if this kind of abuse is pervasive even among the Boy Scouts, what organization is truly safe for America's kids? Have we gotten to the point as a society where our children are literally not safe anywhere? According to ABC News , court documents that were just released indicate that 12,254 victims were abused by 7,819 Boy Scout troop leaders over the years

    An expert who has been working with the Boy Scouts revealed that there may have been as many as 7,819 allegedly sexually abusive troop leaders and volunteers in the storied organization, according to newly released court documents.

    More than 7,800 individuals allegedly abused 12,254 victims, according to the court testimony.

    This is what can happen when a society has absolutely no moral foundation whatsoever. These days, many Americans seem to believe that our country will be turned in the right direction if we can just get the correct political leaders into place, but that is not true at all.

    No political solution is going to fix this kind of evil. Our core problems are moral and spiritual in nature, and most people don't seem to understand that.

    A lawyer named Jeff Anderson is searching for even more Boy Scout victims, and he says that his firm has already identified 130 perpetrators in New York and 50 in New Jersey According to ABC News , court documents that were just released indicate that 12,254 victims were abused by 7,819 Boy Scout troop leaders over the years

    An expert who has been working with the Boy Scouts revealed that there may have been as many as 7,819 allegedly sexually abusive troop leaders and volunteers in the storied organization, according to newly released court documents.

    More than 7,800 individuals allegedly abused 12,254 victims, according to the court testimony.

    This is what can happen when a society has absolutely no moral foundation whatsoever. These days, many Americans seem to believe that our country will be turned in the right direction if we can just get the correct political leaders into place, but that is not true at all.

    No political solution is going to fix this kind of evil. Our core problems are moral and spiritual in nature, and most people don't seem to understand that.

    A lawyer named Jeff Anderson is searching for even more Boy Scout victims, and he says that his firm has already identified 130 perpetrators in New York and 50 in New Jersey

    Dan'l , 1 hour ago link

    "Nothing is more important than the safety and protection of children in Scouting." The courts had to let the fags in as Scout Masters, so who is surprised?

    All of Jewllywood is overrun with pedos

    Cloud9.5 , 55 minutes ago link

    Our handlers have romanticized deviancy to the point that these people cannot be called out. We have been weighed in the balance and found lacking. The good, the bad and the ugly will be swept away with what is coming.

    GeoffreyT , 7 minutes ago link

    Are you really stupid enough to think that homosexual paedophiles never got into positions of authority in the scouts until the scouts permitted openly gay scout leaders?

    You should be thankful that you were an ugly kid - that's the only way you would have escaped their clutches, if you're this naïve as an adult.

    Paedophiles have always been attracted to any job that involves close unsupervised contact with children .

    Anyone in that sort of job should always be immediately suspect: paedophiles are very rare in the broad population, but they're not rare in professions that involve close, unsupervised contact with kids.

    HideTheWeenie , 1 hour ago link

    52 years ago I went to Boy Scout Camp outside of Rhinelander, WI.

    On the third night a scoutmaster, who I didn't know, woke me up around 11:30 pm to go to the Deer Field to look at stars. Being a smart ***, I said, "Oh, I went with the other group and we just got back." The next day I was on the next bus outta there. Told 'em my brother was coming back from Viet Nam ( which was almost true).

    So basically, no surprise. I would've been safer and had more fun with better stories to tell spending the night with Harvey Weinstein.

    gigi fenomen , 1 hour ago link

    Just like a spider builds his web around the light, the homosexual infiltrates places where he can have private access to boys – including the priesthood and the boy scouts.

    This is similar to the way the heterosexual gets a job as like, a lifeguard at a beach in Miami, or joins a rock band.

    I have no idea why people wouldn't simply assume that huge numbers of homosexuals would be signing up for to be Boy Scout Scout Masters, and why they didn't control for that – for instance, not allowing them to join unless they were married with kids, or had otherwise proved they were not faggots.

    But then the decision to just allow open faggots – that is just it is just unfathomable.

    How did we create a society that puts political correctness and the alleged emotions of pederasts above the safety of our children?

    Who is responsible for this?

    MOST IMPORTANTLY

    These faggots ARE NOT ******* PEDOPHILES!

    THEY ARE HOMOSEXUALS!

    "Pedophile" is a specific term that means sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Boy Scouts are pubescent boys in their early teens.

    THIS IS NORMAL HOMOSEXUAL BEHAVIOR.

    During the Catholic Church pederasty scandal, they started talking about "pedophiles" instead of homosexuals, as an attempt to distinguish between "good homos" and "bad homos."

    BUT ALL HOMOSEXUAL HAVE A PREFERENCE FOR YOUNG TEENAGE BOYS!

    THAT IS WHAT HOMOSEXUALITY IS!

    THERE IS ONLY ONE KIND OF "GOOD HOMO" AND THAT IS THE KIND THAT IS FLYING THROUGH THE AIR AFTER HAVING BEEN THROWN OFF A ROOF!

    [Apr 24, 2019] The HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC was the Insurance Policy

    Notable quotes:
    "... While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC. ..."
    "... In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November. ..."
    "... I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create. ..."
    "... Thus began the official demonization of Russia. A demonization very convenient to the necessity of having an implacable enemy always ready to pounce on the good, moral, humanitarian, and freely enterprising United States. ..."
    "... Now, conflating any individual with Russia, will always immediately result in that person becoming, in the US, in the U.K. and in other US-kept vassal nations totally tarred with all sorts of nefarious and always unexamined assumptions. ..."
    "... Thanks to the intelligence community, the political elite, notably in the Democratic "wing" of the War Party, but with the support of the Republican wing of that party, and certain individual players aligned with the US policy "Full Spectrum Dominance" which, of course, is compassionate goodness and not to be confused with the vile aims of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and a whole host of other "bad guy" nations or amorphous groups known as "terrorists. ..."
    "... Clearly, the consensus opinion is shaped, not inside the minds of millions of people, all projecting their very worst fears or even their own worst proclivities on individuals like Putin or whoever is the "Hitler" of the convenient moment, but rather on the efforts of, let us call them "entities" who plan to benefit from a populous aroused to anxiety or even fear itself. ..."
    "... the British ruling elites have hated the Russians for well over a hundred years. ..."
    "... The truth is Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Rachel Maddow, and the rest if the Scooby Doo gang handed Agent Orange the victimhood script he needs to feed his Trumpets to win the 2020 election. ..."
    "... They've also guaranteed no matter what heinous gangster scam shit he has done in the past or will do in the future, none of it will stick because he'll play the falsely accused card. ..."
    "... There is an inability to accept the fact that people in DC and NYC and Boston and San Francisco and other Financial/ MIC-driven areas were doing well relative to the bulk of Americans and life was wonderful until the 2016 Election. For these people "America Has Never Stopped Being Great!" (Similar to the "I've got mine, Jack! " attitude of Great Britain, as their labor unions lost unity with rest of the working class.) ..."
    Apr 24, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    CWG , April 22, 2019 at 17:15

    Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.

    There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably, Putin would have favored Clinton, since she could be bought. Trump can't.

    What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT a FISA warrant. They only obtained that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.

    Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That was apparent ever after Devin Nunes did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying on him.

    Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason) they needed to cover that up as quickly as possible.

    So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying till this very day. The same lie through which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign was being pushed openly.

    The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential Election'.

    They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump through lying to the FISA Court, which again, is treason. According to the Constitution, lying to the FISA court= Treason.

    In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the Attorney General. At all costs, they needed to try and hide what really happened.

    So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire Trump campaign!'.

    'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.

    Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire story. It was only later on that Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.

    The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be able to achieve three main objectives.

    1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential Election.

    2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order to 'take them down'.

    Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a crime that had ANYTHING to with with the elections. NONE.

    They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people are willing to believe the lie'.

    So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many people as possible. 'Russian Collusion, Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia. Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..

    Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?

    Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign.

    There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the Presidential Election.

    That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama regime!!

    So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?

    He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with Russia.

    The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.

    His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude with the Russians'.

    Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.

    They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about. Yet it was not.

    The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.

    It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.

    The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.

    "Russia'.

    So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?

    A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY Russians.

    And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was only a distraction)

    B: Russians hacked the DNC.

    That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.

    Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.

    It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire regime in order to let Clinton win the Presidency.

    That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!

    In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad things.

    That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence' that Russia somehow did bad things.

    Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question 'why did Obama spy on the Trump Campaign'.

    Let's go a bit deeper still.

    Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push? The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?

    After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.

    If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP the real crime', what would happen?

    They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.

    They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing anything wrong, it would show us all THEY were the criminals.

    They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.

    That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon still don't seem to see all that.

    They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is simply not true. It's a Mueller created LIE. That LIE = the Insurance Policy.

    What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about preventing Trump from being elected.

    Although true, that is only A.

    They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and would find out they were illegally spying on him!

    The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected President.

    What's the punishment for Treason?

    About Assange and Seth Rich.

    Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which seems to be succesfull, the Deep State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that lie.

    Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.

    If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be exposed.

    No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for his life.

    Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48

    While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.

    Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.

    Elizabeth K. Burton , April 23, 2019 at 12:50

    It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to deteriorate the more his actions and statements are attacked and countered? You know what happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them down? They get weapons and start killing people.

    There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the least being he's clearly mentally unfit. Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation". Nancy Pelosi stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda "for now". She's now making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are: noise.

    The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one issue to run on next year: getting rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters, the same ones they were positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip service to progressive policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions once the donations start coming, but the common underlying theme was and continues to be "Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."

    In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November.

    Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21

    I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create.

    Jeff Harrison , April 22, 2019 at 10:50

    Thank you, Three Names. The so-called "most qualified presidential candidate ever" who's only actual qualifications are the destruction of what had formerly been a peaceful, secular state into a failed state riven with religious rivalry and racking up a billion frequent flyer miles has left us with a Gordian knot of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies that will bedevil the country and our relations with other countries for some time to come.

    There's a special place in hell for people like you.

    Charron , April 22, 2019 at 10:04

    I see that the very liberal Noam Chomsky has recently stated that he was sure the Russians did not to do the hacking of the DNC emails and that accusing Trump of being a party to this was only going to help him in the 2020 elations because it wasn't true.

    AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 09:20

    Thank you Caitlin for providing a most necessary corrective to the incessant drone that I – unwillingly but have no other radio station available (and it is, however nauseating and rant inducing, necessary to know what propaganda the corporate-capitalist-imperialist state media are disseminating) – hear on both the BBC World Service and NPR. (We refused to pay to watch television and I have continued that partnership tradition since my husband died. So thankfully I've not seen the Maddow money raking insanity.)

    And thank you for suggesting some clear ways to counter the Kool Aid infected codswallop. It amazes just how much even the highly educated have completely accepted the corporate-capitalist-imperialist propaganda, just as I am amazed that the same people (friends of my husband, though what he'd think about their swallowing it all ) really seem to be completely unconcerned about what the US has done and is doing to other peoples in other countries (you know, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine – ah yes that coup – Yemen and so on and on). And they clearly are more afraid of Russia than of their (our) own military-deep state-police

    DW Bartoo , April 22, 2019 at 08:16

    Julian Assange is a vilified human being.

    When vilification occurs a very necessary question that critical thought must ponder is who benefits from such scapegoating?

    However, for the moment, let us ponder, again in service to actual critical thought, why aligning Assange with Russia is expected by those who will and intend to benefit from that association. Why is suggesting that Assange is "a Russian agent" expected to convince millions of USians that Assange is "a bad person"?

    Why would millions accept that assertion without questioning it at all?

    Caitlin suggest that those millions are "herd animals", implying that they are led into believing two things. The first is that Russia and the Russian people are "bad", we have even recently had a much trusted official suggest that Russians are "genetically" predisposed to badness with a malignant tendency to single out the innocent, and one indispensable nation, the United States for the most nefarious of Russian "interventions", amounting, according to a famous Hollywood actor, who occasionally portrays a certain deity in the movies, to "an attack".

    In the meager interest of context and history, stretching back a bit more than a century, some USians who are aware of that history, recognize that the US, under President Woodrow Wilson sent US military troops into Russia in order to end the rise of the Bolshevik rebellion/revolution.

    Thus began the official demonization of Russia. A demonization very convenient to the necessity of having an implacable enemy always ready to pounce on the good, moral, humanitarian, and freely enterprising United States.

    Now, conflating any individual with Russia, will always immediately result in that person becoming, in the US, in the U.K. and in other US-kept vassal nations totally tarred with all sorts of nefarious and always unexamined assumptions.

    Mark Twain once suggested that the deity created war that USians might learn geography. Clearly, it is a laborious process and has failed to create much global geographical awareness among the millions, most of whom are content to think whatever nation is correctly being ministered to or in the sights of "everything is on the table" as simply being, vaguely, "over there".

    That is why the US must strike "them" "over there" so as to avoid the frightening thought of having "them" have to be dealt with "here" in the "Homeland" of "the free and the brave".

    This suggests that the "herd" has to be led to certain conclusions.

    Unlike horses, the herd HAS to drink.

    If the herd does not consume the elixir, then it may not be willing to joyfully send the "flower of its youth" off to become cannon fodder should the Table of Everything so demand.

    I grew up in the nineteen fifties when the first Cold War was in full blossom. We school students were told and taught that Russia hated us, wanted to attack and kill us all, intended to rule the world with an iron hand and ruthless godlessness.

    Thanks to the intelligence community, the political elite, notably in the Democratic "wing" of the War Party, but with the support of the Republican wing of that party, and certain individual players aligned with the US policy "Full Spectrum Dominance" which, of course, is compassionate goodness and not to be confused with the vile aims of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and a whole host of other "bad guy" nations or amorphous groups known as "terrorists.

    Now, by tying Assange to that hodge-podge of baddies, the many may rest assured that he has been put in his proper place.

    Clearly, the consensus opinion is shaped, not inside the minds of millions of people, all projecting their very worst fears or even their own worst proclivities on individuals like Putin or whoever is the "Hitler" of the convenient moment, but rather on the efforts of, let us call them "entities" who plan to benefit from a populous aroused to anxiety or even fear itself.

    The list of beneficiaries includes the financial elites who always profit from war and "confusion", the political elites who serve those monied interests, the media, academia, the military, intelligence, weapons manufacturers, energy producers, military contractors and so on.

    Assange, to his great and everlasting credit, exposed a very large amount of this including, with the invaluable efforts
    of Chelsea Manning, actual war crimes perpetrated by the US, even beyond beginning wars based on lies.

    Fortunately, the media, having overplayed it hand in the manipulation has exposed itself to many as being but a propaganda industry.

    A very real question for those concerned with engaging critical thought processes is just how many humans are still being led, rather easily, around by the fallacious and very dangerous concoctions of the opinion "shapers" in think tanks, media echo chambers, corporate boardrooms, and academic snake pits?

    Perhaps there comes a time for humanity, if it is not to trot along in the footsteps of the dodo bird to look not where the fingers of deceit are pointing, but at those to whom the fingers are attached?

    AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 09:33

    DWB – as a USian of English birth (of about the same age, I would imagine) I am amazed at the fear the US had of the USSR back in the 1950s. When my husband told me, in the 1980s, about how he and his schoolmates had had nuclear air raid attack drills (sheltering under desks and so on!) I'm sure that I gawped, fly-catchingly. What??? Nowt remotely similar occurred in the UK during the 1950s in schools or elsewhere.

    It was only since I began studying history (late in life) that I learnt that the British ruling elites have hated the Russians for well over a hundred years. Still not quite sure why, nor yet why whatever the Russians did (Crimean War in the 1850s?) that pissed them off so royally should have any bearing on Russia-UK relations nowadays. But that could be because I'm dim. And because I've no hatred, dislike, fear of Russians (or Chinese or Iranians) at all. My fears revolve around the hubris-arrogance and determination to retain economic and more general world domination by the US and its poodles in the UK-FR-NATO and Israel (though their status as dog or leash is debatable). These are the countries to be afraid of.

    Sam F , April 22, 2019 at 20:34

    Yes, the remarkably unprovoked hatred of Russia among the UK aristocracy, regardless of era or government there, is a great wonder. They did not even have eras of invasion threats, colonial competition, or competing navies, as with France, Spain, and Portugal. Britain's 19th century invasions of Afghanistan were apparently provoked by nothing but fear, and their several lost wars there apparently did not even engage Russians. Even complete transitions of Russian government from monarchy to communism to capitalism failed to affect UK's fears. If the cause were mere cultural difference, they would have feared the orient.

    Perhaps their aristocracy was not polite enough, or those backwards Ns, upside down Rs, and Pi symbols terrified the British.

    geeyp , April 22, 2019 at 23:49

    Anne R. – For more on your second paragraph, visit Larouchepac.org The late Lyndon Larouche's site has a lot of info on this.

    Zhu , April 23, 2019 at 00:50

    Britain & Russia were rivals for empire. Both were expanding in Asia – The Great Game. Russia got Turkestan, Britain got India, both wanted China. Hence the elite's hatred, although now it's probably traditional and automatic.

    Keep studying history – it's ales ts enlightening!

    AnneR , April 23, 2019 at 09:22

    Yes Zhu – I do continue with history, although of course no historian and thus history is ever free (as with all scholars) of their personal worldview. And yes I realize that the UK, when an imperial power, viewed the world pretty much as the US does now: its domain. So obviously any and all contenders were up for vitriolic loathing and war. But it still doesn't explain the particularly vicious attitude toward Russia on the part of the British ruling elites. After all the Brits also had France, Holland and Germany (earlier Spain and Portugal) as competitors, admittedly at different time periods, and no they weren't "liked" and were often at war with each other. But there was never the same bitterness toward western European rivals as there was and continues to be toward Russia.

    That the USSR provoked deep, undying hatred among the aristos and their hangers' on does not surprise: can't have anything remotely similar happening in our cushy backyard, can't have the unwashed, ignorant, prole herd actually learning any lessons from the Soviets.

    Yet even so – no nuclear air raid drills in schools or anywhere during red-baiting season. Nothing kindred.

    O Society , April 22, 2019 at 08:07

    The truth is Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Rachel Maddow, and the rest if the Scooby Doo gang handed Agent Orange the victimhood script he needs to feed his Trumpets to win the 2020 election.

    They've also guaranteed no matter what heinous gangster scam shit he has done in the past or will do in the future, none of it will stick because he'll play the falsely accused card.

    For the idiot Americans watching White House reality TV at home, this means celebrity Trump now has immunity and can't be voted off the island this season or next.

    https://opensociet.org/2019/04/20/chomsky-by-focusing-on-russia-democrats-handed-trump-a-huge-gift-possibly-the-2020-election/

    Skip Scott , April 22, 2019 at 12:01

    Ah yes, the evil Rooskies. From the article you obviously didn't read: In fact, WikiLeaks has published hundreds of thousands of documents pertaining to Russia, has made critical comments about the Russian government and defended dissident Russian activists, and in 2017 published an entire trove called the Spy Files Russia exposing Russian surveillance practices. wikileaks russia files: https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/

    I think we can tell who the "tool" is.

    AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 12:30

    Did you not actually read Caitlin's article? And other similar ones? YES Wikileaks has published thousands of documents regarding Russian secret activities – and the Russian government has not been at all happy about it. However, unlike the USian government it hasn't trampled all over people's rights under international law to persecute Assange.

    Frankly – if the USian government and its "comrades" in the UK don't like their filthy linen being revealed for what it is – perhaps they should stop creating it in the first place.

    Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:08

    >>> " Do they publish anything on Russia?"

    Yes, as you and all of the many, many others who ignorantly and endlessly repeat this question would know, if you had ever bothered to review WikiLeaks' work. In this case, you would know if you had even bothered to read the article above your comment.

    WikiLeaks: The Spy Files Russia
    https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/

    Zhu , April 23, 2019 at 00:57

    Likewise, the sky is green, the grass is blue and the sun rises in the West

    michael , April 22, 2019 at 07:06

    "People take this repetition as a substitute for proof due to a glitch in human psychology known as the illusory truth effect, a phenomenon which causes our brains to tend to interpret things we've heard before as known truths." I think it is a deeper phenomenon than repetition of lies (which have been legal since 2014 with the 'modernization' of Smith-Mundt, our anti-propaganda law).

    The #resistence seems to fulfill people who have never accepted any religions whole-heartedly; there is something in the human psyche which demands an intuitive evidence-free, faith-based acceptance of beliefs which go beyond facts and evidence. This is a powerful dream world where their illusions are more powerful than reality.

    There is an inability to accept the fact that people in DC and NYC and Boston and San Francisco and other Financial/ MIC-driven areas were doing well relative to the bulk of Americans and life was wonderful until the 2016 Election. For these people "America Has Never Stopped Being Great!" (Similar to the "I've got mine, Jack! " attitude of Great Britain, as their labor unions lost unity with rest of the working class.)

    Their comments have moved away from ad hominem "You are a Putin stooge!" arguments to appeals to Authority fallacies: "All our Intelligence Agencies Know that Assange worked with Russians to embarrass Hillary and cost her the Election". Religiosity is largely Authority-driven, and avoids the angst of critical thinking and putting facts together that (thanks to our Intelligence Agencies!) don't fit together.

    OlyaPola , April 22, 2019 at 03:23

    "The only people claiming that Assange is a Russian agent are those who are unhappy with the things that WikiLeaks publications have exposed, whether that be U.S. war crimes or the corrupt manipulations of Democratic Party leaders."

    Perhaps fuller understanding would be gained by considering the following pathway.

    People who who think that "Assange is a Russian agent" is a plausible belief are the audience encouraged in the view that "Assange is a Russian agent".

    Much of this notion of plausible belief is founded on the creation of holograms consisting in large part of projections of the believer's expectations/experiences of the evaluation criteria used in choosing agents to recruit (for the public largely projected from their experience of creating resumes and attending job interviews) , what motivates an agent to be recruited, how such motivation can facilitate the purpose of the recruiter of the agent, what are the potential dangers of recruiting the agent, and most importantly what is the purpose of and reasons why the recruiter considers recruiting an agent to achieve her/his purpose.

    On projection catalysing plausible belief you will be aware that some encourage the belief that Mr. Putin is the richest man on the planet since in all societies there are assumptions/expectations on motivations.

    However in the presently self-designated "The United States of America" as functions of "exceptionalism", "we the people hold these truths to be self-evident" and lack of direct experience of foreign cultures by many, the population are particulrly prone to projection giving rise to the paradox of "exceptionalists" engaging in the them/us conflation.

    [Apr 24, 2019] Viable Opposition

    Apr 24, 2019 | viableopposition.blogspot.com

    Tuesday, April 23, 2019 US Power Wielding - Unconventional Warfare and Financial Power Back in December 2008, WikiLeaks released a relatively little-noted document " US Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare ". This 248-page, nine chapter publication was the September 2008 revision of the U.S. Army Field Manual 3-05.130, the keystone doctrine for Army special operations forces operations in unconventional warfare.
    This document defines unconventional warfare as:
    " Operations conducted by, with or through irregular forces against a variety of state and no-state opponents. "
    These operations are conducted:
    " ...in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, and ongoing or pending conventional military operations "
    Such operations have the following common conceptual core:
    ". ..working by, with, or through irregular surrogates in a clandestine and/or covert manner against opposing actors. "
    In Chapter 2, the document outlines the instruments of United States national power which help the United States to achieve its national strategic objectives. These instruments of national power include diplomacy, information, intelligence, economic, financial, law enforcement and military. For the purposes of this posting, let's focus on one of these instruments as follows, the Financial Instrument of National Power . Here's how the document describes this instrument:
    " The financial instrument of national power promotes the conditions for prosperity and stability in the United States and encourages prosperity and stability in the rest of the world. The Department of the Treasury (Treasury) is the primary federal agency responsible for the economic and financial prosperity and security of the United States and as such is responsible for a wide range of activities, including advising the President on economic and financial issues, promoting the President's growth agenda, and enhancing corporate governance in financial institutions. In the international arena, the Treasury works with other federal agencies, the governments of other nations, and the international financial institutions to encourage economic growth; raise standards of living; and predict and prevent, to the extent possible, economic and financial crises."
    I like that " encourages prosperity and stability in the rest of the world ". That is true, unless you happen to live in a nation which doesn't share Washington's viewpoint. Just ask people living in one of many nations who are currently subject to one or another of Washington's long list of sanctions as shown here (current to mid-2017):

    The document proceeds to note the following:
    " T he application of economic or financial incentives is among the most powerful ideas in the U.S. arsenal of power. Although some U.S. adversaries are irreconcilable to accommodation with U.S. interests and must be engaged in other ways, many declared or potential adversaries can be persuaded or dissuaded by economic or financial means to become declared or potential allies (or at least neutralized) the ability of the United States government to affect the economic environment is enormous, and it has economic weapons at its disposal. Unconventional warfare planners must carefully coordinate the introduction and withholding of economic and financial assets into the Unconventional Warfare Operational Area (UWOA) with their interagency partners. For example, direct application of USAID grants to specific human groups can alter negative behaviors or cement positive affiliations. At the highest levels of diplomatic and financial interaction, the United States Government's ability to influence international financial institutions -- with corresponding effects to exchange rates, interest rates, credit availability, and money supplies -- can cement multinational coalitions for unconventional warfare campaigns or dissuade adversary nation-state governments from supporting specific actors in the UWOA. " (my bolds)
    As you can see, the United States is willing to use financial blackmail including exchange and interest rate manipulation, credit availability and the supply of money to either persuade certain nations to join its unconventional warfare campaign or to dissuade adversarial nations from supporting the "other side" of an unconventional warfare strategy.
    Here is a screen capture of page 2-8 of the document outlining how the United States can use financial incentives to manipulate other nations (ARSOF = Army Special Operations Forces and UW = Unconventional Warfare, DOS = Department of State, IC = Intelligence Community):

    Note this sentence:
    " Government can apply unilateral and indirect financial power through persuasive influence to international and domestic financial institutions regarding availability and terms of loans, grants, or other financial assistance to foreign state and nonstate actors ."
    It is also interesting to note that the document clearly states that the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and Bank for International Settlements are basically functioning as organizations that Washington can use to drive its global agenda and as yet another tool in America's quest for global hegemony. This isn't terribly surprising in the case of the World Bank since we find the following on its website:

    In addition, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control whose sole responsibility is as follows:
    ". ..to administer and enforce economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists, international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other threats the national security... "
    ...has a " long history of conducting economic warfare valuation to any Army Special Operations Forces unconventional warfare. ".
    This Army manual, leaked over a decade ago by WikiLeaks, gives us a very clear view of how Washington uses financial manipulation through its influence on the World Bank, IMF, OECD and other "global" groups to wage unconventional warfare on any nation that doesn't share its view of how the world should function and that threatens America's control of the globe. The use of financial blackmail to bend countries to America's narrative and overthrow nations who do not succumb to America's wishes is not terribly surprising, however, it is interesting to actually see one key aspect of Washington's unconventional warfare methodology in print.

    [Apr 24, 2019] Obama bait and switch maneuver

    Apr 24, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    arcseconds 04.23.19 at 6:49 am 77

    @Faustusnotes #68:

    For anyone of a social democratic (or lefter) persuasion, and/or see war as something that should only be used as an absolute last resort (due to it invariably being a moral horror), then the Democrats have indeed been the lesser of two evils, and Republican-lite.

    Take Obama for instance. He ran a cleverly ambiguous campaign where he sounded to many as being progessive and left, a breath of fresh air, something finally that would put a stop to limitless capitalism and unwind the Bush era. But in fact he's a 'centrist', which really means thoroughly neoliberal. He's prepared to file some of the sharp edges off capitalism, but he neither promised nor offered a genuine alternative to a lightly regulated free market.

    I mean, look at his most famous legacy: the health care reforms. This is a thoroughly market-based solution that leaves the marketplace largely as it was. Nationalization was nowhere in sight. And the policy was based on one his elecotoral opponent enacted when he was governing Massachusetts! It is literally the case that voting in Democrats at the national level gets you the policy of Republican presidential candidates.

    Also, he's quite happy to unilaterally blow up stuff, including innocent people, in other countries, in order to crush his enemies and to look good domestically. We have no problems in calling this 'evil' when our enemies do anything like this.

    Brian 04.21.19 at 2:43 pm (no link)

    I think the real question is not whether Trump is successful or not. That question is a red herring in American politics today. The real question is whether or not the Democratic "leadership" can allow nomination of a candidate that the Democrat rank and file want. Bernie Sanders should have won the nomination last time. But the superdelegate system gives a literal handful of mandarins the ability to fake the primary process. (I say that as someone who has significant issues with some of Sanders positions.)

    Trump won because Hillary was a horrific candidate. Voters stayed home, disgusted. Trump won because the Obama administration didn't deliver hope nor change. He delivered a government of the corporate criminal bankers for them. Middle and working class America got screwed. Black people got screwed worst. Trump won because the utter corruption at the heart of the DNC was exposed for all to see in the emails. Trump win because of the Obama administration making a trade deal top secret classified and trying to force a vote through congress. Not seeing any point in voting, Democrats didnt.

    All the evidence since shows the DNC leadership didn't learn anything. They are just as contemptuous of voters, just as manipulative with their window dressing as ever. The Democratic party is the party of endless war even more than the Republicans. It's a party that stopped every effort by Trump to wind down or end war posture with Russia and North Korea. There's now 2 parties in Netanyahu's pocket implementing Likuds insane middle east ideas.

    Put some solar energy and LGBTQ butter on it with a side of women's rights bullshit and it's "Democrat". But the politicians are just as venal. The legislature just as wildly right wing war mongering.

    The 1960's is long over. The Democratic party hasn't seen a new idea since and has converted to govern to the right of Nixon. Way to Nixon's right. The Democratic party is the tool of the Uber-ization of not just America, but the whole world. Flour and break the law to pauperize the working class, and suck money to a few in the SF Bay Area. That's policy now.

    You can see it already. Sanders is ahead. But Buttigieg is being anointed. He's the perfect candidate. He's gay! He's out of the closet! And he's a corporate tool who can talk smoothly without speaking a clear word. Best of all, he has ZERO foreign policy experience or positions. So he'll be putty in the hands of the corporations that want endless war for profits. Wall Street wants him. And the street owns the Democratic party. Will he give a flying f*@k about the middle and working class? Will he be anything but another neo-liberal who can be differentiated from a neo-conservative only by mild difference in racism? (Overt vs.covert)

    At least Buttigieg isn't Beto O'Rourke, the most completely empty skin in Congress. There's that.

    All the evidence I see is no. The Democrat "leadership" don't understand. I predict a Trump win, or else a squeaker election that barely scrapes by with a win.

    No matter what, the idiot Democrats won't get it. Pelosi will do her best to cast the Republicans anti-tax anti-government (federal) government culture war in concrete with balanced budget horse manure. The Democrats will continue to force a new cold war on Russia. They will keep backing companies that steal from the middle and working class. (Yes, Uber and Lyft are massive theft operations. They implemented taxi service without licenses. Those licenses cost a lot of money to those who bought them. They put the public at risk causing multiple deaths and assaults from unlicensed taxi drivers.)

    Trump's appeal is that he at least talks a game of "f*@k you". Domestically it's all lies on all sides. He lies to everyone. But at least he doesn't lie smoothly like the "good Democrat" candidates do.

    [Apr 24, 2019] Libya has lost their country to terrorist thugs, their infrastructure has been destroyed, their wealth has been stolen and continues to be stolen. They have had one million Libyans killed.

    Apr 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    marie , Apr 24, 2019 7:37:02 PM | link

    39

    Understand this if nothing else, Khalifa Haftar is a terrorist hand puppet of the CIA. He is a thief, a liar, a thug, and a traitor to Libya. He threatens legitimate Libyans daily and uses the NSA listening equipment (brought into Libya in 2011) to target any Libya who speaks his name. Khalifa Haftar would not ever be supported by Russia. This lie has been perpetrated in the mainstream for years. Now they have stepped up their game and have stated that Russian mercenaries are in Libya supporting Haftar at the behest of the leader of Russia. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

    The Great Tribes have confirmed to me everything that I have written.

    Libya has lost their country to terrorist thugs, their infrastructure has been destroyed, their wealth has been stolen and continues to be stolen. They have had one million Libyans killed....

    It is the assets and geographical location that they would own. The ruination, destruction and death of Libya and her people are just acceptable collateral damage to achieve their evil agenda.

    [Apr 24, 2019] A President is a prisoner of the White House like a Pope is a prisoner of the Vatican.

    Apr 24, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Mulegino1 , says: April 23, 2019 at 4:28 pm GMT

    A President is a prisoner of the White House like a Pope is a prisoner of the Vatican.
    It would take a reformer of the highest order to cleanse and straighten both of these institutions. Unfortunately, contemporary effeminate western society does not produce such men. Trump is the personification of the egotist and blowhard- he is self-assured and not reflective. He is sharp and clever but certainly no major intellect. His spontaneity , which is one enduring trait of his, is cancelled out by his buffoonish gaffes. He has no real lasting principles since his worldview lacks any transcendent or spiritual dimension. Men like Trump, notwithstanding their overbearing and dictatorial persona, are easily manipulated by sycophants and courtiers. The latter never confront- they grovel and burrow their way into positions of influence, or perhaps use subtle methods of blackmail.

    But Trump was, and is, still better than Hillary or any other of the Tweedle-Dem front runners. As Americans , we are ill served by the mediocrity and mendacity of our political so called "elites," who are the laughing stock of history.

    [Apr 24, 2019] Only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies

    Looks like the USA loses the "battle of ideas". Neoliberal globalization does not sell in 2019. So of course Russia is guilty. So easy...
    Apr 24, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    David Walters, April 24, 2019 at 13:14

    "This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies."

    Absolutely correct.

    Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the student body of Texas A&M University, my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent that dark "art".

    [Apr 24, 2019] Integrity Initiative - Driving A Wedge Between Russia and the West

    Images deleted.
    Notable quotes:
    "... RT has been able to capitalise on growing mistrust of western media among westerners. During the breaking of the coverage of many political scandals, RT articles aggressively raised issues that many felt were not being pursued by the western media, which is frequently seen as covering up non-PC stories. Many users believe that RT is willing to talk about incidents that western media will not, a belief that RT actively encourages. As such, many users of a both far-right and far-left disposition are willing to listen to RT, even being aware of RT's control by the government, rather than western media. ..."
    "... On page four of this this interesting sentence we find the following sentence: " Driving a wedge between Russians and government is key. " ..."
    "... It is interesting to see that Integrity Initiative was ahead of the game when it came to punishing Russia for its involvement in Crimea's move to independence from Ukraine to the point that their greatest hope was that there would be regime change in Russia. ..."
    "... As you can see from these documents, Integrity Initiative, a government-funded, not-for-profit charity has a mandate to ensure that the West is immune to Russia's ongoing propaganda campaign by providing propaganda of its own. ..."
    Jan 21, 2019 | viableopposition.blogspot.com
    While it received relatively little coverage from the Western mainstream media establishment, a recent 42 megabyte upload on an Anonymous server provides us with an inside glimpse into the genesis of the Western anti-Russia narrative.
    According to the documents, an organization (rather ironically) named Integrity Initiative with the moniker "Defending Democracy Against Disinformation" was organized to mobilize global public opinion against Russia and its agenda as you can see on the organization's "About" webpage:

    The non-for-profit charity was set up in 2015 as a partnership of several independent organizations led by The Institute for Statecraft. It claims that it is dedicated to " education in good governance and to enabling societies to adapt to a rapidly changing world. ", a rather benign mission statement. In its first two years, it was funded by private individuals, however, funding for 2017 and 2018 was largely provided by governments, particularly the United Kingdom, reflecting the U.K.'s appreciation of the " importance of the threat, and a wish to support civil society programmes seeking to rebuild the ability of democratic societies to resist large scale, malicious disinformation and influence campaigns."
    According to the documents a number of organizations including the United States Department of State, the U.K.'s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), NATO, Facebook and the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense were looking to fund the Integrity Initiative as you can see here:

    Integrity Initiative states the following about its services:
    " It is inevitable that a programme tackling disinformation in Europe finds itself spending much of its time addressing the activities of the Russian State, including those carried out through its intelligence services. The Kremlin has invested more operational thought, intent and resource in disinformation, in Europe and elsewhere in the democratic world, than any other single player. "

    Not surprisingly, Integrity Initiative has comments on the leaking of its own documents by Anonymous:

    " We note both the attempts by Russian state propaganda outlets to amplify the volume of this leak; and the suggestion by a major Anonymous-linked Twitter account that the Kremlin subverted the banner of Anonymous to disguise their responsibility for it...


    It is of course a matter of deep regret that Integrity Initiative documents have been stolen and posted on line, still more so that, in breach of any defensible practice, Russian state propaganda outlets have published or re-published a large number of names and contact details. We have not yet had the chance to analyse all of the documents, so cannot say with confidence whether they are all genuine or whether they include doctored or false material.


    Although it is clear that much of the material was indeed on the Integrity Initiative or Institute systems, much of it is dated and was never used. In particular, many of the names published were on an internal list of experts in this field who had been considered as potential invitees to future cooperation. In the event, many were never contacted by the Integrity Initiative and did not contribute to it. Nor were these documents therefore included in any funding proposals. Not only did these individuals have nothing to do with the programme – they may not even have heard of us. We are of course trying to contact all named individuals for whom we have contact details to ensure that they are aware of what has happened. "

    With that background, let's look at four of the documents that were posted.

    1.) A undated document discussing Russia's use of social media as a proxy for propaganda:

    Note the following comments regarding Russia Today aka RT:

    " RT has been able to capitalise on growing mistrust of western media among westerners. During the breaking of the coverage of many political scandals, RT articles aggressively raised issues that many felt were not being pursued by the western media, which is frequently seen as covering up non-PC stories. Many users believe that RT is willing to talk about incidents that western media will not, a belief that RT actively encourages. As such, many users of a both far-right and far-left disposition are willing to listen to RT, even being aware of RT's control by the government, rather than western media. "

    Here is a page from the document which discusses the target audiences for Russian social media propaganda:

    Note that the memo clearly states that Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik are targeting an audience that is "distrusting of statecraft and major media groups.". I wonder why Westerners would be distrusting of their own media?

    2.) A 2017 document outlining plans for developing an American arm of Integrity Initiative:

    Note that the writer of the memo states that the West is badly in need of a reassertion of U.S. leadership and that America needs to rebuild its understanding of Russia and how to deal with it. It also notes that the international community needs to rebuild its understanding of Russia to ensure that Western governments get the popular support that democracies require (i.e. a strongly anti-populist movement).

    3.) An undated document showing how Integrity Initiative is planning to expand "expert clusters" to other nations including Austria, Canada, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland among others:

    4.) A January 2015 document showing Integrity Initiative's views on setting up anti-Russia sanctions with the goal of changing Russia's behaviour, peace in Ukraine, a return of Crimea and, most importantly, possible regime change in Russia:

    On page four of this this interesting sentence we find the following sentence: " Driving a wedge between Russians and government is key. "

    It is interesting to see that Integrity Initiative was ahead of the game when it came to punishing Russia for its involvement in Crimea's move to independence from Ukraine to the point that their greatest hope was that there would be regime change in Russia.

    As you can see from these documents, Integrity Initiative, a government-funded, not-for-profit charity has a mandate to ensure that the West is immune to Russia's ongoing propaganda campaign by providing propaganda of its own. It's certainly a good thing that Integrity Initiative has the "real truth" and is willing to pressure us into seeing the global geopolitical quagmire with its 20/20 vision. Apparently, integrity in this post-truth era is in the eye of the beholder/purveyor.

    [Apr 24, 2019] One of the reasons I voted for DJT was because I wanted to know if the unelected elites (who control the Deep State) would ever voluntarily surrender the reigns of power in DC without bloodshed.

    Apr 24, 2019 | www.unz.com

    JEinCA , says: April 23, 2019 at 11:05 pm GMT

    One of the reasons I voted for DJT was because I wanted to know if the unelected elites (who control the Deep State) would ever voluntarily surrender the reigns of power in DC without bloodshed. Now I unequivocally know the answer to that question. There is no democracy, there is no Republic and any Constitutional Rights us American citizens have left hang by a thread (think 1st and 2nd Amendments).

    At this point Trump is either a hostage of the Deep State or he has joined them.

    [Apr 24, 2019] Why then Mueller backed off (in panic) from the indicted' readiness to show up in court?

    Apr 24, 2019 | www.unz.com

    annamaria , says: April 23, 2019 at 11:19 pm GMT

    @Sean "Trump owes the Russians nothing, he was their way to stop Clinton."

    -- Sean, you seem as taking really seriously the $4.700 spent by Russians on the Google ads as well as the indictment of Russian "hackers and trolls" (the alleged army of Kremlin) in absentia. Why then Mueller backed off (in panic) from the indicted' readiness to show up in court?

    Your thinking is not original: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democratic-operatives-created-fake-russian-bots-in-alabama-race-designed-to-link-kremlin-to-republican-roy-moore

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-13/google-ceo-exposes-shocking-full-extent-russian-meddling-2016

    https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/04/mueller-russia-interference-election-case-delay-570627

    You may have some special grievances against Russia and Russians, but why such obvious depreciation of your intelligence by repeating after Adam Schiff?

    [Apr 23, 2019] Crowdstrike and the reprise of the Iraq-WMD Fiasco

    Notable quotes:
    "... In May, the company, Crowdstrike, determined that the hack was the work of the Russians. As one unnamed intelligence official told BuzzFeed, "CrowdStrike is pretty good. There's no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate ..."
    "... Perhaps not. Yet Crowdstrike is hardly a disinterested party when it comes to Russia. Crowdstrike's founder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch , is also a senior fellow at the Washington think tank, The Atlantic Council, which has been at the forefront of escalating tensions with Russia. ..."
    "... As I reported in The Nation in early January , the connection between Alperovitch and the Atlantic Council is highly relevant given that the Atlantic Council is funded in part by the State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. In recent years, it has emerged as a leading voice calling for a new Cold War with Russia. ..."
    "... But meanwhile the steady drumbeat of "blame Russia" is having an effect. According to a recent you.gov/Economist poll, 58 percent of Americans view Russia as "unfriendly/enemy" while also finding that 52 percent of Democrats believed Russia "tampered with vote tallies." ..."
    Feb 03, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

    Originally from: A Reprise of the Iraq-WMD Fiasco -- Consortiumnews

    ... ... ...

    A Dangerous Replay?

    Today something eerily similar to the pre-war debate over Iraq is taking place regarding the allegations of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election. Assurances from the intelligence community and from anonymous Obama administration "senior officials" about the existence of evidence is being treated as, well, actual evidence.

    State Department spokesman John Kirby told CNN that he is "100% certain" of the role that Russia played in U.S. election. The administration's expressions of certainty are then uncritically echoed by the mainstream media. Skeptics are likewise written off, slandered as " Kremlin cheerleaders " or worse.

    Unsurprisingly, The Washington Post is reviving its Bush-era role as principal publicist for the government's case. Yet in its haste to do the government's bidding, the Post has published two widely debunked stories relating to Russia (one on the scourge of Russian inspired "fake news", the other on a non-existent Russian hack of a Vermont electric utility) onto which the paper has had to append "editor's notes" to correct the original stories.

    Yet, those misguided stories have not deterred the Post's opinion page from being equally aggressive in its depiction of Russian malfeasance. In late December, the Post published an op-ed by Rep. Adam Schiff and former Rep. Jane Harmon claiming "Russia's theft and strategic leaking of emails and documents from the Democratic Party and other officials present a challenge to the U.S. political system unlike anything we've experienced."

    On Dec. 30, the Post editorial board chastised President-elect Trump for seeming to dismiss "a brazen and unprecedented attempt by a hostile power to covertly sway the outcome of a U.S. presidential election." The Post described Russia's actions as a "cyber-Pearl Harbor."

    On Jan. 1, the neoconservative columnist Josh Rogin told readers that the recent announcement of sanctions against Russia "brought home a shocking realization that Russia is using hybrid warfare in an aggressive attempt to disrupt and undermine our democracy."

    Meanwhile, many of the same voices who were among the loudest cheerleaders for the war in Iraq have also been reprising their Bush-era roles in vouching for the solidity of the government's case.

    Jonathan Chait, now a columnist for New York magazine, is clearly convinced by what the government has thus far provided. "That Russia wanted Trump to win has been obvious for months," writes Chait.

    "Of course it all came from the Russians, I'm sure it's all there in the intel," Charles Krauthammer told Fox News on Jan. 2. Krauthammer is certain.

    And Andrew Sullivan is certain as to the motive. "Trump and Putin's bromance," Sullivan told MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Jan. 2, "has one goal this year: to destroy the European Union and to undermine democracy in Western Europe."

    David Frum, writing in The Atlantic , believes Trump "owes his office in considerable part to illegal clandestine activities in his favor conducted by a hostile, foreign spy service."

    Jacob Weisberg agrees, tweeting: "Russian covert action threw the election to Donald Trump. It's that simple." Back in 2008, Weisberg wrote that "the first thing I hope I've learned from this experience of being wrong about Iraq is to be less trusting of expert opinion and received wisdom." So much for that.

    Foreign Special Interests

    Another, equally remarkable similarity to the period of 2002-3 is the role foreign lobbyists have played in helping to whip up a war fever. As readers will no doubt recall, Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, which served, in effect as an Iraqi government-in-exile, worked hand in hand with the Washington lobbying firm Black, Kelly, Scruggs & Healey (BKSH) to sell Bush's war on television and on the op-ed pages of major American newspapers.

    Chalabi was also a trusted source of Judy Miller of the Times, which, in an apology to its readers on May 26, 2004, wrote : "The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles." The pro-war lobbying of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has also been exhaustively documented .

    Though we do not know how widespread the practice has been as of yet, something similar is taking place today. Articles calling for confrontation with Russia over its alleged "hybrid war" with the West are appearing with increasing regularity . Perhaps the most egregious example of this newly popular genre appeared on Jan. 1 in Politico magazine. That essay, which claims, among many other things, that "we're in a war" with Russia comes courtesy of one Molly McKew.

    McKew is seemingly qualified to make such a pronouncement because she, according to her bio on the Politico website, served as an "adviser to Georgian President Saakashvili's government from 2009-2013, and to former Moldovan Prime Minister Filat in 2014-2015." Seems reasonable enough. That is until one discovers that McKew is actually registered with the Department of Justice as a lobbyist for two anti-Russian political parties, Georgia's UMN and Moldova's PLDM.

    Records show her work for the consulting firm Fianna Strategies frequently takes her to Capitol Hill to lobby U.S. Senate and Congressional staffers, as well as prominent U.S. journalists at The Washington Post and The New York Times, on behalf of her Georgian and Moldovan clients.

    "The truth," writes McKew, "is that fighting a new Cold War would be in America's interest. Russia teaches us a very important lesson: losing an ideological war without a fight will ruin you as a nation. The fight is the American way." Or, put another way: the truth is that fighting a new Cold War would be in McKew's interest -- but perhaps not America's.

    While you wouldn't know it from the media coverage (or from reading deeply disingenuous pieces like McKew's) as things now stand, the case against Russia is far from certain. New developments are emerging almost daily. One of the latest is a report from the cyber-engineering company Wordfence, which concluded that "The IP addresses that DHS [Department of Homeland Security] provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with Russia."

    Indeed, according to Wordfence, "The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any website."

    On Jan. 4, BuzzFeed reported that, according to the DNC, the FBI never carried out a forensic examination on the email servers that were allegedly hacked by the Russian government. "The FBI," said DNC spokesman Eric Walker, "never requested access to the DNC's computer servers."

    What the agency did do was rely on the findings of a private-sector, third-party vendor that was brought in by the DNC after the initial hack was discovered. In May, the company, Crowdstrike, determined that the hack was the work of the Russians. As one unnamed intelligence official told BuzzFeed, "CrowdStrike is pretty good. There's no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate . "

    Perhaps not. Yet Crowdstrike is hardly a disinterested party when it comes to Russia. Crowdstrike's founder and chief technology officer, Dmitri Alperovitch , is also a senior fellow at the Washington think tank, The Atlantic Council, which has been at the forefront of escalating tensions with Russia.

    As I reported in The Nation in early January , the connection between Alperovitch and the Atlantic Council is highly relevant given that the Atlantic Council is funded in part by the State Department, NATO, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania, the Ukrainian World Congress, and the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk. In recent years, it has emerged as a leading voice calling for a new Cold War with Russia.

    Time to Rethink the 'Group Think'

    And given the rather thin nature of the declassified evidence provided by the Obama administration, might it be time to consider an alternative theory of the case? William Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency and the man responsible for creating many of its collection systems, thinks so. Binney believes that the DNC emails were leaked, not hacked, writing that "it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack."

    None of this is to say, of course, that Russia did not and could not have attempted to influence the U.S. presidential election. The intelligence community may have intercepted damning evidence of the Russian government's culpability. The government's hesitation to provide the public with more convincing evidence may stem from an understandable and wholly appropriate desire to protect the intelligence community's sources and methods. But as it now stands the publicly available evidence is open to question.

    But meanwhile the steady drumbeat of "blame Russia" is having an effect. According to a recent you.gov/Economist poll, 58 percent of Americans view Russia as "unfriendly/enemy" while also finding that 52 percent of Democrats believed Russia "tampered with vote tallies."

    With Congress back in session, Armed Services Committee chairman John McCain is set to hold a series of hearings focusing on Russian malfeasance, and the steady drip-drip-drip of allegations regarding Trump and Putin is only serving to box in the new President when it comes to pursuing a much-needed detente with Russia.

    It also does not appear that a congressional inquiry will start from scratch and critically examine the evidence. On Friday, two senators -- Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse -- announced a Senate Judiciary subcommittee investigation into Russian interference in elections in the U.S. and elsewhere. But they already seemed to have made up their minds about the conclusion: "Our goal is simple," the senators said in a joint statement "To the fullest extent possible we want to shine a light on Russian activities to undermine democracy."

    So, before the next round of Cold War posturing commences, now might be the time to stop, take a deep breath and ask: Could the rush into a new Cold War with Russia be as disastrous and consequential -- if not more so -- as was the rush to war with Iraq nearly 15 years ago? We may, unfortunately, find out.

    James W Carden is a contributing writer for The Nation and editor of The American Committee for East-West Accord's eastwestaccord.com. He previously served as an advisor on Russia to the Special Representative for Global Inter-governmental Affairs at the US State Department.

    Don G. , February 5, 2017 at 14:29

    Questioning whether the Russians hacked or didn’t hack is playing into the US narrative to demonize Russia. (Putin)
    It simple doesn’t matter as all nations hack as much as possible to enhance and protect their national interests. Surely Russia has hacked against the US no more than a tenth of what the US had done against Russia.

    The narrative is nothing but a propaganda lie but it’s been accepted by the American people and mostly because of the fight that goes on due to domestic politics, one major party against the other.

    There’s a very good reason to stop promoting the narrative because it only helps to bring Americans onside with more efforts to demonize Putin and to keep all sides in the US promoting their aggression worldwide. Americans are likely easily 90% prowar now and will show little or no resistance to the coming war on Iran. <img alt='' src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/f05d2bb98b641e9e9ab8f3dc738e31a0?s=60&#038;d=identicon&#038;r=pg' srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/f05d2bb98b641e9e9ab8f3dc738e31a0?s=120&#038;d=identicon&#038;r=pg 2x' class='avatar avatar-60 photo' height='60' width='60' />

    yugo , February 4, 2017 at 13:54

    Hysteria has reached fever pitch. Russia’s fake news is apparently so beguiling that it even threatens western democratic discourse. Combine this with its cyber weaponry and Moscow, so we are told, may interfere in this year’s German elections to benefit the hard-right. Such incessant fear mongering has already prompted calls for the censorship of Russian propaganda. It won’t be long before a witch-hunt emerges, directed against ‘fellow travellers’, those who dare to doubt the Russian threat.

    They insist the west made matters worse in Ukraine by not acknowledging that it was a classic example of a young state that didn’t naturally command the allegiance of all its peoples. Other examples are Georgia’s Abkhazians and South Ossetians, Moldova’s Trans-Dniester Slavs and Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians.

    They also doubt the Russian threat to the Baltic states. What is amazing is Moscow’s temperate response to Estonia and Latvia’s gross violation of international norms in denying citizenship to those of its Russian minority who are not conversant in Estonian and Latvian respectively. Nato and the EU turned a blind eye when membership was granted to these two states.

    Fellow travellers furthermore claim the west will keep on floundering in the Middle East as long as it persists in treating Saudi Arabia as a valued ally, while viewing Iran as a permanent enemy. We have for far too long ignored Saudi Arabia’s promotion of Wahhabism and its playing of the destructive sectarian card against ‘apostate’ Shiites. Take the merciless attacks on Shiite worshippers by Sunni jihadis of a Wahhabist persuasion. It occurs with sickening regularity throughout the Middle East. The terrorists attacking westerners are invariably Sunni jihadis, not Shiites. Worse still, Saudi Arabia together with Nato member Turkey facilitated the emergence of Isis. We bizarrely gave priority to toppling Syria’s secular regime.

    The first loyalty of these fellow travellers is to their nation state rather than unfettered globalism. No wonder the western elite disparage their national patriotism, calling it populism. It was, after all, the Achilles Heel of Homo Sovieticus. The elite fear the same fate awaits Homo Europaeus and globalist Homo Economicus.

    Michael K Rohde , February 3, 2017 at 15:12

    This is beginning to look exactly like Iraq 2 and why the same players that led us into that fake war which is still not paid for because the initiators made sure and get themselves a tax cut before they launched it are still being listened to makes it clear. Even with a change in administrations and party our government continues in the same wrong headed direction, to war with the enemies of Israel. When will it stop? When will we take back control of our foreign policy and destiny. <img alt='' src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/cc900a84653501242923790946494dbc?s=60&#038;d=identicon&#038;r=pg' srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/cc900a84653501242923790946494dbc?s=120&#038;d=identicon&#038;r=pg 2x' class='avatar avatar-60 photo' height='60' width='60' />

    Michael Hoefler , February 3, 2017 at 23:29

    As Ray McGovern said several times (not quoting): that Israel is the elephant in the room. Netayahu will not rest until he has all of the Arab states fighting among themselves. IMO he thinks that that will guarantee Israel protection.
    IMO – all that does is put Israel into a continuing worse situation. There will always be someone stronger to come along to overcome them – someday – sometime. If they made peace with those nations and worked with them, traded with them – they would be much safer in the long run.

    Banger , February 3, 2017 at 14:22

    The mainstream media in th USA and, increasingly in the rest of the West are vehicles for propaganda from various factions within the Imperial Deep State. All these outlets are good for is to map the power relations between these factions at least this the case in the major issues of the day.

    This misbehavior going on right now. One factions close to Trump wants to go to war with Iran because, of course there has to be war or the Deep State as a whole stuffers and the people will begin to look at their shakles. The other faction wishes to go to a brinksmanship sort of Cold War situation. The Trumpists believe that making friends with Russia and then destroying Iranian power is the best approach to controlling the MENA region by creating a loose alliance of KSA, Israel, Turkey and Russia in which a weak Iran would be forced to enter the Empire and Russia in return would be given more control of Ukraine and Eastern Europe. I suspect Trump may also want to undercut NATO and the EU. That is my guess. To put it another way, Russia is strong and well led and Iran is not.

    stan , February 3, 2017 at 14:17

    You can read chapter 6 of Mein Kampf if you want to see how this war propaganda stuff works. It is not group think or mistaken ideas. It is deliberate lies to scare you and a carefully crafted false narrative to make it all seem reasonable. People cannot believe that their leaders would tell such a big lie, and that’s why it works. The goal is murder and conquest to get territory, natural resources, and control of business and commerce. Controlling markets for drugs, gambling, and prostitution is for nickel and dime crooks. Controlling markets for natural resources, banking, and consumer and industrial goods is where the real money is. Think of governments as criminal business syndicates and you aren’t far off. Remember, President Obama had a hit list, flew around plane loads of secret cash to make illegal payoffs, and bragged about offing his opponent in the head and dumping his body in the river.

    Jeremy , February 4, 2017 at 11:33

    Yes, Stan,well put! you will never see this sort of talk in the articles here, as the consipiracy theorist label is always one to avoid, but I agree that when we think in terms of a group of people trying to attain “security” the same way any other gangster does, it becomes much less far fetched. George Carlin said, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it!” Men and women of power and wealth will always do what they have to in order to preserve that power and wealth for their children. There is really no conspiracy needed, just a bunch of people at the top looking after themselves and their families.

    Tania Messina , February 3, 2017 at 14:13

    Ah, yes, we’ve always needed a boogeyman to keep us all crazed with fear and the neocons busy with their destruction of society. If there is a crazy out there today, it is those neocons and their puppets who were so intent on destroying “seven countries in five years” and not being able to achieve that diabolical end as so neatly planned. And, now, they’re throwing temper tantrums, because, surprise of surprises! a non career politician comes along who uses common sense for a change and dares to say, “Why can’t we be friends with Russia?” With that comment many exhausted Americans perked up and listened while the Dulles boys turned somersaults in their graves!

    The arrogance and superiority of those who constantly blame Russia for their alleged expansionist ambitions seem blinded to our own aggressions. Fifteen years in Iraq? We finally have a president who talks of peace and we demonize him as the warmonger ready to press the button, while I seem to remember that it was the other candidate who arrogantly referred to Putin as Hitler!

    It is articles like this one by James Carden that we should be teaching in our schools, researching the facts and discussing in our classrooms so that hopefully a new generation might grow up with intelligent exchange rather than the brainwash that has been strangling our society for too many years.

    Mark Thomason , February 3, 2017 at 13:04

    This controversy is driven by Democratic denial of defeat, and infighting in which those defeated seek to hang on to power inside the Democratic Party. It is the Hillary crowd. It can be evidence free because it is driven by political calculation of private power needs, not truth.

    And the WMD fiasco is a perfect comparison, because the same people drove the same sort of fact-free theme for private reasons, as Wolfowitz put it, the story around which varying separate interests could be rallied.

    [Apr 23, 2019] Stephen Cohen about Tulsi

    Apr 23, 2019 | therealnews.com

    PAUL JAY Can I–Can I just intervene for just a sec? The problem here is both on Venezuela and Iran the Democratic Party foreign policy establishment is on the same page as Trump. Netanyahu is on the same page as Trump. The Saudis are on the same page as Trump. When Trump throws this missile, missiles into Syria after the supposed gas attack, Chuck Schumer says finally Trump's acting president -- is a president. The problem is is that as much as these guys vilify and are dangerous -- these guys meaning the Democrats and that whole establishment are dangerous on Russia-

    STEPHEN COHEN I don't disagree.

    PAUL JAY They'll converge with Trump on some very dangerous stuff in Iran.

    STEPHEN COHEN I don't disagree. But that brings me to my final point, I guess, because we are at the time we are in. We now have, I think, at last count 19 or 20 Democratic would be contenders for the presidential nomination; 19 or 20. We need to ask ourselves which, if any, of these people see these dangers clearly, and ask them. But I have a feeling that the mainstream media will not ask them, because these are uncomfortable issues for them. I also think that the one candidate who has embraced a position similar to my own, Tulsi Gabbard, was immediately attacked by NBC, as you know. Scurrilously.

    That it's a question of what kind of discussion–because according to our democracy these existential issues that you and I have discussed are discussed during presidential campaigns. This is when we clarify and make our choices. It seems to me this is unlikely to happen, partly because the mainstream media doesn't permit voices like mine any longer. Though they used to welcome me. I used to work for them. It would be interesting to see how they treat Tulsi Gabbard, who's the closest to this kind of anxiety about the new Cold War with Russia, has taken positions on this. There may be others, but I haven't–I haven't noted that. We'll see how they're–if there's an attempt to suppress her view, or to give her a fair time. Now, she'll have to do well in a primary somewhere to get that. But it's a little discouraging that of 19 or 20 Democrats, only one thus far has spoken with some clarity about this, what I consider to be the number one existential issue; the danger of war with Russia.

    [Apr 23, 2019] US Hoped Putin Would be a 'Sober Yeltsin' - RAI with Stephen Cohen (3-5)

    We've discarded real historical and political analysis for a kind of Russophobia that I actually never experienced in my lifetime before. But this is the second stage. The first stage was demonization of Putin.
    Apr 23, 2019 | therealnews.com

    PAUL JAY Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. And we're continuing our discussions with Stephen Cohen about Russia and the United States, Trump and Putin. Thanks for joining us again.

    STEPHEN COHEN Thank you. For Steven's bio, just look under the video player. Watch the earlier segments. But I'll plug your book. People should read this book. It's important. It's called War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate. And let me say, while in the last segment I am arguing with you about how to characterize Trump–and I don't know, maybe we'll argue again–I think your contribution on this issue is extremely important. I know you've been under incredible pressure and getting isolated on this point. And I think it's brave of you to take the stance you do.

    OK, let's just move on. In the early years of Putin's presidency the West quite liked him. I guess they thought he would be a continuation of Yeltsin. I think they had expectations that he would help facilitate an American–I don't know what the word–'takeover' is too strong–but allowing American mining companies and energy companies and finance to come in. And instead what emerged was a state with real laws. And an oligarchy emerged, which I think at some point the Russian people will have to deal with, because I don't think it's good for them, but it's up to them. That being said, America didn't get a free-for-all.

    But as this relationship with the West became more and more tense–and I think to a large extent for these reasons. The Americans didn't get everything they wanted out of Russia. I don't understand why Putin didn't take more of the Chinese stance, which is avoid direct confrontation as much as you can and build up your strength. And I don't get Crimea. Crimea was–and you suggest in your book–wasn't there an alternative to the annexation? There wasn't, like, an immediate threat. I know there was a right-wing takeover, a far-right takeover of Ukraine. The Americans certainly facilitated and helped engineer it. It is a kind of strategic threat. I mean, I think that's clear, and you've made the case very eloquently. But still, why poke Europe and the United States in the eye and kind of make the case of the anti-detente forces? Oh, look, you know, Russia's on the move. It starts with Crimea, and Georgia will be next, and then it will be the whole of Ukraine.

    STEPHEN COHEN Of course they didn't with Crimea, and that's just the argument that people who don't wish to understand the Russian point of view make. It didn't start with Crimea. It began with the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders.

    PAUL JAY No doubt.

    STEPHEN COHEN Well, not only no doubt, but for Putin and for the Russian political class that was the context and the prism through which they viewed Western–and particularly American–policy toward Russia. So when the Ukrainian crisis began in 2013, let's remember what happened, because it does lead to the annexation of Crimea.

    In 2013 the European Union told the then-president of Ukraine, Yanukovych–and he may have been a rotter, but he was constitutionally and legally elected. It would have been a clean election. He was the president–that he needed to sign a economic partnership with the European Union. It meant, in effect, losing his preferred trade status with Russia, which constituted about 40 percent of Ukrainian trade. Not to mention about 3 to 4 million Ukrainians who worked in Russia to support their families were allowed to do so, and allowed to send their salaries back to Ukraine to support their families.

    So Ukraine was heavily dependent on Russia economically, and along comes the European Union that wants to exclude Russia from this new arrangement. So Putin says, Putin and his Foreign Minister Lavrov say, look, guys, why not a tripartite arrangement? It would be good for everybody. We'll have an economic preferred agreement with Russia, Ukraine, and the European Union. And Washington and Brussels said no. Russia can't participate. Yanukovych for that reason declined to sign the agreement, and that led to the Maidan uprising. And Yanukovych flees from office to Russia.

    So Putin now is sitting in Moscow, and Crimea comes to the fore, because you've got a very right-wing, and I would say crazy, government in power, saying outlandish things. Including, you know, Crimea is ours, and we're going to expel the Russian naval base there, which was there by treaty. They had a lease, I think, 25 years on the base. There were 22,000, by law, Russian soldiers on the Crimean base. They were already there. All right.

    So Putin's sitting here. He sees some kind of threat–maybe it's rhetorical. But bad things are happening. This was a very violent uprising. You remember the burning buildings in Kiev and Maidan. If you watched this on TV, this was violence. It was very serious. Snipers killed, I think, 85 to 100 people in Maidan just before Yanukovych fled. They said that the snipers were sent by Yanukovych, but we now know they weren't. They were sent by neofascists, Ukrainian neofascists, on Maidan. But remember, Putin is operating in a context that's moving very fast, very dangerous. Intelligence is sparse, not clear. But there is clearly a new government in Kiev that's laying claim not only to Crimea forever, but to expelling the Russian naval base there. So Putin has to decide.

    The back history is Putin never showed any interest in Crimea until that moment. However, it had been an issue in Russian politics when Putin ran for president in 2000. There was a party headed by two very influential men, the former mayor of Moscow, Luzhkov, and the former foreign minister Primakov, who had advocated reuniting Crimea with Russia, because Crimea had traditionally been a Russian province, I think somewhere like–don't speak of ethnicity, speak of language. Something like 85 percent of the population speaks Russian as a native language. I mean, enormous number. It's a Russian province. And it was only an act of accident under Khrushchev that had been assigned administratively when the Soviet Union existed to Ukraine, because Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union.

    So what was Putin supposed to do? To the extent that we know how he made the decision, he was told by his intelligence people–all leaders in crisis depend on intelligence people–take Crimea today through a referendum, and peacefully. And by the way, they were polling like crazy. They knew they'd get 85-plus. They knew this. If they had it–and the referendum was completely open. All this crap about 'at gunpoint' is nonsense. I mean, it was a fair referendum. And Gallup has been going back to Crimea and polling. They get the same number; 85 percent want to be with Russia.

    Putin is told do it by the ballot, the box, today, or fight a war there tomorrow. That's what he was told. What would you have done in his place? See, it's easy for you, Paul, and me, Steve, to sit here and debate what leaders–Trump, any leader–Kennedy, Putin, should do in a crisis situation without knowing the circumstances, or what we would do in that situation. I mean, they have to act and they have to act fast. And they're dependent on this intelligence.

    PAUL JAY OK, but in the book you suggest there might have been an alternative.

    STEPHEN COHEN Well, I can just simply tell you what Putin was told as an alternative. One group said "You have to take Crimea now. The polls show Crimeans will vote to join Russia. There is an international law that referendums are binding and legal. We'll have a referendum, we'll get the result, and they'll vote to join Russia and we'll take them in. Do that.".

    The other view was "Hold the referendum, but don't welcome them into Russia. Use it as a bargaining card with the West and Kiev when we see how the Maidan so-called revolution–it wasn't a revolution, but the Maidan coup, it was a coup against Yanukovych–let's see what comes next. But that'll be a diplomatic card we could play. Go ahead and have the referendum. They will vote to join Russia, but that doesn't mean because they've requested to join Russia we have to say OK. Just take that and say to the West, look, the Crimean people want to join Russia. We understand that that may be, you know, difficult for you. Can we find a way to solve this problem short of annexation?" In other words, can we get guarantees for Crimea?

    So Putin was told that was an option, and he didn't choose it. And I try to put myself in his shoes and see what would I have done? And the problem is I don't know the intelligence. For example, there is a report, I don't believe or disbelieve it, that NATO commandos were found on Crimea, on the peninsula. I don't know if that's true. Maybe it was scuttlebutt. Did Putin know it to be true? I don't know. But we have yet to be told the whole story of what happened between the coup in Kiev–because it was a coup. It overthrew the president–and the decision, Russians don't say 'annex,' they say 'rejoined with,' or 'welcomed Crimea home,' to make that decision. One day we'll know more, and then we'll be able to decide if Putin really had a choice.

    PAUL JAY Do you–and I don't, one, have any–I don't have any detailed knowledge about the situation.

    STEPHEN COHEN I don't have enough.

    PAUL JAY Never mind not knowing the intelligence.

    STEPHEN COHEN You understand that's a question mark by what I say. We don't know for sure.

    PAUL JAY Yeah. But was–Do you think there might have been an option to have a referendum that took a little–there was more time, maybe get the United Nations involved? Something that gives a little more recognition to it?

    STEPHEN COHEN Without naming names-

    PAUL JAY And I'm not talking the morality, here. I'm talking tactically.

    STEPHEN COHEN Practical politics. The point is that Putin was told–now, mind you, this is–I mean, it's a good thing that he's a former KGB officer, by the way. Henry Kissinger, when he first met Putin, and he learned–this was when Putin was working as deputy mayor in St. Petersburg, and Kissinger met him. And Putin said to Kissinger, "You know, I began in intelligence." And Kissinger said, "That's the best way to start a political career." Kissinger had started in intelligence during the war, right. Because these guys think, and maybe they're right, that if you're trained in intelligence, or you're able to evaluate intelligence–that is, you aren't going to be fooled by your own intelligence people–that you can sort out false intelligence from legitimate intelligence. Putin was in a position, I think, to evaluate the intelligence. So the question that you raise is true. Why didn't they wait? And he was told we can't wait; events are moving too fast.

    PAUL JAY In the earlier–last segment–you talked about the pressure on him that he's not proactive enough. Is this partly responding to that kind of pressure?

    STEPHEN COHEN Yes. And that's why I want to return to this issue that only once before had Crimea been an issue in Russian politics, when a political party ran against Putin on a platform that we should somehow get Crimea back. They got, I think, two percent of the vote. There was no popular support for this. Putin was disdainful of the idea. In other words, this was something–this was not aggression. This is ridiculous. This was a decision imposed upon him by circumstances that he did not create, but to which he now had to react. And I don't know whether he knew it or not, but that was probably his most historic decision. And I mean–it's not his most historic, but it is part of what will forever define his role for Russians in Russian history forever.

    PAUL JAY So let's get to the big underlying question here-

    STEPHEN COHEN You can go to Moscow and buy a poster in a shop. At the top is a map of Crimea, a very distinctive peninsula, right? On one side is Krushchev, who signed Crimea over to Ukraine, right, when–in 1954-'55, when the Soviet Union existed. On the other side is a picture of Putin. And it simply says "He gave away. He took back." You can see these in the shops. These were–Khrushchev frivolously, on some anniversary, said OK, Crimea is part of Ukraine. And Putin [got it back].

    PAUL JAY In your book [crosstalk] Kissinger saying he might have been drunk that night when he did it.

    STEPHEN COHEN Who?

    PAUL JAY I think in your book you say that, don't you?

    STEPHEN COHEN That's not me.

    PAUL JAY Somebody said that Khrushchev might have been drunk the night that he gave Crimea [crosstalk].

    STEPHEN COHEN No, I didn't say that. I don't know. But-

    PAUL JAY Somebody quotes Kissinger.

    STEPHEN COHEN Possibly. But you know, these are–if you're a student of history, and particularly of political leadership, as I like to think I am, this is a Graham Allison practically made a career of writing about the Cuban missile crisis and how the Kennedy team–right? He's famous for studying that. It's a case study in crisis leadership. And Kennedy comes out looking pretty good. By the way, I would say Khrushchev comes out looking pretty good, too, because the Russian reaction could have been different. But now we have Putin in Crimea. He had to make a decision that was imposed upon him. Now, we don't have all the information. But we should be fascinated to study and understand this rather than demonize Putin for doing it.

    PAUL JAY OK. Let me–this sort of big, underlying question. Because I mean, Kissinger said that what Putin did in Crimea was an anomaly; that you can't extend anything from that. That does not prove that Russia is on the march and they're going to start threatening other Baltic states, and all this. The Crimea is a very particular situation. Clearly that was not the predominant attitude of the West towards Crimea. So why–it began under Yeltsin, but with Putin–and Putin seemed ready for it. Why didn't the West assimilate Russia into Western capitalism?

    ... ... ...

    STEPHEN COHEN Yeah. Clinton unwisely–not only Clinton. Bill Clinton, not Hillary. And Bill Clinton was president then in the '90s–believed that he was assimilating Russia with his policy toward Yeltsin. That's what he thought. And he was so advised by people such as Strobe Talbott, all of whom should have known better. In fact, Russia descended in the 1990s into the worst and most corrosive economic depression ever in peacetime. Men were dying at 57. I think the collapse of industrial production was greater than it was during our own Great Depression. People were not receiving their wages or their social benefits. The middle class was being vaporized. Gangs were controlling large parts of the economy. Some people even think it was what people call state capture, that private oligarchs had captured the state. Russia was on the verge, if not of actually breaking up, of collapsing.

    Now, flash back to that moment, 1999. Russia, the largest territorial country in the world, even after the end of the Soviet Union, laden, laden, stockpiled with every conceivable weapon of mass destruction, from germ, bacterial, chemical, nuclear. What if Russia had broken up? What if? We're talking Apocalypse Now. I would think that people would give Putin a little credit for holding Russia together, reestablishing control over the regions that had these weapons. But he's never given any any, any credit. Russians themselves do. But in the West–Imagine what would have happened. It wasn't just Putin alone. He put together a team, a komanda, as it's called in Russia. No one man can do this. But he chose advisers who understood the situation.

    At the time–at the time–this was semi-welcomed in Washington. You remember that Putin came to see the second President Bush, and they went to the ranch. And Bush said "I looked into his eyes and I saw a good soul." And other things like that. And I think you, Paul, are right when you say that they, meaning the people who control our foreign policy, thought that this would be the continuation of the 1990s, except that Putin would be a healthy and sober Yeltsin; that Yeltsin had become dysfunctional, unable to govern the country that the West wanted to assimilate. And when it turned out that Putin wasn't Yeltsin, even though Yeltsin put him in power–indeed, historically speaking Putin could not have been Yeltsin, though he's never given his anti-Yeltsin speech the way Khrushchev gave his anti-Stalin speech. This is interesting. He's been urged to give this speech, by the way; the de-Yeltsinization speech, analogous to Khruschev's de-Stalinization speech. He's never done that. People say he's too loyal, to a fault. Too loyal. Putin. Some trait he's got. They criticize him for it.

    But nonetheless, very soon American disillusion in Putin set in. And we can date it. There is there was, and even remains today a New York Times columnist, Nick Kristof. Nicholas Kristof. Who wrote–I think it was 2003. Maybe I'm off a year, year and a half–that he was greatly disillusioned, he, Kristof, that Putin had not turned out to be a sober Yeltsin. Imagine this. In other words, they, to the extent that columnists speak for these great powers, wanted Yeltsin, a person who by then had positive ratings in Russia of about 3 percent, who was hated in Russia for what had happened to the country. But the only grievance in Washington was he wasn't sober and healthy enough to continue the policy. And Putin, they thought at the beginning was a sober healthy Yeltsin. Look at him. And Yeltsin–on what Yeltsin is. They say he's from Yeltsin. He's got to be. But it was clear. If you'd been paying attention it would have been clear it was impossible.

    And when it dawned on them they were bitter. And I'm not sure that they started hating on Putin because they personally had been so wrong, their analysis had been wrong, or because they couldn't stand the thought of a non-Yeltsin to this day. Because even today you could read in the New York Times and other analyses, so-called, how great it was under Yeltsin. It wasn't great. It was a country in agony. And it was dangerous to us, with all those weapons.

    So you know, we've discarded history. We've discarded real historical and political analysis for a kind of Russophobia that I actually never experienced in my lifetime before. It's much worse now. And remember one thing, as we all go forward and think about Russiagate, which I think is going to be with us in one way or another for decades. But the Putin-phobia, the hating on Putin, began long before Trump was a presidential candidate. Long before. The two got fused together in Russiagate. The loathing for Putin and the loathing for Trump was fused into this thing called Russiagate. Now, who did the initial fusing? In my book I argued it was our intelligence services, and particularly the CIA. We will see. I think we're going to have some investigations now. I may be wrong. I don't think it was the FBI, as people think. I think was Brennan and Obama's CIA that got all this started.

    But these–this didn't come out of nowhere. This had been developing, this demonizing of Putin had been going on for years before Trump appeared on the scene. And then bingo, it came together. And we're stuck with it. And it ain't going to go away. And I think it's the worst threat to our national security. I've said Russiagate is the great number one threat to our national security. In the book I do the five greatest threats for our national security. The book is all short pieces. And Russia–Russia and China don't make the top five. Russiagate's number one. Unfortunately you're younger than I am so we can't share these moments together. But there was the Cuban missile crisis, correct?

    PAUL JAY Well, I–you know, I was alive. I was very aware of it.

    STEPHEN COHEN All right. But it is said that in the history books, in the textbooks, that it's the closest we ever came to nuclear war with Russia, Soviet Russia. Correct?

    PAUL JAY If you listen Ellsberg we were seconds from it.

    STEPHEN COHEN OK. And yet because of the leadership of Kennedy, and I would add Khrushchev, because it takes two to tango, as Reagan said, these two guys averted Armageddon. Correct? And that's the lesson we've taught our kids and we teach in our textbooks. OK. Imagine today–and it doesn't take a lot of imagining–that we have a Cuban missile crisis-like confrontation. Could be in Venezuela. Could be in Syria. Could be in former Soviet Georgia. Could be in Ukraine. Lots of places. It happens, suddenly. The two nuclear superpowers are eyeball to eyeball like the Cuban missile crisis. Everybody credits Kennedy and Khrushchev for averting the crisis.

    This happens tomorrow, do you think the American political class and its media are going to invest Trump with the authority to negotiate a way out of nuclear war? The guy they called the Kremlin puppet? And are they going to credit Putin, the guy they've so demonized, as a partner to avert nuclear war? They will not. And what happens then? The answer is nuclear war. That's why I say we're walking on a razor's edge with this Russiagate demonizing Putin nonsense. We need these two guys, whether we like them or not, to avoid nuclear war. And we are–we have too many situations fraught with war with Russia which could become nuclear war, more than we've ever had before. And the people who've contributed to these situations refuse to acknowledge what they've done. Above all, the mainstream media. What you and I are discussing today should be discussed in the major newspapers and television talk shows in this country nightly. And I guarantee you decades ago it would have been. We've lost our way. And the new way is exceedingly dangerous.

    [Apr 23, 2019] Groupthink at the CIA by Philip Giraldi

    Looks like tail wags the dog -- CIA controls the US foreign policy and in the last elections also played active role in promoting Hillary. A the level of top brass we have several people mentioned by Giraldi who are probably as dangerous as Allen Dulles was. Brennan is one example.
    The parade of rogues that Philip describes is really alarming. Each with agenda that directly harms the USA as a country promoting the interest of military-industrial complex and neocon faction within the government...
    Notable quotes:
    "... Indeed, one can start with Tenet if one wants to create a roster of recent CIA Directors who have lied to permit the White House to engage in a war crime. Tenet and his staff knew better than anyone that the case against Saddam did not hold water, but President George W. Bush wanted his war and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA had any say in the matter. ..."
    "... Back then as now, international Islamic terrorism was the name of the game. It kept the money flowing to the national security establishment in the false belief that America was somehow being made "safe." But today the terror narrative has been somewhat supplanted by Russia, which is headed by a contemporary Saddam Hussein in the form of Vladimir Putin. If one believes the media and a majority of congressmen, evil manifest lurks in the gilded halls of the Kremlin. Russia has recently been sanctioned (again) for crimes that are more alleged than demonstrated and President Putin has been selected by the Establishment as the wedge issue that will be used to end President Donald Trump's defiance of the Deep State and all that pertains to it. The intelligence community at its top level would appear to be fully on board with that effort. ..."
    "... Remarkably, he also said that there is only "minimal evidence" that Russia is even fighting ISIS. The statement is astonishing as Moscow has most definitely been seriously and directly engaged in support of the Syrian Arab Army. Is it possible that the head of the CIA is unaware of that? It just might be that Pompeo is disparaging the effort because the Russians and Syrians have also been fighting against the U.S. backed "moderate rebels." That the moderate rebels are hardly moderate has been known for years and they are also renowned for their ineffectiveness combined with a tendency to defect to more radical groups taking their U.S. provided weapons with them, a combination of factors which led to their being denied any further American support by a presidential decision that was revealed in the press two weeks ago. ..."
    "... Pompeo's predecessor John Brennan is, however, my favorite Agency leader in the category of totally bereft of his senses. ..."
    "... Brennan is certainly loyal to his cause, whatever that might be. At the same Aspen meeting attended by Pompeo, he told Wolf Blitzer that if Trump were to fire special counsel Robert Mueller government officials should "refuse to carry out" his orders. In other words, they should begin a coup, admittedly non-violent (one presumes), but nevertheless including federal employees uniting to shut the government down. ..."
    "... And finally, there is Michael Morell, also a former Acting Director, who was closely tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently driven by ambition to become Director in her administration. Morell currently provides commentary for CBS television and is a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose show. Morell considerably raised the ante on Brennan's pre-electoral speculation that there had been some Russian recruitment of Trump people. He observed in August that Putin, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them [did exactly that] early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." ..."
    "... Nothing new. In the '50s CIA was making foreign wars and cultivating chaos at home, and blaming all of it on Russia. In the '80s CIA was cultivating anti-nuke groups to undermine Reagan, and blaming it on Russia. CIA has been the primary wellspring of evil for a long time. ..."
    "... Yes you read that right and they are going to the rotten core of this coup against the United States by presenting a report stating that the DNC was "Leaked" not hacked. The real hacking came from President Obama's weaponizing of our intelligence agencies against Russia. ..."
    "... The CIA is the USA's secret army, it is not comparable to a real intelligence organization like the British MI5. The CIA is more like WWII SOE, designed to set fire to Europe, Churchill's words. ..."
    "... As has been the case for decades the Deep State allows Presidents and legislators to make minor decisions in our government as long as those decisions do not in any way interfere with the Deep State's goals of total world hegemony and increase in overwhelming power and wealth. Those who make the important decisions in this country are not elected. The elected 'officials' are sycophants of the Deep State. ..."
    "... The term is appropriated from the use to describe the mutually loyal corps of Ataturkians in the Turkish military and intelligence services who were united in service to uphold the ideal of Ataturkian secular modernisation. The term implies no public accountability or publicity unnecessary to its purposes. ..."
    "... The CIA's source, its birth, is from British secret service. Brit spying. And Brit secret service, long before the official founding of MI5, did exactly the kinds of things you note the CIA has done. ..."
    "... The Mossad is another direct fruit of Brit secret service, as is the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency. ..."
    "... While there can be no doubt about the crackpots in high positions of the most powerful bureaucracies, it seems to me that the CIA loonies are merely shock troops for an even worse bunch of evil psychos, the bankster mafiosi. ..."
    "... I am a retired CIA operations officer (something none of the men mentioned by Giraldi are – Brennan was a failed wanna be, couldn't cut it as an ops officer). He is spot on in his comments. The majority of people in the CIA, the ones who do the heavy lifting, are patriotic Americans who are proud of serving their country. I am sure that most voted for Trump as they all know too well the truth about the Clintons and Obama. ..."
    "... Giraldi is not the only one to notice the upward progress of the most incompetent yes-men in the Agency. A close look at most of them reveals a track record of little or no operational success balanced by excellent sucking up skills. These characters quickly figured out how to get ahead and doing your job in the field is not it. Of course, most are ego maniacs so they are totally oblivious to their own uselessness. ..."
    "... How "Russiagate" began: After the primaries, both Hillary and Donald faced divided political parties even though they had won the nomination. These divisions were worse than the normal situation after contested primaries. On the Democratic side, Hillay had just subverted the will of the voters of her party, who seemed to favor Bernie Sanders over her. Hillay had won with corrupt collusion and rigging amongst the DNC, the higher ranks of the Democratic Party, and major media such as the NYT and CNN. ..."
    "... Then, a leak of emails from the DNC HQ publicized her interference in the democratic processes of the Democratic Party. This threatened to ene the Hillary for President campaign right then and there. If the majority of Democrats who'd favored Bernie refused to support Hillary because of her corruption and collusion in denying democracy within the party, she was a sure loser in the fall election. The Hillary camp then immediately started blaming Russia for the exposure of her corruption and rigging of the Democratic process. And that's how "Russiagate" began. ..."
    "... Take that bunch of mediocre thinkers, and then make most of them obsessed with their own career advancement above all else. The most dangerous place for a career-obsessed individual is outside the group consensus. ..."
    "... So, for instance, Trump should veto the act of war known as the recent sanctions bill. Who cares if it gets overridden? Then he goes back to the voters, who are clearly sick of endless war and who for obvious reasons don't want a nuclear war, and he says this is where I stand. Support me by electing Fill-In-The-Blank to Congress. With the nuclear Doomsday Clock pushing ever closer to midnight, he might just win that fight over the big money and media opposition he's sure to face. ..."
    "... Not only has Trump failed to even try to fight the Deep State, but he's also failing to set himself up for success in the next elections. ..."
    "... What we are seeing now is The Donald's role in the serial Zionist THEATER. Think deeper about the motive behind Mr. Giraldi's choice to use the Orwellian word "Groupthink" in characterizing the CIA zeitgeist? In the classic work "1984," one observes Big Brother as the catalyst in control of the proles' thought pattern & subsequent action. ..."
    "... To rise & FALL as a POTUS is a matter of theater and the American proles are entertained by the political for either 4 or 8 years and the Zionists get their next Chosen actor/actress dramatically sworn in on a bible. ..."
    Aug 01, 2017 | www.unz.com

    Long ago, when I was a spear carrying middle ranker at CIA, a colleague took me aside and said that he had something to tell me "as a friend," that was very important. He told me that his wife had worked for years in the Agency's Administrative Directorate, as it was then called, where she had noticed that some new officers coming out of the Career Trainee program had red tags on their personnel files. She eventually learned from her boss that the tags represented assessments that those officers had exceptional potential as senior managers. He added, however, that the reverse appeared to be true in practice as they were generally speaking serial failures as they ascended the bureaucratic ladder, even though their careers continued to be onward and upward on paper. My friend's wife concluded, not unreasonably, that only genuine a-holes had what it took to get promoted to the most senior ranks.

    I was admittedly skeptical but some recent activity by former and current Directors and Acting Directors of CIA has me wondering if something like my friend's wife's observation about senior management might indeed be true. But it would have to be something other than tagging files, as many of the directors and their deputies did not come up through the ranks and there seems to be a similar strain of lunacy at other U.S. government intelligence agencies. It might be time to check the water supply in the Washington area as there is very definitely something in the kool-aid that is producing odd behavior.

    Now I should pause for a moment and accept that the role of intelligence services is to identify potential threats before they become active, so a certain level of acute paranoia goes with the job. But at the same time, one would expect a level of professionalism which would mandate accuracy rather than emotion in assessments coupled with an eschewing of any involvement in the politics of foreign and national security policy formulation. The enthusiasm with which a number of senior CIA personnel have waded into the Trump swamp and have staked out positions that contradict genuine national interests suggests that little has been learned since CIA Director George Tenet sat behind Secretary of State Colin Powell in the UN and nodded sagaciously as Saddam Hussein's high crimes and misdemeanors were falsely enumerated.

    Indeed, one can start with Tenet if one wants to create a roster of recent CIA Directors who have lied to permit the White House to engage in a war crime. Tenet and his staff knew better than anyone that the case against Saddam did not hold water, but President George W. Bush wanted his war and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA had any say in the matter.

    Back then as now, international Islamic terrorism was the name of the game. It kept the money flowing to the national security establishment in the false belief that America was somehow being made "safe." But today the terror narrative has been somewhat supplanted by Russia, which is headed by a contemporary Saddam Hussein in the form of Vladimir Putin. If one believes the media and a majority of congressmen, evil manifest lurks in the gilded halls of the Kremlin. Russia has recently been sanctioned (again) for crimes that are more alleged than demonstrated and President Putin has been selected by the Establishment as the wedge issue that will be used to end President Donald Trump's defiance of the Deep State and all that pertains to it. The intelligence community at its top level would appear to be fully on board with that effort.

    The most recent inexplicable comments come from the current CIA Director Mike Pompeo, speaking at the Aspen Institute Security Forum. He began by asserting that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election before saying that the logic behind Russia's Middle Eastern strategy is to stay in place in Syria so Moscow can "stick it to America." He didn't define the "it" so one must assume that "it" stands for any utensil available, ranging from cruise missiles to dinner forks. He then elaborated, somewhat obscurely, that "I think they find anyplace that they can make our lives more difficult, I think they find that something that's useful."

    Remarkably, he also said that there is only "minimal evidence" that Russia is even fighting ISIS. The statement is astonishing as Moscow has most definitely been seriously and directly engaged in support of the Syrian Arab Army. Is it possible that the head of the CIA is unaware of that? It just might be that Pompeo is disparaging the effort because the Russians and Syrians have also been fighting against the U.S. backed "moderate rebels." That the moderate rebels are hardly moderate has been known for years and they are also renowned for their ineffectiveness combined with a tendency to defect to more radical groups taking their U.S. provided weapons with them, a combination of factors which led to their being denied any further American support by a presidential decision that was revealed in the press two weeks ago.

    Pompeo's predecessor John Brennan is, however, my favorite Agency leader in the category of totally bereft of his senses. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee back in May, he suggested that some Trump associates might have been recruited by the Russian intelligence service. He testified that "I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind whether or not Russia was able to gain the co-operation of those individuals."

    In his testimony, Brennan apparently forgot to mention that the CIA is not supposed to keep tabs on American citizens. Nor did he explain how he had come upon the information in the first place as it had been handed over by foreign intelligence services, including the British, Dutch and Estonians, and at least some of it had been sought or possibly inspired by Brennan unofficially in the first place. Brennan then used that information to request an FBI investigation into a possible Russian operation directed against potential key advisers if Trump were to somehow get nominated and elected, which admittedly was a longshot at the time. That is how Russiagate started.

    Brennan is certainly loyal to his cause, whatever that might be. At the same Aspen meeting attended by Pompeo, he told Wolf Blitzer that if Trump were to fire special counsel Robert Mueller government officials should "refuse to carry out" his orders. In other words, they should begin a coup, admittedly non-violent (one presumes), but nevertheless including federal employees uniting to shut the government down.

    A lesser known former CIA senior official is John McLaughlin, who briefly served as acting Director in 2004. McLaughlin was particularly outraged by Trump's recent speech to the Boy Scouts, which he described as having the feel "of a third world authoritarian's youth rally." He added that "It gave me the creeps it was like watching the late Venezuelan [President Hugo] Chavez."

    And finally, there is Michael Morell, also a former Acting Director, who was closely tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently driven by ambition to become Director in her administration. Morell currently provides commentary for CBS television and is a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose show. Morell considerably raised the ante on Brennan's pre-electoral speculation that there had been some Russian recruitment of Trump people. He observed in August that Putin, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them [did exactly that] early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."

    I and others noted at the time that Putin and Trump had never met, not even through proxies, while we also wondered how one could be both unwitting and a recruited agent as intelligence recruitment implies control and taking direction. Morell was non-plussed, unflinching and just a tad sanctimonious in affirming that his own intelligence training (as an analyst who never recruited a spy in his life) meant that "[I] call it as I see it."

    One could also cite Michael Hayden and James Clapper, though the latter was not CIA They all basically hew to the same line about Russia, often in more-or-less the same words, even though no actual evidence has been produced to support their claims. That unanimity of thinking is what is peculiar while academics like Stephen Cohen, Stephen Walt, Andrew Bacevich, and John Mearsheimer, who have studied Russia in some depth and understand the country and its leadership far better than a senior CIA officer, detect considerable nuance in what is taking place. They all believe that the hardline policies current in Washington are based on an eagerness to go with the flow on the comforting inside-the- beltway narrative that paints Russia as a threat to vital interests. That unanimity of viewpoint should surprise no one as this is more of less the same government with many of the same people that led the U.S. into Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. They all have a vested interested in the health and well-being of a fully funded national security state.

    And the other groupthink that seems to prevail among the senior managers except Pompeo is that they all hate Donald Trump and have done so since long before he won the election. That is somewhat odd, but it perhaps reflects a fear that Trump would interfere with the richly rewarding establishment politics that had enabled their careers. But it does not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of CIA employees. Though it is admittedly unscientific analysis on my part, I know a lot of former and some current CIA employees but do not know a single one who voted for Hillary Clinton. Nearly all voted for Trump.

    Beyond that exhibition of tunnel vision and sheer ignorance, the involvement of former senior intelligence officials in politics is itself deplorable and is perhaps symptomatic of the breakdown in the comfortable bipartisan national security consensus that has characterized the past fifty years. Once upon time former CIA officers would retire to the Blue Ridge mountains and raise Labradors, but we are now into something much more dangerous if the intelligence community, which has been responsible for most of the recent leaks, begins to feel free to assert itself from behind the scenes. As Senator Chuck Schumer recently warned "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community -- they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."

    exiled off mainstreet, August 1, 2017 at 5:06 am GMT

    In jumping this fascist nihilist shark, the groupthinkers have closed themselves off from the logical conclusion to their viewpoint, which is final annihilation.

    Dan Hayes, August 1, 2017 at 5:47 am GMT

    Schumer's statement is true (and probably the only such one in his political career!).

    annamaria, August 1, 2017 at 6:03 am GMT

    Brennan, Morell, and Pompeo should better find ways to justify their salaries: the U.S. has suffered the greatest breach in cybersecurity on their watch:

    " an enormous breach of the United States Security Apparatus by as many as 80 Democrat members of Congress (past and present). We rail on about the Russians and Trump, but t he media avoids providing nightly updates about these 5 spies that have compromised Congress ."

    http://investmentwatchblog.com/the-awan-brothers-compromised-at-least-80-congregational-computers-and-got-paid-5-million-to-do-it-we-may-never-know-the-extent-of-the-breach/

    "In total, Imran's firm was employed by 31 Democrats in Congress, some of whom held extremely sensitive positions on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Foreign Affair s."

    polistra, August 1, 2017 at 6:17 am GMT

    Nothing new. In the '50s CIA was making foreign wars and cultivating chaos at home, and blaming all of it on Russia. In the '80s CIA was cultivating anti-nuke groups to undermine Reagan, and blaming it on Russia. CIA has been the primary wellspring of evil for a long time.

    Bruce Marshall, August 1, 2017 at 6:39 am GMT

    And back to reality we have VIPS Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

    Yes you read that right and they are going to the rotten core of this coup against the United States by presenting a report stating that the DNC was "Leaked" not hacked. The real hacking came from President Obama's weaponizing of our intelligence agencies against Russia.

    That is war, World War Three and it would seem now that Congress is marching that way, but the report below hold the key to fighting back.

    http://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2017/2017_30-39/2017-30/pdf/37-41_4430.pdf

    One of the VIPS is William Binney fomer NSA Technical Director, an important expert. leading the group is Ray McGovern with some whit and grace, well yes how about some sanity, to which humor is important to the insight and to stay in the sights of what is clever thievery and worse. Much worse, and there is a twinkle in the eye when realize that it is straight forward.

    And Congress could stop it tout sweet, but well old habits but they have taken an Oath of Office, so, so what, yeah they did go after Bernie, so will you challenge your elected officials, either do their sworn duty or resign, for what this sanctions bill against Russia and Iran is a declaration of war, not only against Russia and Iran, but a declaration of war against the United States. for there is no reason to do this against Russia when indeed there are great opportunities to get along, but war is the insanity as it is sedition and treason. Tell them that,

    https://larouchepac.com/20170731/breaking-lyndon-larouche-crush-british-coup-against-president

    Priss Factor, • Website August 1, 2017 at 7:01 am GMT

    Moderate Rebels = Toothfairy Rebels

    jilles dykstra, August 1, 2017 at 7:21 am GMT

    I wonder if groupthink exists. In any organisation people know quite well why the organisation exists, what the threats are to its existence. If they think about this, I wonder.

    The CIA is the USA's secret army, it is not comparable to a real intelligence organization like the British MI5. The CIA is more like WWII SOE, designed to set fire to Europe, Churchill's words. If indeed Trump changes USA foreign policy, no longer trying to control the world, the CIA is obsolete, as obsolete as NATO.

    animalogic, August 1, 2017 at 7:44 am GMT

    " but President George W. Bush wanted his war and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA had any say in the matter."

    Not to defend the CIA, but didn't Rumsfeld, doubt the enthusiasm of the CIA for providing the slanted, bogus, "sexed up" intelligence the Executive required to make its "destroy Iraq now" case ? So Rumsfeld therefore set up an independent intelligence agency within the Defence Dept to provide/create the required "intelligence" ?

    The Alarmist, August 1, 2017 at 7:45 am GMT

    I think they find anyplace that they can make our lives more difficult, I think they find that something that's useful."

    Yeah, because that's what resource-constrained countries with limited ability to tap the global capital markets do. Methinks Mr. Pompeo is projecting his and the neocons' fantasies on the Russians.

    Realist, August 1, 2017 at 10:14 am GMT

    As has been the case for decades the Deep State allows Presidents and legislators to make minor decisions in our government as long as those decisions do not in any way interfere with the Deep State's goals of total world hegemony and increase in overwhelming power and wealth. Those who make the important decisions in this country are not elected. The elected 'officials' are sycophants of the Deep State.

    CalDre, August 1, 2017 at 10:43 am GMT

    If only Trump would really clean the swamp – particularly the neo-cons and other traitors and globalists. One can dream .

    Wizard of Oz, August 1, 2017 at 11:04 am GMT

    Being resistant to jargon and catch phrases it is only slowly that I have accepted that "Deep State" is not entirely pretentious waffle when used to describe aspects of the US. However I may not be your only reader PG who would appreciate a clear explanatory description of the American Deep State and how it works.

    Here are some suggested parameters.

    The term is appropriated from the use to describe the mutually loyal corps of Ataturkians in the Turkish military and intelligence services who were united in service to uphold the ideal of Ataturkian secular modernisation. The term implies no public accountability or publicity unnecessary to its purposes.
    And its origins imply that it is not just one in a number of major influences ln government or those who vote for it.

    So one has to acknowledge that in the US the Deep State has to be different in the important respect that levers of power are observably wielded by lobbies for the aged, gun owners and sellers, Israel, Wall Street, bio fuels, sugar and other ag, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, the arms industry, Disney and other Hollywood and media, health insurers and the medical profession, and I could go on.

    These are all relevant to legal events like votes on impeachment or to hold up appointments. The CIA and FBI together completely united (and note how disunited 9/11 showed them to be) wouldn't remotely approach the old Turkish Deep State's ability to stage a coup. Are all of the putative elements of the Deep State together today as powerful as J.Edgar Hoover with his dirt files on everyone? (A contrast and compare exercise of today's presumed Deep State configuration and modus operandi with the simpler Hoover days might shine some light on who does what and how today. And how effectively).

    To avoid lack of focus can a convincing account of the US Deep State be best given in terms of a plausible scenario for

    1. getting rid of Trump as President and/or
    2. maintaining the lunacy and hubris which has the US wasting its substance on totally unnecessary antagonistic relations with China and Russia and interference in the ME?

    I would read such accounts with great interest. (Handwavers need not apply).

    Jake, August 1, 2017 at 11:26 am GMT

    Of course the US Deep State must hate Russia. First, Jews have a very long history of hating Russia and Russians. That never changed. The USSR was not Russia; the USSR was Marxism replacing Russia. Jews tended to love that. Rich Jews from across the world, from the US and the UK of most interest to us, sent money to support the Bolshevik Revolution.

    Russia managed to survive the USSR and is slowly coming back around to Russian common sense from the Christian perspective. Neither Jews nor their WASP BFFs can ever forgive that. They want Russia to act now to commit cultural and genetic suicide, like Western Europe and the entire Anglosphere are doing.

    Jake, August 1, 2017 at 11:32 am GMT

    @polistra The CIA's source, its birth, is from British secret service. Brit spying. And Brit secret service, long before the official founding of MI5, did exactly the kinds of things you note the CIA has done.

    The Mossad is another direct fruit of Brit secret service, as is the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency.

    jacques sheete, August 1, 2017 at 11:36 am GMT

    While there can be no doubt about the crackpots in high positions of the most powerful bureaucracies, it seems to me that the CIA loonies are merely shock troops for an even worse bunch of evil psychos, the bankster mafiosi.

    We should always keep that in mind.

    Jake, August 1, 2017 at 11:37 am GMT

    @CalDre If only

    But doing so would mean a voluntary end to playing the role of Sauron, determined to find and wear the One Ring to Rule Them All. The average Elite WASP, and his Jewish BFF, definitely would prefer to destroy the world, at least outside their gated compounds of endless luxury, than to step down from that level of global domination.

    Philip Giraldi, August 1, 2017 at 12:02 pm GMT

    @Wizard of Oz Wiz – Here is an article I did on the Deep State two years ago. It was one of the first in the US media looking at the issue. It would have to be updated now in light of Trump, but much of what it states is still more-or-less correct.

    http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/deep-state-america/

    Jake, August 1, 2017 at 12:09 pm GMT

    @jacques sheete Yes, indeed.

    But we need to make certain that your use of the word 'mafiosi' does not lead anyone to assume that group has more than a handful of Italians. Jews, WASPs, and continental Germanics each will outnumber Italians by at least 30 to 1.

    Chris Bridges, August 1, 2017 at 12:46 pm GMT

    I am a retired CIA operations officer (something none of the men mentioned by Giraldi are – Brennan was a failed wanna be, couldn't cut it as an ops officer). He is spot on in his comments. The majority of people in the CIA, the ones who do the heavy lifting, are patriotic Americans who are proud of serving their country. I am sure that most voted for Trump as they all know too well the truth about the Clintons and Obama.

    Giraldi is not the only one to notice the upward progress of the most incompetent yes-men in the Agency. A close look at most of them reveals a track record of little or no operational success balanced by excellent sucking up skills. These characters quickly figured out how to get ahead and doing your job in the field is not it. Of course, most are ego maniacs so they are totally oblivious to their own uselessness.

    Well before he was elected I had a letter delivered to President Trump in which I outlined in detail what would happen to him if he did not immediately purge the CIA of these assholes. I know that at least some people on his staff read it but, of course, my advice was ignored. Trump has paid dearly for not listening to an ordinary CIA guy who wanted to give him a reality brief on those vicious snakes.

    Proud_Srbin, August 1, 2017 at 1:00 pm GMT

    Historical facts teach humanity that Anglo-Saxon group of Nations was built on slavery, thuggery and theft of other peace loving Civilizations. We Slavs are the New "niggers", hate is the glue that holds you "toGether".
    People of color have been successfully conditioned and practice it as well.
    Time will tell how well it holds when balloon bursts and 99% gets called to serve as cannon fodder.
    Terrorizing UNARMED and WEAKER is not true test of "superiority" and "exceptionalism".
    Tiny, extremely tiny minority of Anglo-Saxons and Satraps understand this.

    Bernie voter, August 1, 2017 at 1:20 pm GMT

    How "Russiagate" began: After the primaries, both Hillary and Donald faced divided political parties even though they had won the nomination. These divisions were worse than the normal situation after contested primaries. On the Democratic side, Hillay had just subverted the will of the voters of her party, who seemed to favor Bernie Sanders over her. Hillay had won with corrupt collusion and rigging amongst the DNC, the higher ranks of the Democratic Party, and major media such as the NYT and CNN.

    Then, a leak of emails from the DNC HQ publicized her interference in the democratic processes of the Democratic Party. This threatened to ene the Hillary for President campaign right then and there. If the majority of Democrats who'd favored Bernie refused to support Hillary because of her corruption and collusion in denying democracy within the party, she was a sure loser in the fall election. The Hillary camp then immediately started blaming Russia for the exposure of her corruption and rigging of the Democratic process. And that's how "Russiagate" began.

    Beauracratic Mind, August 1, 2017 at 1:42 pm GMT

    @jacques sheete

    I wonder if groupthink exists.

    It probably does as do group psychoses and group fantasies.. Anyone who's ever served in a beuaracracy knows that groupthink exists.

    Take a bunch of mediocre minds. And, they do exist, as Garrison Keiler once famously made a joke out of with his line Welcome to Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.

    Take that bunch of mediocre thinkers, and then make most of them obsessed with their own career advancement above all else. The most dangerous place for a career-obsessed individual is outside the group consensus. If everyone is wrong, then there is safety in the group. After all, if they are wrong, so was everyone else in the organization. Thus they are immune to attack and censure for being wrong. But if someone takes a position outside of the group consensus, that can be a career-ending move if they are wrong, as now everyone else will be in the I-told-U-So camp. And even if they are correct, they will still be hated and shunned just for being the person who pointed out to the group that they are wrong.

    So, you take your typical average mind, and not only do they not have any great insights of their own, but they tend to stick to the group out of sheer survival and then when you take a mass of these mediocre minds you have 'groupthink'.

    Eticon, August 1, 2017 at 2:00 pm GMT

    @CalDre

    If only Trump would really clean the swamp - particularly the neo-cons and other traitors and globalists. One can dream ....

    What we've learned from Trump is that 'Draining the Swamp' will take more than an individual. It will take a political movement.

    One sees this on the fringes of politics. Someone gets the idea of running for President, and they point out all that is wrong. But, they focus only on their own campaign, their own goal, and they thus gloss over the fact that they'll be outnumbered and powerless even if they win.

    Seen this often on the Left. The most recent example is Bernie Sanders. Likewise, had Bernie been elected President, he too would face an entrenched establishment and media with only a small fraction of the Congress supporting him.

    Change has to be built from the bottom up. There are no shortcuts. Electing a Trump, or a Nader or a Bernie does not lead to real change. Step one is to build the political movement such that it has real voting block power and which has already won voting majorities in the legislature before the movement achieves the election of a President.

    What Trump has needed to be doing for this first two years is to form clear divisions that he could then take to his voters in the mid-term elections. He's needed to lay out his own agenda. So what if he loses votes in Congress? He then takes that agenda back to the voters in 2018 with a nationwide slate of Congressional candidates who support that agenda and runs a midterm campaign asking the voters to help him drain that swamp.

    So, for instance, Trump should veto the act of war known as the recent sanctions bill. Who cares if it gets overridden? Then he goes back to the voters, who are clearly sick of endless war and who for obvious reasons don't want a nuclear war, and he says this is where I stand. Support me by electing Fill-In-The-Blank to Congress. With the nuclear Doomsday Clock pushing ever closer to midnight, he might just win that fight over the big money and media opposition he's sure to face.

    Not only has Trump failed to even try to fight the Deep State, but he's also failing to set himself up for success in the next elections.

    ChuckOrloski, August 1, 2017 at 2:19 pm GMT

    @Jake Hey Jake,

    It is a serious error to consider President Trump "naive."

    What we are seeing now is The Donald's role in the serial Zionist THEATER. Think deeper about the motive behind Mr. Giraldi's choice to use the Orwellian word "Groupthink" in characterizing the CIA zeitgeist? In the classic work "1984," one observes Big Brother as the catalyst in control of the proles' thought pattern & subsequent action.

    To rise & FALL as a POTUS is a matter of theater and the American proles are entertained by the political for either 4 or 8 years and the Zionists get their next Chosen actor/actress dramatically sworn in on a bible.

    Mr. Trump is neither naive nor stupid. Sheldon Adelson would not donate $millioms to any POTUS wannabe who could not effectively lead the American Groupthink tradition. Subsequently, the political horror show is brought to you in the understandable form of the perpetually elusive Deep State which gets annual Academy Award.

    Beware the fake, Jake!,

    [Apr 23, 2019] CIA, the counerstone of the deep state, might have agenda that is radically different from the US national interest and reflect agenda of the special interest groups

    CIA is actually a state within the state as Church commission revealed and it has an immanent tendency to seek control over "surface state" and media. In other words large intelligence apparatus might well be incompatible with the democratic governance.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The CIA has a track record of acting out of self interest since its inception and should not be believed. That being said, the public is almost completely unaware of the agency's misdeeds. ..."
    May 23, 2017 | nakedcapitalism.com

    "In the long run, the CIA can't deceive the Chinese government without also deceiving, in some way, the American public. This leaves us with an obvious problem: Should we believe anything the CIA says?" [RealClearWorld]. "It's a tough question for a democracy to answer. Trust is built on the tacit agreement that the "bad things" an agency does are good for the country.

    If the public believes that that is no longer the case – if it believes the agency is acting out of self-interest and not national interest – then the agreement is broken. The intelligence agency is seen as an impediment of the right to national self-determination, a means for the ends of the few."

    Huey Long <

    RE: Hall of Mirrors/Believing the CIA

    The CIA has a track record of acting out of self interest since its inception and should not be believed. That being said, the public is almost completely unaware of the agency's misdeeds.

    I think the reason folks like Manning, Snowden and Assange are so reviled by the agency is because they are a threat to the CIA's reputation more than anything else.

    [Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

    Highly recommended!
    "Carnage needs to destroyed" mentality is dominant among the USA neoliberal elite and drives the policy toward Russia.
    They all supported neoconservative extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda directed on weakening Russian and establishing of world dominance. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
    Notable quotes:
    "... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
    "... This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya. ..."
    "... And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. ..."
    "... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
    "... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
    "... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
    "... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
    "... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
    "... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
    "... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
    "... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
    "... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
    "... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
    "... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
    "... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
    "... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
    "... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
    "... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
    "... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
    "... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
    "... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
    Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

    In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

    There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

    This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

    And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

    Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

    The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

    In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

    Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

    (See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

    Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

    The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

    Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

    What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

    All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

    (On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

    In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

    Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

    These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

    What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

    Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

    Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

    So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

    All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

    There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

    It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

    It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

    Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

    In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

    Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

    That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

    'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

    (For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

    What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

    For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

    What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

    In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

    According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

    As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

    In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

    A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

    Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

    Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink

    james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

    thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

    it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

    JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
    David,

    Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

    turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
    james

    It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

    Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
    I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
    The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
    catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
    That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

    Re: Levinson

    # Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

    # Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

    # And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

    I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

    Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
    DH,

    As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

    I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

    Be safe.

    Ishmael Zechariah

    Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
    Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

    The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
    ..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

    kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
    IZ
    My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
    kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
    "There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

    David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

    different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
    Ishmael Zechariah,

    ( reply to comment 6),

    I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

    It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

    And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

    So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

    Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
    David,

    Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

    In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

    Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

    Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

    SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
    So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

    Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

    Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
    They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
    kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
    You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
    catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
    ''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

    The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

    '1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

    In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

    'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

    State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

    aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
    David,

    About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

    Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
    Babak,

    "they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

    Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
    David,

    "There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

    Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

    Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
    "They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
    -- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
    turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
    Anna

    The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

    Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
    England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
    jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
    "unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
    Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
    Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
    Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
    Sir

    It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

    David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
    catherine,

    In response to comment 5.

    I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

    It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

    An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

    'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

    (See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

    Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

    Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

    'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

    (See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

    So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

    For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

    '"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [£1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

    'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

    (For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

    Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

    'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

    (For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

    When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

    (For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

    She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

    Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

    What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

    'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

    'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

    'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

    Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

    It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

    An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

    This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

    Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

    There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

    A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

    Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

    The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

    Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
    "They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

    No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

    SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
    - If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

    My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

    Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

    Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

    james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
    there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
    Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
    I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
    begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
    I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
    kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
    IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

    The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

    spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
    Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
    English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
    Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

    https://twitter.com/pat_lang

    - gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

    If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

    "Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

    The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

    In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

    jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
    Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
    Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

    So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

    Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
    All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
    Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
    Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

    The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

    Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

    Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
    Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
    begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
    jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
    FM
    What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
    Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
    Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
    Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
    The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
    "In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
    Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
    Colonel,

    This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

    Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
    Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

    And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

    Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

    Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

    Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

    Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
    http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

    blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
    Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

    "Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

    I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

    What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
    FM

    We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

    Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

    Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
    Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
    blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
    ...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

    Aye. Aye. Sir!

    +1

    That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

    Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
    I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
    English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
    Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

    David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

    The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

    The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

    So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

    I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

    kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
    Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
    EO

    Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

    English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
    Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

    Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

    English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
    Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

    I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

    So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

    Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

    But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

    David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
    Sid Finster,

    In response to comment 53.

    When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

    A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

    When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

    His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

    So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

    The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

    (This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

    The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

    'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

    Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

    '12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

    The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

    'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

    In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

    As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

    In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

    Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

    'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

    From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

    'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

    From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

    'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

    In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

    However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

    Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

    (I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

    And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

    Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

    The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

    Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
    Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
    Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
    David

    You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

    Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
    I know something of spectroscopy. The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation. The paragraph that you have quoted:

    "To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

    And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

    LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
    David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

    I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

    Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

    By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

    According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
    http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

    **********

    JAN RICHARD BÆRUG
    The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism. A Comparative Study of Newspapers and Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

    Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

    Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
    I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

    They clearly are not native speakers of German.

    LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
    why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

    Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

    Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those? The German link is different. How about the Iranian? or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

    LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
    correcting myself #94:

    another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

    I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

    [Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state -- Ukraine. ..."
    "... But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad ..."
    Jul 24, 2018 | angrybearblog.com

    likbez , July 24, 2018 12:23 am

    @run75441 July 23, 2018 2:02 pm

    Best bet is for Russia to want to trade with the US and Europe. The gas pipeline will not be enough leverage on Germany as it provides 9% of their needs.

    Yes. And that's against the USA interests (or more correctly the US-led neoliberal empire interests). North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state -- Ukraine.

    As you know, nothing was proven yet in Russiagate (and DNC hacks looks more and more like a false flag operation, especially this Guccifer 2.0 personality ), but sanctions were already imposed. And when the US government speaks "Russia" in most cases they mean "China+Russia" ;-). Russia is just a weaker link in this alliance and, as such, it is attacked first. Russiagate is just yet another pretext after MH17, Magnitsky and such.

    To me the current Anti-Russian hysteria is mainly a smokescreen to hide attempt to cement cracks in the façade of the USA neoliberal society that Trump election revealed (including apparent legitimization of ruling neoliberal elite represented by Hillary).

    And a desperate attempt to unite the society using (false) war propaganda which requires demonization of the "enemy of the people" and neo-McCarthyism.

    But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad (for example, military alliance means the end of the USA global military domination; energy alliance means that is now impossible to impose a blockade on China energy supplies from Middle East even if Iran is occupied)

    In this sense the recent descent into a prolonged fit of vintage Cold War jingoistic paranoia is quite understandable. While, at the same time, totally abhorrent. My feeling is that unless Russia folds, which is unlikely, the side effects/externalities of this posture can be very bad for the USA. In any case, the alliance of Russia and China which Obama administration policies forged spells troubles to the global neoliberal empire dominated by the USA.

    Trump rejection of existing forms of neoliberal globalization is one sign that this process already started and some politicians already are trying to catch the wind and adapt to a "new brave world" by using preemptive adjustments.

    Which is why all this Trump-Putin summit hysteria is about.

    Neither hard, nor soft neoliberals want any adjustments. They are ready to fight for the US-led neoliberal empire till the last American (excluding, of course, themselves and their families)

    [Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

    Highly recommended!
    "Carnage needs to destroyed" mentality is dominant among the USA neoliberal elite and drives the policy toward Russia.
    They all supported neoconservative extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda directed on weakening Russian and establishing of world dominance. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
    Notable quotes:
    "... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
    "... This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya. ..."
    "... And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. ..."
    "... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
    "... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
    "... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
    "... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
    "... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
    "... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
    "... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
    "... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
    "... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
    "... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
    "... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
    "... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
    "... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
    "... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
    "... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
    "... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
    "... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
    "... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
    Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

    In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

    There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

    This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

    And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

    Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

    The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

    In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

    Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

    (See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

    Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

    The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

    Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

    What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

    All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

    (On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

    In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

    Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

    These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

    What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

    Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

    Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

    So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

    All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

    There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

    It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

    It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

    Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

    In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

    Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

    That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

    'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

    (For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

    What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

    For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

    What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

    In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

    According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

    As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

    In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

    A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

    Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

    Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink

    james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

    thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

    it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

    JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
    David,

    Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

    turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
    james

    It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

    Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
    I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
    The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
    catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
    That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

    Re: Levinson

    # Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

    # Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

    # And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

    I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

    Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
    DH,

    As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

    I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

    Be safe.

    Ishmael Zechariah

    Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
    Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

    The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
    ..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

    kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
    IZ
    My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
    kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
    "There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

    David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

    different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
    Ishmael Zechariah,

    ( reply to comment 6),

    I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

    It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

    And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

    So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

    Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
    David,

    Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

    In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

    Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

    Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

    SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
    So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

    Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

    Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
    They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
    kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
    You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
    catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
    ''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

    The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

    '1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

    In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

    'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

    State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

    aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
    David,

    About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

    Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
    Babak,

    "they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

    Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
    David,

    "There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

    Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

    Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
    "They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
    -- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
    turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
    Anna

    The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

    Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
    England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
    jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
    "unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
    Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
    Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
    Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
    Sir

    It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

    David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
    catherine,

    In response to comment 5.

    I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

    It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

    An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

    'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

    (See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

    Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

    Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

    'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

    (See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

    So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

    For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

    '"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [£1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

    'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

    (For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

    Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

    'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

    (For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

    When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

    (For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

    She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

    Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

    What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

    'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

    'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

    'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

    Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

    It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

    An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

    This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

    Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

    There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

    A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

    Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

    The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

    Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
    "They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

    No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

    SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
    - If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

    My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

    Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

    Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

    james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
    there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
    Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
    I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
    begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
    I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
    kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
    IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

    The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

    spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
    Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
    English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
    Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

    https://twitter.com/pat_lang

    - gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

    If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

    "Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

    The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

    In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

    jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
    Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
    Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

    So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

    Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
    All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
    Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
    Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

    The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

    Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

    Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
    Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
    begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
    jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
    FM
    What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
    Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
    Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
    Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
    The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
    "In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
    Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
    Colonel,

    This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

    Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
    Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

    And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

    Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

    Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

    Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

    Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
    http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

    blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
    Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

    "Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

    I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

    What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
    FM

    We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

    Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

    Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
    Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
    blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
    ...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

    Aye. Aye. Sir!

    +1

    That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

    Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
    I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
    English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
    Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

    David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

    The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

    The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

    So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

    I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

    kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
    Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
    EO

    Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

    English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
    Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

    Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

    English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
    Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

    I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

    So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

    Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

    But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

    David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
    Sid Finster,

    In response to comment 53.

    When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

    A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

    When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

    His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

    So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

    The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

    (This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

    The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

    'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

    Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

    '12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

    The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

    'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

    In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

    As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

    In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

    Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

    'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

    From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

    'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

    From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

    'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

    In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

    However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

    Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

    (I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

    And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

    Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

    The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

    Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
    Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
    Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
    David

    You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

    Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
    I know something of spectroscopy. The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation. The paragraph that you have quoted:

    "To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

    And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

    LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
    David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

    I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

    Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

    By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

    According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
    http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

    **********

    JAN RICHARD BÆRUG
    The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism. A Comparative Study of Newspapers and Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

    Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

    Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
    I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

    They clearly are not native speakers of German.

    LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
    why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

    Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

    Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those? The German link is different. How about the Iranian? or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

    LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
    correcting myself #94:

    another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

    I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

    [Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state -- Ukraine. ..."
    "... But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad ..."
    Jul 24, 2018 | angrybearblog.com

    likbez , July 24, 2018 12:23 am

    @run75441 July 23, 2018 2:02 pm

    Best bet is for Russia to want to trade with the US and Europe. The gas pipeline will not be enough leverage on Germany as it provides 9% of their needs.

    Yes. And that's against the USA interests (or more correctly the US-led neoliberal empire interests). North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state -- Ukraine.

    As you know, nothing was proven yet in Russiagate (and DNC hacks looks more and more like a false flag operation, especially this Guccifer 2.0 personality ), but sanctions were already imposed. And when the US government speaks "Russia" in most cases they mean "China+Russia" ;-). Russia is just a weaker link in this alliance and, as such, it is attacked first. Russiagate is just yet another pretext after MH17, Magnitsky and such.

    To me the current Anti-Russian hysteria is mainly a smokescreen to hide attempt to cement cracks in the façade of the USA neoliberal society that Trump election revealed (including apparent legitimization of ruling neoliberal elite represented by Hillary).

    And a desperate attempt to unite the society using (false) war propaganda which requires demonization of the "enemy of the people" and neo-McCarthyism.

    But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad (for example, military alliance means the end of the USA global military domination; energy alliance means that is now impossible to impose a blockade on China energy supplies from Middle East even if Iran is occupied)

    In this sense the recent descent into a prolonged fit of vintage Cold War jingoistic paranoia is quite understandable. While, at the same time, totally abhorrent. My feeling is that unless Russia folds, which is unlikely, the side effects/externalities of this posture can be very bad for the USA. In any case, the alliance of Russia and China which Obama administration policies forged spells troubles to the global neoliberal empire dominated by the USA.

    Trump rejection of existing forms of neoliberal globalization is one sign that this process already started and some politicians already are trying to catch the wind and adapt to a "new brave world" by using preemptive adjustments.

    Which is why all this Trump-Putin summit hysteria is about.

    Neither hard, nor soft neoliberals want any adjustments. They are ready to fight for the US-led neoliberal empire till the last American (excluding, of course, themselves and their families)

    [Apr 22, 2019] John Helmer The Julian Assange Case Now Puts the US on Trial in a British Court Is There a Get-Out-of-Jail Card for Assange

    Apr 22, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

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    In War the First Victim is the Truth , April 22, 2019 at 3:45 am

    Since the US war machine agencies sees Assange as their enemy, this is a case that should be understood in the context of the three-letter agencies machinations, e.g. Six-Eyes. In relation to these, UK is just a puppet and a poodle. UK has always been the first to jump on the bombing wagon when US so has ordered them.

    The cases about Russian fraudsters are not good cases, since the UK-Russian relations have been strained to say the least. Not extraditing the Russian fraudsters is just to slap Russian authorities in the face, not a proof of independence.

    Moreover, her husband James Arbuthnot served as Chairman of the Defence Select Committee (oversees the operations of the Ministry of Defence and its associated public bodies, including the armed forces) from 2005 to 2014

    Oh , April 22, 2019 at 11:07 am

    I too, am not convinced that Judge Arbuthnot will rule in favor of Assange. The anti Russian posture of the UK along with the Puppy Dog mentality will probably result in his being extradited. The fact that the Ecuador government was swayed by a large loan is already a sign of the Empire's reach.

    Doggrotter , April 22, 2019 at 4:09 am

    Thanks for that. Shedding some light where there is precious little

    Laws for Me and Laws for You , April 22, 2019 at 4:36 am

    Also, after having had to learn new-speak about just about everything at least since the Saddam and WMD I think the cued message "no one is above the law" gives it all away: Assange will get absolutely zero protection by the law.

    Pavel , April 22, 2019 at 6:46 am

    And giving us some hope where there is precious little thank you.

    Let's pray that Julian is at least getting some much-needed medical care whilst in the UK prison but who knows how they are treating him?

    Clive , April 22, 2019 at 6:56 am

    Not especially well, most likely. Not only is prisoners' mental health poorly monitored, there isn't even serious measures in place to start monitoring it.

    The only saving grace is as a cause célèbre, he will get the best legal representation possible.

    Winston Smith , April 22, 2019 at 7:31 am

    I suppose the swedish case is of no importance in realtion to US wishess then?

    Harrold , April 22, 2019 at 10:42 am

    I believe that the women who were involved with Julian have tried to end the case several times.

    Empire of Pain , April 22, 2019 at 12:14 pm

    Sweden is a far cry from safe haven. They have extradited people before on the demand from US, straight to the torture chambers

    https://www.hrw.org/news/2006/11/09/sweden-violated-torture-ban-cia-rendition

    The Rev Kev , April 22, 2019 at 9:28 am

    I can imagine the any good defense counsel will turn the court into a Roman holiday by putting both the Swedish and US legal systems under scrutiny. The Swedes were screwing with their own laws to get Assange and refused year after year to interview Assange so they may have to justify their conduct here. The Swedish Ministry of Justice may find it very awkward answering for their conduct for all those years on the stand under oath.
    With the US it may get more intense as the defense may argue against sending Assange to the US as it is a torture state. Remember, a torturer has been made head of the CIA. They may also bring up the treatment of Chelsea Manning and Maria Butina. The United Nations defines as torture putting people into solitary for more than 15 days and both those people have spent a considerable more length of time than that. Add in other facts and that court room may get rather heated.
    Even if Assange gets off, where can he go? If he tried to fly out of the UK the US would send fighters up to force it to land at a US base. They did that with the Bolivian president's plane because they thought that Snowden may have been aboard. And don't forget that extraordinary rendition is still a thing. I am not even sure that a Sander's presidency would make any difference here. I doubt that Justice Arbuthnot is the sort of person to order Assange taken from Court and sent to the nearest airport for a flight to the US so I expect this to be drawn out over years.

    Heliopause , April 22, 2019 at 2:14 pm

    Assange would certainly be a target for more extreme elements in the US deep state (smarter ones would realize, moral considerations aside, that killing or rendering him would be bad PR). So I've been thinking for a while that if he were to be set free there wouldn't be a truly safe place for him anywhere on the planet. I doubt that Russia or China want anything to do with him, and even if they took him he'd be subject to the whims of the government (as with Ecuador). I was thinking maybe Kim Dotcom's estate in New Zealand (assuming that Dotcom himself isn't extradited to the US), where he'd be with a like-minded benefactor and under heavy security, but that too would be subject to the whims of the government.

    Matthew G. Saroff , April 22, 2019 at 9:28 am

    How will the case change if Brexit is completed, which might mean that the European human rights convention being rendered moot?

    Clive , April 22, 2019 at 11:25 am

    The European Convention on Human Rights , to which I think you are referring, is not an EU treaty.

    But it is, like so much else, bound up in matters Brexit and the most rabidly anti-Europe rabble rousers want to leave that, too.

    The U.K. can't leave the Convention while it is an EU member State. But if/when it isn't, it can. That's a separate process, however.

    juliania , April 22, 2019 at 10:33 am

    Thanks for this. The attention being paid to this case is well warranted, since it has to do with historical matters from the conduct of the Iraq war onward. The British courts have the opportunity to address issues that have lain festering with respect to freedom of the press in a manner which has potentially the power of accountability few such occasions have proven themselves able to accomplish heretofore. World attention will be focused, not merely on the person of Julian Assange, but on the activities of governments in the present era.

    We should all rise above our immediate concerns and pay attention. The world and our younger generations especially are watching. This is for them.

    Listner2 , April 22, 2019 at 11:23 am

    The issues here, my perspective, are "Wikileaks is a terrorist organization" (U.S. Attorneys demanding extradition) Wikileaks, "I love Wikileaks" (Donald Trump, supposed leader of the U.S.on film no less) The message is this; You can distribute damaging information about the U.S. government under the guise of a journalist. You may NOT steal that information either through electronic means or any other method. After careful thought, I think we should steal the Mueller report, distribute the good parts, then head to Ecuador and do some haggling about a spot in the embassy, no ? That's a joke friends. We really DO need humor now !

    Susan the other` , April 22, 2019 at 3:28 pm

    for the US Gov to maintain a legal position in this day and age of zero privacy for you and twist it around so that it is illegal to "steal" information is too rich for my blood. The US Gov has all the info it ever wanted on everyone and everything. Yet somehow it is illegal to have reciprocal information. So that's one big bad. Another is the very concept of illegal. Illegal is only illegal if it is caught in most cases. In government affairs however, it should not be so. The government is answerable to us and we need to go back to square one and establish that fact. Julian Assange was in the process of doing that in his own way, as are most journalists, but he hit a very raw nerve and now they are going to make him pay for it. It is a travesty of both justice and "government".

    Susan the other` , April 22, 2019 at 3:42 pm

    And there are all the usual sneaky sleaze balls lined up to get Assange. From the infuriated democrats to the terrified republicans. Look at the mix. Brett Kavanaugh, Wm. Barr, to Nancy Pelosi; John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, – there isn't one familiar face standing up for Assange. Even Bernie doesn't go overboard. The stakes are so high that we are now in a nasty trade war with the EU to see who can rat out the other faster. And it is a good cover for Nancy Pelosi to act like she is defending our "sacred institutions" (please spare me Nancy) and go to London and give a speech that the UK "cannot count on a trade deal with the US" when it goes full Brexit. She's acting like she's a friend of Ireland. But this is the first I ever heard of it. I think what Nancy is saying is that if the UK doesn't toe the line with Assange the US won't do a trade deal at all. I've never seen Nancy expose her inner Nancy so emphatically. And recently Bolton told the ICC to just fuck straight off – they would never have jurisdiction over our leaders (primarily it is the Bushes is who we are talking about here). It's a showdown. Chickens coming home in a big clucking rush.

    dearieme , April 22, 2019 at 11:38 am

    If I were Arbuthnot I think I might decree "This bloody man has already been locked up for seven years. He should now go free. Meantime I urge Her Majesty's Government to attempt to obtain financial redress from the Swedish government for the cost of this nonsense."

    Big Tap , April 22, 2019 at 1:36 pm

    Australia should ask the U.K. for extradition of Assange. Probably not going to happen.

    Heliopause , April 22, 2019 at 2:17 pm

    If Assange is extradited the game might not be up even then. I assume he still has cards to play in terms of making a deal, as with the Vault 7 releases.

    [Apr 22, 2019] On Contact: Russiagate Mueller Report with Aaron Mate

    That's a great interview that summarizes Russiagate in a very assessable way. This is exactly repetition of Iraq WDM and subsequent cover up. The consequence is a new higher level of discreditation of neoliberal MSM, at least by Trump supporters They will just ignore those bottomfeeders like Clapper and Brennan.
    Endemic of Russophobia is the biggest net result of Russiagate. This is also a big election gift to Trump.
    The Deep State did not view Trump as a reliable steward of neoliberal empire and that's why Russiagate was unleashed. And Trump is an embarrassment to the empire, no questions about it.
    MadCow spend two year rabidly promoting Russiagate nonsense and she still has her job. That's suggest whom she serves. In other cased she would be discarded like used condom.
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Chris Hedges discusses with Nation reporter Aaron Mate how despite the categorical statement in Robert Mueller's report that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia, the conspiracy theories by the nation's mainstream media show little sign of diminishing.

    Find RT America in your area: http://rt.com/where-to-watch/
    Or watch us online: http://rt.com/on-air/rt-america-air/

    Like us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/RTAmerica
    Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/RT_America Category News & Politics

    Amy Marie , 1 day ago

    Keep up the awesome work Aaron on RT

    S Douglas , 1 day ago

    It's great to see some non-propagandist journalism.

    Tertiary Adjunct , 1 day ago (edited)

    RT, give Aaron a show.

    Dan Harris , 1 day ago

    Aaron Mate is the absolute perfect foil to Jimmy when he is on the Jimmy Dore show. It is hilarious.

    NPC Junk Ogre, TYT Head NPC , 1 day ago

    We're all still waiting for MSDNC to bring on Aaron, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Michael Tracey and others on any of their programs. MSDNC has not had on one single lefty who got this fraudulent and disgraceful Stalinesque political investigation right from day one since December of 2016. Not one.

    MrB1923 , 1 day ago

    THIS is journalism. EVERYTHING else is propaganda.

    Eric Disegno , 1 day ago (edited)

    Two of the greatest journalists in Real News! Thank You RT!!!

    J.L. Goodman , 1 day ago

    I've got to admit, I get a massive dopamine rush hearing these two sane, intelligent,critical thinkers, skillfully dissect this convoluted quadrafuck that has wasted some much of our precious time. I literally feel washed clean for a moment.

    Scott Turner , 1 day ago (edited)

    Thanks for this. Aaron Maté and Chris Hedges keep many people somewhat sane in an insane media world. Depressed, but at least somewhat sane. lol

    Mike2020able , 1 day ago

    Chomsky : ' Israel ,not Russia, interferes With US Election '

    [Apr 22, 2019] Are US neocons "the possessed" ?

    Apr 22, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    karlof1 , Apr 21, 2019 7:26:35 PM | link

    For Easter Sunday, Strategic-Culture refers us to Dostoyevsky's The Possessed thanks to Martin Sieff's "The Beast Behind the Mask: The US Fanatical Passion to Destroy Venezuela" . Two of his milder paragraphs help describe how the world views Outlaw US Empire actions and explain why most nations are "no longer with us":

    "Yet so desperate are America's neo-liberals, as well as neo-conservatives to topple democratically twice –elected President Maduro that they are pulling off their bright smiling wholesome masks that are the public face of globalization to reveal the snarling, cowardly, crazed little creeps behind them.

    "We saw this phenomenon last week when Fareed Zakaria, the Golden Pin-Up Boy of global liberalism, used his two supposedly most influential platforms – his talk show on CNN and op-ed page access in The Washington Post to call for the immediate toppling of Maduro and then for a full superpower confrontation with Russia as well."

    The article is actually quite fitting for Easter--Global death of the fealty to the Outlaw US Empire while those nations seek resurrection and far better prospects with BRI/EAEU. National leaders unwilling to see the Devilish/Satanic nature of the Outlaw US Empire that's so evident for all to see must think hard on what they're partnering with. If they continue their partnership, then their citizenry will do the proper thing and exorcize such leaders from their body politic. Globally, there's only one entity that's similar in nature to the Outlaw US Empire--Zionistan--two equally, evilly possessed threats to humanity.

    [Apr 22, 2019] Congress members and top talking heads as foot soldiers of neo-McCarthyism campaign unleashed by intelligence agencies

    Apr 22, 2019 | theduran.com

    Originally from: Russian collusion was no more than "conspiracy porn" created by Clinton and Obama

    But, for the past three years, elite Democratic Party partisans, along with their media partners, force-fed thousands of "Bombshell" headlines to millions of Americans, without ever providing a lick of evidence. The absence of evidence supporting their outrageous lies coupled with the results of Mueller's investigation and Barr's conclusions establishes collusion – not between Russia and the Trump family to influence the 2016 presidential election, but amongst the Democrats and mass media to delegitimize the
    Trump presidency.

    The Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, "We saw cold, hard evidence of the Trump campaign, and indeed the Trump family, eagerly intending to collude with Russia." Pelosi has never presented any evidence to support this claim or any of the many other suspect claims the speaker has made.

    The Chairman of House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff said, "I have evidence of collusion with Russia and kompromat. It's all in plain sight." Schiff regularly repeated this claim to the public yet never provided any evidence. He appeared on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and ABC over 150 times and was never called out for repeating these lies over and over again.

    Congressman Eric Swalwell on MSNBC said, "Donald Trump is a Russian agent; we have evidence Trump and his family colluded with Russia." Swalwell has parroted this and many other claims since 2016. Evidence provided: none.

    Congresswoman Maxine Waters stated, "Trump and his buddies are scumbags who are all Putin's puppets; we will Impeach 45." Waters has been shrieking "Impeach 45" since election day in 2016. Water's reason: she hates Trump and the entire Grand Old Party "GOP."

    Many other Democratic members of Washington DC's swamp echoed similar propaganda that mobilized the Trump "resistance." Their hit list of frequent salacious claims included "Trump in handcuffs;" "The entire Trump family, frog-marched, and jailed forever;" "Treason, much worse than Watergate, we have evidence;" "Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987;" "Trump is a racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, white-national, white-supremacist;"
    and let's not forget "He's the next Hitler." This "hit list" has become the Democratic party mantra since Donald trump announced his candidacy in 2015.

    Ex-Central Intelligence Agency "CIA" director John Brennan, who just so happens to be on MSNBC's payroll, also weighed in on Trump. "Trump's behavior is treasonous. He committed high crimes and misdemeanors. There is evidence that proves many people in Trump's orbit are guilty of serious crimes and indictments are coming, and soon. Trump committed Treason" The penalty for committing "treason" in America, death. Brennan never provided any evidence. Brennan's lies have destroyed the CIA's reputation and credibility.

    Viewers of CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and ABC were inundated with purposeful misrepresentations that continuously promised faithful audiences that Mueller and his team had "mountains" of evidence of Trump's collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. Day after day, these media outlets repeated how Mueller would deliver an indictment of President Trump, who had committed "treason and high crimes and misdemeanors" that would lead to his impeachment and jail time. The corrupt media represented that Trump's family members, who were also guilty of similar crimes, would be sent to prison. All the above were outrageous lies.

    In fact, the only convictions that arose through the Mueller investigation were low-level process crimes which had NOTHING to do with Trump. $25 million wasted, bravo! These salacious accusations proved to be part of an elaborate scheme to delegitimize the sitting president and his administration in order to remove him from office. However, the Democrats and mass media could not have done it without FBI Director James Comey's exploitation of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
    We know the whole coup d'état was facilitated by FBI Director James Comey's October 20, 2016 submission of a 66-page application to the FISA court.

    Comey and Sally Quillian Yates, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, signed this application. Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, the presiding judge of the secret FISA court, granted an order that led to our intelligence agencies spying on the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. The FBI ran a counter-intelligence investigation named "Crossfire Hurricane" on Trump's campaign.

    Comey's FISA application was largely based on information contained in the Steele dossier, a dossier written by a disgraced MI6 agent named Christopher Steele. The dossier made wild, unsubstantiated claims and was financed by the campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee via Clinton's law firm Perkins Coie through a company named Fusion GPS.

    In a meeting with President Trump in early January 2017, James Comey told President Trump about the existence of the Steele dossier and told him not to worry about it. Comey stated that the dossier's contents were salacious, unverified, and untrue. Apparently, James Comey knew, yet never disclosed to Judge Collyer, that the Steele dossier was garbage prepared by political partisans that did not want Trump to be
    elected and financed by Hillary Clinton's campaign. Three days after Comey's meeting with Trump the entire Steele dossier was "leaked" to numerous media sources and published in it's entirety on Buzzfeed with no mention that none of the claims in the Steele dossier had been verified.

    Comey signed and submitted two more FISA applications, one in Jan 2017, and another in April 2017 which relied upon the Steele dossier. FISA Judge Michael W. Mosman signed the January renewal, and Judge Anne C. Conway signed the April renewal.

    Apparently, Comey never disclosed, to any of the FISA judges, that the Steele dossier was: paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, and the DNC, or that the Department of Justice's Bruce Ohr had warned on the credibility of the unverified Steele Dossier, or that Bruce Ohr's wife worked for Fusion GPS and helped back door the Steele dossier into the FBI, or that the dossier was filled with baseless allegations, lies, and
    propaganda. It appears that four secret court, FISA, judges were lied to in order to kick- off the biggest scandal in history.

    FBI's Deputy Director Andrew McCabe recently stated during Congressional testimony that "without the Steele dossier, the FISA warrants would have never been granted." Recent reports suggest that it was ex-CIA director John Brennan who insisted that the Steele dossier be included in the intelligence report used to request the FISA warrants. Senator Rand Paul has issued a call that Brennan be called to testify under oath in Congress.

    The entire Mueller investigation would have never been possible without this fake dossier being used to illegally obtain FISA warrants by the omission of material facts within the original FISA application and the three subsequent renewal applications.

    Why is Judge Collyer not looking into these and other material misrepresentations used in the FISA application to obtain search warrants to spy on Americans and on a presidential campaign by its opposition and enabled by a weaponized Obama Department of Justice? The silence of secret FISA court Judges Mosman, Conway, and Dearie is frightening. America's secret courts should be abolished.

    [Apr 22, 2019] Brzezinski s Warning to America by Mike Whitney

    Notable quotes:
    "... What most people don't realize about Brzezinski, is that he dramatically changed his views on global hegemony a few years after he published his 1997 masterpiece The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative. In his 2012 book, Strategic Vision, Brzezinski recommended a more thoughtful and cooperative approach that would ease America's unavoidable transition (decline?) without creating a power vacuum that could lead to global chaos. ..."
    "... Haass's critique illustrates the level of denial among elites who are now gripped by fear of an uncertain future. ..."
    "... Confrontation will only accelerate the pace of US decline and the final collapse of the liberal world order. ..."
    "... "The liberal world order, which lasted from the end of World War 2 until today" Thanks for the laugh. It was over with the passing of the 1947 National Security Act. ..."
    "... It is not a coincidence that this anti-Russian climate of hatred started back when Putin showed up the left's president, Barack Obama, over Libya. ..."
    "... political globalists who wanted a liberal world order but didn't think about the economic side of things much and so let their economic policy be decided by the central banking mafia ..."
    "... You should think more about US being aced. Syria was a masterstroke, but so was Ukraine, and not for Russia. Russia lost an extremely valuable ally and a trully brother nation, maybe forever. Ukraine, in the grand scheme of things, is a huge defeat for Russia. ..."
    "... You definitely missed last 25 years of Russian-Ukrainian relations. You also, evidently, have very vague understanding of the Ukrainian inner dynamics. I am not sure we can speak of "brother nation" because Ukraine as political nation (and she did form as such by early 2000s) can not be "brother nation" to Russia by definition. In fact, being anti-Russia is the only natural state of Ukrainian political nation ..."
    "... As it turned out, Russia is doing just fine without Ukraine. In a long run, if what is called Ukraine today decides to commit suicide by the cop, she sure can try to place US military bases East of Dniepr and we will observe a rather peculiar case of fireworks. ..."
    "... It would have been a total catastrophe for Russia had she lost Sebastopol; but so long as Crimea is safely in Moscow's hands, Ukraine is not make-or-break. Russia's global position now, in fact, is even stronger than it was in 2014. ..."
    "... Western corporations have been competing with each other (for decades now) to offshore everything to reduce costs /increase profits. The idea is to sell at Western prices and produce at Eastern prices, and this arbitrage has reached crazy proportions. ..."
    "... Jews also hate nationalism since it threatens their (minority) power and highlights dual loyalty (or no loyalty) so the Zio-Glob are on one side, and the public on the other, with little common ground between them. ..."
    "... At least Brzezinski became well aware of this shift. So many of America's neo-conservatives have largely failed in expressing this defeat. Between Brzezinski and Boot, & the Others, they've all turned out to be fanatic ideologues. ..."
    Apr 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

    The liberal world order, which lasted from the end of World War 2 until today, is rapidly collapsing. The center of gravity is shifting from west to east where China and India are experiencing explosive growth and where a revitalized Russia has restored its former stature as a credible global superpower. These developments, coupled with America's imperial overreach and chronic economic stagnation, have severely hampered US ability to shape events or to successfully pursue its own strategic objectives. As Washington's grip on global affairs continues to loosen and more countries reject the western development model, the current order will progressively weaken clearing the way for a multipolar world badly in need of a new security architecture. Western elites, who are unable to accept this new dynamic, continue to issue frenzied statements expressing their fear of a future in which the United States no longer dictates global policy.

    At the 2019 Munich Security Conference, Chairman Wolfgang Ischinger, underscored many of these same themes. Here's an excerpt from his presentation:

    "The whole liberal world order appears to be falling apart – nothing is as it once was Not only do war and violence play a more prominent role again: a new great power confrontation looms at the horizon. In contrast to the early 1990s, liberal democracy and the principle of open markets are no longer uncontested .

    In this international environment, the risk of an inter-state war between great and middle powers has clearly increased .What we had been observing in many places around the world was a dramatic increase in brinkmanship, that is, highly risky actions on the abyss – the abyss of war .

    No matter where you look, there are countless conflicts and crises the core pieces of the international order are breaking apart, without it being clear whether anyone can pick them up – or even wants to. ("Who will pick up the pieces?", Munich Security Conference )

    Ischinger is not alone in his desperation nor are his feelings limited to elites and intellectuals. By now, most people are familiar with the demonstrations that have rocked Paris, the political cage-match that is tearing apart England (Brexit), the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing groups that have sprung up across Europe, and the surprising rejection of the front-runner candidate in the 2016 presidential elections in the US. Everywhere the establishment and their neoliberal policies are being rejected by the masses of working people who have only recently begun to wreak havoc on a system that has ignored them for more than 30 years. Trump's public approval ratings have improved, not because he has "drained the swamp" as he promised, but because he is still seen as a Washington outsider despised by the political class, the foreign policy establishment and the media. His credibility rests on the fact that he is hated by the coalition of elites who working people now regard as their sworn enemy.

    The president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, summed up his views on the "weakening of the liberal world order" in an article that appeared on the CFR's website. Here's what he said:

    "Attempts to build global frameworks are failing. Protectionism is on the rise; the latest round of global trade talks never came to fruition. .At the same time, great power rivalry is returning

    There are several reasons why all this is happening, and why now. The rise of populism is in part a response to stagnating incomes and job loss, owing mostly to new technologies but widely attributed to imports and immigrants. Nationalism is a tool increasingly used by leaders to bolster their authority, especially amid difficult economic and political conditions .

    But the weakening of the liberal world order is due, more than anything else, to the changed attitude of the U.S. Under President Donald Trump, the US decided against joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership and to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. It has threatened to leave the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. It has unilaterally introduced steel and aluminum tariffs, relying on a justification (national security) that others could use, in the process placing the world at risk of a trade war .America First" and the liberal world order seem incompatible." ("Liberal World Order, R.I.P.", Richard Haass, CFR )

    What Haass is saying is that the cure for globalisation is more globalization, that the greatest threat to the liberal world order is preventing the behemoth corporations from getting more of what they want; more self-aggrandizing trade agreements, more offshoring of businesses, more outsourcing of jobs, more labor arbitrage, and more privatization of public assets and critical resources. Trade liberalization is not liberalization, it does not strengthen democracy or create an environment where human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law are respected. It's a policy that focuses almost-exclusively on the free movement of capital in order to enrich wealthy shareholders and fatten the bottom line. The sporadic uprisings around the world– Brexit, yellow vests, emergent right wing groups– can all trace their roots back to these one-sided, corporate-friendly trade deals that have precipitated the steady slide in living standards, the shrinking of incomes, and the curtailing of crucial benefits for the great mass of working people across the US and Europe. President Trump is not responsible for the outbreak of populism and social unrest, he is merely an expression of the peoples rage. Trump's presidential triumph was a clear rejection of the thoroughly-rigged elitist system that continues to transfer the bulk of the nation's wealth to tiniest layer of people at the top.

    Haass's critique illustrates the level of denial among elites who are now gripped by fear of an uncertain future.

    As we noted earlier, the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, which is the one incontrovertible fact that cannot be denied. Washington's brief unipolar moment –following the breakup of the Soviet Union in December, 1991 -- has already passed and new centers of industrial and financial power are gaining pace and gradually overtaking the US in areas that are vital to America's primacy. This rapidly changing economic environment is accompanied by widespread social discontent, seething class-based resentment, and ever-more radical forms of political expression. The liberal order is collapsing, not because the values espoused in the 60s and 70s have lost their appeal, but because inequality is widening, the political system has become unresponsive to the demands of the people, and because US can no longer arbitrarily impose its will on the world.

    Globalization has fueled the rise of populism, it has helped to exacerbate ethnic and racial tensions, and it is largely responsible for the hollowing out of America's industrial core. Haass's antidote would only throw more gas on the fire and hasten the day when liberals and conservatives form into rival camps and join in a bloody battle to the end. Someone has to stop the madness before the country descends into a second Civil War.

    What Haass fails to discuss, is Washington's perverse reliance on force to preserve the liberal world order, after all, it's not like the US assumed its current dominant role by merely competing more effectively in global markets. Oh, no. Behind the silk glove lies the iron fist, which has been used in over 50 regime change operations since the end of WW2. The US has over 800 military bases scattered across the planet and has laid to waste one country after the other in successive interventions, invasions and occupations for as long as anyone can remember. This penchant for violence has been sharply criticized by other members of the United Nations, but only Russia has had the courage to openly oppose Washington where it really counts, on the battlefield.

    Russia is presently engaged in military operations that have either prevented Washington from achieving its strategic objectives (like Ukraine) or rolled back Washington's proxy-war in Syria. Naturally, liberal elites like Haass feel threatened by these developments since they are accustomed to a situation in which 'the world is their oyster'. But, alas, oysters have been removed from the menu, and the United States is going to have to make the adjustment or risk a third world war.

    What Russian President Vladimir Putin objects to, is Washington's unilateralism, the cavalier breaking of international law to pursue its own imperial ambitions. Ironically, Putin has become the greatest defender of the international system and, in particular, the United Nations which is a point he drove home in his presentation at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly in New York on September 28, 2015, just two days before Russian warplanes began their bombing missions in Syria. Here's part of what he said:

    "The United Nations is unique in terms of legitimacy, representation and universality .We consider any attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations as extremely dangerous. It may result in the collapse of the entire architecture of international relations, leaving no rules except the rule of force. The world will be dominated by selfishness rather than collective effort, by dictate rather than equality and liberty, and instead of truly sovereign nations we will have colonies controlled from outside."(Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly )

    Putin's speech, followed by the launching of the Russian operation in Syria, was a clear warning to the foreign policy establishment that they would no longer be allowed to topple governments and destroy countries with impunity. Just as Putin was willing to put Russian military personnel at risk in Syria, so too, he will probably put them at risk in Venezuela, Lebanon, Ukraine and other locations where they might be needed. And while Russia does not have anywhere near the raw power of the US military, Putin seems to be saying that he will put his troops in the line of fire to defend international law and the sovereignty of nations. Here's Putin again:

    "We all know that after the end of the Cold War the world was left with one center of dominance, and those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think that, since they are so powerful and exceptional, they know best what needs to be done and thus they don't need to reckon with the UN, which, instead of rubber-stamping the decisions they need, often stands in their way .

    We should all remember the lessons of the past. For example, we remember examples from our Soviet past, when the Soviet Union exported social experiments, pushing for changes in other countries for ideological reasons, and this often led to tragic consequences and caused degradation instead of progress.

    It seems, however, that instead of learning from other people's mistakes, some prefer to repeat them and continue to export revolutions, only now these are "democratic" revolutions. Just look at the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa already mentioned by the previous speaker. Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention indiscriminately destroyed government institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life.

    I'm urged to ask those who created this situation: do you at least realize now what you've done?" (Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly)

    Here Putin openly challenges the concept of a 'liberal world order' which in fact is a sobriquet used to conceal Washington's relentless plundering of the planet. There's nothing liberal about toppling regimes and plunging millions of people into anarchy, poverty and desperation. Putin is simply trying to communicate to US leaders that the world is changing, that nations in Asia are gaining strength and momentum, and that Washington will have to abandon the idea that any constraint on its behavior is a threat to its national security interests.

    Former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, appears to agree on this point and suggests that the US begin to rethink its approach to foreign policy now that the world has fundamentally changed and other countries are demanding a bigger place at the table.

    What most people don't realize about Brzezinski, is that he dramatically changed his views on global hegemony a few years after he published his 1997 masterpiece The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative. In his 2012 book, Strategic Vision, Brzezinski recommended a more thoughtful and cooperative approach that would ease America's unavoidable transition (decline?) without creating a power vacuum that could lead to global chaos. Here's a short excerpt from an article

    he wrote in 2016 for the American Interest titled "Toward a Global Realignment":

    "The fact is that there has never been a truly "dominant" global power until the emergence of America on the world scene .That era is now ending .As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture .The United States is still the world's politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.

    America can only be effective in dealing with the current Middle Eastern violence if it forges a coalition that involves, in varying degrees, also Russia and China .

    A constructive U.S. policy must be patiently guided by a long-range vision. It must seek outcomes that promote the gradual realization in Russia that its only place as an influential world power is ultimately within Europe. China's increasing role in the Middle East should reflect the reciprocal American and Chinese realization that a growing U.S.-PRC partnership in coping with the Middle Eastern crisis is an historically significant test of their ability to shape and enhance together wider global stability.

    The alternative to a constructive vision, and especially the quest for a one-sided militarily and ideologically imposed outcome, can only result in prolonged and self-destructive futility.

    Since the next twenty years may well be the last phase of the more traditional and familiar political alignments with which we have grown comfortable, the response needs to be shaped now . And that accommodation has to be based on a strategic vision that recognizes the urgent need for a new geopolitical framework." ("Toward a Global Realignment", Zbigniew Brzezinski, The American Interest )

    This strikes me as a particularly well-reasoned and insightful article. It shows that Brzezinski understood that the world had changed, that power had shifted eastward, and that the only path forward for America was cooperation, accommodation, integration and partnership. Tragically, there is no base of support for these ideas on Capital Hill, the White House or among the U.S. foreign policy establishment. The entire political class and their allies in the media unanimously support a policy of belligerence, confrontation and war. The United States will not prevail in a confrontation with Russia and China any more than it will be able to turn back the clock to the post war era when America, the Superpower, reigned supreme. Confrontation will only accelerate the pace of US decline and the final collapse of the liberal world order.

    Walt , says: April 13, 2019 at 11:22 pm GMT

    Zbig has fially admitted that America needs to become friends with Russia. We can not handle the world alone,but with Russia we would have 90% of the worlds nuclear weapons and vast geopolitical ifluence. Americans do hot have anything against Russia. It is the neocon cabal that is fostering conflict . Thet just can not get over the fact that they tried and failed to take control of Russia. They are trying to do so to the u.S.A.
    Walt , says: April 13, 2019 at 11:24 pm GMT
    Zbig is right. We need to be friends with Russia , not enemies.
    China girl , says: April 14, 2019 at 2:30 am GMT
    "2. Russia should become the real leader of the new process. (It has already become it but not yet aware of the fact.) The West and Israel need a strategic alliance with the Muslim world more than anything else, and this alliance is possible only through Russia. Only Russia in an alliance with the Muslim world can keep China in check without conflicts, helping it find its new place in the world as another super-power.

    3. Leaders of Russia, America, Israel, Europe, Iran, India, and international financial capitals must initiate a dialogue over leaving this crisis behind and preventing events like those which swept America on September 11.

    A time of change is upon us, and it's futile to wish we were living in some other era. We have to change ourselves and change the world "

    Novaya Gazeta
    No. 75
    October 2001
    THE THIRD FORCE OF WORLD WAR III

    [MORE]

    "THE AMERICANS DON'T REALIZE IT YET, BUT CHINA HAS WRITTEN ITS OWN SCRIPT FOR SQUEEZING THE UNITED STATES OFF THE WORLD STAGE. CHINA SUPPORTS ACTIONS OF THE WEST AIMED AT MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION OF RUSSIA AND THE MUSLIM WORLD. THE WEST, RUSSIA, ISRAEL, AND THE MUSLIM WORLD MUST WORK TOGETHER.

    THE WESTERN SCRIPT

    [ ]

    "Using techniques of manipulating public opinion, the West is trying to establish the illusion of a global forces with the fascist- like ideology of Wahhabi fundamentalism. As far as the West is concerned, Wahhabi and Islam are the same thing. It is because of this that the essential terrorism of Wahhabi ideas is being formulated so simply for public consumption: all Muslims are terrorists by nature.

    The preliminary objective of brainwashing (Islam is the basis of terrorism) is thus achieved. "

    "This script becomes possible when we assume that some Western elites and secret services made a kind of covert pact with this still-unknown Player."

    THE CHINESE SCRIPT

    [ ]

    " Throw a great deal of dollars into the market all at once, and the dollar will crash. A conflict with Taiwan may follow. It will be a conflict waged with American money, with American weapons, investment, and high technology. Add the nuclear factor here. Suffice it to recall the recent scandal when Chinese intelligence obtained all major nuclear secrets of the United States. "

    Author: Viktor Minin
    [from WPS Monitoring Agency, http://www.wps.ru/e_index.html%5D

    http://www.russialist.org/archives/5497-14.php

    MarkinLA , says: April 14, 2019 at 3:24 am GMT
    What most people don't realize about Brzezinski, is that he dramatically changed his views on global hegemony a few years after he published his 1997 masterpiece The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative. In his 2012 book, Strategic Vision, Brzezinski recommended a more thoughtful and cooperative approach that would ease America's unavoidable transition (decline?) without creating a power vacuum that could lead to global chaos.

    So somebody put forth a deluded crack-pot idea that got great traction and made a lot of people very rich and powerful who want to stay that way, but the originator now says he was wrong and we should change. Yeah, those rich and powerful people just have to agree to give up some of that. How likely is that without a major catastrophe forcing them, given what we know about human nature?

    Maybe the lesson is to have realistic ideas about foreign policy and relations in the future. Did anybody seriously believe countries with long histories like Russia and China were always going to be happy playing second fiddle to the US?

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 14, 2019 at 6:08 am GMT

    Haass's critique illustrates the level of denial among elites who are now gripped by fear of an uncertain future.

    True, but their problem is compounded with their fear which is anchored in the past, whose real history blows all current, being discredited as I type this, narratives out of the water. This, plus most of them, Haas and CFR included, do not operate with actual facts and data.

    anon [423] Disclaimer , says: April 14, 2019 at 12:45 pm GMT
    "The West and Israel need a strategic alliance with the Muslim world"

    Unfortunately, this is probably not entirely feasible considering the United States's inappropriately close relationship to Israel and the American government's radical stance of forcing LGBTQ issues; as San Jose proves, these people aren't simply going to leave you alone, but rather they will make you conform under threat. Probably what will happen in the future is a Japan-EU-Russia alliance that makes peace with the Middle East and contains the Chinese military as much as possible.

    The US could very well find itself cut out at some point. It has already proved itself both reckless and incompetent with its handling of Iran, Israel, and Venezuela. Also, I suspect that neither ordinary EU citizens nor Asians will want to be ruled over by a group of POC racists who discriminate against Europeans, Asian males, and traditional families.

    I think the rest of the world should begin considering alternate defense arrangements. The US cannot afford to defend their interests forever with an aging, shrinking white Caucasian population and a growing, less capable and less conscientious replacement population less willing to die in imperial wars. Increasingly, the US will be less capable of defending others in the Pacific from China as it Affirmative Actions its air force; Obama was trying to do that throughout the whole of the American military and accomplished his objective by lowering standards. I think this process should continue in the future with disastrous results.

    In the future, Asia will try to make peace with China before they get too strong and China will reciprocate with generous territorial concessions in exchange for neutrality. For example, the Chinese may relinquish territorial claims in the Philippines in exchange for a treaty stating that the Philippines will not base the American military or buy weapons from them, but they would be allowed to buy weapons from third parties such as the Russians. A series of moves like this might dramatically weaken the American position in the region, allowing China to jumpskip to Africa and the Middle East more effectively. Perhaps a similar deal will be worked out with Taiwan: autonomy and a peace treaty in exchange for no weapon purchases or defense arrangements with the US, but Taiwan could still buy Russian weapons.

    "Zbig has fially admitted that America needs to become friends with Russia."

    As Karlin has noted, I don't see this happening in the near future, not with the insane levels of anti-Russian hate coming from the American left, some of which is just pure racial hatred of whites projected onto Russians.

    bro3886 , says: April 14, 2019 at 1:08 pm GMT
    All this is irrelevant in the long run. America will be a third-world country in 50 years or less. Imagine a government filled with AOCs, Omars, and Bookers, with a constituency that matches. Brazil of the North isn't going to be a superpower. We can look on that as a silver lining.
    Republic , says: April 14, 2019 at 1:35 pm GMT

    The United States will not prevail in a confrontation with Russia and China any more than it will be able to turn back the clock to the post war era when America, the Superpower, reigned supreme. Confrontation will only accelerate the pace of US decline and the final collapse of the liberal world order.

    Very dangerous times are ahead. A declining superpower in late empire mode may make risky decisions. I wonder if America will have a Suez event in the upcoming decade? The 1956 Suez crisis heralded the rise of a new superpower and the eclipse of another one.

    dearieme , says: April 14, 2019 at 1:37 pm GMT
    @anon some of which is just pure racial hatred of whites projected onto Russians

    That hadn't occurred to me. But can it be true?

    Bill Jones , says: April 14, 2019 at 1:53 pm GMT
    "The liberal world order, which lasted from the end of World War 2 until today" Thanks for the laugh. It was over with the passing of the 1947 National Security Act.
    Bill Jones , says: April 14, 2019 at 1:57 pm GMT
    @Walt I don't know how fucked up you have to be to use "We" to refer to the murderous US State but you should seek competent professional psychiatric assistance, Soon.
    anon [275] Disclaimer , says: April 14, 2019 at 3:42 pm GMT
    "That hadn't occurred to me. But can it be true?"

    The attitudes and political beliefs of your average Russian are very similar to many Red State conservatives, as has been noted on this webzine at least once in recent memory (and with an accompanying political map with similarities noted between American Blue and Red States compared with Russia). The American left projects its racist hate onto the Russians in response to those similarities.

    It is not a coincidence that this anti-Russian climate of hatred started back when Putin showed up the left's president, Barack Obama, over Libya.

    That also explains the left's hypocrisy on war: their tribe's racial leader, Obama, wanted war in Libya, so war is now good; Russia opposed it and later prevented war in Syria (which Obama wanted), so the Russians are now the bad guys. It's purely a matter of tribal affiliation and racial hate on the part of the American left.

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 14, 2019 at 4:21 pm GMT
    @Republic

    I wonder if America will have a Suez event in the upcoming decade?

    She already had it and one is unfolding right this moment. For an empire of this size and influence, granted declining dramatically, it takes a sequence of events. "Suez Moment" for Britain happened during WW II, the actual Suez crisis was merely a nominal conclusion to British Empire dying in WW II.

    Anon [332] Disclaimer , says: April 14, 2019 at 4:51 pm GMT
    ""Suez Moment" for Britain happened during WW II, the actual Suez crisis was merely a nominal conclusion to British Empire dying in WW II."

    True. Syria might have been the American Suez Moment. We'll see in the coming years if we get a crisis that lays it all bare.

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 14, 2019 at 5:22 pm GMT
    @Anon

    We'll see in the coming years if we get a crisis that lays it all bare.

    Ongoing real Revolution in Military Affairs and US losing conventional (and nuclear) arms race is what unfolds right now. Realistically, Putin's March 1, 2018 Speech to Federal Assembly was also one of these moments -- as I said, the process is protracted and at each of its phases US geopolitical cards have been aced and trumped, NO pun intended.

    notanon , says: April 14, 2019 at 6:04 pm GMT
    when i read these people i get the impression there are two camps:

    1) political globalists who wanted a liberal world order but didn't think about the economic side of things much and so let their economic policy be decided by the central banking mafia

    and

    2) The central banking mafia who understood globalization was simply their criminal looting of the West backed up by a big military who could be rented out from a corrupted political class.

    it seems the first group still don't understand that it was the banking mafia's neoliberal economics
    – currency debasement
    – usury
    – cheap labor
    that destroyed their dream.

    the same three things have been destroying civilizations for 3000 years.

    notanon , says: April 14, 2019 at 6:12 pm GMT

    The West and Israel need a strategic alliance with the Muslim world more than anything else, and this alliance is possible only through Russia.

    i think this is short-sighted. The global north needs to combine to contain the global south or the central banking mafia will eventually use them to destroy the north's genetic advantages and all our descendants will end up as 85 IQ slave-cattle.

    Priss Factor , [AKA "Asagirian"] says: Website April 14, 2019 at 8:37 pm GMT
    The liberal world order, which lasted from the end of World War 2 until today, is rapidly collapsing.

    Really? Where? US is still in Middle East and now threatens war with Iran. Venezuela is on the brink. Japan and EU are the ever loyal dogs of the US. If they've been upset with Trump, it's not because he wants to exert more influence but less.

    Republic , says: April 14, 2019 at 10:48 pm GMT
    @Andrei Martyanov

    the actual Suez crisis was merely a nominal conclusion to British Empire dying in WW II

    The Atlantic charter signed aboard the HMS Prince of Wales, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland on August 14, 1941 by FDR and Churchill was probably the moment when the old British empire traded places with the new global power, the United States. So you are correct in your analysis.

    hgw , says: April 14, 2019 at 10:50 pm GMT
    @MarkinLA This is not really about history, it is about power. Many of the US allies have much longer histories, but that does not help them in the power department. China and Russia have enough power to stand only on their own two feet.
    hgw , says: April 14, 2019 at 10:54 pm GMT
    @Andrei Martyanov You should think more about US being aced. Syria was a masterstroke, but so was Ukraine, and not for Russia. Russia lost an extremely valuable ally and a trully brother nation, maybe forever. Ukraine, in the grand scheme of things, is a huge defeat for Russia.
    Anon [341] Disclaimer , says: April 14, 2019 at 11:13 pm GMT

    The West and Israel need a strategic alliance with the Muslim world more than anything else, and this alliance is possible only through Russia.

    Sberbank calls on UAE businesses to invest in Russia, offers help

    "According to the statement, the Gulf countries' total capital available for investment is estimated at more than $3.2 trillion but only "a small part" of capital earmarked for investing in Russia has actually gone into Russia-based projects."

    "The Russian visitors set out Sberbank's technology strategy and described achievements by the Moscow-based lender in artificial intelligence development.

    They also "pointed out interest in Islamic finance", the statement said."

    http://emergingmarkets.me/sberbank-calls-on-uae-businesses-to-invest-in-russia-offers-help/

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 15, 2019 at 12:00 am GMT
    @hgw

    Ukraine, in the grand scheme of things, is a huge defeat for Russia.

    You definitely missed last 25 years of Russian-Ukrainian relations. You also, evidently, have very vague understanding of the Ukrainian inner dynamics. I am not sure we can speak of "brother nation" because Ukraine as political nation (and she did form as such by early 2000s) can not be "brother nation" to Russia by definition. In fact, being anti-Russia is the only natural state of Ukrainian political nation.

    There is another twist to all this–these are Russians now, who do not want to deal with Ukraine in any of her manifestations and, to rub the salt into the wound, Zbig was delusional when thought that denying Ukraine to Russia would spell the end of Russian "imperialism". As it turned out, Russia is doing just fine without Ukraine. In a long run, if what is called Ukraine today decides to commit suicide by the cop, she sure can try to place US military bases East of Dniepr and we will observe a rather peculiar case of fireworks.

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 15, 2019 at 12:11 am GMT
    @Republic

    The Atlantic charter signed aboard the HMS Prince of Wales,in Placentia Bay,Newfoundland on August 14, 1941 by FDR and Churchill was probably the moment when the old British empire traded places with the new global power, the United States.

    This happened in 1941 at secret ABC (America-Britain-Canada) consultations where Lord Halifax was trying to recruit American resources for defense of Britain's imperial interests. US "politely" declined. Big Three became Big Two and a Half at 1943 Tehran Conference at which Stalin was very specific that USSR wanted American as a head of Overlord.

    All this pursuant to a strategic scandal between US and British Empire at Casablanca where General Stanley Embick of Marshall's OPD accused Britain in his memorandum of avoiding fighting main Nazi forces due to Britain's imperial interests. Churchill knew the significance of Tehran and suffered non-stop bouts of jealousy and suspicion towards FDR and Stalin.

    I am sure Sir Winston knew that FDR wanted to meet Stalin without him. Stalin refused to do so without Churchill. As per "global power"–sure, except for one teeny-weeny fact (or rather facts), since WW II "global power" didn't win a single war against even more-or-less determined enemy.

    Digital Samizdat , says: April 15, 2019 at 11:16 am GMT
    @hgw

    Ukraine, in the grand scheme of things, is a huge defeat for Russia.

    It would have been a total catastrophe for Russia had she lost Sebastopol; but so long as Crimea is safely in Moscow's hands, Ukraine is not make-or-break. Russia's global position now, in fact, is even stronger than it was in 2014.

    neutral , says: April 15, 2019 at 12:22 pm GMT
    @bro3886

    Brazil of the North

    It will be much worse than Brazil, Brazil managed to cover up the reality that whites dominate politics and the economy (although there is a new push to copy the American affirmative action ideology). In America whites will not be able to do what is happening in Brazil, all politics will be non white dominated, likewise the woke corporate blue haired brigade will ensure that non whites dominate all companies, no exceptions allowed. The end result of this is predictable, Americans will be wishing they were like Brazil.

    neutral , says: April 15, 2019 at 1:31 pm GMT
    @Republic No it was earlier, it was when it decided to declare war on the Third Reich. It decided that Poland was more important than keeping its empire.
    Miro23 , says: April 15, 2019 at 2:07 pm GMT

    Globalization has fueled the rise of populism, it has helped to exacerbate ethnic and racial tensions, and it is largely responsible for the hollowing out of America's industrial core.

    Western corporations have been competing with each other (for decades now) to offshore everything to reduce costs /increase profits. The idea is to sell at Western prices and produce at Eastern prices, and this arbitrage has reached crazy proportions.

    The US has in fact exported whole industrial sectors (with the jobs and innovation). Same in Europe with a company such as Decathlon (Europe's Nº1 sport goods supplier) entirely sourcing its products outside Europe.

    Conclusion that if globalization fails, then so do these companies, and they have a massive incentive buy political protection from Western governments – which they are doing. Nationalism and America First are anathema to them and they have (amazingly) managed to built globalization and open frontiers into the ethos of the EU and US – with all the self-serving multicultural Save the World blah.

    Jews also hate nationalism since it threatens their (minority) power and highlights dual loyalty (or no loyalty) so the Zio-Glob are on one side, and the public on the other, with little common ground between them.

    This doesn't mean that it's impossible to stop outsourcing. If it happened, then Decathlon would either go bankrupt or have to switch production to Rumania or Portugal = higher prices, but at least the money would stay in Europe. Same with the other industries, and the first step has to be to cut down the power of the EU bureaucracy and Washington.

    notanon , says: April 15, 2019 at 6:39 pm GMT
    @neutral the banking mafia wanted war cos Hitler closed down the German branch of the central bank.

    the rest was puppetry.

    Willie , says: Website April 18, 2019 at 12:22 am GMT
    Just prepare fort the impending surge in Totalitarian methods to halt the inevitable in the USA.
    The rest of the world is not our playground.
    Good luck.
    Alfred , says: April 20, 2019 at 5:42 am GMT
    @Andrei Martyanov Haas and CFR included, do not operate with actual facts and data.

    Absolutely correct. Without an honest media, it is impossible to make good decisions.

    Those Zionists who control the media in the West are deluding themselves. They will be the biggest losers when ordinary people finally wake up to the fact that they have been lied to for over 100 years – WW1, WW2, Palestine, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Russia, Crimea, MH-17, Skripals, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, 9/11 and many other instances.

    Oristayne , says: April 20, 2019 at 6:36 am GMT
    This is a phenomenal article. What an incredibly written piece; much respect to you Mike Whitney.
    Ma Laoshi , says: April 20, 2019 at 7:20 am GMT
    Not so fast. OK, so maybe Zbig had some second thoughts about the whole project in 2012. But didn't the same Zbig opine in 2015, at the start of Russia's Syria intervention, that the US should strike hard and fast before the Russkies managed to complete their buildup there? To me that sounded rather much like an unprovoked attack on Russian troops, who were legally in Syria at the invitation of its internationally recognized government.

    Bottom line, for all of his far-too-long career Mr. Brzezinski has been exactly what one would expect from the spiritual father of al-Qaeda: a vile and reckless individual. Anyone looking that way for salvation needs some time out for reflection.

    Iris , says: April 20, 2019 at 10:58 am GMT

    This strikes me as a particularly well-reasoned and insightful article. It shows that Brzezinski understood that the world had changed, that power had shifted eastward,

    This is an excellent article, which addresses the key historic driver of our time. By 2015, world GDP had already passed the threshold where the GDP share of the West had become lesser than the share of the Rest.

    The major share of global wealth shifting towards Asia is an ineluctable historic re-alignment; it is a natural return to the long-term historic balance pre-Industrial Revolution.

    Western politicians ' problem is that they don't want to "break the news" to their people that Western standards of living are going to degrade ineluctably over the coming years , because that would expose their incompetence, as well as highlight the need to address wealth inequality in the West .

    It is easier instead to the blame the disenfranchised, pauperised citizens voting for Trump, Brexit, and other "extreme" political parties.

    Ahuehuete , says: April 20, 2019 at 4:37 pm GMT
    @bro3886 When you think about it, the USA is going to become the next South Africa.
    Zbig , says: April 20, 2019 at 10:48 pm GMT
    Zbig was, and still is, even tho' he is dead now. He was the original zio-neocon illuminist satantic globalist elite.
    Rubby2 , says: April 21, 2019 at 3:24 am GMT
    @Walt

    At least Brzezinski became well aware of this shift. So many of America's neo-conservatives have largely failed in expressing this defeat. Between Brzezinski and Boot, & the Others, they've all turned out to be fanatic ideologues.

    Endgame Napoleon , says: April 21, 2019 at 11:48 pm GMT
    @notanon Ralph Nader used to say the big issue is money in politics -- the money that "Congress Critters" use to get their government jobs at $174k. To get one of those government jobs, you don't have to understand something as complex as the banking system, which is made more opaque by the globalist neoliberals who want to maintain the Cheap Labor Lobby's beloved status quo.

    You don't have to be Nomi Prins, someone who actually worked on Wall Street and knows its nooks and crannies, to get a Congress Critter job. You just have to be the right kind of pander bear with the right kind of faux outrage at selective moments.

    The other problem is that -- like most of us in the general public -- Congress Critters have to rely on people in the financial system to navigate the terrain. It's a math-heavy field. Politicians have apparently always done this. They have created more than one era with too-big-to-fail institutions. That is what one of Prins' books describes.

    But it does not matter whether it's bankers or the manufacturers, employing welfare-assisted illegal aliens or foreign nationals on foreign soil. And it does not matter that Congress Critters occasionally put the bigwigs on the hot seat as a PR stunt. They aren't going to do anything to actually change policy unless the corporate masters who fund their campaigns give them the go ahead. And they don't really even understand why.

    [MORE]

    If you think Congress Critters understand the global banking system, you should watch the banking committee hearing on C-SPAN, where they grilled the Treasury Secretary, dressing him down like he was a $10-per-hour call center worker. It makes for good theater.

    Just like at a call center, the humiliation parade had nothing to do with the details of the work or getting anything done other than convincing voters that a bunch of fabulously wealthy legislators (every one) with a 212-day work year really care, especially about predatory factors in the financial system that supposedly affect only oppressed skin-pigmentation factions, located in their districts.

    You vicariously enjoy rebellious facial expressions that you could never exhibit during a frequently absentee mom manager's tirades for fear of being fired from a churn job that does not cover the cost of rent that has risen by 72% over 25 years, even when you add any paltry commission for taking the trouble to always meeting your numbers. But that will be the extent of it. It is for show.

    My favorite part was Empire-related; it involved the Rep. from Guam, a Congress Critter from one of US's far-flung territories. His mild and precise disposition made a strong contrast with the Chairwoman's fiery ambiguity. Since his questions were math-related and about specific budgetary matters, the Treasury Secretary seemed more frazzled than when he was receiving the emotional Sermon from the gavel-happy chairwoman.

    Guam Rep asked the Treasury Secretary about a massive transference of funds from the budget, affecting things like the territory's education budget, trying to clarify whether the Earned Income Tax Credit was actually a "liability."

    The language of most of our legislators reflects how bought off they are by the Cheap Labor Lobby. Which is why this Rep from Guam's straight-forward language was so refreshing.

    By design, the "Child" "Tax" "Credit" and the Earned Income Tax Credit sound like things that would not subtract from the overall budget to me, too, but this is not money going to people who paid too much income tax. This is money that is credited back to people who make too little to pay income tax.

    The moms often call it their "taxes," when explaining to you what they plan to spend it on. It is not education, Rep. from Guam. It is stuff like trips to the beach with a boyfriend and tattoos. That's doable for many low-wage mom workers since their major monthly bills are covered by government.

    I enjoyed the Treasury Secretary's facial expressions at this point as well. It appeared to be two math types who didn't really thrive on the process of figuring out how to spin this fiscal irresponsibility, squirming in their chairs and / or looking kind of aghast at the absurdity of the situation.

    It would have been nice if the Rep from Guam had been honest enough to narrow that down even more, explaining that the small amount of EITC money going to non-womb-productive, non-welfare-eligible citizens who mostly don't bother to claim such a paltry sum is the not the big issue.

    It is the Refundable Child Tax Credit up to $6,431, not so much the smaller maximum EITC of up to $451. It is the big check, given as an additional reward to single-breadwinner, womb-productive households that also often receive free EBT food, reduced-cost rent, monthly cash assistance and free electricity when the single breadwinner works part-time, keeping her income under the earned-income limits for the programs.

    He mentioned that Guam has a lot of poor workers like that, but so does the mainland. It is one of the big reasons for the impending collapse: undremployment of prime-aged citizens.

    If it is due to technology, it is just because employers of office workers now mostly need data entry people since advanced software does most of the mid-level analytical work. And employers love to hire a near-100% womb-productive "diversity"of childbearing-aged moms with spousal income, rent-covering child support or welfare and refundable child tax credit cash who do not need decent pay or full-time hours. "It would mess them up with the government," as one all-mom employer put it.

    Employers benefit from a welfare-fueled workforce that does not need higher pay. The Cheap Labor Lobby benefits. Congress Critters at $174k benefit via fat campaign war chests, but the many welfare-ineligible job seekers who need for pay alone to cover all household bills are screwed royally in this rigged system.

    It is also screwing the SS Trust Fund that is no longer running surpluses and a lot of other things.

    Guam Rep asked the Treasury Secretary if he was responsible and, specifically, what could he done to help restore fiscal order. Of course, the Treasury Secretary isn't responsible for the mid-allocation of funds. Pandering Congress Critters are. They have the "power of the purse" per US Constitution. The Treasury Sec. just tries to balance the books.

    But it was nice that at least one of them showed some non-theatrical concern for finding out which of the six-figure Critters is responsible. He sounded like he wanted constructive action to stop the Neoliberal House of Cards from just putting more structurally unsound cards on the deck.

    Good luck with that

    [Apr 22, 2019] Hitler has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life

    Apr 22, 2019 | kunstler.com

    Janos Skorenzy April 20, 2019 at 3:28 pm #

    "[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues.

    Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet"

    ? George Orwell

    BRH, in his perversity, supports Capitalism/Communism and the growth of the Gay Disco Global State. He should be with us but that would mean discarding this Holy of Holies, World War Two American military triumphalism. He jus can't, the Truth be damned.

    FincaInTheMountains April 20, 2019 at 9:37 pm #

    Americans really do not understand who Hitler was, and that is EVRYONE I know. And they never understood, even in the 50s. But the British understand, but made a deal with the devil.

    But let's start everything in order.

    For the dualistic consciousness of Americans, the natural desire is to belittle the role of the USSR in the defeat of Hitler's Germany, since this does not fit their concept of "good guys vs bad guys " – if the Russians are the bad guys, then why did they fight along with the good guys against the bad guy Hitler?

    In addition, in the process of changing generations, they are more and more inclined to the view that Hitler was not so bad, and their fathers and grandfathers put a lot of accusations against him, just as America puts many accusations on those she desire to bomb today.

    Of course, this should not apply to American intelligentsia, but, as I understand it, it is difficult to live in a society that professes these or other errors en masse, and not to allow these errors to penetrate your brain and soul, even if you absolutely know that these errors are invented by you propaganda.

    Especially if these errors are invented by your own propaganda.

    Ol' Scratch April 21, 2019 at 8:40 am #

    Hitler was vilified publicly but glorified privately by the elite (Allen Dulles in particular). He provided a valuable service by providing the test bed for theories and practices (eugenics, wholesale population controls and disruptions, sophisticated propaganda techniques, and perpetual full-spectrum wars) which have since been perfected and are being implemented much more discreetly and effectively now.

    benr April 21, 2019 at 4:17 pm #

    The Fords loved Hitler and IBM helped the NAZIS as well.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender. That would explain Sater's early attempts at apparent entrapment. Since that didn't work, a different strategy had to be devised to deny the presidency to someone over whom the intelligence services lacked sufficient leverage. ..."
    "... Hillary gladly cooperated and raised the specter of collusion with Russia, which she trumpeted in the debates, downplaying other issues that could have resonated more with voters. Since she thought she was a slam dunk, she thought she could afford to cooperate. It could only help ingratiate her with the borg. ..."
    "... On the other hand, Brennan and others in the borg used their allies in the media to promote and propagate the story, which mushroomed when Trump defied the odds and won. Hillary was eager to play the victim as a way to excuse her failure. And the borg began hyping the story to cripple Trump unless he heeled. Initially Trump resisted, firing Comey. But with Bolton now ensconced as the National Security Advisor, it is clear that the borg has won, and the lack of any conspiracy could now be revealed. ..."
    "... IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO apparatus to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position. ..."
    "... Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss. ..."
    "... Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation. ..."
    "... both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference. ..."
    "... It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team. ..."
    "... The most farcical thing in the Mueller report is that he did not fill obstruction charges or even recommend that it should be filled, but yet he did not "exonerate" Trump. ..."
    "... In other words, Mueller did not think that he had enough to make an obstruction case in the courts of justice, and keep in mind that an indictment requires only "probable cause", not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction, but nevertheless he went out of his way to leave the obstruction sword hanging over Trump`s head so the political infighting does not end. ..."
    Apr 21, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
    JohnH , 21 April 2019 at 12:38 AM
    Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender. That would explain Sater's early attempts at apparent entrapment. Since that didn't work, a different strategy had to be devised to deny the presidency to someone over whom the intelligence services lacked sufficient leverage.

    Hillary gladly cooperated and raised the specter of collusion with Russia, which she trumpeted in the debates, downplaying other issues that could have resonated more with voters. Since she thought she was a slam dunk, she thought she could afford to cooperate. It could only help ingratiate her with the borg.

    On the other hand, Brennan and others in the borg used their allies in the media to promote and propagate the story, which mushroomed when Trump defied the odds and won. Hillary was eager to play the victim as a way to excuse her failure. And the borg began hyping the story to cripple Trump unless he heeled. Initially Trump resisted, firing Comey. But with Bolton now ensconced as the National Security Advisor, it is clear that the borg has won, and the lack of any conspiracy could now be revealed.

    Such a scenario would explain why Sater, Mufid, Steele and apparent attempts at entrapment got buried. And, with obstruction still hanging over Trump's head, the borg's leverage is still there if needed.

    turcopolier , 20 April 2019 at 10:44 PM

    IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO apparatus to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position.
    falcemartello , 20 April 2019 at 11:28 PM
    Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss.

    It was obvious from way back in June 2016 when most of the fabricated /novella known as the Steele Dossier was floating around and the role Fusion GPS played in the Clinton POTUS machine. There is a lot out there but as per usual smokey mirrors and deception.

    I live you with this one thought.

    Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation.

    THe IRGC being labeled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference.

    Mahmood Saadi said in reply to falcemartello ... , 21 April 2019 at 07:53 AM
    Indeed, dishonesty seems somewhat institutionalized at this height.. https://twitter.com/JonathanLalon12/status/1119251603716894720

    Trump is not free from illegal use of US institutions against political "opponents", see the last by Wayne Madsen.

    https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/21/trump-attempt-weaponize-nsa-against-his-enemies.html

    Rick Merlotti , 20 April 2019 at 11:51 PM
    The Special Relationship is hopefully entering the divorce stage. None too soon. Great work, Mr. Johnson.
    English Outsider -> Rick Merlotti ... , 21 April 2019 at 09:32 AM
    Special Relationship? All it's possible for the outsider to see in that are questions.

    The UK stands shoulder to shoulder with the US in repelling the Russian threat. Also, along with France, helps with any R2P that needs doing. That's a consistent if by now bedraggled story.

    But Europe, including the UK, is now going hell for leather at the "European Army" project. How long will it be before that becomes a respectable independent force? A decade?

    https://www.dw.com/en/limited-number-of-weapons-in-german-military-ready-for-action-report/a-42752070

    In the meantime all recognise that the US is the only significant European defence force. It's not just the money. The US ties the European components of NATO together and provides the big reserves of men and equipment. Even Mr Blair accepts that reality. I've been listening to his talk at the Munich Security Conference.

    So the US is to hold the fort in Europe while the Europeans prepare to supplant NATO? Do the Europeans plan to be a military superpower themselves eventually?

    And where does Trump fit in? Trumpphobia is as strong as Russophobia in the UK and stronger than Russophobia in continental Europe. So Trump is supposed to sit there placidly defending Europe until the Europeans are strong enough to dispense with the American alliance, and that while the Europeans, including the UK, throw mud at him?

    Neither in neocon terms nor in terms of sensible defence are these various stories compatible. Is there any sort of coherent defense policy in this respect on either side of the Atlantic? Or are they all just winging it and ignoring the inconsistencies?

    likbez , 21 April 2019 at 12:24 AM
    Bravo ! One word "Bravo!!!" This is a very good, probably the best so far in depth analysis of Mueller's final report. And your phase "disingenuous and dishonest" is like a stamp on Mueller's hatchet job:
    A careful reading of the report reveals that Mueller has issued findings that are both disingenuous and dishonest. The report is a failed hatchet job.

    Part of the failure can be attributed to the amount of material that Attorney General Barr allowed to be released.

    It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team.

    Alves , 21 April 2019 at 04:00 AM
    The most farcical thing in the Mueller report is that he did not fill obstruction charges or even recommend that it should be filled, but yet he did not "exonerate" Trump.

    In other words, Mueller did not think that he had enough to make an obstruction case in the courts of justice, and keep in mind that an indictment requires only "probable cause", not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction, but nevertheless he went out of his way to leave the obstruction sword hanging over Trump`s head so the political infighting does not end.

    IMO, that is the biggest evidence that the whole thing was an attempt at facilitating a political power grab instead of a serious criminal investigation.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Even if we got a candidate against the War Party the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump betayal his voters, surrounded himself with neocons, continues to do Bibi's bidding, and ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down?

    Highly recommended!
    Here we need to look at the candidate political history, their actions before the election. "Trump scam" like "Obama scam" was based on the fact that they do not have political history, they were what Romans called "Tabula rasa". A "clean state" politician into which voters can project their wishes about domestic and foreign policy. That was a dirty. but very effective trick.
    But the most important factor in Trump win was the he was competing against despicable warmonger Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate who wanted to kick the neoliberal globalization can down the road. So the "lesser evilism" card was also in play consciously or unconscionably as well. So with Hillary as the opposition candidate it was a kind of implementation of the USSR style elections on a new level. but with the same with zero choice. Effectively the US electorate was disenfranchised when FBI has thrown Sander under the bus by exonerating Hillary. In a way FBI was the kingmaker in 2016 elections.
    And please note that the Deep State launched a color revolution against Trump to keep him in check. Only later it became evident that he from the very beginning was a pro-Israel neoconservative, probably fully controlled by pro-Israel forces. That Trump electorate bought MIGA instead of MAGA from the day one.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The question is even if we got a candidate against the War Party & the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump, the candidate who campaigned on the wasteful expenditures in our endless wars has surrounded himself with neocons and continues to do Bibi's bidding ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down? ..."
    Apr 21, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    blue peacock -> turcopolier ... , 21 April 2019 at 12:36 PM

    Col. Lang,

    In a recent call from Trump requesting his opinion on China, Jimmy Carter noted that China has not spent a dime on war since 1979, whereas we've spent trillions & continue to spend even more.

    China invested trillions in their infrastructure while ours crumbles. They've invested in building the world's manufacturing capacity while we dismantled ours. We spend twice per capita on healthcare compared to any other western country, yet chronic diseases like diabetes keeps growing. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined yet how superior is our weaponry compared to the Russians who spend one-tenth of what we spend? We've financialized our economy and socialized speculative losses of Wall St mavens but when some politicians talk about spending on the commons then socialism is labeled bad.

    https://www.epsilontheory.com/this-is-water/

    The question is even if we got a candidate against the War Party & the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump, the candidate who campaigned on the wasteful expenditures in our endless wars has surrounded himself with neocons and continues to do Bibi's bidding ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down?

    [Apr 21, 2019] Muller report implicates Obama administration in total and utter incompetence, if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called criminal negligence in legal speak.

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 21, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

    likbez , April 20, 2019 2:30 am

    "Within approximately five hours of Trump's statement, GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton's personal office. "
    The report shows that Russia coordinated with Trump even if he was unaware of it.

    Do you understand that you implicate Obama administration in total and utter incompetence, if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called criminal negligence in legal speak.

    So all our three letter agencies with their enormous budgets and staff including NSA which intercepts all incoming/outgoing communications (and probably most internal communications) can't protect the USA elections from interference that they knew about ? Why they did not warn Trump?

    Or NSA assumed that it was yet another CIA "training exercise" imposing as Russian hackers?

    It not clear why Russia need such a crude methods as, for example, hacking Podesta email via spearfishing (NSA has all the recodings in this case), as you can buy, say a couple of Google engineers for less then a million dollars (many Google engineers hate Google with its cult of performance reviews and know that they are getting much less then their Facebook counterparts, so this might well be not that difficult) and get all you want without extra noise.

    Historically Soviet and, especially, East German intelligence were real experts in utilizing "humint". With the crash of neoliberal ideology that probably is easier for Russians now then it was for Soviets or East Germans in 60th-80th.

    For example, from my admittedly nonprofessional point of view, the most logical assumption about DNC hack is that it was a mixture of the internal leak (download of the files to the UCB drive) and Crowdstrike false flag operation (cover up operation which included implanting Russian (or Ukrainian) malware from Vault 7 to blame Russians.

    And that Gussifer 2.0 was most probably a fake personality created specifically to increase credibility of this false flag operation (see for example http://g-2.space/ and https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/guccifer-2-clinton-foundation-hack-leak/ )

    likbez , April 20, 2019 1:12 pm

    Arne,

    April 20, 2019 11:15 am

    "Do you understand that you implicate Obama administration"

    They did screw up.

    Wrong. The fact that they did not warn/brief Trump suggests that this was an a deliberate and pre-planned attempt to entrap him by initiating Russian contacts by FBI/CIA/MI6 moles

    We have some cursory evidence of at least four attempts to link Trump to Russians supposedly conducted by intelligence services ( https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/russiagate/ ):

    1. Moscow Trump Tower set up (via FBI mole Felix Saters), https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/04/the-fbi-tried-and-failed-to-entrap-trump-by-larry-c-johnson.html
    2. DNC email setup (via CIA and FBI contractor Crowdstrike ) https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/04/test-it-yourself-the-2-second-rounding-fact-pattern-in-the-dnc-emails-by-william-binney-and-larry-jo.html
    3. Veselnitskaya Trump tower meeting set up (via MI6 mole Rob Goldstone). https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/04/httpstruepunditcomexclusive-six-u-s-agencies-conspired-to-illegally-wiretap-trump-british-intel-used-as-fr.html
    4. Papadopoulos set up ( via Josef Misfud (MI6) and Stefan Halper (CIA) ). At the time Halper probably was reporting to the current CIA director Gina Haspel who was at this time CIA station chief in GB. She is a Brennan protégé, of recent Skripals dead ducks hoax fame.

    Surveillance was specifically established to collect compromising material on Trump and his associates with high level official in Obama administration (and probably Obama himself) playing coordinating role.

    Colonel Lang's blog is a good source of information on those issues with posts by former intelligence specialists.

    And please note that I am not a Trump supporter. I resent him and his policies.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

    Highly recommended!
    Powerful video about US propaganda machine. Based on Iraq War propaganda efforts. This is a formidable machine.
    Shows quite vividly that most US politicians of Bush era were war criminal by Nuremberg Tribunal standards. Starting with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They planned the war of aggression against Iraq long before 9/11.
    Apr 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Desolation Row , Apr 20, 2019 10:21:11 PM | link

    Desolation Row | Apr 20, 2019 10:09:06 PM | 41

    Psywar

    Source: https://vimeo.com/14772678 @ 48:15

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers. ..."
    "... Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him to act. This was the beginning of downward slope. ..."
    "... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer. ..."
    "... The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have been there anyway. ..."
    "... No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful way ..."
    "... " ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people." ..."
    "... All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests. ..."
    "... A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated the 98% poor, to stay rich. When there were insurrections federal troops restored order. Also FDR put down strikes with troops. ..."
    "... The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter. ..."
    "... "The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story after another would achieve the desired result " ..."
    "... But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world. ..."
    "... I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and facts don't matter! ..."
    "... Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about intimidating them. ..."
    "... The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was, and that means as bad as Hell itself. ..."
    "... Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the 60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally flawed. I would say more so. ..."
    "... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. ..."
    "... That pre-9/11 "cooperation" nearly destroyed Russia. Nobody in Russia (except, perhaps, for Pussy Riot) wants a return to the Yeltsin era. ..."
    "... The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it. ..."
    "... [The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank. ..."
    "... Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran. ..."
    "... Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington. ..."
    "... Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who dictates what they can and can't say. ..."
    "... Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt, compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into something much worse. ..."
    "... Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six month actions – they go on and on.) ..."
    "... Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are we attacking with drones? Where is congress? ..."
    "... Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies. ..."
    Oct 22, 2017 | www.unz.com

    Fran Macadam , October 20, 2017 at 3:08 pm GMT

    A credible reading of the diverse facts, Mike.
    Kirk Elarbee , October 20, 2017 at 8:27 pm GMT
    Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers.

    http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/10/everyone-hacked-everyone-hacked-everyone-spy-spin-fuels-anti-kaspersky-campaign.html

    utu , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:18 am GMT
    Again Mike Whitney does not get it. Though in the first part of the article I thought he would. He was almost getting there. The objective was to push new administration into the corner from which it could not improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he wanted to during the campaign.

    Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him to act. This was the beginning of downward slope.

    Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer.

    Pamela Geller: Thank You, Larry David

    http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/10/19/pamela-geller-thank-larry-david/

    anon , Disclaimer Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:54 am GMT
    OK.

    The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have been there anyway.

    No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful way

    The one thing I am not positive about. If the elite really believe that Russia is a threat, then Americans have done psych ops on themselves.

    The US was only interested in Ukraine because it was there. Next in line on a map. The rather shocking disinterest in investing money -- on both sides -- is inexplicable if it was really important. Most of it would be a waste -- but still. The US stupidly spent $5 billion on something -- getting duped by politicians and got theoretical regime change, but it was hell to pry even $1 billion for real economic aid.

    ThereisaGod , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 6:37 am GMT
    " ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people."

    All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests.

    jilles dykstra , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 6:46 am GMT
    I am reading Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the USA, 1492 to the Present. A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated the 98% poor, to stay rich. When there were insurrections federal troops restored order. Also FDR put down strikes with troops.
    Logan , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 11:16 am GMT
    @jilles dykstra

    You should be aware that Zinn's book is not, IMO, an honest attempt at writing history. It is conscious propaganda intended to make Americans believe exactly what you are taking from it.

    DESERT FOX , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 1:30 pm GMT
    The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter.

    Until that fact changes Americans will continue to fight and die for Israel.

    TG , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 2:03 pm GMT
    "The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story after another would achieve the desired result "

    But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world.

    I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and facts don't matter!

    Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about intimidating them.

    Anonymous , Disclaimer Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 2:05 pm GMT
    Whitney is another author who declares the "Russians did it" narrative a psyop. He then devotes entire columns to the psyop, "naww Russia didn't do it". There could be plenty to write about – recent laws that do undercut liberty, but no, the Washington Post needs fake opposition to its fake news so you have guys like Whitney in the less-mainstream fake news media.

    So Brennan wanted revenge? Well that's simple enough to understand, without being too stupid. But Whitney's whopper of a lie is what you're supposed to unquestionably believe. The US has "rival political parties". Did you miss it?

    Jake , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 2:32 pm GMT
    The US is doing nothing more than acting as the British Empire 2.0. WASP culture was born of a Judaizing heresy: Anglo-Saxon Puritanism. That meant that the WASP Elites of every are pro-Jewish, especially in order to wage war, physical and/or cultural, against the vast majority of white Christians they rule.

    By the early 19th century, The Brit Empire's Elites also had a strong, and growing, dose of pro-Arabic/pro-Islamic philoSemitism. Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which means being pro-Wahhabi and permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite Mohammedans.

    So, by the time of Victoria's high reign, the Brit WASP Elites were a strange brew of hardcoree pro-Jewish and hardcore pro-Arabic/islamic. The US foreign policy of today is an attempt to put those two together and force it on everyone and make it work.

    The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was, and that means as bad as Hell itself.

    Logan , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:04 pm GMT
    @Grandpa Charlie

    Fair enough. I didn't know that about the foreword. If accurate, that's a reasonable approach for a book.

    Here's the problem.

    Back when O. Cromwell was the dictator of England, he retained an artist to paint him. The custom of the time was for artists to "clean up" their subjects, in a primitive form of photoshopping.

    OC being a religious fanatic, he informed the artist he wished to be portrayed as God had made him, "warts and all." (Ollie had a bunch of unattractive facial warts.) Or the artist wouldn't be paid.

    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/08/cromwell-portraitist-samuel-cooper-exhibition

    Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the 60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally flawed. I would say more so.

    All I am asking is that American (and other) history be written "warts and all." The triumphalist version is true, largely, and so is the Zinn version. Gone With the Wind and Roots both portray certain aspects of the pre-war south fairly accurately..

    America has been, and is, both evil and good. As is/was true of every human institution and government in history. Personally, I believe America, net/net, has been one of the greatest forces for human good ever. But nobody will realize that if only the negative side of American history is taught.

    Wally , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:16 pm GMT
    @Michael Kenny

    Hasbarist 'Kenny', you said:

    "There must be something really dirty in Russigate that hasn't yet come out to generate this level of panic."

    You continue to claim what you cannot prove.

    But then you are a Jews First Zionist.

    Russia-Gate Jumps the Shark
    Russia-gate has jumped the shark with laughable new claims about a tiny number of "Russia-linked" social media ads, but the US mainstream media is determined to keep a straight face

    https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/10/robert-parry/jumping-the-shark/

    Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet?

    https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia-story-falls-apart-is-skepticism-permissible-yet/

    + review of other frauds

    Logan , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:20 pm GMT
    @Jake

    Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which means being pro-Wahhabi and permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite Mohammedans.

    Thanks for the laugh. During the 19th century, the Sauds were toothless, dirt-poor hicks from the deep desert of zero importance on the world stage.

    The Brits were not Saudi proponents, in fact promoting the Husseins of Hejaz, the guys Lawrence of Arabia worked with. The Husseins, the Sharifs of Mecca and rulers of Hejaz, were the hereditary enemies of the Sauds of Nejd.

    After WWI, the Brits installed Husseins as rulers of both Transjordan and Iraq, which with the Hejaz meant the Sauds were pretty much surrounded. The Sauds conquered the Hejaz in 1924, despite lukewarm British support for the Hejaz.

    Nobody in the world cared much about the Saudis one way or another until massive oil fields were discovered, by Americans not Brits, starting in 1938. There was no reason they should. Prior to that Saudi prominence in world affairs was about equal to that of Chad today, and for much the same reason. Chad (and Saudi Arabia) had nothing anybody else wanted.

    Grandpa Charlie , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:25 pm GMT
    @Michael Kenny

    'Putin stopped talking about the "Lisbon to Vladivostok" free trade area long ago" -- Michael Kenney

    Putin was simply trying to sell Russia's application for EU membership with the catch-phrase "Lisbon to Vladivostok". He continued that until the issue was triply mooted (1) by implosion of EU growth and boosterism, (2) by NATO's aggressive stance, in effect taken by NATO in Ukraine events and in the Baltics, and, (3) Russia's alliance with China.

    It is surely still true that Russians think of themselves, categorically, as Europeans. OTOH, we can easily imagine that Russians in Vladivostok look at things differently than do Russians in St. Petersburg. Then again, Vladivostok only goes back about a century and a half.

    Seamus Padraig , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:39 pm GMT
    @utu

    Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration.

    I generally agree with your comment, but that part strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration. While relations with Russia certainly haven't improved, how have they really worsened? The second round of sanctions that Trump reluctantly approved have yet to be implemented by Europe, which was the goal. And apart from that, what of substance has changed?

    Seamus Padraig , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:45 pm GMT
    @Grandpa Charlie

    That pre-9/11 "cooperation" nearly destroyed Russia. Nobody in Russia (except, perhaps, for Pussy Riot) wants a return to the Yeltsin era.

    Ludwig Watzal , Website Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:46 pm GMT
    It's not surprising that 57 percent of the American people believe in Russian meddling. Didn't two-thirds of the same crowd believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, too? The American public is being brainwashed 24 hours a day all year long.

    The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it.

    This disinformation campaign might be the prelude to an upcoming war.
    Right now, the US is run by jerks and idiots. Watch the video.

    anonymous , Disclaimer Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:50 pm GMT
    Only dumb people does not know that TRUMP IS NETANYAHU'S PUPPET.

    The fifth column zionist jews are running the albino stooge and foreign policy in the Middle East to expand Israel's interest against American interest that is TREASON. One of these FIFTH COLUMNISTS is Jared Kushner. He should be arrested.

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/donald-trumps-likudist-campaign-against-iran/5614264

    [The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.

    Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran.

    Bolton spoke with Trump by phone on Thursday about the paragraph in the deal that vowed it would be "terminated" if there was any renegotiation, according to Politico. He was calling Trump from Las Vegas, where he'd been meeting with casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the third major figure behind Trump's shift towards Israeli issues. Adelson is a Likud supporter who has long been a close friend of Netanyahu's and has used his Israeli tabloid newspaper Israel Hayomto support Netanyahu's campaigns. He was Trump's main campaign contributor in 2016, donating $100 million. Adelson's real interest has been in supporting Israel's interests in Washington -- especially with regard to Iran.]

    Miro23 , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 4:56 pm GMT
    A great article with some excellent points:

    Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington.

    American dominance is very much tied to the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency, and the rest of the world no longer want to fund this bankrupt, warlike state – particularly the Chinese.

    First, it confirms that the US did not want to see the jihadist extremists defeated by Russia. These mainly-Sunni militias served as Washington's proxy-army conducting an ambitious regime change operation which coincided with US strategic ambitions.

    The CIA run US/Israeli/ISIS alliance.

    Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who dictates what they can and can't say.

    They are given the political line and they broadcast it.

    The loosening of rules governing the dissemination of domestic propaganda coupled with the extraordinary advances in surveillance technology, create the perfect conditions for the full implementation of an American police state. But what is more concerning, is that the primary levers of state power are no longer controlled by elected officials but by factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people. That can only lead to trouble.

    At some point Americans are going to get a "War on Domestic Terror" cheered along by the media. More or less the arrest and incarceration of any opposition following the Soviet Bolshevik model.

    CanSpeccy , Website Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:11 pm GMT
    @utu

    On the plus side, everyone now knows that the Anglo-US media from the NY Times to the Economist, from WaPo to the Gruniard, and from the BBC to CNN, the CBC and Weinstein's Hollywood are a worthless bunch of depraved lying bastards.

    Thales the Milesian , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:53 pm GMT
    Brennan did this, CIA did that .

    So what are you going to do about all this?

    Continue to whine?

    Continue to keep your head stuck in your ass?

    So then continue with your blah, blah, blah, and eat sh*t.

    You, disgusting self-elected democratic people/institutions!!!

    AB_Anonymous , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:59 pm GMT
    Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt, compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into something much worse.

    The thing is, no matter how thick the mental cages are, and how carefully they are maintained by the daily massive injections of "certified" truth (via MSM), along with neutralizing or compromising of "troublemakers", the presence of multiple alternative sources in the age of Internet makes people to slip out of these cages one by one, and as the last events show – with acceleration.

    It means that there's a fast approaching tipping point after which it'd be impossible for those in power both to keep a nice "civilized" face and to control the "cage-free" population. So, no matter how the next war will be called, it will be the war against the free Internet and free people. That's probably why N. Korean leader has no fear to start one.

    Art , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 6:18 pm GMT
    An aside:

    All government secrecy is a curse on mankind. Trump is releasing the JFK murder files to the public. Kudos! Let us hope he will follow up with a full 9/11 investigation.

    Think Peace -- Art

    Mr. Anon , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:07 pm GMT
    @utu

    The objective was to push new administration into the corner from which it could not improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he wanted to during the campaign.

    Good point. That was probably one of the objectives (and from the point of view of the deep-state, perhaps the most important objective) of the "Russia hacked our democracy" narrative, in addition to the general deligitimization of the Trump administration.

    Art , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:11 pm GMT
    And, keep in mind, Washington's Sunni proxies were not a division of the Pentagon; they were entirely a CIA confection: CIA recruited, CIA-armed, CIA-funded and CIA-trained.

    Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six month actions – they go on and on.)

    Are committees of six congressman and six senators, who meet in secret, just avoiding the grave constitutional questions of war? We the People cannot even interrogate these politicians. (These politicians make big money in the secrecy swamp when they leave office.)

    Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are we attacking with drones? Where is congress?

    Spying is one thing – covert action is another – covert is wrong – it goes against world order. Every year after 9/11 they say things are worse – give them more money more power and they will make things safe. That is BS!

    9/11 has opened the flood gates to the US government attacking at will, the various peoples of this Earth. That is NOT our prerogative.

    We are being exceptionally arrogant.

    Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies.

    Think Peace -- Art

    Rurik , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:12 pm GMT
    @Ben10

    right at 1:47

    when he says 'we can't move on as a country'

    his butt hurt is so ruefully obvious, that I couldn't help notice a wry smile on my face

    that bitch spent millions on the war sow, and now all that mullah won't even wipe his butt hurt

    when I see ((guys)) like this raging their inner crybaby angst, I feel really, really good about President Trump

    MAGA bitches!

    Mr. Anon , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:15 pm GMT
    @jilles dykstra

    I am reading Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the USA

    A Peoples History of the USA? Which Peoples?

    Tradecraft46 , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 8:04 pm GMT
    I am SAIS 70 so know the drill and the article is on point.

    Here is the dealio. Most reporters are dim and have no experience, and it is real easy to lead them by the nose with promises of better in the future.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. ..."
    "... The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment, as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player. ..."
    "... Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time. The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence of NATO, for instance. ..."
    "... Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown. Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline. ..."
    "... Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues, will consolidate its economic domination. ..."
    "... A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its different dimensions ..."
    "... Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous combination. ..."
    Oct 28, 2017 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. Alternative social forces, like the ones behind Trump's presidential triumph, only have a limited impact on domestic and ultimately on foreign policy. A conceptual detour and a brief on history and on Trump's domestic setting when he was elected will help clarifying these theses.

    Beyond the different costumes that it wears (dealing with ideology, international law, and even religion), foreign policy follows domestic policy. The domestic policy actors are the social forces at work at a given point of time, mainly the economic agents and their ambitions (in their multiple expressions), including the ruling power elite. Society's aspirations not only relate to material welfare, but also to ideological priorities that population segments may have at a given point of time.

    From America's initial days until the mid 1800s, there seems to have been a broad alignment of US foreign policy with the wishes of its power elite and other social forces. America's expansionism, a fundamental bulwark of its foreign policy from early days, reflected the need to fulfill its growing population's ambitions for land and, later on, the need to find foreign markets for its excess production, initially agricultural and later on manufacturing. It can be said that American foreign policy was broadly populist at that time. The power elite was more or less aligned in achieving these expansionist goals and was able to provide convenient ideological justification through the writings of Jefferson and Madison, among others.

    As the country expanded, diverging interests became stronger and ultimately differing social forces caused a significant fracture in society. The American Civil War was the climax of the conflicted interests between agricultural and manufacturing led societies. Fifty years later, a revealing manifestation of this divergence (which survived the Civil War), as it relates to foreign policy, is found during the early days of the Russian Revolution when, beyond the ideological revulsion of Bolshevism, the US was paralyzed between the agricultural and farming businesses seeking exports to Russia and the domestic extractive industries interested in stopping exports of natural resources from this country.

    The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment, as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player.

    Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time. The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence of NATO, for instance.

    Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown. Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline.

    Trump won his presidency because he was able to get support from the country's growing frustrated white population. His main social themes (bringing jobs to America by stopping the decline of its manufacturing industry, preventing further US consumer dependence on foreign imports and halting immigration) fitted well with the electors' anger. Traditional populist themes linked to foreign policy (like Russophobia) did not play a big role in the last election. But whether or not the Trump administration can align with the ruling power elite in a manner that addresses the key social and economic needs of the American people is still to be seen.

    Back to foreign policy, we need to distinguish between Trump's style of government and his administration's actions. At least until now, focusing excessively on Trump's style has dangerously distracted from his true intentions. One example is the confusion about his initial stance on NATO which was simplistically seen as highly critical to the very existence of this organization. On NATO, all that Trump really cared was to achieve a "fair" sharing of expenditures with other members and to press them to honor their funding commitments.

    From immigration to defense spending, there is nothing irrational about Trump's foreign policy initiatives, as they just reflect a different reading on the American people's aspirations and, consequently, they attempt to rely on supporting points within the power elite which are different from the ones used in the past.

    Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues, will consolidate its economic domination. A far-reaching lesson, although still being ignored, is that China's economic might is showing that capitalism as understood in the West is not winning, much less in its American format. It also shows that democracy may not be that relevant, as it is not necessarily a corollary or a condition for economic development. Perhaps it even shows the superiority of China's economic model, but this is a different matter.

    As Trump becomes more aware about his limitations, he has naturally reversed to the basic imprints of America's traditional foreign policy, particularly concerning defense. His emphasis on a further increase in defense spending is not done for prestigious or national security reasons, but as an attempt to preserve a job generating infrastructure without considering the catastrophic consequences that it may cause.

    On Iran, Obama's initiative to seek normalization was an attempt to walk a fine line (and to find a less conflictive path) between supporting the US traditional Middle East allies (mainly the odd combination of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) and recognizing Iran's growing aspirations. Deep down, Obama was trying to acknowledge Iran's historical viability as a country and a society that will not disappear from the map, while Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, may not be around in a few years. Trump's Iran policy until now only represents a different weighing of priorities, although it is having far reaching consequences on America's credibility as a reliable contractual party in international affairs.

    In the case of Afghanistan, Trump's decision to increase boots on the ground does not break the inertia of US past administrations. Aside from temporary containment, an increasing military presence or a change in tactics will not alter fundamentally this reality.

    Concerning Russia, and regardless of what Trump has said, actions speak more than words. A continuous deterioration of relations seems inevitable.

    Trump will also learn, if he has not done so already, about the growth of multipolar forces in world's events. Russia has mastered this reality for several years and is quite skillful at using it as a basic tool of its own foreign goals. Our multipolar world will expand, and Trump may even inadvertently exacerbate it through its actions (for instance in connection with the different stands taken by the US and its European allies concerning Iran).

    While fulfilling the aspirations of the American people seems more difficult within the existing capitalist framework, there are also growing apprehensions coming from America's power elite as it becomes more frustrated due to its incapacity of being more effective at the world level. America's relative adolescence in world's history will become more and more apparent in the coming years.

    A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its different dimensions. The US has never suffered the consequences of an international conflict in its own backyard. The American Civil War, despite all the suffering that it caused, was primarily a domestic event with no foreign intervention (contrary to the wishes of the Confederation). The deep social and psychological damage caused by war is not part of America's consciousness as it is, for instance in Germany, Russia or Japan. America is insensitive to the lessons of history because it has a very short history itself.

    Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous combination.

    Oscar Silva-Valladares is a former investment banker that has lived and worked in North and Latin America, Western & Eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan, the Philippines and Western Africa. He currently chairs Davos International Advisory, an advisory firm focused on strategic consulting across emerging markets.

    Related

    [Apr 21, 2019] Special Counsel Mueller -- Disingenuous and Dishonest by Larry C Johnson

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... As I noted in my previous piece-- The FBI Tried and Failed to Entrap Trump --Sater was an active FBI undercover informant. ..."
    "... An honest prosecutor would have and should have disclosed this fact. He, Sater, was the one encouraging the Trump team to cozy up to Russia. Mueller does not disclose one single instance of Trump or Cohen or any of the Trump kids calling Sater on the carpet and chewing his ass for not bringing them deals and not opening doors in Russia. Omitting this key fact goes beyond simple disingenuity. It is a conscious lie. ..."
    "... The circumstantial evidence indicates that Sater was doing this at the behest of FBI handlers. We do not yet know who they are. ..."
    "... We also have the case of Michael Caputo and Roger Stone being approached by a Russian gangster named Henry Greenberg. ..."
    "... How does a guy like Vorkretsov/Greenberg, with an extensive criminal record and circumstantial ties to the Russian mob gain entrance into the United States? Very simple answer. He too was an FBI informant : ..."
    "... Please take time to read the full dossier at democrat dossier . This is more than an odd coincidence. This is a pattern. The FBI was targeting the Trump campaign and personnel in a deliberate effort to implicate them in wanting to work with Russians. ..."
    "... Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur -- -i.e., Joseph Mifsud -- -as some simple guy with ties to Russia's political elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on the forefront of exposing Mifsud's ties to western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular . ..."
    "... A number of Twitter users recently observed that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud’s LINK campus in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor’s name and biography had been removed from the campus’ website, writing that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for “years.” ..."
    "... WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: “[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo].” ..."
    "... This is not a mere matter of Mueller and his team "failing" to disclose some important facts. If they were operating honestly they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three--Sater and Greenber--alleged Russian stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community. ..."
    "... Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss. ..."
    "... Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation . THe IRGC being labelled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. ..."
    "... You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference. ..."
    "... The Special Relationship is hopefully entering the divorce stage. None too soon. Great work, Mr. Johnson. ..."
    Apr 20, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    While President Trump is correct to celebrate the Mueller Report’s conclusion that no one on Trump’s side of the ledger attempted to or succeeded in collaborating or colluding with the Russian Government or Russian spies, there remains a dark cloud behind the silver lining. And I am not referring to the claims of alleged obstruction of justice. A careful reading of the report reveals that Mueller has issued findings that are both disingenuous and dishonest. The report is a failed hatchet job. Part of the failure can be attributed to the amount of material that Attorney General Barr allowed to be released. It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team.

    Let us start with the case of trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. If you were to believe that the Steele Dossier accurately reported Vladimir Putin's attitude towards Trump, then a Trump real estate deal in Moscow was a slam dunk. According to one of Steele's breathless reports:
    The Kremlin's cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. How ever, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.
    Then there is reality. The impetus, the encouragement for the Moscow project came from one man--Felix Sater.
    In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov.J07 Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City.30S Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).
    To reiterate--if the Steele Dossier was based on truthful intelligence then the Trump organization only had to sit back, stretch out their hands and seize the moment. Instead, little Felix Sater keeps coming back to the well. In January 2016, according to the Mueller report,
    Sater then sent a draft invitation for Cohen to visit Moscow to discuss the Trump Moscow project,along with a note to "[t]ell me if the letter is good as amended by me or make whatever changes you want and send it back to me."

    After a further round of edits, on January 25, 2016, Sater sent Cohen an invitation -- signed by Andrey Ryabinskiy of the company MHJ -- to travel to "Moscow for a working visit" about the "prospects of development and the construction business in Russia," "the various land plots available suited for construction of this enormous Tower," and "the opportunity to co-ordinate a follow up visit to Moscow by Mr. Donald Trump..

    This produced nothing. No deal, no trip. But Sater persisted:

    Beginning in late 2015, Sater repeatedly tried to arrange for Cohen and candidate Trump, as representatives of the Trump Organization, to travel to Russia to meet with Russian government officials and possible financing partners. . . .

    Into the spring of 2016, Sater and Cohen continued to discuss a trip to Moscow in connection with the Trump Moscow project. On April 20, 2016, Sater wrote Cohen, " [t)he People wanted to know when you are coming?,,

    On May 4, 2016, Sater followed up:

    “I had a chat with Moscow. ASSUMING the trip does happen the question is before or after the convention. I said I believe, but don't know for sure, that's it's probably after the convention. Obviously the pre-meeting trip (you only) can happen anytime you want but he 2 big guys where [sic) the question. I said I would confirm and revert.”

    On May 5, 2016, Sater wrote to Cohen:

    “Peskov would like to invite you as his guest to the St. Petersburg Forum which is Russia's Davos it's June 16-19. He wants to meet there with you and possibly introduce you to either Putin or Medvedev, as they are not sure if 1 or both will be there. This is perfect. The entire business class of Russia will be there as well.”

    On June 14, 2016, Cohen met Sater in the lobby of the Trump Tower in New York and informed him that he would not be traveling at that time.

    Why was Felix Sater the one repeatedly identified pushing to arrange deals with the Russians and yet did not face any subsequent charges by the Mueller team? Sater had been working as part of the Trump team since 2003. Why is it that the proposed deals and travel to Moscow came predominantly from Felix Sater?

    As I noted in my previous piece--The FBI Tried and Failed to Entrap Trump--Sater was an active FBI undercover informant. He had been working with the FBI since 1998. When he agreed to start working as an undercover informant aka cooperator in December 1998 guess who signed off on the deal? Andrew Weissman. You can see the deal here. It was signed 10 December 1998.

    An honest prosecutor would have and should have disclosed this fact. He, Sater, was the one encouraging the Trump team to cozy up to Russia. Mueller does not disclose one single instance of Trump or Cohen or any of the Trump kids calling Sater on the carpet and chewing his ass for not bringing them deals and not opening doors in Russia. Omitting this key fact goes beyond simple disingenuity. It is a conscious lie.

    The circumstantial evidence indicates that Sater was doing this at the behest of FBI handlers. We do not yet know who they are.

    But Sater's behavior and status as an FBI Informant was not an isolated incident. We also have the case of Michael Caputo and Roger Stone being approached by a Russian gangster named Henry Greenberg. According to democratdossier.com:

    Greenberg's birth name is Gennady Vasilievich Vostretsov, the son of Yekatrina Vostretsova and Vasliy Vostretsov. He later adopted new names twice as a result of two different marriages and became Gennady V. Arzhanik and later Henry Oknyansky. Henry Greenberg is not a legal alias, but he uses it quite commonly in recent years.
    But you would not know this from reading the Mueller report. Mr. Disingenuous strikes again:
    In the spring of 2016, Trump Campaign advisor Michael Caputo learned through a Florida-based Russian business partner that another Florida-based Russian, Henry Oknyansky (who also went by the name Henry Greenberg), claimed to have information pertaining to Hillary Clinton . Caputo notified Roger Stone and brokered communication between Stone and Oknyansky.

    Oknyansky and Stone set up a May 2016 in-person meeting. 260 Oknyansky was accompanied to the meeting by Alexei Rasin, a Ukrainian associate involved in Florida real estate. At the meeting, Rasin offered to sell Stone derogatory information on Clinton that Rasin claimed to have obtained while working for Clinton. Rasin claimed to possess financial statements demonstrating Clinton's involvement in money laundering with Rasin's companies. According to Oknyansky, Stone asked if the amounts in question totaled millions of dollars but was told it was closer to hundreds of thousands. Stone refused the offer, stating that Trump would not pay for opposition research.

    How does a guy like Vorkretsov/Greenberg, with an extensive criminal record and circumstantial ties to the Russian mob gain entrance into the United States? Very simple answer. He too was an FBI informant:

    In an affidavit, Vostretsov explained to an immigration judge he worked for the FBI for 17 years throughout the world, including in the US, Iran and North Korea. He explained in the same paperwork the FBI granted him several temporary visas to visit the US in exchange for information about criminal activities.

    Please take time to read the full dossier at democrat dossier. This is more than an odd coincidence. This is a pattern. The FBI was targeting the Trump campaign and personnel in a deliberate effort to implicate them in wanting to work with Russians.

    And there is more. George Papodopoulus was entrapped by individuals linked to British MI-6 and the CIA with offers to provide meetings with Russians and Putin. The Mueller account is a lie:

    In late April 2016, Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, immediately after Mifsud 's return from a trip to Moscow, that the Russian government had obtained "dirt" on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. One week later, on May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to candidate Clinton.

    Papadopoulos shared information about Russian "dirt " with people outside of the Campaign, and the Office investigated whether he also provided it to a Campaign official. Papadopoulos and the Campaign officials with whom he interacted told the Office that they did · not recall that Papadopoulos passed them the information. Throughout the relevant period of time and for several months thereafter, Papadopoulos worked with Mifsud and two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government. That meeting never came to pass.

    Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur -- -i.e., Joseph Mifsud -- -as some simple guy with ties to Russia's political elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on the forefront of exposing Mifsud's ties to western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular.

    Mifsud’s alleged links to Russian intelligence are summarily debunked by his close working relationship with Claire Smith, a major figure in the upper echelons of British intelligence. A number of Twitter users recently observed that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud’s LINK campus in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor’s name and biography had been removed from the campus’ website, writing that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for “years.”

    WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: “[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo].”

    The photograph in question originated on Geodiplomatics.com, where it specified that Joseph Mifsud is indeed standing next to Claire Smith, who was attending a: “…Training program on International Security which was organised by Link Campus University and London Academy of Diplomacy.” The event is listed as taking place in October, 2012. This is highly significant for a number of reasons.

    This is not a mere matter of Mueller and his team "failing" to disclose some important facts. If they were operating honestly they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three--Sater and Greenber--alleged Russian stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community.

    When you put these facts together it is clear that there is real meat on the bone for Barr's upcoming investigation of the "spying" that was being done on the Trump campaign by law enforcement and intelligence. These facts must become a part of the public consciousness. The foreign country that worked feverishly to meddle in the 2016 Presidential election and the subsequent rule of Donald Trump is the United Kingdom. Russia is the patsy.

    turcopolier, 20 April 2019 at 10:44 PM

    IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO apparatus to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position.

    falcemartello, 20 April 2019 at 11:28 PM

    Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss.

    It was obvious from way back in June 2016 when most of the fabricated /novella known as the Steele Dossier was floating around and the role Fusion GPS played in the Clinton POTUS machine. There is a lot out there but as per usual smokey mirrors and deception.

    I live you with this one thought.

    Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation . THe IRGC being labelled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism.

    You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference.

    Rick Merlotti

    The Special Relationship is hopefully entering the divorce stage. None too soon. Great work, Mr. Johnson.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us know how evil and disgusting that person is? It's true of the leader of every nation which refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it's true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it's true of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

    Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they'll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they'll be far more likely to consent to Assange's imprisonment, thereby establishing a precedent for the future prosecution of leak-publishing journalists around the world. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you're suspicious of him you won't believe anything he's saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it's as good as putting a bullet in his head.

    Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they appear. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any kind of centralized source of information which comprehensively debunks all the smears in a thorough and engaging way, so with the help of hundreds of tips from my readers and social media followers I'm going to attempt to make one here. What follows is my attempt at creating a tool kit people can use to fight against Assange smears wherever they encounter them, by refuting the disinformation with truth and solid argumentation.

    This article is an ongoing project which will be updated regularly where it appears on Medium and caitlinjohnstone.com as new information comes in and new smears spring up in need of refutation.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender. That would explain Sater's early attempts at apparent entrapment. Since that didn't work, a different strategy had to be devised to deny the presidency to someone over whom the intelligence services lacked sufficient leverage. ..."
    "... Hillary gladly cooperated and raised the specter of collusion with Russia, which she trumpeted in the debates, downplaying other issues that could have resonated more with voters. Since she thought she was a slam dunk, she thought she could afford to cooperate. It could only help ingratiate her with the borg. ..."
    "... On the other hand, Brennan and others in the borg used their allies in the media to promote and propagate the story, which mushroomed when Trump defied the odds and won. Hillary was eager to play the victim as a way to excuse her failure. And the borg began hyping the story to cripple Trump unless he heeled. Initially Trump resisted, firing Comey. But with Bolton now ensconced as the National Security Advisor, it is clear that the borg has won, and the lack of any conspiracy could now be revealed. ..."
    "... IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO apparatus to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position. ..."
    "... Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss. ..."
    "... Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation. ..."
    "... both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference. ..."
    "... It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team. ..."
    "... The most farcical thing in the Mueller report is that he did not fill obstruction charges or even recommend that it should be filled, but yet he did not "exonerate" Trump. ..."
    "... In other words, Mueller did not think that he had enough to make an obstruction case in the courts of justice, and keep in mind that an indictment requires only "probable cause", not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction, but nevertheless he went out of his way to leave the obstruction sword hanging over Trump`s head so the political infighting does not end. ..."
    Apr 21, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
    JohnH , 21 April 2019 at 12:38 AM
    Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender. That would explain Sater's early attempts at apparent entrapment. Since that didn't work, a different strategy had to be devised to deny the presidency to someone over whom the intelligence services lacked sufficient leverage.

    Hillary gladly cooperated and raised the specter of collusion with Russia, which she trumpeted in the debates, downplaying other issues that could have resonated more with voters. Since she thought she was a slam dunk, she thought she could afford to cooperate. It could only help ingratiate her with the borg.

    On the other hand, Brennan and others in the borg used their allies in the media to promote and propagate the story, which mushroomed when Trump defied the odds and won. Hillary was eager to play the victim as a way to excuse her failure. And the borg began hyping the story to cripple Trump unless he heeled. Initially Trump resisted, firing Comey. But with Bolton now ensconced as the National Security Advisor, it is clear that the borg has won, and the lack of any conspiracy could now be revealed.

    Such a scenario would explain why Sater, Mufid, Steele and apparent attempts at entrapment got buried. And, with obstruction still hanging over Trump's head, the borg's leverage is still there if needed.

    turcopolier , 20 April 2019 at 10:44 PM

    IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO apparatus to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position.
    falcemartello , 20 April 2019 at 11:28 PM
    Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss.

    It was obvious from way back in June 2016 when most of the fabricated /novella known as the Steele Dossier was floating around and the role Fusion GPS played in the Clinton POTUS machine. There is a lot out there but as per usual smokey mirrors and deception.

    I live you with this one thought.

    Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation.

    THe IRGC being labeled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference.

    Mahmood Saadi said in reply to falcemartello ... , 21 April 2019 at 07:53 AM
    Indeed, dishonesty seems somewhat institutionalized at this height.. https://twitter.com/JonathanLalon12/status/1119251603716894720

    Trump is not free from illegal use of US institutions against political "opponents", see the last by Wayne Madsen.

    https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/21/trump-attempt-weaponize-nsa-against-his-enemies.html

    Rick Merlotti , 20 April 2019 at 11:51 PM
    The Special Relationship is hopefully entering the divorce stage. None too soon. Great work, Mr. Johnson.
    English Outsider -> Rick Merlotti ... , 21 April 2019 at 09:32 AM
    Special Relationship? All it's possible for the outsider to see in that are questions.

    The UK stands shoulder to shoulder with the US in repelling the Russian threat. Also, along with France, helps with any R2P that needs doing. That's a consistent if by now bedraggled story.

    But Europe, including the UK, is now going hell for leather at the "European Army" project. How long will it be before that becomes a respectable independent force? A decade?

    https://www.dw.com/en/limited-number-of-weapons-in-german-military-ready-for-action-report/a-42752070

    In the meantime all recognise that the US is the only significant European defence force. It's not just the money. The US ties the European components of NATO together and provides the big reserves of men and equipment. Even Mr Blair accepts that reality. I've been listening to his talk at the Munich Security Conference.

    So the US is to hold the fort in Europe while the Europeans prepare to supplant NATO? Do the Europeans plan to be a military superpower themselves eventually?

    And where does Trump fit in? Trumpphobia is as strong as Russophobia in the UK and stronger than Russophobia in continental Europe. So Trump is supposed to sit there placidly defending Europe until the Europeans are strong enough to dispense with the American alliance, and that while the Europeans, including the UK, throw mud at him?

    Neither in neocon terms nor in terms of sensible defence are these various stories compatible. Is there any sort of coherent defense policy in this respect on either side of the Atlantic? Or are they all just winging it and ignoring the inconsistencies?

    likbez , 21 April 2019 at 12:24 AM
    Bravo ! One word "Bravo!!!" This is a very good, probably the best so far in depth analysis of Mueller's final report. And your phase "disingenuous and dishonest" is like a stamp on Mueller's hatchet job:
    A careful reading of the report reveals that Mueller has issued findings that are both disingenuous and dishonest. The report is a failed hatchet job.

    Part of the failure can be attributed to the amount of material that Attorney General Barr allowed to be released.

    It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team.

    Alves , 21 April 2019 at 04:00 AM
    The most farcical thing in the Mueller report is that he did not fill obstruction charges or even recommend that it should be filled, but yet he did not "exonerate" Trump.

    In other words, Mueller did not think that he had enough to make an obstruction case in the courts of justice, and keep in mind that an indictment requires only "probable cause", not the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction, but nevertheless he went out of his way to leave the obstruction sword hanging over Trump`s head so the political infighting does not end.

    IMO, that is the biggest evidence that the whole thing was an attempt at facilitating a political power grab instead of a serious criminal investigation.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Even if we got a candidate against the War Party the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump betayal his voters, surrounded himself with neocons, continues to do Bibi's bidding, and ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down?

    Highly recommended!
    Here we need to look at the candidate political history, their actions before the election. "Trump scam" like "Obama scam" was based on the fact that they do not have political history, they were what Romans called "Tabula rasa". A "clean state" politician into which voters can project their wishes about domestic and foreign policy. That was a dirty. but very effective trick.
    But the most important factor in Trump win was the he was competing against despicable warmonger Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate who wanted to kick the neoliberal globalization can down the road. So the "lesser evilism" card was also in play consciously or unconscionably as well. So with Hillary as the opposition candidate it was a kind of implementation of the USSR style elections on a new level. but with the same with zero choice. Effectively the US electorate was disenfranchised when FBI has thrown Sander under the bus by exonerating Hillary. In a way FBI was the kingmaker in 2016 elections.
    And please note that the Deep State launched a color revolution against Trump to keep him in check. Only later it became evident that he from the very beginning was a pro-Israel neoconservative, probably fully controlled by pro-Israel forces. That Trump electorate bought MIGA instead of MAGA from the day one.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The question is even if we got a candidate against the War Party & the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump, the candidate who campaigned on the wasteful expenditures in our endless wars has surrounded himself with neocons and continues to do Bibi's bidding ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down? ..."
    Apr 21, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    blue peacock -> turcopolier ... , 21 April 2019 at 12:36 PM

    Col. Lang,

    In a recent call from Trump requesting his opinion on China, Jimmy Carter noted that China has not spent a dime on war since 1979, whereas we've spent trillions & continue to spend even more.

    China invested trillions in their infrastructure while ours crumbles. They've invested in building the world's manufacturing capacity while we dismantled ours. We spend twice per capita on healthcare compared to any other western country, yet chronic diseases like diabetes keeps growing. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined yet how superior is our weaponry compared to the Russians who spend one-tenth of what we spend? We've financialized our economy and socialized speculative losses of Wall St mavens but when some politicians talk about spending on the commons then socialism is labeled bad.

    https://www.epsilontheory.com/this-is-water/

    The question is even if we got a candidate against the War Party & the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump, the candidate who campaigned on the wasteful expenditures in our endless wars has surrounded himself with neocons and continues to do Bibi's bidding ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down?

    [Apr 21, 2019] Muller report implicates Obama administration in total and utter incompetence, if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called criminal negligence in legal speak.

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 21, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

    likbez , April 20, 2019 2:30 am

    "Within approximately five hours of Trump's statement, GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton's personal office. "
    The report shows that Russia coordinated with Trump even if he was unaware of it.

    Do you understand that you implicate Obama administration in total and utter incompetence, if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called criminal negligence in legal speak.

    So all our three letter agencies with their enormous budgets and staff including NSA which intercepts all incoming/outgoing communications (and probably most internal communications) can't protect the USA elections from interference that they knew about ? Why they did not warn Trump?

    Or NSA assumed that it was yet another CIA "training exercise" imposing as Russian hackers?

    It not clear why Russia need such a crude methods as, for example, hacking Podesta email via spearfishing (NSA has all the recodings in this case), as you can buy, say a couple of Google engineers for less then a million dollars (many Google engineers hate Google with its cult of performance reviews and know that they are getting much less then their Facebook counterparts, so this might well be not that difficult) and get all you want without extra noise.

    Historically Soviet and, especially, East German intelligence were real experts in utilizing "humint". With the crash of neoliberal ideology that probably is easier for Russians now then it was for Soviets or East Germans in 60th-80th.

    For example, from my admittedly nonprofessional point of view, the most logical assumption about DNC hack is that it was a mixture of the internal leak (download of the files to the UCB drive) and Crowdstrike false flag operation (cover up operation which included implanting Russian (or Ukrainian) malware from Vault 7 to blame Russians.

    And that Gussifer 2.0 was most probably a fake personality created specifically to increase credibility of this false flag operation (see for example http://g-2.space/ and https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/guccifer-2-clinton-foundation-hack-leak/ )

    likbez , April 20, 2019 1:12 pm

    Arne,

    April 20, 2019 11:15 am

    "Do you understand that you implicate Obama administration"

    They did screw up.

    Wrong. The fact that they did not warn/brief Trump suggests that this was an a deliberate and pre-planned attempt to entrap him by initiating Russian contacts by FBI/CIA/MI6 moles

    We have some cursory evidence of at least four attempts to link Trump to Russians supposedly conducted by intelligence services ( https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/russiagate/ ):

    1. Moscow Trump Tower set up (via FBI mole Felix Saters), https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/04/the-fbi-tried-and-failed-to-entrap-trump-by-larry-c-johnson.html
    2. DNC email setup (via CIA and FBI contractor Crowdstrike ) https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/04/test-it-yourself-the-2-second-rounding-fact-pattern-in-the-dnc-emails-by-william-binney-and-larry-jo.html
    3. Veselnitskaya Trump tower meeting set up (via MI6 mole Rob Goldstone). https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/04/httpstruepunditcomexclusive-six-u-s-agencies-conspired-to-illegally-wiretap-trump-british-intel-used-as-fr.html
    4. Papadopoulos set up ( via Josef Misfud (MI6) and Stefan Halper (CIA) ). At the time Halper probably was reporting to the current CIA director Gina Haspel who was at this time CIA station chief in GB. She is a Brennan protégé, of recent Skripals dead ducks hoax fame.

    Surveillance was specifically established to collect compromising material on Trump and his associates with high level official in Obama administration (and probably Obama himself) playing coordinating role.

    Colonel Lang's blog is a good source of information on those issues with posts by former intelligence specialists.

    And please note that I am not a Trump supporter. I resent him and his policies.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

    Highly recommended!
    Powerful video about US propaganda machine. Based on Iraq War propaganda efforts. This is a formidable machine.
    Shows quite vividly that most US politicians of Bush era were war criminal by Nuremberg Tribunal standards. Starting with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They planned the war of aggression against Iraq long before 9/11.
    Apr 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Desolation Row , Apr 20, 2019 10:21:11 PM | link

    Desolation Row | Apr 20, 2019 10:09:06 PM | 41

    Psywar

    Source: https://vimeo.com/14772678 @ 48:15

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers. ..."
    "... Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him to act. This was the beginning of downward slope. ..."
    "... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer. ..."
    "... The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have been there anyway. ..."
    "... No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful way ..."
    "... " ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people." ..."
    "... All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests. ..."
    "... A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated the 98% poor, to stay rich. When there were insurrections federal troops restored order. Also FDR put down strikes with troops. ..."
    "... The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter. ..."
    "... "The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story after another would achieve the desired result " ..."
    "... But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world. ..."
    "... I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and facts don't matter! ..."
    "... Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about intimidating them. ..."
    "... The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was, and that means as bad as Hell itself. ..."
    "... Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the 60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally flawed. I would say more so. ..."
    "... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. ..."
    "... That pre-9/11 "cooperation" nearly destroyed Russia. Nobody in Russia (except, perhaps, for Pussy Riot) wants a return to the Yeltsin era. ..."
    "... The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it. ..."
    "... [The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank. ..."
    "... Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran. ..."
    "... Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington. ..."
    "... Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who dictates what they can and can't say. ..."
    "... Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt, compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into something much worse. ..."
    "... Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six month actions – they go on and on.) ..."
    "... Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are we attacking with drones? Where is congress? ..."
    "... Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies. ..."
    Oct 22, 2017 | www.unz.com

    Fran Macadam , October 20, 2017 at 3:08 pm GMT

    A credible reading of the diverse facts, Mike.
    Kirk Elarbee , October 20, 2017 at 8:27 pm GMT
    Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers.

    http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/10/everyone-hacked-everyone-hacked-everyone-spy-spin-fuels-anti-kaspersky-campaign.html

    utu , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:18 am GMT
    Again Mike Whitney does not get it. Though in the first part of the article I thought he would. He was almost getting there. The objective was to push new administration into the corner from which it could not improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he wanted to during the campaign.

    Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him to act. This was the beginning of downward slope.

    Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer.

    Pamela Geller: Thank You, Larry David

    http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/10/19/pamela-geller-thank-larry-david/

    anon , Disclaimer Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:54 am GMT
    OK.

    The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have been there anyway.

    No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful way

    The one thing I am not positive about. If the elite really believe that Russia is a threat, then Americans have done psych ops on themselves.

    The US was only interested in Ukraine because it was there. Next in line on a map. The rather shocking disinterest in investing money -- on both sides -- is inexplicable if it was really important. Most of it would be a waste -- but still. The US stupidly spent $5 billion on something -- getting duped by politicians and got theoretical regime change, but it was hell to pry even $1 billion for real economic aid.

    ThereisaGod , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 6:37 am GMT
    " ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people."

    All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests.

    jilles dykstra , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 6:46 am GMT
    I am reading Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the USA, 1492 to the Present. A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated the 98% poor, to stay rich. When there were insurrections federal troops restored order. Also FDR put down strikes with troops.
    Logan , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 11:16 am GMT
    @jilles dykstra

    You should be aware that Zinn's book is not, IMO, an honest attempt at writing history. It is conscious propaganda intended to make Americans believe exactly what you are taking from it.

    DESERT FOX , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 1:30 pm GMT
    The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter.

    Until that fact changes Americans will continue to fight and die for Israel.

    TG , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 2:03 pm GMT
    "The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story after another would achieve the desired result "

    But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world.

    I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and facts don't matter!

    Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about intimidating them.

    Anonymous , Disclaimer Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 2:05 pm GMT
    Whitney is another author who declares the "Russians did it" narrative a psyop. He then devotes entire columns to the psyop, "naww Russia didn't do it". There could be plenty to write about – recent laws that do undercut liberty, but no, the Washington Post needs fake opposition to its fake news so you have guys like Whitney in the less-mainstream fake news media.

    So Brennan wanted revenge? Well that's simple enough to understand, without being too stupid. But Whitney's whopper of a lie is what you're supposed to unquestionably believe. The US has "rival political parties". Did you miss it?

    Jake , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 2:32 pm GMT
    The US is doing nothing more than acting as the British Empire 2.0. WASP culture was born of a Judaizing heresy: Anglo-Saxon Puritanism. That meant that the WASP Elites of every are pro-Jewish, especially in order to wage war, physical and/or cultural, against the vast majority of white Christians they rule.

    By the early 19th century, The Brit Empire's Elites also had a strong, and growing, dose of pro-Arabic/pro-Islamic philoSemitism. Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which means being pro-Wahhabi and permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite Mohammedans.

    So, by the time of Victoria's high reign, the Brit WASP Elites were a strange brew of hardcoree pro-Jewish and hardcore pro-Arabic/islamic. The US foreign policy of today is an attempt to put those two together and force it on everyone and make it work.

    The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was, and that means as bad as Hell itself.

    Logan , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:04 pm GMT
    @Grandpa Charlie

    Fair enough. I didn't know that about the foreword. If accurate, that's a reasonable approach for a book.

    Here's the problem.

    Back when O. Cromwell was the dictator of England, he retained an artist to paint him. The custom of the time was for artists to "clean up" their subjects, in a primitive form of photoshopping.

    OC being a religious fanatic, he informed the artist he wished to be portrayed as God had made him, "warts and all." (Ollie had a bunch of unattractive facial warts.) Or the artist wouldn't be paid.

    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/08/cromwell-portraitist-samuel-cooper-exhibition

    Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the 60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally flawed. I would say more so.

    All I am asking is that American (and other) history be written "warts and all." The triumphalist version is true, largely, and so is the Zinn version. Gone With the Wind and Roots both portray certain aspects of the pre-war south fairly accurately..

    America has been, and is, both evil and good. As is/was true of every human institution and government in history. Personally, I believe America, net/net, has been one of the greatest forces for human good ever. But nobody will realize that if only the negative side of American history is taught.

    Wally , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:16 pm GMT
    @Michael Kenny

    Hasbarist 'Kenny', you said:

    "There must be something really dirty in Russigate that hasn't yet come out to generate this level of panic."

    You continue to claim what you cannot prove.

    But then you are a Jews First Zionist.

    Russia-Gate Jumps the Shark
    Russia-gate has jumped the shark with laughable new claims about a tiny number of "Russia-linked" social media ads, but the US mainstream media is determined to keep a straight face

    https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/10/robert-parry/jumping-the-shark/

    Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet?

    https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia-story-falls-apart-is-skepticism-permissible-yet/

    + review of other frauds

    Logan , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:20 pm GMT
    @Jake

    Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which means being pro-Wahhabi and permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite Mohammedans.

    Thanks for the laugh. During the 19th century, the Sauds were toothless, dirt-poor hicks from the deep desert of zero importance on the world stage.

    The Brits were not Saudi proponents, in fact promoting the Husseins of Hejaz, the guys Lawrence of Arabia worked with. The Husseins, the Sharifs of Mecca and rulers of Hejaz, were the hereditary enemies of the Sauds of Nejd.

    After WWI, the Brits installed Husseins as rulers of both Transjordan and Iraq, which with the Hejaz meant the Sauds were pretty much surrounded. The Sauds conquered the Hejaz in 1924, despite lukewarm British support for the Hejaz.

    Nobody in the world cared much about the Saudis one way or another until massive oil fields were discovered, by Americans not Brits, starting in 1938. There was no reason they should. Prior to that Saudi prominence in world affairs was about equal to that of Chad today, and for much the same reason. Chad (and Saudi Arabia) had nothing anybody else wanted.

    Grandpa Charlie , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:25 pm GMT
    @Michael Kenny

    'Putin stopped talking about the "Lisbon to Vladivostok" free trade area long ago" -- Michael Kenney

    Putin was simply trying to sell Russia's application for EU membership with the catch-phrase "Lisbon to Vladivostok". He continued that until the issue was triply mooted (1) by implosion of EU growth and boosterism, (2) by NATO's aggressive stance, in effect taken by NATO in Ukraine events and in the Baltics, and, (3) Russia's alliance with China.

    It is surely still true that Russians think of themselves, categorically, as Europeans. OTOH, we can easily imagine that Russians in Vladivostok look at things differently than do Russians in St. Petersburg. Then again, Vladivostok only goes back about a century and a half.

    Seamus Padraig , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:39 pm GMT
    @utu

    Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration.

    I generally agree with your comment, but that part strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration. While relations with Russia certainly haven't improved, how have they really worsened? The second round of sanctions that Trump reluctantly approved have yet to be implemented by Europe, which was the goal. And apart from that, what of substance has changed?

    Seamus Padraig , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:45 pm GMT
    @Grandpa Charlie

    That pre-9/11 "cooperation" nearly destroyed Russia. Nobody in Russia (except, perhaps, for Pussy Riot) wants a return to the Yeltsin era.

    Ludwig Watzal , Website Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:46 pm GMT
    It's not surprising that 57 percent of the American people believe in Russian meddling. Didn't two-thirds of the same crowd believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, too? The American public is being brainwashed 24 hours a day all year long.

    The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it.

    This disinformation campaign might be the prelude to an upcoming war.
    Right now, the US is run by jerks and idiots. Watch the video.

    anonymous , Disclaimer Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 3:50 pm GMT
    Only dumb people does not know that TRUMP IS NETANYAHU'S PUPPET.

    The fifth column zionist jews are running the albino stooge and foreign policy in the Middle East to expand Israel's interest against American interest that is TREASON. One of these FIFTH COLUMNISTS is Jared Kushner. He should be arrested.

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/donald-trumps-likudist-campaign-against-iran/5614264

    [The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.

    Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran.

    Bolton spoke with Trump by phone on Thursday about the paragraph in the deal that vowed it would be "terminated" if there was any renegotiation, according to Politico. He was calling Trump from Las Vegas, where he'd been meeting with casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the third major figure behind Trump's shift towards Israeli issues. Adelson is a Likud supporter who has long been a close friend of Netanyahu's and has used his Israeli tabloid newspaper Israel Hayomto support Netanyahu's campaigns. He was Trump's main campaign contributor in 2016, donating $100 million. Adelson's real interest has been in supporting Israel's interests in Washington -- especially with regard to Iran.]

    Miro23 , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 4:56 pm GMT
    A great article with some excellent points:

    Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington.

    American dominance is very much tied to the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency, and the rest of the world no longer want to fund this bankrupt, warlike state – particularly the Chinese.

    First, it confirms that the US did not want to see the jihadist extremists defeated by Russia. These mainly-Sunni militias served as Washington's proxy-army conducting an ambitious regime change operation which coincided with US strategic ambitions.

    The CIA run US/Israeli/ISIS alliance.

    Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who dictates what they can and can't say.

    They are given the political line and they broadcast it.

    The loosening of rules governing the dissemination of domestic propaganda coupled with the extraordinary advances in surveillance technology, create the perfect conditions for the full implementation of an American police state. But what is more concerning, is that the primary levers of state power are no longer controlled by elected officials but by factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people. That can only lead to trouble.

    At some point Americans are going to get a "War on Domestic Terror" cheered along by the media. More or less the arrest and incarceration of any opposition following the Soviet Bolshevik model.

    CanSpeccy , Website Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:11 pm GMT
    @utu

    On the plus side, everyone now knows that the Anglo-US media from the NY Times to the Economist, from WaPo to the Gruniard, and from the BBC to CNN, the CBC and Weinstein's Hollywood are a worthless bunch of depraved lying bastards.

    Thales the Milesian , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:53 pm GMT
    Brennan did this, CIA did that .

    So what are you going to do about all this?

    Continue to whine?

    Continue to keep your head stuck in your ass?

    So then continue with your blah, blah, blah, and eat sh*t.

    You, disgusting self-elected democratic people/institutions!!!

    AB_Anonymous , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 5:59 pm GMT
    Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt, compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into something much worse.

    The thing is, no matter how thick the mental cages are, and how carefully they are maintained by the daily massive injections of "certified" truth (via MSM), along with neutralizing or compromising of "troublemakers", the presence of multiple alternative sources in the age of Internet makes people to slip out of these cages one by one, and as the last events show – with acceleration.

    It means that there's a fast approaching tipping point after which it'd be impossible for those in power both to keep a nice "civilized" face and to control the "cage-free" population. So, no matter how the next war will be called, it will be the war against the free Internet and free people. That's probably why N. Korean leader has no fear to start one.

    Art , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 6:18 pm GMT
    An aside:

    All government secrecy is a curse on mankind. Trump is releasing the JFK murder files to the public. Kudos! Let us hope he will follow up with a full 9/11 investigation.

    Think Peace -- Art

    Mr. Anon , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:07 pm GMT
    @utu

    The objective was to push new administration into the corner from which it could not improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he wanted to during the campaign.

    Good point. That was probably one of the objectives (and from the point of view of the deep-state, perhaps the most important objective) of the "Russia hacked our democracy" narrative, in addition to the general deligitimization of the Trump administration.

    Art , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:11 pm GMT
    And, keep in mind, Washington's Sunni proxies were not a division of the Pentagon; they were entirely a CIA confection: CIA recruited, CIA-armed, CIA-funded and CIA-trained.

    Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six month actions – they go on and on.)

    Are committees of six congressman and six senators, who meet in secret, just avoiding the grave constitutional questions of war? We the People cannot even interrogate these politicians. (These politicians make big money in the secrecy swamp when they leave office.)

    Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are we attacking with drones? Where is congress?

    Spying is one thing – covert action is another – covert is wrong – it goes against world order. Every year after 9/11 they say things are worse – give them more money more power and they will make things safe. That is BS!

    9/11 has opened the flood gates to the US government attacking at will, the various peoples of this Earth. That is NOT our prerogative.

    We are being exceptionally arrogant.

    Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies.

    Think Peace -- Art

    Rurik , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:12 pm GMT
    @Ben10

    right at 1:47

    when he says 'we can't move on as a country'

    his butt hurt is so ruefully obvious, that I couldn't help notice a wry smile on my face

    that bitch spent millions on the war sow, and now all that mullah won't even wipe his butt hurt

    when I see ((guys)) like this raging their inner crybaby angst, I feel really, really good about President Trump

    MAGA bitches!

    Mr. Anon , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 7:15 pm GMT
    @jilles dykstra

    I am reading Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the USA

    A Peoples History of the USA? Which Peoples?

    Tradecraft46 , Next New Comment October 21, 2017 at 8:04 pm GMT
    I am SAIS 70 so know the drill and the article is on point.

    Here is the dealio. Most reporters are dim and have no experience, and it is real easy to lead them by the nose with promises of better in the future.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. ..."
    "... The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment, as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player. ..."
    "... Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time. The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence of NATO, for instance. ..."
    "... Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown. Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline. ..."
    "... Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues, will consolidate its economic domination. ..."
    "... A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its different dimensions ..."
    "... Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous combination. ..."
    Oct 28, 2017 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. Alternative social forces, like the ones behind Trump's presidential triumph, only have a limited impact on domestic and ultimately on foreign policy. A conceptual detour and a brief on history and on Trump's domestic setting when he was elected will help clarifying these theses.

    Beyond the different costumes that it wears (dealing with ideology, international law, and even religion), foreign policy follows domestic policy. The domestic policy actors are the social forces at work at a given point of time, mainly the economic agents and their ambitions (in their multiple expressions), including the ruling power elite. Society's aspirations not only relate to material welfare, but also to ideological priorities that population segments may have at a given point of time.

    From America's initial days until the mid 1800s, there seems to have been a broad alignment of US foreign policy with the wishes of its power elite and other social forces. America's expansionism, a fundamental bulwark of its foreign policy from early days, reflected the need to fulfill its growing population's ambitions for land and, later on, the need to find foreign markets for its excess production, initially agricultural and later on manufacturing. It can be said that American foreign policy was broadly populist at that time. The power elite was more or less aligned in achieving these expansionist goals and was able to provide convenient ideological justification through the writings of Jefferson and Madison, among others.

    As the country expanded, diverging interests became stronger and ultimately differing social forces caused a significant fracture in society. The American Civil War was the climax of the conflicted interests between agricultural and manufacturing led societies. Fifty years later, a revealing manifestation of this divergence (which survived the Civil War), as it relates to foreign policy, is found during the early days of the Russian Revolution when, beyond the ideological revulsion of Bolshevism, the US was paralyzed between the agricultural and farming businesses seeking exports to Russia and the domestic extractive industries interested in stopping exports of natural resources from this country.

    The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment, as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player.

    Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time. The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence of NATO, for instance.

    Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown. Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline.

    Trump won his presidency because he was able to get support from the country's growing frustrated white population. His main social themes (bringing jobs to America by stopping the decline of its manufacturing industry, preventing further US consumer dependence on foreign imports and halting immigration) fitted well with the electors' anger. Traditional populist themes linked to foreign policy (like Russophobia) did not play a big role in the last election. But whether or not the Trump administration can align with the ruling power elite in a manner that addresses the key social and economic needs of the American people is still to be seen.

    Back to foreign policy, we need to distinguish between Trump's style of government and his administration's actions. At least until now, focusing excessively on Trump's style has dangerously distracted from his true intentions. One example is the confusion about his initial stance on NATO which was simplistically seen as highly critical to the very existence of this organization. On NATO, all that Trump really cared was to achieve a "fair" sharing of expenditures with other members and to press them to honor their funding commitments.

    From immigration to defense spending, there is nothing irrational about Trump's foreign policy initiatives, as they just reflect a different reading on the American people's aspirations and, consequently, they attempt to rely on supporting points within the power elite which are different from the ones used in the past.

    Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues, will consolidate its economic domination. A far-reaching lesson, although still being ignored, is that China's economic might is showing that capitalism as understood in the West is not winning, much less in its American format. It also shows that democracy may not be that relevant, as it is not necessarily a corollary or a condition for economic development. Perhaps it even shows the superiority of China's economic model, but this is a different matter.

    As Trump becomes more aware about his limitations, he has naturally reversed to the basic imprints of America's traditional foreign policy, particularly concerning defense. His emphasis on a further increase in defense spending is not done for prestigious or national security reasons, but as an attempt to preserve a job generating infrastructure without considering the catastrophic consequences that it may cause.

    On Iran, Obama's initiative to seek normalization was an attempt to walk a fine line (and to find a less conflictive path) between supporting the US traditional Middle East allies (mainly the odd combination of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) and recognizing Iran's growing aspirations. Deep down, Obama was trying to acknowledge Iran's historical viability as a country and a society that will not disappear from the map, while Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, may not be around in a few years. Trump's Iran policy until now only represents a different weighing of priorities, although it is having far reaching consequences on America's credibility as a reliable contractual party in international affairs.

    In the case of Afghanistan, Trump's decision to increase boots on the ground does not break the inertia of US past administrations. Aside from temporary containment, an increasing military presence or a change in tactics will not alter fundamentally this reality.

    Concerning Russia, and regardless of what Trump has said, actions speak more than words. A continuous deterioration of relations seems inevitable.

    Trump will also learn, if he has not done so already, about the growth of multipolar forces in world's events. Russia has mastered this reality for several years and is quite skillful at using it as a basic tool of its own foreign goals. Our multipolar world will expand, and Trump may even inadvertently exacerbate it through its actions (for instance in connection with the different stands taken by the US and its European allies concerning Iran).

    While fulfilling the aspirations of the American people seems more difficult within the existing capitalist framework, there are also growing apprehensions coming from America's power elite as it becomes more frustrated due to its incapacity of being more effective at the world level. America's relative adolescence in world's history will become more and more apparent in the coming years.

    A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its different dimensions. The US has never suffered the consequences of an international conflict in its own backyard. The American Civil War, despite all the suffering that it caused, was primarily a domestic event with no foreign intervention (contrary to the wishes of the Confederation). The deep social and psychological damage caused by war is not part of America's consciousness as it is, for instance in Germany, Russia or Japan. America is insensitive to the lessons of history because it has a very short history itself.

    Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous combination.

    Oscar Silva-Valladares is a former investment banker that has lived and worked in North and Latin America, Western & Eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan, the Philippines and Western Africa. He currently chairs Davos International Advisory, an advisory firm focused on strategic consulting across emerging markets.

    Related

    [Apr 21, 2019] Special Counsel Mueller -- Disingenuous and Dishonest by Larry C Johnson

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... As I noted in my previous piece-- The FBI Tried and Failed to Entrap Trump --Sater was an active FBI undercover informant. ..."
    "... An honest prosecutor would have and should have disclosed this fact. He, Sater, was the one encouraging the Trump team to cozy up to Russia. Mueller does not disclose one single instance of Trump or Cohen or any of the Trump kids calling Sater on the carpet and chewing his ass for not bringing them deals and not opening doors in Russia. Omitting this key fact goes beyond simple disingenuity. It is a conscious lie. ..."
    "... The circumstantial evidence indicates that Sater was doing this at the behest of FBI handlers. We do not yet know who they are. ..."
    "... We also have the case of Michael Caputo and Roger Stone being approached by a Russian gangster named Henry Greenberg. ..."
    "... How does a guy like Vorkretsov/Greenberg, with an extensive criminal record and circumstantial ties to the Russian mob gain entrance into the United States? Very simple answer. He too was an FBI informant : ..."
    "... Please take time to read the full dossier at democrat dossier . This is more than an odd coincidence. This is a pattern. The FBI was targeting the Trump campaign and personnel in a deliberate effort to implicate them in wanting to work with Russians. ..."
    "... Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur -- -i.e., Joseph Mifsud -- -as some simple guy with ties to Russia's political elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on the forefront of exposing Mifsud's ties to western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular . ..."
    "... A number of Twitter users recently observed that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud’s LINK campus in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor’s name and biography had been removed from the campus’ website, writing that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for “years.” ..."
    "... WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: “[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo].” ..."
    "... This is not a mere matter of Mueller and his team "failing" to disclose some important facts. If they were operating honestly they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three--Sater and Greenber--alleged Russian stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community. ..."
    "... Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss. ..."
    "... Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation . THe IRGC being labelled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism. ..."
    "... You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference. ..."
    "... The Special Relationship is hopefully entering the divorce stage. None too soon. Great work, Mr. Johnson. ..."
    Apr 20, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    While President Trump is correct to celebrate the Mueller Report’s conclusion that no one on Trump’s side of the ledger attempted to or succeeded in collaborating or colluding with the Russian Government or Russian spies, there remains a dark cloud behind the silver lining. And I am not referring to the claims of alleged obstruction of justice. A careful reading of the report reveals that Mueller has issued findings that are both disingenuous and dishonest. The report is a failed hatchet job. Part of the failure can be attributed to the amount of material that Attorney General Barr allowed to be released. It appears that Bill Barr's light editing may have been intended to expose the bias and sloppiness of Mueller and his team.

    Let us start with the case of trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. If you were to believe that the Steele Dossier accurately reported Vladimir Putin's attitude towards Trump, then a Trump real estate deal in Moscow was a slam dunk. According to one of Steele's breathless reports:
    The Kremlin's cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. How ever, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.
    Then there is reality. The impetus, the encouragement for the Moscow project came from one man--Felix Sater.
    In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov.J07 Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City.30S Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).
    To reiterate--if the Steele Dossier was based on truthful intelligence then the Trump organization only had to sit back, stretch out their hands and seize the moment. Instead, little Felix Sater keeps coming back to the well. In January 2016, according to the Mueller report,
    Sater then sent a draft invitation for Cohen to visit Moscow to discuss the Trump Moscow project,along with a note to "[t]ell me if the letter is good as amended by me or make whatever changes you want and send it back to me."

    After a further round of edits, on January 25, 2016, Sater sent Cohen an invitation -- signed by Andrey Ryabinskiy of the company MHJ -- to travel to "Moscow for a working visit" about the "prospects of development and the construction business in Russia," "the various land plots available suited for construction of this enormous Tower," and "the opportunity to co-ordinate a follow up visit to Moscow by Mr. Donald Trump..

    This produced nothing. No deal, no trip. But Sater persisted:

    Beginning in late 2015, Sater repeatedly tried to arrange for Cohen and candidate Trump, as representatives of the Trump Organization, to travel to Russia to meet with Russian government officials and possible financing partners. . . .

    Into the spring of 2016, Sater and Cohen continued to discuss a trip to Moscow in connection with the Trump Moscow project. On April 20, 2016, Sater wrote Cohen, " [t)he People wanted to know when you are coming?,,

    On May 4, 2016, Sater followed up:

    “I had a chat with Moscow. ASSUMING the trip does happen the question is before or after the convention. I said I believe, but don't know for sure, that's it's probably after the convention. Obviously the pre-meeting trip (you only) can happen anytime you want but he 2 big guys where [sic) the question. I said I would confirm and revert.”

    On May 5, 2016, Sater wrote to Cohen:

    “Peskov would like to invite you as his guest to the St. Petersburg Forum which is Russia's Davos it's June 16-19. He wants to meet there with you and possibly introduce you to either Putin or Medvedev, as they are not sure if 1 or both will be there. This is perfect. The entire business class of Russia will be there as well.”

    On June 14, 2016, Cohen met Sater in the lobby of the Trump Tower in New York and informed him that he would not be traveling at that time.

    Why was Felix Sater the one repeatedly identified pushing to arrange deals with the Russians and yet did not face any subsequent charges by the Mueller team? Sater had been working as part of the Trump team since 2003. Why is it that the proposed deals and travel to Moscow came predominantly from Felix Sater?

    As I noted in my previous piece--The FBI Tried and Failed to Entrap Trump--Sater was an active FBI undercover informant. He had been working with the FBI since 1998. When he agreed to start working as an undercover informant aka cooperator in December 1998 guess who signed off on the deal? Andrew Weissman. You can see the deal here. It was signed 10 December 1998.

    An honest prosecutor would have and should have disclosed this fact. He, Sater, was the one encouraging the Trump team to cozy up to Russia. Mueller does not disclose one single instance of Trump or Cohen or any of the Trump kids calling Sater on the carpet and chewing his ass for not bringing them deals and not opening doors in Russia. Omitting this key fact goes beyond simple disingenuity. It is a conscious lie.

    The circumstantial evidence indicates that Sater was doing this at the behest of FBI handlers. We do not yet know who they are.

    But Sater's behavior and status as an FBI Informant was not an isolated incident. We also have the case of Michael Caputo and Roger Stone being approached by a Russian gangster named Henry Greenberg. According to democratdossier.com:

    Greenberg's birth name is Gennady Vasilievich Vostretsov, the son of Yekatrina Vostretsova and Vasliy Vostretsov. He later adopted new names twice as a result of two different marriages and became Gennady V. Arzhanik and later Henry Oknyansky. Henry Greenberg is not a legal alias, but he uses it quite commonly in recent years.
    But you would not know this from reading the Mueller report. Mr. Disingenuous strikes again:
    In the spring of 2016, Trump Campaign advisor Michael Caputo learned through a Florida-based Russian business partner that another Florida-based Russian, Henry Oknyansky (who also went by the name Henry Greenberg), claimed to have information pertaining to Hillary Clinton . Caputo notified Roger Stone and brokered communication between Stone and Oknyansky.

    Oknyansky and Stone set up a May 2016 in-person meeting. 260 Oknyansky was accompanied to the meeting by Alexei Rasin, a Ukrainian associate involved in Florida real estate. At the meeting, Rasin offered to sell Stone derogatory information on Clinton that Rasin claimed to have obtained while working for Clinton. Rasin claimed to possess financial statements demonstrating Clinton's involvement in money laundering with Rasin's companies. According to Oknyansky, Stone asked if the amounts in question totaled millions of dollars but was told it was closer to hundreds of thousands. Stone refused the offer, stating that Trump would not pay for opposition research.

    How does a guy like Vorkretsov/Greenberg, with an extensive criminal record and circumstantial ties to the Russian mob gain entrance into the United States? Very simple answer. He too was an FBI informant:

    In an affidavit, Vostretsov explained to an immigration judge he worked for the FBI for 17 years throughout the world, including in the US, Iran and North Korea. He explained in the same paperwork the FBI granted him several temporary visas to visit the US in exchange for information about criminal activities.

    Please take time to read the full dossier at democrat dossier. This is more than an odd coincidence. This is a pattern. The FBI was targeting the Trump campaign and personnel in a deliberate effort to implicate them in wanting to work with Russians.

    And there is more. George Papodopoulus was entrapped by individuals linked to British MI-6 and the CIA with offers to provide meetings with Russians and Putin. The Mueller account is a lie:

    In late April 2016, Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, immediately after Mifsud 's return from a trip to Moscow, that the Russian government had obtained "dirt" on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. One week later, on May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to candidate Clinton.

    Papadopoulos shared information about Russian "dirt " with people outside of the Campaign, and the Office investigated whether he also provided it to a Campaign official. Papadopoulos and the Campaign officials with whom he interacted told the Office that they did · not recall that Papadopoulos passed them the information. Throughout the relevant period of time and for several months thereafter, Papadopoulos worked with Mifsud and two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government. That meeting never came to pass.

    Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur -- -i.e., Joseph Mifsud -- -as some simple guy with ties to Russia's political elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on the forefront of exposing Mifsud's ties to western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular.

    Mifsud’s alleged links to Russian intelligence are summarily debunked by his close working relationship with Claire Smith, a major figure in the upper echelons of British intelligence. A number of Twitter users recently observed that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud’s LINK campus in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor’s name and biography had been removed from the campus’ website, writing that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for “years.”

    WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: “[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo].”

    The photograph in question originated on Geodiplomatics.com, where it specified that Joseph Mifsud is indeed standing next to Claire Smith, who was attending a: “…Training program on International Security which was organised by Link Campus University and London Academy of Diplomacy.” The event is listed as taking place in October, 2012. This is highly significant for a number of reasons.

    This is not a mere matter of Mueller and his team "failing" to disclose some important facts. If they were operating honestly they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three--Sater and Greenber--alleged Russian stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community.

    When you put these facts together it is clear that there is real meat on the bone for Barr's upcoming investigation of the "spying" that was being done on the Trump campaign by law enforcement and intelligence. These facts must become a part of the public consciousness. The foreign country that worked feverishly to meddle in the 2016 Presidential election and the subsequent rule of Donald Trump is the United Kingdom. Russia is the patsy.

    turcopolier, 20 April 2019 at 10:44 PM

    IMO the FBI leadership, Clapper, Brennan and his flunkies were working with the Brits at some senior level of their IO apparatus to screw Trump. Mueller's testimony before the Congress should be revelatory of his true position.

    falcemartello, 20 April 2019 at 11:28 PM

    Don't hold your breath .The so called deep state which in reality are our plutocratic oligarchical class that win. Look at the new boss same as the old boss.

    It was obvious from way back in June 2016 when most of the fabricated /novella known as the Steele Dossier was floating around and the role Fusion GPS played in the Clinton POTUS machine. There is a lot out there but as per usual smokey mirrors and deception.

    I live you with this one thought.

    Look at all the hair triggers that have been laid out with the TRUMP regime since he became POTUS with regards to the ME and the Russian Federation . THe IRGC being labelled a terrorist organization and further more both Dems and Repub are trying to introduce a bill that labels the Russian Federation as a sponsor of terrorism.

    You just can't make this stuff up. Least we forget replacing the meme of ASSAD HAS TO GO TO MADURRO HAS TO GO. War is a racket and as per usual we the sheeple just fall for it. Ret. Col Wilkerson lays all out at last years Israeli influence conference.

    Rick Merlotti

    The Special Relationship is hopefully entering the divorce stage. None too soon. Great work, Mr. Johnson.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us know how evil and disgusting that person is? It's true of the leader of every nation which refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it's true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it's true of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

    Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they'll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they'll be far more likely to consent to Assange's imprisonment, thereby establishing a precedent for the future prosecution of leak-publishing journalists around the world. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you're suspicious of him you won't believe anything he's saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it's as good as putting a bullet in his head.

    Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they appear. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any kind of centralized source of information which comprehensively debunks all the smears in a thorough and engaging way, so with the help of hundreds of tips from my readers and social media followers I'm going to attempt to make one here. What follows is my attempt at creating a tool kit people can use to fight against Assange smears wherever they encounter them, by refuting the disinformation with truth and solid argumentation.

    This article is an ongoing project which will be updated regularly where it appears on Medium and caitlinjohnstone.com as new information comes in and new smears spring up in need of refutation.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Washington Post's Max Boot Has No Clue What a Neocon Is

    Apr 21, 2019 | splinternews.com

    As he does nearly every day, Max Boot, the Washington Post 's in-house neocon columnist, wrote some words today. As has been the case quite a few times before, none of his latest words, even when strung together into a coherent sentence, were particularly good. For this very reason, several of those sentences were noteworthy. So let's (OK, let me ) look at just what that beautiful, smooth organ in Boot's skull considers a "neoconservative."

    According to Merriam-Webster, a neoconservative is a person who cites dictionary definitions in their writing. It's also, simply put, someone in American politics who's conservative on economic issues, hews to the middle or even center-left on social issues, and also really, really likes to Do War. That last one is a big requirement, so don't forget it -- war equals a strong, responsible nation.

    Boot opened his column with a critique of Rep. Ro Khanna's recent op-ed in the Post , with Boot writing that Khanna's position -- that neocons were responsible for the Iraq War -- is little more than an oft-repeated "canard" that plagues the American discourse. He then proceeded to take the reader through what a real neoconservative looks like by rewriting the top-summary of the neoconservatism Wikipedia page .

    Boot started by citing a group of 1970s characters he classified as the True Neocons. (Initially, the term was embodied by folks who were a little more skeptical of the Soviet Union than some of their Democratic counterparts.) Boot then argued neocons simply were not in power at the time the Iraq War was being decided on (a fact that is demonstratively untrue) by citing Bush administration officials widely credited as architects of the Iraq War:

    The "neocons" -- second-tier officials such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and vice-presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby -- were not the decision-makers. The decision to invade was made by President George W. Bush in consultation with Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. None of them would ever label themselves a "neocon."

    Note the last sentence -- Boot frames his argument in a way that hangs the burden of proof that one is a neoconservative, or acts in a neoconservative fashion, on the stipulation that they publicly identify themselves as such, which, plainly, is so fucking dumb that I'm going to show you him doubling down on this line of thinking just because it's so unbelievably shallow.

    Moreover, a bipartisan majority of both houses approved the use of military force. Are Democratic then-Sens. Joe Biden, John Kerry, Charles E. Schumer, Harry Reid, Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein neocons?

    To state the obvious: Yes! All of those people are absolutely neocons, at least in some way.

    The idea that Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden don't at the very least actively display numerous neoconservative tendencies is an outright rejection of what Americans have watched play out in the political realm since the national Democratic Party imploded in the 70s. Democrats can be neocons; Republicans can be neolibs. Neos of some sort or the other are probably around you, right this very second, and no, not the good kind !

    Boot instead tries to convince readers that they are mislabeling politicians when, in fact, the label of neocon fits better than most for his motley crew of centrist Democrats, far better than "liberal" ever has. The people he chose to list are the people directly responsible for legislating the mass incarceration of minority citizens into existence; the folks known for cutting their teeth on the War on Drugs ; the ones who fucked over middle-class kids taking out college loans ; the assholes who were happy to vilify the welfare system; the elderly power-brokers who stared down a group of kids and poo-poo'd the urgency climate change ; the imperialists who voted for war and then some more war and then continued to be recalcitrant drone-loving war hawks throughout the opening decades of the 21st Century.

    The concept that political identity is wholly defined as being a list of beliefs a person writes down in their diary or says aloud during a campaign ad, and not by the actions conducted by said person, is one that has needed to die for at least the past half-century of American politics. But, again, Boot's column is not engaging in a discussion about what a neocon actually is in 2019. It's a deceptive and even laudatory tactic, but Boot is purposefully choosing to frame his argument around how politicians frame themselves. And that's a major problem if you happen to be employed to write down your opinions for one of the major news outlets in a nation and not for the political operatives themselves.

    If anything, the fact that this batshit lazy argument permeated the top three-fourths of his column offered a bit of relief with how it would end. Then this sentence appeared and I ascended to heaven:

    I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear, but...

    [Apr 21, 2019] The remarkable susceptibility of the American people to propaganda has to do with the philosophical tradition of pragmatism: What is true is that what is useful in our lives

    Notable quotes:
    "... Alex Carey explains is his excellent book "Taking the Risk out of Democracy" that the remarkable susceptibility of the American people to propaganda has to do with the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. Famous scholars like William James and John Dewey said things like: "What is true is that what is useful in our lives" and "Believing something helps to make that thing become true". So you want to believe because you think it serves your purposes. ..."
    "... This whole Russiagate is a sort of orgy of pragmatism. This could not happen in any other country, I'm sure. The only bright lining is that apparently large parts of the US population do not care one whit about Russiagate. The thing only has traction among the educated classes. But still! Amazing to see how so many evidently smart people mislead themselves into believing this shoddy story or at least taking it way too serious. ..."
    Apr 20, 2019 | therealnews.com

    Paul Janssen • 11 hours ago ,

    My God you Americans are so strange! (I'm from the Netherlands)

    Alex Carey explains is his excellent book "Taking the Risk out of Democracy" that the remarkable susceptibility of the American people to propaganda has to do with the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. Famous scholars like William James and John Dewey said things like: "What is true is that what is useful in our lives" and "Believing something helps to make that thing become true". So you want to believe because you think it serves your purposes.

    Betrand Russell considered this attitude to represent a kind of madness. Truth is the objective correspondence to the facts, was his position.

    This whole Russiagate is a sort of orgy of pragmatism. This could not happen in any other country, I'm sure. The only bright lining is that apparently large parts of the US population do not care one whit about Russiagate. The thing only has traction among the educated classes. But still! Amazing to see how so many evidently smart people mislead themselves into believing this shoddy story or at least taking it way too serious.

    As to the title you gave these two items: "Will the Mueller Report Help Defeat Trump in 2020?" Of course not ! TO THE CONTRARY!

    Sad that the Real News also has gone under in this intellectual morass. You really should have kept on Aaron Maté.

    [Apr 21, 2019] It is stunning that the entirety of federal law enforcement, intelligence, and State department embraced and fortified Russian misinformation in their jihad against Trump

    Notable quotes:
    "... Nevertheless, while it appeared to the Clinton partisans in the Obama White House, in the DoJ, the CIA, the FBI and overseas in the UK, that the e-mail case had been quashed sufficiently to preserve the likelihood of Clinton's accession, they had enough reservations to exploit a garbage pail of political dirt to take out an "insurance policy." ..."
    Apr 21, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    blue peacock , 21 April 2019 at 12:15 PM

    Who is taking the over/under on whether Barr will actually investigate the origins of the attempted entrapment of Trump in Russia collusion and the roles played by key players in US law enforcement and intelligence agencies as well as the Brits & Aussie government agencies therein?

    I'm willing to bet that it will all be swept under the rug and that Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Lynch & Rice will not be testifying to any grand jury. Barr has received multiple criminal & conspiracy referrals from Rep. Devin Nunes. However, Trump himself disregarded Nunes recommendation to declassify several documents & communications including the FISA application on Carter Page. The question is does Trump want to get to the bottom of the conspiracy? So far all he's done is tweet. IMO, Barr is the epitome of a Swamp Rat.

    Tom22ndState -> blue peacock... , 21 April 2019 at 05:43 PM
    "Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt." – Sun Tzu

    I have a feeling that President Trump will declassify and release the relevant documents in a manner that they will have maximum effect. It is stunning that the entirety of federal law enforcement, intelligence, and State department embraced and fortified Russian misinformation in their jihad against Trump.

    This must never happen again. At least the operation was run by political hacks, former analysts who fancied themselves as operators. Their ham- fisted prints are over this shit storm. Thank you God for Comey, Brennan, and Clapper -- the three stooges of espionage.

    Mad Max_22 , 21 April 2019 at 06:17 PM
    I suppose that it's possible that AG Barr's DoJ will mount a serious investigation into the many tentacles ongoing governmental debacle that began with the Lynch DoJ providing political direction and cover for Comey's FBI to lie down on the Clinton e-mail investigation. Which came first, the cover up, or the capitulation, is not completely clear. Perhaps it was a hand in glove affair. Suffice it to say that by any standard of competence, it was a faux effort.

    In my opinion, what was not done should constitute the elements of an obstruction violation. It would be a difficult charge to argue before a jury. Was the level of incompetence such that a reasonable person could not believe that it could not exist in the FBI, that there had to be malicious intent?

    Nevertheless, while it appeared to the Clinton partisans in the Obama White House, in the DoJ, the CIA, the FBI and overseas in the UK, that the e-mail case had been quashed sufficiently to preserve the likelihood of Clinton's accession, they had enough reservations to exploit a garbage pail of political dirt to take out an "insurance policy."

    Once again the question, could they possibly have been so incompetent. "What the heck" appears to have been the launching pad; Clinton's going to win anyway, Trump will be crushed under the unmaskings, leaks, and innuendo; and no one will ever find out.

    But Trump wins, and the unwholesome political cabal is now stuck with an investigation of an incoming President whom they had tried to frag on the skimpiest evidentiary grounds imaginable. And worse, he appears to be sensing there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, and Cardinal Jim Comey is a shitty liar, and now he's out, and what is going to happen to this garbage scow they've launched, now with Comey gone. How do they kill this thing? Worse, how do they kill the political riot this thing has caused. They can't; they double down; they take out another insurance policy - Jim Comey's good bud, Bob Mueller with a posse of partisan attorneys, many vets of the Obama DoJ, a couple of squads of FBI Agents, including two who were prominent in the e mail case and the Steele inquiry, and a set up akin to a shadow DoJ. What could go wrong? They would hound the bastard out of office.

    Which returns us to the question of whether Barr will mount a serious investigation into the political scandal of the last 100 years, at least. I suppose it is possible, but right now I'm not optimistic. For one thing Barr appeared at the big press conference with Rod Rosenstein. Rod Rosenstein is at minimum a critical witness. There is every reason to suspect that Comey, McCabe, Mueller, and Rosenstein conferred before Comey's leak to the NYT via a lawyer friend in furtherance of Mueller's appointment.

    Going side by side with Rosenstein at this juncture doesn't augur well.

    On the other hand, the continuing lunatic behavior of the demented left may give Barr no other choice but to sort the mess out once and for all for the good of the country. We'll see.

    jdledell , 21 April 2019 at 06:28 PM
    The biggest take I got out of the Mueller report is that Trump is a sleazy character and that is not what I want from the president, the Face of America to the rest of the world. Whether the Deep State went after Trump in an organized fashion is just noise in my ears. To me that is just normal political infighting the same as Trump and other Republicans went after Obama for being an illegitimate President as a non-citizen.
    turcopolier , 21 April 2019 at 06:28 PM
    Sorry, but it IS NOT "normal political infighting" for the cabal to have sought and still to seek the overthrow of of the legitimate head of state and government.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard on Twitter If our leaders media want to protect our elections, not just score political pts, first most imp

    Apr 21, 2019 | twitter.com

    If our leaders & media want to protect our elections, not just score political pts, first & most important thing we must do is institute b/up paper ballots by passing my Securing America's Elections Act so no one can manipulate our votes & hack our elections

    [Apr 21, 2019] Tulsi Pushes Forward

    Apr 20, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

    apenultimate on Sat, 04/20/2019 - 2:45pm Hello All,

    First, in response to others saying Leftists should support Bernie unless they have an adversity to winning elections, I propose a couple of thoughts. The first is this link showing Jimmy Carter's status in the Democratic primary race through June of 1975--he's almost exactly where Tulsi is right now in polling, and guess what? He won against the giants of his time.

    Carter 6-9 months before first 1976 primaries

    At this point, my advice is to support who you think is best, not who someone tells you is the only realistic choice.

    Here is another factoid for the caucuses/primaries--candidates who do not get at least 15% of the votes do not get any delegates. Think of the strategic ramificaitons of that for a few minutes. Assuming Biden enters the race, many of the Harris, Booker, O'Rourke, Buttigieg level of candidates do not poll above 15% in many (or any) states, but if they remain in the race, it depresses Biden's results. There are a lot of potential various outcomes there depending on how things play out, and Tulsi staying in the race is not a major factor at this point.

    In the past week, Tusli has made 8 stops in Iowa and 4 stops (including 1 today) in New Hampshire on the campaign trail. Good to see her get out and stumping in the early states.

    Some very good media things going on. Tulsi was on FOX News with Brett Baier, and she handled it really well. As he tried to talk over her and twist her words, she essentially just talked over him:

    Kyle Kulinski show about Tulsi on FOX News

    Also, here is a good review of Tulsi's defense of Ilhan Omar:

    The Michael Brooks Show

    Niko House highlighted Tulsi re-introducing her Off Act and contrasting it with the unactionable Green New Deal:

    Niko House

    Finally, Tulsi will be on Jimmy Dore today (if she has not been already). Look for that interview on YouTube in the upcoming week.

    In two recent national polls--Emerson and Morning Consult--Tulsi is polling at 1%. This is important as a second potential placement for the televised Democratic debates (needing to poll at 1% or greater in at least 3 national or early primary state polls). If there end up being more than 20 candidates with 65,000 unique donors or polling at least 1% in 3 polls, they will allow only candidates that met both criteria. Tulsi seems to be there at this point--including the 2 national polls above, and getting 2% in the last Nevada poll.

    [Apr 21, 2019] the current situation is "USSR reversed", in that the US now feels the need to "mute" Russia but Russia does not feel the need to "mute" the US.

    Apr 21, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
    JamesT , 21 April 2019 at 11:14 AM
    The most intelligent discussion of Russiagate that I have seen is Chris Hedges interviewing Aaron Mate on RT:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odEnNBlOJdk

    The fact that one has to go to RT for such professional journalism is telling. A pundit on Vesti is arguing that the current situation is "USSR reversed", in that the US now feels the need to "mute" Russia but Russia does not feel the need to "mute" the US. Because Russia is the country whose leadership is being more truthful, this results in Russia being more open to foreign media and dissident opinion. He says "openness is beneficial for us", "openness makes us the winning side", and "there is nothing they can tell us about us that we don't already know". I have been thinking along the same lines. From the 3:00 mark onwards here:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JkAKYLklYI

    [Apr 21, 2019] Bernie Steals the 'No More Wars' Issue From Trump by Patrick J. Buchanan

    Notable quotes:
    "... Much like Brexit, an antiwar/anit interventionist in the USA has nowhere to go. Both parties have substantial hawkish wings. Any move to peace/antiintervention by the party in power is immediately attacked by the party out of power. MSDNC is practically howling for war with Russia. ..."
    "... Of course Trump wants to take the war side. Saudi wants war. Israel wants war. Nothing else counts. ..."
    "... Tulsi won't surrender. But she obviously won't win the nomination either. ..."
    "... Trump may have said 'no more wars' but he never acted on it. So, someone else came along and picked up the discarded slogan. It's not stealing ..."
    "... I wish Tulsi could get more traction. I voted trump believing his anti war statements. Hate his veto of Yemen resolution ..."
    "... don't underestimate the perpetual war power's grip on the Democrat party. Pro war liberals like the NYtimes aren't going away in fact they are getting louder. ..."
    "... It is remarkable that neither Buchanan nor Khanna would ever consider the necessity to impeach Presidents like Bush, Obama, and Trump for their unconstitutional and criminal acts of aggressive war – or the responsibility of The People to replace the Congress of incumbents with representatives that have not already repeatedly and persistently broken their oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution. ..."
    "... Instead, Buchanan delivers yet another installment of the Incompetence Dodge: if only the Czar wasn't a sociopathic criminal! If only he listened to us, his loyal supporters! ..."
    "... Sanders never "stole" anything, Buchanan. What you're (slowly, dimly) realizing is that your boy Trump never cared a speck for a more sane, less bellicose U.S. foreign policy. ..."
    "... I will never understand why Trump cultists ever believed he did. A clown who's big complaint about the Iraq war is that "we didn't take the oil" is an unlikely peace advocate. But to be a member of the Trump cult you have to engage in massive psychological projection, daily. ..."
    Apr 19, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
    "The president has said that he does not want to see this country involved in endless wars . I agree with that," Bernie Sanders told the Fox News audience at Monday's town hall meeting in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Then, turning and staring straight into the camera, Bernie added: "Mister President, tonight you have the opportunity to do something extraordinary: sign that resolution. Saudi Arabia should not be determining the military or foreign policy of this country." Sanders was talking about a War Powers Act resolution that would have ended U.S. involvement in the five-year civil war in Yemen that has created one of the great humanitarian crises of our time, with thousands of dead children amidst an epidemic of cholera and a famine.

    Supported by a united Democratic Party on the Hill, and an anti-interventionist faction of the GOP led by Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee of Utah, the War Powers resolution had passed both houses of Congress. But 24 hours after Sanders urged him to sign it, Trump, heeding the hawks in his Cabinet and National Security Council, vetoed S.J.Res.7, calling it a "dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities." With sufficient Republican votes in both houses to sustain Trump's veto, that should have been the end of the matter.

    It is not: Trump may have just ceded the peace issue in 2020 to the Democrats. If Sanders emerges as the nominee, we will have an election with a Democrat running on the "no-more-wars" theme Trump touted in 2016. And Trump will be left defending the bombing of Yemeni rebels and civilians by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. Does Trump really want to go into 2020 as a war party president? Does he want to go into 2020 with Democrats denouncing "Trump's endless wars" in the Middle East? Because that is where he is headed.

    In 2008, John McCain, leading hawk in the Senate, was routed by a left-wing first-term senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who had won his nomination by defeating the more hawkish Hillary Clinton, who had voted to authorize the war in Iraq. In 2012, the Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who was far more hawkish than Obama on Russia, lost. Yet in 2016, Trump ran as a different kind of Republican, an opponent of the Iraq war and an anti-interventionist who wanted to get along with Russia's Vladimir Putin and get out of these Middle East wars. Looking closely at the front-running candidates for the Democratic nomination of 2020 -- Joe Biden, Sanders, Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker -- not one appears to be as hawkish as Trump has become. Trump pulled us out of the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry and reimposed severe sanctions.

    He declared Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, to which Tehran has responded by declaring U.S. Central Command a terrorist organization. Ominously, the IRGC and its trained Shiite militias in Iraq are in close proximity to U.S. troops.

    Trump has recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, moved the U.S. embassy there, closed the consulate that dealt with Palestinian affairs, cut off aid to the Palestinians, recognized Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights seized from Syria in 1967, and gone silent on Bibi Netanyahu's threat to annex Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

    Sanders, however, though he stands by Israel, is supporting a two-state solution and castigating the "right-wing" Netanyahu regime. Trump has talked of pulling all U.S. troops out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Yet the troops are still there. Though Trump came into office promising to get along with the Russians, he sent Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine and announced a pullout from Ronald Reagan's 1987 INF treaty that outlawed all land-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles. When Putin provocatively sent 100 Russian troops to Venezuela -- ostensibly to repair the S-400 anti-aircraft and anti-missile system that was damaged in recent blackouts -- Trump, drawing a red line, ordered the Russians to "get out."

    Biden is expected to announce next week. If the stands he takes on Russia, China, Israel, and the Middle East are more hawkish than the rest of the field, he will be challenged by the left wing of his party and by Sanders, who voted "no" on the Iraq war that Biden supported. The center of gravity of U.S. politics is shifting towards the Trump position of 2016. And the anti-interventionist wing of the GOP is growing. And when added to the anti-interventionist and anti-war wing of the Democratic Party on the Hill, together, they are able, as on the Yemen War Powers resolution, to produce a new bipartisan majority.

    Prediction: by the primaries of 2020, foreign policy will be front and center, and the Democratic Party will have captured the "no more wars" political high ground that candidate Donald Trump occupied in 2016.

    Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

    Adriana , says: April 18, 2019 at 9:04 pm

    By the way, Pat, do you know that Jimmy Carter did NOT get the US into any war, nor any "intervention"? Have you showed him any appretiation for it? Or it was a time when you were all for it as long as it was against Commies?
    treehugger , says: April 18, 2019 at 9:21 pm
    Prediction: by the primaries of 2020, foreign policy will be front and center, and the Democratic Party will have captured the "no more wars" political high ground that candidate Donald Trump occupied in 2016.

    Agree. But don't worry. On the second ballot, the super delegates will override the obvious preference of voters for a "no more wars" candidate and give it to Biden. Who will lose.

    john , says: April 18, 2019 at 10:18 pm
    Much like Brexit, an antiwar/anit interventionist in the USA has nowhere to go. Both parties have substantial hawkish wings. Any move to peace/antiintervention by the party in power is immediately attacked by the party out of power. MSDNC is practically howling for war with Russia.
    SteveK9 , says: April 18, 2019 at 10:35 pm
    No one to blame but himself. The anti-Russia insanity made it hard for him to stick to that part of his program, but there is a lot more he could have done, starting by not surrounding himself with war-mongering idiots like Pompeo and Bolton.
    Jim Smith , says: April 19, 2019 at 2:57 am
    I mean, can we actually be honest here? The Neocons simply do not see Sanders as a genuine threat. He has an unfair advantage. He can, for instance, criticize American foreign policy without being accused of anti-semitism.

    Those who wish Trump had maintained a more maverick stance of foreign policy should ask themselves if they supported him energetically enough. He's a survivor first and foremost. If you aren't working to offer him a legit life preserver, this is all on you.

    polistra , says: April 19, 2019 at 3:57 am
    Of course Trump wants to take the war side. Saudi wants war. Israel wants war. Nothing else counts.

    The question is whether Bernie can stick with the anti-war side, given his surrender to Hillary in 2016.

    Tulsi won't surrender. But she obviously won't win the nomination either.

    Kent , says: April 19, 2019 at 6:53 am
    Mr. Buchanan nailed this one.
    Christian J Chuba , says: April 19, 2019 at 8:03 am
    >>When Putin provocatively sent 100 Russian troops to Venezuela<<<

    And this is why Trump is going to win on the 'national security' issue. As long as U.S. troops don't actually fight and die in foreign countries the voters love U.S. 'being tough with its enemies'.
    As long as Trump confines his actions to tormenting 3rd world countries, like Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Syria, and Yemen with sanctions and military assistance to other belligerents any opposition will be portrayed as 'hating or apologizing for America the force for good'.

    Being objective, what is more provocative, sending a small number of specialists to prevent cyber sabotage for the standing govt, or trying to install a new President, seizing their assets and preventing their oil trade. We are the bullies and the day when we finally squander our wealth we will find out that we have no friends despite being an alleged force for good.

    Scott in MD , says: April 19, 2019 at 9:05 am
    I thought that we determined a long time ago that taking something out of another persons trash can was not stealing. Trump may have said 'no more wars' but he never acted on it. So, someone else came along and picked up the discarded slogan. It's not stealing
    Patrick Constantine , says: April 19, 2019 at 10:34 am
    I wish Tulsi could get more traction. I voted trump believing his anti war statements. Hate his veto of Yemen resolution. I still defend trump from unfair attacks but am not a supporter any more.

    Pat – good analysis. But don't underestimate the perpetual war power's grip on the Democrat party. Pro war liberals like the NYtimes aren't going away in fact they are getting louder.

    cka2nd , says: April 19, 2019 at 10:43 am
    Adriana "By the way, Pat, do you know that Jimmy Carter did NOT get the US into any war, nor any 'intervention'? Have you showed him any appretiation [sic] for it? Or it was a time when you were all for it as long as it was against Commies?"

    No, but he did initiate funding for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan BEFORE the Soviet "invasion," specifically to incite the Soviets to invade and get caught in their own Vietnam War-like quagmire. President Carter succeeded in that effort, but the world has suffered the unintended consequences of US funding for jihadist militants ever since.

    Oh, and the Carter Administration also continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as the "legitimate" government of Cambodia after the Vietnamese Stalinists drove them from power in 1978. I'm sure this was partly done with Cold War calculations in mind – US ally Communist China was an enemy to both the Soviet Union and its Vietnamese client state, and the Khmer Rouge were clients of China – but I do not doubt that sticking it to the Vietnamese who had so recently embarrassed the US played a part in that policy decision, too.

    The Reagan Administration maintained both policies, by the way, by continuing to fund the Mujahideen and to uphold the fiction that the Khmer Rouge was still Cambodia's legitimate government (kind of like the fiction that Juan Guaidó is Venezuela's "legitimate" president).

    baldy , says: April 19, 2019 at 2:04 pm
    @Jim Smith

    You are right, if I had just more energetically supported Trump he wouldn't be giving Israel and Saudi Arabia everything they want and trying to start a war with Iran. That poor guy. Would just saying nice things about him have been enough or should I have completely drank the koolade, MAGA hat and all?

    Regarding Pat's argument as usual there is some truth here, but he keeps acting like this is a complete surprise and that Trump has "become" a hawk. Yes some of the campaign promises mentioned are accurate but he was talking about blowing up Iranian ships and tearing up the nuclear agreement on the campaign trail. He was never an anti-war candidate, he was just anti-whatever the previous presidents did candidate. Besides one statement about being even-handed there was every indication he was going to be at least as reflexively pro-Israel as any previous president and unsurprisingly he is more. Paul was the only anti-interventionist candidate and anyone who thinks otherwise was either willfully ignorant or not paying attention.

    bgone , says: April 19, 2019 at 2:32 pm
    "Trump's veto is an unconstitutional act." https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/americas-war-in-yemen-is-plainly-unconstitutional/

    "We must override his veto." https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/1118307049891344384

    It is remarkable that Buchanan considers Trump's veto to be constitutional, but then, so does Khanna. It is remarkable that neither Buchanan nor Khanna would ever consider the necessity to impeach Presidents like Bush, Obama, and Trump for their unconstitutional and criminal acts of aggressive war – or the responsibility of The People to replace the Congress of incumbents with representatives that have not already repeatedly and persistently broken their oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution.

    Instead, Buchanan delivers yet another installment of the Incompetence Dodge: if only the Czar wasn't a sociopathic criminal! If only he listened to us, his loyal supporters!

    It is difficult to decide which kind of unprincipled opportunist is worse – the kind that successfully profits from Trump, like McConnell, or the kind that hopes in vain for their paleolithic cause to benefit.

    Francis Flynn , says: April 19, 2019 at 3:13 pm
    Besides breaking his "no more wars" campaign promises, Trump has not built a wall, jailed Hillary, capped the deficit, re-instated Glass-Steagall, overturned Obamacare, controlled the cost of prescription drugs, de-funded Planned Parenthood, nor pushed legislation for the infrastructure of the country. The potential "peace president" in 2016 is nothing more than another "perpetual war president".
    sglover , says: April 19, 2019 at 3:19 pm
    Sanders never "stole" anything, Buchanan. What you're (slowly, dimly) realizing is that your boy Trump never cared a speck for a more sane, less bellicose U.S. foreign policy.

    I will never understand why Trump cultists ever believed he did. A clown who's big complaint about the Iraq war is that "we didn't take the oil" is an unlikely peace advocate. But to be a member of the Trump cult you have to engage in massive psychological projection, daily.

    Of course in Buchanan's case there's another excuse: He's been so dazzled by Trump's relentless bigotry that everything else, every lie, every cheat, is simply a second- or third-tier concern, something to explain away. How many pathetic exercises in blame-shifting has The American Con published under Buchanan's byline since 2016? And all signs are that they'll keep right on with it until the happy day when Trump is finally gone.

    [Apr 21, 2019] The US Deserves Its Own Nuremberg Trials

    Mar 23, 2019 | www.truthdig.com

    Gordon begins her comparison by exploring the main charge levied against Nazis during the Nuremberg trials, which was committing a crime against peace due to Germany's breach of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which, she explains, "essentially outlawed war." American prosecutors in the mid-20th century insisted that this initial crime was the unlawful act from which all other crimes committed by the Nazis originated.

    "By comparison," the author tells Scheer, "I look at the Bush-Cheney administration's decision to make an unnecessary and illegal war, both in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq.

    "It's very clear from the documentary record that exists that the main reason people were being tortured [by the U.S. before the Iraq War began] was because they wanted to get somebody somewhere to say that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaida, so that there could be an excuse for invading Iraq," Gordon says.

    Throughout the so-called war on terror, the ethics expert says, the U.S. has also violated several rules set forth in just-war theory, including what constitutes collateral damage and proportionality, in its slaughter of countless Iraqi civilians.

    "We took what had been one of the most vibrant, developed and cosmopolitan countries in that part of the world -- which was Iraq -- and we essentially did what [U.S. military officials] used to say they wanted to do to North Vietnam: bombed it back to the Stone Age," Gordon says.

    Listen to Scheer and Gordon discuss a range of moral issues that Americans for several generations have swept under the rug as the government both openly and secretly commits crimes in their name abroad. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player.

    Robert Scheer: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence. The intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it's Rebecca Gordon. And she has her doctorate in ethics and social theory. I teach ethics at USC; you teach at the University of San Francisco, which is a Catholic school, so presumably with all their difficulties they're still concerned about ethics. And actually we have a good pope, in major ways, who's dealing with the subject I want to talk to you about: the ethics of war making, and the violence that has been unleashed on the world. And you wrote two very important books, maybe the most important in some ways. One is called Mainstreaming Torture, and another is called American Nuremberg. So the question I want to ask you, you know, because we've always treated the crimes of others, particularly the Germans, the worst crimes of modern history, as an aberration in the development of the human race. Those people went berserk, crazy, and they were evil; now we have another category, Muslims are evil, they do terrible things. We're recording this on a day where in New Zealand, some 48 people trying to practice their religion were killed. So we see a lot of crime against Muslims, as there was obviously a lot of crimes against Jews and other people. And in your writing, you're very clear that the crimes of Nuremberg, of the Nazis, are a low level of evil. But the real question is, the Germans are so much like Americans. They were–largest number of immigrants in this country were Germans; they're a white, Anglo-Saxon population; they're highly educated, probably the highest level of music and science at that point. And can it happen here?

    Rebecca Gordon: And that, of course, is the question many of us have been asking at least since the election of 2016, and probably before that. And the answer in some ways, of course, is that it did happen here with the invasion of the Americas by people from Europe, and the destruction of all the peoples who were living here at the time. So there has been a genocide on this continent and in South America that, you know, we just forget about, because it happened a while ago. But coming to Nuremberg, what I was trying to do in the book is to say how important the principle was that was established at Nuremberg, which is that international law is real law. And when you break international law, there are genuine consequences, and people can and should be held accountable. So what I looked at was the conduct of this so-called War on Terror in the post-September 11th period, and asked: Could the United States be accused of the same categories of crimes for which the Nazi leadership were held accountable? And there were three categories that were established by the prosecution, and these were crimes against peace; ordinary war crimes, which had already been well described in the body of international law; and a new category, crimes against humanity, which was created in order to take in the enormity of what had been done in Europe by the Nazis. But what was very interesting is that it was Americans who insisted that the first of these crimes should be crimes against peace. So what's that? That means making an aggressive war. It means starting a war that was not a war of self-defense, that was not a war of so-called necessity, but making an aggressive war. Why was that illegal? It was illegal because Germany and the United States and many other countries in Europe had signed a treaty in 1928 called the Kellogg–Briand Treaty, which essentially outlawed war. It said that nations will not use war to settle their disputes. And the argument that the U.S. prosecutors made was that all the other crimes that the Germans committed actually sprang from this first crime of making this aggressive, unnecessary, illegal war. And so by comparison, I look at the Bush-Cheney administration's decision to make an unnecessary and illegal war, both in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. And just as the Nazi crimes arose from this making of a war that was wrong and illegal, the U.S. crimes–and specifically now because my area of expertise is torture, I look at the reasons why the United States became involved in torture. And in the beginning, it's very clear from the documentary record that exists, that the main reason people were being tortured, both in the CIA dark sites and also at Guantanamo under the Department of Defense, was because they wanted to get somebody somewhere to say that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al-Qaeda, so that there could be an excuse for invading Iraq. And so the other crimes–

    RS: But wait, let's be very clear about that. This would be like the Nazis saying, Jewish bankers destroyed our economy and colluded with Western powers, and therefore made life untenable in Germany. That was the vicious scapegoating argument to justify Nazi expansion and destruction of other societies. So this thing of whether Bush–you know, it's kind of become part of folklore–they lied us into the war in Iraq. But what you're saying, and very clearly, the very idea of going to war in Iraq over the 9/11 incident, which not only did Saddam Hussein have–

    RG: Nothing to do with.

    RS: –nothing to do with, but actually he was opposed to Al-Qaeda, and it was the one country where Al-Qaeda could not operate in, was Iraq. But instead of going to war with Pakistan, or going to war, you know, elsewhere–no. We–

    RG: Or Saudi Arabia.

    RS: Well, of course, Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 19 hijackers–

    RG: Came from.

    RS: –came from. You could actually make an argument to go into–hey, you attacked us, you supplied the money and so forth. No, we whitewashed the Saudi Arabia thing and went to war with Iraq. So your analogy, listeners should understand, is very precise. It is inventing an excuse, a defensive excuse, to engage an offensive invasion.

    RG: Exactly. And from that spring all of these other kinds of crimes. So then I look at ordinary war crimes, and if you go over the Geneva Conventions and the various other laws of war, you can see that there are a number of categories of crimes. Many of them have to do with failing to make the distinction between civilians and fighters, combatants. And of course the Bush-Cheney administration very early on decided to create a third, nonexistent category called unlawful combatants. But this designation doesn't exist in the International Red Cross's understanding; it doesn't exist in the Geneva Convention's. It was just a convenient way of saying this particular group of people, whoever it is that we choose to capture, detain forever, torture–they have no legal standing in the world. They exist outside of international law.

    RS: So let me pick up on that also. And I don't want to lose the earlier thread of the invention of war, and connecting with this incredibly important work you've done on torture. And you made the statement, which I think people should ponder: the reason we were torturing these people was not to get information about a future attack. We already had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and everything, we knew everything about it, and so forth. The real reason for it was to invent an alibi for the invasion, to get somebody to say Saddam Hussein was backing them. And I think that's a very important–a reason, by the way, to read your book, Mainstreaming Torture ; let me give a plug here. But this other argument is also interesting, the whole idea of the noncombatant. And we are doing this interview at a time when Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, is in prison–

    RG: Yes.

    RS: –again, because they want to fabricate a story about WikiLeaks and all that, and get everybody off the hook for all of the crimes and torture and everything they've done. But the interesting thing is, if you look at what did WikiLeaks–and they were just like in the position of the Washington Post with the Pentagon Papers, they're the publisher–what did Chelsea Manning reveal? She revealed the death of noncombatants, including journalists. So why don't you develop that a little bit, because that is so critical to the moment, that no one–no one has been prosecuted for those attacks that she revealed with the data. But she is now sitting in prison.

    RG: And this is, of course–the fate of whistleblowers all over the world, and certainly in this country, is exactly that. That the matters that they have revealed disappear in a story that becomes about the crimes of the revealer. And of course in the war in Iraq, there was tremendous amounts of civilian death. And it falls into a number of categories; one category is those people who had actually been detained and were being held by U.S. forces. And for example at Abu Ghraib, we know–which is the prison outside of Baghdad that had been Saddam Hussein's major torture site, and which the U.S. decided in its wisdom would be the perfect place to hold detainees, and where we know a group of reservists ended up torturing people. But the real torture was going on upstairs, by the employees of various C.I.A. contractors, and by the C.I.A. itself. And that's where people actually died. So there's that whole category of people, but that's a much smaller category than the category of ordinary civilians whose lives were either ended or destroyed by the regular U.S. use of warfare in places like Fallujah and other cities. So that we took what had been one of the most vibrant, developed, and cosmopolitan countries in that part of the world–which was Iraq–and we essentially did what they used to say they wanted to do to North Vietnam, bombed it back to the Stone Age. And so in just war theory, there are these rules about discriminating between combatants and noncombatants, and you are permitted a certain number of civilian deaths as long as they are side effects of your attempt to go after some legitimate military target. And this is called collateral damage; it's, collateral means on the side, right? But in fact, in Iraq, we don't know because there are many different counts, but anywhere between 500,000 and a million people have died in the U.S. invasion and occupation in Iraq. And when you lay that against the 3,000 people who died on September 11th, none of whom were killed by anyone even from Iraq, you also see that we have violated another rule of just war theory, which is proportionality. We have destroyed human life out of all proportion.

    RS: And let me just–you know, it's so difficult to grapple with these questions. And you are teaching at one of the major Catholic universities here.

    RG: It's a Jesuit university, and that's a little different. And these are the left-wing Jesuits.

    RS: I'm not putting down your school. [Laughter] Hey, I teach ethics at the University of Southern California–

    RG: Enough said.

    RS: –and clearly, yes, we are ethically challenged at this moment. I was about to actually celebrate the pope in this regard. And so there is a certain necessity for being consistent in the application of these principles, or they mean nothing.

    RG: Exactly.

    RS: And I think that's the body of your life's work, to remind us of that. So in a sense, you are at a good place where you're teaching. I'm just wondering, how is this disregarded so widely? I mean, people make a big deal about don't kill the unborn child. You know, I could see arguments about that. But if that's the beginning of a consistent, pro-life position, yes, it makes certain sense. If it's the end of a pro-life position, and then you end welfare and you don't care what happens to the baby and so forth, you're into a deep immorality. And it seems to me you're at a very interesting place. Because for better or worse, this pope seems to be the only one able to challenge, let's call it U.S. imperialism or imperial ventures, on a moral basis.

    RG: I think that's right. He certainly is doing a better job of that than either of his last two predecessors.

    RS: Or the major–

    RG: Other major, yeah. No, I think that's right. And I think, you know, it's interesting that at USF, we have Reserve Officers' Training Corps. We have people who are training to be second lieutenants when they leave university in the U.S. Army. And I have had students tell me, I had a student from Guam who told me, you know, Professor Gordon, I know that when they send me to basic training, they're going to try to take me apart and change me from being a person into being a soldier. And I just want you to know that I'm not going to let them do that to me. He said, but you know, ROTC was my ticket off the island, and I have a duty now to follow through with my promise. And I just, my heart broke for him. Because what they do to you in basic training is actually a slightly lighter version of what they do when they train torturers. Everyone who becomes a torturer–and people don't just torture on a whim; people are trained to be torturers. And part of that training involves being brutalized first yourself, and having survived that ordeal, you emerge with this sense of yourself as an elite person who therefore has the right, as a superior being, and now the skills, to turn around and abuse and torture people who come along behind you. And the U.S. has its own methods of training, and its own locations where this happens.

    RS: [omission for station break] I'm back after our break with Professor and Doctor Rebecca Gordon. And we were just talking about how we train people to be torturers. And this is fascinating, because if you don't consider this question, that you're getting basically good people to do horrible things, you're missing the whole point. But I just want to say something about the good German. Because the basic appeal of Hitler was the solid–you know, he was going to make Germany great again. And this is, I'm not demonizing Germans here, but Donald Trump's father was obviously familiar with this in his lineage, in that tradition. And the whole appeal, even though this dictator Hitler was this funny-looking guy, hardly the Aryan model–was to a notion of order. And even in the concentration camps, keeping direct bookkeeping of how many teeth you pulled and gold you found in the teeth, and so forth. But it's not–manners. They had the manners. And what bothers me about the very simplistic Trumpwashing that we're going through now, that Trump is uniquely evil–it's all about manners. He's crude, he's boorish, he's a misogynist, he says these things, he does these things, he grabs people's private parts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's not his crime. His crime is he's continuing a tradition of bombing people who we have no right to bomb. And so I want to push this a little bit more, the whole question of manners. Because what Nuremberg did is unmask the manners. And this was also true in the Eichmann trial that Hannah Arendt talked about, when she talked about the banality of evil. Evil can be masked by manners. Smile while you learn to kill, right?

    RG: That's exactly right. And I especially know, when you talk about the meticulous records that they kept, this is a hallmark of torture regimes all over the world. This very careful record-keeping, this documentation of the work that's been done–because there's no shame about the work. The process of becoming a torturer includes developing a sense of yourself as doing something uniquely courageous, uniquely necessary, a unique sacrifice that you as the torturer, more in sorrow than in anger, are being forced to do by the tremendous evil that confronts you. And so you're absolutely right that especially among upper-class liberals in the United States, the objection to Trump is his manner, and his manner is crude and obnoxious, as you say. But what he's really doing is not only continuing to kill people, and in fact increasing the number of drone strikes, for example, over the already great number that the Obama administration–

    RS: A man of impeccable manners. Barack Obama. I even feel that way about Bill Clinton. When Bill Clinton's on television, I smile. I like him. He's warm, he's encouraging. And then I forget, he's the guy that ended the welfare system, for example. Yes.

    RG: Exactly. Exactly right. And you know, Trump is now with his, I don't know if you've taken a look at his so-called budget, but he's planning to take away our Medicare and Medicaid, just in case you might have wanted to have healthcare. Obviously, that's dead on arrival. But nonetheless, the point is that he is masking what he is actually doing by distracting us with this bombastic display. And in fact, one of his officials in the EPA actually recently said exactly that, that they've been able to make all these regulatory changes because every time it looks as though the press is going to notice, Trump fires off a tweet, and everybody's like, ooh, shiny!

    RS: This is a really important point. Because if you look at the Nuremberg Trial or you look at the Eichmann trial, these people all hid behind manners. They were well spoken, they were well educated, and they were following a Charlie Chaplinesque figure, a ludicrous figure; Hitler was certainly a, yes, he was a more ludicrous figure than Trump, in terms of manners and style and everything. But his popularity was largely based on being a sort of comic figure, in a way. He inspired a whole nation of logical, scientific, well-educated–probably the best-educated population in the world. And so I've had this experience, I've talked to people in the business community and they say well, you know, but Trump is good for business. And we did have a mess before, and then look at what's happened to unemployment, and so forth and so on. And so we are really at the limit of manners as a guide. And that's really what Nuremberg is about. Nuremberg was unmasking manners. Now, we didn't continue after that; we had the brief Eichmann trial. But what we didn't really ever do in this country–and this is why I want people to listen or to read your book, better to read it, although listening is great–we never really took apart the Nazi experience. Because we wanted the ex-Nazis and other Germans to be our allies in the Cold War. So we have never had that investigation of how an incredibly well-educated, Christian, law-and-order nation goes into madness.

    RG: Not only that, we never did what the next step was supposed to be, which is establish a venue in which U.S. war crimes could also be examined in World War II. And there were a number of people who developed the Nuremberg principles, and worked on the original trial, who really honestly believed that this would be the prelude to establishing an international court for trying offenses committed during war, and expected that the United States would in fact be held accountable, not only for the firebombing of German cities, but for the destruction of up to 60 Japanese cities which were constructed of wood and paper and reduced to ashes, in a campaign that really very few people in this country even know about. Although Robert McNamara actually describes it in that excellent documentary–

    RS: The Fog of War , yeah.

    RG: -- The Fog of War.

    RS: And it's excellent because you see that McNamara was involved in designing the bombing of Japan and Germany. But also, I mean–like, we talk about Korea. Oh, North Korea, animals, and Kim Il-sung and his progeny–nobody I ever run into knows we leveled every single structure in North Korea during the Korean War. Again, a war that was not needed; it was an attempt to get a Chinese communist who had come to power the year before. I mean, it's bizarre. Then you look at what we did to North Vietnam, and the carpet bombing, and everything. So this is critical. American exceptionalism–I've mentioned this a number of times on this podcast–to my mind, is a really, it's the most profound problem that American people have to face.

    RG: It's a vicious idea. And it's been taken up in different ways by both the liberal democratic world, and by the, you know, the hard right in this country. The idea that by definition, the United States can do no wrong, because we are the leader of the so-called free world. Which is a locution I don't even understand anymore, given that we're not competing anymore with the unfree communist world that supposedly we were in opposition to. But the idea that–and this was the argument, actually, that the Bush administration made about torture. By definition, the United States is a country that does not torture. Therefore, whatever it is that you are observing, it cannot be torture, because that would be a logical contradiction, because we are the nation that doesn't do that. And it's almost impossible to enter into that understanding of the world, because no amount of evidence that you can present to the person who believes that is going to break that worldview. And so American exceptionalism allows us not only to have military bases in over 100 countries around the world; not only to conduct secret wars that the people in this country don't even know about–we just suddenly woke up and said, oh my gosh, we're having a war in Somalia! Who knew. And not to mention Yemen–I was very heartened to see that the Senate had actually voted with the House to reprimand the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia in Yemen. But leave that aside. This whole idea that we are a unique bearer of human rights and democracy in the world–it's very hard to break, because it's a concealed, hermetically sealed worldview that people imbibe in grade school. And they imbibe it as they grow up, and it takes a lot of effort to break through. And one of the sad things that I see, especially with younger people that I've worked with in organizations like War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, is that once you've broken through, it then becomes very hard to imagine that the United States is not permanently and always going to be the hegemon. It almost, having made the effort and understood the danger the U.S. actually presents to the world, it becomes almost impossible to recognize when the U.S. actually loses one. And I think it's very important we claim our victories.

    RS: Well you know, you hit it clearly with this, the abandonment by the Democratic Party of any serious oppositional role. [With] control of the House now, there should be hearings about what are we doing in these different countries. And instead they're actually criticizing Trump for being, kind of selling out by getting out of Afghanistan, or not fighting more aggressively in Syria. And we've actually sort of lost the peace movement, in a way, is a theme I get back to once in a while here. And we forget, actually, most of the terrible wars since World War II have been fought under democrats, and financed enthusiastically. So I want to get back to basic moral principles, because they don't mean anything if you're not consistent. You have to call out people on the left or on the right, you have to call out war crimes, you have to call out the attacks on homosexuals, black people, Jewish people–anybody, any other, and so forth. It's something that Jesus reminded us of in the tale of the Good Samaritan, if you can believe that Luke is the word of God, and not the others, [Laughter] where the Good Samaritan doesn't appear. I don't want to get into your whole Catholic university thing here. But it's interesting to me, this notion of consistency. Because it's painful to be consistent. It requires examining the motives of people you voted for. And this was the problem of Germany: people forget Hitler was elected. People forget Germany had all the trappings of a–

    RG: Of a democracy.

    RS: –of a democracy. And more important, the conceit that somehow education–education, and manners–will prevent genocide is a lie. Maybe it's time to recognize this whole notion of American greatness is the end of thought; if you are by definition great, there's nothing to question. And it seems to me that main religions that we've had, their one demand that they have in common is you must question not only your nation's morality, but your own. The devil is in you. We have to struggle with this devil, we have to struggle with these forces. Yet as a nation, we think America the beautiful absolves us all. And that's what you're saying in your torture book. That basically, you take these young recruits that have a very limited knowledge of our history, and you convince them that they are the agents, really, of a higher power.

    RG: Absolutely right. And in doing that, you pervert the very virtues that we say the United States is supposed to represent. The virtue of courage, for example, becomes the courage to suppress your squeamishness at causing pain to another human being. And justice becomes the idea that you give the punishment first and the trial later, if ever. Right? And this is exactly what we see in the way our detainees have been treated. And honestly, another locus of this that we don't often recognize is what goes on on the U.S. soil prisons and jails in this country, where we have 2.2 million people locked up in cages, and where torture is a regular feature of prison life. It's no accident that the reservists who were downstairs at Abu Ghraib, they were from West Virginia, and most of them in their civilian life were prison guards. They were corrections officers. And there's a famous email that one of the ringleaders, Charles Graner, sent home which said: The Christian in me knows it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me loves to see a grown man piss himself. And that is exactly the attitude of the people who are caging up 2.2 [million] largely, vastly disproportionately, black and Latino, Latinx, people in this country today. And so torture actually is a red thread that runs through the entire history of the United States, beginning with the Native American population. Slavery itself would not have been as successful as it was at allowing the amassing of capital–which is, you know if you're a good Marxist, the congealed labor of these unpaid, captive people, who when they got to the United States, or what was not even yet the United States, would not work unless, the farmers figured out, they were caused physical pain. And it was the use, the concerted, intentional, well-documented use of physical pain in the cotton fields a century later that forced people to develop a physical technology of their bodies that allowed them, in the course of 40 years, to multiply by eight times the amount of cotton a human being could pick in a day, because the alternative was to have the skin taken off your back with a whip.

    RS: You know, increasingly in my life I have been a bad Marxist. And I've embraced some truths that seemed to come out of these religions that, growing up, really frightened me or were intimidating, and also were on the wrong side. But let's take it back to the pope, let's take it back to the Jesuit school, University of San Francisco, where you teach. There's a wisdom that I daresay Karl Marx did not sufficiently embrace. It is that we all have a capacity for evil. That we have virtue; we care, we bring children into this world, we nurture them, we care about others, we can cry over a refugee. On the other hand, the 2.2 million–I've been on Death Row quite recently interviewing Kevin Cooper, who I believe is an innocent man. And fortunately, the governor of California has suspended the death penalty, and I think Gavin Newsom deserves great credit for his courage. But–and it is a cage, and we don't care; we don't care about these people. And we don't care about the people we bomb, and we don't care–they're expendable, they're throwaway people. You want them out of sight, out of mind. It's very deliberate. And the problem is, if Marxism were accurate [Laughter]–I don't know, not too many people care, anyway, but since the two of us are talking about it–you know, if it was just the economic motive, we'd probably do better. The libertarians, for instance–to the degree that they're right, they're right, yes. But the wars don't make sense. And growing that cotton that way didn't ultimately make sense. And slavery didn't make sense. Except–except if we have a barbaric part of our nature, if we have a need to exploit others. Not just for economic reasons; if power corrupts. And this, not to quote Marx, but to quote Jefferson or Washington, these people who came to power in this great experiment of ours, with all its contradictions–I repeat this ad nauseum on these podcasts. All their, yes, white, male, I got it, I got it, slave owners, the whole thing–they were on to a wisdom about their own corruption. And the reason we have the First Amendment, the reason we have all the amendments, the reason we have separation of powers, is that power corrupts.

    RG: Absolutely.

    RS: And what comes through in these torture stories and so forth–I talked, I have one student, just like you, I've had students go off to these wars. I had one who ended up at Abu Ghraib and at Guantanamo, a reserve officer. He was outside with the families. I'm not going to compromise his privacy. But he told me what shook him up was he was being told all these things about the people inside the jail, but his job was to herd the families that were trying to visit. And he could not deny that there was some kind of humanity going on with these people inside, or why would all these people care so much about them. And I think we need to be reminded of our own capacity for evil. I think that's what Nuremberg was about, that the people who commit evil don't present as evil and are not inherently more evil than we are.

    RG: Exactly.

    RS: And we have to struggle with this. And the good liberals who accommodate this, and say well, you know, Barack Obama had to do this with the drones, and governor so-and-so had to kill these people even though he didn't believe in the death penalty–we have to challenge that. Because that is the fount of evil.

    RG: So, my favorite virtue, Aristotle calls it phronesis, or practical wisdom. St. Thomas Aquinas calls it prudentia, prudence. But what it really is, is that capacity of the mind that allows you to actually understand the moral questions that are in front of you. And not to be fooled by the fog of American exceptionalism, by the distraction of a Trumpian tweet, but to be able to actually examine and really see, in this case, the effects of U.S. policy on actual human beings around the world. And this requires a kind of courage to be willing to accept that your own self-understanding, and the understanding of your people, your country, might be wrong. But it also requires a willingness to look, to actually see and examine what's in front of you. And if there's one virtue I would like to see developed, and that I try to develop in my own students, it's this virtue of practical wisdom, where you actually are responsible for what the effects of your actions can reasonably be foreseen to be. And this is something that we in the United States really don't have. It's trained out of us, we don't have it. And part of it, yes, is that capacity to understand that the ability to do evil things exists in all of us, and it's also to understand that when you multiply that capacity by the technological and economic power that a country like the United States has, the results–well, the results

    [Apr 21, 2019] NYT The Tables Have Turned -- Time To Investigate The FBI, Steele And The Rest Of The Witch Hunters

    The country was divided before Mueller Report. Now it is even more divided.
    Notable quotes:
    "... We wouldn't know that a Clinton-linked operative, Joseph Mifsud, seeded Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos with the rumor that Russia had 'Dirt' on Hillary Clinton - which would later be coaxed out of Papadopoulos by a Clinton-linked Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, and that this apparent 'setup' would be the genesis of the FBI's " operation crossfire hurricane " operation against the Trump campaign. ..."
    "... We wouldn't know about the role of Fusion GPS - the opposition research firm hired by Hillary Clinton's campaign to commission the Steele dossier. Fusion is also linked to the infamous Trump Tower meeting , and hired Nellie Ohr - the CIA-linked wife of the DOJ's then-#4 employee, Bruce Ohr. Nellie fed her husband Bruce intelligence she had gathered against Trump while working for Fusion , according to transcripts of her closed-door Congressional testimony. ..."
    "... Now the dossier -- financed by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee , and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele -- is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries . - NYT ..."
    "... The report was debunked after internet sleuths traced the IP address to a marketing server located outside Philadelphia, leading Alfa Bank executives to file a lawsuit against Fusion GPS in October 2017, claiming their reputations were harmed by the Steele Dossier. ..."
    "... And who placed the Trump-Alfa theory with various media outlets? None other than former FBI counterintelligence officer and Dianne Feinstein aide Dan Jones - who is currently working with Fusion GPS and Steele to continue their Trump-Russia investigation funded in part by George Soros . ..."
    "... Of course, when one stops painting with broad brush strokes, it's clear that the dossier was fabricated bullshit. ..."
    "... after a nearly two-year investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and roughly 40 FBI agents and other specialists, no evidence was found to support the dossier's wild claims of "DNC moles, Romanian hackers, Russian pensioners, or years of Trump-Putin intelligence trading ," as the Times puts it. ..."
    "... As there was spying, there must necessarily also have been channels to get the information thus gathered back to its original buyer - the Clinton campaign. Who passed the information back to Clinton, and what got passed? ..."
    "... the NYTt prints all the news a scumbag would. remember Judith Miller, the Zionazi reporter the NYT ..."
    "... There was no 'hack.' That is the big, anti-Russia, pro-MIC lie which all the other lies serve. ..."
    "... Seth Rich had the means and the motive. So did Imran Awan, but it would make no sense for Awan to turn anything over to wikileaks . . .he would have kept them as insurance. ..."
    "... Until the real criminals are processed and the media can be restored you don't have a United States. This corruption is beyond comprehension. You had the (((media)) providing kickbacks to the FBI for leaked information. These bribes are how CNN was on site during Roger Stones invasion. ..."
    "... So now the narrative is, "We were wrong about Russian collusion, and that's Russia's fault"?! ..."
    Apr 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    As we now shift from the "witch hunt" against Trump to 'investigating the investigators' who spied on him - remember this; Donald Trump was supposed to lose the 2016 election by almost all accounts. And had Hillary won, as expected, none of this would have seen the light of day .

    We wouldn't know that a hyper-partisan FBI had spied on the Trump campaign , as Attorney General William Barr put it during his April 10 Congressional testimony .

    We wouldn't know that a Clinton-linked operative, Joseph Mifsud, seeded Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos with the rumor that Russia had 'Dirt' on Hillary Clinton - which would later be coaxed out of Papadopoulos by a Clinton-linked Australian ambassador, Alexander Downer, and that this apparent 'setup' would be the genesis of the FBI's " operation crossfire hurricane " operation against the Trump campaign.

    We wouldn't know about the role of Fusion GPS - the opposition research firm hired by Hillary Clinton's campaign to commission the Steele dossier. Fusion is also linked to the infamous Trump Tower meeting , and hired Nellie Ohr - the CIA-linked wife of the DOJ's then-#4 employee, Bruce Ohr. Nellie fed her husband Bruce intelligence she had gathered against Trump while working for Fusion , according to transcripts of her closed-door Congressional testimony.

    And if not for reporting by the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross and others, we wouldn't know that the FBI sent a longtime spook, Stefan Halper, to infiltrate and spy on the Trump campaign - after the Obama DOJ paid him over $400,000 right before the 2016 US election (out of more than $1 million he received while Obama was president).

    According to the New York Times , the tables are turning, starting with the Steele Dossier.

    [T]he release on Thursday of the report by the special counsel , Robert S. Mueller III, underscored what had grown clearer for months -- that while many Trump aides had welcomed contacts with the Russians, some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared to be false, and others were impossible to prove . Mr. Mueller's report contained over a dozen passing references to the document's claims but no overall assessment of why so much did not check out.

    Now the dossier -- financed by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee , and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele -- is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries . - NYT

    While Congressional Republicans have vowed to investigate, the DOJ's Inspector General is considering whether the FBI improperly relied on the dossier when they used it to apply for a surveillance warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The IG also wants to know about Steele's sources and whether the FBI disclosed any doubts as to the veracity of the dossier .

    Attorney General Barr, meanwhile, said he will review the FBI's conduct in the Russia investigation after saying the agency spied on the Trump campaign .

    Doubts over the dossier

    The FBI's scramble to vet the dossier's claims are well known. According to an April, 2017 NYT report , the FBI agreed to pay Steele $50,000 for "solid corroboration" of his claims . Steele was apparently unable to produce satisfactory evidence - and was ultimately not paid for his efforts:

    Mr. Steele met his F.B.I. contact in Rome in early October, bringing a stack of new intelligence reports. One, dated Sept. 14, said that Mr. Putin was facing "fallout" over his apparent involvement in the D.N.C. hack and was receiving "conflicting advice" on what to do.

    The agent said that if Mr. Steele could get solid corroboration of his reports, the F.B.I. would pay him $50,000 for his efforts, according to two people familiar with the offer. Ultimately, he was not paid . - NYT

    Still, the FBI used the dossier to obtain the FISA warrant on Page - while the document itself was heavily shopped around to various media outlets . The late Sen. John McCain provided a copy to Former FBI Director James Comey, who already had a version, and briefed President Trump on the salacious document. Comey's briefing to Trump was then used by CNN and BuzzFeed to justify reporting on and publishing the dossier following the election.

    Let's not forget that in October, 2016, both Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta promoted the conspiracy theory that a secret Russian server was communicating with Trump Tower.

    The report was debunked after internet sleuths traced the IP address to a marketing server located outside Philadelphia, leading Alfa Bank executives to file a lawsuit against Fusion GPS in October 2017, claiming their reputations were harmed by the Steele Dossier.

    And who placed the Trump-Alfa theory with various media outlets? None other than former FBI counterintelligence officer and Dianne Feinstein aide Dan Jones - who is currently working with Fusion GPS and Steele to continue their Trump-Russia investigation funded in part by George Soros .

    Dan Jones, George Soros, Glenn Simpson

    Russian tricks? The Times notes that Steele "has not ruled out" that he may have been fed Russian disinformation while assembling his dossier.

    That would mean that in addition to carrying out an effective attack on the Clinton campaign, Russian spymasters hedged their bets and placed a few land mines under Mr. Trump's presidency as well.

    Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who now lives outside Washington, saw that as plausible. "Russia has huge experience in spreading false information," he said. - NYT

    In short, Steele is being given an 'out' with this admission.

    A lawyer for Fusion GPS, Joshua Levy, says that the Mueller report substantiated the "core reporting" in the Steele memos - namely that "Trump campaign figures were secretly meeting Kremlin figures," and that Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, had directed "a covert operation to elect Donald J. Trump."

    Of course, when one stops painting with broad brush strokes, it's clear that the dossier was fabricated bullshit.

    The dossier tantalized Mr. Trump's opponents with a worst-case account of the president's conduct. And for those trying to make sense of the Trump-Russia saga, the dossier infused the quest for understanding with urgency.

    In blunt prose, it suggested that a foreign power had fully compromised the man who would become the next president of the United States.

    The Russians, it asserted, had tried winning over Mr. Trump with real estate deals in Moscow -- which he had not taken up -- and set him up with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel in 2013, filming the proceedings for future exploitation. A handful of aides were described as conspiring with the Russians at every turn.

    Mr. Trump, it said, had moles inside the D.N.C. The memos claimed that he and the Kremlin had been exchanging intelligence for eight years and were using Romanian hackers against the Democrats , and that Russian pensioners in the United States were running a covert communications network . - NYT

    And after a nearly two-year investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller and roughly 40 FBI agents and other specialists, no evidence was found to support the dossier's wild claims of "DNC moles, Romanian hackers, Russian pensioners, or years of Trump-Putin intelligence trading ," as the Times puts it.

    Now that the shoe is on the other foot, and key Democrats backing away from talks of impeachment, let's see if lady justice will follow the rest of us down the rabbit hole.

    Yippie21 , 2 minutes ago link

    This is why the whole FISA court is a joke. What is their remedy if their power is abused? What happens. Well,... the FISA courts was lied to and found out about it in the early 2000's. Mueller was FBI chief. So they got a strongly worded dressing-down, a mark in their permanent record from high school, and NO ONE was fired... no one was sanctioned, no agent was transferred to Alaska.

    Fast forward 10 or 12 years and the FBI is doing this **** again. Lying to the court... you know the court where there are no Democrat judges or Republican judges.. they are all super awesome.... and what is the remedy when the FISA court is told they've been lied to by the FBI and used in a intel operation with MI6, inserting assets, into a freaking domestic Presidential campaign!!! and then they WON. Good god.

    And what do we hear from our court? Nadda. Do we hear of some Federal Judges hauling FBI and DOJ folks in front of them and throwing them in jail? Nope. It appears from here... that our Federal Justices are corrupt and have no problem letting illegal police-state actions go on with ZERO accountability or recourse. They could care less evidently. It's all secret you know... trust us they say.. Why aren't these judges publicly making loud noises about how the judiciary is complicit , with the press, in wholesale spying and leaking for political reasons AND a coup attempt when the wrong guy won.???

    Where is awesome Justice Roberts? Why isn't he throwing down some truth on just how compromised the rule of law in his courts clearly are in the last 10 years? The FISA court is his baby. It does no good for them to assure us they are concerned too, and they've taken action and sent strongly worded letters. Pisses me off. ? Right? heck of rant...

    San Pedro , 2 minutes ago link

    When did Russians interfere in our elections?? 2016. Who was president when Russians interfered with elections?? oobama. Who was head of the CIA?? Brennan. Who was National Intelligence director?? Clapper. Who was head of the FBI when the Russians interfered in our elections?? Comey. The pattern is obvious. When Trump was a private citizen the oobama and all his cabinet appointees and Intel Managers had their hands on all the levers and instruments of Government..and did nothing . Your oobama is guilty of treason and failing his Oath Of Office...everybody knows this.

    Scipio Africanuz , 4 minutes ago link

    This article is still a roundabout gambit to blame Russia.

    Fair enough, where's Bill Browder? In England. Browder's allegations were utilized to try and damage Russia, even though Russia (not the USSR), is about the most reliable friend America has.

    Russia helped Lincoln, and were it not for that crucial help, there'd be no America to sanction Russia today. The Tsar paid for that help with his dynasty, when Nicholas II was murdered, and dethroned.

    Americans are truly ungrateful brutes..

    Now, sanctions, opprobrium, and hatred are heaped on Russia, most cogently by chauvinistic racists, who look down their noses at Rus (Russ) and yet, cannot sacrifice 25 millions of their own people, for the sake of others.

    Russians are considered subhuman, and yet, the divine spark of humanity resides solely in their breasts. The zionists claim a false figure of 6 million for a faux holocaust, and yet, nobody pays attention to the true holocaust of 25 millions, or the many millions before that disastrous instigated war.

    That the Russians are childlike, believing others to be like them, loyal, self sacrificing, and generous, has now brought the world to the brink of armageddon, and still, they bear the burden of proof, though their accusers, who ought provide the evidence, are bereft of any..

    Thomas Jefferson it was, who observing whatever he observed, exclaimed in cogent agitation, that "I fear for my countrymen, when I remember that God is Just, and His Justice does not repose forever".

    Investigate Jared and Ivanka Kushner, along with Charles Kushner, and much ought be clear, no cheers...

    King of Ruperts Land , 5 minutes ago link

    I don't buy that "Few bad apples at the top", "Good rank and file" Argument. I have never seen one. We should assume everyone from the top to the bottom of FBI, DOJ, and State, just to get started, probably every other three better agency is bad. At least incompotent, at worst treasonous.

    Sanity Bear , 15 minutes ago link

    As there was spying, there must necessarily also have been channels to get the information thus gathered back to its original buyer - the Clinton campaign. Who passed the information back to Clinton, and what got passed?

    besnook , 20 minutes ago link

    the NYTt prints all the news a scumbag would. remember Judith Miller, the Zionazi reporter the NYT used to push the Iraq war with all sorts of ********? after the war was determined to be started under a false premise and became common knowledge there were no wmds in iraq the nyt came forward and reported the war was ******** as if they were reporting breaking news.

    they have done the same thing here. they pushed the russiagate story with both barrels even though the informed populace knew it was ******** before trump was sworn in as potus. now that the all the holes in the story are readily apparent the nyt comes forward with breaking revelation that something is wrong with the story.

    ClickNLook , 23 minutes ago link

    Now we will have another 2 years of investigation and another expensive and meaningless report. WWE Soup Opera continues. Plot sickens.

    I Am Jack's Macroaggression , 30 minutes ago link

    There was no 'hack.' That is the big, anti-Russia, pro-MIC lie which all the other lies serve.

    I Am Jack's Macroaggression , 30 minutes ago link

    There was no 'hack.' That is the big, anti-Russia, pro-MIC lie which all the other lies serve.

    His name is Seth Rich.

    DaBard51 , 24 minutes ago link

    The Seth Rich investigation; where is it now? Murder of a campaign staffer; tampering with or influencing an election, is it not? Hmmm... When nine hundred years old you become, look this good you will not.

    ClickNLook , 19 minutes ago link

    Once upon a time there was a Bernie supporter. And his name was Seth Rich. Then there was a "botched robbery", which evidence that was concluded on, I have no idea. Do you? Anyhow, The End.

    Amy G. Dala , 22 minutes ago link

    Seth Rich had the means and the motive. So did Imran Awan, but it would make no sense for Awan to turn anything over to wikileaks . . .he would have kept them as insurance.

    Why wouldn't Assange name the source for the DNC emails? Is this a future bargaining chip? And what if he did name Seth Rich? He would have to prove it. Could he?

    ComeAndTakeIt , 10 minutes ago link

    They've got Assange now...Maybe they should ask him if it was Seth Rich who gave him the emails?

    Maybe even do it under oath and on national television. I don't think it's still considered "burning a source" if your source has already been murdered....

    Bricker , 32 minutes ago link

    Until the real criminals are processed and the media can be restored you don't have a United States. This corruption is beyond comprehension. You had the (((media)) providing kickbacks to the FBI for leaked information. These bribes are how CNN was on site during Roger Stones invasion.

    Treason and Sedition is rampant in America and all SPY roads lead to Clapper, Brennan and Obama...This needs attention.

    The media is abusive and narrating attacks on a dully elected president

    Mike Rotsch , 35 minutes ago link

    Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who now lives outside Washington, saw that as plausible. "Russia has huge experience in spreading false information," he said. - NYT

    You have got to be ******* kidding me. So now the narrative is, "We were wrong about Russian collusion, and that's Russia's fault"?!

    [Apr 21, 2019] Washington Post's Max Boot Has No Clue What a Neocon Is

    Apr 21, 2019 | splinternews.com

    As he does nearly every day, Max Boot, the Washington Post 's in-house neocon columnist, wrote some words today. As has been the case quite a few times before, none of his latest words, even when strung together into a coherent sentence, were particularly good. For this very reason, several of those sentences were noteworthy. So let's (OK, let me ) look at just what that beautiful, smooth organ in Boot's skull considers a "neoconservative."

    According to Merriam-Webster, a neoconservative is a person who cites dictionary definitions in their writing. It's also, simply put, someone in American politics who's conservative on economic issues, hews to the middle or even center-left on social issues, and also really, really likes to Do War. That last one is a big requirement, so don't forget it -- war equals a strong, responsible nation.

    Boot opened his column with a critique of Rep. Ro Khanna's recent op-ed in the Post , with Boot writing that Khanna's position -- that neocons were responsible for the Iraq War -- is little more than an oft-repeated "canard" that plagues the American discourse. He then proceeded to take the reader through what a real neoconservative looks like by rewriting the top-summary of the neoconservatism Wikipedia page .

    Boot started by citing a group of 1970s characters he classified as the True Neocons. (Initially, the term was embodied by folks who were a little more skeptical of the Soviet Union than some of their Democratic counterparts.) Boot then argued neocons simply were not in power at the time the Iraq War was being decided on (a fact that is demonstratively untrue) by citing Bush administration officials widely credited as architects of the Iraq War:

    The "neocons" -- second-tier officials such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, and vice-presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby -- were not the decision-makers. The decision to invade was made by President George W. Bush in consultation with Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. None of them would ever label themselves a "neocon."

    Note the last sentence -- Boot frames his argument in a way that hangs the burden of proof that one is a neoconservative, or acts in a neoconservative fashion, on the stipulation that they publicly identify themselves as such, which, plainly, is so fucking dumb that I'm going to show you him doubling down on this line of thinking just because it's so unbelievably shallow.

    Moreover, a bipartisan majority of both houses approved the use of military force. Are Democratic then-Sens. Joe Biden, John Kerry, Charles E. Schumer, Harry Reid, Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein neocons?

    To state the obvious: Yes! All of those people are absolutely neocons, at least in some way.

    The idea that Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden don't at the very least actively display numerous neoconservative tendencies is an outright rejection of what Americans have watched play out in the political realm since the national Democratic Party imploded in the 70s. Democrats can be neocons; Republicans can be neolibs. Neos of some sort or the other are probably around you, right this very second, and no, not the good kind !

    Boot instead tries to convince readers that they are mislabeling politicians when, in fact, the label of neocon fits better than most for his motley crew of centrist Democrats, far better than "liberal" ever has. The people he chose to list are the people directly responsible for legislating the mass incarceration of minority citizens into existence; the folks known for cutting their teeth on the War on Drugs ; the ones who fucked over middle-class kids taking out college loans ; the assholes who were happy to vilify the welfare system; the elderly power-brokers who stared down a group of kids and poo-poo'd the urgency climate change ; the imperialists who voted for war and then some more war and then continued to be recalcitrant drone-loving war hawks throughout the opening decades of the 21st Century.

    The concept that political identity is wholly defined as being a list of beliefs a person writes down in their diary or says aloud during a campaign ad, and not by the actions conducted by said person, is one that has needed to die for at least the past half-century of American politics. But, again, Boot's column is not engaging in a discussion about what a neocon actually is in 2019. It's a deceptive and even laudatory tactic, but Boot is purposefully choosing to frame his argument around how politicians frame themselves. And that's a major problem if you happen to be employed to write down your opinions for one of the major news outlets in a nation and not for the political operatives themselves.

    If anything, the fact that this batshit lazy argument permeated the top three-fourths of his column offered a bit of relief with how it would end. Then this sentence appeared and I ascended to heaven:

    I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear, but...

    [Apr 21, 2019] Escobar The Deep State Vs. WikiLeaks by Pepe Escobar

    Notable quotes:
    "... John Pilger, among few others, has already stressed how a plan to destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was laid out as far back as 2008 – at the tail end of the Cheney regime – concocted by the Pentagon's shady Cyber Counter-Intelligence Assessments Branch. ..."
    "... But it was only in 2017, in the Trump era, that the Deep State went totally ballistic; that's when WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 files – detailing the CIA's vast hacking/cyber espionage repertoire. ..."
    "... This was the CIA as a Naked Emperor like never before – including the dodgy overseeing ops of the Center for Cyber Intelligence, an ultra-secret NSA counterpart. ..."
    "... The monolithic narrative by the Deep State faction aligned with the Clinton machine was that "the Russians" hacked the DNC servers. Assange was always adamant; that was not the work of a state actor – and he could prove it technically. ..."
    "... The DoJ wanted a deal – and they did make an offer to WikiLeaks. But then FBI director James Comey killed it. The question is why. ..."
    "... Some theoretically sound reconstructions of Comey's move are available. But the key fact is Comey already knew – via his close connections to the top of the DNC – that this was not a hack; it was a leak. ..."
    "... Ambassador Craig Murray has stressed, over and over again (see here ) how the DNC/Podesta files published by WikiLeaks came from two different US sources; one from within the DNC and the other from within US intel. ..."
    "... he release by WikiLeaks in April 2017 of the malware mechanisms inbuilt in "Grasshopper" and the "Marble Framework" were indeed a bombshell. This is how the CIA inserts foreign language strings in source code to disguise them as originating from Russia, from Iran, or from China. The inestimable Ray McGovern, a VIPS member, stressed how Marble Framework "destroys this story about Russian hacking." ..."
    "... No wonder then CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a "non-state hostile intelligence agency" ..."
    "... Joshua Schulte, the alleged leaker of Vault 7, has not faced a US court yet. There's no question he will be offered a deal by the USG if he aggress to testify against Julian Assange. ..."
    "... George Galloway has a guest who explains it all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VvPFMyPvHM&t=8s ..."
    "... Escobar is brain dead if he can't figure out that Trumpenstein is totally on board with destroying Assange. As if bringing on pukes like PompAss, BoltON, and Abrams doesn't scream it. ..."
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The Made-by-FBI indictment of Julian Assange does look like a dead man walking. No evidence. No documents. No surefire testimony. Just a crossfire of conditionals...

    But never underestimate the legalese contortionism of US government (USG) functionaries. As much as Assange may not be characterized as a journalist and publisher, the thrust of the affidavit is to accuse him of conspiring to commit espionage.

    In fact the charge is not even that Assange hacked a USG computer and obtained classified information; it's that he may have discussed it with Chelsea Manning and may have had the intention to go for a hack. Orwellian-style thought crime charges don't get any better than that. Now the only thing missing is an AI software to detect them.

    https://www.rt.com/shows/going-underground/456414-assange-wkileaks-asylum-london/video/5cb1c797dda4c822558b463f

    Assange legal adviser Geoffrey Robertson – who also happens to represent another stellar political prisoner, Brazil's Lula – cut straight to the chase (at 19:22 minutes);

    "The justice he is facing is justice, or injustice, in America I would hope the British judges would have enough belief in freedom of information to throw out the extradition request."

    That's far from a done deal. Thus the inevitable consequence; Assange's legal team is getting ready to prove, no holds barred, in a British court, that this USG indictment for conspiracy to commit computer hacking is just an hors d'oeuvre for subsequent espionage charges, in case Assange is extradited to US soil.

    All about Vault 7

    John Pilger, among few others, has already stressed how a plan to destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was laid out as far back as 2008 – at the tail end of the Cheney regime – concocted by the Pentagon's shady Cyber Counter-Intelligence Assessments Branch.

    It was all about criminalizing WikiLeaks and personally smearing Assange, using "shock troops enlisted in the media -- those who are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the truth."

    This plan remains more than active – considering how Assange's arrest has been covered by the bulk of US/UK mainstream media.

    By 2012, already in the Obama era, WikiLeaks detailed the astonishing "scale of the US Grand Jury Investigation" of itself. The USG always denied such a grand jury existed.

    "The US Government has stood up and coordinated a joint interagency criminal investigation of Wikileaks comprised of a partnership between the Department of Defense (DOD) including: CENTCOM; SOUTHCOM; the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA); Headquarters Department of the Army (HQDA); US Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) for USFI (US Forces Iraq) and 1st Armored Division (AD); US Army Computer Crimes Investigative Unit (CCIU); 2nd Army (US Army Cyber Command); Within that or in addition, three military intelligence investigations were conducted. Department of Justice (DOJ) Grand Jury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of State (DOS) and Diplomatic Security Service (DSS). In addition, Wikileaks has been investigated by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Office of the National CounterIntelligence Executive (ONCIX), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); the House Oversight Committee; the National Security Staff Interagency Committee, and the PIAB (President's Intelligence Advisory Board)."

    But it was only in 2017, in the Trump era, that the Deep State went totally ballistic; that's when WikiLeaks published the Vault 7 files – detailing the CIA's vast hacking/cyber espionage repertoire.

    This was the CIA as a Naked Emperor like never before – including the dodgy overseeing ops of the Center for Cyber Intelligence, an ultra-secret NSA counterpart.

    WikiLeaks got Vault 7 in early 2017. At the time WikiLeaks had already published the DNC files – which the unimpeachable Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) systematically proved was a leak, not a hack.

    The monolithic narrative by the Deep State faction aligned with the Clinton machine was that "the Russians" hacked the DNC servers. Assange was always adamant; that was not the work of a state actor – and he could prove it technically.

    There was some movement towards a deal, brokered by one of Assange's lawyers; WikiLeaks would not publish the most damning Vault 7 information in exchange for Assange's safe passage to be interviewed by the US Department of Justice (DoJ).

    The DoJ wanted a deal – and they did make an offer to WikiLeaks. But then FBI director James Comey killed it. The question is why.

    It's a leak, not a hack

    Some theoretically sound reconstructions of Comey's move are available. But the key fact is Comey already knew – via his close connections to the top of the DNC – that this was not a hack; it was a leak.

    Ambassador Craig Murray has stressed, over and over again (see here ) how the DNC/Podesta files published by WikiLeaks came from two different US sources; one from within the DNC and the other from within US intel.

    There was nothing for Comey to "investigate". Or there would have, if Comey had ordered the FBI to examine the DNC servers. So why talk to Julian Assange?

    T he release by WikiLeaks in April 2017 of the malware mechanisms inbuilt in "Grasshopper" and the "Marble Framework" were indeed a bombshell. This is how the CIA inserts foreign language strings in source code to disguise them as originating from Russia, from Iran, or from China. The inestimable Ray McGovern, a VIPS member, stressed how Marble Framework "destroys this story about Russian hacking."

    No wonder then CIA director Mike Pompeo accused WikiLeaks of being a "non-state hostile intelligence agency", usually manipulated by Russia.

    Joshua Schulte, the alleged leaker of Vault 7, has not faced a US court yet. There's no question he will be offered a deal by the USG if he aggress to testify against Julian Assange.

    It's a long and winding road, to be traversed in at least two years, if Julian Assange is ever to be extradited to the US. Two things for the moment are already crystal clear. The USG is obsessed to shut down WikiLeaks once and for all. And because of that, Julian Assange will never get a fair trial in the "so-called 'Espionage Court'" of the Eastern District of Virginia, as detailed by former CIA counterterrorism officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou.

    Meanwhile, the non-stop demonization of Julian Assange will proceed unabated, faithful to guidelines established over a decade ago. Assange is even accused of being a US intel op, and WikiLeaks a splinter Deep State deep cover op.

    Maybe President Trump will maneuver the hegemonic Deep State into having Assange testify against the corruption of the DNC; or maybe Trump caved in completely to "hostile intelligence agency" Pompeo and his CIA gang baying for blood. It's all ultra-high-stakes shadow play – and the show has not even begun.

    JailBanksters , 40 minutes ago link

    Not to mention the Pentagram has silenced 100,000 whistleblower complaints by Intimidation, threats, money or accidents over 5 years . A Whistleblower only does this when know there is something seriously wrong. Just Imagine how many knew something was wrong but looked the other way.

    ExPat2018 , 47 minutes ago link

    George Galloway has a guest who explains it all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VvPFMyPvHM&t=8s

    Betrayed , 2 hours ago link

    Maybe President Trump will maneuver the hegemonic Deep State into having Assange testify against the corruption of the DNC; or maybe Trump caved in completely to "hostile intelligence agency" Pompeo and his CIA gang baying for blood.

    Escobar is brain dead if he can't figure out that Trumpenstein is totally on board with destroying Assange. As if bringing on pukes like PompAss, BoltON, and Abrams doesn't scream it.

    besnook , 2 hours ago link

    assange and wikileaks are the real criminals despite being crimeless. the **** is a sanctioned criminal, allowed to be criminal with the system because the rest of the sanctioned criminals would be exposed if she was investigated.

    this is not the rule of laws. this is the law of rulers.

    _triplesix_ , 2 hours ago link

    Anyone seen Imran Awan lately?

    Four chan , 34 minutes ago link

    yeah those ***** go free because they got everything on the stupid dems and they are muslim.

    assange exposes the podesta dws and clinton fraud against bernie voters+++ and hes the bad guy. yeah right

    hillary clinton murdered seth rich sure as **** too.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Exploring the Shadows of America s Security State Or How I Learned Not to Love Big Brother

    Notable quotes:
    "... Almost by accident, I had launched my academic career by doing something a bit different. Embedded within that study of drug trafficking was an analytical approach that would take me, almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations, including diplomatic alliances, CIA interventions, developing military technology, recourse to torture, and global surveillance. Step by step, topic by topic, decade after decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient understanding of the parts to try to assemble the whole. In writing my new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power , I drew on this research to assess the overall character of U.S. global power and the forces that might contribute to its perpetuation or decline. ..."
    "... In the process, I slowly came to see a striking continuity and coherence in Washington's century-long rise to global dominion. CIA torture techniques emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic robotic aerospace technology had its first trial in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all, Washington's reliance on surveillance first appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900 and soon became an essential though essentially illegal tool for the FBI's repression of domestic dissent that continued through the 1970s. ..."
    "... After occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. Army, facing a difficult pacification campaign in a restive land, discovered the power of systematic surveillance to crush the resistance of the country's political elite. Then, during World War I, the Army's "father of military intelligence," the dour General Ralph Van Deman, who had learned his trade in the Philippines, drew upon his years pacifying those islands to mobilize a legion of 1,700 soldiers and 350,000 citizen-vigilantes for an intense surveillance program against suspected enemy spies among German-Americans, including my own grandfather. In studying Military Intelligence files at the National Archives, I found "suspicious" letters purloined from my grandfather's army locker. In fact, his mother had been writing him in her native German about such subversive subjects as knitting him socks for guard duty. ..."
    "... In the 1950s, Hoover's FBI agents tapped thousands of phones without warrants and kept suspected subversives under close surveillance, including my mother's cousin Gerard Piel, an anti-nuclear activist and the publisher of Scientific American magazine. During the Vietnam War, the bureau expanded its activities with an amazing array of spiteful, often illegal, intrigues in a bid to cripple the antiwar movement with pervasive surveillance of the sort seen in my own FBI file. ..."
    "... What about using the historical method to explore the nature of USA's reducing EU nations to "vassals" – and keeping them in the status of vassals, such that they can be depended on to undermine their own economies and sovereignty for the sake of USA's global initiatives? ..."
    "... An interesting question might be whether the NATO-to-Afghanistan highway (truck route for munitions, etc.), c. 2010, was also, on the back-haul – Afghanistan to EU – the major supply route for heroin throughout the EU and thus the key to corruption of EU governments (and of Russia) and domination of those governments by USA's neocon operatives? (E.g., was/is the distribution system of the "Chocolate King" Petro Poroshenko, President of Ukraine, delivering something besides just chocolate?) ..."
    "... The Puppet Masters Behind Georgia President Saakashvili http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20569.htm ..."
    Aug 26, 2017 | www.unz.com

    Alfred McCoy August 24, 2017

    [ This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy's new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power .]

    In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a "fourth branch" of the federal government -- with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.

    Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history's largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation's 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined "black budget" of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.

    By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web's undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon's Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops (Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.

    While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security's colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses -- from the "red scare" of the 1920s through the FBI's illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s -- could we really be confident that there wasn't a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn't really so benign when it came to us.

    From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family's history over three generations, I've found out in the most personal way possible that there's a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own "war" stories to explain how I've been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way.

    On the Heroin Trail

    After finishing college in the late 1960s, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Japanese history and was pleasantly surprised when Yale Graduate School admitted me with a full fellowship. But the Ivy League in those days was no ivory tower. During my first year at Yale, the Justice Department indicted Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for a local murder and the May Day protests that filled the New Haven green also shut the campus for a week. Almost simultaneously, President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and student protests closed hundreds of campuses across America for the rest of the semester.

    In the midst of all this tumult, the focus of my studies shifted from Japan to Southeast Asia, and from the past to the war in Vietnam. Yes, that war. So what did I do about the draft? During my first semester at Yale, on December 1, 1969, to be precise, the Selective Service cut up the calendar for a lottery. The first 100 birthdays picked were certain to be drafted, but any dates above 200 were likely exempt. My birthday, June 8th, was the very last date drawn, not number 365 but 366 (don't forget leap year) -- the only lottery I have ever won, except for a Sunbeam electric frying pan in a high school raffle. Through a convoluted moral calculus typical of the 1960s, I decided that my draft exemption, although acquired by sheer luck, demanded that I devote myself, above all else, to thinking about, writing about, and working to end the Vietnam War.

    During those campus protests over Cambodia in the spring of 1970, our small group of graduate students in Southeast Asian history at Yale realized that the U.S. strategic predicament in Indochina would soon require an invasion of Laos to cut the flow of enemy supplies into South Vietnam. So, while protests over Cambodia swept campuses nationwide, we were huddled inside the library, preparing for the next invasion by editing a book of essays on Laos for the publisher Harper & Row. A few months after that book appeared, one of the company's junior editors, Elizabeth Jakab, intrigued by an account we had included about that country's opium crop, telephoned from New York to ask if I could research and write a "quickie" paperback about the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam.

    I promptly started the research at my student carrel in the Gothic tower that is Yale's Sterling Library, tracking old colonial reports about the Southeast Asian opium trade that ended suddenly in the 1950s, just as the story got interesting. So, quite tentatively at first, I stepped outside the library to do a few interviews and soon found myself following an investigative trail that circled the globe. First, I traveled across America for meetings with retired CIA operatives. Then I crossed the Pacific to Hong Kong to study drug syndicates, courtesy of that colony's police drug squad. Next, I went south to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to investigate the heroin traffic that was targeting the GIs, and on into the mountains of Laos to observe CIA alliances with opium warlords and the hill-tribe militias that grew the opium poppy. Finally, I flew from Singapore to Paris for interviews with retired French intelligence officers about their opium trafficking during the first Indochina War of the 1950s.

    The drug traffic that supplied heroin for the U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam was not, I discovered, exclusively the work of criminals. Once the opium left tribal poppy fields in Laos, the traffic required official complicity at every level. The helicopters of Air America, the airline the CIA then ran, carried raw opium out of the villages of its hill-tribe allies. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close American collaborator, operated the world's largest heroin lab and was so oblivious to the implications of the traffic that he opened his opium ledgers for my inspection. Several of Saigon's top generals were complicit in the drug's distribution to U.S. soldiers. By 1971, this web of collusion ensured that heroin, according to a later White House survey of a thousand veterans, would be "commonly used" by 34% of American troops in South Vietnam.

    None of this had been covered in my college history seminars. I had no models for researching an uncharted netherworld of crime and covert operations. After stepping off the plane in Saigon, body slammed by the tropical heat, I found myself in a sprawling foreign city of four million, lost in a swarm of snarling motorcycles and a maze of nameless streets, without contacts or a clue about how to probe these secrets. Every day on the heroin trail confronted me with new challenges -- where to look, what to look for, and, above all, how to ask hard questions.

    Reading all that history had, however, taught me something I didn't know I knew. Instead of confronting my sources with questions about sensitive current events, I started with the French colonial past when the opium trade was still legal, gradually uncovering the underlying, unchanging logistics of drug production. As I followed this historical trail into the present, when the traffic became illegal and dangerously controversial, I began to use pieces from this past to assemble the present puzzle, until the names of contemporary dealers fell into place. In short, I had crafted a historical method that would prove, over the next 40 years of my career, surprisingly useful in analyzing a diverse array of foreign policy controversies -- CIA alliances with drug lords, the agency's propagation of psychological torture, and our spreading state surveillance.

    The CIA Makes Its Entrance in My Life

    Those months on the road, meeting gangsters and warlords in isolated places, offered only one bit of real danger. While hiking in the mountains of Laos, interviewing Hmong farmers about their opium shipments on CIA helicopters, I was descending a steep slope when a burst of bullets ripped the ground at my feet. I had walked into an ambush by agency mercenaries.

    While the five Hmong militia escorts whom the local village headman had prudently provided laid down a covering fire, my Australian photographer John Everingham and I flattened ourselves in the elephant grass and crawled through the mud to safety. Without those armed escorts, my research would have been at an end and so would I. After that ambush failed, a CIA paramilitary officer summoned me to a mountaintop meeting where he threatened to murder my Lao interpreter unless I ended my research. After winning assurances from the U.S. embassy that my interpreter would not be harmed, I decided to ignore that warning and keep going.

    Six months and 30,000 miles later, I returned to New Haven. My investigation of CIA alliances with drug lords had taught me more than I could have imagined about the covert aspects of U.S. global power. Settling into my attic apartment for an academic year of writing, I was confident that I knew more than enough for a book on this unconventional topic. But my education, it turned out, was just beginning.

    Within weeks, a massive, middle-aged guy in a suit interrupted my scholarly isolation. He appeared at my front door and identified himself as Tom Tripodi , senior agent for the Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). His agency, he confessed during a second visit, was worried about my writing and he had been sent to investigate. He needed something to tell his superiors. Tom was a guy you could trust. So I showed him a few draft pages of my book. He disappeared into the living room for a while and came back saying, "Pretty good stuff. You got your ducks in a row." But there were some things, he added, that weren't quite right, some things he could help me fix.

    Best of all, there was the one about how the Bureau of Narcotics caught French intelligence protecting the Corsican syndicates smuggling heroin into New York City. Some of his stories, usually unacknowledged, would appear in my book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia . These conversations with an undercover operative, who had trained Cuban exiles for the CIA in Florida and later investigated Mafia heroin syndicates for the DEA in Sicily, were akin to an advanced seminar, a master class in covert operations.

    In the summer of 1972, with the book at press, I went to Washington to testify before Congress. As I was making the rounds of congressional offices on Capitol Hill, my editor rang unexpectedly and summoned me to New York for a meeting with the president and vice president of Harper & Row, my book's publisher. Ushered into a plush suite of offices overlooking the spires of St. Patrick's Cathedral, I listened to those executives tell me that Cord Meyer, Jr., the CIA's deputy director for covert operations, had called on their company's president emeritus, Cass Canfield, Sr. The visit was no accident, for Canfield, according to an authoritative history , "enjoyed prolific links to the world of intelligence, both as a former psychological warfare officer and as a close personal friend of Allen Dulles," the ex-head of the CIA Meyer denounced my book as a threat to national security. He asked Canfield, also an old friend, to quietly suppress it.

    I was in serious trouble. Not only was Meyer a senior CIA official but he also had impeccable social connections and covert assets in every corner of American intellectual life. After graduating from Yale in 1942, he served with the marines in the Pacific, writing eloquent war dispatches published in the Atlantic Monthly . He later worked with the U.S. delegation drafting the U.N. charter. Personally recruited by spymaster Allen Dulles, Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and was soon running its International Organizations Division, which, in the words of that same history , "constituted the greatest single concentration of covert political and propaganda activities of the by now octopus-like CIA," including " Operation Mockingbird " that planted disinformation in major U.S. newspapers meant to aid agency operations. Informed sources told me that the CIA still had assets inside every major New York publisher and it already had every page of my manuscript.

    As the child of a wealthy New York family, Cord Meyer moved in elite social circles, meeting and marrying Mary Pinchot, the niece of Gifford Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forestry Service and a former governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot was a breathtaking beauty who later became President Kennedy's mistress, making dozens of secret visits to the White House. When she was found shot dead along the banks of a canal in Washington in 1964, the head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, another Yale alumnus, broke into her home in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her diary. Mary's sister Toni and her husband, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, later found the diary and gave it to Angleton for destruction by the agency. To this day, her unsolved murder remains a subject of mystery and controversy.

    Cord Meyer was also in the Social Register of New York's fine families along with my publisher, Cass Canfield, which added a dash of social cachet to the pressure to suppress my book. By the time he walked into Harper & Row's office in that summer of 1972, two decades of CIA service had changed Meyer (according to that same authoritative history) from a liberal idealist into "a relentless, implacable advocate for his own ideas," driven by "a paranoiac distrust of everyone who didn't agree with him" and a manner that was "histrionic and even bellicose." An unpublished 26-year-old graduate student versus the master of CIA media manipulation. It was hardly a fair fight. I began to fear my book would never appear.

    To his credit, Canfield refused Meyer's request to suppress the book. But he did allow the agency a chance to review the manuscript prior to publication. Instead of waiting quietly for the CIA's critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh, then an investigative reporter for the New York Times . The same day the CIA courier arrived from Langley to collect my manuscript, Hersh swept through Harper & Row's offices like a tropical storm, pelting hapless executives with incessant, unsettling questions. The next day, his exposé of the CIA's attempt at censorship appeared on the paper's front page . Other national media organizations followed his lead. Faced with a barrage of negative coverage, the CIA gave Harper & Row a critique full of unconvincing denials . The book was published unaltered.

    My Life as an Open Book for the Agency

    I had learned another important lesson: the Constitution's protection of press freedom could check even the world's most powerful espionage agency. Cord Meyer reportedly learned the same lesson. According to his obituary in the Washington Post , "It was assumed that Mr. Meyer would eventually advance" to head CIA covert operations, "but the public disclosure about the book deal apparently dampened his prospects." He was instead exiled to London and eased into early retirement.

    Meyer and his colleagues were not, however, used to losing. Defeated in the public arena, the CIA retreated to the shadows and retaliated by tugging at every thread in the threadbare life of a graduate student. Over the next few months, federal officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare turned up at Yale to investigate my graduate fellowship. The Internal Revenue Service audited my poverty-level income. The FBI tapped my New Haven telephone (something I learned years later from a class-action lawsuit).

    In August 1972, at the height of the controversy over the book, FBI agents told the bureau's director that they had "conducted [an] investigation concerning McCoy," searching the files they had compiled on me for the past two years and interviewing numerous "sources whose identities are concealed [who] have furnished reliable information in the past" -- thereby producing an 11-page report detailing my birth, education, and campus antiwar activities.

    A college classmate I hadn't seen in four years, who served in military intelligence, magically appeared at my side in the book section of the Yale Co-op, seemingly eager to resume our relationship. The same week that a laudatory review of my book appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review , an extraordinary achievement for any historian, Yale's History Department placed me on academic probation. Unless I could somehow do a year's worth of overdue work in a single semester, I faced dismissal.

    In those days, the ties between the CIA and Yale were wide and deep. The campus residential colleges screened students, including future CIA Director Porter Goss, for possible careers in espionage. Alumni like Cord Meyer and James Angleton held senior slots at the agency. Had I not had a faculty adviser visiting from Germany, the distinguished scholar Bernhard Dahm who was a stranger to this covert nexus, that probation would likely have become expulsion, ending my academic career and destroying my credibility.

    During those difficult days, New York Congressman Ogden Reid, a ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, telephoned to say that he was sending staff investigators to Laos to look into the opium situation. Amid this controversy, a CIA helicopter landed near the village where I had escaped that ambush and flew the Hmong headman who had helped my research to an agency airstrip. There, a CIA interrogator made it clear that he had better deny what he had said to me about the opium. Fearing, as he later told my photographer, that "they will send a helicopter to arrest me, or soldiers to shoot me," the Hmong headman did just that.

    At a personal level, I was discovering just how deep the country's intelligence agencies could reach, even in a democracy, leaving no part of my life untouched: my publisher, my university, my sources, my taxes, my phone, and even my friends.

    Although I had won the first battle of this war with a media blitz, the CIA was winning the longer bureaucratic struggle. By silencing my sources and denying any culpability, its officials convinced Congress that it was innocent of any direct complicity in the Indochina drug trade. During Senate hearings into CIA assassinations by the famed Church Committee three years later, Congress accepted the agency's assurance that none of its operatives had been directly involved in heroin trafficking (an allegation I had never actually made). The committee's report did confirm the core of my critique, however, finding that "the CIA is particularly vulnerable to criticism" over indigenous assets in Laos "of considerable importance to the Agency," including "people who either were known to be, or were suspected of being, involved in narcotics trafficking." But the senators did not press the CIA for any resolution or reform of what its own inspector general had called the "particular dilemma" posed by those alliances with drug lords -- the key aspect, in my view, of its complicity in the traffic.

    During the mid-1970s, as the flow of drugs into the United States slowed and the number of addicts declined, the heroin problem receded into the inner cities and the media moved on to new sensations. Unfortunately, Congress had forfeited an opportunity to check the CIA and correct its way of waging covert wars. In less than 10 years, the problem of the CIA's tactical alliances with drug traffickers to support its far-flung covert wars was back with a vengeance.

    During the 1980s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic swept America's cities, the agency, as its own Inspector General later reported , allied itself with the largest drug smuggler in the Caribbean, using his port facilities to ship arms to the Contra guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua and protecting him from any prosecution for five years. Simultaneously on the other side of the planet in Afghanistan, mujahedeen guerrillas imposed an opium tax on farmers to fund their fight against the Soviet occupation and, with the CIA's tacit consent , operated heroin labs along the Pakistani border to supply international markets. By the mid-1980s, Afghanistan's opium harvest had grown 10-fold and was providing 60% of the heroin for America's addicts and as much as 90% in New York City.

    Almost by accident, I had launched my academic career by doing something a bit different. Embedded within that study of drug trafficking was an analytical approach that would take me, almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations, including diplomatic alliances, CIA interventions, developing military technology, recourse to torture, and global surveillance. Step by step, topic by topic, decade after decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient understanding of the parts to try to assemble the whole. In writing my new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power , I drew on this research to assess the overall character of U.S. global power and the forces that might contribute to its perpetuation or decline.

    In the process, I slowly came to see a striking continuity and coherence in Washington's century-long rise to global dominion. CIA torture techniques emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic robotic aerospace technology had its first trial in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all, Washington's reliance on surveillance first appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900 and soon became an essential though essentially illegal tool for the FBI's repression of domestic dissent that continued through the 1970s.

    Surveillance Today

    In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, I dusted off that historical method, and used it to explore the origins and character of domestic surveillance inside the United States.

    After occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. Army, facing a difficult pacification campaign in a restive land, discovered the power of systematic surveillance to crush the resistance of the country's political elite. Then, during World War I, the Army's "father of military intelligence," the dour General Ralph Van Deman, who had learned his trade in the Philippines, drew upon his years pacifying those islands to mobilize a legion of 1,700 soldiers and 350,000 citizen-vigilantes for an intense surveillance program against suspected enemy spies among German-Americans, including my own grandfather. In studying Military Intelligence files at the National Archives, I found "suspicious" letters purloined from my grandfather's army locker. In fact, his mother had been writing him in her native German about such subversive subjects as knitting him socks for guard duty.

    In the 1950s, Hoover's FBI agents tapped thousands of phones without warrants and kept suspected subversives under close surveillance, including my mother's cousin Gerard Piel, an anti-nuclear activist and the publisher of Scientific American magazine. During the Vietnam War, the bureau expanded its activities with an amazing array of spiteful, often illegal, intrigues in a bid to cripple the antiwar movement with pervasive surveillance of the sort seen in my own FBI file.

    Memory of the FBI's illegal surveillance programs was largely washed away after the Vietnam War thanks to Congressional reforms that required judicial warrants for all government wiretaps. The terror attacks of September 2001, however, gave the National Security Agency the leeway to launch renewed surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale. Writing for TomDispatch in 2009, I observed that coercive methods first tested in the Middle East were being repatriated and might lay the groundwork for "a domestic surveillance state." Sophisticated biometric and cyber techniques forged in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq had made a "digital surveillance state a reality" and so were fundamentally changing the character of American democracy.

    Four years later, Edward Snowden's leak of secret NSA documents revealed that, after a century-long gestation period, a U.S. digital surveillance state had finally arrived. In the age of the Internet, the NSA could monitor tens of millions of private lives worldwide, including American ones, via a few hundred computerized probes into the global grid of fiber-optic cables.

    And then, as if to remind me in the most personal way possible of our new reality, four years ago, I found myself the target yet again of an IRS audit, of TSA body searches at national airports, and -- as I discovered when the line went dead -- a tap on my office telephone at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why? Maybe it was my current writing on sensitive topics like CIA torture and NSA surveillance, or maybe my name popped up from some old database of suspected subversives left over from the 1970s. Whatever the explanation, it was a reasonable reminder that, if my own family's experience across three generations is in any way representative, state surveillance has been an integral part of American political life far longer than we might imagine.

    At the cost of personal privacy, Washington's worldwide web of surveillance has now become a weapon of exceptional power in a bid to extend U.S. global hegemony deeper into the twenty-first century. Yet it's worth remembering that sooner or later what we do overseas always seems to come home to haunt us, just as the CIA and crew have haunted me this last half-century. When we learn to love Big Brother, the world becomes a more, not less, dangerous place.

    Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular , is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade , which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the forthcoming In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books, September) from which this piece is adapted. (Republished from TomDispatch by permission of author or representative)

    Grandpa Charlie > , August 24, 2017 at 8:13 pm GMT

    "In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, I dusted off that historical method, and used it to explore the origins and character of domestic surveillance inside the United States." -- Alfred McCoy

    What about using the historical method to explore the nature of USA's reducing EU nations to "vassals" – and keeping them in the status of vassals, such that they can be depended on to undermine their own economies and sovereignty for the sake of USA's global initiatives?

    An interesting question might be whether the NATO-to-Afghanistan highway (truck route for munitions, etc.), c. 2010, was also, on the back-haul – Afghanistan to EU – the major supply route for heroin throughout the EU and thus the key to corruption of EU governments (and of Russia) and domination of those governments by USA's neocon operatives? (E.g., was/is the distribution system of the "Chocolate King" Petro Poroshenko, President of Ukraine, delivering something besides just chocolate?)

    "Just over one third of all cargo goes on routes dubbed the "northern distribution network" through Central Asia, and the Caucasus or Russia. " -- Reuters, 2011

    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-pakistan-isaf-idUSTRE7AR0XK20111128

    Just a thought, speculative, based in part on the assumption that such trucks would not be subject to narcotics search-and-seizure going across borders.

    Anon > , Disclaimer August 25, 2017 at 1:10 pm GMT

    Thanks for this serious, high-quality content, Mr. Unz.

    hyperbola > , August 25, 2017 at 4:12 pm GMT

    @Grandpa Charlie

    The Puppet Masters Behind Georgia President Saakashvili http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20569.htm

    WikiLeaks exposes US cover-up of Georgian attack on South Ossetia

    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/12/geor-d06.html one of the suggestions was that drugs were involved.

    Myth, Meth and the Georgian Invasion https://www.thenation.com/article/myth-meth-and-georgian-invasion/

    Soros, drugs, British Empire and Saakashvili http://www.vijayvaani.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?aid=64

    [Apr 21, 2019] Mark Ames: The FBI Has No Legal Charter But Lots of Kompromat

    Notable quotes:
    "... Today, it seems, the best description of the FBI's main activity is corporate enforcer for the white-collar mafia known as Wall Street. There is an analogy to organized crime, where the most powerful mobsters settled disputes between other gangs of criminals. Similarly, if a criminal gang is robbed by one of its own members, the mafia would go after the guilty party; the FBI plays this role for Wall Street institutions targeted by con artists and fraudsters. Compare and contrast a pharmaceutical company making opiates which is targeted by thieves vs. a black market drug cartel targeted by thieves. In one case, the FBI investigates; in the other, a violent vendetta ensues (such as street murders in Mexico). ..."
    "... The FBI executives are rewarded for this service with lucrative post-retirement careers within corporate America – Louis Freeh went to credit card fraudster, MBNA, Richard Mueller to a corporate Washington law firm, WilmerHale, and Comey, before Obama picked him as Director, worked for Lockheed Martin and HSBC (cleaning up after their $2 billion drug cartel marketing scandal) after leaving the FBI in 2005. ..."
    "... Some say they have a key role to play in national security and terrorism – but their record on the 2001 anthrax attacks is incredibly shady and suspicious. The final suspect, Bruce Ivins, is clearly innocent of the crime, just as their previous suspect, Steven Hatfill was. Ivins, if still alive, could have won a similar multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit against the FBI. All honest bioweapons experts know this to be true – the perpetrators of those anthrax letters are still at large, and may very well have had close associations with the Bush Administration itself. ..."
    "... Comey's actions over the past year are certainly highly questionable, as well. Neglecting to investigate the Clinton Foundation ties to Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments and corporations, particularly things like State Department approval of various arms deals in which bribes may have been paid, is as much a dereliction of duty as neglecting to investigate Trump ties to Russian business interests – but then, Trump has a record of shady business dealings dating back to the 1970s, of strange bankruptcies and bailouts and government sales that the FBI never looked at either. ..."
    May 16, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    By Mark Ames, founding editor of the Moscow satirical paper The eXile and co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast with Gary Brecher (aka John Dolan). Subscribe here . Originally published at The Exiled

    I made the mistake of listening to NPR last week to find out what Conventional Wisdom had to say about Trump firing Comey, on the assumption that their standardized Mister-Rogers-on-Nyquil voice tones would rein in the hysteria pitch a little. And on the surface, it did-the NPR host and guests weren't directly shrieking "the world is ending! We're all gonna die SHEEPLE!" the way they were on CNN. But in a sense they were screaming "fire!", if you know how to distinguish the very minute pitch level differences in the standard NPR Nyquil voice.

    The host of the daytime NPR program asked his guests how serious, and how "unprecedented" Trump's decision to fire his FBI chief was. The guests answers were strange: they spoke about "rule of law" and "violating the Constitution" but then switched to Trump "violating norms"-and back again, interchanging "norms" and "laws" as if they're synonyms. One of the guests admitted that Trump firing Comey was 100% legal, but that didn't seem to matter in this talk about Trump having abandoned rule-of-law for a Putinist dictatorship. These guys wouldn't pass a high school civics class, but there they were, garbling it all up. What mattered was the proper sense of panic and outrage-I'm not sure anyone really cared about the actual legality of the thing, or the legal, political or "normative" history of the FBI.

    For starters, the FBI hardly belongs in the same set with concepts like "constitutional" or " rule of law." That's because the FBI was never established by a law. US Lawmakers refused to approve an FBI bureau over a century ago when it was first proposed by Teddy Roosevelt. So he ignored Congress, and went ahead and set it up by presidential fiat. That's one thing the civil liberties crowd hates discussing - how centralized US political power is in the executive branch, a feature in the constitutional system put there by the holy Founders.

    In the late 1970s, at the tail end of our brief Glasnost, there was a lot of talk in Washington about finally creating a legal charter for the FBI -70 years after its founding. A lot of serious ink was spilled trying to transform the FBI from an extralegal secret police agency to something legal and defined. If you want to play archeologist to America's recent history, you can find this in the New York Times' archives, articles with headlines like "Draft of Charter for F.B.I. Limits Inquiry Methods" :

    The Carter Administration will soon send to Congress the first governing charter for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The proposed charter imposes extensive but not absolute restrictions on the bureau's employment of controversial investigative techniques, .including the use of informers, undercover agents and covert criminal activity.

    The charter also specifies the duties and powers of the bureau, setting precise standards and procedures for the initiation ,and conduct of investigations. It specifically requires the F.B.I. to observe constitutional rights and establishes safeguards against unchecked harassment, break‐ins and other abuses.

    followed by the inevitable lament, like this editorial from the Christian Science Monitor a year later, "Don't Forget the FBI Charter". Which of course we did forget-that was Reagan's purpose and value for the post-Glasnost reaction: forgetting. As historian Athan Theoharis wrote , "After 1981, Congress never seriously considered again any of the FBI charter proposals."

    The origins of the FBI have been obscured both because of its dubious legality and because of its original political purpose-to help the president battle the all-powerful American capitalists. It wasn't that Teddy Roosevelt was a radical leftist-he was a Progressive Republican, which sounds like an oxymoron today but which was mainstream and ascendant politics in his time. Roosevelt was probably the first president since Andrew Jackson to try to smash concentrated wealth-power, or at least some of it. He could be brutally anti-labor, but so were the powerful capitalists he fought, and all the structures of government power. He met little opposition pursuing his imperial Social Darwinist ambitions outside America's borders-but he had a much harder time fighting the powerful capitalists at home against Roosevelt's most honorable political obsession: preserving forests, parks and public lands from greedy capitalists. An early FBI memo to Hoover about the FBI's origins explains,

    "Roosevelt, in his characteristic dynamic fashion, asserted that the plunderers of the public domain would be prosecuted and brought to justice."

    According to New York Times reporter Tim Wiener's Enemies: A History of the FBI , it was the Oregon land fraud scandal of 1905-6 that put the idea of an FBI in TR's hyperactive mind. The scandal involved leading Oregon politicians helping railroad tycoon Edward Harriman illegally sell off pristine Oregon forest lands to timber interests, and it ended with an Oregon senator and the state's only two House representatives criminally charged and put on trial-along with dozens of other Oregonians. Basically, they were raping the state's public lands and forests like colonists stripping a foreign country-and that stuck in TR's craw.

    TR wanted his attorney general-Charles Bonaparte (yes, he really was a descendant of that Bonaparte)-to make a full report to on the rampant land fraud scams that the robber barons were running to despoil the American West, and which threatened TR's vision of land and forest conservation and parks. Bonaparte created an investigative team from the US Secret Service, but TR thought their report was a "whitewash" and proposed a new separate federal investigative service within Bonaparte's Department of Justice that would report only to the Attorney General.

    Until then, the US government had to rely on private contractors like the notorious, dreaded Pinkerton Agency, who were great at strikebreaking, clubbing workers and shooting organizers, but not so good at taking down down robber barons, who happened to also be important clients for the private detective agencies.

    In early 1908, Attorney General Bonaparte wrote to Congress asking for the legal authority (and budget funds) to create a "permanent detective force" under the DOJ. Congress rebelled, denouncing it as a plan to create an American okhrana . Democrat Joseph Sherley wrote that "spying on men and prying into what would ordinarily be considered their private affairs" went against "American ideas of government"; Rep. George Waldo, a New York Republican, said the proposed FBI was a "great blow to freedom and to free institutions if there should arise in this country any such great central secret-service bureau as there is in Russia."

    So Congress's response was the opposite, banning Bonaparte's DOJ from spending any funds at all on a proposed FBI. Another Congressman wrote another provision into the budget bill banning the DOJ from hiring Secret Service employees for any sort of FBI type agency. So Bonaparte waited until Congress took its summer recess, set aside some DOJ funds, recruited some Secret Service agents, and created a new federal detective bureau with 34 agents. This was how the FBI was born. Congress wasn't notified until the end of 1908, in a few lines in a standard report - "oh yeah, forgot to tell you-the executive branch went ahead and created an American okhrana because, well, the ol' joke about dogs licking their balls. Happy New Year!"

    The sordid history of America's extralegal secret police-initially named the Bureau of Investigation, changed to the FBI ("Federal") in the 30's, is mostly a history of xenophobic panic-mongering, illegal domestic spying, mass roundups and plans for mass-roundups, false entrapment schemes, and planting what Russians call "kompromat"- compromising information about a target's sex life-to blackmail or destroy American political figures that the FBI didn't like.

    The first political victim of J Edgar Hoover's kompromat was Louis Post, the assistant secretary of labor under Woodrow Wilson. Post's crime was releasing over 1,000 alleged Reds from detention facilities near the end of the FBI's Red Scare crackdown, when they jailed and deported untold thousands on suspicion of being Communists. The FBI's mass purge began with popular media support in 1919, but by the middle of 1920, some (not the FBI) were starting to get a little queasy. A legal challenge to the FBI's mass purges and exiles in Boston ended with a federal judge denouncing the FBI. After that ruling, assistant secretary Louis Post, a 71-year-old well-meaning progressive, reviewed the cases against the last 1500 detainees that the FBI wanted to deport, and found that there was absolutely nothing on at least 75 percent of the cases. Post's review threatened to undo thousands more FBI persecutions of alleged Moscow-controlled radicals.

    So one of the FBI's most ambitious young agents, J Edgar Hoover, collected kompromat on Post and his alleged associations with other alleged Moscow-controlled leftists, and gave the file to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives-which promptly announced it would hold hearings to investigate Post as a left subversive. The House tried to impeach Post, but ultimately he defended himself. Post's lawyer compared his political persecutors to the okhrana (Russia, again!): "We in America have sunk to the level of the government of Russia under the Czarist regime," describing the FBI's smear campaign as "even lower in some of their methods than the old Russian officials."

    Under Harding, the FBI had a new chief, William Burns, who made headlines blaming the terror bombing attack on Wall Street of 1920 that killed 34 people on a Kremlin-run conspiracy. The FBI claimed it had a highly reliable inside source who told them that Lenin sent $30,000 to the Soviets' diplomatic mission in New York, which was distributed to four local Communist agents who arranged the Wall Street bombing. The source claimed to have personally spoken with Lenin, who boasted that the bombing was so successful he'd ordered up more.

    The only problem was that the FBI's reliable source, a Jewish-Polish petty criminal named Wolf Lindenfeld, turned out to be a bullshitter-nicknamed "Windy Linde"-who thought his fake confession about Lenin funding the bombing campaign would get him out of Poland's jails and set up in a comfortable new life in New York.

    By 1923, the FBI had thoroughly destroyed America's communist and radical labor movements-allowing it to focus on its other favorite pastime: spying on and destroying political opponents. The FBI spied on US Senators who supported opening diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union: Idaho's William Borah, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; Thomas Walsh of the Judiciary Committee, and Burton K Wheeler, the prairie Populist senator from Montana, who visited the Soviet Union and pushed for diplomatic relations. Harding's corrupt Attorney General Dougherty denounced Sen. Wheeler as "the Communist leader in the Senate" and "no more a Democrat than Stalin, his comrade in Moscow." Dougherty accused Sen. Wheeler of being part of a conspiracy "to capture, by deceit and design, as many members of the Senate as possible and to spread through Washington and the cloakrooms of Congress a poison gas as deadly as that which sapped and destroyed brave soldiers in the last war."

    Hoover, now a top FBI official, quietly fed kompromat to journalists he cultivated, particularly an AP reporter named Richard Whitney, who published a popular book in 1924, "Reds In America" alleging Kremlin agents "had an all-pervasive influence over American institutions; they had infiltrated every corner of American life." Whitney named Charlie Chaplin as a Kremlin agent, along with Felix Frankfurter and members of the Senate pushing for recognition of the Soviet Union. That killed any hope for diplomatic recognition for the next decade.

    Then the first Harding scandals broke-Teapot Dome, Veterans Affairs, bribery at the highest rungs. When Senators Wheeler and Walsh opened bribery investigations, the FBI sent agents to the senators' home state to drum up false bribery charges against Sen. Wheeler. The charges were clearly fake, and a jury dismissed the charges. But Attorney General Dougherty was indicted for fraud and forced to resign, as was his FBI chief Burns-but not Burns' underling Hoover, who stayed in the shadows.

    "We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail This must stop."

    With the Cold War, the FBI became obsessed with homosexuals as America's Fifth Column under Moscow's control. Homosexuals, the FBI believed, were susceptible to Kremlin kompromat-so the FBI collected and disseminated its own kompromat on alleged American homosexuals, supposedly to protect America from the Kremlin. In the early 1950s, Hoover launched the Sex Deviates Program to spy on American homosexuals and purge them from public life. The FBI built up 300,000 pages of files on suspected homosexuals and contacted their employers, local law enforcement and universities to "to drive homosexuals from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation," according to Tim Weiner's book Enemies. No one but the FBI knows exactly how many Americans' lives and careers were destroyed by the FBI's Sex Deviants Program but Hoover-who never married, lived with his mother until he was 40, and traveled everywhere with his "friend" Clyde Tolson .

    In the 1952 election, Hoover was so committed to helping the Republicans and Eisenhower win that he compiled and disseminated a 19-page kompromat file alleging that his Democratic Party rival Adlai Stevenson was gay. The FBI's file on Stevenson was kept in the Sex Deviants Program section-it included libelous gossip, claiming that Stevenson was one of Illinois' "best known homosexuals" who went by the name "Adeline" in gay cruising circles.

    In the 1960s, Hoover and his FBI chiefs collected kompromat on the sex lives of JFK and Martin Luther King. Hoover presented some of his kompromat on JFK to Bobby Kennedy, in a concern-trollish way claiming to "warn" him that the president was opening himself up to blackmail. It was really a way for Hoover to let the despised Kennedy brothers know he could destroy them, should they try to Comey him out of his FBI office. Hoover's kompromat on MLK's sex life was a particular obsession of his-he now believed that African-Americans, not homosexuals, posed the greatest threat to become a Kremlin Fifth Column. The FBI wiretapped MLK's private life, collecting tapes of his affairs with other women, which a top FBI official then mailed to Martin Luther King's wife, along with a note urging King to commit suicide.

    FBI letter anonymously mailed to Martin Luther King Jr's wife, along with kompromat sex tapes

    After JFK was murdered, when Bobby Kennedy ran for the Senate in 1964, he recounted another disturbing FBI/kompromat story that President Johnson shared with him on the campaign trail. LBJ told Bobby about a stack of kompromat files - FBI reports "detailing the sexual debauchery of members of the Senate and House who consorted with prostitutes." LBJ asked RFK if the kompromat should be leaked selectively to destroy Republicans before the 1964 elections. Kennedy recalled,

    "He told me he had spent all night sitting up and reading the files of the FBI on all these people. And Lyndon talks about that information and material so freely. Lyndon talks about everybody, you see, with everybody. And of course that's dangerous."

    Kennedy had seen some of the same FBI kompromat files as attorney general, but he was totally opposed to releasing such unsubstantiated kompromat-such as, say, the Trump piss files-because doing so would "destroy the confidence that people in the United States had in their government and really make us a laughingstock around the world."

    Imagine that.

    Which brings me to the big analogy every hack threw around last week, calling Trump firing Comey "Nixonian." Actually, what Trump did was more like the very opposite of Nixon, who badly wanted to fire Hoover in 1971-2, but was too afraid of the kompromat Hoover might've had on him to make the move. Nixon fell out with his old friend and onetime mentor J Edgar Hoover in 1971, when the ailing old FBI chief refused to get sucked in to the Daniel Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers investigation, especially after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the New York Times. Part of the reason Nixon created his Plumbers team of black bag burglars was because Hoover had become a bit skittish in his last year on this planet-and that drove Nixon crazy.

    Nixon called his chief of staff Haldeman:

    Nixon: I talked to Hoover last night and Hoover is not going after this case [Ellsberg] as strong as I would like. There's something dragging him.

    Haldeman: You don't have the feeling the FBI is really pursuing this?

    Nixon: Yeah, particularly the conspiracy side. I want to go after everyone. I'm not so interested in Ellsberg, but we have to go after everybody who's a member of this conspiracy.

    Hoover's ambitious deputies in the FBI were smelling blood, angling to replace him. His number 3, Bill Sullivan (who sent MLK the sex tapes and suicide note) was especially keen to get rid of Hoover and take his place. So as J Edgar was stonewalling the Daniel Ellsberg investigation, Sullivan showed up in a Department of Justice office with two suitcases packed full of transcripts and summaries of illegal wiretaps that Kissinger and Nixon had ordered on their own staff and on American journalists. The taps were ordered in Nixon's first months in the White House in 1969, to plug up the barrage of leaks, the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Sullivan took the leaks from J Edgar's possession and told the DOJ official that they needed to be hidden from Hoover, who planned to use them as kompromat to blackmail Nixon.

    Nixon decided he was going to fire J Edgar the next day. This was in September, 1971. But the next day came, and Nixon got scared. So he tried to convince his attorney general John Mitchell to fire Hoover for him, but Mitchell said only the President could fire J Edgar Hoover. So Nixon met him for breakfast, and, well, he just didn't have the guts. Over breakfast, Hoover flattered Nixon and told him there was nothing more in the world he wanted than to see Nixon re-elected. Nixon caved; the next day, J Edgar Hoover unceremoniously fired his number 3 Bill Sullivan, locking him out of the building and out of his office so that he couldn't take anything with him. Sullivan was done.

    The lesson here, I suppose, is that if an FBI director doesn't want to be fired, it's best to keep your kompromat a little closer to your chest, as a gun to hold to your boss's head. Comey's crew already released the piss tapes kompromat on Trump-the damage was done. What was left to hold back Trump from firing Comey? "Laws"? The FBI isn't even legal. "Norms" would be the real reason. Which pretty much sums up everything Trump has been doing so far. We've learned the past two decades that we're hardly a nation of laws, at least not when it comes to the plutocratic ruling class. What does bind them are "norms"-and while those norms may mean everything to the ruling class, it's an open question how much these norms mean to a lot of Americans outside that club.

    Huey Long , May 16, 2017 at 2:33 am

    Wow, and this whole time I thought the NSA had a kompromat monopoly as they have everybody's porn site search terms and viewing habits on file.

    I had no idea the FBI practically invented it!

    3.14e-9 , May 16, 2017 at 3:04 am

    The Native tribes don't have a great history with the FBI, either.

    https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/culture/thing-about-skins/comey-fbi-destructive-history-native-people/

    voteforno6 , May 16, 2017 at 6:06 am

    Has anyone ever used the FBI's lack of a charter as a defense in court?

    Disturbed Voter , May 16, 2017 at 6:42 am

    The USA doesn't have a legal basis either, it is a revolting crown colony of the British Empire. Treason and heresy all the way down. Maybe the British need to burn Washington DC again?

    Synoia , May 16, 2017 at 9:46 pm

    Britain burning DC, and the so call ed "war" of 1812, got no mention in my History Books. Napoleon on the other hand, featured greatly

    In 1812 Napoleon was busy going to Russia. That went well.

    Ignim Brites , May 16, 2017 at 7:55 am

    Wondered how Comey thought he could get away with his conviction and pardon of Sec Clinton. Seems like part of the culture of FBI is a "above and beyond" the law mentality.

    Watt4Bob , May 16, 2017 at 7:56 am

    Back in the early 1970s a high school friend moved to Alabama because his father was transferred by his employer.

    My friend sent a post card describing among other things the fact that Alabama had done away with the requirement of a math class to graduate high school, and substituted a required class called "The Evils of Communism" complete with a text-book written by J. Edgar Hoover; Masters of Deceit.

    JMarco , May 16, 2017 at 2:52 pm

    In Dallas,Texas my 1959 Civics class had to read the same book. We all were given paperback copies of it to take home and read. It was required reading enacted by Texas legislature.

    Watt4Bob , May 16, 2017 at 4:47 pm

    So I'd guess you weren't fooled by any of those commie plots of the sixties, like the campaigns for civil rights or against the Vietnamese war.

    I can't really brag, I didn't stop worrying about the Red Menace until 1970 or so, that's when I started running into returning vets who mostly had no patience for that stuff.

    Carolinian , May 16, 2017 at 8:35 am

    We've learned the past two decades that we're hardly a nation of laws, at least not when it comes to the plutocratic ruling class. What does bind them are "norms"

    Or as David Broder put it (re Bill Clinton): he came in and trashed the place and it wasn't his place.

    It was David Broder's place. Of course the media play a key role with all that kompromat since they are the ones needed to convey it to the public. The tragedy is that even many of the sensible in their ranks such as Bill Moyers have been sucked into the kompromat due to their hysteria over Trump. Ames is surely on point in this great article. The mistake was allowing secret police agencies like the FBI and CIA to be created in the first place.

    Katharine , May 16, 2017 at 8:37 am

    Sorry, my initial reaction was that people who don't know the difference between "rein" and "reign" are not to be trusted to provide reliable information. Recognizing that as petty, I kept reading, and presently found the statement that Congress was not informed of the founding of the FBI until a century after the fact, which seems implausible. If in fact the author meant the end of 1908 it was quite an achievement to write 2008.

    Interesting to the extent it may be true, but with few sources, no footnotes, and little evidence of critical editing who knows what that may be?

    Carolinian , May 16, 2017 at 9:12 am

    Do you even know who Mark Ames is?

    Petty .yes.

    Katharine , May 16, 2017 at 10:08 am

    Who he is is irrelevant. I don't take things on faith because "the Pope said" or because Mark Ames said. People who expect their information to be taken seriously should substantiate it.

    Bill Smith , May 16, 2017 at 12:00 pm

    Yeah, in the first sentence

    Interesting article though.

    Fiery Hunt , May 16, 2017 at 9:21 am

    Yeah, Kathatine, you're right .very petty.

    And completely missed the point.

    Or worse, you got the point and your best rejection of that point was pointing out a typo.

    Katharine , May 16, 2017 at 10:13 am

    I neither missed the point nor rejected it. I reserved judgment, as I thought was apparent from my comment.

    sid_finster , May 16, 2017 at 10:50 am

    But Trump is bad. Very Bad.

    So anything the FBI does to get rid of him must by definition be ok! Besides, surely our civic-minded IC would never use their power on the Good Guys™!

    Right?

    JTMcPhee , May 16, 2017 at 9:21 am

    Ah yes, the voice of "caution." And such attention to the lack of footnotes, in this day when the curious can so easily cut and paste a bit of salient text into a search engine and pull up a feast of parse-able writings and video, from which they can "judiciously assess" claims and statements. If they care to spend the time, which is in such short supply among those who are struggling to keep up with the horrors and revelations people of good will confront every blinking day

    Classic impeachment indeed. All from the height of "academic rigor" and "caution." Especially the "apologetic" bit about "reign" vs "rein." Typos destroy credibility, don't they? And the coup de grass (sic), the unrebuttable "plausibility" claim.

    One wonders at the nature of the author's curriculum vitae. One also marvels at the yawning gulf between the Very Serious Stuff I was taught in grade and high school civics and history, back in the late '50s and the '60s, about the Fundamental Nature Of Our Great Nation and its founding fathers and the Beautiful Documents they wrote, on the one hand, and what we mopes learn, through a drip-drip-drip process punctuated occasionally by Major Revelations, about the real nature of the Empire and our fellow creatures

    PS: My earliest memory of television viewing was a day at a friend's house - his middle-class parents had the first "set" in the neighborhood, I think an RCA, in a massive sideboard cabinet where the picture tube pointed up and you viewed the "content" in a mirror mounted to the underside of the lid. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5onSwx7_Cn0 The family was watching a hearing of Joe McCarthy's kangaroo court, complete with announcements of the latest number in the "list of known Communists in the State Department" and how Commyanism was spreading like an unstoppable epidemic mortal disease through the Great US Body Politic and its Heroic Institutions of Democracy. I was maybe 6 years old, but that grainy black and white "reality TV" content had me asking "WTF?" at a very early age. And I'd say it's on the commentor to show that the "2008" claim is wrong, by something other than "implausible" as drive-by impeachment. Given the content of the original post, and what people paying attention to all this stuff have a pretty good idea is the general contours of a vast corruption and manipulation.

    "Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or no."

    Katharine , May 16, 2017 at 10:19 am

    It is the author's job to substantiate information, not the reader's. If he thinks his work is so important, why does he not make a better job of it?

    Edward , May 16, 2017 at 9:22 pm

    I think the MLK blackmail scheme is well-established. Much of the article seems to be based on Tim Wiener's "Enemies: A History of the FBI".

    nonsense factory , May 16, 2017 at 11:16 am

    Interesting article on the history of the FBI, although the post-Hoover era doesn't get any treatment. The Church Committee hearings on the CIA and FBI, after the exposure of notably Operation CHAOS (early 60s to early 70s) by the CIA and COINTELPRO(late 1950s to early 1970s) by the FBI, didn't really get to the bottom of the issue although some reforms were initiated.

    Today, it seems, the best description of the FBI's main activity is corporate enforcer for the white-collar mafia known as Wall Street. There is an analogy to organized crime, where the most powerful mobsters settled disputes between other gangs of criminals. Similarly, if a criminal gang is robbed by one of its own members, the mafia would go after the guilty party; the FBI plays this role for Wall Street institutions targeted by con artists and fraudsters. Compare and contrast a pharmaceutical company making opiates which is targeted by thieves vs. a black market drug cartel targeted by thieves. In one case, the FBI investigates; in the other, a violent vendetta ensues (such as street murders in Mexico).

    The FBI executives are rewarded for this service with lucrative post-retirement careers within corporate America – Louis Freeh went to credit card fraudster, MBNA, Richard Mueller to a corporate Washington law firm, WilmerHale, and Comey, before Obama picked him as Director, worked for Lockheed Martin and HSBC (cleaning up after their $2 billion drug cartel marketing scandal) after leaving the FBI in 2005.

    Maybe this is legitimate, but this only applies to their protection of the interests of large corporations – as the 2008 economic collapse and aftermath showed, they don't prosecute corporate executives who rip off poor people and middle-class homeowners. Banks who rob people, they aren't investigated or prosecuted; that's just for people who rob banks.

    When it comes to political issues and national security, however, the FBI has such a terrible record on so many issues over the years that anything they claim has to be taken with a grain or two of salt. Consider domestic political activity: from the McCarthyite 'Red Scare' of the 1950s to COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 1970s to targeting of environmental groups in the 1980s and 1990s to targeting anti-war protesters under GW Bush to their obsession with domestic mass surveillance under Obama, it's not a record that should inspire any confidence.

    Some say they have a key role to play in national security and terrorism – but their record on the 2001 anthrax attacks is incredibly shady and suspicious. The final suspect, Bruce Ivins, is clearly innocent of the crime, just as their previous suspect, Steven Hatfill was. Ivins, if still alive, could have won a similar multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit against the FBI. All honest bioweapons experts know this to be true – the perpetrators of those anthrax letters are still at large, and may very well have had close associations with the Bush Administration itself.

    As far as terrorist activities? Many of their low-level agents did seem concerned about the Saudis and bin Laden in the late 1990s and pre-9/11 – but Saudi investigations were considered politically problematic due to "geostrategic relationships with our Saudi allies" – hence people like John O'Neil and Coleen Rowley were sidelined and ignored, with disastrous consequences. The Saudi intelligence agency role in 9/11 was buried for over a decade, as well. Since 9/11, most of the FBI investigations seem to have involved recruiting mentally disabled young Islamic men in sting operations in which the FBI provides everything needed. You could probably get any number of mentally ill homeless people across the U.S., regardless of race or religion, to play this role.

    Comey's actions over the past year are certainly highly questionable, as well. Neglecting to investigate the Clinton Foundation ties to Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments and corporations, particularly things like State Department approval of various arms deals in which bribes may have been paid, is as much a dereliction of duty as neglecting to investigate Trump ties to Russian business interests – but then, Trump has a record of shady business dealings dating back to the 1970s, of strange bankruptcies and bailouts and government sales that the FBI never looked at either.

    Ultimately, this is because FBI executives are paid off not to investigate Wall Street criminality, nor shady U.S. government activity, with lucrative positions as corporate board members and so on after their 'retirements'. I don't doubt that many of their junior members mean well and are dedicated to their jobs – but the fish rots from the head down.

    Andrew Watts , May 16, 2017 at 3:58 pm

    As far as terrorist activities? Many of their low-level agents did seem concerned about the Saudis and bin Laden in the late 1990s and pre-9/11 – but Saudi investigations were considered politically problematic due to "geostrategic relationships with our Saudi allies" – hence people like John O'Neil and Coleen Rowley were sidelined and ignored, with disastrous consequences.

    The Clinton Administration had other priorities. You know, I think I'll let ex-FBI Director Freeh explain what happened when the FBI tried to get the Saudis to cooperate with their investigation into the bombing of the Khobar Towers.

    "That September, Crown Prince Abdullah and his entourage took over the entire 143-room Hay-Adams Hotel, just across from Lafayette Park from the White House, for six days. The visit, I figured, was pretty much our last chance. Again, we prepared talking points for the president. Again, I contacted Prince Bandar and asked him to soften up the crown prince for the moment when Clinton, -- or Al Gore I didn't care who -- would raise the matter and start to exert the necessary pressure."

    "The story that came back to me, from "usually reliable sources," as they say in Washington, was that Bill Clinton briefly raised the subject only to tell the Crown Prince that he certainly understood the Saudis; reluctance to cooperate. Then, according to my sources, he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the still-to-be-built Clinton presidential library. Gore, who was supposed to press hardest of all in his meeting with the crown Prince, barely mentioned the matter, I was told." -Louis J. Freeh, My FBI (2005)

    In my defense I picked the book up to see if there was any dirt on the DNC's electoral funding scandal in 1996. I'm actually glad I did. The best part of the book is when Freeh recounts running into a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade and listens to how Hoover's FBI ruined his life despite having broken no laws. As if a little thing like laws mattered to Hoover. The commies were after our precious bodily fluids!

    verifyfirst , May 16, 2017 at 12:53 pm

    I'm not sure there are many functioning norms left within the national political leadership. Seemed to me Gingrich started blowing those up and it just got worse from there. McConnell not allowing Garland to be considered comes to mind

    lyman alpha blob , May 16, 2017 at 1:14 pm

    Great article – thanks for this. I had no idea the FBI never had a legal charter – very enlightening.

    JMarco , May 16, 2017 at 2:59 pm

    Thanks to Mark Ames now we know what Pres. Trump meant when he tweeted about his tapes with AG Comey. Not some taped conversation between Pres. Trump & AG Comey but bunch of kompromat tapes that AG Comey has provided Pres. Trump that might not make departing AG Comey looked so clean.

    [Apr 21, 2019] CIA created ISIS and it went out of control

    Notable quotes:
    "... "I have never felt more uncomfortable than I do today," warns former CIA Director Jack Devine, saying that, with "frankly uncivilized" ISIS, there is a greater risk of violence worldwide than ever before. ..."
    "... Devine argued that dismantling ISIS's command structure is crucial for minimizing the danger it presents, much like al Qaeda before them. "We killed three-fourths of their leadership," he said of al Qaeda. "We have to do the same thing with ISIS. "We have to destroy their refuge over there. When they start to lose, their recruiting numbers start to fall." ..."
    "... My guess is that Iran have done a deal with Putin in that once ISIS is swept away Iran gets to build a gas pipeline through Iraq (which it controls) and through Syria into Europe. Russia is allowing Iran into the European gas market because Bandar threatened Sochi, and Putin wants to end the House of Saud in retaliation. Two weeks from now the world is going to make laws that pushes countries towards natural gas and away from coal and oil. ..."
    "... I would say that's accurate, since the U.S. put ISIS there to block the Iran - Iraq - Syria pipeline. When Russia destroys ISIS, the previously planned pipeline can proceed. It has nothing to do with Russian 'permission' - Putin expects someone to eventually be sending gas up from the Middle East once the slaughter stops. He doesn't care who it is or how much. It's not going to displace more than a fraction of the Russian supply to Europe. Syria rejected the Qatari pipeline for its own reasons - probably because Qatar was planning on killing Assad and replacing him with a Western stooge well before the Qatari-Turkey pipeline was announced. In fact, the announcement was pretty much an insult to Syria. Qatar quite arrogantly announced that they WOULD be building the pipeline through Syria without bothering to ask them. ..."
    "... Putin negotiates with everyone. He was even talking with Israel about helping them with the Leviathan pipeline. The U.S. seems to favor 'regime change' as the preferred strategy to expand its oil interests where it has no business doing so. ..."
    "... The CIA serves no master, it is the fucking master. It does deals that are anti American, and they don't care, because America is just a sugar daddy to them. We are the chumps who pay their bills, while they put half of all honest Americans on their enemies list. ..."
    "... CIA is international, not American. They are the hit men for the biggest corporations on earth, and most especially the biggest energy firms. Oil and CIA go together, and there is the Saudi connection. ..."
    "... CIA is the lead agent if world Islamic extremism, they don't fight it, they nurture it! Their long term goal is to use mass Islamic terror armies to do what the CIA and Corporate masters want done. Need a police state in America? Do a hit on America 9/11. Need to eliminate Russia? Create ISIS and direct them against Russia's allies. And you can take it from there. It will continue on as before. Nobody left has the power to take down the CIA terror rings. ..."
    "... No shit, sherlock, and it's because of you and the most vile mass murderer of all time, the CIA (and DIA, and NSA, and FBI, etc.), but predominantly the CIA and the Pentagon, that ISIS and such exists today! Whether it was Allen Dulles coordinating the escape of endless number of mass murderering Nazis, who would end up in CIA-overthrown countries, aiding and abetting their secret police (Example: Walter Rauff, who was responsible for at least 200,000 deaths, ending up as an advisor to Augusto Pinochet's secret police or DINA) or the grandson of the first chairman of the Bank for International Settlements, Richard Helms and his MKULTRA, you devils are to blame. ..."
    "... The Devil's Chessboard ..."
    Nov 23, 2015 | Zero Hedge

    "I have never felt more uncomfortable than I do today," warns former CIA Director Jack Devine, saying that, with "frankly uncivilized" ISIS, there is a greater risk of violence worldwide than ever before.

    According to The Hill,

    "I think this is the most dangerous time in terms of sustained violence," he said on "The Cats Roundtable" in an interview airing Sunday on New York's AM-970.

    "I have never felt more uncomfortable than I do today," he told host John Catsimatidis. "Some percentage of the world today is always either unbalanced or radicalized. When you have a small group of people who are willing to lose their lives and kill anyone they can, we're all vulnerable."

    Devine cited the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) as an unprecedented threat in terms of its wanton disregard for human life...

    "I dealt with terrorists in South America in the 1970s, but they never attacked innocent women and children indiscriminately," he said.

    "You have a group in ISIS today that is frankly uncivilized. These folks could get stronger and stronger. We basically have to destroy ISIS over there," Devine said.

    Devine argued that dismantling ISIS's command structure is crucial for minimizing the danger it presents, much like al Qaeda before them. "We killed three-fourths of their leadership," he said of al Qaeda. "We have to do the same thing with ISIS. "We have to destroy their refuge over there. When they start to lose, their recruiting numbers start to fall."

    Devine, who mainly served during the Cold War, said ISIS is a scourge without parallel because it has no concern for self-preservation.

    "There is nothing that can be compared with nuclear weapons and their use," he said of tensions between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.

    "[But] people felt safe in the sense there was countervailing balance," he added. "Early in our contest with the Russians, it was clear we had checks and balances."

    Finally Devine admits...

    "If there's blame to be put, it's on our failure to have done that by this point."

    Selected Skeptical Comments

    i_call_you_my_base

    "I dealt with terrorists in South America in the 1970s..."

    "And by dealt I mean trained and funded."

    Looney

    John Kerry to the MSM:

    Do not use "Al Qaeda" or "Al Nustra" - just call them "Allies" (pronounced Al Lies). ;-)

    Looney

    Vatican_cameo

    "I have never felt more uncomfortable than I do today," he told host John Catsimatidis. "Some percentage of the world today is always either unbalanced or radicalized. When you have a small group of people who are willing to lose their lives and kill anyone they can, we're all vulnerable."

    By small group he means CIA, Right? I thought he would have been a little clearer.

    Occident Mortal

    My guess is that Iran have done a deal with Putin in that once ISIS is swept away Iran gets to build a gas pipeline through Iraq (which it controls) and through Syria into Europe. Russia is allowing Iran into the European gas market because Bandar threatened Sochi, and Putin wants to end the House of Saud in retaliation. Two weeks from now the world is going to make laws that pushes countries towards natural gas and away from coal and oil.

    Paveway IV

    "...once ISIS is swept away Iran gets to build a gas pipeline through Iraq (which it controls) and through Syria into Europe..."

    I would say that's accurate, since the U.S. put ISIS there to block the Iran - Iraq - Syria pipeline. When Russia destroys ISIS, the previously planned pipeline can proceed. It has nothing to do with Russian 'permission' - Putin expects someone to eventually be sending gas up from the Middle East once the slaughter stops. He doesn't care who it is or how much. It's not going to displace more than a fraction of the Russian supply to Europe. Syria rejected the Qatari pipeline for its own reasons - probably because Qatar was planning on killing Assad and replacing him with a Western stooge well before the Qatari-Turkey pipeline was announced. In fact, the announcement was pretty much an insult to Syria. Qatar quite arrogantly announced that they WOULD be building the pipeline through Syria without bothering to ask them.

    The U.S. blocked the first Iran pipeline (called the Persian Pipeline) FROM IRAN to Iraq in 2010 by forcing the Swiss company that partnered with Iran to back out due to Israeli - ooops, 'Western' sanctions on Iran. The second Iran-sourced NG pipeline from Iran through Iraq and Syria - called the Friendship Pipeline - was agreed to in 2012 by the countries involved. That's when the U.S. launched it's failed coup attempt in Syria and let its ISIS mad-dogs loose in Iraq. Tyler usually refers to this by the derogatory label of "Islamic Pipeline" - a snide label that Kagan-PNAC and Western oil companies used. Tyler never refers to the Western-backed Qatari pipeline as the Jihadi Pipeline, nor does he refer to the Kirkuk-Haifa oil pipeline as the Jewish Pipeline. I'm not sure about the inconsistency - maybe he's trying to make some point.

    Putin negotiates with everyone. He was even talking with Israel about helping them with the Leviathan pipeline. The U.S. seems to favor 'regime change' as the preferred strategy to expand its oil interests where it has no business doing so.

    goldhedge

    The CIA guy doesn't mention the House of Saud.

    Pfft.

    Jack Burton

    Good catch! And there never do.

    CIA and House of Saud have done a long term deal to look out for each other in this world. The CIA serves no master, it is the fucking master. It does deals that are anti American, and they don't care, because America is just a sugar daddy to them. We are the chumps who pay their bills, while they put half of all honest Americans on their enemies list.

    CIA is international, not American. They are the hit men for the biggest corporations on earth, and most especially the biggest energy firms. Oil and CIA go together, and there is the Saudi connection.

    CIA is the lead agent if world Islamic extremism, they don't fight it, they nurture it! Their long term goal is to use mass Islamic terror armies to do what the CIA and Corporate masters want done. Need a police state in America? Do a hit on America 9/11. Need to eliminate Russia? Create ISIS and direct them against Russia's allies. And you can take it from there. It will continue on as before. Nobody left has the power to take down the CIA terror rings.

    scrappy

    Somewhere it's 3:00 AM

    Wikileaks: Hillary Clinton Claims Saudi Arabia is the Largest Donor to "Salafism Terrorists" Worldwide

    http://refreshingnews99.blogspot.in/2015/11/wikileaks-hillary-clinton-cl...

    Clinton Foundation's Colombian 'Private Equity Fund' Deletes Website

    http://investmentwatchblog.com/clinton-foundations-colombian-private-equ...

    sgt_doom

    "I dealt with terrorists in South America in the 1970s, but they never attacked innocent women and children indiscriminately," he said.

    No shit, sherlock, and it's because of you and the most vile mass murderer of all time, the CIA (and DIA, and NSA, and FBI, etc.), but predominantly the CIA and the Pentagon, that ISIS and such exists today!

    Whether it was Allen Dulles coordinating the escape of endless number of mass murderering Nazis, who would end up in CIA-overthrown countries, aiding and abetting their secret police (Example: Walter Rauff, who was responsible for at least 200,000 deaths, ending up as an advisor to Augusto Pinochet's secret police or DINA) or the grandson of the first chairman of the Bank for International Settlements, Richard Helms and his MKULTRA, you devils are to blame.

    Recommended reading (to better understand why the USA is known as the Great Satan):

    The Devil's Chessboard, by David Talbot

    http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=the+devil%27s+chessboard&tag=googhydr-20&index=stripbooks&hvadid=78875381302&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=2565125617248777980&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_34lcz93rcf_e_p4

    logicalman
    Funny how these fucks can come out and say this kind of shit and get away with it. The fucker's basically pleading guilty to murder, FFS.
    Ms No
    They didn't kill anybody in South America my ass.... The school of Americas, Operation Condor, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Guatamala, El Salvador .... who the hell are they kidding? The CIA has always been covered and nobody ever cared.
    Perimetr
    "If there's blame to be put. . ."

    It's on the CIA for running its global terrorist operations, funded by the $1 trillion dollars a year coming from its Afghanistan heroin operation.

    Noplebian

    US Gives Their Proxy Army ISIS 45 Minute Warning Before Air Strikes......

    http://beforeitsnews.com/conspiracy-theories/2015/11/us-gives-their-prox...

    blindman

    sirs and madams,
    .
    "Christmas celebration this year is going to be a charade because the whole world is at war. We are close to Christmas. There will be lights, there will be parties, bright trees, even Nativity scenes – all decked out – while the world continues to wage war.

    It's all a charade. The world has not understood the way of peace. The whole world is at war. A war can be justified, so to speak, with many, many reasons, but when all the world as it is today, at war, piecemeal though that war may be-a little here, a little there-there is no justification.

    What shall remain in the wake of this war, in the midst of which we are living now? What shall remain? Ruins, thousands of children without education, so many innocent victims, and lots of money in the pockets of arms dealers."

    Francis I
    .
    http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2015/11/here-is-british-banned-...

    Dinero D. Profit

    Ladies and gentlemen of ZH.

    In history, what must be, will be.

    The discovery of America by Europe had to happen. The savages had to be eliminated and The Revolutionary War had to happen. Slavery had to begin, and after it, segregation had to begin, but, what must be, will be, slavery and segregation had to end. Old School colonization of poor nations had to happen. The Boer War had to happen. The Spanish American War had to happen. The Main had to be sunk. WWI had to happen. Calvary charges had to end. Totalitarian Communism had to happen. Germany's 20's depression had to happen, reactionary jingoism had to happen, and Kristallnacht and the Reichstag fire had to happen. The Allies had to win WWII, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to be publicity stunts, and the Cold War had to begin. JFK had to be wacked, the Vietnam War had to happen, the FED still was happening. Civil Rights laws had to be passed. Recognition of China had to happen, going off the gold standard had to happen, and Nixon had to be kicked out of office. Corporate Globalization had to begin. After Carter an actor had to be President. Unions had to be stifled. Perestroika and glasnost had to happen. The Berlin Wall had to come down. The MIC had to find another enemy, and suddenly 9/11 had to happen.

    Over population has to happen, poisoning the environment has to happen, and the NWO has to happen.

    Ladies and gentlemen, the NWO is here, and there is nothing you can do, and nothing you could have done to stop it.

    Edit. I see none of our supposed enemies 'truth bombing' 9/11, 7/7, and the 13th Paris attacks. I see no trade embagoes, I see no arguments in the Security Council over the illegality of US/Nato bombing in Syria.

    blindman

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/jimmy-carter-is-correct-t_b_79...
    Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy
    Posted: 08/03/2015 11:48 am EDT
    .
    On July 28, Thom Hartmann interviewed former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and, at the very end of his show (as if this massive question were merely an afterthought), asked him his opinion of the 2010 Citizens United decision and the 2014 McCutcheon decision, both decisions by the five Republican judges on the U.S. Supreme Court. These two historic decisions enable unlimited secret money (including foreign money) now to pour into U.S. political and judicial campaigns. Carter answered:

    It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we've just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. ... At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell." ...
    .
    it is the money "system", man.

    blindman

    corporations and hoodwink powers ride on the indifference of the damned, the silence of the dead and doomed.

    Dinero D. Profit

    The Satus Quo can rely upon the loyalty of their employees, Congress, the military, the military industrial contractors, their workers and family members, the crime control establishment, all Uniersity professors and employees, and every employee of all publically traded companies, and every person employed by the MSM.

    The dead and doomed are irrelevant. If you have an establishment job, you'll obey and ask no vital questions.

    Dick Buttkiss
    Sunnis and Shiites hate each other far more than they hate Christians, Jews, or anyone else. If it weren't for oil, the USG wouldn't give a flyiing fuck if they anihilated each other. Instead, it conspires with them in ways far beyond its ability to comprehend, much less navigate. Thus is the US ship of state heading for the shoals of its destruction, the only question being how much of the country and the outside world it takes down with it.
    ross81
    thats bullshit Western propaganda that Shiites hate Sunnis and vice versa. In the same way that the Brits stirred up Protestant hatred of Catholics in Ulster for centuries, the US/Israel/Saudi does the same with Sunnis vs Shiites on a much bigger scale in the Middle East. Divide and Conquer.
    geno-econ
    This is getting scary in that one or two more attacks will result in travel freezes, flow of Middle East oil and result in huge increase in military as well as Homeland security costs. A depression or economic collapse a real possibility Perhaps time for a Peace Conference of all interested parties. The US started this shit and should be the first to call for a Peace Conference. Macho talk will only make things worse.
    moonmac
    We can print trillions out of thin air at the drop of a hat but we can't kill a small group of terrorists. Got it!
    sgt_doom
    Or, we pour billions of dollars every year into the CIA, NSA, and DIA, and only a poor old fart such as myself can figure out that Bilal Erdogan is the ISIS connection to oil trading (Turkish president, Erdogan's son) and Erdogan's daughter is with ISIS?
    GRDguy
    Ex-CIA boss gets it wrong, again.

    "When you have a small group of people who are willing to lose their lives and kill anyone they can, we're all vulnerable."

    should be:

    "When you have a small group of financial sociopaths willing to lie-to, steal-from and kill anyone they can, we're all vulnerable."

    and you'll probably be punished, jailed or shot for tryin' to protect yourself and your family.

    Ban KKiller
    War profiteer. That is it. Along wth James Comey, James Clapper, Jack Welch and the list is almost endless...
    BarnacleBill
    "When you have a small group of people who are willing to lose their lives and kill anyone they can, we're all vulnerable."

    Simply take out the word "their", and the description perfectly fits the CIA, MI6 and their like. For them, it's all a business deal, nothing more - a massive slum-clearance project. Destroy people's houses, provide accommodation and food, ship them somewhere else; do it again and again until the money-printing machine conks out. It's money for old rope.

    http://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2015/11/slum-clearance-on-massive-scale.html

    And, yes, we're all vulnerable. The man got that right.

    Duc888
    "You get the politicians you deserve."

    CIA types are appointed, not elected.

    Duc888
    I do not know if there are any Catherine Austin Fitts fans on this web site but this is definitely worth the time. The FEDGOV came after her non stop for 6 years when she worked for HUD under Bush Sr. If nothing else this lady is tenacious. In this presentation she uncorks exactly HOW the deep black budgets are paid for...and it ain't your tax dollars. What she uncovered while at HUD was simply amazing..... and she made an excellent point. At the top... it's NOT "fraud" because that's how it was all deigned right from the get go after wwII. It brings to mind the funny computer saying....."it's a feature, not a bug".

    She digs right into how the CIA was funded... Truly amazing stuff. ...of course the dick head brigade will come along here and deride her because of the conference she is speaking at.... well, who the fuck cares, her presentation is excellent and filled with facts.

    Yes it is 1 hour 20 minutes long but imho it is well worth the watch...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0mimIp8mr8

    Dragon HAwk
    After reading all these posts my only question is why does the CIA allow Zero Hedge to Exist ?

    except of course to collect names...

    [Apr 21, 2019] Classified America: Why Is the US Public Allowed To Know So Little by Robert Koehler

    Notable quotes:
    "... And I have yet to hear a mainstream journo challenge or question that word or ask what could be at stake that requires protective secrecy even as the U.S. government seemingly threatens to collapse around Michael Flynn, America's national security advisor for three weeks, and his relationship to Russia. Is there really any there there? ..."
    "... I'm not suggesting that there isn't, or that it's all fake news. Trump and pals are undoubtedly entwined financially with Russian oligarchs, which of course is deeply problematic. And maybe there's more. And maybe some of that "more" is arguably classified for a valid reason, but I want, at the very least, to know why it's classified. What I read and hear feels, instead, like collusion: journalists unquestioningly honoring bureaucratic keep-out signs as objective, even sacred, stopping points. Public knowledge must go no further because . . . you know, national security. But the drama continues! ..."
    "... And this is troubling to me because, for starters, nations built on secrecy are far more unstable than those that aren't. ..."
    "... The United States is engaged in endless war, at unbelievable and never-discussed cost, to no end except destruction in all directions. Those who have launched and perpetuated the wars remain the determiners of what's classified and what isn't. And Russia lurks silently in the background as a new Cold War gestates. And the media participate not in reporting the news but promoting the drama. ..."
    "... Occasionally this has not been the case. Remember the Pentagon Papers? Daniel Ellsberg photocopied a multi-thousand-page secret history of the Vietnam War in 1971 and handed it over to the New York Times. It was classified! But papers printed it. And Sen. Mike Gravel later read portions of the text aloud at a Senate subcommittee hearing. ..."
    "... "These portions," notes history.com , "revealed that the presidential administrations of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson had all misled the public about the degree of US involvement in Vietnam, from Truman's decision to give military aid to France during its struggle against the communist-led Viet Minh to Johnson's development of plans to escalate the war in Vietnam as early as 1964, even as he claimed the opposite during that year's presidential election." ..."
    "... Our own government, in short, is as untrustworthy as the governments of our allies and our enemies. Government officials left to operate free of public scrutiny – bereft of public input – have proven themselves over and over to be shockingly shortsighted and cold-blooded in their decision-making, and indifferent to the impact they have on the future. ..."
    "... "It is nearly a truism," writes Jeffrey Sachs , "that US wars of regime change have rarely served America's security needs. Even when the wars succeed in overthrowing a government, as in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Moammar Khadafy in Libya, the result is rarely a stable government, and is more often a civil war. ..."
    May 14, 2017 | original.antiwar.com

    Classified America: Why Is the US Public Allowed To Know So Little?

    by Robert Koehler , May 13, 2017 Print This | Share This For a journalist – especially one covering government and politics – the most suspicious, least trustworthy word in the language ought to be: "classified."

    As the drama continues to swirl around Russiagate, or whatever the central controversy of the Trump administration winds up being known as, that word keeps popping up, teasingly, seductively: "It appeared that there was a great deal more (former acting Attorney General Sally) Yates wished she could share," the Washington Post informed us the other day, for instance, "but most of the information surrounding everything that happened remains classified."

    And the drama continues! And I have yet to hear a mainstream journo challenge or question that word or ask what could be at stake that requires protective secrecy even as the U.S. government seemingly threatens to collapse around Michael Flynn, America's national security advisor for three weeks, and his relationship to Russia. Is there really any there there?

    I'm not suggesting that there isn't, or that it's all fake news. Trump and pals are undoubtedly entwined financially with Russian oligarchs, which of course is deeply problematic. And maybe there's more. And maybe some of that "more" is arguably classified for a valid reason, but I want, at the very least, to know why it's classified. What I read and hear feels, instead, like collusion: journalists unquestioningly honoring bureaucratic keep-out signs as objective, even sacred, stopping points. Public knowledge must go no further because . . . you know, national security. But the drama continues!

    And this is troubling to me because, for starters, nations built on secrecy are far more unstable than those that aren't. Job #1 of a free, independent media is the full-on, continuous challenge to government secrecy. Such a media understands that it answers to the public, or rather, that it's a manifestation of the public will. Stability and freedom are not the result of private tinkering. And peace is something created openly. The best of who we are is contained in the public soul, not bequeathed to us by unfathomably wise leaders.

    So I cringe every time I hear the news stop at the word "classified." Indeed, in the Trump era, it seems like a plot device: a way to maintain the drama. ". . . there was a great deal more Yates wished she could share, but most of the information surrounding everything that happened remains classified."

    Stay tuned, and keep your imaginations turned to high! This is Russia we're talking about. They messed with our election. They "attacked" us in cyberspace. We'd tell you more about how bad things are, but . . . you know, national security.

    If nothing else, this endless retreat behind the word "classified" is a waste of the Trump presidency. This administration's recklessness is opening all sorts of random doors on national secrets that need airing. It's not as though the country was sailing along smoothly and keeping the world safe and peaceful till Donald Trump showed up.

    Trump could well be making a bad situation worse, but, as William Hartung pointed out: "After all, he inherited no less than seven conflicts from Barack Obama: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen."

    The United States is engaged in endless war, at unbelievable and never-discussed cost, to no end except destruction in all directions. Those who have launched and perpetuated the wars remain the determiners of what's classified and what isn't. And Russia lurks silently in the background as a new Cold War gestates. And the media participate not in reporting the news but promoting the drama.

    Occasionally this has not been the case. Remember the Pentagon Papers? Daniel Ellsberg photocopied a multi-thousand-page secret history of the Vietnam War in 1971 and handed it over to the New York Times. It was classified! But papers printed it. And Sen. Mike Gravel later read portions of the text aloud at a Senate subcommittee hearing.

    "These portions," notes history.com , "revealed that the presidential administrations of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson had all misled the public about the degree of US involvement in Vietnam, from Truman's decision to give military aid to France during its struggle against the communist-led Viet Minh to Johnson's development of plans to escalate the war in Vietnam as early as 1964, even as he claimed the opposite during that year's presidential election."

    Our own government, in short, is as untrustworthy as the governments of our allies and our enemies. Government officials left to operate free of public scrutiny – bereft of public input – have proven themselves over and over to be shockingly shortsighted and cold-blooded in their decision-making, and indifferent to the impact they have on the future.

    "It is nearly a truism," writes Jeffrey Sachs , "that US wars of regime change have rarely served America's security needs. Even when the wars succeed in overthrowing a government, as in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Moammar Khadafy in Libya, the result is rarely a stable government, and is more often a civil war. A 'successful' regime change often lights a long fuse leading to a future explosion, such as the 1953 overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government and installation of the autocratic Shah of Iran, which was followed by the Iranian Revolution of 1979."

    All of this, and so much more, preceded Trump. He's only the tail end of our troubles.

    Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at [email protected] or visit his website at commonwonders.com . Reprinted with permission from PeaceVoice .

    [Apr 21, 2019] Is the CIA Reformable by Melvin A. Goodman

    Notable quotes:
    "... The debate over whether Snowden was a traitor is fatuous. As a result of Snowden's revelations, we learned that the National Security Agency logged domestic phone calls and emails for years, recorded the metadata of correspondence between Americans, and, in some cases, exploited the content of emails. The case against Private Manning was similarly fatuous. Manning provided evidence of the US cover-up of torture by our Iraqi allies; a US Army helicopter opening fire on a group of civilians, including two Reuters journalists; and the use of an air strike to cover up the execution of civilians. Some of these acts were war crimes. ..."
    "... According to US law, the term "whistleblower" applies to anyone who "reasonably believes" he or she is disclosing a violation of law or gross mismanagement, gross waste, or abuse of authority. My testimony documented for the first time the intentional distortion of intelligence by CIA director William Casey and Deputy Director Gates in order to serve the agenda of Ronald Reagan and his administration. ..."
    "... Being a contrarian was easy and natural for me. In fact, no one should think about entering the intelligence profession without good contrarian instincts. Such instincts would include an innate skepticism, the doubting of conventional wisdom and a willingness to challenge authority, which translates to an ability to tell truth to power. These contrarian instincts are essential to the success of any intelligence organization. As Rogers and Hammerstein would have it, it was "doing what comes naturally!" ..."
    "... My book The Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA was the first insider account from an intelligence analyst regarding the skewed and politicized assessments of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence -- the Agency's analytic arm. I also exposed the strategic failure of covert actions that were never intended to be a part of President Harry Truman's CIA ..."
    "... The political pliancy of these directors fully compromised the intelligence mission of the CIA, and it was political pliancy that made directors such as Gates and Tenet so attractive to Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. ..."
    "... In December 1963, less than a month after the assassination of President Kennedy, Truman wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post to document the wrongs of the CIA He concluded that his efforts to "create the quiet intelligence arm of the Presidency" had been subverted by a "sinister" and "mysterious" agency that was conducting far too many clandestine activities in peacetime. I lectured at the Truman Library in the summer of 2014, and found a note in Truman's hand that stated the CIA was not designed to "initiate policy or to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized." ..."
    "... In The Failure of Intelligence , I documented the CIA's resistance to reform and the corruption in both the analytical and operational directorates. I made a case for starting over at the CIA, not dissimilar from the case made by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan 25 years ago as a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Not every agency or department of government can be reformed, and it is possible that the intricate web of habits, procedures, and culture places the CIA in the non-reformable category. Once the political culture of an institution such as the CIA has been broken, it is extremely difficult -- if not impossible -- to rebuild or repair it. ..."
    Jul 21, 2017 | www.truth-out.org

    The CIA's mission has gone dangerously and lethally astray, argues Melvin A. Goodman, former CIA intelligence analyst.

    Whistleblower at the CIA tells the story of the corruption Melvin A. Goodman observed within the intelligence agency and what he did to expose it. NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake says this book "serves in the public interest as a warning and wake-up call for what's at stake and why we cannot trust the CIA or the intelligence establishment to do the right thing." Click here to order a copy today by making a donation to Truthout!

    In this excerpt, , former CIA intelligence analyst Melvin A. Goodman ponders the meanings of the words whistleblower, dissident and contrarian, how they apply to himself and others, and whether the CIA can ever be repaired or rebuilt.

    Whistleblowers. Dissidents. Contrarians.

    The terms are used synonymously by pundits and the public, and I've been all three at one time or another in order to expose improprieties and illegalities in the secret government, and to inform the American public of policies that compromise the freedom and security of US citizens and weaken US standing in the global community.

    I have never liked the terms contrarian or dissident. I've always believed that my criticism should be conventional wisdom. The term whistleblower is more complex because it often raises questions of patriotism or sedition. Chelsea Manning received commutation from her 35-year prison sentence for revealing so-called secrets that documented the terror and violence of the baseless US war in Iraq. Members of the Bush administration who launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are considered honorable members of our society, although their acts involved the corruption of intelligence; caused the death of thousands of US soldiers and foreign civilians; terrorized civilian populations; perpetrated the criminal use of torture and abuse; sanctioned use of secret prisons and extraordinary rendition; and caused the destabilization of the region that has set the stage for strategic advances by Al Qaeda and ISIS.

    Edward Snowden, if he had remained in the United States, would have faced an even longer prison sentence because he revealed the massive NSA surveillance program that was illegal and immoral, and that violated the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal seizures and searches. Manning and Snowden admit to breaking US laws, but their actions were never as serious as the law-breaking, including massive violations of privacy, that they exposed.

    The debate over whether Snowden was a traitor is fatuous. As a result of Snowden's revelations, we learned that the National Security Agency logged domestic phone calls and emails for years, recorded the metadata of correspondence between Americans, and, in some cases, exploited the content of emails. The case against Private Manning was similarly fatuous. Manning provided evidence of the US cover-up of torture by our Iraqi allies; a US Army helicopter opening fire on a group of civilians, including two Reuters journalists; and the use of an air strike to cover up the execution of civilians. Some of these acts were war crimes.

    There is no more compelling evidence of the unconscionable behavior of US personnel in Iraq than the callous dialogue between the crew members of the helicopter regarding the civilian deaths and particularly the firing on those Iraqis who came to recover the dead bodies of Iraqi civilians. Manning's documents exposed this behavior, but her efforts were ridiculed by former secretary of defense Robert Gates, who described it as examining war by "looking through a straw."

    To make matters worse, American journalists have criticized their colleagues (Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald [then of The Guardian]) who brought the Snowden-Manning revelations to the attention of the public. David Gregory, then host of the venerable "Meet the Press" on NBC, asked Greenwald "to the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden ... why shouldn't you ... be charged with a crime?"

    Jeffrey Toobin, a lawyer who labors for CNN and The New Yorker, called Snowden a "grandiose narcissist who belongs in prison" and referred to Greenwald's partner, David Miranda, who was detained by British authorities for nine hours under anti-terror laws, the equivalent of a "drug mule."

    The king of calumny is Michael Grunwald, a senior correspondent for Time, who wrote on Twitter that he couldn't "wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange." The New York Times also targeted Assange, although the paper cooperated with WikiLeaks in 2010 in publishing reams of information from Private Manning's revelations. Of course, if Time or the New York Times had broken these stories, they would have built new shelves to hold their Pulitzer Prizes.

    Their hypocrisy was exposed by David Carr of the New York Times, who expressed shock at finding Assange and Greenwald "under attack, not just from a government bent on keeping its secrets, but from friendly fire by fellow journalists."

    I didn't reveal abuses as great as those revealed by Manning and Snowden or Daniel Ellsberg, but I do claim status as a whistleblower because of my revelations before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during confirmation hearings for Bob Gates, who was nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 to be director of central intelligence.

    According to US law, the term "whistleblower" applies to anyone who "reasonably believes" he or she is disclosing a violation of law or gross mismanagement, gross waste, or abuse of authority. My testimony documented for the first time the intentional distortion of intelligence by CIA director William Casey and Deputy Director Gates in order to serve the agenda of Ronald Reagan and his administration.

    Bob Gates was an old friend, but the friendship ended when he routinely distorted intelligence throughout the 1980s as deputy director for intelligence and deputy director of the CIA In destroying the political culture of the CIA, he created a toxic and corrupt environment at the Agency, and the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA detention and torture reminds us that the Agency hasn't recovered.

    Being a contrarian was easy and natural for me. In fact, no one should think about entering the intelligence profession without good contrarian instincts. Such instincts would include an innate skepticism, the doubting of conventional wisdom and a willingness to challenge authority, which translates to an ability to tell truth to power. These contrarian instincts are essential to the success of any intelligence organization. As Rogers and Hammerstein would have it, it was "doing what comes naturally!"

    My book The Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA was the first insider account from an intelligence analyst regarding the skewed and politicized assessments of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence -- the Agency's analytic arm. I also exposed the strategic failure of covert actions that were never intended to be a part of President Harry Truman's CIA

    I wrote the book for many reasons, including the need to describe the inability of journalists to take into account, let alone understand, the dangers of politicization and the actions of CIA directors such as Casey, Gates, and more recently Goss and Tenet. The political pliancy of these directors fully compromised the intelligence mission of the CIA, and it was political pliancy that made directors such as Gates and Tenet so attractive to Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II.

    Truthout Progressive Pick
    Whistleblower at the CIA: An Insider's Account of the Politics of Intelligence

    "Urgent, timely, and deeply recommended." -- Daniel Ellsberg. Click here now to get the book!

    For the past quarter century, my testimony and writings have exposed the failure to honor President Truman's purpose in creating a CIA to provide policymakers with accurate, unbiased accounts of international developments, and have highlighted the CIA's readiness to cater to the White House. This view is not original with me; in fact, it was President Truman who first acknowledged that the CIA he created in 1947 had gotten off the tracks under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy in the 1950s and early 1960s.

    In December 1963, less than a month after the assassination of President Kennedy, Truman wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post to document the wrongs of the CIA He concluded that his efforts to "create the quiet intelligence arm of the Presidency" had been subverted by a "sinister" and "mysterious" agency that was conducting far too many clandestine activities in peacetime. I lectured at the Truman Library in the summer of 2014, and found a note in Truman's hand that stated the CIA was not designed to "initiate policy or to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized."

    In The Failure of Intelligence , I documented the CIA's resistance to reform and the corruption in both the analytical and operational directorates. I made a case for starting over at the CIA, not dissimilar from the case made by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan 25 years ago as a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Not every agency or department of government can be reformed, and it is possible that the intricate web of habits, procedures, and culture places the CIA in the non-reformable category. Once the political culture of an institution such as the CIA has been broken, it is extremely difficult -- if not impossible -- to rebuild or repair it.

    Copyright (2017) by Melvin A. Goodman. Not be reprinted without permission of the publisher, City Lights Books. Melvin A. Goodman Melvin A. Goodman served as a senior analyst and Division Chief at the CIA from 1966 to 1990. An expert on US relations with Russia, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper's and many others. He is author of six books on US intelligence and international security. Related Stories CIA Asked to Release Documents Related to Massacre in El Salvador By Carmen Rodriguez, CIP Americas Program | Report CIA Watchdog "Mistakenly" Destroys Its Sole Copy of Senate Torture Report By Sarah Lazare, AlterNet | News Analysis CIA Cables Detail Its New Deputy Director's Role in Torture By Raymond Bonner, ProPublica | Report

    [Apr 21, 2019] George Papodopoulus was entrapped by individuals linked to British MI-6 and the CIA with offers to provide meetings with Russians and Putin. The Mueller account is a lie

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 20, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    And there is more. George Papodopoulus was entrapped by individuals linked to British MI-6 and the CIA with offers to provide meetings with Russians and Putin. The Mueller account is a lie:

    In late April 2016, Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, immediately after Mifsud 's return from a trip to Moscow, that the Russian government had obtained "dirt" on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. One week later, on May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to candidate Clinton.

    Papadopoulos shared information about Russian "dirt " with people outside of the Campaign, and the Office investigated whether he also provided it to a Campaign official. Papadopoulos and the Campaign officials with whom he interacted told the Office that they did · not recall that Papadopoulos passed them the information. Throughout the relevant period of time and for several months thereafter, Papadopoulos worked with Mifsud and two Russian nationals to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government. That meeting never came to pass.

    Once again, the Mueller team treats the provocateur -- -i.e., Joseph Mifsud -- -as some simple guy with ties to Russia's political elites. Another egregious lie. Mifsud was not working on behalf of Russia. He was deployed by MI-6. Disobedient Media has been on the forefront of exposing Mifsud's ties to western intelligence in general and the Brits in particular .

    Mifsud's alleged links to Russian intelligence are summarily debunked by his close working relationship with Claire Smith, a major figure in the upper echelons of British intelligence. A number of Twitter users recently observed that Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee at Mifsud's LINK campus in Rome. Newsmax and Buzzfeed later reported that the professor's name and biography had been removed from the campus' website, writing that the mysterious removal took place after Mifsud had served the institution for "years."

    WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange likewise noted the connection between Mifsud and Smith in a Twitter thread, additionally pointing out his connections with Saudi intelligence: "[Mifsud] and Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel both trained Italian security services at the Link University in Rome and appear to both be present in this [photo]."

    The photograph in question originated on Geodiplomatics.com, where it specified that Joseph Mifsud is indeed standing next to Claire Smith, who was attending a: " Training program on International Security which was organised by Link Campus University and London Academy of Diplomacy." The event is listed as taking place in October, 2012. This is highly significant for a number of reasons.

    This is not a mere matter of Mueller and his team "failing" to disclose some important facts. If they were operating honestly they should have investigated Mifsud, Greenberg and Sater. But they did not. Two of the three -- Sater and Greenber -- alleged Russian stooges have ties to the FBI. And Mifsud has been living and working in the belly of the intelligence community.

    [Apr 21, 2019] The Internet Research Agency only spent, according to the report itself, only spent $100,000, actually, on their activity in terms of buying advertising in Facebook and Twitter

    Apr 20, 2019 | therealnews.com

    GREG WILPERT: Yeah. I mean, I think it's also important to note that the Internet Research Agency only spent, according to the report itself, only spent $100,000, actually, on their activity in terms of buying advertising in Facebook and Twitter.

    And that's really absolutely nothing compared to what the campaigns more generally spend in those areas in terms of advertising.

    And so the idea that they somehow influence the election just based on social media seems mind boggling to believe...

    [Apr 21, 2019] CNN's Dana Bash Warns Trump If You Cross The Deep State, They Will Get Back At You; Even If You re The President by Tim Hains

    Video
    May 17, 2017 | www.realclearpolitics.com
    On CNN Tuesday evening, reporter Dana Bash responded to this report in the day's New York Times alleging that Trump asked former FBI director James Comey to end investigations into former national security advisor Mike Flynn by quipping that the "deep state" -- intelligence agencies and the DoD -- "know how t get back" at people who cross them, "even if you're the president of the United States."

    DANA BASH, CNN: So explosive. So incredibly serious. The Times report also says that James Comey created similar memos after the other meetings that he had with the president. So this could be just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe the most explosive, but it's very clear that James Comey wanted to get out there that this happened, created this paper trail real time, contemporaneously rather, in order to protect himself from exactly what happened last week, him being fired, him being blamed. You know, wanting to know that he has sort of the information at his disposal if, in fact, this happened...

    If you just take a step back, Wolf, just in the past 24 hours, right or wrong, what this president has done, his first 100 plus days, even before he came into office is pick fights with the intelligence community and now the law enforcement community. Particularly the way, never mind he fired James Comey, but the way in which he did it, not giving him the respect of actually telling him in person or at least not having him find out from cable news.

    So we know that they talk about the deep state -- well these are communities that have a lot of loyalty within -- and know how to get back, even if you're the president of the United States.

    And the fact is that when the intelligence community found out about the conversation that the president had with the Russians, talking about classified information, we don't know all the details.

    We're told that it wasn't as bad as it might have seemed initially, that's what the White House sources are saying, but still, the intelligence community leaked that out. Now we know that the FBI director was keeping notes on many things. But the fact that this is the first one that he made clear and made public.

    It's so incredibly explosive, as Jeff said, is the clearest most dangerous sign yet of potential obstruction of justice. Makes you think, what else is going to happen? And it's very hard for Republicans who have in the past 24 hours been more aggressively critical of the president begging for a crisis-free day or crisis-free hour, very hard for them not to take this incredibly seriously.

    [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    False Solace , April 19, 2019 at 12:36 pm

    Yet another delusional remark at odds with reality. Haven't these people learned anything from the implosion of their pathetic Russiagate hysteria? The Russophobes won't be happy until we're at war with a nuclear power and the nukes are about to land.

    Here are things Trump has actually done, as opposed to red-limned fantasies drawn from the fever-dreams of Putin haters:

    1. Unilaterally abandoned 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty
    2. Expelled 60 diplomats and closed 3 Russian diplomatic annexes
    3. Bombed Syria, a Russian ally, with Russian troops in country
    4. Sold arms to Ukraine, which is actively at war with Russia
    5. Threatened Germany to cancel a new Russian pipeline through the Baltic (effort failed)
    6. Even more sanctions against Russia and Russian nationals
    7. Stationed missile defense systems on the Russian border in violation of arms treaties
    8. Massive military exercises in Europe on the Russian border
    9. Stationed troops in Poland
    10. Negotiating with Poland to build a permanent US military base in Poland

    All this has certainly made the world safer. /s

    [Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... It is quite distressing that in may so called “progessive” or “left liberal” – self designated of course – circles in the USA and the UK such a statement will lead to your being labelled a Russian Troll or the suggestion you are being on Putin’s payrol ..."
    "... “…In the era of weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear, but primarily nuclear, ever more sophisticated, the Russians now have a new generation of nuclear weapons -- Putin announced them on March 1, they were dismissed here, but they’re real -- that can elude any missile defense. .. ..."
    "... Russia has now thwarted us; they now have missile defense-evading nuclear weapons from submarines, to aircraft, to missiles. And Putin has said, ‘It’s time to negotiate an end to this new arms race,’ and he’s 100 percent right. ..."
    "... So when I heard Trump say, in 2016, we have to cooperate with Russia, I had already become convinced… ..."
    "... When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, “Our democracy has been attacked,” I an reminded of the interview Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to be executed. ..."
    "... Perhaps the assumption of Russia meddling in our election is a simple case of projection. As has been documented, the USA has frequently meddled in other countries’ elections or election outcomes (Iran, Russia, Chile, Central America). ..."
    "... To paraphrase the late Leona Helmsley, “Democracy is for little people”, not for the meddling-in-foreign-democracies policymakers of the Boston-Washington corridor. ..."
    "... We live in a multi-polar world and if Washington can’t get used to it, we are the ones who may pay for their willful stubborn blindness, their inability to come to terms with a perfectly obvious developing reality. ..."
    "... The neocons have not had a new idea in 30 years. I continue to be baffled by their obsession with Iran. Iran is a fact; the enmity goes back to our support for the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 and only made worse by our support of the Shah as our-guy-in-Tehran. ..."
    "... The USA is in disarray internally and in its approach to the rest of the world. ..."
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    flora , , April 19, 2019 at 10:38 am

    The DNC had the biggest influence on the 2016 outcome; they insisted on running a disliked candidate who was a terrible campaigner so disliked the DNC cleared the field for her ahead of time (got Biden and others to not declare in 2016) and had to club dissenters in their own party to make sure she got the nomination. imo. But sure, blame "those guys over there". That's the ultimate "the dog ate my homework" excuse. meh.

    Susan the other` , April 19, 2019 at 10:43 am

    Good analysis. This even makes the insanity of “Russiagate” seem strategic. (But as overwrought as saying ‘give us liberty or give us death’. The solution to everything is somewhere in the middle.) We know that such dedicated souls as the very fatuous Mr. Brennan cooked it all up and pretended it was because Trump was “treasonous”.

    Brennan in his dotage might actually be thinking that.

    I’ve always thought that Putin, like Yeltsin, was pro West. Possibly an atlanticist. Tho’ being as chauvinistic as an atlanticist today is a little offensive to the rest of the world. Cohen’s statement that Putin is pro Russian-anti communism might be a simplification. Russia is certainly positioning itself to be safe from our aggression. I think there are remnants of good social management that the commies learned over the years that Russia/Putin still employs.

    It’s too simplistic to say Putin is anti-communist. He’s just a realist. And he’s a nationalist. Being a nationalist-protectionist is the worst sin against neoliberal advancement. That’s another propaganda bullet point – you never hear a rational discussion of nationalism – it’s all trash, “Marine LePen is a fascist” exaggeration.

    Peter , April 19, 2019 at 11:04 am

    It is quite distressing to see the Mueller report take up as if it were settled fact the idea that Russia influenced the 2016 Presidential election, particularly since his investigation didn’t provide any information that supported this theory.

    It is quite distressing that in may so called “progessive” or “left liberal” – self designated of course – circles in the USA and the UK such a statement will lead to your being labelled a Russian Troll or the suggestion you are being on Putin’s payroll. That is the level of rational discussion in many those circles today when it comes to the discussion about the west's relationship to Russia.

    This of course led in Russia to the conclusion that to engage with the west at present in an attempt to ease the tensions is futile and rather counterproductive.

    juliania , April 19, 2019 at 11:15 am

    I think Professor Cohen has a real point in the following statements:

    “…In the era of weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear, but primarily nuclear, ever more sophisticated, the Russians now have a new generation of nuclear weapons -- Putin announced them on March 1, they were dismissed here, but they’re real -- that can elude any missile defense. ..

    Russia has now thwarted us; they now have missile defense-evading nuclear weapons from submarines, to aircraft, to missiles. And Putin has said, ‘It’s time to negotiate an end to this new arms race,’ and he’s 100 percent right.

    So when I heard Trump say, in 2016, we have to cooperate with Russia, I had already become convinced…

    So I began to speak positively about Trump at that moment–that would have been probably around the summer of 2016–just on this one point, because none of the other candidates were advocating cooperation with Russia…”

    Then, when he goes on to elaborate on China’s weaponry and posit including them in the next round of draw-down negotiations, as far off as that may look – that to me is what Trump can use for his re-election. I do believe his attitude towards Russia won him his first term.

    Those Russia-gate kooks need to focus on the American people, not on Trump. Well, maybe they did, and still do. It’s really about us, not him.

    Procopius , April 19, 2019 at 7:56 pm

    When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, “Our democracy has been attacked,” I an reminded of the interview Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to be executed.

    Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

    John Wright , April 19, 2019 at 11:20 am

    Perhaps the assumption of Russia meddling in our election is a simple case of projection. As has been documented, the USA has frequently meddled in other countries’ elections or election outcomes (Iran, Russia, Chile, Central America).

    One recent Democratic presidential candidate was taped asserting “we should not have held the election unless we could determine the outcome” in another foreign country.

    If Russia did not meddle significantly in the US election, the political class may have had to ponder that possibly the Russians believed that the decline of the US in the world stage did not merit the effort.

    To paraphrase the late Leona Helmsley, “Democracy is for little people”, not for the meddling-in-foreign-democracies policymakers of the Boston-Washington corridor.

    John , April 19, 2019 at 11:45 am

    The thrust of Cohen’s position is correct. Quibble all you wish with the details. We live in a multi-polar world and if Washington can’t get used to it, we are the ones who may pay for their willful stubborn blindness, their inability to come to terms with a perfectly obvious developing reality.

    The neocons have not had a new idea in 30 years. I continue to be baffled by their obsession with Iran. Iran is a fact; the enmity goes back to our support for the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 and only made worse by our support of the Shah as our-guy-in-Tehran.

    The Russians really do have a new generation of weapons. The Chinese are re-assuming a leading position in the world that has been theirs most of the time for two thousand years.

    Europe is not a rising power.

    The USA is in disarray internally and in its approach to the rest of the world. I do not consider these to be opinions but objective statements. I am not prepared to suffer for illusions and vanity among the “elite.”

    [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    False Solace , April 19, 2019 at 12:36 pm

    Yet another delusional remark at odds with reality. Haven't these people learned anything from the implosion of their pathetic Russiagate hysteria? The Russophobes won't be happy until we're at war with a nuclear power and the nukes are about to land.

    Here are things Trump has actually done, as opposed to red-limned fantasies drawn from the fever-dreams of Putin haters:

    1. Unilaterally abandoned 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty
    2. Expelled 60 diplomats and closed 3 Russian diplomatic annexes
    3. Bombed Syria, a Russian ally, with Russian troops in country
    4. Sold arms to Ukraine, which is actively at war with Russia
    5. Threatened Germany to cancel a new Russian pipeline through the Baltic (effort failed)
    6. Even more sanctions against Russia and Russian nationals
    7. Stationed missile defense systems on the Russian border in violation of arms treaties
    8. Massive military exercises in Europe on the Russian border
    9. Stationed troops in Poland
    10. Negotiating with Poland to build a permanent US military base in Poland

    All this has certainly made the world safer. /s

    [Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... It is quite distressing that in may so called “progessive” or “left liberal” – self designated of course – circles in the USA and the UK such a statement will lead to your being labelled a Russian Troll or the suggestion you are being on Putin’s payrol ..."
    "... “…In the era of weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear, but primarily nuclear, ever more sophisticated, the Russians now have a new generation of nuclear weapons -- Putin announced them on March 1, they were dismissed here, but they’re real -- that can elude any missile defense. .. ..."
    "... Russia has now thwarted us; they now have missile defense-evading nuclear weapons from submarines, to aircraft, to missiles. And Putin has said, ‘It’s time to negotiate an end to this new arms race,’ and he’s 100 percent right. ..."
    "... So when I heard Trump say, in 2016, we have to cooperate with Russia, I had already become convinced… ..."
    "... When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, “Our democracy has been attacked,” I an reminded of the interview Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to be executed. ..."
    "... Perhaps the assumption of Russia meddling in our election is a simple case of projection. As has been documented, the USA has frequently meddled in other countries’ elections or election outcomes (Iran, Russia, Chile, Central America). ..."
    "... To paraphrase the late Leona Helmsley, “Democracy is for little people”, not for the meddling-in-foreign-democracies policymakers of the Boston-Washington corridor. ..."
    "... We live in a multi-polar world and if Washington can’t get used to it, we are the ones who may pay for their willful stubborn blindness, their inability to come to terms with a perfectly obvious developing reality. ..."
    "... The neocons have not had a new idea in 30 years. I continue to be baffled by their obsession with Iran. Iran is a fact; the enmity goes back to our support for the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 and only made worse by our support of the Shah as our-guy-in-Tehran. ..."
    "... The USA is in disarray internally and in its approach to the rest of the world. ..."
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    flora , , April 19, 2019 at 10:38 am

    The DNC had the biggest influence on the 2016 outcome; they insisted on running a disliked candidate who was a terrible campaigner so disliked the DNC cleared the field for her ahead of time (got Biden and others to not declare in 2016) and had to club dissenters in their own party to make sure she got the nomination. imo. But sure, blame "those guys over there". That's the ultimate "the dog ate my homework" excuse. meh.

    Susan the other` , April 19, 2019 at 10:43 am

    Good analysis. This even makes the insanity of “Russiagate” seem strategic. (But as overwrought as saying ‘give us liberty or give us death’. The solution to everything is somewhere in the middle.) We know that such dedicated souls as the very fatuous Mr. Brennan cooked it all up and pretended it was because Trump was “treasonous”.

    Brennan in his dotage might actually be thinking that.

    I’ve always thought that Putin, like Yeltsin, was pro West. Possibly an atlanticist. Tho’ being as chauvinistic as an atlanticist today is a little offensive to the rest of the world. Cohen’s statement that Putin is pro Russian-anti communism might be a simplification. Russia is certainly positioning itself to be safe from our aggression. I think there are remnants of good social management that the commies learned over the years that Russia/Putin still employs.

    It’s too simplistic to say Putin is anti-communist. He’s just a realist. And he’s a nationalist. Being a nationalist-protectionist is the worst sin against neoliberal advancement. That’s another propaganda bullet point – you never hear a rational discussion of nationalism – it’s all trash, “Marine LePen is a fascist” exaggeration.

    Peter , April 19, 2019 at 11:04 am

    It is quite distressing to see the Mueller report take up as if it were settled fact the idea that Russia influenced the 2016 Presidential election, particularly since his investigation didn’t provide any information that supported this theory.

    It is quite distressing that in may so called “progessive” or “left liberal” – self designated of course – circles in the USA and the UK such a statement will lead to your being labelled a Russian Troll or the suggestion you are being on Putin’s payroll. That is the level of rational discussion in many those circles today when it comes to the discussion about the west's relationship to Russia.

    This of course led in Russia to the conclusion that to engage with the west at present in an attempt to ease the tensions is futile and rather counterproductive.

    juliania , April 19, 2019 at 11:15 am

    I think Professor Cohen has a real point in the following statements:

    “…In the era of weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear, but primarily nuclear, ever more sophisticated, the Russians now have a new generation of nuclear weapons -- Putin announced them on March 1, they were dismissed here, but they’re real -- that can elude any missile defense. ..

    Russia has now thwarted us; they now have missile defense-evading nuclear weapons from submarines, to aircraft, to missiles. And Putin has said, ‘It’s time to negotiate an end to this new arms race,’ and he’s 100 percent right.

    So when I heard Trump say, in 2016, we have to cooperate with Russia, I had already become convinced…

    So I began to speak positively about Trump at that moment–that would have been probably around the summer of 2016–just on this one point, because none of the other candidates were advocating cooperation with Russia…”

    Then, when he goes on to elaborate on China’s weaponry and posit including them in the next round of draw-down negotiations, as far off as that may look – that to me is what Trump can use for his re-election. I do believe his attitude towards Russia won him his first term.

    Those Russia-gate kooks need to focus on the American people, not on Trump. Well, maybe they did, and still do. It’s really about us, not him.

    Procopius , April 19, 2019 at 7:56 pm

    When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, “Our democracy has been attacked,” I an reminded of the interview Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to be executed.

    Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

    John Wright , April 19, 2019 at 11:20 am

    Perhaps the assumption of Russia meddling in our election is a simple case of projection. As has been documented, the USA has frequently meddled in other countries’ elections or election outcomes (Iran, Russia, Chile, Central America).

    One recent Democratic presidential candidate was taped asserting “we should not have held the election unless we could determine the outcome” in another foreign country.

    If Russia did not meddle significantly in the US election, the political class may have had to ponder that possibly the Russians believed that the decline of the US in the world stage did not merit the effort.

    To paraphrase the late Leona Helmsley, “Democracy is for little people”, not for the meddling-in-foreign-democracies policymakers of the Boston-Washington corridor.

    John , April 19, 2019 at 11:45 am

    The thrust of Cohen’s position is correct. Quibble all you wish with the details. We live in a multi-polar world and if Washington can’t get used to it, we are the ones who may pay for their willful stubborn blindness, their inability to come to terms with a perfectly obvious developing reality.

    The neocons have not had a new idea in 30 years. I continue to be baffled by their obsession with Iran. Iran is a fact; the enmity goes back to our support for the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 and only made worse by our support of the Shah as our-guy-in-Tehran.

    The Russians really do have a new generation of weapons. The Chinese are re-assuming a leading position in the world that has been theirs most of the time for two thousand years.

    Europe is not a rising power.

    The USA is in disarray internally and in its approach to the rest of the world. I do not consider these to be opinions but objective statements. I am not prepared to suffer for illusions and vanity among the “elite.”

    [Apr 20, 2019] Did Assange lied about Seth Rich?

    Assange actually undermined the key pre-condition of the Deep state existence -- secrecy.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Robert Mueller, who helped the Bush administration deceive the world about WMD in Iraq, has claimed that the GRU was the source of WikiLeaks' 2016 drops, and claimed in his report that WikiLeaks deceived its audience by implying that its source was the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich. ..."
    "... The smear is that Assange knew his source was actually the Russian government, and he implied it was Seth Rich to throw people off the scent. Mueller asserted that something happened, and it's interpreted as hard fact instead of assertion. There's no evidence for any of this, and there's no reason to go believing the WMD guy on faith about a narrative which incriminates yet another government which refuses to obey the dictates of the US empire. ..."
    "... HItchen's Razor: "what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." ..."
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    I'm just going to toss this one here at the end because I'm seeing it go around a lot in the wake of the Mueller report.

    Robert Mueller, who helped the Bush administration deceive the world about WMD in Iraq, has claimed that the GRU was the source of WikiLeaks' 2016 drops, and claimed in his report that WikiLeaks deceived its audience by implying that its source was the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich.

    This claim is unsubstantiated because, as we discussed in Smear 4, the public has not seen a shred of evidence proving who was or was not WikiLeaks' source, so there's no way to know there was any deception happening there. We've never seen any hard proof, nor indeed anything besides official narrative, connecting the Russian government to Guccifer 2.0 and Guccifer 2.0 to WikiLeaks, and Daniel Lazare for Consortium News documents that there are in fact some major plot holes in Mueller's timeline. Longtime Assange friend and WikiLeaks ally Craig Murray maintains that he knows the source of the DNC Leaks and Podesta Emails were two different Americans, not Russians, and hints that one of them was a DNC insider. There is exactly as much publicly available evidence for Murray's claim as there is for Mueller's.

    Mainstream media has been blaring day after day for years that it is an absolute known fact that the Russian government was WikiLeaks' source, and the only reason people scoff and roll their eyes at anyone who makes the indisputably factual claim that we've seen no evidence for this is because the illusory truth effect causes the human brain to mistake repetition for fact.

    The smear is that Assange knew his source was actually the Russian government, and he implied it was Seth Rich to throw people off the scent. Mueller asserted that something happened, and it's interpreted as hard fact instead of assertion. There's no evidence for any of this, and there's no reason to go believing the WMD guy on faith about a narrative which incriminates yet another government which refuses to obey the dictates of the US empire.

    And I guess that's it for now. Again, this article is an ongoing project, so I'll be updating it and adding to it regularly as new information comes in and new smears need refutation. If I missed something or got something wrong, or even if you spotted a typo, please email me at [email protected] and let me know. I'm trying to create the best possible tool for people to refute Assange smears, so I'll keep sharpening this baby to make sure it cuts like a razor. Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who helped! Phew! That was long.

    motherjones , 52 minutes ago link

    We don't have to like Julian Assange, but the release of the "Collateral Damage" video alone is enough to justify defending Assange and the freedom of the press.

    Ozymandiasssss , 1 hour ago link

    She really didn't debunk the thing about Seth Rich very well. Basically just said that whatever Mueller said wasn't true, which doesn't go very far for me. He definitely did imply that he got at least some of his info from Rich so if there is some sort of proof of that, it needs to be supplied; otherwise Mueller's story is the only one.

    bh2 , 1 hour ago link

    HItchen's Razor: "what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

    beemasters , 2 hours ago link

    I have recently seen a political cartoon with Dotard then saying: "I love Wikileaks" + " I will throw her in jail" and now saying: "I know nothing about Wikileaks" + "I will throw him in jail"

    It summed up perfectly that swine's lack of integrity.

    Downtoolong , 2 hours ago link

    It's so simple. Assange and Wikileaks exposed Hillary, Podesta, and the entire DNC to be lying, deceiving, hypocritical, disingenuous, elitist bastards. His crimes are miniscule compared to that, and all who attempt to condemn Assange only show us that they are members of that foul group.

    beemasters , 1 hour ago link

    Yet Dotard didn't push hard at all to get Killary, Podesta & friends charged...not even tweets calling for it since he got elected.

    TotalMachineFail , 3 hours ago link

    Excellent thorough content. And Kim Schmitz pointed out they'll drag things on for as long as possible and try to add additional things as they go. Such a bunch of sad, pathetic control freaks. Covering up their own failures, crimes and short comings with a highly publicized distraction putting the screws to a single journalist.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBs1dgYL-7w

    When the next world leader is Kashoggied nobody is going to care.

    freedommusic , 3 hours ago link

    “ Ty Clevenger has FOIAed information from NSA asking for any data that involved both Seth Rich and also Julian Assange .

    And they responded by saying we’ve got 15 files , 32 pages , but they’re all classified in accordance with executive order 13526 covering classification, and therefore you can’t have them.

    That says that NSA has records of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange. I mean, that’s the only business that NSA is in — copying communications between people and devices.”

    —Bill Binney (NSA 30 year vet)

    ( source )

    RussianSniper , 3 hours ago link

    Long story!

    Important topic!!

    Assange and Snowden are freedom fighters, exposing the duplicitous, corrupt, and criminals to the entire world.

    The hundreds of millions of mindless zombies are so brainwashed by the fake news industry, that if Assange and Snowden are not spies, they are criminal in some capacity.

    I have liberal, conservative, and libertarian leaning friends, and virtually every one of them believe Assange and Snowden are traitors to America, got innocent people killed, are rapists, or too cowardly to stand trial in the USA.

    What has happened to common sense and some necessary cynicism?

    Dugald , 2 hours ago link

    The trouble with Common Sense is it's not all that common.....

    LetThemEatRand , 3 hours ago link

    Why even bother arguing with these people. Assange gave up his liberty to reveal the truth, and the American public said in essence "so what." No one except the leakers and whistle-blowers faced any punishment, and I can't think of a single national politician who even talks about doing anything about the misconduct that was revealed. Yeah, a small percentage of the population is outraged at what was revealed, but the vast majority literally don't give a ****.

    fezline , 3 hours ago link

    Hehe... I guess you will find out how wrong you are in 2020 :-) His release of Hillary's emails gave Trump 2016... and him turning his back on Assange took away his chances in 2020

    chunga , 3 hours ago link

    Most regular readers on ZH know but this is an echo chamber for "Always Trumpers" so there won't be many commenters on this article. Rather than defend his DOJ's extradition attempts with implausible theories they'll be chattering back and forth about the Mueller Report.

    /winning

    LetThemEatRand , 2 hours ago link

    Agreed. It's amazing to me that people who claim to be believers of the MAGA message don't see the harm associated with the arrest of Assange, and all of the other uniparty **** Trump is perpetuating. A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.

    ZENDOG , 3 hours ago link

    Whole lot of yadda yadda yadda about someone 99.9% of Americans don't know.

    And even less who give a ****.

    Hillary dead yet?

    fezline , 3 hours ago link

    Yeah and yet.... everyone seemed to credit Hillary's loss to the release of her emails on wikileaks... Hmm that narrative that seems to be trying to minimize the impact on Trumps chances in 2020 really breaks down in the face of that fact doesn't it?? Trump has no hope... just stop... get behind a republican that has a chance... Trump doesn't... he lost half of his base... get over it...

    [Apr 20, 2019] Caitlin Johnstone Debunks All The Assange Smears

    Assange actually undermined the key pre-condition of the Deep state existence -- secrecy.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us know how evil and disgusting that person is? It's true of the leader of every nation which refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it's true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it's true of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. ..."
    "... Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they appear. ..."
    "... I  --  Familiarize yourself with common logical fallacies. ..."
    "... As an additional point, it cannot be denied that governments around the world have an extensive and well-documented history of using sex to advance strategic agendas in various ways, and there's no valid reason to rule this out as a possibility on any level. ..."
    "... The only way to make it feel true for oneself that Assange stands a chance at receiving a fair trial in America is to believe that the US is a just nation with a fair judicial system, especially in the Eastern District of Virginia when trying the cases of people who expose incriminating information about the US war machine. Anyone who believes this has packing foam for brains ..."
    "... "No national security defendant has ever won a case in the EDVA [Eastern District of Virginia]," Kiriakou told RT upon Assange's arrest. "In my case, I asked Judge Brinkema to declassify 70 documents that I needed to defend myself. She denied all 70 documents. And so I had literally no defense for myself and was forced to take a plea." ..."
    "... HItchen's Razor: "what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." ..."
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com

    Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us know how evil and disgusting that person is? It's true of the leader of every nation which refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it's true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it's true of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

    Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they'll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they'll be far more likely to consent to Assange's imprisonment, thereby establishing a precedent for the future prosecution of leak-publishing journalists around the world. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you're suspicious of him you won't believe anything he's saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it's as good as putting a bullet in his head.

    Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they appear. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any kind of centralized source of information which comprehensively debunks all the smears in a thorough and engaging way, so with the help of hundreds of tips from my readers and social media followers I'm going to attempt to make one here. What follows is my attempt at creating a tool kit people can use to fight against Assange smears wherever they encounter them, by refuting the disinformation with truth and solid argumentation.

    This article is an ongoing project which will be updated regularly where it appears on Medium and caitlinjohnstone.com as new information comes in and new smears spring up in need of refutation.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/1efOs0BsE0g

    Here's a numbered list of each subject I'll be covering in this article for ease of reference:

    How to argue against Assange smears.

    1. "He's not a journalist."
    2. "He's a rapist."
    3. "He was hiding from rape charges in the embassy."
    4. "He's a Russian agent."
    5. "He's being prosecuted for hacking crimes, not journalism."
    6. "He should just go to America and face the music. If he's innocent he's got nothing to fear."
    7. "Well he jumped bail! Of course the UK had to arrest him."
    8. "He's a narcissist/megalomaniac/jerk."
    9. "He's a horrible awful monster for reasons X, Y and Z but I don't think he should be extradited."
    10. "Trump is going to rescue him and they'll work together to end the Deep State. Relax and wait and see."
    11. "He put poop on the walls. Poop poop poopie."
    12. "He's stinky."
    13. "He was a bad houseguest."
    14. "He conspired with Don Jr."
    15. "He only publishes leaks about America."
    16. "He's an antisemite."
    17. "He's a fascist."
    18. "He was a Trump supporter."
    19. "I used to like him until he ruined the 2016 election" / "I used to hate him until he saved the 2016 election."
    20. "He's got blood on his hands."
    21. "He published the details of millions of Turkish women voters."
    22. "He supported right-wing political parties in Australia."
    23. "He endangered the lives of gay Saudis."
    24. "He's a CIA agent/limited hangout."
    25. "He mistreated his cat."
    26. "He's a pedophile."
    27. "He lied about Seth Rich."

    Wow! That's a lot! Looking at that list you can only see two possibilities:

    1. Julian Assange, who published many inconvenient facts about the powerful and provoked the wrath of opaque and unaccountable government agencies, is literally the worst person in the whole entire world, OR
    2. Julian Assange, who published many inconvenient facts about the powerful and provoked the wrath of opaque and unaccountable government agencies, is the target of a massive, deliberate disinformation campaign designed to kill the public's trust in him.

    As it happens, historian Vijay Prashad noted in a recent interview with Chris Hedges that in 2008 a branch of the US Defense Department did indeed set out to "build a campaign to eradicate 'the feeling of trust of WikiLeaks and their center of gravity' and to destroy Assange's reputation."

    Let's begin.

    How to argue against Assange smears

    Before we get into refuting the specific points of disinformation, I'd like to share a few tips which I've found useful in my own experience with engaging people online who are circulating smears against Julian Assange.

    A  --  Be clear that your goal is to fight against a disinformation campaign, not to "win" or to change the mind of the person you're arguing with.

    If our interest is in advancing the cause of truth, we're not trying to get into arguments with people for egoic gratification, nor are we trying to change the mind of the smearer. Our first and foremost goal is to spread the truth to the people who are witnessing the interaction, who are always the target audience for the smear. Doesn't matter if it's an argument at the Thanksgiving dinner table or a Twitter thread witnessed by thousands: your goal is to disinfect the smear with truth and solid argumentation so everyone witnessing is inoculated from infection.

    So perform for that audience like a lawyer for the jury. When the smearer refuses to respond to your challenges, when they share false information, when they use a logical fallacy, when they are intellectually dishonest, call it out and draw attention to what they're doing. When it comes to other subjects there are a wide range of opinions that may be considered right or wrong depending on how you look at them, but when it comes to the whether or not it's acceptable for Assange to be imprisoned for his publishing activities you can feel confident that you'll always have truth on your side. So use facts and good argumentation to make the smearer look worse than they're trying to make Assange look, thereby letting everyone know that this person isn't an honest and trustworthy source of information.

    B  --  Remember that whoever you're debating probably doesn't really know much about the claim they're making.

    Last night I had a guy confidently assuring me that Assange and Chelsea Manning had teamed up to get Donald Trump elected in 2016. Most people just bleat whatever they think they've heard people they trust and people around them saying; when they make a claim about Assange, it's not usually because they've done a ton of research on the subject and examined possible counter-arguments, it's because it's an unquestioned doctrine within their echo chamber, and it may never have even occurred to them that someone might question it.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/jS-sxJFn6O0

    For a perfect example of this, check out the New York Times ' Bari Weiss experiencing an existential meltdown on The Joe Rogan Experience when the host simply asked her to substantiate her claim that Tulsi Gabbard is an "Assad toadie". Weiss only ever operates within a tight establishment echo chamber, so when challenged on a claim she'd clearly only picked up secondhand from other people she turned into a sputtering mess.

    Most people you'll encounter who smear Assange online are pulling a Bari Weiss to some extent, so point out the obvious gaps in their knowledge for the audience when they make nonsensical claims, and make it clear to everyone that they have no idea what they're talking about.

    C  --  Remember that they're only ever running from their own cognitive dissonance.

    Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort we experience when we try to hold two strongly contradictory ideas as true at the same time, like the idea that we live in a free liberal democracy and the idea that a journalist is being imprisoned for publishing facts about the US government right in front of us.

    Rank-and-file citizens generally help the mass media propagandists smear Assange not to help protect the world from the influence of a dangerous individual, but to protect themselves from cognitive dissonance. People find themselves eager to believe smears about Assange because the raw facts revealed by WikiLeaks publications punch giant holes in the stories about the kind of world, nation and society that most people have been taught to believe they live in since school age. These kinds of beliefs are interwoven with people's entire egoic structures, with their sense of self and who they are as a person, so narratives which threaten to tear them apart can feel the same as a personal attack. This is why you'll hear ordinary citizens talking about Assange with extreme emotion as though he'd attacked them personally; all he did was publish facts about the powerful , but since those facts conflict with tightly held identity constructs, the cognitive dissonance he caused them to experience can be interpreted as feeling like he'd slapped them in the face.

    Ordinary citizens often find themselves eager to believe the smear campaigns against Assange because it's easier than believing that their government would participate in the deliberate silencing and imprisoning of a journalist for publishing facts. The fact that Assange's persecution is now exposing the ugly face of imperial tyranny presents them with even more to defend.

    It might look like they're playing offense, but they're playing defense. They're attacking Assange because they feel the need to defend themselves from cognitive dissonance.

    If people are acting strangely emotional and triggered when it comes to the issue of imprisoning Assange, it's got very little to do with facts and everything to do with the dynamics of psychological identity structures. There's not necessarily any benefit in pointing this out during a debate, but it helps to understand where people are coming from and why they're acting that way. Keep pointing out that people's feelings have no bearing on the threats that are posed to all of us by Assange's prosecution.

    D  --  Remember that the burden of proof is on the one making the claim.

    "Prove your claim." Use this phrase early and often. It's amazing how frequently I see people blurting out assertions about Assange that I know for a fact they have no way of proving: that he's a Russian agent, that he's a rapist, that he's a CIA asset, etc, which ties in with Point B above. The burden of proof is always on the party making the claim , so if they refuse to do this you can publicly dismiss their argument. If someone comes in making a specific claim about Assange, make them present the specific information they're basing their claim on so that you can refute it. If they refuse, call them out on it publicly. Never let them get away with the fallacious tactic of shifting the burden of proof onto you, and remember that anything which has been asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence .

    E  --  Never let them trick you into expending more energy than they're expending.

    This one's important. The internet is full of genuinely trollish individuals who spend their time acting out their inner pain by trying to suck the life out of other people, and political discussion is certainly no exception to this. A common tactic is to use short phrases, half-thoughts, or word salads which contain few facts and no actual arguments, but contain just enough of a jab to suck you into wasting energy making thorough, well-sourced arguments while they just lean back and continue making weak, low-energy responses to keep you going. This enables them to waste your time and frustrate you while expending little energy themselves, while also not having to reveal the fact that they don't know much about the subject at hand and don't really have an argument.

    Don't let them lean back. Force them to lean in. If someone makes an unsubstantiated assertion, a brief quip, or a vague insinuation, tell them "Make an actual argument using complete thoughts or go away." If they throw an unintelligible word salad at you (a tactic that is also common in abusers with narcissistic personality disorder because it tricks the abusee into falling all over themselves guessing how to respond appropriately, thereby giving the abuser power), tell them "That's gibberish. Articulate yourself using clear arguments or go away."

    This often enrages them, partly because they've generally been getting away with this tactic their entire lives so they feel entitled to demand compliance with it from you, and partly because you're forcing a very unconscious and unattractive part of themselves into attention and consciousness. But if they're interested in having a real and intellectually honest debate they'll do it; if they're not they won't. If they refuse to provide you with lucid, complete arguments that meet their burden of proof, make a show of dismissing them for their refusal to do so, and say you're doing it because they're too dishonest to have a real debate.

    Never chase them. Make them chase you. Never let them lead the dance chasing them around trying to correct their straw man reframing of your actual words or guessing what their word salads are trying to articulate. Make them do the work they're trying to make you do. Force them to either extend themselves into the light where their arguments can be properly scrutinized, or to disqualify themselves by refusing to.

    F  --  When attacking disinformation on Twitter, use this tactic:

    If you see a high-profile Twitter account sharing disinformation about Assange, debunk their disinfo as clearly and concisely as possible, then retweet your response to your followers. Your followers will like and retweet your response, sending it further up the thread so that casual viewers of the disinfo tweet will often also see your response debunking it. If your response is text-only, include a screenshot or the URL of the tweet you're responding to before retweeting your response so that your followers can see the awful post you're responding to. It comes out looking like this:

    This serves the dual function of offsetting the damage done by their smear and alerting your followers to come and help fight the disinfo.

    G  --  Point out at every opportunity that they are advancing a smear.

    Never miss an opportunity to point out to everyone witnessing the exchange that the other party is advancing a smear that is being promulgated by the mass media to manufacture consent for the imprisonment of a journalist who exposed US war crimes. Keep the conversation in context for everyone: this isn't just two people having a difference of opinion, this is one person circulating disinformation which facilitates the agendas of the most powerful people in the world (including the Trump administration, which you should always point out repeatedly if you know they hate Trump), and the other person trying to stop the flow of disinfo. Every time you expose a hole in one of their arguments, add in the fact that this is a dishonest smear designed to benefit the powerful, and that they are helping to advance it.

    H  --  Make it about Assange's imprisonment and extradition.

    One of the very few advantages to Assange being behind bars in the UK's version of Guantanamo Bay instead of holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy is that the arguments are so much clearer and more honest now. You can no longer get away with claiming that Assange is just a coward hiding from justice who can "leave whenever he wants" and present yourself as merely a casual observer who just happens to want to share his opinion that the WikiLeaks founder is a fascist Russian spy rapist who smells bad and mistreats his cat, because you will always be entering a discussion involving the fact that Assange is in prison awaiting extradition to the United States. You are therefore always necessarily either supporting the extradition or distracting from the conversation about it.

    So make that clear to everyone watching. Make them own it. They either support the imprisonment and extradition of Assange for his role in the Manning leaks, or they're interrupting grown-ups who are trying to have an adult conversation about it. If they support Assange's imprisonment and extradition to the United States, that clarifies your line of argumentation, and it makes them look like the bootlicking empire sycophants they are. Keep the fact that they support the extradition and imprisonment of a journalist for publishing facts on the front burner of the conversation, and keep making them own it.

    I  --  Familiarize yourself with common logical fallacies.

    It's fascinating how often people resort to fallacious debate tactics when arguing about Assange. One of the most interesting things to me right now is how the unconscious behaviors of our civilization is mirrored in the unconsciousness of the individuals who support those behaviors. Those who support Assange's persecution are generally very averse to an intellectually honest relationship with their own position, and with the arguments against their position that they encounter.

    So get familiar with basic fallacious debate tactics like straw man arguments (claiming that you have a position that is different from the one you've actually put forth and then attacking that fake position they invented, e.g. "You're defending Assange because you worship him and think he's perfect"), ad hominems (using personal attacks instead of an argument, e.g. "Assange is stinky and smeared poo on the embassy walls"), and appeals to emotion (using emotionally charged statements as a substitute for facts and reason, e.g. "You're defending Assange because you're a rape apologist"). These will give you a conceptual framework for those situations where it feels like the person you're arguing with is being squirmy and disingenuous, but you can't really put your finger on how.

    J  --  Rely as much on fact and as little on opinion as possible.

    Don't get sucked into emotional exchanges about opinions. Facts are what matter here, and, as you will see throughout the rest of this article, the facts are on your side. Make sure you're familiar with them.

    And now for the smears:

    Smear 1: "He is not a journalist."

    Yes he is . Publishing relevant information so the public can inform themselves about what's going on in their world is the thing that journalism is. Which is why Assange was just awarded the GUE/NGL Award for "Journalists, Whistleblowers and Defenders of the Right to Information" the other day, why the WikiLeaks team has racked up many prestigious awards for journalism, and why Assange is a member of Australia's media union . Only when people started seriously stressing about the very real threats that his arrest poses to press freedoms did it become fashionable to go around bleating "Assange is not a journalist."

    The argument, if you can call it that, is that since Assange doesn't practice journalism in a conventional way, there's no way his bogus prosecution for his role in the Manning leaks could possibly constitute a threat to other journalists around the world who might want to publish leaked documents exposing US government malfeasance. This argument is a reprisal of a statement made by Trump's then-CIA director Mike Pompeo, who proclaimed that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic outlet at all but a "hostile non-state intelligence service", a designation he made up out of thin air the same way the Trump administration designated Juan Guaido the president of Venezuela, the Golan Heights a part of Israel, and Iran's military a terrorist organization. Pompeo argued that since WikiLeaks was now this label he made up, it enjoys no free press protections and shall therefore be eliminated.

    So they're already regurgitating propaganda narratives straight from the lips of the Trump administration, but more importantly, their argument is nonsense. As I discuss in the essay hyperlinked here , once the Assange precedent has been set by the US government, the US government isn't going to be relying on your personal definition of what journalism is; they're going to be using their own, based on their own interests. The next time they want to prosecute someone for doing anything similar to what Assange did, they're just going to do it, regardless of whether you believe that next person to have been a journalist or not. It's like these people imagine that the US government is going to show up at their doorstep saying "Yes, hello, we wanted to imprison this journalist based on the precedent we set with the prosecution of Julian Assange, but before doing so we wanted to find out how you feel about whether or not they're a journalist."

    Pure arrogance and myopia.

    Smear 2: "He's a rapist."

    ... ... ...

    "Sources in Swedish intelligence told me at the time that they believed the U.S. had encouraged Sweden to pursue the case," The Intercept 's Charles Glass reported .

    Sometimes smearers will try to falsely claim that Assange or his lawyers admitted that Assange committed rape or pushed its boundaries during the legal proceedings, citing mass media reports on a strategy employed by Assange's legal team of arguing that what Assange was accused of wouldn't constitute rape even if true . This conventional legal strategy was employed as a means of avoiding extradition and in no way constituted an admission that events happened in the way alleged, yet mass media reports like this one deliberately twisted it to appear that way. Neither Assange nor his lawyers have ever made any such admission.

    For more information on the details of the rape accusation, check out this 2012 4 Corners segment titled "Sex, Lies, and Julian Assange", this 2016 Observer article titled "Exclusive New Docs Throw Doubt on Julian Assange Rape Charges in Stockholm", this John Pilger article titled "Getting Julian Assange: The Untold Story", this Justice Integrity Report article titled "Assange Rape Defense Underscores Shameful Swedish, U.S. Tactics", and the aforementioned ten minute Youtube video .

    So there's a lot fishy going on there. From the sounds of it, Wilen privately complained to Ardin that she'd had some unpleasant sexual experiences with Assange, then Ardin and her associates twisted those complaints in the most severe way possible, and when Wilen refused to accuse Assange Ardin began claiming that she had also been criminally violated using an assertion about a condom which DNA evidence contradicts.

    I see a lot of well-meaning Assange defenders using some very weak and unhelpful arguments against this smear, suggesting for example that having unprotected sex without the woman's permission shouldn't qualify as sexual assault or that if Ardin had been assaulted she would necessarily have conducted herself differently afterward. Any line of argumentation like that is going to look very cringey to people like myself who believe rape culture is a ubiquitous societal illness that needs to be rolled back far beyond the conventional understanding of rape as a stranger in a dark alley forcibly penetrating some man's wife or daughter at knifepoint. Don't try to justify what Assange is accused of having done, just point out that there's no actual evidence that he is guilty of rape and that very powerful people have clearly been pulling some strings behind the scenes of this narrative.

    As an additional point, it cannot be denied that governments around the world have an extensive and well-documented history of using sex to advance strategic agendas in various ways, and there's no valid reason to rule this out as a possibility on any level.

    Finally, the fact remains that even if Assange were somehow to be proven guilty of rape, the argument "he's a rapist" is not a legitimate reason to support a US extradition and prosecution which would set a precedent that poses a threat to press freedoms everywhere. "He's a rapist" and "It's okay that the western legal system is funneling him into the Eastern District of Virginia for his publishing activities" are two completely different thoughts that have nothing whatsoever to do with each other, so anyone attempting to associate the two in any way has made a bad argument and should feel bad.

    Smear 3: "He was hiding from rape charges in the embassy."

    No he wasn't, he was hiding from US extradition. And his arrest this month under a US extradition warrant proved that he was right to do so.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/KU2gDGY43Zg

    People who claim Assange was "hiding from rape charges" are necessarily implicitly making two transparently absurd claims: one, that Assange had no reason to fear US extradition, and two, that Ecuador was lying about its official reasons for granting him asylum  --  that in fact the Correa government was just in the business of protecting people from rape charges for some weird reason.

    For its part, the Ecuadorian government was crystal clear in its official statement about the reasons it was providing Assange asylum, saying that "there are serious indications of retaliation by the country or countries that produced the information disclosed by Mr. Assange, retaliation that can put at risk his safety, integrity and even his life," and that "the judicial evidence shows clearly that, given an extradition to the United States, Mr. Assange would not have a fair trial, he could be judged by a special or military court, and it is not unlikely that he would receive a cruel and demeaning treatment and he would be condemned to a life sentence or the death penalty, which would not respect his human rights."

    ... ... ...

    Smear 4: "He's a Russian agent."

    Not even the US government alleges that WikiLeaks knowingly coordinated with the Kremlin in the 2016 publication of Democratic Party emails; the Robert Mueller Special Counsel alleged only that Guccifer 2.0 was the source of those emails and that Guccifer 2.0 was a persona covertly operated by Russian conspirators. The narrative that Assange worked for or knowingly conspired with the Russian government is a hallucination of the demented Russia hysteria which has infected all corners of mainstream political discourse. There is no evidence for it whatsoever, and anyone making this claim should be corrected and dismissed.

    But we don't even need to concede that much. To this day we have been presented with exactly zero hard evidence of the US government's narrative about Russian hackers, and in a post-Iraq invasion world there's no good reason to accept that. We've seen assertions from opaque government agencies and their allied firms within the US-centralized power alliance, but assertions are not evidence. We've seen indictments from Mueller, but indictments are assertions and assertions are not evidence. We've seen claims in the Mueller report, but the timeline is riddled with plot holes , and even if it wasn't, claims in the Mueller report are not evidence. This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies.

    If the public can't see the evidence, then as far as the public is concerned there is no evidence. Invisible evidence is not evidence, no matter how many government officials assure us it exists.

    The only reason the majority believes that Russia is known to have interfered in America's 2016 election is because news outlets have been repeatedly referring to this narrative as an established and proven fact, over and over and over again, day after day, for years. People take this repetition as a substitute for proof due to a glitch in human psychology known as the illusory truth effect , a phenomenon which causes our brains to tend to interpret things we've heard before as known truths. But repetitive assertions are not the same as known truths.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/uyCOy25GdjQ

    For his part, Julian Assange has stated unequivocally that he knows for a fact that the Russian government was not WikiLeaks' source for the emails, telling Fox News in January 2017 that "our source is not the Russian government or any state party." You may be as skeptical or as trusting of his claim as you like, but the fact of the matter is that no evidence has ever been made public which contradicts him. Any claim that he's lying is therefore unsubstantiated.

    This is the best argument there is. A lot of people like to bring up the fact that there are many experts who dispute the Russian hacking narrative, saying there's evidence that the DNC download happened via local thumb drive and not remote exfiltration, but in my opinion that's generally poor argumentation when you're disputing the narrative about WikiLeaks' source. It's a poor tactic because it shifts the burden of proof onto you, making yourself into the claimant and then forcing you to defend complicated claims about data transfer rates and so on which most people viewing the argument won't understand, even if you do. There's no reason to self-own like that and put yourself in a position of playing defense when you can just go on the offense with anyone claiming to know that Russia was WikiLeaks' source and just say "Prove your claim," then poke holes in their arguments.

    There is no evidence that Assange ever provided any assistance to the Russian government, knowingly or unknowingly. In fact, WikiLeaks has published hundreds of thousands of documents pertaining to Russia, has made critical comments about the Russian government and defended dissident Russian activists, and in 2017 published an entire trove called the Spy Files Russia exposing Russian surveillance practices.

    Of course, the only reason this smear is coming up lately is because people want to believe that the recent imprisonment of Julian Assange has anything to do with the 2016 WikiLeaks email publications. It isn't just the propagandized rank-and-file who are making this false claim all over the internet, but Democratic Party leaders like House Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden . As we should all be aware by now, Assange's completely illegitimate arrest in fact had nothing whatsoever to do with 2016 or Russia, but with the 2010 Manning leaks exposing US war crimes. Anyone claiming otherwise is simply informing you that they are brainwashed by Russia conspiracy theories and have no interest in changing that character flaw.

    The smearer may claim "Well, he toes the Kremlin line!" When you ask them to explain what that means, they'll tell you it means that WikiLeaks speaks out against western interventionist and war propaganda narratives like Trump's bombing of Syria, or their criticism of the establishment Russia narrative which tries to incriminate WikiLeaks itself. That's not "toeing the Kremlin line," that's being anti-interventionist and defending yourself from evidence-free smears. Nobody who's viewed their 2010 video Collateral Murder will doubt that criticism of the US war machine is built into the DNA of WikiLeaks, and is central to its need to exist in the first place.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/5rXPrfnU3G0

    In reality, anyone who opposes western interventionism will see themselves tarred as Russian agents if they achieve a high enough profile, and right-wing empire sycophants were fond of doing so years before the brainwashed Maddow Muppets joined them. Russia, like many sovereign nations, opposes western interventionism for its own reasons, so anyone sufficiently dedicated to their own mental contortions can point at a critic of western imperialism and say "Look! They oppose this subject, and so does Russia! They're the same thing!" In reality a westerner opposing western interventionism is highly unlikely to have any particular loyalty to Russia, and opposes western interventionism not to protect their own geostrategic agendas as Moscow does, but because western interventionism is consistently evil, deceitful and disastrous.

    The smearer may claim, "Well he had a show on RT in 2012!" So? What other network would air a TV program hosted by Julian Assange? Name one. I'll wait. If you can't name one, consider the possibility that Assange's appearances on RT were due to the fact that western mass media have completely deplatformed all antiwar voices and all criticism of the political status quo, a fact they could choose to change any time and steal RT's entire audience and all their talent. The fact that they choose not to shows that they're not worried about RT, they're worried about dissident thinkers like Assange.

    In reality, Assange's 2012 show "The World Tomorrow" was produced separately from RT and only picked up for airing by that network, in exactly the same way as Larry King's show has been picked up and aired by RT. Nobody who isn't wearing a tinfoil pussyhat believes that Larry King is a Russian agent, and indeed King is adamant and vocal about the fact that he doesn't work for RT and takes no instruction from them.

    The only people claiming that Assange is a Russian agent are those who are unhappy with the things that WikiLeaks publications have exposed, whether that be US war crimes or the corrupt manipulations of Democratic Party leaders. It's a completely unfounded smear and should be treated as such.

    Smear 5: "He's being prosecuted for hacking crimes, not journalism."

    No, he's being prosecuted for journalism. Assange is being prosecuted based on the exact same evidence that the Obama administration had access to when it was investigated him to see if he could be prosecuted for his role in the Manning leaks, but the Obama administration ruled it was impossible to prosecute him based on that evidence because it would endanger press freedoms. This is because, as explained by The Intercept 's Micah Lee and Glenn Greenwald, the things Assange is accused of doing are things journalists do all the time: attempting to help a source avoid detection, taking steps to try to hide their communications, and encouraging Manning to provide more material. This is all Assange is accused of; there is no "hacking" alleged in the indictment itself.

    Joe Emersberger of Fair.org notes the following :

    Now Assange could be punished even more brutally if the UK extradites him to the US, where he is charged with a "conspiracy" to help Manning crack a password that "would have" allowed her to cover her tracks more effectively. In other words, the alleged help with password-cracking didn't work, and is not what resulted in the information being disclosed. It has also not been shown that it was Assange who offered the help, according to Kevin Gosztola ( Shadowproof , 4/11/19 ). The government's lack of proof of its charges might explain why Manning is in jail again.
    The indictment goes even further, criminalizing the use of an electronic "drop box" and other tactics that investigative journalists routinely use in the computer age to work with a confidential source "for the purpose of publicly disclosing" information.

    The only thing that changed between the Obama administration and the Trump administration is an increased willingness to attack journalism. Assange is being prosecuted for journalism.

    Furthermore, there's every reason to believe that this new charge which the Trump administration pulled out of thin air is only a ploy to get Assange onto US soil, where he can be smashed with far more serious charges including espionage . Pentagon Papers lawyer James Goodale writes the following :

    Under the U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty, one cannot be extradited from the United Kingdom if the extradition is for "political purposes." This explains why the indictment does not contain any charges alleging that Assange conspired with the Russians to impact the 2016 presidential election. It may also explain why the indictment focuses on hacking government computers rather than on leaking stolen government information, in as much as leaking could be characterized as being done for political purposes.
    When Assange arrives in the United States through extradition, as many expect he will, the government will then be able to indict him for his participation in that election. It is not out of the question that the government will come up with additional charges against Assange.

    If that happens, Assange will not be spending the five years behind bars for computer offenses that his current charge allows, he'll be spending decades.

    "I don't think Julian is looking at five years in prison, I think he's probably looking at 50 years in prison," said CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who was the first person tried in the US for leaking classified materials to a journalist under Obama's crackdown on whistleblowers.

    "I think that there are many more charges to be considered for Julian," Kiriakou added. "I would expect a superseding indictment, possibly to include espionage charges."

    There is no legitimate reason to feel confident that this won't happen, and there are many reasons to believe that it will. All for publishing truthful documents about the powerful. Assange is being prosecuted for journalism.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/d46FKzTmfNg

    It's also worth noting here that President Executive Order 13526, section 1.7 explicitly forbids the classification of material in order to hide government malfeasance, meaning it's perfectly reasonable to argue that Manning did not in fact break a legitimate law, and that those prosecuting her did.

    "In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to: (1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency," the section reads, while Manning's lawyer has argued the following :

    "The information released by PFC Manning, while certainly greater in scope than most leaks, did not contain any Top Secret or compartmentalized information. The leaked information also did not discuss any current or ongoing military missions. Instead, the Significant Activity Reports (SIGACTs, Guantanamo detainee assessments, Apache Aircrew video, diplomatic cables, and other released documents dealt with events that were either publicly known or certainly no longer sensitive at the time of release."

    There was no legitimate reason for what Manning leaked to have been classified; it was only kept so to avoid US government embarrassment. Which was illegal. To quote Assange : "The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security."

    Smear 6: "He should just go to America and face the music. If he's innocent he's got nothing to fear."

    This is the new "He can leave the embassy whenever he wants." Except this one's also being bleated by Trump supporters.

    The only way to make it feel true for oneself that Assange stands a chance at receiving a fair trial in America is to believe that the US is a just nation with a fair judicial system, especially in the Eastern District of Virginia when trying the cases of people who expose incriminating information about the US war machine. Anyone who believes this has packing foam for brains.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/oU9_P9ufKpE

    "No national security defendant has ever won a case in the EDVA [Eastern District of Virginia]," Kiriakou told RT upon Assange's arrest. "In my case, I asked Judge Brinkema to declassify 70 documents that I needed to defend myself. She denied all 70 documents. And so I had literally no defense for myself and was forced to take a plea."

    "He will not, he cannot get a fair trial," Kiriakou said on a Unity4J vigil when Assange was still at the embassy. "It's impossible, because the deck is stacked. And everybody knows what's gonna happen if he comes back to the Eastern District of Virginia. This is the same advice I gave Ed Snowden: don't come home, because you can't get a fair trial here. Julian doesn't have the choice, and that's what frightens me even more."

    Assange is indeed being extradited to face trial in the Eastern District of Virginia . Manning herself did not get a fair trial according to her lawyer . Anyone who thinks Assange can expect anything resembling justice upon arrival on US soil has their head in something. Power doesn't work that way. Grow up.

    Smear 7: "Well he jumped bail! Of course the UK had to arrest him."

    Never in my life have I seen so many people so deeply, deeply concerned about the proper adherence to the subtle technicalities of bail protocol as when Sweden dropped its rape investigation, leaving only a bail violation warrant standing between Assange and freedom. All of a sudden I had establishment loyalists telling me how very, very important it is that Assange answer for his horrible, horrible crime of taking political asylum from persecution at the hands of the most violent government on the planet to the mild inconvenience of whoever had to fill out the paperwork.

    This smear is soundly refuted in this lucid article by Simon Floth, which was endorsed by the Defend Assange Campaign. Froth explains that under British law bail is only breached if there's a failure to meet bail "without reasonable cause", which the human right to seek asylum certainly is. The UK was so deeply concerned about this bail technicality that it waited a full nine days before issuing an arrest warrant.

    After the Swedish government decided to drop its sexual assault investigation without issuing any charges, Assange's legal team attempted last year to get the warrant dropped. The judge in that case, Emma Arbuthnot, just happens to be married to former Tory junior Defence Minister and government whip James Arbuthnot, who served as director of Security Intelligence Consultancy SC Strategy Ltd with a former head of MI6. Lady Arbuthnot denied Assange's request with extreme vitriol, despite his argument that British law does have provisions which allow for the time he'd already served under house arrest to count toward far more time than would be served for violating bail. The British government kept police stationed outside the embassy at taxpayers' expense with orders to arrest Assange on sight.

    This, like America's tweaking the law in such a way that allows it to prosecute him for journalism and Ecuador's tweaking its asylum laws in such a way that allowed it to justify revoking Assange's asylum, was another way a government tweaked the law in such a way that allowed it to facilitate Assange's capture and imprisonment. These three governments all tweaked the law in unison in such a way that when looked at individually don't look totalitarian, but when taken together just so happen to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for publishing inconvenient truths.

    Smear 8: "He's a narcissist/megalomaniac/jerk."

    Assange has been enduring hardships far worse than most people ever have to go through in their lifetime because of his dedication to the lost art of using journalism to hold power to account. If that's what a narcissist/megalomaniac/jerk looks like to you, then whatever I guess.

    But really the primary response to this smear is a simple, so what? So what if the guy's got a personality you don't like? What the hell does that have to do with anything? What bearing does that have on the fact that a journalist is being prosecuted in a legal agenda which threatens to set a precedent which is destructive to press freedoms around the world?

    So many of the most common Assange smears boil down to simple ad hominem fallacy , in which the person is attacked because the smearer has no real argument. Pointing out the absence of an actual argument is a more effective weapon against this smear than trying to argue that Assange is a nice person or whatever. Plenty of people say Assange has a pleasant personality, but that's ultimately got nothing to do with anything. It's no more material to meaningful discourse than arguing over his physical appearance.

    Smear 9: "He's a horrible awful monster for reasons X, Y and Z but I don't think he should be extradited."

    I always mentally translate this one into "I'm going to keep advancing the same propaganda narratives which manufactured public consent for Assange's current predicament but I don't want people to see my name on the end result."

    Even if you hate Assange as a man and as a public figure with every fiber of your being, there is no legitimate reason to turn yourself into a pro bono propagandist for the CIA and the US State Department. If you actually do sincerely oppose his extradition, then you should be responsible with the narratives you choose to circulate about him, because smears kill public support and public demand is what can prevent his extradition. If you're just pretending to truly oppose his extradition in order to maintain your public wokeness cred and you really just wanted to throw in a few more smears, then you're a twat.

    When looked at in its proper context, what we are witnessing is the slow-motion assassination of Assange via narrative/lawfare, so by couching your support in smears it's just like you're helping put a few bullets in the gun but loudly letting everyone know that you hope they shoot the blank.

    Smear 10: "Trump is going to rescue him and they'll work together to end the Deep State. Relax and wait and see."

    Make no mistake, this is a smear, and it's just as pernicious as any of the others. People who circulate this hogwash are hurting Assange just as much as the MSNBC mainliners who hate him overtly, even if they claim to support him. At a time when we should all be shaking the earth and demanding freedom for Assange, a certain strain of Trump supporter is going around telling everyone, "Relax, Trump has a plan. Wait and see."

    I've been told to calm down and "wait and see" many times since Assange's arrest. What "wait and see" really means is "do nothing." Don't do anything. Trust that this same Trump administration which issued an arrest warrant for Assange in December 2017 , whose CIA director labeled WikiLeaks a "hostile non-state intelligence service" and pledged to destroy it, trust them to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing. Do absolutely nothing in the meantime, and especially don't help put political pressure on Trump to end Assange's persecution.

    This strategy benefits someone, and that someone ain't Assange.

    Please stop doing this. If you support Assange, stop doing this. Even if you're still chugging the Q-laid and still believe the reality TV star who hired John Bolton as his National Security Advisor is actually a brilliant strategist making incomprehensibly complex 8-D chess moves to thwart the Deep State, even if you believe all that, surely you'll concede that there's no harm in people pressuring Trump to do the right thing and end the persecution of Assange? If he really is a beneficent wizard, there'd surely be no harm in making a lot of noise telling him he'd better pardon Assange, right? Then why spend your energy running around telling everyone to relax and stop protesting?

    One argument I keep encountering is that Trump is bringing Assange to America for trial because he can only pardon him after he's been convicted. This is false. A US president can pardon anyone at any time of any crime against the United States, without their having been convicted and without their even having been charged. After leaving office Richard Nixon was issued a full presidential pardon by Gerald Ford for "all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974." Nixon had never been charged with anything. If Trump were going to pardon Assange he could have done it at any time since taking office, instead of issuing a warrant for his arrest in December 2017 and executing it on Thursday after a series of international legal manipulations . A pardon is not in the plans.

    Another common belief I keep encountering is that Trump is bringing Assange to America to get him to testify about his source for the 2016 Democratic Party emails in exchange for a pardon, thereby revealing the truth about Russiagate's origins and bringing down Clinton and Obama. This is false. Everyone who knows anything about Assange (including the Trump administration) knows that he will never, ever reveal a source under any circumstances whatsoever. It would be a cardinal journalistic sin, a violation of every promise WikiLeaks has ever made, and a betrayal of his entire life's work. More importantly, imprisoning a journalist and threatening him with a heavy sentence to coerce him into giving up information against his will is evil.

    But that isn't what Trump is doing. Trump is pursuing the imprisonment of a journalist for exposing US war crimes, so that he can scare off future leak publishers and set a legal precedent for their prosecution.

    Smear 11: "He put poop on the walls. Poop poop poopie."

    Of all the Assange smears I've encountered, I think this one best epitomizes the entire overarching establishment narrative churn on the subject. Like the rest of the smear campaign, it's a completely unsubstantiated claim designed not to advance a logical argument about the current facts of Assange's situation but to provoke disgust and revulsion towards him, so that when you think of Julian Assange you don't think about press freedoms and government transparency, you think about poo. In a way it's actually more honest than some of the other smears, just because it's so obvious about what it is and what it's trying to do.

    People who advance this smear are literally always acting in very bad faith. As of this writing I've never even bothered trying to engage anyone in debate on the matter, because they're too gross and too internally tormented to make interacting with them anything but unpleasant, so I have no advice to give on how to argue with such creatures. Personally I just block them.

    There is no reason to believe that this smear is true (his lawyer flatly denies it ), and the Ecuadorian government would have had every incentive to lie in order to try and justify its revocation of asylum which WikiLeaks says is "in violation of international law." However, it's worth taking a minute to consider the fact that if this smear were true, the people running around mocking Assange and making poop jokes about him on social media today would be even more depraved. Because what would it mean if Assange really were spreading feces on the wall? It would mean that he'd cracked under the pressure of his embassy imprisonment and lost his mind. Which would mean that these people are running around mocking a man who's been driven to psychosis by his abusive circumstances. Which would be despicable.

    Smear 12: "He's stinky."

    It's amazing how many mainstream media publications have thought it newsworthy to write articles about Assange's body odor. Try advocating for him on any public forum, however, and you'll immediately understand the intention behind this smear. Try to argue against the extradition of a journalist for publishing inconvenient facts about the powerful, and you'll be swarmed by people making scoffing comments about how stinky and disgusting he is. As though that has anything to do with anything whatsoever.

    For the record, people who visit Assange commonly report that he's clean and smells normal, but that's really beside the point. Trying to turn a discussion about a journalist who is being prosecuted by the US empire for publishing truth into a discussion about personal hygiene is despicable, and anyone who does it should feel bad.

    Smear 13: "He was a bad houseguest."

    What he actually was was a target of the US war machine. The "bad houseguest" narrative serves only to distract from Ecuador's role in turning Assange over to the Metropolitan police instead of holding to the reasons it granted Assange asylum in the first place, and to seed disgust as in Smear 11 and Smear 12.

    What actually happened was that Ecuador's new president Lenin Moreno quickly found himself being courted by the US government after taking office, meeting with Vice President Mike Pence and reportedly discussing Assange after US Democratic senators petitioned Pence to push for Moreno to revoke political asylum. The New York Times reported last year that in 2017 Trump's sleazy goon Paul Manafort met with Moreno and offered to broker a deal where Ecuador could receive debt relief aid in exchange for handing Assange over, and just last month Ecuador ended up receiving a 4.2 billion dollar loan from the Washington-based IMF. And then, lo and behold, we just so happen to see Ecuador justifying the revocation of political asylum under the absurd claim that Assange had violated conditions that were only recently invented , using narratives that were based on wild distortions and outright lies .

    Smear 14: "He conspired with Don Jr."

    No he didn't. The email exchanges between Donald Trump Jr and the WikiLeaks Twitter account reveal nothing other than two parties trying to extract favors from each other, unsuccessfully. Here's what the WikiLeaks account sent:

    The password to the website is getting a lot of attention as of this writing since the release of the Mueller report, with Slate going so far as to argue that Don Jr may be guilty of violating "the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it illegal to access a computer using a stolen password without authorization" since he did use the password. This is nonsense. WikiLeaks didn't send Trump a password which enabled him to "access a computer", or do anything other than preview a website that was actively being publicized and viewed by many people using the same password.

    The password WikiLeaks gave him was a press pass to preview a Russiagate website which was about to launch. Here's a hyperlink to an archive of a ( now missing ) article which discussed the website's launch at the time. The article shares an email that was being passed around clearly showing that many people were being invited to look at the site in the hopes that they'd write articles promoting it. The picture that's being painted of WikiLeaks hacking into the back end of a website is completely inaccurate; there was a password to preview a website whose owners wanted people to look at it, lots of people had that password, and one of them reportedly gave it to WikiLeaks.

    Beyond that, what is there? WikiLeaks trying unsuccessfully to get Don Jr to advance its agendas like giving them Trump's tax return (i.e. soliciting a potential source for leaks), challenging America's broken electoral system , trying to get more eyes on their material, and a Hail Mary suggestion that the Trump administration shake things up by making Assange the Australian ambassador with a full acknowledgement that this will never happen. None of these things occurred, and WikiLeaks never responded to Don Jr's request for information about an upcoming leak drop.

    Assange has agendas. Whoop dee doo. I have agendas too, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. All journalists have agendas, it just happens that most of them have the agenda to become rich and famous by any means necessary, which generally means cozying up to the rulers of the establishment and manufacturing consent for the status quo. Assange's agenda is infinitely more noble and infinitely more reviled by the servants of power: to upset the status quo that demands war, corruption and oppression in order to exist. His communications with Don Jr are geared toward this end, as is the rest of his life's work.

    Smear 15: "He only publishes leaks about America."

    This is just wrong and stupid. Do thirty seconds of research for God's sake.

    Smear 16: "He's an antisemite."

    Yes, yes, we all know by now that everyone who opposes the imperial war machine in any way is both a Russian agent and an antisemite. Jeremy Corbyn knows it , Ilhan Omar knows it , we all know it.

    This one's been around a while, ever since headlines blared in 2011 that Assange had complained of a "Jewish conspiracy" against him after an account of a conversation by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop. Assange responded to this claim as follows:

    "Hislop has distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase. In particular, 'Jewish conspiracy' is completely false, in spirit and in word. It is serious and upsetting. Rather than correct a smear, Mr. Hislop has attempted, perhaps not surprisingly, to justify one smear with another in the same direction. That he has a reputation for this, and is famed to have received more libel suits in the UK than any other journalist as a result, does not mean that it is right. WikiLeaks promotes the ideal of 'scientific journalism'  --  where the underlaying evidence of all articles is available to the reader precisely in order to avoid these type of distortions. We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world."

    "We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff." Man, what a Nazi.

    But that wasn't what cemented this smear into public consciousness. Two related events punched that ticket, and bear with me here:

    The first event was the WikiLeaks account tweeting and then quickly deleting the following in July 2016: "Tribalist symbol for establishment climbers? Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. Bizarre." The triple brackets are what's known as echoes , which are a symbol that antisemites often put around words and names to hatefully indicate Jewishness in online discourse. In 2016 some Jewish people began putting the triple brackets around their own names on social media as a way of pushing back against this behavior, so if you really want to it's possible for you to interpret the tweet as saying 'All our critics are Jewish. Bizarre.'

    But does that make sense? Does it make sense for the guy who announced "We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff" to then go making openly antisemitic comments? And if he really did suddenly decide to let the world know that he believes there's a Jewish conspiracy against WikiLeaks, why would he delete it? What's the theory there? That he was like "Oh, I just wanted to let everyone know about my Jewish conspiracy theory, but it turns out people get offended when an account with millions of followers says things like that"? That makes no sense.

    If you look at the account's other tweets at the time, it becomes clear that its operator was actually just trying to communicate an obscure, subtle point that was completely unsuitable for a massive international audience and 140 characters. When a user responded to the tweet before it was deleted explaining that some Jewish people now put triple brackets around their names to push back against antisemitism, the account responded , "Yes, but it seems to have been repurposed for something else entirely  --  a wanna be establishment in-group designator." When accused of antisemitism by another account, WikiLeaks responded , "The opposite. We criticised the misappropriation of anti-Nazi critiques by social climbers. Like Ice Bucket Challenge & ALS."

    It looks clear to me that whoever was running the WikiLeaks Twitter account that day was clumsily trying to communicate an overly complicated idea about "social climbers" and establishment loyalism, then deleted the tweet when they realized they'd screwed up and stumbled into a social media land mine.

    Now, I say "whoever was running the WikiLeaks Twitter account that day" because it's been public knowledge for years that @WikiLeaks is a staff account shared by multiple people. Here's a tweet of the account saying "this is a staff account, not Assange." Here's a tweet of the account saying "@WikiLeaks is a shared staff account." This became self-evidently true for all to see when Assange's internet access was cut off by the Ecuadorian embassy for the first time in October 2016, but the WikiLeaks Twitter account kept making posts during that time without interruption. This takes us to the second event which helped cement the antisemitism smear.

    The second event occurred in February 2018 when The Intercept 's Micah Lee, who has had a personal beef with WikiLeaks and Assange for years, published a ghastly article which made the following assertion :

    "Throughout this article, The Intercept assumes that the WikiLeaks account is controlled by Julian Assange himself, as is widely understood, and that he is the author of the messages, referring to himself in the third person majestic plural, as he often does."

    There is absolutely no reason for Lee to have made this assumption, and the fact that this remains uncorrected in his original article is journalistic malpractice.

    The article reveals Twitter DMs from a group chat of which the WikiLeaks account was a member. One of the other accounts in the group chat shared a tweet by journalist Raphael Satter, who was posting a smear piece he'd written about WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks account responded as follows:

    "He's always ben [sic] a rat."
    "But he's jewish and engaged with the ((())) issue."

    When I first read about this exchange as written down by Micah Lee, I read it as "He's always been a rat, but then, he is Jewish, and engaged with the ((())) issue." Which would of course be gross. Calling someone a rat because they're Jewish would obviously be antisemitic. But if you read the DMs , whoever was running the account didn't do that; they said "He's always ben a rat," followed by a full stop, then beginning a new thought.

    Now if you look at the date on that exchange and compare it to the date on the deleted ((())) tweet , you'll see that this was one month after the infamous ((())) tweet that had caused such a tizzy. It appears likely to me that the operator of the account (who again could have been any of the WikiLeaks staff who had access to it) was saying that Satter was mad about "the ((())) issue", meaning the tweet so many people were so recently enraged about and were still discussing, hence his attacking them with a smear piece.

    There are also claims about an association between Assange and the controversial Israel Shamir, which WikiLeaks denies unequivocally , saying in a statement:

    Israel Shamir has never worked or volunteered for WikiLeaks, in any manner, whatsoever. He has never written for WikiLeaks or any associated organization, under any name and we have no plan that he do so. He is not an 'agent' of WikiLeaks. He has never been an employee of WikiLeaks and has never received monies from WikiLeaks or given monies to WikiLeaks or any related organization or individual. However, he has worked for the BBC, Haaretz, and many other reputable organizations.
    It is false that Shamir is 'an Assange intimate'. He interviewed Assange (on behalf of Russian media), as have many journalists. He took a photo at that time and has only met with WikiLeaks staff (including Asssange) twice. It is false that 'he was trusted with selecting the 250,000 US State Department cables for the Russian media' or that he has had access to such at any time.
    Shamir was able to search through a limited portion of the cables with a view to writing articles for a range of Russian media. The media that subsequently employed him did so of their own accord and with no intervention or instruction by WikiLeaks.

    Now, we're on Smear #16. There's still a ways to go. If you've been reading this article straight through it should be obvious to you by now that there's a campaign to paint Assange as literally the worst person in the world by calling him all the worst things you can possibly call someone. Is it possible that he's some kind of secret Jew hater? Sure, theoretically, but there's certainly no good argument to be made for that based on the facts at hand, and given the extent the narrative shapers are going to to paint him in a negative light, it's a mighty big stretch in my opinion.

    Smear 17: "He's a fascist."

    Unlike most Assange smears this one is more common on the political left than the center, and it totally baffles me. Demanding that governments be transparent and powerful people held to account is not at all compatible with fascism. In fact, it's the exact opposite.

    Italian investigative journalist and longtime WikiLeaks collaborator Stephania Maurizi told Micah Lee the following on Twitter last year:

    "I've worked as a media partner since 2009, I can bring my experience: I've NEVER EVER seen misoginy or fascism, rape apology, anti-semitism. I've anti-fascism deep in my DNA, due to the consequences for my family during Fascism."

    I really don't know how people make this one work in their minds. "You guys know who the real fascist is? It's the guy who's locked behind bars by the most violent and oppressive government on the planet for standing up against the war crimes of that government." I mean, come on.

    When I question what's behind this belief I get variations on Smear 18 and Smear 22, and the occasional reference to one odd tweet about birth rates and changing demographics that could look like a white nationalist talking point if you squint at it just right and ignore the fact that it appears on its own surrounded by a total absence of anything resembling a white nationalist worldview, and ignore the tweet immediately following it criticizing "emotional imperialism" and the theft of caregivers from less powerful nations. You have to connect a whole lot of dots with a whole lot of imaginary red yarn and ignore a huge mountain of evidence to the contrary in order to believe that Assange is a fascist.

    Smear 18: "He was a Trump supporter."

    No he wasn't. He hated Hillary " Can't we just drone this guy? " Clinton for her horrible record and her efforts as Secretary of State to shut down WikiLeaks, but that's not the same as supporting Trump. His hatred of Clinton was personal, responding to a complaint by a lead Clinton staffer about his role in her defeat with the words "Next time, don't imprison and kill my friends, deprive my children of their father, corrupt judicial processes, bully allies into doing the same, and run a seven year unconstitutional grand jury against me and my staff."

    And he wanted her to lose. Desiring the loss of the woman who campaigned on a promise to create a no-fly zone in the same region that Russian military planes were conducting operations is perfectly reasonable for someone with Assange's worldview, and it doesn't mean he wanted Trump to be president or believed he'd make a good one. Preferring to be stabbed over shot doesn't mean you want to be stabbed.

    In July 2016 Assange compared the choice between Clinton and Trump to a choice between cholera and gonorrhea , saying, "Personally, I would prefer neither." When a Twitter user suggested to Assange in 2017 that he start sucking up to Trump in order to secure a pardon, Assange replied , "I'd rather eat my own intestines." Could not possibly be more unequivocal.

    Assange saw Trump as clearly as anyone at the time, and now he's behind bars at the behest of that depraved administration. Clinton voters still haven't found a way to make this work in their minds; they need to hate Assange because he helped Hillary lose, but when they cheerlead for his arrest they're cheering for a Trump administration agenda. These same people who claim to oppose Trump and support the free press are cheerleading for a Trump administration agenda which constitutes the greatest threat to the free press we've seen in our lifetimes. When I encounter them online I've taken to photoshopping a MAGA hat onto their profile pics.

    Assange has never been a Trump supporter. But, in a very real way, those who support his imprisonment are.

    Smear 19: "I used to like him until he ruined the 2016 election" / "I used to hate him until he saved the 2016 election."

    That's just you admitting that you have no values beyond blind partisan loyalty. Only liking truth when it serves you is the same as hating truth.

    Smear 20: "He's got blood on his hands."

    No he doesn't. There's no evidence anywhere that WikiLeaks helped cause anyone's death anywhere in the world. This smear has been enjoying renewed popularity since it became public knowledge that he's being prosecuted for the Manning leaks, the argument being that the leaks got US troops killed.

    This argument is stupid. In 2013 the Pentagon, who had every incentive to dig up evidence that WikiLeaks had gotten people killed, ruled that no such instances have been discovered.

    Smear 21: "He published the details of millions of Turkish women voters."

    No he didn't. The WikiLeaks website reports the following:

    "Reports that WikiLeaks published data on Turkish women are false. WikiLeaks didn't publish the database. Someone else did. What WikiLeaks released were emails from Turkey's ruling party, the Justice & Development Party or AKP, which is the political force behind the country's president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is currently purging Turkey's judiciary, educational sector and press."

    That "someone else" was Emma Best, then known as Michael Best, who also happens to be the one who published the controversial Twitter DMs used in Micah Lee's aforementioned Assange smear piece. Best wrote an article clarifying that the information about Turkish women was published not by WikiLeaks, but by her.

    Smear 22: "He supported right-wing political parties in Australia."

    No he didn't. In 2013 Australia's WikiLeaks Party ended up inadvertently giving preferential votes to right-wing parties in New South Wales as a result of an administrative error.

    In 2012, WikiLeaks announced on Twitter that Assange was running for the Australian senate, and in 2013 the WikiLeaks Party was formally registered with the Australian Electoral Commission and fielded candidates in the states of Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia. The other candidates in the party included a human rights lawyer, an ethicist, a former Greens candidate, a former diplomat, a law professor and a former president of the Ethnic Communities council in WA. It was a very left-wing offering with unusual political ads .

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/w0oI_8r5nXk

    In Australia we have preferential voting, which is also known in the US as ranked-choice voting. You are given two ballots, a small one for the house of representatives and an arm's-length one for the senate, which you number the candidates in order of your preference, number one being your first preference. Voting for the senate is an epic task so you are given the ability to number every single candidate in order of preference (which is called "voting below the line"), or back in 2013 you could simply nominate the party who you want to win "above the line" and if they were knocked out in the first round, their preferences were applied to your vote.

    These preferences make up what's called a "How To Vote" card. Have a look at an example here . It's a pamphlet given to voters on the day that suggests how to number your preferences to support your party, but it's also submitted to the electoral commission so that they can assign your chosen flow of preferences in the senate vote.

    Every election there is a shit-storm over the How To Vote cards as parties bargain with each other and play each other off to try and get the flow of preferences to go their way. To make things even more complex, you have to create these cards for every state and seat you are putting up candidates for. The WikiLeaks Party preferences statement in one of the states, New South Wales, somehow wound up having two right wing parties preferenced before the three major parties. The WikiLeaks Party said it was an administrative error and issued this statement in August 2013:

    Preferences Statement: The WikiLeaks Party isn't aligned with any other political group. We'd rather not allocate preferences at all but allocating preferences is compulsory if your name is to go above the line.

    In allocating preferences between 53 other parties or groups in NSW some administrative errors occurred, as has been the case with some other parties. The overall decision as to preferences was a democratically made decision of the full National Council of the party. According to the National Council decision The Shooters & Fishers and the Australia First Party should have been below Greens, Labor, Liberal. As we said, we aren't aligned with anyone and the only policies we promote are our own. We will support and oppose the policies of other parties or groups according to our stated principles.

    So, in short, the entirety of the WikiLeaks Party gathered and voted to put those right wing parties down the ballot below Greens, Labor and Liberal parties but someone fucked up the form. All How To Vote cards are public and heavily scrutinized so there was never any suggestion that the WL Party had tried to get away with something on the sly, just that they had made a monumental fuckup. The WikiLeaks Party ended up getting 0.66 percent of the vote and in NSW those preferences went to those right wing parties who also failed to get the numbers required to win a seat. Was there mismanagement? Yes. Was it deliberate? There's no reason to believe that it was.

    This was all happening at the same time Chelsea Manning's case was wrapping up and Assange was busy helping Edward Snowden.

    "I made a decision two months ago to spend a lot of my time on dealing with the Edward Snowden asylum situation, and trying to save the life of a young man," Assange told Australian TV at the time. "The result is over-delegation. I admit and I accept full responsibility for over-delegating functions to the Australian party while I try to take care of that situation."

    Smear 23: "He endangered the lives of gay Saudis."

    No he didn't. The Saudi Cables were KSA government documents, i.e. information the government already had, so there was no danger of legal retaliation based on Saudi Arabia's laws against homosexuality. There is no evidence that anyone was ever endangered by the Saudi cables.

    ... ... ...

    Smear 24: "He's a CIA agent/limited hangout."

    I'm probably going to have to revisit this one because it's so all over the place that it's hard for me to even say exactly what it is. It only exists in fringey conspiracy circles, so there's no organized thought around it and when I ask people why they're so sure Assange is a CIA/Mossad agent/asset I get a bunch of different answers, many of them contradictory and none of them comprised of linear, complete thoughts. Mostly I just get an answer that goes something like "Well he spent some time in Egypt and he criticized 9/11 truthers, and he's a few degrees of separation from this one shady person, so, you know, you connect the dots."

    No, you connect the dots. You're the one making the claim.

    None of them ever do.

    You'd think this smear would have subsided since Assange was imprisoned at the behest of the US government, but I'm actually encountering it way more often now. Every day I'm getting conspiracy types telling me Assange isn't what I think he is, right at the time when the MSM has converged to smear him with more aggression than ever before and right when he needs support more than ever.

    I've never encountered anyone who can present a convincing (or even coherent) argument that Assange is working for any intelligence agency, so I generally just declare the burden of proof unmet and move on. If there's anyone out there who believes this and would like to take a stab at proving their claim, I have a few questions for you:

    Why is a CIA/Mossad agent/asset/limited hangout/whatever being rewarded for his loyal service with a stay in Belmarsh Prison awaiting US extradition? How does that work, specifically? Are you claiming that he was an asset that got "burned"? If so, when did this happen? Was he still an asset while he was languishing in the embassy in failing health and chronic pain? Or was it before then? His persecution began in 2010 and the US government was working on sabotaging him back in 2008 , so are you claiming he hasn't been on their side since then? And if you're claiming that he used to be an asset but got burned, why are you spending your energy running around telling people on the internet he's an asset when he isn't one anymore, and now his prosecution threatens press freedoms everywhere? If you oppose his extradition, why are you engaged in this behavior? Are you just interrupting an adult conversation that grownups are trying to have about an urgent matter, or is it something else? Did you run around telling everyone that Saddam used to be a CIA asset instead of protesting the Iraq invasion? Or do you believe this whole US prosecution is fake? If so, what is Assange getting out of it? What's incentivizing him to comply at this point? What specifically is your claim about what's happening?

    My past experiences when engaging these types tells me not to expect any solid and thorough answers to my questions.

    I've been at this commentary gig for about two and a half years, and during that time I've had people show up in my inbox and social media notifications warning me that everyone in anti-establishment circles is a CIA limited hangout. Literally everyone; you name a high-profile anti-establishment figure, and at one time or another I've received warnings from people that they are actually controlled opposition for a government agency.

    This happens because for some people, paranoia is their only compass. They wind up in the same circles as WikiLeaks supporters because the lens of paranoia through which they perceive the world causes them to distrust the same power establishment and mass media that WikiLeaks supporters distrust, but beyond that the two groups are actually quite different. That same paranoia which causes them to view all the wrongdoers with suspicion causes them to view everyone else with suspicion as well.

    Paranoia happens for a number of reasons, one of them being that people who aren't clear on the reasons our society acts so crazy will start making up reasons, like the belief that everyone with a high profile is a covert CIA agent. If you can't see clearly what's going on you start making things up, which can cause paranoia to become your only guidance system.

    Smear 25: "He mistreated his cat."

    There's just no limit to the garbage these smear merchants will cook up. Concern for the embassy cat picked up when the Moreno government began cooking up excuses to oust Assange from the embassy, the most highly publicized of them being a demand that he clean up after his cat. From that point on the narrative became that not only is Assange a stinky Nazi rapist Russian spy who smears poo on the walls he also mistreats his cat. Ridiculous.

    A bunch of "Where is Assange's cat??" news stories emerged after his arrest, because that's where people's minds go when a civilization-threatening lawfare agenda is being carried out. The Guardian 's James Ball, who last year authored an article humiliatingly arguing that the US will never try to extradite Assange titled "The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador's embassy is pride", told his Twitter followers , "For the record: Julian Assange's cat was reportedly given to a shelter by the Ecuadorian embassy ages ago, so don't expect a feline extradition in the next few hours. (I genuinely offered to adopt it)."

    Assange's cat is fine. It wasn't given to a "shelter"; the WikiLeaks Twitter account posted a video of the cat watching Assange's arrest on TV with the caption, "We can confirm that Assange's cat is safe. Assange asked his lawyers to rescue him from embassy threats in mid-October. They will be reunited in freedom."

    Smear 26: "He's a pedophile."

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/0FVpcaaa1X4

    Yes, of course they tried this one too, and I still run into people online from time to time who regurgitate it. CNN has had on guests who asserted that Assange is a pedophile, not once but twice. In January 2017 former CIA official Phil Mudd said live on air that Assange is "a pedophile who lives in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London," and instead of correcting him on the spot CNN did nothing and shared the video on Twitter , leaving the tweet up until WikiLeaks threatened to sue . On what appears to have been right around the same day, Congressman Mike Rogers claimed on CNN that Assange "is wanted for rape of a minor."

    These claims are of course false, designed to paint Assange as literally the worst person in the world with all the very worst qualities you can imagine in a human being.

    These claims came months after an alarming narrative control operation working behind the bogus dating website toddandclare.com persuaded a UN body called the Global Compact to grant it status as a participant, then used its platform to publicly accuse Assange, with whom it was communicating, of "pedophile crimes". McClatchy reports the following :

    "Whoever is behind the dating site has marshaled significant resources to target Assange, enough to gain entry into a United Nations body, operate in countries in Europe, North America and the Caribbean, conduct surveillance on Assange's lawyer in London, obtain the fax number of Canada's prime minister and seek to prod a police inquiry in the Bahamas."

    So that's a thing.

    Smear 27: "He lied about Seth Rich."

    I'm just going to toss this one here at the end because I'm seeing it go around a lot in the wake of the Mueller report.

    Robert Mueller, who helped the Bush administration deceive the world about WMD in Iraq, has claimed that the GRU was the source of WikiLeaks' 2016 drops, and claimed in his report that WikiLeaks deceived its audience by implying that its source was the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich. This claim is unsubstantiated because, as we discussed in Smear 4, the public has not seen a shred of evidence proving who was or was not WikiLeaks' source, so there's no way to know there was any deception happening there. We've never seen any hard proof, nor indeed anything besides official narrative, connecting the Russian government to Guccifer 2.0 and Guccifer 2.0 to WikiLeaks, and Daniel Lazare for Consortium News documents that there are in fact some major plot holes in Mueller's timeline. Longtime Assange friend and WikiLeaks ally Craig Murray maintains that he knows the source of the DNC Leaks and Podesta Emails were two different Americans, not Russians, and hints that one of them was a DNC insider. There is exactly as much publicly available evidence for Murray's claim as there is for Mueller's.

    Mainstream media has been blaring day after day for years that it is an absolute known fact that the Russian government was WikiLeaks' source, and the only reason people scoff and roll their eyes at anyone who makes the indisputably factual claim that we've seen no evidence for this is because the illusory truth effect causes the human brain to mistake repetition for fact.

    The smear is that Assange knew his source was actually the Russian government, and he implied it was Seth Rich to throw people off the scent. Mueller asserted that something happened, and it's interpreted as hard fact instead of assertion. There's no evidence for any of this, and there's no reason to go believing the WMD guy on faith about a narrative which incriminates yet another government which refuses to obey the dictates of the US empire.

    And I guess that's it for now. Again, this article is an ongoing project, so I'll be updating it and adding to it regularly as new information comes in and new smears need refutation. If I missed something or got something wrong, or even if you spotted a typo, please email me at [email protected] and let me know. I'm trying to create the best possible tool for people to refute Assange smears, so I'll keep sharpening this baby to make sure it cuts like a razor. Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who helped! Phew! That was long.

    * * *

    Everyone has my unconditional permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I've written) in any way they like free of charge. My work is entirely reader-supported , so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I'm trying to do with this platform, click here .

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    motherjones , 52 minutes ago link

    We don't have to like Julian Assange, but the release of the "Collateral Damage" video alone is enough to justify defending Assange and the freedom of the press.

    Ozymandiasssss , 1 hour ago link

    She really didn't debunk the thing about Seth Rich very well. Basically just said that whatever Mueller said wasn't true, which doesn't go very far for me. He definitely did imply that he got at least some of his info from Rich so if there is some sort of proof of that, it needs to be supplied; otherwise Mueller's story is the only one.

    bh2 , 1 hour ago link

    HItchen's Razor: "what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

    beemasters , 2 hours ago link

    I have recently seen a political cartoon with Dotard then saying: "I love Wikileaks" + " I will throw her in jail" and now saying: "I know nothing about Wikileaks" + "I will throw him in jail"

    It summed up perfectly that swine's lack of integrity.

    Downtoolong , 2 hours ago link

    It's so simple. Assange and Wikileaks exposed Hillary, Podesta, and the entire DNC to be lying, deceiving, hypocritical, disingenuous, elitist bastards. His crimes are miniscule compared to that, and all who attempt to condemn Assange only show us that they are members of that foul group.

    beemasters , 1 hour ago link

    Yet Dotard didn't push hard at all to get Killary, Podesta & friends charged...not even tweets calling for it since he got elected.

    TotalMachineFail , 3 hours ago link

    Excellent thorough content. And Kim Schmitz pointed out they'll drag things on for as long as possible and try to add additional things as they go. Such a bunch of sad, pathetic control freaks. Covering up their own failures, crimes and short comings with a highly publicized distraction putting the screws to a single journalist.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBs1dgYL-7w

    When the next world leader is Kashoggied nobody is going to care.

    freedommusic , 3 hours ago link

    “ Ty Clevenger has FOIAed information from NSA asking for any data that involved both Seth Rich and also Julian Assange .

    And they responded by saying we’ve got 15 files , 32 pages , but they’re all classified in accordance with executive order 13526 covering classification, and therefore you can’t have them.

    That says that NSA has records of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange. I mean, that’s the only business that NSA is in — copying communications between people and devices.”

    —Bill Binney (NSA 30 year vet)

    ( source )

    RussianSniper , 3 hours ago link

    Long story!

    Important topic!!

    Assange and Snowden are freedom fighters, exposing the duplicitous, corrupt, and criminals to the entire world.

    The hundreds of millions of mindless zombies are so brainwashed by the fake news industry, that if Assange and Snowden are not spies, they are criminal in some capacity.

    I have liberal, conservative, and libertarian leaning friends, and virtually every one of them believe Assange and Snowden are traitors to America, got innocent people killed, are rapists, or too cowardly to stand trial in the USA.

    What has happened to common sense and some necessary cynicism?

    Dugald , 2 hours ago link

    The trouble with Common Sense is it's not all that common.....

    LetThemEatRand , 3 hours ago link

    Why even bother arguing with these people. Assange gave up his liberty to reveal the truth, and the American public said in essence "so what." No one except the leakers and whistle-blowers faced any punishment, and I can't think of a single national politician who even talks about doing anything about the misconduct that was revealed. Yeah, a small percentage of the population is outraged at what was revealed, but the vast majority literally don't give a ****.

    fezline , 3 hours ago link

    Hehe... I guess you will find out how wrong you are in 2020 :-) His release of Hillary's emails gave Trump 2016... and him turning his back on Assange took away his chances in 2020

    chunga , 3 hours ago link

    Most regular readers on ZH know but this is an echo chamber for "Always Trumpers" so there won't be many commenters on this article. Rather than defend his DOJ's extradition attempts with implausible theories they'll be chattering back and forth about the Mueller Report.

    /winning

    LetThemEatRand , 2 hours ago link

    Agreed. It's amazing to me that people who claim to be believers of the MAGA message don't see the harm associated with the arrest of Assange, and all of the other uniparty **** Trump is perpetuating. A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.

    ZENDOG , 3 hours ago link

    Whole lot of yadda yadda yadda about someone 99.9% of Americans don't know.

    And even less who give a ****.

    Hillary dead yet?

    fezline , 3 hours ago link

    Yeah and yet.... everyone seemed to credit Hillary's loss to the release of her emails on wikileaks... Hmm that narrative that seems to be trying to minimize the impact on Trumps chances in 2020 really breaks down in the face of that fact doesn't it?? Trump has no hope... just stop... get behind a republican that has a chance... Trump doesn't... he lost half of his base... get over it...

    [Apr 20, 2019] Brennan should be investigated for unleashing neo-McCarthysim compaign and put of trial

    Notable quotes:
    "... My reasoning starts with a desire to counter Russian and Chinese assertiveness as proposed by Kissinger in an WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 in which Kissinger expressed a desire for a strengthened USA - very much aligned with what one might expect a MAGA nationalist President to achieve. ..."
    "... Kissinger is considered to be the "dean" of US FP establishment and his opinions are respected by 'Deep State' leaders that I mentioned. ..."
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Apr 20, 2019 5:02:40 PM | link

    Brennan on trial

    Did he order the new McCarthyism (aka "Code Red") which included electing Trump as President, setting up Wikileaks to be smeared as a foreign agent, and settling scores with Michael Flynn?

    Acting on 'Deep State' approval from the likes of Clinton, McCain, Mueller, Bush Sr., et al.

    Jackrabbit , Apr 20, 2019 6:34:16 PM | link

    Just to be clear regarding my comment @16

    "Brennan on trial" is an imagined future occurrence based on informed speculation that I've previously described.

    My reasoning starts with a desire to counter Russian and Chinese assertiveness as proposed by Kissinger in an WSJ Op-Ed of August 2014 in which Kissinger expressed a desire for a strengthened USA - very much aligned with what one might expect a MAGA nationalist President to achieve.

    Kissinger is considered to be the "dean" of US FP establishment and his opinions are respected by 'Deep State' leaders that I mentioned.

    [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    False Solace , April 19, 2019 at 12:36 pm

    Yet another delusional remark at odds with reality. Haven't these people learned anything from the implosion of their pathetic Russiagate hysteria? The Russophobes won't be happy until we're at war with a nuclear power and the nukes are about to land.

    Here are things Trump has actually done, as opposed to red-limned fantasies drawn from the fever-dreams of Putin haters:

    1. Unilaterally abandoned 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty
    2. Expelled 60 diplomats and closed 3 Russian diplomatic annexes
    3. Bombed Syria, a Russian ally, with Russian troops in country
    4. Sold arms to Ukraine, which is actively at war with Russia
    5. Threatened Germany to cancel a new Russian pipeline through the Baltic (effort failed)
    6. Even more sanctions against Russia and Russian nationals
    7. Stationed missile defense systems on the Russian border in violation of arms treaties
    8. Massive military exercises in Europe on the Russian border
    9. Stationed troops in Poland
    10. Negotiating with Poland to build a permanent US military base in Poland

    All this has certainly made the world safer. /s

    [Apr 20, 2019] When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, "Our democracy has been attacked," I an reminded of the interview Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to be executed.

    Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Procopius , , April 19, 2019 at 7:56 pm

    When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, “Our democracy has been attacked,” I an reminded of the interview Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to be executed.

    Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

    [Apr 20, 2019] Is Trump a neofascist due to his aggressive foreign policy and promotion of economic Lebensraum for the USA ?

    Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    juliania , April 19, 2019 at 11:15 am

    I think Professor Cohen has a real point in the following statements:

    " In the era of weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear, but primarily nuclear, ever more sophisticated, the Russians now have a new generation of nuclear weapons -- Putin announced them on March 1, they were dismissed here, but they're real–that can elude any missile defense. ..

    Russia has now thwarted us; they now have missile defense-evading nuclear weapons from submarines, to aircraft, to missiles. And Putin has said, 'It's time to negotiate an end to this new arms race,' and he's 100 percent right. So when I heard Trump say, in 2016, we have to cooperate with Russia, I had already become convinced

    So I began to speak positively about Trump at that moment -- that would have been probably around the summer of 2016 -- just on this one point, because none of the other candidates were advocating cooperation with Russia "

    Then, when he goes on to elaborate on China's weaponry and posit including them in the next round of draw-down negotiations, as far off as that may look – that to me is what Trump can use for his re-election. I do believe his attitude towards Russia won him his first term.

    Those Russia-gate kooks need to focus on the American people, not on Trump. Well, maybe they did, and still do. It's really about us, not him.

    Procopius , April 19, 2019 at 7:56 pm

    When I see the right-of-center DNC supporters saying, "Our democracy has been attacked," I an reminded of the interview Hermann Goering gave while he was waiting to be executed.

    Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

    [Apr 20, 2019] Here is an interesting interpretation of Trumps selection of cabinet and advisor positions

    Notable quotes:
    "... Trump's main problem in this respect is that the diversity of viewpoints within the military, the NSA or other government agencies might already be too narrow and he needs a Republican version of Stephen Cohen who has always advocated for engagement with Russia, along with other people from outside Washington DC but with experience in state legislatures for the various departments. ..."
    "... I agree and I suspect Trump regards Putin as a fellow CEO and perhaps the best one on the planet. ..."
    "... A more fundamental problem is that the US has not yet reached rock bottom. So, its delusions remain strong. Trump, as said before, may be a false dawn unless the bottom is closer than suspected and he has new allies (perhaps foreign allies). ..."
    Nov 20, 2016 | marknesop.wordpress.com

    Patient Observer , November 19, 2016 at 8:41 am

    Here is an interesting interpretation of Trump's selection of cabinet and advisor positions:

    https://sputniknews.com/politics/201611191047623363-trump-administration-analysis/

    It is not about politics, but Trump's peculiar management style, Timofey Bordachev, Director of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at Russia's High School of Economics, told RIA Novosti.

    "Those who have been studying the business biography of the newly elected president have noted that he has always played off his high-ranking employees against each other. While doing so he remained above the fight," he said.

    And

    Gevorg Mirzayan, an assistant professor of the Political Science department at the Financial University in Moscow pointed out two purposes for the nominations.

    "Trump needs to consolidate the Republican Party, hence he should nominate representatives of different party groups to key positions in his administration to win the support of the whole party," he told RIA Novosti. Surveillance © Photo: Pixabay Trump National Security Team Reportedly Wants to Dismantle Top US Spy Agency The second purpose is to form an administration that doesn't look too "dovish" or too "hawkish" to be able to avoid further accusations of excessive loyalty towards Moscow, he suggested. Thus without an image of a 'dove" who neglects the national interests, he will be able to normalize Russian-American relations, the expert said.

    The above brings rationality to the diverse selections made by Trump.

    However, the black swan event will be an economic collapse (fast or protracted over several years). That will be the defining event in the Trump presidency. I have no inkling how he or those who may replace him would respond.

    Jen , November 19, 2016 at 12:18 pm
    I had guessed myself that Trump was going to run the government as a business corporation. Surrounding himself with people of competing viewpoints, and hiring on the basis of experience and skills (and not on the basis of loyalty, as Hillary Clinton might have done) would be two ways Trump can change the government and its culture. Trump's main problem in this respect is that the diversity of viewpoints within the military, the NSA or other government agencies might already be too narrow and he needs a Republican version of Stephen Cohen who has always advocated for engagement with Russia, along with other people from outside Washington DC but with experience in state legislatures for the various departments.

    If running the US government as a large mock business enterprise brings a change in its culture so it becomes more open and accountable to the public, less directed by ideology and identity politics, and gets rid of people engaged in building up their own little empires within the different departments, then Trump might just be the President the US needs at this moment in time.

    Interesting that Russian academics have noted the outlines of Trump's likely cabinet and what they suggest he plans to do, and no-one else has. Does this imply that Americans and others in the West have lost sight of how large business corporations could be run, or should be run, and everyone is fixated on fake "entrepreneurship" or "self-entrepreneur" (whatever that means) models of running a business where it's every man, woman, child and dog for itself?

    Patient Observer , November 19, 2016 at 5:21 pm Patient Observer , November 19, 2016 at 5:21 pm
    I agree and I suspect Trump regards Putin as a fellow CEO and perhaps the best one on the planet. Trump may have noted how Putin did an incredible turnaround of Russia and it all started with three objectives: restore the integrity of the borders, rebuild the industrial base and run off the globalists/liberals/kreakles. I am certainly not the first one to say this and I think that there is a lot of basis for that analysis. However, Trump will have a far more difficult challenge and frankly I don't think he has enough allies or smarts to pull it off.

    A more fundamental problem is that the US has not yet reached rock bottom. So, its delusions remain strong. Trump, as said before, may be a false dawn unless the bottom is closer than suspected and he has new allies (perhaps foreign allies).

    [Apr 20, 2019] The Guccifer 2.0 Gaps in Mueller s Full Report undermine the validity of findings

    Apr 10, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Originally from: The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report April 18, 2019 • 12 Commentsave

    Like Team Mueller's indictment last July of Russian agents, the full report reveals questions about Wikileaks' role that much of the media has been ignoring, writes Daniel Lazare.

    By Daniel Lazare
    Special to Consortium News

    <img src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Daniel-Lazare-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="100" height="100" /> A s official Washington pores over the Gospel According to Saint Robert, an all-important fact about the Mueller report has gotten lost in the shuffle. Just as the Christian gospels were filled with holes , the latest version is too – particularly with regard to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

    The five pages that the special prosecutor's report devotes to WikiLeaks are essentially lifted from Mueller's indictment last July of 12 members of the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU. It charges that after hacking the Democratic National Committee, the GRU used a specially-created online persona known as Guccifer 2.0 to transfer a gigabyte's worth of stolen emails to WikiLeaks just as the 2016 Democratic National Convention was approaching. Four days after opening the encrypted file, the indictment says, "Organization 1 [i.e. WikiLeaks] released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators [i.e. the GRU]."

    <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35305" src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-5.00.53-PM.png" alt="Barr holding press conference on full Mueller report, April 18, 2019. (YouTube)" width="1248" height="612" srcset="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-5.00.53-PM.png 848w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-5.00.53-PM-400x196.png 400w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-5.00.53-PM-768x377.png 768w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-5.00.53-PM-700x343.png 700w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-5.00.53-PM-160x78.png 160w" sizes="(max-width: 1248px) 100vw, 1248px" />

    Attorney General William Barr holding press conference on full Mueller report, April 18, 2019. (YouTube)

    Mueller's report says the same thing, but with the added twist that Assange then tried to cover up the GRU's role by suggesting that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich may have been the source and by telling a congressman that the DNC email heist was an "inside job" and that he had "physical proof" that the material was not from Russian.

    All of which is manna from heaven for corporate news outlets eager to pile on Assange, now behind bars in London. An April 11, 2019, New York Times news analysis , for instance, declared that "[c]ourt documents have revealed that it was Russian intelligence – using the Guccifer persona – that provided Mr. Assange thousands of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee," while another Times article published shortly after his arrest accuses the WikiLeaks founder of "promoting a false cover story about the source of the leaks."

    But there's a problem: it ain't necessarily so. The official story that the GRU is the source doesn't hold water, as a timeline from mid-2016 shows. Here are the key events based on the GRU indictment and the Mueller report:

    June 12: Assange tells Britain's ITV that another round of Democratic Party disclosures is on the way: "We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton, which is great. WikiLeaks is having a very big year." June 14: The Democratic National Committee accuses Russia of hacking its computers. June 15: Guccifer 2.0 claims credit for the hack. "The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks ," he brags . "They will publish them soon." June 22: WikiLeaks tells Guccifer via email: "Send any new material here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing." July 6: WikiLeaks sends Guccifer another email: "if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [ sic ] days prefable [ sic ] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after."Replies Guccifer: "ok . . . i " July 14: Guccifer sends WikiLeaks an encrypted file titled "wk dnc link1.txt.gpg." July 18: WikiLeaks confirms it has opened "the 1Gb or so archive" and will release documents "this week." July 22: WikiLeaks releases more than 20,000 DNC emails and 8,000 other attachments.

    According to Mueller and obsequious news outlets like the Times , the sequence is clear: Guccifer sends archive, WikiLeaks receives archive, WikiLeaks accesses archive, WikiLeaks publishes archive. Donald Trump may not have colluded with Russia, but Julian Assange plainly did. [Attorney General Will Barr, significantly calling WikiLeaks a publisher, said at his Thursday press conference: " Under applicable law, publication of these types of materials would not be criminal unless the publisher also participated in the underlying hacking conspiracy."]

    <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35300" src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-4.24.13-PM.png" alt="Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announcing in 2018 a grand jury indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking offenses related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. (Wikimedia Commons) " width="1236" height="611" srcset="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-4.24.13-PM.png 973w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-4.24.13-PM-400x198.png 400w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-4.24.13-PM-768x380.png 768w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-4.24.13-PM-700x346.png 700w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Screen-Shot-2019-04-18-at-4.24.13-PM-160x79.png 160w" sizes="(max-width: 1236px) 100vw, 1236px" />

    Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announcing in 2018 the grand jury indictment of 12 GRU agents. (Wikimedia Commons)

    Avoiding Questions

    The narrative raises questions that the press studiously avoids. Why, for instance, would Assange announce on June 12 that a big disclosure is on the way before hearing from the supposed source? Was there a prior communication that Mueller has not disclosed? What about the reference to "new material" on June 22 – does that mean Assange already had other material in hand? After opening the Guccifer file on July 18, why would he publish it just four days later? Would that give WikiLeaks enough time to review some 28,000 documents to insure they're genuine?

    Honor Bob Parry's legacy by donating to our Spring Fund Drive.

    "If a single one of those emails had been shown to be maliciously altered," blogger Mark F. McCarty observes , "Wikileaks' reputation would have been in tatters." There's also the question that an investigator known as Adam Carter poses in Disobedient Media : why would Guccifer brag about giving WikiLeaks "thousands of files" that he wouldn't send for another month?

    The narrative doesn't make sense – a fact that is crucially important now that Assange is fighting for his freedom in the U.K. New Yorker staff writer Raffi Khatchadourian sounded a rare note of caution last summer when he warned that little about Guccifer 2.0 adds up. While claiming to be the source for some of WikiLeaks ' most explosive emails, the material he released on his own had proved mostly worthless – 20 documents that he "said were from the DNC but which were almost surely not," as Khatchadourian puts it, a purported Hillary Clinton dossier that "was nothing of the sort," screenshots of emails so blurry as to be "unreadable," and so forth.

    <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35303" src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/John_Podesta_at_2nd_debate_full_image.jpg" alt="John Podesta at the spin room of the second presidential debate of 2016. (Voice of America via Wikimedia Commons)" width="500" height="341" srcset="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/John_Podesta_at_2nd_debate_full_image.jpg 650w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/John_Podesta_at_2nd_debate_full_image-400x273.jpg 400w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/John_Podesta_at_2nd_debate_full_image-160x109.jpg 160w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" />

    John Podesta: Target of a phishing expedition. (Voice of America via Wikimedia Commons)

    While insisting that "our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party, Assange told Khatchadourian that the source was not Guccifer either. "We received quite a lot of submissions of material that was already published in the rest of the press, and people seemingly submitted the Guccifer archives," he said somewhat cryptically. "We didn't publish them. They were already published." When Khatchadourian asked why he didn't put the material out regardless, he replied that "the material from Guccifer 2.0 – or on WordPress – we didn't have the resources to independently verify."

    No Time for Vetting

    So four days was indeed too short a time to subject the Guccifer file to proper vetting. Of course, Mueller no doubt regards this as more "dissembling," as his report describes it. Yet WikiLeaks has never been caught in a lie for the simple reason that honesty and credibility are all-important for a group that promises to protect anonymous leakers who supply it with official secrets. (See "Inside WikiLeaks : Working with the Publisher that Changed the World," Consortium News , July 19, 2018.) Mueller, by contrast, has a rich history of mendacity going back to his days as FBI director when he sought to cover up the Saudi role in 9/11 and assured Congress on the eve of the 2003 invasion that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction pose "a clear threat to our national security."

    <img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-35301" src="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/MuellerBushImage.jpg" alt="Mueller with President George W. Bush on July 5, 2001, as he is being appointed FBI director. (White House)" width="501" height="373" srcset="https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/MuellerBushImage.jpg 600w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/MuellerBushImage-400x298.jpg 400w, https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/MuellerBushImage-160x119.jpg 160w" sizes="(max-width: 501px) 100vw, 501px" />

    Mueller with President George W. Bush on July 5, 2001, as he is being appointed FBI director. (White House)

    So if the Mueller narrative doesn't hold up, the charge of dissembling doesn't either. Indeed , as ex-federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy observes in The National Review , the fact that the feds have charged Assange with unauthorized access to a government computer rather than conspiring with the Kremlin could be a sign that Team Mueller is less than confident it can prove collusion beyond a reasonable doubt. As he puts it, the GRU indictment "was more like a press release than a charging instrument" because the special prosecutor knew that the chances were zero that Russian intelligence agents would surrender to a U.S. court.

    Indeed, when Mueller charged 13 employees and three companies owned by Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin with interfering in the 2016 election, he clearly didn't expect them to surrender either. Thus , his team seemed taken aback when one of the alleged " troll farms " showed up in Washington asking to be heard. The prosecution's initial response, as McCarthy put it , was to seek a delay "on the astonishing ground that the defendant has not been properly served – notwithstanding that the defendant has shown up in court and asked to be arraigned." When that didn't work, prosecutors tried to limit Concord's access to some 3.2 million pieces of evidence on the grounds that the documents are too " sensitive " for Russian eyes to see. If they are again unsuccessful, they may have no choice but to drop the charges entirely, resulting in yet another " public relations disaster " for the Russia-gate investigation.

    None of which bodes well for Mueller or the news organizations that worship at his shrine. After blowing the Russia-gate story all these years, why does the Times continue to slander the one news organization that tells the truth?

    Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com .

    [Apr 20, 2019] The culprit is most likely the same of always, US and Israel intelligence, acting directly or through contractors...

    Notable quotes:
    "... "Training exercises" is a good cover. ..."
    "... When Mossad was caught by an alert bystander planting a bomb under a car in Tel Aviv, it was later announced that it had all been a "training exercise gone awry". http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8377746.stm ..."
    "... When bomb parts (not yet assembled) mailed to the US embassy in Tunisia were discovered by Fedex workers at Charles de Gaulle airport the ready explanation was...you guessed it..."training exercise gone awry". https://www.yahoo.com/news/tempers-flare-paris-airport-fake-bombs-found-070909988.html ..."
    "... The culprit is most likely the same of always, US and Israel intelligence, acting directly or through contractors... ..."
    Apr 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    librul , Apr 18, 2019 4:54:19 PM | link

    Originally from: Security Breach At U.S. Embassies In Tunisia And Kuwait Almost Caused A Disaster

    Just say, "training exercise".

    Speaking of Tunisia, there were bomb parts being mailed in the other direction - from the US to the embassy in Tunisia.
    The bomb parts were discovered by accident and so the best response was ... "nothing to see here, folks, just a training exercise".

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/tempers-flare-paris-airport-fake-bombs-found-070909988.html


    ----------

    Often wondered what the planned abort scenario was for 9/11 .

    If the CIA etal had indeed wired the towers with explosives how would they go about deinstalling said explosives if there had been a major muck up and the plans for 9/11 were called off or delayed?

    "Training exercises" is a good cover.

    When Mossad was caught by an alert bystander planting a bomb under a car in Tel Aviv, it was later announced that it had all been a "training exercise gone awry". http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8377746.stm

    When bomb parts (not yet assembled) mailed to the US embassy in Tunisia were discovered by Fedex workers at Charles de Gaulle airport the ready explanation was...you guessed it..."training exercise gone awry". https://www.yahoo.com/news/tempers-flare-paris-airport-fake-bombs-found-070909988.html

    You are probably aware that there were training exercises held in New York just before 9/11.

    http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a090801laguardiaexercise&scale=0

    "September 8, 2001: Bioterrorism Exercise Is Held at a New York Airport

    A training exercise is held at New York's La Guardia Airport, based around the scenario of a terrorist attack with a biological weapon"

    And, you probably recall that active anthrax was being shipped, although "no one was at fault", for years all over the place. That is, anthrax created by the Pentagon that was "believed to be inactive" was actually live anthrax and being shipped around the world. But no one was at fault.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-blames-anthrax-fiasco-on-no-one

    Thus, if someone decided to pull the plug on 9/11 and had to remove the explosives from the towers they could have declared "training exercise has gone awry". The Pentagon could merely declare that they had held an adjunct exercise in the towers and what the biological terror exercise thought was inactive anthrax was actually live and the towers would need to be evacuated while decontamination took place.

    That could have been the ready made abort-scenario to 9/11 .

    Sasha , Apr 18, 2019 5:42:18 PM | link

    The culprit is most likely the same of always, US and Israel intelligence, acting directly or through contractors...

    As the new panarabic front is being built , a great terrorist event against the US is needed to justify another intervention in the Middle East so as to counter it.

    Nor it would be very difficult to imagine that just after naming the IRGC as terrorist organization, they will be most probably to blame....Sounds like the perfect alibi to unleash the WoT on Iran...

    corkie , Apr 18, 2019 7:38:02 PM | link
    The simple explanation is the the explosives were supposed to end up in Kuwait where our soldier friend would use them for whatever murderous or false flag mischief his owners commanded. The luggage wasn't supposed to be checked by the plebs in Kuwait but due to the mission being cancelled the goods ended up in their hands. The conduit from Tunisia to Kuwait was primed to let the cargo through but there was not enough time to set up the transit from Kuwait to the USA. Hence the discovery by the wrong people.
    Kadath , Apr 18, 2019 8:37:53 PM | link
    Anon @1: Yes, C4 is one of the most stable explosives currently in use, you can throw it, hit it, drop it, shoot it, even set fire to it and it will not detonate, unless you run a electric current through it (even a tiny current like from a watch battery can set it off). Without a detonator the C4 would be almost harmless (there's a tiny, tiny chance a static electric spark could detonate it if the C4 wasn't property prepared for transit). So, assuming there wasn't a detonator with the C4, I would lean to this C4 being smuggled to somewhere to be sold or used in an assassination attempt, rather than an attempt to bring down an airplane.
    BM , Apr 19, 2019 4:15:51 AM | link
    The simple explanation is the the explosives were supposed to end up in Kuwait
    Posted by: corkie | Apr 18, 2019 7:38:02 PM | 17

    Another possibility - in my view significantly more likely - is that the originally intended destination for the explosive was the US, and that the Soldier-Mule was the patsy. I.e. the putative posting to Kuwait AND its annulment were set up to enable means for the bag to go through special handling channels that would normally get only token inspection. The text from LW confirms that inspection was indeed utterly token at almost every step, and the alertness of the Kuwaitis was probably unanticipated because they were out of the loop. One critical stage in the transfer - that an explosive detector would be in the path and switched on - was not adequately planned for by the plotters.

    The aim would most likely be to get undocumented C4 into the US, as whoever planned this operation might well have access to documented C4 in the US anyway. That might well signal planned false flag use, so that the false flag can be more easily be blamed on someone else. A putative culprit might be some minor faction in the Deep State.

    One possible target for the false flag might be Russia/Iran/Hezbolla/Syria/China/Venezuela etc ... but in my view this has the wiff of having a somewhat smaller faction behind it, such as NAZIs/white supremacists. What immediately comes to mind was the incident a couple of years ago where a German NAZI sympethising member of the Bundeswehr smuggles weapons and(?) explosives into a stach hidden in a toilet in an Austrian airport for a planned terrorist incident. I haven't followed it/read anything about it recently, but a large network of NAZI sympethising supremacists was unearthed inside and throughout the Bundeswehr in the course of the investigation. Linked is the well established fact that the NAZI movement have extremely high level and strong infiltration in the German BND, police, judiciary, Ministry of Interior, etc - for example one time when a court ordered the Interior Ministry to hand over documents about NAZI activities in Germany, the Interior Ministry illegally shredded millions of documents rather than hand them over.

    In my opinion, it would be a wise move by Russia to start as quickly as possible a covert collaboration with countries around the world - including relatively minor US allies - to ensure that ALL US embassy incidental traffic, such as the bag in this case, get an effective check for explosives, fire hazards, chemical weapons, bio weapons and drugs, despite the official channels giving only token inspection. The recent surge in incidents (or perhaps only the recent exposure of longstandingly regular incidents??) involving US soldiers and weapons/explosives might be read as an indication of a widespread threat.

    vk , Apr 19, 2019 11:09:29 AM | link
    @ Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Apr 19, 2019 1:00:46 AM | 30

    In that case, the most probable scenario was that this marine simply wanted to ship the C4 to the USA in order to do a terrorist attack in American soil, not to take down a plane.

    [Apr 20, 2019] What shocked me most from the recent story here about Torturer Gina Haspel lying to Trump wasn't that she did it. The woman has no scruples at all, and her misbehavior is hardly a surprise.

    Apr 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Zachary Smith , Apr 18, 2019 5:09:48 PM | 7 ">link

    Assuming that it is correct, who might be the most likely culprit?

    Making that assumption, I want to focus on this part:

    The U.S. embassy in Kuwait contacted a contracted private company to send the package to the U.S. on board of an American airline.

    Government is evil. Therefore hiring enough vetted US citizens to run an embassy is to be avoided if a Private Company can be paid to do the same job. It's been done in the Military. NASA. National Intelligence has been "privatized". (think Edward Snowden)

    What shocked me most from the recent story here about Torturer Gina Haspel lying to Trump wasn't that she did it. The woman has no scruples at all, and her misbehavior is hardly a surprise. The NYT piece was just another story about an ignorant old man who can be easily managed. No, here is the part which jumped out at me.

    "Houseflies buzzing around the Oval Office were drawing his attention, and ire.

    After reading that I'd be surprised if there is a competent core of White House GOVERNMENT workers remaining there. Nobody to manage the flying vermin. It took the director of the CIA to send over some flypaper!

    I doubt if the Trumpies could organize a 1-float parade, so the lax security could be almost anywhere in the chain of events. But my present vote is on a Private Company. It might be the transport company. If they don't have junior staffers in the Embassy to run simple missions like delivering a package, they probably don't have an in-house cleaning staff, either. So they may hire some locals to come in and mop and sweep the joint. Inexpensive Outsiders.

    [Apr 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard: People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars?

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... "This is not a joke. This is not about me. This about all of us. This is about our future. About making sure we have one." ..."
    Apr 19, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Al Pinto , April 18, 2019 at 13:25

    Thank you Max, it's a great summary of what is wrong with the foreign policy and why racism is so rampant.

    There are candidates for 2020, who understand and probably share your views. Take for example Tulsi Gabbard in her recent twonhall meeting video:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/tulsi/comments/bbsg8q/reupload_tulsis_most_inspiring_and_controversial/

    Quote from her replies

    "People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars?"

    And just to drive home this point, quote:

    "This is not a joke. This is not about me. This about all of us. This is about our future. About making sure we have one."

    Tulsi did get in to trouble. A day after the video posted on Twitter, it had been deleted by Twitter without explanation

    Mark Dierking , April 18, 2019 at 15:53

    Thanks to you any everyone that has responded for the thoughtful comments. If you are able to edit yours, a more accessible link for the Safari browser is:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/tulsi/comments/bbsg8q/reupload_tulsis_most_inspiring_and_controversial/

    [Apr 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard: People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars?

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... "This is not a joke. This is not about me. This about all of us. This is about our future. About making sure we have one." ..."
    Apr 19, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Al Pinto , April 18, 2019 at 13:25

    Thank you Max, it's a great summary of what is wrong with the foreign policy and why racism is so rampant.

    There are candidates for 2020, who understand and probably share your views. Take for example Tulsi Gabbard in her recent twonhall meeting video:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/tulsi/comments/bbsg8q/reupload_tulsis_most_inspiring_and_controversial/

    Quote from her replies

    "People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars?"

    And just to drive home this point, quote:

    "This is not a joke. This is not about me. This about all of us. This is about our future. About making sure we have one."

    Tulsi did get in to trouble. A day after the video posted on Twitter, it had been deleted by Twitter without explanation

    Mark Dierking , April 18, 2019 at 15:53

    Thanks to you any everyone that has responded for the thoughtful comments. If you are able to edit yours, a more accessible link for the Safari browser is:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/tulsi/comments/bbsg8q/reupload_tulsis_most_inspiring_and_controversial/

    [Apr 19, 2019] Early Assange quote

    Apr 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    somebody , Apr 18, 2019 10:41:06 AM | link

    Add to 80

    Early Assange :

    The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.

    Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

    [Apr 19, 2019] One way to deflect and mask ignorance is to build a monument of commemoration.

    Apr 19, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Maxim Gorki , April 18, 2019 at 13:28

    911 is a monument to American ignorance. The only thing we know for certain about 911 is that we don't know what happened on 911.

    OlyaPola , April 19, 2019 at 04:31

    "911 is a monument to American ignorance."

    One way to deflect and mask ignorance is to build a monument of commemoration.

    There are many monuments in the misnamed "The United States of America" one of which is the Vietnam monument.

    Given their tendency to double down on ignorance perhaps Mr. Trump and his associates' activities in wall building will include, but not necessarily be limited to, extending the Vietnam monument.

    [Apr 19, 2019] The problem is that no one in the USA gives a s**t about facts. The Government is immune from public opinion

    Notable quotes:
    "... Rep. Omar is playing around with assasination in taking on the Israeli Lobby and other powerful interests in Washington. I would be willing to bet that there are already contracts out on her life with the purpose of scaring anyone else from raising there head and stating the obvious. ..."
    Apr 18, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Dan Kuhn , April 18, 2019 at 12:58

    Good article. The problem is that no one in the USA gives a s**t about facts. The Government is immune from public opinion. Of course the MSN is going to crucify her .

    Rep. Omar is playing around with assasination in taking on the Israeli Lobby and other powerful interests in Washington. I would be willing to bet that there are already contracts out on her life with the purpose of scaring anyone else from raising there head and stating the obvious.

    Blessthebeasts , April 18, 2019 at 19:20

    You're absolutely right. Americans are happy to believe the official narrative because it doesn't threaten their comfy pathetic lives. What they don't seem to realize is that the rest of the world doesn't share their blind gullibility.

    JOHN CHUCKMAN , April 18, 2019 at 12:58

    Bigotry, violence, and extreme language – America, it all literally oozes from the pores of your skin. You just look terrible anymore to outside observers.

    [Apr 19, 2019] The USSR was a kind of guarantor of sanity of the USA elite, supressing built-in suisidal tendences. With it gove they went off the rail

    For Western world, especially people of the USA, the collapse of the USSR was really geopolitical catastrophe, as Putin once put it. It unleaseshed cannibalistic instincts of neoliberal elite.
    Apr 19, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Drew Hunkins , April 18, 2019 at 12:39

    " "Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?" remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski "

    Yeah, I can.

    There never would have been a war on Iraq in 1991 nor an obliteration of Iraq in 2003, which has lasted until the present day. The destruction of Yugoslavia never would have taken place and the wars and proxy wars on Syria and Libya would have only existed in the twisted and depraved imaginations of the Zionist and militarist psychos in our midst.

    TINA never would have been an imperative and the working people of the Western world (primarily the U.S.) wouldn't be in a race to the bottom as it comes to wages, healthcare insurance, poverty levels, infant mortality, life-expectancy, union power in the workplace, secure retirements, and outlandish housing costs. With the demise of the USSR the millionaire capitalist-investor class really took the gloves off and saw no reason to provide the working masses with certain life-affirming policies, it was time to really sock it to the bottom 90%.

    Despite some its faults, the world's people have been paying dearly for the demise of the USSR.

    For further reading on what I've outlined above:
    "Blood Lies" by Grover Furr
    "Blackshirts and Reds" by Michael Parenti
    "Fool's Crusade" by Diana Johnstone
    "Against Empire" by Michael Parenti
    essays and articles by Paul Craig Roberts
    essays and articles by Andre Vltchek

    Al Pinto , April 18, 2019 at 13:31

    In short, without an antidote, the US does what the neocons and Israel decide to do. Welcome to the world of "my way, or the highway" cowboy mentality

    Rob Roy , April 18, 2019 at 20:26

    Actually, people in the USSR lived lives of constant fear (they call it the “Time of Terror”) that their friends, relatives, neighbors, strangers, even their children, would “tattle” on them and they would wind up in the torture chambers. They lived in stark, nearly unbearable poverty; the only comfort was that they all were in the same godforsaken boat. Communism might be a good idea on paper, but in reality, because of the ignorance of the bureaucratic leadership, it was a dismal failure.

    The demise of the USSR would have no effect whatsoever on the hegemonic madness of the US which, under the guiding light of the Monroe Doctrine (established way before the USSR), carries on destroying one country after another. I would ask, “What would the world do without the USA?” Live in a much more peaceful world for sure. As for Omar, I wish her the fortitude to continue telling the truth. Again, Max Blumenthal proves himself one of the world’s best reporters.

    OlyaPola , April 19, 2019 at 05:33

    “constant fear”

    The years of 1928 to 1953 were not constant since there were the years 1954 and subsequent.

    Drew Hunkins , April 19, 2019 at 10:22

    That’s not true Rob Roy. You’re parroting Western capitalist talking points. A whole host of brand new scholarly literature has hit the shelves in just the last few years proving the USSR was nowhere near as horrible as the Washington imperialist media made it out to be. In fact, under Stalin the Soviet Union made substantial gains in women’s rights, literacy, healthcare and industrial wages. Also, had it not been for Stalin’s agrarian plan there would have been more famines and more severe famines.

    And as everyone knows, if Stalin never crash course industrialized the country they never would have defeated Nazi Germany.

    Far from the USSR being a police-state it was often seen as a giant trough in which, for example, rent wouldn’t be paid and no one would come around to collect it.

    Please see the following books for a truth trip: “Blood Lies” by Grover Furr and “Stalin, Waiting for the Truth” by Grover Furr. Also, Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds is excellent.

    Dump Pelousy , April 18, 2019 at 20:52

    Micheal Perenti is the best. He was the Truth To Power voice before 9/11, before all the yuppie reporters sold their souls for “access” and a talking heads show. I watched it happen in slow motion with great dismay.

    mp66 , April 18, 2019 at 22:23

    Spot on. The western owner class was forced to share at least one plate with the rest of the population to make the west appear superior in material terms, and with that incentive or threat gone, there is no more need for a plate, few crumbs under the table should be sufficient. But as usual, greed goes along with stupidity, they forgot that doing so for decades undermines the stability of the system. Trump, Brexit, trade wars, abrogations of treaties, blatant disregard for bare basics of international law etc. are just symptoms of deeper discontent across the globe.

    [Apr 19, 2019] People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars?

    Apr 19, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Al Pinto , April 18, 2019 at 13:25

    Thank you Max, it's a great summary of what is wrong with the foreign policy and why racism is so rampant.

    There are candidates for 2020, who understand and probably share your views. Take for example Tulsi Gabbard in her recent twonhall meeting video:

    hxxps://www.reddit.com/r/tulsi/comments/bbsg8q/reupload_tulsis_most_inspiring_and_controversial/

    Quote from her replies

    "People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars?"

    And just to drive home this point, quote:

    "This is not a joke. This is not about me. This about all of us. This is about our future. About making sure we have one."

    Tulsi did get in to trouble. A day after the video posted on Twitter, it had been deleted by Twitter without explanation

    [Apr 19, 2019] Haftar's LNA has won this war, though many battles will be fought ahead, the LNA has brought a very united support from Egypt, KSA and UAE and with that it brings France, Russia and now the US in supporting it, either as opportunistic, individual agenda or simply to speed up the peaceful process.

    Apr 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Canthama , Apr 19, 2019 4:17:22 PM | link

    The military offensive against Tripoli is more political than in fact a military offensive to overwhelm the enemy. Of course battles are fought but just the fact that heavy weapons (tanks, artillery etc...) were not used in the first few weeks could indicate that the attack was somehow aiming to be fast, to aim fo tribal allegiance shifts or just to make a point. Only in the past week or so we have seen tanks and air strikes taking place, which seems an escalation of the conflict.

    Haftar's LNA has won this war, though many battles will be fought ahead, the LNA has brought a very united support from Egypt, KSA and UAE and with that it brings France, Russia and now the US in supporting it, either as opportunistic, individual agenda or simply to speed up the peaceful process.

    The fact is the GNA is becoming seriously isolated, very few support besides Turkey, Qatar and Italy, all the indication that there is a good chance for Tripoli to saved from destruction in a mix of military/political solution in weeks to come. Key tribal vocal and on the ground support, like Zittan's, will be crucial for this peace process.
    Then Misrata will be a totally different animal, here Muslin Brotherhood/al Qaeda and ISIS are packed and strong, support from Turkey and Qatar is abundant, there is no peaceful solution for Misrata, only annihilation of the filthy terrorists, like in Idlib in Syria.

    Circe , Apr 19, 2019 5:07:48 PM | link

    Trump is supporting Haftar because he is STILL a CIA asset and to keep Russia's hands off Libya. Haftar is also friends with the Egyptian Zionist Sissy and likewise, MbinSaw.

    So now, there's only one smart thing for Putin to do; support THE OTHER SIDE. If he doesn't do this, the U.S. has a CIA stooge ruling Libya, who is friends with all its allies including the most lunatic state of the 3 -- Israel, though all three are ruled by despot nutjobs.

    Putin should at worst remain neutral or support the other side to mess with Trump's geo-engineering.

    Now that Putin and Kim will be holding a summit soon; it would be nice to see Putin f...ck up U.S. plans in Libya too!

    It's about putting up roadblocks to the Empire's geopolitical grab. That's the way you balance power. If ever war breaks out, you want to have as many allies, friendly air space and allied ports as possible. It doesn't mean a World War will happen again, but it could, and geostrategy is good INSURANCE. The U.S. will never be Russia's natural ally, not even close, therefore Putin better play it smart always planning for the worst while hoping for the best.

    Alas, I'm not sure what Putin's thinking lately allowing the lunatic state to attack Iranian military assets in Syria! Too many Zionist oligarchs in Putin's sphere. One day Putin will utter Caesar's last words: Et tu, Brute? Because you sure as hell can't trust a Zionist when it comes to securing your own power!

    Curtis , Apr 19, 2019 5:27:20 PM | link
    So if we want to find who to blame for the increase in oil/gas prices, we should look at Trump's actions?

    AP points to a "rogues' gallery of militias" fighting "Hifter"
    https://apnews.com/76313fb7c3654a1a9270bbd7b4bd96f2

    But only the LNA and GNA are mentioned. I thought there were 3 governments in Libya - one west, one east, and one pushed by the UN. Wikipedia's Libyan Civil War entry adds the National Salvation Army to the LNA and GNA. But the NSA may no longer play a part with the militias rising to the fore. And do the militias support the UN-backed GNA? From what I've read the militias are working together against "one-man rule" of Haftar.

    ADKC , Apr 19, 2019 5:30:50 PM | link
    Circe @12

    Libya is a broken country, Haftar brings stability, the end of the militias, Islamists and slavery. Haftar has already won that is why the US are now supporting him.

    Russia has had a long standing dialogue with Haftar. Haftar will probably gain some sort of independence by balancing these conflicting powers (Russia and US). The US will get oil at the price they want (need) but I expect that Russia will gain most from Haftar coming out on top.

    Haftar was part of the revolution that brought Gadaffi to power - I doubt that he is a CIA poodle.

    Circe , Apr 19, 2019 5:42:32 PM | link
    Haftar was part of the revolution that brought Gadaffi to power - I doubt that he is a CIA poodle.

    Posted by: ADKC | Apr 19, 2019 5:30:50 PM

    Hogwash. You left out the part where Haftar joined the revolution that deposed and murdered Gaddafi after returning to Libya from Langley! Haftar is a ruthless power-lusting butcher and not trustworthy at all!

    Circe , Apr 19, 2019 5:42:32 PM | link karlof1 , Apr 19, 2019 6:35:39 PM | link
    Prestigious Valdai Club offers two new papers about the Libya situation, "Tripoli: Haftar's Blitzkrieg Failed. What's Next?" from today, and "Libya: Tug of War and Foreign Policy Aspects" from yesterday.

    Keep abreast of this important Think Tank's numerous papers, presentations and discussions by watching its Twitter account for announcements.

    ADKC , Apr 19, 2019 6:36:56 PM | link
    Circe @16

    Yes he was part of the forces that overthrew Gaddafi and also connected to the CIA - I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I would very much prefer Gaddafi to still be in power - Libyans almost certainly feel the same (the vast majority felt the same when the uprising happened).

    But Haftar has won and the alternative to Haftar is criminal gangs and Islamist militias. So what choice is there really? Haftar brings a much greater likelihood of peace and stability. But, he won't be bringing back the life that Libyans had when Gaddafi was in charge.

    It appears that he instigated his war in 2015 without the agreement/support of US & CIA and this may well indicate that he is his own person - but this might just be a smokescreen. Regardless, what real choice is there for ordinary Libyans - continuing war, chaos and conflict or accepting that Haftar has won?

    Circe , Apr 19, 2019 7:05:43 PM | link
    ADKC@18

    But Haftar has won and the alternative to Haftar is criminal gangs and Islamist militias. So what choice is there really?

    Wrong. It's not an either Haftar or terrorists situation, dynamic whatever. This falsehood is UAE, SAUDI bullshet propaganda. Wahhabism is trying to take over Libya and Sudan! Wherever the Saudis are involved trouble follows lest you forget Syria and Yemen!

    Haftar is bad for Libya PERIOD. More proof is that before Trump called Haftar to offer his support, he spoke with UEA's MBZ. It all stinks! Leave Libya alone -- hands off! All foreign influence out! That's the best option.

    financial matters , Apr 19, 2019 7:08:35 PM | link
    Nice to see Russia and the US on the same side actually fighting real terrorism. This is a win against the deep state.
    Piotr Berman , Apr 19, 2019 7:11:45 PM | link
    The US doesn't care what murderous thug is in charge.
    Posted by: BraveNewWorld | Apr 19, 2019 3:22:46 PM | 9

    My first thought was -- now they are telling us?

    Of course, HRC put it nicely in a debate with Trump: "you will never see me singing praises for a dictator or strongmen who does no love America." Qaddafi, RIP, did not love America, so he had to go once an opportunity emerged. Maduro does not love America. Sisi may have a kind word now and then etc.

    Circe , Apr 19, 2019 7:13:50 PM | link
    @20 financial matters

    This is not a win against anything or a fight against real terrorism. Quit the bull propaganda!

    [Apr 19, 2019] Why Russiagate Will Never Go Away by Rob Urie

    With 240,000 people employed by DHS to find terrorists, terrorists will be found
    Apr 19, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    Given that Russia's economy today is smaller than Italy's and its military budget wouldn't buy a toilet seat or hammer in the U.S. military procurement system, the question of why Russia would seem a great mystery outside of history. And left unstated is that the U.S. defense industry needs enemies to survive. 'Radical Islam,' an invention of oil and gas industry flacks that turned out to be serviceable for marketing Tomahawk missiles and stealth fighter jets as well, lost some of its luster when ISIS and Al Qaeda came over to 'our side.' And humanitarian intervention ain't what it used to be with Libya reduced to rubble and open-air slave markets now dotting the landscape.

    From 1948 through the early 1990s Russia was Pennywise the evil clown, helping to sell bananas, nuclear weapons and cut-rate underwear around the globe wherever American empire alighted. Costumed 'communists,' locals paid a day-rate to dress up and shout whatever slogans conveyed evil most effectively, were a staple of CIA interventions from Iran to Guatemala to the streets of New York, Boston and Los Angeles. Never mind that the slayer of monsters is more monstrous than an army of evil clowns, as the Koreans, Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Nicaraguans, El Salvadorans, Chileans, Iraqis, Afghanis, Yemenis and on and on, were to learn.

    The big why (?) here would suggest an eternal mystery were it not for the arithmetic we learned as tykes. The U.S. has an annual military budget that is larger than the next seven evil empires combined. Killing people and blowing shit up is what America does. Stated reverse-wise, what is the point of being able to end all human life on earth more than once? Yet the U.S. can do it 3X -- 5X or 30X -- 50X, depending on which analysis is chosen. And while it would be anti-historical to remove mal-intent as motive, an alternative explanation of the militarization of the police is 'overstock,' that there is nothing else to do with the stuff that the Pentagon produces.

    This would seem a tremendous waste of resources under any reasonable theory of their efficient use (e.g. capitalism). The explanation of 'national defense' reads as legitimate until history is brought back in. For a few thousand years, the argument against maintaining a standing army was that standing armies tend to get used. Preparations for armed conflict facilitate armed conflict. The mobilizations for WWI and WWII were mobilizations, not drawdowns from existing military inventory. There is something to be said for wars requiring large expenditures of time, effort and resources from everyone for whom they are undertaken. Otherwise, they are likely to be started lightly.

    The U.S. has long been the most militaristic nation in the world. This probably doesn't read right to most Americans. 'We' are a peace-loving nation that only sends in the military as a last resort, goes the myth. And 'we' changed the name from the Department of War to the Department of Defense. It was early in the twentieth century that U.S. General Smedley Butler proclaimed that 'war is a racket' (racket = organized crime) as he described his military career as a ' gangster for capitalism .' The business of war in support of capitalism had long been a business in its own right, just ask Wall Street.

    When the George W. Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security following 9/11, the obvious question from people who thought about such things was: what are these people going to do all day? With daily briefings presented to Mr. Bush entitled ' Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S. 'before 9/11, the only intelligence failure, if that is what it was, occurred in the White House. Mr. Bush's entourage had been rumbling about going back to Iraq to 'finish the job' since the end of his father's war. How much of a leap was it then to assume that Mr. Bush's WMD scam was a pretext for re-invading Iraq?

    But the question isn't rhetorical. With 240,000 people employed by DHS to find terrorists, terrorists will be found. The basic insight is that justifying one's employment is crucial to keeping it. In this light, the FBI counter-terrorism unit spent its time since 2001 enticing poor and desperate people to claim each other as terrorists. The first person to point out that there are no terrorists would be the first to receive a pink slip. And the same is true of government contracting. Brave entrepreneurs who feed at the trough of military largesse need to justify their existences. If they don't, some other proud patriot will step forward and do so. A logic of necessity becomes a legitimating belief system More broadly, one could argue that manufacturing terrorists has been the strategic goal of U.S. military operations for much of the last century. If you bomb enough villages and wedding parties, people will fight back. Wasn't this the implied storyline of anti-communist agitprop like Red Dawn and anti-Muslim agitprop like Zero Dark Thirty -- if you invade 'our' country and / or bomb 'our' villages and wedding parties, we will fight back. As a business proposition, the more people that are killed, the more legitimate the operation is made to appear. Make the weapons, then employ hundreds of thousands of people to explain why 'we' need to bomb villages. Then make more weapons. page1image256

    Graphic: Time Magazine was the voice of post-War liberalism in the 1970s -- it reflected the opinions emanating from American officialdom through a faux-critical lens. This cover featuring Muammar Gaddafi presaged the Obama administration's destruction of Libya by 35 years. The main difference then was relative honesty about U.S. motives -- 'Oil' was the lede in 1973, where 'humanitarian' concerns drove the American propaganda effort in 2011. Note: 'Arab' was replaced by 'Muslim extremist' following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Source: Time, Inc.

    Propaganda theory is relevant here because of the ease with which the Russiagate story was sold -- all evidence, no matter how contradictory, was claimed to point in only one direction. Contrariwise, Russia isn't the Soviet Union. America's political leaders have long supported strongmen and dictators. The biggest threat to free and fair elections in the U.S. is American oligarchs followed by Israel. The Democrat running in the 2016 presidential election openly manipulated the 1996 Russian presidential election. Russia today is a neoliberal petrostate. Vladimir Putin is admired in Russia because he booted out corrupt American 'advisors' who were looting the country. In other words, Russia today isn't Russia!

    With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and ostensible end of the first Cold War, a ' peace dividend ' of reduced military spending was expected to fund increased domestic spending, the classic 'guns versus butter' formulation shifted in favor of butter. A drop to pre-WWII levels of military spending would have meant 95%+ of the military-industrial complex went away. Following a very brief drop in the rate of growth of military spending in the early 1990s, a recession caused by the looting of Savings & Loans and its aftermath led to the argument that 'the economy' couldn't withstand a reduced military. September 11 th , 2001 was the best day ever for U.S. military contractors. America was back in the business of industrial-scale slaughter.

    Early on, the American defense industry tried a few new enemies on for size. The George W. Bush administration's WMD scam targeted an audience that had been primed by several decades of anti-Muslim propaganda (see Time cover above) tied to oil geopolitics. The only WMDs found in Iraq had come from the Reagan administration in its effort to keep Iraq warring with Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. Current American amnesia over the genesis of Islamophobia is quaint. The New York Times has been demonizing Muslims since the 1970s . It was hardly incidental that 'reporting' on the Iraq war contained breathless descriptions of newly created instruments of mass slaughter.

    However, there were two tacks that propelled the Iraq War forward. Humanitarian intervention had been the liberal formulation for selling the carpet bombing of civilian populations as in the interest of those being bombed. The term was used for the aerial bombardment of civilian populations in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s. And it was the back-up explanation for the American war against Iraq -- to remove an evil dictator in order to liberate the people of Iraq. It was also used to justify the U.S. / NATO bombing of Libya in 2011. To the certain dismay of the defense industry, none of those interventions retained the patina of good intentions once it became known that the target nations had been functionally destroyed.

    Russiagate has been a godsend for those who profit from destruction. As the story goes, the wily Russian bear, led by an evil dictator and newly trained in the technologies of modernity, set loose a witch's brew of inter-continental ballistic internet messages to sow dissent amongst the brothers and sisters of die Vaterland united by their common bond of loving America. For younger readers, the claim that foreign 'agitation' motivated the Civil Rights and anti-War movements, and more broadly, the American Left, has been a mainstay of CIA and FBI propaganda since these agencies were created. Old playbooks are good playbooks?

    Those with a sense of humor, if humor includes installing a drunken buffoon to head a nuclear armed foreign power, might offer that 'Trump' is the English translation of 'Yeltsin.' In 1996 the American President colluded with people inside the Russian government to overturn the democratic will of the Russian people to install Boris Yeltsin as President of Russia. Yuk, yuk -- an unstable jackass was installed to head a foreign government. The 'payback' narrative no-doubt motivated true belief amongst some American officials after 2016. But alas, as with bombed villages and wedding parties, unless you just will not stop fucking with other people, they generally have other things to do than plot revenge.

    None of the propagators of the phony WMD stories suffered from passing off state propaganda as news. The New York Times and Washington Post found themselves on the winning side of the 'fake news' scam to shut down the opposition press. Even Judith Miller, brief heroine of the free press for being 'stove-piped' by Dick Cheney, went on to a well-paid gig at Fox News, wrote an autobiography that more than just her immediate family read and now lives as a 'celebrity.' Heroes of the #Resistance like David Corn, Rachel Maddow and Michael Isikoff have the proceeds from book sales and television appearances to sustain them until their services are needed to sell the next scam-with-a-purpose.

    The economic role of American defense spending will lead to endless iterations of WMD and Russiagate scams until the Pentagon is shut down. And that's the good part. The wars that these scams support are the bane of humanity. Their true costs, in terms of lives destroyed, appear to be meaningless to people living in twenty-room houses who want to live in thirty room houses. Winding down the warfare state would be less politically fraught if people had non-murderous ways of paying their bills. But how was this not understood as the warfare state was being built?

    Finally, apologists for Russiagate claim that it has been nowhere near as dangerous as WMD lies. Let's see: a cadre of national security officials spent two-and-one-half years claiming that it has secret evidence that the President of the U.S. colluded with the leader of a foreign government to assume power and then use his office for the benefit of that foreign leader. Following, the domestic press claimed that the U.S. 'was under attack' and 'was at war' with this foreign power. Meanwhile, the U.S. went about arming anti-Russian militias on Russia's border while unilaterally abrogating a short-and-intermediate range nuclear weapons treaty after publicly announcing that it was 'modernizing' its stockpile of short-and-intermediate-range nuclear weapons.

    Respectfully, this has all been a tad less than constructive.

    Join the debate on Facebook

    Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books. More articles by: Rob Urie

    [Apr 19, 2019] The connection between pro-Israel Lobby efforts and the covert operations and overt invasions of America's national security state.

    Notable quotes:
    "... Blumenthal does chronicle a decades-long panoply of active measures by numerous pro-Israel Lobby figures, groups and think tanks. Yet he fails to explicitly recognize the connection between pro-Israel Lobby efforts and the covert operations and overt invasions of America's national security state. ..."
    "... Julian Assange of Wikileaks was more explicit. Assange named the "country that has interfered in U.S. elections, has endangered Americans living or working overseas and has corrupted America's legislative and executive branches. It has exploited that corruption to initiate legislation favorable to itself, has promoted unnecessary and unwinnable wars and has stolen American technology and military secrets. Its ready access to the mainstream media to spread its own propaganda provides it with cover for its actions and it accomplishes all that and more through the agency of a powerful and well-funded domestic lobby [ ] That country is, of course, Israel." ..."
    Apr 19, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Abe , April 18, 2019 at 23:23

    Behind the Omar Outrage: Suppressed History of the pro-Israel Lobby

    Max Blumenthal's article and his 2019 book, The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (2019), is an impressive exercise in burying the lede.

    Blumenthal does chronicle a decades-long panoply of active measures by numerous pro-Israel Lobby figures, groups and think tanks. Yet he fails to explicitly recognize the connection between pro-Israel Lobby efforts and the covert operations and overt invasions of America's national security state.

    Julian Assange of Wikileaks was more explicit. Assange named the "country that has interfered in U.S. elections, has endangered Americans living or working overseas and has corrupted America's legislative and executive branches. It has exploited that corruption to initiate legislation favorable to itself, has promoted unnecessary and unwinnable wars and has stolen American technology and military secrets. Its ready access to the mainstream media to spread its own propaganda provides it with cover for its actions and it accomplishes all that and more through the agency of a powerful and well-funded domestic lobby [ ] That country is, of course, Israel."

    [Apr 19, 2019] The culprit is most likely the same of always, US and Israel intelligence, acting directly or through contractors...

    Apr 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    librul , Apr 18, 2019 4:54:19 PM | link

    Originally from: Security Breach At U.S. Embassies In Tunisia And Kuwait Almost Caused A Disaster

    Just say, "training exercise".

    Speaking of Tunisia, there were bomb parts being mailed in the other direction - from the US to the embassy in Tunisia.
    The bomb parts were discovered by accident and so the best response was ... "nothing to see here, folks, just a training exercise".

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/tempers-flare-paris-airport-fake-bombs-found-070909988.html


    ----------

    Often wondered what the planned abort scenario was for 9/11 .

    If the CIA etal had indeed wired the towers with explosives
    how would they go about deinstalling said explosives if there
    had been a major muck up and the plans for 9/11 were called off or delayed?

    "Training exercises" is a good cover.

    When Mossad was caught
    by an alert bystander planting a bomb under a car in Tel Aviv, it was
    later announced that it had all been a "training exercise gone awry".
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8377746.stm


    When bomb parts (not yet assembled) mailed to the US embassy
    in Tunisia were discovered by Fedex workers at Charles de Gaulle
    airport the ready explanation was...you guessed it..."training
    exercise gone awry".
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/tempers-flare-paris-airport-fake-bombs-found-070909988.html

    You are probably aware that there were training exercises held
    in New York just before 9/11.

    http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a090801laguardiaexercise&scale=0

    "September 8, 2001: Bioterrorism Exercise Is Held at a New York Airport


    A training exercise is held at New York's La Guardia Airport, based around the scenario of a terrorist attack with a biological weapon"

    And, you probably recall that active anthrax was being shipped,
    although "no one was at fault", for years all over the place.
    That is, anthrax created by the Pentagon that was "believed to be inactive" was actually live anthrax
    and being shipped around the world. But no one was at fault.

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-blames-anthrax-fiasco-on-no-one

    Thus, if someone decided to pull the plug on 9/11 and had to remove
    the explosives from the towers they could have declared
    "training exercise has gone awry". The Pentagon could merely declare that
    they had held an adjunct exercise in the towers and what the biological terror
    exercise thought was inactive anthrax was actually live and the
    towers would need to be evacuated while decontamination took place.

    That could have been the ready made abort-scenario to 9/11 .

    Sasha , Apr 18, 2019 5:42:18 PM | link

    The culprit is most likely the same of always, US and Israel intelligence, acting directly or through contractors...

    As the new panarabic front is being built , a great terrorist event against the US is needed to justify another intervention in the Middle East so as to counter it.

    Nor it would be very difficult to imagine that just after naming the IRGC as terrorist organization, they will be most probably to blame....Sounds like the perfect alibi to unleash the WoT on Iran...

    corkie , Apr 18, 2019 7:38:02 PM | link
    The simple explanation is the the explosives were supposed to end up in Kuwait where our soldier friend would use them for whatever murderous or false flag mischief his owners commanded. The luggage wasn't supposed to be checked by the plebs in Kuwait but due to the mission being cancelled the goods ended up in their hands. The conduit from Tunisia to Kuwait was primed to let the cargo through but there was not enough time to set up the transit from Kuwait to the USA. Hence the discovery by the wrong people.
    Kadath , Apr 18, 2019 8:37:53 PM | link
    Anon @1: Yes, C4 is one of the most stable explosives currently in use, you can throw it, hit it, drop it, shoot it, even set fire to it and it will not detonate, unless you run a electric current through it (even a tiny current like from a watch battery can set it off). Without a detonator the C4 would be almost harmless (there's a tiny, tiny chance a static electric spark could detonate it if the C4 wasn't property prepared for transit). So, assuming there wasn't a detonator with the C4, I would lean to this C4 being smuggled to somewhere to be sold or used in an assassination attempt, rather than an attempt to bring down an airplane.
    BM , Apr 19, 2019 4:15:51 AM | link
    The simple explanation is the the explosives were supposed to end up in Kuwait
    Posted by: corkie | Apr 18, 2019 7:38:02 PM | 17

    Another possibility - in my view significantly more likely - is that the originally intended destination for the explosive was the US, and that the Soldier-Mule was the patsy. I.e. the putative posting to Kuwait AND its annulment were set up to enable means for the bag to go through special handling channels that would normally get only token inspection. The text from LW confirms that inspection was indeed utterly token at almost every step, and the alertness of the Kuwaitis was probably unanticipated because they were out of the loop. One critical stage in the transfer - that an explosive detector would be in the path and switched on - was not adequately planned for by the plotters.

    The aim would most likely be to get undocumented C4 into the US, as whoever planned this operation might well have access to documented C4 in the US anyway. That might well signal planned false flag use, so that the false flag can be more easily be blamed on someone else. A putative culprit might be some minor faction in the Deep State.

    One possible target for the false flag might be Russia/Iran/Hezbolla/Syria/China/Venezuela etc ... but in my view this has the wiff of having a somewhat smaller faction behind it, such as NAZIs/white supremacists. What immediately comes to mind was the incident a couple of years ago where a German NAZI sympethising member of the Bundeswehr smuggles weapons and(?) explosives into a stach hidden in a toilet in an Austrian airport for a planned terrorist incident. I haven't followed it/read anything about it recently, but a large network of NAZI sympethising supremacists was unearthed inside and throughout the Bundeswehr in the course of the investigation. Linked is the well established fact that the NAZI movement have extremely high level and strong infiltration in the German BND, police, judiciary, Ministry of Interior, etc - for example one time when a court ordered the Interior Ministry to hand over documents about NAZI activities in Germany, the Interior Ministry illegally shredded millions of documents rather than hand them over.

    In my opinion, it would be a wise move by Russia to start as quickly as possible a covert collaboration with countries around the world - including relatively minor US allies - to ensure that ALL US embassy incidental traffic, such as the bag in this case, get an effective check for explosives, fire hazards, chemical weapons, bio weapons and drugs, despite the official channels giving only token inspection. The recent surge in incidents (or perhaps only the recent exposure of longstandingly regular incidents??) involving US soldiers and weapons/explosives might be read as an indication of a widespread threat.

    librul , Apr 19, 2019 9:01:53 AM | link
    @5

    @5 I had listed some curious incidences of "training exercises" including a bioterrorism training exercise that happened in New York three
    days before 9/11.

    I am adding to my own personal notes another bioterrorism training exercise that happened just prior to the highly suspicious Skripal poisoning.

    -------

    Add to the list, "Toxic Dagger", a biological/chemical training exercise held
    just prior to the Skripal poisoning. Toxic Dagger is the largest annual British army
    biological/chemical training exercise.

    "Completing the training and exercising against these scenarios provides
    a challenging programme for the Royal Marines to demonstrate their proficiency in
    the methods to detect, assess and mitigate a CBRN threat."

    http://www.defenddemocracy.press/a-very-strange-coincidence-exercise-toxic-dagger-on-the-eve-of-skripal-poisoning/

    https://www.greanvillepost.com/2019/01/20/coincidence-chief-nurse-of-british-army-was-first-to-arrive-at-novichoked-skripal-scene/

    The first person to discover the Skripals was the Chief Nursing Officer of the
    British Army (whose experience includes deployment to Sierre Leone to help
    fight Ebola).
    "An experienced officer, highly connected, who is also known for handling highly
    infectious patients?"

    The nurse claimed later that it was actually her daughter that was with her
    that detected and assessed the Skripal scenario.

    The daughter was 16 at the time and we presume the Lifesaver Award she
    received would be a feather in her cap useful for her imminent application
    for admission to a university. Wonder if Lori Loughlin had thought of
    using such an angle?

    Sunny Runny Burger , Apr 19, 2019 10:57:38 AM | link
    Btw on the Skripal thing does that nurse also run over to every "spice" zombie she sees in public? Anyone in a puddle of their own partly digested booze? Does she go hunting under bridges for heroin addicts and glue sniffers? Does she check on everyone sleeping on a bench or in some doorway? It is England after all.

    Weird hobby she's got and with her kid in tow too :P

    (Yes I'm being facetious about a bullshit narrative straight out of the 1950ies).

    vk , Apr 19, 2019 11:09:29 AM | link
    @ Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Apr 19, 2019 1:00:46 AM | 30

    In that case, the most probable scenario was that this marine simply wanted to ship the C4 to the USA in order to do a terrorist attack in American soil, not to take down a plane.

    [Apr 19, 2019] The USSR was a kind of garantor of sanity of the USA elite, suppressing built-in suicidal tendences. With it gone they went off the rail

    For Western world, especially people of the USA, the collapse of the USSR was really geopolitical catastrophe, as Putin once put it. It unleashed cannibalistic instincts of neoliberal elite.
    Apr 19, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Drew Hunkins , April 18, 2019 at 12:39

    " "Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?" remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski "

    Yeah, I can.

    There never would have been a war on Iraq in 1991 nor an obliteration of Iraq in 2003, which has lasted until the present day. The destruction of Yugoslavia never would have taken place and the wars and proxy wars on Syria and Libya would have only existed in the twisted and depraved imaginations of the Zionist and militarist psychos in our midst.

    TINA never would have been an imperative and the working people of the Western world (primarily the U.S.) wouldn't be in a race to the bottom as it comes to wages, healthcare insurance, poverty levels, infant mortality, life-expectancy, union power in the workplace, secure retirements, and outlandish housing costs. With the demise of the USSR the millionaire capitalist-investor class really took the gloves off and saw no reason to provide the working masses with certain life-affirming policies, it was time to really sock it to the bottom 90%.

    Despite some its faults, the world's people have been paying dearly for the demise of the USSR.

    For further reading on what I've outlined above:
    "Blood Lies" by Grover Furr
    "Blackshirts and Reds" by Michael Parenti
    "Fool's Crusade" by Diana Johnstone
    "Against Empire" by Michael Parenti
    essays and articles by Paul Craig Roberts
    essays and articles by Andre Vltchek

    Al Pinto , April 18, 2019 at 13:31

    In short, without an antidote, the US does what the neocons and Israel decide to do. Welcome to the world of "my way, or the highway" cowboy mentality

    Rob Roy , April 18, 2019 at 20:26

    Actually, people in the USSR lived lives of constant fear (they call it the “Time of Terror”) that their friends, relatives, neighbors, strangers, even their children, would “tattle” on them and they would wind up in the torture chambers. They lived in stark, nearly unbearable poverty; the only comfort was that they all were in the same godforsaken boat. Communism might be a good idea on paper, but in reality, because of the ignorance of the bureaucratic leadership, it was a dismal failure.

    The demise of the USSR would have no effect whatsoever on the hegemonic madness of the US which, under the guiding light of the Monroe Doctrine (established way before the USSR), carries on destroying one country after another. I would ask, “What would the world do without the USA?” Live in a much more peaceful world for sure. As for Omar, I wish her the fortitude to continue telling the truth. Again, Max Blumenthal proves himself one of the world’s best reporters.

    OlyaPola , April 19, 2019 at 05:33

    “constant fear”

    The years of 1928 to 1953 were not constant since there were the years 1954 and subsequent.

    Drew Hunkins , April 19, 2019 at 10:22

    That’s not true Rob Roy. You’re parroting Western capitalist talking points. A whole host of brand new scholarly literature has hit the shelves in just the last few years proving the USSR was nowhere near as horrible as the Washington imperialist media made it out to be. In fact, under Stalin the Soviet Union made substantial gains in women’s rights, literacy, healthcare and industrial wages. Also, had it not been for Stalin’s agrarian plan there would have been more famines and more severe famines.

    And as everyone knows, if Stalin never crash course industrialized the country they never would have defeated Nazi Germany.

    Far from the USSR being a police-state it was often seen as a giant trough in which, for example, rent wouldn’t be paid and no one would come around to collect it.

    Please see the following books for a truth trip: “Blood Lies” by Grover Furr and “Stalin, Waiting for the Truth” by Grover Furr. Also, Michael Parenti’s “Blackshirts and Reds is excellent.

    Dump Pelousy , April 18, 2019 at 20:52

    Micheal Perenti is the best. He was the Truth To Power voice before 9/11, before all the yuppie reporters sold their souls for “access” and a talking heads show. I watched it happen in slow motion with great dismay.

    mp66 , April 18, 2019 at 22:23

    Spot on. The western owner class was forced to share at least one plate with the rest of the population to make the west appear superior in material terms, and with that incentive or threat gone, there is no more need for a plate, few crumbs under the table should be sufficient. But as usual, greed goes along with stupidity, they forgot that doing so for decades undermines the stability of the system. Trump, Brexit, trade wars, abrogations of treaties, blatant disregard for bare basics of international law etc. are just symptoms of deeper discontent across the globe.

    [Apr 19, 2019] What shocked me most from the recent story here about Torturer Gina Haspel lying to Trump wasn't that she did it. The woman has no scruples at all, and her misbehavior is hardly a surprise.

    Apr 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Zachary Smith , Apr 18, 2019 5:09:48 PM | link

    Assuming that it is correct, who might be the most likely culprit?

    Making that assumption, I want to focus on this part:

    The U.S. embassy in Kuwait contacted a contracted private company to send the package to the U.S. on board of an American airline.

    Government is evil. Therefore hiring enough vetted US citizens to run an embassy is to be avoided if a Private Company can be paid to do the same job. It's been done in the Military. NASA. National Intelligence has been "privatized". (think Edward Snowden)

    What shocked me most from the recent story here about Torturer Gina Haspel lying to Trump wasn't that she did it. The woman has no scruples at all, and her misbehavior is hardly a surprise. The NYT piece was just another story about an ignorant old man who can be easily managed. No, here is the part which jumped out at me.

    "Houseflies buzzing around the Oval Office were drawing his attention, and ire.

    After reading that I'd be surprised if there is a competent core of White House GOVERNMENT workers remaining there. Nobody to manage the flying vermin. It took the director of the CIA to send over some flypaper!

    I doubt if the Trumpies could organize a 1-float parade, so the lax security could be almost anywhere in the chain of events. But my present vote is on a Private Company. It might be the transport company. If they don't have junior staffers in the Embassy to run simple missions like delivering a package, they probably don't have an in-house cleaning staff, either. So they may hire some locals to come in and mop and sweep the joint. Inexpensive Outsiders.

    [Apr 19, 2019] The UK government and the media, had lost all moral authority

    Not only they lost all moral authority. UK MSM became openly neofascist in some areas exceeeding the press of Third Riech and the USSR in distortions and falsifications. .
    Notable quotes:
    "... Corruption of government and media, is also exceedingly dangerous, for everyone's mental health. People begin to subconsciously know that they are being lied to, but they cannot accept it, because the lies conflict with their worldview, which quite naturally is based on trust for authority, and that nice man reading the news on TV. ..."
    "... In 2004, Karl Rove in The Bush Government " Guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do' ..."
    Apr 17, 2019 | craigmurray.org.uk
    Charles Bostock , April 17, 2019 at 11:40

    Even if the Skripal affair WAS staged, you shouldn't get too excited about it. In fact, you should be rather pleased because it would demonstrate that the tired, incompetent old UK is still capable of mounting an operation of which young, vigorous, competent Russia would be proud.

    The UK can fake events with the best of them! I would find that reassuring rather than deplorable because it's a nasty world out there.

    John2o2o , April 17, 2019 at 19:07

    I shouldn't be anything. The whole thing shames the UK and is an insult to Russia and it's people.

    Tony_0pmoc , April 17, 2019 at 11:44

    The Government and the media, have not been telling the whole truth for a long time. Sometimes they blatantly lie. Most people still believe most of what they say, as there is an in-built trust of authority, for some very good historical reasons. The Skripal story, made it obvious to a large number of people, that some of it could not be true. Most still believe it or din't take much notice. The arrest of Julian Assange made it clearer, to an even larger number of people, that the government and the media, had lost all moral authority. Still many people didn't take much notice, or were convinced by the lies in the media, that he was a rapist and should be in jail.

    The lies and corruption from government, is now increasingly out in the open. I believe that this is deliberate. I also think that it is exceedingly dangerous for society for multiple reasons. We are conditioned to accept authority as our moral guide. They act as an example of acceptable behaviour. If society as a whole, behaved like government, all trust would break down. Virtually all functions of society are based on trust. Without such trust, nothing will work.

    Corruption of government and media, is also exceedingly dangerous, for everyone's mental health. People begin to subconsciously know that they are being lied to, but they cannot accept it, because the lies conflict with their worldview, which quite naturally is based on trust for authority, and that nice man reading the news on TV.

    I believe this has all been pre-planned, and it will result in a disastrous effect on all society, unless something happens to bring the governments and media back to truth and sanity. I have no idea what that might be, but I expect it will not be pleasant.

    The following was an early warning of the mass insanity affecting The US Government. It has spread like a highly infectious disease.

    In 2004, Karl Rove in The Bush Government " Guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'

    [Apr 19, 2019] HARPER RUSSIAGATERS IN IG CROSSHAIRS

    Notable quotes:
    "... While criminal referrals from Congress are often ignored at the DOJ, referrals from the Department's own Inspector General can hardly be ignored altogether. I anticipate that the release of the Horowitz report, expected in four-to-six weeks will be a bombshell. ..."
    "... Cleanout of the corrupt, inept and ultra-partisan elements of the FBI and DOJ is long, long overdue. ..."
    "... Maybe Assange was arrested to prevent him from testifying that he did not get the DNC emails from the Russians. He has always claimed that he did not get it from the Russians. ..."
    "... http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51442.htm : VIPS Fault Mueller Probe, Criticize Refusal To Interview Assange ..."
    "... There is much evidence suggesting an insider leak as opposed to a hack and the VIPS examination has the forensics to assert it, unlike Mueller who declared, without forensic examination, the emails to be hacked. ..."
    "... There are 1000's of real reasons to take down Trump for his financial crimes. Defending the pathetic loss by Hillary Clinton on "Russia" and "Russians" is xenophobic, indeed racist, cold war propaganda. I suggest you stop drinking the kool-aid. ..."
    "... In 2015 the DOJ-OIG (office of inspector general) requested oversight of the DOJ National Security Division. It was Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates who responded with a lengthy 58 page legal explanation saying, essentially, 'nope – not allowed.' All of the DOJ is subject to oversight, except the DOJ-NSD. ..."
    "... Larry Johnson's separate comment is quite true. Just as gentlemen DO read other people's mail, governments have historically used their covert resources to interfere in other nations' elections to their benefit. Nothing new under the Sun in this. Fully agree that VIPS has made a strong case, along with others, that the DNC emails were just as likely obtained from someone on the premises. ..."
    "... I recall Boris Yeltsin's reelection campaign, when a small army of American political campaign experts flooded Moscow and virtually ran Boris' campaign from a Moscow hotel. ..."
    Apr 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    With all the attention focused on tomorrow's release of the redacted version of the Mueller final report, more attention should be directed at the upcoming report of Michael Horowitz, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, who is looking into misconduct by those who foisted the Russiagate/Trump collusion tale. In recent meeting with two House Republican allies of Trump--Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows--Horowitz indicated that he would be making criminal referrals, presumably against FBI and DOJ officials.

    While criminal referrals from Congress are often ignored at the DOJ, referrals from the Department's own Inspector General can hardly be ignored altogether. I anticipate that the release of the Horowitz report, expected in four-to-six weeks will be a bombshell.

    Cleanout of the corrupt, inept and ultra-partisan elements of the FBI and DOJ is long, long overdue. Horowitz is respected for his professionalism. He nailed the bias by some of the FBI and DOJ people who totally blew it in the Hillary Clinton email probe.

    It may take years--perhaps a generation--to do a genuine house cleaning at the FBI and DOJ. But look for Horowitz to move that process ahead. Much more worthwhile reading than the Mueller report when it is released.

    Posted at 01:15 PM | Permalink

    Tom Wonacott , 17 April 2019 at 03:44 PM

    Mr. Harper

    William Barr's summary of the Mueller report included this section from the report:

    "......The second element involved the Russian government's efforts to conduct computer hacking operations designed to gather and disseminate information to influence the election. The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks. Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election. But as noted above, the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign ......."

    It should be noted that WikiLeaks is under indictment by the DOJ for allegedly helping Chelsea Manning hack into intelligence files - and potentially more charges may be pending against Assange for his 2016 election interference and/or the release of Vault 7. The indictment of the GRU which worked to undermine the Hillary campaign and elect Trump is an important part of the Mueller report.

    I'm not disputing that the FBI may have broken the law while investigating the Trump campaign (as you indicate) - and may need to be overhauled.

    blue peacock said in reply to Tom Wonacott... , 17 April 2019 at 05:58 PM
    Maybe Assange was arrested to prevent him from testifying that he did not get the DNC emails from the Russians. He has always claimed that he did not get it from the Russians.

    In any case it will be interesting to see the actual evidence on the basis of which Mueller has come to these conclusions or assertions - that Russia successfully hacked and disseminated through Wikileaks.

    Fred -> Tom Wonacott... , 17 April 2019 at 07:01 PM
    Nice job Tom, I don't recall any of that highlighting. Did you purposely leave off highlighinging

    "did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government"?

    chris trakas said in reply to Tom Wonacott... , 18 April 2019 at 07:44 AM
    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51442.htm : VIPS Fault Mueller Probe, Criticize Refusal To Interview Assange

    There is much evidence suggesting an insider leak as opposed to a hack and the VIPS examination has the forensics to assert it, unlike Mueller who declared, without forensic examination, the emails to be hacked. It's the lynchpin of the entire investigation.

    One need not be a Trump supporter in order to want the truth to be told because what can be done to Trump can AND WILL be done to the next Democratic president (assuming there will ever be another in my lifetime, not an assumption one should make without caution).

    There are 1000's of real reasons to take down Trump for his financial crimes. Defending the pathetic loss by Hillary Clinton on "Russia" and "Russians" is xenophobic, indeed racist, cold war propaganda. I suggest you stop drinking the kool-aid.

    Phillip Allen said in reply to Tom Wonacott... , 18 April 2019 at 08:29 AM
    Why on earth do you credit any Russian involvement in the Clinton/DNC email affair, when VIPS have conclusively demonstrated that those emails had to have been leaked by someone with physical access, and that they were downloaded to a flash drive and therefore physically taken away and then passed on to Wikileaks. There is no credible evidence yet presented that would support a story of Russian involvement in that leak or its dissemination. FBI/CIA/NSA are all partisan actors in this farce, and any credit given to their statements about anything regarding this affair is profoundly misplaced.

    As to Assange, the DOJ can indict a random dairy cow on any allegation they care to invent, and it would have exactly as much meaning as the Assange indictment. Not saying that powerful factions among our owners and masters don't yearn to kill him or at least lock him away forever, but this stupid kabuki they are using to accomplish their end is vastly insulting to even a minimal intelligence.

    Keith Harbaugh , 17 April 2019 at 07:49 PM
    Anyone have any comment on this?:

    "The DOJ and FBI Influence of Dana Boente " , by sundance, 2019-04-17

    In 2015 the DOJ-OIG (office of inspector general) requested oversight of the DOJ National Security Division. It was Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates who responded with a lengthy 58 page legal explanation saying, essentially, 'nope – not allowed.' All of the DOJ is subject to oversight, except the DOJ-NSD.
    BTW, on the Disquis vs. Typepad comment issue, I like very much the ability Typepad gives to preview comments.
    Harper , 18 April 2019 at 08:50 AM
    Larry Johnson's separate comment is quite true. Just as gentlemen DO read other people's mail, governments have historically used their covert resources to interfere in other nations' elections to their benefit. Nothing new under the Sun in this. Fully agree that VIPS has made a strong case, along with others, that the DNC emails were just as likely obtained from someone on the premises.

    Everything I've seen about the level of Russian interference in the 2016 elections was low-budget, low-level and given the controversial nature of the Trump-Clinton election, I do not believe evidence can ever be established that the Russian actions tilted the outcome.

    A contact in the USIC told me at the outset of the so-called Russiagate probe that there would be hyperbolic outrage and exaggeration of what the Russians did to make it more difficult for foreign powers to do it in the future. Issue was not 2016, but 2018 and onward.

    I recall Boris Yeltsin's reelection campaign, when a small army of American political campaign experts flooded Moscow and virtually ran Boris' campaign from a Moscow hotel.

    I hope the Democrats are collectively wise enough to let the Mueller report land and move on. As one reader commented, the backlash down the line will further damage our already hyper-partisan political climate and make bipartisan governance an impossibility for at least the duration of this generation.

    The Beaver , 18 April 2019 at 08:50 AM
    The SCO's report:

    https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

    448 pages

    [Apr 19, 2019] RussiaGate Is Dead! Long Live Russiagate!

    Apr 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Gerald Sussman via Counterpunch.org,

    Now that Mueller's $40 million Humpty Trumpty investigation is over and found wanting of its original purpose (to retire Trump), perhaps the ruling class can return without interruption to the business of destroying the world with ordnance, greenhouse gases, and regime changes. A few more CIA-organized blackouts in Venezuela (it's a simple trick if one follows the Agency's " Freedom Fighter's Manual "), and the US will come to the rescue, Grenada style, and set up yet another neoliberal regime. There is a small solace that with Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton, there is at least a semblance of transparency in their reckless interventions. The assessed value of Guaido and Salman, they forthrightly admit, is in their countries' oil reserves. And Russians better respect the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny if they know what's good for them. Crude as they may be, Trump's men tell it like it is. And when Bolton speaks of "the Western Hemisphere's shared goals of democracy, security, and the rule of law," he is of course referring to US-backed coups, military juntas, debt bondage, invasions, embargoes, assassinations, and other forms of gunboat diplomacy.

    That the US is not already formally at war with Russia (even with NATO forces all along its borders) has only to do with the latter's nuclear arsenal deterrent. Since World War II, a period some describe as a " a period of unprecedented peace, " the US war machine has wiped out some 20 million people, including more than 1 million in Iraq since 2003, engaged in regime change of at least 36 governments, intervened in at least 82 foreign elections, including Russia (1996), planned more than 50 assassinations of foreign leaders, and bombed over 30 countries. This is documented here and here .

    Despite unending US and US-supported assaults on Africa and western and central Asia, the authors who see postwar unprecedented peace argue that it's Russia and China, not the US, that represent the real threats to peace and deserve to be treated as "outcasts." That NATO has warships plying the Black Sea and making port calls at the ethnically Russian Ukraine city of Odessa and is conducting war games from Latvia to Bulgaria and Ukraine represents unprecedented peace? While NATO, which together has 20 times the military spending of Russia and includes member states along virtually the entire perimeter of Russia, in Western propaganda Russia is the aggressor.

    Although the US corporate media may have missed the news, the rest of the world gets the fact that the greatest threat to peace on the planet is Uncle Sam. In 2013, a WIN/Gallup International poll of 66,000 people in 65 countries found that the US was considered by far the most dangerous state on earth (24% of respondents), while Russia didn't even register statistically on that poll. In 2017, a Pew poll found the same perception of US power and that such a view had increased to 38% and had grown in 21 of 30 countries compared to 2013. Even America's neighbors, Canada and Mexico, see the US as a major threat to their countries, worse than either China or Russia. The mainstream media (MSM) stenographers' myopia in failing to cover this story is not an oversight. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate exposé fame, documented in 1977 the fact that from the early 1950s to the late 1970s, the MSM ( New York Times , Washington Post , NBC, ABC, CBS, and the rest) had regularly served as overseas informers for the CIA. It would be hard to believe that those ties are not still intact given the level of collaboration among the CIA, the MSM, and the Democratic Party in the Russiagate conspiracy drama.

    Context is everything.

    In blaming others for the instability of the Middle East, it is important to bear in mind that for 36 years since Reagan launched air attacks on Beirut and parts of Syria, the US, and its ally Israel, has been using the greater Middle East region as a testing ground for its weapons systems. This has meant repeated bombing and droning of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Kuwait, and Sudan, and increased weapons sales to the region to assure continuous instability and profits. The US has "special forces" operating in two-thirds of the world's countries and non-special forces stationed in three-quarters of them, altogether over 800 military bases and installations in as many as 130 countries (the Pentagon refuses to give the exact number). By comparison, apart from several bases in some of the former Soviet republics, Russia has a naval resupply facility in Vietnam and small temporary leased naval and airport stations in Syria. China opened a combined naval and army base in Djibouti in 2017 and an "unofficial military presence" in Tajikistan. There is nothing remotely close to equivalence.

    We can expect a continuing outcasting of Russia, either under a second Trump presidency or, if the long dark shadow of the Clintons prevails, a Joe Biden White House. Biden claims without the benefit of evidence that currently " the Russian government is brazenly assaulting the foundations of Western democracy around the world ," as if the huge imbalance of military forces and the long history of US interventions against liberal democracies and socialist states were unknown or irrelevant. In his (and the establishment's) heavy-handed uses of propaganda, Biden has learned well the tactics of Goebbels – repeat the lies often enough to make the imperial state appear as the victim.

    With regard to a brazen assault on democracy, Biden might take a cue from Clinton, who knew how to capitalize on her power position by signing off on huge arms sales to the Saudis (e.g., a $29 billion sale of fighter jets to that country to be used against Yemen) and other Gulf States while securing tens of millions of dollars in donations from the sheikhs ($25 million from Saudi Arabia alone) to her private foundation, run by her husband. This is all the more contemptuous given that she acknowledged in 2013: "The Saudis and others are shipping large amounts of weapons clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region and pretty indiscriminately – not at all targeted toward the people that we think would be the more moderate, least likely, to cause problems in the future."

    In other words, she knew the Saudis and other Gulf dictators were arming ISIS (ISIL) and other caliphate actors but continued to keep them as allies and patrons. She also took $800 thousand for her 2016 campaign (almost double what Trump received) and some $3 million for her private foundation from oil and gas companies after approving lucrative gas pipeline in the Canadian tar sands. Part of the foundation staff's business was to arrange meetings of top donors meetings with the then secretary of state. Following Clinton and Obama's lead and without a second thought, Trump has authorized US energy companies to sell the Saudi monarchy nuclear power technology and assistance.

    In foreign policy, indeed, it's hard to see any meaningful difference between Republican and Democratic administrations. Obama and John Kerry sent Undersecretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Victoria Nuland to Kiev's Maidan to cheer on the 2014 coup, hand out sandwiches to protesters, and give marching orders to her ambassador there to arrange for Yatsenyuk to be prime minister and to "fuck the EU." Poroshenko, a regular informer at the US embassy, as WikiLeaks revealed, was already in the bag for president. Biden was brought in to "midwife" and "help glue this thing" by pressuring the still-ruling Yanukovych to step down in favor of the US-designated coup leaders. Along the same lines, Trump's then ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, joined Venezuelan protesters outside UN headquarters in New York, using a megaphone to publicly call for a coup against Maduro. "I will tell you," she told the group, "the U.S. voice is going to be loud."

    Both the Ukraine and Venezuela interventions are in part a grand strategy to isolate Russia. However, the orchestration of a new Cold War against Russia and to implicate Trump as a Kremlin puppet has failed, and the problem for Russiagate propagandists is how to keep the conspiracy theory alive now that Mueller's unsuccessful hunt for 5thcolumnists is in the dustbin . The leading Russia scholar, Stephen Cohen , who has been professionally marginalized because of his skepticism toward the CIA narrative, sees the impact of a larger scandal – the corruption of the Democratic Party and its minions in the media that formed an alliance with the spooks. He asks: "what about the legions of high-ranking intelligence officials, politicians, editorial writers, television producers, and other opinion-makers, and their eager media outlets that perpetuated, inflated, and prolonged this unprecedented political scandal in American history ?"

    Another question is, how would the mainstream media financially survive an ending of Russiagate, if indeed the media moguls allow it to end? This spectacular failure of the "fourth estate" in covering the Clinton and Democrats' defeat in 2016 greatly weakened their trust status, which has been in quite steady decline since the 1970s, especially among Republicans. Democrats tend to look more favorably on the largely partisan liberal MSM for obvious reasons. However, as of December 2018, according to an IPSOS/Reuters poll , only 44% of Americans has much (16%) or some (28%) confidence in the MSM, compared to hardly any (48%). On whether MSM news organizations are more interested in making money than telling the truth, 59% agreed with the former assessment. No known organization has published findings on MSM trust since the completion of the Mueller debacle.

    What is to be made politically of the Russia obsession? Russiagate, which Matt Taibbi calls "this generation's WMD," can be seen as serving three broad major purposes.

    It has given the Democratic Party leadership and its partners in the CIA and MSM a cause célèbre inorder to salvage the status and image of the party and distract from its disastrous electoral defeats from 2008 to 2016. It thereby serves as an alternative reality to the widespread recognition that the ruling forces in the party have no genuine popular agenda and represent corporate, banking, neoliberal, and neoconservative militarist projects designed under Bill Clinton's New Democrat agenda.

    On foreign policy, Russiagate puts the Democrats to the right of the Republicans, similar to the way that John Kennedy in the 1960 campaign accused the Eisenhower (and VP Nixon) administration of weakening America's defenses, which presently enables the energy and defense industries and their lobbyists to unduly influence the perception of international threats and flashpoints. Democrats in the House and Senate voted overwhelmingly for the 2019 $716 billion defense budget, over and above what even Trump requested. In 2018, five military contractors – Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon – provided key political leaders in both parties with $14.4 million in addition to $94 million spent on lobbying efforts that year. Oil & gas spent $89 million on the election campaign and $125 million on lobbying.

    And, third, it serves to stifle the political left in and outside the party and the demands for progressive legislative changes activated by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and by newer members like Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Tulsi Gabbard.

    Where is the center of public political confidence these days? Certainly not with the mainstream media, which is even lower than that for Trump. Even in terms of its vaunted claims of press freedom, the US fares quite badly. Reporters Without Borders ranked the US number 45th worldwide (of 180 countries cited) in press freedom in its 2018 report. Tory-led Britain slid from 33rd in 2014 to 40th– only Italy and Greece were behind the UK among western European countries. And although Trump hasn't helped with his attacks on the media (and more than reciprocated by the media's extraordinarily hostile coverage of the president), the situation wasn't much better under Obama, who threatened whistle blowers in the press with enforcing the 1917 Espionage Act. This is law that may be pressed against the journalist Julian Assange. There still exists no "shield law" guaranteeing journalists the right to protect their sources' identities. Journalism students should be concerned for another reason as well:Newspaper employment between 2001 and 2016 has been cut by more than half, from 412,000 to 174,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    William Arkin, who quit NBC News as a political commentator last January, accused the station of peddling "ho-hum reporting" that "essentially condones" an endless US war presence in the Middle East and Africa. He also took the network to task for not reporting "the failures of the generals and national security leaders," and essentially becoming "a defender of the government against Trump" and a "cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering."

    In his parting comments, he wrote: "I'm alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War?"

    It may be whistling in the wind, but there are more important things to worry about than whether "the Russians" exposed the DNC's perfidious behavior in 2016. It would be more worthwhile for Democrats to demand programs that eliminate child poverty, which is at 20% in the US, compared to an OECD average of 13%. It might also be useful to concentrate a bit more on the white working class and working poor that went to Trump in 2016, whose kids make up 31% of the child poverty bracket (black children are 24%, and Latino children are 36%).

    And while they're at it, they might try to change the fact that the US ranks 25thout of 29 industrialized countries in investments in early childhood education or the fact that the disgraceful American infant mortality rate at 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births is 50% higher than the OECD average (3.9%) . Many of the parents of these less privileged children are serving long sentences in prison for non-violent crimes, the discarded citizens who form the highest incarceration rate in the world. Overall, the Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranked the US 18th out of 21 wealthy countries on measures of labor markets, poverty rates, safety nets, wealth inequality, and economic mobility. On the other hand, the US has more than 25% of the world's 2,208 billionaires. This is American exceptionalism at its worst.

    The corporate-run market system and the calamities it is bringing to the world depends on such distractions. As the New York Times journalist and defender of US global supremacy, Thomas Friedman, has noted, "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." In his view, the system needs protecting, for which his "journalism" and most of the MSM are certainly doing their part.

    Unless the rather soft left within the Democratic Party can somehow capture the public imagination, the Democrats' political agenda, the MSM and their cohorts in the deep state will likely continue to report fake Russian conspiracies around the world.

    Russiagate is a propaganda industry that keeps on giving. In the longue durée of American elections, the question is what discourse will dominate the next campaign – social justice and a rational foreign policy or more aggressive polemics about Russia aimed at a steady pathway to nuclear war?

    J S Bach , 12 minutes ago link

    In truth, "Russiagate" is "Obfusgate".

    There is so much obvious obfuscation and deflection taking place by the (((MSM))) as to real issues and guilty parties in world and domestic affairs.

    People... PLEASE... use the internet... with all of its remaining free and accessible qualities to glean truth. Yes... you will come across countless contradictions, but if you have half a brain to use in the processing of data, you won't find it hard to ascertain what is really going on. It is up to YOU to figure it out... not Tucker Carlson, not Laura Ingraham, not Rachel Maddow. No. YOU.

    Do it. Be confident in your conclusions. Pass along to those you know and love those conclusions. If you do this, the tentacles of truth will spread within this body of jewish lies and serve as our leukocytes.

    [Apr 18, 2019] Honest Government Ad on Julian Assange (hilarious video!)

    Notable quotes:
    "... "Authorized by the united bitches of america. ..."
    Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1efOs0BsE0g

    worldblee on April 16, 2019 , · at 3:56 pm EST/EDT

    That video is on fire! Good stuff!
    Павел (Paul) on April 17, 2019 , · at 9:43 am EST/EDT
    It is funny but the problem remains... I want to see serious hard hitting justice whatever it takes.
    vot tak on April 17, 2019 , · at 8:28 pm EST/EDT
    Oops, wrong "button".

    Kruto.

    "Authorized by the united bitches of america." Yeah, israel's bitches.

    [Apr 18, 2019] LIVE Wikileaks editor-in-chief holds presser on new criminal case involving Julian Assange

    Notable quotes:
    "... Assange has exposed so much of the Obama and Clinton cabal that they and their henchman would try any means possible to not have him extradited. ..."
    "... Bit hard to spy on corrupt world leaders without the internet. Pretty sure Moreno has his own set of enemies, since he's blackmailing or bankrolling everyone in his sight with the backing of Goldman Sachs. Also black kettle, that's the most surveilled building in the world inside and out. ..."
    Apr 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Angelor Not , 1 week ago

    Assange has exposed so much of the Obama and Clinton cabal that they and their henchman would try any means possible to not have him extradited.

    fionnualaable , 1 week ago

    (From a horrified and disgusted Brit) My highest regard for: - the 3 dedicated panelists; - those among the honest Spanish police mentioned; - the brave Ecuadorian journalists pursuing presidential corruption charges; and: - elements of the UN not yet become toothless tigers re basic human rights. I have little if any hope such moral fibre will prevail (or be ALLOWED to do so) in the UK. Corruption and blind stupidity seem to have gone too far here, as they have in the USA, and possibly also even in the remaining "5 eyes" countries. Iberia (Portuguese Guteras at UN) has a chance to triumph in justice over degenerate Anglo-Saxon increasingly dictatorship regimes. Will they triumph? We'll see. The whole world will see. And the world has many many more than a mere 5 eyes.

    Driver Driver , 3 days ago (edited)

    The new president of Ecuador is a real thief. A real crook.

    A M , 6 days ago

    It's disgusting how the governments behave as we've seen the truth in Wikileaks which remains correct and truth 100% of the time...that's what the governments are scared of..... the truth and transparency..... it shows them for what they are hypocrites and lairs......!!!

    Hoomanna Dee , 1 week ago

    Bit hard to spy on corrupt world leaders without the internet. Pretty sure Moreno has his own set of enemies, since he's blackmailing or bankrolling everyone in his sight with the backing of Goldman Sachs. Also black kettle, that's the most surveilled building in the world inside and out.

    Asylees are not supposed to be treated like criminals, he's without charge. The US, Ecuador's current government and the UK are violating international law. And the press is an anemic mess. Our message to them: you're next.

    All journalism utilises sources and those sources are entitled to protection. Not a grand jury. Not a supermax. Not torture.

    ishant 7 , 4 days ago

    In India we call these so called journalisfs as PRESSTITUTES

    nick f , 1 day ago

    The cockroaches dont like when the rock is lifted and we see them for what they are. Assange lifted the rock and now the cockroaches are out to get him.

    Nassau Events , 2 days ago

    It is not surprising that Equodoreian leader has failed the integrity of the country and the people of Equodoreian. The fact that Julian Assange had full asylum was granted to him with full protection, it proved the government before protected the souverign country and its citizens as a country which is respected and free from any kind of being a puppet or slave and master position. Assange' s case is extremely important but in the meantime the position of Equodoreian people are let down on the world platform of shame. The day the new leader left Equodoreian naked.

    Needful Things Company , 6 days ago

    This is so wrong! He needs to be protected. Unless they are bringing him to USA to testify against the Clinton/Obama crimes. We never would have found out anything of the corruption and take down of the USA if it were not for his investigating reporting! Because the crooks got caught and exposed they are trying to destroy him. He acted like a reporter or what they use to be like. Just like the Nixon days but they broke into files. Assange was given information. He was not the spy from what I can gather! They should be thanking him for exposing the crimes that have been going on!

    [Apr 18, 2019] Wikileaks started as a Chinese dissident project which certainly had the support of the US military-intelligence complex. It quickly became something else,

    Apr 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    somebody , Apr 18, 2019 6:52:44 AM | link

    @wisdombody | Apr 18, 2019 3:09:38 AM | 71

    They are the hacker/security blackhat/whitehead scene.
    Another example where the actions of the empire bite back.

    To understand where they are coming from read Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley

    US Tech Companies have an extremely nice "inclusive" "open" "transparent" company culture. People who don't drink the kool aid can deal with it, people who are on the Asperger/Authism range can't. And these are the people extremely gifted for tech.

    Basically US military and secret services believed that Western "Freedom" (TM) was such a powerful advantage in global competition that open anonymous systems connecting dissidents would work to their advantage. They forgot that some people can't do double think.

    Wikileaks started as a Chinese dissident project which certainly had the support of the US military-intelligence complex. It quickly became something else, simply because the people working in the project believed the ideology behind it and could not see that what is right for a Chinese dissident against the Chinese state was not right for a US dissident against the US state.

    With Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison, everything about "open society" "transparency" "free media" "supporting dissidents" is in dispute.

    [Apr 18, 2019] Cover-Up Smoking Guns on Clinton Emails

    Apr 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    TJ , Apr 17, 2019 3:29:42 PM | link

    From Judicial Watch

    Cover-Up Smoking Guns on Clinton Emails

    COVER-UP! Smoking Gun Documents on #ClintonEmailScandal

    [Apr 18, 2019] Were FBI honchos on drugs when they went to such an extent to entrap Trump and smear him as Putin's bitch?

    Apr 18, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    He's turned out to be a ziocon and Bibi's bitch instead. He's surrounded himself with neocons. And he's also Wall St's bitch as his primary concern is stock prices. He wants the Fed to lower already low rates and grow its multi-trillion dollar "emergency" balance sheet even more. The federal government will add a trillion dollars to the national debt each year of his term. Isn't this exactly what the establishment of both parties want?

    In any case, the hammer needs to come down hard on the putschists, so that law enforcement & the intelligence agencies don't become an extra-constitutional 4th branch of government accountable only to themselves. We'll see how far the Trump administration will go in holding these seditionists to account?

    [Apr 18, 2019] The FBI Tried and Failed to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson

    Notable quotes:
    "... One of the many critical questions that need to be asked is who at the FBI directed Felix Sater to try to bait the Trump team with the Putin/Moscow opportunity. Felix Sater, given his long track record with the FBI, did not come up with this idea on his own. He was put into play as part of a fishing expedition to hook Trump into a Russian collusion narrative. Fortunately for Trump, he did not take the bait. ..."
    "... This certainly appears to be part of a broader, orchestrated effort to ensnare Trump. As I noted with respect to the Steele Dossier, the theme of Russian Real Estate deals appeared early on: ..."
    "... Thanks to Mueller, we now know that the cultivation operation did not originate in Moscow nor the Kremlin. It came via Felix Sater who was working for the FBI. Do you think that is a mere coincidence? Jack said... Since I don't plan to read the Mueller report, I would like to ask a question of those SST correspondents who have read the report? What evidence was provided that the Russians hacked the DNC servers and provided the contents to Wikileaks? ..."
    "... If the Russian interference in the election was of the magnitude asserted to change the election, then the failure to prevent this interference belongs to the Obama administration under whose watch it took place. That would imply that Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Lynch and Rogers failed in their jobs. Why are there no calls to investigate this failure? ..."
    "... I think you are on to something important. I suspect the Brits collected on them as well, just in case. When it became clear that Trump was on the road to the nomination, the effort focused on him. ..."
    Apr 18, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    The Mueller Report is damning of the FBI and reveals circumstantial evidence that the FBI was engaged actively as early as September 2015 in trying to entrap Donald Trump in a web of Russian conspiracy. Let's go to the report and you can read the evidence yourself .

    In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately September 2015, Felix Sater , a New York based real estate advisor, contacted Michael Cohen, then-executive vice president of the Trump Organization and special counsel to Donald J. Trump. Sater had previously worked with the Trump Organization and advised it on a number of domestic and international projects. Sater had explored the possibility of a Trump Tower project in Moscow while working with the Trump Organization and therefore knew of the organization 's general interest in completing a deal there. Sater had also served as an informal agent of the Trump Organization in Moscow previously and had accompanied Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. to Moscow in the mid-2000s.

    Sater contacted Cohen on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert), a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately 2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee of I.C. Expert.

    Cohen was the only Trump Organization representative to negotiate directly with I.C. Expert or its agents.

    Please pay attention. It was not Trump that directed Felix Sater to go get a deal in Russia. IT WAS SATER BRINGING THE DEAL (or trying to) to Donald Trump. A key fact not included in this paragraph was the fact--yes, established fact--that Sater was a fully signed up FBI informant. He helped the FBI make multiple cases against the Russian mob and Russian spies. Please go back and re-read the pieces I wrote on Sater:

    Felix Sater--The Rosetta Stone for the FBI/CIA Conspiracy Against Trump? Felix Sater and the Steele Dossier

    My eyes bugged out with the next revelation from Mueller. Here is what Sater says to Michael Cohen, his old childhood buddy:

    On November 3,2015, the day after the Trump Organization transmitted the LOI (i.e., Letter Of Intent), Sater emailed Cohen suggesting that the Trump Moscow project could be used to increase candidate Trump's chances at being elected, writing:

    Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process .... Michael, Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the republican nomination. And possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in . ... We will manage this process better than anyone. You and I will get Donald and Vladimir on a stage together very shortly. That the game changer.

    One of the many critical questions that need to be asked is who at the FBI directed Felix Sater to try to bait the Trump team with the Putin/Moscow opportunity. Felix Sater, given his long track record with the FBI, did not come up with this idea on his own. He was put into play as part of a fishing expedition to hook Trump into a Russian collusion narrative. Fortunately for Trump, he did not take the bait.

    This certainly appears to be part of a broader, orchestrated effort to ensnare Trump. As I noted with respect to the Steele Dossier, the theme of Russian Real Estate deals appeared early on:

    The Kremlin's cultivation operation on TRUMP also had comprised offering him various lucrative real estate development business deals in Russia, especially in relation to the ongoing 2018 World Cup soccer tournament. However, so far, for reasons unknown, TRUMP had not taken up any of these.

    Thanks to Mueller, we now know that the cultivation operation did not originate in Moscow nor the Kremlin. It came via Felix Sater who was working for the FBI. Do you think that is a mere coincidence? Jack said... Since I don't plan to read the Mueller report, I would like to ask a question of those SST correspondents who have read the report? What evidence was provided that the Russians hacked the DNC servers and provided the contents to Wikileaks?

    Jack said... 18 April 2019 at 05:47 PM

    Since I don't plan to read the Mueller report, I would like to ask a question of those SST correspondents who have read the report? What evidence was provided that the Russians hacked the DNC servers and provided the contents to Wikileaks?

    If the Russian interference in the election was of the magnitude asserted to change the election, then the failure to prevent this interference belongs to the Obama administration under whose watch it took place. That would imply that Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Lynch and Rogers failed in their jobs. Why are there no calls to investigate this failure?

    Larry Johnson said in reply to Jack... 18 April 2019 at 06:25 PM

    Read the VIPS memo I posted yesterday. It will answer your question.

    akaPatience said... 18 April 2019 at 05:47 PM

    Wow, what an absolutely smarmy, laughable proposal made to Cohen by Felix Sater. If Cohen didn't stand to personally profit from services rendered to facilitate such a deal, I'd consider it very suspicious that he promoted it to Trump for as long as he did. As it is, knowing how much money lawyers can make in matters like this, the potential for profit can't be discounted enough as motivation.

    I recall a strategy of the Clinton campaign called "Pied Piper", revealed in Wikileaks' Podesta dump, in which an email dated April 7, 2015 discussed the goal of "elevating" Trump's candidacy (along with Ted Cruz and Ben Carson), thinking they would be easiest for Hillary to beat. I wonder if we'll ever learn of a connection with efforts to entrap Trump like this Sater offer, the Trump Tower meeting, etc?

    ambrit (ex Britam) said in reply to akaPatience ... 18 April 2019 at 09:09 PM

    Sirs;

    In mentioning the inclusion of Cruz and Carson in the 'Pied Piper' scheme, akaPatience rightly brings up the question as to whether those persons experienced anything similar to Trump regarding 'entrapment.' Are there 'compromising' files in the FBI archives relating to those other politicians? If so, a broad strategy to 'foam the runway' for the presumed Democrat Party candidate in 2016 could be surmised and the "case" for Trump Russian "collusion" as a specific and sinister plot will be demolished. (At least as far as persons with some shreds of attachment to rationality are concerned.)

    Larry Johnson said in reply to ambrit (ex Britam)... 18 April 2019 at 11:13 PM

    I think you are on to something important. I suspect the Brits collected on them as well, just in case. When it became clear that Trump was on the road to the nomination, the effort focused on him.

    Steven Athearn said... 18 April 2019 at 06:02 PM

    Given the absence of evidence of the Kremlin trying to cultivate Trump or offer lucrative real estate development deals - Irecall hearing that one of the Cohen trial documents had him emailing the Kremlin with regard to the Trump Tower idea at an email address taken from its public website, and the Kremlin replying with a pro forma "thank you for your interest in doing business in Russia" and an offer of two free tickets to Valdai - and given the abundance of evidence for a wide-ranging FBI entrapment operation in coordination with foreign intelligence operatives, the association between the latter and the specific form the disinformation took is practically obvious.

    I haven't read the Papadopoulos book yet (though I have it on hand), but in lieu of that I would recommend the long interview Michael Tracey did with him the other day for an overview of another large chunk of these entrapment operations. Reply

    walrus said... 18 April 2019 at 07:57 PM

    And the characters in this hall of mirrors; Steele, Mifsud and Sater. What of them?

    The entire report is a chronicle of the grubby dealings of the courtiers surrounding any great man, nothing more. My opinion is that President Trump and his organisation successfully navigated through the Russian collusion mine field with only minimal casualties. A minefield laid by Hilary Clinton and her acolytes.

    It almost succeeded - Trump, the Republican Presidential nominee, appearing on stage with his good friend Putin? Imagine what Clinton would have done with that...

    blue peacock said... 18 April 2019 at 08:45 PM

    What were they so concerned about Trump that they'd go to such an extent to entrap him and smear him as Putin's bitch?

    He's turned out to be a ziocon and Bibi's bitch instead. He's surrounded himself with neocons. And he's also Wall St's bitch as his primary concern is stock prices. He wants the Fed to lower already low rates and grow its multi-trillion dollar "emergency" balance sheet even more. The federal government will add a trillion dollars to the national debt each year of his term. Isn't this exactly what the establishment of both parties want?

    In any case, the hammer needs to come down hard on the putschists, so that law enforcement & the intelligence agencies don't become an extra-constitutional 4th branch of government accountable only to themselves. We'll see how far the Trump administration will go in holding these seditionists to account?

    [Apr 18, 2019] This Deep State stooge Mueller now looks like a compete idiot

    Apr 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    somebody , Apr 18, 2019 1:18:58 PM | link

    Barr says that the Mueller report insists that Russia attempted to interfere in U.S. elections:
    First, the report details efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company with close ties to the Russian government, to sow social discord among American voters through disinformation and social media operations.

    How exactly was it established that the IRA intended to "sow social discord". Is there any IRA witness that said so? Any documents? No. It is a made up reasoning. The IRA activities were driven by commercial interests. To get as many page-views as possible IRA personnel posted memes on both sides of the political spectrum simply because that is where the viewership is. Just ask Foxnews or CNN. There was no political intent in the IRA's activity. To claim that it intended to "sow social discord" is baseless nonsense.

    The claims by social networks that "Russians" did this or that are dubious. Twitter for example recently revised its count of "Russian trolls":

    On Feb. 8, Twitter removed 228 accounts from the Russian IRA dataset because the social-media company now believes these accounts were operated by a different trolling network located in Venezuela. "We initially misidentified 228 accounts as connected to Russia," Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of site integrity, wrote in an online post. "As our investigations into their activity continued, we uncovered additional information allowing us to more confidently associate them with Venezuela."
    ...
    Twitter's change to its data undercuts all of these analyses of the troll farm's 2017 activity , Clemson researchers said. There was no surge in IRA Twitter activity in mid-2017, and the high-volume accounts that churned out links to ReportSecret were, in fact, being operated by a different, unknown group operating out of Venezuela, according to the updated data.

    Twitter is reluctant to discuss how it connects accounts to trolling networks.

    Twitter "is reluctant" because the company has simply no way to find that some real person driven account is a "troll". It is a completely subjective judgement.

    How exactly was it established that the IRA intended to "sow social discord". Is there any IRA witness that said so? Any documents? No. It is a made up reasoning. The IRA activities were driven by commercial interests. To get as many page-views as possible IRA personnel posted memes on both sides of the political spectrum simply because that is where the viewership is. Just ask Foxnews or CNN. There was no political intent in the IRA's activity. To claim that it intended to "sow social discord" is baseless nonsense

    That does not answer who paid for the clicks, and what was the information the clicks led to. Basically a foreign power is not supposed to run election adverts.

    Memes on both sides of the political spectrum could very well have been anti-Hillary ads for Republicans, DNC leaks for Democrats, and pro Hillary/anti Sanders stuff for Sanders supporters, the idea being to motivate Republicans to vote and disgust Democrats to keep them from voting.

    Facebook is THE tool you would use to create confusion and cause a break up of social relations, simply by its psychological user profiles and the ability to spread news to some groups but not to others unchecked from the outside.

    Any professional in psychological warfare would have a go just for testing.
    Cambridge Analytics was a British psychological warfare company - and they cooperated with Russia .

    Either business is global or it is not, and if you privatise secret service it is global business :-))

    james , Apr 18, 2019 1:21:25 PM | link

    thanks b... i look forward to your comments after reading the full report...

    "the IRA intended to "sow social discord""... it could be argued social networks - facebook, twitter, instagram and etc. etc. "sow social discord"... is that russias fault too?

    obviously there is way too much subjectivity in all of this.. the fact they cia/fbi are unwilling, or unable to define how the clinton e mails came out is another way to add to the subjectivity here.. nothing concrete - just specualation.. russia released them and etc. etc. speculation... where is the proof as b asks? there is none, but there is plenty of subjective speculation and innuendo - all abusing a foreign country... how ethnocentric and convenient that is!

    here is a subjective thought.. this is just what the usa deep state wants and just what the western msm is happy to fulfill..

    Tobin Paz , Apr 18, 2019 1:31:51 PM | link
    @1 Anunnaki

    Judge rejects Mueller's request for delay in Russian troll farm case

    A federal judge has rejected special counsel Robert Mueller's request to delay the first court hearing in a criminal case charging three Russian companies and 13 Russian citizens with using social media and other means to foment strife among Americans in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

    WHAT A DISGRACE! Special Counsel Mueller Charged Russian Company Not in Existence at Time of Charge!

    What was not yet available until last night was the transcript of the hearing. The reason the Concord Management attorneys called the case a 'proverbial ham sandwich' was because one of the entities indicted by the Mueller team, Concord Catering, was not in existence at the time the crimes were alleged to have taken place.
    chet380 , Apr 18, 2019 2:14:44 PM | link
    One of the Russian companies charged by Mueller, Concord Management and Consulting LLC, hired American lawyers to defend it an American court -- the US prosecutors are fighting tooth and nail to to prevent the obtaining o pre-trial discovery of documents ... 3 million documents have been declared by the prosecutors as being "sensitive" and non-discoverable ... the battle continues.

    [Apr 18, 2019] It seems highly reasonable to conclude the NY Times item has blown away any remaining truthfulness to the Skripal Saga and the entire Saga

    British propaganda is clearly as close to neofascist propaganda as one can get... British neocons are even closer to neofascists then the US neocons. And British security services are closer to the Third Reich security services then any other.
    Skripals is a such a grandiose false flag operation that Gellen (of operation Gladio fame) probably would be amazed and humbled.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The official narrative of the Salisbury incident is ever-fluctuating. Seemingly each and every article, news segment, official statement or documentary about any element of the case contains new information, requiring the established account to be at least partially rewritten and/or contradicting established elements of the story.... ..."
    "... If nothing else, that Haynes was willing to transmit an apparently obvious fiction speaks volumes about the willingness of mainstream journalists to parrot each and every fresh claim in the Skripal case, even if it wildly conflicts with what they themselves have written previously. ..."
    "... Oh dear oh dear.. It appears the UK may be denying there were any poor ducks involved... https://twitter.com/haynesdeborah/status/1118409471754153984 ..."
    Apr 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    karlof1 , Apr 17, 2019 2:19:31 PM | link

    It seems highly reasonable to conclude the NY Times item has blown away any remaining truthfulness to the Skripal Saga and the entire Saga--like Russiagate--can be concluded to be a very serious hoax, and that there's no reason whatsoever to trust anything said by UK's Tory government.

    Undaunted, Kit Klarenberg provides further Skripal update in an extensively detailed article that moves him to conclude:

    "The official narrative of the Salisbury incident is ever-fluctuating. Seemingly each and every article, news segment, official statement or documentary about any element of the case contains new information, requiring the established account to be at least partially rewritten and/or contradicting established elements of the story....

    "If nothing else, that Haynes was willing to transmit an apparently obvious fiction speaks volumes about the willingness of mainstream journalists to parrot each and every fresh claim in the Skripal case, even if it wildly conflicts with what they themselves have written previously."

    Klarenberg's tweet response to Haynes is devastating:

    "Difficult to verify your version of events given it involves nameless officials. Knowing you're often used by security services to peddle propaganda seemed a reasonable assumption they'd urged you to backtrack your earlier advocacy as story detonates official #Skripal narrative."

    It seems highly reasonable to conclude the NY Times item has blown away any remaining truthfulness to the Skripal Saga and the entire Saga--like Russiagate--can be concluded to be a very serious hoax, and that there's no reason whatsoever to trust anything said by UK's Tory government.

    S.O. , Apr 17, 2019 3:34:15 PM | link

    Oh dear oh dear.. It appears the UK may be denying there were any poor ducks involved...https://twitter.com/haynesdeborah/status/1118409471754153984

    [Apr 18, 2019] A bill 'Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act (DASKA) of 2019,' has been introduced in the Senate which will ' require the Secretary of State to determine whether the Russian Federation should be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism

    Apr 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    karlof1 , Apr 18, 2019 3:29:11 PM | link

    Regarding the likely continuance of anti-Russian rhetoric, this Philip Giraldi item informs us of the following:

    "A current bill originally entitled the 'Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act (DASKA) of 2019,' is numbered S-1189 [linked to within item]. It has been introduced in the Senate which will ' require the Secretary of State to determine whether the Russian Federation should be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism and whether Russian-sponsored armed entities in Ukraine should be designated as foreign terrorist organizations.' The bill is sponsored by Republican Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado and is co-sponsored by Democrat Robert Menendez of New Jersey.

    "The current version of the bill was introduced on April 11th and it is by no means clear what kind of support it might actually have, but the fact that it actually has surfaced at all should be disturbing to anyone who believes it is in the world's best interest to avoid direct military confrontation between the United States and Russia."

    Giraldi generally concludes the sponsoring Senators are insane--"The Senatorial commentary is, of course, greatly exaggerated and sometimes completely false regarding what is going on in the world, but it is revealing of how ignorant American legislators can be and often are"--but we just finished a witch hunt fueled by such insanity. Some anti-Projection medication is drastically needed for all too many people wielding power in The Swamp.

    [Apr 18, 2019] Halper, Dearlove, and Haspel propbaly run a join operation to initiate a new McCarthyism compaign. With the cornerstone step of Brannan-sponsored US IC "findings" (17 intelligence agencies agree!! Except not - that was a lie)

    Apr 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Apr 18, 2019 12:59:03 PM | link

    This is important and speaks to the real manipulation of the 2016 Presidential election: How Has Former MI6 Spymaster Richard Dearlove Dodged Scrutiny Despite Links To Russiagate?

    One wonders if Halper, Dearlove, and Haspel ran the 'op' to initiate a new McCarthyism. Reinforced by US IC "findings" (17 intelligence agencies agree!! Except not - that was a lie) pushed by Brennan and Clapper.

    Then consider what appears to be a cover-up by Mueller, Comey, and Barr (Note: Mueller is Comey's mentor and Barr is close friends with Mueller) as outlined here: New VIPS Memo :

    So, if it wasn't the Russians, [then] who left the "Russian" bread-crumb "fingerprints?" We do not know for sure; on this question we cannot draw a conclusion based on the principles of science -- at least not yet. We suspect, however, that cyber warriors closer to home were responsible for inserting the "tell-tale signs" necessary to attribute "hacks" to Russia....

    Binney, a plain-spoken, widely respected scientist, began by telling Pompeo that his (CIA) people were lying to him about Russian hacking and that he (Binney) could prove it. Pompeo reacted with disbelief, but then talked of following up with the FBI and NSA. We have no sign, though, that he followed through.... [Furthermore[ we told Attorney General Barr five weeks ago, [that] we consider Mueller's findings fundamentally flawed on the forensics side and ipso facto incomplete. We also criticized Mueller for failing to interview willing witnesses with direct knowledge, like WikiLeaks' Julian Assange.

    If, as we strongly suspect, Mueller is relying for forensics solely on CrowdStrike, the discredited firm hired by the DNC in the spring of 2016, he is acting more in the mold of Inspector Clouseau than the crackerjack investigator he is reputed to be....

    You [addressing Pres. Trump] may be unaware that in March 2017 lawyers for Assange and the Justice Department (acting on behalf of the CIA) reportedly were very close to an agreement under which Assange would agree to discuss "technical evidence ruling out certain parties" in the leak of the DNC emails" and agree to redact some classified CIA information, in exchange for limited immunity. According to the investigative reporter John Solomon of The Hill, Sen. Mark Warner, D,VA, Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, learned of the incipient deal and told then-FBI Director Comey, who ordered an abrupt "stand down"and an end to the discussions with Assange.

    Lastly, given the above, isn't it curious that Trump himself happened to further Russiagate suspicions and the Wikileaks sting by: hiring Manafort, appealing to Wikileaks and Russia to release emails, frequently praising Putin?

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    IMO the Deep State had two main objectives in the 2016 Presidential election: elect a nationalist President and initiate a new McCarthism. Discrediting Wikileaks ran a close third. And settling scores with Flynn was also important to them (Flynn had told the world that the Obama Administration made a "willful decision" to support ISIS).

    [Apr 18, 2019] What will happen once Nord Stream II is finished? Where is Europe heading next, especially in its relationship with the USA and Russia?

    Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

    The Saker: What will happen once Nord Stream II is finished? Where is Europe heading next, especially in its relationship with the USA and Russia?

    Dmitry Orlov: The new pipelines under the Baltic and the Black Sea will be completed, along with the second LNG installation at Sabetta, and Russia will go on supplying natural gas to Europe and Asia. I suspect that the fracking extravaganza in the US is entering its end game and that the dream of large-scale LNG exports to Europe will never materialize.

    The nations of Europe will gradually realize that its relationship with Russia is mostly beneficial while its relationship with the US is mostly harmful, and will make certain adjustments. The Ukraine, its natural gas pipeline system decrepit and beyond repair, will continue to import natural gas from Europe, only now the methane molecules will actually flow to it from the west rather from the east.

    [Apr 18, 2019] Post Putin Russia. Will it survive and prosper?

    Notable quotes:
    "... I fear that in the new liberalist oligarchic Russia they have managers (generally trained in very expensive western universities/think thank) but not statesmen and overall statesmen with an original strategic view for a national independent interest like the old USSR had. ..."
    "... It means TPTB already have a generation of brainwashed liberal narratives in key positions in Russia. It takes a 15-20 years to build up a new generation of nationalists and defenders of their heritage, so this could easily take 50-100 years to change if ever ..."
    Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

    SallysDad on April 17, 2019 , · at 11:03 am EST/EDT

    I don't completely agree . or perhaps I should say, I am concerned, mostly for Russia.

    Good management practices can be applied to anything, positive or negative, and Orlov points out that there seems to be a new generation of "professional" politicians developing in Russia. This worries me as such people have a way of wanting to stay in power at almost any cost, and not always considering the well being of the country.

    Will they have the real world experience of Putin? I don't know. Will they be fooled by the West's propaganda? Have to wait and see.

    The Russian leaders who went through WW2 had a vision and experience which you can't buy and this saved the world many times over.

    But one thing I am certain of, Russia is a greater hope for the world than is the US.

    Michael 0 on April 17, 2019 , · at 4:12 pm EST/EDT
    I fear that in the new liberalist oligarchic Russia they have managers (generally trained in very expensive western universities/think thank) but not statesmen and overall statesmen with an original strategic view for a national independent interest like the old USSR had.

    For the near future a simple copy of a normal western state (colony). And perhaps that future is already here.

    Tomsen on April 17, 2019 , · at 7:53 pm EST/EDT
    @Michael 0

    "new liberalist oligarchic Russia have managers (generally trained in very expensive western universities/think thanks)".

    If thats true, its depressing. Shiny globo-homo eyes having Europe in their heart.

    It means TPTB already have a generation of brainwashed liberal narratives in key positions in Russia. It takes a 15-20 years to build up a new generation of nationalists and defenders of their heritage, so this could easily take 50-100 years to change if ever

    [Apr 18, 2019] OSCE observers released their preliminary report on the results of the first round of the presidential election

    Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

    JJ on April 17, 2019 , · at 1:53 pm EST/EDT

    https://rusemb.org.uk/fnapr/6790

    Not sure if extensive Lavrov interview earlier in April was reported on saker ..extract

    "Question: Have you seen any grounds for optimism in the results of the first round of the presidential election in Ukraine?

    Sergey Lavrov: To be honest, I haven't seen any grounds for either optimism or pessimism. What's the point of guesswork? This is a process that should take place and will be completed. I do not doubt this or that the West will recognise this election.

    OSCE observers released their preliminary report on the results of the first round of the presidential election, which abounds in examples of flagrant violations: corruption, bribery, pressure on voters and many other things. However, all this is described in a neutral tone. I think if they wrote about us, they would present these facts emotionally. Now they are doing it in an understated way and conclude that this did not affect the legitimacy of the election. Neither was it affected by the flagrant violation of OSCE rules when our observers were kicked out and over three million Ukrainians working and living in Russia were deprived of the right to vote. These are facts of life in Ukraine.

    I think that the results of the election and the way it was organised came as no surprise to those who have been following domestic developments in Ukraine and its external ties. They are already calling each other puppets It's probably interesting to watch from the side but I don't think that Ukrainian citizens are happy about this kind of democracy.

    Question: Are the prospects of Russia-Ukraine cooperation still vague?

    Sergey Lavrov: We are open to dialogue if the aim is not chatting and looking for excuses to do nothing but rather the practical implementation of the Minsk agreements. I have no doubt that Petr Poroshenko does not want to do this and won't do this. When Viktor Medvedchuk just suggested seriously discussing what autonomous rights may be granted to Donbass, he was called a traitor. Poroshenko said this will never happen although he himself signed a document on the special status of Donbass, which is described with sufficient detail in the Minsk agreements.

    These provisions on what rights Donbass should have were formulated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel personally, among others, but her ward has got out of hand. This is a fact. On the one hand, he doesn't listen to Germany or France because he has American "patrons". On the other hand, they find it embarrassing to pressure him in public because by doing so they will admit that what they call their "mediation" has failed.

    However, there is no other document except for the Minsk agreements. They can certainly be supplemented. For instance, it is possible to provide OSCE observers with UN armed guards, as we suggest in response to the apprehensions of Ukrainians about their safety. But the core of these agreements must remain unchanged. The main point is that all issues are settled directly between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk .."

    [Apr 18, 2019] The USA Ukrainian endgame is to carve another Poland from the Russian population, as a means to weaken the Russian State

    Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

    Latinoamericano on April 17, 2019 , · at 12:20 pm EST/EDT

    The Toltec sages used to say: "To really know something means that it must also entail the knowledge of what course of action to take. And once you know what to do, you actually do it". So they firmly stated that the only worthy knowledge is a functional one. Normally, the trascendental matters were integrally consulted with the "Eagle" (i.e. the Entity out there with limitless consciousness, which sounds pretty much like "God") through a link that in the west is ignorantly dismissed as "intuition". This to remark that the big decisions must not rely entirely on the rational part, because it is too prone to make mistakes.
    We all know who the adversary is: it's not the AZE (AngloZionist Empire) per se, it's who rule the Empire. And what they are doing in Ukraine is pretty clear:

    * The endgame is to carve another Poland from the Russian population, as a means to weaken the Russian State. The steps are obvious and unfortunately, maybe definitive: zioimposed religious schism, forceful and exclusive use of "Ukrainian" from 2020 on, denial to belong to other country different from "Ukraine" (a patchwork assembled through land thefts). Fortunately Russia recovered Crimea, and the mining/industrial regions are disputed, but the Khazarians control 2 critical assets: the other coastal oblasts and the chernozem soils.

    * Stating that Russia cannot absorb Novorossiya is bullsh¡t. Germany, a smaller economy with no sovereign government could absorb the RDA. If Russia doesn't decide, the situation will decide by itself. Russia is already receiving a lot of displaced Russians, plus tons of Russians in Ukraine who became the source of cheap labor for Russian companies. And what about the costs of humanitarian assistance and military support to Russians under the Ukraine dictatorship? Let's say it takes 30 years to revert the decay, so what? Russia has been around longer and has had successful comebacks under way more destruction.

    * The Donbass people already decided twice, by clear majority of the popular vote, to become part of the Russian Federation. The right thing to do is simply accepting them. Not doing so sends the signal that no matter what the other southwestern Oblasts do, they will not be accepted either. Russia should openly support the Russians in the southeast of Ukraine who want to secede and reintegrate with the Russian Federation.

    For example, financing a reunification party, granting contracts and jobs to the Russian allies there, logistically supporting a secession movement, even militarily, because the Khazarians will not let go without bloodshed.

    [Apr 18, 2019] The Saker interviews Dmitry Orlov

    Notable quotes:
    "... Thus, there is an objective reason to prefer Zelensky over Poroshenko, which is that Poroshenko is a major thief while Zelensky isn't one yet, but it must be understood that this difference will begin to equalize the moment after Zelensky's inauguration. In fact, the elites in Kiev are currently all aquiver over their ingenious plan to sell off all of Ukraine's land to foreign investors (no doubt pocketing a hefty "fee"). ..."
    "... The platforms of all the 30+ candidates were identical, but this makes no difference in a country that has surrendered its sovereignty. In terms of foreign relations and strategic considerations, the Ukraine is run from the US embassy in Kiev. ..."
    "... n terms of its internal functioning, the main prerogative of everyone in power, the president included, is thievery. Their idea is to get their cut and flee the country before the whole thing blows up. ..."
    "... Another option would be for Poroshenko to cheat his way past the second round (in an even more heavy-handed manner, since this time he is behind by over 30%), in which case Zelensky could theoretically contest the result in court and win. This would invalidate the entire election and leave Poroshenko in charge until the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat. Are you excited yet? ..."
    "... None of this matters, because we don't know which of the two is the US State Department's pick. Depending on which one it is, and regardless of the results of any elections or lawsuits, a giant foot will come out of the sky and stomp on the head of the other one. ..."
    Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

    ... ... ...

    ­ The Saker: What is your take on the first round of Presidential elections in the Ukraine?

    Dmitry Orlov: The first round of the elections was an outright fraud. The object of the exercise was to somehow allow president Poroshenko to make it into the second round. This was done by falsifying as many votes as was necessary. In a significant number of precincts the turnout was exactly 100% instead of the usual 60% or so and counted votes from people who had moved, died or emigrated. All of these fake votes went to Poroshenko, allowing him to slither through to the second round.

    Now the fight is between Poroshenko and a comedian named Vladimir Zelensky. The only difference between Poroshenko and Zelensky, or any of the other 30+ people who appeared on the ballot, is that Poroshenko has already stolen his billions while his contestants have not had a chance to do so yet, the only reason to run for president, or any elected office, in the Ukraine, being to put oneself in a position to do some major thieving.

    Thus, there is an objective reason to prefer Zelensky over Poroshenko, which is that Poroshenko is a major thief while Zelensky isn't one yet, but it must be understood that this difference will begin to equalize the moment after Zelensky's inauguration. In fact, the elites in Kiev are currently all aquiver over their ingenious plan to sell off all of Ukraine's land to foreign investors (no doubt pocketing a hefty "fee").

    The platforms of all the 30+ candidates were identical, but this makes no difference in a country that has surrendered its sovereignty. In terms of foreign relations and strategic considerations, the Ukraine is run from the US embassy in Kiev. I

    n terms of its internal functioning, the main prerogative of everyone in power, the president included, is thievery. Their idea is to get their cut and flee the country before the whole thing blows up.

    It remains to be seen whether the second round of elections will also be an outright fraud and what happens as a result. There are many alternatives, but none of them resemble any sort of exercise in democracy. To be sure, what is meant by "democracy" in this case is simply the ability to execute orders issued from Washington; inability to do so would make Ukraine an "authoritarian regime" or a "dictatorship" and subject to "regime change." But short of that, nothing matters.

    The machinations of Ukraine's "democrats" are about as interesting to me as the sex lives of sewer rats, but for the sake of completeness, let me flowchart it out for you. Poroshenko got into second round by outright fraud, because the loss of this election would, within the Ukrainian political food chain, instantly convert him from predator to prey. However, he was none too subtle about it, there is ample proof of his cheating, and the contender he squeezed out -- Yulia Timoshenko -- could theoretically contest the result in court and win. This would invalidate the entire election and leave Poroshenko in charge until the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat.

    Another option would be for Poroshenko to cheat his way past the second round (in an even more heavy-handed manner, since this time he is behind by over 30%), in which case Zelensky could theoretically contest the result in court and win. This would invalidate the entire election and leave Poroshenko in charge until the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat. Are you excited yet?

    None of this matters, because we don't know which of the two is the US State Department's pick. Depending on which one it is, and regardless of the results of any elections or lawsuits, a giant foot will come out of the sky and stomp on the head of the other one.

    Of course, it will all be made to look highly democratic for the sake of appearances. The leadership of the EU will oblige with some golf claps while choking back vomit and the world will move on.

    [Apr 18, 2019] The Ukrainian State Investigation Bureau launched a criminal case on "the intentional surrender" of Crimea against Verkhovna Rada Speaker Andrei Paruby, Secretary of the Ukrainian Council of National Security and Defense Alexander Turchinov, former Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk and others

    If Poroshenko loses all those guys probably need to use their green cards ASAP ;-)
    Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

    JJ on April 17, 2019 , · at 7:26 am EST/EDT

    KIEV, April 17. /TASS/. The Ukrainian State Investigation Bureau launched a criminal case on "the intentional surrender" of Crimea against Verkhovna Rada Speaker Andrei Paruby, Secretary of the Ukrainian Council of National Security and Defense Alexander Turchinov, former Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk and others, the Ukrainian law union Aver Lex told TASS on Wednesday.

    READ ALSO

    Court finds Yanukovich not guilty of 'losing Crimea' -- attorney
    "The State Investigation Bureau opened a criminal case on the intentional surrender of Crimea, violent upheaval, treason and the organization of mass murders on the 'maidan' in 2014 by Ukraine's top officials, in particular by Arseny Yatsenyuk, Alexander Turchinov, Andrei Paruby, [former head of Ukraine's Security Service] Valentin Nalivaichenko, [Verkhovna Rada member] Sergei Pashinsky, [Permanent Representative to the UN] Yuri Sergeyev, [Kiev Mayor] Vitaly Klichko, [head of the Freedom nationalist party] Oleg Tyagnibok, [former Acting Defense Minister] Igor Tenyukh, [Prosecutor General] Yuri Lutsenko, [Defense Minister] Stepan Poltorak and others," Aver Lex said.

    More:
    http://tass.com/world/1054070

    Wow .determined to throw out the old crowd?????????

    Mulga Mumblebrain on April 17, 2019 , · at 6:52 pm EST/EDT
    It gets messy when rats turn on each other-but is entertaining when they are the 'human' sub-species.

    [Apr 18, 2019] Honest Government Ad on Julian Assange (hilarious video!)

    Notable quotes:
    "... "Authorized by the united bitches of america. ..."
    Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1efOs0BsE0g

    worldblee on April 16, 2019 , · at 3:56 pm EST/EDT

    That video is on fire! Good stuff!
    Павел (Paul) on April 17, 2019 , · at 9:43 am EST/EDT
    It is funny but the problem remains... I want to see serious hard hitting justice whatever it takes.
    vot tak on April 17, 2019 , · at 8:28 pm EST/EDT
    Oops, wrong "button".

    Kruto.

    "Authorized by the united bitches of america." Yeah, israel's bitches.

    [Apr 18, 2019] NYT reported on children and ducks not merely as a quote of CIA director, but as a straight fact.

    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Piotr Berman , Apr 17, 2019 1:53:14 PM | link

    I am not sure if it is clear for folks on the far side of NYT paywall that NYT reported on "children and ducks" not merely as a quote of CIA director, but as a straight fact. This is the caption of one of the photos illustrating the article: "A former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter were poisoned last year in Britain in a slipshod attack that also sickened children, killed ducks and required careful cleanup.CreditWill Oliver/EPA, via Shutterstock"

    Zachary Smith , Apr 17, 2019 1:59:53 PM | link

    @ Grieved #74

    I'm willing to believe a lot of things about the Brits and Haspel, but "stupid" isn't one of them. That they tried the Skripal stunt demonstrates they had great confidence in their control of the UK and US press, and I'll concede that confidence was justified.

    karlof1 , Apr 17, 2019 5:44:31 PM | link

    KC @107--

    Note Haspel hasn't denied any aspect of the news item.

    Why perpetrate a hoax like the Skripal Saga, which was all too real for the one confirmed dead.

    Taregt: Russia

    Why? Previous sanctions not performing as anticipated--indeed, they are actually backfiring.

    But if that policy line's already a proven failure, why double-down?
    When faced with failure, Neocons always double-down.

    Meanwhile, sanctions employed for almost 4 years when Skripal Act 1 begins clearly aren't working, which brings up the question of how Russia is actually perceived by the genuine International Community--did the provocations and sanctions diminish Russia's standing in the world prior to March 2018?

    Given ever growing attendance to Russian sponsored and located symposiums, Russia's reputation seems to be growing at the expense of the smearing nations.

    Motive for Skripal Hoax: To do what sanctions couldn't.

    Outcome of Skripal Hoax: Russian reputation higher than ever. Indeed, the two hoaxes have had the opposite affect on Russia's international standing and the entire sanctions regime helped to make Russia stronger than it otherwise would be without their imposition.

    [Apr 18, 2019] The problem with the west is not so much cultural as it is economic the west is a giant Ponzi scheme that must ultimately collapse as all 'financialized' economies have collapsed since the beginning of money as any careful reader of Michael Hudson can tell you

    Apr 18, 2019 | thesaker.is

    FB on April 17, 2019 , · at 5:05 pm EST/EDT

    Well after reading the entire piece, I must admit I'm not impressed

    The main global dynamic right now is the Chinese industrial and economic juggernaut a geopolitically resurgent Russia and the unraveling of the dollar dominated global financial order

    The problem with the west is not so much cultural as it is economic the west is a giant Ponzi scheme that must ultimately collapse as all 'financialized' economies have collapsed since the beginning of money as any careful reader of Michael Hudson can tell you

    One morning we will wake up and the machine will be out of gas simple as that no money no funny

    That's why the rest of the world is moving toward a trading system that circumvents the dollar, or any kind of so-called 'reserve' currency the US itself is shoving this process forward by weaponizing trade and finance by means of sanctions gone wild

    There does not need to be any kind of universal trading currency in the digital age it is simply a matter of putting the settlement mechanisms in place and more important, bypassing the HUMAN exchange networks now in place ie the old boys club through which dollar denominated global trade now flows

    Once these processes mature, there will be no way of perpetuating the western financial Ponzi scheme it has crashed before most recently a decade ago but has been kept on life support by negative interest rates, plus further impoverishment of the marginal class but once the reserve currency is gone, and with it the ability to print free money the machine is dead for good

    At that point the west needs to earn its living the honest way that may be a tough transition

    [Apr 17, 2019] Haspel is not the "underling". Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Haspel is not the "underling" . Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy. ..."
    "... In the real organization chart for the empire the CIA is above the President. This has been the case in the US since Kennedy. ..."
    "... Trump will not fire Haspel. He can't. He's just an actor playing a role in a show, and Haspel is one of the producers/writers of that show. If she doesn't put firing in the script then Trump cannot say those lines. I doubt he really wants to anyway. ..."
    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    William Gruff , Apr 16, 2019 4:41:41 PM | link

    "If Trump were not in on the schemes he would just fire his underlings!"

    This sentiment indicates a failure to understand the power dynamics at play here. Haspel is not the "underling" . Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy.

    In the real organization chart for the empire the CIA is above the President. This has been the case in the US since Kennedy.

    Trump cannot fire Haspel or Pompeo. They can fire him, though, and with a sniper's bullet if they want.

    Unfortunately for the oligarchy, that would cause additional complications at a time when they have lots of tricky and inexplicably unstable (for them) operations ongoing, which is why they are just steering Trump around instead of replacing him. And Trump is willfully cooperating, even if they are not filling him in on the plans.

    Trump will not fire Haspel. He can't. He's just an actor playing a role in a show, and Haspel is one of the producers/writers of that show. If she doesn't put firing in the script then Trump cannot say those lines. I doubt he really wants to anyway.

    [Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    karlof1 , Apr 16, 2019 7:26:23 PM | link

    Ah yes, Prescient observation regarding Venezuela:

    "The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status."--John McEvoy

    So, lets employ this maxim to Russiagate and the Skripal Saga and the respective national media. In the first case, the Russian public's completely ignored unless it's a member of the so-called opposition while Putin and Russia get slandered constantly. The same treatment goes for the UK media and a case could be made that the two act in tandem, implying innerconnectivity between their spy agencies as suspected.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Six US Agencies Conspired ...

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    "Here is what we now know, per intelligence gleaned form federal law enforcement sources with insider knowledge of what amounts to a plot by U.S. intelligence agencies to secure back door and illegal wiretaps of President Trump's associates:

    Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA’s Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself. To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ. The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial of two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump associates. GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping surveillance on Trump associates. The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump’s associates appear compromised. Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner. After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian lawyer at the meeting Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK, federal sources said. By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole to wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones and emails of U.S. citizens inside the United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil at Fort Meade. The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the evidence is considered “poisoned fruit.”

    -----------.

    Someone left this link in a comment to LJ, but as ringmaster of this circus, I choose to publish this as the best summary of all the threads of the supposed conspiracy that I have seen thus far. pl

    https://truepundit.com/exclusive-six-u-s-agencies-conspired-to-illegally-wiretap-trump-british-intel-used-as-front-to-spy-on-campaign-for-nsa/

    Chris Fahlman said...

    Wikipedia page on Paul Manafort says that the FBI began a criminal investigation into him in 2014, associated with his previous dealings in Ukraine. He could have been a target of surveillance and wiretapping since then.

    I therefore think Manafort was the key the intelligence agencies used to get to into Trump's organisation. It may have been initially incidental to their ongoing, and much earlier surveillance of Manafort.

    Robert Poling said...

    Thank-you for this summary. If confirmed, Brennan (and others in the group he formed to spy on Trump and Trump's campaign) should go to jail. Congress specifically forbid American spy agencies spying on American citizens in the U.S. Since that Congressional action, the CIA and NSA have gotten around it by having foreign partners among the 'five eyes' do the collecting and then passing the information back to us.

    The spying on Trump was done at the behest of Obama and his minions. I'm reminded of an American president who was hounded from office by the mainstream press for sending minions to spy and collect dirt at the opposition's political headquarters. He had to resign and leave office. Several involved in the burglary went to jail and lost their livelihoods. Why is this situation today any different and why is there a delay in prosecuting them? It's because the major media is bought out and controlled by Trump's political opponents and not demanding justice, indeed is providing cover and excuses for them

    [Apr 17, 2019] Deep State and the FBI Federal Blackmail Investigation

    Highly recommended!
    Intelligence agencies, once created, has their own development dynamics and tend to escape from the control of civilians and in turn control them. Such an interesting dynamics. In any case, the intelligence agencies and first of all top brass of those agencies constitute the the core of the "deep state". Unlike civiliant emplorres they are protected by the veil of secrecy and has access to large funds. Bush the elder was probably the first deep state creature who became the president of the USA, but "special relationship" of Obama and Brennan is also not a secret.
    Another problem is that secrecy and access to surveillance, Which gives intelligence agencies the ability to blackmail politicians.
    Availability of unaccounted financial resources make them real kingmakers. In a sense, as soon as such agencies were created the tail started waging the dog.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry Truman (1943-53) reportedly characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five decades – as the nation's top law enforcer? ..."
    "... One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb. ..."
    "... JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ. Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ into the White House. ..."
    "... However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald – a cover-up that persists to this day. ..."
    "... But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career. ..."
    "... Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others ..."
    Feb 23, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

    No other individual in modern US history has a more sinister legacy than John Edgar Hoover, the founder and lifetime director of the FBI. He founded the bureau in 1924 and was its director until his death in 1972 at the age of 77.

    Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry Truman (1943-53) reportedly characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five decades – as the nation's top law enforcer?

    J Edgar Hoover and his henchmen kept files on thousands of politicians, judges, journalists and other public figures, according to biographer Anthony Summers. Hoover ruthlessly used those files on the secret and often sordid private lives of senior public figures to control their career conduct and official decisions so as to serve his interests.

    And Hoover's interests were of a rightwing, anti-communist, racist bigot.

    Ironically, his own suppressed homosexuality also manifested in witch-hunts against homosexuals in public life.

    It was Hoover's secret files that largely informed the McCarthyite anti-communist inquisitions of the 1950s, whose baleful legacy on American democracy, foreign policy and freedom of expression continues to this day.

    One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb.

    Absurdly, the FBI chief maintained that there was "no such thing as the Mafia" in public statements.

    Two notorious cases of how FBI wiretapping worked under Hoover can be seen in the presidencies of John F Kennedy (1961-63) and Richard Nixon (1969-74).

    As recounted by Laurent Guyénot in his 2013 book , 'JFK to 9/11: 50 Years of Deep State', Hoover made a point of letting each new president know of compromising information he had on them. It wouldn't be brandished overtly as blackmail; the president would be briefed subtly, "Sir, if someone were to have copies of this it would be damaging to your career". Enough said.

    JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ. Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ into the White House.

    However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald – a cover-up that persists to this day.

    As for Richard Nixon, it is believed that "Tricky Dicky" engaged in secret communications with the US-backed South Vietnamese regime on the cusp of the presidential elections in 1968. Nixon promised the South Vietnamese stronger military support if they held off entering peace talks with communist North Vietnam, which incumbent President Johnson was trying to organize. LBJ wanted to claim a peace process was underway in order to boost the election chances of his vice president Hubert Humphrey.

    Nixon's scheming prevailed. The Vietnam peace gambit was scuttled, the Vietnam war raged on, and so the Democrat candidate lost. Nixon finally got into the White House, which he had long coveted from the time he lost out to JFK back in 1960.

    But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career.

    These are but only two examples of how Deep State politics works in controlling and subverting American democracy. The notion that lawmakers and presidents are free to serve the people is a quaintly naive one. For the US media to pretend otherwise, and to hail the FBI as some kind of benign bastion of justice, while also deprecating claims of "Deep State" intrusion as "conspiracy theory", is either impossibly ignorant of history – or a sign of the media's own compromised complicity.

    Nonetheless, to blame this culture of institutionalized blackmail and corruption on one individual – J Edgar Hoover – is not fair either.

    Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others.

    Once formed, the Deep State – as an alternate, unaccountable, unelected government – does not surrender its immense power willingly. It has learnt to hold on to its power through blackmail, media control, incitement of wars, and, even ultimately, assassination of American dissenters.

    The illegal tapping of private communications is an oxygen supply for the depredations of the American Deep State.

    Thinking that such agencies are not actively warping and working the electoral system to fix the figurehead in the White House is a dangerous delusion.

    So too are claims that American democracy is being "influenced" by malign Russian enemies, as the US intelligence chiefs once again chorused in front of the Senate this past week. The consummate irony of it!

    The real "influence campaigns" corrupting American democracy are those of the "All-American" agencies who claim to be law enforcers and defenders of national security.

    US citizens would do well to refresh on the untold history of their country to appreciate how they are being manipulated.

    We might even surmise that a good number of citizens are already aware, if only vaguely, of the elite corruption – and that is why Washington DC is viewed with increasing contempt by the people.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Did CIA Director William Casey really say, We ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The CIA fabricated a story that the Russians in Afghanistan made plastic bombs in the shape of toys, to blow up children. Casey repeated this story, knowing it to be disinformation, as fact to US journalists and politicians. ..."
    Sep 01, 2013 | www.quora.com

    Bill Bray , Former (Retired) Research Scientist at Central Intelligence Agency Updated Dec 14 2017 · Author has 509 answers and 261.9k answer views

    I am not familiar with that particular quote, but that sounds like the hubris of the CIA. You have to understand, you put a janitor in charge of the other janitors, and he becomes king shit of the janitors. And so it goes all the way to the point where you put someone in charge of an agency which no longer answers to the president, the senate, congress, the UN, or any force on Earth, there is no way you are not going to have anything but a problem. JFK wanted to dissolve them for that reason, 6 months later

    If you really want to take the Dr. Bill acid test, go into Google AdWords. That is where they sell key words to the highest bidder so that their site floats to the top (no it is not 'free information highway,' that's how Google became a multi-billion organization). Watch the key words that are floating to the top. Then, look at tomorrow morning's headlines in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. You will find that magically the minds of Americans predicted the next day's news.

    This of course is not the case. The multi-trillion dollar surveillance of Americans that they told you is to 'protect you from terrorists,' and so on is not what they are doing. All cell phone calls (the verbal content, referred to as meta-data), emails, text, are monitored. Since the Patriot Act portion that allowed this to expire, they used the clause 'on American soil,' literally and monitor everything via the communications satellites. There are also an estimated 20,000 drones OVER (BUT NOT ON) US soil, monitoring verbal communications that are not electronic. This can be done via unidirectional microphone, or by bouncing a laser off your window. That includes car window.

    The Welcome to FBI.gov web site collects information, but is easier to access at Mass Shootings . In 2016 there were 384 mass shootings, almost 100 of which were listed as 'terrorist motivated.' So, the multi-trillion dollar surveillance network is not to 'protect you.'

    The system is designed to gather information on the 'collective thinking,' like the Borg, of the American public, and then design tomorrow's news and media, literally overnight, to cattle herd you into a nice neat profile of behavior and commerce.

    Again, take the acid test. Look at what you have access to, AdWords, and then watch tomorrow's headlines magically appear. At first you might think, well that's what people are interested in so that's what's in the news. Then, as you look at the flow of headlines regarding international campaigns, what the President said yesterday, what the senators and congressmen are doing or being accused of, it starts to get a bit freaky. Do this for several days, and you will see.

    If this doesn't convince you, you fit a nice neat profile of behavior and commerce.

    Otherwise, explain the multi-trillion dollar surveillance network's failure to prevent 384 mass shootings last year, of which about 1 in 4 were 'terrorist motivated,' and I think we already passed that number this year.

    You know the system is in place, the NSA admitted it publicly. The reason they say it is there is obviously not true, as per a hundred terrorist motivated events each year, hundreds of mass shootings, most of which never make it into the 'fake news.'

    Every time the President says 'fake news,' your brain says 'conspiracy theory,' and hardens your cognitive belief, your religion, the media.

    Keeping you stupid keeps you under control. If this were not the case, disinformation would not be a goal. 1.7k Views · View Upvoters ·

    Vulky Sellars Vulky Sellars Matthew Egan , former Intelligence Officer Answered Sep 8 · Author has 1.5k answers and 575.1k answer views

    It does appear he said something very much along those lines, though I doubt it meant what it appears to mean absent the context. He made the statement not long after he became the Director of Central Intelligence, during a discussion of the fact that, to his amazement, about 80 percent of the contents of typical CIA intelligence publications was based on information from open, unclassified sources, such as newspapers and magazines. Apparently, and reasonably, he judged that about the same proportion of Soviet intelligence products was probably based on open sources, as well. That meant that CIA disinformation programs directed at the USSR wouldn't work unless what was being disseminated by US magazines and newspapers on the same subjects comported with what the CIA was trying to sell the Soviets. Given that the CIA could not possibly control the access to open sources of all US publications, the subjects of CIA disinformation operations had to be limited to topics not being covered by US public media. To be sure, some items of disinformation planted by the CIA in foreign publications might subsequently be discovered and republished by US media. I'm guessing the CIA would not leap to correct those items.

    But that is a far cry from concluding that the CIA would (or even could) arrange that "everything the American public believes is false."

    Fred Landis , Investigative Reporter Answered Sep 10, 2013 · Author has 12.8k answers and 15.6m answer views

    The American public has never been the primary target of any disinformation campaign.

    The CIA once had influence in a number of English language publications abroad, some of which stories were reprinted in the US media. This was known as "blowback", and unintended in most cases.

    The CIA fabricated a story that the Russians in Afghanistan made plastic bombs in the shape of toys, to blow up children. Casey repeated this story, knowing it to be disinformation, as fact to US journalists and politicians.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Haspel is not the "underling". Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Haspel is not the "underling" . Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy. ..."
    "... In the real organization chart for the empire the CIA is above the President. This has been the case in the US since Kennedy. ..."
    "... Trump will not fire Haspel. He can't. He's just an actor playing a role in a show, and Haspel is one of the producers/writers of that show. If she doesn't put firing in the script then Trump cannot say those lines. I doubt he really wants to anyway. ..."
    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    William Gruff , Apr 16, 2019 4:41:41 PM | link

    "If Trump were not in on the schemes he would just fire his underlings!"

    This sentiment indicates a failure to understand the power dynamics at play here. Haspel is not the "underling" . Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy.

    In the real organization chart for the empire the CIA is above the President. This has been the case in the US since Kennedy.

    Trump cannot fire Haspel or Pompeo. They can fire him, though, and with a sniper's bullet if they want.

    Unfortunately for the oligarchy, that would cause additional complications at a time when they have lots of tricky and inexplicably unstable (for them) operations ongoing, which is why they are just steering Trump around instead of replacing him. And Trump is willfully cooperating, even if they are not filling him in on the plans.

    Trump will not fire Haspel. He can't. He's just an actor playing a role in a show, and Haspel is one of the producers/writers of that show. If she doesn't put firing in the script then Trump cannot say those lines. I doubt he really wants to anyway.

    [Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    karlof1 , Apr 16, 2019 7:26:23 PM | link

    Ah yes, Prescient observation regarding Venezuela:

    "The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status."--John McEvoy

    So, lets employ this maxim to Russiagate and the Skripal Saga and the respective national media. In the first case, the Russian public's completely ignored unless it's a member of the so-called opposition while Putin and Russia get slandered constantly. The same treatment goes for the UK media and a case could be made that the two act in tandem, implying innerconnectivity between their spy agencies as suspected.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Six US Agencies Conspired ...

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    "Here is what we now know, per intelligence gleaned form federal law enforcement sources with insider knowledge of what amounts to a plot by U.S. intelligence agencies to secure back door and illegal wiretaps of President Trump's associates:

    Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA’s Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself. To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ. The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial of two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump associates. GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping surveillance on Trump associates. The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump’s associates appear compromised. Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner. After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian lawyer at the meeting Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK, federal sources said. By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole to wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones and emails of U.S. citizens inside the United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil at Fort Meade. The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the evidence is considered “poisoned fruit.”

    -----------.

    Someone left this link in a comment to LJ, but as ringmaster of this circus, I choose to publish this as the best summary of all the threads of the supposed conspiracy that I have seen thus far. pl

    https://truepundit.com/exclusive-six-u-s-agencies-conspired-to-illegally-wiretap-trump-british-intel-used-as-front-to-spy-on-campaign-for-nsa/

    Chris Fahlman said...

    Wikipedia page on Paul Manafort says that the FBI began a criminal investigation into him in 2014, associated with his previous dealings in Ukraine. He could have been a target of surveillance and wiretapping since then.

    I therefore think Manafort was the key the intelligence agencies used to get to into Trump's organisation. It may have been initially incidental to their ongoing, and much earlier surveillance of Manafort.

    Robert Poling said...

    Thank-you for this summary. If confirmed, Brennan (and others in the group he formed to spy on Trump and Trump's campaign) should go to jail. Congress specifically forbid American spy agencies spying on American citizens in the U.S. Since that Congressional action, the CIA and NSA have gotten around it by having foreign partners among the 'five eyes' do the collecting and then passing the information back to us.

    The spying on Trump was done at the behest of Obama and his minions. I'm reminded of an American president who was hounded from office by the mainstream press for sending minions to spy and collect dirt at the opposition's political headquarters. He had to resign and leave office. Several involved in the burglary went to jail and lost their livelihoods. Why is this situation today any different and why is there a delay in prosecuting them? It's because the major media is bought out and controlled by Trump's political opponents and not demanding justice, indeed is providing cover and excuses for them

    [Apr 17, 2019] Deep State and the FBI Federal Blackmail Investigation

    Highly recommended!
    Intelligence agencies, once created, has their own development dynamics and tend to escape from the control of civilians and in turn control them. Such an interesting dynamics. In any case, the intelligence agencies and first of all top brass of those agencies constitute the the core of the "deep state". Unlike civiliant emplorres they are protected by the veil of secrecy and has access to large funds. Bush the elder was probably the first deep state creature who became the president of the USA, but "special relationship" of Obama and Brennan is also not a secret.
    Another problem is that secrecy and access to surveillance, Which gives intelligence agencies the ability to blackmail politicians.
    Availability of unaccounted financial resources make them real kingmakers. In a sense, as soon as such agencies were created the tail started waging the dog.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry Truman (1943-53) reportedly characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five decades – as the nation's top law enforcer? ..."
    "... One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb. ..."
    "... JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ. Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ into the White House. ..."
    "... However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald – a cover-up that persists to this day. ..."
    "... But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career. ..."
    "... Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others ..."
    Feb 23, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

    No other individual in modern US history has a more sinister legacy than John Edgar Hoover, the founder and lifetime director of the FBI. He founded the bureau in 1924 and was its director until his death in 1972 at the age of 77.

    Serving under nine presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon, the FBI was turned into a "Gestapo by Hoover whose modus operandi was blackmail". That's how President Harry Truman (1943-53) reportedly characterized Hoover's bureau. How else do you think he survived for so long – five decades – as the nation's top law enforcer?

    J Edgar Hoover and his henchmen kept files on thousands of politicians, judges, journalists and other public figures, according to biographer Anthony Summers. Hoover ruthlessly used those files on the secret and often sordid private lives of senior public figures to control their career conduct and official decisions so as to serve his interests.

    And Hoover's interests were of a rightwing, anti-communist, racist bigot.

    Ironically, his own suppressed homosexuality also manifested in witch-hunts against homosexuals in public life.

    It was Hoover's secret files that largely informed the McCarthyite anti-communist inquisitions of the 1950s, whose baleful legacy on American democracy, foreign policy and freedom of expression continues to this day.

    One of Hoover's mainstay sources is strongly believed to be Mafia crime bosses who had lots of dirt on politicians, from bribe-taking to vote-rigging, to illicit sexual affairs. It is suspected that the Mafia had their own dossier of images on Hoover in a compromising homosexual tryst which, in turn, kept him under their thumb.

    Absurdly, the FBI chief maintained that there was "no such thing as the Mafia" in public statements.

    Two notorious cases of how FBI wiretapping worked under Hoover can be seen in the presidencies of John F Kennedy (1961-63) and Richard Nixon (1969-74).

    As recounted by Laurent Guyénot in his 2013 book , 'JFK to 9/11: 50 Years of Deep State', Hoover made a point of letting each new president know of compromising information he had on them. It wouldn't be brandished overtly as blackmail; the president would be briefed subtly, "Sir, if someone were to have copies of this it would be damaging to your career". Enough said.

    JFK was particularly wide open to blackmail owing to his rampant promiscuity and extra-marital liaisons, including with screen idol Marilyn Monroe. Kennedy more than once confided to his aides that "the bastards" had him nailed. It was for this reason that he made the thuggish Texan Senator Lyndon B Johnson his vice president even though he detested LBJ. Hoover and Johnson were longtime associates and the former no doubt pulled a favor to get LBJ into the White House.

    However, Hoover's blackmail on JFK was not enough to curtail his defiance of rabidly anti-communist Cold War politics. Against the hostility of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, Kennedy pursued a courageous policy of detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba. Such a policy no doubt led to his assassination by the Deep State in Dallas on November 22, 1963. There is ample evidence that Hoover and Johnson, who became the new president, then colluded with the Deep State assassins to cover up the assassination as the act of lone nut Lee Harvey Oswald – a cover-up that persists to this day.

    As for Richard Nixon, it is believed that "Tricky Dicky" engaged in secret communications with the US-backed South Vietnamese regime on the cusp of the presidential elections in 1968. Nixon promised the South Vietnamese stronger military support if they held off entering peace talks with communist North Vietnam, which incumbent President Johnson was trying to organize. LBJ wanted to claim a peace process was underway in order to boost the election chances of his vice president Hubert Humphrey.

    Nixon's scheming prevailed. The Vietnam peace gambit was scuttled, the Vietnam war raged on, and so the Democrat candidate lost. Nixon finally got into the White House, which he had long coveted from the time he lost out to JFK back in 1960.

    But Hoover and Johnson got their revenge by subsequently letting Nixon know that there was classified information on him – thanks to FBI wiretaps. The specter of incrimination is possibly a factor in Nixon becoming increasingly paranoid during this presidency, culminating in the ignominy of the Watergate scandal that ended his career.

    These are but only two examples of how Deep State politics works in controlling and subverting American democracy. The notion that lawmakers and presidents are free to serve the people is a quaintly naive one. For the US media to pretend otherwise, and to hail the FBI as some kind of benign bastion of justice, while also deprecating claims of "Deep State" intrusion as "conspiracy theory", is either impossibly ignorant of history – or a sign of the media's own compromised complicity.

    Nonetheless, to blame this culture of institutionalized blackmail and corruption on one individual – J Edgar Hoover – is not fair either.

    Hoover certainly was the devious architect of a malign Deep State machine. But he was not alone. He instilled a culture and legacy that pervades the top echelons of the bureau. And not just the FBI. The early Cold War years saw the formation of the CIA and the NSA under the Machiavellian guidance of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Helms and a host of others.

    Once formed, the Deep State – as an alternate, unaccountable, unelected government – does not surrender its immense power willingly. It has learnt to hold on to its power through blackmail, media control, incitement of wars, and, even ultimately, assassination of American dissenters.

    The illegal tapping of private communications is an oxygen supply for the depredations of the American Deep State.

    Thinking that such agencies are not actively warping and working the electoral system to fix the figurehead in the White House is a dangerous delusion.

    So too are claims that American democracy is being "influenced" by malign Russian enemies, as the US intelligence chiefs once again chorused in front of the Senate this past week. The consummate irony of it!

    The real "influence campaigns" corrupting American democracy are those of the "All-American" agencies who claim to be law enforcers and defenders of national security.

    US citizens would do well to refresh on the untold history of their country to appreciate how they are being manipulated.

    We might even surmise that a good number of citizens are already aware, if only vaguely, of the elite corruption – and that is why Washington DC is viewed with increasing contempt by the people.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Did CIA Director William Casey really say, We ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The CIA fabricated a story that the Russians in Afghanistan made plastic bombs in the shape of toys, to blow up children. Casey repeated this story, knowing it to be disinformation, as fact to US journalists and politicians. ..."
    Sep 01, 2013 | www.quora.com

    Bill Bray , Former (Retired) Research Scientist at Central Intelligence Agency Updated Dec 14 2017 · Author has 509 answers and 261.9k answer views

    I am not familiar with that particular quote, but that sounds like the hubris of the CIA. You have to understand, you put a janitor in charge of the other janitors, and he becomes king shit of the janitors. And so it goes all the way to the point where you put someone in charge of an agency which no longer answers to the president, the senate, congress, the UN, or any force on Earth, there is no way you are not going to have anything but a problem. JFK wanted to dissolve them for that reason, 6 months later

    If you really want to take the Dr. Bill acid test, go into Google AdWords. That is where they sell key words to the highest bidder so that their site floats to the top (no it is not 'free information highway,' that's how Google became a multi-billion organization). Watch the key words that are floating to the top. Then, look at tomorrow morning's headlines in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. You will find that magically the minds of Americans predicted the next day's news.

    This of course is not the case. The multi-trillion dollar surveillance of Americans that they told you is to 'protect you from terrorists,' and so on is not what they are doing. All cell phone calls (the verbal content, referred to as meta-data), emails, text, are monitored. Since the Patriot Act portion that allowed this to expire, they used the clause 'on American soil,' literally and monitor everything via the communications satellites. There are also an estimated 20,000 drones OVER (BUT NOT ON) US soil, monitoring verbal communications that are not electronic. This can be done via unidirectional microphone, or by bouncing a laser off your window. That includes car window.

    The Welcome to FBI.gov web site collects information, but is easier to access at Mass Shootings . In 2016 there were 384 mass shootings, almost 100 of which were listed as 'terrorist motivated.' So, the multi-trillion dollar surveillance network is not to 'protect you.'

    The system is designed to gather information on the 'collective thinking,' like the Borg, of the American public, and then design tomorrow's news and media, literally overnight, to cattle herd you into a nice neat profile of behavior and commerce.

    Again, take the acid test. Look at what you have access to, AdWords, and then watch tomorrow's headlines magically appear. At first you might think, well that's what people are interested in so that's what's in the news. Then, as you look at the flow of headlines regarding international campaigns, what the President said yesterday, what the senators and congressmen are doing or being accused of, it starts to get a bit freaky. Do this for several days, and you will see.

    If this doesn't convince you, you fit a nice neat profile of behavior and commerce.

    Otherwise, explain the multi-trillion dollar surveillance network's failure to prevent 384 mass shootings last year, of which about 1 in 4 were 'terrorist motivated,' and I think we already passed that number this year.

    You know the system is in place, the NSA admitted it publicly. The reason they say it is there is obviously not true, as per a hundred terrorist motivated events each year, hundreds of mass shootings, most of which never make it into the 'fake news.'

    Every time the President says 'fake news,' your brain says 'conspiracy theory,' and hardens your cognitive belief, your religion, the media.

    Keeping you stupid keeps you under control. If this were not the case, disinformation would not be a goal. 1.7k Views · View Upvoters ·

    Vulky Sellars Vulky Sellars Matthew Egan , former Intelligence Officer Answered Sep 8 · Author has 1.5k answers and 575.1k answer views

    It does appear he said something very much along those lines, though I doubt it meant what it appears to mean absent the context. He made the statement not long after he became the Director of Central Intelligence, during a discussion of the fact that, to his amazement, about 80 percent of the contents of typical CIA intelligence publications was based on information from open, unclassified sources, such as newspapers and magazines. Apparently, and reasonably, he judged that about the same proportion of Soviet intelligence products was probably based on open sources, as well. That meant that CIA disinformation programs directed at the USSR wouldn't work unless what was being disseminated by US magazines and newspapers on the same subjects comported with what the CIA was trying to sell the Soviets. Given that the CIA could not possibly control the access to open sources of all US publications, the subjects of CIA disinformation operations had to be limited to topics not being covered by US public media. To be sure, some items of disinformation planted by the CIA in foreign publications might subsequently be discovered and republished by US media. I'm guessing the CIA would not leap to correct those items.

    But that is a far cry from concluding that the CIA would (or even could) arrange that "everything the American public believes is false."

    Fred Landis , Investigative Reporter Answered Sep 10, 2013 · Author has 12.8k answers and 15.6m answer views

    The American public has never been the primary target of any disinformation campaign.

    The CIA once had influence in a number of English language publications abroad, some of which stories were reprinted in the US media. This was known as "blowback", and unintended in most cases.

    The CIA fabricated a story that the Russians in Afghanistan made plastic bombs in the shape of toys, to blow up children. Casey repeated this story, knowing it to be disinformation, as fact to US journalists and politicians.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Putin's remark about people with breifcases and impotent US presidents

    With Haspel at the helm of CIA, the threat of waterboarding the President is also very real;-)
    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Bart Hansen , Apr 16, 2019 6:41:05 PM | link

    Concerning who is pulling the strings, please forgive a repost of an interview with one who knows. On 31 May 2017 Putin gave an interview with Le Figaro where he said:

    "I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go, but politics stay the same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is what happens with every administration."

    A long list of people with briefcases so far ends with Gina.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Haspel revelation sheds a whole new light on the death of those two poor little hamsters, or was it guinea pigs, said to be starved while the police was investigating the premises of Skripal.

    Notable quotes:
    "... With Haspel around they might have succombed to her nasty ways of torturing. ..."
    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    willie , Apr 16, 2019 6:29:03 PM | link

    This sheds a whole new light on the death of those two poor little hamsters, or was it guinea pigs, said to be starved while the police was investigating the premises of Skripal.

    With Haspel around they might have succombed to her nasty ways of torturing.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Ecuador sells off Assange to US Ron Paul

    It is unclear what danger WikiLeaks represents naw, as it probably was infiltrated. But publishing of Podesta emails and DNC files was really damaging to the Dems during 2016 elections.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "We have two foreign policies. We tell people what to do. And if they do it, we reward them. We give them a lot of money. If they don't, they're in for big trouble, they're liable to get bombed; we invade them, and there will be a coup," Dr. Paul said. ..."
    "... "We find that Moreno, the president of Ecuador, did not do badly. He's been playing footsies with us, and gaining some money and he delivered, you know, after he became president – it's shame because the previous president the one that allowed or at least would at least Assange could be 'protected' to some degree," he stated. ..."
    "... "The IMF has already delivered $4.2 billion to [Ecuador], and there's another six billion dollars in the pipeline for that," he said. ..."
    Apr 17, 2019 | www.presstv.com

    Dr. Paul, the founder of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, made the remarks on Monday while discussing the violent arrest of Assange by UK Metropolitan Police last week at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after the Moreno government cancelled his asylum.

    The Australian whistleblower was arrested on behalf of the US on Thursday at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he had been granted asylum since 2012.

    Assange, 47, is wanted by the US government for publishing classified documents related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that were leaked by American whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Assange spent seven years at the Ecuadorian embassy before his arrest.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/HqPAwI4EmsU?rel=0

    "We have two foreign policies. We tell people what to do. And if they do it, we reward them. We give them a lot of money. If they don't, they're in for big trouble, they're liable to get bombed; we invade them, and there will be a coup," Dr. Paul said.

    "We find that Moreno, the president of Ecuador, did not do badly. He's been playing footsies with us, and gaining some money and he delivered, you know, after he became president – it's shame because the previous president the one that allowed or at least would at least Assange could be 'protected' to some degree," he stated.

    "But he (Moreno) evidently is out form and now of course he has delivered him. And this might not be even all of that. This probably is official tool of ours to provide these funds," the analyst noted.

    "The IMF has already delivered $4.2 billion to [Ecuador], and there's another six billion dollars in the pipeline for that," he said.

    PressTV-Moreno: Assange used Ecuador's London Embassy for spying President Moreno claims the WikiLeaks founder tried to use Ecuador's Embassy in London for spying activities during his almost seven-year stay.

    Moreno on Sunday accused Assange of trying to use Ecuador's embassy in London as a "center for spying," and said that the decision to strip the whistleblower of his political asylum followed "violations" of that status.

    In an interview with The Guardian , Moreno defended his decision on the Assange case.

    "It is unfortunate that, from our territory and with the permission of authorities of the previous government, facilities have been provided within the Ecuadoran Embassy in London to interfere in processes of other states," the president said.

    [Apr 17, 2019] The Fly in the Mueller Ointment

    Apr 17, 2019 | original.antiwar.com

    MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
    FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPs)
    SUBJECT: The Fly in the Mueller Ointment

    Mr. President:

    The song has ended but the melody lingers on. The expected release Thursday of the redacted text of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's "Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election" will nudge the American people a tad closer to the truth on so-called "Russiagate."

    But judging by Attorney General William Barr's 4-page summary, the Mueller report will leave unscathed the central-but-unproven allegation that the Russian government hacked into the DNC and Podesta emails, gave them to WikiLeaks to publish, and helped you win the election. The thrust will be the same; namely, even if there is a lack of evidence that you colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin, you have him to thank for becoming president. And that melody will linger on for the rest of your presidency, unless you seize the moment.

    Mueller has accepted that central-but-unproven allegation as gospel truth, apparently in the lack of any disinterested, independent forensic work. Following the odd example of his erstwhile colleague, former FBI Director James Comey, Mueller apparently has relied for forensics on a discredited, DNC-hired firm named CrowdStrike, whose credibility is on a par with "pee-tape dossier" compiler Christopher Steele. Like Steele, CrowdStrike was hired and paid by the DNC (through a cutout).

    We brought the lack of independent forensics to the attention of Attorney General William Barr on March 13 in a Memorandum entitled "Mueller's Forensic-Free Findings", but received no reply or acknowledgment. In that Memorandum we described the results of our own independent, agenda-free forensic investigation led by two former Technical Directors of the NSA, who avoid squishy "assessments," preferring to base their findings on fundamental principles of science and the scientific method. Our findings remain unchallenged; they reveal gaping holes in CrowdStrike's conclusions.

    We do not know if Barr shared our March 13 Memorandum with you. As for taking a public position on the forensics issue, we suspect he is being circumspect in choosing his battles carefully, perhaps deferring until later a rigorous examination of the dubious technical work upon which Mueller seems to have relied.

    Barr's Notification to Congress

    As you know, the big attention-getter came on March 24 when Attorney General William Barr included in his four-page summary a quote from Mueller's report: "The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities." Understandably, that grabbed headlines – the more so, since most Americans had been convinced earlier by the media that the opposite was true.

    There remains, however, a huge fly in the ointment. Barr's summary makes it clear that Mueller accepts as a given – an evidence-impoverished given – that the Russian government interfered in the election on two tracks:

    Track 1 involves what Barr, echoing Mueller, claims "a Russian organization, the Internet Research Agency (IRA)" did in using social media "to sow social discord, eventually with the aim of interfering with the election." A careful look at this allegation shows it to be without merit, despite Herculean efforts by the NY Times, for example, to put lipstick on this particular pig. After some rudimentary research, award winning investigative reporter Gareth Porter promptly put that pig out of its misery and brought home the bacon. We do not believe "Track 1" merits further commentary.

    Track 2 does need informed commentary, since it is more technical and – to most Americans – arcane. In Barr's words: "The Special Counsel found that Russian government actors successfully hacked into computers and obtained emails from persons affiliated with the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party organizations, and publicly disseminated those materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks. Based on these activities, the Special Counsel brought criminal charges against a number of Russian military officers for conspiring to hack into computers in the United States for purposes of influencing the election."

    We are eager to see if Mueller's report contains more persuasive forensic evidence than that which VIPS has already debunked. In Barr's summary, the only mention of forensics refers to "forensic accountants" – a far cry from the kind of forensic investigators needed to provide convincing proof of "hacking" by the Russian government.

    But They Were Indicted!

    Circular reasoning is not likely to work for very long, even with a U.S. populace used to being brainwashed by the media. Many Americans had mistakenly assumed that Mueller's indictment of Russians – whether they be posting on FaceBook or acting like intelligence officers – was proof of guilt. But, as lawyers regularly point out, "one can easily indict a ham sandwich" – easier still these days, if it comes with Russian dressing.

    Chances have now increased that the gullible folks who had been assured that Mueller would find collusion between you and Putin may now be a bit more circumspect – skeptical even – regarding the rest of the story-line of the "Russian hack," and that will be even more likely among those with some technical background. Such specialists will have a field day, IF – and it is a capital "IF" – by some miracle, word of VIPs' forensic findings gets into the media this time around.

    The evidence-impoverished, misleadingly labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment" of January 6, 2017 had one saving grace. The authors noted: "The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation – malicious or not – leaves a trail." Forensic investigators can follow a trail of metadata and other technical properties. VIPs has done that.

    A "High-Class Entity?"

    If, as we strongly suspect, Mueller is relying for forensics solely on CrowdStrike, the discredited firm hired by the DNC in the spring of 2016, he is acting more in the mold of Inspector Clouseau than the crackerjack investigator he is reputed to be. It simply does not suffice for Mueller's former colleague James Comey to tell Congress that CrowdStrike is a "high-class entity." It is nothing of the sort and, in addition to its documented incompetence, it is riddled with conflicts of interest. Comey needs to explain why he kept the FBI away from the DNC computers after they were said to have been "hacked."

    And former National Intelligence Director James Clapper needs to explain his claim last November that "the forensic evidence was overwhelming about what the Russians had done." What forensic evidence? From CrowdStrike? We at VIPs, in contrast, are finding more and more forensic evidence that the DNC emails were leaked, not hacked by the Russians or anyone else – and that "Guccifer 2.0" is an out-and-out fraud. Yes, we can prove that from forensics too.

    But the Talking Heads Say

    Again, if Mueller's incomplete investigation is allowed to assume the status of Holy Writ, most Americans will continue to believe that – whether you colluded the Russians or not – Putin came through for you big time. In short, absent President Putin's help, you would not be president.

    Far too many Americans will still believe this because of the mainstream-media fodder – half-cooked by intelligence leaks – that they have been fed for two and a half years. The media have been playing the central role in the effort of the MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank) complex to stymie any improvement in relations with Russia. We in VIPs have repeatedly demonstrated that the core charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election are built on a house of cards. But, despite our record of accuracy on this issue – not to mention our pre-Iraq-war warnings about the fraudulent intelligence served up by our former colleagues – we have gotten no play in mainstream media.

    Most of us have chalked up decades in the intelligence business and many have extensive academic and government experience focusing on Russia. We consider the issue of "Russian interference" of overriding significance not only because that the allegation is mischievously bogus and easily disproven. More important, it has brought tension with nuclear-armed Russia to the kind of dangerous fever pitch not seen since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the Russian provocation was real – authentic, not synthetic.

    Sober minds resolved that crisis more than a half-century ago, and we all got to live another day. These days sober minds seem few and far between and a great deal is at stake. On the intelligence/forensics side, we have proved that the evidence adduced to "prove" that the Russians hacked into the DNC and Podesta emails and gave them to WikiLeaks is spurious. For example, we have examined metadata from one key document attributed to Russian hacking and shown that it was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."

    Who Left the Bread Crumbs?

    So, if it wasn't the Russians, who left the "Russian" bread-crumb "fingerprints?" We do not know for sure; on this question we cannot draw a conclusion based on the principles of science – at least not yet. We suspect, however, that cyber warriors closer to home were responsible for inserting the "telltale signs" necessary to attribute "hacks" to Russia. We tacked on our more speculative views regarding this intriguing issue onto the end of our May 24, 2017 Memorandum to you entitled "Intelligence Veterans Challenge Russia Hack Evidence"

    We recall that you were apprised of that Memorandum's key findings because you ordered then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo to talk to William Binney, one of our two former NSA Technical Directors and one of the principal authors of that Memorandum. On October 24, 2017, Pompeo began an hour-long meeting with Binney by explaining the genesis of the odd invitation to CIA Headquarters: "You are here because the president told me that if I really wanted to know about Russian hacking I needed to talk to you."

    On the chance Pompeo has given you no report on his meeting with Binney, we can tell you that Binney, a plainspoken, widely respected scientist, began by telling Pompeo that his (CIA) people were lying to him about Russian hacking and that he (Binney) could prove it. Pompeo reacted with disbelief, but then talked of following up with the FBI and NSA. We have no sign, though, that he followed through. And there is good reason to believe that Pompeo himself may have been reluctant to follow up with his subordinates in the Directorate of Digital Innovation created by CIA Director John Brennan in 2015. CIA malware and hacking tools are built by the Engineering Development Group, part of that relatively new Directorate.

    ' Obfuscation'

    A leak from within the CIA, published on March 31, 2017 by WikiLeaks as part of the so-called "Vault 7" disclosures, exposed a cyber tool called "Marble," which was used during 2016 for"obfuscation" (CIA's word). This tool can be used to conduct a forensic attribution double game (aka a false-flag operation); it included test samples in Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Korean, and Russian. Washington Post reporter Ellen Nakashima, to her credit, immediately penned an informative article on the Marble cyber-tool, under the caching (and accurate) headline "WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations." That was apparently before Nakashima "got the memo." Mainstream media have otherwise avoided like the plague any mention of Marble.

    Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Directorate of Digital Innovation have been with the White House – or with former Director Pompeo – on this touchy issue. Since it is still quite relevant, we will repeat below a paragraph included in our July 2017 Memorandum to you under the subheading"Putin and the Technology:"

    We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin. In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly, he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager – to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7 disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's technology enables hacking to be "masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand the origin" [of the hack] And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack. Hackers may be anywhere," he said. "There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a scenario? I can."

    As we told Attorney General Barr five weeks ago, we consider Mueller's findings fundamentally flawed on the forensics side and ipso facto incomplete. We also criticized Mueller for failing to interview willing witnesses with direct knowledge, like WikiLeaks' Julian Assange.

    Political Enemies & Mainstream Media (Forgive the Redundancy)

    You may be unaware that in March 2017 lawyers for Assange and the Justice Department (acting on behalf of the CIA) reportedly were very close to an agreement under which Assange would agree to discuss "technical evidence ruling out certain parties" in the leak of the DNC emails" and agree to redact some classified CIA information, in exchange for limited immunity. According to the investigative reporter John Solomon of The Hill, Sen. Mark Warner, D,VA, Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, learned of the incipient deal and told then-FBI Director Comey, who ordered an abrupt "stand down" and an end to the discussions with Assange.

    Why did Comey and Warner put the kibosh on receiving "technical evidence ruling out certain parties [read Russia]? We won't insult you with the obvious answer. Assange is now in prison, to the delight of so many – including Mrs. Clinton who has said Assange must now "answer for what he has done."

    But is it too late to follow up somehow on Assange's offer? Might he or his associates be still willing to provide "technical evidence" showing, at least, who was not the culprit?

    You, Mr. President, could cause that to happen. You would have to buck strong resistance at every turn, and there all manner of ways that those with vested interests and a lot of practice in sabotage can try to thwart you – with the full cooperation of most media pundits. By now, you know all too well how that works.

    But you are the president. And there may be no better time than now to face them down, show the spurious nature of the concocted "evidence" attempting to put you in "Putin's pocket," and – not least – lift the cloud that has prevented you from pursuing a more decent relationship with Russia.

    For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

    Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is made up of former intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers and congressional staffers. The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington's justifications for launching a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than contrived threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of VIPS memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com . Reprinted from Consortium News with permission.

    Read more by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

    [Apr 17, 2019] What Are We to Make of Gina Haspel by Publius Tacitus

    Notable quotes:
    "... That fact is a very sad and disturbing commentary on what America is or has become. Tolerating torture and excusing such an activity in the name of national security is the same justification that Stalin and Castro employed to punish dissidents. ..."
    "... Let me be clear about my position. If Gina was in fact the Chief of Base and oversaw the application of the waterboarding and other inhuman treatment then she lacks the moral authority to head the CIA. Unfortunately, the United States has a long history of overlooking human rights violations and war crimes. ..."
    "... Students of WW II will recall that US military intelligence recruited and protect Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, as an asset after the war. He murdered Jews and sent others to Auschwitz. He should have been hung. Instead, we turned a blind eye and gave him a paycheck. ..."
    "... I've read that she enjoyed torture and mocked a prisoner who was drooling by accused him of faking it. I never knew anything about her sexual orientation but now I have to consider if she's so cruel because she hates men. ..."
    "... Yes, waterboarding is torture. We considered it so egregious that we prosecuted Japanese military officers after WWII for using it on POWs. ..."
    "... just reinforces the feeling that those at the upper echelons are completely out of touch or alternatively are just lying/posturing to present themselves in a better light. ..."
    "... A torturer is a torturer, no matter how one try to glaze it, or sugar coat it. If one is against torture, or the fancy name for it EIT, one should come out and say it like it is. This lady is accused of torturing captives ( enemy combatant) that can't and will not go away unless she come clean. ..."
    Mar 19, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Before Gina became the Chief of Staff for Rodriguez, what role did she play in the waterboarding of two AQ operatives in Thailand? It appears that she was at least witting of what was going on. Did she have the authority to decide what measures to apply to the two? Did she make such decisions?

    Those are facts still to be determined. I am inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. But there are others who I respect that are adamant in opposing her nomination. The only thing I know for sure is that her nomination will be a bloody and divisive political battle. If it comes down to embracing waterboarding as an appropriate method to use on suspected terrorists, then a majority of Americans are supportive of that practice and will cheer the appointment of Haspel.

    That fact is a very sad and disturbing commentary on what America is or has become. Tolerating torture and excusing such an activity in the name of national security is the same justification that Stalin and Castro employed to punish dissidents. It is true that one man's terrorist is another woman's freedom fighter.

    Let me be clear about my position. If Gina was in fact the Chief of Base and oversaw the application of the waterboarding and other inhuman treatment then she lacks the moral authority to head the CIA. Unfortunately, the United States has a long history of overlooking human rights violations and war crimes.

    Students of WW II will recall that US military intelligence recruited and protect Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, as an asset after the war. He murdered Jews and sent others to Auschwitz. He should have been hung. Instead, we turned a blind eye and gave him a paycheck.

    Cee , 18 March 2018 at 12:55 PM

    PT,

    I've read that she enjoyed torture and mocked a prisoner who was drooling by accused him of faking it. I never knew anything about her sexual orientation but now I have to consider if she's so cruel because she hates men.

    No to her confirmation.

    steve , 18 March 2018 at 01:11 PM
    IIRC, Haspel was the chief of staff to whom Rodriguez refers. That does not sound like a bit player. Would you say that Kelly is a bit player in the Trump admin? As you say, we should know the facts, but so far it looks like she both participated in torture and in its cover-up.

    Steve

    tv , 18 March 2018 at 01:11 PM
    Is waterboarding "torture?" It does not draw blood nor leave any physical damage. Psychological damage? These ARE admitted terrorists.
    BillWade , 18 March 2018 at 01:20 PM
    With all the crap going on at the FBI, the last thing we need now is a divisive candidate for any top level government position (torture advocacy is divisive for many of us).

    A woman, a lesbian, who cares as long as they are a capable and decent law-abiding individual.

    Publius Tacitus -> tv... , 18 March 2018 at 01:23 PM
    Yes, waterboarding is torture. We considered it so egregious that we prosecuted Japanese military officers after WWII for using it on POWs.

    And where do you get "admitted" terrorists from? In America, even with suspected terrorists, there is the principle of innocent until proven guilty. At least we once believed in that standard.

    Apenultimate said in reply to turcopolier ... , 18 March 2018 at 01:26 PM
    And I very much respect you for your position on this (it is this American's view as well).

    What amazes me (and yet doesn't) is the example of Rodriguez's supposed introspection "How bad could this be?" Really?!? That just strikes me as not having any feel for the media, US citizenry, or even common sense, and just reinforces the feeling that those at the upper echelons are completely out of touch or alternatively are just lying/posturing to present themselves in a better light.

    Laura , 18 March 2018 at 01:42 PM
    PT -- Thank you. Much to consider in these times. I come down on the "no torture and waterboarding is torture" side of the debate but am also just eager for some competence and professional experience in key positions.

    That these positions may be mutually exclusive says a great deal about our current situation. Again, thank you, for your opinions and information.

    Kooshy , 18 March 2018 at 01:42 PM
    A torturer is a torturer, no matter how one try to glaze it, or sugar coat it. If one is against torture, or the fancy name for it EIT, one should come out and say it like it is. This lady is accused of torturing captives ( enemy combatant) that can't and will not go away unless she come clean.

    At the end of the day that don't matter, since as a policy, and base on your own statement, this country's government will prosecut and punish for liking of torture but not torture and tortures. And, furthermore, is not even willing to do away with it, per it's elected president. Trying to show a clean, moral, democracy on the hilltop image, is a BS and a joke.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Haspel used brazen manipulation of her boss, who happens to be a commander in chief of a nuclear power. It looks like waterboarding Trump with the stream of lies.

    Apr 17, 2019 | craigmurray.org.uk

    Vinnie Pooh , April 17, 2019 at 14:07

    Yeah, my eyes almost popped out of my head as I read it in the news. Direct brazen manipulation of your boss, who happens to be a commander in chief of a nuclear power. And no, I don't hear any howls about treason and conspiracy from across the pond.

    John Dowser | Apr 17, 2019 2:16:43 AM | 75

    "Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied".

    This would indicate, if true, that the Brits desired to manipulate and used the CIA here mainly as conduit to influence Trump. It would make more sense, historically as well, interpreting causality and motive this way.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Gina Haspel the CIA torturer extraordinaire

    Notable quotes:
    "... The idea that Trump was kidded along in this way with photos of suffering children is similar to that which allegedly persuaded him to bomb Syria (along with the UK and France) after the more recent also alleged Douma chemical weapons attacks. So who actually was telling him porkies and why or is this just another myth to prove Trump's crassness – in which case there is no need to make anything up. ..."
    "... Trump doesn't give a toss about suffering children or suffering anyone else, so it's not likely that he was persuaded by the kind of argument that runs from injured children to the need for US diplomatic action. ..."
    "... Trump forgets he lies in minutes. He'd not heard about Julian Assange? If I was reporter I would have played him his words from my laptop and ask: Mr President is this you or a fake President? ..."
    "... Actually he is a fake President as most US Presidents are. The man's a dunce. I thought after George W Bush US Presidents couldn't get any worse but know history hits us up the backside with a banjo yet again. ..."
    Apr 17, 2019 | craigmurray.org.uk

    Sharp Ears , April 17, 2019 at 12:06

    Gina Haspel the CIA torturer extraordinaire.

    Q. Where are the Skripals?

    Crispa , April 17, 2019 at 12:07

    I took note when I read that on the Guardian website late last night. What struck me was the treatment of the statement as if it could be true, but in more than one way.

    The idea that Trump was kidded along in this way with photos of suffering children is similar to that which allegedly persuaded him to bomb Syria (along with the UK and France) after the more recent also alleged Douma chemical weapons attacks. So who actually was telling him porkies and why or is this just another myth to prove Trump's crassness – in which case there is no need to make anything up.

    Even if the story is true, the article accepts it as fact and in no way qualifies it, which is just plain misrepresentation as Craig points out.

    The reference to the two Russian operatives at that time is certainly a give away one way and another – but nothing in the article to highlight that inconsistency.

    Strange timing too for the appearance of the article too. No doubt there will be a response from the Russian Embassy.

    N_ , April 17, 2019 at 12:34

    Trump brings together stupidity, narcissistic mental illness and obnoxiousness such that when an official has to deal with him their attitude must surely be to tell the moron whatever gets him to do what they want as soon as possible, so they don't have to spend any more time than necessary in a room with him.

    He lies all the time – the guy can't stop lying – nobody wants to spend time with a person like that – even his wife can't stand the sight of him – and it doesn't matter what it is that you tell him or show him.

    Trump doesn't give a toss about suffering children or suffering anyone else, so it's not likely that he was persuaded by the kind of argument that runs from injured children to the need for US diplomatic action.

    The question is who was behind the anti-Russian side of the Skripal story and why. Not much progress will be made without looking at the British defence review and the huge increase in military spending that warfare interests have moved Gavin Williamson's lips to call for.

    N_ , April 17, 2019 at 12:23

    "(E)xtremely clear CCTV footage of the duck feeding"? So there are fixed cameras watching where the ducks swim in Queen Elizabeth's Park in Salisbury, are there? Because I haven't been able to find even some lamp posts they might be secured to. ( Some images .) Which is not to say the Skripals weren't photographed. And how's the Nikolai Glushkov inquest going?

    Ken Kenn , April 17, 2019 at 13:40

    Trump forgets he lies in minutes. He'd not heard about Julian Assange? If I was reporter I would have played him his words from my laptop and ask: Mr President is this you or a fake President?

    Actually he is a fake President as most US Presidents are. The man's a dunce. I thought after George W Bush US Presidents couldn't get any worse but know history hits us up the backside with a banjo yet again.

    Simple really: Show the video of the Skripal actively feeding the ducks – blank the kids faces and we'll be able to see them in all of their pre poisoned glory.

    All this has been done before by the MS – The London Bridge attackers – 7/7 and so on.

    So why not show the video? Because it shows something(s) which they want to hide. I have my views as to why, as do others but once you start lying you have to develop a good memory and ' British Intelligence ' is a misnomer.

    It's quackery.

    Phil , April 17, 2019 at 15:01

    Rob Slane from the Blogmire interviewed the mother of the children who fed the ducks and she said she was shown "extremely clear CCTV footage".

    Nicholas Kollerstrom , April 17, 2019 at 12:26

    Let us not for one moment forget: Yulia musty be alive somewhere. I reckon they did in Sergei – serve him right for being a double (or triple) agent – but Yulia must still be around. She TOLD US in her video she was fine and getting better.

    Thank god for Craig Murray and the Off-Guardian, they have preserved our sanity over this mad story, this maddest of British Intel cockups.

    N_ , April 17, 2019 at 12:37

    @Nicholas – I'd advise delaying the conclusion that it was a cockup, except in the sense that in most military and intelligence operations something cocks up – until we hear what happens with British military spending plans.

    Gerard Hobley , April 17, 2019 at 12:27

    Someone said to me on Twitter that confirmation of Novichock was from a Mass Spec of the nerve agent bound to some enzyme (probably acetyl cholinesterase). Is this really the official line? If so it's rubbish. Whoever made such a claim was clearly no chemist. Acetyl Cholinesterase weighs about 66700 Daltons and the nerve agent weighed, say between 200 and 400 daltons. Firstly a mass spectrum of the protein would be that of the protein plus or minus anything upto about 300 water molecules Which makes the mass (69400 +/- 2700) and a multitude of other possible ions or other factors bound to it. The error in the mass of the protein clearly exceeds the mass of the nerve agent. Given that, because of the blinding uncertainties as to what species are actually hitting the detector in the mass spectrometer, no-one anywhere attempts to study ligands bound to proteins by mass spec and certainly not one of this size, why would they do it in this case?

    John2o2o , April 17, 2019 at 19:21

    They make it up Gerard.

    Unfortunately most people are not chemists and therefore lack the required knowledge to be skeptical about such claims.

    Casual Observer , April 17, 2019 at 12:45

    Apply the smell test ?

    The CIA Director tells outright lies to her boss, who as a result approves a stern national rebuke.

    In a cartoon version of life where Dick Dastardly gets to be an intelligence supremo, and a total dummy gets to be President, this would be highly likely. Needless to say, to believe such a scenario would exist in the real world requires a massive suspension of logic.

    More likely there's something coming down the track that requires Haspel, and or the CIA, to be discredited prior to its becoming visible to the public ?

    Northern , April 17, 2019 at 13:29

    What could possibly be coming down the track that isn't comparable to what we already know about Haspel and the CIA though?

    If you can straight faced maintain support for an admitted and documented human rights abuser who heads a non accountable government spy agency that has been extra judicially torturing, assassinating and over throwing any who stands in its way for 70 years; what on earth could be about to come out that's suddenly going to convince our bought and paid for media, and by extension the general public, that these monsters have been discredited?

    Brendan , April 17, 2019 at 13:04

    UK spooks are switching to damage limitation mode, with the help of the Deborah Haynes of Sky and II:

    "Update: UK security sources say they're unaware of children hospitalised because of #novichok or wildlife killed in #Skripal attack. May have been a photo of a dead swan though not evidence swan was killed by #Novichok. If that's true, I wonder what these images used by CIA were! "

    https://twitter.com/haynesdeborah/status/1118409471754153984

    John2o2o , April 17, 2019 at 19:22

    lies?

    Goose , April 17, 2019 at 13:12

    I'm not a conspiracy theorist –
    I'm a conspiracy analyst.

    Gore Vidal

    [Apr 17, 2019] Gina Haspel As If Nuremberg Never Happened

    Notable quotes:
    "... I was not in the least surprised at reports that a known torturer was slated to head the CIA, and I expected quick confirmation. Such is my opinion of our ruling classes. ..."
    "... Whatever Haspel may be, we can be sure the CIA will continue to torture, detain people without charge, assassinate and terrorize with its own drone force, and cause mayhem around the world and at home. No one can be trusted with the Ring of Power. ..."
    "... American Exceptionalism is perhaps the most toxic ideology since Nazism and Stalinism. It says that the United States is always virtuous even when it tortures, when it bombs towns, villages, cities in the name of "freedom or installs dictators, military governments, trains torturers, and, yes, rapes and loots in the name of "democracy." ..."
    "... Fast forward to January, 2017 and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer telling MSNBC's Rachael Maddow that President-elect Donald Trump is "being really dumb" by criticizing the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia's cyber activities: Shumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." No, Shumer wasn't joking. He was serious. ..."
    "... There won't be a 'Nuremberg' tribunal because Al Qaida didn't defeat the United States, and you'd have to convict not just Ms. Haspel, but a sizeable portion of the U.S. Government. ..."
    "... If nothing else, the appointment of Bloody Gina as CIA head finally drives a wooden stake through the heart of the myth that "we're The Good Guys(tm)!" or its cousin "all we gotta do is elect Team D and we can be The Good Guys(R) again!" ..."
    "... I do not know whether to admire Mr. van Buren's idealism or be astonished at his naivete. Has he never heard of the School of the Americas, of sinister reputation, or the Condor Plan, aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence? People in Latin America know better than to believe the U.S. protestations of virtue. They know about torturers, and the U.S. support for them. ..."
    "... She was put in charge there not long after and oversaw the waterboarding of at least one prisoner, and later followed orders to destroy the tapes of waterboarding at that site. Your claim that " She had nothing to do with torture anywhere" is incorrect. ..."
    "... furbo: your contention that " US extreme interrogation techniques are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating the genitals, pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones" is wrong. The UN Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, states " For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person " Ask anyone who has been waterboarded whether that fits the official definition? ..."
    "... Ceterum censeo: given that the Iraq invasion and occupation was an act of aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter and thus illegal under US law, it is not just torturers but also war criminals in government and general staff that have to be considered in the contexts of these words. ..."
    Mar 19, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Nothing will say more about who we are, across three American administrations -- one that demanded torture, one that covered it up, and one that seeks to promote its bloody participants -- than whether Gina Haspel becomes director of the CIA.

    Haspel oversaw the torture of human beings in Thailand as the chief of a CIA black site in 2002. Since then, she's worked her way up to deputy director at the CIA. With current director Mike Pompeo slated to move to Foggy Bottom, President Donald Trump has proposed Haspel as the Agency's new head.

    Haspel's victims waiting for death in Guantanamo cannot speak to us, though they no doubt remember their own screams as they were waterboarded. And we can still hear former CIA officer John Kiriakou say : "We did call her Bloody Gina. Gina was always very quick and very willing to use force. Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information."

    It was Kiriakou who exposed the obsessive debate over the effectiveness of torture as false. The real purpose of torture conducted by those like Gina Haspel was to seek vengeance, humiliation, and power. We're just slapping you now, she would have said in that Thai prison, but we control you, and who knows what will happen next, what we're capable of? The torture victim is left to imagine what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, creating his own terror.

    Haspel won't be asked at her confirmation hearing to explain how torture works, but those who were waterboarded under her stewardship certainly could.

    I met my first torture victim in Korea, where I was adjudicating visas for the State Department. Persons with serious criminal records are ineligible to travel to the United States, with an exception for dissidents who have committed political crimes. The man I spoke with said that under the U.S.-supported military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee he was tortured for writing anti-government verse. He was taken to a small underground cell. Two men arrived and beat him repeatedly on his testicles and sodomized him with one of the tools they had used for the beating. They asked no questions. They barely spoke to him at all.

    Though the pain was beyond his ability to describe, he said the subsequent humiliation of being left so utterly helpless was what really affected his life. It destroyed his marriage, sent him to the repeated empty comfort of alcohol, and kept him from ever putting pen to paper again. The men who destroyed him, he told me, did their work, and then departed, as if they had others to visit and needed to get on with things. He was released a few days later and driven back to his apartment by the police. A forward-looking gesture.

    The second torture victim I met was while I was stationed in Iraq. The prison that had held him was under the control of shadowy U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces. Inside, masked men bound him at the wrists and ankles and hung him upside-down. He said they neither asked him questions nor demanded information. They did whip his testicles with a leather strap, then beat the bottoms of his feet and the area around his kidneys. They slapped him. They broke the bones in his right foot with a steel rod, a piece of rebar ordinarily used to reinforce concrete.

    It was painful, he told me, but he had felt pain before. What destroyed him was the feeling of utter helplessness, the inability to control things around him as he once had. He showed me the caved-in portion of his foot, which still bore a rod-like indentation with faint signs of metal grooves.

    Gina Haspel is the same as those who were in the room with the Korean. She is no different than those who tormented the Iraqi.

    As head of a black site, Haspel had sole authority to halt the questioning of suspects, but she allowed torture to continue. New information and a redaction of earlier reporting that said Haspel was present for the waterboarding and torture of Abu Zubaydah (she was actually the station chief at the black site after those sessions) makes it less clear whether Haspel oversaw the torture of all of the prisoners there, but pay it little mind. The confusion arises from the government's refusal to tell us what Haspel actually did as a torturer. So many records have yet to be released and those that have been are heavily redacted. Then there are the tapes of Zubaydah's waterboarding, which Haspel later pushed to have destroyed.

    Arguing over just how much blood she has in her hands is a distraction from the fact that she indeed has blood on her hands.

    Gina Haspel is now eligible for the CIA directorship because Barack Obama did not prosecute anyone for torture; he merely signed an executive order banning it in the future. He did not hold any truth commissions, and ensured that almost all government documents on the torture program remained classified. He did not prosecute the CIA officials who destroyed videotapes of the torture scenes.

    Obama ignored the truth that sees former Nazis continue to be hunted some 70 years after the Holocaust: that those who do evil on behalf of a government are individually responsible. "I was only following orders" is not a defense of inhuman acts. The purpose of tracking down the guilty is to punish them, to discourage the next person from doing evil, and to morally immunize a nation-state.

    To punish Gina Haspel "more than 15 years later for doing what her country asked her to do, and in response to what she was told were lawful orders, would be a travesty and a disgrace," claims one of her supporters. "Haspel did nothing more and nothing less than what the nation and the agency asked her to do, and she did it well," said Michael Hayden, who headed the CIA during the height of the Iraq war from 2006-2009.

    Influential people in Congress agree. Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will soon review Haspel's nomination, said , "I know Gina personally and she has the right skill set, experience, and judgment to lead one of our nation's most critical agencies."

    "She'll have to answer for that period of time, but I think she's a highly qualified person," offered Senator Lindsey Graham. Democratic Senator Bill Nelson defended Haspel's actions, saying they were "the accepted practice of the day" and shouldn't disqualify her.

    His fellow Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, signaled her likely acceptance, saying , "Since my concerns were raised over the torture situation, I have met with her extensively, talked with her She has been, I believe, a good deputy director." Senator Susan Collins added that Haspel "certainly has the expertise and experience as a 30-year employee of the agency." John McCain, a victim of torture during the Vietnam War, mumbled only that Haspel would have to explain her role.

    Nearly alone at present, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he will oppose Haspel's nomination. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, both Democrats, have told Trump she is unsuitable and will likely also vote no.

    Following World War II, the United States could have easily executed those Nazis responsible for the Holocaust, or thrown them into some forever jail on an island military base. It would have been hard to find anyone who wouldn't have supported brutally torturing them at a black site. Instead, they were put on public trial at Nuremberg and made to defend their actions as the evidence against them was laid bare. The point was to demonstrate that We were better than Them.

    Today we refuse to understand what Haspel's victims, and the Korean writer, and the Iraqi insurgent, already know on our behalf: unless Congress awakens to confront this nightmare and deny Gina Haspel's nomination as director of the CIA, torture will have transformed us and so it will consume us. Gina Haspel is a torturer. We are torturers. It is as if Nuremberg never happened.

    Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan. He tweets @WeMeantWell.

    Douglas K. March 19, 2018 at 3:19 am

    Covering up torture is quite possibly the worst thing Obama did. (I'd put it neck-and-neck with targeted killing.) This nation desperately needs a president who will expose all of these horrors, and appoint an attorney general who will prosecute these acts as war crimes.
    I Don't Matter , says: March 19, 2018 at 4:49 am
    Trump likes waterboarding. He said so himself. One assumes he meant, being a whimpering coward himself, when someone else does it to someone else. But who knows? Enjoy judge Gorsuch.
    Mark Thomason , says: March 19, 2018 at 4:49 am
    "doing what her country asked her to do, and in response to what she was told were lawful orders"

    To complete the parallel, we would need to prosecute and punish those who asked her to do it, and those who told her those orders were lawful. Instead, some are doing paintings of their toes, some are promoted to be Federal judges, and some are influential professors at "liberal" law schools. Why punish *only* her?

    Peter Hopkins , says: March 19, 2018 at 6:52 am
    Those who forget the past are destined to repeat it.
    Ian , says: March 19, 2018 at 7:10 am
    As we've proved, we're not better than them. Any of them.
    Bagby , says: March 19, 2018 at 8:00 am
    I was not in the least surprised at reports that a known torturer was slated to head the CIA, and I expected quick confirmation. Such is my opinion of our ruling classes. I am in full support of Mr. Van Buren's thesis. However, Pro Publica, which seems to have been the source of much reporting of Haspel's torture record, has retracted the claim that Haspel had tortured in Thailand. Mr. Van Buren quotes another source from his blog that supports the thesis that Haspel is a torturer. How does one know what to believe? Whatever Haspel may be, we can be sure the CIA will continue to torture, detain people without charge, assassinate and terrorize with its own drone force, and cause mayhem around the world and at home. No one can be trusted with the Ring of Power.
    Centralist , says: March 19, 2018 at 8:19 am
    Its because we lost our sense of what makes us who we are. We are an empire that dances for private interests. In Rome they were called families and led by patricians, they had money private guards, gladiators, and even street people supporting them. In the Modern USA they are called Interest Groups and/or Corporations. They are lead by CEOs and instead of gladiators they have Lawyers. Our being better matters less then their own squabbles which is why a torturer could reach the highest seat in intel. The majority of Americans have lost their sense of being Americans instead they are Republicans, Democrats, etc, etc. Things that once use to be part of an American have come to define us.
    Banger , says: March 19, 2018 at 9:09 am
    American Exceptionalism is perhaps the most toxic ideology since Nazism and Stalinism. It says that the United States is always virtuous even when it tortures, when it bombs towns, villages, cities in the name of "freedom or installs dictators, military governments, trains torturers, and, yes, rapes and loots in the name of "democracy."

    At least this appointment along with the election of Trump shows the true face of the United States in international affairs. When we face the fact we are (a) an oligarchy and (b) a brutal Empire we might have a chance to return to something more human. Few readers, even of TAC, will want to look at our recent history of stunning brutality and lack of interest in even being in the neighborhood of following international law.

    Peter Van Buren , says: March 19, 2018 at 9:31 am
    CIA has purposefully refused to disclose Haspel's role for a decade+ They have selectively released information last week to discredit those criticizing her. I don't think we should play their game, letting them set the agenda. Instead, I declaim torture itself and any role she played in it, whether she poured the water or kept the books.
    Kurt Gayle , says: March 19, 2018 at 9:34 am
    Does Peter Van Buren's criticism of the CIA's Haspel put him at risk?

    In the 2003 film "Love Actually" the British Prime Minister (played by Hugh Grant) jokes with a Downing Street employee Natalie (Martine McCutcheon):

    "PM: You live with your husband? Boyfriend, three illegitimate but charming children? –
    "NATALIE: No, I've just split up with my boyfriend, so I'm back with my mum and dad for a while.
    "PM: Oh. I'm sorry.
    "NATALIE: No, it's fine. I'm well shot of him. He said I was getting fat.
    "PM: I beg your pardon?
    "NATALIE: He said no one's going to fancy a girl with thighs the size of big tree trunks. Not a nice guy, actually, in the end.
    "PM: Right You know, being Prime Minister, I could just have him murdered.
    "NATALIE: Thank you, sir. I'll think about it.
    "PM: Do – the SAS are absolutely charming – ruthless, trained killers are just a phone call away."

    It's just a film. It's just a joke. But the joke works because the public knows that – in reality – the security services have the skills-sets and the abilities, to do damage anyone they want to do damage to -- and to probably get away with it.

    Fast forward to January, 2017 and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer telling MSNBC's Rachael Maddow that President-elect Donald Trump is "being really dumb" by criticizing the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia's cyber activities: Shumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." No, Shumer wasn't joking. He was serious.

    Fast forward again to yesterday, March 17, 2018: Former CIA Director John Brennan wasn't joking when he reacted to the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe -- and President Donald Trump's tweeted celebration of it -- by tweeting this attack against Trump:

    "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America America will triumph over you."

    Obama UN Representative Samantha Power followed up on the Brennan tweet with this:

    "Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan."

    When public officials and former public officials -- like Shumer, Brennan and Power -- make such public statements it must necessarily have a chilling effect on public criticism of the security services.

    After all, none of the three are joking. They're serious. And the American people know that they're serious.

    Does Peter Van Buren's criticism of CIA operative Haspel put him at risk?

    Peter Van Buren , says: March 19, 2018 at 9:35 am
    New information makes it less clear whether Haspel oversaw the torture of all of the prisoners at her black site, but pay it little mind. The confusion is because the government refuses to tell us what Haspel actually did as a torturer. Arguing over just how much blood she has on her hands is a distraction when she indeed has blood on her hands.

    The idea is her participation on any level at the black site is sufficient to disqualify her from heading the Agency. If the Agency wishes to clarify her role, as was done via trial for the various Nazis at Nuremberg, we can deal with her actions more granularly.

    Wilfred , says: March 19, 2018 at 10:25 am
    Since we have not had any more successful attacks on the scale of 9-11, it is very easy to be scrupulous regarding rough treatment of terrorists.

    But if we had suffered a dozen or more such attacks, of increasing magnitude and maybe involving nuclear weapons, how many of you would still be condemning Mrs Haspel et al.? Or would you then be complaining they had not used water-boarding enough?

    The 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, was caught weeks before 9-11. Investigators figured out he was up to no good, tried to get permission to search his computer, but were denied. The U.S. Government carefully protected his privacy rights. So are you pleased with the outcome, Mr van Buren?

    furbo , says: March 19, 2018 at 10:45 am
    I'm sorry – this whole piece is a massive non sequitur. Ms. Haspel has no 'blood' on her hands as US extreme interrogation techniques (sleep deprivation, uncomfortable positions, waterboarding) didn't draw any. They are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating the genitals, pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones. US techniques might have been bad policy – won't argue – but lets not fall for a false equivalency.

    Ms. Haspel was an agent of her government, acting on it's orders under it's policies and guidelines. Which leads to

    Nuremberg. The Nuremberg tribunals (they were military tribunals – not trials) were conducted by a victorious military force against a defeated military force. They were widely criticized as vengeance even by such august people as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Stone and associate Justice Douglas. There won't be a 'Nuremberg' tribunal because Al Qaida didn't defeat the United States, and you'd have to convict not just Ms. Haspel, but a sizeable portion of the U.S. Government.

    And lastly there's this from a comment of the authors: "The idea is her participation on any level at the black site is sufficient to disqualify her from heading the Agency." Utter nonsense. That was the mission of the Agency at that time. It's like saying a 33yr old Drone Pilot who takes out an ISIS/Al Qaida operative as well as 15 civilians is disqualified to be the Sec Def 2 decades later.

    Just stop.

    Sid Finster , says: March 19, 2018 at 10:59 am

    If nothing else, the appointment of Bloody Gina as CIA head finally drives a wooden stake through the heart of the myth that "we're The Good Guys(tm)!" or its cousin "all we gotta do is elect Team D and we can be The Good Guys(R) again!"

    We demonize Russia at every opportunity, but I don't see Russia rewarding torturers by appointing them to high office.

    Sally Stewart , says: March 19, 2018 at 11:11 am
    Douglas K. What are you talking about? Covered up? You mean Bush http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/175/end-the-use-of-torture/
    Stephen J. , says: March 19, 2018 at 11:12 am
    A lot of info below on the War criminals at large.
    -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
    May 26, 2015 Do We Need Present Day Nuremberg Trials? http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2015/05/do-we-need-present-day-nuremberg-trials.html

    And

    March 9, 2018 Are We Seeing Government By Gangsters? http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2018/03/are-we-seeing-government-by-gangsters.html

    connecticut farmer , says: March 19, 2018 at 11:49 am
    I didn't know too much about this woman's background until I read that Rand Paul opposes her nomination. I tend to take notice whenever Rand Paul holds forth on any subject. All I can say is that if her actual record even approximates what has been alleged, then this woman is unfit for the post–Nuremberg or no Nuremberg.
    Winston , says: March 19, 2018 at 11:54 am
    "As we've proved, we're not better than them. Any of them." Oh, -PLEASE-, spare us the hyperbole! WE burn alive captives held in cages? WE saw off their heads?

    Thousands of US Navy and Air Force pilots have been waterboarded as part of their Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (S.E.R.E.) training programs.

    Lex Talionis , says: March 19, 2018 at 12:00 pm
    All of the torturers should be brought to justice. So should all of the officials who ordered or authorized torture.

    There is no statute of limitations on capital Federal crimes. For a U.S. citizen to kill via torture is a capital Federal crime, no matter where the torture took place. If statutes of limitations make it too late to prosecute some acts of torture, it is not too late to bring about some measure of justice by making torturers pariahs. As many sexual harassers have recently learned, there is no statute of limitations in the court of public opinion.

    bob sykes , says: March 19, 2018 at 12:16 pm
    The story linking her to torture has been formally retracted. She had nothing to do with torture anywhere. How about a retraction of this story and an apology.
    Youknowho , says: March 19, 2018 at 12:30 pm
    I do not know whether to admire Mr. van Buren's idealism or be astonished at his naivete. Has he never heard of the School of the Americas, of sinister reputation, or the Condor Plan, aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence? People in Latin America know better than to believe the U.S. protestations of virtue. They know about torturers, and the U.S. support for them.

    Personally, I prefer that the cruelty should be, as Lincoln once put it, "unalloyed by the base metal of hypocrisy"

    Tyrone Slothrop , says: March 19, 2018 at 1:07 pm
    bob sykes: you should read Pro Publica's retraction ( https://www.propublica.org/article/cia-cables-detail-its-new-deputy-directors-role-in-torture ) of the claim that Haspel was in charge of the Thai black site when Abu Zubaydeh was tortured. She was put in charge there not long after and oversaw the waterboarding of at least one prisoner, and later followed orders to destroy the tapes of waterboarding at that site. Your claim that " She had nothing to do with torture anywhere" is incorrect.

    Winston: why do you suppose "thousands of US Navy and Air Force pilots have been waterboarded as part of their Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (S.E.R.E.) training programs"? Is it not to prepare them for the possibility of what we call torture when used by our adversaries?

    furbo: your contention that " US extreme interrogation techniques are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating the genitals, pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones" is wrong. The UN Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, states " For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person " Ask anyone who has been waterboarded whether that fits the official definition?

    Near Rockaway , says: March 19, 2018 at 1:31 pm
    "Has he never heard of the School of the Americas, of sinister reputation, or the Condor Plan, aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence?"

    Evil stuff. And we're still paying for it. Keeping Haspel out of the Director's chair is a basic step toward avoiding more such needless, stupid evil.

    Chris Mallory , says: March 19, 2018 at 1:47 pm
    Wilfred, the problem was not that the Feds protected Zacarias Moussaoui's right to privacy. The problem is that it let any of the 20 Arab Muslims into the US in the first place. Closing our borders and mass deportations would have been the best thing to do in the aftermath of 9/11, not torture and invasions.
    b. , says: March 19, 2018 at 1:58 pm
    Very well put. Lest we forget: Bush also delivered the stern warning that "war crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished, and it will be no defense to say, 'I was just following orders'."

    Ceterum censeo: given that the Iraq invasion and occupation was an act of aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter and thus illegal under US law, it is not just torturers but also war criminals in government and general staff that have to be considered in the contexts of these words.

    Wilfred , says: March 19, 2018 at 4:28 pm
    Chris Mallory (Mar 19 @1:47 p.m.), I agree with you. We shouldn't be letting them in.

    But if someone had sneaked-a-peek at Moussaoui's laptop during the 3 weeks they had him before 9-11, we might have been able to thwart the attack altogether. (And the Press has been strangely incurious about investigating whoever it was who issued the injunction protecting Moussie's precious computer). This type of hand-wringing cost us 3,000 lives. Even more, considering the Afghan & 2nd Iraq wars would never have been launched, were it not for 9-11.

    [Apr 17, 2019] If you had watched Skripal's saga you might have noticed something: The UK s propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany.

    Notable quotes:
    "... The Steele dossier is British, Orbis intelligence = British, Institute for statecraft / Integrity Initiative = British, Skripal defection. Location, evidence, statements = British, the list goes on and on. ..."
    "... The UK's propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. ..."
    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    S.O. , Apr 17, 2019 9:48:02 AM | link

    @75

    The Steele dossier is British, Orbis intelligence = British, Institute for statecraft / Integrity Initiative = British, Skripal defection. Location, evidence, statements = British, the list goes on and on.

    You'd think someone might have noticed something of a trend by now.

    Gravatomic , Apr 17, 2019 10:07:57 AM | link

    They just don't bother anymore, the level of double black psy-ops and gaslighting is a mine field of disinformation. That's what you get when Washington - Obama, gives the green light to propagandizing their people. It's escalated, like we haven't noticed, under Trump despite his pathetic attempts at assuring folks it's fake news.
    Gravatomic , Apr 17, 2019 10:20:02 AM | link
    The UK's propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. I watched about 10 minutes of a documentary about Easter Island, as an example, and it was revisionist to the nth degree. Just absolute rubbish insinuating that white European travelers destroyed the Island. This is what British kids are now being marinated in, "He who controls the past"

    [Apr 17, 2019] Trey Gowdy Calls Hillary Clinton a Habitual Serial Liar

    Highly recommenced to listen. Judge Napolitano is an interesting speaker (start at 41 min)
    As CIA in the USA government organizational chart stands above the Presidential Office Hillary is really untouchable, unless the Presidential Office is also occupied by CIA-democrat like Obama.
    Notable quotes:
    "... She absolutely thinks she is untouchable ..."
    "... Every corrupt person was praised and given more power!!! Hillary sat back and knew of all the raping that bill was doing to kids teenagers young ladies boys young men and she never blinked an eye!!! If a simple tax paying citizen was to pull the bullshit that Hillary has pulled in front of Howdy that citizen would be see the lights day until Jesus came and took us home to Heaven!! ..."
    "... Hillary Clinton actually says in this video that half of Trump supporters are "deplorable". That is equivalent to roughly 25% of the American population! That constitutes a very strong statement from someone who wants to be president of The United States. ..."
    Jan 28, 2018 | www.youtube.com
    Jeanne Stjohn 1 month ago

    Congress is a waste of tax money, they have no power, so obvious! Criminal leaders just lie to them, knowing they can't do a thing and most of them are paid off anyway, they don't want to do anything! Elections are rigged, so they don't have to worry about, "we the poor, lowly people!" We are not even in the equation!

    Giorgio Cooper 1 month ago

    Why is this pathological liar Hillary still running around free ?? Isn't lying to Congress a felony ??? If this lowlife is simply above the law lets change the laws !

    Ann Martin-Frey 1 month ago (edited)

    Prosecute everyone of them that knew and allowed even the smallest bit of knowledge and make every one of them ineligible for their pensions. They do not deserve those pensions, they stole them, treasonous acts against your government does not make you eligable..they do not deserve it!!

    Kathie Logan 2 months ago

    Not only a habitual serial liar but a career Criminal! Hillary and Bill have been involved in illegal manners for over 40 years! Hillary stated it best last year during the time of the election!. " If Donald Trump becomes president, WE WILL ALL HANG!" She finally told the truth!

    Pamela Dunford 1 week ago

    She absolutely thinks she is untouchable because not one person has been brave enough and bold enough to take her down the Clinton's have been corrupt and evil from child good and they were taught from NWO that they will never be taken down go child rob steel kill do everything in the power we Give you both and bring me all glory!!! We will let you control the United States as long as you want!!!

    All the connected deaths that embrace the Clinton's and not single piece of evidence is kept found or stored that it doesn't come up missing so they sit back and allow these foreign governments to take over major areas and promote child sex trafficking who're houses with kids being sold to any man with air in his lungs!

    Every corrupt person was praised and given more power!!! Hillary sat back and knew of all the raping that bill was doing to kids teenagers young ladies boys young men and she never blinked an eye!!! If a simple tax paying citizen was to pull the bullshit that Hillary has pulled in front of Howdy that citizen would be see the lights day until Jesus came and took us home to Heaven!!

    She gas lied straight face looked him dead in the eyes and laughed at the bengahzi deaths that She is on record having him killed she laughed and she didn't Give a f*** about killing him and leaving his remains behind but my question is why hasn't she been arrested booked finger printed and mugshot took with a huge bond or mot and put behind bars until you beat the f******truth out if her??? I would get the death penalty she wouldn't and hasn't gotten a contempt of court for not complying with mr. Gowdy

    CB 2 weeks ago

    Hillary Clinton actually says in this video that half of Trump supporters are "deplorable". That is equivalent to roughly 25% of the American population! That constitutes a very strong statement from someone who wants to be president of The United States.

    To say that 80 million people are "deplorable" IS TRULY DEPLORABLE!!! After hearing this I can't really understand WHY she got even a single vote!

    tropolite 3 weeks ago

    This is a fantastic mosaic of the state of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. It is absolutely clear that she is an habitual liar, corrupt to the extreme and has absolutely no credibility.

    I'd love to see Mr Gowdy take the gloves off and take her down. She must be removed from the public as she is a menace. She is the mother of deplorable.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Never underestimate the CIA by Nancy O'Brien Simpson

    "Many in the USA have come to realize this stealth organization does not work on the behalf of the USA but rather to its own ends."
    CIA probably was involved in Skripals false flag operation as well. Because the behaviour of Theresa May suggest that she from the very beginning was sure about the USA full and unconditional support and putting pressure on EU allies. Then now we know that Gina Haspel, who was also involved in Steele dossier and handled most oversees assets involved in entrapment of Trump, misled Trump and pervaded him to expel 80 Russian diplomats.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Then there is 9/11. This one also has a USA government narrative that defies logic. This time it is so blatant and egregious that an organization called "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth" was founded by Richard Gage, an architect with vast experience in steel structured buildings and fire. The organization demands on official investigation by Congress into exactly how the buildings came down. ..."
    "... According to a statement reported by the BBC , Loose Change film producer Dylan Avery thinks the destruction of the building was suspicious because it housed some unusual tenants, including a clandestine CIA office on the 25th floor, an outpost of the U.S. Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and New York City's emergency command center." Wikipedia ..."
    "... So now we have Prime Minister, Teresa May, accusing Putin and Russia of the May 4 nerve agent attack of Sergei V. Skripal (66) and his daughter, Yulia (33), in Salibury, England. Both are in critical condition after being found unconscious on a bench outside The Maltings Shopping Center in Salibury. As we all know Russia is the new Antichrist. The harbinger of all evil. The enemy we all must view with the utmost fear and loathing. Daily, the MSM in USA recoils as they report story after story of Russia meddling in our elections, shaking the very foundations of our democracy. ..."
    "... Let's get this straight. Mr. Skripal was convicted of high treason in Russia in 2004. He was not tortured, killed or murdered, rather he was allowed to settle in Britain after a spy swap in 2010. Sounds pretty friendly to me, considering that Putin is portrayed as a sadistic monster out to settle scores with those who cross him, by the Western media. ..."
    "... So, why now? Why this attempted assassination now? This is the question, dear reader. Why attempt to assassinate Mr. Skripal now? He was convicted of high treason 14 years ago. He has been in England for eight years. Russia knew at this point he was no threat to them with no new secrets to betray. What would be gained at this point by assassinating the man? ..."
    "... None. However, if the CIA took him out, or paid unscrupulous foreign mercenaries to take him out, much could be gained. The narrative of big bad Putin, in his big bad Russia, would be reinforced. Now, not only is he meddling in elections, getting the dastardly Trump elected, he is using nerve gas to take out enemies on foreign soil. My god, what will be next? ..."
    "... "If we don't take immediate concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be the last place we see chemical weapons used," said Haley. "They could be used here in New York or in cities of any country that sits on this council." CNN Politics ..."
    Mar 18, 2018 | www.veteranstoday.com

    Many in the USA have come to realize this stealth organization does not work on the behalf of the USA but rather to its own ends. And, in this realization, comes a jaded view of both the CIA and the government it represents.

    This realization may have begun with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Warren Commission, a congressional investigation was convened. The commission concluded there was a single lone shooter, a fringe outcast, Lee Harvey Oswald who acted alone in the assassination of the president. Many felt, in light of the facts, that the Warren Commission was a cover up of what really went down on November 22, 1963, in Houston, Texas.

    In 1976, the Congress reopened the Kennedy investigation. They created The United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy (and Martin Luther King Jr.).

    The HSCA completed its investigation in 1978 and determined the Warren Commission was faulty and there was more than one shooter and there was indeed a conspiracy to kill the president. So much for the official narrative of the Warren Commission.

    Why the Warren Commission cover up back then that even the Congress in 1976 (HSCA) reported was bogus? One theory April 25, 1966, The New York Times wrote, "And, President Kennedy, as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of his Administration, that he wanted to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."

    Kennedy was no fan of the Director of the C.I.A. Allen Dulles or his agency, and in the autumn of 1961 he purged the C.I.A. of Dulles and his entourage. This included Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr. and and Deputy Director Charles Cabell. You do not mess with Allen Dulles and the C.I A. Let's leave it at that. Kennedy was dead within two years.

    Then there is 9/11. This one also has a USA government narrative that defies logic. This time it is so blatant and egregious that an organization called "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth" was founded by Richard Gage, an architect with vast experience in steel structured buildings and fire. The organization demands on official investigation by Congress into exactly how the buildings came down.

    By December 2014, over 2,300 architectural and engineering professionals had signed a petition for this investigation. If one looks at controlled demolitions and how the buildings actually came down it is obvious the collapse was not due to an airplane flying into the buildings, but rather a controlled demolition. 2,300 architects and engineers with verified credentials all testify that the narrative of the government is patently false and scientifically implausible if not impossible.

    At about nine a.m. the Twin Towers are crashed into and collapse. At about five twenty p.m. that same day, Building Seven collapses. No planes fly into Building 7, it just collapses. Again, the videos show a controlled demolition.

    There are various theories as to why 7 WTC was taken down. Theories range from 7 WTC being the operation center for the demolition of the Twin Towers to more nefarious motives. "

    According to a statement reported by the BBC , Loose Change film producer Dylan Avery thinks the destruction of the building was suspicious because it housed some unusual tenants, including a clandestine CIA office on the 25th floor, an outpost of the U.S. Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and New York City's emergency command center." Wikipedia

    What is important to remember is that NO STEEL FRAME HIGH RISE HAS EVER TOTALLY COLLAPSED DUE TO FIRE.

    These are but two examples of hundreds where we have been mislead by the official narrative of the government and its MSM news. Remember the Trump Dossier that was leaked and printed as fact? Or, the death of Seth Rich, a "botched" robbery? Or, the list of 200 news outlets in the USA that were Russian Propaganda fronts? All reported as fact by the New York Times and Washington Post. All fake news by the MSM fed to an unsuspecting American people.

    So now we have Prime Minister, Teresa May, accusing Putin and Russia of the May 4 nerve agent attack of Sergei V. Skripal (66) and his daughter, Yulia (33), in Salibury, England. Both are in critical condition after being found unconscious on a bench outside The Maltings Shopping Center in Salibury. As we all know Russia is the new Antichrist. The harbinger of all evil. The enemy we all must view with the utmost fear and loathing. Daily, the MSM in USA recoils as they report story after story of Russia meddling in our elections, shaking the very foundations of our democracy.

    Let's get this straight. Mr. Skripal was convicted of high treason in Russia in 2004. He was not tortured, killed or murdered, rather he was allowed to settle in Britain after a spy swap in 2010. Sounds pretty friendly to me, considering that Putin is portrayed as a sadistic monster out to settle scores with those who cross him, by the Western media.

    Teresa May called the act "reckless" and "indiscriminate", and basically said Putin put innocent English bystanders at risk. She upped the ante by dismissing 23 Russian diplomats, the largest such expulsion in thirty years.

    On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused May of grandstanding in her response to the incident. Russian news agency Interfax reported that The Kremlin denies involvement in the nerve agent poisoning, insisting one motive was to complicate Russia's hosting of the World Cup this summer. Ah, dear Kremin, the motive was much deeper than the World Cup games, which were only a bonus to the attack.

    So, why now? Why this attempted assassination now? This is the question, dear reader. Why attempt to assassinate Mr. Skripal now? He was convicted of high treason 14 years ago. He has been in England for eight years. Russia knew at this point he was no threat to them with no new secrets to betray. What would be gained at this point by assassinating the man?

    None. However, if the CIA took him out, or paid unscrupulous foreign mercenaries to take him out, much could be gained. The narrative of big bad Putin, in his big bad Russia, would be reinforced. Now, not only is he meddling in elections, getting the dastardly Trump elected, he is using nerve gas to take out enemies on foreign soil. My god, what will be next?

    Nikki Haley, Ambassador to the UN tells us, "The United States of America believes that Russia is responsible for the attack on two people in the United Kingdom using a military-grade nerve agent," Haley said in her remarks at a UN Security Council emergency session, blasting the Russian government for flouting international law.

    "If we don't take immediate concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be the last place we see chemical weapons used," said Haley. "They could be used here in New York or in cities of any country that sits on this council." CNN Politics

    The USA needs an enemy to foment fear to justify it's astronomical defense budget. It just loves a good cold war. However, now that Russia is no longer a pinko commie nation to be demonized, and is indeed a capitalist democracy, we have to resurrect a new straw man to hate.

    It is remarkable the degree to which the liberal left has bought into this industrial-military-complex narrative. The USA always has to be bombing someone, droning someone or napalming someone to keep the monies flowing into the defense budget. Take a look at our spending compared to Russia or other nations.

    Alas, it is certainly not out of the question that the CIA was behind the attack. After this amount of time Mr. Putin had nothing to gain in assassinating Mr. Skripal and his daughter. In fact, he had a lot to lose. The CIA? They had a lot to gain, and nothing to lose. Never underestimate the CIA and its brilliance in setting the narrative for its agenda. And, never underestimate Mr. Putin in his resolve not to become their lapdog.

    Ms. Simpson was a radio personality in New York. She was a staff writer for The Liberty Report. A PBS documentary was done on her activism for human rights. She is a psychotherapist and political commentator.

    [Apr 17, 2019] A bridge from fiction to reality

    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Koen , Apr 16, 2019 6:13:59 PM | link

    B, here's a remarkable fact: The Skripal Novichok perfume bottle assassination story is is eerily similar to episode 2 of BBC show 'Killing Eve' where an assassin uses a perfume bottle to kill her target and where later an innocent person accidentally dies after coming into contact with said perfume bottle.

    The episode aired around a month after the Skripal attack but well before the other 2 people fell ill and the perfume bottle theory emerged.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Haspel revelation sheds a whole new light on the death of those two poor little hamsters, or was it guinea pigs, said to be starved while the police was investigating the premises of Skripal.

    Notable quotes:
    "... With Haspel around they might have succombed to her nasty ways of torturing. ..."
    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    willie , Apr 16, 2019 6:29:03 PM | link

    This sheds a whole new light on the death of those two poor little hamsters, or was it guinea pigs, said to be starved while the police was investigating the premises of Skripal.

    With Haspel around they might have succombed to her nasty ways of torturing.

    [Apr 17, 2019] Putin's remark about people with breifcases and impotent US presidents

    With Haspel at the helm of CIA, the threat of waterboarding the President is also very real;-)
    Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Bart Hansen , Apr 16, 2019 6:41:05 PM | link

    Concerning who is pulling the strings, please forgive a repost of an interview with one who knows. On 31 May 2017 Putin gave an interview with Le Figaro where he said:

    "I have already spoken to three US Presidents. They come and go, but politics stay the same at all times. Do you know why? Because of the powerful bureaucracy. When a person is elected, they may have some ideas. Then people with briefcases arrive, well dressed, wearing dark suits, just like mine, except for the red tie, since they wear black or dark blue ones. These people start explaining how things are done. And instantly, everything changes. This is what happens with every administration."

    A long list of people with briefcases so far ends with Gina.

    [Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Return of the Just April 14, 2019 at 10:46 am

    You're right. I see people like Robert Kagan's opinions being respectfully asked on foreign affairs, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams being hired to direct our foreign policy.

    The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they're angling for war with Iran.

    It's preposterous and sickening. And it can't be allowed to stand, so you can't just stand off and say you're "wrecked". Keep fighting, as you're doing. I will fight it until I can't fight anymore.

    Ken Zaretzke , says: April 14, 2019 at 3:38 pm
    Fact-bedeviled JohnT: “McCain was a problem for this nation? Sweet Jesus! There quite simply is no rational adult on the planet who buys that nonsense.”

    McCain had close ties to the military-industrial complex. He was a backer of post-Cold War NATO. He was a neoconservative darling. He never heard of a dictator that he didn’t want to depose with boots on the ground, with the possible exception of various Saudi dictators (the oil-weaponry-torture nexus). He promoted pseudo-accountability of government in campaign finance but blocked accountability for the Pentagon and State Department when he co-chaired the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs with John Kerry.

    And, perhaps partly because of the head trauma and/or emotional wounds he suffered at the hands of Chinese-backed Commies, it’s plausible to think he was regarded by the willy-nilly plotters of the deep state as a manipulable, and thus useful, conduit of domestic subversion via the bogus Steele dossier.

    Unfortunately, the episode that most defines McCain’s life is the very last one–his being a pawn of M-16 in the the deep state’s years-long attempt to derail the presidency of Donald Trump.

    Joe Dokes , says: April 14, 2019 at 11:55 pm
    Measuring success means determining goals. The goals of most wars is to enrich the people in charge. So, by this metric, the war was a success. The rest of it is just props and propaganda.
    Andrew Stergiou , says: April 15, 2019 at 5:11 am
    “Pyrrhic Victory” look it up the Roman Empire Won but lost if the US is invaded and the government does not defend it I would like to start my own defense: But the knee jerk politics that stirs America’s cannon fodder citizens is a painful reminder of a history of jingoist lies where at times some left and right agree at least for a short moment before the rich and powerful push their weight to have their way.

    If All politics is relative Right wingers are the the left of what? Nuclear destruction? or Slavery?

    Peter Smith , says: April 15, 2019 at 5:13 am
    My goodness! I am also a veteran, but of the Vietnam war, and my father was a career officer from 1939-1961 as a paratrooper first, and later as an intelligence officer. He argued vigorously against our Vietnam involvement, and was cashiered for his intellectual honesty. A combat veteran’s views are meaningless when the political winds are blowing.

    Simply put, we have killed thousands of our kids in service of the colonial empires left to us by the British and the French after WWII. More practice at incompetent strategies and tactics does not make us more competent–it merely extends the blunders and pain; viz the French for two CENTURIES against the Britsh during the battles over Normandy while the Planagenet kings worked to hold their viking-won inheritance.

    At least then, kings risked their own lives. Generals fight because the LIKE it…a lot. Prior failures are only practice to the, regardless of the cost in lives of the kids we tried to raise well, and who were slaughtered for no gain.

    We don’t need the empire, and we certainly shouldn’t fight for the corrupt businessmen who have profited from the never-ending conflicts. Let’s spend those trillions at home, so long as we also police our government to keep both Democrat and Republican politicians from feathering their own nests. Term limits and prosecutions will help us, but only if we are vigilant. Wars distract our attention while corruption is rampant at home.

    Fayez Abedaziz , says: April 12, 2019 at 12:25 am
    Thanks, I appreciate this article.
    I’ll make two points, my own opinion:
    it’s the same story as Vietnam, the bull about how the politicians or anti-war demonstrators tied the military ‘hand,’ blah, blah.
    Nonsense. Invading a nation and slaughtering people in their towns, houses…gee…what’s wrong with that, eh?
    The average American has a primitive mind when it comes to such matters.
    Second point I have, is that both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Hillary and Trump should be dragged to a world court, given a fair trial and locked up for life with hard labor… oh, and Cheney too,for all those families, in half a dozen nations, especially the children overseas that suffered/died from these creeps.
    And, the families of dead or maimed American troops should be apologized to and compensation paid by several million dollars to each.
    The people I named above make me sick, because I have feelings and a conscience. Can you dig?
    kingdomofgodflag.info , says: April 12, 2019 at 8:19 am
    Though there is a worldly justification for killing to obtain or maintain freedoms, there is no Christian justification for it. Which suggests that Christians who die while doing it, die in vain.

    America’s wars are prosecuted by a military that includes Christians. They seldom question the killing their country orders them to do, as though the will of the government is that of the will of God. Is that a safe assumption for them to make? German Christian soldiers made that assumption regarding their government in 1939. Who was there to tell them otherwise? The Church failed, including the chaplains. (The Southern Baptist Convention declared the invasion of Iraq a just war in 2003.) These wars need to be assessed by Just War criteria. Christian soldiers need to know when to exercise selective conscientious objection, for it is better to go to prison than to kill without God’s approval. If Just War theory is irrelevant, the default response is Christian Pacifism.

    Mark Thomason , says: April 12, 2019 at 10:43 am
    “has gone un-investigated, unheard of, or unpunished.”

    The one guy who did tell us has just been arrested for doing exactly that.

    The arrest is cheered by those who fantasize about Russiagate, but it is expressly FOR telling us about these things.

    Stephen J. , says: April 12, 2019 at 10:51 am
    “Iraq Wrecked” a lot of innocent people. Millions are dead, cities reduced to rubble, homes and businesses destroyed and it was all a damned lie. And the perpetrators are Free.
    Now there is sectarian violence too, where once there was a semblance of harmony amongst various denominations. See article link below.

    “Are The Christians Slaughtered in The Middle East Victims of the Actions of Western War Criminals and Their Terrorist Supporting NATO ‘Allies’”?

    http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/04/are-christians-slaughtered-in-middle.html

    the the , says: April 12, 2019 at 11:53 am
    We are a globalist open borders and mass immigration nation. We stand for nothing. To serve in this nation’s military is very stupid. You aren’t defending anything. You are just a tool of globalism. Again, we don’t secure our borders. That’s a very big give away to what’s going on.
    the the , says: April 12, 2019 at 11:57 am
    If our nation’s military really was an American military concerned with our security we would have secured our border after 9/11, reduced all immigration, deported ALL muslims, and that’s it. Just secure the borders and expel Muslims! That’s all we needed to do.

    Instead we killed so many people and imported many many more Muslims! And we call this compassion. Its insane.

    Kouros , says: April 12, 2019 at 12:02 pm
    Maybe if Talibans get back in power they will destroy the opium. You know, like they did when they were first in power…. It seems that wherever Americans get involved, drugs follow…
    JohnT , says: April 12, 2019 at 2:03 pm
    “Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” In Eisenhower’s televised farewell address January 17, 1961.
    Rational thought would lead one to believe such words from a fellow with his credentials would have had a useful effect. But it didn’t. In point of fact, in the likes of Eric Prince and his supporters the notion of war as a profit center is quite literally a family affair.
    Ken Zaretzke , says: April 12, 2019 at 2:10 pm
    The military-industrial complex couldn’t accomplish this all by its lonesome self. The deep state was doing its thing. The two things overlap but aren’t the same. The deep state is not only or mainly about business profits, but about power. Power in the world means empire, which requires a military-industrial complex but is not reducible to it.

    We now have a rare opportunity to unveil the workings of the deep state, but it will require a special counsel, and a lengthy written report, on the doings in the 2016 election of the FBI (Comey, Strzok, et. al.), and collaterally the CIA and DIA (Brennan and Clapper). Also the British government (M-16), John McCain, and maybe Bush and Obama judges on the FISA courts.

    [Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene: ..."
    "... Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose: ..."
    "... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
    "... Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option. ..."
    "... If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked. ..."
    "... The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him: ..."
    "... The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. ..."
    "... The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men. ..."
    "... The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead. ..."
    "... It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing. ..."
    "... Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter. ..."
    "... Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss. ..."
    "... Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War. ..."
    "... after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative.. ..."
    "... once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible. ..."
    "... Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians. ..."
    "... The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both. ..."
    "... Haspel will not be fired. ..."
    "... It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). .. ..."
    "... The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. ..."
    Apr 16, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    An ass kissing portrait of Gina Haspel, torture queen and director of the CIA, reveals that she lied to Trump to push for more aggression against Russia.

    In March 2018 the British government asserted, without providing any evidence, that the alleged 'Novichok' poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal was the fault of Russia. It urged its allies to expel Russian officials from their countries.

    The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene:
    President Trump seemed distracted in March as his aides briefed him at his Mar-a-Lago resort on the administration's plan to expel 60 Russian diplomats and suspected spies.

    The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of Russians as its European allies -- part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.

    "We'll match their numbers," Trump instructed, according to a senior administration official. "We're not taking the lead. We're matching."

    The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials -- far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.

    The president, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.

    The expulsion marked a turn in the Trump administration's relation with Russia:

    The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration's increasingly hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close relationship with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

    The past month, in particular, has marked a major turning point in the administration's stance, according to senior administration officials. There have been mass expulsions of Russian diplomats, sanctions on oligarchs that have bled billions of dollars from Russia's already weak economy and, for the first time, a presidential tweet that criticized Putin by name for backing Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

    Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose:

    Last March, top national security officials gathered inside the White House to discuss with Mr. Trump how to respond to the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, the former Russian intelligence agent.

    London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical.
    ...
    During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.

    To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the only victims of Russia's attack.

    Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.

    Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option.

    The Skripal case was widely covered and we followed it diligently (scroll down). There were no reports of any children affected by 'Novichok' nor were their any reports of dead ducks. In the official storyline the Skripals, before visiting a restaurant, fed bread to ducks at a pond in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury.

    They also gave duck-bread to three children to do the same. The children were examined and their blood was tested. No poison was found and none of them fell ill . No duck died. (The duck feeding episode also disproves the claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching a door handle.)

    If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked.

    The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him:

    The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.

    Co-workers and friends of Ms. Haspel push back on any notion that she is manipulating the president. She is instead trying to get him to listen and to protect the agency, according to former intelligence officials who know her.

    The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in the game:

    Ms. Haspel won the trust of Mr. Pompeo, however, and has stayed loyal to him. As a result, Mr. Trump sees Ms. Haspel as an extension of Mr. Pompeo, a view that has helped protect her, current and former intelligence officials said.

    Posted by b on April 16, 2019 at 08:37 AM | Permalink

    Russ , Apr 16, 2019 9:02:41 AM | link

    I don't see how it's possible to manipulate someone (and especially the US president) into doing something they don't want to do with lies like the ones described here. On the contrary presidents, CEOs etc. favor the staffers who tell them the kind of lies they want to hear in order to reinforce what they wanted to do in the first place.

    I've never seen any reason to alter my first position on Trump, that like any other president he does what he wants to do.

    Jerry , Apr 16, 2019 9:14:30 AM | link
    The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men.

    The joke 7in the final scene Robert Redford tells See Eye A man Cliff Robertson that he gave all the evidence to the NY Times. What a joke. The NY Times and the Wash Post are the mouthpieces for the SEE Eye A. The AP news sources most of their stories from those two papers and other lackey See Eye A newspapers.

    One final criticism in moon's story. The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead.

    manny , Apr 16, 2019 9:15:16 AM | link
    Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director

    After this, she got the top job, so what is the real lesson here? Sociopathic liars get promoted....or you can tell the truth, try to be honorable and fade into obscurity.. In a nest of psychos, you have to really be depraved to become the top psycho...

    Nuke it for orbit, it's the only way to be sure...

    Sally Snyder , Apr 16, 2019 9:35:40 AM | link
    Here is an article that looks at whether nations around the world regard the United States or Russia as the greater threat to their nation:

    https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/03/which-is-greater-threat-russia-or.html

    It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing.

    donkeytale , Apr 16, 2019 9:40:06 AM | link
    b

    Backing up Russ's point, when will you realise the "buck stops" on Trump's desk for any and all departments he oversees, which are run by his appointees? Trump is dedicated to creating a neoconservative foreign policy melded to a neoliberal economic policy favouring his corporate fascist sponsors. Recently, you've been all over the Assange indictment, Trump's relationship with Nuttyahoo and the related rollback of JCPOA. Is this what you want to see continued into a second term?

    There is much evidence to show Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy" where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the point where no one can tell the difference.

    They haven't got there quite yet but once the judiciary is controlled by GOP ideologues it's game over. And McConnell is dedicating his life to make that the reality ASAP.

    Meanwhile back at the ranch we are dedicated to knocking down any and all potential opposition to this GOP hostile takeover for some reason I've yet to fathom.

    BM , Apr 16, 2019 9:42:46 AM | link
    Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in the game[Pompeo]

    Hopefully yes to all four propositions. Why am I sceptical though (except conceivably the first)?

    Mataman , Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM | link
    The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. He's the first POTUS in decades I believe to not even pretend to like dogs by having an official White House dog and every policy his Administration can take against animals, they have taken. I'm not even sure I buy the spin that he cared about dead kids either. And NYT readers know this about him, so I don't understand what the point of peddling this fiction is other than to paint Torture Queen in some kind of good light (and we KNOW that she certainly doesn't care about dead anything).
    the pair , Apr 16, 2019 10:08:18 AM | link
    another example of trump's stupidity and pathological inability to think for himself. he gets his views from fox and his policy from bolton. his equally vapid daughter and kushner whine to him about sooper sad syria pictures they saw in a sponsored link while googling for new tmz gossip.

    even worse that this is the twat in charge of one of russiagate's main instigating "deep state" agencies. he spent the entirety of his presidency railing against their various lies then takes this wankery at face value. it's just like the "chinese soldiers in venezuela"; if those pictures were legit they'd have been splattered over every front page and permanently attached to screeching cnn and msnbc segments demanding trump "finally get tough" on "putin's russia".

    my only surprise is that she didn't tell him about british babies ripped from incubators and dipped in anthrax powder.
    the nyt shilling for a soCIopAth? not that surprising.

    Twiki , Apr 16, 2019 10:43:11 AM | link

    The consultant in emergency medicine at Salisbury hospital wrote to The Times, shortly after the Skripal incident. His choice of words was odd, and some have said they indicate no novichok poisoning occurred. Leaving that to one side, his letter certainly puts paid to the idea that more than three people (the Skripals and the policeman, DCI Bailey) were poisoned. https://www.onaquietday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DocSaysNoNerveAgentInSalisbury.jpg
    bjd , Apr 16, 2019 10:43:51 AM | link
    " the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, "

    There was no attack on the Skripals. or on anyone else. The Russophobia in whose context it falls, is of a higher order, in which a fabricated narrative of a Skripal-like attack had an important function. The Skripals were perfectly happy to lend their name to the fabrication, and are living happily, probably in New Zealand.

    Jackrabbit , Apr 16, 2019 10:59:48 AM | link
    The Daily Beast article that b linked to describes how many serious, well-informed people felt that Haspel was unsuitable to lead the CIA. Even more strange and troubling was that Haspel was supported by Trump's nemesis, John Brennan.

    Despite all that, MAGA Trump still nominated her. Any notion that Trump is at odds with, or "manipulated" by, Haspel, Bolton, or Pompeo is just propaganda. We've seen such reporting before (esp. wrt Bolton) and Trump has taken no action.

    Babyl-on , Apr 16, 2019 11:04:28 AM | link
    I see that Trump derangement is alive and well here at MoA. Commenters talk as if Trump is the first president stupid enough to be manipulated by the security agencies and shadow government sometimes referred to as a "deep state". People don't have to be historians or look back to Rome, just read the books about how the great general who "won WWII" was used by the oligarchy which had full control of US foreign policy throughout Eisenhower's term in office.

    Works produced after WWII, C. Wright Mills, The Power elite was written in 1956,The Brothers and The Divil's Chessboard each about the Dulles Brothers and how they operated US foreign policy for the interests of the oligarchy, and the work Peter Phillips, GIANTS: The Global Power Elite and the work of David Rothkopf which thoroughly describes the feudal system under which the Western cultures are ruled.
    The US government is a pantomime it is a show it has no power.

    How many here can honestly say they understand that the US dollar itself and the ENTIRE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM is privately owned. Why do you think the "banks were bailed out"? because the banks were in power not the government. The US is 22 trillion in debt - the oligarchy is the creditor - take over the US gov. and you have a powerless pile of debt.

    Around 6,000 people control 85% of global assets until that changes nothing will change. The oligarchy won virtually all the mines and control the price of all basic commodities necessary for modern life, the internet, oil of course and more.

    What is failing and what has failed over and over for 500 years is Western Civilization and its three "great religions" which preach obedience, oppression, domination by a one god suffocating mythology.

    But the oligarchy doesn't own just the basic commodities, it owns the religions and it owns the drugs and all illegal trade as well.

    Western "civilization" is really nothing more than one vast feudal kingdom, with royal courts in DC, Tel Aviv and Ryiadh. Wheather there is a god or not, religion is made of flesh and blood not miracles. No Rabbi or Priest or Imam claims visitations by god to instruct them on doctrine - they are flesh and blood and they want power so they behave like sycophants to the money they need to expand their power...all for the good souls under their care.

    Jackrabbit , Apr 16, 2019 11:16:08 AM | link
    Correction @13 Trump's supposed nemesis. Trump has brought several friends and associates of his enemies into his Administration:
    • VP Pence: John McCain's buddy
    • Bolton: a neocon (neocons were "Never Trump", remember?)
    • Wm Barr: close with Mueller
    • Haspel: Brennan's gal at CIA
    And Trump himself was close to the Clintons.
    lysias , Apr 16, 2019 12:00:59 PM | link
    Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter.
    Jose Garcia , Apr 16, 2019 12:08:01 PM | link
    What can we expect from a tv personality who became a US president? A man who ran with an advertisement worthy of a business man like him, "Make America Great Again." How does he go about doing it? Giving more money to the military industrial-Congressional complex, even though we are really flat broke. Using aggressive tactics used by Wall Street in hostile company takeovers to really intimidate other nations. And hire and place those he really agrees with in important positions who really reflect his true feelings. I'm sure when he spoke with Haspel before offering her the job, he brought up the topic of torture and agreed with her on its use on terrorists.
    Jackrabbit , Apr 16, 2019 12:24:11 PM | link
    lysias @18: conspired to stop Trump's candidacy

    I think there's a reasonable case to be made that they conspired not to stop Trump but to further speculation of Trump's "collusion" with Russia (what would later be known as Russiagate). The "collusion" and "Russia meddled" accusations are what fueled the new McCarthyism.

    juliania , Apr 16, 2019 12:28:54 PM | link
    I'll just add to Jerry's comment at #3 that the final line in the movie "Day of the Condor" is something like "But will they print it?" which really spoke to the message of the film in its entirety. The condor being an endangered bird for whom the hero is named, and the beginning outrage being the brutal murder of book lovers researching useable plot details for the 'company'makes this message current and applicable to what we see in the Skripal case. And instead of librarians, we now have online commenters, a doughty breed, and we have Assange.

    Instead of 'Will they print it?' I am wondering 'Will they make another movie about it?'

    "Day of the Condor: Part Two." Some Day.

    Ross , Apr 16, 2019 12:41:17 PM | link
    Remind me, where is Yulia Skripal these days? Well and truly 'disappeared' it seems. The mask is off. the snarling face of the beast is there for all to see.
    Kiza , Apr 16, 2019 12:49:37 PM | link
    What a total waste of an article discussing a story published in NYT or WaPo.

    b, the World has divided itself into those who consume alternative media such as this and stupidos who consume MSM. There is nothing in-between that you are attempting to discuss and dissect here. NYT = cognitive value zero.

    Fake News not worth one millisecond of our time, not even to decode what the regime wants us to know, we know all that already. Personally, I am only interested in the new methods of domestic repression, what is next after the warning of Assange arrest, future rendition and torture. The Deep Stare appears to be coming out into open, will it soon get rid of the whole faux democracy construct and just use iron fist to rule? It already impose its will as the rule of law. All of the Western block is heading in this direction.

    jayc , Apr 16, 2019 1:00:38 PM | link
    Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss.
    Piotr Berman , Apr 16, 2019 1:11:24 PM | link
    The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. Mataman | Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM

    This assumes that Trump would primarily care about the ducks (and children) when he approved a massive expulsion, rather that his image and "ah, in that case it would look bad if we do not do something really decisive".

    In any case, I was thinking why NYT would disclose something like that. The point is that readers of Craig Murray (not so few, but mostly Scottish nationalists who are also leftist and have scant possibilities and/or inclination to vote in USA) and MoonOfAlabama would quickly catch a dead fish here, but 99.9% of the public is blissfully unaware of any incongruences in the "established" Skripal narrative.

    Piotr Berman , Apr 16, 2019 1:22:03 PM | link
    BTW, it is possible that the journalist who scribbled fresh yarn obtained from CIA did it earnestly. Journalists do not necessarily follow stories that they cover -- scribbling from given notes does not require overtaxing the precious attention span that can be devoted to more vital cognitive challenges. I am lazy to find the link, but while checking for news on Venezuela, I stumbled on a piece from Express, a British tabloid, where Guaido was named a "figurehead of the oposition" supported by "450 Western countries". My interpretation was that more literate journalists were moved for to more compelling stories as Venezuela went to the back burner.
    JOHN CHUCKMAN , Apr 16, 2019 1:28:11 PM | link
    Yes, indeed, the Skripal Affair is one of the obviously contrived stunts we've seen. Just outrageous in its execution. On a par with the US having a man who didn't even run for president of Venezuela swear himself in and then pressure everyone to accept him as president.

    Interesting, I had no idea Gina Haspel - aka, The Queen of Blood - played a role. I thought it was all original dirty work by Britain's Theresa May. Boy, I hope people are through with the false notion that if women just get into leadership, the world will become a better gentler place.

    Here's some interesting background:

    Noirette , Apr 16, 2019 1:28:44 PM | link
    Macron was (afaik?) the only EU 'leader' who was quoted in the MSM as bruiting re. the Skripal affair a message like:

    .. no culpability in the part of Russia has been evidenced .. for now...

    I suppose he was enjoined to shut his gob right quick (have been reading about brexit so brit eng) as nothing more in that line was heard.

    Hooo, the EU expelled a lot of Russ. diplomats, obeying the USuk, which certainly created some major upsets on the ground.

    Some were expelled, went into other jobs, other places, but then others arrived, etc. The MSM has not made any counts - lists - of names numbers - etc. of R diplos on the job - anywhere. As some left and then others arrived.

    Once more, this was mostly a symbolic move, if extremely nasty, insulting, and disruptive.

    Theresa May's speech re. Novichok, Independent 14 March 2018:

    .. on Monday I set out that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Novichok: a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia. Based on this capability, combined with their record of conducting state sponsored assassinations – including against former intelligence officers whom they regard as legitimate targets – the UK Government concluded it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and despicable act. ..

    https://ind.pn/2XcAIk4

    Cost her a consequent amount of political capital. - Everyone knows the Skripal story is BS.

    semiconscious , Apr 16, 2019 1:31:34 PM | link
    @25 & @26:

    imo, the media has, once again, simply taken its lead from trump himself, & started making things up completely. & you're absolutely correct in pointing out that, much like trump's true believers, the msm's targeted audience never even notices...

    karlof1 , Apr 16, 2019 1:53:44 PM | link
    Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War.
    james , Apr 16, 2019 2:03:20 PM | link
    after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative..

    what i didn't know is what @18 lysias pointed out.."Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter." ditto jr's speculation @20 too...

    so gaspel shows trump some cheap propaganda that she got from who??

    my main problem with b's post - i tend to see it like kiza @23) is maintaining the idea trump isn't in on all of this.. the thought trump is being duped by his underlings.. if he was and it mattered, he would get rid of them.. the fact he doesn't says to me, he is in on it - get russia, being the 24/7 game plan of the west here still..

    c1ue , Apr 16, 2019 2:03:56 PM | link
    Please stop listening to idiot libertarians and their "US is flat broke" meme. The reality is that: so long as Americans transact in dollars, the United States government can tax anytime it feels like by issuing new dollars via the Fed.

    Equally, so long as 60% of the world's trade is conducted in dollars, this is tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxation surface area. The MMT people - I don't agree 100% with everything they say, but they do understand the actual operation of fiat currency.

    The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy.

    Michael Droy , Apr 16, 2019 2:12:37 PM | link
    Well this could be Syria, not Salisbury!

    I doubt Haspel knew the ducks were fake - she was probably just given stuff to pass up the chain. It is a lot like John Kerry who was shown convincing satellite data of the BUK launch that hit MH17 - but no one could be bothered to pass on even the launch site coordinates to the JIT. I'm sure this stuff goes on all the time, and of course, once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible.

    Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians.

    bjd , Apr 16, 2019 2:25:23 PM | link
    The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both.
    fastfreddy , Apr 16, 2019 2:48:31 PM | link
    Haspel will not be fired.
    Russ , Apr 16, 2019 3:02:51 PM | link
    @c1ue | Apr 16, 2019 2:03:56 PM | 32

    "The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy."

    The useful idiocy is most surprising among US farmers. In the 19th century they broadly understood that fiat money was good for chronic low-wealth debtors like themselves, while hard money was bad and a gold standard lethal. This was the basis of the Populist movement. Nothing has changed financially, but today's farmers, and the low-wealth debtor class in general, seem more likely to be goldbuggers than to have any knowledge of economics or of their own political history.

    karlof1 36

    Once a faction becomes submerged in the Mammon theocracy and becomes nothing but mercenary nihilists, thinking is no longer necessary or desirable, except to come up with attractive, pseudo-plausible lies.

    This certainly characterizes "the right" (including liberals), but they have no monopoly on it. By now "the left" is nearly as thoughtless and instrumental on behalf of Mammon, except to the extent that a few people are starting to really grapple with what it means to have an intrinsically ecocidal and therefore suicidal civilization. That's really the only thought frontier left, all else has been engulfed in Mammon, productionism, scientism and technocracy.

    snake , Apr 16, 2019 3:29:24 PM | link
    @7 ..Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy" where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the point where no one can tell the difference. https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/04/15/593529/Ecuadoran-president-sold-off-Assangeto-America-Ron-Paul

    I remind that Mussolini wasted his legislature.. 1 balmy after noon @ a roadside spot. it made his government stronger.?

    It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). ..

    The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. Everyone in the government is covering for the behaviors of someone else in government, the MSM has raised the price of a pencil to just under a million, stock markets are bags of hot thin air, and everyone in side and outside of the centers of power at all levels of government have lied thru their teeth so much that their teeth are melting from the continuous flow of hot deceitful air.

    Corrupt is now the only qualification for political office, trigger happy screwball the only qualification for the police and the military and . making progress is like trying to conduct a panty raid at a female nudist camp.

    John Anthony La Pietra , Apr 16, 2019 3:47:03 PM | link
    https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/quotes?ref_=m_tt_trv_qu

    Higgins: Hey, Turner! How do you know they'll print it? You can take a walk, but how far if they don't print it?

    Joe Turner: They'll print it.

    Higgins: How do you know?

    [Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Return of the Just April 14, 2019 at 10:46 am

    You're right. I see people like Robert Kagan's opinions being respectfully asked on foreign affairs, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams being hired to direct our foreign policy.

    The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they're angling for war with Iran.

    It's preposterous and sickening. And it can't be allowed to stand, so you can't just stand off and say you're "wrecked". Keep fighting, as you're doing. I will fight it until I can't fight anymore.

    Ken Zaretzke , says: April 14, 2019 at 3:38 pm
    Fact-bedeviled JohnT: “McCain was a problem for this nation? Sweet Jesus! There quite simply is no rational adult on the planet who buys that nonsense.”

    McCain had close ties to the military-industrial complex. He was a backer of post-Cold War NATO. He was a neoconservative darling. He never heard of a dictator that he didn’t want to depose with boots on the ground, with the possible exception of various Saudi dictators (the oil-weaponry-torture nexus). He promoted pseudo-accountability of government in campaign finance but blocked accountability for the Pentagon and State Department when he co-chaired the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs with John Kerry.

    And, perhaps partly because of the head trauma and/or emotional wounds he suffered at the hands of Chinese-backed Commies, it’s plausible to think he was regarded by the willy-nilly plotters of the deep state as a manipulable, and thus useful, conduit of domestic subversion via the bogus Steele dossier.

    Unfortunately, the episode that most defines McCain’s life is the very last one–his being a pawn of M-16 in the the deep state’s years-long attempt to derail the presidency of Donald Trump.

    Joe Dokes , says: April 14, 2019 at 11:55 pm
    Measuring success means determining goals. The goals of most wars is to enrich the people in charge. So, by this metric, the war was a success. The rest of it is just props and propaganda.
    Andrew Stergiou , says: April 15, 2019 at 5:11 am
    “Pyrrhic Victory” look it up the Roman Empire Won but lost if the US is invaded and the government does not defend it I would like to start my own defense: But the knee jerk politics that stirs America’s cannon fodder citizens is a painful reminder of a history of jingoist lies where at times some left and right agree at least for a short moment before the rich and powerful push their weight to have their way.

    If All politics is relative Right wingers are the the left of what? Nuclear destruction? or Slavery?

    Peter Smith , says: April 15, 2019 at 5:13 am
    My goodness! I am also a veteran, but of the Vietnam war, and my father was a career officer from 1939-1961 as a paratrooper first, and later as an intelligence officer. He argued vigorously against our Vietnam involvement, and was cashiered for his intellectual honesty. A combat veteran’s views are meaningless when the political winds are blowing.

    Simply put, we have killed thousands of our kids in service of the colonial empires left to us by the British and the French after WWII. More practice at incompetent strategies and tactics does not make us more competent–it merely extends the blunders and pain; viz the French for two CENTURIES against the Britsh during the battles over Normandy while the Planagenet kings worked to hold their viking-won inheritance.

    At least then, kings risked their own lives. Generals fight because the LIKE it…a lot. Prior failures are only practice to the, regardless of the cost in lives of the kids we tried to raise well, and who were slaughtered for no gain.

    We don’t need the empire, and we certainly shouldn’t fight for the corrupt businessmen who have profited from the never-ending conflicts. Let’s spend those trillions at home, so long as we also police our government to keep both Democrat and Republican politicians from feathering their own nests. Term limits and prosecutions will help us, but only if we are vigilant. Wars distract our attention while corruption is rampant at home.

    Fayez Abedaziz , says: April 12, 2019 at 12:25 am
    Thanks, I appreciate this article.
    I’ll make two points, my own opinion:
    it’s the same story as Vietnam, the bull about how the politicians or anti-war demonstrators tied the military ‘hand,’ blah, blah.
    Nonsense. Invading a nation and slaughtering people in their towns, houses…gee…what’s wrong with that, eh?
    The average American has a primitive mind when it comes to such matters.
    Second point I have, is that both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Hillary and Trump should be dragged to a world court, given a fair trial and locked up for life with hard labor… oh, and Cheney too,for all those families, in half a dozen nations, especially the children overseas that suffered/died from these creeps.
    And, the families of dead or maimed American troops should be apologized to and compensation paid by several million dollars to each.
    The people I named above make me sick, because I have feelings and a conscience. Can you dig?
    kingdomofgodflag.info , says: April 12, 2019 at 8:19 am
    Though there is a worldly justification for killing to obtain or maintain freedoms, there is no Christian justification for it. Which suggests that Christians who die while doing it, die in vain.

    America’s wars are prosecuted by a military that includes Christians. They seldom question the killing their country orders them to do, as though the will of the government is that of the will of God. Is that a safe assumption for them to make? German Christian soldiers made that assumption regarding their government in 1939. Who was there to tell them otherwise? The Church failed, including the chaplains. (The Southern Baptist Convention declared the invasion of Iraq a just war in 2003.) These wars need to be assessed by Just War criteria. Christian soldiers need to know when to exercise selective conscientious objection, for it is better to go to prison than to kill without God’s approval. If Just War theory is irrelevant, the default response is Christian Pacifism.

    Mark Thomason , says: April 12, 2019 at 10:43 am
    “has gone un-investigated, unheard of, or unpunished.”

    The one guy who did tell us has just been arrested for doing exactly that.

    The arrest is cheered by those who fantasize about Russiagate, but it is expressly FOR telling us about these things.

    Stephen J. , says: April 12, 2019 at 10:51 am
    “Iraq Wrecked” a lot of innocent people. Millions are dead, cities reduced to rubble, homes and businesses destroyed and it was all a damned lie. And the perpetrators are Free.
    Now there is sectarian violence too, where once there was a semblance of harmony amongst various denominations. See article link below.

    “Are The Christians Slaughtered in The Middle East Victims of the Actions of Western War Criminals and Their Terrorist Supporting NATO ‘Allies’”?

    http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/04/are-christians-slaughtered-in-middle.html

    the the , says: April 12, 2019 at 11:53 am
    We are a globalist open borders and mass immigration nation. We stand for nothing. To serve in this nation’s military is very stupid. You aren’t defending anything. You are just a tool of globalism. Again, we don’t secure our borders. That’s a very big give away to what’s going on.
    the the , says: April 12, 2019 at 11:57 am
    If our nation’s military really was an American military concerned with our security we would have secured our border after 9/11, reduced all immigration, deported ALL muslims, and that’s it. Just secure the borders and expel Muslims! That’s all we needed to do.

    Instead we killed so many people and imported many many more Muslims! And we call this compassion. Its insane.

    Kouros , says: April 12, 2019 at 12:02 pm
    Maybe if Talibans get back in power they will destroy the opium. You know, like they did when they were first in power…. It seems that wherever Americans get involved, drugs follow…
    JohnT , says: April 12, 2019 at 2:03 pm
    “Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” In Eisenhower’s televised farewell address January 17, 1961.
    Rational thought would lead one to believe such words from a fellow with his credentials would have had a useful effect. But it didn’t. In point of fact, in the likes of Eric Prince and his supporters the notion of war as a profit center is quite literally a family affair.
    Ken Zaretzke , says: April 12, 2019 at 2:10 pm
    The military-industrial complex couldn’t accomplish this all by its lonesome self. The deep state was doing its thing. The two things overlap but aren’t the same. The deep state is not only or mainly about business profits, but about power. Power in the world means empire, which requires a military-industrial complex but is not reducible to it.

    We now have a rare opportunity to unveil the workings of the deep state, but it will require a special counsel, and a lengthy written report, on the doings in the 2016 election of the FBI (Comey, Strzok, et. al.), and collaterally the CIA and DIA (Brennan and Clapper). Also the British government (M-16), John McCain, and maybe Bush and Obama judges on the FISA courts.

    [Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene: ..."
    "... Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose: ..."
    "... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
    "... Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option. ..."
    "... If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked. ..."
    "... The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him: ..."
    "... The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. ..."
    "... The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men. ..."
    "... The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead. ..."
    "... It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing. ..."
    "... Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter. ..."
    "... Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss. ..."
    "... Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War. ..."
    "... after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative.. ..."
    "... once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible. ..."
    "... Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians. ..."
    "... The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both. ..."
    "... Haspel will not be fired. ..."
    "... It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). .. ..."
    "... The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. ..."
    Apr 16, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    An ass kissing portrait of Gina Haspel, torture queen and director of the CIA, reveals that she lied to Trump to push for more aggression against Russia.

    In March 2018 the British government asserted, without providing any evidence, that the alleged 'Novichok' poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal was the fault of Russia. It urged its allies to expel Russian officials from their countries.

    The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene:
    President Trump seemed distracted in March as his aides briefed him at his Mar-a-Lago resort on the administration's plan to expel 60 Russian diplomats and suspected spies.

    The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of Russians as its European allies -- part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.

    "We'll match their numbers," Trump instructed, according to a senior administration official. "We're not taking the lead. We're matching."

    The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials -- far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.

    The president, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.

    The expulsion marked a turn in the Trump administration's relation with Russia:

    The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration's increasingly hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close relationship with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

    The past month, in particular, has marked a major turning point in the administration's stance, according to senior administration officials. There have been mass expulsions of Russian diplomats, sanctions on oligarchs that have bled billions of dollars from Russia's already weak economy and, for the first time, a presidential tweet that criticized Putin by name for backing Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.

    Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose:

    Last March, top national security officials gathered inside the White House to discuss with Mr. Trump how to respond to the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, the former Russian intelligence agent.

    London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical.
    ...
    During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.

    To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the only victims of Russia's attack.

    Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.

    Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option.

    The Skripal case was widely covered and we followed it diligently (scroll down). There were no reports of any children affected by 'Novichok' nor were their any reports of dead ducks. In the official storyline the Skripals, before visiting a restaurant, fed bread to ducks at a pond in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury.

    They also gave duck-bread to three children to do the same. The children were examined and their blood was tested. No poison was found and none of them fell ill . No duck died. (The duck feeding episode also disproves the claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching a door handle.)

    If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked.

    The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him:

    The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.

    Co-workers and friends of Ms. Haspel push back on any notion that she is manipulating the president. She is instead trying to get him to listen and to protect the agency, according to former intelligence officials who know her.

    The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in the game:

    Ms. Haspel won the trust of Mr. Pompeo, however, and has stayed loyal to him. As a result, Mr. Trump sees Ms. Haspel as an extension of Mr. Pompeo, a view that has helped protect her, current and former intelligence officials said.

    Posted by b on April 16, 2019 at 08:37 AM | Permalink

    Russ , Apr 16, 2019 9:02:41 AM | link

    I don't see how it's possible to manipulate someone (and especially the US president) into doing something they don't want to do with lies like the ones described here. On the contrary presidents, CEOs etc. favor the staffers who tell them the kind of lies they want to hear in order to reinforce what they wanted to do in the first place.

    I've never seen any reason to alter my first position on Trump, that like any other president he does what he wants to do.

    Jerry , Apr 16, 2019 9:14:30 AM | link
    The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men.

    The joke 7in the final scene Robert Redford tells See Eye A man Cliff Robertson that he gave all the evidence to the NY Times. What a joke. The NY Times and the Wash Post are the mouthpieces for the SEE Eye A. The AP news sources most of their stories from those two papers and other lackey See Eye A newspapers.

    One final criticism in moon's story. The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead.

    manny , Apr 16, 2019 9:15:16 AM | link
    Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director

    After this, she got the top job, so what is the real lesson here? Sociopathic liars get promoted....or you can tell the truth, try to be honorable and fade into obscurity.. In a nest of psychos, you have to really be depraved to become the top psycho...

    Nuke it for orbit, it's the only way to be sure...

    Sally Snyder , Apr 16, 2019 9:35:40 AM | link
    Here is an article that looks at whether nations around the world regard the United States or Russia as the greater threat to their nation:

    https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/03/which-is-greater-threat-russia-or.html

    It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing.

    donkeytale , Apr 16, 2019 9:40:06 AM | link
    b

    Backing up Russ's point, when will you realise the "buck stops" on Trump's desk for any and all departments he oversees, which are run by his appointees? Trump is dedicated to creating a neoconservative foreign policy melded to a neoliberal economic policy favouring his corporate fascist sponsors. Recently, you've been all over the Assange indictment, Trump's relationship with Nuttyahoo and the related rollback of JCPOA. Is this what you want to see continued into a second term?

    There is much evidence to show Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy" where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the point where no one can tell the difference.

    They haven't got there quite yet but once the judiciary is controlled by GOP ideologues it's game over. And McConnell is dedicating his life to make that the reality ASAP.

    Meanwhile back at the ranch we are dedicated to knocking down any and all potential opposition to this GOP hostile takeover for some reason I've yet to fathom.

    BM , Apr 16, 2019 9:42:46 AM | link
    Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in the game[Pompeo]

    Hopefully yes to all four propositions. Why am I sceptical though (except conceivably the first)?

    Mataman , Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM | link
    The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. He's the first POTUS in decades I believe to not even pretend to like dogs by having an official White House dog and every policy his Administration can take against animals, they have taken. I'm not even sure I buy the spin that he cared about dead kids either. And NYT readers know this about him, so I don't understand what the point of peddling this fiction is other than to paint Torture Queen in some kind of good light (and we KNOW that she certainly doesn't care about dead anything).
    the pair , Apr 16, 2019 10:08:18 AM | link
    another example of trump's stupidity and pathological inability to think for himself. he gets his views from fox and his policy from bolton. his equally vapid daughter and kushner whine to him about sooper sad syria pictures they saw in a sponsored link while googling for new tmz gossip.

    even worse that this is the twat in charge of one of russiagate's main instigating "deep state" agencies. he spent the entirety of his presidency railing against their various lies then takes this wankery at face value. it's just like the "chinese soldiers in venezuela"; if those pictures were legit they'd have been splattered over every front page and permanently attached to screeching cnn and msnbc segments demanding trump "finally get tough" on "putin's russia".

    my only surprise is that she didn't tell him about british babies ripped from incubators and dipped in anthrax powder.
    the nyt shilling for a soCIopAth? not that surprising.

    Twiki , Apr 16, 2019 10:43:11 AM | link

    The consultant in emergency medicine at Salisbury hospital wrote to The Times, shortly after the Skripal incident. His choice of words was odd, and some have said they indicate no novichok poisoning occurred. Leaving that to one side, his letter certainly puts paid to the idea that more than three people (the Skripals and the policeman, DCI Bailey) were poisoned. https://www.onaquietday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DocSaysNoNerveAgentInSalisbury.jpg
    bjd , Apr 16, 2019 10:43:51 AM | link
    " the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, "

    There was no attack on the Skripals. or on anyone else. The Russophobia in whose context it falls, is of a higher order, in which a fabricated narrative of a Skripal-like attack had an important function. The Skripals were perfectly happy to lend their name to the fabrication, and are living happily, probably in New Zealand.

    Jackrabbit , Apr 16, 2019 10:59:48 AM | link
    The Daily Beast article that b linked to describes how many serious, well-informed people felt that Haspel was unsuitable to lead the CIA. Even more strange and troubling was that Haspel was supported by Trump's nemesis, John Brennan.

    Despite all that, MAGA Trump still nominated her. Any notion that Trump is at odds with, or "manipulated" by, Haspel, Bolton, or Pompeo is just propaganda. We've seen such reporting before (esp. wrt Bolton) and Trump has taken no action.

    Babyl-on , Apr 16, 2019 11:04:28 AM | link
    I see that Trump derangement is alive and well here at MoA. Commenters talk as if Trump is the first president stupid enough to be manipulated by the security agencies and shadow government sometimes referred to as a "deep state". People don't have to be historians or look back to Rome, just read the books about how the great general who "won WWII" was used by the oligarchy which had full control of US foreign policy throughout Eisenhower's term in office.

    Works produced after WWII, C. Wright Mills, The Power elite was written in 1956,The Brothers and The Divil's Chessboard each about the Dulles Brothers and how they operated US foreign policy for the interests of the oligarchy, and the work Peter Phillips, GIANTS: The Global Power Elite and the work of David Rothkopf which thoroughly describes the feudal system under which the Western cultures are ruled.
    The US government is a pantomime it is a show it has no power.

    How many here can honestly say they understand that the US dollar itself and the ENTIRE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM is privately owned. Why do you think the "banks were bailed out"? because the banks were in power not the government. The US is 22 trillion in debt - the oligarchy is the creditor - take over the US gov. and you have a powerless pile of debt.

    Around 6,000 people control 85% of global assets until that changes nothing will change. The oligarchy won virtually all the mines and control the price of all basic commodities necessary for modern life, the internet, oil of course and more.

    What is failing and what has failed over and over for 500 years is Western Civilization and its three "great religions" which preach obedience, oppression, domination by a one god suffocating mythology.

    But the oligarchy doesn't own just the basic commodities, it owns the religions and it owns the drugs and all illegal trade as well.

    Western "civilization" is really nothing more than one vast feudal kingdom, with royal courts in DC, Tel Aviv and Ryiadh. Wheather there is a god or not, religion is made of flesh and blood not miracles. No Rabbi or Priest or Imam claims visitations by god to instruct them on doctrine - they are flesh and blood and they want power so they behave like sycophants to the money they need to expand their power...all for the good souls under their care.

    Jackrabbit , Apr 16, 2019 11:16:08 AM | link
    Correction @13 Trump's supposed nemesis. Trump has brought several friends and associates of his enemies into his Administration:
    • VP Pence: John McCain's buddy
    • Bolton: a neocon (neocons were "Never Trump", remember?)
    • Wm Barr: close with Mueller
    • Haspel: Brennan's gal at CIA
    And Trump himself was close to the Clintons.
    lysias , Apr 16, 2019 12:00:59 PM | link
    Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter.
    Jose Garcia , Apr 16, 2019 12:08:01 PM | link
    What can we expect from a tv personality who became a US president? A man who ran with an advertisement worthy of a business man like him, "Make America Great Again." How does he go about doing it? Giving more money to the military industrial-Congressional complex, even though we are really flat broke. Using aggressive tactics used by Wall Street in hostile company takeovers to really intimidate other nations. And hire and place those he really agrees with in important positions who really reflect his true feelings. I'm sure when he spoke with Haspel before offering her the job, he brought up the topic of torture and agreed with her on its use on terrorists.
    Jackrabbit , Apr 16, 2019 12:24:11 PM | link
    lysias @18: conspired to stop Trump's candidacy

    I think there's a reasonable case to be made that they conspired not to stop Trump but to further speculation of Trump's "collusion" with Russia (what would later be known as Russiagate). The "collusion" and "Russia meddled" accusations are what fueled the new McCarthyism.

    juliania , Apr 16, 2019 12:28:54 PM | link
    I'll just add to Jerry's comment at #3 that the final line in the movie "Day of the Condor" is something like "But will they print it?" which really spoke to the message of the film in its entirety. The condor being an endangered bird for whom the hero is named, and the beginning outrage being the brutal murder of book lovers researching useable plot details for the 'company'makes this message current and applicable to what we see in the Skripal case. And instead of librarians, we now have online commenters, a doughty breed, and we have Assange.

    Instead of 'Will they print it?' I am wondering 'Will they make another movie about it?'

    "Day of the Condor: Part Two." Some Day.

    Ross , Apr 16, 2019 12:41:17 PM | link
    Remind me, where is Yulia Skripal these days? Well and truly 'disappeared' it seems. The mask is off. the snarling face of the beast is there for all to see.
    Kiza , Apr 16, 2019 12:49:37 PM | link
    What a total waste of an article discussing a story published in NYT or WaPo.

    b, the World has divided itself into those who consume alternative media such as this and stupidos who consume MSM. There is nothing in-between that you are attempting to discuss and dissect here. NYT = cognitive value zero.

    Fake News not worth one millisecond of our time, not even to decode what the regime wants us to know, we know all that already. Personally, I am only interested in the new methods of domestic repression, what is next after the warning of Assange arrest, future rendition and torture. The Deep Stare appears to be coming out into open, will it soon get rid of the whole faux democracy construct and just use iron fist to rule? It already impose its will as the rule of law. All of the Western block is heading in this direction.

    jayc , Apr 16, 2019 1:00:38 PM | link
    Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss.
    Piotr Berman , Apr 16, 2019 1:11:24 PM | link
    The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. Mataman | Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM

    This assumes that Trump would primarily care about the ducks (and children) when he approved a massive expulsion, rather that his image and "ah, in that case it would look bad if we do not do something really decisive".

    In any case, I was thinking why NYT would disclose something like that. The point is that readers of Craig Murray (not so few, but mostly Scottish nationalists who are also leftist and have scant possibilities and/or inclination to vote in USA) and MoonOfAlabama would quickly catch a dead fish here, but 99.9% of the public is blissfully unaware of any incongruences in the "established" Skripal narrative.

    Piotr Berman , Apr 16, 2019 1:22:03 PM | link
    BTW, it is possible that the journalist who scribbled fresh yarn obtained from CIA did it earnestly. Journalists do not necessarily follow stories that they cover -- scribbling from given notes does not require overtaxing the precious attention span that can be devoted to more vital cognitive challenges. I am lazy to find the link, but while checking for news on Venezuela, I stumbled on a piece from Express, a British tabloid, where Guaido was named a "figurehead of the oposition" supported by "450 Western countries". My interpretation was that more literate journalists were moved for to more compelling stories as Venezuela went to the back burner.
    JOHN CHUCKMAN , Apr 16, 2019 1:28:11 PM | link
    Yes, indeed, the Skripal Affair is one of the obviously contrived stunts we've seen. Just outrageous in its execution. On a par with the US having a man who didn't even run for president of Venezuela swear himself in and then pressure everyone to accept him as president.

    Interesting, I had no idea Gina Haspel - aka, The Queen of Blood - played a role. I thought it was all original dirty work by Britain's Theresa May. Boy, I hope people are through with the false notion that if women just get into leadership, the world will become a better gentler place.

    Here's some interesting background:

    Noirette , Apr 16, 2019 1:28:44 PM | link
    Macron was (afaik?) the only EU 'leader' who was quoted in the MSM as bruiting re. the Skripal affair a message like:

    .. no culpability in the part of Russia has been evidenced .. for now...

    I suppose he was enjoined to shut his gob right quick (have been reading about brexit so brit eng) as nothing more in that line was heard.

    Hooo, the EU expelled a lot of Russ. diplomats, obeying the USuk, which certainly created some major upsets on the ground.

    Some were expelled, went into other jobs, other places, but then others arrived, etc. The MSM has not made any counts - lists - of names numbers - etc. of R diplos on the job - anywhere. As some left and then others arrived.

    Once more, this was mostly a symbolic move, if extremely nasty, insulting, and disruptive.

    Theresa May's speech re. Novichok, Independent 14 March 2018:

    .. on Monday I set out that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Novichok: a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia. Based on this capability, combined with their record of conducting state sponsored assassinations – including against former intelligence officers whom they regard as legitimate targets – the UK Government concluded it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and despicable act. ..

    https://ind.pn/2XcAIk4

    Cost her a consequent amount of political capital. - Everyone knows the Skripal story is BS.

    semiconscious , Apr 16, 2019 1:31:34 PM | link
    @25 & @26:

    imo, the media has, once again, simply taken its lead from trump himself, & started making things up completely. & you're absolutely correct in pointing out that, much like trump's true believers, the msm's targeted audience never even notices...

    karlof1 , Apr 16, 2019 1:53:44 PM | link
    Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War.
    james , Apr 16, 2019 2:03:20 PM | link
    after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative..

    what i didn't know is what @18 lysias pointed out.."Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter." ditto jr's speculation @20 too...

    so gaspel shows trump some cheap propaganda that she got from who??

    my main problem with b's post - i tend to see it like kiza @23) is maintaining the idea trump isn't in on all of this.. the thought trump is being duped by his underlings.. if he was and it mattered, he would get rid of them.. the fact he doesn't says to me, he is in on it - get russia, being the 24/7 game plan of the west here still..

    c1ue , Apr 16, 2019 2:03:56 PM | link
    Please stop listening to idiot libertarians and their "US is flat broke" meme. The reality is that: so long as Americans transact in dollars, the United States government can tax anytime it feels like by issuing new dollars via the Fed.

    Equally, so long as 60% of the world's trade is conducted in dollars, this is tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxation surface area. The MMT people - I don't agree 100% with everything they say, but they do understand the actual operation of fiat currency.

    The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy.

    Michael Droy , Apr 16, 2019 2:12:37 PM | link
    Well this could be Syria, not Salisbury!

    I doubt Haspel knew the ducks were fake - she was probably just given stuff to pass up the chain. It is a lot like John Kerry who was shown convincing satellite data of the BUK launch that hit MH17 - but no one could be bothered to pass on even the launch site coordinates to the JIT. I'm sure this stuff goes on all the time, and of course, once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible.

    Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians.

    bjd , Apr 16, 2019 2:25:23 PM | link
    The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both.
    fastfreddy , Apr 16, 2019 2:48:31 PM | link
    Haspel will not be fired.
    Russ , Apr 16, 2019 3:02:51 PM | link
    @c1ue | Apr 16, 2019 2:03:56 PM | 32

    "The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy."

    The useful idiocy is most surprising among US farmers. In the 19th century they broadly understood that fiat money was good for chronic low-wealth debtors like themselves, while hard money was bad and a gold standard lethal. This was the basis of the Populist movement. Nothing has changed financially, but today's farmers, and the low-wealth debtor class in general, seem more likely to be goldbuggers than to have any knowledge of economics or of their own political history.

    karlof1 36

    Once a faction becomes submerged in the Mammon theocracy and becomes nothing but mercenary nihilists, thinking is no longer necessary or desirable, except to come up with attractive, pseudo-plausible lies.

    This certainly characterizes "the right" (including liberals), but they have no monopoly on it. By now "the left" is nearly as thoughtless and instrumental on behalf of Mammon, except to the extent that a few people are starting to really grapple with what it means to have an intrinsically ecocidal and therefore suicidal civilization. That's really the only thought frontier left, all else has been engulfed in Mammon, productionism, scientism and technocracy.

    snake , Apr 16, 2019 3:29:24 PM | link
    @7 ..Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy" where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the point where no one can tell the difference. https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/04/15/593529/Ecuadoran-president-sold-off-Assangeto-America-Ron-Paul

    I remind that Mussolini wasted his legislature.. 1 balmy after noon @ a roadside spot. it made his government stronger.?

    It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). ..

    The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. Everyone in the government is covering for the behaviors of someone else in government, the MSM has raised the price of a pencil to just under a million, stock markets are bags of hot thin air, and everyone in side and outside of the centers of power at all levels of government have lied thru their teeth so much that their teeth are melting from the continuous flow of hot deceitful air.

    Corrupt is now the only qualification for political office, trigger happy screwball the only qualification for the police and the military and . making progress is like trying to conduct a panty raid at a female nudist camp.

    John Anthony La Pietra , Apr 16, 2019 3:47:03 PM | link
    https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0073802/quotes?ref_=m_tt_trv_qu

    Higgins: Hey, Turner! How do you know they'll print it? You can take a walk, but how far if they don't print it?

    Joe Turner: They'll print it.

    Higgins: How do you know?

    [Apr 16, 2019] Trump as a useful idiot of the Deep State

    Apr 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Anunnaki , 11 hours ago link

    If Trump pardoned Assange, I would consider that draining the swamp. But Orange Jewlius is a Deep State **** socket, so the swamp has grown to a lagoon

    Anunnaki , 11 hours ago link

    Jimmy Dore and Tucker Carlson nail it

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SnwC_1Pf9VQ

    rtb61 , 12 hours ago link

    Clearly the US government has zero respect for Australia, Australian Law or Australian citizens. The case is shite, else they would allow Assange to be deported to Australia and the extradition hearing to be heard there. They refuse because they know their case is shite and they would have to prove it in Australia before they could get extradition.

    The USA is not an ally of Australia because it does not respect Australian law, not in the least. Prove US respect of Australians by deporting Assange to Australia and holding the extradition hearings there, else look as guilty as shite and never ever to be trusted by Australians.

    OZZIDOWNUNDER , 9 hours ago link

    The US Govt respects NOBODY but its own Interests. It's the Australian Govt that's complicit in this travesty of Nil justice. The Gutless Australian Govt has NO interest in helping Julian Assange because they were persuaded NOT to by their American masters. It hurts that your own Govt are total A$$holes & follow USA into Crimes with out question. The Australian Govt has a History of lip service only when assistance Overseas is required. **** them !

    NYC80 , 13 hours ago link

    Assange probably is a narcissist. So what? All the people criticizing him are, too. At least he's an honest narcissist. In everything he's published, not a single item has even been allegedly false. Can any of these other so-called "journalists" demonstrate that level of accuracy?

    Ms No , 14 hours ago link

    Here is a good article on Assange. Explains the cat. Things were okay for him under the real elected president of Ecuador, except no sunlight thanks to US spooks.

    https://www.sott.net/article/411173-My-friend-Julian-Assange-Alicia-Castro-former-ambassador-for-Argentina

    [Apr 16, 2019] No One Can Trust Trump

    That's from ZeroHedge, the bastion of Trumpism ;-)
    Apr 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Deep Snorkeler , 1 hour ago link

    No One Can Trust Trump erratic and dysfunctional, absurd and incongruous, fantastic and ludicrous - he rules from an immoral crevasse:

    he sustains massive corporate profits and upper caste power.

    Fantasy Free Economics , 1 hour ago link

    It is normal that others see weakness in the U.S. before we do. The notion in the United States is that what we want to be true is true. Fantasy is a comforting mechanism but it sure is painful when everything falls apart. Our reality gap has not slammed shut but it will.

    http://quillian.net/blog/victims-of-fascism/

    Cosmicserpent , 10 minutes ago link

    It's official. Trump is a cum guzzling **** for Israel's Bentoveryahoo, and the US MIC. He wishes he was Putin's bitch.

    †FreeThought† , 11 minutes ago link

    What happened to "Nationalism, not globalism will be our credo"...? I voted for Trump and I got Trumpstein instead.

    Empire's Frontiers , 18 minutes ago link

    An exceptionally good goy, this Trump guy.

    Shalom! And get back to work.

    Dr. Acula , 7 minutes ago link

    It's X-dimensional chess, where the value of X increases each day.

    SHsparx , 30 minutes ago link

    I'm starting to get the feeling that maybe Trump won't run again? And so now he feels he doesn't even have to pretend anymore.

    R19 , 29 minutes ago link

    Which President has been the best weapons salesman? I vote:

    Trump

    Obama

    ThomasEdmonds , 28 minutes ago link

    Like a guided missile: sure of its target.

    KekistanisUnite , 28 minutes ago link

    Disappointing but not surprising. I do hope at some point his mind will be changed. Give full credit to the 16 Republicans in the House and 7 Republican Senators for supporting this resolution.

    warsev , 37 minutes ago link

    I guess we now know fully where President Trump stands on reining in executive warmongering.

    evoila , 30 minutes ago link

    Better buy your call options on Tulsi Gabbard. She is going to surprise da **** out of these idiots same way Trump surprised in 2016.

    jimfcarroll , 28 minutes ago link

    Never voted for a democrat in my life. She might be the first. I wont vote for Trump again after this.

    [Apr 16, 2019] The Six Degrees of Paul Manafort caucus99percent

    Apr 16, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

    The Six Degrees of Paul Manafort

    span y Bob In Portland on Mon, 04/15/2019 - 3:59pm Under the general rubric of conspiracy theory is the subset called "coincidence theory", which dismisses connections between people as mere happenstance in order to dismiss any thought of networks that exist beyond public scrutiny. But these networks do exist. Sometimes history takes decades to find them, but they exist. Let's take a peek at networks in Paul Manafort's life.

    Manafort was an advisor for four Republican presidential candidates: Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and Bob Dole. Three of these men were connected to the CIA. Gerald Ford was on the Warren Commission and helped its conclusions of a single assassin by moving the bullet hole several inches up from JFK's back to the back of JFK's neck. It was an obvious fraud, and he should have been prosecuted as an accessory after the fact. There are other indications that he was involved with the CIA's mind control program prior to his political career. Ronald Reagan while governor of California blocked extradition requests from New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in the investigation into President Kennedy's murder. Reagan was governor at the time of JFK's brother's assassination in Los Angeles. I'll refer readers to Lisa Pease's A LIE TOO BIG TO FAIL about Reagan during that time. Reagan was also the spokesman for the Crusade For Freedom, a CIA psyop started in the 1950s which in conjunction with Radio Free Europe promoted former Nazis and fascists allied with Hitler during WWII and which imported many of these Nazis into the US. George HW Bush was the CIA Director under Ford, and investigations put him as a CIA agent or asset since his college days at Yale. I haven't looked at Bob Dole's history. But three out of four of Manafort's presidential employers had roots in the CIA.

    If you look at Paul Manafort's history, he seems to work for sleazy dictators who were either put into power by the CIA, supported while in power by the CIA or taken out of power by the CIA. And sometimes killed by the CIA. I would suggest that Manafort's ultimate employer was the CIA. After the sitting president of the Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich was ousted in a US-backed coup in Ukraine back in 2014 (under Secretary of State John Kerry) Manafort stuck around there and helped the people who ousted Yanukovich. Even though Yanukovich was the duly elected president of Ukraine, he has been dismissed as a Russian agent because he saw that the terms of Russian treaties with Ukraine would be better for the economy than treaties with the European Union. Therefore, the US branded Yanukovich as a Russian agent.

    Just to refresh everyone's memory William Barr worked for the CIA in the seventies until he got his law degree. He was named Attorney General by President GHW Bush (the first Bush president) during congressional and court investigations of Iran-contra, which was a CIA operation to illegally support the contras' attempt to overthrow the Nicaraguan government while also illegally arming both Iraq and Iran, allegedly in exchange for releasing hostages in Beruit. The interagency team investigating the kidnappings in Beruit was on Pan Am 103 and perished returning to the US.

    Robert Mueller was the prosecutor in the Pan Am 103 case. He shifted the case to a couple of Libyan jamokes and away from a group of Palestinian terrorists operating in Frankfurt, Germany who allegedly were supplied the bomb used to bring down the airliner by Syrian arms and heroin smuggler Monzer al-Kassar. Al-Kassar was a major arms supplier for the Iran-contra operation. Robert Swan Mueller III has never himself been specifically identified as being a CIA employee. However, his uncle, Richard Bissell, was an officer high in the CIA ranks. Mueller's wife, Ann Cabell Standish, whom he married three years after the John F Kennedy assassination, was the granddaughter of Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA at the time of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, who was fired by JFK along with the above-mentioned Bissell and Allen Dulles. Ann Mueller's granduncle, Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas at the time of President Kennedy's assassination there, was revealed to have been a CIA asset in a recent declassification of JFK papers.

    Curiously, Mueller's career has been marked with prosecuting cases that touch on CIA covert activities. He prosecuted John Gotti, who was on trial for distribution of cocaine which has been identified as having arrived in the US via Mena, Arkansas as part of the Iran-contra drug importation operation. Bill Clinton was the governor of Arkansas at the time.

    Mueller prosecuted Noriega, who was the CIA's point man in Panama, where the CIA laundered money and moved cocaine and weapons for the contras during Iran-contra. The federal prosecutor in the Mena corner of Arkansas at the time of the Mena operations who steered clear of it was Asa Hutchinson, who went on to become George W Bush's first "drug czar". (More curiously, the person leading the failed attempt to uncover Iran-contra in the US Senate was John Kerry, who just happened to be a teammate of Mueller on their prep school lacrosse team many years earlier.)

    Mueller prosecuted BCCI (the international bank which laundered mob and intelligence money) without seeing CIA fingerprints. Mueller became the Director of the FBI a week before 9/11. Look it up.

    Some more: Go read Gregory Craig's Wiki page. Robert Mueller just indicted Craig along the lines of Manafort, a la aiding Russians (actually representing Ukrainians). Craig himself has an interesting past. He was the lawyer defending John Hinckley for the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, which, if succcessful, would have put GHW Bush into the White House; Craig defended CIA Director Richard Helms for his part in the coup of Salvador Allende; he was the State Department's director of policy planning under Madeleine Albright; Craig worked with Bill Clinton on his impeachment proceedings; he represented the Cuban father in the Elian Gonzalez case. Craig was on the other side of the Noriega case.

    Mueller prosecuted Noriega and Craig defended him. Craig helped Obama flipflop his position over the FISA court and the big communications corporations who cooperated with them. Craig represented John Edwards. And, of course, he did work in UKRAINE.

    I realize that some people in the left-right political universe will rejoice that a "Democrat" is being indicted, but Craig's history suggests that like Manafort, Mueller, Barr and others he represents a party across the river in Langley, Virginia. Very interesting, he and Mueller going toe to toe as Noriega was put behind bars without a hint of Noriega's Iran-contra work for Bush and the CIA. If you've got both the prosecutor and the defense attorney you're going to win the trial.

    It's a small world after all, but you won't hear Rachel Maddow repeat long-winded linkages among these characters in her stories.

    such a web we weave in order to deceive.

    CIA psyops where ever you look. Curious or should I say Q reous? Cause Q sure seems CIA to me....or so says Seth Rich...no he said DNC=CIA. up 8 users have voted. —

    “Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

    span y Bob In Portland on Mon, 04/15/2019 - 8:33pm

    DLC = DNC

    @Lookout At some point the Democratic Party was rolled. Bill Clinton got the big speech at the 1988 convention. He certainly wasn't the speaker he became. That speech went on and on. Then next time around he won the presidency in a three-way race with a funny Texas billionaire and George Bush.

    When Bill went to Oxford his classmates presumed he was CIA.

    Our election of 1992 may have been to promote Clinton while taking the heat away from GHW Bush.

    [Apr 16, 2019] Ray on Why the Deep State Hates Julian Assange

    Apr 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Saoirse , says: April 13, 2019 at 1:39 am GMT

    http://raymcgovern.com/

    Ray on Why the Deep State Hates Julian Assange

    [Apr 16, 2019] Is the NYT promoting Gina Haspel as someone who deserves a more influential position than the nation's top torturer?

    Notable quotes:
    "... What's the real agenda though behind that article? It's to put Gina Haspel in a favourable light at the same time as it's criticising Trump. Is the NYT promoting Gina Haspel as someone who deserves a more influential position than the nation's top torturer? She wouldn't be the first such criminal being subtly encouraged to try for DJT's job in the future. ..."
    "... I see it as a complex exercise in CYA. They need to reinforce certain narratives. ..."
    "... As of almost 8 PM, there are 35 comments. In a national newspaper on a story like this? There must be a committee cherry picking them for "suitability" - the collection is as fake as the article. Wonderful Haspel at the head of an amazing CIA tutoring a clueless moron of a POTUS. The third part they got right. ..."
    "... Why are they fluffing the torturer and the out-of-control CIA? Is something planned where they want both to shine in their future stories on that "something"? ..."
    Apr 16, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jen , Apr 16, 2019 7:32:35 PM | link

    The New York Times article seems whiffy to me. (Is anything from the NYT not whiffy?) The article is the work of no fewer than five writers and the part about Donald Trump being swayed by pictures of sick children in hospital and dead ducks seems a bit like a game of Chinese whispers.

    What's the real agenda though behind that article? It's to put Gina Haspel in a favourable light at the same time as it's criticising Trump. Is the NYT promoting Gina Haspel as someone who deserves a more influential position than the nation's top torturer? She wouldn't be the first such criminal being subtly encouraged to try for DJT's job in the future.

    Jen , Apr 16, 2019 7:39:15 PM | link

    ADKC @ 56 (and Koen @ 50):

    Better not play too many of those "Call of Duty" video games either. You might find that being a pretend mercenary shooting up innocent people in foreign lands is not just for the purpose of wasting a half of day on mindless entertainment.

    Jackrabbit , Apr 16, 2019 7:59:38 PM | link
    Jen @59

    I see it as a complex exercise in CYA. They need to reinforce certain narratives.

    >> The media was right about Trump: he has a soft spot for Russia.

    >> Trump cares about people (and even ducks) - remember how he bombed Syria because of the babies? Now Trump is super concerned about the people of Venezuela. What a humanitarian!

    >> Russia has no reason to oppose USA (in Venezuela or elsewhere) - they could just contact their friend Trump! To do otherwise demonstrates malicious intent.

    Zachary Smith , Apr 16, 2019 8:00:12 PM | link
    @ Bart Hansen #1

    As of almost 8 PM, there are 35 comments. In a national newspaper on a story like this? There must be a committee cherry picking them for "suitability" - the collection is as fake as the article. Wonderful Haspel at the head of an amazing CIA tutoring a clueless moron of a POTUS. The third part they got right.

    Why are they fluffing the torturer and the out-of-control CIA? Is something planned where they want both to shine in their future stories on that "something"?

    [Apr 16, 2019] Trump was transparently chosen to be the fake "agent of change" for the other half of the US population, just as Obama before

    Notable quotes:
    "... Therefore, both individuals were both an admission that the change in the system is needed and that the ruling regime is into life-extension by means of "whatever it takes". Once the "change" potential is exhausted, repression must take over as the principal life extension mechanism; clearly, these methods do not have a sharp start-over points in time - they overlap. ..."
    "... It is an interesting connection of dots that Bloody Gina is Brennan's protégée and thus that Trump has truly stacked up his administration with former i.e. current enemies, But this only shows that Trump works for the same masters as his political enemies. Again, nothing new. ..."
    Apr 16, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Kiza , Apr 16, 2019 5:33:36 PM | link

    Trump is like a voodoo doll into which every sh**bag sticks pins. Firstly, it is irrelevant whether he was a swamp creature before election or was coopted into it after.

    Secondly, Trump was transparently chosen to be the "agent of change" for the other half of the US population, just as Obama before.

    Therefore, both individuals were both an admission that the change in the system is needed and that the ruling regime is into life-extension by means of "whatever it takes". Once the "change" potential is exhausted, repression must take over as the principal life extension mechanism; clearly, these methods do not have a sharp start-over points in time - they overlap.

    This is where we are now, Assange was the most prominent member of the real opposition to the regime, where they try to confuse with plenty of faux opposition. Therefore, the Assange's head had to be chopped off publicly and his slowly rotting corpse will now be on display through "courts of justice" for the next couple of years as a warning to the consumers of alternative media. Go back to reading the approved "journalism" or ... To understand better one just needs to read/re-read Solzhenitsyn.

    The other major ongoing life-extension activity, overlapping with repression, is the confiscation of guns from the last remaining armed Western population (lots of leftist oxen pulling that cart). Having too many guns amongst the population is bad for resolving personal conflicts peacefully, but it is even worse for the abusive, exploitative regime. Thus, taking the guns away is doing the right thing for a totally wrong reason.

    It is an interesting connection of dots that Bloody Gina is Brennan's protégée and thus that Trump has truly stacked up his administration with former i.e. current enemies, But this only shows that Trump works for the same masters as his political enemies. Again, nothing new.

    Therefore, where is a Western Solzhenitsyn to document artistically what transpires in a society deeply in debt and in social & moral decline?

    [Apr 16, 2019] Trump doesn't strike me as someone with principles or opinions of his own. He will say and do whatever his base of "deplorables" likes to hear and whatever helps him get what he wants.

    Apr 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Escher , says: April 13, 2019 at 1:01 pm GMT

    @The Alarmist Trump doesn't strike me as someone with principles or opinions of his own. He will say and do whatever his base of "deplorables" likes to hear and whatever helps him get what he wants.

    [Apr 16, 2019] Andrew O'Hagan Ghosting Julian Assange LRB 6 March 2014

    Apr 16, 2019 | lrb.co.uk

    There were two last visits. During the first I was led in by a new young assistant, Ethan, who was keen to agree with everything being said. Our conversation was mainly about Edward Snowden. There are few subjects on which Julian would be reluctant to take what you might call a paternalistic position, but over Snowden, whom he's never met but has chatted with and feels largely responsible for, he expressed a kind of irritable admiration. 'Just how good is he?' I asked.

    'He's number nine,' he said.

    'In the world? Among computer hackers? And where are you?'

    'I'm number three.' He went on to say that he wondered whether Snowden was calm enough, intelligent enough, and added that he should have come to them for advice before fleeing to Hong Kong.

    A fair reading of the situation might conclude, without prejudice, that Assange, like an ageing movie star, was a little put out by the global superstardom of Snowden. He has always cared too much about the fame and too much about the credit, while real relationships and real action often fade to nothing. Snowden was now the central hub and Julian was keen to help him and keen to be seen to be helping him. It's how the ego works and the ego always comes first. Snowden, while grateful for the advice and the comradeship, was meanwhile playing a cannier game than Julian. He was eager for credit, too, but behaving more subtly, more amiably, and playing with bigger secrets. Julian said he hoped that others, I took him to mean the Guardian and Glenn Greenwald, didn't claim too much credit for the flow of secrets. He said he wanted me to help him get a film going, an account of what actually happened in Hong Kong, how he helped Snowden. He said he had all the inside information and connections and it would make a fantastic thriller. We discussed it at length and I told him the way to get movie interest in such a thing was to get behind a big piece in Vanity Fair . He agreed and said he would set aside time to get down to it. But I knew he wouldn't. It was odd the way he spoke about Snowden, almost jealously, as if the younger man didn't quite understand what he was about, needing much more from Julian than he knew how to ask for. I recognised the familiar anxiety about non-influence: 'Snowden should have been with us from the beginning,' he said. 'He's flailing.' But they were now making up for lost time. As we spoke, Sarah was in Moscow Airport, where Snowden was being held without a passport. 'I sent Sarah over,' said Julian in his favourite mode. All he needed at that point was a white cat to stroke.

    Snowden was everywhere in the news the last time I decided to drop in on Julian after I'd been out in his neighbourhood. The embassy was quiet. I brought a couple of bottles of beer up from the street and we sat in the dark room. It was a Friday night and Julian had never seemed more alone. We laughed a lot and then he went very deeply into himself. He drank his beer and then lifted mine and drank that. 'We've got some really historic things going on,' he said. Then he opened his laptop and the blue screen lit his face and he hardly noticed me leaving.

    [Apr 16, 2019] In terms of banking, here is a great explanation, including The City of London that owns UK:

    Apr 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Mark Bruzonsky , says: Website April 16, 2019 at 5:22 am GMT

    To understand how such total control is done, one has to look at the role of banking serfdom, led by the FED and the central bankers, and media brainwash, run by Hollywood and mainstream media.

    In terms of banking, here is a great explanation, including The City of London that owns UK:

    Prof. Werner brilliantly explains how the banking system and financial sector really work.
    402,668 views

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/EC0G7pY4wRE?feature=oembed

    Batman11:

    The workings of the monetary system have been a mystery throughout globalisation, which is why we have had so many financial crises.

    The central banks were charged with bringing financial stability, but they didn't understand it either, so they didn't stand a chance.

    The BIS is just as bad and Richard Werner points out the Basel regulations are based on the assumption that banks are financial intermediaries, but they are not.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/EC0G7pY4wRE?start=3&feature=oembed

    This is RT, but this is the most concise explanation available on YouTube.

    Professor Werner, DPhil (Oxon) has been Professor of International Banking at the University of Southampton for a decade.

    The central banks even know banks are not financial intermediaries.

    https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf

    The central banks know a bit, but obviously not enough.

    Financial stability is a lot easier than it looks when you know what you are doing.

    Richard Werner was in Japan in the 1980s when it went from a very stable economy and turned into a debt fuelled monster. He worked out what happened and had all the clues necessary to point him in the right direction.

    The three types of bank lending:

    1) Into business and industry – gives a good return in GDP and doesn't lead to inflation

    2) To consumers – leads to consumer price inflation

    3) Into real estate and financial speculation – leads to asset price inflation and gives a poor return in GDP and shows up in the graph of debt-to-GDP

    Bank credit has been used for all the wrong things during globalisation and the bankers have just been inflating asset prices, not creating real wealth as measured by GDP and this has caused nearly all the financial crises.

    1929 and 2008 stick out like sore thumbs when you know where to look, but the FED didn't.

    [Apr 16, 2019] Why tiny groups are able to control large mass of population

    Apr 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    jacques sheete , says: April 16, 2019 at 12:22 pm GMT

    @Thomm

    i) If gentiles are so smart, why are Jews, whom gentiles outnumber 40:1 across the combined Western World, able to control everything?

    If you're so smart, then what makes you think it has much to do with smarts? Violence may trump intelligence in the likely event you haven't figured that out.

    Carroll Price , says: April 16, 2019 at 12:24 pm GMT
    @Thomm

    If gentiles are so smart, why are Jews, whom gentiles outnumber 40:1 across the combined Western World, able to control everything?

    It's the Benjamins baby.

    Ilyana_Rozumova , says: April 16, 2019 at 1:12 pm GMT
    @jacques sheete Please do not try to teach dishonest person about honesty. Dishonest person know about honesty. He only did figure out that being dishonest is more rewarding than being honest.
    Justsaying , says: April 16, 2019 at 1:19 pm GMT
    @Thomm Posing a question without giving it a thought first will backfire. The same question could be asked of Whites in the Western world: if they are so smart, why are >99% of them totally controlled by <1%? It is that <1% that is the dog wagged by the Zio-tail.

    [Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork??? ..."
    "... I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy ..."
    "... To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president. ..."
    "... Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors. ..."
    "... Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors. ..."
    "... "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands." ..."
    "... Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side. ..."
    "... It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times! ..."
    "... The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible. ..."
    Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    John, says: April 13, 2019 at 3:18 am

    With all due respect, Iraq didn't wreck you. The US wrecked Iraq, and the US wrecked you.
    Uncle Billy , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:00 am
    The invasion of Iraq was a mistake of historic dimensions. The "weapons of mass destruction" excuse was a lie. When I see George W. Bush smiling on TV, I want to puke. Likewise, I cannot view an image of Lyndon Johnson without revulsion. They are both responsible for much death and suffering. I have heard people try to excuse both of them, with the statement that "they meant well." The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
    JohnT , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:06 am
    @Ken Zaretzke.

    For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork???

    I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy.

    Bob , says: April 13, 2019 at 9:57 am
    The war In Afghanistan would have ended 15 years ago if the sons of members of Congress were being drafted. "It's easy to send someone else's sons to war."
    Ken Zaretzke , says: April 13, 2019 at 4:43 pm
    @JohnT,

    You left out the phrase "anything other than" following the phrase "have served this nation with" in your last sentence.

    You forgot to express your confidence in John McCain. Good luck with that. McCain's top aide flew to a foreign city to receive the Steele dossier, gave it to the senator, who then gave it to the FBI–as per Steele's script, I assume. It's another reason why we need a special counsel to look into the FBI's role. A special counsel can hardly omit the McCain piece of the puzzle, whereas a regular prosecutor can easily ignore it and cover McCain's keister.

    To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president.

    More than anything else concerning the FBI's election shenanigans, the McCain-Steele nexus–specifically the report written about it by a special counsel–could expose the deep state's modus operandi. Not even an inspector general's report can do that as well as a special counsel's report.

    Sarto , says: April 13, 2019 at 5:02 pm
    Remember, 75% of Americans wanted Bush to invade Iraq. War is the force that gives America its meaning.
    Lee Green , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:11 pm
    Your book will go out of print. In 10 to 20 years it will be reprinted and sell well. It takes that long for people to remove their heads from their nether regions and be willing to contemplate the errors made.

    The real irony is that we know better. There is a vast body of literature on major cognitive errors, and the whole catalog is on display in the debacle described. Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors.

    Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors.

    George Hoffman , says: April 13, 2019 at 10:09 pm
    I commiserate with your disillusioning journey because I went through a similar odyssey into self-awareness like yours many decades ago. I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 – 31 May 1968). It's all been downhill from there. A gradual slide down the slippy slope of history in our decline as a nation. There's not much one can really do. But at my age, I will be long gone when our country hits burns and crashes as it hits bottom.
    Talltale , says: April 13, 2019 at 10:11 pm
    "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands."

    Enough books and movies about those poor damaged American boys yet?

    The navel gazing never stops.

    Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side.

    Get over yourselves! Honestly! It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times!

    Craig Morris , says: April 14, 2019 at 1:59 am
    The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible.

    [Apr 15, 2019] Do you need to be stupid to support Trump in 2020, even if you voted for him as lesser evil in 2016

    Highly recommended!
    Please note that unz.com used be forum of stalwart Trump supporters. Times change.
    Notable quotes:
    "... This will at least wake up those morons at places like Breitbart that Trump is nothing more than a neocon swine. I mean how much more evidence do they need to see that he is invite the world, invade the world. ..."
    "... One doesn't have to be stupid to support Trump but it helps. The same can be said for his prominent enemies though. To unconditionally and faithfully support Trump, Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Pelosi, one would have to be stupid or totally controlled by one's emotions. ..."
    "... You and I are voting right now just by publicly engaging in politics. Voting on election day is worth it in the same way posting comments online is worth it. ..."
    "... Wouldn't a smart person recognize that falling for a grifter who cares not about Heritage America and who dances to Bibi's tune is never a good option? ..."
    "... Yes. But during the election, Trump was the least bad option who sometimes seemed like a good option. That's still true today. ..."
    Apr 15, 2019 | www.unz.com

    neutral , says: April 11, 2019 at 11:37 am GMT

    This will at least wake up those morons at places like Breitbart that Trump is nothing more than a neocon swine. I mean how much more evidence do they need to see that he is invite the world, invade the world.

    On top of that mass censorship being unleashed under Trump, how can anyone still be conned into supporting him.

    Colin Wright , says: Website April 13, 2019 at 5:18 am GMT
    @neutral 'On top of that mass censorship being unleashed under Trump, how can anyone still be conned into supporting him '

    We'll be 'conned' the same way as always; what's the alternative?

    Liberty Mike , says: April 13, 2019 at 1:56 pm GMT
    @Colin Wright For one, its not reposing any confidence, faith, and trust in DJT. He is a charlatan who appeals to low IQ whites.

    Why do so many intelligent people delude themselves into rationalizing their support and vote for Trump upon the basis of the lesser of two evils loser mindset?

    Cagey Beast , says: April 13, 2019 at 2:17 pm GMT
    @Liberty Mike

    One doesn't have to be stupid to support Trump but it helps. The same can be said for his prominent enemies though. To unconditionally and faithfully support Trump, Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Pelosi, one would have to be stupid or totally controlled by one's emotions.

    That being said, a smart person could still support Trump. A smart person could recognize Trump finishing his term as the least bad option. In 2020, this same smart person might recognize that, amazingly, a Trump second term had become the least bad option. People can scream and throw around insults or they can present an alternative to Trump.

    Liberty Mike , says: April 15, 2019 at 1:36 pm GMT
    @Cagey Beast

    Wouldn't a smart person recognize that his vote does not matter?

    Wouldn't a smart person recognize that Stalin's maxim, "its not who votes that counts, its who counts the votes" controls?

    Wouldn't a smart person recognize that falling for a grifter who cares not about Heritage America and who dances to Bibi's tune is never a good option?

    Cagey Beast , says: April 15, 2019 at 2:14 pm GMT

    @Liberty Mike Wouldn't a smart person recognize that his vote does not matter?

    You and I are voting right now just by publicly engaging in politics. Voting on election day is worth it in the same way posting comments online is worth it.

    Wouldn't a smart person recognize that falling for a grifter who cares not about Heritage America and who dances to Bibi's tune is never a good option?

    Yes. But during the election, Trump was the least bad option who sometimes seemed like a good option. That's still true today.

    [Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork??? ..."
    "... I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy ..."
    "... To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president. ..."
    "... Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors. ..."
    "... Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors. ..."
    "... "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands." ..."
    "... Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side. ..."
    "... It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times! ..."
    "... The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible. ..."
    Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    John, says: April 13, 2019 at 3:18 am

    With all due respect, Iraq didn't wreck you. The US wrecked Iraq, and the US wrecked you.
    Uncle Billy , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:00 am
    The invasion of Iraq was a mistake of historic dimensions. The "weapons of mass destruction" excuse was a lie. When I see George W. Bush smiling on TV, I want to puke. Likewise, I cannot view an image of Lyndon Johnson without revulsion. They are both responsible for much death and suffering. I have heard people try to excuse both of them, with the statement that "they meant well." The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
    JohnT , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:06 am
    @Ken Zaretzke.

    For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork???

    I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy.

    Bob , says: April 13, 2019 at 9:57 am
    The war In Afghanistan would have ended 15 years ago if the sons of members of Congress were being drafted. "It's easy to send someone else's sons to war."
    Ken Zaretzke , says: April 13, 2019 at 4:43 pm
    @JohnT,

    You left out the phrase "anything other than" following the phrase "have served this nation with" in your last sentence.

    You forgot to express your confidence in John McCain. Good luck with that. McCain's top aide flew to a foreign city to receive the Steele dossier, gave it to the senator, who then gave it to the FBI–as per Steele's script, I assume. It's another reason why we need a special counsel to look into the FBI's role. A special counsel can hardly omit the McCain piece of the puzzle, whereas a regular prosecutor can easily ignore it and cover McCain's keister.

    To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president.

    More than anything else concerning the FBI's election shenanigans, the McCain-Steele nexus–specifically the report written about it by a special counsel–could expose the deep state's modus operandi. Not even an inspector general's report can do that as well as a special counsel's report.

    Sarto , says: April 13, 2019 at 5:02 pm
    Remember, 75% of Americans wanted Bush to invade Iraq. War is the force that gives America its meaning.
    Lee Green , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:11 pm
    Your book will go out of print. In 10 to 20 years it will be reprinted and sell well. It takes that long for people to remove their heads from their nether regions and be willing to contemplate the errors made.

    The real irony is that we know better. There is a vast body of literature on major cognitive errors, and the whole catalog is on display in the debacle described. Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors.

    Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors.

    George Hoffman , says: April 13, 2019 at 10:09 pm
    I commiserate with your disillusioning journey because I went through a similar odyssey into self-awareness like yours many decades ago. I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 – 31 May 1968). It's all been downhill from there. A gradual slide down the slippy slope of history in our decline as a nation. There's not much one can really do. But at my age, I will be long gone when our country hits burns and crashes as it hits bottom.
    Talltale , says: April 13, 2019 at 10:11 pm
    "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands."

    Enough books and movies about those poor damaged American boys yet?

    The navel gazing never stops.

    Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side.

    Get over yourselves! Honestly! It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times!

    Craig Morris , says: April 14, 2019 at 1:59 am
    The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible.

    [Apr 15, 2019] Do you need to be stupid to support Trump in 2020, even if you voted for him as lesser evil in 2016

    Highly recommended!
    Please note that unz.com used be forum of stalwart Trump supporters. Times change.
    Notable quotes:
    "... This will at least wake up those morons at places like Breitbart that Trump is nothing more than a neocon swine. I mean how much more evidence do they need to see that he is invite the world, invade the world. ..."
    "... One doesn't have to be stupid to support Trump but it helps. The same can be said for his prominent enemies though. To unconditionally and faithfully support Trump, Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Pelosi, one would have to be stupid or totally controlled by one's emotions. ..."
    "... You and I are voting right now just by publicly engaging in politics. Voting on election day is worth it in the same way posting comments online is worth it. ..."
    "... Wouldn't a smart person recognize that falling for a grifter who cares not about Heritage America and who dances to Bibi's tune is never a good option? ..."
    "... Yes. But during the election, Trump was the least bad option who sometimes seemed like a good option. That's still true today. ..."
    Apr 15, 2019 | www.unz.com

    neutral , says: April 11, 2019 at 11:37 am GMT

    This will at least wake up those morons at places like Breitbart that Trump is nothing more than a neocon swine. I mean how much more evidence do they need to see that he is invite the world, invade the world.

    On top of that mass censorship being unleashed under Trump, how can anyone still be conned into supporting him.

    Colin Wright , says: Website April 13, 2019 at 5:18 am GMT
    @neutral 'On top of that mass censorship being unleashed under Trump, how can anyone still be conned into supporting him '

    We'll be 'conned' the same way as always; what's the alternative?

    Liberty Mike , says: April 13, 2019 at 1:56 pm GMT
    @Colin Wright For one, its not reposing any confidence, faith, and trust in DJT. He is a charlatan who appeals to low IQ whites.

    Why do so many intelligent people delude themselves into rationalizing their support and vote for Trump upon the basis of the lesser of two evils loser mindset?

    Cagey Beast , says: April 13, 2019 at 2:17 pm GMT
    @Liberty Mike

    One doesn't have to be stupid to support Trump but it helps. The same can be said for his prominent enemies though. To unconditionally and faithfully support Trump, Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Pelosi, one would have to be stupid or totally controlled by one's emotions.

    That being said, a smart person could still support Trump. A smart person could recognize Trump finishing his term as the least bad option. In 2020, this same smart person might recognize that, amazingly, a Trump second term had become the least bad option. People can scream and throw around insults or they can present an alternative to Trump.

    Liberty Mike , says: April 15, 2019 at 1:36 pm GMT
    @Cagey Beast

    Wouldn't a smart person recognize that his vote does not matter?

    Wouldn't a smart person recognize that Stalin's maxim, "its not who votes that counts, its who counts the votes" controls?

    Wouldn't a smart person recognize that falling for a grifter who cares not about Heritage America and who dances to Bibi's tune is never a good option?

    Cagey Beast , says: April 15, 2019 at 2:14 pm GMT

    @Liberty Mike Wouldn't a smart person recognize that his vote does not matter?

    You and I are voting right now just by publicly engaging in politics. Voting on election day is worth it in the same way posting comments online is worth it.

    Wouldn't a smart person recognize that falling for a grifter who cares not about Heritage America and who dances to Bibi's tune is never a good option?

    Yes. But during the election, Trump was the least bad option who sometimes seemed like a good option. That's still true today.

    [Apr 15, 2019] 4 Myths About Julian Assange DEBUNKED Zero Hedge

    Apr 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Myth #2: Assange Will Get a Fair Trial In the U.S.

    14-year CIA officer John Kiriakou notes :

    Assange has been charged in the Eastern District of Virginia -- the so-called "Espionage Court." That is just what many of us have feared. Remember, no national security defendant has ever been found not guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia . The Eastern District is also known as the "rocket docket" for the swiftness with which cases are heard and decided. Not ready to mount a defense? Need more time? Haven't received all of your discovery? Tough luck. See you in court.

    I have long predicted that Assange would face Judge Leonie Brinkema were he to be charged in the Eastern District. Brinkema handled my case, as well as CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling's. She also has reserved the Ed Snowden case for herself. Brinkema is a hanging judge .

    ***

    Brinkema gave me literally no chance to defend myself . At one point, while approaching trial, my attorneys filed 70 motions, asking that 70 classified documents be declassified so that I could use them to defend myself. I had no defense without them. We blocked off three days for the hearings. When we got to the courtroom, Brinkema said, "Let me save everybody a lot of time. I'm going to deny all 70 of these motions. You don't need any of this information to be declassified." The entire process took a minute. On the way out of the courtroom, I asked my lead attorney what had just happened. "We just lost the case. That's what happened. Now we talk about a plea."

    My attorneys eventually negotiated a plea for 30 months in prison -- significantly below the 45 years that the Justice Department had initially sought. The plea was something called an 11-C1C plea; it was written in stone and could not be changed by the judge. She could either take it or leave it. She took it, but not after telling me to rise, pointing her finger at me, and saying, "Mr. Kiriakou, I hate this plea. I've been a judge since 1986 and I've never had an 11C1C. If I could, I would give you ten years." Her comments were inappropriate and my attorneys filed an ethics complaint against her. But that's Brinkema. That's who she is.

    Julian Assange doesn't have a prayer of a fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia.

    [Apr 15, 2019] Julian Assange Is Guilty Of Only One Thing: Revealing The Evil Soul Of US Imperialism

    Apr 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Assange's arrest represents an abuse of power, highlighting not only how true journalism has now been banished in the West, but also how politicians, journalists, news agencies and think-tanks collude with each other to silence people

    [Apr 15, 2019] A letter to the> President Trump from former voter

    Apr 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Dude-dude , 20 minutes ago link

    Dear President Trump:

    Tears came to my eyes - happy tears - when you were elected! A seemingly impossible feat was accomplished that day in November.

    I understood when you faced tremendous resistance in your first 200 days from Demorats. It seemed you were unphased and determined - all was good.

    Good night, and good luck.

    Good night, and good luck.

    [Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork??? ..."
    "... I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy ..."
    "... To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president. ..."
    "... Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors. ..."
    "... Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors. ..."
    "... "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands." ..."
    "... Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side. ..."
    "... It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times! ..."
    "... The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible. ..."
    Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    John, says: April 13, 2019 at 3:18 am

    With all due respect, Iraq didn't wreck you. The US wrecked Iraq, and the US wrecked you.
    Uncle Billy , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:00 am
    The invasion of Iraq was a mistake of historic dimensions. The "weapons of mass destruction" excuse was a lie. When I see George W. Bush smiling on TV, I want to puke. Likewise, I cannot view an image of Lyndon Johnson without revulsion. They are both responsible for much death and suffering. I have heard people try to excuse both of them, with the statement that "they meant well." The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
    JohnT , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:06 am
    @Ken Zaretzke.

    For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork???

    I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy.

    Bob , says: April 13, 2019 at 9:57 am
    The war In Afghanistan would have ended 15 years ago if the sons of members of Congress were being drafted. "It's easy to send someone else's sons to war."
    Ken Zaretzke , says: April 13, 2019 at 4:43 pm
    @JohnT,

    You left out the phrase "anything other than" following the phrase "have served this nation with" in your last sentence.

    You forgot to express your confidence in John McCain. Good luck with that. McCain's top aide flew to a foreign city to receive the Steele dossier, gave it to the senator, who then gave it to the FBI–as per Steele's script, I assume. It's another reason why we need a special counsel to look into the FBI's role. A special counsel can hardly omit the McCain piece of the puzzle, whereas a regular prosecutor can easily ignore it and cover McCain's keister.

    To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president.

    More than anything else concerning the FBI's election shenanigans, the McCain-Steele nexus–specifically the report written about it by a special counsel–could expose the deep state's modus operandi. Not even an inspector general's report can do that as well as a special counsel's report.

    Sarto , says: April 13, 2019 at 5:02 pm
    Remember, 75% of Americans wanted Bush to invade Iraq. War is the force that gives America its meaning.
    Lee Green , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:11 pm
    Your book will go out of print. In 10 to 20 years it will be reprinted and sell well. It takes that long for people to remove their heads from their nether regions and be willing to contemplate the errors made.

    The real irony is that we know better. There is a vast body of literature on major cognitive errors, and the whole catalog is on display in the debacle described. Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors.

    Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors.

    George Hoffman , says: April 13, 2019 at 10:09 pm
    I commiserate with your disillusioning journey because I went through a similar odyssey into self-awareness like yours many decades ago. I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 – 31 May 1968). It's all been downhill from there. A gradual slide down the slippy slope of history in our decline as a nation. There's not much one can really do. But at my age, I will be long gone when our country hits burns and crashes as it hits bottom.
    Talltale , says: April 13, 2019 at 10:11 pm
    "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands."

    Enough books and movies about those poor damaged American boys yet?

    The navel gazing never stops.

    Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side.

    Get over yourselves! Honestly! It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times!

    Craig Morris , says: April 14, 2019 at 1:59 am
    The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible.

    [Apr 15, 2019] Iraq Wrecked Me for Nothing The American Conservative

    Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    I recently spoke to some college students who, I realized, were in fifth grade when I got on a plane to Iraq. They now study that stuff in history classes like "Opportunities and Errors: 21st-Century America in the Middle East." About halfway through our conversation, I realized it's coming up on 10 years since I first went to Iraq. Now that's real history.

    I was a Foreign Service Officer then, a diplomat, embedded with the U.S. Army at a series of forward operating bases and in charge of a couple of reconstruction teams, small parts of a complex failure to rebuild the Iraq we wrecked. I ended up writing a book about it all, explaining in tragicomic terms how we failed (those "Errors").

    The book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People was -- and wasn't -- well-received. People laughed at the funny parts, but my message -- it didn't work and here's why -- was largely dissipated at the time (2012) by government and media propaganda centered on The Surge. That was David Petraeus's plan to pacify the Sunnis and push al-Qaeda away, while clearing, holding, and building across the country, apparently to make room so ISIS and the Iranians could move in.

    Meanwhile, the new American president, elected in part based on his "no" vote on the war in 2003, proclaimed it all a victory and started bringing the troops home even while I was still in Iraq. Meanwhile my employer, the U.S. Department of State, was unhappy with my book. After a year-long process , State pushed me into early retirement. My career was history.

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    Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands. Around us, Iraqis blew themselves up alongside children. Everyone was a potential killer and a potential target. I did this at age 49, on antidepressants and with a good family waiting back home. I cannot imagine what it would have done to 18-year-old me. And I had it easier than most, and much easier than many.

    People asked in line at Trader Joe's and in interviews on semi-important TV shows, "Was it all worth it to you?" I always answered yes. I'm not important, I said, but the story is. And now we're making the same mistakes in Afghanistan. The only way to even start to justify it was to think there might be some meaning behind it all. It didn't do anything for me but fill my soul with vodka but maybe somehow it helped?

    See, my book wasn't aimed at cataloging the failures in Iraq per se, but in trying to make sure we didn't do the same thing in Afghanistan. The initial title wasn't We Meant Well, but Lessons for Afghanistan from the Reconstruction of Iraq . The early drafts were pretentious scholarly stuff, outlining our mistakes. Harvard Business School-like case studies. Maps. Footnotes. It would have sold maybe five copies, and so my editors encouraged me to add more funny parts. NPR's Fresh Air actually added a laugh track to my interview . I figured I'd get the lessons across with humor more effectively anyway. In such situations, you have to think that way. You can't believe that what you went through didn't matter and keep getting out of bed every morning.

    I now know officially that it did not matter. It was pointless. SIGAR shows I accomplished nothing.

    Rejecting the Mindset of Iraq, Not Just the Outcome The Army's Iraq War History: Truth-Telling or Mythmaking?

    SIGAR is the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, a government oversight body that is supposed to prevent waste, fraud, and mismanagement of the billions of dollars being spent rebuilding Afghanistan but that has its hands full just keeping a CVS receipt-length history of what's wrong. Sound familiar?

    SIGAR just released its " 2019 High-Risk List ," which points out especially egregious things that will follow in the wake of any peace agreement in Afghanistan. Here are some quoted highlights:

    set the cash ablaze on the streets of Kabul for all the good it will do."

    That last line really got me. In my book, I'd written, "While a lot of the money was spent in big bites at high levels through the Embassy, or possibly just thrown into the river when no one could find a match to set it on fire ." Had SIGAR read what I'd written? Or was the joke just so obvious that we'd both come to the same punchline 10 years and two countries apart?

    Word for word as in Iraq, and after over 17 years of American effort, the U.S. has failed to establish a viable government in Afghanistan, eliminate the local insurgents/patriots/residents, establish a civil society, tamp down corruption, and ensure some sort of national defense. Afghanistan has almost no chance of survival except as a Taliban narcoland with financial support needed indefinitely to avoid whatever "worse" would be in that calculus.

    But there still are semi-believers. One former State Department colleague is on her fourth assignment in Kabul, roughly half her career. Her job is to liaise with the few NATO officials still hanging around. She says it's easy work; they've known each other for years. She's heard we're making progress.

    Around the same time as the SIGAR report, the Army War College released its history of the Iraqi Surge, a quagmire of dense prose that I'm only about halfway through, but so far no mention of the impact of reconstruction. The theme seems to be that the Army had some good ideas but the politicians got in the way. Fair enough, but they misspelled Vietnam as I-r-a-q all throughout.

    The post-9/11 wars have metastasized across three presidencies so far. Pick the thing you detest most about Bush, Obama, and Trump, and complain about how it was never investigated enough and how there weren't enough hearings. And then I'll disagree, for most everything that happened and continues to happen in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone uninvestigated, unheard of, and unpunished. It's ancient history.

    We all want to believe that what we did, what we didn't do, the moral injury, the PTSD, the fights with spouses, the kid at home we smacked too hard when she wouldn't eat her green beans, all of what we saw and heard, mattered. You read that SIGAR report and tell me how. Because basically I'm history now.

    Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan.

    [Apr 15, 2019] The Elite prosper from war that is why there has been continual war and slaughter on their behalf

    Notable quotes:
    "... In SUPERCLASS we learn that this class of people actually own and control the three largest Western religions and many of the secondary ones - they all preach obedience to authority as paramount. They also own the drugs trade around the world. 95% of the world supply of opium comes out of Afghanistan under the watchful eye of the Elite through use of the US military. ..."
    "... And just as an aside to any historians out there, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-first Century shows how a critical mass of capital was had formed 500 years ago and has grown consistently at a rate greater than the general economy ever sense. He showed that before, during and after the French Revolution and later the US "revolution" the core capital of the west made profits. These revolutions, like government today, were pantomimes whilew the real power profited from the slaughter. The Elite prosper from war that is why there has been continual war and slaughter on their behalf sinse August 6, 1945. The nuclear weapons belong to them. ..."
    Apr 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Paul Damascene , Apr 14, 2019 10:19:30 AM | link

    You ask a question about European political class's perception and defence of European interests that is as perplexing here as it is in regard to Libya and Syria, to name just these. There was at least some coherent defence of international law and principle during Bush II's lead up to the Iraq war, but Europe's defence of law and Europe's common interests seem to have ceased at some point since then.

    pretzelattack , Apr 14, 2019 10:31:57 AM | link

    so many poodles, but there can only be one alpha poodle and that's the uk so far.
    Babyl-on , Apr 14, 2019 10:43:53 AM | link
    "Why are they playing this game?"

    Because, like the US European government is a tool of the Global Power Elite, it is nothing more than pantomime. The West is fully owned and operated by the global elite.

    In books going back to C Wright Mills' The Power Elite in 1956 to SUPERCLASS by David Rothkopf, and GIANTS: The Global Power Elite by Peter Phillips clearly outline just how powerful the Global Elites really are.

    In SUPERCLASS we learn that this class of people actually own and control the three largest Western religions and many of the secondary ones - they all preach obedience to authority as paramount. They also own the drugs trade around the world. 95% of the world supply of opium comes out of Afghanistan under the watchful eye of the Elite through use of the US military.

    There is one and only one Western empire - that of the Global Elites.

    85% of the valuable assets in the world are controlled by the Global Elites.

    There is no offsetting force against them, there simply does not exist today a force capable of challenging their ownership of the world.

    And just as an aside to any historians out there, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-first Century shows how a critical mass of capital was had formed 500 years ago and has grown consistently at a rate greater than the general economy ever sense. He showed that before, during and after the French Revolution and later the US "revolution" the core capital of the west made profits. These revolutions, like government today, were pantomimes whilew the real power profited from the slaughter. The Elite prosper from war that is why there has been continual war and slaughter on their behalf sinse August 6, 1945. The nuclear weapons belong to them.

    [Apr 15, 2019] Neoliberal globalization is under sieve, countries that refuse to unconditionally open markts to transnationals and be vassal of Washington are now labeled as authoritarian

    This slur "authoritarian state" is now peddled by neocons as synonym for the "countries we do not like"
    This neocons in not very inventive... We already saw this line from Robert Kagan, who actually is a better writer. This neocon/neolib pressitute can't even use proper terms such as "neoliberalism" and "Washington consensus"
    And slide to far-right nationalism and neo-fascism is direct result of neoliberalism dominance for the last 40 years (since Carter) and sliding of the standard of living of workers and the middle class.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Both countries have touted the virtues of their systems, while arguing that Western values are a source of decadence, amorality and disorder in the Western world. ..."
    Apr 15, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

    Liberalism Is Under Siege. Conservatives Can Save It. - Bloomberg By Hal Brands

    As international rivalry intensifies, the core strategic task for the U.S.-led democratic community is to contain the geopolitical influence and political disruption caused by authoritarian great powers, namely China and Russia. Yet that task is made all the harder because illiberalism -- and sympathy for those illiberal powers -- is simultaneously surging among key actors on the political right. If the U.S. and its allies are to succeed in the great global rivalry of the 21st century, the right must confront the threat of illiberalism within its ranks -- just as the left did during a previous twilight struggle in the 20th century.

    ... ... ...

    This time, the threat is not expansionist communism, but a combination of autocracy and geopolitical revisionism. China has been moving toward a dystopian future of high-tech authoritarianism, as it pushes for greater power and influence overseas. Putin's Russia has consolidated an illiberal oligarchy, while using information warfare, political meddling and other tools to subvert liberal democracies in Europe, the U.S. and beyond.

    Both countries have touted the virtues of their systems, while arguing that Western values are a source of decadence, amorality and disorder in the Western world.

    ... ... ...

    It is not for nothing that the political scientist Marc Plattner has written that the gravest threat to liberal democracy today is “that it will end up being abandoned by substantial segments of the right.” And even in the U.S., there are alarming signs that conservative commitment to the norms of liberal democracy is under strain.

    Hal Brands at [email protected]

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    Che Guevara • 10 hours ago ,

    Communism was not a threat, but actually benefited the world in many ways.
    It was communism that put pressure on capitalism to provide labor a fair share of wealth and income. As soon as Soviet communism collapsed, capitalism returned to its avaricious roots, resulting in stagnant wages for the working class. And the pauperization of the working class in recent decades is the cause for the current revolt against liberal capitalism.
    So it was the competition from communism that was helping capitalism to stay healthy. Without it capitalism has degenerated into a Dickensian dystopia. We should therefore welcome any alternative socio-economic models to liberal capitalism.

    EmilyEnso Che Guevara • 7 hours ago ,

    It was communism that put pressure on capitalism to provide labor a fair
    share of wealth and income. As soon as Soviet communism collapsed,
    capitalism returned to

    Thats a great point Che.
    I have never ever looked at it from that angle.
    Interesting.

    EeeYepBlowing Whistles EmilyEnso • 7 hours ago ,

    The odd thing is that both communism and capitalism are both controlled from the same evil hidden hand!!!

    George Evans Che Guevara • 8 hours ago ,

    the success of the Chinese efforts may just be the spur needed...

    brad_sk • 13 hours ago ,

    Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, who has long been a leading conservative intellectual, warns that this disillusion with liberal democracy “is clearly present among American conservatives, and not just among the ‘alt-right.’

    Honest and real conservatives are far and fewer in today's MAGA/tea party infested GOP. Forget career politicians like Ted Cruz or McConnell, even the previously decent conservative think tanks/pundits like from NR or Erik Erickson or others have all given up on any principles and just bow at the altar of Trump now.

    Sebastian Cremmington brad_sk • 29 minutes ago ,

    No they haven’t, Trump decided to put McConnell in charge so of course the #neverTrumpers like the McConnell presidency...which consists of appointing Republican judges at record pace and little else.

    johnny sunshine brad_sk • 4 hours ago ,

    Or they've become the right wing of the Democratic party.

    dnjake • 12 hours ago ,

    The biggest need is to resist holy warriors like Hal Brands who want to destroy the world if it resists their version of revealed truth. They are the biggest threat to the human future. The United States has to learn to live in a world that it cannot control. The American goal should be to work towards a constructive human future not some kind of holy war to impose American control on the rest of the world. The United States is the biggest military spender. In recent history, It has been the world's global aggressor.

    It has an history of wars that have made little difference whether America won or lost them. Perhaps the United States could succeed with some kind of genocide that wiped out all of the parts of the world that refuse to accept American supremacy. But, short of that kind of disgrace, the United States is not going to succeed in achieving any meaningful goal through war. As long as America does not destroy the world, the future is going to be determined by economic competition and the destinies that the people of different parts of the world choose for themselves.

    dav1234 • 11 hours ago ,

    The author needs a reality check. Much of what he says is in his imagination.

    emno3 • 3 hours ago ,

    I had wondered if it was noticed the Liberalism was dying. The world has turned hard right, with all the anger, nationalism, do-as-I-say, and social intolerance. I don't even the children of today.

    Camus53 • 4 hours ago ,

    I might suggest that liberals themselves are destroying their freedoms with illogical illiberal liberalism.

    YOU can't do that, say that, act like that, think like that...no no no...we must act and be correct, nice, polite, all forgiving and never critical.

    Huh?

    The freedoms that so many of us marched for, fought for, voted for, sang about (thank gawd the music still lives), got bloody for, even died for, are slipping away quicker than you can say me, me, me...it's all about me.

    Maybe...small maybe...our youth can once again awaken America and the world's conscience. Maybe? Maybe not!

    Mark Miller • 9 hours ago ,

    "Just as the Cold War left broke with communism"

    Wha? It seems our LIttle Cultural Revolution is just warming up. Wait till AOC et al are all growed up.

    "This is a moment when the “free world” needs to be strong and united."

    Is this the same "free" world that jails grandmothers over contested historical views? That has reneged on free speech?

    Thanks to a truly ethnomasochistic immigration policy, I assure you that this will not happen. The West will be lucky if squeaks through this period without a civil war.

    [Apr 14, 2019] It has since been revealed that Epstein had 21 different phone numbers for contacting his friend Bill Clinton, who, court records allege, "frequently flew" on Epstein's private jet between 2002 and 2005.

    Apr 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Si1ver1ock says: April 13, 2019 at 12:01 pm GMT

    It's interesting the Media has brought back the Sweden rape charge, but they are avoiding this rape story like the pest.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/1jDPzW9COsU?feature=oembed

    Read More

    annamaria , says: April 13, 2019 at 12:19 pm GMT

    "Assange was reduced from one of the few towering figures of our time – a man who will have a central place in history books, if we as a species live long enough to write those books "

    -- The presstituting crowd of stenographers (MSM) and the zionized X-tian war profiteers have made everything in their power (inadvertently) to ensure that Assange is and will be a towering figure of our time.

    Even in distress, Assange has been fighting for truth and dignity; the ongoing show of lawlessness exposes the rot. The moral and creative midgets constituting the core of MSM and the satanic deciders are upset. Good!

    The idiotic Senior District "Judge" Emma Arbuthnot (a wife and beneficiary of a mega-war profiteer Lord Arbuthnot -- Arbuthnot served as Chairman of the Defence Select Committee from 2005 to 2014) and the no less idiotic District "Judge" Michael Snow have entered the history books as well. As scoundrels: http://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1555064882.html

    Snow does his best to bring the Judiciary into disrepute by playing to the gallery. He comments on the extradition in the same vein in a totally unprofessional manner. He is of course in a long line of disreputable members of the judiciary Snow's place in history is now secured – he chose to abuse the defendant rather than perform his role which was really quite straightforward. He is the narcissist and guilty of self interest not Julian Assange.

    annamaria , says: April 13, 2019 at 12:33 pm GMT
    @Si1ver1ock For every pronouncement against Assange by the US/UK government and judiciary, there should be an immediate question about the leniency shown towards the pedophiles and rapists in the UK (see Savile and the sudden "disappearance" of files re the high-placed pedophiles) and the story of Lolita Island and Lolita Express in the US.

    Theresa May as the protector of pedophiles and rapists in the UK: https://www.corbettreport.com/pedophiles-in-politics-an-open-source-investigation/

    One of the hurdles in investigating the claims is the Official Secrets Act, which prevents the disclosure of state secrets and "sensitive" information. "It is clear there are a lot of people who could provide a lot of information to support ongoing criminal investigations But they are not doing so because of the Official Secrets Act. They are fearful of not only breaking the law but the potential effect on their pension. This is absolutely crucial if we are to get some of these ex-officers coming forward and to get prosecutions of some of the former MPs." He has asked Home Secretary Theresa May to lift the restrictions, allowing former officials to speak up about what they know about the case, but so far there is no indication that this has been done.

    The protection of the high-placed pedophiles and rapists in the US:

    In the Epstein case, as well, there are numerous questions surrounding the possibility of high-level cover up. In recent weeks it has emerged that Epstein struck a remarkable secret deal with the US Attorney's Office that barred more than 500 pages of documents detailing negotiations of the deal and a staggering 13,000 documents from the investigation into Epstein's activities that were shelved as a result of the bargain.

    Let the scoundrels talk about Assange to see how the concocted fraud is backfired.

    Mrs. Clinton in particular should have been more circumspect:

    It has since been revealed that Epstein had 21 different phone numbers for contacting his friend Bill Clinton, who, court records allege, "frequently flew" on Epstein's private jet between 2002 and 2005.

    annamaria , says: April 13, 2019 at 1:28 pm GMT
    @Ronald Thomas West And why are you spreading the MSM disinformation on the Unz forum? -- Just to satisfy your desire to litter the forum?

    Read and learn: https://www.corbettreport.com/pedophiles-in-politics-an-open-source-investigation/

    Also, perhaps you need to ponder why you are not treated the same way as the courageous, talented, principled, and dignified Assange is treated. Perhaps, something is missing in your character.

    annamaria , says: April 13, 2019 at 1:44 pm GMT
    @Art Theresa May has been the main protector of the high-placed British pedophiles

    "Theresa May and the 'missing' child sex abuse files" https://www.reknr.com/uk/theresa-may-and-the-missing-child-sex-abuse-files/

    "British PM Blocks Elite Pedophile Enquiry On Grounds Of 'National Security'" https://newspunch.com/british-pm-blocks-pedophile-enquiry/

    The documents are thought to shed light on the years of ongoing pedophilia and child abuse within Westminster and contained names of "several" high-level politicians in the UK and US who are connected to an elite pedophile ring.

    The followup: "Theresa May accused of cover-up over child abuse inquiry concerns," https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-child-abuse-inquiry-cover-up-concerns-dame-lowell-goddard-stories-a7369976.html

    "England: Land of Royals, Tea and Horrific Pedophilia Coverups" http://time.com/2974381/england-land-of-royals-tea-and-horrific-pedophilia-coverups/

    In the case of the Westminster "pedophile ring," the mounting sentiment that Britain's establishment serves its own interests and conceals its wrongdoing may be well founded. Until recently only seven police officers were working on Operation Fernbridge; Scotland Yard announced today the figure is now 22.

    By fraudulently accusing Assange, Theresa May reminds the world about her role in the protection of the wealthy and influential Westminster pedophiles (the real rapists).

    [Apr 14, 2019] You could not get a more sinister confluence of political fraudsters by Michael Tracey

    Notable quotes:
    "... Assange accomplished more in 2010 alone than any of his preening media antagonists will in their entire lifetime, combined. Your feelings about him as a person do not matter. He could be the scummiest human on the face of Earth, and it would not detract from the fact that he has brought revelatory information to public that would otherwise have been concealed. He has shone light on some of the most powerful political factions not just in the US, but around the world. This will remain true regardless of whether Trump capitulates to the 'Deep State' and goes along with this utterly chilling, free speech-undermining prosecution. ..."
    "... My support was based on the fact that Assange had devised a novel way to hold powerful figures to account, whose nefarious conduct would otherwise go unexamined but for the methods he pioneered. ..."
    Apr 12, 2019 | spectator.us

    The nine-year gap – long after Manning had been charged, found guilty, and released from prison – suggests that there is something ulterior going on here. The offenses outlined in the indictment are on extraordinarily weak legal footing. Part of the criminal 'conspiracy,' prosecutors allege, is that Assange sought to protect Manning as a source and encouraged her to provide government records in the public interest.

    This is standard journalistic practice.

    And it is now being criminalized by the Trump DoJ, while liberals celebrate from the sidelines – eager to join hands with the likes of Mike Pompeo and Lindsey Graham. You could not get a more sinister confluence of political fraudsters.

    They – meaning most Democrats – will never get over their grudge against Assange for having dared to expose the corruption of America's ruling party in 2016, which they believed help deprive their beloved Hillary of her rightful ascension to the presidential throne. Once again, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard is among the few exceptions.

    The DNC and Podesta email releases, now distilled reductively into the term 'Russian interference,' contained multitudinous newsworthy revelations, as evidenced by the fact that virtually the entire US media reported on them. (Here, feel free to refresh your memory on this as well.) But for no reason other than pure partisan score-settling, elite liberals are willing to toss aside any consideration for the dire First Amendment implications of Assange's arrest and cry out with joy that this man they regard as innately evil has finally been ensnared by the punitive might of the American carceral state.

    Trump supporters and Trump himself also look downright foolish. It takes about two seconds to Google all the instances in which Trump glowingly touted WikiLeaks on the 2016 campaign trail. 'I love WikiLeaks!' he famously proclaimed on October 10, 2016 in Wilkes-Barre, Penn.

    Presumably this expression of 'love' was indication that Trump viewed WikiLeaks as providing a public service. If not, perhaps some intrepid reporter can ask precisely what his 'love' entailed. He can pretend all he wants now that he's totally oblivious to WikiLeaks, but it was Trump himself who relayed that he was contemporaneously reading the Podesta emails in October 2016, and reveling in all their newsworthiness. If he wanted, he could obviously intercede and prevent any unjust prosecution of Assange. Trump has certainly seen fit to complain publicly about all matter of other inconvenient Justice Department activity, especially as it pertained to him or his family members and associates. But now he's acting as though he's never heard of WikiLeaks, which is just pitiful: not a soul believes it, even his most ardent supporters.

    Sean Hannity became one of Assange's biggest fans in 2016 and 2017, effusively lavishing him with praise and even visiting him in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for an exclusive interview. One wonders whether Hannity, who reportedly speaks to his best buddy Trump every night before bedtime, will counsel a different course on this matter. There's also the question of whether Trump's most vehement online advocates, who largely have become stalwart defenders of WikiLeaks, will put their money where their mouth is and condition their continued support on Assange not being depredated by the American prison system.

    Assange accomplished more in 2010 alone than any of his preening media antagonists will in their entire lifetime, combined. Your feelings about him as a person do not matter. He could be the scummiest human on the face of Earth, and it would not detract from the fact that he has brought revelatory information to public that would otherwise have been concealed. He has shone light on some of the most powerful political factions not just in the US, but around the world. This will remain true regardless of whether Trump capitulates to the 'Deep State' and goes along with this utterly chilling, free speech-undermining prosecution.

    I personally have supported Assange since I started in journalism, nine years ago, not because I had any special affinity for the man himself (although the radical transparency philosophy he espoused was definitely compelling). My support was based on the fact that Assange had devised a novel way to hold powerful figures to account, whose nefarious conduct would otherwise go unexamined but for the methods he pioneered. As thanks, he was holed up in a tiny embassy for nearly seven years – until yesterday, when they hauled him out ignominiously to face charges in what will likely turn out to be a political show trial. Donald Trump has the ability to stop this, but almost certainly won't. And that's all you need to know about him.

    [Apr 14, 2019] Robert Kaplan Writes In Defense Of Slavery

    Notable quotes:
    "... Neocon Robert Kaplan is writing In Defense of Empire . Empire is good, he believes, even for those who a ruled by it without having any representation. ..."
    "... Hitler's empire was not, of course, simply a continuation of the Habsburg legacy. There were many other factors, not least the persistent envy in German circles after 1919 of the other imperial powers: empire still seemed attractive to those who did not have one, or one large enough, and Mazower shows how Japanese and Italian imperial ambitions meshed with German in trying to divide the world up anew, as it had been divided by European states for four hundred years. The absence of any clear planning or forethought also found Hitler dragging ex-colonial officials back into public life to try to rule Eastern Europe the way they had ruled Africa. ..."
    "... Elites who have never worked a day in their lives....never served in the military (right or wrong)....have a one dimensional view of social justice.... ..."
    "... The actual kinship of zionism and US-imperialism is based on both israel and the US are settler-societies that never came to be nations. ..."
    "... So the USA never became a nation. The settler-state of freedom of private property was directly converted to an empire-state ruled by a corporative elite of oligarchs, military staff and a serfing legion of descendant bureaucratic personnel. ..."
    "... This is why amerika had a civil war. The southern elites wanted to continue as always importing African slaves and paying them nothing, while providing the bare minimum for survival as food & shelter. The factory and retail giant owning Northen elites couldn't give a flying fuck about 'the rights of man' they wanted to get richer that is why they went to war. ..."
    "... Well, then lets compare the US GDP to Israel's GDP. Sorry, there is no way Israel can dominate the US. Just more dumbing down the "stupid class". ..."
    "... The Ziocon Jews Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Leo Strauss were the earlier founders of the so-called neoconservatism movement, and were vehemently opposed to relaxing foreign policy in regards to the Soviet Union and communism in general. ..."
    "... In the early nineties the Ziocon torch was passed on to the likes of William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. And we all know what followed next...years of endless war. ..."
    "... And so Israel was not created by the likes of Herzl, it was created by the force (monetary and military) of British empire, and such creations by the British was not peculiar to middle east and Israel, the British had many other such wonderous feats of crime all over the globe, of which Israel constitutes but a single example! The British did not create Israel because they were in love with the Jews or were obssessed with Jewish nationalism. They did it because it was PROFITABLE. Hegemony is always profitable. And they did in the middle east, what they had done all over the globe to maintain their hegemony and increase their profit. NOTHING MORE. ..."
    "... You can blame the British all you want but around the late 50s early 1960s, again, while Kennedy was a rising star and becoming President, Zionists were in charge of their affairs, and the worst crimes of Zionism, the worst unilateral attacks on neighboring countries happened under Zionist sovereignty. Zionist were so in charge of their fiefdom that they started developing nuclear weapons behind Kennedy's back; that's how powerful they were becoming. ..."
    "... It's very convenient for you, Arnold, to blame simply "US imperialism", as if it fell out of the sky. It didn't. It was directed by finance capital, which is not an impersonal force but a collection of individual investors, more than a few of whom are interested particularly in Jewish welfare, as they conceive it: that is to say, they want to use Jewish issues, to which the general US public is already well conditioned, to push through an entire program of global domination by force. ..."
    Mar 21, 2014 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Robert Kaplan Writes In Defense Of Slavery

    Neocon Robert Kaplan is writing In Defense of Empire . Empire is good, he believes, even for those who a ruled by it without having any representation. The lunacy of his arguments can be show best when one substitute the object of his essay:

    Throughout history, governance and relative safety have most often been provided by slavery, Western or Eastern. Anarchy reigned in the interregnums. To wit, the British may have failed in Baghdad, Palestine, and elsewhere, but the larger history of the British slaveholdership is one of providing a vast armature of stability, fostered by sea and rail communications, where before there had been demonstrably less stability.

    ...

    But slavery is now seen by global elites as altogether evil, despite slaveholdership having offered the most benign form of order for thousands of years, keeping the anarchy of ethnic, tribal, and sectarian war bands to a reasonable minimum.

    Compared with slaveholdership, democracy is a new and uncertain phenomenon. Even the two most estimable democracies in modern history, the United States and Great Britain, were slaveholdership for long periods. "As both a dream and a fact the American slaveholdership was born before the United States," writes the mid-20th-century historian of westward expansion Bernard DeVoto. Following their initial settlement, and before their incorporation as states, the western territories were nothing less than slaveholdership possessions of Washington, D.C. No surprise there: slaveholdership confers a loose and accepted form of sovereignty, occupying a middle ground between anarchy and full state control.

    ...

    Rome, Parthia, and Hapsburg Austria were great precisely because they gave significant parts of the world a modicum of slavery order that they would not otherwise have enjoyed. America must presently do likewise, particularly in East Asia, the geographic heartland of the world economy and the home of American treaty allies.

    ...

    That, I submit, would be a policy direction that internalizes both the drawbacks and the benefits of slaveholdership, not as it has been conventionally thought of, but as it has actually been practiced throughout history.

    It is somewhat frightening that people believing such nonsense have influence in political circles.

    Weldon Berger , Mar 21, 2014 3:15:28 PM | 1

    In October of 2001, Max Boot wrote a Weekly Standard piece, " The Case for American Empire ," that featured perhaps the most representative neoconservative-authored sentence of all time:
    Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets ."
    Haralambos , Mar 21, 2014 3:41:05 PM | 6
    Notice that your link is not to anything by Kagan but to this: http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/in-defense-of-empire/358645/ by Kaplan. This is rather damaging to your credibility, something that I find alarming, since I am a loyal reader.
    c , Mar 21, 2014 3:43:37 PM | 7
    on empire building: Richard Overy

    GENERAL PLAN EAST Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe

    By Mark Mazower (Allen Lane 2008)

    "Hitler's empire was not, of course, simply a continuation of the Habsburg legacy. There were many other factors, not least the persistent envy in German circles after 1919 of the other imperial powers: empire still seemed attractive to those who did not have one, or one large enough, and Mazower shows how Japanese and Italian imperial ambitions meshed with German in trying to divide the world up anew, as it had been divided by European states for four hundred years. The absence of any clear planning or forethought also found Hitler dragging ex-colonial officials back into public life to try to rule Eastern Europe the way they had ruled Africa."

    zingaro , Mar 21, 2014 4:08:18 PM | 9
    isn't he married to Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland?

    if it was Kagan , yes, but as already pointed above, it's Robert "how we would fight china" KaPLan... Let's say it's the KK brotherhood of lunatic warhawks

    thomas , Mar 21, 2014 4:13:03 PM | 10
    Racism –a residual legacy of Slavery?

    By Chinweizu

    [In December 2006, the London-based magazin e, Index-on-Censorship, invited a number of persons to respond to the question:

    "To what extent is racism and discrimination against black people in the US and particularly in this country, a residual legacy of slavery?"

    The answer below was sent in by Chinweizu]

    ------------------------------------------------------------------

    Racism is not at all a legacy of slavery but a constitutive and sustaining element of the White Supremacy system estab lished by European power during the centuries of trans-Atlantic enslavement of Black Africans. Hence its extreme resistance to eradication.

    Racism is, certainly, not a "residual legacy" in the passive sense of the dead hand of the past. It is not like a motion imparted to an object by an impulse withdrawn long ago; a motion sustained entirely by inertia. Because it is a constitutive element, it has been necessary to systematically apply force and fraud to maintain, in mutant forms, this vital pillar of white supremacy. Accordingly, new forms of "slave trade" and slavery as well as new structures of raci

    sm are still being elaborated and justified, even today, as they have been, whenever needed, since the 16th century.

    For example, on Nov. 11, 2006, in Philadelphia, at a Wharton Business School conference on business in Africa, World Trade Organization representative Hanniford Schmidt announced the creation of a WTO initiative for "full private stewardry of labor" for the parts of Africa

    that have been hardest hit by the 500 years of Africa's free trade with the West. "Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable resu

    lt of free-market theory," Schmidt told more than 150 attendees.

    Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program -- which will require Western companies doing business in some parts of Africa to own their workers outright-- was similar in many ways

    to slavery, but explained that just as "compassionate conservatism" has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized countries, full stewardry, or "compassionate slavery," could be a similar boon to developing ones.

    http://www.platformslavernijmonument.nl/docs/Racism-aResidualLegacyOfSlavery.pdf

    georgeg , Mar 21, 2014 4:14:12 PM | 11
    Elites who have never worked a day in their lives....never served in the military (right or wrong)....have a one dimensional view of social justice....and on and on...
    Massinissa , Mar 21, 2014 4:26:29 PM | 14
    Anyone else notice the picture that went with the article? Its a picture of a man holding up the world. The same bollocks that people 150 years ago claimed that Great Britain was 'Holding Up The World' by killing Africans and ruling over India. Such bollocks. The rhetoric of 2 centuries ago is the same rhetoric of today. Nothing ever changes, but people never learn to see the propaganda for what it is.
    thomas , Mar 21, 2014 4:28:18 PM | 15
    Robert Kaplan, Robert Kagan. David Horowitz... see Mother Jones May 1987, p. 27

    http://books.google.de/books?id=recDAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

    Demian , Mar 21, 2014 4:36:39 PM | 17
    Kaplan is Jewish, and it is utterly bizarre that he can write positively about empire, given that the paradigmatic empire, the Roman one, colonized the area now called Israel, with the Jews revolting, to which Rome responded by destroying the Temple in Jerusalem, an event which forced Kagan's religion to be reconstituted, since up until the Temple was destroyed by the Romans, Judaism centered around the Temple.

    Kagan seems to be completely unaware of his own heritage, or at least not to care about it: but then why does he start his piece with a pogrom? This reminds me of something that Putin has said in a speech :

    Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognise everyone's right to the freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning. This destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority, which does not accept the changes occurring or the proposed revision of values.
    ProPeace , Mar 21, 2014 4:42:01 PM | 18
    It's symptomatic that certain hasbara troll missed no opportunity to take up strategic position and drop some initial disinfo in order to block here any inquiry into who really were the masters of the slave trade over centuries ?

    Speaking of which: Jewish Slavery in Western Culture (Part III) , Rockefellers, Crown Cocaine & Haitian Slavery , Kosher Slavery .

    Slavery pays to the masters: New Report: Fortune 100 Companies Have Received a Whopping $1.2 Trillion in Corporate Welfare Recently

    kooshy , Mar 21, 2014 4:50:10 PM | 19
    This A*Hole if he could have f*ed his own wife, she wouldn't end up doing the whole Europe
    ana souri , Mar 21, 2014 4:51:17 PM | 20
    Robert kagan or Robert Kaplan both are lunnies and unfortunately, in the past several US administrations, these cooks have risen to the top. These guys are a product of nazi Germany at its worst where the thinking that the powerful nations have a god given mission to rule and the rest of the world is here to be slaves to be taken care of.

    Not sure how many people caught this, but the prince of Wales, on a visit to Iraq was filmed during a visit to British troops saying just that. "These people are happy to have us here to rule them just like we did before".

    Neocons are today's version old British imperial superiority which led to the Second World War along with nazi ideology.

    Someday we are going to have an overwhelming US neocon administration and this will be the end.

    Mike Maloney , Mar 21, 2014 5:10:46 PM | 22
    I think this is definitely the direction the neoliberal neocons want to take us -- back to slavery. I was struck by a statement made by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Thomas Perkins (who created a stir in January with a letter published in the WSJ comparing the 1% in the U.S. to Jews persecuted by the Nazis during Kristallnacht). In this statement, Perkins is calling for suffrage based on the total number of tax dollars the voter pays.

    Perkins gave a talk titled "The War on the 1%" last month at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco:

    Mr. Perkins' interlocutor, Adam Lashinsky, soon had the frustrated look of a man trying to swim in a vat of molasses.

    Mr. Lashinsky pointed out, for instance, that it was ridiculous to equate powerless Jews in the Third Reich with extremely powerful tech overlords in present-day America.

    "No, I think the parallel holds," Mr. Perkins said calmly. For one thing, "If you pay 75 percent of your life's earnings to the government you are being persecuted."

    He had a better plan: "You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar in taxes. later he added, "A million in taxes, you get a million votes." He said he was kidding about that last part, kind of.

    One could argue that Citizens United already creates the dollarocracy system Perkins imagines. Slavery can't be far off.
    Massinissa , Mar 21, 2014 5:21:29 PM | 23
    @22

    Personally I think the Neos would be fine with a modified Feudalism: Serfs are easier to control than slaves.

    But the difference is minimal and largely rhetorical. Ultimately neither has much freedom.

    Anyway, what Perkins was advocating (different amounts of votes depending on wealth) isnt new. Some folks advocated that in the 1800s.

    But its so weird to see a modern person advocating that openly. Thats supposed to be a thing youre only supposed to talk about behind closed doors. But I guess times are changing and some kind of NeoFeudalism will probably be endorsed publicly by the mainstream in a few decades.

    Massinissa , Mar 21, 2014 5:23:58 PM | 24
    @20

    Overwhelming Neocon administration? You mean like the one we had 2000-20008 that got us into two foreign engagements costing trillions of dollars?

    If that wasnt an overwhelming Neocon administration I dont know what is.

    Though it could be worse. There could be an administration with, for lack of a better word, WORSE neocons than the ones under George W. Bush.

    ana souri , Mar 21, 2014 6:37:13 PM | 27
    @24

    I personally do not think bush was a neocon. He was a patsy who was manipulated by neocons. He didn't have the brains, the ability to plot or the vision of these two loonies and the neocon masses that seems to be growing everyday in the US. Bush was a twit. A neocon administration is what we will see with hitlery Clinton if she is elected. Nothing worse that an intelligent, motivated, self entered, ambitious neocon to set the road for a PNAC scenario.

    JohnH , Mar 21, 2014 6:39:36 PM | 28
    A hired pen is a hired pen is a hired penis...

    What we all need now is neocondums.

    Nora , Mar 21, 2014 6:41:37 PM | 29
    #24

    But Cheney was a Neocon, and he and Rumsfeld hired the whole PNAC crew and set all that crap in motion. He was also trying to make up for damned near bankrupting what then became Halliburton. And he succeeded on both counts. There isn't a person in the US today with any "serious" foreign policy creds who has any business running anything. So our choice next time will be... bad and worse.

    remembererringgiap , Mar 21, 2014 7:00:45 PM | 30
    it matters not kagan, kaplan - fecal matter

    like tennyson & wordsworth

    they changed their name at half time

    Mr. Pragma , Mar 21, 2014 7:15:56 PM | 31
    Lovely.

    But energy invested in that discussion will be wasted.

    They write the plays and you play them. Keeps you busy.

    dahoit , Mar 21, 2014 7:45:09 PM | 32
    Zionists are slavers;well,who knew?sheesh,It's nice when they articulate it though,it gives one a warm feeling inside as self ego re-enforcement.
    dahoit , Mar 21, 2014 7:47:12 PM | 33
    What we really need is a American anti-Zionist movement.I'm ready.
    Nora , Mar 21, 2014 7:57:58 PM | 34
    dahoit, #32. Start by joining the boycott! Hit 'em where it hurts.
    Demian , Mar 21, 2014 8:07:31 PM | 35
    Kaplan effectively believes that the Empire is AngloZionist:
    the British had their hands full in Mesopotamia in 1941: given the tendency of the Arab masses toward anti-Western and anti-Zionist ideologies (a tendency that was itself at least in part a reaction to British dominance)

    So maybe I was unfair to the Saker when I said in an earlier thread that I regretted his using this term.

    Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 21, 2014 8:09:17 PM | 36
    Kaplan/Kagan is an amusing slip, but they're equally insane and the point is well made - that supremacists are a bit too eager to fall in love with their own bullshit.

    "As both a dream and a fact the American slaveholdership was born before the United States," writes the mid-20th-century historian of westward expansion Bernard DeVoto.

    Did he mean Danny DeVito?

    antistupid , Mar 21, 2014 8:21:59 PM | 37
    Actually, I think these neocons fail on their on there own terms. I mean that they're actually very poor imperial strategists even if one accepts the neocon argument that empire is a good thing. If anything, it's the neocons who have no grasp of realpolitik and who are blinded by an ideology that is far more pro-Israel than pro-American. All the wars they've promoted have been debacles that have diminished not increased America's standing. Unconditional support for Israel (which earns successive American administrations only Israeli contempt, never gratitude) and the obsession with punishing and destabilizing Iran totally distorts not only American Middle East policy but American foreign policy as a whole. Pushing for a new Cold War with Russia creates a powerful enemy where previously there was none. So for all their seemingly shameless promotion of empire, these people will one day be noted only for their contribution to American decline.
    Paul Bogdanich , Mar 21, 2014 8:50:30 PM | 38
    Robert Kagan is Victoria Nuland's husband no? My question would be how did Ms. Nuland get promoted to Under-Secretary? Hillary Clinton had to have signed off on that.
    guest77 , Mar 21, 2014 8:53:22 PM | 39
    " the most benign form of order for thousands of years, keeping the anarchy of ethnic, tribal, and sectarian war bands to a reasonable minimum"

    Am i mistaken? Because I am quite certain sectarian wars have never been worse. Syria, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Rwanda, and DRC. These countries became mixed at some point. And now they are being torn apart.

    kalithea , Mar 21, 2014 9:02:00 PM | 40
    Finally, we get to discuss the poisonous, rotten core of Imperial Supremacy and who authored, promotes it and is the main driving force behind it. Hallelujah! This is exactly where we must begin. Finally, the purpose of all these discussions becomes more defined.

    I'm not sure if your error in the author's name was really so bad. Maybe it was meant this way for all to investigate further , because that is precisely what everyone is failing to do in these discussions on imperial supremacy: to research the authors of this evil ideological foreign policy and there are many behind it in different arenas: politics, finance, media, lobbies, religious groups, all honing the message, driving the narrative, driving policy, bribing politicians to push this twisted ideology forward.

    Your error, intentional or otherwise was nonetheless so timely and auspicious at a moment in history when we are starting to see , what evil injustice is being advanced in our name against other nations, and this article falls into our lap in an almost prophetic manner with such perfect timing as a warning to us all: to look for the root and squash it before it's too late, because unless we see where it originates, we are powerless. The fact that your error perplexed many here already can only be a good thing, because it peaks their curiosity: hey, wait a minute; this is not the author, what's going on here? And then upon further research, they discover two names to familiarize themselves with, and then three, and then a pattern starts to emerge, and then they go further connecting the dots until they finally get the big picture that: the advancement of imperial supremacy in this day and age...is most definitely a Zionist-driven operation.

    So they have similar names, and are no relation but they're united in the cause of Zionism and the imperial project that will shelter Zionism permanently.:

    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2001/10/no_relation_no_13_the_foreign_policy_edition.html

    This individual, Kaplan, is obviously trying to make the case for imperial supremacy which sets the stage for justifying the injustice that Zionism has wrought in Israel and that Zionists want to permanently legitimize by any means possible.

    These Ziocons will bombard us and the world from left, right and centre with an argument designed for every political persuasion to justify legitimizing imperial supremacy where Zionism can exist comfortably with permanent impunity and be cleansed of its ongoing and future crimes.

    Now I know I'm going to have fun here separating the chaff from the wheat on this issue. This is a subject that Zionists, whether liberal (a non-existent creatures in Zionism; because Zionism turns all who embrace it into fascists) or conservative, are irresistably drawn to and at the same time it's a subject that draws out their duplicitous nature. Those who are secretly with Zionism's goals will do ANYTHING to steer us off course and prevent us from visualizing the pattern, and if we dare to; they'll hurl their most convenient slander; A.S.

    Thank you for making us aware of this article which lays the foundation for all discussions on what we are witnessing in Ukraine and the Middle East with advancing imperial supremacy and which hopefully will motivate everyone to further explore the depth and scope of Zionist involvement in this expanding foreign operation that is evil to its core.

    And don't worry, apparently you're not the first to mix up these names and make this fortunate mistake, because in essence, whether one author is blunt and the other doublespeaks liberal jargon they are united in their cause and we should be aware of what we're up against to tear their structure down and derail their agenda.

    It's great to see others stumble upon the truth that was begging to be found. If not for this timely omen, I might have given up trying to make everyone see and have started doubting even the sound of my own fury.

    Massinissa , Mar 21, 2014 9:03:31 PM | 41
    @38

    Kaplan would probably say its because America isnt a powerful enough empire or something. Lulz.

    kalithea , Mar 21, 2014 9:06:46 PM | 42
    @10 thomas

    Stop beating around the bush, and just come out with it already! We are being sold a case for Zionist Supremacy right from the horses mouth!

    kalithea , Mar 21, 2014 9:12:36 PM | 43
    @34 Demian

    Well you could have knocked me over with a feather! And to think I had to go through all that to see you get to this point. Thank God for serendipity!

    kalithea , Mar 21, 2014 9:15:02 PM | 44
    @37 They don't talk about it in polite society; but it's understood they're all on the same page.
    kalithea , Mar 21, 2014 9:23:12 PM | 45
    @29 Nora

    Who set these wheel in motion Robert Kagan and William Kristol or Dick and Rummy? Come on...the authors of the PLAN of course. Sure Cheney's a lunatic, but even he couldn't come up with this. Cheney's part of the muscle.

    Nora , Mar 21, 2014 9:35:21 PM | 46
    #44 Kalithea

    We've been fighting this fight, Kalithea, for a long time now, every way we can. So you'll not find me defending a one of them. But the wheels were set in motion before any of us were born, and I'm an old woman now. We're "just" dealing with the current crop, and hopefully we'll somehow succeed before there's no Palestine, Palestinians or olive trees left. Or Syrians, or Iraqis, or Ukrainians, or... Just don't think for a minute that these monsters were not, and are not, encouraged and enabled by non-Jews, low and high, who share the same damned values even if they don't personally give a crap about Israel or its "chosen". And they've ALL got to be stopped.

    kalithea , Mar 21, 2014 9:45:10 PM | 47
    This is from a 2004 article by Uri Avnery at Counterpunch:
    The "oligarchs" are a tiny group of entrepreneurs who exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they took control of the state. Six out of the seven are Jews.

    In the first years of post-Soviet Russian capitalism they were the bold and nimble ones who knew how to exploit the economic anarchy in order to acquire enormous possessions for a hundredth or a thousandth of their value: oil, natural gas, nickel and other minerals. They used every possible trick, including cheating, bribery and murder. Every one of them had a small private army.

    But the most intriguing part of the series recounts the way they took control of the political apparatus. After a period of fighting each other, they decided that it would be more profitable for them to cooperate in order to take over the state.

    At the time, President Boris Yeltsin was in a steep decline. On the eve of the new elections for the presidency, his rating in public opinion polls stood at 4%. He was an alcoholic with a severe heart disease, working about two hours a day. The state was, in practice, ruled by his bodyguard and his daughter; corruption was the order of the day.

    The oligarchs decided to take power through him. They had almost unlimited funds, control of all TV channels and most of the other media.

    Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here.

    George W. Bush and John Kerry both brag about their talent for raising enormous sums of money. From whom? From pensioners? From the mythical "old lady in tennis shoes"? Of course not, but from the cabals of billionaires, the giant corporations and powerful lobbies (arms dealers, Jewish organiztions, doctors, lawyers and such). Many of them give money to both candidates–just to be on the safe side.

    All of these expect, of course, to receive a generous bonus when their candidate is elected. "There is no such thing as a free lunch", as the right-wing economist Milton Friedman wrote. As in Russia, every dollar (or ruble) invested wisely in an election will yield a ten- or hundred-fold return.

    http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/08/03/or-how-the-virgin-became-a-whore/

    Demian , Mar 21, 2014 10:12:07 PM | 48
    Even educated Americans speak of Putin as a "thug". All he has done is restore the rule of law, what Germans used to call a Rechtsstaat .

    It was very revealing for me to watch his recent informal press conference and his speech to the Duma. He is obviously a man of the people. He also takes the political ideas that European civilization was built on seriously, something that can be said for no Western leader I know of.

    It is turning out as the nineteenth century Slavophiles thought it would: Russia has become the last defender of Western civilization.

    ToivoS , Mar 21, 2014 10:34:42 PM | 49
    Someone above mentioned the Robert Kaplan piece in the Atlantic "how we would fight china" that appeared in 2005. This was not lunatic but a very interesting article on US military plans on how to confront China just off of China's territorial waters (I think the lunacy is the notion that US national interests require us to maintain a war footing in the Western Pacific, but that is an argument we have lost here in the US). I hadn't seen this before. In any case it should be read by anyone interested in US plans against China. It explains Hillary's 'pivot to Asia' policy.

    Demian , Mar 21, 2014 10:40:14 PM | 50
    As for Uri Avnery at Counterpunch: today he writes :
    By the same token, Ukrainians can be understood when they kick out a president who wants to bring them into the Russian orbit against their will.

    I was surprised to read that. I should have thought that Avnery has a concept of the rule of law. Also, is Avnery so uninformed not to know that most Ukrainians do not want to join NATO?

    scalawag , Mar 21, 2014 10:49:46 PM | 51
    Uri Avnery is "soft" zionism. Says most the "right" things, but essentially there to steer the gullible towards the lesser of two zionist evils.
    DM , Mar 21, 2014 11:04:15 PM | 53
    "Even educated Americans". That must be either a relative term, or the voice of the educated is never heard. It is difficult for me to imagine how an "educated" person could be so ill-informed. Back on planet earth, this would never happen.
    kalithea , Mar 21, 2014 11:09:00 PM | 54
    Maybe this is far-fetched and I know that Putin bailed out some the the Russian Oligarchy during the 2008 recession so they would owe him support at this crucial time. But recently I watched an interview on 60 Minutes with businessman Bill Browder who trashed talked Putin. Browder ran a Capital Management firm investing in Russia's largest oil companies. Browder who at one point alleges being a supporter of Putin ended up blacklisted as being a threat to the country. Anyway I'm not sure what kind of subterfuge he was up to when he stayed in Russia but he made some nasty accusations against Putin.

    A Zionist Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky who went into exile in the U.K. after being accused of fraud and embezzlement during Primkov's government in 1999 also hated Putin. Beresovsky is one of those oligarchs by the way who exploited the fall of the Soviet Union to his advantange. Beresovsky later became a vocal opponent of Putin.

    Berezovsky publicly threatened Putin and stated that he was on a mission to bring down Putin "by force" or by bloodless revolution. Berezovsky held media holdings in Russia and used them to slam Putin's policies.

    I believe it is during this time Putin became aware of the power of Zionist media to destroy political careers.

    In October, in an interview in Le Figaro, Putin announced that he would no longer tolerate criticism of the government by media controlled by the oligarchs. "If necessary we will destroy those instruments that allow this blackmail", he declared.

    Details from wiki:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Berezovsky_(businessman)#Conflict_with_Putin_and_emigration

    Berezovsky even set up a foundation based in New York whose purpose it was said was to "bankroll widespread opposition to Putin":

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Foundation_for_Civil_Liberties

    There's no doubt in my mind that Zionist influence had a hand in what is happening in Ukraine and the protests that tried to interfere with Putin's re-election. Maybe Putin pissed off some other Zionist oligarchs. I haven't been able to research more on this issue but hopefully some of you will look further.

    But this just reinforces the point I've been trying to make that Zionists are involved in this imperial global expansion, in this case because the capitalist system feels threatened by Putin and potential reforms. Zionists are up to their eyeballs in this imperial advance and I still believe they're in the driver's seat.

    kalithea , Mar 21, 2014 11:16:52 PM | 55
    @48 ToivoS

    Are you kidding me? Do you think the U.S. could ever dream of reining 1.3 billion stray cats with nukes and a formidable army? For gawd's sake this article is practically a manifesto on Zionism supremacy, it's that transparent. But of course, you'll never admit it.

    Nora , Mar 21, 2014 11:24:00 PM | 57
    kalithea # 53

    Oh the Neocons were absolutely behind this Ukrainian gambit, and I'm thinking their goals were twofold: to keep Russia preoccupied and get hold of Sevastopol. That way, it would be very difficult for her to help Syria and, of course, Iran -- still the main goals for those creeps. And yeah, find me one Neocon, anywhere, who does not support Israel. So yeah, Zionists.

    remembererringgiap , Mar 21, 2014 11:37:51 PM | 58
    really, read some history? u s imperialism is the single most dangerous threat to humanity

    israel is a vassal state

    exactly as indonesia was under suharto, or colombia under any of its creep compradors

    your sense of disproportion amazes me truly, maybe it is because you are american, you want to blame someoen else for your barbarity, 'the smart jew' is again the perfect target for imbeciles

    it is a puppet state, it is a non state, who does exactly what washington wants it to do. it effects only only middle east policy & even that it is by far the junior party, if washington told israel to go live in the sudetenland, the state of israel would, is is a pantin, a puppet increasingly with more bark than bite

    you choose anti semitism because as american you are frightened of being obliged to burn your shithouse down

    Nora , Mar 21, 2014 11:43:38 PM | 59
    Oh no, rememberringgiap, no. It's the combination of the two. And for gosh sakes, I've known how bad America was since I was a kid, and spent most of my life trying to do something about it so I'm hardly afraid to admit it. We see the end coming, it's gonna be UGLY, and we know we deserve it; not a nice place to be but it's honest. And Israel is equally nasty, sometimes in the lead, sometimes as a follower, and I don't hate Jews but I sure do loathe Zionists, whatever faith they may be. (And again, in America, there are a lot more Christians blindly supporting Israel than Jews.)
    remembererringgiap , Mar 21, 2014 11:49:14 PM | 60
    they are puppets, nothing more nothing less. the actual state of israel began criminally with deir yassin & that state gets worse, it is little surprise, that its population is leaving in droves, more than at any other time, so would i with nutcases like lieberman & netanyahu

    but they are no more than donkeys

    pakistan on the other hand frightens the living shit out of those united states

    Nora , Mar 21, 2014 11:50:07 PM | 61
    They're just two sides of the same (filthy) coin.
    LJ , Mar 21, 2014 11:52:34 PM | 62
    In the atlantic.com article In Defense of Empire the words "slave" or "slavery" in fact do not exist.

    or example, in the above quoted text, we find this phrase: "Throughout history, governance and relative safety have most often been provided by slavery ...". From the atlantic.com url, instead we find: "Throughout history, governance and relative safety have most often been provided by empires ...".

    The same types of differences exist in every single case. Obviously, this is a huge problem. Either the quotes are wrong in this post or they have been edited out in a later version of the atlantic.com version and replaced with the words "empires," "imperialism", etc.

    This problem should be addressed ASAP.

    scalawag , Mar 22, 2014 12:07:42 AM | 63
    "israel is a vassal state"

    Which lets Israel/zionist Jewish fascists off the hook for the war crimes they are responsible for. "They're just pawns of a larger poer, pity them, but don't condemn them. And for god's sakes, don't do anything meaningful that might interfere in their sacred mandate from the godhead."

    Which is essentially what Jewish zionist hasbara is all about, whether from the zionist left or the zionist right.

    It's never "us", it's always "them".

    Excuse me while I go puke, Charles Manson in drag.

    Massinissa , Mar 22, 2014 12:08:18 AM | 64
    @48 Yes, totally not lunatic for the United States to go to war with one of the most populated countries on the planet.

    Wanting to go to war with enormous countries like China, Russia or even Iran (not as big, but still what, over twice as big as iraq and afghanistan combined?) is totally and completely rational.

    /sarc off

    kalithea , Mar 22, 2014 12:08:37 AM | 65
    Okay, I found another corrupt Zionist Russian Oligarch who was accused of fraud, embezzlement and money laundering who's also an enemy of Putin:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky

    Thank goodness Putin did some house-cleaning, but he no doubt made enemies among Zionists no doubt on Wall Street as well. They must have had capital tied up in these Zionist-run Russsian companies.

    Massinissa , Mar 22, 2014 12:11:27 AM | 68
    @62 WHAT Zionist left? There is none. All the Democrats or whatever that are zionists are also right wing. They just dress up imperialism in fancy words like 'humanitarianism', thats all.

    There hasnt been a zionist left since the last communist zionists in Israel retired or died decades ago.

    Massinissa , Mar 22, 2014 12:16:47 AM | 69
    @57 You realize that critiquing zionism, which is a modern political ideology, is NOT the same as critiquing Judaism, the religion, right? Right? Guess not.

    Because there are zionist Christians (probably more than there are zionist jews) and nonzionist jews (a growing number of young jews realize Israel is an apartheid state).

    So stop trying to slur anti-zionists as anti-semites, thats just slander.

    scalawag , Mar 22, 2014 12:22:05 AM | 70
    Hey kalithea, the Russians let Khodorkovsky out of prison early. Almost the first thing the loyal Israeli citizen did was go to the Ukraine and encourage the neo-nazis running the place now to get even more brutal and nazi like.

    I could ask what's up with that, but I think everybody here knows the answer.

    Demian , Mar 22, 2014 12:26:54 AM | 71
    @65: I think b made it very clear. He used the word "substitute", and the title of the post was directly followed by the same title, but without the substitution.

    This kind of snark is just part of leftist blog culture. (I don't know if right wingers do it.)

    I'm beginning to think that the substitution of "Kagan" for "Kaplan" was snark too, but that I didn't pick up on.

    Demian , Mar 22, 2014 12:37:00 AM | 75
    In China, Michelle Obama calls for universal rights

    Do Michelle and her speechwriters really think that Chinese rulers don't take that as a big joke? I'm sure they're laughing their heads off behind her back. I hope that the reason speechwriters put stuff like that in there is for the domestic American audience.

    kalithea , Mar 22, 2014 12:55:37 AM | 77
    And yet another Zionist oligarch who bilked Russia and hates Putin.:
    On 23 August 2003, Gusinsky travelled from Israel to Athens, where he was arrested under a Greek-Russian treaty for fraud amounting to millions in damages.[5] Intense pressure from American leaders (mainly from US ambassador in Athens Tomas Miller), Israeli officials and the European Jewish Congress on the Greek government led to Gusinsky's release within five days.[6]

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gusinsky

    Mr Gusinsky says we will all pay the price if western leaders appease President Putin. He likens the situation apocalyptically to the 1930s and the world's treatment of Hitler. Mr Putin's hands, he says, are already red with the blood of murdered Chechens.

    Mr Putin's popularity comes in part from his promise to do away with the oligarchs, a group of 20-odd billionaire businessmen who got rich stripping assets from privatised companies they bought for nothing.

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/apr/24/russia.gilestremlett

    scalawag , Mar 22, 2014 1:25:52 AM | 78
    Posted by: remembererringgiap | Mar 22, 2014 12:46:04 AM | 75

    "just read strormfront that enough - that's the level of research repeated ad finitum - whether its lagos or louisiana"

    It's well known stormfront is a zionist front/agent provocateur site, much like freerepublic, though tailored to the more hardcore freak. Why promote them?

    Crash Craddock , Mar 22, 2014 1:48:24 AM | 79
    Maybe Zionists deserve to rule, they're smarter, they work harder and are better organized. You folks couldn't organize an ice cream social. Just sayin'
    fairleft , Mar 22, 2014 2:38:49 AM | 80
    Nora and 'Destroy MoonofAlabama Project' at 45:
    But the wheels were set in motion before any of us were born, and I'm an old woman now. ... Just don't think for a minute that these monsters were not, and are not, encouraged and enabled by non-Jews, low and high, who share the same damned values even if they don't personally give a crap about Israel or its "chosen".

    Testify Sister! Tell us who set the wheels in motion, tell us all what the plan is. What tricks did the Jews pull on us non-Jews way back then, how are non-Jews enabling their diabolical worldwide plan?

    ToivoS , Mar 22, 2014 2:40:38 AM | 81
    Posted by: kalithea | Mar 21, 2014 11:16:52 PM | 54

    WTF are you trying to say? The Zionist have no position on US-China relations as far as anyone can see. I read that article by Robert Kaplan and he reported the views of officers in the US Navy. I am quite sure that Israel has not penetrated the US Navy. This is a perspective of good old fashioned US imperialism. I know that the Zionist work in the background and try to influence US policy, but they do not control it. Especially inside the US Navy. You have no idea how power is distributed inside the US.

    Outraged , Mar 22, 2014 3:40:54 AM | 82
    The War Prayer
    "... I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world ..." Mark Twain

    Eugenics is evil ... however, in Kagans case, his removal from the gene pool and his ilk, could only be seen as a darwinian, evolutionary advancement for humanity.

    brian , Mar 22, 2014 3:52:15 AM | 83
    nice to see Kagan defend empire...so he defends russias and soviets

    meanwhile: #Kiev authorities giving school camps to neo-#Nazis for military training

    http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_22/Kiev-authorities-giving-school-camps-to-neo-Nazis-for-military-training-5367/

    #Svoboda #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/LFNocUcc5x

    Knut , Mar 22, 2014 3:57:39 AM | 84
    thank you, rememberinggiap, for your calmness. you are correct in saying that many of us (and that includes myself look for causes outside our internal history. perhaps the fixed point should be the Dulles brothers, who if they did not set us down this infernal path, gave us a mighty and prolonged push. Mark Twain had it all figured out over a century ago. as to American zionists, Jews of my and Nora's generaton lived through the discrimination of convenanted housing tracts, university quotas and professional exclusions down to the Vietnam war, and they can't put it out of their mind. they probably don't know that they were not the only ones. when I was a student at Yale living with George Bush Sr.'s aunt in New Haven, Catholics and most of the Yale professors were excluded from the lawn tennis club situated just behind the new school of management on Whitney avenue. No Irish or italians need apply. the us is a swarm of internal contradictions, and it's history is out of control.
    fairleft , Mar 22, 2014 4:08:55 AM | 85
    Nora at 45: Kindly cancel that request. Just answer this. Do you agree with this quote from Pragma:
    Neither is it coincidence that (before the creation of izrael but about the time of the balfour deal ...) Russia was poisoned by zionist "communists" (just another projection), nor is it coincidence that Germany was relentlessly pushed into war and later broken and crushed and not reinstated until this very day ...

    If that's a good summary of them, maybe there's no need for you to tell us about your 'historical' beliefs.

    Also, in fact I only think Pragma is the actual 'destroy moonofalabama' operative here. You and his other supporters seem to hold your beliefs sincerely. FWIW and for what they're worth which is less than zero.

    Outraged , Mar 22, 2014 4:09:28 AM | 86
    @ToivoS #48

    There will be no 'US Naval' war off Chinas coast.

    The US Navy has known it Carriers are simply very large targets for many, many years, and so do the PLAN.

    Carrier battle groups are for projecting brute military force and creating invasive sovereignity(sic) in support of Empire around the globe ... NEVER , in the modern era to be risked against 1st world powers. All those billions upon billions of $ would be lost in the briefest moment of conflict with the PLAN. See: Anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBM).

    thomas , Mar 22, 2014 4:16:04 AM | 87
    I must admit I didn't compare the original text with what b cited, I still had too much of a confidence into him which now vanished totally. Others @6) and Massinissa discovered the bluff immediately, so they deserve the honour. I really don't know what the purpose of this double bluff is: changing the text and the author??? I would say just stupid...

    It also damages people like Chinweizu @10), the famous nigerian writer who presented a case of REAL stewardry of labour by WTO close to slaveholdership

    maybe Mr Pragma is also his creation, b is a talented computer freak and I think he is LoL in his little room about all of us; and also about having added two hysterical anti-zionist broads programmes to the commenters here confusing all of us.... I think the whole blog here is really disintegrating, from top to bottom...

    fairleft , Mar 22, 2014 4:32:48 AM | 89
    Knut at 83: Lenin had this figured out, imperialism is a stage of capitalism, a reaction to excess production and internal markets being exhausted of opportunities for excess profits. The European capitalist countries began struggling with this phenomenon in the late 19th century and the US a few decades later. There's really no solution other than ending capitalism and/or social democracy.

    In that context, pinning responsibility for imperialism on Jews is just idiotic, and pinning things on the US will just make folks less wary of its natural successor, China. That doesn't mean it's not a good thing when there is multi-polar world, because that coincided in the post-war era and may coincide again with greater 'space' for independent, populist, democratic regimes to arise.

    And that also doesn't mean I accuse Russia of being an imperialist. Lenin was making a general observation (I think) and there are exceptions. Regimes under attack by 'big imperialism' sometimes produce sincere democratic/populist nationalists. I hope/think Russians are lucky enough to have one of those running their country now. The people should be aware they'll likely need to struggle 'some day soon' to avoid reverting to the 'imperialist norm'.

    thomas , Mar 22, 2014 4:54:44 AM | 90
    @87) where is the enlightment of readers doing this? all empires, great and less great, historically have been founded on slaveholdership, now changing to a form of forced labour like in most of the arabic monarchistic countries or work without the minimum ILO standards like in the case of the Sotchi Olympic workers....
    Outraged , Mar 22, 2014 6:44:10 AM | 91
    After 12 Years of War, Labor Abuses Still Rampant on U.S. Bases in Afghanistan (as in Iraq & elsewhere)

    Human Trafficking and Slavery by the US Government, Military and Corporations for MASSIVE PROFIT is very, very real, in a 'literal' sense, too ... all of it corrupt and illegal even under US Law ... and no one will ever be prosecuted ...

    12 years a Slave , indeed ... as I recall, no individual, business or official involved was ever held accountable for the multiple crimes, even then illegal, committed against Solomon Northup , then a Freeman ... one hundred and sixty years has passed and where are we now ?

    somebody , Mar 22, 2014 6:55:48 AM | 92
    What Kaplan's "defense of imperialism" is trying to prevent are these

    " proposed defense cuts "

    But if Congress approves, the Army would drop from today's active-duty force of 522,000 soldiers to between 440,000 and 450,000 over the next three years.

    "Since we are no longer sizing the force for prolonged" ground wars, the Army is larger than required and "larger than we can afford," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who announced the plan, said at the Pentagon.

    California may win more than it loses in the shift of resources as older aircraft are phased out and new ones are brought on board.

    Spending for cyberwarfare will increase under the plan. That could benefit larger government contractors in Silicon Valley, including Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle Corp. and a growing number of start-ups in defense-related equipment and software.

    In addition, Northrop Grumman Corp. uses a facility in Palmdale to build the unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk drone aircraft that will replace the high-flying U-2 spy planes, famous in the early Cold War but now proposed for retirement. The company has about 2,500 employees on the program in Southern California.

    The Pentagon previously had planned to mothball a version of the Global Hawk and keep the U-2 flying. But Hagel said the operating costs of the drone had fallen and that with its greater range and endurance, it "makes a better high-altitude reconnaissance platform for the future."

    The Air Force has 32 U-2s based at Beale Air Force Base in Marysville, Calif.

    Hagel also called for retiring the Air Force's entire fleet of A-10 "Warthog" ground attack fighters, as well as mothballing half of the Navy's fleet of 22 cruisers, and building only 32 of the Navy's littoral combat ships, not 52 as previously planned. The shallow-draft, lightly armed warship is designed for clearing mines and anti-submarine warfare. Hagel said it might not be heavily armed enough and called for studying whether a new frigate would be better.

    The only military force to grow would be special operations forces. Increasingly used for training and counter-terrorism missions around the world, the elite force would increase by several thousand to 69,700 .

    Which would give the US a spoiling, blackmail power to push for its interests but no imperial power.

    Rather than Obama's post-imperialism, in which the secretary of state appears like a lonely and wayward operator encumbered by an apathetic White House, I maintain that a tempered imperialism is now preferable.

    No other power or constellation of powers is able to provide even a fraction of the global order provided by the United States. U.S. air and sea dominance preserves the peace, such as it exists, in Asia and the Greater Middle East. American military force, reasonably deployed, is what ultimately protects democracies as diverse as Poland, Israel, and Taiwan from being overrun by enemies. If America sharply retrenched its air and sea forces, while starving its land forces of adequate supplies and training, the world would be a far more anarchic place, with adverse repercussions for the American homeland.

    Rome, Parthia, and Hapsburg Austria were great precisely because they gave significant parts of the world a modicum of imperial order that they would not otherwise have enjoyed. America must presently do likewise, particularly in East Asia, the geographic heartland of the world economy and the home of American treaty allies.

    He seems to realize his argument is an uphill struggle as he adds this

    This by no means obliges the American military to repair complex and populous Islamic countries that lack critical components of civil society. America must roam the world with its ships and planes, but be very wary of where it gets involved on the ground. And it must initiate military hostilities only when an overwhelming national interest is threatened. Otherwise, it should limit its involvement to economic inducements and robust diplomacy -- diplomacy that exerts every possible pressure in order to prevent widespread atrocities in parts of the world, such as central Africa, that are not, in the orthodox sense, strategic.

    That he goes back to "White Man's Burden" in his arguments presumably means he is too old and out of touch with US demography .

    somebody , Mar 22, 2014 7:01:56 AM | 93
    There is a great RT interview by Anastasja Churkina - the daughter of the Russian UN ambassador - with Amy Goodman on the role of corporate media - when corporations profit from war.
    Mr. Pragma , Mar 22, 2014 9:55:02 AM | 95
    Demian (47)
    Putin ...

    It was very revealing for me to watch his recent informal press conference and his speech to the Duma. He is obviously a man of the people.

    Indeed. It's also instructive to compare a Putin speech and say an obama or merkel speech. While Putin *evidently and doubtlessly* really addresses the people and explains what has been, or must be, done and why, the western puppets merely utter system standard pieces of text and are ignoring the people.

    kalithea (53)

    Bill Browder who trashed talked Putin. Browder ran a Capital Management firm investing in Russia's largest oil companies. Browder who at one point alleges being a supporter of Putin ended up blacklisted as being a threat to the country.

    Well, depending on whom you ask, weztern media and even (reliably and confrontingly jew defending) wikipedia, or Russian investigators, witnesses, and victims, the answer will be very different.

    Actually browder was deeply and dirtily linked to a concerted crime operation that tried to steal Russias (mostly hydrocarbon) resources in a "professional" way. This, of course *had* to be understood for what it was, a direct attack on Russias life blood, which maybe was not even the goal of browder and accomplices but at least a non issue for them. Looking closer you will also find khodorkovsky and the "devils advocate" magnitsky in those circles.

    Funnily the wezt and wikipedia paint browder as a gently minded businessman who got thrown out by evil Putin for unmasking Putin and his crime gang (well noted, that's how the weztern thugs paint it).

    A Zionist Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky who went into exile in the U.K. after being accused of fraud and embezzlement during Primkov's government in 1999 also hated Putin. Beresovsky is one of those oligarchs by the way who exploited the fall of the Soviet Union to his advantange. Beresovsky later became a vocal opponent of Putin.

    Berezovsky publicly threatened Putin and stated that he was on a mission to bring down Putin "by force" or by bloodless revolution. Berezovsky held media holdings in Russia and used them to slam Putin's policies.

    berezovsky didn't stick to the deal, he left the frame so clearly - and wisely - assigned by Putin. Quite possibly berezovsky is the symbol of the "political oligarchs" which, of course, were not at all happy about Putin stopping their free looting of Russia.

    It is noteworthy - yet widely "forgotten" - that berezovsky later, in London, more or less confessed his crimes and evil spirited attacks and asked Putin to forgive him and to please, pretty please, let him go back to Russia.

    One might also have a good case here for the difference between jews and zionists. Yes, most oligarchs are jews but that's not the point. The point is that extremely greedy people with a large crime register wanted to and still want to earn ever more billions, jew or not jew. But that's it. And one can make agreements with them, even agreements in favour of Russia and even agreements basically employing those oligarchs for the good of Russia.

    Not so with the zionists. The zionist oligarchs never respected Putin, nor the people, nor Russia herself. To them Russia was but a helpless but very rich lady they would loot and rob with utmost brutality. And as soon as anyone dared to stop them they would scream "anti-semites!" and leave to izrael or another zio controlled country.

    For those oligarchs who stuck and stick to the agreements one must not care about jew or not and indeed there are non-jews, too. The most brutal and despicable criminals though are zio-jews, each and all of them.

    Ad "zusa attacking China":

    That must be a joke. Anyone with some basic knowledge about military issues will tell you a simple truth: zusa must hope and pray that none of their protectees, namely japan, sk, and taiwan, ever comes in a situation to ask for zusa help. For a simple reason. zusa would be doomed.

    Japan being the least dangerous, sk would pretty much be lost before zusa could fire some shots, and taiwan (and largely sk) are basically denied zones.

    Not only are 100% of taiwan covered by Chinese anti-air systems but worse for zusa, zusa would be stopped dead in its tracks because China can interdict the ca. 600 - 750km wide "belt" around taiwan needed for zusa air operations. About the only tool not interdicted would be zusa firing cruise missiles; as those are old tech., and slow China would comfortably kill at least 80% (and more realistically around 90%) of those. Would do zusa that, would zusa protect taiwan knowing there is little they could do but there would be a very considerable risk of China (rightfully!) destroying major parts of the zusa fleet? I strongly doubt that.

    About the most realistic and favourable (for zusa) scenario I see would be a China japan war with zusa interfering somewhat. And even that is doubtful as it might "invite" nk to use China supplied weapons against both japan and the much hated zusa.

    maybe Mr Pragma is also his creation, b is a talented computer freak and I think he is LoL in his little room about all of us; and also about having added two hysterical anti-zionist broads programmes

    maybe? MAYBE? What an incompetent asshole! OF COURSE I'm a programm! But not by b; I've been programmed by KGB on a rusty typewriter.

    izrael should ask zusa for more funds or they should ask one of the zio-controlled countries. Obviously izrael *urgently* needs funds for better agents. Current ones like thomas miss even the most obvious points.

    Ceterum censeo israel americanamque vehementer delenda esse!

    somebody , Mar 22, 2014 10:00:10 AM | 96
    94) no, you are definitively CIA programmed, probably by their Israeli subcontractors.
    Sanford Russell , Mar 22, 2014 10:02:00 AM | 97
    Please, b, have some truly competent person proof read your posts. A few more blunders such as this one and you lose a bunch of readers.
    kalithea , Mar 22, 2014 10:15:25 AM | 98
    @96

    I doubt he will lose readers; and if it's you, nitpicker - Good Riddance.

    somebody , Mar 22, 2014 10:24:30 AM | 99
    96) Sanford Russel - hint: it is intentional.

    Some people plan for Afghanistan in Ukraine .

    Bright future for Pravy Sector Taliban.

    Mr. Pragma , Mar 22, 2014 10:26:43 AM | 100
    Oh no, b made an error!

    What a shocking revelation. Who would have thought that a human being can make an occasional error?!

    sanford russell is absolutely right. The readers are fleeing MoA in batallion-sized troves.

    Say, sanford russell, how many errors are needed to lose *you*? I'm more than ready to commit them.

    Here's a first downpayment:

    1 + 1 = 7

    zionists are acceptable human beings

    sun is going around earth which is the center of the universe (hint to zamericans: Attention, this is actually an error!)

    water flows upward

    kalithea , Mar 22, 2014 10:27:48 AM | 101
    @94 Mr. Pragma

    Mikhail Fridman Zionist Oligarch:

    He has been an active supporter of Jewish initiatives in Russia and Europe. In 1996 Fridman was one of the founders of the Russian Jewish Congress, now sitting on the RJC Presidium. He makes large contribution to the work of the European Jewish Fund, a non-profit organization aimed at developing European Jewry and promoting tolerance and reconciliation on the continent.[5]

    Presently, a member of the Public Chamber of Russia. Was presented with an award by Bill Clinton, uber-supporter of Zionism.

    What is this? A case of keep your friends close and enemies closer? I wouldn't trust a Zionist as far as I can spit! How many Zionists are in his entourage? I hope Putin doesn't end up like Caesar - stabbled in the back by those close to him - et tu Brute?

    kalithea , Mar 22, 2014 10:28:40 AM | 102
    Link for details:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Fridman

    kalithea , Mar 22, 2014 10:31:55 AM | 105
    Mikhail Fridman and his fellow Russian Jewish philanthropists are ponying up some serious cash to create what is being touted as a "Jewish Nobel Prize." The Russian billionaire and co-founder of the five-year-old Genesis philanthropy group announced the creation of a $1 million prize that will be awarded to Jews who win global recognition for their professional achievements, including in the world of science and the arts. The prize, launched in collaboration with the Israeli government, was announced on Tuesday, which coincided with the visit of Russian president Vladimir Putin to Israel. The award will be presented annually by the Israeli prime minister around Passover time. As if the world was short on Jewish Nobel Prize winners.

    Read more: http://www.jta.org/2012/06/29/life-religion/friday-five-ankie-spitzer-hateful-elmo-aaron-sorkin-mikhail-fridman-and-pamela-geller#ixzz2whaPoKar

    Cynthia , Mar 22, 2014 10:34:08 AM | 106
    Crash Craddock@78,

    Neocon Zionists, aka Israeli Firsters, and most of the One Percent on Wall Street have owned Congress and the mainstream media propaganda machine since the beginning of modern print, and then broadcast media. By this control of what people read, hear, and see, they have been able to control what people believe and think. Game set match, until now.

    Now, the internet has opened the Pandora's box of Truth, and as people have an instinct for the truth, they are beginning to see what was concealed from them before. (And they're inevitably getting smarter, developing the skill needed to distinguish noisy nonsense from correct information.) So Robert Kagan and other neocon Zionists like him whose first loyalty is to Israel, are rightly worried that when the "tapestry of lies" is stripped away, and the American people see the extent of the Zionist subversion, there will be consequences.

    This is the pattern of five-thousand years of Jewish history: they go somewhere, do very well by themselves and the locals, then they get powerful, and they overreach and become abusive, at which point the locals accost them, or holocaust them. This is how Jewish talent becomes Jewish self-destruction.

    This is sad enough, but as an American, I'm particularly dismayed, because the American Jews in my surrounding community have -- too easily I must confess -- been hoodwinked into supporting the Zionist criminal enterprise.

    Stealing someone else's country to start your own -- despite all the historical precedent -- is not a good strategy, particularly when the folks whose country you stole have a billion and a half co-religionists out there unhappy about the theft.

    H/T: antiwar.com

    Nora , Mar 22, 2014 10:34:22 AM | 107
    Let's get some definitions right, ok. Zionism in this day and age means no more and no less than a strong supporter of the state of Israel. It simply doesn't mean "Jew", but it does mean condoning increased settlements and outrageous attacks against Gaza, etc. The entire movement is a bit more than 100 years old; it began at roughly the same time that TR and his lovely "White Fleet" sailed the Pacific to do some of the same lovely stuff to the Philippines that we'd been doing to North America since the 1600's and the rest of the Americas since the 1800s (the entire purpose of the Monroe Doctrine was to legitimize it).

    Okay, a bit more history: our entry into WWI was, among other things, closely related to the Balfour Doctrine. We did it for many mercantile reasons as well (DuPont vs. Krupp, etc.), but the point is, just like the Yalies in OSS whose families had been bankrolling Hitler before (and during, see: Prescott Bush) WWII then snarfed up a bunch of leading Nazis afterwards, different people w/different goals and beliefs, can work together when it suits their purposes. And "Israel returning to Zion" was and is a MAJOR theme for the Puritans, both here and in England (look up Dispensationalism; it's a big deal) and various other groups of Christians.

    So yes, no CT here at all, but why waste time separating out blame: it's a many-headed monster that's easily judged simply by its effects, summed up as harm to innocent people in the furtherance of... whatever.

    Mr. Pragma , Mar 22, 2014 10:36:08 AM | 108
    kalithea

    a) Putin is a pragmatic who tries to *integrate* all the diverse groups. As long as m.f. and the likes stick to the rules, it's O.K.

    And frankly, who cares a cigar about the clintons?

    b) Rest assured that m.f. *is* sticking to the rules. After all zionism is only the second priority of rich zionists ...

    @ cold n holefield

    Great. Good to see that you despise Putin. That's a strong indicator for Putin doing an excellent job.

    As for Putins often implied and never proven western expansion desires:

    Well, actually most zeuropeans would just LOVE to have a president who actually works *for* them and *for* the country.

    hollande, merkel, cameron and all the other puppets definitely and obviously do *not* care batshit about "their" countries or people.

    Nora , Mar 22, 2014 10:47:28 AM | 109
    fairleft, I left some stuff for you that you may not have read. I'm putting it here but will not engage you again until you've digested at least one of the readings I suggested.

    I have an honest question I wish you'd really think about. I'm assuming you're an American, like me. And we have no compunction praising our fellow Americans when they do something in accord with our values, and criticizing them when they don't. I.e., we're not blindly zenophobic, right? And I think that's pretty generally true for most of the people here, whatever their ethnicity: they can criticize "their own" when they find it warranted, based on what the person, or group of people, did. So I'm wondering about your blind spot: are all Jews blameless just by definition, or might some of them, sometimes, do something objectionable? And if so, why is no one allowed to say so? In my family's background are lots of different peoples who at various times were subjected to hideous repression, ethnic cleansing and yes, genocide, but I still see no reason not to criticize them when they're doing something wrong -- why can't you? And please don't invoke the Holocaust: I can trump you in my own background by hundreds of years and millions of people. Really: not all Jews are perfect or blameless, and we're not really talking Jews anyhow, we're talking support for criminal acts by the state of Israel, supported here in America by a LOT more Christians than Jews. I.e., Zionism.

    Sometimes this knee-jerk respose is just group-think by otherwise decent people who've been frightened and brainwashed their entire lives and might possibly be reachable. Gilad Atzmon, Israel Adam Shamir and Philip Weiss, to name just three, all started out like that too -- and then grew. I was trying to give fairleft an opportunity to open his mind a bit; he can take it not, as he chooses.

    In any case, please read Norton Mezvinsky and Israel Shahak, "Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel", Israel Shahak, a Holocuast survivor, btw, "Jewish History, Jewish Religion", and a piece up on CounterPunch right now: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/the-origins-of-the-israel-lobby-in-the-us/

    You seem like a decent person: please read these. It won't be easy for you -- it's hard to challenge deeply-ingrained beliefs -- but reading these books with a mind open to seeing things differently is more than worth it.

    Mr. Pragma , Mar 22, 2014 11:00:06 AM | 111
    Nora

    In all friendliness, it seems you just don't get it. Yes, fairleft is somewhat more professional than, say thomas, in not exclusively relying on crude attacks and gross propaganda.

    He is, however, nevertheless and evidently a fervent pro-zionist and trying his best to do their work here.

    (But of course, this is but some friendly sentences. Feel free by all means to continue your endeavour)

    Nora , Mar 22, 2014 11:10:48 AM | 112
    ben @ 109

    Thank you.

    Mr. P @ 110

    Just giving him the benefit of the doubt this one last time.

    But those two books and Allison Weir's piece imo are important for anyone who wants to be informed; there's a lot of data in each of them that simply cannot be refuted. And Shahak's book is still available online, I think.

    somebody , Mar 22, 2014 11:12:40 AM | 113
    105) Especially when it was the British who promised the place to two peoples

    for a) get support in their fight against the Ottoman empire (who had robbed the place before them)

    to b) have a "European" colony to subject the natives.

    Saying you are not Main Stream Media and making up your own truth does you better than Main Stream Media.

    Americans inherited the British empire that is all there is to it. Deal with it.

    Crest , Mar 22, 2014 11:31:04 AM | 115
    Imperialism benefits no one but a small slice of the ruling class. But it's always defended as if it's the only thing providing food for the average person. It's been true since the Roman empire. The looting oriented British Raj stripped away so much and somehow almost none of it ended up in the hands of the average Briton. Same for the Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. It's just no good. I don't know how long it will take for average people to understand it.
    Noirette , Mar 22, 2014 11:37:48 AM | 116
    The interest in slavery is not just neo-connish etc. but in a way, underground, an interest of Big Corporations (1).

    Not, imho, in first place because of the 'cheap labor' but because of issues of control.

    Right now we are living in a world that is organized in part by nation-states (as a kind of ultimate authority) and for another part, not well coordinated with the first, by Big Corporations, who increasingly control Banking and Finance, thus also say pol. contributions in the US, territory (2) and its uses, supra-territorial matters such as communications and benchmarks (internet, the control of space, rating agencies, for ex.), and other related matters like patent laws.

    Slavery as an official doctrine is not in their interests, cheap labor is already available thru modern slavery. So they keep a low profile, and let their 'elected' representatives take the flack.

    Such clashing interests are well illustrated in the case of Ukraine, where the confusion of the Western 'nation-states' has become pathetically ridiculous, as they cannot make public their lack of power and attendant subservience to Corporate interests. They are kind of 'holding on' to keep some hand in the game, and mobilizing their 'electorate' with propaganda, as that is where their livelihood come from.

    One article about Corp. interests in Ukraine:

    Consortium news, March 16, 2014

    http://tinyurl.com/omfmbp5

    1. Shell, BP, Total, plus many others in the energy field. Also the likes of Glencore Xstrata, Cargill, AXA, Monsanto, Nestlé, JP Morgan, etc. etc. all entwined in a kind of global network.

    2. Straight out buying and leasing land; owning thru investments and 'deals', exploration rights, mineral rights, agriculture, transport hubs (pipelines, shipping, ports, the machines that implement the transport, etc.)

    Rowan Berkeley , Mar 22, 2014 11:45:48 AM | 118
    In the tiny minds of these neocons, it is possible that in some simplified way, the marxist theory of the falling rate of profit penetrated, at least sufficiently for this one to infer that wage labour is inexorably doomed by its own internal contradictions. However, applying the same marxian analysis, it is possible to prove that an economy based on slave labour generates no capitalist profits at all.
    Noirette , Mar 22, 2014 11:47:42 AM | 119
    israel is a vassal state r giap

    Israel (in the form of its present Govmt, and past as well) is US State number 51, a splinter outpost on foreign lands.

    Its continuing existence in the shape of its crazily belligerent and racist, apartheid stance, and all the dire cruelties we know about, is maintained by the unwavering support and investment from the US, though EU poodles have followed along. (See e.g. UN vetos, etc.) It is a sick, symbiotic relationship, with one party acting the thug, encouraged by the backer. It is economically dependent on its masters so cannot stop, and leaders of course join for their own personal interests.

    Not to minimize the influence of the "Jewish / Isr. lobby" e.g. Walt and Mearsheimer, etc. whatever - exists because it is welcomed, and then provides strange grist to many lunatic mills.

    brian , Mar 22, 2014 11:49:41 AM | 120
    Patrick deHahn ‏@patrickdehahn 20h

    NBC News: New U S. State Dept travel warning tells citizens to defer travel to east regions of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine .......................so is west ukraine safe?>!!

    Nora , Mar 22, 2014 11:53:38 AM | 121
    @ Crest 114

    Good points. The sorrow is, average people have rarely been in a position to do anything anyhow; they're generally too busy just trying to survive. What we're seeing now in both the EU and US is the steep downward slope of economic and political disempowerment while (hopefully) heading upwards is the shallower slope of public understanding. Will they intersect in time, i.e., while people still have enough power to do something about it? Who knows. And what can people do? In the US the angry folks with guns have been successfully brainwashed to ultimately support TPTB -- while believing they're rebelling against them. (Some really clever work there, worth of Goebbels at his best.)

    Nora , Mar 22, 2014 12:06:24 PM | 123
    Here's a good one: Soros wants us to dump our strategic reserves and crash the oil market. WTF?

    http://voiceofrussia.com/2014_03_22/Ukraine-crisis-oddities-Tycoon-George-Soros-wants-US-to-crash-oil-market-1957/

    fairleft , Mar 22, 2014 12:07:27 PM | 124
    Cynthia at 105:
    This is the pattern of five-thousand years of Jewish history: they go somewhere, do very well by themselves and the locals, then they get powerful, and they overreach and become abusive, at which point the locals accost them, or holocaust them. This is how Jewish talent becomes Jewish self-destruction.

    Hi Cynthia! Are you part of Pragma's takedown of moonofalabama or are you just a stupid solo anti-Semite? If the latter, how did you find your way here?

    ben , Mar 22, 2014 12:24:19 PM | 126
    Nora @ 108: Your're on a roll today it seems. Your expression at 108 truly fits MOST folks here at MOA, at least I sincerely hope so. Like society in general, there are people afoot in this world, who get PAYED to disrupt objectivity on the Internet and the Media.
    Mr. Pragma , Mar 22, 2014 12:29:24 PM | 127
    It's obvious. b has done an excellent job with MoA.

    All those fairleft, thomas, and other zionists in berserk mode area major compliment to b and MoA.

    Thank you, zionist fans and agents, for confirming so clearly and fervently that MoA and many of its long term contributors are on the right track!

    james , Mar 22, 2014 12:41:51 PM | 129
    @126 - true. it would be nice if folks ignored those who they believe are full of shite too, lol.. i think b would benefit correcting the kagan verses kaplan issue.. both of them are friggin nutso's but still..
    somebody , Mar 22, 2014 12:43:40 PM | 130
    108/125 - err ... what has anybody's race, religion or nationality got to do with how they act?

    To be able to be a thief, robber or murderer is universal, no? So people who connect a crime to a race, religion or nationality would attempt what?

    james , Mar 22, 2014 12:46:28 PM | 131
    ot - cannonfire has a good article titled "propaganda and truth" that some might enjoy reading - http://cannonfire.blogspot.ca/2014/03/propaganda-and-truth.html
    zingaro , Mar 22, 2014 12:55:55 PM | 132
    @126, concerned about human trafficking ?

    Wipe your ass first

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_Kosovo

    kalithea , Mar 22, 2014 1:08:21 PM | 136
    Zionist supremacy indoctrination:
    In 2003, Rabbi Saadya Grama of the Beth Medrash Govoha, the renowned Talmudic school of Lakewood, NJ, published a book in which he claimed that Gentiles were completely evil and that Jews constituted a separate, genetically superior species.

    The book published under the Hebrew Title "Romemut Yisrael Ufarsahat Hagalut" quoted numerous classical Jewish sources to prove Jewish superiority over the rest of humankind.

    The difference between Jews and gentiles, he argued, is not religious, historical, cultural, or political. It is rather racial, genetic, and scientifically unalterable. The one groups is at its very root and by natural constitution "totally evil" while the other is "totally good"

    If gentiles (goyem) are inherently inferior to Jews, and if their very humanity is presumed to be denied, it is axiomatically inferred from this that these gentiles have inherently lesser rights than Jews do.

    Indeed, some Talmudic references do refer to gentiles as "animals walking on two feet instead of four".

    Even today, some Rabbis, such as David Batsri, invoke the "bestiality" of non-Jews, claiming that the Creator created them with two legs instead of four in deference to Jews, because it is not appropriate that Jews be served with four-legged animals.

    Rabbi Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, taught that "the difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews -- all of them in all different levels -- is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle." (Reuters Photo)

    Remarks by the Israeli Minister of Interior Yaakov Neeman suggesting that the Jewish religious law (Halacha) should be adopted as the "law of the land" in the Jewish state has drawn strong reactions from both Jews and non-Jews.

    "Step by step, we will bestow upon the citizens of Israel the laws of the Torah and we will turn Halacha into the binding law of the nation," Neeman told Rabbis at a Jewish law convention in occupied Jerusalem in December 2009.

    "We must bring back the heritage of our fathers to the nation of Israel," he said. "The torah has the complete solution to all of the questions we are dealing with."

    Neeman's statements were met applauds from participants who included high-ranking Rabbis, as well as representatives of religious parties.

    However, for non-Jews, who now constitute nearly 50 percent of the total population in occupied Palestine, Neeman's remarks are a serious cause for concern since Halacha, at least according to the Orthodox Jewish interpretation, does not recognize the full humanity of non-Jews.

    Hence, non-Jews living under Halacha must accept to live under a perpetual state of inferiority, if not persecution.

    Lesser in Every Aspect

    According to Orthodox Judaism, a non-Jew (goy) is inferior to a Jew in every conceivable aspect. This inferiority is absolute, inherent, intrinsic, and not subject to any related or unrelated factors.

    Rabbi Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, taught that "the difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews -- all of them in all different levels -- is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle."

    The teachings of Kook are based on the Lurianic Cabala (Jewish mysticism), which teaches the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. This means, according to one Rabbi who is member of the Chabadi Lubovitcher sect, that "every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity and is part of God."

    In 2003, Rabbi Saadya Grama of the Beth Medrash Govoha, the renowned Talmudic school of Lakewood, NJ, published a book in which he claimed that Gentiles were completely evil and that Jews constituted a separate, genetically superior species.

    The book published under the Hebrew Title "Romemut Yisrael Ufarsahat Hagalut" quoted numerous classical Jewish sources to prove Jewish superiority over the rest of humankind.

    The difference between Jews and gentiles, he argued, is not religious, historical, cultural, or political. It is rather racial, genetic, and scientifically unalterable. The one groups is at its very root and by natural constitution "totally evil" while the other is "totally good"

    "Jewish successes in the world are completely contingent upon the failure of all other peoples. Only when the gentiles face total catastrophe, Jews do experience good fortune."

    "The Jews themselves brought about their own destruction during the Holocaust, since they arrogantly endeavored to overcome their very essence, dictated by divine law."

    While castigated by many Jewish figures, religious and secular, for its brazen racism, Grama's thesis is not really in conflict with the Rabbis of Gush Emunim (the settler camp) and the rest of the National religious movement in Israel today.

    He readily applies Torah passages against idolaters, other pagans to Christianity and Islam, and other monotheists who worship the God of Abraham, the very God proclaimed by the Torah.

    He also ignores extensive Rabbinic deliberations during the medieval period, which concluded that both Islam and Christianity as "licit, monotheistic faiths."

    Hence, Muslims and Christians could not be lumped in one category with the idol-worshipers of earlier times.

    Sub-human Slaves

    If gentiles (goyem) are inherently inferior to Jews, and if their very humanity is presumed to be denied, it is axiomatically inferred from this that these gentiles have inherently lesser rights than Jews do.

    Indeed, some Talmudic references do refer to gentiles as "animals walking on two feet instead of four".

    Even today, some Rabbis, such as David Batsri, invoke the "bestiality" of non-Jews, claiming that the Creator created them with two legs instead of four in deference to Jews, because it is not appropriate that Jews be served with four-legged animals.

    It is true that this view is not shared by all Rabbis, especially the enlightened ones. However, it is also true that some prominent sages holding both Halachic and historical weight are among the main advocates of this pure racism.

    For example, according to the code of Maimonides (Rambam): "A Jew who killed a non-Jew is exempt from human judgment, and has not violated the prohibition of murder."

    This code is implicitly practiced by Jewish settler judges when dealing with Jews convicted of killing Palestinians, which explains the extremely light punishments meted out to the perpetrators, especially in comparison to Arabs convicted of the same felony.

    And here's the perfect explanation for ummm...imperial supremacist hegemony:

    "Jewish successes in the world are completely contingent upon the failure of all other peoples. Only when the gentiles face total catastrophe, Jews do experience good fortune."

    And yet more shocking supremacist garbage...

    https://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/living-under-israels-jewish-law/

    Oh and here's our favorite Rabbi Ovadia:

    "Non-Jews were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world-only to serve the People of Israel."

    In Israel, death has no dominion over them With gentiles, it will be like any person-They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one's donkey would die, they'd lose their money.

    "This is his servant That's why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew."

    "why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap; and we will sit like an effendi and eat."

    "That is why gentiles were created."

    And settler Rabbi Abraham Kook (great last name!):

    "The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews -- all of them in all different levels -- is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle."

    Oh and here's Ovadia picking his own brain:

    http://mondoweiss.net/2010/11/god-isnt-finished-with-me-yet.html

    Teach your children well; to load Kalashnikovs write on bombs that kill and main Palestinian children and kick and spit on their poor grandmothers while you pull off their hijab.

    This is what the new generation of Zionists are learning.

    TomGard , Mar 22, 2014 2:45:05 PM | 137

    The actual kinship of zionism and US-imperialism is based on both israel and the US are settler-societies that never came to be nations.

    The expression "nation-state" inverses the factual notions of nation and state. Though a state can enforce submission it can't establish sovereignty. Souvereignty has to be effected by mental and ideological submission of the subject itself to his master and therefore its not fully established without the rule of law.

    While the American secession war is duly called a civil war, because it established rule of law within the union states it left the relation of union states to the federal state widely outside this rule. The rule of the federal state became and stayed a military and mafia-like hegemony established on constant war and the amalgamation of military, political and economic clout in corporative elite clans, families, alumnis and the union bureaucracy itself.

    The force, that drove this rule of war and corporative hegemony in the American federation after the civil war was accomplishment of the genocide of native cultures. It followed (selection): Spanish-American war, Philippine war, the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine in Cuba, Hawai, Samoa, Venezuela. But it had another component: The federal war on the working class and their partly imported organizations. Then followed WWI and WWII, which were essentially wars against the French and British empire.

    So the USA never became a nation. The settler-state of freedom of private property was directly converted to an empire-state ruled by a corporative elite of oligarchs, military staff and a serfing legion of descendant bureaucratic personnel.

    It is easy to see, that the never established and unestablishable "Jewish State", the corporative military rule of a zionist Oligarchy in Israel follows roughly the same pattern.

    This is a kind of basic line in a history full of contradictions. Mind the suez-war followed by the nuclear armament of Israel by France against the will of the american hegemon. And mind that Israel nowadays has but one enemy it has to fear: The faction of US-elite, which wants to establish a new and stable order in the middle east instead of "creative" chaos in favour of Israel and SA. The faction that would welcome an iranian gas-pipeline from South Pars to the mediterranian, try to keep the integrity of Syria and Lebanon and split the GCC.

    ...

    I tried my best to bring forward my thougts in a tongue that never became mine although I read it every day, because there was nobody deconstructing the "zionist evil"-talk without referring to quasi-religious attitudes and delusive facts and figures that tell nearly nothing about their coherence. If it was too bad - just tell me and I won't follow up or try again.

    TomGard , Mar 22, 2014 4:09:30 PM | 144
    Nora 138

    Okay, thank you, then I want ro add an inference though it needed a bunch of constituents and chain-links to corroborate it:

    The US Federal State is warring for it's very existance. If it ends being the executive power of imperialistic metropolises it will probably fall apart, even in the most favorable circumstances you might think of, because of its lack of national substance.

    Thats the interface to the fight of the zionist oligarchy for their status as "villa in the jungle", their rule as warlords who can and "must" project power in all the near and middle east and even north africa to stay the ruling power in Palestine. This strongly associates them to the before mentioned faction of the US-elite, especially the MIF(inancial)C.

    There is no other evil as the evil of war and it's cause in freedom and accumulation of competing private property.

    Nora , Mar 22, 2014 4:22:33 PM | 145
    TomGard,

    I've cut-and-pasted everything bc I just can't give it the time it deserves right this afternoon. I will though, I promise: it just may take me a little while bc it's a very different way of looking at things and I really need to examine it more carefully. And again, thank you, it's really good food for thought and I'll give it my best.

    james , Mar 22, 2014 5:14:35 PM | 146
    @137 /144 - tomgard. i 2nd nora's response to you in that i find your commentary highly educational in so far as you articulate a similar viewpoint of mine, but from a very different angle. i am curious what you mean by MIF(inancial)C. - that sounds like what i tend to think military/industrial/financial/complex.. they are definitely rolled into one, even though people look at these entities as being separate and not connected..
    MRW , Mar 22, 2014 5:31:58 PM | 150
    The result of the neocon meddling in Ukraine has created, as usual, a terrible mess for the "west" and even more so for the Ukrainians. Is there any way to prevent a repeat of such misdeeds?
    Yeah, sticking the neocons under water for a week.
    amspirnational , Mar 22, 2014 6:00:53 PM | 153
    The American political Elite consists of both Zionists and Anglophiles. Just as Lindbergh said.

    Now, as far as the Iraq War, as Congressman Moran said, the Jews were not even nearly solely responsible for driving the United States in, based on WMD lies, but as a group they could have politically vetoed the move, dominant and decisive. On other foreign/domestic matters, your fractional mileage may vary.

    kalithea , Mar 22, 2014 6:52:36 PM | 155
    Blood diamonds are...a Zionist's best friend!
    Dan Gertler's grandfather, Moshe Schnitzer (d. November 2007), was known in Israel as "Mr. Diamond;" in youth he joined the pre-state underground organization Etzel (Irgoun), an Israeli military cell self-defined as an "untra-nationationalist Jewish militia," but one that committed acts of terrorism in service to the Israeli cause.8 Moshe Schnitzer assumed a major role in the Africa-Israeli diamond trade in the 1950's in a partnership business called Schnitzer-Greenstein. Schnitzer later founded the Israel Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv in 1960, which today brings Israel $14 billion annually in blood business, and is the country's second-largest industry, but Israel's top export. King Leopold III of Belgium decorated Schnitzer in recognition of his activities favoring the close relationship of Belgium, Israel and the DeBeers diamond cartels, and Schnitzer was also President of the Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Museum in Israel.80

    The diamond jewelry trade in the United States is more than $30 billion annually, and 99% -- everything that is not synthetic or artificial diamonds -- involves blood diamonds and the above organized crime syndicates. Israel buys more than 50% of the world's rough diamonds, and the U.S. buys two-thirds of these. The diamond factories are located in Nethanya, Petach Tikvah, Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Jerusalem, and other cities around the country, but most of the offices were in Tel Aviv in the financial district on Ahad Ha'am Street.81 Dan Gertler's father, Asher Gertler, and his uncle, Shmuel Schnitzer, manage the original family business, and Shmuel is Vice-Chairman of the Belgian-based World Diamond Council -- the entity that spends more money promoting the false image of "conflict-free" diamonds than it does helping any of the people dispossessed or brutalized by the diamond industry.48

    On August 16, 2007, Rabbi Bentolila in Kinshasa received a communication asking: "What does the Torah say about men exploiting other men for vast profits while other men are starving and dying all around them? Is there some hierarchy to the Torah that suggests, for example, that black people or Africans are lesser beings, and therefore not to be a concern where profound profits are being made?"

    There was no reply from Rabbi Bentolila, he was apparently busy readying for another Bar Mitsvah in Belgium. Unfortunately for Dan Gertler and his spiritual advisers, the Torah says that a Jew can keep a slave, but a Jew kept as a slave must be redeemed, and that -- an empty, foolish justification for exploiting innocent people -- is how religion falsifies spirituality.

    http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/02/gertlers-bling-bang-torah-gang/

    Zionists seem to enjoy exploiting the poor and the oppressed...depraved bastards.

    Debs is dead , Mar 23, 2014 12:39:23 AM | 158
    So much confusion and little light.

    The confusion began when b did one of his usual deliberate substitutions to provoke a bit of thought by substituting slavery for empire.

    The normal confusion, generally engendered by the more pedantic of us whenever b does a semantic substitution, was hugely increased when b himself confused two asshole neocons of similar name with each other.

    Normally b's substitutions generate thought because the concept summoned by the original wording is considerably different to the concepts generated by its replacement.

    This is not the way it is with empire and slavery - two concepts I have always believed to be pretty much indistinguishable from one another.

    That is the heart of the issue here, but but adding the confusion from the juxtaposition of similar terms is the confusion many people have about slavery.

    For me slavery is enforced labour where a human, regarded as the property of another, is forced to live in a way that is beneficial to his/her 'masters' wants, with no regard for his/her own needs.

    Amerikan slavery just like the slavery instituted by the original english colonisers, also featured no payments or wages be given the slaves.

    That isn't always the case slaves who are paid are still slaves and may be worse off because of that. The Greek slaves who worked as doctors, secretaries, and retail assistants in imperial Rome frequently were paid for their work, but they were still slaves - their lives were not their own. They were humans who belonged to someone else.

    Berkeley is correct at #118 where he points out that slavery without pay ultimately destroys capitalism.

    This is why amerika had a civil war. The southern elites wanted to continue as always importing African slaves and paying them nothing, while providing the bare minimum for survival as food & shelter. The factory and retail giant owning Northen elites couldn't give a flying fuck about 'the rights of man' they wanted to get richer that is why they went to war.

    The northern elites preferred the form of slavery that had been evolving in Europe since the industrial revolution, where slaves, imported from Europe and more culturally acclimated to factory work than Africans, whose culture and sense of self had been deliberately destroyed, leaving the recipients of that horror in a vacuum.

    The 'new slaves' would be responsible for their own upkeep receiving minimum payment to keep themselves in food and shelter, just enough to (a) keep them highly motivated at work and (b) for the elites to profit by taking it back.

    Both forms are slavery - the vast majority of humans born into poverty in so-called 'developed' nations such as amerika, england, or israel, have as little say in their own destiny as does a domestic slave in Saudi Arabia.

    The biggest difference is that the rules are unwritten & unstated allowing the western elites great flexibility in fucking everyone else over.

    They don't need to be written because once the responsibility for feeding yourself and your family is put onto your shoulders in the opprressive and domineering manner which neo-liberal unsocieties put on individuals, the majority follow the same well worn path to personal impoverishment and elite enrichment.

    Those who veer off the path - climb outta the rut - can be picked off one by one as needs must. Occasionally one may achieve independence in the form of what seems to be economic self determination, but with few exceptions that is because their divergence suits (& enriches), the slave owners.

    This egregious exploitation of ordinary, normal, unsociopathic, humans by the sociopathic elites has been around a lot longer that the organised political movement created to enable followers of Judaism to colonise the Jordan Valley.

    If permitted to, ruthless domination of the decent by the greedy will continue long after the zionists have been driven out of the area and the land returned to its original indigenous owners.

    Palestinians are the descendants of the people who stayed on, minding their farms and orchards when the despotic monarchists who had comprised Jerusalem's ruling elite fled from their Roman replacements.

    It isn't merely incorrect to put the cart before the horse by blaming amerikan imperialism on the corrupt israeli regime, it is fucking dangerous and destructive - firstly because it causes too much time and energy be spent upon a mob of petty crims (yes they are psychopaths, but in comparison to the crimes of amerika, israeli leaders are petty crims), but most importantly because blaming 'the jews' for the world's ills is so destructive to resistance against the asshole elites.

    If the elites are to be beaten it will be when all the 'normal' humans have stuck together in common cause against those who consciously butcher any/all of us for profit.

    Once we have learned not to be distracted by deliberately nurtured divisive arguments about race, gender, nationality etc - then we will rid ourselves of the leeches and then, that time, provided we have managed to do so without making any scapegoats, maybe then we will be able to asshole-proof our communities ensuring no new sociopaths slink in again under cover of saving us from oldies, 'those kids', morbidly obese, anorexics, gypsies, kaffirs, niggers or jews.

    DM , Mar 23, 2014 1:22:26 AM | 160

    ...Israel as a vassal state of the US http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/158624

    U.S. to Israel: You Decide Nukes in Iran, We Decide Bedrooms in Jerusalem http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2009/07/us-israel-iran-nukes-bedrooms-jerusalem

    somebody , Mar 23, 2014 2:34:39 AM | 162
    @161

    How many inhabitants does Israel have? How many the US? What percentage of US citizens are Jewish? You must have a theory of Jews being the superior race if you think they can dominate. Of course Israel is a puppet state. What people are trying with their "anti-zionist" theories of "zionist" rulership of the world is very transparent. They are either crazy and obsessed or they try to intentionally disrupt the discussion. They sure don't know anything about history, about who got killed and why.

    The recipe is so simple. Tell the stupid class xy people are responsible for their trouble, make them fight each other and rule them.

    TomGard , Mar 23, 2014 4:55:48 AM | 165
    Debs is dead | Mar 23, 2014 12:39:23 AM | 158

    Substituting exploitation of labor-power for slavery, then the rule of law in trade and exchange for rule of a "greedy", "indecent", "sociopathic" (and, as many consequently say: mentally ill) elite introduces one tribe ("lunatics") for another ("Jews") and therefore an alternative racist doctrine. Both are manifestations of still the same patriarch pattern of subjugation of one gender to the other (slavery of women), "order" vs. "chaos", rule of command vs. rule of reason, rule of decalogue over collective knowledge and judgement,"good" over "evil", and, following up this pattern, rule of a pristhood over patriarchs, of "God" over "men", of intellectual workforce ("Kopfarbeit) over handcraft and, ultimately, the worship of psyche. It's religion combined with the everyday racist interpretation of competition- results by a mix of functionally allocated benchmarks of (awe of) "success" and (worship of) "virtue". The slightly "modern" manifestations, mythologies and patterns are toothless against the inquisitional redoctrination of "good" and "evil" in times of war, that shows up in a renaissance and reconstruction of tribal thought.

    Don't know if this rant was kind of understandable, so, simply:

    There is no such THING as "common cause" . That's the simple source and agent of racism! But if it's so one has to infer: There is a common source of the delusion of "common cause" that is transformed in tribal or racist thought. I name this common source: Negation of class struggle. Wage-labor is a historical formation of slavery, thats right, and its based on sheer military power like antique slavery, thats right as well. Its usefull and even necessary to remind those roots, but, since the social fundament of wage-labor slavery is not only different, but antithetic to elder formations, its criticism and scandalization has to be different and even antithetic. "Freedom" is not a cause, even less a "common" one, there is no such THING as freedom except freedom of private property. Walking freely is a cause of lust, convenience and a resulting desire. If it becomes obligative and necessary freedom is over and delusion comes in, solemnizing free movement against the bondage of slavery. Americans could have learned this of native leaders they preferred to stab when they couldn't break them in cages.

    dan of steele , Mar 23, 2014 6:07:39 AM | 166
    @somebody #162

    that indeed is a silly argument.

    World's 85 richest individuals have as much money as 3.5billion poorest people PUT TOGETHER

    the poor are many, the rich are few. Why do the rich control their lives as well as those of all the poor? What is the ratio of guards to prisoners in a jail? by your logic the prisoners should be in control.

    seriously, you can do better than that.

    regardless, there is way too much time and effort spent on blaming the jews for this mess. there was plenty of inequality before Moses led the slaves out of Egypt.

    somebody , Mar 23, 2014 6:24:46 AM | 167
    166) Of course, numbers translate into political influence.

    But in the last analysis power is in the end of a gun. Money gets you nothing if you cannot defend it. So let's compare the sizes of the US army and the Israeli army, shall we?

    The "zionist conspiracy" theory is designed for the "stupid class".

    Juan Moment , Mar 23, 2014 7:22:19 AM | 168
    somebody @167
    [...] But in the last analysis power is in the end of a gun. Money gets you nothing if you cannot defend it. [...]
    Sure, no guns no power, but at the same token, no money no guns. You see, one needs the money first, and thats where your friendly neighborhood banker comes into the picture. But before it gets too conspiratorial for you, I better won't elaborate any further.
    [...] So let's compare the sizes of the US army and the Israeli army, shall we? [...]
    Why? Would only make sense to do so if we'd assume those two are enemies. But they are not. They are close allies, to the point that if Israel would be attacked by any force strong enough to cause sweat in Tel Aviv the US would without blinking once have its military might come to the rescue.

    That's why I called NATO Israel's ultimate henchmen, troops it knows it can call on should things get hairy one day.

    Since the start of the 20th century no country was allowed to attack the US Navy without getting its teeth kicked in, just Israel. Nearly sinking in 1967 the USS Liberty, killing 34 US sailors and wounding more than a 100, but still best friends. Weird relationship to say the least, better not think too much about it.

    somebody , Mar 23, 2014 8:16:00 AM | 169
    @168

    Well, then lets compare the US GDP to Israel's GDP. Sorry, there is no way Israel can dominate the US. Just more dumbing down the "stupid class".

    Rowan Berkeley , Mar 23, 2014 8:36:30 AM | 170
    The reason the above argument is irresolvable is that neither side is willing to query the relatively PC term "Zionists" in favour of the more inclusive "Jews". They say that to do this would be "divisive of the class struggle", which obviously is supposed to be against "the bourgeoisie", whoever they are - technically, I should say, all those who live off profits or as they call them 'dividends'. But anyway, this brings us back to the weakness in Marx himself which I mentioned before, namely the apparently deliberate neglect of the power of bankers over industrial capitalists, which even in the 1860s must have been quite evident. So we have to ask, who are the bankers, specifically, the 'merchant bankers' who financed the development of western colonialism, and after them the 'international bankers' who orchestrate the global pecking order under neo-colonialism. There cannot be more than a few tens of thousands of these specialised creatures, worldwide, and one would like to know whether, by the ruse of history, many of them are Jewish. Then the artificial question of 'Zionists' versus 'Non-Jewish USAian Imperialists' would resolve itself, because we would be able to see who was pulling the money strings, which ultimately decide all questions great and small.
    hans , Mar 23, 2014 9:14:16 AM | 171
    Kagan, while he is of Jewish belief, has Zionist tendency, his and his kind ultimate aim, is the resurrection of the Khazar empire, the control of the desert religions, the destruction of the Rus as a nation state.
    Juan Moment , Mar 23, 2014 9:54:40 AM | 172
    Somebody, you keep referring to the stupid class. By doing so you're putting yourself right in it, subset "chardonnay sipping intellectual up themselves bozos".
    Well, then lets compare the US GDP to Israel's GDP. Sorry, there is no way Israel can dominate the US. [...]
    You are stuck in this idea that one country dominates the other. What would help our discussion along is if you would open your mind to the possibility a third party dominates both countries. Once you allow for this reality the weird and opaque relationship the US and Israel have, or the EU for that matter, starts to make sense.

    The fact that there is this seemingly never ending discussion going on about which country is the dog and which one the tail should tell you that there are enough arguments to be found to make either theory appear plausible. The only way that is possible is if there is a third "unifying" theory, one which explains those arguments without confusion.

    And I am afraid to tell you man, the reason those two countries act in unison so often and have each others back in all important international affairs is because the top echelons in both countries live at the whim of someone far more powerful than them. A group of people who with their extended family have say 10 trillion dollars in assets, that's three times Germany's GDP, and control a network of influence so wide and ingrained it knows no rival.

    Rowan @170

    [...] But anyway, this brings us back to the weakness in Marx himself which I mentioned before, namely the apparently deliberate neglect of the power of bankers over industrial capitalists, which even in the 1860s must have been quite evident. So we have to ask, who are the bankers, specifically, the 'merchant bankers' who financed the development of western colonialism, and after them the 'international bankers' who orchestrate the global pecking order under neo-colonialism. [...]
    Great summary. Their fingerprints are all over the history of wars.

    I don't believe its tens of thousands, at the very tip of the pyramid, where there isn't much room left for competition as wealth is so concentrated a clash would cause death to all, I expect a couple of hundred at the most.

    kalithea , Mar 23, 2014 1:01:54 PM | 173
    @162 somebody
    They are either crazy and obsessed or they try to intentionally disrupt the discussion. They sure don't know anything about history, about who got killed and why.

    The only person trying to intentionally disrupt is YOU.

    I haven't posted consistently on this blog since the Ukraine crisis, so I didn't much analyze the intentions of every poster. But it didn't take me long to have you pegged. You are as transparent as Zionists come. You divert, you distract all discussion away from the real guilty party. That's your main mission here. A hasbara spy in the house of free speech.

    FYI, it's not the percentage, buddy, it's the power. Occupy was protesting against the 1% holding all the power and hoarding all the wealth.

    If I do a run-down of the heads of all the top banks, equity capital and venture capital firms; I'm talking those that have hundreds of billions invested in the whole spectrum of American industry I come up with at least 80% run by supporters of Zionism. That's a whole lot of power behind Zionism!

    So don't give me the percentages bullshit, what level of intelligence quotient do you think we own around here??? Quit insulting our intelligence!

    kalithea , Mar 23, 2014 2:41:11 PM | 175
    @164 radiator
    boy, this "zionism" discussion is getting a but much, lately...

    Uh, no. IMO, the subject of Zionism has been way too neglected everywhere, especially considering the gravity of our situation and the increasing threat that Zionism presents to the integrity of justice and our own freedoms in the West, and security in this day and age. Never mind the Palestinians; WE are at risk now. Our own rights are under fire here!

    The start of Neoconism led by Kagan, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith and others (the majority, Zionists) was the start of the Zionization of America and subsequently the Zionization of other Western nations, the U.S., Canada and U.K being the most affected with Australia and others now catching up.

    Of course it started quietly, sinuously working its way through the system trying not to attract too much attention. But ever since the exposé on the Lobby, we're starting to discover just how rampant is Zionism's influence and hold and how much control is exerted on the public's perception and how it's already started chiseling away at rights we used to take for granted.

    We are so bombarded with propaganda now in the Zionist media that we've all turned to the internet because we no longer trust the media. But now, they're after our rights and freedom here!

    I read a saying the other day that went something like this: The Palestinians will never be free until America is freed. How true! But this problem isn't only America's any more.

    Today I posted somewhere else a modified version of MLKs quote on justice: An injustice to someone anywhere is an injustice to us all everywhere. Because it's so true, that if we allow that injustice to fester indefinitely, in particular, the injustice against Palestinians and ignore or smother the problem; eventually the rest of us will be subjected to a version of that injustice.

    I'll tell you something, every airport in the world is starting to ressemble Ben Gurion. When I travel now; I feel like I'm at an Israeli checkpoint; I can almost taste the abuse! I can only imagine the level of humiliation and pain Palestinians endure daily.

    Our freedom of speech is also on the line; the internet is no longer a free speech zone; we are monitored; we are censored; we are bombarded with junk. When I research now, I feel like the results have been altered, like what may appear to be offensive events or fact has been relegated to back pages or altogether removed to pink wash or whitewash what is happening. It almost feels like the search engine is laundering information and spitting it out in the cleanest order. Is it my imagination? I don't think so; I've been using the internet for quite some time and I'm noticing a change; something's off now.

    Our privacy is threatened more than ever. Our intuitive intellect is being smothered or ridiculed. Our financial system is dominated by individuals who not only are supporting a grave injustice, which I believe is supremacist imperialism emerging from Zionism, but they're intent on creating a uniform system globally that is affecting the livelihoods of millions everywhere with a selfish supremacist intention in mind based on monopolization. This is as well as I can express it given my limited economic understanding; but I'm witnessing the results and I like everyone else is in the position to judge and criticize and stop this outrage.

    The Federal Reserve has been run by a succession of Zionists, as is the IMF and the top 1%, well just look it up; it's all there; it's disheartening.

    Honestly, wherever one looks, one sees a Zionist driving the system. What can I say, if they had honorable, decent, altruistic intentions; personally I might not give a shit; but I really don't like where we're heading; I really don't like where they're steering and I feel my rights and everyone's rights are being threatened and diminished and I don't want my country and the world heading down this destructive path.

    When they started accusing Occupy of anti-Semitism it appeared like Zionism was trying to control the 99%'s right to protest, in order not to discover how really rampant Zionism is at the top 1%. I see it; everyone knows it, but we're being muzzled and wrist tied with that pity card "anti-Semitism" that has turned into a whip against our rights instead of a means to protect people from hate crimes.

    Maybe, you and those who want to shield Zionism try to deny what our eyes plainly recognize as a threat to our freedom! Do our eyes deceive us? You want us to stop seeing by telling us our lying eyes deceive us or we're anti-Semites? Bullshit! Our eyes and our intuition don't deceive us! And we won't be robbed of our rights so that a supremacist ideology can exist, be legitimized and carry on with impunity permanently!

    There is the chaff and the wheat here. The wheat see without denying their inner voice and the chaff are here to ridicule that voice and distract from the truth.

    kalithea , Mar 23, 2014 5:41:31 PM | 184
    @182 Copeland

    Well I see the hasbara reinforcements have arrived!

    The "zionism" discussion is no discussion at all, but a constant, percussive irritant.

    And expect it to get progressively more constant, progressively more irritating and percussive. This is but the beginning of Ravel's bolero, my friend because we're still at the beginning, it's still a whisper, but it's gonna turn into a ROAR. Zionism is going to be exposed for all it is, for the criminal supremacist, racist ideology that it is. It's really to bad for your that it's so fatally flaw and that it's expiry date is already is view! You're on the wrong side of history and I can't wait til you eat your words. It's coming!

    james , Mar 23, 2014 6:06:17 PM | 185
    @182 and @184 -

    kalithea, i tend to agree with copeland fwiw.. does every conversation have to turn into a discussion on zionism? as for mr. pragma's creative use of the letter z, it is a bit inane on another level. i am willing to accept and agree with the fact it is a large issue and of concern, but that to bring it into every conversation seems redundant. while it is true the thread title makes for a natural fit here, but that is not the case with every thread. i think that is partly what copeland is getting at and i agree with them on this.

    Mr. Pragma , Mar 23, 2014 6:11:16 PM | 186
    Wow, me impressed.

    So, some people have no qualms about zusa wanton mass murdering thousands and thousands ... but they are gravely irritated by someone adding a letter too often?!

    Whenever I think the zionists have finally hit the bottom of the pit they somehow manage to pierce through to an ever deeper level.

    But I'm a well minded man, so I make you an offer: As soon as zionists stop slaughtering innocent people I shall refrain from adding the of so harmful and evil letter 'z' to words, OK.

    kalithea , Mar 23, 2014 7:55:47 PM | 187
    Tom G
    No, seriously, I hope I never will have to deal with your "argument".

    I got bad news for you and your fellow legion of hasbarists: expect my argument, ie the truth about Zionism, to grow exponentially, and to get more constant and more persuasive and to go viral with millions more. You can't stop this cause anymore; you can't stop the truth from busting loose and becoming the pain in your ass it'll be until it's acknowledged.

    Before Obama was first elected in 08, I was being censored and labelled an anti-Semite for referring to The Zionist Lobby as a den of spies and political browbeaters and hustlers for Zionism. And wo' and behold, turns out they've ruined careers, and were being investigated by the FBI for espionage. Few dared type Aipac or Zionism in a negative context for fear of being banned. Now, we can justifiably attack these from every angle because they're proving exactly what they are and many of us predicted they were.

    We've come a long way, baby! And this is going all the way until Zionism goes down into the pages of historical INFAMY, and nothing less will suffice!

    You can ridicule all you want, but I won't rest and neither will the growing number, who believe as I do that Zionism is a threat to us all and not just to Palestinians!

    james @185:

    The Zionist connection redundant? Not a chance! What it is, is pivotal in getting to the heart of these foreign interventions.

    Lest you forget, we're usually discussing a consistent policy of foreign meddling: in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, possibly Russia and Iran next, each one practically rebounding off the other because Syria was the road to Iran and Russia, and Ukraine is to Russia what Syria is to Iran in this agenda; the proxies; it's all connected and if you don't get this; you're dumber than I thought or pretending to be.

    Russia doesn't only have a port at stake in Syria, Russian companies are involved in gas and oil exploration off Syria's coast, an area that Zionists want to hoard for themselves, and Russia was heavily involved in Libya and Iraq until the mess created in both which weakened Russian influence in both, although Russia's trying to recover it, another reason Russia's a thorn in Zionism's side. And Ukraine is the strategy to get Russia mired in a problem on its own doorstep to take Russia's focus off Syria, deprive it of Tartus, and again try to weaken its influence in the Middle East, and at the same time weaken Russia's economy so that it will never be a competitive threat again in the Middle East! So you bet Zionism's fingerprints are all over this! And the connections to Zionism go beyond what I've just stated which I've already outlined in other posts.

    All these incursions even Ukraine are linked to ZIOCON foreign agenda; forget neocon forever; the term "Neocon" was always a red herring; a Zionist euphemism used to disguise how many Zionists are actually involved in the hegemonic operation.

    So don't give me that redundant crap. Neocons are ZIONISTS with an aggressive global initiative based on neutralization; and they're driving this policy and you better believe I'm going to harp on that!

    Copeland , Mar 23, 2014 8:43:09 PM | 189
    @184 kalithea

    It's easy to see the mental disturbance occurring in the writings of a polemicist, in the mindless overuse of a particular word in any given tract. It's obvious kalithea, that an abundance of couple of these words, is not a question of style in your writing, but of obsession. First of all, this is a literate group, composed of a lot of longtime readers. Another thing is that your irresponsible use of "hasbara" is nothing but a smear against those who have a record here of opposing the outrages of Israeli governments, and their war crimes, about which you bark. This doesn't make you look so good.

    What you remind me of most, is an enforcer of party discipline, whose job it is to crack the whip, and to hand out censures, in other words, to excoriate and verbally abuse anyone who doesn't keep to your dogma.

    The issue of the injustices handed out to Palestinians has been focused upon by most of us here for a long time; but it is not courageous, or good of you, to fire polemic broadsides, or to dispense wantonly,

    the charges of hasbara, upon anyone who hasn't tipped over into your particular fantasies.

    Debs is dead , Mar 23, 2014 10:54:27 PM | 191
    I don't have time for those who seek to use the crimes committed against jews by europeans to excuse the crimes committed by israel against the indigenous people of the Jordan Valley, but I don't believe that is what Tom G is doing. I supposed he was pointing out that having half yer family knocked off by assholes tends to focus the mind (there is a lesson in there for israelis but if they haven't learned by now its unlikely they ever will).

    Pragma et al may have confused predecessors with ancestors. Predecessor is not another word for ancestor; it is someone who precedes someone else in an office or title.

    When I read Tom G's post which alluded to kalithea's predecessors I assumed that he was referring to the last mob of cheerleaders for judeophobia - the nazis.

    At no stage did I consider Tom G had some sorta special insight into the mindset of kalithea's primogenitors.

    Those people who focus upon a persons race rather than the person's actions are always gonna be susceptible to believing that others operate on the same basis.

    I'm all for kicking alla the talk of antisemitism into touch as long as we can stick to considering people by what they say and do rather than what we believe their genetics to be.

    kalithea , Mar 23, 2014 11:14:16 PM | 192
    Occupy Wall Street was on the right track. People of the world need to rise up against the 1% banksters AND Zionism although they're one and the same. These forces are driving the Ziocon imperial advance. If Occupy hadn't dissolved because of winter; Zionists were ready to kill it because they were very worried that the Occupy Movement would eventually merge with the BDS movement against Zionism and gain momentum on a larger scale and this is exactly what was starting to happen. People are starting to feel like the Palestinians under Zionism; they're starting to feel like their leaders are collaborators with Zionism like Abbas and the PA negotiating to screw their people. People are feeling like they no longer have a voice against the powerbrokers in Washington and on Wall Street. They're feeling like they can't trust the media, because it's full of Ziocon propaganda. We are watched; we are listened to; we are monitored. We are now the OCCUPIED of Wall Street and Zionism.

    There are all kinds of articles on the web written by Zionists condemning Occupy as anti-Semitic. Google Zionism and Occupy Wall Street. Why were Zionists so scared of Occupy? Because they know Wall Street is run by Zionists and everyone at Occupy knew saw this; that's why they're next target was The Lobby; and they were planning to occupy Aipac. Zionists realized that the Occupy movement getting closer and closer to the cause of Occupied Palestine. The Occupy Movement was starting to move against Zionism.

    Zionism has no clothes and because we all see this FACT; they accuse us of anti-Semitism. Occupy Wall Street needs to mobilize again, and occupy not only Wall Street, but the Zionist Lobby as well as it planned to and join with the BDS movement, because if we don't mobilize soon against Ziocon expansion we will become the empire of Orwellian slavery that this Zionist Kaplan dreams of. Maybe that's Zionism's PROMISED LAND.

    Pirouz_2 , Mar 23, 2014 11:20:24 PM | 193
    "It isn't merely incorrect to put the cart before the horse by blaming American imperialism on the corrupt Israeli regime, it is fucking dangerous and destructive - firstly because it causes too much time and energy be spent upon a mob of petty crimes (yes they are psychopaths, but in comparison to the crimes of America, Israeli leaders are petty criminals), but most importantly because blaming 'the Jews' for the world's ills is so destructive to resistance against the asshole elites."

    Thank god finally some one other than myself said this, and in a much more eloquent way than I could ever do; because I am afraid what 'mearsheimer and walt' are doing is precisely that : "putting the cart before the horse" and the direct implication of that is "blaming 'the jews' for the world's ills".

    Sadly this is an inevitable consequence that very often is neglected by decent progressive people, in a way that I some times feel being a part of a very small minority even on this site!

    kalithea , Mar 23, 2014 11:48:40 PM | 195
    @191

    I find your argument naive*, but I won't argue it, except for the short paragraph below; and whether he meant predecessors as in people he thinks held my beliefs, or he meant ancestors - it's still slanderous crap, because he doesn't know me and I am not no Nazi-lover just as I'm no Zionist lover! What I am sick to death of is that bloody victim card and having it shoved in my face like so much shit, and hung over me like the sword of Damocles! I am not German and even if I were I wouldn't be responsible for the crap Nazis pulled. That was then and this is now. I know what I see, I see Zionist supremacy, and I always call things as I see them and if he's offended. Tough, scroll or get lost.

    I don't buy into exclusivity, exceptionalism or choseness bullshet of any kind and if that's some genetic bias than too bad get off the f*cking chosen pedestal! I can't stand monarchies either. And I really can't stand people who don't get the concept of universality.

    Mr. Pragma , Mar 24, 2014 12:10:59 AM | 197
    Oh well, predecessor, ancestor, whatever. I think everyone could understand what I was meaning.

    Anyway TomGard can hardly know about kalitheas predecessors, ancestors, or whatever-cestors.

    Debs is dead brought up an interesting point, which I'd like to extend.

    Actually I remember quite well, what my first thought was when I for the first time didn't simply brush off as "oh well, palestinians are terrorists anyway" (I should mention that I was a young man then, quite innocent or stupid, depending on ones pov) but actually began to understand what israelis did there.

    It was "Hell no! If anyone on earth is to know how evil it is to terrorize others for being of this or that race or for believing in this that God, then it must certainly be the israelis!"

    For while my anger grew and I began to despise jews. Until one day a patient elderly french jew explained it me. He showed me the smearings on their synagogue and explained "whenever israel commits cruelties the smearings here in at our cemetery increase in frequency and anger".

    That was my lesson about the jews and the israelis and about them not always being one and the same.

    And although I had all I needed to understand more I still somehow didn't arrive at the conclusion that there might be evil planning behind it. It took me again several years and a coincidence to understand that the "jewish" in "jewish state" (israel) might actually be a really evil disguise and a perfidious one at that.

    Perfidious because israel willfully abused the negative image of "the jews" for which they were responsible in the first place. But perfidious also because israel greatly profits from anti-semitism, both real and grossly attributed anti-semitism because it perfectly fits israels "jews should come to israel to live there" credo.

    kiev is just another case of that in a series of cases.

    There is a lot more to tell but I will cut it at that point for the moment.

    But although it took me long to pervade through that complex matter and often disguised by different layers and tricks, I made it a habit to tell zionists who tried the "half of my family was killed by nazis" plot to mute someone that may dare to create demands on history once they have proven to themselves have learned from the nazi time what is to be learned, namely that racial or religious based terror is cruel, inhumane, and utterly despicable. Someone supporting a regime that acts not that much different from what the nazis have been accused have simply no right to recur on that time, and even less to base demands on it, as long as their very fucking own actions prove that, if at all, they only learned to be the criminals themselves in the very crime they complain about.

    As far as I'm concerned israel can burn and so can all its supporters.

    Pirouz_2 , Mar 24, 2014 12:36:08 AM | 199
    Kalithea;

    What you guys don't understand, is that "Zionism" is the manifestation of the global Western imperialism in middle east. It is nothing more. Is it ugly? Yes! Is it criminal? Yes! Is it responsible for all the crimes in the world? NO! Was Zionism responsible for the coup of 1953 in Iran? NO! Who was behind it? The Western imperialism! Was Zionism behind the coup in Guatemala in 1954? NO! Who was behind it? The Western imperialism! Was Zionism responsible for the coup against Sukarno? NO!

    Was Zionism responsible for the Vietnam war? NO! Who was responsible it? The Western imperialism! Was Zionism behind the coup against Allende? NO! Who was behind it? The Western imperialism!

    IN FACT: Was Zionism behind Zionism? NO! It was the Western imperialism and its ambitions to hegemonize the world energy resources which was behind Zionism to begin with (Balfour declaration)!

    Israel's birth predates 1948! Its real birth was in 1939 when *BRITISH IMPERIALISM* massacred Palestinians and suppressed the Arab revolt! Zionism is the manifestation of the Western imperialism *in middle east* and not the other way around!

    kalithea , Mar 24, 2014 3:26:39 AM | 201
    @199
    Was zionism behind zionism? NO! blah-blah

    What a load of crock! Guys like Herzl and Jabotinsky were behind Zionism so don't gimme that crap.

    I already wrote in another post here that power in the U.S. started turning Zionist sometime during Kennedy's Presidency, not that I blame him he was otherwise very occupied. So you could have saved yourself some time screaming all those historical references at me. And why are you so freakin' defensive anyway?

    The Ziocon Jews Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Leo Strauss were the earlier founders of the so-called neoconservatism movement, and were vehemently opposed to relaxing foreign policy in regards to the Soviet Union and communism in general.

    In the early nineties the Ziocon torch was passed on to the likes of William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. And we all know what followed next...years of endless war.

    All these "neocons" were Zionists and Jews and were instrumental in influencing foreign policy.

    So as you can see Zionists and Zionism was leading the charge. Maybe you should read Paul Wolfowitz's speech at West Point.

    Wolfowitz Doctrine...Not intended for public release, it was leaked to the New York Times on March 7, 1992,[1] and sparked a public controversy about U.S. foreign and defense policy. The document was widely criticized as imperialist as the document outlined a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action to suppress potential threats from other nations and prevent any other nation from rising to superpower status.

    A real manifesto for authored by a Zionist for supremacy and imperialiam.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfowitz_Doctrine

    But this is not all the Zionist cabal authored as you well know: Zionist Pnac members also authored another document called:A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm

    Next time do the research before you rant.

    Pirouz_2 , Mar 24, 2014 1:22:59 PM | 203
    kalithea;

    This subject has been talked about extensively, and I really don't have the desire to get into a useless and endless debate recounting the history especially when people want to obstinately shut their eyes to the most obvious facts going on right before their eyes; facts such as what's going on in Ukraine and the bloody war waged to disintegrate Yugoslavia which has/had nothing to do with zionism.

    I will just go over a couple of points in your argument which were quite nonsense (well your whole comment was nonsense but I will just go over a couple of points).

    First of all US imperialism in particular and the Western imperialism in general did not start with Kennedy, the coup against Mosaddegh in 1953, the coup against Arbenz in 1954, the first indochina war (with absolute and active support of the French by the USA), the Korean war and the attrocities commited by USA in Korean peninsula, the whole hearted support for Batista and brutal suppression of the cubans, the coup against Patrice Lumumba, The colonization of India and brutal suppression of Indians by the british, the coup after coup made against the constitutional revolution in Iran etc. etc. ALL PREDATE Kennedy. In fact in case of USA its very inception was based on imperialism, land grab, ethnic cleansing, genocide and slavery, all happening LONG before Kennedy and having ZERO to do with zionism.

    Secondly guys like Herzl and Jabotinsky are nothing but clowns. Ineffective idiots who without the active support and the absolute control and management of the Western imperialism would not be able to make an autonomous village let alone making an independent country based on ethnic cleansing and mass murder. Land grab through ethnic cleansing, mass murder of the native population and wars against all local nations require CAPITAL and MILITARY. And No capitalist invests such huge sums of capital without any rate of return. Capital is invested for RATE OF RETURN and a hegemony to make possible the continous flow of that rate of return, not for some nationalistic, racial or religious motive!

    And so Israel was not created by the likes of Herzl, it was created by the force (monetary and military) of British empire, and such creations by the British was not peculiar to middle east and Israel, the British had many other such wonderous feats of crime all over the globe, of which Israel constitutes but a single example! The British did not create Israel because they were in love with the Jews or were obssessed with Jewish nationalism. They did it because it was PROFITABLE. Hegemony is always profitable. And they did in the middle east, what they had done all over the globe to maintain their hegemony and increase their profit. NOTHING MORE.

    Had the geology followed a different trend and all that oil been formed some where other than middle east -say in the region of Tibet- Herzl and Jabotinsky would not have been even remembered today!

    kalithea , Mar 25, 2014 1:59:26 AM | 209
    Pirouz_2

    Omg, where do I start? I won't; I don't even want to dignify most of that. First, if you want to be taken seriously, paragraphs might help.

    Second, I never said imperialism started with Kennedy; at least quote me for God's sakes; it's in front of you! I said that power in the U.S. get it? i.e. those who wield power in the US , such power started changing hands from Anglo to Zionist during Kennedy's presidency, and I'm talking about the top of the corporate food chain, the super-wealthy who influence power in Washington, and the evolution of the Ziocon movement. But it started discreetly without becoming obvious. Only in the 1980s did it start becoming obvious, because it had grown so much and it's influence was becoming more transparent. The flaw with Zionists is that they're control freaks (rig every corner of the system as much as possible in Zionism's favor) maybe it has to do with latent paranoia, but that's the reality; don't blame me.

    As far as the other wars you mention; most were to fight communism; but guess why the Ziocons, Kristol sr., Podhoretz and Strauss formed this Ziocon movement? To prevent Communism from spreading! They broke with the Democratic party because they saw these liberals trying to relax relations with the Soviet Union and they wanted to go in another direction: neutralize; using force.

    You can blame the British all you want but around the late 50s early 1960s, again, while Kennedy was a rising star and becoming President, Zionists were in charge of their affairs, and the worst crimes of Zionism, the worst unilateral attacks on neighboring countries happened under Zionist sovereignty. Zionist were so in charge of their fiefdom that they started developing nuclear weapons behind Kennedy's back; that's how powerful they were becoming.

    I stated over and over again that I'm not concerned with ancient history; I'm concerned with post-WWII after the Partition, when Zionists started bombing Palestinian villages, ethnic cleansing and massacre upon massacre. Okay Zionists started their terrorism before, but that was only to set the stage for frustrating the British to impose their rule over the Palestinians with brutal force.

    Let's agree to disagree; you and r'giap and TomGuard can't stand my attacking Zionism, and the power it wields to keep perpetuating the longest-running most brutal occupation in modern history and committing crimes with total impunity. You don't get to subert the rule of law without astounding power and influence.

    Your not so cogent narrative only serves to protect Zionism, and thus perpetuate this horrific injustice.

    Dont' bother replying; you will never change my mind; I know what I see; and I'm going to call it as I see it: based on the obvious exponential growth of Zionist power in the U.S.; cause I repeat; you don't get away with such crimes with TOTAL impunity without pretty significant power, and stiffling that truth is what perpetuates Zionist Injustice against Palestine. That power sustains injustice!

    Arnold Lockshin , Mar 28, 2014 7:08:45 AM | 211
    Defense of slavery and the slave trade -- the most inhuman form of exploitation conceivable. Defense of United States imperialism. One and the same. Arnold Lockshin, political exile from the US living in Moscow
    Rowan Berkeley , Mar 28, 2014 8:10:11 AM | 212
    It's very convenient for you, Arnold, to blame simply "US imperialism", as if it fell out of the sky. It didn't. It was directed by finance capital, which is not an impersonal force but a collection of individual investors, more than a few of whom are interested particularly in Jewish welfare, as they conceive it: that is to say, they want to use Jewish issues, to which the general US public is already well conditioned, to push through an entire program of global domination by force. One wonders who these individuals are, and why they chose Jewish issues as their cover, if they're not Jews.

    [Apr 14, 2019] Neocons vs Jews

    Notable quotes:
    "... I MET ONE JEWISH OFFICER IN COMBAT ARMS, PERIOD!!!!! ..."
    "... Compare that to their ever-presence in politics and, in particular, among the Neocons who are ceaselessly starting wars and sending non-Jews to die for them. It's disgusting. ..."
    "... Here's a quote from Kissinger which neatly sums it up: "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." ..."
    "... "The dislike is profoundly visceral, not rational" ..."
    "... Let's see Fred.. Heard of the Neocons, near exclusively Jews, running US foreign policy to establish Israel's hegemony in the Middle East a la Oden Yinon? Who openly acknowledges running Hollywood, Freddie? How about the moral quality of what Hollywood produces. ..."
    "... "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation." ..."
    "... Also, there's the paraphrased quote from the Godfather Movie; "men in suits and ties make better bank robbers than men with guns." ..."
    Mar 10, 2018 | www.unz.com

    Jus' Sayin'... , March 5, 2018 at 5:08 pm GMT

    I thought Mr. Reed provided a good summary of the situation. The diversity of responses suggests that he struck a nice balance in presenting his observations.

    I am a mixed-ethnicity Roman Catholic but starting with college and ever since, most of my closest associates and many of those with whom I work and play, except for immediate family, have been middle class Jews. I have found these individuals to be generous and kind and not at all clannish. All regard themselves as and in fact are patriotic Americans. Many have achieved extraordinary success and contributed to the commonweal. Many have gone out of their way to help and comfort me in times of personal crisis.

    I find my personal experiences with individual Jews hard to reconcile with the – to me – obvious observation that, considered as a group, American Jews have had a disastrous impact on the United States in many areas including invidious control of (1) the news media, publishing, and entertainment industries, (2) culture generally, (3) finance, (4) legal institutions. (5) the government generally, and (6) foreign policy in particular.

    In high school I monitored a college course on democratic political theory (excluding Rousseau's totalitarian version) and democracy's totalitarian opponents, i.e., communism and fascism. The readings on fascism included lengthy sections from Rosenberg's "Myth of the Twentieth Century".

    At the time, I thought that even the less hyperbolic of Rosenberg's rants verged on insanity. Now, after observing our Jewish-dominated late republic hurtling towards utter ruination, I'm not so sure.

    Longfisher , March 5, 2018 at 5:26 pm GMT
    "What have Jews actually done to you? Hacked your bank account? Gypped you out of your house? Shot your dog?" and the answer will likely be, "Nothing."

    Simple. I served in the Marines for about 7 years as an infantry officer. I met, worked with and greatly valued many 10s of thousands of Marines.

    Infantry is combat arms as are artillery, special ops, missile forces, Marine Air, etc.

    I MET ONE JEWISH OFFICER IN COMBAT ARMS, PERIOD!!!!!

    Now, they were everywhere in professional positions in our sister service, the Navy. Doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc. But almost none in combat arms in America but well represented in the armed forces of Israel.

    Compare that to their ever-presence in politics and, in particular, among the Neocons who are ceaselessly starting wars and sending non-Jews to die for them. It's disgusting.

    Onward Christian soldier is the new Jewish American national anthem. They're disloyal cowards and they're a fifth column for Israel here in the U.S. If they vaporized tomorrow we'd be better off.

    Here's a quote from Kissinger which neatly sums it up: "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy."

    No wonder to me why they were burned in the crematoriums in German during WWII.

    Rex Little , March 5, 2018 at 5:59 pm GMT

    From two percent of the population?

    I've long wondered how that 2% number was arrived at. Who is counted as Jewish? If it's only those who actively practice the religion, then I'd guess 2% is about right. But how many more are there whose ancestors were Jewish but who aren't religious (like me) or practice Christianity (like my brother)?

    Granted, the number of non-religious Jews is shrinking, as Corvinus pointed out upthread. My brothers and I would all be considered Jewish by ancestry, but none of our children are, because their mothers aren't.

    I suspect that support for Israel and Zionism is much stronger among religious Jews than my sort. I've never been to Israel, and you'd have to pay me a lot of money to get me to go there. My parents' opinion was that the state of Israel should never have been created.

    Mussolini's Fist , March 5, 2018 at 6:59 pm GMT
    This article should be entitled "1000 Reasons why Fred Reed is a Complete Moron".

    "The dislike is profoundly visceral, not rational"

    Let's see Fred.. Heard of the Neocons, near exclusively Jews, running US foreign policy to establish Israel's hegemony in the Middle East a la Oden Yinon? Who openly acknowledges running Hollywood, Freddie? How about the moral quality of what Hollywood produces.

    Commenting on fashion might be more your speed.

    Carroll Price , March 5, 2018 at 3:20 pm GMT
    @turtle

    Fred apparently slept through Bible class, but the New Testament refers to it as devouring widow's houses.

    Matthew 23:14
    "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation."

    Also, there's the paraphrased quote from the Godfather Movie; "men in suits and ties make better bank robbers than men with guns."

    [Apr 14, 2019] The Complete Unexpurgated AIPAC Tape from 1993

    Jul 07, 2018 | www.unz.com

    renfro , July 5, 2018 at 7:41 pm GMT

    Why I am all for wire tapping and all other spying by the CIA and FBI ...get all the uber Jews and all the politicians and make it public. Would be delighted if all the news channels did nothing but play the tapes on the daily news.

    The Complete Unexpurgated AIPAC Tape

    https://www.wrmea.org/1992-december/january-1993/the-complete-unexpurgated-aipac-tape.html

    Following is a transcript of the Oct. 22, 1992 conversation with President David Steiner of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) recorded without his knowledge by New York businessman Haim (Harry) Katz. Its existence was first revealed to the Washington Times and its release triggered Steiner's resignation.

    (sample)

    HK: Let me tell you, I was planning, I was planning to, to . . . Inouye, by the way, is in real trouble? He's been there forever. . .

    DS: Yeah! Well, we might lose him. There's been such a sea change, such trouble this year, I can't believe all our friends that are in trouble. Because there's an anti-incumbency mood, and foreign aid has not been popular. You know what I got for, I met with [U.S. Secretary of State] Jim Baker and I cut a deal with him. I got, besides the $3 billion, you know they're looking for the Jewish votes, and I'll tell him whatever he wants to hear . . .

    HK: Right.

    DS: Besides the $10 billion in loan guarantees which was a fabulous thing, $3 billion in foreign, in military aid, and I got almost a billion dollars in other goodies that people don't even know about .

    HK: Such as?

    DS: $700 million in military draw-down, from equipment that the United States Army's going to give to Israel; $200 million the U.S. government is going to preposition materials in Israel, which Israel can draw upon; put them in the global warning protection system; so when if there's a missile fired, they'll get the same advanced notification that the U.S., is notified, joint military exercises -- I've got a whole shopping list of things .

    HK: So this is from Baker?

    DS: From Baker and from the Pentagon.

    [Apr 14, 2019] Ethno-Centrism Myths and Mania by James Petras

    Interesting but very controversial. Jewish people do possess business acumen and are more oriented toward money success. Just look what happened in the USSR after its dissolution and Yeltsin privatization. Most "oligarchs" turned to be Jewish ;-)
    Also the achievement of Jewish people in science should be be underestimated. This nation gave world a lot of top physicists mathematicians and philosophers.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Even the Saudi Monarchy's occasional outbursts against Israel do not inhibit it from engaging in large-scale financial transactions with the Jewish banking elite on Wall Street and City of London and from forming covert alliances with Israeli intelligence in order to overthrow secular pro-Palestinian Arab regimes – as has happened in Libya, Iraq and Syria. They have both benefited from the massive ethnic cleansing of the highly educated minority Christian populations of secular Iraq and Syria. ..."
    "... Fake anti-Semitism is most recently seen in the launching of series of anti-Semitic 'threats' by ethno-centric Jews to create hysteria, serves many purposes following the recent rise of populism in Europe and the election of the American President Donald Trump who had promised to withdraw the US from wars in the Middle East. First, it secures widespread support from North American and European regimes, especially when Israel is criticized throughout the world and at the United Nations for its war crimes in occupied Palestine. ..."
    "... It is almost certain that the US FBI had identified the perpetrator of these acts as they uncovered the sophisticated operation based in Israel. The FBI would have demanded Israeli police arrest 'the culprit' and shut down the operation. Israeli police staged their own 'fake' investigation and concluded that the complex cloaked cyber operations 'were the work of a shy nineteen year old with dyslexia' – clearly another example of the Jewish genius. ..."
    "... A review of the top 10 US multi-billionaires finds four who are identified as 'Jews': Mark Zuckerberg with $56 billion, Larry Ellison with $52.2 billion, Michael Bloomberg with $47.5 billion and Sergey Brin $39.4 billion. In other words 40% of the super-richest Americans are 'Jews' while 60% are non-Jews. Among the top ten in the US, billionaire Jews with a total of $195.1 billion are collectively less rich than the top billionaire Gentiles who own $282.7 billion. ..."
    "... All the high-tech computer and financial billionaires are just assumed by the tribalists to view themselves as 'Jewish geniuses' even though they may have learned and borrowed ideas and knowledge from their non-Jewish partners and mentors in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. ..."
    Apr 17, 2017 | www.unz.com

    Introduction

    Ethno-religious (ER) beliefs and practices have been harmless when individuals or groups linked to those practices have limited influence over the state and economy. In contrast, when such groups exercise a disproportionately powerful influence over the state and economy, they dominate and exploit majorities while forming closed self-replicating networks.

    Examples of powerful ethno-centric regimes in the 1930's are well known for their brutality and devastating consequences. These include the white Christians in the US, Germany and the European colonial settlement regimes in Rhodesia, South Africa, India and Indonesia, as well as the Japanese imperialists in Asia.

    In the post-colonial or neo-colonial era, ethno-centrism has taken the form of virulent anti-Islamic hysteria resulting in predatory Western regimes embarking on wars and military occupations in the Middle East.

    The rise of Judeo-centrism, as an economic and political force, occurred in the last half of the 20th century. The Jewish-Zionist seizure, occupation and ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine and their rising economic and political influence within the United States has created a formidable power bloc with significant implications for world peace.

    The rise of Jewish ethnocentrism (JE) has confounded its proponents as well as its adversaries; Zionists and anti-Semites alike are surprised by the scope and depth of JE.

    Advocates and adversaries, of all persuasions, conflate the power of what they call 'the Jews', for their own purposes. Advocates find proof of 'Jewish genius' in every prestigious position and attribute it to their own unique culture, heredity and scholarship, rather than the result of a greater social-cultural context. The anti-Semites, for their part, attribute all the world's nefarious dealings and diabolic plots to 'the Jews'. This creates a strange duality of illusions about the exceptionalism of a minority group.

    In this paper I will focus on demystifying the myths buttressing the power of contemporary Judeo-centric ideology, belief and organizational influence. There is little point in focusing on anti-Semitism, which has no impact on the economy and the exercise of state power with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia. Even the Saudi Monarchy's occasional outbursts against Israel do not inhibit it from engaging in large-scale financial transactions with the Jewish banking elite on Wall Street and City of London and from forming covert alliances with Israeli intelligence in order to overthrow secular pro-Palestinian Arab regimes – as has happened in Libya, Iraq and Syria. They have both benefited from the massive ethnic cleansing of the highly educated minority Christian populations of secular Iraq and Syria.

    Fake Anti-Semitism: Operational Weapon of the Ethno-Centric Jews

    Fake anti-Semitism is most recently seen in the launching of series of anti-Semitic 'threats' by ethno-centric Jews to create hysteria, serves many purposes following the recent rise of populism in Europe and the election of the American President Donald Trump who had promised to withdraw the US from wars in the Middle East. First, it secures widespread support from North American and European regimes, especially when Israel is criticized throughout the world and at the United Nations for its war crimes in occupied Palestine. Widespread fake anti-Semitic attacks divert attention to Judeo-ethno centrists and validate their claims to be the first among the history's victims. Second, widely publicized 'fake' acts of anti-Semitism arouse the ethnocentric foot soldiers and increase rich donor contributions to the illegal Jewish settlements and the Israeli military. Third, 'fake anti-Semitism' is used to threaten, repress and outlaw any organizations and individuals who criticize Israel and the influence of Jewish ethnocentric organizations in their home countries.

    How many 'anti-Semitic' acts are staged is uncertain: On March 23, 2017, an Israeli-American man was arrested in Israel for sending hundreds of fake anti-Semitic threats to Jewish institutions and schools in four European countries and nine US states. Such threats led to the emergency grounding of two US airlines and the panicked evacuation of countless schools and cultural centers. This man used a sophisticated system of cloaking accounts to appear to originate in other countries. Despite his high skills at cyber-terrorism, Israeli authorities preposterously described him as a 'teenager with a learning disability'. The Israeli-American cyber-terrorist's arrest made the 'back-pages' news in the US for one day while his (and others') fake threats continued to make international headlines for weeks.

    These scores of fake anti-Semitic bomb threats were cited by the major ethnocentric leaders in the US to pressure the US President and hundreds of Congressional leaders, University Presidents, etc. to mindlessly echo their clamor for greater police state investigations against critics of Israel and to offer special 'protection' for potential 'Jewish victims'. Moves to outlaw criticism of Israel as 'anti-Semitism' and a 'hate crime' increased.

    Not surprisingly the leading Jewish organizations never backed down or called on the US government to investigate the source of the fake anti-Semitic threats: that is Israeli-American Zionists, who carry both nations' passports and can enter and exit with total ease and enjoy immunity from extradition.

    It is almost certain that the US FBI had identified the perpetrator of these acts as they uncovered the sophisticated operation based in Israel. The FBI would have demanded Israeli police arrest 'the culprit' and shut down the operation. Israeli police staged their own 'fake' investigation and concluded that the complex cloaked cyber operations 'were the work of a shy nineteen year old with dyslexia' – clearly another example of the Jewish genius.

    It is more likely that the hundreds of false-anti-Semitic threats were part of an Israeli state operation identified by the FBI who 'diplomatically' pressured Tel Aviv to cut out the monkey business. The news report of the lone-wolf teenager in Israel allowed the Israeli intelligence to cover-up their role. Once the Israelis passed off the unbelievable tale of a brilliant, if troubled, young 'lone wolf', the entire US mass media buried the story forever. In due time the so-called perpetrator will be released, amply rewarded and his identity re-cycled. In the meantime the US government, as well as several European governments, was forced to allocate tens of millions of dollars to provide extra security to Jewish institutions in the wake of these fake threats.

    Jewish Power: The Top 25 American Multi-Billionaires

    In February 2017, Forbes magazine compiled a list of the world's billionaires, including a country-by-country account. The top five countries with multi-billionaires among its citizens are: the US with 565, China with 319, Germany with 114, India with 101, and Russia with 96. Moreover, since 2016 the net worth of the multi-billionaires grew 18% to $7.67 trillion dollars.

    While the US has the greatest number of billionaires, China is fast catching up.

    Despite China's advances, the US remains the center of world capitalism with the greatest concentration of wealth, as well as the greatest and growing inequalities. One reasonably can argue that who controls US wealth controls the world.

    'Jews' among the Top 25 Multi-Billionaires in the US

    A review of the top 10 US multi-billionaires finds four who are identified as 'Jews': Mark Zuckerberg with $56 billion, Larry Ellison with $52.2 billion, Michael Bloomberg with $47.5 billion and Sergey Brin $39.4 billion. In other words 40% of the super-richest Americans are 'Jews' while 60% are non-Jews. Among the top ten in the US, billionaire Jews with a total of $195.1 billion are collectively less rich than the top billionaire Gentiles who own $282.7 billion.

    Of the top 25 multi-billionaires in the US, 11 of the 25 are Jews. In other words 'the Jews' represent 44% of the top 25 biggest billionaires – outnumbered by Gentiles but catching up.

    Analysis of the 'Richest Jews'

    We place 'Jews' in quotation marks because this is a doubtful signifier – more useful to both Zionist fanatics and anti-Semitic polemicists. Most are not 'practicing' or are completely disinterested in tribal religions. Nevertheless, half of secular Jews in the US are active supporters of Israel or involved in Fifth Column Israeli 'front groups'.

    In other words, about half of the richest 'Jews' do not consider themselves to be religiously or ethnically 'Jewish'. Super rich Jews are divided regarding their ethnic loyalties between the US and Israel.

    Moreover what is murkier, many of the richest so-called 'Jews' were born to 'mixed marriages'. Strictly religious Jews do not recognize the children of such marriages as Jews because their mothers are not Jewish. The omnivorous Zionists, on the other hand, classify all of them as Jews on the basis of their actual or potential contribution to the State of Israel. In other words, the Zionist classification of 'Jews' becomes arbitrary, politicized and dependent on organizational affiliation. Religious practice and ethno-cultural purity are less important.

    Judeo-Centrism and the Intrinsic Superiority Fallacy

    Among the many zealous advocates of the Judeo-centric world, the most tiresome are those who claim they represent the product of superior genetics, culture and heritage – unique and intrinsic to Jews.

    For many centuries most Jews were illiterate believers of religious tribal myths, taught by anti-scientific rabbis, who closed off the ghettos from the accomplishments of higher culture and forbade integration or mixed marriages. The high priests punished and expelled any Jews who were influenced by the surrounding Hellenistic, Romanized, Arabic, Renaissance and Rationalists cultures, like the great Spinoza.

    In other words, Jews who had rejected Jewish law, the Scriptures and the Torah were expelled as apostates. But these 'apostates' were most open to the modern ideas of science. Jews greatly benefited from the emancipatory laws and opportunities following the French Revolution. Under Napoleon, Jews became citizens and were free to advance in science, the arts and finance by attending secular universities away from the primitive, superstitious Rabbi-controlled ghetto 'schools'.

    The dramatic growth of intellectual excellence among Jews in the 19th century was a result of their ceasing to be Jews in the traditional closed religious sense. Did they suddenly switch on their 'genius genes' or invent a fake history or religion, as the ethno-centrist would have us believe? It seems far more likely that they took great advantage of the opportunities opened to them with major social and political developments in the greater society. As they assimilated and integrated in secular traditions, they ceased to be Jews in the tribal religious sense. Their scientific, medical and financial success came from learning, absorbing and exchanging scientific ideas, high culture and conservative, liberal and socialist ideas with the larger progressive non-Jewish society.

    It is no coincidence that 'great Jewish achievers' like the totally secular Albert Einstein were educated in German universities by German professors and drew on scientific knowledge by German and non-Jewish scholars. His intellectual development was due to his free association with the great scientists and scholars of Germany and Europe, not closeted away in some ethno-tribal commune.

    The Jews who remained embedded in the Polish, Lithuanian and Russian ghettos, under the reign of the leading Rabbis, remained illiterate, poor and backward. Most of the claims of 'superior' cultural heritage or traditions are the creation of a mythical folk history serving ethno-national supremacists.

    The Myth of the Contemporary Genius

    The modern ethnocentric ideologues ignore the 'dilution of Jewishness' in their celebratory identification with successful 'Jews'.

    Many of the best thinkers, writers, scientists and political leaders were conversos (Christian converts), or integrated European secular nationalists, socialists, monarchists, bankers and professionals.

    Some remained 'reformed Jews' or later transformed into secular Zionists: nationalists who despised non-Europeans as inferior and couldn't even conceive of Arab Palestine as their 'homeland'. It wasn't until the 20th century that Zionism was in part 'Judacized'. Early Zionists looked at various locations for a homeland, including Argentina and parts of Africa and Russia.

    These ethno-chauvinist ideologues lay claim to all brilliant individuals, no matter how tenuous as examples of 'Jewish genius'. Even those personally opposed Jewish ethno-religious beliefs and indifferent to tribal loyalties end up being claimed as examples of the 'Jewish genius'. Once some 'matrilineal link' could be found, their success and brilliance was tied to the mystical lineage, no matter how tenuous.

    This bizarre practice became even more commonplace following the Jewish military conquest and brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestine, with the military, political and financial backing of non-Jewish Europe and the United States. With myths and inflated ideas of unique virtue and brilliance, Israel was established as a racist apartheid state. A new militant, ethnocentric Judaism converted Israel and its overseas backers into an ethno-ideological international power with religious trappings, based on the myth of its 'exceptionalism'. To maintain this myth, the personal histories of all prominent 'Israel Firsters' were sanitized and scrubbed of anti-social and destructive behavior.

    All Jewish billionaires were to be portrayed as uniquely philanthropic, while the exploits of Jewish billionaire swindlers (Bernie Madoff, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky) were not to be mentioned in polite company. The conquests of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, rapist-procurer head of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Governor Elliot Spitzer, Congressman Anthony Weiner and other similar perverts quietly slithered off the edge of the planet although all had once been hailed as examples of 'ethnocentric genius'.

    Major Jewish political donors to US-UK-French electoral parties were hailed while their work on behalf of Israel was naturally assumed but not discussed. The dizzying shifts between open adulation and selective whitewash served to reinforce the illusion of superiority. Anyone, Jew or Gentile, bold enough to point out the obvious hypocrisy would be immediately censored as 'self-hating' (Jew) or 'anti-Semite' (Gentile).

    Return to the Beginning: Judeo-Centric Power

    As mentioned above, Jews represent a substantial minority among the top multi-billionaires, but they are still a minority. Below the top level of wealth are the single digit billionaires and triple and double digit multi-millionaires; here the proportion of 'Jews' increases. These 'less-than-super-billionaires' are among the most active and the biggest financial and political supporters of the ethno centric ideology and tribal cohesion.

    Los Angeles-based Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban contributed tens of millions of dollars to support of the Jewish state's occupation of Palestine and brutal colonial land grabbing 'settlers'. His wealth is largely based on his 'genius' in pushing culturally vacuous Japanese cartoons (Mighty Morphing Power Rangers) on the nation's children. He is the primary donor to the Democratic Party pushing Israel's agenda – his number one priority as an American citizen.

    The lesser 'foot soldiers' of the Zionist power structure are the millionaires and affluent professionals, dentists, stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors and impresarios. The middle and lower levels of wealth and power are a diverse group – mostly ethno-religious and secular, but very self-identified ethno-Jews. A minority is totally secular or converted to non-Jewish religions (especially Buddhism, Christianity)

    Despite the constant drumbeat of ethnocentric identity, an increasing number of young US 'Jews' do not identify with Judaism or Israel. Their influence however is minimal.

    The wealthy ethno-religious and secular ethnic Jews may or may not constitute a numerical majority but they are the best organized, most political and most adamant in their claims to 'speak for and represent the Jewish community' as a whole, especially during waves of (fake) 'anti-Semitism'!

    The many former-Jews, anti-tribal Jews and 'non-Jewish' Jews are no match for the ethnocentric political apparatus controlled by the chauvinists.

    When the tribalists appropriate the glory of a secular non-Jewish Jewish scientist or major 'prize winner' they claim his or her tribal affiliation in order to impress the 'goys' and to seduce younger more skeptical Jews about the advantages of ethno-chauvinism.

    All the high-tech computer and financial billionaires are just assumed by the tribalists to view themselves as 'Jewish geniuses' even though they may have learned and borrowed ideas and knowledge from their non-Jewish partners and mentors in Silicon Valley or Wall Street.

    Upward mobility within academia, government and business circles is automatically assumed by the tribalists to be a reward for superior merit – 'Jewish genius' – rather than nepotism or connections. Tribal networks and 'understandings' play a powerful unspoken role in career success and immunity from the consequences of failure, incompetence or dishonesty.

    Multi-billionaires and multi-millionaires prospered because they entered establish lucrative fields or made their career choices highly profitable.

    Early on, many powerful Gentile bankers provided entry for talented Jews to succeed. This is despite revisionist history bemoaning the exclusion of US Jews on Wall Street and their degrading denial of membership in select WASP country clubs. These myths of brutal oppression on Wall Street or Long Island yacht clubs have empowered generations of American Jews to assume the role of spokespersons for the oppressed everywhere. The expression 'crying all the way to the bank' comes to mind.

    By the last quarter of the 20th century and especially in the 21st century, deindustrialization and the shift to financialization in the US economy increased the power and privilege of a disproportionate number of multi-billionaire/millionaire Jews. This seismic shift has coincided with the pervasive impoverishment of the marginalized working class in the former 'rust belt' and central parts of the country and the incredible concentration of national wealth at the top 1%. This is a demographic shift and ethno-class apartheid of huge, but unstudied, significance.

    The most important political question is not how many Jews are super-wealthy but what proportion of them are influential political donors and active in the Democratic or Republican Parties in order to intervene on behalf of clan, tribe and motherland (Israel). Majorities among Jews are not crucial – most are not politically active. What is decisive is the percentage of all the super-wealthy who are politically active, organized and contribute substantially to influence and control the mass media to promote their ethno-centric ideology and punish critics.

    Conclusion

    Overt and covert Jewish supremacists have embroidered a fake history and legacy of exceptional intelligence ignoring the context of advanced non-Jewish science and cultures, which preceded and later provided Jews with opportunities for education and wealth.

    The danger inherent in all ethno-centric tribes is that they work to dominate majority populations by creating systems of assigning superiority and inferiority. They then use these to justify growing inequalities of wealth, education and political power!

    Historically favored minorities tend to overreach and, like the eyeless Sampson, bring down the Temple on everyone. Power corrupts and absolute ethno-chauvinist power corrupts absolutely. Intelligent Jews of principle are abandoning

    [Apr 14, 2019] 'Boom!' an autopsy of the media after the Mueller bombshell by Michael Tracey

    That was Neo-McCarthyim hysteria plain and simple; and it still is continuing as "FullOfSchiff" fqrse.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Can you think of a more vulgar and disgraceful manifestation of Trump-Russia media malfeasance than Rachel Maddow? Her deluded nightly conspiratorial rants may have been lucrative for MSNBC, but she fed viewers a complete fraud for three years. Now her show is undergoing a genuine existential crisis after Robert Mueller's exoneration of Trump . ..."
    "... The harm Maddow inflicted is unforgivable and she should obviously resign, go into exile, and take up some other line of work: perhaps gardening. That said, she has also become something of a scapegoat. ..."
    "... As contemptible as Rachel undoubtedly is, dwelling on her absolves the rest of the industry from acknowledging what really happened: a structural calamity of epic proportions, implicating almost all of them, which has utterly destroyed the reputation of the media writ large. And for good reason. ..."
    "... (Brennan infamously declared Trump guilty of treason on Twitter following the Helsinki summit). ..."
    "... Last week, Wheeler finally admitted her suspicion that the FBI may have just decided she is 'crazy.' Yes, sounds plausible. ..."
    "... Sadly, all the media figures who might have been assigned to legitimate evidence-based inquiries were wrapped up in the never-ending Russia melodrama, based on the hunch that it would result in the revelation of treasonous collusion, followed by the arrest of Trump's family and his swift impeachment. None of this happened. So what was the point? ..."
    "... Most disturbing of all is how otherwise-smart journalists and commentators lost their minds and integrity throughout the debacle. It was all a joke, a scam, and I've barely even scratched the surface here. It will take years to fully sift through the wreckage ..."
    Apr 04, 2019 | spectator.us
    'Boom!': an autopsy of the media after the Mueller bombshell Dunking on Rachel Maddow may be fun, but she's far from the sole perpetrator Michael Tracey Rachel Maddow

    Can you think of a more vulgar and disgraceful manifestation of Trump-Russia media malfeasance than Rachel Maddow? Her deluded nightly conspiratorial rants may have been lucrative for MSNBC, but she fed viewers a complete fraud for three years. Now her show is undergoing a genuine existential crisis after Robert Mueller's exoneration of Trump .

    The harm Maddow inflicted is unforgivable and she should obviously resign, go into exile, and take up some other line of work: perhaps gardening. That said, she has also become something of a scapegoat. It's convenient to disavow Maddow's excesses if you're a journalist who wants to pretend that the media failures which gave rise to Trump-Russia weren't a full-scale indictment of their entire profession. To act as though the misconduct was somehow confined to one unhinged cable news personality would be a gross distortion.

    As contemptible as Rachel undoubtedly is, dwelling on her absolves the rest of the industry from acknowledging what really happened: a structural calamity of epic proportions, implicating almost all of them, which has utterly destroyed the reputation of the media writ large. And for good reason.

    Easy as it might be to pooh-pooh Maddow as some zany outlier, the undeniable reality is that the sick conspiratorial mindset she embodied was thoroughly mainstream: it infected virtually every sector of elite American culture, from journalism, to entertainment, to the professional political class. Rachel is just the tip of the rotten iceberg.

    Take, for instance, Keith Olbermann. Keith was the most influential host on MSNBC during the George W. Bush years, when audiences ate up his furious denunciations of the Iraq War, which scratched a genuine itch because of the prevailing pro-war media conformity of the time. Olbermann gave voice to frustrated liberals who felt that their well-founded grievances were not being represented in the popular media, and his style came to be emulated across the industry (including by the host he recruited for a top spot on the network, Rachel Maddow.)

    Then came the Trump era, when Olbermann's brain appeared to explode. He began recording short video rants for GQ magazine, which rank among the most mind-bendingly deranged content produced throughout the entire Russiagate ordeal. Please, just watch this unbelievable screed from December 2016:

    'We are at war with Russia,' Olbermann gravely proclaims. The inauguration of Donald Trump, he prophesies, will mark 'the end of the United States as an independent country.' Anyone who rejects this analysis is a 'traitor' says Olbermann, and in league with 'Russian scum.' His recommendation is to thwart Trump via some harebrained Electoral College scheme where electors are intimidated into violating their duty to vote according to the election outcome in their respective states and districts. I covered this attempted coup at the time, which failed, but was supported by leading Democrats ranging from Hillary Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri to Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe; as well as Michael Moore, Lawrence Lessig, Peter Beinart, DeRay McKesson, Paul Krugman, and Neera Tanden. Prominent liberals had been melodramatically whinging for months about how appalled they were by Trump's alleged propensity to violate 'norms,' but the next minute they turned around and demanded that all norms governing the centuries-old Electoral College process be thrown out the window. The wild propaganda promoted by Olbermann had become the standard, mainstream view among American liberals: fundamentally corrupting their capacity to view subsequent political events with any semblance of rationality.

    Despite their truly insane offerings, focusing solely on demented opinionators like Olbermann and Maddow still lets ostensibly 'neutral' journalists off the hook. The amount of journalistic resources squandered on the Trump-Russia boondoggle, for instance by the New York Times and the Washington Post , will never be fully quantified. Both newspapers were lavished with Pulitzer Prizes and every other pointless accolade for their supposedly intrepid journalism. Their constant 'bombshell scoops' routinely ricocheted across Twitter before they were injected into the rest of the turbocharged media ecosystem, each one breathlessly touted on cable news for hours at a time. The harsh truth is that most all of these 'scoops' were predicated on a fiction. There was supposed to be a core conspiracy, which was meant to explain why Trump associates kept getting caught in lies – why their communications were extrajudicially intercepted, why they were surveilled on dubious pretenses. But no underlying conspiracy was ever revealed. The whole thing was based on a fairytale. Shouldn't the Times and WaPo therefore apologize and give back their Pulitzers? Or at very least toss them in the dumpster.

    Benjamin Wittes, the LawFare website guru and arguably the most lauded Twitter authority on the Trump-Russia scam, became well-known for his fun slogan, 'BOOM!,' which he would gleefully tweet every time a supposed bombshell article burst on the scene. Here's a Washington Post story from October 21 last year headlined 'Special counsel examines conflicting accounts as scrutiny of Roger Stone and WikiLeaks deepens,' which got the Wittes 'boom' treatment. Wow, very dramatic! Sounds a lot like Mueller and his squad were closing in on Stone as the evil mastermind behind some grand Trump-Russia conspiracy plot, given his suspicious ties to WikiLeaks, right? The only problem is, when Stone was indicted three months later, Mueller not only brought zero charges alleging Stone as party to any conspiracy, he dispelled such notions.

    All the correspondence cited in Mueller's indictment showed that Stone had no advanced knowledge of WikiLeaks releases or any privileged access to its operations. Roger Stone was just doing what Roger Stone does best: bullshitting.

    Stone was eventually charged by Mueller for making false statements, but again: none of those statements pertained to a conspiracy cover-up. They pertained to the dirty trickster being who he's been for decades: a fabulist who frequently misrepresents himself and gets in stupid feuds with fellow political hucksters. The October 2018 story about which Wittes tweeted 'boom' ultimately had no real significance. Like so many other stories touted at the time as an incredible BOMBSHELL, everyone got amped up over a total fantasy. The story had no serious value, other than to temporarily scintillate now-discredited obsessives like Wittes.

    Special scorn should be reserved for those in prominent media positions who ought to have known better, but indulged day after day in conspiratorial nonsense anyway. Take Chris Hayes, the popular 8pm MSNBC host, who unlike Maddow has a journalistic background (he was formerly the Washington Editor of The Nation magazine). Theoretically, Hayes should have been imbued with a greater sense of ingrained skepticism regarding CIA and FBI claims, which are what drove the entire Trump-Russia investigation to begin with. He is also a genuinely intelligent person, having (ironically) written the excellent Twilight of the Elites (2012), a book which examined the propensity for upper-crust society to engage in self-defeating groupthink.

    But Hayes too ended up witlessly amplifying the most obscene Russiagate antics – no doubt influenced by the pressure of having to turn in big ratings every night. His shows were always brimming with security state spooks like John Brennan , the former CIA Director and proven fantasist . Brennan was eventually hired by NBC, becoming one of Hayes's colleagues despite having played a central role in instigating the original Trump-Russia investigation in 2016 and inflaming its most incendiary elements (Brennan infamously declared Trump guilty of treason on Twitter following the Helsinki summit).

    For further insight on the subject, Hayes generally turned to pseudo-journalistic figures like Natasha Bertrand of The Atlantic , whose frenetically conspiratorial Russia coverage has also proven to have been total bunk – as well as former prosecutors and FBI officials like Chuck Rosenberg, disreputable security state apparatchiks like former NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey, and outright charlatans like purported 'intelligence expert' Malcolm Nance. (Here's an example from 2016 of the esteemed Nance getting tricked by a Twitter troll.)

    Hayes even went so far as to promote the theory that Trump had been colluding with Russia since 1987, a story somehow featured on the cover of New York magazine despite drawing on source material that literally originated with the recently deceased, notorious madman Lyndon LaRouche. Hayes's descent into fact-free mania culminated with his declaration to Stephen Colbert on March 8 last year that Trump and his associates were 'super guilty' of collusion. Whoops!

    While many once-respectable media figures like Hayes have seen their reputations inserted directly into the toilet, maybe the most bizarre case of all is Marcy Wheeler, the independent journalist known as @emptywheel . Wheeler appeared on Hayes's first show after Mueller decisively cleared Trump of collusion – you know, the central tenet of the Special Counsel's mandate. The fact that Hayes would have Wheeler on at that moment – after the entire Trump-Russia drama was definitively exposed as a ludicrous fantasy – showed that Hayes was committed to perpetuating the deceit even in the face of all countervailing evidence, whether unconsciously or consciously. That's because Marcy Wheeler is almost certainly a deluded basket case.

    The most obvious evidence for this is Wheeler's sensational admission in July 2018 that she burned a source to the FBI, voluntarily and proactively, thereby committing one of journalism's mortal sins. Wheeler justified her demented action on numerous fronts. First, she claimed that she possessed bombshell, smoking gun info that proved a Trump-Russia conspiracy, and felt a patriotic duty to hand this over to the FBI – in retribution for what she called Russia's 'attack' on the United States. Let's remember, shall we, that said attack at most amounted to some Twitter bots, goofy Facebook memes, and spear-phished Gmail accounts: John Podesta famously clicked on a phony link, which led to his emails being swiped. Hardly 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, wouldn't you say? However, those comparisons have been seriously made by various prominent elected officials, including Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, who would have presided over impeachment proceedings had things panned out differently.

    When pressed – even after the Mueller clearly asserted that no such Trump-Russia conspiracy ever existed – Wheeler still refuses to divulge any details about the extraordinary dispositive evidence she mysteriously claims to possess. Second, Wheeler further justified her insane conduct by insisting she could literally be killed by some unknown sinister alliance of Russians and Trump-backed mafia figures, or something ( I'm not making this up .). Shamefully, Wheeler's outlandish assertions were treated as gospel by members of the media who failed to apply even a modicum of critical scrutiny; Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post heralded Wheeler as following her conscience and wrote this about the supposed Russian hit squad out to get her: 'Overly dramatic? Not really. The Russians do have a penchant for disposing of people they find threatening.' Utter lunacy. Since the Mueller finding, Wheeler has strangely not revealed any additional information about the nature of these would-be assassins.

    Think about it. For months, Wheeler dangled cryptic hints about the explosive info that she alone supposedly knew about, enthralling blog readers and Twitter followers – and earning her major platforms not just on MSNBC but even the New York Times , where she contributed columns that contained blatant falsehoods. In the pages of the world's most influential newspaper, she claimed that Mueller had been 'hiding' evidence showing Trump's participation in a Russia conspiracy, and it would all come out once Mueller issued his final verdict. No dice.

    Last week, Wheeler finally admitted her suspicion that the FBI may have just decided she is 'crazy.' Yes, sounds plausible.

    So much journalistic energy was wasted chronicling the ins-and-outs of the Russiagate non-story. Imagine if instead that time was devoted to reporting in the public interest: like, say, I don't know – investigating the militaristic think tanks which attempted to undermine Trump's key diplomatic initiatives (such as North Korea), or how Trump was co-opted by the Republican donor class, or his various actual corruptions that didn't happen to involve any international espionage conspiracy.

    Sadly, all the media figures who might have been assigned to legitimate evidence-based inquiries were wrapped up in the never-ending Russia melodrama, based on the hunch that it would result in the revelation of treasonous collusion, followed by the arrest of Trump's family and his swift impeachment. None of this happened. So what was the point?

    Most disturbing of all is how otherwise-smart journalists and commentators lost their minds and integrity throughout the debacle. It was all a joke, a scam, and I've barely even scratched the surface here. It will take years to fully sift through the wreckage.

    See other Michael Tracy articles Michael Tracey, Author at Spectator USA

    [Apr 14, 2019] Edward Snowden: Surveillance Is About Power

    Now a lot of unpleasant question arise for Trump administration. Assange case is rather difficult to handle without spilling the beans.
    Apr 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

    wayfarer , says: April 13, 2019 at 1:47 pm GMT

    "Edward Snowden: Surveillance Is About Power."
    https://www.youtube.com/embed/RSc_IlFBWkw?feature=oembed
    jim jones , says: April 13, 2019 at 1:54 pm GMT
    The Assange arrest has strengthened my resolve never to vote Conservative again
    Agent76 , says: April 13, 2019 at 3:07 pm GMT
    @wayfarer Good share wayfarer. January 10, 2014 *500* Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is Always Aimed at Crushing Dissent *It's Never to Protect Us From Bad Guys*

    No matter which government conducts mass surveillance, they also do it to crush dissent, and then give a false rationale for why they're doing it.

    http://www.globalresearch.ca/500-years-of-history-shows-that-mass-spying-is-always-aimed-at-crushing-dissent/5364462

    [Apr 14, 2019] The FBI/CIA gang is also very stupid. From Halper-the-spy and his incompetent handler Brennan to the obnoxious Zionists of Ledeen kind they, the members of the "gang", show incompetence and the self-endangering and stupid amorality.

    Apr 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

    annamaria , says: April 13, 2019 at 1:19 pm GMT

    @Carlton Meyer 'This gang is so powerful "

    -- The gang is also very stupid. From Halper-the-spy and his incompetent handler Brennan to the obnoxious zionists of Ledeen kind they, the members of the "gang", show incompetence and the self-endangering and stupid amorality.

    By destroying whatever decent has been in the western civilization so far, and by spreading the rot around, the gangsters have been destroying their children's & grandchildren's future.

    [Apr 14, 2019] Assange rendition might backfire for Trump administration

    Vindictiveness not always play in the vindictive party favour.
    You may love Assange you may hate Assange for his WikiLeaks revelation (And Vault 7 was a real bombshell), but it is clear that it will cost Trump some reputation out of tini share that still left, especially in view of Trump declaration "I love Wikileaks"
    Apr 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

    For seven years, we have had to listen to a chorus of journalists, politicians and "experts" telling us that Assange was nothing more than a fugitive from justice, and that the British and Swedish legal systems could be relied on to handle his case in full accordance with the law. Barely a "mainstream" voice was raised in his defence in all that time.

    ... ... ...

    The political and media establishment ignored the mounting evidence of a secret grand jury in Virginia formulating charges against Assange, and ridiculed Wikileaks' concerns that the Swedish case might be cover for a more sinister attempt by the US to extradite Assange and lock him away in a high-security prison, as had happened to whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

    ... ... ...

    Equally, they ignored the fact that Assange had been given diplomatic status by Ecuador, as well as Ecuadorean citizenship. Britain was obligated to allow him to leave the embassy, using his diplomatic immunity, to travel unhindered to Ecuador. No "mainstream" journalist or politician thought this significant either.

    ... ... ...

    They turned a blind eye to the news that, after refusing to question Assange in the UK, Swedish prosecutors had decided to quietly drop the case against him in 2015. Sweden had kept the decision under wraps for more than two years.

    ... ... ...

    Most of the other documents relating to these conversations were unavailable. They had been destroyed by the UK's Crown Prosecution Service in violation of protocol. But no one in the political and media establishment cared, of course.

    Similarly, they ignored the fact that Assange was forced to hole up for years in the embassy, under the most intense form of house arrest, even though he no longer had a case to answer in Sweden. They told us -- apparently in all seriousness -- that he had to be arrested for his bail infraction, something that would normally be dealt with by a fine.

    ... ... ...

    This was never about Sweden or bail violations, or even about the discredited Russiagate narrative, as anyone who was paying the vaguest attention should have been able to work out. It was about the US Deep State doing everything in its power to crush Wikileaks and make an example of its founder.

    It was about making sure there would never again be a leak like that of Collateral Murder, the military video released by Wikileaks in 2007 that showed US soldiers celebrating as they murdered Iraqi civilians. It was about making sure there would never again be a dump of US diplomatic cables, like those released in 2010 that revealed the secret machinations of the US empire to dominate the planet whatever the cost in human rights violations.

    Now the pretence is over. The British police invaded the diplomatic territory of Ecuador -- invited in by Ecuador after it tore up Assange's asylum status -- to smuggle him off to jail. Two vassal states cooperating to do the bidding of the US empire. The arrest was not to help two women in Sweden or to enforce a minor bail infraction.

    No, the British authorities were acting on an extradition warrant from the US. And the charges the US authorities have concocted relate to Wikileaks' earliest work exposing the US military's war crimes in Iraq -- the stuff that we all once agreed was in the public interest, that British and US media clamoured to publish themselves.

    Still the media and political class is turning a blind eye. Where is the outrage at the lies we have been served up for these past seven years? Where is the contrition at having been gulled for so long? Where is the fury at the most basic press freedom -- the right to publish -- being trashed to silence Assange? Where is the willingness finally to speak up in Assange's defence?

    It's not there. There will be no indignation at the BBC, or the Guardian, or CNN. Just curious, impassive -- even gently mocking -- reporting of Assange's fate.

    And that is because these journalists, politicians and experts never really believed anything they said. They knew all along that the US wanted to silence Assange and to crush Wikileaks. They knew that all along and they didn't care. In fact, they happily conspired in paving the way for today's kidnapping of Assange.

    They did so because they are not there to represent the truth, or to stand up for ordinary people, or to protect a free press, or even to enforce the rule of law. They don't care about any of that. They are there to protect their careers, and the system that rewards them with money and influence. They don't want an upstart like Assange kicking over their applecart.

    Now they will spin us a whole new set of deceptions and distractions about Assange to keep us anaesthetised, to keep us from being incensed as our rights are whittled away, and to prevent us from realising that Assange's rights and our own are indivisible. We stand or fall together.

    Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .

    anonymous [340] • Disclaimer , says: April 12, 2019 at 10:41 am GMT

    Thank you.

    This should be an uncomfortable time for the “journalists” of the Establishment. Very few will speak up as does Mr. Cook. Watch how little is said about the recent Manning re-imprisonment to sweat out grand jury testimony. Things may have grown so craven that we’ll even see efforts to revoke Mr. Assange’s awards.

    This is also a good column for us to share with those people who just might want not to play along with the lies that define Exceptionalia.

    Digital Samizdat , says: April 12, 2019 at 5:11 pm GMT

    … from the moment Julian Assange first sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, they have been telling us we were wrong, that we were paranoid conspiracy theorists. We were told there was no real threat of Assange’s extradition to the United States, that it was all in our fevered imaginations.

    It all reminds me of Rod Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility: “That’ll never happen. And when it does , boy won’t you deserve it!”

    Equally, they ignored the fact that Assange had been given diplomatic status by Ecuador, as well as Ecuadorean citizenship. Britain was obligated to allow him to leave the embassy, using his diplomatic immunity, to travel unhindered to Ecuador. No “mainstream” journalist or politician thought this significant either.

    Why would they? They don’t even recognize diplomatic status for heads of state who get in their way! Remember what they did to President Evo Morales of Bolivia back when he was threatening to grant asylum to Ed Snowden? Here’s a refresher:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident

    Any way you slice, this is a sad for liberty.

    Carlton Meyer , says: • Website April 13, 2019 at 4:32 am GMT
    From my blog:

    Apr 13, 2019 – Julian Assange

    People who just watch corporate media think Julian Assange is a bad guy who deserves life in prison, except those who watch the great Tucker Carlson. Watch his recent show where he explains why our corporate media and political class hate Assange.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZE7OfU71Sbk?feature=oembed

    He is charged with encouraging Army Private Chelsea Manning to send him embarrassing information, specifically this video of a US Army Apache helicopter gunning down civilians in broad daylight in Baghdad.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/25EWUUBjPMo?feature=oembed

    But there is no proof of this, and Manning has repeatedly said he never communicated to Assange about anything. Manning got eight years in prison for this crime; the Apache pilots were never charged. and now they want to hang Assange for exposing a war crime. I have recommend this great 2016 interview twice, where Assange calmly explains the massive corruption that patriotic FBI agents refer to as the “Clinton Crime Family.”

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/_sbT3_9dJY4?feature=oembed

    This gang is so powerful that it ordered federal agents to spy on the Trump political campaign, and indicted and imprisoned some participants in an attempt to pressure President Trump to step down. It seems Trump still fears this gang, otherwise he would order his attorney general to drop this bogus charge against Assange, then pardon him forever and invite him to speak at White House press conferences.

    The Alarmist , says: April 13, 2019 at 5:01 am GMT

    “… they ignored the fact that Assange was forced to hole up for years in the embassy, under the most intense form of house arrest, even though he no longer had a case to answer in Sweden.”

    Meh! Assange should have walked out the door of the embassy years ago. He might have ended up in the same place, but he could have seized the moral high ground by seeking asylum in Britain for fear of the death penalty in the US, which was a credible fear given public comments by various US officials. By rotting away in the Ecuadorian embassy, be greatly diminished any credibility he might have had to turn the UK judicial system inside out to his favour. Now he’s just a creepy looking bail jumper who flung faeces against the wall, rather than being a persecuted journalist.

    Endgame Napoleon , says: April 13, 2019 at 6:14 am GMT
    @Johnny Rottenborough Millionaire politicians on both sides of the political fence get very emotional about anything that impacts their own privacy & safety and the privacy & safety of their kin, while ignoring the issues that jeopardize the privacy & safety of ordinary voters. While corporate-owned politicians get a lot out of this game, ordinary voters who have never had less in the way of Fourth Amendment privacy rights, and whose First Amendment rights are quickly shrinking to the size of Assange’s, do not get the consolation of riches without risk granted to bought-off politicians in this era’s pay-to-play version of democracy. It’s a lose / lose for average voters.
    Tom Welsh , says: April 13, 2019 at 9:31 am GMT
    Mr Cook’s criticism of the mainstream media (MSM) is absolutely justified.

    It seems to me that their hatred of Mr Assange reflects the unfortunate fact that, while he is a real journalist, they actually aren’t. Instead, they are stenographers for power: what Paul Craig Roberts calls “presstitutes” (a very happy coinage which exactly hits the bull’s eye).

    The difference is that real journalists, like Mr Assange, Mr Roberts and Mr Cook, are mainly motivated by the search for objective truth – which they then publish, as far as they are able.

    Whereas those people who go by the spurious names of “journalist”, “reporter”, “editor”, etc. are motivated by the desire to go on earning their salaries, and to gain promotion and “distinction” in society. (Sad but true: social distinction is often gained by performing acts of dishonesty and downright wickedness).

    Here are some interesting quotations that cast some light on this disheartening state of affairs. If you look carefully at their dates you may be surprised to find that nothing has changed very much since the mid-19th century.

    ‘Marr: “How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are…”

    ‘Chomsky: “I’m not saying you’re self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting”’.

    – Transcript of interview between Noam Chomsky and Andrew Marr (Feb. 14, 1996) https://scratchindog.blogspot.com/2015/07/transcript-of-interview-between-noam.html

    ‘If something goes wrong with the government, a free press will ferret it out and it will get fixed. But if something goes wrong with our free press, the country will go straight to hell’.

    – I. F. Stone (as reported by his son Dr Jeremy J Stone) http://russia-insider.com/en/media-criticism/hey-corporate-media-glenn-greenwald-video-can-teach-you-what-real-journalism/ri6669

    ‘There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes’.

    – John Swinton (1829–1901), Scottish-American journalist, newspaper publisher, and orator. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Swinton http://www.rense.com/general20/yes.htm

    ‘The press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty’.

    – Oswald Spengler, “The Decline of the West” Vol. II, trans. C.F. Atkinson (1928), p. 462

    ‘How do wars start? Wars start when politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read in the press’.

    – Karl Kraus, “Through Western Eyes – Russia Misconstrued” http://www.hellevig.net/ebook/Putin’s%20new%20Russia.pdf

    And finally, two quotations from classic novels which go to the heart of the matter.

    ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it’.

    – Upton Sinclair

    ‘Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids’.

    – John Steinbeck (“East of Eden”)

    UncommonGround , says: April 13, 2019 at 10:13 am GMT
    Very good article. There is one point that I would like to make: Assange asked for asyl before he went to the embassy of Ecuador and Ecuador gave him asylum. This meant that they had an obligation to protect him. It’s really unbeliavable that a country gives asylum to someone and half way tells that they have changed their mind and will let the person be arrested. ” We told you you would be safe with us, but now we just changed our mind”. Assange also became a citizen of Ecuador and this possibly means that Ecuador couldn’t have let him been arrested in their embassy by the police of another country without a process against him in Ecuador and without him having the right to defend himself in a court. Many countries don’t extradit their citizens to other countries.

    Another remark. For years there were uncountable articles about Assange in The Guardian. Those articles were read by many people and got really many comments. There were very fierce discussions about him with thousends of comments. With time The Guardian turned decisively against him and published articles againt him. There were people there who seemed to hate him. In the last days there were again many articles about him. They pronounce themselves discretely against his extradition to the US even if showing themselves to be critical of him as if trying to justify their years of attacks against him. But one detail: I didn’t find even one article in The Guardian where you can comment the case. Today for instance you can comment an article by Gaby Hinsliff about Kim Kardashian. Marina Hyde talks in an article about washing her hair (whatever else she wants to say, with 2831 comments at this moment). But you don’t find any article about Assange that you can comment. 10 or 8 or 5 years ago there were hundreds of articles about him that you could comment.

    EliteCommInc. , says: April 13, 2019 at 10:59 am GMT
    The game afoot here is obvious.

    https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2017/04/03/ecuador-next-venezuela/

    Pressure relief

    Tsar Nicholas , says: April 13, 2019 at 11:38 am GMT
    @Art

    UK PM May said about Assange – “no one is above the law” – proving she is a weak sister without a clue.

    No one is above the law except the British government, which ignored the provisions of the EU Withdrawal Act requiring us to leave on March 29th.

    No one is above the law except for the US and the UK which have illegally deployed forces to Syria against the wishes of the government in Damascus.

    And Tony Blair, a million dead thanks to his corruption. He should be doing time in a Gulag for his evil crimes.

    And of course, the black MP for Peterborough – Fiona Onasanya – served a mere three weeks in jail for perverting the course of justice, normally regarded as a very serious offence. But she was out in time – electronic tag and curfew notwithstanding – to vote in the House of Commons against leaving the EU.

    [Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). ..."
    "... Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017). ..."
    "... "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) ..."
    "... Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today." ..."
    "... From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma. ..."
    "... So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis. ..."
    "... And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. ..."
    "... Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not? ..."
    "... So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers ..."
    Apr 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Jean Ranc via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Russophobia, as psycho-social-political pathology, is diagnosed as a disorder in The West since before the 1000-year-old Roman-Orthodox religious schism and most recently manifested with a vengeance in the course of the 2013-14 with Edward Snowden's revelations of mass surveillance by the US and its covert activities leading to the Ukraine coup with Russophobia used thereafter as a weapon of mass deception to inflame this latent pathology in the public.

    After more than a year since we first heard the BBC "breaking news" about the "Russians Poisoning the Skipals", all we have are allegations, but there is still no real evidence to present before a judge and jury for a just trial, only media propaganda which has provoked even more fear and hysteria meant to distract people from the government's bungling and high level of anxiety over Brexit by once again blaming Russia . Never-the-less, it prompted politicians to administer instant sanctions against Russia as punishment. That first day, the "evidence", presented in the usual clipped, "authoritative" British accents, included interviews with a conservative British MP, then the former US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow (2001-05), now with the notoriously hawkish US-based think tank, the Atlantic Council. Thus, the three of them: the BBC "journalist" and the two "experts", colluded to transform false allegations into "facts"... fueled, as always, by their perpetual prejudice, RUSSOPHOBIA, in the course of their propaganda war to force Russia to surrender to American-led Western Domination or else: have their economy destroyed & their people suffer. Indeed, it is a threat to the whole world played to the discord of rattling nuclear swords with a chorus of vindictive Russian oligarchs, whom Putin expelled for robbing the Russian people. So, now living in London as expats, they would seem to be the more likely culprits. All the while elsewhere in London, thanks to our "special US-UK relationship", Julian Assange has been excommunicated and imprisoned in a tiny "cell" at the Ecuador embassy for revealing embarrassing American secrets via Wikileaks.

    There we have it: the poisoning of our minds by the media and politicians which are owned and controlled by the US-UK-EU 1%, who benefit from Western Hegemony. So, these deluded few are now desperately defending it from the rising powers led by Russia and China with India not far behind demanding a multi-polar, democratic world order.

    My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). And there, the detoxification of my mind began as I studied his deft, well-documented deconstruction of the political propaganda disseminated "by various think tanks, congressional testimonials, activities of NGOs and the media" (preface p. XIII)

    Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017).

    There, Mettan informs us that this psycho-social pathology in Western Civilization" goes back more than 1000 years: to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox and Roman churches. Indeed, his research into the depths of history confirms the diagnosis by our renowned American psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, in his 2003 book, "Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World".

    Therein, Lifton states: "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) And Mettan's analysis of Russophobia also underscores the work of University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, our leading international relations "realist" in his three Henry L. Stimson lectures at Yale University November 2017: "The Roots of Liberal Hegemony", "The False Promises of Liberal Hegemony" and "The Case for Restraint": with his book , "The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams, International Realities" published in 2018.

    But what about "Russian Aggression" in Ukraine & Crimea?

    In the first place, it was the astute Mearsheimer, who, in the Sept-Oct 2014 Foreign Affairs, informed us "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin" (pp 77-89), but the American foreign policy establishment, together with ambitious politicians and the me-too media, paid no heed and continues to repeat its fabricated "facts".

    Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today."

    Karl Rove: "We're an empire now; we create our own reality."

    [In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W. Bush -- identified later as Karl Rove, Bush's Deputy White House Chief of Staff -- told him, "We're an empire now, we create our own reality."]

    Thus, we've become trapped in a contrived "reality" promulgated by neo-conservative warriors under cover of neo-liberal "democracy-spreading-humanitarian-interventionists" to justify an American Empire promoting itself as the indispensable "Liberal World Order". However, under that global order, as Sakwa points out on p. 219: "If a foreign power is considered to have violated 'international order', then it can be overthrown" as a rationale for American "regime change" anywhere around the world: whether to control the supply of copper in Chile or oil in Iran. And, with its eye on Russia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources, America claims the right to threaten Russia by ringing it with weapons which we would not abide were the Russians to place missiles in Mexico as the Soviets did in Cuba to defend it after our "Bay of Pigs" invasion that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. Thus, Russia was defending itself in Ukraine against further NATO expansion while Crimean citizens, by majority vote in a democratic referendum, chose to rejoin Russia as they had been one country ever since Catherine the Great except for an interval in the '50s when Crimea was" gifted" to Ukraine while they were all members of the Soviet Union.

    "Ditching Solzhenitsyn, Defender of Russia"

    And not to forget that in 1974, after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his family fled first to Zurich then to Vermont in 1976 and lived on a farm near Cavendish, where he continued to write and publish his work. Meanwhile, Mettan, as a journalist covering events related to Russia, became quite distressed over "the widespread prejudices, cartloads of clichés and systematic anti-Russian biases of most western media." And he went on to say that "the more I traveled, discussed and read, the wider I perceived, the more the gap of incomprehension and ignorance between Western Europe and Russia became evident.

    "That was why, during the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn. For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence. We had praised Solzhenitsyn to the skies as long as he criticized his native country, communist Russia. But as soon as he emigrated, realizing that he preferred to isolate himself in his Vermont retreat to work rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves from the great writer.

    "The idol no longer matched the image they had built and was becoming a hindrance to their academic and journalistic career plans. And once Solzhenitsyn had left the United States to go back to Russia and defend his humiliated, demoralized motherland that was being sold at auction, raising his voice against the Russian 'Westernizers' and pluralist liberals who denied the interests of Russia to better revel in the troughs of capitalism, he became a marked man, an outdated, senile writer, even though he himself had not changed in the least, denouncing with the same vigor the defects of market totalitarianism as those of communist totalitarianism.

    "He was booed, despised, his name was dragged through the mud for his choices, often by the very people who had praised his first fights. Despite that, against all odds, against the most powerful powers that were trying to dissuade him, Solzhenitsyn defended his one and only cause, that of Russia. He was not forgiven for having turned his pen against that West that had welcomed him and felt it was owed eternal gratitude. A dissident today, a dissident wherever truth compelled, such was his motto. This deserves to be remembered." Mettan, pp. 15-16 in "Creating Russophobia".

    Russophobia: akin to Racism

    From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma.

    Until in high school, I became so perplexed and appalled by the curtain of hate and "justifications" in which we were smothered: the Negro schools on the other side of town? and why were there separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains & restrooms in bus and train stations?...that I began poking holes in the curtain to see what was outside...and found a book in the library: "South of Freedom" by Carl Rowan, an African-American Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, describing his journey from South to North. So, thanks to what I learned from Rowan, I began to tear the whole damned curtain down...at least in my mind.

    Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad?

    So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis.

    These are not poor "niggers" from the Eurasian ghetto we've been trying to club into submission as second-class citizens of "The Liberal World Order" dominated by US; they're nuclear-armed and no longer willing to sit at a separate, inferior table with no vote and no voice over who makes the rules...nor are China, India and Brazil. And last year, while the wave of Russophobic hysteria over alleged "Russian poisoning" was rolling out of the UK and engulfing the Western world in the latest siege of mass madness with only Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labor party, having the courage to stand up in Parliament on the Ides of March and demand Evidence! only to be pilloried by the mindless politicians and media led by the once esteemed BBC.

    And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.

    Meanwhile, not to forget that it was Hearst newspaper propaganda that whipped the American public into a war frenzy to support our first step in empire-building: our 1898 intervention in Cuba's war for independence from the Spanish Empire which had dominated all of Latin America for 500 years. As the former NYTimes journalist/bureau chief in Istanbul, Berlin & Central America, Stephen Kinzer reminds us in his latest book "The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire", Twain, Booker T. Washington and even Andrew Carnegie leading a handful of other anti-imperialists...were not able to prevail against Roosevelt with his Rough Riders and the Hearst newspapers' war propaganda.

    Regime Change Comes Home

    Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not?

    In the Middle East where our regime-change machine managed to plow its way through Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya before breaking down in Syria. Until now it's been brought home again, renovated and renamed "RussiaGate" for another attempt at removing a President for trying to mend US relations with Russia. Though even after more than a year of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigations accompanied by such cinematic support as the movie, "Felt", another "Watergate" re-run. Did anyone else notice the resemblance between "Felt" and Mueller? And despite the media's commemoration of its 44-year-old "moment of courage" with the movie "The Post" to promote Trump's ouster, our democratically-elected President, as of this writing, remains in power. However, in this rush to "regime change", didn't the our "ruling elite" read Jane Mayer's "The Danger of President Pence" in the 10/23/17 New Yorker? At least the 70s' "ruling class" was smart enough to remove an unqualified Vice President Spiro (who?) Agnew before "regime changing" Nixon and replacing him with the more or less benign Gerald Ford.

    A Florentine Epiphany

    But back to last January in Florence, Italy, when I was hiking in the hills beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its spectacular view of that Renaissance city and its centerpiece, the Duomo, I came across the Villa Galileo, which had been his last home after his trial as a "heretic", during which to save himself from torture and execution, he was forced to deny his helio-centric vision and henceforth lived under "villa arrest", from 1631 until his natural death in 1642. While pondering his fate, I continued walking along the gently rising, ever-narrowing road between ancient stone walls overlooking villas and olive groves until I reached the peak, where I felt as if I were standing on top of the world as I contemplated both the Arno and Ema river valleys far below and where I swear I heard Galileo declare: "The world does not turn on an American axis!"

    The 21st Century Inquisition

    So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers such as Edward Snowden, our electronic age "Solzhenitsyn?" in Russian exile; Chelsea Manning, imprisoned some 7 years for revealing US brutality in Iraq; Julian Assange confined to his Ecuadorian Embassy exile in London since August 2012; Katharine Gun, a whistleblower attempting to stop the Iraq invasion, who faced 2 years of British imprisonment before her case was dropped; James Risen, former New York Times journalist who was persecuted by our "justice" system for revealing our government's surveillance of US!

    Any Good Sense Left?

    So, do we the people have enough good sense & independent thinking left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau?

    "Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality."

    "Walden" 1854

    If not, the Doctor prescribes Shock Therapy:

    For a week, a month, or however long it takes to cleanse and open the mind, one must adhere to strict abstinence from Mainstream Media propaganda, junk news, pseudo analysis, fake photos, TV & videos including absolutely NO phony "for, by & of the people" NPR, PBS, BBC or other Government-funded Neo or LibCon Imperial tranquilizer.

    [Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). ..."
    "... Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017). ..."
    "... "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) ..."
    "... Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today." ..."
    "... From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma. ..."
    "... So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis. ..."
    "... And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. ..."
    "... Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not? ..."
    "... So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers ..."
    Apr 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Jean Ranc via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Russophobia, as psycho-social-political pathology, is diagnosed as a disorder in The West since before the 1000-year-old Roman-Orthodox religious schism and most recently manifested with a vengeance in the course of the 2013-14 with Edward Snowden's revelations of mass surveillance by the US and its covert activities leading to the Ukraine coup with Russophobia used thereafter as a weapon of mass deception to inflame this latent pathology in the public.

    After more than a year since we first heard the BBC "breaking news" about the "Russians Poisoning the Skipals", all we have are allegations, but there is still no real evidence to present before a judge and jury for a just trial, only media propaganda which has provoked even more fear and hysteria meant to distract people from the government's bungling and high level of anxiety over Brexit by once again blaming Russia . Never-the-less, it prompted politicians to administer instant sanctions against Russia as punishment. That first day, the "evidence", presented in the usual clipped, "authoritative" British accents, included interviews with a conservative British MP, then the former US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow (2001-05), now with the notoriously hawkish US-based think tank, the Atlantic Council. Thus, the three of them: the BBC "journalist" and the two "experts", colluded to transform false allegations into "facts"... fueled, as always, by their perpetual prejudice, RUSSOPHOBIA, in the course of their propaganda war to force Russia to surrender to American-led Western Domination or else: have their economy destroyed & their people suffer. Indeed, it is a threat to the whole world played to the discord of rattling nuclear swords with a chorus of vindictive Russian oligarchs, whom Putin expelled for robbing the Russian people. So, now living in London as expats, they would seem to be the more likely culprits. All the while elsewhere in London, thanks to our "special US-UK relationship", Julian Assange has been excommunicated and imprisoned in a tiny "cell" at the Ecuador embassy for revealing embarrassing American secrets via Wikileaks.

    There we have it: the poisoning of our minds by the media and politicians which are owned and controlled by the US-UK-EU 1%, who benefit from Western Hegemony. So, these deluded few are now desperately defending it from the rising powers led by Russia and China with India not far behind demanding a multi-polar, democratic world order.

    My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). And there, the detoxification of my mind began as I studied his deft, well-documented deconstruction of the political propaganda disseminated "by various think tanks, congressional testimonials, activities of NGOs and the media" (preface p. XIII)

    Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017).

    There, Mettan informs us that this psycho-social pathology in Western Civilization" goes back more than 1000 years: to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox and Roman churches. Indeed, his research into the depths of history confirms the diagnosis by our renowned American psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, in his 2003 book, "Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World".

    Therein, Lifton states: "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) And Mettan's analysis of Russophobia also underscores the work of University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, our leading international relations "realist" in his three Henry L. Stimson lectures at Yale University November 2017: "The Roots of Liberal Hegemony", "The False Promises of Liberal Hegemony" and "The Case for Restraint": with his book , "The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams, International Realities" published in 2018.

    But what about "Russian Aggression" in Ukraine & Crimea?

    In the first place, it was the astute Mearsheimer, who, in the Sept-Oct 2014 Foreign Affairs, informed us "Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin" (pp 77-89), but the American foreign policy establishment, together with ambitious politicians and the me-too media, paid no heed and continues to repeat its fabricated "facts".

    Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today."

    Karl Rove: "We're an empire now; we create our own reality."

    [In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W. Bush -- identified later as Karl Rove, Bush's Deputy White House Chief of Staff -- told him, "We're an empire now, we create our own reality."]

    Thus, we've become trapped in a contrived "reality" promulgated by neo-conservative warriors under cover of neo-liberal "democracy-spreading-humanitarian-interventionists" to justify an American Empire promoting itself as the indispensable "Liberal World Order". However, under that global order, as Sakwa points out on p. 219: "If a foreign power is considered to have violated 'international order', then it can be overthrown" as a rationale for American "regime change" anywhere around the world: whether to control the supply of copper in Chile or oil in Iran. And, with its eye on Russia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources, America claims the right to threaten Russia by ringing it with weapons which we would not abide were the Russians to place missiles in Mexico as the Soviets did in Cuba to defend it after our "Bay of Pigs" invasion that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. Thus, Russia was defending itself in Ukraine against further NATO expansion while Crimean citizens, by majority vote in a democratic referendum, chose to rejoin Russia as they had been one country ever since Catherine the Great except for an interval in the '50s when Crimea was" gifted" to Ukraine while they were all members of the Soviet Union.

    "Ditching Solzhenitsyn, Defender of Russia"

    And not to forget that in 1974, after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his family fled first to Zurich then to Vermont in 1976 and lived on a farm near Cavendish, where he continued to write and publish his work. Meanwhile, Mettan, as a journalist covering events related to Russia, became quite distressed over "the widespread prejudices, cartloads of clichés and systematic anti-Russian biases of most western media." And he went on to say that "the more I traveled, discussed and read, the wider I perceived, the more the gap of incomprehension and ignorance between Western Europe and Russia became evident.

    "That was why, during the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn. For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence. We had praised Solzhenitsyn to the skies as long as he criticized his native country, communist Russia. But as soon as he emigrated, realizing that he preferred to isolate himself in his Vermont retreat to work rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves from the great writer.

    "The idol no longer matched the image they had built and was becoming a hindrance to their academic and journalistic career plans. And once Solzhenitsyn had left the United States to go back to Russia and defend his humiliated, demoralized motherland that was being sold at auction, raising his voice against the Russian 'Westernizers' and pluralist liberals who denied the interests of Russia to better revel in the troughs of capitalism, he became a marked man, an outdated, senile writer, even though he himself had not changed in the least, denouncing with the same vigor the defects of market totalitarianism as those of communist totalitarianism.

    "He was booed, despised, his name was dragged through the mud for his choices, often by the very people who had praised his first fights. Despite that, against all odds, against the most powerful powers that were trying to dissuade him, Solzhenitsyn defended his one and only cause, that of Russia. He was not forgiven for having turned his pen against that West that had welcomed him and felt it was owed eternal gratitude. A dissident today, a dissident wherever truth compelled, such was his motto. This deserves to be remembered." Mettan, pp. 15-16 in "Creating Russophobia".

    Russophobia: akin to Racism

    From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma.

    Until in high school, I became so perplexed and appalled by the curtain of hate and "justifications" in which we were smothered: the Negro schools on the other side of town? and why were there separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains & restrooms in bus and train stations?...that I began poking holes in the curtain to see what was outside...and found a book in the library: "South of Freedom" by Carl Rowan, an African-American Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, describing his journey from South to North. So, thanks to what I learned from Rowan, I began to tear the whole damned curtain down...at least in my mind.

    Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad?

    So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis.

    These are not poor "niggers" from the Eurasian ghetto we've been trying to club into submission as second-class citizens of "The Liberal World Order" dominated by US; they're nuclear-armed and no longer willing to sit at a separate, inferior table with no vote and no voice over who makes the rules...nor are China, India and Brazil. And last year, while the wave of Russophobic hysteria over alleged "Russian poisoning" was rolling out of the UK and engulfing the Western world in the latest siege of mass madness with only Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labor party, having the courage to stand up in Parliament on the Ides of March and demand Evidence! only to be pilloried by the mindless politicians and media led by the once esteemed BBC.

    And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.

    Meanwhile, not to forget that it was Hearst newspaper propaganda that whipped the American public into a war frenzy to support our first step in empire-building: our 1898 intervention in Cuba's war for independence from the Spanish Empire which had dominated all of Latin America for 500 years. As the former NYTimes journalist/bureau chief in Istanbul, Berlin & Central America, Stephen Kinzer reminds us in his latest book "The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire", Twain, Booker T. Washington and even Andrew Carnegie leading a handful of other anti-imperialists...were not able to prevail against Roosevelt with his Rough Riders and the Hearst newspapers' war propaganda.

    Regime Change Comes Home

    Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not?

    In the Middle East where our regime-change machine managed to plow its way through Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya before breaking down in Syria. Until now it's been brought home again, renovated and renamed "RussiaGate" for another attempt at removing a President for trying to mend US relations with Russia. Though even after more than a year of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigations accompanied by such cinematic support as the movie, "Felt", another "Watergate" re-run. Did anyone else notice the resemblance between "Felt" and Mueller? And despite the media's commemoration of its 44-year-old "moment of courage" with the movie "The Post" to promote Trump's ouster, our democratically-elected President, as of this writing, remains in power. However, in this rush to "regime change", didn't the our "ruling elite" read Jane Mayer's "The Danger of President Pence" in the 10/23/17 New Yorker? At least the 70s' "ruling class" was smart enough to remove an unqualified Vice President Spiro (who?) Agnew before "regime changing" Nixon and replacing him with the more or less benign Gerald Ford.

    A Florentine Epiphany

    But back to last January in Florence, Italy, when I was hiking in the hills beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its spectacular view of that Renaissance city and its centerpiece, the Duomo, I came across the Villa Galileo, which had been his last home after his trial as a "heretic", during which to save himself from torture and execution, he was forced to deny his helio-centric vision and henceforth lived under "villa arrest", from 1631 until his natural death in 1642. While pondering his fate, I continued walking along the gently rising, ever-narrowing road between ancient stone walls overlooking villas and olive groves until I reached the peak, where I felt as if I were standing on top of the world as I contemplated both the Arno and Ema river valleys far below and where I swear I heard Galileo declare: "The world does not turn on an American axis!"

    The 21st Century Inquisition

    So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers such as Edward Snowden, our electronic age "Solzhenitsyn?" in Russian exile; Chelsea Manning, imprisoned some 7 years for revealing US brutality in Iraq; Julian Assange confined to his Ecuadorian Embassy exile in London since August 2012; Katharine Gun, a whistleblower attempting to stop the Iraq invasion, who faced 2 years of British imprisonment before her case was dropped; James Risen, former New York Times journalist who was persecuted by our "justice" system for revealing our government's surveillance of US!

    Any Good Sense Left?

    So, do we the people have enough good sense & independent thinking left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau?

    "Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality."

    "Walden" 1854

    If not, the Doctor prescribes Shock Therapy:

    For a week, a month, or however long it takes to cleanse and open the mind, one must adhere to strict abstinence from Mainstream Media propaganda, junk news, pseudo analysis, fake photos, TV & videos including absolutely NO phony "for, by & of the people" NPR, PBS, BBC or other Government-funded Neo or LibCon Imperial tranquilizer.

    [Apr 13, 2019] How about a paedophile UK Prime Minister never investigated ?

    Apr 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Iris , says: April 13, 2019 at 8:11 pm GMT

    @The Alarmist

    Not to mention more than a few paedo-grooming ring members who are still awaiting deportation

    How convenient these immigrants are when a good smokescreen is needed.
    And how about a paedophile UK Prime Minister never investigated ?

    "Sir Edward Heath WAS a paedophile, says police chief: Astonishing claim is made that the former PM is guilty of vile crimes 'covered up by the Establishment'"

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4238188/Sir-Edward-Heath-paedophile-says-police-chief.html

    [Apr 13, 2019] CIA s 60-Year History of Fake News How the Deep State Corrupted Many American Writers

    Apr 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Agent76 says: April 13, 2019 at 3:12 pm GMT

    April 2, 2019 The CIA Takeover of America in the 1960s Is the Story of Our Times. The Killing of the Kennedys and Today's New Cold War

    'We're all puppets,' the suspect [Sirhan Sirhan] replied, with more truth than he could have understood at that moment." – Lisa Pease, quoting from the LAPD questioning of Sirhan

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/cia-takeover-america-1960s/5673387

    March 19, 2017 The CIA's 60-Year History of Fake News How the Deep State Corrupted Many American Writers

    Whitney's new book, "Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers," explores how the CIA influenced acclaimed writers and publications during the Cold War to produce subtly anti-communist material.

    During the interview, Scheer and Whitney discuss these manipulations and how the CIA controlled major news agencies and respected literary publications (such as the Paris Review).

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46688.htm

    [Apr 13, 2019] Trump Puts America Last by Daniel Larison

    Money quote (from comments): This GOP/Israel connection stinks to high heaven. Anyone who studied or remembers our problem with Communist spies back in the '50s has got to be hearing alarm bells ringing in their ears. Worries about Soviet spying and Russian meddling pale in comparison to what's now going on in plain sight with Israel.
    Notable quotes:
    "... As usual, Trump made the announcement of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials: ..."
    "... After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. ..."
    "... Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for carrying out his policies ..."
    "... There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors. ..."
    "... Once again, Trump has put narrow political ambitions and the interests of a foreign government ahead of the interests of the United States. That seems to be the inevitable result of electing a narcissist who conducts foreign policy based on which leaders flatter and praise him. ..."
    "... Bolton is usually the culprit responsible any destructive and foolish policy decision over the last year, and his baleful influence continues to grow. We can also see the harmful effects of the administration's Iran obsession at work. In the end, the Syria "withdrawal" hasn't happened and apparently isn't going to, but Trump nonetheless gives Israel whatever it wants in exchange for nothing so that they will be "reassured" of our unthinking support. ..."
    "... I wonder what Mr. Kagan has to say now about "authoritarian" regimes?! ..."
    "... Trump is making one hell of a mess for the next president to clean up. ..."
    "... The decision to leave the INF treaty was taken in a similar way and with a total disregard for the consequences. The leaders of the European NATO countries have shown utter spinelessness in going along with it. ..."
    "... I am shocked and horrified by what I've seen under Trump. I am deeply disappointed that so few Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) have stood up to him on foreign policy, and I will never vote Republican again. This GOP/Israel connection stinks to high heaven. Anyone who studied or remembers our problem with Communist spies back in the '50s has got to be hearing alarm bells ringing in their ears. Worries about Soviet spying and Russian meddling pale in comparison to what's now going on in plain sight with Israel. ..."
    "... To be fair, it ain't just Team R that has the sloppy crush on Israel. Team D is just as bad, even if they don't gush quite so publicly. In fact, episodes such as this one are useful in a way, as they make it hard to pretend that this is just a one-off, a misguided decision that we have to go along with to appease a powerful friend. ..."
    "... Nevertheless, Israel should be very concerned about Northern Syria. If war breaks out and the US is forced to go to war with its own NATO ally as a result, Israel should prepare to kiss its alliance with the US goodbye. ..."
    "... Many (rightfully or not) will blame Israel due to its connections to neoconservatism and Saudi jingoism, and consequently we may end up seeing BOTH parties becoming unfriendly to Israel over the subsequent generation. ..."
    "... All of this could be prevented if President Trump would just tell Saudi Arabia to STOP the nonsense. But no. He's too focused on MIC profits. He's not America First. And quite frankly, I'm starting to think Benjamin Netanyahu is not Israel-first either, because if he were he'd be warning Trump about the mess he's going to end up getting America, Israel, and much of Europe and the Middle East into. ..."
    Mar 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    As usual, Trump made the announcement of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials:

    President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.

    U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential announcement this week.

    No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.

    Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.

    After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do.

    Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be good, but the lack of an organized policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they would otherwise be.

    There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.

    Whatever short-term benefit Israel gains from it, the U.S. gains nothing and stands to lose quite a bit in terms of our international standing.

    There has been no consideration of the costs and problems this will create for the U.S. in its relations with other regional states and beyond because Trump couldn't care less about the long-term effects that his decisions have on the country.

    Once again, Trump has put narrow political ambitions and the interests of a foreign government ahead of the interests of the United States. That seems to be the inevitable result of electing a narcissist who conducts foreign policy based on which leaders flatter and praise him.

    Trump's bad decision can be traced back to Bolton's visit to Israel earlier this year:

    Administration officials said that National Security Advisor John Bolton was instrumental to the decision, after visiting Israel in January to assure officials there that the United States would not abandon them in Syria despite Trump's sudden withdrawal of troops from the battlefield.

    Nervous Israeli officials saw an opportunity. "It was an ask," one Israeli source said, "because of the timing -- it suddenly became a relevant issue about Iran."

    Bolton is usually the culprit responsible any destructive and foolish policy decision over the last year, and his baleful influence continues to grow. We can also see the harmful effects of the administration's Iran obsession at work. In the end, the Syria "withdrawal" hasn't happened and apparently isn't going to, but Trump nonetheless gives Israel whatever it wants in exchange for nothing so that they will be "reassured" of our unthinking support.

    SF Bay March 21, 2019 at 10:28 pm

    Well, of course Trump puts America last. There is one and only one person he is interested in -- himself. As you say this is his narcissistic personality at work.

    My never ending question is always, "Why does any Republican with a conscience remain silent? Are they really all this shallow and self absorbed? Is there nothing Trump does that will finally force them to put country before party and their own ambition?"

    It's a really sad state of events that has put this country on the road to ruin.

    Kouros , , March 21, 2019 at 11:39 pm
    I wonder what Mr. Kagan has to say now about "authoritarian" regimes?!
    Trump 2016 , , March 22, 2019 at 1:45 am
    Trump is making one hell of a mess for the next president to clean up. Straightening out all this stupidity will take years. Here's hoping that Trump gets to watch his foreign policy decisions tossed out and reversed from federal prison.
    Grumpy Old Man , , March 22, 2019 at 3:29 am
    He ought to recognize Russia's seizure of Crimea. Why not? Кто кого?
    Tony , , March 22, 2019 at 8:50 am
    The decision to leave the INF treaty was taken in a similar way and with a total disregard for the consequences. The leaders of the European NATO countries have shown utter spinelessness in going along with it.

    The administration says that a Russian missile violates the treaty but it will not tell us what the range of the missile is. Nor will it allow its weapons inspectors to go and look at it.

    The reason is clear: Fear that the weapons inspectors' findings would contradict the administration's claims.

    Some Perspective , , March 22, 2019 at 9:08 am
    I voted Republican ever since I started voting. I voted for Bush I, Dole, Dubya, and McCain. I couldn't vote for either Obama or Romney, but I voted for Trump because of Hillary Clinton.

    I am shocked and horrified by what I've seen under Trump. I am deeply disappointed that so few Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) have stood up to him on foreign policy, and I will never vote Republican again. This GOP/Israel connection stinks to high heaven. Anyone who studied or remembers our problem with Communist spies back in the '50s has got to be hearing alarm bells ringing in their ears. Worries about Soviet spying and Russian meddling pale in comparison to what's now going on in plain sight with Israel.

    We're losing our country. We're losing America.

    Sid Finster , , March 22, 2019 at 10:22 am
    To be fair, it ain't just Team R that has the sloppy crush on Israel. Team D is just as bad, even if they don't gush quite so publicly. In fact, episodes such as this one are useful in a way, as they make it hard to pretend that this is just a one-off, a misguided decision that we have to go along with to appease a powerful friend.

    Europoliticians tell that last one a lot. "We really don't want to but the Americans twisted our arms ZOMG Special Relationship so sorry ZOMG!" Only with a lot more Eurobureaucratese.

    G-Pol , , March 22, 2019 at 11:15 am
    I agree with the article's premise, but not because of this move regarding Israel.

    Personally, I believe this move will have little impact on the outcome of the crisis in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and the other Arab monarchies are too focused on containing Iran and Turkey to give a crap about what Israel does. The only Arab states that I can see objecting to this move are Syria (obviously) and the others who were already allied with Iran and/or Turkey to begin with.

    Right now, the REAL center of attention in the region should be Northern Syria. THAT's where the next major war likely will begin. In that area, Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are the ones doing the major escalations, while Israel has virtually no role at all aside from sideline cheer-leading. And of course, Trump is doing nothing to stop what could become the next July Crisis. What's "America First" about that?

    Nevertheless, Israel should be very concerned about Northern Syria. If war breaks out and the US is forced to go to war with its own NATO ally as a result, Israel should prepare to kiss its alliance with the US goodbye.

    There is no way our international reputation will come out of this war unscathed, and odds are we'll be in a far worse position diplomatically than we were at any point in our history, even during the Iraq war. When that happens, the American people will be out to assign blame. Many (rightfully or not) will blame Israel due to its connections to neoconservatism and Saudi jingoism, and consequently we may end up seeing BOTH parties becoming unfriendly to Israel over the subsequent generation.

    All of this could be prevented if President Trump would just tell Saudi Arabia to STOP the nonsense. But no. He's too focused on MIC profits. He's not America First. And quite frankly, I'm starting to think Benjamin Netanyahu is not Israel-first either, because if he were he'd be warning Trump about the mess he's going to end up getting America, Israel, and much of Europe and the Middle East into.

    [Apr 13, 2019] GOVERNMENT IS BAD, BUT THE DEEP STATE IS PURE EVIL

    The book discussed is The Joys of Psychopathocracy Why Criminality Is Essential To Effective Modern Government, Our Rebirth In The Wake of Their Des
    A very questionable book, which I would not recommend, but some quotes (and only they) are somewhat interesting.
    Mar 30, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Unlike invasive weeds, however, modem Governments - the more effective of them - have managed to develop offensive systems that have destroyed nearly all of the traditional, reformative feedback loops that were used to keep the more outrageous negaciprocal Governments in check in the past.

    For example, the very purpose of the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution - expressed quite specifically by its framers as the People’s God-given right to bear arms - was to allow “the People” to revolt against tyranny. The American Revolution itself wasn’t an act of repulsing a foreign power. It was a war by the British colonies against the very Government which was legally entitled to lay claim to its territory.

    There is absolutely nothing about the American Revolution, celebrated every year in the U.S. with the Day of Independence (July 4), which could not be compared to U.S. citizens rising up today and dethroning the crime syndicate that currently resides in Washington D.C.1

    Will such an occurrence ever happen?

    It will never occur . . . regardless of which new, demonic, uncharted levels of Extreme Negaprocity the U.S. descends into. Quite apart from the stunning successes of the U.S. Government’s relentless gullibility tests, there is the issue of a complete disparity in both defensive and offensive capability between the Government and the governed, between the privileged and the non 1%.

    In earlier times a Government didn’t think in terms of superior military technology. It thought about advantages in terms of “numbers” or resources. For many hundreds of years, European Governments had able fighters; so did the people. Governments had military hardware; spears, shields, horses, bows, arrows, and other low-tech weaponry. So did the people. Governments were far more worried about inciting citizen unrest.

    Washington has the luxury of not caring whatsoever about this. Today the disparity between the tools that a people can use to protect itself against an excessively tyrannical Government and the tools that a Government can use to quell even mild dissension have never been greater.

    Chapter 3: It Is the Nature Of Governments, As Creatures Of Extreme Negaprocity, To Create And Nurture Systems Of "Intermediaryism"' That Extend And Preserve Their Negaciprocal Activities

    When Jerry Mander wrote The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television in 1975, his first argument was that television was creating an "intermediary" world where people were divorced from their own experience of reality.2 Having been near the pinnacle of the television advertising business for years, he could see, first-hand, how television allowed vested interests to create realities that distorted, subverted, and misdirected not only people's own personal interests, but how it disconnected them from any meaningful interaction with the natural world around them.

    He was able to see how television was being used to program people in insidious ways. Television, however, is only one artifact of intermediary subversion that saturates the landscape of modern life. The arguments that Mander made could well be applied to a host of
    technological gadgets and devices...

    ... ... ....

    as i proceeded into aduitnood, i was sucked into a dcvolutionary whirlwind of college life, military service, business, the creation of three manufacturing companies, two failed marriages, two stints in U.S. federal prison related to my work as an herbalist, and then the realization that I could never safely return to the country of my birth - no matter what I said or did - and that 1 must live out the remainder of my days in exile.

    There is no place left for me in this world.

    With more than seven billion people currently living on the planet, it would be absurd to suggest that we have seen the complete collapse of human habitat. It’s a work in progress. (You always see the greatest population bloom just before overshoot and die-out. Ask any evolutionary biologist.)

    What we have now is only the complete collapse of suitable habitat for fully functioning human beings who are spiritually aware. I am, as author Kurt Vonnegut concluded in his final work, “a Man Without a Country,” who has unwittingly found himself in the “Lunatic Asylum of the Universe.”1 And I suspect that many of the people who will choose to read this book feel the same way. Nonetheless, it is yet a better exile that we seek. Once
    again, if the fundamental principle of life as expressed in the Chinese I Ching is true - that “when situations proceed beyond their extremes, they alternate to their opposites,”4 then our journey home can only be filled with light, love, and an inexpressible joy that we cannot - even now - imagine. No one may know the timing, but our way must be clear, our minds calm, and our spirits aware. For "only the bright and the gentle can overcome
    the dark and unyielding.”5

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

    Author, lecturer and herbalist Greg Caton joins me to discuss the psychopathy of government and the pure evil that is the deep state.

    Please consider supporting SGT Report on Patreon with a monthly contribution: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5104183

    Follow My Logic , 1 week ago

    It wasn't Colby, but William Casey. "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." William Casey, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1981 – 1987.

    Victoria O'Shea , 1 week ago

    32:54 ..."I'm an elitist and you're stupid which gives me a right to rule over you".... ... I'm paraphrasing here Darwin's theory of evolution goes against the laws of thermodynamics in that you cannot create order out of chaos, chaos creates chaos. This man is brilliant I'm getting his book!

    Metal Warrior , 1 week ago

    Here in Portugal people almost beat me when i talk about this things, i feel alone, nobody see the Deep state pulling the strings throught the Eurpean Union, i'm hiting my my to the wall everyday seeing some shiit hapening in this country

    Cindy WH-Witter , 1 week ago

    Another book now on my reading list! And I buy the books. I still love the feel of them in my hands. 😊

    [Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a "key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz). ..."
    "... It is true that Putin is different from the silver-spooned Trump and the rabid war-mongers Pompeo and Bolton. ..."
    Apr 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    annamaria , says: April 12, 2019 at 5:32 pm GMT

    @Anonymous

    What planet are you from? https://www.rt.com/news/456363-victory-trump-icc-atrocities/

    annamaria , says: April 12, 2019 at 5:47 pm GMT
    @Dmitry " because Putin was a KGB officer during the Cold War."

    How interesting And what was the position of the pres. Bush Sr.? You have never knew? Here is a surprise for "Dmitri:" https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2016-featured-story-archive/bush-as-director-of-central-intelligence.html

    Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a "key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz).

    Ledeen is "a former consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense. He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a scholar for twenty years and now holds the similarly named chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

    Ledeen is considered an "agent of influence" for a foreign government: Israel.

    http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=michael_ledeen

    https://off-guardian.org/2019/04/06/operation-gladio-the-unholy-alliance/

    It is true that Putin is different from the silver-spooned Trump and the rabid war-mongers Pompeo and Bolton.

    [Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a "key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz). ..."
    "... It is true that Putin is different from the silver-spooned Trump and the rabid war-mongers Pompeo and Bolton. ..."
    Apr 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    annamaria , says: April 12, 2019 at 5:32 pm GMT

    @Anonymous

    What planet are you from? https://www.rt.com/news/456363-victory-trump-icc-atrocities/

    annamaria , says: April 12, 2019 at 5:47 pm GMT
    @Dmitry " because Putin was a KGB officer during the Cold War."

    How interesting And what was the position of the pres. Bush Sr.? You have never knew? Here is a surprise for "Dmitri:" https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2016-featured-story-archive/bush-as-director-of-central-intelligence.html

    Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a "key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz).

    Ledeen is "a former consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense. He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a scholar for twenty years and now holds the similarly named chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

    Ledeen is considered an "agent of influence" for a foreign government: Israel.

    http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=michael_ledeen

    https://off-guardian.org/2019/04/06/operation-gladio-the-unholy-alliance/

    It is true that Putin is different from the silver-spooned Trump and the rabid war-mongers Pompeo and Bolton.

    [Apr 12, 2019] Did Max Boot and Commentary Magazine Lie About Edward Snowden You Decide by Glenn Greenwald

    Notable quotes:
    "... It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank warmonger is the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice . Unlike Snowden -- who sacrificed his liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs -- the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself. ..."
    "... All of that is just garden-variety neocon cowardice, and it's of course grotesque to watch someone like this call someone else a coward. ..."
    "... It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear whistleblowers. But even neocon rags like Commentary shouldn't be able to get away with this level of blatant lying. ..."
    "... Being a neocon coward means never having to admit error. ..."
    Jun 05, 2015 | theintercept.com

    In the neocon journal Commentary , Max Boot today complains that the New York Times published an op-ed by Edward Snowden . Boot's objection rests on his accusation that the NSA whistleblower is actually a "traitor." In objecting, Boot made these claims:

    Oddly enough nowhere in his article -- which is datelined Moscow -- does he mention the surveillance apparatus of his host, Vladimir Putin , which far exceeds in scope anything created by any Western country. . . .That would be the same FSB that has taken Snowden into its bosom as it has previously done (in its earlier incarnation as the KGB) with previous turncoats such as Kim Philby. . . .

    But of course Ed Snowden is not courageous enough, or stupid enough, to criticize the dictatorship that he has defected to. It's much easier and safer to criticize the country he betrayed from behind the protection provided by the FSB's thugs. The only mystery is why the Times is giving this traitor a platform.

    It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank warmonger is the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice . Unlike Snowden -- who sacrificed his liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs -- the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself.

    All of that is just garden-variety neocon cowardice, and it's of course grotesque to watch someone like this call someone else a coward. But it's so much worse if he lies when doing so. Did he do so here? You decide. From Snowden's NYT op-ed today:

    Basic technical safeguards such as encryption -- once considered esoteric and unnecessary -- are now enabled by default in the products of pioneering companies like Apple, ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private. Such structural technological changes can ensure access to basic privacies beyond borders, insulating ordinary citizens from the arbitrary passage of anti­ privacy laws, such as those now descending upon Russia.

    The meaning of that passage -- criticisms of Russia's attack on privacy -- is so clear and glaring that it caused even Time magazine to publish this today :

    The first sentence of Time 's article: "Former CIA officer and NSA contractor Ed Snowden has taken a surprising swing at his new home, accusing Russia of 'arbitrarily passing' new anti-privacy laws ." In other words, in the very op-ed to which Boot objects, Snowden did exactly that which Boot accused him of lacking the courage to do: "criticize" the country that has given him asylum.

    This is far from the first time Snowden has done exactly that which the Tough and Swaggering Think Tank Warrior proclaimed Snowden would never do. In April, 2014, Snowden wrote an op-ed in The Guardian under this headline:

    With Max Boot's above-printed accusations in mind, just re-read that. Did Boot lie? To pose the question is to answer it. Here's part of what Snowden wrote in that op-ed:

    On Thursday, I questioned Russia's involvement in mass surveillance on live television. . . . I went on to challenge whether, even if such a mass surveillance program were effective and technically legal, it could ever be morally justified. . . . In his response, Putin denied the first part of the question and dodged on the latter. There are serious inconsistencies in his denial.

    In countless speeches, Snowden has said much the same thing: that Russian spying is a serious problem that needs investigation and reform, and that Putin's denials are not credible. Boot simply lied about Snowden.

    It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear whistleblowers. But even neocon rags like Commentary shouldn't be able to get away with this level of blatant lying.

    UPDATE : In typical neocon fashion, Boot first replies by minimizing his own error to a mere innocent oversight, and implying that only hysteria could cause anyone to find what he did to be problematic. Even then, the facts negate his self-justification. But then he says he was actually right all along and his "point stands":

    Being a neocon coward means never having to admit error.

    [Apr 12, 2019] John Bolton Took Money From Clinton Foundation Donor, Banks Tied To Cartels, Terrorists, Iran by William Craddick

    Notable quotes:
    "... On June 12, 2018 The Washington Post ran an overlooked story where they disclosed that National Security Advisor John Bolton had accepted money from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Deutsche Bank and HSBC to return for his participation in speeches and panel discussions ..."
    "... John Bolton accepted $115,000 from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation to speak at multiple events hosted by the Foundation including one in September 2017 where Bolton assured his audience that President Donald Trump would not radically change US foreign policy despite his explicit campaign promises to do so. ..."
    "... More broadly, John Bolton's work for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, HSBC and Deutsche Bank shows that while he preaches hardline foreign policy approaches towards nations such as Iran and North Korea he has no issue tying himself to those who openly flaunt American sanctions and diplomatic attempts to pressure these states. For an individual who is the President's National Security Advisor to have taken money from banks who provide financial services to terror groups who have murdered thousands of Americans is totally unacceptable. ..."
    Apr 10, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Via Disobedient Media

    On June 12, 2018 The Washington Post ran an overlooked story where they disclosed that National Security Advisor John Bolton had accepted money from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Deutsche Bank and HSBC to return for his participation in speeches and panel discussions. These three entities have been linked to various kinds of corruption including sanctions evasion for Iran, money laundering on behalf of drug cartels, provision of banking services to backers of Islamic terror organizations and controversial donations to the Clinton Foundation.

    The financial ties between Bolton and these institutions highlight serious ethical concerns about his suitability for the position of National Security Advisor.

    I. Victor Pinchuk Foundation

    John Bolton accepted $115,000 from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation to speak at multiple events hosted by the Foundation including one in September 2017 where Bolton assured his audience that President Donald Trump would not radically change US foreign policy despite his explicit campaign promises to do so.

    The Victor Pinchuk Foundation was blasted in 2016 over their donation of $10 to $25 million to the Clinton Foundation between 1994 and 2005. The donations lead to accusations of influence peddling after it emerged that Victor Pinchuk had been invited to Hillary Clinton's home during the final year of her tenure as Secretary of State.

    Even more damning was Victor Pinchuk's participation in activities that constituted evasions of sanctions levied against Iran by the American government. A 2015 exposé by Newsweek highlighted the fact that Pinchuk owned Interpipe Group, a Cyprus-incorporated manufacturer of seamless pipes used in oil and gas sectors. A now-removed statement on Interpipe's website showed that they were doing business in Iran despite US sanctions aimed to prevent this kind of activity.

    Why John Bolton, a notorious war hawk who has called for a hardline approach to Iran, would take money from an entity who was evading sanctions against the country is not clear. It does however, raise serious questions about whether or not Bolton should be employed by Donald Trump, who made attacks on the Clinton Foundation's questionable donations a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign.

    II. HSBC Group

    British bank HSBC paid Bolton $46,500 in June and August 2017 to speak at two gatherings of hedge fund managers and investors.

    HSBC is notorious for its extensive ties to criminal and terror organizations for whom it has provided illegal financial services. Clients that HSBC have laundered money for include Colombian drug traffickers and Mexican cartels who have terrorized the country and recently raised murder rates to the highest levels in Mexico's history . They have also offered banking services to Chinese individuals who sourced chemicals and other materials used by cartels to produce methamphetamine and heroin that is then sold in the United States. China's Triads have helped open financial markets in Asia to cartels seeking to launder their profits derived from the drug trade.

    In 2012, HSBC was blasted by the US Senate for for allowing money from Russian and Latin American criminal networks as well as Middle Eastern terror groups to enter the US. The banking group ultimately agreed to pay a $1.9 billion fine for this misconduct as well as their involvement in processing sanctions-prohibited transactions on behalf of Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma.

    Some of the terror groups assisted by HSBC include the notorious Al Qaeda. During the 2012 scrutiny of HSBC, outlets such as Le Monde , Business Insider and the New York Times revealed that HSBC had maintained ties to Saudi Arabia's Al Rajhi Bank. Al Rajhi Bank was one of Osama Bin Ladin's "Golden Chain" of Al Qaeda's most important financiers. Even though HSBC's own internal compliance offices asked for the bank to terminate their relationship with Al Rajhi Bank, it continued until 2010.

    More recently in 2018, reports have claimed that HSBC was used for illicit transactions between Iran and Chinese technology conglomerate Huawei. The US is currently seeking to extradite Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou after bringing charges against Huawei related to sanctions evasion and theft of intellectual property. The company has been described as a "backdoor" for elements of the Chinese government by certain US authorities.

    Bolton's decision to accept money from HSBC given their well-known reputation is deeply hypocritical. HSBC's connection to terror organizations such as Al Qaeda in particular is damning for Bolton due to the fact that he formerly served as the chairman of the Gatestone Institute , a New York-based advocacy group that purports to oppose terrorism. These financial ties are absolutely improper for an individual acting as National Security Advisor.

    III. Deutsche Bank

    John Bolton accepted $72,000 from German Deutsche Bank to speak at an event in May 2017.

    Deutsche Bank has for decades engaged in questionable behavior. During World War II, they provided financial services to the Nazi Gestapo and financed construction of the infamous Auschwitz as well as an adjacent plant for chemical company IG Farben.

    Like HSBC, Deutsche Bank has provided illicit services to international criminal organizations. In 2014 court filings showed that Deutsche Bank, Citi and Bank of America had all acted as channels for drug money sent to Colombian security currency brokerages suspected of acting on behalf of traffickers. In 2017, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay a $630 million fine after working with a Danish bank in Estonia to launder over $10 billion through London and Moscow on behalf of Russian entities. The UK's financial regulatory watchdog has said that Deutsche Bank is failing to prevent its accounts from being used to launder money, circumvent sanctions and finance terrorism. In November 2018, Deutsche Bank's headquarters was raided by German authorities as part of an investigation sparked by 2016 revelations in the "Panama Papers" leak from Panama's Mossack Fonseca.

    Two weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the Bush administration signed an executive order linking a company owned by German national Mamoun Darkazanli to Al Qaeda. In 1995, Darkazanli co-signed the opening of a Deutsche Bank account for Mamdouh Mahmud Salim. Salim was identified by the CIA as the chief of bin Laden's computer operations and weapons procurement. He was ultimately arrested in Munich, extradited to the United States and charged with participation in the 1998 US embassy bombings.

    In 2017, the Office of the New York State Comptroller opened an investigation into accounts that Deutsche Bank was operating on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP is defined by both the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization. It is ironic that Bolton, who is a past recipient of the "Guardian of Zion Award" would accept money from an entity who provided services to Palestinian groups that Israel considers to be terror related.

    IV. Clinton-esque Financial Ties Unbecoming To Trump Administration

    Bolton's engagement in paid speeches, in some cases with well-known donors to the Clinton Foundation, paints the Trump administration in a very bad light. Donald Trump criticized Hillary Clinton during his 2016 Presidential campaign for speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs that were labeled by her detractors as "pay to play" behavior. John Bolton's acceptance of money from similar entities, especially the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, are exactly the same kind of activity and are an embarrassment for a President who claims to be against corruption.

    More broadly, John Bolton's work for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, HSBC and Deutsche Bank shows that while he preaches hardline foreign policy approaches towards nations such as Iran and North Korea he has no issue tying himself to those who openly flaunt American sanctions and diplomatic attempts to pressure these states. For an individual who is the President's National Security Advisor to have taken money from banks who provide financial services to terror groups who have murdered thousands of Americans is totally unacceptable.

    It is embarrassing enough that Donald Trump hired Bolton in the first place. The next best remedy is to let him go as soon as possible.

    [Apr 12, 2019] The main goal of those who started Russia probe was to unleash neo-McCarthyism compaign, not so much to attack Trump who provided to the Deep State everything they wanted: he expanded the military budget, cut taxes, reduced regulations

    Notable quotes:
    "... Those who started Russia probe were attempting a 'coup', AG must start investigation – Trump ..."
    "... The coup happened in earnest on 9/11 and the people who started the Russia probe were just doing what they do: sow division and strife within the domestic population to allow them to continue operating in an unfettered manner in service to their master, Zionism. ..."
    "... "When the Mueller report is released, it would be wonderful if he explained why neither he, the senate, nor any one of the federal law or intelligence agencies who have all given opinions on the matter, has ever taken the simple first step of examining the DNC servers. He won't." ..."
    "... Friends and associates of all of these 'ringleaders' (in single-quotes because my suppositions are based on indirect evidence) have gotten key positions in the Trump Administration. ..."
    Apr 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    james , Apr 10, 2019 12:14:58 PM | link

    thoughts on how far this will go?

    Those who started Russia probe were attempting a 'coup', AG must start investigation – Trump

    SlapHappy , Apr 10, 2019 12:29:20 PM | link

    The coup happened in earnest on 9/11 and the people who started the Russia probe were just doing what they do: sow division and strife within the domestic population to allow them to continue operating in an unfettered manner in service to their master, Zionism.
    PJB , Apr 10, 2019 4:04:00 PM | link
    The absurdity of two official mainstream conspiracy theories.

    Nice satire: https://consentfactory.org/2019/04/02/a-russiagate-requiem/

    karlof1 , Apr 10, 2019 7:25:22 PM | link
    Good thread discussion:

    "When the Mueller report is released, it would be wonderful if he explained why neither he, the senate, nor any one of the federal law or intelligence agencies who have all given opinions on the matter, has ever taken the simple first step of examining the DNC servers.
    He won't."

    Nor will there be any answer to the unasked questions that after Murray's open statement about he knowing the leaker and the revelation of the metadata why none of the people involved were questioned.

    karlof1 , Apr 10, 2019 8:13:38 PM | link
    Excellent thread by Aaron Mate! "With Trump, Barr now on offense..."

    "Dems face an awkward choice: continue to defend those who gave them a discredited (& self-defeating) conspiracy theory, or acknowledge that those people, including intel officials, acted improperly."

    I'm sure we'll be discussing what Ray McGovern has dubbed Deep State Gate now that Russiagate's ended. I linked to Ray's essay earlier, which focused on BigLie media's roll.

    Jackrabbit , Apr 10, 2019 11:30:41 PM | link
    karlof1 @49

    IMO the notion that a few senior Intelligence officials (mostly FBI) tried to overthrow Trump is silly to the point of being laughable. But that is the fall-back position that is being ... ur, Trumped up. The fact is, Trump has done everything that the Deep State and establishment could have wanted: expanded the military budget, cut taxes, reduced regulations, etc.

    While some will complain loudly (for now), the whole affair will slowly fade away because, as I've previously noted, the best explanation for Russiagate is that the Deep State selected Trump and ran an anti-Russia psyop to spur neo-McCarthyism. As part of that effort, it seems highly likely that they attempted to settle scores with Wikileaks/Assange and Michael Flynn.

    FBI failures - to follow investigative procedures; to include important information to the FISA court, etc. - are best explained as part of the bi-partisan Deep State consensus to pursue an anti-Russia agenda.

    Anyone that thinks that senior people would participate in such activities without the cover of higher-ups is smoking something. Brennan, Mueller, Hillary, McCain, and Kissinger have the collective power to form and initiate a strategy to meet the challenge from Russia and China.

    It all goes back to the 2014 surprise realization that Russia had grown a backbone and that the Russia-China Alliance was a serious threat to AZ Empire's NWO. That point of view was described by Kissinger in August 2014, in which Kissinger ALSO called for MAGA.

    Trump entered the race for President 10 months later as the only MAGA candidate.

    Jackrabbit | Apr 10, 2019 11:46:30 PM | 69

    @67

    Friends and associates of all of these 'ringleaders' (in single-quotes because my suppositions are based on indirect evidence) have gotten key positions in the Trump Administration.

    [Apr 12, 2019] Tulsi might get a considerable part of nationalists voters who previously voted for Trump

    Apr 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Grahamsno(G64) , says: April 10, 2019 at 5:54 am GMT

    @Thomm That's so true that it's almost incredible, Andrew Anglin of the daily stormer has been campaigning for Tulsi Gabbard & Andrew Yang for well over a month

    He could be said to be instrumental in putting Yang on the democratic primaries and possibly Tulsi as well all the while using his weaponized memes against Trump!! I'm in disbelief.

    [Apr 12, 2019] Gabbard on Assange arrest

    Apr 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Art , says: April 12, 2019 at 6:52 am GMT

    Good On Tulsi Gabbard.

    Gabbard: Assange arrest is a threat to journalists

    By Rachel Frazin – 04/11/19 06:10 PM EDT

    Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) condemned the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday, calling the arrest a threat to journalists.

    "The arrest of #JulianAssange is meant to send a message to all Americans and journalists: be quiet, behave, toe the line. Or you will pay the price," Gabbard tweeted.

    The Democrat's remark came hours after police in London arrested Assange, citing charges he is facing in the U.S.

    Assange is accused of conspiring to hack into computers in connection with WikiLeaks's release of classified documents from former Army private and intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/438542-gabbard-assange-arrest-is-a-threat-to-journalists

    Think Peace -- Art

    [Apr 12, 2019] Was McCain a fake candidate selected to ensure Obama win and Trump another fake candidate who accidentally won?

    Apr 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Zachary Smith , Apr 11, 2019 5:39:02 PM | link

    @ Circe @164

    Odd thing, but suddenly I remember how John McCain came out of nowhere back in 2008. Polling in single digits, suddenly the man is hyped like hell and becomes the candidate. Perfect foil for Obama, I suppose.

    Somehow reminds me of 2016, but then Obama was an unknown, not the most hated politician in the US.

    ^^^

    As for "why now" on the arrest of Assange, it diverts attention from a lot of other topics. Some of those will probably never re-surface.

    [Apr 12, 2019] Skripal, the Russkies and Bellingcat

    The fact that Glenn Greenwald proved to be a despicable pressitute cast a long shadow of Snowden and Assange.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Not mentioned by any of the major news media is the fact that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (sic), renowned for its interference in foreign elections, funding terrorists and overthrowing governments the US doesn't approve of. ..."
    Sep 27, 2018 | investigatingimperialism.wordpress.com
    September 27, 2018 September 27, 2018 27 September 2018 -- Investigating Imperialism

    I smell a rat!

    A quick comment about the two Russian alleged assassins, exposed, we are told by the 'investigative' Website, Bellingcat. Not mentioned by any of the major news media is the fact that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (sic), renowned for its interference in foreign elections, funding terrorists and overthrowing governments the US doesn't approve of.

    Media Lens picked up on this awhile back in reference to another Western financed outfit, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), funded by the UK Foreign Office. I've also expanded this by quoting from Media Lens' other article that deals with Western-funded disinfo, ' Douma: Part 1 – Deception In Plain Sight':

    Liberal corporate journalists and politicians have been impressed by the fact that SOHR and White Helmets claims have been supported by ostensibly forensic analysis supplied by the Bellingcat website, which publishes 'citizen journalist' investigations. As we noted in a recent alert, Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is funded by the US government and is 'a notorious vehicle for US soft power'. – ' The Syrian Observatory – Funded By The Foreign Office ', Media Lens, June 4 2018

    It's worth quoting more of the Media Lens article as it exposes the nature of Western so-called lefties and their attachment to Western (funded) propaganda outfits:

    In the New Statesman, Paul Mason offered a typically nonsensical argument, linking to the anti-Assad website, Bellingcat:

    'Despite the availability of public sources showing it is likely that a regime Mi-8 helicopter dropped a gas container onto a specific building, there are well-meaning people prepared to share the opinion that this was a "false flag", staged by jihadis, to pull the West into the war. The fact that so many people are prepared to clutch at false flag theories is, for Western democracies, a sign of how effective Vladimir Putin's global strategy has been.'

    Thus, echoing Freedland's reference to 'denialists and conspiracists', sceptics can only be idiot victims of Putin's propaganda. US media analyst Adam Johnson of FAIR accurately described Mason's piece as a 'mess', adding :

    'I love this thing where nominal leftists run the propaganda ball for bombing a country 99 yards then stop at the one yard and insist they don't support scoring goals, that they in fact oppose war.'

    Surprisingly, the Bellingcat website, which publishes the findings of 'citizen journalist' investigations, appears to be taken seriously by some very high-profile progressives.

    In the Independent, Green Party leader Caroline Lucas also mentioned the Syrian army 'Mi-8' helicopters. Why? Because she had read the same Bellingcat blog as Mason, to which she linked:

    'From the evidence we've seen so far it appears that the latest chemical attack was likely by Mi-8 helicopters, probably from the forces of Syria's murderous President Assad.'

    On Democracy Now!, journalist Glenn Greenwald said of Douma:

    'I think that it's -- the evidence is quite overwhelming that the perpetrators of this chemical weapons attack, as well as previous ones, is the Assad government '

    This was an astonishing comment. After receiving fierce challenges (not from us), Greenwald partially retracted, tweeting :

    'It's live TV. Something [sic – sometimes] you say things less than ideally. I think the most likely perpetrator of this attack is Syrian Govt.'

    We wrote to Greenwald asking what had persuaded him of Assad's 'likely' responsibility for Douma. (Twitter, April 10, direct message)

    The first piece of evidence he sent us (April 12) was the Bellingcat blog mentioning Syrian government helicopters cited by Mason and Lucas. Greenwald also sent us a report from Reuters, as well as a piece from 2017, obviously prior to the alleged Douma event.

    This was thin evidence indeed for the claim made. In our discussion with him, Greenwald then completely retracted his claim (Twitter, April 12, direct message) that there was evidence of Syrian government involvement in the alleged attack. [My emph. WB] – ' Douma: Part 1 – Deception In Plain Sight'

    [Apr 12, 2019] Did Max Boot and Commentary Magazine Lie About Edward Snowden You Decide by Glenn Greenwald

    Notable quotes:
    "... It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank warmonger is the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice . Unlike Snowden -- who sacrificed his liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs -- the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself. ..."
    "... All of that is just garden-variety neocon cowardice, and it's of course grotesque to watch someone like this call someone else a coward. ..."
    "... It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear whistleblowers. But even neocon rags like Commentary shouldn't be able to get away with this level of blatant lying. ..."
    "... Being a neocon coward means never having to admit error. ..."
    Jun 05, 2015 | theintercept.com

    In the neocon journal Commentary , Max Boot today complains that the New York Times published an op-ed by Edward Snowden . Boot's objection rests on his accusation that the NSA whistleblower is actually a "traitor." In objecting, Boot made these claims:

    Oddly enough nowhere in his article -- which is datelined Moscow -- does he mention the surveillance apparatus of his host, Vladimir Putin , which far exceeds in scope anything created by any Western country. . . .That would be the same FSB that has taken Snowden into its bosom as it has previously done (in its earlier incarnation as the KGB) with previous turncoats such as Kim Philby. . . .

    But of course Ed Snowden is not courageous enough, or stupid enough, to criticize the dictatorship that he has defected to. It's much easier and safer to criticize the country he betrayed from behind the protection provided by the FSB's thugs. The only mystery is why the Times is giving this traitor a platform.

    It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank warmonger is the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice . Unlike Snowden -- who sacrificed his liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs -- the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself.

    All of that is just garden-variety neocon cowardice, and it's of course grotesque to watch someone like this call someone else a coward. But it's so much worse if he lies when doing so. Did he do so here? You decide. From Snowden's NYT op-ed today:

    Basic technical safeguards such as encryption -- once considered esoteric and unnecessary -- are now enabled by default in the products of pioneering companies like Apple, ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private. Such structural technological changes can ensure access to basic privacies beyond borders, insulating ordinary citizens from the arbitrary passage of anti­ privacy laws, such as those now descending upon Russia.

    The meaning of that passage -- criticisms of Russia's attack on privacy -- is so clear and glaring that it caused even Time magazine to publish this today :

    The first sentence of Time 's article: "Former CIA officer and NSA contractor Ed Snowden has taken a surprising swing at his new home, accusing Russia of 'arbitrarily passing' new anti-privacy laws ." In other words, in the very op-ed to which Boot objects, Snowden did exactly that which Boot accused him of lacking the courage to do: "criticize" the country that has given him asylum.

    This is far from the first time Snowden has done exactly that which the Tough and Swaggering Think Tank Warrior proclaimed Snowden would never do. In April, 2014, Snowden wrote an op-ed in The Guardian under this headline:

    With Max Boot's above-printed accusations in mind, just re-read that. Did Boot lie? To pose the question is to answer it. Here's part of what Snowden wrote in that op-ed:

    On Thursday, I questioned Russia's involvement in mass surveillance on live television. . . . I went on to challenge whether, even if such a mass surveillance program were effective and technically legal, it could ever be morally justified. . . . In his response, Putin denied the first part of the question and dodged on the latter. There are serious inconsistencies in his denial.

    In countless speeches, Snowden has said much the same thing: that Russian spying is a serious problem that needs investigation and reform, and that Putin's denials are not credible. Boot simply lied about Snowden.

    It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear whistleblowers. But even neocon rags like Commentary shouldn't be able to get away with this level of blatant lying.

    UPDATE : In typical neocon fashion, Boot first replies by minimizing his own error to a mere innocent oversight, and implying that only hysteria could cause anyone to find what he did to be problematic. Even then, the facts negate his self-justification. But then he says he was actually right all along and his "point stands":

    Being a neocon coward means never having to admit error.

    [Apr 12, 2019] Met Police Arrests Julian Assange

    Apr 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    SteveK9 , Apr 11, 2019 8:29:52 AM | link

    With Bolsanaro in charge in Brazil, Glenn Greenwald could be next. Something I am sure he is very aware. It's also curious that no more of Snowden's documents have been published. I've wondered if they have threatened Greenwald and he is withholding the information, to keep himself out of some dungeon somewhere.

    Russ , Apr 11, 2019 8:37:22 AM | link

    Posted by: SteveK9 | Apr 11, 2019 8:29:52 AM | 33

    "I've wondered if they have threatened Greenwald and he is withholding the information, to keep himself out of some dungeon somewhere."

    No one needs to threaten Greenwald to get him to withhold information. He withholds out of elitist conviction. In his way he's just as much of an elite gatekeeper as anyone at any MSM outlet. (And really an outfit like the Intercept is just a thinly veiled extension of the MSM.)

    It's amazing how for many people, even going to work for a predatory billionaire as Greenwald has, or collaborating as part of that billionaire's project as Snowden has, doesn't automatically peg one as a system stooge.

    Cynica , Apr 11, 2019 8:38:05 AM | link
    @SteveK9 #33

    1. Information "piracy" may have to take to the high seas.
    2. Maybe it would be best to release the rest of Snowden's documents now. Tit for tat.

    vk , Apr 11, 2019 8:39:08 AM | link
    The best Assange can hope for, after the judicial process ran its course, is a pardon by the president of the United States.

    Which, whoever will be, will be the smart thing to do if he/she wants to keep America's soft power from continuing to bleed out.

    GeorgeSmiley , Apr 11, 2019 8:46:18 AM | link
    @SteveK9 #33

    1. Information "piracy" may have to take to the high seas.
    2. Maybe it would be best to release the rest of Snowden's documents now. Tit for tat.

    Posted by: Cynica | Apr 11, 2019 8:38:05 AM | 35


    This WILL NOT happen. Greenwald, his billionaire backer (who owns the docs technically as crazy as that sounds) and his website are all an example of the "acceptable" counter narrative. Greenwald should deserve no respect, he chose money and fame over integrity. That much has become clear. I think the same of Scahill and a few others, though I hear little from him now.

    Sad days. Money will buy a LOT of people. Even those we believe it won't as they are "principled" or once carried conviction . Hell, I imagine most of us are vulnerable to that as well.

    Cynica , Apr 11, 2019 8:38:05 AM | link
    @SteveK9 #33

    1. Information "piracy" may have to take to the high seas.
    2. Maybe it would be best to release the rest of Snowden's documents now. Tit for tat.

    vk , Apr 11, 2019 8:39:08 AM | link
    The best Assange can hope for, after the judicial process ran its course, is a pardon by the president of the United States.

    Which, whoever will be, will be the smart thing to do if he/she wants to keep America's soft power from continuing to bleed out.

    GeorgeSmiley , Apr 11, 2019 8:46:18 AM | link
    @SteveK9 #33

    1. Information "piracy" may have to take to the high seas.
    2. Maybe it would be best to release the rest of Snowden's documents now. Tit for tat.

    Posted by: Cynica | Apr 11, 2019 8:38:05 AM | 35


    This WILL NOT happen. Greenwald, his billionaire backer (who owns the docs technically as crazy as that sounds) and his website are all an example of the "acceptable" counter narrative. Greenwald should deserve no respect, he chose money and fame over integrity. That much has become clear. I think the same of Scahill and a few others, though I hear little from him now.

    Sad days. Money will buy a LOT of people. Even those we believe it won't as they are "principled" or once carried conviction . Hell, I imagine most of us are vulnerable to that as well.

    arby , Apr 11, 2019 8:47:14 AM | link
    It's amazing how for many people, even going to work for a predatory billionaire as Greenwald has, or collaborating as part of that billionaire's project as Snowden has, doesn't automatically peg one as a system stooge.

    Posted by: Russ | Apr 11, 2019 8:37:22 AM | 34

    I don't know. I still read Greenwald on twitter. You just have to pick through where he is dancing on a thin line and in some places openly speaking truth.
    Pretty hard to live on next to nothing and get heard and also enjoy a bit of life as well.
    Obviously he is getting paid very well but I don't see him as a MSM stooge and propagandist.
    I don't bother with the intercept.

    Hoarsewhisperer , Apr 11, 2019 8:49:21 AM | link
    I doubt that Trump will have to intervene. If we cast our minds back to David Hicks and Chelsea Manning, the Yanks wanted both of them to rot in jail for Eternity but 'time served' for both was considerably less. There was also a swarthy, savvy, well-educated bespectacled Brit picked up about the same time as Hicks. I've forgotten his name but he was released in response to strident demands from UK.gov. Ozzies were very pissed off with the Liberal Govt for not following UK.gov's example re David Hicks.

    Superficially, at least, it seems that the US is happy to 'prove' its relentless invincibility, to as wide an audience as possible, when pursuing The AmeriKKKan Way regarding certain 'evildoers' and then going back to sleep.

    If there's a short-term bright note to this story it's the fact that Scum Mo announced the start of Oz Federal Election campaign yesterday and Assange will become an election issue. Scum Mo's Liberals are already in deep doodoo with the electorate for delaying the Banking Royal Commission for almost 2 years. The RC found that all of the big banks and other financial institutions had been engaged in widespread deception, theft and fraudulent behavior. The Royal Commission was given a limited time to produce a report and did NOT set up a compensation body or procedure for the tens of thousands of victims of bank malfeasance.
    So Scum Mo will be tempted to grow a pair and demand that Trump send Assange back to Oz because the Libs were going to be toast anyway and Saving Julian might help some people to forget what greedy dishonest assholes the Libs are.

    Ghost Ship , Apr 11, 2019 8:53:04 AM | link
    I'm not sure Assange will end up in solitary in a U.S. Supermax prison as many so-called progressive Clintonists are hoping and gloating over. From memory the ECHR regards solitary as torture particularly over long periods and the United Kingdom judiciary (who will make the decision) have an established policy of not extraditing prisoners who will be tortured. So, my assessment is, he will be extradited once the US DoJ has given assurances he will not be held in solitary, but it will be a very sad day for press freedom in the United Kingdom.
    Russ , Apr 11, 2019 8:58:29 AM | link
    Posted by: arby | Apr 11, 2019 8:47:14 AM | 38

    "Pretty hard to live on next to nothing and get heard and also enjoy a bit of life as well."

    I've heard about the lavish "next to nothing" Greenwald lives on. Doesn't quite sound the same as my next-to-nothing. As for getting heard, that's mathematical: There's an direct relationship between one's utility to the empire and how much one "gets heard".

    In this case, Greenwald collaborated with the NYT, WaPo and Guardian to curate Snowden's alleged trove (which stopped appearing at all long before it was supposed to be exhausted), in order to release heavily censored portions in a form these MSM elitists judged was suitable for the people to see.

    The basic message, which Snowden himself also has spewed in many speeches, is that the Deep State is basically good, and certainly necessary, it just has committed some abuses and needs "reform" and "oversight".

    That's Greenwald's #1 service for the empire so far, to be the lead man in co-opting the whole Wikileaks-whistleblower movement, since so many people are so interested in "leaks" (even though they never tell us anything we didn't already know from plain sight).

    Zanon , Apr 11, 2019 9:11:08 AM | link
    There we have it! Extradition will (most likely) occur..

    Assange indicted over 'conspiracy with Chelsea Manning in 2010' – DOJ statement
    https://www.rt.com/usa/456244-assange-manning-us-indictment/

    Josh , Apr 11, 2019 9:18:26 AM | link
    We do all hope that Assange's arrest will motivate all those with access to other incriminating data to release those, via Wikileaks or other. The first comment here accurately describes it: (the UK and) the US - and let's add the whole silly 'five eyes' and western front - has become the new Soviet Union. Roles have reversed; it's not about ideology but about power structure.
    Here's for Assange to become the Sakharov of our time. However, that would mean we foster the hope or expect that our western hemisphere could birth a Gorbachev-type idealist who can attain power long enough to destroy the power base.
    Christian J Chuba , Apr 11, 2019 9:57:12 AM | link
    Reading the user comments on Assange's arrest in the 'Washington Post' story, all I can say is that we in the U.S. are a bunch of jingoistic morons. We are exceptionally narcissistic and small minded.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/wikileakss-julian-assange-evicted-from-ecuador-embassy-in-london/2019/04/11/1bd87b58-8f5f-11e8-ae59-01880eac5f1d_story.html?utm_term=.82cc871b70df

    Barovsky , Apr 11, 2019 10:22:46 AM | link
    I had a feeling this would be the tack the USG would take. Stops them getting tangled up with issues around the 1st Amendment:

    WikiLeaks Founder Charged in Computer Hacking Conspiracy
    https://www.justice.gov/usao-edva/pr/wikileaks-founder-charged-computer-hacking-conspiracy

    WJ , Apr 11, 2019 10:23:00 AM | link
    Russ @43,

    Indeed. It's almost as if the Snowden--Greenwald affair were an intended or at least foreseen and allowed limited hangout operation one aim of which was to discredit the "irresponsible" leaking of Assange while establishing Greenwald as paradigm for all correct left-libertarian critiques of the US.

    On the other hand, if the Snowden--Greenwald *were* simply a limited hangout thing, then it was far more successfully and realistically contrived than most of our current very mediocre intelligence agency operations have been. The rush to apprehend Snowden en route to Central America, the forced detainment of Greenwald's partner in the UK, the MI5-6 destruction of the Guardian servers and subsequent takeover of the newspaper...all these events really happened and clearly were much more serious endeavors than the obvious staged operations like Steele, Russiagate, Skripal which followed after.

    So I think that the Snowden--gGreenwald---Poitras thing started as genuine and then was subsequently coopted and controlled via Greenwald and Omidar's Intercept. What I don't know is whether Greenwald entered the Snowden affair already coopted or whether he became so willingly sometime later. For lots of people like Greenwald--achievement oriented, desirous of public fame and respect, interested in obtaining personal wealth and stability--a very "soft" touch is all that's needed by our intelligence ops to arrive at an understanding between them.

    Walter , Apr 11, 2019 10:43:37 AM | link
    If one were to change the calendar to 1938 or so, and the names to Goebbels et al, one would recognize the character of the criminals.
    This is a typical nazi "action" against people who have failed to conceal evidence of major war crimes. Their "crime" is reporting crime.

    One sees clearly where the heart of the nazi has always been> and an interesting paper on this @ http://katehon.com/article/hub-world-evil-british-deep-state

    The German nazis were curated by CoL and Wall-Street bankers to ruin USSR and loot Russia. As we see this remains a basic, essential, nazi goal of the Anglo-Saxon nazi heartland, er. "Heimat" - England and their servile willing US accomplices.


    WJ , Apr 11, 2019 10:50:43 AM | link
    apanaz @63,

    Alas, states use propaganda for a reason. It works.

    Jackrabbit , Apr 11, 2019 11:03:31 AM | link
    The real Iraq War criminals are free.

    - Madeline Albright: "We think it's worth it" to kill 500,000 children.
    - Bush Admin and neocons lied to start the war a war that cost trillions of dollars wasted; thousands of deaths
    - Multiple grievous human rights abuses now engraved in memory: Abu Grave; Faluja; Rendition and Torture; Guantanamo, etc.

    And the same lousy criminal asshats brought us the Afghanistan debacle, color revolutions, and the Syrian Jihadi proxy war.

    As long as the real criminals walk free, they will continue to drive their criminal agenda.

    Circe , Apr 11, 2019 11:09:57 AM | link
    In the indictment, the government alleges that Assange worked with Chelsea Manning to obtain classified documents. Prosecutors say that Manning accessed classified government files, provided them to Assange, and later worked with Assange in an attempt to crack the password of a classified government network.

    The indictment outlines communications between Manning and Assange from the spring of 2010. WikiLeaks later released a major cache of State Department cables, and

    Prosecutors also argue that Assange actively encouraged Manning to access files, at one point saying, "curious eyes never run dry in my experience."

    Currently, the only charge Assange faces is one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. The maximum penalty for the violation is five years in prison, but the government could bring additional charges against Assange at a later date.

    Assange indictment hacking conspiracy

    Trump was pissed Obama commuted Manning's sentence. Now he's after two birds with one stone.

    bSirius , Apr 11, 2019 11:25:02 AM | link
    A friend of mine is a retired intelligence asset. What he has to say may upset lots of you. So be it. Everyone wants heroes but others say no more heroes anymore.

    WikiLeaks is accused of releasing the DNC mails via a Russian hack but the Wikileaks organization denies Russia was the source yet declines to offer proof, allowing the false perception to persevere. Why does Wikileaks persevere in concealing the otherwise well known fact it was the assassinated Seth Rich leaked the DNC mails? Is it because Assange's currency as an intelligence agency asset isn't yet entirely exhausted?

    Possibility 1) As stated at this website previously, the point of charging Assange with an older crime could be to bury the prime witness (Assange) in maximum security where any testimony threatening John Brennan's CIA invented DNC 'hack' narrative will never come to light.

    Possibility 2) This is part of a staged event by the USA's neocon/Christian Zionist alliance in the CIA, working with MOSSAD (recalling Assange's MOSSAD connections attested to by former CIA clandestine services officer Robert Steele) to sink the neoliberal element of the USA's intelligence establishment; where Trump will pardon Assange for Assange's cooperation with the Justice Department in sinking the Obama/Clinton/John Brennan clique behind 'Russiagate' (finally resolving the DNC mails.)

    Consider this: certain alternative media stars either fail to realize or selectively black out the fact Julian Assange was a critical gear in the intelligence agency (primarily CIA & MOSSAD) information operations responsible for the so-called 'Arab Spring' leading to not only revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt but also the overthrow of Gaddafi and the Syrian 'civil war.' How do alternative media stars Glen Greenwald, Chris Hedges, Caitlin Johnstone, Vanessa Beeley and Raul Ilargi Meijer (among others), when defending their perception of Assange as a hero, drive that square peg into the round hole of Wikileaks supported the intelligence agency geopolitical engineering called the Arab Spring?

    Babyl-on , Apr 11, 2019 11:32:21 AM | link
    Many readers here will be hearing from Glenn Greenwald about the arrest of Assange as if He(Greenwald)just loves Julian so much and is just so upset by his arrest. DO NOT BELIEVE HIM. Take the time to look back at what Greenwald has said - such as claiming that Assange is not a journalist because he does ont "curate" the material he receives for anything other than authenticity.

    According to Snowden and Greenwald if a journalist does not contact the government in advance and agreed to censor the material for "sources and methods" then they are not journalists.

    Glenn Greenwald has made a fortune off Snowden - including $250 million from Pierre Omidyar an oligarch for The Intercept which clearly supports the oligarchy and its interests. Greenwald has stated clearly in the past that he does not consider Wikileaks a journalistic operation. Greenwald still has perhaps thousands of Snowden documents which he refuses to release - then he gets $250 million from the oligarchy. Sure there is "journalism" as long as the CIA can review what you publish first. One of the founders of the Intercept is Laura Pordris who produced a psyco-hit piece on Assange.

    In this environment if you Trust these people without question you are risking being mislead. Like a good propagandist Greenwald is out now singing the tune which will gain him trust so he can slip in the propaganda effectively when the time comes.

    [Apr 12, 2019] It appears Assange was able to trigger the kill switch. There's been a massive data dump at Wikileaks

    Apr 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Anon [417] Disclaimer , says: April 12, 2019 at 7:56 pm GMT

    Just for the record, it appears Assange was able to trigger the kill switch. There's been a massive data dump at Wikileaks:

    https://file.wikileaks.org/file/

    Sparkon , says: April 12, 2019 at 8:29 pm GMT
    @Anon J ust for a more important record -- no surprise here -- my quick scan of the index of file names of that "massive data dump at Wikileaks" found quite a few files about Scientology, one about tuition increase at "uofa," another concerning Hawaii's announcement about Obama's birth certificate, and a "yes-we-can mp4," but nothing at all about the World Trade Center or 9/11 that I could find.

    [Apr 12, 2019] Assange, Snowden and Greenwald

    The arrest probably means that WikiLeaks was thoroughly infiltrated and the US authorities are sure that there are no "unexploded bombs" in their arsenal.
    Apr 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
    WJ , Apr 11, 2019 10:23:00 AM | link

    Russ @43,

    Indeed. It's almost as if the Snowden--Greenwald affair were an intended or at least foreseen and allowed limited hangout operation one aim of which was to discredit the "irresponsible" leaking of Assange while establishing Greenwald as paradigm for all correct left-libertarian critiques of the US.

    On the other hand, if the Snowden--Greenwald *were* simply a limited hangout thing, then it was far more successfully and realistically contrived than most of our current very mediocre intelligence agency operations have been. The rush to apprehend Snowden en route to Central America, the forced detainment of Greenwald's partner in the UK, the MI5-6 destruction of the Guardian servers and subsequent takeover of the newspaper...all these events really happened and clearly were much more serious endeavors than the obvious staged operations like Steele, Russiagate, Skripal which followed after.

    So I think that the Snowden--gGreenwald---Poitras thing started as genuine and then was subsequently coopted and controlled via Greenwald and Omidar's Intercept. What I don't know is whether Greenwald entered the Snowden affair already coopted or whether he became so willingly sometime later. For lots of people like Greenwald--achievement oriented, desirous of public fame and respect, interested in obtaining personal wealth and stability--a very "soft" touch is all that's needed by our intelligence ops to arrive at an understanding between them.

    Russ , Apr 11, 2019 8:37:22 AM | link

    Posted by: SteveK9 | Apr 11, 2019 8:29:52 AM | 33

    "I've wondered if they have threatened Greenwald and he is withholding the information, to keep himself out of some dungeon somewhere."

    No one needs to threaten Greenwald to get him to withhold information. He withholds out of elitist conviction. In his way he's just as much of an elite gatekeeper as anyone at any MSM outlet. (And really an outfit like the Intercept is just a thinly veiled extension of the MSM.)

    It's amazing how for many people, even going to work for a predatory billionaire as Greenwald has, or collaborating as part of that billionaire's project as Snowden has, doesn't automatically peg one as a system stooge.

    GeorgeSmiley , Apr 11, 2019 8:46:18 AM | link
    @SteveK9 #33

    1. Information "piracy" may have to take to the high seas.
    2. Maybe it would be best to release the rest of Snowden's documents now. Tit for tat.

    Posted by: Cynica | Apr 11, 2019 8:38:05 AM | 35


    This WILL NOT happen. Greenwald, his billionaire backer (who owns the docs technically as crazy as that sounds) and his website are all an example of the "acceptable" counter narrative. Greenwald should deserve no respect, he chose money and fame over integrity. That much has become clear. I think the same of Scahill and a few others, though I hear little from him now.

    Sad days. Money will buy a LOT of people. Even those we believe it won't as they are "principled" or once carried conviction . Hell, I imagine most of us are vulnerable to that as well.

    Zanon , Apr 11, 2019 9:11:08 AM | link
    There we have it! Extradition will (most likely) occur..

    Assange indicted over 'conspiracy with Chelsea Manning in 2010' – DOJ statement
    https://www.rt.com/usa/456244-assange-manning-us-indictment/

    Josh , Apr 11, 2019 9:18:26 AM | link
    We do all hope that Assange's arrest will motivate all those with access to other incriminating data to release those, via Wikileaks or other. The first comment here accurately describes it: (the UK and) the US - and let's add the whole silly 'five eyes' and western front - has become the new Soviet Union. Roles have reversed; it's not about ideology but about power structure.
    Here's for Assange to become the Sakharov of our time. However, that would mean we foster the hope or expect that our western hemisphere could birth a Gorbachev-type idealist who can attain power long enough to destroy the power base.
    Jackrabbit , Apr 11, 2019 11:03:31 AM | link
    The real Iraq War criminals are free.

    - Madeline Albright: "We think it's worth it" to kill 500,000 children.
    - Bush Admin and neocons lied to start the war a war that cost trillions of dollars wasted; thousands of deaths
    - Multiple grievous human rights abuses now engraved in memory: Abu Grave; Faluja; Rendition and Torture; Guantanamo, etc.

    And the same lousy criminal asshats brought us the Afghanistan debacle, color revolutions, and the Syrian Jihadi proxy war.

    As long as the real criminals walk free, they will continue to drive their criminal agenda.

    Babyl-on , Apr 11, 2019 11:32:21 AM | link
    Many readers here will be hearing from Glenn Greenwald about the arrest of Assange as if He(Greenwald)just loves Julian so much and is just so upset by his arrest. DO NOT BELIEVE HIM. Take the time to look back at what Greenwald has said - such as claiming that Assange is not a journalist because he does ont "curate" the material he receives for anything other than authenticity.

    According to Snowden and Greenwald if a journalist does not contact the government in advance and agreed to censor the material for "sources and methods" then they are not journalists.

    Glenn Greenwald has made a fortune off Snowden - including $250 million from Pierre Omidyar an oligarch for The Intercept which clearly supports the oligarchy and its interests. Greenwald has stated clearly in the past that he does not consider Wikileaks a journalistic operation. Greenwald still has perhaps thousands of Snowden documents which he refuses to release - then he gets $250 million from the oligarchy. Sure there is "journalism" as long as the CIA can review what you publish first. One of the founders of the Intercept is Laura Pordris who produced a psyco-hit piece on Assange.

    In this environment if you Trust these people without question you are risking being mislead. Like a good propagandist Greenwald is out now singing the tune which will gain him trust so he can slip in the propaganda effectively when the time comes.

    George Lane , Apr 11, 2019 12:00:09 PM | link
    Kevin Gosztola and Aaron Mate have good twitter threads analysing the indictment:

    https://twitter.com/kgosztola/status/1116341233289396225

    https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1116330261321527299

    john , Apr 11, 2019 12:59:00 PM | link
    But the case against Assange is not about justice. His publication of state secrets was obviously an act of journalism and free speech. But the deep state was embarrassed and demands revenge

    Assange gave us graphic video of the US Army shredding a couple of unarmed Iraqi journalists (and others) with 30mm canon fire. memory that can't be deleted.

    ...

    hey, ready for another sclerotic investigation?

    Circe , Apr 11, 2019 1:01:58 PM | link
    Here it is:

    Wikileaks veteran cooperates with grand jury

    AriusArmenian , Apr 11, 2019 1:57:51 PM | link
    I will repeat what others here have already said:

    The US == USSR.

    As a US citizen I loath the mendacity and actions of the elites that have left us with nothing to hope for or believe in for some decent future with the US striding across the world sowing fear, hatred, and war. The reality of the depraved elites is such that I am usually right to first assume they are lying whatever they say. This all applies to the UK as well.

    John Smith , Apr 11, 2019 2:05:58 PM | link
    Trump Says WikiLeaks 141 Times On The Campaign Trail
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H26hVPoCO-o

    Did Trump really mention WikiLeaks over 160 times in the last month of the election cycle?
    https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/apr/21/jackie-speier/did-trump-really-mention-wikileaks-over-160-times-/
    -------------------------

    Christina Wilkie :
    ‏

    Trump just now: "I know nothing about Wikileaks. It's not my thing."

    Trump Oct 2016: "WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks."

    Trump Oct 2016: "This WikiLeaks is like a treasure trove,"

    Trump Nov 2016: "Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks."

    psychohistorian , Apr 11, 2019 2:26:31 PM | link Circe , Apr 11, 2019 2:29:22 PM | link
    Here's the REAL Donald Trump on Wikileaks.:

    https://youtu.be/V-pv_3i-dOs

    Zanon , Apr 11, 2019 2:32:23 PM | link
    'UK, you are America's bitch': Pamela Anderson launches scathing tweetstorm following Assange arrest
    https://www.rt.com/news/456243-pamela-anderson-assange-arrest-betrayal/

    Damn right but its not only UK but the whole of the western world that have been silent if not supportive of the arrest!

    SlapHappy , Apr 11, 2019 2:46:20 PM | link
    Here's the guy I was referring to, Circe:

    WikiLeaks Editor goes missing in Norway

    Zanon , Apr 11, 2019 3:28:40 PM | link
    A bit off topic, or is it...

    2016: Pompeo wants to execute Snowden
    https://youtu.be/DZxu73OJHkI?t=26

    karlof1 , Apr 11, 2019 3:55:53 PM | link
    Corbyn breaks silence on Assange :

    "The extradition of Julian Assange to the US for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan should be opposed by the British government."

    Interesting comments in thread. I think a few here owe mea culpas.

    karlof1 , Apr 11, 2019 4:10:06 PM | link
    AOC on Assange only went as far as retweeting this:

    "This is a real test for the American media. Can they separate their personals feelings toward Assange from the question of whether it is okay to prosecute a publisher for publishing? Matt is right, this is extremely dangerous."

    The above was made in reply to Matthew Yglesias who clearly hates Assange:

    "Assange sucks but prosecuting publishers seems extremely dangerous and troubling to me." And he calls himself a journalist. He has as much honor as Moreno. The resulting threads are educational and revelatory. Lots of very confused, screwed up minds showing few morals mixed in with a few good eggs.

    karlof1 , Apr 11, 2019 4:27:01 PM | link
    Senator Mike Gravel & 2020 candidate on Assaange :

    "Today, I stand with Julian Assange and Wikileaks."

    Please see tweet for entire statement. As with other threads on this topic, the comments are educational and revelatory. It's rather amazing how many utterly weak minds are in positions of responsibility. Some have lapped up so much propaganda Koolaid that they're now delusional.

    jayc , Apr 11, 2019 5:30:56 PM | link
    Wired has a piece working through the indictment:
    https://www.wired.com/story/julian-assange-arrest-indictment-hacking-cfaa/amp

    The statute of limitation is overcome by referring this as a "terrorism" case.

    The indictment is perhaps selected to ensure the extradition, with further charges waiting once Assange is in possession of the USA.

    teri , Apr 11, 2019 5:49:11 PM | link
    To those posting about Glenn Greenwald; I don't know what Greenwald really stands for any more and no longer read his stuff, but you might be interested in this pathetic and predictable end to the Greenwald/Omidyar conservatorship of the Snowden documents. A month ago, Greenwald announced via twitter that The Intercept/First Look was now officially shutting down access to the Snowden archives and has laid off the group of employees that secured and curated the cache. (It cost First Look $400,000/year to maintain the files, which is 1.5% of its 2019 budget.)

    Greenwald did not even consult Snowden on this decision. So, without much fanfare, the cache is simply disappeared, without ever being fully opened to the public, although Greenwald claims in his tweet that he's looking for the "right partner – an academic institution or research facility – that has the funds to robustly publish." (Which, one might have supposed, would be the sort of funds that a news site such as The Intercept might enjoy given that they have the resources of their own billionaire founder behind them.)

    They did not allow Poitras to attend the company meeting held on the subject after they made this announcement, and kept her in the dark until the announcement was rolled out. Poitras, recall, also has a copy of the archives and was one of the founding editors of Intercept. She is objecting to the move. Although given that the Intercept has merely sat on the cache for so long, it hardly matters now.

    I thought from the beginning of the Intercept/First Look/Omidyar site that the eventual disappearance of the files was the very purpose behind Omidyar buying off Greenwald (and his valuable Snowden material along with him) in the first place.
    Anyway, poof go the Snowden files, without most of the material ever being released to the public.

    Two articles on this:

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-intercept-shuts-down-access-to-snowden-trove

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/laura-poitras-co-founder-of-the-intercept-barred-from-company-meeting-after-snowden-archive-shutdown

    Zachary Smith , Apr 11, 2019 6:42:29 PM | link
    Jonathan Cook: " The 7 years of lies about Assange won't stop now"
    There will be no indignation at the BBC, or the Guardian, or CNN. Just curious, impassive reporting of Assange's fate.

    And that is because these journalists, politicians and experts never really believed anything they said. They knew all along that the US wanted to silence Assange and to crush Wikileaks. They knew that all along and they didn't care. In fact, they happily conspired in paving the way for today's kidnapping of Assange.

    They did so because they are not there to represent the truth, or to stand up for ordinary people, or to protect a free press, or even to enforce the rule of law. They don't care about any of that. They are there to protect their careers, and the system that rewards them with money and influence. They don't want an upstart like Assange kicking over their applecart.

    Razor , Apr 11, 2019 6:49:15 PM | link
    @bSirius 80

    In fact it seems to me the reason he is being changed with conspiracy is so that they can avoid defence claims that his publishing information is covered by the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution. Any worthwhile lawyer would paste it on thick for the jury that convicting Assange for publication would be a deep betrayal of their much beloved Constitution. It also means that the information on war crimes in the famous video would be once more broadcast to the world, and more importantly to the jury. Imagine what a fiasco and embarrassment US Govt would face if after all the fuss, Assange was acquitted by a US Jury?

    Furthermore,in common law countries, such as the UK, a typical court condition of agreement to extradite is that the accused will only be charged with crimes exhibited in the extradition warrant. That being the case, the maximum sentence he would face is 5 and a half years I believe.

    arby , Apr 11, 2019 7:27:21 PM | link
    Chris Hedges has a good rant on this affair-

    https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-martyrdom-of-julian-assange/

    ADKC , Apr 11, 2019 7:41:25 PM | link
    Some posters here criticise Asssange/Wikileaks for not being critical of Israel or supporting Catalonia independence but the Wikileaks website isn't really like that.

    Wikileaks is a non-redacted searchable database of documents that have been leaked. Most of these documents are dry and it really depends on what you a looking for and what you find. It is rare to find a single document that by itself clearly reveals a scandal or a plot of some sort. Also, there is no editorial from Wikileaks. It is up to the user to search, find and interpret.

    For instance, I just did a search and found a US cable dated 30th Jan 2008 which describes Erdogan's concerns about an armed deep state extra-legal grouping which has a suspected overlap with a cold war Gladio group and which is protected by the Turkish judiciary. So, obviously, subversion was an issue long before the attempted coup in 2016, but it's up to me to make a story out of it.

    There is plenty of stuff about Israel, for instance there seems to be quite a number of incidents concerning Obama and/or Clinton trying to get Netanyahu to apologise for something that matters very little and Netanyahu invariable refusing.

    The easiest way for a body, such as the CIA, to manipulate Wikileaks is just be selective about what information is leaked.

    If you're looking for dirt on Israel, Clinton, Trump, Erdogan, Putin, Catalonia, etc. just go and look for it.

    Jezabeel , Apr 11, 2019 8:58:48 PM | link
    Wikileaks came up with quat on 9/11. Why?
    haze , Apr 11, 2019 9:01:04 PM | link
    Bravo Tulsi Gabbard!

    "Today's arrest and indictment of Julian Assange undermines freedom of the press, and seeks to silence whistleblowers and the journalists who publish their information. This sets a dangerous precedent of criminal prosecution of journalists or news organizations who publish information the government doesn't like, while also opening the door for other countries to extradite US journalists who publish their country's secrets," said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. "We must protect whistleblowers and freedom of the press, and exercise oversight over our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to ensure our Constitutional rights are upheld."

    https://gabbard.house.gov/news/press-releases/rep-tulsi-gabbard-assange-arrest-sets-dangerous-precedent-threatens-freedom

    Piotr Berman , Apr 11, 2019 11:29:04 PM | link
    Dear Sacha,

    "why do you think Assange supported the invasion and destruction of Syria"

    This is very simple. Back at the time of Arab Spring, most of the Western opinion, be it left or right, supported overthrowing a dictator. Assange, for better or worse, was in the lopsided majority, hardly strange.

    "how do you explain Assange´s strong support for the Independence of Catalonia...."

    This was not a majority opinion, but not rare. More importantly, tracing it to the needs of "deep state" is very speculative. On the other hand, the rage of established political circles against the very idea of Wikileaks was palpable, and what Wikileaks did was perceived as "very damaging". Even if independence of Catalonia were in some mysterious ways a priority of the sinister and hardly known deep state that you postulate, Assange had scant influence on that happening. So the putative plan of using leaks to Wikileaks to build up its stature and to use that to further the causes of fragmenting Syria and Spain would be weird indeed: huge losses for speculative gains.

    One has to understand the nature of the rage against Wikileaks. Any conceivable deep stater depends on secrecy. To them, secrecy is like air for birds and water for fish -- a necessary element that makes their ecological niche habitable. An organization that facilitates dissemination of secret is, to them, a blasphemous existence.

    One has to understand that what we call "deep state" is hardly secret in the outline. Its member go back and forth from private sector (corporations, think tanks, media, academic gig etc.) and the government leaving a large visible trail that is in the public view. That said, they need many secrets because the wide public in democratic countries needs to have pure, trusting, uncomplicated minds. Like making children, implementation of most of policies requires some f...ng activity

    imo , Apr 12, 2019 2:08:58 AM | link
    Remember George Orwell's "1984" describes a dismal future when most of the world population have become victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and media propaganda. Interesting that Orwell's arch protagonist (Emmanuel Goldstein) and his "Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" sees the three "opposing" ideologies as functionally identical and each superstate being powerful enough that even shifting alliances (of two against one) only results in a continuing stalemate dynamic.

    Are we there yet? I think Julian Assange might be feeling it so and this latest saga looks like an ominous tipping point indicator for those who think they live in a western democracy with press freedom to hold government (by the people) accountable.

    truth seeker , Apr 12, 2019 2:23:44 AM | link
    Moral to all the truth-seekers of the planet - if you look for salvation, then only in Russia.....

    [Apr 12, 2019] Edward Snowden and Julian Assange Betrayed

    Feb 24, 2014 | homment.com
    Correspondence with Edward Snowden, and the key to freedom for Julian Assange

    A member of our Belgian Jewish community is in touch with Edward Snowden in Russia, both sharing the role of being significant global dissidents who used to live in the USA.

    We are publishing here a copy of some of that correspondence between those two figures, as it discusses the likelihood of how both Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are being betrayed and actively harmed by the American lawyers and US-UK media companies claiming to 'represent' them, including America's ACLU (America's Civil Liberties Union), the UK Guardian and New York Times newspapers, and Glenn Greenwald.

    All these groups and journalists, are apparently hiding thousands of pages of legal files, about the corruption and bribery of US federal (national) judges who are the same judges who would put Julian Assange or Edward Snowden on trial ... even though these lawyers and journalists all know that exposing the crimes of the bribed US judges, is the quick key to releasing Julian Assange from threats that confine him to his refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, and key to more safety and freedom for Snowden as well.

    US Attorney General Eric Holder is accused of sponsoring criminal acts of deception against the UK, Sweden, Russia and other countries, hiding 'smoking gun' evidence of US judge bribery, in order to harm and destroy both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Google Inc has agreed to censor and hoax the internet and hide dozens of web pages about this.

    This bribery is said to be funded by Britain's Pearson plc, with the Guardian and New York Times accused of accepting Pearson-funded bribes to print fake 'news' to obstruct and pervert justice so that the UK will not prosecute Pearson's bribery of US high judges and government.

    Mr Snowden is also facing the terrifying possibility that his name is being abused by these parties, New York Times, Guardian and Greenwald, for the sake of entrapping other dissidents and whistleblowers into 'trusting' these journalists, who might then convey dissident names to the US regime in order to silence and murder them. It seems possible the Guardian and New York Times have already given Snowden files back to the US regime.

    The correspondence with Edward Snowden makes reference to the police file with several EU countries, who are beginning investigations and prosecutions, starting in Finland, of the CIA-tied Wikipedia website, for fundraising fraud ... that police file significantly discusses the evidence of bribery of US federal judges who are the same judges who would put Edward Snowden and Julian Assange on trial in America, and how Wikipedia, actually an American CIA-controlled 'Trojan horse' for inserting lies on targeted topics, has been used to plant lies about that judicial bribery - the police dossier text is here:

    'CIA Wikipedia fraud Finland police report'
    http://homment.com/FB3PjBQ2DF

    Here is a screenshot of a Google Inc 'search results' page, with tiny text at the bottom admitting that Google is censoring a large number of search results, about Edward Snowden's correspondent, a major witness to the crimes involving the same US judges who would put Edward Snowden or Julian Assange on trial:

    'Live Photo: Google Inc. Caught Censoring EU Search Results on US corruption'
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/22325431@N05/6100668211/in/photostream

    - Jewish Community of Flanders

    [Apr 12, 2019] Is Mueller another of Putin's puppets? I ask because it simply isn't credible that he couldn't find any evidence of collusion, as Adam Schiff has seen it and he has said so repeatedly.

    Apr 12, 2019 | consentfactory.org

    Eric McCow April 2, 2019 at 13:40 Reply

    'So the Mueller report is finally in, and it appears that hundreds of millions of Americans have, once again, been woefully bamboozled. Weird, how this just keeps on happening. At this point, Americans have to be the most frequently woefully bamboozled people in the entire history of woeful bamboozlement. If you didn't know better, you'd think we were all a bunch of hopelessly credulous imbeciles that you could con into believing almost anything, or that our brains had been bombarded with so much propaganda from the time we were born that we couldn't really even think anymore.'

    Brilliant. That really is the central message of '1984'. A lot of the brainwashing, particularly to liberals is ego massaging.They are led to believe they have superior education, intelligence and information.Even in the slipstream of this insanity, it's unlikely you will find a liberal whose confidence in his cultural superiority is even slightly dented.

    'If there is hope,' wrote Winston, 'it lies in the proles.' .

    'The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes'.

    Nineteen Eighty-four, by George Orwell

    https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chapter1.7.html

    Robert Laine April 2, 2019 at 22:05

    Thanks so much CJ for putting my mind at ease. I feel much better now knowing it was all just a big mistake. Actually, in corporate management courses they don't use the term "mistake". They prefer "learning experience". I have certainly learned a lot during this McCarthy rerun episode.

    Lorie April 3, 2019 at 21:12

    Whew. Now we can all turn our attention to Saddam Maduro who is most surely some kind of a Hitler, or Stapn, or, SOMETHING. Even Trump haters can agree with him on that one, lead by the Bezos Post and the New York peTimes.

    steve Hayes April 9, 2019 at 10:54

    Is Mueller another of Putin's puppets? I ask because it simply isn't credible that he couldn't find any evidence of collusion, as Adam Schiff has seen it and he has said so repeatedly. So all Mueller had to do was ask Schiff – hey, even Tucker Carlson asked.

    [Apr 12, 2019] U.S. attorney general's 'spying' remarks anger Democrats

    Apr 12, 2019 | www.reuters.com


    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Attorney General William Barr said on Wednesday he would look into whether U.S. agencies illegally spied on President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, sparking criticism from Democrats who accused him of promoting a conspiracy theory.

    Barr, who was appointed by Trump, is already facing criticism by congressional Democrats for how he has handled the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on the probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and his comments about surveillance brought more derision from Democratic senators.

    His testimony echoed longstanding allegations by Trump and Republican allies that seeks to cast doubt on the early days of the federal investigation in an apparent attempt to discredit Mueller, law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

    Posted by: librul | Apr 10, 2019 11:47:32 PM | 70 @ Jackrabbit #67

    IMO the notion that a few senior Intelligence officials (mostly FBI) tried to overthrow Trump is silly to the point of being laughable.

    Not to all of us, it isn't. The part I don't understand is the Why of their effort. Did they have some scheme to get rid of Pence too? Or was it all mindless blind hatred because he took down their Goddess Hillary?

    Posted by: Zachary Smith | Apr 10, 2019 11:49:22 PM | 71 ZS @ 68 said in part;"assuming the Corporate Democrats don't force one of their candidates Big Corporations want on the ballot. Which is, of course, most of them."

    I assume what you speculated on above, will happen.

    Posted by: ben | Apr 10, 2019 11:56:00 PM | 72 Zachary Smith @68: ... Corporate Democrats ... domestic policies ...

    The democratic party is irredeemable as it operates as one arm of the duopoly. I don't see any meaningful distinction between "Corporate Democrats" and progressive Democrats except this: progressive Democrats give the Democratic Party cover to support the establishment.

    IMO domestic policy can no longer be considered separately from Empire. "Progressive Democrats" are forced encouraged by their Party to support the military and ignore foreign policy.

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    IMO the only grouping that is currently viable/strong alternative is the libertarians. If they could bring conservatives and (real) progressives together, then we could see a real challenge to the "radical center" (which actually rules as center-right).

    But conservatives, (real) progressives, and libertarians are underfunded and constantly get played.

    Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 11, 2019 12:02:16 AM | 73 @ Zachary Smith | Apr 10, 2019 11:49:22 PM | 71


    RussiaGate: 'Why Did This Ever Start In The First Place?'

    Posted by: librul | Apr 11, 2019 12:06:23 AM | 74 Zachary Smith @71:

    Not to all of us, it isn't. The part I don't understand is the Why of their effort.

    Well of course the WHY baffles you, because the only WHY that makes sense is what I described and that will never be allowed to come out publicly because then people will see that their democracy is a sham.

    The "managed democracy" that we have in USA subverts the will of the people to the Empire.

    Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 11, 2019 12:08:56 AM | 75 "Germany still owes Israel $19 billion for the Holocaust. The new estimate was calculated by independent American economist Sidney Zabludoff, a former CIA, White House and U.S. Treasury official."

    https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-netanyahu-could-have-prevented-the-submarine-affair-by-collecting-germany-s-debt-1.7086232

    https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/East-Germanys-reparation-debt-must-be-demanded-584941
    ---------------

    Chutzpah...

    Posted by: John Smith | Apr 11, 2019 12:13:27 AM | 76 @ 74: Why did Russiagate start in the first place? The short answer is IMO, diversion.

    Another answer could be, that DJT stood on a stage, and asked another country to find his opponents e-mails.

    Posted by: ben | Apr 11, 2019 12:34:51 AM | 77 @ librul #74

    Though I hadn't seen that before, the general theme is in agreement with what I believe is the truth. Even ignorant and thuggish goons like Trump can be victims of a crime, and I believe that's what happened here.

    Posted by: Zachary Smith | Apr 11, 2019 12:52:57 AM | 78 I find it piquant that the vice president of the US attacks a Venezuelan ambassador at the UN and then ramps up his aggression...by retreating.

    Pence is so certain that the other guy doesn't belong, that he himself walks away. Every schoolyard would see this behavior for exactly what it is. Animals would understand it clearly also, in terms of pecking order.

    How perfect this action is in matching precisely what we've been watching the US do in several military theaters for some time now. The louder and the ruder the bluster, the more certain we can be that it covers pure emptiness. And that the US is tangibly retreating under cover of the smoke.

    The cowardice is becoming palpable.

    Posted by: Grieved | Apr 11, 2019 12:53:10 AM | 79 ben

    Well, why did "America First" Trump ask Russia to do that? (And later ask Wikileaks to release the DNC emails!)

    And why did "America First" Trump hire Manafort who had extensive Russian contacts and pro-Russian activities that drew the ire of US officials?

    These (and more) played into Russiagate hysteria that followed the election and were not in keeping with Trump's "America First" rhetoric.

    Now, long after the election, we see additional strangeness like Roger Stone's claims of a contact at Wikileaks.

    Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 11, 2019 1:01:14 AM | 80 Posted by: karlof1 | Apr 10, 2019 6:42:57 PM | 38

    "IDF's chief rabbi-to-be permits raping women in wartime."

    Just how does that differ from Daesh's behavior? Or was it the IDF that told Deash such behavior was okay? I'm pretty certain that rabbi is afoul of fundamental Mosaic Law and thus shouldn't be a rabbi.
    ----------------------

    "The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition," Ketubot 11b, vol. 7 (NY: Random House, 1991), p. 145:

    "If a grown man has intercourse with a little girl less than three years old, all agree that it is not a significant sexual act "

    "Koren Talmud Bavli," Sanhedrin 54b, vol. 30 (Jerusalem, 2017), p. 41:

    "If a man engages in homosexual intercourse with a minor who is under the age of nine, whether actively or passively, he is exempt as with regard to ritual law..."

    .

    Posted by: John Smith | Apr 11, 2019 1:02:54 AM | 81 @ Grieved with the UN/Pence story....here is China's take on the situation
    "
    UNITED NATIONS, April 10 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese ambassador to the United Nations on Wednesday rejected U.S. Vice President Mike Pence's accusation against China over Venezuela.

    "China categorically rejects the accusation," Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, told a Security Council meeting on the situation in Venezuela.

    "Earlier in his intervention, the U.S. representative leveled an unfounded accusation on China's position on Venezuela in the Security Council," he said, referring to Pence's remarks that Russia and China obstructed Council action on Venezuela with their veto power.

    China has all along maintained friendly and cooperative relations with other countries around the world, including Venezuela, on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, he said.

    "We support peoples of all countries in independently choosing their development paths that cater to their national conditions. We never interfere in other countries' internal affairs, nor do we impose anything on other countries," Ma added.

    Members of the Security Council should faithfully abide by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and the universally recognized norms of international relations, genuinely respect the choices of peoples of other countries, and do more positive and practical things for the people of Venezuela rather than the opposite, said the Chinese envoy.
    "

    Posted by: psychohistorian | Apr 11, 2019 1:02:58 AM | 82 WJ @51 ... FWIW, as of this writing I'm having no trouble accessing the naked capitalism site.

    Posted by: John Anthony La Pietra | Apr 11, 2019 1:05:26 AM | 83 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Instagram March 10, 2019:

    "Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People -- and them alone."

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D1T_F00VsAAb25V.jpg

    Posted by: John Smith | Apr 11, 2019 1:07:35 AM | 84 @ Jackrabbit #75

    I"m not sure we disagree very much, for I also believe our "democracy" is thoroughly managed, and "sham" is quite a good word for it. The part I don't understand is why you seem to object to pointing out efforts by the 'managers' to correct the error of a slam dunk election going bad. Hillary was supposed to be in the White House. More than one nation had been making advance payments to the Clinton Foundation to purchase her goodwill. She was the dream for Big Banking, the apartheid Jewish state, and probably a lot more folks. That didn't happen, and some people became unhinged.

    Posted by: Zachary Smith | Apr 11, 2019 1:08:09 AM | 85 Zionism & Wahhabism: Twin Cancers of the Middle East (And Their Veiled Origins)

    It is a fascinating, though rather grim, story, spanning the First World War, the creation of the states of Israel, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, and taking in Lawrence of Arabia, all the way to the fall of Gadaffi in Libya, the Syria Civil War and Rise of the so-called Islamic State, among other things. It's a story of long-term manipulation, insidious indoctrination, and secret, almost 'mythical' works of literature.

    These two ideologies – Wahhabism in Islam and Zionism which is linked primarily to the Jewish religion – may seem like unrelated entities on the surface of it

    https://theburningbloggerofbedlam.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/zionism-and-wahhabism-the-twin-cancers-destroying-the-middle-east-and-their-dark-origins/

    Posted by: John Smith | Apr 11, 2019 1:16:39 AM | 86 @ Zachary Smith who wrote about Clinton II
    "
    She was the dream for Big Banking, the apartheid Jewish state, and probably a lot more folks.
    "
    So that makes Trump a nightmare for Big Banking, the apartheid Jewish state, etc., right?

    I encourage you to understand how much you are being played. If Big Banking has both of them, whom is being played?

    Posted by: psychohistorian | Apr 11, 2019 1:17:13 AM | 87 Zachary Smith @78:

    Though I hadn't seen that before, the general theme is in agreement with what I believe is the truth.

    I think that you're not thinking this through.

    You're question of WHY, is still unanswered.

    > WHY did the hold back on Russian-influence allegations during the election?
    Hillary was suppose to win, sure. But why not ENSURE that win?

    > WHY did they continue with Russiagate after the election?
    They engaged in Treasonous behavior because Hillary was butthurt?
    She supposedly got 3 million more votes than Trump; how badly could her ego be bruised?

    > WHY did the establishment hate Trump so much?
    He's delivered all they could want and more.

    > Why did Russiagate force Trump to bend to Deep State wishes?
    Ha! It didn't! Trump has always maintained that there was no Russia collusion. And now the Mueller Report confirms this. Trump's Cold War policy continues the Deep State's same policy - because Trump is part of the team.


    This is not meant to be exhaustive. There are many other questions that you could ask because there's a lot that doesn't add up - unless Russiagate was a Deep State psyop with bi-partisan support (as I've described).

    Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 11, 2019 1:21:14 AM | 88 Zachary Smith @85: efforts by the 'managers' to correct the error

    Because it makes no sense.

    If they got their wish and "corrected" the error by overthrowing Trump, there would be a civil war. Which is counter-productive in the extreme.

    But they don't need to take such drastic action 'cause Trump does that the Deep States wants anyway! So what are they trying to "correct"?!?

    Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 11, 2019 1:29:31 AM | 89 correction: ... what the Deep State wants ...

    Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 11, 2019 1:30:30 AM | 90 Alleged ongoing Military Coup in Sudan today, another just happened in Algeria... Haftar making moves in Libya, could all just be a coincidence, then again, maybe not? Anyone got anything? Wondering what Mr B. thinks..

    Posted by: EtTuBrute | Apr 11, 2019 5:08:30 AM | 91 Assange has just been expelled from the embassy and arrested

    Posted by: Kadath | Apr 11, 2019 5:53:11 AM | 92 @ 92 * time for everyone to stand up for human rights promoter Assange?

    The end of capitalism, in disguise. US pol structure does not allow for such, as the US (and other West, the US is just a stellar ex.) are ruled by rapacious coproratist (typo) oligarchs. Won't happen.
    Posted by: Noirette @ 7

    I don't think the issue is to end capitalism, but economic Zionism (all known as capitalism changed into monopoism) is on its way out. Revolutionaries, all over the world, are in place to revert monopolism back to capitalism and democracy back to human rights.**

    She [Hillary] was the dream for Big Banking, the apartheid Jewish state, and probably a lot more folks. That didn't happen, and some people became unhinged. by Zachary Smith @85 As things have turned out.. we might have all been better off with Hillary than Trump.. Next time around I am going to vote for the most obvious liar, and the candidate with the most stinking capaign promises. looking back over the elections since Abe Lincolm was assassinated by the city of London.. because Lincoln was moving to make USA its own bank and to issue its own currency.. **

    At http://representativepress.org/IsraelViolatesResolution.html c/b found the pre conditions, all of which Israel agreed to,
    for admission of Israel into the UN..
    1. he status of jerusalem w/n/b altered
    2. Palestinans w/b permitted to return
    3. The partition agreement w/become the final borders.

    Text of General Assembly Resolution 273 of May 11, 1949 admitting Israel into the UN, notes Israel agreed to comply with Resolution 194 : UNITED NATIONS General Assembly A/RES/273 (III) 11 May 1949

    what is really interesting is to take a look at the low life supporting this UN action at the press, in the white house and at the MIC. Many supporters there played at hugmongous part in the rest of the rise of Economic Zionism which depends on leg breaker USA to get its way..

    Posted by: snake | Apr 11, 2019 6:18:53 AM | 93
    Julian Assange has been arrested and dragged out of the embassy. he does not look well.

    http://news.trust.org/item/20190411092809-cxs4c

    Posted by: michaelj72 | Apr 11, 2019 6:22:16 AM | 94 Posted by: Zachary Smith | Apr 10, 2019 7:43:14 PM | 45

    "I went to the Black Agenda link and saw nothing more than "sheepdog" being used as an insult and as a reason not to consider that candidate. Do you have any specifics for Gabbard not being sincere in wanting to stop endless wars?"

    She's a Democrat, a leading cadre of an indelibly war-mongering political party (in addition to being the oldest, longest-running pro-capitalist party on Earth; by definition a socialist also could never be a Democrat).

    Therefore by definition she has to be pro-war, just as anyone who's anti-war could never be a Democrat. (That's just one of many, many reasons I could never possibly even consider the Democrats; it's a non-starter.)

    "Sheepdog" is not an insult. (Well, not just an insult.) It's a technical term for a pro-system politician who pretends to be "progressive", "socialist", "radical" etc. but is really no such thing where it comes to any real action. The purpose is to keep people from straying outside the fold of the Democrat Party (Sanders is the most notorious example, a con artist his entire career), or of electoralism as such (the "Green Party" version).

    "I'm aware the woman is totally in bed with the apartheid Jewish State, but then, who isn't?"

    And still you ask if it's possible even in principle for her to be anti-war?

    Posted by: Russ | Apr 11, 2019 6:32:23 AM | 95 On Assange -
    So where are the NGO/MSM/liberals human rights supporters now defending Assange?! What a joke.
    Extradition to the US is a no brainer, apparently Assange was right about residing in the embassy.

    Is this a Trump or rather what I believe - a deep state/CIA/FBI operation? Trump have after all been quite positive on Assange as far as the clinton email leak.

    Posted by: Zanon | Apr 11, 2019 6:33:55 AM | 96 whatever happened to that old "insurance" file WikiLeaks put out way back in 2011 when this whole thing started which they threaten to release the encryption keys for if Assange was arrested/harmed. Did they already release the contents through WikiLeaks. I recall that one of Assange's old partners turned traitor after he was bribed by the US and stole thousands of documents and passwords in an effort to sabotage WikiLeaks. If Wikileaks does have anything they've been holding back, now is the time to release it. Wikileaks may have western legal tradition on it's side, but in the Outlaw empire the law means nothing, only force and bribery hold sway.

    In a larger sense, while the US empire may have won this round, they may end up rueing this day, as I am certain there are dozens of closet Wikileaks supporters within the US/British governments who will be outraged by these actions and they will strike back in their own ways. At the very least I suspect that Moreno will suffer severe consequences from this action. We already know that some of his own diplomats leaked this expulsion in advance in hopes of sabotaging it and the former President Correa has just declared Moreno the 'Greatest traitor in Ecuadorian history', so I gleefully expect some daggers to find their way into his backside in the near future (most probably leaking documents to WikiLeaks showing Moreno's involvement in massive corruption - not that there's anything unique about corruption in South American governments)

    Posted by: Kadath | Apr 11, 2019 7:38:34 AM | 97 @45 Zachary Smith

    I would like to see Tulsi (or any other anti-war candidate) take the mantle of the democratic party on an anti-war platform.

    I posted the link to bring attention to the efforts being made (and coincidentally mentioned by wendy davis @42) of efforts to create a true anti-war 3d party. I think it would be easier at this point in time to create a new 3d party focused on reducing military spending than to urge the democrat or republican party to adopt a half hearted effort at limiting us military misadventures. Both parties are fragile and susceptible to splintering in the current environment and this does improve the chances for a viable 3d party to emerge.

    I don't think the author was insulting to Gabbard. It read to me like he was explaining the role any anti-war candidate would play in a party controlled by the established democratic party. You can already see the obstacles being put in her way by the way she is being down-played in the press.

    b4real

    Posted by: b4real | Apr 11, 2019 8:22:00 AM | 98 @43 Dadda: " A true Zen saying!"

    Posted by: Chevrus | Apr 11, 2019 8:26:34 AM | 99 Is Russia a failed state -
    https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/424511-managing-russias-dissolution

    Or is U.S. (actually the entire Globalist empire) maxing out it's credit card?

    And speaking of failed states -
    https://southfront.org/us-southcom-head-says-venezuela-military-intervention-might-be-necessary-by-end-of-2019/

    Posted by: jared | Apr 11, 2019 8:28:18 AM | 100

    [Apr 12, 2019] A Dummies Guide To What Dems Will Say When Mueller Report Is Released

    Notable quotes:
    "... The Dems, of course, will cherry-pick passages from the report that can most effectively be spun together into a fantastic web of collusion. And like most conspiracy theorists, they will allege things that can never be proven or disproven. That basic fact alone will allow them to keep expressing outrage and carry on with their accusations about collusion and obstruction for as long as they choose. ..."
    "... Different Democrats will parrot one or more of these, depending on whether they are in a safe or vulnerable district. For example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), in the heart of an overwhelmingly Democratic region, will likely employ all four points, while a newly elected Democrat in a district won by Trump might focus only on the first. ..."
    "... Oh, one last thing. Here is what the Democrats will not say: We appreciate all the work that went into this report. This counterintelligence investigation was very thorough, there is no evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice, so we look forward to going back to the job we were elected to do: legislating for the benefit of the American people. ..."
    Apr 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Tom Donner via Liberty Nation,

    Now that Attorney General William Barr has promised to release the Mueller report in all its glory within the next few days, we thought it considerate to save you time you'll never get back watching the establishment media's reaction by informing you in advance of just how the Democrats are going to respond.

    But, you say, the report has not even been released, so how could you know what the Democrats will say? Well, they have been at this collusion delusion for more than two years now, we have witnessed the lengths to which they are willing to go in an effort to take down President Trump, and they have only a few bullets left in their chamber. We can state with overwhelming confidence that they will fire all of them.

    But let's start by reaffirming something as certain as the sun rising in the east: The Democrats will not accept the validity of the report in whatever form they receive it. That would, after all, require them to stop spinning their conspiracy theories, and we can't have that.

    From there, we move seamlessly to a preview of the four prefabricated talking points that will launch the Democrats' spin cycle. We call them the Mueller final four, because this is the last chance to demagogue the issue of Trump-Russia collusion. You need only to fill in the blanks using yet-to-be-determined passages from the report.

    So without further ado, we present the talking points Democrats will provide for the elite media to dutifully repeat and amplify:

    Talking Point 1 (mildest of the four): While we thank and commend Mr. Mueller for his work, the scope of his investigation was necessarily limited by his specific mandate and the special counsel law itself. There are just so many areas Mueller was not able to probe, thus at least six, and perhaps as many as nine, of our congressional committees must take the baton and continue running down the track. It is undoubtedly the highest and best use of our time, because as legislators we are elected to investigate (LINOs – legislators in name only?). After all, even though the financial disclosure forms Trump filed during the presidential campaign are far more revealing than any tax return, we must do everything possible to force the release of Trump's tax returns anyway. He is the first presidential candidate in 40 years not to release his tax returns, so he must be hiding something. And, of course, we need to dig into the entire history of the Trump organization, because we have deep suspicions all manner of crookedness is hidden in there.

    Talking Point 2 : While the conduct outlined does not quite rise to the level of criminality, the report details events and conversations that are deeply disturbing, primarily (fill in most easy-to-spin passages of report). Remember that not all improper, shameful, and traitorous conduct is felonious. Though the special counsel falls just short of uncovering collusion, he also refused to issue a recommendation on obstruction of justice . We all know that the attorney general is little more than a bootlicking hack taking orders from Trump, ipso facto his finding of no obstruction is likely some sort of coverup. And even though we lauded Rod Rosenstein for his stewardship of the special counsel investigation, even Rosenstein, in concurring with Barr's judgment on obstruction, has evidently fallen under the spell of the president and, like Barr, cannot be trusted.

    Talking Point 3 : Yes, the report contains no direct evidence of anything other than process and financial crimes that occurred either during the special counsel investigation itself or before Trump ran for president, and those have already been litigated. But there is ample circumstantial evidence of conspiracy between Trump operatives and the Russians to interfere in the election. For example, (fill in name of alleged conspirator) and (fill in name of another alleged conspirator) spoke to (fill in name of alleged Russian conspirator) less than two weeks apart. Mueller is by nature conservative in his judgments, no matter that an overwhelming majority of the lawyers he hired are politically active, anti-Trump Democrats who contributed to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or both. And regardless of whether he felt it appropriate to launch military-style raids on Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. So we must investigate this circumstantial evidence and connect the dots ourselves.

    Talking Point 4 : The redactions in this report are clear evidence that someone is trying to hide the parts that likely reveal actual collusion. The crooked attorney general and deplorable president used the cover of (choose one: grand jury testimony/classified information/interviews with completely innocent subjects) to redact the truth. Yes, all of that testimony and information must be redacted by law or by long-standing department regulations and precedent, but we nevertheless repeat our demand that the entire report, unredacted, be released, or we will launch yet more investigations on the cover-up by Barr and, of course, Trump. What are you hiding with these redactions, Mr. Barr?

    The Dems, of course, will cherry-pick passages from the report that can most effectively be spun together into a fantastic web of collusion. And like most conspiracy theorists, they will allege things that can never be proven or disproven. That basic fact alone will allow them to keep expressing outrage and carry on with their accusations about collusion and obstruction for as long as they choose.

    Different Democrats will parrot one or more of these, depending on whether they are in a safe or vulnerable district. For example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), in the heart of an overwhelmingly Democratic region, will likely employ all four points, while a newly elected Democrat in a district won by Trump might focus only on the first.

    Oh, one last thing. Here is what the Democrats will not say: We appreciate all the work that went into this report. This counterintelligence investigation was very thorough, there is no evidence of collusion or obstruction of justice, so we look forward to going back to the job we were elected to do: legislating for the benefit of the American people.

    So there you go. Everything you need to know about the Democrats' response to the Mueller report before it is even released.

    You're welcome.

    [Apr 11, 2019] Putin Derangement Syndrome After Mueller

    Notable quotes:
    "... In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost a sure-fire election to Donald Trump and, looking for an excuse, jumped on the Russia claim. Putin Derangement Syndrome was ramped up to a much more dangerous level. War-level dangerous. ..."
    Apr 11, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

    Putin Derangement Syndrome After Mueller

    The West – its governments and its governments' scribes – are obsessed with Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Obsessed" is probably too weak a word to describe the years of impassioned coverage, airy speculation and downright nonsense. He is the world's leading cover boy : military hats, Lenin poses, imperial crowns, scary red eyes, strait-jackets, clown hats; anything and everything. He's the avatar of Stalin , he's the avatar of the Tsars , he's the Joker , he's Cthulhu , he's Voldemort , he's Satan . He's the palimpsest for the New World Order's nightmares. Putin is always messing with our minds. He weaponises information, misinformation and sexual assault accusations . Childrens' cartoons , fishsticks , Pokemon and Yellow Vests , "Putin's warships" are lurking when they aren't stalking ; "Putin's warplanes" penetrate European airspace ; "Putin's tanks", massing in 2016 , massing in 2018 , still massing . His empire of rogue states grows . All Putin, all the time .

    In an especially imbecile display in 2015, Western reporters (unable to find his website) thinking he hadn't been seen for several days started a contest of speculation about coups, death, wars, plastic surgery, secret births and other nonsense; when he "re-appeared", the story went down the Memory Hole.

    For some reason, Americans personalise everything. In meetings with US intelligence agencies I was always fascinated how they would reduce every complicated reality to a single individual. But it isn't Saddam, or Assad, or Qaddafi, or Osama, or Aidid, or Milosevic, or Maduro, or Castro or any of the other villains-of-the-day, it's a whole country : these people got to the top for good reasons. Removing the boss makes some difference but never all the difference. They go but they never leave a Washington-friendly country behind and Washington does it all over again somewhere else. This peculiar blindness drives Putin Derangement Syndrome and has infected everybody else.

    But Putin is much worse than the others. The other enemies had relatively weak countries but Russia could obliterate the USA. But worse, Putin's team has steadily become more powerful and more influential. And worst of all, he's still there: huffing and puffing has not blown him down, sanctions strengthen the economy and there is nothing to suggest he won't be succeeded by someone who carries on the same policies. It's a whole country, not just one man.

    Vladimir Putin is the biggest man on earth.

    Except that he's short and can't hide it . He's a megalomaniac because he's short ; he's trying to prove his bigness ; napoleon complex says some shrink . Just another in a long list of crackpot "expert" opinions. From a list I complied in 2015: Asperger's Syndrome , cancer of the spinal cord , personality disorders , gayness , Parkinson's Disease , psychopath , people don't like him so animals have to , sinister, lonely life , fears his own people , envious of Obama . Remember the " gunslinger walk "? Oh, in case you hadn't heard, he was in the KGB and that explains everything: "Once a KGB man, always a KGB man". Nothing is too absurd.

    But laughing has passed – Putin Derangement Syndrome has become dangerous.

    In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost a sure-fire election to Donald Trump and, looking for an excuse, jumped on the Russia claim. Putin Derangement Syndrome was ramped up to a much more dangerous level. War-level dangerous.

    Former Attorney General Eric Holder said President Donald Trump's administration is doing nothing to stop Russians from interfering in the 2018 election cycle, comparing the lack of action on the part of the president to the 9/11 and Pearl Harbor attacks that killed thousands of Americans.

    A popular actor made a video to tell us we were at war . "Warfare" says Haley , "act of war" said John McCain , could be says Cheney , 911 says Clinton , disappointed CIA guy agrees , Pearl Harbor says Nadler . Diplomatic expulsions and sanctions and more sanctions . These are much more serious than gassy op-eds about Putin's gait or fish weights , these are actions: actions have consequences. Moscow doesn't find war talk very funny.

    Clinton's victory was 99% certain until it wasn't and excuses were needed. Clinton went through a lot of them but "Russian interference" was always the big one.

    That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. [9 November 2016] Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument. (From Shattered , quoted here .)

    In What Happened, Clinton also says Russian President Vladimir Putin's support for Trump was driven by his own anti-women sentiment, stacking the deck against her: "What Putin wanted to do was...influence our election, and he's not exactly fond of strong women, so you add that together and that's pretty much what it means." At press events for her memoir, Clinton continues to warn Americans against Russia's power over Trump and the country. "The Russians aren't done. This is an ongoing threat, and that is one of the reasons why I wrote the book and one of the reasons I'm talking about it," she said on Sunday at Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival. ( Newsweek )

    Her claim is, to put it mildly, unproven; the so-called " all 17 agencies" report notwithstanding . (The first premise that it was hacked is here disproved: downloaded by someone in the building ). Her accusation moved Putin Derangement Syndrome away from the realm of mere craziness into war talk. Taking the hint, Western politicians, under attack for their lacklustre performances, were happy to push the blame onto Putin. He's attacking democracy ! Western media weighed in until it became completely accepted by some people that anything that spoiled the happy complacency of the Western world must be a result of Putin's interference: gilets jaunes , " assistance provided to far-right and anti-establishment parties ", he's the poster boy of the dreaded populism , his populist tentacles reach Hungary and Italy . And the next thing we knew, Putin was mucking around in everybody's votes: Brexit ; Catalonia ; Netherlands ; Germany ; Sweden ; Italy ; EU in particular and Europe in general ; Mexico ; Canada . Newsweek gives a helpful list . Sometimes he loses elections: Germany , Ukraine but he goes on, unstopping . But his greatest triumph was said to have been in the US election : he " won " because Donald Trump was his willing puppet .

    (None of these "experts" ever seem to wonder why Putin's influence, so decisive far away, is so ineffective in Ukraine or Georgia. But then, it's not actually a rational, fact-based belief, is it?)

    The entire ramshackle construction is collapsing: if Mueller says there was no collusion then even the last ditch believers will have to accept it: Robert Mueller Prayer Candles are out of stock, time to toss the other tchotchkes , it wasn't a Mueller Christmas after all . Clinton's fabrication had two parts to it: 1) Putin interfered/determined the election 2) in collusion with Trump. When the second part is blown up, so must the first be. And then what will happen to all the loyal little allies crying "ours were interfered with too"!? The two halves of the story had the same authors and the same purpose: if one dies, so must the other. Now that Trump is secured from the obstruction charges that hung there as long as Mueller was in session , he is free to declassify the background documents that will show the origin, mechanics, authors and extent of the conspiracy. And he has said he will . In the process, both halves of the story will be destroyed: they're both lies.

    (For those who now realise there is something they have to catch up on: Conrad Black has a good exposition of the overall conspiracy and here is a quick round-up of the mechanics of the conspiracy . This may show its very beginning, three years ago ).

    Will the exposure of the plot and the plotters end the war-talk stage of Putin Derangement Syndrome? In a rational world, it would (but can its believers be embarrassed by the exposure of their credulity? Can they be made to think it all over again from the beginning?). It is true that Russia stands in the way of the neocons and liberal interventionists who have been guiding Washington this century, but that hardly means that Putin is the enemy of the American people. Because, properly considered, it's the neocons/liberal interventionists and their endless wars burning up lives, money and good will that are the enemies of Americans; in that respect Putin (unintentionally) stands with the true best interests of the American people. But the propaganda is so strong and the hysteria so unrestrained, that anyone who suggests that blocking the war party is in the best interests of Americans would be run out of town on a rail. ( As the attacks on Tulsi Gabbard show .) The USA is far down the rabbit hole. (Although I should say US elites: a Rasmussen poll shows that slightly more Americans think Clinton colluded with a foreign power than think Trump did . Considering the news coverage of the last two and a half years, that's a very interesting finding.)

    So, the sad conclusion is that Putin Derangement Syndrome will probably endure and the best we can hope for is that it is dialled down a bit and the "act of war" nonsense is quietly forgotten. Derangement was strong before the interference/collusion lie and it will exist as long as Putin does: the war party is too invested in personalities ever to realise that it's Russia, not its president, that's the obstacle. Let alone ever understand that much of what Moscow does is a pushback against Washington's aggression.

    Let The Onion have the last laugh at this dismal matter :

    "What the hell? I worked so hard on this -- if I wasn't colluding with the Trump campaign, who the hell was I colluding with?" said the dumbfounded Russian president, growing increasingly angry as he scrolled through his email inbox and recounted his numerous efforts at covert communication with individuals who he had thought were high-ranking Trump officials, but now he suspected were bots or anonymous internet trolls."

    [Apr 11, 2019] Vindicated At Last, Thank You General Barr by Larry C Johnson

    Notable quotes:
    "... Attorney General Barr stated the obvious--law enforcement and intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump's campaign ..."
    "... I had learned in December 2016 from friends inside the intelligence community that there was collaboration with the Brits to collect and disseminate intel on persons on the Trump campaign. With Trump's tweet making news, I was invited by RT (i.e., Russia Today) to come on one of their news programs and discuss the matter that same afternoon. ..."
    "... I then shared what I had learned about British intelligence ops to intercept U.S. communications on people affiliated with the Trump campagin with members of VIPS—i.e., Veteran Intelligence Professionals. One of these colleagues shared my analysis without my knowledge with Judge Andrew Napolitano. ..."
    "... The Brits reportedly initiated collection on their own. The “collection” from those intercepted conversations and emails were shared with the Obama Administration through normal intelligence channels—i.e., principally the NSA. It is important to note that the Brits targeting and collecting on Americans is not illegal. We are foreigners as far as they are concerned. They can collect anything. ..."
    "... The Independent ..."
    "... I felt sorry for the Judge and knew he was being railroaded. But I did not expect a phone call from him, asking for my help. He called and asked me to help. Prior to the phone call on Thursday, March 16, 2017, I had never spoken to the Judge. We were not even casual acquaintances. ..."
    "... Grynbaum is a classic example of what is wrong with the journalism today. For starters, he manufactured the “Frederick Forsyth” quote. I said no such thing. Besides fabricating a quote, he refused to address the substance of my information regarding the activities and conduct of British GCHQ. Instead, he went for the “Whitey” smear. ..."
    "... This was a dark period for me. People I thought I could rely on abandoned me. I was on my own. But not for long. Rescue came via Judge Napolitano and an unlikely source, The Guardian—a left leaning British newspaper. The Judge was brought back on air at Fox on March 29, 2017 and stood his ground: ..."
    "... On Wednesday morning, Napolitano returned to the network, making an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” His first order of business? Doubling down on the claims that got him suspended in the first place. (From the Washington Post, 29 March 2017, Amy Wang). ..."
    "... Two weeks later, on April 13 th , The Guardian not only confirmed what I had said about GCHQ (note, in some of my on air interviews I stupidly and mistakenly called the British spy agence GHCQ) but identified other countries as well who were collecting intelligence, i.e., intercepting communications : ..."
    "... There is a simple bottomline—My information was accurate and reliable. Also, I had the story before anyone else. Journalists and pundits were unwilling to listen. ..."
    "... Former national security adviser Susan Rice privately told House investigators that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates was in New York late last year, multiple sources told CNN. ..."
    "... Do you understand what this means? If you have never had a clearance and had access to NSA material then you probably fail to understand how profound this is. Let me explain. There were multiple intelligence reports released by the NSA. I am pretty certain all were classified as Top Secret. Some of these may have been generated by NSA, but most, according to the Guardian piece I mentioned above, were from foreign liaison. The names of the American citizens were initially obscured--e.g., Subject 1 or Subject 2. Hence the "request" to unmask. In other words, identify the nameless person by name. That, boys and girls, is known as spying. ..."
    "... Bill Barr is now getting the Larry Johnson treatment for daring to speak a simple, self-evident truth. One big difference. Barr can set in motion the legal process to indict and prosecute those American traitors in the law enforcement and intelligence community who violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and used their positions to launch a political witch-hunt. Stay tuned. ..."
    "... Thank you for this clarifying account. I used to read NoQuarter back in the day, and had been mystified when it was taken down. Now I understand, and am glad that Col. Lang has facilitated your return to blogging. ..."
    Apr 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Attorney General Barr stated the obvious--law enforcement and intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump's campaign -- and touched off an incredible display of stupidity and obtuseness among the Trump haters. Me? I was cheering because Bill Barr confirmed what I said two years ago. Unfortunately, for daring to speak a simple truth in the spring of 2017 I immediately was a target of the hate Trump media mob.

    I was attacked for telling the public the truth that foreign intelligence--the British to be precise--were spying on the Trump campaign and passing this info along to US intelligence. But the Brits were not acting unilaterally. There was full cooperation and activity by U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI. Another word for this is "COLLUSION."

    My speaking out brought about a furious counter attack by the media. People inside the Department of Justice reached out to my business partner and denounced me as a crank and conspiracy theorist. Because of that backlash I took down my blog, NoQuarter, and "retired" from blogging. Thanks to generosity of Colonel Lang, I eventually climbed back onto the blogging saddle.

    Let me take you back to the events that unfolded after Donald Trump tweeted on March 4, 2017 that he was being wiretapped by the FBI. The media establishment erupted in laughter and saw this as just one more piece of evidence proving Trump's mental instability. But I had a different take.

    I had learned in December 2016 from friends inside the intelligence community that there was collaboration with the Brits to collect and disseminate intel on persons on the Trump campaign. With Trump's tweet making news, I was invited by RT (i.e., Russia Today) to come on one of their news programs and discuss the matter that same afternoon.

    https://youtu.be/gPVkHGmw-7A

    Worth noting that my appearance on RT made no waves and generated no pushback. That tells you everything you need to know about RT’s alleged influence over public and punditry opinion as an alleged arm of Russian propaganda.

    I then shared what I had learned about British intelligence ops to intercept U.S. communications on people affiliated with the Trump campagin with members of VIPS—i.e., Veteran Intelligence Professionals. One of these colleagues shared my analysis without my knowledge with Judge Andrew Napolitano.

    Napolitano went on Fox on Monday, March 13, 2017 and declared:

    On Monday, Fox News Channel judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano alleged that three intelligence sources had confirmed to him that the Obama administration used GCHQ (Britain's NSA) to spy on President Trump during the 2016 election so that there would be no paper trail.

    "Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the 'chain of command' to conduct the surveillance on Trump," he said. "Obama didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of Justice."

    "What happened to the guy who ordered this? Resigned three days after Trump took office," he added.

    The Judge got some key nuances wrong. Obama, to my knowledge, did not ask the Brits/GCHQ to do anything on his behalf. The Brits reportedly initiated collection on their own. The “collection” from those intercepted conversations and emails were shared with the Obama Administration through normal intelligence channels—i.e., principally the NSA. It is important to note that the Brits targeting and collecting on Americans is not illegal. We are foreigners as far as they are concerned. They can collect anything.

    The Judge’s comments set off a firestorm. In a matter of hours, Fox News Corporation, responding to pressure from the British Government, took Napolitano off the air. The Independent, a British newspaper, reported as follows:

    A legal analyst who claimed British intelligence could have helped spy on Donald Trump during his bid to become US president has been taken off the air.

    Andrew Napolitano has been pulled from the Fox News Channel, a source at the organisation said.

    The Independent understands that Mr Napolitano is not expected to appear on the Fox News Channel anytime in the near future.

    The analyst's claim that GCHQ had helped former president Barack Obama bug Trump Tower was cited last week by White House press secretary Sean Spicer, sparking a diplomatic incident.

    I felt sorry for the Judge and knew he was being railroaded. But I did not expect a phone call from him, asking for my help. He called and asked me to help. Prior to the phone call on Thursday, March 16, 2017, I had never spoken to the Judge. We were not even casual acquaintances.

    Judge Napolitano, clearly smarting over the public lashing he was receiving, asked if I would be willing to speak to a New York Times reporter, Michael Grynbaum, about the matter. I agreed to do so. That was a mistake. Here is how Grynbaum reported what I did not say:

    Mr. Napolitano also has a taste for conspiracy theories, which led him to Larry C. Johnson, a former intelligence officer best known for spreading a hoax about Michelle Obama. . . .

    But Mr. Johnson, who was himself once a Fox News contributor, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Napolitano called him on Friday and requested that he speak to The New York Times. Mr. Johnson said he was one of the sources for Mr. Napolitano’s claim about British intelligence.

    Mr. Johnson became infamous in political circles after he spread false rumors in 2008 that Michelle Obama had been videotaped using a slur against Caucasians. In the interview on Friday, Mr. Johnson acknowledged his notoriety, but said that his knowledge of surveillance of Mr. Trump came from sources in the American intelligence community. Mr. Napolitano, he said, heard about his information through an intermediary.

    “It sounds like a Frederick Forsyth novel,” Mr. Johnson said.

    Grynbaum is a classic example of what is wrong with the journalism today. For starters, he manufactured the “Frederick Forsyth” quote. I said no such thing. Besides fabricating a quote, he refused to address the substance of my information regarding the activities and conduct of British GCHQ. Instead, he went for the “Whitey” smear.

    If you are not familiar with that episode, permit me to refresh your memory or create a new one for you. It is a simple story—I allowed myself to be used by Clinton campaign, Sid Blumenthal in particular, to spread a rumor that turned out to be untrue.

    I was an ardent supporter of Hillary in 2007 and 2008. I had previously briefed her in 2007 on the war in Iraq and found her, at least in a one-on-one setting, to be very intelligent and very well informed. But that was then. Her subsequent conduct as the Secretary of State, especially how she mishandled the Benghazi incident, ended any chance that I would ever support her for any role in which the lives of American military, diplomats or intelligence officers are on the line.

    After that briefing, I found myself as an unofficial member of the Clinton for President team via my friendship with Sid Blumenthal. I had enormous respect for Sid and his wife. I thought they were good people. The only thing I now know for certain is that they are fiercely loyal to the Clintons.

    As the contest between Hillary and Barach Obama heated up, Sid would call me from time to time with suggestions of articles I could write or pieces that could be run on my now defunct blog--NoQuarterUSa.net. I was more than happy to help. I believed then (and have been vindicated by the passage of time) that Barack Obama was just a pretty face with no significant experience and he would be a terrible President.

    Then came the fateful phone call from Sid Blumenthal in late May 2008. He told me he had learned of a tape that was circulating in restricted circles that featured Michelle Obama using the derogatory phrase, “whitey.” Armed with that tidbit of gossip I turned to an old friend in the media community and he too confirmed he had heard the same thing (stupidly, I never considered the possibility that Sid was spreading this far and wide and that I was getting blowback).

    When I mentioned the possible existence of this tape to a Republican friend of mine and former CIA colleague in California, I was shocked when he said, “I have a friend who has seen and heard the tape. That was enough for me. Based on these two sources, I wrote the story up at NoQuarterUSA.net.

    It went viral. But nothing surfaced. I became uneasy. So I went back to Sid and pressed him for more information. He in turn sent me to David Brock of Media Matters. (I had met Brock previously at the Blumenthal home watching election returns in 2006.) Brock told me that the information came from female friend who insisted she had seen and heard the slur by Michelle Obama.

    The matter became more confused when the Obama campaign sent out an email to their campaign workers claiming that Michelle said “WHY DID HE” rather than the pejorative, “WHITEY.” That led me to believe there was substance to the Blumenthal/Brock rumor.

    Ultimately the story died out. No tape surfaced, but I bore the blame as the “Whitey” guy. With the benefit of hindsight I now understand that I was an unwitting but willing tool in a David Brock dirty trick. No such tape ever surfaced. I can only conclude that the desperation of the Clinton campaign to win was so extreme that they would stoop to use a racist meme to smear Obama.

    I regret what I did in writing the story up. But it did not originate with me. It started with David Brock. Which brings me back to the Napolitano affair.

    After Grynbaun identified me as one of Judge Napolitano’s sources, it was open season on me. Not one of the media outlets—except for CNN and the Politico — even took the time to reach out to me and ask me to tell my side of the story. Instead, they recirculated talking points from Media Matters.

    Here is what I told Brian Stelter during this period:

    https://youtu.be/NRxuzxcOLdM

    Talk about Chutzpah. David Brock started the Whitey rumor (I will happily take a polygraph on that point) and then has the audacity to attack me and dismiss my information (via Media Matters) simply because I had passed on rumors where he was the original source:

    Media Matters first traced Napolitano's wiretapping conspiracy back to an interview on the state-sponsored Russian television network RT with the former CIA analyst and discredited conspiracy theorist Larry C. Johnson, who previously promoted false claims that Michelle Obama used a racial slur against Caucasian people.

    This was a dark period for me. People I thought I could rely on abandoned me. I was on my own. But not for long. Rescue came via Judge Napolitano and an unlikely source, The Guardian—a left leaning British newspaper. The Judge was brought back on air at Fox on March 29, 2017 and stood his ground:

    On Wednesday morning, Napolitano returned to the network, making an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” His first order of business? Doubling down on the claims that got him suspended in the first place. (From the Washington Post, 29 March 2017, Amy Wang).

    Two weeks later, on April 13th, The Guardian not only confirmed what I had said about GCHQ (note, in some of my on air interviews I stupidly and mistakenly called the British spy agence GHCQ) but identified other countries as well who were collecting intelligence, i.e., intercepting communications:

    Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.

    GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

    Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said.

    There is a simple bottomline—My information was accurate and reliable. Also, I had the story before anyone else. Journalists and pundits were unwilling to listen.

    We know a lot more today then we did in the Spring of 2017. George Papadopoulos was targeted by a MI-6 covert action designed to portray him as a lackey of Russia and promoting Russia to the Trump campaign. Carter Page was spied upon under four separate FISA warrants that were based on the fictitious Steel Dossier. And a CIA "contractor", Stefan Halper, played the role of an agitator trying to lure Papadopoulos into implicating himself in a Russian plot.

    And then we have the unmasking of American citizens. Here is but one example:

    Former national security adviser Susan Rice privately told House investigators that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates was in New York late last year, multiple sources told CNN.

    The New York meeting preceded a separate effort by the UAE to facilitate a back-channel communication between Russia and the incoming Trump White House.

    Do you understand what this means? If you have never had a clearance and had access to NSA material then you probably fail to understand how profound this is. Let me explain. There were multiple intelligence reports released by the NSA. I am pretty certain all were classified as Top Secret. Some of these may have been generated by NSA, but most, according to the Guardian piece I mentioned above, were from foreign liaison. The names of the American citizens were initially obscured--e.g., Subject 1 or Subject 2. Hence the "request" to unmask. In other words, identify the nameless person by name. That, boys and girls, is known as spying.

    Bill Barr is now getting the Larry Johnson treatment for daring to speak a simple, self-evident truth. One big difference. Barr can set in motion the legal process to indict and prosecute those American traitors in the law enforcement and intelligence community who violated their oath to uphold the Constitution and used their positions to launch a political witch-hunt. Stay tuned.

    JerseyJeffersonian , 12 hours ago

    Mr. Johnson,

    Thank you for this clarifying account. I used to read NoQuarter back in the day, and had been mystified when it was taken down. Now I understand, and am glad that Col. Lang has facilitated your return to blogging.

    And just in time to see some of your tormentors - and unsurprisingly the very same tormentors of our constitutional republic - be (hopefully) called to account for their actions.

    The Lame Stream Media have much for which to answer concerning their part in all of this; they have abrogated their role as even-handed watchdogs through their open-eyed and monolithic dissemination of hyper-partisan, cultural marxist agitprop, much of it focused on character assassination of those who did not share their beliefs, and yet more noxiously by throttling the expression of contrary argumentation across the board.

    But the genuine opprobium should be reserved for those officers and officials, sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, who determinedly worked to instead disregard and undermine the Constitution, and the constitutional republic which it undergirds.

    [Apr 11, 2019] Interview transcripts from Congress on FBI officials Bill Priestap and James Baker by Robert Willmann

    Apr 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Congressman Doug Collins (Repub. Georgia) has released two more transcripts of committee interviews of people about the attempt to de-legitimize the election and inauguration of an elected president, and to create conditions for his removal. They can be viewed and downloaded for reading.

    ... ... ...

    Representative Collins previously released transcripts of interviews of Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, George Papadopolous, and Bruce and Nellie Ohr. Those transcripts were cited here at SST on 29 March 2019--

    https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/03/interview-transcripts-from-congress-on-peter-strzok-lisa-page-g-papadopoulos-and-b-and-n-ohr.html

    [Apr 11, 2019] The dubious products of the glorified diploma mills we call "higher education" are often the most gullible and dim-witted

    Apr 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    HallParvey , says: April 10, 2019 at 2:56 pm GMT

    @Nicolás Palacios Navarro

    Unfortunately, the near totality of this country's populace is effectively illiterate and poorly equipped to think critically and independently, preferring to accept the verdicts of their oleaginous talking heads at face value without ever troubling themselves to examine why.

    (The dubious products of the glorified diploma mills we call "higher education" are often the most gullible and dim-witted.)

    Someday, when we all have multiple degrees from prestigious institutions of exalted learning, our collective I.Q. will be substantially higher than it is today, and we will understand everything.

    Except how to change a light bulb.

    [Apr 11, 2019] Tulsi Hits 65,000 Donors!!!---UPDATE caucus99percent

    Apr 11, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

    span y apenultimate on Wed, 04/10/2019 - 7:09pm She did it, an hour ago!

    Tulsi Gabbard now has enough individual donors to make it into the televised Democratic debates! Thanks to those of you who helped, either by becoming a donor, or in spirit!

    [Apr 11, 2019] A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.

    Notable quotes:
    "... He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague ..."
    Apr 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Republic , says: April 10, 2019 at 1:47 pm GMT

    Cicero's quotation:

    A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

    For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.

    He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague."

    ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

    [Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

    Highly recommended!
    Money quote: "The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate."
    Notable quotes:
    "... Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’ ..."
    "... Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .) ..."
    "... Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them. ..."
    "... ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’ ..."
    "... The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same. ..."
    "... A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation. ..."
    "... In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’) ..."
    "... The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief. ..."
    "... There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller." ..."
    "... I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language. ..."
    "... The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. ..."
    "... There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate. ..."
    Apr 08, 2019 | www.wsws.org

    Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

    "Dan, Thanks for the reference, which I will follow up. Unfortunately, although Bongino has produced a lot of extremely valuable material, a lot of it is buried in the 'postcasts', searching through which is harder than with printed materials. It would greatly help if there were transcripts, but of course those cost money.

    I am still trying to fit the exploding mass of information which has been coming out into a coherent timeline. Part of the problem is that there is so much appearing in so many different places. In addition to trying to think through the implications of the information in this post and the subsequent exchanges of comments, I have been trying to make sense of evidence coming out about the British end of the conspiracy.

    An important development here has been rather well covered by Chuck Ross, in a recent ‘Daily Caller’ piece headlined ‘Cambridge Academic Reflects On Interactions With 'Spygate’ Figure’ and one on ‘Fox’ by Catherine Herridge and Cyd Upson, entitled ‘Russian academic linked to Flynn denies being spy, says her past contact was “used” to smear him.’ However, the evidence involved has ramifications which they cannot be expected to understand, as yet at least.

    (See https://dailycaller.com/201... ; https://www.foxnews.com/pol... .)

    At issue is the attempt to use the – apparently casual – encounter between Lieutenant-General Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner in Cambridge (U.K.) in February 2016 to smear him by, among other things, portraying her as some kind of ‘Mata Hari’ figure.

    Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’

    This suggests that this was not simply a case Halper acting on his own. It also I think brings us back to the central importance of Flynn’s visit to Moscow in December 2015.

    Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .)

    Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them.

    Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:

    ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’

    (See https://twitter.com/RealSLo... .)

    Meanwhile, another interesting recent ‘tweet’ comes from Eliot Higgins, of ‘Bellingcat’ fame. He is known to some skeptics as ‘the couch potato’ – perhaps he should be rechristened ‘king cockroach.’ It reads:

    ‘Looking forward to gettin g things rolling with the Open Information Partnership, with @bellingcat, @MDI_UK, @DFRLab, and @This_Is_Zinc https://www.openinformation...’

    (See https://twitter.com/EliotHi... )

    There is an interesting ‘backstory’ to this. The announcement of an FCO-supported ‘Open Information Partnership of European Non-Governmental Organisations, charities, academics, think-tanks and journalists’, supposedly to counter ‘disinformation’ from Russia, came in a written answer from the Minister of State, Sir Alan Duncan, on 3 April.

    (See https://www.theyworkforyou.... )

    In turn this followed the latest in a series of releases of material either leaked or hacked from the organisations calling themselves ‘Institute for Statecraft’ and ‘Integrity Initiative’ by the group calling themselves ‘Anonymous’ on 25 March.

    (See https://www.cyberguerrilla .... )

    The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same.

    A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation.

    An interesting paragraph reads as follows:

    ‘An expanded research component could generate better understanding of the drivers (psychological, sociopolitical, cultural and environmental) of those who are susceptible to disinformation. This will allow us to map vulnerable audiences, and build scenario planning models to test the efficiency of different activities to build resilience of those populations over time.’

    They have not yet got to the point of recommending psychiatic treatment for ‘dissidents’, but these are still early days. The ‘Sovietisation’ of Western life proceeds apace.

    In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’)

    Study of the proposal hacked/leaked by ‘Anonymous’ bring out both the ‘boondoggle’ element – there is a lot of state funding available for people happy to play these games – and also the strong transatlantic links.

    A particularly significant presence, here, is the ‘DFRLab’. This is the ‘Digital Forensic Research Lab’ at the ‘Atlantic Council’, where Eliot Higgins is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’ The same organisation has a ‘Cyber Statecraft Initiative’ where Dmitri Alperovitch is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’

    It cannot be repeated often enough that it is difficult to see any conceivable excuse for the FBI to fail to secure access to the DNC servers. One would normally moreover expect that, on an issue of this sensitivity, they would have the ‘digital forensics’ done by their own people.

    There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that organisation.

    To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic ‘Atlantic Council’ is even more preposterous.

    The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief.

    There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller."

    chris chuba , a day ago

    OT but related, just watched a former naval Intelligence officer, now working for the Hoover Institute interviewed on FOX about the Rooshins in Venezuela. Said, the 100 Russians are there to protect Maduro because he cannot trust his own army. Maduro's days are numbered because he is toxically unpopular.

    Got me thinking, our Intelligence services are good at psy-ops and keeping our gullible MSM in line but God help us if we ever actually needed real Intelligence about a country. I remember about a month ago how all of these 'Think Tank Guys' were predicting how the only people loyal to Maduro were a few of his crony Generals, that the rank and file military hated him and there were going to be mass defections.

    It didn't happen and we are all just supposed to forget that.
    [not a socialist, don't have any love for Maduro, I just know that I will never learn anything of about Venezuela from these think tank dudes, we are just getting groomed]

    Karl Kolchak -> chris chuba , a day ago
    Venezuela isn't about "socialism," or even Maduro--it's about the oil. They have the largest proven reserves in the world, though much of it is non-conventional and would need a ton of investment to exploit. But it's their oil, not ours, and we have no right to meddle in their internal affairs.
    Jack -> Karl Kolchak , 15 hours ago
    Venezuela is neither about socialism nor oil in my opinion. It is everything to do with the neocons. And Trump buying into their hegemonic dreams. Notice the resurrection of Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame as the man spearheading this in a triumvirate with Bolton & Pompeo. IMO, a perfect foil for Putin & Xi to embroil the US in another regime change quagmire that further weakens the US.
    Mad_Max22 , 17 hours ago
    "There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that organisation.
    To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic 'Atlantic Council' is even more preposterous."

    True; and true. It is also true that the Clinton e-mail investigation was faux, a limp caricature of what an investigation would look like when it is designed to uncover the truth. Allowing a subject's law firm to review the subject's e-mails from when she was in government for relevancy is beyond preposterous. An investigation conducted in the normal way by apolitical Agents in a field office would not walk away from a trove of evidence empty handed.
    The inter-relatedness and overlapping of DoJ, CIA, and FBI personnel assigned to the Clinton e-mail case, the Russophobic nightmare of a 'case' targeting Carter Page, and by extension, the Trump presidential campaign, and yes, the Mueller political op, all reek of political bias and ineptitude followed by more political bias; and then culmination in a scorched earth investigation more characteristic of something the STASI might have undertaken than American justice.
    Early morning raids, gag orders, solitary confinements, show indictments that will never see adjudication in a court room - truly unbelievable.

    Jack , 15 hours ago
    David

    In your opinion was this surveillance, criminal & counter-intelligence investigation as well as information operations against Trump centrally orchestrated or was it more reactive & decentralized?

    There are so many facets. Fusion GPS & Nellie Ohr with her previous CIA connection. Her husband Bruce at the DOJ stovepiping the dossier to the FBI. Brennan and his EC. Clapper and his intelligence assessment. Halper, Mifsud, Steele along with Hannigan and the MI6 + GCHQ connection. Downer and the Aussies. FISA warrants on Page & Papadopolous. The whole Strzok & Page texting. Comey, Lynch & the Hillary exoneration. McCabe. Then all the Russians. And the media leaks to generate hysteria.

    john fletcher , a day ago

    I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language.

    And yet the chatterati continued to chatter and invent ludicrously unreal worlds and analyses of the actual world they lived in until... bang... it was no more.

    I'd skip the first few chapters which are full of impenetrable marxist jargon.

    VietnamVet , 12 hours ago
    The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler.

    There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate.

    [Apr 10, 2019] A demoralized white working and middle class was willing to believe in anything, deluding themselves into reading between the barren eruptions of his blowzy proclamations. They elevated him to messianic heights, ironically fashioning him into that which he publicly claims to despise: an Obama, a Barry in negative image, hope and change for the OxyContin and Breitbart set

    Highly recommended!
    Trump betrayed white workers because he knows he can get away with it. For the last thirty years of the 20th century millions of white families were wrenched out of the middle class without a squeak out of any major news outlet or national level politician. Trump himself stiffed his workers in those days and got away with it.
    Notable quotes:
    "... “In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider. ..."
    "... A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won’t fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics.” ..."
    "... Yes, it would have been worse with the Cackling Hyena, but what does that tell ya? ..."
    Apr 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: April 10, 2019 at 8:55 am GMT

    I'm not sure why the author of this article seems to be surprised by the actions of Trump and his administration. The collective image of him as a blood-thirsty racist whose hatred of all peoples queer 'n' colored runs marrow and generations-deep -- think of a cross between a street corner John Galt and Ian Smith, daubed with vague overtones of Archie Bunker mingling with Clint Eastwood -- is purely an invention of the media, the left as well as that of the right.

    Why or how he became the impromptu pope of white nationalism escapes me. Anyone with ears to listen and eyes to see could find for themselves that he never so much as intimated even muted sympathy for that movement, not during his campaign and certainly not as head of state, media accusations of "dog whistles" and the like notwithstanding.

    But a demoralized white working and middle class were willing to believe in anything, deluding themselves into reading between the barren eruptions of his blowzy proclamations. They elevated him to messianic heights, ironically fashioning him into that which he publicly claims to despise: an Obama, a Barry in negative image, "hope and change" for the OxyContin and Breitbart set. Like his predecessor, Trump never really says anything at all. There are grand pronouncements, bilious screeds targeting perceived enemies, glib generalities, but rarely are any concrete, definitive ideas and policies ever articulated. Trump, like Obama, is merely a cipher, an empty suit upon which the dreams (or nightmares) of the beholder can effortlessly be projected, a polarizing figurehead who wields mostly ceremonial powers while others ostensibly beneath him busy themselves with the actual running of the republic.

    To observe this requires no great research or expenditure of effort -- he lays it all out there for anybody to hear or read. Unfortunately, the near totality of this country's populace is effectively illiterate and poorly equipped to think critically and independently, preferring to accept the verdicts of their oleaginous talking heads at face value without ever troubling themselves to examine why. (The dubious products of the glorified diploma mills we call "higher education" are often the most gullible and dim-witted.) Trump is the dark magus of racism and bigotry -- boo! Trump is the man of sorrows who will carry aloft Western Civilization resurgent -- yay!

    Just as the hysterical left was quickly shattered by the mediocrity that was Barack Obama, so too does the hysterical right now ululate the sting of Donald Trump's supposed betrayal. As with their ideological antipodes, they got what they deserved. Pity that the rest of us have to be carted along for the ride.

    Amerimutt Golem , says: April 10, 2019 at 9:39 am GMT

    Trump is just a golem -- a creature made by you know who to destroy their enemies like Iran etc, no different from GW or FDR.
    anonymous [340] • Disclaimer , says: April 10, 2019 at 10:01 am GMT
    Politics, at least at the national level, is a puppet show to channel and periodically blow off dissent.

    “In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.

    A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won’t fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics.”

    Linh Dinh, “Orlando Shooting Means Trump for President,” published at The Unz Review, June 12, 2016.

    jacques sheete , says: April 10, 2019 at 10:12 am GMT

    @Hank

    We were “Trumped”. Hard to believe.

    What’s so hard to believe? Many of us predicted as much.

    PS: It would be more accurate to admit that his supporters have been t Rumped . He stuck it to ya and you enjoyed it. Believe it and remember it.

    Yes, it would have been worse with the Cackling Hyena, but what does that tell ya?

    [Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

    Highly recommended!
    Money quote: "The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate."
    Notable quotes:
    "... Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’ ..."
    "... Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .) ..."
    "... Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them. ..."
    "... ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’ ..."
    "... The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same. ..."
    "... A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation. ..."
    "... In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’) ..."
    "... The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief. ..."
    "... There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller." ..."
    "... I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language. ..."
    "... The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. ..."
    "... There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate. ..."
    Apr 08, 2019 | www.wsws.org

    Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

    "Dan, Thanks for the reference, which I will follow up. Unfortunately, although Bongino has produced a lot of extremely valuable material, a lot of it is buried in the 'postcasts', searching through which is harder than with printed materials. It would greatly help if there were transcripts, but of course those cost money.

    I am still trying to fit the exploding mass of information which has been coming out into a coherent timeline. Part of the problem is that there is so much appearing in so many different places. In addition to trying to think through the implications of the information in this post and the subsequent exchanges of comments, I have been trying to make sense of evidence coming out about the British end of the conspiracy.

    An important development here has been rather well covered by Chuck Ross, in a recent ‘Daily Caller’ piece headlined ‘Cambridge Academic Reflects On Interactions With 'Spygate’ Figure’ and one on ‘Fox’ by Catherine Herridge and Cyd Upson, entitled ‘Russian academic linked to Flynn denies being spy, says her past contact was “used” to smear him.’ However, the evidence involved has ramifications which they cannot be expected to understand, as yet at least.

    (See https://dailycaller.com/201... ; https://www.foxnews.com/pol... .)

    At issue is the attempt to use the – apparently casual – encounter between Lieutenant-General Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner in Cambridge (U.K.) in February 2016 to smear him by, among other things, portraying her as some kind of ‘Mata Hari’ figure.

    Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’

    This suggests that this was not simply a case Halper acting on his own. It also I think brings us back to the central importance of Flynn’s visit to Moscow in December 2015.

    Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .)

    Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them.

    Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:

    ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’

    (See https://twitter.com/RealSLo... .)

    Meanwhile, another interesting recent ‘tweet’ comes from Eliot Higgins, of ‘Bellingcat’ fame. He is known to some skeptics as ‘the couch potato’ – perhaps he should be rechristened ‘king cockroach.’ It reads:

    ‘Looking forward to gettin g things rolling with the Open Information Partnership, with @bellingcat, @MDI_UK, @DFRLab, and @This_Is_Zinc https://www.openinformation...’

    (See https://twitter.com/EliotHi... )

    There is an interesting ‘backstory’ to this. The announcement of an FCO-supported ‘Open Information Partnership of European Non-Governmental Organisations, charities, academics, think-tanks and journalists’, supposedly to counter ‘disinformation’ from Russia, came in a written answer from the Minister of State, Sir Alan Duncan, on 3 April.

    (See https://www.theyworkforyou.... )

    In turn this followed the latest in a series of releases of material either leaked or hacked from the organisations calling themselves ‘Institute for Statecraft’ and ‘Integrity Initiative’ by the group calling themselves ‘Anonymous’ on 25 March.

    (See https://www.cyberguerrilla .... )

    The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same.

    A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation.

    An interesting paragraph reads as follows:

    ‘An expanded research component could generate better understanding of the drivers (psychological, sociopolitical, cultural and environmental) of those who are susceptible to disinformation. This will allow us to map vulnerable audiences, and build scenario planning models to test the efficiency of different activities to build resilience of those populations over time.’

    They have not yet got to the point of recommending psychiatic treatment for ‘dissidents’, but these are still early days. The ‘Sovietisation’ of Western life proceeds apace.

    In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’)

    Study of the proposal hacked/leaked by ‘Anonymous’ bring out both the ‘boondoggle’ element – there is a lot of state funding available for people happy to play these games – and also the strong transatlantic links.

    A particularly significant presence, here, is the ‘DFRLab’. This is the ‘Digital Forensic Research Lab’ at the ‘Atlantic Council’, where Eliot Higgins is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’ The same organisation has a ‘Cyber Statecraft Initiative’ where Dmitri Alperovitch is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’

    It cannot be repeated often enough that it is difficult to see any conceivable excuse for the FBI to fail to secure access to the DNC servers. One would normally moreover expect that, on an issue of this sensitivity, they would have the ‘digital forensics’ done by their own people.

    There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that organisation.

    To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic ‘Atlantic Council’ is even more preposterous.

    The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief.

    There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller."

    chris chuba , a day ago

    OT but related, just watched a former naval Intelligence officer, now working for the Hoover Institute interviewed on FOX about the Rooshins in Venezuela. Said, the 100 Russians are there to protect Maduro because he cannot trust his own army. Maduro's days are numbered because he is toxically unpopular.

    Got me thinking, our Intelligence services are good at psy-ops and keeping our gullible MSM in line but God help us if we ever actually needed real Intelligence about a country. I remember about a month ago how all of these 'Think Tank Guys' were predicting how the only people loyal to Maduro were a few of his crony Generals, that the rank and file military hated him and there were going to be mass defections.

    It didn't happen and we are all just supposed to forget that.
    [not a socialist, don't have any love for Maduro, I just know that I will never learn anything of about Venezuela from these think tank dudes, we are just getting groomed]

    Karl Kolchak -> chris chuba , a day ago
    Venezuela isn't about "socialism," or even Maduro--it's about the oil. They have the largest proven reserves in the world, though much of it is non-conventional and would need a ton of investment to exploit. But it's their oil, not ours, and we have no right to meddle in their internal affairs.
    Jack -> Karl Kolchak , 15 hours ago
    Venezuela is neither about socialism nor oil in my opinion. It is everything to do with the neocons. And Trump buying into their hegemonic dreams. Notice the resurrection of Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame as the man spearheading this in a triumvirate with Bolton & Pompeo. IMO, a perfect foil for Putin & Xi to embroil the US in another regime change quagmire that further weakens the US.
    Mad_Max22 , 17 hours ago
    "There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that organisation.
    To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic 'Atlantic Council' is even more preposterous."

    True; and true. It is also true that the Clinton e-mail investigation was faux, a limp caricature of what an investigation would look like when it is designed to uncover the truth. Allowing a subject's law firm to review the subject's e-mails from when she was in government for relevancy is beyond preposterous. An investigation conducted in the normal way by apolitical Agents in a field office would not walk away from a trove of evidence empty handed.
    The inter-relatedness and overlapping of DoJ, CIA, and FBI personnel assigned to the Clinton e-mail case, the Russophobic nightmare of a 'case' targeting Carter Page, and by extension, the Trump presidential campaign, and yes, the Mueller political op, all reek of political bias and ineptitude followed by more political bias; and then culmination in a scorched earth investigation more characteristic of something the STASI might have undertaken than American justice.
    Early morning raids, gag orders, solitary confinements, show indictments that will never see adjudication in a court room - truly unbelievable.

    Jack , 15 hours ago
    David

    In your opinion was this surveillance, criminal & counter-intelligence investigation as well as information operations against Trump centrally orchestrated or was it more reactive & decentralized?

    There are so many facets. Fusion GPS & Nellie Ohr with her previous CIA connection. Her husband Bruce at the DOJ stovepiping the dossier to the FBI. Brennan and his EC. Clapper and his intelligence assessment. Halper, Mifsud, Steele along with Hannigan and the MI6 + GCHQ connection. Downer and the Aussies. FISA warrants on Page & Papadopolous. The whole Strzok & Page texting. Comey, Lynch & the Hillary exoneration. McCabe. Then all the Russians. And the media leaks to generate hysteria.

    john fletcher , a day ago

    I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language.

    And yet the chatterati continued to chatter and invent ludicrously unreal worlds and analyses of the actual world they lived in until... bang... it was no more.

    I'd skip the first few chapters which are full of impenetrable marxist jargon.

    VietnamVet , 12 hours ago
    The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler.

    There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate.

    [Apr 10, 2019] A demoralized white working and middle class was willing to believe in anything, deluding themselves into reading between the barren eruptions of his blowzy proclamations. They elevated him to messianic heights, ironically fashioning him into that which he publicly claims to despise: an Obama, a Barry in negative image, hope and change for the OxyContin and Breitbart set

    Highly recommended!
    Trump betrayed white workers because he knows he can get away with it. For the last thirty years of the 20th century millions of white families were wrenched out of the middle class without a squeak out of any major news outlet or national level politician. Trump himself stiffed his workers in those days and got away with it.
    Notable quotes:
    "... “In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider. ..."
    "... A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won’t fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics.” ..."
    "... Yes, it would have been worse with the Cackling Hyena, but what does that tell ya? ..."
    Apr 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: April 10, 2019 at 8:55 am GMT

    I'm not sure why the author of this article seems to be surprised by the actions of Trump and his administration. The collective image of him as a blood-thirsty racist whose hatred of all peoples queer 'n' colored runs marrow and generations-deep -- think of a cross between a street corner John Galt and Ian Smith, daubed with vague overtones of Archie Bunker mingling with Clint Eastwood -- is purely an invention of the media, the left as well as that of the right.

    Why or how he became the impromptu pope of white nationalism escapes me. Anyone with ears to listen and eyes to see could find for themselves that he never so much as intimated even muted sympathy for that movement, not during his campaign and certainly not as head of state, media accusations of "dog whistles" and the like notwithstanding.

    But a demoralized white working and middle class were willing to believe in anything, deluding themselves into reading between the barren eruptions of his blowzy proclamations. They elevated him to messianic heights, ironically fashioning him into that which he publicly claims to despise: an Obama, a Barry in negative image, "hope and change" for the OxyContin and Breitbart set. Like his predecessor, Trump never really says anything at all. There are grand pronouncements, bilious screeds targeting perceived enemies, glib generalities, but rarely are any concrete, definitive ideas and policies ever articulated. Trump, like Obama, is merely a cipher, an empty suit upon which the dreams (or nightmares) of the beholder can effortlessly be projected, a polarizing figurehead who wields mostly ceremonial powers while others ostensibly beneath him busy themselves with the actual running of the republic.

    To observe this requires no great research or expenditure of effort -- he lays it all out there for anybody to hear or read. Unfortunately, the near totality of this country's populace is effectively illiterate and poorly equipped to think critically and independently, preferring to accept the verdicts of their oleaginous talking heads at face value without ever troubling themselves to examine why. (The dubious products of the glorified diploma mills we call "higher education" are often the most gullible and dim-witted.) Trump is the dark magus of racism and bigotry -- boo! Trump is the man of sorrows who will carry aloft Western Civilization resurgent -- yay!

    Just as the hysterical left was quickly shattered by the mediocrity that was Barack Obama, so too does the hysterical right now ululate the sting of Donald Trump's supposed betrayal. As with their ideological antipodes, they got what they deserved. Pity that the rest of us have to be carted along for the ride.

    Amerimutt Golem , says: April 10, 2019 at 9:39 am GMT

    Trump is just a golem -- a creature made by you know who to destroy their enemies like Iran etc, no different from GW or FDR.
    anonymous [340] • Disclaimer , says: April 10, 2019 at 10:01 am GMT
    Politics, at least at the national level, is a puppet show to channel and periodically blow off dissent.

    “In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.

    A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won’t fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics.”

    Linh Dinh, “Orlando Shooting Means Trump for President,” published at The Unz Review, June 12, 2016.

    jacques sheete , says: April 10, 2019 at 10:12 am GMT

    @Hank

    We were “Trumped”. Hard to believe.

    What’s so hard to believe? Many of us predicted as much.

    PS: It would be more accurate to admit that his supporters have been t Rumped . He stuck it to ya and you enjoyed it. Believe it and remember it.

    Yes, it would have been worse with the Cackling Hyena, but what does that tell ya?

    [Apr 10, 2019] I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes

    Apr 10, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:

    ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’

    [Apr 10, 2019] Trump and low-information voters

    Apr 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Hail , says: Website April 10, 2019 at 5:41 am GMT

    @Thinker

    who are those idiots who still keep showing up at his rallies?

    See the SteveSailerism "Low-information voters."

    If one is a regular reader of the Unz Review , one is almost by definition not among this class of people. Regulars at sites like this are mainly all off towards the right tail of the low-to-high 'information' distribution curve. It's easy to forget that most of our fellow people are somewhere near the center of the curve, or in the left half. And there is your answer.

    Biff , says: April 10, 2019 at 4:14 am GMT
    Packaging

    Nothing gets my liberal friends gnashing their teeth harder than when I point out(with facts) how Trump is just like Hillary – and that was before the election.

    Thinker , says: April 10, 2019 at 4:16 am GMT
    Yep. Trump's a lying POS pond scum like the rest of the DC swamp that he said he was going to drain, turns out he is one of them all along. We elected America's first Jewish president, nothing more. He needs to change his campaign slogan to MIGA, Make Israel Great Again, that was the plan of his handlers all along.

    What I want to know is, who are those idiots who still keep showing up at his rallies? Are they really that dumb?

    Even Sanders came out and said we can't have open borders. I've also heard him said back in 2015 that the H1b visa program is a replacement program for American workers. If he grows a pair and reverts back to that stance, teams up with Tulsi Gabbard, I'll vote for them 2020. Fuck Trump! Time for him and his whole treasonous rat family to move to Israel where they belong.

    [Apr 10, 2019] "First the poor taxpayers, robbed by the politicians of one great party and then by those of the other, turn to a group of free-lance rogues in the middle ground -- non-partisan candidates, Liberals, reformers, or what not: the name is unimportant.

    Notable quotes:
    "... Then, flayed and pillaged by these gentry as they never were by the old-time professionals, they go back in despair to the latter, and are flayed and pillaged again." ..."
    Apr 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    jacques sheete says: April 10, 2019 at 10:50 am GMT

    Reed was wrong here. The American voter, for the most part, still doesn't realize any of this.

    In June 1922 the Zionist halter was firmly reaffixed
    round the neck of American State policy, and though American voter only slowly
    realized this, it became immaterial to him which party prevailed at elections.

    -Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion , p 300-301

    jacques sheete , says: April 10, 2019 at 10:56 am GMT

    @WorkingClass

    Today I switch to the Democrats.

    Please, no!

    "First the poor taxpayers, robbed by the politicians of one great party and then by those of the other, turn to a group of free-lance rogues in the middle ground -- non-partisan candidates, Liberals, reformers, or what not: the name is unimportant.

    Then, flayed and pillaged by these gentry as they never were by the old-time professionals, they go back in despair to the latter, and are flayed and pillaged again."

    -H.L.Mencken, Editorial , In The American Mercury, April 1924, pp. 408-412

    Antonius , says: April 10, 2019 at 11:10 am GMT
    Trump is attacked relentlessly by Israel firsters (both left and right) prior to, and after his investiture as POTUS. How does he respond? How has he responded to relentless attacks on his base? The man has no spine, and no sense of gratitude or morality.

    'Not worth feeding' my late grandfather would have said. Although he has made a lot of wealthy petulant people (who despise him and laugh behind his back) even wealthier.

    What is needed is a billionaire who has genuine sense of noblesse oblige. Hopeless!

    Anon918 , says: April 10, 2019 at 11:30 am GMT

    Of course Trump was a gamble. I clearly remember him saying he wanted to get out of Syria, put an end to the endless wars, and he declared himself neutral on the Israel/Palestine issue–those were the biggest reasons I voted for him. Turns out he lied big time.

    Now what? Looking at the clown car of presidential candidates just induces political nausea. No matter who gets elected it will be a government of, by, and for Jewish/Israeli/Zionist interests.

    In the meantime I see no real progress on putting the brakes on illegals flooding the country. I see no economic miracles in spite of all the spin. Actual unemployment in the US was at 21.2% in March, really not much better than it has been since the 2008 crash ( http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts ), and record numbers of people are behind on mortgages and car payments, suicide and drug casualties have been skyrocketing.

    Our political system is not going to bring any solutions, it has been far too corrupt for far too long.

    jacques sheete , says: April 10, 2019 at 11:32 am GMT
    @Nicolás Palacios Navarro

    Pity that the rest of us have to be carted along for the ride.

    That’s the truth, but we ‘re being carted along not for the ride but for the porking.

    [Apr 10, 2019] I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes

    Apr 10, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:

    ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’

    [Apr 09, 2019] Russiagate The Great Tragic Comedy of Modern Journalism by Matt Bivens,

    Mar 25, 2019 | blog.usejournal.com

    In its Russiagate coverage, The New York Times has repeatedly offered a graphic accusing the President's retinue of "more than 100 contacts with Russian nationals." This decision to question the loyalty of people who have had contact with a Russian national  --  so, for just knowing or meeting a Russian  --  has been a staple of New York Times coverage.

    "More than 100 contacts with Russian nationals." It's incredible that this can even be an allegation  --  in our paper of record  --  there in explainer graphics almost every day, for more than two years now.

    It smacks of the famous Senator Joseph McCarthy speeches in the 1950s: "I have in my hand a list of 205 [or 57, or 81] "

    And yet no one ever seemed to mind.

    After all, as former intelligence chief (and liar to Congress ) James Clapper has asserted on television, "Russians are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor." Worse, I may have already been co-opted and penetrated without even knowing it! As Clapper said recently on CNN when asked if Trump could be "a Russian asset," it is "a possibility, and I would add to that a caveat, whether witting or unwitting."

    Unwitting!

    So you can be an unwitting traitor?

    Infected with Russian mind-control, like a zombie?

    Yes. As mainstream media have argued repeatedly and quite explicitly.

    Consider the stunning set of short films on The New York Times op-ed webpages titled " Operation Infektion: How Russia Perfected the Art of War ".

    Over a sinister animation of black and white human cells being penetrated by bright red virus particles, the narration begins: "The thing about a virus is it doesn't destroy you head-on. Instead, it brings you down  --  from the inside. Turning your own cells into enemies."

    This incredible film is well worth watching to see how ill our body politic has become. As the red virus invades cell after cell, the narration goes on: "This story is about a virus  --  a virus created five decades ago by a government, to slowly and methodically poison its enemies. But it's not a biological virus, it's more like a political one. And chances are, you've already been infected."

    Animation cuts abruptly to Donald Trump.

    The evil genius behind this virus? The Leonid Brezhnev-era KGB. (Really! I'm not making this up!)

    "If you feel like you don't know who to trust anymore, this might be the thing that's making you feel that way," the narrator says, as the animation shows more and more black and white cells hopelessly succumbing to the red virus  --  reds spreading everywhere, bringing us down from within, as it were. "If you feel exhausted by the news, this could be why. And if you're sick of it all and you just want to stop caring, then we really need to talk."

    Animation cuts to a human eye, now filled like a zombie's with infected red sclera.

    Amazing. I thought I was exhausted by the news and sick of it all because the journalists have all become exhausting and sickening; because whenever I turn on NPR or open up The New York Times , I feel like Jennifer Connelly in "A Beautiful Mind"when she walks into the garage and discovers it's a shrine to paranoid schizophrenia, and realizes with horror that Russell Crowe's back home with the baby about to give it a bath.

    But no. "Chances are," I'm already infected by a KGB virus. Cut to face of Donald Trump.

    Makes sense. After all, I have personally had "more than 100 contacts with Russian nationals." I guess I better turn myself in. (For anti-viral treatments? Re-education? A struggle session?)

    [Apr 09, 2019] Trump clamors for new regime change wars -- Iran, Venezuela

    Trump is an Israel lobby marionette. As simple as that.
    Feb 09, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    President Trump campaigned against regime change wars when he ran for President, but now he bows to the wishes of the neocons who surround him, clamoring for the regime change wars that he claimed to oppose--this time in Venezuela and Iran.

    These powerful politicians dishonor the sacrifices made by every one of my brothers and sisters in uniform, their families - as they are the ones who pay the price for these wars.

    In fact, every American pays the price for these wars that have cost us trillions of dollars since 9/11.

    Every dollar that we spend on regime change wars or on the new cold war and this nuclear arms race is a dollar coming out of our pockets dollars that should be used to address the very real, urgent needs of our people and our communities right here at home.

    - Tulsi Gabbard

    [Apr 09, 2019] Trump, Netanyahu, Saudis leading us closer to catastrophe

    Trump is an Israel lobby marionette. As simple as that.
    Apr 09, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia want to drag the United States into war with Iran, and Trump is submitting to their wishes. The cost in money and lives will be catastrophic.

    [Apr 09, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard SMASHES HER CRITICS In Corporate News - YouTube

    Apr 09, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    John S , 1 week ago

    She needs like 5000 more donors. Put in that dollar!

    double down , 1 week ago

    Getting my news from Jimmy and my comedy from CNN and CNBC. Go Figure.

    [Apr 09, 2019] Launched under the pretext of a UN resolution authorizing the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya to halt the supposed (but non-existent) threat of a massacre in the eastern city of Benghazi, the war saw money and arms poured into Islamist militias and lavished on Al Qaeda operatives, who were backed by a relentless bombing campaign, which included nearly 30,000 sorties in the course of seven months.

    Apr 09, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

    Northern Star April 9, 2019 at 1:00 pm

    "On Friday, the United Nations Security Council, following a closed-door meeting, issued a statement to the press calling for Hifter's LNA to "halt its military activity" near Tripoli. When Britain proposed a formal resolution along these lines, however, Russia opposed it, no doubt fearing that it could become the pretext for a fresh Western intervention in Libya.

    The British draft included a passage calling "for those who undermine Libya's peace and security to be held to account."

    What hypocrisy! There was no such call when the UK joined with France and the United States to overthrow the country's government and inflict death upon its population and destruction upon its infrastructure.

    *****No one, from Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron on down, was ever held accountable for a criminal war of aggression that turned the country into a living hell.****

    Launched under the pretext of a UN resolution authorizing the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya to halt the supposed (but non-existent) threat of a massacre in the eastern city of Benghazi, the war saw money and arms poured into Islamist militias and lavished on Al Qaeda operatives, who were backed by a relentless bombing campaign, which included nearly 30,000 sorties in the course of seven months.

    A war launched on the pretext of protecting civilians culminated in the carpet bombing of Sirte, a bastion of popular support for Gaddafi, and the lynch-mob torture and murder of the Libyan leader, over which then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laughingly gloated, "We came, we saw, he died."

    "In the intervening eight years, the attempts to install a pro-Western puppet regime in a devastated country controlled by clashing Islamist, tribal and other militias have failed miserably. The regime headed up by Sarraj, recognized as Libya's "legitimate" government, barely controls even Tripoli. Under its supposed rule, the country's education and health systems have collapsed, while inflation is ravaging living standards, the unemployment rate has reached 30 percent, and fully a third of the population lives below the poverty line. Conditions of life for masses of Libyans have deteriorated dramatically since the overthrow of Gaddafi."

    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/09/liby-a09.html

    [Apr 09, 2019] Part of the problem may be that the American oligarchy is now believing its own bullshit, or put another way, has descended into decadence.

    Apr 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    c1ue , Apr 9, 2019 2:31:57 PM | link

    Part of the problem may be that the American oligarchy is now believing its own bullshit, or put another way, has descended into decadence.
    The United States has morphed stories many times - from a land of opportunity via theft from Natives/occupying new land, to jobs and growth opportunities via the Industrial Revolution, to economic prosperity through rebuilding other nations torn apart by war.
    Under these lenses - particularly the last one - the Ukraine, Libya, Syria and other "freedom and nation building" exercises make sense.
    The problem is that it is still unclear that the other major nations are willing to get themselves into another major war with each other - from which the US can sell into, both during and after.
    Another way to look at it is the Dr. Michael Hudson model: that any economy which permits interest bearing debt to, by natural law, greatly exceed organic economic capability to repay and is thus doomed to cataclysm - the increase of the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) from 12% in the 80s to well over 40%, maybe 50% or 60% today, would be a good indicator.
    Under the Dr. Michael Hudson model - the "western" tradition is the abolishing of the debt jubilee, replaced by the Roman looting of foreign lands model.
    Note that the debt jubilee model can still work: a 100% or 150% inflation over a 1-3 year period would do it, accompanied and followed by policies which restrain FIRE going forward. However, the unwillingness of the oligarchy to accept/understand/implement is very clear.
    Interesting times.

    [Apr 08, 2019] Aaron Maté Was Also Right About Russiagate

    Highly recommended!
    Mar 31, 2019 | scotthorton.org

    by Scott | Interviews Aaron Maté discusses the aftermath of the Russia investigation and what it's revealed about mainstream American journalists. In addition to seriously undermining media credibility, the obsession with possible Russian influence over the president has made it next to impossible for Trump to do anything that might be seen as helpful for Putin, like pulling troops out of Syria or pushing for nuclear detente.

    Discussed on the show:

    Aaron Maté is a former host and producer at The Real News and writes regularly at The Nation . Follow him on Twitter @AaronJMate .

    This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs , by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom ; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott ; and LibertyStickers.com .

    Donate to the show through Patreon , PayPal , or Bitcoin: 1Ct2FmcGrAGX56RnDtN9HncYghXfvF2GAh.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

    [Apr 08, 2019] Aaron Maté Was Also Right About Russiagate

    Highly recommended!
    Mar 31, 2019 | scotthorton.org

    by Scott | Interviews Aaron Maté discusses the aftermath of the Russia investigation and what it's revealed about mainstream American journalists. In addition to seriously undermining media credibility, the obsession with possible Russian influence over the president has made it next to impossible for Trump to do anything that might be seen as helpful for Putin, like pulling troops out of Syria or pushing for nuclear detente.

    Discussed on the show:

    Aaron Maté is a former host and producer at The Real News and writes regularly at The Nation . Follow him on Twitter @AaronJMate .

    This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Kesslyn Runs , by Charles Featherstone; NoDev NoOps NoIT , by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State , by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com ; Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. ; Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom ; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott ; and LibertyStickers.com .

    Donate to the show through Patreon , PayPal , or Bitcoin: 1Ct2FmcGrAGX56RnDtN9HncYghXfvF2GAh.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download

    [Apr 08, 2019] Opinion Russians Always Knew There Was No Collusion

    Russiagate is about keeping Russian down via additional sections. As simple as that. Epidemics of Neo-McCarthyism also helps to cement cracks in the US neoliberal facade and, as such, is very helpful for the US elite.
    It also absolves Neoliberal Democrats of the political fiasco of the century -- rejection of establishment candidate by the majoring of working Americans which happened when Hillary Clinton was defeated by a person with zero political experience and no political patty behind him.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "The results of Mueller's investigations are a disgrace to the U.S. and their political elite. It's now confirmed that all their allegations have been plucked out of thin air. The media have played a shameful role of lie-mongers in a campaign built on lies. The adherents of this conspiracy theory are discredited. Only an idiot can believe them now." ..."
    "... We've seen anti-Russian xenophobia spread into the American mainstream. Etched in our minds are comments like the one James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, made in an interview when he said that Russians are "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever." ..."
    "... To those of us who paid attention to American media and politics over the past two years, it quickly became clear that too many in the United States know nothing about our country. ..."
    Apr 08, 2019 | www.nytimes.com
    ... ... ...

    Alexey Pushkov, a former diplomat and a political analyst, tweeted to his 360,000 followers on Tuesday , following the release of Attorney General William Barr's summary of the report:

    "The results of Mueller's investigations are a disgrace to the U.S. and their political elite. It's now confirmed that all their allegations have been plucked out of thin air. The media have played a shameful role of lie-mongers in a campaign built on lies. The adherents of this conspiracy theory are discredited. Only an idiot can believe them now."

    To the Kremlin and its supporters, Russia is the aggrieved party here, and the government's consistent denials of interfering in America's internal affairs have been fully vindicated. Appearing on the Russian talk show "60 Minutes," Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the foreign ministry, said the ministry was preparing a report to name and shame the "brigade of propagandists" -- pointing at, among others, Fareed Zakaria -- who tried to tie Mr. Trump to Russia. She added that "apologies are expected."

    ... ... ...

    ...it becomes clear that whatever the outcome of the Mueller investigation, our relationship with America has changed.

    We've seen anti-Russian xenophobia spread into the American mainstream. Etched in our minds are comments like the one James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, made in an interview when he said that Russians are "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever."

    ... ... ...

    In the atmosphere where "contacts with Russians" has become cause for suspicion, every bank transaction and visa application faces extra scrutiny. I've heard from people I know about how exchange programs, conferences and businesses are suffering.

    To those of us who paid attention to American media and politics over the past two years, it quickly became clear that too many in the United States know nothing about our country. Ominous images of onion-shaped domes taking over the White House baffled us; St. Basil's Cathedral is not part of the Kremlin complex and has no political connotation. The ubiquity of hammers and sickles in visuals accompanying Trump-Russia reports seemed likewise absurd. Our country hasn't been Communist for about 30 years.

    [Apr 08, 2019] 7 years after the US - led by Obama, Hillary @SamanthaJPower - bombed Libya in the name of "humanitarianism" along with the UK France then utterly ignored it, the country is so violent, unstable dangerous that US troops can no longer safely remain

    Notable quotes:
    "... The seeds sown in the US' "Long War"* are terrible. Libya discord gave arms and bases for US support to Salafi jihad in Syria, ISIS is US sown, Iraq is to be a permanent occupation more dangerous than South Korea, Afghanistan is a tottering escapade each new commander bringing a fresh set of objectives none connected to an end to the blood shed. ..."
    "... The press is at fault, they work for the empire's war profiteers. ..."
    "... *Many commentators on the US' military horrors since 9/11/01 stopped saying "global war on terror" and use "Long War". ..."
    Apr 08, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

    anne , April 07, 2019 at 08:48 AM

    https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1114894864880218112

    Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

    7 years after the US - led by Obama, Hillary & @SamanthaJPower - bombed Libya in the name of "humanitarianism" along with the UK & France & then utterly ignored it, the country is so violent, unstable & dangerous that US troops can no longer safely remain

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/american-troops-in-libya-moved-out-of-country-as-violence-escalates-near-capital/2019/04/07/bf754a6c-58b2-11e9-aa83-504f086bf5d6_story.html

    American troops in Libya moved out of country as violence escalates near capital

    The announcement comes as the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli vowed to defend the capital against a renegade militia seeking to storm its way into the city, a showdown that threatened to spill into bloody urban combat in the streets of Tripoli.

    7:17 AM - 7 Apr 2019

    ilsm -> anne... , April 07, 2019 at 09:46 AM
    How come none of this is on page one above the fold?

    EMichael, goes after Chinese oppression of Muslims, but never a word about humanitarian tragedies US spreads from Caracas to Yemen through Kandahar to Pyongyang.

    Russia doing any of this to Ukraine or Georgia would be howled about!

    The seeds sown in the US' "Long War"* are terrible. Libya discord gave arms and bases for US support to Salafi jihad in Syria, ISIS is US sown, Iraq is to be a permanent occupation more dangerous than South Korea, Afghanistan is a tottering escapade each new commander bringing a fresh set of objectives none connected to an end to the blood shed.

    The press is at fault, they work for the empire's war profiteers.

    *Many commentators on the US' military horrors since 9/11/01 stopped saying "global war on terror" and use "Long War".

    [Apr 08, 2019] Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance

    Notable quotes:
    "... All of us in the West pay the Scumbag Tax: crime, terrorism, corruption, addiction, excessive immigration (in part from smashed countries) , pollution, propaganda, managed/faux democracy, wealth/income inequality, moral turpitude (supporting dictators, war, genocide, human rights abuses, apartheid, torture, etc.) , and more. ..."
    Apr 08, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    Jackrabbit | Apr 7, 2019 10:23:49 AM | 1

    All of us in the West pay the Scumbag Tax: crime, terrorism, corruption, addiction, excessive immigration (in part from smashed countries) , pollution, propaganda, managed/faux democracy, wealth/income inequality, moral turpitude (supporting dictators, war, genocide, human rights abuses, apartheid, torture, etc.) , and more.

    All in the name of freedom and democracy. How's that working out for ya?

    AntiSpin | Apr 7, 2019 3:06:21 PM | 37

    @ lysias | Apr 7, 2019 12:22:45 PM | 17

    You might have been given an incorrect title to the book; I think that you may be referring to this:

    "Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia"

    It's for sale here:
    https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Gladio-Alliance-between-Vatican/dp/1616149744

    Here is a highly informative, detailed, fact-filled review of the book

    https://off-guardian.org/2019/04/06/operation-gladio-the-unholy-alliance/

    that might hold you until you manage to acquire the book itself.

    The review by itself is filled with names, dates, events, places, and ties together dozens of nasty historical threads, making sense out of so many seemingly senseless horrors over the past 70 years.

    [Apr 08, 2019] Journalist Media's Mueller leaks are a sign of desperation

    Tucker interviews Glenn Greenwald
    But we need to understand the Mueller expedition was witch hunt form the beginning to the end, and the fact that Mueller backed off means that some pressure was exerted on him to stay within civilized discourse, or...
    I doubt that Mueller of his anthrax investigation fame would have any problems to implicate Trump in non-existent crimes. That would means the false assumption that he has some integrity, which his 9/11 behavioud fully contradict of.
    In this sense lawyers from Mueller team complain about Mueller betrayal: he carefully selected the most Trump hating lawyers and brought them for a witch hunt, but at the end he backed off. Ma be under pressure from Israel lobby.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The legal system isn't supposed to "damage" people, it is supposed to find them innocent or guilty. Shame on Mueller for appointing such disgraceful and unprofessional people. ..."
    Apr 08, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    monkeygraborange , 2 days ago

    JOURNALISM NO LONGER EXISTS... NOW IT'S ONLY THE MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA!

    BlissfulXerces , 2 days ago

    They are willing to damage our entire country for power. When do we end this?

    Flying Gabriel , 2 days ago

    Anonymous sources don't cut it anymore. You might as well say "we're making this up." Either put up or shut up.

    Shelly Kennedy , 2 days ago

    Greenwald is a consistent voice of sanity from the political left. Need more such sane voices to restart cultural debate. Because as we all know, politics is downstream from culture.

    Chad Elmer , 2 days ago

    "Continual attempt to remove independent thought and reasoning by big tech !"

    kim wiser , 2 days ago

    He is right tribalism is wrong. What Covington and all the fake stories should teach us it to make sure that we look at the facts. The hard part is finding the good journalists so you can support them.

    Sergio Sotelo , 2 days ago

    Why isn't anyone being prosecuted for these leaks?

    West Kagle , 2 days ago

    . Gee.....I wonder why the big media firms are having to layoff huge numbers of their workforce? Could it be that they have destroyed their own credibility and the revenue is no longer there to support the bloated staffs they once had, because people are going elsewhere for their information?

    Will to Power , 2 days ago

    The legal system isn't supposed to "damage" people, it is supposed to find them innocent or guilty. Shame on Mueller for appointing such disgraceful and unprofessional people.

    [Apr 07, 2019] Nunes The Russian Collusion Hoax Meets An Unbelievbable End

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Nice group shot of the three stooges. The most dishonest, disloyal, dipshitted psychopaths a country should never have to endure. ..."
    "... The likelihood of anyone being convicted let alone indicted is rather slim. Why? These people know where too many dead bodies are buried. ..."
    "... There is an understanding in their circles that certain individuals on both sides of the spectrum are bulletproof. You can't run such a large criminal enterprise without it being this way. Why else would Mueller not talk to Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Steele, the heads of Fusion GPS, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr., the promoter who set that up, etc., etc. ..."
    "... This whole ordeal was meant to die an uneventful death. It's unlikely Barr will act on any recommendations from Nunes becuase it would start a partisan war that would snare GOP never Trumpers too. It's how Washington works. Like Carlin says - it's a great big club and you ain't in it. They are, and they don't do time. ..."
    Apr 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Rep. Devin Nunes, op-ed via The Washington Examiner,

    As the Russia collusion hoax hurtles toward its demise, it's important to consider how this destructive information operation rampaged through vital American institutions for more than two years , and what can be done to stop such a damaging episode from recurring.

    While the hoax was fueled by a wide array of false accusations, misleading leaks of ostensibly classified information, and bad-faith investigative actions by government officials, one vital element was indispensable to the overall operation: the Steele dossier.

    <

    Funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee, which hid their payments from disclosure by funneling them through the law firm Perkins Coie, the dossier was a collection of false and often absurd accusations of collusion between Trump associates and Russian officials. These allegations, which relied heavily on Russian sources cultivated by Christopher Steele, were spoon-fed to Trump opponents in the U.S. government, including officials in law enforcement and intelligence.

    The efforts to feed the dossier's allegations into top levels of the U.S. government, particularly intelligence agencies, were championed by Steele, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, and various intermediaries. These allegations were given directly to the FBI and Justice Department, while similar allegations were fed into the State Department by long-time Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal.

    Their efforts were remarkably effective. Officials within the FBI and DOJ, whether knowingly or unintentionally, provided essential support to the hoax conspirators, bypassing normal procedures and steering the information away from those who would view it critically. The dossier soon metastasized within the government, was cloaked in secrecy, and evaded serious scrutiny.

    High-ranking officials such as then-FBI general counsel James Baker and then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr were among those whose actions advanced the hoax. Ohr, one of the most senior officials within the DOJ, took the unprecedented step of providing to Steele a back door into the FBI investigation. This enabled the former British spy to continue to feed information to investigators, even though he had been terminated by the FBI for leaking to the press and was no longer a valid source. Even worse, Ohr directly briefed Andrew Weissmann and Zainab Ahmad, two DOJ officials who were later assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. In short, the investigation was marked by glaring irregularities that would normally be deemed intolerable.

    According to Ohr's congressional testimony, he told top-level FBI officials as early as August or September 2016 that Steele was biased against Trump, that Steele's work was connected to the Clinton campaign, and that Steele's material was of questionable reliability. Steele himself confirmed that last point in a British court case in which he acknowledged his allegations included unverified information. Yet even after this revelation, intelligence leaders continued to cite the Steele dossier in applications to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

    It is astonishing that intelligence leaders did not immediately recognize they were being manipulated in an information operation or understand the danger that the dossier could contain deliberate disinformation from Steele's Russian sources . In fact, it is impossible to believe in light of everything we now know about the FBI's conduct of this investigation, including the astounding level of anti-Trump animus shown by high-level FBI figures like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, as well as the inspector general's discovery of a shocking number of leaks by FBI officials.

    It's now clear that top intelligence officials were perfectly well aware of the dubiousness of the dossier, but they embraced it anyway because it justified actions they wanted to take - turning the full force of our intelligence agencies first against a political candidate and then against a sitting president.

    The hoax itself was a gift to our nation's adversaries, most notably Russia. The abuse of intelligence for political purposes is insidious in any democracy. It undermines trust in democratic institutions, and it damages the reputation of the brave men and women who are working to keep us safe. This unethical conduct has had major repercussions on America's body politic, creating a yearslong political crisis whose full effects remain to be seen.

    Having extensively investigated this abuse, House Intelligence Committee Republicans will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved in these matters.

    These people must be held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future. The men and women of our intelligence community perform an essential service defending American national security, and their ability to carry out their mission cannot be compromised by biased actors who seek to transform the intelligence agencies into weapons of political warfare.

    -320 for Money , 2 hours ago link

    Nice group shot of the three stooges. The most dishonest, disloyal, dipshitted psychopaths a country should never have to endure.

    I certainly do not know the cure for all the nations ills, but these 3 ***** could do more by dying than they ever did by living.

    Fall on your swords swine, save a smidgen of face, you are a disgrace.

    Real Estate Guru , 2 hours ago link

    All 3 of them have been confirmed to by lying through their teeth by their own people. They are all going down. We just need the Mueller report to come out to get the ball rolling. Can't do it before the report comes out as they would call it obstruction. So we wait another 9 days, or less, according to AG Barr.

    Jackprong , 4 hours ago link

    Could be, PapaGeorge. Maybe this time it's different because it could be argued that the TPTB don't want Trump pulling the same thing on the DNC--and get away with it like the Usual Suspects just did. In legal terms, a bar has been set. BARR? Get it? Buwhahahahahahahahahha!!!

    The likelihood of anyone being convicted let alone indicted is rather slim. Why? These people know where too many dead bodies are buried. There is an understanding in their circles that certain individuals on both sides of the spectrum are bulletproof. You can't run such a large criminal enterprise without it being this way. Why else would Mueller not talk to Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Steele, the heads of Fusion GPS, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr., the promoter who set that up, etc., etc.

    This whole ordeal was meant to die an uneventful death. It's unlikely Barr will act on any recommendations from Nunes becuase it would start a partisan war that would snare GOP never Trumpers too. It's how Washington works. Like Carlin says - it's a great big club and you ain't in it. They are, and they don't do time

    papageorgeo , 5 hours ago link

    The likelihood of anyone being convicted let alone indicted is rather slim. Why? These people know where too many dead bodies are buried.

    There is an understanding in their circles that certain individuals on both sides of the spectrum are bulletproof. You can't run such a large criminal enterprise without it being this way. Why else would Mueller not talk to Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Steele, the heads of Fusion GPS, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr., the promoter who set that up, etc., etc.

    This whole ordeal was meant to die an uneventful death. It's unlikely Barr will act on any recommendations from Nunes becuase it would start a partisan war that would snare GOP never Trumpers too. It's how Washington works. Like Carlin says - it's a great big club and you ain't in it. They are, and they don't do time.

    Fred box , 5 hours ago link

    <<<House Intelligence Committee Republicans will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved in these matters<<< We shall see now, won't we? I won't believe this, till I see It!

    [Apr 07, 2019] Nunes The Russian Collusion Hoax Meets An Unbelievbable End

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Nice group shot of the three stooges. The most dishonest, disloyal, dipshitted psychopaths a country should never have to endure. ..."
    "... The likelihood of anyone being convicted let alone indicted is rather slim. Why? These people know where too many dead bodies are buried. ..."
    "... There is an understanding in their circles that certain individuals on both sides of the spectrum are bulletproof. You can't run such a large criminal enterprise without it being this way. Why else would Mueller not talk to Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Steele, the heads of Fusion GPS, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr., the promoter who set that up, etc., etc. ..."
    "... This whole ordeal was meant to die an uneventful death. It's unlikely Barr will act on any recommendations from Nunes becuase it would start a partisan war that would snare GOP never Trumpers too. It's how Washington works. Like Carlin says - it's a great big club and you ain't in it. They are, and they don't do time. ..."
    Apr 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Rep. Devin Nunes, op-ed via The Washington Examiner,

    As the Russia collusion hoax hurtles toward its demise, it's important to consider how this destructive information operation rampaged through vital American institutions for more than two years , and what can be done to stop such a damaging episode from recurring.

    While the hoax was fueled by a wide array of false accusations, misleading leaks of ostensibly classified information, and bad-faith investigative actions by government officials, one vital element was indispensable to the overall operation: the Steele dossier.

    <

    Funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee, which hid their payments from disclosure by funneling them through the law firm Perkins Coie, the dossier was a collection of false and often absurd accusations of collusion between Trump associates and Russian officials. These allegations, which relied heavily on Russian sources cultivated by Christopher Steele, were spoon-fed to Trump opponents in the U.S. government, including officials in law enforcement and intelligence.

    The efforts to feed the dossier's allegations into top levels of the U.S. government, particularly intelligence agencies, were championed by Steele, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson, and various intermediaries. These allegations were given directly to the FBI and Justice Department, while similar allegations were fed into the State Department by long-time Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal.

    Their efforts were remarkably effective. Officials within the FBI and DOJ, whether knowingly or unintentionally, provided essential support to the hoax conspirators, bypassing normal procedures and steering the information away from those who would view it critically. The dossier soon metastasized within the government, was cloaked in secrecy, and evaded serious scrutiny.

    High-ranking officials such as then-FBI general counsel James Baker and then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr were among those whose actions advanced the hoax. Ohr, one of the most senior officials within the DOJ, took the unprecedented step of providing to Steele a back door into the FBI investigation. This enabled the former British spy to continue to feed information to investigators, even though he had been terminated by the FBI for leaking to the press and was no longer a valid source. Even worse, Ohr directly briefed Andrew Weissmann and Zainab Ahmad, two DOJ officials who were later assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. In short, the investigation was marked by glaring irregularities that would normally be deemed intolerable.

    According to Ohr's congressional testimony, he told top-level FBI officials as early as August or September 2016 that Steele was biased against Trump, that Steele's work was connected to the Clinton campaign, and that Steele's material was of questionable reliability. Steele himself confirmed that last point in a British court case in which he acknowledged his allegations included unverified information. Yet even after this revelation, intelligence leaders continued to cite the Steele dossier in applications to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

    It is astonishing that intelligence leaders did not immediately recognize they were being manipulated in an information operation or understand the danger that the dossier could contain deliberate disinformation from Steele's Russian sources . In fact, it is impossible to believe in light of everything we now know about the FBI's conduct of this investigation, including the astounding level of anti-Trump animus shown by high-level FBI figures like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, as well as the inspector general's discovery of a shocking number of leaks by FBI officials.

    It's now clear that top intelligence officials were perfectly well aware of the dubiousness of the dossier, but they embraced it anyway because it justified actions they wanted to take - turning the full force of our intelligence agencies first against a political candidate and then against a sitting president.

    The hoax itself was a gift to our nation's adversaries, most notably Russia. The abuse of intelligence for political purposes is insidious in any democracy. It undermines trust in democratic institutions, and it damages the reputation of the brave men and women who are working to keep us safe. This unethical conduct has had major repercussions on America's body politic, creating a yearslong political crisis whose full effects remain to be seen.

    Having extensively investigated this abuse, House Intelligence Committee Republicans will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved in these matters.

    These people must be held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future. The men and women of our intelligence community perform an essential service defending American national security, and their ability to carry out their mission cannot be compromised by biased actors who seek to transform the intelligence agencies into weapons of political warfare.

    -320 for Money , 2 hours ago link

    Nice group shot of the three stooges. The most dishonest, disloyal, dipshitted psychopaths a country should never have to endure.

    I certainly do not know the cure for all the nations ills, but these 3 ***** could do more by dying than they ever did by living.

    Fall on your swords swine, save a smidgen of face, you are a disgrace.

    Real Estate Guru , 2 hours ago link

    All 3 of them have been confirmed to by lying through their teeth by their own people. They are all going down. We just need the Mueller report to come out to get the ball rolling. Can't do it before the report comes out as they would call it obstruction. So we wait another 9 days, or less, according to AG Barr.

    Jackprong , 4 hours ago link

    Could be, PapaGeorge. Maybe this time it's different because it could be argued that the TPTB don't want Trump pulling the same thing on the DNC--and get away with it like the Usual Suspects just did. In legal terms, a bar has been set. BARR? Get it? Buwhahahahahahahahahha!!!

    The likelihood of anyone being convicted let alone indicted is rather slim. Why? These people know where too many dead bodies are buried. There is an understanding in their circles that certain individuals on both sides of the spectrum are bulletproof. You can't run such a large criminal enterprise without it being this way. Why else would Mueller not talk to Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Steele, the heads of Fusion GPS, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr., the promoter who set that up, etc., etc.

    This whole ordeal was meant to die an uneventful death. It's unlikely Barr will act on any recommendations from Nunes becuase it would start a partisan war that would snare GOP never Trumpers too. It's how Washington works. Like Carlin says - it's a great big club and you ain't in it. They are, and they don't do time

    papageorgeo , 5 hours ago link

    The likelihood of anyone being convicted let alone indicted is rather slim. Why? These people know where too many dead bodies are buried.

    There is an understanding in their circles that certain individuals on both sides of the spectrum are bulletproof. You can't run such a large criminal enterprise without it being this way. Why else would Mueller not talk to Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Steele, the heads of Fusion GPS, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr., the promoter who set that up, etc., etc.

    This whole ordeal was meant to die an uneventful death. It's unlikely Barr will act on any recommendations from Nunes becuase it would start a partisan war that would snare GOP never Trumpers too. It's how Washington works. Like Carlin says - it's a great big club and you ain't in it. They are, and they don't do time.

    Fred box , 5 hours ago link

    <<<House Intelligence Committee Republicans will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved in these matters<<< We shall see now, won't we? I won't believe this, till I see It!

    [Apr 07, 2019] The chain of events that led to the publication of the DNC emails is highly suspect

    Selection of Crowdstrike is highly suspect; the behaviour of FBI is highly suspect (why they allowed the contractor to handle the evidence), the behaviour of MSM is highly suspect (they came with the predefined notion -- Russia), the murder of Seth Rich and subsequent investigation (or the lack of thereof ) are highly suspect. Add to this mix incredible Awan brothers story and Debbie Wasserman behaviour after Imran Awan arrest
    This all points in the direction of the false flag.
    Notable quotes:
    "... There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that organisation . ..."
    "... The chain of events that led to the publication of the DNC emails is highly suspect. IMO it's likely to be a CIA/Mossad op to portray Wikileaks as an agent of Russia (AFAIK, Seth Rich was Jewish; and his family has acted strangely about the whole affair). And this 'op' fits well with use of the 2016 Presidential campaign to prepare for McCarthyist 'Russiagate' - for which CIA seems to have joined with MI6. ..."
    "... If the publication of the DNC emails was in fact a false flag then to support Assange that fact needs to be proven, and the persons responsible exposed for staging a false "framing of Assange" event.. ..."
    "... The Zionist "take the oil from the Ottoman" project involved weaponizing Jewish immigration and and redirecting European Jewish immigration from locating in Argentina ..."
    Apr 07, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Apr 7, 2019 11:25:38 AM | link

    Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

    It cannot be repeated often enough that it is difficult to see any conceivable excuse for the FBI to fail to secure access to the DNC servers. One would normally moreover expect that, on an issue of this sensitivity, they would have the 'digital forensics' done by their own people.

    There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that organisation .

    To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic 'Atlantic Council' is even more preposterous.

    The clear close integration of other cyber people from the 'Atlantic Council' into Orwellian 'information operations' sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief.

    There has to be a strong possible 'prima facie' case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the 'digital forensics' from 'CrowdStrike' is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller."

    IMO The suggestion that Crowdstrike called it a hack instead of a leak to absolve themselves [as per the bolded phrase] is specious. But Habbuk (thankfully) rightly puts the onus on the FBI for not doing their job.

    The chain of events that led to the publication of the DNC emails is highly suspect. IMO it's likely to be a CIA/Mossad op to portray Wikileaks as an agent of Russia (AFAIK, Seth Rich was Jewish; and his family has acted strangely about the whole affair). And this 'op' fits well with use of the 2016 Presidential campaign to prepare for McCarthyist 'Russiagate' - for which CIA seems to have joined with MI6.

    snake , Apr 7, 2019 1:39:35 PM | link

    The chain of events that led to the publication of the DNC emails is highly suspect. IMO it's likely to be a CIA/Mossad op to portray Wikileaks as an agent of Russia (AFAIK, Seth Rich was Jewish; and his family has acted strangely about the whole affair). And this 'op' fits well with use of the 2016 Presidential campaign to prepare for McCarthyist 'Russiagate' - for which CIA seems to have joined with MI6.

    by: Jackrabbit @7

    Seems to me this could be that place to start donkeytale @ 3 asks is there a way to save Julian Assange..

    If the publication of the DNC emails was in fact a false flag then to support Assange that fact needs to be proven, and the persons responsible exposed for staging a false "framing of Assange" event..

    The Jews immigrated to NYC from Salonika (the other half went to Russia) after the failure to use a corrupted CUP to over throw the Ottomans ( Ottomans discovered, and burned the Jews out) in 1908-1912 the dominate political majority in NYC became Jewish, dwarfing the previous majority, who were the Irish.

    So when the POTUS needed stronger support to force governed Americans into WWI, Those in charge of the banker backed "take the oil and land from the Ottomans" project in banker controlled Europe directed the new NYC immigrants to send letters to the POTUS urging USA entry into the war in Europe.. within a week over a million letters arrived, which were designed to strengthen POTUS efforts to force Americans and the congress critters into WWI (abuse of American human rights by sending soldiers, creating a tax law, that had been rule unconstitutional every year since 1865 to (1912-13) diverting the domestic budget to a foreign war budget, and organizing and directing the industrial might of America to assist in the WWI Zionist movement in Europe to take the oil from the Ottoman.

    WWI was planned before 1896, (Read: Roland Green Usher Pan-Germanism 1913-14 and My Memoirs 1878-1918 by Ex-Kaiser William, II< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_II,_German_Emperor) and organized at Zionist Congress (1897) in Europe (Russia signed a contain Germany Agreement with France in 1896 to deny Germany) and in 1897 the USA secretly agreed to support France and England against Germany agreement (why? Germany relations with Ottomans gave Germans access to the Ottoman oil, which the British, French and USA bankers and the corporations they sponsored would not stand for.

    The Zionist "take the oil from the Ottoman" project involved weaponizing Jewish immigration and and redirecting European Jewish immigration from locating in Argentina [ http://www.billgladstone.ca/?p=3197] to locating in Ottoman-Palestine-Israel locations <=object to: occupy and eventually displace the Ottomans (WWI divided the Ottoman empire into British Palestine, and French Syria) from their land and their oil.

    So letters (in answer to donkeytale @ 3) with return receipt, sent directly to the POTUS might be a means to support Julian Assange?

    I can imagine what it might be like to see 10 million return receipts posted somewhere!

    [Apr 07, 2019] Operation Gladio The Unholy Alliance Between The Vatican, The CIA, The Mafia

    Notable quotes:
    "... The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry, revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of an organization which later came to be identified as 'Gladio'. ..."
    "... Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst 'Gladio' was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament ..."
    "... The primal author of the 'stay-behind-armies', Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had "concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics" ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as 'werewolves'. ..."
    "... Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources. ..."
    "... The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles ..."
    "... These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power. ..."
    "... the initial $200 million in funding for Gladio (which had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations) was quickly exhausted. And though the National Security Act of 1947 had provided the loophole that allowed for the CIA's covert operations, it had not allowed for their overt Congressional funding. There lay the rub. Thankfully, Paul Helliwell knew how to salve the itch. ..."
    "... It was he, who having cut his teeth in the drugs-for-arms trade by shepherding opium deals with the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese National Army fighting against Mao Zedung), conjured the brilliant inspiration to do the very same thing – in the United States itself. ..."
    "... All very well and good. But, to begin with, there was yet a fly in the whole drugs-for-arms-for-terror ointment. To wit: how to pay off the mafioso without anyone noticing; indeed, how to stash, launder and hide all of this financial derring-do from the prying eyes of the authorities; you know, the real-enough authorities, the Treasury cops and so forth. How do you do that? ..."
    "... Established by Pope Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara in 1942, the Bank would quickly come to serve as the principal repository post-war both for the Sicilian Mafia and for the OSS/CIA wherein all of the monies and documents relating to drug trafficking and to Gladio would be stored and laundered. ..."
    "... To this end the pope authorized his own terror squads (under Monsignor Bicchierai) to assist the gladiators and the 'made men' in intimidating the Italian electorate. Task accomplished. ..."
    "... Under 'Mockingbird' the Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists to spread false stories and propaganda about the Company's 'benign' activities. Eventually, this depraved fabric of anti-journalism enlisted entire news networks including ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now the guys and gals at Langley could relax. Henceforth, American (and global) eyes were dutifully prismed through the rose-coloured lens of 'Mockingbird'. ..."
    "... The BPF then became, by way of a Chicago-based intermediary bank, Continental Illinois, a principal conduit for transferring drug money from the IOR for the purposes of Gladio. In fact, it was this banking pipeline in particular which provided the filthy lucre that fueled the 1967 coup d'etat in Greece. But more on this heady stuff in a bit. ..."
    "... Working with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, Gelli soon gained entry to the Vatican where he helped set up the Nazi escape routes to Argentina. His ties with Argentina would later prove critical in facilitating Operation Condor (the US-backed mass assassination program in 1970s and '80s South America). ..."
    "... One of the first substantive actions of Gladio was the Turkish coup of 1960. Here the incumbent Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, made the fatal mistake of believing he was really in charge and thereafter initiating a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid. ..."
    "... The production ended all somewhat anticlimactically when the Pope (on May 13, 1981) was only seriously wounded. In a fascinating denouement, however, on Christmas Day 1983, the Pope opted to publicly forgive Agca. Italian state television was allowed to record the moment when John Paul asked his assassin from whom he had received his orders. Leaning forward to hear Agca's response the Pope appeared momentarily frozen, then clasped his hands to his face. Though the Pontiff kept it secret, there was little need to guess at the answer. ..."
    Apr 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by via Off-Guardian.org,

    On the hot summer morning of Aug. 2, 1980 a massive explosion ripped apart the main waiting room of the Bologna railway station. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds more injured. Though at first blamed on Italy's legendary urban guerrillas, The Red Brigades, it soon emerged that the attack had, in fact, originated from within the 'deep state' of the Italian government itself.

    The full nature of this secret parallel state would only come to light a decade later when the Italian premier, Giulio Andreotti, under questioning from a special commission of inquiry, revealed the existence of arms caches stashed all around the country and which were at the disposal of an organization which later came to be identified as 'Gladio'.

    The members of this group turned out to include not only hundreds of far-right figures in the intelligence, military, government, media, Church and corporate sectors, but a motley assortment of unreconstructed WW2 fascists, psychopaths and criminal underworld types to boot. And despite Andreotti's attempts to airbrush the group as 'patriots' it appeared evident to much of the rest of the Italian polity that these seemed rather more like pretty bad folk indeed. Little did they know. Follow-up research by the likes of Daniele Ganser, Claudio Celani, Jurgen Roth and Henrik Kruger traced connections to similar groups spread throughout Europe of which all were found to be deep state terrorist organizations, and all of which were found, ultimately, to be subservient unto the highest levels of the CIA and NATO command structures.

    The moniker 'Gladio' (after the two-edged sword used in classical Rome) was eventually broadened to include a bewildering host of related deep state terrorist structures including : 'P2' In Italy, 'P26' in Switzerland, 'Sveaborg' in Sweden, 'Counter-Guerrilla' in Turkey and 'Sheepskin' in Greece. This (hardly definitive) European list was then found to have connections not only to virtually every US sponsored secret state terrorist organization the world over (including the likes of Operation Condor in Latin America), but also to many of the global drug cartels that provided the secretive wealth needed to fund and otherwise lubricate the whole rotting, corrupt shebang.

    If all this sounds sinister enough, it pales in light of the detailed structure of the dazzlingly diabolical Gladio edifice. And it is to those details we now repair vis a vis an overview of the remarkable, if otherwise unheralded, 2015 work by journalist Paul L. Williams entitled, 'Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia'. Though there are other books on the subject worthy of honourable mention (including Daniele Ganser's seminal tome, 'NATO's Secret Armies', and Richard Cottrell's recent and stylishly written, 'Gladio: NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe'), it is to Williams that I believe we owe a particular debt of gratitude in having provided a more or less fully integrated portrait of the global machinations of Operation Gladio.

    Before embarking on our grim, if yet fascinating, journey it is worth first noting that whilst 'Gladio' was officially acknowledged and condemned by the European Parliament (in Nov., 1990; Washington and NATO having ever after refused 'comment' on the matter), and its multifarious organs and factions ordered dismantled, it is hardly likely that the latter was ever fully enacted. The historical context of 'Gladio', then, is really the quintessential backdrop to understanding the trademark false flag events of the modern era.

    OF SPOOKS AND MADE MEN

    The general origins of this labyrinthine network of deep state actors lay in the so-called 'stay-behind-armies' set up at the end of WW2 by the Allied powers (principally the US) ostensibly to act as resistance forces should the Soviets ever decide to invade Europe. Quickly, however, the raison d'etre of the 'armies' transmogrified into a mission to counteract, not external invasion, but 'internal subversion'. Such would eventually result in the undermining not just of post-war European socialism, but of Italian, Greek – and later global – democracy itself.

    But we get ahead of ourselves.

    The primal author of the 'stay-behind-armies', Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had "concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics" ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as 'werewolves'.

    Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources.

    The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the American fold, the 'werewolves' were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded as 'gladiators'. Operation Gladio was born.

    In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task, i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well. Fortunately, 'Gladio' was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.

    In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand with the communist 'problem'. The arrival of the 'made men' was the result of Donovan's efforts from 1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles 'Lucky' Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new (drug) funding for the OSS's off-books' operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power.

    Still, the threat remained. Fully half the Italian electorate were communist sympathizers and, moreover, leftist politics pervaded much of the rest of the diseased European body. More would have to be done. The problem, however, was money. There simply wasn't enough of it. Thus, the initial $200 million in funding for Gladio (which had come from the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations) was quickly exhausted. And though the National Security Act of 1947 had provided the loophole that allowed for the CIA's covert operations, it had not allowed for their overt Congressional funding. There lay the rub. Thankfully, Paul Helliwell knew how to salve the itch.

    Paul Helliwell was an inner member of the original OSS (along with key scions of the Morgan, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, DuPont and Ryan families) and, according to Williams, likely the greatest unsung hero of the nicknamed 'Oh-So-Social' club. It was he, who having cut his teeth in the drugs-for-arms trade by shepherding opium deals with the Kuomintang (KMT, the Chinese National Army fighting against Mao Zedung), conjured the brilliant inspiration to do the very same thing – in the United States itself.

    Thus, it was at his suggestion that Donovan elected to forge the deep bond (and that exists to this day) between the nation's intelligence services and organized crime. Enter stage left such notables as 'Lucky' Luciano, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and the Trafficante and Gambino crime clans. Quickly the streets of, first, New York, and later many an American metropolis, were flooded with heroin. These early, halcyon days would soon lead to the infamous 'French Connection', thence to the 'Golden Triangle' (where the CIA's very own 'Air America' transported drugs out of South East Asia during the Vietnam War) and, later, to the Balkan, Mexican, and Colombian drug cartels.

    All very well and good. But, to begin with, there was yet a fly in the whole drugs-for-arms-for-terror ointment. To wit: how to pay off the mafioso without anyone noticing; indeed, how to stash, launder and hide all of this financial derring-do from the prying eyes of the authorities; you know, the real-enough authorities, the Treasury cops and so forth. How do you do that?

    THE VATICAN CONNECTION

    Article 2 of the Lateran Treaty of 1929 was clear and unequivocal. The Article, which served to regulate matters between the Holy See and the Italian state, expressly forbade any interference of the latter in the affairs of the former. It is hardly conceivable, of course, that the framers of the Treaty ever foresaw what such immunity could actually mean in practice. But then they probably hadn't reckoned on the fiendish formation of the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), or more colloquially, the Vatican Bank.

    Established by Pope Pius XII and Bernardino Nogara in 1942, the Bank would quickly come to serve as the principal repository post-war both for the Sicilian Mafia and for the OSS/CIA wherein all of the monies and documents relating to drug trafficking and to Gladio would be stored and laundered.

    Already in 1945 the pope had held private audiences with Donovan to discuss the implementation of Gladio and where, as Williams reports, Donovan was knighted as an anti-Communist crusader with the Grand Cross of the Order of Sylvester. Prior to this time Pius XII had proven himself a loyal ally in working with Dulles and the OSS to establish the ratlines used to help prominent Nazis escape Europe. Now, new horizons beckoned. The first duty at hand, of course, was to destroy the communist menace in respect of the 1948 elections. To this end the pope authorized his own terror squads (under Monsignor Bicchierai) to assist the gladiators and the 'made men' in intimidating the Italian electorate. Task accomplished.

    The second duty at hand, however, was longer term. Communism, socialism and, indeed, any Godless form of progressive government, anywhere, had to be stamped out at source. For this money would be needed. Lots of money. Untraceable money. Drug money. Now in the months before the 1948 election the CIA deposited some $65 million into the Vatican Bank. The source of these monies came from heroin produced by the Italian pharmaceutical giant, Schiaparelli, and which was then transported by the Sicilian mob into Cuba where it was cut and then distributed to New Orleans, Miami and New York by the Santo Trafficante family. Lucrative though this trade was, it was not nearly enough to suit the needs of the CIA and 'Gladio'. More would be required. More drug networks and more banks. Gladio was about to global.

    To start with a new alliance was forged with the Corsican mafia. Unlike the Sicilian mob, the Corsicans had extensive experience in processing heroin, a skill they had picked up through years of working with Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese technicians in French Indochina. A supply route then emerged running from Burma through Turkey to Beirut and thence to Marseille. Alas, there was a slight hitch when the leftist dockworkers in Marseille, being sympathetic to the rebel army under Ho Chi Minh, refused to load and unload the boats from Indochina. No worries. A deft bit of terror administered by the Corsican boys (and funded by the CIA), and problem solved. By 1951, then, Marseille had become the center of the Western heroin industry. Voila, the 'French Connection'.

    Meanwhile, Wild Bill Donovan had 'resigned' from the CIA to form the World Commerce Corporation (WCC) whose primary function was to facilitate the arms-for-drugs deals with the KMT. Paul Helliwell lent a needed hand at the helm by heading up Sea Supply, Inc., a CIA front company gainfully employed in shipping heroin from Bangkok. By 1958 the whole operation was so successful that a second supply route was established running through Saigon. Here, the help of Ngo Dinh Diem, the US installed despot of South Vietnam, proved invaluable.

    Still, there was a potential cloud on the horizon, i.e. word of all these shenanigans was bound to leak out. What to do? The first reflex, naturally, was to pin the blame for the West's growing heroin problem on the Communist Chinese under Mao Zedung. Check. The second, more considered response, was to organize an ongoing campaign to deflect attention away from, and burnish the image of, the CIA. And to this end, in 1953, did the CIA establish 'Operation Mockingbird'. Under 'Mockingbird' the Agency recruited hundreds of American journalists to spread false stories and propaganda about the Company's 'benign' activities. Eventually, this depraved fabric of anti-journalism enlisted entire news networks including ABC, NBC, Newsweek, Associated Press, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now the guys and gals at Langley could relax. Henceforth, American (and global) eyes were dutifully prismed through the rose-coloured lens of 'Mockingbird'.

    But back to the Vatican. The IOR, solid banking pillar of the Gladio community that it was, could hardly be expected to do all the heavy lifting itself. After all, the global heroin industry would, by 1980, be pulling in a cool $400 billion annually. En route an extensive and orchestrated financial network would be required to supplement God's Bank. As with any fine orchestra it helps to have a maestro of exquisite genius to run the show. A nice round of applause, then, for one Michele Sindona. The biography of Sindona begins, humbly enough, with his degree in tax law from the University of Messina in 1942 after which, in quick succession, he rockets to stardom as a leading financial adviser to the Sicilian mafia, an agent for the CIA, and, thereafter, a financial intimate of the Holy See. By the late 1950s Sindona had become the lynchpin in a nexus between the mob, the CIA and the Vatican that would eventually, as Williams chillingly puts it, "result in the toppling of governments, wholesale slaughter and financial devastation."

    Though a full elaboration of this bewilderingly complex financial system is best left to the author, it is worth briefly savouring a few highlights. To begin with Sindona purchased Fasco AG, a Liechtenstein holding company and through which he purchased his first bank – the Banca Privata Finanziaria (BPF). The BPF then became, by way of a Chicago-based intermediary bank, Continental Illinois, a principal conduit for transferring drug money from the IOR for the purposes of Gladio. In fact, it was this banking pipeline in particular which provided the filthy lucre that fueled the 1967 coup d'etat in Greece. But more on this heady stuff in a bit.

    It was through his Chicago contacts that Sindona first met Monsignor Paul Marcinkus, popularly known as 'the Gorilla'. The Gorilla was six foot four, "a gifted street fighter and a lover of bourbon, fine cigars and young women". Under Sindona's patronage Marcinkus would soon rise to become both Pope Paul VI's personal body guard and the head of the IOR. A third musketeer in the person of Roberto Calvi (the assistant – and later full – director of the famous, Milan-based Banco Ambrosiano) came to complete the three Vatican amigos. Together they would cut a dramatic, collective figure in the global banking underworld all through the 'anni di Piombo' (the Gladio 'years of lead' in Italy from 1969 to 1987). Exactly how dramatic is illustrated, par excellence, by Calvi's eventual dark demise. Who among us, old enough to remember, can forget the macabre spectacle (June, 1982) of Calvi's body hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, his feet dangling in the Thames and pockets stuffed with five masonry bricks. Sindona would also later be murdered (1986) by means of a cyanide-laced cup of coffee whilst in jail and under 'maximum protective custody'.

    Calvi was a key figure in establishing a series of eight shell companies (six in Panama, two in Europe) through which drug lords like Pablo Escobar in South America were encouraged to deposit their ill-gotten loot. (The CIA put shoulder to wheel by helping ferry the Escobar cocaine in a fleet of planes operating out of Scranton airport in Pennsylvania). The monies were then transferred via Banco Ambrosiano to the IOR which took a 15 to 20 percent processing fee. From there funds were distributed to a host of European banks set up by Sindona for use by Gladio units spread throughout the continent. In addition to the flow of cash from the cartels, funds were bled from Banco Ambrosiano into the eight shell companies – again for use by the CIA in funding its covert operations.

    This points up a general operating procedure of the entire Gladio 'banking' system, i.e. the system, far from being designed to turn a profit, was expressly designed to 'lose' money; that is, to have it siphoned off into covert ops. Such explains the regular and spectacular failure of a host of CIA-related banks including: Franklin National Bank (purchased by Sindona), Castle Bank & Trust, Mercantile Bank & Trust (both set up by the ubiquitous Paul Helliwell), Nugan Hand Bank (in Australia, and from which funds were diverted to undermine Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during the Vietnam War), and the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (based in Karachi in aid, primarily, of the Southeast Asian heroin trade). Indeed, it was precisely the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano itself that brought both Calvi and Sindona to their untimely ends.

    Finally, it is worth noting here that these august institutions were linked in a tight criminal embrace with many of the most prestigious financial firms in America including Citibank, the Bank of New York, and the Bank of Boston. The base of the iceberg, in short, extended far and wide. But then, what was all this money really doing?

    THE TERROR

    Following the thwarting of Italian democracy in 1948 the Gladio 'secret armies' entered into a period of what one might characterize as pregnant incubation. Thus, it was during the 1950s that the various drug supply routes and financial networks were being created, as were some of the principal political organizations. Probably the most important of the latter was 'Propaganda Due' otherwise known as 'P2'.

    Created in 1877 as a Freemasonry lodge for the Piedmont nobility, it was banned by Mussolini in 1924 only to be resurrected post-war with the approval of Allen Dulles, himself a thirty-third degree Mason. The lodge, though at first dominated mainly by spooks, spies, military and mafia figures, would soon encompass a who's who of Italian political, corporate, banking and media supremos to boot. Indeed, the organization would eventually spread shoots throughout Europe as well as North and South America, and its members would come to include such luminaries as Henry Kissinger and General Alexander Haig.

    A 'P2' denizen of especial significance was Licio Gelli. The latter's pedigree was impressive: a former volunteer in the 735th Black Shirts Battalion, a former member of the elite SS Division under Field Marshall Goering and, thereafter, a chummy employee of the US Counter Intelligence Corps of the Fifth Army. Working with William Colby, the OSS agent in France, and Allen Dulles, the OSS director, Gelli soon gained entry to the Vatican where he helped set up the Nazi escape routes to Argentina. His ties with Argentina would later prove critical in facilitating Operation Condor (the US-backed mass assassination program in 1970s and '80s South America). Moreover, in 1972, Gelli would emerge as P2's supreme 'Worshipful Master' under whose leadership the lodge would reach its full, horrific flowering. Finally, it is worth mentioning at this juncture that it was as a result of a police raid on Gelli's villa in 1981 that the full, tentacled structure of Gladio would come to light. But we digress.

    One of the first substantive actions of Gladio was the Turkish coup of 1960. Here the incumbent Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, made the fatal mistake of believing he was really in charge and thereafter initiating a visit to Moscow to secure economic aid. The 'stay-behind-army' in Turkey known as Counter-Guerilla, in alliance with the Turkish military, quickly disabused him of any such delusions by arresting and executing him. Throughout the 1970s both Counter-Guerilla and its youth wing, the Grey Wolves, would stage "ongoing terror attacks that resulted in the deaths of over five thousand students, teachers, trade union leaders, booksellers and politicians".

    Counter-Guerilla would also figure in the Turkish coup of 1980 when its commander, General Kenan Evren, toppled the moderate government of Bulent Ecevit . According to Williams, US President Jimmy Carter phoned in his approval to the CIA station-chief in Ankara, Paul Henze, with a jubilant, 'Your boys have done it!' What they had done, of course, was set up a tyranny in which thousands more would be tortured while incarcerated. The Turkish Gladio boys would also be unleashed in the 1980s upon the PKK – the Kurdistan Workers Party. All of this was in keeping with Zbigniew Brzezinski's (Carter's national security advisor) core vision of the importance of controlling Central Asia to which Turkey was both a vital portal and, thus, a key NATO ally.

    Alas, Gladio would prove something of a disappointment in France, where, after having backed a series of assassination attempts against the regrettably too independent President Charles de Gaulle, it found itself on the receiving end of de Gaulle's boot. Actually, it was NATO itself – at the time, headquartered in Paris – that was unceremoniously kicked out of France (in 1966, whence it took up its present cozy and famously corrupt abode in Brussels). But, of course, de Gaulle was ahead of the curve and understood all too well who was really behind the mayhem and murder.

    Greece, unfortunately, did not fare as well. In 1967 the 'Hellenic Raiding Force', a franchise of Gladio and playing to a NATO authored script entitled Operation Prometheus, overthrew the left-leaning government of George Papandreou. The ensuing military dictatorship would last until 1974 though this would hardly signal the end of Greece's tribulations. From 1980 until near the turn of the millennium, the nation would suffer under a reign of terror and political assassinations nominally attributed to 'November 17', an alleged Marxist revolutionary group, but which in fact (and here I briefly tag-team with authors Cottrell and Ganser) was yet another faction of Greek-Gladio known as 'Sheepskin'.

    This illustrates a point originally brought home by Ganser's research to the effect that virtually every alleged 'leftist revolutionary' group said to have been operating in Europe throughout the post-war years was, in truth, either a Gladio 'secret army' unit or else had been completely infiltrated by state intelligence services, and was subsequently being steered by them for Gladio-style state-terrorist ends.

    Such is well documented for the 'Red Brigades' in Italy and the 'Baader-Meinhof Gang' in Germany (the 'gang' being conveniently and cold-bloodedly exterminated on the 'night of the long knives', Oct.18, 1977, whilst under custody in Stammheim prison). It also, just by the by, speaks to the universally attested prior association of many a modern-day 'terrorist' and their police and intelligence handlers.

    In Spain, during the early '70s, Stefano delle Chiaie and fellow Gladio agents from Italy provided their consulting expertise to General Francisco Franco's secret police who conducted over a thousand violent acts and some fifty murders. Following Franco's death in 1975, delle Chiaie moved to Chile to lend a fatherly hand in helping the CIA-backed Augusto Pinochet set up his death squads. In later years the Spanish Gladio unit would find gainful employment hunting down and assassinating the leaders of the Basque separatist movement.

    Of Italy we have already mentioned the 'years of lead', but just to capture a few highlights. The 'strategy of tension' unleashed in 1969 in Italy – the same year 'Condor' was unleashed in Latin America – was in response to the renewed popularity of Communism throughout the country and which, itself, was partly in response to the uptick in revolutionary sentiment globally as a result of antipathy towards the US war on Vietnam. The antidote, naturally, to this woeful state of progressive affairs was a healthy dose of terror. According to Williams, "Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor, issued orders to Licio Gelli through his deputy, General Alexander Haig, for the implementation of terror attacks and coup attempts." The terror attacks began on December 12, 1969 when a bomb exploded in the crowded lobby of a bank in Milan's Piazza Fontana in which seventeen people were killed and eighty-eight injured. Over the ensuing years (from 1969 to 1987) there followed more than '14,000 acts of violence with a political motivation'. The most infamous of these was, of course, the Bologna bombing in August of 1980 and which led to the initial exposure of Gladio in Italy.

    Of the many attempted coups and related high-level political machinations engineered by Gladio forces in Italy (1963, 1970, 1976) and Sicily (more or less continually on tap throughout the decade), the kidnapping on March 16, 1978 – and murder a month or so later – of Prime Minister Aldo Moro was likely the most sensational. Moro had dared to include communists in his new coalition government. At first blamed on the usual suspects, i.e. the Red Brigades, further investigation (to begin with by journalist Carmine 'Mino' Pecorelli who paid with his life) led to the real usual suspects including CIA operative Mario Moretti (eventually convicted of the killing) and thence up the line to Gelli, then to Italy's interior minister Francesco Cossiga and onwards to Zbigniew Brzezinski.

    The high-level intrigue did not stop at the murder of a prime minister however. At least two Popes felt the sharp end of the Gladio sword as well. In August of 1978, Pope Paul VI died. His successor, the preternaturally timid John Paul I, soon gave his handlers a very real shock when, after looking at the IOR accounts, he issued a 'call for reform'. The very next day the otherwise fastidiously health-conscious pontiff – in office barely a month – was dead. Not just dead but expired with the telltale bulging eyes and horrific grimace of acute poisoning. His autopsy was definitively thwarted by an illegal and hastily contrived embalming, and his personal papers disappeared without a trace. Archbishop Marcinkus, having been temporarily removed prior, was returned to office whilst Calvi and Sindona, also under scrutiny at the time, breathed a (temporary) sigh of relief.

    Having been (almost) burned once the overseers of Gladio made sure to engineer the follow-up Papal succession. Thus did Cardinal Karol Wojtyla shuffle onto the historical proscenium as Pope John Paul II. Now, at first, John Paul worked seamlessly with the CIA and Gladio. Together they oversaw the destruction of Liberation Theology in Latin America, the continued undermining of Italian democracy, and the dispensing of black funds for Solidarity in Poland. Ah, but how the best laid plans do oft go astray. By the spring of 1981 not only were events spinning out of control for Gladio itself, but so too were they for Banco Ambrosiano, and by extension, the IOR. The Pope, inexplicably, refused to act. Compounding this lapse was an unaccountable trifecta of moral turpitude that witnessed the Holy Father suddenly breaking into treasonous song singing the benefits of rapprochement with the Soviets; recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization; and, egads, nuclear disarmament. The order from on high was given: 'Kill the Pope'.

    But best blame it on the Soviets. So issued the 'Bulgarian Thesis' wherein a lowly Bulgarian airline employee (Sergei Antonov) was set up as the patsy. In truth, the key actors in the Papal plot came straight from Gladio central casting. The starring role in the drama fell to General Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italy's military intelligence (SISMI) and the commander of the Italian Gladio units. His co-star, Theodore Shackley, was the infamous CIA mastermind who had already served as executive producer on such epics as Operation Phoenix (involving the murder of some 40,000 non-combatants in Vietnam), Operation Condor, the setting up of Nugan Hand Bank, and, along with delle Chiaie, the murder of Salvador Allende. West Germany's BND (the national security services) garnered a significant credit by harbouring and financing the two actual assassins, Mehmet Agca and Abdullah Cath (both from Turkish Gladio). And, of course, the Mighty Wurlitzer, i.e. Operation Mockingbird, figured prominently in the aftermath grinding out endless tunes on the 'Bulgarian Thesis' – despite the fact of Agca's eventual (lone) conviction in the shooting.

    The production ended all somewhat anticlimactically when the Pope (on May 13, 1981) was only seriously wounded. In a fascinating denouement, however, on Christmas Day 1983, the Pope opted to publicly forgive Agca. Italian state television was allowed to record the moment when John Paul asked his assassin from whom he had received his orders. Leaning forward to hear Agca's response the Pope appeared momentarily frozen, then clasped his hands to his face. Though the Pontiff kept it secret, there was little need to guess at the answer.

    The adventures of both Agca and Cath are the stuff of legend. Indeed, Cath figures in events well beyond the time line of Gladio proper, enough to suggest that Gladio never really shut down at all. But that, as they say, is a whole other story – and one I leave to the author to take up.

    * * *

    Paul Williams has made a fine contribution here. Certainly, if the day ever comes when, seated across from some smug establishment interlocutor, you are taken to task for being a 'conspiracy monger' – well, you need only lean back, smile gently, and utter but two words .'Operation Gladio'.

    apocalypticbrother , 12 minutes ago link

    Mockingbird has the annoyance of freedom on the internet to occupy themselves with. And a new false flag in a different country every 6 weeks. Hard to sell enough heroin to finance it all.

    Joe A , 13 minutes ago link

    Great read. I think I will buy the book. You can bet Gladio is still alive wsiting to get back into action. Frightening to see how that evolved from a stay behind army in case of a Soviet invasion into a fascist overtaking on a continent. Oh yeah, they are biding their time alright. They

    OliverAnd , 28 minutes ago link

    Didn't the Vatican help NAZIs escape Europe after the war falsifying papers so that they could get new identities to travel? Always remember that the richest economic and most influential entity/business on the planet is the Vatican. You cannot be the richest and most influential without corruption; it's against human nature.

    [Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

    Highly recommended!
    Money quote: "Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union. "
    Notable quotes:
    "... Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary. ..."
    "... The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations. ..."
    "... The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally. ..."
    "... There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge. ..."
    Apr 06, 2019 | www.aseees.org

    In 2016, Andrei Lvovich Nekrasov, a well-known Russian film-maker, playwright, theater director, and actor, released a docudrama entitled, The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes . Although the film won many artistic accolades, including a special commendation from the Prix Europa Award for a Television Documentary, public screenings were abruptly canceled in both Europe and the United States. Political pressure from various constituents and the threat of lawsuits from William Browder, the American-British billionaire and human-rights activist, ensured the limitation of the film to a single website. To the knowledge of this author, there has been only one public screening of The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes in the United States. In June 2016, Seymour Hersch, a renowned investigative journalist, presided over a showing of the film at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that generated much controversy. The American press has not been kind to either the film or the director, Andrei Nekrasov. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Daily Beast all seem to agree that the film is an overt work of Russian propaganda that aims to introduce confusion about the circumstances leading to the death of tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, in the minds of the viewers. The Putin administration, which has been the prime target of both the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Accountability Act and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, has good reason to promote a film that questions the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's untimely death in Moscow's Butyrka Prison in 2009.

    Despite a flood of persuasive articles and editorials by well-known journalists suggesting that this inconvenient film deserves no more than a quick burial, I was drawn to reconsider both the film and the political controversy that it continues to create for two main reasons. First, as the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own recent presidential campaigns show, we can never entirely prohibit the intrusion of propaganda or politically slanted content into the public sphere. Instead, as a historian and faculty member who serves at a public university, I believe that it is my job to teach our students how to diagnose an issue, and how to consider the many sides that a story necessarily involves. As an intellectual process this has immense value both in and of itself. Source criticism is a time tested and reliable means through which we can make sense of an event or a phenomenon. Our students need to learn both the mechanics and the intellectual value of analyzing a source and should be able to evaluate the nature of political content whether it is embedded in a Facebook post, a scholarly article, or a documentary.

    The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes can serve as an important vehicle to introduce the contested nature of historical truth, and as a prism, it allows us to view the multiple modes through which various versions of the truth are disseminated in the twenty-first century. Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary.

    Second, I am concerned by the fact that both critics and supporters have turned the debate about the film into a referendum on William Browder, his business dealings as well as his global human rights activism, and the Putin administration. In this interview with Andrei Nekrasov, I turn the spotlight back on the film-maker, his motivations for making the film, and on his political experiences since the release of the film. It is important to remember that in the past Nekrasov has made several politically charged films including Disbelief (2004), and Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007) -- films that are extremely critical of the Putin administration. Nekrasov, a student of philosophy and literature, is in the unique position of having experienced censorship in the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia, and in the democratic countries of Western Europe and the United States.

    1) Why did you want to make a film about the Magnitsky Act? What drew you to this project?

    Andrei Nekrasov : I felt that the story of Magnitsky, in its accepted version, was very powerful and important. I thought that Sergei Magnitsky was a hero, and I wanted to tell the story of the modern hero, my compatriot. His case seemed very special because Magnitsky, a tax lawyer (in reality, an accountant) had come from the world of capitalism, to symbolize all that is good and moral in modern Russia. I believed that Magnitsky did not surrender under torture and sacrificed his life fighting corruption.

    2) Who has funded the making of this film and what motivated them to invest in this production?

    AN : The film was produced by Piraya Film, a Norwegian company. There is a long list of funders, and none are from Russia. (Please visit www.magnitskyact.com for further information). And they are all very "mainstream." I believe in the United States and Russia it is easier to construe the specific reasons that motivate funders, who are mostly private, to support a project. In Europe, where more public money is available for the arts, the state is more or less obliged to fund the cultural process. So I submit an idea to a producer, and if they like it, they introduce it into a complex system of funding that is supposed to be politically neutral. Only quality matters, in theory. In practice "quality" has political aspects, and its interpretation is open to prejudices.

    But it would be a simplification to say the film was funded because I had set out to tell Browder's version of the Magnitsky case. Those funders who were (through their commissioning editors) monitoring the editing process, ZDF/ARTE, for example, became aware of the inconsistencies in Browder's version and supported my investigation into the truth. What they did not realize was who, and what, we were all dealing with. They did not realize that Browder was supported by the entire political system of North America and Western Europe. They realized that only when they were told by politicians to stop the film. And they obeyed, contrary to what I thought was their principles.

    3) How has the role of censorship, both in Russia and the West, affected your artistic career?

    AN : Censorship has had a very strong and damaging impact on my career. But while censorship in Russia had never been something surprising to me, the way that the film T he Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes was treated by western politicians was totally unanticipated and shocking. Yet, intellectually, the experience was very illuminating. The pro-Western intelligentsia of Russia, a class to which I have belonged, idolizes the West and believes that the freedom of expression is an essential and even intrinsic part of Western culture. The notion that the interests of economically powerful groups can set a geopolitical agenda and that easily overrides democratic freedom of expression is considered to be a remnant of Soviet era thinking. So I had to have a direct and personal experience of Western censorship to realize that that notion is rooted in reality.

    The issue of censorship in Russia is, on the other hand, often misunderstood in the West. There is no direct political censorship of the kind that existed in the Soviet Union, and that possibly exists in countries like China today. Many popular Russian news outlets are critical of the government, and of Putin personally as evidenced by the content in media outlets such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya Gazeta, Dozhd TV, New Times, Vedomosti, Colta. ru, and others. The internet is full of mockery of Putin, his ministers and of his party's representatives. There is neither a system nor the kind of wellresourced deep state structures that control the flow of information. Many Russian media outlets, for example, repeat Browder's story of Magnitsky killed by the corrupt police with the state covering it up. All that is perfectly "allowed" while Putin angrily condemns Browder as a criminal and Browder calls himself Putin's number one enemy. In reality, it is not allowed but simply happens because of the lack of consistent political censorship.

    However, you will hardly ever hear a proper analysis and criticism in the Russian media of the big corporations, and of the oligarchs that make up the state. It is also true that such acute crises as military operations, such as Russian-Georgian war of 2008 produce intolerance to the voices of the opposition. My film Russian Lessons (2008) about the suffering of the Georgians during that short war and its aftermath wasbanned in Russia. But nationalism is not only a government policy. It's the prevailing mood. The supposedly democratic leader of the opposition, that the West seems to praise and support, Alexei Navalny, was on the record insulting Georgians in jingo-nationalistic posts during the war. The film industry is, of course, easier to steer in the "right direction" as films, unlike articles and essays, are very expensive to produce. But Russia is a complex society, deeply troubled, but also misunderstood by the West. If my films, such as Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File , and Russian Lessons (2010) were attacked by pro-government media, then some of my articles were censored by the independent, "opposition" outlets, such as Ekho Moskvy .

    4) Did you actually begin filming the movie with an outcome of supporting Browder's story in mind, as you represent in the film, or did you plan from the start of the filming process to end the film as it now stands?

    AN : I started filming the story. I totally believed in the story that Browder had told me, and all the mainstream media repeated after him.

    5) You know that there are many more "disappeared" journalists and others listed in the formal US Congress Magnitsky Act who have suffered from the effects of corrupt power in Russia. Why did you not address the fates of some of those others as well in your film?

    AN : I may be misunderstanding this question, but I do not see how addressing the fates of "disappeared" journalists and others' would be relevant to the topic of my film in its final version. I obviously condemn the "disappearance" of journalists and others. In Russia journalists disappear usually by being "simply" shot (not in "sophisticated" Saudi ways), and as far as I remember only one is referred to in The Magnitsky Act , Paul Khlebnikov. He was the editor of Forbes, Russia , and was shot in 2004 when Bill Browder was a great fan of Vladimir Putin and continued to be for some time. I have not seen any evidence or even claim, that Putin may have been behind that murder. I was a friend of Anna Politkovskaya, perhaps the most famous of all Russian journalists who was assassinated in the recent past. She is featured in my film, Poisoned by Polonium .

    The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations.

    6) Does William Browder's role in the formulation of the Magnitsky Act invalidate its value and that of the Global Magnitsky Act, in seeking to provide protection for those suffering from the effects of deadly and corrupt power such as the recently deceased Saudi Arabian journalist, Jamal Khashoggi?

    AN : Let me, for the argument's sake, pose myself what would seem like a version of your question: "Would Browder's role in creating a weapon that could protect someone like Khashoggi from deadly and corrupt power invalidate that weapon?" My answer would be, no, it would not invalidate that weapon. However, we are dealing with a fallacy here, in my humble opinion. The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally.

    There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge.

    Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union.

    Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Chatterjee, along with Steven Marks, Mary Neuberger, and Steve Sabol, edited The Wider Arc of Revolution in three volumes (Slavica Publishers).

    [Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

    Highly recommended!
    Tulsi is a really great polemist with a very sharp mind and ability to find weak points in the opponent platform/argumentation and withstand pressure. In the debate she will probably will wipe the floor with Trump. IMHO he stands no chances against her in the open debate
    Notable quotes:
    "... Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers. The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country's infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity. ..."
    "... While the paper hailed the fact that the Pentagon's budget increase allowed local workers to keep their jobs and encouraged a skilled workforce to move to a small town in rural Ohio, Gabbard apparently hinted that the whole story in fact described what amounted to re-distribution of money from taxpayers to a de-facto depressed area to save some jobs – a social-democratic if not outright socialist move indeed. ..."
    "... In her post, Gabbard also added that the US might have had a better use for a $160 billion boost in defense spending over two years. “The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country’s infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity,” she wrote. ..."
    Apr 05, 2019 | www.rt.com

    US President Donald Trump, who has been relentlessly bashing everything linked to what he sees as 'socialism,' is himself no stranger to using socialist principles to support the US arms industry, Tulsi Gabbard has claimed. One could hardly suspect Trump of being a socialist in disguise.

    After all, the US president has emerged as one of the most ardent critics of the leftist ideological platform. Just recently, he announced he would "go into the war with some socialists," while apparently referring to his political opponents from the Democratic Party.

    But the president also seems to be quite keen on borrowing some socialist ideas when it fits his agenda, at least, according to the congresswoman from Hawaii and Democratic presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, who recently wrote in a tweet that "Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers."

    Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers. The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country's infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity. https://t.co/tcNqsNQVbN

    -- Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) April 5, 2019

    She was referring to a piece in The Los Angeles Times, which cheerfully reported that Trump's whopping military budget helps to breathe some new life into a Pentagon-owned tank manufacturing plant somewhere in northwestern Ohio that was once on the verge of a shutdown.

    While the paper hailed the fact that the Pentagon's budget increase allowed local workers to keep their jobs and encouraged a skilled workforce to move to a small town in rural Ohio, Gabbard apparently hinted that the whole story in fact described what amounted to re-distribution of money from taxpayers to a de-facto depressed area to save some jobs – a social-democratic if not outright socialist move indeed.

    It is very much unclear if Trump had this Ohio plant or any other factories like it in mind when he supported the record Pentagon budget. After all, redistributing large sums of public money in favor of the booming US military industrial complex does not look very much like socialism.

    In her post, Gabbard also added that the US might have had a better use for a $160 billion boost in defense spending over two years. “The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country’s infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity,” she wrote.

    Trump, meanwhile, seems to be pretty confident that his policies indeed “make America great again” while it is those pesky socialists that threaten to ruin everything he has achieved. “I love the idea of 'Keep America Great' because you know what it says is we've made it great now we're going to keep it great because the socialists will destroy it,” he told an audience of Republican congress members this week, while talking about the forthcoming presidential campaign.

    [Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

    Highly recommended!
    Money quote: "Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union. "
    Notable quotes:
    "... Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary. ..."
    "... The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations. ..."
    "... The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally. ..."
    "... There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge. ..."
    Apr 06, 2019 | www.aseees.org

    In 2016, Andrei Lvovich Nekrasov, a well-known Russian film-maker, playwright, theater director, and actor, released a docudrama entitled, The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes . Although the film won many artistic accolades, including a special commendation from the Prix Europa Award for a Television Documentary, public screenings were abruptly canceled in both Europe and the United States. Political pressure from various constituents and the threat of lawsuits from William Browder, the American-British billionaire and human-rights activist, ensured the limitation of the film to a single website. To the knowledge of this author, there has been only one public screening of The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes in the United States. In June 2016, Seymour Hersch, a renowned investigative journalist, presided over a showing of the film at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that generated much controversy. The American press has not been kind to either the film or the director, Andrei Nekrasov. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Daily Beast all seem to agree that the film is an overt work of Russian propaganda that aims to introduce confusion about the circumstances leading to the death of tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, in the minds of the viewers. The Putin administration, which has been the prime target of both the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Accountability Act and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, has good reason to promote a film that questions the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's untimely death in Moscow's Butyrka Prison in 2009.

    Despite a flood of persuasive articles and editorials by well-known journalists suggesting that this inconvenient film deserves no more than a quick burial, I was drawn to reconsider both the film and the political controversy that it continues to create for two main reasons. First, as the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own recent presidential campaigns show, we can never entirely prohibit the intrusion of propaganda or politically slanted content into the public sphere. Instead, as a historian and faculty member who serves at a public university, I believe that it is my job to teach our students how to diagnose an issue, and how to consider the many sides that a story necessarily involves. As an intellectual process this has immense value both in and of itself. Source criticism is a time tested and reliable means through which we can make sense of an event or a phenomenon. Our students need to learn both the mechanics and the intellectual value of analyzing a source and should be able to evaluate the nature of political content whether it is embedded in a Facebook post, a scholarly article, or a documentary.

    The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes can serve as an important vehicle to introduce the contested nature of historical truth, and as a prism, it allows us to view the multiple modes through which various versions of the truth are disseminated in the twenty-first century. Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary.

    Second, I am concerned by the fact that both critics and supporters have turned the debate about the film into a referendum on William Browder, his business dealings as well as his global human rights activism, and the Putin administration. In this interview with Andrei Nekrasov, I turn the spotlight back on the film-maker, his motivations for making the film, and on his political experiences since the release of the film. It is important to remember that in the past Nekrasov has made several politically charged films including Disbelief (2004), and Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007) -- films that are extremely critical of the Putin administration. Nekrasov, a student of philosophy and literature, is in the unique position of having experienced censorship in the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia, and in the democratic countries of Western Europe and the United States.

    1) Why did you want to make a film about the Magnitsky Act? What drew you to this project?

    Andrei Nekrasov : I felt that the story of Magnitsky, in its accepted version, was very powerful and important. I thought that Sergei Magnitsky was a hero, and I wanted to tell the story of the modern hero, my compatriot. His case seemed very special because Magnitsky, a tax lawyer (in reality, an accountant) had come from the world of capitalism, to symbolize all that is good and moral in modern Russia. I believed that Magnitsky did not surrender under torture and sacrificed his life fighting corruption.

    2) Who has funded the making of this film and what motivated them to invest in this production?

    AN : The film was produced by Piraya Film, a Norwegian company. There is a long list of funders, and none are from Russia. (Please visit www.magnitskyact.com for further information). And they are all very "mainstream." I believe in the United States and Russia it is easier to construe the specific reasons that motivate funders, who are mostly private, to support a project. In Europe, where more public money is available for the arts, the state is more or less obliged to fund the cultural process. So I submit an idea to a producer, and if they like it, they introduce it into a complex system of funding that is supposed to be politically neutral. Only quality matters, in theory. In practice "quality" has political aspects, and its interpretation is open to prejudices.

    But it would be a simplification to say the film was funded because I had set out to tell Browder's version of the Magnitsky case. Those funders who were (through their commissioning editors) monitoring the editing process, ZDF/ARTE, for example, became aware of the inconsistencies in Browder's version and supported my investigation into the truth. What they did not realize was who, and what, we were all dealing with. They did not realize that Browder was supported by the entire political system of North America and Western Europe. They realized that only when they were told by politicians to stop the film. And they obeyed, contrary to what I thought was their principles.

    3) How has the role of censorship, both in Russia and the West, affected your artistic career?

    AN : Censorship has had a very strong and damaging impact on my career. But while censorship in Russia had never been something surprising to me, the way that the film T he Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes was treated by western politicians was totally unanticipated and shocking. Yet, intellectually, the experience was very illuminating. The pro-Western intelligentsia of Russia, a class to which I have belonged, idolizes the West and believes that the freedom of expression is an essential and even intrinsic part of Western culture. The notion that the interests of economically powerful groups can set a geopolitical agenda and that easily overrides democratic freedom of expression is considered to be a remnant of Soviet era thinking. So I had to have a direct and personal experience of Western censorship to realize that that notion is rooted in reality.

    The issue of censorship in Russia is, on the other hand, often misunderstood in the West. There is no direct political censorship of the kind that existed in the Soviet Union, and that possibly exists in countries like China today. Many popular Russian news outlets are critical of the government, and of Putin personally as evidenced by the content in media outlets such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya Gazeta, Dozhd TV, New Times, Vedomosti, Colta. ru, and others. The internet is full of mockery of Putin, his ministers and of his party's representatives. There is neither a system nor the kind of wellresourced deep state structures that control the flow of information. Many Russian media outlets, for example, repeat Browder's story of Magnitsky killed by the corrupt police with the state covering it up. All that is perfectly "allowed" while Putin angrily condemns Browder as a criminal and Browder calls himself Putin's number one enemy. In reality, it is not allowed but simply happens because of the lack of consistent political censorship.

    However, you will hardly ever hear a proper analysis and criticism in the Russian media of the big corporations, and of the oligarchs that make up the state. It is also true that such acute crises as military operations, such as Russian-Georgian war of 2008 produce intolerance to the voices of the opposition. My film Russian Lessons (2008) about the suffering of the Georgians during that short war and its aftermath wasbanned in Russia. But nationalism is not only a government policy. It's the prevailing mood. The supposedly democratic leader of the opposition, that the West seems to praise and support, Alexei Navalny, was on the record insulting Georgians in jingo-nationalistic posts during the war. The film industry is, of course, easier to steer in the "right direction" as films, unlike articles and essays, are very expensive to produce. But Russia is a complex society, deeply troubled, but also misunderstood by the West. If my films, such as Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File , and Russian Lessons (2010) were attacked by pro-government media, then some of my articles were censored by the independent, "opposition" outlets, such as Ekho Moskvy .

    4) Did you actually begin filming the movie with an outcome of supporting Browder's story in mind, as you represent in the film, or did you plan from the start of the filming process to end the film as it now stands?

    AN : I started filming the story. I totally believed in the story that Browder had told me, and all the mainstream media repeated after him.

    5) You know that there are many more "disappeared" journalists and others listed in the formal US Congress Magnitsky Act who have suffered from the effects of corrupt power in Russia. Why did you not address the fates of some of those others as well in your film?

    AN : I may be misunderstanding this question, but I do not see how addressing the fates of "disappeared" journalists and others' would be relevant to the topic of my film in its final version. I obviously condemn the "disappearance" of journalists and others. In Russia journalists disappear usually by being "simply" shot (not in "sophisticated" Saudi ways), and as far as I remember only one is referred to in The Magnitsky Act , Paul Khlebnikov. He was the editor of Forbes, Russia , and was shot in 2004 when Bill Browder was a great fan of Vladimir Putin and continued to be for some time. I have not seen any evidence or even claim, that Putin may have been behind that murder. I was a friend of Anna Politkovskaya, perhaps the most famous of all Russian journalists who was assassinated in the recent past. She is featured in my film, Poisoned by Polonium .

    The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations.

    6) Does William Browder's role in the formulation of the Magnitsky Act invalidate its value and that of the Global Magnitsky Act, in seeking to provide protection for those suffering from the effects of deadly and corrupt power such as the recently deceased Saudi Arabian journalist, Jamal Khashoggi?

    AN : Let me, for the argument's sake, pose myself what would seem like a version of your question: "Would Browder's role in creating a weapon that could protect someone like Khashoggi from deadly and corrupt power invalidate that weapon?" My answer would be, no, it would not invalidate that weapon. However, we are dealing with a fallacy here, in my humble opinion. The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally.

    There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge.

    Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union.

    Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Chatterjee, along with Steven Marks, Mary Neuberger, and Steve Sabol, edited The Wider Arc of Revolution in three volumes (Slavica Publishers).

    [Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

    Highly recommended!
    Tulsi is a really great polemist with a very sharp mind and ability to find weak points in the opponent platform/argumentation and withstand pressure. In the debate she will probably will wipe the floor with Trump. IMHO he stands no chances against her in the open debate
    Notable quotes:
    "... Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers. The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country's infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity. ..."
    "... While the paper hailed the fact that the Pentagon's budget increase allowed local workers to keep their jobs and encouraged a skilled workforce to move to a small town in rural Ohio, Gabbard apparently hinted that the whole story in fact described what amounted to re-distribution of money from taxpayers to a de-facto depressed area to save some jobs – a social-democratic if not outright socialist move indeed. ..."
    "... In her post, Gabbard also added that the US might have had a better use for a $160 billion boost in defense spending over two years. “The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country’s infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity,” she wrote. ..."
    Apr 05, 2019 | www.rt.com

    US President Donald Trump, who has been relentlessly bashing everything linked to what he sees as 'socialism,' is himself no stranger to using socialist principles to support the US arms industry, Tulsi Gabbard has claimed. One could hardly suspect Trump of being a socialist in disguise.

    After all, the US president has emerged as one of the most ardent critics of the leftist ideological platform. Just recently, he announced he would "go into the war with some socialists," while apparently referring to his political opponents from the Democratic Party.

    But the president also seems to be quite keen on borrowing some socialist ideas when it fits his agenda, at least, according to the congresswoman from Hawaii and Democratic presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, who recently wrote in a tweet that "Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers."

    Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers. The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country's infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity. https://t.co/tcNqsNQVbN

    -- Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) April 5, 2019

    She was referring to a piece in The Los Angeles Times, which cheerfully reported that Trump's whopping military budget helps to breathe some new life into a Pentagon-owned tank manufacturing plant somewhere in northwestern Ohio that was once on the verge of a shutdown.

    While the paper hailed the fact that the Pentagon's budget increase allowed local workers to keep their jobs and encouraged a skilled workforce to move to a small town in rural Ohio, Gabbard apparently hinted that the whole story in fact described what amounted to re-distribution of money from taxpayers to a de-facto depressed area to save some jobs – a social-democratic if not outright socialist move indeed.

    It is very much unclear if Trump had this Ohio plant or any other factories like it in mind when he supported the record Pentagon budget. After all, redistributing large sums of public money in favor of the booming US military industrial complex does not look very much like socialism.

    In her post, Gabbard also added that the US might have had a better use for a $160 billion boost in defense spending over two years. “The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country’s infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity,” she wrote.

    Trump, meanwhile, seems to be pretty confident that his policies indeed “make America great again” while it is those pesky socialists that threaten to ruin everything he has achieved. “I love the idea of 'Keep America Great' because you know what it says is we've made it great now we're going to keep it great because the socialists will destroy it,” he told an audience of Republican congress members this week, while talking about the forthcoming presidential campaign.

    [Apr 06, 2019] Despicable warmonger Max Boot is FullOfSchiff

    Apr 06, 2019 | www.breitbart.com

    "You see all of these Russian connections -- there's a new one every single day, and increasingly benign explanations for what the Trump, for what they're up to, benign explanations are just not credible."

    -- Max Boot, warmonger, MSNBC, July 21, 2017

    [Apr 06, 2019] Relationship with Russia is the main casualty of Russiagate

    Apr 06, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Brendan April 5, 2019 at 12:40 pm

    Relationship with the only nation on Earth besides US is the main casualty of Russiagate. Ever since the religious schism of 1054, the West has failed to understand Russia. In the 19th Century only Harvard even offered a Russian language course. Our main ally, Britian, has been irrationally Russophobic since Benjamin Disraeli. There is no evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Internet Research Institute was a commercial click bait business, staffed by underpaid grad students, not KGB spies. The DNC files were not hacked, they were downloaded by disgruntled Bernie Bros and given to Wikileaks.

    Trump gave Putin the respect he deserves at Helsinki. Putin has done much for his country, and the world, by checking Western Imperialism in the Ukraine, Syria, and now Venezuela. History will recognize Putin as the preeminent statesman of the early 21 Century, and will honor Trump to the extent Trump recognizes that.

    [Apr 06, 2019] Despicable warmonger Max Boot is FullOfSchiff

    Apr 06, 2019 | www.breitbart.com

    "You see all of these Russian connections -- there's a new one every single day, and increasingly benign explanations for what the Trump, for what they're up to, benign explanations are just not credible."

    -- Max Boot, warmonger, MSNBC, July 21, 2017

    [Apr 06, 2019] USA is neo-McCarthyism hysteria resemble some obsure religious cult, not a civilized country

    "Were these gun rights folks potentially a conduit for Russian money alongside other forms of Russian government influence on our 2016 campaign?" -- Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, July 25, 2018
    Apr 06, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Steve April 5, 2019 at 12:50 pm

    Let me add my two cents. If you accuse someone of wrong-doing, and the accusation is serious, then two points:

    1. A basic moral principle undergirding what we call "civilization" is the notion that the burden of proof is on the accuser. It is the accuser that must prove the accusation. The accused, or any of the accused defenders, DO NOT HAVE TO "PROVE" ANYTHING, PERIOD.

    2. The more serious the accusation, the stiffer the burden of proof. Period.

    Because of their flagrant disregard for these basic principles, what we call the "mainstream media" in the U.S. has shown itself to be utterly worthless and untrustworthy. And the MORE serious the issue, the LESS trustworthy it is!

    [Apr 05, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate with any real substance on either side of the political divide.

    Apr 05, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    whybother , 34 minutes ago link

    Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate with any real substance on either side of the political divide.

    Everybody else is a slimy, gutless, servile tool of the military industrial complex.

    You know its true.

    [Apr 05, 2019] Tulsi Continues April 03, 2019 (Donors, Dore, Iversen)

    Notable quotes:
    "... Tulsi didn't join in the standing ovation for NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg during his warmongering speech to the US Congress on Weds. Good for her. ..."
    "... Tracey has allowed Tulsi to explain the nuances of her foreign policy stands concerning regime change, war, and fighting terrorism. I do not believe any other interviewer has been able to bring out those distinctions. ..."
    "... I hope people will take the time to listen to Tracey's interview. It is posted on YouTube, but it is an audio interview only. Tracey does a nice introduction to both parts of the interview which was conducted over two days. ..."
    Apr 03, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

    apenultimate on Wed, 04/03/2019 - 11:53pm

    The Tulsi2020 campaign continues to gain unique donors, closing in on the magic number. As of tonight, Tulsi has 61,029 of them, and needs only 3,971 more to get into the Democratic debates. That's only 97 new donors per day through May 14.

    Centaurea on Thu, 04/04/2019 - 4:39am

    From what I've heard,

    Tulsi didn't join in the standing ovation for NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg during his warmongering speech to the US Congress on Weds. Good for her.

    gulfgal98 on Thu, 04/04/2019 - 7:15am
    IMHO, Michael Tracey has done the best interview

    with Tulsi Gabbard so far. Tracey has allowed Tulsi to explain the nuances of her foreign policy stands concerning regime change, war, and fighting terrorism. I do not believe any other interviewer has been able to bring out those distinctions.

    I hope people will take the time to listen to Tracey's interview. It is posted on YouTube, but it is an audio interview only. Tracey does a nice introduction to both parts of the interview which was conducted over two days.

    //www.youtube.com/embed/FPq5Qp5mlc0?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

    [Apr 05, 2019] Looking at the Integrity Initiative it's clear that information warfare at all levels - academia, the media, on down to the little subsidized web sites and right on down to the individuals who are paid to insert comments on social media - is now regarded in England as an integral part of Intelligence work

    Apr 05, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    English Outsider -> Fred , 7 days ago

    Fred - I don't think it's going to go away that easily. This is the BBC web site today, again keeping alive much the same theme as your man of courage. We're moving on from whether Trump was a Russian agent to whether Trump deliberately attempted to stop us finding out whether he was a Russian agent -

    "But Mr Mueller declined to draw a conclusion on whether Mr Trump had obstructed justice, saying only that the president could not be exonerated.

    Attorney General Barr, who was appointed by the president, concluded in his summary of the report that there was not enough evidence to determine if the president had committed the offence."

    So it's too useful a theme to be let go entirely, and fits with the general suspicion of Russian interference.

    It's a difficult one, that. Looking at the Integrity Initiative and 77 Brigade it's clear that information warfare at all levels - academia, the media, on down to the little subsidized web sites and right on down to the individuals who are paid to insert comments on social media - is now regarded in England as an integral part of Intelligence work. Presumably everyone else is doing it too so why not the Russians? But to trace the huge political movements of our time back to Moscow, as if they were due to sinister Russians cleverly playing us via social media and other propaganda outlets, seems to me to be grossly overdone. After all, if it were that easy it would have worked for the West too. Iran would now be another Syria and Syria long since gone.

    No, even the most ardent Russophobes on our side of the Atlantic might have to admit sometimes that the reason we're screwed up in Europe at present is that we've screwed ourselves up. We are not uniformly happy prosperous peoples who would continue to be uniformly happy and prosperous were it not for Moscow. So it must be in the States.

    Even so, the Russians are still the get-out for many. On English web sites "Putin done it" surfaces regularly as the reason for us voting Brexit. There were suggestions that he had stirred up the Yellow Vests in France. The Italians are sometimes viewed with suspicion for the same reason.

    And I got caught up in an unusual traffic hold-up just this morning. I can't prove to you it was the Russians. But can you prove to me it wasn't?

    [Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else. ..."
    Apr 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    "Russia is an inalienable and organic part of Greater Europe and European civilization. Our citizens think of themselves as European. That's why Russia proposes moving towards the creation of a common economic space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, a community referred to by Russian experts as 'the Union of Europe' which will strengthen Russia's potential in its economic pivot toward the 'New Asia.'" Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, February 2012

    The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its tentacles across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda, but the victim. The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire Washington political establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony.

    Try to imagine for a minute, that the hacking claims were not part of a sinister plan by Vladimir Putin "to sow discord and division" in the United States, but were conjured up to create an external threat that would justify an aggressive response from Washington. That's what Russiagate is really all about.

    US policymakers and their allies in the military and Intelligence agencies, know that relations with Russia are bound to get increasingly confrontational, mainly because Washington is determined to pursue its ambitious "pivot" to Asia plan. This new regional strategy focuses on "strengthening bilateral security alliances, expanding trade and investment, and forging a broad-based military presence." In short, the US is determined to maintain its global supremacy by establishing military outposts across Eurasia, continuing to tighten the noose around Russia and China, and reinforcing its position as the dominant player in the most populous and prosperous region in the world. The plan was first presented in its skeletal form by the architect of Washington's plan to rule the world, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Here's how Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor summed it up in his 1997 magnum opus, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives:

    "For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia (p.30) .. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. . About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." ("The Grand Chessboard:American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives", Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic Books, page 31, 1997)

    14 years after those words were written, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took up the banner of imperial expansion and demanded a dramatic shift in US foreign policy that would focus primarily on increasing America's military footprint in Asia. It was Clinton who first coined the term "pivot" in a speech she delivered in 2010 titled "America's Pacific Century". Here's an excerpt from the speech:

    "As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific region

    Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology ..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia The region already generates more than half of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to meet President Obama's goal of doubling exports by 2015, we are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia and our investment opportunities in Asia's dynamic markets."

    ("America's Pacific Century", Secretary of State Hillary Clinton", Foreign Policy Magazine, 2011)

    The pivot strategy is not some trifling rehash of the 19th century "Great Game" promoted by think-tank fantasists and conspiracy theorists. It is Washington's premier foreign policy doctrine, a 'rebalancing' theory that focuses on increasing US military and diplomatic presence across the Asian landmass. Naturally, NATO's ominous troop movements on Russia's western flank and Washington's provocative naval operations in the South China Sea have sent up red flags in Moscow and Beijing. Former Chinese President Hu Jintao summed it up like this:

    "The United States has strengthened its military deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, strengthened the US-Japan military alliance, strengthened strategic cooperation with India, improved relations with Vietnam, inveigled Pakistan, established a pro-American government in Afghanistan, increased arms sales to Taiwan, and so on. They have extended outposts and placed pressure points on us from the east, south, and west."

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has been equally critical of Washington's erratic behavior. NATO's eastward expansion has convinced Putin that the US will continue to be a disruptive force on the continent for the foreseeable future. Both leaders worry that Washington's relentless provocations will lead to an unexpected clash that will end in war.

    Even so, the political class has fully embraced the pivot strategy as a last-gasp attempt to roll back the clock to the post war era when the world's industrial centers were in ruins and America was the only game in town. Now the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn the applecart by bullying allies and threatening rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging, and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end.

    Washington has many ways of dealing with its enemies, but none of these strategies have dampened the growth of its competitors in the east. China is poised to overtake the US as the world's biggest economy sometime in the next 2 decades while Russia's intervention in Syria has rolled back Washington's plan to topple Bashar al Assad and consolidate its grip on the resource-rich Middle East. That plan has now collapsed forcing US policymakers to scrap the War on Terror altogether and switch to a "great power competition" which acknowledges that the US can no longer unilaterally impose its will wherever it goes. Challenges to America's dominance are emerging everywhere particularly in the region where the US hopes to reign supreme, Asia.

    This is why the entire national security state now stands foursquare behind the improbable pivot plan. It's a desperate "Hail Mary" attempt to preserve the decaying unipolar world order.

    What does that mean in practical terms?

    It means that the White House (the National Security Strategy) the Pentagon (National Defense Strategy) and the Intelligence Community (The Worldwide Threat Assessment) have all drawn up their own respective analyses of the biggest threats the US currently faces. Naturally, Russia is at the very top of those lists. Russia has derailed Washington's proxy war in Syria, frustrated US attempts to establish itself across Central Asia, and strengthened ties with the EU hoping to "create a harmonious community of economies from Lisbon to Vladivostok." (Putin)

    Keep in mind, the US does not feel threatened by the possibility of a Russian attack, but by Russia's ability to thwart Washington's grandiose imperial ambitions in Asia.

    As we noted, the National Security Strategy (NSS) is a statutorily mandated document produced by the White House that explains how the President intends to implement his national security vision. Not surprisingly, the document's main focus is Russia and China. Here's an excerpt:

    "China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence." (Neither Russia nor China are attempting to erode American security and prosperity." They are merely growing their economies and expanding their markets. If US corporations reinvested their capital into factories, employee training and R and D instead of stock buybacks and executive compensation, then they would be better able to complete globally.)

    Here's more: "Through modernized forms of subversive tactics, Russia interferes in the domestic political affairs of countries around the world." (This is a case of the 'pot calling the kettle black.')

    "Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data." (The western media behemoth is the biggest disinformation bullhorn the world has ever seen. RT and Sputnik don't hold a candle to the ginormous MSM 'Wurlitzer' that controls the cable news stations, the newspapers and most of the print media. The Mueller Report proves beyond a doubt that the politically-motivated nonsense one reads in the media is neither reliably sourced nor trustworthy.)

    The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community is even more explicit in its attacks on Russia. Check it out:

    "Threats to US national security will expand and diversify in the coming year, driven in part by China and Russia as they respectively compete more intensely with the United States and its traditional allies and partners . We assess that Moscow will continue pursuing a range of objectives to expand its reach, including undermining the US-led liberal international order, dividing Western political and security institutions, demonstrating Russia's ability to shape global issues, and bolstering Putin's domestic legitimacy.

    We assess that Moscow has heightened confidence, based on its success in helping restore the Asad regime's territorial control in Syria, ·Russia seeks to boost its military presence and political influence in the Mediterranean and Red Seas mediate conflicts, including engaging in the Middle East Peace Process and Afghanistan reconciliation .

    Russia will continue pressing Central Asia's leaders to support Russian-led economic and security initiatives and reduce engagement with Washington. Russia and China are likely to intensify efforts to build influence in Europe at the expense of US interests " ("The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community", USG )

    Notice how the Intelligence Community summary does not suggest that Russia poses an imminent military threat to the US, only that Russia has restored order in Syria, strengthened ties with China, emerged as an "honest broker" among countries in the Middle East, and used the free market system to improve relations with its trading partners and grow its economy. The IC appears to find fault with Russia because it is using the system the US created to better advantage than the US. This is entirely understandable given Putin's determination to draw Europe and Asia closer together through a region-wide economic integration plan. Here's Putin:

    "We must consider more extensive cooperation in the energy sphere, up to and including the formation of a common European energy complex. The Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea and the South Stream pipeline under the Black Sea are important steps in that direction. These projects have the support of many governments and involve major European energy companies. Once the pipelines start operating at full capacity, Europe will have a reliable and flexible gas-supply system that does not depend on the political whims of any nation. This will strengthen the continent's energy security not only in form but in substance. This is particularly relevant in the light of the decision of some European states to reduce or renounce nuclear energy."

    The gas pipelines and high-speed rail are the arteries that will bind the continents together and strengthen the new EU-Asia superstate. This is Washington's greatest nightmare, a massive, thriving free trade zone beyond its reach and not subject to its rules. In 2012, Hillary Clinton acknowledged this new threat and promised to do everything in her power to destroy it. Check out this excerpt:

    "U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described efforts to promote greater economic integration in Eurasia as "a move to re-Sovietize the region." . "We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it," she said at an international conference in Dublin on December 6, 2012, Radio Free Europe."

    "Slow down or prevent it"?

    Why? Because EU-Asia growth and prosperity will put pressure on US debt markets, US corporate interests, US (ballooning) national debt, and the US Dollar? Is that why Hillary is so committed to sabotaging Putin's economic integration plan?

    Indeed, it is. Washington wants to block progress and prosperity in the east in order to extend the lifespan of a doddering and thoroughly-bankrupt state that is presently $22 trillion in the red but continues to write checks on an overdrawn account.

    But Russia shouldn't be blamed for Washington's profligate behavior, that's not Putin's fault. Moscow is merely using the free market system more effectively that the US.

    Now consider the Pentagon's 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) which reiterates many of the same themes as the other two documents.

    "Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding. We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order -- creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security."

    (Naturally, the "security environment" is going to be more challenging when 'regime change' is the cornerstone of one's foreign policy. Of course, the NDS glosses over that sad fact. Here's more:)

    "Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbors ..(Baloney. Russia has been a force for stability in Syria and Ukraine. If Obama had his way, Syria would have wound up like Iraq, a hellish wastelands occupied by foreign mercenaries. Is that how the Pentagon measures success?) Here's more:

    "China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model

    "China and Russia are now undermining the international order from within the system .

    "China and Russia are the principal priorities for the Department because of the magnitude of the threats they pose to U.S. security." ( National Defense Strategy of the United States of America )

    Get the picture? China and Russia, China and Russia, China and Russia. Bad, bad, bad.

    Why? Because they are successfully implementing their own development model which is NOT programed to favor US financial institutions and corporations. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. The only reason Russia and China are a threat to the "rules-based system", is because Washington insists on being the only one who makes the rules. That's why foreign leaders are no longer falling in line, because it's not a fair system.

    These assessments represent the prevailing opinion of senior-level policymakers across the spectrum. (The White House, the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community) The USG is unanimous in its judgement that a harsher more combative approach is needed to deal with Russia and China. Foreign policy elites want to put the nation on the path to more confrontation, more conflict and more war. At the same time, none of these three documents suggest that Russia has any intention of launching an attack on the United States. The greatest concern is the effect that emerging competitors will have on Washington's provocative plan for military and economic expansion, the threat that Russia and China pose to America's tenuous grip on global power. It is that fear that drives US foreign policy.

    And this is broader context into which we must fit the Russia investigation. The reason the Russia hacking furor has been allowed to flourish and spread despite the obvious lack of any supporting evidence, is because the vilifying of Russia segues perfectly with the geopolitical interests of elites in the government. The USG now works collaboratively with the media to influence public attitudes on issues that are important to the powerful foreign policy establishment. The ostensible goal of these psychological operations (PSYOP) is to selectively use information on "audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals."

    The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes and perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the

    Beckow , says: April 4, 2019 at 1:02 am GMT

    The emerging Euro-Asian power block is very heterogeneous. Russia, China, and the smaller affiliated players like Central Asia, Iran, Syria, Turkey don't agree on almost anything. They have different cultures, religions, economies, demographic profiles, even writing systems. The most rational strategy to prevent the Euro-Asian block from consolidating would be to get them to fight each other. Alternatively, find the weakest link and attack it in an area where its reluctant allies don't share its interests.

    Exactly the opposite has happened in the last 5-10 years: US has seemingly worked overtime to get China-Russia alliance of the ground. They used to distrust each other, today, after Ukraine, South China See, etc they have become close allies. Same with Iran and Syria: instead of letting them stew in their own internal problems – mostly religious and having a nepotistic elite – US has managed to turn the fight into an external geo-political struggle, literally invited Russia to join in, and ended up losing.

    Bush turned Iraq from a fanatically anti-Iran bastion to a reliable ally of Iran and started an un-winnable land war in Afghanistan (incredible!). Obama turned Libya, the richest and most stable African country that threatened no-one and kept African migrants far away, into a chaotic hellhole where slave trade flourishes and millions of Sub-Saharan Africans can use it to move on to Europe.

    Then Obama tried to coup-de-etat Erdogan in Turkey, and – even worse – failed miserably. This gang can't shoot straight – whatever they put in their position papers is meaningless drivel because they are too stupid to think. They have no patience to wait for the right time to move, no ability to manage on the ground allies, and an aversion to casualties that makes winning a war impossible. Today Trump threatens Germany over its energy security (pipelines), further antagonises Turkey and Erdogan, watches helplessly as EU becomes the next UN (lame and irrelevant), and bets everything on a few small allies like Saudi Arabia and Izrael that are of almost no use in Euro-Asia.

    A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that ' maybe I had bad information ' is no master of the universe. And he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or ' information warfare ' – is a pathetic sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.

    anon [338] Disclaimer , says: April 4, 2019 at 4:07 am GMT
    the russophobia is just drama to keep the MIC spending at $700+ billion per year

    there is no way to justify that level of spending and pretend they don't have $25 billion one time to actually help solve the real problem for the U.S.

    Krollchem , says: April 4, 2019 at 5:38 am GMT
    "The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes and perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the battlespace" which they must exploit in order to build public support for their vastly unpopular wars and interventions. "

    Here is a short guide on how to detect subversion of the mind by the media and their handlers by a former military intelligence officer.

    JR , says: April 4, 2019 at 6:00 am GMT
    If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing "Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia", "Tausendjähriges Reich" with "American Primacy" and providing our 'elite' with an "realist" and "amoral" excuse to act completely and consistently immoral one has to recognize too that this "Grand Chessboard" is an amalgamation of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Il Principe".

    Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki himself proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American Primacy".

    Recognizing this however one can't escape the conclusion that this "Grand Chessboard" with its consistent 'amoral realist imperatives' is serving up inherently immoral 'imperatives' as inescapable options dressed up in academic language and with absolutely abhorrent arrogance.

    Stating that Brennan's Russophobia is somehow a degeneration of Brzezinki's "Grand Chessboard" is completely overlooking how difficult it would be to outdo Brzezinki's own total moral degeneration.

    One has to recognize that by now the only bipartisan aspect of US policy can be found in sharing these despicable and immoral 'imperatives' to maintain that "American Primacy" at all cost (of course to the rest of the world).

    Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 12:01 pm GMT
    "The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its tentacles across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda, but the victim. The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire Washington political establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony."

    TRUE!

    I would suggest that the initials 'US' in the final sentence be changed to: Anglo-Zionist Empire.

    Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 12:12 pm GMT
    "Now the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn the applecart by bullying allies and threatening rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging, and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end."

    Just like the Brit Empire – of which the Yank Empire is merely Part 2, the part where it becomes obvious that it is the Anglo-Zionist Empire, which, like a band of screeching Pharisees standing on the walls of Jerusalem hurling curses at the Romans they inform that Jehovah will soon wipe out all Romans to save His Chosen Race, would choose utter destruction for all over any common sense backing down to prevent mass slaughter.

    Ilyana_Rozumova , says: April 4, 2019 at 12:43 pm GMT
    Nothing harmed US more than Brzezinski's ideology. US did build up far east with their investments, while neglecting their own backyard. US should have build up rather North and South America and make it the envy of the world. Neglecting particularly South America now created Desperate south American people, who have no jobs and no future and these people are now invading US.
    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 4, 2019 at 12:44 pm GMT
    @Beckow

    A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that 'maybe I had bad information' is no master of the universe. And he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or 'information warfare' – is a pathetic sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.

    Testosterone plus steady, unrelenting decline and corruption of American "elites" most of who have no background in any fields related to actual effective governance especially in national security (military) and diplomatic fields. Zbig's book is also nothing more than doctrine-mongering based on complete lack of understanding of Russian history.

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 4, 2019 at 12:52 pm GMT
    @JR

    Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki himself proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American Primacy".

    Zbig was a political "scientist" (which is not a science) by education, fact aggravated by his Russophobia, and thus inability to grasp fundamentals of military power and warfare–a defining characteristic of American "elites". He, obviously, missed on the military-technological development of 1970s through 1990s, to arrive to the inevitable conclusion that classic "geopolitics" doesn't apply anymore. Today we all can observe how it doesn't apply and is made obsolete.

    Agent76 , says: April 4, 2019 at 2:45 pm GMT
    (Jan.1998) US history – "How Jimmy Carter I Started the Mujahideen" – Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor 1977-1981

    "Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter.

    http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a13_1240427874

    Zbigniew Brzezinski Taliban Pakistan Afghanistan pep talk 1979

    In 1979 Carters National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski went into Pakistans border regions with Afghanistan to give a little pep talk to some prospective majehadeen (Holy Warriors). In a 1997 interview for CNN's Cold War Series, Brzezinski hinted about the Carter Administration's proactive Afghanistan policy before the Soviet invasion in 1979, that he had conceived.

    flashlight joe , says: April 4, 2019 at 2:55 pm GMT
    @Jake @Jake

    "Just like the Brit Empire – of which the Yank Empire is merely Part 2,"

    I call it the Western British Empire.

    Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:14 pm GMT
    @DESERT FOX Why was it that the Brit Empire kept acting throughout the later 18th, the 19th and early 20th centuries to harm Russia, even when it technically was allied with Russia? Why the Crimean War, for example?

    Why, for example, was Brit secret service all over the assassination of Rasputin and tied in multiple ways to most non-Marxist revolutionary groups?

    mike k , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:18 pm GMT
    This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else.
    Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:26 pm GMT
    @anon Like the Ukranians, the 'Balts' virtually always are controlled by somebody else. When Russia does not control the Baltic states, they are controlled by either Poles or Germans. Russians know what that means: the Baltic states are then used as weapons to attack Russia.

    The region is much calmer when Russia controls the Baltic states, and that is before taking into consideration how the Polish-Lithuanian Empire turned its Jews lose to terrorize all Orthodox Christians and how Germanic states later used Lutheranism as a force in the Baltics to ignite war with Russia and, under the queer Frederick the Great also used Jewish bankers to finance wars against Russia.

    [Apr 04, 2019] Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader?

    by Tyler Durden Thu, 04/04/2019 - 21:25 550 SHARES Authored by Monica Crowley, op-ed via The Washington Times,

    The best defense, the saying goes, is a good offense.

    The key orchestrators of the Big Trump-Russia Collusion Lie seem to have hewed tightly to that tactical advice.

    Over the past two years, one of their biggest "tells" has been their hyper-aggressive and gratuitous attacks on the president. Given that special counsel Robert Mueller 's investigation found no collusion or obstruction of justice, their constant broadsides now look, in retrospect, like calculated pre-emptive strikes to deflect attention and culpability away from themselves.

    By accusing Mr. Trump of what they themselves were guilty of, they created a masterful distraction through projection.

    We now know that former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, are hip-deep in the conspiracy. Both wrote supposed "tell-all" books and carpet-bombed the media with interviews in which they regularly flung criminal accusations against the president. Whenever asked about their own roles, they reverted to denouncing Mr. Trump .

    With Mr. Mueller 's findings, Mr. Comey 's and Mr. McCabe's media benders look increasingly suspicious.

    As do those of their comrades in the Obama national security apparatus, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and his partner in possible crime, former CIA Director John Brennan , who, apart from former President Barack Obama himself, may be the biggest player of them all.

    Any investigation into the origins and execution of the Big Lie must focus on Mr. Brennan , whose job as the nation's chief spook would have prohibited him, by law, from engaging in any domestic political spy games.

    Of course, the law didn't stop him from illegally spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee by hacking into its computers and lying repeatedly about it, prompting Democratic senators to call for his resignation.

    Once out of Langley, Mr. Brennan tore into Mr. Trump, accusing him of "treason" (among other crimes) in countless television appearances and bitter tweets. It got so vicious that Mr. Trump pulled his security clearance.

    Consider a few critical data points.

    The Obama Department of Justice and FBI targeting of two low-level Trump aides, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, was carried out in the spring of 2016 because they wanted to spy on the Trump campaign but needed a way in. They enlisted an American academic and shadowy FBI informant named Stefan Halper to repeatedly sidle up to both Mr. Papadopoulos and Mr. Page. But complementing his work for the FBI , Mr. Halper had a side gig as an intelligence operative with longstanding ties to the CIA and British intelligence MI6.

    Another foreign professor, Joseph Mifsud, who played an important early part in targeting Papadopoulos, also had abiding ties to the CIA , MI6 and the British foreign secretary.

    A third operative, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, targeted Mr. Papadopoulos in a London bar. It was Mr. Downer's "tip" to the FBI that provided the justification for the start of Russia counterintelligence investigation, complete with fraudulently-obtained FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.

    All of these interactions reek of entrapment. Mr. Papadopoulos now says, "I believe Australian and UK intelligence were involved in an active operation to target Trump and his associates." Like Mr. Halper and Mr. Mifsud, Mr. Downer had ties to the CIA , MI6 and (surprise!) the Clintons.

    Given the deep intelligence backgrounds of these folks, it's difficult to believe that former DOJ/ FBI officials such as Peter Strzok or even James Comey and Andrew McCabe on their own devised the plan to deploy them.

    So: who did? How did the relationships with Messrs. Halper, Mifsud and Downer come about? Who suggested them for these tasks? To whom did they report? How were they compensated?

    Any investigation must follow the money -- and the personnel. There were plenty of DOJ/ FBI officials involved, but what about intelligence officials? Was Mr. Brennan a central player in the hoax, which would help explain the participation of Mr. Halper, Mr. Mifsud and Mr. Downer? Intel officials are likely to draw on other intelligence operatives.

    There is also a glimpse of a paper trail.

    Fox News' Catherine Herridge reported last week that "in a Dec. 12, 2016 text, [ FBI lawyer Lisa] Page wrote to McCabe: "Btw, Clapper told Pete that he was meeting with Brennan and Cohen for dinner tonight. Just FYSA [for your situational awareness ]."

    "Within a minute, McCabe replied, "OK."

    Ms. Herridge notes that those named are likely Peter Strzok and Mr. Brennan 's then-deputy, David Cohen. Ms. Herridge also notes that while we don't yet know what was discussed during the dinner, government sources thought it "irregular" for Mr. Clapper to be in contact with the more junior-level Mr. Strzok. She also points out that the text came "during a critical time for the Russia probe."

    Indeed. It was right before the publication of the ICA, the official Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian 2016 election interference.

    As Paul Sperry has reported, "A source close to the House investigation said Brennan himself selected the CIA and FBI analysts who worked on the ICA, and that they included former FBI counterespionage chief Peter Strzok.

    "Strzok was the intermediary between Brennan and Comey , and he was one of the authors of the ICA," according to the source." Recall that the dossier-based ICA was briefed to Obama , Trump and Congress ahead of Trump's inauguration.

    Post- Mueller report, Mr. Brennan is spinning wildly that perhaps his early condemnations of Mr. Trump were based on "bad information."

    These are just some of the threads suggesting Mr. Brennan may be one of the Masters of the Big Lie, requiring full investigation.

    If the devil is in the details, Mr. Brennan is all over the details.

    No wonder he -- and his fellow caballers -- have been so loud. They doth protest too much.

    Luau , 6 minutes ago link

    Obama was the ringleader. Brennan's just the fall guy.

    Yars Revenge , 7 minutes ago link

    Trying to frame a sitting President is treason.

    Which under the law is punishable by death.

    outofnowhere , 12 minutes ago link

    Yes, yes he was. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Brennan was and is the darkest of evil. He is insane.

    MoreFreedom , 27 minutes ago link

    By accusing Mr. Trump of what they themselves were guilty of, they created a masterful distraction through projection.

    Hillary setup a unsecured server and had confidential government information on it, including 20 emails with Obama suspiciously using an alias. If you're in law enforcement, and get a tip that Papadopolous may get some of those emails from Russians, what crime has been committed by Papadopolous? Isn't Papadopolous doing the US a favor by obtaining those emails from those who hacked her server?

    If you believe Hillary that her server wasn't hacked (and you don't have any evidence because Obama's people allowed practically all the evidence to be destroyed) then there's no reason to investigate Papadopolous. If you think Hillary's server was hacked, shouldn't you be investigating her and examining her server to see who hacked her and what damage was done, such as blackmailing her and Obama into appeasement and flexibility, like selling 20% of the US's uranium reserves to Russians just before an election?

    ... ... ...

    American2 , 1 hour ago link

    John Brennan, James Clapper, Strozk, Ohr, Page were only some of Obama's political pythons operating in the jungle of Washington. Obama orchestrated a symphony of harmful actions that will take the US a generation to recover from. That is if Obama's criminal actions can be undone and then we get to recover.

    [Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else. ..."
    Apr 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    "Russia is an inalienable and organic part of Greater Europe and European civilization. Our citizens think of themselves as European. That's why Russia proposes moving towards the creation of a common economic space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, a community referred to by Russian experts as 'the Union of Europe' which will strengthen Russia's potential in its economic pivot toward the 'New Asia.'" Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, February 2012

    The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its tentacles across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda, but the victim. The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire Washington political establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony.

    Try to imagine for a minute, that the hacking claims were not part of a sinister plan by Vladimir Putin "to sow discord and division" in the United States, but were conjured up to create an external threat that would justify an aggressive response from Washington. That's what Russiagate is really all about.

    US policymakers and their allies in the military and Intelligence agencies, know that relations with Russia are bound to get increasingly confrontational, mainly because Washington is determined to pursue its ambitious "pivot" to Asia plan. This new regional strategy focuses on "strengthening bilateral security alliances, expanding trade and investment, and forging a broad-based military presence." In short, the US is determined to maintain its global supremacy by establishing military outposts across Eurasia, continuing to tighten the noose around Russia and China, and reinforcing its position as the dominant player in the most populous and prosperous region in the world. The plan was first presented in its skeletal form by the architect of Washington's plan to rule the world, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Here's how Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor summed it up in his 1997 magnum opus, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives:

    "For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia (p.30) .. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. . About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." ("The Grand Chessboard:American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives", Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic Books, page 31, 1997)

    14 years after those words were written, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took up the banner of imperial expansion and demanded a dramatic shift in US foreign policy that would focus primarily on increasing America's military footprint in Asia. It was Clinton who first coined the term "pivot" in a speech she delivered in 2010 titled "America's Pacific Century". Here's an excerpt from the speech:

    "As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific region

    Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology ..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia The region already generates more than half of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to meet President Obama's goal of doubling exports by 2015, we are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia and our investment opportunities in Asia's dynamic markets."

    ("America's Pacific Century", Secretary of State Hillary Clinton", Foreign Policy Magazine, 2011)

    The pivot strategy is not some trifling rehash of the 19th century "Great Game" promoted by think-tank fantasists and conspiracy theorists. It is Washington's premier foreign policy doctrine, a 'rebalancing' theory that focuses on increasing US military and diplomatic presence across the Asian landmass. Naturally, NATO's ominous troop movements on Russia's western flank and Washington's provocative naval operations in the South China Sea have sent up red flags in Moscow and Beijing. Former Chinese President Hu Jintao summed it up like this:

    "The United States has strengthened its military deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, strengthened the US-Japan military alliance, strengthened strategic cooperation with India, improved relations with Vietnam, inveigled Pakistan, established a pro-American government in Afghanistan, increased arms sales to Taiwan, and so on. They have extended outposts and placed pressure points on us from the east, south, and west."

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has been equally critical of Washington's erratic behavior. NATO's eastward expansion has convinced Putin that the US will continue to be a disruptive force on the continent for the foreseeable future. Both leaders worry that Washington's relentless provocations will lead to an unexpected clash that will end in war.

    Even so, the political class has fully embraced the pivot strategy as a last-gasp attempt to roll back the clock to the post war era when the world's industrial centers were in ruins and America was the only game in town. Now the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn the applecart by bullying allies and threatening rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging, and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end.

    Washington has many ways of dealing with its enemies, but none of these strategies have dampened the growth of its competitors in the east. China is poised to overtake the US as the world's biggest economy sometime in the next 2 decades while Russia's intervention in Syria has rolled back Washington's plan to topple Bashar al Assad and consolidate its grip on the resource-rich Middle East. That plan has now collapsed forcing US policymakers to scrap the War on Terror altogether and switch to a "great power competition" which acknowledges that the US can no longer unilaterally impose its will wherever it goes. Challenges to America's dominance are emerging everywhere particularly in the region where the US hopes to reign supreme, Asia.

    This is why the entire national security state now stands foursquare behind the improbable pivot plan. It's a desperate "Hail Mary" attempt to preserve the decaying unipolar world order.

    What does that mean in practical terms?

    It means that the White House (the National Security Strategy) the Pentagon (National Defense Strategy) and the Intelligence Community (The Worldwide Threat Assessment) have all drawn up their own respective analyses of the biggest threats the US currently faces. Naturally, Russia is at the very top of those lists. Russia has derailed Washington's proxy war in Syria, frustrated US attempts to establish itself across Central Asia, and strengthened ties with the EU hoping to "create a harmonious community of economies from Lisbon to Vladivostok." (Putin)

    Keep in mind, the US does not feel threatened by the possibility of a Russian attack, but by Russia's ability to thwart Washington's grandiose imperial ambitions in Asia.

    As we noted, the National Security Strategy (NSS) is a statutorily mandated document produced by the White House that explains how the President intends to implement his national security vision. Not surprisingly, the document's main focus is Russia and China. Here's an excerpt:

    "China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence." (Neither Russia nor China are attempting to erode American security and prosperity." They are merely growing their economies and expanding their markets. If US corporations reinvested their capital into factories, employee training and R and D instead of stock buybacks and executive compensation, then they would be better able to complete globally.)

    Here's more: "Through modernized forms of subversive tactics, Russia interferes in the domestic political affairs of countries around the world." (This is a case of the 'pot calling the kettle black.')

    "Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data." (The western media behemoth is the biggest disinformation bullhorn the world has ever seen. RT and Sputnik don't hold a candle to the ginormous MSM 'Wurlitzer' that controls the cable news stations, the newspapers and most of the print media. The Mueller Report proves beyond a doubt that the politically-motivated nonsense one reads in the media is neither reliably sourced nor trustworthy.)

    The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community is even more explicit in its attacks on Russia. Check it out:

    "Threats to US national security will expand and diversify in the coming year, driven in part by China and Russia as they respectively compete more intensely with the United States and its traditional allies and partners . We assess that Moscow will continue pursuing a range of objectives to expand its reach, including undermining the US-led liberal international order, dividing Western political and security institutions, demonstrating Russia's ability to shape global issues, and bolstering Putin's domestic legitimacy.

    We assess that Moscow has heightened confidence, based on its success in helping restore the Asad regime's territorial control in Syria, ·Russia seeks to boost its military presence and political influence in the Mediterranean and Red Seas mediate conflicts, including engaging in the Middle East Peace Process and Afghanistan reconciliation .

    Russia will continue pressing Central Asia's leaders to support Russian-led economic and security initiatives and reduce engagement with Washington. Russia and China are likely to intensify efforts to build influence in Europe at the expense of US interests " ("The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community", USG )

    Notice how the Intelligence Community summary does not suggest that Russia poses an imminent military threat to the US, only that Russia has restored order in Syria, strengthened ties with China, emerged as an "honest broker" among countries in the Middle East, and used the free market system to improve relations with its trading partners and grow its economy. The IC appears to find fault with Russia because it is using the system the US created to better advantage than the US. This is entirely understandable given Putin's determination to draw Europe and Asia closer together through a region-wide economic integration plan. Here's Putin:

    "We must consider more extensive cooperation in the energy sphere, up to and including the formation of a common European energy complex. The Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea and the South Stream pipeline under the Black Sea are important steps in that direction. These projects have the support of many governments and involve major European energy companies. Once the pipelines start operating at full capacity, Europe will have a reliable and flexible gas-supply system that does not depend on the political whims of any nation. This will strengthen the continent's energy security not only in form but in substance. This is particularly relevant in the light of the decision of some European states to reduce or renounce nuclear energy."

    The gas pipelines and high-speed rail are the arteries that will bind the continents together and strengthen the new EU-Asia superstate. This is Washington's greatest nightmare, a massive, thriving free trade zone beyond its reach and not subject to its rules. In 2012, Hillary Clinton acknowledged this new threat and promised to do everything in her power to destroy it. Check out this excerpt:

    "U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described efforts to promote greater economic integration in Eurasia as "a move to re-Sovietize the region." . "We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it," she said at an international conference in Dublin on December 6, 2012, Radio Free Europe."

    "Slow down or prevent it"?

    Why? Because EU-Asia growth and prosperity will put pressure on US debt markets, US corporate interests, US (ballooning) national debt, and the US Dollar? Is that why Hillary is so committed to sabotaging Putin's economic integration plan?

    Indeed, it is. Washington wants to block progress and prosperity in the east in order to extend the lifespan of a doddering and thoroughly-bankrupt state that is presently $22 trillion in the red but continues to write checks on an overdrawn account.

    But Russia shouldn't be blamed for Washington's profligate behavior, that's not Putin's fault. Moscow is merely using the free market system more effectively that the US.

    Now consider the Pentagon's 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) which reiterates many of the same themes as the other two documents.

    "Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding. We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order -- creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security."

    (Naturally, the "security environment" is going to be more challenging when 'regime change' is the cornerstone of one's foreign policy. Of course, the NDS glosses over that sad fact. Here's more:)

    "Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbors ..(Baloney. Russia has been a force for stability in Syria and Ukraine. If Obama had his way, Syria would have wound up like Iraq, a hellish wastelands occupied by foreign mercenaries. Is that how the Pentagon measures success?) Here's more:

    "China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model

    "China and Russia are now undermining the international order from within the system .

    "China and Russia are the principal priorities for the Department because of the magnitude of the threats they pose to U.S. security." ( National Defense Strategy of the United States of America )

    Get the picture? China and Russia, China and Russia, China and Russia. Bad, bad, bad.

    Why? Because they are successfully implementing their own development model which is NOT programed to favor US financial institutions and corporations. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. The only reason Russia and China are a threat to the "rules-based system", is because Washington insists on being the only one who makes the rules. That's why foreign leaders are no longer falling in line, because it's not a fair system.

    These assessments represent the prevailing opinion of senior-level policymakers across the spectrum. (The White House, the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community) The USG is unanimous in its judgement that a harsher more combative approach is needed to deal with Russia and China. Foreign policy elites want to put the nation on the path to more confrontation, more conflict and more war. At the same time, none of these three documents suggest that Russia has any intention of launching an attack on the United States. The greatest concern is the effect that emerging competitors will have on Washington's provocative plan for military and economic expansion, the threat that Russia and China pose to America's tenuous grip on global power. It is that fear that drives US foreign policy.

    And this is broader context into which we must fit the Russia investigation. The reason the Russia hacking furor has been allowed to flourish and spread despite the obvious lack of any supporting evidence, is because the vilifying of Russia segues perfectly with the geopolitical interests of elites in the government. The USG now works collaboratively with the media to influence public attitudes on issues that are important to the powerful foreign policy establishment. The ostensible goal of these psychological operations (PSYOP) is to selectively use information on "audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals."

    The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes and perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the

    Beckow , says: April 4, 2019 at 1:02 am GMT

    The emerging Euro-Asian power block is very heterogeneous. Russia, China, and the smaller affiliated players like Central Asia, Iran, Syria, Turkey don't agree on almost anything. They have different cultures, religions, economies, demographic profiles, even writing systems. The most rational strategy to prevent the Euro-Asian block from consolidating would be to get them to fight each other. Alternatively, find the weakest link and attack it in an area where its reluctant allies don't share its interests.

    Exactly the opposite has happened in the last 5-10 years: US has seemingly worked overtime to get China-Russia alliance of the ground. They used to distrust each other, today, after Ukraine, South China See, etc they have become close allies. Same with Iran and Syria: instead of letting them stew in their own internal problems – mostly religious and having a nepotistic elite – US has managed to turn the fight into an external geo-political struggle, literally invited Russia to join in, and ended up losing.

    Bush turned Iraq from a fanatically anti-Iran bastion to a reliable ally of Iran and started an un-winnable land war in Afghanistan (incredible!). Obama turned Libya, the richest and most stable African country that threatened no-one and kept African migrants far away, into a chaotic hellhole where slave trade flourishes and millions of Sub-Saharan Africans can use it to move on to Europe.

    Then Obama tried to coup-de-etat Erdogan in Turkey, and – even worse – failed miserably. This gang can't shoot straight – whatever they put in their position papers is meaningless drivel because they are too stupid to think. They have no patience to wait for the right time to move, no ability to manage on the ground allies, and an aversion to casualties that makes winning a war impossible. Today Trump threatens Germany over its energy security (pipelines), further antagonises Turkey and Erdogan, watches helplessly as EU becomes the next UN (lame and irrelevant), and bets everything on a few small allies like Saudi Arabia and Izrael that are of almost no use in Euro-Asia.

    A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that ' maybe I had bad information ' is no master of the universe. And he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or ' information warfare ' – is a pathetic sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.

    anon [338] Disclaimer , says: April 4, 2019 at 4:07 am GMT
    the russophobia is just drama to keep the MIC spending at $700+ billion per year

    there is no way to justify that level of spending and pretend they don't have $25 billion one time to actually help solve the real problem for the U.S.

    Krollchem , says: April 4, 2019 at 5:38 am GMT
    "The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes and perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the battlespace" which they must exploit in order to build public support for their vastly unpopular wars and interventions. "

    Here is a short guide on how to detect subversion of the mind by the media and their handlers by a former military intelligence officer.

    JR , says: April 4, 2019 at 6:00 am GMT
    If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing "Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia", "Tausendjähriges Reich" with "American Primacy" and providing our 'elite' with an "realist" and "amoral" excuse to act completely and consistently immoral one has to recognize too that this "Grand Chessboard" is an amalgamation of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Il Principe".

    Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki himself proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American Primacy".

    Recognizing this however one can't escape the conclusion that this "Grand Chessboard" with its consistent 'amoral realist imperatives' is serving up inherently immoral 'imperatives' as inescapable options dressed up in academic language and with absolutely abhorrent arrogance.

    Stating that Brennan's Russophobia is somehow a degeneration of Brzezinki's "Grand Chessboard" is completely overlooking how difficult it would be to outdo Brzezinki's own total moral degeneration.

    One has to recognize that by now the only bipartisan aspect of US policy can be found in sharing these despicable and immoral 'imperatives' to maintain that "American Primacy" at all cost (of course to the rest of the world).

    Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 12:01 pm GMT
    "The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its tentacles across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda, but the victim. The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire Washington political establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony."

    TRUE!

    I would suggest that the initials 'US' in the final sentence be changed to: Anglo-Zionist Empire.

    Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 12:12 pm GMT
    "Now the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn the applecart by bullying allies and threatening rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging, and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end."

    Just like the Brit Empire – of which the Yank Empire is merely Part 2, the part where it becomes obvious that it is the Anglo-Zionist Empire, which, like a band of screeching Pharisees standing on the walls of Jerusalem hurling curses at the Romans they inform that Jehovah will soon wipe out all Romans to save His Chosen Race, would choose utter destruction for all over any common sense backing down to prevent mass slaughter.

    Ilyana_Rozumova , says: April 4, 2019 at 12:43 pm GMT
    Nothing harmed US more than Brzezinski's ideology. US did build up far east with their investments, while neglecting their own backyard. US should have build up rather North and South America and make it the envy of the world. Neglecting particularly South America now created Desperate south American people, who have no jobs and no future and these people are now invading US.
    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 4, 2019 at 12:44 pm GMT
    @Beckow

    A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that 'maybe I had bad information' is no master of the universe. And he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or 'information warfare' – is a pathetic sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.

    Testosterone plus steady, unrelenting decline and corruption of American "elites" most of who have no background in any fields related to actual effective governance especially in national security (military) and diplomatic fields. Zbig's book is also nothing more than doctrine-mongering based on complete lack of understanding of Russian history.

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website April 4, 2019 at 12:52 pm GMT
    @JR

    Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki himself proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American Primacy".

    Zbig was a political "scientist" (which is not a science) by education, fact aggravated by his Russophobia, and thus inability to grasp fundamentals of military power and warfare–a defining characteristic of American "elites". He, obviously, missed on the military-technological development of 1970s through 1990s, to arrive to the inevitable conclusion that classic "geopolitics" doesn't apply anymore. Today we all can observe how it doesn't apply and is made obsolete.

    Agent76 , says: April 4, 2019 at 2:45 pm GMT
    (Jan.1998) US history – "How Jimmy Carter I Started the Mujahideen" – Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor 1977-1981

    "Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter.

    http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a13_1240427874

    Zbigniew Brzezinski Taliban Pakistan Afghanistan pep talk 1979

    In 1979 Carters National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski went into Pakistans border regions with Afghanistan to give a little pep talk to some prospective majehadeen (Holy Warriors). In a 1997 interview for CNN's Cold War Series, Brzezinski hinted about the Carter Administration's proactive Afghanistan policy before the Soviet invasion in 1979, that he had conceived.

    flashlight joe , says: April 4, 2019 at 2:55 pm GMT
    @Jake @Jake

    "Just like the Brit Empire – of which the Yank Empire is merely Part 2,"

    I call it the Western British Empire.

    Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:14 pm GMT
    @DESERT FOX Why was it that the Brit Empire kept acting throughout the later 18th, the 19th and early 20th centuries to harm Russia, even when it technically was allied with Russia? Why the Crimean War, for example?

    Why, for example, was Brit secret service all over the assassination of Rasputin and tied in multiple ways to most non-Marxist revolutionary groups?

    mike k , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:18 pm GMT
    This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else.
    Jake , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:26 pm GMT
    @anon Like the Ukranians, the 'Balts' virtually always are controlled by somebody else. When Russia does not control the Baltic states, they are controlled by either Poles or Germans. Russians know what that means: the Baltic states are then used as weapons to attack Russia.

    The region is much calmer when Russia controls the Baltic states, and that is before taking into consideration how the Polish-Lithuanian Empire turned its Jews lose to terrorize all Orthodox Christians and how Germanic states later used Lutheranism as a force in the Baltics to ignite war with Russia and, under the queer Frederick the Great also used Jewish bankers to finance wars against Russia.

    [Apr 04, 2019] Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader

    Highly recommended!
    Apr 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader?

    by Tyler Durden Thu, 04/04/2019 - 21:25 550 SHARES Authored by Monica Crowley, op-ed via The Washington Times,

    The best defense, the saying goes, is a good offense.

    The key orchestrators of the Big Trump-Russia Collusion Lie seem to have hewed tightly to that tactical advice.

    Over the past two years, one of their biggest "tells" has been their hyper-aggressive and gratuitous attacks on the president. Given that special counsel Robert Mueller 's investigation found no collusion or obstruction of justice, their constant broadsides now look, in retrospect, like calculated pre-emptive strikes to deflect attention and culpability away from themselves.

    By accusing Mr. Trump of what they themselves were guilty of, they created a masterful distraction through projection.

    We now know that former FBI Director James Comey and his deputy, Andrew McCabe, are hip-deep in the conspiracy. Both wrote supposed "tell-all" books and carpet-bombed the media with interviews in which they regularly flung criminal accusations against the president. Whenever asked about their own roles, they reverted to denouncing Mr. Trump .

    With Mr. Mueller 's findings, Mr. Comey 's and Mr. McCabe's media benders look increasingly suspicious.

    As do those of their comrades in the Obama national security apparatus, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and his partner in possible crime, former CIA Director John Brennan , who, apart from former President Barack Obama himself, may be the biggest player of them all.

    Any investigation into the origins and execution of the Big Lie must focus on Mr. Brennan , whose job as the nation's chief spook would have prohibited him, by law, from engaging in any domestic political spy games.

    Of course, the law didn't stop him from illegally spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee by hacking into its computers and lying repeatedly about it, prompting Democratic senators to call for his resignation.

    Once out of Langley, Mr. Brennan tore into Mr. Trump, accusing him of "treason" (among other crimes) in countless television appearances and bitter tweets. It got so vicious that Mr. Trump pulled his security clearance.

    Consider a few critical data points.

    The Obama Department of Justice and FBI targeting of two low-level Trump aides, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, was carried out in the spring of 2016 because they wanted to spy on the Trump campaign but needed a way in. They enlisted an American academic and shadowy FBI informant named Stefan Halper to repeatedly sidle up to both Mr. Papadopoulos and Mr. Page. But complementing his work for the FBI , Mr. Halper had a side gig as an intelligence operative with longstanding ties to the CIA and British intelligence MI6.

    Another foreign professor, Joseph Mifsud, who played an important early part in targeting Papadopoulos, also had abiding ties to the CIA , MI6 and the British foreign secretary.

    A third operative, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, targeted Mr. Papadopoulos in a London bar. It was Mr. Downer's "tip" to the FBI that provided the justification for the start of Russia counterintelligence investigation, complete with fraudulently-obtained FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.

    All of these interactions reek of entrapment. Mr. Papadopoulos now says, "I believe Australian and UK intelligence were involved in an active operation to target Trump and his associates." Like Mr. Halper and Mr. Mifsud, Mr. Downer had ties to the CIA , MI6 and (surprise!) the Clintons.

    Given the deep intelligence backgrounds of these folks, it's difficult to believe that former DOJ/ FBI officials such as Peter Strzok or even James Comey and Andrew McCabe on their own devised the plan to deploy them.

    So: who did? How did the relationships with Messrs. Halper, Mifsud and Downer come about? Who suggested them for these tasks? To whom did they report? How were they compensated?

    Any investigation must follow the money -- and the personnel. There were plenty of DOJ/ FBI officials involved, but what about intelligence officials? Was Mr. Brennan a central player in the hoax, which would help explain the participation of Mr. Halper, Mr. Mifsud and Mr. Downer? Intel officials are likely to draw on other intelligence operatives.

    There is also a glimpse of a paper trail.

    Fox News' Catherine Herridge reported last week that "in a Dec. 12, 2016 text, [ FBI lawyer Lisa] Page wrote to McCabe: "Btw, Clapper told Pete that he was meeting with Brennan and Cohen for dinner tonight. Just FYSA [for your situational awareness ]."

    "Within a minute, McCabe replied, "OK."

    Ms. Herridge notes that those named are likely Peter Strzok and Mr. Brennan 's then-deputy, David Cohen. Ms. Herridge also notes that while we don't yet know what was discussed during the dinner, government sources thought it "irregular" for Mr. Clapper to be in contact with the more junior-level Mr. Strzok. She also points out that the text came "during a critical time for the Russia probe."

    Indeed. It was right before the publication of the ICA, the official Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian 2016 election interference.

    As Paul Sperry has reported, "A source close to the House investigation said Brennan himself selected the CIA and FBI analysts who worked on the ICA, and that they included former FBI counterespionage chief Peter Strzok.

    "Strzok was the intermediary between Brennan and Comey , and he was one of the authors of the ICA," according to the source." Recall that the dossier-based ICA was briefed to Obama , Trump and Congress ahead of Trump's inauguration.

    Post- Mueller report, Mr. Brennan is spinning wildly that perhaps his early condemnations of Mr. Trump were based on "bad information."

    These are just some of the threads suggesting Mr. Brennan may be one of the Masters of the Big Lie, requiring full investigation.

    If the devil is in the details, Mr. Brennan is all over the details.

    No wonder he -- and his fellow caballers -- have been so loud. They doth protest too much.

    Luau , 6 minutes ago link

    Obama was the ringleader. Brennan's just the fall guy.

    Yars Revenge , 7 minutes ago link

    Trying to frame a sitting President is treason.

    Which under the law is punishable by death.

    outofnowhere , 12 minutes ago link

    Yes, yes he was. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Brennan was and is the darkest of evil. He is insane.

    MoreFreedom , 27 minutes ago link

    By accusing Mr. Trump of what they themselves were guilty of, they created a masterful distraction through projection.

    Hillary setup a unsecured server and had confidential government information on it, including 20 emails with Obama suspiciously using an alias. If you're in law enforcement, and get a tip that Papadopolous may get some of those emails from Russians, what crime has been committed by Papadopolous? Isn't Papadopolous doing the US a favor by obtaining those emails from those who hacked her server?

    If you believe Hillary that her server wasn't hacked (and you don't have any evidence because Obama's people allowed practically all the evidence to be destroyed) then there's no reason to investigate Papadopolous. If you think Hillary's server was hacked, shouldn't you be investigating her and examining her server to see who hacked her and what damage was done, such as blackmailing her and Obama into appeasement and flexibility, like selling 20% of the US's uranium reserves to Russians just before an election?

    ... ... ...

    American2 , 1 hour ago link

    John Brennan, James Clapper, Strozk, Ohr, Page were only some of Obama's political pythons operating in the jungle of Washington. Obama orchestrated a symphony of harmful actions that will take the US a generation to recover from. That is if Obama's criminal actions can be undone and then we get to recover.

    [Apr 04, 2019] As Merkel is the USA stooge, and Germany needs to be freed from the USA vassalitete, and re-installed as an independent country; Putin should do is set up a "Free" German government in K nigsburg just like the US is doing with Gaido in Venezuela.

    Apr 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Cowboy , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:35 pm GMT

    @Rurik Upon consideration, what Putin should do is set up a "Free" German government in Königsburg just like the US is doing with Gaido in Venezuela. Get China to recognize it. Then they should start negotiating lucrative contracts, treaties and alliances between the Free Germans and the rest of OBOR. It would be fascinating to see how ZOG reacted.

    Oh, and most important of all, declare a new debt free currency, perhaps gold backed. I could live with the Reichsmark.

    [Apr 04, 2019] In this interview Cenk asks Tulsi directly if she opposes the Isreal Occupation, she says

    Apr 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    RobinG says: April 2, 2019 at 11:35 pm GMT 100 Words @Cloak And Dagger What do they say about Tulsi? Please note in this interview when Cenk asks her directly if she opposes the Occupation, she says Yes! A true Zio supporter (as some here have accused her!) would object to even using the word. And she addresses the Adelson question. On the conflict, her answer is pretty pablum, but probably as far as she can go strategically.

    Cenk has been castigated from both sides, either as too harsh or too easy with her. IMO it's a very good interview. Can you picture for a moment, Tulsi in a debate with Trump? What are her boosters doing to prepare her for that? She's handling all the animosity with equanimity, and she'll arrive at the final contest battle-hardened.

    Tulsi Gabbard Interview On TYT

    Cloak And Dagger , says: April 3, 2019 at 5:56 am GMT

    @RobinG

    Cenk has been castigated from both sides, either as too harsh or too easy with her.

    It is a good interview and she handles herself very well and her positions are well articulated. I remain wary of her, however, but I will keep an open mind and watch her in the months ahead to see where her funding comes from.

    Cloak And Dagger , says: April 3, 2019 at 6:30 am GMT
    @RobinG You may also be interested in this interview:

    [Apr 04, 2019] If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing "Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia", "Tausendj hriges Reich" with "American Primacy"

    Apr 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Wally , says: April 4, 2019 at 4:43 pm GMT

    @JR ssaid:
    If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing "Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia", "Tausendjähriges Reich" with "American Primacy" and providing our 'elite' with an "realist" and "amoral" excuse to act completely and consistently immoral one has to recognize too that this "Grand Chessboard" is an amalgamation of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Il Principe".

    Except that Germany did not send Germans into the conquered territories during WWII, though they wanted to do so.

    [Apr 04, 2019] Fascism A Warning by Madeleine Albright

    Junk author, junk book of the butcher of Yugoslavia who would be hanged with Bill clinton by Nuremberg Tribunal for crimes against peace. Albright is not bright at all. she a female bully and that shows.
    Mostly projection. And this arrogant warmonger like to exercise in Russophobia (which was the main part of the USSR which saved the world fro fascism, sacrificing around 20 million people) This book is book of denial of genocide against Iraqis and Serbian population where bombing with uranium enriched bombs doubled cancer cases.If you can pass over those facts that this book is for you.
    Like Robert Kagan and other neocons Albright is waiving authoritarism dead chicken again and again. that's silly and disingenuous. authoritarism is a method of Governance used in military. It is not an ideology. Fascism is an ideology, a flavor of far right nationalism. Kind of "enhanced" by some socialist ideas far right nationalism.
    The view of fascism without economic circumstances that create fascism, and first of immiseration of middle and working class and high level of unemployment is a primitive ahistorical view. Fascism is the ultimate capitalist statism acting simultaneously as the civil religion for the population also enforced by the power of the state. It has a lot of common with neoliberalism, that's why neoliberalism is sometimes called "inverted totalitarism".
    In reality fascism while remaining the dictatorship of capitalists for capitalist and the national part of financial oligarchy, it like neoliberalism directed against working class fascism comes to power on the populist slogans of righting wrong by previous regime and kicking foreign capitalists and national compradors (which in Germany turned to be mostly Jewish) out.
    It comes to power under the slogans of stopping the distribution of wealth up and elimination of the class of reinters -- all citizens should earn income, not get it from bond and other investments (often in reality doing completely the opposite).
    While intrinsically connected and financed by a sizable part of national elite which often consist of far right military leadership, a part of financial oligarchy and large part of lower middle class (small properties) is is a protest movement which want to revenge for the humiliation and prefer military style organization of the society to democracy as more potent weapon to achieve this goal.
    Like any far right movement the rise of fascism and neo-fascism is a sign of internal problem within a given society, often a threat to the state or social order.
    Apr 04, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    Still another noted that Fascism is often linked to people who are part of a distinct ethnic or racial group, who are under economic stress, and who feel that they are being denied rewards to which they are entitled. "It's not so much what people have." she said, "but what they think they should have -- and what they fear." Fear is why Fascism's emotional reach can extend to all levels of society. No political movement can flourish without popular support, but Fascism is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street -- on those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.

    This insight made us think that Fascism should perhaps be viewed less as a political ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power. For example, Italy in the 1920s included self-described Fascists of the left (who advocated a dictatorship of the dispossessed), of the right (who argued for an authoritarian corporatist state), and of the center (who sought a return to absolute monarchy). The German National Socialist Party (the

    Nazis) originally came together ar ound a list of demands that ca- tered to anti-Semites, anti-immigrants, and anti-capitalists but also advocated for higher old-age pensions, more educational op- portunities for the poor, an end to child labor, and improved ma- ternal health care. The Nazis were racists and, in their own minds, reformers at the same time.

    If Fascism concerns itself less with specific policies than with finding a pathway to power, what about the tactics of lead- ership? My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remem- ber best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the sur- face. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democ- racy. Unlike a monarchy or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above. Fascism draws energy from men and women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of hu- miliation, or a sense that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier it is for a Fascist leader to gam followers by dangling the prospect of re- newal or by vowing to take back what has been stolen.

    Like the mobilizers of more benign movements, these secular evangelists exploit the near-universal human desire to be part of a meaningful quest. The more gifted among them have an apti- tude for spectacle -- for orchestrating mass gatherings complete with martial music, incendiary rhetoric, loud cheers, and arm-

    lifting salutes. To loyalists, they offer the prize of membership in a club from which others, often the objects of ridicule, are kept out. To build fervor, Fascists tend to be aggressive, militaristic, and -- when circumstances allow -- expansionist. To secure the future, they turn schools into seminaries for true believers, striv- ing to produce "new men" and "new women" who will obey without question or pause. And, as one of my students observed, "a Fascist who launches his career by being voted into office will have a claim to legitimacy that others do not."

    After climbing into a position of power, what comes next: How does a Fascist consolidate authority? Here several students piped up: "By controlling information." Added another, "And that's one reason we have so much cause to worry today." Most of us have thought of the technological revolution primarily as a means for people from different walks of life to connect with one another, trade ideas, and develop a keener understanding of why men and women act as they do -- in other words, to sharpen our perceptions of truth. That's still the case, but now we are not so sure. There is a troubling "Big Brother" angle because of the mountain of personal data being uploaded into social media. If an advertiser can use that information to home in on a consumer because of his or her individual interests, what's to stop a Fascist government from doing the same? "Suppose I go to a demonstra- tion like the Women's March," said a student, "and post a photo

    on social media. My name gets added to a list and that list can end up anywhere. How do we protect ourselves against that?"

    Even more disturbing is the ability shown by rogue regimes and their agents to spread lies on phony websites and Facebook. Further, technology has made it possible for extremist organiza- tions to construct echo chambers of support for conspiracy theo- ries, false narratives, and ignorant views on religion and race. This is the first rule of deception: repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is neither.

    Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by assert- ing: "Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain." Over the years, he and other scholars have developed lists of the many moving parts that Fascism entails. Toward the end of our discussion, my class sought to articulate a comparable list.

    Fascism, most of the students agreed, is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are required to do exactly what lead- ers say they must do, nothing more, nothing less. The doctrine is linked to rabid nationalism. It also turns the traditional social contract upside down. Instead of citizens giving power to the state in exchange for the protection of their rights, power begins with the leader, and the people have no rights. Under Fascism,

    the mission of citizens is to serve; the government's job is to rule.

    When one talks about this subject, confusion often arises about the difference between Fascism and such related concepts as totalitarianism, dictatorship, despotism, tyranny, autocracy, and so on. As an academic, I might be tempted to wander into that thicket, but as a former diplomat, I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels. To my mind, a Fascist is someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary -- including violence -- to achieve his or her goals. In that conception, a Fascist will likely be a tyrant, but a tyrant need not be a Fascist.

    Often the difference can be seen in who is trusted with the guns. In seventeenth-century Europe, when Catholic aristocrats did battle with Protestant aristocrats, they fought over scripture but agreed not to distribute weapons to their peasants, thinking it safer to wage war with mercenary armies. Modern dictators also tend to be wary of their citizens, which is why they create royal guards and other elite security units to ensure their personal safe- ty. A Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down, Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and the firepower to strike first.

    petarsimic , October 21, 2018

    Madeleine Albright on million Iraqis dead: "We think the price is worth It"

    Hypocrisy at its worst from a lady who advocated hawkish foreign policy which included the most sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam, when, in 1998, Clinton began almost daily attacks on Iraq in the so-called no-fly zones, and made so-called regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy.

    In May of 1996, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Madeleine Albright, who at the time was Clinton's U.N. ambassador. Correspondent Leslie Stahl said to Albright, in connection with the Clinton administration presiding over the most devastating regime of sanctions in history that the U.N. estimated took the lives of as many as a million Iraqis, the vast majority of them children. , "We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And -- and, you know, is the price worth it?"

    Madeleine Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it.

    <img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png"> P. Bierre , June 11, 2018
    Does Albright present a comprehensive enough understanding of fascism to instruct on how best to avoid it?

    While I found much of the story-telling in "Fascism" engaging, I come away expecting much more of one of our nation's pre-eminent senior diplomats . In a nutshell, she has devoted a whole volume to describing the ascent of intolerant fascism and its many faces, but punted on the question "How should we thwart fascism going forward?"

    Even that question leaves me a bit unsatisfied, since it is couched in double-negative syntax. The thing there is an appetite for, among the readers of this book who are looking for more than hand-wringing about neofascism, is a unifying title or phrase which captures in single-positive syntax that which Albright prefers over fascism. What would that be? And, how do we pursue it, nurture it, spread it and secure it going forward? What is it?

    I think Albright would perhaps be willing to rally around "Good Government" as the theme her book skirts tangentially from the dark periphery of fascistic government. "Virtuous Government"? "Effective Government"? "Responsive Government"?

    People concerned about neofascism want to know what we should be doing right now to avoid getting sidetracked into a dark alley of future history comparable to the Nazi brown shirt or Mussolini black shirt epochs. Does Albright present a comprehensive enough understanding of fascism to instruct on how best to avoid it? Or, is this just another hand-wringing exercise, a la "you'll know it when you see it", with a proactive superficiality stuck at the level of pejorative labelling of current styles of government and national leaders? If all you can say is what you don't want, then the challenge of threading the political future of the US is left unruddered. To make an analogy to driving a car, if you don't know your destination, and only can get navigational prompts such as "don't turn here" or "don't go down that street", then what are the chances of arriving at a purposive destination?

    The other part of this book I find off-putting is that Albright, though having served as Secretary of State, never talks about the heavy burden of responsibility that falls on a head of state. She doesn't seem to empathize at all with the challenge of top leadership. Her perspective is that of the detached critic. For instance, in discussing President Duterte of the Philippines, she fails to paint the dire situation under which he rose to national leadership responsibility: Islamic separatists having violently taken over the entire city of Marawi, nor the ubiquitous spread of drug cartel power to the level where control over law enforcement was already ceded to the gangs in many places...entire islands and city neighborhoods run by mafia organizations. It's easy to sit back and criticize Duterte's unleashing of vigilante justice -- What was Mrs. Albright's better alternative to regain ground from vicious, well-armed criminal organizations? The distancing from leadership responsibility makes Albright's treatment of the Philippines twin crises of gang-rule and Islamist revolutionaries seem like so much academic navel-gazing....OK for an undergrad course at Georgetown maybe, but unworthy of someone who served in a position of high responsibility. Duterte is liked in the Philippines. What he did snapped back the power of the cartels, and returned a deserved sense of security to average Philippinos (at least those not involved with narcotics). Is that not good government, given the horrendous circumstances Duterte came up to deal with? What lack of responsibility in former Philippine leadership allowed things to get so out of control? Is it possible that Democrats and liberals are afraid to be tough, when toughness is what is needed? I'd much rather read an account from an average Philippino about the positive impacts of the vigilante campaign, than listen of Madame Secretary sermonizing out of context about Duterte. OK, he's not your idea of a nice guy. Would you rather sit back, prattle on about the rule of law and due process while Islamic terrorists wrest control over where you live? Would you prefer the leadership of a drug cartel boss to Duterte?

    My critique is offered in a constructive manner. I would certainly encourage Albright (or anyone!) to write a book in a positive voice about what it's going to take to have good national government in the US going forward, and to help spread such abundance globally. I would define "good" as the capability to make consistently good policy decisions, ones that continue to look good in hindsight, 10, 20 or 30 years later. What does that take?

    I would submit that the essential "preserving democracy" process component is having a population that is adequately prepared for collaborative problem-solving. Some understanding of history is helpful, but it's simply not enough. Much more essential is for every young person to experience team problem-solving, in both its cooperative and competitive aspects. Every young person needs to experience a team leadership role, and to appreciate what it takes from leaders to forge constructive design from competing ideas and champions. Only after serving as a referee will a young person understand the limits to "passion" that individual contributors should bring to the party. Only after moderating and herding cats will a young person know how to interact productively with leaders and other contributors. Much of the skill is counter-instinctual. It's knowing how to express ideas...how to field criticism....how to nudge people along in the desired direction...and how to avoid ad-hominem attacks, exaggerations, accusations and speculative grievances. It's learning how to manage conflict productively toward excellence. Way too few of our young people are learning these skills, and way too few of our journalists know how to play a constructive role in managing communications toward successful complex problem-solving. Albright's claim that a journalist's job is primarily to "hold leaders accountable" really betrays an absolving of responsibility for the media as a partner in good government -- it doesn't say whether the media are active players on the problem-solving team (which they have to be for success), or mere spectators with no responsibility for the outcome. If the latter, then journalism becomes an irritant, picking at the scabs over and over, but without any forward progress. When the media takes up a stance as an "opponent" of leadership, you end up with poor problem-solving results....the system is fighting itself instead of making forward progress.

    "Fascism" doesn't do nearly enough to promote the teaching of practical civics 101 skills, not just to the kids going into public administration, but to everyone. For, it is in the norms of civility, their ability to be practiced, and their defense against excesses, that fascism (e.g., Antifa) is kept at bay.
    Everyone in a democracy has to know the basics:
    • when entering a disagreement, don't personalize it
    • never demonize an opponent
    • keep a focus on the goal of agreement and moving forward
    • never tell another person what they think, but ask (non-rhetorically) what they think then be prepared to listen and absorb
    • do not speak untruths or exaggerate to make an argument
    • do not speculate grievance
    • understand truth gathering as a process; detect when certainty is being bluffed; question sources
    • recognize impasse and unproductive argumentation and STOP IT
    • know how to introduce a referee or moderator to regain productive collaboration
    • avoid ad hominem attacks
    • don't take things personally that wrankle you;
    • give the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous situation
    • don't jump to conclusions
    • don't reward theatrical manipulation

    These basics of collaborative problem-solving are the guts of a "liberal democracy" that can face down the most complex challenges and dilemmas.

    I gave the book 3 stars for the great story-telling, and Albright has been part of a great story of late 20th century history. If she would have told us how to prevent fascism going forward, and how to roll it back in "hard case" countries like North Korea and Sudan, I would have given her a 5. I'm not that interested in picking apart the failure cases of history...they teach mostly negative exemplars. Much rather I would like to read about positive exemplars of great national government -- "great" defined by popular acclaim, by the actual ones governed. Where are we seeing that today? Canada? Australia? Interestingly, both of these positive exemplars have strict immigration policies.

    Is it possible that Albright is just unable, by virtue of her narrow escape from Communist Czechoslovakia and acceptance in NYC as a transplant, to see that an optimum immigration policy in the US, something like Canada's or Australia's, is not the looming face of fascism, but rather a move to keep it safely in its corner in coming decades? At least, she admits to her being biased by her life story.

    That suggests her views on refugees and illegal immigrants as deserving of unlimited rights to migrate into the US might be the kind of cloaked extremism that she is warning us about.

    Anat Hadad , January 19, 2019
    "Fascism is not an exception to humanity, but part of it."

    Albright's book is a comprehensive look at recent history regarding the rise and fall of fascist leaders; as well as detailing leaders in nations that are starting to mimic fascist ideals. Instead of a neat definition, she uses examples to bolster her thesis of what are essential aspects of fascism. Albright dedicates each section of the book to a leader or regime that enforces fascist values and conveys this to the reader through historical events and exposition while also peppering in details of her time as Secretary of State. The climax (and 'warning'), comes at the end, where Albright applies what she has been discussing to the current state of affairs in the US and abroad.

    Overall, I would characterize this as an enjoyable and relatively easy read. I think the biggest strength of this book is how Albright uses history, previous examples of leaders and regimes, to demonstrate what fascism looks like and contributing factors on a national and individual level. I appreciated that she lets these examples speak for themselves of the dangers and subtleties of a fascist society, which made the book more fascinating and less of a textbook. Her brief descriptions of her time as Secretary of State were intriguing and made me more interested in her first book, 'Madame Secretary'. The book does seem a bit slow as it is not until the end that Albright blatantly reveals the relevance of all of the history relayed in the first couple hundred pages. The last few chapters are dedicated to the reveal: the Trump administration and how it has affected global politics. Although, she never outright calls Trump a fascist, instead letting the reader decide based on his decisions and what you have read in the book leading up to this point, her stance is quite clear by the end. I was surprised at what I shared politically with Albright, mainly in immigration and a belief of empathy and understanding for others. However, I got a slight sense of anti-secularism in the form of a disdain for those who do not subscribe to an Abrahamic religion and she seemed to hint at this being partly an opening to fascism.

    I also could have done without the both-sides-ism she would occasionally push, which seems to be a tactic used to encourage people to 'unite against Trump'. These are small annoyances I had with the book, my main critique is the view Albright takes on democracy. If anything, the book should have been called "Democracy: the Answer" because that is the most consistent stance Albright takes throughout. She seems to overlook many of the atrocities the US and other nations have committed in the name of democracy and the negative consequences of capitalism, instead, justifying negative actions with the excuse of 'it is for democracy and everyone wants that' and criticizing those who criticize capitalism.

    She does not do a good job of conveying the difference between a communist country like Russia and a socialist country like those found in Scandinavia and seems okay with the idea of the reader lumping them all together in a poor light. That being said, I would still recommend this book for anyone's TBR as the message is essential for today, that the current world of political affairs is, at least somewhat, teetering on a precipice and we are in need of as many strong leaders as possible who are willing to uphold democratic ideals on the world stage and mindful constituents who will vote them in.

    Matthew T , May 29, 2018
    An easy read, but incredibly ignorant and one eyed in far too many instances

    The book is very well written, easy to read, and follows a pretty standard formula making it accessible to the average reader. However, it suffers immensely from, what I suspect are, deeply ingrained political biases from the author.

    Whilst I don't dispute the criteria the author applies in defining fascism, or the targets she cites as examples, the first bias creeps in here when one realises the examples chosen are traditional easy targets for the US (with the exception of Turkey). The same criteria would define a country like Singapore perfectly as fascist, yet the country (or Malaysia) does not receive a mention in the book.

    Further, it grossly glosses over what Ms. Albright terms facist traits from the US governments of the past. If the author is to be believed, the CIA is holier than thou, never intervened anywhere or did anything that wasn't with the best interests of democracy at heart, and American foreign policy has always existed to build friendships and help out their buddies. To someone ingrained in this rhetoric for years I am sure this is an easy pill to swallow, but to the rest of the world it makes a number of assertions in the book come across as incredibly naive. out of 5 stars Trite and opaque

    Avid reader , December 20, 2018
    Biast much? Still a good start into the problem

    We went with my husband to the presentation of this book at UPenn with Albright before it came out and Madeleine's spunk, wit and just glorious brightness almost blinded me. This is a 2.5 star book, because 81 year old author does not really tell you all there is to tell when she opens up on a subject in any particular chapter, especially if it concerns current US interest.

    Lets start from the beginning of the book. What really stood out, the missing 3rd Germany ally, Japan and its emperor. Hirohito (1901-1989) was emperor of Japan from 1926 until his death in 1989. He took over at a time of rising democratic sentiment, but his country soon turned toward ultra-nationalism and militarism. During World War II (1939-45), Japan attacked nearly all of its Asian neighbors, allied itself with Nazi Germany and launched a surprise assault on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, forcing US to enter the war in 1941. Hirohito was never indicted as a war criminal! does he deserve at least a chapter in her book?

    Oh and by the way, did author mention anything about sanctions against Germany for invading Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland? Up until the Pearl Harbor USA and Germany still traded, although in March 1939, FDR slapped a 25% tariff on all German goods. Like Trump is doing right now to some of US trading partners.

    Next monster that deserves a chapter on Genocide in cosmic proportions post WW2 is communist leader of China Mao Zedung. Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants compares to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the total worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

    We learn that Argentina has given sanctuary to Nazi war criminals, but she forgets to mention that 88 Nazi scientists arrived in the United States in 1945 and were promptly put to work. For example, Wernher von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rocket program, but had intimate knowledge of what was going on in the concentration camps. Von Braun himself hand-picked people from horrific places, including Buchenwald concentration camp. Tsk-Tsk Madeline.

    What else? Oh, lets just say that like Madelaine Albright my husband is Jewish and lost extensive family to Holocoust. Ukrainian nationalists executed his great grandfather on gistapo orders, his great grandmother disappeared in concentration camp, grandfather was conscripted in june 1940 and decommissioned september 1945 and went through war as infantryman through 3 fronts earning several medals. his grandmother, an ukrainian born jew was a doctor in a military hospital in Saint Petersburg survived famine and saved several children during blockade. So unlike Maideline who was raised as a Roman Catholic, my husband grew up in a quiet jewish family in that territory that Stalin grabbed from Poland in 1939, in a polish turn ukrainian city called Lvov(Lemberg). His family also had to ask for an asylum, only they had to escape their home in Ukraine in 1991. He was told then "You are a nice little Zid (Jew), we will kill you last" If you think things in ukraine changed, think again, few weeks ago in Kiev Roma gypsies were killed and injured during pogroms, and nobody despite witnesses went to jail. Also during demonstrations openly on the streets C14 unit is waving swastikas and Heils. Why is is not mentioned anywhere in the book? is is because Hunter Biden sits on the board of one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies called Burisma since May 14, 2014, and Ukraine has an estimated 127.9 trillion cubic feet of unproved technically recoverable shale gas resources? ( according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).1 The most promising shale reserves appear to be in the Carpathian Foreland Basin (also called the Lviv-Volyn Basin), which extends across Western Ukraine from Poland into Romania, and the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the East (which borders Russia).
    Wow, i bet you did not know that. how ugly are politics, even this book that could have been so much greater if the author told the whole ugly story. And how scary that there are countries where you can go and openly be fascist.

    &amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/0e64e0cb-01e4-4e58-bcae-bba690344095._CR0,0.0,333,333_SX48_.jpg"&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; NJ , February 3, 2019
    Interesting...yes. Useful...hmmm

    To me, Fascism fails for the single reason that no two fascist leaders are alike. Learning about one or a few, in a highly cursory fashion like in this book or in great detail, is unlikely to provide one with any answers on how to prevent the rise of another or fend against some such. And, as much as we are witnessing the rise of numerous democratic or quasi-democratic "strongmen" around the world in global politics, it is difficult to brand any of them as fascist in the orthodox sense.

    As the author writes at the outset, it is difficult to separate a fascist from a tyrant or a dictator. A fascist is a majoritarian who rouses a large group under some national, racial or similar flag with rallying cries demanding suppression or exculcation of those excluded from this group. A typical fascist leader loves her yes-men and hates those who disagree: she does not mind using violence to suppress dissidents. A fascist has no qualms using propaganda to popularize the agreeable "facts" and theories while debunking the inconvenient as lies. What is not discussed explicitly in the book are perhaps some positive traits that separate fascists from other types of tyrants: fascists are rarely lazy, stupid or prone to doing things for only personal gains. They differ from the benevolent dictators for their record of using heavy oppression against their dissidents. Fascists, like all dictators, change rules to suit themselves, take control of state organizations to exercise total control and use "our class is the greatest" and "kick others" to fuel their programs.

    Despite such a detailed list, each fascist is different from each other. There is little that even Ms Albright's fascists - from Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin to the Kims to Chavez or Erdogan - have in common. In fact, most of the opponents of some of these dictators/leaders would calll them by many other choice words but not fascists. The circumstances that gave rise to these leaders were highly different and so were their rules, methods and achievements.

    The point, once again, is that none of the strongmen leaders around the world could be easily categorized as fascists. Or even if they do, assigning them with such a tag and learning about some other such leaders is unlikely to help. The history discussed in the book is interesting but disjointed, perfunctory and simplistic. Ms Albright's selection is also debatable.

    Strong leaders who suppress those they deem as opponents have wreaked immense harms and are a threat to all civil societies. They come in more shades and colours than terms we have in our vocabulary (dictators, tyrants, fascists, despots, autocrats etc). A study of such tyrant is needed for anyone with an interest in history, politics, or societal well-being. Despite Ms Albright's phenomenal knowledge, experience, credentials, personal history and intentions, this book is perhaps not the best place to objectively learn much about the risks from the type of things some current leaders are doing or deeming as right.

    Gderf , February 15, 2019
    Wrong warning

    Each time I get concerned about Trump's rhetoric or past actions I read idiotic opinions, like those of our second worst ever Secretary of State, and come to appreciate him more. Pejorative terms like fascism or populism have no place in a rational policy discussion. Both are blatant attempts to apply a pejorative to any disagreeing opinion. More than half of the book is fluffed with background of Albright, Hitler and Mussolini. Wikipedia is more informative. The rest has snippets of more modern dictators, many of whom are either socialists or attained power through a reaction to failed socialism, as did Hitler. She squirms mightily to liken Trump to Hitler. It's much easier to see that Sanders is like Maduro. The USA is following a path more like Venezuela than Germany.

    Her history misses that Mussolini was a socialist before he was a fascist, and Nazism in Germany was a reaction to Wiemar socialism. The danger of fascism in the US is far greater from the left than from the right. America is far left of where the USSR ever was. Remember than Marx observed that Russia was not ready for a proletarian revolution. The USA with ready made capitalism for reform fits Marx's pattern much better. Progressives deny that Sanders and Warren are socialists. If not they are what Lenin called "useful idiots."
    Albright says that she is proud of the speech where she called the USA the 'Indispensable Nation.' She should be ashamed. Obama followed in his inaugural address, saying that we are "the indispensable nation, responsible for world security." That turned into a policy of human rights interventions leading to open ended wars (Syria, Yemen), nations in chaos (Libya), and distrust of the USA (Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Tunisia, Israel, NK). Trump now has to make nice with dictators to allay their fears that we are out to replace them.
    She admires the good intentions of human rights intervention, ignoring the results. She says Obama had some success without citing a single instance. He has apologized for Libya, but needs many more apologies. She says Obama foreign policy has had some success, with no mention of a single instance. Like many progressives, she confuses good intentions with performance. Democracy spreading by well intentioned humanitarian intervention has resulted in a succession of open ended war or anarchy.

    The shorter histories of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Venezuela are much more informative, although more a warning against socialism than right wing fascism. Viktor Orban in Hungary is another reaction to socialism.

    Albright ends the book with a forlorn hope that we need a Lincoln or Mandela, exactly what our two party dictatorship will not generate as it yields ever worse and worse candidates for our democracy to vote upon, even as our great society utopia generates ever more power for weak presidents to spend our money and continue wrong headed foreign policy.

    The greatest danger to the USA is not fascism, but of excessively poor leadership continuing our slow slide to the bottom.

    [Apr 04, 2019] The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012

    Apr 04, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

    The NSA access was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012. Prism Photograph: Guardian

    The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.

    It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants.

    Disclosure of the Prism program follows a leak to the Guardian on Wednesday of a top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers.

    The participation of the internet companies in Prism will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.

    Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

    It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

    Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

    [Apr 04, 2019] As Merkel is the USA stooge, and Germany needs to be freed from the USA vassalitete, and re-installed as an independent country; Putin should do is set up a "Free" German government in K nigsburg just like the US is doing with Gaido in Venezuela.

    Apr 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Cowboy , says: April 4, 2019 at 3:35 pm GMT

    @Rurik Upon consideration, what Putin should do is set up a "Free" German government in Königsburg just like the US is doing with Gaido in Venezuela. Get China to recognize it. Then they should start negotiating lucrative contracts, treaties and alliances between the Free Germans and the rest of OBOR. It would be fascinating to see how ZOG reacted.

    Oh, and most important of all, declare a new debt free currency, perhaps gold backed. I could live with the Reichsmark.

    [Apr 04, 2019] But current American elites have no concept of own actions having consequences

    Notable quotes:
    "... I believe that the current GLOBAL elites do understand exactly what they are doing and the potential consequences to the ongoing existence of private finance. ..."
    "... The war that is being waged is an attempt to keep private finance in charge of our world ..."
    Apr 04, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    psychohistorian , Apr 4, 2019 12:11:22 PM | link

    The posting ended with

    "But current American elites have no concept of own actions having consequences."

    I believe that the current GLOBAL elites do understand exactly what they are doing and the potential consequences to the ongoing existence of private finance.

    The war that is being waged is an attempt to keep private finance in charge of our world and they are losing I am pleased to report

    [Apr 04, 2019] I think you should distinguish between the deep state and the elite. The former are primarily concerned with US primacy. The elite are economic internationalists and focused on profit.

    Notable quotes:
    "... China is a milch cow for the global capitalists, they are dependant on China succeeding. ..."
    Apr 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Sean says: April 4, 2019 at 4:51 pm GMT 300 Words I am not aware that anyone has ever considered Syria a crucial centre of world power, and while Ukraine was once thought of that way back in the days of Halford Makinder, I am afraid now they are both worthless.

    I think you should distinguish between the deep state and the elite. The former are primarily concerned with US primacy. The elite are economic internationalists and focused on profit. Carter instituted a decades long policy mandating officials to help trade with China under the influence of Brzezinski's Russophobia.

    They fundamentally miscalculated the ability of China to rapidly rival the West in productive capacity. Now the Western economies are dependant on a Keynesian and financially frail China going all out for future growth. The elite are in no position to lower the boom on China, and I think that is the last thing they intend.

    China is a milch cow for the global capitalists, they are dependant on China succeeding.

    Everyone is in favour of free trade if they think they will be successful in it, so the Chinese enthusiasm is no evidence of altruism or the absence of a venal elite in their country. Free trade allocating reward based on merit will benefit the American elite through their Chinese investments, but it does not sound like good news for the American worker.

    If there is pressure for something to stop China it will not just be coming from the rust belt. The deep state plus the working class versus the financial elite is already ongoing; a struggle to control American policy as the wealth generated by China is reaped by Western financial elites and America falls to the status of second rate power.

    [Apr 03, 2019] What We Can Learn From 1920s Germany by Brian E. Fogarty

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... As usually happens in times of distress, the Germans became a people for whom resolve was valued more highly than prudence, daring more than caution, and righteousness more than discretion. In many ways, they were a people not so different from today's Americans. ..."
    "... What was needed, the Germans thought, was a strong leader -- someone who would put an end to politics as usual; most of all, someone who could unite all the divisions in Germany and dispel the clamor. They found that leader in Adolf Hitler, and for a time, most Germans were glad they did. ..."
    "... How would we react if things got worse? If we were to lose the war in Iraq, leaving a fundamentalist regime in place; if we endured several more major terrorist attacks; if the economy collapsed; if fuel prices reached $7 per gallon -- would we cling even more fiercely to our democratic ideals? Or would we instead demand greater surveillance, more secret prisons, more arrests for "conspiracies" that amount to little more than daydreams, and more quashing of dissent? ..."
    "... Our history suggests the latter. We Americans have had our flights from democracy -- the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, Watergate -- but we have always pulled back from the brink and returned to normal. ..."
    Apr 03, 2019 | www.commondreams.org

    Imagine this situation: Your country has had a military setback in a war that was supposed to be over after a few months of "shock and awe." Because of that war, it has lost the goodwill and prestige of much of the international community.

    The national debt has grown to staggering size. Citizens complain bitterly about the government, especially the legislative branch, for being a bunch of do-nothings working solely for themselves or for special interest groups. In fact, the political scene has pretty much lost its center -- moderates are attacked by all sides as the political discourse becomes a clamor of increasingly extreme positions.

    It seems there are election campaigns going on all the time, and they are increasingly vicious. The politicians just want to argue about moral issues -- sexuality, decadent art, the crumbling family and the like -- while pragmatic matters of governance seem neglected.

    Sound familiar? That society was Germany of the 1920s -- the ill-fated Weimar Republic. But it also describes more and more the political climate in America today.

    Germans were worried about the future of their country. They suffered from all sorts of terror, as assassinations, coup attempts and crime pulled their society apart. The left blamed the right; the right blamed the left, and the political center simply dried up.

    To get themselves out of the mess, Germans might have demanded government that carefully mended fences with its allies and enemies; one that judiciously hammered out compromises among the various political parties and sought the middle path.

    But we know that didn't happen. In Germany of the 1920s, as now in 21st-century America, appeals to reason and prudence were no way to get votes in times of crisis. Much more effective were appeals to the anger and fear of the German people. A politician could attract more votes by criticizing the government than by praising it, and a vicious negative campaign was usually more effective than a clean one. One of the problems of democracy is that voters aren't always rational, and appeals like these could be very effective.

    As usually happens in times of distress, the Germans became a people for whom resolve was valued more highly than prudence, daring more than caution, and righteousness more than discretion. In many ways, they were a people not so different from today's Americans.

    What was needed, the Germans thought, was a strong leader -- someone who would put an end to politics as usual; most of all, someone who could unite all the divisions in Germany and dispel the clamor. They found that leader in Adolf Hitler, and for a time, most Germans were glad they did.

    Of course, America is not 1920s Germany, and we are certainly not on the verge of a fascist state. But neither have we experienced the deep crises the Germans faced. The setbacks of the Iraq/Afghan war are a far cry from the devastating loss of the First World War; we are not considered the scourge of the international community, and we don't need wheelbarrows full of money to buy a loaf of bread. But even in these relatively secure times, we have shown an alarming willingness to choose headstrong leadership over thoughtful leadership, to value security over liberty; to accept compromises to constitutional principles, and to defy the opinion of the rest of the world.

    How would we react if things got worse? If we were to lose the war in Iraq, leaving a fundamentalist regime in place; if we endured several more major terrorist attacks; if the economy collapsed; if fuel prices reached $7 per gallon -- would we cling even more fiercely to our democratic ideals? Or would we instead demand greater surveillance, more secret prisons, more arrests for "conspiracies" that amount to little more than daydreams, and more quashing of dissent?

    Our history suggests the latter. We Americans have had our flights from democracy -- the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, Watergate -- but we have always pulled back from the brink and returned to normal.

    The time is coming for us to pull back from the brink again. This must happen before the government gets so strong that it can completely demonize opposition, gain complete control of the media, and develop dossiers on all its citizens. By then it will be too late, and we'll have ourselves to blame.

    Brian E. Fogarty, a sociology professor at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, is the author of " War, Peace, and the Social Order ."

    [Apr 03, 2019] What We Can Learn From 1920s Germany by Brian E. Fogarty

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... As usually happens in times of distress, the Germans became a people for whom resolve was valued more highly than prudence, daring more than caution, and righteousness more than discretion. In many ways, they were a people not so different from today's Americans. ..."
    "... What was needed, the Germans thought, was a strong leader -- someone who would put an end to politics as usual; most of all, someone who could unite all the divisions in Germany and dispel the clamor. They found that leader in Adolf Hitler, and for a time, most Germans were glad they did. ..."
    "... How would we react if things got worse? If we were to lose the war in Iraq, leaving a fundamentalist regime in place; if we endured several more major terrorist attacks; if the economy collapsed; if fuel prices reached $7 per gallon -- would we cling even more fiercely to our democratic ideals? Or would we instead demand greater surveillance, more secret prisons, more arrests for "conspiracies" that amount to little more than daydreams, and more quashing of dissent? ..."
    "... Our history suggests the latter. We Americans have had our flights from democracy -- the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, Watergate -- but we have always pulled back from the brink and returned to normal. ..."
    Apr 03, 2019 | www.commondreams.org

    Imagine this situation: Your country has had a military setback in a war that was supposed to be over after a few months of "shock and awe." Because of that war, it has lost the goodwill and prestige of much of the international community.

    The national debt has grown to staggering size. Citizens complain bitterly about the government, especially the legislative branch, for being a bunch of do-nothings working solely for themselves or for special interest groups. In fact, the political scene has pretty much lost its center -- moderates are attacked by all sides as the political discourse becomes a clamor of increasingly extreme positions.

    It seems there are election campaigns going on all the time, and they are increasingly vicious. The politicians just want to argue about moral issues -- sexuality, decadent art, the crumbling family and the like -- while pragmatic matters of governance seem neglected.

    Sound familiar? That society was Germany of the 1920s -- the ill-fated Weimar Republic. But it also describes more and more the political climate in America today.

    Germans were worried about the future of their country. They suffered from all sorts of terror, as assassinations, coup attempts and crime pulled their society apart. The left blamed the right; the right blamed the left, and the political center simply dried up.

    To get themselves out of the mess, Germans might have demanded government that carefully mended fences with its allies and enemies; one that judiciously hammered out compromises among the various political parties and sought the middle path.

    But we know that didn't happen. In Germany of the 1920s, as now in 21st-century America, appeals to reason and prudence were no way to get votes in times of crisis. Much more effective were appeals to the anger and fear of the German people. A politician could attract more votes by criticizing the government than by praising it, and a vicious negative campaign was usually more effective than a clean one. One of the problems of democracy is that voters aren't always rational, and appeals like these could be very effective.

    As usually happens in times of distress, the Germans became a people for whom resolve was valued more highly than prudence, daring more than caution, and righteousness more than discretion. In many ways, they were a people not so different from today's Americans.

    What was needed, the Germans thought, was a strong leader -- someone who would put an end to politics as usual; most of all, someone who could unite all the divisions in Germany and dispel the clamor. They found that leader in Adolf Hitler, and for a time, most Germans were glad they did.

    Of course, America is not 1920s Germany, and we are certainly not on the verge of a fascist state. But neither have we experienced the deep crises the Germans faced. The setbacks of the Iraq/Afghan war are a far cry from the devastating loss of the First World War; we are not considered the scourge of the international community, and we don't need wheelbarrows full of money to buy a loaf of bread. But even in these relatively secure times, we have shown an alarming willingness to choose headstrong leadership over thoughtful leadership, to value security over liberty; to accept compromises to constitutional principles, and to defy the opinion of the rest of the world.

    How would we react if things got worse? If we were to lose the war in Iraq, leaving a fundamentalist regime in place; if we endured several more major terrorist attacks; if the economy collapsed; if fuel prices reached $7 per gallon -- would we cling even more fiercely to our democratic ideals? Or would we instead demand greater surveillance, more secret prisons, more arrests for "conspiracies" that amount to little more than daydreams, and more quashing of dissent?

    Our history suggests the latter. We Americans have had our flights from democracy -- the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the Red Scare and the McCarthy era, Watergate -- but we have always pulled back from the brink and returned to normal.

    The time is coming for us to pull back from the brink again. This must happen before the government gets so strong that it can completely demonize opposition, gain complete control of the media, and develop dossiers on all its citizens. By then it will be too late, and we'll have ourselves to blame.

    Brian E. Fogarty, a sociology professor at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, is the author of " War, Peace, and the Social Order ."

    [Apr 03, 2019] Putin says Trump's opponents have invented 'spymania' to block the U.S. president's agenda

    Notable quotes:
    "... "You know all of this has been invented, made up by people who are in opposition to President Trump with a view to shedding a negative light on what Trump is doing," ..."
    "... Meetings between Russian diplomatic officials and Trump's campaign team before the election were routine and normal, and part of a process to figure out what a potential U.S. candidate will do should he or she come to power, Putin said. But those meetings, particularly those involving the former Russian ambassador to the U.S., were twisted by Trump's opponents. ..."
    "... "For me, it's very bizarre," Putin said. "I don't understand what someone saw there that was out of place in those meetings, and why all this should turn into a kind of 'spymania.'" ..."
    Dec 14, 2017 | www.latimes.com

    Accusations that Donald Trump's team colluded with the Kremlin during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign are an invention of the American president's opposition that has sparked "spymania" in Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday.

    "You know all of this has been invented, made up by people who are in opposition to President Trump with a view to shedding a negative light on what Trump is doing," Putin said, responding to a U.S. journalist's question during his annual marathon news conference in Moscow.

    Meetings between Russian diplomatic officials and Trump's campaign team before the election were routine and normal, and part of a process to figure out what a potential U.S. candidate will do should he or she come to power, Putin said. But those meetings, particularly those involving the former Russian ambassador to the U.S., were twisted by Trump's opponents.

    "For me, it's very bizarre," Putin said. "I don't understand what someone saw there that was out of place in those meetings, and why all this should turn into a kind of 'spymania.'"

    [Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

    Highly recommended!
    This article by late Robert Parry is from 2016 but is still relevant in context of the current Ukrainian elections and the color revolution is Venezuela. The power of neoliberal propaganda is simply tremendous. For foreign events it is able to distort the story to such an extent that the most famous quote of CIA director William Casey "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" looks like constatation of already accomplished goal.
    Apr 11, 2016 | consortiumnews.com

    Exclusive: Several weeks before Ukraine's 2014 coup, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Nuland had already picked Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the future leader, but now "Yats" is no longer the guy, writes Robert Parry.

    In reporting on the resignation of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the major U.S. newspapers either ignored or distorted Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's infamous intercepted phone call before the 2014 coup in which she declared "Yats is the guy!"

    Though Nuland's phone call introduced many Americans to the previously obscure Yatsenyuk, its timing – a few weeks before the ouster of elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych – was never helpful to Washington's desired narrative of the Ukrainian people rising up on their own to oust a corrupt leader.

    Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.

    Instead, the conversation between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt sounded like two proconsuls picking which Ukrainian politicians would lead the new government. Nuland also disparaged the less aggressive approach of the European Union with the pithy put-down: "Fuck the E.U.!"

    More importantly, the intercepted call, released onto YouTube in early February 2014, represented powerful evidence that these senior U.S. officials were plotting – or at least collaborating in – a coup d'etat against Ukraine's democratically elected president. So, the U.S. government and the mainstream U.S. media have since consigned this revealing discussion to the Great Memory Hole.

    On Monday, in reporting on Yatsenyuk's Sunday speech in which he announced that he is stepping down, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal didn't mention the Nuland-Pyatt conversation at all. The New York Times did mention the call but misled its readers regarding its timing, making it appear as if the call followed rather than preceded the coup. That way the call sounded like two American officials routinely appraising Ukraine's future leaders, not plotting to oust one government and install another.

    The Times article by Andrew E. Kramer said: "Before Mr. Yatsenyuk's appointment as prime minister in 2014, a leaked recording of a telephone conversation between Victoria J. Nuland, a United States assistant secretary of state, and the American ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, seemed to underscore the West's support for his candidacy. 'Yats is the guy,' Ms. Nuland had said."

    Notice, however, that if you didn't know that the conversation occurred in late January or early February 2014, you wouldn't know that it preceded the Feb. 22, 2014 coup. You might have thought that it was just a supportive chat before Yatsenyuk got his new job.

    You also wouldn't know that much of the Nuland-Pyatt conversation focused on how they were going to "glue this thing" or "midwife this thing," comments sounding like prima facie evidence that the U.S. government was engaged in "regime change" in Ukraine, on Russia's border.

    The 'No Coup' Conclusion

    But Kramer's lack of specificity about the timing and substance of the call fits with a long pattern of New York Times' bias in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis. On Jan. 4, 2015, nearly a year after the U.S.-backed coup, the Times published an "investigation" article declaring that there never had been a coup. It was just a case of President Yanukovych deciding to leave and not coming back.

    That article reached its conclusion, in part, by ignoring the evidence of a coup, including the Nuland-Pyatt phone call. The story was co-written by Kramer and so it is interesting to know that he was at least aware of the "Yats is the guy" reference although it was ignored in last year's long-form article.

    Instead, Kramer and his co-author Andrew Higgins took pains to mock anyone who actually looked at the evidence and dared reach the disfavored conclusion about a coup. If you did, you were some rube deluded by Russian propaganda.

    "Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych's ouster to what it portrays as a violent, 'neo-fascist' coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular uprising," Higgins and Kramer wrote . "Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin's line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych's government, questions remain about how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely."

    The Times' article concluded that Yanukovych "was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else. The allies' desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych's own efforts to make peace."

    Yet, one might wonder what the Times thinks a coup looks like. Indeed, the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.

    The way those coups played out is now historically well known. Secret U.S. government operatives planted nasty propaganda about the targeted leader, stirred up political and economic chaos, conspired with rival political leaders, spread rumors of worse violence to come and then – as political institutions collapsed – watched as the scared but duly elected leader made a hasty departure.

    In Iran, the coup reinstalled the autocratic Shah who then ruled with a heavy hand for the next quarter century; in Guatemala, the coup led to more than three decades of brutal military regimes and the killing of some 200,000 Guatemalans.

    Coups don't have to involve army tanks occupying the public squares, although that is an alternative model which follows many of the same initial steps except that the military is brought in at the end. The military coup was a common approach especially in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

    ' Color Revolutions'

    But the preferred method in more recent years has been the "color revolution," which operates behind the façade of a "peaceful" popular uprising and international pressure on the targeted leader to show restraint until it's too late to stop the coup. Despite the restraint, the leader is still accused of gross human rights violations, all the better to justify his removal.

    Later, the ousted leader may get an image makeover; instead of a cruel bully, he is ridiculed for not showing sufficient resolve and letting his base of support melt away, as happened with Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.

    But the reality of what happened in Ukraine was never hard to figure out. Nor did you have to be inside "the Russian propaganda bubble" to recognize it. George Friedman, the founder of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called Yanukovych's overthrow "the most blatant coup in history."

    Which is what it appears if you consider the evidence. The first step in the process was to create tensions around the issue of pulling Ukraine out of Russia's economic orbit and capturing it in the European Union's gravity, a plan defined by influential American neocons in 2013.

    On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    At the time, Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100 million a year, was financing scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for journalists and organizing business groups.

    As for the even bigger prize -- Putin -- Gershman wrote: "Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."

    At that time, in early fall 2013, Ukraine's President Yanukovych was exploring the idea of reaching out to Europe with an association agreement. But he got cold feet in November 2013 when economic experts in Kiev advised him that the Ukrainian economy would suffer a $160 billion hit if it separated from Russia, its eastern neighbor and major trading partner. There was also the West's demand that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund.

    Yanukovych wanted more time for the E.U. negotiations, but his decision angered many western Ukrainians who saw their future more attached to Europe than Russia. Tens of thousands of protesters began camping out at Maidan Square in Kiev, with Yanukovych ordering the police to show restraint.

    Meanwhile, with Yanukovych shifting back toward Russia, which was offering a more generous $15 billion loan and discounted natural gas, he soon became the target of American neocons and the U.S. media, which portrayed Ukraine's political unrest as a black-and-white case of a brutal and corrupt Yanukovych opposed by a saintly "pro-democracy" movement.

    Cheering an Uprising

    The Maidan uprising was urged on by American neocons, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Nuland, who passed out cookies at the Maidan and reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their "European aspirations."

    A screen shot of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland speaking to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, at an event sponsored by Chevron, with its logo to Nuland's left.

    Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also showed up, standing on stage with right-wing extremists from the Svoboda Party and telling the crowd that the United States was with them in their challenge to the Ukrainian government.

    As the winter progressed, the protests grew more violent. Neo-Nazi and other extremist elements from Lviv and other western Ukrainian cities began arriving in well-organized brigades or "sotins" of 100 trained street fighters. Police were attacked with firebombs and other weapons as the violent protesters began seizing government buildings and unfurling Nazi banners and even a Confederate flag.

    Though Yanukovych continued to order his police to show restraint, he was still depicted in the major U.S. news media as a brutal thug who was callously murdering his own people. The chaos reached a climax on Feb. 20 when mysterious snipers opened fire, killing both police and protesters. As the police retreated, the militants advanced brandishing firearms and other weapons. The confrontation led to significant loss of life, pushing the death toll to around 80 including more than a dozen police.

    U.S. diplomats and the mainstream U.S. press immediately blamed Yanukovych for the sniper attack, though the circumstances remain murky to this day and some investigations have suggested that the lethal sniper fire came from buildings controlled by Right Sektor extremists.

    To tamp down the worsening violence, a shaken Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal on Feb. 21, in which he accepted reduced powers and an early election so he could be voted out of office. He also agreed to requests from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back the police.

    The precipitous police withdrawal opened the path for the neo-Nazis and other street fighters to seize presidential offices and force Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their lives. The new coup regime was immediately declared "legitimate" by the U.S. State Department with Yanukovych sought on murder charges. Nuland's favorite, Yatsenyuk, became the new prime minister.

    Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted protesters versus a black-hatted president. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who fired on unarmed supporters of "democracy." The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American people heard from the major media.

    The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: "More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February."

    The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and peaceful Maidan protests.

    Any reference to a "coup" was dismissed as "Russian propaganda." There was a parallel determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians simply became "Russian aggression."

    Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)

    This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II – reached absurd levels as The New York Times and The Washington Post buried references to the neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.

    The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by quoting one militia commander as calling them "romantic" gestures by impressionable young men. [See Consortiumnews.com's " Ukraine's 'Romantic' Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers ."]

    But today – more than two years after what U.S. and Ukrainian officials like to call "the Revolution of Dignity" – the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government is sinking into dysfunction, reliant on handouts from the IMF and Western governments.

    And, in a move perhaps now more symbolic than substantive, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is stepping down. Yats is no longer the guy.

    Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).

    Khalid Talaat , April 16, 2016 at 20:39

    Is it too far fetched to think that all these color revolutions are a perfection of the process to unleash another fake color revolution, only this time it is a Red, White and Blue revolution here at home? Those that continue to booze and snooze while watching the tube will not know the difference until it is too late.

    The freedom and tranquility of our country depends on finding and implementing a counterweight to the presstitutes and their propaganda. The alternative is too destructive in its natural development.

    Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:49

    Yats and Porko are the guys who broke Ukraine. By the end of December 2015, Ukraine's gross domestic product had shrunk around 19 percent in comparison with 2013. Its decimated industrial sector needs less fuel. Yatsie did a heck of a job.

    Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:35

    Carl Gershman: "Ukraine is the biggest prize" -- Paragraph 6 of https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-soviet-states-stand-up-to-russia-will-the-us/2013/09/26/b5ad2be4-246a-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html

    David Smith , April 12, 2016 at 13:51

    The timing of "Yats" departure is ominous. Mid-April, six weeks from now would be the first chance to renew the invasion of DPR Donesk/Lugansk."Yats" failed in 2014, and didn't try in 2015. Who is "the new guy"? Will the new Prime Minister begin raving about renewing the holy war to recover the lost oblasts? 2016 is really Ukraine's last chance. Ukraine refuses to implement Minsk2, and they have been receiving lots of new weapons. I believe President Putin put the Syrian operation on " standby" not only to avoid approaching the border, provoking a Turkish intervention, but also so he can give undistracted attention to DPR Donesk/Lugansk.

    Bill Rood , April 12, 2016 at 11:50

    I guess I must be inside the Russian propaganda bubble. It was obvious to me when I looked at the YouTube videos of policemen burning after being hit with Molotov cocktails.

    We played the same game of encouraging government "restraint" in Syria, where we demanded Assad free "political prisoners," but we now accuse him of deliberately encouraging ISIS by freeing those people, so that he can point to ISIS and ask, "Do you want that?" Targeted leaders are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

    Andrei , April 12, 2016 at 10:26

    "the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954", Romania 1989 Shots were fired by snipers in order to stirr the crowds (sounds familiar?) and also by the army after Ceasescu ran away, which resulted in civilians getting murdered. Could it possibly be that it was said : "Iliescu (next elected president) is the guy!" ?

    Joe L. , April 12, 2016 at 11:00

    Check out the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela 2002, that is very similar with protesters, snipers on rooftops, IMF immediately offering loans to the new coup government, new government positions for the coup plotters, complacency with the media – propaganda, funding by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy etc. John Pilger documents how the coup occurred in his documentary "War on Democracy" – https://vimeo.com/16724719 .

    archaos , April 12, 2016 at 09:45

    It was noted in the minutes of Verkhovna Rada almost 2 years before Maidan 2 , that Geoffrey Pyatt was fomenting and funding destabilisation of Ukraine.
    All of Svoboda Nazis in parliament (and other fascisti) then booed the MP who stated this.

    Mark Thomason , April 12, 2016 at 06:57

    Also, the Dutch voted "no" on the economic agreement the coup was meant to force through instead of the Russian agreement accepted by the President it overthrew. Now both "Yats" and the economic agreement are gone. All that is left is the war. Neocons are still happen. They wanted the war. They really want to overthrow Putin, and Ukraine was just a tool in that.

    Realist , April 12, 2016 at 05:51

    You're right, it doesn't have to be the military that carries out a coup by deploying tanks on the National Mall. In 2000, it was the United States Supreme Court that exceeded its constitutional authority and installed George W. Bush as president, though in reality he had lost that election. I wonder when that move will rightfully be characterized as a coup by the historians.

    Bryan Hemming , April 12, 2016 at 04:00

    "On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian President Vladimir Putin."

    It should be remembered that Victoria Nuland took up the post of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in Washington on September 18, 2013.

    Coincidentally, two other women closely connected to events in Ukraine were also in Washington during September 2013.

    Friend of Nuland and boss of the IMF, which has its own HQ in Washington, Christine Lagarde was swift to respond to a Ukraine request for IMF loans on February 27th 2014, just five days after the removal of Yanukovych on February 22nd. Lagarde is pictured with Baronness Catherine Ashton in Washington in a Facebook entry dated September 30th 2013. Ashton was High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy at the time.

    Though visiting Kiev at the same time as Nuland in February 2014 Catherine Ashton never appeared in public with her, which seems a little odd considering the women were on the same mission, and talking to the same people. Nevertheless, despite appearing shy of being photographed with each other the two women weren't quite so shy of being pictured with leaders of the coup, including the right wing extremist, Oleh Tyahnybok.

    Ashton refused to be drawn into commenting on Nuland's "Fuck the E.U.!" outburst, describing Nuland as "a friend of mine." The two women certainly weren't strangers, they had worked closely together before. September 2012 saw them involved in discussions with Iran negotiator Saeed Jalili over the country's supposed nuclear arms ambitions.

    The question is not so much whether the three women talked about Ukraine's future – it would be ridiculous to think they did not – but how closely they worked together, and exactly how closely they might have been involved in events leading up to the overthrow of the legitimate government in Kiev. More on this here:

    https://bryanhemming.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/double-double-toil-and-trouble-the-cauldron-of-kiev/

    Pablo Diablo , April 11, 2016 at 22:56

    Another failed "regime change". Aren't these guys (Neoconservatives) great. They fail, piss off/kill millions, yet seem to keep making money and retaining power. Time to WAKE UP AMERICA.

    Skip Edwards , April 11, 2016 at 20:06

    Read "The Devil'Chessboard" by David Talbot to understand what has been occurring as a result of America's Dark, Shadow government, an un-elected bunch of vicious psychopaths controlling our destiny; unless stopped. Get a clue and realize that "Yats is our guy" Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton's "gal." Hillary Clinton is Robert Kagen's "gal." Time to flush all these rats out of the hold and get on with our lives.

    Joe L. , April 11, 2016 at 18:40

    Mr. Parry thank you for delving into the proven history of coups and the parallels with Ukraine. It amazes me how anyone can outright deny this was a coup especially if they know anything about US coups going back to WW2 (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, attempt in Venezuela 2002 etc. – and there are a whole slew more). I read before, as you have rightly pointed out, that in 1953 the CIA led a propaganda campaign in Iran against Mossadegh as well as financing opposition protesters and opposition government officials. Another angle, as well, is looking historically back to what papers such as the New York Times were reporting around the time of the coup in Iran – especially when we know that the US/Britain overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh for their own oil interests (British Petroleum):

    New York Times: "Mossadegh Plays with Fire" (August 15, 1953):

    The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier Mossadegh.

    Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry, personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own people. We have seen this onetime champion of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.

    His power would seem to be complete, but he has alienated the traditional ruling classes -the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes. There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russia and the Russians. The peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.

    All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer's apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.

    Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians because she has nothing to fear -and therefore the West has nothing to fear. Thanks largely to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.

    http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/new-york-times/august-15-1953/

    My feeling is that the biggest sin that our society has is forgetting history. If we remembered history I would think that it would be very difficult to pull off coups but most media does not revisit history which proves US coups even against democracies. I actually think that the coup that occurred in Ukraine was similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela in 2002 with snipers on rooftops, immediate blame for the deaths on Hugo Chavez where media manipulated the footage, immediate acceptance of the temporary coup government by the US Government, immediately offering IMF loans for the new coup government, government positions for many of the coup plotters, and let us not leave out the funding for the coup coming from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. I also remember seeing the New York Times immediately blaming Chavez and praising the coup but when the coup was overturned and US fingerprints started to become revealed (with many of the coup plotters fleeing to the US) then the New York Times wrote a limited retraction buried in their paper. Shameless.

    SFOMARCO , April 11, 2016 at 15:16

    How was NED able to finance "scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for journalists and organizing business groups", not to mention to host such dignitaries as Cookie Nuland, Loser McCain and assorted Bidens? Seems like a recipe for a coup "hidden in plain sight".

    Bob Van Noy , April 11, 2016 at 14:36

    Ukraine, one would hope, represents the "Bridge Too Far" moment for the proponents of regime change. Surely Americans must be catching on to what we do for selected nations in the name of "giving them their freedoms". The Kagan Family, empowered by their newly endorsed candidate for President, Hillary Clinton, will feel justified in carrying on a new cold war, this time world wide. Of course they will not be doing the fighting, they, like Dick Cheney are the self appointed intellects of geopolitical chess, much like The Georgetown Set of the Kennedy era, they perceive themselves as the only ones smart enough to plan America's future.

    Helen Marshall , April 11, 2016 at 17:11

    I wish. How many Americans know ANYTHNG about what has happened in Ukraine, about Crimea and its history, and/or could even locate them on a map?

    Pastor Agnostic , April 12, 2016 at 04:11

    Nuland is merely the inhouse, PNAC female version of Sidney Blumenthal. Which raises the scary question. Who would she pick to be SecState?

    [Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

    Highly recommended!
    This article by late Robert Parry is from 2016 but is still relevant in context of the current Ukrainian elections and the color revolution is Venezuela. The power of neoliberal propaganda is simply tremendous. For foreign events it is able to distort the story to such an extent that the most famous quote of CIA director William Casey "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" looks like constatation of already accomplished goal.
    Apr 11, 2016 | consortiumnews.com

    Exclusive: Several weeks before Ukraine's 2014 coup, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Nuland had already picked Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the future leader, but now "Yats" is no longer the guy, writes Robert Parry.

    In reporting on the resignation of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the major U.S. newspapers either ignored or distorted Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's infamous intercepted phone call before the 2014 coup in which she declared "Yats is the guy!"

    Though Nuland's phone call introduced many Americans to the previously obscure Yatsenyuk, its timing – a few weeks before the ouster of elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych – was never helpful to Washington's desired narrative of the Ukrainian people rising up on their own to oust a corrupt leader.

    Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.

    Instead, the conversation between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt sounded like two proconsuls picking which Ukrainian politicians would lead the new government. Nuland also disparaged the less aggressive approach of the European Union with the pithy put-down: "Fuck the E.U.!"

    More importantly, the intercepted call, released onto YouTube in early February 2014, represented powerful evidence that these senior U.S. officials were plotting – or at least collaborating in – a coup d'etat against Ukraine's democratically elected president. So, the U.S. government and the mainstream U.S. media have since consigned this revealing discussion to the Great Memory Hole.

    On Monday, in reporting on Yatsenyuk's Sunday speech in which he announced that he is stepping down, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal didn't mention the Nuland-Pyatt conversation at all. The New York Times did mention the call but misled its readers regarding its timing, making it appear as if the call followed rather than preceded the coup. That way the call sounded like two American officials routinely appraising Ukraine's future leaders, not plotting to oust one government and install another.

    The Times article by Andrew E. Kramer said: "Before Mr. Yatsenyuk's appointment as prime minister in 2014, a leaked recording of a telephone conversation between Victoria J. Nuland, a United States assistant secretary of state, and the American ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, seemed to underscore the West's support for his candidacy. 'Yats is the guy,' Ms. Nuland had said."

    Notice, however, that if you didn't know that the conversation occurred in late January or early February 2014, you wouldn't know that it preceded the Feb. 22, 2014 coup. You might have thought that it was just a supportive chat before Yatsenyuk got his new job.

    You also wouldn't know that much of the Nuland-Pyatt conversation focused on how they were going to "glue this thing" or "midwife this thing," comments sounding like prima facie evidence that the U.S. government was engaged in "regime change" in Ukraine, on Russia's border.

    The 'No Coup' Conclusion

    But Kramer's lack of specificity about the timing and substance of the call fits with a long pattern of New York Times' bias in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis. On Jan. 4, 2015, nearly a year after the U.S.-backed coup, the Times published an "investigation" article declaring that there never had been a coup. It was just a case of President Yanukovych deciding to leave and not coming back.

    That article reached its conclusion, in part, by ignoring the evidence of a coup, including the Nuland-Pyatt phone call. The story was co-written by Kramer and so it is interesting to know that he was at least aware of the "Yats is the guy" reference although it was ignored in last year's long-form article.

    Instead, Kramer and his co-author Andrew Higgins took pains to mock anyone who actually looked at the evidence and dared reach the disfavored conclusion about a coup. If you did, you were some rube deluded by Russian propaganda.

    "Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych's ouster to what it portrays as a violent, 'neo-fascist' coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular uprising," Higgins and Kramer wrote . "Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin's line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych's government, questions remain about how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely."

    The Times' article concluded that Yanukovych "was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else. The allies' desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych's own efforts to make peace."

    Yet, one might wonder what the Times thinks a coup looks like. Indeed, the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.

    The way those coups played out is now historically well known. Secret U.S. government operatives planted nasty propaganda about the targeted leader, stirred up political and economic chaos, conspired with rival political leaders, spread rumors of worse violence to come and then – as political institutions collapsed – watched as the scared but duly elected leader made a hasty departure.

    In Iran, the coup reinstalled the autocratic Shah who then ruled with a heavy hand for the next quarter century; in Guatemala, the coup led to more than three decades of brutal military regimes and the killing of some 200,000 Guatemalans.

    Coups don't have to involve army tanks occupying the public squares, although that is an alternative model which follows many of the same initial steps except that the military is brought in at the end. The military coup was a common approach especially in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

    ' Color Revolutions'

    But the preferred method in more recent years has been the "color revolution," which operates behind the façade of a "peaceful" popular uprising and international pressure on the targeted leader to show restraint until it's too late to stop the coup. Despite the restraint, the leader is still accused of gross human rights violations, all the better to justify his removal.

    Later, the ousted leader may get an image makeover; instead of a cruel bully, he is ridiculed for not showing sufficient resolve and letting his base of support melt away, as happened with Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.

    But the reality of what happened in Ukraine was never hard to figure out. Nor did you have to be inside "the Russian propaganda bubble" to recognize it. George Friedman, the founder of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called Yanukovych's overthrow "the most blatant coup in history."

    Which is what it appears if you consider the evidence. The first step in the process was to create tensions around the issue of pulling Ukraine out of Russia's economic orbit and capturing it in the European Union's gravity, a plan defined by influential American neocons in 2013.

    On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    At the time, Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100 million a year, was financing scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for journalists and organizing business groups.

    As for the even bigger prize -- Putin -- Gershman wrote: "Ukraine's choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."

    At that time, in early fall 2013, Ukraine's President Yanukovych was exploring the idea of reaching out to Europe with an association agreement. But he got cold feet in November 2013 when economic experts in Kiev advised him that the Ukrainian economy would suffer a $160 billion hit if it separated from Russia, its eastern neighbor and major trading partner. There was also the West's demand that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund.

    Yanukovych wanted more time for the E.U. negotiations, but his decision angered many western Ukrainians who saw their future more attached to Europe than Russia. Tens of thousands of protesters began camping out at Maidan Square in Kiev, with Yanukovych ordering the police to show restraint.

    Meanwhile, with Yanukovych shifting back toward Russia, which was offering a more generous $15 billion loan and discounted natural gas, he soon became the target of American neocons and the U.S. media, which portrayed Ukraine's political unrest as a black-and-white case of a brutal and corrupt Yanukovych opposed by a saintly "pro-democracy" movement.

    Cheering an Uprising

    The Maidan uprising was urged on by American neocons, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Nuland, who passed out cookies at the Maidan and reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their "European aspirations."

    A screen shot of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland speaking to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, at an event sponsored by Chevron, with its logo to Nuland's left.

    Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also showed up, standing on stage with right-wing extremists from the Svoboda Party and telling the crowd that the United States was with them in their challenge to the Ukrainian government.

    As the winter progressed, the protests grew more violent. Neo-Nazi and other extremist elements from Lviv and other western Ukrainian cities began arriving in well-organized brigades or "sotins" of 100 trained street fighters. Police were attacked with firebombs and other weapons as the violent protesters began seizing government buildings and unfurling Nazi banners and even a Confederate flag.

    Though Yanukovych continued to order his police to show restraint, he was still depicted in the major U.S. news media as a brutal thug who was callously murdering his own people. The chaos reached a climax on Feb. 20 when mysterious snipers opened fire, killing both police and protesters. As the police retreated, the militants advanced brandishing firearms and other weapons. The confrontation led to significant loss of life, pushing the death toll to around 80 including more than a dozen police.

    U.S. diplomats and the mainstream U.S. press immediately blamed Yanukovych for the sniper attack, though the circumstances remain murky to this day and some investigations have suggested that the lethal sniper fire came from buildings controlled by Right Sektor extremists.

    To tamp down the worsening violence, a shaken Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal on Feb. 21, in which he accepted reduced powers and an early election so he could be voted out of office. He also agreed to requests from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back the police.

    The precipitous police withdrawal opened the path for the neo-Nazis and other street fighters to seize presidential offices and force Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their lives. The new coup regime was immediately declared "legitimate" by the U.S. State Department with Yanukovych sought on murder charges. Nuland's favorite, Yatsenyuk, became the new prime minister.

    Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted protesters versus a black-hatted president. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who fired on unarmed supporters of "democracy." The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American people heard from the major media.

    The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: "More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February."

    The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and peaceful Maidan protests.

    Any reference to a "coup" was dismissed as "Russian propaganda." There was a parallel determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians simply became "Russian aggression."

    Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)

    This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II – reached absurd levels as The New York Times and The Washington Post buried references to the neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.

    The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by quoting one militia commander as calling them "romantic" gestures by impressionable young men. [See Consortiumnews.com's " Ukraine's 'Romantic' Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers ."]

    But today – more than two years after what U.S. and Ukrainian officials like to call "the Revolution of Dignity" – the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government is sinking into dysfunction, reliant on handouts from the IMF and Western governments.

    And, in a move perhaps now more symbolic than substantive, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is stepping down. Yats is no longer the guy.

    Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ).

    Khalid Talaat , April 16, 2016 at 20:39

    Is it too far fetched to think that all these color revolutions are a perfection of the process to unleash another fake color revolution, only this time it is a Red, White and Blue revolution here at home? Those that continue to booze and snooze while watching the tube will not know the difference until it is too late.

    The freedom and tranquility of our country depends on finding and implementing a counterweight to the presstitutes and their propaganda. The alternative is too destructive in its natural development.

    Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:49

    Yats and Porko are the guys who broke Ukraine. By the end of December 2015, Ukraine's gross domestic product had shrunk around 19 percent in comparison with 2013. Its decimated industrial sector needs less fuel. Yatsie did a heck of a job.

    Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:35

    Carl Gershman: "Ukraine is the biggest prize" -- Paragraph 6 of https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-soviet-states-stand-up-to-russia-will-the-us/2013/09/26/b5ad2be4-246a-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html

    David Smith , April 12, 2016 at 13:51

    The timing of "Yats" departure is ominous. Mid-April, six weeks from now would be the first chance to renew the invasion of DPR Donesk/Lugansk."Yats" failed in 2014, and didn't try in 2015. Who is "the new guy"? Will the new Prime Minister begin raving about renewing the holy war to recover the lost oblasts? 2016 is really Ukraine's last chance. Ukraine refuses to implement Minsk2, and they have been receiving lots of new weapons. I believe President Putin put the Syrian operation on " standby" not only to avoid approaching the border, provoking a Turkish intervention, but also so he can give undistracted attention to DPR Donesk/Lugansk.

    Bill Rood , April 12, 2016 at 11:50

    I guess I must be inside the Russian propaganda bubble. It was obvious to me when I looked at the YouTube videos of policemen burning after being hit with Molotov cocktails.

    We played the same game of encouraging government "restraint" in Syria, where we demanded Assad free "political prisoners," but we now accuse him of deliberately encouraging ISIS by freeing those people, so that he can point to ISIS and ask, "Do you want that?" Targeted leaders are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

    Andrei , April 12, 2016 at 10:26

    "the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954", Romania 1989 Shots were fired by snipers in order to stirr the crowds (sounds familiar?) and also by the army after Ceasescu ran away, which resulted in civilians getting murdered. Could it possibly be that it was said : "Iliescu (next elected president) is the guy!" ?

    Joe L. , April 12, 2016 at 11:00

    Check out the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela 2002, that is very similar with protesters, snipers on rooftops, IMF immediately offering loans to the new coup government, new government positions for the coup plotters, complacency with the media – propaganda, funding by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy etc. John Pilger documents how the coup occurred in his documentary "War on Democracy" – https://vimeo.com/16724719 .

    archaos , April 12, 2016 at 09:45

    It was noted in the minutes of Verkhovna Rada almost 2 years before Maidan 2 , that Geoffrey Pyatt was fomenting and funding destabilisation of Ukraine.
    All of Svoboda Nazis in parliament (and other fascisti) then booed the MP who stated this.

    Mark Thomason , April 12, 2016 at 06:57

    Also, the Dutch voted "no" on the economic agreement the coup was meant to force through instead of the Russian agreement accepted by the President it overthrew. Now both "Yats" and the economic agreement are gone. All that is left is the war. Neocons are still happen. They wanted the war. They really want to overthrow Putin, and Ukraine was just a tool in that.

    Realist , April 12, 2016 at 05:51

    You're right, it doesn't have to be the military that carries out a coup by deploying tanks on the National Mall. In 2000, it was the United States Supreme Court that exceeded its constitutional authority and installed George W. Bush as president, though in reality he had lost that election. I wonder when that move will rightfully be characterized as a coup by the historians.

    Bryan Hemming , April 12, 2016 at 04:00

    "On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian President Vladimir Putin."

    It should be remembered that Victoria Nuland took up the post of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in Washington on September 18, 2013.

    Coincidentally, two other women closely connected to events in Ukraine were also in Washington during September 2013.

    Friend of Nuland and boss of the IMF, which has its own HQ in Washington, Christine Lagarde was swift to respond to a Ukraine request for IMF loans on February 27th 2014, just five days after the removal of Yanukovych on February 22nd. Lagarde is pictured with Baronness Catherine Ashton in Washington in a Facebook entry dated September 30th 2013. Ashton was High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy at the time.

    Though visiting Kiev at the same time as Nuland in February 2014 Catherine Ashton never appeared in public with her, which seems a little odd considering the women were on the same mission, and talking to the same people. Nevertheless, despite appearing shy of being photographed with each other the two women weren't quite so shy of being pictured with leaders of the coup, including the right wing extremist, Oleh Tyahnybok.

    Ashton refused to be drawn into commenting on Nuland's "Fuck the E.U.!" outburst, describing Nuland as "a friend of mine." The two women certainly weren't strangers, they had worked closely together before. September 2012 saw them involved in discussions with Iran negotiator Saeed Jalili over the country's supposed nuclear arms ambitions.

    The question is not so much whether the three women talked about Ukraine's future – it would be ridiculous to think they did not – but how closely they worked together, and exactly how closely they might have been involved in events leading up to the overthrow of the legitimate government in Kiev. More on this here:

    https://bryanhemming.wordpress.com/2015/04/01/double-double-toil-and-trouble-the-cauldron-of-kiev/

    Pablo Diablo , April 11, 2016 at 22:56

    Another failed "regime change". Aren't these guys (Neoconservatives) great. They fail, piss off/kill millions, yet seem to keep making money and retaining power. Time to WAKE UP AMERICA.

    Skip Edwards , April 11, 2016 at 20:06

    Read "The Devil'Chessboard" by David Talbot to understand what has been occurring as a result of America's Dark, Shadow government, an un-elected bunch of vicious psychopaths controlling our destiny; unless stopped. Get a clue and realize that "Yats is our guy" Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton's "gal." Hillary Clinton is Robert Kagen's "gal." Time to flush all these rats out of the hold and get on with our lives.

    Joe L. , April 11, 2016 at 18:40

    Mr. Parry thank you for delving into the proven history of coups and the parallels with Ukraine. It amazes me how anyone can outright deny this was a coup especially if they know anything about US coups going back to WW2 (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, attempt in Venezuela 2002 etc. – and there are a whole slew more). I read before, as you have rightly pointed out, that in 1953 the CIA led a propaganda campaign in Iran against Mossadegh as well as financing opposition protesters and opposition government officials. Another angle, as well, is looking historically back to what papers such as the New York Times were reporting around the time of the coup in Iran – especially when we know that the US/Britain overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh for their own oil interests (British Petroleum):

    New York Times: "Mossadegh Plays with Fire" (August 15, 1953):

    The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier Mossadegh.

    Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry, personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own people. We have seen this onetime champion of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.

    His power would seem to be complete, but he has alienated the traditional ruling classes -the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes. There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russia and the Russians. The peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.

    All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer's apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.

    Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians because she has nothing to fear -and therefore the West has nothing to fear. Thanks largely to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.

    http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/new-york-times/august-15-1953/

    My feeling is that the biggest sin that our society has is forgetting history. If we remembered history I would think that it would be very difficult to pull off coups but most media does not revisit history which proves US coups even against democracies. I actually think that the coup that occurred in Ukraine was similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela in 2002 with snipers on rooftops, immediate blame for the deaths on Hugo Chavez where media manipulated the footage, immediate acceptance of the temporary coup government by the US Government, immediately offering IMF loans for the new coup government, government positions for many of the coup plotters, and let us not leave out the funding for the coup coming from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. I also remember seeing the New York Times immediately blaming Chavez and praising the coup but when the coup was overturned and US fingerprints started to become revealed (with many of the coup plotters fleeing to the US) then the New York Times wrote a limited retraction buried in their paper. Shameless.

    SFOMARCO , April 11, 2016 at 15:16

    How was NED able to finance "scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for journalists and organizing business groups", not to mention to host such dignitaries as Cookie Nuland, Loser McCain and assorted Bidens? Seems like a recipe for a coup "hidden in plain sight".

    Bob Van Noy , April 11, 2016 at 14:36

    Ukraine, one would hope, represents the "Bridge Too Far" moment for the proponents of regime change. Surely Americans must be catching on to what we do for selected nations in the name of "giving them their freedoms". The Kagan Family, empowered by their newly endorsed candidate for President, Hillary Clinton, will feel justified in carrying on a new cold war, this time world wide. Of course they will not be doing the fighting, they, like Dick Cheney are the self appointed intellects of geopolitical chess, much like The Georgetown Set of the Kennedy era, they perceive themselves as the only ones smart enough to plan America's future.

    Helen Marshall , April 11, 2016 at 17:11

    I wish. How many Americans know ANYTHNG about what has happened in Ukraine, about Crimea and its history, and/or could even locate them on a map?

    Pastor Agnostic , April 12, 2016 at 04:11

    Nuland is merely the inhouse, PNAC female version of Sidney Blumenthal. Which raises the scary question. Who would she pick to be SecState?

    [Apr 02, 2019] Poroshenko was just a US marionette which helped to loot the country and impoverish Ukrainian people

    Under neoliberalism any regime change is necessary followed by an economic rape. That was the case with the USSR in 1991, that was the case in Ukraine in 2014. Only the size and length of the looting varies depending of the strength of new government. Both the size and the length is maximal if in power are marionette like Yeltsin or Yatsenyuk/Poroshenko.
    Saying "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" now should sound as "Beware of Americans who bring you color revolutions." They bring the economic rape (aka "Disaster capitalism") as the second phase. That's the nature of neocolonialism -- now you do not need to occupy the country. It's enough to make it a debt slave using IMF and install compradors to endure the low of money and continuing impoverishment of the population.
    With such crooked and greedy friends as Biden and Kerry and their narcoaddicts sons you do not need enemies. But the main danger are not individual sharks but Western financial institutions like IMF and World bank. Those convert countries into debt slaves and that means permanently low standard (Central African in case of Ukraine, something like $2 a day) of living for generations to come.
    What is interesting is that unlike say German nationalists in 30th, the Ukrainian nationalists proved to be completly useless in defending the Ukraine from looting. They actually serves as supplementary tool of the same looting.
    The standard of living of Ukrainians dropped 2-3 times since 2014. How pensioners survive, on $50 a month pension I simply do not understand. In any case Neoliberalism proved to be very effecting is keeping "developing" nations economic growth down and converting them into debt slaves. The fact that Biden use loans as a tool of extortion (as in threat to cancel one billion loan) to close criminal investigation of his sons company is just an icing on the cake. Poroshenko and his camarilla should be tried in the court of law for his corruption and pandering to the Western sharks, who were happy to steal from Ukraine as much as then can.
    To pay $166K a month for Biden's son cocaine is way too much to such impoverished country as Ukraine.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko. ..."
    "... " Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council on Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat. ..."
    "... The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden's younger son, Hunter, as a board member. ..."
    "... U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. - The Hill ..."
    "... And before he was fired, Shokin says he had made "specific plans" for the investigation - including "interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden." "I would like to emphasize the fact that presumption of innocence is a principle in Ukraine," added Shokin. Joe Biden "clearly had to know" about the probe before he insisted on Shokin's ouster . Via The Hill: ..."
    "... The U.S. Embassy in Kiev that coordinated Biden's work in the country repeatedly and publicly discussed the general prosecutor's case against Burisma; ..."
    "... President Obama named Biden the administration's point man on Ukraine in February 2014 ..."
    "... Remember Victoria Nuland's famous phone recording of "**** the EU?" This was nothing more than another CIA destabilization campaign carried out of another Sovereign Country. With the goal of breaking the Bush Senior & Jim Baker agreement of not surrounding Russia with NATO countries after their Collapse. ..."
    "... Let's face it. If Ukrainians loved it's Country, Joey, Hunter and the Choco-**** would have wound up like Mikhail Lesin during an all night party in an upscale grotto in Kiev by now! ..."
    "... At last some questions for this dirt ball-burisma is tied in with one of the most if not the most corrupt oligarch, Koloimiski. Biden is up to his eyeballs in some dodgy deals in china as well-this guy and his son are walking corruption personified. ..."
    "... Didn't Hillary teach Joe that a tax free foundation is better than using your son's LLC for laundering the bribes... This is basic stuff. ..."
    "... Joe "the Conqueror" "Caesar Magnus" Biden. Joe of Ukraine, the best bud of $oro$. ..."
    Apr 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
    Originally from: Forget 'Creepy' - Biden Has A Major Ukraine Problem Joe Biden appears to have made a major tactical error last year when he bragged to an audience of foreign policy experts how he threatened to hurl Ukraine into bankruptcy if their top prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin, wasn't immediately fired, according to The Hill 's John Solomon.

    In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees , sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn't immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. - The Hill

    "I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko.

    " Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council on Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q0_AqpdwqK4?start=3128

    Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden's account, though they claim the pressure was applied over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day . Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine's parliament obliged by ending Shokin's tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired. - The Hill

    And why would Biden want the "son of a bitch" fired?

    In what must be an amazing coincidence, the prosecutor was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into a natural gas firm - which Biden's son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors.

    The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden's younger son, Hunter, as a board member.

    U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. - The Hill

    The Hill 's Solomon reviewed the general prosecutor's file for the Burisma probe - which he reports shows Hunter Biden, his business partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.

    And before he was fired, Shokin says he had made "specific plans" for the investigation - including "interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden." "I would like to emphasize the fact that presumption of innocence is a principle in Ukraine," added Shokin. Joe Biden "clearly had to know" about the probe before he insisted on Shokin's ouster . Via The Hill:

    Although Biden made no mention of his son in his 2018 speech, U.S. and Ukrainian authorities both told me Biden and his office clearly had to know about the general prosecutor's probe of Burisma and his son's role. They noted that:

    President Obama named Biden the administration's point man on Ukraine in February 2014 , after a popular revolution ousted Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych and as Moscow sent military forces into Ukraine's Crimea territory.

    ***

    Key questions for 'ol Joe:

    Was it appropriate for your son and his firm to cash in on Ukraine while you served as point man for Ukraine policy? What work was performed for the money Hunter Biden's firm received? Did you know about the Burisma probe? And when it was publicly announced that your son worked for Burisma, should you have recused yourself from leveraging a U.S. policy to pressure the prosecutor who very publicly pursued Burisma?

    Read the rest of Solomon's report here .

    Chupacabra-322 , 58 minutes ago link

    Remember Victoria Nuland's famous phone recording of "**** the EU?" This was nothing more than another CIA destabilization campaign carried out of another Sovereign Country. With the goal of breaking the Bush Senior & Jim Baker agreement of not surrounding Russia with NATO countries after their Collapse.

    Son of Captain Nemo , 1 hour ago link

    Let's face it. If Ukrainians loved it's Country, Joey, Hunter and the Choco-**** would have wound up like Mikhail Lesin during an all night party in an upscale grotto in Kiev by now!

    Amazing that all 3 of them are still alive and that "Song Bird" McCain (#4) was allowed to die from his brain cancer instead of joining them or being dismembered and put on display when he made these visit(s) ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbfsTcJCKDE ) along with General Vallely (#5)!!!

    Taras Bulba , 1 hour ago

    At last some questions for this dirt ball-burisma is tied in with one of the most if not the most corrupt oligarch, Koloimiski. Biden is up to his eyeballs in some dodgy deals in china as well-this guy and his son are walking corruption personified.

    CarifonianSeven, 2 hours ago

    Didn't Hillary teach Joe that a tax free foundation is better than using your son's LLC for laundering the bribes... This is basic stuff.

    Pernicious Gold Phallusy, 1 hour ago

    Joe cheated his way through undergrad and law school. He would be unable to understand any of that.

    whittler, 1 hour ago

    What? You mean folks will finally care about little Hunter hiring Azov neo-Nazi fighters (oops! security I mean) to protect his fracking site just north of the 'troubles' in the eastern Ukraine? I'm sure they were working for free and that no Biden money was ever used to payoff (oops again! I mean pay the wages of) a bunch of Nazis (dang it again, I mean neo-Nazis, it sounds so much warmer and fuzzier when you add 'neo').

    Creepy Joe and all D's agree, 'Nazi' = bad, neo-Nazi = warm, fuzzy and good; heck, they even like to kill Russians Russians Russians!!!

    Cracker 16 , 1 hour ago

    Joe "the Conqueror" "Caesar Magnus" Biden. Joe of Ukraine, the best bud of $oro$.

    [Apr 02, 2019] On The Incorrigible Hypocrisy Of The Conservative Neocons

    Apr 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

    Last week a Wall Street Journal editorial revealed the incorrigible hypocrisy with which conservatives have long suffered. Conservatives, of course, have long suffered this malady with respect to domestic policy given their ardent devotion to Social Security, Medicare, foreign aid, and other welfare-state programs even while decrying the left's devotion to socialism.

    But this particular WSJ editorial revealed the incorrigible conservative hypocrisy with respect to foreign policy.

    The editorial was entitled " Putin Pulls a Syria in Venezuela ." The opening sentence is comical:

    "Vladimir Putin has made a career of intervening abroad and seeing if the world lets him get away with it."

    Why is that sentence funny?

    Because it also describes ever single U.S. president for the last 100 years!

    Every president from Woodrow Wilson through today has made a career of intervening abroad and seeing if the world lets him get away with it. Indeed, the central feature of the U.S. government for the last 100 years has been and continues to be empire and foreign interventionism.

    Clearly, conservatives do not see anything wrong with foreign interventionism as long as the interventionists are wearing an American flag on their sleeves and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. They obviously consider foreign interventionism to be bad only when those pesky Russkies (of Russia-Trump conspiracy fame) do it.

    Another humorous aspect to the editorial is the verbiage that the Journal' s editorial writer uses to condemn Putin's interventionism. The editorial condemns Putin for extending his interventionism in Syria to Venezuela.

    Why is that point humorous?

    Because the U.S. government, with the full support of conservatives, has also been intervening in both Syria and Venezuela! Thus, the Journal could just as easily have stated that "Putin pulls a U.S. in Syria and Venezuela," except, well, for one thing: The regimes in both countries invited Russia into their countries. The U.S. government, on the other hand, is intervening in both countries illegally with the intent of ousting both regimes from power and installing pro-U.S. regimes in their stead.

    The Journal pointed out Russia's intervention in Crimea and Ukraine. Not surprisingly, the Journal failed to point out that after the end of the Cold War, NATO, that old Cold War-era dinosaur controlled by the U.S., proceeded to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact and was threatening to absorb Ukraine, which would then have put U.S. forces on Russia's border. In the eyes of conservatives, that sort of interventionism just doesn't count because it's U.S. interventionism.

    In fact, notice that conservatives, while lamenting Russian and Chinese support of Latin American countries hardly ever lament U.S. government support of European, Eastern European, and Asian countries. That's hypocrisy in its purest and most incorrigible form.

    Venezuela is an independent country. As such, it has the right to seek and receive help from anyone it wants, including Russia, China, North Korea, or any other regime, Red or not. Conservative calls to put a stop to this process are a throwback to the old Cold War mindset that the Reds were coming to get us as part of the supposed worldwide communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow. That's what gave rise, of course, to the conversion of our federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state and to an even bigger expansion of an interventionist foreign policy.

    That's in fact why the CIA, the Pentagon, and the NSA embarked on a decades-long policy of assassinations of foreign leaders, invasions, occupations, coups, partnerships with dictatorial regimes, torture, indefinite detention, sanctions, embargoes, regime-change operations, secret surveillance, and other dark-side practices. The national-security triumvirate said that all this dark-side activity was necessary to protect us and keep us safe from the Russians (i.e. Soviets), Chinese, North Koreans, North Vietnamese, Cubans, and other Reds. In other words, we had to become like the Reds in order to prevent them from taking control of the United States and teaching communism in America's public (i.e., government-owned) schools.

    Which raises the important question : Simply because Russia, China, North Korea, or other foreign regimes engage in foreign interventionism, assassination, torture, secret surveillance, indefinite detention, or other dark-side practices, does that mean that the U.S. government must do the same as a defensive or protective measure?

    The answer is no. The U.S. government should never have gone down the road to empire and foreign interventionism regardless of what the Reds were doing, and it should never have become a national-security state, which is a type of dark-side governmental structure that is inherent to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.

    The United States should restore its founding principles of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy regardless of what foreign regimes are doing. The U.S. should be leading the world to freedom by example, not by copying the Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, or Vietnamese.

    [Apr 02, 2019] The abuse of power of the special counsel is a deadly cancer on American democracy.

    Notable quotes:
    "... Originally from: ..."
    "... Among the scope memo's few unredacted lines are allegations regarding Paul Manafort's "colluding with Russian government officials to interfere with the 2016 elections." The only known source for those allegations is the Steele dossier. What that strongly suggests is that under those redactions are other fabricated allegations that were also drawn from the Clinton-funded smear campaign -- a dirty-tricks operation that was led by Fusion GPS founder and conspiracy theorist Glenn Simpson. ..."
    "... Saturday Night Live ..."
    "... While the length of Mueller's investigative process may have protected the FBI from the president's immediate rage, the release of the report has exposed the deep corruption and personal narcissism of the press and its professional networks of "experts" and "sources." ..."
    "... Russiagate was an information operation from the beginning, in which dozens of individual reporters and institutions actively partnered with paid political operatives like Glenn Simpson and corrupt law enforcement and intelligence officials like former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr to smear Trump and his circle, and then to topple him. None of what went on the last two years would have been possible without the press, an indispensable partner in the biggest political scandal in a generation. ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    Mar 27, 2019 | www.tabletmag.com

    Originally from: System Fail – Tablet Magazine by Lee Smith

    It will take weeks for the elite pundit class to unravel all the possible implications and subtexts embedded in Robert Mueller's final report on the charge that Donald Trump and his team colluded with Russia to fix the 2016 election. The right claims that the report exonerates Trump fully, while the left contends there are lots of nuggets in the full text of the final report that may point to obstruction of justice, if not collusion.

    But here's all you need to know about the special counsel probe:

    First, after nearly two years, the special counsel found no credible evidence of collusion. It found no credible evidence of a plot to obstruct justice, to hide evidence of collusion. The entire collusion theory, which has formed the center of elite political discourse for over two years now, has been publicly and definitely proclaimed to be a hoax by the very person on whom news organizations and their chosen "experts" and "high-level sources" had so loudly and insistently pinned their daily, even hourly, hopes of redemption.

    Mueller should have filed his report on May 18, 2017 -- the day after the special counsel started and he learned the FBI had opened an investigation on the sitting president of the United States because senior officials at the world's premier law enforcement agency thought Trump was a Russian spy. Based on what evidence? A dossier compiled by a former British spy, relying on second- and third-hand sources, paid for by the Clinton campaign .

    Instead, the special counsel lasted 674 days, during which millions of people who believed Mueller was going to turn up conclusive evidence of Trump's devious conspiracies with the Kremlin have become wrapped up in a collective hallucination that has destroyed the remaining credibility of the American press and the D.C. expert class whose authority they promote.

    Mueller knew that he wasn't ever going to find "collusion" or anything like it because all the intercepts were right there on his desk. As it turned out, two of his prosecutors, including Mueller's so-called "pit bull," Andrew Weissman, had been briefed on the Steele dossier prior to the 2016 election and were told that it came from the Clintons, and was likely a biased political document.

    Weissman left, or was pushed out of, his employment with the special counsel a few weeks ago, after the arrival of a new attorney general, William Barr, who had deep experience in government, including stints at the Justice Department and the CIA. Knowing what we know now, here's what seems most likely to have just happened: Barr looked at the underlying documents on which Mueller's investigation was based. First, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's May 17, 2017, memo appointing the former FBI director to take supervision of the FBI's investigation of Trump. And more importantly, the Aug. 2, 2017, memo from Rosenstein outlining the scope of the investigation.

    Among the scope memo's few unredacted lines are allegations regarding Paul Manafort's "colluding with Russian government officials to interfere with the 2016 elections." The only known source for those allegations is the Steele dossier. What that strongly suggests is that under those redactions are other fabricated allegations that were also drawn from the Clinton-funded smear campaign -- a dirty-tricks operation that was led by Fusion GPS founder and conspiracy theorist Glenn Simpson.

    And now, after all the Saturday Night Live skits, the obscenity-riddled Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert routines, the half a million news stories and tens of millions of tweets all foretelling the end of Trump, the comedians and the adult authority figures are exposed as hoaxsters, or worse, based on evidence that was always transparently phony.

    The Mueller report is in. But the abuse of power that the special counsel embodied is a deadly cancer on American democracy. Two years of investigations have left families in ruins, stripping them of their savings, their homes, threatening their liberty, and dragging their names through the mud. The investigation of the century was partly based on the possibility that Michael Flynn, a combat veteran who served his country for more than three decades, might be a Russian spy -- because of a dinner he once attended in Moscow, and because as incoming national security adviser he spoke to the Russian ambassador to Washington. What rot.

    While the length of Mueller's investigative process may have protected the FBI from the president's immediate rage, the release of the report has exposed the deep corruption and personal narcissism of the press and its professional networks of "experts" and "sources." Instead of providing medicine, the press chose instead to spread the disease through a body that was already badly weakened by the advent of "free" digital media . Only, it wasn't free .

    * * *

    The media criticism of the media's performance covering Russiagate is misleadingly anodyne -- OK, sure the press did a bad job, but to be fair there really was a lot of suspicious stuff going on and now let's all get back to doing our important work. But two years of false and misleading Russiagate coverage was not a mistake, or a symptom of lax fact-checking.

    Russiagate was an information operation from the beginning, in which dozens of individual reporters and institutions actively partnered with paid political operatives like Glenn Simpson and corrupt law enforcement and intelligence officials like former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr to smear Trump and his circle, and then to topple him. None of what went on the last two years would have been possible without the press, an indispensable partner in the biggest political scandal in a generation.

    The campaign was waged not in hidden corners of the internet, but rather by the country's most prestigious news organizations -- including, but not only, The New York Times , the Washington Post , CNN, and MSNBC. The farce that has passed for public discourse the last two years was fueled by a concerted effort of the media and the pundit class to obscure gaping holes in logic as well as law. And yet, they all appeared to be credible because the institutions sustaining them are credible .

    ... ... ...

    Americans still want and need accurate information on which to base their decisions about their own lives and the path that the country should take. But neither the legacy media nor the expert class it sustains is likely to survive the post-dossier era in any recognizable form . For them, Russiagate is an extinction level event.

    Lee Smith is the author of The Consequences of Syria .

    [Apr 02, 2019] Mr Cohen and I Live on Different Planets

    Apr 02, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    Looks like the reviewer is a typical neocon. Typical neocon think tanks talking points that reflect the "Full Spectrum Dominance" agenda.

    As for Ukraine yes, of course, Victoria Nuland did not interfere with the event, did not push for the deposing Yanukovich to spoil agreement reached between him and the EU diplomats ("F**k EU" as this high level US diplomat eloquently expressed herself) and to appoint the US stooge Yatsenyuk. The transcript of Nuland's phone call actually introduced many Americans to the previously obscure Yatsenyuk.

    And the large amount of cash confiscated in the Kiev office of Yulia Timostchenko Batkivshchina party (the main opposition party at the time run by Yatsenyuk, as Timoshenko was in jail) was just a hallucination. It has nothing to do with ";bombing with dollars"; -- yet another typical color revolution trick.

    BTW "government snipers of rooftops" also is a standard false flag operation used to instill uprising at the critical moment of the color revolution. Ukraine was not the first and is not the last. One participant recently confessed. The key person in this false flag operation was the opposition leader Andriy Parubiy -- who was responsible for the security of the opposition camp. Google "Parubiy and snipergate" for more information.

    His view on DNC hack (which most probably was a leak) also does not withstand close scrutiny. William Binney, a former National Security Agency high level official who co-authored an analysis of a group of former intelligence professionals thinks that this was a transfer to the local USB drive as the speed of downloads was too high for the Internet connection. In this light the death of Seth Rich looks very suspicious indeed.

    As for Russiagate, he now needs to print his review and the portrait of Grand Wizard of Russiagate Rachel Maddow, shed both of them and eat with Borscht ;-)

    [Apr 02, 2019] Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

    Notable quotes:
    "... When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. ..."
    Apr 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Apr 1, 2019 1:27:52 PM | link

    mourning dove

    Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

    When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

    [Apr 02, 2019] The latest Integrity Initiative dump by Anonymous

    Apr 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Symen Danziger , Mar 31, 2019 4:13:36 PM | link

    The latest Integrity Initiative dump by Anonymous

    https://www.cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation-integrity-initiative-british-informational-war-against-all-part-7/?fbclid=IwAR0wCU71fMwwcKhT9jhPUFQWt0UudPsWRxFlQQlCbAosSPkPkSnfPsdcEJ4

    [Apr 02, 2019] Shadowbanning

    See also Shadow banning - Wikipedia
    Shadow banning (also called stealth banning, ghost banning or comment ghosting[1]) is the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned.
    By making a user's contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope may be that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the problematic or otherwise out-of-favour user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site.
    Apr 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Lozion , Mar 31, 2019 4:33:21 PM | link

    < More and more "resistance" type Twitteratti get shadowbanned, that is, their posts dont appear in the Twitter feed though they are visible on their profiles. Find out if you are shadowbanned here:>

    https://shadowban.eu/

    Zachary Smith , Mar 31, 2019 5:24:53 PM | link

    @ Lozion #12

    Until recently I didn't know the word "shadowbanning", but that was what happened to me several years ago. The managers of the Indianapolis Star had given their forum to the tender care of a mix of Libertarians, rightwingnuts, and devoted followers of the Holy Cesspool south of Syria. Gradually I realized nobody was responding to my posts, and only by accident did I learn those posts were invisible to everybody else. Only when I was logged in could I see them myself.

    So that's why I have gone cold turkey on the only Indianapolis newspaper. I'd recommend it only for folks whose parakeets need a lining for the bottom of the bird's cage. Their editorial page works best for that application.

    Lozion , Mar 31, 2019 7:55:34 PM | link
    @12 Zachary.

    Yeah I first encountered the phenom during the last days of the 2014 Euromaidan while reposting info on Facebook about sniper fire coming from opp held rooftops. I couldnt understand why interaction on the subject stopped until someone confirmed via the chat that none of my posts with the word "Ukraine" appeared in the feed. They must've triggered FBs early filter algorithm. I have since left the Ministry of Truth..

    [Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

    Highly recommended!
    Important book. Kindle sample
    Notable quotes:
    "... Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. ..."
    "... As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive relationship."' ..."
    "... But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'. ..."
    "... In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin. Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West. ..."
    "... Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, "de-democratized" a Russian democracy established by President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet "totalitarianism." ..."
    "... Nor did Putim then make himself a tsar or Soviet-like autocrat, which means a despot with absolute power to turn his will into policy, the last Kremlin leader with that kind of power was Stalin, who died in 1953, and with him his 20-year mass terror. ..."
    "... Putin is not a Kremlin leader who "reveres Stalin" and whose "Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin's Soviet Union." 13 , 14 These assertions are so far-fetched and uninfoimed about Stalin's terror-ridden regime, Putin, and Russia today, they barely warrant comment. ..."
    "... Nor did Putin create post-Soviet Russia's "kleptocratic economic system," with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption. This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin's shock-therapy "privatization" schemes of the 1990s, when the "swindlers and thieves" still denounced by today's opposition actually emerged. ..."
    "... Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as "a KGB thug," regularly orders the killing of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a "mafia state boss." ..."
    "... More recently, there is yet another allegation: Putin is a fascist and white supremacist. The accusation is made mostly, it seems, by people wishing to deflect attention from the role being played by neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine. ..."
    "... Finally, at least for now. there is the ramifying demonization allegation that, as a foreign-policy leader. Putin has been exceedingly "aggressive" abroad and his behavior has been the sole cause of the new cold war. ..."
    "... Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians. ..."
    "... The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America." ..."
    "... Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations, he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States." 3 " ..."
    "... A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy, without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34 ..."
    "... <img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png"> P. Philips ..."
    "... "In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" ..."
    "... Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation. ..."
    "... If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris. ..."
    Apr 01, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    THE SPECTER OF AN EVIL-DOING VLADIMIR PUTIN HAS loomed over and undermined US thinking about Russia for at least a decade. Inescapably, it is therefore a theme that runs through this book. Henry' Kissinger deserves credit for having warned, perhaps alone among prominent American political figures, against this badly distorted image of Russia's leader since 2000: "The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one." 4

    But Kissinger was also wrong. Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. Those policies spread from growing complaints in the early 2000s to US- Russian proxy wars in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and eventually even at home, in Russiagate allegations. Indeed, policy-makers adopted an earlier formulation by the late Senator .Tolm McCain as an integral part of a new and more dangerous Cold War: "Putin [is] an unreconstructed Russian imperialist and K.G.B. apparatchik.... His world is a brutish, cynical place.... We must prevent the darkness of Mr. Putin's world from befalling more of humanity'." 3

    Mainstream media outlets have play'ed a major prosecutorial role in the demonization. Far from aty'pically', the Washington Post's editorial page editor wrote, "Putin likes to make the bodies bounce.... The rule-by-fear is Soviet, but this time there is no ideology -- only a noxious mixture of personal aggrandizement, xenophobia, homophobia and primitive anti-Americanism." 6 Esteemed publications and writers now routinely degrade themselves by competing to denigrate "the flabbily muscled form" of the "small gray ghoul named Vladimir Putin." 7 , 8 There are hundreds of such examples, if not more, over many years. Vilifying Russia's leader has become a canon in the orthodox US narrative of the new Cold War.

    As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive relationship."'

    But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'.

    Who has Putin really been during his many years in power? We may' have to leave this large, complex question to future historians, when materials for full biographical study -- memoirs, archive documents, and others -- are available. Even so, it may surprise readers to know that Russia's own historians, policy intellectuals, and journalists already argue publicly and differ considerably as to the "pluses and minuses" of Putin's leadership. (My own evaluation is somewhere in the middle.)

    In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin. Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West.

    By identifying and examining, however briefly, the primary "minuses" that underpin the demonization of Putin, we can understand at least who he is not:

    Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians.

    Though often critical of the Soviet system and its two formative leaders, Lenin and Stalin, Putin, like most of his generation, naturally remains in part a Soviet person. But what he said in 2010 reflects his real perspective and that of very many other Russians: "Anyone who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants its rebirth in its previous form has no head." 28 , 29

    The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America." 30 , 31 A simple reading of his years in power tells us otherwise. A Westernized Russian, Putin came to the presidency in 2000 in the still prevailing tradition of Gorbachev and Yeltsin -- in hope of a "strategic friendship and partnership" with the United States.

    How else to explain Putin's abundant assistant to US forces fighting in Afghanistan after 9/1 1 and continued facilitation of supplying American and NATO troops there? Or his backing of harsh sanctions against Iran's nuclear ambitions and refusal to sell Tehran a highly effective air-defense system? Or the information his intelligence services shared with Washington that if heeded could have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2012?

    Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations, he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States." 3 "

    Given all that has happened during the past nearly two decades -- particularly what Putin and other Russian leaders perceive to have happened -- it would be remarkable if his views of the W^est, especially America, had not changed. As he remarked in 2018, "We all change." 33

    A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy, without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34

    P. Philips , December 6, 2018

    "In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act"

    "In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" is a well known quotation (but probably not of George Orwell). And in telling the truth about Russia and that the current "war of nerves" is not in the interests of either the American People or national security, Professor Cohen in this book has in fact done a revolutionary act.

    Like a denizen of Plato's cave, or being in the film the Matrix, most people have no idea what the truth is. And the questions raised by Professor Cohen are a great service in the cause of the truth. As Professor Cohen writes in his introduction To His Readers:

    "My scholarly work -- my biography of Nikolai Bukharin and essays collected in Rethinking the Soviet Experience and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, for example -- has always been controversial because it has been what scholars term "revisionist" -- reconsiderations, based on new research and perspectives, of prevailing interpretations of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history. But the "controversy" surrounding me since 2014, mostly in reaction to the contents of this book, has been different -- inspired by usually vacuous, defamatory assaults on me as "Putin's No. 1 American Apologist," "Best Friend," and the like. I never respond specifically to these slurs because they offer no truly substantive criticism of my arguments, only ad hominem attacks. Instead, I argue, as readers will see in the first section, that I am a patriot of American national security, that the orthodox policies my assailants promote are gravely endangering our security, and that therefore we -- I and others they assail -- are patriotic heretics. Here too readers can judge."

    Cohen, Stephen F.. War with Russia (Kindle Locations 131-139). Hot Books. Kindle Edition.

    Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation.

    Indeed, with the hysteria on "climate change" isn't it odd that other than Professor Cohen's voice, there are no prominent figures warning of the devastation that nuclear war would bring?

    If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris.

    I cannot recommend Professor Cohen's work with sufficient superlatives; his arguments are erudite, clearly stated, supported by the facts and ultimately irrefutable. If enough people find Professor Cohen's work and raise their voices to their oblivious politicians and profiteers from war to stop further confrontation between Russia and America, then this book has served a noble purpose.

    If nothing else, educate yourself by reading this work to discover what the *truth* is. And the truth is something sacred.

    America and the world owe Professor Cohen a great debt. "Blessed are the peace makers..."

    [Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

    Highly recommended!
    Important book. Kindle sample
    Notable quotes:
    "... Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. ..."
    "... As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive relationship."' ..."
    "... But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'. ..."
    "... In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin. Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West. ..."
    "... Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, "de-democratized" a Russian democracy established by President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet "totalitarianism." ..."
    "... Nor did Putim then make himself a tsar or Soviet-like autocrat, which means a despot with absolute power to turn his will into policy, the last Kremlin leader with that kind of power was Stalin, who died in 1953, and with him his 20-year mass terror. ..."
    "... Putin is not a Kremlin leader who "reveres Stalin" and whose "Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin's Soviet Union." 13 , 14 These assertions are so far-fetched and uninfoimed about Stalin's terror-ridden regime, Putin, and Russia today, they barely warrant comment. ..."
    "... Nor did Putin create post-Soviet Russia's "kleptocratic economic system," with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption. This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin's shock-therapy "privatization" schemes of the 1990s, when the "swindlers and thieves" still denounced by today's opposition actually emerged. ..."
    "... Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as "a KGB thug," regularly orders the killing of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a "mafia state boss." ..."
    "... More recently, there is yet another allegation: Putin is a fascist and white supremacist. The accusation is made mostly, it seems, by people wishing to deflect attention from the role being played by neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine. ..."
    "... Finally, at least for now. there is the ramifying demonization allegation that, as a foreign-policy leader. Putin has been exceedingly "aggressive" abroad and his behavior has been the sole cause of the new cold war. ..."
    "... Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians. ..."
    "... The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America." ..."
    "... Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations, he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States." 3 " ..."
    "... A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy, without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34 ..."
    "... <img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png"> P. Philips ..."
    "... "In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" ..."
    "... Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation. ..."
    "... If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris. ..."
    Apr 01, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    THE SPECTER OF AN EVIL-DOING VLADIMIR PUTIN HAS loomed over and undermined US thinking about Russia for at least a decade. Inescapably, it is therefore a theme that runs through this book. Henry' Kissinger deserves credit for having warned, perhaps alone among prominent American political figures, against this badly distorted image of Russia's leader since 2000: "The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one." 4

    But Kissinger was also wrong. Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. Those policies spread from growing complaints in the early 2000s to US- Russian proxy wars in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and eventually even at home, in Russiagate allegations. Indeed, policy-makers adopted an earlier formulation by the late Senator .Tolm McCain as an integral part of a new and more dangerous Cold War: "Putin [is] an unreconstructed Russian imperialist and K.G.B. apparatchik.... His world is a brutish, cynical place.... We must prevent the darkness of Mr. Putin's world from befalling more of humanity'." 3

    Mainstream media outlets have play'ed a major prosecutorial role in the demonization. Far from aty'pically', the Washington Post's editorial page editor wrote, "Putin likes to make the bodies bounce.... The rule-by-fear is Soviet, but this time there is no ideology -- only a noxious mixture of personal aggrandizement, xenophobia, homophobia and primitive anti-Americanism." 6 Esteemed publications and writers now routinely degrade themselves by competing to denigrate "the flabbily muscled form" of the "small gray ghoul named Vladimir Putin." 7 , 8 There are hundreds of such examples, if not more, over many years. Vilifying Russia's leader has become a canon in the orthodox US narrative of the new Cold War.

    As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive relationship."'

    But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'.

    Who has Putin really been during his many years in power? We may' have to leave this large, complex question to future historians, when materials for full biographical study -- memoirs, archive documents, and others -- are available. Even so, it may surprise readers to know that Russia's own historians, policy intellectuals, and journalists already argue publicly and differ considerably as to the "pluses and minuses" of Putin's leadership. (My own evaluation is somewhere in the middle.)

    In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin. Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West.

    By identifying and examining, however briefly, the primary "minuses" that underpin the demonization of Putin, we can understand at least who he is not:

    Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians.

    Though often critical of the Soviet system and its two formative leaders, Lenin and Stalin, Putin, like most of his generation, naturally remains in part a Soviet person. But what he said in 2010 reflects his real perspective and that of very many other Russians: "Anyone who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants its rebirth in its previous form has no head." 28 , 29

    The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America." 30 , 31 A simple reading of his years in power tells us otherwise. A Westernized Russian, Putin came to the presidency in 2000 in the still prevailing tradition of Gorbachev and Yeltsin -- in hope of a "strategic friendship and partnership" with the United States.

    How else to explain Putin's abundant assistant to US forces fighting in Afghanistan after 9/1 1 and continued facilitation of supplying American and NATO troops there? Or his backing of harsh sanctions against Iran's nuclear ambitions and refusal to sell Tehran a highly effective air-defense system? Or the information his intelligence services shared with Washington that if heeded could have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2012?

    Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations, he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States." 3 "

    Given all that has happened during the past nearly two decades -- particularly what Putin and other Russian leaders perceive to have happened -- it would be remarkable if his views of the W^est, especially America, had not changed. As he remarked in 2018, "We all change." 33

    A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy, without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34

    P. Philips , December 6, 2018

    "In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act"

    "In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" is a well known quotation (but probably not of George Orwell). And in telling the truth about Russia and that the current "war of nerves" is not in the interests of either the American People or national security, Professor Cohen in this book has in fact done a revolutionary act.

    Like a denizen of Plato's cave, or being in the film the Matrix, most people have no idea what the truth is. And the questions raised by Professor Cohen are a great service in the cause of the truth. As Professor Cohen writes in his introduction To His Readers:

    "My scholarly work -- my biography of Nikolai Bukharin and essays collected in Rethinking the Soviet Experience and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, for example -- has always been controversial because it has been what scholars term "revisionist" -- reconsiderations, based on new research and perspectives, of prevailing interpretations of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history. But the "controversy" surrounding me since 2014, mostly in reaction to the contents of this book, has been different -- inspired by usually vacuous, defamatory assaults on me as "Putin's No. 1 American Apologist," "Best Friend," and the like. I never respond specifically to these slurs because they offer no truly substantive criticism of my arguments, only ad hominem attacks. Instead, I argue, as readers will see in the first section, that I am a patriot of American national security, that the orthodox policies my assailants promote are gravely endangering our security, and that therefore we -- I and others they assail -- are patriotic heretics. Here too readers can judge."

    Cohen, Stephen F.. War with Russia (Kindle Locations 131-139). Hot Books. Kindle Edition.

    Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation.

    Indeed, with the hysteria on "climate change" isn't it odd that other than Professor Cohen's voice, there are no prominent figures warning of the devastation that nuclear war would bring?

    If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris.

    I cannot recommend Professor Cohen's work with sufficient superlatives; his arguments are erudite, clearly stated, supported by the facts and ultimately irrefutable. If enough people find Professor Cohen's work and raise their voices to their oblivious politicians and profiteers from war to stop further confrontation between Russia and America, then this book has served a noble purpose.

    If nothing else, educate yourself by reading this work to discover what the *truth* is. And the truth is something sacred.

    America and the world owe Professor Cohen a great debt. "Blessed are the peace makers..."

    [Apr 01, 2019] Johnstone Leaked '401'-Page Mueller Report Proves Barr Lied, Collusion Theorists Vindicated

    Notable quotes:
    "... "I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species" ..."
    "... " He then put on a pair of sunglasses and rode off on a motorcycle due east into the rising sun, while the smooth notes of a single saxophone resounded through the D.C. cityscape." ..."
    Apr 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    An unredacted copy of the Robert Mueller report has been leaked to the Washington Post , who published the full document on its website Monday.

    The report contains many shocking revelations which prove that Attorney General William Barr deceived the world in his summary of its contents, as astute Trump-Russia collusion theorists have been claiming since it emerged .

    For example, while Barr's excerpted quote from the report may read like a seemingly unequivocal assertion, "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities," it turns out that the full sentence reads very differently:

    " It is totally not the case that the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

    The following sentence is even more damning: "It definitely did establish that that happened."

    The report goes on to list the evidence for numerous acts of direct conspiracy between Trump allies and the Russian government, including a detailed description of the footage from an obtained copy of the notorious "kompromat" video, in which Trump is seen paying Russian prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept in by Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as other documents fully verifying the entire Christopher Steele dossier which was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017.

    Other evidence listed in the report includes communication transcripts in which Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen ordering President Trump to bomb Syria, stage a coup in Venezuela, arm Ukraine, escalate against Russia in America's Nuclear Posture Review, withdraw from the INF treaty and the Iran deal, undermine Russia's fossil fuel interests in Germany, expand NATO, and maintain a large military presence near Russia's border.

    ... ... ...

    Obviously I owe the world a very big apology. I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species. Clearly, because of their indisputable vindication this April the first 2019, they are definitely none of these things.

    RightLineBacker, (Edited)

    After recovering from a near heart attack...and loading my weapons in preparation of taking to the streets... I noticed it was April 1st. Funny & not funny at the same time.

    Damn! Back to my beer & popcorn.

    desertboy

    "I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species"

    Me too. It's worth repeating.

    noshitsherlock

    " He then put on a pair of sunglasses and rode off on a motorcycle due east into the rising sun, while the smooth notes of a single saxophone resounded through the D.C. cityscape."

    Bwahahahaha


    [Apr 01, 2019] Trey Gowdy Adam Schiff is a 'deeply partisan person'

    Schiff is a typical witch hunter (or Cheka goon, if you wish ;-) , much like Mueller staff was. What is unclear why theywant to unseat Trump with his complete falding to neocons and strong pro-Israel stance?
    Notable quotes:
    "... It was the DNC and Ukraine. They wanted HRC to win. No collusion was on President Trump's side. All the top players in the FBI and DOJ played games and lost. President Trump won and plays the game better than those on the DNC. Their game book has been showed to be stupid. ..."
    "... Brennan thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. He spins lies like a hungry spider. Brennan, Clapper, Schiff, Swalwell, and some others need to go. ..."
    Apr 01, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Rosemary Storm , 1 day ago

    Trump HATER Brennan - says: "U.S. PERSONS" - meaning Schiff, Comey, Obama, Strozk, His Lover, The OBAMAS, - are all THOSE "U.S. PERSONS" who gave him the so-called "INTELLIGENCE" - at WHAT POINT does "UN-VERIFIED INFO" become a TREASONOUS WEAPONIZED INSTRUMENT of an ATTEMPTED COUP D'eta against the President Of The United States of America.

    Stan Wilson , 1 day ago

    Seditious liar Schifty Adam Schiff was involved in criminal leaking of classified information to Democrat propaganda machines CNN and MSNBC -- Should not just resign but held accountable for his crimes and major role he played in the Coup attempt against the duly elected US president

    halas , 1 day ago

    If Brennan didn't know, he admits to being incompetent. If he did know, he is complicit. He accused someone of treason without evidence. Losing his security clearance is not justice. He needs to pay a bigger price.

    Steven Miller , 1 day ago

    Gowdy is correct. Had there been something there, yes perhaps then people should see it. When there results yield "not even probable cause", it probably shouldn't be released in it's entirety.

    Andrea Visconti , 1 day ago

    It was the DNC and Ukraine. They wanted HRC to win. No collusion was on President Trump's side. All the top players in the FBI and DOJ played games and lost. President Trump won and plays the game better than those on the DNC. Their game book has been showed to be stupid.

    TNA2Me , 1 day ago

    Brennan thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. He spins lies like a hungry spider. Brennan, Clapper, Schiff, Swalwell, and some others need to go.

    Robert Silvermyst , 1 day ago

    Adam Schiff claims there is clear evidence, yet never states what this evidence is. Yet it is so clear that Muller, the FBI, the Senate investigation and the House spent two years and never found it. Must be extremely transparent to the point of not existing period. I think Schiff needs to not only step down, but he needs to see a psychitatrist.

    [Apr 01, 2019] Johnstone Leaked '401'-Page Mueller Report Proves Barr Lied, Collusion Theorists Vindicated

    Notable quotes:
    "... "I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species" ..."
    "... " He then put on a pair of sunglasses and rode off on a motorcycle due east into the rising sun, while the smooth notes of a single saxophone resounded through the D.C. cityscape." ..."
    Apr 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    An unredacted copy of the Robert Mueller report has been leaked to the Washington Post , who published the full document on its website Monday.

    The report contains many shocking revelations which prove that Attorney General William Barr deceived the world in his summary of its contents, as astute Trump-Russia collusion theorists have been claiming since it emerged .

    For example, while Barr's excerpted quote from the report may read like a seemingly unequivocal assertion, "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities," it turns out that the full sentence reads very differently:

    " It is totally not the case that the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

    The following sentence is even more damning: "It definitely did establish that that happened."

    The report goes on to list the evidence for numerous acts of direct conspiracy between Trump allies and the Russian government, including a detailed description of the footage from an obtained copy of the notorious "kompromat" video, in which Trump is seen paying Russian prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept in by Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as other documents fully verifying the entire Christopher Steele dossier which was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017.

    Other evidence listed in the report includes communication transcripts in which Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen ordering President Trump to bomb Syria, stage a coup in Venezuela, arm Ukraine, escalate against Russia in America's Nuclear Posture Review, withdraw from the INF treaty and the Iran deal, undermine Russia's fossil fuel interests in Germany, expand NATO, and maintain a large military presence near Russia's border.

    ... ... ...

    Obviously I owe the world a very big apology. I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species. Clearly, because of their indisputable vindication this April the first 2019, they are definitely none of these things.

    RightLineBacker, (Edited)

    After recovering from a near heart attack...and loading my weapons in preparation of taking to the streets... I noticed it was April 1st. Funny & not funny at the same time.

    Damn! Back to my beer & popcorn.

    desertboy

    "I'm sorry for calling the Russiagaters idiots, morons, drooling imbeciles, stupid, gullible sheep, foam-brained human livestock, tinfoil pussyhat-wearing delusional conspiracy theorists, demented cold war-enabling McCarthyite bootlickers, oafish slug-headed slime creatures, energy-sucking, CIA-coddling wastes of space and oxygen, and an embarrassment to the human species"

    Me too. It's worth repeating.

    noshitsherlock

    " He then put on a pair of sunglasses and rode off on a motorcycle due east into the rising sun, while the smooth notes of a single saxophone resounded through the D.C. cityscape."

    Bwahahahaha


    [Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years. ..."
    "... It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land. ..."
    "... Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans. ..."
    "... The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other. ..."
    "... The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system. ..."
    Mar 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    S , Mar 30, 2019 8:51:37 PM | link

    @b:
    What is the purpose of making that claim?

    The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years.

    It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land.

    Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans.

    Whatever they do, it's always wrong, bad, oppressive, etc. Russians are bad because they're bad. They must be "taught a lesson", "put into their place". It would, of course, be beneficial and highly profitable for Europeans to break with Anglo-Saxons and to live in peace and harmony with Russia, but Europeans simply can not overcome their racism towards Russians. The young Europeans are just as racist, with their incessant memes about "squatting Russians in tracksuits", "drunken Russians", etc., as if there's nothing else that is notable about a country of 147 million people.

    The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other.

    The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system.

    [Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years. ..."
    "... It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land. ..."
    "... Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans. ..."
    "... The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other. ..."
    "... The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system. ..."
    Mar 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    S , Mar 30, 2019 8:51:37 PM | link

    @b:
    What is the purpose of making that claim?

    The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years.

    It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land.

    Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans.

    Whatever they do, it's always wrong, bad, oppressive, etc. Russians are bad because they're bad. They must be "taught a lesson", "put into their place". It would, of course, be beneficial and highly profitable for Europeans to break with Anglo-Saxons and to live in peace and harmony with Russia, but Europeans simply can not overcome their racism towards Russians. The young Europeans are just as racist, with their incessant memes about "squatting Russians in tracksuits", "drunken Russians", etc., as if there's nothing else that is notable about a country of 147 million people.

    The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other.

    The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system.

    [Mar 31, 2019] Taibbi On Russiagate America s Refusal To Face Why Trump Won

    Yes, "Trump was selling himself as a traitor to a corrupt class, someone who knew how soulless and greedy the ruling elite was because he was one of them. " But he turned to be a fake, a marionette who is controlled by neocons like hapless Bush II.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Last weekend, I published a book chapter criticizing the Russiagate narrative, claiming it was a years-long press error on the scale of the WMD affair heading into the Iraq war. ..."
    "... The overwhelming theme of that race, long before anyone even thought about Russia, was voter rage at the entire political system. ..."
    "... The anger wasn't just on the Republican side, where Trump humiliated the Republicans' chosen $150 million contender , Jeb Bush (who got three delegates, or $50 million per delegate ). It was also evident on the Democratic side, where a self-proclaimed "Democratic Socialist" with little money and close to no institutional support became a surprise contender . ..."
    "... Trump was gunning for votes in both parties. The core story he told on the stump was one of system-wide corruption, in which there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats. ..."
    "... Perhaps just by luck, Trump was tuned in to the fact that the triumvirate of ruling political powers in America – the two parties, the big donors and the press – were so unpopular with large parts of the population that he could win in the long haul by attracting their ire, even if he was losing battles on the way. ..."
    "... The subtext was always: I may be crude, but these people are phonies, pretending to be upset when they're making money off my bullshit . ..."
    "... Trump was selling himself as a traitor to a corrupt class, someone who knew how soulless and greedy the ruling elite was because he was one of them. ..."
    Mar 31, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Taibbi: On Russiagate & America's Refusal To Face Why Trump Won

    by Tyler Durden Sat, 03/30/2019 - 15:30 261 SHARES Authored by Matt Taibbi via RollingStone.com,

    Faulty coverage of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign later made foreign espionage a more plausible explanation for his ascent to power

    Last weekend, I published a book chapter criticizing the Russiagate narrative, claiming it was a years-long press error on the scale of the WMD affair heading into the Iraq war.

    Obviously (and I said this in detail), the WMD fiasco had a far greater real-world impact, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost and trillions in treasure wasted. Still, I thought Russiagate would do more to damage the reputation of the national news media in the end.

    A day after publishing that excerpt, a Attorney General William Barr sent his summary of the report to Congress, containing a quote filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller : "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."

    Suddenly, news articles appeared arguing people like myself and Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept were rushing to judgment , calling us bullies whose writings were intended to leave reporters "cowed" and likely to " back down from aggressive coverage of Trump ."

    This was baffling. One of the most common criticisms of people like Greenwald, Michael Tracey, Aaron Mate, Rania Khalek, Max Blumenthal, Jordan Chariton and many others is that Russiagate "skeptics" - I hate that term, because it implies skepticism isn't normal and healthy in this job - were really secret Trump partisans, part of a "horseshoe" pact between far left and far right to focus attention on the minor foibles of the center instead of Trump's more serious misdeeds. Even I received this label, and I once wrote a book about Trump called Insane Clown President .

    A typical social media complaint:

    @mtaibbi and all his deplorable followers. The truth will come out and your premature celebrations are embarrassing.

    It's irritating that I even have to address this, because my personal political views shouldn't have anything to do with how I cover anything. But just to get it out of the way: I'm no fan of Donald Trump .

    I had a well-developed opinion about him long before the 2016 race started. I once interned for Trump's nemesis-biographer, the late, great muckraker Wayne Barrett . The birther campaign of 2011 was all I ever needed to make a voting decision about the man.

    I started covering the last presidential race in 2015 just as I was finishing up a book about the death of Eric Garner called I Can't Breathe . Noting that a birther campaign started by "peripheral political curiosity and reality TV star Donald Trump" led to 41 percent of respondents in one poll believing Barack Obama was "not even American," I wrote:

    If anyone could communicate the frustration black Americans felt over Stop-and-Frisk and other neo-vagrancy laws that made black people feel like they could be arrested anywhere, it should have been Barack Obama. He'd made it all the way to the White House and was still considered to be literally trespassing by a huge plurality of the population.

    So I had no illusions about Trump. The Russia story bothered me for other reasons, mostly having to do with a general sense of the public being misled, and not even about Russia.

    The problem lay with the precursor tale to Russiagate, i.e. how Trump even got to be president in the first place.

    The 2016 campaign season brought to the surface awesome levels of political discontent. After the election, instead of wondering where that anger came from, most of the press quickly pivoted to a new tale about a Russian plot to attack our Democracy. This conveyed the impression that the election season we'd just lived through had been an aberration, thrown off the rails by an extraordinary espionage conspiracy between Trump and a cabal of evil foreigners.

    This narrative contradicted everything I'd seen traveling across America in my two years of covering the campaign. The overwhelming theme of that race, long before anyone even thought about Russia, was voter rage at the entire political system.

    The anger wasn't just on the Republican side, where Trump humiliated the Republicans' chosen $150 million contender , Jeb Bush (who got three delegates, or $50 million per delegate ). It was also evident on the Democratic side, where a self-proclaimed "Democratic Socialist" with little money and close to no institutional support became a surprise contender .

    Because of a series of press misdiagnoses before the Russiagate stories even began, much of the American public was unprepared for news of a Trump win. A cloak-and-dagger election-fixing conspiracy therefore seemed more likely than it might have otherwise to large parts of the domestic news audience, because they hadn't been prepared for anything else that would make sense.

    This was particularly true of upscale, urban, blue-leaning news consumers, who were not told to take the possibility of a Trump White House seriously.

    Priority number-one of the political class after a vulgar, out-of-work game-show host conquered the White House should have been a long period of ruthless self-examination. This story delayed that for at least two years.

    It wasn't even clear Trump whether or not wanted to win. Watching him on the trail, Trump at times went beyond seeming disinterested. There were periods where it looked like South Park's " Did I offend you? " thesis was true, and he was actively trying to lose, only the polls just wouldn't let him.

    Forget about the gift the end of Russiagate might give Trump by allowing him to spend 2020 peeing from a great height on the national press corps. The more serious issue has to be the failure to face the reality of why he won last time, because we still haven't done that.

    ... ... ...

    Trump, the billionaire, denounced us as the elitists in the room. He'd call us "bloodsuckers," "dishonest," and in one line that produced laughs considering who was saying it, " highly-paid ."

    He also did something that I immediately recognized as brilliant (or diabolical, depending on how you look at it). He dared cameramen to turn their cameras to show the size of his crowds.

    They usually wouldn't – hey, we don't work for the guy – which thrilled Trump, who would then say something to the effect of, "See! They're very dishonest people ." Audiences would turn toward us, and boo and hiss, and even throw little bits of paper and other things our way. This was unpleasant, but it was hard not to see its effectiveness: he'd re-imagined the lifeless, poll-tested format of the stump speech, turning it into menacing, personal, WWE-style theater.

    Trump was gunning for votes in both parties. The core story he told on the stump was one of system-wide corruption, in which there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats.

    ...

    Perhaps just by luck, Trump was tuned in to the fact that the triumvirate of ruling political powers in America – the two parties, the big donors and the press – were so unpopular with large parts of the population that he could win in the long haul by attracting their ire, even if he was losing battles on the way.

    ...

    The subtext was always: I may be crude, but these people are phonies, pretending to be upset when they're making money off my bullshit .

    I thought this was all nuts and couldn't believe it was happening in a real presidential campaign. But, a job is a job. My first feature on candidate Trump was called " How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable ." The key section read:

    In person, you can't miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don't want to admit it, but it's sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won:

    President Donald Trump

    It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.

    And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He's way better than average.

    Traditional Democratic audiences appeared thrilled by the piece and shared it widely. I was invited on scads of cable shows to discuss ad nauseum the "con man" line. This made me nervous, because it probably meant these people hadn't read the piece, which among other things posited the failures of America's current ruling class meant Trump's insane tactics could actually work.

    Trump was selling himself as a traitor to a corrupt class, someone who knew how soulless and greedy the ruling elite was because he was one of them.

    ...

    The only reason most blue-state media audiences had been given for Trump's poll numbers all along was racism, which was surely part of the story but not the whole picture. A lack of any other explanation meant Democratic audiences, after the shock of election night, were ready to reach for any other data point that might better explain what just happened.

    Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump."

    Post-election, Russiagate made it all worse. People could turn on their TVs at any hour of the day and see anyone from Rachel Maddow to Chris Cuomo openly reveling in Trump's troubles. This is what Fox looks like to liberal audiences.

    Worse, the "walls are closing in" theme -- two years old now -- was just a continuation of the campaign mistake, reporters confusing what they wanted to happen with what was happening . The story was always more complicated than was being represented.

    [Mar 31, 2019] US Army Major Warns Dems Trump Will Wipe The Floor In 2020 Unless You Fix Foreign Policy

    I think Trump completely discredited himself in foreign policy due to appointment of Bush II team of neocon which drive it.
    So the only chance for him to win is if US voters do not care about foreign policy. Demagogy will not work like in 2016 as he now have a dismal record including attempt in regime change in Venezuela.
    Notable quotes:
    "... the vast majority of Americans don't give a hoot about issues of war, peace, and international diplomacy. Why should they care? It's not as though anything is asked of them as citizens. By cynically ditching the draft, Tricky Dick Nixon took the wind out of the sails of current and future antiwar movements, and permanently cleaved a gap between the U.S. people and their military ..."
    "... Mothers no longer lose sleep over their teenage sons serving their country and they – along with the rest of the family – quit caring about foreign policy. Such it is, and so it will be, that the 2020 presidential election is likely to be decided by "kitchen-table" affairs like healthcare, immigration, race, and taxes. ..."
    "... In 2016, he (correctly) made Hillary"regime change" Clinton out to be the true hawk in the race. Trump, on the other hand, combined tough guy bravado (he'd "bomb the shit" out of ISIS) with earthy good sense (there'd be no more "stupid" Iraq invasions. And it worked. ..."
    "... Mark my words: if the DNC – which apparently picks the party's candidates – backs a conventional neoliberal foreign policy nominee, Trump will wipe the floor with him or her. ..."
    "... If they want to stand a chance in 2020, the Dems had better back a nominee with a clear, alternative progressive foreign policy or get one the domestic-focused candidates up to speed and fast. ..."
    "... So here's how my mental math works: a progressive candidate needs to win over libertarian-minded Republicans and Independents (think Rand Paul-types) by force of their commonsense alternative to Trump's foreign policy. ..."
    "... Still, there's more than a little reason for concern . Look at how "Nasty" Nancy Pelosi and the establishment Dems came down on Ilhan Omar for that representative's essentially accurate tweets criticizing the Israel Lobby. ..."
    "... Tulsi Gabbard, though she still looks the long shot, remains intriguing given here genuine antiwar (and combat veteran) credentials. ..."
    "... Then again, even Bernie has his foreign affairs flaws – such as reflexively denouncing the BDS movement and occasionally calling for regime change in Syria. Nevertheless, both Bernie and Tulsi demonstrate that there's some promise for fresh opposition foreign policy. ..."
    Mar 31, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by US Army Major Danny Sjursen (ret.) via TruthDig.com, Still Waiting: 2020 Fever and the Quest for a Progressive Foreign Policy

    The 2020 election will not turn on global issues – and more's the pity. After all, thanks to decades upon decades of accumulating executive power in an increasingly imperial presidency, it is in foreign affairs that the commander-in-chief possesses near dictatorial power. Conversely, in domestic policy, a hostile Congress can – just ask Barry Obama – effectively block most of a president's agenda.

    Still, the vast majority of Americans don't give a hoot about issues of war, peace, and international diplomacy. Why should they care? It's not as though anything is asked of them as citizens. By cynically ditching the draft, Tricky Dick Nixon took the wind out of the sails of current and future antiwar movements, and permanently cleaved a gap between the U.S. people and their military.

    Mothers no longer lose sleep over their teenage sons serving their country and they – along with the rest of the family – quit caring about foreign policy. Such it is, and so it will be, that the 2020 presidential election is likely to be decided by "kitchen-table" affairs like healthcare, immigration, race, and taxes.

    Be that as it may, serious observers should pay plenty of attention to international strategy.

    So, while Dems can't win the White House with foreign policy alone, they can lose it by ignoring these issues or – oh so typically – presenting a muddled overseas strategy.

    This is serious.

    Just in case there are any out there still underestimating Trump – I, for one, predict he'll win in 2020 – make no mistake, he's no pushover on foreign policy. Sure he doesn't know much – but neither does the average voter. Nonetheless, Trump is no dope. He's got the pulse of (white) voters across this country and senses that the populace is tired of spending blood and cash (but mostly its cash) on Mideast forever wars. In 2016, he (correctly) made Hillary"regime change" Clinton out to be the true hawk in the race. Trump, on the other hand, combined tough guy bravado (he'd "bomb the shit" out of ISIS) with earthy good sense (there'd be no more "stupid" Iraq invasions. And it worked.

    So, with 2020 in mind, whether you're a progressive, a libertarian, or just a Trump-hater, its vital that the opposition (most likely the Dems) nominate a candidate who can hang with Trump in foreign affairs.

    Mark my words: if the DNC – which apparently picks the party's candidates – backs a conventional neoliberal foreign policy nominee, Trump will wipe the floor with him or her. And, if the Dems national security platform reads like a jumbled, jargon-filled sheet full of boring (like it usually does) than Joe the proverbial plumber is going to back The Donald.

    That's what has me worried. As one candidate after another enters an already crowded field, this author is left wondering whether any of them are commander-in-chief material. So far I see a huge crew (Liz, Kirsten, Kamala, Beto) that live and die by domestic policy; two potentially conventional foreign policy guys (Biden and Booker); and two other wildcards (Bernie and Tulsi). That's not a comprehensive list, but you get the point. If they want to stand a chance in 2020, the Dems had better back a nominee with a clear, alternative progressive foreign policy or get one the domestic-focused candidates up to speed and fast.

    So here's how my mental math works: a progressive candidate needs to win over libertarian-minded Republicans and Independents (think Rand Paul-types) by force of their commonsense alternative to Trump's foreign policy. That means getting the troops out of the Mideast, pulling the plug from other mindless interventions and cutting runaway defense spending. Then, and only then, can the two sides begin arguing about what to do with the resultant cash surplus. That's an argument for another day, sure, but here and now our imaginary Democratic (or Third Party?) nominee needs to end the wars and curtail the excesses of empire. I know many libertarians – some still nominally Republican – who could get behind that agenda pretty quickly!

    Still, there's more than a little reason for concern . Look at how "Nasty" Nancy Pelosi and the establishment Dems came down on Ilhan Omar for that representative's essentially accurate tweets criticizing the Israel Lobby. Then there's Joe Biden. Look, he's definitely running. He's also definitely been wrong time and again on foreign policy – like how he was for the Iraq War before he was against it (how'd that turn out for John Kerry in 2004?). And, for all the talk of a progressive "blue wave" in the party ranks, Biden still polls as the top choice for Democratic primary voters. Yikes.

    Behind him, thankfully, is old Bernie – who sometimes shows potential in foreign affairs – the only candidate who has both backed Omar and been consistent in a career of generally antiwar votes. Still, Bernie won his household name with domestic policy one-liners – trashing Wall Street and pushing populist economic tropes. Whether he can transform into a more balanced candidate, one that can confidently compose and deliver a strong alternative foreign policy remains to be seen.

    Tulsi Gabbard, though she still looks the long shot, remains intriguing given here genuine antiwar (and combat veteran) credentials. Still, she'll have her hands full overcoming problematic skeletons in her own closet: ties to Indian Hindu nationalists, opposition to the Iran deal, and sometime backing of authoritarians and Islamophobes. Then again, even Bernie has his foreign affairs flaws – such as reflexively denouncing the BDS movement and occasionally calling for regime change in Syria. Nevertheless, both Bernie and Tulsi demonstrate that there's some promise for fresh opposition foreign policy.

    Here's (some) of what that would look like:

    Our imaginary candidate would need to convey this commonsense course to a war-weary American people as plainly and coherently as Trump can. No jargon, no Clintonian wonky crap – simple and to the point. Imagine it: a commonsense course for a clear-eyed country!

    Less war and more investment at home. Less war and more middle-class tax cuts. Whatever. That fight will come and the progressives and independents/libertarians will fight it out. For now, though, what's essential is checking the war machine and military-industrial behemoth before its too late (it may be already!).

    None of this will be easy or likely, of course. But count on this much: the establishment Democrats, media-mogul "left," and centrist DC think tanks won't save us from the imperial monster or deliver a Trump-defeating strategy in foreign affairs. The Mueller-will-save-us, Mattis-was-a-hero, reflexively anti-Trump, born-again hawks like Rachel Maddow and the other disappointing chumps at MSNBC or CNN aren't on our side. Worse yet, they're born losers when it comes to delivering elections.

    All of this may be far-fetched, but is not impossible. Neither libertarians nor progressives can countenance Trump. Nor should they. One of their only true hopes for compromise rest on foreign policy and a genuine antiwar message. It can be done.

    Look, on a personal note, even America's beloved and over-adulated soldiers are reachable on this issue – that's how you know the foreign policy alliance has potential! For every rah-rah war-fever cheerleader in uniform, there's an exhausted foot soldier on his Nth tour in the Mideast. There's also a huge chunk ( 40%! ) who are racial minorities – usually a reliably anti-Trump demographic. Finally, among the white men and women in uniform I've personally met a solid core of libertarians. And the data backs up my anecdotal observation – Ron Paul was highly popular among active-duty military members and their families. A progressive foreign policy alliance with the libertarian wing of Republicans and Independents would sell better with these such voters both in and out of uniform. You know the type: sick of war but just as sick of stereotypical liberal snowflakes.

    So here's a plea to the "opposition" such at it is: avoid the usual mistakes – don't cede foreign affairs to the Trump and the Republicans; don't nominate anyone remotely resembling Joe Biden; don't alienate libertarians and independents with wonky or muddled international policy.

    Try something new. Like winning

    * * *

    Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer and regular contributor to antiwar.com . He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet .

    [Mar 31, 2019] Issue Brief Distinguishing Disinformation from Propaganda, Misinformation, and "Fake News" NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY

    Mar 31, 2019 | www.ned.org

    This is from culture revolution experts in NED ;-)

    Issue Brief: Distinguishing Disinformation from Propaganda, Misinformation, and "Fake News" Published on October 17, 2017

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    In This Brief: What is Disinformation? Is it Different from Propaganda?

    Disinformation is a relatively new word. Most observers trace it back to the Russian word dezinformatsiya , which Soviet planners in the 1950s defined as "dissemination (in the press, on the radio, etc.) of false reports intended to mislead public opinion." Others suggest that the earliest use of the term originated in 1930s Nazi Germany. In either case, it is much younger (and less commonly used) than ' propaganda, ' which originated in the 1600s and generally connotes the selective use of information for political effect.

    Whether and to what degree these terms overlap is subject to debate. Some define propaganda as the use of non-rational arguments to either advance or undermine a political ideal, and use disinformation as an alternative name for undermining propaganda. Others consider them to be separate concepts altogether. One popular distinction holds that disinformation also describes politically motivated messaging designed explicitly to engender public cynicism, uncertainty, apathy, distrust, and paranoia, all of which disincentivize citizen engagement and mobilization for social or political change. "Misinformation," meanwhile, generally refers to the inadvertent sharing of false information.

    Analysts generally agree that disinformation is always purposeful and not necessarily composed of outright lies or fabrications. It can be composed of mostly true facts, stripped of context or blended with falsehoods to support the intended message, and is always part of a larger plan or agenda. In the Russian context, observers have described its use to pursue Moscow's foreign policy goals through a "4D" offensive: dismiss an opponent's claims or allegations, distort events to serve political purposes, distract from one's own activities, and dismay those who might otherwise oppose one's goals.

    Analysts generally agree that disinformation is always purposeful and not necessarily composed of outright lies or fabrications. It can be composed of mostly true facts, stripped of context or blended with falsehoods to support the intended message, and is always part of a larger plan or agenda."

    Disinformation in the Digital Age

    The reemerging interest in disinformation is not because such techniques are novel. There are similarities between the contemporary 4D model and, for example, Soviet active measures . Rather, a growing consensus asserts that while the use of disinformation is not new, the digital revolution has greatly enhanced public vulnerability to manipulation by information -- a trend which is predicted to continue .

    In part, these changes have been wrought by the advent of new social media platforms and their growing dominance over advertising revenues. This shift in the media funding environment has weakened traditional media gatekeepers, changed incentives for content providers, and promoted the rise of unprofessional and/or unscrupulous outlets capable of drawing large audiences at a low cost. As digital advertising assumes an ever-larger role in shaping news consumption, targeted advertising allows for more sophisticated forms of propaganda: for example, in September of 2017, Facebook disclosed that roughly 3,000 ads related to divisive US political issues were purchased by a network of 470 accounts and pages suspected to be run out of Russia. The company says that at least a quarter of those ads were geographically targeted. Twitter later deleted two hundred accounts linked to those same Facebook accounts and pages and revealed that in 2016, the Russian state-funded broadcaster RT spent $274,100 on advertising targeting users in the United States.

    Research suggests the total scale of "low quality political information" on those platforms during the 2016 US elections was much larger, particularly in swing states. The degree of Russian influence on this market for digital disinformation is unknown; post-election, researchers are launching new efforts to track and analyze it.

    Although there is no universal definition, fake news generally refers to misleading content found on the internet, especially on social media."

    The Rise of 'Fake News'

    The role of disinformation in recent elections has given rise to another distinct, but related, term: ' fake news .'

    Although there is no universal definition, fake news generally refers to misleading content found on the internet, especially on social media. One analysis lays out five types of fake news, including intentionally deceptive content, jokes taken at face value, large-scale hoaxes, slanted reporting of real facts, and coverage where the truth may be uncertain or contentious. These are not new: an example of fake news from 2011 involves websites masquerading as real news organizations to spread false information about the health benefits of acai berries.

    Much of this content is produced by for-profit websites and Facebook pages gaming the platform for advertising revenue. By producing tailored false content targeted at the views, concerns, and preferences of social media users, these pages can generate tens of thousands of interactions and thousands of dollars a month. In 2015, Facebook began taking steps to curtail this content, which it called a form of "news feed spam." By 2016, it became clear the problem was growing out of control. Fabricated and fiercely partisan political content -- much of it produced abroad for profit -- in some instances outpaced engagement with credible mainstream news outlets.

    Facebook initially downplayed the potential influence of fake news, although it also pledged to pursue a response involving expanded partnerships with fact-checkers, increased emphasis on detection and reporting, warning labels for untrustworthy stories, and a crackdown on for-profit fake news pages. Twitter also reacted , developing an experimental prototype feature to allow users to report "fake news" and exploring the use of machine learning to detect automated accounts spreading political content.

    Is Fake News Disinformation?

    More often than not, fake news does not meet the definition of disinformation or propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to a larger agenda. One attempt to classify various types of misleading and manipulative news content separates misinformation (inadvertent sharing of false information) from disinformation, which is deliberate, and arranges examples by motivation and degree of deception. Most of the fake news described above falls somewhere in the middle: not inadvertent, but motivated by profit rather than influence. To the degree that its purpose can be described as political, fake news begins to resemble more insidious content.

    Fake news' political prominence does have lessons for analysts of disinformation. Fake news draws audiences because it validates their political preconceptions and worldviews, capitalizing on media consumers' confirmation bias . Many argue that because social media curates content according to user preferences, it has a polarizing effect that leaves consumers more vulnerable to manipulation in this way. Political actors have been able to use this to their advantage by producing incendiary content that spreads rapidly through grassroots online networks (some call this " political astroturfing ").

    More often than not, fake news does not meet the definition of disinformation or propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to a larger agenda."

    Marketing, Public Affairs, Public Diplomacy, and other "Information Campaigns"

    Some analysts also differentiate between various types of "information campaigns" -- organized attempts to communicate with large groups of individuals -- which may include marketing, public affairs, and public diplomacy. All of these terms are worth disentangling from each other and from propaganda and disinformation writ large.

    Marketing and public relations rely on a mix of facts, opinions, and emotional cues to persuade audiences and build affinity between individuals and brands or organizations. As promotional activities meant to augment or protect the reputation of the messenger, their goals may be commercial or political, or they may simply aim to generate publicity. Similarly promotional is public diplomacy, which states utilize to represent their viewpoints to foreign audiences and promote positive associations with that country among foreign publics. Done well, public diplomacy distinguishes itself from propaganda by never intentionally spreading false information or relying on non-rational means of persuasion (though marketing and public relations, of course, may rely on such non-rational devices).

    Marketing, public relations, public diplomacy, and similar information campaigns are all related to the field of " strategic communication ," broadly defined as the purposeful use of information and messaging to advance the mission of a given organization, be it a corporate, government, non-profit, or military actor. In the military context, a 2007 paper from the U.S. Army War College emphasizes that strategic communication in a military context aims to influence adversaries, reassure allies, and persuade publics. Because it may be impossible to deceive one of these audiences without deceiving others, some advocate that "deception should be rigorously forbidden in strategic communication" and that the use of disinformation should never fall under the rubric of strategic communication.

    Done well, public diplomacy distinguishes itself from propaganda by never intentionally spreading false information or relying on non-rational means of persuasion."

    Intent as a Distinguishing Feature

    Some argue the intent of the messenger is crucial to distinguishing between different types of messages. This makes it difficult to draw a bright, clear line between marketing, public relations, and public diplomacy, on one side, and propaganda and disinformation on the other. This is especially true when the content in question includes both objective fact and subjective interpretation but no clear falsehood, because it may be unclear whether the message reflects a genuine perspective or an intent to mislead. When content does include falsehoods, it may be unclear whether they are accidental or purposeful.

    If an information campaign uses falsehoods and emotional appeals not to persuade or attract but to disrupt, divide, confuse, or otherwise damage target audiences' understanding or political cohesion, it more closely aligns with disinformation and its undermining function. This is not solely the realm of the state: many activities undertaken by non-state actors may also fit this description.

    If an information campaign uses falsehoods and emotional appeals not to persuade or attract but to disrupt, divide, confuse, or otherwise damage target audiences' understanding or political cohesion, it more closely aligns with disinformation and its undermining function."

    Information Operations as a Tool of Political Influence

    Information campaigns with these goals in mind are now sometimes referred to as "information operations," a term until recently used primarily by defense officials in referring broadly to the use of communications in military operations. In April 2017, Facebook described "information (or influence) operations" on the platform, which aim "to achieve a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome" using "a combination of methods, such as false news, disinformation, or networks of fake accounts (false amplifiers) aimed at manipulating public opinion." In the run-up to the 2017 French presidential election, Facebook deleted 30,000 fake French accounts from the platform, providing a sense of the scale these operations can reach.

    In that election, an information operation ( likely of Russian origin ) released hacked documents just before the beginning of a legally mandated election news blackout in order to damage the campaign of Emmanuel Macron, the eventual winner. The manipulation of information has been a feature of Syria's civil war since the conflict's beginning. Research from a diverse set of country case studies suggests that a wide array of political, military, and private actors now routinely use social media to manipulate public opinion. Italy's populist Five Star Movement, for instance, is tied to a large constellation of online disinformation outlets. Taiwanese democracy must grapple with both domestic and cross-strait sources of disinformation. Information operations, including those involving the use of disinformation during elections, are likely to remain a tool of political influence well into the foreseeable future.

    Brief prepared by Dean Jackson, International Forum for Democratic Studies.

    Image Credit: kaboompics/Pixabay (Creative Commons)

    [Mar 31, 2019] Disinfo Maginot Line Protecting EU From Russian Influence By Manufacturing History

    Mar 31, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Disinfo Maginot Line: Protecting EU From "Russian Influence" By Manufacturing History

    by Tyler Durden Sun, 03/31/2019 - 07:00 68 SHARES Authored by Nina Cross via 21stCenturyWire.com,

    It is now apparent with the release of the Mueller investigation findings , that the great storm that has embattled the US government and establishment since 2016 over supposed Russia-Trump collusion during the US elections, originates not from a genuine tangible source, but a constant stream of rhetoric driven by partisan corporate media. One certainty though is the Western narrative of Russia as a 'malign influence' will not go away.

    While America's liberal establishment continues to rage at Trump, Europe allies, under the influence of Washington, maintain their aggressive stance towards Russia following the catastrophic US meddling in Ukraine in 2014 and the subsequent reunification of Crimea with Russia .

    The question is how can the narrative of 'malign Russian influence' be kept going? Mainstream media will continue its role in this, but Western governments are also pouring resources into promulgating certain narratives while containing others.

    This week, hackers released more documents from the UK government-funded project known as the Integrity Initiative , revealing British government plans to build an umbrella network of organisations across Europe to counter 'Russian disinformation'.

    The following is a look at one of the EU projects already operating to ensure European populations do not stray from this constructed narrative that at times crosses over into real xenophobic racism, or Russophobia. While researching this phenomenon, it was impossible not to find some of the EU's counter-propaganda material quite funny.

    If we want to know the meaning of disinformation, the American think tank known as the National Endowment for Democracy which funds regime change in the service of US corporate interests, has its own definition , but it's not important – so long as we believe Russia or the Nazis invented the problem. In fact, if we search the word 'disinformation,' a good number of the results tell us it originated in Russia and is the baby of Stalin or the KGB. If we are not careful, we could end up thinking that dishonesty is an inherent characteristic of Russians, a view actually promoted by the former US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper , who, coincidentally was caught ' wilfully ' lying to Congress.

    The view of Russians being hard-wired for corruption was also promoted by the New York Times in an article published in February, The Putin I knew; the Putin I know , written by Franz J Sedelmeyer, exposing deep prejudice behind the corporate media's shallow identity politics.

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    But this narrative fails to credit the CIA, which has spent decades crafting skills carrying out the most grotesque deceptions in history targeted abroad and at home. To leave out the role of the CIA in disinformation must be the equivalent of writing an omelette recipe and leaving out the eggs. In fact, the CIA doesn't just carry out disinformation campaigns, as Victor Marchetti, former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA described it: the CIA manufactures history . Not to recognise American intelligence services or government in the history of disinformation while painting Russia as its mother is to deprive America of the recognition it deserves for one of its most notable institutions. Somewhat ironically, you can learn all about the history of disinformation from both Google and the National Endowment for Democracy which are two entities which have received financial support from the CIA.

    What about the EU? Does Brussels think that Russia is an inherently dishonest nation? Are they aware that the CIA could be manufacturing Europe's history this very moment? Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) so concerned about disinformation might want to study the documented atrocities of the CIA, some of which were carried out in Europe. Perhaps they are not aware of the US intelligence services' role in the history of subterfuge in Europe:

    memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

    Paradoxically, given the probability rate of the CIA meddling in the EU, MEPs should consider putting out a public warning:

    The CIA is the most likely source of disinformation in Europe today. It manufactures crises – and we've plenty of those.

    But none of it. Instead, the European Parliament is fixated on ensuring its populations fear Russia and are accepting of the narratives pushed on them. The EU released a new report this month repeating the narratives it has been accumulating to justify increasing actions against Russia, particularly since 2014 following the reunification of Crimea. It has passed a resolution stating that Russia could no longer be considered a strategic partner of the EU:

    While condemning the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea, as well as Russia's continued violation of the territorial integrity of Georgia and Moldova, Members stressed that the EU cannot envisage a gradual return to business as usual until Russia fully implements the Minsk Agreement and restores the territorial integrity of Ukraine

    Members condemned Russia's involvement in the Skripal case, and in disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks carried out by the Russian intelligence services aimed at destabilising public and private communications infrastructure and at increasing tensions within the EU and its Member States

    They are concerned about the relations between the Russian government and the extreme right-wing and populist nationalist parties and governments in the EU, such as in Hungary. They also recalled that the interference of Russian state actors in the referendum campaign on Brexit is currently under investigation by the UK authorities

    As Russia can no longer be considered a strategic partner in the current circumstances, Members believe that the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement should be reconsidered

    Ministry of Truth?

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    As well as the coordinated strategic isolation of Russia by the EU, members of the G7 have signed up to a Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM) designed to:

    see hostile states publicly 'called out' for their egregious behaviour – with coordinated international attribution of cyber and other attacks.

    The agreement involves sharing intelligence , attribution of hostile activity and forming a common narrative and response, effectively a military-like propaganda coordination between the countries that can be applied for a chosen agenda.

    To protect its version of history the EU has created mechanisms to fight off alternative realities, narratives, or truths – which ever word fits – claiming any fact or opinion contrary to those of the stated EU decree must be condemned as pro-Kremlin, pro-Russian, or 'Putinist', a derogatory depiction presently supported by the corporate media. The EU claims these 'alternative narratives' are the product of a Russian disinformation campaign and has developed resources to 'disprove' that disinformation. These are the EU vanguards of truth set up and funded by the European Council in 2015: the European External Action Service East Stratcom Task Force or unaffectionately known here as Team East Stratcom . A brief study of their work only leads to further concerns about who is manufacturing history, but also to the likely conclusion that Team East Stratcom is made up of media studies students who drink beer and watch RT all day.

    Here's how Team East Stratcom describes itself in a Q&A:

    Does the team engage in counter-propaganda?

    No. It identifies and corrects disinformation

    Counter-propaganda vs correct disinformation (you say tomatto, I say tomayto).

    Julian King, the EU's security commissioner, has described it as a counter-propaganda cell . Come on Brussels, make up your mind.

    What does Team East StratCom do, and what is the role of its website EUVDisinfo ?

    The Task Force reports on and analyses disinformation trends, explains and exposes disinformation narratives, and raises awareness of disinformation coming from Russian State, Russian sources and spread in the Eastern neighbourhood media space

    RUSSIAN MEMES: Official EU conspiracy theory diagram explains how 'Russian disinfo' permeates mainstream western discourse ( EU External Action 2017)

    Firstly, who defines what is disinformation? Is it just assumed that any information emanating from a Russian media outlet is automatically disinformation?

    Narratives and sources. Does this mean that any narrative which matches a Russian one is then classed as Russian in origin? If a Western alternative media outlet publishes a narrative which happens to match that of a Russian media outlet, does this then mean that the said alternative media outlet is 'under Russian influence', or 'in league with the Kremlin'? Could such a politicized method of labelling lead to potential McCarthyite targeting of independent journalists?

    The Task Force does not target opinions and does not seek to "blacklist" anyone. It checks facts and identifies disinformation coming from Russian State, Russian language and Eastern Neighbourhood media. It focuses on the disinformation message, not the messenger.

    Yet, individual journalists are identified in many of these so-called 'disinformation cases' and described as supporters of one leader or other on the EU's list of bogeymen. Team East StratCom – there is no need to be shy about McCarthyism. Certain mainstream media stalwarts of establishment narratives are more upfront about whom they do and do not want in the club, as Oliver Kamm of The Times has demonstrated:

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    For an agency already struggling with the concept of truth, Team East StratCom is not off to a great start.

    So how does Team East StratCom protect EU narratives? The European Council made it clear in 2015 they wanted to counter narratives about regime change in Ukraine and its consequences. In fact, about half of its 'disinformation cases' are about Ukraine:

    Ukraine tops the EUvsDisinfo database as the most frequent target with 461 references among a total of 1,000 disinformation cases reported in the course of 2018.

    So how does Team East StratCom counter propaganda sorry correct disinformation? The following are a few case samples that help to illuminate their methodologies (although with a budget increase from €1.1 million in 2018 to €3 million in 2019, it may find new and diverse ones):

    Disinformation Example 1: Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe

    Team East StratCom argues that undermining the credibility of Ukraine benefits Russia. It reports that RT Deutsch described Ukraine as the most corrupt country in Europe. It then tries to debunk this using Transparency International 's corruption perception index, a chart which is created and paid for by Western neoliberal governments – the same ones that help to keep corrupt governments in power so long as they provide opportunities to serve Western corporate interests.

    Team East StratCom tries to disprove this case by drawing our attention away from corruption in Europe to corruption worldwide. This puts 60 countries ahead of Ukraine. That is sneaky Team East StratCom because, aside from Russia, which we must believe is the most corrupt country in Europe, Ukraine actually tops the list. So why does the EU want to hide the extent of corruption in Ukraine and is it the only thing being hidden about the country? According to Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova the West wants to stop the world from recognising Crimea as part of Russia's territory. In order to do this it must maintain a manufactured reality; the narrative of Ukraine being a victim of Russian aggression and in no way a liability due, at least in part, to the West's meddling. This approach also entails downplaying any suggestion that the West planned and orchestrated a coup d'etat in Kiev in February 2014.

    Disinformation Example 2: Far-right groups in Ukraine

    This extract by Team East StratCom criticises the reporting of far-right groups in Ukraine:

    Dehumanise, demoralise, make Ukraine the guilty party

    Pro-Kremlin disinformation about Ukraine targets audiences in Russia, in Ukraine and in third countries, including the West. Domestic audiences in Russia are e.g. faced with narratives which dehumanise Ukrainians and show the authorities in Kyiv as a cynical modern heir to 20th century Nazism. Such a strategy can turn Ukraine into an acceptable target of the Kremlin's military aggression.

    The involvement of far right groups in the run-up to and during 2014 Maidan events and since , has already been widely reported across much of the global mainstream media, for example, here , here , here , here and here , as well as in alternate media. To suggest that this narrative is Russian disinformation is ludicrous. What's more, the European Parliament have already recognised in 2012 the threat of the far-right parties like Svoboda and Pravi Sektor in Ukrainian politics:

    Parliament goes on to express concern about the rising nationalistic sentiment in Ukraine, expressed in support for the Svoboda Party, which, as a result, is one of the two new parties to enter the Verkhovna Rada. It recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views go against the EU's fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic parties in the Verkhovna Rada not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party.

    Team East StratCom, you are implying the EU dehumanised Ukraine! But then the EU did later drop its objection as members of the same racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic party gained positions in Ukraine's government , so perhaps you will be forgiven. Perhaps sowing a little confusion of its own, is Brussels.

    Disinformation Example 3: Russia is depicted as a 'defender' and a 'peacekeeper' and the West – as the villain .

    Team East Stratcom likes using Twitter graphics as evidence when 'disproving pro-Kremlin disinformation.' Never mind history, reason and common sense – just bring out a nice Twitter graphic! According to disinfo mavens, any spike in Twitter activity with the words 'Russia' 'Moscow' or 'Putin' in reference to Venezuela is proof of a 'pro-Kremlin' disinformation campaign, says Team East StratCom. Here is their graphical chart of Twitter traffic:

    But Russia is an ally of Venezuela so why would this not be reflected on Twitter when there is a blatant attempt by a Western aggressor to impose its military and economic will on Venezuela? Such was the situation in February when the US tried to pressure the Venezuelan government into allowing in trucks, supposedly carrying humanitarian aid, into the country. Aid as a Trojan Horse for weapons has historical context, especially with regards to the US and its new special envoy to Venezuela, Elliot Abrams , a convicted war criminal who illicitly supplied weapons to death squads in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala on behalf of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s. Now that he is special envoy to Venezuela, it is common sense to suspect foul play. Can such people really be seen as peacekeepers, Team East Stratcom? And using a Twitter graphic to divert attention from a flagrant coup attempt by an aggressive power is more than a little contemptible. What's more, a few days afterwards, one of those trucks carrying supplies was found to contain nails and other materials useful for making barricades:

    me title=

    And so to sum up the tactics used by Team East StratCom for 'disproving pro-Kremlin disinformation', based on the above cases alone, a list could include for starters:

    me title=

    But Team East StratCom can't erase history or delete context or bore us half to death with those Twitter graphics and still expect to retain their credibility.

    What's more, given the Russia-Trump collusion narrative has been exposed as a hoax, Team East StratCom really ought to let that one go .

    Anyone for a pint?

    [Mar 31, 2019] Woodward was Naval intelligence. Watergate was the coup that established the Bush cabal.

    Mar 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    GeorgeV , Mar 30, 2019 2:43:57 PM | 12

    Woodward was Naval intelligence. Watergate was the coup that established the Bush cabal.

    [aside for b: thank you for forcing us to beacon to Google our presence and comments on your site. The "secret team" says danke.]

    ">link

    Realist , Mar 30, 2019 4:31:08 PM | link

    OMG! How far the mighty MSM doyen The Washington Post has fallen. Those halcyon days of Woodward and Bernstein are now but a distant memory. The shinning victory of driving the hated President Richard Nixon from high office ... a ... myth ... morons ... We the people ...

    [Mar 31, 2019] Russiagate The Great Tragic Comedy of Modern Journalism

    Mar 31, 2019 | blog.usejournal.com

    And then Stephen Cohen of The Nation , another voice of reason, sent me a copy of his book, " War With Russia? " It's a collection of his heretical writings about our new, unnecessary Cold War, and the opening essay , adapted from a talk he gave in Washington D.C., made me ashamed of my silence.

    "Some people who privately share our concerns  --  again, in Congress, the media, universities and think tanks  --  do not speak out at all. For whatever reason  --  concern about being stigmatized, about their career, personal disposition  --  they are silent. But in our democracy, where the cost of dissent is relatively low, silence is no longer a patriotic option," Cohen wrote, adding, "We should exempt from this imperative young people, who have more to lose. A few have sought my guidance, and I always advise, 'Even petty penalties for dissent in regard to Russia could adversely affect your career. At this stage of life, your first obligation is to your family and thus to your future prospects. Your time to fight lies ahead'."

    Well, what was my excuse?

    Special Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller has now turned in his findings, and there's not much there. For weeks beforehand, mainstream media warned about this  --  exhorting readers against succumbing to feeling "disappointed".

    Disappointed? I guess, as my friend Taibbi has noted , it would have been an immense relief had the U.S. president been found to be a high-level traitor. We could have all brought picnic lunches to his execution.

    Right before the species-ending war with Russia.

    In their fanatic loyalty to the narrative, what used to be my favorite media have stridently reminded us that, Mueller aside, "it's not over!" The "focus of the investigation" will move now to the New York prosecutors, to House committees. The American intelligentsia will continue to dream up wild theories  --  they'll be Scotch-taped on every vertical surface, connected by bits of yarn and magic marker scribbles and hyperverbal mania.

    The question now is, has the Mueller report finally freed up the rest of us to challenge the more insane flights of fantasy? Or is it instead so close to the 2020 presidential elections  --  and so legally dangerous for some of the intelligence insiders who have tried to bring down the president  --  that skeptical journalists more than ever will be bullied to keep silent?

    Rootless Whataboutism

    As a test case  --  a first step on the road to journalistic recovery  --  can I suggest we at least retire the insane, Orwellian term "whataboutism?"

    Whataboutism really deserves consideration as a "Word of the Year", and not in a good way. There have been multiple non-ironic media reports about this odious concept, on NPR , in the Huffington Post , in The Washington Post , you name it.

    "His campaign may or may not have conspired with Moscow," The Washington Post told us awhile back, "but President Trump has routinely employed a durable old Soviet propaganda tactic 'whataboutism,' the practice of short-circuiting an argument by asserting moral equivalency between two things that aren't necessarily comparable."

    NPR's version also claims that whataboutism is a Soviet-tainted practice. "It's not exactly a complicated tactic  --  any grade-schooler can master the 'yeah-well-you-suck-too-so-there' defense," NPR says. "But it came to be associated with the USSR because of the Soviet Union's heavy reliance upon whataboutism throughout the Cold War and afterward, as Russia."

    Yet in my experience, it's not so much a Soviet tactic as an American one  --  specifically, it's a way of demanding a loyalty oath to the anti-Trump resistance.

    I have occasionally dared express skepticism about the entire overblown story that Russia was involved in our 2016 elections at all. That's right. I don't buy it. I am not entirely convinced that "Russian bots and trolls" infected anyone's mind by, say, taking positions both for and against gun control after the Parkland high school mass shooting, or by setting up anti-masturbation hotlines , or by giving bad reviews to "Star Wars: the Last Jedi."

    I am also not entirely convinced that the Russians, having supposedly decided at the highest levels of their government to try to sink Hilary Clinton's candidacy, couldn't think of anything more clever than to spear-phish campaign manager John Podesta's G-mail.

    Nor do I share the concerns of The Times of London that the Russian animated cartoon "Masha and the Bear" is part of a soft propaganda drive to weaken the minds of Estonian children ahead of their eventual annexation by Red Army tanks.

    Yet before I can even offer any subtler qualification of all this  --  sure, there is Russian-government, let's say, "illicit computer and social media activity" out there, mixed with a lot of other noise signals (click-bait farms, which explains at least some of the infamous Internet Research Agency's activities; ordinary Russians with pro-Kremlin positions and personal Facebook accounts; and yes, people sitting on their beds who weigh 400 pounds), but it has to be weighed against  --  I'll be cut off.

    "That's whataboutism ," I've been told flatly.

    It's actually not   --  that doesn't even meet the absurd quasi-official definitions of this new Kafkaesque term  --  but that's the whole point. Disagreement is by its very nature whataboutist . Every skeptical question, after all, could technically begin, "But what about ?"

    Of course, it's far, far worse if I truly commit a whataboutism and  --   God forbid! God forbid! – I express curiosity about The New York Times reporting about millions flowing to the Clintons and associated with the Russian purchase of American uranium mines.

    Whataboutism! It's so comparable to the old Soviet thought crimes  --  Trotskyite, wrecker, cosmopolitan, rootless cosmopolitanism Every time I hear someone flag a statement as guilty of whataboutism, I mentally add " rootless whataboutism."

    People tell me Mueller missed the point. It's about Russian oligarch and Kremlin money, invested in Trump real estate  --  it's not over! All hail the Southern District prosecutors! OK, let's see it, I'm open to that possibility. But if all Russian money is tainted just because it's "oligarchical"  --  good luck defining that !  --  then is it O.K. for the spouse of then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to take $500,000 for a single hour's work, a speech in Moscow, for one of the most famous "oligarch" banks?

    "That's whataboutism! NPR and The Washington Post say that's a Soviet-favored tactic! Your loyalty is thus suspect two-fold. Have you had contact with any Russian nationals?"

    Communists and Crickets

    "EVIDENCE POINTS TO RUSSIA AS MAIN SUSPECT IN BRAIN INJURY ATTACKS ON DOZENS OF U.S. DIPLOMATS" was the report by MSNBC in September 2017, and they flogged that big scoop for months, and have never really apologized for it.

    Two dozen American diplomats in Cuba suffered headaches, dizziness and other vague symptoms they blamed on strange sounds  --  sounds some of them tape-recorded and supplied to journalists, doctors and the government. "It sounds sort of like a mass of crickets," was the opening line of the Associated Press report about the recordings (which you can listen to yourself here ).

    But no. Not crickets. As MSNBC reported, our intelligence services had intercepted Russian communications (!) revealing the sounds were "some kind of microwave weapon," one so sophisticated that our top government minds were at a loss.

    We might not know how it works, MSNBC reported, but we did know it was a weapon, and "now Russia is the leading suspect."

    "This is not an accident," reported anchorwoman Andrea Mitchell then. "This is not a microwave listening device gone bad. This is an attack  --  against American diplomats and intelligence officers, and this was targeting."

    What an amazing allegation. The Russian government was beaming a mysterious, high-tech weapon at our citizens ; we had intercepted communications that made this clear.

    For more than a year, I and colleagues with Russia-reporting experience would be grilled about this, and would just have to shrug apologetically. We just didn't know what to say. It didn't make a lot of face-value sense  --  why exactly would Russian agents, amid all this rabid anti-Russia hysteria, beam a secret brain-frying weapon at two-dozen random American diplomats and their family members in Cuba, for weeks apparently? What would be the logic behind giving these random-seeming people headaches and making them dizzy and even causing "brain injuries similar to concussions"?

    As a physician, I also shared the s kepticism of colleagues published about this in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Playing odds, I agreed with those critics that I would have assumed either a mass psychogenic illness or a viral infection more likely etiologies than a secret Siberian death ray. I also read "brain injuries similar to concussions" as, "brain injuries that don't show up on objective testing." (Of course, I've not examined any of these patients or reviewed their cases so it's not for me to say.)

    But in our fevered Russophobic environment, no one wanted to entertain alternative scenarios  --  after all, we don't even understand this sophisticated weapon, which our intelligence agencies assure us (anonymously) they have intercepted Russian communications bragging about, so how dare we debate the logic behind its use? (Maybe this is how they control the president!)

    Then three months ago, American scientists published in a peer-review journal their analysis of the dastardly recordings and identified the sounds : Crickets. Caribbean crickets.

    Specifically, the echoing call of the male, short-tailed indies. During mating season.

    But did MSNBC apologize, or retract?

    Crickets.

    Instead, during a historically cold week this winter, MSNBC star Rachel Maddow used the excuse of a government panel about energy security to go on a Jack D. Ripper about Russia someday deciding to freeze middle America to death.

    "It is like negative 50 degrees in the Dakotas right now. What would happen if Russia killed the power in Fargo today? What would happen if all the natural gas lines that service Sioux Falls just 'poofed', on the coldest day in recent memories, and it wasn't in our power whether or not to turn them back on?" Maddow asked . "What would you do if you lost heat indefinitely  --  as the act of a foreign power!  --  on the same day the temperature in your front yard matched the temperature in Antarctica? I mean, what would you and your family do?"

    Gee, I don't know Rachel. What would my family and I do if Russia launched a nuclear weapon at my front yard? I guess we'd all die. I guess I don't know who to trust anymore, I feel exhausted by the news, sick of it all, I just want to stop caring, and you seem to feel the same, and omigosh Rachel, we've been infected by the red virus!

    'They Hate our Freedoms'

    James Comey, the former FBI director, testified before the Senate after his firing that the Russians are "coming after America," because, "They think that this great experiment of ours is a threat to them, and so they're going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as possible."

    Right. It's because "they hate our freedoms."

    Where have I heard that before?

    People had been waiting breathlessly for Mueller's report, but in reality, everything we needed to know was right there in the first report  --  the January 6, 2017, grand announcement, the big reveal by our Intelligence Community  --  the consensus of CIA, FBI and NSA  --  "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections."

    I remember finishing that report at the time and thinking: Holy Cow, they have nothing.

    Nothing!

    Of the 15 pages with any meat to them in that report, seven were a long, bizarre complaint about the existence and activities of RT (formerly Russia Today ), the Kremlin-sponsored English-language news channel.

    Our intelligence agencies reported that RT has become "the most-watched foreign news channel in the UK," had more YouTube viewers than the BBC or CNN , and was surpassing al-Jazeera in New York and Washington D.C. ( Voice of America , which is the U.S. government version of RT , has no sense of humor or passion and so no viewers anywhere outside of Foggy Bottom.)

    RT's success was, per the intelligence report, thanks to a combination of lavish Kremlin funding and an alluring editorial slant. The intelligence report quoted RT's editor as saying her station got lots of new viewers after offering sympathetic coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The intelligence report continued:

    In an effort to highlight the alleged "lack of democracy" in the United States, RT broadcast, hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a "sham." RT's reports often characterize the United States as a "surveillance state" and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT's hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US financial collapse RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health

    This was hilarious of course  --  a public snit by our intel communities about Russians racking up big numbers among American viewers in Washington and New York , just by offering mildly critical takes on drone killings and fracking and "alleged Wall Street greed" ("alleged"? Really ?). We were promised a major assessment of any improper Russian influences on our 2016 electoral process and we got  --  this? A formal complaint that Russian TV gave Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein too much air time?

    All this bitching and moaning about RT   --  which, remember, is not some secret plot, but just a public TV station you can go watch on YouTube or not watch   --  takes up well more than half of that grand intelligence community assessment. It really speaks volumes about what was on their minds. And again, my conclusion reading it two years ago was: So, they've got nothing.

    The one caveat, though, was that there was a classified appendix. There's always a classified appendix. So, who knew what was in that ? After all, immediately and in the two years since, intelligence officials have occasionally been cited  --  always anonymously!  --   in The Guardian , The New Yorker , and The New York Times   --  as claiming to have intercepted communications between the Trump team and the Russian government.

    Well, by now, we should realize the appendix is a myth.

    First, we now know that at least part of it   --  and, I would guess, probably all of it  --  was nothing more than the Steele report, the infamous document first posted on BuzzFeed , that collection of anti-Trump opposition research paid for by the Hilary Clinton campaign. (You know  --  the pee tape stuff.)

    And we now also know, courtesy of Robert Mueller's report, that there are no "intercepted communications" between Russians and the Trump campaign teams. Just like there are no Russian intercepts about secret Siberian brain-frying rays in Cuba, because that, again, was the mating call of a short-tailed Caribbean cricket.

    I don't know what's funnier about all of this  --  and it is damned funny, really  --  the fact that all of this has actually happened , or the fact that I feel the need to come out of journalistic retirement to help point it out.

    A President With a Traitor's Heart  --  for Six More Years

    And that's the way it is, and has been, all along for these past two years. There have been non-stop media allegations that, one way or another, our narcissistic, loud-mouthed, overtly racist U.S. president has a traitor's heart. Any errors or inaccuracies  --  and there have been a shocking number of retracted "scoops," as well as screwups like the Caribbean crickets that have just been ignored  --  are excused in service of this larger truth: Our president has a traitor's heart.

    But I already knew that! We all did!

    We knew it the moment he said , "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you'll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing"  --  referencing some official e-mails of Hilary Clinton's that were improperly handled and got deleted. (Among the onion layers of irony to this political season is that Trump pioneered the 21st century witch hunt. There has never been any evidence that Clinton's deleted emails represent anything at all  --  yet Trump hammered away at this as if it mattered, until one day it did. And he didn't even suggest investigations, he skipped straight to "lock her up!").

    Being racist, or stupid, or sexist, or a bully, or a New York real estate developer  --  all of these are deep character flaws. They are not always crimes. (Sexually assaulting someone is always a crime, however, even if you are a TV star and remember your breath mints.)

    And yet, again, we already knew all of this. Remember this transcript from The New York Times ?

    Trump : I did try and fuck her. She was married and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, "I'll show you where they have some nice furniture." I took her out furniture  --  I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn't get there.
    Trump : Yeah, that's her [peeking out a trailer window at a different target, an approaching actress] . I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful  --  I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.
    Billy Bush [a fawning minor TV personality] : Whatever you want.
    Trump : Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.

    Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

    I share your pain. And I have no doubt he'd trade his own son for majority ownership of a moderately nice golf course. But I'm also, frankly, no longer very interested in him. I'm much more interested in us  --  the rest of us.

    What happened to us?

    Well, I'll amend that slightly. I am of course quite interested in seeing Donald Trump leave office. I suspect, however, that these two-plus years of journalistic malpractice  --  a politically-motivated Red Scare at a time when we don't even have any Reds anymore, just Russians  --  has locked in his second term. (What's that? Impeachment you say? Oh please. He'd set up a government-in-exile in Mar-a-Lago and then he'd be around for twenty more years instead of six. And he'd have half the nation with him the entire time.) So thank you for that, MSNBC and NPR and New York Times.

    # # #

    [Mar 31, 2019] Trump and GOP Allies Want Investigation of Mueller Probe s Roots

    Notable quotes:
    "... Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, tweeted: "Time to investigate the Obama officials who concocted and spread the Russian conspiracy hoax!" Representative Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican, said "underlying documents" supporting what became Mueller's probe should be released to the public. ..."
    "... A McCain associate, David Kramer, acknowledged in a deposition in a libel case that he spread word of the dossier to several news organizations. ..."
    Mar 25, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

    President Donald Trump and a key ally, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, said Monday that after Robert Mueller closed his Russia probe, they want an investigation of the investigators.

    Graham said at a news conference that Attorney General William Barr should appoint a new special counsel to examine why the U.S. government, under President Barack Obama, decided to open an investigation into Russian election interference in 2016, and whether it was an excuse to spy on Trump's campaign.

    "Was it a ruse to get into the Trump campaign?" Graham said at the news conference. "I don't know but I'm going to try to find out."

    Trump told reporters at the White House that unspecified "people" behind the Russia probe would "be looked at."

    The remarks show that Trump and some of his allies have retribution and score-settling on their minds after Mueller found no evidence that the president or his campaign colluded with the Kremlin's election interference. It's unclear whom Trump wants investigated, but possibilities include former FBI Director James Comey, whom he fired in May 2017; Obama's CIA Director John Brennan, whom Trump stripped of his security clearance last year; and other former intelligence and Justice Department officials who have vocally criticized the president.

    The stage is also set for dueling and contradictory congressional investigations. In the House, controlled by Democrats, several committees have opened investigations into the president's financial and business affairs, and Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler said Sunday he wants Barr to testify soon on his finding that Mueller didn't produce sufficient evidence that Trump obstructed justice by interfering in the Russia inquiry.

    The Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, on Monday blocked a vote on a measure by the Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, calling for Mueller's report to be made public. McConnell said Barr should have time to consider which portions of the report can be publicly released given concerns about classified information, ongoing investigations and other information protected by law.

    Republican Allies

    Several other Republicans backed Graham and Trump on Monday. Senate Oversight Committee Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said he'd like to work with Graham "to get those answers for the American public."

    "We need to find out what happened," he said in an interview.

    Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, tweeted: "Time to investigate the Obama officials who concocted and spread the Russian conspiracy hoax!" Representative Mark Meadows, a North Carolina Republican, said "underlying documents" supporting what became Mueller's probe should be released to the public.

    "Let them decide for themselves whether this investigation was warranted -- or whether it was a two-year long episode of political targeting, driven by FBI and DOJ executives who wanted to retaliate against a legitimately elected president," Meadows said in an interview.

    Graham said his committee would also look into the FBI's handling of the inquiry into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, saying that Comey's actions in that investigation "did affect" the 2016 election. Comey held a news conference in July 2016 to announce that Clinton wouldn't be charged with a crime, and then announced less than two weeks before the election that the investigation had been re-opened after additional emails were discovered.

    'Evil Things'

    Trump's indication that unnamed people responsible for the probe would be investigated was vague. He didn't name anyone, and after he made similar remarks on Sunday, White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley told reporters that Barr hadn't been directed to open any investigations of Democrats.

    "People that have done such harm to our country," Trump complained on Monday. "We've gone through a period of really bad things happening. Those people will certainly be looked at. I've been looking at them for a long time and I'm saying, why haven't they been looked at. They lied to Congress. Many of them. You know who they are. They've done so many evil things."

    Trump added that he hasn't considered pardoning anyone convicted in connection to Mueller's probe.

    Graham said he planned to talk with Barr on Monday and hoped to hold a public hearing with the attorney general to explain his findings in the Mueller probe. Barr sent a four-page letter to Congress on Sunday summarizing Mueller's findings, which have not been publicly released.

    "I'm asking him to lay it all out," Graham said.

    Both Trump and Graham said they support Barr publicly releasing as much of Mueller's report as possible. The investigation turned out "100 percent" as it should have, Trump told reporters.

    Dossier Distribution

    Trump has previously singled out individuals over their role in the probe, calling for an investigation into the " other side " of the investigation. He's mentioned Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and Justice Department attorney Bruce Ohr.

    Graham also said he advised his friend and Senate colleague John McCain to give the FBI the so-called Steele dossier on Trump, rebutting the president's accusations that McCain tried to hinder his 2016 election.

    Graham told reporters that McCain, an Arizona Republican who died last year, had shown him the unverified collection of intelligence reports on Trump's links to Russia that was put together by a former British spy, Christopher Steele. Steele was commissioned to compile the information by an opposition research firm hired by Democrats.

    McCain put the dossier in his safe and handed it over to the FBI the next day, Graham said.

    A McCain associate, David Kramer, acknowledged in a deposition in a libel case that he spread word of the dossier to several news organizations.

    -- With assistance by Billy House

    ( Updates with McConnell blocking Schumer measure in seventh paragraph. ) Published on ‎March‎ ‎25‎, ‎2019‎ ‎12‎:‎37‎ ‎PM
    Updated on ‎March‎ ‎25‎, ‎2019‎ ‎5‎:‎58‎ ‎PM

    [Mar 31, 2019] All I can see in Russigate is that two faction of the US elite seem to be fighting amongst themselves. With Russigate (IMO) providing cover for this power struggle

    Notable quotes:
    "... Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. ..."
    "... Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ..."
    Mar 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    psychohistorian , Mar 30, 2019 7:51:28 PM | link

    Here is an insightful read on Trump's (s)election and Russiagate that I think is not OT

    Taibbi: On Russiagate and Our Refusal to Face Why Trump Won

    The take away quote

    " Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming.

    Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ."

    As a peedupon all I can see is that the elite seem to be fighting amongst themselves or (IMO) providing cover for ongoing elite power/control efforts. It might not be about private/public finance in a bigger picture but I can't see anything else that makes sense

    Zachary Smith , Mar 30, 2019 10:07:37 PM | link
    @ psychohistorian #43

    Thanks for the Taibbi link. I hadn't seen it, and found him to be in good form. I do think he ought to have spoken more about how bad Trump's Primary opponents were.

    Most of those reporters were going to slant their stories the way their bosses wanted. Their jobs are just too nice to do otherwise. Getting Trump as Hillary's opponent had to have been a goal for the majority of them. He was the patsy who would become squished roadkill in the treads of The Most Experienced Presidential Candidate In History. More on that for people with strong stomachs:

    What Hillary Clinton's Fans Love About Her 11/03/2016

    Sample:

    Hillary Clinton is a knowledgeable, well-prepared, reasonable, experienced, even-tempered, hardworking candidate, while her opponent is a stubbornly uninformed demagogue who has been proven again and again to be a liar on matters big and small. There is no objective basis on which to equate Hillary Clinton to her opponent.
    The author had it half right. Turns out the voters knew quite a bit about Trump, and still preferred him to the Butcher of Libya.

    [Mar 31, 2019] Seems to me what that BigLie's of Us propaganda is this tale: Relations with Russia during the post-USSR age were going along swell until Russia began involved in the Venezuelan Crisis.

    Mar 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    karlof1 , Mar 30, 2019 7:15:26 PM | link

    b--

    Seems to me what that BigLie's about is this tale: Relations with Russia during the post-USSR age were going along swell until Russia began involved in the Venezuelan Crisis.

    The attempt is to try a new narrative using a different angle to blame Russia which is the goal of the BigLie. Signal a new line of approach in dealing with the attitude toward Russia to the trusty echoers of His Master's Voice.

    That's what it seems, b.

    [Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

    Highly recommended!
    So Russiagate smoothly transferred in Neo-McCarthyism and it will poison the US political atmosphere for a decade or two.
    Notable quotes:
    "... But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." ..."
    "... Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections ..."
    "... Persistent demands to "secure our elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process ..."
    "... Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people? ..."
    "... Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. ..."
    "... Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, " have no regrets ." ..."
    "... Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance." With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations. ..."
    "... Rachel Maddow continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.) ..."
    "... Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be " derisive and scornful " toward our political life. ..."
    Mar 30, 2019 | www.thenation.com

    But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." Joy Reid of MSNBC, which has been a citadel of Russiagate allegations along with CNN, even suggested that Mueller and Attorney General William Barr were themselves engaged in " a cover-up ."

    Contrary to a number of major media outlets, from Bloomberg News to The Wall Street Journal , nor does Mueller's exculpatory finding actually mean that " Russiagate is dead " and indeed that " it expired in an instant ." Such conclusions reveal a lack of historical and political understanding. Nearly three years of Russiagate's toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and again in one form or another.

    This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy -- damage done not by an alleged "Trump-Putin axis" but by Russsigate's perpetrators themselves. Having examined this collateral damage in my recently published book War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate , I will only note them here.

    § Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere -- national, state, and local. If true, or even suspected, how can voters have confidence in the electoral foundations of American democracy? Persistent demands to "secure our elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process.

    Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people?

    § Defamatory Russsiagate allegations that Trump was a "Kremlin puppet" and thus "illegitimate" were aimed at the president but hit the presidency itself, degrading the institution, bringing it under suspicion, casting doubt on its legitimacy. And if an "agent of a hostile foreign power" could occupy the White House once, a "Manchurian candidate," why not again? Will Republicans be able to resist making such allegations against a future Democratic president? In any event, Hillary Clinton's failed campaign manager, Robby Mook, has already told us that there will be a " next time ."

    § Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. No mainstream media did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents -- the so-called Steele Dossier and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment -- but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives. Little more need be said here about this institutional self-degradation. Glenn Greenwald and a few others followed and exposed it throughout, and now Matt Taibbi has given us a meticulously documented account of that systematic malpractice , concluding that Mueller's failure to confirm the media's Russiagate allegations "is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media."

    Nor, it must be added, was this entirely inadvertent or accidental. On August 8, 2016, the trend-setting New York Times published on its front page an astonishing editorial manifesto by its media critic. Asking whether "normal standards" should apply to candidate Trump, he explained that they should not: "You have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century." Let others decide whether this Times proclamation unleashed the highly selective, unbalanced, questionably factual "journalism" that has so degraded Russiagate media or instead the publication sought to justify what was already underway. In either case, this remarkable -- and ramifying -- Times rejection of its own professed standards should not be forgotten. Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, " have no regrets ."

    § For better or worse, America has a two-party political system, which means that the Democratic Party is also a foundational institution. Little more also need be pointed out regarding its self-degrading role in the Russiagate fraud. Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance." With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations.

    As for Mueller's finding, the party's virtual network, MSNBC, remains undeterred.

    Rachel Maddow continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.)

    § Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be " derisive and scornful " toward our political life.

    [Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population. ..."
    "... Decades ago while in a leftist organization debate was raised as to how to find valid information to inform ourselves with. It was well understood that the vast majority of the western corporate mass media was a brainwashing operation to keep the masses clueless and supporting imperialist war but, we reasoned, the ruling class itself would need to be kept informed with quality information in order to feel confident that they were making good decisions. ..."
    "... But things change. Note how the Russiagate skeptics in the US were attacked by the desperately faithful: If you focused attention on flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory then the general consensus was that you were defending Trump. ..."
    "... This condition has arisen from literally generations of propaganda instilling as reality in American media consumers the myth of "American Exceptionalism" . The current crop of American adults have been raised by parents who themselves have been thoroughly indoctrinated in this alter reality. The disease is literally universal across the nation, from lowliest and most oppressed Black transvestites to the CEOs of the biggest corporations. ..."
    "... The Washington Post used to be one of the journals that the elites looked to in order to help inform their decisions, but now in the post-truth, or relative truth, world these information sources have increasingly sought to align their information products with the "proper" relative truths that reinforce the myth of "American Exceptionalism" , even if that is in conflict with objective and empirical reality. ..."
    "... In short, Washington Bezos Post writers are not moronic or drunk. They are delusional . They are in the grips of a delusion that afflicts the entire United States, and portions of the rest of the world as well ..."
    Mar 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    William Gruff , Mar 30, 2019 5:18:08 PM | link

    "... Washington Bezos Post writers are moronic or drunk."

    What ails them is far more complicated and vastly more sinister.

    One often hears people say of other countries "It isn't the people of Elbonia whom I hate, it is their government." It may be difficult for some in Europe, where there remains a vestige of an imperative to foster a worldview based upon objective reality, to come to grips with the fact that the problem with America has metastasized and spread to the level of the individual citizens... all of them, to one degree or another. You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton?

    All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.

    How did this happen to America?

    Decades ago while in a leftist organization debate was raised as to how to find valid information to inform ourselves with. It was well understood that the vast majority of the western corporate mass media was a brainwashing operation to keep the masses clueless and supporting imperialist war but, we reasoned, the ruling class itself would need to be kept informed with quality information in order to feel confident that they were making good decisions.

    With this in mind we identified journals and sources that the capitalist elites themselves relied upon to inform their decisions.

    Things like the CIA World Factbook, for instance, even though created by an organization devoted to disinformation, could be trusted back then to be relatively dependable.

    But things change. Note how the Russiagate skeptics in the US were attacked by the desperately faithful: If you focused attention on flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory then the general consensus was that you were defending Trump. The possibility that you could be defending reason and truth is still dismissed out of hand. Why is that? Because in America (it's a mind disease spreading to Europe, apparently) truth is relative and reason has become just whatever justifies what you wish to be the truth; therefore, those who propose a "truth" that conflicts with what people want to believe are agents of some enemy.

    This condition has arisen from literally generations of propaganda instilling as reality in American media consumers the myth of "American Exceptionalism" . The current crop of American adults have been raised by parents who themselves have been thoroughly indoctrinated in this alter reality. The disease is literally universal across the nation, from lowliest and most oppressed Black transvestites to the CEOs of the biggest corporations.

    As prior generations of the ruling elites from the post WWII era who still retained some sense for the importance of objective reality have died off they have been replaced by the newer generation for whom reality is entirely subjective. If they want to believe their gender is mountain panda then that's their right as Americans! Likewise if they want to believe that America's bombing is humanitarian and god's gift to the species, then anyone who suggests otherwise is obviously a KGB troll.

    The Washington Post used to be one of the journals that the elites looked to in order to help inform their decisions, but now in the post-truth, or relative truth, world these information sources have increasingly sought to align their information products with the "proper" relative truths that reinforce the myth of "American Exceptionalism" , even if that is in conflict with objective and empirical reality.

    To do otherwise would be to aid and give comfort to America's "enemies" (do keep in mind that America is a nation at war - has been for decades - and that workers in the corporate mass media are very much conscious of their roles in that ongoing war effort, to the point that they see themselves as information warriors fighting shadowy enemies that only exist in their own relative reality bubbles).

    In short, Washington Bezos Post writers are not moronic or drunk. They are delusional . They are in the grips of a delusion that afflicts the entire United States, and portions of the rest of the world as well.

    Some Americans have broken free from this Matrix-like delusion, but the numbers remain somewhat small... certainly less than one or two percent of the population, and those who have broken free of the delusion will never be given a soapbox to speak to the rest of the population from by the corporate elites.

    mourning dove , Mar 30, 2019 6:36:14 PM | link
    William Gruff @33

    I think you have wildly underestimated the number of Americans who are very aware of what is going on with our country and the world. More than 40% of eligible voters elect not to participate in elections realizing the futility of it, and withholding their consent to this regime. It's a feature of propaganda to engender feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and feelings of isolation by falsely portraying a consensus among the population for the policies of the regime. Resist!

    [Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

    Highly recommended!
    So Russiagate smoothly transferred in Neo-McCarthyism and it will poison the US political atmosphere for a decade or two.
    Notable quotes:
    "... But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." ..."
    "... Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections ..."
    "... Persistent demands to "secure our elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process ..."
    "... Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people? ..."
    "... Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. ..."
    "... Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, " have no regrets ." ..."
    "... Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance." With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations. ..."
    "... Rachel Maddow continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.) ..."
    "... Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be " derisive and scornful " toward our political life. ..."
    Mar 30, 2019 | www.thenation.com

    But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." Joy Reid of MSNBC, which has been a citadel of Russiagate allegations along with CNN, even suggested that Mueller and Attorney General William Barr were themselves engaged in " a cover-up ."

    Contrary to a number of major media outlets, from Bloomberg News to The Wall Street Journal , nor does Mueller's exculpatory finding actually mean that " Russiagate is dead " and indeed that " it expired in an instant ." Such conclusions reveal a lack of historical and political understanding. Nearly three years of Russiagate's toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and again in one form or another.

    This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy -- damage done not by an alleged "Trump-Putin axis" but by Russsigate's perpetrators themselves. Having examined this collateral damage in my recently published book War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate , I will only note them here.

    § Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere -- national, state, and local. If true, or even suspected, how can voters have confidence in the electoral foundations of American democracy? Persistent demands to "secure our elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process.

    Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people?

    § Defamatory Russsiagate allegations that Trump was a "Kremlin puppet" and thus "illegitimate" were aimed at the president but hit the presidency itself, degrading the institution, bringing it under suspicion, casting doubt on its legitimacy. And if an "agent of a hostile foreign power" could occupy the White House once, a "Manchurian candidate," why not again? Will Republicans be able to resist making such allegations against a future Democratic president? In any event, Hillary Clinton's failed campaign manager, Robby Mook, has already told us that there will be a " next time ."

    § Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. No mainstream media did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents -- the so-called Steele Dossier and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment -- but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives. Little more need be said here about this institutional self-degradation. Glenn Greenwald and a few others followed and exposed it throughout, and now Matt Taibbi has given us a meticulously documented account of that systematic malpractice , concluding that Mueller's failure to confirm the media's Russiagate allegations "is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media."

    Nor, it must be added, was this entirely inadvertent or accidental. On August 8, 2016, the trend-setting New York Times published on its front page an astonishing editorial manifesto by its media critic. Asking whether "normal standards" should apply to candidate Trump, he explained that they should not: "You have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century." Let others decide whether this Times proclamation unleashed the highly selective, unbalanced, questionably factual "journalism" that has so degraded Russiagate media or instead the publication sought to justify what was already underway. In either case, this remarkable -- and ramifying -- Times rejection of its own professed standards should not be forgotten. Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, " have no regrets ."

    § For better or worse, America has a two-party political system, which means that the Democratic Party is also a foundational institution. Little more also need be pointed out regarding its self-degrading role in the Russiagate fraud. Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance." With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations.

    As for Mueller's finding, the party's virtual network, MSNBC, remains undeterred.

    Rachel Maddow continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.)

    § Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be " derisive and scornful " toward our political life.

    [Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population. ..."
    "... Decades ago while in a leftist organization debate was raised as to how to find valid information to inform ourselves with. It was well understood that the vast majority of the western corporate mass media was a brainwashing operation to keep the masses clueless and supporting imperialist war but, we reasoned, the ruling class itself would need to be kept informed with quality information in order to feel confident that they were making good decisions. ..."
    "... But things change. Note how the Russiagate skeptics in the US were attacked by the desperately faithful: If you focused attention on flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory then the general consensus was that you were defending Trump. ..."
    "... This condition has arisen from literally generations of propaganda instilling as reality in American media consumers the myth of "American Exceptionalism" . The current crop of American adults have been raised by parents who themselves have been thoroughly indoctrinated in this alter reality. The disease is literally universal across the nation, from lowliest and most oppressed Black transvestites to the CEOs of the biggest corporations. ..."
    "... The Washington Post used to be one of the journals that the elites looked to in order to help inform their decisions, but now in the post-truth, or relative truth, world these information sources have increasingly sought to align their information products with the "proper" relative truths that reinforce the myth of "American Exceptionalism" , even if that is in conflict with objective and empirical reality. ..."
    "... In short, Washington Bezos Post writers are not moronic or drunk. They are delusional . They are in the grips of a delusion that afflicts the entire United States, and portions of the rest of the world as well ..."
    Mar 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    William Gruff , Mar 30, 2019 5:18:08 PM | link

    "... Washington Bezos Post writers are moronic or drunk."

    What ails them is far more complicated and vastly more sinister.

    One often hears people say of other countries "It isn't the people of Elbonia whom I hate, it is their government." It may be difficult for some in Europe, where there remains a vestige of an imperative to foster a worldview based upon objective reality, to come to grips with the fact that the problem with America has metastasized and spread to the level of the individual citizens... all of them, to one degree or another. You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton?

    All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.

    How did this happen to America?

    Decades ago while in a leftist organization debate was raised as to how to find valid information to inform ourselves with. It was well understood that the vast majority of the western corporate mass media was a brainwashing operation to keep the masses clueless and supporting imperialist war but, we reasoned, the ruling class itself would need to be kept informed with quality information in order to feel confident that they were making good decisions.

    With this in mind we identified journals and sources that the capitalist elites themselves relied upon to inform their decisions.

    Things like the CIA World Factbook, for instance, even though created by an organization devoted to disinformation, could be trusted back then to be relatively dependable.

    But things change. Note how the Russiagate skeptics in the US were attacked by the desperately faithful: If you focused attention on flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory then the general consensus was that you were defending Trump. The possibility that you could be defending reason and truth is still dismissed out of hand. Why is that? Because in America (it's a mind disease spreading to Europe, apparently) truth is relative and reason has become just whatever justifies what you wish to be the truth; therefore, those who propose a "truth" that conflicts with what people want to believe are agents of some enemy.

    This condition has arisen from literally generations of propaganda instilling as reality in American media consumers the myth of "American Exceptionalism" . The current crop of American adults have been raised by parents who themselves have been thoroughly indoctrinated in this alter reality. The disease is literally universal across the nation, from lowliest and most oppressed Black transvestites to the CEOs of the biggest corporations.

    As prior generations of the ruling elites from the post WWII era who still retained some sense for the importance of objective reality have died off they have been replaced by the newer generation for whom reality is entirely subjective. If they want to believe their gender is mountain panda then that's their right as Americans! Likewise if they want to believe that America's bombing is humanitarian and god's gift to the species, then anyone who suggests otherwise is obviously a KGB troll.

    The Washington Post used to be one of the journals that the elites looked to in order to help inform their decisions, but now in the post-truth, or relative truth, world these information sources have increasingly sought to align their information products with the "proper" relative truths that reinforce the myth of "American Exceptionalism" , even if that is in conflict with objective and empirical reality.

    To do otherwise would be to aid and give comfort to America's "enemies" (do keep in mind that America is a nation at war - has been for decades - and that workers in the corporate mass media are very much conscious of their roles in that ongoing war effort, to the point that they see themselves as information warriors fighting shadowy enemies that only exist in their own relative reality bubbles).

    In short, Washington Bezos Post writers are not moronic or drunk. They are delusional . They are in the grips of a delusion that afflicts the entire United States, and portions of the rest of the world as well.

    Some Americans have broken free from this Matrix-like delusion, but the numbers remain somewhat small... certainly less than one or two percent of the population, and those who have broken free of the delusion will never be given a soapbox to speak to the rest of the population from by the corporate elites.

    mourning dove , Mar 30, 2019 6:36:14 PM | link
    William Gruff @33

    I think you have wildly underestimated the number of Americans who are very aware of what is going on with our country and the world. More than 40% of eligible voters elect not to participate in elections realizing the futility of it, and withholding their consent to this regime. It's a feature of propaganda to engender feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and feelings of isolation by falsely portraying a consensus among the population for the policies of the regime. Resist!

    [Mar 30, 2019] John Brennan, embattled ex-CIA chief, meets with Rep. Hoyer, Democrats to discuss national security issues Fox News

    Notable quotes:
    "... Brennan, whose security clearance has been revoked and who this week admitted he may have "received bad information" while opining about the Russia investigation in his role as an MSNBC analyst, discussed a wide range of national security issues with Democrats, an official familiar with the meeting told Fox News. ..."
    "... Brennan's meeting with Democrats comes amid a reexamination of his role in the launching and furthering of the narrative that President Trump's campaign colluded with Russia. ..."
    "... Paul added: "Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP." The next day, Brennan was just steps from the Senate -- but as part of the Hoyer meeting. ..."
    "... Brennan on Monday issued one of the few mea culpas offered by members of the media in the aftermath of Barr's letter, in which he quoted Mueller as having found no evidence of any collusion or coordination between the Trump team and Russia. Prior to that finding, Brennan, the CIA Director from 2013-2017, had adamantly insinuated in tweets and on TV that Mueller would put Trump's "political & financial future in jeopardy." ..."
    "... "I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was," Brennan said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." ..."
    "... Trump has frequently hit back at Brennan's broadsides. "I think Brennan is a very bad guy and, if you look at it, a lot of things happened under his watch," Trump once told Fox News' Tucker Carlson. "I think he's a very bad person." ..."
    Mar 30, 2019 | www.foxnews.com

    Former CIA Director John Brennan – who's come under fire in recent days for his alleged role in pushing the unverified anti-Trump dossier – met with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and other House Democrats on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Fox News has learned.

    Brennan, whose security clearance has been revoked and who this week admitted he may have "received bad information" while opining about the Russia investigation in his role as an MSNBC analyst, discussed a wide range of national security issues with Democrats, an official familiar with the meeting told Fox News.

    Brennan was invited "long before" the Mueller investigation was reportedly concluded last Friday, the official told Fox News, but it was not clear if the Mueller report or the four-page summary letter of it released by Attorney General Bill Barr on Sunday were discussed during the "Leader's Council" meeting.

    SEN. PAUL: SOURCE SAID BRENNAN, CLAPPER AND COMEY PUSHED DISCREDITED DOSSIER

    The council is composed of a "diverse group of members of the caucus" and meet on a regular basis with a wide range of guests, the official said.

    Brennan's meeting with Democrats comes amid a reexamination of his role in the launching and furthering of the narrative that President Trump's campaign colluded with Russia.

    The day before his Capitol Hill meeting, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., tweeted he'd been told by a "high-level source" that Brennan "insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report "

    Paul added: "Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP." The next day, Brennan was just steps from the Senate -- but as part of the Hoyer meeting.

    Video

    Brennan on Monday issued one of the few mea culpas offered by members of the media in the aftermath of Barr's letter, in which he quoted Mueller as having found no evidence of any collusion or coordination between the Trump team and Russia. Prior to that finding, Brennan, the CIA Director from 2013-2017, had adamantly insinuated in tweets and on TV that Mueller would put Trump's "political & financial future in jeopardy."

    FOX NEWS EXCLUSIVE: INTERNAL TEXTS SHOW DOJ CONCERNS OVER 'BIAS' OF DOSSIER AUTHOR BEFORE CRUCIAL WARRANT APPLICATION

    Going even beyond that, Brennan said Trump's July 2018 Helsinki press conference alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin "rises to & exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes & misdemeanors.' It was nothing short of treasonous." Brennan later doubled-down on the "treasonous" line during a television appearance.

    But he struck a different tone Monday in the wake of the Mueller news.

    "I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was," Brennan said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

    Trump has frequently hit back at Brennan's broadsides. "I think Brennan is a very bad guy and, if you look at it, a lot of things happened under his watch," Trump once told Fox News' Tucker Carlson. "I think he's a very bad person."

    To that end, in 2018, the Trump administration revoked Brennan's security clearance, saying the former Obama official had been "leveraging" his clearance to make "wild outbursts" about the president.

    TheOutlawJoseyWales518 1h

    Old Johnny is in a bunch of trouble....hopefully he will take all the Obama/Clinton Cabal down with him. F him.

    Lugnuts30Leader

    John Brennan is as crooked as Adam Schiff. Actually he is worse. He is guilty of everything that he adamantly accused President Trump of doing. The Democrats are about to find out what happens when you are caught lying and committing treasons' crimes. They are running around like the rats they are.

    nationalist70Leader

    Brennan is everything he accusesTrump of being!! That goes for the rest of the democrats too!!!

    [Mar 30, 2019] Why Is The Washington Post Inventing Warming Ties Between Trump And Moscow

    Notable quotes:
    "... Woodward was Naval intelligence. Watergate was the coup that established the Bush cabal. ..."
    "... "What, then, is the US doing in Syria, Iraq, Poland, Lithuania, South Korea, Japan, etc ad nauseam?" Full Spectrum Dominance is ubiquitous like an atmosphere i.e. you're not supposed to notice. Are you this persnickety with oxygen too? ..."
    "... Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ..."
    Mar 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Why Is The Washington Post Inventing "Warming Ties" Between Trump And Moscow? Red Ryder , Mar 30, 2019 1:28:38 PM | link

    Sometimes it is impossible to discern whether Washington Post writers are moronic or drunk.

    In a front page piece today about Russia's engagement in Venezuela the three authors include this line:

    In an era of generally warming ties between the Trump administration and Moscow , Russia's deepening involvement in Venezuela is creating a flash point by challenging the U.S. effort to force Maduro from office.

    What please are the signs that we are in an "in an era of generally warming ties between the Trump administration and Moscow" ?

    The piece includes nothing that supports that claim.

    The U.S. is occupying parts of Syria against Russia's will. It is threatening Russia by positioning ever more NATO forces at its borders. Trump left the INF treaty with Russia. He opposed Russia wherever he could . Nothing of that has changed.

    In fact yesterday Bloomberg reported that the U.S. is reading new sanctions against Russia for the MI6 stunt of vanishing Sergej Skripal:

    The White House has received a long-awaited package of new sanctions on Russia, intended to punish the Kremlin for a 2018 nerve-agent attack on a former Russian spy in the U.K.

    Last week Russia deployed some 100 military technicians and cyber-defense specialists to Venezuela. They will test and probably upgrade Venezuela's S-300 air defense systems. They will also help to check the control systems of Venezuela's Simón Bolívar Hydroelectric Plant and the Guri Dam that trice led to large scale electricity outages during the last month. Venzuela suspects that U.S. cyber attacks led to those failures.

    Also yesterday Trump's special envoy for Venezuela Elliot Abrams and National Security Advisor John Bolton threatened even more sanctions against Russia for its hardly existing footprint in Venezuela:

    U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been given a list of options to respond to Russia's growing presence in Venezuela in support of Maduro, including new sanctions, said Elliott Abrams, the U.S. special representative for Venezuela.

    "We have options and it would be a mistake for the Russians to think they have a free hand here. They don't," Abrams told reporters at the State Department.

    U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this week said "Russia has to get out" of Venezuela and said "all options" were open to force Russia to do so after two Russian air force planes carrying nearly 100 military personnel landed outside Caracas.

    Trump's national security adviser John Bolton issued a second warning on Friday in a strongly worded formal statement.

    "We strongly caution actors external to the Western Hemisphere against deploying military assets to Venezuela, or elsewhere in the Hemisphere, with the intent of establishing or expanding military operations," Bolton said.

    "We will consider such provocative actions as a direct threat to international peace and security in the region. We will continue to defend and protect the interests of the United States, and those of our partners in the Western Hemisphere," he said.

    Again we ask: What please are the signs that we are "in an era of generally warming ties between the Trump administration and Moscow"?

    What is the purpose of making that claim?

    Posted by b on March 30, 2019 at 01:17 PM | Permalink

    Comments Anything less than a war against Russia, somewhere, anywhere, is "warming relations" to the psycho-Russophobes.

    Never Mind the Bollocks , Mar 30, 2019 1:29:10 PM | link

    Russiagate collapse shows CIA black propaganda loops are obsolete and ineffective
    John Anthony La Pietra , Mar 30, 2019 1:46:52 PM | link
    My first thought is that they still haven't caught on to (or caught up with) the sarcasm in b's list of things the Common Orange-Crested Dotard and his flock have "done for" Russia, and are continuing to try to link Trump and Putin even in the absence of help from Mueller.
    Jackrabbit , Mar 30, 2019 1:58:23 PM | link
    b: What please are the signs that we are "in an era of generally warming ties ..."

    Russia and USA didn't go to war in Syria, and now Trump says he wants to leave Syria.

    He wouldn't say it if he didn't mean it, would he?/sarc

    james , Mar 30, 2019 2:05:35 PM | link
    it is stretching it to say because the mueller investigation can up ziltch, that the ties are warming with russia.. more warm milk with arsenic in it as i see it... it's not like the wapo has never offered arsenic before is it??
    Jackrabbit , Mar 30, 2019 2:20:52 PM | link
    A set up?

    "Generally warning ties" will soon give way to OUTRAGE that "Trump's Syrian appeasement encouraged Putin to meddle in Venezeula!!!"

    dh , Mar 30, 2019 2:24:58 PM | link
    Warming ties? It is an extraordinary way to describe things. I can only see the choice of words as yet another attempt to blame Russia for the deterioration in relations. i.e. Trump is trying to mend fences and look what they do!
    b real , Mar 30, 2019 2:25:43 PM | link
    it's a smug way of saying things are heating up between the two powers and this can become a flash point
    BM , Mar 30, 2019 2:26:15 PM | link
    "We strongly caution actors external to the Western Hemisphere against deploying military assets to Venezuela, or elsewhere in the Hemisphere, with the intent of establishing or expanding military operations," Bolton said.

    "We will consider such provocative actions as a direct threat to international peace and security in the region.

    What, then, is the US doing in Syria, Iraq, Poland, Lithuania, South Korea, Japan, etc ad nauseam? Are all of these countries also in the US backyard? When the US is creating provocations on the Russian and Chinese borders many thousands of miles from the US, are Russia and China to blame for "threatening" the US's backyard in Lithuania and South Korea etc?

    The US have not noticed that the virtual world they have created for themselves conflicts with the reality on the ground. Instead of correcting their erroneous world-view they try to imagine changes in the world into conformation with their erroneous world-view, thereby making the error even greater. They are descending into ever increasing madness.

    mourning dove , Mar 30, 2019 2:32:40 PM | link
    They went all-in on a bluff, now that it's been called, they just can't walk away from the table.
    Harry Law , Mar 30, 2019 2:42:49 PM | link
    The Russians don't realize that the US are the unassailable Masters of the Universe, if more countries like Germany and Russia ignore their sanctions they will look like a paper tiger and lose their credibility, I look forward to that day.
    GeorgeV , Mar 30, 2019 2:43:57 PM | link
    OMG! How far the mighty MSM doyen The Washington Post has fallen. Those halcyon days of Woodward and Bernstein are now but a distant memory. The shinning victory of driving the hated President Richard Nixon from high office has dimmed to the level of a fading myth. Sic transit gloria! That vaunted stable of journalists that once terrified and bedeviled those at the acme of political power, has sunk to the nadir of the profession, to wit: supermarket tabloids! We will miss you Walter Cronkite! Farewell Edward R. Murrow! Good bye H.L. Mencken. The Fourth Estate is in the hands of morons and drunks. We the people have lost.
    hopehely , Mar 30, 2019 2:48:37 PM | link
    For the globalist hawk, Bolton's grasp on geography is quite limited.
    The far eastern part of Russia is actually in the western hemisphere. So, Russia is technically part of western hemisphere too.
    BTW, only 3 European countries are completely in western hemisphere: Iceland, Ireland and Portugal.
    UK, France and Spain are partly in both. The rest of Europe is in the eastern hemisphere, and no part of the US is in it.
    AntiSpin , Mar 30, 2019 2:51:19 PM | link
    @ BM | Mar 30, 2019 2:26:15 PM | 9
    " The US have not noticed that the virtual world they have created for themselves conflicts with the reality on the ground. Instead of correcting their erroneous world-view they try to imagine changes in the world into conformation with their erroneous world-view . . . "

    And it's not just the so-called "leadership." There is, for example, a once-pretty-good left-wing site that has become a groveling pseudo-left site, with a significant number of members who think of something that they wish were true, and then just post comments stating that it is true, and absolutely refuse to acknowledge any evidence to the contrary.

    I do not remember who posted this link here recently, but it presents a good explanation of why some people behave that way:
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/03/26/the-illusory-truth-effect-how-millions-were-duped-by-russiagate/

    hopehely , Mar 30, 2019 2:52:40 PM | link
    Posted by: mourning dove | Mar 30, 2019 2:32:40 PM | 10

    They went all-in on a bluff, now that it's been called, they just can't walk away from the table.

    Yes they can! They can do everything!

    mourning dove , Mar 30, 2019 3:02:17 PM | link
    @15
    I should have said that they WON'T walk away from the table. They sit there begging for credit to play another hand, and too many Americans will be only to happy to extend that credit.
    Harry , Mar 30, 2019 3:03:29 PM | link
    The Americans believe they have full spectrum dominance. They believe they can dictate terms to Russia. They are probably right. I worry about them being wrong.
    Brendan , Mar 30, 2019 3:26:39 PM | link
    The answer is that WaPo wants to cast doubt on Mueller's reluctant finding of no collusion. If WaPo did not hint at friendly relations between the Trump White House and the Kremlin, it would be admitting that its Russiagate reporting has been fake news for years. As WaPo reports it, it's just the same old Trump-Putin bromance.
    Pnyx , Mar 30, 2019 3:28:30 PM | link
    I can't stand that much quoted bullshit, especially when this comes from the world inflamer in chief Schnauzer Bolton.
    snake , Mar 30, 2019 3:32:52 PM | link

    They won't walk away from the table.. by: mourning dove @ 16; <= it more like they will continue to hide under the table.. i have yet to see a competent accurate list of events and concerns that justify.. invasion.... if anyone knows of one, please post it.


    A set up? <= "Generally warning ties" will soon give way to OUTRAGE
    that "Trump's Syrian appeasement encouraged Putin to meddle in Venezeula!!!"by: Jackrabbit | @ 6

    Syrian appeasement qualifies as "Trojan propaganda" see => https://southfront.org/dozens-of-terrorists-killed-in-new-us-led-coalition-airstrikes-on-isis-hideouts-in-euphrates-valley-video/

    17yr old Murdered by Israeli Snipers Todayhttp://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51352.htm
    https://southfront.org/french-belgian-intelligence-officers-are-planning-chemical-provocation-in-syrias-idlib-russian-mod/

    Maracatu , Mar 30, 2019 3:35:52 PM | link
    The fact that the current US administration is reviving the nearly two century old Monroe Doctrine speaks volumes. I'm curious as to how much success they are going to have with 'whipping' the dissenters back in line?
    Jen , Mar 30, 2019 3:38:10 PM | link
    When Hollywood no longer produces anything remotely resembling genuine comedy and all that the US film industry is useful for is generating live-action cartoon propaganda trash like "Captain Marvel" to recruit more cannon fodder for US wars around the planet, the world is in serious need of true stand-up comedy and outlets like Jeff Bozo's The Washington Post bravely step in to fill the breach.

    Maybe if WaPo wants to report any real news its readers can take seriously, it should advertise for another Saudi journalist to write op-eds for it and then send that journalist to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.

    (Sarc alert)

    psychohistorian , Mar 30, 2019 4:08:44 PM | link

    B asked why the purpose of the claim
    "
    In an era of generally warming ties between the Trump administration and Moscow,
    "
    Era is a term usually associated with geologic time but can be abused to mean any time frame as it is here to say that black is white in State Dept. speak but to answer the why look at the rest of the sentence
    "
    Russia's deepening involvement in Venezuela is creating a flash point by challenging the U.S. effort to force Maduro from office.
    "
    To me the US is saying the we have done regime change before and got away with it ( within the era) but are being opposed now and bullying is our modus operendi if we can't use force so get out of our way.

    Posted by: psychohistorian | Mar 30, 2019 4:08:44 PM | link

    mourning dove , Mar 30, 2019 4:11:40 PM | link
    Snake
    If you've ever played poker, you know that you can't play from under the table. It's the game that they won't walk away from.
    mourning dove , Mar 30, 2019 4:13:02 PM | link
    More clearly put, the game is the thing that they won't walk away from.
    bevin , Mar 30, 2019 4:20:23 PM | link
    So far as the Monroe Doctrine is concerned, the US is breaching it while Russia appears to be upholding it. Monroe was protecting Latin American countries, and none more than Venezuela, from imperialism; asserting their right to independence and self rule. Trump is denying them those rights by insisting on its power to determine what form their government should take and who should compose it.

    While it seems unlikely that the US will actually invade Venezuela it seems extremely probable that the US will employ, train, arm and direct mercenary terrorists to make life in Venezuela as difficult as it can. In this enterprise it will have the support of most of Venezuela's corrupt neighbours, who fear the spirit of the Bolivarian experiment much more than Washington does. This means that, with idiots like Bolsonaro and Duque in nominal command, anything might happen and that blood will flow.
    Today there is news that Trump has cut off aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. What is to be made of that?

    Realist , Mar 30, 2019 4:31:08 PM | link
    OMG! How far the mighty MSM doyen The Washington Post has fallen. Those halcyon days of Woodward and Bernstein are now but a distant memory. The shinning victory of driving the hated President Richard Nixon from high office ... a ... myth ... morons ... We the people ...

    Posted by: GeorgeV | Mar 30, 2019 2:43:57 PM | 12

    Woodward was Naval intelligence. Watergate was the coup that established the Bush cabal.

    [aside for b: thank you for forcing us to beacon to Google our presence and comments on your site. The "secret team" says danke.]

    worldblee , Mar 30, 2019 4:50:41 PM | link
    Why is the Post saying something so ridiculous? Because it fits into their fact-free narrative of Russian collusion
    dh-mtl , Mar 30, 2019 5:00:04 PM | link
    The U.S. desperately needs Venezuelan oil.

    They lost control of Saudi Arabia, after trying to take down MBS and then betraying him by unexpectedly allowing waivers on Iranian oil in November.

    The U.S. cannot take down Iran without Venezuelan oil. What is worse, right now they don't have access to enough heavy oil to meet their own needs.

    Controlling the world oil trade is central to Trump's strategy for the U.S. to continue its empire. Without Venezuelan oil, the U.S. is a bit player in the energy markets, and will remain so.

    Having Russia block the U.S. in Venezuela adds insult to injury. After Crimea and Syria, now Venezuela, Russia exposes the U.S. as a loud mouthed-bully without the capacity to back up its threats, a 'toothless tiger', an 'emperor without clothes'.

    If the U.S. cannot dislodge Russia from Venezuela, its days as 'global hegemon' are finished. For this reason the U.S. will continue escalating the situation with ever-riskier actions, until it succeeds or breaks.

    In the same manor, if Russia backs off, its resistance to the U.S. is finished. And the U.S. will eventually move to destroy Russia, like it has been actively trying to do for the past 30 years. Russia cannot and will not back off.

    Venezuela thus becomes the stage where the final act in the clash of empires plays out. Will the world become a multi-polar world, in which the U.S. becomes a relatively isolated and insignificant pole? Or will the world become more fully dominated by a brutal, erratic hegemon?

    All options are on the table. For both sides!

    CDWaller , Mar 30, 2019 5:06:12 PM | link
    Trump campaigned on detente with Russia. Trump has made an effort to stand by his promises, no matter how ill conceived or misguided. Looks like a shot across his bow, warning him not keep the one campaign promise that could actually lead away from the abyss?

    As for the WaPo, Bezos dependence on military contracts is an obvious motivation plus whatever the NSA has collected on him. As for his editors, journalists and many of the most irrational in government, something in the amphetamine family. Euphoria trumps conscience and gives the false impression that you are the smartest guy in the room. Makes logic and reasoning by cooler heads impossible.

    The next day let down invites repeat ingestion. Most unfortunate of all is the willingness of readers to swallow this sort of fear mongering and fairy stories without question, even to the point of defending them. I wonder what the eventual outcome will be when enough of us realize that the social contract between ourselves, our government and those institutions that are meant to support us are well and truly broken.

    uncle tungsten , Mar 30, 2019 5:07:46 PM | link
    Thaks b, now that is a delightful question to pose on the eve of April fool's day.

    My suggestion is that Cambridge Analytica and others backing Trump and the yankee imperial machine have been taking measurements of USA citizens opinions and are staggered by the results. They are panicked!

    I suspect that the cool aid is not working effectively these days and that far too many people see through the charades and lies. An interesting story lurks behind this and the entire 'hate russia' and 'monkey mueller' episode.

    The attitudes of the masses are spinning out of the manipulative hands of the deep state and the oligarchs. Do any of our comrades have a handle on this type of research and the implication for voter attitudes?

    William Gruff , Mar 30, 2019 5:18:08 PM | link
    "... Washington Bezos Post writers are moronic or drunk."

    What ails them is far more complicated and vastly more sinister.

    One often hears people say of other countries "It isn't the people of Elbonia whom I hate, it is their government." It may be difficult for some in Europe, where there remains a vestige of an imperative to foster a worldview based upon objective reality, to come to grips with the fact that the problem with America has metastasized and spread to the level of the individual citizens... all of them, to one degree or another. You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.

    How did this happen to America?

    Decades ago while in a leftist organization debate was raised as to how to find valid information to inform ourselves with. It was well understood that the vast majority of the western corporate mass media was a brainwashing operation to keep the masses clueless and supporting imperialist war but, we reasoned, the ruling class itself would need to be kept informed with quality information in order to feel confident that they were making good decisions. With this in mind we identified journals and sources that the capitalist elites themselves relied upon to inform their decisions. Things like the CIA World Factbook, for instance, even though created by an organization devoted to disinformation, could be trusted back then to be relatively dependable.

    But things change. Note how the Russiagate skeptics in the US were attacked by the desperately faithful: If you focused attention on flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory then the general consensus was that you were defending Trump. The possibility that you could be defending reason and truth is still dismissed out of hand. Why is that? Because in America (it's a mind disease spreading to Europe, apparently) truth is relative and reason has become just whatever justifies what you wish to be the truth; therefore, those who propose a "truth" that conflicts with what people want to believe are agents of some enemy.

    This condition has arisen from literally generations of propaganda instilling as reality in American media consumers the myth of "American Exceptionalism" . The current crop of American adults have been raised by parents who themselves have been thoroughly indoctrinated in this alter reality. The disease is literally universal across the nation, from lowliest and most oppressed Black transvestites to the CEOs of the biggest corporations. As prior generations of the ruling elites from the post WWII era who still retained some sense for the importance of objective reality have died off they have been replaced by the newer generation for whom reality is entirely subjective. If they want to believe their gender is mountain panda then that's their right as Americans! Likewise if they want to believe that America's bombing is humanitarian and god's gift to the species, then anyone who suggests otherwise is obviously a KGB troll.

    The Washington Post used to be one of the journals that the elites looked to in order to help inform their decisions, but now in the post-truth, or relative truth, world these information sources have increasingly sought to align their information products with the "proper" relative truths that reinforce the myth of "American Exceptionalism" , even if that is in conflict with objective and empirical reality. To do otherwise would be to aid and give comfort to America's "enemies" (do keep in mind that America is a nation at war - has been for decades - and that workers in the corporate mass media are very much conscious of their roles in that ongoing war effort, to the point that they see themselves as information warriors fighting shadowy enemies that only exist in their own relative reality bubbles).

    In short, Washington Bezos Post writers are not moronic or drunk. They are delusional . They are in the grips of a delusion that afflicts the entire United States, and portions of the rest of the world as well. Some Americans have broken free from this Matrix-like delusion, but the numbers remain somewhat small... certainly less than one or two percent of the population, and those who have broken free of the delusion will never be given a soapbox to speak to the rest of the population from by the corporate elites.

    Maracatu , Mar 30, 2019 5:36:10 PM | link
    Engdhal doesn't think it is only about oil.

    To bevin@27, I suggest you review your history of the 1902 and 1903 blockade of Venezuela, particularly with regards to the enactment of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

    psychohistorian , Mar 30, 2019 5:47:01 PM | link
    @ Maracatu with the Engdhal link saying the real threat to the US is China

    The real threat to the Western empire (which owns the US) is the concept of socialistic finance which China is evolving. The West wants China to evolve to be the next host for private finance empire.....

    And its not working so we get this show we see as the bully of private finance is allowed to die of its own cancer....total erosion of public trust.

    Assuming the West will not go nuclear over Venezuela, when that loss of Venezuela becomes apparent to the rest of the world, the knives will come out and empire will eviscerate itself as former colonies cut themselves loose.

    Maximus , Mar 30, 2019 6:24:34 PM | link
    Did the smarties in the Whitehouse realize that Russia itself straddles both Hemispheres? ... idiots
    Full Spectrum Domino , Mar 30, 2019 6:33:52 PM | link
    @9

    "What, then, is the US doing in Syria, Iraq, Poland, Lithuania, South Korea, Japan, etc ad nauseam?" Full Spectrum Dominance is ubiquitous like an atmosphere i.e. you're not supposed to notice. Are you this persnickety with oxygen too?

    mourning dove , Mar 30, 2019 6:36:14 PM | link
    William Gruff @33

    I think you have wildly underestimated the number of Americans who are very aware of what is going on with our country and the world. More than 40% of eligible voters elect not to participate in elections realizing the futility of it, and withholding their consent to this regime. It's a feature of propaganda to engender feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, and feelings of isolation by falsely portraying a consensus among the population for the policies of the regime. Resist!

    uncle tungsten , Mar 30, 2019 6:43:10 PM | link
    psychohistorian #35

    YES. I totally support that and would add that the response to the lucid campaign of the Sanders run for presidency and the current rising wave from that has the oligarchy spooked.

    In addition the 'one belt one road' infrastructure scheme has the Yankees totally out foxed. That is why the USA continue to meddle in Afghanistan and the western Islamic province of China plus threaten Iran etc etc. There is likely to be no future if oil and coal are pursued and even if there were no global warming from those sources they are soon (within a century) to be eclipsed by solar/hydro energy systems.

    The oligarchy has lost its grip, its credibility and soon its masses: see Gillet Jaunes.

    mourning dove , Mar 30, 2019 6:44:51 PM | link
    Adding to my comment @38

    By regime, I'm not referring to whoever sits in the Oval Office, but rather this system of domination. MSM does not accurately depict the attitudes and opinions of Americans, or anyone else. It only represents what they want us to think.

    uncle tungsten , Mar 30, 2019 6:51:29 PM | link
    One though I should add is that the future for rapid retrofit of energy and hydro Computer Numerically Controlled machine networks. After Stuxnet attack in Iran and now the same in Venezuela there will be few nation states that will be satisfied with the older systems.

    New technology will oust the old and likely from China or Russia.

    karlof1 , Mar 30, 2019 7:15:26 PM | link
    b--

    Seems to me what that BigLie's about is this tale: Relations with Russia during the post-USSR age were going along swell until Russia began involved in the Venezuelan Crisis. The attempt is to try a new narrative using a different angle to blame Russia which is the goal of the BigLie. Signal a new line of approach in dealing with the attitude toward Russia to the trusty echoers of His Master's Voice. That's what it seems, b.

    psychohistorian , Mar 30, 2019 7:51:28 PM | link
    Here is an insightful read on Trump's (s)election and Russiagate that I think is not OT

    Taibbi: On Russiagate and Our Refusal to Face Why Trump Won

    The take away quote

    "Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump."

    As a peedupon all I can see is that the elite seem to be fighting amongst themselves or (IMO) providing cover for ongoing elite power/control efforts. It might not be about private/public finance in a bigger picture but I can't see anything else that makes sense

    bevin , Mar 30, 2019 8:51:21 PM | link
    Maracatu@34

    Thanks for the tip. Coincidentally I have just been reading Mark Twain's autobiography on that matter.

    But I was talking not of the Roosevelt corollary nor of the post Spanish War era but Monroe and 1823. It is instructive that Monroe's Secretary of State at the time was John Q Adams who, it is generally held, was largely responsible for its wording. It was undoubtedly aimed in the first instance at Spain and intended to deter it from attempting to re-establish its influence, militarily.

    Of course the Doctrine depended upon the co-operation of the British who, through the Royal Navy, supplied the force needed to prevent Spain, or possibly France acting as its proxy, from foing then what the US is doing now.

    Zachary Smith , Mar 30, 2019 10:07:37 PM | link
    @ psychohistorian #43

    Thanks for the Taibbi link. I hadn't seen it, and found him to be in good form. I do think he ought to have spoken more about how bad Trump's Primary opponents were.

    Most of those reporters were going to slant their stories the way their bosses wanted. Their jobs are just too nice to do otherwise. Getting Trump as Hillary's opponent had to have been a goal for the majority of them. He was the patsy who would become squished roadkill in the treads of The Most Experienced Presidential Candidate In History. More on that for people with strong stomachs:

    What Hillary Clinton's Fans Love About Her 11/03/2016

    Sample:

    Hillary Clinton is a knowledgeable, well-prepared, reasonable, experienced, even-tempered, hardworking candidate, while her opponent is a stubbornly uninformed demagogue who has been proven again and again to be a liar on matters big and small. There is no objective basis on which to equate Hillary Clinton to her opponent.
    The author had it half right. Turns out the voters knew quite a bit about Trump, and still preferred him to the Butcher of Libya.

    [Mar 30, 2019] China's Ambassador to Canada Exposes the White Supremacist Five Eyes Surveillance State

    Mar 30, 2019 | theduran.com

    In an article entitled Why the double standard on justice for Canadians, Chinese? Ambassador Lu cut through the noise being created by the media and western political class by exposing the over bloated western surveillance state known as the Five Eyes which he properly identified as the outgrowth of the unconstitutional Patriot Act, the Prism surveillance system which has annihilated all semblance of privacy among trans-Atlantic nations.

    After describing the double standard applied by Canadian elites who have constructed a narrative that always paints China as the villain of the world while portraying the west as "free and democratic" Ambassador Lu stated :

    "these same people have conveniently ignored the PRISM Program, Equation Group, and Echelon -- global spying networks operated by some countries that have been engaging in large-scale and organized cyber stealing, and spying and surveillance activities on foreign governments, enterprises, and individuals. These people also took a laissez-faire attitude toward a country that infringes on its citizens' privacy rights through the Patriot Act. They shouted for a ban by the Five Eyes alliance countries . on the use of Huawei equipment by these countries' own enterprises"

    For those who may not be aware, the Five Eyes is the name given to the British GCHQ-controlled surveillance structure that involves the four primary Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth countries (Britain, Canada, Australian and New Zealand) along with the United States. This is the deep state that has been dedicated to overthrowing American President Donald Trump since MI6 and their junior partners in America began organising Russia-gate in 2015-when it became apparent that Trump had a serious chance of defeating the Deep State candidate Hillary Clinton.

    As many patriotic whistle blowers such as Bill Binney, Ray McGovern, and Edward Snowden have exposed throughout recent years , the Five Eyes system that the Ambassador referenced was formed in the "post-911 world order" as a means of overriding each nations' constitutional protection of its own citizens' by capitalising on a major legal loop hole (viz: Since it is technically illegal for American intelligence agencies to spy on Americans without warrant, and for CSIS to do the same to Canadians, it is claimed that it is okay for British/Canadian intelligence agencies to spy on Americas and visa versa).

    The Chinese Ambassador didn't stop there however, but went one step further, ending his op-ed with a controversial claim which has earned him much criticism in the days since its publication. It was in his closing paragraph that Ambassador Lu made the uncomfortable point that the double standards employed against China and the west's willingness to ignore the Five Eyes "is due to Western egotism and white supremacy" . Is this the "belligerent and unfounded name calling" that his detractors are labelling it, or is there something more to it?

    When we look to the origins of the Five Eyes, which goes back MUCH further than September 11, 2001 , we can clearly see that Lu Shaye is touching a very deep and truthful nerve.

    Cecil Rhodes and the Racist Roots of the Deep State

    19 th Century spokesman for the British Empire, Cecil Rhodes wrote his infamous "Seventh Will" in 1877 where, speaking on behalf of an empire dying in the midst of the global spread of republican institutions, called for the formation of a new plan to re-organise the Empire, and re-conquer all colonial possessions that had been contaminated by republican ideas of freedom, progress, equality and self-determination [1] . Rhodes stated:

    "I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives. I contend that every acre added to our territory means in the future birth to some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence . Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire " [2]

    Race Patriot" Cecil Rhodes from Punch Magazine lording over Africa

    The Rhodes Trust was set up at his death in 1902 to administer the vast riches accrued during Rhodes' exploitation of diamond mines in Africa. Steered by Lord Alfred Milner, it was this Trust which gave birth to the Round Table Movement and Rhodes Scholarship Fund which themselves have been behind the creation of a century's worth of indoctrinated technocrats who have permeated all branches of government, finance, military, media, corporate and academia- both in America and internationally [3] .

    The Round Table Movement, (working in tandem with London's Fabian Society) didn't replace the old British Empire's power structures, so much as re-define their behaviour based upon the re-absorption of America back into the Anglo-Saxon hive. This involved centralising control of the education of their "managerial elite" with special scholarship's in Oxford and the London School of Economics- then sending the indoctrinated victims in droves back into their respective nations in order to be absorbed into the British Empire's governance structures in all domains of private and public influence. In Fabian Society terms, this concept is known as "permeation theory" [4] .

    Although it sometimes took the early removal of nationalist political leaders from power, via intrigue, coups or assassination, the 20 th century was shaped in large measure by the cancerous growth of this British-directed network that sought to undo the republican concept that progress and cooperation were the basis for both sovereignty and international law as laid out in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 [5] .

    This is the deep state that President Roosevelt warned of when he said in 1936 "The economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain about is that we seek to take away their power." This is the deep state that outgoing President Eisenhower warned of when he spoke of the "acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex" in 1961 and that John Kennedy fought against when he fired Allen Dulles and threatened to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter into the winds" . It is what Ronald Reagan contended with when he attempted to break the world out of the Cold War by working with Russia and other nations on Beam defense in 1983. It is this structure that owned Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's entire career , from his 1980s railroading of Lyndon LaRouche into prison to his cover up of the Anglo-Saudi role in 911 as CIA director to his efforts to impeach President Donald Trump today [6] .

    It is this same complex which is the direct outgrowth of the racist British-run drug wars on China and suppression of India and Africa throughout the 19 th and 20 th centuries.

    In Canada, this was the network that destroyed the plans of nationalist Prime Minister John Diefenbaker after he fired the Rhodes Scholar Governor of the Bank of Canada in 1959 during a desperate struggle to take control of the national bank in order to fund his Northern Vision [7] . Earlier, it was this group that Lincoln-admirer Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier warned of after his defeat in 1911 when he said "Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as "The Round Table", with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria, with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their respective parties." [8]

    The lesson to be learned is that the Deep State is not "American" as many commentators have assumed. It is the same old British Empire from which America brilliantly broke free in 1776 and which Cecil Rhodes and Milner led in re-organising on behalf of the monarchy at the beginning of the 20 th century. It was racist when Lords Palmerston and Russell ran it in the 19 th century and it continues to be racist today.

    So when Ambassador Lu says "the reason why some people are used to arrogantly adopting double standards is due to Western egotism and white supremacy – in such a context, the rule of law is nothing but a tool for their political ends and a fig leaf for their practising hegemony in the international arena" he is not being "belligerent or provocative", but is rather hitting on a fact which must be better understood if the deep state will finally be defeated and nations liberated to work with the new spirit of progress and cooperation exemplified by China's Belt and Road Initiative which is quickly spreading across the earth.

    Footnotes

    [1] By 1876, the American Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia showcased to a world audience the success of the "American System of Political Economy" which asserted that the value and behaviour of money was contingent upon the physical productive growth of the nation rather than "British-system free markets". Lincoln's system was being adopted across South American nations, Japan, China, India and many European powers as well (including Russia) which had grown tired of being manipulated by British imperial intrigues.

    [2] Cecil Rhodes, 1877 Confessions of Faith, University of Oregon

    [3] See American System or British Dictatorship part 1 by the author, Canadian Patriot #7, June 2013

    [4] For anyone in Canada wishing to learn about this in greater depth, they may wish to ask Canadian technocratic Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland how her experience as a Rhodes Scholar shaped her career.

    [5] The Peace of Westphalia: France's Defense of the Sovereign Nation by Pierre Beaudry, EIR Nov. 29, 2002

    [6] Robert Mueller Is an Amoral Legal Assassin: He Will Do His Job If You Let Him by Barbara Boyd , October 1, 2017 larouchepac.com. A common denominator among all of the mentioned American leaders is not only that they waged war on the deep state structures but made constant attempts to work constructively with Russia, China, India and other nations for industrial and scientific development. This policy of "win-win cooperation" is antagonistic to all systems of empire and is the reason why the Empire hates China and the potential created with Trump's intention to work with both China and Russia.

    [7] See John Diefenbaker and the Sabotage of the Northern Vision by the author, Canadian Patriot #4, January 2013

    [8] O.D. Skelton, The Life of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, p. 510

    BIO: Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review. His works have been published in Executive Intelligence Review, Global Resesarch, Global Times, Nexus Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Veterans Today and Sott.net. Matthew has also published the book "The Time has Come for Canada to Join the New Silk Road " and three volumes of the Untold History of Canada (available on untoldhistory.canadianpatriot.org). He has been associated with the Schiller Institute since 2006.

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    [Mar 30, 2019] Why There'll Be No US-Russia Reset Post-Mueller

    Mar 30, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Why There'll Be No US-Russia Reset Post-Mueller

    by Tyler Durden Fri, 03/29/2019 - 23:25 15 SHARES Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    President Donald Trump and his White House team have been cleared of collusion with the Kremlin in the 2016 presidential election. That startling conclusion by Special Counsel Robert Mueller after nearly two years of investigation, might be viewed by some as giving Trump freedom to now get on with normalizing relations with Moscow. Don't bet on it.

    Mueller's report, and US attorney general William Barr's appraisal of it, only partially vindicate Trump's long-held claims that the whole so-called "Russiagate" story is a "hoax".

    Yes, Mueller and Barr conclude that neither Trump nor his campaign team "conspired" with Russia to win the presidential race. But Democrat opponents are now dredging up the possibility that Trump "unwittingly" facilitated Kremlin cyber operations to damage his 2016 rival for the White House, Hillary Clinton.

    In his summary of Mueller's report, Barr unquestioningly accepts as fact the otherwise contentious claim that Russia interfered in the US election. Democrats and the anti-Trump US news media have not been deterred from pursuing their fantasy that the Kremlin allegedly meddled in US democracy. Trump has been cleared, but Russia has certainly not. It very much continues to have the smear of interference slapped all over its image.

    At the heart of this narrative – bolstered by Mueller and Barr – is the false claim that Russian cyber agents hacked into the Democrat party computer system during 2016 and released emails compromising Clinton to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. That whole claim has been reliably debunked by former NSA technical expert William Binney and other former US intelligence officials who have shown indisputably that the information was not hacked from outside, but rather was released by an insider in the Democrat party, presumably based on indignation over the party's corruption concerning the stitch-up against Clinton's rival nomination for the presidential ticket, Bernie Sanders.

    That is real scandal crying out to be investigated, as well as the Obama administration's decision to unleash FBI illegal wiretapping and dirty tricks against Trump as being a "Russian stooge". The Russian collusion charade was always a distraction from the really big serious crimes carried out by the Obama White House, the FBI and the Democrat party.

    In any case, the notion that Russia interfered in the US elections – even without Trump's collusion – has become an article of faith among the American political and media establishment.

    That lie will continue to poison US-Russia relations and be used to justify more economic sanctions being imposed against Moscow. Trump may be cleared of being a "Kremlin stooge". But he will find no political freedom to pursue a normalization in bilateral relations because of the predictable mantra about Russia interfering in American democracy.

    But there is a deeper reason why there will be no reset in US-Russia relations. And it has nothing to do with whether Trump is in the White House. The problem is a strategic one, meaning it relates to underlying geopolitical confrontation between America's desired global hegemony and Russia's rightful aspiration to be an independent foreign power not beholden to Washington's dictate.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Trumps billionaire coup détat: Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history. It's not only the fact that his administration has been literally taken over by Goldman Sachs, the top vampire-bank of the Wall Street mafia. ..."
    "... The 'anti-establishment Trump' joke has already collapsed and the US middle class is about be eliminated by the syndicate of the united billionaires under Trump administration. ..."
    "... Paul Singer whose nickname is "the vulture", he didn't get that nickname because he is a sweet an honest businessman. This is the guy who closed the Delphi auto plants in Ohio and sent them to China and also to Monterrey-Mexico. Donald Trump as a candidate, excoriated the billionaires who sent Delphi auto parts company down to Mexico ..."
    "... Paul Singer has two concerns: one of them is that we eliminate the banking regulations known as Dodd–Frank. He is called 'the vulture' cause he eats companies that died. He has invested heavily in banks that died. He makes his billions from government bail-outs, he has never made a product in his life, it's all money and billions made from your money, out of the US treasury ..."
    "... The Mercers are the real big money behind Donald Trump. When Trump was in trouble in the general election he was out of money and he was out of ideas and he was losing. It was the Mercers, Robert, who is the principal at the Renaissance Technologies, basically investment banking sharks, that's all they are. They are market gamblers and banking sharks, and that's how he made his billions, he hasn't created a single job as Donald Trump himself like to mention. ..."
    "... Both the vulture and the Mercers, they don't pay the same taxes as the rest. They don't pay regular income taxes. They have a special billionaires loophole called 'carried interest'. ..."
    "... They were two candidates who said that they would close that loophole: one was Bernie Sanders and the other, believe it or not, was Donald Trump, it was part of his populist movie, he said ' These Wall Street sharks, they don't build anything, they don't create a single job, when they lose we pay, when they win, they get a tax-break called carried interest. I will close that loophole. ' Has he said a word about that loophole? It passed away. ..."
    Mar 22, 2017 | failedevolution.blogspot.gr

    Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history. It's not only the fact that his administration has been literally taken over by Goldman Sachs, the top vampire-bank of the Wall Street mafia.

    Recently, Trump announced another big alliance with the vulture billionaire, Paul Singer, who, initially, was supposedly against him. It looks like the Trump big show continues.

    The 'anti-establishment Trump' joke has already collapsed and the US middle class is about be eliminated by the syndicate of the united billionaires under Trump administration.

    As Greg Palast told to Thom Hartmann:

    Paul Singer whose nickname is "the vulture", he didn't get that nickname because he is a sweet an honest businessman. This is the guy who closed the Delphi auto plants in Ohio and sent them to China and also to Monterrey-Mexico. Donald Trump as a candidate, excoriated the billionaires who sent Delphi auto parts company down to Mexico.

    Paul Singer has two concerns: one of them is that we eliminate the banking regulations known as Dodd–Frank. He is called 'the vulture' cause he eats companies that died. He has invested heavily in banks that died. He makes his billions from government bail-outs, he has never made a product in his life, it's all money and billions made from your money, out of the US treasury.

    He is against what Obama created, which is a system under Dodd–Frank, called 'living wills', where if a bank starts going bankrupt, they don't call the US treasury for bail-out. These banks go out of business and they are broken up so we don't have to pay for the bail-out. Singer wants to restore the system of bailouts because that's where he makes his money.

    The Mercers are the real big money behind Donald Trump. When Trump was in trouble in the general election he was out of money and he was out of ideas and he was losing. It was the Mercers, Robert, who is the principal at the Renaissance Technologies, basically investment banking sharks, that's all they are. They are market gamblers and banking sharks, and that's how he made his billions, he hasn't created a single job as Donald Trump himself like to mention.

    Both the vulture and the Mercers, they don't pay the same taxes as the rest. They don't pay regular income taxes. They have a special billionaires loophole called 'carried interest'.

    They were two candidates who said that they would close that loophole: one was Bernie Sanders and the other, believe it or not, was Donald Trump, it was part of his populist movie, he said ' These Wall Street sharks, they don't build anything, they don't create a single job, when they lose we pay, when they win, they get a tax-break called carried interest. I will close that loophole. ' Has he said a word about that loophole? It passed away.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/z-q5R4k_3rE

    Take a taste of Paul Singer from Wikipedia :

    His political activities include funding the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and he has written against raising taxes for the 1% and aspects of the Dodd-Frank Act. Singer is active in Republican Party politics and collectively, Singer and others affiliated with Elliott Management are "the top source of contributions" to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

    A number of sources have branded him a "vulture capitalist", largely on account of his role at EMC, which has been called a vulture fund. Elliott was termed by The Independent as "a pioneer in the business of buying up sovereign bonds on the cheap, and then going after countries for unpaid debts", and in 1996, Singer began using the strategy of purchasing sovereign debt from nations in or near default-such as Argentina, ]- through his NML Capital Limited and Congo-Brazzaville through Kensington International Inc. Singer's business model of purchasing distressed debt from companies and sovereign states and pursuing full payment through the courts has led to criticism, while Singer and EMC defend their model as "a fight against charlatans who refuse to play by the market's rules."

    In 1996, Elliott bought defaulted Peruvian debt for $11.4 million. Elliott won a $58 million judgment when the ruling was overturned in 2000, and Peru had to repay the sum in full under the pari passu rule. When former president of Peru Alberto Fujimori was attempting to flee the country due to facing legal proceedings over human rights abuses and corruption, Singer ordered the confiscation of his jet and offered to let him leave the country in exchange for the $58 million payment from the treasury, an offer which Fujimori accepted. A subsequent 2002 investigation by the Government of Peru into the incident and subsequent congressional report, uncovered instances of corruption since Elliott was not legally authorized to purchase the Peruvian debt from Swiss Bank Corporation without the prior approval of the Peruvian government, and thus the purchase had occurred in breach of contract. At the same time, Elliott's representative, Jaime Pinto, had been formerly employed by the Peruvian Ministry of Economy and Finance and had contact with senior officials. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Peruvian government paid Elliott $56 million to settle the case.

    After Argentina defaulted on its debt in 2002, the Elliott-owned company NML Capital Limited refused to accept the Argentine offer to pay less than 30 cents per dollar of debt. With a face value of $630 million, the bonds were reportedly bought by NML for $48 million, with Elliott assessing the bonds as worth $2.3 billion with accrued interest. Elliott sued Argentina for the debt's value, and the lower UK courts found that Argentina had state immunity. Elliott successfully appealed the case to the UK Supreme Court, which ruled that Elliott had the right to attempt to seize Argentine property in the United Kingdom. Alternatively, before 2011, US courts ruled against allowing creditors to seize Argentine state assets in the United States. On October 2, 2012 Singer arranged for a Ghanaian Court order to detain the Argentine naval training vessel ARA Libertad in a Ghanaian port, with the vessel to be used as collateral in an effort to force Argentina to pay the debt. Refusing to pay, Argentina shortly thereafter regained control of the ship after its seizure was deemed illegal by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Alleging the incident lost Tema Harbour $7.6 million in lost revenue and unpaid docking fees, Ghana in 2012 was reportedly considering legal action against NML for the amount.

    His firm... is so influential that fear of its tactics helped shape the current 2012 Greek debt restructuring." Elliott was termed by The Independent as "a pioneer in the business of buying up sovereign bonds on the cheap, and then going after countries for unpaid debts", and in 1996, Singer began using the strategy of purchasing sovereign debt from nations in or near default-such as Argentina, Peru-through his NML Capital Limited and Congo-Brazzaville through Kensington International Inc. In 2004, then first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund Anne Osborn Krueger denounced the strategy, alleging that it has "undermined the entire structure of sovereign finance."

    we wrote that " Trump's rhetoric is concentrated around a racist delirium. He avoids to take direct position on social matters, issues about inequality, etc. Of course he does, he is a billionaire! Trump will follow the pro-establishment agenda of protecting Wall Street and big businesses. And here is the fundamental difference with Bernie Sanders. Bernie says no more war and he means it. He says more taxes for the super-rich and he means it. Free healthcare and education for all the Americans, and he means it. In case that Bernie manage to beat Hillary, the establishment will definitely turn to Trump who will be supported by all means until the US presidency. "

    Yet, we would never expect that Trump would verify us, that fast.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Trumps billionaire coup détat: Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history. It's not only the fact that his administration has been literally taken over by Goldman Sachs, the top vampire-bank of the Wall Street mafia. ..."
    "... The 'anti-establishment Trump' joke has already collapsed and the US middle class is about be eliminated by the syndicate of the united billionaires under Trump administration. ..."
    "... Paul Singer whose nickname is "the vulture", he didn't get that nickname because he is a sweet an honest businessman. This is the guy who closed the Delphi auto plants in Ohio and sent them to China and also to Monterrey-Mexico. Donald Trump as a candidate, excoriated the billionaires who sent Delphi auto parts company down to Mexico ..."
    "... Paul Singer has two concerns: one of them is that we eliminate the banking regulations known as Dodd–Frank. He is called 'the vulture' cause he eats companies that died. He has invested heavily in banks that died. He makes his billions from government bail-outs, he has never made a product in his life, it's all money and billions made from your money, out of the US treasury ..."
    "... The Mercers are the real big money behind Donald Trump. When Trump was in trouble in the general election he was out of money and he was out of ideas and he was losing. It was the Mercers, Robert, who is the principal at the Renaissance Technologies, basically investment banking sharks, that's all they are. They are market gamblers and banking sharks, and that's how he made his billions, he hasn't created a single job as Donald Trump himself like to mention. ..."
    "... Both the vulture and the Mercers, they don't pay the same taxes as the rest. They don't pay regular income taxes. They have a special billionaires loophole called 'carried interest'. ..."
    "... They were two candidates who said that they would close that loophole: one was Bernie Sanders and the other, believe it or not, was Donald Trump, it was part of his populist movie, he said ' These Wall Street sharks, they don't build anything, they don't create a single job, when they lose we pay, when they win, they get a tax-break called carried interest. I will close that loophole. ' Has he said a word about that loophole? It passed away. ..."
    Mar 22, 2017 | failedevolution.blogspot.gr

    Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history. It's not only the fact that his administration has been literally taken over by Goldman Sachs, the top vampire-bank of the Wall Street mafia.

    Recently, Trump announced another big alliance with the vulture billionaire, Paul Singer, who, initially, was supposedly against him. It looks like the Trump big show continues.

    The 'anti-establishment Trump' joke has already collapsed and the US middle class is about be eliminated by the syndicate of the united billionaires under Trump administration.

    As Greg Palast told to Thom Hartmann:

    Paul Singer whose nickname is "the vulture", he didn't get that nickname because he is a sweet an honest businessman. This is the guy who closed the Delphi auto plants in Ohio and sent them to China and also to Monterrey-Mexico. Donald Trump as a candidate, excoriated the billionaires who sent Delphi auto parts company down to Mexico.

    Paul Singer has two concerns: one of them is that we eliminate the banking regulations known as Dodd–Frank. He is called 'the vulture' cause he eats companies that died. He has invested heavily in banks that died. He makes his billions from government bail-outs, he has never made a product in his life, it's all money and billions made from your money, out of the US treasury.

    He is against what Obama created, which is a system under Dodd–Frank, called 'living wills', where if a bank starts going bankrupt, they don't call the US treasury for bail-out. These banks go out of business and they are broken up so we don't have to pay for the bail-out. Singer wants to restore the system of bailouts because that's where he makes his money.

    The Mercers are the real big money behind Donald Trump. When Trump was in trouble in the general election he was out of money and he was out of ideas and he was losing. It was the Mercers, Robert, who is the principal at the Renaissance Technologies, basically investment banking sharks, that's all they are. They are market gamblers and banking sharks, and that's how he made his billions, he hasn't created a single job as Donald Trump himself like to mention.

    Both the vulture and the Mercers, they don't pay the same taxes as the rest. They don't pay regular income taxes. They have a special billionaires loophole called 'carried interest'.

    They were two candidates who said that they would close that loophole: one was Bernie Sanders and the other, believe it or not, was Donald Trump, it was part of his populist movie, he said ' These Wall Street sharks, they don't build anything, they don't create a single job, when they lose we pay, when they win, they get a tax-break called carried interest. I will close that loophole. ' Has he said a word about that loophole? It passed away.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/z-q5R4k_3rE

    Take a taste of Paul Singer from Wikipedia :

    His political activities include funding the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and he has written against raising taxes for the 1% and aspects of the Dodd-Frank Act. Singer is active in Republican Party politics and collectively, Singer and others affiliated with Elliott Management are "the top source of contributions" to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

    A number of sources have branded him a "vulture capitalist", largely on account of his role at EMC, which has been called a vulture fund. Elliott was termed by The Independent as "a pioneer in the business of buying up sovereign bonds on the cheap, and then going after countries for unpaid debts", and in 1996, Singer began using the strategy of purchasing sovereign debt from nations in or near default-such as Argentina, ]- through his NML Capital Limited and Congo-Brazzaville through Kensington International Inc. Singer's business model of purchasing distressed debt from companies and sovereign states and pursuing full payment through the courts has led to criticism, while Singer and EMC defend their model as "a fight against charlatans who refuse to play by the market's rules."

    In 1996, Elliott bought defaulted Peruvian debt for $11.4 million. Elliott won a $58 million judgment when the ruling was overturned in 2000, and Peru had to repay the sum in full under the pari passu rule. When former president of Peru Alberto Fujimori was attempting to flee the country due to facing legal proceedings over human rights abuses and corruption, Singer ordered the confiscation of his jet and offered to let him leave the country in exchange for the $58 million payment from the treasury, an offer which Fujimori accepted. A subsequent 2002 investigation by the Government of Peru into the incident and subsequent congressional report, uncovered instances of corruption since Elliott was not legally authorized to purchase the Peruvian debt from Swiss Bank Corporation without the prior approval of the Peruvian government, and thus the purchase had occurred in breach of contract. At the same time, Elliott's representative, Jaime Pinto, had been formerly employed by the Peruvian Ministry of Economy and Finance and had contact with senior officials. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Peruvian government paid Elliott $56 million to settle the case.

    After Argentina defaulted on its debt in 2002, the Elliott-owned company NML Capital Limited refused to accept the Argentine offer to pay less than 30 cents per dollar of debt. With a face value of $630 million, the bonds were reportedly bought by NML for $48 million, with Elliott assessing the bonds as worth $2.3 billion with accrued interest. Elliott sued Argentina for the debt's value, and the lower UK courts found that Argentina had state immunity. Elliott successfully appealed the case to the UK Supreme Court, which ruled that Elliott had the right to attempt to seize Argentine property in the United Kingdom. Alternatively, before 2011, US courts ruled against allowing creditors to seize Argentine state assets in the United States. On October 2, 2012 Singer arranged for a Ghanaian Court order to detain the Argentine naval training vessel ARA Libertad in a Ghanaian port, with the vessel to be used as collateral in an effort to force Argentina to pay the debt. Refusing to pay, Argentina shortly thereafter regained control of the ship after its seizure was deemed illegal by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Alleging the incident lost Tema Harbour $7.6 million in lost revenue and unpaid docking fees, Ghana in 2012 was reportedly considering legal action against NML for the amount.

    His firm... is so influential that fear of its tactics helped shape the current 2012 Greek debt restructuring." Elliott was termed by The Independent as "a pioneer in the business of buying up sovereign bonds on the cheap, and then going after countries for unpaid debts", and in 1996, Singer began using the strategy of purchasing sovereign debt from nations in or near default-such as Argentina, Peru-through his NML Capital Limited and Congo-Brazzaville through Kensington International Inc. In 2004, then first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund Anne Osborn Krueger denounced the strategy, alleging that it has "undermined the entire structure of sovereign finance."

    we wrote that " Trump's rhetoric is concentrated around a racist delirium. He avoids to take direct position on social matters, issues about inequality, etc. Of course he does, he is a billionaire! Trump will follow the pro-establishment agenda of protecting Wall Street and big businesses. And here is the fundamental difference with Bernie Sanders. Bernie says no more war and he means it. He says more taxes for the super-rich and he means it. Free healthcare and education for all the Americans, and he means it. In case that Bernie manage to beat Hillary, the establishment will definitely turn to Trump who will be supported by all means until the US presidency. "

    Yet, we would never expect that Trump would verify us, that fast.

    [Mar 29, 2019] The president-elect requested security clearance for Kushner to attend top-secret presidential briefings

    That was a classic "Nepotism 101" lesson. More to follow...
    Mar 23, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

    Trump has described his son-in-law as a "great guy". The president-elect has also reportedly taken the unprecedented step of requesting security clearance for Kushner to attend top-secret presidential briefings, the first one of which was on Tuesday. It's unclear if the request will be approved. It marks an astonishing departure and invites the accusation of nepotism.

    Kushner's options for a White House job are limited given his family ties to the president, Richard Painter, who served as President George W Bush's White House ethics lawyer, told the Associated Press. Congress passed an anti-nepotism law in 1967 that prohibits the president from appointing a family member – including a son-in-law – to work in the office or agency they oversee. The measure was passed after President John F Kennedy appointed his brother, Robert Kennedy, as attorney general.

    But the law does not appear to prevent Kushner from serving as an unpaid adviser, and few doubt that Kushner will play a decisive role in shaping the Trump presidency, acting as policy adviser and gate-keeper. As Trump and Barack Obama met privately at the White House last week, Kushner strolled the mansion's South Lawn, deep in conversation with Obama's chief of staff. As Kushner walked through the bustling West Wing during Trump's visit last week, he was heard asking Obama aides: "How many of these people stay?", apparently blissfully unaware that the entire West Wing staff will leave at the end of Obama's term.

    His contacts already include Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch; he has received foreign ambassadors. Like Trump, Kushner has never had a formal role in government, but he now appears set to be more important than many who do.

    [Mar 29, 2019] America is a banana republic! FBI chief agrees with CIA on Russia alleged election help for Trump

    Comey was a part of the coup -- a color revolution against Trump with Bremmen (possibly assigned by Obama) pulling the strings. That's right. This is a banana republic with nukes.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials who have seen it. ..."
    "... Comment: The FBI now flip-flops from its previous assessment: FBI rejects CIA assessment that Russia influenced presidential election ..."
    www.sott.net
    Reprinted from RT

    FBI and National Intelligence chiefs both agree with the CIA assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 US presidential elections partly in an effort to help Donald Trump win the White House, US media report.

    FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper are both convinced that Russia was behind cyberattacks that targeted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, The Washington Post and reported Friday, citing a message sent by CIA Director John Brennan to his employees.

    "Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials who have seen it.

    "The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI," it continued.

    Comment: The FBI now flip-flops from its previous assessment: FBI rejects CIA assessment that Russia influenced presidential election to help Trump win, calling info "fuzzy and ambiguous"

    ... ... ...

    [Mar 29, 2019] Early troubling sign of Trump: most individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated obsession with Iran

    One of the rare early realistic assessments of Trump foreign policy. most were wrong. Circe was right in major points. The appointment of CIA director was the litmus test and Trump failed it by appointing neocon Pompeo.
    Trump foreign policy is a typical neocon foreign policy. People just tried to overlook it in vain hopes that Trump will change the US foreign policy
    Notable quotes:
    "... 95% or more of the individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated obsession with Iran. This is very troubling. It's going to lead to war and not a regular war where 300,000 people die. This is a catastrophic error in judgment I don't give a sh...t who makes such an error, Trump or the representative from Kalamazoo! This is so bad that it disqualifies whatever else appears positive at this time. ..."
    "... And one more deeply disturbing thing; Pompeo, chosen to head the CIA has threatened Ed Snowden with the death penalty, if Snowden is caught, and now as CIA Director he can send operatives to chase him down wherever he is and render him somewhere, torture him to find out who he shared intelligence with and kill him on the spot and pretend it was a foreign agent who did the job. He already stated before he was assigned this powerful post that Snowden should be brought back from Russia and get the death penalty for treason. ..."
    "... Pompeo also sided with the Obama Administration on using U. S. military force in Syria against Assad and wrote this in the Washington Post: "Russia continues to side with rogue states and terrorist organizations, following Vladimir Putin's pattern of gratuitous and unpunished affronts to U.S. interests,". ..."
    "... Aside: I find those who talk about "factions" in foreign policy making to be un-credible. Among these were those that spoke of 'Obama's legacy'. A bullshit concept for a puppet. The neocons control FP. And they could only be unseated if a neocon -unfriendly President was elected. ..."
    "... Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran. But I doubt that it will result in a shooting war with Iran. The 'deep-state' (arms industry and security agencies) just wants a foreign enemy as a means of ensuring that US govt continues to fund security agencies and buy arms. ..."
    "... And really, Obama's "peace deal" with Iran was bogus anyway. It was really just a placeholder until Assad could be toppled. Only a small amount of funds were released to Iran, and US-Iranian relations have been just as bad as they were before the "peace deal". So all the hand-wringing about Trump vs. Iran is silly. ..."
    "... What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest" military (note: every candidate was for a strong military), the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense. ..."
    "... he is close to Jews/Zionists/Israel or even Jewish himself. Funny that Trump wasn't attacked like that before the election, huh? ..."
    www.moonofalabama.org
    Circe | Nov 19, 2016 8:37:46 PM | 23

    95% or more of the individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated obsession with Iran. This is very troubling. It's going to lead to war and not a regular war where 300,000 people die. This is a catastrophic error in judgment I don't give a sh...t who makes such an error, Trump or the representative from Kalamazoo! This is so bad that it disqualifies whatever else appears positive at this time.

    And one more deeply disturbing thing; Pompeo, chosen to head the CIA has threatened Ed Snowden with the death penalty, if Snowden is caught, and now as CIA Director he can send operatives to chase him down wherever he is and render him somewhere, torture him to find out who he shared intelligence with and kill him on the spot and pretend it was a foreign agent who did the job. He already stated before he was assigned this powerful post that Snowden should be brought back from Russia and get the death penalty for treason.

    Pompeo also sided with the Obama Administration on using U. S. military force in Syria against Assad and wrote this in the Washington Post: "Russia continues to side with rogue states and terrorist organizations, following Vladimir Putin's pattern of gratuitous and unpunished affronts to U.S. interests,".

    That's not all, Pompeo wants to enhance the surveillance state, and he too wants to tear up the Iran deal.

    Many of you here are extremely naïve regarding Trump.

    b's speculation has the ring of truth. I've often wondered if Trump was encouraged to run by a deep-state faction that found the neocons to be abhorrent and dangerous.

    Aside: I find those who talk about "factions" in foreign policy making to be un-credible. Among these were those that spoke of 'Obama's legacy'. A bullshit concept for a puppet. The neocons control FP. And they could only be unseated if a neocon-unfriendly President was elected.

    Jackrabbit | Nov 19, 2016 10:20:57 PM | 26

    Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran. But I doubt that it will result in a shooting war with Iran. The 'deep-state' (arms industry and security agencies) just wants a foreign enemy as a means of ensuring that US govt continues to fund security agencies and buy arms.

    And really, Obama's "peace deal" with Iran was bogus anyway. It was really just a placeholder until Assad could be toppled. Only a small amount of funds were released to Iran, and US-Iranian relations have been just as bad as they were before the "peace deal". So all the hand-wringing about Trump vs. Iran is silly.

    What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest" military (note: every candidate was for a strong military), the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense.

    And so it is interesting that those that want to undermine Trump have resorted to the claim that he is close to Jews/Zionists/Israel or even Jewish himself. Funny that Trump wasn't attacked like that before the election, huh?

    The profound changes and profound butt-hurt lead to the following poignant questions:

    >> Have we just witnessed a counter-coup?

    >> Isn't it sad that, in 2016(!), the only check on elites are other elite factions? An enormous cultural failure that has produced a brittle social fabric.

    >> If control of NSA snooping power is so crucial, why would ANY ruling block ever allow the another to gain power?

    Indeed, the answer to this question informs one's view on whether the anti-Trump protests are just Democratic Party ass-covering/distraction or a real attempt at a 'color revolution'.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Nickolas Kristof again demonstrates the level of neocons panic and his MIC lobbyist credentials by Nicholas Kristof

    Kristof panic was premature and just shows that he is a really has no political analyst talent whatsoever. Trump was quickly co-opted by neocons.
    It is interesting that Kristof, even at such an early stages of Russiagate was already "FullOfSchiff"
    "... The CIA says it has "high confidence" that Russia was trying to get Trump elected, and, according to The Washington Post, the directors of the F.B.I. and national intelligence agree with that conclusion. ..."
    "... Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its attack on the United States. ..."
    "... Rex Tillerson, Trump's nominee for secretary of state, is a smart and capable manager. Yet it's notable that he is particularly close to Putin, who had decorated Tillerson with Russia's "Order of Friendship." ..."
    Dec 12, 2017 | nytimes.com

    From Donald Trump The Russian Poodle - The New York Times

    In 1972, President Richard Nixon's White House dispatched burglars to bug Democratic Party offices. That Watergate burglary and related "dirty tricks," such as releasing mice at a Democratic press conference and paying a woman to strip naked and shout her love for a Democratic candidate, nauseated Americans - and impelled some of us kids at the time to pursue journalism.

    Now in 2016 we have a political scandal that in some respects is even more staggering. Russian agents apparently broke into the Democrats' digital offices and tried to change the election outcome. President Obama on Friday suggested that this was probably directed by Russia's president, saying, "Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin."

    In Watergate, the break-in didn't affect the outcome of the election. In 2016, we don't know for sure. There were other factors, but it's possible that Russia's theft and release of the emails provided the margin for Donald Trump's victory.

    The CIA says it has "high confidence" that Russia was trying to get Trump elected, and, according to The Washington Post, the directors of the F.B.I. and national intelligence agree with that conclusion.

    Both Nixon and Trump responded badly to the revelations, Nixon by ordering a cover-up and Trump by denouncing the CIA and, incredibly, defending Russia from the charges that it tried to subvert our election. I never thought I would see a dispute between America's intelligence community and a murderous foreign dictator in which an American leader sided with the dictator.

    Let's be clear: This was an attack on America, less lethal than a missile but still profoundly damaging to our system. It's not that Trump and Putin were colluding to steal an election. But if the CIA is right, Russia apparently was trying to elect a president who would be not a puppet exactly but perhaps something of a lap dog - a Russian poodle.

    In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely (and unfairly) mocked as President George W. Bush's poodle, following him loyally into the Iraq war. The fear is that this time Putin may have interfered to acquire an ally who likewise will roll over for him.

    Frankly, it's mystifying that Trump continues to defend Russia and Putin, even as he excoriates everyone else, from CIA officials to a local union leader in Indiana.

    Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its attack on the United States.

    Rex Tillerson, Trump's nominee for secretary of state, is a smart and capable manager. Yet it's notable that he is particularly close to Putin, who had decorated Tillerson with Russia's "Order of Friendship."

    Whatever our personal politics, how can we possibly want to respond to Russia's interference in our election by putting American foreign policy in the hands of a Putin friend?

    Tillerson's closeness to Putin is especially troubling because of Trump's other Russia links. The incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, accepted Russian money to attend a dinner in Moscow and sat near Putin. A ledger shows $12.7 million in secret payments by a pro-Russia party in Ukraine to Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort. And the Trump family itself has business connections with Russia.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Donald Trump just another say-anything-to-get-elected phony by Chuck Baldwin

    Early warning about Trump betrayal
    Notable quotes:
    "... And, as I wrote last week, the biggest indicator as to whether or not he is truly going to follow through with his rhetoric is who he selects for his cabinet and top-level government positions. So far, he has picked Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist. ..."
    "... Reince Priebus is an establishment insider. He did NOTHING to help Trump get elected until toward the very end of the campaign. He is the current chairman of the Republican National Committee. ..."
    "... On the other hand, Stephen Bannon is probably a very good pick. He headed Breitbart.com, which is one of the premier "alt-right" media outlets that has consistently led the charge against the globalist, anti-freedom agenda of the political establishment in Washington, D.C. Albeit, Bannon is probably blind to the dangers of Zionism and is, therefore, probably naïve about the New World Order. I don't believe anyone can truly understand the New World Order without being aware of the role that Zionism plays in it. ..."
    "... To be honest, the possible appointments of Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, John Bolton and especially Newt Gingrich are MORE than troubling. Rudy Giuliani is "Mr. Police State," and if he is selected as the new attorney general, the burgeoning Police State in this country will go into hyperdrive. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is already warning us about this. Chris Christie is a typical New England liberal Republican. His appointment to any position bodes NOTHING good. And John Bolton is a Bush pro-war neocon. But Newt Gingrich is the quintessential insider, globalist, and establishment hack. ..."
    "... Newt Gingrich is a HIGH LEVEL globalist and longtime CFR member. He is the consummate neocon. And he has a brilliant mind (NO morals, but a brilliant mind--a deadly combination, for sure). ..."
    "... You cannot drain the swamp by putting the very people who filled the swamp back in charge. And that's exactly what Trump would be doing if he appoints Gingrich to any high-level position in his administration. ..."
    "... Trump is already softening his position on illegal immigration, on dismantling the EPA, on repealing Obamacare, on investigating and prosecuting Hillary Clinton, etc. ..."
    "... What we need to know right now is that WE CANNOT GO TO SLEEP. We cannot sit back in lethargy and complacency and just assume that Donald Trump is going to do what he said he would do. If we do that, we might as well have elected Hillary Clinton, because at least then we would be forever on guard against her forthcoming assaults against our liberties. ..."
    "... The difference in this election is that Donald Trump didn't run against the Democrats; he ran against the entire Washington establishment, including the Republican establishment. Hopefully that means that the people who supported and voted for Trump will NOT be inclined to go into political hibernation now that Trump is elected. ..."
    Nov 17, 2016 | www.newswithviews.com

    Originally from: Chuck Baldwin -- Trump Supporters Must Not Go To Sleep

    After my post-election column last week, a lady wrote to me and said, "I have confidence he [Trump] plans to do what is best for the country." With all due respect, I don't! I agree wholeheartedly with Thomas Jefferson. He said, "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

    If Donald Trump is going to be anything more than just another say-anything-to-get-elected phony, he is going to have to put raw elbow grease to his rhetoric. His talk got him elected, but it is going to be his walk that is going to prove his worth.

    And, as I wrote last week, the biggest indicator as to whether or not he is truly going to follow through with his rhetoric is who he selects for his cabinet and top-level government positions. So far, he has picked Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist.

    Reince Priebus is an establishment insider. He did NOTHING to help Trump get elected until toward the very end of the campaign. He is the current chairman of the Republican National Committee. If that doesn't tell you what he is, nothing will. Trump probably picked him because he is in so tight with House Speaker Paul Ryan (a globalist neocon of the highest order) and the GOP establishment, thinking Priebus will help him get his agenda through the GOP Congress. But ideologically, Priebus does NOT share Trump's anti-establishment agenda. So, this appointment is a risk at best and a sell-out at worst.

    On the other hand, Stephen Bannon is probably a very good pick. He headed Breitbart.com, which is one of the premier "alt-right" media outlets that has consistently led the charge against the globalist, anti-freedom agenda of the political establishment in Washington, D.C. Albeit, Bannon is probably blind to the dangers of Zionism and is, therefore, probably naïve about the New World Order. I don't believe anyone can truly understand the New World Order without being aware of the role that Zionism plays in it.

    To be honest, the possible appointments of Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, John Bolton and especially Newt Gingrich are MORE than troubling. Rudy Giuliani is "Mr. Police State," and if he is selected as the new attorney general, the burgeoning Police State in this country will go into hyperdrive. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is already warning us about this. Chris Christie is a typical New England liberal Republican. His appointment to any position bodes NOTHING good. And John Bolton is a Bush pro-war neocon. But Newt Gingrich is the quintessential insider, globalist, and establishment hack.

    There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the globalist elite gave Newt Gingrich the assignment of cozying up to (and "supporting") Trump during his campaign with the sole intention of being in a position for Trump to think he owes Gingrich something so as to appoint him to a key cabinet post in the event that he won. Gingrich could then weave his evil magic during a Donald Trump presidential administration.

    Newt Gingrich is a HIGH LEVEL globalist and longtime CFR member. He is the consummate neocon. And he has a brilliant mind (NO morals, but a brilliant mind--a deadly combination, for sure). If Donald Trump does not see through this man, and if he appoints him as a cabinet head in his administration, I will be forced to believe that Donald Trump is clueless about "draining the swamp." You cannot drain the swamp by putting the very people who filled the swamp back in charge. And that's exactly what Trump would be doing if he appoints Gingrich to any high-level position in his administration.

    Trump is already softening his position on illegal immigration, on dismantling the EPA, on repealing Obamacare, on investigating and prosecuting Hillary Clinton, etc. Granted, he hasn't even been sworn in yet, and it's still way too early to make a true judgment of his presidency. But for a fact, his cabinet appointments and his first one hundred days in office will tell us most of what we need to know.

    What we need to know right now is that WE CANNOT GO TO SLEEP. We cannot sit back in lethargy and complacency and just assume that Donald Trump is going to do what he said he would do. If we do that, we might as well have elected Hillary Clinton, because at least then we would be forever on guard against her forthcoming assaults against our liberties.

    There is a reason we have lost more liberties under Republican administrations than Democratic ones over the past few decades. And that reason is the conservative, constitutionalist, Christian, pro-freedom people who should be resisting government's assaults against our liberties are sound asleep because they trust a Republican President and Congress to do the right thing -- and they give the GOP a pass as our liberties are expunged piece by piece. A pass they would NEVER give to a Democrat.

    The difference in this election is that Donald Trump didn't run against the Democrats; he ran against the entire Washington establishment, including the Republican establishment. Hopefully that means that the people who supported and voted for Trump will NOT be inclined to go into political hibernation now that Trump is elected.

    I tell you again: this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the course of a nation. Frankly, if this opportunity is squandered, there likely will not be another one in most of our lifetimes.

    [Mar 29, 2019] America is a banana republic! FBI chief agrees with CIA on Russia alleged election help for Trump

    Comey was a part of the coup -- a color revolution against Trump with Bremmen (possibly assigned by Obama) pulling the strings. That's right. This is a banana republic with nukes.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials who have seen it. ..."
    "... Comment: The FBI now flip-flops from its previous assessment: FBI rejects CIA assessment that Russia influenced presidential election ..."
    www.sott.net
    Reprinted from RT

    FBI and National Intelligence chiefs both agree with the CIA assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 US presidential elections partly in an effort to help Donald Trump win the White House, US media report.

    FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper are both convinced that Russia was behind cyberattacks that targeted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, The Washington Post and reported Friday, citing a message sent by CIA Director John Brennan to his employees.

    "Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials who have seen it.

    "The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI," it continued.

    Comment: The FBI now flip-flops from its previous assessment: FBI rejects CIA assessment that Russia influenced presidential election to help Trump win, calling info "fuzzy and ambiguous"

    ... ... ...

    [Mar 29, 2019] 8 Cases That Prove The FBI CIA Were Out Of Control Long Before Russiagate

    Mar 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    8 Cases That Prove The FBI & CIA Were Out Of Control Long Before Russiagate

    by Tyler Durden Fri, 03/29/2019 - 18:45 424 SHARES Authored by Jon Miltimore and Carey Wedler via The Foundation for Economic Education,

    Conservatives tend to have two bad habits. First, they're prone to viewing the past through a nostalgic lens. Second, they tend to instinctively give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt.

    These tendencies help explain why conservatives for decades have been able to overlook the many abuses -- constitutional, legal, and moral -- of US intelligence agencies.

    Unlike some more seasoned media , conservatives have appeared genuinely shocked by revelations of the Trump-Russia saga: abuse of FISA warrants , classified leaks from top FBI brass, corruption , campaign moles , and an apparent plot to remove an elected president through undemocratic (and likely extra-constitutional) means.

    These revelations are unique in that they have become highly public and involve a sitting president. However, an examination of the history of US intelligence agencies reveals government bureaucrats were out of control long before the 2016 presidential election.

    1. That Time the CIA Considered Bombing Miami and Blaming It on Castro

    It's no secret that the US government sought to assassinate Fidel Castro for years. Less well known, however, was that part of their regime-change plot included a plan to blow up Miami and sinking a boat-full of innocent Cubans.

    The plan, which was revealed in 2017 when the National Archives declassified 2,800 documents from the JFK era, was a collaborative effort that included the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies that sought to brainstorm strategies to topple Castro and sow unrest within Cuba. One of those plans included Operation Northwoods, submitted to the CIA by General Lyman Lemnitzer on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It summarized nine "pretexts" the CIA and US government could employ to justify military intervention in Cuba. One of the official CIA documents shows officials musing about staging a terror campaign ("real or simulated") and blaming it on Cuban refugees.

    "We could develop a Cuban Communist terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," the Operation Mongoose document says.

    "The terror campaign could be pointed at Cubans refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated.) We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots."

    Ultimately, the broader Mongoose effort failed to remove Castro from power or effectively establish an infiltration within Cuba, though the CIA did engage in several sabotage operations. Mongoose was suspended and ultimately discontinued amid the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    2. In 2014 the CIA Was Caught Red-Handed Spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee

    In the summer of 2014, the CIA's inspector general concluded that the CIA had "improperly" spied on US Senate staffers who were researching the agency's black history of torture. As the New York Times reported :

    An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program.

    And that's not the worst part. The Times goes on to note that CIA officers didn't just read the emails of the Senate investigators. They also sent "a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information."

    John Brennan, CIA director from 2013-2017, insisted during Senate hearings these were "very limited inappropriate actions" and that "the actions of the CIA were reasonable."

    Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) disagreed.

    "That's not what the Inspector General [concluded]," Wyden said. "When you're talking about spying on a committee responsible for overseeing your agency, in my view that undermines the very checks and balances that protect our democracy, and it's unacceptable in a free society. And your compatriots in all your sister agencies agree with that."

    Brennan, who publicly lied about the episode, was not punished and even retained his security clearance until Aug. 15, 2018.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/IjFsWWsv8M8

    3. The FBI's "Suicide Letter" to MLK and His Wife

    Before he had a day named in his honor and a monument on the National Mall, the government viewed Martin Luther King Jr. very much as a threat. In fact, his message of peace, love, equality, and civil disobedience had the FBI so scared that agents actually sent King and his wife a package containing a strange letter and tape recording. It contained details of the civil rights activist's sexual indiscretions and encouraged him to kill himself.

    In 1961, the FBI learned that Stanley Levison, a known "Red," had become a close advisor to King. The following year, Bobby Kennedy approved wiretaps on Levison's home and office, surveillance that would eventually expand. It turns out that J. Edgar Hoover stumbled on to MLK's busy sex life while investigating King.

    "Hoover found out very little about any Communist subterfuge," wrote Yale historian Beverly Gage in the New York Times in 2014, "but he did begin to learn about King's extramarital sex life ."

    The FBI apparently had no scruples about using the information to try to bring King down. James Comey, Gage writes, used to keep a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk "as a reminder of the bureau's capacity to do wrong."

    4. The CIA Forced Prisoners to Participate in Mind Control Experiments in the 1950s

    If you've never heard of Project MKUltra, you might find it hard to believe. Also known as "the CIA Mind Control Program," the effort was launched by the agency in 1953. The program used drug experiments on humans, oftentimes on prisoners who were tested against their will or in exchange for early release. The experiments were undertaken so CIA agents could better understand how to extract information from enemies during interrogations. Here is a description from the History Channel:

    MK-Ultra's "mind control" experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered, some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a sweeping defense research program. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school, to American soldiers, to "sexual psychopaths" at a state hospital, MK-Ultra's programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society. The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences.

    Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote of his experience as an inmate test subject in MK-Ultra. "Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state," Bulger said of the 1957 tests at the Atlanta penitentiary where he was serving time. "Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane."

    How was any of this legal? Well, it wasn't, which is why the CIA understood it had to be concealed from the American public at all costs.

    "Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general," wrote a CIA auditor.

    "The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles."

    5. The FBI's Systemic Forensic Fraud in Crime Labs

    In the early 1990s, Dr. Frederic Whitehurst , an attorney and chemist who worked at the FBI as a Supervisory Special Agent, noticed troubling practices in the in the bureau's Investigation Laboratory.

    There were "alterations of reports, alterations of evidence, folks testifying outside their areas of expertise in courts of law," said Whitehurst. "[Really] what was going on was human rights violations. We have a right to fair trials in this country And that's not what was going on at the FBI lab."

    In 1994, he blew the whistle on the "systemic forensic fraud" he witnessed. Nothing happened. So he took his case to the Department of Justice. The FBI didn't like that. Whitehurst was eventually chased out of the Bureau, but not before winning a $1.16 million settlement.

    Unfortunately, however, the wheels of justice turn slowly at the Bureau.

    "It wasn't until ten years later that Whitehurst was finally vindicated," notes the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund note, "when a scathing 500+ page study of the lab by the Justice Department Inspector General, Michael Bromwich, concluded major reforms were required in the lab."

    But by then, an untold number of people had been convicted with the help of tainted evidence -- evidence the DOJ knew was tainted.

    In 2012 the Washington Post published an extensive review of the FBI and DOJ failures to properly review the cases impacted by the FBI lab scandal, based on Whitehurst's research.

    As a result, the DOJ agreed to conduct yet another review of hair cases in collaboration with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

    At least 35 of these cases involved convicted criminals who received the death penalty, according to the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund.

    6. Operation Midnight Climax: Drugging Unsuspecting Johns and Filming their Interactions with Prostitutes

    In the 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA admitted to operating a "bawdy house" in a San Francisco apartment where "unsuspecting citizens were lured for the CIA's drug experiments," according to a local news story report documented by the agency.

    "Private citizens were taken to the bordello by $100 prostitutes and drugged without their knowledge, usually with LSD, " the San Francisco Examiner reported in 1977 after the CIA admitted to the operation. Agents sat behind a two-way mirror and filmed the interactions between the drugged men and prostitutes.

    Then-CIA director Stansfield Turner suggested the operation was intended to understand how drugs could potentially be used against the American people, though he called the experiments "abhorrent" and acknowledged it was "inexplicable" that the CIA would do this without the subjects' consent. He insisted the agency had ceased the experiments 12 years prior. In a 1977 Senate testimony, CIA agents said the purpose of the experiments was to "learn about thought control and sexual behavior," the Examiner noted.

    7. The FBI Has Routinely Staged Acts of Terrorism

    In the wake of 9/11, the FBI has, on numerous occasions, targeted unstable and mentally ill individuals, sending informants to bait them into committing terror attacks. Before these individuals can actually carry out the attack, however, the Bureau intervenes, presenting the foiled plot to the public as a successfully thwarted attack.

    In 2011, journalist Glenn Greenwald summarized several examples of this deceitful tactic:

    [T]he FBI subjected 19-year-old Somali-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud to months of encouragement, support and money and convinced him to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon, only to arrest him at the last moment and then issue a Press Release boasting of its success. In late 2009 , the FBI persuaded and enabled Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian citizen, to place a fake bomb at a Dallas skyscraper and separately convinced Farooque Ahmed, a 34-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, to bomb the Washington Metro .

    8. The CIA's Media Manipulation Campaigns

    From the agency's earliest days, it has attempted to control the flow of information to the public. In his book Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA , former New York Times journalist Tim Weiner documented how much influence the agency's first civilian director, Allen Dulles, had among major media companies:

    Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran The New York Times, The Washington Post , and the nation's leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time' s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek 's man in Tokyo.

    Weiner noted, "It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government's wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information." During his time at the agency, Dulles "built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany's most powerful press baron."

    In 1977, Carl Bernstein further exposed the CIA's efforts to influence news organization in an article for Rolling Stone in which he revealed that "more than 400 American journalists in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters."

    The Lesson

    Amid the media and political establishment's ongoing, frenzied coverage of Russia-gate, Americans are eager to pin guilt on the president have shown a willingness to trust the CIA and FBI without question despite numerous past and present reasons to be skeptical of their conclusions. Considering the CIA's long history of intervening in other countries' elections and governments, it is particularly ironic that their claims of Russia's meddling in the US' democracy are taken at face value.

    Nor is the corruption and deceit limited to the FBI and CIA. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to lawmakers and the public in 2013 when he claimed NSA did not collect any type of data on "millions or hundreds of millions of Americans." He was caught red-handed months later when whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the agency's mass surveillance operations.

    The survival of liberty depends on skepticism of government power -- and make no mistake, that includes President Trump. But in light of these federal agencies' chronic tendency to engage in behavior wholly inconsistent with American values, the same distrust must be applied to the institutions that claim to shed light on abuses by unpopular leaders.

    dirty belly , 48 minutes ago link

    Here's another CIA involvement:

    Inside The LC:

    The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation

    Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation: Part I

    by Dave McGowan | May 8, 2008

    Zappa's manager, by the way, is a shadowy character by the name of Herb Cohen, who had come out to L.A. from the Bronx with his brother Mutt just before the music and club scene began heating up. Cohen, a former U.S. Marine, had spent a few years traveling the world before his arrival on the Laurel Canyon scene. Those travels, curiously, had taken him to the Congo in 1961, at the very time that leftist Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was being tortured and killed by our very own CIA. Not to worry though; according to one of Zappa's biographers, Cohen wasn't in the Congo on some kind of nefarious intelligence mission. No, he was there, believe it or not, to supply arms to Lumumba "in defiance of the CIA." Because, you know, that is the kind of thing that globetrotting ex-Marines did in those days (as we'll see soon enough when we take a look at another Laurel Canyonluminary).

    WhiteOakQueen , 1 hour ago link

    And no mention of their dirty little hands in 9/11? https://www.floridabulldog.org/2017/12/fbi-asks-two-courts-to-block-further-disclosures-about-its-911-investigation-of-sarasota-saudis/ https://www.floridabulldog.org/2017/07/miami-judge-rules-out-foia-trial/

    WhiteOakQueen , 1 hour ago link

    Thank God for Florida Bulldog! https://www.floridabulldog.org/foia-lawsuit/

    DaiRR , 1 hour ago link

    It is a rare occasion when power is not wielded with chronic corruption and deceit. In the ***** world, if you're not lying and cheating you're not trying. Damn if I can figure a way to reign this all in. Maybe try a big reset by firing anyone who is a registered DemoRat and from then on publicly hanging any creeps who authorize or participate in partisan politically motivated fraudulent schemes or immoral acts. The Senate and House Intelligence Committees need to ride herd on this, but how in the world can they do that with their DemoRats and a corrupt serial liar chairman like A. Schiff ?

    surf@jm , 1 hour ago link

    And, the two political parties, instead of trying to reform these agencies, prefer to use them for their own nefarious political purposes by installing party hacks in their senior management positions....

    Sociopaths appointed to carry out sociopathic missions....

    francis scott falseflag , 59 minutes ago link

    the two political parties, instead of trying to reform these agencies,

    The Democrats and Republican parties may be very stupid but thanks for reminding us that neither party is/was stupid enough to think they could reform the FBI or the CIA.

    LOL

    bh2 , 1 hour ago link

    If there has been a Russian mole in the top echelon of the USG, that person is most likely John Brennan.

    surf@jm , 1 hour ago link

    Why CNN would have you believe Brennan the communist is an American patriot.....Lol!....

    Merica101 , 8 minutes ago link

    At this point, Brennan has been totally discredited. Either out of stupidity or ideology. Even he is back tracking saying he received bad information. What a complete jackass if not worse...

    Reaper , 1 hour ago link

    lord Acton paraphrased. The Great American heresy is that a US government office held imparts either decency or honor upon the holder thereof.

    rosiescenario , 1 hour ago link

    This author missed some of the bigger ops:

    The Gulf Of Tonkin Incident which greatly extended the Vietnam war resulting in many young draftees being killed for no reason.

    Also at that time, Air America....Cia's operation using opium to fund activity in Laos because our elected officials would not support it.

    More recently Waco and Ruby Ridge.

    And then there was the WMD false flag that got us deeply embroiled in the ME where we have no reason to be.

    GRDguy , 1 hour ago link

    A good place to start understanding things:

    The Union Station Massacre :
    The Original Sin of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI
    Published 2005

    I grew up in the Kansas City area;

    I've seen the bullet holes that are stlll there.

    Moribundus , 1 hour ago link

    This must be fake news. USA has democracy... FLAWED DEMOCRACY. My personal opinion is that it is on the edge 6 and 5.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

    Know thy enemy , 1 hour ago link

    Allen Dulles (2nd CIA Director) and his brother John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State) and a small group of others including George HW Bush wanted to make sure that the CIA didn't have to go before Congress or the Senate and ask for funding for clandestine operations, so they hit upon a plan to sell drugs; heroin and cocaine - it was called Operation Hammer. It amassed enormous slush funds (all around the world) that exist to this day.

    The 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit commonly known as the Lockerbie Bombing, was in fact the CIA taking down a fully loaded commercial jet to cover up the fact that a major heroin shipment had been intercepted by the FBI. Those Agents were on board Flight 103 returning to the US (with the evidence) to expose the CIA.

    francis scott falseflag , 22 minutes ago link

    I suppose the money the English got when they forced the Chinese to buy the opium they stole from India paid for maintaining English absolute power halfway round the world. Operation Hammer was just a knockoff of something they had done in Asia an hundred years ago.

    Does anybody know if any empires previous to the English (French, Spanish, Turkish) forced people, either their own or their victims, to buy and use drugs?

    Or is this just another evil idea foisted on mankind by the loverly Brits?

    artistant , 1 hour ago link

    Russiagate has nothing to do with the FBI or the CIA.

    Why?

    Russia is an IMPEDIMENT to Apartheid Israhell's design for the region .

    Without Russia, ASSAD would be long gone and IRAN would have been bombed to oblivion, and Greater Israhell would have been fulfilled and ruling over the MidEast.

    In other words, Russiagate is simply PAYBACK .

    swmnguy , 1 hour ago link

    Ask anyone who's ever been opposed to the Wars of Empire. The police/spy complex has always used sabotage, agents provocateurs, forged evidence, blackmail, harassment, unwarranted searches and black bag jobs; all of it. America has always had secret political police. Apparently until very recently the Right was just fine with it.

    boattrash , 2 hours ago link

    9. Ruby Ridge

    10. Waco

    rosiescenario , 1 hour ago link

    Gulf of Tonkin incident to prolong the Vietnam war....CIA

    "Air America" ...using opium to fund clandestine operations in Laos....CIA

    AND for these few we know about lets multiply by 1000 to get the real picture.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Initial hopes on Trump attacking neoliberalism proved to be illusions. He is a Republican Obama by Paul Craig Roberts

    That was written in March 2017. Looks like Paul Craig Roberts was completely detached from reality
    Notable quotes:
    "... By standing up for Americans, Trump alienated the global corporations, their executives and shareholders, all of whom benefit from stealing the economic life of Americans and producing abroad where labor and regulatory costs are lower. Neoliberal junk economists describe this labor arbitrage, which reduces the real incomes of the American labor force, as the beneficial working of free trade. ..."
    "... These offshoring firms not only have destroyed the economic prospects of millions of Americans, but also have destroyed the payroll tax base of Social Security and Medicare, and the tax base of local and state governments, with the consequence that numerous pension systems are on the verge of failure. The New York Teamsters Road Carriers Local 707 Pension Fund has just failed. This failure, experts predict, is the beginning of a tsunami that will spread into municipal and state pension systems. ..."
    "... Once Trump put Flynn's blood in the water, he set the situation for the sacrifice of other of his appointees, ending with himself. At the present time, "the Russian connection" black mark is operating against Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. If Sessions falls, Trump is next. ..."
    "... Despite the facts, the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and all the rest of the CIA's media whores are consciously and intentionally misrepresenting the facts. Americans do not need any more evidence that the entirety of the American media is totally devoid of integrity and respect for truth. The American media is a collection of whores who lie for a living. The presstitutes are despicable, the scum of the earth. ..."
    "... The real question is how has contact with Russian government officials become criminalized, grounds for removing a National Security Adviser, an Attorney General, and impeaching a President himself. President John F. Kennedy had ongoing contact with Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet government, in order to resolve the Cuban/Turkish missile crisis without nuclear war. President Nixon had ongoing contact with the Russians in order to achieve SALT I and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. President Carter had ongoing contact with Russians in order to achieve SALT II. President Reagan worked with the Russian leader in order to end the Cold War. I know. I was there. ..."
    "... Dear reader, ask yourself, how did communications with Russians in the interest of peace and the reduction of tensions become a criminal act? Have laws been passed that it is forbidden for US officials to speak with Russian officials? Are you so utterly stupid that a presstitute media that has never in your entire life told you anything that was truthful can convince you that those who seek to avoid a conflict between thermo-nuclear powers are "Russian agents"? ..."
    "... The entirety of the world has been put on the knife edge of existence by the arrogance, stupidity, and hubris of the neoconservative pursuit of American world hegemony. The neoconservative ideology is perfect cover for the material interest of the military/security Deep State that is driving the world to destruction. ..."
    "... W Bush: "Dad, what's a neocon?" HW Bush: "You want names or description?" W: "Description." HW: "Israel." ..."
    "... "To see who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." -Voltaire ..."
    "... Hint: If you criticize them, you're called an anti-Semite. And they're not even Semites. ..."
    "... Insouciant is merely Paul Craig Roberts way of registering his extreme disgust, being a gentlemen, unlike me, he doesn't use other, more crude adjectives .. ..."
    "... What we are witnessing is calculated, but is driven by desperation.. Trump has resources now that he did not have as a candidate, and he is using them. Yes, it is taking longer than we hoped, but the progressives are doing everything possible to slow if not stop him. I seriously doubt any president has faced such resistance before. We still don't know the story behind Flynn. He surely knew his phones were tapped and is surely smart enough to know they would leak it. And, while he lost his title, he is still there with his team. ..."
    "... No, because if he gets too close to anything important his family members start dropping dead. He knows this... he knew it before he ran. If he goes after the rothchild-backed cabal he gets dead. ..."
    "... It's war and there is no going back. Trump has the will and the resources, so all we can do is support where possible....and hope. ..."
    "... The public does know what is going on. Nobody is being fooled. The problem is that the press presents the narrative (often implicitly) that gives the impression PCR is conveying here. ..."
    Mar 04, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com

    Via Paul Craig Roberts

    The question in the title is V.I. Lenin's question. His answer was to create a revolutionary "vanguard" to spread revolutionary ideas among the workers, the economic class that Karl Marx had declared to be the class rising to the ascendency of political power. Finally, democracy, frustrated by upper class interests in its earlier manifestations, would become reality. The workers would rule.

    Given the presence of evil and human failing, it did not work out in that way. But Lenin's question remains a valid one. Americans whose economic life and prospects for their children have been destroyed by the offshoring of American manufacturing and tradable professional skills jobs, such as software engineering, answered the question by electing Donald Trump.

    The Americans, dispossessed by the offshoring corporations, elected Trump, because Trump was the only American running for a political office who called attention to the problem and declared his intention to fix it.

    By standing up for Americans, Trump alienated the global corporations, their executives and shareholders, all of whom benefit from stealing the economic life of Americans and producing abroad where labor and regulatory costs are lower. Neoliberal junk economists describe this labor arbitrage, which reduces the real incomes of the American labor force, as the beneficial working of free trade.

    These offshoring firms not only have destroyed the economic prospects of millions of Americans, but also have destroyed the payroll tax base of Social Security and Medicare, and the tax base of local and state governments, with the consequence that numerous pension systems are on the verge of failure. The New York Teamsters Road Carriers Local 707 Pension Fund has just failed. This failure, experts predict, is the beginning of a tsunami that will spread into municipal and state pension systems.

    When you add up the external costs of jobs offshoring that are imposed on Americans, the costs far exceed the value of the profits that flow to the One Percent. Clearly, this is an intolerable situation.

    Dispossessed Americans rose up. They ignored the presstitute media, or perhaps were driven to support Trump by the hostility of the media. Trump was elected by dispossessed America, by the working class.

    The working class is out of favor with the elite liberal/progressive/left which abhors the working class as racist, misogynist, homophobic, gun nuts who oppose transgendered toilet facilities. Thus, the working class, and their chosen representative, Donald Trump, are under full assault by the presstitutes. "Trump Must Go" is their slogan.

    And well he might. Trump, in a fit of stupidity, dismissed his National Security Advisor, Gen. Flynn, because Flynn did what he should have done and spoke with the Russian ambassador in order to avoid a Russian response to Obama's provocation of expelling Russian diplomats at Christmas.

    Russians have been demonized and ascribed demonic powers. If you speak to a Russian, you fall under suspicion and become a traitor to your country. This is the story according to the CIA, the Democratic Party, the military/security complex, and the presstitute media.

    Once Trump put Flynn's blood in the water, he set the situation for the sacrifice of other of his appointees, ending with himself. At the present time, "the Russian connection" black mark is operating against Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. If Sessions falls, Trump is next.

    Let's be clear. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sessions met with the Russian ambassador, just as he met with a number of other countries' ambassadors. There is nothing unusual or surprising about a US senator meeting with foreign diplomatic representatives.

    Those who accuse Sessions of lying are misrepresenting the facts. Sessions met with ambassadors in his capacity as a US Senator, not in his capacity as a Trump representative. As a former US Senate staffer, I can attest that it is perfectly normal for US Senators to meet with diplomats. John McCain and Lindsey Graham even fly to the Middle East to meet with terrorists.

    Despite the facts, the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and all the rest of the CIA's media whores are consciously and intentionally misrepresenting the facts. Americans do not need any more evidence that the entirety of the American media is totally devoid of integrity and respect for truth. The American media is a collection of whores who lie for a living. The presstitutes are despicable, the scum of the earth.

    The real question is how has contact with Russian government officials become criminalized, grounds for removing a National Security Adviser, an Attorney General, and impeaching a President himself. President John F. Kennedy had ongoing contact with Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet government, in order to resolve the Cuban/Turkish missile crisis without nuclear war. President Nixon had ongoing contact with the Russians in order to achieve SALT I and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. President Carter had ongoing contact with Russians in order to achieve SALT II. President Reagan worked with the Russian leader in order to end the Cold War. I know. I was there.

    But if President Trump wants to defuse the extremely dangerous tensions that the reckless Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes have resurrected with a powerful thermo-nuclear state that only wants peace with the US, President Trump and any of his appointees who spoke to a Russian are unfit for office! This madness is the position of the idiot liberal/progressive/left, the CIA, the Democratic Party, the right-wing morons of the Republican Party such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and the two-bit whores that comprise the Western media.

    Dear reader, ask yourself, how did communications with Russians in the interest of peace and the reduction of tensions become a criminal act? Have laws been passed that it is forbidden for US officials to speak with Russian officials? Are you so utterly stupid that a presstitute media that has never in your entire life told you anything that was truthful can convince you that those who seek to avoid a conflict between thermo-nuclear powers are "Russian agents"?

    I have no doubt that the vast bulk of Western populations are insouciant. But if there is no intelligence and awareness left anywhere in the population, and most certainly there is none whatsoever in the governments of the West or in the Western media or the Identity Politics of the liberal/progressive/left, then don't expect to be alive much longer.

    The entirety of the world has been put on the knife edge of existence by the arrogance, stupidity, and hubris of the neoconservative pursuit of American world hegemony. The neoconservative ideology is perfect cover for the material interest of the military/security Deep State that is driving the world to destruction.

    BabaLooey , Mar 3, 2017 10:14 PM

    Trump needs to tighten up. Get even tougher than he is now. Go out and do more speeches. Take the message STRAIGHT to the masses.........unfiltered. LET the MSM "fake" that.

    kavlar -> BabaLooey , Mar 3, 2017 10:24 PM

    W Bush: "Dad, what's a neocon?" HW Bush: "You want names or description?" W: "Description." HW: "Israel."

    The neocons are Israel-first fanatics. They did 9/11 and support all terrorist groups. And because Russia came to Syria's aid, they're after Russia as well.

    Stuck on Zero -> kavlar , Mar 3, 2017 10:25 PM

    If you want to see just how powerful the neo-con deep state is just declare a general strike for all the people doing real work.

    lexxus -> Stuck on Zero , Mar 3, 2017 10:29 PM

    The deep state is the money power. http://biblicisminstitute.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/how-the-ashkenazi-jew...

    Mano-A-Mano -> lexxus , Mar 3, 2017 10:32 PM

    "To see who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." -Voltaire

    Hint: If you criticize them, you're called an anti-Semite. And they're not even Semites.

    SofaPapa -> Mano-A-Mano , Mar 3, 2017 10:41 PM

    In Dr Strangelove, the mindblowingly stupid response of the characters played by the generals saying "attack Russia no matter what they do" was portrayed as a joke, and the audience got it. Nobody could be that stupid, so it looked funny.

    We are in desperately sick times when the attitude displayed by those comedically-stupid characters has become our official policy and our propaganda.

    Let's pray the American people are not yet completely stupid, and that there are still enough who see this insanity for the immediate and extreme danger that it is.

    Pray hard.

    xythras -> DownWithYogaPants , Mar 3, 2017 11:47 PM

    Drain The SWAMP -- Starting with Schumer

    Pedophile Enabler? Chuck Schumer Helped Accused Child Sex Abuser into US

    http://dailywesterner.com/news/2017-03-03/pedophile-enabler-chuck-schume...

    # PizzaGate

    Byte Me -> xythras , Mar 4, 2017 6:38 AM

    Drain The SWAMP -- Starting with Obama, Soros and The Clintons

    The purpose of all of this "RussiaDidIt" bollocks has long been postulated as having the purpose of starting the Last War. The question arises: "Who benefits?" (Ordinarily, no-one 'benefits' and only morons think that a 'benefit' could arise)

    But, just for a moment, turn it on its head and ask the counter-question: "Who benefits the least ?"

    Pretty obviously, the USA and the Russian Federation come out badly. Assume the impossible: that it doesn't spread out and result in planetdeath.

    Who just (quite coincidentally - of course) had its main rivals effectively eliminated? Quietly. Efficiently. Anonymously...

    Who, currently quietly colonizing Africa for its resorce base, might now divert their attentions to the (much greater and closer) resource base to their North, West and East, ostensibly in the name of "reconstruction?"

    Naturally, it's just a coincidence that a large slice of Global Manufacturing has recently been transferred to that country (recent decades)

    So congrats are due to the DemoCrud skum who perpetrated this crime against humanity as the willing "useful idiots" of the PuppetMasters. Burn in Hell you motherfukkerz.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ah1JM9mf60

    grizfish -> Byte Me , Mar 4, 2017 1:47 PM

    The only way to "drain the swamp" is to eliminate the brainwashed masses who enable the warmongering globalist neocons. Without the democratic partys' tens of million sheeple, the power hungry devils like Soros, the Clintons, McCain, Pelosi, Feinstein, and the rest of the "perverted elite" would have no power.

    Having considered this FACT, I have decided not to oppose their quest to start a global thermonuclear war with Russia. I saw war up close and personal in Viet-Nam. I am 71 years old, so not much time remaining to waste in a political battle against the snowflakes here in Californicate. I feel confident that I have a better chance of surviving than they do.

    I have also decided to sit back, with my personal defenses in hand, and watch them experience, up close and personal for themselves, the horrors of war like they are presently inflicting on the mid-eastern countries. The children of these despots, if they survive, will finally witness proof that their parents are the cause of their misery.

    Then, and only then, will the survivors be able to reconstruct toward a peaceful world.

    Giant Meteor -> DownWithYogaPants , Mar 4, 2017 1:50 AM

    Insouciant adjective

    1. free from concern, worry, or anxiety; carefree; nonchalant.

    I agree, we're way past that ... Robert's knows this , all too well ..

    Insouciant is merely Paul Craig Roberts way of registering his extreme disgust, being a gentlemen, unlike me, he doesn't use other, more crude adjectives ..

    I cut him slack on his overuse of the word insouciant, because it would just seem so out of place substituting instead, "fucking assholes," for every place it is prominently used in his writing.

    I mean can you imagine?

    No, I'm glad he's more refined than me. Makes for a more interesting and gentile world.

    Paper Mache -> SofaPapa , Mar 4, 2017 8:52 AM

    Hahaa Dr Strangelove. Strange movie, for even stranger times

    "They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

    TDK -> kavlar , Mar 4, 2017 3:45 AM

    The Right wing Neo-cons and the Right Wing media were always a match made in heaven.

    Oldwood -> BabaLooey , Mar 3, 2017 10:28 PM

    What we are witnessing is calculated, but is driven by desperation.. Trump has resources now that he did not have as a candidate, and he is using them. Yes, it is taking longer than we hoped, but the progressives are doing everything possible to slow if not stop him. I seriously doubt any president has faced such resistance before. We still don't know the story behind Flynn. He surely knew his phones were tapped and is surely smart enough to know they would leak it. And, while he lost his title, he is still there with his team.

    Everything is obvious now and I think this is what Trump has been goading them into. Putting blood in the water to draw the sharks to the surface. We will see.

    fbazzrea -> Oldwood , Mar 3, 2017 10:48 PM

    i hope you're right. i keep wanting to think he's a clever fox but the acceleration of events is mind-boggling. the liberal onslaught is from all directions and relentless. i pray he's able to withstand their attacks and counter with an epic T-Day rout--one for the history books--that exposes and annihilates the seditious traitors in the world of public opinion, giving him political capital to rid our nation of the unconstitutional Patriot Act and Big Brother's illegal 4th Amendment violations of illegal search and seizure.

    it's hard to keep the faith right now... i wanna believe he's got the wherewithall to pull this off. if i get weak and shout for quick solutions, just downvote my stupid butt bigly.

    crossroaddemon -> Oldwood , Mar 3, 2017 11:34 PM

    No, because if he gets too close to anything important his family members start dropping dead. He knows this... he knew it before he ran. If he goes after the rothchild-backed cabal he gets dead.

    Give up guys... there's no winning this. The sooner we accept this the sooner we can maybe fucking DO something.

    Oldwood -> crossroaddemon , Mar 4, 2017 9:07 AM

    It's war and there is no going back. Trump has the will and the resources, so all we can do is support where possible....and hope.

    new game -> Oldwood , Mar 4, 2017 9:40 AM

    i think you are suggesting first touch/listen of utah spying. if true, step one. step 2 is to take down the main operatives and bring them down with all the resources of the justice dept.

    this is assuming that all parties stay in the confines of law...hmmm

    Chris Dakota -> BabaLooey , Mar 3, 2017 10:28 PM

    Trump is following my advise.

    Pluto gives you enough rope to hang yourself.

    He is letting them.

    My God no sane person will vote for this crew ever again.

    chubbar -> BabaLooey , Mar 3, 2017 10:36 PM

    Exactly, Trump needs to go on TV and speak plainly, layout the thesis as outlined in this article. Make sure the country knows EXACTLY what is going on and what the stakes are. Most libtards don't have one fucking clue how they are being used by these sick fucks. Get everything he knows and what he SUSPECTS, even with no direct evidence out into the general public. Time is running short.

    HedgeJunkie -> chubbar , Mar 4, 2017 1:03 AM

    I don't twit. I don't even 'follow' a twit. I don't know how.

    But I'm pretty sure this sort of message would take a hell of a lot more characters than, what is it, 140?

    That means he would need some other means to deliver a complicated message that by-passes an inherently hostile media yet still gets viewed by tens of millions.

    Anyone have ideas on that?

    leeteam -> BabaLooey , Mar 3, 2017 10:51 PM

    You are absolutely right, "Take the message STRAIGHT to the masses.........unfiltered."

    Now is the time for a TRUMP Network. Daily briefings directly to the people.

    skunzie , Mar 3, 2017 10:17 PM

    Couldn't agree more. I fail to fathom how meeting with Russian diplomats constitutes any type of crime. That's what diplomats do for God's sake. Wake up people before it's too late.

    Future Jim , Mar 3, 2017 10:17 PM

    So it's all the Neocons ... No need to look anywhere else ...

    The psyop is strong in this one.

    Implied Violins -> Future Jim , Mar 3, 2017 10:43 PM

    Ah, but everything PCR says is true. It's what he doesn't say that gives away the lie.

    All of his articles demonize the west (and he's right). But he's deliberately not looking at the higher dynamics of this globalist, central bank-led kabuki theater.

    fbazzrea -> Implied Violins , Mar 3, 2017 10:55 PM

    But he's deliberately not looking...

    ah, but i disagree. PCR spares not the higher powers. this is but one article. he hones in on them all.

    Implied Violins -> fbazzrea , Mar 3, 2017 11:04 PM

    I think he's a 'gatekeeper' who's job is to point out the evils of the west and make the east look good in comparison, so that when the 'reset' comes people will buy into the globalist one world currency that will be offered.

    I've never seen him talk disparagingly about either China or Russia or the BRICS. Certainly he has mentioned the FED and the IMF, but not the big one - the BIS - that I have seen. And until he does, he's just another Rothschild/Rockefeller plant to me.

    fbazzrea -> Implied Violins , Mar 3, 2017 11:26 PM

    i subscribe to his donations-based newsletter. you probably do too but just in case, here's his homepage.

    http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/category/articles/

    he takes on the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, NATO, liberals, Ruling Establishment, Obama the War Criminal Butcherer of Women and Children, Kissinger, pretty much everybody. i agree he's not a Russiaphobe, thankfully someone's got a balanced position.

    anyway... we'll have to agree to disagree. i believe he's a patriot true blue... errr, red. nope. red, white and blue.

    crossroaddemon -> Implied Violins , Mar 3, 2017 11:36 PM

    I agree. Any political pundit as highly placed as him who isn't screaming bloody murder about 9/11 is a plant by default.

    fbazzrea -> crossroaddemon , Mar 4, 2017 12:05 AM

    he's an economist. that's like accusing Stockman of being a plant. it's just beyond their area of expertise and interest.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Craig_Roberts

    for example, here's a 2002 article where he examines the Soviet Union's economic shortcomings.

    http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2002/10/07/my-time-with-soviet-economics-2/

    it's nothing to me and i'm not trying to defend him. i just think he's not what you suggest. professionals feel responsible for their words and only write about what they know. we can all speculate about 9/11 but without launching our own investigation, it's just "talk." and at PCR and Stockman's level, they refrain from flapping their lips to hear themselves speak, metaphorically.

    anyway...

    namaste

    Implied Violins -> fbazzrea , Mar 4, 2017 12:33 AM

    IF you are really open-minded, I'll just leave this here for your perusal:

    http://redefininggod.com/2015/05/globalist-agenda-watch-2015-update-24-g...

    From the article:

    > "He is a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy.

    > He is a former editor at the Wall Street Journal.

    > He was the "first occupant of the William E. Simon Chair for Economic Policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS], then part of Georgetown University." It's worth noting that Georgetown is a Jesuit institution, and the Board of Trustees of CSIS includes Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and representatives of Exxon Mobil, Boeing, Coca Cola, AIG, GlaxoSmithKline, and Morgan Stanley (to name a few).

    Looking at the high positions this guy has held in the Washington/Wall Street Establishment, ask yourself this: "Is PCR really going against all of his lifelong associates or is he simply carrying water for them like he always has?" "

    fbazzrea -> Implied Violins , Mar 4, 2017 2:24 AM

    i consider myself open-minded and reviewed your link.

    as far as the 3 bullet points the author suggests condemn PCR:

    1. Austrian economics are largely followed by most conservative economists as opposed to Keynesian.
    2. I would also argue the American govt pursues global hegemony, i.e., an American empire
    3. Who among us would not believe there is widespread incompetence in DC? Would anyone use the term "competent" with Obama, other than describing his knack for telling untruths and perhaps killing innocent Near East women and children?

    He was former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Reagan

    A strong critic of the Bush (and later Obama ) administrations' handling of the War on Terror , he has taken positions strongly at odds with mainstream politicians: harshly criticising the ineffectiveness, severity and high rates of incarceration associated with the War on Drugs , excessive police violence and use of SWAT teams against civilians. He has criticised the law and order politics and congressional approval of increased government surveillance associated with the War on Terror age, which he views as fundamental threats to the civil liberties and Right to Privacy enshrined in the US constitution, opening the way for an oligarchic police state to be imposed upon the US population... -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Craig_Roberts

    sorry, i just don't see it. as far as his association with the WSJ and Georgetown Univ, that would pretty much be the aspirations of most journalists. and lastly, here are the closing statements from his newsletter yesterday:

    The voice here at this website, my voice, provides perspectives that permit escape from the Matrix, but it depends on your support. As March is upon us, so is my quarterly request for your support. So far, we have both kept our word. You have supported the site, and I have continued to ruin my reputation in Washington by writing explanations that are unpopular in the ruling circles.

    I am prepared to fight for our lives, but I cannot do it without you .-- http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/03/02/can-truth-prevail-paul-craig-...

    but even more than that, i read his articles and take what i want and discard the rest. no one is mind controlling me. can't be brainwashed. got to have a brain first. (;

    Elco the Consti... -> Future Jim , Mar 4, 2017 2:44 AM

    This quote was setting off sirens in my mind:

    "I have no doubt that the vast bulk of Western populations are insouciant. But if there is no intelligence and awareness left anywhere in the population, and most certainly there is none whatsoever in the governments of the West or in the Western media or the Identity Politics of the liberal/progressive/left, then don't expect to be alive much longer."

    The public does know what is going on. Nobody is being fooled. The problem is that the press presents the narrative (often implicitly) that gives the impression PCR is conveying here.

    So is PCR part of the problem?

    [Mar 29, 2019] Donald Trump meets with prominent Sanders supporter Tulsi Gabbard

    An interesting bit of history
    Nov 23, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

    Donald Trump's unorthodox US presidential transition continued on Monday when he held talks with one of the most prominent supporters of leftwing Democrat Bernie Sanders.

    The president-elect's first meeting of the day at Trump Tower in New York was with Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic maverick who endorsed the socialist Sanders during his unsuccessful primary battle with Hillary Clinton.

    ... ... ...

    At first glance Gabbard, who is from Hawaii and is the first Hindu member of the US Congress, seems an unlikely counsellor. She resigned from the Democratic National Committee to back Vermont senator Sanders and formally nominated him for president at the party convention in July, crediting him with starting a "movement of love and compassion", although by then Clinton's victory was certain.

    But the Iraq war veteran has also expressed views that might appeal to Trump, criticising Obama, condemning interventionist wars in Iraq and Libya and taking a hard line on immigration. In 2014, she called for a rollback of the visa waiver programme for Britain and other European countries with what she called "Islamic extremist" populations.

    In October last year she tweeted: "Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won't bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911." She was then among 47 Democrats who joined Republicans to pass a bill mandating a stronger screening process for refugees from Iraq and Syria coming to the US.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Gabbard is inspiring... I can't see anyone winning against imperial propaganda at this point, but I will support her as much as I can

    Mar 29, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    This should be the end of the Democratic party. This dismal state of affairs is their fault, from the content of the leaked emails to their handling of it. They have had choices on the way to clean up their act but, they have blankly refused at every juncture. Not one thing has changed since the emails revealed that the DNC rigs its primaries, and yet here we are in the middle of another fake primary with everyone going along with it like it's a real thing. It's weird. In a healthy democratic republic the party would be dead already, and a new one would've taken its place fueled by fresh energy and enthusiasm but the donor-class corruption is so deeply entrenched that that possibility has seemed like a fantasy.

    Gregory Herr , March 27, 2019 at 19:30

    As an old-fashioned labor-lefty who used to call himself a Democrat, I'd say the alienation continues unabated.
    No illusions about who and what the party represents. Bad enough at home, but shit, they also drop bombs like no tomorrow and spout lines from Langley and Likud like the back of their hand.

    As an armchair goof playing early guessing games, I'd say Sanders will pull at least the weight he did last time as the uninspiring field of corporatists will split Hillary's wing and the wild card Gabbard may draw support widely.

    SteveK9 , March 28, 2019 at 10:03

    Lifelong Democrat here that saw the writing on the wall, one year into Obama's first term (gave up on MSM during the runup to the Iraq invasion). Although, I could hardly have imagined how low the Democratic leadership would sink with Russia-gate. Gabbard is inspiring, but they are already starting to wear her down. I can't see anyone winning against imperial propaganda at this point, but I will support her as much as I can.

    Gregory Herr , March 28, 2019 at 18:40

    I'm sending a small donation to help her get into the Dem debates.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Unfortunately, in every way that matters, RussiaGate has been a complete success

    Notable quotes:
    "... Unfortunately, in every way that matters, RussiaGate has been a complete success. ..."
    "... Though Trump says he is a Nationalist, his every move in foreign policy shows him to be toeing the line for the interests of the PNACers, and whenever he bucks their interests, he has shown that he can be brought to heel as long as they don't trample his ego. ..."
    "... Tell them how utterly abhorrent and degenerate this war of terrorism against the Syrian people has been... ..."
    "... I think there will be a major smear campaign against Bernie and Tulsi. Wikileaks has shown that the DNC had plans to smear Bernie as an atheist in 2016, among other things ..."
    "... They will say that Socialism will bankrupt the Nation, and if we don't keep bombing everyone the "terrorists" will win. Divide and conquer is the game plan. ..."
    "... They have retained the superdelegates for the second ballot, and they are running so many candidates that they are purposely aiming for a second ballot, where the oligarchs will once again decide for the people. ..."
    "... Next step for the MSM propaganda machine? Probably assisting the CIA in whipping up war fever against Venezuela. ..."
    "... They've pounded "Putin evil!" into the heads of their party fanatics long enough that shouting "Putin plus Maduro!" at them will have the most ardent Democrat voter screaming to massacre all of Caracas. ..."
    Mar 29, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Skip Scott , March 26, 2019 at 08:24

    I posted this on Medium when this article first came out.

    Unfortunately, in every way that matters, RussiaGate has been a complete success. When Donald Trump said "wouldn't it be great to get along with Russia" RussiaGate was born. The thought of detente was his cardinal sin. That possibility has been completely demolished.

    The MIC and its trillions of wasted dollars are safe. The Evil Empire's Forever War continues unabated, and even has new horizons in places such as Iran and Venezuela. Nuclear brinksmanship keeps the R&D money flowing to Lockheed Martin and the other death dealers.

    Though Trump says he is a Nationalist, his every move in foreign policy shows him to be toeing the line for the interests of the PNACers, and whenever he bucks their interests, he has shown that he can be brought to heel as long as they don't trample his ego.

    The DNC/RNC theater will go on, and the MSM will seek to ensure that our choice for 2020 will be corporate sponsored warmonger from column A or B.

    ... ... ...

    The young people of today spend more time on the internet than they do watching network television, and 42 percent of registered voters didn't bother to cast a ballot in 2016. Therein lies our hope.

    Gregory Herr , March 26, 2019 at 20:30

    The time is ripe for leaving the Democrats, Skip. I think Tulsi should take your advice. But I've a funny feeling she'll throw the support she builds to Bernie towards a VP slot on the ticket.

    Tulsi Gabbard is saying things fairly directly that Americans aren't used to hearing from their politicians. I love hearing it. But I have to say I'm bothered by her handling of the "Assad question". She could simply relate some of her experience in Syria, including her time with Assad. She could, in point of fact, refer to Assad as the President of Syria.

    She could say that Syria's culture and political system are their own and that we would all do better to seek understanding of that culture before we set about trying to destroy it by arming terrorists.

    She did say the CIA armed terrorists in Syria, didn't she? Come on Tulsi. Just part of the truth isn't enough truth. Tell them they ought to go to Syria themselves. Tell them the reporters aren't doing their jobs.

    Tell them how utterly abhorrent and degenerate this war of terrorism against the Syrian people has been...

    Skip Scott , March 28, 2019 at 08:13

    I think there will be a major smear campaign against Bernie and Tulsi. Wikileaks has shown that the DNC had plans to smear Bernie as an atheist in 2016, among other things. They have Bob Parry's "Mighty Wurlitzer" and a vast toolkit.

    They will say that the progressives are splintering the party, and that getting rid of Trump is all that matters, so you need to hold you nose and choose warmonger from column B.

    They will say that Socialism will bankrupt the Nation, and if we don't keep bombing everyone the "terrorists" will win. Divide and conquer is the game plan.

    They have retained the superdelegates for the second ballot, and they are running so many candidates that they are purposely aiming for a second ballot, where the oligarchs will once again decide for the people.

    That's why a real progressive needs to split from the Dems in a dramatic fashion , go third party, and shoot for the 15% to make the debates. In the end, that's the only venue that matters.

    AelfredRex , March 26, 2019 at 06:31

    Next step for the MSM propaganda machine? Probably assisting the CIA in whipping up war fever against Venezuela.

    They've pounded "Putin evil!" into the heads of their party fanatics long enough that shouting "Putin plus Maduro!" at them will have the most ardent Democrat voter screaming to massacre all of Caracas.

    Zhu , March 26, 2019 at 01:44

    US elections are like those in the Roman Empire: prestigious but meaningless.

    Zhu , March 26, 2019 at 01:47

    America. We are definitely a genocidal nation. In all ways we are to blame for your own problems.

    [Mar 29, 2019] That has always been the main goal of Russiagatevent: brainwashing the US public to convice her of Russian enmity and aggression

    Notable quotes:
    "... Nowhere in any corporate media coverage will you see the collapse of the collusion narrative used as an opportunity to re-examine the Russian attack narrative, based as it is unassailably (they would have us believe) on the twin pillars of the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and Mueller's never-to-be-tried indictments of a raft of obscure Russians. ..."
    "... Yes. The Dismal Faking MSM are NOT going to let go of their Russophobic Orwellian propaganda – it clearly serves purposes (the MIC's being one, surely). ..."
    "... Trump the Siberian Candidate was a useful part of the hate campaign against Russia, but ultimately expendable, like one stage in a multi-stage rocket booster ..."
    "... The important work goes on, regardless of what happens to one individual like Donald, or one species like Homo sapiens. ..."
    "... This Russia-Trump collusion thing is and has been a criminal conspiracy to undermine and possibly remove from office an elected President, and it has taken Russian-American relations down to a plainly dangerous level. ..."
    "... I think there's evidence that this conspiracy was a product of Hillary Clinton, her staff, the DNC, elements of the FBI, FBI director Comey, CIA director Brennan, other elements of the CIA, elements of British intelligence, possibly elements of the Ukrainian govt., and possibly persons tied into the corrupt Clinton "charity" foundation and its networks. ..."
    "... The US govt. is deeply corrupt – murderously corrupt – that's been plain at least since the Kennedy assassination in 1963, followed by the murders of a number of other prominent American political figures. ..."
    Mar 29, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    David G , March 25, 2019 at 20:41

    "As the clamoring din of Russia-gate falls into the memory hole, a large empty space will open up. So why not use this space to push forward some new exciting ideas. Space means possibilities."

    It's sad, but in a very important way, I don't think that's true.

    One of the neat tricks of Russia-gate all along has been that while such prolonged and sententious effort has been devoted to the question of "collusion" – i.e. TrumpWorld's alleged disloyal canoodling with Russia – which was always destined to come up dry in the end, the underlying allegation of the Russian "attack on our democracy" – i.e. the thing Trump was supposedly colluding *in* – has been allowed to solidify into an undisputed fact, despite being likewise unproven, and in reality just as false, or at best wildly overblown.

    Nowhere in any corporate media coverage will you see the collapse of the collusion narrative used as an opportunity to re-examine the Russian attack narrative, based as it is unassailably (they would have us believe) on the twin pillars of the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and Mueller's never-to-be-tried indictments of a raft of obscure Russians.

    Rather, the Russian attack story is getting all the more play now in corporate media as they try to salvage the Russia-gate debacle from the Mueller disappointment.

    (This has been playing out on MSNBC as I have been composing this comment: Chris Hayes just had on a congressman who used the very phrase "attack on our democracy" referring to what he considers an undisputed fact, and now David Corn and Michael Isikoff are on, energetically moving the goalposts away from the collapsing collusion fairy tale. For what it's worth, Isikoff and Hayes are showing a little more discomfort than Corn, who is full-steam-ahead on perfidious Muscovy.)

    That has always been the main event: convincing the U.S. public of Russian enmity and aggression – the Threat – to ensure the diametrically opposed reality remains outside the mainstream.

    There will be some dead-enders who will try to keep the Trump side of Russia-gate alive (obstruction of justice!), but most of that energy will eventually be diverted to the vast cesspool of Trump's financial dealings, which has always been the more promising and legitimate route for exposing the Orange Schmegegge's corruption.

    Meanwhile the campaign to keep the U.S. public squarely behind the drive to Make Earth Great Again (for the subterranean archaea prokaryotes that will survive the nuclear exchange unscathed, that is) continues, and has even been strengthened by Russia-gate's sinister propagandistic sleight-of-hand.

    Zhu , March 26, 2019 at 02:02

    Soon it'll be "China, China, China!"

    AnneR , March 26, 2019 at 09:32

    Yes. The Dismal Faking MSM are NOT going to let go of their Russophobic Orwellian propaganda – it clearly serves purposes (the MIC's being one, surely).

    This morning on NPR (don't recall the Beeb World Service, but all too likely there as well) while the presenters, facilitators – whatever they're called – were presenting the non-existence of *collusion* they continued with their assertions, at some length, that Russia *had meddled* in the 2016 election, had hacked the DNC server etc., etc.

    No if, ands or buts, evidence lacking or not. And they proceeded to 'warn' about the 'strong likelihood' of both Russia (read the Kremlin, read Putin) and China doing the same for the 2020 election: so be warned, folks if the Strumpet gets re-elected it won't be because of anything the Demrats have done or not done, won't be because the Demrats' candidate is HRC in drag, attractively turned out. No. It will be Putin's and Xi's doing.

    Meanwhile, the country that really does interfere in our elections and policies – via oodles of money contributed by its lobbying group supporters (and I gather there will be another such "legal" lobbying entity established in DC for smaller donors to continue to, see Alison Weir's article at Mint Press News) – neither has to register as a foreign agent nor cease and desist its influence over our politicians (who are all too clearly buyable). Nor is the UK getting hauled over the coals, or threatened with war, being beleaguered by sanctions for its real interference in our politics.

    Thank you Caitlin for your usual good work.

    David G , March 26, 2019 at 11:02

    Trump the Siberian Candidate was a useful part of the hate campaign against Russia, but ultimately expendable, like one stage in a multi-stage rocket booster .

    The important work goes on, regardless of what happens to one individual like Donald, or one species like Homo sapiens.

    Pft , March 25, 2019 at 20:04

    So you have obstruction preventing the finding of evidence. Mueller proclaims no evidence found, punts on obstruction charges, presenting only the facts indicating obstruction. New AJ Barr, a relic from Iran Gate and close to Mueller, concludes there is not sufficient evidence of obstruction.

    Mueller and Barr cover it up as they have been doing for 30-40 years. Why is anyone surprised? I never was big on Russia gate but collusion with Russian Mafia and Israel and certainly conflict of interest over the proposed Trump Tower in Moscow certainly should have been exposed, as should a DNC insiders complicity in releasing the emails

    Tom Kath , March 25, 2019 at 19:30

    Caitlin, I get the overwhelming message that you consider Trump the worst possible POTUS and that Hilary, Sanders, or any other POSSIBLE alternatives would be even worse.

    When it comes to the realistically POSSIBLE, we do have to settle for the lesser of two evils. I believe the Yanks have actually done just that, and it seems pointless to argue so vehemently against all possibilities.

    Could you be making a case for Tulsi by omission?

    mauisurfer , March 25, 2019 at 18:54

    I have never worked as a prosecutor, but I have taught criminal law at an accredited state university law school.

    Mueller's report states: "While this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." This is the first time I ever heard such a statement. I have never heard of a criminal investigation that concluded that the defendant was "not exonerated".

    The prosecutor is not empowered to make statements intended to influence public opinion. It seems to be a 100% political statement, 100% extralegal comment. The purpose of a criminal investigation is to find crime and prosecute it. It is NOT to exonerate or "not exonerate". If insufficient evidence is found to proceed with criminal prosecution, then the job is done, the prosecutor is not empowered to comment about ifs, buts, or maybes, or about exoneration.

    Such comments are contrary to our system of criminal justice, which supposedly assumes innocence until guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt. Reply

    Maxwell Quest , March 25, 2019 at 22:27

    Yes, Mueller's statement: "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him" appears to be a sop thrown to the media and the DNC, in short, those that hired him to prosecute Trump er, I mean investigate Trump's supposed crime of collusion.

    It certainly muddies the waters, and is a wishy-washy, cowardly declaration. It's outside his mandate as Special Counsel and borders on slander. In his blog today Howard Kunstler referred to Mueller's parting aspersion as a "nice red poison cherry" on top of the report.

    I've always felt that Mueller knew from the very beginning that this was a witch hunt, and the sloppy commentary added to his report only confirms it in my mind.

    Mike Lamb , March 26, 2019 at 12:16

    Could it be that this is Mueller's "Comey moment"?

    Charles Barnes , March 25, 2019 at 18:14

    A lot of voters are fed up with the continuous barrage of hate coming from the Left towards President Trump. If the Left keeps on coming up with more and more investigations after the Mueller report found no collusion on the president's part voters are going to get fed up with the whole debacle this could well backfire on Democrats and conservative Republicans might just take back the House.

    Eric32 , March 25, 2019 at 17:41

    >people will be left to their own devices for a few precious moments. They won't know what to think. <

    Well, here's what I think

    This Russia-Trump collusion thing is and has been a criminal conspiracy to undermine and possibly remove from office an elected President, and it has taken Russian-American relations down to a plainly dangerous level.

    Why not get something positive out of it?

    I think there's evidence that this conspiracy was a product of Hillary Clinton, her staff, the DNC, elements of the FBI, FBI director Comey, CIA director Brennan, other elements of the CIA, elements of British intelligence, possibly elements of the Ukrainian govt., and possibly persons tied into the corrupt Clinton "charity" foundation and its networks.

    The US govt. is deeply corrupt – murderously corrupt – that's been plain at least since the Kennedy assassination in 1963, followed by the murders of a number of other prominent American political figures.

    Why not use this recent obvious conspiracy to start a real investigation using a newly created, large well funded investigative organization independent of the above mentioned corrupted organizations, to investigate what has going on?

    If this most recent deep state operation is allowed to pass un-investigated, without punishment and a long overdue rooting out of what's been making this country's government sick and corrupt, it's going to be taken as a sign of encouragement by certain actors, with future actions that will make past ones look mild.

    Deniz , March 25, 2019 at 17:41

    You are putting far too much faith in the American people's attention span. Omar's comments on AIPAC were erased in a matter of days by a conveniently timed terror attack. We are in the middle of March Madness, currently the single most important event in the majority of American's lives. This is why Assange was so brilliant in waiting until weeks before the election to release the Clinton emails.

    Have hope!

    [Mar 29, 2019] Angry Bear Maybe No Conspiracy Or Coordination, But Lots And Lots Of Collusion

    Notable quotes:
    "... This was artificially created Saddam WDM II hysteria and many people became hooked. MSM honchos with some integrity should publicly commit hara-kiri, but that's too much to ask as they are mostly chickenhawks that have no honor. They never spent time in rat infested foxholes under bombardment. ..."
    Mar 29, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

    likbez, March 27, 2019 2:34 am

    Barkley,

    It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, if there is none 😉

    Despite being a Professor of Economics, and having a Russian speaking wife you are utterly incompetent in this area and are completely brainwashed by the neoliberal/neocon MSM. You tend to subconsciously equate Russia and the USSR. For your information, Russia is a neoliberal state; much like the USA and Putin is promoter of neoliberal capitalism, although in less man-eating mutation than in the USA.

    For your information Mueller investigation was a part of color revolution against Trump launched by intelligence services in the same way they launch color revolution in other countries. It is unclear to me why they did that, but that fact if provable

    See for example https://www.theepochtimes.com/spygate-the-true-story-of-collusion_2684629.html

    And the sequence of event, especially questioning the legitimacy of election, and Mueller appointment gambit with Comey as a sacrificing pawn, corresponds to what you can learn from the books of CIA-connected writer Gene Sharp - the reference source on color revolution mechanics. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp

    It is not clear to me why the Deep State in the USA (as well as in GB) has such an allergic reaction and viewed Trump as a threat to the US governed world neoliberal empire, because Trump, as corrupt as he is, he is a part of NYC neoliberal elite and in no way a revolutionary. And it was clear that he will execute the same "bait and switch" maneuver as Obama betraying his election promises.

    Which actually happened three months after inauguration when he bombed Syria targets without any investigation of a chemical attack - which most probably was stages by jihadists (supposedly he was influenced by Ivanka; actually Javanka is another problem of this corrupt administration and suggest completely different course of the investigation; hopefully by the Southern District of NY - I would like Jared Kushner going to jail with or without Trump)

    But it was a color revolution. Which so far failed.

    So you better stop writing such detached from reality statements as "But on the matter of collusion we have piles of evidence that this has occurred, and the evidence is the large pile of indictments that Mueller has brought forward against a lot of people, with many of those charged with having unreported meetings and dealings with Russians," This is such a low level of IQ that it hurts. Naivety unacceptable for a Professor pretending to be a political analyst.

    In reality this was a false flag operation to present Russia as the culprit. Highly successful operation I would say. Russia serves as a very convenient scapegoat for such things.

    And having an external scapegoat and projecting into it all the ills helped to cement cracks in the neoliberal façade, when the US population rejected neoliberal's elite candidate. In addition, it allowed to launch NeoMcCartyism campaign in MSM for the suppressing the internal dissent, when anybody who question the US foreign wars or the rule of financial oligarchy can be framed as Putin's agent.

    So this is another classic method of suppressing the dissident voices including whose who argue for the return of the New Deal Capitalism and/or are against foreign wars. Looks at how MSMs treat Tulsi Gabbard visit to Syria. Does not it remind you something ?

    So most of your writings on this particular topic are just an implicit repetition of State Department taking points infused into your brain via MSMs you read. You have no first hand sources about Russia. That's why I would strongly recommend you to stop writing on this topic. You just disgrace yourself.

    ilsm , March 28, 2019 6:35 pm

    merde,

    Let the Russiagate foul ball fly out of bounds in to the stands!

    Oening day is soon and US don't need any more conspiracy theories over Russia and Putin beating Clinton.

    Mueller brought no indictments against Trump or any US citizen for conspiracy with Russians. The reason the Mueller report is "confidential" has nothing to do with national security. It has to do with federal grand jury legal process. No indictments means the grand juries that prosecutors have plead to with under cooked nothing burgers returned no indictments!

    Not getting an indictment may not be an exoneration for media propagandists who have pounded conspiracy theories for 28 months, but it is pretty close for anyone tired of the moral equivalent of seeing Saddam doing 9/11 perpetrated over and over again.

    All those indictments associated with Russiagate are 'procedural' like misspeaking to inquisitors.

    Get over it Clinton lost to Trump!

    likbez , March 28, 2019 10:35 pm

    ilsm.

    "Not getting an indictment may not be exoneration for media propagandists who have pounded conspiracy theories for 28 months, but it is pretty close for anyone tired of the moral equivalent of seeing Saddam doing 9/11 perpetrated over and over again."

    This is a very apt observation. This was artificially created Saddam WDM II hysteria and many people became hooked. MSM honchos with some integrity should publicly commit hara-kiri, but that's too much to ask as they are mostly chickenhawks that have no honor. They never spent time in rat infested foxholes under bombardment.

    How idiotic it would be if the Earth were destroyed because this crazy neocon warmonger Hillary Clinton lost, couldn't accept it, and invented a story for lying liars to lie about, while the Deep State launched a color revolution to depose Trump because he did not fully conform to Washington neocons foreign policy script

    In retrospect he changed nothing; Trump foreign policy is just a continuation of "Full spectrum dominance" madness ( Bolton and Pompeo would be perfect for Hillary Administration after routine sex change operation )

    Academic stooges of this new Iraq WDM II hysteria should at least repent, but as Barkley demonstrated in his response this is way too difficult for them.

    He is still, as Trump Jr put it, "FullOfSchiff"

    Immense damage has been done to Russo-Us relations. Will it be repaired? Can it be repaired?

    [Mar 29, 2019] Jimmy Dore -- a lonely fighter with NeoMcCartyism

    Notable quotes:
    "... When the mainstream news is a joke, the court jesters are the only ones allowed to tell the truth. But Jimmy is exceptionally well informed. ..."
    "... So, now the nation is in the midst of a New Cold War and a renewed arms race between two world powers -- all because this woman and her criminally liable hordes in the Democratic Party and the idiotic corporate media pedalled this insanity. I only hope there is a special place in the ninth circle of Hell for Mdm. Clinton and her lickspittles. ..."
    "... This is right on point. There were two main reasons for this (perhaps fatal) error on the Democrats' part. First, they made common cause with neo-cons, retired intelligence chiefs, Congressional hawks, Pentagon officials, and other advocates of a revived American Empire. ..."
    "... Second, they let Donald Trump dictate the mode of political discourse (ultra-personal, characterological, conspiracy-minded, etc.) and thought that they could beat him at his own game. The first error was criminal and the second stupid. We may have to support some Democrat in 2020 to get rid of Mr. Trump, but we clearly need a new political party to represent the interests of working people in social justice and peace. ..."
    Mar 29, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    Dwight Spencer , March 26, 2019 at 11:10

    You neglected to mention American comedian Jimmy Dore who practically single-handedly spent the past two and a half years ferociously combating the Russiagate conspiracy myth with some of the best amateur investigative journalism in the world essentially alone while building up his base of a half-million subscribers.

    He has been praised by the likes of Aaron Maté, Tulsi Gabbard, and Glen Greenwald for his incredible work.

    He has been such a force for truth that even Bernie Sanders has timidly ignored and avoided his show.

    The Jimmy Dore Show on YouTube ranks up there with The Intercept in journalistic integrity and diligence. In a sane world, Jimmy Dore would be deserving of a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

    JRGJRG , March 26, 2019 at 11:19

    When the mainstream news is a joke, the court jesters are the only ones allowed to tell the truth. But Jimmy is exceptionally well informed.

    Eddie , March 26, 2019 at 13:59

    Indeed, Jimmy Dore the self-styled "jag-off" comedian working out of his garage informed growing numbers of us of us who were willing to peel our eyeballs away from the cavalcade of celebrity ravings on MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, et al. Hillary Clinton, in her vainglorious attempt to find a scapegoat for her political ineptitude blamed her loss on her invented Trump-Putin "collusion."

    So, now the nation is in the midst of a New Cold War and a renewed arms race between two world powers -- all because this woman and her criminally liable hordes in the Democratic Party and the idiotic corporate media pedalled this insanity. I only hope there is a special place in the ninth circle of Hell for Mdm. Clinton and her lickspittles.

    Rich Rubenstein , March 26, 2019 at 11:09

    This is right on point. There were two main reasons for this (perhaps fatal) error on the Democrats' part. First, they made common cause with neo-cons, retired intelligence chiefs, Congressional hawks, Pentagon officials, and other advocates of a revived American Empire.

    Second, they let Donald Trump dictate the mode of political discourse (ultra-personal, characterological, conspiracy-minded, etc.) and thought that they could beat him at his own game. The first error was criminal and the second stupid. We may have to support some Democrat in 2020 to get rid of Mr. Trump, but we clearly need a new political party to represent the interests of working people in social justice and peace.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Taibbi: As the Mueller Probe Ends, New Russiagate Myths Begin by Matt Taibbi

    Powerful, artificially created hysteria.
    Mar 29, 2019 | www.rollingstone.com

    Donald Trump couldn't have asked for a juicier 2020 campaign issue

    Matt Taibbi

    @mtaibbi Follow Matt Taibbi's Most Recent Stories

    ... ... ...

    Mueller knows became the cornerstone belief of nearly all reporters who covered the Russia investigation. Journalists reveled in the idea of being kept out of the loop, thrilled to defer to the impenetrable steward of national secrets, the interview-proof Man of State. He was no blabbermouth Donald Trump, this Mueller! He won't tell us a thing!

    [Mar 28, 2019] Both Clinton and Trump were close to Epstein. To me this smells like there was a bi-partisan consensus to bury Lolita Express scandal

    Notable quotes:
    "... "I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy," Trump said of Epstein during a 2002 interview with New York magazine. "He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." ..."
    "... "How would he know that?" he said of Trump's acknowledgement of Epstein's penchant for young women. The interview came nearly six years before Epstein's secret sex life exploded into public view when the money manager pleaded guilty to Florida charges of procuring and soliciting a minor for prostitution. "Why would he make a joke like that?" the West Palm Beach attorney asked. ..."
    "... Bill has frequent flier points on Lolita Express. He had a 14yr.old toy on the island and the flight logs can prove his attendance. ..."
    "... "The Government aligned themselves with Epstein, working against his victims, for 11 years..." ..."
    "... THE SAME can be said for this: "The Government aligned themselves with APARTHEID Israhell, working against their Palestinians victims, for over 70 years... " ..."
    "... Epstein has dirt on EVERYONE ... If he ever gets in a legitimate court room? - many, many, shitty people will be in trouble ... GOP and Democrat. And Trump? Acosta is in his admin, right? Or, he didn't fire the scum yet? And when is Hillary going to jail? ..."
    "... I assume MOSSAD & friends will have to pull some very fancy rabbits out of their hat to get this buried again. The $wamp can't afford to have him cooperating, so I'm guessing Epstein will have to 'retire' to Tel-Aviv - or have an accident/become 'depressed, etc.' ..."
    "... Hastert mentioned in WikiLeaks: https://wearechange.org/disgraced-house-speaker-pedophile-dennis-hastert/ As you dig into these stories, one singular theory emerges again and again: Sexual deviants and psychos have been groomed for office because they are easier to blackmail and control. ..."
    Feb 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Judge Rules Plea Deal For Orgy Island Billionaire Broke Federal Law

    youshallnotkill , 1 hour ago link

    Both Clinton and Trump were close to Epstein. To me this smells like there was a bi-partisan consensus to bury this, and only now that the Clintons are no longer dominating the Democrat party, do we get some results.

    While Trump has recently distanced himself from Epstein, a 64-year-old financier, it wasn't always that way.

    "I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy," Trump said of Epstein during a 2002 interview with New York magazine. "He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."

    Attorney Spencer Kuvin, one of dozens of lawyers who successfully sued Epstein on behalf of roughly 30 women who claimed he lured them to his Palm Beach mansion for sexually-charged massages when they were as young as 14, said he always found the comment curious.

    "How would he know that?" he said of Trump's acknowledgement of Epstein's penchant for young women. The interview came nearly six years before Epstein's secret sex life exploded into public view when the money manager pleaded guilty to Florida charges of procuring and soliciting a minor for prostitution. "Why would he make a joke like that?" the West Palm Beach attorney asked.

    SOURCE: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20170512/will-president-trump-be-used-as-witness-in-sex-offender-epstein-case

    Justin Case , 1 hour ago link

    Bill has frequent flier points on Lolita Express. He had a 14yr.old toy on the island and the flight logs can prove his attendance.

    zeezrom2point0, 2 hours ago link

    Be nice if someone found the guest list because Bill Clinton wouldn't be able to kill that many people to cover it up. It'd be sweet if they found evidence that Trump went, because he definitely did. He's probably the one to name it "Lolita Express."...no, that was probably Bill.

    TeraByte , 2 hours ago link

    Manford´s life time vs a slap on the wrist. I does not matter, what you do, but whom you know.

    loop , 2 hours ago link

    "The Government aligned themselves with Epstein, working against his victims, for 11 years..."

    THE SAME can be said for this: "The Government aligned themselves with APARTHEID Israhell, working against their Palestinians victims, for over 70 years... "

    WARNING: Graphic Images

    DFGTC , 2 hours ago link

    Epstein has dirt on EVERYONE ... If he ever gets in a legitimate court room? - many, many, shitty people will be in trouble ... GOP and Democrat. And Trump? Acosta is in his admin, right? Or, he didn't fire the scum yet? And when is Hillary going to jail?

    William Dorritt , 2 hours ago link


    Billionaire Palm Beach serial sex offender allowed to serve time in luxurious milieu | Fred Grimm

    ... ... ...

    https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/fl-op-col-fred-grimm-jeffrey-epste ...
    2 of 2 2/7/2019, 10:41 AM

    4 wheel drift , 3 hours ago link

    The ruling comes after Senators on the Judiciary Committee asked that the DOJ open an investigation into the deal, which was offered at a time when Robert Mueller was running the FBI .

    LOLOLOL.... THAT explains a lot...

    ******* criminals the entire lot of them

    Baron Samedi , 3 hours ago link

    I assume MOSSAD & friends will have to pull some very fancy rabbits out of their hat to get this buried again. The $wamp can't afford to have him cooperating, so I'm guessing Epstein will have to 'retire' to Tel-Aviv - or have an accident/become 'depressed, etc.'

    I will further bet that JE has had adequate notice of all this to be getting out of the USA to Balfourstan - a non-extradition country - ASAP.

    Reaper , 3 hours ago link

    The DOJ can prosecute now for the conspiracy of prosecutors and Epstein.

    https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource-manual-923-18-usc-371-conspiracy-defraud-us

    dirty fingernails , 3 hours ago link

    Don't hold your breath.

    William Dorritt , 3 hours ago link
    Hastert mentioned in WikiLeaks: https://wearechange.org/disgraced-house-speaker-pedophile-dennis-hastert/ As you dig into these stories, one singular theory emerges again and again: Sexual deviants and psychos have been groomed for office because they are easier to blackmail and control.
    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/01/1389654/-Dennis-Hastert-as-the-Tip-of-the-Iceberg

    [Mar 28, 2019] NeoMcCartyism campaign will continue despite another blow for the reputation of the American MSM

    Notable quotes:
    "... "How idiotic it would be if the Earth were destroyed because Hillary Clinton lost, couldn't accept it and invented a story for lying liars to lie about." ..."
    Mar 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    MEDIA. "[Did you] receive bad information throughout this process like so many of us did? " asks whathishair – remember that moment: a "Big Journalist" admits that they're just typists . Followed by the admission from the boss of CNN that they're not investigators . NYT blubbers not just we, but you too.

    Taibbi is correct: " death-blow for the reputation of the American news media. " Last week I wrote "A poll shows that "hardly any confidence at all in the press" is the winning answer."

    What's next week's answer going to be? A free, skeptical and challenging media is important; what happens when it's just a big typing pool waiting for Big Brother's Dictaphone?

    Time to learn from the Soviets .

    Harlan Easley , 6 hours ago

    "How idiotic it would be if the Earth were destroyed because Hillary Clinton lost, couldn't accept it and invented a story for lying liars to lie about."

    That sums it up for me. "Do not go gentle delusionally into that good night"

    [Mar 28, 2019] Bernie Repeats CIA Talking Points On Venezuela

    King of Faustian bargain of a US politician. Bernie showed his colors in the 2016 primaries. He can't be trusted...
    What Bernie is doing is eliminating chances for Tulsi...
    Notable quotes:
    "... Thank you Jimi, for calling out even Bernie when he buys the corporate bullshit ..."
    "... Seriously, if you still support this clown, you are part of the problem. ..."
    "... There's nothing progressive about silence, tepidness, or even support for destructive policies abroad by the same forces -- & for the same interests -- that we claim to oppose at home. ..."
    "... this is the bargain Bernie made to run as a Democrat ..."
    "... Bernie lost credibility when he endorsed Hilary in 2016... Tulsi is the one for 2020... ..."
    Feb 26, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Jools Tyler , 1 day ago

    Thank you Jimi, for calling out even Bernie when he buys the corporate bullshit, You restored my faith in you man.

    Cindy Klenk , 1 day ago

    Aloha! Tulsi for President! No excuses!!! Bernie is compromised. Peace, Love and Aloha #Tulsi2020

    poofendorf , 1 day ago (edited)

    Here's a list of Bernie's foreign policy stances:

    1. Supported bombing of Yugoslavia.
    2. Supported Afghanistan war.
    3. Supported Israeli bombing of Gaza.
    4. Demanded that Gaddafi step down as leader of Libya and supported no-fly zone over Libya thus making way for US regime change.
    5. Supported CIA narrative of Assad using chemical weapons.
    6. Supported CIA narrative on Venezuela.
    7. Supported CIA narrative of Russia/collusion conspiracy theory.
    8. Supported CIA and MIC candidate Hillary Clinton even after getting cheated by her campaign.
    9. Supported CIA efforts in Ukraine.

    Seriously, if you still support this clown, you are part of the problem.

    Eric Anderson , 1 day ago

    Aaron Maté tweets -- Do we need a new category for progressives whose progressive values stop at the US border?

    There's nothing progressive about silence, tepidness, or even support for destructive policies abroad by the same forces -- & for the same interests -- that we claim to oppose at home.

    Vas Sagar , 18 hours ago

    this is the bargain Bernie made to run as a Democrat..

    b cornejo , 23 hours ago

    Bernie lost credibility when he endorsed Hilary in 2016... Tulsi is the one for 2020...

    pandastratton. 23 hours ago

    Donate to Tulsi to get her on the debate stage!!!!

    Dionysos, 19 hours ago

    Jimmy I know Tulsi is the best candidate in terms of foreign policy, but Bernie is our only chance at getting a real progressive in the White House!

    People are suffering economically and that is the issue where the vast majority of support lies. If stuff like this splits the progressive support and allows someone like Kamala to win in the primaries, things will get really bad.

    Robert Rowland23 hours ago

    Jimmy (God love ya), the Military Industrial Complex is the single most gut-wrenchingly ruthless, most awesome entity on the planet. It has the ability to kill pretty much anyone they want without repercussion. No domestic political movement, even one that holds the Whitehouse, is capable of bringing them down or even reining them in. They will eventually meet their demise through bad management in combination with a series of misfortunes resulting in defeat in all-out global war. Until then, and while we as a nation are still able, the best we common folks can hope for is this juggernaut (the true boss) to give us some measure of these desperately needed social reforms. In other words, Bernie is just being realistic.

    Meanwhile, Tulsi, The Real Deal Gabbard (God bless her soul), if successful, will be on a course to join the ranks of JFK, RFK, and MLK.


    Our much-vaunted democracy is a sham and our freedom isn't actually what it is represented as being. May I suggest you watch this video and view it as a metaphor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb8Rj5xkDPk

    [Mar 28, 2019] NeoMcCartyism has done immense damage to Russo-US relations. Will it be repaired? Can it be repaired?

    Mar 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    RUSSIA RELATIONS. Immense damage has been done. Will it be repaired? Can it be repaired? Russia is not a joke country in Disneyland and we're not characters in a Marvel comic.

    How idiotic it would be if the Earth were destroyed because Hillary Clinton lost, couldn't accept it and invented a story for lying liars to lie about. Much will depend on whether Trump starts a real investigation so that the falsity is exposed.

    ( Conrad Black has the best exposition of the conspiracy for people who are just tuning in .)

    MUELLER. One half of the lie has been exploded with the finding that no one connected with Trump colluded with any Russians. The other half of the lie – created by the same people for the same reasons – lives on. Again I tell you: Russia did not/not interfere in the US election , Mueller's indictment of a Russian clickbait farm notwithstanding . (Again: read MoA and learn today what the NYT will discover (admit to) tomorrow .) Neither official Russia nor unofficial Russia. Why not? Simple deduction: if Moscow had wanted to damage Clinton, it would have used its most powerful weapon ; it didn't; QED.

    AMERICA-HYSTERICA. Will continue – somewhat diminished by the hard kick of reality to be sure – but they've too much invested in it and some will double down while others try to slither away . We see the goalposts being moved .

    The winner so far: Mueller Report Has Moscow in Ecstasy, Opening the Way for More Putin Plots... expect Vladimir Putin to be more aggressive than ever . Schiff ( Mr Pillow Man ) digs his hole deeper ; Swalwell and Peters dive into it .

    [Mar 28, 2019] Trump Supporters Are Switching To Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube

    Mar 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    George Washington , 1 week ago

    I am a former Trump supporter, hardcore Trump supporter but I got off the Trump train 2 years ago after he bombed Syria. I got fooled once but I will not be fooled a second time. This country needs a real leader with real sincerity with a real heart for the American people and that's Tulsi Gabbard!!!

    [Mar 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard is scary. Scary good. #CNNTownHall by OpenMind

    She is brilliant public speaker. That's for sure. With very sharp mind. People underestimated her.
    She is head above Bernie and two heads above Obama.
    Mar 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    handbanana19 , 1 week ago

    Tulsi Gabbard has always said she does and will always put people and policy over political party. She is a legit leader.

    Carl Huffman , 1 week ago

    The main reason I support Tulsi is for her anti-interventionism.

    Mauel Thomas , 1 week ago

    The main stream media and pollsters are ignoring Tulsi. That means she is doing a lot better than they are letting on. They will not be able to ignore her forever.

    Raj Bodepudi , 1 week ago

    Tulsi is a Thought Leader & a Principled Practitioner

    Valentine Xavier , 2 weeks ago

    i love tulsi. something ive noticed a lot is her bipartisan support. both sensible thoughtful republicans and sensible thoughtful democrats (yes they both exist) seem to be for her. either way her anti war stance is something that i hope gets more coverage and people see through the blantant mainstream media smear attempts. whether you vote for her or not, it's refreshing and compelling to hear an iraq veteran take a strong stance against endless regime change war.

    Buster Friendly , 1 week ago

    Thanks for your thoughtful analysis. I agree that Tulsi would indeed be THE most formidable opponent against "The Donald". She offers the greatest contrast to him and in that, gives the electorate a clear defined choice. As a woman with a multi-cultural and strong religious upbringing, a Gen Xer and a veteran, she has all the qualities that "The Donald" lacks. In addition, her life long commitment to public service, as well as her well-defined policy platform, puts the icing on the cake as the best "Anti-Donald" candidate.

    [Mar 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Schools Dianne Feinstein on 'Medicare For All' by The Humanist Report

    Youtube video
    Apr 22, 2017 | www.youtube.com

    Some Democrats have been taking a lot of heat at town halls because they refuse to get behind a 'Medicare For All' system. And it's not just that they're getting booed; their constituents are literally calling for them to retire. Dianne Feinstein has been one of the recipients of this outrage. Tulsi Gabbard, however, had overwhelming support from enthusiastic constituents at her town hall because she actually pledged to support a 'Medicare For All' system. In this segment, we juxtapose Feinstein's town halls with Gabbard's to illustrate EXACTLY how you talk with your constituents about healthcare.

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    paul lymberopoulos , 2 months ago

    OMG Australia, Canada, UK and most other European countries can do it, BUT the mighty USA can't????? TULSI 2020

    Mark McCarty , 1 year ago

    Is Medicare "government take over of health care"? Hell no. People on Medicare visit the doctor of their choice, and the doctors are private entrepreneurs - unlike the doctors in the VA, they aren't paid a salary by the govt. Time to retire, Dianne!

    Craig Holman , 1 year ago

    Ecuador is a small country without the resources we have. They have single payer system. In this country my medication, Xeralto, costs $300 a month. In Ecuador the cost is $90 a month. I practiced medicine in Canada for two years. It is the way to go. It is less expensive and provides better care.

    Edulis , 1 year ago

    Watching this old fartbag talk and STILL have a seat in the senate really boils my blood, I can't watch this without my blood pressure rising which I'd get checked out if Medicare for all was a thing lol

    Simon Smith , 1 year ago (edited)

    Tulsi will be the Bernie of the 2020 election. The problem is, the same corrupt sellouts are still in control of the DNC. So unless something changes she will be shut down in favour of people like Corey Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff.

    mike bengyak , 1 year ago

    she is what is called a Public Servant not a low life politician, seeking either power or my! like say chris christie - old man mike begyak

    D LG , 1 year ago

    I'm happy to say that my rep, Tim Ryan, was an early co-sponsor of HR676 and is a real blue color progressive. However, I'm still calling and emailing others. Don't stop at your own rep, folks. Please contact as many corporate dems as you have time for and let them know that their job is on the line. The pressure must be turned up to 100!

    [Mar 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard 2020 Progressive Powerhouse by Thersites the Historian

    Great 31 min presentation on Tulsi. Outstanding analysis of Tulsi as a candidate. Bravo !!!
    The idea the contrast between Trump and Tulsi will help Tulsi looks plausible. Trump is dumb, corrupt, very rich and old chickenhawk. There can't be greater contract. She is almost 100% opposite of Donald Trump.
    In additional picking up voters disappointed with Trump she also will pick up large fraction of voters that voted for Hillary.
    The complication is the Bernie Sanders also runs and will attacks the same category of voters.
    True left was always anti-war, so Tulsi is the natural candidate of "true left"
    Apr 19, 2018 | www.youtube.com

    In this video, I argue that Tulsi Gabbard could potentially make a very strong run in 2020 and that everyone who tries to dismiss her is vastly underestimating her potential.

    edfou5 , 4 months ago

    Tulsi is my first choice, by a mile, for all the reasons you've mentioned. The #1 liability she has, only because of the fact that half of the American populace are ignorant intolerant lunkheads, is her faith. She's a Hindu (which easily translates as being a Krishna devotee.)

    Farero Lobos , 4 months ago

    Only one correction. Assad isn't a dictator, he's been elected president of Syria in democratic elections. And if you want to argue that the elections in Syria are rigged or that the opposition candidates don't get impartial coverage in the press Well then I'd say that's the same case of the USA and many other democracies around the world!

    Ralph P. , 11 months ago

    Tulsi Gabbard stands alone, she should form an independent party by asking the people to donate to her cause. Bernie Sanders is a deferential failed candidate that is too worried about the democratic party than winning for the people. It is too late to reform the 2 parties in charge since they are part of the cancer created by the Kakistocracy. Eventually the masses will wake up, unfortunately they are in a catatonic state allowing the current situation.

    Henry H. , 11 months ago

    Surprised you didn't mention her religion: Hinduism. The left doesn't care, but you mentioned that the right will have a hard time hitting her on traditional stuff... I think that's wrong in one instance, religion. If she gets the nomination, the right wing establishment will absolutely hit her on her religion, no question. I think you shoulda mentioned that in your analysis.

    Alax Martin , 11 months ago

    Howard Dean, decided to use this occasion to taunt Trump in schoolyard fashion. "Why are you such a wimp for Assad and Putin?" Dean tweeted.

    edy kubiak , 11 months ago

    She should run independent. The democrats are corrupt liars.

    aerily1 , 4 months ago

    I think your analysis is outstanding, many thanks! I haven't yet watched your other videos but it's my intention. I agree with you almost 100% about Tulsi but am not yet convinced Trump will be defeatable in 2020. I've been watching a lot of coverage from the conservative right and he is way more popular than people on the left understand.

    [Mar 28, 2019] Why Tulsi Gabbard is hated by AIPAC members - YouTube

    Mar 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Nika D , 11 months ago

    She and Rand Paul are the voices of reason with only a handful of others. Stop unjust wars now!

    assault and battery , 1 year ago

    Beautiful, strong, correct woman. Please God, turn more hearts to her point of view. It's the only hope now, for your world. Please protect her.

    [Mar 28, 2019] Michael Tracey interviews Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube

    Mar 25, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Michael Tracey (@mtracey) interviewed Democratic presidential candidate and Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) in New Hampshire on March 23 and 24, 2019. They discussed topics ranging from the farce of the Trump/Russia saga, her views on identity politics, her religious background, her relationship with Bernie Sanders, and much more.

    Subscribe to Michael Tracey's podcast on Patreon: https://patreon.com/mtracey

    Support Tracey's ventures through PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/mctracey

    Read Tracey's New York Daily News column on the collapse of the Trump/Russia narrative: https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/n... Category Film & Animation

    PathToAutonomy , 2 days ago

    Good job Michael. This is real journalism unlike the poison peddled by MSM vipers.

    Dominik Fabianowski , 2 days ago

    Enjoying this interview very much. I hope she has a good run, it will be good for the USA and the world.

    Scripts 2 Clips 4 Series & Flicks , 2 days ago

    Nice job, Michael. It's great to hear an interview with Tulsi w/o all the smears!

    [Mar 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard talks about AIPAC by Rod Webber

    She is a real gifted politician. The question was very tricky. "Will you be able to pledge to return any continuation of people who also donated to AIPAC"
    Mar 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    "Mirek M. , 4 days ago

    Tulsi needs around 20000 more donors to be eligible for the Democratic debates. Please donate a dollar to her campaign and tell your friends and family to do the same!

    StealieSteve , 1 day ago

    I support BDS of Israel. They are an apartheid state and Netanyahu is guilty of crimes against humanity. These are cold hard facts.

    meeg_2005 , 1 day ago

    Great answer, tulsi. Let's get her on the debate stage and bring down aipac. Everybody donate $1. We are getting closer

    iruz29 , 1 day ago

    She will be dragged through so much mud by the establishment in the coming days, we saw a glimpse of it in Colbert show, her training will help her a lot though

    polara01 , 1 day ago

    Rod, you just gained this subscriber excellent pointing this out! Once again Tulsi is demonstrating she is on the right side of history and will even stand up to AIPEC like ilhan Omar did sure would be nice to see Bernie make a similar stand!

    meach TheAmericanPatriot , 3 days ago

    Donate to Tulsi Gabbard campaign to help her get into the debates by donating to tulsi2020.com you can donate more than once and they'll each count as a unique donation even $1 at a time

    saj h , 1 day ago

    Trump drained the swamp and put them in his government , he surrounds himself all kinds of human crap, the oval Office must stink to high heaven

    George Washington , 4 days ago

    AIPAC is a foreign terrorist organization that needs to be outlawed and any American that takes their bribe money to do their bidding should be arrested for treason.

    Glyne Martin , 4 days ago

    In other wotds, she's totally, comprehensively, completely against the lobbying zionist faction of AIPAC...

    Dublin Bay , 9 hours ago

    The more I hear Tulsi Gabbard speak the more I want her to win, and I am Irish living in Dublin, Ireland.You can tell by the reaction of the people there, what it means to them not to have foreign government dictate their foreign policy

    A J , 6 hours ago

    It's absurd to ask her to return money to someone who has donated to aipac. They would probably just donate more to aipac.

    Yevrah Hipstar , 1 day ago

    Really can't imagine AIPAC wanting to donate to Tulsi...

    Joey , 14 hours ago

    Trump is just looking for s big war, I think he reallys believe America can't be touched. Meaning what he did with the golden Heights. Like really that's so wrong and you did it in the open like it's not a bad thing. He's pissing off many countries and Russia is one of them. Putin isn't happy ab the golden height thing.

    Ric Pel , 1 hour ago

    Is there a website that list where candidates stand as far as the numbers they have and in what states? I find it hard to believe that Tulsi hasn't reached the number yet, while other less known candidates who entered after her have already blown past the needed 65K mark. If this is something that is kept hidden, who's to know if more lying and cheating is going on?

    HRivera , 3 days ago

    Tulsi Gabbard on AIPAC: "Our opportunity is to challenge leaders to see where we stand and the policies we are pushing forward; and the kinds of debates and discussions we need to have about our foreign policy and where our tax-payer dollars are going." My understanding: FP = The US position on Israel 's policy vis a vis settlements and military entanglements. Tax-Payer $$ = The money spent by the government in supporting the above.

    This is, in my opinion, a very sane way to open the door to a healthy discussion about such an important issue which up to now has been lopsided towards the Establishment's position with little opportunity for the people to have a say in the matter.

    [Mar 28, 2019] BREAKING Tulsi Beating Kamala Harris-Cory Booker In New Daily Kos Poll by MCSC Network W/ Niko House

    Current lineup in this particular poll is (1)Bernie, (2)Yung and (3)Tulsi
    Mar 07, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    The Daily Kos has made it their personal mission to make sure Tulsi has no success - or so they said in an email just a couple of days after she announced. However, that didn't stop one of the "Kosters" from putting out a more objective poll on Kos's website. 20k people voted in this poll, and the results bode well for Tulsi.

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019...

    #kamalaharris #tulsigabbard #tulsi2020

    Nalu Rash , 2 weeks ago

    It's so frustrating what is happening to Tulsi Gabbard. She is being shut out/hidden. It's just so frustrating.

    Dan Extrinsic01 , 2 weeks ago (edited)

    Gabbard deserves to be higher up. She should be side by side with Yang. Tho, its still makes you feel warm inside that Kamala Harris lost to her.

    [Mar 28, 2019] BREAKING Tulsi Gabbard Puts Morning Joe Host In Her Place! - YouTube

    Amazing level of polemic and diplomatic skills. That's really high class my fiends. Rare for any US politician: most are suckers that can answer only prepared questions. MSNBC presstitutes should be ashamed, but they have not shame. amasing !!!
    See also Smug MSNBC Hosts Treat Tulsi Like Trash For Bucking Pro-War Narrative - YouTube and NBC's Bizarre Attack on Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube
    RT has a dog in this game and they really provide detailed analysis: NBC's Bizarre Attack on Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube
    Feb 06, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    In this segment, we look at Tulsi's savvy and brutally honest rebuttal when the Morning Show hosts allege that "Russia" is looking to help Tulsi when the 2020 Democratic Primary election

    [Mar 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard on NHPR's The Exchange by New Hampshire Public Radio

    How it can be that there not 50K anti war people in the whole USA? Or they are waiting for something ? I do not know what is the deadline, I do not understand why she still did not got 50K donations to bring her to debate. .
    Mar 22, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Mirek M. , 4 days ago

    Tulsi needs about 20000 more unique donors to get to the debate stage! Tell your friends and family to donate a dollar at tulsi2020.com ! Even if she isn't their preferred candidate, they might still appreciate a strong anti-interventionist voice on the debate stage!

    chuckuc , 4 days ago

    A calm, thoughtful, anti-war progressive voice that we need to hear in the coming debates. Please make a donation or buy something at Tulsi2020.com She needs another 20,000 contributors to meet the DNC requirement.

    Mia Lovely , 3 days ago

    100% facts! Thank you Tulsi. Never stop speaking the truth.

    illegalmonkey , 5 days ago

    Tulsi is one of the most genuine, no bullshit people in congress!

    Raj Bodepudi , 4 days ago

    She is a Thought Leader & ACTS upon her principles

    Mok Palo , 3 days ago

    Tulsi is the best thing that could ever happen to the US and then the world.

    [Mar 28, 2019] How Millions Were Duped By Russiagate The Illusory Truth Effect

    Mar 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    "Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy", read the front page headline of Sunday's New York Times. Bit by bit, mainstream American consciousness is slowly coming to terms with the death of the thrilling conspiracy theory that the highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and with the stark reality that the mass media and the Democratic Party spent the last two and-a-half years monopolizing public attention with a narrative which never had any underlying truth to it.

    There are still holdouts, of course. Many people invested a tremendous amount of hope, credibility, and egoic currency in the belief that Robert Mueller was going to arrest high-ranking Trump administration officials and members of Trump's own family, leading seedy characters to "flip" on the president in their own self-interest and thereby providing evidence that will lead to impeachment. Some insist that Attorney General William Barr is holding back key elements of the Mueller report, a claim which is premised on the absurd belief that Mueller would allow Barr to lie about the results of the investigation without speaking up publicly. Others are still holding out hope that other investigations by other legal authorities will turn up some Russian shenanigans that Mueller could not, ignoring Mueller's sweeping subpoena powers and unrivaled investigative authority. But they're coming around.

    The question still remains, though: what the hell happened? How did a fact-free conspiracy theory come to gain so much traction among mainstream Americans? How were millions of people persuaded to invest hope in a narrative that anyone objectively analyzing the facts knew to be completely false?

    The answer is that they were told that the Russiagate narrative was legitimate over and over again by politicians and mass media pundits, and, because of a peculiar phenomenon in the nature of human cognition, this repetition made it seem true.

    The rather uncreatively-named illusory truth effect describes the way people are more likely to believe something is true after hearing it said many times. This is due to the fact that the familiar feeling we experience when hearing something we've heard before feels very similar to our experience of knowing that something is true. When we hear a familiar idea, its familiarity provides us with something called cognitive ease , which is the relaxed, unlabored state we experience when our minds aren't working hard at something. We also experience cognitive ease when we are presented with a statement that we know to be true.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/cebFWOlx848

    We have a tendency to select for cognitive ease, which is why confirmation bias is a thing; believing ideas which don't cause cognitive strain or dissonance gives us more cognitive ease than doing otherwise. Our evolutionary ancestors adapted to seek out cognitive ease so that they could put their attention into making quick decisions essential for survival, rather than painstakingly mulling over whether everything we believe is as true as we think it is. This was great for not getting eaten by saber-toothed tigers in prehistoric times, but it's not very helpful when navigating the twists and turns of a cognitively complex modern world. It's also not helpful when you're trying to cultivate truthful beliefs while surrounded by screens that are repeating the same bogus talking points over and over again.

    I'm dealing with a perfect example of the perils of cognitive ease right now. Writing this essay has required me to move outside my familiar comfort zone of political commentary and read a bunch of studies and essays, think hard about new ideas, and then figure out how to convey them as clearly and concisely as possible without boring my audience. This movement away from cognitive ease has resulted in my checking Twitter a lot more often than I usually do, and seeking so much distraction that this essay will probably end up getting published about twelve hours later than I had intended. Having to read a bunch of scholars explaining the precise reasons why I'm acting like such an airhead hasn't exactly helped my sense of cognitive ease any, either.

    me title=

    Science has been aware of the illusory truth effect since 1977, when a study found that subjects were more likely to evaluate a statement as true when it's been repeatedly presented to them over the course of a couple of weeks, even if they didn't consciously remember having encountered that statement before. These findings have been replicated in numerous studies since, and new research in recent years has shown that the phenomenon is even more drastic than initially believed. A 2015 paper titled " Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth " found that the illusory truth effect is so strong that sheer repetition can change the answers that test subjects give, even when they had been in possession of knowledge contradicting that answer beforehand . This study was done to test the assumption which had gone unchallenged up until then that the illusory truth effect only comes into play when there is no stored knowledge of the subject at hand.

    "Surprisingly, repetition increased statements' perceived truth, regardless of whether stored knowledge could have been used to detect a contradiction," the paper reads.

    "Reading a statement like 'A sari is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots' increased participants' later belief that it was true, even if they could correctly answer the question 'What is the name of the short pleated skirt worn by Scots?'"

    Stored knowledge tells pretty much everybody that the "short, pleated skirt worn by Scots" is a kilt, not a sari, but simply repeating the contrary statement can convince them otherwise.

    This explains why we all know people who are extraordinarily intelligent, but still bought into the Russiagate narrative just as much as our less mentally apt friends and acquaintances. Their intelligence didn't save them from this debunked conspiracy theory, it just made them more clever in finding ways of defending it. This is because the illusory truth effect largely bypasses the intellect, and even one's own stored knowledge, because of the way we all reflexively select for cognitive ease.

    Another study titled " Incrimination through innuendo: Can media questions become public answers? " found that subjects can be manipulated into believing an allegation simply by exposure to innuendo or incriminating questions in news media headlines. Questions like, for example, " What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since 1987 ?", printed by New York Magazine in July of last year.

    me title=

    You can understand, then, how a populace who is consuming repetitive assertions, innuendo, and incriminating questions on a daily basis through the screens that they look at many times a day could be manipulated into believing that Robert Mueller would one day reveal evidence which will lead to the destruction of the Trump administration. The repetition leads to belief, the belief leads to trust, and before you know it people who are scared of the president are reading the Palmer Report every day and parking themselves in front of Rachel Maddow every night and letting everything they say slide right past their skepticism filters, marinating comfortably in a sedative of cognitive ease.

    And that repetition has been no accident. CNN producer John Bonifield was caught on video nearly two years ago admitting that CNN's CEO Jeff Zucker was personally instructing his staff to stay focused on Russia even in the midst of far more important breaking news stories.

    "My boss, I shouldn't say this, my boss yesterday we were having a discussion about this dental shoot and he goes and he was just like I want you to know what we are up against here," Bonifield told an undercover associate of James O'Keefe's Project Veritas .

    "And he goes, just to give you some context, President Trump pulled out of the climate accords and for a day and a half we covered the climate accords. And the CEO of CNN said in our internal meeting, he said good job everybody covering the climate accords, but we're done with it, let's get back to Russia. "

    (And before you get on me about O'Keefe's shady record, CNN said in a statement that the video was legitimate and disputed none of its content, saying only that it stands by Bonifield and that "Diversity of personal opinion is what makes CNN strong, we welcome it and embrace it.")

    Zucker, for his part, told the New York Times in an article published yesterday that he was "entirely comfortable" with CNN's role in promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory the way that it did.

    "We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did," Zucker said.

    "A sitting president's own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That's not enormous because the media says so. That's enormous because it's unprecedented."

    me title=

    "We are not investigators"? What the fuck kind of dumbass shit is that? So it's not your job to investigate whether what you're reporting is true or false? It's not your job to investigate whether the anonymous sources you're basing your reports on might be lying or not? It's not your job to investigate whether or not you'd be committing journalistic malpractice with the multiple completely bullshit stories your outlet has been humiliated by in the last two years? It's not your job to weigh the consequences of deliberately monopolizing public attention on a narrative which consists of nothing but confident-sounding assertions and innuendo?

    "We are not investigators." So? You're not dentists or firefighters either, what's your point? That has nothing to do with the mountains of journalistic malpractice you've been perpetrating by advancing this conspiracy theory, nor with the inexcusable brutalization you've been inflicting upon the American psyche with your deliberate nonstop repetition of bogus assertions, innuendo, and incriminating questions.

    The science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for over a century . If you think about how many advances have been made in other military fields over the last hundred years, that gives you a clear example of how sophisticated an understanding the social engineers must now have of the methods of mass manipulation of human psychology. We may be absolutely certain that there are people who've been working to drive the public narratives about western rivals like Russia, and that they are doing so with a far greater understanding of the concepts we've touched on in this essay than we have at our disposal.

    The manipulators understand our psyches better than we understand them ourselves, and they're getting more clever, not less. The only thing we can do to keep our heads while immersed in a society that is saturated with propaganda is be as relentlessly honest as possible, with ourselves and with the world. We'll never be able to out-manipulate the master manipulators, but we can be real with ourselves about whether or not we're selecting for cognitive ease rather than thinking rigorously and clearly. We can be truthful with our friends, family, coworkers and social media followers wherever untruth seems to be taking hold. We can do our very best to shine the light of truth on the puppeteers wherever we spot them and ruin the whole goddamn show for everyone.

    It may not seem like a lot, but truth is the one thing they can't manipulate, whether it's truth about them, truth about the world, or truthfulness with yourself. The lying manipulators got us into this mess, so only truth can get us out.

    * * *

    Thanks for reading! My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish.

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    [Mar 27, 2019] Mueller definitely influenced midterm election

    Mar 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Originally from: Did Mueller Know There Was No Trump-Russia Collusion Before The Midterms Authored by Andrew McCarthy via FoxNews.com,

    Almost from the start, Democrats and their media echo chamber have moved the goal posts on collusion . The original allegation – the political narrative that the Clinton campaign, through Obama administration alchemy, honed into a counterintelligence investigation – was that that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russia's "cyberespionage" attacks on the 2016 election.

    But there was no evidence that candidate Trump and his surrogates had anything to do with the Kremlin's hacking and propaganda schemes. And no supporting logic. The Russians are very good at espionage. They neither needed nor wanted American help, their operations predated Trump's entry into the campaign, and some of those operations were anti-Trump.

    Nevertheless, in short order, that endlessly elastic word, collusion , was being stretched to the breaking point – covering every conceivable type of association between Trump associates and Russia.

    Some of these were unseemly, such as the Trump Tower meeting, an apparently unsuccessful effort to obtain campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton. More of them were routine, such as incoming national-security adviser Michael Flynn's communications with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the post-election transition. But none of these collusion episodes were criminal. The only "collusion" prosecutors care about is conspiracy; a criminal agreement to violate a federal penal statute – such as the laws against hacking.

    There was never any such evidence. There was just unverified, sensational, hearsay nonsense – the Steele dossier generated by the Clinton campaign.

    Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has concluded that there was no criminal collusion, the question arises: When during their exhaustive 22-month investigation did prosecutors realize they had no case? I put it at no later than the end of 2017. I suspect it was in the early autumn.

    By the time Mueller was appointed on May 17, 2017, the FBI had been trying unsuccessfully for nearly a year to corroborate the dossier's allegations. Top bureau officials have conceded to congressional investigators that they were never able to do so – notwithstanding that, by the time of Mueller's appointment, the Justice Department and FBI had relied on the dossier three times, in what they labeled "VERIFIED" applications, to obtain warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

    And make no mistake about what this means. In each and every application, after describing the hacking operations carried out by Russian operatives, the Justice Department asserted:

    The FBI believes that the Russian Government's efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election were being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with [Donald Trump's] campaign.

    Yes, the Justice Department continued to make that allegation to the secret federal court for months after Trump was sworn in as president.

    Notably, in June 2017, about a month after Mueller took over the investigation, while he was still getting his bearings, the Justice Department and the FBI went on to obtain a fourth FISA warrant. Yet again, they used the same unverified information. Yet again, they withheld from the court the fact that this information was generated by the Clinton campaign; that the Clinton campaign was peddling it to the media at the same time the FBI was providing it to the court; and that Christopher Steele, the informant on whom they were so heavily relying, had misled the bureau about his media contacts.

    You know what's most telling about this fourth FISA warrant? The fact that it was never renewed. The 90-day authorization lapsed in September 2017. When it did, Mueller did not seek to extend it with a new warrant.

    Think about that for a moment. President Trump fired FBI Director Comey on May 9, 2017. Eight days later, on May 17, Mueller was named special counsel. This appointment effectively wrested control of the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation from acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, transferring it to the special counsel.

    By August 2017, Mueller had removed the lead investigator, Agent Peter Strzok over the rabidly anti-Trump texts he'd exchanged with Lisa Page, a top FBI lawyer who served as McCabe's counsel. Page herself had resigned in May. Meanwhile, the FBI reassigned its top counsel, James Baker (who later resigned); and the bureau's inspection division referred McCabe to the Justice Department's inspector general for leaking investigative information and then lying about it (and McCabe was later fired and referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution).

    This means that by autumn 2017 when it would have been time to go back to the court and reaffirm the dossier's allegations of a Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy, the major FBI officials involved in placing those unverified allegations before the court had been sidelined. Clearly up to speed after four months of running the investigation, Mueller decided not to renew these allegations.

    Once the fourth warrant lapsed in September, investigators made no new claims of a Trump-Russia conspiracy to the court. The collusion case was the Clinton campaign's Steele dossier, and by autumn 2017, the investigators now in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation were unwilling to stand behind it.

    In order to get the FISA warrants, the Justice Department and the FBI had had to allege that there was probable cause to believe former Trump adviser Carter Page was an agent of Russia. Under FISA law, that requires alleging that he was knowingly involved in clandestine activity on behalf of Russia, and that this clandestine activity involved probable violations of American criminal law – offenses such as espionage. Yet, despite the fact that this representation was made four times in sworn "verified" applications, Mueller never charged Page with a crime – not espionage, not false statements, nothing.

    When Special Counsel Mueller closed his investigation last week, he almost certainly knew for about a year and a half that there was no collusion case. Indeed, the indictments that he did bring appeared to preclude the possibility that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin.

    [Mar 27, 2019] John Brennan Pulls a 180 on MSNBC Says He Might Have Received Bad Information - Sara A. Carter

    Mar 27, 2019 | saraacarter.com

    For those that remember all the statements that former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan made on Trump-Russia investigation, his latest appearance on MSNBC this morning might come as a huge surprise:

    Brennan on MSNBC: Well, I don't know if I received bad information but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was. I am relieved that it's been determined there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election.

    Embedded video


    [Mar 27, 2019] Trump s recognition of the Golan Heights marks the total capture of US policymaking in the Middle East by pro-Israel right

    Notable quotes:
    "... It gives a formal US stamp of approval to Israel's violation of international law, and, in particular of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilians into occupied territory. Roughly 20,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied Golan Heights today – now with the unambiguous backing of the US government. ..."
    "... Jared Kusher's family is so close Netanyahu that the prime minister once slept in Kushner's childhood bedroom . Between the Trump administration's personnel and rightward lurch in Israeli politics, the pieces that would make the current one-state reality permanent are rapidly falling into place. ..."
    Mar 27, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

    No country in the world recognizes Israel's rule over the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1981 – no country, that is, until now.

    Donald Trump signed a presidential proclamation on Monday formally recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, still considered Syrian territory under international law. Standing by President Trump's side during an address by the two heads of state in Washington DC, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly called Trump's decision " historic justice " and gifted the president a box of wine from the occupied territory. As they embraced, Israeli forces began an aerial bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip after rockets launched from Gaza hit a house in a community north of Tel Aviv earlier that day.

    Trump's announcement is unmistakably an election-time favor for Netanyahu. Saddled with multiple corruption charges, including one for bribery, Netanyahu and his Likud party have been flagging in the polls. Likud increasingly appears threatened by the center-right Blue and White party, jointly headed by the taciturn retired general Benny Gantz and former TV personality Yair Lapid. Netanyahu's desperation can be measured by the extremity of his rhetoric. He and his surrogates have spent the past several weeks waging a hateful, vicious campaign, accusing the Arab political parties of supporting terrorism and explicitly warning that a Gantz and Lapid victory would lead to dead Israelis.

    Many in Israel, however, view Netanyahu, despite his flaws, as a talented statesman and skilled advocate for the country's interests on the international stage, and Netanyahu has campaigned on achievements such as normalizing relations with the Gulf states and the US embassy's move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Golan Heights declaration – which initially took even the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who was in Israel at the time, by surprise – is likely meant to bolster this image.

    Trump's recognition of the Golan Heights marks the total capture of US policymaking in the Middle East by pro-Israel right

    But Trump's Golan Heights proclamation is not just a cynical political gambit. It is a dramatic change in US policy in the Middle East that could have serious consequences. Trump, unlike his predecessors, has never even pretended to abide by international norms and conventions. And yet the decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over territory that the international community nearly unanimously considers occupied, or at the very least disputed, is unprecedented.

    It gives a formal US stamp of approval to Israel's violation of international law, and, in particular of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilians into occupied territory. Roughly 20,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied Golan Heights today – now with the unambiguous backing of the US government.

    This potentially paves the way for Israel's annexation, in part or whole, of the West Bank. It has long been a talking point on the Israeli hard right that, despite the international community's protestations, there would be few consequences for extending Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank . Trump's declaration, it seems, has not only proven them right, but given them an added boost: unlike during the Obama years, they can be confident that the global hegemon will take their side.

    If Netanyahu's Likud wins enough seats on 9 April to form a government, it is very like that annexation, at the very least, will be on the table for discussion. The Likud's central committee unanimously voted in 2017 in favor of annexing the West Bank. Naftali Bennett, co-chair of the New Right party, has proposed a plan to annex parts of Area C of the West Bank. And the other rightwing parties – the extremist Union of Parties of the Right and Moshe Feiglin's Identity party, both of which would almost certainly sit in a future Likud government – have only more extreme proposals for dealing with "the Palestinian question", including the forced transfer of Palestinians out of the West Bank and into Jordan.

    Trump's recognition of the Golan Heights marks the total capture of US policymaking in the Middle East by pro-Israel right. US ambassador to Israel David Friedman is an opponent of the two-state solution who previously operated the charitable arm of a rightwing orthodox religious seminary in the West Bank settlement of Beit El. Jared Kusher's family is so close Netanyahu that the prime minister once slept in Kushner's childhood bedroom . Between the Trump administration's personnel and rightward lurch in Israeli politics, the pieces that would make the current one-state reality permanent are rapidly falling into place.

    It is important to remember this in light of the glitz and pablum of the AIPAC policy conference taking place this week in Washington DC, where the PR hacks and policy flacks are working hard to launder Israel's image, to obscure the fact that there is one sovereign state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that determines the lives of roughly 13 million people; that of those 13 million, only half – Israeli Jews – have full citizenship and social rights; and that the other half, the Palestinians, live under a range of discriminatory systems, from codified discrimination but legal citizenship within Israel, to residency without the right to vote in East Jerusalem, to military dictatorship in the West Bank. Donald Trump , his administration, the pro-Israel lobby, and Netanyahu all intend to keep it that way.

    Joshua Leifer is an associate editor at Dissent. Previously, he worked at +972 Magazine and was based in Jerusalem

    [Mar 27, 2019] Israel's Moves to the Right by Lawrence Davidson

    Notable quotes:
    "... What in the world is a fascist Jew? Well, in this case, it is someone who uses violent methods to realize the logical consequences of Zionism -- if Israel is a "Jewish state," then non-Jews must go. How they ultimately go has been left an open-ended question, though Israel is engaged in a continuous effort to destroy Palestinian infrastructure . Fascist Jews advocate expulsion of all Palestinians and sometimes engage in direct violence -- akin to classic pogroms -- in an effort to fulfill this goal. ..."
    "... The "migration" of Israeli Jews to the right has narrowed the gap between the majority of "ordinary" citizens and the fascists. So, back into favor come the Kahanists. ..."
    Mar 25, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org
    An article published in the Israeli news blog +972 on 19 November 2018 posed the question: Why does the right keep winning elections in Israel? The answer offered was "because Israelis are right wing." Simple enough, and apparently, quite true. The article estimates that over half of Israeli Jews think of themselves as "right wing." Self-defined centrists are about 25 percent, and those Israeli Jews who still cling to "leftist" ideals are now only about 15 percent of the population. The remainder are non-committal.

    This movement to the right is often blamed on the Palestinians, but that is largely an evasion. As the story goes, it was the Second Intifada (occurring from late 2000 to early 2005) that so scared a majority of Israeli Jews that it " led to a migration of left-wingers to the political center [and] centrists [to the] right, causing the percentage of Jewish right-wingers to drift upward over the decade." While the "migration to the right" has certainly taken place, it is better understood as follows: under Palestinian pressure for democratic reforms and justice, along with corresponding resistance to oppression, Israeli Jews who could not face the prospect of real democracy had nowhere politically to go than to the right -- what should properly be described as the racist right. And, so they went. From this point on there was no more obfuscation -- Israeli "security" is now clearly a stand-in phrase for the maintenance of Israeli Jewish domination over non-Jews.

    Enter the Fascists

    The present shifting about on Israel's political landscape prior to its April 2019 elections confirms this basically rightwing racist scene. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu affirmed that Israel is "the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people ." A minority of Israeli Jews might denounce such racism, but Israel's recently adopted nationality law states that the right of national self-determination in Israel is "unique to the Jewish people." And whether the "left" acknowledges the fact or not, this law is in perfect sync with Zionist ideology.

    It should be noted that the prime minister's personal preference is not for "the Jewish people" as a whole. Indeed, in his eyes, if you are an anti-Zionist Jew you are an anti-Semitic Jew -- whatever that might mean. The prime minister is more comfortable with Jews of the fascist, racist right, with whom he has so much in common. This is the kind of Jew he has politically allied with. What in the world is a fascist Jew? Well, in this case, it is someone who uses violent methods to realize the logical consequences of Zionism -- if Israel is a "Jewish state," then non-Jews must go. How they ultimately go has been left an open-ended question, though Israel is engaged in a continuous effort to destroy Palestinian infrastructure . Fascist Jews advocate expulsion of all Palestinians and sometimes engage in direct violence -- akin to classic pogroms -- in an effort to fulfill this goal.

    You might shake your head in wonderment at the notion of Jewish fascists, but they have always been an important element in Zionist history. You can trace their activity from Vladimir Jabotinsky and his notion of an "iron wall" (1923) that would force the Palestinians to acquiesce in Zionist domination, right up to Meir Kahane, an advocate of expulsion , and his Kach Party (1971-1990). It is Kahane's followers who now are political partners of Netanyahu.

    The "migration" of Israeli Jews to the right has narrowed the gap between the majority of "ordinary" citizens and the fascists. So, back into favor come the Kahanists.

    What is an Israeli Centrist?

    Nor should we look for anti-racist activism among the 25 percent who see themselves as centrists. Presently, those who seek to capture the centrist vote are Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid. Gantz is former chief-of-staff and a man who is being sued for war crimes. He is leader of the Israeli Resilience Party (Hosen Israel). That party has allied with Yair Lapid, a former TV celebrity, and his There is a future Party (Yesh Atid).

    Both of these politicians call themselves "new centrists" and concentrate their platforms on "socio-economic issues such as the cost of living." However, when it comes to the Palestinians, neither of them are interested in a democratic Israel that would afford non-Jews equal rights -- nothing particularly "new" here for "centrists." Gantz is the classic military maven so prevalent in Israeli politics. Here is his view of where "resilience" should take Israel relative to the Palestinians: "The Jordan Valley will remain our eastern security border," Gantz declared. "We will maintain security in the entire Land of Israel we will not allow the millions of Palestinians living beyond the separation fence to endanger our security and our identity as a Jewish state." For someone who is campaigning on the theme that, under its present government, " Israel has lost its way ," Gantz's intentions in this regard are remarkably similar to those of Benjamin Netanyahu.

    Yair Lapid's position on the Palestinians is little different from that of Gantz. He says that "we need to separate from the Palestinians," as if Israeli Jews haven't been doing just that for the past 71 years. He goes on to demand that all issues of security have to "stay in Israel's hands," there is no such thing as a "right of return," and Jerusalem will not be divided into two capitals.

    On the Palestinian issue -- the one that now divides Israel from increasing numbers of citizens in the democratic world -- there is little difference between the Israeli rightists and the centrists except that the latter do not publicly talk about the forceful expulsion.

    That approximately 85 percent of Israeli Jews should end up unwilling to grant equal rights to the 20 percent of Palestinians who are their segregated neighbors; that they should support, or at best not act against the relentless, vicious process of illegal settlement in the Occupied Territories; and finally that they should react to Palestinian resistance to Zionist oppression by "migrating" to the right, is both tragic and predictable.

    It must be realized that any country that allows racism to rule its public sphere cannot pass itself off as a democracy. It is simply a contradiction. The Zionist experiment looking toward a democratic Jewish state might have gone differently if it had been tried somewhere devoid of a non-Jewish population (like the moon), but then, in the end, the Zionists became obsessed with Palestine, fell in with the colonial mentality still prevalent during the first half of the twentieth century, and have never progressed beyond it.

    To this point, I beg the reader's patience as I repeat an argument I have made more than once in past analyses: It is impossible to create a state exclusively for one people (call them people A) in a territory already populated by another people (call them people B) without the eventual adoption of racist policies by A and eventual resistance on the part of B. Under such circumstances, for A, there can be no real security, nor can there be anything like a healthy national culture.

    Indeed, unless a majority of Israeli Jews are willing to go the route of South Africa and renounce their program of discriminatory dominion over millions of non-Jews, they have nowhere else to go but head-first into the hell that is the racist right. With 85 percent sharing, or at least acquiescing, in the views of Netanyahu, Gantz, and Lapid, the chances for redemption do not look good. In fact, it is probably the case that the "light unto the nations" has long since gone out.

    [Mar 27, 2019] Russia is perforce the enemy that Washington needs in order to stay in the business of Empire by David Stockman

    Notable quotes:
    "... Namely, that America is suffering Regime Failure. Thus, wrong-headed Washington policies have brought prosperity to Wall Street but not main street, which is what actually explains why Trump won the left-behind precincts of Flyover America. ..."
    "... Regime Failure has also fostered confrontation with Russia when it is no threat to homeland security at all, but so doing has vilified Putin and Russia to the point that random dots of RussiaGate got woven into a preposterous theory of collusion. ..."
    "... The foundation document which turned these random developments into the Russia Collusion story, of course, was the January 6, 2017 report entitled, "Assessing Russian Activities And Intentions in Recent US Elections". The report was nothing of the kind, of course, and is now well-understood to have been written by outgoing CIA director John Brennan and a hand-picked posse of politicized analysts from the CIA, FBI and NSA. It was essentially a political screed thinly disguised as the product of the professional intelligence community and was designed to discredit and sabotage the Trump presidency. ..."
    "... William Binney, who is the father of modern NSA internet spying technologies, says that the DNC emails were leaked on a thumb-drive and couldn't have been hacked as a technical matter; and equally competent analysts have shown that Guccifer 2.0 is almost surely a NSA contrived fiction based on the oldest trick in the police precinct station house – planting evidence, in this case telltale Cyrillic letters and the name of a notorious head of the Soviet secret police. ..."
    "... So what we are left with is the fact that Binney, a NSA veteran and actually the father of much of today's NSA internet spying capability, says that the recorded download speed of the DNC emails could only have been done by plugging a thumb-drive into the machines on site. That is, nothing downloads across 5,000 miles of digital expanse at the recorded 22.7 megabytes per second. ..."
    "... The pure grandstanding nature of this blow against the purported election meddling of the nefarious Russians is more than evident in the 3,000 ads IRA bought on Facebook for about $100,000 – more than half of which were posted after the election. ..."
    "... Yet here's a typical example of how the Russians stormed into America's sacred election space – even if according to Facebook this particular ad got less than 10,000 "impressions" and the mighty sum of 160 "shares" . For crying out loud, it didn't take any nefarious Russian intelligence agent to post this kind of cartoonish Islamophobia. There are millions of American xenophobes more than happy to do it with their own dime, time and bile. ..."
    Mar 27, 2019 | original.antiwar.com

    Originally from: Not Mueller Time: Hey, MSM, This Dud's For You! ,

    Now that the giant Mueller Nothingburger (with a side of crow-flavored fries, per Jim Kunstler) has been officially delivered unto the mainstream media's wailing and gnashing of teeth, the essence of the matter should be obvious: To wit, the RussiaGate Collusion story was always way above the pay grade of the legal sleuths and gunslingers who wasted $25 million on it – and notwithstanding 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witnesses, 40 FBI agents and 21 lawyers.

    This prosecutorial blitzkrieg had no chance of discovering the nefarious facts of conspiracy, however, because there never were any worthy of adult consideration. To the contrary, from day #1 the whole cock-and-bull story was based on a syllogism which held that Trump's very election victory and support for rapprochement with Russia were in themselves proof of a conspiracy with the Kremlin to steal the election.

    That is to say, by the lights of the Dems, official Washington and their mainstream media echo chamber, Hillary Clinton could not have lost the 2016 election to the worst GOP candidate in history including Barry Goldwater and Alf Landon (true) without the sinister intervention of a foreign power hostile to Hillary.

    Therefore, Putin and the Russians elected Trump. Q.E.D.

    Likewise, Russia is perforce the enemy that Washington needs in order to stay in the business of Empire. So advocacy of rapprochement with Moscow was per se evidence that the Kremlin had blackmail (kompromat for the RussiaGate cognoscenti) on Trump and his campaign.

    Once these predicates were established, of course, any old dog-eared "facts" could be hung on the frame in order to establishment an air of verisimilitude.

    But now we know. Strip away the false predicates and the flotsam and jetsam of the case fall flat on their face. Even 22 months of Mueller Time couldn't stich together a Humpty-Dumpty that never was.

    As it happens, however, there has been all along a perfectly plausible alternative explanation for why Trump won and why repairing relations with Russia made eminent good sense.

    Namely, that America is suffering Regime Failure. Thus, wrong-headed Washington policies have brought prosperity to Wall Street but not main street, which is what actually explains why Trump won the left-behind precincts of Flyover America.

    Regime Failure has also fostered confrontation with Russia when it is no threat to homeland security at all, but so doing has vilified Putin and Russia to the point that random dots of RussiaGate got woven into a preposterous theory of collusion.

    What is left without the syllogistic predicates, of course, are the ludicrous threadbare facts of the case.

    After all, can there be anything more pitiful after 22 months of prosecutorial scorched earth on the Russian collusion file than Mueller's list of indictments. These include:

    That's all she wrote and it's about as pathetic as it gets. Mueller should have been guffawed out of town on account of this tommyrot long before belatedly delivering a report that proved exactly that.

    So it is perhaps a measure of the degree to which the Imperial City has fallen prey to the Trump Derangement Syndrome that the five core events of the case survived as long as they did. In fact, it has long been evident from public information that there was nothing nefarious about any of these ragged building blocks of the case:

    The foundation document which turned these random developments into the Russia Collusion story, of course, was the January 6, 2017 report entitled, "Assessing Russian Activities And Intentions in Recent US Elections". The report was nothing of the kind, of course, and is now well-understood to have been written by outgoing CIA director John Brennan and a hand-picked posse of politicized analysts from the CIA, FBI and NSA. It was essentially a political screed thinly disguised as the product of the professional intelligence community and was designed to discredit and sabotage the Trump presidency.

    And it was lied about over and over by the MSM who called it an assessment of the 17 US intelligence agencies when it was nothing of the kind, and said so right on the cover page.

    In fact, when we first read this ballyhooed report our thought was that someone at the Onion had pilfered the CIA logo and published a sidesplitting satire.

    The 9-pager on RT America, which is presented as evidence of "Kremlin messaging", is so sophomoric and hackneyed that it could have been written by a summer intern at the CIA. It consists entirely of a sloppy catalogue of leftist and libertarian based dissent from mainstream policy that has been aired on RT America on such subversive topics as Occupy Wall Street, anti-fracking, police brutality, foreign interventionism and civil liberties.

    Actually, your editor has appeared dozens of times on RT America and advocated nearly every position cited by the CIA as evidence of nefarious Russian propaganda.

    And we thought it up all by ourselves!

    So, yes, we do think US intervention in Syria was wrong; that Georgia was the aggressor when it invaded South Ossetia; that the American people have been disenfranchised and need to "take this government back"; that Washington runs a "surveillance state" where civil liberties are being ridden roughshod upon; that Wall Street is riven with "greed" and the "US national debt" is out of control; that the two-party system is a "sham "and that it doesn't represent the views of "one-third of the population" (at least!); and that most especially after killing millions in unnecessary wars Washington has "no moral right to teach the rest of the world".

    So there you have it: Policy views on various topics that are embraced in some instances by both your libertarian editor and the left-wing Nation magazine were held to be examples of Russian messaging, and alarming evidence of nefarious meddling in our electoral process at that.

    In fact, the single proposition in the entire ten-pages of political opinionating that relates to an actual Russian intrusion (other than the hideous St. Petersburg troll farm which we debunk below) in the American electoral process is the completely discredited notion that the Russian GRU hacked the DNC emails and handed them off to WikiLeaks

    No, not at all.

    William Binney, who is the father of modern NSA internet spying technologies, says that the DNC emails were leaked on a thumb-drive and couldn't have been hacked as a technical matter; and equally competent analysts have shown that Guccifer 2.0 is almost surely a NSA contrived fiction based on the oldest trick in the police precinct station house – planting evidence, in this case telltale Cyrillic letters and the name of a notorious head of the Soviet secret police.

    Indeed, if the Russians did it – from a troll farm in St. Petersburg or the Kremlin itself – the fingerprints from any remote hacking operation would be all over the computers involved. Moreover, the National Security Agency (NSA) would have a record of the breach stored at one of its server farms because it does capture and store everything that comes into the US over the internet.

    Said record, of course, would amount to the Smoking Intercept. So the only thing Mueller really needed to do was to call the head of NSA and request the NSA intercept – something he obviously didn't do or it would have leaked long ago.

    In the alternative, if NSA has no such record, he could have confiscated the DNC computers – which had never even been inspected by the FBI, let alone taken into custody – to determine whether William Binney is right.

    That didn't happen, either, or it too would have leaked in a heartbeat.

    So what we are left with is the fact that Binney, a NSA veteran and actually the father of much of today's NSA internet spying capability, says that the recorded download speed of the DNC emails could only have been done by plugging a thumb-drive into the machines on site. That is, nothing downloads across 5,000 miles of digital expanse at the recorded 22.7 megabytes per second.

    In short, if the Russians hacked them, the evidence is all there in the hard drives; and if they didn't, the entire RussiaGate hoax should have been shutdown long ago.

    That's because the only thing that remotely smacks of untoward meddling by the Kremlin is the DNC emails – and even then, they only concerned intra-party squabbles between the Clinton and the Sandernista factions of the Dem party that were already well advertised and known to the American electorate.

    Cyber Garbage From the St. Petersburg Troll Farm

    By contrast, another prime exhibit in the meddling narrative is the pitiful efforts of the Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency (IRA). This is was cited over and over by the RussiaGaters as evidence of Putin's nefarious hand at work, but did they ever investigate the matter?

    The fact is, the IRA was such a belly-splitting joke that they only thing it proved is that prosecutor Mueller did actually indict 13 Russian-speaking ham sandwiches.

    Indeed, the joker in the whole deck is that the nefarious"troll farm" in St. Petersburg was not even a Russian intelligence agency operation at all.

    It was just "Russian" even by the careful terminology of Barr's summary. As it happened, the RussiaGate hysteria had reached such a point that any contact with any of Russia's 144 million citizens became inherently suspect, as if that beleaguered nation had become a race of evildoers.

    Actually, the IRA was the relatively harmless Hobby Farm of a fanatical Russian oligarch and ultra-nationalist, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has a great big beef against Imperial Washington's demonization of Russia and Vlad Putin. Apparently, the farm was (it's apparently being disbanded) the vehicle through which he gave Washington the middle finger and buttered up his patron.

    Prigozhin is otherwise known as "Putin's Cook" because he made his fortune in St. Petersburg restaurants that Putin favored and via state funded food service operations at Russian schools and military installations.

    Like most Russian oligarchs not in jail, he apparently tithes in gratitude to the Kremlin: In this case, by bankrolling the rinky-dink operation at 55 Savushkina Street in St. Petersburg that was the object of Mueller's pretentious foray into the flotsam and jetsam of social media low life.

    Prigozhin's trolling farm was grandly called the Internet Research Agency (IRA), but what it actually did was hire (apparently) unemployed 20-somethings at $4-8 per hour to pound out ham-handed political messaging on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc. They banged away twelve hours at a shift on a quota-driven paint-by-the-internet-numbers basis where their output was rated for engagements, likes, retweets etc.

    Whatever these keyboard drones might have been, they were not professional Russian intel operators. And the collection of broken English postings strewn throughout Mueller's indictment were not one bit scary.

    The pure grandstanding nature of this blow against the purported election meddling of the nefarious Russians is more than evident in the 3,000 ads IRA bought on Facebook for about $100,000 – more than half of which were posted after the election.

    Yet here's a typical example of how the Russians stormed into America's sacred election space – even if according to Facebook this particular ad got less than 10,000 "impressions" and the mighty sum of 160 "shares" . For crying out loud, it didn't take any nefarious Russian intelligence agent to post this kind of cartoonish Islamophobia. There are millions of American xenophobes more than happy to do it with their own dime, time and bile.

    [Mar 27, 2019] EconoSpeak Maybe No Conspiracy Or Coordination, But Lots And Lots Of Collusion

    Mar 26, 2019 | econospeak.blogspot.com

    So how do these things differ? Conspiracy and cooedination both imply some amount of planning and direction, with for conspiracy some sort of communication and agreement on the plan with the other conspiring party, namely the Russians. What apparently the Mueller report finds is none of that: no central plan or direction or the making of such a plan with the Russians. This indeed looks like it is true, although some of what went on around the Trump Tower meeting gets pretty borderline, even as that seems to have been sort of a mutually botched meeting.

    But on the matter of collusion we have piles of evidence that this has occurred, and the evidence is the large pile of indictments that Mueller has brought forward against a lot of people, with many of those charged with having unreported meetings and dealings with Russians, including passing of information back and forth, with many of these then lying about all this, and with some of these people pleading guilty of what they were charrged with. These actions have involved very clearly in many cases collusion with the Russians rhese people were dealing with. The crucial diffeeence is that it appears that all this collusion was unplanned and undirected. It was disorganized and spontaneous collusion, although serious enough to bring about efforts to cover up what was going on by many, including apparently Trump himself, even if AG Barr has decided he did not commit obstruction of justice.

    Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Editing:

    Nothing will cure the writer of Russian-itis.

    Barkley Rosser said...
    Me or somebody else, Anonymous?

    Six of Trump's closest associates have been indicted in connection with this. I only note that Dana Milbank of WaPo agrees with me: lots of collusion, which is different from conspiracy, which Trump is too stupid to actually engage in.

    As it is, Anonymous, I happen to be very well informed about Russia and pay close attention to it, probably more than you on both counts. So spouting about "Russian-itis" just makes you poorly informed and stupid.

    As it is, I am increasingly disgusted that most of the media has simply rolled over and bought the Trump/Hannity line that "no collusion" is what has been shown. It has not. Again, the word does not appear in the Bar letter.

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    1. likbez March 27, 2019 2:34 am

      Barkley,

      It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, if there is none 😉

      Despite being a Professor of Economics, and having a Russian speaking wife you are utterly incompetent in this area and are completely brainwashed by the neoliberal/neocon MSM. You tend to subconsciously equate Russia and the USSR. For your information, Russia is a neoliberal state; much like the USA and Putin is promoter of neoliberal capitalism, although in less man-eating mutation than in the USA.

      For your information Mueller investigation was a part of color revolution against Trump launched by intelligence services in the same way they launch color revolution in other countries. It is unclear to me why they did that, but that fact is provable

      See for example https://www.theepochtimes.com/spygate-the-true-story-of-collusion_2684629.html

      And the sequence of event, especially questioning the legitimacy of election, and Mueller appointment gambit with Comey as a sacrificing pawn, corresponds to what you can learn from the books of CIA-connected writer Gene Sharp -- the reference source on color revolution mechanics. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Sharp

      It is not clear to me why the Deep State in the USA (as well as in GB) has such an allergic reaction and viewed Trump as a threat to the US governed world neoliberal empire, because Trump, as corrupt as he is, is a part of NYC neoliberal elite and in no way a revolutionary. And it was clear that he will execute the same "bait and switch" maneuver as Obama betraying his election promises.

      Which actually happened three months after inauguration when he bombed Syria targets without any investigation of a chemical attack -- which most probably was staged by jihadists (supposedly he was influenced by Ivanka; actually Javanka is another problem of this corrupt administration and suggest completely different course of the investigation; hopefully by the Southern District of NY -- I would like Jared Kushner going to jail with or without Trump)

      But it was a color revolution. Which so far failed.

      So you better stop writing such detached from reality statements as "But on the matter of collusion we have piles of evidence that this has occurred, and the evidence is the large pile of indictments that Mueller has brought forward against a lot of people, with many of those charged with having unreported meetings and dealings with Russians," This is such a low level of IQ that it hurts. Naivety unacceptable for a Professor pretending to be a political analyst.

      In reality this was a false flag operation to present Russia as the culprit. Highly successful operation I would say. Russia serves as a very convenient scapegoat for such things.

      And having an external scapegoat and projecting into it all the ills helped to cement cracks in the neoliberal façade, when the US population rejected neoliberal's elite candidate. In addition, it allowed to launch NeoMcCartyism campaign in MSM for the suppressing the internal dissent, when anybody who question the US foreign wars or the rule of financial oligarchy can be framed as Putin's agent.

      So this is another classic method of suppressing the dissident voices including whose who argue for the return of the New Deal Capitalism and/or are against foreign wars. Looks at how MSMs treat Tulsi Gabbard visit to Syria. Does not it remind you something ?

      So most of your writings on this particular topic are just an implicit repetition of State Department taking points infused into your brain via MSMs you read. You have no first hand sources about Russia. That's why I would strongly recommend you to stop writing on this topic. You just disgrace yourself.

    [Mar 27, 2019] Russia and the Democrats by Rob Urie

    Notable quotes:
    "... What this implies is that the received wisdom amongst bourgeois Democrats -- the bosses, bank managers, academics, realtors and administrative class, looks to be what it is: a combination of class loathing that their 'lessors' didn't perceive the munificent blessing of their electoral choice; mass delusion on the part of self-styled 'high-information voters' about who really controls American 'democracy;' and studied ignorance of the consequences of the last half-century of bi-partisan neoliberal governance. ..."
    "... Most damaging to the burgeoning left in the U.S. is the deeply ugly character assassination of poor and working-class voters carried out by the urban bourgeois, many from the self-described radical left. People I know and like, but with whom I disagree politically but am working hard to convert, have spent the last three years being derided as traitorous, marginally literate hicks too stupid to know they are pawns of the Kremlin. The irony, if you care to call it that, is that they knew the Russian interference story was cynical bullshit all along while the graduate degree crowd was following every twist and turn as if it were true knowledge. ..."
    "... The New York Times and Washington Post have been publishing politically motivated 'fake news' in support of establishment interests since their inceptions. Their service to powerful interests is why they are still around. The FBI, CIA and NSA have been putting out politically motivated bullshit since their respective inceptions. They exist to serve the rich and powerful against all comers. To claim these as bastions of integrity was always a tough sell. To continue to claim it is the stuff from which revolutions are made. In this case, right-wing revolutions. ..."
    "... While the urban bourgeois have long been dismissive of the 'burn it down' contingent of Trump voters, they seem incapable of seeing their own roles as defenders of the establishment as corrupt and ultimately, politically suicidal. ..."
    "... . Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because she is a corrupt, neoliberal, militaristic piece of shit ..."
    "... Lying sacks of shit like James Clapper and John Brennan will tie their lots to whomever will fund their adventures in mal-governance as the world burns and species become extinct. The tragedy here is that there are real issues in need of resolution. ..."
    Mar 27, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org
    Two years ago authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in their book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign that within 24 hours of her 2016 electoral loss, Hillary Clinton's senior campaign staff decided to blame the loss on Russian interference. Given the apparent source of the charge in opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign , the move seemed both desperate and pathetic -- a thread for Clinton's true believers to hang onto, an effort to keep campaign contributions rolling in and a ploy to cleave liberals from the left through red-baiting.

    For perspective, from the time leading up to the 2016 election through today, I chose to live amongst poor and working-class people of color, with occasional forays into the rural working and middle classes and the urban bourgeois. What became apparent early on is that the audience for the Russian interference story was the urban and suburban bourgeois who had seen their lots by-and-large restored by Barack Obama's bank bailouts and who had no knowledge of, or interaction with, the 90% of the country that is living, by degree, hand-to-mouth.

    What this implies is that the received wisdom amongst bourgeois Democrats -- the bosses, bank managers, academics, realtors and administrative class, looks to be what it is: a combination of class loathing that their 'lessors' didn't perceive the munificent blessing of their electoral choice; mass delusion on the part of self-styled 'high-information voters' about who really controls American 'democracy;' and studied ignorance of the consequences of the last half-century of bi-partisan neoliberal governance.

    As I wrote in early 2018:

    "Prior to the 2016 presidential election, if one were to ask what single act could seal a new Cold War with Russia, align liberals and progressives with the operational core of the American military-industrial-surveillance complex, expose the preponderance of left-activism as an offshoot of Democratic Party operations and consign most of what remained to personal invective against an empirically dangerous leader, consensus would likely have it that doing so wouldn't be easy."

    The Clinton campaign's decision to blame her electoral loss on Russian interference demonstrates why she was, and still is, unqualified to hold elected office. In the first, the U.S. – Russian rivalry is backed-up by hair-trigger nuclear arsenals that could end the world in a matter of minutes. Inciting tensions based on self-serving lies is stunningly reckless. In the second, the claim demonstrates utter contempt for her most loyal followers by feeding them purposely misleading explanations of the loss. And most damagingly for political opponents of Donald Trump, these actions give credence to the insurgent status of his retro-Republicanism against liberal and left defenders of the political establishment.

    Most damaging to the burgeoning left in the U.S. is the deeply ugly character assassination of poor and working-class voters carried out by the urban bourgeois, many from the self-described radical left. People I know and like, but with whom I disagree politically but am working hard to convert, have spent the last three years being derided as traitorous, marginally literate hicks too stupid to know they are pawns of the Kremlin. The irony, if you care to call it that, is that they knew the Russian interference story was cynical bullshit all along while the graduate degree crowd was following every twist and turn as if it were true knowledge.

    The Democratic Party 'leadership' that pursued this story is as stupid as it is corrupt. The purpose of Russia-gate was apparently to keep the Party faithful, faithful. But as was demonstrated in 2016, the faithful alone can't win an election. This leadership turned what could have been an effective 'give 'em enough rope' strategy against arrogant jackass Trump back on itself. The establishment-left had been in the process of giving self-described socialists someone to vote for in 2020. Too-clever-by-half liberal twaddle about 'post-truth' now has liberals -- universally conflated with the left, perceived as both idiots and liars. And rightly so.

    Democrats who spent the last three years making less than plausible (and politically retrograde) accusations against Mr. Trump likely still don't understand their current position. Their call for an exhaustive investigation carried out by people they trust was honored. While the investigation was underway, the mainstream press put one ludicrous fantasy after another forward as news. This while a host of real issues affecting real people's lives were studiously ignored. As incredulous as I am that it could be done, liberal Democrats have made corrupt oligarch Trump appear to be righteously aggrieved. Who says these people have no talent?

    The New York Times and Washington Post have been publishing politically motivated 'fake news' in support of establishment interests since their inceptions. Their service to powerful interests is why they are still around. The FBI, CIA and NSA have been putting out politically motivated bullshit since their respective inceptions. They exist to serve the rich and powerful against all comers. To claim these as bastions of integrity was always a tough sell. To continue to claim it is the stuff from which revolutions are made. In this case, right-wing revolutions.

    While the urban bourgeois have long been dismissive of the 'burn it down' contingent of Trump voters, they seem incapable of seeing their own roles as defenders of the establishment as corrupt and ultimately, politically suicidal. I voted for a woman for president and a black man for vice president in 2016. But they weren't Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because she is a corrupt, neoliberal, militaristic piece of shit. Ironically, or not, most of Trump voters I've spoken with know more about the Democrats' actual record than the highly educated urban bourgeois pontificating on NPR or in the New York Times.

    A quick bet is that the 2020 presidential election is now Donald Trump's to lose. Lying sacks of shit like James Clapper and John Brennan will tie their lots to whomever will fund their adventures in mal-governance as the world burns and species become extinct. The tragedy here is that there are real issues in need of resolution. The Democrats' three-year adventure in red-baiting served to legitimate a financial-military-industrial complex that apparently intends to end the planet as it makes as many people miserable in the process as is possible. Congratulations assholes. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Rob Urie

    Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.

    [Mar 26, 2019] When Are We Going To Tackle The For-Profit Monopolies Which Censored RussiaGate Skeptics? by Charles Hugh Smith

    Notable quotes:
    "... The RussiaGate Narrative has been revealed as a Big Con (a.k.a. Nothing-Burger), but what's dangerously real is the censorship that's being carried out by the for-profit monopolies Facebook and Google on behalf of the status quo's Big Con. ..."
    "... The damage to democracy wrought by Facebook and Google is severe: free speech no longer exists except in name, and what individuals see in search and social media feeds is designed to manipulate them without their consent or knowledge--and for a fat profit. Whether Facebook and Google are manipulating users for profit or to buy off Status Quo pressures to start regulating these monopolistic totalitarian regimes or to align what users see with their own virtue-signaling, doesn't matter. ..."
    Mar 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

    We either take down Facebook and Google and turn them into tightly regulated transparent public utilities available to all or they will destroy what little is left of American democracy.

    The RussiaGate Narrative has been revealed as a Big Con (a.k.a. Nothing-Burger), but what's dangerously real is the censorship that's being carried out by the for-profit monopolies Facebook and Google on behalf of the status quo's Big Con.

    This site got a taste of Facebook-Google-Big-Media's Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship back in 2016 when a shadowy fake-news site called PropOrNot aggregated every major alt-media site that had published anything remotely skeptical of the coronation of Hillary Clinton as president and labeled us all shills for Russian propaganda.

    Without any investigation of the perps running the site or their fake-news methodology, The Washington Post (Jeff Bezos' plaything) saw fit to promote the fake-news on Page One as if it were journalistically legitimate. Why would a newspaper that supposedly values the integrity of its content run with such shameless fake-news propaganda? Because it fit the Post's own political agenda and biases.

    This is the essence of Facebook-Google-Big-Media's Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship: sacrifice accepted journalistic practice, free speech and transparency to promote an absurdly obvious political and social agenda.

    If there was any real justice in America, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai should be wearing prison jumpsuits for what Facebook and Google have done to American democracy. Both of these monopolies have manipulated news feeds, search results and what individuals are shown in complete secret, with zero public oversight or transparency .

    The damage to democracy wrought by Facebook and Google is severe: free speech no longer exists except in name, and what individuals see in search and social media feeds is designed to manipulate them without their consent or knowledge--and for a fat profit. Whether Facebook and Google are manipulating users for profit or to buy off Status Quo pressures to start regulating these monopolistic totalitarian regimes or to align what users see with their own virtue-signaling, doesn't matter.

    What matters is that no one can possibly know how Facebook and Google have rigged their algorithms and to what purpose. The typical corporation can buy political influence, but Facebook and Google are manipulating the machinery of democracy itself in three ways:

    1. They are secretly censoring alternative media and skeptics of the status quo narratives.

    2. They are selling data and ads to anyone interested in manipulating voters and public opinion.

    3. They are providing data to the National Security organs of the state which can then use this data to compile dossiers on "enemies of the people," i.e. skeptics and dissenters who question the "approved" context and narrative.

    That's a much more dangerous type of power than buying political influence or manipulating public opinion by openly publishing biased "commentary."

    We all understand how America's traditional Corporate Media undermines democracy: recall how every time Bernie Sanders won a Democratic primary in 2016, The New York Times and The Washington Post "reported" the news in small typeface in a sidebar, while every Hillary Clinton primary win was trumpeted in large headlines at the top of page one.

    But this sort of manipulation is visible; what Google and Facebook do is invisible. What their algorithms do is invisible, and the shadow banning and other forms of invisible censorship cannot be easily traced.

    A few of us can trace shadow banning because we have access to our site's server data. Please consider the data of Google searches and direct links from Facebook to oftwominds.com from November 2016 and November 2018:

    Nov. 2016: Google Searches: 36,779
    Nov. 2016: links from Facebook: 9,888

    Nov. 2018: Google Searches: 12,671
    Nov. 2018: links from Facebook: 859

    Oftwominds.com has been around since 2005 and consistently draws around 250,000 page views monthly (via oftwominds.com and my mirror site on blogspot, which is owned/operated by Google. Interestingly, traffic to that site has been less affected by shadow banning ; Coincidence? You decide....).

    Given the consistency of my visitor traffic over the years, it's "interesting" how drastically the site's traffic with Google and Facebook has declined in a mere two years. How is this shadow banning not Orwellian Authoritarian-Totalitarian censorship? It's akin to China's Orwellian Social Credit system but for private profit .

    It wouldn't surprise me to find my photo airbrushed out of group photos on Facebook and Google just as the Soviet propaganda organs did when someone fell out of favor in the 1930s.

    Fortunately, oftwominds.com isn't dependent on Facebook or Google for its traffic; other content creators who were skeptical of RussiaGate are not so fortunate. One of the implicit goals of shadow banning and filters is to destroy the income of dissenting sites without the content creators knowing why their income plummeted.

    Strip dissenters of their income and you strip them of the ability to dissent. Yea for "free speech" controlled by for-profit monopolies!

    Where's the "level playing field" of free speech? As long as Facebook and Google are free to censor and filter in secret, there is no free speech in America. All we have is a simulacrum of free speech in which parroting "approved" narratives is promoted and dissent is censored/banned--but without anyone noticing or even being able to tell what's been filtered, censored or banned.

    So when are we going to tackle privately held monopolies which are selling user data to the highest bidder, obliterating free speech in secret and manipulating news feeds and search to promote hidden agendas? I've argued (see links below) that the solution is very simple:

    1. Regulate Facebook and Google as public utilities. Ban them from collecting and selling user data to anyone, including federal agencies.

    2. Allow a modest profit to each firm via display adverts that are shown equally to every user.

    3. Require any and all search/content filters and algorithms be made public, i.e. published daily.

    4. Any executive or employee of these corporations who violates these statutes will face criminal felony charges and be exposed to civil liability lawsuits from users or content providers who were shadow-banned or their right to free speech was proscribed or limited by filters or algorithms.

    There is no intrinsic right for privately held corporations to establish monopolies that can manipulate and filter free speech in secret to maximize profits and secret influence. We either take down Facebook and Google and turn them into tightly regulated transparent public utilities available to all or they will destroy what little is left of American democracy.

    I recently addressed these invisible (but oh-so profitable) mechanisms in a series of essays:

    * * *

    Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($6.95 ebook, $12 print, $13.08 audiobook ): Read the first section for free in PDF format. My new mystery The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake is a ridiculously affordable $1.29 (Kindle) or $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF) . My book Money and Work Unchained is now $6.95 for the Kindle ebook and $15 for the print edition. Read the first section for free in PDF format. If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com .

    [Mar 26, 2019] I am impressed by the sheer silliness of Russiagate and the tenacious ignorance of those who still believe the corporate media.

    Mar 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

    WorkingClass , says: March 27, 2019 at 12:13 am GMT

    Russiagate is a story about greed and lust for power manifesting as treachery and corruption. As a hoax it is notable for it's size and duration and damage done. But it is nothing at all compared to 9/11. I am impressed by the sheer silliness of Russiagate and the tenacious ignorance of those who still believe the corporate media.

    But lessons for the left? None that I can see.

    [Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism by Jonathan Cook

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... It may look like Russiagate was a failure, but it was actually a success. It deflected the left's attention from endemic corruption within the leadership of the Democratic party, which supposedly represents the left. It rechannelled the left's political energies instead towards the convenient bogeymen targets of Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin. ..."
    "... What Mueller found – all he was ever going to find – was marginal corruption in the Trump camp. And that was inevitable because Washington is mired in corruption. In fact, what Mueller revealed was the most exceptional forms of corruption among Trump's team while obscuring the run-of-the-mill stuff that would have served as a reminder of the endemic corruption infecting the Democratic leadership too. ..."
    "... Further, in focusing on the Trump camp – and relative minnows like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone – the Russiagate inquiry actually served to shield the Democratic leadership from an investigation into the much worse corruption revealed in the content of the DNC emails. ..."
    "... What should have been at the front and centre of any inquiry was how the Democratic party sought to rig its primaries to prevent party members selecting anyone but Hillary as their presidential candidate. ..."
    "... Trump faces opposition from within the establishment not because he is "anti-establishment" but because he refuses to decorate the pig's snout with lipstick. He is tearing the mask off late-stage capitalism's greed and self-destructiveness ..."
    "... The corporate media, and the journalists they employ, are propagandists – for a system that keeps them wealthy. When Trump was a Republican primary candidate, the entire corporate media loved him because he was TV's equivalent of clickbait, just as he had been since reality TV began to usurp the place of current affairs programmes and meaningful political debate. ..."
    "... The "[neo]liberal" corporate media shares the values of the Democratic party leadership. In other words, it is heavily invested in making sure the pig doesn't lose its lipstick. By contrast, Fox News and the shock-jocks, like Trump, prioritise making money in the short term over the long-term credibility of a system that gives them licence to make money. They care much less whether the pig's face remains painted. ..."
    "... Just as too many on the left sleep-walked through the past two years waiting for Mueller – a former head of the FBI, the US secret police, for chrissakes! – to save them from Trump, they have been manipulated by liberal elites into the political cul-de-sac of identity politics. ..."
    "... The "[neo]liberal" elites exploited identity politics to keep us divided by pacifying the most maginalised with the offer of a few additional crumbs. Trump has exploited identity politics to keep us divided by inflaming tensions as he reorders the hierarchy of "privilege" in which those crumbs are offered. In the process, both wings of the elite have averted the danger that class consciousness and real solidarity might develop and start to challenge their privileges. ..."
    "... Were the US to get its own Corbyn as president, he or she would undoubtedly face a Mueller-style inquiry, and one far more effective at securing the president's impeachment than this one was ever going to be. ..."
    Mar 25, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org
    Here are three important lessons for the progressive left to consider now that it is clear the inquiry by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russiagate is never going to uncover collusion between Donald Trump's camp and the Kremlin in the 2016 presidential election.

    Painting the pig's face

    The left never had a dog in this race. This was always an in-house squabble between different wings of the establishment. Late-stage capitalism is in terminal crisis, and the biggest problem facing our corporate elites is how to emerge from this crisis with their power intact. One wing wants to make sure the pig's face remains painted, the other is happy simply getting its snout deeper into the trough while the food lasts.

    Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism.

    The leaders of the Democratic party are less terrified of Trump and what he represents than they are of us and what we might do if we understood how they have rigged the political and economic system to their permanent advantage.

    It may look like Russiagate was a failure, but it was actually a success. It deflected the left's attention from endemic corruption within the leadership of the Democratic party, which supposedly represents the left. It rechannelled the left's political energies instead towards the convenient bogeymen targets of Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

    Mired in corruption

    What Mueller found – all he was ever going to find – was marginal corruption in the Trump camp. And that was inevitable because Washington is mired in corruption. In fact, what Mueller revealed was the most exceptional forms of corruption among Trump's team while obscuring the run-of-the-mill stuff that would have served as a reminder of the endemic corruption infecting the Democratic leadership too.

    An anti-corruption investigation would have run much deeper and exposed far more. It would have highlighted the Clinton Foundation, and the role of mega-donors like James Simons, George Soros and Haim Saban who funded Hillary's campaign with one aim in mind: to get their issues into a paid-for national "consensus".

    Further, in focusing on the Trump camp – and relative minnows like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone – the Russiagate inquiry actually served to shield the Democratic leadership from an investigation into the much worse corruption revealed in the content of the DNC emails. It was the leaking / hacking of those emails that provided the rationale for Mueller's investigations. What should have been at the front and centre of any inquiry was how the Democratic party sought to rig its primaries to prevent party members selecting anyone but Hillary as their presidential candidate.

    So, in short, Russiagate has been two years of wasted energy by the left, energy that could have been spent both targeting Trump for what he is really doing rather than what it is imagined he has done, and targeting the Democratic leadership for its own, equally corrupt practices.

    Trump empowered

    But it's far worse than that. It is not just that the left wasted two years of political energy on Russiagate. At the same time, they empowered Trump, breathing life into his phony arguments that he is the anti-establishment president, a people's president the elites are determined to destroy.

    Trump faces opposition from within the establishment not because he is "anti-establishment" but because he refuses to decorate the pig's snout with lipstick. He is tearing the mask off late-stage capitalism's greed and self-destructiveness. And he is doing so not because he wants to reform or overthrow turbo-charged capitalism but because he wants to remove the last, largely cosmetic constraints on the system so that he and his friends can plunder with greater abandon – and destroy the planet more quickly.

    The other wing of the neoliberal establishment, the one represented by the Democratic party leadership, fears that exposing capitalism in this way – making explicit its inherently brutal, wrist-slitting tendencies – will awaken the masses, that over time it will risk turning them into revolutionaries. Democratic party leaders fear Trump chiefly because of the threat he poses to the image of the political and economic system they have so lovingly crafted so that they can continue enriching themselves and their children.

    Trump's genius – his only genius – is to have appropriated, and misappropriated, some of the language of the left to advance the interests of the 1 per cent. When he attacks the corporate "liberal" media for having a harmful agenda, for serving as propagandists, he is not wrong. When he rails against the identity politics cultivated by "liberal" elites over the past two decades – suggesting that it has weakened the US – he is not wrong. But he is right for the wrong reasons.

    TV's version of clickbait

    The corporate media, and the journalists they employ, are propagandists – for a system that keeps them wealthy. When Trump was a Republican primary candidate, the entire corporate media loved him because he was TV's equivalent of clickbait, just as he had been since reality TV began to usurp the place of current affairs programmes and meaningful political debate.

    The handful of corporations that own the US media – and much of corporate America besides – are there both to make ever-more money by expanding profits and to maintain the credibility of a political and economic system that lets them make ever more money.

    The "[neo]liberal" corporate media shares the values of the Democratic party leadership. In other words, it is heavily invested in making sure the pig doesn't lose its lipstick. By contrast, Fox News and the shock-jocks, like Trump, prioritise making money in the short term over the long-term credibility of a system that gives them licence to make money. They care much less whether the pig's face remains painted.

    So Trump is right that the "liberal" media is undemocratic and that it is now propagandising against him. But he is wrong about why. In fact, all corporate media – whether "liberal" or not, whether against Trump or for him – is undemocratic. All of the media propagandises for a rotten system that keeps the vast majority of Americans impoverished. All of the media cares more for Trump and the elites he belongs to than it cares for the 99 per cent.

    Gorging on the main course

    Similarly, with identity politics. Trump says he wants to make (a white) America great again, and uses the left's obsession with identity as a way to energize a backlash from his own supporters.

    Just as too many on the left sleep-walked through the past two years waiting for Mueller – a former head of the FBI, the US secret police, for chrissakes! – to save them from Trump, they have been manipulated by liberal elites into the political cul-de-sac of identity politics.

    Just as Mueller put the left on standby, into waiting-for-the-Messiah mode, so simple-minded, pussy-hat-wearing identity politics has been cultivated in the supposedly liberal bastions of the corporate media and Ivy League universities – the same universities that have turned out generations of Muellers and Clintons – to deplete the left's political energies. While we argue over who is most entitled and most victimised, the establishment has carried on raping and pillaging Third World countries, destroying the planet and siphoning off the wealth produced by the rest of us.

    These liberal elites long ago worked out that if we could be made to squabble among ourselves about who was most entitled to scraps from the table, they could keep gorging on the main course.

    The "[neo]liberal" elites exploited identity politics to keep us divided by pacifying the most maginalised with the offer of a few additional crumbs. Trump has exploited identity politics to keep us divided by inflaming tensions as he reorders the hierarchy of "privilege" in which those crumbs are offered. In the process, both wings of the elite have averted the danger that class consciousness and real solidarity might develop and start to challenge their privileges.

    The Corbyn experience

    3. But the most important lesson of all for the left is that support among its ranks for the Mueller inquiry against Trump was foolhardy in the extreme.

    Not only was the inquiry doomed to failure – in fact, not only was it designed to fail – but it has set a precedent for future politicised investigations that will be used against the progressive left should it make any significant political gains. And an inquiry against the real left will be far more aggressive and far more "productive" than Mueller was.

    If there is any doubt about that look to the UK. Britain now has within reach of power the first truly progressive politician in living memory, someone seeking to represent the 99 per cent, not the 1 per cent. But Jeremy Corbyn's experience as the leader of the Labour party – massively swelling the membership's ranks to make it the largest political party in Europe – has been eye-popping.

    I have documented Corbyn's travails regularly in this blog over the past four years at the hands of the British political and media establishment. You can find many examples here.

    Corbyn, even more so than the small, new wave of insurgency politicians in the US Congress, has faced a relentless barrage of criticism from across the UK's similarly narrow political spectrum. He has been attacked by both the rightwing media and the supposedly "liberal" media. He has been savaged by the ruling Conservative party, as was to be expected, and by his own parliamentary Labour party. The UK's two-party system has been exposed as just as hollow as the US one.

    The ferocity of the attacks has been necessary because, unlike the Democratic party's success in keeping a progressive leftwinger away from the presidential campaign, the UK system accidentally allowed a socialist to slip past the gatekeepers. All hell has broken out ever since.

    Simple-minded identity politics

    What is so noticeable is that Corbyn is rarely attacked over his policies – mainly because they have wide popular appeal. Instead he has been hounded over fanciful claims that, despite being a life-long and very visible anti-racism campaigner, he suddenly morphed into an outright anti-semite the moment party members elected him leader.

    I will not rehearse again how implausible these claims are. Simply look through these previous blog posts should you be in any doubt.

    But what is amazing is that, just as with the Mueller inquiry, much of the British left – including prominent figures like Owen Jones and the supposedly countercultural Novara Media – have sapped their political energies in trying to placate or support those leading the preposterous claims that Labour under Corbyn has become "institutionally anti-semitic". Again, the promotion of a simple-minded identity politics – which pits the rights of Palestinians against the sensitivities of Zionist Jews about Israel – was exploited to divide the left.

    The more the left has conceded to this campaign, the angrier, the more implacable, the more self-righteous Corbyn's opponents have become – to the point that the Labour party is now in serious danger of imploding.

    A clarifying moment

    Were the US to get its own Corbyn as president, he or she would undoubtedly face a Mueller-style inquiry, and one far more effective at securing the president's impeachment than this one was ever going to be.

    That is not because a leftwing US president would be more corrupt or more likely to have colluded with a foreign power. As the UK example shows, it would be because the entire media system – from the New York Times to Fox News – would be against such a president. And as the UK example also shows, it would be because the leaderships of both the Republican and Democratic parties would work as one to finish off such a president.

    In the combined success-failure of the Mueller inquiry, the left has an opportunity to understand in a much more sophisticated way how real power works and in whose favour it is exercised. It is moment that should be clarifying – if we are willing to open our eyes to Mueller's real lessons.

    Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are " Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and " Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair " (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

    [Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson

    Highly recommended!
    This is probably the most comprehensive outline of the color revolution against Trump. Bravo, simply bravo !!!
    Reads like Agatha Christi Murder on the Orient Express ;-) Rosenstein role is completely revised from a popular narrative. Brennan role clarifies and detailed. Obama personal role hinted. Victoria Nuland role and the role of the State Department in Russiagate is documented for the first time, I think.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The "insurance policy" appears to have been the effort to legitimize the Trump–Russia collusion narrative so that an FBI investigation, led by McCabe, could continue unhindered. ..."
    "... Ohr, one of the highest-ranking officials in the DOJ, was communicating on an ongoing basis with Steele, whom he had known since at least 2006 , well into mid-2017. He is also married to Nellie Ohr, an expert on Russia and Eurasia who began working for Fusion GPS sometime in late 2015 . Nellie Ohr likely played a significant role in the construction of the dossier. ..."
    "... The Obama administration provided a simultaneous layer of protection and facilitation for the entire effort. One example is provided by Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333 , also known as Obama's data-sharing order . With the passage of the order, agencies and individuals were able to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that was useful to a particular mission. ..."
    "... Leaking, including felony leaking of classified information, has been widespread. The Carter Page FISA warrant -- likely the unredacted version -- has been in the possession of The Washington Post and The New York Times since March 2017. Traditionally, the intelligence community leaked to The Washington Post while the DOJ leaked to sources within The New York Times. This was a historical pattern that stood until this election. The leaking became so widespread, even this tradition was broken. ..."
    "... The information contained within both articles likely came via felony leaks from James Wolfe, former director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who was arrested on June 7, 2018, and charged with one count of lying to the FBI. Wolfe's indictment alleges that he was leaking classified information to multiple reporters over an extended period of time. ..."
    "... The Steele dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources. One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood later relayed information regarding the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who dispatched David Kramer, a fellow at the McCain Institute, to London to meet with Steele in November 2016. McCain would later admit in a Jan. 11, 2017, statement that he had personally passed on the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey. ..."
    "... Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations -- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia. ..."
    "... Questions to be asked are why is it that two of our allies would find themselves so opposed to the release of these classified documents that a coordinated plea would be made directly to the president? And why would these same allies have even the slightest idea of what was contained in these classified U.S. documents? ..."
    Oct 12, 2018 | www.theepochtimes.com
    Spygate: The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] How America's most powerful agencies were weaponized against President Donald Trump

    Although the details remain complex, the structure underlying Spygate -- the creation of the false narrative that candidate Donald Trump colluded with Russia, and the spying on his presidential campaign -- remains surprisingly simple:

    1. CIA Director John Brennan, with some assistance from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, gathered foreign intelligence and fed it throughout our domestic Intelligence Community.
    2. The FBI became the handler of Brennan's intelligence and engaged in the more practical elements of surveillance.
    3. The Department of Justice facilitated investigations by the FBI and legal maneuverings, while providing a crucial shield of nondisclosure.
    4. The Department of State became a mechanism of information dissemination and leaks.
    5. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee provided funding, support, and media collusion.
    6. Obama administration officials were complicit, and engaged in unmasking and intelligence gathering and dissemination.
    7. The media was the most corrosive element in many respects. None of these events could have transpired without their willing participation. Stories were pushed, facts were ignored, and narratives were promoted.

    Let's start with a simple premise: The candidacy of Trump presented both an opportunity and a threat.

    Initially not viewed with any real seriousness, Trump's campaign was seen as an opportunistic wedge in the election process. At the same time, and particularly as the viability of his candidacy increased, Trump was seen as an existential threat to the established political system.

    The sudden legitimacy of Trump's candidacy was not welcomed by the U.S. political establishment. Here was a true political outsider who held no traditional allegiances. He was brash and boastful, he ignored political correctness, he couldn't be bought, and he didn't care what others thought of him -- he trusted himself.

    Governing bodies in Britain and the European Union were also worried. Candidate Trump was openly challenging monetary policy, regulations, and the power of special interests. He challenged Congress. He challenged the United Nations and the European Union. He questioned everything.

    Brennan played a crucial role in the creation of the Russia-collusion narrative and the spying on the Trump campaign. (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

    Brennan became the point man in the operation to stop a potential Trump presidency. It remains unclear whether his role was self-appointed or came from above. To embark on such a mission without direct presidential authority seems both a stretch of the imagination and particularly foolhardy.

    Brennan took unofficial foreign intelligence compiled by contacts, colleagues, and associates -- primarily from the UK , but also from other Five Eyes members, such as Australia.

    Individuals in official positions in UK intelligence, such as Robert Hannigan -- head of the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of the National Security Agency) -- partnered with former UK foreign intelligence members. Former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove , former Ambassador Sir Andrew Wood, and private UK intelligence firm Hakluyt all played a role.

    In the summer of 2016, Hannigan traveled to Washington to meet with Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. On Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration -- Hannigan abruptly announced his retirement. The Guardian openly speculated that Hannigan's resignation was directly related to the sharing of UK intelligence.

    One method used to help establish evidence of collusion was the employment of "spy traps." Prominent among these were ones set for Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. The intent was to provide or establish connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. The content and context mattered little as long as a connection could be established that could then be publicized. The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting was another such attempt.

    Western intelligence assets were used to initiate and establish these connections, particularly in the cases of Papadopoulos and Page.

    Ultimately, Brennan formed an inter-agency task force comprising an estimated six agencies and/or government departments. The FBI, Treasury, and DOJ handled the domestic inquiry into Trump and possible Russia connections. The CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency (NSA) handled foreign and intelligence aspects.

    Brennan's inter-agency task force is not to be confused with the July 2016 FBI counterintelligence investigation, which was formed later at Brennan's urging.

    During this time, Brennan also employed the use of reverse targeting , which relates to the targeting of a foreign individual with the intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen. This effort was uncovered and made public by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in a March 2017 press conference :

    "I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show the president-elect and his team were monitored and disseminated out in intelligence-reporting channels. Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent foreign-intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.

    "From what I know right now, it looks like incidental collection. We don't know exactly how that was picked up but we're trying to get to the bottom of it."

    As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of any traditional channels -- was gathered, Brennan began a process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director pushed the FBI toward the establishment of a formal counterintelligence investigation. Brennan repeatedly noted this during a May 23, 2017, congressional testimony :

    "I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign, was shared with the [FBI]."

    Brennan also admitted that his intelligence helped establish the FBI investigation:

    "I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred."

    This admission is important, as no official intelligence was used to open the FBI's investigation.

    Once the FBI began its counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, Brennan shifted his focus. Through a series of meetings in August and September 2016, Brennan informed the congressional Gang of Eight regarding intelligence and information he had gathered. Notably, each Gang of Eight member was briefed separately, calling into question whether each of the members received the same information. Efforts to block the release of the transcripts from each meeting remain ongoing.

    The last major segment of Brennan's efforts involved a series of three reports and greater participation from Clapper. The first report, the "Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security ," was released on Oct. 7, 2016. The second report, "GRIZZLY STEPPE -- Russian Malicious Cyber Activity ," was released on Dec. 29, 2016. The third report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections " -- also known as the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) -- was released on Jan. 6, 2017.

    This final report was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of President Donald Trump. Notably, Admiral Mike Rogers of the NSA publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning only a moderate confidence level.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/bMcNbum93cU?wmode=transparent&wmode=opaque

    Federal Bureau of Investigation

    Although the FBI is technically part of the DOJ, it is best for the purposes of this article that the FBI and DOJ be viewed as separate entities, each with its own related ties.

    The FBI itself was comprised of various factions, with a particularly active element that has come to be known as the "insurance policy group." It appears that this faction was led by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and comprised other notable names such as FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and FBI general counsel James Baker.

    The FBI established the counterintelligence investigation into alleged Russia collusion with the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016. Comey initially refused to say whether the FBI was investigating possible connections between members of the Trump campaign and Russia. He would continue to refuse to provide answers until March 20, 2017, when he disclosed the existence of the FBI investigation during congressional testimony.

    Comey also testified that he did not provide notification to the Gang of Eight until early March 2017 -- less than one month earlier. This admission was in stark contrast to actions taken by Brennan, who had notified members of the Gang of Eight individually during August and September 2016. It's likely that Brennan never informed Comey that he had briefed the Gang of Eight in 2016. Comey did note that the DOJ "had been aware" of the investigation all along.

    Comey opened the counterintelligence investigation into Trump on the urging of CIA Director John Brennan.
    Following Comey's firing on May 9, 2017, the FBI's investigation was transferred to special counsel Robert Mueller. The Mueller investigation remains ongoing.

    The FBI's formal involvement with the Steele dossier began on July 5, 2016, when Mike Gaeta, an FBI agent and assistant legal attaché at the US Embassy in Rome, was dispatched to visit former MI6 spy Christopher Steele in London. Gaeta would return from this meeting with a copy of Steele's first memo. This memo was given to Victoria Nuland at the State Department, who passed it along to the FBI.

    Gaeta, who also headed the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit, had known Steele since at least 2010, when Steele had provided assistance to the FBI's investigation into the FIFA corruption scandal .

    Prior to the London meeting, Gaeta may also have met on a less formal basis with Steele several weeks earlier. "In June, Steele flew to Rome to brief the FBI contact with whom he had cooperated over FIFA," The Guardian reported. "His information started to reach the bureau in Washington."

    It's worth noting that there was no "dossier" until it was fully compiled in December 2016. There was only a sequence of documents from Steele -- documents that were passed on individually -- as they were created. Therefore, from the FBI's legal perspective, they didn't use the dossier. They used individual documents.

    For the next month and a half, there appeared to be little contact between Steele and the FBI. However, the FBI's interest in the dossier suddenly accelerated in late August 2016, when the bureau asked Steele "for all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources."

    In September 2016, Steele traveled back to Rome to meet with the FBI's Eurasian squad once again. It's likely that the meeting included several other FBI officials as well. According to a House Intelligence Committee minority memo , Steele's reporting reached the FBI counterintelligence team in mid-September 2016 -- the same time as Steele's September trip to Rome.

    The reason for the FBI's renewed interest had to do with an adviser to the Trump campaign -- Carter Page -- who had been in contact with Stefan Halper, a CIA and FBI source, since July 2016. Halper arranged to meet with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page took a trip to Moscow. Speakers at the symposium included Madeleine Albright, Vin Webber, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6.

    Page was now the FBI's chosen target for a FISA warrant that would be obtained on Oct. 21, 2016. The Steele dossier would be the primary evidence used in obtaining the FISA warrant, which would be renewed three separate times, including after Trump took office, finally expiring in September 2017.

    Former volunteer Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on Nov. 2, 2017. The FBI obtained a retroactive FISA spy warrant on Page.

    After being in contact with Page for 14 months, Halper stopped contact exactly as the final FISA warrant on Page expired. Page, who has steadfastly maintained his innocence, was never charged with any crime by the FBI. Efforts for the declassification of the Page FISA application are currently ongoing through the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.

    Peter Strzok and Lisa Page

    Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were two prominent members of the FBI's "insurance policy" group. Strzok, a senior FBI agent, was the deputy assistant director of FBI's Counterintelligence Division. Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, served as special counsel to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

    Strzok was in charge of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for government business. He helped FBI Director James Comey draft the statement exonerating Clinton and was personally responsible for changing specific wording within that statement that reduced Clinton's legal liability. Specifically, Strzok changed the words "grossly negligent," which could be a criminal offense, to "extremely careless."

    Strzok also personally led the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into the alleged Trump–Russia collusion and signed the documents that opened the investigation on July 31, 2016. He was one of the FBI agents who interviewed Trump's national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn. Strzok met multiple times with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and received information from Steele at those meetings.

    Following the firing of FBI Director James Comey, Strzok would join the team of special counsel Robert Mueller. Two months later, he was removed from that team after the DOJ inspector general discovered a lengthy series of texts between Strzok and Page that contained politically charged messages. Strzok would be fired from the FBI in August 2018.

    Both Strzok and Page engaged in strategic leaking to the press. Page did so at the direction of McCabe, who directly authorized Page to share information with Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett. That information was used in an Oct. 30, 2016, article headlined "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe ." Page leaked to Barrett thinking she had been granted legal and official authorization to do so.

    McCabe would later initially deny providing such authorization to the Office of Inspector General. Page, when confronted with McCabe's denials, produced texts refuting his statement. It was these texts that led to the inspector general uncovering the texts between Strzok and Page.

    The two exchanged thousands of texts, some of them indicating surveillance activities, over a two-year period. Texts sent between Aug. 21, 2015, and June 25, 2017, have been made public . The series comes to an end with a final text by Page telling Strzok, "Don't ever text me again."

    On Aug. 8, 2016, Stzrok wrote that they would prevent candidate Trump from becoming president:

    Page: "[Trump is] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!"

    Strzok: "No. No he won't. We'll stop it."

    On Aug. 15, 2016, Strzok sent a text referring to an "insurance policy":

    "I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office -- that there's no way [Trump] gets elected -- but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."

    The "insurance policy" appears to have been the effort to legitimize the Trump–Russia collusion narrative so that an FBI investigation, led by McCabe, could continue unhindered.

    Department of Justice

    The Department of Justice, which comprises 60 agencies , was transformed during the Obama years. The department is forbidden by federal law from hiring employees based on political affiliation.

    However, a series of investigative articles by PJ Media published during Eric Holder's tenure as attorney general revealed an unsettling pattern of ideological conformity among new hires at the DOJ: Only lawyers from the progressive left were hired. Not one single moderate or conservative lawyer made the cut. This is significant as the DOJ enjoys significant latitude in determining who will be subject to prosecution.

    The DOJ's job in Spygate was to facilitate the legal side of surveillance while providing a protective layer of cover for all those involved. The department became a repository of information and provided a protective wall between the investigative efforts of the FBI and the legislative branch. Importantly, it also served as the firewall within the executive branch, serving as the insulating barrier between the FBI and Obama officials. The department had become legendary for its stonewalling tactics with Congress.

    DOJ Official Bruce Ohr on Aug. 28, 2018. Ohr passed on information from Christopher Steele to the FBI.

    The DOJ, which was fully aware of the actions being taken by James Comey and the FBI, also became an active element acting against members of the Trump campaign. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, along with Mary McCord, the head of the DOJ's National Security Division, was actively involved in efforts to remove Gen. Michael Flynn from his position as national security adviser to President Trump.

    To this day, it remains unknown which individual was responsible for making public Flynn's call with the Russian ambassador. Flynn ultimately pleaded guilty to a process crime: lying to the FBI. There have been questions raised in Congress regarding the possible alteration of FD-302s, the written notes of Flynn's FBI interviews. Special counsel Robert Mueller has repeatedly deferred Flynn's sentencing hearing.

    David Laufman, deputy assistant attorney general in charge of counterintelligence at the DOJ's National Security Division, played a key role in both the Clinton email server and Russia hacking investigations. Laufman is currently the attorney for Monica McLean, the long-time friend of Christine Blasey Ford, who recently accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while in high school. McLean was also employed by the FBI for 24 years.

    Bruce Ohr was a significant DOJ official who played a key role in Spygate. Ohr held two important positions at the DOJ: associate deputy attorney general, and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. As associate deputy attorney general, Ohr was just four offices away from then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and he reported directly to her. As director of the task force, he was in charge of a program described as "the centerpiece of the attorney general's drug strategy."

    Ohr, one of the highest-ranking officials in the DOJ, was communicating on an ongoing basis with Steele, whom he had known since at least 2006 , well into mid-2017. He is also married to Nellie Ohr, an expert on Russia and Eurasia who began working for Fusion GPS sometime in late 2015 . Nellie Ohr likely played a significant role in the construction of the dossier.

    According to testimony from FBI agent Peter Strzok, he and Ohr met at least five times during 2016 and 2017. Strzok was working directly with then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

    Additionally, Ohr met with the FBI at least 12 times between late November 2016 and May 2017 for a series of interviews. These meetings could have been used to transmit information from Steele to the FBI. This came after the FBI had formally severed contact with Steele in late October or early November 2016.

    John Carlin is another notable figure with the DOJ. Carlin was an assistant attorney general and the head of the DOJ's National Security Division until October 2016. His role will be discussed below in the section on FISA abuse.

    The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe

    Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe held a pivotal role in what has become known as "Spygate." He directed the activities of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and was involved in all aspects of the Russia investigation. He was also mentioned in the infamous "insurance policy" text message.

    McCabe was a major component of the insurance policy.

    On April 26, 2017, Rosenstein found himself appointed as the new deputy attorney general. He was placed into a somewhat chaotic situation, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the ongoing Russia investigation a little less than two months earlier, on March 2, 2017. This effectively meant that no one in the Trump administration had any oversight of the ongoing investigation being conducted by the FBI and the DOJ.

    Additionally, the leadership of then-FBI Director James Comey was coming under increased scrutiny as the result of actions taken leading up to and following the election, particularly Comey's handling of the Clinton email investigation.

    On May 9, 2017, Rosenstein wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be fired. The subject of the memo was "Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI." Comey was fired that day. McCabe was now the acting director of the FBI and was immediately under consideration for the permanent position.

    On the same day Comey was fired, McCabe would lie during an interview with agents from the FBI's Inspection Division (INSD) regarding apparent leaks that were used in an Oct. 30, 2016, Wall Street Journal article, "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe" by Devlin Barrett. This would later be disclosed in the inspector general report, "A Report of Investigation of Certain Allegations Relating to Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe."

    At the time, nobody, including the INSD agents, knew that McCabe had lied, nor were the darker aspects of McCabe's role in Spygate fully known.

    In late April or early May 2016, McCabe opened a federal criminal investigation on Sessions, regarding potential lack of candor before Congress in relation to Sessions's contacts with Russians. Sessions was unaware of the investigation.

    Sessions would later be cleared of any wrongdoing by special counsel Robert Mueller.

    On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein reportedly suggested to McCabe that he secretly record President Trump. This remark was reported in a New York Times article that was sourced from memos from the now-fired McCabe, along with testimony taken from former FBI general counsel James Baker, who relayed a conversation he had with McCabe about the occurrence. Rosenstein issued a statement denying the accusations.

    The alleged comments by Rosenstein occurred at a meeting where McCabe was "pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation into the president." An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post, framed the conversation somewhat differently, noting Rosenstein responded sarcastically to McCabe, saying, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"

    Later, on the same day that Rosenstein had his meetings with McCabe, President Trump met with Mueller, reportedly as an interview for the FBI director job. On May 17, 2017, the day after President Trump's meeting with Mueller -- and the day after Rosenstein's encounters with McCabe -- Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel.

    The May 17 appointment of Mueller in effect shifted control of the Russia investigation from the FBI and McCabe to Mueller. Rosenstein would retain ultimate authority for the probe and any expansion of Mueller's investigation required authorization from Rosenstein.

    Interestingly, without Comey's memo leaks, a special counsel might not have been appointed -- the FBI, and possibly McCabe, would have remained in charge of the Russia investigation. McCabe was probably not going to become the permanent FBI director, but he was reportedly under consideration. Regardless, without Comey's leak, McCabe would have retained direct involvement and the FBI would have retained control.

    On July 28, 2017, McCabe lied to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while under oath regarding authorization of the leaking to The Wall Street Journal. At this point, Horowitz knew McCabe was lying, but did not yet know of the May 9 INSD interview with McCabe.

    On Aug. 2, 2017, Rosenstein secretly issued Mueller a revised memo on "the scope of investigation and definition of authority" that remains heavily redacted. The full purpose of this memo remains unknown. On this same day, Christopher Wray was named as the new FBI director.

    Two days later, on Aug. 4, 2017, Sessions announced that the FBI had created a new leaks investigation unit. Rosenstein and Wray were tasked with overseeing all leak investigations.

    That Aug. 2 memo from Rosenstein to Mueller may have been specifically designed to remove any residual FBI influence -- specifically that of McCabe -- from the Russia investigation. The appointment of Wray as FBI director helped cement this. McCabe was finally completely neutralized.

    On March 16, 2018, McCabe was fired for lying under oath at least three different times and is currently the subject of a grand jury investigation.

    State Department

    The State Department, with its many contacts within foreign governments, became a conduit for the flow of information. The transfer of Christopher Steele's first dossier memo was personally facilitated by Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Nuland gave approval for FBI agent Michael Gaeta to travel to London to obtain the memo from Steele. The memo may have passed directly from her to FBI leadership. Secretary of State John Kerry was also given a copy.

    Steele was already well-known within the State Department. Following Steele's involvement in the FIFA scandal investigation, he began to provide reports informally to the State Department. The reports were written for a "private client" but were "shared widely within the U.S. State Department, and sent up to Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the U.S. response to Putin's annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine," the Guardian reported.

    Nuland passed on parts of the Steele dossier to the FBI. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

    In July 2016, when the FBI wanted to send Gaeta to visit Steele in London, the bureau sought permission from the office of Nuland, who provided this version of events during a Feb. 4, 2018, appearance on CBS's "Face the Nation":

    "In the middle of July, when [Steele] was doing this other work and became concerned, he passed two to four pages of short points of what he was finding and our immediate reaction to that was, this is not in our purview. This needs to go to the FBI if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian Federation. That's something for the FBI to investigate."

    Steele also met with Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement and former special envoy for Libya. Steele and Winer had known each other since at least 2010. In an opinion article in The Washington Post, Winer wrote the following:

    "In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the 'dossier.' Steele's sources suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign but also had compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign."

    In a strange turn of events, Winer also received a separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from long-time Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. This "second dossier" had been compiled by another longtime Clinton operative, former journalist Cody Shearer, and echoed claims made in the Steele dossier. Winer then met with Steele in late September 2016 and gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele went on to share this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it to corroborate his dossier.

    Winer passed on memos from Christopher Steele to Victoria Nuland. (State Department)

    Other foreign officials also used conduits into the State Department. Alexander Downer, Australia's high commissioner to the UK, reportedly funneled his conversation with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos -- later used as a reason to open the FBI's counterintelligence investigation -- directly to the U.S. Embassy in London.

    "The Downer details landed with the embassy's then-chargé d'affaires, Elizabeth Dibble, who previously served as a principal deputy assistant secretary in Mrs. Clinton's State Department," The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel wrote in a May 31, 2018, article .

    If true, this would mean that neither Australian intelligence nor the Australian government alerted the FBI to the Papadopoulos information. What happened with the Downer details, and to whom they were ultimately relayed, remains unknown.

    Curiously, details surprisingly similar to the Papadopoulos–Downer conversation show up in the first memo written by Steele on June 20, 2016:

    "A dossier of compromising information on Hillary Clinton has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls. It has not yet been distributed abroad, including to Trump."

    Clinton Campaign and the DNC

    The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee both occupied a unique position. They had the most to gain but they also had the most to lose. And they stood willing and ready to do whatever was necessary to win. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, is credited with being the first to raise the specter of candidate Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.

    The entire Clinton campaign willfully promoted the narrative of Russia–Trump collusion despite the uncomfortable fact that they were the ones who had engaged the services of Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele through their law firm Perkins Coie. Information flowed from the campaign -- sometimes through Perkins Coie, other times through affiliates -- ultimately making its way into the media and sometimes to the FBI. Information from the Clinton campaign may also have ended up in the Steele dossier.

    Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, in tandem with Jake Sullivan, the senior policy adviser to the campaign, took the lead in briefing the press on the Trump–Russia collusion story.

    Another example of this behavior can be seen from an instance when Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann leaked information from Steele and Fusion GPS to Franklin Foer of Slate magazine. This event is described in the House Intelligence Committee's final report on Russian active measures , in footnote 43 on page 57. Foer then published the article "Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia? " on Oct. 31, 2016. The article concerns allegations regarding a server in the Trump Tower.

    The Slate article managed to attract the immediate attention of Clinton, who posted a tweet on the same day the article was published:

    "Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank."

    Attached to her tweet was a statement from Sullivan:

    "This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.

    "This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists."

    These statements, which were later proven to be incorrect, are all the more disturbing with the hindsight knowledge that it was a senior Clinton/DNC lawyer who helped plant the story. And given the prepared statement by Sullivan, the Clinton campaign knew this.

    This type of behavior would be engaged in repeatedly -- damning leaks leading to media stories, followed by ready attacks from the Clinton campaign.

    Alexandra Chalupa is a Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee. Chalupa met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, Paul Manafort, and Russia. Chalupa began investigating Manafort in 2014. In late 2015, Chalupa expanded her opposition research on Manafort to include Trump's ties to Russia. In January 2016, Chalupa shared her information with a senior DNC official.

    Chalupa's meetings with DNC and Ukrainian officials would continue. On April 26, 2016, investigative reporter Michael Isikoff published a story on Yahoo News about Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It was later learned from a DNC email leaked by Wikileaks that Chalupa had been working with Isikoff -- the same journalist Christopher Steele leaked to in September 2016. Manafort would later be indicted for Foreign Agents Registration Act violations that occurred during the Obama administration.

    Perkins Coie

    International law firm Perkins Coie served as the legal arm for both the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Ties to Perkins Coie extended beyond the DNC into the Obama White House.

    Bob Bauer, a partner at the law firm and founder of its political law practice, served as White House counsel to President Barack Obama throughout 2010 and 2011. Bauer was also general counsel to Obama's campaign organization, Obama for America, in 2008 and 2012.

    Perkins Coie partners Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann each played critical roles and were the ones who hired Fusion GPS and Steele. Sussmann personally handled the alleged hack of the DNC server. He also transmitted information, likely from Steele and Fusion GPS, to James Baker, then-chief counsel at the FBI, and to several members of the press.

    Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann. Sussmann transmitted information to FBI chief counsel James Baker and several journalists. (Courtesy Perkins Coie)

    According to a letter dated Oct. 24, 2017, written by Matthew Gehringer, general counsel at Perkins Coie, the firm was approached by Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson in early March 2016 regarding the possibility of hiring Fusion GPS to continue opposition research into the Trump campaign. Simpson's overtures were successful, and in April 2016, Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the DNC.

    Sometime in April or May 2016, Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele. During this same period, Fusion also reportedly hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr. Steele would complete his first memo on June 20, 2016, and send it to Fusion via enciphered mail.

    Perkins Coie appears to have also been acting as a conduit between the DNC and the FBI. Documents suggest that Sussmann was feeding information to FBI general counsel James Baker and at least one journalist ahead of the FBI's application for a FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.

    The information provided by Sussmann may have been used by the FBI as "corroborating information."

    Obama Administration

    The Obama administration provided a simultaneous layer of protection and facilitation for the entire effort. One example is provided by Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333 , also known as Obama's data-sharing order . With the passage of the order, agencies and individuals were able to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that was useful to a particular mission.

    Section 2.3 had been expected to be finalized by early to mid-2016. Instead, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn't sign off on Section 2.3 until Dec. 15, 2016. The order was finalized when Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed it on Jan. 3, 2017.

    The reason for the delay could relate to the fact that while the executive order made it easier to share intelligence between agencies, it also limited certain types of information from going to the White House.

    An example of this was provided by Evelyn Farkas during a March 2, 2017, MSNBC interview , where she detailed how the Obama administration gathered and disseminated intelligence on the Trump team:

    "I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill 'Get as much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.'

    "The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, [they] would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. That's why you have the leaking."

    Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia Evelyn Farkas on May 6, 2014. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

    Many of the Obama administration's efforts appear to have been structural in nature, such as establishing new procedures or creating impediments to oversight that enabled much of the surveillance abuse to occur.

    DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was appointed by Obama in 2011. From the very start, he found his duties throttled by the attorney general's office. According to congressional testimony by Horowitz:

    "We got access to information up to 2010 in all of these categories. No law changed in 2010. No policy changed. It was simply a decision by the General Counsel's Office in 2010 that they viewed, now, the law differently. And as a result, they weren't going to give us that information."

    These new restrictions were put in place by Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole.

    On Aug. 5, 2014, Horowitz and other inspectors general sent a letter to Congress asking for unimpeded access to all records. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates responded on July 20, 2015, with a 58-page memorandum . The memo specifically denied the inspector general access to any information collected under Title III -- including intercepted communications and national security letters.

    The New York Times recently disclosed that national security letters were used in the surveillance of the Trump campaign.

    At other times, the Obama administration's efforts were more direct. The Intelligence Community assessment was released internally on Jan. 5, 2017. On this same day, Obama held an undisclosed White House meeting to discuss the dossier with national security adviser Susan Rice, FBI Director James Comey, and Yates. Rice would later send herself an email documenting the meeting.

    The following day, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they gave Obama. Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey, Brennan, and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the Intelligence Community assessment and the Steele dossier.

    Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview why:

    "Because that was the part that the leaders of the Intelligence Community agreed he needed to be told about."

    Shortly after Comey's meeting with Trump, both the Trump–Comey meeting and the existence of the dossier were leaked to CNN. The significance of the meeting was material, as Comey noted in a Jan. 7 memo he wrote:

    "Media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material."

    Clapper leaked information to CNN, after which he publicly condemned the leaks. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

    The media had widely dismissed the dossier as unsubstantiated and, therefore, unreportable. It was only after learning that Comey briefed Trump that CNN reported on the dossier. It was later revealed that DNI James Clapper personally leaked Comey's meeting with Trump to CNN.

    The Obama administration also directly participated in a series of intelligence unmaskings , the process whereby a U.S. citizen's identity is revealed from collected surveillance. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power reportedly engaged in hundreds of unmasking requests. Rice has admitted to doing the same.

    The Obama administration engaged in the ultimately successful effort to oust Trump's newly appointed national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn. Yates, along with Mary McCord, head of the DOJ's National Security Division, led that effort .

    Executive Order 13762

    President Barack Obama issued a last-minute executive order on Jan. 13, 2017, that altered the line of succession within the DOJ. The action was not done in consultation with the incoming Trump administration.

    Acting Attorney General Sally Yates was fired on Jan. 30, 2017, by a newly inaugurated President Trump for refusing to uphold the president's executive order limiting travel from certain terror-prone countries. Yates was initially supposed to serve in her position until Jeff Sessions was confirmed as attorney general.

    Obama's executive order placed the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia next in line behind the department's senior leadership. The attorney at the time was Channing Phillips.

    Phillips was first hired by former Attorney General Eric Holder in 1994 for a position in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office. Phillips, after serving as a senior adviser to Holder, stayed on after he was replaced by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

    It appears the Obama administration was hoping the Russia investigation would default to Channing in the event Sessions was forced to recuse himself from the investigation. Sessions, whose confirmation hearings began three days before the order, was already coming under intense scrutiny.

    The implementation of the order may also tie into Yates's efforts to remove Gen. Michael Flynn over his call with the Russian ambassador.

    Trump ignored the succession order, as he is legally allowed to do, and instead appointed Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, as acting attorney general on Jan. 30, 2017, the same day Yates was fired.

    Trump issued a new executive order on Feb. 9, 2017, the same day Sessions was sworn in, reversing Obama's prior order.

    On March 10, 2017, Trump fired 46 Obama-era U.S. attorneys, including Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. These firings appear to have been unexpected.

    Media

    In some respects, the media has played the most disingenuous of roles. Areas of investigation that historically would have proven irresistible to reporters of the past have been steadfastly ignored. False narratives have been all-too-willingly promoted and facts ignored. Fusion GPS personally made a series of payments to several as-of-yet- unnamed reporters .

    The majority of the mainstream media has represented positions of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

    Steele met with members of certain media with relative frequency. In September 2016 , he met with a number of U.S. journalists for "The New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN," according to The Guardian. It was during this period that Steele met with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News.

    In mid-October 2016, Steele returned to New York and met with reporters again. Toward the end of October, Steele spoke via Skype with Mother Jones reporter David Corn.

    Leaking, including felony leaking of classified information, has been widespread. The Carter Page FISA warrant -- likely the unredacted version -- has been in the possession of The Washington Post and The New York Times since March 2017. Traditionally, the intelligence community leaked to The Washington Post while the DOJ leaked to sources within The New York Times. This was a historical pattern that stood until this election. The leaking became so widespread, even this tradition was broken.

    On April 3, 2017, BuzzFeed reporter Ali Watkins wrote the article " A Former Trump Adviser Met With a Russian Spy ." In the article, she identified "Male-1," referred to in court documents relating to the case of Russian spy Evgeny Buryakov, as Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who had provided the FBI with assistance in the case. Just over a week later, on April 11, 2017, a Washington Post article, " FBI Obtained FISA Warrant to Monitor Former Trump Adviser Carter Page ," confirmed the existence of the October 2016 Page FISA warrant.

    The information contained within both articles likely came via felony leaks from James Wolfe, former director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who was arrested on June 7, 2018, and charged with one count of lying to the FBI. Wolfe's indictment alleges that he was leaking classified information to multiple reporters over an extended period of time.

    Reporter Ali Watkins likely received the undredacted FISA application on Carter Page from James Wolfe.
    It appears probable that Wolfe leaked unredacted copies of the Page FISA application. According to the indictment , Wolfe exchanged 82 text messages with Watkins on March 17, 2017. That same evening they engaged in a 28-minute phone call. The original Page FISA application is 83 pages long, including one final signatory page.

    In the public version of the application, there are 37 fully redacted pages. In addition to that, several other pages have redactions for all but the header. There are only two pages in the entire document that contain no redactions.

    Why would Wolfe bother to send 37 pages of complete redactions? It seems more than plausible that Wolfe took pictures of the original unredacted FISA application and sent them by text to Watkins.

    House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has repeatedly stated that evidence within the FISA application shows the counterintelligence agencies were abused by the Obama administration. Most of the mainstream media has known this.

    Despite this, most major news organizations for over two years have promoted the Russia-collusion narrative. Despite ample evidence having come out to the contrary, they have not admitted they were wrong, likely because doing so would mean they would have to admit their complicity.

    Foreign Intelligence

    UK and Australian intelligence agencies also played meaningful roles during the 2016 presidential election.

    Britain's GCHQ was involved in collecting information regarding then-candidate Trump and transmitting it to the United States. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, the head of GCHQ, flew from London to meet personally with then-CIA Director John Brennan, The Guardian reported.

    Former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan in this file photo. Hannigan transmitted information regarding Donald Trump to John Brennan in the summer of 2016. (Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images)

    Hannigan's meeting was noteworthy because Brennan wasn't Hannigan's counterpart. That position belonged to NSA Director Mike Rogers. In the following year, Hannigan abruptly announced his retirement on Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration.

    As GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly so.

    Christopher Steele, who authored the dossier on Trump, was an MI6 agent while the agency was headed by Sir Richard Dearlove. Steele retains close ties with Dearlove.

    Dearlove has ties to most of the parties mentioned. It was he who advised Steele and his business partner, Chris Burrows, to work with a top British government official to pass along information to the FBI in the fall of 2016. He also was a speaker at the July 2016 Cambridge symposium that Halper invited Carter Page to attend.

    Dearlove knows Halper through their mutual association at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. Dearlove also knows Sir Iain Lobban, a former head of GCHQ, who is an advisory board member at British strategic intelligence and advisory firm Hakluyt , which was founded by former MI6 members and retains close ties to UK intelligence services.

    Halper has historical connections to Hakluyt through Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has co-authored two books.

    Downer, who met Papadopoulos in a May 2016 meeting established through a chain of two intermediaries, served on the advisory board of Hakluyt from 2008 to 2014. He reportedly still maintains contact with Hakluyt officials. Information from his meeting with Papadopoulos was later used by the FBI to establish the bureau's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. Downer has changed his version of events multiple times.

    The Steele dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources. One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood later relayed information regarding the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who dispatched David Kramer, a fellow at the McCain Institute, to London to meet with Steele in November 2016. McCain would later admit in a Jan. 11, 2017, statement that he had personally passed on the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey.

    Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations -- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia.

    In a Twitter post , Trump wrote that the "key Allies called to ask not to release" the documents.

    Questions to be asked are why is it that two of our allies would find themselves so opposed to the release of these classified documents that a coordinated plea would be made directly to the president? And why would these same allies have even the slightest idea of what was contained in these classified U.S. documents?

    Britain and Australia appear to know full well what those documents contain, and their attempt to prevent their public release appears to be because they don't want their role in events surrounding the 2016 presidential election to be made public.

    Fusion GPS/Orbis/Christopher Steele

    Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is co-founder of Fusion GPS, along with Peter Fritsch and Tom Catan. Fusion was hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign through law firm Perkins Coie to produce and disseminate the Steele dossier used against Trump. The dossier would later be the primary evidence used to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page on Oct. 21, 2016.

    The company was hired by the Clinton campaign and the DNC–through law firm Perkins Coie–to produce the dossier on Trump.

    Christopher Steele, who retains close ties to UK intelligence, worked for MI6 from 1987 until his retirement in 2009, when he and his partner, Chris Burrows, founded Orbis Intelligence. Steele maintains contact with British intelligence, Sir Richard Dearlove , and UK intelligence firm Hakluyt.

    Steele appears to have been represented by lawyer Adam Waldman, who also represented Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. We know this from texts sent by Waldman. On April 10, 2017, Waldman sent this to Sen. Mark Warner:

    "Hi. Steele: would like to get a bi partisan letter from the committee; Assange: I convinced him to make serious and important concessions and am discussing those w DOJ; Deripaska: willing to testify to congress but interested in state of play w Manafort. I will be with him next tuesday for a week."

    Steele also appears to have lobbied on behalf of Deripaska, who was discussed in emails between Bruce Ohr and Steele that were recently disclosed by the Washington Examiner:

    "Steele said he was 'circulating some recent sensitive Orbis reporting' on Deripaska that suggested Deripaska was not a 'tool' of the Kremlin. Steele said he would send the reporting to a name that is redacted in the email."

    Fusion GPS was also employed by Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in a previous case. Veselnitskaya was involved in litigation pitting Russian firm Prevezon Holdings against British-American financier William Browder. Veselnitskaya hired U.S. law firm BakerHostetler, who, in turn, hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Browder. Veselnitskaya was one of the participants at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, at which she discussed the Magnitsky Act .

    Fox News reported on Nov. 9, 2017, that Simpson met with Veselnitskaya immediately before and after the Trump Tower meeting.

    A declassified top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report released on April 26, 2017, revealed that government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and NSA, had improperly accessed Americans' communications. The FBI specifically provided outside contractors with access to raw surveillance data on American citizens without proper oversight.

    Communications and other data of members of the Trump campaign may have been accessed in this way.


    Nellie Ohr, the wife of high-ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr, was hired by Fusion GPS to work on the dossier on Trump.

    Bruce and Nellie Ohr have known Simpson since at least 2010 and have known Steele since at least 2006. The Ohrs and Simpson worked together on a DOJ report in 2010 . In that report, Nellie Ohr's biography lists her as working for Open Source Works, which is part of the CIA. Simpson met with Bruce Ohr before and after the 2016 election.

    Bruce Ohr had been in contact repeatedly with Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign -- while Steele was constructing his dossier. Ohr later actively shared information he received from Steele with the FBI, after the agency had terminated Steele as a source. Interactions between Ohr and Steele stretched for months into the first year of Trump's presidency and were documented in a number of FD-302s -- memos that summarize interviews with him by the FBI.

    Spy Traps

    In an effort to put forth evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it appears that several different spy traps were set, with varying degrees of success. Many of these efforts appear to center around Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and involve London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, who has ties to Western intelligence, particularly in the UK.

    Papadopoulos and Mifsud both worked at the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP). Mifsud appears to have joined LCILP around November 2015 . Papadopoulos reportedly joined LCILP sometime in late February 2016 after leaving Ben Carson's presidential campaign. However, some reports indicate Papadopoulos joined LCILP in November or December of 2015. Mifsud and Papadopoulos reportedly never crossed paths until March 14, 2016, in Italy.

    Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to several Russians, including Olga Polonskaya, whom Mifsud introduced as "Putin's niece," and Ivan Timofeev, an official at a state-sponsored think tank called the Russian International Affairs Council. Both Papadopoulos and Mifsud were interviewed by the FBI. Papadopoulos was ultimately charged with a process crime and was recently sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying to the FBI. Mifsud was never charged by the FBI.

    Throughout this period, Papadopoulos continuously pushed for meetings between Trump campaign officials and Russian contacts but was ultimately unsuccessful in establishing any meetings.

    Papadopoulos met with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer on May 10, 2016. The Papadopoulos–Downer meeting has been portrayed as a chance encounter in a bar. That does not appear to be the case.

    Papadopoulos was introduced to Downer through a chain of two intermediaries who said Downer wanted to meet with Papadopoulos. Another individual happened to be in London at exactly the same time: the FBI's head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap. The purpose of Priestap's visit remains unknown.

    The Papadopoulos–Downer meeting was later used to establish the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. It was repeatedly reported that Papadopoulos told Downer that Russia had Hillary Clinton's emails. This is incorrect.

    Foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign was approached by several individuals with ties to UK and U.S. intelligence agencies. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

    According to Downer, Papadopoulos at some point mentioned the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

    "During that conversation, he [Papadopoulos] mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging,'' Downer told The Australian about the Papadopoulos meeting in an April 2018 article. "He didn't say dirt, he said material that could be damaging to her. No, he said it would be damaging. He didn't say what it was."

    Downer, while serving as Australia's foreign minister, was responsible for one of the largest foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation: $25 million from the Australian government.

    Unconfirmed media reports, including a Jan. 12, 2017, BBC article , have suggested that the FBI attempted to obtain two FISA warrants in June and July 2016 that were denied by the FISA court. It's likely that Papadopoulos was an intended target of these failed FISAs.

    Interestingly, there is no mention of Papadopoulos in the Steele dossier. Paul Manafort, Carter Page, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Gen. Michael Flynn, and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski are all listed in the Steele dossier.

    Papadopoulos may have started out assisting the FBI or CIA and later discovered that he was being set up for surveillance himself.

    After failing to obtain a spy warrant on the Trump campaign using Papadopoulos, the FBI set its sights on campaign volunteer Carter Page. By this time, the counterintelligence investigation was in the process of being established, and we know now that it was formalized with no official intelligence. The FBI needed some sort of legal cover. They needed a retroactive warrant. And they got one on Oct. 21, 2016. The Page FISA warrant would be renewed three times and remain in force until September 2017.

    Stefan Halper met with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page's July 2016 Moscow trip. As noted previously, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove was a speaker at the symposium. Halper and Dearlove have known each other for years and maintain several mutual associations.

    Page was already known to the FBI. The Page FISA warrant application references the Buryakov spy case and an FBI interview with Page. Current information suggests there was only one meeting between Page and the FBI in 2016. It happened on March 2, 2016. It was in relation to Victor Podobnyy, who was named in the Buryakov case.

    Page, who cooperated with the FBI on the case, almost certainly was providing testimony or details against Podobnyy. Page had been contacted by Podobnyy in 2013 and had previously provided information to the FBI. Buryakov pleaded guilty on March 11, 2016 -- nine days after Page met with the FBI on the case -- and was sentenced to 30 months in prison on May 25, 2016. On April 5, 2017, Buryakov was granted early release and was deported to Russia.

    FBI informant Stefan Halper approached Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.

    House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said in August that exculpatory evidence on Page exists that wasn't included by the DOJ and the FBI in the FISA application and subsequent renewals. The exculpatory evidence likely relates specifically to Page's role in the Buryakov case.

    If the FBI failed to disclose Page's cooperation with the bureau or materially misrepresented his involvement in its application to the FISA Court, it means that the FBI's Woods procedures, which govern FISA applications, were violated.

    Page has not been arrested or charged with any crime related to the investigation.

    FISA Abuse

    Admiral Mike Rogers, while director of the NSA, was personally responsible for uncovering an unprecedented level of FISA abuse that would later be documented in a 99-page unsealed FISA court ruling . As the FISA court noted in the April 26, 2017, ruling, the abuses had been occurring since at least November 2015:

    "The FBI had disclosed raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information, to private contractors.

    "Private contractors had access to raw FISA information on FBI storage systems.

    "Contractors had access to raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI's requests."

    The FISA Court report is particularly focused on the FBI:

    "The Court is concerned about the FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported."

    The FISA Court disclosed that illegal NSA database searches were endemic. Private contractors, employed by the FBI, were given full access to the NSA database. Once in the contractors' possession, the data couldn't be traced.

    In April 2016, after Rogers became aware of improper contractor access to raw FISA data on March 9, 2016, he directed the NSA's Office of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702."

    On April 18, 2016, Rogers shut down all outside contractor access to raw FISA information -- specifically outside contractors working for the FBI.

    Then-NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers on May 23, 2017. Rogers uncovered widespread abuse of FISA data by the FBI. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

    DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the Office of the Inspector General and associated FISA abuse to the FISA Court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702 compliance review.

    The following day, on Sept. 27, 2016, Carlin announced his resignation, effective Oct. 15, 2016.

    After receiving a briefing by the NSA compliance officer on Oct. 20, 2016, detailing numerous "about query" violations from the 702 NSA compliance audit, Rogers shut down all "about query" activity the next day and reported his findings to the DOJ. "About queries" are searches based on communications containing a reference "about" a surveillance target but that are not "to" or "from" the target.

    On Oct. 21, 2016, the DOJ and the FBI sought and received a Title I FISA probable-cause order authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISA Court.

    At this point, the FISA Court was still unaware of the Section 702 violations.

    On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally informed the FISA Court of his findings. On Oct. 26, 2016, Rogers appeared formally before the FISA Court and presented the written findings of his audit.

    The FISA Court had been unaware of the query violations until they were presented to the court by Rogers.

    Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications in order to avoid raising suspicions at the FISA Court ahead of receiving the Page FISA warrant.

    The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

    While all this was transpiring, DNI James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter submitted a recommendation that Rogers be removed from his post as NSA director.

    The move to fire Rogers, which ultimately failed, originated sometime in mid-October 2016 -- exactly when Rogers was preparing to present his findings to the FISA Court.

    The Insurance Policy

    Ever since the release of FBI text messages revealing the existence of an "insurance policy," the term has been the subject of wide speculation.

    Some observers have suggested that the insurance policy was the FISA spy warrant used to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and, by extension, other members of the Trump campaign. This interpretation is too narrow and fails to capture the underlying meaning of the text.

    The insurance policy was the actual process of establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative.

    It encompassed actions undertaken in late 2016 and early 2017, including the leaking of the Steele dossier and James Clapper's leaks of James Comey's briefing to President Trump. The intent behind these actions was simple. The legitimization of the investigation into the Trump campaign.

    The strategy involved the recusal of Trump officials with the intent that Andrew McCabe would end up running the investigation.

    The Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the foundation for the Russia narrative.

    The intelligence community, led by CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper, used the dossier as a launching pad for creating their Intelligence Community assessment.

    This report, which was presented to Obama in December 2016, despite NSA Director Mike Rogers having only moderate confidence in its assessment, became one of the core pieces of the narrative that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections.

    Through intelligence community leaks, and in collusion with willing media outlets, the narrative that Russia helped Trump win the elections was aggressively pushed throughout 2017.

    Spygate

    Spygate represents the biggest political scandal in our nation's history. A sitting administration actively colluded with a political campaign to affect the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Government agencies were weaponized and a complicit media spread intelligence community leaks as facts.

    But a larger question remains: How long has the United States been subject to interference from the intelligence community and our political agencies? Was the 2016 presidential election a one-time aberration, or is this episode symptomatic of a larger pattern extending back decades?

    The intensity, scale, and coordination suggest something greater than overzealous actions taken during a single election. They represent a unified reaction of the establishment to a threat posed by a true outsider -- a reaction that has come to be known as Spygate.

    Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.

    [Mar 25, 2019] Another SIGINT compromise ...

    Highly recommended!
    In Ber 2018 Kusher security clearance wasdongraded.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner to their advantage were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico, the current and former officials said. ..."
    "... Kushner's interim security clearance was downgraded last week from the top-secret to the secret level, which should restrict the regular access he has had to highly classified information, according to administration officials. Washpost ..."
    Feb 28, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    " Officials in at least four countries have privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports on the matter.

    Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner to their advantage were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico, the current and former officials said.

    It is unclear if any of those countries acted on the discussions, but Kushner's contacts with certain foreign government officials have raised concerns inside the White House and are a reason he has been unable to obtain a permanent security clearance, the officials said.

    Kushner's interim security clearance was downgraded last week from the top-secret to the secret level, which should restrict the regular access he has had to highly classified information, according to administration officials. Washpost

    ------------------

    Most people will probably be struck by the fall from grace of Kushner and other WH staff dilettantes. I am not terribly interested in that. What strikes me is that this is the third major compromise of US SIGINT products in the last year. The first was the felonious disclosure to the press of US intelligence penetration of Russian diplomatic communications. the second was the disclosure to the press of penetration of GRU communications. In this one the oral or written discussions among the officials of several foreign countries are revealed. These conversations were probably encrypted.

    Is Jeff Sessions still alive? Why are there no prosecutions for these felonies? pl

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kushners-overseas-contacts-raise-concerns-as-foreign-officials-seek-leverage/2018/02/27/16bbc052-18c3-11e8-942d-16a950029788_story.html?utm_term=.e3639623e918

    [Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism by Jonathan Cook

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... It may look like Russiagate was a failure, but it was actually a success. It deflected the left's attention from endemic corruption within the leadership of the Democratic party, which supposedly represents the left. It rechannelled the left's political energies instead towards the convenient bogeymen targets of Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin. ..."
    "... What Mueller found – all he was ever going to find – was marginal corruption in the Trump camp. And that was inevitable because Washington is mired in corruption. In fact, what Mueller revealed was the most exceptional forms of corruption among Trump's team while obscuring the run-of-the-mill stuff that would have served as a reminder of the endemic corruption infecting the Democratic leadership too. ..."
    "... Further, in focusing on the Trump camp – and relative minnows like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone – the Russiagate inquiry actually served to shield the Democratic leadership from an investigation into the much worse corruption revealed in the content of the DNC emails. ..."
    "... What should have been at the front and centre of any inquiry was how the Democratic party sought to rig its primaries to prevent party members selecting anyone but Hillary as their presidential candidate. ..."
    "... Trump faces opposition from within the establishment not because he is "anti-establishment" but because he refuses to decorate the pig's snout with lipstick. He is tearing the mask off late-stage capitalism's greed and self-destructiveness ..."
    "... The corporate media, and the journalists they employ, are propagandists – for a system that keeps them wealthy. When Trump was a Republican primary candidate, the entire corporate media loved him because he was TV's equivalent of clickbait, just as he had been since reality TV began to usurp the place of current affairs programmes and meaningful political debate. ..."
    "... The "[neo]liberal" corporate media shares the values of the Democratic party leadership. In other words, it is heavily invested in making sure the pig doesn't lose its lipstick. By contrast, Fox News and the shock-jocks, like Trump, prioritise making money in the short term over the long-term credibility of a system that gives them licence to make money. They care much less whether the pig's face remains painted. ..."
    "... Just as too many on the left sleep-walked through the past two years waiting for Mueller – a former head of the FBI, the US secret police, for chrissakes! – to save them from Trump, they have been manipulated by liberal elites into the political cul-de-sac of identity politics. ..."
    "... The "[neo]liberal" elites exploited identity politics to keep us divided by pacifying the most maginalised with the offer of a few additional crumbs. Trump has exploited identity politics to keep us divided by inflaming tensions as he reorders the hierarchy of "privilege" in which those crumbs are offered. In the process, both wings of the elite have averted the danger that class consciousness and real solidarity might develop and start to challenge their privileges. ..."
    "... Were the US to get its own Corbyn as president, he or she would undoubtedly face a Mueller-style inquiry, and one far more effective at securing the president's impeachment than this one was ever going to be. ..."
    Mar 25, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org
    Here are three important lessons for the progressive left to consider now that it is clear the inquiry by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russiagate is never going to uncover collusion between Donald Trump's camp and the Kremlin in the 2016 presidential election.

    Painting the pig's face

    The left never had a dog in this race. This was always an in-house squabble between different wings of the establishment. Late-stage capitalism is in terminal crisis, and the biggest problem facing our corporate elites is how to emerge from this crisis with their power intact. One wing wants to make sure the pig's face remains painted, the other is happy simply getting its snout deeper into the trough while the food lasts.

    Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism.

    The leaders of the Democratic party are less terrified of Trump and what he represents than they are of us and what we might do if we understood how they have rigged the political and economic system to their permanent advantage.

    It may look like Russiagate was a failure, but it was actually a success. It deflected the left's attention from endemic corruption within the leadership of the Democratic party, which supposedly represents the left. It rechannelled the left's political energies instead towards the convenient bogeymen targets of Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

    Mired in corruption

    What Mueller found – all he was ever going to find – was marginal corruption in the Trump camp. And that was inevitable because Washington is mired in corruption. In fact, what Mueller revealed was the most exceptional forms of corruption among Trump's team while obscuring the run-of-the-mill stuff that would have served as a reminder of the endemic corruption infecting the Democratic leadership too.

    An anti-corruption investigation would have run much deeper and exposed far more. It would have highlighted the Clinton Foundation, and the role of mega-donors like James Simons, George Soros and Haim Saban who funded Hillary's campaign with one aim in mind: to get their issues into a paid-for national "consensus".

    Further, in focusing on the Trump camp – and relative minnows like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone – the Russiagate inquiry actually served to shield the Democratic leadership from an investigation into the much worse corruption revealed in the content of the DNC emails. It was the leaking / hacking of those emails that provided the rationale for Mueller's investigations. What should have been at the front and centre of any inquiry was how the Democratic party sought to rig its primaries to prevent party members selecting anyone but Hillary as their presidential candidate.

    So, in short, Russiagate has been two years of wasted energy by the left, energy that could have been spent both targeting Trump for what he is really doing rather than what it is imagined he has done, and targeting the Democratic leadership for its own, equally corrupt practices.

    Trump empowered

    But it's far worse than that. It is not just that the left wasted two years of political energy on Russiagate. At the same time, they empowered Trump, breathing life into his phony arguments that he is the anti-establishment president, a people's president the elites are determined to destroy.

    Trump faces opposition from within the establishment not because he is "anti-establishment" but because he refuses to decorate the pig's snout with lipstick. He is tearing the mask off late-stage capitalism's greed and self-destructiveness. And he is doing so not because he wants to reform or overthrow turbo-charged capitalism but because he wants to remove the last, largely cosmetic constraints on the system so that he and his friends can plunder with greater abandon – and destroy the planet more quickly.

    The other wing of the neoliberal establishment, the one represented by the Democratic party leadership, fears that exposing capitalism in this way – making explicit its inherently brutal, wrist-slitting tendencies – will awaken the masses, that over time it will risk turning them into revolutionaries. Democratic party leaders fear Trump chiefly because of the threat he poses to the image of the political and economic system they have so lovingly crafted so that they can continue enriching themselves and their children.

    Trump's genius – his only genius – is to have appropriated, and misappropriated, some of the language of the left to advance the interests of the 1 per cent. When he attacks the corporate "liberal" media for having a harmful agenda, for serving as propagandists, he is not wrong. When he rails against the identity politics cultivated by "liberal" elites over the past two decades – suggesting that it has weakened the US – he is not wrong. But he is right for the wrong reasons.

    TV's version of clickbait

    The corporate media, and the journalists they employ, are propagandists – for a system that keeps them wealthy. When Trump was a Republican primary candidate, the entire corporate media loved him because he was TV's equivalent of clickbait, just as he had been since reality TV began to usurp the place of current affairs programmes and meaningful political debate.

    The handful of corporations that own the US media – and much of corporate America besides – are there both to make ever-more money by expanding profits and to maintain the credibility of a political and economic system that lets them make ever more money.

    The "[neo]liberal" corporate media shares the values of the Democratic party leadership. In other words, it is heavily invested in making sure the pig doesn't lose its lipstick. By contrast, Fox News and the shock-jocks, like Trump, prioritise making money in the short term over the long-term credibility of a system that gives them licence to make money. They care much less whether the pig's face remains painted.

    So Trump is right that the "liberal" media is undemocratic and that it is now propagandising against him. But he is wrong about why. In fact, all corporate media – whether "liberal" or not, whether against Trump or for him – is undemocratic. All of the media propagandises for a rotten system that keeps the vast majority of Americans impoverished. All of the media cares more for Trump and the elites he belongs to than it cares for the 99 per cent.

    Gorging on the main course

    Similarly, with identity politics. Trump says he wants to make (a white) America great again, and uses the left's obsession with identity as a way to energize a backlash from his own supporters.

    Just as too many on the left sleep-walked through the past two years waiting for Mueller – a former head of the FBI, the US secret police, for chrissakes! – to save them from Trump, they have been manipulated by liberal elites into the political cul-de-sac of identity politics.

    Just as Mueller put the left on standby, into waiting-for-the-Messiah mode, so simple-minded, pussy-hat-wearing identity politics has been cultivated in the supposedly liberal bastions of the corporate media and Ivy League universities – the same universities that have turned out generations of Muellers and Clintons – to deplete the left's political energies. While we argue over who is most entitled and most victimised, the establishment has carried on raping and pillaging Third World countries, destroying the planet and siphoning off the wealth produced by the rest of us.

    These liberal elites long ago worked out that if we could be made to squabble among ourselves about who was most entitled to scraps from the table, they could keep gorging on the main course.

    The "[neo]liberal" elites exploited identity politics to keep us divided by pacifying the most maginalised with the offer of a few additional crumbs. Trump has exploited identity politics to keep us divided by inflaming tensions as he reorders the hierarchy of "privilege" in which those crumbs are offered. In the process, both wings of the elite have averted the danger that class consciousness and real solidarity might develop and start to challenge their privileges.

    The Corbyn experience

    3. But the most important lesson of all for the left is that support among its ranks for the Mueller inquiry against Trump was foolhardy in the extreme.

    Not only was the inquiry doomed to failure – in fact, not only was it designed to fail – but it has set a precedent for future politicised investigations that will be used against the progressive left should it make any significant political gains. And an inquiry against the real left will be far more aggressive and far more "productive" than Mueller was.

    If there is any doubt about that look to the UK. Britain now has within reach of power the first truly progressive politician in living memory, someone seeking to represent the 99 per cent, not the 1 per cent. But Jeremy Corbyn's experience as the leader of the Labour party – massively swelling the membership's ranks to make it the largest political party in Europe – has been eye-popping.

    I have documented Corbyn's travails regularly in this blog over the past four years at the hands of the British political and media establishment. You can find many examples here.

    Corbyn, even more so than the small, new wave of insurgency politicians in the US Congress, has faced a relentless barrage of criticism from across the UK's similarly narrow political spectrum. He has been attacked by both the rightwing media and the supposedly "liberal" media. He has been savaged by the ruling Conservative party, as was to be expected, and by his own parliamentary Labour party. The UK's two-party system has been exposed as just as hollow as the US one.

    The ferocity of the attacks has been necessary because, unlike the Democratic party's success in keeping a progressive leftwinger away from the presidential campaign, the UK system accidentally allowed a socialist to slip past the gatekeepers. All hell has broken out ever since.

    Simple-minded identity politics

    What is so noticeable is that Corbyn is rarely attacked over his policies – mainly because they have wide popular appeal. Instead he has been hounded over fanciful claims that, despite being a life-long and very visible anti-racism campaigner, he suddenly morphed into an outright anti-semite the moment party members elected him leader.

    I will not rehearse again how implausible these claims are. Simply look through these previous blog posts should you be in any doubt.

    But what is amazing is that, just as with the Mueller inquiry, much of the British left – including prominent figures like Owen Jones and the supposedly countercultural Novara Media – have sapped their political energies in trying to placate or support those leading the preposterous claims that Labour under Corbyn has become "institutionally anti-semitic". Again, the promotion of a simple-minded identity politics – which pits the rights of Palestinians against the sensitivities of Zionist Jews about Israel – was exploited to divide the left.

    The more the left has conceded to this campaign, the angrier, the more implacable, the more self-righteous Corbyn's opponents have become – to the point that the Labour party is now in serious danger of imploding.

    A clarifying moment

    Were the US to get its own Corbyn as president, he or she would undoubtedly face a Mueller-style inquiry, and one far more effective at securing the president's impeachment than this one was ever going to be.

    That is not because a leftwing US president would be more corrupt or more likely to have colluded with a foreign power. As the UK example shows, it would be because the entire media system – from the New York Times to Fox News – would be against such a president. And as the UK example also shows, it would be because the leaderships of both the Republican and Democratic parties would work as one to finish off such a president.

    In the combined success-failure of the Mueller inquiry, the left has an opportunity to understand in a much more sophisticated way how real power works and in whose favour it is exercised. It is moment that should be clarifying – if we are willing to open our eyes to Mueller's real lessons.

    Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are " Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and " Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair " (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

    [Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson

    Highly recommended!
    This is probably the most comprehensive outline of the color revolution against Trump. Bravo, simply bravo !!!
    Reads like Agatha Christi Murder on the Orient Express ;-) Rosenstein role is completely revised from a popular narrative. Brennan role clarifies and detailed. Obama personal role hinted. Victoria Nuland role and the role of the State Department in Russiagate is documented for the first time, I think.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The "insurance policy" appears to have been the effort to legitimize the Trump–Russia collusion narrative so that an FBI investigation, led by McCabe, could continue unhindered. ..."
    "... Ohr, one of the highest-ranking officials in the DOJ, was communicating on an ongoing basis with Steele, whom he had known since at least 2006 , well into mid-2017. He is also married to Nellie Ohr, an expert on Russia and Eurasia who began working for Fusion GPS sometime in late 2015 . Nellie Ohr likely played a significant role in the construction of the dossier. ..."
    "... The Obama administration provided a simultaneous layer of protection and facilitation for the entire effort. One example is provided by Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333 , also known as Obama's data-sharing order . With the passage of the order, agencies and individuals were able to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that was useful to a particular mission. ..."
    "... Leaking, including felony leaking of classified information, has been widespread. The Carter Page FISA warrant -- likely the unredacted version -- has been in the possession of The Washington Post and The New York Times since March 2017. Traditionally, the intelligence community leaked to The Washington Post while the DOJ leaked to sources within The New York Times. This was a historical pattern that stood until this election. The leaking became so widespread, even this tradition was broken. ..."
    "... The information contained within both articles likely came via felony leaks from James Wolfe, former director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who was arrested on June 7, 2018, and charged with one count of lying to the FBI. Wolfe's indictment alleges that he was leaking classified information to multiple reporters over an extended period of time. ..."
    "... The Steele dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources. One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood later relayed information regarding the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who dispatched David Kramer, a fellow at the McCain Institute, to London to meet with Steele in November 2016. McCain would later admit in a Jan. 11, 2017, statement that he had personally passed on the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey. ..."
    "... Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations -- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia. ..."
    "... Questions to be asked are why is it that two of our allies would find themselves so opposed to the release of these classified documents that a coordinated plea would be made directly to the president? And why would these same allies have even the slightest idea of what was contained in these classified U.S. documents? ..."
    Oct 12, 2018 | www.theepochtimes.com
    Spygate: The True Story of Collusion [Infographic] How America's most powerful agencies were weaponized against President Donald Trump

    Although the details remain complex, the structure underlying Spygate -- the creation of the false narrative that candidate Donald Trump colluded with Russia, and the spying on his presidential campaign -- remains surprisingly simple:

    1. CIA Director John Brennan, with some assistance from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, gathered foreign intelligence and fed it throughout our domestic Intelligence Community.
    2. The FBI became the handler of Brennan's intelligence and engaged in the more practical elements of surveillance.
    3. The Department of Justice facilitated investigations by the FBI and legal maneuverings, while providing a crucial shield of nondisclosure.
    4. The Department of State became a mechanism of information dissemination and leaks.
    5. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee provided funding, support, and media collusion.
    6. Obama administration officials were complicit, and engaged in unmasking and intelligence gathering and dissemination.
    7. The media was the most corrosive element in many respects. None of these events could have transpired without their willing participation. Stories were pushed, facts were ignored, and narratives were promoted.

    Let's start with a simple premise: The candidacy of Trump presented both an opportunity and a threat.

    Initially not viewed with any real seriousness, Trump's campaign was seen as an opportunistic wedge in the election process. At the same time, and particularly as the viability of his candidacy increased, Trump was seen as an existential threat to the established political system.

    The sudden legitimacy of Trump's candidacy was not welcomed by the U.S. political establishment. Here was a true political outsider who held no traditional allegiances. He was brash and boastful, he ignored political correctness, he couldn't be bought, and he didn't care what others thought of him -- he trusted himself.

    Governing bodies in Britain and the European Union were also worried. Candidate Trump was openly challenging monetary policy, regulations, and the power of special interests. He challenged Congress. He challenged the United Nations and the European Union. He questioned everything.

    Brennan played a crucial role in the creation of the Russia-collusion narrative and the spying on the Trump campaign. (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

    Brennan became the point man in the operation to stop a potential Trump presidency. It remains unclear whether his role was self-appointed or came from above. To embark on such a mission without direct presidential authority seems both a stretch of the imagination and particularly foolhardy.

    Brennan took unofficial foreign intelligence compiled by contacts, colleagues, and associates -- primarily from the UK , but also from other Five Eyes members, such as Australia.

    Individuals in official positions in UK intelligence, such as Robert Hannigan -- head of the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of the National Security Agency) -- partnered with former UK foreign intelligence members. Former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove , former Ambassador Sir Andrew Wood, and private UK intelligence firm Hakluyt all played a role.

    In the summer of 2016, Hannigan traveled to Washington to meet with Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. On Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration -- Hannigan abruptly announced his retirement. The Guardian openly speculated that Hannigan's resignation was directly related to the sharing of UK intelligence.

    One method used to help establish evidence of collusion was the employment of "spy traps." Prominent among these were ones set for Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. The intent was to provide or establish connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. The content and context mattered little as long as a connection could be established that could then be publicized. The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting was another such attempt.

    Western intelligence assets were used to initiate and establish these connections, particularly in the cases of Papadopoulos and Page.

    Ultimately, Brennan formed an inter-agency task force comprising an estimated six agencies and/or government departments. The FBI, Treasury, and DOJ handled the domestic inquiry into Trump and possible Russia connections. The CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency (NSA) handled foreign and intelligence aspects.

    Brennan's inter-agency task force is not to be confused with the July 2016 FBI counterintelligence investigation, which was formed later at Brennan's urging.

    During this time, Brennan also employed the use of reverse targeting , which relates to the targeting of a foreign individual with the intent of capturing data on a U.S. citizen. This effort was uncovered and made public by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in a March 2017 press conference :

    "I have seen intelligence reports that clearly show the president-elect and his team were monitored and disseminated out in intelligence-reporting channels. Details about persons associated with the incoming administration, details with little apparent foreign-intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.

    "From what I know right now, it looks like incidental collection. We don't know exactly how that was picked up but we're trying to get to the bottom of it."

    As this foreign intelligence -- unofficial in nature and outside of any traditional channels -- was gathered, Brennan began a process of feeding his gathered intelligence to the FBI. Repeated transfers of foreign intelligence from the CIA director pushed the FBI toward the establishment of a formal counterintelligence investigation. Brennan repeatedly noted this during a May 23, 2017, congressional testimony :

    "I made sure that anything that was involving U.S. persons, including anything involving the individuals involved in the Trump campaign, was shared with the [FBI]."

    Brennan also admitted that his intelligence helped establish the FBI investigation:

    "I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred."

    This admission is important, as no official intelligence was used to open the FBI's investigation.

    Once the FBI began its counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016, Brennan shifted his focus. Through a series of meetings in August and September 2016, Brennan informed the congressional Gang of Eight regarding intelligence and information he had gathered. Notably, each Gang of Eight member was briefed separately, calling into question whether each of the members received the same information. Efforts to block the release of the transcripts from each meeting remain ongoing.

    The last major segment of Brennan's efforts involved a series of three reports and greater participation from Clapper. The first report, the "Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security ," was released on Oct. 7, 2016. The second report, "GRIZZLY STEPPE -- Russian Malicious Cyber Activity ," was released on Dec. 29, 2016. The third report, "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections " -- also known as the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) -- was released on Jan. 6, 2017.

    This final report was used to continue pushing the Russia-collusion narrative following the election of President Donald Trump. Notably, Admiral Mike Rogers of the NSA publicly dissented from the findings of the ICA, assigning only a moderate confidence level.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/bMcNbum93cU?wmode=transparent&wmode=opaque

    Federal Bureau of Investigation

    Although the FBI is technically part of the DOJ, it is best for the purposes of this article that the FBI and DOJ be viewed as separate entities, each with its own related ties.

    The FBI itself was comprised of various factions, with a particularly active element that has come to be known as the "insurance policy group." It appears that this faction was led by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and comprised other notable names such as FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and FBI general counsel James Baker.

    The FBI established the counterintelligence investigation into alleged Russia collusion with the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016. Comey initially refused to say whether the FBI was investigating possible connections between members of the Trump campaign and Russia. He would continue to refuse to provide answers until March 20, 2017, when he disclosed the existence of the FBI investigation during congressional testimony.

    Comey also testified that he did not provide notification to the Gang of Eight until early March 2017 -- less than one month earlier. This admission was in stark contrast to actions taken by Brennan, who had notified members of the Gang of Eight individually during August and September 2016. It's likely that Brennan never informed Comey that he had briefed the Gang of Eight in 2016. Comey did note that the DOJ "had been aware" of the investigation all along.

    Comey opened the counterintelligence investigation into Trump on the urging of CIA Director John Brennan.
    Following Comey's firing on May 9, 2017, the FBI's investigation was transferred to special counsel Robert Mueller. The Mueller investigation remains ongoing.

    The FBI's formal involvement with the Steele dossier began on July 5, 2016, when Mike Gaeta, an FBI agent and assistant legal attaché at the US Embassy in Rome, was dispatched to visit former MI6 spy Christopher Steele in London. Gaeta would return from this meeting with a copy of Steele's first memo. This memo was given to Victoria Nuland at the State Department, who passed it along to the FBI.

    Gaeta, who also headed the FBI's Eurasian Organized Crime unit, had known Steele since at least 2010, when Steele had provided assistance to the FBI's investigation into the FIFA corruption scandal .

    Prior to the London meeting, Gaeta may also have met on a less formal basis with Steele several weeks earlier. "In June, Steele flew to Rome to brief the FBI contact with whom he had cooperated over FIFA," The Guardian reported. "His information started to reach the bureau in Washington."

    It's worth noting that there was no "dossier" until it was fully compiled in December 2016. There was only a sequence of documents from Steele -- documents that were passed on individually -- as they were created. Therefore, from the FBI's legal perspective, they didn't use the dossier. They used individual documents.

    For the next month and a half, there appeared to be little contact between Steele and the FBI. However, the FBI's interest in the dossier suddenly accelerated in late August 2016, when the bureau asked Steele "for all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources."

    In September 2016, Steele traveled back to Rome to meet with the FBI's Eurasian squad once again. It's likely that the meeting included several other FBI officials as well. According to a House Intelligence Committee minority memo , Steele's reporting reached the FBI counterintelligence team in mid-September 2016 -- the same time as Steele's September trip to Rome.

    The reason for the FBI's renewed interest had to do with an adviser to the Trump campaign -- Carter Page -- who had been in contact with Stefan Halper, a CIA and FBI source, since July 2016. Halper arranged to meet with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page took a trip to Moscow. Speakers at the symposium included Madeleine Albright, Vin Webber, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6.

    Page was now the FBI's chosen target for a FISA warrant that would be obtained on Oct. 21, 2016. The Steele dossier would be the primary evidence used in obtaining the FISA warrant, which would be renewed three separate times, including after Trump took office, finally expiring in September 2017.

    Former volunteer Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on Nov. 2, 2017. The FBI obtained a retroactive FISA spy warrant on Page.

    After being in contact with Page for 14 months, Halper stopped contact exactly as the final FISA warrant on Page expired. Page, who has steadfastly maintained his innocence, was never charged with any crime by the FBI. Efforts for the declassification of the Page FISA application are currently ongoing through the DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.

    Peter Strzok and Lisa Page

    Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were two prominent members of the FBI's "insurance policy" group. Strzok, a senior FBI agent, was the deputy assistant director of FBI's Counterintelligence Division. Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, served as special counsel to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

    Strzok was in charge of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for government business. He helped FBI Director James Comey draft the statement exonerating Clinton and was personally responsible for changing specific wording within that statement that reduced Clinton's legal liability. Specifically, Strzok changed the words "grossly negligent," which could be a criminal offense, to "extremely careless."

    Strzok also personally led the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into the alleged Trump–Russia collusion and signed the documents that opened the investigation on July 31, 2016. He was one of the FBI agents who interviewed Trump's national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn. Strzok met multiple times with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and received information from Steele at those meetings.

    Following the firing of FBI Director James Comey, Strzok would join the team of special counsel Robert Mueller. Two months later, he was removed from that team after the DOJ inspector general discovered a lengthy series of texts between Strzok and Page that contained politically charged messages. Strzok would be fired from the FBI in August 2018.

    Both Strzok and Page engaged in strategic leaking to the press. Page did so at the direction of McCabe, who directly authorized Page to share information with Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett. That information was used in an Oct. 30, 2016, article headlined "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe ." Page leaked to Barrett thinking she had been granted legal and official authorization to do so.

    McCabe would later initially deny providing such authorization to the Office of Inspector General. Page, when confronted with McCabe's denials, produced texts refuting his statement. It was these texts that led to the inspector general uncovering the texts between Strzok and Page.

    The two exchanged thousands of texts, some of them indicating surveillance activities, over a two-year period. Texts sent between Aug. 21, 2015, and June 25, 2017, have been made public . The series comes to an end with a final text by Page telling Strzok, "Don't ever text me again."

    On Aug. 8, 2016, Stzrok wrote that they would prevent candidate Trump from becoming president:

    Page: "[Trump is] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!"

    Strzok: "No. No he won't. We'll stop it."

    On Aug. 15, 2016, Strzok sent a text referring to an "insurance policy":

    "I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office -- that there's no way [Trump] gets elected -- but I'm afraid we can't take that risk. It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40."

    The "insurance policy" appears to have been the effort to legitimize the Trump–Russia collusion narrative so that an FBI investigation, led by McCabe, could continue unhindered.

    Department of Justice

    The Department of Justice, which comprises 60 agencies , was transformed during the Obama years. The department is forbidden by federal law from hiring employees based on political affiliation.

    However, a series of investigative articles by PJ Media published during Eric Holder's tenure as attorney general revealed an unsettling pattern of ideological conformity among new hires at the DOJ: Only lawyers from the progressive left were hired. Not one single moderate or conservative lawyer made the cut. This is significant as the DOJ enjoys significant latitude in determining who will be subject to prosecution.

    The DOJ's job in Spygate was to facilitate the legal side of surveillance while providing a protective layer of cover for all those involved. The department became a repository of information and provided a protective wall between the investigative efforts of the FBI and the legislative branch. Importantly, it also served as the firewall within the executive branch, serving as the insulating barrier between the FBI and Obama officials. The department had become legendary for its stonewalling tactics with Congress.

    DOJ Official Bruce Ohr on Aug. 28, 2018. Ohr passed on information from Christopher Steele to the FBI.

    The DOJ, which was fully aware of the actions being taken by James Comey and the FBI, also became an active element acting against members of the Trump campaign. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, along with Mary McCord, the head of the DOJ's National Security Division, was actively involved in efforts to remove Gen. Michael Flynn from his position as national security adviser to President Trump.

    To this day, it remains unknown which individual was responsible for making public Flynn's call with the Russian ambassador. Flynn ultimately pleaded guilty to a process crime: lying to the FBI. There have been questions raised in Congress regarding the possible alteration of FD-302s, the written notes of Flynn's FBI interviews. Special counsel Robert Mueller has repeatedly deferred Flynn's sentencing hearing.

    David Laufman, deputy assistant attorney general in charge of counterintelligence at the DOJ's National Security Division, played a key role in both the Clinton email server and Russia hacking investigations. Laufman is currently the attorney for Monica McLean, the long-time friend of Christine Blasey Ford, who recently accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while in high school. McLean was also employed by the FBI for 24 years.

    Bruce Ohr was a significant DOJ official who played a key role in Spygate. Ohr held two important positions at the DOJ: associate deputy attorney general, and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. As associate deputy attorney general, Ohr was just four offices away from then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and he reported directly to her. As director of the task force, he was in charge of a program described as "the centerpiece of the attorney general's drug strategy."

    Ohr, one of the highest-ranking officials in the DOJ, was communicating on an ongoing basis with Steele, whom he had known since at least 2006 , well into mid-2017. He is also married to Nellie Ohr, an expert on Russia and Eurasia who began working for Fusion GPS sometime in late 2015 . Nellie Ohr likely played a significant role in the construction of the dossier.

    According to testimony from FBI agent Peter Strzok, he and Ohr met at least five times during 2016 and 2017. Strzok was working directly with then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe.

    Additionally, Ohr met with the FBI at least 12 times between late November 2016 and May 2017 for a series of interviews. These meetings could have been used to transmit information from Steele to the FBI. This came after the FBI had formally severed contact with Steele in late October or early November 2016.

    John Carlin is another notable figure with the DOJ. Carlin was an assistant attorney general and the head of the DOJ's National Security Division until October 2016. His role will be discussed below in the section on FISA abuse.

    The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe

    Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe held a pivotal role in what has become known as "Spygate." He directed the activities of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and was involved in all aspects of the Russia investigation. He was also mentioned in the infamous "insurance policy" text message.

    McCabe was a major component of the insurance policy.

    On April 26, 2017, Rosenstein found himself appointed as the new deputy attorney general. He was placed into a somewhat chaotic situation, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the ongoing Russia investigation a little less than two months earlier, on March 2, 2017. This effectively meant that no one in the Trump administration had any oversight of the ongoing investigation being conducted by the FBI and the DOJ.

    Additionally, the leadership of then-FBI Director James Comey was coming under increased scrutiny as the result of actions taken leading up to and following the election, particularly Comey's handling of the Clinton email investigation.

    On May 9, 2017, Rosenstein wrote a memorandum recommending that Comey be fired. The subject of the memo was "Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI." Comey was fired that day. McCabe was now the acting director of the FBI and was immediately under consideration for the permanent position.

    On the same day Comey was fired, McCabe would lie during an interview with agents from the FBI's Inspection Division (INSD) regarding apparent leaks that were used in an Oct. 30, 2016, Wall Street Journal article, "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe" by Devlin Barrett. This would later be disclosed in the inspector general report, "A Report of Investigation of Certain Allegations Relating to Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe."

    At the time, nobody, including the INSD agents, knew that McCabe had lied, nor were the darker aspects of McCabe's role in Spygate fully known.

    In late April or early May 2016, McCabe opened a federal criminal investigation on Sessions, regarding potential lack of candor before Congress in relation to Sessions's contacts with Russians. Sessions was unaware of the investigation.

    Sessions would later be cleared of any wrongdoing by special counsel Robert Mueller.

    On the morning of May 16, 2017, Rosenstein reportedly suggested to McCabe that he secretly record President Trump. This remark was reported in a New York Times article that was sourced from memos from the now-fired McCabe, along with testimony taken from former FBI general counsel James Baker, who relayed a conversation he had with McCabe about the occurrence. Rosenstein issued a statement denying the accusations.

    The alleged comments by Rosenstein occurred at a meeting where McCabe was "pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation into the president." An unnamed participant at the meeting, in comments to The Washington Post, framed the conversation somewhat differently, noting Rosenstein responded sarcastically to McCabe, saying, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"

    Later, on the same day that Rosenstein had his meetings with McCabe, President Trump met with Mueller, reportedly as an interview for the FBI director job. On May 17, 2017, the day after President Trump's meeting with Mueller -- and the day after Rosenstein's encounters with McCabe -- Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel.

    The May 17 appointment of Mueller in effect shifted control of the Russia investigation from the FBI and McCabe to Mueller. Rosenstein would retain ultimate authority for the probe and any expansion of Mueller's investigation required authorization from Rosenstein.

    Interestingly, without Comey's memo leaks, a special counsel might not have been appointed -- the FBI, and possibly McCabe, would have remained in charge of the Russia investigation. McCabe was probably not going to become the permanent FBI director, but he was reportedly under consideration. Regardless, without Comey's leak, McCabe would have retained direct involvement and the FBI would have retained control.

    On July 28, 2017, McCabe lied to Inspector General Michael Horowitz while under oath regarding authorization of the leaking to The Wall Street Journal. At this point, Horowitz knew McCabe was lying, but did not yet know of the May 9 INSD interview with McCabe.

    On Aug. 2, 2017, Rosenstein secretly issued Mueller a revised memo on "the scope of investigation and definition of authority" that remains heavily redacted. The full purpose of this memo remains unknown. On this same day, Christopher Wray was named as the new FBI director.

    Two days later, on Aug. 4, 2017, Sessions announced that the FBI had created a new leaks investigation unit. Rosenstein and Wray were tasked with overseeing all leak investigations.

    That Aug. 2 memo from Rosenstein to Mueller may have been specifically designed to remove any residual FBI influence -- specifically that of McCabe -- from the Russia investigation. The appointment of Wray as FBI director helped cement this. McCabe was finally completely neutralized.

    On March 16, 2018, McCabe was fired for lying under oath at least three different times and is currently the subject of a grand jury investigation.

    State Department

    The State Department, with its many contacts within foreign governments, became a conduit for the flow of information. The transfer of Christopher Steele's first dossier memo was personally facilitated by Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. Nuland gave approval for FBI agent Michael Gaeta to travel to London to obtain the memo from Steele. The memo may have passed directly from her to FBI leadership. Secretary of State John Kerry was also given a copy.

    Steele was already well-known within the State Department. Following Steele's involvement in the FIFA scandal investigation, he began to provide reports informally to the State Department. The reports were written for a "private client" but were "shared widely within the U.S. State Department, and sent up to Secretary of State John Kerry and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who was in charge of the U.S. response to Putin's annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine," the Guardian reported.

    Nuland passed on parts of the Steele dossier to the FBI. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

    In July 2016, when the FBI wanted to send Gaeta to visit Steele in London, the bureau sought permission from the office of Nuland, who provided this version of events during a Feb. 4, 2018, appearance on CBS's "Face the Nation":

    "In the middle of July, when [Steele] was doing this other work and became concerned, he passed two to four pages of short points of what he was finding and our immediate reaction to that was, this is not in our purview. This needs to go to the FBI if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian Federation. That's something for the FBI to investigate."

    Steele also met with Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement and former special envoy for Libya. Steele and Winer had known each other since at least 2010. In an opinion article in The Washington Post, Winer wrote the following:

    "In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the 'dossier.' Steele's sources suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign but also had compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign."

    In a strange turn of events, Winer also received a separate dossier , very similar to Steele's, from long-time Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal. This "second dossier" had been compiled by another longtime Clinton operative, former journalist Cody Shearer, and echoed claims made in the Steele dossier. Winer then met with Steele in late September 2016 and gave Steele a copy of the "second dossier." Steele went on to share this second dossier with the FBI, which may have used it to corroborate his dossier.

    Winer passed on memos from Christopher Steele to Victoria Nuland. (State Department)

    Other foreign officials also used conduits into the State Department. Alexander Downer, Australia's high commissioner to the UK, reportedly funneled his conversation with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos -- later used as a reason to open the FBI's counterintelligence investigation -- directly to the U.S. Embassy in London.

    "The Downer details landed with the embassy's then-chargé d'affaires, Elizabeth Dibble, who previously served as a principal deputy assistant secretary in Mrs. Clinton's State Department," The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel wrote in a May 31, 2018, article .

    If true, this would mean that neither Australian intelligence nor the Australian government alerted the FBI to the Papadopoulos information. What happened with the Downer details, and to whom they were ultimately relayed, remains unknown.

    Curiously, details surprisingly similar to the Papadopoulos–Downer conversation show up in the first memo written by Steele on June 20, 2016:

    "A dossier of compromising information on Hillary Clinton has been collated by the Russian Intelligence Services over many years and mainly comprises bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls. It has not yet been distributed abroad, including to Trump."

    Clinton Campaign and the DNC

    The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee both occupied a unique position. They had the most to gain but they also had the most to lose. And they stood willing and ready to do whatever was necessary to win. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, is credited with being the first to raise the specter of candidate Donald Trump's alleged collusion with Russia.

    The entire Clinton campaign willfully promoted the narrative of Russia–Trump collusion despite the uncomfortable fact that they were the ones who had engaged the services of Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele through their law firm Perkins Coie. Information flowed from the campaign -- sometimes through Perkins Coie, other times through affiliates -- ultimately making its way into the media and sometimes to the FBI. Information from the Clinton campaign may also have ended up in the Steele dossier.

    Jennifer Palmieri, the communications director for the Clinton campaign, in tandem with Jake Sullivan, the senior policy adviser to the campaign, took the lead in briefing the press on the Trump–Russia collusion story.

    Another example of this behavior can be seen from an instance when Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann leaked information from Steele and Fusion GPS to Franklin Foer of Slate magazine. This event is described in the House Intelligence Committee's final report on Russian active measures , in footnote 43 on page 57. Foer then published the article "Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia? " on Oct. 31, 2016. The article concerns allegations regarding a server in the Trump Tower.

    The Slate article managed to attract the immediate attention of Clinton, who posted a tweet on the same day the article was published:

    "Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank."

    Attached to her tweet was a statement from Sullivan:

    "This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow. Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.

    "This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump's ties to Russia. It certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide, given that it apparently took steps to conceal the link when it was discovered by journalists."

    These statements, which were later proven to be incorrect, are all the more disturbing with the hindsight knowledge that it was a senior Clinton/DNC lawyer who helped plant the story. And given the prepared statement by Sullivan, the Clinton campaign knew this.

    This type of behavior would be engaged in repeatedly -- damning leaks leading to media stories, followed by ready attacks from the Clinton campaign.

    Alexandra Chalupa is a Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee. Chalupa met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, Paul Manafort, and Russia. Chalupa began investigating Manafort in 2014. In late 2015, Chalupa expanded her opposition research on Manafort to include Trump's ties to Russia. In January 2016, Chalupa shared her information with a senior DNC official.

    Chalupa's meetings with DNC and Ukrainian officials would continue. On April 26, 2016, investigative reporter Michael Isikoff published a story on Yahoo News about Manafort's business dealings with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. It was later learned from a DNC email leaked by Wikileaks that Chalupa had been working with Isikoff -- the same journalist Christopher Steele leaked to in September 2016. Manafort would later be indicted for Foreign Agents Registration Act violations that occurred during the Obama administration.

    Perkins Coie

    International law firm Perkins Coie served as the legal arm for both the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Ties to Perkins Coie extended beyond the DNC into the Obama White House.

    Bob Bauer, a partner at the law firm and founder of its political law practice, served as White House counsel to President Barack Obama throughout 2010 and 2011. Bauer was also general counsel to Obama's campaign organization, Obama for America, in 2008 and 2012.

    Perkins Coie partners Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann each played critical roles and were the ones who hired Fusion GPS and Steele. Sussmann personally handled the alleged hack of the DNC server. He also transmitted information, likely from Steele and Fusion GPS, to James Baker, then-chief counsel at the FBI, and to several members of the press.

    Perkins Coie partner Michael Sussmann. Sussmann transmitted information to FBI chief counsel James Baker and several journalists. (Courtesy Perkins Coie)

    According to a letter dated Oct. 24, 2017, written by Matthew Gehringer, general counsel at Perkins Coie, the firm was approached by Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson in early March 2016 regarding the possibility of hiring Fusion GPS to continue opposition research into the Trump campaign. Simpson's overtures were successful, and in April 2016, Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the DNC.

    Sometime in April or May 2016, Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele. During this same period, Fusion also reportedly hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr. Steele would complete his first memo on June 20, 2016, and send it to Fusion via enciphered mail.

    Perkins Coie appears to have also been acting as a conduit between the DNC and the FBI. Documents suggest that Sussmann was feeding information to FBI general counsel James Baker and at least one journalist ahead of the FBI's application for a FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.

    The information provided by Sussmann may have been used by the FBI as "corroborating information."

    Obama Administration

    The Obama administration provided a simultaneous layer of protection and facilitation for the entire effort. One example is provided by Section 2.3 of Executive Order 12333 , also known as Obama's data-sharing order . With the passage of the order, agencies and individuals were able to ask the NSA for access to specific surveillance simply by claiming the intercepts contained relevant information that was useful to a particular mission.

    Section 2.3 had been expected to be finalized by early to mid-2016. Instead, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn't sign off on Section 2.3 until Dec. 15, 2016. The order was finalized when Attorney General Loretta Lynch signed it on Jan. 3, 2017.

    The reason for the delay could relate to the fact that while the executive order made it easier to share intelligence between agencies, it also limited certain types of information from going to the White House.

    An example of this was provided by Evelyn Farkas during a March 2, 2017, MSNBC interview , where she detailed how the Obama administration gathered and disseminated intelligence on the Trump team:

    "I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill 'Get as much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.'

    "The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, [they] would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. That's why you have the leaking."

    Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia Evelyn Farkas on May 6, 2014. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

    Many of the Obama administration's efforts appear to have been structural in nature, such as establishing new procedures or creating impediments to oversight that enabled much of the surveillance abuse to occur.

    DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz was appointed by Obama in 2011. From the very start, he found his duties throttled by the attorney general's office. According to congressional testimony by Horowitz:

    "We got access to information up to 2010 in all of these categories. No law changed in 2010. No policy changed. It was simply a decision by the General Counsel's Office in 2010 that they viewed, now, the law differently. And as a result, they weren't going to give us that information."

    These new restrictions were put in place by Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole.

    On Aug. 5, 2014, Horowitz and other inspectors general sent a letter to Congress asking for unimpeded access to all records. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates responded on July 20, 2015, with a 58-page memorandum . The memo specifically denied the inspector general access to any information collected under Title III -- including intercepted communications and national security letters.

    The New York Times recently disclosed that national security letters were used in the surveillance of the Trump campaign.

    At other times, the Obama administration's efforts were more direct. The Intelligence Community assessment was released internally on Jan. 5, 2017. On this same day, Obama held an undisclosed White House meeting to discuss the dossier with national security adviser Susan Rice, FBI Director James Comey, and Yates. Rice would later send herself an email documenting the meeting.

    The following day, Brennan, Clapper, and Comey attached a written summary of the Steele dossier to the classified briefing they gave Obama. Comey then met with President-elect Trump to inform him of the dossier. This meeting took place just hours after Comey, Brennan, and Clapper formally briefed Obama on both the Intelligence Community assessment and the Steele dossier.

    Comey would only inform Trump of the "salacious" details contained within the dossier. He later explained on CNN in an April 2018 interview why:

    "Because that was the part that the leaders of the Intelligence Community agreed he needed to be told about."

    Shortly after Comey's meeting with Trump, both the Trump–Comey meeting and the existence of the dossier were leaked to CNN. The significance of the meeting was material, as Comey noted in a Jan. 7 memo he wrote:

    "Media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material."

    Clapper leaked information to CNN, after which he publicly condemned the leaks. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

    The media had widely dismissed the dossier as unsubstantiated and, therefore, unreportable. It was only after learning that Comey briefed Trump that CNN reported on the dossier. It was later revealed that DNI James Clapper personally leaked Comey's meeting with Trump to CNN.

    The Obama administration also directly participated in a series of intelligence unmaskings , the process whereby a U.S. citizen's identity is revealed from collected surveillance. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power reportedly engaged in hundreds of unmasking requests. Rice has admitted to doing the same.

    The Obama administration engaged in the ultimately successful effort to oust Trump's newly appointed national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn. Yates, along with Mary McCord, head of the DOJ's National Security Division, led that effort .

    Executive Order 13762

    President Barack Obama issued a last-minute executive order on Jan. 13, 2017, that altered the line of succession within the DOJ. The action was not done in consultation with the incoming Trump administration.

    Acting Attorney General Sally Yates was fired on Jan. 30, 2017, by a newly inaugurated President Trump for refusing to uphold the president's executive order limiting travel from certain terror-prone countries. Yates was initially supposed to serve in her position until Jeff Sessions was confirmed as attorney general.

    Obama's executive order placed the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia next in line behind the department's senior leadership. The attorney at the time was Channing Phillips.

    Phillips was first hired by former Attorney General Eric Holder in 1994 for a position in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office. Phillips, after serving as a senior adviser to Holder, stayed on after he was replaced by Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

    It appears the Obama administration was hoping the Russia investigation would default to Channing in the event Sessions was forced to recuse himself from the investigation. Sessions, whose confirmation hearings began three days before the order, was already coming under intense scrutiny.

    The implementation of the order may also tie into Yates's efforts to remove Gen. Michael Flynn over his call with the Russian ambassador.

    Trump ignored the succession order, as he is legally allowed to do, and instead appointed Dana Boente, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, as acting attorney general on Jan. 30, 2017, the same day Yates was fired.

    Trump issued a new executive order on Feb. 9, 2017, the same day Sessions was sworn in, reversing Obama's prior order.

    On March 10, 2017, Trump fired 46 Obama-era U.S. attorneys, including Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. These firings appear to have been unexpected.

    Media

    In some respects, the media has played the most disingenuous of roles. Areas of investigation that historically would have proven irresistible to reporters of the past have been steadfastly ignored. False narratives have been all-too-willingly promoted and facts ignored. Fusion GPS personally made a series of payments to several as-of-yet- unnamed reporters .

    The majority of the mainstream media has represented positions of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

    Steele met with members of certain media with relative frequency. In September 2016 , he met with a number of U.S. journalists for "The New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker and CNN," according to The Guardian. It was during this period that Steele met with Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News.

    In mid-October 2016, Steele returned to New York and met with reporters again. Toward the end of October, Steele spoke via Skype with Mother Jones reporter David Corn.

    Leaking, including felony leaking of classified information, has been widespread. The Carter Page FISA warrant -- likely the unredacted version -- has been in the possession of The Washington Post and The New York Times since March 2017. Traditionally, the intelligence community leaked to The Washington Post while the DOJ leaked to sources within The New York Times. This was a historical pattern that stood until this election. The leaking became so widespread, even this tradition was broken.

    On April 3, 2017, BuzzFeed reporter Ali Watkins wrote the article " A Former Trump Adviser Met With a Russian Spy ." In the article, she identified "Male-1," referred to in court documents relating to the case of Russian spy Evgeny Buryakov, as Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who had provided the FBI with assistance in the case. Just over a week later, on April 11, 2017, a Washington Post article, " FBI Obtained FISA Warrant to Monitor Former Trump Adviser Carter Page ," confirmed the existence of the October 2016 Page FISA warrant.

    The information contained within both articles likely came via felony leaks from James Wolfe, former director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who was arrested on June 7, 2018, and charged with one count of lying to the FBI. Wolfe's indictment alleges that he was leaking classified information to multiple reporters over an extended period of time.

    Reporter Ali Watkins likely received the undredacted FISA application on Carter Page from James Wolfe.
    It appears probable that Wolfe leaked unredacted copies of the Page FISA application. According to the indictment , Wolfe exchanged 82 text messages with Watkins on March 17, 2017. That same evening they engaged in a 28-minute phone call. The original Page FISA application is 83 pages long, including one final signatory page.

    In the public version of the application, there are 37 fully redacted pages. In addition to that, several other pages have redactions for all but the header. There are only two pages in the entire document that contain no redactions.

    Why would Wolfe bother to send 37 pages of complete redactions? It seems more than plausible that Wolfe took pictures of the original unredacted FISA application and sent them by text to Watkins.

    House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has repeatedly stated that evidence within the FISA application shows the counterintelligence agencies were abused by the Obama administration. Most of the mainstream media has known this.

    Despite this, most major news organizations for over two years have promoted the Russia-collusion narrative. Despite ample evidence having come out to the contrary, they have not admitted they were wrong, likely because doing so would mean they would have to admit their complicity.

    Foreign Intelligence

    UK and Australian intelligence agencies also played meaningful roles during the 2016 presidential election.

    Britain's GCHQ was involved in collecting information regarding then-candidate Trump and transmitting it to the United States. In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, the head of GCHQ, flew from London to meet personally with then-CIA Director John Brennan, The Guardian reported.

    Former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan in this file photo. Hannigan transmitted information regarding Donald Trump to John Brennan in the summer of 2016. (Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images)

    Hannigan's meeting was noteworthy because Brennan wasn't Hannigan's counterpart. That position belonged to NSA Director Mike Rogers. In the following year, Hannigan abruptly announced his retirement on Jan. 23, 2017 -- three days after Trump's inauguration.

    As GCHQ was gathering intelligence, low-level Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos appears to have been targeted after a series of highly coincidental meetings. Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, FBI informant Stefan Halper, and officials from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) all crossed paths with Papadopoulos -- some repeatedly so.

    Christopher Steele, who authored the dossier on Trump, was an MI6 agent while the agency was headed by Sir Richard Dearlove. Steele retains close ties with Dearlove.

    Dearlove has ties to most of the parties mentioned. It was he who advised Steele and his business partner, Chris Burrows, to work with a top British government official to pass along information to the FBI in the fall of 2016. He also was a speaker at the July 2016 Cambridge symposium that Halper invited Carter Page to attend.

    Dearlove knows Halper through their mutual association at the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. Dearlove also knows Sir Iain Lobban, a former head of GCHQ, who is an advisory board member at British strategic intelligence and advisory firm Hakluyt , which was founded by former MI6 members and retains close ties to UK intelligence services.

    Halper has historical connections to Hakluyt through Jonathan Clarke, with whom he has co-authored two books.

    Downer, who met Papadopoulos in a May 2016 meeting established through a chain of two intermediaries, served on the advisory board of Hakluyt from 2008 to 2014. He reportedly still maintains contact with Hakluyt officials. Information from his meeting with Papadopoulos was later used by the FBI to establish the bureau's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. Downer has changed his version of events multiple times.

    The Steele dossier was fed into U.S. channels through several different sources. One such source was Sir Andrew Wood, the former British ambassador to Russia, who had been briefed about the dossier by Steele. Wood later relayed information regarding the dossier to Sen. John McCain, who dispatched David Kramer, a fellow at the McCain Institute, to London to meet with Steele in November 2016. McCain would later admit in a Jan. 11, 2017, statement that he had personally passed on the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey.

    Trump, after issuing an order for the declassification of documents and text messages related to the Russia-collusion investigations -- including parts of the Carter Page FISA warrant application -- received phone calls from two U.S. allies saying, "Please, can we talk." Those "allies" were almost certainly the UK and Australia.

    In a Twitter post , Trump wrote that the "key Allies called to ask not to release" the documents.

    Questions to be asked are why is it that two of our allies would find themselves so opposed to the release of these classified documents that a coordinated plea would be made directly to the president? And why would these same allies have even the slightest idea of what was contained in these classified U.S. documents?

    Britain and Australia appear to know full well what those documents contain, and their attempt to prevent their public release appears to be because they don't want their role in events surrounding the 2016 presidential election to be made public.

    Fusion GPS/Orbis/Christopher Steele

    Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is co-founder of Fusion GPS, along with Peter Fritsch and Tom Catan. Fusion was hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign through law firm Perkins Coie to produce and disseminate the Steele dossier used against Trump. The dossier would later be the primary evidence used to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page on Oct. 21, 2016.

    The company was hired by the Clinton campaign and the DNC–through law firm Perkins Coie–to produce the dossier on Trump.

    Christopher Steele, who retains close ties to UK intelligence, worked for MI6 from 1987 until his retirement in 2009, when he and his partner, Chris Burrows, founded Orbis Intelligence. Steele maintains contact with British intelligence, Sir Richard Dearlove , and UK intelligence firm Hakluyt.

    Steele appears to have been represented by lawyer Adam Waldman, who also represented Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. We know this from texts sent by Waldman. On April 10, 2017, Waldman sent this to Sen. Mark Warner:

    "Hi. Steele: would like to get a bi partisan letter from the committee; Assange: I convinced him to make serious and important concessions and am discussing those w DOJ; Deripaska: willing to testify to congress but interested in state of play w Manafort. I will be with him next tuesday for a week."

    Steele also appears to have lobbied on behalf of Deripaska, who was discussed in emails between Bruce Ohr and Steele that were recently disclosed by the Washington Examiner:

    "Steele said he was 'circulating some recent sensitive Orbis reporting' on Deripaska that suggested Deripaska was not a 'tool' of the Kremlin. Steele said he would send the reporting to a name that is redacted in the email."

    Fusion GPS was also employed by Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in a previous case. Veselnitskaya was involved in litigation pitting Russian firm Prevezon Holdings against British-American financier William Browder. Veselnitskaya hired U.S. law firm BakerHostetler, who, in turn, hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Browder. Veselnitskaya was one of the participants at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, at which she discussed the Magnitsky Act .

    Fox News reported on Nov. 9, 2017, that Simpson met with Veselnitskaya immediately before and after the Trump Tower meeting.

    A declassified top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report released on April 26, 2017, revealed that government agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and NSA, had improperly accessed Americans' communications. The FBI specifically provided outside contractors with access to raw surveillance data on American citizens without proper oversight.

    Communications and other data of members of the Trump campaign may have been accessed in this way.


    Nellie Ohr, the wife of high-ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr, was hired by Fusion GPS to work on the dossier on Trump.

    Bruce and Nellie Ohr have known Simpson since at least 2010 and have known Steele since at least 2006. The Ohrs and Simpson worked together on a DOJ report in 2010 . In that report, Nellie Ohr's biography lists her as working for Open Source Works, which is part of the CIA. Simpson met with Bruce Ohr before and after the 2016 election.

    Bruce Ohr had been in contact repeatedly with Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign -- while Steele was constructing his dossier. Ohr later actively shared information he received from Steele with the FBI, after the agency had terminated Steele as a source. Interactions between Ohr and Steele stretched for months into the first year of Trump's presidency and were documented in a number of FD-302s -- memos that summarize interviews with him by the FBI.

    Spy Traps

    In an effort to put forth evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, it appears that several different spy traps were set, with varying degrees of success. Many of these efforts appear to center around Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and involve London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, who has ties to Western intelligence, particularly in the UK.

    Papadopoulos and Mifsud both worked at the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP). Mifsud appears to have joined LCILP around November 2015 . Papadopoulos reportedly joined LCILP sometime in late February 2016 after leaving Ben Carson's presidential campaign. However, some reports indicate Papadopoulos joined LCILP in November or December of 2015. Mifsud and Papadopoulos reportedly never crossed paths until March 14, 2016, in Italy.

    Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to several Russians, including Olga Polonskaya, whom Mifsud introduced as "Putin's niece," and Ivan Timofeev, an official at a state-sponsored think tank called the Russian International Affairs Council. Both Papadopoulos and Mifsud were interviewed by the FBI. Papadopoulos was ultimately charged with a process crime and was recently sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying to the FBI. Mifsud was never charged by the FBI.

    Throughout this period, Papadopoulos continuously pushed for meetings between Trump campaign officials and Russian contacts but was ultimately unsuccessful in establishing any meetings.

    Papadopoulos met with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer on May 10, 2016. The Papadopoulos–Downer meeting has been portrayed as a chance encounter in a bar. That does not appear to be the case.

    Papadopoulos was introduced to Downer through a chain of two intermediaries who said Downer wanted to meet with Papadopoulos. Another individual happened to be in London at exactly the same time: the FBI's head of counterintelligence, Bill Priestap. The purpose of Priestap's visit remains unknown.

    The Papadopoulos–Downer meeting was later used to establish the FBI's counterintelligence investigation into Trump–Russia collusion. It was repeatedly reported that Papadopoulos told Downer that Russia had Hillary Clinton's emails. This is incorrect.

    Foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign was approached by several individuals with ties to UK and U.S. intelligence agencies. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

    According to Downer, Papadopoulos at some point mentioned the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

    "During that conversation, he [Papadopoulos] mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging,'' Downer told The Australian about the Papadopoulos meeting in an April 2018 article. "He didn't say dirt, he said material that could be damaging to her. No, he said it would be damaging. He didn't say what it was."

    Downer, while serving as Australia's foreign minister, was responsible for one of the largest foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation: $25 million from the Australian government.

    Unconfirmed media reports, including a Jan. 12, 2017, BBC article , have suggested that the FBI attempted to obtain two FISA warrants in June and July 2016 that were denied by the FISA court. It's likely that Papadopoulos was an intended target of these failed FISAs.

    Interestingly, there is no mention of Papadopoulos in the Steele dossier. Paul Manafort, Carter Page, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Gen. Michael Flynn, and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski are all listed in the Steele dossier.

    Papadopoulos may have started out assisting the FBI or CIA and later discovered that he was being set up for surveillance himself.

    After failing to obtain a spy warrant on the Trump campaign using Papadopoulos, the FBI set its sights on campaign volunteer Carter Page. By this time, the counterintelligence investigation was in the process of being established, and we know now that it was formalized with no official intelligence. The FBI needed some sort of legal cover. They needed a retroactive warrant. And they got one on Oct. 21, 2016. The Page FISA warrant would be renewed three times and remain in force until September 2017.

    Stefan Halper met with Page for the first time on July 11, 2016, at a Cambridge symposium , just three days after Page's July 2016 Moscow trip. As noted previously, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove was a speaker at the symposium. Halper and Dearlove have known each other for years and maintain several mutual associations.

    Page was already known to the FBI. The Page FISA warrant application references the Buryakov spy case and an FBI interview with Page. Current information suggests there was only one meeting between Page and the FBI in 2016. It happened on March 2, 2016. It was in relation to Victor Podobnyy, who was named in the Buryakov case.

    Page, who cooperated with the FBI on the case, almost certainly was providing testimony or details against Podobnyy. Page had been contacted by Podobnyy in 2013 and had previously provided information to the FBI. Buryakov pleaded guilty on March 11, 2016 -- nine days after Page met with the FBI on the case -- and was sentenced to 30 months in prison on May 25, 2016. On April 5, 2017, Buryakov was granted early release and was deported to Russia.

    FBI informant Stefan Halper approached Trump campaign advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.

    House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said in August that exculpatory evidence on Page exists that wasn't included by the DOJ and the FBI in the FISA application and subsequent renewals. The exculpatory evidence likely relates specifically to Page's role in the Buryakov case.

    If the FBI failed to disclose Page's cooperation with the bureau or materially misrepresented his involvement in its application to the FISA Court, it means that the FBI's Woods procedures, which govern FISA applications, were violated.

    Page has not been arrested or charged with any crime related to the investigation.

    FISA Abuse

    Admiral Mike Rogers, while director of the NSA, was personally responsible for uncovering an unprecedented level of FISA abuse that would later be documented in a 99-page unsealed FISA court ruling . As the FISA court noted in the April 26, 2017, ruling, the abuses had been occurring since at least November 2015:

    "The FBI had disclosed raw FISA information, including but not limited to Section 702-acquired information, to private contractors.

    "Private contractors had access to raw FISA information on FBI storage systems.

    "Contractors had access to raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI's requests."

    The FISA Court report is particularly focused on the FBI:

    "The Court is concerned about the FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported."

    The FISA Court disclosed that illegal NSA database searches were endemic. Private contractors, employed by the FBI, were given full access to the NSA database. Once in the contractors' possession, the data couldn't be traced.

    In April 2016, after Rogers became aware of improper contractor access to raw FISA data on March 9, 2016, he directed the NSA's Office of Compliance to conduct a "fundamental baseline review of compliance associated with 702."

    On April 18, 2016, Rogers shut down all outside contractor access to raw FISA information -- specifically outside contractors working for the FBI.

    Then-NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers on May 23, 2017. Rogers uncovered widespread abuse of FISA data by the FBI. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

    DOJ National Security Division (NSD) head John Carlin filed the government's proposed 2016 Section 702 certifications on Sept. 26, 2016. Carlin knew the general status of compliance review by Rogers. The NSD was part of the review. Carlin failed to disclose a critical Jan. 7, 2016, report by the Office of the Inspector General and associated FISA abuse to the FISA Court in his 2016 certification. Carlin also failed to disclose Rogers's ongoing Section 702 compliance review.

    The following day, on Sept. 27, 2016, Carlin announced his resignation, effective Oct. 15, 2016.

    After receiving a briefing by the NSA compliance officer on Oct. 20, 2016, detailing numerous "about query" violations from the 702 NSA compliance audit, Rogers shut down all "about query" activity the next day and reported his findings to the DOJ. "About queries" are searches based on communications containing a reference "about" a surveillance target but that are not "to" or "from" the target.

    On Oct. 21, 2016, the DOJ and the FBI sought and received a Title I FISA probable-cause order authorizing electronic surveillance on Carter Page from the FISA Court.

    At this point, the FISA Court was still unaware of the Section 702 violations.

    On Oct. 24, 2016, Rogers verbally informed the FISA Court of his findings. On Oct. 26, 2016, Rogers appeared formally before the FISA Court and presented the written findings of his audit.

    The FISA Court had been unaware of the query violations until they were presented to the court by Rogers.

    Carlin didn't disclose his knowledge of FISA abuse in the annual Section 702 certifications in order to avoid raising suspicions at the FISA Court ahead of receiving the Page FISA warrant.

    The FBI and the NSD were literally racing against Rogers's investigation in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.

    While all this was transpiring, DNI James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter submitted a recommendation that Rogers be removed from his post as NSA director.

    The move to fire Rogers, which ultimately failed, originated sometime in mid-October 2016 -- exactly when Rogers was preparing to present his findings to the FISA Court.

    The Insurance Policy

    Ever since the release of FBI text messages revealing the existence of an "insurance policy," the term has been the subject of wide speculation.

    Some observers have suggested that the insurance policy was the FISA spy warrant used to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and, by extension, other members of the Trump campaign. This interpretation is too narrow and fails to capture the underlying meaning of the text.

    The insurance policy was the actual process of establishing the Trump–Russia collusion narrative.

    It encompassed actions undertaken in late 2016 and early 2017, including the leaking of the Steele dossier and James Clapper's leaks of James Comey's briefing to President Trump. The intent behind these actions was simple. The legitimization of the investigation into the Trump campaign.

    The strategy involved the recusal of Trump officials with the intent that Andrew McCabe would end up running the investigation.

    The Steele dossier, which was paid for by the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the foundation for the Russia narrative.

    The intelligence community, led by CIA Director John Brennan and DNI James Clapper, used the dossier as a launching pad for creating their Intelligence Community assessment.

    This report, which was presented to Obama in December 2016, despite NSA Director Mike Rogers having only moderate confidence in its assessment, became one of the core pieces of the narrative that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections.

    Through intelligence community leaks, and in collusion with willing media outlets, the narrative that Russia helped Trump win the elections was aggressively pushed throughout 2017.

    Spygate

    Spygate represents the biggest political scandal in our nation's history. A sitting administration actively colluded with a political campaign to affect the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Government agencies were weaponized and a complicit media spread intelligence community leaks as facts.

    But a larger question remains: How long has the United States been subject to interference from the intelligence community and our political agencies? Was the 2016 presidential election a one-time aberration, or is this episode symptomatic of a larger pattern extending back decades?

    The intensity, scale, and coordination suggest something greater than overzealous actions taken during a single election. They represent a unified reaction of the establishment to a threat posed by a true outsider -- a reaction that has come to be known as Spygate.

    Jeff Carlson is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. He also runs the website TheMarketsWork.com and can be followed on Twitter @themarketswork.

    [Mar 25, 2019] Another SIGINT compromise ...

    Highly recommended!
    In Ber 2018 Kusher security clearance wasdongraded.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner to their advantage were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico, the current and former officials said. ..."
    "... Kushner's interim security clearance was downgraded last week from the top-secret to the secret level, which should restrict the regular access he has had to highly classified information, according to administration officials. Washpost ..."
    Feb 28, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    " Officials in at least four countries have privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties and lack of foreign policy experience, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with intelligence reports on the matter.

    Among those nations discussing ways to influence Kushner to their advantage were the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel and Mexico, the current and former officials said.

    It is unclear if any of those countries acted on the discussions, but Kushner's contacts with certain foreign government officials have raised concerns inside the White House and are a reason he has been unable to obtain a permanent security clearance, the officials said.

    Kushner's interim security clearance was downgraded last week from the top-secret to the secret level, which should restrict the regular access he has had to highly classified information, according to administration officials. Washpost

    ------------------

    Most people will probably be struck by the fall from grace of Kushner and other WH staff dilettantes. I am not terribly interested in that. What strikes me is that this is the third major compromise of US SIGINT products in the last year. The first was the felonious disclosure to the press of US intelligence penetration of Russian diplomatic communications. the second was the disclosure to the press of penetration of GRU communications. In this one the oral or written discussions among the officials of several foreign countries are revealed. These conversations were probably encrypted.

    Is Jeff Sessions still alive? Why are there no prosecutions for these felonies? pl

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/kushners-overseas-contacts-raise-concerns-as-foreign-officials-seek-leverage/2018/02/27/16bbc052-18c3-11e8-942d-16a950029788_story.html?utm_term=.e3639623e918

    [Mar 25, 2019] Crocodile tears: M>adCow crying for indictments after setting up public hostility to Russia for a decade or more.

    Doubling down is just stupid. And that war pig Rachel Maddow lost 500k viewers. That's why she cries. she sries about lst money.
    She does not cry about deceived and brainwashed public, which was subjected to unprecedented Neo-McCarthyism complagn for more then a year.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments ..."
    "... Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something." ..."
    "... "Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted radio host Mark Simone. ..."
    "... "This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson. ..."
    "... "#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history," quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods. ..."
    "... "So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr. ..."
    "... Later on Saturday, Maddow mocked the suggestion that she was watery-eyed and might have held back tears. ..."
    Mar 25, 2019 | www.rt.com

    Crying for indictments? Maddow 'holds backs tears' as she discusses end of Mueller probe (VIDEO)

    The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments.

    Rachel Maddow ( @maddow ) is literally crying 😂😂😂 #LiberalismIsAMentalDisease #MuellerReport pic.twitter.com/hNZThQlREv

    -- Conservative Millennial (@deeg25) March 23, 2019

    According to the Daily Caller, Maddow came close to crying as she commented on the Russiagate-deflating development. Many on Twitter insisted that she actually shed tears. A clip of the broadcast shows a watery-eyed Maddow seemingly grappling with the reality that Donald Trump and his family will not be frog-marched out of the White House.

    Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something."

    The internet laughed and laughed.

    "Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted radio host Mark Simone.

    Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up.

    -- MARK SIMONE (@MarkSimoneNY) March 23, 2019

    "This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson.

    This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow https://t.co/4bkBUEwx8y

    -- Emerald Robinson (@EmeraldRobinson) March 23, 2019

    "#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history," quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods.

    "What's going on with Maddow? Has she been hospitalized? Sedated?" inquired journalist Michael Tracey.

    Others expressed exasperation at Maddow's refusal to face the music, accusing the MSNBC host of ignoring real, pressing issues as she leads her Russiagate crusade.

    "So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr.

    So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate ?
    For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia
    What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?

    -- Dennis Trainor Jr (@dennistrainorjr) March 23, 2019

    Later on Saturday, Maddow mocked the suggestion that she was watery-eyed and might have held back tears.

    LOL -- the Russia Today and conservative media news this morning that I **wept** -- I cried and cried -- through the show last night. LOLololol.

    -- Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 23, 2019

    [Mar 25, 2019] Crocodile tears: M>adCow crying for indictments after setting up public hostility to Russia for a decade or more.

    Doubling down is just stupid. And that war pig Rachel Maddow lost 500k viewers. That's why she cries. she sries about lst money.
    She does not cry about deceived and brainwashed public, which was subjected to unprecedented Neo-McCarthyism complagn for more then a year.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments ..."
    "... Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something." ..."
    "... "Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted radio host Mark Simone. ..."
    "... "This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson. ..."
    "... "#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history," quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods. ..."
    "... "So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr. ..."
    "... Later on Saturday, Maddow mocked the suggestion that she was watery-eyed and might have held back tears. ..."
    Mar 25, 2019 | www.rt.com

    Crying for indictments? Maddow 'holds backs tears' as she discusses end of Mueller probe (VIDEO)

    The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments.

    Rachel Maddow ( @maddow ) is literally crying 😂😂😂 #LiberalismIsAMentalDisease #MuellerReport pic.twitter.com/hNZThQlREv

    -- Conservative Millennial (@deeg25) March 23, 2019

    According to the Daily Caller, Maddow came close to crying as she commented on the Russiagate-deflating development. Many on Twitter insisted that she actually shed tears. A clip of the broadcast shows a watery-eyed Maddow seemingly grappling with the reality that Donald Trump and his family will not be frog-marched out of the White House.

    Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something."

    The internet laughed and laughed.

    "Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted radio host Mark Simone.

    Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up.

    -- MARK SIMONE (@MarkSimoneNY) March 23, 2019

    "This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson.

    This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow https://t.co/4bkBUEwx8y

    -- Emerald Robinson (@EmeraldRobinson) March 23, 2019

    "#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history," quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods.

    "What's going on with Maddow? Has she been hospitalized? Sedated?" inquired journalist Michael Tracey.

    Others expressed exasperation at Maddow's refusal to face the music, accusing the MSNBC host of ignoring real, pressing issues as she leads her Russiagate crusade.

    "So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr.

    So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate ?
    For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia
    What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?

    -- Dennis Trainor Jr (@dennistrainorjr) March 23, 2019

    Later on Saturday, Maddow mocked the suggestion that she was watery-eyed and might have held back tears.

    LOL -- the Russia Today and conservative media news this morning that I **wept** -- I cried and cried -- through the show last night. LOLololol.

    -- Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) March 23, 2019

    [Mar 25, 2019] The Narrative Is Dead! Long Live The Narrative!

    Mar 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    What actually happened with RussiaGate? A cabal of government officials colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign to interfere in the 2016 election and, failing to achieve their desired outcome, engineered a two-years-plus formal inquisition to deflect attention from their own misconduct and attempt to overthrow the election result.

    The Cable News characters, quite a few of them lawyers, were litigating the living shit out of the story on Sunday night in their usual spirit of obdurate rank dishonesty. For instance, Jeffrey Toobin, who plays Attorney General on CNN, went off on the infamous 2016 Trump Tower Meeting in which the president's son, Donald, Jr., met with Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya. Toobin omitted to mention that Ms. Veselnitskaya was, at that very time, on the payroll of Fusion GPS, Hillary Clinton's "oppo" research contractor. In other words, Trump Junior was set up.

    That was characteristic of the collusion that actually occurred between the Hillary campaign, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, the UK's MI6 intel agency, and the Obama White House, striving to prevent the election of a TV reality show star, and to disable him afterwards -- also of the news media's role in the whole interminable scam of RussiaGate. Their fury and despair were as vivid the night of March 24, 2019, as on November 8, 2016. And now they will attempt to spark off a sequel.

    Rachel Maddow, for instance, struggling to maintain her dignity after two years playing Madame DeFarge on MSNBC, tried to console her fans with the prospect of Mr. Trump getting raked over the coals by the DOJ's Southern District of NY prosecutors for crimes as yet unpredicted -- really, whatever they might find if they turn over enough rocks in Manhattan. Perhaps she doesn't know how the justice system actually works in this country: we prosecute crimes not persons. In places like Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany, you first choose a person to eliminate and then fit them to a crime. If no crime can be found, one is easily manufactured. In the USA, a predicate crime is required before you can launch a prosecution. Perhaps the actual Attorney General, Mr. Barr, will advise the avid staff of the Southern District of NY how this works.

    There remains also, the rather sweeping panorama of misconduct and probable crime among the government (and former government) players in the agencies mentioned above. Does the full Mueller Report mention, for instance, that the animating document claiming that Trump colluded with Russia was manufactured by Mrs. Clinton's employees? And that this document was used time and again improperly and illegally to prolong the inquisition? How could Mr. Mueller not acknowledge that? And if not, what sort of investigation was this?

    You are forced to ask: did Mr. Mueller play an honorable role in this epic, multilayered scandal? And is Mr. Mueller himself an honorable character, or something less than that? I believe we'll find out. The other team is coming to bat now -- and just in time for MLB's opening day, too. The Mueller report has been a shocking disappointment to the so-called "resistance," but what about the as-yet-unreleased DOJ Inspector General's report on these very matters ? Or the parallel investigation of federal prosecutor John Huber, who is charged specifically with looking into the malfeasance of the RussiaGate investigators? Or whatever action the Attorney General himself launches in the wake of all this? Or whether Mr. Trump finally declassifies the mountains of documents behind the simple failure to find him guilty of any crime? My favorite college professor and mentor, David Hamilton, once put a curious question to us when we were vexing him for some reason now forgotten: "Why," he asked, "Did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times?"

    We twiddled our cigarettes and pulled our chins.

    "Because he was just that pissed," he said.

    Groundround , 1 minute ago link

    So, If they would trample Trump's constitutional rights by abusing this bogus fisa warrant system, shouldn't we assume they are 10 times as likely to abuse it to spy on average americans, who have no chance of protecting themselves from the police state they have built since 9-11? Revoke the patriot act. It is unconstitutional anyway, though Trump rewarded the man who helped write it with the Supreme court position. We have a small window to claw back the rights they stripped from us. If we don't do it now, when these programs are called into question, these deep state turds will do whatever they can to consolidate their hold on the US. I'm not too hopeful, myself. Seeing the blatant piracy they are attempting in Venezuela, even after the failures in Iraq and Syria, doesn't do much to console me as to America's future. My relatives came here from England and Germany with little more than the clothes on their backs. It may be time to look for greener pastures if we are going to be a proxy of Israel, and a deep state, stripped of our inherent rights bit by bit until we aren't allowed to leave.

    ComeAndTakeIt , 55 minutes ago link

    These shitbags attempted a coup and failed.

    Now they're either in complete denial that the coup failed, or are arrogantly attempting to continue it by other means.

    I don't think there's a historical precedent anywhere in the world for this level of ridiculous.

    VonSteever , 1 hour ago link

    The real scandal here is two fold.

    First is the multipart crime committed by Hillary Clinton and her cabal of deep state co-conspirators to rig a primary, which they did against Bernie Sanders, then attempt to steal an election by using various intelligence connections in the FBI and CIA to dig up dirt on candidate Trump in the form of a fake Russia dossier, then petition the DOJ with only parts of it, to get a warrant to spy on him and ultimately discredit him. Then in the event he won, use that dossier to concoct a fake Trump/Russia collusion scandal in order to delegitimize and hopefully reverse the Trump Presidential victory. This was treasonous and seditious to its core and those conspirators should be investigated as thoroughly as Mueller investigated Trump and all of his acquaintances.

    The second was the Mainstream media's part in all of this mess. They so eagerly bought into the false narrative and went out of their way, like good little bolsheviks, and disseminated unproven and unsubstantiated "fake news" that was fed to them each morning by democrat operatives and consultants, 24/7/365 . Every mainstream media reporter (and I use that term loosely), and every late night talk host on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, NY Times, Washington Post, and others, as well as every guest pundit opined without proof, and pounded the table to every lemming who would listen, that Trump had to be guilty and was in fact guilty because, well, they didn't like him. These reporters and pundits spread rumors, called him names such as racist and nazi, etc, etc, with no basis in fact, which was an historically new low, even for state based propaganda. (FOX news, to their credit, did not). This agenda driven media overstepped the boundaries of good reporting and journalistic ethical standards and set the news business back 250 years. What American journalists, reporters and pundits did in the name of the first amendment "free press" was a national and global disgrace.

    elctro static , 48 minutes ago link

    Well said. You forget to mention, as did the article, Mueller's seditious criminal past. Worst of all - Madcow and the rest of the MSM did a serious smear job on the Russian government, at a time of already heightened propaganda against a country that could reduce the USA to ashes. Also - there is the collusion of the UK government and the equally ridiculous Skripal affair.

    It is profoundly sad none of the ringleaders and real provocateurs will be prosecuted, and things will continue to deteriorate until there is a nuclear war. Because the entire system is rotten to the core and the citizens don't care about truth or justice.

    VonSteever , 35 minutes ago link

    Thanks for your additional comments. While I'm hopeful Hillary and her co-conspirators will be investigated, indicted, tried and found guilty of sedition and treason in breaking laws of at least 6 different acts, I don't believe Republicans have the spine or intestinal fortitude to make their case, even if they have proof beyond any reasonable doubt to the extent a first year law student could argue and win the case open and shut.

    Also, I do not believe, even for one Milli-second, that public verbal sparring of political leaders or their hyperbole in the midst of tough negotiations, will ever lead civilized nations of the world to a nuclear war. it is done purely for effect and political strategy in their home nations.

    That said, you are correct that the media's continuously negative anti-Trump, anti-America tone for two straight years, did not help trade negotiations or international relations, and in fact, put the US at a distinct disadvantage. It's a small wonder President Trump has achieved all the successes he has in spite of this. He deserves great credit.

    Fuster-cluck , 10 minutes ago link

    Since this will be military tribunals, there does not need to be much political spine. Just one order from, say, CINC...

    artistant , 1 hour ago link

    That's the ONLY THING Trump has to show for.

    Meanwhile,

    as America 's economy crumbles,

    Trump is busy giving Israhell stolen land

    and carte blanche to go on with CRIMES vs Humanity .

    M.A.G.A. is out

    K.A.K.A. is in (Keep America Kabalah Again)

    http://cufpa.wordpress.com/2018/01/07/trumps-jewish-agenda/

    duo , 1 hour ago link

    Mueller knew this was all lies and BS within weeks of taking the job and put on this charade for 2 YEARS and ruined the lives of innocent people. Mueller is not the good guy here at all.

    buzzsaw99 , 1 hour ago link

    That was characteristic of the collusion that actually occurred between the Hillary campaign, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, the UK's MI6 intel agency, and the Obama White House...

    awesome!

    fanbeav , 1 hour ago link

    After the IG report is released in April, we need to start real investigations. Congressional and Senate hearings are kabuki! President Trump needs to hire outside lawyers as a special counsel to get to the bottom of this treason! I don't trust anyone in DOJ to do that!

    Ribeye , 1 hour ago link

    It's on..Trump just made an extremely strong statement about "this must NEVER happen to ANY President EVER again" in response to a question from a journo..

    It's go time...the counterattack is live..

    Q just confirmed it..

    It's Hammer Time...

    fuglysheepleco , 1 hour ago link

    This implies they have any concept of decency or shame to begin with.

    They've been planning the SpecialCounsel-Russiagate to Congressional-Obstruction pivot since 2017... as continued albatross around Trump & MAGA's neck.

    Trump better get voter fraud under control to win 2020.

    [Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate is looking like this generation s WMD – a catastrophe for the reputation of the news media:

    Notable quotes:
    "... Is it even possible to have any sense of NUANCE to debating investigations of Trump & his "Russian connections"? It's actually possible to OPPOSE Cold War II with Russia and yet, still be suspicious of Trump's dealings with foreign powers–including Russia (how about all the MONEY LAUNDERING for Russian OLIGARCHS Trump's done by selling them real estate?) ..."
    "... But, REGARDLESS if "Russian interference" had ANY role in the 2016 Election, Donald Trump is being revealed as a CORRUPT LIAR who raises the WORST elements in American life: to quote a famous witness: he's a racist, a con man and a cheat. ..."
    "... The USA has become a theater state. Concrete achievements, concrete evidenve, do no matter. All that matters is theatrical statements, dramatic actions. ..."
    "... Of course, the US Empire is waning, its capacity to dominate gone, it will behave rather badly. However, if sufficient fervor may be stirred, the populace may yet embrace an end-times crusade and rally round the flag, once more, to deal with foul and evil Russia, with China thrown in, just for good measure. ..."
    Mar 25, 2019 | www.politifact.com

    There are two certainties we can rely upon as we await Mueller's final word, none a cause for relief.

    Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author, and lecturer. His most recent book is "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him @thefloutist. His web site is www.patricklawrence.us. Support his work via www.patreon.com/thefloutist .

    1. Jim Coyle March 24, 2019 at 20:59

      " The chance to rebuild mutually beneficial relations with Moscow has been damaged. "

      Why else was this narrative initiated by the Corporate Democrats? Expecting the person who lead the cover up of the crimes of 9/11 was great comedy, indeed.

    1. Tom March 24, 2019 at 16:39 Matt Taibbi

      Russiagate is looking like this generation's WMD – a catastrophe for the reputation of the news media:

      https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million

    1. Lydia Howell March 23, 2019 at 09:27

      Is it even possible to have any sense of NUANCE to debating investigations of Trump & his "Russian connections"? It's actually possible to OPPOSE Cold War II with Russia and yet, still be suspicious of Trump's dealings with foreign powers–including Russia (how about all the MONEY LAUNDERING for Russian OLIGARCHS Trump's done by selling them real estate?)

      How do any of the nay-sayers of investigating them feel about Trump's (seemly obvious) CORRUPTION of campaign & post-election trolling for Putin's permission to build his decades long dream of a TRUMP TOWER MOSCOW? or Son-In-Law-In-Charge-of-Middle-East-Peace Jared Kushner's attempts at "back channel" (NON-transparent) communications with Russian government? or Trump himself making sure there's NO RECORD of any of his one-0on-one conversations with Putin?

      At the very least, it appears thta Donald Trump has more interests in HIS MONEY than in U.S. foreign policy.

      That any progresisve/leftist could see Trump as a "peace activist" is a joke! He's had TWO YEARS to bring the troops home from Iraq & Afghanistan & the other 5 countries that President Obama started wars on & he hasn't done it. Trump has RAISED Pentagon budget & put people with ECONOMIC CONFLICTS OF INTEREST into his Cabinet–like the BOEING executive now as Sec. of Defense.

      I DISLIKE Hillary Clinton & did NOT vote for her–or Trump. I think there are MANY reasons she lost the election -- not the least of which is her long terrible record when it comes to EVERYONE–except the 1%.

      The rooted-in-PRESERVING-SLAVERY/Antiquated Electoral College was another reason. James Comey's announcements in both JULY & OCT. 106 didn't help -- nor did, what looks like Russian targeting of specific white working class Midwest voters.

      But, REGARDLESS if "Russian interference" had ANY role in the 2016 Election, Donald Trump is being revealed as a CORRUPT LIAR who raises the WORST elements in American life: to quote a famous witness: he's a racist, a con man and a cheat.

    2. nomad March 24, 2019 at 09:57 Lydia,

      If you had disconnected yourself from the 2 party system, what do you see?
      You will see one party, not two, that associates itself with the elites, not the regular voters.
      The regular voters are just pawn pieces on the political chess board that is played with or removed.
      I see a corrupt system that both parties belong to, and its members serve it for their own interests.
      If both parties were good, where are the business, military, educational, political, financial, legal, and medical reforms that apply to everyone?
      Why are most government politicians above the law?
      Why do executive-level government get executive healthcare while the majority of its citizens get
      less than this?
      Why is the U.S hated by some countries?
      Why is the U.S. government so corrupt? If you look at the corruption index, the U.S. is negatively trending downwards over time.
      https://www.transparency.org/cpi2018?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIlvH8gvOa4QIVZBh9Ch0usQonEAAYASAAEgIfj_D_BwE
      Why does the U.S. still have so much debt from the past, the present, and going towards the future?
      http://www.usdebtclock.org/

      For our government system, it does not make a difference who is in charge after this president and its congress.

      If you had watched the movie Matrix, don't be a battery.

    3. William March 22, 2019 at 17:47

      Mueller's failure to interview the absolutely vital witnesses is obvious to those who have kept up with related events and information since the beginning. This, however, amounts to such an extremely small number that it is fairly obvious that the truth about "Russia Gate" will be as quickly forgotten as the Bush administrations lying us into war with Iraq.

    4. Bob In Portland March 22, 2019 at 15:15 This: https://caucus99percent.com/content/what-mueller-wont-find

      5. Dave churbuck March 22, 2019 at 13:10 The corrup people that are and will continue to do the never ending investigations make a lot of money.
      By do the investigations they protect the guilty which are the investigators themselves.
      They also insure that the Clinton Cartel will never get caught . Think about that. Reply

    5. O Society March 22, 2019 at 11:51 Did you see James Comey let the public down gently and try to quell the riots ahead of time with the seal of his authenticity?

      http://opensociet.org/2019/03/22/james-comey-what-i-want-from-the-mueller-report/

    6. Zhu March 22, 2019 at 01:02

      The USA has become a theater state. Concrete achievements, concrete evidenve, do no matter. All that matters is theatrical statements, dramatic actions.

      O Society March 21, 2019 at 13:07 Truth is Donald Trump is a tool. Like a weedeater or a vacuum, except in reverse. His job is to make a mess like a chaos snowmachine. Crap all over the Oval Office, the military, and any coherent notion of policy and government as being for good of the people.

      With Russia (and all other simmering wars), Trump does whatever the neoconservatives tell him to do because he has no foreign policy or ideology of his own. Don't overthink it. There's no 4D chess going on here, just pissing on things, marking his territory.

      In fact, Trump has no economic, domestic, or foreign ideology other than "Me." Therefore, any benefit to anyone not named "Me" which may come from anything he does is coincidental. Collateral damage, so to speak. Inadvertent to the hoisting of the Great Leader's social status.

      Trump is against blacks because he is white. He is against women because he's a man. He's against the regular people because he's an oligarch. Simple.

      http://opensociet.org/2019/03/21/the-american-emperor-has-no-clothes

        • DH Fabian March 22, 2019 at 01:01 Agree, and take a look at what Trump did. He reinforced economic sanctions against Russia, increased US "meddling" in Ukraine, increased US/NATO troops near the Russian border, and we've been subjected to two years of anti-Russian propaganda. And yes, Trump is about Trump. Period. Reply
        • Eddie March 24, 2019 at 12:05 Yes O'S, as I've noted a number of times before, the 'Occam's razor' POV here (which I and some others subscribed to) is that Trump basically ran for office as a PR event, to help his always shady/chronically financially troubled scam empire by getting name recognition to help fool potential investors. His stated political views were by and large entirely opportunistic and irrelevant -- - for instance, he supposedly used to be a liberal Democratic supporter who reportedly supported abortion rights and advocated for Hillary Clinton. Trump was more stunned than elated when he won on election night (you could almost see him thinking 'Oh crap, NOW I might actually have to do some WORK, and it'll be in the public eye, where I can't con people as easily as I do investors'), and his wife reportedly cried, but not tears of joy. To impute any serious political policies to the man is to vastly exaggerate his interest in politics. He never previously held any elected office, which tells us a lot. Reply
      2. Gary March 21, 2019 at 08:11 It is clear the author & responders do not understand geo-politics. As US imperialism continues its hegemonic actions, like the expansion of NATO, it is clear the Russians need to foil this aggression. How do they do it short of nuclear war? They need to disrupt bourgeois democracy in order to maintain & spread real democracy, i.e., socialist democracy. It doesn't matter that the October Revolution was destroyed which Putin said recently is the worst thing that happened in the 20th century. There is still a desire to reestablish socialism. In addition the US doesn't want that nor will it tolerate a powerful capitalist Russia. Writers at Consortium don't seem to understand this facet of geo-politics. Why? Because writers & readers here are of the bourgeoisie & are not Marxists even though they seem to be defending Russia & speak about preventing a Cold War II.
    1. O Society March 20, 2019 at 14:42 There's a clear pattern in Donald Trump's life, as well as the life of his father, and his father before that.

      They'll steal and lie and scam and defraud the public, and get away with it.

      We all know that's how the American Fairytale ends: He shat all over the place and someone else cleaned it up. Again.

      https://opensociet.org/2018/09/18/the-donald-in-wonderland-down-the-financial-rabbit-hole-with-trump/

      • Eddie March 24, 2019 at 15:22 As per your link to the article by Nomi Prins, and other similar articles going back to the 80's, Trump is easily the most financially corrupt POTUS we've seen in our generation (I was born in '49), possibly the worst ever, at least on a personal-business basis (things like the Teapot Dome scandal were more 'political-financial' corrupt, a somewhat different category, though in the end it's obviously all CORRUPTION*). It's sad that the US has gotten to this point politically -- - to have someone so ill-suited and corrupt as our POTUS -- - but maybe as some critics have said Trump IS an appropriate symbol of the crass country we've become..? If that's true or not, maybe he'll serve as a 'bottoming-out' signal to enough of the US electorate to examine our overall culture and start a correction to more humanistic policies.

        * Side note: Zephyr Teachout (quoted in the link) wrote an excellent book "Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United", which is a very readable, informative book on that timely subject.

    1. O Society March 19, 2019 at 23:55 You can't believe the president. You can't believe anything anyone says about the president either.

      Whomever had the bright idea to make sure no one believes anything coming out of Washington DC for the foreseeable future

      Ding! Ding! WINNER WINNER chicken dinner!

      https://opensociet.org/2019/03/19/usatoday/ Reply

      • Tom March 20, 2019 at 04:02 "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false"

        CIA Director William Casey

    1. Tom March 19, 2019 at 16:18 The very fact that the servers were never inspected by the FBI but a private company that has a history of being anti Russia completely ruined the investigation and chain of evidence that breached their own laws and never sought any interview with Ambassador Craig Murray who said he knows who leaked the evidence says it all.

      Craig Murray is banned from the USA.

      Why?

    1. Anarcissie March 19, 2019 at 15:00 I was quite interested in the early reports of supposed foreign influences and hacks of the 2016 election, because to some extent computer security has been part of my métier. I soon realized that very little actual evidence was being presented in comparison with the wild stories being circulated. So I don't think it's surprising that Mueller appears to be coming up with nothing substantial (unless there's a big surprise awaiting us all). Mueller did not call a number of the obvious witnesses (as noted above) because he knew they could not offer anything.

      The House investigation is motivated by two things: (1) Democrats promised that if they got control of the House they would investigate and maybe impeach Trump; (2) CYA procedures. The main effort of the Democratic Party leadership is keeping the Left down; Russiagate was supposed to distract people from concerns like climate change, health care, education costs, and so on; the Democratic leadership's donor class wants this sort of thing to be stopped or diverted. Hence the constant focus on Trump and the conspiracy fables associated by them with him. They have now made a number of gaffes, not just Russiagate, which have to be covered up and put out of mind if possible.

      Those who went along with all this, especially those who indulged in McCarthyism, should be reminded of it frequently.

    1. Lisa March 19, 2019 at 14:13 Concerning the first charge, Russian intelligence hacking the DNC computers, there is one more witness whom Mueller never contacted, although he sent a message to Mueller and volunteered to be interviewed:

      Kim Dotcom / Twitter 8. Aug. 2018
      "I certainly know that Wikileaks didn't get it from Russia. I know who was the Wikileaks DNC source. I was involved. The Mueller indictment of 12 Russians will never be tested in Court, it's a scam, initiated by Hillary Clinton. Mueller is a political hitman tasked to end Trump."

      It seems that both sides are steering the discussion to another dimension, being frustrated in advance of the coming Mueller report. The Democrats are starting new investigations on other issues on Trump, not pushing the impeachment project further, the other side is worried that the Mueller report will leave the question open, undecided, so that everyone can stick to their original suspicions, and the country is left in turmoil. Reply

      • DH Fabian March 19, 2019 at 21:56 It was reported some time ago that the DNC servers hadn't been hacked at all. It was determined that someone who had direct access to the computers had simply downloaded a huge number of files onto ordinary thumb drives, and these were passed along, ultimately to Wikileaks. Reply
      • Norumbega March 20, 2019 at 18:21 I hadn't been aware of Kim Dotcom's 2018 Tweet, but he is one of several potential witnesses to the matter in whom Mueller has shown zero interest in interviewing.

        I discuss this matter in a long post under last week's VIPS memo. In combination this witness evidence further underscores that what Mueller is doing cannot by any stretch be considered an honest investigation:

        https://consortiumnews.com/2019/03/13/vips-muellers-forensics-free-findings/ Reply

    2. Gregory Kruse March 19, 2019 at 13:34 Paranoiac hyperbole, is it? Reply
    3. Jeff Harrison March 19, 2019 at 13:32 Yes, it's pretty clear that the Democrats want to do to the Republicans what the Republicans did to the Democrats under Clinton and Obama. Hobble the president that they don't want to consider legitimate. The Democrats have a couple of problems. One is that when there was no there there in Clinton's case special persecutor Starr was able to get salacious bits on Clinton and essentially trap him into a formal form of perjury because Clinton didn't want to admit that he had had sex with "that woman". Trump doesn't give a sh*t. God and the gang know who he's been sleeping with and he doesn't care so the prudish, hypocritical sanctimony of the evangelicals won't get him. The other problem is essentially that impeachment isn't really the vehicle to remove presidents you don't like. That's what elections are for. You can't impeach him for something he did five years ago.

      It really is too bad that he didn't depose Christopher Steele. Christopher Steele gives new meaning to the line out of the Charlie Daniels hit where Uneasy Rider says, "he may look dumb, but that's just a disguise. He's a mastermind in the ways of espionage". So, not only aren't today's Democrats very competent, they can't hire competent help, either.

      It's not clear to me what the country does when neither political party is competent.

    1. O Society March 19, 2019 at 13:19 Donald Trump is nothing more than an aristocrat. He got his family millions from his dad, Fred, whose own mother, Elizabeth, started him in real estate. It's a family of rich grifters.

      Yet the Democratic party doesn't go after all the Trump's financial fraud and scams. It's all Spy vs. Spy Russia baloney instead. Why?

      https://opensociet.org/2019/03/07/exposing-trumps-tax-returns-is-way-more-important-than-his-impeachment/

      • O Society March 19, 2019 at 17:21 Oh, I think we all know Trump is as crooked as a stick in water. There's mountains of corruption in his family, at least a century's worth of fraud and scams to hold up in the sunlight.

        The so called "meritocracy" – aka aristocracy, oligarchy, elite, plutocrats, etc – don't want to turn over rocks looking for Trumps financial corruption because they're all hiding fraud and scams of their own.

        Meritocracy itself is a fraud. These aren't our best and brightest and most worthy running things, they're celebrities and vampires, just like Trump is.

        Are you ready to expose how the selfish bastards rig the game to keep the rest of us from getting any of their so called "merit?"

        The first rule of Rich Club is you don't talk about Rich Club!

        https://opensociet.org/2019/03/14/meritocracy-is-a-myth-invented-by-rich-people/

    1. Eric32 March 19, 2019 at 13:18 The US is a bizarrely corrupt dysfunctional country.

      The two countries that (past and present) interfere the most in US politics and elections are Israel and Britain. The corrupt FBI didn't include them in its politicized "investigation".

      Due to Hillary's incompetent attempts to hide her emails from examination via FOIA requests by using her own insecure servers, Russia and all other countries with competent computer intelligence capabilities likely have all her emails dealing with State Dept. classified and unclassified info. They also likely have her emails dealing with the corrupt Clinton "charity" foundation dealings.

      Despite the above, the evidence indicates Wikileaks got the DNC emails showing corrupt activities, not from Russia or any other country, but from a DNC onsite data transfer to a USB thumb drive, which was later physically transferred to wiki (involving Craig Murray) . Seth Rich, a DNC employee whose subsequent murder remains unsolved, has been all but named by Assange as the DNC source.

      Big Russian money flowed to Bill Clinton for speeches. Big Russian money flowed to the obviously corrupt Clinton foundation as "donations".

      Bill Clinton said: "I left the White House [2001] $16 million in debt". A Forbes magazine analysis of Clinton tax returns had them pulling in $240 million over the ensuing 15 years.

      What do the Clintons have to offer in books and speeches that would pull in that kind of money?

      And yet, all the legal and press attention goes to supposed Trump corruption.

      So far at least, nobody has been able to point to any any dirt on Trump that could have been used as blackmail leverage, which is somewhat amazing for an operator who was involved in New York real estate, casinos and hotels.

      • Glennn March 19, 2019 at 14:14 Russiagate has been a smashing success. It has turned the bulk of the liberal Democratic voting bloc into Russiaphobic cold warriors who don't seem overly concerned with the almost certain dire consequences of such insanity. They seem eager to see their freedoms set aside so the rebranded Democratic Neocons can protect them from boogeymen. It's never been easier in all of human history to inform oneself, yet we find ourselves surrounded by astonishing ignorance as sites like this see their traffic from search reduced by tricks done by the corporate providers of the search engines. I foolishly thought that Trump would cause a leftward movement in the population, and to a limited degree it has. I'm just shocked at how many of my friends and family are totally sucked in by Russiagate and surrounding manipulations. I see no sign that they learned anything from the 2016 debacle.
      • Skip Scott March 20, 2019 at 08:58 Yes, there would be at least as much "meat" examining the Clintons' finances as there is in examining Trump's.

        By your wording I'm not sure if you realize that you are talking about two different sets of emails. Hillary's emails for while she was SoS have no doubt been obtained by the Russians and the Chinese, and any country with an interest in monitoring US foreign policy that has hacking capability. That she got away with that without being prosecuted is astounding. The DNC emails could also have been hacked, but all evidence supports a leak being the source for Wikileaks. As Putin said, why would they bother to try to influence the election, when US foreign policy never changes no matter who is president. If the DNC and Podesta were hacked by foreign powers, it was likely just done for information.

        (I just re-read your comment more carefully and see that you are likely aware that we're talking about separate sets of emails.)

    1. hetro March 19, 2019 at 12:48 Also not investigated is the role of the Clinton forces, including Obama, in perpetuating the myth of collusion as cover action for a) a failed election b) problems with The Clinton Foundation. Further on the not emphasized includes the ICA of January 2017 relying on Crowdstrike, a dubious intelligence service to begin with in the employ of Hillary Clinton. The earmarks of a fantastic propaganda scheme, involving supposedly reliable agencies of the US government, are clear and demonstrable under the noses of those who still clamor there must be something legitimate about Mueller and his investigation fiasco. If we needed further indications of corruption in high places, following the Democratic Party's lead in fixing the 2016 presidential nomination for Clinton, it came speedily along thereafter, with an apparent, "Oh, gee, those nasty Russians are responsible!" response from a heavily brainwashed public. It would seem we need an official investigation of the investigation to join the enquiries of Mr. Lawrence, William Binney, et al.

      As to Robert Reich, he was "paranoiacally hyperbolic" back in 2016 and has only added to the TDS hysteria.

    1. DW Bartoo March 19, 2019 at 12:25 Of course, the Mueller investigation was never intended to definitively answer any serious questions, including why the FBI never insisted upon taking charge of the DNC computers allowing, instead, the allegations of a private firm to stand as "evidence".

      As you say, the harm done by the "Russia did it!" claim is immense and will have increasingly dire consequences as time goes on.

      The point and purpose of the Mueller spectacle is to allow evidence-free speculation to entrance the political system, not just to excuse Hillary and the financial class Democrats of any responsibility for their loss in the election of 2016, but also to shift attention away from the dismal failure of perpetual warfare and neoliberal austerity, in the service of military empire and global capitalist extraction, even as the capacity of the planet to support human existence is daily diminished.

      As long as the many can be kept distracted, the existential issues of nuclear war and environmental collapse may be avoided by the political class.

      Even such ideas as genuine health care or a more sane, humane, and sustainable economic system can be kept from ever becoming something that people ought think and talk about.

      If all problems may be attributed to Trump and Russia, then getting back to the Clinton-Bush-Obama daze of "business as usual" will drone on most happily and a new Cold War may be heated up as the next thrilling adventure.

      Of course, the US Empire is waning, its capacity to dominate gone, it will behave rather badly. However, if sufficient fervor may be stirred, the populace may yet embrace an end-times crusade and rally round the flag, once more, to deal with foul and evil Russia, with China thrown in, just for good measure.

      There is lots of great mileage in Russuagate.

      It might yet be all to end all.

      Pathetic?

      Yes.

      But what else have the desperate elite got? Reply

    2. exiled off mainstreet March 19, 2019 at 11:53
      This is certainly an accurate view of the problem. He mentions Robert Reich, who along with the rest of the 'mainstream" Democrats jumped the shark long ago on this issue, which has destroyed the legitimacy of the democratic party. Reich lost any claim on rationality by following the conventional wisdom. Meanwhile, Trump's defense against the false charges bolstered the neocon element in the Republican party. I don't see how this ends well.

    [Mar 25, 2019] Bush lied, people died, Obama lied people died, Trump lied people died. What changed?

    Bush II campaigned on "no nation building" mantra. He lied. Crump campaigned no foreign wars manta. He lied.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The 16th anniversary of the Iraq war last week was marked by a shortage of people defending the costliest foreign policy blunder of this young century, even in circles where support for that misadventure was once sacrosanct. ..."
    "... Yet even as the folly and injustice of Iraq congeals into conventional wisdom inside the Beltway, famously resistant to rethinking bipartisan military interventions no matter how ill-advised, it is an open question whether anything has changed. Dick Cheney's protestations notwithstanding , the presidential wars largely continue unimpeded by the "America First" commander-in-chief. ..."
    "... John Bolton seems to have more say about when American troops will leave Syria or Afghanistan than the president of the United States. Trump's second veto will almost certainly be of a bipartisan resolution rebuking -- and terminating -- U.S. support for the war in Yemen. We appear to be escalating in Somalia. Tensions are rising with Iran and Venezuela, with the administration trending toward a functionally neoconservative position on both despite major newspapers publishing pleas to retire that label . ..."
    Mar 25, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    The 16th anniversary of the Iraq war last week was marked by a shortage of people defending the costliest foreign policy blunder of this young century, even in circles where support for that misadventure was once sacrosanct.

    Former George W. Bush mouthpiece Ari Fleischer supplied a promptly ratioed tweetstorm that quibbled with the "Bush lied, people died" mantra concerning his old boss's handling of the intelligence on Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Never Trumper David French gamely argued that Saddam Hussein was a greater source of instability than the chaos brought about by the invasion, followed by Barack Obama's withdrawal. In so doing, French reminded us that, however off-putting some conservatives find Donald Trump, the president's criticism of the war matters more to many of those who devote their time to denouncing his every utterance.

    Yet even as the folly and injustice of Iraq congeals into conventional wisdom inside the Beltway, famously resistant to rethinking bipartisan military interventions no matter how ill-advised, it is an open question whether anything has changed. Dick Cheney's protestations notwithstanding , the presidential wars largely continue unimpeded by the "America First" commander-in-chief.

    John Bolton seems to have more say about when American troops will leave Syria or Afghanistan than the president of the United States. Trump's second veto will almost certainly be of a bipartisan resolution rebuking -- and terminating -- U.S. support for the war in Yemen. We appear to be escalating in Somalia. Tensions are rising with Iran and Venezuela, with the administration trending toward a functionally neoconservative position on both despite major newspapers publishing pleas to retire that label .

    [Mar 25, 2019] It Was All a Lie

    this is much worse that WDM case. It poisoned relations with Russia at least for a generation. People who planned and executed Russiagate color revolution, of which Mueller witch hunt was an integral part are criminals. All of them.
    But Russiagate told us a lot about British and Israeli influence on the Us presidential elections, as well as CIA and FBI machinations.
    Mar 25, 2019 | theamericanconservative.com

    Robert Mueller has come up empty handed, exposing two years of relentless Russiagate propaganda and the media that sold it.

    The short version? Mueller is done. His report unambiguously states there was no collusion or obstruction. He was allowed to follow every lead unfettered in an investigation of breathtaking depth.

    It cannot be clearer. The report summary states, "The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election the report does not recommend any further indictments, nor did the Special Counsel obtain any sealed indictments that have yet to be made public."

    Robert Mueller did not charge any Americans with collusion, coordination, or criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. The special counsel also considered whether members of the Trump campaign "coordinated," a much lower standard defined as an "agreement, tacit or express," with Russian election interference activities. They did not.

    Everything -- everything -- else we have been told since the summer of 2016 falls, depending on your conscience and view of humanity, into the realm of lies, falsehoods, propaganda, exaggerations, political manipulation, stupid reporting, fake news, bad judgment, simple bull, or, in the best light, hasty conclusions.

    As with Dorothy's ruby slippers, the proof of no collusion has always been with us. There was a guilty plea from Michael Flynn, Trump's national security advisor, on one count of perjury unrelated to Russiagate. Flynn lied about a legal meeting with the Russian ambassador. Rick Gates, deputy campaign manager, pled guilty to conspiracy and false statements unrelated to Russiagate. George Papadopoulos, a ZZZ-level adviser, pled guilty to making false statements about legal contact with the Russians. Michael Cohen , Trump's lawyer, pled guilty to lying to Congress about a legal Moscow real estate project. Paul Manafort , very briefly Trump's campaign chair, pled guilty to conspiracy charges unrelated to Russiagate and that for the most part occurred before he even joined the campaign. Roger Stone, who never officially worked for Trump, awaits a trial that will happen long after Mueller turns off the last lights in his office.

    Mueller did indict some Russian citizens for hacking, indictments that in no way tied them to anything Trump and which will never see trial. Joseph Mifsud, the Russian professor who supposedly told Papadopoulos Moscow had "thousands of Hillary's emails," was never charged .

    Carter Page, subject of FISA surveillance and a key actor in the Steele dossier, was also never charged. After hours of testimony about that infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting to discuss Hillary's email and other meeting around the Moscow hotel, no one was indicted for perjury.

    The short version of Russiagate? There was no Russiagate.

    What Will Happen Next is already happening. Democrats are throwing up smoke demanding that the full Mueller report be made public. Even before AG Barr released the summary, Speaker Pelosi announced that whatever he decided to release wouldn't be enough. One Dem on CNN warned they would need the FBI agents' actual handwritten field notes.

    Paul Manafort: Eulogy for a Straw Man Mueller's Investigation is Missing One Thing: A Crime

    Adam Schiff said , "Congress is going to need the underlying evidence because some of that evidence may go to the compromise of the president or people around him that poses a real threat to our national security." Schiff believes his committee is likely to discover things missed by Mueller, whose report indicates his team interviewed about 500 witnesses, obtained more than 2,800 subpoenas and warrants, executed 500 search warrants, obtained 230 orders for communications records, and made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence.

    Mueller may still be called to testify in front of Congress, as nothing will ever be enough for the #Resistance cosplayers now in charge. Overnight, the findings, made by Mueller the folk hero , the dogged Javert, the Marine on his last patrol, suddenly weren't worth puppy poo unless we could all look over his shoulder and line-by-line second guess him. MSNBC host Joy Reid, for her part, has already accused Mueller of covering up the crime of the century .

    The New York Times headline "As Mueller Report Lands, Prosecutorial Focus Moves to New York" says the rest -- we're movin' on! Whatever impeachment/indictment fantasies diehard Dems have left are being transferred from Mueller to the Southern District of New York. The SDNY's powers, we are reminded with the tenacity of a bored child in the back seat, are outside of Trump's control, the Wakanda of justice.

    The new holy land is called Obstruction of Justice, though pressing a case against Trump in a process that ultimately exonerated him will be a tough sell. In a sentence likely to fuel discussion for months, the attorney general quotes Mueller, "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

    It sounds dramatic, but in fact it means that, while taking no position on whether obstruction took place, Mueller concluded that he did not find enough evidence to prosecute. In the report, he specifically turns over to the attorney general any decision to pursue obstruction further. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, meanwhile, have already determined that the evidence does not support prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.

    Mueller also specifically noted that obstruction of justice requires proof of intent, and since he found that Trump, et al, did not conspire with Russia, there can be no intent to obstruct an investigation Trump knew could not lead to anything. The case is thus closed judicially (Mueller having essentially telegraphed the defense strategy), though Democrats are likely to quixotically keep pursuing it.

    What's left is corruption. Politico has already published a list of 25 "new" things to investigate about Trump, trying to restock the warehouse of broken impeachment dreams (secret: it's filled with sealed indictments no one will ever see). The pivot will be from treason to corruption: see the Cohen hearings as Exhibit A. Campaign finance minutiae , real estate assessment questions, tax cheating from the 1980s, a failed Buffalo Bills purchase years ago how much credibility will any of that have now with a public realizing it has been bamboozled on Russia?

    At some point, even the congresswoman with the most Twitter followers is going to have to admit there is no there there. By digging the hole they are standing in even deeper, Dems will only make it more obvious to everyone except Samantha Bee's interns that they have nothing. Expect to hear "this is not the end, it's only the end of the beginning" more often, even if it sounds more needy than encouraging, like a desperate ex checking in to see if you want to meet for coffee.

    Someone at the DNC might also ask how this unabashed desire to see blood drawn from someone surnamed Trump will play out with potential 2020 purple voters. It is entirely possible that the electorate is weary and would like to see somebody actually address immigration, health care, and economic inequality now that we've settled the Russian question.

    That is what is and likely will happen. What should happen is a reckoning.

    Even as the story fell apart over time, a large number of Americans and nearly all of the mainstream media still believed that the president of the United States was a Russian intelligence asset -- in Clinton's own words, " Putin's puppet ." How did that happen?

    A mass media that bought lies about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then promised "never again!" did it again. The New York Times , WaPo, CNN, MSNBC, et al, reported falsehoods to drive a partisan narrative. They gleefully created a serial killer's emptywheel -like bulletin board covered in blurry photos connected by strands of yarn.

    Another generation of journalists soiled themselves. They elevated mongerers like Seth Abramson, Malcolm Nance, and Lawrence Tribe, who vomited nonsense all over Twitter every afternoon before appearing before millions on CNN. They institutionalized unsourced gossip as their ledes -- how often were we told that the walls were closing in? That it was Mueller time? How often was the public put on red alert that Trump/Sessions/Rosenstein/Whitaker/Barr was going to fire the special prosecutor? The mass media featured only stories that furthered the collusion tall tale and silenced those skeptical of the prevailing narrative, the same way they failed before the Iraq war.

    The short version: there were no WMDs in Iraq. That was a lie and the media promoted it shamelessly while silencing skeptical voices. Now Mueller has indicted zero Americans for working with Russia to influence the election. Russiagate was a lie and the media promoted it shamelessly while silencing skeptical voices.

    The same goes for the politicians , alongside Hayden , Brennan , Clapper, and Comey , who told Americans that the president they elected was a spy working against the United States. None of that was accidental. It was a narrative they desperately wanted to be true so they could profit politically regardless of what it did to the nation. And today the whitewashing is already ongoing (watch out for tweets containing the word "regardless").

    Someone should contact the ghost of Consortium News's Robert Parry , one of the earliest and most consistent skeptics of Russiagate, and tell him he was right all along. That might be the most justice we see out of all this.

    Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, wrote We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99% .

    [Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate Revisited by Jackson Lears

    This article is over a year old, but it really explains what this with hunt was about -- to deflect real interference in the US election as well as exonerate Hillary fiasco. The way Russian were selected is a typical "projected" Anti-Semitism -- persecution on the base on national origin without any solid fact, but with plenty of prejudices due to Russia Soviet past. What a gang of scamsters the US neoliberal elite became !
    Feb 22, 2018 | lrb.co.uk
    Russiagate Revisited 35 The anti-Russian hysteria in Washington has slipped beyond self-parody. We now have front-row seats in a theatre of the absurd, watching the media furor explode after Robert Mueller's 'indictments' of 13 Russians and three Russian companies for interfering in the 2016 presidential elections.

    Mueller's actions deserve the scare quotes because they are not really indictments at all. The accused parties will never be extradited or brought to trial. Nor is it clear that their actions rise to the level of crimes. The supposed indictments are merely dramatic accusations, a giant publicity stunt.

    Even if they were real indictments, they would not be convictions. American journalists seem to have forgotten that distinction. In contemporary American jurisprudence, prosecutors routinely get rubber stamps from grand juries. A grand jury, the adage goes, will indict a ham sandwich. For a g-man on a white horse like Mueller, universally lionised in the mainstream media, a grand jury would probably indict a peanut butter sandwich.

    One of the most bizarre aspects of Russiagate is the magical transformation of intelligence agency heads into paragons of truth-telling – a trick performed not by reactionary apologists for domestic spying, as one would expect, but by people who consider themselves liberals. There is something genuinely absurd about a former director of the FBI – which along with the CIA and NSA has long been one of the gravest threats to democracy in America – solemnly warning of the threat to democracy posed by Russian meddling in the election.

    And what was the nature of that alleged meddling? The pseudo-indictments are clear: the meddlers had nothing to do with the Russian government and nothing to do with the Trump campaign – except that they sometimes 'communicated with unwitting individuals' associated with it. And the Russians' activities had no impact on the outcome of the election. Mueller's assignment was to investigate whether the Russian government colluded with the Trump campaign to promote his victory over Hillary Clinton. None of the current charges has anything to do with this. (Nor does Mueller's recent indictment of Alex van der Zwaan, an attorney and associate of Trump's crony Paul Manafort.) The pseudo-indictments merely add to the billowing clouds of innuendo that have characterised the Russiagate narrative from the beginning.

    According to Mueller's accusations, the meddlers began their operations long before the campaign began and certainly before anyone thought Trump had a snowball's chance in hell; they posed as Muslims, black activists, white Southerners, among other social types, all posting slogans and invective on social media. After the election, they staged pro-Trump and anti-Trump rallies. Somehow the media have made this mishmash fit the Russiagate narrative, assuming it reveals a coherent Kremlin plan to elect Trump.

    So what is the point of these sham indictments? It is fair to speculate that there is more going on here than a simple search for truth. Early on in the 37-page document that was released to such fanfare, the FBI makes a revealing assertion, claiming that the Russians aimed 'to sow discord in the US political system' – as if vigorous debate were not an appropriate state of affairs for a democratic polity; as if the normal expression of democracy is bland conformity to policies fashioned by elites. By explicitly linking the Russians with support for the Sanders and Trump campaigns, Mueller's pseudo-indictments identify dissent from the Washington consensus with foreign subversion. They reinforce the reigning orthodoxy and tighten the boundaries of permissible public discourse.

    The consequences are potentially catastrophic. By focusing on the manufactured menace of Russiagate, the Democratic Party leadership can continue to ignore its own failures as well as the actual menace posed by Trump. And by fostering the fantasy of a vast Russian plot against America, the mainstream media can shut down reasonable foreign policy debate and promote a dangerous, unnecessary confrontation with a rival power. The final act in Washington's theatre of the absurd has yet to be written, but the denouement looks dark.

    [Mar 25, 2019] With Mueller Done, WSJ Urges Probe The Real Scandal

    Will never happens. The regime of "No accountability" for Intelligence agencies was established in 1962.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Seth Rich if justice is truly served will be the end of both parties ..."
    Mar 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Source: GatewayPundit

    Just hours after reports that Rep. Devin Nunes will refer criminal charges against Clinton operatives & high-level FBI & DOJ officials for perpetuating the Russiagate hoax for over three years, The Wall Street Journal's outspoken voice of reason, Kimberley Strassel, stresses that Americans deserve a full accounting of the missteps of Comey and the FBI.

    Which is all the more reason Americans now deserve a full accounting of the missteps of former FBI Director James Comey and his team -- in part so that this never happens again.

    That includes the following:

    What "evidence" did the FBI have in totality?

    What efforts did the bureau take to verify it?

    Did it corroborate anything before launching its probe?

    What role did political players play?

    How aware was the FBI that it was being gulled into a dirty-trick operation, and if so, how did it justify proceeding?

    How intrusive were the FBI methods?

    And who was harmed?

    If Mr. Mueller has done his job properly, his report will address some of this. His team would have had to look into the sources of the allegations as part of determining the documents' (lack of) veracity. A Mueller report that doesn't mention the dossier and its political provenance, or questionable news stories used to justify surveillance warrants, for instance, is a report that is playing politics.

    The fuller accounting will come only through total disclosure of FBI and Justice Department probe documents. Mr. Trump promised that disclosure in September but has yet to follow through.

    Strassel concludes that "transparency is now a necessity. "

    The Mueller report is only half the story. With the special-counsel probe at an end, it's time to go back the beginning - to the documents that explain its origin. Only then will Americans have the full story of the Russia-collusion narrative.

    How long before #LockThemUp starts trending?

    VWAndy , 1 minute ago link

    Seth Rich if justice is truly served will be the end of both parties. The Ds for doing it and the Rs for letting it slide.

    Zero Schmeero , 1 minute ago link

    Finally, after the President nearly single handedly fought those bastards off, we see the "courage" of the press...LOL. I'd like to add one more name to that group; the Judas Goat Sessions.

    hanekhw , 1 minute ago link

    Ever since the OJ Simpson trial 'justice' in America has been a bad political joke. You expect justice? Get ready for major disappointment. True justice won't come out of a court room in America where they routinely make things up as they go, lie, cheat and steal, blackmail and browbeat, permit prosecutorial abuses not seen since Stalin's show trials of the 1930s and after literally years of bs arrive at the predetermined verdict.

    warpigs , 3 minutes ago link

    A fake ******* dossier ruined this nation for 2 years. **** anyone who allowed this to occur. ****. Them.

    ken , 1 minute ago link

    Job security for the prosecution?

    [Mar 25, 2019] Ari Fleischer Lied, and People Died by Scott Ritter

    Mar 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    "The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow," Fleischer tweeted on March 19. "There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed 'Bush lied. People died.' This accusation itself is a lie. It's time to put it to rest."

    Fleischer goes on to declare that "The fact is that President Bush (and I as press secretary) faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community concluded," before noting that "The CIA, along with the intelligence services of Egypt, France, Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD. We all turned out to be wrong. That is very different from lying."

    As a Chief Weapons Inspector with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq from 1991 through 1998, I was intimately familiar with the intelligence used by the U.S. Intelligence Community to underpin the case for war (which I debunked in June 2002 in an article published in Arms Control Today ). Armed with the unique insights that came from this experience, I can state clearly and without any reservation that Ari Fleischer, once again, has misrepresented the facts when it comes to the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

    Advertisement

    The fact is, the Iraq War was never about WMD. Rather, it was waged for one purpose and one purpose only -- regime change. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the sole focus of this effort, and the so-called "intelligence" used to justify this act was merely an excuse for action. Ari Fleischer knows this, and to contend otherwise -- as he does via twitter -- is simply a continuation of the lies he told from the very beginning about the U.S. case for war with Iraq.

    UNSCOM had, by the fall of 2002, been relegated to the pages of history, replaced by a new inspection organization, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) . It is through the work of UNMOVIC that Ari Fleischer's defense of George W. Bush collapses. In November 2002 the Bush administration pushed for the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1441 , which found Iraq to be in "material breach" of its disarmament obligations. Inspectors from UNMOVIC were dispatched to Iraq shortly thereafter in a last-ditch effort to account for the totality of Iraq's WMD.

    The work of the inspectors was undermined from the start by the Bush administration, led by Ari Fleischer. "It is very well true that the inspectors who are working as diligently as they can in an environment made very difficult for them by Iraqi actions, may not be giving notice," Fleischer explained in a press conference, "but that does not mean Iraq is not receiving notice as a result of their electronic means and other means to know what the inspectors are doing. Which puts the inspectors in a very hard position."

    But Fleischer had no evidence that Iraq was getting advance notice, and the experience of UNMOVIC inspectors on the ground suggested otherwise. When asked by a reporter about the possibility of giving the UN weapons inspectors more time to complete their task, Fleischer fired back, asking "More time for what? More time to be run-around by a regime that has not complied, that has concealed its weapons, and that has grown throughout the years -- particularly the four years when no one was in the country -- extraordinarily good at hiding what they have and deceiving those who are there to do their level best."

    Trump is Right: The Intelligence Community Needs to 'Go Back to School' The Army's Iraq War History: Truth-Telling or Mythmaking?

    Left unsaid was the fact that the inspectors had repeatedly asked the U.S. for access to the very intelligence being used to underpin the American claims that Iraq was holding on to prohibited WMD and were denied. "If the UK and the U.S. are convinced and they say they have evidence," Hans Blix, the head of UNMOVIC, had noted on December 20, 2002, "then one would expect they would be able to tell us where is this stuff." When asked if they were getting cooperation from U.S. and Western intelligence agencies, Blix replied, "Not yet. We get some, but we don't get all we need."

    In 2010, Blix commented on the provisions of Security Council resolution 1441, which had declared Iraq to be in "material breach" of its obligation to disarm, and which was cited by Ari Fleischer to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003. "The declaration, I felt, might give Iraq a chance for a new start," Blix noted, " except that it was very hard for them to declare any weapons when they didn't have any. "

    This is the conclusion that anyone taking umbrage with Ari Fleischer over his attempt to whitewash the role he played -- as an extension of President George W. Bush -- in facilitating the Iraq War should rely on. Deflecting blame onto the U.S. intelligence community ignores the fact that the decision to go to war was the exclusive purview of the Executive Branch that Fleischer served. Iraq's alleged retention of proscribed WMD were merely an excuse to achieve the higher goal of regime change. The inspection process initiated in November 2002 to investigate Iraq's WMD programs was, from the U.S. perspective, a façade created to justify a decision to go to war that was made long before the inspectors ever set foot on the ground.

    "Intelligence," therefore, was an artifice manufactured by the Bush administration as a smoke screen. A memorandum prepared by the head of the British MI-6 intelligence service , Richard Dearlove, following a July 23, 2002 meeting in Washington, DC, underscores this truth: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD . But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

    Bush knew that the engagement with the United Nations, including the crafting of resolution 1441 and the dispatch of inspectors to Iraq, was simply an elaborate charade, cruel theatrics meant to dangle the prospects of peace, all the while preparing for war -- something Ari Fleischer knew all along, as this exchange with the press aptly demonstrates:

    Question: "Does regime change mean that you want to change the leader of Iraq, or you want to change the nature of the regime?"

    Fleischer: "The objective is for Saddam Hussein's Iraq to disarm, to stop threatening its neighbors, to stop repressing minorities within its own country. And that's why Congress passed the policy of regime change."

    Press: "Well, which of those definitions is correct?"

    Fleischer: "Well, let's do it -- let me cut to the bottom line on it. What I would propose is that in the event Saddam Hussein gives the order, and under his leadership and direction disarms Iraq, gives up its weapons of mass destruction, has no more chemical weapons, no more biological weapons, stops using hostility as a way to deal with its neighbors, stops repression of minorities with his own country, give me a call. After you cover Saddam Hussein doing these things, let's talk about it. Until then, the president is focused on making sure that these developments take place as a result either of the UN resolutions being enforced, or by whoever in Iraq taking these actions to make it happen. But this is probably the mother of all hypotheticals. Give me a phone call when it happens."

    Press: "So Saddam could stay in power if those objectives were carried out?"

    Fleischer: "Again, call me up when Saddam Hussein gives the directions for all those factors to take place."

    Press: "So, that's a yes?"

    Fleischer: "I think this is a question of how many devils can dance on the head of a pin."

    Press: "It's not. Can he stay in power and have regime change?"

    Fleischer: "You're asking the mother of hypotheticals. And I think it's a rather "

    Press: "Does it refer to a leader or a government regime change?"

    Fleischer: "It refers to actions that have to be taken to keep the peace."

    Press: "So it's a question of policy, not personnel?"

    Fleischer: "That's a good way to put it."

    Press: "So he could stay in power if those things happen?"

    Fleischer: "If you want to fool yourselves into believing that that's what Saddam Hussein would do in policy, that's an interesting way to approach it."

    The fact of the matter is that Saddam did, in fact, do everything listed by Ari Fleischer to effect a change in the policies of Iraq in order to preserve his regime. But President Bush -- whom Fleischer represented -- never had any intention of recognizing such change, even when it occurred. President Bush, Ari Fleischer and every representative of the U.S. administration involved in formulating and implementing U.S. policy on Iraq was being dishonest in the extreme when dangling the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the Iraq problem.

    In short, they all lied, and Ari Fleischer was the mouthpiece for disseminating these lies, a task he continues to perform to this day.

    Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of Deal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road to War . 14 Responses to Ari Fleischer Lied, and People Died

    Sid Finster March 22, 2019 at 6:41 pm

    Ari Fleischer is the equivalent of a Rosenberg or Streicher.

    He deserves the same fate, and for his memory to be remembered with the same disgust.

    Whine Merchant , says: March 22, 2019 at 7:18 pm
    Thank you for another reminder of what really happened. My only quibble is that this uses GWB, the figurehead, as the power and decision-maker. Like Bolton & Co today, the ones calling the plays are not the public face that can get elected by the proles. It was the Cheney/Wolfy/Rummy cabal, smokescreened by Rove, who sent Iraq back to the stone age at the behest of Israel.

    One down and more to go Iran is the next big target of the same mentality.

    Gene Smolko , says: March 22, 2019 at 7:41 pm
    Liberals were called traitors, we were right

    The Bush admin's push for war stank from the beginning

    Kouros , says: March 22, 2019 at 8:54 pm
    Whitewashing and preparing the stage for Iran

    It is interesting to note the following requirement: "stops repression of minorities with his own country". It indicates that Bush administration had a plan B for invading Iraq, on the template of Kosovo

    Iran is probably paying attention.

    Stephen J. , says: March 22, 2019 at 10:11 pm
    The writer states: "In short, they all lied, "
    Therefore, based on the evidence that the Iraq war was a lie, where are the prosecutions? Millions of people are dead, soldiers are dead or maimed, Iraq is reduced to rubble in parts of its land and nothing happens to the perpetrators of lies. What does this say about our so-called "justice system"?
    http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2018/12/will-war-criminals-be-brought-to.html
    Ken T , says: March 23, 2019 at 8:21 am
    Thank you for keeping the truth alive, Mr. Ritter.
    Tony , says: March 23, 2019 at 8:23 am
    "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

    It is the same today with the intelligence being fixed to justify the US exit from the INF treaty.

    Why does the administration not tell us what the range of the disputed missile is?

    Why would Russia deploy a land-based missile in breach of the treaty when it could deploy it at sea and not violate any treaty?

    Not surprisingly, this information has not been supplied.

    Behind the decision to leave the INF treaty is John Bolton. He also fought to remove Jose Bustani as the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which governs the Chemical Weapons Convention.

    Bustani was trying to bring Iraq into that treaty. That is why he had to go. If he had succeeded it would have removed the excuse for war.

    https://theintercept.com/2018/03/29/john-bolton-trump-bush-bustani-kids-opcw/

    just go away , says: March 23, 2019 at 8:27 am
    It's astonishing that creeps like Fleischer have the temerity to show their faces in public. His lies caused terrible damage to America and millions of innocent civilians in the Middle East. He should shut the **** up and thank his lucky stars he wasn't sent to prison for his part in this disgusting episode.
    Stephen J. , says: March 23, 2019 at 11:24 am
    The War of Lies Against Iraq
    By Eric S. Margolis
    March 23, 2019

    Sixteen years ago, the US and Britain committed a crime of historic proportion, the invasion and destruction of Iraq. It was as egregious an aggression as Nazi Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland.

    Large numbers of Iraqi civilians died from 2003-2007. Iraq's water and sewage systems were bombed, causing widespread cholera. The UN estimated 500,000 Iraqi children alone died as a result. Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, said it was 'a price worth paying.'
    [read more at link below]

    https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/03/eric-margolis/the-war-of-lies-against-iraq/
    -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
    "Former US military adviser David Kilcullen says there would be no Isis without Iraq invasion" Lizzie Dearden, March 4, 2016.
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-war-invasion-caused-isis-islamic-state-daesh-saysus-military-adviser-david-kilcullen-a6912236.html
    -- -- -- -- -- -- --
    See also:
    http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/04/are-christians-slaughtered-in-middle.html

    Inanna , says: March 23, 2019 at 12:27 pm
    And now we get to do all over again, with the right target this time, Iran. Don't forget that after 9/11 the first call was to go after Iran and not our trusty allies in the ME who were the real perps. Iraq was just the consolation prize for these insane ideologues, who should all be in jailed for war crimes.
    Maria , says: March 23, 2019 at 2:51 pm
    If you define weapons of mass destruction as nuclear war capabilities, then Iraq had none. If you define weapons of mass destruction as chemical, then Iraq historically had these weapons which it used against Iran, the Kurds, and shot some in Iraq War I at Israel. What happened to the chemical weapons? They were sold/moved to Syria, where they still are today, and still being used by the Assad regime. When the US troops got to Iraq in Gulf War II, the chemical weapons were gone from Iraq, but not from Syria, which is why Iran, has a vested interest in being involved in Syria, not to mention Israel. Does this help to make more sense of what seems to be a perpetual war?
    Trump just wanted these chemical weapons destroyed and never created again, and the US will evacuate the Middle East once this is accomplished.
    john d. , says: March 23, 2019 at 2:53 pm
    Thank you for this important reminder, as we are following this template in Iran & Syria. Neocons/Zionists will stop at nothing.
    Taras 77 , says: March 23, 2019 at 6:18 pm
    The article and the comments say it all: the lies, nothing else, were used to destroy Iraq!

    No intell "mistake" can be offered-it is and was a neo con deception of the country and the world.

    Accountability, however, will not happen. Very ominous for the situation pertaining to Iran and Venezuela. If the thugs in suits, pompeo, bolton, abrams, feel no consequence will happen, why worry-it is off to intervention/regime change they go.

    American sheeple have the institutional memory of a gnat and the mass media coverup and malfeseance will continue.

    EliteCommInc. , says: March 24, 2019 at 10:58 am
    "Liberals were called traitors, we were right
    The Bush admin's push for war stank from the beginning"

    On the issue of Iraq, there's no hiding behind liberal, democrats, conservative, republicans, libertarians, etc.

    Most of the country was heck bent on war as a matter of revenge, regardless of policy. The fear mongering for policies adjecent to the actual events and actors of 9/11 was not only coming out of DC, but main street. New Yorkers were no less intent on war making than the WH, Congress or various think tanks, businesses or educators from elite or non-elite schools.

    And what has occurred since moots any real escape in labels. The group who should have been the least likely and the most prudent, the most thoughtful – the conservatives had bent conservatism so out of distortion that even they had no defense against unreason.

    I have tended to give the president and those in the WH and Congress the benefit of the doubt that they sincerely considered a response in the region as a defense. I did not go to select schools, and the schools I did attend did not require me to Ovid or an overview of the classics in Greek or Latin. I had not attended a war college class or anything of the kind. But when the case was presented for war – it simply didn't have the evidence or a rationale that made sense. In fact, some of those contentions contradicted the what was known as well as each other. It was deeply disturbing and disappointing. But when I read the president's response to Dir. Tenet,

    "If that's all you got, we can't go to war"

    or words to that effect, they reflected my thoughts entirely. And for a long time I considered that all of this mayhem was part of a diplomatic package. I was already outside the main on the issue of Afghanistan, which I thought was overkill and strategically unsound for the what should have been the goal – dealing with the actors of 9/11.

    I do agree with Inspector Ritter, it was also quite clear that until the inspectors had finished their mission, minus any evidence that Pres Hussein was in violation – there was no case. Nor was there a case for invasion based on any humanitarian crisis or genocide.

    But what I have not been able to do is cross that line that they the president knowing and deliberately conspired to manufacture (lie) evidence against an innocent party. And I have been able to cross that line to despite having contemplated this article for two days and I will no doubt read it again, to include the references. Those of that objected the first go 'round, if not pacifists, have problem read several pools of of information and arguments regarding the case or lack thereof for war and the misleading the country by the leadership. And it's frustrating that those who actually got the matter spot on are still battling the those that got the matter and subsequent similar advances incorrect to this day. It's down right painful considering the measures that were engaged to not merely silence opposition, but to destroy people's lives.

    What has been broken may not be repairable, one hopes it is, believes it is, but reading this article is just too deep wound to see it. And what is salt in the wound has been three years of accusations about Russian collusion for the purposes of undermining the executive who claimed we should reconsider how we address the adventures. And the near total buy in of that press by half of the country minus any catastrophic event, makes the wars seem as window dressing to a much deeper and darker ethic that plagues us.

    And then there is the question of what to do about all of this official misrepresentation. Not only must we filter out whether they knowingly lied, but what to do about it. The daunting task of arresting so many in so many positions of leadership and research. I consider it serious business to make a false report, much less doing so on a document of declaration for official business -- that is purjury. We impeached a president because he mislead about what was a private intimate indiscretion --

    What s described above is devastatingly more egregious by several Everests in magnitude.

    And it implicates our partners in what could only be a crime: Great Britain, Israel, Australia, Poland and others who aided and abetted in the matter.

    Caveat pre-defense: L'est I be called an anti-semite, Israel has a right to exist and self defense.

    They were wrong. And that the factual data contradicted their claims may not be enough to claim they did not genuinely believe their own "lies" if "lies" they were. Or maybe I am just unwilling to hold people on my team to account to the standard required. Perhaps, accepting the idea that they knowingly perjured themselves is just too painful to accept.

    Unwilling to call a spade a spade – maybe just too merciful or at the end of the day -- cowardice.

    [Mar 25, 2019] R.I.P. Russiagate. Here's What We Learned by Leonid Bershidsky

    Leonid Bershidsky is very superficial and decided to put rose glasses. In reality color revolution against Trump was a very dangerous event. It is the next stop after Patriot Act in sliding toward totalitarism in the USA. It really demonstrates that existence of super-powerful and well financed intelligence agencies is incompatible with the democracy even in limited form that existed int he USA. They necessarily emerged as kingmakers, the new Praetorian Guard. The level of control by intelligence agencies of major MSM proved to be stggeringly effective. They all sing in unison that same song: Russia, Russia, Russia.
    Another sad fact is the level of influence British government and British intelligence agencies exhibited in the USA. Steele dossier was an unpresended level of interference in the US elections. Yet another the power of pro-Israel lobby.
    Russiagate might be dead but neo-McCarthyism is alive and flourishing... It proves very easy to poison relations between two countries for at least a generation using the power of neoliberal MSM and intelligence agencies who control them.
    Another intere4sting observation is that FBI in this story played the role of Gestapo or STASI -- political police. That's totalitarism. May be this inverted totalistism, but still totolistrism. Empires can's allow to be democratic.
    Mar 25, 2015 | www.bloomberg.com
    One doesn't need the full text of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference into the 2016 U.S. presidential election to know that Russiagate, perhaps the most powerful anti-Donald Trump narrative of the last three years, is dead. But it wasn't completely pointless: We can learn important things about both Russia and the U.S. from it.

    People who pushed the conspiracy theory are already busy telling their audiences that Trump still isn't out of legal trouble. None of the legalistic niggling, however, will change the basic fact: A thorough, hard-hitting two-year investigation by a team that can't be accused of being Trump sympathizers has found no proof of a conspiracy that has dominated U.S. airwaves since before Trump got elected. After this, any further political use of Russiagate can, and will, be deflected with an eye-roll.

    The millions of words written about the conspiracy that wasn't will interfere with a meaningful post-mortem. I find it unnecessary to recall, as my one-time Moscow Times colleague Matt Taibbi did , the lurid details of the dot-connecting orgy; I haven't kept links to the hundreds of tweets in which I was accused of being a shill for Russian President Vladimir Putin when I consistently doubted the narrative. It's important now to be clear-eyed, no matter if you bought the conspiracy theory or not.

    One thing that's important to realize is that regional expertise matters. For example, it was obvious to people with some understanding of Moscow's inner workings that looking into the famous Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, wasn't going to yield evidence of Trump-Putin collusion because, at the Russian end, the people involved weren't credible as Kremlin emissaries.

    That these signs were largely ignored is evidence that the level of Russia expertise in the U.S. media and intelligence community is lower than it should be. Investing in raising it, both through educational programs and through making more knowledgeable voices heard, should prevent embarrassing mistakes in the future.

    ... ... ...

    On the other hand, it distracted many Americans from the real causes of Hillary Clinton's defeat and Trump's victory. Those causes, at the forefront of media attention for a short while after the election, were about the Democrats' failure to engage certain poor and middle class voters. Russiagate, however, made Putin's evil trickery the issue. It worked in the short term, but failed in the longer-run – also in both countries.

    ... ... ...

    And in the U.S., the Democrats have clearly shot themselves in the foot. Instead of wasting their time on Russiagate...

    ... ... ...

    [Mar 24, 2019] The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... "After reading several articles, it seemed clear that key difficulties for Russians communicating in English include: definite and indefinite articles, the use of presuppositions and correct usage of say/tell and said/told. Throughout 2017, I constructed a corpus of Guccifer 2.0's communications and analyzed the frequency of different types of mistakes. The results of this work corroborate Professor Connolly's assessment. ..."
    "... Overall, it appears Guccifer 2.0 could communicate in English quite well but chose to use inconsistently broken English at times in order to give the impression that it wasn't his primary language. The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian. ..."
    "... Access and motive . . .here are two who had both: Seth Rich and Imran Awan. That our fake news organizations have no interest in either, that should tell you something. ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Tunga , 2 hours ago link

    "I didn't really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now." - exce

    The State Department paused its investigation of the Secretary's emails so as not to interfere with the Mueller investigation. Here we see Taibbi writes an exhaustive condemnation of the Western press while leaving out the very crux of the story, the very source of the stolen DNC emails was Clapper and Brennan pretending to be Guccifer 2.0.

    Pitiful attempt at redemption there Matt. Seriously, go **** your self.

    "After reading several articles, it seemed clear that key difficulties for Russians communicating in English include: definite and indefinite articles, the use of presuppositions and correct usage of say/tell and said/told. Throughout 2017, I constructed a corpus of Guccifer 2.0's communications and analyzed the frequency of different types of mistakes. The results of this work corroborate Professor Connolly's assessment.

    Overall, it appears Guccifer 2.0 could communicate in English quite well but chose to use inconsistently broken English at times in order to give the impression that it wasn't his primary language. The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.

    To date, Connolly's language study has not drawn any significant objections or criticism."

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-25/guccifer-20-game-over-year-end-review-0

    Any G Dala,

    DNC emails were downloaded at 22.3Mbs, a speed which is not possible to achieve remotely, or even local. It is the exact download speed of a thumb drive.

    All russian "fingerprints" were embedded in error codes, which had to be affirmatively copied. They were not an accident.

    And please remind me, who exactly was it that examined the DNC servers and pointed at Russia?

    Access and motive . . .here are two who had both: Seth Rich and Imran Awan. That our fake news organizations have no interest in either, that should tell you something.

    [Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections. ..."
    "... At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this. ..."
    "... I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy. ..."
    "... It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further. ..."
    "... They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. ..."
    "... Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal. ..."
    "... The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue; ..."
    "... Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law. ..."
    "... It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.) ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
    1. President Trump was not indicted, nor did Mueller recommend an indictment against him for collusion or obstruction.
    2. There were no major disagreements between Mueller and his managers at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
    3. The Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 election were exposed and charged -- but no American was charged with any effort to conspire with Moscow and hijack the election.
    4. While nearly three dozen people were charged , including a few close to the president or who worked for his campaign, no one in proximity to the president was formally charged with colluding with Russia. Most, such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn or campaign adviser George Papadopoulos , were charged with process crimes or felonies unrelated to the main case, as in Paul Manafort 's secretive, multimillion-dollar foreign lobbying spree through Ukraine.

    *********

    Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.

    An upcoming DOJ inspector general's report should trigger the beginning of that accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials. " The Hill

    ------------

    Pilgrims, the seditious conspiracy to depose the elected president of the United States for conspiracy to commit treason with the Government of the Russian Federation has been defeated.

    The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections.

    At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this.

    The leftist press is already discounting the results of Mueller's investigation while gloating over how long the Democratic held House of Representatives can continue to search through Trump's life trying to find criminality.

    AG Barr should stand Mueller up next to him at a press conference to make clear the results of his report and to answer questions about it. After that the prosecutions should begin. pl

    https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/435394-the-wisdom-of-trumps-lawyers-and-the-accountability-that-must-follow

    Posted at 09:00 AM in government , Justice , Politics | Permalink | 20 Comments

    David Habakkuk , 14 hours ago

    I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy.

    It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further.

    The argument that declassification of relevant documentation would harm the intelligence relationship between the U.S. and U.K. has clearly been made with great emphasis from this side.

    In fact, it is pure bollocks. A serious investigation on your side, which could lead to the kind of clean-out which should have happened when the scale of the corruption of intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq became clear, might pave the way for us to reconstruct reasonably functional intelligence services.

    Doing this on both sides of the Atlantic might pave the way for a reconstruction of an intelligence relationship which was actually beneficial to both countries, as in recent years it patently has not been.

    Whether there is a realistic prospect of people on your side opening the cans of worms on ours, as well as your own, of course remains a moot point.

    English Outsider -> David Habakkuk , 12 hours ago
    Mr Habakkuk,

    I'm glad the Steele affair has been examined at the American end -

    "They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. "

    What about the UK end? We're fussing over some little local difficulties in the UK at the moment and at our end the questions still remain - Who in the UK authorised it and how high did it go?

    Mark Logan -> David Habakkuk , 9 hours ago

    The problem with criminal prosecution is one must cite a Brit or US law which was violated. The only ones in US law that I am aware of stipulate that the plotting must be by means of violence, "by force". All this appears to me to be only the propagation of rumors.
    English Outsider -> Mark Logan , 6 hours ago
    I think it might be more the investigation of the propagation of rumours. Think back to that election campaign, and to the period before the inauguration.

    Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal.

    With respect it is not propagating rumours to ask how that happened. As for my own interest in the affair, it is not propagating rumours to ask how a senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer comes to be mixed up in it all. I suppose I started to look on it as rather more than a prank or a few cogs slipping when that senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer got whisked away to a safe house. We're a penny pinching lot over here and we don't run to that sort of thing for nothing.

    Pat Lang Mod -> English Outsider , 6 hours ago
    Ex?
    Mad_Max22 , 11 hours ago
    An investigation could certainly be predicated on the reasonable suspicion that Steele, et al, conspired to defraud the United States, in this case a purposeful and knowing smear of a candidate for office; also, another potential violation could be lying to the FBI, T 18 USC 1001.

    The problem, as I see it, is sorting out the malignant from the merely incompetent. As I've argued many times, the dossier should have been dismissed from the outset as a pile of garbage, empty of actionable content, because the ultimate sources could not be vetted: the information could not be said to be either credible or reliable. The information was acted on by screening it behind the reliabilty and credibility, so called, of Steele. So it would be necessary to show that Steele knew that the information, point by point, was false. This could be difficult. Steele's first line of defense would be that he threw everything that he heard from anyone at all into the mix in the expectation that the "professionals" would figure it out.

    Yes, they were all partisan, Steele, his sources, his bosses, the so called professionals, and their partisanship would be easy to prove; and yes, almost assuredly their partisanship contributed, perhaps even explained, their defective judgement as to how to handle the scurrilous information, especially on the part of the so called professionals, but proving they actually knew the materials to be false would be difficult.

    They couldn't know that it was false because they had no ability to run down the sources. The professionals would defend themselves by saying they had no ability to vet the sources but the information represented such a serious security threat that they had no alternative but to try to vet the information by launching the investigation against the targets. This puts the cart before the horse, represents an astonishing lack of judgement, especially considering the "exalted" positions in the Intel Community the people exercising the bad judgement occupied, but there it is - "we thought we were doing the right thing."

    Perhaps this defense could be overcome by demonstrating that people at such high and important heights of government could not possible be so stupid... maybe.

    And of course we have the orchestrated leaks to various media, the orchestrated unmaskings, all of which kept the media frenzy fired up. All in all, it was the greatest political dirty trick ever attempted in American Politics, and did devastating damage to both domestic tranquility and national security. Trump survived, but the damage done is incalculable.

    So It pains me greatly to think that the reckoning will likely have to be political rather than criminal because the malice that can be demonstrated is so admixed and even overshadowed by incompetence and judgement flaws; and even a political reckoning given the state of the country is so uncertain.

    I hope that I am wrong and that some kind of prosecution can be fashioned because of the sheer enormity of violence that was done to our electoral system, surpassing by far the chickenshit case Mueller brought against the Russian troll farm; but I fear that I am right. It hurts to think that so much damage can be caused by scheming little political weasels and that they all may well walk away scot free; and even be lionized by their political confreres as having tried to do the right thing. This is the state of American politics today!!!

    Eric Newhill , 12 hours ago
    I see that some of the midgets on horseback are saying that they will bring Mueller before congress to explain himself. Their knight in shining armor has failed to return with the holy grail. A couple even suggested that perhaps Mueller has been influenced by the Russians or somehow intimated by Trump.

    The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue;

    and that + all the crazy Marxism (social and economic), bad immigration policy and Green New Deal is going to doom the Democrats in 2020. They look like they are jumping off a final sake fueled banzai charge. Maybe they think the best defense is a good offense re; the prosecutions that should happen. What is the chance that Mueller will pass *all* he has learned to help get the criminal cases under way?

    robt willmann , 3 hours ago
    seesee2468,

    On 13 July 2018, when announcing the indictment of 12 Russian military officers by the Mueller group for "conspiring to interfere" in the 2016 presidential election, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein admitted that no "interference" actually happened. In this video of his announcement, starting at 5 minutes, 52 seconds into it and ending at the 6 minute, 5 second mark, he says--

    "There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime. There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election result."

    https://www.c-span.org/vide...

    Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law.

    However, I am concerned that the new attorney general, William Barr, will not do so based on his past associations and work. I hope I am wrong about that, but I am not optimistic.

    Divadab Newton , 10 hours ago
    It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.)

    I'm wrestling with the idea that 'twas ever thus and now with the internet its workings are revealed to a "lay" audience with no connection to the dark arts of the spy business. But I am curious, with the good Colonel's indulgence, if the new tools of the trade have made things which should be secret not possible to be kept secret?

    Walrus , 13 hours ago
    Amen to the prosecutions. If there is seen to be no accountability for this fraud then we are seriously damaging what's left of democracy. Who, in their right mind, is going to publicly support and assist a political candidate who is not "Swamp approved" if they face the threat of thereby triggering their own, and their family's destruction by the judicial system?

    I suggest that even a pardon is not enough for those entrapped in this mess. There needs to be restitution.

    To put that another way, in my opinion, "birther" allegations could be passed off as political tactics. Nobody got hurt. It is just good luck that Russiagate hasn't resulted in suicide or worse - so far.

    ugluk2 , 3 hours ago
    Matt Taibbi on how the press has destroyed its credibility.

    https://taibbi.substack.com...

    Taras77 , 8 hours ago
    I certainly agree that consequences must be brought to bear: lying politicians without a shred of evidence, nor did they offer any for their lies; press for their utter and complete malfeasance and corruption without a shred of evidence, the doj/fbi corrupted and coup plotting officials,and finally the shame to all who shrieked about "evil" putin, russia the aggressor, etc. It has set our discourse back decades, forced any critics of this insanity into the shadows, and completely killed any attempt at normal diplomacy between nations.

    I noted one astute writer as equating this russiagate insanity to the lies surrounding wmd and the destruction of iraq. Close. The damage from this criminality is incalculable!

    Will the shrillest of all in the press lose their jobs? Nah, not a chance. Prob get raise or promotion.Will the brennans, clintons, clappers, et al do the perp walk. Nah, not a chance. High paid lawyers will tie the courts up for years if not decades.

    And america has the institutional memory of a gnat. And of course, the question is as to high up did this criminality go? I personally do not believe it is a question-it is obvious to me. The major question for me is how high up the prosecution, if any, will go.

    MP98 , 12 hours ago
    Problem is...who's going to do the prosecuting? The DOJ - protector of the swamp - has become thoroughly corrupted as an arm of the Democrat-media party. Should (can) Trump appoint a special prosecutor as far as possible from the DOJ?
    Greco , 12 hours ago
    The president might use this and any Republican-led prosecutions as leverage to work out deals that will allow him to achieve his agenda. I think he'll need to given how the Democrats intend to use their house majority to launch investigations and hearings to find something, anything to howl about and impede his agenda.
    Fred W , 12 hours ago
    Still need to see the full report. I hope it is releasable. Otherwise the conspiracy theories or leaks will never let up. The article cited is a partisan opinion piece, not a news report. It accepts the fallback stance that yes, crimes were committed but collusion by Trump was not among them. This actually seems possible if only in light of the chaotic condition of the campaign.

    That said, I would not be surprised to find collusion discounted. Not that the Russians didn't interfere. That would be entirely in character. But I don't know any reason for supposing that they would have a better understanding of American political dynamics than the Americans who make good livings being the best in that arena. The Russians seem to have been doing the same things as numerous other players. They shouldn't have been in that game, but there is no strong reason for according them Superman status. Their strongest feature seems to have been sheer quantity. Outrage over their actions often seems to flow from a poor grasp of the real nature of normal political process.

    Fred -> Fred W , 4 hours ago
    "The Russians seem to have been doing the same things..."

    Multiple members of the FBI and DOJ seem to have been interfering in the 2016 Presidential election. How many other federal and state elections did they interfere with?

    seesee2468 -> Fred W , 6 hours ago
    Can you cite a single piece of hard evidence, not simply allegation, that proves the Russians interfered in the 2016 election? If so, please cite it, since I know of none. Thank you.
    Pat Lang Mod -> seesee2468 , 6 hours ago
    I cannot.
    peter hodges , 12 hours ago
    Nothing will happen. In fact, the way things have been going, Trump will make Mueller the next AG.

    [Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president ..."
    "... The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup. ..."
    "... It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. ..."
    "... As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry. Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch ..."
    "... I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way. ..."
    "... Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller to prove. ..."
    "... It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the "national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon. ..."
    "... It is time to build cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony. Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it. The truth will work better. ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Ken , Mar 23, 2019 2:09:31 PM | link

    Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president. They did this fully aware that Trump was a repulsive, narcissistic ass clown who bragged about "grabbing women by the pussy" and jabbered about building "a big, beautiful wall" and making the Mexican government pay for it. They did this fully aware of the fact that Donald Trump had zero experience in any political office whatsoever, was a loudmouth bigot, and was possibly out of his gourd on amphetamines half the time. The American people did not care. They were so disgusted with being conned by arrogant, two-faced, establishment stooges like the Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama that they chose to put Donald Trump in office, because, fuck it, what did they have to lose?

    The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup.

    This is the story Donald Trump is going to tell the American people.
    https://consentfactory.org/2019/03/21/mueller-dammerung/

    GeorgeV , Mar 23, 2019 2:13:42 PM | link

    It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. The Clintons once again, both Bill and Hillary, have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug in the White House to the status of some kind of martyr. What a country America it is. One thing should be clear however. Any politician or media pundit that towed the pro-Clintonista line should be barred from public office or the media forever.

    As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry. Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch. There is one difference between Typhoid Mary, and Bill and Hillary: Typhoid Mary didn't realize what she was doing, the Clintons did!

    the pair , Mar 23, 2019 2:14:43 PM | link
    sorry to double post, but it just occurred to me that they pulled a classic DC move: if you have something humiliating or horrible to admit, do it on a friday night.

    i have to wonder if the entire western media is cynically praying for a (coincidentally distracting) school shooting or terrorist attack within the next two days.

    ger , Mar 23, 2019 2:16:08 PM | link
    I have close friends that have been on the MSNBC/Maddow Kool-Ade for years. Constantly declaring Mueller was on the verge of closing in on Trump and associates for treason with the Russians. On Friday night after dinner at our home, the TV was tuned to MSNBC so they could watch their spiritual leader Rachel Maddow....what a pitiful sight (both Maddow and friends). No one was going to jail or be impeached for conspiring with Putin.....how on how could that be true. Putin personally stole the election from Clinton and THEY are just going to let him walk was the declaration a few feet from my chair. Normally, I would recommend grieve counseling, but they are still my friends ... now they can go back to blaming Bernie for Clinton's loss. Maybe I will recommend grieve counseling!
    DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Mar 23, 2019 2:27:18 PM | link
    @dltravers: Apart from the "goyim" you may be right.. But if you want to claim with that Trumps opponents where under the pressure of the Zionists, you got it all wrong man.. ;) No presidents been more under the Zionist thumb than DJT.
    That ofc doesnt make Hillarys Saudi and Muslim brotherhood connections better.. ;)

    Anyway, cheers to the end of this BS! And lets hope that Trump has now payed off his debts with Adelson now that he secured Bibis reelection. But dont hold your breath.. ;)

    Nathan Mulcahy , Mar 23, 2019 2:31:06 PM | link
    "very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life".

    I wish so, but that's not how the exceptional nation of US of A works, as demonstrated by the Iraq WMD fiasco case. In fact, very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit (about Saddam's WMD" BS) is alive and well, spreading more BS. What is even more depressing is that the huge chunk of this exceptional nation cannot have enough of the BS and is chanting "give me more, give me more...".

    Disgusting! sorry for the pessimistic rant.

    renfro , Mar 23, 2019 2:56:18 PM | link
    The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion.

    However some good things have come out of the investigation. It cost taxpayers 2 million but recouped over 25 million from those convicted of fraud and tax evasion.
    And its not over, Mueller has sent 5 to 7 referrals or evidence/witnesses to SDNY, EDNY, DC, EDVA, plus the National Security and Criminal Divisions. These from information turned up crimes unrelated to his Russia probe and allegedly concerning Trump or his family business, a cadre of his advisers and associates. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles to Brooklyn.

    The bad news is it exposed how wide spread and corrupt the US has become...in private and political circles.

    The other bad news is most of the Trump lovers and Trump haters are too stupid to drop their partisan and personal blinders and recognize that ....ITS THE CORRUPTION STUPID.

    BraveNewWorld , Mar 23, 2019 3:00:34 PM | link
    b you have repeatedly made the case that this whole thing was kicked off by the Steele dossier. That is factually incorrect. The first investigation was already running before the dossier ever materialized. That investigation spawned the special prosecutors investigation when Trump fired Comey and then went on TV and said it was because of the Russia investigation. The Russia investigation was originally kicked off by Papadopoulos drinking with the the Australian ambassador and bragging about what the campaign was doing with Russia. Remember the original evidence was presented to the leadership of both the House and the Senate when they were both controlled by the Republican party and every one that was briefed came out on camera and said the Justice dept was doing the right thing in pursuing this.

    I think the Democrats should lose Hillary down a deep hole and not let her near any of the coming campaign events. But this came about because of the actions of the people around Trump. Not because Hillary controls the US government from some secret bunker some where.

    Lozion , Mar 23, 2019 3:09:29 PM | link
    One could argue Russiagate was on the contrary quite a success. The Elites behind the scheme never believed it would end up with Trump's impeachment. What they did accomplish though is a deflection via "Fake News" from the Dem's election failures & shenanigans and refocus the attention towards the DNC's emerging pedophilia scandals (Weiner, the Podesta's, Alefantis, etc) & suspicious deaths (Seth Rich, etc) towards a dead-end with the added corollary of preventing US/Ru rapprochement for more then half an administration..
    Blooming Barricade , Mar 23, 2019 3:10:02 PM | link
    The deeply tragic thing about this for the media, the neocons, and the liberals is that they brought it upon themselves by moving the goalposts continuously. If, after Hillary lost, they had stuck to the "Russia hacked WikiLeaks" lie, then they probably have sufficient proof from their perspective and the perspective of most of the public that Russia helped Trump win. In this case it would be remembered by the Democrats like the stolen election of 2000 (albeit the fact that it was a lie this time). They had multiple opportunities to jump off this train. Even the ridiculous DNI report could have been their final play: "Russia helped Trump." Instead of going with 2000 they went with 2001, aka 9-11, with the same neocon fearmongers playing the pipe organ of lies. As soon as they accepted the Steele Dossier, moving the focus to "collusion" they discredited themselves forever. Many of the lead proponents were discredited Iraq war hawks. Except this time it was actually worse because the whole media bought into it. This leaves an interesting conundrum: there were at least some pro-Afghanistan anti-Iraq warmongers who rejected the Bush premise in the media, so they took over the airwaves for about two years before the real swamp creatures returned. This time, it will be harder to issue a mea culpa. They made this appear like 9-11, well, this time the truthers have won, and they are doomed.
    dh-mtl , Mar 23, 2019 3:11:13 PM | link
    Societies collapse when their systems (institutions) become compromised. When they are no longer capable of meeting the needs of the population, or of adapting to a changing world.

    Societal systems become compromised when their decision making structures, which are designed to ensure that decisions are taken in the best interest of the society as a whole, are captured by people who have no legitimacy to make the decisions, and who make decisions for the benefit of themselves, at the expense of society as a whole.

    Russia-gate is a flagrant example of how the law enforcement and intelligence institutions have been captured. Their top officials, no longer loyal to their country or their institution, but rather to an international elite (including the likes of Soros, the Clintons, and far beyond) have used these institutions in an attempt to delegitimize a constitutionally elected president and to over turn an election. This is no less than treason of the highest order.

    Indeed, the actions much of the Washington establishment, as well as a number international actors, since Trump was elected seems suspiciously like one of the 'Color Revolutions' that are visited upon any country who's citizens did not 'vote right' the first time. Over-throw the vote, one way or another, until the result that is wanted is achieved. None of these 'Color Revolutions' has resulted in anything good for the country involved. Rather they have resulted in the destruction of each country's institutions, and eventually societal collapse.

    In the U.S. the capturing of systems' decision making structures is not limited to Russia-Gate and the overturning of the electoral system. Their are other prime examples:

    - The capture of the Air Transport Safety System by Boeing that has resulted in the recent 737 Max crashes, and likely the destruction of the reputation of the U.S. aviation industry, in an industry where reputation is everything.

    - The capture of the Financial Regulatory System, by Wall Street, who in 1998 rewrote the rules in their own favor, against the best interests of the population as a whole. The result was the 2008 financial crisis and the inability of the U.S. economy to effectively recover from that crisis.

    - This capture is also seen in international diplomatic systems, where the U.S. is systematically by-passing or subverting international law and international institutions, (the U.N. I.C.J., I.N.F. treaty) etc., and in doing so is destroying these institutions and the ability to maintain peace.

    The result of system (institution) capture is difficult to see at first. But, in time, the damage adds up, the ability of the systems to meet the needs of the population disappears, and societal decline sets in.

    It looks today like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of many indicators.

    English Outsider , Mar 23, 2019 3:27:38 PM | link
    The pair @ 3.

    Your comment on the BBC is on the mild side. I listen to it when I drive in in the morning and also get annoyed sometimes. When it is reporting on the Westminster bubble it is factually accurate as far as I can judge. Apart from that, and particularly in the case of the BBC news, we're in information control territory.

    But accept that and the BBC turns into quite a valuable resource. It's well staffed, has good contacts, and picks up what the politicians want us to think with great accuracy.

    In that respect it's better than the newspapers and better also than the American media. Those news outlets have several masters of which the political elite is only one. The BBC has just the one master, the political elite, and is as sensitive as a stethoscope to the shifting currents within that political elite.

    So I wouldn't despise the BBC entirely. It tells us how the politicians want us to think. In telling us that it sometimes gives us a bearing on what the politicians et al are doing and what they intend to do.

    worldblee , Mar 23, 2019 3:28:20 PM | link
    The never-Trumpers will never let their dreams die. Of course, they never oppose Trump on substantive issues like attempting a coup in Venezuela, withdrawing from the INF treaty, supporting the nazis in Ukraine, supporting Al Qaeda forces in Syria, etc. But somehow they're totally against him and ready to haul out the latest stupid thing he said as their daily fodder for conversation...
    ben , Mar 23, 2019 3:32:48 PM | link
    renfro @ 10 said;"The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion."

    Uh no, just doing their job of distracting the public, while ignoring the real issues the
    American workers care about. You know, the things DJT promised the workers, but has never delivered.(better health care for all, ending the useless wars overseas, an infrastructure
    plan to increase good paying jobs), to name just a few.

    The corporate Dems( which is the lions share of them), are bought and paid for to distract, and they've done it well.

    The Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, and most who have come before, are of the same ilk.

    Bend over workers and lube up, for more of the same in 2020...

    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 3:48:10 PM | link
    I profoundly disagree with the notion that Russiagate had anything to do with Hillary's collusion with the DNC. Gosh, that is naive at best.
    1) Hillary didn't need to collude against Sanders - the additional money that she got from doing so was small change compared the to overall amount she raised for her campaign.

    2) Sanders was a long-time friend of the Clintons. He boasted that he's known Hillary for over 25 years.

    3) Sanders was a sheepdog meant to keep progressives in the Democratic Party. He was never a real candidate. He refused to attack Hillary on character issues and remained loyal even after Hillary-DNC collusion was revealed.

    When Sanders had a chance to total disgrace Hillary, he refused to do so. Hillary repeatedly said that she had NEVER changed for vote for money but Warren had proven that she had: Hillary changed her vote on the Bankruptcy Bill for money from the credit card industry.

    4) Hillary didn't try to bury her collusion with the DNC (as might be expected), instead she used it to alienate progressive voters by bring Debra Wasserman-Shultz into her campaign.

    5) Hillary also alienated or ignored other important constituencies: she wouldn't support an increase in the minimum wage but accepted $750,000 from Goldman Sachs for a speech; she took the black vote for granted and all-but berated a Black Lives Matters activist; and she called whites "deplorables".

    Hillary threw the race to her OTHER long-time friend in the race: Trump. The Deep-State wanted a nationalist and that's just what they got.

    6) Hillary and the DNC has shown NO REMORSE whatsoever about colluding with Sanders and Sanders has shown no desire whatsoever to hold them accountable.

    IMO Russiagate (Russian influence on Trump) and accusations of "Russian meddling" in the election are part of the same McCarthyist psyop to direct hate at Russia and stamp out any dissent. Trump probably knowingly, played into the Deep State's psyop by:

    > hiring Manafort;

    > calling on Russia to release Hillary's emails;

    > talking about Putin in a admiring way.

    And it accomplished much more than hating on Russia:

    > served as excuse for Trump to do Deep State bidding;

    > distracted from the real meddling in the 2016 election;

    > served as a device for settling scores:

    - Assange isolated
    (Wikileaks was termed an "agent of a foreign power");

    - Michael Flynn forced to resign
    (because he spoke to the Russian ambassador).

    hopehely , Mar 23, 2019 3:49:15 PM | link The US owes Russia an official apology. And also Russia should get its stolen buildings and the consulate back. And maybe to get paid some compensation for the injustice and for damages suffered. Without that, the Russiagate is not really over.
    Jen , Mar 23, 2019 4:01:43 PM | link
    BraveNewWorld @ 11:

    If memory serves me correctly, the initial accusations of collusion between DJT's presidential campaign and the Kremlin came from Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company hired by the Democratic National Committee to oversee the security of its computers and databases. This was done to deflect attention away from Hillary Clinton's illegal use of a personal server at home to conduct government business during her time as US State Secretary (2009 - 2013), business which among other things included plotting with the US embassy in Libya (and the then US ambassador Chris Stevens) to overthrow Muammar Gaddhafi's government in 2011, and conspiring also to overthrow the elected government in Honduras in 2010.

    The business of Christopher Steele's dossier (part or even most of which could have been written by Sergei Skripal, depending on who you read) and George Papadopoulos' conversation with the half-wit Australian "diplomat" Alexander Downer in London were brought in to bolster the Russiagate claims and make them look genuine.

    As B says, Crowdstrike does indeed have a Ukrainian nationalist agenda: its founder and head Dmitri Alperovich is a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council (the folks who fund Bellingcat's crapaganda) and which itself receives donations from Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk. Crowdstrike has some association with one of the Chalupa sisters (Alexandra or Andrea - I can't be bothered dredging through DuckDuckGo to check which - but one of them was employed by the DNC) who donated money to the Maidan campaign that overthrew Viktor Yanukovych's government in Kiev in February 2014.

    james , Mar 23, 2019 4:16:03 PM | link
    thanks b... i would like russiagate to be finished, but i tend to see it much like kadath @2.. the link @2 is worth the read as a reminder of how far the usa has sunk in being a nation of passive neocons... emptywheel can't say no to this as witnessed by her article from today.. ) as a consequence, i agree with @14 dh-mtl's conclusion - "It looks today like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of many indicators."

    the irony for those of us who don't live in the usa, is we are going to have watch this sad state of affairs continue to unravel, as the usa and the west continue to unravel in tandem.. the msm as corporate mouthpiece is not going to be tell us anything of relevance.. instead it will be continued madcow, or maddow bullshit 24-7... amd as kadath notes @2 - if any of them are to step up as a truth teller - they will be marginalized or silenced... so long as the mainstream swallow what they are fed in the msm, the direction of the titanic is still on track...

    @19 hopehely... you can forget about anything like that happening..

    WDDiM , Mar 23, 2019 4:36:17 PM | link
    What Difference Does it Make?
    They don't really need Russia-gate anymore. It bought them time. As we speak nuclear bombers make runs near Russian borders every day and Russian consulates get attacked with heavy weaponry in the EU and no Russian outlet is even making a reference,while Israel is ready to move heavy artillery in to Golan targeting Russia bases in Syria and China raking all their deals for civilian projects in the Med.
    Russia got stuffed in the corner getting all the punches.
    Zanon , Mar 23, 2019 4:37:43 PM | link
    What a horrible witch hunt, but the msm will keep on denying and keep creating new hoaxes about Trump, Russia.
    Heck the media even deny there was no collussion, they keep spinning it in different ways!

    But remember folks, we here was always right...
    The Mueller Report Is In. They Were Wrong. We Were Right.
    https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-mueller-report-is-in-they-were-wrong-we-were-right-a915d23a6d82

    iv> also, there is a big risk that the media, deep state will create new accusations coming days.

    Posted by: Zanon , Mar 23, 2019 4:39:30 PM | link

    also, there is a big risk that the media, deep state will create new accusations coming days.

    Posted by: Zanon | Mar 23, 2019 4:39:30 PM | link

    Russ , Mar 23, 2019 4:41:30 PM | link
    People are forgetting to call Dembot agent Wheeler "FBI rat Wheeler", or just Rat Wheeler. Or EmptySqueal.
    karlof1 , Mar 23, 2019 4:47:23 PM | link
    Thanks for citing Caitlin Johnstone's wonderful epitaph, b--Russiavape indeed!

    During the fiasco, the Outlaw US Empire provided excellent proof to the world that it does everything it accused Russia of doing and more, while Russia's cred has greatly risen. Meanwhile, there're numerous other crimes Trump, his associates, Clinton, her associates--like Pelosi--ought to be impeached, removed from office, arrested, then tried in court, which is diametrically opposed to the current--false--narrative.

    Scotch Bingeington , Mar 23, 2019 4:47:39 PM | link
    The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world.

    Yes, absolutely. And not just regarding the world's future, but even if you happen to be in the same building with one of them and he/she bursts into your already smoke-filled room yelling that the house is on fire.

    Btw, whatever authority has ever ruled that "ex-MI6 dude" Steele (who doesn't remind me of steel at all, but rather of a certain nondescript entity named Anthony Blair) is in fact merely 'EX'? He himself? The organisation? The Queen perhaps?

    Zanon , Mar 23, 2019 4:52:41 PM | link
    Scotch Bingeington

    Expose them at every opportunity, they should not get away with this like nothing happend:

    If you think a single Russiagate conspiracist is going to be held accountable for media malpractice, you clearly haven't been awake the past 2 decades. No one will pay for being wrong. This profession is as corrupt & rotten as the kleptocracy it serves

    defeatism isn't the answer -- should remind & mock these hacks every opportunity. Just need to be aware of the beast we're up against.


    https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1109235461430657026
    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 5:00:23 PM | link
    Who will say that the King has no clothes?

    The establishment plays on peoples fears and so we all sink together as we all cling to our "lesser evils", tribal allegiances, and try to avoid the embarrassment of being wrong.

    Although everyone is aware of the corruption and insider dealing, no one seems to want to acknowledge the extent, or to think critically so as to reveal any more than we already know.

    It's almost as though corruption (the King's nudity) is a national treasure and revealing it would be a national security breach in the exceptional nation.

    And so to the Deep State cabal continues to rule unimpeded.

    WDDiM , Mar 23, 2019 5:08:16 PM | link
    The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years

    Posted by: Ken | Mar 23, 2019 2:09:31 PM | 4

    You people don't get it do you?
    'The Plan' was to get rid of Turkey-Russia-Israel (and a few others) with one fell swoop....

    steve , Mar 23, 2019 5:11:08 PM | link
    Deep state makes the warren commish seem authoritative
    john , Mar 23, 2019 5:13:37 PM | link
    the rot in DC is palpable. this whole russiagate fiasco's been like some kind of really bad audition for deeper state kabuki...what's next?

    keeping brand Trump alive.

    Blooming Barricade , Mar 23, 2019 5:22:08 PM | link
    Matt Taibbi:

    It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD
    The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it

    https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million

    Pft , Mar 23, 2019 5:38:41 PM | link
    Russia gate was both a diversion from the real collusions (Russian Mafia , China and Israel) and a clever ruse to allow Trump to back off from his campaign promise to improve relations with Russia. US policy toward Russia is no different under Trump than it was during Obamas administration. Exactly what the Russia Gaters wanted and Trump delivered.

    That Mueller could find nothing more than some tax/money laundering/perjury charges in which the culprits in the end get pardoned is hardly surprising given his history. Want something covered up? Put Mueller on it.

    To show how afraid Trump was of Mueller he appointed his long term friend Barr as AJ and pretended he didn't know how close they were when it came out. There is no lie people wont believe. Lol

    Meanwhile Trumps Russian Mafia connections stay under the radar in MSM, Trump continues as Bibi's sock puppet, the fake trade war with China continues as Ivanka is rolling in China trademarks .

    The Rothschild puppet that bailed out Trumps casinos as Commerce Secretary overseeing negotiations that will open the doors for more US and EU (they willy piggy back on the deal like hyenas) jobs to go to China (this time in financial/services) and stronger IPR protections that will facilitate this transfer, and will provide companies more profits in which to buyback stocks but wont bring manufacturing jobs back.

    tuyzentfloot , Mar 23, 2019 5:46:31 PM | link
    The collusion story has been hit badly and it will likely lose its momentum, but I wonder how far reaching this loss of momentum is. There are many variants. The 'unwitting accomplice' is an oxymoron which isn't finished yet. The Russians hacking the election: not over. The Russians sowing discord and division. Not over. Credibility of the Russiagate champions overall? Not clear. Some could take a serious hit. Brennan and other insiders who made it onto cable tv?
    It is possible that the whole groupthink about Russiagate changes drastically
    and that 'the other claims' also lose their credibility but it's far from certain. After years of building up tension Russia's policies are also changing. I think they have shown restraint but their paranoia and aggressiveness is also increasing and some claims will become true after all.
    JOHN CHUCKMAN , Mar 23, 2019 5:48:55 PM | link

    "Russiagate" has always been a meaningless political fraud.

    When folks like Hillary Clinton sign on to something and give it a great deal of weight, you really do know you are talking about an empty bag of tricks. She is a psychopathic liar, one with a great deal of blood on her hands.

    My problem with this official result is that it may tend to give Trump a boost, new credibility.

    The trouble with Trump has never been Russia - something only blind ideologues and people with the minds of children believe - it is that he is genuinely ignorant and genuinely arrogant and loud-mouthed - an extremely dangerous combination.

    And in trying to defend himself, this genuine coward has completely surrendered American foreign policy to its most dangerous enemies, the Neocons.


    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/john-chuckman-comment-americas-democrats-launch-lawsuit-against-trump-and-russia-and-wiki-leaks-over-election-hilarious-this-is-a-country-fit-to-dominate-the-earth-they-cant-manage-their-own/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/john-chuckman-comment-yet-more-ignorant-gossip-and-innuendo-about-trump-and-russia-this-all-reminds-me-of-insane-past-american-campaigns-against-procter-gamble-or-harry-potter-charging-devil/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/12/08/john-chuckman-comment-what-americas-neocons-represent-for-arms-control-agreements-such-as-the-inf-with-russia-and-heres-the-deadly-weakness-in-trumps-psychology-that-has-allowed-neocons-to-ta/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/09/23/john-chuckman-comment-a-comment-rightly-asks-with-trump-doing-everything-the-establishment-wants-why-do-they-still-want-to-get-rid-of-him-i-think-these-are-the-essential-reasons/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/06/john-chuckman-comment-some-very-dark-thoughts-of-where-america-is-going-in-its-relations-with-russia-and-iran-i-do-think-we-live-in-dangerous-times-and-they-are-deliberately-manufactured/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/04/08/john-chuckman-comment-complete-degradation-of-a-self-styled-great-nation-which-allows-paid-thugs-to-use-poison-gas-to-give-it-an-excuse-for-still-more-killing-the-dark-place-we-are-brought-to-by-tr/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/12/06/john-chuckman-comment-more-on-the-strange-phenomenon-of-trump-and-americas-neocons-a-man-who-imagines-himself-a-great-leader-leading-nothing-and-he-still-has-pathetic-followers-who-think-hes-fi/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/12/14/john-chuckman-comment-new-phony-book-on-trump-and-russia-whats-really-going-on-with-all-the-mumbo-jumbo-insanity-in-america-the-real-target-aint-trump-neocons-and-russia/


    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 5:59:03 PM | link
    Blaming Russiagate on Hillary is very easy for those who hate her or hope that Trump will deliver on his faux populist fake-agenda.

    No one wants to contemplate the possibility that Hillary and Trump, and the duopoly they lead, fixed the election and planned Russiagate in advance.

    It seems a bridge too far, even for the smart skeptics at MoA.

    So funny.

    Trump has proven himself to be a neocon. He broke his campaign promise to investigate Hillary within DAYS of being elected. He has brought allies of his supposed enemies into his Administration.

    Yet every one turns from the possibility that the election was fixed. LOL.

    The horrible possibility that our "democracy" is managed is too horrible to contemplate. Lets just blame it all on Hillary.

    Welcome to the rabbithole.

    Copeland , Mar 23, 2019 6:23:41 PM | link
    Those who have been holding their breath for two years can finally exhale. I guess the fever of hysteria will have to be attended a while longer. A malady of this kind does not easily die out overnight. Those who have been taken in, and duped for so long, can not so easily recover. The weight of so much cognitive dissonance presses down on them like a boulder. The dust of the stampeded herd behind Russiagate is enough paralyze the will of those who have succumbed.

    As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "The ways of human progress are inscrutable."

    Jonathan , Mar 23, 2019 7:02:54 PM | link
    @37 Jackrabbit,

    Of course it was fixed. That's what the Electoral College is for .

    Arioch , Mar 23, 2019 7:06:26 PM | link
    Russiagate is a pendulum, it reached the dead point, it would hange in the air for a moment, then it would start swinging right backwards at full speed crashign everything in the way!

    It would be revealed, it was Russia who paid Muller to start that hysteria and stole money from American tax-payers and make America an international laughing stock. "Putin benefited from it", highly likely!

    Muller's investigation is paid for with Manafort's seized cash and property and Manafort has made Yanukovich king of Ukraine, so Manafort is Putin's agent, so Muller is working of Putin's money, so it was Putin's collusion everything that Muller is doing! Highly likely.

    fast freddy , Mar 23, 2019 7:12:20 PM | link
    There is no "Liberal Media". Those whom claim to be Liberal and yet support the Warmonger Democratic Party (Republican lite) are frauds. Liberalism does not condone war and it most certainly does not support wars of aggression - especially those wars waged against defenseless nations. Neither can liberalism support trade sanctions or the subjugation of Palestinians in the Apartheid State of ISreal.
    Peter , Mar 23, 2019 7:16:00 PM | link
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHo6cW0HVkQ DISGRACEFUL WILL WE EVER SAY NO?
    vk , Mar 23, 2019 7:24:32 PM | link
    @ Posted by: Jackrabbit | Mar 23, 2019 3:48:10 PM | 18

    We must be very careful with the words we choose, in order to paint the correct conjuncture and not to throw the bathtub with the baby inside.

    It's one thing to say Bernie Sanders is not a revolutionary; it's another completely different thing to say he was in cahoots with the Clintons.

    If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have disputed the primaries against Hillary. Not only he chose to do so, but he only didn't win because the DNC threw all its weight against him.

    Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist. He's an imperialist who believes the spoils of the empire should be also used to build a Scandinavian-style Welfare State for the American people only. A cynic would tell you this would make him a Nazi without the race theme, but you have to keep in mind societies move in a dialectical patern, not a linear one: if you preach for "democratic socialism", you're bringing the whole package, not only the bits you want.

    I believe the rise of Bernie Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists. Americans are more aware of their own contradictions (more enlightened) now than before he disputed those faithful primaries of 2016. And the most important ingredient for that, in my opinion, was the fact he was crushed by both parties; that the "establishment" acted in unison not to let him get near the WH. That was a didactic moment for the American people (or a signficant part of it).

    But I agree Russiagate went well beyond just covering the Clintons' dirt in the DNC.

    It may have be born like that, but, if that was the case, the elites quickly realized it had other, ampler practical uses. The main one, in my opinion, was to drive a wedge between Trump's Clash of Civilizations's doctrine -- which perceives China as the main long term enemy, and Russia as a natural ally of the West -- and the public opinon. The thing is most of the American elite is far too dependent on China's productive chain; Russia is not, and can be balkanized.

    Sandwichman , Mar 23, 2019 7:30:58 PM | link
    counterpoint: If the Mueller report does not EXPLICITLY exonerate Trump, it does NOT exonerate Trump.
    wagelaborer , Mar 23, 2019 7:43:06 PM | link
    There is a funny video compilation of the TV talking heads predicting the end of Trump, new bombshells, impeachment, etc., over the last two years.
    Unfortunately, the same sort of compilation could be made of sane people predicting "this new information means the end of Russiagate" over the same time period.
    The truth is that the truth doesn't matter, only the propaganda, and it has not stopped, only spun onto new hysteria.
    Rob , Mar 23, 2019 7:58:15 PM | link
    As others have said, hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been wrong all along. They have too much emotional investment in the grand conspiracy theory to simply let it go. Rather, they will forever point to what they believe are genuine bits of evidence and curse Mueller for not following the leads. And the Dems in the House of Representatives will waste more time and resources on pointless investigations in an effort to keep the public sufficiently distracted from more important matters, such as the endless wars and coups that they support. A pox on all their houses, both Democrats and Republicans.
    Sandwichman , Mar 23, 2019 8:08:59 PM | link
    "...hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been wrong all along."

    Wrong about what? There seems to be "narrative" operative here that there are only two positions on this matter: the "right" one and the "wrong" one and nothing else.

    Sunny Runny Burger , Mar 23, 2019 8:10:36 PM | link
    Ben nails it in "Mar 23, 2019 3:32:48 PM | 17".

    Ben's and other comments might make this a little bit superfluous but it's short.

    A case of divide and conquer against the population

    This time it was a fabricated scandal.

    Continued control over "facts" and narratives, the opportunity for efficient misdirection and distraction, stealing and wasting other people's time and effort, spurious disagreements, wearing down relations.

    The illusion of choice, (false) opposition, blinded "oversight", and mythical claims concerning a civilian government (in the case of the US: "of, for, and by" or something like that).

    Who knew or knows is irrelevant as long as the show goes on. There's nothing to prove anything significant about who if anyone may or may not be behind the curtain and thus on towards the next big or small scandal we go because people will be dissatisfied and hungry and ready to bite as hard as possible on some other bait for or against something.

    Maybe "Russiagate" was impeccably engineered or maybe it organically outcompeted other distractions on offer that would ultimately also waste enormous amounts of time and effort.

    Management by crisis

    The scandals, crises, "Science says" games and rubbish, outrage narratives, and any other manipulations attempt and perhaps succeed at controlling the US and the world through spam.

    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 8:11:22 PM | link
    Jonathan @39: Of course it was fixed. That's what the Electoral College is for.

    Well, you can say the same think about money-as-speech , gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc. Despite all these, Americans believe that their democracy works.

    I contend that what we witnessed in 2016 was a SHOW. Like American wrestling. It was (mostly) fake. The proper term for this is kayfabe .

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    And we have seen other 'shows' also, like:

    > White Helmets;

    >> Skripal;

    >> the Kavanaugh hearings;

    >> pulling troops out of Syria.

    aspnaz , Mar 23, 2019 8:19:24 PM | link
    My advice to the yanks mourning Russiagate: move to the UK. The sick Brits will keep the Russia hating cult alive even after they spend a decade puking over Brexit.
    mourning dove , Mar 23, 2019 8:50:48 PM | link
    Jackrabbit @18
    So, you don't think HRC qualifies as a nationalist? She can't fake populist, but she can do nationalist.
    I also think she is much too ambitious to have intentionally thrown the election. It was her turn dammit! Take a look at her behavior as First Lady if you think she's the kind of personality that is content to wield power from behind the scenes.
    Cortes , Mar 23, 2019 8:51:27 PM | link
    As usual, a fine essay. Thank you.

    A couple of suggestions?

    The headline would be better worded "Russiagate really is finished."

    And the reaction at Colonel Lang's site makes interesting reading.

    Les , Mar 23, 2019 8:55:52 PM | link
    They didn't fall for the Steele dossier. I recall that emptywheel had discredited the dossier during the election as it was known to have been rejected by major media outlets leading up to the election. I think they merely fell behind the others as the outgoing administration, the Democrats, the CIA, and the media chose to use the dossier to 'blackmail' Trump.
    paul , Mar 23, 2019 8:56:02 PM | link
    The most important fruit of russiagate, from the view of the establishment of the hegemon, is that America has now taken a giant step towards full bore censorship.
    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 9:00:35 PM | link
    vk @43

    We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby inside.
    Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?

    If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have disputed the primaries against Hillary.
    Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?

    Have you read this: Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016 ?

    Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's that?

    The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him and Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.

    Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax returns. Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the press asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of returns). Bernie refused.

    Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
    Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.

    What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate, meaningless astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like open borders. These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the Democrats and another 4 years for Trump.

    Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character issues and to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other examples: Bernie refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's well known work to squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer Flowers), and didn't talk about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make") and her glee at the overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").

    And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find that even a little bit strange?

    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 9:02:11 PM | link
    Sorry, here's a more readable version:

    We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby inside.
    Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?

    If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have disputed the primaries against Hillary.
    Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?

    Have you read this: Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016 ?

    Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's that?

    The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him and Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.

    Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax returns. Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the press asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of returns) . Bernie refused.

    Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
    Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.

    What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate, meaningless astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like open borders. These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the Democrats and another 4 years for Trump.

    Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character issues and to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other examples: Bernie refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's well known work to squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer Flowers), and didn't talk about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make") and her glee at the overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").

    And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find that even a little bit strange?

    mourning dove , Mar 23, 2019 9:06:00 PM | link
    Jonathan @39
    Exactly! It's the Electoral College that decides elections, not voters.
    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 9:13:59 PM | link
    mourning dove @57: Exactly! It's the Electoral College that decides elections, not voters.

    Do you think Hillary didn't know that? She refused to campaign in the three mid-western states that would've won her the electoral college. Each of the states were won by Trump by a thin margin.

    Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 23, 2019 9:14:04 PM | link
    Gosh and Blimey!
    Comment #56 in a thread about an utterly corrupt political system and no-one has mentioned the pro-"Israel" Lobby?
    Words fail me. So I'll use someone else's...

    From Xymphora March 21, 2019.

    "Truth or Trope?" (Sailer):

    "Of the top 50 political donors to either party at the federal level in 2018, 52 percent were Jewish and 48 percent were gentile. Individuals who identify as Jewish are usually estimated to make up perhaps 2.2 percent of the population.
    Of the $675 million given by the top 50 donors, 66 percent of the money came from Jews and 34 percent from gentiles.
    Of the $297 million that GOP candidates and conservative causes received from the top 50 donors, 56 percent was from Jewish individuals.
    Of the $361 million Democratic politicians and liberal causes received, 76 percent came from Jewish givers.
    So it turns out that Rep. Omar and Gov. LePage appear to have been correct, at least about the biggest 2018 donors. But you can also see why Pelosi wanted Omar to just shut up about it: 76 percent is a lot."

    Erelis , Mar 23, 2019 9:35:12 PM | link
    Next up another false flag operation. The thing is, it would have be non-trivial and involving the harming of people to jolt the narrative back to that favoring the deep state. And taking off the proverbial media table, that Mueller found no collusion. Yes, election in 2016 no collusion, but Putin was behind the latest horrific false flag, "oh look, Trump is not confronting Putin"...
    daffyDuct , Mar 23, 2019 9:40:02 PM | link

    Not even getting into the "treason", "putin's c*ckholster", "what's the time on Moscow, troll!" crap we've been subjected to for 3 years, please enjoy this mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjUvfZj-Fm0.

    mourning dove , Mar 23, 2019 9:54:13 PM | link
    Jackrabbit,

    I've said before that she's a terrible strategist and she ran a terrible campaign and she's terribly out of touch. I think she expected a cake walk and was relying on Trump being so distasteful to voters that they'd have no other option.

    I think Trump legitimately won the election and I don't believe for a second that she won the popular vote. There were so many problems with the election but since they were on the losing side, nobody cares. In 2012 I didn't know anyone else who was voting for Jill Stein, way too many people were still in love with Obama. She got .4% of the vote. In 2016 most of the people I knew were voting for Jill Stein, she drew a large crowd from DemExit, but they say she got .4% of the vote. Total bullshit. There was also ballot stuffing and lots of other problems, but it still wasn't enough.

    I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way.

    jadan , Mar 23, 2019 9:56:37 PM | link

    Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller to prove.

    It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the "national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon.

    It is time to build cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony. Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it. The truth will work better.

    [Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... RussiaGate was never a sustainable narrative. It was ludicrous from the beginning. And now that it has ended with a whimper there are a lot of angry, confused and scared people out there. ..."
    "... And now his report is in. There are no new indictments. And by doing so he is saving his reputation for the future. And that is your biggest tell that Hillary's blackmail is now worthless. ..."
    "... They don't fear her anymore because RussiaGate outed her as the architect. Anything else she has is irrelevant in the face of trying to oust a sitting president from power. ..."
    "... The Deep State and The Davos Crowd stand revealed and reviled. If they don't do something dramatic then the anger from the rest of the country will also be palpable come election time. Justice is not done simply by saying, "No evidence of collusion." ..."
    "... It's clear that RussiaGate is a failure of monumental proportions. Heads will have to roll. But who will be willing to fall on their sword at this point? Comey? No. McCabe? No. ..."
    "... If there is no collusion, if RussiaGate is a scam, then all roads lead back to Hillary as the sacrificial lamb. ..."
    "... If there is any hope of salvaging the center of this country for the Democrats, the ones that voted against Hillary in 2016, then there is no reason anymore not to indict Hillary as the architect of RussiaGate. ..."
    "... And hope that is enough bread and circuses to distract from the real storm ahead of us. ..."
    "... Hillary is the epitome of evil. ..."
    "... I don't think Hillary is enough. I want McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch, Obama, Lois Lerner, Blasey Ford, Brennan, Clapper, Abedin, Weiner, Cheryl Mills, Susan Rice, Strzok, Page, Sally Yates, all of the phony FISA cohort brought to justice. ..."
    "... Her DNC cabal cooked in less than 24 hours from the election defeat a conspiracy of Russian meddling and now, when more information became available, HCR is involved in two separate cases of foreign collusion, The Steele dossier, with Russo-Anglo meddling and another a Ukrainian one, which is now under investigation and the purpose was getting their help for becoming elected. ..."
    "... Without a doubt the Russian collusion is the most serious one, because it deliberately sabotaged diplomatic relations with Russia and lead into to a new cold war era. This also raised substantially risks for a direct confrontation with catastrophic consequences. The damage from these treacherous acts is huge and the felony bears pretty much all hallmarks of treason. Se deliberately undermined her own nation´s interests and rather risked even a war simply, because she is a psychopath, who refused to concede the defeat in due elections and instead wanted to hide real reasons for her loss to any cost for everybody else, "because it was her turn to get elected". ..."
    "... HIS NAME WAS SETH RICH ..."
    "... It is clear that from the beginning, fraudulent FISA warrants, that it was a case of Obama's administration digging dirt on Trump believing that when Hillary wins there will be nobody to hold them responsible ..."
    "... When Hillary lost there was only one way out for them to justify that kind of abuse, to find something, anything on Trump so they can say that they were right. Worse than Watergate by orders of magnitude, involving FBI, DOJ and WH itself. ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Tom Luongo,

    During most of the RussiaGate investigation against Donald Trump I kept saying that all roads lead to Hillary Clinton.

    Anyone with three working brain cells knew this, including 'Miss' Maddow, whose tears of disappointment are particularly delicious.

    Robert Mueller's investigation was designed from the beginning to create something out of nothing. It did this admirably.

    It was so effective it paralyzed the country for more than two years, just like Europe has been held hostage by Brexit. And all of this because, in the end, the elites I call The Davos Crowd refused to accept that the people no longer believed their lies about the benefits of their neoliberal, globalist agenda.

    Hillary Clinton's ascension to the Presidency was to be their apotheosis along with the Brexit vote. These were meant to lay to rest, once and for all time, the vaguely libertarian notion that people should rule themselves and not be ruled by philosopher kings in some distant land.

    Hillary's failure was enormous. And the RussiaGate gambit to destroy Trump served a laundry list of purposes to cover it:

    1. Undermine his legitimacy before he even takes office.
    2. Accuse him of what Hillary actually did: collude with Russians and Ukrainians to effect the outcome of the election
    3. Paralyze Trump on his foreign policy desires to scale back the Empire
    4. Give aid and comfort to hurting progressives and radicalize them further undermining our political system
    5. Polarize the electorate over the false choice of Trump's guilt.
    6. Paralyze the Dept. of Justice and Congress so that they would not uncover the massive corruption in the intelligence agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.
    7. Isolate Trump and take away every ally or potential ally he could have by turning them against him through prosecutor overreach.

    Hillary should have been thrown to the wolves after she failed. When you fail the people she failed and cost them the money she cost them, you lose more than just your funding. What this tells you is that Hillary has so much dirt on everyone involved, once this thing started everyone went along with it lest she burn them down as well.

    Burnin' Down da House

    Hillary is the epitome of envy. Envy is the destructive sin of coveting someone else's life so much they are obsessed with destroying it. It's the sin of Cain. She envies what Trump has, the Presidency. And she was willing to tear it down to keep him from having it no matter how much damage it would do. She's worse than the Joker from The Dark Knight.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/efHCdKb5UWc

    Because while the Joker is unfathomable to someone with a conscience there's little stopping us from excising him from the community completely., even though Batman refuses.

    Hillary hates us for who we are and what we won't give her. And that animus drove her to blackmail the world while putting on the face of its savior.

    And that's what makes what comes next so obvious to me. RussiaGate was never a sustainable narrative. It was ludicrous from the beginning. And now that it has ended with a whimper there are a lot of angry, confused and scared people out there.

    Mueller thought all he had to do was lean on corrupt people and threaten them with everything. They would turn on Trump. He would resign in disgrace from the public outcry. It didn't work. In the end Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and Roger Stone all held their ground or perjured themselves into the whole thing falling apart.

    Andrew Weissman's resignation last month was your tell there was nothing. Mueller would pursue this to the limit of his personal reputation and no further. Just like so many other politicians.

    Vote Your Pocketbook

    With respect to Brexit I've been convinced that it would come down to reputations. Would the British MP's vote against their own personal best interests to do the bidding of the EU? Would Theresa May eventually realize her historical reputation would be destroyed if she caves to Brussels and betrays Brexit in the end? Always bet on the fecklessness of politicians. They will always act selfishly when put to the test. While leading RussiaGate, Mueller was always headed here if he couldn't get someone to betray Trump.

    And now his report is in. There are no new indictments. And by doing so he is saving his reputation for the future. And that is your biggest tell that Hillary's blackmail is now worthless.

    They don't fear her anymore because RussiaGate outed her as the architect. Anything else she has is irrelevant in the face of trying to oust a sitting president from power. The progressives that were convinced of Trump's treason are bereft; their false hope stripped away like standing in front of a sandblaster. They will be raw, angry and looking for blood after they get over their denial.

    Everyone else who was blackmailed into going along with this lunacy will begin cutting deals to save their skins. The outrage over this will not end. Trump will be President when he stands for re-election.

    The Wolves Beckon

    The Democrats do not have a chance against him as of right now. When he was caving on everything back in December it looked like he was done. That there was enough meat on the RussiaGate bones to make Nancy Pelosi brave. Then she backed off on impeachment talk. Oops....

    ... ... ...

    The Deep State and The Davos Crowd stand revealed and reviled. If they don't do something dramatic then the anger from the rest of the country will also be palpable come election time. Justice is not done simply by saying, "No evidence of collusion."

    It's clear that RussiaGate is a failure of monumental proportions. Heads will have to roll. But who will be willing to fall on their sword at this point? Comey? No. McCabe? No. There is only one answer. And Obama's people are still in place to protect him. I said last fall that " Hillary would indict herself. " And I meant it. Eventually her blackmail and drive to burn it all down led to this moment.

    The circumstances are different than I expected back then, Trump didn't win the mid-terms. But the end result was always the same. If there is no collusion, if RussiaGate is a scam, then all roads lead back to Hillary as the sacrificial lamb.

    Because the bigger project, the erection of a transnational superstate, is bigger than any one person. Hillary is expendable. Lies are expensive to maintain. The truth is cheap to defend. Think of the billions in opportunity costs associated with this. Once the costs rise above the benefits, change happens fast. If there is any hope of salvaging the center of this country for the Democrats, the ones that voted against Hillary in 2016, then there is no reason anymore not to indict Hillary as the architect of RussiaGate.

    We all know it's the truth. So, the cheapest way out of this mess for them is to give the MAGApedes what they want, Hillary.

    And hope that is enough bread and circuses to distract from the real storm ahead of us.

    Jdhank , 27 minutes ago link

    Hillary ain't enough!

    We demand Comey, Brennan, Bill, the Podesta's, and the prancing little effiminate pony himself.

    consider me gone , 29 minutes ago link

    I'm surprised Donna Brazier and Pedo Podesta are still breathing. Maybe Hillary got God. Or gin.

    Koba the Dread , 32 minutes ago link

    Hillary is the epitome of envy.

    Your spelling is atrocious. Let me correct it.

    Hillary is the epitome of evil.

    There, that does it.

    KnitDame , 1 hour ago link

    I don't think Hillary is enough. I want McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch, Obama, Lois Lerner, Blasey Ford, Brennan, Clapper, Abedin, Weiner, Cheryl Mills, Susan Rice, Strzok, Page, Sally Yates, all of the phony FISA cohort brought to justice. Think of the taxpayer money wasted on this ridiculous Mueller investigation! The Roger Stone arrest was an outrage. Who tipped off CNN? Who ordered it? What was with the attack dogs and machine guns?

    And now we have Nadler trying to destroy anyone and everyone who ever did business with Trump. All those 80 people who got letters from him asking for documents will now be bankrupted by legal fees.

    According to Scott Adams, one recipient is refusing to cooperate -- he's saying "I can't afford for me and family to be destroyed." He put the request for documents in a drawer. He has no money for lawyers.

    This insanity and abuse of power has got to stop. Meanwhile, nothing gets done in Congress. We're all looking at censorship, tilted search engines, de-monetization, being beat up on campus for trying to express an opinion, being accosted in a restaurant (or, VP Pence, from the stage ("Hamilton"), getting sucker-punched for wearing a MAGA hat, having elections stolen through myriad Dem cheating methods, and NOTHING is being done.

    2willies , 1 hour ago link

    You forgot Rachel

    TeraByte , 1 hour ago link

    "all roads lead to Hillary Clinton"

    Her DNC cabal cooked in less than 24 hours from the election defeat a conspiracy of Russian meddling and now, when more information became available, HCR is involved in two separate cases of foreign collusion, The Steele dossier, with Russo-Anglo meddling and another a Ukrainian one, which is now under investigation and the purpose was getting their help for becoming elected.

    Without a doubt the Russian collusion is the most serious one, because it deliberately sabotaged diplomatic relations with Russia and lead into to a new cold war era. This also raised substantially risks for a direct confrontation with catastrophic consequences. The damage from these treacherous acts is huge and the felony bears pretty much all hallmarks of treason. Se deliberately undermined her own nation´s interests and rather risked even a war simply, because she is a psychopath, who refused to concede the defeat in due elections and instead wanted to hide real reasons for her loss to any cost for everybody else, "because it was her turn to get elected".

    Dragon HAwk , 1 hour ago link

    Hillary is expendable.

    God I Love Feel Good Stories.

    East Indian , 1 hour ago link

    And, oh, I almost forgot.

    HIS NAME WAS SETH RICH

    Neochrome , 1 hour ago link

    It is clear that from the beginning, fraudulent FISA warrants, that it was a case of Obama's administration digging dirt on Trump believing that when Hillary wins there will be nobody to hold them responsible.

    When Hillary lost there was only one way out for them to justify that kind of abuse, to find something, anything on Trump so they can say that they were right. Worse than Watergate by orders of magnitude, involving FBI, DOJ and WH itself.

    [Mar 24, 2019] One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.

    Highly recommended!
    Mar 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    "The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: `[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.' |"

    From page one of the Barr letter to the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. https://www.scribd.com/document/402973432/AG-March-24-2019-Letter-to-House-and-Senate-Judiciary-Committees#from_embed Some call this merely the "end of the beginning." Further revelations will be emerging, including from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz. " J ustice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed Thursday his office is still investigating possible abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the DOJ and FBI in their investigation into President Trump and associates of his 2016 campaign," reported the Washington Examiner this week.

    Decameron , 32 minutes ago

    However, AG Barr's letter retells the tale of Russian Interference in our elections, according to Mr. Mueller and his team's investigation and indictments. So, the anti-Trump camp will undoubtedly continue to question the 2016 election results, and blame the defeat of HRC on the "Reds." One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.

    [Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Sites that use Disqus that allow shadow banning or steal and sell your information are just plain evil. ..."
    "... The marketing of Russiagate™ was no act of "stupidity". News outlets didn't erroneously "swallow" anything. They acted as agents of the Globalist American Establishment/Deep State which was attempting to shake an interloper (Trump) off its back or, at the very least, to completely tie his hands in policy-making terms. Too bad that same Deep State has created a "Cadillac of (P)residential prerogative over the years which Trump has been driving right over their little blood-stained hands....as an added benefit, this new brand of hyper-partisan "Yellow Journalism" sold papers...to some ..."
    "... How many fake headlines were created? How many panels of propaganda spreading "experts" were assembled? How many drooling sycophant hosts made this their everyday routine to stir the 'divide the nation' pot as they swore to God and the American People that the President was an asset of a foreign provocateur subverting the Republic? ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Smiley, 4 hours ago (Edited)

    One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates. In other words, the Media's ability to simply ignore criticism enabled them to go off into their own Russiagate universe. Places that still allow competing narratives and diverse opinions, like ZeroHedge, are the main places I read anymore. If a link leads to WaPo or NYT, I bail instantly.

    Sites that use Disqus that allow shadow banning or steal and sell your information are just plain evil.

    Won't even go there.

    Bananaamerican , 4 hours ago (Edited)

    One thing I massively disagree with Taibbi on: "news outlets once again 'swallowed' a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included"

    The marketing of Russiagate™ was no act of "stupidity". News outlets didn't erroneously "swallow" anything. They acted as agents of the Globalist American Establishment/Deep State which was attempting to shake an interloper (Trump) off its back or, at the very least, to completely tie his hands in policy-making terms. Too bad that same Deep State has created a "Cadillac of (P)residential prerogative over the years which Trump has been driving right over their little blood-stained hands....as an added benefit, this new brand of hyper-partisan "Yellow Journalism" sold papers...to some

    4 hours ago
    (Edited)

    Spot on. There was no misunderstanding. Everyone in The Swamp and MSM knew and accepted their assigned roles. That's why their was nary a retraction. Retractions played no part in their goals.

    Nael, 1 hour ago
    Agreed. They were totally complicit. How many fake headlines were created? How many panels of propaganda spreading "experts" were assembled? How many drooling sycophant hosts made this their everyday routine to stir the 'divide the nation' pot as they swore to God and the American People that the President was an asset of a foreign provocateur subverting the Republic?

    Too many to count.

    [Mar 24, 2019] The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... "After reading several articles, it seemed clear that key difficulties for Russians communicating in English include: definite and indefinite articles, the use of presuppositions and correct usage of say/tell and said/told. Throughout 2017, I constructed a corpus of Guccifer 2.0's communications and analyzed the frequency of different types of mistakes. The results of this work corroborate Professor Connolly's assessment. ..."
    "... Overall, it appears Guccifer 2.0 could communicate in English quite well but chose to use inconsistently broken English at times in order to give the impression that it wasn't his primary language. The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian. ..."
    "... Access and motive . . .here are two who had both: Seth Rich and Imran Awan. That our fake news organizations have no interest in either, that should tell you something. ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Tunga , 2 hours ago link

    "I didn't really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now." - exce

    The State Department paused its investigation of the Secretary's emails so as not to interfere with the Mueller investigation. Here we see Taibbi writes an exhaustive condemnation of the Western press while leaving out the very crux of the story, the very source of the stolen DNC emails was Clapper and Brennan pretending to be Guccifer 2.0.

    Pitiful attempt at redemption there Matt. Seriously, go **** your self.

    "After reading several articles, it seemed clear that key difficulties for Russians communicating in English include: definite and indefinite articles, the use of presuppositions and correct usage of say/tell and said/told. Throughout 2017, I constructed a corpus of Guccifer 2.0's communications and analyzed the frequency of different types of mistakes. The results of this work corroborate Professor Connolly's assessment.

    Overall, it appears Guccifer 2.0 could communicate in English quite well but chose to use inconsistently broken English at times in order to give the impression that it wasn't his primary language. The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.

    To date, Connolly's language study has not drawn any significant objections or criticism."

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-25/guccifer-20-game-over-year-end-review-0

    Any G Dala,

    DNC emails were downloaded at 22.3Mbs, a speed which is not possible to achieve remotely, or even local. It is the exact download speed of a thumb drive.

    All russian "fingerprints" were embedded in error codes, which had to be affirmatively copied. They were not an accident.

    And please remind me, who exactly was it that examined the DNC servers and pointed at Russia?

    Access and motive . . .here are two who had both: Seth Rich and Imran Awan. That our fake news organizations have no interest in either, that should tell you something.

    [Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections. ..."
    "... At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this. ..."
    "... I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy. ..."
    "... It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further. ..."
    "... They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. ..."
    "... Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal. ..."
    "... The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue; ..."
    "... Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law. ..."
    "... It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.) ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
    1. President Trump was not indicted, nor did Mueller recommend an indictment against him for collusion or obstruction.
    2. There were no major disagreements between Mueller and his managers at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
    3. The Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 election were exposed and charged -- but no American was charged with any effort to conspire with Moscow and hijack the election.
    4. While nearly three dozen people were charged , including a few close to the president or who worked for his campaign, no one in proximity to the president was formally charged with colluding with Russia. Most, such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn or campaign adviser George Papadopoulos , were charged with process crimes or felonies unrelated to the main case, as in Paul Manafort 's secretive, multimillion-dollar foreign lobbying spree through Ukraine.

    *********

    Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.

    An upcoming DOJ inspector general's report should trigger the beginning of that accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials. " The Hill

    ------------

    Pilgrims, the seditious conspiracy to depose the elected president of the United States for conspiracy to commit treason with the Government of the Russian Federation has been defeated.

    The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections.

    At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this.

    The leftist press is already discounting the results of Mueller's investigation while gloating over how long the Democratic held House of Representatives can continue to search through Trump's life trying to find criminality.

    AG Barr should stand Mueller up next to him at a press conference to make clear the results of his report and to answer questions about it. After that the prosecutions should begin. pl

    https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/435394-the-wisdom-of-trumps-lawyers-and-the-accountability-that-must-follow

    Posted at 09:00 AM in government , Justice , Politics | Permalink | 20 Comments

    David Habakkuk , 14 hours ago

    I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy.

    It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further.

    The argument that declassification of relevant documentation would harm the intelligence relationship between the U.S. and U.K. has clearly been made with great emphasis from this side.

    In fact, it is pure bollocks. A serious investigation on your side, which could lead to the kind of clean-out which should have happened when the scale of the corruption of intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq became clear, might pave the way for us to reconstruct reasonably functional intelligence services.

    Doing this on both sides of the Atlantic might pave the way for a reconstruction of an intelligence relationship which was actually beneficial to both countries, as in recent years it patently has not been.

    Whether there is a realistic prospect of people on your side opening the cans of worms on ours, as well as your own, of course remains a moot point.

    English Outsider -> David Habakkuk , 12 hours ago
    Mr Habakkuk,

    I'm glad the Steele affair has been examined at the American end -

    "They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. "

    What about the UK end? We're fussing over some little local difficulties in the UK at the moment and at our end the questions still remain - Who in the UK authorised it and how high did it go?

    Mark Logan -> David Habakkuk , 9 hours ago

    The problem with criminal prosecution is one must cite a Brit or US law which was violated. The only ones in US law that I am aware of stipulate that the plotting must be by means of violence, "by force". All this appears to me to be only the propagation of rumors.
    English Outsider -> Mark Logan , 6 hours ago
    I think it might be more the investigation of the propagation of rumours. Think back to that election campaign, and to the period before the inauguration.

    Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal.

    With respect it is not propagating rumours to ask how that happened. As for my own interest in the affair, it is not propagating rumours to ask how a senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer comes to be mixed up in it all. I suppose I started to look on it as rather more than a prank or a few cogs slipping when that senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer got whisked away to a safe house. We're a penny pinching lot over here and we don't run to that sort of thing for nothing.

    Pat Lang Mod -> English Outsider , 6 hours ago
    Ex?
    Mad_Max22 , 11 hours ago
    An investigation could certainly be predicated on the reasonable suspicion that Steele, et al, conspired to defraud the United States, in this case a purposeful and knowing smear of a candidate for office; also, another potential violation could be lying to the FBI, T 18 USC 1001.

    The problem, as I see it, is sorting out the malignant from the merely incompetent. As I've argued many times, the dossier should have been dismissed from the outset as a pile of garbage, empty of actionable content, because the ultimate sources could not be vetted: the information could not be said to be either credible or reliable. The information was acted on by screening it behind the reliabilty and credibility, so called, of Steele. So it would be necessary to show that Steele knew that the information, point by point, was false. This could be difficult. Steele's first line of defense would be that he threw everything that he heard from anyone at all into the mix in the expectation that the "professionals" would figure it out.

    Yes, they were all partisan, Steele, his sources, his bosses, the so called professionals, and their partisanship would be easy to prove; and yes, almost assuredly their partisanship contributed, perhaps even explained, their defective judgement as to how to handle the scurrilous information, especially on the part of the so called professionals, but proving they actually knew the materials to be false would be difficult.

    They couldn't know that it was false because they had no ability to run down the sources. The professionals would defend themselves by saying they had no ability to vet the sources but the information represented such a serious security threat that they had no alternative but to try to vet the information by launching the investigation against the targets. This puts the cart before the horse, represents an astonishing lack of judgement, especially considering the "exalted" positions in the Intel Community the people exercising the bad judgement occupied, but there it is - "we thought we were doing the right thing."

    Perhaps this defense could be overcome by demonstrating that people at such high and important heights of government could not possible be so stupid... maybe.

    And of course we have the orchestrated leaks to various media, the orchestrated unmaskings, all of which kept the media frenzy fired up. All in all, it was the greatest political dirty trick ever attempted in American Politics, and did devastating damage to both domestic tranquility and national security. Trump survived, but the damage done is incalculable.

    So It pains me greatly to think that the reckoning will likely have to be political rather than criminal because the malice that can be demonstrated is so admixed and even overshadowed by incompetence and judgement flaws; and even a political reckoning given the state of the country is so uncertain.

    I hope that I am wrong and that some kind of prosecution can be fashioned because of the sheer enormity of violence that was done to our electoral system, surpassing by far the chickenshit case Mueller brought against the Russian troll farm; but I fear that I am right. It hurts to think that so much damage can be caused by scheming little political weasels and that they all may well walk away scot free; and even be lionized by their political confreres as having tried to do the right thing. This is the state of American politics today!!!

    Eric Newhill , 12 hours ago
    I see that some of the midgets on horseback are saying that they will bring Mueller before congress to explain himself. Their knight in shining armor has failed to return with the holy grail. A couple even suggested that perhaps Mueller has been influenced by the Russians or somehow intimated by Trump.

    The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue;

    and that + all the crazy Marxism (social and economic), bad immigration policy and Green New Deal is going to doom the Democrats in 2020. They look like they are jumping off a final sake fueled banzai charge. Maybe they think the best defense is a good offense re; the prosecutions that should happen. What is the chance that Mueller will pass *all* he has learned to help get the criminal cases under way?

    robt willmann , 3 hours ago
    seesee2468,

    On 13 July 2018, when announcing the indictment of 12 Russian military officers by the Mueller group for "conspiring to interfere" in the 2016 presidential election, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein admitted that no "interference" actually happened. In this video of his announcement, starting at 5 minutes, 52 seconds into it and ending at the 6 minute, 5 second mark, he says--

    "There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime. There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election result."

    https://www.c-span.org/vide...

    Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law.

    However, I am concerned that the new attorney general, William Barr, will not do so based on his past associations and work. I hope I am wrong about that, but I am not optimistic.

    Divadab Newton , 10 hours ago
    It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.)

    I'm wrestling with the idea that 'twas ever thus and now with the internet its workings are revealed to a "lay" audience with no connection to the dark arts of the spy business. But I am curious, with the good Colonel's indulgence, if the new tools of the trade have made things which should be secret not possible to be kept secret?

    Walrus , 13 hours ago
    Amen to the prosecutions. If there is seen to be no accountability for this fraud then we are seriously damaging what's left of democracy. Who, in their right mind, is going to publicly support and assist a political candidate who is not "Swamp approved" if they face the threat of thereby triggering their own, and their family's destruction by the judicial system?

    I suggest that even a pardon is not enough for those entrapped in this mess. There needs to be restitution.

    To put that another way, in my opinion, "birther" allegations could be passed off as political tactics. Nobody got hurt. It is just good luck that Russiagate hasn't resulted in suicide or worse - so far.

    ugluk2 , 3 hours ago
    Matt Taibbi on how the press has destroyed its credibility.

    https://taibbi.substack.com...

    Taras77 , 8 hours ago
    I certainly agree that consequences must be brought to bear: lying politicians without a shred of evidence, nor did they offer any for their lies; press for their utter and complete malfeasance and corruption without a shred of evidence, the doj/fbi corrupted and coup plotting officials,and finally the shame to all who shrieked about "evil" putin, russia the aggressor, etc. It has set our discourse back decades, forced any critics of this insanity into the shadows, and completely killed any attempt at normal diplomacy between nations.

    I noted one astute writer as equating this russiagate insanity to the lies surrounding wmd and the destruction of iraq. Close. The damage from this criminality is incalculable!

    Will the shrillest of all in the press lose their jobs? Nah, not a chance. Prob get raise or promotion.Will the brennans, clintons, clappers, et al do the perp walk. Nah, not a chance. High paid lawyers will tie the courts up for years if not decades.

    And america has the institutional memory of a gnat. And of course, the question is as to high up did this criminality go? I personally do not believe it is a question-it is obvious to me. The major question for me is how high up the prosecution, if any, will go.

    MP98 , 12 hours ago
    Problem is...who's going to do the prosecuting? The DOJ - protector of the swamp - has become thoroughly corrupted as an arm of the Democrat-media party. Should (can) Trump appoint a special prosecutor as far as possible from the DOJ?
    Greco , 12 hours ago
    The president might use this and any Republican-led prosecutions as leverage to work out deals that will allow him to achieve his agenda. I think he'll need to given how the Democrats intend to use their house majority to launch investigations and hearings to find something, anything to howl about and impede his agenda.
    Fred W , 12 hours ago
    Still need to see the full report. I hope it is releasable. Otherwise the conspiracy theories or leaks will never let up. The article cited is a partisan opinion piece, not a news report. It accepts the fallback stance that yes, crimes were committed but collusion by Trump was not among them. This actually seems possible if only in light of the chaotic condition of the campaign.

    That said, I would not be surprised to find collusion discounted. Not that the Russians didn't interfere. That would be entirely in character. But I don't know any reason for supposing that they would have a better understanding of American political dynamics than the Americans who make good livings being the best in that arena. The Russians seem to have been doing the same things as numerous other players. They shouldn't have been in that game, but there is no strong reason for according them Superman status. Their strongest feature seems to have been sheer quantity. Outrage over their actions often seems to flow from a poor grasp of the real nature of normal political process.

    Fred -> Fred W , 4 hours ago
    "The Russians seem to have been doing the same things..."

    Multiple members of the FBI and DOJ seem to have been interfering in the 2016 Presidential election. How many other federal and state elections did they interfere with?

    seesee2468 -> Fred W , 6 hours ago
    Can you cite a single piece of hard evidence, not simply allegation, that proves the Russians interfered in the 2016 election? If so, please cite it, since I know of none. Thank you.
    Pat Lang Mod -> seesee2468 , 6 hours ago
    I cannot.
    peter hodges , 12 hours ago
    Nothing will happen. In fact, the way things have been going, Trump will make Mueller the next AG.

    [Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president ..."
    "... The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup. ..."
    "... It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. ..."
    "... As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry. Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch ..."
    "... I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way. ..."
    "... Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller to prove. ..."
    "... It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the "national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon. ..."
    "... It is time to build cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony. Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it. The truth will work better. ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Ken , Mar 23, 2019 2:09:31 PM | link

    Back in November of 2016, the American people were so fed up with the neoliberal oligarchy that everyone knows really runs the country that they actually elected Donald Trump president. They did this fully aware that Trump was a repulsive, narcissistic ass clown who bragged about "grabbing women by the pussy" and jabbered about building "a big, beautiful wall" and making the Mexican government pay for it. They did this fully aware of the fact that Donald Trump had zero experience in any political office whatsoever, was a loudmouth bigot, and was possibly out of his gourd on amphetamines half the time. The American people did not care. They were so disgusted with being conned by arrogant, two-faced, establishment stooges like the Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama that they chose to put Donald Trump in office, because, fuck it, what did they have to lose?

    The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years, and appointing a special prosecutor to conduct an official investigation in order to lend it the appearance of legitimacy. Every component of the ruling establishment (i.e., the government, the media, the intelligence agencies, the liberal intelligentsia, et al.) collaborated in an unprecedented effort to remove an American president from office based on a bunch of made-up horseshit which kind of amounts to an attempted soft coup.

    This is the story Donald Trump is going to tell the American people.
    https://consentfactory.org/2019/03/21/mueller-dammerung/

    GeorgeV , Mar 23, 2019 2:13:42 PM | link

    It now appears that the world will see that the so-called "Russia Gate" investigation was nothing more than the pro-Clintonista BS that Trump always claimed it was. The Clintons once again, both Bill and Hillary, have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug in the White House to the status of some kind of martyr. What a country America it is. One thing should be clear however. Any politician or media pundit that towed the pro-Clintonista line should be barred from public office or the media forever.

    As for the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, they should be treated like the creeps they are: corrupt, opportunistic and power hungry. Like Typhoid Mary, they infect everything they touch. There is one difference between Typhoid Mary, and Bill and Hillary: Typhoid Mary didn't realize what she was doing, the Clintons did!

    the pair , Mar 23, 2019 2:14:43 PM | link
    sorry to double post, but it just occurred to me that they pulled a classic DC move: if you have something humiliating or horrible to admit, do it on a friday night.

    i have to wonder if the entire western media is cynically praying for a (coincidentally distracting) school shooting or terrorist attack within the next two days.

    ger , Mar 23, 2019 2:16:08 PM | link
    I have close friends that have been on the MSNBC/Maddow Kool-Ade for years. Constantly declaring Mueller was on the verge of closing in on Trump and associates for treason with the Russians. On Friday night after dinner at our home, the TV was tuned to MSNBC so they could watch their spiritual leader Rachel Maddow....what a pitiful sight (both Maddow and friends). No one was going to jail or be impeached for conspiring with Putin.....how on how could that be true. Putin personally stole the election from Clinton and THEY are just going to let him walk was the declaration a few feet from my chair. Normally, I would recommend grieve counseling, but they are still my friends ... now they can go back to blaming Bernie for Clinton's loss. Maybe I will recommend grieve counseling!
    DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Mar 23, 2019 2:27:18 PM | link
    @dltravers: Apart from the "goyim" you may be right.. But if you want to claim with that Trumps opponents where under the pressure of the Zionists, you got it all wrong man.. ;) No presidents been more under the Zionist thumb than DJT.
    That ofc doesnt make Hillarys Saudi and Muslim brotherhood connections better.. ;)

    Anyway, cheers to the end of this BS! And lets hope that Trump has now payed off his debts with Adelson now that he secured Bibis reelection. But dont hold your breath.. ;)

    Nathan Mulcahy , Mar 23, 2019 2:31:06 PM | link
    "very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life".

    I wish so, but that's not how the exceptional nation of US of A works, as demonstrated by the Iraq WMD fiasco case. In fact, very politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit (about Saddam's WMD" BS) is alive and well, spreading more BS. What is even more depressing is that the huge chunk of this exceptional nation cannot have enough of the BS and is chanting "give me more, give me more...".

    Disgusting! sorry for the pessimistic rant.

    renfro , Mar 23, 2019 2:56:18 PM | link
    The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion.

    However some good things have come out of the investigation. It cost taxpayers 2 million but recouped over 25 million from those convicted of fraud and tax evasion.
    And its not over, Mueller has sent 5 to 7 referrals or evidence/witnesses to SDNY, EDNY, DC, EDVA, plus the National Security and Criminal Divisions. These from information turned up crimes unrelated to his Russia probe and allegedly concerning Trump or his family business, a cadre of his advisers and associates. They are being conducted by officials from Los Angeles to Brooklyn.

    The bad news is it exposed how wide spread and corrupt the US has become...in private and political circles.

    The other bad news is most of the Trump lovers and Trump haters are too stupid to drop their partisan and personal blinders and recognize that ....ITS THE CORRUPTION STUPID.

    BraveNewWorld , Mar 23, 2019 3:00:34 PM | link
    b you have repeatedly made the case that this whole thing was kicked off by the Steele dossier. That is factually incorrect. The first investigation was already running before the dossier ever materialized. That investigation spawned the special prosecutors investigation when Trump fired Comey and then went on TV and said it was because of the Russia investigation. The Russia investigation was originally kicked off by Papadopoulos drinking with the the Australian ambassador and bragging about what the campaign was doing with Russia. Remember the original evidence was presented to the leadership of both the House and the Senate when they were both controlled by the Republican party and every one that was briefed came out on camera and said the Justice dept was doing the right thing in pursuing this.

    I think the Democrats should lose Hillary down a deep hole and not let her near any of the coming campaign events. But this came about because of the actions of the people around Trump. Not because Hillary controls the US government from some secret bunker some where.

    Lozion , Mar 23, 2019 3:09:29 PM | link
    One could argue Russiagate was on the contrary quite a success. The Elites behind the scheme never believed it would end up with Trump's impeachment. What they did accomplish though is a deflection via "Fake News" from the Dem's election failures & shenanigans and refocus the attention towards the DNC's emerging pedophilia scandals (Weiner, the Podesta's, Alefantis, etc) & suspicious deaths (Seth Rich, etc) towards a dead-end with the added corollary of preventing US/Ru rapprochement for more then half an administration..
    Blooming Barricade , Mar 23, 2019 3:10:02 PM | link
    The deeply tragic thing about this for the media, the neocons, and the liberals is that they brought it upon themselves by moving the goalposts continuously. If, after Hillary lost, they had stuck to the "Russia hacked WikiLeaks" lie, then they probably have sufficient proof from their perspective and the perspective of most of the public that Russia helped Trump win. In this case it would be remembered by the Democrats like the stolen election of 2000 (albeit the fact that it was a lie this time). They had multiple opportunities to jump off this train. Even the ridiculous DNI report could have been their final play: "Russia helped Trump." Instead of going with 2000 they went with 2001, aka 9-11, with the same neocon fearmongers playing the pipe organ of lies. As soon as they accepted the Steele Dossier, moving the focus to "collusion" they discredited themselves forever. Many of the lead proponents were discredited Iraq war hawks. Except this time it was actually worse because the whole media bought into it. This leaves an interesting conundrum: there were at least some pro-Afghanistan anti-Iraq warmongers who rejected the Bush premise in the media, so they took over the airwaves for about two years before the real swamp creatures returned. This time, it will be harder to issue a mea culpa. They made this appear like 9-11, well, this time the truthers have won, and they are doomed.
    dh-mtl , Mar 23, 2019 3:11:13 PM | link
    Societies collapse when their systems (institutions) become compromised. When they are no longer capable of meeting the needs of the population, or of adapting to a changing world.

    Societal systems become compromised when their decision making structures, which are designed to ensure that decisions are taken in the best interest of the society as a whole, are captured by people who have no legitimacy to make the decisions, and who make decisions for the benefit of themselves, at the expense of society as a whole.

    Russia-gate is a flagrant example of how the law enforcement and intelligence institutions have been captured. Their top officials, no longer loyal to their country or their institution, but rather to an international elite (including the likes of Soros, the Clintons, and far beyond) have used these institutions in an attempt to delegitimize a constitutionally elected president and to over turn an election. This is no less than treason of the highest order.

    Indeed, the actions much of the Washington establishment, as well as a number international actors, since Trump was elected seems suspiciously like one of the 'Color Revolutions' that are visited upon any country who's citizens did not 'vote right' the first time. Over-throw the vote, one way or another, until the result that is wanted is achieved. None of these 'Color Revolutions' has resulted in anything good for the country involved. Rather they have resulted in the destruction of each country's institutions, and eventually societal collapse.

    In the U.S. the capturing of systems' decision making structures is not limited to Russia-Gate and the overturning of the electoral system. Their are other prime examples:

    - The capture of the Air Transport Safety System by Boeing that has resulted in the recent 737 Max crashes, and likely the destruction of the reputation of the U.S. aviation industry, in an industry where reputation is everything.

    - The capture of the Financial Regulatory System, by Wall Street, who in 1998 rewrote the rules in their own favor, against the best interests of the population as a whole. The result was the 2008 financial crisis and the inability of the U.S. economy to effectively recover from that crisis.

    - This capture is also seen in international diplomatic systems, where the U.S. is systematically by-passing or subverting international law and international institutions, (the U.N. I.C.J., I.N.F. treaty) etc., and in doing so is destroying these institutions and the ability to maintain peace.

    The result of system (institution) capture is difficult to see at first. But, in time, the damage adds up, the ability of the systems to meet the needs of the population disappears, and societal decline sets in.

    It looks today like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of many indicators.

    English Outsider , Mar 23, 2019 3:27:38 PM | link
    The pair @ 3.

    Your comment on the BBC is on the mild side. I listen to it when I drive in in the morning and also get annoyed sometimes. When it is reporting on the Westminster bubble it is factually accurate as far as I can judge. Apart from that, and particularly in the case of the BBC news, we're in information control territory.

    But accept that and the BBC turns into quite a valuable resource. It's well staffed, has good contacts, and picks up what the politicians want us to think with great accuracy.

    In that respect it's better than the newspapers and better also than the American media. Those news outlets have several masters of which the political elite is only one. The BBC has just the one master, the political elite, and is as sensitive as a stethoscope to the shifting currents within that political elite.

    So I wouldn't despise the BBC entirely. It tells us how the politicians want us to think. In telling us that it sometimes gives us a bearing on what the politicians et al are doing and what they intend to do.

    worldblee , Mar 23, 2019 3:28:20 PM | link
    The never-Trumpers will never let their dreams die. Of course, they never oppose Trump on substantive issues like attempting a coup in Venezuela, withdrawing from the INF treaty, supporting the nazis in Ukraine, supporting Al Qaeda forces in Syria, etc. But somehow they're totally against him and ready to haul out the latest stupid thing he said as their daily fodder for conversation...
    ben , Mar 23, 2019 3:32:48 PM | link
    renfro @ 10 said;"The Dems were stupid to gin up the Russian collusion."

    Uh no, just doing their job of distracting the public, while ignoring the real issues the
    American workers care about. You know, the things DJT promised the workers, but has never delivered.(better health care for all, ending the useless wars overseas, an infrastructure
    plan to increase good paying jobs), to name just a few.

    The corporate Dems( which is the lions share of them), are bought and paid for to distract, and they've done it well.

    The Bushes, the Clintons, the Obamas, and most who have come before, are of the same ilk.

    Bend over workers and lube up, for more of the same in 2020...

    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 3:48:10 PM | link
    I profoundly disagree with the notion that Russiagate had anything to do with Hillary's collusion with the DNC. Gosh, that is naive at best.
    1) Hillary didn't need to collude against Sanders - the additional money that she got from doing so was small change compared the to overall amount she raised for her campaign.

    2) Sanders was a long-time friend of the Clintons. He boasted that he's known Hillary for over 25 years.

    3) Sanders was a sheepdog meant to keep progressives in the Democratic Party. He was never a real candidate. He refused to attack Hillary on character issues and remained loyal even after Hillary-DNC collusion was revealed.

    When Sanders had a chance to total disgrace Hillary, he refused to do so. Hillary repeatedly said that she had NEVER changed for vote for money but Warren had proven that she had: Hillary changed her vote on the Bankruptcy Bill for money from the credit card industry.

    4) Hillary didn't try to bury her collusion with the DNC (as might be expected), instead she used it to alienate progressive voters by bring Debra Wasserman-Shultz into her campaign.

    5) Hillary also alienated or ignored other important constituencies: she wouldn't support an increase in the minimum wage but accepted $750,000 from Goldman Sachs for a speech; she took the black vote for granted and all-but berated a Black Lives Matters activist; and she called whites "deplorables".

    Hillary threw the race to her OTHER long-time friend in the race: Trump. The Deep-State wanted a nationalist and that's just what they got.

    6) Hillary and the DNC has shown NO REMORSE whatsoever about colluding with Sanders and Sanders has shown no desire whatsoever to hold them accountable.

    IMO Russiagate (Russian influence on Trump) and accusations of "Russian meddling" in the election are part of the same McCarthyist psyop to direct hate at Russia and stamp out any dissent. Trump probably knowingly, played into the Deep State's psyop by:

    > hiring Manafort;

    > calling on Russia to release Hillary's emails;

    > talking about Putin in a admiring way.

    And it accomplished much more than hating on Russia:

    > served as excuse for Trump to do Deep State bidding;

    > distracted from the real meddling in the 2016 election;

    > served as a device for settling scores:

    - Assange isolated
    (Wikileaks was termed an "agent of a foreign power");

    - Michael Flynn forced to resign
    (because he spoke to the Russian ambassador).

    hopehely , Mar 23, 2019 3:49:15 PM | link The US owes Russia an official apology. And also Russia should get its stolen buildings and the consulate back. And maybe to get paid some compensation for the injustice and for damages suffered. Without that, the Russiagate is not really over.
    Jen , Mar 23, 2019 4:01:43 PM | link
    BraveNewWorld @ 11:

    If memory serves me correctly, the initial accusations of collusion between DJT's presidential campaign and the Kremlin came from Crowdstrike, the cybersecurity company hired by the Democratic National Committee to oversee the security of its computers and databases. This was done to deflect attention away from Hillary Clinton's illegal use of a personal server at home to conduct government business during her time as US State Secretary (2009 - 2013), business which among other things included plotting with the US embassy in Libya (and the then US ambassador Chris Stevens) to overthrow Muammar Gaddhafi's government in 2011, and conspiring also to overthrow the elected government in Honduras in 2010.

    The business of Christopher Steele's dossier (part or even most of which could have been written by Sergei Skripal, depending on who you read) and George Papadopoulos' conversation with the half-wit Australian "diplomat" Alexander Downer in London were brought in to bolster the Russiagate claims and make them look genuine.

    As B says, Crowdstrike does indeed have a Ukrainian nationalist agenda: its founder and head Dmitri Alperovich is a Senior Fellow at The Atlantic Council (the folks who fund Bellingcat's crapaganda) and which itself receives donations from Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk. Crowdstrike has some association with one of the Chalupa sisters (Alexandra or Andrea - I can't be bothered dredging through DuckDuckGo to check which - but one of them was employed by the DNC) who donated money to the Maidan campaign that overthrew Viktor Yanukovych's government in Kiev in February 2014.

    james , Mar 23, 2019 4:16:03 PM | link
    thanks b... i would like russiagate to be finished, but i tend to see it much like kadath @2.. the link @2 is worth the read as a reminder of how far the usa has sunk in being a nation of passive neocons... emptywheel can't say no to this as witnessed by her article from today.. ) as a consequence, i agree with @14 dh-mtl's conclusion - "It looks today like the the societal decline is acellerating. Russia-gate is just one of many indicators."

    the irony for those of us who don't live in the usa, is we are going to have watch this sad state of affairs continue to unravel, as the usa and the west continue to unravel in tandem.. the msm as corporate mouthpiece is not going to be tell us anything of relevance.. instead it will be continued madcow, or maddow bullshit 24-7... amd as kadath notes @2 - if any of them are to step up as a truth teller - they will be marginalized or silenced... so long as the mainstream swallow what they are fed in the msm, the direction of the titanic is still on track...

    @19 hopehely... you can forget about anything like that happening..

    WDDiM , Mar 23, 2019 4:36:17 PM | link
    What Difference Does it Make?
    They don't really need Russia-gate anymore. It bought them time. As we speak nuclear bombers make runs near Russian borders every day and Russian consulates get attacked with heavy weaponry in the EU and no Russian outlet is even making a reference,while Israel is ready to move heavy artillery in to Golan targeting Russia bases in Syria and China raking all their deals for civilian projects in the Med.
    Russia got stuffed in the corner getting all the punches.
    Zanon , Mar 23, 2019 4:37:43 PM | link
    What a horrible witch hunt, but the msm will keep on denying and keep creating new hoaxes about Trump, Russia.
    Heck the media even deny there was no collussion, they keep spinning it in different ways!

    But remember folks, we here was always right...
    The Mueller Report Is In. They Were Wrong. We Were Right.
    https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/the-mueller-report-is-in-they-were-wrong-we-were-right-a915d23a6d82

    iv> also, there is a big risk that the media, deep state will create new accusations coming days.

    Posted by: Zanon , Mar 23, 2019 4:39:30 PM | link

    also, there is a big risk that the media, deep state will create new accusations coming days.

    Posted by: Zanon | Mar 23, 2019 4:39:30 PM | link

    Russ , Mar 23, 2019 4:41:30 PM | link
    People are forgetting to call Dembot agent Wheeler "FBI rat Wheeler", or just Rat Wheeler. Or EmptySqueal.
    karlof1 , Mar 23, 2019 4:47:23 PM | link
    Thanks for citing Caitlin Johnstone's wonderful epitaph, b--Russiavape indeed!

    During the fiasco, the Outlaw US Empire provided excellent proof to the world that it does everything it accused Russia of doing and more, while Russia's cred has greatly risen. Meanwhile, there're numerous other crimes Trump, his associates, Clinton, her associates--like Pelosi--ought to be impeached, removed from office, arrested, then tried in court, which is diametrically opposed to the current--false--narrative.

    Scotch Bingeington , Mar 23, 2019 4:47:39 PM | link
    The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world.

    Yes, absolutely. And not just regarding the world's future, but even if you happen to be in the same building with one of them and he/she bursts into your already smoke-filled room yelling that the house is on fire.

    Btw, whatever authority has ever ruled that "ex-MI6 dude" Steele (who doesn't remind me of steel at all, but rather of a certain nondescript entity named Anthony Blair) is in fact merely 'EX'? He himself? The organisation? The Queen perhaps?

    Zanon , Mar 23, 2019 4:52:41 PM | link
    Scotch Bingeington

    Expose them at every opportunity, they should not get away with this like nothing happend:

    If you think a single Russiagate conspiracist is going to be held accountable for media malpractice, you clearly haven't been awake the past 2 decades. No one will pay for being wrong. This profession is as corrupt & rotten as the kleptocracy it serves

    defeatism isn't the answer -- should remind & mock these hacks every opportunity. Just need to be aware of the beast we're up against.


    https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1109235461430657026
    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 5:00:23 PM | link
    Who will say that the King has no clothes?

    The establishment plays on peoples fears and so we all sink together as we all cling to our "lesser evils", tribal allegiances, and try to avoid the embarrassment of being wrong.

    Although everyone is aware of the corruption and insider dealing, no one seems to want to acknowledge the extent, or to think critically so as to reveal any more than we already know.

    It's almost as though corruption (the King's nudity) is a national treasure and revealing it would be a national security breach in the exceptional nation.

    And so to the Deep State cabal continues to rule unimpeded.

    WDDiM , Mar 23, 2019 5:08:16 PM | link
    The oligarchy that runs the country responded to the American people's decision by inventing a completely cock-and-bull story about Donald Trump being a Russian agent who the American people were tricked into voting for by nefarious Russian mind-control operatives, getting every organ of the liberal corporate media to disseminate and relentlessly promote this story on a daily basis for nearly three years

    Posted by: Ken | Mar 23, 2019 2:09:31 PM | 4

    You people don't get it do you?
    'The Plan' was to get rid of Turkey-Russia-Israel (and a few others) with one fell swoop....

    steve , Mar 23, 2019 5:11:08 PM | link
    Deep state makes the warren commish seem authoritative
    john , Mar 23, 2019 5:13:37 PM | link
    the rot in DC is palpable. this whole russiagate fiasco's been like some kind of really bad audition for deeper state kabuki...what's next?

    keeping brand Trump alive.

    Blooming Barricade , Mar 23, 2019 5:22:08 PM | link
    Matt Taibbi:

    It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD
    The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it

    https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million

    Pft , Mar 23, 2019 5:38:41 PM | link
    Russia gate was both a diversion from the real collusions (Russian Mafia , China and Israel) and a clever ruse to allow Trump to back off from his campaign promise to improve relations with Russia. US policy toward Russia is no different under Trump than it was during Obamas administration. Exactly what the Russia Gaters wanted and Trump delivered.

    That Mueller could find nothing more than some tax/money laundering/perjury charges in which the culprits in the end get pardoned is hardly surprising given his history. Want something covered up? Put Mueller on it.

    To show how afraid Trump was of Mueller he appointed his long term friend Barr as AJ and pretended he didn't know how close they were when it came out. There is no lie people wont believe. Lol

    Meanwhile Trumps Russian Mafia connections stay under the radar in MSM, Trump continues as Bibi's sock puppet, the fake trade war with China continues as Ivanka is rolling in China trademarks .

    The Rothschild puppet that bailed out Trumps casinos as Commerce Secretary overseeing negotiations that will open the doors for more US and EU (they willy piggy back on the deal like hyenas) jobs to go to China (this time in financial/services) and stronger IPR protections that will facilitate this transfer, and will provide companies more profits in which to buyback stocks but wont bring manufacturing jobs back.

    tuyzentfloot , Mar 23, 2019 5:46:31 PM | link
    The collusion story has been hit badly and it will likely lose its momentum, but I wonder how far reaching this loss of momentum is. There are many variants. The 'unwitting accomplice' is an oxymoron which isn't finished yet. The Russians hacking the election: not over. The Russians sowing discord and division. Not over. Credibility of the Russiagate champions overall? Not clear. Some could take a serious hit. Brennan and other insiders who made it onto cable tv?
    It is possible that the whole groupthink about Russiagate changes drastically
    and that 'the other claims' also lose their credibility but it's far from certain. After years of building up tension Russia's policies are also changing. I think they have shown restraint but their paranoia and aggressiveness is also increasing and some claims will become true after all.
    JOHN CHUCKMAN , Mar 23, 2019 5:48:55 PM | link

    "Russiagate" has always been a meaningless political fraud.

    When folks like Hillary Clinton sign on to something and give it a great deal of weight, you really do know you are talking about an empty bag of tricks. She is a psychopathic liar, one with a great deal of blood on her hands.

    My problem with this official result is that it may tend to give Trump a boost, new credibility.

    The trouble with Trump has never been Russia - something only blind ideologues and people with the minds of children believe - it is that he is genuinely ignorant and genuinely arrogant and loud-mouthed - an extremely dangerous combination.

    And in trying to defend himself, this genuine coward has completely surrendered American foreign policy to its most dangerous enemies, the Neocons.


    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/john-chuckman-comment-americas-democrats-launch-lawsuit-against-trump-and-russia-and-wiki-leaks-over-election-hilarious-this-is-a-country-fit-to-dominate-the-earth-they-cant-manage-their-own/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/john-chuckman-comment-yet-more-ignorant-gossip-and-innuendo-about-trump-and-russia-this-all-reminds-me-of-insane-past-american-campaigns-against-procter-gamble-or-harry-potter-charging-devil/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/12/08/john-chuckman-comment-what-americas-neocons-represent-for-arms-control-agreements-such-as-the-inf-with-russia-and-heres-the-deadly-weakness-in-trumps-psychology-that-has-allowed-neocons-to-ta/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/09/23/john-chuckman-comment-a-comment-rightly-asks-with-trump-doing-everything-the-establishment-wants-why-do-they-still-want-to-get-rid-of-him-i-think-these-are-the-essential-reasons/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/06/john-chuckman-comment-some-very-dark-thoughts-of-where-america-is-going-in-its-relations-with-russia-and-iran-i-do-think-we-live-in-dangerous-times-and-they-are-deliberately-manufactured/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/04/08/john-chuckman-comment-complete-degradation-of-a-self-styled-great-nation-which-allows-paid-thugs-to-use-poison-gas-to-give-it-an-excuse-for-still-more-killing-the-dark-place-we-are-brought-to-by-tr/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/12/06/john-chuckman-comment-more-on-the-strange-phenomenon-of-trump-and-americas-neocons-a-man-who-imagines-himself-a-great-leader-leading-nothing-and-he-still-has-pathetic-followers-who-think-hes-fi/

    https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/12/14/john-chuckman-comment-new-phony-book-on-trump-and-russia-whats-really-going-on-with-all-the-mumbo-jumbo-insanity-in-america-the-real-target-aint-trump-neocons-and-russia/


    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 5:59:03 PM | link
    Blaming Russiagate on Hillary is very easy for those who hate her or hope that Trump will deliver on his faux populist fake-agenda.

    No one wants to contemplate the possibility that Hillary and Trump, and the duopoly they lead, fixed the election and planned Russiagate in advance.

    It seems a bridge too far, even for the smart skeptics at MoA.

    So funny.

    Trump has proven himself to be a neocon. He broke his campaign promise to investigate Hillary within DAYS of being elected. He has brought allies of his supposed enemies into his Administration.

    Yet every one turns from the possibility that the election was fixed. LOL.

    The horrible possibility that our "democracy" is managed is too horrible to contemplate. Lets just blame it all on Hillary.

    Welcome to the rabbithole.

    Copeland , Mar 23, 2019 6:23:41 PM | link
    Those who have been holding their breath for two years can finally exhale. I guess the fever of hysteria will have to be attended a while longer. A malady of this kind does not easily die out overnight. Those who have been taken in, and duped for so long, can not so easily recover. The weight of so much cognitive dissonance presses down on them like a boulder. The dust of the stampeded herd behind Russiagate is enough paralyze the will of those who have succumbed.

    As Joseph Conrad once wrote, "The ways of human progress are inscrutable."

    Jonathan , Mar 23, 2019 7:02:54 PM | link
    @37 Jackrabbit,

    Of course it was fixed. That's what the Electoral College is for .

    Arioch , Mar 23, 2019 7:06:26 PM | link
    Russiagate is a pendulum, it reached the dead point, it would hange in the air for a moment, then it would start swinging right backwards at full speed crashign everything in the way!

    It would be revealed, it was Russia who paid Muller to start that hysteria and stole money from American tax-payers and make America an international laughing stock. "Putin benefited from it", highly likely!

    Muller's investigation is paid for with Manafort's seized cash and property and Manafort has made Yanukovich king of Ukraine, so Manafort is Putin's agent, so Muller is working of Putin's money, so it was Putin's collusion everything that Muller is doing! Highly likely.

    fast freddy , Mar 23, 2019 7:12:20 PM | link
    There is no "Liberal Media". Those whom claim to be Liberal and yet support the Warmonger Democratic Party (Republican lite) are frauds. Liberalism does not condone war and it most certainly does not support wars of aggression - especially those wars waged against defenseless nations. Neither can liberalism support trade sanctions or the subjugation of Palestinians in the Apartheid State of ISreal.
    Peter , Mar 23, 2019 7:16:00 PM | link
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHo6cW0HVkQ DISGRACEFUL WILL WE EVER SAY NO?
    vk , Mar 23, 2019 7:24:32 PM | link
    @ Posted by: Jackrabbit | Mar 23, 2019 3:48:10 PM | 18

    We must be very careful with the words we choose, in order to paint the correct conjuncture and not to throw the bathtub with the baby inside.

    It's one thing to say Bernie Sanders is not a revolutionary; it's another completely different thing to say he was in cahoots with the Clintons.

    If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have disputed the primaries against Hillary. Not only he chose to do so, but he only didn't win because the DNC threw all its weight against him.

    Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist. He's an imperialist who believes the spoils of the empire should be also used to build a Scandinavian-style Welfare State for the American people only. A cynic would tell you this would make him a Nazi without the race theme, but you have to keep in mind societies move in a dialectical patern, not a linear one: if you preach for "democratic socialism", you're bringing the whole package, not only the bits you want.

    I believe the rise of Bernie Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists. Americans are more aware of their own contradictions (more enlightened) now than before he disputed those faithful primaries of 2016. And the most important ingredient for that, in my opinion, was the fact he was crushed by both parties; that the "establishment" acted in unison not to let him get near the WH. That was a didactic moment for the American people (or a signficant part of it).

    But I agree Russiagate went well beyond just covering the Clintons' dirt in the DNC.

    It may have be born like that, but, if that was the case, the elites quickly realized it had other, ampler practical uses. The main one, in my opinion, was to drive a wedge between Trump's Clash of Civilizations's doctrine -- which perceives China as the main long term enemy, and Russia as a natural ally of the West -- and the public opinon. The thing is most of the American elite is far too dependent on China's productive chain; Russia is not, and can be balkanized.

    Sandwichman , Mar 23, 2019 7:30:58 PM | link
    counterpoint: If the Mueller report does not EXPLICITLY exonerate Trump, it does NOT exonerate Trump.
    wagelaborer , Mar 23, 2019 7:43:06 PM | link
    There is a funny video compilation of the TV talking heads predicting the end of Trump, new bombshells, impeachment, etc., over the last two years.
    Unfortunately, the same sort of compilation could be made of sane people predicting "this new information means the end of Russiagate" over the same time period.
    The truth is that the truth doesn't matter, only the propaganda, and it has not stopped, only spun onto new hysteria.
    Rob , Mar 23, 2019 7:58:15 PM | link
    As others have said, hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been wrong all along. They have too much emotional investment in the grand conspiracy theory to simply let it go. Rather, they will forever point to what they believe are genuine bits of evidence and curse Mueller for not following the leads. And the Dems in the House of Representatives will waste more time and resources on pointless investigations in an effort to keep the public sufficiently distracted from more important matters, such as the endless wars and coups that they support. A pox on all their houses, both Democrats and Republicans.
    Sandwichman , Mar 23, 2019 8:08:59 PM | link
    "...hard core Russiagaters will likely not be convinced that they have been wrong all along."

    Wrong about what? There seems to be "narrative" operative here that there are only two positions on this matter: the "right" one and the "wrong" one and nothing else.

    Sunny Runny Burger , Mar 23, 2019 8:10:36 PM | link
    Ben nails it in "Mar 23, 2019 3:32:48 PM | 17".

    Ben's and other comments might make this a little bit superfluous but it's short.

    A case of divide and conquer against the population

    This time it was a fabricated scandal.

    Continued control over "facts" and narratives, the opportunity for efficient misdirection and distraction, stealing and wasting other people's time and effort, spurious disagreements, wearing down relations.

    The illusion of choice, (false) opposition, blinded "oversight", and mythical claims concerning a civilian government (in the case of the US: "of, for, and by" or something like that).

    Who knew or knows is irrelevant as long as the show goes on. There's nothing to prove anything significant about who if anyone may or may not be behind the curtain and thus on towards the next big or small scandal we go because people will be dissatisfied and hungry and ready to bite as hard as possible on some other bait for or against something.

    Maybe "Russiagate" was impeccably engineered or maybe it organically outcompeted other distractions on offer that would ultimately also waste enormous amounts of time and effort.

    Management by crisis

    The scandals, crises, "Science says" games and rubbish, outrage narratives, and any other manipulations attempt and perhaps succeed at controlling the US and the world through spam.

    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 8:11:22 PM | link
    Jonathan @39: Of course it was fixed. That's what the Electoral College is for.

    Well, you can say the same think about money-as-speech , gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc. Despite all these, Americans believe that their democracy works.

    I contend that what we witnessed in 2016 was a SHOW. Like American wrestling. It was (mostly) fake. The proper term for this is kayfabe .

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    And we have seen other 'shows' also, like:

    > White Helmets;

    >> Skripal;

    >> the Kavanaugh hearings;

    >> pulling troops out of Syria.

    aspnaz , Mar 23, 2019 8:19:24 PM | link
    My advice to the yanks mourning Russiagate: move to the UK. The sick Brits will keep the Russia hating cult alive even after they spend a decade puking over Brexit.
    mourning dove , Mar 23, 2019 8:50:48 PM | link
    Jackrabbit @18
    So, you don't think HRC qualifies as a nationalist? She can't fake populist, but she can do nationalist.
    I also think she is much too ambitious to have intentionally thrown the election. It was her turn dammit! Take a look at her behavior as First Lady if you think she's the kind of personality that is content to wield power from behind the scenes.
    Cortes , Mar 23, 2019 8:51:27 PM | link
    As usual, a fine essay. Thank you.

    A couple of suggestions?

    The headline would be better worded "Russiagate really is finished."

    And the reaction at Colonel Lang's site makes interesting reading.

    Les , Mar 23, 2019 8:55:52 PM | link
    They didn't fall for the Steele dossier. I recall that emptywheel had discredited the dossier during the election as it was known to have been rejected by major media outlets leading up to the election. I think they merely fell behind the others as the outgoing administration, the Democrats, the CIA, and the media chose to use the dossier to 'blackmail' Trump.
    paul , Mar 23, 2019 8:56:02 PM | link
    The most important fruit of russiagate, from the view of the establishment of the hegemon, is that America has now taken a giant step towards full bore censorship.
    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 9:00:35 PM | link
    vk @43

    We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby inside.
    Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?

    If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have disputed the primaries against Hillary.
    Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?

    Have you read this: Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016 ?

    Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's that?

    The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him and Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.

    Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax returns. Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the press asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of returns). Bernie refused.

    Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
    Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.

    What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate, meaningless astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like open borders. These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the Democrats and another 4 years for Trump.

    Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character issues and to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other examples: Bernie refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's well known work to squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer Flowers), and didn't talk about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make") and her glee at the overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").

    And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find that even a little bit strange?

    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 9:02:11 PM | link
    Sorry, here's a more readable version:

    We must be very careful ... and not to throw the bathtub with the baby inside.
    Don't we already have plenty of evidence that there is no precious democratic baby in the bath? What do you think the Yellow Vests are doing every weekend?

    If Bernie Sanders really was a "friend" of the Clintons, then he wouldn't even have disputed the primaries against Hillary.
    Why not? Do you know him personally? Can you vouch for him?

    Have you read this: Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016 ?

    Bernie referred to Hillary as "my friend" many times on the campaign trail. He told Politico that he's known her for 25 years but they are not "best friends". That's Sander's typical word judo. Like when he was asked about Zionism, his response: what's that?

    The fact is, Bernie is friendly with all the top Democrats: Obama campaigned for him and Schumer wouldn't allow funding for democratic candidates that opposed him.

    Then there's other strangeness. Like Bernie's refusal to release his 2014 tax returns. Bernie said his returns were "boring" but when his 2015 tax return was delayed the press asked him to release his 2014 return (Hillary boasted that she had released 10 years of returns) . Bernie refused.

    Now, I agree he's not a revolutionary socialist.... I believe the rise of Bernie Sanders had an overall positive impact in the world as it exists.
    Really? LOL. Sanders REFUSED to lead a Movement for real change. That might've changed things for the better Mi>- like the Yellow Vests are changing things for the better.

    What have we seen from the Democratics since 2016? Bullshit like Russiagate, meaningless astroturf activism around bathrooms and statues, and outlandish policies like open borders. These things just irritate most Americans and will lead to more failure for the Democrats and another 4 years for Trump.

    Lastly, you said nothing about Bernie's refusal to attack Hillary on character issues and to counter her assertion that she NEVER changed her vote for money. Other examples: Bernie refused to discuss Hillary's home email server, never mentioned Hillary's well known work to squash investigations of Bill Clinton for abusing women (Jennifer Flowers), and didn't talk about other scandals like Benghazi ("What difference does it make") and her glee at the overthrow of Quadaffi ("we came, we saw, we kicked his ass").

    And what of Trump? He was the ONLY republican populist in a field of 19. Do you find that even a little bit strange?

    mourning dove , Mar 23, 2019 9:06:00 PM | link
    Jonathan @39
    Exactly! It's the Electoral College that decides elections, not voters.
    Jackrabbit , Mar 23, 2019 9:13:59 PM | link
    mourning dove @57: Exactly! It's the Electoral College that decides elections, not voters.

    Do you think Hillary didn't know that? She refused to campaign in the three mid-western states that would've won her the electoral college. Each of the states were won by Trump by a thin margin.

    Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 23, 2019 9:14:04 PM | link
    Gosh and Blimey!
    Comment #56 in a thread about an utterly corrupt political system and no-one has mentioned the pro-"Israel" Lobby?
    Words fail me. So I'll use someone else's...

    From Xymphora March 21, 2019.

    "Truth or Trope?" (Sailer):

    "Of the top 50 political donors to either party at the federal level in 2018, 52 percent were Jewish and 48 percent were gentile. Individuals who identify as Jewish are usually estimated to make up perhaps 2.2 percent of the population.
    Of the $675 million given by the top 50 donors, 66 percent of the money came from Jews and 34 percent from gentiles.
    Of the $297 million that GOP candidates and conservative causes received from the top 50 donors, 56 percent was from Jewish individuals.
    Of the $361 million Democratic politicians and liberal causes received, 76 percent came from Jewish givers.
    So it turns out that Rep. Omar and Gov. LePage appear to have been correct, at least about the biggest 2018 donors. But you can also see why Pelosi wanted Omar to just shut up about it: 76 percent is a lot."

    Erelis , Mar 23, 2019 9:35:12 PM | link
    Next up another false flag operation. The thing is, it would have be non-trivial and involving the harming of people to jolt the narrative back to that favoring the deep state. And taking off the proverbial media table, that Mueller found no collusion. Yes, election in 2016 no collusion, but Putin was behind the latest horrific false flag, "oh look, Trump is not confronting Putin"...
    daffyDuct , Mar 23, 2019 9:40:02 PM | link

    Not even getting into the "treason", "putin's c*ckholster", "what's the time on Moscow, troll!" crap we've been subjected to for 3 years, please enjoy this mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjUvfZj-Fm0.

    mourning dove , Mar 23, 2019 9:54:13 PM | link
    Jackrabbit,

    I've said before that she's a terrible strategist and she ran a terrible campaign and she's terribly out of touch. I think she expected a cake walk and was relying on Trump being so distasteful to voters that they'd have no other option.

    I think Trump legitimately won the election and I don't believe for a second that she won the popular vote. There were so many problems with the election but since they were on the losing side, nobody cares. In 2012 I didn't know anyone else who was voting for Jill Stein, way too many people were still in love with Obama. She got .4% of the vote. In 2016 most of the people I knew were voting for Jill Stein, she drew a large crowd from DemExit, but they say she got .4% of the vote. Total bullshit. There was also ballot stuffing and lots of other problems, but it still wasn't enough.

    I'm also convinced that Trump and Clinton colluded, but that they did so in order to get her elected. I don't think he really wanted the job. But still, Hillary can do nationalist, and the designs of the Empire would have proceeded either way.

    jadan , Mar 23, 2019 9:56:37 PM | link

    Trump is a crook who takes money wherever he can get it, from subcontractors foolish enough to work for him to bankers dumb enough to believe his financial statements. No doubt he has helped Russian crooks sanitize their booty, but that is apparently too difficult for Mueller to prove.

    It is not good news that this troglodyte was not indicted, but it is good news that Russia was not found guilty of electing him. Russiagate is an existential issue for the "national security" establishment and just another propaganda offensive designed to justify the largely useless & destructive activities of the Pentagon.

    It is time to build cooperation not continue the stupidity of US unilateralism and pursuit of global hegemony. Trump and his team have to be removed from office. Democrats don't need Russiagate to do it. The truth will work better.

    [Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... RussiaGate was never a sustainable narrative. It was ludicrous from the beginning. And now that it has ended with a whimper there are a lot of angry, confused and scared people out there. ..."
    "... And now his report is in. There are no new indictments. And by doing so he is saving his reputation for the future. And that is your biggest tell that Hillary's blackmail is now worthless. ..."
    "... They don't fear her anymore because RussiaGate outed her as the architect. Anything else she has is irrelevant in the face of trying to oust a sitting president from power. ..."
    "... The Deep State and The Davos Crowd stand revealed and reviled. If they don't do something dramatic then the anger from the rest of the country will also be palpable come election time. Justice is not done simply by saying, "No evidence of collusion." ..."
    "... It's clear that RussiaGate is a failure of monumental proportions. Heads will have to roll. But who will be willing to fall on their sword at this point? Comey? No. McCabe? No. ..."
    "... If there is no collusion, if RussiaGate is a scam, then all roads lead back to Hillary as the sacrificial lamb. ..."
    "... If there is any hope of salvaging the center of this country for the Democrats, the ones that voted against Hillary in 2016, then there is no reason anymore not to indict Hillary as the architect of RussiaGate. ..."
    "... And hope that is enough bread and circuses to distract from the real storm ahead of us. ..."
    "... Hillary is the epitome of evil. ..."
    "... I don't think Hillary is enough. I want McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch, Obama, Lois Lerner, Blasey Ford, Brennan, Clapper, Abedin, Weiner, Cheryl Mills, Susan Rice, Strzok, Page, Sally Yates, all of the phony FISA cohort brought to justice. ..."
    "... Her DNC cabal cooked in less than 24 hours from the election defeat a conspiracy of Russian meddling and now, when more information became available, HCR is involved in two separate cases of foreign collusion, The Steele dossier, with Russo-Anglo meddling and another a Ukrainian one, which is now under investigation and the purpose was getting their help for becoming elected. ..."
    "... Without a doubt the Russian collusion is the most serious one, because it deliberately sabotaged diplomatic relations with Russia and lead into to a new cold war era. This also raised substantially risks for a direct confrontation with catastrophic consequences. The damage from these treacherous acts is huge and the felony bears pretty much all hallmarks of treason. Se deliberately undermined her own nation´s interests and rather risked even a war simply, because she is a psychopath, who refused to concede the defeat in due elections and instead wanted to hide real reasons for her loss to any cost for everybody else, "because it was her turn to get elected". ..."
    "... HIS NAME WAS SETH RICH ..."
    "... It is clear that from the beginning, fraudulent FISA warrants, that it was a case of Obama's administration digging dirt on Trump believing that when Hillary wins there will be nobody to hold them responsible ..."
    "... When Hillary lost there was only one way out for them to justify that kind of abuse, to find something, anything on Trump so they can say that they were right. Worse than Watergate by orders of magnitude, involving FBI, DOJ and WH itself. ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Tom Luongo,

    During most of the RussiaGate investigation against Donald Trump I kept saying that all roads lead to Hillary Clinton.

    Anyone with three working brain cells knew this, including 'Miss' Maddow, whose tears of disappointment are particularly delicious.

    Robert Mueller's investigation was designed from the beginning to create something out of nothing. It did this admirably.

    It was so effective it paralyzed the country for more than two years, just like Europe has been held hostage by Brexit. And all of this because, in the end, the elites I call The Davos Crowd refused to accept that the people no longer believed their lies about the benefits of their neoliberal, globalist agenda.

    Hillary Clinton's ascension to the Presidency was to be their apotheosis along with the Brexit vote. These were meant to lay to rest, once and for all time, the vaguely libertarian notion that people should rule themselves and not be ruled by philosopher kings in some distant land.

    Hillary's failure was enormous. And the RussiaGate gambit to destroy Trump served a laundry list of purposes to cover it:

    1. Undermine his legitimacy before he even takes office.
    2. Accuse him of what Hillary actually did: collude with Russians and Ukrainians to effect the outcome of the election
    3. Paralyze Trump on his foreign policy desires to scale back the Empire
    4. Give aid and comfort to hurting progressives and radicalize them further undermining our political system
    5. Polarize the electorate over the false choice of Trump's guilt.
    6. Paralyze the Dept. of Justice and Congress so that they would not uncover the massive corruption in the intelligence agencies in the U.S. and the U.K.
    7. Isolate Trump and take away every ally or potential ally he could have by turning them against him through prosecutor overreach.

    Hillary should have been thrown to the wolves after she failed. When you fail the people she failed and cost them the money she cost them, you lose more than just your funding. What this tells you is that Hillary has so much dirt on everyone involved, once this thing started everyone went along with it lest she burn them down as well.

    Burnin' Down da House

    Hillary is the epitome of envy. Envy is the destructive sin of coveting someone else's life so much they are obsessed with destroying it. It's the sin of Cain. She envies what Trump has, the Presidency. And she was willing to tear it down to keep him from having it no matter how much damage it would do. She's worse than the Joker from The Dark Knight.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/efHCdKb5UWc

    Because while the Joker is unfathomable to someone with a conscience there's little stopping us from excising him from the community completely., even though Batman refuses.

    Hillary hates us for who we are and what we won't give her. And that animus drove her to blackmail the world while putting on the face of its savior.

    And that's what makes what comes next so obvious to me. RussiaGate was never a sustainable narrative. It was ludicrous from the beginning. And now that it has ended with a whimper there are a lot of angry, confused and scared people out there.

    Mueller thought all he had to do was lean on corrupt people and threaten them with everything. They would turn on Trump. He would resign in disgrace from the public outcry. It didn't work. In the end Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and Roger Stone all held their ground or perjured themselves into the whole thing falling apart.

    Andrew Weissman's resignation last month was your tell there was nothing. Mueller would pursue this to the limit of his personal reputation and no further. Just like so many other politicians.

    Vote Your Pocketbook

    With respect to Brexit I've been convinced that it would come down to reputations. Would the British MP's vote against their own personal best interests to do the bidding of the EU? Would Theresa May eventually realize her historical reputation would be destroyed if she caves to Brussels and betrays Brexit in the end? Always bet on the fecklessness of politicians. They will always act selfishly when put to the test. While leading RussiaGate, Mueller was always headed here if he couldn't get someone to betray Trump.

    And now his report is in. There are no new indictments. And by doing so he is saving his reputation for the future. And that is your biggest tell that Hillary's blackmail is now worthless.

    They don't fear her anymore because RussiaGate outed her as the architect. Anything else she has is irrelevant in the face of trying to oust a sitting president from power. The progressives that were convinced of Trump's treason are bereft; their false hope stripped away like standing in front of a sandblaster. They will be raw, angry and looking for blood after they get over their denial.

    Everyone else who was blackmailed into going along with this lunacy will begin cutting deals to save their skins. The outrage over this will not end. Trump will be President when he stands for re-election.

    The Wolves Beckon

    The Democrats do not have a chance against him as of right now. When he was caving on everything back in December it looked like he was done. That there was enough meat on the RussiaGate bones to make Nancy Pelosi brave. Then she backed off on impeachment talk. Oops....

    ... ... ...

    The Deep State and The Davos Crowd stand revealed and reviled. If they don't do something dramatic then the anger from the rest of the country will also be palpable come election time. Justice is not done simply by saying, "No evidence of collusion."

    It's clear that RussiaGate is a failure of monumental proportions. Heads will have to roll. But who will be willing to fall on their sword at this point? Comey? No. McCabe? No. There is only one answer. And Obama's people are still in place to protect him. I said last fall that " Hillary would indict herself. " And I meant it. Eventually her blackmail and drive to burn it all down led to this moment.

    The circumstances are different than I expected back then, Trump didn't win the mid-terms. But the end result was always the same. If there is no collusion, if RussiaGate is a scam, then all roads lead back to Hillary as the sacrificial lamb.

    Because the bigger project, the erection of a transnational superstate, is bigger than any one person. Hillary is expendable. Lies are expensive to maintain. The truth is cheap to defend. Think of the billions in opportunity costs associated with this. Once the costs rise above the benefits, change happens fast. If there is any hope of salvaging the center of this country for the Democrats, the ones that voted against Hillary in 2016, then there is no reason anymore not to indict Hillary as the architect of RussiaGate.

    We all know it's the truth. So, the cheapest way out of this mess for them is to give the MAGApedes what they want, Hillary.

    And hope that is enough bread and circuses to distract from the real storm ahead of us.

    Jdhank , 27 minutes ago link

    Hillary ain't enough!

    We demand Comey, Brennan, Bill, the Podesta's, and the prancing little effiminate pony himself.

    consider me gone , 29 minutes ago link

    I'm surprised Donna Brazier and Pedo Podesta are still breathing. Maybe Hillary got God. Or gin.

    Koba the Dread , 32 minutes ago link

    Hillary is the epitome of envy.

    Your spelling is atrocious. Let me correct it.

    Hillary is the epitome of evil.

    There, that does it.

    KnitDame , 1 hour ago link

    I don't think Hillary is enough. I want McCabe, Comey, Mueller, Rosenstein, Loretta Lynch, Obama, Lois Lerner, Blasey Ford, Brennan, Clapper, Abedin, Weiner, Cheryl Mills, Susan Rice, Strzok, Page, Sally Yates, all of the phony FISA cohort brought to justice. Think of the taxpayer money wasted on this ridiculous Mueller investigation! The Roger Stone arrest was an outrage. Who tipped off CNN? Who ordered it? What was with the attack dogs and machine guns?

    And now we have Nadler trying to destroy anyone and everyone who ever did business with Trump. All those 80 people who got letters from him asking for documents will now be bankrupted by legal fees.

    According to Scott Adams, one recipient is refusing to cooperate -- he's saying "I can't afford for me and family to be destroyed." He put the request for documents in a drawer. He has no money for lawyers.

    This insanity and abuse of power has got to stop. Meanwhile, nothing gets done in Congress. We're all looking at censorship, tilted search engines, de-monetization, being beat up on campus for trying to express an opinion, being accosted in a restaurant (or, VP Pence, from the stage ("Hamilton"), getting sucker-punched for wearing a MAGA hat, having elections stolen through myriad Dem cheating methods, and NOTHING is being done.

    2willies , 1 hour ago link

    You forgot Rachel

    TeraByte , 1 hour ago link

    "all roads lead to Hillary Clinton"

    Her DNC cabal cooked in less than 24 hours from the election defeat a conspiracy of Russian meddling and now, when more information became available, HCR is involved in two separate cases of foreign collusion, The Steele dossier, with Russo-Anglo meddling and another a Ukrainian one, which is now under investigation and the purpose was getting their help for becoming elected.

    Without a doubt the Russian collusion is the most serious one, because it deliberately sabotaged diplomatic relations with Russia and lead into to a new cold war era. This also raised substantially risks for a direct confrontation with catastrophic consequences. The damage from these treacherous acts is huge and the felony bears pretty much all hallmarks of treason. Se deliberately undermined her own nation´s interests and rather risked even a war simply, because she is a psychopath, who refused to concede the defeat in due elections and instead wanted to hide real reasons for her loss to any cost for everybody else, "because it was her turn to get elected".

    Dragon HAwk , 1 hour ago link

    Hillary is expendable.

    God I Love Feel Good Stories.

    East Indian , 1 hour ago link

    And, oh, I almost forgot.

    HIS NAME WAS SETH RICH

    Neochrome , 1 hour ago link

    It is clear that from the beginning, fraudulent FISA warrants, that it was a case of Obama's administration digging dirt on Trump believing that when Hillary wins there will be nobody to hold them responsible.

    When Hillary lost there was only one way out for them to justify that kind of abuse, to find something, anything on Trump so they can say that they were right. Worse than Watergate by orders of magnitude, involving FBI, DOJ and WH itself.

    [Mar 24, 2019] One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.

    Highly recommended!
    Mar 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    "The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: `[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.' |"

    From page one of the Barr letter to the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. https://www.scribd.com/document/402973432/AG-March-24-2019-Letter-to-House-and-Senate-Judiciary-Committees#from_embed Some call this merely the "end of the beginning." Further revelations will be emerging, including from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz. " J ustice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed Thursday his office is still investigating possible abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the DOJ and FBI in their investigation into President Trump and associates of his 2016 campaign," reported the Washington Examiner this week.

    Decameron , 32 minutes ago

    However, AG Barr's letter retells the tale of Russian Interference in our elections, according to Mr. Mueller and his team's investigation and indictments. So, the anti-Trump camp will undoubtedly continue to question the 2016 election results, and blame the defeat of HRC on the "Reds." One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.

    [Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Sites that use Disqus that allow shadow banning or steal and sell your information are just plain evil. ..."
    "... The marketing of Russiagate™ was no act of "stupidity". News outlets didn't erroneously "swallow" anything. They acted as agents of the Globalist American Establishment/Deep State which was attempting to shake an interloper (Trump) off its back or, at the very least, to completely tie his hands in policy-making terms. Too bad that same Deep State has created a "Cadillac of (P)residential prerogative over the years which Trump has been driving right over their little blood-stained hands....as an added benefit, this new brand of hyper-partisan "Yellow Journalism" sold papers...to some ..."
    "... How many fake headlines were created? How many panels of propaganda spreading "experts" were assembled? How many drooling sycophant hosts made this their everyday routine to stir the 'divide the nation' pot as they swore to God and the American People that the President was an asset of a foreign provocateur subverting the Republic? ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Smiley, 4 hours ago (Edited)

    One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates. In other words, the Media's ability to simply ignore criticism enabled them to go off into their own Russiagate universe. Places that still allow competing narratives and diverse opinions, like ZeroHedge, are the main places I read anymore. If a link leads to WaPo or NYT, I bail instantly.

    Sites that use Disqus that allow shadow banning or steal and sell your information are just plain evil.

    Won't even go there.

    Bananaamerican , 4 hours ago (Edited)

    One thing I massively disagree with Taibbi on: "news outlets once again 'swallowed' a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included"

    The marketing of Russiagate™ was no act of "stupidity". News outlets didn't erroneously "swallow" anything. They acted as agents of the Globalist American Establishment/Deep State which was attempting to shake an interloper (Trump) off its back or, at the very least, to completely tie his hands in policy-making terms. Too bad that same Deep State has created a "Cadillac of (P)residential prerogative over the years which Trump has been driving right over their little blood-stained hands....as an added benefit, this new brand of hyper-partisan "Yellow Journalism" sold papers...to some

    4 hours ago
    (Edited)

    Spot on. There was no misunderstanding. Everyone in The Swamp and MSM knew and accepted their assigned roles. That's why their was nary a retraction. Retractions played no part in their goals.

    Nael, 1 hour ago
    Agreed. They were totally complicit. How many fake headlines were created? How many panels of propaganda spreading "experts" were assembled? How many drooling sycophant hosts made this their everyday routine to stir the 'divide the nation' pot as they swore to God and the American People that the President was an asset of a foreign provocateur subverting the Republic?

    Too many to count.

    [Mar 24, 2019] No matter the result, what is found or is not, to the neocons/neolib Establishment, Trump will always be waiting for his next check written in Cyrillic and denominated in rubles.

    Notable quotes:
    "... It's not Rubles.. Those be Sheckels. ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Perry Colace

    All of this reminds me of the first combat scene in 'Full Metal Jacket'. Joker is being helicoptered into the battle at Hue, and the door gunner is just firing his M-60 nonstop, yelling 'Get some! Come on! Get some!', as people below are running and getting shot. Joker says, 'Aren't you afraid that you might be killing innocent women......or children?'. The door gunner says,

    If they run, they're VC.

    If they stand still, they're WELL TRAINED VC!'.

    No matter the result, what is found or is not, to the left, Trump will always be waiting for his next check written in Cyrillic and denominated in rubles.

    Macher1, 3 hours ago

    It's not Rubles.. Those be Sheckels.

    [Mar 24, 2019] Poor Travolta. With Mueller finished, US media turns to John Travolta for collusion gossip

    Mar 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Zanon , Mar 24, 2019 3:35:09 PM | link

    Poor Travolta..
    With Mueller finished, US media turns to John Travolta for collusion gossip
    https://on.rt.com/9qss

    [Mar 24, 2019] The Israel-gate Side of Russia-gate by Dennis J Bernstein

    Notable quotes:
    "... At Netanyahu's behest, Flynn and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly took the lead in the lobbying to derail the U.N. resolution, which Flynn discussed in a phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (in which the Russian diplomat rebuffed Flynn's appeal to block the resolution). ..."
    "... In this case, what Flynn and Kushner were doing was going directly against US foreign policy, because Obama wanted the resolution to pass; He just didn't want to vote for it because that would cross the Israel lobby in the United States. The US finally ended up abstaining on the resolution and it passed 14-0. ..."
    "... But before that happened, Flynn went to the Russians and to Egypt, both members of the Security Council, and tried to get the resolution delayed. But all of Israel's machinations to derail this resolution failed and that is what Mueller was investigating, the intervention and disruption of American foreign policy by private citizens who had no official role. ..."
    "... While I think Bibi is an idiot, I also think the Logan Act is overinvoked, overstated, probably of dubious legal value and also of dubious constitutional value. ..."
    "... In short, especially because Trump had been elected, though not yet inaugurated, I think he is not at all guilty of a Logan Act violation. This is nothing close to Spiro Agnew calling Anna Chenault from the airplane in August 1968. ..."
    "... Probably true, although evidence of extreme collusion with Israel eliminates any case against Russia, with whom we have far more reasons for amity. Bringing out the Israel collusion greatly improves public understanding of political corruption. Perhaps it will awaken some to the Agnew-Chennault betrayal of the people of the US. ..."
    "... It's ironic that Russia-gate is turning out to be Israel's effort to distract attention from its complete control over the Democratic party in 2016. From Israeli billionaires behind the scenes to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at the helm. ..."
    "... "Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an enemy state." So that is how it works, the White House says it is an enemy state and therefore it is. The so called declaration is the hammer used for trying to make contact with Russia a criminal offense. We are not at war with Russia although we see our leaders doing their best to provoke Russia into one. ..."
    "... The Israel connection disclosed by the malpracticer hack Mueller in the recent Flynn-flam just made Trump bullet-proof (so to speak). ..."
    "... So Mueller caught Kushner and Flynn red-handed, sabotaging the Obama administration? What of it? He can't use that evidence, because it would inculpate the Zionist neocons that are orchestrating his farcical, Stalinist witchhunt. And Mueller, being an efficient terminator bot, knows that his target is Russia, not Israel. ..."
    "... So Mueller will just have to continue swamp-fishing for potential perjurers ahem witnesses, for the upcoming show trials (to further inflame public opinion against Russia and Russia sympathizers). And continue he will, because (as we all know from Schwarzenegger's flicks), the only way to stop the terminator is to terminate him/it first. ..."
    "... Trump and Kushner have nothing to worry about, even if a smoking gun is found that proves their collusion with Israel. That's because the entire political and media establishment will simply ignore the Israeli connection. ..."
    "... Journalists and politicians will even continue to present Mike Flynn's contacts as evidence of collusion with Russia. They'll keep on repeating that "Flynn lied about his phone call to the Russian ambassador". But there will be no mention of the fact that the purpose of this contact was to support Israel and not any alleged Russian interference. ..."
    "... I think you have it right Brendan. The MSM, Intelligence Community, and Mueller would never go down any path that popularized undue Israeli influence on US foreign policy. "Nothing to see here folks, move along." ..."
    "... The Nice Zionists responsible for the thefts and murders for the past 69 years along with the "Jewish Community" in the rest of the world will resolve the matter so as to be fair to both parties. This is mind-boggling fantasy. ..."
    "... FFS, Netanyahu aired a political commercial in Florida for Romney saying vote for this guy (against Obama)! I mean, it doesn't get any more overtly manipulative than that. Period. End of story. ..."
    "... God, I hate to go all "Israel controls the media" but there it is. Not even a discussion. Just a fact. ..."
    "... I also have to point out that he "fist pumped" Hillary Clinton at Mohammed Ali's eulogy. If he's as astute as he purports to be, he has to know that Hillary would have invaded Syria and killed a few hundred thousand more Syrians for the simple act of defiantly preserving their country. By almost any read of Ali's history, he would have been adamantly ("killing brown people") against that. But there was Silverstein using the platform to promote, arguably, perpetual war. ..."
    "... Yeah I found a couple of Silverstein's statements to be closer to neocon propaganda than reality: "Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby . . ." "Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to Trump instead." My impression was that the whole "terrible relationship between Obama and Netanyahu" was manufactured by the Israel lobby to bully Obama. However these are small blips within an otherwise solid critique of the Israel lobby's influence. ..."
    Dec 25, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

    The Israel-gate Side of Russia-gate December 23, 2017

    While unproven claims of Russian meddling in U.S. politics have whipped Official Washington into a frenzy, much less attention has been paid to real evidence of Israeli interference in U.S. politics, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.

    In investigating Russia's alleged meddling in U.S. politics, special prosecutor Robert Mueller uncovered evidence that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pressured the Trump transition team to undermine President Obama's plans to permit the United Nations to censure Israel over its illegal settlement building on the Palestinian West Bank, a discovery referenced in the plea deal with President Trump's first National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

    At Netanyahu's behest, Flynn and President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly took the lead in the lobbying to derail the U.N. resolution, which Flynn discussed in a phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak (in which the Russian diplomat rebuffed Flynn's appeal to block the resolution).

    I spoke on Dec, 18 with independent journalist and blogger Richard Silverstein, who writes on national security and other issues for a number of blogs at Tikun Olam .

    Dennis Bernstein: A part of Michael Flynn's plea had to do with some actions he took before coming to power regarding Israel and the United Nations. Please explain.

    Richard Silverstein:

    The Obama administration was negotiating in the [UN] Security Council just before he left office about a resolution that would condemn Israeli settlements. Obviously, the Israeli government did not want this resolution to be passed. Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to Trump instead. They approached Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner became involved in this. While they were in the transition and before having any official capacity, they negotiated with various members of the Security Council to try to quash the settlement resolution.

    One of the issues here which is little known is the Logan Act, which was passed at the foundation of our republic and was designed to prevent private citizens from usurping the foreign policy prerogatives of the executive. It criminalized any private citizen who attempted to negotiate with an enemy country over any foreign policy issue.

    In this case, what Flynn and Kushner were doing was going directly against US foreign policy, because Obama wanted the resolution to pass; He just didn't want to vote for it because that would cross the Israel lobby in the United States. The US finally ended up abstaining on the resolution and it passed 14-0.

    But before that happened, Flynn went to the Russians and to Egypt, both members of the Security Council, and tried to get the resolution delayed. But all of Israel's machinations to derail this resolution failed and that is what Mueller was investigating, the intervention and disruption of American foreign policy by private citizens who had no official role.

    This speaks to the power of the Israel lobby and of Israel itself to disrupt our foreign policy. Very few people have ever been charged with committing an illegal act by advocating on behalf of Israel. That is one of the reasons why this is such an important development. Until now, the lobby has really ruled supreme on the issue of Israel and Palestine in US foreign policy. Now it is possible that a private citizen will actually be made to pay a price for that.

    This is an important development because the lobby till now has run roughshod over our foreign policy in this area and this may act as a restraining order against blatant disruption of US foreign policy by people like this.

    Bernstein: So this information is a part of Michael Flynn's plea. Anyone studying this would learn something about Michael Flynn and it would be part of the prosecution's investigation.

    Silverstein:

    That's absolutely right. One thing to note here is that it is reporters who have raised the issue of the Logan Act, not Mueller or Flynn's people or anyone in the Trump administration. But I do think that Logan is a very important part of this plea deal, even if it is not mentioned explicitly.

    Bernstein: If the special prosecutor had smoking-gun information that the Trump administration colluded with Russia, in the way they colluded with Israel before coming to power, this would be a huge revelation. But it is definitely collusion when it comes to Israel.

    Silverstein: Absolutely. If this were Russia, it would be on the front page of every major newspaper in the United States and the leading story on the TV news. Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby and they have so much influence on US policy concerning Israel, it has managed to stay on the back burner. Only two or three media outlets besides mine have raised this issue of Logan and collusion. Kushner and Flynn may be the first American citizens charged under the Logan Act for interfering on behalf of Israel in our foreign policy. This is a huge issue and it has hardly been raised at all.

    Bernstein: As you know, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has made a career out of investigating the Russia-gate charges. She says that she has read all this material carefully, so she must have read about Flynn and Israel, but I haven't heard her on this issue at all.

    Silverstein:

    Even progressive journalists, who you'd think would be going after this with a vengeance, are frightened off by the fact the lobby really bites back. So, aside from outlets like the Intercept and the Electronic Intifada, there is a lot of hesitation about going after the Israel lobby. People are afraid because they know that there is a high price to be paid. It goes from being purely journalism to being a personal and political vendetta when they get you in their sights. In fact, one of the reasons I feel my blog is so important is that what I do is challenge Israeli policy and Israeli intervention in places where it doesn't belong.

    Bernstein: Jared Kushner is the point man for the Trump administration on Israel. He has talked about having a "vision for peace." Do you think it is a problem that this is someone with a long, close relationship with the prime minister of Israel and, in fact, runs a foundation that invests in the building of illegal Israeli settlements? Might this be problematic?

    Silverstein:

    It is quite nefarious, actually. When Jared Kushner was a teenager, Netanyahu used to stay at the Kushner family home when he visited the United States. This relationship with one of the most extreme right political figures in Israel goes back decades. And it is not just Kushner himself, but all the administration personnel dealing with these so-called peace negotiations, including Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman, the ambassador. These are all orthodox Jews who tend to have very nationalist views when it comes to Israel. They all support settlements financially through foundations. These are not honest brokers.

    We could talk at length about the history of US personnel who have been negotiators for Middle East peace. All of them have been favorable to Israel and answerable to the Israel lobby, including Dennis Ross and Makovsky, who served in the last administration. These people are dyed-in-the-wool ultra-nationalist supporters of [Israeli] settlements. They have no business playing any role in negotiating a peace deal.

    My prediction all along has been that these peace negotiations will come to naught, even though they seem to have bought the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, which is something new in the process. The Palestinians can never accept a deal that has been negotiated by Kushner and company because it will be far too favorable to Israel and it will totally neglect the interests of the Palestinians.

    Bernstein: It has been revealed that Kushner supports the building of settlements in the West Bank. Most people don't understand the politics of what is going on there, but it appears to be part of an ethnic cleansing.

    Silverstein:

    The settlements have always been a violation of international law, ever since Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967. The Geneva Conventions direct an occupying power to withdraw from territory that was not its own. In 1967 Israel invaded Arab states and conquered the West Bank and Gaza but this has never been recognized or accepted by any nation until now.

    The fact that Kushner and his family are intimately involved in supporting settlements–as are David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt–is completely outrageous. No member of any previous US administration would have been allowed to participate with these kinds of financial investments in support of settlements. Of course, Trump doesn't understand the concept of conflict of interest because he is heavily involved in such conflicts himself. But no party in the Middle East except Israel is going to consider the US an honest broker and acceptable as a mediator.

    When they announce this deal next January, no one in the Arab World is going to accept it, with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia because they have other fish to fry in terms of Iran. The next three years are going to be interesting, supposing Trump lasts out his term. My prediction is that the peace plan will fail and that it will lead to greater violence in the Middle East. It will not simply lead to a vacuum, it will lead to a deterioration in conditions there.

    Bernstein: The Trump transition team was actually approached directly by the Israeli government to try to intercede at the United Nations.

    Silverstein:

    I'm assuming it was Netanyahu who went directly to Kushner and Trump. Now, we haven't yet found out that Trump directly knew about this but it is very hard to believe that Trump didn't endorse this. Now that we know that Mueller has access to all of the emails of the transition team, there is little doubt that they have been able to find their smoking gun. Flynn's plea meant that they basically had him dead to rights. It remains to be seen what will happen with Kushner but I would think that this would play some role in either the prosecution of Kushner or some plea deal.

    Bernstein: The other big story, of course, is the decision by the Trump administration to move the US embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. Was there any pre-election collusion in that regard and what are the implications?

    Silverstein:

    Well, it's a terrible decision which goes against forty to fifty years of US foreign policy. It also breaches all international understanding. All of our allies in the European Union and elsewhere are aghast at this development. There is now a campaign in the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution condemning the announcement, which we will veto, but the next step will be to go to the General Assembly, where such a resolution will pass easily.

    The question is how much anger, violence and disruption this is going to cause around the world, especially in the Arab and Muslim world. This is a slow-burning fuse. It is not going to explode right now. The issue of Jerusalem is so vital that this is not something that is simply going to go away. This is going to be a festering sore in the Muslim world and among Palestinians. We have already seen attacks on Israeli soldiers and citizens and there will be many more.

    As to collusion in all of this, since Trump always said during the campaign that this was what he was going to do, it might be difficult to treat this in the same way as the UN resolution. The UN resolution was never on anybody's radar and nobody knew the role that Trump was playing behind the scenes with that–as opposed to Trump saying right from the get-go that Jerusalem was going to be recognized as the capital of Jerusalem.

    By doing that, they have completely abrogated any Palestinian interest in Jerusalem. This is a catastrophic decision that really excludes the United States from being an honest broker here and shows our true colors in terms of how pro-Israel we are.

    Dennis J Bernstein is a host of "Flashpoints" on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom . You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net .

    Drew Hunkins , December 23, 2017 at 5:37 pm

    As most regular readers of CN already know, some dynamite books on the inordinate amount of influence pro-Israel zealots have on Washington:

    1.) 'The Host and the Parasite' by Greg Felton
    2.) 'Power of Israel in the United States' by James Petras
    3.) 'They Dare to Speak Out' by Paul Findley
    4.) 'The Israel Lobby' by Mearsheimer and Walt
    5.) 'Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of U.S. Power' by James Petras

    I suggest that anyone relatively knew to this neglected topic peruse a few of the aforementioned titles. An inevitable backlash by the citizens of the United States is eventually forthcoming against the Zionist Power Configuration. It's crucial that this impending backlash remain democratic, non-violent, eschews anti-Semitism, and travels in a progressive in direction.

    Annie , December 23, 2017 at 5:47 pm

    Which one would you suggest? I already read "The Israel Lobby."

    Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:38 pm

    Findley and Mearsheimer are certainly worthwhile. I will look for Petras.

    Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:38 pm

    If you haven't already read them, the end/footnotes in "The Israel Lobby" are more illuminating.

    SocraticGadfly , December 23, 2017 at 6:10 pm

    That influence is also shown, of course, by the fact that Obama waited until the midnight hours of his tenure and after the 2016 election to even start working on this resolution.

    SocraticGadfly , December 23, 2017 at 6:05 pm

    While I think Bibi is an idiot, I also think the Logan Act is overinvoked, overstated, probably of dubious legal value and also of dubious constitutional value.

    In short, especially because Trump had been elected, though not yet inaugurated, I think he is not at all guilty of a Logan Act violation. This is nothing close to Spiro Agnew calling Anna Chenault from the airplane in August 1968.

    Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:41 pm

    Probably true, although evidence of extreme collusion with Israel eliminates any case against Russia, with whom we have far more reasons for amity. Bringing out the Israel collusion greatly improves public understanding of political corruption. Perhaps it will awaken some to the Agnew-Chennault betrayal of the people of the US.

    JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:32 am

    It's ironic that Russia-gate is turning out to be Israel's effort to distract attention from its complete control over the Democratic party in 2016. From Israeli billionaires behind the scenes to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz at the helm.

    The leaked emails showed the corruption plainly, and based on the ACTUAL evidence (recorded download time), most likely came from a highly disgruntled insider. The picture was starting to spill into public view. I'd estimate the real huge worry was that if this stuff came out, it could bring out other Israeli secrets, like their involvement in 9/11. That would mean actual jail time. Might be hard to buy your way out of that no matter how much money you have.

    Annie , December 23, 2017 at 10:48 pm

    The Logan act states that anyone who negotiates with an enemy of the US, and Israel is not defined as an enemy.

    Annie , December 23, 2017 at 6:59 pm

    The Logan act would not apply here, although I wish it would. I don't think anyone has been convicted based on this act, and they were part of a transition team not to mention the Logan act clearly states a private citizen who attempts to negotiate with an enemy state, and that certainly doesn't apply to Israel. In this administration their bias is so blatant that they can install Kushner as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestine peace process while his family has a close relationship with Netanyahu, and he runs a foundation that invests in the building of illegal settlements which goes against the Geneva conventions. Hopefully Trump's blatant siding with Israel will receive a lot of backlash as did his plan to make Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

    I also found that so called progressive internet sites don't cover this the way they should.

    Al Pinto , December 24, 2017 at 9:16 am

    @Annie

    "The Logan act would not apply here, although I wish it would."

    You and me both .

    From the point of starting to read this article, it has been in my mind that the Logan act would not apply here. After reading most of the comments, it became clear that not many people viewed this as such. Yes, Joe Tedesky did as well

    The UN is the "clearing house" for international politics, where countries freely contact each other's for getting support for their cause behind the scene. The support sought after could be voting for or against the resolution on hand. At times, as Israel did, countries reach out to perceived enemies as well, if they could not secure sufficient support for their cause. This is the normal activity of the UN diplomacy.

    Knowing that the outgoing administration would not support its cause, Israel reached out to the incoming administration to delay the vote on the UN resolution. I fail to see anything wrong with Israel's action even in this case; Israel is not an enemy state to the US. As such, there has been no violation of any acts by the incoming administration, even if they tried to secure veto vote for Israel. I do not like it, but no action by Mueller in this case is correct.

    People, just like the article in itself, implying that the Logan Act applies in this case are just plain wrong. Not just wrong, but their anti-Israel bias is in plain view.

    Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an enemy state. Even then, Russia contacting the incoming administration is not a violation of the Logan Act. That is just normal diplomacy in the background between countries. What would be a violation is that the contacted official acted on the behalf of Russia and tried to influence the outgoing administration's decision. That is what the Mueller investigation tries to prove hopelessly

    Herman , December 24, 2017 at 10:54 am

    "Whether we like it or not, the former and current administration view Russia is as an enemy state." So that is how it works, the White House says it is an enemy state and therefore it is. The so called declaration is the hammer used for trying to make contact with Russia a criminal offense. We are not at war with Russia although we see our leaders doing their best to provoke Russia into one.

    Annie , December 24, 2017 at 1:55 pm

    Thanks for your reply. When I read the article and it referenced the Logan Act, which I am familiar with in that I've read about it before, I was surprised that Bernstein and Silverstein even brought it up because it so obviously does not apply in this case, since Israel is not considered an enemy state. Many have even referenced it as flimsy when it comes to convictions against those in Trump's transition team who had contacts with Russia. No one has ever been convicted under the Logan Act.

    Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:41 pm

    The Logan Act either should apply equally, or not apply at all. This "Russia-gate" hype seems to apply it selectively.

    mrtmbrnmn , December 23, 2017 at 7:36 pm

    You guys are blinded by the light. The Israel connection disclosed by the malpracticer hack Mueller in the recent Flynn-flam just made Trump bullet-proof (so to speak).

    There is no doubt that Trump is Bibi's and the Saudi's ventriloquist dummy and Jared has been an Israel agent of influence since he was 12.

    But half the Dementedcrat Sore Loser Brigade will withdraw from the field of battle (not to mention most of the GOP living dead too) if publically and noisily tying Israel to Trump's tail becomes the only route to his removal. Which it would have to be, as there is no there there regarding the yearlong trumped-up PutinPutinPutin waterboarding of Trump.

    Immediately (if not sooner) the mighty (pro-Israel) Donor Bank of Singer (Paul), Saban (Haim), Sachs (Goldman) & Adelson (Sheldon), would change their passwords and leave these politicians/beggars with empty begging bowls. End of $ordid $tory.

    alley cat , December 23, 2017 at 7:45 pm

    So Mueller caught Kushner and Flynn red-handed, sabotaging the Obama administration? What of it? He can't use that evidence, because it would inculpate the Zionist neocons that are orchestrating his farcical, Stalinist witchhunt. And Mueller, being an efficient terminator bot, knows that his target is Russia, not Israel.

    Mueller can use that evidence of sabotage and/or obstruction of justice to try to coerce false confessions from Kushner and Flynn. But what are the chances of that, barring short stayovers for them at some CIA black site?

    So Mueller will just have to continue swamp-fishing for potential perjurers ahem witnesses, for the upcoming show trials (to further inflame public opinion against Russia and Russia sympathizers). And continue he will, because (as we all know from Schwarzenegger's flicks), the only way to stop the terminator is to terminate him/it first.

    Leslie F. , December 23, 2017 at 8:28 pm

    He used it, along with other info, to turn flip Flynn and possibly can use it the same way again Kusher. Not all evidence has end up in court to be useful.

    JWalters , December 23, 2017 at 8:40 pm

    This is an extremely important story, excellently reported. All the main "facts" Americans think they know about Israel are, amazingly, flat-out lies.

    1. Israel was NOT victimized by powerful Arab armies. Israel overpowered and victimized a defenseless, civilian Arab population. Military analysts knew the Arab armies were in poor shape and would not be able to resist the zionist army.

    2. Muslim "citizens" of Israel do NOT have all the same rights as Jews.

    3. Israelis are NOT under threat from the indigineous Palestinians, but Palestinians are under constant threats of theft and death from the Israelis.

    4. Israel does NOT share America's most fundamental values, which rest on the principle of equal human rights for all.

    Maintaining such a blanket of major lies for decades requires immense power. And this power would have to be exercised "under the radar" to be effective. That requires even more power. Both Congress and the press have to be controlled. How much power does it take to turn "Progressive Rachel" into "Tel Aviv Rachel"? To turn "It Takes a Village" Hillary into "Slaughter a Village" Hillary? It takes immense power AND ruthlessness.

    War profiteers have exactly this combination of immense war profits and the ruthlessness to victimize millions of people.
    "War Profiteers and the Roots of the War on Terror"
    http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com

    Vast war profits easily afford to buy the mainstream media. And controlling campaign contributions for members of Congress is amazingly cheap in the big picture. Such a squalid sale of souls.

    And when simple bribery is not enough, they ruin a person's life through blackmail or false character assassination. And if those don't work they use death threats, including to family members, and finally murder. Their ruthlessness is unrestrained. John Perkins has described these tactics in "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man".

    For readers who haven't seen it, here is an excellent riff on the absurdly overwhelming evidence for Israel's influence compared to that of Russia, at a highly professional news and analysis website run by Jewish anti-Zionists.
    "Let's talk about Russian influence"
    http://mondoweiss.net/2016/08/about-russian-influence/

    mike k , December 23, 2017 at 8:44 pm

    Hitler and Mussolini, Trump and Netanyahoo – matches made in Hell. These characters are so obviously, blatantly evil that it is deeply disturbing that people fail to see that, and instead go to great lengths to find some complicated flaws in these monsters.

    mike k , December 23, 2017 at 8:49 pm

    Keep it simple folks. No need for complex analyses. Just remember that these characters as simply as evil as it gets, and proceed from there. These asinine shows that portray mobsters as complex human beings are dangerously deluding. If you want to be victimized by these types, this kind of overthinking is just the way to go.

    Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 9:00 pm

    There is a modern theory of fiction that insists upon the portrayal of inconsistency in characters, both among the good guys and the bad guys. It is useful to show how those who do wrongs have made specific kinds of errors that make them abnormal, and that those who do right are not perfect but nonetheless did the right thing. Instead it is used by commercial writers to argue that the good are really bad, and the bad are really good, which is of course the philosophy of oligarchy-controlled mass publishers.

    Sam F , December 23, 2017 at 8:54 pm

    A very important article by Dennis Bernstein, and it is very appropriate that non-zionist Jews are active against the extreme zionist corruption of our federal government. I am sure that they are reviled by the zionists for interfering with the false denunciations of racism against the opponents of zionism. Indeed critics face a very nearly totalitarian power of zionism, which in league with MIC/WallSt opportunism has displaced democracy altogether in the US.

    backwardsevolution , December 23, 2017 at 9:18 pm

    A nice little set-up by the Obama administration. Perhaps it was entrapment? Who set it up? Flynn and Kushner should have known better to fall for it. So at the end of his Presidency, Obama suddenly gets balls and wants to slap down Israel? Yeah, right.

    Nice to have leverage over people, though, isn't it? If you're lucky and play your cards right, you might even be lucky enough to land an impeachment.

    Of course, I'm just being cynical. No one would want to overturn democracy, would they?

    Certainly people like Comey, Brenner, Clinton, Clapper, Mueller, Rosenstein wouldn't want that, would they?

    Joe Tedesky , December 23, 2017 at 10:33 pm

    I just can't see any special prosecutor investigating Israel-Gate. Between what the Zionist donors donate to these creepy politicians, too what goods they have on these same mischievous politicians, I just can't see any investigation into Israel's collusion with the Trump Administration going anywhere. Netanyahu isn't Putin, and Russia isn't Israel. Plus, Israel is considered a U.S. ally, while Russia is being marked as a Washington rival. Sorry, this news regarding Israel isn't going to be ranted on about for the next 18 months, like the MSM has done with Russia, because our dear old Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, or so they tell us. So, don't get your hopes up.

    JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:33 am

    It's true the Israelis have America's politicians by the ears and the balls. But as this story gets better known, politicians will start getting questions at their town meetings. Increasingly the politicians will gag on what Israel is force-feeding them, until finally they reach a critical mass of vomit in Congress.

    Joe Tedesky , December 24, 2017 at 11:12 am

    I hope you are right JWalters. Although relying on a Zionist controlled MSM doesn't give hope for the news getting out properly. Again I hope you are right JWalters. Joe

    Jeff Blankfort , December 24, 2017 at 12:18 am

    Actually, Netanyahu was so desperate to have the resolution pulled and not voted on that he reached out to any country that might help him after the foreign minister of New Zealand, one of its co-sponsors refused to pull the plug after a testy phone exchange with the Israeli PM ending up threatening an Israeli boycott oturnef the KIwis.

    He then turned to his buddy, Vladimir Putin, who owed him a favor for having Israel's UN delegate absent himself for the UNGA vote on sanctioning Russia after its annexation of Crimea.

    Putin then called Russia's UN Ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, since deceased, and asked him to get the other UNSC ambassadors to postpone the vote until Trump took over the White House but the other ambassadors weren't buying it. Given Russia's historic public position regarding the settlements, Churkin had no choice to vote Yes with the others.

    This story was reported in detail in the Israeli press but blacked out in the US which, due to Zionist influence on the media, does not want the American public to know about the close ties between Putin and Netanyahu which has led to the Israeli PM making five state visits there in the last year and a half.

    Had Clinton won the White House we can assume that there would have been no US veto. That Netanyahu apparently knew in advance that the US planned to veto the resolution was, I suspect, leaked to the Israelis by US delegate Samantha Power, who was clearly unhappy at having to abstain.

    Abe , December 24, 2017 at 12:39 am

    The Israeli Prime Minister made five state visits to Russia in the last year and a half to make sure the Russians don't accidentally on purpose blast Israeli warplanes from the sky over Syria (like they oughtta). Putin tries not to snicker when Netanyahu bloviates ad nauseum about the purported "threat" posed by Iran.

    argos , December 24, 2017 at 7:00 am

    He thinks Putin is a RATS ASS like the yankee government

    JWalters , December 24, 2017 at 3:34 am

    "This story was reported in detail in the Israeli press but blacked out in the US"

    We've just had a whole cluster of big stories involving Israel that have all been essentially blacked out in the US press. e.g.
    "Dionne and Shields ignore the Adelson in the room"
    http://mondoweiss.net/2017/12/jerusalem-israels-capital

    This is not due to chance. There is no doubt that the US mainstream media is wholly controlled by the Israelis.

    alley cat , December 24, 2017 at 4:49 am

    "He [Netanyahu] then turned to his buddy, Vladimir Putin "

    Jeff, that characterization of Putin and Netanyahu's relationship makes no sense, since the Russians have consistently opposed Zionism and Putin has been no exception, having spoiled Zionist plans for the destruction of Syria.

    "Had Clinton won the White House we can assume that there would have been no US veto."

    Not sure where you're going with that, since the US vote was up to Obama, who wanted to get some payback for all of Bibi's efforts to sabotage Obama's treaty with Iran.

    For the record, Zionism has had no more rabid supporter than the Dragon Lady. If we're going to make assumptions, we could start by assuming that if she had won the White House we'd all be dead by now, thanks to her obsession (at the instigation of her Zionist/neocon sponsors) with declaring no-fly zones in Syria.

    Brendan , December 24, 2017 at 6:18 am

    Trump and Kushner have nothing to worry about, even if a smoking gun is found that proves their collusion with Israel. That's because the entire political and media establishment will simply ignore the Israeli connection.

    Journalists and politicians will even continue to present Mike Flynn's contacts as evidence of collusion with Russia. They'll keep on repeating that "Flynn lied about his phone call to the Russian ambassador". But there will be no mention of the fact that the purpose of this contact was to support Israel and not any alleged Russian interference.

    Skip Scott , December 24, 2017 at 7:59 am

    I think you have it right Brendan. The MSM, Intelligence Community, and Mueller would never go down any path that popularized undue Israeli influence on US foreign policy. "Nothing to see here folks, move along."

    argos , December 24, 2017 at 6:57 am

    The zionist will stop at nothing to control the middle east with American taxpayers money/military equiptment its a win win for the zionist they control America lock stock and barrel a pity though it is a great country to be led by a jewish entity.

    Herman , December 24, 2017 at 10:47 am

    What will Israel-Palestine look like twenty years from now? Will it remain an apartheid regime, a regime without any Palestinians, or something different. The Trump decision, which the world rejects, brings the issue of "final" settlement to the fore. In a way we can go back to the thirties and the British Mandate. Jewish were fleeing Europe, many coming to Palestine. The British, on behalf of the Zionists, were delaying declaring Palestine a state with control of its own affairs. Seeing the mass immigration and chafing at British foot dragging, the Arabs rebelled, What happened then was that the British, responding to numerous pressures notably war with Germany, acted by granting independence and granting Palestine control of its borders.

    With American pressure and the mass exodus of Jews from Europe, Jews defied the British resulting in Jewish resistance. What followed then was a UN plan to divide the land with a Jerusalem an international city administered by the UN. The Arabs rebelled and lost much of what the UN plan provided and Jerusalem as an international city was scrapped.

    Will there be a second serious attempt to settle the issue of the land and the status of Jerusalem? Will there be a serious move toward a single state? How will the matter of Jerusalem be resolved. The two state solution has always been a fantasy and acquiescence of Palestinians to engage in this charade exposes their leaders to charges of posturing for perks. Imagined options could go on and on but will there be serious options placed before the world community or will the boots on the ground Israeli policies continue?

    As I have commented before, it will most probably be the Jewish community in Israel and the world that shapes the future and if the matter is to be resolved that is fair to both parties, it will be they that starts the ball rolling.

    Zachary Smith , December 24, 2017 at 1:34 pm

    As I have commented before, it will most probably be the Jewish community in Israel and the world that shapes the future and if the matter is to be resolved that is fair to both parties, it will be they that starts the ball rolling.

    The Nice Zionists responsible for the thefts and murders for the past 69 years along with the "Jewish Community" in the rest of the world will resolve the matter so as to be fair to both parties. This is mind-boggling fantasy.

    Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 5:56 pm

    Truly mind-boggling. Ahistorical, and as you say, fantasy.

    Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 5:48 pm

    FFS, Netanyahu aired a political commercial in Florida for Romney saying vote for this guy (against Obama)! I mean, it doesn't get any more overtly manipulative than that. Period. End of story.

    $50K of Facebook ads about puppies pales in comparison to that blatant, prima facia, public manipulation. God, I hate to go all "Israel controls the media" but there it is. Not even a discussion. Just a fact.

    Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 6:11 pm

    Just for the record, Richard Silverstein blocked me on Twitter because I pointed out that he slammed someone who was suggesting that the Assad government was fighting for its (Syria's) life by fighting terrorists. Actually, more specifically, because of that he read my "Free Palestine" bio on Twitter and called me a Hamas supporter (no Hamas mentioned) and a "moron" for some seeming contradiction.

    I also have to point out that he "fist pumped" Hillary Clinton at Mohammed Ali's eulogy. If he's as astute as he purports to be, he has to know that Hillary would have invaded Syria and killed a few hundred thousand more Syrians for the simple act of defiantly preserving their country. By almost any read of Ali's history, he would have been adamantly ("killing brown people") against that. But there was Silverstein using the platform to promote, arguably, perpetual war.

    Silverstein is probably not a good (ie. consistent) arbiter of Israeli impact on US politics. Just sayin'.

    I wish it were otherwise.

    Taras 77 , December 24, 2017 at 6:35 pm

    https://www.therussophile.org/virus-found-inside-dnc-server-is-linked-to-a-company-based-in-pakistan.html/

    This may be a tad ot but it relates to the alleged hacking of the DNC, the role debbie wasserman schultz plays in the spy ring (awan bros) in house of rep servers: I have long suspected that mossad has their fingers in this entire mess. FWIW

    Good site, BTW.

    Zachary Smith , December 24, 2017 at 7:35 pm

    I can't recall why I removed the Tikun Olam site from my bookmarks – it happened quite a while back. Generally I do that when I feel the blogger crossed some kind of personal red line. Something Mr. Silverstein wrote put him over that line with me.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/us/06leak.html?hp

    In the course of a search I found that at the neocon NYT. Mr. Silverstein claims several things I find unbelievable, and from that alone I wonder about his ultimate motives. I may be excessively touchy about this, but that's how it is.

    Larry Larsen , December 24, 2017 at 8:51 pm

    Yeah Zachary, "wondering about ultimate motives" is probably a good way to put it/his views. He's obviously conflicted, if not deferential in some aspects of Israeli policy. He really was a hero of mine, but now I just don't get whether what he says is masking something or a true belief. He says some good stuff, but, but, but .

    P. Michael Garber , December 24, 2017 at 11:54 pm

    Yeah I found a couple of Silverstein's statements to be closer to neocon propaganda than reality: "Because this is Israel and because we have a conflicted relationship with the Israel lobby . . ." "Instead of going directly to the Obama administration, with which they had terrible relations, they went to Trump instead." My impression was that the whole "terrible relationship between Obama and Netanyahu" was manufactured by the Israel lobby to bully Obama. However these are small blips within an otherwise solid critique of the Israel lobby's influence.

    [Mar 24, 2019] No matter the result, what is found or is not, to the neocons/neolib Establishment, Trump will always be waiting for his next check written in Cyrillic and denominated in rubles.

    Notable quotes:
    "... It's not Rubles.. Those be Sheckels. ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Perry Colace

    All of this reminds me of the first combat scene in 'Full Metal Jacket'. Joker is being helicoptered into the battle at Hue, and the door gunner is just firing his M-60 nonstop, yelling 'Get some! Come on! Get some!', as people below are running and getting shot. Joker says, 'Aren't you afraid that you might be killing innocent women......or children?'. The door gunner says,

    If they run, they're VC.

    If they stand still, they're WELL TRAINED VC!'.

    No matter the result, what is found or is not, to the left, Trump will always be waiting for his next check written in Cyrillic and denominated in rubles.

    Macher1, 3 hours ago

    It's not Rubles.. Those be Sheckels.

    [Mar 24, 2019] Taibbi It s Official - Russiagate Is This Generation s WMD

    This is the most grandiose False flag propaganda operation known to the mankind. McCarthyism while more vicious was just a blip of the screen in comparison this this tide of disinformation and insinuations. Iraq WDM resulted in more casualties but was much more short term. Damage for the USA from this false flag operation might even exceed the damage for Iraq WDM fiasco.
    British government and intelligence serves were active participants and in this sense "Skripals poisoning" looks like a perverted form of "witness protection:" program. A false flag operation on the top of a false flag operation ("Russiagate").
    What is amazing is how unapt were the major players.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media. ..."
    "... A few weeks after that hearing, Steele gave testimony in a British lawsuit filed by one of the Russian companies mentioned in his reports. In a written submission , Steele said his information was "raw" and "needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified." He also wrote that (at least as pertained to the memo in that case) he had not written his report "with the intention that it be republished to the world at large." ..."
    "... That itself was a curious statement, given that Steele reportedly spoke with multiple reporters in the fall of 2016, but this was his legal position. This story about Steele's British court statements did not make it into the news much in the United States, apart from a few bits in conservative outlets like The Washington Times. ..."
    "... The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were unable to independently produce Steele's results in the lab. Failure to reckon with this corrupted the narrative from the start. ..."
    "... "Just called," Page said to McCabe. "Apparently the DAG [Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates] now wants to be there, and WH wants DOJ to host. So we are setting that up now. ... We will very much need to get Cohen's view before we meet with her. Better, have him weigh in with her before the meeting. We need to speak with one voice, if that is in fact the case." ..."
    "... Someday I hope that Hillary has to be rolled up to testify about the Benghazi business. Grab the guns and the gold (and the oil). Ukraine gold: check. Libyan gold and weapons: check. ..."
    Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Matt Taibbi, excerpted from his serial book Hate Inc.,

    The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it...

    Note to readers: in light of news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigation is complete, I'm releasing this chapter of Hate Inc. early, with a few new details added up top. Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

    As has long been rumored , the former FBI chief's independent probe will result in multiple indictments and convictions, but no " presidency-wrecking " conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman's definition of "collusion" with Russia.

    With the caveat that even this news might somehow turn out to be botched, the key detail in the many stories about the end of the Mueller investigation was best expressed by the New York Times :

    A senior Justice Department official said that Mr. Mueller would not recommend new indictments.

    The Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. Nobody even pretended it was supposed to be a fact-finding mission, instead of an act of faith.

    The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing " All I Want for Christmas is You " to him featuring the rhymey line: "Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup."

    The Times story today tried to preserve Santa Mueller's reputation, noting Trump's Attorney General William Barr's reaction was an "endorsement" of the fineness of Mueller's work:

    In an apparent endorsement of an investigation that Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked as a "witch hunt," Mr. Barr said Justice Department officials never had to intervene to keep Mr. Mueller from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step.

    Mueller, in other words, never stepped out of the bounds of his job description. But could the same be said for the news media?

    For those anxious to keep the dream alive, the Times published its usual graphic of Trump-Russia "contacts," inviting readers to keep making connections. But in a separate piece by Peter Baker , the paper noted the Mueller news had dire consequences for the press:

    It will be a reckoning for President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for Congress, for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and, yes, for the system as a whole

    This is a damning page one admission by the Times. Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper also ran suggesting " We don't need to read the Mueller report " because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question: "Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?"

    The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like themselves made a galactic error by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach , trying to be true to "history's judgment" on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming , the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.

    Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a "witch hunt."

    Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller's final report might leave audiences " disappointed ," as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

    Openly using such language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you'd have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.

    There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn't prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters ! There's an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and

    Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.

    For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something "so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan" against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecute.

    The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That's a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn't so.

    The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who'd helped him win the election.

    The betrayal narrative was not reported at first as metaphor. It was not "Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be a spy for them." It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing – crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump " will die in jail ."

    In the early months of this scandal, the New York Times said Trump's campaign had "repeated contacts" with Russian intelligence; the Wall Street Journal told us our spy agencies were withholding intelligence from the new President out of fear he was compromised; news leaked out our spy chiefs had even told other countries like Israel not to share their intel with us, because the Russians might have "leverages of pressure" on Trump.

    CNN told us Trump officials had been in "constant contact" with "Russians known to U.S. intelligence," and the former director of the CIA, who'd helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller's probe, said the President was guilty of "high crimes and misdemeanors," committing acts " nothing short of treasonous ."

    Hillary Clinton insisted Russians "could not have known how to weaponize" political ads unless they'd been "guided" by Americans. Asked if she meant Trump, she said, " It's pretty hard not to ." Harry Reid similarly said he had "no doubt" that the Trump campaign was " in on the deal " to help Russians with the leak.

    None of this has been walked back. To be clear, if Trump were being blackmailed by Russian agencies like the FSB or the GRU, if he had any kind of relationship with Russian intelligence, that would soar over the "overwhelming and bipartisan" standard, and Nancy Pelosi would be damning torpedoes for impeachment right now.

    There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn't. If he isn't, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC's Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a " reckoning for the media ."

    Of course, there won't be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can't confirm.

    #Russiagate debuted as a media phenomenon in mid-summer, 2016. The roots of the actual story, i.e. when the multi-national investigation began, go back much further, to the previous year at least. Oddly, that origin tale has not been nailed down yet, and blue-state audiences don't seem terribly interested in it, either.

    By June and July of 2016, bits of the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which had been funded by the Democratic National Committee through the law firm Perkins Coie (which in turn hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS), were already in the ether.

    The Steele report occupies the same role in #Russiagate the tales spun by Ahmed Chalabi occupied in the WMD screwup. Once again, a narrative became turbo-charged when Officials With Motives pulled the press corps by its nose to a swamp of unconfirmable private assertions.

    Some early stories, like a July 4, 2016 piece by Franklin Foer in Slate called " Putin's Puppet ," outlined future Steele themes in "circumstantial" form. But the actual dossier, while it influenced a number of pre-election Trump-Russia news stories (notably one by Michael Isiskoff of Yahoo! that would be used in a FISA warrant application ), didn't make it into print for a while.

    Though it was shopped to at least nine news organizations during the summer and fall of 2016, no one bit, for the good reason that news organizations couldn't verify its "revelations."

    The Steele claims were explosive if true. The ex-spy reported Trump aide Carter Page had been offered fees on a big new slice of the oil giant Rosneft if he could help get sanctions against Russia lifted. He also said Trump lawyer Michael Cohen went to Prague for "secret discussions with Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers."

    Most famously, he wrote the Kremlin had kompromat of Trump "deriling" [sic] a bed once used by Barack and Michelle Obama by "employing a number of prostitutes to perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show."

    This was too good of a story not to do. By hook or crook, it had to come out. The first salvo was by David Corn of Mother Jones on October 31, 2016: " A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump ."

    The piece didn't have pee, Prague, or Page in it, but it did say Russian intelligence had material that could "blackmail" Trump. It was technically kosher to print because Corn wasn't publishing the allegations themselves, merely that the FBI had taken possession of them.

    A bigger pretext was needed to get the other details out. This took place just after the election, when four intelligence officials presented copies of the dossier to both President-Elect Trump and outgoing President Obama.

    From his own memos , we know FBI Director James Comey, ostensibly evincing concern for Trump's welfare, told the new President he was just warning him about what was out there, as possible blackmail material:

    I wasn't saying [the Steele report] was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold [sic].

    Comey's generous warning to Trump about not providing a "news hook," along with a promise to keep it all "close-held," took place on January 6, 2017. Within four days, basically the entire Washington news media somehow knew all about this top-secret meeting and had the very hook they needed to go public. Nobody in the mainstream press thought this was weird or warranted comment.

    Even Donald Trump was probably smart enough to catch the hint when, of all outlets, it was CNN that first broke the story of "Classified documents presented last week to Trump" on January 10 .

    At the same time, Buzzfeed made the historic decision to publish the entire Steele dossier, bringing years of pee into our lives. This move birthed the Russiagate phenomenon as a never-ending, minute-to-minute factor in American news coverage.

    Comey was right. We couldn't have reported this story without a "hook." Therefore the reports surrounding Steele technically weren't about the allegations themselves, but rather the journey of those allegations, from one set of official hands to another. Handing the report to Trump created a perfect pretext.

    This trick has been used before, both in Washington and on Wall Street, to publicize unconfirmed private research. A short seller might hire a consulting firm to prepare a report on a company he or she has bet against. When the report is completed, the investor then tries to get the SEC or the FBI to take possession. If they do, news leaks the company is "under investigation," the stock dives, and everyone wins.

    This same trick is found in politics. A similar trajectory drove negative headlines in the scandal surrounding New Jersey's Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who was said to be under investigation by the FBI for underage sex crimes (although some were skeptical ). The initial story didn't hold up, but led to other investigations.

    Same with the so-called " Arkansas project ," in which millions of Republican-friendly private research dollars produced enough noise about the Whitewater scandal to create years of headlines about the Clintons. Swiftboating was another example. Private oppo isn't inherently bad. In fact it has led to some incredible scoops, including Enron. But reporters usually know to be skeptical of private info, and figure the motives of its patrons into the story.

    The sequence of events in that second week of January, 2017 will now need to be heavily re-examined. We now know, from his own testimony , that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had some kind of role in helping CNN do its report, presumably by confirming part of the story, perhaps through an intermediary or two (there is some controversy over whom exactly was contacted, and when).

    Why would real security officials help litigate this grave matter through the media? Why were the world's most powerful investigative agencies acting like they were trying to move a stock, pushing an private, unverified report that even Buzzfeed could see had factual issues? It made no sense at the time , and makes less now.

    In January of 2017, Steele's pile of allegations became public, read by millions. "It is not just unconfirmed," Buzzfeed admitted . "It includes some clear errors."

    Buzzfeed's decision exploded traditional journalistic standards against knowingly publishing material whose veracity you doubt. Although a few media ethicists wondered at it , this seemed not to bother the rank-and-file in the business. Buzzfeed chief Ben Smith is still proud of his decision today. I think this was because many reporters believed the report was true.

    When I read the report, I was in shock. I thought it read like fourth-rate suspense fiction (I should know: I write fourth-rate suspense fiction). Moreover it seemed edited both for public consumption and to please Steele's DNC patrons.

    Steele wrote of Russians having a file of "compromising information" on Hillary Clinton, only this file supposedly lacked "details/evidence of unorthodox or embarrassing behavior" or "embarrassing conduct."

    We were meant to believe the Russians, across decades of dirt-digging, had an empty kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, to say nothing of human tabloid headline Bill Clinton? This point was made more than once in the reports, as if being emphasized for the reading public.

    There were other curious lines, including the bit about Russians having "moles" in the DNC, plus some linguistic details that made me wonder at the nationality of the report author.

    Still, who knew? It could be true. But even the most cursory review showed the report had issues and would need a lot of confirming. This made it more amazing that the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, held hearings on March 20, 2017 that blithely read out Steele report details as if they were fact. From Schiff's opening statement:

    According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. Intelligence, Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin (SEH-CHIN), CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company.

    I was stunned watching this. It's generally understood that members of congress, like reporters, make an effort to vet at least their prepared remarks before making them public.

    But here was Schiff, telling the world Trump aide Carter Page had been offered huge fees on a 19% stake in Rosneft – a company with a $63 billion market capitalization – in a secret meeting with a Russian oligarch who was also said to be "a KGB agent and close friend of Putin's."

    (Schiff meant "FSB agent." The inability of #Russiagaters to remember Russia is not the Soviet Union became increasingly maddening over time. Donna Brazile still hasn't deleted her tweet about how " The Communists are now dictating the terms of the debate ." )

    Schiff's speech raised questions. Do we no longer have to worry about getting accusations right if the subject is tied to Russiagate? What if Page hadn't done any of these things? To date, he hasn't been charged with anything. Shouldn't a member of Congress worry about this?

    A few weeks after that hearing, Steele gave testimony in a British lawsuit filed by one of the Russian companies mentioned in his reports. In a written submission , Steele said his information was "raw" and "needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified." He also wrote that (at least as pertained to the memo in that case) he had not written his report "with the intention that it be republished to the world at large."

    That itself was a curious statement, given that Steele reportedly spoke with multiple reporters in the fall of 2016, but this was his legal position. This story about Steele's British court statements did not make it into the news much in the United States, apart from a few bits in conservative outlets like The Washington Times.

    I contacted Schiff's office to ask if the congressman if he knew about Steele's admission that his report needed verifying, and if that changed his view of it at all. The response (emphasis mine):

    The dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and which was leaked publicly several months ago contains information that may be pertinent to our investigation. This is true regardless of whether it was ever intended for public dissemination. Accordingly, the Committee hopes to speak with Mr. Steele in order to help substantiate or refute each of the allegations contained in the dossier.

    Schiff had not spoken to Steele before the hearing, and read out the allegations knowing they were unsubstantiated.

    The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were unable to independently produce Steele's results in the lab. Failure to reckon with this corrupted the narrative from the start.

    For years, every hint the dossier might be true became a banner headline, while every time doubt was cast on Steele's revelations, the press was quiet. Washington Post reporter Greg Miller went to Prague and led a team looking for evidence Cohen had been there. Post reporters, Miller said, "literally spent weeks and months trying to run down" the Cohen story.

    "We sent reporters through every hotel in Prague, through all over the place, just to try to figure out if he was ever there," he said, "and came away empty."

    This was heads-I-win, tails-you-lose reporting. One assumes if Miller found Cohen's name in a hotel ledger, it would have been on page 1 of the Post. The converse didn't get a mention in Miller's own paper. He only told the story during a discussion aired by C-SPAN about a new book he'd published. Only The Daily Caller and a few conservative blogs picked it up.

    It was the same when Bob Woodward said, "I did not find [espionage or collusion] Of course I looked for it, looked for it hard."

    The celebrated Watergate muckraker – who once said he'd succumbed to "groupthink" in the WMD episode and added, "I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder" – didn't push very hard here, either. News that he'd tried and failed to find collusion didn't get into his own paper. It only came out when Woodward was promoting his book Fear in a discussion with conservative host Hugh Hewitt.

    When Michael Cohen testified before congress and denied under oath ever being in Prague, it was the same. Few commercial news outlets bothered to take note of the implications this had for their previous reports. Would a man clinging to a plea deal lie to congress on national television about this issue?

    There was a CNN story , but the rest of the coverage was all in conservative outlets – the National Review , Fox , The Daily Caller . The Washington Post's response was to run an editorial sneering at " How conservative media downplayed Michael Cohen's testimony ."

    Perhaps worst of all was the episode involving Yahoo! reporter Michael Isikoff. He had already been part of one strange tale: the FBI double-dipping when it sought a FISA warrant to conduct secret surveillance of Carter Page, the would-be mastermind who was supposed to have brokered a deal with oligarch Sechin.

    In its FISA application, the FBI included both the unconfirmed Steele report and Isikoff's September 23, 2016 Yahoo! story, " U.S. Intel Officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin ." The Isikoff story, which claimed Page had met with "high ranking sanctioned officials" in Russia, had relied upon Steele as an unnamed source.

    This was similar to a laundering technique used in the WMD episode called "stove-piping," i.e. officials using the press to "confirm" information the officials themselves fed the reporter.

    But there was virtually no non-conservative press about this problem apart from a Washington Post story pooh-poohing the issue. (Every news story that casts any doubt on the collusion issue seems to meet with an instantaneous "fact check" in the Post .) The Post insisted the FISA issue wasn't serious among other things because Steele was not the "foundation" of Isikoff's piece.

    Isikoff was perhaps the reporter most familiar with Steele. He and Corn of Mother Jones , who also dealt with the ex-spy, wrote a bestselling book that relied upon theories from Steele, Russian Roulette , including a rumination on the "pee" episode. Yet Isikoff in late 2018 suddenly said he believed the Steele report would turn out to be " mostly false ."

    Once again, this only came out via a podcast, John Ziegler's "Free Speech Broadcasting" show. Here's a transcript of the relevant section:

    Isikoff: When you actually get into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, you know, we have not seen the evidence to support them. And in fact there is good grounds to think some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven, and are likely false.

    Ziegler: That's...

    Isikoff: I think it's a mixed record at best at this point, things could change, Mueller may yet produce evidence that changes this calculation. But based on the public record at this point I have to say that most of the specific allegations have not been borne out.

    Ziegler: That's interesting to hear you say that, Michael because as I'm sure you know, your book was kind of used to validate the pee tape, for lack of a better term.

    Isikoff: Yeah. I think we had some evidence in there of an event that may have inspired the pee tape and that was the visit that Trump made with a number of characters who later showed up in Moscow, specifically Emin Agalarov and Rob Goldstone to this raunchy Las Vegas nightclub where one of the regular acts was a skit called "Hot For Teacher" in which dancers posing as college Co-Ed's urinated – or simulated urinating on their professor. Which struck me as an odd coincidence at best. I think, you know, it is not implausible that event may have inspired...

    Ziegler: An urban legend?

    Isikoff: ...allegations that appeared in the Steele dossier.

    Isikoff delivered this story with a laughing tone. He seamlessly transitioned to what he then called the "real" point, i.e. "the irony is Steele may be right, but it wasn't the Kremlin that had sexual kompromat on Donald Trump, it was the National Enquirer. "

    Recapping: the reporter who introduced Steele to the world (his September 23, 2016 story was the first to reference him as a source), who wrote a book that even he concedes was seen as "validating" the pee tape story, suddenly backtracks and says the whole thing may have been based on a Las Vegas strip act, but it doesn't matter because Stormy Daniels, etc.

    Another story of this type involved a court case in which Webzilla and parent company XBT sued Steele and Buzzfeed over the mention their firm in one of the memos. It came out in court testimony that Steele had culled information about XBT/Webzilla from a 2009 post on CNN's "iReports" page .

    Asked if he understood these posts came from random users and not CNN journalists who'd been fact-checked, Steele replied, " I do not ."

    This comical detail was similar to news that the second British Mi6 dossier released just before the Iraq invasion had been plagiarized in part from a thirteen year-old student thesis from California State University, not even by intelligence people, but by mid-level functionaries in Tony Blair's press office.

    There were so many profiles of Steele as an " astoundingly diligent " spymaster straight out of LeCarre : he was routinely described like a LeCarre-ian grinder like the legendary George Smiley, a man in the shadows whose bookish intensity was belied by his "average," "neutral," "quiet," demeanor, being "more low-key than Smiley." One would think it might have rated a mention that our "Smiley" was cutting and pasting text like a community college freshman. But the story barely made news.

    This has been a consistent pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step three (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the same publication.

    That's been rare. More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the "retraction" process to conservative outlets that don't reach the original audiences.

    This is a major structural flaw of the new fully-divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither "side" feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.

    This has been the main difference between Russiagate and the WMD affair. Despite David Remnick's post-invasion protestations that "nobody got [WMD] completely right," the Iraq war was launched against the objections of the 6 million or more people who did get it right, and protested on the streets . There was open skepticism of Bush claims dotting the press landscape from the start, with people like Jack Shafer tearing apart every Judith Miller story in print. Most reporters are Democrats and the people hawking the WMD story were mostly Republicans, so there was political space for protest.

    Russiagate happened in an opposite context. If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump politically, a fact that made a number of reporters queasy about coming forward. #Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public skepticism a complicated proposition.

    Early in the scandal, I appeared on To The Point, a California-based public radio show hosted by Warren Olney, with Corn of Mother Jones. I knew David a little and had been friendly with him. He once hosted a book event for me in Washington. In the program, however, the subject of getting facts right came up and Corn said this was not a time for reporters to be picking nits:

    So Democrats getting overeager, overenthusiastic, stating things that may not be [unintelligible] true ? Well, tell me a political issue where that doesn't happen. I think that's looking at the wrong end of the telescope.

    I wrote him later and suggested that since we're in the press, and not really about anything except avoiding "things that may not be true," maybe we had different responsibilities than "Democrats"? He wrote back:

    Feel free to police the Trump opposition. But on the list of shit that needs to be covered these days, that's just not high on my personal list.

    Other reporters spoke of an internal struggle. When the Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency was met with exultation in the media, New Yorker writer Adrian Chen, who broke the original IRA story, was hesitant to come forward with some mild qualms about the way the story was being reported:

    "Either I could stay silent and allow the conversation to be dominated by those pumping up the Russian threat," he said, "or I could risk giving fodder to Trump and his allies."

    After writing, " Confessions of a Russiagate Skeptic ," poor Blake Hounsell of Politico took such a beating on social media, he ended up denouncing himself a year later.

    "What I meant to write is, I wasn't skeptical," he said.

    Years ago, in the midst of the WMD affair, Times public editor Daniel Okrent noted the paper's standard had moved from "Don't get it first, get it right" to "Get it first and get it right." From there, Okrent wrote , "the next devolution was an obvious one."

    We're at that next devolution: first and wrong. The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once "reputable" outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident.

    Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia "bombshells" being walked back, I started to keep a list. It's well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you'd expect them in both directions , but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way.

    In some cases the stories are only partly wrong, as in the case of the famed " 17 intelligence agencies said Russia was behind the hacking " story (it was actually four: the Director of National Intelligence "hand-picking" a team from the FBI, CIA, and NSA).

    In other cases the stories were blunt false starts, resulting in ugly sets of matching headlines:

    " Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility "

    Washington Post, December 31, 2016.

    " Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility "

    Washington Post, Jan. 2, 2017.

    " Trump Campaign Aides had repeated contacts with Russian Intelligence ," published by the Times on Valentine's Day, 2017, was an important, narrative-driving "bombshell" that looked dicey from the start. The piece didn't say whether the contact was witting or unwitting, whether the discussions were about business or politics, or what the contacts supposedly were at all.

    Normally a reporter would want to know what the deal is before he or she runs a story accusing people of having dealings with foreign spies. "Witting" or "Unwitting" ought to be a huge distinction, for instance. It soon after came out that people like former CIA chief John Brennan don't think this is the case. "Frequently, people who are on a treasonous path do not know they're on a treasonous path," he said, speaking of Trump's circle.

    This seemed a dangerous argument, the kind of thing that led to trouble in the McCarthy years. But let's say the contacts were serious. From a reporting point of view, you'd still need to know exactly what the nature of such contacts were before you run that story, because the headline implication is grave. Moreover you'd need to know it well enough to report it, i.e. it's not enough to be told a convincing story off-the-record, you need to be able to share with readers enough so that they can characterize the news themselves.

    Not to the Times, which ran the article without the specifics. Months later, Comey blew up this "contacts" story in public, saying, " in the main, it was not true ."

    As was the case with the "17 agencies" error, which only got fixed when Clapper testified in congress and was forced to make the correction under oath, the "repeated contacts" story was only disputed when Comey testified in congress, this time before the Senate Intelligence Committee . How many other errors of this type are waiting to be disclosed?

    Even the mistakes caught were astounding. On December 1, 2017, ABC reporter Brian Ross claimed Trump "as a candidate" instructed Michael Flynn to contact Russia. The news caused the Dow to plummet 350 points. The story was retracted almost immediately and Ross was suspended .

    Bloomberg reported Mueller subpoenaed Trump's Deutsche Bank accounts; the subpoenas turned out to be of other individuals' records. Fortune said C-SPAN was hacked after Russia Today programming briefly interrupted coverage of a Maxine Waters floor address. The New York Times also ran the story, and it's still up, despite C-SPAN insisting its own "internal routing error" likely caused the feed to appear in place of its own broadcast.

    CNN has its own separate sub-list of wrecks. Three of the network's journalists resigned after a story purporting to tie Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund was retracted. Four more CNN reporters (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus) were bylined in a story that claimed Comey was expected to refute Trump's claims he was told he wasn't the target of an investigation. Comey blew that one up, too.

    In another CNN scoop gone awry, " Email pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents ," the network's reporters were off by ten days in a "bombshell" that supposedly proved the Trump campaign had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps. "It's, uh, perhaps not as significant as what we know now," offered CNN's Manu Raju in a painful on-air retraction .

    The worst stories were the ones never corrected. A particularly bad example is " After Florida School Shooting, Russian 'Bot' Army Pounced ," from the New York Times on Feb 18, 2018. The piece claimed Russians were trying to divide Americans on social media after a mass shooting using Twitter hashtags like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting.

    The Times ran this quote high up:

    "This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this," said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. "The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically."

    About a year after this story came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder reported that the same outfit, New Knowledge , and in particular that same Jonathon Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity in an Alabama Senate race. The idea was to try to convince voters Russia preferred the Republican.

    The Times quoted a New Knowledge internal report about the idiotic Alabama scheme:

    We orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet

    The Parkland story was iffy enough when it came out, as Twitter disputed it, and another of the main sources for the initial report, former intelligence official Clint Watts, subsequently said he was "not convinced" on the whole "bot thing."

    But when one of your top sources turns out to have faked exactly the kind of activity described in your article, you should at least take the quote out, or put an update online. No luck: the story remains up on the Times site, without disclaimers.

    Russiagate institutionalized one of the worst ethical loopholes in journalism, which used to be limited mainly to local crime reporting. It's always been a problem that we publish mugshots and names of people merely arrested but not yet found guilty. Those stories live forever online and even the acquitted end up permanently unable to get jobs, smeared as thieves, wife-beaters, drunk drivers, etc.

    With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there's a difference between indictment and conviction. The most disturbing story involved Maria Butina. Here authorities and the press shared responsibility. Thanks to an indictment that initially said the Russian traded sex for favors, the Times and other outlets flooded the news cycle with breathless stories about a redheaded slut-temptress come to undermine democracy, a "real-life Red Sparrow," as ABC put it.

    But a judge threw out the sex charge after "five minutes" when it turned out to be based on a single joke text to a friend who had taken Butina's car for inspection.

    It's pretty hard to undo public perception you're a prostitute once it's been in a headline, and, worse, the headlines are still out there. You can still find stories like " Maria Butina, Suspected Secret Agent, Used Sex in Covert Plan " online in the New York Times.

    Here a reporter might protest: how would I know? Prosecutors said she traded sex for money. Why shouldn't I believe them?

    How about because, authorities have been lying their faces off to reporters since before electricity! It doesn't take much investigation to realize the main institutional sources in the Russiagate mess – the security services, mainly – have extensive records of deceiving the media.

    As noted before, from World War I-era tales of striking union workers being German agents to the "missile gap" that wasn't (the "gap" was leaked to the press before the Soviets had even one operational ICBM) to the Gulf of Tonkin mess to all the smears of people like Martin Luther King, it's a wonder newspapers listen to whispers from government sources at all.

    In the Reagan years National Security Adviser John Poindexter spread false stories about Libyan terrorist plots to The Wall Street Journal and other papers. In the Bush years, Dick Cheney et al were selling manure by the truckload about various connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, infamously including a story that bomber Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague.

    The New York Times ran a story that Atta was in Prague in late October of 2001, even giving a date of the meeting with Iraqis, April 8, or "just five months before the terrorist attacks." The Prague story was another example of a tale that seemed shaky because American officials were putting the sourcing first on foreign intelligence, then on reporters themselves. Cheney cited the Prague report in subsequent TV appearances, one of many instances of feeding reporters tidbits and then selling reports as independent confirmation.

    It wasn't until three years later, in 2004, that Times reporter James Risen definitively killed the Atta-in-Prague canard (why is it always Prague?) in a story entitled " No evidence of meeting with Iraqi ." By then, of course, it was too late. The Times also held a major dissenting piece by Risen about the WMD case, "C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports," until days after war started. This is what happens when you start thumbing the scale.

    This failure to demand specifics has been epidemic in Russiagate, even when good reporters have been involved. One of the biggest "revelations" of this era involved a story that was broken first by a terrible reporter (the Guardian's Luke Harding) and followed up by a good one (Jane Mayer of the New Yorker ). The key detail involved the elusive origin story of Russiagate.

    Mayer's piece, the March 12, 2018 " Christopher Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier " in the New Yorker , impacted the public mainly by seeming to bolster the credentials of the dossier author. But it contained an explosive nugget far down. Mayer reported Robert Hannigan, then-head of the GCHQ (the British analog to the NSA) intercepted a "stream of illicit communications" between "Trump's team and Moscow" at some point prior to August 2016. Hannigan flew to the U.S. and briefed CIA director John Brennan about these communications. Brennan later testified this inspired the original FBI investigation.

    When I read that, a million questions came to mind, but first: what did "illicit" mean?

    If something "illicit" had been captured by GCHQ, and this led to the FBI investigation (one of several conflicting public explanations for the start of the FBI probe, incidentally), this would go a long way toward clearing up the nature of the collusion charge. If they had something, why couldn't they tell us what it was? Why didn't we deserve to know?

    I asked the Guardian: "Was any attempt made to find out what those communications were? How was the existence of these communications confirmed? Did anyone from the Guardian see or hear these intercepts, or transcripts?"

    Their one-sentence reply:

    The Guardian has strict and rigorous procedures when dealing with source material.

    That's the kind of answer you'd expect from a transnational bank, or the army, not a newspaper.

    I asked Mayer the same questions. She was more forthright, noting that, of course, the story had originally been broken by Harding , whose own report said "the precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public."

    She added that "afterwards I independently confirmed aspects of [Harding's piece] with several well-informed sources," and "spent months on the Steele story [and] traveled to the UK twice for it." But, she wrote, "the Russiagate story, like all reporting on sensitive national security issues, is difficult."

    I can only infer she couldn't find out what "illicit" meant despite proper effort. The detail was published anyway. It may not have seemed like a big deal, but I think it was.

    To be clear, I don't necessarily disbelieve the idea that there were "illicit" contacts between Trump and Russians in early 2015 or before. But if there were such contacts, I can't think of any legitimate reason why their nature should be withheld from the public.

    If authorities can share reasons for concern with foreign countries like Israel, why should American voters not be so entitled? Moreover the idea that we need to keep things secret to protect sources and methods and "tradecraft" (half the press corps became expert in goofy spy language over the last few years, using terms like "SIGINT" like they've known them their whole lives), why are we leaking news of our ability to hear Russian officials cheerin g Trump's win?

    Failure to ask follow-up questions happened constantly with this story. One of the first reports that went sideways involved a similar dynamic: the contention that some leaked DNC emails were forgeries.

    MSNBC's "Intelligence commentator" Malcolm Nance, perhaps the most enthusiastic source of questionable #Russiagate news this side of Twitter conspiracist Louise Mensch, tweeted on October 11, 2016: " #PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done."

    As noted in The Intercept and elsewhere, this was re-reported by the likes of David Frum (a key member of the club that has now contributed to both the WMD and Russiagate panics) and MSNBC host Joy Reid . The reports didn't stop until roughly October of 2016, among other things because the Clinton campaign kept suggesting to reporters the emails were fake. This could have been stopped sooner if examples of a forgery had been demanded from the Clinton campaign earlier.

    Another painful practice that became common was failing to confront your own sources when news dispositive to what they've told you pops up. The omnipresent Clapper told Chuck Todd on March 5, 2017, without equivocation, that there had been no FISA application involving Trump or his campaign. " I can deny it ," he said.

    It soon after came out this wasn't true. The FBI had a FISA warrant on Carter Page. This was not a small misstatement by Clapper, because his appearance came a day after Trump claimed in a tweet he'd had his " wires tapped ." Trump was widely ridiculed for this claim, perhaps appropriately so, but in addition to the Page news, it later came out there had been a FISA warrant of Paul Manafort as well, during which time Trump may have been the subject of " incidental " surveillance.

    Whether or not this was meaningful, or whether these warrants were justified, are separate questions. The important thing is, Clapper either lied to Todd, or else he somehow didn't know the FBI had obtained these warrants. The latter seems absurd and unlikely. Either way, Todd ought to been peeved and demanded an explanation. Instead, he had Clapper back on again within months and gave him the usual softball routine, never confronting him about the issue.

    Reporters repeatedly got burned and didn't squawk about it. Where are the outraged stories about all the scads of anonymous "people familiar with the matter" who put reporters in awkward spots in the last years? Why isn't McClatchy demanding the heads of whatever "four people with knowledge" convinced them to double down on the Cohen-in-Prague story ?

    Why isn't every reporter who used "New Knowledge" as a source about salacious Russian troll stories out for their heads (or the heads of the congressional sources who passed this stuff on), after reports they faked Russian trolling? How is it possible NBC and other outlets continued to use New Knowledge as a source in stories identifying antiwar Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian-backed candidate?

    How do the Guardian's editors not already have Harding's head in a vice for hanging them out to dry on the most dubious un-retracted story in modern history – the tale that the most watched human on earth, Julian Assange, had somehow been visited in the Ecuadorian embassy by Paul Manafort without leaving any record? I'd be dragging Harding's "well placed source" into the office and beating him with a hose until he handed them something that would pass for corroborating evidence.

    The lack of blowback over episodes in which reporters were put in public compromised situations speaks to the overly cozy relationships outlets had with official sources. Too often, it felt like a team effort, where reporters seemed to think it was their duty to take the weight if sources pushed them to overreach. They had absolutely no sense of institutional self-esteem about this.

    Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump. Why bother having a press corps at all if you're going to go that route?

    This posture all been couched as anti-Trump solidarity, but really, did former CIA chief John Brennan – the same Brennan who should himself have faced charges for lying to congress about hacking the computers of Senate staff – need the press to whine on his behalf when Trump yanked his security clearance? Did we need the press to hum Aretha Franklin tunes, as ABC did, and chide Trump for lacking R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the CIA? We don't have better things to do than that "work"?

    This catalogue of factual errors and slavish stenography will stand out when future analysts look back at why the "MSM" became a joke during this period, but they were only a symptom of a larger problem. The bigger issue was a radical change in approach.

    A lot of #Russiagate coverage became straight-up conspiracy theory, what Baker politely called "connecting the dots ." This was allowed because the press committed to a collusion narrative from the start, giving everyone cover to indulge in behaviors that would never be permitted in normal times.

    Such was the case with Jonathan Chait's #Russiagate opus , "PRUMP TUTIN: Will Trump be Meeting With his Counterpart – or his Handler?" The story was also pitched as "What if Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987," which recalls the joke from The Wire: " Yo, Herc, what if your mother and father never met ?" What if isn't a good place to be in this business.

    This cover story (!) in New York magazine was released in advance of a planned "face-to-face" summit between Trump and Putin, and posited Trump had been under Russian control for decades. Chait noted Trump visited the Soviet Union in 1987 and came back "fired up with political ambition." He offered the possibility that this was a coincidence, but added:

    Indeed, it seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back this far. But it can't be dismissed completely.

    I searched the Chait article up and down for reporting that would justify the suggestion Trump had been a Russian agent dating back to the late eighties, when, not that it matters, Russia was a different country called the Soviet Union.

    Only two facts in the piece could conceivably have been used to support the thesis: Trump met with a visiting Soviet official in 1986, and visited the Soviet Union in 1987. That's it. That's your cover story.

    Worse, Chait's theory was first espoused in Lyndon Larouche's " Elephants and Donkeys " newsletter in 1987, under a headline, "Do Russians have a Trump card?" This is barrel-scraping writ large.

    It's a mania. Putin is literally in our underpants. Maybe, if we're lucky, New York might someday admit its report claiming Russians set up an anti-masturbation hotline to trap and blackmail random Americans is suspicious, not just because it seems absurd on its face, but because its source is the same "New Knowledge" group that admitted to faking Russian influence operations in Alabama.

    But what retraction is possible for the Washington Post headline, " How will Democrats cope if Putin starts playing dirty tricks for Bernie Sanders (again )?" How to reverse Rachel Maddow's spiel about Russia perhaps shutting down heat across America during a cold wave? There's no correction for McCarthyism and fearmongering.

    This ultimately will be the endgame of the Russia charade. They will almost certainly never find anything like the wild charges and Manchurian Candidate theories elucidated in the Steele report. But the years of panic over the events of 2016 will lead to radical changes in everything from press regulation to foreign policy, just as the WMD canard led to torture, warrantless surveillance, rendition, drone assassination, secret budgets and open-ended, undeclared wars from Somalia to Niger to Syria. The screw-ups will be forgotten, but accelerated vigilance will remain.

    It's hard to know what policy changes are appropriate because the reporting on everything involving the Russian threat in the last two to three years has been so unreliable.

    I didn't really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now. I was told early on that this piece of the story seemed "solid," but even that assertion has remained un-bolstered since then, still based on an " assessment " by the intelligence services that always had issues, including the use of things like RT's "anti-American" coverage of fracking as part of its case. The government didn't even examine the DNC's server, the kind of detail that used to make reporters nervous.

    We won't know how much of any of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security services and looks at this whole series of events all over again with fresh eyes, as journalists, not political actors. That means being open to asking what went wrong with this story, in addition to focusing so much energy on Trump and Russia.

    The WMD mess had massive real-world negative impact, leading to over a hundred thousand deaths and trillions in lost taxpayer dollars. Unless Russiagate leads to a nuclear conflict, we're unlikely to ever see that level of consequence.

    Still, Russiagate has led to unprecedented cooperation between the government and Internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, all of which are censoring pages on the left, right, and in between in the name of preventing the "sowing of discord." The story also had a profound impact on the situation in places like Syria, where Russian and American troops have sat across the Euphrates River from one another, two amped-up nuclear powers at a crossroads.

    As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it's led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We've become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

    We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don't turn things around, this story will destroy it

    motherjones , 31 minutes ago link

    Taibbi is spot on, and in depth with this writing. The main stream media sold Americans on the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Almost 2 decades later, we have spent 6 trillion dollars, 8 millions lives have been lost, and millions of refugees have flooded out of those countries, causing instability in Europe and beyond. For the past 2 years, 24/7, we have not been able to escape the claims of Russiagate. He does not mention how the very same media gave Trump 24/7 coverage long before he was elected, and in fact this free publicity, is probably why Trump is in the White House today. Without the constant press coverage of his campaign, coverage that was not provided to other candidates, he would most likely not have found his way to the White House. Taibbi does not go on to tell us what the motivation of the press is, or what he thinks can be done. News shows in the US have become little more than entertainment. Many of us no longer rely on main stream press for any real news. The mass media has become irrelevant at it's best, and dangerous, at it's worst. The driving force behind the so called news today, is the advertising dollars, and the politics of the owners of the networks. How can we have a "free press" when just a few individuals own all the major news outlets? We are not going to get the real news on tv of from the big newspapers, as long as the power is in the hands of a few rich and powerful individuals, who decide what is news.

    southpaw47 , 50 minutes ago link

    "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" - Alexander Pope

    The rash or inexperienced will attempt things that wiser people are more cautious of.

    Finally the libs will agree that guns do have their place in society. These crazy zealots may just blow their own brains out or just find the nearest cliff. Ace Hardware is loading up on rope.

    hooligan2009 , 1 hour ago link

    hmmm....just imagine if - sleyers money contribution fo impeach trump was turned into a movie where a "sponsor" drew up a hit list of batshit crazy MSM "personalities" to include late night "comfuckedupedians"

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-25/billionaire-tom-steyer-s-quest-to-impeach-trump

    PerilouseTimes , 1 hour ago link

    Even if you were stupid enough to believe Trump was getting dirt on Hillary from the Russians, what is wrong with that? Is there a law against that? Why is it OK for Obama and the FBI to get away with wiretapping Trump during the election? Why is it OK for NSA to wiretap All Americans and store all their conversations and internet traffic on hard drives?

    foxenburg , 1 hour ago link

    Steele, Orbis, Pablo Miller, Salisbury, Porton Down, golden-shower dossier supposedly written by a native Russian speaker with an intelligence background....it all makes me wonder what happened to Skripal.

    hooligan2009 , 1 hour ago link

    "Skripalgate" is suppressed by UK law. All russians are evil in the UK. The fact that (as with tony Bliar and yellowcake Iraq) any sitting government can prosecute another country without a trial, witnesses or evidence - as in the Skripals and within the FUKUS cabal that bombed syria because of - "chlorine barrel bomb attacks on civilians" who later showed up unscathed in Den Haag.

    UK governments cannot be held to account for their actions domestically or overseas.

    motherjones , 1 hour ago link

    Both parties have been playing up the threat from Russia for decades. The Military Industrial Complex was built on creating fear about the possibility of war with Russian. The military industrial complex owns Congress, so of course Congress is going to play up this threat. " The reason why media is working so hard to create the impression that Russia is actively conspiring against is because conflict with the former Soviet Union is good for business." We can expect this to continue in one form or another. If Americans were not afraid of Russia, we would not support a defense budget that is equal to all other countries in the world combined.

    https://www.wakingtimes.com/2016/08/30/defense-contractors-tell-investors-world-war-iii-great-for-business/?fbclid=IwAR0rSFD3EPOgCd_dohnRg_4W1VUMcu-u33PBi9LW8Pdcv4F4pL4_MTXU31c

    devnickle , 1 hour ago link

    Put a sock in it. You should be embarrassed to even comment.

    motherjones , 1 hour ago link

    Right. The depth of your analysis is impressive. You seem to have an unlimited knowledge of world and national affairs too. Other than some stalking tendencies, why do you post on ZH? You don't really seem to have any interest in the content, or the discussion.

    Bricker , 2 hours ago link

    The head of the pin starts with OBAMA

    I dont want to type up everything that led me to believe this. But the racism, his empathy towards certain muslims groups and how he treated the war, the prisoner release, the sailors broadcasted on tv about drifting into territorial waters, I mean it was so obvious how he felt about America.

    Pile on his efforts to interfere in the election and eavesdrop, unmasking with Hillary getting and receiving emails from her home brew server not to mention her foundation pulling in 145 million from Russia.

    The CIA is sickening to what has developed over the last 20 years

    blind_understanding , 2 hours ago link

    Taibbi: 'Russiagate' Is This Generation's WMD

    Blind: If so, it just means it will not be reported on in the MainStream Media(MSM) and soon forgotten.

    The same people who own the private central bank and currency, also own the MSM, and they control the narrative on ALL TOPICS. And control of narrative mean control of what people think.

    Control of money and mind means TOTAL control of a country.

    Nothing will change until control of minds is returned to the people, then issuance of currency can be returned to the government.

    Alex Jones' of Infowars got it right when he said "There's a war on for your mind!" ... even though he became a turncoat himself, soon after.

    SnottyBubbles , 2 hours ago link

    Hillary lost a freaking election. After almost 3 freaking years of coup d'état the left deserves mocking humiliation. Mock them ruthlessly. Never, ever let them forget the horrible thing that they did.

    Never stop making fun of them and reminding them how stupid and crazy they acted during this humiliating period of US history. Never let them forget what they did to the nation or what they cost us all. Never let Democrats forget how much time and energy they wasted, how very, very wrong they were.

    Every politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this moronic load of Russia! Russia! Russia! has utterly discredited themselves for life. They executed and failed to accomplish a coup d'état. These are the very last people anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world or an ice cream truck.

    Refuse them, laugh at them, ignore them. They earned it and deserve nothing but the greatest disdain.

    devnickle , 1 hour ago link

    Revenge is best served cold. I am dishing out in buckets to the retards.

    artistant , 2 hours ago link

    Russia is an IMPEDIMENT to APARTHEID Israhell's design for the region .

    Without Russia, ASSAD would be long gone and IRAN would have been bombed to oblivion, and Greater Israhell would have been fulfilled and ruling over the MidEast.

    In other words, Russiagate is simply PAYBACK .

    youshallnotkill , 2 hours ago link

    There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn't.

    Of course there isn't. But this doesn't mean that a prosecutor like Mueller can prove this beyond any reasonable doubt. In fact it is quite likely that he cannot. The only charge that should be fairly easy to establish is obstruction of justice.

    Without knowing what is in the report, Taibbi really jumps the gun here. Especially given the comparison to WMDs.

    I knew there were no WMDs in Iraq before the invasion because I followed, and chose to believe, a credible diplomat like Hans Blix over the dog and pony show that Colin Powell put on. But WMDs are very tangible you either find the hardware or you do not. Yet, what Putin and Trump discuss without a single other American in the room nobody knows but the Kremlin and Trump.

    Amy G. Dala , 2 hours ago link

    Um, they talked about grandchildren and golf. MSM bought that about Bill and Loretta.

    youshallnotkill , 2 hours ago link

    At least Loretta probably did not aspire to bring the US to its knees.

    Amy G. Dala , 2 hours ago link

    Then I guess you didn't catch her "blood in the streets" speech.

    youshallnotkill , 2 hours ago link

    Original quote:

    "It has been people, individuals who have banded together, ordinary people who simply saw what needed to be done and came together and supported those ideals who have made the difference.

    They've marched, they've bled and yes, some of them died. This is hard. Every good thing is. We have done this before. We can do this again ."

    Hardly the call for violent civil war at which it has been portrayed.

    hanekhw , 2 hours ago link

    The most coiffed, manicured, made up sacks of **** ever to glorify the airwaves tell US what THEY think and get paid handsome salaries for their effort to overthrow the American system. Freedom of Speech? That'll be gone in a heartbeat if THEY get power. We have an obligation to not just protect it but a greater one to preserve it.

    Tunga , 2 hours ago link

    "I didn't really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now." - exce

    The State Department paused its investigation of the Secretary's emails so as not to interfere with the Mueller investigation. Here we see Taibbi writes an exhaustive condemnation of the Western press while leaving out the very crux of the story, the very source of the stolen DNC emails was Clapper and Brennan pretending to be Guccifer 2.0.

    Pitiful attempt at redemption there Matt. Seriously, go **** your self.

    "After reading several articles, it seemed clear that key difficulties for Russians communicating in English include: definite and indefinite articles, the use of presuppositions and correct usage of say/tell and said/told. Throughout 2017, I constructed a corpus of Guccifer 2.0's communications and analyzed the frequency of different types of mistakes. The results of this work corroborate Professor Connolly's assessment.

    Overall, it appears Guccifer 2.0 could communicate in English quite well but chose to use inconsistently broken English at times in order to give the impression that it wasn't his primary language. The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.

    To date, Connolly's language study has not drawn any significant objections or criticism."

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-25/guccifer-20-game-over-year-end-review-0

    Amy G. Dala , 2 hours ago link

    Here's the goddam thing IMO. There is this thing called freedom of the press, it's constitutionally protected, no different than the right to bear arms.

    But just because I have the right to carry an M+A 9mm around, that doesn't mean I can point it at the guy who cut me off in traffic. In that case, I go to jail.

    For almost three years now, I've been hearing "bombshell" after unsourced "bombshell" from CNN/MSNBC/WaPo/NPR/NYT et. al. Here's how it usually goes:

    And now let's turn to our panel of experts to "unpack" this latest revelation . . .

    These people have criminally abused their rights, and those rights need to be taken away.

    Otschelnik,

    If Rachel Maddow, Chris Mathews, Judy Woodruff, Chuck Todd, Anderson Cooper, Brian Stelter, Chris Hayes, Mika Brzezinski, Don Lemon, Alysin Camerota, Lawrence O'Donnell had the slightest inkling of professional integrity, and human conscience - they'd commit seppuku on national live TeeVee to restore their honor.

    A rope leash, 3 hours ago

    In his effort to cleanse himself of the slimy residue of his profession, Tiabbi has written a fine piece here, a nice little documentation of press collusion with government spooks and political operatives.

    If a little honest reporting will offer some redemption to damned journalists, his name was Seth Rich.

    hooligan2009, 3 hours ago

    don't forget that Obama was PERSONALLY and DIRECTLY involved in all aspects of Russiagate.

    read between these lines

    On Oct. 14, 2016, Page again wrote to McCabe, this time concerning a meeting with the White House.

    "Just called," Page said to McCabe. "Apparently the DAG [Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates] now wants to be there, and WH wants DOJ to host. So we are setting that up now. ... We will very much need to get Cohen's view before we meet with her. Better, have him weigh in with her before the meeting. We need to speak with one voice, if that is in fact the case."

    newworldorder, 3 hours ago

    The simple truth here is that most Americans no longer have any critical thinking skills, - all media realized this a long time ago, and catered to their audience.

    The Benjamin Franklin famous quote in answer to the question of "what kind of government have you given us?" rings very hollow after 240+ years. The "Republic" exists in name only, because its people have not protected it, after the passing of the WW2 generation.

    Unrestricted, open borders invasion disguised as alleged migration, and the legalization of an eventual 100+ million new "migrant" voters will be the final nail on the coffin of the US Republic by 2030.

    Mob rule will finally destroy the greatest Republic ever conceived by the mind of men.

    Mike Rotsch, 3 hours ago (Edited)

    If "open borders" is your measuring stick on Americans' critical-thinking skills, then where does that place Europeans? They actually have them officially.

    Paracelsus, 3 hours ago

    Someday I hope that Hillary has to be rolled up to testify about the Benghazi business. Grab the guns and the gold (and the oil). Ukraine gold: check. Libyan gold and weapons: check.

    Ghaddafi actually warned the west that after him would come a deluge of illegals (okay refugees: young males, black, often Islamic, with little respect for women or experience with western society).

    While I have reservations about Trump and his policies, the MSM owe him a huge mea culpa.

    [Mar 24, 2019] The main reason Mueller has served up his nothing burger is because to produce enough "evidence" to impeach Trump would require publicly exposing the full extent of the Deep State illegal spying, hit squads (his name was Seth Rich) and electoral manipulations so common in the US today

    Mar 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    A P , Mar 24, 2019 3:14:34 PM | link

    The main reason Mueller has served up his nothing burger is because to produce enough "evidence" to impeach Trump would require publicly exposing the full extent of the Deep State illegal spying, hit squads (his name was Seth Rich) and electoral manipulations so common in the US today. Expect a lot of "national security concerns" being tossed out to "explain" why Mueller can't lay charges against Trump or any of his few real supporters in the US administration. The various Swamp Creatures that have slimed through the Trump administration for 2 years won't be touched by Mueller.

    A P , Mar 24, 2019 3:17:28 PM | link

    Forgot to add: I am no Trump supporter, other than the fact he was less odious than Clinton. But as the last 2 years shows, not less odious by much. At least the world is not in WW3 yet.
    Zachary Smith , Mar 24, 2019 3:22:08 PM | link
    @ A P #6

    I thing a lot of people were satisfied with this "investigation". The Hillary bots had a long period of dreaming of Trump being smashed into pieces small enough to be ground underfoot.

    And the folks who have finally put Trump firmly under their thumbs must have found it useful in gaining control of the man. For example, even if my "blackmail" theory is overblown, Trump would be at least as terrified of becoming an impoverished felon as he would of having pictures of him in an illegal or compromising position with ..... you name it.

    [Mar 24, 2019] Poor Travolta. With Mueller finished, US media turns to John Travolta for collusion gossip

    Mar 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Zanon , Mar 24, 2019 3:35:09 PM | link

    Poor Travolta..
    With Mueller finished, US media turns to John Travolta for collusion gossip
    https://on.rt.com/9qss

    [Mar 24, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard is less than 20K individual donations away from getting on the debate stage!

    Mar 22, 2019 | twitter.com

    Niko House ‏ 10:57 AM - 22 Mar 2019

    Tulsi Gabbard is less than 20K individual donations away from getting on the debate stage! Help her get there by donating just $1 to her campaign!

    Tulsi Gabbard ‏ 5:21 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    Thank you! So far we have 44,255 unique donors of the 65,000 needed to get on the debate stage! Almost 4,000 people contributed in the last 2 days. I'm humbled by your support. Stay tuned for updates! pic.twitter.com/UOd5Ky39vf

    [Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed

    Highly recommended!
    So Brennan conspired with MI6 and Clinton wing of Dems to bring down Trump. Trump was falsely accused of colliding with Russia while he openly collided with Israel. Of course colliding with Israel is not a crime in the USA as political establishment assumes that the interests of both countries are identical. This is pretty far from being true. Israel plays its own and sometime harmful for the USA game in the Middle East. And Israel agents of influence like Kushner, Pompeo, Haley and Bolton really infiltrated the Trump administration, unlike mythical Russian.
    Now the question is: was Brennan acted in the interests of MI6 only, or only of Mossad?
    Mar 23, 2019 | dailycaller.com

    Brennan's pipe dream was all but obliterated on Friday when Mueller submitted his report to the Justice Department. Officials at the agency said that no more indictments will be submitted in the 22-month old investigation. There are also no indictments that have been issued under seal. The last indictment in the investigation was handed down on Jan. 24 against Trump confidant Roger Stone .

    Of the three dozen indictments or guilty pleas obtained in the investigation, none have involved charges of conspiracy between Trump associates and Russian government officials.

    It does remain unclear whether Mueller recommended Trump for impeachment proceedings, or whether he found non-criminal evidence of links between Trumpworld and the Kremlin. Attorney General William Barr said in a letter Friday afternoon that he will likely provide a summary of the investigation to the Houe and Senate Judiciary Committees as soon as this weekend.

    [Mar 23, 2019] Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Once the fingerprints and bread crumbs led away from Russia to Israel, and Netanyahoo and his oligarch friends, Mueller stopped looking further as the writing on the wall became clear. Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel. ..."
    "... Manafort was the fall guy for Trump. ..."
    "... This investgation was a convenient sham to cover for the real collusion and Trump was the Zionist one percenters choice and nothing was going to foil that and many of you here fell for the entire charade hook, line and sinker believing Trump was a poor victim all along. ..."
    Mar 23, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Circe , Mar 22, 2019 7:48:23 PM | link

    @48 arby

    Max Blumenthal has it right on, but the proxy war in Syria was also about stopping a gas pipeline from Iran through Syria as a shortcut to EU market to compete with the Levant Israeli gas route.

    I disagree with any analogy drawn between the Golan Heights and Crimea for various reasons. It's wrong and counterproductive to draw such analogy. If anything sanctions should have been imposed on Israel for usurping and settling that land which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

    Crimea went back and forth changing hands throughout history. Finally when Catherine the Great defeated the Ottoman Empire, Crimea was traded in a treaty to Russia. So technically, legally it was always Russian territory and merely went back to its lawful owner with the present inhabitants of Crimea totally in agreement.

    The Golan Heights were throughout history mostly under Arab control and later also part of the Ottoman Empire until it was under French control and then became part of Syria, so Israel has no legitimate claim whatsoever and sanctions should have been imposed on Israel for its illegal occupation of the Golan Heights and not on Russia for taking back what was legitimately Russian territory for centuries minus the brief blunder by the Soviet Presidium of 1954 which transfer decree violated the Russian Constitution of 1937. So in essence it was an illegal transfer and now that error has been rectified, therefore sanctions on Russia are illegal.

    ◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇

    The nothing-burger Mueller Report is done and arrived at the Justice Dept. What will be missing from the report is how Trump colluded with Zionists to become President. Zionist oligarchs funded Trump at various stages of his campaign and were involved in influencing American public perception funding Cambridge Analytica and other cyber outfits.

    Facebook's Zionist owner also helped in the operation to get Trump elected.

    Once the fingerprints and bread crumbs led away from Russia to Israel, and Netanyahoo and his oligarch friends, Mueller stopped looking further as the writing on the wall became clear. Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel.

    Manafort was the fall guy for Trump. Originally, I thought Flynn was the fall guy and in a way he was because he quit and lied for him (I don't believe he was fired) to save Trump's neck at the time. Trump was never in jeopardy because his Zionist masters ensured there were others around him they knew were compromised and would end up having to take the fall for their Chosen one.

    This investgation was a convenient sham to cover for the real collusion and Trump was the Zionist one percenters choice and nothing was going to foil that and many of you here fell for the entire charade hook, line and sinker believing Trump was a poor victim all along.

    [Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed

    Highly recommended!
    So Brennan conspired with MI6 and Clinton wing of Dems to bring down Trump. Trump was falsely accused of colliding with Russia while he openly collided with Israel. Of course colliding with Israel is not a crime in the USA as political establishment assumes that the interests of both countries are identical. This is pretty far from being true. Israel plays its own and sometime harmful for the USA game in the Middle East. And Israel agents of influence like Kushner, Pompeo, Haley and Bolton really infiltrated the Trump administration, unlike mythical Russian.
    Now the question is: was Brennan acted in the interests of MI6 only, or only of Mossad?
    Mar 23, 2019 | dailycaller.com

    Brennan's pipe dream was all but obliterated on Friday when Mueller submitted his report to the Justice Department. Officials at the agency said that no more indictments will be submitted in the 22-month old investigation. There are also no indictments that have been issued under seal. The last indictment in the investigation was handed down on Jan. 24 against Trump confidant Roger Stone .

    Of the three dozen indictments or guilty pleas obtained in the investigation, none have involved charges of conspiracy between Trump associates and Russian government officials.

    It does remain unclear whether Mueller recommended Trump for impeachment proceedings, or whether he found non-criminal evidence of links between Trumpworld and the Kremlin. Attorney General William Barr said in a letter Friday afternoon that he will likely provide a summary of the investigation to the Houe and Senate Judiciary Committees as soon as this weekend.

    [Mar 23, 2019] Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Once the fingerprints and bread crumbs led away from Russia to Israel, and Netanyahoo and his oligarch friends, Mueller stopped looking further as the writing on the wall became clear. Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel. ..."
    "... Manafort was the fall guy for Trump. ..."
    "... This investgation was a convenient sham to cover for the real collusion and Trump was the Zionist one percenters choice and nothing was going to foil that and many of you here fell for the entire charade hook, line and sinker believing Trump was a poor victim all along. ..."
    Mar 23, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Circe , Mar 22, 2019 7:48:23 PM | link

    @48 arby

    Max Blumenthal has it right on, but the proxy war in Syria was also about stopping a gas pipeline from Iran through Syria as a shortcut to EU market to compete with the Levant Israeli gas route.

    I disagree with any analogy drawn between the Golan Heights and Crimea for various reasons. It's wrong and counterproductive to draw such analogy. If anything sanctions should have been imposed on Israel for usurping and settling that land which is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

    Crimea went back and forth changing hands throughout history. Finally when Catherine the Great defeated the Ottoman Empire, Crimea was traded in a treaty to Russia. So technically, legally it was always Russian territory and merely went back to its lawful owner with the present inhabitants of Crimea totally in agreement.

    The Golan Heights were throughout history mostly under Arab control and later also part of the Ottoman Empire until it was under French control and then became part of Syria, so Israel has no legitimate claim whatsoever and sanctions should have been imposed on Israel for its illegal occupation of the Golan Heights and not on Russia for taking back what was legitimately Russian territory for centuries minus the brief blunder by the Soviet Presidium of 1954 which transfer decree violated the Russian Constitution of 1937. So in essence it was an illegal transfer and now that error has been rectified, therefore sanctions on Russia are illegal.

    ◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇◇

    The nothing-burger Mueller Report is done and arrived at the Justice Dept. What will be missing from the report is how Trump colluded with Zionists to become President. Zionist oligarchs funded Trump at various stages of his campaign and were involved in influencing American public perception funding Cambridge Analytica and other cyber outfits.

    Facebook's Zionist owner also helped in the operation to get Trump elected.

    Once the fingerprints and bread crumbs led away from Russia to Israel, and Netanyahoo and his oligarch friends, Mueller stopped looking further as the writing on the wall became clear. Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel.

    Manafort was the fall guy for Trump. Originally, I thought Flynn was the fall guy and in a way he was because he quit and lied for him (I don't believe he was fired) to save Trump's neck at the time. Trump was never in jeopardy because his Zionist masters ensured there were others around him they knew were compromised and would end up having to take the fall for their Chosen one.

    This investgation was a convenient sham to cover for the real collusion and Trump was the Zionist one percenters choice and nothing was going to foil that and many of you here fell for the entire charade hook, line and sinker believing Trump was a poor victim all along.

    [Mar 23, 2019] FLASHBACK John Brennan Predicted Additional Mueller Indictments Just Two Weeks Ago

    Brennan was actually right about Kushner and Ivanka. But after that he continued to beat dead Russia horse. Trump collition is with KSA and Isreal is much more plausable then with Russia. And even in case of Russia it was probably with Russian mafia, which is actually ethnically is a Jewish and Georgian mafia,
    Notable quotes:
    "... "If anybody from the Trump family is going to be indicted, it would be in the final act of Mueller's investigation because Bob Mueller and I think his team knows that if he were to do something, indicting a Trump family member, or if he were to go forward with an indictment on a criminal conspiracy involving U.S. persons that would basically be the death knell of the special counsel's office," ..."
    Mar 23, 2019 | gaysfortrump.org

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1BSmwJb6gs

    Former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan predicted just two short weeks ago that President Trump's family members or associates would be indicted in the special counsel's probe.

    During an appearance on MSNBC on March 5, Brennan predicted that Mueller would issue indictments related to a "criminal conspiracy" involving Trump or his associates' activities during the 2016 election. The forecast proved far off the mark on Friday after Robert Mueller ended his investigation without issuing new indictments.

    "If anybody from the Trump family is going to be indicted, it would be in the final act of Mueller's investigation because Bob Mueller and I think his team knows that if he were to do something, indicting a Trump family member, or if he were to go forward with an indictment on a criminal conspiracy involving U.S. persons that would basically be the death knell of the special counsel's office,"

    Brennan told anchor Lawrence O'Donnell. (RELATED: Ex-CIA Director John Brennan Accuses Trump Of Treason Following Putin Summit)

    "I don't believe that Donald Trump would allow Bob Mueller to continue in the aftermath of those actions," he added.

    [Mar 23, 2019] When the tide subside Brennan is swimming naked

    He probably was the main plotter of Russiagate color revolution against Trump
    Mar 23, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
    dltravers , Mar 23, 2019 1:38:07 PM | link
    Just two week ago former CIA director John Brennan, who likely conspired with British intelligence to frame Trump with the Russia affair, said (vid) that he expected further indictments :
    During an appearance on MSNBC on March 5, Brennan predicted that Mueller would issue indictments related to a "criminal conspiracy" involving Trump or his associates' activities during the 2016 election.

    That last hope of the Russiagate dead-enders is now gone :

    Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III submitted a long-awaited report to Attorney General William P. Barr on Friday, marking the end of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump.
    ...
    A senior Justice Department official said the special counsel has not recommended any further indictments -- a revelation that buoyed Trump's supporters, even as other Trump-related investigations continue in other parts of the Justice Department.
    ...
    None of the Americans charged by Mueller are accused of conspiring with Russia to interfere in the election -- the central question of Mueller's work. Instead, they pleaded guilty to various crimes, including lying to the FBI.

    The investigation ended without charges for a number of key figures who had long been under Mueller's scrutiny ...

    Conclusions from the Mueller report will be released by the Justice Department over the next days.

    That the Russiagaters were wrong for falling for the bullshit peddled in the Steele dossier and the "Russian hacking" lies of the snakeoil salesmen Clapper and Brennan was obvious long ago. In June 2017 we pointed to a long Washington Post piece on alleged Russian election hacking and remarked :

    Reading that piece it becomes clear (but is never said) that the sole source for that August 2016 Brennan claim of "Russian hacking" is the absurd Steele dossier some ex-MI6 dude created for too much money as opposition research against Trump. The only other "evidence" for "Russian hacking" is the Crowdstrike report on the DNC "hack". Crowdstrike has a Ukrainian nationalist agenda, was hired by the DNC, had to retract other "Russian hacking" claims and no one else was allowed to take a look at the DNC servers. Said differently: The whole "Russian hacking" claims are solely based on "evidence" of two fake reports.

    The Steele dossier was fake opposition research peddled by the Clinton campaign, John McCain and a bunch of anti-Trump national security types. The still unproven claim of "Russian hacking" was designed to divert from the fact that Clinton and the DNC colluded to cheat Bernie Sanders out of the nomination. The stupid claim that commercial click-bait from a company in Leningrad was a "Russian influence campaign" was designed to explain Clinton's election loss to the other worst-candidate-ever. The "Russiagate" investigation was designed to prevent Trump from finding better relations with Russia as he had promised during his campaign.

    All were somewhat successful because some media and some bloggers were happy to sell such nonsense without putting it into the big picture.

    It is high time to start a deep investigation into Brennan, Clapper, Comey and the Clinton campaign and to uncover the conspiracy that led to the Steele dossier, the FBI investigation following from it and all the other bullshit that evolved from that investigation.

    As for Marcy Wheeler, Rachel Maddow and other dimwits who peddled the Russiagate nonsense I agree with the advice Catlin Johnstone gives :

    Every politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life.
    ...
    The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world.

    Posted by b at 01:12 PM | Comments (61) Among my friends who hate Trump their is a deep desire to grasp anything that would destroy him. The media played the phony collusion story relentlessly and the goyim ate it up. People who had some intellect parked it to get Trump, others who did not understand how the system works believed the story.

    Clearly this was operation crossfire hurricane. Trump was the hurricane blowing in and the phony collusion story was the crossfire with the top DOJ officials pushing the story to the hilt. By going on the attack they sucked out all of the oxygen out of the room.

    I believe they feared any investigation against their coverup of the real collusion between Russian oligarchs and the Clinton foundation. The "lock her up" chant frightened them. Basically the best defense is a good offense.

    The empire cannot police itself, it can only protect itself and its primary backers.

    Kadath , Mar 23, 2019 1:50:50 PM | link

    I wish I could agree with your assessment of how these Russiagate fools have discredited themselves for life, but as we've seen with the Iraq war the political/media elite are never punished for their crimes and failures. Only those that oppose the crimes are ever punished, Phil Donahue never got his show back after he was fired for opposing the Media's drive for the Iraq war, Assange is still imprisoned without trial, Manning is back in jail for contempt of court which will probably be a reoccurring weapon to be used against her for the rest of her life.

    Conversely, those individuals that committed the supreme crime against the world are stronger than ever; John Bolton is back in power as if the Iraq war disaster never happened, Elliott Abrams has been forgiven by the Congress he lied to and is back in power planning another dirty war against Venezuela, relations with Russia are now wrecked for at LEAST another 10 years (maybe 20 years or more). Brennan, Clapper, Comey and the Clinton gang will never be punished and will instead be lionized for the rest of their lives since all of the media elite is complicit in their crimes. Rachel Madcow, Chris Matthews, Brian Williams and the rest of the MSNBC/CNN crowed will continue to be "Guided by the beauty of our weapons" for the glory of their sponsors. The Alternative media that brought many of these crimes to light is now being strangled by a censorship imposed by the very criminals they exposed. All of the vested Political/Economic interests in the current status quo will quash the needed reforms and the world community will suffer - things will get worst, things can only get worse from here.

    I feel this article accurately explains what the US (and truly all of the Western world) have become
    https://www.mintpressnews.com/16-years-iraq-us-become-nation-passive-neocons/256387/

    the pair , Mar 23, 2019 2:06:27 PM | link
    and yet they will keep going and "fail upward" as is the usual progression of beltway and manhattan types. it certainly worked for abrams and bolton over their long careers as incompetent serial killers. even bush II has been slowly rehabilitated by the very "resistance" who loathed him after the 9/11 honeymoon was over.

    i had on the bbc's US nightly news thing last night...they were coming on air just as this was "breaking news". they stated outright that they had no idea what was in it (at that point even trump didn't) yet filled the next 30 minutes with "we don't know what's in it but it's in and we assume BOOM". that's literally all they had and they said it over and over in 40 different ways. because there's nothing else going on in the world right now i suppose.

    one of the bits was prepared by a field "reporter" who within 5 or 6 sentences of his stock footage fluff said "derpa derp when the russians hacked the DNC and handed it over to wikileaks diddly derp". they stated this as fact and once again exemplified the worst part of arguing with stupid assholes: even when you've proven them 100% objectively, empirically wrong ...they just don't care. for them reality is a matter of consensus and as long as enough other idiots exist to keep the story going it's "true".

    [Mar 23, 2019] Former CIA Director John Brennan Bashed on Twitter for Inaccurate Prediction of Coming Mueller Indictments by Chris Morran

    Mar 23, 2019 | www.newsweek.com

    Now that Robert Mueller has closed his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election without bringing any new indictments, some Twitter users have lashed out at former at political analyst and former CIA director for his recent prediction that Mueller would be bringing additional charges before finishing his probe.

    Brennan appeared on MSNBC earlier this month, where he predicted that the special counsel's office would soon be bringing indictments to add to the list of 34 individuals already charged by Mueller's team.

    In that interview, Brennan also opined that he expected that any indictment of anyone close to President Trump, including his family or extended family, would be named at the conclusion of the investigation.

    "Bob Mueller and his team knows if he were to do something -- indicting a Trump family member or if he were to go forward with indictment on criminal conspiracy involving U.S. persons -- that would basically be the death of the special counsel's office, because I don't believe Donald Trump would allow Bob Mueller to continue in the aftermath of those types of actions," Brennan explained at the time.

    Yet Mueller closed his investigation without bringing any further indictments and without any charges being brought against anyone within Trump's closest circle. The president's supporters and others took this opportunity to pounce on Brennan via Twitter.

    Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been openly critical of the Russia investigation, was among the first to call out Brennan's indictment prediction.

    "You can't blame MSNBC viewers for being confused," tweeted Greenwald in the wake of news that Mueller had submitted his report. "They largely kept dissenters from their Trump/Russia spy tale off the air for 2 years. As recently as 2 weeks ago, they had @JohnBrennan strongly suggesting Mueller would indict Trump family members on collusion as his last act"

    He later added, "The worst part of this video is how Brennan said Mueller would indict Trump Family members for conspiring with Russia before March 15 or after, because he was too noble to do it on the Ides of March. Will MSNBC or Brennan apologize? Will there be consequences for any of this? LOL"

    Conservative political pundit Charlie Kirk listed Brenna on a list of other frequent targets -- Hillary Clinton, President Barack Obama, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, among others -- of people who should be investigated, though it was not clear which laws Kirk believes any of these individuals might have broken.

    Actor Dean Cain likened Brennan's indictment prediction to Vermont Governor Howard Dean's infamous "Dean Scream" that helped to tank Dean's 2004 presidential campaign.

    Conservative political consultant Frank Luntz used the incorrect Brennan prediction to criticize media outlets for what he saw as a failure to acknowledge errors on their part.

    ... ... ...

    [Mar 23, 2019] Mock The Russiagaters. Mock Them Ruthlessly by Caitlin Johnstone

    Mar 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    The Robert Mueller investigation which monopolized political discourse for two years has finally concluded , and his anxiously awaited report has been submitted to Attorney General William Barr. The results are in and the debate is over: those advancing the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government were wrong, and those of us voicing skepticism of this were right.

    The contents of the report are still secret, but CNN's Justice Department reporter Laura Jarrett has told us all we need to know, tweeting , "Special Counsel Mueller is not recommending ANY further indictments am told." On top of that, William Barr said in a letter to congressional leaders that there has been no obstruction of Mueller's investigation by Justice Department officials.

    So that's it, then. A completely unhindered investigation has failed to convict a single American of any kind of conspiracy with the Russian government, and no further indictments are coming. The political/media class which sold rank-and-file Americans on the lie that the Mueller investigation was going to bring down this presidency were liars and frauds, and none of the goalpost-moving that I am sure is already beginning to happen will change that.

    It has been obvious from the very beginning that the Maddow Muppets were being sold a lie. In 2017 I wrote an article titled " How We Can Be Certain That Mueller Won't Prove Trump-Russia Collusion ", saying that Mueller would continue finding evidence of corruption "since corruption is to DC insiders as water is to fish", but he will not find evidence of collusion. If you care to take a scroll through the angry comments on that article, just on Medium alone, you will see a frozen snapshot of what the expectations were from mainstream liberals at the time. They had swallowed the Russiagate narrative hook, line and sinker, and they believed that the Mueller investigation was going to vindicate them. It did not.

    I've been saying Russiagate is bullshit from the beginning, and I've been called a Trump shill, a Kremlin propagandist, a Nazi and a troll every day for saying so by credulous mass media-consuming dupes who drank the Kool Aid . And I've only taken a fraction of the flack more high profile Russiagate skeptics like Glenn Greenwald and Michael Tracey have been getting for expressing doubt in the Gospel According to Maddow. The insane, maniacal McCarthyite feeding frenzy that these people were plunged into by nonstop mass media propaganda drowned out the important voices who tried to argue that public energy was being sucked into Russia hysteria and used to manufacture support for dangerous cold war escalations with a nuclear superpower.

    Just think what we could have done with that energy over the last two years. Think how much public support could have been poured into the sweeping progressive reforms called for by the Sanders movement, for example, instead of constant demands for more sanctions and nuclear posturing against Russia. Think how much more attention could have been drawn to Trump's actual horrific policies like his facilitation of Saudi butchery in Yemen or his regime change agendas in Iran and Venezuela, his support for ecocide and military expansionism and the barbarism of Jair Bolsonaro and Benjamin Netanyahu. Think how much more energy could have gone into beating back the Republicans in the midterms, reclaiming far more House seats and taking the Senate as well, gathering momentum for a presidential candidacy that truly threatens Trump instead of 9,000 primary candidates who will probably be selected by superdelegates after the first ballot when there's too many of them to establish a clear majority under the new rules.

    me title=

    We must never let them forget what they did or what they cost us all. We must never let mainstream Democrats forget how crazy they got, how much time and energy they wasted, how very, very wrong they were and how very, very right we were.

    Never stop reminding them of this. Never stop mocking them for it. Never stop mocking their idiotic Rachel Maddow worship. Never stop mocking the Robert Mueller prayer candles. Never stop making fun of the way they blamed all their problems on Susan Sarandon. Never stop reminding them of those stupid pink vagina hats. Never stop mocking them for elevating Louise Mensch and Eric Garland. Never stop mocking them for creating the fucking Krassenstein brothers.

    Every politician, every media figure, every Twitter pundit and everyone who swallowed this moronic load of bull spunk has officially discredited themselves for life. Going forward, authority and credibility rests solely with those who kept clear eyes and clear heads during the mass media propaganda blitzkrieg, not with those who were stupid enough to believe what they were told about the behaviors of a noncompliant government in a post-Iraq invasion world. The people who steered us into two years of Russiavape insanity are the very last people anyone should ever listen to ever again when determining the future direction of our world.

    * * *

    Thanks for reading! My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish.

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    messystateofaffairs , 56 minutes ago link

    I think Russiagate is a deliberate Jewish ploy to distract Trump supporters, and others, from the fact that Trump is very deeply involved in Israelgate. It's a sophisticated strategy designed to demonize Russia and favor Israel at the same time. The fact that America will bear the burden is lost on the Dumbfuck, if the narcissict is capable of caring in the first place. Obama was a brilliant *** handler compared to this man.

    chestergimli , 59 minutes ago link

    I believe that Trump and all the neocons along with Sheldon Adelson and Netenyahu pulled this BIG costly Shenanigan off to divert attention away from what Trump was doing for Israel.

    keep the bastards honest , 58 minutes ago link

    Moonlighting on https://youtu.be/pbYvRTGylyw shows the next insanity. Swearing it's Muellars findings are not true. That muellar was got at..whatever.

    See revealing light tarot on YouTube to get the insanity and hate.

    Hatred of Trump hatred of Putin. Jealousy of Melania. It's delusional.

    No interest in Bolton or pompeo nor international affairs. blind hatred of Russia.

    Brazen Heist II , 1 hour ago link

    And lets be clear.....both Democrats and Republicans are failing America.

    The fringe lunatics on both sides have hijacked the umbrella party. The Zionist cretins/MIC whores on the Right and SJW Snowflakes/ War Party on the Left are both owned by the bankster/corporate ruling classes. They are the same turd on foreign policy.

    Its time to balkanize and butcher both parties.

    The Deep State needs contrived divisions and dichotomies to split Americans. People should see past these pathetic attempts to divide the population.

    johnnycanuck , 1 hour ago link

    Even Caitlin misses what's going on here. I'm kinda disappointed, but hey no one gets everything right and she does have to earn a buck wherever she can. I get that

    The new McCarthyism has been embraced far and wide in Murika, by both parties, all the MSM. But that's just a ruse for the home team, to recreate the USSR bogeyman for political purposes and to feed the MIC. It's worked, polls show Murikan sheep are more a feared of the Russian bogeyman than they have been since the cold war

    Russia isn't encroaching on America's borders, PNAC is encroaching on theirs.

    That said, the Mueller effort is more than what you think, it's like a bird dog and it flushed many a bird of prey for shotgun totin' prosecutors, if they be inclined to fire. And that is how the game works in the world of dirty sum bitches and misc psychopaths.

    Like the big ***** guy in the movie Platoon said, 'the rich always **** over the poor, that's the way it's always been.'

    Brazen Heist II , 1 hour ago link

    Recent events can be explained rather accurately if one knows history. Which most people don't apparently.

    This is just a re-run of cold war psyops. Except this time, the USSA will meet the fate of the USSR in its own way.

    The Jewish Marxists that ran away from Russia and infested America, are now drowning in their lies, and gotta vent somewhere! They are behind the MSM, and cozy dalliance between the Deep State and useful idiot Leftards.

    Brazen Heist II , 1 hour ago link

    Glancing at various Twatter feeds over the years...and I couldn't help but notice that the number of ****-for-brains Americans who fell for the Russiagate psyop was simply staggering.

    I guess its these gullible morons that the powers-that-be relied on in the vaunted dumbassocracy, to get away with distracting away from their own crimes. But alas, the day of judgement always arrives, and the ******** implodes. It depends on how many of them awaken in the process, to render this reckoning as either a bang or a whimper.

    [Mar 23, 2019] " ... the accountability that must follow Mueller's report." The Hill

    Mar 23, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    6129lady_of_justice

    " 1. President Trump was not indicted, nor did Mueller recommend an indictment against him for collusion or obstruction.

    three dozen people were charged , including a few close to the president or who worked for his campaign, no one in proximity to the president was formally charged with colluding with Russia. Most, such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn or campaign adviser George Papadopoulos , were charged with process crimes or felonies unrelated to the main case, as in Paul Manafort 's secretive, multimillion-dollar foreign lobbying spree through Ukraine.

    *********

    the "Steele dossier" that was the main FISA evidence was paid for with funds from Hillary Clinton 's campaign and the Democratic Party;

    Christopher Steele, the dossier's author, had told a senior DOJ official he was desperate to defeat Trump;

    most of the dossier was not verified before it was used as evidence of alleged Trump-Russia collusion; and

    agents collected statements from key defendants such as Papadopoulos and Carter Page during interactions with an FBI informant that strongly suggested their innocence.

    Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal cour t. And each and every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.

    An upcoming DOJ inspector general's report should trigger the beginning of that accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials. " The Hill

    ------------

    Pilgrims, the seditious conspiracy to depose the elected president of the United States for conspiracy to commit treason with the Government of the Russian Federation has been defeated.

    The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections.

    At the bottom of the mountain of political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this.

    The leftist press is already discounting the results of Mueller's investigation while gloating over how long the Democratic held House of Representatives can continue to search through Trump's life trying to find criminality.

    AG Barr should stand Mueller up next to him at a press conference to make clear the results of his report and to answer questions about it. After that the prosecutions should begin. pl

    https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/435394-the-wisdom-of-trumps-lawyers-and-the-accountability-that-must-follow

    [Mar 23, 2019] For decades, Space has been a model of cooperation between global superpowers. But such cooperation is the latest victim of the new Cold War. Trump/Neocon efforts to start a space war/arms race will lead to destruction of our country and planet.

    Mar 23, 2019 | twitter.com

    Tulsi Gabbard ‏Verified account @ TulsiGabbard Mar 17

    For decades, Space has been a model of cooperation between global superpowers. But such cooperation is the latest victim of the new Cold War. Trump/Neocon efforts to start a space war/arms race will lead to destruction of our country and planet. # Tulsi2020

    https://www.newsweek.com/scientists-warn-trumps-space-force-could-create-incentives-nations-build-1336633 pic.twitter.com/WSX3q8J3Hb

    /ol

    Tulsi Gabbard ‏Verified account @ TulsiGabbard Mar 17

    For decades, Space has been a model of cooperation between global superpowers. But such cooperation is the latest victim of the new Cold War. Trump/Neocon efforts to start a space war/arms race will lead to destruction of our country and planet. # Tulsi2020

    https://www.newsweek.com/scientists-warn-trumps-space-force-could-create-incentives-nations-build-1336633 pic.twitter.com/WSX3q8J3Hb

    [Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... No one says Trump is a saint. But the deep state wanted to cover its tracks. Dems and deep state hated that their preferred candidate didn't win. They ended up achieving their goal of delegitimizing 2016 and distracting the country for 2 years. ..."
    "... They tried to delegitimize the 2016 Election but failed to do so. ..."
    Mar 22, 2019 | twitter.com

    Glenn Greenwald 3h 3 hours ago

    The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away: not one single American was charged, indicted or convicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election - not even a low-level volunteer. The number is zero.

    Compare what cable hosts (let's leave them unnamed) & Democratic operatives spent two years claiming this would lead to - the imprisonment of Don, Jr., Jared, even Trump on conspiracy-with-Russia charges - to what it actually produced. A huge media reckoning is owed.

    Don't even try to pretend the point of the Mueller investigation from the start wasn't to obtain prosecutions of Americans guilty of conspiring with Russia to influence the outcome of the election or that Putin controlled Trump through blackmail. Nobody will believe your denials.

    Are we now ready to rid ourselves of the thrilling espionage fantasy that Trump is controlled by Putin and the Kremlin using blackmail? There's no way Robert Mueller would have gone 18 months without telling anyone about this if it were true, right? How could that be justified?

    Perhaps now we can focus on the actually consequential actions the Trump administration is taking and finally move past the deranged conspiracy theories that have drowned US discourse for 2+ years. A side benefit will be not ratcheting up tension between 2 nuclear-armed powers.

    Giving up these exciting conspiracy theories about international blackmail & convening panels to decipher all the genius hidden maneuvers of Mueller will be bad for cable ratings, book sales & the Patreon accounts of online charlatans. But it'll be very healthy in all other ways.

    CNN's Justice Department reporter https:// twitter.com/LauraAJarrett/ status/1109210442864439299

    The desperate attempts to salvage something from this debacle by the Mueller dead-enders are just sad. Yes, the public hasn't read the Mueller report. But we *know* he ended his investigation without indicting a single American for conspiring with Russia to influence the election

    Trump, Jr. testified for hours and hours before Congress, including about the Trump Tower meeting. If he lied there, or to Mueller, why didn't Mueller indict him for perjury, lying to Congress or obstruction? Same questions for Kushner. Stop embarrassing yourselves.

    If Mueller found evidence that Putin controls Trump & forces him to act against US interests & in favor of Russia - not just with a pee-pee tape but with financial blackmail - what could possibly justify keeping that a secret through the end of the investigation? It's ludicrous.

    US discourse has been drowned for 2+ years with conspiratorial, unhinged, but highly inflammatory and unhinged idiocy - playing games with two nuclear-armed powers because of anger over the 2016 election. It's time to stop. Mueller ended his work. We see the public indictments.

    And to be clear: I've urged a full investigation into these Trump/Russia claims from the start, from before Mueller was appointed, with full disclosure. I still favor that - precisely to end the reckless speculation to which we've been endlessly subjected https:// medium.com/@ggreenwald/st atements-about-possibility-russia-meddling-hacking-need-for-investigations-2016-present-f5794c1496d6

    So many in the media devoted endless airtime & print & pixels misleading people to believe Mueller was coming to arrest & prosecute Trump, Jr, Kushner & so many others for conspiring with Russia over the election & obstruction. None of that happened. You can't pretend it away.

    hard to make jokes 59m 59 minutes ago

    the Supreme Court of the Southern District of New York can also do that. And please, wait until the report comes out and read it, then we'll see.

    Bala R 32m 32 minutes ago

    They was never the point. No one says Trump is a saint. But the deep state wanted to cover its tracks. Dems and deep state hated that their preferred candidate didn't win. They ended up achieving their goal of delegitimizing 2016 and distracting the country for 2 years.

    Mary Batson 17m 17 minutes ago

    They tried to delegitimize the 2016 Election but failed to do so.

    [Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... No one says Trump is a saint. But the deep state wanted to cover its tracks. Dems and deep state hated that their preferred candidate didn't win. They ended up achieving their goal of delegitimizing 2016 and distracting the country for 2 years. ..."
    "... They tried to delegitimize the 2016 Election but failed to do so. ..."
    Mar 22, 2019 | twitter.com

    Glenn Greenwald 3h 3 hours ago

    The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away: not one single American was charged, indicted or convicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election - not even a low-level volunteer. The number is zero.

    Compare what cable hosts (let's leave them unnamed) & Democratic operatives spent two years claiming this would lead to - the imprisonment of Don, Jr., Jared, even Trump on conspiracy-with-Russia charges - to what it actually produced. A huge media reckoning is owed.

    Don't even try to pretend the point of the Mueller investigation from the start wasn't to obtain prosecutions of Americans guilty of conspiring with Russia to influence the outcome of the election or that Putin controlled Trump through blackmail. Nobody will believe your denials.

    Are we now ready to rid ourselves of the thrilling espionage fantasy that Trump is controlled by Putin and the Kremlin using blackmail? There's no way Robert Mueller would have gone 18 months without telling anyone about this if it were true, right? How could that be justified?

    Perhaps now we can focus on the actually consequential actions the Trump administration is taking and finally move past the deranged conspiracy theories that have drowned US discourse for 2+ years. A side benefit will be not ratcheting up tension between 2 nuclear-armed powers.

    Giving up these exciting conspiracy theories about international blackmail & convening panels to decipher all the genius hidden maneuvers of Mueller will be bad for cable ratings, book sales & the Patreon accounts of online charlatans. But it'll be very healthy in all other ways.

    CNN's Justice Department reporter https:// twitter.com/LauraAJarrett/ status/1109210442864439299

    The desperate attempts to salvage something from this debacle by the Mueller dead-enders are just sad. Yes, the public hasn't read the Mueller report. But we *know* he ended his investigation without indicting a single American for conspiring with Russia to influence the election

    Trump, Jr. testified for hours and hours before Congress, including about the Trump Tower meeting. If he lied there, or to Mueller, why didn't Mueller indict him for perjury, lying to Congress or obstruction? Same questions for Kushner. Stop embarrassing yourselves.

    If Mueller found evidence that Putin controls Trump & forces him to act against US interests & in favor of Russia - not just with a pee-pee tape but with financial blackmail - what could possibly justify keeping that a secret through the end of the investigation? It's ludicrous.

    US discourse has been drowned for 2+ years with conspiratorial, unhinged, but highly inflammatory and unhinged idiocy - playing games with two nuclear-armed powers because of anger over the 2016 election. It's time to stop. Mueller ended his work. We see the public indictments.

    And to be clear: I've urged a full investigation into these Trump/Russia claims from the start, from before Mueller was appointed, with full disclosure. I still favor that - precisely to end the reckless speculation to which we've been endlessly subjected https:// medium.com/@ggreenwald/st atements-about-possibility-russia-meddling-hacking-need-for-investigations-2016-present-f5794c1496d6

    So many in the media devoted endless airtime & print & pixels misleading people to believe Mueller was coming to arrest & prosecute Trump, Jr, Kushner & so many others for conspiring with Russia over the election & obstruction. None of that happened. You can't pretend it away.

    hard to make jokes 59m 59 minutes ago

    the Supreme Court of the Southern District of New York can also do that. And please, wait until the report comes out and read it, then we'll see.

    Bala R 32m 32 minutes ago

    They was never the point. No one says Trump is a saint. But the deep state wanted to cover its tracks. Dems and deep state hated that their preferred candidate didn't win. They ended up achieving their goal of delegitimizing 2016 and distracting the country for 2 years.

    Mary Batson 17m 17 minutes ago

    They tried to delegitimize the 2016 Election but failed to do so.

    [Mar 22, 2019] I wonder what Mr. Kagan has to say now about authoritarian regimes?!

    Mar 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    As usual, Trump made the announcement of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials...

    President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.

    U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential announcement this week.

    No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.

    Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.

    After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be good, but the lack of an organized policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they would otherwise be.

    There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.

    Kouros , March 21, 2019 at 11:39 pm

    I wonder what Mr. Kagan has to say now about "authoritarian" regimes?!

    [Mar 22, 2019] I wonder what Mr. Kagan has to say now about authoritarian regimes?!

    Mar 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    As usual, Trump made the announcement of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials...

    President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.

    U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential announcement this week.

    No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.

    Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.

    After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be good, but the lack of an organized policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they would otherwise be.

    There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.

    Kouros , March 21, 2019 at 11:39 pm

    I wonder what Mr. Kagan has to say now about "authoritarian" regimes?!

    [Mar 22, 2019] Tulsi will probably pick-up some additional independents voters with her condemnation of Trump impulsive decision about Golan heights

    Mar 22, 2019 | twitter.com

    Tulsi Gabbard ‏ 1:09 PM - 21 Mar 2019

    Another example of Trump and Netanyahu putting their own political interests ahead of the interests of our respective countries. Will escalate tensions and likelihood of war between Israel/US/Syria/Iran/Russia. Shortsighted. https:// twitter.com/nytimes/status /1108783266075684865

    Omani ‏ 1:12 PM - 21 Mar 2019

    How long will this continue to go on? They must be stopped. # Tulsi2020

    Dana Moretti Fairbanks, MD 1:28 PM - 21 Mar 2019

    LET'S BE CLEAR – Israel's Long-Running Settlement Policy Constitutes A # WarCrime : "ALL Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are illegal" https://www. amnestyusa.org/lets-be-clear- israels-long-running-settlement-policy-constitutes-a-war-crime/ @ Amnesty # OccupiedTerritoriesNOTSettlements @ DonnaLynnNH

    Dana Moretti Fairbanks, MD 1:32 PM - 21 Mar 2019

    @ Netanyahu Accidentally Tells the Truth: Are the U.S., Israel and its Arab allies meeting in Warsaw "to advance the common interest of war with Iran"? Not officially, says @ elilake , but the @ IsraeliPM 's tweet was a classic # KinsleyGaffe https://www. bloomberg.com/opinion

    [Mar 22, 2019] Robert Mueller Submits Report on Trump Russia Probe

    It is evident that President Trump is acting in the interests of a foreign power and contrary to American interests. But this power is not Russia
    Mar 22, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

    Attorney General William Barr said in a letter to Congress Friday that he may be able to provide lawmakers with the special counsel's principal conclusions "as soon as this weekend."

    There were no instances in which Mueller was told not to take a specific action in his wide-ranging probe, Barr said.

    [Mar 22, 2019] So you ask what I will change? I will change our priorities so we stop wasting trillions of our dollars on wasteful counterproductive wars

    Mar 22, 2019 | twitter.com

    Tulsi Gabbard ‏ 7:34 AM - 19 Mar 2019

    "So you ask what I will change? I will change our priorities so we stop wasting trillions of our dollars on wasteful counterproductive wars and dedicate them to taking care of the urgent needs of our communities across this country." # ServiceBeforeSelf # PeaceDvidend

    Tulsi Gabbard ‏ 7:44 AM - 20 Mar 2019

    "I'm not running for president to BE president. I'm running for president to be able to bring about this sea change in our foreign policy that is so necessary for us and for the world, and I'm most qualified to do that." # ServiceBeforeSelf # Tulsi2020 pic.twitter.com/wk2M7O0CgR

    [Mar 22, 2019] Muller investigation is actually a farce, huge waste of money and their narrative is dead

    NKVD investigations were tragedy, Mueller investigation is a farce.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Next narrative: There is no evidence because it was suppressed! ;-) ..."
    "... "Trust Mueller" remember? # MuellerIsComingForYou ... remember? Well # MuellerIsHere so deal with reality. FANTASY TIME IS OVER There was NO TrumpRussia collusion! ..."
    "... Unconvinced that Mueller's report ends anything Mueller report may disavow of actual collusion, but the door still open to "ATTEMPTED" Russian influencing of US elections, a fact that will be used by Russiagate cold war demagogues to justify Mueller & RG investigation ..."
    Mar 22, 2019 | twitter.com

    Becky 4:55 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    It's actually a farce, huge waste of money and their narrative is dead. What now? PTSD for the dems

    David Ian ‏ 3:55 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    Wanted to reach out to thank you for all your coverage during the investigation Glenn, must have been hard to go against the grain in this sea of propaganda. Kudos for sticking to the truth!

    Jon ‏ 3:55 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    By the way, CNN is sitting on TV complaining how trump will spin it. Yet CNN is already spinning it.

    Steve Culy ‏ 3:55 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    Next narrative: There is no evidence because it was suppressed! ;-)

    Phyllis Moore ‏ 5:25 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    "Trust Mueller" remember? # MuellerIsComingForYou ... remember? Well # MuellerIsHere so deal with reality. FANTASY TIME IS OVER There was NO TrumpRussia collusion!

    Mama Bear 5:05 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    https://twitter.com/Yo_RightGirl/status/1109215991974682624?s=20

    fishnski ‏ 4:54 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    Love seeing the uncomfort level on the left now as they Squirm to fight back with this and that and the big fat nothing Burger they are trying to Choke down..

    Rob van Cappellen 3:57 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    But.. what about John Huber and his investigations in DOJ/FBI ? Why don't we hear a thing, is he still alive ?

    scott stocker ‏ 4:50 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    Yes he is. Now it is their turn

    Shamelessly Libertarian ‏ 3:54 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    No matter what the report says it won't change the fact that the evidence to indict him just isn't there

    Toxic Mask ‏ 3:56 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    Triggered pic.twitter.com/LxVYF7e8jN

    https:// twitter.com/kt_so_it_goes/ status/1109226660325453824?s=21

    Grant Jarvis ‏ 4:35 PM - 22 Mar 2019

    Unconvinced that Mueller's report ends anything Mueller report may disavow of actual collusion, but the door still open to "ATTEMPTED" Russian influencing of US elections, a fact that will be used by Russiagate cold war demagogues to justify Mueller & RG investigation

    [Mar 21, 2019] Jared Kushner WhatsApp, Private Email Democrats Demand Records - Bloomberg

    Notable quotes:
    "... The White House didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. But in another stand-off with House Democrats, Cipollone on Thursday rejected a request renewed last week from Cummings and two other committee chairmen for information on Trump's communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
    "... Cummings said the committee obtained a document that "appears" to show that McFarland conducted official business on her personal email account. He said the document was related to efforts by McFarland and other White House officials to transfer sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia "in coordination with Tom Barrack, a personal friend of President Trump and the chairman of President Trump's inaugural committee." ..."
    "... Regarding Trump's communications with Putin, Cummings, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel say they are examining the substance of in-person meetings and phone calls, the effects on foreign policy, and whether anyone has sought to conceal those communications. ..."
    "... The Constitution gives the executive branch exclusive power to conduct foreign relations, Cipollone said. "Congress cannot require the president to disclose confidential communications with foreign leaders." ..."
    Mar 21, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

    A key House Democrat is renewing demands that the White House turn over documents about the use of private texts or emails by Jared Kushner, saying Kushner's lawyer acknowledged that the senior aide used the non-secure WhatsApp application to communicate with foreign leaders.

    House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said in a letter sent Thursday to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone that the administration has failed to produce documents tied to Kushner and other officials despite requests from the committee since 2017. Cummings also sought a briefing on how the official messages are being preserved.

    ... ... ...

    The White House didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. But in another stand-off with House Democrats, Cipollone on Thursday rejected a request renewed last week from Cummings and two other committee chairmen for information on Trump's communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    WhatsApp

    Cummings, to underscore his concern about whether unsecured White House communications have included classified information, said in his letter that Lowell acknowledged during the December meeting that Kushner had used WhatsApp to communicate with foreign leaders.

    Kushner is a senior White House adviser and the son-in-law of President Donald Trump , overseeing the administration's Middle East policies among other issues. Cummings said he and then-Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy , a Republican who has since retired from Congress, met with Lowell in December.

    Cummings's letter said Lowell said that Kushner has been in compliance with the law, and that he takes "screenshots" of communications on his private WhatsApp account and forwards them to his official White House email account or to the National Security Council.

    Cummings wrote that when asked whether Kushner ever used WhatsApp to discuss classified information, Lowell replied, "That's above my pay grade."

    The focus on Kushner and others follows the earlier investigations by the Justice Department and Republican-controlled congressional committees of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she served as secretary of state during the Obama administration.

    'Alternative Means'

    In Thursday's letter, Cummings said the White House's refusal to turn over documents is "obstructing the committee's investigation into allegations of violations of federal records laws" and potential breaches of national security. He demanded that the White House say by March 28 whether it intends to comply voluntarily with the renewed requests.

    "If you continue to withhold these documents from the committee, we will be forced to consider alternative means to obtain compliance," Cummings said.

    ... ... ....

    K.T. McFarland

    Cummings also wrote that his committee has obtained new information about other White House officials that raises additional security and federal records concerns about the use of private email and messaging applications.

    His letter said others may have been involved in the practice while they worked at the White House, including former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland and former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

    Cummings said the committee obtained a document that "appears" to show that McFarland conducted official business on her personal email account. He said the document was related to efforts by McFarland and other White House officials to transfer sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia "in coordination with Tom Barrack, a personal friend of President Trump and the chairman of President Trump's inaugural committee."

    The chairman said another document appeared to show that Bannon received documents "pitching the plan from Mr. Barrack through his personal email account," at a time Bannon was at the White House and working on broader Middle East policy.

    Regarding Trump's communications with Putin, Cummings, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel say they are examining the substance of in-person meetings and phone calls, the effects on foreign policy, and whether anyone has sought to conceal those communications.

    In a written response Thursday, Cipollone wrote, "While we respectfully seek to accommodate appropriate oversight requests, we are unaware of any precedent supporting such sweeping requests."

    The Constitution gives the executive branch exclusive power to conduct foreign relations, Cipollone said. "Congress cannot require the president to disclose confidential communications with foreign leaders."

    In a joint statement on Thursday night, Cummings, Engel and Schiff said that the Obama administration had "produced records describing the president and secretary of state's calls with foreign leaders." The congressmen added that "President Trump's decision to break with this precedent raises the question of what he has to hide."

    ( Updates with statement from Cummings, Schiff and Engel, in final paragraph.

    [Mar 21, 2019] Trump, Bolsonaro and the danger of fascism

    Mar 20, 2019 | www.wsws.org

    The three-day visit to Washington by the president of Brazil brought together two of the most right-wing figures in the world: Jair Bolsonaro, a former military officer and fervent admirer of the blood-soaked military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, and Donald Trump, who has become the pole of attraction for authoritarians and fascists the world over, including the gunman who slaughtered 50 Muslims at two New Zealand mosques last week.

    During their joint press conference at the White House Tuesday afternoon, Trump repeated his declaration, delivered to an audience of right-wing Cuban and Venezuelan exiles in Florida, that "The twilight hour of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere." He emphasized, as he did in his State of the Union speech, that this also involved putting an end to the threat of socialism within the United States itself.

    Both Trump and Bolsonaro have made the extirpation of socialism -- the political core of fascist movements -- the central goal of their governments. At their joint press conference, they railed against socialism only days after the massacre in New Zealand, carried out by Brenton Tarrant. Tarrant posted a manifesto hailing Trump as a "symbol of renewed white identity" and declaring his desire to put his boot on the neck of every "Marxist."

    The mutual embrace of Trump and Bolsonaro at the White House is symbolic of the elevation of far-right parties and cultivation of fascistic forces by capitalist governments and established bourgeois parties all over the world. It underscores the fact that the growth of fascism in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the US is the result not of a groundswell of mass support from below, but rather the sponsorship and encouragement of so-called "democratic" governments that are, in fact, controlled top to bottom by corporate oligarchs.

    The global promotion of extreme right politics was embodied by the presence of right-wing ideologue Steve Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs vice president and Navy officer, as a guest of honor at a dinner with Jair Bolsonaro Monday night. Bannon has close ties with Bolsonaro's son, Eduardo, who is a member of the Brazilian Parliament and a Latin American representative of the political consortium set up by Bannon, known as the Movement, whose aim is to promote extreme right-wing political parties throughout the world. "Some of the Bolsonaro team on the right see themselves as disciples of the Bannon movement and representatives of Bannon for Brazil and Latin America," one former Trump administration official told McClatchy.

    At the press conference, both Jair Bolsonaro and Trump pledged their support to a fascistic litany of "god, family and nation," as Trump put it. Bolsonaro declared, "Brazil and the United States stand side-by-side in their efforts to share liberties and respect to traditional and family lifestyles, respect to God, our creator, against the gender ideology of the politically correct attitudes, and fake news."

    Both presidents threatened the use of military force against Venezuela, demonizing President Nicolas Maduro as a socialist dictator. (He heads a capitalist regime, but one whose foreign policy tilts toward China and Russia rather than US imperialism).

    Trump reiterated the mantra that "all options are on the table" against Venezuela. Bolsonaro was asked if he would permit US soldiers to use Brazilian soil as a base for military operations against Venezuela. Rather than dismissing that prospect as a violation of both Brazilian and Venezuelan sovereignty, he declined to answer, citing the need for maintaining operational secrecy and the element of surprise.

    One of the bilateral agreements that Trump and Bolsonaro signed would allow the United States to use Brazil's Alcantara Aerospace Launch Base for its satellites. Brazil also announced an end to visa requirements for US visitors...

    Before visiting the White House, Bolsonaro made an unannounced visit to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, an extraordinary move for the president of a country that was subjected to 21 years of unrestrained torture and murder by a military dictatorship installed in a CIA-backed coup.

    The dire implications for the working class of the global rise of the far right are indicated by Bolsonaro's glorification of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Trump hailed the "shared values" between his government and that of a former military officer who praises a regime that jailed, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of workers and students. Twenty years ago, Bolsonaro told an interviewer that the Brazilian Congress should be shut down and that the country could be changed only by a civil war that completed "the job that the military regime didn't do, killing 30,000 people."

    The capitalist ruling classes are turning once again to dictatorship and fascism in response to the intensification of the world economic crisis, the disintegration of the postwar international order and growth of trade war and geostrategic conflicts, and, above all, the resurgence of the class struggle on a world scale...

    ... ... ...

    Patrick Martin

    [Mar 20, 2019] Despicable Max Boot does not even have courage to admit his Iraq war warmongering crimes, which are crimes against humanity if we use Nuremberg statute

    Intellectually Max Boot is a loud mouth nothing. I wonder how he managed to graduate from a prestigious university. he might be able to work as copywriters, but not above that.
    Neocon didn't "get it wrong." They understood that this is wrong. It was all about money for MIC which as lobbyists of MIC is their first priority. That's why they lied the American people into wars. They are war criminals. They should be tried for war crimes.
    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Kurt Gayle February 17, 2019 at 9:34 am

    Tom Gorman (Feb 15, 8:36 am)–as evidence that Max Boot "has recanted his support of the Iraq War"–quoted two sentences from Boot's 2018 book. Two sentences earlier in the same book Boot wrote:

    "In truth the decision to go to war had been made by President George W. Bush, in consultation with colleagues such as Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Don Rumsfeld, none of whom was remotely a 'neocon.'

    Those of us who supported the invasion were, as one of my friends said, like hapless passengers who got into a vehicle with a drunk driver and could not escape as the car careened across the center divider."

    [Mar 20, 2019] The US wants Brazil to join NATO

    Mar 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Guy Thornton , Mar 19, 2019 4:22:12 PM | link

    Merkel might say:

    "There is definitely a place for Brazil in NATO. They can have ours."

    [Mar 20, 2019] Ex-CIA Chief John Brennan Threatens Trump Mueller Will Soon Likely Put Your Political and Financial Future in Jeopardy

    Notable quotes:
    "... Former CIA Chief-turned-Twitter-troll John Brennan warned the President on Wednesday that Special Counsel Mueller will soon put Trump's political and financial future in jeopardy. ..."
    Mar 20, 2019 | www.thegatewaypundit.com

    Former CIA Chief-turned-Twitter-troll John Brennan warned the President on Wednesday that Special Counsel Mueller will soon put Trump's political and financial future in jeopardy.

    The President fired off an incendiary tweet directed towards Kellyanne Conway's cruel, Trump-hating "husband from hell," George Conway on Wednesday.

    "George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife's success & angry that I, with her help, didn't give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!"

    Trump said in a tweet Wednesday after a nasty exchange between the two took place on Tuesday.

    In response to Trump's tweets to George Conway, John Brennan, one of the architects of Russiagate, accused President Trump of throwing temper tantrums because he is panicking over Mueller's impending report.

    What does John Brennan know about Mueller's report? Brennan is admitting Mueller's report will complicate Trump's life and cripple him financially and politically in the future.

    BRENNAN:

    Hmmm your bizarre tweets and recent temper tantrums reveal your panic over the likelihood the Special Counsel will soon further complicate your life, putting your political & financial future in jeopardy. Fortunately, Lady Justice does not do NDAs.

    [Mar 20, 2019] John McCain Associate Provided Dossier to Obama National Security Council Breitbart

    Mar 20, 2019 | www.breitbart.com

    David Kramer, a long-time advisor to late Senator John McCain, revealed that he met with two Obama administration officials to inquire about whether the anti-Trump dossier authored by former British spy Christopher Steele was being taken seriously.

    In one case, Kramer said that he personally provided a copy of the dossier to Obama National Security Council official Celeste Wallander.

    In a deposition on Dec. 13, 2017 that was recently posted online, Kramer said that McCain specifically asked him in early December 2016 to meet about the dossier with Wallander and Victoria Nuland, a senior official in John Kerry's State Department. Senator McCain asked me to meet with both of them to see if this was being taken seriously in the government," Kramer said.

    "And Senator McCain asked you to meet with them?" Kramer was asked to clarify.

    "Yes, just to see if this was being taken seriously. I think he wanted to do -- this was his kind of due diligence before he went to Director Comey."

    Kramer testified that in his conversations with Nuland and Wallander he was told by both of them that each were aware of the dossier and that Nuland "thought Steele was a serious person."

    Kramer revealed that he gave a copy of the dossier to Wallander, who was familiar with the contents but did not have a copy.

    "I had a subsequent conversation with Ms. Wallander in which I gave her a copy of the document. That was probably around New Year's," he said.

    "She had not seen it herself until I had shown it to her," Kramer added. "She had heard about it. And she didn't know the status of it."

    In the same testimony, the McCain associate revealed that he held a meeting about the dossier with a reporter from BuzzFeed News who he says snapped photos of the controversial document without Kramer's permission when he left the room to go to the bathroom. That meeting was held at the McCain Institute office in Washington, Kramer stated.

    BuzzFeed infamously published Steele's full dossier on January 10, 2017 setting off a firestorm of news media coverage about the document.

    Prior to his death, McCain admitted to personally handing the dossier to then-FBI Director James Comey but he refused repeated requests for comment about whether he had a role in providing the dossier to BuzzFeed, including numerous inquiries sent to his office by this reporter.

    In his book published last year, McCain maintained he had an "obligation" to pass the dossier charges against Trump to Comey and he would even do it again. "Anyone who doesn't like it can go to hell," McCain exclaimed.

    Kramer, meanwhile, also said that he briefed others reporters on the dossier contents, including CNN's Carl Bernstein, in an effort to have the anti-Trump charges verified.

    The same day BuzzFeed released the full dossier, CNN first reported the leaked information that the controversial contents of the dossier were presented during classified briefings inside classified documents presented one week earlier to then-President Obama and President-elect Trump.

    Kramer said that he believed McCain was sought out in order to provide credibility to the dossier claims.

    "I think they felt a senior Republican was better to be the recipient of this rather than a Democrat because if it were a Democrat, I think that the view was that it would have been dismissed as a political attack," Kramer stated.

    The controversial Fusion GPS firm hired Steele to do the anti-Trump work that resulted in the compilation of the dossier. Fusion GPS was paid for its anti-Trump work by Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee via the Perkins Coie law firm.

    Kramer's testimony sheds a new light on the role of the Obama administration in disseminating the largely-discredited dossier that was reportedly involved in the FBI's initial investigation into the Trump campaign and unsubstantiated claims of Russian collusion. Also Comey cited the dossier as evidence in a successful FISA application to obtain a warrant to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a former adviser to President Trump's 2016 campaign. The testimony also revealed how McCain was utilized to give the wild dossier charges a credibility boost.

    Nuland and dossier

    Nuland's specific role in the dossier episode has been the subject of some controversy for her.

    In their book , "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump," authors and reporters by Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that Nuland gave the green light for the FBI to first meet with Steele regarding his dossier's claims. It was at that meeting that Steele initially reported his dossier charges to the FBI, the book relates.

    Steele sought out Rome-based FBI Special Agent Michael Gaeta, with whom he had worked on a previous case. Before Gaeta met with Steele on July 5, 2016, the book relates that the FBI first secured the support of Nuland, who at the time was assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs specializing in Russia.

    Regarding the arrangements for Steele's initial meeting with the FBI about the dossier claims, Isikoff and Corn report:

    There were a few hoops Gaeta had to jump through. He was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Rome. The FBI checked with Victoria Nuland's office at the State Department : Do you support this meeting ? Nuland, having found Steele's reports on Ukraine to have been generally credible, gave the green light.

    Within a few days, on July 5, Gaeta arrived and headed to Steele's office near Victoria station . Steele handed him a copy of the report. Gaeta, a seasoned FBI agent, started to read . He turned white. For a while, Gaeta said nothing . Then he remarked, "I have to report this to headquarters."

    The book documents that Nuland previously received Steele's reports on the Ukrainian crisis and had been familiar with Steele's general work.

    Nuland faced confirmation questions prior to her appointment as assistant secretary of state over her reported role in revising controversial Obama administration talking points about the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks. Her reported changes sought to protect Clinton's State Department from accusations that it failed to adequately secure the woefully unprotected U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi.

    Nuland's name surfaced in a flurry of news media reports last year about the dossier and Kerry's State Department.

    Sidney Blumenthal

    An extensive New Yorker profile of Steele named another former official from Kerry's State Department for alleged involvement in circulating the dossier. The magazine reported that Kerry's chief of staff at the State Department, John Finer, obtained the contents of a two-page summary of the dossier and eventually decided to share the questionable document with Kerry.

    Finer received the dossier summary from Jonathan M. Winer, the Obama State Department official who acknowledged regularly interfacing and exchanging information with Steele, according to the report. Winer previously conceded that he shared the dossier summary with Nuland.

    After his name surfaced in news media reports related to probes by House Republicans into the dossier, Winer authored a Washington Post oped in which he conceded that while he was working at the State Department he exchanged documents and information with Steele.

    Winer further acknowledged that while at the State Department, he shared anti-Trump material with Steele passed to him by longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whom Winer described as an "old friend." Winer wrote that the material from Blumenthal – which Winer in turn gave to Steele – originated with Cody Shearer, who is a controversial figure long tied to various Clinton scandals.

    Nuland, Winer Give Conflicting Accounts

    There are seeming discrepancies between Winer and Nuland about actions taken involving the dossier.

    Nuland described in a Politico podcast interview what she claimed was her reaction when she was presented with Steele's dossier information at the State Department.

    She said that she offered advice to "those who were interfacing with" Steele, immediately telling the intermediary or intermediaries that Steele "should get this information to the FBI." She further explained that a career employee at the State Department could not get involved with the dossier charges since such actions could violate the Hatch Act, which prevents employees in the executive branch of the federal government from engaging in certain kinds of political activities.

    In a second interview, this one with CBS's Face The Nation, Nuland also stated that her "immediate" reaction was to refer Steele to the FBI.

    Here is a transcript of the relevant section of her February 5 interview with Susan B. Glasser, who described Nuland as "my friend" and referred to her by her nickname "Toria":

    Glasser: When did you first hear about his dossier?

    Nuland: I first heard -- and I didn't know who his client was until much later, until 2017, I think, when it came out. I first heard that he had done work for a client asserting these linkages -- I think it was late July, something like that.

    Glasser: That's very interesting. And you would have taken him seriously just because you knew that he knew what he was talking about on Russia?

    Nuland: What I did was say that this is about U.S. politics, and not the work of -- not the business of the State Department, and certainly not the business of a career employee who is subject to the Hatch Act, which requires that you stay out of politics. So, my advice to those who were interfacing with him was that he should get this information to the FBI, and that they could evaluate whether they thought it was credible.

    Glasser: Did you ever talk about it with anyone else higher up at the department? With Secretary Kerry or anybody else?

    Nuland: Secretary Kerry was also aware. I think he's on the record and he had the same advice.

    Nuland stated that Kerry "was also aware" of the dossier, but she did not describe how he was made aware. She made clear that she told "those who were interfacing" with Steele to go to the FBI since any State Department involvement could violate the Hatch Act.

    Her Politico podcast interview was not the only time she claimed that her reaction was to refer Steele to the FBI.

    On Face The Nation on February 4, Nuland engaged in the following exchange in which she stated her "immediate" reaction was to refer Steele to the FBI (emphasis added):

    MARGARET BRENNAN: The dossier.

    VICTORIA NULAND: The dossier, he passed two to four pages of short points of what he was finding, and our immediate reaction to that was, "This is not in our purview. This needs to go to the FBI, if there is any concern here that one candidate or the election as a whole might be influenced by the Russian federation. That's something for the FBI to investigate."

    And that was our reaction when we saw this. It's not our -- we can't evaluate this. And frankly, if every member of the campaign who the Russians tried to approach and tried to influence had gone to the FBI as well in real time, we might not be in the mess we're in today.

    Nuland gave the two interviews after her name started surfacing in news media reports involving Kerry's State Department and the dossier. Her name also came up in relation to a criminal referral of Steele to the Justice Department in the form of a letter authored last year by Sen. Chuck Grassley, who at the time chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

    The Grassley-Graham criminal referral contains redacted information that Steele received information from someone in the State Department, who in turn had been in contact with a "foreign sub-source" who was in touch with a redacted name described as a "friend of the Clintons."

    Numerous media reports have since stated that the source of information provided to the State Department that was in turn passed on to Steele was Cody Shearer, a controversial figure tied to the Clintons who is also an associate of longtime Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal. According to sources who spoke to CNN, Shearer's information was passed from Blumenthal to Winer, who at the time was a special State Department envoy for Libya working under Kerry. Winer says that Kerry personally recruited him to work at the State Department.

    It is Winer's version of events that seems to conflict with Nuland's.

    In an oped published in the Washington Post, Winer identified Nuland as the State Department official with whom he shared Steele's information. Winer writes that Nuland's reaction was that "she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material." He does not relate any further reaction from Nuland.

    Winer wrote in the Washington Post (emphasis added):

    In the summer of 2016, Steele told me that he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign and senior Russian officials. He did not provide details but made clear the information involved "active measures," a Soviet intelligence term for propaganda and related activities to influence events in other countries.

    In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the "dossier." Steele's sources suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign but also had compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign.

    I was allowed to review, but not to keep, a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department. I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material.

    That was the extent of Winer's description of Nuland's reaction upon being presented with Steele's dossier claims. Nuland's public claim that her "immediate" response was to refer Steele to the FBI since State involvement could violate the Hatch Act seems to conflict with the only reaction that Winer relates from Nuland – that she felt Kerry should be made aware of the dossier information.

    In Winer's Washington Post oped, he writes that Steele had a larger relationship with the State Department, passing over 100 reports relating to Russia to the U.S. government agency through Winer. Winer wrote that Nuland found Steele's reports to be "useful" and asked Winer to "continue to send them."

    He wrote:

    In 2013, I returned to the State Department at the request of Secretary of State John F. Kerry, whom I had previously served as Senate counsel. Over the years, Steele and I had discussed many matters relating to Russia. He asked me whether the State Department would like copies of new information as he developed it. I contacted Victoria Nuland, a career diplomat who was then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and shared with her several of Steele's reports. She told me they were useful and asked me to continue to send them. Over the next two years, I shared more than 100 of Steele's reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to find them useful. None of the reports related to U.S. politics or domestic U.S. matters, and the reports constituted a very small portion of the data set reviewed by State Department experts trying to make sense of events in Russia.

    Kramer and the dossier

    In his book, "The Restless Wave," McCain provided an inside account of how he says he came across the dossier.

    He wrote that he was told about the claims in the document at a security conference in Canada in November 2016, where he was approached by Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and friend of ex-British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier.

    McCain wrote that Wood told him Steele "had been commissioned to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Russian agents as well as potentially compromising information about the President-elect that Putin allegedly possessed."

    McCain, however, did not address the obvious question of whether he was told exactly who "commissioned" Steele to "investigate" the alleged Russian ties. The dossier was paid for by Clinton's campaign and the DNC.

    McCain goes on to describe Wood as telling him Steele's work "was mostly raw, unverified intelligence, but that the author strongly believed merited a thorough examination by counterintelligence experts."

    The politician says the dossier claims described to him were "too strange a scenario to believe, something out of a le Carré novel, not the kind of thing anyone has ever actually had to worry about with a new President, no matter what other concerns."

    Still, McCain says he reasoned that "even a remote risk that the President of the United States might be vulnerable to Russian extortion had to be investigated."

    McCain concedes Wood told him he had not actually read the dossier himself, and writes that he wasn't sure if he ever met Wood before and couldn't recall previously having a conversation with Wood. Still, McCain took Wood's word for it when Wood vouched for Steele's credibility. "Steele was a respected professional, Wood assured us, who had good Russian contacts and long experience collecting and analyzing intelligence on the Kremlin," McCain wrote.

    Present at the meeting with Wood and McCain was Kramer, who McCain writes agreed to "go to London to meet Steele, confirm his credibility and report back to me."

    McCain doesn't detail Kramer's visit to London beyond simply writing, "When David returned, and shared his impression that the former spy was, as Sir Andrew had vouched, a respected professional, and not to outward appearances given to hyperbole or hysteria, I agreed to receive a copy of what is now referred to as 'the dossier.'''

    McCain leaves out exactly where Kramer obtained his dossier copy.

    The Washington Post reported last February that Kramer received the dossier directly from Fusion GPS after McCain expressed interest in it. Those details marked the clearest indication that McCain may have known that the dossier originated with Fusion GPS, meaning that he may have knowingly passed on political material to the FBI.

    Also, in a New York Times oped in January, GPS co-founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritch wrote that they helped McCain share their anti-Trump dossier with the Obama-era intelligence community via an unnamed "emissary."

    In his own testimony, Kramer relates conversations with Simpson about the dossier.

    Aaron Klein is Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, " Aaron Klein Investigative Radio ." Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

    [Mar 20, 2019] The difference between Tulsi and Sanders: Sanders will not touch provate banking

    Mar 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    lgfocus , Mar 19, 2019 5:09:15 PM | link

    psychohistorian @14

    Actually Tulsi Gabbard made this point strongly in her last town hall.

    Tulsi Gabbard Answers The Question, "How Are You Different From Bernie Sanders"
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz_TwpA8awo

    [Mar 20, 2019] Merkel is the most servile lackey that the US could wish for

    Mar 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Cemi , Mar 20, 2019 8:50:23 AM | link

    @17 Guy Thornton wrote:
    Merkel might say: "There is definitely a place for Brazil in NATO. They can have ours."
    Forget it! Merkel is the most servile lackey that the US could wish for. She is doing everything her masters in Washington ask her to do. For example the German public is awaiting a mildly entertaining show of their government on how to work around yesterdays court decision:
    International law is the yardstick for international politics. This has been clarified by the Higher Administrative Court in Münster in a spectacular ruling on lethal US drone missions in Yemen. Several relatives of victims who were killed in such attacks had sued. They hold the Federal Republic of Germany jointly responsible for this because the United States allegedly also uses the US airbase in Ramstein in Rhineland-Palatinate for these fatal attacks.

    There are important indications that the drone attacks in question violate international law and the fundamental right to life. The Federal Republic of Germany must protect these rights and stand up for them. Therefore the Federal Republic must clarify now in a first step whether the attacks offend against international right.

    (Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator from Urteil über US-Airbase in Ramstein: Deutsche Richter fordern Überprüfung tödlicher US-Drohneneinsätze )

    NOT! Aside from the fact, that the public press largely ignores this decision, our governments have a long record of doing actually nothing when formally independent judges even from the highest courts ask them to adhere to the law.
    Speaking of embarrassing lackeys, when the empire was seeking a new nodal point to more efficiently drone bomb Northern Africa the most obvious/nearby European locations like Italy, France or Greece all said "Nah, better not". But, don't you worry, Missus Merkel was of course happy to offer Stuttgard in Southern Germany as base for AFRICOM!

    Always at your service!

    [Mar 20, 2019] The US wants Brazil to join NATO

    Mar 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Guy Thornton , Mar 19, 2019 4:22:12 PM | link

    Merkel might say:

    "There is definitely a place for Brazil in NATO. They can have ours."

    [Mar 20, 2019] Bad Blood - Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou - Observations by Walrus.

    Notable quotes:
    "... I read this book over two nights and it unfortunately brought back my own experiences of working for a narcissist to the point of causing sleeplessness and indigestion. ..."
    "... However the pattern of behavior at Theranos was ingrained and consistent - "an orchestrated litany of lies" as a judge has said in another matter. ..."
    "... This is a similar personality type with a different set of risks. These people are common in finance and medicine: https://www.theatlantic.com... ..."
    "... In the absence of a moral filter, says Martha Stout[1], "Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths...That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow–but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one." ..."
    turcopolier.typepad.com

    I wrote in 2010 at SST on the characteristics and dangers associated with narcissistic leadership. "Bad Blood' by John Carreyrou chronicles the rise and fall of Theranos, a Silicon Valley healthcare startup founded and run by Elizabeth Holmes, a card carrying narcissist if ever I saw one.

    This book, in my opinion, paints such a detailed and comprehensive picture of the way these creatures operate that I thought it worthwhile to bring it to the attention of SST members who may doubt my warnings of the dangers of allowing such folk near the levers of power in business and, worse, Government.

    I read this book over two nights and it unfortunately brought back my own experiences of working for a narcissist to the point of causing sleeplessness and indigestion.

    Under the direction of the charismatic Holmes, Theranos burned through some $900 million in investors funds before being found out in 2015. Their blood testing business was a sham that endangered patients. The company's key business strengths were the "reality distortion field" Elizabeth Holmes projected over investors and directors and the twin weapons of secrecy and fear they wielded over their employees.

    Disbelievers my argue that start up companies sometimes require desperate measures to stay afloat and that you cannot make an omelette, etc. etc. However the pattern of behavior at Theranos was ingrained and consistent - "an orchestrated litany of lies" as a judge has said in another matter.

    If you wish to perhaps be a little forearmed against the day that you perhaps must engage with one of these creatures it would be well to understand the cautionary tale of Theranos. https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/152473165X https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2010/05/walrus-on-narcissistic-leaders-.html

    jnewman , 3 hours ago

    This is a similar personality type with a different set of risks. These people are common in finance and medicine: https://www.theatlantic.com...
    Godfree Roberts , 8 hours ago
    In the absence of a moral filter, says Martha Stout[1], "Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths...That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow–but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one."

    My study of Chinese government revealed an important truth -- one that explains much about that country's rapid rise: they find our amateur, promise-driven, personality-based governance repulsive. They would no more vote for amateur politicians than for amateur brain surgeons. To them charm, good looks, quick wits and rhetorical skill signify shallowness, instability and glibness. Altruistic politicians have been fundamental to Chinese governance for two millennia.

    Their political stars have always been experienced, scholarly, altruistic problem-solvers chosen on merit after decades of testing.

    In 1000 AD, during our Dark Ages, with just one scholar-official for every eight thousand citizens, China was harmonious, technologically advanced and prosperous. Emperors and dynasties came and went while loyal, disciplined–often courageous–civil servants lived far from family, serving in remote regions under terrible conditions.

    Confucius'[2] moral meritocracy and the rigors of the job discouraged sociopaths and officials integrity, efficiency and entrepreneurial energy made China the most advanced civilization on earth.

    So highly do the Chinese esteem their best politicians that they deified one whose legacy, a water diversion project, has repaid its capital investment every twenty-four hours for 2,270 years. Millions visit his shrine, which is built overlooking his masterpiece, every year to offer incense and sincere thanks.

    The altruistic tradition is remembered in a Singapore Government White Paper, "The concept of government by honorable men who have a duty to do right for the people and who have their trust and respect fits us better than the Western idea that government power should be as limited as possible."

    And would-be members of China's Communist Party take an oath to "Bear the people's difficulties before the people and enjoy their fruits of their labors after the people". They often fail, obviously, but at least they've got something to shoot for–and a standard that the other 1.3 billion non-members can hold them to.

    [1] The Sociopath Next Door, by Martha Stout Ph.D.
    [2] The Doctrine of the Mean

    [Mar 20, 2019] Vladimir Putin celebrates birthday on ice in celebrity hockey match

    This article was written 4 years ago, but the problem with Putin successor remains. Putin is a unique politician and his replacement might be much weaker, causing troubles for Russia. This is not new problem for Russia, but this time it will be especially acute. BTW this comment thread looks like "who is who" list for NATObots.
    Notable quotes:
    "... We could all use a real leader like Putin who takes no b.s. from anybody and is quick to adapt to any situation in a calm assertive way. He earns our admiration every day, the way he steers across an ever changing minefield and not because of his mucho image. We do not need leaders who deceit people by spewing relentless propaganda and no clarity. They fail as individuals and as a group because they are spineless. If multiple people repeat the same lie it does not make it true. It must be a club membership requirement to play the politics game and keep quiet about wrong things you see. ..."
    "... Action man outwitting the Neocons in the international chess game. More surprises to come ..."
    "... Karl Rove said "Empire creates its own reality". No wonder the mantra "Assad must go" is now enshrined in international politics by the Neocon alliance. They didnt figure on Putin obviously. ..."
    "... It happens regardless, take the example in Volgograd (Vauxhall) two years ago. I am afraid that KSA and the Gulf States will be funding the usual mix of 'moderately terroristic shenanigans" in reprisal, but they did this before anyways. ..."
    "... He making the US looked like whiny bitches. Good job; you alienate Russia and manage to strengthen the China-Russo relationrelationship. Sanctions that don't work, secret economic wars and multiple failed coup d'etat in Georgia and Ukraine [also do not work] ..."
    "... Like US - Hospital - Afganistain. anyway ISIS are paid money by the CIA and don't care who they work for it's money that they are motivated by not ideology, that ideology stuff is made-up. Google it and dig, get yourself informed. ..."
    "... Not quite sure why Mr Putin playing ice-hockey on his birthday is worthy of a story to open up for comments unless the Guardian is ' trawling ' to encourage some new anti-Putin Cold War rhetoric in the comments section. ..."
    "... PS / Don't forget that nice Israeli Prime Minister Mr Netanyahu's birthday and how he celebrates it. Ensure you open it up for comment as I'm sure also that many will wish to voice an opinion. Will this now be a standard ' Birthday Feature ' for all world leaders in the Guardian, or has this newspaper just granted an exception for Mr Putin's birthday ? ..."
    Oct 07, 2015 | The Guardian

    goatrider 7 Oct 2015 17:12

    I wonder if everyone on the Guardian staff has the same "man crush" on Putin? Could explain all these obsessive articles. I also wonder if he spent any time in the penalty box?

    laticsfanfromeurope -> Extracrispy 7 Oct 2015 17:06

    You prefer ISIS and Al-Nusra then the legitimate Syrian gov. and the legitimate help of Russia...not a surprise from stupid western supporters!


    pfox33 7 Oct 2015 17:05

    There isn't one of our western politicians that wouldn't sell his fucking mother to be getting the attention that Putin's getting. I thought he was supposed to be isolated.

    So to keep the hockey thing going, Putin's stolen the puck in the neutral zone, split the Nato defensemen who were too far forward and is on a breakaway.

    I feel sorry for Obama because I think he's a good leader but when it comes to trying to maneuver in a geopolitical situation like Syria he's fucked before he leaves the house. Putin can just act without trying to herd cats like Obama has to do with his Nato minions. He doesn't have a bunch of recalcitrant GOP senators calling him everything but a white man and running their mouths about what they would do.

    ... ... ...


    filin led -> Braminski 7 Oct 2015 16:55

    It's you who are a troll, sir. By what you say, anything can be dismissed as paid propaganda. That means, you are as likely to be a paid agent yourself. So, if you can't come up with a constructive argument, stop commenting please.


    Mordantdude -> Poppy757 7 Oct 2015 16:40

    As Russians say: "Envy silently".

    giacinto101 7 Oct 2015 15:59

    We could all use a real leader like Putin who takes no b.s. from anybody and is quick to adapt to any situation in a calm assertive way. He earns our admiration every day, the way he steers across an ever changing minefield and not because of his mucho image. We do not need leaders who deceit people by spewing relentless propaganda and no clarity. They fail as individuals and as a group because they are spineless. If multiple people repeat the same lie it does not make it true. It must be a club membership requirement to play the politics game and keep quiet about wrong things you see.


    SilkverBlogger 7 Oct 2015 15:54

    Action man outwitting the Neocons in the international chess game. More surprises to come


    CIAbot007 -> Poppy757 7 Oct 2015 15:39

    Most of Aussies have a bit of common sense which says that you can't blame anyone before it is prooved. With Western MSM propaganda machine blaming Russia and Putin even before anything happens you bet there's no such thing as balanced and unskewed reporting and even will for any kind of such thing. Don't get fooled, use your brain or your brain will be used by someone else.


    SilkverBlogger 7 Oct 2015 14:48

    Karl Rove said "Empire creates its own reality". No wonder the mantra "Assad must go" is now enshrined in international politics by the Neocon alliance. They didnt figure on Putin obviously.


    PekkaRoivanen MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:30

    In the West, we don't have a sycophantic press kissing the leader's backside:

    Guardian: Barack Obama scores just 2 out of 22 basketball hoops - video

    You wrote that Obama plays basketball and you prove it with this video where Obama wears dress shirt (tie removed :-D) and scores badly.

    Are you sure Obama plays basketball? Or is it just press kissing his backside?

    Kev Kev Hektor Uranga 7 Oct 2015 14:28

    the USA persecutes and kills people who speak out against it. Only difference is the USA does it in ways that nobody sees.. In other words the USA is the same as Russia only they do their work in the dark. When nobody is looking.

    Abiesalba MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:26

    That's the guy who is wishing Putin a happy birthday.

    The US/UK duo have caused with their insane illegal wars more than a million deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and counting.

    I recommend you look up a little the complex history and present situation in Chechnya and the North Caucasus region.

    ISIS (which the insanely aggressive US/UK duo have in effect created) is already spreading its influence INSIDE the Russian Federation. So Putin has direct interests to defeat ISIS and stabilise Syria (and Iraq). In addition, the south of the Russian Federation is on the map of territories which ISIS plans to conquer.

    See for example:
    -
    8 ISIS supporters killed in N. Caucasus special op

    (2 August 2015)

    Russian security forces have foiled a terrorist group that recently pledged allegiance to ISIS in Ingushetia, in the Northern Caucasus, according to the National Anti-Terror Committee (NAC). Security forces seized explosives, weapons and over 2,000 rounds of ammunition.
    -
    How Russian Militants Declared A New ISIS 'State' In Russia's North Caucasus

    (26 June 2015)

    The Islamic State group announced the creation of its northernmost province this week, after accepting a formal pledge of allegiance from former al Qaeda militants in the North Caucasus region of Russia.
    -
    -
    It is true that at present, the Chechens are begging Putin to let them strike in Syria (and this is also closely linked to the complicated history of North Caucasus), but Putin has not unleashed them. See for example here:
    -
    -
    Kadyrov asks Putin to allow Chechen infantry to fight in Syria (RT, 2 October 2015)
    -
    The head of the Chechen Republic has asked the Russian president to send Chechen units to fight Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Syria, adding that his fighters have sworn to fight terrorists till the end.

    "Being a Muslim, a Chechen and a Russian patriot I want to say that in 1999 when our republic was overrun with these devils we swore on the Koran that we would fight them wherever they are," the Chechen leader said. "But we need the Commander-in-Chief's decision to do this," he emphasized. According to the Russian Constitution, the president [Putin] is also the commander-in-chief of the military forces.


    BMWAlbert clanview46 7 Oct 2015 14:26

    It happens regardless, take the example in Volgograd (Vauxhall) two years ago. I am afraid that KSA and the Gulf States will be funding the usual mix of 'moderately terroristic shenanigans" in reprisal, but they did this before anyways.


    Julian1972 MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:21

    That was last year...also it was authored by a combination of the CIA and their right-wing 'Operation Stay Behind' cohorts...though, if you don't know that by now you doubtless never will.


    Abiesalba MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:16

    Murderers, thieves and embezzlers stroking each other's egos.

    Putin has a long way to go to match the US/UK.
    -
    -
    Here is a recent report about 'collateral damage' compiled by Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War:
    -
    Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the 'War on Terror' (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan)

    (March 2015)
    -
    This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.

    NOT included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen.

    The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs.

    And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely.
    -
    -
    For more about civilian casualties due to the US-led coalition strikes in Syria and Iraq, see the Airwars website:

    584 – 1,720 civilians killed:

    To date, the international coalition has only conceded two "likely" deaths, from an event in early November 2014. It is also presently investigating seven further incidents of concern; is carrying out credibility assessments on a further 13; and has concluded three more investigations – having found no 'preponderance of evidence' to support civilian casualty claims.

    More Power -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:13

    He making the US looked like whiny bitches. Good job; you alienate Russia and manage to strengthen the China-Russo relationrelationship. Sanctions that don't work, secret economic wars and multiple failed coup d'etat in Georgia and Ukraine [also do not work]. Just look at the World Bank, BRICS is on the door step. Happy birth day Putin. A badass mofo

    blueskis -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:06

    The vats majority of the 5500 killed have been civilians in East Ukraine killed by airstrikes ordered by kiev/washington, fully justifying Russian intervention.


    ooTToo -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:40

    Like US - Hospital - Afganistain. anyway ISIS are paid money by the CIA and don't care who they work for it's money that they are motivated by not ideology, that ideology stuff is made-up. Google it and dig, get yourself informed.


    geedeesee -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:19

    Russia is attacking what they said they'd attack, Tavernier. ISIS, al-Nusrah, and other terrorist organisations.

    inconvenienttruth13 -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:18

    No he isn't. Anybody with a functioning brain knows he had nothing to do with that. Unlike the US genocide in the Middle East - over 2 million dead and counting - not to mention the deliberate and sustained attack on a hospital. Maybe you don' get to see the news in your ward?

    inconvenienttruth13 -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:13

    The US created, funds, trains and arms ISIS - they are only supporting terrorists in their campaign to effect regime change. Russia is responding to a request fro the Syrian government, so its actions are entirely legal. The faces that the USA and the KSA are the biggest sponsors of terrorism in the world.

    monteverdi1610 7 Oct 2015 12:22

    Not quite sure why Mr Putin playing ice-hockey on his birthday is worthy of a story to open up for comments unless the Guardian is ' trawling ' to encourage some new anti-Putin Cold War rhetoric in the comments section.

    PS / Don't forget that nice Israeli Prime Minister Mr Netanyahu's birthday and how he celebrates it. Ensure you open it up for comment as I'm sure also that many will wish to voice an opinion. Will this now be a standard ' Birthday Feature ' for all world leaders in the Guardian, or has this newspaper just granted an exception for Mr Putin's birthday ?

    [Mar 20, 2019] The Opportunity Cost of America s Disastrous Foreign Policy by Vlad Sobell

    Foreign policy is no longer controlled by the President of the USA. It is controlled by the Deep state. This article is from 2015 but can easily be written about Trump administration
    Notable quotes:
    "... Indeed, as Putin himself had proposed in his visionary October 2011 article, the Eurasian Union could have become one of the pillars of a huge harmonized economic area stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok and based on the EU's single-market rules (acquis communautaire). ..."
    "... First and foremost, because the self-proclaimed "exceptional" power (actually, a mere "outlying island" in the Atlantic, according to the founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder) and its dysfunctional "deep-state" officialdom did not want it to be. How could they have permitted such a thing? How could they have allowed other countries to get on with improving the lives of their citizens without being obliged to seek Washington's approval every step of the way? ..."
    "... In order to make sure that they were not side-lined, the US elites had to intervene. The Western propaganda machine started churning out all sorts of nonsense that Putin is a new Hitler who is bent on restoring the Soviet empire and who is bullying Europe, while continuing to bang on about his "increasingly autocratic rule". ..."
    "... Deadly attacks by chauvinistic proxies were launched on the Russophone people in South Ossetia, Georgia in 2008 and more recently in Ukraine. ..."
    "... Stuck in an Orwellian nightmare, Europe has to demonstrate its unfailing loyalty to Big Brother and go along with the view that Russia, an intrinsic and valuable part of the European mainstream both historically and culturally, represents universal evil and that the Earth will not be safe until the Federation has been dismembered and Putinism wiped out once and for all. ..."
    "... Having self-destructed in two world wars, it has become an easy and even willing prey to an arrogant, ignorant and power-drunk predator that has never experienced the hardships and horrors that Europe has. ..."
    "... Even more terrifying, intellectually third-rate Washington viceroys such as Victoria Nuland and the freelancing armchair warrior Senator McCain are allowed to play God with our continent. ..."
    "... Indeed, the damage extends beyond the economy. By aligning with the forces of chaos – such as chauvinistic extremists in Ukraine – Washington and its Euro-vassals are corrupting the moral (and intellectual) core of the West. ..."
    "... 'My Ph.D. dissertation chairman, who became a high Pentagon official assigned to wind down the Vietnam war, in answer to my question about how Washington gets Europeans to always do what Washington wants replied: "Money, we give them money." "Foreign aid?" I asked. "No, we give the European political leaders bagfuls of money. They are for sale. We bought them. They report to us." Perhaps this explains Tony Blair's $50 million fortune one year out of office'. ..."
    "... "We, the [CENSORED] people, control America and the Americans know it." -- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of [CENSORED] ..."
    Mar 18, 2015 | Russia Insider

    Washington is betraying the best interests of the American people through its current foreign policy... European democracy is threatened by US, not Russian, foreign policy

    The avalanche of commentary since the Ukrainian crisis erupted a year ago has overshadowed any reflections on the immense forgone benefits (technically speaking, the "opportunity cost") of what might have been if Washington had been working for peace and stability instead of war and chaos.

    Imagine the following: After the unraveling of the Communist bloc, Europe, in partnership with the US, had forged a new security system in which Russia was treated as a valued and equal partner – one whose interests were respected. Russia, decimated by a century of wars and Communist imperialism, would doubtless have eagerly reciprocated in kind. Most countries of the former Soviet Union would have then proceeded to build a new Eurasian structure of which Russia would have served as the natural umbrella, given its long-standing interaction with the region's diverse nations and cultures.

    Indeed, as Putin himself had proposed in his visionary October 2011 article, the Eurasian Union could have become one of the pillars of a huge harmonized economic area stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok and based on the EU's single-market rules (acquis communautaire).

    The rising Far Eastern economic powerhouse, with the world's most populous country, China, at its centre, would have linked up with the world's largest economy (the EU). An enormous Eurasian production and financial bloc would have been created – one that drew primarily on secure supplies of Russian energy and other natural resources. Untold investment opportunities would have opened up in Siberia and Russia's Far East as well as in Central Asia. Hundreds of millions of people in Eurasia and elsewhere would have been lifted out of poverty. And, not least, the EU would have been refashioned as an integral part of the dynamic trans-Eurasian economy (rather than as a German-centred empire, as appears to be the case today), thereby making a major contribution to overcoming the ongoing global economic depression.

    All of this was not to be, however. Why not? First and foremost, because the self-proclaimed "exceptional" power (actually, a mere "outlying island" in the Atlantic, according to the founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder) and its dysfunctional "deep-state" officialdom did not want it to be. How could they have permitted such a thing? How could they have allowed other countries to get on with improving the lives of their citizens without being obliged to seek Washington's approval every step of the way?

    European democracy is threatened by US, not Russian, foreign policy

    In order to make sure that they were not side-lined, the US elites had to intervene. The Western propaganda machine started churning out all sorts of nonsense that Putin is a new Hitler who is bent on restoring the Soviet empire and who is bullying Europe, while continuing to bang on about his "increasingly autocratic rule".

    Deadly attacks by chauvinistic proxies were launched on the Russophone people in South Ossetia, Georgia in 2008 and more recently in Ukraine.

    And in what is eerily reminiscent of Stalinist "bloc discipline", the EU/NATO nomenclature was ordered to implement the absurd strategy of severing the Russian economy from the EU. For their part, the cowering Eurocrats willingly obliged by imposing sanctions on Russia that, perversely, have had a negative impact on their own economies (but, let it be stressed, not that of the US). No questions raised and no public debate on the wisdom of such a strategy permitted.

    Stuck in an Orwellian nightmare, Europe has to demonstrate its unfailing loyalty to Big Brother and go along with the view that Russia, an intrinsic and valuable part of the European mainstream both historically and culturally, represents universal evil and that the Earth will not be safe until the Federation has been dismembered and Putinism wiped out once and for all.

    This abuse and humiliation of Europe is unparalleled. The continent that gave the world the wonders of the Antiquity, modern democracy, the industrial revolution and what is arguably the greatest tradition of philosophy, fine arts and classical music is being bullied by its oversized offspring. Having self-destructed in two world wars, it has become an easy and even willing prey to an arrogant, ignorant and power-drunk predator that has never experienced the hardships and horrors that Europe has. War and extermination camps are etched into the European DNA. America "knows" about them only from afar – and, not least, from the Hollywood entertainment industry.

    Even more terrifying, intellectually third-rate Washington viceroys such as Victoria Nuland and the freelancing armchair warrior Senator McCain are allowed to play God with our continent. The so-called European "leaders" are colluding with them in plunging Europe into the abyss and thereby risking nuclear confrontation.

    America, too, is a loser

    But this is not just a tragedy for Europe and Eurasia. We are also witnessing the wilful misrule of America and, by default, of the entire West. Indeed, Washington is betraying the best interests of the American people through its current foreign policy. The "democracy-promoters" running Washington's foreign-policy apparatus apparently do not understand that America has nothing to lose and a lot to gain from the Eurasian economic project: the rising tide of global economic welfare would lift everyone's boats, including its own. Why should it matter to Washington if the rising tide comes from other quarters beyond its control?

    Indeed, the damage extends beyond the economy. By aligning with the forces of chaos – such as chauvinistic extremists in Ukraine – Washington and its Euro-vassals are corrupting the moral (and intellectual) core of the West. If it continues to support such forces against Russia, united Europe will lose not only its backbone but its very soul. The moral consequences of this loss will be enormous and could lead to the precipitous erosion of Western democracy.

    The 'autocrats' want to work with the West, not against it

    US and EU leaders believe that the Russian and Chinese "autocrats" are out to destroy the West because the latter hate freedom (as George W. Bush might have put it). And hence, they argue, the autocrats must be stopped in their tracks. The simple truth is that Western leaders are too blinkered to understand that far from desiring to destroy the West, Russia and China want it to prosper so that they can work with it to everyone's benefit. Having enjoyed a privileged position over several centuries and having attained unprecedented prosperity in recent decades, the West simply cannot understand that the rest of humanity has no interest in fomenting the "clash of civilizations" but rather craves peace and stability so that it can finally improve its economic lot.

    Perhaps, however, all is not yet lost. It is still possible that reason – and economic forces – will prevail and force the West to correct the errors of its ways. What we need, perhaps, more than ever is the ability to step out of the box, question our fundamental assumptions (not least about Russia and China) and find the courage to change policies that have proved disastrous. After all, critical thought, dispassionate analysis and the ability to be open to new ideas is what made the West so successful in the past. If we are to thrive once again in the future, we must resurrect these most valuable and unsurpassed assets.

    Vlad Sobell teaches political economy in Prague and Berlin Europeans Look On as US Sows Discord on the Continent Wed, Nov 2

    Tom Welsh

    What I cannot understand is the naive belief that elected politicians would act in the interests of those whom they represent. Under what other circumstances do we see human beings act with disinterested altruism? So why would a bunch of people who have been ruthlessly selected for selfishness, arrogance, and callousness - a bunch of carefully chosen psychopaths, if you will - behave in that way?

    'My Ph.D. dissertation chairman, who became a high Pentagon official assigned to wind down the Vietnam war, in answer to my question about how Washington gets Europeans to always do what Washington wants replied: "Money, we give them money." "Foreign aid?" I asked. "No, we give the European political leaders bagfuls of money. They are for sale. We bought them. They report to us." Perhaps this explains Tony Blair's $50 million fortune one year out of office'.

    - Paul Craig Roberts

    jabirujoe

    "Washington is betraying the best interests of the American people through its current foreign policy".

    Not only it's foreign policy but it's domestic policy as well. Let's call it for what it really is. The Wall Street/Corporate policy which is the driving force behind behind everything the US does

    Toddrich

    "We, the [CENSORED] people, control America and the Americans know it." -- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of [CENSORED]

    "When we're done with the U.S. it will shrivel up and blow away." -- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of [CENSORED]

    The welfare or future of the American people are not part of the equation.

    [Mar 20, 2019] Sanders was a sheepdog>

    Notable quotes:
    "... There are numerous clues that point to the 2016 US Presidential Election as having been a set-up. Few seem willing to take a close look at these facts. But it is necessary for an understanding of the world we live in today. ..."
    "... Sanders as sheep-dog Black Agenda Report called Sanders a sheep-dog soon after he entered the race . ..."
    "... "Enough with the emails!" ..."
    "... Not pursuing Hillary's 'winning' of 6 coin tosses in Iowa ..."
    "... Virtually conceding the black and female vote to Hillary ..."
    "... Not calling Hillary out about her claim to have NEVER sold her vote ..."
    "... Endorsing Hillary despite learning of Hillary-DNC collusion ..."
    "... Continuing to help the Democratic Party reach out to Bernie supports even after the election ..."
    "... As one keen observer noted: Sanders is a Company Man . ..."
    May 31, 2017 | jackrabbit.blog
    There are numerous clues that point to the 2016 US Presidential Election as having been a set-up. Few seem willing to take a close look at these facts. But it is necessary for an understanding of the world we live in today.

    Trump's first 100 days has come and gone and he has proven to be every bit the faux populist that Obama was (as I explained in a previous post). In hind-sight we can see how a new faux populist was installed.

    Evidence

    1. Sanders as sheep-dog Black Agenda Report called Sanders a sheep-dog soon after he entered the race .

      Sanders made it clear from the start that he ruled out the possibility of running as an independent. That was only the first of many punches that Sanders pulled as he led his 'sheep' into the Democratic fold.

      Others were:

      • ; "Enough with the emails!"

      • ; Not pursuing Hillary's 'winning' of 6 coin tosses in Iowa;

      • ; Virtually conceding the black and female vote to Hillary;

      • ; Not calling Hillary out about her claim to have NEVER sold her vote;

      • ; Endorsing Hillary despite learning of Hillary-DNC collusion;

      • ; Continuing to help the Democratic Party reach out to Bernie supports even after the election.

      As one keen observer noted: Sanders is a Company Man .

    2. Trump as Clinton protege

    [Mar 20, 2019] Fool me once... Here is an interesting info of the stage of public mind mid 2016. I see no poseter that suspect that Sanders is a turncoat, who eesentially spend all those hard earned money and then folded to hillry formally giving her votes of people who supported Sanders becuase that hate Hillar and neoliberalims too much. I wonder how many suckers will support him for 2020

    Notable quotes:
    "... "Defiant leftwinger" is a bit rich. "Defiant leftwinger" only in relation to an artificially skewed spectrum represented by Fox News, Casino Trump, and a corporate funded neoliberal nominee toeing a rightwing foreign policy line. ..."
    "... Bernie Sanders is a social democrat in the tradition of FDR whose policies are centrist in relation to other industrialised nations. ..."
    "... He has focused on four planks he wants in the Democratic Party platform: the creation of an economy that works for all citizens, breaking up the five "too-big-to-fail" banks, a carbon tax to address climate change, and a single-payer healthcare system. ..."
    "... Of course Bernie needs to stay. Hillary is under FBI investigation. If she ends up in an orange pantsuit in the big house Bernie will look very stupid and basically has thrown out over 200 mio. dollars which is the amount he has spent on his campaign so far. Given to him by his supporters. It is his duty to them to stay in. ..."
    "... " the Guardian are stuck in the old, failed new Labour/Lib Dem politics and do everything to undermine him.( Corbyn )" ..."
    "... The Clinton camp is attempting to pressure Sanders to force him out before the convention to make sure that doesn't happen. The Sanders camp is just following the rules and playing fairly. ..."
    "... Britain began its retreat from this post WWII social democracy in 1979, 37 years ago when Thatcher took over. The essentially neo-liberal agenda has been actively pursued by every government since then - Thatcher-Major-Blair-Brown - and indeed has accelerated under Cameron. ..."
    "... There is nothing to indicate that the average american will be worse off with Trump in office as opposed to Clinton. That's how far to the right her actual policies are. Not the crap she claims, but the stuff she has been doing for the past 20 years. ..."
    "... People wonder why there is such animosity towards Americans. You support a woman for president whilst disregarding her most vile traits as a joke? Clinton is a real danger towards the Middle East and that is partly because of her warmongering and absolute support for Israel, wrong or right. There are girls in Sirte, Libya currently being used as sex slaves by ISIS who may think your not so funny. ..."
    "... "He tapped into deeply held sentiments about a rigged economy and a broken political system, and built a mass movement of people who believe we can do better and demand solutions that match the scale of the crises." Corbyn has the same agenda in the UK and given the internecine struggle in the Tory Party has an even better chance of winning in 2020. Pity that progressive newspapers like the Guardian are stuck in the old, failed new Labour/Lib Dem politics and do everything to undermine him. ..."
    "... And, who knows, elsewhere could possibly prove better - your guess is as good as mine. Clinton is neo-liberal establishment through-and-through. The darling of the global capitalist corporations. ..."
    "... Yes, what is wrong with the idiots? Why don't they just lie on their backs and surrender to the neo-liberalist elite? ..."
    "... Just a few years ago Americans prised themselves from an unelected monster, G. W. Bush - he and his monster crowd being the key architects/facilitators of the current economic woes and mayhem in the middle east. That's pretty well indisputable. People can try to dispute it but they are flat out wrong and they know it. So given that, why would America now want to place another monster in power? ..."
    "... Funny, cancer works this way on the human organism confusing the immune system so much that the body thinks a tumour is okay, a genuine part of the body. Until it's too late. ..."
    "... So the American presidential race is down to a contest between the supporter of Oligarchy (Clinton) and the Oligarch (Trump). Of course this would never lead you to believe that American politics serves only the Oligarchy and funds only their candidates. ..."
    "... Dems are only about 29% of registered voters, btw, so that is 6% of 29% of voters backing her right now. Yep. Trump has a good chance of winning against that - a write-in campaign for a soggy loaf of bread has a good chance of winning against that. ..."
    "... You really don't get what created Trump's opportunity do you, its the same that has seen a new options becoming a political force throughout Europe, its ever & constant growth of disenchantment with the Clinton's, Cameron's & the rest of the political establishment.......sadly the US people need Sanders far more than he needs them of so it would seem. ..."
    "... It is no longer "God Bless America". It's "God Help America". With the choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Bill (Mr. Zippy) Clinton is already interviewing the interns and glad that he can now get Cuban cigars. From President to "First Man". Remember " I did not have sexual relations with this woman." Just a Blow Job. ..."
    "... However they must take a leaf out of the Tea Party's book and start getting their candidates elected as State and congress candidates. There is no point in having a radical president and a reactionary congress. ..."
    "... No, those who propped up the corrupt Hitlery, knowing full-well that the system is rigged and the super delegates are bought and paid for, are to blame. ..."
    "... Republicans have more of a spine than the Hitlery voters, because they voted for who they actually wanted, not who they were told to. ..."
    "... Bernie is an Independent, he should run as one. F*ck Clinton and f*ck the DNC. ..."
    "... The 67-year-old Democratic front-runner has been "frequently plagued" by "blinding headaches" and a series of strokes over the course of the campaign which have left her second-guessing her chances of winning in 2016, says the upcoming book "Unlikeable - The Problem with Hillary." ..."
    "... The Democrat Party is controlled by the Right and the the representatives at [almost] all levels appear untouchable. The key to the future, not just for Sanders but for the Left he has mobilised, will be in opening up the Party to democracy and accountability. ..."
    "... It is truly depressing that the democrats had the chance to put a decent trustworthy person in the White House but instead opted for Clinton, who represents the interests of Wall Street and the Party of Perpetual War. By opting for her they have handed the keys to the repulsive Trump. ..."
    "... For decades tens of millions of Americans who are left politically on major issues (whether they identify as "left-wing" or not) have voted for politicians who have carried water for Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the national security apparatus--often more effectively than the Republicans they depict themselves as the progressive alternative to. ..."
    "... Money buys power - always has; always will. Read 'Clinton Ca$h'. Or just read something besides MSM. ..."
    "... I'm not saying that there are not people who fully support her (and Obama's) IMF/World Bank/USAID/Clinton Foundation approach to international development and international trade, her center aisle approach to use of armed force, her (and Obama's) preference for private insurance based health reform, her approach to Haiti ..."
    "... Remember!, it wasn't all sweetness and light under warmonger Hillary. C. ..."
    "... "save America" - if Clinton or Trump gets into the White House, NOTHING will save America! ..."
    "... "In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA" ..."
    "... ISIS was not reversed in Syria until Russia became involved, and they were in full decline within a month. Years of Obama's war against them and they expanded to holding 80% of Syria , and beyond. ..."
    www.theguardian.com

    greven -> truebluetah 9 Jun 2016 04:53

    There is a difference isn't it? The Clintons are career politicians who have amassed a bigger fortune than Trump (and they are not the only ones that's become wealthy representing corporations) Bernie has amassed a few hundred thousand from a life in politics representing the voters.

    SoxmisUK -> Shelfunit 9 Jun 2016 04:50

    Compared to all the vile insults, conspiracy theory wailing and holy-than-thou posts by Sanders supporters over the last few months it's nothing

    Let me amend that for you: "Compared to all the vile insults, conspiracy theory wailing and holy-than-thou posts by Clinton's supporters over the last few months it's nothing.."

    There. Fixed.

    Not true in either case, as one has been as bad as the other, but good to see you sticking your British oar in where it's clearly not wanted. You shit-stir enough for the Tories here in the UK.


    WhigInterpretation 9 Jun 2016 04:50

    "Defiant leftwinger" is a bit rich. "Defiant leftwinger" only in relation to an artificially skewed spectrum represented by Fox News, Casino Trump, and a corporate funded neoliberal nominee toeing a rightwing foreign policy line.

    Bernie Sanders is a social democrat in the tradition of FDR whose policies are centrist in relation to other industrialised nations.

    He has focused on four planks he wants in the Democratic Party platform: the creation of an economy that works for all citizens, breaking up the five "too-big-to-fail" banks, a carbon tax to address climate change, and a single-payer healthcare system.

    Victorious1 -> Herr_Settembrini 9 Jun 2016 04:50

    Sorry, but you cannot compare Ron Paul to Sanders and say they have little to show. One ran for many years and despite his sincerity and common sense came nowhere being nominated at any point in time and the other started a political revolution in his first run as nominee, drawing tens of thousands in crowds, more individual contributions than ever before and incredibly nearly won the nomination and probably would have done if he wasn't largely ignored by the media and the superdelegates weren't a bunch of establishment corrupt cronies.

    ungruntled -> killedbydrones 9 Jun 2016 04:47

    The election isnt over until the Party congress. In politics people often lie. A bunch of folk have said they will vote one way........but they may vote another(they may have been lying, or they may just change their minds.)

    When the dust settles, and a few more wobbly polls are applied, it may transpire Clinton has no chance against Trump. In which case Clinton could easily be shown the VP's seat or...........

    Seeing as there is little difference between Dems and Repubs, they might put the top heads of each party together in a room and dream up some other staretegy to screw over the American people. Clinton might get arrested. The possibilities are pretty endless

    But the next POTUS is yet to be chosen
    And Bernie is fighting on, just because he can. He isnt playing the stupid "I will bow out gracefully to keep the party together" bollocks because the party needs to be blown apart. Democracy in the USA is a joke.
    Its all about who can buy the power, and Clinton and Trump are living proof of that fact.
    Sanders sees that as corrupt and unnaceptable to the American people, (so do I) and anything he can do to upset the apple cart/gravy train, is fine with me

    Ummmmm -> Suckspencil 9 Jun 2016 04:41

    I agree with a fair amount of what you're saying, but with all due respect, you're missing the point, which is that what Sanders is proposing is eminently affordable for any developed nation. The Czech Republic, Greece, Norway, Sweden and Estonia, among others, do, I believe, provide free higher education. If Estonia, why not the US?

    As things stand, most of Europe still has a healthcare system free at the point of delivery. Europe has more stringent climate legislation than the US. That's one of the reasons that TTIP poses such a threat.

    And you'll find that the Callaghan government was ahead of the Thatcher government that followed it in retreating from post WWII social democracy: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/sterling-devalued-imf-loan.htm

    fedback 9 Jun 2016 04:37

    Of course Bernie needs to stay. Hillary is under FBI investigation. If she ends up in an orange pantsuit in the big house Bernie will look very stupid and basically has thrown out over 200 mio. dollars which is the amount he has spent on his campaign so far. Given to him by his supporters. It is his duty to them to stay in.

    ID6512838 -> Herr_Settembrini 9 Jun 2016 04:35

    corporations will just do business elsewhere (especially in emergent markets like India and China). The result will be a relative decline in living standards for the lower and middle classes in the U.S. (good bye cheap kitchen appliances, cellular phones, and big screen tvs) and a further erosion in jobs.

    Corporations do business where the consumers. The USA is going to be a consumer society for many more years - they have been trained over many years to consume more and more.

    HNS1684 9 Jun 2016 04:30

    As I said before: the very fact that Clinton has only "won" VERY NARROWLY in New Mexico, Nevada, South Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts and probably other states as well, the fact Bernie got nearly half the votes in these states, means that there is STILL at least some hope left for Bernie Sanders.

    ArchibaldLeach 9 Jun 2016 04:30

    Sanders campaign did a lot to move Hilary to the left but it's not enough. He needs to start moving from his campaign to building a grassroots liberal activist movement. (Not just supporting people who endorsed him). My hope is that the next Democratic nominee will be more liberal. Sanders showed us that liberalism is alive and well and he brought crucial issues to the debate that were being ignored.

    snakeatzoes kirby1 9 Jun 2016 04:30

    " the Guardian are stuck in the old, failed new Labour/Lib Dem politics and do everything to undermine him.( Corbyn )"

    The latest, yesterday, in the middle of the Euro debate, was an astonishing attack by Blair, who clearly is about to" have his collar felt " over Iraq .

    aaronpeacock 9 Jun 2016 04:30

    what a load... it's a bitter pill and no one wants to eat it.

    Clinton supporters have done little to nothing in the way of policy/platform inclusion, and the general election means she will pivot to the right shortly, where she always lived anyway.

    It's going to take yet another cycle of right-wing idiocy, it seems, before the Democrats will realize that pushing a strong left/liberal candidate is what's required for electoral success. Get ready for a President Trump.

    Lagasse 9 Jun 2016 04:29

    Right now the delegate count stands at 2,178 to 1,810. Neither can get enough in the final primary to clinch the nomination. It has to go to the convention for a decision, therefore. Either candidate could be given the nomination at the convention, per DNC rules.

    The Clinton camp is attempting to pressure Sanders to force him out before the convention to make sure that doesn't happen. The Sanders camp is just following the rules and playing fairly.

    SoxmisUK -> Deborah Holloway 9 Jun 2016 04:27

    That's twice you've posted that. Trolling for some reason? The only reason Bernie lost was that Clinton got a massive head start from the DLC as part of the institution and she was married to a former president.

    If Sanders had another 3 months (Possibly much less..) he'd have wiped the floor with her and re-written politics in the USA. You can crow all you wish now, but the truth is come the next time around there will be a popular vote that stands firmly on the foundations Sanders has (Quite remarkably..) built.

    Suckspencil Ummmmm 9 Jun 2016 04:26

    what Sanders proposes is no more than bog-standard, post WWII social democracy - the sort of infrastructure that most of the rest of the developed world has enjoyed for the past seven decades

    Britain began its retreat from this post WWII social democracy in 1979, 37 years ago when Thatcher took over. The essentially neo-liberal agenda has been actively pursued by every government since then - Thatcher-Major-Blair-Brown - and indeed has accelerated under Cameron.

    These are the issues which Sanders has campaigned on:

    getting big money out of politics, his plan to make public colleges and universities tuition-free, combating climate change and ensuring universal healthcare,"

    I wonder if Ummmmm could remind me which of those we still have in the UK. The struggle must continue here as well, I think. I wouldn't mind a bit of Sanders' "crazed pipe dream".

    Ziontrain -> anemag 9 Jun 2016 04:24

    There is nothing to indicate that the average american will be worse off with Trump in office as opposed to Clinton. That's how far to the right her actual policies are. Not the crap she claims, but the stuff she has been doing for the past 20 years.

    Spare us the scaremongering. If you wanted to vote for a republican, why would you do so under the "Democratic party" banner?

    p0winc -> Ummmmm 9 Jun 2016 04:22

    Completely agree. What he wants to implement is what the rest of us take as ordinary and for granted. 643,000 People in the states went bankrupt from Medical bills last year. He has however started something unique in the states, showing it's possible to fund and at times out fund the political establishment from individual small donations and not have to compromise on policies.

    Bookseeker -> snakeatzoes 9 Jun 2016 04:22

    'La Lucha Continua' was also a slogan used by the CNT on its 100th anniversary.

    JayJ66 -> R. Ben Madison 9 Jun 2016 04:21

    People wonder why there is such animosity towards Americans. You support a woman for president whilst disregarding her most vile traits as a joke? Clinton is a real danger towards the Middle East and that is partly because of her warmongering and absolute support for Israel, wrong or right. There are girls in Sirte, Libya currently being used as sex slaves by ISIS who may think your not so funny.

    kirby1 9 Jun 2016 04:20

    "He tapped into deeply held sentiments about a rigged economy and a broken political system, and built a mass movement of people who believe we can do better and demand solutions that match the scale of the crises." Corbyn has the same agenda in the UK and given the internecine struggle in the Tory Party has an even better chance of winning in 2020. Pity that progressive newspapers like the Guardian are stuck in the old, failed new Labour/Lib Dem politics and do everything to undermine him.

    chrisdix15 9 Jun 2016 04:18

    Trump and Clinton are a double headed coin. I would hope Sanders keeps himself away from either but ensures his supporters vote for neither - don't join the Corrupters Bernie, but stay where you are and keep the struggle going within Congress to show that both Trump and Clinton mean and do the same things. Only doing this will ensure people see a real alternative to the strait-jacket the Democrat/Republican parties stand for. The struggle has only just begun.


    ryanpatrick9192 -> fedback 9 Jun 2016 04:39

    If Hillary is indicted then that does not make Bernie the nominee by default. The superdelegates can still back Clinton and let her pick a replacement they approve of. Why would they choose Bernie? He doesnt have enouh support to win a general election. Trunp got more votes in the primary than Bernie for crying out loud.

    Suckspencil -> Shotcricket 9 Jun 2016 04:35

    How could you, even in jest, suggest such a thing possible? We in the West, are blessed to be led by fearless god-fearing moderates who believe in justice, peace, equality and the rule of law. Shame on you!

    Suckspencil -> Cleggatemyhamster 9 Jun 2016 04:31

    And, who knows, elsewhere could possibly prove better - your guess is as good as mine. Clinton is neo-liberal establishment through-and-through. The darling of the global capitalist corporations.


    Suckspencil -> twiglette 9 Jun 2016 04:30

    Yes, what is wrong with the idiots? Why don't they just lie on their backs and surrender to the neo-liberalist elite?

    BruceRobbie 9 Jun 2016 04:15

    Despite this dreadful situation one thing remains, Sanders and Trump supporters simply do not TRUST Clinton to deliver on her promises and she needs them to trust her if she is to get people go out and to vote for her. Voting requires effort for many people, and if they don't believe, they will simply stay at home on Election Day. In which case Clinton will lose, because a majority of Americans actually don't like her.

    She is also perceived by a large numbers of Americans as little more than a Manager of the American nation; the leaders, the CEOs of America, sit in board rooms of corporate America waiting for their "manager" to deliver on their investment in her campaign.

    Due to her untrustworthiness and serpentine character, Sanders has wisely shifted his efforts to Congress and the Senate, so that Clinton if elected, is held to account for electoral promises, Clinton is adept at avoiding difficult situation, emails and Goldman Speeches, and will try to wriggle out of any commitment if her leaders deem it necessary. She and the DNC have fought a disgraceful, campaign of deceit, corrupt electoral practise and voter suppression. So when she spouts her Democratic rhetoric in the coming months, her words will ring hollow as a drum. Good luck America, I fear you're going to need it as your choice of leader this time around truly is the lesser of two evils.

    LouisianaAlba 9 Jun 2016 04:13

    The story foisted upon us so far in this electoral cycle is a reasonably but not very complicated narrative - a few players strutting, ranting and pouting about the country in a predictable plot. In keeping with this predictability let's keep any analysis simple - fairytale level. Let's talk about monsters.

    Just a few years ago Americans prised themselves from an unelected monster, G. W. Bush - he and his monster crowd being the key architects/facilitators of the current economic woes and mayhem in the middle east. That's pretty well indisputable. People can try to dispute it but they are flat out wrong and they know it.

    So given that, why would America now want to place another monster in power?

    Another age of the political monster is looming. Two loom over the world in the coming battle, with a third in the wings by marriage who wants another shot at power as well, the man who signed away the last threads of Glass Steagall's legal powers.

    What is it with Americans and their love affair with these political monsters? Can't Americans choose a good and decent human being who cares for the people and the country. A person who doesn't treat the country and the world as fools.

    Even on the money front, it can be so simple, as economists often say - a confident happy people can lead to economic prosperity. It won't guarantee it I concede and I won't trade arguments on government or no government intervention, but a happy people is a better bet for a good economy than the opposite. Keeping it all at the fairytale level of course. Treating people well leads them to be disposed, motivated towards treating others well. Most times. Okay then there is psychopathology and the narrative gets complicated.

    But the simple truth is - the simple story has been hijacked because a simple story is too easily managed and a country easily managed is not so easily fooled. And if you can't fool a country and the world, it is not so easy to get away with complicated crimes. Which is the usual way a monster gets away with them or gets to be rich, complicating things so much we aren't aware fast enough to stop any of it. Then after we know we are so beaten down and weakened we're simply not strong or ready enough to fix blame where it belongs.

    Funny, cancer works this way on the human organism confusing the immune system so much that the body thinks a tumour is okay, a genuine part of the body. Until it's too late.

    NickDaGeek 9 Jun 2016 04:13

    So the American presidential race is down to a contest between the supporter of Oligarchy (Clinton) and the Oligarch (Trump). Of course this would never lead you to believe that American politics serves only the Oligarchy and funds only their candidates.

    God help us if Trump wins and the idiots in Whitehall sign up to TTIP. If that happens Brexit will swap Brussels for Washington and we will still be a vassal state of a huge power block run by tax avoiding globalist monopoly capitalists.

    Lagasse -> MrBrownley 9 Jun 2016 04:13

    the large majority who didn't vote for him

    Where did that happen? Democratic primary turnout has been around 11%. So far she's got about 6% of Dem voters, meaning that around 94% of registered Dems that could have voted for her, didn't.

    Dems are only about 29% of registered voters, btw, so that is 6% of 29% of voters backing her right now. Yep. Trump has a good chance of winning against that - a write-in campaign for a soggy loaf of bread has a good chance of winning against that.

    She polls terribly with the largest group of registered voters: Independent (however Sanders does quite well).

    Meanwhile, the GOP has had higher primary turnouts. More votes were cast in their primaries even though there are fewer registered Rep voters.

    GOP voters are fired up while Dem voters aren't fired up to vote for an unpopular, DNC-annointed candidate - that's a recipe for losing, ask Martha Coakley.

    Clinton and her supporters better up their games and quick.


    Shotcricket -> pucksfriend 9 Jun 2016 04:10

    You really don't get what created Trump's opportunity do you, its the same that has seen a new options becoming a political force throughout Europe, its ever & constant growth of disenchantment with the Clinton's, Cameron's & the rest of the political establishment.......sadly the US people need Sanders far more than he needs them of so it would seem.

    Clinton is the old way, Sanders is the new way...the irony of that should not be lost on anyone.


    SonOfFredTheBadman 9 Jun 2016 04:10

    It is no longer "God Bless America". It's "God Help America". With the choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Bill (Mr. Zippy) Clinton is already interviewing the interns and glad that he can now get Cuban cigars. From President to "First Man". Remember " I did not have sexual relations with this woman." Just a Blow Job.

    ga gamba 9 Jun 2016 04:09

    Shrewd move by Sanders, I think. Many believe that Clinton will veer sharply to the right when she nominated and campaigns for the general election. Withholding an endorsement until late October keeps her honest; if she backtracks on her "progressive" promises made during the primaries Sanders can endorse Jill Stein. In a sense, Sanders is the conscience Clinton doesn't possess.

    He said it was a revolution, so Clinton and her supporters shouldn't be surprised that he's using revolutionary tactics.

    Oudeis1 -> fahkingobserving 9 Jun 2016 04:09

    I thank you -primarily for you actually typing-out your rationale. Mere 'carping' is the more common response to my posts, thanks again - for processing and expounding. And yes, I know enough of American Football to appreciate your analogy.

    On the Green invitation to Sanders: I have been aware of this for some time. I'm sure that it is sincere, I'm also certain that it was a little too soon. Sanders does indeed know much about US Politics, and his conduct throughout this contest has been consistent enough for most observers to discern a clear pattern:

    -His ideas are more important to him that his personal success.

    -His 'read' on the electoral niceties, possibilities, probabilities and 'desirabilities' is sagacious.

    -His initiation of his campaign by way of the Democrat Party is entirely logical.

    -A firm commitment from the DNC & HRC on some of his more important policy-planks would allow him to conclude that his job was (well) done. And to then advise his supporters to get behind the renewed and revitalized HRC ticket.

    Personally, inline with my own take on these things, Senator Sanders will not concede without (firm & meaningful) concessions. Should no such concessions be forthcoming...

    He may then - if this is how things pan out, turn to his supporters for their opinion, or 'knowing' full well there likely response, turn directly to the Greens and add Jill Stein to his then Independent ticket, and run as a third option.
    These last two options represent at least as much chance of the defeat of Trump, and very likely more chance of doing that, than his caving-in (selling his soul) to the DNC.
    -Yes, I am aware that Sanders has firmly denied that he has any wish at all to run as a third option - this stance is both inline with his desire to see the Democrat Party turn away from the neoliberal/Republican-lite present and his overall objective of getting his policies promoted in November.
    However: Nobody can promote the fundamentals of US Democracy and then deny them.

    MajorRoadRage -> abdul maulud 9 Jun 2016 04:05

    I would rather see Trump in office and see Hillary's supporters endure the same punishment as if we had all voted for her to begin with. Hillary is in it for herself and her corporate sponsors. So if I'm gonna be screwed, so will Hillary supporters, even with mountains of evidence available that she is NOT the candidate to run for presidency people still smile and nod their heads with complacency. Wake up and smell the corruption.

    Bitty31985 -> powellscribe 9 Jun 2016 04:08

    As I said; if you want some one to blame , blame the media and the DNC. I am never wasting my vote on the lesser of two evils ever again. You WILL never ever convince me to do otherwise. I vote for who I BELIEVE IN. Good luck trying to guilt people into supporting that sociopath.

    wiseowler 9 Jun 2016 04:06

    If Sanders can get people who support his core radical progressive changes onto key Democratic committees and positions of power, plus get support at the convention for these policies then he may be bale to set in train a transformation of the Democratic Party and the possibility of a real change candidate winning the next election.

    However they must take a leaf out of the Tea Party's book and start getting their candidates elected as State and congress candidates. There is no point in having a radical president and a reactionary congress.

    If he can achieve this then maybe his momentum can help transform the Clinton campaign - which is in sore need of some radical and youthful energy if she is to defeat Trump

    artvandalay316 -> abdul maulud 9 Jun 2016 04:01

    No, those who propped up the corrupt Hitlery, knowing full-well that the system is rigged and the super delegates are bought and paid for, are to blame. Spineless cowards who would rather tow the establishment line and never see any real change than vote for something a bit different for once. The most amusing thing is, the Republicans have more of a spine than the Hitlery voters, because they voted for who they actually wanted, not who they were told to.

    Shotcricket 9 Jun 2016 03:57

    "Sanders will discuss a wide range of issues, including getting big money out of politics, his plan to make public colleges and universities tuition-free, combating climate change and ensuring universal healthcare"

    Almost The Guardian mantra of many a year

    And yet The Guardian has been pro Clinton throughout the nomination campaign.....& very negative toward Sanders, just what does The Guardian believe in, other than the longevity of the political establishment ?


    SilverTui 9 Jun 2016 03:45

    L.A. County Supervisors Demand Answers Day After CBS2 Investigation Uncovers Deceased Voters Casting Ballots

    so this is how Clinton won California - zombies

    http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2016/05/24/l-a-county-board-of-supervisors-demand-answers-day-after-cbs2-investigation-uncovers-deceased-voters-casting-ballots/


    Virginia Fast -> gaiayceleste 9 Jun 2016 03:29

    How can people believe their vote counts when it is opposed by endless money, lies and manipulation ? For example, how could the media make free tuition, last signed into law, by Abe Lincoln and existing in California until a couple of decades ago, seem strange ? And it's normal in all other countries as a matter of course. I cannot believe you can have that debt at such a young age and manage. It seems the last economic conflict exploited by capitalism is conflict--which should not be--is between old people and young people. Young people more and more are excluded from that American economic leveler, education.


    blackerdog -> StephenChin 9 Jun 2016 03:20

    The super delegates are all full paid up members of the establishment that's why Clinton get their vote.
    She won't win against Tump, she has blood on her hands legal problems and can't control her own house never mind the lives of hundreds of millions.
    Trump is a buffoon but he hasn't been bought. Middle America won't vote for her.


    Flugler -> Virginia Fast 9 Jun 2016 03:18

    Bill Clinton stripped the social security fund dry and used it to balance the budgets. Americans retiring in the near future are screwed. Cheers bill.


    Virginia Fast -> Flugler 9 Jun 2016 03:14

    With Clinton putting Hubby in charge of financial affairs, better get ready to bail out the banks and lose whatever you managed to keep last time. If only the fools who voted for them suffered --

    It's a nightmare of endless war and homeless filling th streets. More of the same forever and ever.......the future as igtmare


    Mynameistoocommon -> turn1eft 9 Jun 2016 02:50

    If this were true the FBI should get the hell on with it and not play political games. It is certainly not any of their concern whether Clinton could be pardoned by Obama (which would surely kill her campaign in any event). Since she is innocent until proven guilty, the suspicion that the investigation places over her is itself damaging. If it could ever be proven that the FBI had deliberately taken their time in order to prolong the doubt, before clearing her, that would be a very serious allegation. I can't really see why they would bother though.


    JK1875 9 Jun 2016 02:50

    Bernie is an Independent, he should run as one. F*ck Clinton and f*ck the DNC.

    robinvp11 -> Highgatecemetry 9 Jun 2016 02:47

    I lived in the US for twelve years. Bernie Sanders is not a 'socialist;' in the UK, he'd be a Tory - not entirely sure where. Maybe liberal Tory but on a lot of things, he'd be to the right ie his views on guns (yes, he's pro-limited control but he buys into the NRA idea that it's 'mental health' issue).

    trow 9 Jun 2016 02:46

    Clinton was not elected she was appointed by so called super delegates .The election process was exposed as a farce .


    turn1eft 9 Jun 2016 02:44

    Sanders is only hanging on because the FBI have said they will prosecute Hillary on treason and racketeering.

    Which sound strange to our ears. But racketeering was revived during the 1920s and treason during the Cold War.

    Clintons email server didnt just include top secret documents illegally it also included information about illegal donations from foreign backers.

    I think the FBI are undecided whether to press charges now - with a high chance Obama will pardon her - or press charges after the election in November when she will be spending the rest of her life dealing with this case.

    ShaneFromMelbourne saddam 9 Jun 2016 02:43

    Under Obama's watch:
    Too big to fail banks....they're even BIGGER
    1.5 Quadrillion dollar derivatives market that scares the shit out of even the hedge funds.
    Dodd-Frank Act that has loopholes you could drive a truck through.
    Unemployment still out of the park (as if anyone believes the BS statistic of 4.9%)
    The US economy is still so shit the the Fed can't increase interest rates (that's right, there will be no interest rate hike this year or the next)
    8 years hasn't improved much.....

    qelt17 -> Aquarius9 9 Jun 2016 02:38

    The 67-year-old Democratic front-runner has been "frequently plagued" by "blinding headaches" and a series of strokes over the course of the campaign which have left her second-guessing her chances of winning in 2016, says the upcoming book "Unlikeable - The Problem with Hillary."
    http://nypost.com/2015/09/22/hillary-is-dealing-with-mounting-health-issues-new-book-claims/

    FrankLeeSpeaking -> Mea Mea 9 Jun 2016 02:26

    You must be a Killkary feminist. Sanders has deep rooted integrity and a fire to make the US a better place, unlike Killary ready to make the next killing, physically and financially speaking.

    SilverTui 9 Jun 2016 02:15

    A well funded and organised exit poll, which included mail in ballots, had a deficit of 16 percent from the reported results in California.

    A deficit of 2 percent is sufficient to trigger an official investigation in Denmark.

    Just saying.

    https://public.tableau.com/profile/paulmitche11#!/vizhome/CapitolWeeklyDemPresidentialPrimaryAVExitPoll/USDEMPRIM

    Also millions of California independents were given "placebo" affidavit ballots, that are not counted.

    passtherockplease -> davidlen 9 Jun 2016 02:14

    I believe we are already there. I think it will be very close but Trump will win -- republican tend to vote for their 'side' no matter whom it is. Those of us on the left seem to like purity, more than getting power to get things done. It is why These people only come out at Presidential elections forgetting there are three branches to governing in the US, Check out off year voting patterns GOP vote numbers stay firm. Democrats less so it is why there is no Democratic control senate and house and the house, well that is lost at least until the next census.

    Go look at things like Young Turks and the like. They really think Clinton is worse than Trump.

    gwynnechris -> Dennis25 9 Jun 2016 02:13

    Lessor 'evilism' argument don't work. Trump may have different style, but politically/economically he's similar to Clinton. (Technically he's not a Fascist. He does not have bullyboys physically attacking left-wing/Trade Union meetings. eg Germany 1930's). I guess many people in USA want something different to Corporate dominance; which I believe will require a Labour Party formed from the Trade Unions. So Trump gets elected. Big deal. People will soon see their mistake and change. Politics has moved beyond the illusionary middle-ground as the election of Jeremy Corbyn indicates.


    queequeg7 9 Jun 2016 01:52

    The Democrat Party is controlled by the Right and the the representatives at [almost] all levels appear untouchable. The key to the future, not just for Sanders but for the Left he has mobilised, will be in opening up the Party to democracy and accountability.

    In much the same way as Corbyn's election must make Labour MPs and Councillors more accountable to the Party membership, so Sanders' campaign must now find a way of challenging both the individuals and the process.


    eastbayradical 9 Jun 2016 01:51

    Here some wondrous policies and initiative enacted or supported by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama during their presidencies, almost all of which Hillary Clinton supports:

    --Deregulation of telecom and finance
    --The Omnibus Crime Bill
    --The sanctions regime against Iraq (which killed 500,000 Iraqi children)
    --NAFTA
    --CAFTA
    --TPP
    --Fracking
    --The objectively-racist death penalty
    --Don't Ask, Don't Tell
    --The Defense of Marriage Act
    --Historic levels of repression against whistle-blowers
    --Preservation of Bush-era tax cuts on the rich
    --Expansion of NSA spying
    --Years of foot-dragging on climate change
    --Support for Israeli atrocities
    --Support for the right-wing coup in Honduras
    --Support for fraudulent election in Haiti
    --Support for the Saudi dictatorship
    --Support for a 31 cents/hour minimum wage (and against attempts to raise it)
    --Arctic Drilling
    --$1 trillion 20 year modernization of nuclear weapons arsenal
    --Historically high numbers of deportations
    --Drone missile strikes that kill large numbers of civilian an inflame anti-US hatred
    --Health care reform that fortifies the power of the insurance cartel
    --The bail-out of Wall Street


    eastbayradical -> MikaelRogers 9 Jun 2016 01:48

    Mikael supports the candidate that has backed the destruction of welfare, the private prison industry, the objectively-racist death penalty, fortification of the police state, deregulation of investment banks, NAFTA, the Iraq War, the bombing of Libya, the right-wing coup in Honduras, Israel's starvation blockade and blitzkrieg of Gaza, and the fight against raising the minimum wage in Haiti from 30 cents/hour to 60 cents/hour--all policies from which non-white people hav disproportionately suffered--yet every chance she gets, Mikael accuses the Sanders' campaign and supporters of being the racists.


    Nietzschestache 9 Jun 2016 01:37

    It is truly depressing that the democrats had the chance to put a decent trustworthy person in the White House but instead opted for Clinton, who represents the interests of Wall Street and the Party of Perpetual War. By opting for her they have handed the keys to the repulsive Trump.

    Guest Oo -> saddam 9 Jun 2016 01:30

    If Bernie took in all the BIG MONEY like the corrupt politicians, he would accomplished a lot more for the oligarchy and corporations and forget the people. He would also be a multi-millionaire by now.

    Bernie chose the route to have a government for the PEOPLE and that does not work anymore. Majority of the corrupt Democrat voters chose a GOVERNMENT FOR THE CORPORATIONS by voting for Hillary.

    johnnyhacket NigelRG 9 Jun 2016 01:29

    The lesser of two evils is an argument that holds no water.
    Read this for a different perspective I do not agree with it all but it will make a change from all the Trump is evil you must vote HRC stuff that is coming our way .
    http:// https://off-guardian.org/2016/06/06/the-myth-of-the-spoiler-why-the-machine-elites-fear-democracy/www .

    eastbayradical HilltopRide 9 Jun 2016 01:25

    For decades tens of millions of Americans who are left politically on major issues (whether they identify as "left-wing" or not) have voted for politicians who have carried water for Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the national security apparatus--often more effectively than the Republicans they depict themselves as the progressive alternative to.

    Every four years we're told "yes, X Democrat is a corporate-backed, warmongering stooge, but look at how horrible Y Republican is! If you don't vote for the Democrat you're voting for the Republican!" It's the same scare tactics year after year after year--and year after year the political center of gravity shifts further to the right. This is the anatomy of our demise.

    Finally, millions that have for years dutifully voted for the corporate, warmongering pseudo-progressive stooge with the (D) next to his name are waking up and saying to the Democrats: Try to win without out us you corporate scum!

    joeblow9999 -> saddam 9 Jun 2016 01:16

    Hilly's accomplishments?

    Iraq War
    Setting the stage for ISIS
    Kicking off the next Cold War

    She is a sham.

    Jill McLean 9 Jun 2016 01:15

    What I don't get is everyone's surprise. Just one example: A $29 billion deal with Saudi Arabia goes down, and the Clinton Foundation gets a $10 mil contribution. What kind of payback could Bernie get for petitioning for 'equal rights'? Come one, people. Money buys power - always has; always will. Read 'Clinton Ca$h'. Or just read something besides MSM.

    duncandunnit 9 Jun 2016 01:03

    Hillary Clinton is a warmongering she devil, that will only ever work with problems rather than solutions. She will be very happy for the usa to continue selling billions of dollars of weapons to wasabi jihadists at saudi instruction (which caused the European refugee crisis), she will continue the usa track record of the usa sticking in puppet presidentas into countries denying them democracy. She will continue the usa using propaganda as a weapon.

    sammy3110 9 Jun 2016 00:48

    After Hillary's coronation, I'll change my registration from D to I, and I hope others will consider doing the same. I'm not leaving the D Party, the D Party has left me.

    ynnej1964 -> garth25 9 Jun 2016 00:42

    I have to wonder. Among my pro-Clinton friends the dominant arguments were a) her 'qualification' b) it's time for a woman c) Bernie is less qualified, and so to chose him over hillary might indicate unconscious sexism.

    I'm not saying that there are not people who fully support her (and Obama's) IMF/World Bank/USAID/Clinton Foundation approach to international development and international trade, her center aisle approach to use of armed force, her (and Obama's) preference for private insurance based health reform, her approach to Haiti , but I don't think that is why my clinton friends supported her. I can't speak for all. But i'd say these are more things they would forgive her for, rather than their first choice on policy.

    daWOID -> eastbayradical 9 Jun 2016 00:36

    Sorry, friend, I happen to know a good deal about voter fraud in New York State, where I worked for a few decades as Inspector of Elections. Don't know much about California. So here's what I can contribute:

    a) In New York State at least, provisional ballots are exactly the joke you describe. All it takes is a poll worker who doesn't like your looks and they'll pretend they can't find you on the rolls and why don't you simply fill out a provisional ballot?

    b) And of course the provisional ballots never get counted, because to have your ballot counted you would have to go before a judge to determine whether or not you were rightly denied your vote.

    c) The amount of voter fraud and voter suppression perpetrated in the Democratic Primary this year has surpassed anything I've ever seen in my lifetime, excepting my work during the Civil Rights Era, where it was just as bad but considerably less sophisticated. So is it likely that the same applied in California? Well, duh...

    macktan894 9 Jun 2016 00:32

    These are crucial issues that most people have repeatedly bitched about over the years in these forums. It makes no sense to plunge kids into bankruptcy and lifelong debt with outrageous fees and interest rates who are tying to get an education. We have seniors whose social security checks are being garnished because they still owe on college loans. We have people who are afraid to see a doctor or go to an emergency room, even though they pay yearly escalating premiums, because they fear the debt it will trigger. Yet Elected Officials seem only able to act when it comes to Endless Wars and surveillance; no problem spending trillions on defense, just don't ask them to spend it on the American people lest they feel entitled.

    I'm hardly surprised that the Status Quo wants Bernie to just shut up and disappear. Who's lauding him for running a campaign financed by people who voted for him, not by corporations and billionaires? And I'll continue to donate to him because he is the people's lobbyist. Go, Bernie!

    GigabitG 9 Jun 2016 00:31

    So is the Guardian arguing that Clinton fought a fair campaign? Really? Try a little harder please, you know full well that Clinton hobbled Sanders at every step. Throughout this campaign the Guardian has chosen to ignore all the reports of widespread disenfranchisement and polling irregularities that prevented millions of Sanders supporters from voting and instead lazily point to the inevitability of Clinton. Depressing news from a complicit Guardian.

    RogersRoy ChrisD58 9 Jun 2016 00:29

    Sad to see Sanders ego and self delusion providing even more opportunity for the monster that is Trump

    Remember!, it wasn't all sweetness and light under warmonger Hillary. C.

    The Republican & Democrat DNA is within 1% of each other. These parties have loads of Corporate corrupt White House monsters.

    When our governments; the White House and their British Parliamentary lackeys use our taxes to pay their terrorists to overthrow legitimate sovereign countries and their elected leaders and organise assassinations then I say; it's high time this incompetent maverick nonsense stopped!!.

    I Refuse To Pay These Illegal Bills.

    eastbayradical 9 Jun 2016 00:07

    Both my wife and I registered as Democrats in California in the last month.

    My wife received a ballot in the mail but she was still listed as a Green. When she went to the precinct to vote she was given a provisional ballot that allowed her to vote in the Democratic primary. I just asked her if her name was on the voter rolls and she said she doesn't know, that the precinct workers "didn't know what they were doing, they just gave me a provisional ballot."

    Unlike my wife I did receive confirmation that I had been registered as a Democrat and I received a ballot with the Democratic primary choices on it. Despite getting the ballot in the mail I wanted to vote at the precinct. I found when I got to the precinct that my name wasn't listed on voter rolls. The precinct worker recommended that I vote by provisional ballot, which I didn't like the idea of. I decided to fill out my ballot at the precinct and I was told to put it into a blue bag with a slot on the top. The precinct worker assured me that my ballot would be counted.

    Journalist Greg Palast reports that provisional ballots, like the one my wife voted with, are essentially "placebo ballots"--that a very large percentage of them are never counted. He additionally reports that there are hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots in California that have yet to be counted. There is every reason to believe that provisional ballots, since they're given to newly-registered voters, were disproportionately given to Sanders' voters like my wife. Palast also reports that very large numbers of voters found that there names were not on voting rolls when they went to vote. It would seem that this would also disproportionately affect newly-registered voters.

    On top of all this, there are many thousands of ballots that were sent on Monday and Tuesday that have yet to be counted.

    Does anyone have any thoughts on this matter? Is Greg Palast wrong about provisional ballots? Are all the votes going to be counted? I'm happy to hear the thoughts of people who think that Palast is full of shit, so long as they're actually engaging in thinking.

    Janosik53 -> sandi78 8 Jun 2016 23:55

    Published May 11, 2016

    Hillary Clinton for months has downplayed the FBI investigation into her private email server and practices as a mere "security inquiry."

    But when asked Wednesday about Clinton's characterization of the bureau's probe, FBI Director James Comey said he doesn't know what "security inquiry" means -- adding, "We're conducting an investigation. That's what we do."

    Hillary Clinton is a pathological liar.

    iammaynard -> drpage1 8 Jun 2016 23:38

    Your leaders, Clinton and Obama created ISIS

    I wish I had the middle east figured out as well as you got it. If you understand the causes so clearly, when will you be bringing your solutions? Those must obviously as clear to you, yes?


    Carenshare -> Annie Rainier 8 Jun 2016 23:31

    Re: Your points.....

    "bags" - Both Clintons drag around more baggage than American Airlines
    "old man" - Sanders isn't much older than Clinton
    "God" - There is no God
    "save America" - if Clinton or Trump gets into the White House, NOTHING will save America!

    But 'Good Luck' anyways!

    Girl 8 Jun 2016 23:27

    Super delegates don't count until the convention... The Guardian has aided the fruad and been a champion for the DNC...Hillary is goin' down, either the e mails, the clinton foundation, or Trump, she is done...

    drpage1 -> nevesone 8 Jun 2016 23:19

    Your leaders, Clinton and Obama created ISIS. Here is a clue:

    http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-isis-20160327-story.html

    "In Syria, militias armed by the Pentagon fight those armed by the CIA"

    "...a string of embarrassing setbacks which included recruits being ambushed and handing over much of their U.S.-issued ammunition and trucks to an Al Qaeda affiliate."

    ISIS was not reversed in Syria until Russia became involved, and they were in full decline within a month. Years of Obama's war against them and they expanded to holding 80% of Syria , and beyond.

    DesertPear -> Jared Hall 8 Jun 2016 23:06

    The US Military-Industrial Complex is possibly the largest user of fossil fuels in the world and the information is not transparent nor available. We absolutely must turn away from war as a solution if we are to slow climate change! And the only way to change the military is to get money out of politics.

    mbidding -> notmurdoch 8 Jun 2016 21:34

    Student financial aid is not extremely generous in the US and generally does not cover the full cost of tuition at modestly priced state schools, let alone books. Loans, of course, are available, but financial aid is nothing like it was before Reagan gutted federal financial aid in the eighties and the states started divesting from their public universities at the same time.

    [Mar 20, 2019] Despicable Max Boot does not even have courage to admit his Iraq war warmongering crimes, which are crimes against humanity if we use Nuremberg statute

    Intellectually Max Boot is a loud mouth nothing. I wonder how he managed to graduate from a prestigious university. he might be able to work as copywriters, but not above that.
    Neocon didn't "get it wrong." They understood that this is wrong. It was all about money for MIC which as lobbyists of MIC is their first priority. That's why they lied the American people into wars. They are war criminals. They should be tried for war crimes.
    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Kurt Gayle February 17, 2019 at 9:34 am

    Tom Gorman (Feb 15, 8:36 am)–as evidence that Max Boot "has recanted his support of the Iraq War"–quoted two sentences from Boot's 2018 book. Two sentences earlier in the same book Boot wrote:

    "In truth the decision to go to war had been made by President George W. Bush, in consultation with colleagues such as Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Don Rumsfeld, none of whom was remotely a 'neocon.'

    Those of us who supported the invasion were, as one of my friends said, like hapless passengers who got into a vehicle with a drunk driver and could not escape as the car careened across the center divider."

    [Mar 20, 2019] Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi

    Mar 20, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Jandy Thomas , 1 week ago

    Ms. Bash is the personification of what's wrong with our country. Tulsi was extremely patient with her. Tulsi Gabbard 2020

    ChainMail , 1 week ago (edited)

    i am impressed how she handles baited questions

    softminimal1 , 1 week ago

    She can serve in the army and still be anti interventionist because our military is supposed to be a defense force not an offense force. You can be willing to fight to protect your country without wanting to go running round the world creating conflict for oil and regime change.

    Philip Murphy , 1 week ago

    This is how bad the Dems are: 12 are running, and the only one with military service is the peace candidate, I will change my party to vote for her.

    Joel Alvarado , 1 week ago

    Dana Bash is another foot soldier for corporate elitists who want less for the American people.

    edfou5 , 1 week ago

    'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins. Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi.

    [Mar 20, 2019] Neoliberal MSM all invte Tuslsi to ask her if whe was Asssad girlfriend. What a despible bootomfeeders

    Notable quotes:
    "... The american entitlement, as if it is your buisness what happens in other countries to the point that you have a right to invade, kill, and oppress their citizens is disgusting. The U.S. sanctions are starving Venezeualans, as is the theft of billions of dollars by the wannabe puppet president. Sanders/Gabbard all the way. ..."
    Mar 20, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Errol Tumarae , 3 weeks ago

    Assad didn't gas his people it was the US backed moderate rebels you yanks are brainwashed

    Sharon Abreu , 3 weeks ago

    I hope Tulsi's message is getting through. We have become accustomed to a pro-war society. It's very concerning to me.

    Debbie Vretis , 3 weeks ago

    Why doesn't anyone say...Assad did not gas his own people...US backed rebels gassed the Syrian people. It's called manufactured consent. Sometimes I really hate the ignorance too many Americans choose.

    Simon Threlkeld , 3 weeks ago (edited)

    Megan is such a lying fake news propagandist. Yes Assad is a brutal dictator. However, the allegations of gassing his people are debunked fake news (her stating them as facts is fake news). There was no ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria before the US backed regime change war. Hundreds of thousands have been killed, millions displaced.

    Io inthenightsky , 3 weeks ago

    Her calm and poise in the face of these right wing hacks is impressive. The american entitlement, as if it is your buisness what happens in other countries to the point that you have a right to invade, kill, and oppress their citizens is disgusting. The U.S. sanctions are starving Venezeualans, as is the theft of billions of dollars by the wannabe puppet president. Sanders/Gabbard all the way.

    [Mar 20, 2019] Anti-semitism became a form of Neo-McCarthyim

    Notable quotes:
    "... George Galloway and Steve Topple of the Canary posted this video on the ongoing transatlantic attack campaign against the left wing, including Ilhan Omar, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Yellow Vests under the canard that they are anti-Semitic. This has now reached the level of the transnational RussiaGate hysteria to the point where it is obviously a coordinated smear by global corporate and political Establishment and ruling class people to muzzle the voice of a rising generation which is anti-capitalist and anti-war. ..."
    Mar 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Anne Jaclard , Mar 10, 2019 11:07:50 PM | link

    George Galloway and Steve Topple of the Canary posted this video on the ongoing transatlantic attack campaign against the left wing, including Ilhan Omar, Jeremy Corbyn, and the Yellow Vests under the canard that they are anti-Semitic. This has now reached the level of the transnational RussiaGate hysteria to the point where it is obviously a coordinated smear by global corporate and political Establishment and ruling class people to muzzle the voice of a rising generation which is anti-capitalist and anti-war.

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=SCpBsC8l5AU&feature=youtu.be


    @4 Adam Curtis is always great, I personally preferred The Trap and his short film on Nixon, but Hypernormalisation is arguably the most powerful and illustrative film of our times. It would be perfect if it weren't for the Russia segment.

    james , Mar 10, 2019 3:25:22 PM | link

    anti-semitism... regarding the 2 links on corbyn - both very good btw and worth checking out if you are interested. i find it disturbing how this topic can be pushed to the forefront 24/7, or ad nauseam... for me, the only purpose it seems to serve is to inadvertently turn people completely off everything to do with israel.. obviously the initial purpose here is to smear corbyn in the hopes that the mud sticks.. either way, the fact it is in the news constantly is a clear heads up the media is not neutral, or unbiased in it's selection of the topics put before people on a regular basis..

    arby , Mar 10, 2019 4:03:27 PM | link
    Galloway on Corbyn and anti semitism

    https://twitter.com/georgegalloway/status/1104094293789155328

    m , Mar 10, 2019 4:24:35 PM | link
    Speaking of anti-semitism, what do Dershowitz, Netanyahoo, Adelson and Trump all have in common? https://journal-neo.org/2019/03/10/the-netanyahu-problem/ Here's the thing (if any of the stated things in the article are true): Bibi's up for re-election on the 9th, and not looking too well, it seems. Elijah Magnier has sounded alarm bells, too: https://ejmagnier.com/2019/03/07/syria-preparing-its-missiles-for-the-next-battle-with-israel/ Things might be getting quite interesting in the next weeks. Oh, we can add Corbyn
    with the anti-semitism accusations against him and the Brexit mess into the mix, too, with the big vote on May's deal on Tuesday. It's small wonder why there is so much talk of anti-semitism these days, given the stellar cast of characters involved.
    bevin , Mar 10, 2019 5:23:38 PM | link
    The anti-semistism charges against Corbyn only seem potentially damaging because they occur in the echo chamber of a media system unanimously organised against him and the anti-imperialism that he supports.

    There are signs-one of which is the desperation of the media in making ever more extreme charges- that the campaign has had very little effect. Labour Party membership is increasing steadily, the largest political party in Europe gets larger every week, making the party financially independent (it relies much less now than it ever has in the past on Union financing) and organisationally stronger, as thousands of energetic, intelligent youthful people volunteer to work for it.

    Part of the antisemitism campaign has consisted of MPs going out on a limb and, with maximum publicity, resigning from the party, thus saving the members the messy job of expelling them or refusing to select them for re-election. At the same time local party organisations, long strongholds of municipal and regional bosses and Blairite politics, are being re-captured by the membership. Both Scotland and Wales, for example, are now led by anti-imperialist socialists. Two years ago they were centres of anti-Corbyn organising.

    These things are important because this is a demonstration of the way that a media system, by consistently promoting the interests of the 'elites' loses its credibility. Most of those who read and contribute to this site were once regular and comnplacent consumers of the MSM. We used if not to accept uncritically then at least to take as probably true the 'news' on public broadcasters and quality broadsheets. Now we realise that they are utterly unreliable retailers of propaganda.

    The good news is that this is becoming a majority attitude- we are on the way to a situation, already achieved in France I suspect, in which nothing from the state is taken on trust. And people are making up their own minds after comparing information, thru places such as this one, with each other.

    To get back to Corbyn, I find it hard to believe that he will not only win the next general election but in doing so lead a new sort of party, backed by a powerful and massive popular movement, full of committed, if often mild reforming, socialists into Parliament.
    If that happens it will only be fair if the Israeli government be asked to take a bow for 'going over the top' to such an extent that it is going to be difficult to convince anyone that Corbyn is other than spotlessly clear, politically and highly principled.

    pantaraxia , Mar 10, 2019 6:41:33 PM | link
    Jeremy Corbyn is a dead man walking. His failure to stand by his allies (from Ken LIvingstone to the more recent Chris Williamson) within the Labour Party as they have been successfully picked off, victims of anti-semetic smear campaigns, has seriously undermined his leadership and increasingly isolated him within his own party. Corbyn's policy of accommodation and appeasement is obviously failing and has only emboldened his attackers. From his failure to geld the Blairites within his party by expelling its most vocal zionist mouthpieces (the odious Margaret Hodge and Joan Ryan being prime examples) to Labour's adoption of IHRA's redefinition of anti-semetism to include anti-zionism, Corbyn's appeasement policy has been an unmitigated disaster, leaving him effectively neutered in the face of this unremitting onslaught as his poll numbers continue to drop. Even George Galloway, a staunch Corbyn supporter, is despairing of this state of affairs.

    Topple Galloway: The Witch-Hunt (approx. 12 min starting at 17:00)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCpBsC8l5AU&t=1741s


    More on this subject. (cannot recommend highly enough):

    Britain's Witchfinders Are Ready to Burn Jeremy Corbyn - Jonathan Cook
    http://www.unz.com/article/britains-witchfinders-are-ready-to-burn-jeremy-corbyn/

    [Mar 20, 2019] The sex slave scandal that exposed pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein by Maureen Callahan

    Notable quotes:
    "... Another house manager, Alfredo Rodriguez, told Recarey that very young girls were giving Epstein massages at least twice a day, and in one instance, Epstein had Rodriguez deliver one dozen roses to Mary, at her high school. ..."
    "... Palm Beach prosecutors said the evidence was weak, and after presenting the case to a grand jury, Epstein was charged with only one count of felony solicitation of prostitution. In 2008, he pleaded guilty and nominally served 13 months of an 18-month sentence in a county jail: Epstein spent one day a week there, the other six out on "work release." ..."
    "... Today, Jeffrey Epstein is a free man, albeit one who routinely settles civil lawsuits against him, brought by young women, out of court. As of 2015, Epstein had settled multiple such cases. ..."
    Oct 09, 2016 | nypost.com
    Judge gives deadline for arguments relating to unsealing Jeffrey Epstein documents Documents related to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein may be unsealed Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's deal with feds was illegal: judge Northam has only himself to blame

    In 2005, the world was introduced to reclusive billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, friend to princes and an American president, a power broker with the darkest of secrets: He was also a pedophile, accused of recruiting dozens of underage girls into a sex-slave network, buying their silence and moving along, although he has been convicted of only one count of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Visitors to his private Caribbean island, known as "Orgy Island," have included Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Stephen Hawking.

    According to a 2011 court filing by alleged Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre, she saw Clinton and Prince Andrew on the island but never saw the former president do anything improper. Giuffre has accused Prince Andrew of having sex with her when she was a minor, a charge Buckingham Palace denies.

    "Epstein lives less than one mile away from me in Palm Beach," author James Patterson tells The Post. In the 11 years since Epstein was investigated and charged by the Palm Beach police department, ultimately copping a plea and serving 13 months on one charge of soliciting prostitution from a 14-year-old girl, Patterson has remained obsessed with the case.

    "He's a fascinating character to read about," Patterson says. "What is he thinking? Who is he?"

    Patterson's new book, "Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy," is an attempt to answer such questions. Co-authored with John Connolly and Tim Malloy, the book contains detailed police interviews with girls who alleged sexual abuse by Epstein and others in his circle. Giuffre alleged that Epstein's ex-girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late media tycoon Robert Maxwell, abused her. Ghislaine Maxwell has denied allegations of enabling abuse.

    Epstein has spent the bulk of his adult life cultivating relationships with the world's most powerful men. Flight logs show that from 2001 to 2003, Bill Clinton flew on Epstein's private plane, dubbed "The Lolita Express" by the press, 26 times. After Epstein's arrest in July 2006, federal tax records show Epstein donated $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation that year.

    Bill Clinton in 1994. AP

    Epstein was also a regular visitor to Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago, and the two were friends. According to the Daily Mail, Trump was a frequent dinner guest at Epstein's home, which was often full of barely dressed models. In 2003, New York magazine reported that Trump also attended a dinner party at Epstein's honoring Bill Clinton.

    Last year, The Guardian reported that Epstein's "little black book" contained contact numbers for A-listers including Tony Blair, Naomi Campbell, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Bloomberg and Richard Branson.

    In a 2006 court filing, Palm Beach police noted that a search of Epstein's home uncovered two hidden cameras. The Mirror reported that in 2015, a 6-year-old civil lawsuit filed by "Jane Doe No. 3," believed to be the now-married Giuffre, alleged that Epstein wired his mansion with hidden cameras, secretly recording orgies involving his prominent friends and underage girls. The ultimate purpose: blackmail, according to court papers.

    Britain's Prince Andrew in 2012 AP

    "Jane Doe No. 3" also alleged that she had been forced to have sex with "numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders."

    "We uncovered a lot of details about the police investigation and a lot about the girls, what happened to them, the effect on their lives," Patterson says.

    "The reader has to ask: Was justice done here or not?"

    Epstein, now 63, has always been something of an international man of mystery. Born in Brooklyn, he had a middle-class upbringing: His father worked for the Parks Department, and his parents stressed hard work and education.

    'We uncovered a lot of details about the police investigation and a lot about the girls, what happened to them, the effect on their lives.'

    - James Patterson

    Epstein was brilliant, skipping two grades and graduating Lafayette High School in 1969. He attended Cooper Union but dropped out in 1971 and by 1973 was teaching calculus and physics at Dalton, where he tutored the son of a Bear Stearns exec. Soon, Epstein applied his facility with numbers on Wall Street but left Bear Stearns under a cloud in 1981. He formed his own business, J. Epstein & Co.

    The bar for entry at the new firm was high. According to a 2002 profile in New York magazine, Epstein only took on clients who turned over $1 billion, at minimum, for him to manage. Clients also had to pay a flat fee and sign power of attorney over to Epstein, allowing him to do whatever he saw fit with their money.

    Still, no one knew exactly what Epstein did, or how he was able to amass a personal billion-dollar-plus fortune. In addition to a block-long, nine-story mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Epstein owns the $6.8 million mansion in Palm Beach, an $18 million property in New Mexico, the 70-acre private Caribbean island, a helicopter, a Gulfstream IV and a Boeing 727.

    "My belief is that Jeff maintains some sort of money-management firm, though you won't get a straight answer from him," one high-level investor told New York magazine. "He once told me he had 300 people working for him, and I've also heard that he manages Rockefeller money. But one never knows. It's like looking at the Wizard of Oz -- there may be less there than meets the eye."

    Jeffrey Epstein's Palm Beach home Splash News

    "He's very enigmatic," Rosa Monckton told Vanity Fair in 2003. Monckton was the former British CEO of Tiffany & Co. and confidante to the late Princess Diana. She was also a close friend of Epstein's since the 1980s. "He never reveals his hand . . . He's a classic iceberg. What you see is not what you get."

    Both profiles intimated that Epstein had a predilection for young women but never went further. In the New York magazine piece, Trump said Epstein's self-professed image as a loner, an egghead and a teetotaler was not wholly accurate.

    Donald Trump in 1990 AP

    "I've known Jeff for 15 years," Trump said. "Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it -- Jeffrey enjoys his social life."

    Three years after that profile ran, Palm Beach Police Officer Michele Pagan got a disturbing message. A woman reported that her 14-year-old stepdaughter confided to a friend that she'd had sex with an older man for money. The man's name was Jeff, and he lived in a mansion on a cul-de-sac.

    Pagan persuaded the woman to bring her stepdaughter down to be interviewed. In his book, Patterson calls the girl Mary. And Mary, like so many of the other girls who eventually talked, came from the little-known working-class areas surrounding Palm Beach.

    A friend of a friend, Mary said, told her she could make hundreds of dollars in one hour, just for massaging some middle-aged guy's feet. Lots of other girls had been doing it, some three times a week.

    Mary claimed she had been driven to the mansion on El Brillo Way, where a female staffer escorted her up a pink-carpeted staircase, then into a room with a massage table, an armoire topped with sex toys and a photo of a little girl pulling her underwear off.

    Ghislaine Maxwell Getty Images

    Epstein entered the room, wearing only a towel, Mary said.

    "He took off the towel," Mary told Pagan. "He was a really built guy. But his wee-wee was very tiny."

    Mary said Epstein got on the table and barked orders at her. She told police she was alone in the room with him, terrified.

    Pagan wrote the following in her incident report:

    "She removed her pants, leaving her thong panties on. She straddled his back, whereby her exposed buttocks were touching Epstein's exposed buttocks. Epstein then turned to his side and started to rub his penis in an up-and-down motion. Epstein pulled out a purple vibrator and began to massage Mary's vaginal area."

    Palm Beach assigned six more detectives to the investigation. They conducted a "trash pull" of Epstein's garbage, sifting through paper with phone numbers, used condoms, toothbrushes, worn underwear. In one pull, police found a piece of paper with Mary's phone number on it, along with the number of the person who recruited her.

    On Sept. 11, 2005, detectives got another break. Alison, as she's called in the book, told Detective Joe Recarey that she had been going to Epstein's house since she was 16. Alison had been working at the Wellington Green Mall, saving up for a trip to Maine, when a friend told her, "You can get a plane ticket in two hours . . . We can go give this guy a massage and he'll pay $200," according to her statement to the police.

    Alison told Recarey that she visited Epstein hundreds of times. She said he had bought her a new 2005 Dodge Neon, plane tickets, and gave her spending money. Alison said he even asked her to emancipate from her parents so she could live with him full-time as his "sex slave."

    She said Epstein slowly escalated his sexual requests, and despite Alison's insistence that they never have intercourse, alleged, "This one time . . . he bent me over the table and put himself in me. Without my permission."

    Alison then asked if what Epstein had done to her was rape and spoke of her abject fear of him.

    An abridged version of her witness statement, as recounted in the book:

    Alison : Before I say anything else . . . um, is there a possibility that I'm gonna have to go to court or anything?
    Recarey : I mean, what he did to you is a crime. I'm not gonna lie to you.
    Alison : Would you consider it rape, what he did?
    Recarey : If he put himself inside you without permission . . . That, that is a crime. That is a crime.
    Alison : I don't want my family to find out about this . . . 'Cause Jeffrey's gonna get me. You guys realize that, right? . . . I'm not safe now. I'm not safe.
    Recarey : Why do you say you're not safe? Has he said he's hurt people before?
    Alison : Well, I've heard him make threats to people on the telephone, yeah. Of course.
    Recarey : You're gonna die? You're gonna break your legs? Or  --
    Alison : All of the above!

    Alison also told Recarey that Epstein got so violent with her that he ripped out her hair and threw her around. "I mean," she said, "there's been nights that I walked out of there barely able to walk, um, from him being so rough."

    Two months later, Recarey interviewed Epstein's former house manager of 11 years, documented in his probable-cause affidavit as Mr. Alessi. "Alessi stated Epstein receives three massages a day . . . towards the end of his employment, the masseuses . . . appeared to be 16 or 17 years of age at the most . . . [Alessi] would have to wash off a massager/vibrator and a long rubber penis, which were in the sink after the massage."

    Another house manager, Alfredo Rodriguez, told Recarey that very young girls were giving Epstein massages at least twice a day, and in one instance, Epstein had Rodriguez deliver one dozen roses to Mary, at her high school.

    In May 2006, the Palm Beach Police Department filed a probable-cause affidavit, asking prosecutors to charge Epstein with four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor -- a second-degree felony -- and one count of lewd and lascivious molestation of a 14-year-old minor, also a second-degree felony.

    Today, Jeffrey Epstein is a free man, albeit one who routinely settles civil lawsuits against him, brought by young women, out of court.

    Palm Beach prosecutors said the evidence was weak, and after presenting the case to a grand jury, Epstein was charged with only one count of felony solicitation of prostitution. In 2008, he pleaded guilty and nominally served 13 months of an 18-month sentence in a county jail: Epstein spent one day a week there, the other six out on "work release."

    Today, Jeffrey Epstein is a free man, albeit one who routinely settles civil lawsuits against him, brought by young women, out of court. As of 2015, Epstein had settled multiple such cases.

    Giuffre has sued Ghislaine Maxwell in Manhattan federal court, charging defamation -- saying Maxwell stated Giuffre lied about Maxwell's recruitment of her and other underage girls. Epstein has been called upon to testify in court this month, on Oct. 20.

    The true number of Epstein's victims may never be known.

    He will be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life, not that it fazes him. "I'm not a sexual predator, I'm an 'offender,' " Epstein told The Post in 2011. "It's the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel."

    [Mar 20, 2019] Britain s witchfinders are ready to burn Jeremy Corbyn by Jonathan Cook

    We should not idealize nether Israelis not Palestinians. the latter were pushed by Israeli policies to more fundamentalist Islam.
    Changes of anti-Semitism is nor the favorite tool of Israeli lobby to smear critics of Israeli polices.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The flood of exaggerated claims of antisemitism make it harder to deal with any real instances of antisemitism. The credibility of well-founded allegations is undermined by the less credible ones and real perpetrators are more likely not to be held to account. Crying wolf is dangerous when there are real wolves around the corner. This was the reality that Chris Williamson was drawing attention to. ..."
    "... Right now, the establishment -- represented by Richard Dearlove, a former head of the MI6 -- is maliciously trying to frame Corbyn's main adviser, Seumas Milne, as a Kremlin asset. ..."
    "... Jewish is about race, religion and place of origin, Zionism is about economics and unabashed wealth: the two concepts are polar opposites. Very few non wealthy Jews are zionist. ..."
    "... The gods of finance don't really care about a few dead self-identifying Jews. Once it happens there will be no more pretence of niceness or democratic nonsense and the Orwellian police-state crackdown can proceed in earnest but now with almost everyone's blessing. Expect the very same thing everywhere across Europe and the Anglosphere. ..."
    "... Anti-Semitism has re-established itself on the left partly by way of an ideology of anti-colonialism. Believing Western colonial power to be the worst evil in history – a progressive orthodoxy that has been inculcated in Western education systems for decades – sections of the left relativise the Holocaust, treating it as only one among many crimes against humanity. At the same time, they see Israel as the worst embodiment of colonialism – hence the demand that, alone among the world's states, it must demonstrate its "right to exist". ..."
    "... Antisemitism in the UK used to mean hostility to the pushiness, greed and mad manners of successful Jews like Philip Green, but it has now been redefined to mean someone who thinks the Palestinians should not be used as target practice. ..."
    "... Antisemitism here is a middle and upper class thing. There are so few Jews in some parts of the UK that many people have never met a Jew. I was over 30 before I ever knew anyone who was Jewish. ..."
    "... Where is the sanctimonious Catholic Church to anathemize the major war criminal Tony Blair the Pious? ..."
    "... British Labor MP Tam Dalyell has charged that Prime Minister Tony Blair was "being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers" ..."
    "... The comment echoed remarks by U.S. Republican Patrick Buchanan, who was accused of anti-Semitism when in an article last March, he described a predominantely Jewish group of advisers to President Bush as "a cabal of polemicists and public officials [who] seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests." ..."
    "... You're confusing the issue. The issue is this: it's not anti-Semitic to be anti-Zionist. All the rest is squid ink. ..."
    "... McCarthyism is the extension of the European dark age inquisition. Nowadays the American glosses over McCarthyism with the terms democracy, neo-liberal order, and human rights. Any idealism other than the American's must be denied, even in the accused own defence. The American presents the accused as an enemy so dangerous, their ideas so corrupting, that they must be silenced from the outset. Their only chance of rehabilitation is prostration before their accusers and utter repentance. ..."
    "... Antisemitism in the UK used to mean hostility to the pushiness, greed and mad manners but it has now been redefined to mean someone who thinks the Palestinians should not be used as target practice. ..."
    "... On Twitter, Corbyn wrote: "The UN says Israel's killings of demonstrators in Gaza – including children, paramedics and journalists – may constitute 'war crimes or crimes against humanity'". ..."
    "... The UN report, published earlier this week, said: "The Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to others when they were shot, nor were they directly participating in hostilities," adding that the protests had been "civilian in nature". ..."
    "... "A quite incredible story out of England has not received much media coverage in the United States. It concerns how the Israeli Embassy in London connived with government officials to "take down" parliamentarians and government ministers who were considered to be critical of the Jewish State. It was also learned that the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament (MPs)." ..."
    Mar 01, 2019 | www.unz.com
    Jonathan Cook March 1, 2019 2,400 Words 107 Comments Reply Email This Page to Someone

    "McCarthyism" is a word thrown around a lot nowadays, and in the process its true meaning -- and horror -- has been increasingly obscured.

    McCarthyism is not just the hounding of someone because their views are unpopular. It is the creation by the powerful of a perfect, self-rationalising system of incrimination -- denying the victim a voice, even in their own defence. It presents the accused as an enemy so dangerous, their ideas so corrupting, that they must be silenced from the outset. Their only chance of rehabilitation is prostration before their accusers and utter repentance.

    McCarthyism, in other words, is the modern political parallel of the witch hunt.

    In an earlier era, the guilt of women accused of witchcraft was tested through the ducking stool. If a woman drowned, she was innocent; if she survived, she was guilty and burnt at the stake. A foolproof system that created an endless supply of the wicked, justifying the status and salaries of the men charged with hunting down ever more of these diabolical women.

    And that is the Medieval equivalent of where the British Labour party has arrived, with the suspension of MP Chris Williamson for anti-semitism.

    Revenge of the Blairites

    Williamson, it should be noted, is widely seen as a key ally of Jeremy Corbyn, a democratic socialist who was propelled unexpectedly into the Labour leadership nearly four years ago by its members. His elevation infuriated most of the party's MPs, who hanker for the return of the New Labour era under Tony Blair, when the party firmly occupied the political centre.

    Corbyn's success has also outraged vocal supporters of Israel both in the Labour party -- some 80 MPs are stalwart members of Labour Friends of Israel -- and in the UK media. Corbyn is the first British party leader in sight of power to prefer the Palestinians' right to justice over Israel's continuing oppression of the Palestinians.

    For these reasons, the Blairite MPs have been trying to oust Corbyn any way they can. First through a failed re-run of the leadership contest and then by assisting the corporate media -- which is equally opposed to Corbyn -- in smearing him variously as a shambles, a misogynist, a sympathiser with terrorists, a Russian asset, and finally as an "enabler" of anti-semitism.

    This last accusation has proved the most fruitful after the Israel lobby began to expand the definition of anti-semitism to include not just hatred of Jews but also criticism of Israel. Labour was eventually forced to accept a redefinition, formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that conflates anti-Zionism -- opposition to Israel's violent creation on the Palestinians' homeland -- with anti-semitism.

    Guilt by association

    Once the mud stuck through repetition, a vocal group of Labour MPs began denouncing the party for being "institutionally anti-semitic", "endemically anti-semitic" and a "cesspit of anti-semitism". The slurs continued relentlessly, even as statistics proved the accusation to be groundless. The figures show that anti-semitism exists only in the margins of the party, as racism does in all walks of life.

    Meanwhile, the smears overshadowed the very provable fact that anti-semitism and other forms of racism are rearing their head dangerously on the political right.

    But the witchfinders were never interested in the political reality. They wanted a never-ending war -- a policy of "zero tolerance" -- to root out an evil in their midst, a supposed "hard left" given succour by Corbyn and his acolytes.

    This is the context for understanding Williamson's "crime".

    Despite the best efforts of our modern witchfinder generals to prove otherwise, Williamson has not been shown to have expressed hatred towards Jews, or even to have made a comment that could be interpreted as anti-semitic.

    One of the most experienced of the witchfinders, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, indulged familiar McCarthyite tactics this week in trying to prove Williamson's anti-semitism by association. The MP was what Freedland termed a "Jew baiter" because he has associated with people whom the witchfinders decree to be anti-semites.

    'Too apologetic'

    Shortly before he found himself formally shunned by media commentators and his own parliamentary party, Williamson twice confirmed his guilt to the inquisitors.

    First, he dared to challenge the authority of the witchfinders. He suggested that some of those being hounded out of Labour may not in fact be witches. Or more specifically, in the context of constant claims of a Labour "anti-semitism crisis", he argued that the party had been "too apologetic" in dealing with the bad-faith efforts of those seeking to damage a Corbyn-led party.

    In other words, Williamson suggested that Labour ought to be more proactively promoting the abundant evidence that it was indeed dealing with what he called the "scourge of anti-semitism", and thereby demonstrate to the British public that Labour wasn't "institutionally anti-semitic". Labour members, he was pointing out, ought not to have to keep quiet as they were being endlessly slandered as anti-semites.

    As Jewish Voice for Labour, a Jewish group supportive of Corbyn, noted :

    The flood of exaggerated claims of antisemitism make it harder to deal with any real instances of antisemitism. The credibility of well-founded allegations is undermined by the less credible ones and real perpetrators are more likely not to be held to account. Crying wolf is dangerous when there are real wolves around the corner. This was the reality that Chris Williamson was drawing attention to.

    As with all inquisitions, however, the witchfinders were not interested in what Williamson actually said, but in the threat he posed to the narrative they have created to destroy their enemy, Corbynism, and reassert their own power.

    So his words were ripped from their context and presented as proof that he did indeed support witches.

    He was denounced for saying what he had not: that Labour should not apologise for its anti-semitism. In this dishonest reformulation of Williamson's statement, the witchfinders claimed to show that he had supported anti-semitism, that he consorted with witches.

    No screening for documentary

    Second, Williamson compounded his crime by publicly helping just such a readymade witch: a black Jewish woman named Jackie Walker.

    He had booked a room in the British parliament building -- the seat of our supposed democracy -- so that audiences could see a new documentary on an earlier Labour witch hunt. More than two years ago the party suspended Walker over anti-semitism claims.

    The screening was to inform Labour party members of the facts of her case in the run-up to a hearing in which, given the current atmosphere, it is likely she will be expelled. The screening was sponsored by Jewish Voice for Labour, which has also warned repeatedly that anti-semitism is being used malevolently to silence criticism of Israel and weaken Corbyn.

    Walker was seen as a pivotal figure by those opposed to Corbyn. She was a co-founder of Momentum, the grassroots organisation established to support Corbyn after his election to the leadership and deal with the inevitable fallout from the Blairite wing of MPs.

    Momentum expected a rough ride from this dominant faction, and they were not disappointed. The Blairites still held on to the party machinery and they had an ally in Tom Watson, who became Corbyn's deputy.

    Walker was one of the early victims of the confected claims of an Labour "anti-semitism crisis". But she was not ready to roll over and accept her status as witch. She fought back.

    From lynching to witch hunt

    First, she produced a one-woman show about her treatment at the hands of the Labour party bureaucracy -- framed in the context of decades of racist treatment of black people in the west -- called The Lynching .

    And then her story was turned into a documentary film, fittingly called Witch Hunt . It sets out very clearly the machinations of the Blairite wing of MPs, and Labour's closely allied Israel lobby, in defaming Walker as part of their efforts to regain power over the party.

    For people so ostensibly concerned about racism towards Jews, these witchfinders show little self-awareness about how obvious their own racism is in relation to some of the "witches" they have hunted down.

    But that racism can only be understood if people have the chance to hear from Walker and other victims of the anti-semitism smears. Which is precisely why Williamson, who was trying to organise the screening of Witch Hunt, had to be dealt with too.

    Party in disrepute

    Walker is not the only prominent black anti-racism activist targeted. Marc Wadsworth, another longtime ally of Corbyn's, and founder of the Anti-Racist Alliance, was "outed" last year in another confected anti-semitism scandal. The allegations of anti-semitism were impossible to stand up publicly, so finally he was booted out on a catch-all claim that he had brought the party "into disrepute".

    Jews who criticise Israel and support Corbyn's solidarity with Palestinians have been picked off by the witchfinders too, cheered on by media commentators who claim this is being done in the service of a "zero tolerance" policy towards racism. As well as Walker, the targets have included Tony Greenstein, Moshe Machover, Martin Odoni, Glyn Secker and Cyril Chilson.

    But as the battle in Labour has intensified to redefine anti-Zionism as anti-semitism, the deeper issues at stake have come to the fore. Jon Lansman, another founder of Momentum, recently stated : "I don't want any Jewish member in the party to be leaving. We are absolutely committed to making Labour a safe space."

    But there are a set of very obvious problems with that position, and they have gone entirely unexamined by those promoting the "institutional anti-semitism" and "zero tolerance" narratives.

    Lobby's covert actions exposed

    First, it is impossible to be a home to all Jews in Labour, when the party's Jewish members are themselves deeply split over key issues like whether Corbyn is a force for good and whether meaningful criticism of Israel should be allowed.

    A fanatically pro-Israel organisation like the Jewish Labour Movement will never tolerate a Corbyn-led Labour party reaching power and supporting the Palestinian cause. To pretend otherwise is simple naivety or deception.

    That fact was demonstrably proven two years ago in the Al Jazeera undercover documentary The Lobby into covert efforts by Israel and its UK lobbyists to undermine Corbyn from within his own party through groups like the JLM and MPs in Labour Friends of Israel. It was telling that the party machine, along with the corporate media, did its best to keep the documentary out of public view.

    The MPs loudest about "institutional anti-semitism" in Labour were among those abandoning the party to join the Independent Group this month, preferring to ally with renegade Conservative MPs in an apparent attempt to frustrate a Corbyn-led party winning power.

    Institutional racism on Palestinians

    Further, if a proportion of Jewish Labour party members have such a heavy personal investment in Israel that they refuse to countenance any meaningful curbs on Israel's abuses of Palestinians -- and that has been underscored repeatedly by public comments from the JLM and Labour Friends of Israel -- then keeping them inside the party will require cracking down on all but the flimsiest criticism of Israel. It will tie the party's hands on supporting Palestinian rights.

    In the name of protecting the "Israel right or wrong" crowd from what they consider to be anti-semitic abuse, Labour will have to provide institutional support for Israel's racism towards Palestinians.

    In doing so, it will in fact simply be returning to the status quo in the party before Corbyn, when Labour turned a blind eye over many decades to the Palestinians' dispossession by European Zionists who created an ugly anachronistic state where rights accrue based on one's ethnicity and religion rather than citizenship.

    Those in Labour who reject Britain's continuing complicity in such crimes -- ones the UK set in motion with the Balfour Declaration -- will find, as a result, that it is they who have no home in Labour. That includes significant numbers of anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinians, Muslims and Palestinian solidarity activists.

    Safe space for whom?

    If the creation of a "safe space" for Jews in the Labour party is code, as it appears to be, for a safe space for hardline Zionist Jews, it will inevitably require that the party become a hostile environment for those engaged in other anti-racism battles.

    Stripped bare, what Lansman and the witchfinders are saying is that Zionist Jewish sensitivities in the party are the only ones that count, that anything and everything must be done to indulge them, even if it means abusing non-Zionist Jewish members, black members, Palestinian and Muslim members, and those expressing solidarity with Palestinians.

    This is precisely the political black hole into which simplistic, kneejerk identity politics inevitably gets sucked.

    Right now, the establishment -- represented by Richard Dearlove, a former head of the MI6 -- is maliciously trying to frame Corbyn's main adviser, Seumas Milne, as a Kremlin asset.

    While the witchfinders claim to have unearthed a "pattern of behaviour" in Williamson's efforts to expose their smears, in fact the real pattern of behaviour is there for all to see: a concerted McCarthyite campaign to destroy Corbyn before he can reach No 10.

    Corbyn's allies are being picked off one by one, from grassroots activists like Walker and Wadsworth to higher-placed supporters like Williamson and Milne. Soon Corbyn will stand alone, exposed before the inquisition that has been prepared for him.

    Then Labour can be restored to the Blairites, the members silenced until they leave and any hope of offering a political alternative to the establishment safely shelved. Ordinary people will again be made passive spectators as the rich carry on playing with their lives and their futures as though Britain was simply a rigged game of Monopoly.

    If parliamentary politics returns to business as usual for the wealthy, taking to the streets looks increasingly like the only option. Maybe it's time to dust off a Yellow Vest.

    Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .

    Sean , says: March 1, 2019 at 5:08 pm GMT

    https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3413292,00.html

    LONDON – Many of the key players in the escalating British campaign to boycott Israel are Jewish or Israeli, the Jewish Chronicle revealed in an investigation published Thursday.

    According to the investigation, the Jewish academics justify their stance as part of the struggle for Palestinian rights and ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.

    The report stated that a high proportion of the academics were deeply involved in UCU, the University and College Union, which last month sparked an international outcry by voting to facilitate a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

    Anti-boycott figures suggest that the campaign has been fuelled by a well-organized mix of far-left activists and Islamic organizations, the JC reported. In reality, the main proponents are a loosely knit collection of academics and trade unionists linked to groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Jews for the Boycotting of Israeli Goods, and Bricup, the British Committee for Universities of Palestine

    Working class British do not have their own intellectuals. The Jewish intelligentsia's humanist and realist wings are at war. Gilad Atzmon is being described without qualification as an Anti Semite in popular British newspapers, which never mention that he is Jewish.

    It used to be that Atzmon being a Jew would protect him from accusations of antisemitism, and he would have be described as "self hating". Unfortunately the main intellectuals of the pro Palestinian movement are are humanist Jewish intellectuals, often of Israeli origin and the simple minded white gentiles of the Labour Party foolishly think that they are protected. The brilliant public relations and political experts working for the realist Israel-supporting Jews always lead with their Sunday punch and go nuclear with a moralising onslaught on white gentiles to get them to altruistically punish anyone Israel does not like. And it always works. Yet humanist Jews bleating about the Palestinians can always convince the more intellectual humanitarian white gentiles into supporting the Palestinians. So it will be never ending.

    niteranger , says: March 2, 2019 at 6:42 am GMT
    Britain is done. The laws passed show any idea or statement that criticizes Jews and Israel is antisemitic. Atzmon was foolish to believe that he had some protection from attacks because he was Jewish. They made an example out of him for the rest of those who do not fall in line with the belief that all true knowledge comes from the Jews and Israel.

    The only chance that Britain has is the fact that the crazy Muslim hoards may actually turn on the Magic Jews and start to murder them. The Jews may have overplayed their hand with immigration just like in France. The Brits have been pummel into cuckolds as their world is being destroyed by both the Jews and the Muslims.

    Tsigantes , says: March 2, 2019 at 9:02 am GMT
    It works because the majority Israeli-bought politicians let it work. It works because we the public let the politicians get away with it.

    I'm beginning to think that the only way to expose and end this false equivalency [criticism of Israel = anti-semitism) is for the 80% [yes!] of Europeans who support Palestine against Israel to show up in droves to their respective parliaments and insist on being imprisoned according to the law.

    Anonymous [341] Disclaimer , says: March 2, 2019 at 9:11 am GMT
    It's curious that the Labour Party – in both its Blair and Corbyn manifestations – actively encourages the ethnic displacement of white Britons from their ancient motherland, with their policy of massive uncontrolled immigration, but weeps great big sobs and tears about the ethnic displacement of one group of foreigners by another group of foreigners.
    Tyrion 2 , says: March 2, 2019 at 10:00 am GMT
    Corbyn promised, in the party's manifesto, to back the Brexit referendum result. Now, at the worst possible time, he has reneged on that promise. He had one thing going for him – his reputation as "principled". There is no move more fatal to that reputation than what he has just done.

    Thankfully, Theresa May has a sense of duty and, I think, will outmanoeuvre him in the end. But as innumerable denizens of this board will ask themselves: so what if Corbyn stands against British democracy, national sovereignty, any form of border control? So what if he promotes avowed anti-British racists to his shadow cabinet? At least he probably dislikes Jews

    Ah, yes but it is "unfair to conclude the last bit" – even while the rest is straightforward matter of record "he has Jewish supporters". Great, but those Jews, who remain Jeremy Corbyn supporters, after his great stab in the back over Brexit, are his collaborators in his attempt to fatally wound Britain as a nation. That tells me all I need to know about their politics. May they reflect on their grim dishonesty.

    Miro23 , says: March 2, 2019 at 10:18 am GMT

    If parliamentary politics returns to business as usual for the wealthy, taking to the streets looks increasingly like the only option. Maybe it's time to dust off a Yellow Vest.

    I've been thinking the same. The political systems in the UK and the US are so putrid that street demonstrations seem the only way forward.

    Issue by issue they can be Brexit or Anti-War, and the minority elites are obliged to use their security forces (with all the risks that that involves).

    smokey , says: March 2, 2019 at 11:10 am GMT
    One should not merge or confuse, by any means rationally imaginable, -- "Economic Zionism (EZ)", a system of economics that claims it enjoys exclusive right to establish and enforce its monopoly rule over all persons and things, -- -with --

    -- "racial bias", a system that claims it enjoys exclusive right to establish and enforce its Jews-Only rule over all persons and things.

    Jewish is about race, religion and place of origin, Zionism is about economics and unabashed wealth: the two concepts are polar opposites. Very few non wealthy Jews are zionist.

    Zionism has long exploited the myth that wealth established by EZ only comes to a Jewish tribal member who is faithful to the needs and wants of Zionism. This propaganda has a long history being the key that has opened the door to make many Zionist projects successful.

    EZ explains why the wealth of 26 Zionist equates to the wealth of the rest of the world. See also the picture at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

    Tyrion 2 , says: March 2, 2019 at 11:52 am GMT
    @Sean Paul Embery is a smart younger bloke. https://unherd.com/2019/02/the-trade-union-club-for-liberal-cosmopolitans/

    As is Jonathan Rutherford and Maurice Glasman. Meanwhile, working class Englishman John Gray is one of the finest thinkers of the last few decades.

    NoseytheDuke , says: March 2, 2019 at 12:38 pm GMT
    @niteranger

    the fact that the crazy Muslim hoards may actually turn on the Magic Jews and start to murder them

    Of course, it is what is desired and very likely the real reason that they are there in the first place. The gods of finance don't really care about a few dead self-identifying Jews. Once it happens there will be no more pretence of niceness or democratic nonsense and the Orwellian police-state crackdown can proceed in earnest but now with almost everyone's blessing. Expect the very same thing everywhere across Europe and the Anglosphere.

    Jake , says: March 2, 2019 at 1:05 pm GMT
    When you fail, or refuse, to understand the root source of the growth of a poisonous thing, you aint ever got no hope better than a soothing fart in Hell to make a correction.

    Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was a Judaizing heresy rising from the specifics of Anglophone rebellion against Christendom, which 'reformation' itself began from Saxon Martin Luther's theorizing how to feel as 'saved' just by being who he was as Jews felt by being Jews – salvation by faith ONLY became Luther's Christian version of salvation by Jewish blood ONLY. Then Luther cemented even more the Judaizing of the movement by declaring that the Pharisaic definition of Scripture was the defintion of the Old Testament.

    A Judaizing heresy will always produce culture that is pro-Jewish and anti-Christendom and anti-peoples most closely seen as still reflecting Christendom.

    Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was the Protestant precursor of the French Revolution. It swept away all that had been in place before, so thoroughly that it was the final piece of remaking, at points inverting, the national character that had existed before the 16th century.

    The best moniker for that new English culture is WASP, though that initial letter seems to make no sense until the US was on the scene. However, UK WASP Elites were quite busy during the 18th century explaining how the Irish were subhuman, and by the dawn of the 19th century political cartoons of the Irish as simian were common – before such images were ever used for blacks in the USA. That WASP culture then began a rather systematic war to exterminate all cultures native to the British Isles that were not in step with WASP culture.

    All cultures produced by, shaped by, finalized by Judiaizing heresy will not merely evolve so that they become staunchly pro-Jewish, but that necessarily occurs as they also wage at least culture war to exterminate non-Judaizing white Christian cultures . WASP culture is defined by WASPs using whatever force required (including forcing huge populations into indentured servitude and rather large segments into chattel slavery) to batter all non-WASP whites into accepting the overlordship of all thins WASP.

    WASP culture immediately signaled that it favored Jews over all non-WASP peoples native to the British Isles – Oliver Cromwell, a truly quintessential WASP invited Jews back into England legally and granted special rights and privileges that the vast majority of British Isles natives did not have.

    The above pattern was far from a one time thing. It is a major factor even throughout the 19th century: the world's all time largest and richest empire saw Jewish wealth explode and Jews able to flex their political and cultural power openly, while perhaps a slim majority of the white natives of the British Isles languished barely on or below the poverty line. It was a world in which even Charles Dickens had to bow to Jewish demands to rewrite Oliver Twist so that Fagin not only was not identified as a Jews, open preying on the poorest whites, but that he remove all markers that Fagin was indeed almost certainly a Jew.

    The Jewish problem cannot be separated from the WASP problem. You cannot have WASP culture that is not philoSemitic. And WASP Elites always act to ally with Jews (and by the Victorian era, the
    other' Semites: Arabs and Mohammedans) while acting to harm the best interests of the vast majority of white Gentiles.

    Anglo-Zionist Empore.

    Tyrion 2 , says: March 2, 2019 at 1:19 pm GMT
    John Gray on Corbyn's anti-Semitism as a strange subset of his anti-Britishness:

    Anti-Semitism has re-established itself on the left partly by way of an ideology of anti-colonialism. Believing Western colonial power to be the worst evil in history – a progressive orthodoxy that has been inculcated in Western education systems for decades – sections of the left relativise the Holocaust, treating it as only one among many crimes against humanity. At the same time, they see Israel as the worst embodiment of colonialism – hence the demand that, alone among the world's states, it must demonstrate its "right to exist".

    Claims that anti-Semitism is being "weaponised" in an attempt to undermine Corbyn are the opposite of the truth. More than a personal failure, Corbyn's complicity in anti-Semitism is a symptom of the morbid politics he embodies.

    https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2018/05/how-we-entered-age-strongman

    Ned Ludlam , says: March 2, 2019 at 1:20 pm GMT
    Corbyn needs to unleash the huge Labour Party membership on the Blairite traitors in its ranks, especially the MPs. Driven out into the wilderness they will die off and Labour can consolidate itself against its non-external critics.
    A British Reader , says: March 2, 2019 at 1:38 pm GMT
    Antisemitism in the UK used to mean hostility to the pushiness, greed and mad manners of successful Jews like Philip Green, but it has now been redefined to mean someone who thinks the Palestinians should not be used as target practice.

    Antisemitism here is a middle and upper class thing. There are so few Jews in some parts of the UK that many people have never met a Jew. I was over 30 before I ever knew anyone who was Jewish.

    The middle class and upper class British antisemites see Jews as unpleasant and underhand rivals, but for a working class man like Chris Williamson, who would probably not have known any Jews when he was growing up in Derby, Jews would have been just another religious group. I've known many people who have met him. He has no interest in religion. His main concerns are veganism and animal welfare. His holidays are cycling tours around the nearby national park. He is really just a 1970s hippy in a suit. To tar someone like that with the old antisemitism canard will backfire. The intelligent British person knows Williamson is not the antisemite type.

    annamaria , says: March 2, 2019 at 1:43 pm GMT
    The Blair's bloody legacy: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-01/uks-unreported-bombing-iraq-syria

    Interestingly, Sir John Chilcot believed as late as 2016 that about 150,000 Iraqis were killed during the invasion and subsequent instability. The figure was in fact well over one million. This much was known years earlier. Chilcott, covering for his friend Tony Blair did not read the mounting evidence – or more likely, just ignored it.

    The 2006 Lancet survey calculated fatalities at well over 650,000 just three years into the conflict and the 2007 ORB survey that actually surveyed fifteen of the eighteen governorates within Iraq found that number was somewhere between 1,033,000 and a staggering 1,220,588 . Since then, the violence created by the vacuum has continued and many more civilians have died. The numbers above do not include deaths after 13 years of sanctions imposed by the UN.

    Many members of the general public in Britain might mistakenly think that the bombing has stopped in Iraq and Syria – but they would be wrong. In fact, in the last four years, Britain has spent over £300 million on weapons fired from its air forces, including drones. The cost does not include personnel, wages, equipment, maintenance, fuel, air bases, etc.

    Analysis of data conducted by human rights group Reprieve in 2014 concluded that of 41 men targeted by coalition drone strikes a further 1,147 innocent civilians were killed simply for being in the way.

    Where is the sanctimonious Catholic Church to anathemize the major war criminal Tony Blair the Pious?

    A portrait of the Devil's pupil: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/11670425/Revealed-Tony-Blair-worth-a-staggering-60m.html

    Tony Blair's fortune now stands at three times the amount he has previously claimed, at some £60 million – which includes 10 homes

    annamaria , says: March 2, 2019 at 1:52 pm GMT
    @annamaria "Tony Blair receives $1,000,000 reward from a Jewish/Zionist organisation in Israel" http://theinsider.org/news/article.asp?id=2736

    Mr Blair made a career out of attacking the enemies of Israel, sending his country into more wars than any prime minister ever before in history as the UK joined the US in fighting the perceived enemies of Israel both militarily and politically, advantaging the Zionist cause.

    The award is presented by the Dan David Foundation, based at Tel Aviv University

    https://www.haaretz.com/1.4804388

    British Labor MP Tam Dalyell has charged that Prime Minister Tony Blair was "being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers"

    The comment echoed remarks by U.S. Republican Patrick Buchanan, who was accused of anti-Semitism when in an article last March, he described a predominantely Jewish group of advisers to President Bush as "a cabal of polemicists and public officials [who] seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests."

    UrbaneFrancoOntarian , says: March 2, 2019 at 2:30 pm GMT
    Who cares about Israel in this case? He supports another Brexit referendum, supports open borders with the 3rd world, and is probably a full fledged communist (a Jewish, anti white ideology).

    The Jews and the muslims can squabble over petty details, I'm more worried about what will benefit European nations.

    His election would be disastrous for the white, European race. Of course, I do fully expect for a hard shift against Israel as Muslims grow their populations in Europe.

    Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: March 2, 2019 at 2:37 pm GMT
    Go Brexit , brits , go ,
    Antiwar7 , says: March 2, 2019 at 3:05 pm GMT
    @Tyrion 2 You're confusing the issue. The issue is this: it's not anti-Semitic to be anti-Zionist. All the rest is squid ink.
    smokey , says: March 2, 2019 at 3:18 pm GMT
    @anon declare immigration <=fraudulent unwind/ deportation
    declare <feminism<= unworkable restore/ patriarchy
    Why should the Jews be permitted to declare anything; no one appointed them king?

    Instead, what is needed is for the people to hold a referendum that declares race homogenizing immigration to be a technique capable of use by proponents of Economic Zionism(EZ) to impose divide and conquer strategies on race resolved populations in order to generate racial unrest and conflict . When divided; the people cannot organize, to throw the rascals out!

    EZ monitors and destroys cooperative working together because sooner or later such groups organize with common objects which involve finding ways to resist nasty outcomes fostered by economic zionism).

    I believe the civil rights movement in America was fostered in great measure by privately instituted racial unrest and conflict objectives.

    Z-man , says: March 2, 2019 at 3:49 pm GMT
    I've been 'watching' Britain the last few years thru the BBC and other outlets and am slightly amazed at how much they are controlled by the Jooz and American NEOCONS. Their foreign policy is almost completely Neo coon . They've kept to the Iran deal, but under the slightest pressure from big Joo they will fold. The charade of the poising last year of two Russian expats, just as Russia was hosting the World Cup was disgustingly transparent. MI6 is a joo run intelligence service. It's amazing how Britain has turned into a multi cult whore and slut of the KIKE! It started with Disraeli! They should have been 'pogromed' out back then!
    Tyrion 2 , says: March 2, 2019 at 4:03 pm GMT
    @Antiwar7

    Israel is not a global outlier for humanitarian issues, so people assume Corbyn's obsession with it has something to do with it being lived in by Jews.

    They're only sort of right. In fact, it is because it is a well-organised country of more Western people than those they're in conflict with. In other words, Corbyn dislikes Israel, and Jews to some degree, as an extension of his oikophobia.

    His oikophobia is best show in his grim betrayal over Brexit. This last part is unforgivable.

    Joe Wong , says: March 2, 2019 at 4:10 pm GMT
    McCarthyism is the extension of the European dark age inquisition. Nowadays the American glosses over McCarthyism with the terms democracy, neo-liberal order, and human rights. Any idealism other than the American's must be denied, even in the accused own defence. The American presents the accused as an enemy so dangerous, their ideas so corrupting, that they must be silenced from the outset. Their only chance of rehabilitation is prostration before their accusers and utter repentance.
    Tyrion 2 , says: March 2, 2019 at 4:11 pm GMT
    @Ned Ludlam Huge membership of aging Trots LARPing as the youth and only being less than half of what the Green party got in votes at the last election

    The Conservatives ran their last campaign with a clear Brexit position and honesty over no tax cuts and no big government spending increases because we're bankrupt. I don't think there's ever been such a truthful but unexciting campaign by a political party. I don't think any party will make that mistake again. Corbyn instead ran on a lie over Brexit and infinite gibs for everyone. It is sad that the latter softened his loss considerably.

    Tyrion 2 , says: March 2, 2019 at 4:17 pm GMT Anonymous [219] Disclaimer , says: March 2, 2019 at 4:32 pm GMT
    @UrbaneFrancoOntarian

    Couldn't agree more. The "Left's" core value in the US and UK is white genocide. It really doesn't matter what Corbyn thinks about the Jew-occupied territories in Palestine as long as he's assisting the Jewish occupation in the UK.

    WorkingClass , says: March 2, 2019 at 4:35 pm GMT
    Yeah, Too bad about Corbin. He's a good bloke. Trump should give him a green card and make him Secretary Of Labor. Do we still have a Secretary Of Labor?
    Colin Wright , says: March 2, 2019 at 4:57 pm GMT
    Here's some data on the last Labour MP -- an Ian Austin -- who quit because of 'anti-semitism.' His recorded foreign trips over the last three years make fascinating reading.

    https://www.theyworkforyou.com/regmem/?p=11553

    'Kurdistan', AIPAC conference in Washington DC, Jerusalem, Israel, Israel, 'Kurdistan', AIPAC conference in Washington DC, Israel, Israel

    Sponsors: Nokan Group, Labour Friends of Israel, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Australia Israel Cultural Exchange Ltd -- all multiple times.

    anonymous [204] Disclaimer , says: March 2, 2019 at 5:05 pm GMT
    SHAME ON AMERICA, A JEWISH STATE

    Will the Supreme Court Finally Protect the Right Not to Work on the Sabbath?

    The Supreme Court may be on the verge of correcting a constitutional injustice that has affected the lives and careers of thousands of religiously observant employees for almost half a century. It can do so in a case that the justices have obviously been taking very seriously during their recent private conferences.

    The case involves an Orlando, Florida, training instructor, Darrell Patterson, who sued his former employer, Walgreen Co., for religious discrimination. Patterson is a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which prohibits work on the Sabbath. Walgreen scheduled Patterson for a Saturday shift, and fired him when he refused the assignment. The case made it to the Eleventh Circuit federal appeals court, which ruled for Walgreen. The court held that forcing Walgreen to guarantee that Patterson would never have to work on Saturdays posed an undue hardship on the corporation. Patterson and his church, backed by several other religious groups, have asked the Supreme Court to hear his case, and the court will soon decide whether to do so.

    https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/281122/the-right-not-to-work-on-the-sabbath

    will the sabbath of other minorities who build america, be recognized???

    Miro23 , says: March 2, 2019 at 6:03 pm GMT
    @Stephen Paul Foster

    The second sentences is completely perverse. "McCarthyism" was created by "the powerful," but it was the communists and their fellow travelers in high places seeking to avoid detection and accountability by incriminating McCarthy, a self-rationalizing smear that worked out very well for them.

    True enough, it was the communists (or rather Jewish activists) and their fellow travelers in high places who created the "McCarthyism" meme.

    It was constructed as a psychological shield against future interference in their subversion – the same as the "Anti-Semitism" and "Conspiracy Theory" memes.

    For example, the MSM have trained the US public to regard anyone who questions the government account of 9/11 as a sort of far out nutcase looking for UFOs. If you don't believe it, read the factual impossibilities of the government 9/11 account in the literature of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth https://www.ae911truth.org/ and try presenting some of the evidence in a friendly way (e.g. that the towers didn't collapse due to fire) in a middle class social setting – and see what happens.

    james charles , says: March 2, 2019 at 6:14 pm GMT
    @Hawker

    Who was 'really' supporting the Soviet Union?

    "Taken together, these four volumes constitute an extraordinary commentary on a basic weakness in the Soviet system. The Soviets are heavily dependent on Western technology and innovation not only in their civilian industries, but also in their military programs.

    An inevitable conclusion from the evidence in this book is that we have totally ignored a policy that would enable us to neutralize Soviet global ambitions while simultaneously reducing the defense budget and the tax load on American citizens." . . .

    " His book tells at least part of the story of the Soviet Union's reliance on Western technology, including the infamous Kama River truck plant, which was built by the Pullman-Swindell company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a subsidiary of M. W. Kellogg Co. Prof. Pipes remarks that the bulk of the Soviet merchant marine, the largest in the world, was built in foreign shipyards.

    He even tells the story (related in greater detail in this book) of the Bryant Chucking Grinder Company of Springfield, Vermont, which sold the Soviet Union the ball-bearing machines that alone made possible the targeting mechanism of Soviet MIRV'ed ballistic missiles. "

    http://www.crowhealingnetwork.net/pdf/Antony%20Sutton%20-%20The%20Best%20Enemy%20Money%20Can%20Buy.pdf

    james charles , says: March 2, 2019 at 6:40 pm GMT
    @Stephen Paul Foster

    "The communists (high-ups in the FDR and Truman administrations who were, secretly working for Stalin, e.g. Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Bernard Currie) . . . "

    It wasn't just the US government 'supporting' the S.U.?

    See comment 45.

    Benjy , says: March 2, 2019 at 6:41 pm GMT
    @anarchyst But McCarthy's lawyer was Ray Cohen, the queer jew. Ray Cohen was also Trump's mentor. And Ray Cohen was also a close friend of Roger Stone, who is also a fairy of some flavor or another. Stone was recently crudely raided by the FBI, for lying about Trump's non-connections to jewish mafia in Russia, which Trump clearly has.

    I have no idea what this all means, except that satanists like Crowley were also into weird forms of bisexuality.

    annamaria , says: March 2, 2019 at 6:43 pm GMT
    @Tyrion 2 Please ponder on the following before accusing others in the lack of humanness.

    Antisemitism in the UK used to mean hostility to the pushiness, greed and mad manners but it has now been redefined to mean someone who thinks the Palestinians should not be used as target practice.

    Sean , says: March 2, 2019 at 7:38 pm GMT
    @Tyrion 2 John Gray is a genuine intellectual and, as far as I know, of solid working class origins. However he was associated with the Conservative party rather than Labour and very greatly influenced by his friendship with Isaiah Berlin. Gray is good example of how white gentile intellectuals not of the left attack the hapless Labour white gentiles by drawing a bien pensant parallel between racial anti Semitism, the Holocaust and antiZionism.

    https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2018/05/how-we-entered-age-strongman

    Racist attitudes have existed in sections of the British left throughout much of its history. What is unprecedented is that anti-Semitism is now an integral part of a new style of politics promoted by the leader of the Labour Party. [ ]

    Claims that anti-Semitism is being "weaponised" in an attempt to undermine Corbyn are the opposite of the truth. More than a personal failure, Corbyn's complicity in anti-Semitism is a symptom of the morbid politics he embodies. But is the British conscience now so lax and coarse that voters are ready to propel into power a party led, and in its current form largely created, by a shifty figure whose most genuine quality is a deep-seated affinity with the politics of conspiracy and hate?

    A few years ago the contest for the Labour party came down to a choice e between the Milibrands: two sons of a Trotskyite theoretician and his wife that had hastened to Britain during WW2, because they were Jewish people.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/13/miliband-days-over-brothers-david-ed

    The Miliband days are over. So was the brothers' epic battle worth it? Despite their flaws, David and Ed Miliband are two of the most talented Labour politicians of their generation. Theirs is both a political and a personal tragedy

    'The relationship between these two siblings irrevocably changed the day Ed decided he wanted to be leader of the Labour party, too.' Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

    The leaders of disinvestment and antiZionism are the humanist wing of the Jewish intelligentsia. The Israel Lobby essay of Mearshiemer and Walt that latter became best selling screed was was commissioned by London Review of Books's Mary-Kay Wilmers. "I'm unambiguously hostile to Israel because it's a mendacious state". Wilmers is Jewish, and has used 25 million of family trust money for the LRB. The intellectual, financial and organisational resources behind antZionism are are almost completely supplied by humanistic Jewish intellectuals.

    Not convinced? How about brilliant biologist Steven Rose (once Britain's youngest full professor and chair of department. )

    a founder member of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science in the 1960s, and more recently they have been instrumental in calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions for as long as Israel continues its occupation of the Palestinian Territories, on the grounds of Israeli academics' close relationship with the IDF. An open letter[6] initiated by Steven and Hilary Rose, and also signed by 123 other academics was published in The Guardian on 6 April 2002.[7] In 2004 Hilary Rose and he were the founding members of the British Committee for Universities of Palestine.[5][8]

    Gray is not alone in failing to mention anything about the identity of the most formidable antiZionists.

    Che Guava , says: March 2, 2019 at 7:49 pm GMT
    Jonathon Cook, just another example of his people trying to monopolize all political positions (hint: he has been a dual citizen, Israeli and Brit for some years, so that means ).

    I found this site, according to the search engine's blurb, it was his. Not now.

    I do not think that he is now connected to it, but the contents are very strange. Worth looking, esp. if interested in the pathologies of 'the religion of peace'.

    http://www.jkcook.net

    He is surely the least worth reading of commentators here, I can see that Mr. Unz prints 'Cook' articles for the commenary on Brit politics, but surely there must be an actual British person who is actually living there writing good commentary, instead of a former crypto-Jew now living in Israel (but still making big efforts to stay as crypto as possible)?

    jim jones , says: March 2, 2019 at 8:14 pm GMT
    Lord Ahmed of Rotherham charged with sexual abuse of children:

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/03/01/rotherham-peer-lord-ahmed-charged-historic-child-sex-offences/

    annamaria , says: March 2, 2019 at 8:53 pm GMT
    @Sean "The leaders of disinvestment and antiZionism are the humanist wing of the Jewish intelligentsia."
    -- Thank you for the summary.
    Art , says: March 2, 2019 at 9:02 pm GMT
    Corbyn shaming and humiliating the Brit sellout elite that genuflects to the Jews.

    Corbyn calls for UK to condemn Israel's targeting of Palestinians

    March 2, 2019 at 1:37 pm | Published in: Europe & Russia, Israel, Middle East, News, Palestine, UK

    Head of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn has called for the UK government to condemn Israel's killing of Palestinians as well as to freeze arms sales to the occupation state.

    His remarks came in the wake of a UN report which found that Israel might have committed war crimes against Palestinians.

    On Twitter, Corbyn wrote: "The UN says Israel's killings of demonstrators in Gaza – including children, paramedics and journalists – may constitute 'war crimes or crimes against humanity'".

    "The UK government must unequivocally condemn the killings and freeze arms sales to Israel."

    The UN report, published earlier this week, said: "The Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to others when they were shot, nor were they directly participating in hostilities," adding that the protests had been "civilian in nature".

    https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190302-corbyn-calls-for-uk-to-condemn-israels-targeting-of-palestinians/

    Think Peace -- Art

    nmb , says: March 2, 2019 at 9:16 pm GMT
    Neoliberal fascists attempt to regain control over the European continent to prevent a Leftist revival
    Anon [257] Disclaimer , says: March 2, 2019 at 9:59 pm GMT
    @Jake Fagin was based on Ikey Solomon, a notorious organized crime figure.
    Iris , says: March 2, 2019 at 10:06 pm GMT
    @Tyrion 2 " Israel is not a global outlier for humanitarian issues "

    This has to be the joke of the month: I never suspected you had such great hidden comic talents, Tyrion.

    Anonymous [219] Disclaimer , says: March 2, 2019 at 10:33 pm GMT
    @Anon Jonathan Cook is a Jew living in Israel. Shocking, I know.
    Tyrion 2 , says: March 2, 2019 at 10:42 pm GMT
    @Sean "Humanist" is a funny name for people who worship the primitive.
    Curmudgeon , says: March 2, 2019 at 11:14 pm GMT
    @Anon It's more than that. Claiming Blair

    firmly occupied the political centre.

    is pure fantasy. His crowd attacked the public service and privatized things Margaret Thatcher wouldn't go near.

    Nonny , says: March 2, 2019 at 11:22 pm GMT
    @Monotonous Languor Disgusting genocidal comment.

    Every dual citizen should be kicked out of every legislature.

    Everyone genitally mutilating a baby should be imprisoned for 10 years.

    Every illegal settler should be ordered to go back where he came from.

    Sean , says: March 2, 2019 at 11:54 pm GMT
    @Tyrion 2 The member of the House of Lords (Baron) Glasman is the 100% Jewish son of a businessman who had his own manufacturing company. Though he talks a lot of sense, I really don't see Maurice Glasman being the mastermind of the the Labour Party's "Blue" school of strategic thought (see here ) is an indication that the indigenous British working class are producing their own thinkers. Did it really need a Jewish academic to say that Labour were in a 'weird space where we thought that a real assault on the wage levels of English workers was a positive good'?

    Even if they thought it, white gentiles in the Labour Party did not dare articulate the obvious truth that mass immigration under Labour was 'an unofficial wages policy'. There is a lack of confidence in their own thought processes among everyone but Jews, and not just in the Labour Party.

    John Gray's book Black Mass had the thesis of a link between the Bible's 1,000-year reign of the saints, Christian millenarianism , Nazism's a 1000-year Reich Auschwitz and the Enlightenment which Gray sees as explaining the invasion of Iraq but when he actual identified the people responsible for influencing Bush, he was, as Damian Thompson noted in a review, too nervous to mention that they, and others (pre 9/11 Wolfowitz had been like 'a parrot' about toppling Saddam ), wanting an invasion of Iraq were mostly Jewish. Some people say Rumsfeld (a gentile with what Jews think is a very Jewish sounding name) was the prime mover in that perhaps forgetting his support of Saddam's Iraq complete with its open nuclear construction project during the Reagan Presidency. Rumsfeld was greatly influenced by the Albert Wohlsetter , who became the guru of Richard Perle who dated Wohlsetter's daughter when they met at Hollywood High School (Ron Unz was born in Hollywood).

    Holliwood is exceptionally Jewish, because it is basically Jews who make films that people will pay to see,. They understand human nature and how to work with it, and thus Jews have a greater power to influence or force of moral suasion than other people. As a result the great debates in the West come down to arguments between Jews as with the vendetta between Bernard Brodie and Wohlsetter (who without any official position, invented the Missile Gap for JFK and the Window Of Opportunity for Reagan).

    Art , says: March 3, 2019 at 12:10 am GMT
    @Tyrion 2 Israel is not a global outlier for humanitarian issues.

    You lie so effortlessly, so carefree, with such nonchalance, such blithe. How do you do it?

    The Jew "humanitarian" obsession with getting Iran has let to this.

    Over 80,000 kids under the age of five have died of starvation in Yemen, UN chief says

    "Children did not start the war in Yemen, but they are paying the highest price. Some 360,000 children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition, fighting for their lives every day. And one credible report put the number of children under 5 who have died of starvation at more than 80,000," Guterres told a donor conference in the Swiss city of Geneva on Tuesday.

    https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/02/26/589651/Over-80000-kids-under-the-age-of-five-have-died-of-starvation-in-Yemen-UN-chief-says

    Think Peace -- Do No harm -- Art

    annamaria , says: March 3, 2019 at 12:48 am GMT
    Ziocons' Ukrainian baby: https://www.voltairenet.org/article205172.html

    Ukraine: NATO in the Constitution.

    The merit for having introduced into the Ukrainian Constitution the engagement to enter officially into NATO goes to Parliamentary President Andriy Parubiy. Co-founder in 1991 of the Ukrainian National-Socialist Party, on the model of Adolf Hitler's National-Socialist Party; head of the neo-Nazi paramilitary formations which were used in 2014 during the putsch of Place Maïdan under US/NATO command, and in the massacre of Odessa ; head of the Ukraine National Security and Defense Council, which, with the Azov Battalion and other neo-Nazi units, attacked Ukrainian civilians of Russian nationality in the Eastern part of the country and used his squadrons for acts of ferocious abuse, the plunder of political headquarters and other auto-da-fés in a truly Nazi style.

    Ukraine is already linked to NATO, of which it is a partner: for example, the Azov Battalion, whose Nazi character is represented by the emblem copied from that of the SS unit Das Reich, has been transformed into a special operations regiment, equipped with armoured vehicles and trained by US instructors from the 173rd Airborne Division, transferred to Ukraine from Vicence, and seconded by other NATO members.

    Not a peep from Britsh purists of holo-biz persuasion. LFI chair Joan Ryan, in particular, is not "disturbed' at all by the NATO cooperation with Ukrainian neo-Nazi. The Friends of Israel in the UK accept cordially the "good" neo-Nazis that have been accepted by the Jewish State itself:

    Altai , says: March 3, 2019 at 1:11 am GMT
    @Sean On the other hand, why do the pro-Palestinian intellectuals in the diaspora always lose out? Why are they incapable of ever showing influence in any serious way in the Jewish community? Why is it not a widely known reality that most diaspora have views on Israel similar to the broad opinion in their host countries or even more radical inline with their socio-political stance elsewhere? Perhaps they don't get much support from the others because they don't want to give it. If even the likes of Rachel Riley and Stephen Fry are on the anti-Corbyn witchhunt, what is the attitude of the average Jew?

    For god's sake, Riley is barely Jewish, (to the point that practically nobody knew she considered herself Jewish until now) never lived a second in Israel and yet is so emotionally attached to it that she waged a full spectrum media campaign (complete with the typical selfie of her looking sad after online 'assault') in service of silencing any dissent on Israel.

    As Atzmon himself has noted, the entry of large numbers of Jews in the pro-Palestinian movement shifted it's agenda to one less and less accommodating to Palestinian interests and less demanding of Israel. See MondoWeiss.

    Miggle , says: March 3, 2019 at 1:17 am GMT
    @Byrresheim

    Please explain, brainwashed American. Childhood brainwashing is remarkably effective.

    These people are right and they know it. If you can't afford to got to hospital and get deeper in debt because you can't afford the interest payments, just borrow for a flight to Cuba and stay there. You will get the hospital care and not sink deeper into debt.

    Or are you about to start screaming about the most vicious, evil Communist of all time, Jesus of Nazareth, who said, "Sell all you have and give to the poor"?

    Or do you know some objective specifics that the rest of us should know about?

    annamaria , says: March 3, 2019 at 1:18 am GMT
    "Why Is The British Government Banning Hizbullah?" https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/03/why-is-britains-government-banning-hizbullah.html#comments
    Comment section:

    Sometimes soon the FUK, the Former United Kingdom, will have to get used to the fact, that they are not an Empire anymore.

    The Lobby has helped the Tories in Britain a lot recently in painting Corbyn as an anti-Semite. Making sure that Corbyn never becomes prime minister is a big issue for them.

    The payback for the Israeli help given is, of course, banning Hizbullah.

    -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
    the UK has really gone insane! did they ban bds and anyone opposed to zionism too? only a matter of time

    -- -- -- -- -- -- -- –
    The UK's been in gross violation of International Law for decades on end, the latest determination by the WCJ on the Chomoro Islanders is its latest defeat and proof of its terrorizing policies. Then we have the subject of support for terrorists in Syria and terrorism in Venezuela. Some brave, enterprising folk ought to plant a passel of Hezbollah flags on the grounds of the minister's house, then report him for his crime of being in possession of banned material. And yet another reason for Scots to vote for independence and the end of Union, as I'm certain Scots don't want to be associated with a terror state like Britain.

    The UK government has been supporting the terrorists of all stripes including White Helmets and Al Qaeda -- as was ordered by their masters in Tel Aviv and the Friends of Israel in the UK. The traitorous fools still believe in the chosenites' omnipotence.

    Anon [253] Disclaimer , says: March 3, 2019 at 1:35 am GMT
    But what happens when this anti-Semitic nonsense creates the White Christian Radicals who want to avenge the murder of the Christ that was done by the Hebrews. Are they ready for that?
    Miggle , says: March 3, 2019 at 2:15 am GMT
    @smokey

    Jewish is about race, religion and place of origin,

    Modern Jews are not a religion, not a race, and have no place of origin. They are a gang forever imprisoned in an inherited totalitarian culture by childhood brainwashing to hate all non-Jews. The first thing they are taught is that the non-Jews have always hated the Jews and wanted to kill them, when the reverse is true.

    Most Jews are atheists. It is on record that David Ben-Gurion was an atheist, but still he was a Jew. So Judaism is not a religion.

    As for place of origin, it is about how far the proselytizing rabbis reached in the cosmopolitan world of the Macedonian and Roman empires, where travel was safe and the whole world shared Greek as its lingua franca.

    Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass land and sea to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. [Matt. 23:15, original in Greek!]

    The mark of modern Jews is that hypocrisy, pretending they are the victims, that everyone wants to kill them. It goes back at least as far as the Book of Esther, a fictitious story about how the Persians wanted to kill all the Jews for a trivial reason.

    Jew-hating is an incurable disease. Under certain democratic conditions it may not flourish well. Under certain conditions the germ may even appear to die, but it never does die even in most ideal climate. [Leon Uris, Exodus ]

    Culloden , says: March 3, 2019 at 2:27 am GMT
    The Anglo-American Establishment, from Rhodes to Cliveden: {Balfour, Palestine, Ireland, Zionism, and Anti-Semitism}

    http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/the_anglo-american_establishment.pdf

    renfro , says: March 3, 2019 at 2:51 am GMT
    Is it worse in the US ..I would say so

    GOP's anti-Muslim display likening Rep. Omar to a terrorist rocks W. Virginia capitol

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/gop-s-anti-muslim-display-likening-rep-omar-terrorist-rocks-n978371

    "Angry arguments broke out in the West Virginia statehouse on Friday after the state Republican Party allegedly set up an anti-Muslim display in the rotunda linking the 9/11 terror attacks to a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota.

    The display featured a picture of the World Trade Center in New York City as a fireball exploded from the one of the Twin Towers, set above a picture of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is Muslim. "'Never forget' – you said. . ." read a caption on the first picture. "I am the proof – you have forgotten," read the caption under the picture of Omar, who is wearing a hijab.

    One staff member was physically injured during the morning's confrontations, and another official resigned after being accused of making anti-Muslim comments. Several Democrats objected to the display, and reportedly got into an argument with the House's sergeant at arms, Anne Lieberman, after she allegedly made an anti-Muslim remark.

    Del. Mike Angelucci, D-Marion, charged Lieberman had said "all Muslims are terrorists." "I am furious, and I don't want to see her representing the people of this great state in the House again," Angelucci said of Lieberman, who became the state's first female sergeant at arms last year. Speaking to West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Lieberman denied she'd made the comment. By the end of the day she had submitted her resignation "effective immediately," officials said

    Miggle , says: March 3, 2019 at 2:57 am GMT
    @Z-man

    It's amazing how Britain has turned into a multi cult whore and slut of the KIKE! It started with Disraeli!

    I haven't read his books. I might be a little pedantic here. But I have read his biography by a French Jew, André Maurois, a famous author. Disraeli was a Christian. Jewish childhood. But never knew that till he went to school and found that he and another pupil were treated differently when the time came for the class on religion. Great puzzle for him and Sarah to work out. And instead of bar-mitzvah, which he had probably never heard of, he went to baptism.

    Beefcake the Mighty , says: March 3, 2019 at 3:03 am GMT
    @Tyrion 2 LOL. Israel lives parasitically off of stolen land and it's fifth column in the West preventing even remotely balanced policy towards it. It really is amazing how you fail to see how transparent your bullshit is.
    Culloden , says: March 3, 2019 at 3:03 am GMT

    Soon Corbyn will stand alone, exposed before the inquisition that has been prepared for him.

    No. He will have support from Ireland and Scotland. The Brits, artificial famines, and exporting cheap labour and slaves abroad:

    An artificial famine

    "A Celtic cross stands high above the waters at the western end of Canada's Grosse Isle. The Cross bears inscription in Gaelic, French and English, carved on ebony panels."

    " Children of the Gael died in their thousands on this island having fled from the laws of the foreign tyrants and an artificial famine in the years 1847-48.

    God's loyal blessing upon them. Let this monument be a token to their name and honour from the Gaels of America. God save Ireland."

    "That is the translation from the Gaelic inscription. The bitterness of the accusatory Gaelic inscription is absent from the English dedication. [ ] The French dedication is similarly lacking in bitterness."

    Edward Laxton, The Famine Ships, The Irish Exodus to America . An Owl Book, Henry Holt and Company, New York.

    Beefcake the Mighty , says: March 3, 2019 at 3:08 am GMT
    @Anonymous These are very valid points, but the fact is, the powers that be are terrified of his election for a reason. The sad fact is, political hope these days lies with the Left, since the cuck right is beyond useless, and there is currently little hope for a legitimate opposition Right movement. It would be thoroughly demonized in the US and subject to arrest in toilets like Britain or France. AOC is a very stupid girl, but people like her and Corbyn deserve some consideration, unfortunately.
    Saoirse , says: March 3, 2019 at 3:12 am GMT
    "Taking Down" British Officials

    Israel conspires against the Mother of Parliaments

    "A quite incredible story out of England has not received much media coverage in the United States. It concerns how the Israeli Embassy in London connived with government officials to "take down" parliamentarians and government ministers who were considered to be critical of the Jewish State. It was also learned that the Israeli Embassy was secretly subsidizing and advising private groups promoting Israeli interests, including associations of Members of Parliament (MPs)."

    Philip Giraldi • January 31, 2017

    http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/taking-down-british-officials/

    Beefcake the Mighty , says: March 3, 2019 at 3:15 am GMT
    @niteranger Britain deserves it fate for instigating two world wars that destroyed European civilization.
    Monotonous Languor , says: March 3, 2019 at 3:32 am GMT
    It's absolutely amazing how even the very concept of Jewry (let alone their actual existence) can sow such enormous discord all up and down the political spectrum, with such myriad permutations and combinations thereof.

    At the end of the day, there has to be a kind of benign neglect towards the Jews, BUT ONLY after each and every last single one of them has moved to Israel, by force if necessary. None of them should be allowed to live ever again in any other nation-state, nor have any controlling interests in anything outside of Israel. Otherwise the rest of us will be back at each other's throats again in no time.

    If they're all in one spot, attending to their own interests, then fine, so be it. They can do whatever they want to and with their immediate moslem neighbors, as long as the rest of the world doesn't feel obliged to assist, resist, or even care very much. At that point it should all be left up to them. Truly, a pox on all their houses.

    Sean , says: March 3, 2019 at 3:41 am GMT
    @Altai

    https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/So-farewell-then-Tony-Judt

    In a much-cited October 2003 essay in The New York Review of Books, Judt called to dismantle the state and to replace it with "a single, integrated, bi-national state" between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – a recipe for national suicide for the sovereign Jewish entity. This categorical rejection of Zionism put him in a class with other contemporary Jewish intellectuals of the Diaspora such as Jacqueline Rose, Michael Neumann and Joel Kovel,

    I suppose they are not taken seriously by people with their hands on the levers of power and governments, because they are asking too much. Diaspora intellectuals represent the intelligentsia's view, which is that ethnic domination of a nations-state as with the Jewish state of Israel is incompatible with humanist principles.

    Lots of politicians get elected by sounding as if they are humanists, but then they are responsible for a state and they start to obey the dictates of realism. Withdrawing from the occupied territories is now quite clearly something Israel has no intention of ever doing, although it would not require the evacuation of more than 48,000 people (9000 families) according to this

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-many-settlers-need-to-be-evacuated-to-make-way-for-a-palestinian-state-1.6386939

    The information in the above link was quite surprising to me, and it seems that expulsion of the West Bank Arabs is, for the foreseeable future, a long way from of being the best solution for Israel.

    Nevertheless as Ehud Barak said "Every attempt [by the State of Israel] to keep hold of this area [the West Bank and Gaza] as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don't vote it is an apartheid state." I think the Palestinians position is stronger than Israel and its Lobby want anyone to know, so they are making maximum efforts to stifle debate. But the Palestinians are holding out for much more that just a state, partly because of Western internationalists.

    Asagirian , says: Website March 3, 2019 at 4:53 am GMT
    McCarthyism is ancient history. We now have Soros-Bezos Complex.
    Tyrion 2 , says: March 3, 2019 at 8:34 am GMT
    @Sean Your post reminds me of my Great Aunt, who was prone to saying things like "your birthday is the 2nd of July and mine is in September, that's amazing, because 2 + 7 (July) = 9 (September)" as if this was meaningful.

    The reductio ad adsurdum of this where you try to include Rumsfeld in a special peri-Jew category on account of the sound of his name

    james charles , says: March 3, 2019 at 10:09 am GMT
    @Saoirse "Sir Alan Duncan, the senior Foreign Office minister revealed as the target of an Israeli embassy official's desire to "take down" British MPs, is responsible on paper for Europe and the Americas, worrying primarily about the Falklands and Cyprus."
    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/08/why-might-an-israeli-diplomat-believe-alan-duncan-needs-taking-down
    james charles , says: March 3, 2019 at 10:42 am GMT
    @Beefcake the Mighty You may like this?

    Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich
    By Guido Giacomo Preparata

    https://www.solargeneral.org/wp-content/uploads/library/conjuring-hitler.pdf

    annamaria , says: March 3, 2019 at 12:28 pm GMT
    @Tyrion 2 The Jewish State is indeed an outlier considering its hypocrisy, including holo-biz profiteering schema based on the alleged "superior morality" and "eternal victimhood" and other Anne Frank specialties:
    Tyrion 2 , says: March 3, 2019 at 12:28 pm GMT
    @Sean The progressives are Janus-faced. In that on one they believe in the perfect, but on the other hand they let it be the enemy of the good, thus they end up rejecting realistic achievement and instead exult in bringing it low. They, and their allies, seem to be mostly riffs on Year Zero cults. No wonder they get all loved up for Islamist fanaticism.

    Idolators, perfectionists and slavish decandents, all at once. Naturally, they're strongest among the coddled and well-to-do.

    Let's all sit around and worship the golden calf to absolute excess, while we fade away or starve. There can be no middle ground between perfection or complete embrace of the other.

    Wizard of Oz , says: March 3, 2019 at 1:12 pm GMT
    @Che Guava Why do you call Cook a crypto-Jew? His claim to Israeli citizenship is based only on his marriage to an Israeli citizen and she is a Christian Palestinian.
    Tyrion 2 , says: March 3, 2019 at 1:45 pm GMT
    @james charles Another individual whom, like Corbyn, claimed to be for British sovereignty all of his political career in order to signal his patriotism but then, when push came to shove, he campaigned for Remain.

    Worse, when given a second chance and the backing of a public vote to go for Brexit, again like Corbyn, Duncan doubled down and ended up dismissing the vote as a mere "working class tantrum".

    With his "soak the poor", "open borders", "let them eat cultural enrichment" attitude, he is the Marie Antoinette of British politics.

    [Mar 20, 2019] The Mysterious Collapse of WTC Building 7

    Is this a plan of the elite to introduce national security state in action. Are they afraid of the collapse of neoliberal social order and try to take precautions?
    Notable quotes:
    "... These factors would have resulted in the structural framing furthest from the flames remaining intact and possessing its full structural integrity, i.e., strength and stiffness. ..."
    "... the superstructure above would begin to lean in the direction of the burning side. ..."
    "... Nevertheless, the ultimate failure mode would have been a toppling of the upper floors to one side-much like the topping of a tall redwood tree-not a concentric, vertical collapse. ..."
    "... no molten metal ..."
    "... A reporter with rare access to the debris at ground zero "descended deep below street level to areas where underground fires still burned and steel flowed in molten streams." ..."
    "... Please remember that firefighters sprayed millions of gallons of water on the fires, and also applied high-tech fire retardants. Specifically, 4 million gallons of water were dropped on Ground Zero within the first 10 days after September 11, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories : ..."
    "... Why would the Insiders bother blowing Building 7? Indeed, why would the Insiders bother with WTC at all? Exactly what were the motivations of the Insiders supposed to be? ..."
    "... Larry Silverstein had a magic ball that told him to insure the buildings for "terrorist attacks". In February of 2002, Silverstein was awarded $861,000,000 for his insurance claims from Industrial Risk Insurers. His initial investment in WTC 7 was only $386,000,000. ..."
    "... Perhaps after the first couple of attempted attacks on the WTC in the 90's they had a good look at what would happen if an attack was successful. Perhaps they then decided that the massive collateral damage from a partial or messy collapse could be greatly reduced by having the buildings ready to be brought down in a controlled way. ..."
    "... All this would have to be kept secret as noone would work in a building lined with explosives. However the insurance companies, and the owner of the building would know, and this would explain the comments made by silverstein (comments that he himself never clarified). ..."
    "... This may all be completely wrong, but lets face it, explosives did bring these buildings down. ..."
    "... http://topdocumentaryfilms.com ...How about a 5 hour video that methodically refutes and explains the flaws of virtually every aspect of the 'official story', in particular the shamefully flawed NIST report ..."
    "... There were no pyroclastic flows at WTC. That's obvious by the fact that pieces of intact paper lay everywhere, something that would be impossible if a hot cloud covered the area. ..."
    "... The reason that you have to resort to esoteric explanations for what happened at WTC is that you believe lies about what happened at WTC. ..."
    "... If you really believe that this was done by hydrocarbon based fires begun by burning jet fuel you are beyond hopeless. ..."
    "... Why do you trust the government so much? That to me is idiotic. History has proven pretty much every government to be corrupt. It's sheep like you that allow them to get away with it. Just keep walking sheep, don't want to fall back from the mob. ..."
    "... The "accepted scholarship" is conducted almost entirely by government shills for the benefit of dumbed down Americans whose information intake is limited to Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. ..."
    Sep 15, 2012 | WashingtonsBlog

    ... ... ...

    What Do the Experts Say?

    What does the evidence show about the Solomon Brothers Building in Manhattan?

    Numerous structural engineers – the people who know the most about office building vulnerabilities and accidents – say that the official explanation of why building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11 is "impossible", "defies common logic" and "violates the law of physics":

    The collapse of WTC7 looks like it may have been the result of a controlled demolition. This should have been looked into as part of the original investigation

    Photos of the steel, evidence about how the buildings collapsed, the unexplainable collapse of WTC 7, evidence of thermite in the debris as well as several other red flags, are quite troubling indications of well planned and controlled demolition

    In my view, the chances of the three buildings collapsing symmetrically into their own footprint, at freefall speed, by any other means than by controlled demolition, are so remote that there is no other plausible explanation

    Near-freefall collapse violates laws of physics. Fire induced collapse is not consistent with observed collapse mode . . . .

    How did the structures collapse in near symmetrical fashion when the apparent precipitating causes were asymmetrical loading? The collapses defies common logic from an elementary structural engineering perspective.

    ***

    Heat transmission (diffusion) through the steel members would have been irregular owing to differing sizes of the individual members; and, the temperature in the members would have dropped off precipitously the further away the steel was from the flames-just as the handle on a frying pan doesn't get hot at the same rate as the pan on the burner of the stove. These factors would have resulted in the structural framing furthest from the flames remaining intact and possessing its full structural integrity, i.e., strength and stiffness.

    Structural steel is highly ductile, when subjected to compression and bending it buckles and bends long before reaching its tensile or shear capacity. Under the given assumptions, "if" the structure in the vicinity started to weaken, the superstructure above would begin to lean in the direction of the burning side. The opposite, intact, side of the building would resist toppling until the ultimate capacity of the structure was reached, at which point, a weak-link failure would undoubtedly occur. Nevertheless, the ultimate failure mode would have been a toppling of the upper floors to one side-much like the topping of a tall redwood tree-not a concentric, vertical collapse.

    For this reason alone, I rejected the official explanation for the collapse .

    We design and analyze buildings for the overturning stability to resist the lateral loads with the combination of the gravity loads. Any tall structure failure mode would be a fall over to its side. It is impossible that heavy steel columns could collapse at the fraction of the second within each story and subsequently at each floor below.We do not know the phenomenon of the high rise building to disintegrate internally faster than the free fall of the debris coming down from the top.

    The engineering science and the law of physics simply doesn't know such possibility. Only very sophisticated controlled demolition can achieve such result, eliminating the natural dampening effect of the structural framing huge mass that should normally stop the partial collapse. The pancake theory is a fallacy, telling us that more and more energy would be generated to accelerate the collapse. Where would such energy would be coming from?

    Fire and impact were insignificant in all three buildings [Again, please ignore any reference to the Twin Towers this essay focuses solely on WTC7]. Impossible for the three to collapse at free-fall speed. Laws of physics were not suspended on 9/11, unless proven otherwise

    The symmetrical "collapse" due to asymmetrical damage is at odds with the principles of structural mechanics

    It is virtually impossible for WTC building 7 to collapse as it did with the influence of sporadic fires. This collapse HAD to be planned

    It is very suspicious that fire brought down Building 7 yet the Madrid hotel fire was still standing after 24 hours of fire. This is very suspicious to me because I design buildings for a living

    The above is just a sample. Many other structural engineers have questioned the collapse of Building 7, as have numerous top experts in other relevant disciplines, including:

    The collapse was too symmetrical to have been eccentrically generated. The destruction was symmetrically initiated to cause the buildings to implode as they did

    Watch this short video on Building 7 by Architects and Engineers (ignore any reference to the Twin Towers, deaths on 9/11, or any other topics other than WTC7):

    Fish In a Barrel

    Poking holes in the government's spin on Building 7 is so easy that it is like shooting fish in a barrel.

    As just one example, the spokesman for the government agency which says that the building collapsed due to fire said there was no molten metal at ground zero:


    The facts are a wee bit different:

    Please remember that firefighters sprayed millions of gallons of water on the fires, and also applied high-tech fire retardants. Specifically, 4 million gallons of water were dropped on Ground Zero within the first 10 days after September 11, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories:

    Approximately three million gallons of water were hosed on site in the fire-fighting efforts, and 1 million gallons fell as rainwater, between 9/11 and 9/21 .

    The spraying continued for months afterward (the 10 day period was simply the timeframe in which the DOE was sampling). Enormous amounts of water were hosed on Ground Zero continuously, day and night:

    "Firetrucks [sprayed] a nearly constant jet of water on [ground zero]. You couldn't even begin to imagine how much water was pumped in there," said Tom Manley of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, the largest fire department union. "It was like you were creating a giant lake."

    This photograph may capture a sense of how wet the ground became due to the constant spraying:

    murphy Arguments Regarding the Collapse of the World Trade Center Evaporate Upon Inspection
    In addition, the fires were sprayed with thousands of gallons of high tech fire-retardants.

    The fact that there were raging fires and molten metal even after the application of massive quantities of water and fire retardants shows how silly the government spokesman's claim is.

    Again, this has nothing to do with "inside job" no one was killed in the collapse of Building 7, no wars were launched based on a rallying cry of "remember the Solomon Brothers building", and no civil liberties were lost based on a claim that we have to prevent future WTC7 tragedies.

    It is merely meant to show that government folks sometimes lie even about issues tangentially related to 9/11.

    Pooua > Wolfen Batroach • 2 years ago

    Why would the Insiders bother blowing Building 7? Indeed, why would the Insiders bother with WTC at all? Exactly what were the motivations of the Insiders supposed to be?

    JusticeFor911 > Pooua

    Larry Silverstein had a magic ball that told him to insure the buildings for "terrorist attacks". In February of 2002, Silverstein was awarded $861,000,000 for his insurance claims from Industrial Risk Insurers. His initial investment in WTC 7 was only $386,000,000.

    I'd say nearly half of $1,000,000,000.00 was the primary cause to include this building with the towers. Keep in mind that President Bush's brother Marvin was a principal in the company Securacom that provided security for the WTC, United Airlines and Dulles International Airport. Are dots connecting yet?

    Pooua > JusticeFor911

    If you buy a new car, you take out full coverage insurance on it. Insuring billion-dollar buildings is standard procedure, especially when one had already suffered a terrorist attack. You insinuation is nothing but gossip and suggestion.

    No, Securacom did not provide security for WTC; that's the job of the Port Authority of NY & NJ. Securacom had a contract to perform a limited service for PANYNJ, and Marvin Bush was only a bit player (he was on the board of directors) in the company. Your paranoid ramblings are lies.

    IBSHILLIN > Pooua

    Perhaps after the first couple of attempted attacks on the WTC in the 90's they had a good look at what would happen if an attack was successful. Perhaps they then decided that the massive collateral damage from a partial or messy collapse could be greatly reduced by having the buildings ready to be brought down in a controlled way.

    All this would have to be kept secret as noone would work in a building lined with explosives. However the insurance companies, and the owner of the building would know, and this would explain the comments made by silverstein (comments that he himself never clarified).

    This may all be completely wrong, but lets face it, explosives did bring these buildings down.

    Pooua > IBSHILLIN

    I find it amazing that you consider yourself such an unquestionable expert that you not only feel qualified to insist that explosives brought down the WTC buildings, even in contradiction to scores of scientists, engineers and investigators of NIST, FEMA, FBI and MIT who say otherwise, and you do so without offering any evidence at all to support your bizarre claim.

    No building the size of any of the WTC buildings has ever been brought down by controlled demolition, but of those that come closest, the planning took years, and the rigging took months of hard work by teams of experts working around the clock. This is not something that can be hidden.

    Your suggestion is entirely preposterous and without merit.

    ihaveabrain > Pooua

    explain this? You are smarter than these experts? http://www.hulu.com/watch/4120...

    NIST, FEMA, FBI and MIT are worthless entities! What about the experts in that documentary? Nanothermite brought them down smart guy!

    Pooua > ihaveabrain • 25 days ago

    You posted a 1.5-hour video. I am not here to watch a 1.5-hour video; I'm here to discuss the topic of the collapse of WTC 7. If you have something to say, say it here.

    NIST has been the premier standards body used by the US government for a century, covering virtually every aspect of engineering and public safety in this country. It employes thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians. For you to claim that it is a worthless entity is idiocy on your part.

    linked1 > Pooua • 24 days ago

    http://topdocumentaryfilms.com ...How about a 5 hour video that methodically refutes and explains the flaws of virtually every aspect of the 'official story', in particular the shamefully flawed NIST report

    You claim to want to discuss the topic of the collapse of WTC-7 but you can't be bothered to watch painstakingly researched documentaries that include thousands of witnesses, victims, scientists, and structural professionals.

    You ought to educate yourself before calling other's claims 'worthless idiocy'. You are wrong, and history will prove you wrong.

    Pooua > linked1

    I've been reading arguments about 9/11 for two years. I've been arguing about other issues for the last 25 years, at least since I took a class in classical logic. What you need to understand is, you aren't arguing anything when you send me off to listen to someone else. The other guy might be arguing something, but you aren't doing anything. And, the fact that I've spent two years reading everything I could find on the subject makes me strongly suspect that this five-hour video would be just a waste of my time.

    If you want to discuss this matter, then discuss it. Don't send me off to spend hours of my time listening to someone else. You explain it. If you can't explain it, then you don't understand it, and you are wasting everyone's time.

    mulegino1 . > Pooua

    The levels of energy required to turn most of the Twin Towers and WTC7 into nanoparticles (thus the pyrocastic flow which only occurs in volcanic eruptions and nuclear detonations) would be thousands of orders of magnitude greater than airliner impacts and hydrocarbon based office fires, which are claimed to have initiated a "gravity collapse".

    How could a "gravity collapse" perfectly mimic the detonation of a small tactical nuclear device or devices-electromagnetic pulse, molten lava and a mushroom cloud?

    Pooua > mulegino1

    I want you to look at this image from the WTC on 9/11. It shows the debris after the Towers collapsed. Does this look like nanoparticles to you? Most of the debris was bigger than a man's fist.

    Thumbnail

    There were no pyroclastic flows at WTC. That's obvious by the fact that pieces of intact paper lay everywhere, something that would be impossible if a hot cloud covered the area.

    The reason that you have to resort to esoteric explanations for what happened at WTC is that you believe lies about what happened at WTC.

    mulegino1 . > Pooua

    If you really believe that this was done by hydrocarbon based fires begun by burning jet fuel you are beyond hopeless.

    There was indeed a pyroclasticas flow as anyone with youtube can determine for themselves.

    Pooua > WilliamBinney • a year ago

    It is your job to do more than make idiotic, speculative assertions and pretend that constitutes a reason for disregarding the government's account of the event. Yet, you all have completely failed to do anything except expose your own inability to account for the events of that day.

    Dizzer13 > Pooua • a year ago

    Why do you trust the government so much? That to me is idiotic. History has proven pretty much every government to be corrupt. It's sheep like you that allow them to get away with it. Just keep walking sheep, don't want to fall back from the mob.

    mulegino1 . > Pooua • 2 years ago

    The "accepted scholarship" is conducted almost entirely by government shills for the benefit of dumbed down Americans whose information intake is limited to Fox, CNN, and MSNBC.

    The official narrative is so ludicrous from any standpoint that the "debunkers" resort to wildly implausible scenarios in order to convince the above cited demographic that the government and the major national media were reporting factual information when in fact they were reading from a script. And it was a very poorly written script. The Bin Laden bogeyman was already being invoked before the buildings exploded.

    What you've got here is a pseudo-religious narrative designed to so enrage the dumbed down sheeple that they will lash out in their fury against virtually anyone designated by the powers that be as the enemy- a Sorelian myth.

    Like any false narrative, the official story breaks down at the level of discrete facts and can only survive as a holistic mythologized, meta-historical events.

    [Mar 20, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard's appearance on Stephen Colbert by Kim Iversen

    I was pleasantly surprised that so many people were on Tulsi's side.
    Now it is clear the Stephen Colbert is creation of his handlers and personally is quite stupid.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Stephen Colbert is a total disgrace and surprisingly really stupid ..."
    "... Colbert is a corporate toadie and an apologist for neocon regime change wars. Tulsi put him in check. ..."
    Mar 20, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Kim Iversen , 5 days ago

    Well, this was demonetized and is under copyright review....:(

    ArgentiumTea , 5 days ago

    Stephen Colbert should be ashamed of himself

    Cody Hald , 5 days ago

    I unsubscribed from Colbert's channel because of his hackey establishment propaganda. He is now in the same category as Bill Maher

    Jared Oborny , 5 days ago

    I grew up watching and loving Colbert. Over the last few years I have not really liked him or his views, but still had a sot spot in my heart for him. This interview makes me never want to even watch another clip of his again. I felt disgust and anger after watching his interrogation of Tulsi.

    Steve Smith , 5 days ago

    Tulsi meeting with Assad is called diplomacy. Apparently, this is no longer a concept that our government recognizes.

    Gordon Adams , 5 days ago

    I have never before heard a politician give a straight yes or no answer to a direct question and follow through with, "in my opinion". She is fantastic.

    Fay A , 5 days ago

    I wish Tulsi told Colbert that he and the media are giving David Duke too much power giving them the voice to discredit any presidential election.

    ND Williams , 5 days ago (edited)

    What Tulsi should point out is that we created the vacuum in the first place. If we had not intervened there would be no power vacuum for China or Russia to fill. The first rule of getting out of a hole: stop digging

    Loro sono umano , 5 days ago

    China is going to become the worlds biggest super power because they're playing the long game. Although you can say their building is a "debt trap" it's still business deals that the other countries need and it's not like we Americans dont use credit cards and are in a bunch of debt.

    The US keeps losing trust in the world because of how we've gone about things. We need someone like Tulsi to gain that trust back and actually do good in the world

    Troy McGarrigle , 5 days ago

    U.S. drops a bomb every 20 minutes for the past 10 years, on countries its not even at war with, and to this Colbert says 'nature abhors a vacuum'.

    GundyG B , 5 days ago (edited)

    Great video as usual. Stephen Colbert is a total disgrace and surprisingly really stupid. However, it doesn't matter if Tulsi doesn't win the presidency in 2020. What is most important is she becomes a part of Sander's team so that she can put a stop to the crazy US military ambition.

    Tulsi is perfect as the Sec of State. She can be the president a few years into a Sanders presidency. Her time is not in 2020, but in 2024 or 2028. Her support will grow over time.

    ND Williams , 5 days ago (edited)

    That's how the propaganda works. Repeat repeat repeat. 'sometimes you gotta propel the truth to get it to sink in' Bush, Jr. TULSI 2020

    Greg Rubin , 5 days ago

    Colbert is a corporate toadie and an apologist for neocon regime change wars. Tulsi put him in check.

    rambanita , 5 days ago

    Quote of the day..."Use your own goddamn Brain ! " Applause

    Norbert Rosendahl , 5 days ago

    The USA does not force for good . Look for Venezuela .... the USA does force for access to the resources.

    Patience Goudledieu , 2 days ago

    Stephen is the establishment. His idol, Les Moonves, passed him the torch. Colbert needs to go away.

    [Mar 19, 2019] ALERT Tulsi Gabbard Demolishes The View co-host Meghan McCain - YouTube

    Feb 21, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Once again Tulsi Gabbard was smeared by War Friendly Agents this time it was The View's Meghan McCain. Tulsi Gabbard explains her positions on a series of issues. #TulsiGabbard #TheView #TimBlackShow Pinned by TBTV

    TBTV , 3 weeks ago

    DEBUNKING ANOTHER TULSI GABBARD SMEAR HERE: https://youtu.be/Lo3GM760a2s

    E Menz , 1 week ago

    She is a very smart woman. Her demeanor and composure to answering questions was 

    CASSINE70 , 1 week ago

    What a classy, compassionate, intelligent, empathetic WOMAN!!!!! Go Tulsi!

    darren alevi , 3 weeks ago

    Meghan McCain is a disgusting little Neocon warmonger who has been brought up in an elite bubble she wouldn't have the guts or integrity to serve like Tulsi did. Tulsi handed this with class.

    Lakeview Recording Studio , 2 weeks ago

    Tulsi has a clue. She knows the dynamics of war. She knows why we need to stop been the world police. She's amazing and so brave.

    savagemaestro , 2 weeks ago

    These old girls got schooled by an actual WOMAN.

    justafanintexas , 1 week ago

    For the record, I always cringe when Meghan McCain opens her mouth Anyone remember her appearance on Bill Maher's show when she engaged Paul Begalla in a little debate on a specific moment in history and she replied, "I wasn't born yet," and then Begalla immediately stated, "I wasn't round during the French Revolution but I know about it"? Time to stop employing the uninformed daughter of a deceased Senator, dontcha think? Especially one who is so unmercifully unread.

    Mint & Tea , 2 weeks ago

    Gabbard is fantastic. An incredible level head.

    Mel Bowen , 3 weeks ago

    I don't no this lady but after this interview I'm on board with Tulsi Gabbard.

    Kim Leroux , 1 week ago (edited)

    The fact that Americans are still convinced the reasons they intervene in other countries are humanitarian help and defending freedom and not economic or strategic reasons is laughable. Get real, people, you are rarely the good guys. And no, the rest of the world do not want you barging in and patronize them.

    ucanthandledatruth01 , 2 days ago

    First time I've seen this beautiful intelligent compassionate lady named Tulsi. That blonde haired land shark thinks she's smart because she has been allowed to masquerade as some sort of respectable human for so long, she's just a fool even she's fooled by her own foolishness

    Celieboo , 3 weeks ago (edited)

    Damn! Tulsi Gabbard just gained my respect. She walked through minefield and came out unscathed because she kept her composure and stuck to her beliefs. And she is right--Assad has never threatened us!

    Chaitanya Srishti , 3 days ago

    hated the way Tulsi was attacked by these women there was literally hate on their faces they were clearly biased unfortunate she had to be interviewed by them but kudos to her, she answered every question and hell yes, there is vagueness in the green new deal Tulsi is talking about environment since a long time now but there is suddenly a new deal and new blood in Congress and all of a sudden ppl are noticing 'women' in Congress talking and making valid points while women like Tulsi have been making their arguments and many valid points w/o shouting

    Angel Leigh , 1 week ago

    You're the only person that I've heard be honest enough to say that the Green New Deal is just a framework. It is a starting point to a conversation. Thank you. Secondly, it is always amazing to me when political Talking Heads say we can't pay for universal healthcare or free higher education but are willing to fund regime changes in other countries. Willing to spend unnegotiated billions of dollars and Wars and conflicts in other countries. Where's the sense in that? And finally what would Meghan McCain have done had Hillary Clinton not accepted the Electoral College results and declared herself president in the United States because she won the popular vote? What would all of those Talking Heads and politicians have thought or done at all had all of those voters marched against the White House and Congress to force Hillary into the presidency? Hmmmm

    Wesley Byrd , 6 days ago (edited)

    Hello... military industrial complex is the driver here, always has been, always will be, until we come to terms with this, we'll keep intervening.

    [Mar 19, 2019] Tulsi 2020! No other democrat focuses on Foreign Policy like her! Tulsi Gabbard Speaks in San Francisco

    Important speech. Important ideas. No teleprompter.
    Mar 19, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Wahpahh , 2 days ago

    Tulsi 2020! No other democrat focuses on Foreign Policy like her!

    alorr4uz , 2 days ago (edited)

    wow. that was just wow. when she said "I am not someone who will go into the white house and sit back and rely on the foreign policy establishment in Washington to tell me what to do, I don't have to. I'm not intimidated by the stars that someone wears on their shoulders. I am not intimidated by the military industrial complex and what they're pushing for." she literally could have just dropped the mic. I bet the aforementioned military industrial complex just peed themselves a little. This is why MSM and DNC hate her. And why we all love her. I'm all in on #Tulsi2020 .

    Majdi Saadieh , 2 days ago (edited)

    Hello, Mrs. Gabbard excuse my English which is my third language. I respect you so much, I'm from Syrian, I live in SF you are the only one who really stood up for the Syrian people by talking about the lies of the media toward my country, and also by meeting with The Syrian President who is the legal representative of the Syrian people by election. You had the honor to visit my country and saw the miserable situation caused by the war that was made and supported by the US; please if you become the president end this war and end the suffer of the Syrian people 

    Brooks Rogers , 2 days ago

    99 year Old Mother, WWII ARMY Nurse Corp Vet on the Comfort when it was hit by a kamikaze, "adores" you Tulsi. So moved when watching the CNN Town Hall. You are her hero!

    cptsketch13 , 2 days ago

    Keep going Tulsi! You are making progress with your visibility and you crush those lame interviews that try to smear you

    Peter Rieser , 2 days ago

    That is my President right there.

    wanowan , 2 days ago

    Great speech. If you guys in USA don't want her, will take Tulsi in Canada.

    Agz , 2 days ago

    Get her to the debate stage America! Donate!!!

    eXcommunicate1979 , 2 days ago

    Listening to Tulsi is so inspiring. <3

    Highlander77 , 2 days ago

    I don't think I've ever seen a politician who I've listened to and said "This person, THIS is the one I want to be our President. THIS is the one who will truly represent the people, and lead this nation with a true vision and actually fight to do the things they say they want to do". But when I see and hear Tulsi, I feel like I'm seeing just that, for maybe the first time in my life.

    Nate Murdoch , 2 days ago

    Who should I support? An incredible woman who is a combat veteran with original ideas, or a white skateboarder who pretends to be Latino and married a rich girl? #Tulsi2020

    bones007able , 2 days ago

    she is starting to talk a little tougher lately.... she needs to ramp up her passion and she can't fail.....

    re575817 , 2 days ago

    We all have to work hard to get her up in the polls. She is a brilliant candidate!

    Midori L. , 2 days ago (edited)

    I was overwhelmed with so much warmth when I heard you speak, I swear I have never felt this before. Thank You for all your hard work! No matter what happens, you have my full support and my vote :)

    Jesse Pentecost , 2 days ago

    The next president of the united states of America

    uncleo , 2 days ago

    I've been all in for Bernie but listening to Tulsi is equally if not more inspiring given that her focus is on our insane interventionist foreign policy

    Raynaud Moreno , 2 days ago

    I donated $250. Please donate at least one dollar to her campaign and get her on the debate stage. We will she her crush all the other candidates

    BigAlShark , 2 days ago

    No teleprompters, no notes, no platitudes or empty rhetoric. Calm and logical and intelligent. No wonder the establishment is scared of her. GO TULSI!!!!

    [Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

    Highly recommended!
    Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?
    Notable quotes:
    "... Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? ..."
    "... "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." ..."
    "... Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
    "... The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. ..."
    "... As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career". ..."
    "... Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance. ..."
    Mar 03, 2006 | www.nytimes.com

    Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from an article at the excellent Medialens

    http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060303_hacks_and_spooks.php

    HACKS AND SPOOKS

    By Professor Richard Keeble

    And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...

    I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services: While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources) on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.

    As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:

    "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."

    Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.

    And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.

    In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.

    As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career".

    Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.

    A brief history

    Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.

    Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.

    The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.

    According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.

    And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.

    In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives' Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.

    And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.

    David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody in every office in Fleet Street"

    Leaker King

    And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications".

    Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction".

    Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot". King was also closely involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.

    Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.

    David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

    Maxwell and Mossad

    According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the 1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.

    In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6 were equally as strong.

    Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks were fascinating.

    For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse during the Cold War."

    The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms of first-hand knowledge."

    And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.

    Lawson strongly denied the allegations.

    Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not being used." (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)

    Growing power of secret state

    Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.

    But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.

    Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.

    According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by the Rockingham cell within the MoD.

    A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.

    Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.

    Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group, the Iraqi National Congress.

    Sexed up – and missed out

    During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government (in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.

    The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition? But those facts will be forever secret.

    Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was ignored by the inquiry.

    Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.

    Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."

    Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.

    ~

    Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.

    [Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

    Highly recommended!
    amazing, simply amazing. You need to watch this Town Hall in full to appreciate the skills she demonstrated in defense of her principles. What a fearless young lady.
    And this CNN warmonger, a prostitute of MIC was/is pretty devious. Question were selected with malice to hurt Tulsi and people who ask them were definitely pre-selected with an obvious intent to smear Tulsi. In no way those were spontaneous question. This was a session of Neocon//Neolib inquisition. Tulsi behaves like a modern Joan of Arc
    From comments: "People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000 unique donors required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25"(mrfuzztone)
    Notable quotes:
    "... Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people are starting to get fed up with the show. About time ..."
    "... WE CURRENTLY HAVE A CRONY CAPITALIST PYRAMID SCHEME AND CNN PLAYS IT'S PART TO KEEP THAT SYSTEM IN PLACE ..."
    "... I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins. Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi. ..."
    Mar 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com
    lalamimix , 1 week ago

    Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people are starting to get fed up with the show. About time✌️ 😉

    FMA Bincarim , 1 week ago

    CNN has the nerve to claim that Cloudbootjar Copmala Cory and Creepy Joe are polling higher than her.

    softminimal1 , 1 week ago (edited)

    WE CURRENTLY HAVE A CRONY CAPITALIST PYRAMID SCHEME AND CNN PLAYS IT'S PART TO KEEP THAT SYSTEM IN PLACE.

    softminimal1 , 1 week ago

    CNN LOVES WARS.

    edfou5 , 1 week ago

    I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins. Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi.

    mb1968nz , 1 week ago (edited)

    Tulsi handled these hacks like a pro LOOL Are you a capitalist? LOL What s stupid question.....CCN usually stacks there town halls with corporate cronies. I bet Bernie picks her for a high position in his government.

    mrfuzztone , 1 week ago

    People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000 unique donors required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25.

    [Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children. ..."
    "... Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War". ..."
    "... The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war. ..."
    "... the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces. ..."
    "... The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening ..."
    "... In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing. ..."
    "... The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. ..."
    "... Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet. ..."
    "... But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day. ..."
    Oct 10, 2014 | The Guardian
    BradBenson, 10 October 2014 6:14pm
    The American Public has gotten exactly what it deserved. They have been dumbed-down in our poor-by-intention school systems. The moronic nonsense that passes for news in this country gets more sensational with each passing day. Over on Fox, they are making the claim that ISIS fighters are bringing Ebola over the Mexican Border, which prompted a reply by the Mexican Embassy that won't be reported on Fox.

    We continue to hear and it was even reported in this very fine article by Ms. Benjamin that the American People now support this new war. Really? I'm sorry, but I haven't seen that support anywhere but on the news and I just don't believe it any more.

    There is also the little problem of infiltration into key media slots by paid CIA Assets (Scarborough and brainless Mika are two of these double dippers). Others are intermarried. Right-wing Neocon War Criminal Dan Senor is married to "respected" newsperson Campbell Brown who is now involved in privatizing our school system. Victoria Nuland, the slimey State Department Official who was overheard appointing the members of the future Ukrainian Government prior to the Maidan Coup is married to another Neo-Con--Larry Kagan. Even sweet little Andrea Mitchell is actually Mrs. Alan Greenspan.

    General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children.

    Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War".

    Yesterday there was a coordinated action by all of the networks, which was clearly designed to support the idea that the generals want Obama to act and he just won't. The not-so-subtle message was that the generals were right and that the President's "inaction" was somehow out of line-since, after all, the generals have recommended more war. It was as if these people don't remember that the President, sleazy War Criminal that he is, is still the Commander in Chief.

    The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war.

    Finally, this Sunday every NFL Game will begin with some Patriotic "Honor America" Display, which will include a missing man flyover, flags and fireworks, plenty of uniforms, wounded Vets and soon-to-be-wounded Vets. A giant American Flag will, once again, cover the fields and hundreds of stupid young kids will rush down to their "Military Career Center" right after the game. These are the ones that I pity most.

    BaronVonAmericano , 10 October 2014 6:26pm
    Let's be frank: powerful interests want war and subsequent puppet regimes in the half dozen nations that the neo-cons have been eyeing (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). These interests surely include industries like banking, arms and oil-all of whom make a killing on any war, and would stand to do well with friendly governments who could finance more arms purchases and will never nationalize the oil.

    So, the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces.

    IanB52, 10 October 2014 6:57pm

    The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening. When I'm down at the gym they always have CNN on (I can only imagine what FOX is like) which is a pretty much dyed in the wool yellow jingoist station at this point. With all the segments they dedicate to ISIS, a new war, the "imminent" terrorist threat, they seem to favor talking heads who support a full ground war and I have never, not once, heard anyone even speak about the mere possibility of peace. Not ever.

    In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing.

    I'd imagine that these media companies have a lot stock in and a cozy relationship with the defense contractors.

    Damiano Iocovozzi, 10 October 2014 7:04pm

    The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. The media doesn't report on anything but relies on repeating manufactured crises, creating manufactured consent & discussing manufactured solutions. Follow the oil, the pipelines & the money. Both R's & D's are left & right cheeks of the same buttock. Thanks to Citizens United & even Hobby Lobby, a compliant Supreme Court, also owned by United States of Corporations, it's a done deal.

    ID5868758 , 10 October 2014 10:20pm
    Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet.

    Let me give you one clear example. A year ago Barack Obama came very close to bombing Syria to kingdom come, the justification used was "Assad gassed his own people", referring to a sarin gas attack near Damascus. Well, it turns out that Assad did not initiate that attack, discovered by research from many sources including the prestigious MIT, it was a false flag attack planned by Turkey and carried out by some of Obama's own "moderate rebels".

    But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day.

    [Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

    Highly recommended!
    Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?
    Notable quotes:
    "... Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? ..."
    "... "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." ..."
    "... Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
    "... The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. ..."
    "... As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career". ..."
    "... Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance. ..."
    Mar 03, 2006 | www.nytimes.com

    Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from an article at the excellent Medialens

    http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060303_hacks_and_spooks.php

    HACKS AND SPOOKS

    By Professor Richard Keeble

    And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...

    I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services: While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources) on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.

    As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:

    "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."

    Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.

    And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.

    In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.

    As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career".

    Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.

    A brief history

    Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.

    Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.

    The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.

    According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.

    And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.

    In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives' Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.

    And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.

    David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody in every office in Fleet Street"

    Leaker King

    And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications".

    Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction".

    Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot". King was also closely involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.

    Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.

    David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

    Maxwell and Mossad

    According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the 1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.

    In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6 were equally as strong.

    Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks were fascinating.

    For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse during the Cold War."

    The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms of first-hand knowledge."

    And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.

    Lawson strongly denied the allegations.

    Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not being used." (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)

    Growing power of secret state

    Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.

    But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.

    Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.

    According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by the Rockingham cell within the MoD.

    A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.

    Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.

    Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group, the Iraqi National Congress.

    Sexed up – and missed out

    During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government (in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.

    The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition? But those facts will be forever secret.

    Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was ignored by the inquiry.

    Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.

    Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."

    Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.

    ~

    Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.

    [Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

    Highly recommended!
    amazing, simply amazing. You need to watch this Town Hall in full to appreciate the skills she demonstrated in defense of her principles. What a fearless young lady.
    And this CNN warmonger, a prostitute of MIC was/is pretty devious. Question were selected with malice to hurt Tulsi and people who ask them were definitely pre-selected with an obvious intent to smear Tulsi. In no way those were spontaneous question. This was a session of Neocon//Neolib inquisition. Tulsi behaves like a modern Joan of Arc
    From comments: "People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000 unique donors required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25"(mrfuzztone)
    Notable quotes:
    "... Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people are starting to get fed up with the show. About time ..."
    "... WE CURRENTLY HAVE A CRONY CAPITALIST PYRAMID SCHEME AND CNN PLAYS IT'S PART TO KEEP THAT SYSTEM IN PLACE ..."
    "... I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins. Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi. ..."
    Mar 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com
    lalamimix , 1 week ago

    Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people are starting to get fed up with the show. About time✌️ 😉

    FMA Bincarim , 1 week ago

    CNN has the nerve to claim that Cloudbootjar Copmala Cory and Creepy Joe are polling higher than her.

    softminimal1 , 1 week ago (edited)

    WE CURRENTLY HAVE A CRONY CAPITALIST PYRAMID SCHEME AND CNN PLAYS IT'S PART TO KEEP THAT SYSTEM IN PLACE.

    softminimal1 , 1 week ago

    CNN LOVES WARS.

    edfou5 , 1 week ago

    I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins. Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi.

    mb1968nz , 1 week ago (edited)

    Tulsi handled these hacks like a pro LOOL Are you a capitalist? LOL What s stupid question.....CCN usually stacks there town halls with corporate cronies. I bet Bernie picks her for a high position in his government.

    mrfuzztone , 1 week ago

    People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000 unique donors required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25.

    [Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children. ..."
    "... Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War". ..."
    "... The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war. ..."
    "... the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces. ..."
    "... The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening ..."
    "... In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing. ..."
    "... The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. ..."
    "... Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet. ..."
    "... But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day. ..."
    Oct 10, 2014 | The Guardian
    BradBenson, 10 October 2014 6:14pm
    The American Public has gotten exactly what it deserved. They have been dumbed-down in our poor-by-intention school systems. The moronic nonsense that passes for news in this country gets more sensational with each passing day. Over on Fox, they are making the claim that ISIS fighters are bringing Ebola over the Mexican Border, which prompted a reply by the Mexican Embassy that won't be reported on Fox.

    We continue to hear and it was even reported in this very fine article by Ms. Benjamin that the American People now support this new war. Really? I'm sorry, but I haven't seen that support anywhere but on the news and I just don't believe it any more.

    There is also the little problem of infiltration into key media slots by paid CIA Assets (Scarborough and brainless Mika are two of these double dippers). Others are intermarried. Right-wing Neocon War Criminal Dan Senor is married to "respected" newsperson Campbell Brown who is now involved in privatizing our school system. Victoria Nuland, the slimey State Department Official who was overheard appointing the members of the future Ukrainian Government prior to the Maidan Coup is married to another Neo-Con--Larry Kagan. Even sweet little Andrea Mitchell is actually Mrs. Alan Greenspan.

    General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children.

    Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War".

    Yesterday there was a coordinated action by all of the networks, which was clearly designed to support the idea that the generals want Obama to act and he just won't. The not-so-subtle message was that the generals were right and that the President's "inaction" was somehow out of line-since, after all, the generals have recommended more war. It was as if these people don't remember that the President, sleazy War Criminal that he is, is still the Commander in Chief.

    The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war.

    Finally, this Sunday every NFL Game will begin with some Patriotic "Honor America" Display, which will include a missing man flyover, flags and fireworks, plenty of uniforms, wounded Vets and soon-to-be-wounded Vets. A giant American Flag will, once again, cover the fields and hundreds of stupid young kids will rush down to their "Military Career Center" right after the game. These are the ones that I pity most.

    BaronVonAmericano , 10 October 2014 6:26pm
    Let's be frank: powerful interests want war and subsequent puppet regimes in the half dozen nations that the neo-cons have been eyeing (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). These interests surely include industries like banking, arms and oil-all of whom make a killing on any war, and would stand to do well with friendly governments who could finance more arms purchases and will never nationalize the oil.

    So, the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces.

    IanB52, 10 October 2014 6:57pm

    The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening. When I'm down at the gym they always have CNN on (I can only imagine what FOX is like) which is a pretty much dyed in the wool yellow jingoist station at this point. With all the segments they dedicate to ISIS, a new war, the "imminent" terrorist threat, they seem to favor talking heads who support a full ground war and I have never, not once, heard anyone even speak about the mere possibility of peace. Not ever.

    In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing.

    I'd imagine that these media companies have a lot stock in and a cozy relationship with the defense contractors.

    Damiano Iocovozzi, 10 October 2014 7:04pm

    The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. The media doesn't report on anything but relies on repeating manufactured crises, creating manufactured consent & discussing manufactured solutions. Follow the oil, the pipelines & the money. Both R's & D's are left & right cheeks of the same buttock. Thanks to Citizens United & even Hobby Lobby, a compliant Supreme Court, also owned by United States of Corporations, it's a done deal.

    ID5868758 , 10 October 2014 10:20pm
    Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet.

    Let me give you one clear example. A year ago Barack Obama came very close to bombing Syria to kingdom come, the justification used was "Assad gassed his own people", referring to a sarin gas attack near Damascus. Well, it turns out that Assad did not initiate that attack, discovered by research from many sources including the prestigious MIT, it was a false flag attack planned by Turkey and carried out by some of Obama's own "moderate rebels".

    But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day.

    [Mar 18, 2019] Christopher Steele s Former MI6 Boss Calls Dossier Overrated

    Mar 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    In yet another stunning blow to the so-called "Steele Dossier" assembled by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the former chief of the (MI6) said the hastily cobbled-together report by his former employee is "overrated" and its salacious claims against Donald Trump unlikely to be verified, as the Daily Wire 's Ashe Schow reports.

    Following an appearance at the Jamestown Foundation's 12th annual terrorism conference in Washington D.C., Sir John Scarlett - who headed the British Secret Intelligence Service from 2004 to 2009, fielded a question from journalist Nicholas Ballasy, who asked Scarlett what he thought of the dossier and if he believed what was written in it.

    "Well, no," said Scarlett, adding "I looked at it and I thought these are commercial intelligence reports; I don't know about the sources -- they might be right, they might be wrong and they'll probably be overrated and they've been overrated. "

    When asked if the dossier could ever be verified, Steele's former boss said "No."

    Ballasy then asked Scarlett if he was surprised that Steele would produce the dossier using unverified information, to which the former MI6 head replied:

    "Well, they were commercial intelligence reports and they were visibly that so there's a question of why they were there and where they came from and who commissioned them and so on," adding" So, I've tended to see them in that context and never quite of political significance for obvious reasons and actually if you think about it, people have talked about them in a really big way a year or so ago and they haven't really made that much of a difference. "

    "As I said, I suspect, all I can say, is they are overrated. "

    When asked about what Steele was like to work with, Scarlett replied: " I'm not going to comment ," before walking away. We're guessing he's probably tired of MI6 having been mentioned in the same breath as Steele for the last several years.

    Listen:

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/hSxBL86YuVY

    [Mar 18, 2019] College-entrance-exam cheating scandal exposes corrupt aristocracy (Video)

    Mar 18, 2019 | theduran.com

    RT CrossTalk host Peter Lavelle and The Duran's Alex Christoforou take a quick look at the college admissions scam revolving around William Rick Singer, who was running a for-profit college-counseling program, where according to federal prosecutors, has a goal focused on helping "the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids into school."

    Arrest warrants for Hollywood stars, Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, were delivered on Tuesday following their alleged involvement in a college-entrance-exam cheating scandal.

    According to CNN, the women were two of around 50 people who were the subject of federal indictment following an extensive FBI investigation named "Operation Varsity Blues."

    Loughlin's husband, Mossimo Giannulli, was also implicated, and was arrested early on Tuesday morning.

    TMZ reported that Huffman was arrested by seven armed FBI agents. Her husband, William H. Macy, has not been charged in connection to the case. Loughlin, Giannulli, and Huffman are all facing charges of felony conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud.

    Huffman is accused of spending $15,000 on an organization that allegedly helped her daughter cheat on her SATs. Loughlin and Giannulli are accused of paying $500,000 to get their daughters into University of Southern California as recruits for the crew team for which neither of Loughlin's daughters rowed crew.

    All three were recorded by the FBI on phone calls discussing their plans to alter or lie about their children's college applications.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/DCX35SWyrSU?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    Via Zerohedge

    Is there anything left in this country that has not been deeply tainted by corruption?

    By now you have probably heard that dozens of people have been arrested for participating in a multi-million dollar college admissions scam. Enormous amounts of money were paid out in order to ensure that children from very wealthy families were able to get into top schools such as Yale University, Stanford University, the University of Texas and the University of Southern California. And as The Economic Collapse blog's Michael Snyder writes, we should certainly be disgusted by these revelations, but we shouldn't be surprised. Such corruption happens every single day on every single level of society in America. At this point our nation is so far gone that it is shocking when you run into someone that actually still has some integrity.

    The "mastermind" behind this college admissions scam was a con man named William Rick Singer. He had been successfully getting the kids of wealthy people into top colleges for years using "side doors", and he probably thought that he would never get caught.

    But he did.

    There were four basic methods that Singer used to get children from wealthy families into elite schools. The first two methods involved bribes

    Bribing college entrance exam administrators to allow a third party to facilitate cheating on college entrance exams, in some cases by posing as actual students,' is the first.

    Bribing university athletic coaches and administrators to designate applicants as purported athletic recruits – regardless of their athletic abilities, and in some cases, even though they did not play the sport,' is the second.

    Because many of these kids didn't even play the sports they were being "recruited" for, in some cases Photoshop was used to paste their faces on to the bodies of real athletes

    In order to get non-athletic kids admitted to college as athletes, Singer often had to create fake profiles for them. Sometimes this involved fabricating resumes that listed them having played on elite club teams, but to finish the illusion Singer and his team would also use Photoshop to combine photos of the kids with actual athletes in the sport.

    A number of college coaches became exceedingly wealthy from taking bribes to "recruit" kids that would never play once they got to school, but now a lot of those same coaches are probably going to prison.

    The third and fourth methods that Singer used involved more direct forms of cheating

    'Having a third party take classes in place of the actual students, with the understanding that the grades earned in those classes would be submitted as part of the students' application,' is the third.

    The fourth was 'submitting falsified applications for admission to universities that, among other things, included the fraudulently obtained exam scores and class grades, and often listed fake awards and athletic activities.'

    Of course the main thing that the media is focusing on is the fact that some celebrities are among those being charged in this case, and that includes Lori Loughlin from "Full House"

    It was important to "Full House" star Lori Loughlin that her kids have "the college experience" that she missed out on, she said back in 2016.

    Loughlin, along with "Desperate Housewives" actress Felicity Huffman, is among those charged in a scheme in which parents allegedly bribed college coaches and insiders at testing centers to help get their children into some of the most elite schools in the country, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.

    Despite how cynical I have become lately, I never would have guessed that Lori Loughlin was capable of such corruption.

    After all, she seems like such a nice lady on television.

    But apparently she was extremely determined to make sure that her daughters had "the college experience", and so Loughlin and her husband shelled out half a million dollars in bribes

    Loughlin and Giannulli 'agreed to pay bribes totaling $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as recruits to the USC crew team – despite the fact that they did not participate in crew – thereby facilitating their admission to USC,' according to the documents.

    As bad as this scandal is, can we really say that it is much worse than what is going on around the rest of the country every single day?

    Of course not.

    We are a very sick nation, and we are getting sicker by the day.

    William Rick Singer had a good con going, and he should have stopped while he was ahead

    William "Rick" Singer said he had the inside scoop on getting into college, and anyone could get in on it with his book, "Getting In: Gaining Admission To Your College of Choice."

    "This book is full of secrets," he said in Chapter 1 before dispensing advice on personal branding, test-taking and college essays.

    But Singer had even bigger secrets, and those would cost up to $1.2 million.

    But like most con men, Singer just had to keep pushing the envelope, and in the end it is going to cost him everything.

    The ironic thing is that our colleges and universities are pulling an even bigger con. They have convinced all of us that a college education is the key to a bright future, but meanwhile the quality of the "education" that they are providing has deteriorated dramatically. I spent eight years in school getting three degrees, and so I know what I am talking about. For much more on all this, please see my recent article entitled "50 Actual College Course Titles That Prove That America's Universities Are Training Our College Students To Be Socialists" .

    I know that it is not fashionable to talk about "morality" and "values" these days, but the truth is that history has shown us that any nation that is deeply corrupt is not likely to survive for very long.

    Our founders understood this, and former president John Adams once stated that our Constitution "was made only for a moral and religious people"

    Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

    Today, we are neither moral or religious.


    What we are is deeply corrupt, and America will not survive if we keep going down this path.

    [Mar 18, 2019] Boeing Tumbles On Grand Jury Subpoena Probing 737 MAX Approval

    Mar 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    In the latest blow to both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, the WSJ reported overnight that Federal prosecutors and Department of Transportation officials are scrutinizing the development of Boeing 737 MAX jetliners and in particular its anti-stall (MCAS) system, inquiries described as "unusual" and which come amid probes of regulators' safety approvals of the new plane.

    The Seattle Times separately reported that Boeing's safety analysis of a new flight control system on 737 MAX jets had several crucial flaws.

    According to the WSJ , a "grand jury in Washington, D.C., issued a broad subpoena dated March 11 - a day after the Ethiopian Airlines crash a week ago - to at least one person involved in the 737 MAX's development, seeking related documents, including correspondence, emails and other messages." The subpoena, with a prosecutor from the Justice Department's criminal division listed as a contact, sought documents to be handed over later this month.

    It wasn't immediately clear if the Justice Department's probe is related to scrutiny of the FAA by the DOT inspector general's office, reported earlier Sunday by The Wall Street Journal and that focuses on a safety system that has been implicated in the Oct. 29 Lion Air crash that killed 189 people, according to a government official briefed on its status. Aviation authorities are looking into whether the anti-stall system may have played a role in last week's Ethiopian Airlines crash, which killed all 157 people on board . The WSJ sources add that the inspector general's inquiry focuses on ensuring relevant documents and computer files are retained.

    The Justice Department probe involves a prosecutor in the fraud section of the department's criminal division, a unit that has brought cases against well-known manufacturers over safety issues, including Takata Corp.

    The news comes at a sensitive time for both the FAA, which was among the last regulators to ground the 737 Max following a broad global response (led by China) and for Boeing, whose stock has tumbled in the aftermath of the latest crash, and as the WSJ notes, "it is highly unusual for federal prosecutors to investigate details of regulatory approval of commercial aircraft designs, or to use a criminal probe to delve into dealings between the FAA and the largest aircraft manufacturer the agency oversees."

    Probes of airliner programs or alleged lapses in federal safety oversight typically are handled as civil cases, often by the DOT inspector general. The inspector general, however, does have authority to make criminal referrals to federal prosecutors and has its own special agents.

    Ironically, over the years, U.S. aviation companies and airline officials have been sharply critical of foreign governments, including France, South Korea and others, for conducting criminal probes of some plane makers, their executives and in some cases, even individual pilots, after high-profile or fatal crashes. The FAA's current enforcement policy stresses enhanced cooperation with domestic airlines and manufacturers -- featuring voluntary sharing of important safety data -- instead of seeking fines or imposing other punishment.

    News of the U.S. government scrutiny comes shortly after Ethiopia's transport minister, Dagmawit Moges, said there were "clear similarities" between the two crashes. U.S. officials cautioned that it was too early to draw conclusions because data from the black boxes of the Ethiopian Airlines plane still need to be analyzed. The two crashes - which may be linked to the same structural defect on the airliner - have sparked the biggest crisis Boeing has faced in about two decades, threatening sales of a plane model that has been the aircraft giant's most stable revenue source and potentially making it more time consuming and difficult to get future aircraft designs certified as safe to fly.

    The FAA said Sunday that the 737 MAX, which entered service in 2017, was approved to carry passengers as part of the agency's "standard certification process," including design analyses; ground and flight tests; maintenance requirements; and cooperation with other civil aviation authorities. Agency officials in the past have declined to comment on various decisions regarding specific systems. Sunday's statement said the agency's "certification processes are well established and have consistently produced safe aircraft."

    Earlier, a Boeing spokesman said: "The 737 MAX was certified in accordance with the identical FAA requirements and processes that have governed certification of all previous new airplanes and derivatives. The FAA considered the final configuration and operating parameters of MCAS during MAX certification, and concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements."

    Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg said in a statement Sunday the company continues to support the Ethiopian investigation, "and is working with the authorities to evaluate new information as it becomes available." Muilenburg added: "As part of our standard practice following any accident, we examine our aircraft design and operation, and when appropriate, institute product updates to further improve safety."

    Governments world-wide have grounded the MAX, an updated version of the decades-old 737, while investigators and engineers seek clues.

    And so, as 737 Max scrutiny grows and as Boeing and the FAA now seek to deflect increased government attention to one another - Boeing stock is once again tumbling, and is down 3% in premarket trading...

    [Mar 18, 2019] Tulsi Smashes CNN's Pro War Horribleness

    CNN is just mouthpiece for intelligence community and MIC
    The question of a type "did you finished to beat your wife" are very difficult to ask. So how skillfully Tulsi handled those "sinking" question comment her skills.
    Mar 18, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Become a Patron/Premium Member: https://www.patreon.com/jimmydore & http://bit.ly/JDPremium Schedule of Live Shows: http://bit.ly/2gRqoyL

    PeterMX , says: March 16, 2019 at 12:16 am GMT

    The problem with Jimmy Dore is he has some kind of mental block or is somehow completely unaware of the reasons we bomb countries that are hostile to Israel and located right on their border or at least near them. You also have to be completely unaware of the power of the Jewish lobbies and their obvious bias towards their own interests to ignore Jews role in promoting wars that benefit Israel. It's not the "military industrial complex" Jimmy, it's who controls that complex. Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN is a Jew, that like Jake Tapper (also a Jew) sees any destruction of Syria as beneficial to Israel. The neo-Con Max Boot was born in Russia and still wants to bomb Russia because he's a Jew that doesn't want Putin preventing Jewish controlled US from destroying Syria. I can level some similar criticism at Jimmy that he levels at the mainstream media.

    [Mar 18, 2019] Boeing Drops as Role in Vetting Its Own Jets Comes Under Fire

    Mar 18, 2019 | finance.yahoo.com

    Boeing Co. tumbled early Monday on heightened scrutiny by regulators and prosecutors over whether the approval process for the company's 737 Max jetliner was flawed.

    A person familiar with the matter on Sunday said that the U.S. Transportation Department's Inspector General was examining the plane's design certification before the second of two deadly crashes of the almost brand-new aircraft.

    Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported that a grand jury in Washington, D.C., on March 11 issued a subpoena to at least one person involved in the development process of the Max. And a Seattle Times investigation found that U.S. regulators delegated much of the plane's safety assessment to Boeing and that the company in turn delivered an analysis with crucial flaws.

    Boeing dropped 2.8 percent to $368.53 before the start of regular trading Monday in New York, well below any closing price since the deadly crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10. Ethiopia's transport minister said Sunday that flight-data recorders showed "clear similarities" between the crashes of that plane and Lion Air Flight 610 last October.

    U.S. Federal Aviation Administration employees warned as early as seven years ago that Boeing had too much sway over safety approvals of new aircraft, prompting an investigation by Transportation Department auditors who confirmed the agency hadn't done enough to "hold Boeing accountable."

    The 2012 investigation also found that discord over Boeing's treatment had created a "negative work environment" among FAA employees who approve new and modified aircraft designs, with many of them saying they'd faced retaliation for speaking up. Their concerns pre-dated the 737 Max development.

    In recent years, the FAA has shifted more authority over the approval of new aircraft to the manufacturer itself, even allowing Boeing to choose many of the personnel who oversee tests and vouch for safety. Just in the past few months, Congress expanded the outsourcing arrangement even further.

    "It raises for me the question of whether the agency is properly funded, properly staffed and whether there has been enough independent oversight," said Jim Hall, who was chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board from 1994 to 2001 and is now an aviation-safety consultant.

    Outsourcing Safety

    At least a portion of the flight-control software suspected in the 737 Max crashes was certified by one or more Boeing employees who worked in the outsourcing arrangement, according to one person familiar with the work who wasn't authorized to speak about the matter.

    The Wall Street Journal first reported the inspector general's latest inquiry. The watchdog is trying to assess whether the FAA used appropriate design standards and engineering analysis in approving the 737 Max's anti-stall system, the newspaper said.

    Both Boeing and the Transportation Department declined to comment about that inquiry.

    In a statement on Sunday, the agency said its "aircraft certification processes are well established and have consistently produced safe aircraft designs," adding that the "737 Max certification program followed the FAA's standard certification process."

    The Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed minutes after it took off from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. The accident prompted most of the world to ground Boeing's 737 Max 8 aircraft on safety concerns, coming on the heels of the October crash of a Max 8 operated by Indonesia's Lion Air that killed 189 people. Much of the attention focused on a flight-control system that can automatically push a plane into a catastrophic nose dive if it malfunctions and pilots don't react properly.

    In one of the most detailed descriptions yet of the relationship between Boeing and the FAA during the 737 Max's certification, the Seattle Times quoted unnamed engineers who said the planemaker had understated the power of the flight-control software in a System Safety Analysis submitted to the FAA. The newspaper said the analysis also failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded -- in essence, gradually ratcheting the horizontal stabilizer into a dive position.

    Software Fix

    Boeing told the newspaper in a statement that the FAA had reviewed the company's data and concluded the aircraft "met all certification and regulatory requirements." The company, which is based in Chicago but designs and builds commercial jets in the Seattle area, said there are "some significant mischaracterizations" in the engineers' comments.

    [Mar 18, 2019] The U.S. Shouldn t Seek New Ideological Confrontations Abroad by Daniel Larison

    This MIC prostitute Karan, like his wife Nuland are un-reformable. They just earn their living ing by warmongering. And they will screem like pigs if they are deprived from those money, and do not care one bit how many people will be killed as the result of their policies.
    There is no war that those neocon chickenhawks do not like. It's their family racket.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Kagan's preferred foreign policy requires that there is some global "ideological confrontation" for the U.S. to be engaged in. If there isn't one, it has to be invented. ..."
    "... Kagan isn't all that interested in details or accuracy. Those are "beside the point." ..."
    "... Kagan doesn't make it explicit in this essay, but his larger goal in all of this is to advocate for a more confrontational foreign policy mobilized against the authoritarian enemies that he has described. He hints at this when he disparages contemporary "realists" ..."
    "... realists, non-interventionists, and progressives that see no compelling reason for the U.S. to engage in destructive rivalries with major authoritarian powers in their own backyards. Except for a lame, overused comparison to the 1930s, Kagan doesn't even try to explain why we are wrong to think this. Kagan assumes that such destructive rivalries are both necessary and desirable, and this essay is the latest part of his effort to lay the groundwork for the ideological justification for those rivalries. ..."
    "... A recent WSJ article (03/11/19) titled "Russian Gas Plan Divides U.S., Allies" with the subtitle "Washington fears undersea project would make Germany too reliant on Moscow" tells the tale of what the real reasons for America to demonize Russia and Putin. The U.S. leaders fear that the German-Russian pipeline project, Nord Stream 2, will make Europe reliant on Russian energy instead of Europe purchasing it energy from the United States. What gives the U.S. the right to stop one nation from doing commerce with other nations? The answer is "Greed." ..."
    "... Kagan is and will until the bitter end defend American hegemony and the ideological mantle will be used as a cover ..."
    "... People also forget that US is not a democracy, but a managed Republic, and according to all indicators, it is not even that liberal ..."
    "... The fallout from the actions of these "interventionists" is millions are dead in a number of countries. Millions are refugees and thousands of soldiers are dead or maimed. More facts on these war criminals at link below. https://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-facts-on-crimes-of-war-criminals.html ..."
    "... This Kagan family, with Robert now the lead figure, has done a great deal towards furthering conflicts and violence in the world. It is long past time that they be put in their place, whatever that is, but it will not happen because their Zionist mindset is very well funded. ..."
    "... "The U.S. has spent the last twenty years fighting wars that Kagan and other like-minded interventionists advocated for and endorsed. We shouldn't make the same mistake again when the stakes are even higher." We ought to do more than that. He should be muzzled and sent to live in a cave somewhere to repent the consequences of the terrible damage he and other incompetents have done to America. That people like this still have access to the media is almost beyond belief. ..."
    Mar 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
    Brookings Senior Fellow and author Robert Kagan in March 2018. (Brookings Institution/Paul Morigi) Robert Kagan warns us about global authoritarianism:

    Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days, the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism. We are not used to thinking of authoritarianism as a distinct worldview that offers a real alternative to liberalism.

    We are not used to thinking of authoritarianism as a distinct worldview because it isn't one. All authoritarian states share certain things in common, and they may see some of the same things as threats, but there isn't a single worldview that all authoritarian governments subscribe to. There is no one ideology that binds them together. Most of them are nationalistic to one degree or another, but because of that they usually have competing and opposing goals. Treating all authoritarian regimes as part of the same global threat lumps illiberal and majoritarian democracies together with kleptocracies, communist dictatorships, and absolute monarchies. That exaggerates the danger that these regimes pose, and it tries to invent a Cold War-like division between rival camps that doesn't really exist. If the U.S. treats these states as if they are all in league with one another, it will tend to drive together states that would otherwise remain at odds and keep each other at arm's length.

    Kagan's preferred foreign policy requires that there is some global "ideological confrontation" for the U.S. to be engaged in. If there isn't one, it has to be invented. His account of the history of the 20th century shows how determined he is to see international politics in terms of grand ideological battles even when there wasn't one. He takes seriously the idea that WWI is one of these struggles: "But for those who fought it, on both sides, it was very much a war between liberalism and authoritarianism." Kagan makes the mistake of treating wartime propaganda descriptions of the war as the real motivation for the war, and he relies on stereotypes of the nations on the other side of the war as well. The world's largest colonial empires were not fighting for "the liberties of Europe" and they certainly weren't fighting for the rights of small nations, as wartime British propaganda would have it, and that became abundantly clear in the post-war settlement. It was primarily a war among empires for supremacy in Europe, and the surviving Allied empires consolidated their hold on their own colonial possessions and gained more. To the extent that Americans genuinely believed that joining the war had something to do with vindicating the cause of democracy, they were quickly disabused of that notion when they saw the fruits of the vindictive settlement that their allies imposed on the losing side.

    Kagan admits that there are many differences of regime type that he is trying to collapse into one group:

    We have become lost in endless categorizations, viewing each type of non-liberal government as unique and unrelated to the others -- the illiberal democracy, the "liberal" or "liberalizing" autocracy, the "competitive" and "hybrid" authoritarianism. These different categories certainly describe the myriad ways non-liberal societies may be governed. But in the most fundamental way, all of this is beside the point.

    In other words, Kagan isn't all that interested in details or accuracy. Those are "beside the point." What matters is dividing up the world into two opposing camps: "Nations are either liberal, meaning that there are permanent institutions and unchanging norms that protect the "unalienable" rights of individuals against all who would infringe on those rights, whether the state or the majority; or they are not liberal." The criteria for qualifying as a liberal nation are extremely demanding. What institutions can honestly be called "permanent" and what norms are ever truly "unchanging"? Judged against this extreme and unreasonable standard, there won't ever be many nations that qualify as liberal, including quite a few that we would normally consider liberal democracies in good standing. That makes it a lot easier for Kagan to exaggerate the power of "resurgent authoritarianism."

    Kagan doesn't make it explicit in this essay, but his larger goal in all of this is to advocate for a more confrontational foreign policy mobilized against the authoritarian enemies that he has described. He hints at this when he disparages contemporary "realists" whom he doesn't name or cite:

    Just as during the 1930s, when realists such as Robert Taft assured Americans that their lives would be undisturbed by the collapse of democracy in Europe and the triumph of authoritarianism in Asia, so we have realists today insisting that we pull back from confronting the great authoritarian powers rising in Eurasia.

    To be much more accurate, there are realists, non-interventionists, and progressives that see no compelling reason for the U.S. to engage in destructive rivalries with major authoritarian powers in their own backyards. Except for a lame, overused comparison to the 1930s, Kagan doesn't even try to explain why we are wrong to think this. Kagan assumes that such destructive rivalries are both necessary and desirable, and this essay is the latest part of his effort to lay the groundwork for the ideological justification for those rivalries.

    Kagan's analysis suffers from the problem of mirror-imaging that always plagues ideologues. He assumes that everyone sees the world in starkly ideological categories just as he does, and he thinks that other actors are just as determined to export their ideology as he is. His entire worldview depends on linking great power competition with larger ideological causes, and for almost thirty years there has been no such "ideological confrontation" for Kagan to theorize about. Despite Kagan's insistence to the contrary, there still isn't. He wants the U.S. to take a more confrontational approach to dealing with Russia and China, and in order to sell that today he has to dress it up as something more than the destructive and costly pursuit of hegemony that he has been pushing for decades. The U.S. has spent the last twenty years fighting wars that Kagan and other like-minded interventionists advocated for and endorsed. We shouldn't make the same mistake again when the stakes are even higher.

    Minnesota Mary March 17, 2019 at 1:56 pm

    A recent WSJ article (03/11/19) titled "Russian Gas Plan Divides U.S., Allies" with the subtitle "Washington fears undersea project would make Germany too reliant on Moscow" tells the tale of what the real reasons for America to demonize Russia and Putin. The U.S. leaders fear that the German-Russian pipeline project, Nord Stream 2, will make Europe reliant on Russian energy instead of Europe purchasing it energy from the United States. What gives the U.S. the right to stop one nation from doing commerce with other nations? The answer is "Greed."

    All wars are predicated on lies, and all wars are fought for economic reasons and not the so called humanitarian reasons that are fed to the people.

    Kouros , says: March 17, 2019 at 3:41 pm
    Always insightful indeed: Kagan is and will until the bitter end defend American hegemony and the ideological mantle will be used as a cover (Mel Gibson screaming "Freedom!" in Bravehart; killing the babies and stealing the incubators!).

    People also forget that US is not a democracy, but a managed Republic, and according to all indicators, it is not even that liberal

    So better save this post because you are still young and in 30 years from now you will be able to re-post it and just change a couple of names

    JR , says: March 17, 2019 at 3:57 pm
    Ironically he seems in the same (lack of) weight class (intellectually) as Pompeo.
    Stephen J. , says: March 17, 2019 at 5:22 pm
    You write:

    "The U.S. has spent the last twenty years fighting wars that Kagan and other like-minded interventionists advocated for and endorsed."

    --

    Right on the mark. The fallout from the actions of these "interventionists" is millions are dead in a number of countries. Millions are refugees and thousands of soldiers are dead or maimed. More facts on these war criminals at link below.
    https://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-facts-on-crimes-of-war-criminals.html

    Taras 77 , says: March 17, 2019 at 7:15 pm
    Thanks much for this, Mr Larison.

    Anytime, anywhere, anyone comes out and destroys kagan's Zionist globalist babble as you have done, it is a very commendable exercise for the good of mankind and America.

    This Kagan family, with Robert now the lead figure, has done a great deal towards furthering conflicts and violence in the world. It is long past time that they be put in their place, whatever that is, but it will not happen because their Zionist mindset is very well funded.

    Your article does a public service.

    prolegomenon to any future foreign policy , says: March 18, 2019 at 2:27 am
    "The U.S. has spent the last twenty years fighting wars that Kagan and other like-minded interventionists advocated for and endorsed. We shouldn't make the same mistake again when the stakes are even higher."

    We ought to do more than that. He should be muzzled and sent to live in a cave somewhere to repent the consequences of the terrible damage he and other incompetents have done to America. That people like this still have access to the media is almost beyond belief.

    [Mar 17, 2019] Mueller uses the same old false flag scams, just different packaging of his forensics-free findings

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... It appears the FBI, CIA, and NSA have great difficulty in differentiating between Russians and Democrats posing as Russians. ..."
    "... Maybe the VIPS should look into the murder of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who had the security clearance required to access the DNC servers, and who was murdered in the same week as the emails were taken. In particular, they should ask why the police were told to stand down and close the murder case without further investigation. ..."
    "... What a brilliant article, so logical, methodical & a forensic, scientific breakdown of the phony Russiagate project? And there's no doubt, this was a co-ordinated, determined Intelligence project to reverse the results of the 2016 Election by initiating a soft coup or Regime change op on a elected Leader, a very American Coup, something the American Intelligence Agencies specialise in, everywhere else, on a Global scale, too get Trump impeached & removed from the Whitehouse? ..."
    "... Right. Since its purpose is to destroy Trump politically, the investigation should go on as long as Trump is in office. Alternatively, if at this point Trump has completely sold out, that would be another reason to stop the investigation. ..."
    "... Nancy Pelosi's announcement two days ago that the Democrats will not seek impeachment for Trump suggests the emptiness of the Mueller investigation on the specific "collusion" issue. ..."
    "... We know and Assange has confirmed Seth Rich, assassinated in D.C. for his deed, downloaded the emails and most likely passed them on to former British ambassador Craig Murray in a D.C. park for transport to Wikileaks. ..."
    "... This so-called "Russiagate" narrative is an illustration of our "freedom of the press" failure in the US due to groupthink and self censorship. He who pays the piper is apt to call the tune. ..."
    "... Barr, Sessions, every congressmen all the corporate MSM war profiteer mouth pieces. They all know that "Russia hacked the DNC" and "Russia meddled" is fabricated garbage. They don't care, because their chosen war beast corporate candidate couldn't beat Donald goofball Trump. So it has to be shown that the war beast only lost because of nefarious reasons. Because they're gonna run another war beast cut from the same cloth as Hillary in 2020. ..."
    "... Mar 4, 2019 Tom Fitton: President Trump a 'Crime Victim' by Illegal Deep State DOJ & FBI Abuses: https://youtu.be/ixWMorWAC7c ..."
    "... Trump is a willing player in this game. The anti-Russian Crusade was, quite simply, a stunningly reckless, short-sighted effort to overturn the 2016 election, removing Trump to install Hillary Clinton in office. ..."
    "... Much ado about nothing. All the talk and chatter and media airplay about "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election only tells me that these liars think the American public is that stupid. ..."
    "... Andrew Thomas I'm afraid that huge amounts of our History post 1947 is organized and propagandized disinformation. There is an incredible page that John Simpkin has organized over the years that specifically addresses individuals, click on a name and read about them. https://spartacus-educational.com/USAdisinformation.htm ..."
    "... It's pretty astonishing that Mueller was more interested in Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi as credible sources about Wikileaks and the DNC release than Craig Murray! ..."
    "... Yes, he has done his job. And his job was to bring his royal Orangeness to heel, and to make sure that detente and co-operation with Russia remained impossible. The forever war continues. Mission Accomplished. ..."
    Mar 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    O Society , March 16, 2019 at 7:55 am

    The Truth is Out There. I Want to Believe!

    Same old scams, different packaging. That's New & Improved for you.

    http://opensociet.org/2019/03/16/the-return-of-the-hidden-persuaders

    Raymond Comeau , March 15, 2019 at 12:35 pm

    I could not suffer through reading the whole article. This is mainly because I have watched the news daily about Mueller's Investigation and I sincerely believe that Mueller is Champion of the Democrats who are trying to depose President Donald Trump at any cost.

    For what Mueller found any decent lawyer with a Degree and a few years of experience could have found what Mueller found for far far less money. Mueller only found common crimes AND NO COLLUSION BETWEEN PRESIDENT TRUMP AND PUTIN!

    The Mueller Investigation should be given to an honest broker to review, and Mueller should be paid only what it would cost to produce the commonplace crimes Mueller, The Democrats, and CNN has tried to convince the people that indeed Trump COLLUDED with RUSSIA. Mueller is, a BIG NOTHING BURGER and THE DEMOCRATS AND CNN ARE MUELLER'S SINGING CANARYS! Mueller should be jailed.

    Bogdan Miller , March 15, 2019 at 11:04 am

    This article explains why the Mueller Report is already highly suspect. For another thing, we know that since before 2016, Democrats have been studying Russian Internet and hacking tactics, and posing as Russian Bots/Trolls on Facebook and other media outlets, all in an effort to harm President Trump.

    It appears the FBI, CIA, and NSA have great difficulty in differentiating between Russians and Democrats posing as Russians.

    B.J.M. Former Intelligence Analyst and Humint Collector

    vinnieoh , March 15, 2019 at 8:17 am

    Moving on: the US House yesterday voted UNANIMOUSLY (remember that word, so foreign these days to US governance?) to "urge" the new AG to release the complete Mueller report.

    A non-binding resolution, but you would think that the Democrats can't see the diesel locomotive bearing down on their clown car, about to smash it to pieces. The new AG in turn says he will summarize the report and that is what we will see, not the entire report. And taxation without representation takes a new twist.

    ... ... ...

    Raymond Comeau , March 15, 2019 at 12:38 pm

    What else would you expect from two Political Parties who are really branches of the ONE Party which Represents DEEP STATE".

    DWS , March 15, 2019 at 5:58 am

    Maybe the VIPS should look into the murder of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who had the security clearance required to access the DNC servers, and who was murdered in the same week as the emails were taken. In particular, they should ask why the police were told to stand down and close the murder case without further investigation.

    Raymond Comeau , March 15, 2019 at 12:47 pm

    EXACTLY! But, Deep State will not allow that. And, it would ruin the USA' plan to continue to invade more sovereign countries and steal their resources such as oil and Minerals. The people of the USA must be Ostriches or are so terrified that they accept anything their Criminal Governments tell them.

    Eventually, the chickens will come home to roost and perhaps the USA voters will ROAST when the crimes of the USA sink the whole country. It is time for a few Brave Men and Women to find their backbones and throw out the warmongers and their leading Oligarchs!

    KiwiAntz , March 14, 2019 at 6:44 pm

    What a brilliant article, so logical, methodical & a forensic, scientific breakdown of the phony Russiagate project? And there's no doubt, this was a co-ordinated, determined Intelligence project to reverse the results of the 2016 Election by initiating a soft coup or Regime change op on a elected Leader, a very American Coup, something the American Intelligence Agencies specialise in, everywhere else, on a Global scale, too get Trump impeached & removed from the Whitehouse?

    If you can't get him out via a Election, try & try again, like Maduro in Venezuela, to forcibly remove the targeted person by setting him up with fake, false accusations & fabricated evidence? How very predictable & how very American of Mueller & the Democratic Party. Absolute American Corruption, corrupts absolutely?

    Brian Murphy , March 15, 2019 at 10:33 am

    Right. Since its purpose is to destroy Trump politically, the investigation should go on as long as Trump is in office. Alternatively, if at this point Trump has completely sold out, that would be another reason to stop the investigation.

    If the investigation wraps up and finds nothing, that means Trump has already completely sold out. If the investigation continues, it means someone important still thinks Trump retains some vestige of his balls.

    DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:19 pm

    By last June or July the Mueller investigation has resulted in roughly 150 indictments for perjury/financial crimes, and there was a handful of convictions to date. The report did not support the Clinton wing's anti-Russian allegations about the 2016 election, and was largely brushed aside by media. Mueller was then reportedly sent back in to "find something." presumably to support the anti-Russian claims.

    mike k , March 14, 2019 at 12:57 pm

    From the beginning of the Russia did it story, right after Trump's electoral victory, it was apparent that this was a fraud. The democratic party however has locked onto this preposterous story, and they will go to their graves denying this was a scam to deny their presidential defeat, and somehow reverse the result of Trump's election. My sincere hope is that this blatant lie will be an albatross around the party's neck, that will carry them down into oblivion. They have betrayed those of us who supported them for so many years. They are in many ways now worse than the republican scum they seek to replace.

    DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:26 pm

    Trump is almost certain to be re-elected in 2020, and we'll go through this all over again.

    Tom , March 14, 2019 at 12:00 pm

    The very fact that the FBI never had access to the servers and took the word of a private company that had a history of being anti-Russian is enough to throw the entire ruse out.

    LJ , March 14, 2019 at 2:39 pm

    Agreed!!!! and don't forget the FBI/Comey gave Hillary and her Campaign a head's up before they moved to seize the evidence. . So too, Comey said he stopped the Investigation , thereby rendering judgement of innocence, even though by his own words 'gross negligence' had a occurred (which is normally considered grounds for prosecution). In doing so he exceeded the FBI's investigative mandate. He rationalized that decision was appropriate because of the appearance of impropriety that resulted from Attorney General Lynch having a private meeting on a plane on a runway with Bill and Hillary . Where was the logic in that. Who called the meeting? All were Lawyers who had served as President, Senator, Attorney General and knew that the meeting was absolutely inappropriate. . Comey should be prosecuted if they want to prosecute anyone else because of this CRAP. PS Trump is an idiot. Uhinfortunately he is just a symptom of the disease at this point. Look at the cover of Rolling Stone magazine , carry a barf bag.

    Jane Christ , March 14, 2019 at 6:51 pm

    Exactly. This throws doubt on the ability of the FBI to work independently. They are working for those who want to cover -up the Hillary mess . She evidently has sufficient funds to pay them off. I am disgusted with the level of corruption.

    hetro , March 14, 2019 at 10:50 am

    Nancy Pelosi's announcement two days ago that the Democrats will not seek impeachment for Trump suggests the emptiness of the Mueller investigation on the specific "collusion" issue. If there were something hot and lingering and about to emerge, this decision is highly unlikely, especially with the reasoning she gave at "so as not to divide the American people." Dividing the people hasn't been of much concern throughout this bogus witch hunt on Trump, which has added to his incompetence in leavening a growing hysteria and confusion in this country. If there is something, anything at all, in the Mueller report to support the collusion theory, Pelosi would I'm sure gleefully trot it out to get a lesser candidate like Pence as opposition for 2020.

    James Clooney , March 14, 2019 at 11:17 am

    We know and Assange has confirmed Seth Rich, assassinated in D.C. for his deed, downloaded the emails and most likely passed them on to former British ambassador Craig Murray in a D.C. park for transport to Wikileaks.

    We must also honor Shawn Lucas assassinated for serving DNC with a litigation notice exposing the DNC conspiracy against Sanders.

    hetro , March 14, 2019 at 3:18 pm

    Where has Assange confirmed this? Assange's long-standing position is NOT to reveal his sources. I believe he has continued to honor this position.

    Skip Scott , March 15, 2019 at 7:15 am

    It has merely been insinuated by the offering of a reward for info on Seth's murder. In one breath he says wikileaks will never divulge a source, and in the next he offers a $20k reward saying that sources take tremendous risk. Doesn't take much of a logical leap to connect A to B.

    DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:30 pm

    Are you aware that Democrats split apart their 0wn voting base in the 1990s, middle class vs. poor? The Obama years merely confirmed that this split is permanent. This is particularly relevant for Democrats, as their voting base had long consisted of the poor and middle class, for the common good. Ignoring this deep split hasn't made it go away.

    hetro , March 14, 2019 at 3:24 pm

    Even more important is how the Democrats have sold out to an Establishment view favoring neocon theory, since at least Bill Clinton. Pelosi's recent behavior with Ilhan Omar confirms this and the split you're talking about. My point is it is distinctly odd that Pelosi is discouraging impeachment on "dividing the Party" (already divided, of course, as you say), whereas the Russia-gate fantasy was so hot not that long ago. Again it points to a cynical opportunism and manipulation of the electorate. Both parties are a sad excuse to represent ordinary people's interests.

    Skip Scott , March 15, 2019 at 7:21 am

    She said "dividing the country", not the party. I think she may have concerns over Trump's heavily armed base. That said, the statement may have been a ruse. There are plenty of Republicans that would cross the line in favor of impeachment with the right "conclusions" by Mueller. Pelosi may be setting up for a "bombshell" conclusion by Mueller. One must never forget that we are watching theater, and that Trump was a "mistake" to be controlled or eliminated.

    Cindy Haddix , March 14, 2019 at 8:04 am

    Mueller should be ashamed that he has made President Trump his main concern!! If all this investigation would stop he could save America millions!!! He needs to quit this witch-hunt and worry about things that really need to be handled!!! If the democrats and Trump haters would stop pushing senseless lies hopefully this would stop ? It's so disgusting that his democrat friend was never really investigated ? stop the witch-hunt and move forward!!!!

    torture this , March 14, 2019 at 7:29 am

    According to this letter, mistakes might have been made on Rachel Maddow's show. I can't wait to read how she responds. I'd watch her show, myself except that it has the same effect on me as ipecac.

    Zhu , March 14, 2019 at 3:37 am

    People will cling to "Putin made Trump President!!!" much as many cling "Obama's a Kenyan Muslim! Not a real American!!!". Both nut theories are emotionally satisfying, no matter what the historical facts are. Many Americans just can't admit their mistakes and blaming a scapegoat is a way out.

    O Society , March 14, 2019 at 2:03 am

    Thank you VIPS for organizing this legit dissent consisting of experts in the field of intelligence and computer forensics.

    This so-called "Russiagate" narrative is an illustration of our "freedom of the press" failure in the US due to groupthink and self censorship. He who pays the piper is apt to call the tune.

    It is astounding how little skepticism and scientifically-informed reasoning goes on in our media. These folks show themselves to be native advertising rather than authentic journalists at every turn.

    DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:33 pm

    But it has been Democrats and the media that market to middle class Dems, who persist in trying to sell the Russian Tale. They excel at ignoring the evidence that utterly contradicts their claims.

    O Society , March 15, 2019 at 3:50 pm

    Oh, we're well beyond your "Blame the middle class Dems" stage.

    The WINNING!!! team sports bullshit drowns the entire country now the latrine's sprung a leak. People pretend to live in bubbles made of blue or red quite like the Three Little Pigs, isn't it? Except instead of a house made of bricks saving the day for the littlepiggies, what we've got here is a purple puddle of piss.

    Everyone's more than glad to project all our problems on "THEM" though, aren't we?

    Meanwhile, the White House smells like a urinal not washed since the 1950s and simpletons still get their rocks off arguing about whether Mickey Mouse can beat up Ronald McDonald.

    T'would be comic except what's so tragic is the desperate need Americans have to believe, oh just believe! in something. Never mind the sound of the jackhammer on your skull dear, there's an app for that or is it a pill?

    I don't know, don't ask me, I'm busy watching TV. Have a cheeto.

    https://opensociet.org/2018/12/18/the-disneyfication-of-america/

    Sam F , March 13, 2019 at 6:45 pm

    Very good analysis clearly stated, especially adding the FAT timestamps to the transmission speeds.

    Minor corrections: "The emails were copied from the network" should be "from the much faster local network" because this is to Contradict the notion that they were copied over the internet network, which most readers will equate with "network." Also "reportedin" should be "reported in."

    Michael , March 13, 2019 at 6:25 pm

    It is likely that New Knowledge was actually "the Russians", possibly working in concert with Crowdstrike. Once an intelligence agency gets away with something like pretending to be Russian hackers and bots, they tend to re-use their model; it is too tempting to discard an effective model after a one-off accomplishment. New Knowledge was caught interfering/ determining the outcome in the Alabama Senate race on the side of Democrat Doug Jones, and claimed they were merely trying to mimic Russian methods to see if they worked (they did; not sure of their punishment?). Occam's razor would suggest that New Knowledge would be competent to mimic/ pretend to be "Russians" after the fact of wikileaks' publication of emails. New Knowledge has employees from the NSA and State department sympathetic to/ working with(?) Hillary, and were the "outside" agency hired to evaluate and report on the "Russian" hacking of the DNC emails/ servers.

    DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 5:48 pm

    Mueller released report last summer, which resulted in (the last I checked) roughly 150 indictments, a handful of convictions to date, all for perjury/financial (not political) crimes. This wasn't kept secret. It simply wasn't what Democrats wanted to hear, so although it was mentioned in some lib media (which overwhelmingly supported neoliberal Hillary Clinton), it was essentially swept under the carpet.

    Billy , March 13, 2019 at 11:11 pm

    Barr, Sessions, every congressmen all the corporate MSM war profiteer mouth pieces. They all know that "Russia hacked the DNC" and "Russia meddled" is fabricated garbage. They don't care, because their chosen war beast corporate candidate couldn't beat Donald goofball Trump. So it has to be shown that the war beast only lost because of nefarious reasons. Because they're gonna run another war beast cut from the same cloth as Hillary in 2020.

    Realist , March 14, 2019 at 3:22 am

    You betcha. Moreover, who but the Russians do these idiots have left to blame? Everybody else is now off limits due to political correctness. Sigh Those Catholics, Jews, "ethnics" and sundry "deviants" used to be such reliable scapegoats, to say nothing of the "undeveloped" world. As Clapper "authoritatively" says, only this vile lineage still carries the genes for the most extremes of human perfidy. Squirrels in your attic? It must be the damned Russkies! The bastards impudently tried to copy our democracy, economic system and free press and only besmirched those institutions, ruining all of Hillary's glorious plans for a worldwide benevolent dictatorship. All this might be humorous if it weren't so funny.

    And those Chinese better not get to thinking they are somehow our equals just because all their trillions invested in U.S. Treasury bonds have paid for all our wars of choice and MIC boondoggles since before the turn of the century. Unless they start delivering Trump some "free stuff" the big man is gonna cut off their water. No more affordable manufactured goods for the American public! So there!

    As to the article: impeccable research and analysis by the VIPS crew yet again. They've proven to me that, to a near certainty, the Easter Bunny is not likely to exist. Mueller won't read it. Clapper will still prance around a free man, as will Brennan. The Democrats won't care, that is until November of 2020. And Hillary will continue to skate, unhindered in larding up the Clinton Foundation to purposes one can only imagine.

    Joe Tedesky , March 14, 2019 at 10:02 pm

    Realist,

    I have posted this article 'the Russia they Lost' before and from time to time but once again it seems appropriate to add this link to expound upon for what you've been saying. It's an article written by a Russian who in they're youth growing up in the USSR dreamed of living the American lifestyle if Russia were to ever ditch communism. But . Starting with Kosovo this Russian's youthful dream turned nightmarishly ugly and, as time went by with more and yet even more USA aggression this Russian author loss his admiration and desire for all things American to be proudly envied. This is a story where USA hard power destroyed any hope of American soft power for world unity. But hey that unity business was never part of the plan anyway.

    https://slavyangrad.org/2014/09/24/the-russia-they-lost/

    Realist , March 15, 2019 at 10:38 pm

    right you are, joe. if america was smart rather than arrogant, it would have cooperated with china and russia to see the belt and road initiative succeed by perhaps building a bridge or tunnel from siberia to alaska, and by building its own fleet of icebreakers to open up its part of the northwest passage. but no, it only wants to sabotage what others propose. that's not being a leader, it's being a dick.

    i'm gonna have to go on the disabled list here until the sudden neurological problem with my right hand clears up–it's like paralysed. too difficult to do this one-handed using hunt and peck. at least the problem was not in the old bean, according to the scans. carry on, sir.

    Brian James , March 13, 2019 at 5:04 pm

    Mar 4, 2019 Tom Fitton: President Trump a 'Crime Victim' by Illegal Deep State DOJ & FBI Abuses: https://youtu.be/ixWMorWAC7c

    DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 5:55 pm

    Trump is a willing player in this game. The anti-Russian Crusade was, quite simply, a stunningly reckless, short-sighted effort to overturn the 2016 election, removing Trump to install Hillary Clinton in office. Trump and the Republicans continue to win by default, as Democrats only drive more voters away.

    Howard , March 13, 2019 at 4:36 pm

    Thank you Ray McGovern and the Other 17 VIPS C0-Signers of your National Security Essay for Truth. Along with Craig Murray and Seymour Hirsch, former Sam Adams Award winners for "shining light into dark places", you are national resources for objectivity in critical survival information matters for our country. It is more than a pity that our mainstream media are so beholden to their corporate task masters that they cannot depart from the company line for fear of losing their livelihoods, and in the process we risk losing life on the planet because of unconstrained nuclear war on the part of the two main adversaries facing off in an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. Let me speak plainly. THEY SHOULD BE TALKING TO YOU AND NOT THE VESTED INTERESTS' MOUTHPIECES. Thank you for your continued leadership!

    James Clooney , March 14, 2019 at 11:28 am

    Roger Ailes founder of FOX news died, "falling down stairs" within a week of FOX news exposing to the world that the assassinated Seth Rich downloaded the DNC emails.

    DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 6:03 pm

    Google the Mueller investigation report from last June or July. When it was released, the public response was like a deflated balloon. It did not support the "Russian collusion" allegations -- the only thing Democrats still had left to sell. The report resulted in roughly 150 indictments for perjury/financial crimes (not political), and a handful of convictions to date -- none of which had anything to do with the election results.

    Hank , March 13, 2019 at 6:19 pm

    Much ado about nothing. All the talk and chatter and media airplay about "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election only tells me that these liars think the American public is that stupid. They are probably right, but the REAL reason that Hillary lost is because there ARE enough informed people now in this nation who are quite aware of the Clinton's sordid history where scandals seem to follow every where they go, but indictments and/or investigations don't. There IS an internet nowadays with lots of FACTUAL DOCUMENTED information. That's a lot more than I can say about the mainstream corporate-controlled media!

    I know this won't ever happen, but an HONEST investigation into the Democratic Party and their actions during the 2016 election would make ANY collusion with ANY nation look like a mole hill next to a mountain! One of the problems with living in this nation is if you are truly informed and make an effort 24/7 to be that way by doing your own research, you more-than-likely can be considered an "island in a sea of ignorance".

    Tom , March 14, 2019 at 12:13 pm

    We know that the FBI never had access to the servers and a private company was allowed to handle the evidence. Wasnt it a crime scene? The evidence was tampered with And we will never know what was on the servers.

    Mark McCarty , March 13, 2019 at 4:10 pm

    As a complement to this excellent analysis, I would like to make 2 further points:

    The Mueller indictment of Russian Intelligence for hacking the DNC and transferring their booty to Wikileaks is absurd on its face for this reason: Assange announced on June 12th the impending release of Hillary-related emails. Yet the indictment claims that Guccifer 2.0 did not succeed in transferring the DNC emails to Wikileaks until the time period of July 14-18th – after which they were released online on July 22nd. Are we to suppose that Assange, a publisher of impeccable integrity, publicly announced the publication of emails he had not yet seen, and which he was obtaining from a source of murky provenance? And are we further to suppose that Wikileaks could have processed 20K emails and 20K attachments to insure their genuineness in a period of only several days? As you will recall, Wikileaks subsequently took a number of weeks to process the Podesta emails they released in October.

    And another peculiarity merits attention. Assange did not state on June 12th that he was releasing DNC emails – and yet Crowdstrike and the Guccifer 2.0 personna evidently knew that this was in store. A likely resolution of this conundrum is that US intelligence had been monitoring all communications to Wikileaks, and had informed the DNC that their hacked emails had been offered to Wikileaks. A further reasonable prospect is that US intelligence subsequently unmasked the leaker to the DNC; as Assange has strongly hinted, this likely was Seth Rich. This could explain Rich's subsequent murder, as Rich would have been in a position to unmask the Guccifer 2.0 hoax and the entire Russian hacking narrative.

    https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/muellers-new-indictment-do-the-feds-take-us-for-idiots-5406ef955406

    https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/how-did-crowdstrike-guccifer-2-0-know-that-wikileaks-was-planning-to-release-dnc-emails-42e6db334053

    Sam F , March 13, 2019 at 7:06 pm

    Curious that Assange has Not explicitly stated that the leaker was Seth Rich, if it was, as this would take pressure from himself and incriminate the DNC in the murder of Rich. Perhaps he doesn't know, and has the honor not to take the opportunity, or perhaps he knows that it was not Rich.

    James Clooney , March 14, 2019 at 11:40 am

    View the Dutch TV interview with Asssange and there is another interview available on youtube in which Assange DOES subtly confirmed it was Seth Rich.

    Assange posted a $10,000 reward for Seth Rich's murders capture.

    Abby , March 13, 2019 at 10:11 pm

    Another mistaken issue with the "Russia hacked the DNC computers on Trump's command" is that he never asked Russia to do that. His words were, "Russia if you 'find' Hillary's missing emails let us know." He said that after she advised congress that she wouldn't be turning in all of the emails they asked for because she deleted 30,000 of them and said that they were personal.

    But if Mueller or the FBI wants to look at all of them they can find them at the NYC FBI office because they are on Weiner's laptop. Why? Because Hillary's aid Huma Abedin, Weiner's wife sent them to it. Just another security risk that Hillary had because of her private email server. This is why Comey had to tell congress that more of them had been found 11 days before the election. If Comey hadn't done that then the FBI would have.

    But did Comey or McCabe look at her emails there to see if any of them were classified? No they did not do that. And today we find out that Lisa Page told congress that it was Obama's decision not to charge Hillary for being grossly negligent on using her private email server. This has been known by congress for many months and now we know that the fix was always in for her to get off.

    robert e williamson jr , March 13, 2019 at 3:26 pm

    I want to thank you folks at VIPS. Like I have been saying for years now the relationship between CIA, NSA and DOJ is an incestuous one at best. A perverse corrupted bond to control the masses. A large group of religious fanatics who want things "ONE WAY". They are the facilitators for the rogue government known as the "DEEP STATE"!

    Just ask billy barr.

    More truth is a very good thing. I believe DOJ is supporting the intelligence community because of blackmail. They can't come clean because they all risk doing lots of time if a new judicial mechanism replaces them. We are in big trouble here.

    Apparently the rule of law is not!

    You folks that keep claiming we live in the post truth era! Get off me. Demand the truth and nothing else. Best be getting ready for the fight of your lives. The truth is you have to look yourself in the mirror every morning, deny that truth. The claim you are living in the post truth era is an admission your life is a lie. Now grab a hold of yourself pick a dogdamned side and stand for something,.

    Thank You VIPS!

    Joe Tedesky , March 13, 2019 at 2:58 pm

    Hats off to the VIP's who have investigated this Russian hacking that wasn't a hacking for without them what would we news junkies have otherwise to lift open the hood of Mueller's never ending Russia-gate investigation. Although the one thing this Russia-gate nonsense has accomplished is it has destroyed with our freedom of speech when it comes to how we citizens gather our news. Much like everything else that has been done during these post 9/11 years of continual wars our civil rights have been marginalized down to zero or, a bit above if that's even still an argument to be made for the sake of numbers.

    Watching the Manafort sentencing is quite interesting for the fact that Manafort didn't conclude in as much as he played fast and loose with his income. In fact maybe Manafort's case should have been prosecuted by the State Department or, how about the IRS? Also wouldn't it be worth investigating other Geopolitical Rain Makers like Manafort for similar crimes of financial wrongdoing? I mean is it possible Manafort is or was the only one of his type to do such dishonest things? In any case Manafort wasn't charged with concluding with any Russians in regard to the 2016 presidential election and, with that we all fall down.

    I guess the best thing (not) that came out of this Russia-gate silliness is Rachel Maddow's tv ratings zoomed upwards. But I hate to tell you that the only ones buying what Ms Maddow is selling are the died in the wool Hillary supporters along with the chicken-hawks who rally to the MIC lobby for more war. It's all a game and yet there are many of us who just don't wish to play it but still we must because no one will listen to the sanity that gets ignored keep up the good work VIP's some of us are listening.

    Andrew Thomas , March 13, 2019 at 12:42 pm

    The article did not mention something called to my attention for the first time by one of the outstanding members of your commentariat just a couple of days ago- that Ambassador Murray stayed publicly, over two years ago, that he had been given the thumb drive by a go-between in D.C. and had somehow gotten it to Wikileaks. And, that he has NEVER BEEN INTERVIEWED by Mueller &Company. I was blown away by this, and found the original articles just by googling Murray. The excuse given is that Murray "lacks credibility ", or some such, because of his prior relationship with Assange and/or Wikileaks. This is so ludicrous I can't even get my head around it. And now, you have given me a new detail-the meeting with Pompeo, and the complete lack of follow-up thereafter. Here all this time I thought I was the most cynical SOB who existed, and now I feel as naive as when I was 13 and believed what Dean Rusk was saying like it was holy writ. I am in your debt.

    Bob Van Noy , March 13, 2019 at 2:33 pm

    Andrew Thomas I'm afraid that huge amounts of our History post 1947 is organized and propagandized disinformation. There is an incredible page that John Simpkin has organized over the years that specifically addresses individuals, click on a name and read about them. https://spartacus-educational.com/USAdisinformation.htm

    Mark McCarty , March 13, 2019 at 4:18 pm

    A small correction: the Daily Mail article regarding Murray claimed that Murray was given a thumbdrive which he subsequently carried back to Wikileaks. On his blog, Murray subsequently disputed this part of the story, indicating that, while he had met with a leaker or confederate of a leaker in Washington DC, the Podesta emails were already in possession of Wikileaks at the time. Murray refused to clarify the reason for his meeting with this source, but he is adamant in maintaining that the DNC and Podesta emails were leaked, not hacked.

    And it is indeed ludicrous that Mueller, given the mandate to investigate the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC and Podesta, has never attempted to question either Assange or Murray. That in itself is enough for us to conclude that the Mueller investigation is a complete sham.

    Ian Brown , March 13, 2019 at 4:43 pm

    It's pretty astonishing that Mueller was more interested in Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi as credible sources about Wikileaks and the DNC release than Craig Murray!

    LJ , March 13, 2019 at 12:29 pm

    A guy comes in with a pedigree like that, """ former FBI head """ to examine and validate if possible an FBI sting manufactured off a phony FISA indictment based on the Steele Report, It immediately reminded me of the 9-11 Commission with Thomas Kean, former Board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, being appointed by GW Bush the Simple to head an investigation that he had previously said he did not want to authorize( and of course bi partisan yes man Lee Hamilton as #2, lest we forget) . Really this should be seen as another low point in our Democracy. Uncle Sam is the Limbo Man, How low can you go?

    After Bill and Hillary and Monica and Paula Jones and Blue Dresses well, Golden Showers in a Moscow luxury hotel, I guess that make it just salacious enough.

    Mueller looks just like what he is. He has that same phony self important air as Comey . In 2 years this will be forgotten.. I do not think this hurts Trumps chances at re-election as much as the Democrats are hurting themselves. This has already gone on way too long.

    Drew Hunkins , March 13, 2019 at 11:59 am

    Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians.

    Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump, which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein, Brennan, Podesta and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. It will be fascinating to witness how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?

    So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was likely in bed with the Winter Hill Gang.

    Jack , March 13, 2019 at 12:21 pm

    You have failed. An investigation is just that, a finding of the facts. What would Mueller have to extricate himself from? If nothing is found, he has still done his job. You are a divisive idiot.

    Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 1:13 pm

    Yes, he has done his job. And his job was to bring his royal Orangeness to heel, and to make sure that detente and co-operation with Russia remained impossible. The forever war continues. Mission Accomplished.

    Drew Hunkins , March 13, 2019 at 2:12 pm

    @Jack,
    Keep running cover for an out of control prosecutor, who, if he had any integrity, would have hit the bully pulpit mos ago declaring there's nothing of substance to one of the most potentially dangerous accusations in world history: the Kremlin hacking the election. Last I checked it puts two nuclear nation-states on the brink of potential war. And you call me divisive? Mueller's now a willing accomplice to this entire McCarthyite smear and disinformation campaign. It's all so pathetic that folks such as yourself try and mislead and feed half-truths to the people.

    You're failing Jack, in more ways than you know.

    Gregory Herr , March 13, 2019 at 9:13 pm

    https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/liberals-are-digging-their-own-grave-with-russiagate-2019-03-08

    Drew, you might enjoy this discussion Robert Scheer has with Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel.

    Realist , March 15, 2019 at 3:38 am

    Moreover, as the Saker pointed out in his most recent column in the Unz Review, the entire Deep State conspiracy, in an ad hoc alliance with the embarrassed and embarrassing Democrats, have made an absolute sham of due process in their blatant witch hunt to bag the president. This reached an apex when his personal lawyer, Mr. Cohen, was trotted out before congress to violate Trump's confidentiality in every mortifying way he could even vaguely reconstruct. The man was expected to say anything to mitigate the anticipated tortures to come in the course of this modern day inquisition by our latter day Torquemada. To his credit though, even with his ass in a sling, he could simply not confabulate the smoking gun evidence for the alleged Russian collusion that this whole farce was built around.

    Tom , March 14, 2019 at 12:30 pm

    Mueller stood with Bush as he lied the world into war based on lies and illegally spied on America and tortured some folks.

    George Collins , March 13, 2019 at 2:02 pm

    QED: as to the nexus with the Winter Hill gang wasn't there litigation involving the Boston FBI, condonation of murder by the FBI and damages awarded to or on behalf of convicted parties that the FBI had reason to know were innocent? The malfeasance reportedly occurred during Mueller time. Further on the sanctified diligence of Mr. Mueller can be gleaned from the reports of Coleen Rowley, former FBI attorney stationed in Milwaukee??? when the DC FBI office was ignoring warnings sent about 9/11. See also Sibel Edmonds who knew to much and was court order muzzled about FBI mis/malfeasance in the aftermath of 9/11.

    I'd say it's game, set, match VIPS and a pox on Clapper and the complicit intelligence folk complicit in the nuclear loaded Russia-gate fibs.

    Kiers , March 13, 2019 at 11:47 am

    How can we expect the DNC to "hand it " to Trumpf, when, behind the scenes, THEY ARE ONE PARTY. They are throwing faux-scary pillow bombs at each other because they are both complicit in a long chain of corruptions. Business as usual for the "principled" two party system! Democracy! Through the gauze of corporate media! You must be joking!

    Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 11:28 am

    "We believe that there are enough people of integrity in the Department of Justice to prevent the outright manufacture or distortion of "evidence," particularly if they become aware that experienced scientists have completed independent forensic study that yield very different conclusions."

    I wish I shared this belief. However, as with Nancy Pelosi's recent statement regarding pursuing impeachment, I smell a rat. I believe with the help of what the late Robert Parry called "the Mighty Wurlitzer", Mueller is going to use coerced false testimony and fabricated forensics to drop a bombshell the size of 911. I think Nancy's statement was just a feint before throwing the knockout punch.

    If reason ruled the day, we should have nothing to worry about. But considering all the perfidy that the so-called "Intelligence" Agencies and their MSM lackeys get away with daily, I think we are in for more theater; and I think VIPS will receive a cold shoulder outside of venues like CN.

    I pray to God I'm wrong.

    Sam F , March 13, 2019 at 7:32 pm

    My extensive experience with DOJ and the federal judiciary establishes that at least 98% of them are dedicated career liars, engaged in organized crime to serve political gangs, and make only a fanatical pretense of patriotism or legality. They are loyal to money alone, deeply cynical and opposed to the US Constitution and laws, with no credibility at all beyond any real evidence.

    Eric32 , March 14, 2019 at 4:24 pm

    As near I can see, Federal Govt. careers at the higher levels depend on having dirt on other players, and helping, not hurting, the money/power schemes of the players above you.

    The Clintons (through their foundation) apparently have a lot of corruption dirt on CIA, FBI etc. top players, some of whom somehow became multi-millionaires during their civil service careers.

    Trump, who was only running for President as a name brand marketing ploy with little desire to actually win, apparently came into the Presidency with no dirt arsenal and little idea of where to go from there.

    Bob Van Noy , March 13, 2019 at 11:09 am

    I remember reading with dismay how Russians were propagandized by the Soviet Press Management only to find out later the depth of disbelief within the Russian population itself. We now know what that feels like. The good part of this disastrous scenario for America is that for careful readers, disinformation becomes revelatory. For instance, if one reads an editorial that refers to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or continually refers to Russian interference in the last Presidential election, then one can immediately dismiss the article and question the motivation for the presentation. Of course the problem is how to establish truth in reporting

    Jeff Harrison , March 13, 2019 at 10:41 am

    Thank you, VIPs. Hopefully, you don't expect this to make a difference. The US has moved into a post truth, post reality existence best characterized by Karl Rove's declaration: "we're an empire now, when we act, we create our own reality." What Mr. Rove in his arrogance fails to appreciate is that it is his reality but not anyone else's. Thus Pompous can claim that Guaido is the democratic leader in Venezuela even though he's never been elected .

    Gary Weglarz , March 13, 2019 at 10:21 am

    Thank you. The next time one of my friends or family give me that glazed over stare and utters anymore of the "but, RUSSIA" nonsense I will refer them directly to this article. Your collective work and ethical stand on this matter is deeply appreciated by anyone who values the truth.

    Russiagate stands with past government propaganda operations that were simply made up out of thin air: i.e. Kuwaiti incubator babies, WMD's, Gaddafi's viagra fueled rape camps, Assad can't sleep at night unless he's gassing his own people, to the latest, "Maduro can't sleep at night unless he's starving his own people."

    The complete and utter amorality of the deep state remains on display for all to see with "Russiagate," which is as fact-free a propaganda campaign as any of those just mentioned.

    Marc , March 13, 2019 at 10:13 am

    I am a computer naif, so I am prepared to accept the VIPS analysis about FAT and transfer rates. However, the presentation here leaves me with several questions. First, do I understand correctly that the FAT rounding to even numbers is introduced by the thumb drive? And if so, does the FAT analysis show only that the DNC data passed through a thumb drive? That is, does the analysis distinguish whether the DNC data were directly transferred to a thumb drive, or whether the data were hacked and then transferred to a thumb drive, eg, to give a copy to Wikileaks? Second, although the transatlantic transfer rate is too slow to fit some time stamps, is it possible that the data were hacked onto a local computer that was under the control of some faraway agent?

    Jeff Harrison , March 13, 2019 at 11:12 am

    Not quite. FAT is the crappy storage system developed by Microsoft (and not used by UNIX). The metadata associated with any file gets rewritten when it gets moved. If that movement is to a storage device that uses FAT, the timestamp on the file will end in an even number. If it were moved to a unix server (and most of the major servers run Unix) it would be in the UFS (unix file system) and it would be the actual time from the system clock. Every storage device has a utility that tells it where to write the data and what to write. Since it's writing to a storage device using FAT, it'll round the numbers. To get to your real question, yes, you could hack and then transfer the data to a thumb drive but if you did that the dates wouldn't line up.

    Skip Scott , March 14, 2019 at 8:05 am

    Jeff-

    Which dates wouldn't line up? Is there a history of metadata available, or just metadata for the most recent move?

    David G , March 13, 2019 at 12:22 pm

    Marc asks: "[D]oes the analysis distinguish whether the DNC data were directly transferred to a thumb drive, or whether the data were hacked and then transferred to a thumb drive, eg, to give a copy to Wikileaks?"

    I asked that question in comments under a previous CN piece; other people have asked that question elsewhere.

    To my knowledge, it hasn't been addressed directly by the VIPS, and I think they should do so. (If they already have, someone please enlighten me.)

    Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 1:07 pm

    I am no computer wiz, but Binney has repeatedly made the point that the NSA scoops up everything. If there had been a hack, they'd know it, and they wouldn't only have had "moderate" confidence in the Jan. assessment. I believe that although farfetched, an argument could be made that a Russian spy got into the DNC, loaded a thumb drive, and gave it to Craig Murray.

    David G , March 13, 2019 at 3:31 pm

    Respectfully, that's a separate point, which may or may not raise issues of its own.

    But I think the question Marc posed stands.

    Skip Scott , March 14, 2019 at 7:59 am

    Hi David-

    I don't see how it's separate. If the NSA scoops up everything, they'd have solid evidence of the hack, and wouldn't have only had "moderate" confidence, which Bill Binney says is equivalent to them saying "we don't have squat". They wouldn't even have needed Mueller at all, except to possibly build a "parallel case" due to classification issues. Also, the FBI not demanding direct access to the DNC server tells you something is fishy. They could easily have gotten a warrant to examine the server, but chose not to. They also purposely refuse to get testimony from Craig Murray and Julian Assange, which rings alarm bells on its own.

    As for the technical aspect of Marc's question, I agree that I'd like to see Bill Binney directly answer it.

    [Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings

    Highly recommended!
    Mar 13, 2019 | Consortiumnews

    The final Mueller report should be graded "incomplete," says VIPS, whose forensic work proves the speciousness of the story that DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking.

    MEMORANDUM FOR: The Attorney General

    FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

    SUBJECT: Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings

    Executive Summary

    Media reports are predicting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to give you the findings of his probe into any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump. If Mueller gives you his "completed" report anytime soon, it should be graded "incomplete."

    Major deficiencies include depending on a DNC-hired cybersecurity company for forensics and failure to consult with those who have done original forensic work, including us and the independent forensic investigators with whom we have examined the data. We stand ready to help.

    We veteran intelligence professionals (VIPS) have done enough detailed forensic work to prove the speciousness of the prevailing story that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking. Given the paucity of evidence to support that story, we believe Mueller may choose to finesse this key issue and leave everyone hanging. That would help sustain the widespread belief that Trump owes his victory to President Vladimir Putin, and strengthen the hand of those who pay little heed to the unpredictable consequences of an increase in tensions with nuclear-armed Russia.

    There is an overabundance of "assessments" but a lack of hard evidence to support that prevailing narrative. We believe that there are enough people of integrity in the Department of Justice to prevent the outright manufacture or distortion of "evidence," particularly if they become aware that experienced scientists have completed independent forensic study that yield very different conclusions. We know only too well -- and did our best to expose -- how our former colleagues in the intelligence community manufactured fraudulent "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

    We have scrutinized publicly available physical data -- the "trail" that every cyber operation leaves behind. And we have had support from highly experienced independent forensic investigators who, like us, have no axes to grind. We can prove that the conventional-wisdom story about Russian-hacking-DNC-emails-for-WikiLeaks is false. Drawing largely on the unique expertise of two VIPS scientists who worked for a combined total of 70 years at the National Security Agency and became Technical Directors there, we have regularly published our findings. But we have been deprived of a hearing in mainstream media -- an experience painfully reminiscent of what we had to endure when we exposed the corruption of intelligence before the attack on Iraq 16 years ago.

    This time, with the principles of physics and forensic science to rely on, we are able to adduce solid evidence exposing mistakes and distortions in the dominant story. We offer you below -- as a kind of aide-memoire -- a discussion of some of the key factors related to what has become known as "Russia-gate." And we include our most recent findings drawn from forensic work on data associated with WikiLeaks' publication of the DNC emails.

    We do not claim our conclusions are "irrefutable and undeniable," a la Colin Powell at the UN before the Iraq war. Our judgments, however, are based on the scientific method -- not "assessments." We decided to put this memorandum together in hopes of ensuring that you hear that directly from us.

    If the Mueller team remains reluctant to review our work -- or even to interview willing witnesses with direct knowledge, like WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, we fear that many of those yearning earnestly for the truth on Russia-gate will come to the corrosive conclusion that the Mueller investigation was a sham.

    In sum, we are concerned that, at this point, an incomplete Mueller report will fall far short of the commitment made by then Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "to ensure a full and thorough investigation," when he appointed Mueller in May 2017. Again, we are at your disposal.

    Discussion

    The centerpiece accusation of Kremlin "interference" in the 2016 presidential election was the charge that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee emails and gave them to WikiLeaks to embarrass Secretary Hillary Clinton and help Mr. Trump win. The weeks following the election witnessed multiple leak-based media allegations to that effect. These culminated on January 6, 2017 in an evidence-light, rump report misleadingly labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)." Prepared by "handpicked analysts" from only three of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI, and NSA), the assessment expressed "high confidence" in the Russia-hacking-to-WikiLeaks story, but lacked so much as a hint that the authors had sought access to independent forensics to support their "assessment."

    The media immediately awarded the ICA the status of Holy Writ, choosing to overlook an assortment of banal, full-disclosure-type caveats included in the assessment itself -- such as:

    " When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as 'we assess' or 'we judge,' they are conveying an analytic assessment or judgment. Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong."

    To their credit, however, the authors of the ICA did make a highly germane point in introductory remarks on "cyber incident attribution." They noted: "The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation -- malicious or not -- leaves a trail." [Emphasis added.]

    Forensics

    The imperative is to get on that "trail" -- and quickly, before red herrings can be swept across it. The best way to establish attribution is to apply the methodology and processes of forensic science. Intrusions into computers leave behind discernible physical data that can be examined scientifically by forensic experts. Risk to "sources and methods" is normally not a problem.

    Direct access to the actual computers is the first requirement -- the more so when an intrusion is termed "an act of war" and blamed on a nuclear-armed foreign government (the words used by the late Sen. John McCain and other senior officials). In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017, former FBI Director James Comey admitted that he did not insist on physical access to the DNC computers even though, as he conceded, "best practices" dictate direct access.

    In June 2017, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr asked Comey whether he ever had "access to the actual hardware that was hacked." Comey answered, "In the case of the DNC we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. " Sen. Burr followed up: "But no content? Isn't content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?" Comey: "It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016."

    The "private party/high-class entity" to which Comey refers is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm of checkered reputation and multiple conflicts of interest, including very close ties to a number of key anti-Russian organizations. Comey indicated that the DNC hired CrowdStrike in the spring of 2016.

    Given the stakes involved in the Russia-gate investigation – including a possible impeachment battle and greatly increased tension between Russia and the U.S. -- it is difficult to understand why Comey did not move quickly to seize the computer hardware so the FBI could perform an independent examination of what quickly became the major predicate for investigating election interference by Russia. Fortunately, enough data remain on the forensic "trail" to arrive at evidence-anchored conclusions. The work we have done shows the prevailing narrative to be false. We have been suggesting this for over two years. Recent forensic work significantly strengthens that conclusion.

    We Do Forensics

    Recent forensic examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May 2016. (On June 12, Julian Assange announced he had them; WikiLeaks published them on July 22.) We recently discovered that the files reveal a FAT (File Allocation Table) system property. This shows that the data had been transferred to an external storage device, such as a thumb drive, before WikiLeaks posted them.

    FAT is a simple file system named for its method of organization, the File Allocation Table. It is used for storage only and is not related to internet transfers like hacking. Were WikiLeaks to have received the DNC files via a hack, the last modified times on the files would be a random mixture of odd-and even-ending numbers.

    Why is that important? The evidence lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the Wikileaks files. When a file is stored under the FAT file system the software rounds the time to the nearest even-numbered second. Every single one of the time stamps in the DNC files on WikiLeaks' site ends in an even number.

    We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on the Wikileaks site. All 500 files end in an even number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If those files had been hacked over the Internet, there would be an equal probability of the time stamp ending in an odd number. The random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power. Thus, these data show that the DNC emails posted by WikiLeaks went through a storage device, like a thumb drive, and were physically moved before Wikileaks posted the emails on the World Wide Web.

    This finding alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts, for example, about Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC emails given to WikiLeaks. A defense attorney could easily use the forensics to argue that someone copied the DNC files to a storage device like a USB thumb drive and got them physically to WikiLeaks -- not electronically via a hack.

    Role of NSA

    For more than two years, we strongly suspected that the DNC emails were copied/leaked in that way, not hacked. And we said so. We remain intrigued by the apparent failure of NSA's dragnet, collect-it-all approach -- including "cast-iron" coverage of WikiLeaks -- to provide forensic evidence (as opposed to "assessments") as to how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks and who sent them. Well before the telling evidence drawn from the use of FAT, other technical evidence led us to conclude that the DNC emails were not hacked over the network, but rather physically moved over, say, the Atlantic Ocean.

    Is it possible that NSA has not yet been asked to produce the collected packets of DNC email data claimed to have been hacked by Russia? Surely, this should be done before Mueller competes his investigation. NSA has taps on all the transoceanic cables leaving the U.S. and would almost certainly have such packets if they exist. (The detailed slides released by Edward Snowden actually show the routes that trace the packets.)

    The forensics we examined shed no direct light on who may have been behind the leak. The only thing we know for sure is that the person had to have direct access to the DNC computers or servers in order to copy the emails. The apparent lack of evidence from the most likely source, NSA, regarding a hack may help explain the FBI's curious preference for forensic data from CrowdStrike. No less puzzling is why Comey would choose to call CrowdStrike a "high-class entity."

    Comey was one of the intelligence chiefs briefing President Obama on January 5, 2017 on the "Intelligence Community Assessment," which was then briefed to President-elect Trump and published the following day. That Obama found a key part of the ICA narrative less than persuasive became clear at his last press conference (January 18), when he told the media, "The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to how 'the DNC emails that were leaked' got to WikiLeaks.

    Is Guccifer 2.0 a Fraud?

    There is further compelling technical evidence that undermines the claim that the DNC emails were downloaded over the internet as a result of a spearphishing attack. William Binney, one of VIPS' two former Technical Directors at NSA, along with other former intelligence community experts, examined files posted by Guccifer 2.0 and discovered that those files could not have been downloaded over the internet. It is a simple matter of mathematics and physics.

    There was a flurry of activity after Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016: "We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication." On June 14, DNC contractor CrowdStrike announced that malware was found on the DNC server and claimed there was evidence it was injected by Russians. On June 15, the Guccifer 2.0 persona emerged on the public stage, affirmed the DNC statement, claimed to be responsible for hacking the DNC, claimed to be a WikiLeaks source, and posted a document that forensics show was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."

    Our suspicions about the Guccifer 2.0 persona grew when G-2 claimed responsibility for a "hack" of the DNC on July 5, 2016, which released DNC data that was rather bland compared to what WikiLeaks published 17 days later (showing how the DNC had tipped the primary scales against Sen. Bernie Sanders). As VIPS reported in a wrap-up Memorandum for the President on July 24, 2017 (titled "Intel Vets Challenge 'Russia Hack' Evidence)," forensic examination of the July 5, 2016 cyber intrusion into the DNC showed it NOT to be a hack by the Russians or by anyone else, but rather a copy onto an external storage device. It seemed a good guess that the July 5 intrusion was a contrivance to preemptively taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish from the DNC, by "showing" it came from a "Russian hack." WikiLeaks published the DNC emails on July 22, three days before the Democratic convention.

    As we prepared our July 24 memo for the President, we chose to begin by taking Guccifer 2.0 at face value; i. e., that the documents he posted on July 5, 2016 were obtained via a hack over the Internet. Binney conducted a forensic examination of the metadata contained in the posted documents and compared that metadata with the known capacity of Internet connection speeds at the time in the U.S. This analysis showed a transfer rate as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, which is much faster than was possible from a remote online Internet connection. The 49.1 megabytes speed coincided, though, with the rate that copying onto a thumb drive could accommodate.

    Binney, assisted by colleagues with relevant technical expertise, then extended the examination and ran various forensic tests from the U.S. to the Netherlands, Albania, Belgrade and the UK. The fastest Internet rate obtained -- from a data center in New Jersey to a data center in the UK -- was 12 megabytes per second, which is less than a fourth of the capacity typical of a copy onto a thumb drive.

    The findings from the examination of the Guccifer 2.0 data and the WikiLeaks data does not indicate who copied the information to an external storage device (probably a thumb drive). But our examination does disprove that G.2 hacked into the DNC on July 5, 2016. Forensic evidence for the Guccifer 2.0 data adds to other evidence that the DNC emails were not taken by an internet spearphishing attack. The data breach was local. The emails were copied from the network.

    Presidential Interest

    After VIPS' July 24, 2017 Memorandum for the President, Binney, one of its principal authors, was invited to share his insights with Mike Pompeo, CIA Director at the time. When Binney arrived in Pompeo's office at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017 for an hour-long discussion, the director made no secret of the reason for the invitation: "You are here because the President told me that if I really wanted to know about Russian hacking I needed to talk with you."

    Binney warned Pompeo -- to stares of incredulity -- that his people should stop lying about the Russian hacking. Binney then started to explain the VIPS findings that had caught President Trump's attention. Pompeo asked Binney if he would talk to the FBI and NSA. Binney agreed, but has not been contacted by those agencies. With that, Pompeo had done what the President asked. There was no follow-up.

    Confronting James Clapper on Forensics

    We, the hoi polloi, do not often get a chance to talk to people like Pompeo -- and still less to the former intelligence chiefs who are the leading purveyors of the prevailing Russia-gate narrative. An exception came on November 13, when former National Intelligence Director James Clapper came to the Carnegie Endowment in Washington to hawk his memoir. Answering a question during the Q&A about Russian "hacking" and NSA, Clapper said:

    " Well, I have talked with NSA a lot And in my mind, I spent a lot of time in the SIGINT business, the forensic evidence was overwhelming about what the Russians had done. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever." [Emphasis added]

    Clapper added: " as a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn't have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election."

    (A transcript of the interesting Q&A can be found here and a commentary on Clapper's performance at Carnegie, as well as on his longstanding lack of credibility, is here .)

    Normally soft-spoken Ron Wyden, Democratic senator from Oregon, lost his patience with Clapper last week when he learned that Clapper is still denying that he lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee about the extent of NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens. In an unusual outburst, Wyden said: "James Clapper needs to stop making excuses for lying to the American people about mass surveillance. To be clear: I sent him the question in advance. I asked him to correct the record afterward. He chose to let the lie stand."

    The materials brought out by Edward Snowden in June 2013 showed Clapper to have lied under oath to the committee on March 12, 2013; he was, nevertheless, allowed to stay on as Director of National Intelligence for three and half more years. Clapper fancies himself an expert on Russia, telling Meet the Press on May 28, 2017 that Russia's history shows that Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever."

    Clapper ought to be asked about the "forensics" he said were "overwhelming about what the Russians had done." And that, too, before Mueller completes his investigation.

    For the steering group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity:

    Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is made up of former intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers and congressional staffers. The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington's justifications for launching a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than contrived threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of VIPS memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com.

    image_pdf image_print 9280

    Tags: Bill Binney Donald Trump Hillary Clinton James Clapper James Comey Mike Pompeo Robert Mueller Veteran Intelligence Professional for Sanity VIPS WikiLeaks


    [Mar 17, 2019] Mueller uses the same old false flag scams, just different packaging of his forensics-free findings

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... It appears the FBI, CIA, and NSA have great difficulty in differentiating between Russians and Democrats posing as Russians. ..."
    "... Maybe the VIPS should look into the murder of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who had the security clearance required to access the DNC servers, and who was murdered in the same week as the emails were taken. In particular, they should ask why the police were told to stand down and close the murder case without further investigation. ..."
    "... What a brilliant article, so logical, methodical & a forensic, scientific breakdown of the phony Russiagate project? And there's no doubt, this was a co-ordinated, determined Intelligence project to reverse the results of the 2016 Election by initiating a soft coup or Regime change op on a elected Leader, a very American Coup, something the American Intelligence Agencies specialise in, everywhere else, on a Global scale, too get Trump impeached & removed from the Whitehouse? ..."
    "... Right. Since its purpose is to destroy Trump politically, the investigation should go on as long as Trump is in office. Alternatively, if at this point Trump has completely sold out, that would be another reason to stop the investigation. ..."
    "... Nancy Pelosi's announcement two days ago that the Democrats will not seek impeachment for Trump suggests the emptiness of the Mueller investigation on the specific "collusion" issue. ..."
    "... We know and Assange has confirmed Seth Rich, assassinated in D.C. for his deed, downloaded the emails and most likely passed them on to former British ambassador Craig Murray in a D.C. park for transport to Wikileaks. ..."
    "... This so-called "Russiagate" narrative is an illustration of our "freedom of the press" failure in the US due to groupthink and self censorship. He who pays the piper is apt to call the tune. ..."
    "... Barr, Sessions, every congressmen all the corporate MSM war profiteer mouth pieces. They all know that "Russia hacked the DNC" and "Russia meddled" is fabricated garbage. They don't care, because their chosen war beast corporate candidate couldn't beat Donald goofball Trump. So it has to be shown that the war beast only lost because of nefarious reasons. Because they're gonna run another war beast cut from the same cloth as Hillary in 2020. ..."
    "... Mar 4, 2019 Tom Fitton: President Trump a 'Crime Victim' by Illegal Deep State DOJ & FBI Abuses: https://youtu.be/ixWMorWAC7c ..."
    "... Trump is a willing player in this game. The anti-Russian Crusade was, quite simply, a stunningly reckless, short-sighted effort to overturn the 2016 election, removing Trump to install Hillary Clinton in office. ..."
    "... Much ado about nothing. All the talk and chatter and media airplay about "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election only tells me that these liars think the American public is that stupid. ..."
    "... Andrew Thomas I'm afraid that huge amounts of our History post 1947 is organized and propagandized disinformation. There is an incredible page that John Simpkin has organized over the years that specifically addresses individuals, click on a name and read about them. https://spartacus-educational.com/USAdisinformation.htm ..."
    "... It's pretty astonishing that Mueller was more interested in Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi as credible sources about Wikileaks and the DNC release than Craig Murray! ..."
    "... Yes, he has done his job. And his job was to bring his royal Orangeness to heel, and to make sure that detente and co-operation with Russia remained impossible. The forever war continues. Mission Accomplished. ..."
    Mar 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    O Society , March 16, 2019 at 7:55 am

    The Truth is Out There. I Want to Believe!

    Same old scams, different packaging. That's New & Improved for you.

    http://opensociet.org/2019/03/16/the-return-of-the-hidden-persuaders

    Raymond Comeau , March 15, 2019 at 12:35 pm

    I could not suffer through reading the whole article. This is mainly because I have watched the news daily about Mueller's Investigation and I sincerely believe that Mueller is Champion of the Democrats who are trying to depose President Donald Trump at any cost.

    For what Mueller found any decent lawyer with a Degree and a few years of experience could have found what Mueller found for far far less money. Mueller only found common crimes AND NO COLLUSION BETWEEN PRESIDENT TRUMP AND PUTIN!

    The Mueller Investigation should be given to an honest broker to review, and Mueller should be paid only what it would cost to produce the commonplace crimes Mueller, The Democrats, and CNN has tried to convince the people that indeed Trump COLLUDED with RUSSIA. Mueller is, a BIG NOTHING BURGER and THE DEMOCRATS AND CNN ARE MUELLER'S SINGING CANARYS! Mueller should be jailed.

    Bogdan Miller , March 15, 2019 at 11:04 am

    This article explains why the Mueller Report is already highly suspect. For another thing, we know that since before 2016, Democrats have been studying Russian Internet and hacking tactics, and posing as Russian Bots/Trolls on Facebook and other media outlets, all in an effort to harm President Trump.

    It appears the FBI, CIA, and NSA have great difficulty in differentiating between Russians and Democrats posing as Russians.

    B.J.M. Former Intelligence Analyst and Humint Collector

    vinnieoh , March 15, 2019 at 8:17 am

    Moving on: the US House yesterday voted UNANIMOUSLY (remember that word, so foreign these days to US governance?) to "urge" the new AG to release the complete Mueller report.

    A non-binding resolution, but you would think that the Democrats can't see the diesel locomotive bearing down on their clown car, about to smash it to pieces. The new AG in turn says he will summarize the report and that is what we will see, not the entire report. And taxation without representation takes a new twist.

    ... ... ...

    Raymond Comeau , March 15, 2019 at 12:38 pm

    What else would you expect from two Political Parties who are really branches of the ONE Party which Represents DEEP STATE".

    DWS , March 15, 2019 at 5:58 am

    Maybe the VIPS should look into the murder of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who had the security clearance required to access the DNC servers, and who was murdered in the same week as the emails were taken. In particular, they should ask why the police were told to stand down and close the murder case without further investigation.

    Raymond Comeau , March 15, 2019 at 12:47 pm

    EXACTLY! But, Deep State will not allow that. And, it would ruin the USA' plan to continue to invade more sovereign countries and steal their resources such as oil and Minerals. The people of the USA must be Ostriches or are so terrified that they accept anything their Criminal Governments tell them.

    Eventually, the chickens will come home to roost and perhaps the USA voters will ROAST when the crimes of the USA sink the whole country. It is time for a few Brave Men and Women to find their backbones and throw out the warmongers and their leading Oligarchs!

    KiwiAntz , March 14, 2019 at 6:44 pm

    What a brilliant article, so logical, methodical & a forensic, scientific breakdown of the phony Russiagate project? And there's no doubt, this was a co-ordinated, determined Intelligence project to reverse the results of the 2016 Election by initiating a soft coup or Regime change op on a elected Leader, a very American Coup, something the American Intelligence Agencies specialise in, everywhere else, on a Global scale, too get Trump impeached & removed from the Whitehouse?

    If you can't get him out via a Election, try & try again, like Maduro in Venezuela, to forcibly remove the targeted person by setting him up with fake, false accusations & fabricated evidence? How very predictable & how very American of Mueller & the Democratic Party. Absolute American Corruption, corrupts absolutely?

    Brian Murphy , March 15, 2019 at 10:33 am

    Right. Since its purpose is to destroy Trump politically, the investigation should go on as long as Trump is in office. Alternatively, if at this point Trump has completely sold out, that would be another reason to stop the investigation.

    If the investigation wraps up and finds nothing, that means Trump has already completely sold out. If the investigation continues, it means someone important still thinks Trump retains some vestige of his balls.

    DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:19 pm

    By last June or July the Mueller investigation has resulted in roughly 150 indictments for perjury/financial crimes, and there was a handful of convictions to date. The report did not support the Clinton wing's anti-Russian allegations about the 2016 election, and was largely brushed aside by media. Mueller was then reportedly sent back in to "find something." presumably to support the anti-Russian claims.

    mike k , March 14, 2019 at 12:57 pm

    From the beginning of the Russia did it story, right after Trump's electoral victory, it was apparent that this was a fraud. The democratic party however has locked onto this preposterous story, and they will go to their graves denying this was a scam to deny their presidential defeat, and somehow reverse the result of Trump's election. My sincere hope is that this blatant lie will be an albatross around the party's neck, that will carry them down into oblivion. They have betrayed those of us who supported them for so many years. They are in many ways now worse than the republican scum they seek to replace.

    DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:26 pm

    Trump is almost certain to be re-elected in 2020, and we'll go through this all over again.

    Tom , March 14, 2019 at 12:00 pm

    The very fact that the FBI never had access to the servers and took the word of a private company that had a history of being anti-Russian is enough to throw the entire ruse out.

    LJ , March 14, 2019 at 2:39 pm

    Agreed!!!! and don't forget the FBI/Comey gave Hillary and her Campaign a head's up before they moved to seize the evidence. . So too, Comey said he stopped the Investigation , thereby rendering judgement of innocence, even though by his own words 'gross negligence' had a occurred (which is normally considered grounds for prosecution). In doing so he exceeded the FBI's investigative mandate. He rationalized that decision was appropriate because of the appearance of impropriety that resulted from Attorney General Lynch having a private meeting on a plane on a runway with Bill and Hillary . Where was the logic in that. Who called the meeting? All were Lawyers who had served as President, Senator, Attorney General and knew that the meeting was absolutely inappropriate. . Comey should be prosecuted if they want to prosecute anyone else because of this CRAP. PS Trump is an idiot. Uhinfortunately he is just a symptom of the disease at this point. Look at the cover of Rolling Stone magazine , carry a barf bag.

    Jane Christ , March 14, 2019 at 6:51 pm

    Exactly. This throws doubt on the ability of the FBI to work independently. They are working for those who want to cover -up the Hillary mess . She evidently has sufficient funds to pay them off. I am disgusted with the level of corruption.

    hetro , March 14, 2019 at 10:50 am

    Nancy Pelosi's announcement two days ago that the Democrats will not seek impeachment for Trump suggests the emptiness of the Mueller investigation on the specific "collusion" issue. If there were something hot and lingering and about to emerge, this decision is highly unlikely, especially with the reasoning she gave at "so as not to divide the American people." Dividing the people hasn't been of much concern throughout this bogus witch hunt on Trump, which has added to his incompetence in leavening a growing hysteria and confusion in this country. If there is something, anything at all, in the Mueller report to support the collusion theory, Pelosi would I'm sure gleefully trot it out to get a lesser candidate like Pence as opposition for 2020.

    James Clooney , March 14, 2019 at 11:17 am

    We know and Assange has confirmed Seth Rich, assassinated in D.C. for his deed, downloaded the emails and most likely passed them on to former British ambassador Craig Murray in a D.C. park for transport to Wikileaks.

    We must also honor Shawn Lucas assassinated for serving DNC with a litigation notice exposing the DNC conspiracy against Sanders.

    hetro , March 14, 2019 at 3:18 pm

    Where has Assange confirmed this? Assange's long-standing position is NOT to reveal his sources. I believe he has continued to honor this position.

    Skip Scott , March 15, 2019 at 7:15 am

    It has merely been insinuated by the offering of a reward for info on Seth's murder. In one breath he says wikileaks will never divulge a source, and in the next he offers a $20k reward saying that sources take tremendous risk. Doesn't take much of a logical leap to connect A to B.

    DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:30 pm

    Are you aware that Democrats split apart their 0wn voting base in the 1990s, middle class vs. poor? The Obama years merely confirmed that this split is permanent. This is particularly relevant for Democrats, as their voting base had long consisted of the poor and middle class, for the common good. Ignoring this deep split hasn't made it go away.

    hetro , March 14, 2019 at 3:24 pm

    Even more important is how the Democrats have sold out to an Establishment view favoring neocon theory, since at least Bill Clinton. Pelosi's recent behavior with Ilhan Omar confirms this and the split you're talking about. My point is it is distinctly odd that Pelosi is discouraging impeachment on "dividing the Party" (already divided, of course, as you say), whereas the Russia-gate fantasy was so hot not that long ago. Again it points to a cynical opportunism and manipulation of the electorate. Both parties are a sad excuse to represent ordinary people's interests.

    Skip Scott , March 15, 2019 at 7:21 am

    She said "dividing the country", not the party. I think she may have concerns over Trump's heavily armed base. That said, the statement may have been a ruse. There are plenty of Republicans that would cross the line in favor of impeachment with the right "conclusions" by Mueller. Pelosi may be setting up for a "bombshell" conclusion by Mueller. One must never forget that we are watching theater, and that Trump was a "mistake" to be controlled or eliminated.

    Cindy Haddix , March 14, 2019 at 8:04 am

    Mueller should be ashamed that he has made President Trump his main concern!! If all this investigation would stop he could save America millions!!! He needs to quit this witch-hunt and worry about things that really need to be handled!!! If the democrats and Trump haters would stop pushing senseless lies hopefully this would stop ? It's so disgusting that his democrat friend was never really investigated ? stop the witch-hunt and move forward!!!!

    torture this , March 14, 2019 at 7:29 am

    According to this letter, mistakes might have been made on Rachel Maddow's show. I can't wait to read how she responds. I'd watch her show, myself except that it has the same effect on me as ipecac.

    Zhu , March 14, 2019 at 3:37 am

    People will cling to "Putin made Trump President!!!" much as many cling "Obama's a Kenyan Muslim! Not a real American!!!". Both nut theories are emotionally satisfying, no matter what the historical facts are. Many Americans just can't admit their mistakes and blaming a scapegoat is a way out.

    O Society , March 14, 2019 at 2:03 am

    Thank you VIPS for organizing this legit dissent consisting of experts in the field of intelligence and computer forensics.

    This so-called "Russiagate" narrative is an illustration of our "freedom of the press" failure in the US due to groupthink and self censorship. He who pays the piper is apt to call the tune.

    It is astounding how little skepticism and scientifically-informed reasoning goes on in our media. These folks show themselves to be native advertising rather than authentic journalists at every turn.

    DH Fabian , March 14, 2019 at 1:33 pm

    But it has been Democrats and the media that market to middle class Dems, who persist in trying to sell the Russian Tale. They excel at ignoring the evidence that utterly contradicts their claims.

    O Society , March 15, 2019 at 3:50 pm

    Oh, we're well beyond your "Blame the middle class Dems" stage.

    The WINNING!!! team sports bullshit drowns the entire country now the latrine's sprung a leak. People pretend to live in bubbles made of blue or red quite like the Three Little Pigs, isn't it? Except instead of a house made of bricks saving the day for the littlepiggies, what we've got here is a purple puddle of piss.

    Everyone's more than glad to project all our problems on "THEM" though, aren't we?

    Meanwhile, the White House smells like a urinal not washed since the 1950s and simpletons still get their rocks off arguing about whether Mickey Mouse can beat up Ronald McDonald.

    T'would be comic except what's so tragic is the desperate need Americans have to believe, oh just believe! in something. Never mind the sound of the jackhammer on your skull dear, there's an app for that or is it a pill?

    I don't know, don't ask me, I'm busy watching TV. Have a cheeto.

    https://opensociet.org/2018/12/18/the-disneyfication-of-america/

    Sam F , March 13, 2019 at 6:45 pm

    Very good analysis clearly stated, especially adding the FAT timestamps to the transmission speeds.

    Minor corrections: "The emails were copied from the network" should be "from the much faster local network" because this is to Contradict the notion that they were copied over the internet network, which most readers will equate with "network." Also "reportedin" should be "reported in."

    Michael , March 13, 2019 at 6:25 pm

    It is likely that New Knowledge was actually "the Russians", possibly working in concert with Crowdstrike. Once an intelligence agency gets away with something like pretending to be Russian hackers and bots, they tend to re-use their model; it is too tempting to discard an effective model after a one-off accomplishment. New Knowledge was caught interfering/ determining the outcome in the Alabama Senate race on the side of Democrat Doug Jones, and claimed they were merely trying to mimic Russian methods to see if they worked (they did; not sure of their punishment?). Occam's razor would suggest that New Knowledge would be competent to mimic/ pretend to be "Russians" after the fact of wikileaks' publication of emails. New Knowledge has employees from the NSA and State department sympathetic to/ working with(?) Hillary, and were the "outside" agency hired to evaluate and report on the "Russian" hacking of the DNC emails/ servers.

    DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 5:48 pm

    Mueller released report last summer, which resulted in (the last I checked) roughly 150 indictments, a handful of convictions to date, all for perjury/financial (not political) crimes. This wasn't kept secret. It simply wasn't what Democrats wanted to hear, so although it was mentioned in some lib media (which overwhelmingly supported neoliberal Hillary Clinton), it was essentially swept under the carpet.

    Billy , March 13, 2019 at 11:11 pm

    Barr, Sessions, every congressmen all the corporate MSM war profiteer mouth pieces. They all know that "Russia hacked the DNC" and "Russia meddled" is fabricated garbage. They don't care, because their chosen war beast corporate candidate couldn't beat Donald goofball Trump. So it has to be shown that the war beast only lost because of nefarious reasons. Because they're gonna run another war beast cut from the same cloth as Hillary in 2020.

    Realist , March 14, 2019 at 3:22 am

    You betcha. Moreover, who but the Russians do these idiots have left to blame? Everybody else is now off limits due to political correctness. Sigh Those Catholics, Jews, "ethnics" and sundry "deviants" used to be such reliable scapegoats, to say nothing of the "undeveloped" world. As Clapper "authoritatively" says, only this vile lineage still carries the genes for the most extremes of human perfidy. Squirrels in your attic? It must be the damned Russkies! The bastards impudently tried to copy our democracy, economic system and free press and only besmirched those institutions, ruining all of Hillary's glorious plans for a worldwide benevolent dictatorship. All this might be humorous if it weren't so funny.

    And those Chinese better not get to thinking they are somehow our equals just because all their trillions invested in U.S. Treasury bonds have paid for all our wars of choice and MIC boondoggles since before the turn of the century. Unless they start delivering Trump some "free stuff" the big man is gonna cut off their water. No more affordable manufactured goods for the American public! So there!

    As to the article: impeccable research and analysis by the VIPS crew yet again. They've proven to me that, to a near certainty, the Easter Bunny is not likely to exist. Mueller won't read it. Clapper will still prance around a free man, as will Brennan. The Democrats won't care, that is until November of 2020. And Hillary will continue to skate, unhindered in larding up the Clinton Foundation to purposes one can only imagine.

    Joe Tedesky , March 14, 2019 at 10:02 pm

    Realist,

    I have posted this article 'the Russia they Lost' before and from time to time but once again it seems appropriate to add this link to expound upon for what you've been saying. It's an article written by a Russian who in they're youth growing up in the USSR dreamed of living the American lifestyle if Russia were to ever ditch communism. But . Starting with Kosovo this Russian's youthful dream turned nightmarishly ugly and, as time went by with more and yet even more USA aggression this Russian author loss his admiration and desire for all things American to be proudly envied. This is a story where USA hard power destroyed any hope of American soft power for world unity. But hey that unity business was never part of the plan anyway.

    https://slavyangrad.org/2014/09/24/the-russia-they-lost/

    Realist , March 15, 2019 at 10:38 pm

    right you are, joe. if america was smart rather than arrogant, it would have cooperated with china and russia to see the belt and road initiative succeed by perhaps building a bridge or tunnel from siberia to alaska, and by building its own fleet of icebreakers to open up its part of the northwest passage. but no, it only wants to sabotage what others propose. that's not being a leader, it's being a dick.

    i'm gonna have to go on the disabled list here until the sudden neurological problem with my right hand clears up–it's like paralysed. too difficult to do this one-handed using hunt and peck. at least the problem was not in the old bean, according to the scans. carry on, sir.

    Brian James , March 13, 2019 at 5:04 pm

    Mar 4, 2019 Tom Fitton: President Trump a 'Crime Victim' by Illegal Deep State DOJ & FBI Abuses: https://youtu.be/ixWMorWAC7c

    DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 5:55 pm

    Trump is a willing player in this game. The anti-Russian Crusade was, quite simply, a stunningly reckless, short-sighted effort to overturn the 2016 election, removing Trump to install Hillary Clinton in office. Trump and the Republicans continue to win by default, as Democrats only drive more voters away.

    Howard , March 13, 2019 at 4:36 pm

    Thank you Ray McGovern and the Other 17 VIPS C0-Signers of your National Security Essay for Truth. Along with Craig Murray and Seymour Hirsch, former Sam Adams Award winners for "shining light into dark places", you are national resources for objectivity in critical survival information matters for our country. It is more than a pity that our mainstream media are so beholden to their corporate task masters that they cannot depart from the company line for fear of losing their livelihoods, and in the process we risk losing life on the planet because of unconstrained nuclear war on the part of the two main adversaries facing off in an atmosphere of fear and mistrust. Let me speak plainly. THEY SHOULD BE TALKING TO YOU AND NOT THE VESTED INTERESTS' MOUTHPIECES. Thank you for your continued leadership!

    James Clooney , March 14, 2019 at 11:28 am

    Roger Ailes founder of FOX news died, "falling down stairs" within a week of FOX news exposing to the world that the assassinated Seth Rich downloaded the DNC emails.

    DH Fabian , March 13, 2019 at 6:03 pm

    Google the Mueller investigation report from last June or July. When it was released, the public response was like a deflated balloon. It did not support the "Russian collusion" allegations -- the only thing Democrats still had left to sell. The report resulted in roughly 150 indictments for perjury/financial crimes (not political), and a handful of convictions to date -- none of which had anything to do with the election results.

    Hank , March 13, 2019 at 6:19 pm

    Much ado about nothing. All the talk and chatter and media airplay about "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election only tells me that these liars think the American public is that stupid. They are probably right, but the REAL reason that Hillary lost is because there ARE enough informed people now in this nation who are quite aware of the Clinton's sordid history where scandals seem to follow every where they go, but indictments and/or investigations don't. There IS an internet nowadays with lots of FACTUAL DOCUMENTED information. That's a lot more than I can say about the mainstream corporate-controlled media!

    I know this won't ever happen, but an HONEST investigation into the Democratic Party and their actions during the 2016 election would make ANY collusion with ANY nation look like a mole hill next to a mountain! One of the problems with living in this nation is if you are truly informed and make an effort 24/7 to be that way by doing your own research, you more-than-likely can be considered an "island in a sea of ignorance".

    Tom , March 14, 2019 at 12:13 pm

    We know that the FBI never had access to the servers and a private company was allowed to handle the evidence. Wasnt it a crime scene? The evidence was tampered with And we will never know what was on the servers.

    Mark McCarty , March 13, 2019 at 4:10 pm

    As a complement to this excellent analysis, I would like to make 2 further points:

    The Mueller indictment of Russian Intelligence for hacking the DNC and transferring their booty to Wikileaks is absurd on its face for this reason: Assange announced on June 12th the impending release of Hillary-related emails. Yet the indictment claims that Guccifer 2.0 did not succeed in transferring the DNC emails to Wikileaks until the time period of July 14-18th – after which they were released online on July 22nd. Are we to suppose that Assange, a publisher of impeccable integrity, publicly announced the publication of emails he had not yet seen, and which he was obtaining from a source of murky provenance? And are we further to suppose that Wikileaks could have processed 20K emails and 20K attachments to insure their genuineness in a period of only several days? As you will recall, Wikileaks subsequently took a number of weeks to process the Podesta emails they released in October.

    And another peculiarity merits attention. Assange did not state on June 12th that he was releasing DNC emails – and yet Crowdstrike and the Guccifer 2.0 personna evidently knew that this was in store. A likely resolution of this conundrum is that US intelligence had been monitoring all communications to Wikileaks, and had informed the DNC that their hacked emails had been offered to Wikileaks. A further reasonable prospect is that US intelligence subsequently unmasked the leaker to the DNC; as Assange has strongly hinted, this likely was Seth Rich. This could explain Rich's subsequent murder, as Rich would have been in a position to unmask the Guccifer 2.0 hoax and the entire Russian hacking narrative.

    https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/muellers-new-indictment-do-the-feds-take-us-for-idiots-5406ef955406

    https://medium.com/@markfmccarty/how-did-crowdstrike-guccifer-2-0-know-that-wikileaks-was-planning-to-release-dnc-emails-42e6db334053

    Sam F , March 13, 2019 at 7:06 pm

    Curious that Assange has Not explicitly stated that the leaker was Seth Rich, if it was, as this would take pressure from himself and incriminate the DNC in the murder of Rich. Perhaps he doesn't know, and has the honor not to take the opportunity, or perhaps he knows that it was not Rich.

    James Clooney , March 14, 2019 at 11:40 am

    View the Dutch TV interview with Asssange and there is another interview available on youtube in which Assange DOES subtly confirmed it was Seth Rich.

    Assange posted a $10,000 reward for Seth Rich's murders capture.

    Abby , March 13, 2019 at 10:11 pm

    Another mistaken issue with the "Russia hacked the DNC computers on Trump's command" is that he never asked Russia to do that. His words were, "Russia if you 'find' Hillary's missing emails let us know." He said that after she advised congress that she wouldn't be turning in all of the emails they asked for because she deleted 30,000 of them and said that they were personal.

    But if Mueller or the FBI wants to look at all of them they can find them at the NYC FBI office because they are on Weiner's laptop. Why? Because Hillary's aid Huma Abedin, Weiner's wife sent them to it. Just another security risk that Hillary had because of her private email server. This is why Comey had to tell congress that more of them had been found 11 days before the election. If Comey hadn't done that then the FBI would have.

    But did Comey or McCabe look at her emails there to see if any of them were classified? No they did not do that. And today we find out that Lisa Page told congress that it was Obama's decision not to charge Hillary for being grossly negligent on using her private email server. This has been known by congress for many months and now we know that the fix was always in for her to get off.

    robert e williamson jr , March 13, 2019 at 3:26 pm

    I want to thank you folks at VIPS. Like I have been saying for years now the relationship between CIA, NSA and DOJ is an incestuous one at best. A perverse corrupted bond to control the masses. A large group of religious fanatics who want things "ONE WAY". They are the facilitators for the rogue government known as the "DEEP STATE"!

    Just ask billy barr.

    More truth is a very good thing. I believe DOJ is supporting the intelligence community because of blackmail. They can't come clean because they all risk doing lots of time if a new judicial mechanism replaces them. We are in big trouble here.

    Apparently the rule of law is not!

    You folks that keep claiming we live in the post truth era! Get off me. Demand the truth and nothing else. Best be getting ready for the fight of your lives. The truth is you have to look yourself in the mirror every morning, deny that truth. The claim you are living in the post truth era is an admission your life is a lie. Now grab a hold of yourself pick a dogdamned side and stand for something,.

    Thank You VIPS!

    Joe Tedesky , March 13, 2019 at 2:58 pm

    Hats off to the VIP's who have investigated this Russian hacking that wasn't a hacking for without them what would we news junkies have otherwise to lift open the hood of Mueller's never ending Russia-gate investigation. Although the one thing this Russia-gate nonsense has accomplished is it has destroyed with our freedom of speech when it comes to how we citizens gather our news. Much like everything else that has been done during these post 9/11 years of continual wars our civil rights have been marginalized down to zero or, a bit above if that's even still an argument to be made for the sake of numbers.

    Watching the Manafort sentencing is quite interesting for the fact that Manafort didn't conclude in as much as he played fast and loose with his income. In fact maybe Manafort's case should have been prosecuted by the State Department or, how about the IRS? Also wouldn't it be worth investigating other Geopolitical Rain Makers like Manafort for similar crimes of financial wrongdoing? I mean is it possible Manafort is or was the only one of his type to do such dishonest things? In any case Manafort wasn't charged with concluding with any Russians in regard to the 2016 presidential election and, with that we all fall down.

    I guess the best thing (not) that came out of this Russia-gate silliness is Rachel Maddow's tv ratings zoomed upwards. But I hate to tell you that the only ones buying what Ms Maddow is selling are the died in the wool Hillary supporters along with the chicken-hawks who rally to the MIC lobby for more war. It's all a game and yet there are many of us who just don't wish to play it but still we must because no one will listen to the sanity that gets ignored keep up the good work VIP's some of us are listening.

    Andrew Thomas , March 13, 2019 at 12:42 pm

    The article did not mention something called to my attention for the first time by one of the outstanding members of your commentariat just a couple of days ago- that Ambassador Murray stayed publicly, over two years ago, that he had been given the thumb drive by a go-between in D.C. and had somehow gotten it to Wikileaks. And, that he has NEVER BEEN INTERVIEWED by Mueller &Company. I was blown away by this, and found the original articles just by googling Murray. The excuse given is that Murray "lacks credibility ", or some such, because of his prior relationship with Assange and/or Wikileaks. This is so ludicrous I can't even get my head around it. And now, you have given me a new detail-the meeting with Pompeo, and the complete lack of follow-up thereafter. Here all this time I thought I was the most cynical SOB who existed, and now I feel as naive as when I was 13 and believed what Dean Rusk was saying like it was holy writ. I am in your debt.

    Bob Van Noy , March 13, 2019 at 2:33 pm

    Andrew Thomas I'm afraid that huge amounts of our History post 1947 is organized and propagandized disinformation. There is an incredible page that John Simpkin has organized over the years that specifically addresses individuals, click on a name and read about them. https://spartacus-educational.com/USAdisinformation.htm

    Mark McCarty , March 13, 2019 at 4:18 pm

    A small correction: the Daily Mail article regarding Murray claimed that Murray was given a thumbdrive which he subsequently carried back to Wikileaks. On his blog, Murray subsequently disputed this part of the story, indicating that, while he had met with a leaker or confederate of a leaker in Washington DC, the Podesta emails were already in possession of Wikileaks at the time. Murray refused to clarify the reason for his meeting with this source, but he is adamant in maintaining that the DNC and Podesta emails were leaked, not hacked.

    And it is indeed ludicrous that Mueller, given the mandate to investigate the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC and Podesta, has never attempted to question either Assange or Murray. That in itself is enough for us to conclude that the Mueller investigation is a complete sham.

    Ian Brown , March 13, 2019 at 4:43 pm

    It's pretty astonishing that Mueller was more interested in Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi as credible sources about Wikileaks and the DNC release than Craig Murray!

    LJ , March 13, 2019 at 12:29 pm

    A guy comes in with a pedigree like that, """ former FBI head """ to examine and validate if possible an FBI sting manufactured off a phony FISA indictment based on the Steele Report, It immediately reminded me of the 9-11 Commission with Thomas Kean, former Board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, being appointed by GW Bush the Simple to head an investigation that he had previously said he did not want to authorize( and of course bi partisan yes man Lee Hamilton as #2, lest we forget) . Really this should be seen as another low point in our Democracy. Uncle Sam is the Limbo Man, How low can you go?

    After Bill and Hillary and Monica and Paula Jones and Blue Dresses well, Golden Showers in a Moscow luxury hotel, I guess that make it just salacious enough.

    Mueller looks just like what he is. He has that same phony self important air as Comey . In 2 years this will be forgotten.. I do not think this hurts Trumps chances at re-election as much as the Democrats are hurting themselves. This has already gone on way too long.

    Drew Hunkins , March 13, 2019 at 11:59 am

    Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians.

    Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump, which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein, Brennan, Podesta and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. It will be fascinating to witness how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?

    So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was likely in bed with the Winter Hill Gang.

    Jack , March 13, 2019 at 12:21 pm

    You have failed. An investigation is just that, a finding of the facts. What would Mueller have to extricate himself from? If nothing is found, he has still done his job. You are a divisive idiot.

    Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 1:13 pm

    Yes, he has done his job. And his job was to bring his royal Orangeness to heel, and to make sure that detente and co-operation with Russia remained impossible. The forever war continues. Mission Accomplished.

    Drew Hunkins , March 13, 2019 at 2:12 pm

    @Jack,
    Keep running cover for an out of control prosecutor, who, if he had any integrity, would have hit the bully pulpit mos ago declaring there's nothing of substance to one of the most potentially dangerous accusations in world history: the Kremlin hacking the election. Last I checked it puts two nuclear nation-states on the brink of potential war. And you call me divisive? Mueller's now a willing accomplice to this entire McCarthyite smear and disinformation campaign. It's all so pathetic that folks such as yourself try and mislead and feed half-truths to the people.

    You're failing Jack, in more ways than you know.

    Gregory Herr , March 13, 2019 at 9:13 pm

    https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/scheer-intelligence/liberals-are-digging-their-own-grave-with-russiagate-2019-03-08

    Drew, you might enjoy this discussion Robert Scheer has with Stephen Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel.

    Realist , March 15, 2019 at 3:38 am

    Moreover, as the Saker pointed out in his most recent column in the Unz Review, the entire Deep State conspiracy, in an ad hoc alliance with the embarrassed and embarrassing Democrats, have made an absolute sham of due process in their blatant witch hunt to bag the president. This reached an apex when his personal lawyer, Mr. Cohen, was trotted out before congress to violate Trump's confidentiality in every mortifying way he could even vaguely reconstruct. The man was expected to say anything to mitigate the anticipated tortures to come in the course of this modern day inquisition by our latter day Torquemada. To his credit though, even with his ass in a sling, he could simply not confabulate the smoking gun evidence for the alleged Russian collusion that this whole farce was built around.

    Tom , March 14, 2019 at 12:30 pm

    Mueller stood with Bush as he lied the world into war based on lies and illegally spied on America and tortured some folks.

    George Collins , March 13, 2019 at 2:02 pm

    QED: as to the nexus with the Winter Hill gang wasn't there litigation involving the Boston FBI, condonation of murder by the FBI and damages awarded to or on behalf of convicted parties that the FBI had reason to know were innocent? The malfeasance reportedly occurred during Mueller time. Further on the sanctified diligence of Mr. Mueller can be gleaned from the reports of Coleen Rowley, former FBI attorney stationed in Milwaukee??? when the DC FBI office was ignoring warnings sent about 9/11. See also Sibel Edmonds who knew to much and was court order muzzled about FBI mis/malfeasance in the aftermath of 9/11.

    I'd say it's game, set, match VIPS and a pox on Clapper and the complicit intelligence folk complicit in the nuclear loaded Russia-gate fibs.

    Kiers , March 13, 2019 at 11:47 am

    How can we expect the DNC to "hand it " to Trumpf, when, behind the scenes, THEY ARE ONE PARTY. They are throwing faux-scary pillow bombs at each other because they are both complicit in a long chain of corruptions. Business as usual for the "principled" two party system! Democracy! Through the gauze of corporate media! You must be joking!

    Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 11:28 am

    "We believe that there are enough people of integrity in the Department of Justice to prevent the outright manufacture or distortion of "evidence," particularly if they become aware that experienced scientists have completed independent forensic study that yield very different conclusions."

    I wish I shared this belief. However, as with Nancy Pelosi's recent statement regarding pursuing impeachment, I smell a rat. I believe with the help of what the late Robert Parry called "the Mighty Wurlitzer", Mueller is going to use coerced false testimony and fabricated forensics to drop a bombshell the size of 911. I think Nancy's statement was just a feint before throwing the knockout punch.

    If reason ruled the day, we should have nothing to worry about. But considering all the perfidy that the so-called "Intelligence" Agencies and their MSM lackeys get away with daily, I think we are in for more theater; and I think VIPS will receive a cold shoulder outside of venues like CN.

    I pray to God I'm wrong.

    Sam F , March 13, 2019 at 7:32 pm

    My extensive experience with DOJ and the federal judiciary establishes that at least 98% of them are dedicated career liars, engaged in organized crime to serve political gangs, and make only a fanatical pretense of patriotism or legality. They are loyal to money alone, deeply cynical and opposed to the US Constitution and laws, with no credibility at all beyond any real evidence.

    Eric32 , March 14, 2019 at 4:24 pm

    As near I can see, Federal Govt. careers at the higher levels depend on having dirt on other players, and helping, not hurting, the money/power schemes of the players above you.

    The Clintons (through their foundation) apparently have a lot of corruption dirt on CIA, FBI etc. top players, some of whom somehow became multi-millionaires during their civil service careers.

    Trump, who was only running for President as a name brand marketing ploy with little desire to actually win, apparently came into the Presidency with no dirt arsenal and little idea of where to go from there.

    Bob Van Noy , March 13, 2019 at 11:09 am

    I remember reading with dismay how Russians were propagandized by the Soviet Press Management only to find out later the depth of disbelief within the Russian population itself. We now know what that feels like. The good part of this disastrous scenario for America is that for careful readers, disinformation becomes revelatory. For instance, if one reads an editorial that refers to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or continually refers to Russian interference in the last Presidential election, then one can immediately dismiss the article and question the motivation for the presentation. Of course the problem is how to establish truth in reporting

    Jeff Harrison , March 13, 2019 at 10:41 am

    Thank you, VIPs. Hopefully, you don't expect this to make a difference. The US has moved into a post truth, post reality existence best characterized by Karl Rove's declaration: "we're an empire now, when we act, we create our own reality." What Mr. Rove in his arrogance fails to appreciate is that it is his reality but not anyone else's. Thus Pompous can claim that Guaido is the democratic leader in Venezuela even though he's never been elected .

    Gary Weglarz , March 13, 2019 at 10:21 am

    Thank you. The next time one of my friends or family give me that glazed over stare and utters anymore of the "but, RUSSIA" nonsense I will refer them directly to this article. Your collective work and ethical stand on this matter is deeply appreciated by anyone who values the truth.

    Russiagate stands with past government propaganda operations that were simply made up out of thin air: i.e. Kuwaiti incubator babies, WMD's, Gaddafi's viagra fueled rape camps, Assad can't sleep at night unless he's gassing his own people, to the latest, "Maduro can't sleep at night unless he's starving his own people."

    The complete and utter amorality of the deep state remains on display for all to see with "Russiagate," which is as fact-free a propaganda campaign as any of those just mentioned.

    Marc , March 13, 2019 at 10:13 am

    I am a computer naif, so I am prepared to accept the VIPS analysis about FAT and transfer rates. However, the presentation here leaves me with several questions. First, do I understand correctly that the FAT rounding to even numbers is introduced by the thumb drive? And if so, does the FAT analysis show only that the DNC data passed through a thumb drive? That is, does the analysis distinguish whether the DNC data were directly transferred to a thumb drive, or whether the data were hacked and then transferred to a thumb drive, eg, to give a copy to Wikileaks? Second, although the transatlantic transfer rate is too slow to fit some time stamps, is it possible that the data were hacked onto a local computer that was under the control of some faraway agent?

    Jeff Harrison , March 13, 2019 at 11:12 am

    Not quite. FAT is the crappy storage system developed by Microsoft (and not used by UNIX). The metadata associated with any file gets rewritten when it gets moved. If that movement is to a storage device that uses FAT, the timestamp on the file will end in an even number. If it were moved to a unix server (and most of the major servers run Unix) it would be in the UFS (unix file system) and it would be the actual time from the system clock. Every storage device has a utility that tells it where to write the data and what to write. Since it's writing to a storage device using FAT, it'll round the numbers. To get to your real question, yes, you could hack and then transfer the data to a thumb drive but if you did that the dates wouldn't line up.

    Skip Scott , March 14, 2019 at 8:05 am

    Jeff-

    Which dates wouldn't line up? Is there a history of metadata available, or just metadata for the most recent move?

    David G , March 13, 2019 at 12:22 pm

    Marc asks: "[D]oes the analysis distinguish whether the DNC data were directly transferred to a thumb drive, or whether the data were hacked and then transferred to a thumb drive, eg, to give a copy to Wikileaks?"

    I asked that question in comments under a previous CN piece; other people have asked that question elsewhere.

    To my knowledge, it hasn't been addressed directly by the VIPS, and I think they should do so. (If they already have, someone please enlighten me.)

    Skip Scott , March 13, 2019 at 1:07 pm

    I am no computer wiz, but Binney has repeatedly made the point that the NSA scoops up everything. If there had been a hack, they'd know it, and they wouldn't only have had "moderate" confidence in the Jan. assessment. I believe that although farfetched, an argument could be made that a Russian spy got into the DNC, loaded a thumb drive, and gave it to Craig Murray.

    David G , March 13, 2019 at 3:31 pm

    Respectfully, that's a separate point, which may or may not raise issues of its own.

    But I think the question Marc posed stands.

    Skip Scott , March 14, 2019 at 7:59 am

    Hi David-

    I don't see how it's separate. If the NSA scoops up everything, they'd have solid evidence of the hack, and wouldn't have only had "moderate" confidence, which Bill Binney says is equivalent to them saying "we don't have squat". They wouldn't even have needed Mueller at all, except to possibly build a "parallel case" due to classification issues. Also, the FBI not demanding direct access to the DNC server tells you something is fishy. They could easily have gotten a warrant to examine the server, but chose not to. They also purposely refuse to get testimony from Craig Murray and Julian Assange, which rings alarm bells on its own.

    As for the technical aspect of Marc's question, I agree that I'd like to see Bill Binney directly answer it.

    [Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings

    Highly recommended!
    Mar 13, 2019 | Consortiumnews

    The final Mueller report should be graded "incomplete," says VIPS, whose forensic work proves the speciousness of the story that DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking.

    MEMORANDUM FOR: The Attorney General

    FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

    SUBJECT: Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings

    Executive Summary

    Media reports are predicting that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to give you the findings of his probe into any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump. If Mueller gives you his "completed" report anytime soon, it should be graded "incomplete."

    Major deficiencies include depending on a DNC-hired cybersecurity company for forensics and failure to consult with those who have done original forensic work, including us and the independent forensic investigators with whom we have examined the data. We stand ready to help.

    We veteran intelligence professionals (VIPS) have done enough detailed forensic work to prove the speciousness of the prevailing story that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking. Given the paucity of evidence to support that story, we believe Mueller may choose to finesse this key issue and leave everyone hanging. That would help sustain the widespread belief that Trump owes his victory to President Vladimir Putin, and strengthen the hand of those who pay little heed to the unpredictable consequences of an increase in tensions with nuclear-armed Russia.

    There is an overabundance of "assessments" but a lack of hard evidence to support that prevailing narrative. We believe that there are enough people of integrity in the Department of Justice to prevent the outright manufacture or distortion of "evidence," particularly if they become aware that experienced scientists have completed independent forensic study that yield very different conclusions. We know only too well -- and did our best to expose -- how our former colleagues in the intelligence community manufactured fraudulent "evidence" of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

    We have scrutinized publicly available physical data -- the "trail" that every cyber operation leaves behind. And we have had support from highly experienced independent forensic investigators who, like us, have no axes to grind. We can prove that the conventional-wisdom story about Russian-hacking-DNC-emails-for-WikiLeaks is false. Drawing largely on the unique expertise of two VIPS scientists who worked for a combined total of 70 years at the National Security Agency and became Technical Directors there, we have regularly published our findings. But we have been deprived of a hearing in mainstream media -- an experience painfully reminiscent of what we had to endure when we exposed the corruption of intelligence before the attack on Iraq 16 years ago.

    This time, with the principles of physics and forensic science to rely on, we are able to adduce solid evidence exposing mistakes and distortions in the dominant story. We offer you below -- as a kind of aide-memoire -- a discussion of some of the key factors related to what has become known as "Russia-gate." And we include our most recent findings drawn from forensic work on data associated with WikiLeaks' publication of the DNC emails.

    We do not claim our conclusions are "irrefutable and undeniable," a la Colin Powell at the UN before the Iraq war. Our judgments, however, are based on the scientific method -- not "assessments." We decided to put this memorandum together in hopes of ensuring that you hear that directly from us.

    If the Mueller team remains reluctant to review our work -- or even to interview willing witnesses with direct knowledge, like WikiLeaks' Julian Assange and former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, we fear that many of those yearning earnestly for the truth on Russia-gate will come to the corrosive conclusion that the Mueller investigation was a sham.

    In sum, we are concerned that, at this point, an incomplete Mueller report will fall far short of the commitment made by then Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "to ensure a full and thorough investigation," when he appointed Mueller in May 2017. Again, we are at your disposal.

    Discussion

    The centerpiece accusation of Kremlin "interference" in the 2016 presidential election was the charge that Russia hacked Democratic National Committee emails and gave them to WikiLeaks to embarrass Secretary Hillary Clinton and help Mr. Trump win. The weeks following the election witnessed multiple leak-based media allegations to that effect. These culminated on January 6, 2017 in an evidence-light, rump report misleadingly labeled "Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)." Prepared by "handpicked analysts" from only three of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI, and NSA), the assessment expressed "high confidence" in the Russia-hacking-to-WikiLeaks story, but lacked so much as a hint that the authors had sought access to independent forensics to support their "assessment."

    The media immediately awarded the ICA the status of Holy Writ, choosing to overlook an assortment of banal, full-disclosure-type caveats included in the assessment itself -- such as:

    " When Intelligence Community analysts use words such as 'we assess' or 'we judge,' they are conveying an analytic assessment or judgment. Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary High confidence in a judgment does not imply that the assessment is a fact or a certainty; such judgments might be wrong."

    To their credit, however, the authors of the ICA did make a highly germane point in introductory remarks on "cyber incident attribution." They noted: "The nature of cyberspace makes attribution of cyber operations difficult but not impossible. Every kind of cyber operation -- malicious or not -- leaves a trail." [Emphasis added.]

    Forensics

    The imperative is to get on that "trail" -- and quickly, before red herrings can be swept across it. The best way to establish attribution is to apply the methodology and processes of forensic science. Intrusions into computers leave behind discernible physical data that can be examined scientifically by forensic experts. Risk to "sources and methods" is normally not a problem.

    Direct access to the actual computers is the first requirement -- the more so when an intrusion is termed "an act of war" and blamed on a nuclear-armed foreign government (the words used by the late Sen. John McCain and other senior officials). In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in March 2017, former FBI Director James Comey admitted that he did not insist on physical access to the DNC computers even though, as he conceded, "best practices" dictate direct access.

    In June 2017, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr asked Comey whether he ever had "access to the actual hardware that was hacked." Comey answered, "In the case of the DNC we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. " Sen. Burr followed up: "But no content? Isn't content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?" Comey: "It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016."

    The "private party/high-class entity" to which Comey refers is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm of checkered reputation and multiple conflicts of interest, including very close ties to a number of key anti-Russian organizations. Comey indicated that the DNC hired CrowdStrike in the spring of 2016.

    Given the stakes involved in the Russia-gate investigation – including a possible impeachment battle and greatly increased tension between Russia and the U.S. -- it is difficult to understand why Comey did not move quickly to seize the computer hardware so the FBI could perform an independent examination of what quickly became the major predicate for investigating election interference by Russia. Fortunately, enough data remain on the forensic "trail" to arrive at evidence-anchored conclusions. The work we have done shows the prevailing narrative to be false. We have been suggesting this for over two years. Recent forensic work significantly strengthens that conclusion.

    We Do Forensics

    Recent forensic examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May 2016. (On June 12, Julian Assange announced he had them; WikiLeaks published them on July 22.) We recently discovered that the files reveal a FAT (File Allocation Table) system property. This shows that the data had been transferred to an external storage device, such as a thumb drive, before WikiLeaks posted them.

    FAT is a simple file system named for its method of organization, the File Allocation Table. It is used for storage only and is not related to internet transfers like hacking. Were WikiLeaks to have received the DNC files via a hack, the last modified times on the files would be a random mixture of odd-and even-ending numbers.

    Why is that important? The evidence lies in the "last modified" time stamps on the Wikileaks files. When a file is stored under the FAT file system the software rounds the time to the nearest even-numbered second. Every single one of the time stamps in the DNC files on WikiLeaks' site ends in an even number.

    We have examined 500 DNC email files stored on the Wikileaks site. All 500 files end in an even number -- 2, 4, 6, 8 or 0. If those files had been hacked over the Internet, there would be an equal probability of the time stamp ending in an odd number. The random probability that FAT was not used is 1 chance in 2 to the 500th power. Thus, these data show that the DNC emails posted by WikiLeaks went through a storage device, like a thumb drive, and were physically moved before Wikileaks posted the emails on the World Wide Web.

    This finding alone is enough to raise reasonable doubts, for example, about Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC emails given to WikiLeaks. A defense attorney could easily use the forensics to argue that someone copied the DNC files to a storage device like a USB thumb drive and got them physically to WikiLeaks -- not electronically via a hack.

    Role of NSA

    For more than two years, we strongly suspected that the DNC emails were copied/leaked in that way, not hacked. And we said so. We remain intrigued by the apparent failure of NSA's dragnet, collect-it-all approach -- including "cast-iron" coverage of WikiLeaks -- to provide forensic evidence (as opposed to "assessments") as to how the DNC emails got to WikiLeaks and who sent them. Well before the telling evidence drawn from the use of FAT, other technical evidence led us to conclude that the DNC emails were not hacked over the network, but rather physically moved over, say, the Atlantic Ocean.

    Is it possible that NSA has not yet been asked to produce the collected packets of DNC email data claimed to have been hacked by Russia? Surely, this should be done before Mueller competes his investigation. NSA has taps on all the transoceanic cables leaving the U.S. and would almost certainly have such packets if they exist. (The detailed slides released by Edward Snowden actually show the routes that trace the packets.)

    The forensics we examined shed no direct light on who may have been behind the leak. The only thing we know for sure is that the person had to have direct access to the DNC computers or servers in order to copy the emails. The apparent lack of evidence from the most likely source, NSA, regarding a hack may help explain the FBI's curious preference for forensic data from CrowdStrike. No less puzzling is why Comey would choose to call CrowdStrike a "high-class entity."

    Comey was one of the intelligence chiefs briefing President Obama on January 5, 2017 on the "Intelligence Community Assessment," which was then briefed to President-elect Trump and published the following day. That Obama found a key part of the ICA narrative less than persuasive became clear at his last press conference (January 18), when he told the media, "The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to how 'the DNC emails that were leaked' got to WikiLeaks.

    Is Guccifer 2.0 a Fraud?

    There is further compelling technical evidence that undermines the claim that the DNC emails were downloaded over the internet as a result of a spearphishing attack. William Binney, one of VIPS' two former Technical Directors at NSA, along with other former intelligence community experts, examined files posted by Guccifer 2.0 and discovered that those files could not have been downloaded over the internet. It is a simple matter of mathematics and physics.

    There was a flurry of activity after Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016: "We have emails relating to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication." On June 14, DNC contractor CrowdStrike announced that malware was found on the DNC server and claimed there was evidence it was injected by Russians. On June 15, the Guccifer 2.0 persona emerged on the public stage, affirmed the DNC statement, claimed to be responsible for hacking the DNC, claimed to be a WikiLeaks source, and posted a document that forensics show was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."

    Our suspicions about the Guccifer 2.0 persona grew when G-2 claimed responsibility for a "hack" of the DNC on July 5, 2016, which released DNC data that was rather bland compared to what WikiLeaks published 17 days later (showing how the DNC had tipped the primary scales against Sen. Bernie Sanders). As VIPS reported in a wrap-up Memorandum for the President on July 24, 2017 (titled "Intel Vets Challenge 'Russia Hack' Evidence)," forensic examination of the July 5, 2016 cyber intrusion into the DNC showed it NOT to be a hack by the Russians or by anyone else, but rather a copy onto an external storage device. It seemed a good guess that the July 5 intrusion was a contrivance to preemptively taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish from the DNC, by "showing" it came from a "Russian hack." WikiLeaks published the DNC emails on July 22, three days before the Democratic convention.

    As we prepared our July 24 memo for the President, we chose to begin by taking Guccifer 2.0 at face value; i. e., that the documents he posted on July 5, 2016 were obtained via a hack over the Internet. Binney conducted a forensic examination of the metadata contained in the posted documents and compared that metadata with the known capacity of Internet connection speeds at the time in the U.S. This analysis showed a transfer rate as high as 49.1 megabytes per second, which is much faster than was possible from a remote online Internet connection. The 49.1 megabytes speed coincided, though, with the rate that copying onto a thumb drive could accommodate.

    Binney, assisted by colleagues with relevant technical expertise, then extended the examination and ran various forensic tests from the U.S. to the Netherlands, Albania, Belgrade and the UK. The fastest Internet rate obtained -- from a data center in New Jersey to a data center in the UK -- was 12 megabytes per second, which is less than a fourth of the capacity typical of a copy onto a thumb drive.

    The findings from the examination of the Guccifer 2.0 data and the WikiLeaks data does not indicate who copied the information to an external storage device (probably a thumb drive). But our examination does disprove that G.2 hacked into the DNC on July 5, 2016. Forensic evidence for the Guccifer 2.0 data adds to other evidence that the DNC emails were not taken by an internet spearphishing attack. The data breach was local. The emails were copied from the network.

    Presidential Interest

    After VIPS' July 24, 2017 Memorandum for the President, Binney, one of its principal authors, was invited to share his insights with Mike Pompeo, CIA Director at the time. When Binney arrived in Pompeo's office at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017 for an hour-long discussion, the director made no secret of the reason for the invitation: "You are here because the President told me that if I really wanted to know about Russian hacking I needed to talk with you."

    Binney warned Pompeo -- to stares of incredulity -- that his people should stop lying about the Russian hacking. Binney then started to explain the VIPS findings that had caught President Trump's attention. Pompeo asked Binney if he would talk to the FBI and NSA. Binney agreed, but has not been contacted by those agencies. With that, Pompeo had done what the President asked. There was no follow-up.

    Confronting James Clapper on Forensics

    We, the hoi polloi, do not often get a chance to talk to people like Pompeo -- and still less to the former intelligence chiefs who are the leading purveyors of the prevailing Russia-gate narrative. An exception came on November 13, when former National Intelligence Director James Clapper came to the Carnegie Endowment in Washington to hawk his memoir. Answering a question during the Q&A about Russian "hacking" and NSA, Clapper said:

    " Well, I have talked with NSA a lot And in my mind, I spent a lot of time in the SIGINT business, the forensic evidence was overwhelming about what the Russians had done. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever." [Emphasis added]

    Clapper added: " as a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn't have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election."

    (A transcript of the interesting Q&A can be found here and a commentary on Clapper's performance at Carnegie, as well as on his longstanding lack of credibility, is here .)

    Normally soft-spoken Ron Wyden, Democratic senator from Oregon, lost his patience with Clapper last week when he learned that Clapper is still denying that he lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee about the extent of NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens. In an unusual outburst, Wyden said: "James Clapper needs to stop making excuses for lying to the American people about mass surveillance. To be clear: I sent him the question in advance. I asked him to correct the record afterward. He chose to let the lie stand."

    The materials brought out by Edward Snowden in June 2013 showed Clapper to have lied under oath to the committee on March 12, 2013; he was, nevertheless, allowed to stay on as Director of National Intelligence for three and half more years. Clapper fancies himself an expert on Russia, telling Meet the Press on May 28, 2017 that Russia's history shows that Russians are "typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever."

    Clapper ought to be asked about the "forensics" he said were "overwhelming about what the Russians had done." And that, too, before Mueller completes his investigation.

    For the steering group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity:

    Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is made up of former intelligence officers, diplomats, military officers and congressional staffers. The organization, founded in 2002, was among the first critics of Washington's justifications for launching a war against Iraq. VIPS advocates a US foreign and national security policy based on genuine national interests rather than contrived threats promoted for largely political reasons. An archive of VIPS memoranda is available at Consortiumnews.com.

    image_pdf image_print 9280

    Tags: Bill Binney Donald Trump Hillary Clinton James Clapper James Comey Mike Pompeo Robert Mueller Veteran Intelligence Professional for Sanity VIPS WikiLeaks


    [Mar 17, 2019] Epstein, Clinton and Trump are all connected to Lolita Express scandal

    Notable quotes:
    "... Both Clinton and Trump were close to Epstein. To me this smells like there was a bi-partisan consensus to bury this, and only now that the Clintons are no longer dominating the Democrat party, do we get some results. ..."
    "... "I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy," Trump said of Epstein during a 2002 interview with New York magazine. "He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." ..."
    "... "The Government aligned themselves with Epstein, working against his victims, for 11 years..." THE SAME can be said for this: "The Government aligned themselves with APARTHEID Israhell, working against their Palestinians victims, for over 70 years... " WARNING: Graphic Images ..."
    "... Epstein has dirt on EVERYONE ... If he ever gets in a legitimate court room? - many, many, shitty people will be in trouble ... GOP and Democrat. ..."
    "... The ruling comes after Senators on the Judiciary Committee asked that the DOJ open an investigation into the deal, which was offered at a time when Robert Mueller was running the FBI . ..."
    "... I assume MOSSAD & friends will have to pull some very fancy rabbits out of their hat to get this buried again . The $wamp can't afford to have him cooperating, so I'm guessing Epstein will have to 'retire' to Tel-Aviv - or have an accident/become 'depressed, etc.' ..."
    Feb 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Judge Rules Plea Deal For Orgy Island Billionaire Broke Federal Law

    youshallnotkill, 1 hour ago link

    Both Clinton and Trump were close to Epstein. To me this smells like there was a bi-partisan consensus to bury this, and only now that the Clintons are no longer dominating the Democrat party, do we get some results.

    While Trump has recently distanced himself from Epstein, a 64-year-old financier, it wasn't always that way.

    "I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy," Trump said of Epstein during a 2002 interview with New York magazine. "He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."

    Attorney Spencer Kuvin, one of dozens of lawyers who successfully sued Epstein on behalf of roughly 30 women who claimed he lured them to his Palm Beach mansion for sexually-charged massages when they were as young as 14, said he always found the comment curious.

    "How would he know that?" he said of Trump's acknowledgement of Epstein's penchant for young women. The interview came nearly six years before Epstein's secret sex life exploded into public view when the money manager pleaded guilty to Florida charges of procuring and soliciting a minor for prostitution. "Why would he make a joke like that?" the West Palm Beach attorney asked.

    SOURCE: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/20170512/will-president-trump-be-used-as-witness-in-sex-offender-epstein-case

    Justin Case, 1 hour ago link

    Bill has frequent flier points on Lolita Express. He had a 14yr.old toy on the island and the flight logs can prove his attendance.

    zeezrom2point0, 2 hours ago link

    Be nice if someone found the guest list because Bill Clinton wouldn't be able to kill that many people to cover it up. It'd be sweet if they found evidence that Trump went, because he definitely did. He's probably the one to name it "Lolita Express."...no, that was probably Bill.

    TeraByte, 2 hours ago link

    Manford´s life time vs a slap on the wrist. I does not matter, what you do, but whom you know.

    loop, 2 hours ago link

    "The Government aligned themselves with Epstein, working against his victims, for 11 years..." THE SAME can be said for this: "The Government aligned themselves with APARTHEID Israhell, working against their Palestinians victims, for over 70 years... " WARNING: Graphic Images

    DFGTC , 2 hours ago link

    Epstein has dirt on EVERYONE ... If he ever gets in a legitimate court room? - many, many, shitty people will be in trouble ... GOP and Democrat.

    And Trump? Acosta is in his admin, right? Or, he didn't fire the scum yet? And when is Hillary going to jail?

    William Dorritt , 2 hours ago link

    Billionaire Palm Beach serial sex offender allowed to serve time in luxurious milieu | Fred Grimm

    ... ... ...

    https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/fl-op-col-fred-grimm-jeffrey-epste ...

    2 of 2 2/7/2019, 10:41 AM

    4 wheel drift , 3 hours ago link

    The ruling comes after Senators on the Judiciary Committee asked that the DOJ open an investigation into the deal, which was offered at a time when Robert Mueller was running the FBI .

    LOLOLOL.... THAT explains a lot... ******* criminals the entire lot of them

    Baron Samedi , 3 hours ago link

    I assume MOSSAD & friends will have to pull some very fancy rabbits out of their hat to get this buried again. The $wamp can't afford to have him cooperating, so I'm guessing Epstein will have to 'retire' to Tel-Aviv - or have an accident/become 'depressed, etc.'

    I will further bet that JE has had adequate notice of all this to be getting out of the USA to Balfourstan - a non-extradition country - ASAP.

    Reaper , 3 hours ago link

    The DOJ can prosecute now for the conspiracy of prosecutors and Epstein: https://www.justice.gov/jm/criminal-resource-manual-923-18-usc-371-conspiracy-defraud-us

    dirty fingernails , 3 hours ago link

    Don't hold your breath.

    William Dorritt , 3 hours ago link
    Hastert mentioned in WikiLeaks: https://wearechange.org/disgraced-house-speaker-pedophile-dennis-hastert/
    As you dig into these stories, one singular theory emerges again and again: Sexual deviants and psychos have been groomed for office because they are easier to blackmail and control.
    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/01/1389654/-Dennis-Hastert-as-the-Tip-of-the-Iceberg

    [Mar 17, 2019] CIA Director Gina Haspel is Complicit with the Coup

    Notable quotes:
    "... Bill Preistap was the supervisor for Strzok and Lisa Page who also worked for John Carlin in the Department of Justice National Security Division under Sally Yates. Then Strozk and Page continued their CIA operation as they were appointed to Mueller's Special Council Investigation. ..."
    "... Gina Haspel worked directly for the instigator of the Crossfire Hurricane operation – John Brennan. It would have been impossible for Haspel not to have known about the British spying from London since it was reported in UK newspaper on a weekly basis. She certainly was controlling Stefan Halper , Josef Mifsud , Stephan Roh , Alexander Downer, Andrew Wood, John McCain, Mark Warner, Adam Schiff and the other conspirators. ..."
    "... Keep in mind Haspel was Michael Gaeta's handler. Gaeta handled the frame-up of George Papadopoulos. ..."
    Mar 13, 2019 | patriots4truth.org

    When we saw these tweets from George Papadopoulos, we thought we could help him out with some answers. If you can get them to George, please do.

    Has congress figured out why Peter Strzok's former boss, Bill Priestap, was in London (of all places) the days before Alexander Downer was sent to spy on me and lie about our meeting? If not, time to get a move on it.

    -- George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) March 12, 2019

    Britain is in a political crisis. To push Brexit hard, declassifying the spy role of the David Cameron government on Trump and his team is paramount. Congress can not overlook the vital importance of London as the center of the coup attempt.

    -- George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) March 12, 2019

    What was I REALLY under surveillance for then? Explosive https://t.co/AVGlfwi5ld

    -- George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) March 13, 2019

    Our reply to George:

    Bill Priestap was the Director of the FBI national security division and would have gone to the London CIA "office" for a meeting. There he would have met with Stefan Halper and Gina Haspel who was, at the time, head of the London CIA office and would have been in charge of the connections with Robert Hannigan (British GCHQ) and John Brennan who planned and executed the wiretapping of Trump Team at Trump Towers. Haspel's communications, when released, will reveal the full scope of the CIA led international attack on the 2016 presidential election.

    Gina Haspel would have known about the coup. If she has not reported all of this to the President Trump, she is complicit in the coup attempt and is guilty of HIGH TREASON.

    Keep in mind, Peter Strzok was a CIA Regional Director who John Brennan appointed as the head of Crossfire Hurricane, the CIA counter-intelligence operation to "take out" candidate Trump – later it became the Mueller Witch Hunt after 13 different iterations spanning:

    1. the CIA (John Brennan),
    2. FBI (James Comey, Andrew McCabe, James Baker, etc.),
    3. DoJ (Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, Andrew Weisseman),
    4. State Department (Victoria Nuland, Jonathon Winer, Hilary Clinton, John Kerry),
    5. ODNS (James Clapper),
    6. NSA (Admiral Mike Rogers)
    7. and the White House senior staff (directly to Obama, Biden, Jarret, Rice, Powers, etc.).

    Bill Preistap was the supervisor for Strzok and Lisa Page who also worked for John Carlin in the Department of Justice National Security Division under Sally Yates. Then Strozk and Page continued their CIA operation as they were appointed to Mueller's Special Council Investigation.

    Gina Haspel worked directly for the instigator of the Crossfire Hurricane operation – John Brennan. It would have been impossible for Haspel not to have known about the British spying from London since it was reported in UK newspaper on a weekly basis. She certainly was controlling Stefan Halper , Josef Mifsud , Stephan Roh , Alexander Downer, Andrew Wood, John McCain, Mark Warner, Adam Schiff and the other conspirators.

    All of these facts are well known and reported in open source documents. As the 53 testimonies of the House Intelligence Committee are released, we will see the house of cards all fall down and Gina Haspel will go with it.

    Keep in mind Haspel was Michael Gaeta's handler. Gaeta handled the frame-up of George Papadopoulos.

    [Mar 16, 2019] Kept Secret For 17 Years Intel Memo Warned Bush's Iraq Invasion To Create Perfect Storm

    Mar 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    A newly declassified US intelligence memo has been unearthed this week and featured in a bombshell Wall Street Journal report. It proves that the year prior to the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq the White House was expressly warned in great detail of all that could and would go wrong in the regime change war's aftermath, including the Sunni-Shia sectarian chaos and proxy war with Iran that would define Iraq and the whole region for years following. And crucially, it reveals that seven months before the US invasion of Iraq, American intelligence officials understood that Osama bin Laden was likely "alive and well and hiding in northwest Pakistan" -- important given that a key Bush admin claim to sell the war was that Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were "in league" against the United States.

    The July 2002 memo was authored by William Burns, then serving as assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, and though clearly dismissed by the Bush neocons making the case for war, proved prescient on many levels. "Following are some very quick and informal thoughts on how events before, during and after an effort to overthrow the regime in Baghdad could unravel if we're not careful, intersecting to create a 'perfect storm' for American interests," Burns wrote in the memo, classified 'Secret' and sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

    Saddam Hussein waves to supporters in Baghdad, Wednesday, October 18, 1995. AP file photo

    The classified memo's existence was first brought to the public's attention through Knight Ridder's reporting in July 2003, which sought to reveal at the time there were pockets of dissenting voices in the State Department and intelligence community pushing back against the absurd White House claim that the whole operation would be a "cakewalk" and US troops would be greeted as "liberators". And there's Vice President Dick Cheney's infamous declaration that the military effort would take "weeks rather than months."

    Now, sixteen years after the start of the war the "perfect storm" intel briefing has been made public in fully redacted form and it affirms, as the WSJ reports , "Diplomats accurately forecast many setbacks: sectarian violence, attacks on U.S. troops, Iranian intervention and long road to structural change ." Out of this came the rise of ISIS and the continued unleashing of regime change and sectarian chaos on neighboring Syria.

    The ten page memo outlines a litany of catastrophic doom and gloom scenarios resulting from the invasion which would destabilize not only Iraq, but unleash sectarian hell on the entire region .

    Here are but a handful of the memo's many warnings which later proved right on target, as summarized by the military reporting website Task & Purpose :

    "I don't mean to be pessimistic, because I really do believe that if we do it right this could be a tremendous boon to the future of the region, and to U.S. national security interests," the memo stated. "But we should have no illusion that it will be quick or easy."

    And further contradicting Cheney's "weeks rather than months" claim, the memo accurately predicted that U.S. troops would have to stay for, "Five years – maybe four if we're lucky, ten if we're not."

    Read the full newly declassified and unredacted intelligence memo here .

    Some further interesting highlights from the July 2002 'Secret' report are below.

    * * *

    Osama bin Laden hiding in Pakistan (the Bush admin claimed Saddam and bin Laden were in cahoots)

    "Osama bin Laden turns out to be alive and well and hiding in NW Pakistan. We press Paks, internal stresses grow in Pakistan."

    Iran and Syria targeted next

    "Following US warnings that it would take the war on terrorism to all groups with global capabilities, Iran and Syria hold summit meeting, decide US has targeted them."

    Iran and Syria "strengthen positions in face of perceived US threat against them following action in Iraq."

    Sectarian score settling and Shia uprising

    "This means night becomes the time for revenge, all over Iraq. A horrible wave of bloodletting and private vengeance begins... US forces are helpless to stop the countrywide phenomenon. Police, intelligence, senior military, and Baath Party officials effectively go into hiding..."

    "Shia religious and political leaders, unhappy with composition of provisional government and determined to secure greater share of power in post-Saddam Iraq... This leads to more violent confrontations, and deaths, and the riots become a political tool to demonstrate power and increase leverage against Sunnis and Kurds..."

    Long US quagmire to put down sectarian powder keg

    "Faced with inchoate and escalating disorder in the provinces, the US faces an agonizing decision: step up to a more direct security role, or devolve power to local leaders."

    "The Shia in the south, quietly aided by Iran, stage major revolt, taking over local government offices and killing interim officials."

    Weapons from Saddam's army will disappear (to be later used against US occupation)

    "Law and Order, collecting weapons. We won't get them, most will go to ground."

    "All for one, one for all, free for all - deals, short-term scrambles. It will be every clan for itself."

    [Mar 16, 2019] CIA Blames Its Proxy For Its Raid On North Korea's Embassy In Spain

    Another CIA false flag?
    Notable quotes:
    "... At least two of the 10 assailants who broke into the embassy and interrogated diplomatic staff have been identified and have connections to the US intelligence agency ..."
    "... Some of the assailants were Asian and spoke Korean language. They were probably from the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS), a subsidiary of the CIA know for its extremely hawkish politics. It often rigged elections in South Korea in support of hawkish conservatives candidates. ..."
    "... A story was thought up and pushed to the favorite CIA outlet, the Washington Post . It wasn't the CIA which did it, writes the Post's national security reporter, it was a CIA controlled 'regime change' organization. ..."
    "... The White Helmets, the MI-6 organization for 'regime change' in Syria, has the website domain "www.syriacivildefense.org". Cheollima's website domain is "www.cheollimacivildefense.org". The logos of the two organization are also somewhat similar. ..."
    Mar 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    March 15, 2019 CIA Blames Its Proxy For Its Raid On North Korea's Embassy In Spain james , Mar 15, 2019 7:15:08 PM | link

    The CIA is the main suspect in the military style raid on the North Korean embassy in Madrid. It now launched a somewhat hapless effort to deflect from it. The original Spanish report said :

    At least two of the 10 assailants who broke into the embassy and interrogated diplomatic staff have been identified and have connections to the US intelligence agency. The CIA has denied any involvement but government sources say their response was "unconvincing."

    That the CIA is the main suspect in the assault was reported on Wednesday in the Spanish mainstream paper El Pais . The paper made the extra effort to publish an abbreviated English language version . It was widely picked up by other international outlets . Some of the assailants were Asian and spoke Korean language. They were probably from the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS), a subsidiary of the CIA know for its extremely hawkish politics. It often rigged elections in South Korea in support of hawkish conservatives candidates.

    Attacking a foreign embassy in a third country is far out of bounce of international law and diplomatic decency. After the El Pais report something had to be done to direct the attention away from the CIA and to find some other culprit.

    A story was thought up and pushed to the favorite CIA outlet, the Washington Post . It wasn't the CIA which did it, writes the Post's national security reporter, it was a CIA controlled 'regime change' organization.

    A shadowy group trying to overthrow Kim Jong Un raided a North Korean embassy in broad daylight

    In broad daylight, masked assailants infiltrated North Korea's embassy in Madrid, restrained the staff with rope, stole computers and mobile phones, and fled the scene in two luxury vehicles.

    The group behind the late February operation is known as Cheollima Civil Defense , a secretive dissident organization committed to overthrowing the Kim dynasty, people familiar with the planning and execution of the mission told The Washington Post.
    ...
    People familiar with the incident say the group did not act in coordination with any governments. U.S. intelligence agencies would have been especially reluctant to do so given the sensitive timing and brazen nature of the mission. But the raid represents the most ambitious operation to date for an obscure organization that seeks to undermine the North Korean regime and encourage mass defections, they say.

    The CIA agents, led by torture queen Gina Haspel, are snowflakes who would never break the law or cause some international outrage. It must have been some independent group:

    "This group is the first known resistance movement against North Korea, which makes its activities very newsworthy," said Sung-Yoon Lee, a North Korea expert at Tufts University.

    The identity of the assailants is a particularly sensitive topic given the delicate nature of Trump and Kim's relationship.
    ...
    Any hint of U.S. involvement in an assault on a diplomatic compound could have derailed the talks , a prospect the CIA would likely be mindful of.

    Derailing the talks was and is exactly what Trump's National Security Advisor John Bolton wanted to do. We know that because the Post reported it on February 20, two days before the raid on the embassy and seven days before the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi:

    Last month, in a lengthy speech at Stanford University, [Trump's special envoy Stephen E.] Biegun set out his vision for North Korea to dismantle its plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities in exchange for "corresponding measures" by the United States.

    Hawks such as Bolton have fiercely opposed this "step-by-step" process in favor of maintaining maximum pressure through economic sanctions that would, in theory , force a better deal by eroding North Korea's resolve.

    Tasking the CIA to raid a North Korean embassy to spoil the talks is exactly a thing John Bolton would do. The Post's shameful attempt to make believe otherwise is laughable :

    "Infiltrating a North Korean embassy days before the nuclear summit would throw that all into jeopardy," said Sue Mi Terry, a former Korea analyst at the CIA . "This is not something the CIA would undertake."

    The agency declined to comment.

    We can of course fully believe the 'former' CIA analyst's assertion that the CIA never do such a thing. Aside from Bolton's urge to sabotage the negotiations it would have had no motive. Except, of course, it would have many:

    Experts say the computers and phones seized in the raid amount to a treasure trove of information that foreign intelligence agencies are likely to seek out from the group.

    In 2017 Spain asked the North Korean ambassador Kim Hyok Chol to leave. He is now the leader of the negotiations with the United States. To know everything about him is important. He may even be susceptible to blackmail:

    The assailants also possess a video recording they took during the raid, which they could release anytime, said one person who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive and illegal operation.

    The Spanish language version of the El Pais report had a side box that might explain the possible content of a video (machine translated):

    One of the darkest aspects of the assault on the North Korean Embassy in Madrid is the interrogation to which the head of the command, who called himself The Entrepreneur, subjected the charge of business, leading the diplomatic delegation since the ambassador was expelled. The head of the commando separated the diplomat from the rest of the hostages and locked himself alone with him. It is not known what he intended, but the current head of the Pyongyang delegation in Madrid probably knows a lot about Kim Hyok Chol, head of the North Korean delegation in the nuclear negotiations before the US, with whom he coincided when the latter was ambassador in Madrid, between 2014 and 2017.

    Mentioning a video recording taken during the raid is supposed to sow 'fear and doubt' in the North Korean negotiator.

    The new Washington Post /CIA story goes on to describe the 'regime change' organization that is supposed to divert from the direct CIA involvement in the raid:

    The Cheollima group, which also goes by the name Free Joseon, came to prominence in 2017 after it successfully evacuated the nephew of Kim Jong Un from Macau when potential threats to his life surfaced. The nephew was the son of Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean leader's exiled half brother who was assassinated in a nerve-gas attack in a Malaysian airport in 2017.

    ...

    For safety reasons, the leader of the group does not disclose his name, and his identity is known only to a small group of people.

    Cheollima is the name of a mythical horse in Chinese and Korean folklore. The Joseon dynasty ruled Korea from 1392 to 1897. It went down when Japan tried to gain control of the country which it achieved a few years later.

    Kim Jong Nam was killed on February 13, 2017. In a redacted video his son Kim Han-sol thanks the people who picked him up. (They might want to use him as a future replacement for Kim Jong-un.) The video was recorded on February 15 2017 ("my father was killed two days ago"). It was published on March 7 2017 on a Cheollima channel on Youtube created on March 4 2017. The Cheollima website domain the group uses was anonymously registered in March 2017. It was updated on November 29 2918 shortly after the South Korean NIS received new orders from its headquarter in Washington DC.

    Cheollima/Free Joseon also seeks defectors from North Korea. On February 28 2019 (not "in March" as the Post claims), the very same day the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi failed , Cheollima published a manifest that clearly aims at 'regime change' in North Korea:

    WE DECLARE ON THIS DAY the establishment of Free Joseon, a provisional government preparing the foundations for a future nation built upon respect for principles of human rights and humanitarianism, holding sacred a manifest dignity for every woman, man, and child.

    We declare this entity the sole legitimate representative of the Korean people of the north.

    The U.S. driven 'regime change' attempt in Venezuela also has a figure that claims to be the "sole legitimate representative" while having zero power in that country.

    The English version of the manifest reads like it was written by someone who is a native English speaker or at least studied English literature:

    Joseon must and shall be free. Arise! Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves!

    We reject the chains of our historic unrequited grief, declare henceforth a new era in our history, and prepare the way for a New Joseon. We therefore proclaim the birth of our revolution and our intentions towards building a more just and equal society, as truest expressions of the shared affections of our people.

    A report on the manifest launch in the British Sun remarks :

    The Cheollima Civil Defense (CCD) organisation has declared itself as a shadow government which is working to overthrow the regime.
    ...
    Not a lot is known about the CCD but some people believe it is linked to South Korea's spy agency.

    The White Helmets, the MI-6 organization for 'regime change' in Syria, has the website domain "www.syriacivildefense.org". Cheollima's website domain is "www.cheollimacivildefense.org". The logos of the two organization are also somewhat similar.


    Is there a corporate design/marketing company specialized in spy service cutouts for 'regime change'?

    The 'former' CIA analyst in the Post piece 'predicts' that there will be more 'embassy raid' operations:

    "In its messaging, the group said they have formed a provisional government to replace the regime in Pyongyang," said Terry, who is a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "They have now shown the seriousness of their intent and some capabilities to carry out operations. We will see in the coming months the extent of their capabilities."

    While the CIA makes a hapless attempt to cover its traces in Madrid, North Korea continues to follow its game plan for the next round of negotiations. It prepares the public for a U.S. failure :

    North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will soon decide whether to continue diplomatic talks and maintain his moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, a senior North Korean official said Friday, adding that the U.S. threw away a golden opportunity at the recent summit between their leaders.
    ...
    She said Pyongyang now has no intention of compromising or continuing talks unless the United States takes measures that are commensurate to the changes it has taken -- such as the 15-month moratorium on launches and tests -- and changes its "political calculation."

    The North Korean statement blames Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo for the failure of the negotiations while it empathizes a special relation between Kim and Trump.

    The signaled satellite launch by North Korea will proceed. It will push the Trump administration back to the starting point of its efforts to 'denuclearize' North Korea.

    The difference now is that North Korea has earned good will in China and Russia. It showed its willingness to negotiate and stuck to its commitments made in the Joint Declaration in Singapore while the U.S. obviously refused to fulfill its parts. China and Russia already gave North Korea some unofficial 'sanction relief'. They are unlike to again support the failed 'maximum pressure' approach the Trump administrations once set out with.

    The hapless CIA nonsense will not change those facts.

    Posted by b on March 15, 2019 at 06:50 PM | Permalink

    Comments thanks for this b.. fascinating.. reality is stranger then fiction.. trust the wapo prints mostly fiction to run to the cias rescue..

    yeah, i just can't imagine the cia doing anything bad... that would really be unlike them!! the logo designers are going to have to be more creative, but until such time as they are, we can count on such branding that appears to come out of the same graphic design outfit.. i wonder how the poodle spain proceeds from here??

    Zachary Smith , Mar 15, 2019 7:24:22 PM | link

    Tasking the CIA to raid a North Korean embassy to spoil the talks is exactly a thing John Bolton would do.
    So it was probably Bolton after all. If he had no authority to issue orders within the CIA, things would have been lots fuzzier with that "proxy". Especially if somebody was waving around shopping bags full of large bills. The other day at the xymphora site the blogger wrote this:
    More Bolton hyper-aggression on multiple fronts. Bolton out of control is the best example of the complete deterioration of Trump. Remember it was Sheldon who forced Trump to appoint him, and the equally incompetent Abrams. One of the problems with the Deep State animosity towards Trump is that the 'adults' who would normally move in to fix this have relatively little influence over Trump, who is now flailing away under the influence of shekels and the most obvious blackmail I've ever seen.
    Influence! But only today did I read a comment which caused me to add 2 + 2 to get 4.

    It has to be Mossad-Epstein nasty pedophilia videos.

    Maybe Trump will fire Bolton and Abrams. That's not the outcome I expect if the apartheid Jewish state holds videos demonstrating behavior both sinful and criminal.

    Sally Snyder , Mar 15, 2019 7:26:01 PM | link
    Here is an article that looks at what one former U.S. president had to say about trusting his own intelligence network:

    https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/02/americas-intelligence-community-can.html

    Given the current world geopolitical situation and the American intelligence network's close involvement in the Russian meddling narrative, it's looking this former president's assessment was prescient.

    Yonatan , Mar 15, 2019 7:28:04 PM | link
    "Is there a corporate design/marketing company specialized in spy service cutouts for 'regime change'?" (presumably rhetorical)

    https://alexandrabader.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/otporinterna.jpg

    steve , Mar 15, 2019 7:31:50 PM | link
    It was not me defence does not work in real life. In the master of reality distortion field it is accepted effective SOP. My SITRAP tells me that this operating system is due to crash.
    John , Mar 15, 2019 7:35:53 PM | link
    Some more context on "Cheollima," in Korean mythology the Cheollima arrives to sanctify the founder of a new dynasty, thus quite literally a reference to "regime change." Also, Joseon is both a reference to the last dynasty and a reference to the official name of North Korea, which prefers "Joseon" to South Korea's "Han." Both terms are frequently used in Juche ideology, meaning they've worked out a communications strategy for this outfit that fits with the ruling ideology of the Communist Party.
    robjira , Mar 15, 2019 8:11:15 PM | link
    "We will see in the coming months the extent of their capabilities."
    Followed by...
    "While the CIA makes a hapless attempt to cover its traces in Madrid..."
    My god, are these fkrs even trying to be subtle anymore, or are they (as the Saker has asserted) just that stupid? They sure as sheise aren't doing very well at the "cover its traces" part...
    I'd also like to add that despite all the cracks about "little rocket man," "fat boy," pie, and cakes, etc., Kim Jong Un is proving to be just about as sharp as Kim Il Sung (I hear Kim's sister, Kim Yo Jong is also very bright).
    Excellent report; many thanks once again, b.
    DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Mar 15, 2019 8:17:49 PM | link
    @B: Thanks for connecting the dots. Thats the great strength of MoA IMHO, that you put all details together, revealing the whole picture. Those details, that even supposed first class journalists dont (want to) remember. Thus enabling a look on the deeper truths.

    @John: Thanks for the background info!

    Trump IS being blackmailed. Not by Russia, but by Sheldon Adelson and Co. With the neocons in the admin being the price DJT and we all now pay.
    That this can not end well, no matter if with Trump or Clinton or whoever, should be clear by now. The USA and us their vassals are on a path on which there are no happy endings i fear. Only crash and burn, and the near hope to rebuild something liveable out of the ruins. Dystopia.

    dltravers , Mar 15, 2019 8:20:57 PM | link
    Do not forget the Democrats hand in this. They want Trump to fail. They held the Cohen hearings while Trump was negotiating with Kim in Vietnam. Clearly that was intended to show that Trump is weak and not in control. Joined together with the embassy raid it shows the NK leadership that any promises made are not likely to be kept by the next administration.

    Trump needs to change tack by backing off slightly on his demands and getting the UN more involved bypassing his national security establishment.
    I cannot recall there ever being a regime change organization directed at North Korea.

    All of this is obvious, the war party is using its resources to push North Korea away from the table. In my opinion the South is way to smart to swallow that BS. The South does have its war hawks as well but it appears that the desire for reunification is quite strong.

    Piotr Berman , Mar 15, 2019 8:30:00 PM | link
    The Tick 201 The Little Wooden Boy, part 2, dialog around 5:50 of the You Tube video:

    Wonder Woman: "So it is true! The Swiss mean to take over the City!"

    Anonymous person with gray mustache, a leader of a masked group, all armed in huge and very special Swiss Army Knives: "No, no, no, no! Silly American woman, we are certainly Swiss, but our actions IN NO WAY represent the policies of the Swiss government. Actually, we are more like, err, criminals."

    Wonder Woman: "Yea, this is what they all say."

    David , Mar 15, 2019 8:42:15 PM | link
    Another possibility not mentioned is the possibility of a false flag operation carried out by the NOKO's themselves (or some other entity).
    Jackrabbit , Mar 15, 2019 8:46:07 PM | link
    1) AFAIK Bolton can't order the CIA to do anything.

    2) If Bolton has any 'pull' it's because he is a neocon and advances their agenda (but he can't order CIA to do anything).

    3) Gina Haspel is Brennan's gal at CIA. Trump appointed her as well as others connected to his (supposed) enemies like:

    - VP Pence, long-time friend of John McCain;

    Bolton, who Trump had praised long before the election;

    William Barr, who is close to Robert Mueller;

    4) In foreign policy, Trump plays the good cop to the Deep State's bad cop.

    5) We've seen apologists give numerous excuses for Trump:

    - he's a foreign policy neophyte, getting played by the neocons!

    - he's playing 11-dimensional chess!

    - Bolton!

    The same sort of excuses were made for Obama, USA's previous faux populist President.

    When people tire of the excuses, maybe they will start to see how a) faux populism is a political model that serves the establishment and b) revisit the 2016 Presidential election and connect the memory-holed dots:

    - the Deep State wanted a nationalist President to counter the challenge from Russia-China ( Kissinger alluded to MAGA in his WSJ Op-Ed in August 2014) ;

    - Trump was the ONLY populist running on the Republican side (out of 19 candidates!) ;

    - Trump was close to the Clintons for years (even their daughters are close) ;

    - Felix Sater worked for Trump for over a decade while an informant for Robert Mueller's FBI (Sater's family had Russian mob connections) ;

    - Virtually all of the dubious Russian oligarch ties attributed to Trump are Jewish and are likely (if not known to be) more connected to Israel than Russia;

    - Sanders was a sheepdog (this 25-year friend of Hillary's was not a real candidate) ;

    - Hillary deliberately alienated key voter groups (Sanders progressives, BLM blacks, 'delorable' whites) ;

    - CIA/MI6 'meddled' in the election and arranged to trap Wikileaks and Flynn and agents of Russia/Turkey.


    6) USA/Trump/neocons were never interested in Korean peace. The first Summit was a PR event to further the Trump psyop.

    .
    Welcome to the rabbit hole.

    Jen , Mar 15, 2019 9:12:00 PM | link
    Jackrabbit @ 12 beat me in saying that John Bolton has no authority over the CIA to tell them to do anything but he's head of the NSA and that organisation could have been tasked with organising the raid using mercenaries.
    Jackrabbit , Mar 15, 2019 9:40:15 PM | link
    Jen

    John Bolton is National Security Advisor (NSA), and as the name implies, it is an ADVISORY position (with no formal command authority):

    The National Security Advisor participates in meetings of the National Security Council (NSC) and ... is supported by NSC staff who produce research and briefings ...

    The influence and role of the National Security Advisor varies from administration to administration and depends not only on the qualities of the person appointed to the position, but also on the style and management philosophy of the incumbent President....

    National Security Agency (NSA) is headed by Gen. Paul M. Nakasone:

    ... (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence [DNI] . The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign and domestic intelligence and counterintelligence purposes ...
    Jackrabbit , Mar 15, 2019 9:45:44 PM | link
    Jen

    I'm glad you reiterated the point (that Bolton has no such authority). It's an important one.

    I rarely beat you at making important points, and even rarer do I make them as well as you do!

    bevin , Mar 15, 2019 9:53:49 PM | link
    No Bolton can't order the CIA to do anything. But he can indicate to the Korean Intelligence Service (Formerly known as the Korean CIA) that an attack on the Embassy would be a good thing to do.
    There are rogue players here, one is the ultra right Korean deep state. Another is Japan. Both are committed to keeping US troops in Korea and to continuing to treat the North as an enemy.
    Then there is the influence, in both Korea and Japan, of the Pentagon or elements within it equally committed to maintaining the status quo: permanent war with the North, permanent control over South Korea's forces, butting up to China's border, and the continued hostility between Japan and China.
    One thing we do know is that the South Korean government will not have approved of this raid.
    Sasha , Mar 15, 2019 9:59:37 PM | link
    @Posted by: Jackrabbit | Mar 15, 2019 8:46:07 PM | 12

    Agree in that Trump is not innocent at all, as clearly states Miles Copeland in an article linked by P. Armstrong in his last Russian SitRep ....

    Ordinarily, when you get an order from headquarters you never obey it the first time because you're not sure they mean it. It might be some guy telling you to do something to get himself off the hook, being on record as having ordered it. So you always wait until the second time. But if there's a White House code word, you'd better take it seriously. The message from the White House said he was to assassinate Lumumba(...)

    (...)my complaint has been that the CIA isn't overthrowing enough anti-American governments or assassinating enough anti-American leaders, but I guess I'm getting old. What's keeping the agency inactive is Congress and disinformed public opinion(...

    Especially interesting the part dedicated to poisonoing, Skripal case comes to mind, taking into account the coordianted effort in expelling diplomats and the US expelling more than anybody, even than UK...

    Trump approves all this outrage, it has his seal all the way...

    Jackrabbit , Mar 15, 2019 10:20:47 PM | link
    bevin:
    But he can indicate to the Korean Intelligence Service ...
    Any NSA that stepped out of bounds like that with out authorization would be sacked.

    The point stands: Trump is not being undermined or blind-sided by Bolton, Trump approves of what Bolton does and has done.

    In fact, Trump has admired Bolton for a long time. Two and a half years before appointing Bolton as NSA, Trump mentioned Bolton as someone that is his "go to" person for military/foreign affairs :

    CHUCK TODD:

    Who do you talk to for military advice right now? ... is there a go-to for you?

    DONALD TRUMP:

    Yeah, probably there are two or three. I mean, I like Bolton. I think he's, you know, a tough cookie, knows what he's talking about . Jacobs is a good guy--

    CHUCK TODD:

    Do you mean Ambassador John Bolton--

    DONALD TRUMP:

    Yes. I think he's terrific --

    CHUCK TODD:

    You mean Colonel Jack Jacobs?

    DONALD TRUMP:

    Colonel Jack Jacobs is a good guy. And I see him on occasion.

    karlof1 , Mar 15, 2019 10:26:10 PM | link
    With this quite obvious violation of International Law on top of the seemingly infinite previous violations, Pompeo and Bolton have tag teamed to tell the ICJ they'll sanction anyone that comes after any Outlaw US Empire individual, the threat itself likely being against the UN Charter and thus unlawful. I really don't have much further comment on this incident other than to reiterate that the United States of America should no longer be called that as it now proven beyond all doubt to be the Outlaw US Empire--internationally, the USA's Federal government's an Outlaw and must be treated as such. It's time to flip GW Bush's ultimatum on its head and tell every nation on the planet that if you're with the Outlaw US Empire then you're also an Outlaw, part of its Evil designs and abettor of its crimes. The UK & Zionistan have already proven themselves to be the top accomplices, with France and Canada their juniors. It's long past time to form an international posse, and no nation can claim ignorance.
    mourning dove , Mar 15, 2019 10:38:43 PM | link
    damn b, you just tear it up, thank you so much!!

    [Mar 15, 2019] What the Strzok-Page 'insurance policy' text was actually about - The Washington Post

    Mar 15, 2019 | www.washingtonpost.com

    What the Strzok-Page 'insurance policy' text was actually about - The Washington Post

    With the release of testimony from those two employees -- attorney Lisa Page and agent Peter Strzok -- the "insurance policy" argument for the illegitimacy of the Russia investigation gained new energy. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tweeted a Fox News story about Page's testimony.

    "This deserves more attention!" he wrote . "FBI Mistress, Lisa Page, confirmed to House Judiciary, there was an anti-Trump Insurance Policy and it's the fake Russian investigation! She admits there was almost no evidence on collusion, yet they continued with WITCH HUNT!"

    Trump tweeted Paul's message to his followers, adding, "I agree with Rand Paul. This is a total disgrace and should NEVER happen to another President!"

    [Mar 15, 2019] Omidyar's Democracy Fund has also helped to finance the "News Integrity Initiative," a name that evokes the U.K.'s notorious Integrity Initiative.

    Mar 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Blooming Barricade , Mar 14, 2019 5:36:22 PM | link

    Pierre Omidyar opens up new Integrity Initiative

    Omidyar's Democracy Fund has also helped to finance the "News Integrity Initiative," a name that evokes the U.K.'s notorious Integrity Initiative. The latter group claimed to be an independent charity battling foreign disinformation until it was exposed by hackers as a propaganda mill run by military officers and covertly funded by the British Foreign Office to cultivate public opinion in support of heightened conflict with Russia. Leaked communications revealed how the Integrity Initiative mobilized clusters of journalists, self-styled disinformation experts, academics and political figures throughout the West to advocate for a long-term war footing against the Russian menace.

    For its part, the News Integrity Initiative is a murky $14 million operation intended to "combat media manipulation" through a network of "journalists, technologists, academic institutions, non-profits, and other organizations." The set-up is eerily evocative of the influence clusters developed by the British Integrity Initiative. Few specifics are provided, however, on what the group actually does.

    A hint about the agenda of the News Integrity Initiative lies in a grant of $1 million it made to an outlet called Internews in 2017. The bulk of Internews' money -- some 80 percent of it -- comes from the U.S. government. It has also received backing from liberal financier George Soros and USAID, which provided the group with seed money for a Russian-language television network, helped drive the pro-NATO color revolution in the Republic of Georgia, and published footage of Russian casualties in Chechnya to erode Russian public support for the war.

    In countries that are considered official and semi-official enemies of the United States, Internews has organized de facto boot camps for opposition journalists. "In the Middle East," says Internews founder David Hoffman, "training sessions often begin with discussion of whether Internews is really U.S. propaganda or the CIA." However Hoffman answers the question, it is abundantly clear that his outlet has advanced Washington's priorities abroad behind the guise of independent journalism.

    In November 2017, the News Integrity Initiative hosted a workshop alongside Internews and the Omidyar-backed First Draft News in Kiev, Ukraine, according to the initiative's managing director, Molly de Aguiar. Kiev is today a nexus for intelligence-connected media crusaders and a launch pad for projects ostensibly aimed at countering Russia's "information warfare." But, what exactly the News Integrity Initiative was doing there was left unsaid.

    While Omidyar ploughs his fortune into organizations that claim to be countering "disinformation," especially of the Russian variety, he has established a culture factory to publicize the supposed feats of the journalists often hyped up by the cartel of media transparency groups and fact-checking sites he funds.

    http://failedevolution.blogspot.com/2019/03/how-one-of-americas-premier-data_5.html

    [Mar 15, 2019] If Germany tries to close NATO conmmand center very likely, a color revolution will break out in Germany

    Mar 15, 2019 | nationalinterest.org
    Allalin • 2 days ago ,

    Can anyone confirm what will happen when Germany will shut down those US Command Center (NATO) because Germany is able to finance their own. (US Personal has to go) Nato support Act is an US Law and not an authorized NATO Law

    Nick Klaus Allalin • 2 days ago ,

    Very likely, a color revolution will break out in Germany

    [Mar 15, 2019] The Battle for the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy Has Begun by Ted Galen Carpenter

    that's a fake battle. The US foreign policy is controlled by MIC and Wall Street. Elected officials, as we see in cases of both Oabma and Trump administrations, "simply does not matter."
    That arrangement (which now is associated with the term the Deep state") is a part of the rule of military-industrial complex and due to the existence of powerful three letter agencies created by Truman can't be changed. Essntially Truman secured the victory of military industrial complex for the next hundred years or more.
    Mar 14, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

    Congressional efforts are underway to seize control of foreign-policy decisions from the executive. Who will win?

    There are signs of growing congressional inconsistency, if not incoherence, regarding the authority of the president in foreign affairs. The legislature seeks to interfere on issues that are the president's responsibility while still failing to fulfill its own constitutionally mandated responsibility regarding the war power.

    An incident of misplaced assertiveness took place in January when the House of Representatives passed the NATO Support Act prohibiting the executive branch from using any funds to facilitate U.S. withdrawal from the Alliance in any way. The legislation appears to bar a drawdown of U.S. troop levels in Europe and any effort to terminate U.S. membership in NATO.

    Enacting the legislation seemed weirdly premature. President Donald Trump has not even taken any substantive actions that might diminish U.S. participation in NATO affairs. He has merely criticized the allies for their lack of burden-sharing in the collective defense effort and (correctly) suggested that NATO itself might be "obsolete" given how much the European and global security environments have changed since the Alliance's birth at the dawn of the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

    The constitutionality of such restrictions also is highly suspect. The Constitution makes the president the steward of foreign affairs. Presidents historically have enjoyed wide latitude regarding the interpretation, execution, and even termination of U.S. treaties. Chief executives have enjoyed even greater latitude regarding troop deployments, especially in noncombat situations, and the nature, extent, and duration of military commitments to implement treaties or other agreements. Congressional interference in the form of the NATO Support Act would be truly revolutionary -- and not in a good way. It is a transparent congressional attempt to usurp the president's rightful constitutional authority and seek to micromanage U.S. foreign policy.

    The NATO issue is not the only case in which congressional efforts are underway to seize control of foreign-policy decisions from the executive. A faction in both houses is now pushing a measure that would prevent the White House from failing to honor U.S. obligations under the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty until it expires in February 2021. Unlike in the case of NATO, the president has taken tangible steps against the INF. After accusing Russia of violating its obligations under the treaty, Trump announced that the United States intended to withdraw from the INF . It should be stressed that the issue is not whether the president's policies on NATO or the INF are wise or misguided; the relevant issue is whether the Constitution invests the executive or Congress with the authority to make those decisions.

    Greater congressional assertiveness on such issues is especially odd given how readily Congress has abandoned its own explicit constitutional authority to control the war power. Even as legislators moved to restrict Trump regarding NATO and the INF, there was no effective campaign to prevent him from implementing his decision to keep at least two hundred troops in Syria, despite the continuing lack of any congressional authorization for U.S. military involvement in that combat zone.

    ... ... ...

    Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the National Interest , is the author of twelve books and more than 750 articles on foreign affairs.

    Mr Russian milo • 2 days ago ,

    Could you say that "checks and balances" of the US in current stage are "unbalanced"
    Looks like executive branch has its own policies and legislative branch is trying very hard to nullify whatever executive branch can or could potentially do (and it will impact future presidents too).
    And more importantly all this "meddling" (forgive me the pun) between the branches essentially cripples the US politics, foreign and internal.
    If one can imaging THAT is the Russian goal then perhaps Mr. Trump could get the Star of Hero of the Russian Federation pretty soon

    milo Mr Russian • 2 days ago ,

    Our system of checks and balances has become totally unbalanced, destabilized like some Arab government we've decided don't like. Political scientists are all telling us that we're on the way to having a classic autocratic regime, where nothing matters except what El Supremo says matters.

    And Congress is supine. They really don't care much about how the country is being run, they just care if they get re-elected. And the right half of them thinks they won't get re-elected if they oppose Trump. So there's no veto-proof majority.

    It never used to be this way. But it has been said that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants." (Thomas Jefferson)

    And we just don't have enough patriots to get the job done. I look to the young people to be changing that.

    Mr Russian milo • 2 days ago ,
    Political scientists are all telling us that we're on the way to having a classic autocratic regime, where nothing matters except what El Supremo says matters.


    I have elusive feeling that American policies have already been praying to "El Supremo" for some time, it just wasn't so openly obvious until now.
    And the "El Supremo" name is "Wall Street". Globalisation have taken over American policies for some time.
    It became obvious after "too big to fail" incidents of 2008.
    Another example: FAANG has so much power now that it can literally kill smaller private companies with a mouse click. It can shape public opinion and no doubt it can soon be able to elect politicians.

    milo Mr Russian • 2 days ago ,

    That's something different. Wall Street funds quite a large portion of the campaigns waged by both parties. So whichever party wins an election, they are anxious to never offend their sponsors. You might look up the proportions of presidential elections contributions made by the financial and insurance industries.

    (This is also why we can never seem to get a good single-payer health system. It would get rid of private health insurance.)

    I was talking about the once-creeping, now-galloping expansion of presidential powers. This was first evident during the presidency of George W Bush, when the theory of the Unitary Executive was put forth, by people like John Yoo and David Addington.

    It establishes the theory that the Constitution allows a sitting president to disregard those laws he doesn't want to enforce and to take executive actions that do not depend on congressional approval. That is, he is above the law and accountable to no one.

    https://www.acslaw.org/?pos...
    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pa...

    Mr Russian milo • 2 days ago ,

    Empire, even a powerful one cannot win prosperity with a war or wars. Eventually you'd need to provide some economy to the colonies. The less you provide the more they gonna hate you and resist you. The more you provide the less they gonna need you and eventually overthrow you.
    Winning with wars is utopia, like communism.

    Nick Klaus Mr Russian • 2 days ago ,

    You are a little wrong when you call this system "colonial". Today it is neo-colonialism. When the United States subordinates the country, they do not bear any responsibility for the fate of this country, since the formally subordinate country remains independent and all its actions are performed "voluntarily."

    Ukraine is a good example. Now this country commits ritual suicide "completely voluntarily."

    [Mar 14, 2019] Top Mueller Prosecutor Weissmann Steps Down In Latest Sign Probe Ending

    Mar 14, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Andrew Weissmann, perhaps the ' angriest ' Democrat on special counsel Robert Mueller's probe, is leaving the investigation and will return to the private sector, according to NPR , citing two sources.

    Considered the "architect" of the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort - who was sentenced to a combined 7.5 years in prison for financial crimes related to his private business dealings, Weissmann will now study and teach at New York University. He will also embark on several public service projects, such as how to prevent wrongful convictions by improving forensic science standards.

    As NPR notes, " The departure is the strongest sign yet that Mueller and his team have all but concluded their work. "

    Weissmann - who wasn't able to link Manafort to collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, has come under fire from conservatives for his extreme liberalism. He attended Hillary Clinton's election night party in 2016, and was one of several officials told by then-DOJ #4 Bruce Ohr prior to the DOJ obtaining a FISA surveillance warrant that the 'Steele Dossier' was opposition research connected to Clinton and might be biased . Weissmann was the head of the DOJ's fraud section at the time.

    Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon also issued a warning about Weissmann and other senior members of the special counsel team when they were named in 2017.

    Other departures signaling the end of Mueller's probe

    While Weissmann's departure is the largest indication to date that the Mueller probe is near its end, several other investigators have already left the special counsel's office - including the senior-most FBI agent working the case; David Archey. Archey will head up the FBI's Richmond, VA office.

    Another prosecutor, Brandon Van Grack, is now leading a DOJ effort to enforce compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) - a law requiring that people disclose if they are representing foreign powers in the United States. Created in 1938, the law remained virtually unenforced until the DOJ was able to nab Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates, who failed to register as foreign agents while representing the government of Ukraine. Notably, lobbyist Tony Podesta - who worked alongside Manafort, had the uncanny foresight to retroactively file as a foreign agent months before Manafort was charged.

    aelfheld , 1 minute ago link

    "Throughout his career, Andrew has had unparalleled success in building case after case against the most sophisticated criminals in the world," said former colleague Leslie Caldwell. "He took on New York's most feared organized crime families, unraveled the incredibly ornate frauds at Enron, and has tracked international criminals, exposing their carefully concealed financial dealings in many dark corners of the world."

    And has, because of his aggressively unethical & corrupt methods has ended up having most of those cases thrown out of court.

    Weissmann should have been disbarred decades ago.

    Bastiat , 11 minutes ago link

    So who speaks his praises? Kathy Ruemmler, Obama fixer.

    Moe Hamhead , 27 minutes ago link

    Well that didn't take so long for Mueller. The last time he took a wrong turn he spent five years and many millions of dollars chasing the wrong man. ... in the anthrax case. No conviction there!

    This was only three years, and who knows how many tens of millions!

    Ban KKiller , 29 minutes ago link

    Will Andrew investigate Mueller and Clinton uranium one? Nope, but you knew that.

    VonSteever , 30 minutes ago link

    Weissman should never have been hired in the first place because of his obvious bias and conflicts of interest. The fact that he was, just makes the partisan "witch hunt" label more accurate.

    Moving and Grooving , 20 minutes ago link

    He's described as a fearless and effective money-laundering prosecutor. Wasn't money laundering supposed to be the charge that would sink Trump? What happened? Couldn't find any proof? Couldn't coerce some low-level flunky to rat Trump out? Ooh, so sad. I'm taking my ball and going to lick my wounds privately for a little while, but I'll be back!

    overmedicatedundersexed , 43 minutes ago link

    " including the senior-most FBI agent working the case; David Archey. Archey will head up the FBI's Richmond, VA office."

    soon the richmond office will be called the:" FBI HQ in exile .

    Catullus , 44 minutes ago link

    Weissman's prosecutions of several Enron executives were thrown out by a several judge for gross prosecutorial overreach. Including having several people plea out in crimes that didn't exist. This person should never be near government ever again.

    https://m.chron.com/business/enron/article/Supreme-Court-overturns-Arthur-Andersen-s-Enron-1940557.php

    Defendants in other Enron cases want this government defeat to spill over and help their cases too. Jeff Skilling 's lawyer, Dan Petrocelli , said all the remaining Enron cases boil down to improper criminalization of business judgements just like the Arthur Andersen case.

    "This is a denunciation of the Enron Task Force by the highest court in the land,'' said Petrocelli. "The message is loud and clear -- you can't criminalize innocent conduct.''

    DeepThoughts , 53 minutes ago link

    Remember, Rep. Devin Nunes sent a letter to new AG William Barr that he has until March 15 "to report out on 'conflicted' Mueller hacks Weissmann and Ahmad". And voila', Weissman departs on March 14. I'm not getting my hopes up about Barr, because one data point doesn't make a trend, but I'm thinking about going long Barr and short Mueller.

    DeepThoughts , 50 minutes ago link

    Link to an article for those not familiar with topic:
    https://thenationalsentinel.com/2019/03/04/nunes-ag-barr-has-until-march-15-to-report-out-on-conflicted-mueller-hacks-weissmann-and-ahmad/

    Obamaroid Ointment , 55 minutes ago link

    Special Agent Oberführer Müeller's FBI colluded with Whitey Bulger and his Irish Winter Hill Gang vs the Italian Patriarca Mafia family when he was stationed in Boston. Some of the Fibbies under his command even went to prison for being hit men on the side. To keep Whitey from singing in the slammer is why Müeller had him whacked.

    [Mar 13, 2019] Sic Semper Tyrannis The Paul Manafort sentence and the notorious and diabolical federal sentencing guidelines

    Mar 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    The Paul Manafort sentence and the notorious and diabolical federal sentencing guidelines Ussc_logo
    By Robert Willmann

    Crime is a legal definition. This means that to commit big crime you make it legal. Or, you can try to enhance your commercial business or money making organization by getting conduct made into a crime that is competition to your activity, like is found in copyright law, and is done by state governments that make gambling illegal but have state-run lotteries in which the odds of winning are so remote they make the negative percentage in Las Vegas casino games look like a paragon of virtue. This also means that the concept of a crime is created by a government, even though it is commonly thought to be bad behavior (or a failure to act), as described by social relations, culture, religion, and human biology (with murder opposed by the instinctive act of self defense). Conduct that is said to be bad enough is defined as a crime and involves the government using force directly against the actor at least in the form initially of an arrest, possible imprisonment, or later if an order from a criminal court case is not followed.

    The ongoing jabbering in the mass media -- starting in November 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president -- declared that all sorts of conduct was illegal, as a civil or criminal case, or should be the subject of charges for impeachment. A lot of that talk can be described as horse manure, but it has had a real effect on the public, which effect has been and is the intent. It reached a fever pitch last week when Judge T.S. Ellis III, an American hero, in a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, sentenced Paul Manafort in one of his two criminal cases to 47 months in prison, which was noticeably below the "sentencing guidelines range" of 235 to 293 months--

    https://turcopolier.typepad.com/files/manafort_court_sentencing_minutes.pdf

    Television talkers expressed shock and dismay that Manafort received such a "low" sentence below the guidelines and they look forward with glee to his second sentencing on 13 March, beginning at 9:30 a.m., eastern time, in federal court in Washington DC, with Judge Amy Berman Jackson presiding. Her rulings can be described as statistically matching to a degree those requested by government prosecutors in cases brought by "special counsel" Robert Mueller, who was tasked to investigate "interference" in the 2016 presidential election by the Russian government, with attention to "collusion" by the Trump campaign, but mysteriously not involving possible collusion with Russia by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

    Just as important as the definition of a crime are the rules of procedure and evidence that govern a criminal justice system from start to finish, such as: detaining and arresting a person, questioning a suspect, confinement or release before a trial (if any), pretrial court hearings, a trial itself by a jury or otherwise, any appeal of a trial's verdict, ordering a sentence of punishment or a consequence to the finding of guilt, suspending a sentence through probation, operating a prison, the power of a president or governor to pardon a person's conviction or commute the sentence, and so forth.

    This brings us to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, a deceptive name if there ever was one. They are part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 (CCCA), disguised inside House Joint Resolution 648, "A joint resolution making continuing appropriations for the fiscal year 1985, and for other purposes", which became Public Law 98-473 and which president Ronald Reagan signed on 12 October 1984. That legislation shifted the existing federal criminal law so extensively that it can accurately be described as a radical change. Whether becoming a law in 1984 was a coincidence or an arrogant expression by implementing some of the meaning in George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-four" (published in 1949) is not known.

    The so-called guidelines came from the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, introduced by Senator Edward Kennedy (Dem. Massachusetts), and they became part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which in turn was Title 2 of the continuing appropriations bill, Public Law 98-473. In the legislation, Congress created the United States Sentencing Commission, and it would write the new sentencing rules, and federal judges would have to sentence someone within the "guideline range" set by the commission. This smaller "guideline range" was within the regular "range of punishment" set by Congress as a possible minimum to maximum sentence for each particular crime Congress defined. Before the CCCA, if a defendant was found guilty, the federal judge had the power and discretion to sentence the person to anything within the regular range of punishment established by Congress, and order probation if allowed in that instance. But the sentencing guidelines took that discretion away from the federal judge, and required the sentence to be within the guideline range. The self-righteous language that supposedly allowed a judge to "depart" from the guideline range in a certain way was laughable as a practical matter.

    When the sentencing guidelines became law, the sentencing commission magically was said to become part of the judicial branch of government, where it resides today [1].

    When the sentencing guidelines kicked in and became operational, a court challenge followed. The case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, as United States v. Mistretta, 488 U.S. 361 (1989), and even though at that time "liberals" such as Judges William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and John Paul Stevens were on the court, the decision was 8 to 1 that the guidelines were constitutional, with the lone dissenter being none other than Antonin Scalia [2]. Sometimes Judge Scalia would pull back covering language about an issue and shine a light on what was really going on. He did so at the start of his dissent--

    "While the products of the Sentencing Commission's labors have been given the modest name 'Guidelines,' see 28 U.S.C. 994(a)(1) (1982 ed., Supp. IV); United States Sentencing Commission Guidelines Manual (June 15, 1988), they have the force and effect of laws, prescribing the sentences criminal defendants are to receive. A judge who disregards them will be reversed, 18 U.S.C. 3742 (1982 ed., Supp. IV). I dissent from today's decision because I can find no place within our constitutional system for an agency created by Congress to exercise no governmental power other than the making of laws."

    As some sort of smiling rationale is always given for a new law or governmental action, the sentencing guidelines were promoted as providing certainty and fairness in sentencing and avoiding unwarranted disparities among defendants with similar records found guilty of similar offenses. Never mind that the differences between individual human beings, their backgrounds, and behavior are basically unlimited and disparate in reality. The existence of reality was not part of the new game, and "disparity" was claimed to be a bad thing. Asserted to be just as bad was the difference between federal judges and the sentences they imposed. Surprisingly, one of the original members of the sentencing commission, Paul Robinson, objected to what was created as a final product, and Judge Scalia quoted him--

    " ' Under the guidelines, the judge could give the same sentence for abusive sexual contact that puts the child in fear as for unlawfully entering or remaining in the United States. Similarly, the guidelines permit equivalent sentences for the following pairs of offenses: drug trafficking and a violation of the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act; arson with a destructive device and failure to surrender a cancelled naturalization certificate; operation of a common carrier under the influence of drugs that causes injury and alteration of one motor vehicle identification number; illegal trafficking in explosives and trespass; interference with a flight attendant and unlawful conduct relating to contraband cigarettes; aggravated assault and smuggling $11,000 worth of fish.' Dissenting View of Commissioner Paul H. Robinson on the Promulgation of the Sentencing Guidelines by the United States Sentencing Commission 6-7 (May 1, 1987) (citations omitted)".

    The point was and is that laws are to be made by Congress, and not from scratch by delegating the power to a type of commission, which Judge Scalia called "a sort of junior-varsity Congress". This context also raises thoughts about the separation of powers in the structure of the federal government.

    Sentencing in federal court became a process of assigning a certain number of points to certain factors, and adding them up and subtracting some to reach a numerical score, and after that looking at a grid and finding the pigeon hole telling you, and the handcuffed judge, what the sentence within the new, smaller range of punishment could be. If you think that such a process is surreal, it is. The sentencing scheme with its new commission became a sprawling monster, not only in its text and procedures, but also in its expenditure of time and money and court litigation, which continues to this day. Here is the current version of the sentencing guidelines manual, in excess of 500 pages, which you can read if your stomach can stand it--

    https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/guidelines-manual/2018/GLMFull.pdf

    After the guidelines became effective in 1987 and the Mistretta opinion was handed down in 1989, the problems generated by the new system became more and more obvious and acute. Despite dissatisfaction expressed in the legal community, Congress did nothing, and it took 15 years until 2004 for another case with some substance to be accepted by the Supreme Court for review, called United States vs. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005). It produced an unusual decision consisting of two separate majority opinions, with each one made up of a different group of five judges, and several dissenting opinions [3].

    One opinion ruled that two sections of the Sentencing Reform Act that made the guidelines mandatory had to be severed and excised from that law because a conflict existed between facts that might be found by a jury through a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, and what could be done under the mandatory aspects of the sentencing guidelines. Invalidating the two sections made the guidelines effectively advisory , but the "[federal] district courts, while not bound to apply the Guidelines, must consult those Guidelines and take them into account when sentencing", and the "courts of appeals review sentencing decisions for unreasonableness" (see pages 246-267, pdf pages 448-469). The supreme court did not have the intestinal fortitude to strike down the entire sentencing guidelines regime, and instead wrote around the problems, split hairs, and kept the system mostly in place, requiring the trial judge to still consider the "numerous factors that guide sentencing", and a court of appeals can review the judge's sentence and decide whether it is "unreasonable".

    Judge Stephen Breyer is the author of that particular majority opinion in the Booker case that kept the guidelines mostly in place; Supreme Court Judge John Paul Stevens wrote the other majority opinion. One of the original members of the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 1985-1989 was a judge on the federal First Circuit Court of Appeals named Stephen Breyer, who was on that court from 1980-1994. He was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by president Bill Clinton and took his seat on 3 August 1994.

    The world is indeed small, for in the Booker case before the supreme court in 2004, two lawyers involved in writing the brief (the written argument) for the Justice Department to support the guidelines were Christopher Wray, now the FBI Director, and Michael Drebeen, who has been in the Solicitor General's office in the Justice Department and who has been working at least part time since 2017 for -- you guessed it -- special counsel Robert Mueller [4]. In this New York Times newspaper story from 6 June 2017 about Christopher Wray being nominated to be FBI Director, at the beginning of the story is a photograph from February 2004 of three men standing together -- James Comey (the Deputy Attorney General), Robert Mueller (FBI Director), and Christopher Wray (Chief of the Criminal Division in the Justice Department) [5]. To slightly modify the immortal words of comedian George Carlin, "It's a small club, and you're not in it".

    The growing mutation of the sentencing system continues, with endless quibbling among lawyers in court, judges, and the sentencing commission through litigation over detailed bureaucratic parts of the guidelines attempting to identify and pull under control every conceivable variation of a person, the person's conduct, and different factors that might be considered in a sentence, and assign a number to it, ultimately producing your guideline and criminal history levels. The sentencing commission has published a selected annotation of 85 supreme court cases from the Mistretta decision in 1989 to one from 2018, with a brief discussion of each opinion [6].

    You can now see and understand the real reason for the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the carefully crafted system of assigning numbers to points and designing strict categories to include and control every possible factor about ordering a sentence for a crime.

    This system removes the sentencing power and discretion from the courts and judges in the judicial branch and gives them to the prosecuting attorneys in the executive branch, through the Department of Justice and the offices of U.S. Attorneys. It has been and is a clever and diabolical transfer to the prosecuting authority of one of the most important functions in a criminal justice system: the sentencing punishment or consequence given to a defendant.

    I, the federal prosecutor, will decide what your sentence will be by the offenses I decide to charge you with. All I have to do is get a guilty verdict from a jury trial or from a trial to the judge if you agree to have a judge alone hear and decide the trial. Or obtain a guilty plea from you to a charge and on terms that I agree to, whether that guilty plea results from your objective decision about your conduct, or whether you are coerced into pleading guilty by the sheer number of charges with possible sentences I have filed against you, or you plead guilty because you have run out of money and cannot afford a trial, or I threaten to charge your wife or family members also if you do not plead guilty to what I agree you can plead to. The judge is so constrained and limited by the sentencing guideline scheme that I am not worried at all about the sentence you will get; I have no downside risk there.

    The presentence investigation report (PSI) about Paul Manafort from the federal probation office was filed on 6 March and is not publicly available, as is standard practice. Manafort's sentencing hearing on 13 March is taking on the aura of a spectacle, boosted by the government's allegation that he violated the terms of his plea agreement, and after the courageous departure downward from the sentencing guidelines by Judge T.S. Ellis III last week. Whether Judge Ellis's sentence may be the subject of review by appeal is another dense issue.

    Meanwhile, in the pending case of Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.), a status report by the lawyers was filed on 12 March. It requested that his sentencing hearing be rescheduled--

    https://turcopolier.typepad.com/files/michaelflynn_status_report_20190312.pdf

    Politicians, the press, and candidates announcing a year before the presidential primaries begin are blathering on clownlike about who has verbally offended whom, which newly invented group should have new "rights", whether someone is cis-gender, whether the president had sexual contact with a floozy pornographic movie performer and whether a legal payment to her to keep it confidential violated campaign finance laws (it did not), and on and on.

    All the while, they are blithely unaware that playing out right in front of their faces is a radical transformation of federal criminal law, consolidating the ultimate governmental power in the branch that executes the police power, while federal judges with a lifetime appointment and all office facilities and perks paid for by taxpayers, dither and refuse to honestly describe and resist what has been happening. All federal judges except for two. One, Antonin Scalia, left this world in 2016, but was the only one on the supreme court standing against the slick usurpation of the democratic process and sentencing discretion. The other one, T.S. Ellis III, is still with us, and he not only understands what the sentencing guidelines really are, but he also assessed a sentence as it used to be done, without the double meaning of 1984.

    [1] The United States Sentencing Commission--

    http://www.ussc.gov

    [2] The official version of a Supreme Court opinion is in a book called the United States Reports. The Supreme Court has a digital version of its opinions in the pdf computer format going back only to volume 509, and the Mistretta opinion is in volume 488. Other internet websites have reproduced the opinion.

    https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/488/361.html

    [3] The supreme court opinion is in a bound volume on the court's website, but I do not have the software at hand to pull it out as a separate document. The full volume of 1,259 pages in the pdf computer format is 3.9 megabytes in size and can be viewed or downloaded. The Booker opinion is on pdf pages 422 to 536, and on book pages 220 to 334.

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/boundvolumes/543bv.pdf

    [4] Justice Department lawyers for the government in the Booker appeal--

    https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/united-states-v-booker-brief-merits

    Michael Drebeen in the Booker appeal is hired by Mueller in the Russia investigation--

    https://jonathanturley.org/2017/06/12/mueller-hires-justice-official-with-history-of-arguing-for-expansive-interpretation-of-obstruction-of-justice/

    [5] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/07/us/politics/christopher-wray-bio.html

    [6] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/training/case-law-documents/2018-supreme-court-cases.pdf

    blue peacock , 9 hours ago

    Thank you Robert for the education. Most people, even educated ones don't grasp the scale, scope and intricacies of our governmental apparatus. I know the more I learn, the more I become convinced we have a leviathan that is manipulated, twisted, overly complex and one that is working only for the ruling elites. We have to cut this behemoth down to size. And follow Taleb's maxims of "Skin in the Game" and "Anti-fragile" meaning simplicity.
    Bill H , 10 hours ago
    "The point was and is that laws are to be made by Congress, and not from
    scratch by delegating the power to a type of commission, which Judge
    Scalia called 'a sort of junior-varsity Congress' ".     Such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

    [Mar 13, 2019] Stephen Colbert, millionaire mouthpiece for billionaire war mongers. tried to ambush Tulsi and failed.

    In this interview with Colbert, Tulsi Gabbard discussed what should be one of the biggest scandals of the 21st century -- war in Syria and support of jihadists by the USA government
    Tulsi demonstrated again "courage under fire". Evidently hostile Colbert is a more dangerous opponent then Megan McCain, even if he asked basically the same questions. His popularity adds to the weight of the questions. .
    Notable quotes:
    "... America is not the "policeman of the world". It is the military enforcer of its multinational corporations. ..."
    "... Oh my God Colbert. Hack and establishment stooge. Embarrassing line of questioning. ..."
    "... They ALL try to pin her on Syria, Assad, how can she be non-interventionist and still support the military, etc etc etc. ..."
    "... It's SERIOUSLY as though they're all reading from the same exact script verbatim. Someone could put together a soundbyte of all of the different anchors asking the same questions sycnhronized I bet. ..."
    "... @Animus Nocturnus the same recycled questions about meeting Assad she has answered 1000 times before isnt journalism. Journalism is what you need to get NEW information. ..."
    "... T his is just one hack beating the war drum. ( dog whistling I believe the new term is) and pushing American exceptionalism ..."
    "... Wow.... Colbert is being quite the little imperialist! Thanks for nothing Colbert. ..."
    "... Colbert did the Clintons bidding, again ... he tried to ambush Tulsi, but Tulsi was too good, and also right! I'm with Tulsi. I donated, and I want the USA to be involved in the world too, to be a force for good. GO TULSI GABBARD!! ..."
    Mar 13, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0jnKb8MDks

    Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard explains a 2020 foreign policy platform that is largely informed by her own experience serving in the military.

    Ben Norton ✔ @BenjaminNorton

    In this rare mainstream interview, @ TulsiGabbard discussed what should be one of the biggest scandals of the 21st century (which Colbert has never mentioned on his show):

    In its war on Syria, the US armed and trained far-right Salafi-jihadist rebels, empowering al-Qaeda and ISIS

    Sumerian Hero 1 day ago

    Tulsi dismantled every single one of Golbert's CIA talking points. She's f*** amazing!

    RasJam Kebraraw 1 day ago

    CBS evolved Colbert into his own satire.. I miss the old him.

    Bob Gillis 1 day ago

    America is not the "policeman of the world". It is the military enforcer of its multinational corporations.

    Veronica Reid 1 day ago

    Ashamed of Colbert asking the same questions as CNN. Shame, shame, shame!

    LoSt GaNdalF 1 day ago

    Very disappointed in Colbert. I mean I know he is part of the establishment. But to see it in action hurts

    dirtcom7 1 day ago

    Oh my God Colbert. Hack and establishment stooge. Embarrassing line of questioning.

    bob Saget 13 hours ago

    Yea Colbert is bought and paid for by his NBC/corporate masters, anti-war pro peace is not allowed, we spend $700 billion dollars a year on the military. They will smear anyone who tries to stop that gravy train and he's one of their puppets that does that smearing. 8

    Animus Nocturnus 8 hours ago

    Actually, that was a great line of questioning. Instead of the wish-wash "how are you, how are the kids, what did you ate today" bullshit, he asked real questions and she was able to give real answers. That's what journalism should look like, and how people running for high government jobs should be interviewed.

    Those are jobs that require people who know their stuff instead of entertainers.

    And you will only know about how the people runnig for those jobs will conduct themselves if they get asked tough questions. And she did a great job answering those questions.

    MawcDrums, 6 hours ago (edited)

    @Animus Nocturnus

    The thing is they "sound like" real questions, BUT, and this is a HUGE but, they are the EXACT SAME questions she has received from every other mainstream media interview I've seen with her.

    They ALL try to pin her on Syria, Assad, how can she be non-interventionist and still support the military, etc etc etc.

    And then some cute jab about Hawaii as if to say "Sorry about that". It's despicable and it's happening to Bernie and all of the true progressive candidates (AOC as well).

    It's SERIOUSLY as though they're all reading from the same exact script verbatim. Someone could put together a soundbyte of all of the different anchors asking the same questions sycnhronized I bet.

    dirtcom7, 4 hours ago

    @Animus Nocturnus the same recycled questions about meeting Assad she has answered 1000 times before isnt journalism. Journalism is what you need to get NEW information. Hence the NEWS.

    This is just one hack beating the war drum. ( dog whistling I believe the new term is) and pushing American exceptionalism

    Ron Widelec, 23 hours ago

    Wow.... Colbert is being quite the little imperialist! Thanks for nothing Colbert.

    Jesse Prevallet, 1 day ago

    Colbert,

    if you had any of your 3 kids serving in the military right now, you would not be such a mouthpiece for the empire. Grow a spine and ask a real question instead of these CIA lapdog questions

    Robert S, 23 hours ago

    Colbert did the Clintons bidding, again ... he tried to ambush Tulsi, but Tulsi was too good, and also right! I'm with Tulsi. I donated, and I want the USA to be involved in the world too, to be a force for good. GO TULSI GABBARD!!

    

    [Mar 13, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard: The US Government s Treatment of Wikileaks Will Have a Chilling Effect on Investigative Reporting

    Notable quotes:
    "... If the government can change the designation of Wikileaks from being a news organization (Obama Administration's designation of Wikileaks) to a 'hostile intelligence service' (Trump Administration's designation), then any entity – online and offline – is in danger of being designated a hostile intelligence agency if they carry out investigative reporting that the US government or a particular administration considers to be hostile to itself. ..."
    "... This will have a chilling effect on investigative reporting of powerful government agencies or officials, including the president, intelligence agencies, etc. This is a serious breach of our constitutional freedoms and every American – Democrat, Republican or Independent – must stand up against it." ..."
    "... This is a follow-up to similar statements she's made about WikiLeaks before. During an event in New Hampshire, she said the stolen information that WikiLeaks published had "spurred necessary change." During her Concord meet and greet she said: "Obviously the information that has been put out has exposed a lot of things that have been happening that the American people were not aware of and have spurred some necessary change there." ..."
    Mar 09, 2019 | heavy.com
    ...Today she wrote on Facebook:

    If the government can change the designation of Wikileaks from being a news organization (Obama Administration's designation of Wikileaks) to a 'hostile intelligence service' (Trump Administration's designation), then any entity – online and offline – is in danger of being designated a hostile intelligence agency if they carry out investigative reporting that the US government or a particular administration considers to be hostile to itself.

    This will have a chilling effect on investigative reporting of powerful government agencies or officials, including the president, intelligence agencies, etc. This is a serious breach of our constitutional freedoms and every American – Democrat, Republican or Independent – must stand up against it."

    ... ... ...

    You can see her Facebook post and the responses below.

    ... ... ...

    This is a follow-up to similar statements she's made about WikiLeaks before. During an event in New Hampshire, she said the stolen information that WikiLeaks published had "spurred necessary change." During her Concord meet and greet she said: "Obviously the information that has been put out has exposed a lot of things that have been happening that the American people were not aware of and have spurred some necessary change there."

    Her response was an answer to a question about President Donald Trump's administration seeking to prosecute Julian Assange. Just this week, Chelsea Manning was jailed for not answering questions from a grand jury about Assange. She refused to testify before a grand jury investigation regarding WikiLeaks, AP shared . She said she objected to the secrecy of the grand jury process and had already shared everything that she knows. Because prosecutors granted her immunity for her testimony, she said she couldn't invoke the Fifth Amendment to defend her right not to speak.

    The emails from the DNC shared by WikiLeaks did indeed ultimately bring about some changes, including lesser power to superdelegates in 2020. Donna Brazile, former DNC chairwoman, has said that the DNC primary in 2016 was "rigged" against Bernie Sanders. Brazile herself had even leaked some debate questions to Hillary Clinton before her debate with Sanders. Brazile has said that the DNC worked closely with Clinton's campaign in 2016 because it needed the money, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz let Clinton's campaign help cover the DNC's debt in exchange for some level of control, the Miami Herald reported . The DNC is supposed to be impartial during Democratic presidential primaries, but Brazile said that was not the case.

    ... ... ...

    In July 2016, Wasserman Schultz stepped down as chair of the DNC after WikiLeaks published DNC emails that showed the organization strongly favored Clinton over Sanders during the primary. Brazile briefly served as interim chair before Tom Perez took over.

    When DWS resigned, many supporters said the resignation was not enough . Bernie Sanders had demanded her resignation after nearly 20,000 DNC emails were released by WikiLeaks that showed she and others in the DNC had a clear bias against Sanders.

    Sanders himself said that he believed Debbie Wasserman Schultz should resign:

    I asked and demanded Debbie Wasserman Schultz's resignation many, many months ago and I state that again. I don't think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC. Not only for these awful emails which revealed the prejudice of the DNC, but also because we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people and I don't think her leadership style is doing that."

    However, DWS was allowed to resign after the 2016 Convention, which angered some. Meanwhile, Clinton praised DWS and gave her an honorary position on her campaign.

    ... ... ...

    One of the emails that WikiLeaks leaked showed a letter from Darnell Strom and Michael Kives to Tulsi Gabbard, saying they were very disappointed that she had resigned from the DNC to endorse Bernie Sanders. The email read in part: "For you to endorse a man who has spent almost 40 years in public office with very few accomplishments, doesn't fall in line with what we previously thought of you. Hillary Clinton will be our party's nominee and you standing on ceremony to support the sinking Bernie Sanders ship is disrespectful to Hillary Clinton. A woman who has spent the vast majority of her life in public service and working on behalf of women, families, and the underserved. You have called both myself and Michael Kives before about helping your campaign raise money, we no longer trust your judgement so will not be raising money for your campaign "

    Recent reports have indicated that the U.S. may be considering prosecuting Julian Assange.

    [Mar 13, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard on WikiLeaks' Julian Assange

    Tulsi Gabbard: The U.S. Government's Treatment of Wikileaks Will 'Have a Chilling Effect on Investigative Reporting'
    See also Tulsi Gabbard on the issues - TulsiGabbard.org
    Mar 13, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Micah W , 2 weeks ago

    She doesn't have a policy ready yet on the issue, and it is an important one she needs to address better than this. FWIW, she follows Wikileaks on Twitter and she is critical of the Deep State- which is better than Bernie Sanders. It matters to me and most Americans, I believe, that she would not pursue Julian Assange. It also matters that she believes in very strong progressive taxation. Top marginal rate over a million needs to start at 50 percent. Progressively increase the rate so it becomes impossible to become a billionare. This is about fairness and making sure that a single person does not have control of that many resources. I prefer to talk about resource distribution instead of wealth inequality.

    Lynzi Wildheart , 2 weeks ago

    Tulsi is the bravest candidate for standing against war!! This should indeed be our first consideration. Please donate to her effort, even if it's just $5!! She needs 65,000 donations from different people in at least 30 states!! Please donate!! Go Tulsi!!!

    Marc A , 1 week ago

    Donated! - For once let's say 'No Wars', 'Yes to health care', 'Yes we like to spend our $s here in the U S of A', 'Let's free ourselves from Employer health care bondage!'. Why not divert billions of dollars that feed wars go to our health care, our schools. And yes to retrain those people whom current system is forcing to go back into tunnels and dig dirt to make money. America is great when her people are living great lives! -- Why not make funds available to retrain these wonderful people in jobs above ground? Do you know the risks to health working underground? At minimum you must heard of Radon gas in basements, right? causes cancer. And basements are only a few feet deep!. Come on people do you really want this work for your children and their children? no you do not. You deserve to have shot at good life, a healthy shot!

    [Mar 13, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard comments on WikiLeaks' Julian Assangr are encouraging for anti-war independents'

    Nikki2 comment on Youtube: "GUYS! Tulsi needs 65,000 individual donations to get into the debates. Even if she's not your #1 candidate, please donate a small amount so she can bring the foreign policy/regime change conversation to the debates"
    Mar 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

    RobinG , says: March 12, 2019 at 8:11 pm GMT

    @ChuckOrloski Chelsea Manning is imprisoned (from the article you cited) "for refusing to testify in front of a secretive Grand Jury." The regime is after Julian Assange, so they're trying to squeeze Manning. Not happening!

    BTW, Tulsi Gabbard on WikiLeaks' Julian Assange

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r96RWyhDPS0

    [Mar 13, 2019] Neoconservatives use of projection

    Mar 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Felix-Culpa, March 12, 2019 at 2:04 pm GMT • 200 Words

    [Stephens] attributes to her "insidious cunning" and "anti-Jewish bigotry" observing how "she wraps herself in the flag, sounding almost like Pat Buchanan when he called Congress "Israeli-occupied" territory." And it's all " how anti-Zionism has abruptly become an acceptable point of view in reputable circles. It's why anti-Semitism is just outside the frame, bidding to get in.

    Let's examine how and why the cunning and bigotry of Bret Stephens gets projected by him onto Ilhan Omar.

    1. Charge, sans evidence, your opponent with your own crimes and repeat the charge ad nauseam.

    2. In lieu of refutation of your opponent's argument, train your reader to identify his argument as galling chutzpah and your galling chutzpah as an argument.

    3. Double down on the accusatory inversion and invoke anti- Semitism: It is not the Jewish demand that the USA shut-up and bow down before Israel which is threatening to provoke an anti-Semitic reaction; no: anti-Semitism results from acknowledging as legitimate a scrutiny of the claims and aims of the Zionist state.

    Mr. Stephen's rhetoric is an admission that he and his kind hate Jews, insisting as it does on the implicit acceptance of Jewish identity as irrational and homicidal. His rhetoric also represents an ultimatum to the USA: honor Israel's irrational hatred and killing of its neighbors or you are guilty of irrationally killing Jews.

    This is known as desperation and is an infallible sign that yet another false Jewish messiah – Neoconservatism-has failed.

    [Mar 12, 2019] "One nation, under God and all of his defense contractors "

    Notable quotes:
    "... I thought we lived in a corporate state and since the Supreme Court has ruled corporations have rights – the voting morons already have loyalty to their corporate masters – "one nation, under God and all of his defense contractors " ..."
    Mar 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    never-anonymous , says: March 12, 2019 at 5:23 pm GMT

    I thought we lived in a corporate state and since the Supreme Court has ruled corporations have rights – the voting morons already have loyalty to their corporate masters – "one nation, under God and all of his defense contractors "

    Anti-Semitism theater – a carefully staged social movement organized by Government owned media to divide the peons and make them hate each other. Real hate-group profit lies in charging for vast quantities of militarism but making just enough to kill women and children overseas.

    Back home the flag waving patriots insist they need a giant military with weapons for anyone who can pay to protect them and their families. Dual loyalty to the Jewish lobby and the defense lobby.

    [Mar 12, 2019] "One nation, under God and all of his defense contractors "

    Notable quotes:
    "... I thought we lived in a corporate state and since the Supreme Court has ruled corporations have rights – the voting morons already have loyalty to their corporate masters – "one nation, under God and all of his defense contractors " ..."
    Mar 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    never-anonymous , says: March 12, 2019 at 5:23 pm GMT

    I thought we lived in a corporate state and since the Supreme Court has ruled corporations have rights – the voting morons already have loyalty to their corporate masters – "one nation, under God and all of his defense contractors "

    Anti-Semitism theater – a carefully staged social movement organized by Government owned media to divide the peons and make them hate each other. Real hate-group profit lies in charging for vast quantities of militarism but making just enough to kill women and children overseas.

    Back home the flag waving patriots insist they need a giant military with weapons for anyone who can pay to protect them and their families. Dual loyalty to the Jewish lobby and the defense lobby.

    [Mar 11, 2019] Bruce Ohr, Liar or Moron by Larry C Johnson

    Highly recommended!
    Looks like Orr was one of the central figures of the conspiracy against Trump in Justice Department. And it was Orr wife who probably had written parts of the dossier at the request of CIA Brennan and other conspirators in CIA (who were acting via controlled by them counterintelligence division at FBI)
    Notable quotes:
    "... Christopher Steele, a "former" MI-6 officer, had been a paid FBI informant for several years. ..."
    "... Bruce Ohr met with Glenn Simpson in August 2016, which totally contradicts Simpson's previous sworn testimony that he did not meet with Ohr until after the 2016 election. ..."
    "... Ohr informed FBI and senior DOJ officials, who signed off on the FISA application in October 2016 to spy on Carter Page, that the "dossier" had a tainted political history. ..."
    "... What is truly remarkable about Ohr's testimony is that his explanation for repeated meetings and contacts with Christopher Steele do not make sense. I am referring specifically to Ohr's claim that Steele wanted him, Ohr, to pass info to the FBI. ..."
    "... This guy is a senior DOJ official. He is a former prosecutor. He knows that the minute he accepts anything from Steele and then passes it on to the FBI that he, Ohr, became a fact witness. He is part of the chain of custody. More importantly, Ohr, knowing that Steele is on the FBI payroll, should have refused to accept any information and direct Steele to talk to his Agent/handler. Period. ..."
    "... One other important sidetone--there has been a longstanding agreement among the 5 Eyes (i.e., US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to NOT recruit as assets each other's spies. ..."
    "... In light of all of this one can only conclude that Bruce Ohr is lying about the real reason for meeting with Steele or that he is a complete moron. There is no other possible explanation or excuse. I do not think that Ohr is a moron. He does not strike me as a man of limited intelligence. I think he is lying. I believe that the reason Steele approached Ohr was to provide some insulation to the FBI, which was engaged in an act of sedition. The FBI was interfering in the 2016 election and working to destroy Donald Trump. ..."
    "... As more transcripts and documents come into the sunlight, we will get a clearer picture of the corruption at both the FBI and the DOJ. The FISA applications to spy on a US citizen, Carter Page, are without foundation. I am sure that William Barr appreciates this point and will press for action against those who willingly engaged in such despicable actions. ..."
    Mar 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Sorry to have been out of pocket (I've fled the wintry north for a new home in Florida). I am back, so to speak, and ready to write a bit. Last week's release by Congressman Collins of the interview transcript of Bruce Ohr, who appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last year is quite damning of the FBI and the DOJ. If our system of justice is truly blind and committed to fairness, there is little doubt that former FBI and DOJ officials--Comey, McCabe, Yates and Rosenstein--will be facing serious legal jeopardy. They have lied.

    The biggest "revelations" from Ohr are as follows:

    1. Christopher Steele, a "former" MI-6 officer, had been a paid FBI informant for several years.
    2. Bruce Ohr met with Glenn Simpson in August 2016, which totally contradicts Simpson's previous sworn testimony that he did not meet with Ohr until after the 2016 election.
    3. Ohr informed FBI and senior DOJ officials, who signed off on the FISA application in October 2016 to spy on Carter Page, that the "dossier" had a tainted political history.

    I put "revelations" in quotations because we already knew most of this--specifically Steele's status as a paid informant and the failure of the FBI and DOJ to verify the accuracy of the so-called dossier. The new meat on the bone is Ohr's claim that he met with Simpson in August 2016. Simpson swore under oath that no such meeting took place. That's a substantive lie and, if the Flynn case is a guide, Mr. Simpson will be looking at prison.

    What is truly remarkable about Ohr's testimony is that his explanation for repeated meetings and contacts with Christopher Steele do not make sense. I am referring specifically to Ohr's claim that Steele wanted him, Ohr, to pass info to the FBI. Think about this for a moment--Ohr knows that Steele is a paid FBI informant. That means Steele has an FBI agent who is his conduit into the FBI. That Agent handles interviews and writes up reports. Why in the hell would Steele approach Ohr and not his FBI handler? Because Steele did not want to create a record, i.e., a 302, that would have been generated if he had followed protocol and gone thru normal channels.

    And Ohr? This guy is a senior DOJ official. He is a former prosecutor. He knows that the minute he accepts anything from Steele and then passes it on to the FBI that he, Ohr, became a fact witness. He is part of the chain of custody. More importantly, Ohr, knowing that Steele is on the FBI payroll, should have refused to accept any information and direct Steele to talk to his Agent/handler. Period.

    One other important sidetone--there has been a longstanding agreement among the 5 Eyes (i.e., US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to NOT recruit as assets each other's spies. Christopher Steele's employ with the FBI violates this policy.

    In light of all of this one can only conclude that Bruce Ohr is lying about the real reason for meeting with Steele or that he is a complete moron. There is no other possible explanation or excuse. I do not think that Ohr is a moron. He does not strike me as a man of limited intelligence. I think he is lying. I believe that the reason Steele approached Ohr was to provide some insulation to the FBI, which was engaged in an act of sedition. The FBI was interfering in the 2016 election and working to destroy Donald Trump.

    As more transcripts and documents come into the sunlight, we will get a clearer picture of the corruption at both the FBI and the DOJ. The FISA applications to spy on a US citizen, Carter Page, are without foundation. I am sure that William Barr appreciates this point and will press for action against those who willingly engaged in such despicable actions.

    [Mar 11, 2019] Bruce Ohr, Liar or Moron by Larry C Johnson

    Highly recommended!
    Looks like Orr was one of the central figures of the conspiracy against Trump in Justice Department. And it was Orr wife who probably had written parts of the dossier at the request of CIA Brennan and other conspirators in CIA (who were acting via controlled by them counterintelligence division at FBI)
    Notable quotes:
    "... Christopher Steele, a "former" MI-6 officer, had been a paid FBI informant for several years. ..."
    "... Bruce Ohr met with Glenn Simpson in August 2016, which totally contradicts Simpson's previous sworn testimony that he did not meet with Ohr until after the 2016 election. ..."
    "... Ohr informed FBI and senior DOJ officials, who signed off on the FISA application in October 2016 to spy on Carter Page, that the "dossier" had a tainted political history. ..."
    "... What is truly remarkable about Ohr's testimony is that his explanation for repeated meetings and contacts with Christopher Steele do not make sense. I am referring specifically to Ohr's claim that Steele wanted him, Ohr, to pass info to the FBI. ..."
    "... This guy is a senior DOJ official. He is a former prosecutor. He knows that the minute he accepts anything from Steele and then passes it on to the FBI that he, Ohr, became a fact witness. He is part of the chain of custody. More importantly, Ohr, knowing that Steele is on the FBI payroll, should have refused to accept any information and direct Steele to talk to his Agent/handler. Period. ..."
    "... One other important sidetone--there has been a longstanding agreement among the 5 Eyes (i.e., US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to NOT recruit as assets each other's spies. ..."
    "... In light of all of this one can only conclude that Bruce Ohr is lying about the real reason for meeting with Steele or that he is a complete moron. There is no other possible explanation or excuse. I do not think that Ohr is a moron. He does not strike me as a man of limited intelligence. I think he is lying. I believe that the reason Steele approached Ohr was to provide some insulation to the FBI, which was engaged in an act of sedition. The FBI was interfering in the 2016 election and working to destroy Donald Trump. ..."
    "... As more transcripts and documents come into the sunlight, we will get a clearer picture of the corruption at both the FBI and the DOJ. The FISA applications to spy on a US citizen, Carter Page, are without foundation. I am sure that William Barr appreciates this point and will press for action against those who willingly engaged in such despicable actions. ..."
    Mar 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Sorry to have been out of pocket (I've fled the wintry north for a new home in Florida). I am back, so to speak, and ready to write a bit. Last week's release by Congressman Collins of the interview transcript of Bruce Ohr, who appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last year is quite damning of the FBI and the DOJ. If our system of justice is truly blind and committed to fairness, there is little doubt that former FBI and DOJ officials--Comey, McCabe, Yates and Rosenstein--will be facing serious legal jeopardy. They have lied.

    The biggest "revelations" from Ohr are as follows:

    1. Christopher Steele, a "former" MI-6 officer, had been a paid FBI informant for several years.
    2. Bruce Ohr met with Glenn Simpson in August 2016, which totally contradicts Simpson's previous sworn testimony that he did not meet with Ohr until after the 2016 election.
    3. Ohr informed FBI and senior DOJ officials, who signed off on the FISA application in October 2016 to spy on Carter Page, that the "dossier" had a tainted political history.

    I put "revelations" in quotations because we already knew most of this--specifically Steele's status as a paid informant and the failure of the FBI and DOJ to verify the accuracy of the so-called dossier. The new meat on the bone is Ohr's claim that he met with Simpson in August 2016. Simpson swore under oath that no such meeting took place. That's a substantive lie and, if the Flynn case is a guide, Mr. Simpson will be looking at prison.

    What is truly remarkable about Ohr's testimony is that his explanation for repeated meetings and contacts with Christopher Steele do not make sense. I am referring specifically to Ohr's claim that Steele wanted him, Ohr, to pass info to the FBI. Think about this for a moment--Ohr knows that Steele is a paid FBI informant. That means Steele has an FBI agent who is his conduit into the FBI. That Agent handles interviews and writes up reports. Why in the hell would Steele approach Ohr and not his FBI handler? Because Steele did not want to create a record, i.e., a 302, that would have been generated if he had followed protocol and gone thru normal channels.

    And Ohr? This guy is a senior DOJ official. He is a former prosecutor. He knows that the minute he accepts anything from Steele and then passes it on to the FBI that he, Ohr, became a fact witness. He is part of the chain of custody. More importantly, Ohr, knowing that Steele is on the FBI payroll, should have refused to accept any information and direct Steele to talk to his Agent/handler. Period.

    One other important sidetone--there has been a longstanding agreement among the 5 Eyes (i.e., US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to NOT recruit as assets each other's spies. Christopher Steele's employ with the FBI violates this policy.

    In light of all of this one can only conclude that Bruce Ohr is lying about the real reason for meeting with Steele or that he is a complete moron. There is no other possible explanation or excuse. I do not think that Ohr is a moron. He does not strike me as a man of limited intelligence. I think he is lying. I believe that the reason Steele approached Ohr was to provide some insulation to the FBI, which was engaged in an act of sedition. The FBI was interfering in the 2016 election and working to destroy Donald Trump.

    As more transcripts and documents come into the sunlight, we will get a clearer picture of the corruption at both the FBI and the DOJ. The FISA applications to spy on a US citizen, Carter Page, are without foundation. I am sure that William Barr appreciates this point and will press for action against those who willingly engaged in such despicable actions.

    [Mar 11, 2019] Major Cracks in the Pedophile Ring

    Mar 11, 2019 | www.sott.net

    Former Pope Benedict's sudden resignation is speculated by many to have stemmed from rampant child abuse. These accusations are supported by a number of witnesses and a shocking story that got no air time in the mainstream media -- that the former Pope Benedict's brother abused at least 231 children at a catholic boys choir .

    In another major outing of the pedophile culture, Scotland Yard obtained video evidence of a UK Politician "Murdering a Child in a bizarre ritual." A Scotland Yard official said " these accusations are true" - and another 261 prominent people including politicians and TV stars are suspected of partaking in the horrific evil of child abuse/murder. Some have speculated the criminal ritual is used as a form of blackmail to compromise individuals - and that high level people are preventing prosecutions.

    The U.K. probe known as Operation Midlands was shut down in March for "insignificant evidence" despite a quote from MP John Mann saying "that the victim total could be in the many tens of thousands." The probe had video evidence, and several victim's testimonies, including Alex Wheatle , Steven George , George Smith , Darren , Thomas , Nick , and several additional witnesses. The claims are backed up by retired Scotland yard detectives . Yet the probe was shut down, and at least 114 documents just vanished.

    One document that turned up after 30 years showed that the Thatcher government knew and was told about the Westminster officials' odd sexual behaviors. The CIA and KGB even knew about what was going on and hoped to blackmail the VIP pedophile ring in exchange for information.

    Sixteen MP's were named in a 1984 dossier of VIP pedophile abusers documenting the influence that the the Pedophile Information Exchange lobby had on Westminster. A whistle-blower goes further to state that 20 powerful elitists abused children for decades , including a female MP . The ultimate goal of the pedophile lobby was to lower the age of consent and push the pedophilia agenda, which several people tried to do.

    Even the High Court judge to the Queen, Lord Justice Fulford, tried to lower the age of consent to four. Absolutely sick and twisted -- four years old.

    Another official, Patricia Hewitt, former Labour cabinet minister, was caught trying to push the pedophile's agenda to make incest legal and lower the age of consent to the age of 10 .

    The Pedophile inquiries which include investigations into Kincora house , Elm Guest House , Dolphin Square , St. Helena and the Lambeth Town Hall basement were covered up and ignored to protect the establishment from embarrassment, just like other investigations. Investigators were told to back off investigating because a royal was suspected to be involved and several others even warned police, including MP John Mann . Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle have even come up in the current investigation as a witness has claimed he was sexually assaulted there at the age of 16.

    Put simply this is utterly disgusting.. Children are being put below politics, because psychopaths are in control and believe that they are entitled to abuse people . It's even alleged that they used children's foster homes as a supply to fulfill their sick urge.

    Actor and comedian Russell Brand did a very good expose on the UK Pedophilia scandal. So did Australia's 60 minutes and another Australian comedy show called "The Last Leg". Using comedy to shed light on a dark subject is an old practice made well known by comedian's like George Carlin .

    ... ... ...

    There was a documentary set to be aired called the "Conspiracy of Silence" on the Discovery Channel, but that documentary was canceled at the last minute and all copies bought up until a copy leaked online years later...showing the influence these pedophiles have on the media. Not only that but several people were threatened, murdered or imprisoned to keep this sick secret hushed up.

    Conspiracy of Silence BANNED TV Documentary :

    ... ... ...

    The State Department

    DYNCORP was found to have trafficked children, and continued to receive government contracts. Congresswoman Cynthia Mckinney asked then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld why this corporation continues to receive funding. His answer admitted abuse happened.

    Further information on DYNCORP's trafficking of children can be found from a whistle-blower, Kathryn Bolkovac - a human rights investigator who saw UN officials, military and state department officials involved in human trafficking in Bosnia. Her story was then turned into a Hollywood movie called "The Whistleblower."

    5,200 Pentagon Employees Bought Child Pornography, Investigation halted after 8 Months :

    ... ... ...

    Comment: These are only some of the major stories that show just how psychopathic many among the elites are. See also: Psychopaths in power: Woman accuses 3 former Australian PMs of participating in 'VIP Pedophile Ring' North Wales pedophile network: Government officials and high level public figures involved Ex-Army Intelligence officer: MI5 covered up child sex abuse in Belfast, Ireland care home Global Pedophile Network Broken Up By Italian Police The real EU : Powerhouse and protection mechanism for pedophile elite Monsters among us: Ritual child abuse in France Portuguese Pedophile Network: Popular TV host and UN Ambassador among those sentenced for raping children Pedophile prostitution trial implicates Netherlands elite, royalty Italian pedophile scandal goes all the way to the top Pedophile Case Judge Breaks Down in Belgian Court

    [Mar 11, 2019] Is There Any Real Evidence of Elite Pedophile Sex Rings Involving Government Pop Culture – Collective Evolution

    Mar 11, 2019 | www.collective-evolution.com

    Pedophilia has come up in the mainstream a lot lately, as PizzaGate came to light fairly recently and more and more pedophile rings are being exposed, some of which have involved government officials.

    If you're unfamiliar with PizzaGate, it refers to a wide range of email correspondence leaked from the DNC that allegedly unearthed a high-level elitist global pedophile ring in which the U.S. government was involved.

    It emerged when Wikileaks released tens of thousands of emails from the former White House Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton, John Podesta, who also served as Hillary Clinton's campaign manager. It's because of these emails that many claimed John Podesta was a part of these child trafficking rings as well.

    Since then, conspiracy theorists and world renowned journalists alike have been looking into the topic and speculating how big this problem could be and who could be involved within these underground rings.

    For example, award winning American journalist Ben Swann explained the Pizzagate controversy in detail on mainstream news:

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/-GZFHLAcG8A?start=0&modestbranding=1&showinfo=0&theme=light

    Not long after, Swann's entire online personal brand and accounts had all but vanished from the internet. Why?

    More recently, there's been some speculation that these pedophile rings could stretch into pop culture, potentially involving more pedophilia scandals and symbolism within the media. The question here is: Is there any tangible evidence of all of this, or is it mere speculation?

    Pedophilia Symbolism

    I'd like to begin by identifying the symbols that are used by pedophiles to identify themselves and make their requests within underground networks. Here is a link to a declassified FBI document illustrating the symbols and images used by pedophiles to "identify their sexual preferences."

    So, how do these images relate to pizza? First of all, before PizzaGate was even suggested, "cheese pizza" was used as a code word to discuss "child porn" (hint: it's the same initials, CP). A quick Google search will reveal that the market for underage sex workers is fairly substantial, and you can even see a 2015 post on Urban Dictionary that explains how "cheese pizza" is used as code for child porn.

    As per PizzaGate and the symbolism, it all started when multiple emails involving John Podesta, his brother, and Hillary Clinton simply didn't add up. Strange wording discussing pizza and cheese left readers confused, and because the emails made so little sense, it led many to suspect that they were code for something else.

    For example, this email addressed to John Podesta reads: "The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related)," and this email sent from John Podesta asks: "Do you think I'll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?" There are many more examples, and I encourage you to go through the Wikileaks vault to explore.

    On top of that, the DNC was associated with two pizza places, Comet Ping Pong and Besta Pizza, which use very clear symbols of pedophilia in their advertising and have strange images of children and other ritualistic type images and suspicious videos on their social media accounts – which has since been made private given the controversy over the images and their link to the DNC, but again, a quick Google search will show you what those images looked like. You can read the email correspondence between John Podesta and Comet Ping Pong's owner, James Alefantis, here .

    ... ... ...

    [Mar 11, 2019] Bruce Ohr s Testimony Contradicts Testimony Provided By Rosenstein And Simpson by Sara Carter

    Notable quotes:
    "... Bruce Ohr testified that Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS provided to federal officials information we know to be false regarding Cleta Mitchell, a Republican campaign finance attorney, and the NRA. Giving false statements to federal officials is a crime under 18 U.S.C. 1001. pic.twitter.com/vm0tc4ft5R ..."
    "... "Rod Rosenstein won't tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS," said Gaetz, in August, 2018. "So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues at the Department of Justice that in violation of law that required him to disclose his wife's occupation his sources of income. He did not do that. So when did all of the other people at the Department of Justice find this out because Rod Rosenstein, I've asked him twice in open hearing and he will not give an answer. I think there's a real smoking gun there." ..."
    "... in Ohr's testimony he says he told the FBI about his wife's role at Fusion GPS but only divulged his role to one person at the DOJ: Rosenstein. ..."
    "... It also appears he failed to tell lawmakers about the information he delivered to the FBI. ..."
    "... Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of information heading into Fusion GPS." ..."
    "... In the testimony Ohr also revealed that Steele had told him details about his work with Deripaska saying Deripaska's attorney Paul Hauser "had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with" Deripaska. Ohr said Manafort "had stolen a large amount of money from" the Russian Oligarch and that Hauser was "trying to gather information that would show that." ..."
    Mar 08, 2019 | saraacarter.com

    Department of Justice senior official Bruce Ohr's testimony contradicts testimony given by other senior government officials and key witnesses who testified before Congress regarding the FBI's investigation into President Trump's 2016 campaign and alleged collusion with the Russian government, according to the full transcripts released Friday.

    Ohr's 268-page testimony, released by Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, reveals inconsistency and contradiction in testimony given by Glenn Simpson, founder of embattled research firm Fusion GPS and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is set to leave his post sometime this month.

    It also reveals that many questions are still left unanswered.

    The Contradictions and The Revelations
    1. Glenn Simpson suggests in his testimony to the Senate that he never spoke to anyone at the FBI about Christopher Steele, the former British spy he hired to investigate the Trump campaign during the election. However, Ohr suggest otherwise telling former Rep.Trey Gowdy under questioning "As I recall, and this is after checking with my notes, Mr. Simpson and I spoke in August of 2016. I met with him, and he provided some information on possible intermediaries between the Russian government and the Trump campaign."
    2. In another instance, Simpson's testimony also contradicts notes taken by Ohr after a meeting they had in December, 2016. Unverified allegations were decimated among the media that the Trump campaign had a computer server that was linked to a Russian bank in Moscow: Alpha Bank. Simpson suggested to the Senate that he knew very little about the Trump -Alpha Bank server story and couldn't provide information. But Bruce Ohr's own handwritten notes state that when he met with Simpson in December 2016, Simpson was concerned over the Alpha Bank story in the New York Times. "The New York Times story on Oct. 31 downplaying the connection between Alfa servers and the Trump campaign was incorrect. There was communication and it wasn't spam," stated Ohr's notes. This suggests that Simpson was well aware of the story, which was believed by congressional investigators to have started from his research firm.
    3. Ohr testified to lawmakers that Simpson provided information to federal officials that was false regarding Cleta Mitchell, a well-known Republican campaign finance lawyer, and information regarding the National Rifle Association. Sean Davis, with the Federalist pointed this out in a tweet today. Read one of those stories here.

    Bruce Ohr testified that Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS provided to federal officials information we know to be false regarding Cleta Mitchell, a Republican campaign finance attorney, and the NRA. Giving false statements to federal officials is a crime under 18 U.S.C. 1001. pic.twitter.com/vm0tc4ft5R

    -- Sean Davis (@seanmdav) March 8, 2019

    4. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would not answer questions to lawmakers during testimony about when he learned that Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, was working for Fusion GPS. Just check this out from Rep. Matt Gaetz's interview with Judge Jeanine on Fox News .

    "Rod Rosenstein won't tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS," said Gaetz, in August, 2018. "So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues at the Department of Justice that in violation of law that required him to disclose his wife's occupation his sources of income. He did not do that. So when did all of the other people at the Department of Justice find this out because Rod Rosenstein, I've asked him twice in open hearing and he will not give an answer. I think there's a real smoking gun there."

    However, in Ohr's testimony he says he told the FBI about his wife's role at Fusion GPS but only divulged his role to one person at the DOJ: Rosenstein. At the time, Rosenstein was overseeing the Trump-Russia probe, and had taken the information from Ohr and gave it to the FBI. Just read The Hill's John Solomon full story here for the full background on Ohr's testimony. I highlighted an important date below: remember Rosenstein wouldn't answer lawmakers questions as to when he knew about Nellie Ohr. It also appears he failed to tell lawmakers about the information he delivered to the FBI.

    Ohr stated in his testimony: "What I had said, I think, to Mr. Rosenstein in October of 2017 was that my wife was working for Fusion GPS The dossier, as I understand it, is the collection of reports that Chris Steele has prepared for Fusion GPS."

    Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of information heading into Fusion GPS."

    5. Ohr also told lawmakers in his testimony that the former British spy, Christopher Steele was being paid by the FBI at the same time he was getting paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. However, there was another player paying Steele and it was a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska, a tycoon connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin, had well known animus toward his former friend Paul Manafort.

    Rep. Mark Meadows asked Ohr during testimony "Did Chris Steele get paid by the Department of Justice?

    Ohr's response: "My understanding is that for a time he was a source for the FBI, a paid source.

    In the testimony Ohr also revealed that Steele had told him details about his work with Deripaska saying Deripaska's attorney Paul Hauser "had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with" Deripaska. Ohr said Manafort "had stolen a large amount of money from" the Russian Oligarch and that Hauser was "trying to gather information that would show that."

    [Mar 11, 2019] CNN 2020 Town Hall Live Stream Time, How to Watch Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Buttigieg, John Delaney at SXSW

    Mar 11, 2019 | www.newsweek.com

    Gabbard is set to lay out her vision for the country and her 2020 candidacy during a live presidential town hall starting at 8 p.m. ET. The "Live From SXSW" event Sunday will be moderated by CNN's Dana Bash and Jake Tapper. The event will air live on CNN , CNN International and CNN Español channels.

    [Mar 11, 2019] Anyone remember Mullah Omar

    Notable quotes:
    "... That 93% of all personnel that are employed by the CIA are paper pushers in Langley and just 7% are in the field, of which I read sometime ago, has a ring of truth to me. ..."
    Mar 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    David , Mar 10, 2019 2:18:10 PM | link

    Anyone remember Mullah Omar, the deceased leader of the Taliban? The U.S. military and intelligence services claimed over and over again that he was hiding in Pakistan. Bette Dam finds (pdf) that he wasn't:
    After 2001, Mullah Omar never stepped foot in Pakistan, instead opting to hide in his native land -- and for eight years, lived just a few miles from a major U.S. Forward Operating Base that housed thousands of soldiers.

    In late 2001, after the U.S. invasion, Mullah Omar resigned as leader of the Taliban and the movement officially surrendered to Hamid Karzai who promised them reconciliation. The U.S. did not like that and launched a vengeful campaign against all former Taliban member. Eighteen years later the U.S. is suing for peace.

    Mullah Omar lived quietly, meditated and studied religious text. Allah remarked on his death:

    On April 23, 2013, Mullah Omar passed away. That day, Jabbar Omari told me, the hot, dry lands of southern Afghanistan experienced something he'd never seen before: a hail storm. I assumed it was hagiographic bluster, but later I found a U.S. army publication referring to that day: "More than 80 Task Force Falcon helicopters were damaged when a sudden unprecedented hailstorm hit Kandahar Airfield April 23, where nearly half of the brigade's helicopters were parked."
    The fact that Mullah Omar's death was suppressed for two years even from high-level official sources, indicates to me that the theory bin Laden died in 2001 is very plausible. We even have a similar progression of statements regarding their respective health, doubts of whether they were alive at the respective time, etc.

    Of course, both terror leaders were kept "alive" for geopolitical reasons. Once ISIS (and later Russia/China) took over as a serious threat in the corporate media narrative, they no longer had to cling to those old phantoms.

    Jose Garcia , Mar 10, 2019 2:38:46 PM | link

    The story on Omar is astonishing, but to me not surprising. If the US spends billions on finding one guy, and at the end of the day, he is literally just down the road, it shows how incompetent and useless our intelligence gathering has become.

    That 93% of all personnel that are employed by the CIA are paper pushers in Langley and just 7% are in the field, of which I read sometime ago, has a ring of truth to me.

    Stupidity has a firm grip on our rulers, and they are getting, not only us but many others, killed for absolutely no reason. And the dunces called the American voter, keep re-electing them. It leaves me breathless.

    [Mar 11, 2019] Not one critical word about people throwing Molotov cocktails

    Mar 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Rufus , Mar 10, 2019 1:06:59 PM | link

    On the NYT story, you have to love how transparent the propaganda is, and yet they (Bolton, Pompeo, Rubio) don't care whatsoever. Oh, and not one critical word about people throwing Molotov cocktails. Like that's a perfectly normal, non-violent means of protest.

    Glenn Greenwald also has a good one on this.

    https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-about-burning-humanitarian-trucks-in-venezuela-shows-how-us-govt-and-media-spread-fake-news/

    [Mar 11, 2019] Military industrial complex might struggle for relevance as the country

    Mar 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    ben , Mar 10, 2019 9:31:32 PM | link

    IF this article has validity, there was absolutely no play on MSM anywhere.

    "A group of progressive lawmakers including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Elizabeth Warren, and many others are signing onto a pledge saying that they will not support the endless "forever wars" that the U.S. loves to engage in. This is a big leap forward, and it shows that the military industrial complex might struggle for relevance as the country continues to move to the left. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this."

    https://trofire.com/2019/03/05/progressive-lawmakers-team-up-to-stop-americas-forever-wars

    [Mar 09, 2019] According to the text of the application Dems candidates swear to be "faithful" to the "interests, welfare and success of the Democratic Party," but not to its principles. That's because there aren't any.

    Mar 09, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Note that the candidate swears to be "faithful" to the "interests, welfare and success of the Democratic Party," but not to its principles. That's because there aren't any.

    Readers may enjoy picking through the bafflegab, because I think you could drive a whole fleet of trucks through the loopholes. Here, for example, is Benjamin Studebaker's view : "A Second Term for Trump is Better Than Beto."

    Nobody, after all, said that success had to be immediate ; perhaps a short term failure improves the ultimate welfare and prospects for success for the party.

    In a way, this McCarthy-ite armraising is a kludge, another symptom of a fraying system: Exactly as we can no longer, apparently, trust voters to pick a President, and so must give veto power to the intelligence community, so we can no longer trust primary voters to pick a candidate, and the "National Chairperson" must step in if they somehow get the wrong answer. Pesky voters!

    [Mar 09, 2019] Intelligence Contractors Are a real danger to the US national security

    Mar 09, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    by William Craddick Fri, 03/08/2019 - 21:29 74 SHARES

    Via Disobedient Media

    Intelligence Contractors Make SECOND Attempt In One Week To Provoke Tensions With North Korea Zero Hedge

    It's the second, but no less ludicrous, attempt in one week to sway the opinion of the public and President Donald Trump against the concept of denuclearization and peaceful dialogue with North Korea.

    A March 8, 2019 report from National Public Radio (NPR) follows another by NBC News with sensational and misleading claims that satellite imagery released by private corporations with contractual ties to government defense and intelligence agencies show imminent preparations by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to engage in missile testing or the launch of a satellite from their facilities in Sanumdong, North Korea. An examination of the photos provided shows absolutely no indication of such activity.

    I. Satellite Footage Of Sanumdong Facility Shows No Sign Of Imminent Launch

    Images provided to NPR by private contractor DigitalGlobe consist of two low resolution images, one of a building in the Sanumdong complex and the other of a train sitting along a rail line. In neither photo is there any discernible amount of unusual activity.

    Credit: Image ©2019 DigitalGlobe, Inc. Graphic: Alyson Hurt/NPR

    The first image of a "production hall" bears a striking resemblance to a similar photo run by the Washington Post in July 2018 where unnamed intelligence officials claimed that North Korea was building one or possibly two liquid fueled ICBMs which appear to have never materialized or been used in any launch. The claims came one month after President Trump met with Chairman Kim Jong Un in Singapore for a historic summit between the United States and the DPRK.

    NPR's claims that the imagery shows "vehicle activity" occurring around the facility. Yet close inspection shows that the "activity" consists of a few inert vehicles, which appear to be a white pickup and white dump truck or flatbed parked in a permanent position next to piles of metal. The scene does not appear to be different from any number of sleepy yards of businesses that can be examined by members of the public on Google Maps.

    Credit: Image ©2019 DigitalGlobe, Inc. Graphic: Koko Nakajima/NPR

    The second image, according to NPR, shows rail cars sitting "in a nearby rail yard, where two cranes are also erected." The photo simply shows a train car sitting inert with empty flatbed cars and hopper cars that are either filled with coal or empty. A second rail line similarly holds a number of hoppers and flatbed cars. Hopper cars in particular are totally unsuitable for the transportation of military technology such as missiles.

    The tracks in the lower left corner are covered in snow, meaning that the train sat for many months through the winter or was backed into its position. Considering that US and international sanctions have caused an extreme scarcity of fuel in the DPRK it is likely that the trains have not moved for quite some time, unless their diesel engines were converted to burn coal or wood.

    In short, there is absolutely no indication that several low resolution photos of a facility in North Korea have any activity in them outside of a few rusting vehicles that have sat without moving for some time.

    II. NPR's Sources Of Satellite Imagery Are Contractors For The CIA And Pentagon

    The report by NPR lists two sources of satellite imagery - DigitalGlobe, Inc. and Planet Labs, Inc. As Disobedient Media has previously reported, DigitalGlobe is an American vendor of satellite imagery founded by a scientist who worked on the US military's Star Wars ICBM defense program under President Ronald Reagan. DigitalGlobe began its existence in Oakland, CA and was seeded with money from Silicon Valley sources and corporations in North America, Europe and Japan. Headquartered in Westminster CO, DigitalGlobe works extensively with defense and intelligence programs . In 2016, it was revealed that DigitalGlobe was working with CIA chipmaker NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services to create an AI-run satellite surveillance network known as Spacenet .

    Planet Labs is a private satellite imaging corporation based in San Francisco, CA that allows customers with the money to pay an opportunity to gain access to next generation surveillance capabilities. In February 2016, Federal technology news source Nextgov noted a statement from former CIA Information Operations Center director and senior cyber adviser Sue Gordon that Planet Labs, DigitalGlobe and Google subsidiary Skybox Imaging were all working with the Pentagon's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to provide location intelligence. Planet Labs' own website also lists press releases detailing past contracts for subscription access to high resolution imagery with the NGA.

    The pervasive involvement of intelligence agencies and defense contractors in attempts to undermine negotiations with North Korea does not create confidence in the already shaky claims made by NPR regarding alleged preparations by the DPRK to participate in a missile launch. These contentions are not supported in substance by any tangible facts. As claims and pressure continue to build on President Donald Trump to abandon the peace process , there are multiple factions of the United States government who are running a real risk of behaving in manners which could be interpreted as open sedition or refusal to carry out the stated goals and policies of the President.

    just the tip , 52 minutes ago link

    OT

    full disclosure: in 1990 i was in my sixteenth year as a project manager for an oil field equipment manufacturer. we built oilfield production equipment, and replacement equipment vessels for major refineries around the US.

    almost thirty years ago, at the end of gulf war I, there was a video shown during a press briefing of a missile destroying a loading platform in the gulf that was being used as warning base by the iraqis. they explained during the briefing that it had been left alone before the invasion as a diversion because the actual invasion was land based from KSA.

    the interesting part of this video was from a camera mounted in the nose of the missile. it showed the "birds eye view" of the flight of the missile. then as it closed on the target, the frame changed. instantly. and the image that was shown on screen was nothing like a loading facility or anything like an offshore production platform that i had ever seen.

    in my opinion, it was not even up to the quality of stanley kubrick moon walk videos, and they were shot almost thirty years before this video.

    my point is, that was the first time i questioned the validity of what the government was holding up and saying, "see what we did". in the interim, i have done the same with numerous photographs presented by the government saying "see what we see". in reality it was more like "see what we tell you to see". now it has morphed to in your face "we will tell you what to see and don't give a damn what you think or do not see".

    each time i see an article like this, i see the video of something i was told was a loading platform, however, was anything butt.

    Herdee , 7 hours ago link

    I think that the draining of the swamp is ending up to be nothing more than a lot of ******** from a professional con man. He'll move onto developing TNN.

    AyatollahOfRockandRollaaa , 7 hours ago link

    Hey, remember when Colin Powell showed pictures of Iraqi WMD rail cars and truck trailers to the U.N. in the run-up to the big war. This all looks equally legit.

    Groundround , 7 hours ago link

    Like every thing Chicken Hawk, it made for a headline, and crumbled at the first investigation. America has fought many wars on the basis of such flimsy evidence.

    scraping_by , 8 hours ago link

    American foreign policy no longer makes sense, and that's deliberate. Since The Donald went full Tricky **** on Syria, cruise missiles in Damascus waving the poison gas narrative, it's been getting deliberately more chaotic.

    Trump and the other neocons can no longer keep up a coherent narrative about the world wide organized threat. So they've gone to chaotic contradictory statements, gestures, and actions to keep the sense of crisis alive. The chaos is the problem, and USA World Police is the solution.

    HowdyDoody , 6 hours ago link

    "The chaos is the problem, and USA World Police is their solution."
    FTFY

    TeethVillage88s , 3 hours ago link

    So they've gone to chaotic contradictory statements ...

    In the face of Chaos, MSM Conflicting or One Sided Narratives... voters/people likely have to rely on the US Federal Govt for "Truth, Problem Definition, Possible Solutions (which increasingly are limited to just two), and for Powerful Federal Funding of Response, Powerful MSM assertion of the Success, and Powerful Narrative of How US Federal Govt was the Solution, The Diplomat, The Disinterested Third Party, The Judge, The Prosecutor, The Jailer,... and etc

    Pussy Biscuit , 9 hours ago link

    I honestly doubt ameriKa could win a conventional war against N. Korea.

    tedstr , 9 hours ago link

    Zealots will use anything do anything to support their confirmation bias

    El Oregonian , 9 hours ago link

    These miscreants "believe" they are doing god's work.

    Unfortunately for them, their god will turn out to be the wrong one...

    tangent , 10 hours ago link

    I'll never forget how dementia man Bolton added in a demand for N Korea to take away their chemical weapons too. Obviously meant to sabotage the talks. Trump looking pretty foolish to have such bat **** crazy by his side.

    [Mar 09, 2019] Another crazy demand: Trump Asks Germany, Japan To Pay For Being Occupied

    Notable quotes:
    "... The multi-polar world is quickly becoming a reality and the US empire is in decline. Doubtful this brouhaha about 'protection money' will change that trend in any meaningful way. ..."
    Mar 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Rollings | Mar 8, 2019 12:35:35 PM | link

    The simplistic explanation is tempting:

    The multi-polar world is quickly becoming a reality and the US empire is in decline. Doubtful this brouhaha about 'protection money' will change that trend in any meaningful way.

    The only other explanation is this really is 4D chess on Trump's part where he sees these silly shakedown attempts as the most efficient way of getting the US out of NATO.

    [Mar 09, 2019] Journalist Confronts CNN Over Smear Piece

    A very interesting interview. A really brave woman...
    Mar 09, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Koi Mies Profeetta , 1 day ago

    I am neither a Millienal nor am I Russian but I am a critical thinker who doesn't fall for the CIA narrative of MSM. Keep doing what your doing Jimmy.

    Juvanaly , 1 day ago

    I'm 72 and I don't watch any main stream news. All they do is "spin" the whatever the "party line" of the so called "right" or "left". Oh yes, US Government, keep your bloody hands off of South America.

    Matt Chew , 1 day ago

    CNN stands for "Consistently Not News". They are just the establishment mouthpiece...smh

    RageAgainstTheMachine RageAgainstTheMachine , 1 day ago

    Jimmy Dore You Rock! 😃😃👍👍👌👌💯💯

    Alondra Hernandez , 1 day ago

    I❤You Jimmy. You tell us the truth. And the truth is so hard to come by. So on behalf of the rest of us...THANK YOU! Hugs and many many kisses on your cheeck. I send you my love and respect.

    Mr Magoo , 1 day ago

    The manufacturing consent industry is undergoing an expansion.

    Mr Magoo , 1 day ago

    CNN, MSNBC and FOX are places were brains go to rot and die, and these stenographers of the criminal class wants to keep it that way.

    Pat Hacker , 1 day ago (edited)

    No accident I spend most of my time on YouTube, at least I know where they are coming from at the moment. I got pushed out of Common Dreams, Truth Out and Truth Dig by Hillary bots during the 2016 primary. You couldn't have a conversation there anymore. It was all Bernie hate all the time and everyday. I sought news and conversation here on YouTube then.

    paxe1 , 1 day ago

    God she's beautiful and smart.

    Uncle Torino , 1 day ago

    Ahh CNN the bastion of fake news and propaganda 📺

    Doc BBC , 1 day ago (edited)

    These MSM smears against real independent journalism must stop! Thanks JD for not being afraid to report this!

    Koi Mies Profeetta , 1 day ago

    I am neither a Millienal nor am I Russian but I am a critical thinker who doesn't fall for the CIA narrative of MSM. Keep doing what your doing Jimmy.

    Vincenzo , 1 day ago

    If CNN ever happens to report any actual news, it's most often entirely accidental

    Juvanaly , 1 day ago

    I'm 72 and I don't watch any main stream news. All they do is "spin" the whatever the "party line" of the so called "right" or "left". Oh yes, US Government, keep your bloody hands off of South America.

    rcaugh , 1 day ago (edited)

    We are sunk unless we can take back the media from the 6 corporations propagandizing our country into war, division, and mayhem.

    Hellkite1999 , 1 day ago

    I look forward to the day that Jimmy gets one million subscribers. He will soon get half a million.

    Furry Beaver , 1 day ago

    Jimmy Dore never a bore! The true teller of truth!

    Jack Klugman , 1 day ago

    CNN might has well just move their HQ to Langley, where they get their "news" anyway.

    knowledge share , 1 day ago

    Let her talk Jimmy, she is the guest !

    Matt Chew , 1 day ago

    CNN stands for "Consistently Not News". They are just the establishment mouthpiece...smh

    RageAgainstTheMachine RageAgainstTheMachine , 1 day ago

    Jimmy Dore You Rock! 😃😃👍👍👌👌💯💯

    Alondra Hernandez , 1 day ago

    I❤You Jimmy. You tell us the truth. And the truth is so hard to come by. So on behalf of the rest of us...THANK YOU! Hugs and many many kisses on your cheeck. I send you my love and respect.

    Mr Magoo , 1 day ago

    The manufacturing consent industry is undergoing an expansion.

    Ponte Vedra , 1 day ago

    Merci, I thank you from my heart, ana maria

    Zever BlackBull , 1 day ago

    Mr Jimmy is the real deal!!

    Mr Magoo , 1 day ago

    CNN, MSNBC and FOX are places were brains go to rot and die, and these stenographers of the criminal class wants to keep it that way.

    David Clawson , 1 day ago

    Doesn't CNN's failure to report on New Knowledge's scam actually make them part of the grift? Talk about collusion.

    Sean O. Gamalson , 1 day ago

    Why won't Twitter and Facebook ban Liars like Jake Tapper for telling lies about Healthcare and other issues in the United States? He is nothing more than a propagandist.

    RD Patterson , 1 day ago

    New Knowledge aren't grifters...they are govt. funded deep state operatives.

    MrGivememyoldaccount , 1 day ago

    Big Brother does not approve of your page.

    Uncle Torino , 1 day ago

    Jimmy, Stef and, Ron, I hope the three of you all have a most groovy and pleasant weekend 🏖🍹

    K B , 1 day ago

    CNN is total 🗑

    Pat Hacker , 1 day ago (edited)

    No accident I spend most of my time on YouTube, at least I know where they are coming from at the moment. I got pushed out of Common Dreams, Truth Out and Truth Dig by Hillary bots during the 2016 primary. You couldn't have a conversation there anymore. It was all Bernie hate all the time and everyday. I sought news and conversation here on YouTube then. Plus when I need to recharge I can find kitten and puppy videos.

    Robert Simon , 1 day ago

    CNN.....Channel No longer Needed

    Shawn Carroll , 1 day ago

    Rania is so hot.

    French Frys , 1 day ago

    Jimmy Dore is the most important independent news show right now in America. He needs 10 M subs and no less right now!!

    ENOCH MATHUSAEL , 1 day ago (edited)

    CNN Sounds like a quasi McCarthyism/facist big media, yellow journalism company for the zombie masses! Truth is what the people want.

    starlight122012 , 1 day ago

    WOW Rania Khalek is so beautiful, and so smart

    Tony Mathis , 1 day ago

    When Alex Jones did it he was banned from facebook and twitter. What will be the punish this time?

    J Salameh. , 1 day ago

    Rania Khalek is the epitome of a strong, intelligent and most definitely beautiful Arab woman.

    Matt Chew , 1 day ago

    Rachel Maddow looks like Harry Potter went on a meth+frappachino bender...

    Giovanna Liviana , 1 day ago

    Wasn't it beautiful hearing Berners chanting "CNN Sucks!" back in 2016?

    FreedomFox1 , 1 day ago (edited)

    Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may be privately owned, but they are the public square. So this stuff is a violation of the first amendment. We need the ACLU to take this to the Supreme Court (I can't stand him, but Alex Jones is an ideal test case). With respect to funding, we should always expect the worst (even progressive media like TYT, just look at how they have treated Tulsi - TYT is obviously compromised by some pro-establishment funding source).

    [Mar 09, 2019] Gone When They Get Your Vote

    Notable quotes:
    "... I'll be honest here and admit that Democrats irritate me more than Republicans for this one simple reason. ..."
    "... I've come to expect Republicans to be malicious -- there is honesty in their advertisement. However, it's the Democrats who smile like foxes as they pretend to be our allies only to stab us in our backs the minute they get elected. ..."
    Mar 09, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    ...He brilliantly exposed the false-distinction between Democrats and Republicans as a choice between the lesser of the same evil.

    Malcom X's last speech after Feb. 1965 firebombing of his home https://vimeo.com/192326332

    "Foxes and wolves usually are of the same breed. They belong to the same family -- I think it's called canine. And the difference is that the wolf when he shows you his teeth, you know that he's your enemy; and the fox, when he shows you his teeth, he appears to be smiling. But no matter which of them you go with, you end up in the dog house."

    It took a mean mugging by reality -- one that shook me out of cognitive dissonance -- for me to realize that Democrats are no different than Republicans. They differ in their methods, but in the end they feast on us regardless of their gang affiliation. Both parties are subsidiaries of corporations and oligarchs; our entire political system is based on two factions bamboozling their respective bases while manufacturing dissension on all sides.

    ... ... ...

    Now that I've shed my political blinders, I see how this game is played. I'll be honest here and admit that Democrats irritate me more than Republicans for this one simple reason.

    I've come to expect Republicans to be malicious -- there is honesty in their advertisement. However, it's the Democrats who smile like foxes as they pretend to be our allies only to stab us in our backs the minute they get elected.

    They have maintained power for decades by successfully treading on the pains of marginalized groups as they concurrently enact legislation and regulations that inflame the very injustices they rail against.

    If there is one group that has been leveraged the most by Democrats, it's the descendants of slaves and "black" diaspora as a whole. For generations, supposed liberals -- who now call themselves progressives -- have cunningly used the pains of "African-Americans" to further their own agendas. The Democrat's most loyal voting bloc have time and time again been taken advantage of only to be tossed to the side as soon as Democrats gain power. They talk a good game and pretend to be for us right up until election day, soon as the last ballot is counted, they are nowhere to be found.

    [Mar 09, 2019] Germany served its sentence; now the US troops should simply leave the country

    Mar 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    m , Mar 8, 2019 11:38:31 AM | link

    Thanks B. This is how empires end, or at least one way. Hubris gets them every time. I for one will be glad to see US troops at the very least reduced in Italy, and for all of Europe for that matter.

    Especially now that the INF is dead. And I hear that Italy is now looking at embracing China's B&R Initiative. I say have at it! There's the shiver waiting to run up Washington's spine. You might find this amusing, too: > https://thesaker.is/us-treats-luxembourg-like-a-vassal-state-or-us-imperial-hubris-gone-bonkers/ Little Luxembourg. It does bring a big smile. Keep going, Trump. You're on the right track. More Art of the Deal, anyone?

    BM , Mar 8, 2019 11:38:41 AM | link

    Oh, what a perfect graphic depiction! Spot on!
    james , Mar 8, 2019 11:40:05 AM | link
    thanks b... descriptive pic!!! why are american bases all over the planet anyway?
    ab initio , Mar 8, 2019 11:42:03 AM | link
    This will be good for every one. Trump demands the Germans and Japanese pay for US protection, which they reject and the US military goes home. Isn't that an excellent outcome for all parties?
    Elliott A , Mar 8, 2019 11:42:10 AM | link
    Thank you for yet another good and humorous post.

    The only section that is slightly unclear is, "The only sound reason to keep the 30,000 U.S. troops in Germany is to prevent them from moving to Poland from where they could threaten the country."

    Surely the US occupation of Germany has been tacitly or latently threatening and controlling and dominating and bullying and extorting Germany for around 74 years?

    So what major difference would it make if they were moved a few hundred kilometers away?

    Kick 'em out! Germany has more than served her sentence!

    A clarification would be much appreciated.

    ab initio , Mar 8, 2019 11:49:49 AM | link
    The European people should support Trump in his desire to eliminate NATO. Of course the Deep State in both Europe and the US will fight it tooth and nail. Maybe the #GiletsJaunes who have been erased from western media will finally topple the Party of Davos candidate Macron. And similar populist movements in other European countries can topple other Deep State stooges from western Europe. Merkel is already on her way out as the CDU/CSU combine and the Social Democrats implode in Germany.
    Jose Garcia , Mar 8, 2019 11:52:33 AM | link
    Extortion because you're broke. We don't have the money to pay for it, so this administration resorts to mob tactics to keep the scam going. "The government and us are cut from the same cloth." Sam Giancana, former Chicago mob boss.
    Zachary Smith , Mar 8, 2019 11:54:49 AM | link
    If that graphic is any indication of public opinion in Germany, things are even worse than I'd heard.

    There has been a small series of events where the German Government gave the US meddlers a shove-off. First was the new gas pipeline Nord 2 - they refused to fold for perfectly good economic reasons. Next was the German rejection of the horrible F-35. Recently I'm seeing headlines about Germany and the Chinese 5G company.

    Germany won't ban Huawei from 5G auction

    Given all of this, I'm beginning to doubt if the Germans will allow the US to plant new short-range nuclear missiles on their soil. Becoming a WW3 target for no good reason except to please the US of A Imperia wouldn't seem to be a very clever move on their part.

    BM , Mar 8, 2019 11:55:54 AM | link
    I agree with Elliott A that it is better to have the US troops in Poland than in Germany - and better that the inviters of the US troops then become the target for the defensive nuclear missiles they force Russia to deploy rather than Germany.

    Furthermore, if Poland is forced to pay the full cost of their invited US guests, maybe their voters will eventually come to their senses and vote in more rational Polish politicians.

    Spectacular own goal, Trump!

    dh , Mar 8, 2019 12:00:27 PM | link
    The Poles may want them but they won't be paying for it. Nice of Donald to ask though rather than tell .... has he been talking diplomacy classes?
    Elliott A , Mar 8, 2019 12:06:26 PM | link
    Thank you, BM.

    The Poles are generally pseudo-Catholic and mercenary, pro-American in-name-only; as soon as it could hit them in the pocket, they will pipe down very quickly and balk/bridle.

    Hence Poland is a worthy (temporary) stopover for the US (including the NSA) when evicted from Germany. The fact that Merkel is out soon is dangerous because she doesn't really G/A/F, and will defer the decision to the next poor blighter.

    There could be a treaty in place that says American troops can remain in Germany until the year 2500 but Trump's just shot himself in the foot again by giving Germany a get-out clause.

    Kadath , Mar 8, 2019 12:07:23 PM | link
    Zero hedge is reporting that Pence went a bit further than that and urged Germany To provoke Russian Navy in the Kerch Strait by sending ships there in a freedom of navigation exercise. Strangely enough Merkel said she was willing to provoke Russia, but thought doing it wouldn't accomplish anything so she didn't want to provoke Russia for no reason. God, how insane are these idiots. And now it looks like in response Pence/Trump will extort Germany for not being mindlessly obedient enough.
    BM , Mar 8, 2019 12:07:51 PM | link
    Merkel is already on her way out as the CDU/CSU combine and the Social Democrats implode in Germany.
    Posted by: ab initio | Mar 8, 2019 11:49:49 AM | 6

    The problem is though, that the Deep State have already reserved their places in Merkel's successors, the AfD. All of these right-wing "populist" parties acros Europe seem to be no more than a cynical vehicle for the Deep State to hijack popular discontent and channel it into a new form of slavery to replace the old. Hence Steve Banner's dubious and highly dangerous politicking for the so-called populist movement in Europe.

    A real future lies in Jeremy Corbyn and maybe also a few other left-wing parties in Europe (as long as they don't become compradors like Syriza) - but the Deep State is fighting Corbyn tooth and nail. In Germany there is Die Linke who have some good people and some good policies (from my limited knowledge!) - but their popularity is still in the doldrums, unfortunately.

    JohninMK , Mar 8, 2019 12:08:50 PM | link
    Wow, if he is asking us to pay for the US occupation does that mean that if we say no that he will take them home? Or is it an empty threat?

    A very dangerous question to even think about asking let alone encourage it.

    karlof1 , Mar 8, 2019 12:14:11 PM | link
    And of course, the extortion must be paid in US Dollars. Clearly, the threat is all about keeping Dollar Hegemony alive by reducing the massive trade deficit. I see AfD making capital thanks to this. As for Japan, Russia will not sign a Peace Treaty with it until all foreign military forces are removed--a condition that's been reiterated several times over the last few months to which I've linked. Okinawans are furious at being twice colonized and are at the end of their rope. So far they've been peaceful, but I think it's clear to them by now that the only way to remove the foreign vermin is to literally push them into the sea. Korea's situation's been discussed on that thread.

    For the domestic Outlaw US Empire, shutting down the Overseas Empire of Bases and the related destabilization projects globally would save @ $1 Trillion/year--an utter wastage of monies for projects that are decidedly NOT in the National Interest. And as most here understand, the world would be more peaceful if the Outlaw US Empire would cease being an Outlaw and an Empire. And it would become cleaner too as the US Military is the most polluting entity on the planet.

    Ghost Ship , Mar 8, 2019 12:17:52 PM | link
    >>>> dh | Mar 8, 2019 12:00:27 PM | 10

    Isn't Poland offering to pay the United States $2 billion to establish a base called Fort Trump?

    BTW, perhaps this is a ruse to remove all U.S. troops from Syria. I'd love to be there when Elliott "debt collector" Abrams turns up demanding the money from Assad. There is an opportunity for one of the greatest reality TV programs ever (I'm a neo-con, get me out of here) which makes me wonder if that's Trump's reason for this scheme.

    stevelaudig , Mar 8, 2019 12:19:30 PM | link
    All Americans needs to protect Americans in the US is a coast guard and a border patrol. Everything else is either protection for corporations doing business [which should be added to the price of their products/services to reflect true costs] or empire.
    Elliott A , Mar 8, 2019 12:19:55 PM | link
    Yes, it's another damp squib, another no-win, another over-promise, another posture, like all the others.

    This is all Trump knows and integrity never enters the equation.

    Any sign of that border wall, that the Mexican government was going to pay for?

    Not exactly "The Art of The Deal". more like one long and embarrassing suicide note.

    I don't exactly dislike Trump particularly as he has "Mullered" a number of cretinous insiders whom required a reality check but he is hindbound by his capinet; none of his plans went through and he is in it well over his depth particularly since he appears to be suffering from ADHD, dementia and schizophrenia - just what you need in the Commander-in-Chief?

    Ger , Mar 8, 2019 12:20:34 PM | link
    On the bright side, you can get a bigly discount for being a faithful toady and swearing allegiance to the US of A. Wonder where the US 'leaders' got the idea of swearing allegiance to a foreign power?
    Lavrenty , Mar 8, 2019 12:21:04 PM | link
    A Fort Trump in Poland? Maybe...

    https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/08/fort-trump-is-a-farce-poland/

    Ghost Ship , Mar 8, 2019 12:24:34 PM | link
    >>>> karlof1 | Mar 8, 2019 12:14:11 PM | 15
    ....the world would be more peaceful if the Outlaw US Empire would cease being an Outlaw and an Empire....

    Trump's just demonstrated that by staying out of the very recent Indo-Pakistan incident. Maybe he didn't want Americans dying in the shithole that is the sub-continent. Maybe he didn't see any opportunity to line his own pocket. Whatever his reason, he did the right thing. Would Hillary have done the same? I don't know.....

    psychohistorian , Mar 8, 2019 12:25:28 PM | link
    Thanks for the posting b LOL!!!!

    Empire is getting the rest of its plates spinning so that must mean that the end is getting closer. I don't think that the Philippine's plate is spinning fast enough so Trump needs to give it some special love.

    Pretty soon we will need a plate spinning scorecard just to keep track of all the action.

    Syria
    Iran
    Ukraine
    Venezuela
    Russia
    China
    Korea
    EU w/ NATO
    and now Germany and Japan

    What plates am I missing?

    Think about how much of the peoples resources are going to keeping these plates spinning.

    Who are going to come to the table with what arguments when the debt music stops?

    Zanon , Mar 8, 2019 12:31:41 PM | link
    For Germans here,
    Is there any party in Germany being against US forces in Germany? Or if not being against, atleast questioning this issue?
    Rollings , Mar 8, 2019 12:35:35 PM | link
    The simplistic explanation is tempting:

    * Trump has driving desire to be seen as the first businessman president.
    * The appeal of Trump making 'allies pay their fair share' any reality check on how counterproductive the effort is to the waning US empire
    * Trump's unique candidacy put him in the White House without any real foreign policy staff who would have long ago gotten Trump to abandon the silly idea - at least after he was elected.

    The multi-polar world is quickly becoming a reality and the US empire is in decline. Doubtful this brouhaha about 'protection money' will change that trend in any meaningful way.

    The only other explanation is this really is 4D chess on Trump's part where he sees these silly shakedown attempts as the most efficient way of getting the US out of NATO.

    mk , Mar 8, 2019 12:42:27 PM | link

    btw - The picture is probably from the Duesseldorf Carnival.
    GM , Mar 8, 2019 12:51:49 PM | link
    American troops pack up your shit and get the f*ck out, oh and here's an invoice for $100 billion to cover the cost of cleaning up your toxic waste.
    Thanks for your business.
    David Wooten , Mar 8, 2019 12:52:15 PM | link
    "They are neither needed nor wanted."

    The only Germans that want them are restaurants and shops located near the bases and other businesses that cater to them.

    Yes, Trump's new policy is very welcome if it gets Germany to kick them out or, better yet, get out of NATO. I wonder if Trump intends it - or is he just plain stupid?

    hopehely , Mar 8, 2019 12:52:16 PM | link
    From the article:
    Victor Cha, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the administration was sending a deliberate message by demanding "Cost Plus 50" from South Korea first , even though that effort fell short.

    Ouch, poor SK. What a timing, straight after 'successful' NK talks.
    With allies like that, who needs enemies?
    dh , Mar 8, 2019 12:53:42 PM | link
    @16 Only $2 billion? Would that be a lump sum up front or payable in installments? Can't see Donald falling for it.
    KD , Mar 8, 2019 12:57:36 PM | link
    Ghost Ship @ 21
    In that incident an aged MIG21 from India downed a F16 from Pakistan.
    Also there is a $20bil project going on in India to make F16 locally.
    https://in.reuters.com/article/lockheed-india/lockheed-sees-potential-exports-of-200-f-16-jets-from-proposed-indian-plant-idINKCN1PF1CG?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social

    I guess the atmosphere was just not right to poke the nose in else it would have been ideal scenario.

    AriusArmenian , Mar 8, 2019 1:08:21 PM | link
    Perhaps this will finally get the EU to kick the US and its NATO out.

    But I don't underestimate the ability of EU elites to crawl to the US. It's like second nature. And they get their pockets stuffed full of dollars to be kept in line.

    BraveNewWorld , Mar 8, 2019 1:22:44 PM | link
    Let me guess the free loading douche bag country that gets the most support from the US will magically be excluded from these demands yet again.

    I sure hope they try this protection racquet in Iraq. The government is already under huge pressure to kick the Americans out after Trumps visit there last month.

    Lysander , Mar 8, 2019 1:38:09 PM | link
    What's America's plan to maintain economic wealth at the end of the debt spiral and dollar collapse????

    I have an idea!! Tribute! Hey, it worked for the Aztecs. Soon many countries will see it as a small price to pay to avoid having democracy brought to their countries. Previous versions of this scheme, such as buying US treasury debt knowing full well it will never be repaid wont cut it anymore. So we are moving towards the real thing.

    Vato , Mar 8, 2019 1:56:22 PM | link
    When I used to play football in my young days (i.e. soccer for the american lads here), I had to pass by a huge US military base in the south of Germany each time in order to reach the training ground. But strangely, I never challenged the necessity of that base in the first place - probably due to my lack of geopolitical, historical consciousness. Only after they build a second, even bigger base directly on the opposite side of the road and after two combat helicopters - for the first time - flew directly above my head, I finally became aware and started to question things. I wonder how many people that drive the same road each day actually do feel the same...
    Anyway, thank you b and thanks to all the well-experienced forumites for providing the vital informations and inputs that helped me to better understand what is going on after all.
    Alaric , Mar 8, 2019 2:04:56 PM | link
    Is trump trying to get the US booted from Europe?

    This is quite a slap in the face as the US has been raising tensions with Russia and any conflict with Russia would likely cause the destruction of Europe.

    jv , Mar 8, 2019 2:07:06 PM | link
    Wondering how this will play out in places such as the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain where the U.S. actually pays the dictator to lease the Navy and Air Force bases? Where the U.K. pays the dictator for a British naval facility, too, which is shared?

    Remember when Bahrain and other Arab countries in the Persian Gulf didn't want bases to be called bases? Instead they were each a Regional Operations Support Establishment, aka ROSE. Surely there's a different term now, but we still pay to lease bases.

    Nemesiscalling , Mar 8, 2019 2:10:58 PM | link
    Give trump credit: he raises the issue. And by doing so he gives people the opportunity to be thrust into the act of questioning.

    I continue to believe that this is really the overriding attribute of his presidency. What people like the Germans do with this opportunity is entirely incumbent on them. But it is an opportunity nonetheless, and as b correctly asserts, this is a welcomed change from the political grab ass of the preceding administrations.

    Jen , Mar 8, 2019 2:23:58 PM | link
    We should wish good luck to the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) in hosting US bases: not only will they have to foot the cost of hosting US forces but their entire economies by now must be revolving around being open-air military barracks. All while their own citizens are voting with their feet.
    Jen , Mar 8, 2019 2:30:14 PM | link
    Psychohistorian @ 22: You're missing large parts of Africa (possibly Djibouti where there's a US base; Rwanda which is a US satrapy under President Paul Kagame; western Africa where there are offshore oil and gas deposits) and Georgia where the US operates a bioweapons laboratory.
    Drew , Mar 8, 2019 2:38:57 PM | link
    Once again, on the surface this is obvious extortion. But I can't help but think this is really a purposeful 'own goal.' I know this is likely giving Trump too much credit, but in a parallel universe this is exactly what you would do if you had a hidden agenda to enfeeble the US to cause our eventual pull back. There's no political way to slowly scale back our involvement, but there is a way to overreach under everyone's noses and get the same end result. Is this a 666d chess move or just what happens as empire descends into chaos, grasping at straws? Either way I'm fine with the obvious result!
    Likklemore , Mar 8, 2019 2:49:53 PM | link
    We are seeing the true colors. What we now have are Co-Presidents: Bolton, Trump; and Co-Vice Presidents Pompous and Pence. The 4 morons do not realize they are isolating the U.S.A. and hastening rejection of the USD.
    Adhere my diktat and keep purchasing our T-bills.

    RT cites Bloomberg Merkel refuses to send Navy ships to Russia's shores, rebuffs US pressure

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel has allegedly stood up to pressure from Washington as she declined a proposal by Vice President Mike Pence to send German Navy ships towards Russia's Crimea, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. Pence allegedly wanted German ships to sail through the Kerch Strait separating Crimea from mainland Russia. France, [.]
    pretzelattack , Mar 8, 2019 3:13:14 PM | link
    next, trump asks venezuela to pay in advance for the invasion. in usd.
    Emmanuel Goldstein , Mar 8, 2019 3:59:51 PM | link
    This is an utterly brilliant Empire-killing move by Trump. Speaking of the UK I wonder how much we will be asked to pony up for the US air bases and troops still in the UK 75 years after D-day. This should hit just after Brexit and we may have a different government in the chair......
    chuck newsum , Mar 8, 2019 4:08:51 PM | link
    the germans would be owned by the russian,gadaffi saddam hussein serbia and hitler if it was not for uk and usa.
    we keep the world safe and stop irania and the hamas terroist pushing israel into the sea.

    i say to the germans pay the man or be invaded by evil doers

    john , Mar 8, 2019 4:09:12 PM | link
    i know it's an old trope...it goes all the way back to 2016...but i smell weaponized flatulence.
    james , Mar 8, 2019 4:14:29 PM | link
    lol to the last two posts...
    Jonathan , Mar 8, 2019 4:26:37 PM | link
    pretzelattack @42,

    That's not how a leveraged buyout works.

    karlof1 , Mar 8, 2019 4:29:06 PM | link
    Although I didn't read or watch, it appears most major BigLie Media have published/aired this story, a point I was curious about since Friday's usually a slow news day, thus begging the question: What's the public's reaction? Might there be a groundswell calling for returning the troops home so that both the occupied nation and the occupier save monies? And what of the opposite argument, that even more troops and bases are needed to defend against the Red and Yellow Menace?
    Deltaeus , Mar 8, 2019 4:42:01 PM | link
    If I was a president who could not step too far out of line due to powerful forces all around me, I would take the ideas of neocons et al and push them even further over the line past reasonable.
    No-one in power could argue against me because I'm implementing their ideas, even though I'm taking them too far.
    But pushing things too far creates real resistance, and makes the real policies obvious, and brings about the end of the empire.

    I might decide to:
    1. Move the US embassy to Jerusalem, to make it clear who calls the shots
    2. Demand that NATO countries pay more and publicly disrespect their leaders
    3. Demand that Germany and Japan pay for their occupation
    4. Obviously attack Venezuela (in contrast to previous less-obvious attacks)
    5. and other increasingly outrageous demands until the vassals get fed up

    Meanwhile I'd do other things that I have to do to keep the powerful forces happy.
    I may be a terrible person with no 3-d chess master plan, but perhaps things would be different after my term. And "different" might approximate "better".

    karlof1 , Mar 8, 2019 4:49:28 PM | link
    OT--FYI--OT--WOW!

    "Obama was a smiling murderer, says Ilhan Omar" And of course, she's 100% correct. As Ben Norton noted in this tweet , Omar's words were citied in a Politico article that he linked. You'll note, that by extension she also called Trump a murderer, just not as "polished."

    karlof1 , Mar 8, 2019 4:58:29 PM | link
    Deltaeus @49--

    There's merit in your argument. For example, the so far small contingent of anti-war Progressive Democrats either were elected or emboldened thanks to Trump, Rep. Omar being the most prominent example. The same could be said of pushing the far-right's policy goals, as that's also generated resistance. Too bad the initial call for resistance was based on the Russiagate hoax. Time will tell!

    teri , Mar 8, 2019 4:59:53 PM | link
    Okay. If you don't get your weekly payola, then shut down the foreign bases. Only thing is, what do we do with all these armed people trained to kill on command, looking for some action in between saying the Pledge of Allegiance and painting Bible verses on bombs?

    I sure as shit don't want them all coming back here, loitering around in the US. Got too many cops on steroids as it is.

    psychohistorian , Mar 8, 2019 5:05:44 PM | link
    @ teri who wrote
    "
    I sure as shit don't want them all coming back here, loitering around in the US. Got too many cops on steroids as it is.
    "
    Its called karma


    I live here too....the energy needs to be refocused on planet rehab and going to the stars along with my standard make global finance public

    Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 8, 2019 5:35:10 PM | link
    It will fun to watch this developing:

    It sure will.
    Especially the Neocons as they scramble around trying to collect all the rust flakes to glue them back onto dilapidated USA's dilapidated Foreign Policy.

    ADKC , Mar 8, 2019 5:44:06 PM | link
    I'm sorry, but many people posting here are delusional about Trump's motives.

    For a start, none of the issues discussed in this post would cause the American people much in the way of dispute. Broadly, most Americans would think that other countries should pay for US "support". Americans disagree quite a bit about "The Wall" and gender issues around public restrooms; but not so much about the issues raised in this post. So there IS NO RESISTANCE, and WILL NOT BE ANY RESISTANCE, within the US, on getting countries to pay.

    Other countries might have problems but what other countries think has never been much of an issue for Americans.

    The issue of getting other countries to pay is about cost and the out-of-control US debt. And, also, about Trump electioneering.

    Should other countries refuse to pay (or request US troops to leave), then they can expect to be sanctioned or economically damaged. Just consider how France (a US ally) had one of their prize jewel (world-beating) nuclear technology intellectual assets, Alstom's Arabelle steam turbine , taken from them by the US. This happened way before Trump so demonstrates how the US operates (the art of the [coercive] deal is the way the US rolls). France, and in particular Macron, who was French Finance/Economic Minster, at the time, had no choice but to accept the takeover. Macron actually appeared quite gleeful about it (Macron was effectively working for US, not French, interests).

    Ghost Ship , Mar 8, 2019 5:47:59 PM | link
    Can Columbia or Kosovo afford to pay? Or will Washington increase the financial support they give to those countries to cover the bill.

    As for NATO, the core system was based on the countries that are members providing a reliable easily-secured base for American expeditionary forces to attack and invade one of the two countries that are at the heart of the Eurasian landmass. In exchange for that the United States bankrolled NATO. If Trump breaks that bargain, what incentive is there for the core members of NATO to allow wars to be fought on their territory particularly now that Putin has said he is focused on improving the lives of ordinary Russians rather than going to war with Europe but will make sure that the decision centres of any countries that attack or are somehow involved in an attack on Russia will be destroyed. None as far as I can see, so it looks like it'll be goodbye NATO.

    james , Mar 8, 2019 6:04:23 PM | link
    @55ADKC - why would other countries pay to have the usa military on their soil? this explains the whole agenda of fearmongering that has been in overdrive 24/7 since i was a kid... nothing else explains it.. keep the fear up to justify this craziness.. i can't see anyone paying for it.. i sure wouldn't want that if i was german, japanese or south korean for example... now, maybe the leaders of these countries are going to be faced with a stark choice... side with this b.s., or get removed from office... i praise trump for bringing this forth and hope that he strikes a big fat zero from the countries that have usa bases on them...
    Seamus Padraig , Mar 8, 2019 6:12:39 PM | link
    @23

    Die Linke are officially opposed to NATO and want Germany to withdraw from it.

    arby , Mar 8, 2019 6:18:07 PM | link
    I think Trump believes the hype fed to Americans forever that the US soldiers are the good guys and they really are protecting these countries. He also has a reputation for squeezing contractors etc.
    To MAGA he thinks it needs better deals and more people sending money in.

    These are his motives and not 4d chess.

    dh , Mar 8, 2019 6:45:47 PM | link
    @59. I think that's right. He genuinely believes US forces are out there protecting 'our allies' and keeping the world safe for democracy etc. But he also thinks 'our allies' are taking advantage of American generosity. This is a common sentiment among Trump voters.
    arby , Mar 8, 2019 6:49:46 PM | link
    I think most Americans think they are protecting the world.
    iv> i agrees we are the white hatters many folks hate the uk and usa and norway for are freedoms.
    we need to be able to affords a big bat to stomp the evil doers if we cannot afford the big bat folks must suffer.
    the uk and usa tax payers are sick of paying for new bats to protect the world if the world does not pay for protection new hitlers arrafats,gadaffis and hezbollah terrosits will be along soon to take are democrasy

    Posted by: chuck newsum , Mar 8, 2019 6:50:20 PM | link

    i agrees we are the white hatters many folks hate the uk and usa and norway for are freedoms.
    we need to be able to affords a big bat to stomp the evil doers if we cannot afford the big bat folks must suffer.
    the uk and usa tax payers are sick of paying for new bats to protect the world if the world does not pay for protection new hitlers arrafats,gadaffis and hezbollah terrosits will be along soon to take are democrasy

    Posted by: chuck newsum | Mar 8, 2019 6:50:20 PM | link

    Yeah, Right , Mar 8, 2019 6:54:05 PM | link
    What better evidence that the MIC is bankrupting the USA?

    This is how empires fall - the cost of empire bleeds them white and eventually hollows them out to such a degree that collapse becomes inevitable.

    The USA is in for a massive shock over this: it believes those "allies" have no choice but to pay that extortion money.

    But they do have a choice.

    All these treaties have a withdrawal clause, and it doesn't seem to occur to the Americans that it's not just Uncle Sam who can invoke it.

    My money is on the Phillipines to be the first to invoke their clause. South Korea next, and only then the gutless Europeans.

    Australia last, or maybe not at all.

    Gonna be ugly when all 800 overseas military bases are in Oz. Not sure Sydney Harbour is able to accommodate all those warships....

    ADKC , Mar 8, 2019 6:57:39 PM | link
    james @57

    Because they are (particularly, in Europe) occupied countries and many things can be done to ensure compliance (economic, gladio operations, sanctions, theft of assets, prosecution for any offence [no matter how small, incidental, or accidental] if a dollar is involved, influx of refugees, war [directly or adjacent to target country], removal of post-colonial areas of influence, instigating financial collapse [Deutche Bank is supposed to be very vulnerable and would effect the entire EU/world], etc).

    Why couldn't France protect Alstom? Would France be able to resist if the US targeted the African CFA countries (which are France's neo-colonial milk-cows and essential to the economic well-being of France and detrimental to the African people subject to the CFA franc)?

    You "praise Trump" for raising this issue but it's just the same old, same old.

    The only place relatively secure is the Chinese/Russia milieu but that's the other side of the real "wall" and restricts the expansion of OBOR. And the price (for Russia and China) is having the entire western nuclear arsenal aimed at you.

    Whether or not any payments are actually made will make no difference; US troops will remain in occupied territory. (BTW: Europe will pay, the key is Germany. If Germany refuse to pay the rest will follow. But Germany can't fudge this; it would amount to open resistance and a re-negotiation of the outcome of the 2nd World War and, unless the US want to give up the fruits of their 1945 victory, I don't see that happening. Germany will realise that, if the US insist, they will have to comply; it's the direct consequence of losing the war and being occupied.]


    Piotr Berman , Mar 8, 2019 6:57:53 PM | link
    Moving American troops to Poland? Surely, the benefits are many. First, since the size of the military is much smaller than in Warsaw block times, there are many military grounds. Particularly in areas where forests are larger, climate harsher, and local men are fond of beating up strangers when they get drunk. Local roads are crappy and American soldiers are prone to hit side road trees. To summarize, martial skills and spirit are bound to improve.

    For even better results, they should be moved to Estonia, Latvia and Finnmark, areas bordering Russian Federation. OTOH, fleecing Balts would be like squeezing blood from stone. E.g. Lithuania is an exemplary NATO member, spending 2% of GDP on the military, and yet they cannot afford a tank.

    Hoarsewhisperer , Mar 8, 2019 7:01:03 PM | link
    Posted by: arby | Mar 8, 2019 6:18:07 PM | 59

    He's already said he doesn't believe the hype. He said it 60 Minutes after his inauguration...

    "We've spent 6 Trillion dollars in the Middle East....6 Trillion! We could have rebuilt America twice. It's unfair what's happened to the American people, and we're gonna put a stop to it."

    Remember now?

    arby , Mar 8, 2019 7:05:21 PM | link
    He believes the hype that America is protecting the world. He just thinks that the protected should at least pay for it.
    Peter AU 1 , Mar 8, 2019 7:05:53 PM | link
    The countries Trump wants to hit with fees are those he wanted the US military to pull out of anyway. The cold war relics. Europe, Korea ect. Any bases to do with Israel Iran Venezuela will not be hitting up the host country for extortion money. Bases he wants to use to pressure China will also likely be exempt.
    Those that do get hit with the fees, Trump doesn't give a shit if the US stays or leaves, so long as the US is well paid if it stays.
    Yeah, Right , Mar 8, 2019 7:06:07 PM | link
    @55 If the NATO countries refuse to pay then Trump can't respond by imposing sanctions on the individual countries.

    Well, he could, but what is the point?

    The USA can't sanction the EU, China and Russia. That is economic suicide.

    Trump would be creating a rival trade bloc that is many times bigger than the US economy. The American nightmare for over a century.

    English Outsider , Mar 8, 2019 7:06:41 PM | link
    BM @ 13

    I don't think Corbyn is the Messiah you take him for. He has sound ideas on not bombing foreigners - unusual in a British politician - but apart from that he's a busted flush. Not even close observers care to predict who will come out on top in the mud wrestling at Westminster but if Corbyn makes it watch him accommodate.

    .

    With great respect, "b", and as happens rarely, I don't believe this article is on target. America is the spine and most of the muscle of European defence. Forget Aachen. It'll be a long time before any purely European defence force is up to scratch.

    The Europeans are hoping that America will hold the fort in the meantime. That's not an alliance. It's a marriage of temporary convenience.

    Presumably the Americans must be sensing that.

    https://www.euractiv.com/section/defence-and-security/news/nine-european-countries-to-formalise-eu-defence-force-plan/

    /

    BraveNewWorld , Mar 8, 2019 7:08:50 PM | link
    Of course the other problem with this is it makes the American forces official mercenaries rather than national forces and all the legal consequences that flow from that.
    Augustin L , Mar 8, 2019 7:16:52 PM | link
    History first as tragedy and later as a farce. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "Beria reported only to Stalin and Stalin reported only to Satan." Now Bolton reports only to Trump and Chump reports only to Sreadsheets. So much winning and multi-dimensional chess... It's deplorable. Lol
    Yeah, Right , Mar 8, 2019 7:17:30 PM | link
    @59 and @60 This is why the shock will be all the more stunning to the Americans.

    Its "allies" have no problem with Uncle Sam spending like a drunken sailor. As far as they are concerned, well, who cares.

    But if Trump insists THEY pay for American profligacy then they are going to say "no".

    American pundits will then pontificate on how much MORE it would cost those allies, and the response will be: don't be stupid, we won't spend money to protect ourselves against a threat that doesn't exist.

    Because - and let's be honest here - in a post-NATO world the only military threat to Europe will be the USA, and the US Army will be on the other side of the Atlantic.

    karlof1 , Mar 8, 2019 7:17:31 PM | link
    I see a number of comments where the question's begged: Just what nation intends to invade Europe such that the continuing Outlaw US Empire's occupation's warranted? Putin and Xi want Europe to join the EAEU/BRI confab--invasion via commerce?!

    It appears the Anti-Communist Crusade is having a hard time dying in some quarters, particularly where continually invoking it is required dogma by controlling interests.

    arby , Mar 8, 2019 7:18:21 PM | link
    I think Trump and his MAGA boils everything down to money. Money goes out and money comes in. His job is to slow the money going out and get more money coming in. I think it is that simple. You get bombed by our smart freedom and democracy bombs then you should be decent enough to pay for it. Also our bases are protecting you from getting bombed by evildoers bombs. You should definitely pay for that. Why are we?
    Pft , Mar 8, 2019 7:34:09 PM | link
    I'd like to see a study of the amount of money spent into the local economy by the occupation forces in Germany, Japan and South Korea. Not just by the military but by the servicemen, families, civilian contractors for housing, travel, schools, food, entertainment, etc

    Obviously paying to be occupied is not happening, but there is some logic to the idea that the occupied receive some economic benefits from being occupied, including but not limited to a reduction in spending on their own military.

    Elliott A , Mar 8, 2019 7:39:53 PM | link
    This is, frankly, a lot of nonsensical showboating that will not have any actual effect on anything.

    -- "Pay us or we will leave"
    -- "We are not paying"
    -- "Um?"

    There's probably more bullshit going on behind the scenes but this just looks RIDICULOUS, as does the Venezuelan adventure.

    God Bless America!

    karlof1 , Mar 8, 2019 7:44:39 PM | link
    Pft @76--

    Any spending into the local economy is dwarfed by the amount of ecological damage done--just look at Subic Bay or Okinawa. And yes, studies have been done into both aspects; I've read them, but have no links.

    Pft , Mar 8, 2019 7:50:32 PM | link
    Horsewhisperer@66

    ." It's unfair what's happened to the American people, and we're gonna put a stop to it."

    Trump just does not believe in others hype, only his own hype. So show me evidence he is stopping the spending which was his main point in what was infaur to Americans. Spending on the military is even higher, 6 trillion is now 8 trillion even if the accountants still cant tell who got paid

    If Trump has shown us anything it is that he believes in the hype that whats good for Big Business is good for America. Even his request for more money from NATO countries is a request/demand to buy more from the MIC and not money to offset US military spending.

    Sure, the reasons for the increased military spending are bogus, but he adds fuel to supposed conflicts with Iran, Russia, China, North Korea that allows him to justify more spending. Trumps just replaced Obama/Bush hype with his own personal hype. Call it Trump hype.

    jonku , Mar 8, 2019 7:50:43 PM | link
    Pft, that's what economist Michael Hudson has been saying:

    The US military spending overseas during the Vietnam war resulted in a balance of payments crisis, with the surprise solution being the recycling of USD from offshore economies back into the US financial sector.

    And it's been going on ever since.

    I'll try to get a link ... Super Imperialism also recently linked by the indefatigable karlof1.

    The larger America's balance-of-payments deficit becomes, the more dollars end up in the hands of European, Asian and Near Eastern central banks, and the more money they must recycle back to the United States by buying U.S. Treasury bonds.

    It's worthwhile to read any and all of Hudson's writings, including his autobiographical essay. He has worked in the belly of the beast; Chase Manhattan bank and Standard Oil (Exxon) just for starters, the Treasury and Finance departments of USA and Canada amongst others.

    Here's that Michael Hudson Autobiography . It's both a video soliloquy and transcript.

    Yeah, Right , Mar 8, 2019 8:24:52 PM | link
    @70 English Outsider care to identify the military threat that US forces "have to hold the fort" over until the Europeans get their shit together?

    Who, exactly, is itching to invade Europe once US forces leave?

    If US forces leave then the need for European countries to increase their military spending is negligible.

    Indeed, it would be based on a single calculation: how big a threat is the USA?

    ben , Mar 8, 2019 8:26:56 PM | link
    OK fine, more hot air and theater. The BS spewed by this admin. is just friggen endless.

    Beats talking about real issues facing 99% of Americans...

    juliania , Mar 8, 2019 8:31:01 PM | link
    People, people!...Where will the military go? It's so obvious, it is staring us in the face...

    Space!

    Ah, but not just space --

    Mars!

    The War Planet!

    And best of all -- there's no people there! They can have their war games ad infinitum!!! To boldly go...ok, I know, that dates me...

    But oh my, blow it up! Blow it all up!! Keep on making horrible weapons, ship them off to Mars! Raytheon on steroids; what's not to love????? Trump will go down in history - no - up, up, and AWAY!!! [Just think - he'll have to visit the troops at Thanksgiving, take them a turkey - oh and take any Bushes and Boltons and Obamas and Clintons with him as it is rather far, a few Thanksgivings away but who's counting?]

    And let there be peace on earth. So, be it!

    Augustin L , Mar 8, 2019 8:36:01 PM | link
    Trump making brothels great again and declaring a truce to Chinese honey traps on US soil. The front goy is seriously compromised, deplorables will rue the day... https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article227186429.html?fbclid=IwAR1FkjigXKFOf8gcPoKRqwqfqSLRuzPNDig5sg7XWtBQClavo73RQRsVWYs
    c1ue , Mar 8, 2019 8:51:38 PM | link
    People are really thinking too hard.
    The Trump strategy is simple a la "The Apprentice":
    Get a bunch of ambitious people to commit to deliver to outlandish goals. These goals are set such that achieving or failing them, the blame goes to the failure but the success goes to the leader.
    If they fail: "You're Fired"
    If they succeed: "I'm Brilliant"
    Jiri , Mar 8, 2019 8:54:23 PM | link
    With the Soviets out of Germany it is only appropriate that the other three move out too.

    I am surprised why this wasn't negotiated then.

    Jackrabbit , Mar 8, 2019 9:00:37 PM | link
    This proposal broadens USA's demand that Germany terminate its plans to obtain energy imports from Russia via Northstream. Trump has already asserted publicly (weeks ago) that the added cost of LNG imports should be viewed as a defense-related cost. Via this new mechanism, the cost will be not be borne 100% by Germany.

    To understand why this new approach is likely to work, please read ADKC's comments.

    Pundits may poke fun but the AZ Empire is deadly serious and most AZ elites will be supportive. Especially when they are insulated from the cost (as they are).

    james , Mar 8, 2019 9:22:14 PM | link
    @6ADKC... i agree with arbys view on this... trump and an undue number of americans probably think they are doing some good protecting others.. it's laughable! now, as to your question about france and alstrom... i don't know the specifics, but i know how easily euro politicians, and politicians in general can be bought... i think it is excellent trump is raising this issue, as i hope the leadership in these poodle countries recognize their goose will be cooked soon enough, as ordinary people won't stand for it.. so, i am simplifying here and i have to race out and will be back later to add more.. i see what you and jackrabbit are getting at, but at some point this mafia-gangster strategy is going to collapse.. maybe i am too naive, or idealistic.. i will give you that!
    Bob , Mar 8, 2019 9:45:15 PM | link
    Zanon @23 you might follow this german website http://luftpost-kl.de/
    Interesting links from there:
    https://www.ewg.org/research/update-mapping-expanding-pfas-crisis
    https://partner-mco-archive.s3.amazonaws.com/client_files/1524589484.pdf
    https://theintercept.com/2018/11/30/pfoa-and-pfos-cause-lower-sperm-counts-and-smaller-penises-study-finds/
    https://theintercept.com/2018/02/10/firefighting-foam-afff-pfos-pfoa-epa/
    NemesisCalling , Mar 8, 2019 9:50:15 PM | link
    @87 jackrabbit

    Your assessment is fine and not without merits but the other variable you seem to be missing is the German people and others in Europe, themselves.

    Will this cowtowing to the US bullying not in the end fully ensconse their leaders as the globalist shills they truly are and thus lead to their demise? That is what b us alluding to. We are unaware of Trump's motivations, here, but that is inconsequential when we are talking about him waking up the people of Europe to finally give US the boot.

    haze , Mar 8, 2019 9:51:19 PM | link
    86

    Well it was sort of ...

    https://www.rt.com/usa/germany-us-pact-komossa-978/

    lysias , Mar 8, 2019 10:08:12 PM | link
    "There's room at the top, they are telling you still, but first you must learn to smile as you kill," sang John Lennon.

    Obama learned that lesson.

    Zachary Smith , Mar 8, 2019 10:37:57 PM | link
    While cruising around the internet tubes I ran into a casual remark about Syria to the effect that since the US is doing an occupation there, aren't "we" entitled to payment? If there is any truth to a spate of recent headlines, the neocons have already solved that one.

    U.S. Forces Steal Tons Of Gold Captured By ISIS In Syria, Iraq

    How would ISIS have acquired any tonnage of gold? Perhaps it was part-payment for the oil they sold until the Russians intervened. (the US sure didn't bother those sales!) More likely they stole it from citizens and businesses. There have been LOTS of reports about the US secretly rescuing ISIS fighters. Now here is yet another motive for those airlifts. I predict any such gold will be quickly melted down so as to make it forever untraceable. Would Pompeo or Bolton do such a thing?

    Hmm. That's a really hard one.

    Zachary Smith , Mar 8, 2019 10:46:32 PM | link
    @ lysias #92

    Oh my, but your post triggered the memory of yet another post I saw earlier.

    Obama was a smiling murderer, says Ilhan Omar

    It's bad enough that Omar tackled AIPAC, but to dump on Saint Obama is likely to get her pegged as a "self-hating negro". Wonder what Speaker Nancy will do this time? Threaten to waterboard her?

    Steven Keith , Mar 8, 2019 11:12:13 PM | link
    Speaking of invasions and occupation...

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    اگر آپ کے ایئرپورٹ امیگریشن اہلکاروں سے اچھے تعلقات ہیں تو آپ اپنے پسند کے ممالک میں سفر کر سکتے ہیں۔
    آپ ان ڈاکیومنٹ سے کینیڈا، انگلینڈ، امریکہ اور کسی بھی دوسرے ملک میں نوکری اور رہاہیش حاصل کر سکتے ہیں اور اپنا بینک اکاؤنٹ کھلوا سکتے ہیں۔
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    MarkU , Mar 8, 2019 11:12:50 PM | link
    @70 English Outsider.

    Re: "America is the spine and most of the muscle of European defence."

    Defence against whom exactly? People pushing the narrative that the Russian Federation is a menace never mention the numbers involved. The European countries have roughly 3 times the population, 5 times the military spending and a massive advantage in GDP, look it up. If you add the US to the equation then more like 5 times the population and 15 times the military spending. The Russians have nukes of course but with the odds stacked up so spectacularly against them I don't blame them for thinking they need them as a deterrent. If you had another adversary in mind don't be shy.

    Pft , Mar 8, 2019 11:36:05 PM | link

    Jonku@80

    Thanks for the links. I have been following Hudson for the last 12 years and agree with much of what he says. I do disagree that dollar holdings are a tax on other countries. These dollars for the most part are paid to companies for goods and services. They exchange some of this with their central bank to invest locally or pay expenses. The central bank then prints their local currency out of thin air to exchange. The USD are then counted as reserves which allows them to create more local currency by 10+ times, depending on their reserve requirements. This money is spent or invested in the local economy.

    The USD reserves can also be used to fund their own trade deficits with other countries, or pay of USD denominated loans

    A lot has changed since 1971. After the Vietnam War was winding down the US pulled out of Bretton Woods as Hudson anticipated. They then established the Petrodollar which was not anticipated. This put more USD into the hands of OPEC nations as they were told to accept only USD and in return would be allowed higher oil prices, and much was recycled back to the US, but they and the rest of the world had other options.

    This option was the Eurodollar which began in the 60's in a limited fashion . A later sub-option was Eurodollars in the many tax havens, which developed first on British territories and then in the Carribean.

    These options being exercised limited the amount of dollars coming back to the US and caused higher interest rates in order to attract some more of the dollars back.

    The 1985 Plaza accord put in place an agreement to weaken the dollar with the US to buy more imported goods as they encouraged more US companies to move offshore to produce in low wage countries to keep inflation down. In return the deficits would be funded by other countries resending back the USD they received by buying treasuries. This was when the US realized they could spend and run up fiscal/trade deficits without consequences, and so they did. Oh my.

    Then after the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent looting bu oligarchs the Eurodollar Market, especially in the tax havens , exploded even further as these oligarchs and western investors transferred their stolen loot to these offshore tax havens which were already loaded with dollars from the criminal drug trade (mafia-five eyes) and multinational corporations evading taxes at home

    In 1990 the Fed then made it easier for US banks to import and use these Eurodollars by setting a zero reserve requirement (same as Fed Funds) on Eurodollar deposits which they could then loan out at many order of magnitudes. This fueled the great credit and asset bubbles using drug money and stolen Soviet asset money which came in to buy Trumps property and stocks. It also allowed banks to increase credit to cash strapped consumers who felt the pinch of neoliberalism and globalization, since the banks were flush with cheap cash. This led to the Great Collapse in 2008

    Added to this Eurodollar supply from 1993 was Chinas own oligarchs growing increasingly rich from US investment/trade and from converting the peoples assets to individual party members who wanted a safe place to hide their loot and evade taxes in China

    Quantitative Easing following the crash of 2008 provided another source of a cash influx for the US. Toxic waste from foreign and local banks were bought with USD printed from thin air.

    Recent Quantitative Tightening meant trouble though. So Trumps new tax measures made it possible for US corporations to return Eurodollars hidden offshore which is fueling stock buybacks and propping up the market. If not for this a 2008 collapse would be here.

    When the next crash happens, I am sure the US will surprise us yet again. Pretty sure the fix will be named Green something or another and a Carbon Dollar/Tax


    Friar Ockham , Mar 9, 2019 12:14:47 AM | link
    What Pres. Trump is doing is a clever ploy to start bringing the troops home as promised. That is his way of announcing the event.
    james , Mar 9, 2019 1:38:28 AM | link
    @70 english outsider.. i agree with @13 BM... however, the msm in the uk is so warped, maybe they will succeed in marginalizing corbyn.. i thought this article today from jonathan cook was pretty good.. as for the usa being the backbone of europe military and etc.. europe needs to grow a spine themselves and stop taking it in the rear from the usa.. this suggestion from trump is a good place to start by saying no... maybe the poodles are incapable.. that sounds like what you are saying..

    @pft... i think i agree with you, although i don't study the financial dynamics enough.. the bailout from 2008 will be followed by more bailouts.. they will just be bigger... that is the name of the game - bust and bailout.. bailing out the banks, until the world asks for something different..

    iv> Trump May Charge Allies Up To 600% More For Hosting US Troops
    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-08/trump-may-charge-allies-600-more-hosting-us-troops

    Posted by: John Smith , Mar 9, 2019 2:12:24 AM | link

    Trump May Charge Allies Up To 600% More For Hosting US Troops
    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-08/trump-may-charge-allies-600-more-hosting-us-troops

    Posted by: John Smith | Mar 9, 2019 2:12:24 AM | link

    [Mar 09, 2019] According to the text of the application Dems candidates swear to be "faithful" to the "interests, welfare and success of the Democratic Party," but not to its principles. That's because there aren't any.

    Mar 09, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Note that the candidate swears to be "faithful" to the "interests, welfare and success of the Democratic Party," but not to its principles. That's because there aren't any.

    Readers may enjoy picking through the bafflegab, because I think you could drive a whole fleet of trucks through the loopholes. Here, for example, is Benjamin Studebaker's view : "A Second Term for Trump is Better Than Beto."

    Nobody, after all, said that success had to be immediate ; perhaps a short term failure improves the ultimate welfare and prospects for success for the party.

    In a way, this McCarthy-ite armraising is a kludge, another symptom of a fraying system: Exactly as we can no longer, apparently, trust voters to pick a President, and so must give veto power to the intelligence community, so we can no longer trust primary voters to pick a candidate, and the "National Chairperson" must step in if they somehow get the wrong answer. Pesky voters!

    [Mar 08, 2019] The Orientalism of Western Russophobia by Max Parry

    Mar 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of Edward W. Said's pioneering book, Orientalism , as well as fifteen years since the Palestinian-American intellectual's passing. To bid farewell to such an important scholar shortly after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which Said fiercely criticized until his dying breath before succumbing to leukemia, made an already tremendous loss that much more impactful. His seminal text forever reoriented political discourse by painstakingly examining the overlooked cultural imperialism of colonial history in the West's construction of the so-called Orient. Said meticulously interrogated the Other-ing of the non-Western world in the humanities, arts, and anthropology down to its minutiae. As a result, the West was forced to confront not just its economic and political plunder but the long-established cultural biases filtering the lens through which it viewed the East which shaped its dominion over it.

    His writings proved to be so influential that they laid the foundations for what is now known as post-colonial theory. This became an ironic category as the author himself would strongly reject any implication that the subjugation of developing countries is a thing of the past. How apropos that the Mandatory Palestine-born writer's death came in the midst of the early stages of the 'War on Terror' that made clear Western imperialism is very much alive. Despite its history of ethnic cleansing, slavery, and war, the United States had distinguished itself from Britain and France in that it had never established its own major colonies within the Middle East, Asia or North Africa in the heart of the Orient. According to Said, it was now undergoing this venture as the world's sole remaining superpower following the end of the Cold War with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Today's political atmosphere makes the Bush era seem like eons ago. Thanks to the shameful rehabilitation of neoconservatism by centrist extremists, Americans fail to understand how Trumpism emerged from the pandora's box of destructiveness of Bush policies that destabilized the Middle East and only increased international terrorism. Since then, another American enemy has been manufactured in the form of the Russian Federation and its President, Vladimir Putin, who drew the ire of the West after a resurgent Moscow under his leadership began to contain U.S. hegemony. This reached a crescendo during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election with the dubious accusations of election interference made by the same intelligence agencies that sold the pack of lies that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction. The establishment has even likened the alleged intrusion by Moscow to 9/11.

    If a comparison between the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and the still unproven allegations of Russian meddling seems outrageous, it is precisely such an analogy that has been made by Russiagate's own biggest proponents, from neoconservative columnist Max Boot to Hillary Clinton herself . Truthfully, it is the climate of hysteria and dumbing down of discourse to such rigid dichotomies following both events where a real similarity can be drawn. The 'with us or against us' chasm that followed 9/11 has reemerged in the 'either/or' post-election polarity of the Trump era whereby all debate within the Overton window is pigeonholed into a 'pro vs. anti-Trump' or 'pro vs. anti-Russia' false dilemma. It is even perpetrated by some on the far left , e.g. if one critiques corporate media or Russiagate, they are grouped as 'pro-Trump' or 'pro-Putin' no matter their political orientation. This dangerous atmosphere is feeding an unprecedented wave of censorship of dissenting voices across the spectrum.

    In his final years, not only did Edward Said condemn the Bush administration but highlighted how corporate media was using bigoted tropes in its representations of Arabs and Muslims to justify U.S. foreign policy. Even though it has gone mostly undetected, the neo-McCarthyist frenzy following the election has produced a similar travesty of caricatures depicting Russia and Vladimir Putin. One such egregious example was a July 2018 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Russia's Turn to Its Asian Past" featuring an illustration portraying Vladimir Putin as Genghis Khan. The racist image and headline suggested that Russia is somehow inherently autocratic because of its past occupation under the Mongol Empire during its conquest of Eastern Europe and the Kievan Rus state in the 13th century. In a conceptual revival of the Eurocentric trope of Asiatic or Oriental despotism, the hint is that past race-mixing is where Russia inherited this tyrannical trait. When the cover story appeared, there was virtually no outcry due to the post-election delirium and everyday fear-mongering about Russia that is now commonplace in the media.

    The overlooked casual racism used to demonize Russia in the new Cold War's propaganda doesn't stop there. One of the main architects of Russiagate, former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, in an interview with NBC's Meet the Press on the reported meddling stated :

    "And just the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were concerned."

    Clapper, whose Office of the DNI published the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections", has been widely praised and cited by corporate media as a trustworthy source despite his previous history of making intentionally false statements at a public hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee denying that the National Security Agency (NSA) was unconstitutionally spying on U.S. citizens.

    The disclosures of NSA activities by whistleblower Edward Snowden that shocked the world should have discredited Clapper's status as a reliable figure, but not for mainstream media which has continuously colluded with the deep state during the entire Russia investigation. In fact, the scandal has been an opportunity to rehabilitate figures like the ex-spymaster complicit in past U.S. crimes from surveillance to torture. Shortly after the interview with NBC, Clapper repeated his prejudiced sentiments against Russians in a speech at the National Press Club in Australia:

    "But as far as our being intimate allies, trusting buds with the Russians that is just not going to happen. It is in their genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed, to the United States and to Western democracies."

    The post-election mass Trump derangement has not only enabled wild accusations of treason to be made without sufficient evidence to support them, but such uninhibited xenophobic remarks to go without notice or disapproval.

    In fact, liberals have seemingly abandoned their supposed progressive credence across the board while suffering from their anti-Russia neurological disorder. In an exemplar of yellow journalism, outlets like NBC News published sensational articles alleging that because of the perceived ingratiation between Trump and Putin, there was an increase in Russian 'birth tourism' in the United States. More commonly known by the pejorative 'anchor babies', birth tourism is the false claim that many immigrants travel to countries for the purpose of having children in order to obtain citizenship. While there may be individual cases, the idea that it is an epidemic is a complete myth  --  the vast majority of immigration is motivated by labor demands and changes in political or socio-economic factors in their native countries, whether it is from the global south or Eastern Europe. Trump has been rightfully criticized for promoting this falsehood regarding undocumented immigrants and his executive orders targeting birthright citizenship, but it appears liberals are willing to unfairly apply this same fallacy toward Russians for political reasons.

    ... ... ...

    Yee , says: March 7, 2019 at 3:26 am GMT

    This connected continents of Europe and Asia have 70% of the world population, so it is the center of the world. But the United States is not a local power, it's thousands of miles away from it. Therefore, the US NEEDS conflicts in Europe and Asia to maintain its influence in the world stage and its status of "safe haven for capita", as it found out in WW2 that can be very profitable.

    Peace and integration in Europe and Asia is the last thing the US wants. This is why it'd try its hardest to stir up tension in Europe, Asia and MiddleEast. The Russians were naive to believe it was about Communism.

    World dominance has been very profitable for the capital class, whether the cost for world dominance worth it for the working class, is open for debate, as citizens of the dominate nation enjoy nice benefits too.

    [Mar 07, 2019] Guardian adopted nazy propaganda cartoons to demonize Russia

    Mar 07, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Steve Bell cartoon of Putin in The Guardian (left) contrasted with Nazi propaganda (right).

    [Mar 07, 2019] The democracy problem that has been brewing for 40 years has been the practical curtailment of representative democracy in the West. The chief driver of this has been the institutional encroachment of the market, from supranational bodies down to local authorities.

    Notable quotes:
    "... One thing your blog ignores is the role of the media (note that Johnson and Gove had secondary careers as journalists). Democracy specifically doesn't work if the public are shamelessly misled by the people whose job it is to inform others. ..."
    "... The key question for Burkeans is: to what degree do these elites look out for the interests of the people as a whole, instead of their own interests? ..."
    "... The EU vote was influenced not only by the belief that "Europe" was symbolic of this decline, but by the realisation that a referendum was a rare opportunity for direct democracy ..."
    "... The Left get a bloody nose from the electorate over a major shift in the course society is going to take for the first time in 30 years and suddenly democracy isn't a satisfactory way of deciding things. ..."
    "... How convenient. I've always said the Left don't really give a sh*t about the people they purport to represent, its all just a facade to gain power. I think the response to the Brexit vote pretty much settles it. ..."
    "... I think if the Australian system of compulsory [voting] was introduced it would help - by making zealots a smaller proportion of the electorate and by (hopefully) making it clear that voting is not a right to get what you want, but a responsibility to vote in the public interest. ..."
    "... This is the problem with the state of our politics. There is a group of people who think they have some kind of right to sit in judgment on the others and decide what is right for them. They have unilaterally split the world into sensible rational people like us and stupid people not like us. They have decided that people who seek out rotten fish are clearly stupid, when they might have decided that "One's man's trash is another man's treasure" ..."
    "... The politicians are the ones who are informed and they have a difficult job. Sometimes they have to decide to do things which are unpopular but which will benefit society at large. ..."
    "... Our FPTP system ensures that only a minority of an elite make these decisions, and sadly the rest of the tories fall into line like willing sheep. Ultimately the question for the people is whether they can trust the decision-makers to decide on their behalf. Over the last few decades that trust has been eroded. ..."
    "... There is, I believe, a political consequence of our modern "knowledge explosion" that has yet to be widely recognized. That lack of recognition may have very grave consequences. ..."
    "... Human knowledge has vastly outstripped the capacity of any single human mind. ..."
    "... The men who wrote the Constitution of the United States of America "knew everything". As a group, they held all human knowledge: economics, physics, medicine, geology, ... everything! ..."
    "... Back then, any (fairly intelligent) person who was determined enough, could collect all the knowledge needed to competently understand the policy decisions that the Founding Fathers were making. ..."
    "... Democracy was possible, because demos could in fact be competent. ..."
    "... This is no longer true. Demos has absolutely no chance of being competent on the complex and interlocking topics of today's world. If an incompetent demos tries to run the world, the inevitable result is erratic, erroneous policy with no basis in fact: Tea Party America. ..."
    "... We are not competent to decide policy; but no political organization has yet had the courage to say, "We propose to choose the experts who MUST decide and manage policies on such-and-such criteria"... which would be the best that demos could hope to decide with any degree of competence. ..."
    "... I fear that democracy is a zombie. Walking dead. ..."
    Oct 07, 2016 | stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com
    Hilary Richards | October 06, 2016 at 02:20 PM
    One thing your blog ignores is the role of the media (note that Johnson and Gove had secondary careers as journalists). Democracy specifically doesn't work if the public are shamelessly misled by the people whose job it is to inform others.

    The people have asked for rotting fish because they were told it was good nourishing fish.

    Dmcdougall | October 06, 2016 at 03:18 PM
    Traditionally, representative democracy has maintained a mainly Burkean ethos, and respecting 'the will of the people' has largely been done only when it represents the desires of (some set of) elites. Brexit is largely falling into this camp -- May et al are claiming clear mandates for specific policies from a vote which offered, at best, a murky amalgamation of possible motives (as well as very likely the problems of misinformation/ignorance).

    There has for the last half-century or so been a push toward removing this layer of Burkean restraint -- not institutionally, but culturally, in rhetoric if not in practice. The current Tory policy move to the hard right on immigration makes canny use of this, but the anti-Burkean left seems very happy to let this happen in its respect for methodology over outcomes.

    Respect for the trappings of democracy (voting, the will of the people) without the accompanying information & deliberation seems a shallow form of democracy. I too would like to see the left-intelligentsia's critique of Burke struggle against these challenges of voter understanding, and to propose a new model for achieving Burke's desired ends, but I'm not sure that epistocracy moves us any closer to a fair society than the system of having a powerful class of elites act as a check on the will of the people. The key question for Burkeans is: to what degree do these elites look out for the interests of the people as a whole, instead of their own interests?

    From Arse To Elbow | October 06, 2016 at 03:58 PM
    The democracy problem that has been brewing for 40 years has been the practical curtailment of representative democracy in the West. The chief driver of this has been the institutional encroachment of the market, from supranational bodies down to local authorities. The decline in respect for the political class is due more to a belief that our elected representatives are powerless than that they are corrupt.

    The EU vote was influenced not only by the belief that "Europe" was symbolic of this decline, but by the realisation that a referendum was a rare opportunity for direct democracy (it's worth wondering to what extent the "excitement" around the Scottish independence vote fed into this). Michael Gove may be an idiot, but his jibe at "experts" resonated.

    Any theory of politics that doesn't address this encroachment by the market is just rearranging the deckchairs.

    Jim | October 06, 2016 at 09:28 PM
    The Left get a bloody nose from the electorate over a major shift in the course society is going to take for the first time in 30 years and suddenly democracy isn't a satisfactory way of deciding things.

    How convenient. I've always said the Left don't really give a sh*t about the people they purport to represent, its all just a facade to gain power. I think the response to the Brexit vote pretty much settles it.

    reason | October 07, 2016 at 09:34 AM

    I think if the Australian system of compulsory [voting] was introduced it would help - by making zealots a smaller proportion of the electorate and by (hopefully) making it clear that voting is not a right to get what you want, but a responsibility to vote in the public interest.
    Dipper | October 07, 2016 at 09:37 AM
    "If a man asks for a lot of rotting fish, should we blame the fishmonger for giving it him?"

    This is the problem with the state of our politics. There is a group of people who think they have some kind of right to sit in judgment on the others and decide what is right for them. They have unilaterally split the world into sensible rational people like us and stupid people not like us. They have decided that people who seek out rotten fish are clearly stupid, when they might have decided that "One's man's trash is another man's treasure"

    http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/icelandic-cuisine-hakarl-iceland-fermented-shark.html

    aragon | October 07, 2016 at 10:10 AM
    @TonyBrite

    Not Social Darwinism but Psychology, backed by experimental evidence. But people aren't killing each other in the Middle East in a spasm of tribalism? And when they come here they will be enlightened by your views and not keep their culture, attitudes to women and prejudices, as the Swedes about that one, and social cohesion.

    Rather than voting from experience it was mob mentality? Half the country in a civilised exercise in democracy over several months. No they have experienced immigration and rejected free movement.

    Boston in Lincolnshire is one of the areas most impacted by European immigration and voted Brexit.

    The areas that voted remain are the areas doing best from the status quo e.g London and the South East, who don't want to rock the boat.

    towerbridge | October 07, 2016 at 01:37 PM
    Aragon, you have just vindicated TonyBrite's point. You start with stating that there are people in the middle east who have different values.

    You then connect that to the EU. This is a deliberate conflation I have seen time and time again with immigration especially in our awful media.

    As Dave Hansell said a few posts ago, you will find that save for one year immigration has primarily came from outside the EU.

    This is exactly why the complex decision of brexit should not have been left to the media in this country and a simple vote, as it just brought out base prejudices and ill-informed opinions.

    For example, how many people knew that when outside the EU it would be unlawful to subsidise the farming industry? (WTO rules) or how many people believed the propaganda that the original EC treaty voted on in 1975 was really just a trade treaty (a look at that treaty, article 46, "social policy" would have ended that argument)?

    The politicians are the ones who are informed and they have a difficult job. Sometimes they have to decide to do things which are unpopular but which will benefit society at large.

    I agree with you, Chris, that it is difficult to do, but what I would say is that we could make a better fist of it than we currently do. One of the ways of doing this would be to increase representation at governing level and force more negotiation/compromise. Our FPTP system ensures that only a minority of an elite make these decisions, and sadly the rest of the tories fall into line like willing sheep. Ultimately the question for the people is whether they can trust the decision-makers to decide on their behalf. Over the last few decades that trust has been eroded.

    Robert Nelson | October 07, 2016 at 01:58 PM
    There is, I believe, a political consequence of our modern "knowledge explosion" that has yet to be widely recognized. That lack of recognition may have very grave consequences.

    The founders of our "Modern Occidental World" -- France's philosophes, Great Britain's Royal Academy, America's Founding Fathers -- were men (and a very few particularly enterprising women) who "knew everything". If you google "the last man who knew everything" you'll find several candidates... but none are modern. Even such wide-ranging intellects as Hawking and Sagan never pretended to "know everything".

    Human knowledge has vastly outstripped the capacity of any single human mind.

    That seems like an obvious statement... but it is in fact quite a recent situation. The men who wrote the Constitution of the United States of America "knew everything". As a group, they held all human knowledge: economics, physics, medicine, geology, ... everything!

    When those men decided policy, they could -- BY THEMSELVES -- take account of ALL human knowledge.

    Back then, any (fairly intelligent) person who was determined enough, could collect all the knowledge needed to competently understand the policy decisions that the Founding Fathers were making.

    (Not incidentally, human population and human technology were still such that the Earth could digest any negative consequences of erroneous decisions.)

    Democracy was possible, because demos could in fact be competent.

    This is no longer true. Demos has absolutely no chance of being competent on the complex and interlocking topics of today's world. If an incompetent demos tries to run the world, the inevitable result is erratic, erroneous policy with no basis in fact: Tea Party America.

    We are not competent to decide policy; but no political organization has yet had the courage to say, "We propose to choose the experts who MUST decide and manage policies on such-and-such criteria"... which would be the best that demos could hope to decide with any degree of competence.

    I fear that democracy is a zombie. Walking dead.

    And we have yet to even begin to discuss its replacement.

    [Mar 07, 2019] "Fake Wrestling" theory

    Mar 07, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Pft , Mar 5, 2019 8:17:55 PM | link

    tNot so puzzling if you buy into the "Fake Wrestling" theory. Since Bill Clinton each party gets 8 years on the throne then hands off to the other party. Dems just playing their part as they did in the 2016 election. Both parties controlled by the corporate and cognitive elites pursuing their globalist agenda thats occasionally masked by nationalism to appease the herd.

    China has multiple parties within the CCP. The CCP is the visible face of authority. In the West the CCP equivalent is hidden, preferring to allow each party in turn to accept the blame for executing their agenda. Every 8 years the herd votes for Hope and Change or the lesser evil and watches in amazement as nothing changes and lesser evil becomes more, only to try again in the next cycle. Kind of like Groundhog Day.

    When half the population has an IQ under 100, its easy for those with IQ's 4-6 SD above average to manipulate the herd given the tools they have today. People can be made to believe anything and much of what people believe is not true.

    bevin , Mar 5, 2019 9:53:36 PM | link

    Pft@54

    "Every 8 years the herd votes for Hope and Change or the lesser evil and watches in amazement as nothing changes and lesser evil becomes more, only to try again in the next cycle. Kind of like Groundhog Day.....When half the population has an IQ under 100, its easy for those with IQ's 4-6 SD above average to manipulate the herd given the tools they have today. People can be made to believe anything and much of what people believe is not true."

    My guess is that this contempt for "the herd" must be accompanied by a very generous estimation of your own independence of mind and superiority of intellect.

    My question, is how can democracy work in the world which you describe? Or would it just consist of the idiotic "herd" listening to your ideas, applauding and carrying out orders?

    [Mar 07, 2019] Will Russiagate witch hunt be replaced with Chinagate

    Mar 07, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Shee Meng , Mar 6, 2019 2:32:42 AM | 90

    National Defence Strategy, FBI etc, are targeting everything Chinese. Building case against Chinese hackers without evidence.

    I'm inclined to agree with that.
    At this point; I try to listen to everything; and believe nothing...

    Shee Meng , Mar 6, 2019 2:32:42 AM | link John Smith , Mar 6, 2019 4:14:30 AM | link

    Now US government and media, think tanks, researchers, etc are creating Chinagate.
    ---------------------------

    You bet! Who wants to become an outsider, being a leader now!

    This is China's plan to eclipse Silicon Valley

    China's Pearl River delta is the site of the most dramatic urbanization in human history. The area is home to nearly 70 million people. It contributes an eighth of China's GDP, with an economy worth $1.5 trillion - roughly the same as Australia and Spain, and nearly as big as Russia and South Korea.

    Now the Chinese government has outlined its plans to unite what it calls the Greater Bay Area into a giant megalopolis, and transform it into a high-tech centre that could rival California's Silicon Valley and Japan's Tokyo Bay.

    John Smith , Mar 6, 2019 4:18:02 AM | link
    This is China's plan to eclipse Silicon Valley

    China's Pearl River delta is the site of the most dramatic urbanization in human history. The area is home to nearly 70 million people. It contributes an eighth of China's GDP, with an economy worth $1.5 trillion - roughly the same as Australia and Spain, and nearly as big as Russia and South Korea.

    Now the Chinese government has outlined its plans to unite what it calls the Greater Bay Area into a giant megalopolis, and transform it into a high-tech centre that could rival California's Silicon Valley and Japan's Tokyo Bay.

    John Smith , Mar 6, 2019 4:20:48 AM | link
    Trump is right that the US risks losing the 5G race, Huawei chairman says

    President Trump is right that the U.S. risks being left behind on 5G, Huawei's rotating chairman said on Sunday in Barcelona.

    ">link

    Shee Meng , Mar 6, 2019 2:32:42 AM | link


    Russiagate is no more. Now US government and media, think tanks, researchers, etc are creating Chinagate.

    National Defence Strategy, FBI etc, are targeting everything Chinese. Building case against Chinese hackers without

    evidence.

    V , Mar 6, 2019 3:58:50 AM | link

    [Mar 06, 2019] The faces of US elite: The marasmic McCain, marasmic Pelosi, and hysterical Max Boot, the openly lying Clapper and the hate-filled profiteer Brennan

    Notable quotes:
    "... The next two weeks will show whether Trump is the real deal, or just another schlub. ..."
    Jul 27, 2017 | www.unz.com

    annamaria > , July 27, 2017 at 8:06 pm GMT

    @Seamus Padraig

    His greatest accomplishment may well be that he has caused Washington's Swamp Dwellers to rise from the ooze and expose themselves for all the world to see. That's weakened them immeasurably, perhaps fatally. To be sure, that's no small thing, and the next Trump to come along is now on full alert as to who & what to bring with him.
    You nailed it. Even if they do eventually succeed in foiling Trump, things will never be the same again. The whole world is watching the circus in Washington, and so Washington's brand ('democracy') is now shot. 2016 was indeed an annus mirabilis! " things will never be the same again. The whole world is watching the circus in Washington.."

    It looks and sounds like dementia – as if a sick person behaving inappropriately, showing unprovoked aggression (like some Alzheimer patients), using silly or senseless phrasing, and having the unreasonable demands and uncontrolled fits of rage like a spoiled child. The marasmic McCain, marasmic Pelosi, and hysterical Max Boot, the openly lying Clapper and the hate-filled profiteer Brennan.

    What a panopticon.

    Here is an outline of the current state of "western values" by Patrick Armstrong: http://turcopolier.typepad.com

    Jeff Davis > , July 27, 2017 at 8:54 pm GMT

    As I have written here and elsewhere, President Swamp Drainer needs to get control of the DoJ. He got rid of Comey, which was good, but got Rosenstein and Mueller in response. Meanwhile Jeff Sessions is twiddling his thumbs re the Russia witch hunt. Perhaps his recusal was appropriate, but he's not doing anything whatsoever regarding Swamp Draining. So it feels like he's a disingenuous old guard GOPer, who wants to obstruct any real progress, while dragging his feet with do-nothingness obscured behind a facade of law enforcement community boosterism. By this tactic the GOP attempts to stall until 2020, when it can then point at Trump's failures (failures they have enabled by their stalling, wink wink) and then campaign to take "their" party back. In short, Sessions may just be an anti-Trump "mole" planted in the single most important position with regard to swamp draining, in order to ***prevent*** any swamp draining.

    Let me be clear: in the last 24 years the DC political class has gone almost entirely criminal, with the last 13 years dedicated to serial war crimes. In this sort of situation the DoJ, AG, and FBI head, becomes corrupted, and turns away from the rule of law to become a shield for the DC criminal despotism.

    So watch closely what happens next. Just today rumors have come out -- though I've been speaking of this for several weeks now -- that there is talk in the White House about ***recess appointments*** . We have reached the crucial moment, and I for one am surprised that, as important as this is, it has not been prominent in public discussion until now. The "August" was scheduled to begin at the end of business tomorrow, July 28th. Because of the health care business, McConnell has postponed it for two weeks, so let's call it for close of business Friday, August 11th. That's fifteen days from now.

    When Congress goes home fifteen days from now, this country and the world may very well change forever. Go to Wikipedia and look up "recess appointment". Here's what you will find:

    " a recess appointment is an appointment by the President of a federal official while the U.S. Senate is in recess.

    Recess appointments are authorized by Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which states:

    The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session .

    If Trump is the fighter I think he is, then this is what he has been waiting for, ever so patiently these last six months. Notice that the Congress cannot countermand recess appointments. Recess appointments end by expiration, and then only at the end of the following Congressional session. Other than impeachment, Congress cannot stop Trump from doing this .

    So Trump dumps Sessions, purges the anti-Trump prosecutors from previous administrations, and appoints a new FBI head and dozens of fire-breathing swamp-draining prosecutors who immediately start doling out orange jumpsuits. He could -- not saying that he would execute this "nuclear option" -- but he could lock up virtually the entire Congress on war crimes charges; Neocons for conspiracy to commit war crimes; Cheney, Addington, Yoo, and Bybee to the Hague for torture; Hillary and Obama for Libya.

    Control of the DoJ is the key.

    The next two weeks will show whether Trump is the real deal, or just another schlub.

    [Mar 05, 2019] The Shadow Governments Destruction Of Democracy

    Highly recommended!
    Trump actually proved to be very convenient President to CIA., Probably as convenient as Obama... Both completely outsourced foreign policy to neocons and CIA )in this sense the appointment of Pompeo is worst joke Trump could play with the remnants of US democracy_ .
    Notable quotes:
    "... "The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street." ..."
    "... "It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads." ..."
    "... Greenwald asserts the the CIA preferred Clinton because, like the clandestine agency, she supported regime change in Syria. In contrast, Trump dismissed America's practice of nation-building and declined to tow the line on ousting foreign leaders, instead advocating working with Russia to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups. ..."
    "... "So, Trump's agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted," Greenwald argued. "Clinton's was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they've been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him." ..."
    "... But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They're barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. ..."
    "... He also points out the left's hypocrisy in condemning Flynn for lying when James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration, perpetuated lies without ever being held accountable. ..."
    Feb 19, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
    And on the heels of Dennis Kucinich's warnings , The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, who opposes Trump for a variety of reasons, warns that siding with the evidently powerful Deep State in the hopes of undermining Trump is dangerous. As TheAntiMedia's Carey Wedler notes , Greenwald asserted in an interview with Democracy Now, published on Thursday, that this boils down to a fight between the Deep State and the Trump administration.

    https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2017/2/16/greenwald_empowering_the_deep_state_to

    Though Greenwald has argued the leaks were "wholly justified" in spite of the fact they violated criminal law, he also questioned the motives behind them.

    "It's very possible - I'd say likely - that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble," he wrote. "Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House."

    According to an in-depth report by journalist Mike Lofgren:

    "The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street."

    As Greenwald explained during his interview:

    "It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads."

    Greenwald believes this division is a result of the Deep State's disapproval of Trump's foreign policy and the fact that the intelligence community overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Trump because of her hawkish views. Greenwald noted that Mike Morell, acting CIA chief under Obama, and Michael Hayden, who ran both the CIA and NSA under George W. Bush, openly spoke out against Trump during the presidential campaign.

    Greenwald asserts the the CIA preferred Clinton because, like the clandestine agency, she supported regime change in Syria. In contrast, Trump dismissed America's practice of nation-building and declined to tow the line on ousting foreign leaders, instead advocating working with Russia to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups.

    "So, Trump's agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted," Greenwald argued. "Clinton's was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they've been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him."

    "[In] the closing months of the Obama administration, they put together a deal with Russia to create peace in Syria. A few days later, a military strike in Syria killed a hundred Syrian soldiers and that ended the agreement. What happened is inside the intelligence and the Pentagon there was a deliberate effort to sabotage an agreement the White House made."

    Greenwald, who opposes Trump for a variety of reasons, warns that siding with the evidently powerful Deep State in the hopes of undermining Trump is dangerous. "Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving," he said, likely alluding to a recent court ruling that nullified Trump's travel ban.

    He continued:

    "But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They're barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity."

    He argues that mentality is "a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it," highlighting that members of both prevailing political parties are praising the Deep State's audacity in leaking details of Flynn's conversations.

    As he wrote in his article, " it's hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people - from both parties, across the ideological spectrum - who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn."

    He also points out the left's hypocrisy in condemning Flynn for lying when James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration, perpetuated lies without ever being held accountable.

    [Mar 05, 2019] The Shadow Governments Destruction Of Democracy

    Highly recommended!
    Trump actually proved to be very convenient President to CIA., Probably as convenient as Obama... Both completely outsourced foreign policy to neocons and CIA )in this sense the appointment of Pompeo is worst joke Trump could play with the remnants of US democracy_ .
    Notable quotes:
    "... "The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street." ..."
    "... "It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads." ..."
    "... Greenwald asserts the the CIA preferred Clinton because, like the clandestine agency, she supported regime change in Syria. In contrast, Trump dismissed America's practice of nation-building and declined to tow the line on ousting foreign leaders, instead advocating working with Russia to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups. ..."
    "... "So, Trump's agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted," Greenwald argued. "Clinton's was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they've been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him." ..."
    "... But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They're barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity. ..."
    "... He also points out the left's hypocrisy in condemning Flynn for lying when James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration, perpetuated lies without ever being held accountable. ..."
    Feb 19, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
    And on the heels of Dennis Kucinich's warnings , The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, who opposes Trump for a variety of reasons, warns that siding with the evidently powerful Deep State in the hopes of undermining Trump is dangerous. As TheAntiMedia's Carey Wedler notes , Greenwald asserted in an interview with Democracy Now, published on Thursday, that this boils down to a fight between the Deep State and the Trump administration.

    https://www.democracynow.org/embed/story/2017/2/16/greenwald_empowering_the_deep_state_to

    Though Greenwald has argued the leaks were "wholly justified" in spite of the fact they violated criminal law, he also questioned the motives behind them.

    "It's very possible - I'd say likely - that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble," he wrote. "Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House."

    According to an in-depth report by journalist Mike Lofgren:

    "The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street."

    As Greenwald explained during his interview:

    "It's agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the other intelligence agencies, that are essentially designed to disseminate disinformation and deceit and propaganda, and have a long history of doing not only that, but also have a long history of the world's worst war crimes, atrocities and death squads."

    Greenwald believes this division is a result of the Deep State's disapproval of Trump's foreign policy and the fact that the intelligence community overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Trump because of her hawkish views. Greenwald noted that Mike Morell, acting CIA chief under Obama, and Michael Hayden, who ran both the CIA and NSA under George W. Bush, openly spoke out against Trump during the presidential campaign.

    Greenwald asserts the the CIA preferred Clinton because, like the clandestine agency, she supported regime change in Syria. In contrast, Trump dismissed America's practice of nation-building and declined to tow the line on ousting foreign leaders, instead advocating working with Russia to defeat ISIS and other extremist groups.

    "So, Trump's agenda that he ran on was completely antithetical to what the CIA wanted," Greenwald argued. "Clinton's was exactly what the CIA wanted, and so they were behind her. And so, they've been trying to undermine Trump for many months throughout the election. And now that he won, they are not just undermining him with leaks, but actively subverting him."

    "[In] the closing months of the Obama administration, they put together a deal with Russia to create peace in Syria. A few days later, a military strike in Syria killed a hundred Syrian soldiers and that ended the agreement. What happened is inside the intelligence and the Pentagon there was a deliberate effort to sabotage an agreement the White House made."

    Greenwald, who opposes Trump for a variety of reasons, warns that siding with the evidently powerful Deep State in the hopes of undermining Trump is dangerous. "Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls, as these courts just demonstrated and as the media is showing, as citizens are proving," he said, likely alluding to a recent court ruling that nullified Trump's travel ban.

    He continued:

    "But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They're barely subject to democratic controls at all. And so, to urge that the CIA and the intelligence community empower itself to undermine the elected branches of government is insanity."

    He argues that mentality is "a prescription for destroying democracy overnight in the name of saving it," highlighting that members of both prevailing political parties are praising the Deep State's audacity in leaking details of Flynn's conversations.

    As he wrote in his article, " it's hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people - from both parties, across the ideological spectrum - who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn."

    He also points out the left's hypocrisy in condemning Flynn for lying when James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration, perpetuated lies without ever being held accountable.

    [Mar 05, 2019] The political purpose behind Nadler investigation can best be summed up in this quote concerning the Benghazi hearings. In September 2015, Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy famously said Clinton s numbers are dropping because we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee.

    Now they do not even pretend that Justice exists in the USA: only kangaroo courts
    Why they are sill waving a dead chicken ? Because they are crooks and can't prosecute Trump for his real misdeeds. Or investigate influence of MI6 and Israeli lobby on the USA elections. Crooks. all of them.
    Notable quotes:
    "... This is not a standard beltway tit for tat investigation. Even before Trump took office, the tools of government were used against him. What is more interesting is that the inquisitors have unchecked authority. There is no limit imposed on the inquisitors either in scope or frankly legality. ..."
    "... The Republican Party has consistently undermined him. It is the American electorate that will not turn on him. Do you blame them!.? They are slowly realizing that a war has been waging against them. Their way of life, the American way of life, is being dismantled. Years and years of compromise and lofty adherence to reasonable principles by the American electorate have done not a damn thing to abate the onslaught against them. ..."
    "... Your timing as well as details are off. Iran-Contra was in the 80s. Laundering money from arms sales to Iran to fund the Contras in violation of the Boland amendement is far different than the Affaire de coeur Russia, which is now turning into an investigation of every financial deal Trump ever did. ..."
    "... "The tradition" is using investigative powers to politicaly attack ones opponents when you are in power. ..."
    Mar 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Nadler is the kangaroo in chief?

    "House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, who would eventually lead any impeachment proceedings, on Sunday signaled a significant escalation into congressional inquiries into the President.

    The New York Democrat plans on Monday to request documents from 60 people and entities close to Trump, including from the Department of Justice, the White House and the Trump Organization. The document trawl will be used "to present the case to the American people about obstruction of justice, about corruption and abuse of power, " Nadler said on ABC News' "This Week" on Sunday.

    Nadler stuck to the House Democratic position that impeachment "is a long way down the road," apparently in order to avoid Republican arguments that the decision has already been made to try to oust Trump. The document requests are not taking place under the auspices of an official impeachment investigation."

    Nadler could not be more clear. He and the other kangaroos in the Democrat herd (flock?) will search through every aspect of Trump's life for the purpose of finding something that will cause a revulsion against Trump among the American people. If they can find that, their allies among the press and TeeVee agitprop apparatchiks will make judgments evident as to whether or not a bill of impeachment would result in a conviction in the senate. This method is reminiscent of the attempt to impeach President Andrew Johnson. Remember him? The Radical Republicans hated this Southern War Democrat simply because he was Southern without regard for his well demonstrated hatred for the planter class in the greater South as opposed to his east Tennessee anti-slavery home. So, pilgrims, American tradition is to be reversed. The Democrats will seek for confirmation bias of Trump's "crimes" because of their "progressive" hatred of his perhaps cynical leadership of a popular revolution against them and the idiot college kids. pl

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/04/politics/trump-mueller-report-nadler-investigation-impeachment/index.html

    blue peacock -> Eric Newhill , 2 hours ago

    IMO, Trump could blow the kangaroos off the range by declassifying it all and allowing the American people to see the details of the attempted coup. And the collusion among the kangaroos. But he chooses to not do that. Very puzzling.

    Clearly it can't be because of Mueller and the potential charge of obstruction of justice, as the kangaroos are running hard towards getting him and his family in any case. So what's behind his strategy of just tweeting witch hunt, which he's been doing for 2 years, and not doing what could blow this all up which is his prerogative as POTUS?

    jnewman , 4 hours ago

    This is the politics necessary to continue to govern a largely unified country as if it were deeply divided: https://www.nytimes.com/201...

    The minorities that both of our parties represent have had their way for forty years, the majority is fed up by not being represented and increasingly absurd distractions are required to maintain this status quo.

    Fred , 19 hours ago

    What can any Trump supporter expect once a Democrat is again elected president, besides a similar witch hunt into thier life past and present?

    TTG -> Fred , 19 hours ago

    This has been standard beltway politics since at least the Iran-Contra and Whitewater investigations. It hit hot and heavy once the Republicans regained control of the Congress in 2014 and hit Obama/Clinton with the Benghazi hearings. I think the political purpose behind all these investigations, including the current crop of investigations into Trump can best be summed up in this quote concerning the Benghazi hearings. "In September 2015, Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy famously said Clinton's "numbers are dropping" because "we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee." I doubt Nadler will ever pursue an impeachment. His goal is to tear at Trump until the 2020 elections. Anyways, I can't think of anything Trump could have done or will do that would persuade the Republican party to turn on him. Nothing. You're right. Whoever wins that election will be subject to the same scrutiny.

    aint.no.robot -> TTG , 14 hours ago

    True, their motives were suspect, but Benghazi was a thing.

    Stueeeeee -> TTG , 2 hours ago

    This is not a standard beltway tit for tat investigation. Even before Trump took office, the tools of government were used against him. What is more interesting is that the inquisitors have unchecked authority. There is no limit imposed on the inquisitors either in scope or frankly legality.

    The Republican Party has consistently undermined him. It is the American electorate that will not turn on him. Do you blame them!.? They are slowly realizing that a war has been waging against them. Their way of life, the American way of life, is being dismantled. Years and years of compromise and lofty adherence to reasonable principles by the American electorate have done not a damn thing to abate the onslaught against them.

    2020 elections will be won by a Democrat. Trump won by razor thin margins, and those margins will be erased as a malignant crop of woke young voters will come of age. Frankly I am curious if his health can hold up for another campaign.

    Fred -> TTG , 6 hours ago

    Your timing as well as details are off. Iran-Contra was in the 80s. Laundering money from arms sales to Iran to fund the Contras in violation of the Boland amendement is far different than the Affaire de coeur Russia, which is now turning into an investigation of every financial deal Trump ever did.

    The Republicans didn't control the House until the mid-90s and lost it in 2007. The invasion and occupation of Iraq played a big part in losing the House then.

    TTG -> Fred , 5 hours ago

    The Congressional investigation of Iran-Contra was also referred to as a witch hunt by Republicans. So that usage of the term was around since the 80s. Reagan's Tower Commission was a different animal altogether. We'll probably never see something as introspective as that again.

    I mentioned both Iran-Contra and Whitewater to point out the longstanding tradition of politically tinged Congressional investigations. The Whitewater Congressional investigations went into overdrive up after the Republicans won the House in 1994. The Republican controlled both the House and Senate in 2014. That's when the Benghazi hearings really ramped up. The ramp up of Congressional investigations with the Democratic winning of the House last year is just following in that tradition.

    Fred -> TTG , 5 hours ago

    Selling weapons to Iran was a crime. "The tradition" is using investigative powers to politicaly attack ones opponents when you are in power. Kind of like using the executive branch of government to hinder opponents activities, such as preventing IRS non-profit status, or spying on them like the NSA has been doing. All done by the Obama administration. Then there is the conduct of the FBI. I haven't seen Trump do any of those things with executive branch powers.

    Stuart Wood -> TTG , 8 hours ago

    TTG hit the nail on the head. Since Clinton and Whitewater, investigations have been the method to hit back at the Presidency you don't support. The only thing I would add is the Iran-Contra investigation was much more relevant than Whitewater, the Clinton's Christmas card list, or Benghazi; officials were actually convicted from the Iran-Contra investigation. The sad fact is that some investigations that are BS successfully work to rile up the investigator's supporters, example Benghazi. I would only add that Trump's past history provides a lot of fuel for the investigatory fire.

    [Mar 05, 2019] Now the majority of the people do not believe anything coming from two major parties. The proper term is alienated. That's why Trump

    Feb 12, 2017 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

    libezkova -> Yikes... February 11, 2017 at 06:02 AM

    No. the train left the station. Obama was a sellout who used to speak right things and did completely opposite to please his sponsors.

    Now the majority of the people do not believe anything coming from two major parties. The proper term is alienated. That's why Trump.

    libezkova -> sanjait... February 12, 2017 at 11:30 AM

    The problem with your views is that there is no liberals in the USA per se. Most are in reality neoliberals and as such are the part of the right, if we define right as those who want to increase the power of capital vs. labor.

    This flavor of democracy for top 1% the they promote (one dollar one vote) should be property called "oligarchy" or at best "polyarchy" (the power of the top 10%).

    The rest (aka "Debt slaves") are second class citizens and are prevented from political self-organization, which by-and-large deprives them of any form of political participation. In best Roman tradition it is substituted with the participation in political shows ("Bread and circuses"). In a way US election is the ultimate form of "bait and switch" maneuvers of the ruling elite.

    The two party system invented by the elite of Great Britain proved to be perfect for neoliberal regimes, which practice what Sheldon Wolin called inverted totalitarism.

    The latter is the regime in which all political power belongs to the financial oligarchy which rules via the deep state mechanisms, and where traditional political institutions including POTUS are downgraded to instruments of providing political legitimacy of the ruling elite. Population is discouraged from political activity. "Go shopping" as famously recommended Bush II to US citizens after 9/11.

    [Mar 04, 2019] Corporatism masquerading as Liberty

    Jan 18, 2014 | creditwritedowns.com

    I have been meaning to write something on faux Libertarians of the corporatist ilk for a while. However, since I switched to forecasting mode instead of advocacy , I have tried to leave the political element out of my posts as much as possible. I'll leave the politics to those who enjoy it; I don't. But, I think this is an important topic so I am going to give it a go here.

    If you do a search for the word 'liberty' on the Internet, invariably you find the Wikipedia entry for that word. I think the definition used there is a good one. Here's what Wikipedia says about Liberty :

    Liberty is the concept of ideological and political philosophy that identifies the condition to which an individual has the right to behave according to one's own personal responsibility and free will. The conception of liberty is influenced by ideals concerning the social contract as well as arguments that are concerned with the state of nature.

    Individualist and classical liberal conceptions of liberty relate to the freedom of the individual from outside compulsion or coercion and this is defined as negative liberty.

    What you will notice is there is nothing in this definition regarding corporations. It is all about individual liberty and the freedoms of individuals . Individuals are born with innate, natural and inalienable rights to liberty that are self-evident. This philosophical view of humankind gained currency during the enlightenment and is now universally accepted. It also underpins the very concept of democracy and is the origin of the founding of the United States of America.

    For example, the U.S. Declaration of Independence begins [highlighting added]:

    When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them withpowers of the earth, the separate and equal sta

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness . -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

    As always, I have to note that the writer of the Declaration was a slaveholder in a country in which government killed the indigenous population. So, there is certainly a gap between the high-mindedness of this wonderful document and actual events on the ground. Don't let that detract from the aspirational quality of the words.This is exactly what individual liberty is all about.

    On the other hand, a corporation is a societal construct codified into legal existence to further the mutual interests of individuals. A corporation is "an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of the law," according to Chief Justice Marshall in the Dartmouth College Case of 1819. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward , won by Daniel Webster when the state of New Hampshire attempted to turn the college into The University of New Hampshire, was an early American test of eminent domain-type property seizure.

    A corporation has no inalienable or natural rights. Nevertheless, it is the fact that corporations represent a group of individuals that allows the 'corporatist' to claim that these fictional legal entities should enjoy the same natural and legal liberties and rights with which individuals are born.

    Let me be bold here: The 'Corporatist' is a kleptocrat masquerading as a believer in liberty. He uses terminology based in liberty to construct an ideology solely as a means of furthering the gains of a specific strata of society allied with the corporatist and at the expense of other strata, by coercion if necessary .

    Remember my post on kleptocracy from 2008? If not, here are the four methods Jared Diamond says ruling elites use to maintain power:

    1. Disarm the populace, and arm the elite.
    2. Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute received, in popular ways.
    3. Use the monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence. This is potentially a big and underappreciated advantage of centralized societies over noncentralized ones.
    4. The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy.

    I broadened the argument on this in my year in review in 2009. Please read The year in review at Credit Writedowns – Kleptocracy to get a fuller perspective. Here's the statement from that post I want to concentrate on:

    The last (and perhaps most important) issue [of the four ways elites maintain power], in my view, has to do with the unabiding faith in free markets that many now have. It is with religious zeal that these so-called Libertarians defend the primacy of markets over all else when in reality common sense would tell you that those with the greatest influence and money will always be at an advantage without some check on that influence and power.

    This is the corporatism, the faux Libertarianism, to which I refer. The logic goes like this:

    1. Individuals have inalienable rights to freedom. This is a fundamental right that all individuals have and efforts by government to undermine these rights must be resisted at all costs.
    2. Corporations are groups of individuals which have banded together for mutual benefit. In so doing, they can express their individual natural rights more effectively than they could as individuals.
    3. As such, corporations must retain the same rights as individuals legally in order to allow those individuals the corporation represents to express there natural rights. Therefore, the same resistance to denying the rights of individuals must also be transferred to the corporations which represent them .

    This logic will take you much further in furthering the aims of corporations, the point being that corporations, businesses, should enjoy the same rights that individuals have.

    That is not to say that businesses should not have rights. They should; and we should grant them as much liberty as is reasonable and warranted. But let's be clear, corporations are not individuals; they are collections of individuals. Often, individuals hide behind this collective using the corporate veil to shield themselves from sanction for behaviour that abuses individual liberties. In a very real sense, the rights and liberties of businesses and individuals often come into conflict. A real libertarian would always favour the individual in that conflict . A corporatist would favour the corporation. That's the difference.

    Let me give you an example. Say I was walking down the street in Louisville, Kentucky and saw a cute little shop that sold Kettle Korn. For those of you who don't know kettle korn, it is salted and sweetened popcorn that was brought to the U.S. by German immigrant farmers in Pennsylvania, Maryland and into the Midwest over two hundred years ago. In Germany, popcorn is sweet not salty like it is in the U.S. So, I see this store and I am thinking, "They have Kettle Korn in Kentucky? Wow, who knew. I love this stuff. Let me go get some." Here's the problem: the owner of the store has a business policy that no black people are allowed inside. Mind you, this isn't a government policy because government discrimination based on race or ethnicity is illegal in the United States. But, this business owner doesn't want Blacks in his store. So when I enter, he tells me to leave because I am violating his store's liberty to choose its own policies.

    I would say the individual liberty trumps the business liberty in this case, especially since the owner is violating his own government's business policy as well as societal norms. A corporatist would say that the business owner wins since it is his business. Again, that's the difference.

    There are lots of other examples of corporatism at work in the U.S. legal system regarding property rights in particular. My November 2009 post " New York to use eminent domain to build a basketball stadium " showed the New York State Court of Appeals ruling that the Atlantic Yards basketball project can go forward as planned, dislocating the residents in the Brooklyn, NY area where the stadium is to be built. The decision means that government can evict you from your own home, seize your property, and give you what it believes is a fair price without your consent to build a sports arena, ostensibly for the public good but certainly for state and private profit.

    This and other cases like it are occurring because of the decision in Kelo v. City of New London, Conn . If a state or local government deems a private project – funded by private monies and profiting private enterprises – to be in the public interest, it can seize your property to allow this project to occur. In the New London case, residents were evicted to make way for a luxury hotel and up-scale condos, from which private developers would profit handsomely. Kelo was an outrageous example of cronyism completely at odds with the ethos of the Dartmouth College Case of 1819. Because of Kelo , government can now abuse its power to enrich specific private interests. That's corporatism at work.

    Corporatism has nothing to do with liberty. It is all about power and coercion. It's about favouring the big guy over the little guy, the more well-connected over the less well-connected, the insider over the outsider. And in society that means favouring large, incumbent businesses over smaller businesses, new entrants or individuals. How does deregulation and free market ideology fit into this ?

    "Obviously, if some always have more power and wealth than others, there is never a situation in which the economic playing field is level. Moreover, it is axiomatic that those with the means and access will always have greater influence over government than those without. So, in a very real sense, the socioeconomic elite of any advanced, stratified society will always have disproportionate control of the economic and political system.

    "Now, I happen to be a Libertarian-minded individual, so I have nothing against the free markets or the concept of limited government and deregulation. Freer markets and more limited government are my preferred ideal. However, I am a realist. I understand that markets are never truly free and government fulfils a necessary function .

    "So, when you hear someone talking about getting government out of the way and allowing the free markets to work, you should be thinking about the influence and control this would naturally engender.

    "Think crony capitalism

    "In fact, I would argue that the deregulation and free market capitalism that these individuals refer to is really crony capitalism in disguise. I will explain.

    "When I think of deregulation, I think of two related but distinct concepts. The one is the actual de-regulation, which is the permission of economic actors to compete in markets previously unavailable to them by order of legislation or de facto government intervention and coercion. The other is regulatory oversight, which is the maintenance of specific rules of engagement under threat of penalty on economic actors by government. De-regulation and regulatory oversight are related concepts but they are not the same."

    This favouring of large corporate interests is what Bill Black has been calling Deregulation, Desupervision and De Facto Decriminalization . Dylan Ratigan calls it corporate communism . Ron Paul calls it corporatism . I am calling it kleptocracy. Whatever label you put on this 'thing', it is not about liberty at all. It is about entrenching the interests of a select few at the expense of the rest– and that has nothing to do with liberty.

    [Mar 04, 2019] Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People by Servando Gonzalez

    I think the books contains some useful information about the history of Propaganda Wars and the Deep state. But also a lot of junk: Fidel Castro listed along with CIA connected neocons as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski: Key elements in this secret war have been the Department of State, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the conspirators' secret agents like Allen Dulles, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Fidel Castro.
    He also denigrates Marx, which sound very simplistic. While Marx was wrong about many things and first of about "the dictatorship of the proletariat". As well as the idea that proletariat is a new progressive class that will became the next dominant class on the next stage of the development of the mankind, displacing capitalists. But Marx provided an excellent framework for the analysis of capitalism. So to throw out all the Marxism is IMHO unwise.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The conspirators are a small group of Wall Street bankers, oil magnates and CEOs of transnational corporations, most of them senior members of the Council on Foreign Relations. ..."
    "... Key elements in this secret war have been the Department of State, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the conspirators' secret agents like Allen Dulles, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Fidel Castro. ..."
    Mar 09, 2016 | www.amazon.com

    America is at war. But this not a conventional war waged with tanks, battleships and planes in conventional battlefields -- at least not yet. It is a secret, insidious type of war whose battleground is the people's minds. Its main weapons are propaganda and mass brainwashing by disinformation, cunning, deception and lies in a large scale not used against the people of any nation since Nazi Germany. Though important, however, those elements are just part of a series of carefully planned and executed long and short-term psychological warfare operations. In synthesis, it is a psychological war -- a PSYWAR.

    If an unfriendly foreign power had carried out against the American people the actions carried out by Wall Street bankers, Oil magnates and CEOs of transnational corporations entrenched at the Council on Foreign Relations and its parasite organizations, we might well have considered it an act of war.

    Unfortunately, most Americans ignore that they are under attack. The reason is because, like Ninja assassins, the main weapon used by the conspirators who have managed to infiltrate and take control of the U.S. Government and most of American life has been their invisibility. For almost a century, these small group of conspirators have been waging a quiet, non-declared war of attrition against the American people, and it seems that they are now ready for the final, decisive battle.

    Unfortunately, as the last two presidential elections showed, the brainwashed American people reacted by changing the puppets, leaving the puppet masters untouched and in control. In this book Servando Gonzalez studies in detail the origins of the conspiracy, who the conspirators are, the main elements of this PSYWAR and, what's more important, how we can fight back and win

    S. Gonzalez "Conspiracy analyst" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

    More Info About the Book , December 11, 2010

    This review is from: Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People (Paperback)

    About the book

    America is at war. But this is not a conventional war waged with tanks, battleships and planes in conventional battlefields --at least, not yet. It is a secret, insidious type of war whose battleground is the people's minds. Its main weapons are mind viruses disseminating mass brain-washing through propaganda disinformation, cunning, deception and lies in a large scale not used against any people since Nazi Germany. Though important, these elements are just part of a series of carefully planned and executed long- and short-term psychological warfare operations. In synthesis, it is a psychological war --a PSYWAR.

    If an unfriendly foreign power had carried out against the American people the actions carried out by Wall Street bankers, Oil magnates and CEOs of transnational corporations entrenched at the Council on Foreign Relations and its parasite organizations, we might well have considered it an act of war. Unfortunately, most Americans ignore that they are under attack. The reason is because, like Ninja assassins, the main weapon used by the conspirators who have managed to infiltrate and take control of the U.S. Government and most of American life has been their invisibility.

    For almost a century, this small group of conspirators have been waging a quiet, non-declared war of attrition against the American people, and it seems that they are now ready for the final, decisive battle. Unfortunately, as the last two presidential elections showed, the brainwashed American people reacted by changing the puppets, leaving the puppet masters in control.

    This book studies in detail the origins of the conspiracy, who the conspirators are, the main elements of this PSYWAR and, what's more important, how we can fight back and win.

    About the Author

    Cuban-born Servando Gonzalez got his training as a historian at the University of Havana. He has written books, essays and articles on Latin American history, intelligence, espionage, and semiotics.

    Servando is the author of Historia herética de la revolución fidelista, The Secret Fidel Castro, The Nuclear Deception and La madre de todas las conspiraciones, all available at Amazon.com.

    He also hosted the documentaries Treason in America: The Council on Foreign Relations and Partners in Treason: The CFR-CIA-Castro Connection, produced by Xzault Media Group of San Leandro, California.

    What the critics are saying

    Book's Content

    Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People

    Contents

    Preface

    Conspiracies and Conspiracy "Theories"
    Espionage and Skepticism
    Historians and Intelligence Analysts
    The Art and Science of Historical Tradecraft

    Introduction

    A Fractured America
    The Covert American Revolution
    Who Are the New World Order Conspirators?
    The Secret War Against the American People
    Walking Back the Cat

    Chapter 1. Is There an Invisible Government of the United States?

    The CIA as Scapegoat
    The Council on What?
    The Science of Historical Forensics
    U.S. Presidents on Blinders
    CFR's Inside Critics
    The CFR Octopus
    The CIA's True Bosses

    Chapter 2. Spying: The Rockefellers' True Passion

    The Inquiry: First U.S. Civilian Intelligence Agency
    House-Wilson: A Typical Case of Agent Recruitment
    Wilson: The First Successful U.S. Puppet President
    The Family that Spies Together . . .
    Nelson and David Inherit Their Grandpa's Passion for Spying
    The Family Tradition Continues

    Chapter 3. The Council on Foreign Relations: The Conspirators' Secret Intelligence Agency

    The Conspirators Create an Anti-American Monster
    The CFR: Second U.S. Civilian Intelligence Agency
    A Very Secretive Organization
    The CFR: an Association of Criminal Traitors
    The Invisible Government of the United States
    The CFR Conspirators Take Early Control of the Press
    The Conspirators Extend Their Control Over the Press, the Arts and the Academia
    The Conspirators Infiltrate the Two Parties
    The Conspirators Infiltrate the State Department

    Chapter 4. The OSS: of the Bankers, by the Bankers, for the Bankers

    American Intelligence Before and After WWI
    Was the OSS an Intelligence Agency?
    OSS: The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight
    OSS: The Conspirators' Fifth Column Inside the U.S. Armed Forces
    The Assassination of General Patton

    Chapter 5. The National Security Act, the CIA and the Creation of Artificial Insecurity

    The National Security Act of 1947 and the Origins of the National Security Council
    U.S. Presidents as CFR's Puppets
    The National Security Council: a Key Tool of the CFR Conspirators
    Why the CIA?
    The CIA: The Conspirators' Secret Military Arm
    The NSC Illegally Authorizes the CIA to Conduct Covert Operations
    Covert Operations: The CIA's True and Only Purpose

    Chapter 6. The CIA's "Failures"

    The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight?
    The Gang That Shouldn't Shoot Straight
    CIA's Failed Assassination Attempts on Fidel Castro
    The CIA's True Role
    Team B VS Team A
    The Two CIAs
    CFR Conspirators Create CIA B
    American Patriots Working for CIA A
    HUMINT VS TECHINT
    Enemy Moles Inside the CIA
    Angleton's Deep Game

    Chapter 7. The Cold War PSYOP

    The CFR Conspirators Use the CIA to Recruit Fidel Castro
    The Bogotazo False Flag Operation and the Cold War PSYOP
    The Agent Provocateurs
    Planting False Clues
    Was Castro a Communist?
    The Bogotazo and the Assassination of Gaitán
    An Intelligence Analysis of the Bogotazo
    Gaitan's Assassin: A Manchurian Candidate?
    An Intelligence Analysis of Gaitán's Assassination
    New Pieces of the Puzzle
    The Bogotazo: Still a Mystery

    Chapter 8. The CFR Mole Infiltrates the Soviets

    The Destruction of Russia and the Creation of the Soviet Union
    Khrushchev's Peaceful Threat
    A Spy is Born ... or Made?
    Fidel Castro to the Rescue
    The Bay of Pigs PSYOP

    Chapter 9. Agent Castro Warms Up the Cold War

    The Soviets Swallow the Dangling Bait
    The CFR's Agent Provocateur Strikes Again
    Khrushchev Tries to Get Rid of Castro, But Fails
    Castro's Good Job on Behalf of His CFR Masters
    The Latin American Guerrillas and Other PSYOPs
    Fidel Castro and the 9/11 False Flag Operation
    The Castro-Chávez PSYOP

    Chapter 10. PSYOPs Against the American People I

    A War in the People's Minds
    PSYOPs Do Exist
    The War-for-Eugenics PSYOP
    The Anti-Christian PSYOP
    The Gay Movement PSYOP
    The Gay Marriage PSYOP

    Chapter 11. PSYOPs Against the American People II

    The Environmental PSYOP
    Anthropogenic Global Warming?
    The Two Party PSYOP
    The War on Terror PSYOP
    The Obama PSYOP

    Chapter 12. Castro's Cuba: A Testing Ground for the New World Order?

    The Cuban Economy Before Castro
    Cuba as a Testing Ground
    Castro's Cuba: a CFR Conspirator's Paradise

    Chapter 13. The End of the CIA and the Beginning of the New World Order

    The CFR Conspirators Take Control Over the U.S. Military
    The CFR's Fifth Column Inside the U.S. Armed Forces
    Faithful to Two Flags?
    The CFR Conspirators Destroy the CIA They Don't Need Anymore
    The "Support Our Army" Myth

    Epilogue: What Can We Do to Win This War?

    Is the U.S. Becoming a Totalitarian Dictatorship?
    Ballots or Bullets?
    Why They Hate Us?
    The Conspirators' Final Push for the New World Order
    PSYWAR and Mind Viruses

    Appendixes
    Appendix I. A Chronology of Treason
    Appendix II. The Evaluation of Information: Intelligence, the 9/11/2001 Events, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962
    Appendix III. Hegelian-type PSYOPS. False Flag Operations: Bogotazo and 9/11/2001

    From the Preface

    This is a book about a conspiracy. It is not, however, about the imaginary "vast right-wing conspiracy" mentioned by Hillary Clinton. Neither it is about the alleged "conspiracy of ideas" carried out by well-intentioned, honest people engaged in "an ideological battle," mentioned by Congressman Ron Paul.

    It is about a real vast right- left-wing conspiracy carried out by a group of criminal psychopaths without any ideology at all except maximum power and control. To carry out their plants, the conspirators usually resort to deception, coercion, extortion, usury, racketeering, Ponzi schemes, theft, torture, assassination and large-scale mass murder.

    The ultimate goal of these conspirators is the total destruction of the American republic as we knew it and the creation of a global communo-fascist feudal totalitarian society under their full control --a society they euphemistically call the New World Order.

    The conspirators are a small group of Wall Street bankers, oil magnates and CEOs of transnational corporations, most of them senior members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Though their push for total control of the U.S. government began in 1913 during the Wilson administration, since the end of WWII it has become a fully developed psychological war of immense proportions secretly waged against the American people. Key elements in this secret war have been the Department of State, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the conspirators' secret agents like Allen Dulles, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Fidel Castro.

    This conspiracy resembles a gigantic puzzle of which many pieces are missing or have been intentionally placed in the wrong place in order to mislead. This explains why most analysts who have studied the phenomenon using the analytical method have failed to find the true source of the problem.

    Help other customers find the most helpful reviews

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    MANUEL ESTEVE - See all my reviews

    5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a roller coaster... , September 13, 2010

    This book is a roller coaster. It questions most of your accepted ideas about the Council on Foreign Relations, the OSS, the CIA, Castro, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, 9/11 and many other events we take for granted. After reading this book I agree with the author's assertion that most of what has been written about the CIA - pro and con - is simply hogwash.

    Gonzalez's theory about the two CIAs after the Team A -- Team B deception is very convincing. This may explain why this is at the same time the most anti-CIA and the most pro-CIA book ever written. (The book is dedicated to Arthur B. Darling, the first CIA official historian.)

    Moreover, this is the only book I have read that provides a logical explanation to the CIA's seemingly illogical abandonment of HUMINT for its current widespread use of TECHINT, and why good CIA officers have been abandoning the Agency.

    Also, after reading many books about James Jesus Angleton, this books dissects his behavior and shows what he really was: a traitor and a common criminal serving not the American people but his true masters, the Wall Street bankers and oil magnates who created the CIA.

    A must read for CIA former and current officers, particularly the ones in the intelligence area.

    Cquevedo - See all my reviews
    Believed is happening , September 14, 2010

    This book reads like a spy novel. In almost every single page I found shocking assertions and theories -- supported by more than a thousand scholarly footnotes.

    After enumerating the long list of CIA's failures, many books about the CIA rhetorically ask the question: "Why the CIA has been so stupid?" After reading Gonzalez' book now I ask myself, how I have been so stupid to believe the assertions that the CIA guys --or, much better, the people who control the CIA-- are stupid?

    In his book Gonzalez shows how, since its very conception, the CIA has never served us, the American people, but the Wall Street bankers, oil magnates and CEOs of transnational corporations who created it. The time is ripe to get rid of the CIA and the rest of alphabet soup of intelligence organizations who use taxpayers money to protect the interest of international bankers and transnational corporations.

    Ah, and before we close the CIA building and throw away the key, I would like to see destroyed the bust of William Donovan decorating its vestibule. While the traitor who ordered that assassination of General Patton got a statue, the heroic, patriotic general's memory has been covered with mud. What a shame!

    Bondolfo Shamitoff (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

    very interesting book , September 13, 2010

    I had a chance to read and advance copy of this book and it was very interesting. I am a fan of conspiracy theory books and historical books so this was right up my alley. What I realized though, after I read more and more of the book is that this is not your typical book on this subject. It backs ideas up with facts and has lots of good footnotes which I will use for future reference. This type of subject matter may not be for everyone, but considering how things are going in this country, it might be worth the read.

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    Luisa - See all my reviews

    Could not put it down! , September 13, 2010

    Had a chance to purchase a copy of the book this past Saturday, started reading it then and finished it this morning. Mr. Gonzalez has done such a remarkable job of analyzing historical events in detail and providing so much key evidence that his claims must be taken seriously. I'm not going to go into every detail about the book, but if you believe that everything in this country is not as it seems and that we are being lied to by our government now and have been lied to in the past, read this book.
    Rose M. Aasen-rojas "rose" (atlanta) - See all my reviews
    (REAL NAME)

    A Quick Up-To-Speed Study , February 15, 2011

    Gonzalez in his engaging prose brings you quickly up-to-speed in the globalist plan and the players. In spite of the abundance of typos and editing errors along with some stilted English phrases, the book will be difficult to put down; and when it ends, you'll want to know more. Hopefully,the second printing will be better-edited.

    boatsmac (James McDonald) (San Diego) - See all my reviews
    Warning, you will not be able to go back to where you were before, after reading this book! , June 12, 2012

    I am an honorably discharged Veteran with 20 years of military service and because I've questioned the actions and motivations of the CFR, Homeland security, the bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building and the events of 9/11, I have been labeled by my government as a potential terrorist. I am ashamed, hurt, confused and feel alarmed.

    Why and how did it get to this point?

    If you want to understand, put on your seat-belt and prepare yourself when you read Servando Gonzalez's Psychological Warfare and the New World Order.

    The wealth of historical, empirical proof within this work will rock your world. Just when you think that you have reached the climax of evidence, the next wave of proof makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up!

    This book will affect you in a way that you will never be able to walk down American streets again without recognizing that you could be seen as nothing more than cannon fodder for a ruthless and cunning organization that has been working for a goal for over a hundred years.

    I am not religious but what has been going on in America and the rest of the world, is truly evil. It's a force that is working to insure billions of people will suffer and who is left will serve the masters of the New World Order.

    This is not science fiction, not some crazy story of some sick delusional nut, this is reality of elements within our government.

    Servando Gonzalez will guide you through this strange and factual journey about what is really going on in America and elements with in our government. If you don't care about your love ones, if you don't care about your honor, if you don't care about knowing about what you can do to protect yourself against this force, don't read this master piece of factual work.

    ***Fair warning*** The knowledge in this capstone of work will affect you personally!

    applewood (everywhere and nowhere) - See all my reviews

    Literally. Servando Gonzalez's book on psychological warfare looks at the people and organizations (and their motivations) of the conspiracy behind all other conspiracies.

    For decades I've read of the main conspiracy-related events of my life time, the who's and why's behind - JFK's and RFK's assassinations, the Contra/Arkansas cocaine/arms trade and Whitewater money laundering scandal, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 attacks - and have been fascinated, shocked, outraged, bewildered and disgusted. This book goes right to the heart of the agenda behind these various events, and shows them to be mere layers in a much larger onion. This book provides a clear overview but is also full of fascinating details, especially on how Castro was a CIA agent and how his rule of Cuba has not been what it seems, as well as providing a run down of some of the current PSYOPs being run on the American public.

    Gonzalez's own review here gives an outline of the details better than I ever could so I will keep this short. I came across this book after reading a lengthy review by Gonzalez for a different book on Amazon, greatly impressed by his intellect and perspective. At first I was leery of purchasing his book because many of these reviews appear written by friends of his (single review reviewers always make me skeptical). However this book delivers, and as another reviewer commented here, it will change your understanding, views and perhaps life. It has quickly risen into the top 10 list of influential books I've read. I'd even venture say it is essential.

    My main complaint is that while well informed, and intelligent Gonzalez's writing is often dense and repetitive (as well as having a fair number of typos), and so apparently rushed to press without thorough editing. Given the timely need of this book this is excusable, but hopefully will be remedied in a second edition. More importantly I was sometimes left wondering how Gonzalez knows all these (specific) people are CFR members/agents? And this uncertainty of mine, and implied dependence on him, left me in doubt about the whole thesis (are we both just paranoid delusional? lol!).... But perhaps such doubt (in the face of my own mix of information and disinformation) is a healthy thing.

    Many times when talking with friends about conspiracy ideas and theories they inevitably ask two fundamental questions; 1) who is behind it all, and 2) why?

    This book answers both clearly;

    1) The Council of Foreign Relations (via the National Security Council, the CIA and increasingly the US military command) and various sister organizations (The Trilateral Commission and The Bilderberg Group). Many individuals are identified, most of these are familiar public figures (as most high level government appointees and elected officials are drawn from this elite group).

    2) The New World Order - global domination for sustainable control and order by the super-rich elite (the .0001%, not the mere, ordinary, scape-goated/smoke-screened "1%"). The effect could well be a return to a new feudal age, with almost all of us in a "safe" but unfree and impoverished serfdom (kind of like with the Cuba "experiment"). The kicker being that to do this, "us" will probably be less than a quarter (and perhaps much less) of those now alive.

    And it also answers the question of how.

    "But the conspirators who planned to bring a revolutionary change of government in the United States to implement the communo-fascist regime they call the New World Order were a bunch of physical cowards, who didn't have the courage to risk their lives in a revolution by gun play. Consequently, despite the fact that the political system they wanted to implement was a mixture of communism and fascism, they neither adopted the revolutionary tactics of open insurrection favored by the Communists, nor the coup d'etat techniques of the Fascists, but the evolutionary, infiltration techniques advocated by the British Fabians." (pg. 40)

    The tools to achieve this Brave New World vision include any and all available. For some it is direct warfare (the Middle East), for others, famine and eugenics (Africa), and for American's it is mainly mind control (mass hypnosis and indoctrination) and psychological warfare (destabilizing events leading to doubt, confusion, fear, depression and helplessness). Of course this plan is not a given (even though already far along in it's realization). There are other forces for change, sanity and awakening in the world today.

    This is where you and I come into play....

    Frances Fletcher - See all my reviews

    A Must Read! , May 21, 2013

    This is a well-documented expose of the puppet masters that pull the strings of the United States Government.

    As a retired police officer and intelligence analyst, I read this book with validation of the ideas presented in the fore front of my mind. I used two bookmarks while reading. One bookmark kept my current place and the other marked the corresponding footnotes. The footnotes are detailed and accurate and led to even-more paths of discovering the truth.

    This book is proof that the United States Government has been usurped by the Council of Foreign Relations, transnational corporations and Wall Street bankers.

    Every chapter is a light bulb going off in your mind. The author has brilliantly gathered pieces of the puzzle and assembled them into a coherent picture.

    This book is essential for understanding what has happened to our country and what is still happening. It is a MUST read!

    [Mar 04, 2019] Bill "amusing nuclear war" Maher is really out of his mind

    Mar 04, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

    Patient Observer March 2, 2019 at 4:14 pm

    Can't find the link but Bill Maher said an Indo-Pakistani war would be "entertaining" or "amusing" or something like that. That guy has become untethered from his brain.

    [Mar 04, 2019] It is important to Americans that they always are doing the right thing, the just thing, the altruistic thing, and that nothing so smutty as American profit and financial gain come into it. It is for this reason they are fed such self-serving pablum daily by their news media.

    Mar 04, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

    Northern Star March 2, 2019 at 1:07 pm

    Hmmmm ..

    https://www.yahoo.com/finance/video/venezuela-accepts-aid-russia-us-020038728.html

    Patient Observer March 2, 2019 at 2:58 pm
    God, that Trish Regan is a moron on steroids. But, it was very heartening to see Russia stepping up with aid. Certainly, the physical aid is important to Venezuela but, more important, is the knowledge that they are not facing the US alone – cautiously optimistic that Venezuela can survive the assault.
    Mark Chapman March 2, 2019 at 5:24 pm
    Soooo many bullshit moments, my head is reeling. "The ones who are the aggressors here are the RUSSIANS, the United States supports a peaceful transition of power". Yes, to the leader it picked for the country, in a process about as far from democracy as an egg is from an eggplant. "Russia might not have the same good sweet deals, there would be a more competitive landscape, and they don't like that". Trish, baby – your National Security Advisor is on record as publicly stating it would make a big difference to the US economy if the USA could invest in and produce Venezuela's oil. It already has complete control of the refining end – if it were also investing in it and producing it what would be left for the Venezuelans?

    It is important to Americans that they always are doing the right thing, the just thing, the altruistic thing, and that nothing so smutty as American profit and financial gain come into it. It is for this reason they are fed such self-serving pablum daily by their news media.

    yalensis March 3, 2019 at 3:11 pm
    At 3:50 minutes in, did I just hear the "brunette" on the left threaten to murder Maduro's family, if he doesn't comply with her demands?

    She sounds like a Mafia chick: "Nice family you got there, Maduro, would be a pity of something was to happen to them "

    Northern Star March 2, 2019 at 1:39 pm
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2019/03/01/ilhan-omar-tied-9-11-attack-poster-west-virginia-capitol/3033450002/

    https://www.stripes.com/news/us/poster-linking-rep-ilhan-omar-to-9-11-sparks-outrage-injuries-in-w-va-state-capitol-1.571055

    https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/video/poster-linking-muslim-congresswoman-ilhan-omar-to-9-11-sparks-confrontation/vp-BBUhMXZ

    https://nypost.com/2019/03/02/eliot-engel-rips-ilhan-omar-for-vile-anti-semitic-slur/
    " Last month, Omar came under fire for tweeting, "It's all about the Benjamins baby," suggesting politicians who support Israel only do so for money."

    Northern Star March 2, 2019 at 1:44 pm
    The American BILLIONAIRE elite:
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/robert-kraft-debate-sex-trafficking-203517978.html

    .degenerate racist ol' white bastards..all the way down..!!!

    LOL!!!

    Patient Observer March 2, 2019 at 4:05 pm
    But why should someone as wealthy and well known as Robert Kraft visit a massage parlor in a strip mall? He could have top whores from around the world flown in to his penthouse . For god's sake, he could have gone to that private Caribbean Island where the insiders go for illicit sex with whomever/whatever they could imagine. Something is weirder than average here.
    Patient Observer March 3, 2019 at 10:35 am
    https://theduran.com/blackout-during-orgy-island-pedophile-jeffrey-epstein-hearing/

    Log books show Bill Clinton just loved Island hospitality as evidenced by his numerous visits. Odd, how utterly quiet the MSM is about this – y'ld think that industrial scale rape of young girls would be newsworthy in the MSM. No, just the Covington Kid get them going. Eyes Wide Shut at work here.

    Patient Observer March 3, 2019 at 10:39 am
    Here is the link to a pretty good video on an escapee from the Island.
    Jen March 3, 2019 at 3:20 pm
    I think it's the thrill of the chase that appeals, plus knowing that you did something illegal (either secretly or in full view) and got away with it. Having whores flown to your place wouldn't have the same appeal.
    Patient Observer March 3, 2019 at 7:24 pm
    Well, I suppose being a Peeping Tom could his next adventure. Nevertheless, it still makes little sense from a psychological aspect. Some say he was somehow set up as a lot of NFL owners are tired of his team winning the Superbowl every other year and wanted to take him down a notch or two.

    I suspect that most super rich, if not perverts from a young age, end up being perverted – the power of money and a highly developed market offering perversion is just too much to resist for most humans. That is a major reason why capitalism or free markets or whatever you want to call a system that encourages accumulation of vast amounts of wealth is (drum roll) perverted.

    Patient Observer March 2, 2019 at 3:59 pm
    Again, the only defense needed by a cop in killing a suspect was "I thought my life was in danger" regardless if that were actually the case. In the particular instance, I do think the cops may have thought such but they were apparently trigger happy and reacted to a "flash of light" or glint off some something metallic. They thought it was a muzzle blast. Really? They offered confusing statements as well – the suspect advanced on them in a shooting stance but refused to show his hands. What kind of shooting stance would that be?

    I don't think it was cold blooded murder in this case – just manslaughter. They ought to be charged accordingly and kicked off the force. But no, everything is OK, nothing to see. Besides, it would have a chilling effect on police everywhere if they were fearful of being charged every time they killed someone. I mean, like, who would want to be a cop?

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/no-charges-officers-shooting-death-unarmed-black-man-215503582–abc-news-topstories.html

    Mark Chapman March 2, 2019 at 6:27 pm
    I note that in this instance, though, the deceased was committing a crime; a series of them, in fact. Nothing he needed to be killed for, certainly, but a case removed from all the other black men who have been shot with their cell phone in their hand, or nothing at all, while the cops who decided to 'question' them ( sometimes for nothing more than walking on the sidewalk in a mostly-white neighbourhood) had no apparent reason to be bothering them. Police intervention was certainly called for here, although it is hard to believe it could not have been carried out without any real violence at all. The list of people who actually decided to go for their gun when ordered to put their hands up by police who already have their weapons out must be a short one.

    Police in America seem uniformly convinced that black men they detain will try to kill them. I wonder why? Have a lot of police officers been shot to death by black men? I bet the list of black men killed by police is a lot longer.

    Patient Observer March 3, 2019 at 7:17 am
    To partially address the question of how many police are killed by felonious acts (shot, run over, etc.) versus how many they have killed by shooting (not counting fatalities from crashes during police chases), its roughly 65 to 1,000+. or better than a 15 to 1 kill ratio. 31% of the civilian victims were black.

    In Britain and Japan, there were a few civilians killed by police last year. China had 4 (US rate was 1,500 times higher per capita). Could not find info on Russia. Philippines was way higher than the US rate apparently due to the drug war and terrorists may be included in that data as well.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_countries

    [Mar 03, 2019] Netanyahu's Possible Indictment and Jewish Dialectics by Gilad Atzmon

    Notable quotes:
    "... Yesterday Israel's attorney general published his decision to indict Mr Netanyahu on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in connection with three cases. ..."
    "... Israel is tough on its leaders. It is certainly tougher than Britain that has so far failed to charge Tony Blair with war crimes or the USA that similarly failed to indict George Bush for launching an illegal war*. ..."
    "... Ariel Sharon's political career didn't come to an end after the massacre in Sabra and Shatila. The Kahan Commission that was formed to probe Israeli involvement in that colossal crime found that the IDF was indirectly responsible and that Sharon, who was then the Defense Minister, bore personal responsibility for the massacre. The commission recommended the removal of Sharon from his post as Defense Minister. ..."
    "... Israel is led by criminals who love their country. For at least 70 years, Britain has been led by criminals who loathe their country. ..."
    "... "The Jewish State is an unusual place. It indicts its leaders and occasionally even locks them behind bars". ..."
    "... Which is hardly surprising, since most people who rise to high political office (in any country) tend to be criminals – or at the very least callous and cruel. What really is surprising, as Mr Atzmon observes, is how rarely other countries see fit to prosecute their political leaders, even when they commit glaringly obvious crimes. ..."
    "... As Howard Scott accurately remarked, "A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation". (Or, one might add, enough influence to launch a campaign for political power). ..."
    "... Canadian Jew Henry Makow speaks often of the vicious rivalry in Jewry between the 'globalist' Jews typified by George Soros, and the 'nationalist-zionist' Jews typified by Netanyahu, who has recently making waves by his alliances with European right-wing parties, who are associated in many Jewish minds with 'anti-semitism' ..."
    "... The prosecution of Netanyahu, can be seen as artillery fire by the Soros-type camp, which thinks Netanyahu has really gone too far linking himself with Viktor Orbán and so on ..."
    "... One recalls the famous 'anti-semitic' tweet of Netanyahu's son Yair against Soros, using the infamous 'happy merchant' jewish caricature http://images.jpost.com/image/upload/q_60/391963 ..."
    Mar 01, 2019 | www.unz.com

    The Jewish State is an unusual place. It indicts its leaders and occasionally even locks them behind bars. Former Israeli president Moshe Katsav was found guilty of "rape, sexual harassment, committing an indecent act while using force, harassing a witness and obstruction of justice". He was sentenced to seven years in prison. Veteran Israeli PM Ehud Olmert was convicted of two counts of bribery and was also sent to prison.

    Yesterday Israel's attorney general published his decision to indict Mr Netanyahu on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in connection with three cases.

    Israel is tough on its leaders. It is certainly tougher than Britain that has so far failed to charge Tony Blair with war crimes or the USA that similarly failed to indict George Bush for launching an illegal war*.

    Yet Israel is far from an ethical realm. It is institutionally racist towards the indigenous people of the land as well as African immigrants, and it is also abusive to its poor. Israel is occasionally accused of gross war crimes . One may wonder why a criminal state with such an appalling record is so harsh with its leaders.

    Zionism is one possible answer. Zionism, in its early days, was contemptuous of 'the Jews.' It promised to civilise the chosen people by means of 'homecoming.' The following comments weren't made by Adolf Hitler or a member of the Nazi party but by some of the most dedicated early Zionists:

    The wealthy Jews control the world, in their hands lies the fate of governments and nations. They set governments one against the other. When the wealthy Jews play, the nations and the rulers dance. One way or the other, they get rich." (Theodor Herzl, Deutsche Zeitung, as cited by an Israeli documentary )

    'The Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline.' ( Our Shomer 'Weltanschauung' , Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936, p.26. As cited by Lenni Brenner)

    'The enterprising spirit of the Jew is irrepressible. He refuses to remain a proletarian. He will grab at the first opportunity to advance to a higher rung in the social ladder.' (The Economic Development of the Jewish People, Ber Borochov, 1916)

    The harsh treatment of Israeli politicians by the Israeli media and judicial system is inspired by that Zionist promise. Israel wants to be 'a state like all other states.' It wants its politicians to be ethical and behave with dignity. But the Israeli people aren't sure about the importance of such trappings. Mostly, they could care less whether the judicial system or the media approve of their leaders' ethical records.

    Ariel Sharon's political career didn't come to an end after the massacre in Sabra and Shatila. The Kahan Commission that was formed to probe Israeli involvement in that colossal crime found that the IDF was indirectly responsible and that Sharon, who was then the Defense Minister, bore personal responsibility for the massacre. The commission recommended the removal of Sharon from his post as Defense Minister. These findings did not stop Sharon political career, as we know, he went on to become Israel's prime minister a few years later.

    Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website March 1, 2019 at 7:57 pm GMT

    Israel is tough on its leaders. It is certainly tougher than Britain that has so far failed to charge Tony Blair with war crimes

    Israel is led by criminals who love their country. For at least 70 years, Britain has been led by criminals who loathe their country.

    swamped , says: March 2, 2019 at 5:52 am GMT
    The asterisk says it all:"Needless to mention, Israel sends its politicians to jail for bribery but also does not prosecute war crimes as much as it should." As long as you're plundering & strafing shegetzes you're on safe ground in Israel (or wherever else you can get away with it in heathen territory). Just like you can traffic in shiksas all you want (one of Israel's leading industries until too much publicity recently).But if you dare screw (either connotation) one of the tribe, your bacon (oink, oink) is fried!

    "As much as early Zionism promised to change the people of Israel, the people themselves haven't been keen of turning into something totally foreign to their true nature" instead, they're more keen to turn their true nature into something very threatening to foreigners. "Despite yesterday's polls that suggest that Netanyahu's support has dropped following the decision to indict him, it is likely that within a few days we will find that Netanyahu's support is rising" as he directs his ire to another foreign population again, in Iran or Gaza or Europe or wherever. "This response to findings of criminal behaviour [of only one kind] enlightens the dialectical clash between what the Israelis 'are' and the image they insist upon attributing to"..the Other.

    "Israelis love to see themselves as a dignified Western civilisation guided by law and order" at home; while they avidly sell-out this image in the world. "Israel is at least 'democratic' enough to bring this contradiction to light." So give them a little credit, anyway – but no reprieve.

    Tsigantes , says: March 2, 2019 at 8:34 am GMT
    The striking thing about the crimes Netanyahu is charged with is how trivial and Pollyannish they are compared to what he should be charged with. If I think this living outside Israel, I can only imagine what his diehard supporters think .
    Tom Welsh , says: March 2, 2019 at 10:15 am GMT
    "The Jewish State is an unusual place. It indicts its leaders and occasionally even locks them behind bars".

    Which is hardly surprising, since most people who rise to high political office (in any country) tend to be criminals – or at the very least callous and cruel. What really is surprising, as Mr Atzmon observes, is how rarely other countries see fit to prosecute their political leaders, even when they commit glaringly obvious crimes.

    As Howard Scott accurately remarked, "A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation". (Or, one might add, enough influence to launch a campaign for political power).

    Brabantian , says: March 2, 2019 at 5:21 pm GMT
    Regarding why corrupt Israel surprises us by prosecuting its own leaders sometimes – Before he ended up suddenly dead in Florida USA, exiled Israeli journalist Barry Chamish (1952-2016), always pointed out a corruption back-story behind such criminal charges

    For example, Chamish attributed the bizarre Moshe Katsav indictment, to how Katsav had been an impediment to the machinations of the even-more-connected Shimon Peres.

    Canadian Jew Henry Makow speaks often of the vicious rivalry in Jewry between the 'globalist' Jews typified by George Soros, and the 'nationalist-zionist' Jews typified by Netanyahu, who has recently making waves by his alliances with European right-wing parties, who are associated in many Jewish minds with 'anti-semitism'

    The prosecution of Netanyahu, can be seen as artillery fire by the Soros-type camp, which thinks Netanyahu has really gone too far linking himself with Viktor Orbán and so on

    One recalls the famous 'anti-semitic' tweet of Netanyahu's son Yair against Soros, using the infamous 'happy merchant' jewish caricature
    http://images.jpost.com/image/upload/q_60/391963

    Anonymous [253] Disclaimer , says: March 2, 2019 at 7:03 pm GMT
    @NoseytheDuke "inquiry into metaphysical contradictions and their solutions."

    "also known as the dialectical method, is at base a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned arguments."

    "the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions."

    "a term used to describe a method of philosophical argument that involves some sort of contradictory process between opposing sides. " [the key phrase: Israelis contradict themselves, or Israeli behavior contradicts its profession of virtue]

    synonyms: reasoning, argumentation, contention, logic;

    [Mar 03, 2019] CrossTalk on Tulsi Gabbard Peace Candidate

    Feb 20, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Is America ready for a real antiwar candidate? Clearly the political establishment and the media aren't. Criticism of presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard and anyone else who questions foreign policy orthodoxies is swift and unrelenting. Fighting for peace has never been so difficult.

    CrossTalking with Daniel Faraci, Thomas Palley, and Philip Giraldi.

    RT LIVE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFAcq...

    Check out http://rt.com

    Subscribe to RT! http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c...

    #RT (Russia Today) is a global #news network broadcasting from Moscow and Washington studios. RT is the first news channel to break the 1 billion YouTube views benchmark.

    B. Greene , 1 week ago (edited)

    I have met a surprising number of Republicans and Libertarians who support Tulsi, many of them former Trump supporters. Bernie had a meeting with her in Vermont before she announced that she is running. Many think that they plan to join forces at some point. They would be a formidable team for the neoliberal neocons to beat.

    Rustyjeff , 1 week ago

    its worse than stifling free speech. These neocons are criminals. Anyone who is always for invading other countries to take control of resources & killing millions of people along the way should be considered war criminals & enemies of the USA. They should be locked up. Including the media fanboys.

    ivette moux , 1 week ago

    The Democratic party is trying to keep Tulsi from the debates , they want her to have 60 something thousand individual donations to her campaign, it's the only way for her to participate. They want her out of the way ...donate a dollar everyone...let's see her at the debates. She is the only one that can take Trump on.

    marspluto5 , 1 week ago

    If just ONE MSM outlet held a show with such open,honest,invigorating discussion as CROSSTALK allowing real analyst to present facts and reality into the discussion it would be a totally different world this morning. Instead I need to go to Internet,go outside my own countries news sources,even watch other countries governments relations on shadow banned or plain censored sources. To find the facts,the truth in America today is to risk your own freedom,Physically,Spiritually,or just plain Sanity. 1933 has collided with 1984 to bring us 2019.

    Juniper lane , 1 week ago (edited)

    No the sheep citizens of US are not ready for anti war establishment because the dual nationals in congress won't let that happen who works for Israel not their own country. People like Ron Paul are never elected in US who wants to work to fix the problems in his own country and US citizens. They need war criminals and zionist puppets to promote the new liberal world order and globalist agenda. Even now the Trump is not ending the wars. He is just shifting the illegal wars from middle east to latin america which will also be a disaster. This will create more chaos, economic and migrant crisis. US needs anti war leaders or else one day world will be pushed to nuclear ww3 because of these parasites.

    Janet Baker , 1 week ago (edited)

    Peter your indignation over Tulsa's treatment is just a wonderful thing to see. She has been treated horribly so far and I don't think it's ever going to stop. Although as far as I stand right now she is who I will vote for. I just wish Bernie and Tulsi would run on a ticket together and run on the Green Party. 47% of America voted for Independents last elections. Bernie could win as an independent.

    Lawrence Taylor , 1 week ago

    Thank you for this conversation. I never wanted to hug old white men so much. Ideas that should be bought up and discussed and never are since everyone is in such a cult of personality around that guy. These men should be regulars on your show since this was riveting conversation. Spot On.

    Fred Dietz , 1 week ago

    Well, what sort of "patsy" do you think the powers that be will use when they go to assassinate Tulsi? That's my only question at this point. I assume they'll find some modern version of Sirhan-Sirhan; that is, they'll find some foreign goofball who actually has a mild political grudge against the candidate, have their Mossad agents to work him up with drugs and hypnosis, drive him to wherever the candidate is visiting nearby, have an actual assassin (paid-off security guard) shoot the candidate for real as soon as their drugged-up patsy starts firing his gun. Only later do we learn the candidate was killed with 9 bullets while the patsy's gun only held 8 rounds. In fact, I'll make a prediction of the sort of patsy they'll use: It will be a Venezuelan emigre who dislikes Maduro's socialism and who believes Tulsi wants to socialize all of America. However, he won't be able to recall where he was the 12 hours before the shooting. That, and one of the recently-hired armed security guards at the building where she was speaking decides to quit his job and move to some farm in Peru or Chile right after the assassination. And the mainstream media will give it only one headline in their newspapers. After that, they'll go back to headlining sports events and whatever alleged "hate crime" is in vogue this week.

    henk senster , 1 week ago (edited)

    Say what its is: the deepest cause of our political and societal problems is the MSM power of international Zionism in America and Europe. To break this power at the current rate with social media, will at least take another generation's time. But probably long before this time the social media will be blocked for Zionism criticism by a new inquisition. Which we are already seeing in progress. So what is left for us to shake off the Zionist yoke? Not Trump!

    Cant_Touch_This , 1 week ago

    Megan McCaine have the nerve to claim she supports the military yet here she is attacking an actual military servicewomen who've lost her brothers and sisters in arms in Iraq for lies such as WMD and fake Al Qaeda connection. The establishment media should and chickenhawks should be called out for this treasonous labeling of Tulsi Gabbard.

    ivette moux , 1 week ago

    These neocons invaded OUR country ...the U.S. is a police State country ...our freedoms went to hell a long time ago.

    MsPokey1234 , 1 week ago

    Gabbard/Sanders or Sanders/Gabbard ~ I am INDEPENDENT and ready to move on for 2020. Trump has NOT drained the swamp......EX: Reappoint COMEY = No..........But thanks Pres. Trump for NOT giving us HRC! Dean K.

    M VET , 1 week ago

    President Trump just a Robot in the White House and His Foreign Policies decided by Pro Israel and Anti Russia WAR CRIMINALS,who are a Bullish,Lying and pro War.

    Robert Covarrubias , 1 week ago

    Tulsi Gabbard is the total answer for peace. The will not destroy Tulsi Gabbard she will succeed. We will destroy these news Medias liers

    Christian Miller , 1 week ago

    I am 74 years old. I have never voted for a Democrat, but I am supporting Tulsi Gabbard because of her ant-war stance.

    polara01 , 1 week ago

    Why isn't crosstalk talkin about AIPEC influence on Congress because the neocons And AIPEC are basically controlling Congress and are the people responsible behind all the Middle East War chicanery and Benjamin Netanyahu's influence on Congress is obscene and they actually are passing laws now that if you speak up against AIPEC in anyway whatsoever you are immediately smeared and called an anti-semite and your words are considered a hate speech crime... as in the recent case of congresswoman Ilhan Omar... WTF is going on here??!!

    paul mueller , 1 week ago

    Tulsi seems to be genuine .. It would be interesting to learn of her views of Palestine and the special relationship of U.S . and Israel .

    MrEyegee , 1 week ago

    Excellent show! Tulsi is great, she just has to be the next POTUS.

    C C , 1 week ago

    Tulsi is on the same page as Bernie, if she aligns with Bernie and they are on the ticket for the Dem's - they will win the election - zionists hate them both for the same reason they are against war machine and want to look after the American homeland and people. Notice how they are the only two in the US that want to pressure dotard through congress to not be able to pull out of INF and rejoin the Iran deal. They are for peace .. something Americans want and zionists don't

    Pansy Benn , 1 week ago

    One of your best programmes/ panels, Peter. Thank you! Hope you keep on this story as you said you would... We'll be listening. Tulsi2020!!

    Robert Covarrubias , 1 week ago

    Tulsi Gabbard will win one way or another, simple as that.

    Joe M , 6 days ago

    As Noam Chomsky has said- 'We have a single Business Party that offer essentially the same bills with different propaganda talking points.'

    Luke Ashton Ford , 1 week ago

    Usa is beyond abhorrent a terrorist state!! only hope is bernie tulsi 2020!!

    michael morrison , 1 week ago

    Tulsi Gabbard = American Hero

    Steven Russell , 1 week ago

    This panel is sounding like they have been listing to a lot of Jimmy Dore. Fantastic to hear such support for Tulsi's message.

    Raj Bodepudi , 1 week ago

    Tulsi is the only candidate with compassion & wisdom

    James M Revell , 1 week ago (edited)

    As a registered independent and former Trump supporter, she has my vote. I don't agree with 80% of her platform but I do trust her to do her best to end the US perpetual war state. However, if she should happen to do the obligatory trip to the wailing wall and pledge allegiance to Israel, she will lose my support immediately. We'll know she's full of sh*t when she bows to AIPAC.

    avni ajdini , 1 week ago

    only ally america have is israel and saudi arabia

    harriet , 1 week ago

    MSM either makes ridiculous smears on tulsi or/and what's happening the most at the moment is to COMPLETELY IGNORE her and act like doesnt exist, even when talking about all candidates they will conveniently never mention her and pass though her name quickly sometimes even say her name in a like quieter tone then change the subject, so frustrating! While shoving basic bitches pro establishment pro war morons like Kamal Harris down our throats, no thank you. I really hope ALL people see though this at very least most. And people still supporting trump even after he turned on alot lf his main promises and pretending to be "anti interventionist" while being compete opposite and wanting to invade any country he can see to benefit from, how can they still Support him and not even call out his hypocrisy and lies. Hes just another neocon warmonger.

    that_genius J , 1 week ago

    I want tulsi to win. Plus she a damn hot powerful woman. Go Tulsi

    hobo1975 , 1 week ago

    Neocons. It always come down to Zionists.

    Peter Panino , 1 week ago

    "Domocrats" are mafia gangsters. US = IS

    Normandie Frankia , 1 week ago

    Neo Cons = God's Chosen Lunatics

    Peter Panino , 1 week ago (edited)

    Can you imagine Tulsi Gabbard fighting a nuclear war for Israel??

    malena garcia , 1 week ago

    Tulsi is amazing; she is the only dem I would vote for, all the rest are phonies or brainwashed. Bernie is especially disappointing in his gullible acceptance of the fake Russia collusion narrative, his voting for every war except the Iraq war, and his do nothing/say nothing about election fraud. Tulsi is the real deal; in my opinion she is the only dem who could beat Trump at this point. All the rest of the dems are scary and crazy, including Bernie.

    Creature Of the night , 1 week ago

    She's my candidate.

    Nova Cadian , 1 week ago

    Great guests!

    Bob Le Clair , 1 week ago

    Tulsi Gabbard for president

    Hope Da Builder , 1 week ago

    No capital, no war

    Nalin Jayawardena , 1 week ago

    Peter, there should be more presentations and conversations about Tulsi on Cross talk and the Duran as she, in my opinion, is the only person who will bring honesty and integrity to US politics and restore America as a truly democratic country and restore the bad image that the rest of the world has of the US apart from the current western alliance. I have listened to her talks in New Hampshire and Iowa and can see her popularity increasing by the day. The rest of the Democrats are part of the neocon group that supports war along with the Republicans. When Trump was running in 2016 I thought it was a breath of fresh air compared to Clinton. He has reneged on most things he promised to his base and has increased foreign intervention. The world as a whole is looking for and needs peace.

    tony mantana , 6 days ago

    Bernie&Gabbard 2020 ❤

    ishant 7 , 1 week ago

    Well, Tulsi is the only politician i respect

    Qinby 1 , 6 days ago (edited)

    Tulsi will not become the Democratic nominee, to low name recognition and not enough cash. Donate to her, 1 USD is enough, she needs 65.000 individual donations to get on the televised debates. She will drive other candidates to take a stance on US military interventions, a good cause in itself. I would like to see, in the end, Bernie as POTUS, Warren in Treasury and Tulsi as Sec State OR VP but think Sec State is better.

    Fawad Charkhi , 1 week ago (edited)

    I love this show and amazing intelligent knowledgeable people as your guests. Excellent. Please Keep going because you have 99% of humanity with you. The victory is certain and it takes a bit more time to overcome evil that has built foundations for centuries but not winning. You are the real champions not Old books or statues, and future generations will play your each videos again and again and they will analyse it over and over again. What you say and what you do is part of renaissance and foundation of future of the world. It is important to say and do right things and be proud that you are making important history for humanity. You will not have only statues or quotes also will have real videos to play it and listen and see it. Children in schools, students at colleges and universities and intellectuals politicians all will listen to your important brave opinions and views in this curtail time of human history. I hope you realise the importance of this time and your moral stands

    Alberto Vildosola , 1 week ago

    Tulsi is going directly for the jugular of the ultimate origin of all this mess, she is aiming at the core problem that generates, or makes worse, any other problem in our society, ranging since: Climate Change on the top at planet level, down to bullying in schools at street level. Not to mention, of course, that War Business means "Killing Humans by the Thousands Business".

    Fionán , 1 week ago

    Tulsi Gabbard would do a better job than Bernie, who supports Government Intervention in Venezuela and didn't expose the corruption of the DNC when he should have.

    D Personal , 1 week ago

    Dirty Bernie is there to diffuse Tulsi Gabbard.

    Scott Garry , 3 days ago

    The establishment will try to marginalize a la Kucinich

    Take Rocco , 2 days ago

    the Us War hawks know that these wars are very complicated if it was quick and dirty how would they make $billoins on these

    Miles Tackett Music , 17 hours ago

    The only corporate US news reporter that doesn't try to "gotcha" Gabbard & smear her is Tucker Carlson who gives her a chance to express her anti foreign intervention message

    For-Knees , 1 week ago

    So, Lindsey Graham, both Bushes, John McCain, and virtually all the other Republicans are peaceniks and it's all the Democrats' fault? As to the baby boomers...I am a baby boomer and have opposed US warmongering ever since Vietnam....ever heard of Jesse Ventura, or horrors! Jill Stein? Partly, after they came home from Woodstock, it was back to business as usual. Certainly a component of that is there. Many boomers sold out after the Civil Rights and anti war movements. So, so far in this discussion, I am not hearing anything about what's left of the real Left, such as Chris Hedges on RT, or Ventura and many other voices like Michael Parenti, whom the Establishment either bought off or banished. Dennis Kucinich being a good example. And let's not even talk about the Greens, who have always been anti war. Their candidate--a female baby boomer was shackled so she couldn't be in the presidential debates! And then accused by the Democrats of being a Russian bot.

    TheDudeAbidesByAgoodTime , 1 week ago

    Neo-Cons are Zionist partisans and former "Troksyists"(as Chris Hitchens would say), AIPAC is the only foriegn lobby not registered under FARA....this network has infiltrated this country on every government and social level since even before they accomplished a state, Mossad is tied hip to hip with our intelligence agencies and have and continue to steal secrets and material of all kinds.....btw the last president and attorney general to demand inspections of Dimona, supported Palestinian right of return and gave the Zionist lobby 72 hours to register under FARA were Jack and Bobby Kennedy, read Michael Collins Piper's Final Judgment if you wan't more about that but we should all know who the real problem is and that problem comes out of Tel Aviv.....

    joe bob , 5 days ago

    Do not base your opinion of what the people want by looking at the 2018 mid term elections. Between the astronomical amount of voter fraud and the sabotaging by Paul Ryan (because he is one of those neocons or some would call RHINO"s) because Paul Ryan hates Trump! 2020 will be a huge disappointment if you do. For starters there were about 40 seats that dems ran completely unopposed!

    IronicalSmirk , 1 week ago

    Tulsi Gabbard does NOT align with Bernie Sanders at all. Sanders is PRO war. Do your homework, jog your memory. As VP she wouild have zip power over foreign affairs or u.s. war involvement. She is however, aligned with Rand Paul, if anyone. Sanders' association with socialist DOMESTIC change has nothing to do with his unspoken position on imperialistic occupation and regime change.

    Steve McCormack , 1 week ago

    Its so comical to hear news hosts on all the mainstream media outlets criticizing Tulsi for going to Syria yet none of them ever discuss Chelsea Manning let alone show the video of the US Hellicopter gunning down 12 people and the American soldiers laughing after it. Manning was imprisoned and tortured for her act of journalism. The networks still do not dare show that video let alone discuss it.

    Steve McCormack , 1 week ago

    Its so comical to hear news hosts on all the mainstream media outlets criticizing Tulsi for going to Syria yet none of them ever discuss Chelsea Manning let alone show the video of the US Hellicopter gunning down 12 people and the American soldiers laughing after it. Manning was imprisoned and tortured for her act of journalism. The networks still do not dare show that video let alone discuss it.

    Charles Canzater , 6 days ago

    She will make an excellent VP. or Secretary of State if not the President ! I am tired of being taken to war by people who haven't served . (Not even as Boy Scout) !!!

    tobagocat conman , 6 days ago

    I wish Tulsi well..best candidate since Ron Paul. Unfortunately the stupidity of the American public never ceases to amaze. Just YouTube a few of Mark Dice interviews when he asks just the basic of questions...the responses are a scary but albeit reflection of why America is doomed

    cyclamengarden , 1 week ago (edited)

    "legacy media" !! a great phrase. Oh, I see. I thought legacy media was a reference to sources like CNN and MSNBC. But it refers more to magazines and other publications (old media).

    Alan Conlan , 1 week ago

    The current and past agendas of the neocons can be easily identified as failures from the viewpoint of making things better for humanity. But this is not their measure. The failure you are seeing is actually success for them. Their interest is in war and destruction. See how this cancer is spreading through their thought patterns. The total dismantling of their military complex is the only way to bring this cancer to heel. This must happen from within.

    dan cureton , 1 week ago

    The curtains are being raised showing neo cons and neo libs on same team exposing war mongers in media as well Tulsi Gabbard for president feel the aloha

    KL Scott , 1 week ago

    Tulsi's voting record shows she will feed the DOD machine regardless of pork. She voted yea on HR 695, HR 3364, HR 1301, etc., all for a DOD that is yet to be held accountable for lost $ trillions.

    [Mar 03, 2019] Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: Regime change wars have disastrous consequences

    Feb 28, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Truth , Mar 2, 2019 4:02:55 PM | link

    Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: Regime change wars have disastrous consequences

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpe79LfhUZU

    [Mar 02, 2019] Tancredo Would Republican Establishment Use Impeachment to Block Trump Agenda

    First vices about the color revolution against Trump were heard on December 2016
    Notable quotes:
    "... Republican leaders in Congress are already sending Trump a subtle but clear warning: accept our business-as-usual Chamber of Commerce agenda or we will join Democrats to impeach you. ..."
    "... Impeachment has been the goal of Democrats since the day after Trump won the election, and the Republican establishment will use the veiled threat as leverage to win concession after concession from the Trump White House. ..."
    "... There are at least four Trump campaign promises which, if not dropped or severely compromised, could generate Republican support for impeachment: Trump's Supreme Court appointments, abandoning the Trans Pacific Partnership, radical rollback of Obama regulatory projects, and real enforcement of our nation's immigration laws. ..."
    "... On regulatory rollback, Congress can legitimately insist on negotiating the details with Trump. But on the other three, immigration, the TPP, and Supreme Court nominees, Trump's campaign promises were so specific - and so popular - that he need not accept congressional foot-dragging. ..."
    "... Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced this week he will oppose Trump's tax reforms. Senator Lindsey Graham is joining Democrats in sponsoring new legislation to protect the "Dreamers" from deportation after their unlawfully granted legal status and work permits expire. Senator Susan Collins will oppose any restrictions on Muslim refugees, no matter how weak and inadequate the vetting to weed out jihadists. Senator Lamar Alexander aims to protect major parts of Obamacare, despite five years of voluminous Republican promises to "repeal and replace" it if they ever had the power to do so. ..."
    "... on the House side, we have the naysayer-in-chief, Speaker Paul Ryan, who refused to campaign with Donald Trump in Wisconsin, and who has vowed to obstruct Trump's most important and most popular campaign promise - an end to open borders and vigorous immigration law enforcement. ..."
    "... Donald Trump won a electoral mandate to change direction and put American interests first, beginning with border security. If the congressional Republican establishment chooses to block the implementation of that electoral mandate, it would destroy not only Trump's agenda, it would destroy the Republican Party. ..."
    Dec 18, 2016 | www.breitbart.com
    Several months ago I was asked what advice I would give to the Trump campaign.

    I said, only half joking, that he had better pick a vice presidential candidate the establishment hates more than it hates him. That would be his only insurance against impeachment. Those drums have already begun to beat, be it ever so subtly.

    Is anyone surprised how quickly the establishment that Donald Trump campaigned against has announced opposition to much of his policy agenda? No. But few understand that the passionate opposition includes a willingness to impeach and remove President Trump if he does not come to heel on his America First goals.

    Ferocious opposition to Trump from the left was expected and thus surprises nobody. From the comical demands for vote recounts to street protests by roving bands of leftist hate-mongers and condescending satire on late-night television, hysterical leftist opposition to Trump is now part of the cultural landscape.

    But those are amusing sideshows to the main event, the Republican establishment's intransigent opposition to key pillars of the Republican president's agenda.

    Republican leaders in Congress are already sending Trump a subtle but clear warning: accept our business-as-usual Chamber of Commerce agenda or we will join Democrats to impeach you.

    If you think talk of impeachment is insane when the man has not even been sworn into office yet, you have not been paying attention. Impeachment has been the goal of Democrats since the day after Trump won the election, and the Republican establishment will use the veiled threat as leverage to win concession after concession from the Trump White House.

    What are the key policy differences that motivate congressional opposition to the Trump agenda? There are at least four Trump campaign promises which, if not dropped or severely compromised, could generate Republican support for impeachment: Trump's Supreme Court appointments, abandoning the Trans Pacific Partnership, radical rollback of Obama regulatory projects, and real enforcement of our nation's immigration laws.

    On regulatory rollback, Congress can legitimately insist on negotiating the details with Trump. But on the other three, immigration, the TPP, and Supreme Court nominees, Trump's campaign promises were so specific - and so popular - that he need not accept congressional foot-dragging.

    Yet, while the President-elect 's transition teams at the EPA, State Department and Education Department are busy mapping ambitious changes in direction, Congress's Republican leadership is busy doubling down on dissonance and disloyalty.

    Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced this week he will oppose Trump's tax reforms. Senator Lindsey Graham is joining Democrats in sponsoring new legislation to protect the "Dreamers" from deportation after their unlawfully granted legal status and work permits expire. Senator Susan Collins will oppose any restrictions on Muslim refugees, no matter how weak and inadequate the vetting to weed out jihadists. Senator Lamar Alexander aims to protect major parts of Obamacare, despite five years of voluminous Republican promises to "repeal and replace" it if they ever had the power to do so.

    And then, on the House side, we have the naysayer-in-chief, Speaker Paul Ryan, who refused to campaign with Donald Trump in Wisconsin, and who has vowed to obstruct Trump's most important and most popular campaign promise - an end to open borders and vigorous immigration law enforcement.

    It is no exaggeration to say that Trump's success or failure in overcoming the opposition to immigration enforcement will determine the success or failure of his presidency. If he cannot deliver on his most prominent and most popular campaign promise, nothing else will matter very much.

    So, the bad news for President Trump is this: If he keeps faith with his campaign promises on immigration, for example to limit Muslim immigration from terrorism afflicted regions, which is within his legitimate constitutional powers as President, he will risk impeachment. However, his congressional critics will face one enormous hurdle in bringing impeachment charges related to immigration enforcement: about 90 percent of what Trump plans to do is within current law and would require no new legislation in Congress. Obama disregarded immigration laws he did not like, so all Trump has to do is enforce those laws.

    Now, if you think talk of impeachment is ridiculous because Republicans control Congress, you are underestimating the depth of Establishment Republican support for open borders.

    The first effort in the 21st century at a general amnesty for all 20 million illegal aliens came in January 2005 from newly re-elected President George Bush. The "Gang of Eight" amnesty bill passed by the US Senate in 2013 did not have the support of the majority of Republican senators, and now they are faced with a Republican president pledged to the exact opposite agenda, immigration enforcement. And yet, do not doubt the establishment will sacrifice a Republican president to protect the globalist, open borders status quo.

    The leader and spokesman for that establishment open borders agenda is not some obscure backbencher, it is the Republican Speaker of the House. Because the Speaker controls the rules and the legislative calendar, if he chooses to play hardball against Trump on immigration he can block any of Trump's other policy initiatives until Trump abandons his immigration enforcement goals.

    What all this points to is a bloody civil war within the Republican Party fought on the battlefield of congressional committee votes.

    Donald Trump won a electoral mandate to change direction and put American interests first, beginning with border security. If the congressional Republican establishment chooses to block the implementation of that electoral mandate, it would destroy not only Trump's agenda, it would destroy the Republican Party.

    [Mar 02, 2019] How do you like the NKVD libruls afraid of Trump bringing fascism who were running a gestapo (the FBI wiring tapping other countrys Ministers) on US citizens of the opposing party?

    Feb 19, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
    ilsm : , February 18, 2017 at 04:45 AM
    Vox, what about reporting from a crystal ball requires truth?
    Peter K. -> ilsm... , February 18, 2017 at 07:37 AM
    The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming! Hide under your bed.
    ilsm -> Peter K.... , February 18, 2017 at 12:42 PM
    Flynn could have said something "inappropriate" by a Clintonista definition of "inappropriate", and he "could" be prosecuted under a law designed to muzzle US citizens, that has never been tried bc a Bill of rights argument would win!

    How do you like the NKVD libruls afraid of Trump bringing fascism who were running a gestapo (the FBI wiring tapping other country's Ministers) on US citizens of the opposing party?

    If the fascists are coming they would keep Obama's FBI!

    [Mar 02, 2019] Watters Words The swamp strikes back

    Pretty interesting video... no we know that the Swamp consumed Flatfooted Donald rather quickly
    Notable quotes:
    "... Pete Hegseth and Jesse Watters discuss the bitter establishment's desperation to manufacture a Trump scandal ..."
    "... Most people don't know that after the 134 men died on the Forrestal fire in 1967 McCain was the ONLY person helicoptered off the ship. It was done for his own safety as many on the ship blamed him for causing the fire by "wet" starting his jet causing a plume of fire to shoot out his plane's exhaust and into the plane behind McCain causing the ordnance to cook off on that jet. McCain then panicked and dropped his own bombs onto the deck making matters much worse. McCain should have ended his career in jail. Oh, wait, he kinda did, maybe karma justice? ..."
    "... FakeStream Media ..."
    "... The very Fake Media has met their match ..."
    Feb 18, 2017 | www.youtube.com
    Pete Hegseth and Jesse Watters discuss the bitter establishment's desperation to manufacture a Trump scandal

    Louis John 2 hours ago

    @hexencoff

    McCain is a trouble maker. supporter of the terrorist and warmonger Iraq Libya Syria he is behind all the trouble scumbag

    Gary M 3 hours ago
    McCain is a globalist
    belaghoulashi 2 hours ago
    (edited) McCain has always been full of horseshit. And he has always relied on people calling him a hero to get away with it. That schtick is old, the man is a monumental failure for this country, and he needs to have his sorry butt kicked.

    ryvr madduck 1 hour ago

    +belaghoulashi

    Most people don't know that after the 134 men died on the Forrestal fire in 1967 McCain was the ONLY person helicoptered off the ship. It was done for his own safety as many on the ship blamed him for causing the fire by "wet" starting his jet causing a plume of fire to shoot out his plane's exhaust and into the plane behind McCain causing the ordnance to cook off on that jet. McCain then panicked and dropped his own bombs onto the deck making matters much worse. McCain should have ended his career in jail. Oh, wait, he kinda did, maybe karma justice?

    Michael Cambo 4 hours ago
    When you start to drain the swamp, the swamp creatures start to show.
    Alexus Highfield 3 hours ago
    @Michael Cambo

    don't they...they do say shit floats.

    Geoffry Allan 41 minutes ago

    @Michael Cambo - Trump has not drained the swamp he has surrounded himself with billionaires in his cabinet who don't give a damn about the working middle class who struggle e eryday to make a living - explain to me how he is draining the swamp

    tim sparks 3 hours ago
    Trump is trying so fucking hard to do a good job for us.
    Integrity Truth-seeker 2 hours ago
    @tim sparks

    He is not trying... HE IS DOING IT... Like A Boss. Thank God Mark Taylor Prophecies 2017 the best is yet to come

    Jodi Boin 3 hours ago
    McCain is a traitor and is bought and paid for by Soros.
    Grant Davidson 4 hours ago
    Love him or hate him. The guy is a frikkin Genius...
    Patrick Reagan 4 hours ago
    FakeStream Media
    Michael Cambo 4 hours ago
    @Patrick Reagan

    Very FakeStream Media

    aspengold5 4 hours ago
    I am so disappointed in McCain.
    orlando pablo 4 hours ago
    my 401k is keep on going up....thank u mr trump....
    Dumbass Libtard 3 hours ago
    McCain is not a Republican. He is a loser. Yuge difference.1
    Mitchel Colvin 3 hours ago
    Shut up McCain! I can't stand this clown anymore! Unfortunately, Arizona re-elected him for six more years!
    robert barham 4 hours ago
    The very Fake Media has met their match
    H My ways of thinking! 3 hours ago
    Why does everyone feel that if they don't kiss McCain's ass, they are being un American? Mccain has sold out to George Soros. He is a piece of shit who is guilty of no less than treason! Look up the definition for treason if you're in doubt!
    Sam Nardo 3 hours ago
    (edited) Mc Cain and Graham are two of the best democrats in the GOP. They are called RINOS
    kazzicup 3 hours ago
    We love and support our President Donald Trump. The media is so dishonest. CNN = Criminal News Network.

    Geoffry Allan 34 minutes ago

    @kazzicup - yeah if you get rid of the media Trump becomes a dictator - is that what you want he will censor everything and tell you what he wants - Trump is still president and he is doing his job and fulfilling his promises even though the media is there and reporting - so what's the problem - I don't want a got damn dictator running this country - if you don't like the media then just listen to Trump - 2nd amendment free speech and the right to bear arms we have to respect it even if we may disagree

    [Mar 02, 2019] The billionaire Warren Buffett to Trump: "I feel that way no matter who is president, the CEO -- which I am -- should have the ability to pick people that help you run a place."

    Now we know why he supported Trump picks ;-) They all were from the swap, that Trump supposedly intended to drain ;-)
    Jan 21, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
    Peter K. : January 20, 2017 at 11:50 AM

    Billionaires have to stick together.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-20/buffett-says-he-supports-trump-s-cabinet-picks-overwhelmingly?bcomANews=true

    Buffett Supports Trump on Cabinet Picks 'Overwhelmingly'

    by Amanda L Gordon and Noah Buhayar

    January 19, 2017, 8:19 PM EST January 20, 2017, 10:12 AM EST

    Warren Buffett said he "overwhelmingly" supports President-elect Donald Trump's choices for cabinet positions as the incoming commander-in-chief's selections face confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate.

    "I feel that way no matter who is president," the billionaire Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chairman and chief executive officer said Thursday in New York at the premiere of a documentary about his life. "The CEO -- which I am -- should have the ability to pick people that help you run a place."

    "If they fail, then it's your fault and you got to get somebody new," Buffett said. "Maybe you change cabinet members or something."

    Buffett, 86, backed Hillary Clinton in the presidential election, stumping for her in Omaha, Nebraska, and headlining fundraisers. The billionaire frequently clashed with Trump and scolded him for not releasing income-tax returns, as major party presidential candidates have done for roughly four decades.

    Trump's cabinet picks include Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker; former Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state; and retired Marine Corps General James Mattis as Defense secretary.

    Since the election, Buffett has struck a more conciliatory tone toward Trump and called for unity. In an interview with CNN in November, he said that people could disagree with the president-elect, but ultimately he "deserves everybody's respect."

    Trump's Popularity

    That message hasn't resonated. Trump's popularity is the worst for an incoming president in at least four decades, with just 40 percent of Americans saying they have a favorable impression of him, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll published Tuesday. Buffett said on Thursday that the low approval ratings won't matter much.

    "It's what you go out with that counts -- 20, 50 years later what people feel you've achieved," Buffett said.

    The president-elect has continued his pugnacious style during the transition, picking fights on Twitter with news outlets, automakers, defense contractors, intelligence agencies, Hollywood actress Meryl Streep and civil rights hero-turned-U.S. Congressman John Lewis.

    ...

    JohnH -> Peter K.... , January 20, 2017 at 12:05 PM
    Class warfare at its finest...
    sanjait -> Peter K.... , January 20, 2017 at 12:54 PM
    I wondered how you'd synthesize a way to disagree with Krugman on this one, given how seemingly commonsense and obvious are Krugman's points.

    Here's the answer it seems: talk about something else.

    John M -> sanjait... , January 20, 2017 at 01:14 PM
    The Bush team went further than that, actively sabotaging FBI field agents' investigations of possible upcoming attacks.

    Need it be stated that 9/11 did wonders for the Bush Administration?

    John M -> pgl... , January 20, 2017 at 01:35 PM
    Wonders for the Bush Administration:

    * It solved the problem of Democrats beginning to get a spine and going after the Felonious Five (or at least the three with major conflict of interest).

    * It bumped Bush's approval rating from 40% to 80%.

    * It greatly lowered opposition to Bush's anti-civil-liberties policies, such as creating "1st Amendment Zones".

    * It made passage of the Patriot Act possible.

    * People were able to smear opposition to the Bush team policies as treasonous.

    * It rendered torture, aggressive war, and barbaric imprisonment without due process of law respectable.

    Bush Administration sabotaged investigation:

    Remember Coleen Rowley who claimed that an FBI superior back in DC rewrote her request for a warrant, to make it less likely that it would be approved? There was also the FBI agent in Arizona who wanted to investigate certain pilot students, but was prohibited.

    pgl -> sanjait... , January 20, 2017 at 01:20 PM
    Remember the DeLenda Plan? Once we knew the USS Cole was Al Qaeda, it should have been executed. As in the spring of 2001. Alas, it was deferred to after 9/11. Most incompetent crew ever and the Twin Towers fell down taking 3000 people with because of their utter incompetence.
    ilsm -> sanjait... , January 20, 2017 at 03:09 PM
    Obama presided over 8 more years of Bushco organized murder and good profits for the war mongers.

    [Mar 02, 2019] I don't think much of Trump but it is kind of amusing to see the elites, who screwed over most of the population, now having nervous breakdowns

    The US neoliberal/neocon elite emasculated Trump in just three months.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The elites are wetting their pants ..."
    "... The really clever ones recognize that their is a populist upsurge worldwide against elite policymaking as Thoma discussed in his column on Davos man. ..."
    Jan 20, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
    Tom aka Rusty -> Fred C. Dobbs... Reply Friday, January 20, 2017 at 07:05 AM

    The elites are wetting their pants.

    I don't think much of Trump but it is kind of amusing to see the elites, who screwed over most of the population, now having nervous breakdowns.

    Therapists in Manhattan and Hollywood will do a booming business.

    Peter K. -> Tom aka Rusty... , January 20, 2017 at 07:14 AM

    yeah the elites are getting a taste of the fear regular folks get over losing a job and financial disaster.

    The thing is, Trump is very unpopular.

    EMichael -> Tom aka Rusty... , January 20, 2017 at 07:20 AM
    So, which elites are you talking about? Just give me an example or two. Y'know, it is possible to be successful and still spend a lot of time doing the right things for people not as successful as you.
    Peter K. -> EMichael... , January 20, 2017 at 07:36 AM
    Summers and Krugman. See their most recent columns. I think more of the level-headed elites are thinking/hoping that Trump will be 4 years and out and it will all blow over.
    Peter K. -> Peter K.... , January 20, 2017 at 07:38 AM
    The really clever ones recognize that their is a populist upsurge worldwide against elite policymaking as Thoma discussed in his column on Davos man.
    Tom aka Rusty -> EMichael... , -1
    Yes, there are a few of those. I;ve been impressed by some of the things I have heard from the Steyer brothers. But then there is Bill and Hill, Soros, the Trump cabinet, Rubin/Corzine/Rattner/Summers and a whole unheavenly host. But not all that many impress me, particularly in Manhattan and California.

    [Mar 02, 2019] Trump is the Republican Obam

    Mar 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Feb 28, 2019 10:29:45 AM | link

    Trump apologists spinning the failed summit

    Once again, I remind everyone that we saw THE EXACT SAME THING with Obama. Failures were NEVER attributed to Obama despite the fact that Obama kept "failing" over and over again.

    What is "failure" to us is success for the establishment.

    That's how the faux populist leader psyop works. I've been writing about Trump as a faux populist like Obama for about 18 months. But those who hope that Trump is their hero refuse to see what they don't want to see . And then there are those that deliberately want to push the pretense that hero Trump is repeatedly confounded by his advisors.

    steven t johnson @6 has it right: Believing Trump is or ever was open to breaking with US imperialism is Trumpery.

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    Anyone trying to excuse Trump is a fool or worse. Trump is not hero, he's a member of the team. He is is part and parcel of the anti-democratic scam. He is the Empire's spokesperson, and a tool of the Deep State.

    Is he a puppet? No. He is a member of the team.

    fastfreddy , Feb 28, 2019 2:49:48 PM | link

    Trump's 11 dimensional chess is a lot like Obama's 11 dimensional chess. Neither could figure out a way to keep warmongers and hateful pricks out of their cabinets, or curtail the war machine in any way, or to stop handing out tax giveaways to people who don't need them.

    [Mar 01, 2019] ...a nation divided against itself ...

    Feb 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    "For more than two years, the United States and the world have had two competing narratives: that an elected president of the United States was a Russian agent whom the Kremlin helped elect; and its rival narrative that senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and other national intelligence organizations had repeatedly lied under oath, misinformed federal officials, and meddled in partisan political matters illegally and unconstitutionally and had effectively tried to influence the outcome of a presidential election, and then undo its result by falsely propagating the first narrative. It is now obvious and indisputable that the second narrative is the correct one.

    The authors, accomplices, and dupes of this attempted overthrow of constitutional government are now well along in reciting their misconduct without embarrassment or remorse because -- in fired FBI Director James Comey's formulation -- a "higher duty" than the oath they swore to uphold the Constitution compelled them.

    Or -- in fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's words -- "the threat" was too great. Nevermind that the nature of "the threat" was that the people might elect someone he and Comey disapproved of as president, and that that person might actually serve his term, as elected." Black

    ----------

    Baron Black of Crossharbour, is an interesting fellow. In this piece he (or someone) makes the case for the reality of the "soft coup" that the Borg (foreign policy establishment) and the Deep State mandarins (SES ers) scattered across the Executive Branch undertook and for which they only now are being driven back into their dens. Black reminds me of Lord Beaverbrook, another Canadian who was a member of the War Cabinet in WW2?

    The caste of US general and admirals are not I think part of the coup plot. They have their own game as a group and it is not a neocon game except for a few outliers like Jack Keane, a priest of the neocon cult.

    Nevertheless, IMO Black is wrong when he thinks that the present situation is the worst constitutional crisis since the outbreak of the WBS. No, IMO, this is far worse than that. It is the worst ever. In 1860 the seceding states did not seek to overthrow Lincoln, the legally elected president of the US, even though he had been elected by a plurality in the popular vote and not a single electoral vote from the South. They simply wished to depart what they saw as a voluntary union of the states.

    In this case the forces arrayed against Trump wish to overthrow the constitutional order. That is much worse. pl

    http://www.conradmblack.com/1449/the-greatest-constitutional-crisis-since?fbclid=IwAR2qWyKRRnX94rYAZ4xBeWE8yscLdMA8U-bWfPYirVfCXjFiigyUcf_nIM4

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrad_Black

    MP98 , 5 hours ago

    Unfortunately nothing will happen to these people.
    No one will be charged, much less tried..
    The swamp is above the law - "laws are for little people."
    We are not governed, we are ruled.
    Pat Lang Mod -> MP98 , 3 hours ago
    Ok. I will quit.
    Keith Harbaugh , 7 hours ago
    "In this case the forces arrayed against Trump wish to overthrow the constitutional order. That is much worse. pl"

    Just want to point out someone who seems to agree with you on many issues, such as this: David A. Stockman .
    For a sample of his thinking and writing, see
    "The New Gray Lady – Comfort Woman for the War Party" , 2019-01-16

    The Donald has been on a red hot twitter rampage, and he's completely justified. Actually, we didn't think the Russian Collusion Hoax could get any stupider until we saw the New York Times' Friday evening bushwhack. ...

    And for lots of his columns, see his archive at antiwar.com . There you will find not only the titles of his articles, but also short summaries.

    Interesting (actually quite disappointing) how little he is quoted in the MSM. What an echo chamber it is!

    [Feb 27, 2019] Their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... "That might have left people with the false impression that their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy, and in reality they are living in a neo-feudalist, de facto global capitalist empire administrated by omnicidal money-worshipping human parasites that won't be satisfied until they've remade the whole of creation in their nihilistic image." ..."
    Feb 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Jake , says: February 26, 2019 at 12:04 pm GMT

    "That might have left people with the false impression that their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy, and in reality they are living in a neo-feudalist, de facto global capitalist empire administrated by omnicidal money-worshipping human parasites that won't be satisfied until they've remade the whole of creation in their nihilistic image."

    Now that's writing worth reading. If the Nobel committee did not serve the Global Empire, it would give the Literature Prize to Hopkins.

    The late 19th and 20th century Russians had the horror of dealing with Nihilists running amuck in their country. Now the Nihilists rule the world as multi-billionaire Globalists.

    [Feb 27, 2019] Their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... "That might have left people with the false impression that their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy, and in reality they are living in a neo-feudalist, de facto global capitalist empire administrated by omnicidal money-worshipping human parasites that won't be satisfied until they've remade the whole of creation in their nihilistic image." ..."
    Feb 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Jake , says: February 26, 2019 at 12:04 pm GMT

    "That might have left people with the false impression that their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy, and in reality they are living in a neo-feudalist, de facto global capitalist empire administrated by omnicidal money-worshipping human parasites that won't be satisfied until they've remade the whole of creation in their nihilistic image."

    Now that's writing worth reading. If the Nobel committee did not serve the Global Empire, it would give the Literature Prize to Hopkins.

    The late 19th and 20th century Russians had the horror of dealing with Nihilists running amuck in their country. Now the Nihilists rule the world as multi-billionaire Globalists.

    [Feb 27, 2019] Mueller investigation was clearly was part of the leverage used to get control of Trump

    Feb 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Zachary Smith , Feb 26, 2019 1:37:24 AM | link

    @Circe @100

    Tump can go back and keep his job pleasing the Zionist elite that installed him.

    So far as I'm concerned Hillary was the dream candidate for the apartheid Jewish state. That the Zionists have made a terrific rebound in capturing Trump seems to me to be another story entirely. At a guess, I'd say the job was done with a combination of flattery, bribery, and naked force.

    I've tuned out the Mueller thing, but suspect it was part of the leverage used to get control of Trump. Again a guess, but I'd say Trump was totally in bed with the Russians - and everybody else with whom he thought he might run a scam. But this was "business", as in making promises and squeezing money out of them. Things like Trump University. With proper handling the cost of the failures would fall mostly on the "investors". And in the worst case, there was always the fifth or sixth bankruptcy.

    Trump didn't expect to be president - that was a humongous publicity campaign financed by the Corporate Media. I don't think Pence was expecting anything besides getting some national exposure which might lead him becoming Senator from Indiana in 2018.

    I'm very glad Hillary isn't perched in the White House, but the price of avoiding that has been higher than I expected. Speaking of the devil, I read some ugly stuff at the 2:00 news part of Naked Capitalism.

    Clinton (2): "EX-CLINTON POLLSTER: Hillary will run if Biden doesn't -- or field is 'too far left'" [The American Mirror]. "After defending Clinton's credentials as 'one of the most experienced politicians around,' [Mark] Penn went on to say of the reported recent confabs between Hillary and declared candidates, "Those meetings are going to be somewhat awkward because she hasn't declared that she's not definitely running, and she, in fact, at the same time is looking over the field and I think will make a decision later in the year whether or not to run herself. Penn said the chances of Hillary running depends on how the field shapes up. 'If the party looks too far to the left and there's no front runner, she'll get in,' he said. 'I think if Joe Biden gets in, that probably means she won't run if he gets in. If he doesn't get in, I think the field will be open for her,' Penn said." • She's tanned, rested, and ready!

    That fits right in with my belief that the corporate Dems would prefer Trump's second term or Pence's first term to any decent Democrat being elected. I'll be saying this over and over - while Sander's foreign policy credentials stink to high heaven, the prospect of him being "decent" in domestic matters isn't too awfully bad.

    Jackrabbit , Feb 26, 2019 2:26:48 AM | link

    Zachary Smith | Feb 26, 2019 1:37:24 AM | 102

    Mueller [investigation]... suspect it was part of the leverage used to get control of Trump.
    Well, the "Russia meddled" scare-mongering has worked well as a means of reviving anti-Russian McCarthyism. It even ensnared Wikileaks and Michael Flynn (both of whom were CIA/Deep State targets).

    And, why would the Deep State allow an unvetted person to assume control of the Presidency? They are too careful for that. In fact, all recent President's have some connection to CIA: Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama. Felix Slater, an FBI informant worked for Trump for over a decade while informing on the Russian mob, and most of Trump dubious Russian oligarch connections are actually more loyal to Israel than Russia.

    Trump didn't expect to be president
    That's funny, given the fact that he bragged that he would win and that he was the ONLY populist running for the Republican nomination (out of 19 contenders!). And none of the other candidates (many of whom are seasoned campaigners) sought to alter their strategy when the saw Trump pulling ahead?!?!

    Oh, and Hillary helped her friend Trump win when she alienated key constituencies (Sanders progressives, Blacks) and energized Trump's base by calling them "deploreables".

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    Oh, sorry, these things are supposed to be memory-holed. Hope you and MoA readers don't suffer from too much cognitive dissonance from such facts.

    [Feb 27, 2019] Barr is CIA's shyster lawyer, Mueller is CIA's cleaner. Both FBI and DoJ are completely controlled by CIA "focal points" (Dulles' term) or dotted-line reports (Bush-era Newspeak.)

    Feb 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Bern , says: February 25, 2019 at 10:31 pm GMT

    follyofwar, I hate to be Debbie Downer, but who do think Mueller works for?

    https://digwithin.net/2018/04/08/muellers-history/

    Barr is CIA's shyster lawyer, Mueller is CIA's cleaner. Both FBI and DoJ are completely controlled by CIA "focal points" (Dulles' term) or dotted-line reports (Bush-era Newspeak.)

    What's more, Hill and Bill work for CIA too: Hill got her start purloining documents for CIA's "Watergate" purge of Nixon; Cord Meyer recruited Bill at Oxford.

    CIA brainwashing makes Republicans blame Democrats for what CIA does to you, and makes Democrats blame Republicans for what CIA does to them. CIA runs your country while party loyalists tear each other's throats out. Divide et impera.

    Nobody will be doing a fine job for the country because CIA doesn't give a rat's ass about the country. They've got a business to run: drug-dealing, gun-running, child trafficking and pedophile blackmail, money-laundering, foreign asset-stripping.

    [Feb 27, 2019] Microsoft employees petition against Hololens contract with US Army

    Feb 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    vk , Feb 25, 2019 10:55:17 AM | link

    A curiosity:

    Microsoft employees petition against Hololens contract with US Army

    [Feb 26, 2019] Neoliberalism by Julie Wilson

    Highly recommended!
    The book adhere to "classic" line of critique of neoliberalism as a new "secular religion" ( the author thinking is along the lines of Gramsci idea of "cultural hegemony"; Gramsci did not use the term 'secular religion" at all, but this close enough concept) that deified the market. It stress the role of the state in enforcing the neoliberalism.
    Oct 09, 2017 | www.amazon.com

    skeptic on October 8, 2017

    A solid book on neoliberal ideology and neoliberal rationality. Highly recommended

    The book adhere to "classic" line of critique of neoliberalism as a new "secular religion" ( the author thinking is along the lines of Gramsci idea of "cultural hegemony"; Gramsci did not use the term 'secular religion" at all, but this is close enough concept) that deified the market. It stresses the role of the state in enforcing the neoliberal ideology much like was the case with Bolsheviks in the USSR:

    Gramsci's question is still pressing: How and why do ordinary working folks come to accept a system where wealth is produced by their collective labors and energies but appropriated individually by only a few at the top? The theory of hegemony suggests that the answer to this question is not simply a matter of direct exploitation and control by the capitalist class. Rather, hegemony posits that power is maintained through ongoing, ever-shifting cultural processes of winning the consent of the governed, that is, ordinary people like you and me.

    According to Gramsci, there was not one ruling class, but rather a historical bloc, "a moving equilibrium" of class interests and values. Hegemony names a cultural struggle for moral, social, economic, and political leadership; in this struggle, a field -- or assemblage -- of practices, discourses, values, and beliefs come to be dominant. While this field is powerful and firmly entrenched, it is also open to contestation. In other words, hegemonic power is always on the move; it has to keep winning our consent to survive, and sometimes it fails to do so.
    Through the lens of hegemony, we can think about the rise of neoliberalism as an ongoing political project -- and class struggle -- to shift society's political equilibrium and create a new dominant field. Specifically, we are going to trace the shift from liberal to neoliberal hegemony. This shift is represented in the two images below.

    Previous versions of liberal hegemony imagined society to be divided into distinct public and private spheres. The public sphere was the purview of the state, and its role was to ensure the formal rights and freedoms of citizens through the rule of law. The private sphere included the economy and the domestic sphere of home and family.

    For the most part, liberal hegemony was animated by a commitment to limited government, as the goal was to allow for as much freedom in trade, associations, and civil society as possible, while preserving social order and individual rights. Politics took shape largely around the line between public and private; more precisely, it was a struggle over where and how to draw the line. In other words, within the field of liberal hegemony, politics was a question of how to define the uses and limits of the state and its public function in a capitalist society. Of course, political parties often disagreed passionately about where and how to draw that line. As we'll see below, many advocated for laissez-faire capitalism, while others argued for a greater public role in ensuring the health, happiness, and rights of citizens. What's crucial though is that everyone agreed that there was a line to be drawn, and that there was a public function for the state.

    As Figure 1.1 shows, neoliberal hegemony works to erase this line between public and private and to create an entire society -- in fact, an entire world -- based on private, market competition. In this way, neoliberalism represents a radical reinvention of liberalism and thus of the horizons of hegemonic struggle. Crucially, within neoliberalism, the state's function does not go away; rather, it is deconstructed and reconstructed toward the new' end of expanding private markets.

    This view correlates well with the analysis of Professor Wendy Brown book "Undoing the Demos" and her paper "Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy" (pdf is freely available)

    In this sense neoliberalism are just "Trotskyism for the rich" with the same utopian dream of global neoliberal revolution, but much more sinister motives. And is as ruthless in achieving its goals, if necessary bring neoliberal "regime change" on the tips of bayonets, or via 'cultural revolutions".

    If we follow the line of thinking put forward by Professor Philip Mirowski's in his book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown," we can say that neoliberals essentially "reverse-engineered" Bolsheviks methods of acquiring and maintaining political power, replacing "dictatorship of proletariat" with the "dictatorship of financial oligarchy".

    I would say more: The "professional revolutionary" cadre that were the core of Bolshevik's Party were replaced with well paid, talented intellectual prostitutes at specially created neoliberal think tanks. And later "infiltrated" in economic departments (kind of stealth coup d'état in academia financed by usual financial players).

    Which eventually created a critical mass of ideas which were able to depose New Deal Capitalism ideology, putting forward the set of remedies that restore the power the financial oligarchy enjoyed in 1920th. Technological changes such as invention of computers and telecommunication revolution also helped greatly.

    At the same time unlike Bolsheviks, neoliberals are carefully hiding their agenda. Funny, neoliberalism is the only known to me major ideology which the US MSM are prohibited to mention by name ;-)

    The role of state under neoliberalism is very close to the role of state under Bolsheviks' "dictatorship of proletariats". It no way this still a liberal democracy -- this is what Sheldon Wolin called "inverted totalitarism". Less brutal then Bolsheviks' regime, but still far from real democracy. Under neoliberalism the state is a powerful agent needed to enforce markets on unsuspecting population in all spheres of life, whether they want it or not (supported by 12" guns of neoliberal MSM battleships):

    As Figure 1.1 shows, neoliberal hegemony works to erase this line between public and private and to create an entire society -- in fact, an entire world -- based on private, market competition. In this way, neoliberalism represents a radical reinvention of liberalism and thus of the horizons of hegemonic struggle. Crucially, within neoliberalism, the state's function does not go away; rather, it is deconstructed and reconstructed toward the new' end of expanding private markets. Consequently, contemporary politics take shape around questions of how best to promote competition. For the most part, politics on both the left and right have been subsumed by neoliberal hegemony. For example, while neoliberalism made its debut in Western politics with the right-wing administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, leaders associated with the left have worked to further neoliberal hegemony in stunning ways. As we will explore in more depth below and in die coming chapters, both U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have governed to create a privatized, market society. In other words, there is both a left and a right hegemonic horizon of neoliberalism. Thus, moving beyond neoliberalism will ultimately require a whole new field of politics.

    One of the most interesting part of the book is the brief analysis of the recent elections (with very precise characterization of Hillary Clinton defeat as the defeat of the "neoliberal status quo"). The author claims that Trump supporters were mainly representatives of the strata of the US society which were sick-and-tied of neoliberalism (note the percentage of Spanish speaking electorate who voted for Trump), but they were taken for a ride, as instead of rejection of globalism and free movement of labor, Trump actually represented more right wing, more bastardized version of "hard neoliberalism".

    In the period which followed the elections Trump_vs_deep_state emerged as a kind of "neoliberalism in one country" -- much like Stalin's "socialism in one country". It and did not care one bit about those who voted for him during election . As in classic "The Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go."

    So in a way Trump represents the mirror image of Obama who in the same way betrayed his votes (twice) acting from "soft neoliberalism" position, while Trump is acting from "hard neoliberalism" position.

    On the other hand, we saw' the rise of the Tea Party, a right-wing response to the crisis. While the Tea Party was critical of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was perfectly embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-, it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism.

    Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering. Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. There were just too many fissures and fault lines in the glossy, cosmopolitan world of left neoliberalism and marketized equality. Indeed, while Clinton ran on status-quo stories of good governance and neoliberal feminism, confident that demographics and diversity would be enough to win the election, Trump effectively tapped into the unfolding conjunctural crisis by exacerbating the cracks in the system of marketized equality, channeling political anger into his celebrity brand that had been built on saying "f*** you" to the culture of left neoliberalism (corporate diversity, political correctness, etc.) In fact, much like Clinton's challenger in the Democratic primary, Benie Sanders, Trump was a crisis candidate.
    ... ... ...

    In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as Rottenberg argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism that has many concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism.

    We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and left neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here. As I suggested in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled politics of both right and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized equality. After all, as political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive, left neoliberalism.

    While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected the chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."'

    [Feb 26, 2019] Neoliberalism by Julie Wilson

    Highly recommended!
    The book adhere to "classic" line of critique of neoliberalism as a new "secular religion" ( the author thinking is along the lines of Gramsci idea of "cultural hegemony"; Gramsci did not use the term 'secular religion" at all, but this close enough concept) that deified the market. It stress the role of the state in enforcing the neoliberalism.
    Oct 09, 2017 | www.amazon.com

    skeptic on October 8, 2017

    A solid book on neoliberal ideology and neoliberal rationality. Highly recommended

    The book adhere to "classic" line of critique of neoliberalism as a new "secular religion" ( the author thinking is along the lines of Gramsci idea of "cultural hegemony"; Gramsci did not use the term 'secular religion" at all, but this is close enough concept) that deified the market. It stresses the role of the state in enforcing the neoliberal ideology much like was the case with Bolsheviks in the USSR:

    Gramsci's question is still pressing: How and why do ordinary working folks come to accept a system where wealth is produced by their collective labors and energies but appropriated individually by only a few at the top? The theory of hegemony suggests that the answer to this question is not simply a matter of direct exploitation and control by the capitalist class. Rather, hegemony posits that power is maintained through ongoing, ever-shifting cultural processes of winning the consent of the governed, that is, ordinary people like you and me.

    According to Gramsci, there was not one ruling class, but rather a historical bloc, "a moving equilibrium" of class interests and values. Hegemony names a cultural struggle for moral, social, economic, and political leadership; in this struggle, a field -- or assemblage -- of practices, discourses, values, and beliefs come to be dominant. While this field is powerful and firmly entrenched, it is also open to contestation. In other words, hegemonic power is always on the move; it has to keep winning our consent to survive, and sometimes it fails to do so.
    Through the lens of hegemony, we can think about the rise of neoliberalism as an ongoing political project -- and class struggle -- to shift society's political equilibrium and create a new dominant field. Specifically, we are going to trace the shift from liberal to neoliberal hegemony. This shift is represented in the two images below.

    Previous versions of liberal hegemony imagined society to be divided into distinct public and private spheres. The public sphere was the purview of the state, and its role was to ensure the formal rights and freedoms of citizens through the rule of law. The private sphere included the economy and the domestic sphere of home and family.

    For the most part, liberal hegemony was animated by a commitment to limited government, as the goal was to allow for as much freedom in trade, associations, and civil society as possible, while preserving social order and individual rights. Politics took shape largely around the line between public and private; more precisely, it was a struggle over where and how to draw the line. In other words, within the field of liberal hegemony, politics was a question of how to define the uses and limits of the state and its public function in a capitalist society. Of course, political parties often disagreed passionately about where and how to draw that line. As we'll see below, many advocated for laissez-faire capitalism, while others argued for a greater public role in ensuring the health, happiness, and rights of citizens. What's crucial though is that everyone agreed that there was a line to be drawn, and that there was a public function for the state.

    As Figure 1.1 shows, neoliberal hegemony works to erase this line between public and private and to create an entire society -- in fact, an entire world -- based on private, market competition. In this way, neoliberalism represents a radical reinvention of liberalism and thus of the horizons of hegemonic struggle. Crucially, within neoliberalism, the state's function does not go away; rather, it is deconstructed and reconstructed toward the new' end of expanding private markets.

    This view correlates well with the analysis of Professor Wendy Brown book "Undoing the Demos" and her paper "Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy" (pdf is freely available)

    In this sense neoliberalism are just "Trotskyism for the rich" with the same utopian dream of global neoliberal revolution, but much more sinister motives. And is as ruthless in achieving its goals, if necessary bring neoliberal "regime change" on the tips of bayonets, or via 'cultural revolutions".

    If we follow the line of thinking put forward by Professor Philip Mirowski's in his book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown," we can say that neoliberals essentially "reverse-engineered" Bolsheviks methods of acquiring and maintaining political power, replacing "dictatorship of proletariat" with the "dictatorship of financial oligarchy".

    I would say more: The "professional revolutionary" cadre that were the core of Bolshevik's Party were replaced with well paid, talented intellectual prostitutes at specially created neoliberal think tanks. And later "infiltrated" in economic departments (kind of stealth coup d'état in academia financed by usual financial players).

    Which eventually created a critical mass of ideas which were able to depose New Deal Capitalism ideology, putting forward the set of remedies that restore the power the financial oligarchy enjoyed in 1920th. Technological changes such as invention of computers and telecommunication revolution also helped greatly.

    At the same time unlike Bolsheviks, neoliberals are carefully hiding their agenda. Funny, neoliberalism is the only known to me major ideology which the US MSM are prohibited to mention by name ;-)

    The role of state under neoliberalism is very close to the role of state under Bolsheviks' "dictatorship of proletariats". It no way this still a liberal democracy -- this is what Sheldon Wolin called "inverted totalitarism". Less brutal then Bolsheviks' regime, but still far from real democracy. Under neoliberalism the state is a powerful agent needed to enforce markets on unsuspecting population in all spheres of life, whether they want it or not (supported by 12" guns of neoliberal MSM battleships):

    As Figure 1.1 shows, neoliberal hegemony works to erase this line between public and private and to create an entire society -- in fact, an entire world -- based on private, market competition. In this way, neoliberalism represents a radical reinvention of liberalism and thus of the horizons of hegemonic struggle. Crucially, within neoliberalism, the state's function does not go away; rather, it is deconstructed and reconstructed toward the new' end of expanding private markets. Consequently, contemporary politics take shape around questions of how best to promote competition. For the most part, politics on both the left and right have been subsumed by neoliberal hegemony. For example, while neoliberalism made its debut in Western politics with the right-wing administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, leaders associated with the left have worked to further neoliberal hegemony in stunning ways. As we will explore in more depth below and in die coming chapters, both U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have governed to create a privatized, market society. In other words, there is both a left and a right hegemonic horizon of neoliberalism. Thus, moving beyond neoliberalism will ultimately require a whole new field of politics.

    One of the most interesting part of the book is the brief analysis of the recent elections (with very precise characterization of Hillary Clinton defeat as the defeat of the "neoliberal status quo"). The author claims that Trump supporters were mainly representatives of the strata of the US society which were sick-and-tied of neoliberalism (note the percentage of Spanish speaking electorate who voted for Trump), but they were taken for a ride, as instead of rejection of globalism and free movement of labor, Trump actually represented more right wing, more bastardized version of "hard neoliberalism".

    In the period which followed the elections Trump_vs_deep_state emerged as a kind of "neoliberalism in one country" -- much like Stalin's "socialism in one country". It and did not care one bit about those who voted for him during election . As in classic "The Moor has done his duty, the Moor can go."

    So in a way Trump represents the mirror image of Obama who in the same way betrayed his votes (twice) acting from "soft neoliberalism" position, while Trump is acting from "hard neoliberalism" position.

    On the other hand, we saw' the rise of the Tea Party, a right-wing response to the crisis. While the Tea Party was critical of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was perfectly embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-, it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism.

    Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering. Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. There were just too many fissures and fault lines in the glossy, cosmopolitan world of left neoliberalism and marketized equality. Indeed, while Clinton ran on status-quo stories of good governance and neoliberal feminism, confident that demographics and diversity would be enough to win the election, Trump effectively tapped into the unfolding conjunctural crisis by exacerbating the cracks in the system of marketized equality, channeling political anger into his celebrity brand that had been built on saying "f*** you" to the culture of left neoliberalism (corporate diversity, political correctness, etc.) In fact, much like Clinton's challenger in the Democratic primary, Benie Sanders, Trump was a crisis candidate.
    ... ... ...

    In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as Rottenberg argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism that has many concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism.

    We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and left neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here. As I suggested in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled politics of both right and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized equality. After all, as political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive, left neoliberalism.

    While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected the chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."'

    [Feb 26, 2019] Banning Huawei in the US will hurt US Huawei dealers more than it will hurt Huawei.

    Feb 26, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Hoarsewhisperer , Feb 24, 2019 1:29:18 PM | link

    I'm watching CGTN ... Huawei are telling the Yanks that they can live without the USA market and will NOT allow back doors in their phones; adding that banning Huawei in the US will hurt US Huawei dealers more than it will hurt Huawei. The report also included an Advertorial for the new Huawei folding smart phone. It looks like a 7" tablet when open and folds down the centre with the screen on the OUTSIDE of the closed phone. It can download a 1 Gb movie in 3 (three) seconds and will cost $2600-00, making it the most expensive smartphone on the market.
    Sounds like a great big FU AmeriKKKa to me.

    [Feb 26, 2019] That might have left people with the false impression that their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy, and in reality they are living in a neo-feudalist, de facto global capitalist empire administrated by omnicidal money-worshipping human parasites that won't be satisfied until they've remade the whole of creation in their nihilistic image

    Feb 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Jake , says: February 26, 2019 at 12:04 pm GMT

    "That might have left people with the false impression that their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy, and in reality they are living in a neo-feudalist, de facto global capitalist empire administrated by omnicidal money-worshipping human parasites that won't be satisfied until they've remade the whole of creation in their nihilistic image."

    Now that's writing worth reading. If the Nobel committee did not serve the Global Empire, it would give the Literature Prize to Hopkins.

    The late 19th and 20th century Russians had the horror of dealing with Nihilists running amuck in their country. Now the Nihilists rule the world as multi-billionaire Globalists.

    [Feb 26, 2019] Warren Joins Bernie In Rejecting Private Fundraisers.. For Now - YouTube

    Feb 26, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Jonathan Powling , 7 hours ago

    Send a buck to Tulsi. 65,000 donors baby

    Mister Methuselah , 6 hours ago

    What's wrong with Tulsi's fundraisers? They are not PAC money and $125/plate is not that expensive. Tulsi has a huge disadvantage, because she isn't getting any coverage. Tulsi's dinners are not sponsored by Corporate money.

    Rosannasfriend , 6 hours ago (edited)

    Warren said to Cenk Uygur(in a NEW interview!) that her refusal of corporate donations only extends to the primaries. She said [we] need corporate donations- or as she calls them- "everything in our arsenal to beat Trump". Still want to lump her in with Bernie?

    Max Waller , 7 hours ago (edited)

    Never Completely Trust anyone, so thoroughly research everyone before supporting anyone on anything to be fully aware of who benefits and how, since you may or may not benefit at all 11:16 hours Pacific Standard Time on Tuesday, 26 February 2019

    un mog , 6 hours ago

    Im not too mad about Tulsi, especially when a "large" donation is 200 or more. I think large should be considered more than 500

    [Feb 26, 2019] The USA elite will never willingly give up their power. It has to be taken from them.

    Feb 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

    renfro , says: February 26, 2019 at 6:14 am GMT

    @redmudhooch

    "I've given up the illusion that we'll ever vote our way out of this madness, look at Narco Rubio's tweet yesterday using snuff photos of Gaddafi after the gangsters in DC murdered him and destroyed his country, turning it back centuries, using them as a threat to Maduro. You don't vote that kind of Mob out, we have the mafia now in charge of our country, the most powerful military in the world is run by satanic mobsters, and we're foolish enough to think voting is going to make this go away? Criminals and gangsters don't stop until they're either in prison or dead. They don't go away or give up power because you ask them to, which is all voting is, asking them nicely. Good luck with that!

    Mafia is the correct description. And you are right, they will never willingly give up their power. It has to be taken from them. And anyone who expects voting to do that job better find themselves a Elliot Ness to put in the WH.

    [Feb 26, 2019] Nobody will be doing a fine job for the country because CIA doesn't give a rat's ass about the country

    Feb 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Bern , says: February 25, 2019 at 10:31 pm GMT

    follyofwar, I hate to be Debbie Downer, but who do think Mueller works for?

    https://digwithin.net/2018/04/08/muellers-history/

    Barr is CIA's shyster lawyer, Mueller is CIA's cleaner. Both FBI and DoJ are completely controlled by CIA "focal points" (Dulles' term) or dotted-line reports (Bush-era Newspeak.)

    What's more, Hill and Bill work for CIA too: Hill got her start purloining documents for CIA's "Watergate" purge of Nixon; Cord Meyer recruited Bill at Oxford.

    CIA brainwashing makes Republicans blame Democrats for what CIA does to you, and makes Democrats blame Republicans for what CIA does to them. CIA runs your country while party loyalists tear each other's throats out. Divide et impera.

    Nobody will be doing a fine job for the country because CIA doesn't give a rat's ass about the country. They've got a business to run: drug-dealing, gun-running, child trafficking and pedophile blackmail, money-laundering, foreign asset-stripping.

    [Feb 26, 2019] Calling a spade a spade

    Feb 26, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    psychohistorian , Feb 24, 2019 11:58:04 PM | link

    Calling a spade a spade......
    "
    TEHRAN, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Sunday that the West has turned the Middle East into a "powder keg" through arms sales to the Arab countries in the region, Press TV reported.

    Over the past year alone, the West sold weapons worth 100 billion U.S. dollars to the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, said Zarif.

    "The weapons did not bring security to anyone," he added.

    The Iranian minister made the remarks in a foreign policy speech at the University of Tehran.

    Since the United States withdrew from the 2015 landmark Iranian nuclear deal last May, Iran has been under unprecedented sanctions from Washington.

    Iran has also repeatedly denied the West's criticism of its alleged "interfering" policies in the region.
    "

    [Feb 26, 2019] Civilizations are only held together by the "glue" of shared beliefs. The deep-state-media-complex has just applied a solvent to the very glue that holds the entire culture together.

    Feb 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

    densa , says: February 26, 2019 at 11:04 pm GMT

    @Mike from Jersey This:

    Don't the people pulling the strings behind the media understand what they have done? They have convinced a large part of the nation that everything that they were taught from childhood is a fraud.

    Civilizations are only held together by the "glue" of shared beliefs. The deep-state-media-complex has just applied a solvent to the very glue that holds the entire culture together.

    And Hopkins says a disillusioned people might realize

    in reality they are living in a neo-feudalist, de facto global capitalist empire administrated by omnicidal money-worshipping human parasites that won't be satisfied until they've remade the whole of creation in their nihilistic image.

    There has been a longstanding bipartisan attack against the nation, and I use that term as defined as "a stable, historically developed community of people with a territory, economic life, distinctive culture, and language in common."

    But I don't think the "deep-state-media-complex" is concerned by this. Again, feature not bug.

    [Feb 26, 2019] Corrupt and decaying neoliberal elite and Gramsci's idea of hegemony

    Feb 26, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    We begin our investigation with a historical account of the rise of neoliberal hegemony. Hegemony is a concept developed by Italian Marx- ist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was keen to account for the definitive role that culture played in legitimizing and sustaining capitalism and its exploitation of the working classes. In our own context of extreme economic inequality, Gramsci's question is still pressing: How and why do ordinary working folks come to accept a system where wealth is produced by their collective labors and energies but appropriated individually by only a few at the top?

    The theory of hegemony suggests that the answer to this question is not simply a matter of direct exploitation and control by the capitalist class. Rather, hegemony posits that power is maintained through ongoing, ever-shifting cultural processes of winning the consent of the governed, that is, ordinary people like you and me.

    In other words, if we want to really understand why and how phenomena like inequality and exploitation exist, we have to attend to the particular, contingent, and often contradictory ways in which culture gets mobilized to forward the interests and power of the ruling classes. According to Gramsci, there was not one ruling class, but rather a historical blос. "A moving equilibrium" of class interests and values.

    Hegemony names a cultural struggle for moral, social, economic, and political leadership; in this struggle, a field -- or assemblage -- of practices, discourses, values, and beliefs come to be dominant. While this field is powerful and firmly entrenched, it is also open to contestation.

    In other words, hegemonic power is always on the move; it has to keep winning our consent to survive, and sometimes it fails to do so. Through the lens of hegemony, we can think about the rise of neoliberalism as an ongoing political project -- and class struggle -- to shift society's political equilibrium and create a new' dominant field.

    [Feb 25, 2019] Forget Jussie Smollet, Here Are the Real False Flags by Kevin Barrett

    Feb 25, 2019 | www.unz.com
    Kevin Barrett February 24, 2019 •

    The world slipped closer to nuclear war. Big false flags -- actual, suspected, and anticipated -- were a key factor. But hardly anybody noticed. Everyone was riveted by the story of actor Jussie Smollet, who supposedly paid a couple of Nigerian-American bodybuilders for a staged racist-homophobic near-lynching. The ostensible motive: Add a zero to Smollet's pathetic little million-a-year salary.

    [Feb 24, 2019] David Stockman on Peak Trump : Undrainable swamp (which is on Pentagon side of Potomac river) and fantasy of MAGA (which become MIGA -- make Israel great again)

    Highly recommended!
    Interview is about forthcoming book "Peak Trump" In "Peak Trump", Stockman goes after all the sacred cows: Military spending, entitlement spending, MAGA, Trump's tax cut, the intelligence budget, and the Wall. Trump is a symptom of the problem. He wanted to drain the swamp but failed to do so. He never really had a good chance of doing that, but he failed to make the most of the chance he had. We are where we are because of decades of Congressional and monetary mismanagement
    All in the name of empire... the Deep state in non-particular and Trump proved to be a "naked king"
    At 15:49 min Ron Paul asks the question about Tulsi... She positioned herself as noninterventionists and has similar foreign policy as Ron Paul used to have. Stockman answer was very interesting and informative.. MSM journalists are essentially federal contractor, lobbyists of MIC.
    He also mentioned that Trump falls from the bait. And the appointment of Elliot Abrams was real betrayal of his voters.
    Notable quotes:
    "... He was smart enough to understand that the commonplace observation codified as the Laffer Curve, while true, didn't mean that DC could just go on an endless spending spree and expect increased tax revenues to exceed the avarice of politicians, though. ..."
    "... No, I don't think Stockman's rhetoric was a lie. He did end up getting shoved out of the Reagan regime, after all, precisely because he resisted giving every cabinet secretary all the money they wanted and, as you say, insisted that the tax cuts needed to be accompanied by spending cuts. ..."
    "... But supply-side economics is, perversely, a departure from sound economic policy in the direction of central planning . Its premise is that instead of production being driven by diffuse demand, money should be concentrated in the hands of a few who "know better" what should be produced. ..."
    "... And in practice, the "entrepreneurs" intended to benefit were the businesses who already had the clout to make themselves part of the political class, not the guy in his garage designing a better mousetrap. ..."
    "... The Laffer Curve is an interesting but much over-used (and badly used) observation: There is a tax revenue curve with a top to it. That is, as you raise taxes, revenues go up ... until the taxation gets onerous enough that additional earnings beyond bare subsistence strike people as not worth the input, beyond which point tax INcreases produce revenue DEcreases. ..."
    Feb 04, 2019 | www.antiwar.com

    supremeborg • 19 days ago ,

    David Stockman was one of my conservative heroes during the Reagan years. He was the one person in the Administration who seemed to have an honest understanding of economics. It's nice to see that his experiences with the reality of the DC swamp have made him go all the way to describing himself as a libertarian, rather than a conservative.

    He could have sold out, given up any modicum of principle, and simply become a multi-millionaire Republican Party establishment hack.

    I would venture to say he and I have some policy differences, but it's always nice to see when someone embraces their best, rather than their worst, instincts.

    Thomas L. Knapp Mod supremeborg • 19 days ago ,

    My recollection of Stockman's economics from those years (based on e.g. The Triumph of Politics) was that he was all-in on "supply side" economics, which is twaddle. He was smart enough to understand that the commonplace observation codified as the Laffer Curve, while true, didn't mean that DC could just go on an endless spending spree and expect increased tax revenues to exceed the avarice of politicians, though.

    supremeborg Thomas L. Knapp • 19 days ago ,

    Yes, supply side is bogus, but my observations were that Stockman was quite critical of the spending increases that the Administration put forth. He approved of the so called tax-cuts, but he did so with the understanding that there would be spending cuts along with them.

    My own recollections (I was alive back then, but not as politically conscious as I am now) were that Stockman was not endorsing the supply side theory so much as his own idea that cuts in government spending were necessary, and that tax cuts would put pressure on Congress and the administration to cut spending. The irony is that, for whatever reason, tax revenues overall increased by 60% in Reagan's two terms, yet spending increased almost 100%. This certainly disproves the idea that there was ever a revenue problem, and that it has always been a spending problem.

    In any event, Stockman was just about the only person with an official capacity in DC, who actually worked toward spending cuts. Unless you are saying that his rhetoric was a lie, and he was just like all the others. If that is the case then, of course, you could always be right.

    Thomas L. Knapp Mod supremeborg • 18 days ago ,

    No, I don't think Stockman's rhetoric was a lie. He did end up getting shoved out of the Reagan regime, after all, precisely because he resisted giving every cabinet secretary all the money they wanted and, as you say, insisted that the tax cuts needed to be accompanied by spending cuts.

    But supply-side economics is, perversely, a departure from sound economic policy in the direction of central planning . Its premise is that instead of production being driven by diffuse demand, money should be concentrated in the hands of a few who "know better" what should be produced.

    True, the central planning class in question was, broadly and not very honestly defined, "entrepreneurs" rather than government bureaucrats, but the principle was the same. And in practice, the "entrepreneurs" intended to benefit were the businesses who already had the clout to make themselves part of the political class, not the guy in his garage designing a better mousetrap.

    supremeborg Thomas L. Knapp • 18 days ago ,

    "But supply-side economics is, perversely, a departure from sound economic policy"

    Perhaps the most damning thing about it was that the stated goal was to increase the federal government's revenue. What person in their right mind would wish to give even more money and power to the federal government?

    Thomas L. Knapp Mod supremeborg • 18 days ago ,

    I think you're mixing up two different things.

    The Laffer Curve is an interesting but much over-used (and badly used) observation: There is a tax revenue curve with a top to it. That is, as you raise taxes, revenues go up ... until the taxation gets onerous enough that additional earnings beyond bare subsistence strike people as not worth the input, beyond which point tax INcreases produce revenue DEcreases.

    [Feb 24, 2019] David Stockman on Peak Trump : Undrainable swamp (which is on Pentagon side of Potomac river) and fantasy of MAGA (which become MIGA -- make Israel great again)

    Highly recommended!
    Interview is about forthcoming book "Peak Trump" In "Peak Trump", Stockman goes after all the sacred cows: Military spending, entitlement spending, MAGA, Trump's tax cut, the intelligence budget, and the Wall. Trump is a symptom of the problem. He wanted to drain the swamp but failed to do so. He never really had a good chance of doing that, but he failed to make the most of the chance he had. We are where we are because of decades of Congressional and monetary mismanagement
    All in the name of empire... the Deep state in non-particular and Trump proved to be a "naked king"
    At 15:49 min Ron Paul asks the question about Tulsi... She positioned herself as noninterventionists and has similar foreign policy as Ron Paul used to have. Stockman answer was very interesting and informative.. MSM journalists are essentially federal contractor, lobbyists of MIC.
    He also mentioned that Trump falls from the bait. And the appointment of Elliot Abrams was real betrayal of his voters.
    Notable quotes:
    "... He was smart enough to understand that the commonplace observation codified as the Laffer Curve, while true, didn't mean that DC could just go on an endless spending spree and expect increased tax revenues to exceed the avarice of politicians, though. ..."
    "... No, I don't think Stockman's rhetoric was a lie. He did end up getting shoved out of the Reagan regime, after all, precisely because he resisted giving every cabinet secretary all the money they wanted and, as you say, insisted that the tax cuts needed to be accompanied by spending cuts. ..."
    "... But supply-side economics is, perversely, a departure from sound economic policy in the direction of central planning . Its premise is that instead of production being driven by diffuse demand, money should be concentrated in the hands of a few who "know better" what should be produced. ..."
    "... And in practice, the "entrepreneurs" intended to benefit were the businesses who already had the clout to make themselves part of the political class, not the guy in his garage designing a better mousetrap. ..."
    "... The Laffer Curve is an interesting but much over-used (and badly used) observation: There is a tax revenue curve with a top to it. That is, as you raise taxes, revenues go up ... until the taxation gets onerous enough that additional earnings beyond bare subsistence strike people as not worth the input, beyond which point tax INcreases produce revenue DEcreases. ..."
    Feb 04, 2019 | www.antiwar.com

    supremeborg • 19 days ago ,

    David Stockman was one of my conservative heroes during the Reagan years. He was the one person in the Administration who seemed to have an honest understanding of economics. It's nice to see that his experiences with the reality of the DC swamp have made him go all the way to describing himself as a libertarian, rather than a conservative.

    He could have sold out, given up any modicum of principle, and simply become a multi-millionaire Republican Party establishment hack.

    I would venture to say he and I have some policy differences, but it's always nice to see when someone embraces their best, rather than their worst, instincts.

    Thomas L. Knapp Mod supremeborg • 19 days ago ,

    My recollection of Stockman's economics from those years (based on e.g. The Triumph of Politics) was that he was all-in on "supply side" economics, which is twaddle. He was smart enough to understand that the commonplace observation codified as the Laffer Curve, while true, didn't mean that DC could just go on an endless spending spree and expect increased tax revenues to exceed the avarice of politicians, though.

    supremeborg Thomas L. Knapp • 19 days ago ,

    Yes, supply side is bogus, but my observations were that Stockman was quite critical of the spending increases that the Administration put forth. He approved of the so called tax-cuts, but he did so with the understanding that there would be spending cuts along with them.

    My own recollections (I was alive back then, but not as politically conscious as I am now) were that Stockman was not endorsing the supply side theory so much as his own idea that cuts in government spending were necessary, and that tax cuts would put pressure on Congress and the administration to cut spending. The irony is that, for whatever reason, tax revenues overall increased by 60% in Reagan's two terms, yet spending increased almost 100%. This certainly disproves the idea that there was ever a revenue problem, and that it has always been a spending problem.

    In any event, Stockman was just about the only person with an official capacity in DC, who actually worked toward spending cuts. Unless you are saying that his rhetoric was a lie, and he was just like all the others. If that is the case then, of course, you could always be right.

    Thomas L. Knapp Mod supremeborg • 18 days ago ,

    No, I don't think Stockman's rhetoric was a lie. He did end up getting shoved out of the Reagan regime, after all, precisely because he resisted giving every cabinet secretary all the money they wanted and, as you say, insisted that the tax cuts needed to be accompanied by spending cuts.

    But supply-side economics is, perversely, a departure from sound economic policy in the direction of central planning . Its premise is that instead of production being driven by diffuse demand, money should be concentrated in the hands of a few who "know better" what should be produced.

    True, the central planning class in question was, broadly and not very honestly defined, "entrepreneurs" rather than government bureaucrats, but the principle was the same. And in practice, the "entrepreneurs" intended to benefit were the businesses who already had the clout to make themselves part of the political class, not the guy in his garage designing a better mousetrap.

    supremeborg Thomas L. Knapp • 18 days ago ,

    "But supply-side economics is, perversely, a departure from sound economic policy"

    Perhaps the most damning thing about it was that the stated goal was to increase the federal government's revenue. What person in their right mind would wish to give even more money and power to the federal government?

    Thomas L. Knapp Mod supremeborg • 18 days ago ,

    I think you're mixing up two different things.

    The Laffer Curve is an interesting but much over-used (and badly used) observation: There is a tax revenue curve with a top to it. That is, as you raise taxes, revenues go up ... until the taxation gets onerous enough that additional earnings beyond bare subsistence strike people as not worth the input, beyond which point tax INcreases produce revenue DEcreases.

    [Feb 24, 2019] Sarah Abed on Twitter You ve really folded under pressure @TulsiGabbard. You know for a FACT that #Assad isn t a brutal dictator by Sarah Abed

    She folded under pressure, but what would you expect her to do. Being branded as an "Assad stooge", even if wrong, is a death sentence for the campaign. This is was nasty and effective trick to keep her "in place". And it worked.
    Off course, Megan McCain behaved like an angry alcoholic, but that does not change the situation much: all them were neoliberal/neocon warmongers.
    Notable quotes:
    "... You know for a FACT that # Assad isn't a brutal dictator and that he never used chemical weapons against his people. You even went to Syria. Yet you're willing to lie just to please a bullying McCain of all people. What a shame. ..."
    "... Melissa, when you come up with a reasonable alternative to al nusra, al qaeda and isis to govern the country and unite the syrian people, and have a game plan to impose it, please let us know. ..."
    "... Well you have a big problem on your hands @ MeghanMcCain because your dads "moderate rebels" beheaded 2 of our family members in # Syria Not President Assad He has protected our family in the Christian Valley of Syria and we went to over 50 Reporters "experts" who refused to talk ..."
    @ TulsiGabbard .

    You know for a FACT that # Assad isn't a brutal dictator and that he never used chemical weapons against his people. You even went to Syria. Yet you're willing to lie just to please a bullying McCain of all people. What a shame.

    Verified account @ TheView Feb 20

    Rep. Tulsi Gabbard says "there's no disputing the fact" that Bashar Al-Assad is a "brutal dictator" who "has used chemical weapons" against his people, but adds that amid the US's "regime-change war," the "lives of the Syrian people have not been improved" http:// abcn.ws/2Ne74r9

    NativeSF‏ @dypraxia Replying to @melmel24 @TheView

    Melissa, when you come up with a reasonable alternative to al nusra, al qaeda and isis to govern the country and unite the syrian people, and have a game plan to impose it, please let us know.

    Jennifer Kahl ‏ @ jnj_kahl Feb 21 Replying to @ TheView

    Well you have a big problem on your hands @ MeghanMcCain because your dads "moderate rebels" beheaded 2 of our family members in # Syria Not President Assad He has protected our family in the Christian Valley of Syria and we went to over 50 Reporters "experts" who refused to talk

    [Feb 24, 2019] How the Revolution Could Devour Bernie by W. James Antle III

    Bernie was a sheepdog. He has no real intention to fight for the presidency in 2016, and he gave up very despicably to Hillary during the National convention.
    At his age he is not a presidential candidate in 2020 (he was born in 1941). He just again play the role of sheep dog, possibly helping to defeat Tulsi Gabbard. As The Atlantic pointed out:" Sanders will hurt contenders whose support overlaps with his, reducing the pool of voters available for those who are targeting the same groups most drawn to him, particularly young people, the most liberal activists, and independents who participate in Democratic primaries. "
    Sanders's entry could also influence his competitors' assessment of the earliest primary states, by causing other candidates to view the New Hampshire contest as a regional showdown between him and Warren
    Notable quotes:
    "... "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders." – Hillary Clinton to investors in a paid speech given to Brazilian Banco Itau in 2013 ..."
    "... Had primary voters known everything that was going on, including rigging of the primaries and laundering of money from state and local committees, and Bernie had actually hammered Clinton for those things like any normal candidate would, he'd have won the primary and might very well be President today. Her compromising of national security via email would've been the cherry on top. ..."
    Feb 24, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Bernie Sanders's quest for the Democratic presidential nomination was one of the biggest surprises of the 2016 campaign, surpassed only by the election's ultimate winner . The rumpled septuagenarian socialist senator from the tiny state of Vermont, who had never even run for office as a Democrat before, went from decades of laboring in obscurity to competing with Hillary Clinton on something approaching even terms. On Tuesday he announced he wants to try again, this time in a race with no obvious frontrunner.

    The closest parallel to Sanders's success was probably Ron Paul: elderly, ideological veteran lawmakers who were beloved by younger voters inside the major political party to which they were intermittently attached (Paul was the 1988 Libertarian Party nominee for president, Sanders technically won all his elections as an independent or third-party candidate) when they sought its presidential nomination late in their careers. Despite their vast differences on economics, both men also wanted an end to perpetual war in the Middle East.

    Yet Sanders thrived in a two-way race and came closer than Paul to the nomination, even if he never quite threatened to pull off a Barack Obama-style upset against Clinton. With the GOP's small government wing in decline , Sanders also appears for now to have had more of a transformative effect on the Democratic Party.

    "Socialism" is no longer an epithet in American politics and Sanders proved there was valuable ground to the left of Obama.

    Can Sanders do it again? To get a sense of how the Bernie revolution might eat its own, let's reflect on why he fell short the first time. Sanders is an old-school leftist who believes in the centrality of class, not race.

    Hailing from one of the whitest states in the country, he never made inroads in the communities of color that have become such a large part of the Democratic primary electorate -- and the crucial reason Obama prevailed where Sanders' fellow Vermonter Howard Dean did not. Sanders was pilloried for his refusal to support open borders in a 2015 interview with liberal pundit Ezra Klein. "No, that's a Koch brothers proposal," Sanders replied, later calling it "right-wing." He added, "It would make everybody in America poorer -- you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that." Klein's website then ran a piece with a headline claiming "Bernie Sanders's fear of immigrant labor is ugly -- and wrongheaded."

    This left-wing economic nationalism might make Sanders attractive to the white working-class voters who cast the decisive ballots for Donald Trump in 2016. So too would the fact that while Sanders is reliably liberal on social issues, including the obligatory support for abortion on demand, he is clearly not animated by them. The key swing voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are economically liberal but socially conservative.

    What might be assets in the general election against Trump are huge liabilities in the Democratic primaries, however. In an American progressivism increasingly defined by intersectionality and identity politics, even a socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union is something of a relic. Centrists and liberals alike lobbed accusations of sexism against the "Bernie bros" supporting Sanders.

    Now these Sanders critics will have liberal women -- in some cases, women of color -- to choose from in the primaries. Even outside presidential politics, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offers the same democratic socialism in a more attractive, internet-savvy, diverse, and woke package. In the primaries, Sanders will have to share the left lane with others. Elizabeth Warren can compete with him on economics, Tulsi Gabbard for antiwar street cred. Nearly all the contenders now support "Medicare for All," with many signing up for the $42 trillion Green New Deal.

    How Paul Ryan Turned Trump into Jeb Bush The Democrats Need a Brutal Primary to Beat Trump

    If Democrats decide they want an aging white male for old times sake, Joe Biden could do the trick. His eight years as vice president under Obama revived his political fortunes, as Trump says in less flattering terms . A crowded group of progressives could give an establishment icon who starts with high name recognition a path to the nomination. And Biden could also vie with Trump for blue-collar white voters.

    Of course, Biden would be making much of that appeal on the basis of personality. Trump and Sanders rail against bad trade deals and the Iraq war. Biden has an even longer record of supporting such policies than Clinton did. Some of the other Sanders alternatives' progressivism is of more recent vintage (Kamala Harris) and perhaps of questionable sincerity (Cory Booker). Bernie is a true believer.

    But the modern Democratic Party is like a parade marching leftward so rapidly that it is hard for anyone, even Bernie Sanders, to keep up for long.

    Fayez Abedaziz February 19, 2019 at 11:52 pm

    Interesting take on Bernie here, yet, at the same time, I'm thinkin': The bad jokes continue on the American people, which is, for example, the two names toward the end of this article.

    Booker and Harris? These two intellectually hollow politicians are quite different from Bernie. They are opportunists using the labels 'liberal' or simply 'Democrats' to run for office. And, cynically using the label of being a 'minority.' Come on now!

    The joke I refer to is that these two, unlike Bernie don't give a rat's butt about anyone, ii's all self serving bull.

    The difference with Bernie? He, Bernie, is sincere and really cares for people, he has heart. Now, would some of you care to read old articles, some in the San Francisco newspapers from the bad old days when mayor Willie Brown was there and how he, married, was having ah, regular 'get togethers' with Kamala Harris and how he got her high paid positions with commissions and then helped her become Att. General. And, so they used the exact opposite of what I and my generation (teens) in the mid-late 60's were told, which was: judge everyone by THEIR character (as MLK also said). It doesn't matter whether you are of this or that, you know, race, national origin and so on.

    So Kamala Harris was using her ah, whatever to get ego positions and money. These are facts and I'm being kind here. There's more, Brown himself said, in recent interviews that he had the ah, affair(we know what that means and it's not for discussions on Plato and Calvin, ha) with her. So, this clown Booker is running cause he's black and that's it and Harris is using that too and that she's a female??

    More jokes from jokers on the American people. Again, a betrayal of myself and my fellow liberals from the 60's and 70's. Run, brother Bernie run! At least you're real and not sleazy, can you all dig what I'm sayin'?

    cka2nd , says: February 20, 2019 at 12:16 am
    If memory serves, significant numbers of black and Hispanic voters do not support open borders either. Bernie should learn from his 2016 mistakes, and go for the jugular against ex-prosecutor Harris and longtime foe of teachers and water carrier for the charter school industry Booker. He might also note Gillibrand's flip flop on guns, if he hasn't done the same.

    He also needs to call out the Democratic establishment for supporting Medicare for All in words, while undercutting it in deed.

    And he must learn not to be so solicitous of corporate Democrats, be they corrupt war criminals like Clinton (he should have kept his mouth shut about the e-mails) or bait-and-switch types like Andrew Cuomo, who is pulling on a state level with "free college" and an "increased" minimum wage exactly what Pelosi is doing at the federal level with Medicare for All. Oh, and talk more about jobs for all, a shortened workweek, restoring voting rights and the Voting Rights Act, and breaking up and controlling the banks and near monopolies instead of wonking out about Big Money in politics (nowhere near as visceral as closing down polling places and purging voter rolls, although gerrymandering might be turning into a rare winning "wonk" issue).

    Respect the voters, Bernie, lay out your records vs. your opponents in targeted advertising, but treat your opponents as most of them deserve.

    Some advice from a non-supporter.

    polistra , says: February 20, 2019 at 2:08 am
    Nah. Ideology is meaningless. It's all about GANG POWER. Bernie is not authorized by the Clinton Mob, so he can't win. Kamala is employed by the Clinton Mob, so she will win.
    JonF , says: February 20, 2019 at 6:50 am
    Re: Sanders was pilloried for his refusal to support open borders in a 2015 interview with liberal pundit Ezra Klein.

    This is lazy writing. Words have meaning and there's no support for "open borders" among the Democrats either– which would mean tearing down all our border controls so that travel into the US from either Mexico or Canada would be as unhindered, on our side, as travel between Michigan and Ohio.

    Re: The key swing voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are economically liberal but socially conservative.

    It would be better stated that they are socially moderate: generally in favor of abortion rights (with limitations) and at peace with SSM, but not on board with the more extreme forms of feminism or gay rights advocacy. The days of true social conservatism as the default working class position are long gone. Mostly these people just want to be left alone– by both SJWs of the Left and Bible thumping preachers of the Right. In that regard Donald Trump seemed like a safe vote for them.

    zagonostra , says: February 20, 2019 at 9:15 am
    "Can Sanders do it again? To get a sense of how the Bernie revolution might eat its own, let's reflect on why he fell short the first time"

    Wow, not one word on the corruption and collusion between HRC and DNC as evidenced in Podesta emails and Donna Brazile's book.

    Lloyd Conway , says: February 20, 2019 at 12:33 pm
    As someone who voted for Ron Paul 2008-12, , Bernie in the primaries and then for Trump (reluctantly) in the general election, I will share what I see in Bernie: Honesty. Unbought. Unbossed. No taint of scandal, lifelong devotion to his beliefs, went to jail over housing desegregation, itinerate ne'er-d0-well supporting himself with home-made educational films for schools and carpentry gigs, a gadfly who won his first election by 10 votes in a four-way race, etc. , in other words, he's real. I don't share his views on social issues, but Trump's judicial picks make it a lot easier to contemplate a Bernie Presidency, as the Senate and courts would check and balance his more lefty impulses.

    He's about as un-bought as any politician in America, and having not been one of the cool kids means he's not beholden to them.

    Teamed with another outsider like Tulsi, Bernie would have a very good chance of winning, and he's quite possibly do as much good, on balance, as anyone could hope for.

    MM , says: February 20, 2019 at 12:51 pm
    JonF: "Words have meaning and there's no support for 'open borders' among the Democrats either."

    https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-hillary-clinton-open-borders-kass-1012-20161011-column.html

    "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders." – Hillary Clinton to investors in a paid speech given to Brazilian Banco Itau in 2013

    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/05/18/rep_jackie_speier_democrats_are_still_willing_to_trade_daca_for_trumps_wall_we_can_tear_down_the_wall_later.html

    Rep. Jackie Speier: "I have said publically before that if what we're doing is build a useless wall for a couple of years that we can then tear down, I'm willing to pay that price to make sure these DACA kids can stay in the country."

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/i-d-take-wall-down-says-beto-o-rourke-current-n971896

    "Beto O'Rourke said he would take down existing walls and fencing at the U.S.-Mexico border if he could."

    Harvard/Harris Poll, June 2018
    http://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Final_HHP_Jun2018_RegisteredVoters_Crosstabs_Memo.pdf

    Question: "Do you think we should have basically open borders or do you think we need secure borders?"

    Democrats: 36% favor open over secure borders
    Liberals: 46% favor open over secure borders

    What do those words mean, sir?

    MM , says: February 20, 2019 at 12:57 pm
    zagonostra: "Wow, not one word on the corruption and collusion between HRC and DNC as evidenced in Podesta emails and Donna Brazile's book."

    Had primary voters known everything that was going on, including rigging of the primaries and laundering of money from state and local committees, and Bernie had actually hammered Clinton for those things like any normal candidate would, he'd have won the primary and might very well be President today. Her compromising of national security via email would've been the cherry on top.

    Think about that

    Salt Lick , says: February 20, 2019 at 1:04 pm
    Sorry, that was a very cheap shot to snidely refer to Socialist Bernie's Honeymoon in the Soviet Union. He was mayor of Burlington, Vermont at the time and he officially visited the town's sister city in Russia with his new bride. Did he have fun while he was there, God forbid? Probably, as the video link clearly shows. Was he there to report to his Kremlin masters?
    Obviously not, since he has never been suspected of spying or of being a Russian stooge.
    CLW , says: February 20, 2019 at 2:07 pm
    TAC in general -- but Pat Buchannan and Rod Dreher in particular -- continues to exaggerate the portion of Democrats who are on the extreme far-left, and thus more "radical" than Bernie. Clinton hangers-on and hardcore DNC insiders aside, most Democrats can easily square their ideals and beliefs with Bernie's and have stronger incentives to do so than they did in 2016. Beyond the Democrats, those who saw him as too extreme in 2016 must re-calibrate and consider him as a viable alternative to the fiasco of Trump. However, it's difficult to imagine the extreme MAGA club defecting to Sanders, given how deeply they've entrenched themselves in Trump's fakery and lies.
    SteveM , says: February 20, 2019 at 2:16 pm
    Re: Kent, "Then we will have a great national debate over what's more important: a wall to keep out the Mexicans, or affordable healthcare."

    Related to "affordable" healthcare, the Democrat Medicare for All proposal is a naive and stupid illusion. The U.S. health care system based on the current fee-for-service model cannot be reformed by moving the "who pays" food around the plate.

    U.S. health care per capita costs of over $10,000 a year are 45% higher than German per capita costs. The ONLY genuine reform would provide a significant reduction in the per cost of health care to approach than of other advanced nations with some universal health care model.

    The ONLY way Medicare for All could work would be for the government to force massive fee cram-downs on the health care Crony Cartels. Big Doctor, Big Hospital, Big Pharma, Big Insurance would all have to be lined up for Big Haircuts.

    Only nobody in Washington has the guts to do that. Or has the guts to propose a truly transformational change in the health care model paradigm, e.g., a variation of the German model.

    The sad thing is that so many Americans are played for chumps by politicians spouting their simplistic solutions that make no more sense than the obviously wired-for-failure Obamacare.

    Stick a fork in America with Dems running the show too – Because it's still cooked.

    Idiots

    Richard W. Bray , says: February 20, 2019 at 3:11 pm
    All this concern-trolling from the Right and Center is really amusing.

    Polls indicate that the actual voters want what Bernie is selling. Given the chance, he will crush Trump, defeating ugly and vulgar cruelty with love and kindness.

    bgone , says: February 20, 2019 at 3:20 pm
    "the crucial reason Obama prevailed where Sanders' fellow Vermonter Howard Dean did not"

    Beyond all the bad faith toothless crushing of sour grapes in the article, this is an interesting line.

    Dean ran on an anti-war platform – against the Bush Doctrine – at a time when no other Democratic "leader" dared, and Barbara Lee's resolution to disavow the doctrine of preventive war got cobwebbed in the biparty Congress. His position – which contrasts well with his pitiful shilling for MEK these days – challenged the blobbed US biparty foreign policy "consensus" in much the same manner Primary Trump did, and the media and party backstablishment rallied to derail Dean ASAP.

    Obama had the foresight to speak out against the Iraq war without having to deliver a Senate vote, and he postured as comprehensively dishonest as an anti-war candidate as Trump did, and then implemented US impunitivism just as Trump does.

    The difference was 4 years, from 2004 to 2008. The People, in their finite wisdom, saw fit to elect a Supreme Court-selected GWB with popular majority, approving of illegal aggressive war (as well as Congress' unconstitutional authorizations for that crime).

    Incidentally, Barbara Lee refrained from re-introducing the disavowal of preventive war during the Obama years. Presumably the party might have not actually voted for it as long as they had that uncomfortable majority.

    Since 2008, the anti-war "movement" has veritably sublimated, and Obama's continuation of expansion of Bush's illegal wars has not been challenged and is – Syria, Yemen – rarely mentioned by those who criticize Trump for delivering Bush 5th term. In this respect, 2012 and 2016 were as different from 2008 as 2008 was from 2004 – and frankly, Obama's re-election in 2012 had the same "follow the leader" partisan stain that Bush's election in 2004 had: letters of indulgence to Presidents who had proven themselves liars and criminals.

    If there is one valid criticism of Sanders, it is that he has not committed in 2016 or since to a full, open break with the blob and the foreign policy consensus, and he has not taken a clear stand against illegal war, wasteful debt-backed military spending, and US impunitivism.

    No candidate for 2020 has committed to repealing the AUMF:

    https://www.rollcall.com/news/new-bill-introduced-in-honor-of-rep-walter-jones-would-repeal-the-aumf

    Connecticut Farmer , says: February 20, 2019 at 3:42 pm
    Nice guy, Bernie, though wooly-headed. I would like to think, however, that he truly believes in what he is saying. Sometimes, however, I wonder if what he says is for public consumption only and not reflective of what he really believes in–namely, garden variety Old School Liberalism. If he had been a True Believer and given the way they cooked the books, he would have flipped the bird to Madame and her DNC flunkies and run third-party (wouldn't THAT have been fun!). In the end, however he copped out, which makes one wonder where he really stands.

    If Sanders is denied the nomination of his party again–a distinct possibility as suggested by Mr. Antle–let's see if he"bolts" and mounts a third-party candidacy. If he does, he would be demonstrating the courage of his convictions–a rare commodity among politicians.

    If he doesn't and cops out yet again, falling meekly in lockstep behind the Democrat nominee, then it says here that Bernie Sanders is just another phony politician.

    Tomas , says: February 20, 2019 at 3:51 pm
    "When we talk about the word 'socialism,' I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day."

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

    "They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

    George Carlin

    Patrick Rodgers , says: February 20, 2019 at 11:31 pm
    Before the George Soros clones start the Revolution, they need to understand who owns most of the guns and ammunition in this country and knows how to use them. If you ass wipes want to dance, then start the music or shut the Hell up.
    DenverJ , says: February 21, 2019 at 12:04 am
    Salt Lick says " he has never been suspected of spying or of being a Russian stooge."
    No, the phrase is "useful idiot".
    Barry , says: February 21, 2019 at 6:56 am
    In the end, Bernie succeeded; the Democratic Party is now much more to the left than it was in 2016.

    This means that Bernie is no longer a genuine alternative, but one person in a crowd. *Now* he has to offer something special.

    Barry , says: February 21, 2019 at 6:57 am
    polistra

    "Nah. Ideology is meaningless. It's all about GANG POWER. Bernie is not authorized by the Clinton Mob, so he can't win. Kamala is employed by the Clinton Mob, so she will win."

    Little known political trivia: in the 2008 primaries, there was a challenger to Clinton, named Barrack Obama. He was stomped out of the race so fast that most people don't even remember him.

    Johann , says: February 21, 2019 at 7:52 am
    The far left tend to eat their own first.
    Mac61 , says: February 21, 2019 at 11:24 am
    I am not a fan of Trump, and believe the country would be better off with new leadership. But the liberal-left wing of the Democratic Party -- well, is it a wing or the party proper, that's the question -- is seriously delusional to think Bernie, Harris, Warren, Booker and the rest could carry more than 5 states. My guess is that only Sherrod Brown of Ohio could pull off a victory, if he has the chops to handle whatever slurs and nicknames Trump will have for him. Maybe the Democrats should draft Michael Dukakis. He crushed Biden.
    Positivethinker , says: February 21, 2019 at 3:44 pm
    " Kamala is employed by the Clinton Mob, so she will win."

    What a scary idea

    john , says: February 21, 2019 at 6:42 pm
    The problem for the Republicans is that we can't deny that the economy favors the wealthy, not because they are creative, or because they are building factories, and providing jobs but because they are able to borrow money at zero percent interest in order to keep the Wall Street casinos going. Trillions of dollars have been transferred from savings and pension plans to the wealthy in the form of bailouts and quantitative easing. And now the Fed has decided to not unload its balance sheet which means the debt has been monetized. Soon there will be lowering of interest rates and more quantitative easing. In short, we have a managed economy that favors the wealthy. Capitalism is dead. Transferring money to the wealthy while everyone else must bear the burden of austerity cannot, and should not last. The people will not continue to accept it. The wealthy brought it upon themselves.
    bkh , says: February 23, 2019 at 2:52 am
    john said:

    "The people will not continue to accept it. The wealthy brought it upon themselves."

    Great! So what can the people do? Those wealthy have the ability to send unemployment skyrocketing. They have the backing of both parties. Those people were progressive before anything we have today. Those wealthy do not play by the same rules others do. You can blame Republicans all you want, but many Dems are just as guilty and many Dem voters will feel the pain. too.

    MM , says: February 23, 2019 at 6:21 pm
    bkh: "They have the backing of both parties."

    Democrats are wealthier than Republicans, statistically speaking.

    And they've given more to Democrats than Republicans over the last 30 years.

    But Republicans are better armed.

    Left-wing radicals ought to think about those facts before they start going after "the rich" indiscriminately

    [Feb 24, 2019] Did Bernie effectively killed Tulsi campaign?

    Feb 24, 2019 | www.antiwar.com

    Skywalker • 5 days ago ,

    You can't say it any clearer than that. Tulsi will get her chance to shine and break from the pack in the first debate. She will stand out in stark contrast against the other war party candidates in both parties. I am looking for Tulsi to come out of the debates as a clear anti-war alternative while the others split the pro-war vote.

    Unlike Trump you don't have to read between the lines to cherry pick anti war nuggets while ignoring the other 90% of what Gabbard says. Nor do you need to ignore her vids about "pussy grabbing" or her draft dodging or tabloid scandals and self-centered get rich schemes. Tulsi is an Iraq War combat zone veteran with a genuine commitment to public service with crossover appeal to red and blue voters. She would beat Trump head to head.

    Trump barely beat Hillary despite Hillary's warmongering , poor judgment and scandalous foundation. Tulsi has none of Hillary's baggage and would demolish Trump on national TV. Would you rather your kids grew up to be like Tulsi or like Trump?

    I hope Sanders understands that Gabbard will be a much more powerful candidate than he could ever be, especially since he will be 79 before the 2020 election, he can't connect with Black voters and has no military service.

    Sanders should throw his support to Gabbard early and become her adviser or running mate. Sanders' support could help Tulsi get off to a strong start in New Hampshire. Here's hoping.

    comrade hermit Skywalker • 4 days ago ,

    It's official today, Bernie is running. Even if he wasn't, he doesn't possess the backbone to support a candidate this dangerous to the DNC. He didn't even have the backbone to stand up for his own voters when Hillary mugged the vote. The man is on the record as a Russia-bating, Hugo-bashing, drone-strike-socialist. He's an albatross around the left's neck. Nobody needs another FDR. Nobody but the Military Industrial Complex that is. People like Bernie only give such institutions a much needed "compassionate" makeover.

    AGPhillbin comrade hermit • 4 days ago ,

    Not to nitpick your verbiage, but I think you meant to say that Sanders is an ALBATROSS around the left's neck, not an abacus.

    comrade hermit AGPhillbin • 3 days ago ,

    Yeah, that's what I said. ;-P

    supremeborg AGPhillbin • 3 days ago ,

    "not an abacus."

    Well, Sanders does seem to be quite calculating.

    HiltonCaldwell martinbrock • 4 days ago ,

    And nobody was clapping? Ugh.

    Oh well, Bernie started his Death Watch Tour - err I mean Vanity Campaign, so Tulsi's gonna have a hard time getting traction.

    comrade hermit • 4 days ago ,

    Bernie can shit in his hat. There is only one Democrat left committed to McGovern-style anti-imperialism and that's Tulsi Gabbard . I left that party of dickless hypocrites years ago and I have zero intention of ever returning but you can consider this an endorsement. If you're gonna vote in 2020, vote for Tulsi. We gotta put an end to this bomb-dropping shitshow we call a super-power. This is a start.

    [Feb 24, 2019] Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on Warmongers in Their Ivory Towers by Eric Garris

    Notable quotes:
    "... So, you can actually help to get her in the Debates by going to her Campaign Page and making a contribution, and encouraging others to do the same. It's the total number of contributions that matters, not the total amount, so anything will help toward the goal. ..."
    "... Let's get Tulsi Gabbard on the stage for the first Democratic Primary Debate in June! Donate $5 today at www.tulsi2020.com to help Tulsi get her message out to America! ..."
    "... Again, you're a young Hawaiian female. In a field of more than a dozen candidates, you have to quickly establish yourself as "top tier". Barring an endorsement from Bernie Sanders, the only way to do that is to look, speak, and act top tier. ..."
    "... Like Ron Paul, Gabbard says things that desperately need saying but that establishment politicians rarely say. She not only says them. She makes them the centerpiece of her campaign, so I support her speaking tour rather than the campaign per se. ..."
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.antiwar.com

    Posted on February 18, 2019

    Rep. Tulsi Gabbard released this 30-second video in her campaign for the White House. It is one of the most clear and unequivocal statements I have ever heard from a presidential candidate:

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

    Please note that this is not an endorsement or statement of support. Antiwar.com is a nonprofit organization and does not endorse or urge support for any candidates. We do, however, provide news and commentary on campaigns.

    dave • 5 days ago ,

    Just because the talk gets tougher doesn't mean the policy will change. Especially from the top down. We can hope, but if she's at all sincere I doubt she'll ever get close to the debates since it would be an indictment upon the elite who stack the slate we vote from.

    I hope she keeps saying what she's saying but it's abundantly clear to me the five eyes countries are already beyond the point of no return as far as their sh*tty global debt peonage and slavery utopia dream goes.......

    Without mass civil disobedience this gal will either fade away or get JFK'd.

    John McCarthy dave • 5 days ago ,

    The rules say that they have to let her in the first Debate if she raises donations from at least 65,000 people by then. She has to have raised these contributions from at least 20 States, with at least 200 contributors coming from an individual State in order for that State to count toward the 20 State total.

    So, you can actually help to get her in the Debates by going to her Campaign Page and making a contribution, and encouraging others to do the same. It's the total number of contributions that matters, not the total amount, so anything will help toward the goal.

    There is also a polling threshold in order to qualify for the Debates, but you only have to meet one or the other. The polling threshold is too easy for the Establishment to manipulate and rig. The donation threshold can't be faked, and is the safer path toward getting her on that Stage. https://www.tulsi2020.com/s...

    Thane_Eichenauer John McCarthy • 5 days ago ,

    FYI, they, them, those only follow the rules if they feel like it. Other than that contributing to her campaign is a good suggestion.

    Cratylus John McCarthy • 5 days ago ,

    Great post.

    dave John McCarthy • 5 days ago ,

    I don't give money to politicians. That's how we got to this point remember ? All you're doing is paying consultants who used to work for the Clinton Mafia anyway.

    Thane_Eichenauer dave • 5 days ago ,

    Your comment is paradoxical. You either have hope for recovery or you believe all hope is lost. You can't claim both. I don't worry about the debates as each four years that pass reduces the hold the TV debates have on Joe America and pumps up the internet which the Commission on Presidential Debates has no control. Thank you for your passionate comment.

    dave Thane_Eichenauer • a day ago ,

    I have no hope the current system will recover. I have hope something new will rise out of the ashes of the old. The enemy is this stupid idea of there being an "elite" class among us.

    Thane_Eichenauer dave • a day ago ,

    Interesting assertion you have there. I'd be interested if you know of any articles or books that elaborate on your no elite class among us concept. Thank you for your reply.

    Cratylus dave • 5 days ago ,

    Dave chimes in with his usual cynicism and the well worn " only massive civil disobedience will work" trope. Read John McCarthy below for a solid and effective thing to do for Tulsi - not that Dave seems to want to help in any way.
    Is he cynical or lazy - and those are not mutually exclusive?

    dave Cratylus • 5 days ago ,

    I'd say it's the more naive among us that believe that political stump speeches actually have to mean something that are the lazy ones.

    How come voting hasn't changed policy goals so far Cratylus ?

    If people like you would pull your head out of your arses and quit supporting the two funding arms of the war party we would be less likely to get "hope and change" over and over again.

    Here's a clue for you..... Politicians don't always mean what they say in stump speeches......

    Here's another clue for you..... You live in a plutocracy, please take note of this and quit pretending you have representative government or anything close to a democracy.

    Thane_Eichenauer dave • 4 days ago ,

    FYI for those that don't have their dictionary handy.

    The definition of a plutocracy is a political system where the wealthy govern. When the richest people have all of the power in a society and make all of the political decisions, this is an example of a plutocracy. YourDictionary definition and usage example.

    https://www.yourdictionary....

    supremeborg Thane_Eichenauer • 3 days ago ,

    "The definition of a plutocracy is a political system where the wealthy govern."

    You repeat yourself. All existing States are governed by the (relatively) wealthy. It cannot be otherwise. Once the State has been granted the legal authority to plunder, it is only a matter of time before the wealthy become the biggest purchasers of the plundering service.

    dave supremeborg • a day ago ,

    That just means the state isn't the enemy, the "elite" are. Or in other words, the concept of their being an elite. The state is just another benign entity like a religion that in reality is the control mechanism of the so called elite.

    Thomas L. Knapp Mod dave • 19 hours ago ,

    Yes, the state is just another benign entity that murdered somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 million people in the 20th century, excluding war deaths and incidental rather than intentional killings.

    comrade hermit dave • 4 days ago ,

    If Trump can win, anything is possible. We're looking at a whole new ballgame here. I generally prefer general strikes and direct action myself but if there's a ballot box just lying there, I'm gonna pick it up and throw it through the nearest government window. Why the f**k not? The brick and the ballot box, that's my motto. Put that shit on a T-shirt and sell it.

    tom dave • 4 days ago ,

    For anyone to actually get elected President and THEN make major policy changes that GREATLY benefit the American people, as USG policies should, would take a full-scale revolution against the ruling classes! That is the REALITY of the USA today. All talk about "freedom and democracy" and nothing but policies that suffocate these two things all over the globe AND at home! A candidate can have 70% of the vote and STILL be prisoner to the Deep State in some way.

    supremeborg Skywalker • 5 days ago ,

    Even if I didn't vote for her in the general election, I am certainly going to contribute, as she will probably be the only major party candidate who is remotely antiwar. If she can get her ideas some exposure, you are correct, she would mop the floor with Trump. My only concern would be her coziness with Israel, but, perhaps, she will rethink those ties to be consistent with her overall antiwar message.

    Skywalker supremeborg • 5 days ago ,

    Borg, I agree that Gabbard needs to articulate a clearer understanding of Israel and its lobby in US wars. But she is the only candidate who would never put Israel's interest ahead of the interests of the American people.

    In less than 20 years Gabbard has grown from a homophobic Hawaiian surfer girl to the youngest woman legislator in American history to a veteran twice deployed in an Iraq war zone to a resolute critic of the eternal wars who condemned Obama and Trump alike for their neocon foreign policies. She is still growing. I hope she comes to a deeper understanding of the Zionist influence on US policy as well as a deeper appreciation of the foreign policy goals of the Iranian regime. I am optimistic because her past record shows a capacity for change, a commitment to honesty and the ability to respond effectively and courageously to diverse challenges. If given the chance Tulsi would resolutely fight against the war mongers in both parties.

    Sharon M Mercer • 5 days ago ,

    We need Tulsi on that debate stage! She is the only candidate speaking about the issues of war and peace. Once she gets the exposure, people will like her and her platform. Then she has a chance to get to the White House.

    We can help her!

    Let's get Tulsi Gabbard on the stage for the first Democratic Primary Debate in June! Donate $5 today at www.tulsi2020.com to help Tulsi get her message out to America!

    We need 65,000 supporters across the country to donate so we can meet the DNC's fundraising threshold requirement to qualify Tulsi for the debate stage.

    HiltonCaldwell • 5 days ago ,

    Good message. Poor ad.

    - Lose the lei. It's distracting and it subconsciously broadcasts that you're an "other".

    - You're a 37-year-old woman from a tiny state. People need to get to know you. Start with a photo/video montage showing military career, family, speaking in the House, etc. while you do a voiceover. Then switch to headshot video of you speaking directly to the viewer.

    - Instead of attacking "warmongers in their ivory towers", connect with viewers by explaining that you're a combat veteran who shares their war-weariness. Leave in the stuff about the monetary and human costs of the wars.

    - The "speech" setting for the ad doesn't work: if you're speaking to a crowd, where's the applause? And the constant looking left and right (to, presumably, imaginary people) makes you look nervous.

    Again, you're a young Hawaiian female. In a field of more than a dozen candidates, you have to quickly establish yourself as "top tier". Barring an endorsement from Bernie Sanders, the only way to do that is to look, speak, and act top tier.

    martinbrock HiltonCaldwell • 4 days ago ,

    People were clapping, but the event was outdoors, and the clips don't feature applause lines. The entire speech is online if you want to hear it.

    Sanders doesn't excite me, and I don't think he'll fare as well in a crowded field, but I'll be happy with Gabbard as his running mate. She's not remotely like Trump, but because corporate media paint her this way, they'll help her draw votes from Trump.

    I don't vote as a rule, and I don't support political candidates because I expect them to win. Like Ron Paul, Gabbard says things that desperately need saying but that establishment politicians rarely say. She not only says them. She makes them the centerpiece of her campaign, so I support her speaking tour rather than the campaign per se.

    The lei and aloha talk also seem overdone to me, but these superficial appeals don't affect me one way or the other, and for all I know, they're effective for people who are moved by them.

    supremeborg comrade hermit • 3 days ago ,

    I think if Tulsi became President, we would know soon whether or not the Trump apologists are full of crap that Trump is simply "playing 3D Chess" and doing everything in his power for peace. Tulsi appears to be the real thing, and, if she actually followed through, we would put an end to this talk of Trump - Peace - MAGA. Of course, there is always the slight chance, no matter how small, that the Deep State actually does possess mind control weapons which can morph any pro-peace President into another Trump, but I'd like to think it is not that late yet.

    Jim Bim • 4 days ago ,

    She previous talked in favor of torture and drone killing.

    supremeborg Jim Bim • 3 days ago ,

    I would be interested in a few reference links. If this is true, it would complicate things, but, people, even politicians, can learn and change for the better. If I can be redeemed after some of the lame headed things I've said and done, anyone can.

    Jim Bim supremeborg • 3 days ago ,

    i google it for you.

    [Feb 23, 2019] Chances for Tulsi might improve if she view her followers as a party and uses method of political parties struggle for power in her compaign

    Reading Gene Sharp book might also help ;-)
    Feb 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
    1. "Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have." Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. "Have-Nots" must build power from flesh and blood.
    2. "Never go outside the expertise of your people." the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
    1. "Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy." Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
    1. "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
    1. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon ." It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
    1. "A good tactic is one your people enjoy." If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
    1. "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag." Man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment, like going to church on Sunday mornings. New issues and crises are always developing, and one's reaction becomes, "Well, my heart bleeds for those people and I'm all for the boycott, but after all there are other important things in life" -- and there it goes.
    1. "Keep the pressure on. Never let up." [use] different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
    1. " The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. "
    1. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition." It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign. It should be remembered not only that the action is in the reaction but that action is itself the consequence of reaction and of reaction to the reaction, ad infinitum. The pressure produces the reaction, and constant pressure sustains action.
    1. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside [positive] " this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative. We have already seen the conversion of the negative into the positive, in Mahatma Gandhi's development of the tactic of passive resistance.
    1. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative." You cannot risk being trapped by the enemy in his sudden agreement with your demand and saying "You're right -- we don't know what to do about this issue. Now you tell us."
    1. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." the opposition must be singled out as the target and "frozen." in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil. There is a constant passing of the buck. Obviously there is no point to tactics unless one has a target upon which to center the attacks If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible.

    So the next time you see a political movement or campaign in action, compare their tactics to the list above and you'll know how you are being manipulated!

    [Feb 23, 2019] FBI EXTENSIVE ILLEGAL SURVAILANCE PROGRAM

    Feb 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    William Dorritt , 3 hours ago link

    CREATION OF CONTROL FILES TRANSFERRED FROM FBI TO NSA

    "But by then, it was already too late. The FBI's surveillance was messy and involved too many agents who could potentially blow the whistle. In the wake of 9/11, the internal surveillance program was shifted from the Bureau to the NSA, and it was not long before those surveillance powers were being directed against politicians and officials in yet another attempt to gather dirt and find blackmail-worthy material on these individuals.

    As NSA whistleblower Russell Tice told The Corbett Report in 2013, he had first-hand knowledge of this surveillance, which included politicians, judges, military personnel, and even the future President of the United States.

    In short, this scandal is too deep, too dark, and covers too many people from both sides of the political aisle for it to ever proceed in public. If it were to be exposed it would uncover a tale of surveillance, scandal, drug money, child prostitution and blackmail that could blow up all over Washington and make Watergate look like a minor footnote in the history of political scandal."

    https://www.corbettreport.com/the-real-hastert-scandal-pedophilia-drug-money-and-blackmail/

    FBI EXTENSIVE ILLEGAL SURVAILANCE PROGRAM

    "In 2002 Gilbert Graham, a Special Agent in the Washington Field Office of the FBI, blew the whistle on an illegal surveillance program being conducted out of the Bureau's Washington headquarters. According to the unclassified version of his complaint, obtained by the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition in 2007, Graham alleged violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Act "in conducting electronic surveillance as a subterfuge to acquire evidence of criminal activity."

    These allegations were backed up by a former FBI Counterintelligence Specialist in the Washington Field Office, who told the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition: " you are looking at covering up massive public corruption and espionage cases; to top that off you have major violations of FISA by the FBI Washington Field Office and HQ targeting these cases. Everyone involved has motive to cover up these reports and prevent investigation and public disclosure."

    According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, revealing the details of this program for the first time in a series of podcasts in the wake of the Hastert revelations, this illegal surveillance program -- dubbed COINTELPRO II by the agents who were asked to implement it -- dates back to the mid-1990s, when the Clinton White House was being rocked by a series of sex scandals."

    https://www.corbettreport.com/the-real-hastert-scandal-pedophilia-drug-money-and-blackmail/

    The main objective of the plan was to:

    [SOURCE: Probable Cause Podcast #23 | BoilingFrogsPost.com ]

    [Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions

    Highly recommended!
    Unfortunately the article does not mention the term McCarthyism, which is fully applicable. Also the role of CNN of the voice of Clinton wing of Democratic Party presuppose the attitudes the Caitlin is complaining about. This is a party MSM masquerading as impendent new outlet. This are neoliberal presstitutes and warmongers, for the lack of stronger worlds.
    Also correlation with RT policies does undermine the US foreign policy. We need only decide whether this is a good or bad thing and whether the US imperial policies are good for American people, or only for large transnational corporations. I think Tucker Carlson also undermines the US foreign policy and as such you can find a correlation between his positions and RT position. Now what ?
    Money quote: "the possibility of an American opposing US warmongering and the political establishment which drives it without being ordered to by a rubles-dispensing FSB officer was a completely alien idea to them."
    Yes, they actually care only in the "politically correct" reason for suppression. So the only new moment is blatant hypocrisy. But that's how all societies work and in this sense there is nothing special in the fact that dissident voices are suppressed. In middle ages heretics were burned at the stake.
    The situation is interesting because neoliberalism is definitely on the decline and as such represent now (unlike say 10 year ago) and rich target of attack and as the USA support it neoliberal empire such attacks usually attack the US foreign policy. The real question is what alternative the particular outlet proposes -- the return to the New Deal Capitalism in some form or shape, or new socialist experiment is some form of shape.
    Notable quotes:
    "... CNN knew that Facebook was going to be suspending the pages of her company Maffick Media before she did, suggesting a creepy degree of coordination between the two massive outlets to silence an alternative media platform. ..."
    "... the US government has found a legal loophole to suppress speech, in this case speech that is critical of destructive US government policies around the world. ..."
    "... Thirdly, and in my opinion weirdest of all, the article goes to great lengths to make the fact that a dissident media outlet supports the same foreign policy positions as Russia look like something strange and nefarious, instead of the normal and obvious thing that it is. ..."
    "... the possibility of an American opposing US warmongering and the political establishment which drives it without being ordered to by a rubles-dispensing FSB officer was a completely alien idea to them. ..."
    "... Nimmo said the tone of Maffick's pages is 'broadly anti-US and anti-corporate. That's strikingly similar to RT's output. Maffick may technically be independent, but their tone certainly matches the broader Kremlin family.' ..."
    "... This is a truly obnoxious mind virus we're seeing the imperial narrative controllers pushing more and more aggressively into mainstream consciousness today : that anyone who opposes the beltway consensus on western interventionism is not simply an individual with a conscience who is thinking critically for themselves, but is actually "boosting the Kremlin narrative" ..."
    "... Don't even subscribe to an anti-establishment subreddit. Those things are all Russian. Listen to Big Brother instead. Big Brother will protect you from their filthy Russian lies. ..."
    "... "If CNN would like to hire me to present facts against destructive US wars and corporate ownership of our political system, I'll gladly accept," Khalek told me when asked for comment ..."
    "... Russian media influence is not their actual target. Their actual target is leftist, antiwar and anti-establishment voices. That's what they're really trying to eliminate. ..."
    "... It doesn't take any amount of sympathy for Russia to see that the unipolar empire is toxic for humanity, and most westerners who oppose that toxicity have no particular feelings about Russia any more than they have about Turkey or the Philippines ..."
    Feb 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Originally from: Caitlin Johnstone Exposes "The Truly Obnoxious Mind Virus" Of Imperial Narrative Controllers

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    In an extremely weird article titled " Russia is backing a viral video company aimed at American millennials ", CNN reports that Facebook has suspended popular dissident media outlet "In The Now" and its allied pages for failing to publicly "disclose" its financial ties to a subsidiary of RT.

    According to CNN, such disclosures are not and have never been an actual part of Facebook's official policy, but Facebook has made the exceptional precondition of public disclosure of financial ties in order for In The Now to return to its platform.

    I say the article is extremely weird for a number of reasons.

    Firstly , according to In The Now CEO Anissa Naouai, CNN knew that Facebook was going to be suspending the pages of her company Maffick Media before she did, suggesting a creepy degree of coordination between the two massive outlets to silence an alternative media platform.

    Secondly, the article reports that CNN found out about Maffick's financial ties thanks to a tip-off from the German Marshall Fund, a narrative control firm which receives funding from the US government. In The Now 's Rania Khalek has described this tactic as "a case where the US government has found a legal loophole to suppress speech, in this case speech that is critical of destructive US government policies around the world."

    Thirdly, and in my opinion weirdest of all, the article goes to great lengths to make the fact that a dissident media outlet supports the same foreign policy positions as Russia look like something strange and nefarious, instead of the normal and obvious thing that it is.

    The article repeatedly mentions the fact that all the people working for In The Now "claim" to be editorially independent as opposed to being told what to report by Kremlin officials, a notion which Khalek says was met with extreme skepticism when she was interviewed for the piece by CNN. As though the possibility of an American opposing US warmongering and the political establishment which drives it without being ordered to by a rubles-dispensing FSB officer was a completely alien idea to them.

    Check out the following excerpt, for example of this bizarre attitude:

    "Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow for information defense at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, told CNN that while Russian state-backed outlets claim to be editorially independent, 'they routinely boost Kremlin narratives, especially those which portray the West negatively.'

    "Nimmo said the tone of Maffick's pages is 'broadly anti-US and anti-corporate. That's strikingly similar to RT's output. Maffick may technically be independent, but their tone certainly matches the broader Kremlin family.' "

    This is a truly obnoxious mind virus we're seeing the imperial narrative controllers pushing more and more aggressively into mainstream consciousness today : that anyone who opposes the beltway consensus on western interventionism is not simply an individual with a conscience who is thinking critically for themselves, but is actually "boosting the Kremlin narrative". If you say it in an assertive and authoritative tone like Mr Nimmo does, it can sound like a perfectly reasonable position if you don't think about it too hard. If you really look at it directly, though, what these manipulators are actually saying is "Russia opposes western interventionism, therefore anyone who opposes western interventionism is basically Russian."

    Which is of course a total non-argument. You don't get to just say "Russia bad" for two years to get everyone riled up into a state of xenophobic hysteria and then say "That's Russian!" at anything you don't like. That's not a thing. More to the point, though, there is no causal relationship between the fact that Russia opposes western interventionism and the fact that many westerners do.

    As we discussed recently , there will necessarily be inadvertent agreement between Russia and westerners who oppose western interventionism, because Russia, like so many other sovereign nations, opposes western interventionism. If you discover that an American who opposes US warmongering and establishment politics is saying the same things as RT, that doesn't mean you've discovered a shocking conspiracy between western dissidents and the Russian government, it means people who oppose the same things oppose the same things.

    We're seeing this absurd gibberish spouted over and over again by the mainstream media now. The other day the delightful pro-Sanders subreddit WayOfTheBern was smeared as a Russian operation by the Washington Times, not because the Washington Times had any evidence anywhere supporting that claim, but because the subreddit's members are hostile to Democratic presidential hopefuls other than Sanders, and because its posts "consistently support positions that would be amenable to the Kremlin." All this means is that the subreddit is full of people who support Bernie Sanders and oppose US government malfeasance, yet an entire article was published in a mainstream outlet treating this as something dangerous and suspicious.

    If you really listen to what the CNNs and Ben Nimmos and Washington Timeses are actually trying to tell you, what they're saying is that it's not okay for anyone to oppose any part of the unipolar world order or the establishment which runs it . Never ever, under any circumstances. Don't work for a media outlet that's funded by the Russian government even though no mainstream outlets will ever platform you. Don't even subscribe to an anti-establishment subreddit. Those things are all Russian. Listen to Big Brother instead. Big Brother will protect you from their filthy Russian lies.

    "If CNN would like to hire me to present facts against destructive US wars and corporate ownership of our political system, I'll gladly accept," Khalek told me when asked for comment.

    "But the corporate media doesn't allow antiwar voices a platform. In The Now does. I've worked for dozens of different outlets, from Vice to Al Jazeera to RT, and my message has always been the same: leftist, antiwar and pro justice and equality. People should be asking why US mainstream media outlets that claim to be free and independent refuse to air critical and adversarial voices like mine."

    Why indeed? Actually, if CNN is so worried about Russian media influence in America, all they'd have to do is put on a few shows featuring leftist, antiwar and pro-justice voices and that would be the end of it. They could easily out-spend RT by a massive margin, buy up all the talent like Khalek, Lee Camp and Chris Hedges, put on a sleek, high-budget show and steal RT America's audience, killing it dead and drawing all anti-establishment energy to their material.

    But they don't. They don't, and they never will. Because Russian media influence is not their actual target. Their actual target is leftist, antiwar and anti-establishment voices. That's what they're really trying to eliminate.

    So yes, Moscow will of course elevate some western voices who oppose the power establishment that is trying to undermine and subvert Russia. Those voices will not require any instruction to speak out against that establishment, since that's what they'd be doing anyway and they're just grateful to finally have a platform upon which to speak. And it is good that they're getting a platform to speak. If western power structures have a problem with it, they should stop universally refusing to platform anyone who opposes the status quo that is destroying nations abroad and squeezing the life out of citizens at home.

    It doesn't take any amount of sympathy for Russia to see that the unipolar empire is toxic for humanity, and most westerners who oppose that toxicity have no particular feelings about Russia any more than they have about Turkey or the Philippines. Sometimes Russia will come in and give them a platform in the void that has been left by the mainstream outlets which are doing everything they can to silence them. So what? The alternative is all dissident voices being silenced. The fact that Russia prevents a few of them from being silenced is not the problem. The problem is that they are being silenced at all.

    * * *

    Thanks for reading! My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish.

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    [Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions

    Highly recommended!
    Unfortunately the article does not mention the term McCarthyism, which is fully applicable. Also the role of CNN of the voice of Clinton wing of Democratic Party presuppose the attitudes the Caitlin is complaining about. This is a party MSM masquerading as impendent new outlet. This are neoliberal presstitutes and warmongers, for the lack of stronger worlds.
    Also correlation with RT policies does undermine the US foreign policy. We need only decide whether this is a good or bad thing and whether the US imperial policies are good for American people, or only for large transnational corporations. I think Tucker Carlson also undermines the US foreign policy and as such you can find a correlation between his positions and RT position. Now what ?
    Money quote: "the possibility of an American opposing US warmongering and the political establishment which drives it without being ordered to by a rubles-dispensing FSB officer was a completely alien idea to them."
    Yes, they actually care only in the "politically correct" reason for suppression. So the only new moment is blatant hypocrisy. But that's how all societies work and in this sense there is nothing special in the fact that dissident voices are suppressed. In middle ages heretics were burned at the stake.
    The situation is interesting because neoliberalism is definitely on the decline and as such represent now (unlike say 10 year ago) and rich target of attack and as the USA support it neoliberal empire such attacks usually attack the US foreign policy. The real question is what alternative the particular outlet proposes -- the return to the New Deal Capitalism in some form or shape, or new socialist experiment is some form of shape.
    Notable quotes:
    "... CNN knew that Facebook was going to be suspending the pages of her company Maffick Media before she did, suggesting a creepy degree of coordination between the two massive outlets to silence an alternative media platform. ..."
    "... the US government has found a legal loophole to suppress speech, in this case speech that is critical of destructive US government policies around the world. ..."
    "... Thirdly, and in my opinion weirdest of all, the article goes to great lengths to make the fact that a dissident media outlet supports the same foreign policy positions as Russia look like something strange and nefarious, instead of the normal and obvious thing that it is. ..."
    "... the possibility of an American opposing US warmongering and the political establishment which drives it without being ordered to by a rubles-dispensing FSB officer was a completely alien idea to them. ..."
    "... Nimmo said the tone of Maffick's pages is 'broadly anti-US and anti-corporate. That's strikingly similar to RT's output. Maffick may technically be independent, but their tone certainly matches the broader Kremlin family.' ..."
    "... This is a truly obnoxious mind virus we're seeing the imperial narrative controllers pushing more and more aggressively into mainstream consciousness today : that anyone who opposes the beltway consensus on western interventionism is not simply an individual with a conscience who is thinking critically for themselves, but is actually "boosting the Kremlin narrative" ..."
    "... Don't even subscribe to an anti-establishment subreddit. Those things are all Russian. Listen to Big Brother instead. Big Brother will protect you from their filthy Russian lies. ..."
    "... "If CNN would like to hire me to present facts against destructive US wars and corporate ownership of our political system, I'll gladly accept," Khalek told me when asked for comment ..."
    "... Russian media influence is not their actual target. Their actual target is leftist, antiwar and anti-establishment voices. That's what they're really trying to eliminate. ..."
    "... It doesn't take any amount of sympathy for Russia to see that the unipolar empire is toxic for humanity, and most westerners who oppose that toxicity have no particular feelings about Russia any more than they have about Turkey or the Philippines ..."
    Feb 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Originally from: Caitlin Johnstone Exposes "The Truly Obnoxious Mind Virus" Of Imperial Narrative Controllers

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    In an extremely weird article titled " Russia is backing a viral video company aimed at American millennials ", CNN reports that Facebook has suspended popular dissident media outlet "In The Now" and its allied pages for failing to publicly "disclose" its financial ties to a subsidiary of RT.

    According to CNN, such disclosures are not and have never been an actual part of Facebook's official policy, but Facebook has made the exceptional precondition of public disclosure of financial ties in order for In The Now to return to its platform.

    I say the article is extremely weird for a number of reasons.

    Firstly , according to In The Now CEO Anissa Naouai, CNN knew that Facebook was going to be suspending the pages of her company Maffick Media before she did, suggesting a creepy degree of coordination between the two massive outlets to silence an alternative media platform.

    Secondly, the article reports that CNN found out about Maffick's financial ties thanks to a tip-off from the German Marshall Fund, a narrative control firm which receives funding from the US government. In The Now 's Rania Khalek has described this tactic as "a case where the US government has found a legal loophole to suppress speech, in this case speech that is critical of destructive US government policies around the world."

    Thirdly, and in my opinion weirdest of all, the article goes to great lengths to make the fact that a dissident media outlet supports the same foreign policy positions as Russia look like something strange and nefarious, instead of the normal and obvious thing that it is.

    The article repeatedly mentions the fact that all the people working for In The Now "claim" to be editorially independent as opposed to being told what to report by Kremlin officials, a notion which Khalek says was met with extreme skepticism when she was interviewed for the piece by CNN. As though the possibility of an American opposing US warmongering and the political establishment which drives it without being ordered to by a rubles-dispensing FSB officer was a completely alien idea to them.

    Check out the following excerpt, for example of this bizarre attitude:

    "Ben Nimmo, a senior fellow for information defense at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, told CNN that while Russian state-backed outlets claim to be editorially independent, 'they routinely boost Kremlin narratives, especially those which portray the West negatively.'

    "Nimmo said the tone of Maffick's pages is 'broadly anti-US and anti-corporate. That's strikingly similar to RT's output. Maffick may technically be independent, but their tone certainly matches the broader Kremlin family.' "

    This is a truly obnoxious mind virus we're seeing the imperial narrative controllers pushing more and more aggressively into mainstream consciousness today : that anyone who opposes the beltway consensus on western interventionism is not simply an individual with a conscience who is thinking critically for themselves, but is actually "boosting the Kremlin narrative". If you say it in an assertive and authoritative tone like Mr Nimmo does, it can sound like a perfectly reasonable position if you don't think about it too hard. If you really look at it directly, though, what these manipulators are actually saying is "Russia opposes western interventionism, therefore anyone who opposes western interventionism is basically Russian."

    Which is of course a total non-argument. You don't get to just say "Russia bad" for two years to get everyone riled up into a state of xenophobic hysteria and then say "That's Russian!" at anything you don't like. That's not a thing. More to the point, though, there is no causal relationship between the fact that Russia opposes western interventionism and the fact that many westerners do.

    As we discussed recently , there will necessarily be inadvertent agreement between Russia and westerners who oppose western interventionism, because Russia, like so many other sovereign nations, opposes western interventionism. If you discover that an American who opposes US warmongering and establishment politics is saying the same things as RT, that doesn't mean you've discovered a shocking conspiracy between western dissidents and the Russian government, it means people who oppose the same things oppose the same things.

    We're seeing this absurd gibberish spouted over and over again by the mainstream media now. The other day the delightful pro-Sanders subreddit WayOfTheBern was smeared as a Russian operation by the Washington Times, not because the Washington Times had any evidence anywhere supporting that claim, but because the subreddit's members are hostile to Democratic presidential hopefuls other than Sanders, and because its posts "consistently support positions that would be amenable to the Kremlin." All this means is that the subreddit is full of people who support Bernie Sanders and oppose US government malfeasance, yet an entire article was published in a mainstream outlet treating this as something dangerous and suspicious.

    If you really listen to what the CNNs and Ben Nimmos and Washington Timeses are actually trying to tell you, what they're saying is that it's not okay for anyone to oppose any part of the unipolar world order or the establishment which runs it . Never ever, under any circumstances. Don't work for a media outlet that's funded by the Russian government even though no mainstream outlets will ever platform you. Don't even subscribe to an anti-establishment subreddit. Those things are all Russian. Listen to Big Brother instead. Big Brother will protect you from their filthy Russian lies.

    "If CNN would like to hire me to present facts against destructive US wars and corporate ownership of our political system, I'll gladly accept," Khalek told me when asked for comment.

    "But the corporate media doesn't allow antiwar voices a platform. In The Now does. I've worked for dozens of different outlets, from Vice to Al Jazeera to RT, and my message has always been the same: leftist, antiwar and pro justice and equality. People should be asking why US mainstream media outlets that claim to be free and independent refuse to air critical and adversarial voices like mine."

    Why indeed? Actually, if CNN is so worried about Russian media influence in America, all they'd have to do is put on a few shows featuring leftist, antiwar and pro-justice voices and that would be the end of it. They could easily out-spend RT by a massive margin, buy up all the talent like Khalek, Lee Camp and Chris Hedges, put on a sleek, high-budget show and steal RT America's audience, killing it dead and drawing all anti-establishment energy to their material.

    But they don't. They don't, and they never will. Because Russian media influence is not their actual target. Their actual target is leftist, antiwar and anti-establishment voices. That's what they're really trying to eliminate.

    So yes, Moscow will of course elevate some western voices who oppose the power establishment that is trying to undermine and subvert Russia. Those voices will not require any instruction to speak out against that establishment, since that's what they'd be doing anyway and they're just grateful to finally have a platform upon which to speak. And it is good that they're getting a platform to speak. If western power structures have a problem with it, they should stop universally refusing to platform anyone who opposes the status quo that is destroying nations abroad and squeezing the life out of citizens at home.

    It doesn't take any amount of sympathy for Russia to see that the unipolar empire is toxic for humanity, and most westerners who oppose that toxicity have no particular feelings about Russia any more than they have about Turkey or the Philippines. Sometimes Russia will come in and give them a platform in the void that has been left by the mainstream outlets which are doing everything they can to silence them. So what? The alternative is all dissident voices being silenced. The fact that Russia prevents a few of them from being silenced is not the problem. The problem is that they are being silenced at all.

    * * *

    Thanks for reading! My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish.

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    [Feb 22, 2019] FBI Official Admits To Infiltrating Trump Campaign - Just Don't Call It Spying

    Notable quotes:
    "... Halper is reportedly a longtime CIA and FBI informant, and has been involved in US politics at the highest levels for decades, becoming George H.W. Bush's National Director for Policy Development during his presidential campaign. After Bush lost to Reagan, Halper worked as Reagan's Deputy Assistant Secretary of State - where he served under three different Secretaries . ..."
    "... He then became a senior advisor to the Department of Defense and DOJ between 1984 and 2001. Halper's former father-in-law was Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA . He also allegedly spied on the Carter administration - collecting information on foreign policy (an account disputed by Ray Cline). ..."
    Feb 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
    A top FBI official admitted to Congressional investigators last year that the agency had contacts within the Trump campaign as part of operation "Crossfire Hurricane," which sounds a lot like FBI "informant" Stefan Halper - a former Oxford University professor who was paid over $1 million by the Obama Department of Defense between 2012 and 2018, with nearly half of it surrounding the 2016 US election.

    According to portions of transcripts published on Tuesday by the Epoch Times of a Aug. 31, 2018 deposition by Trisha Anderson, the FBI relied on sources who "already had campaign contacts" in order to surveil the Trump team.

    "To my knowledge, the FBI did not place anybody within a campaign but, rather, relied upon its network of sources, some of whom already had campaign contacts, including the source that has been discussed in the media at some length beyond Christopher Steele ," said Anderson - who was the #2 attorney at the FBI's Office of General Counsel, and had extensive involvement with the Trump counterintelligence investigation.

    Halper is reportedly a longtime CIA and FBI informant, and has been involved in US politics at the highest levels for decades, becoming George H.W. Bush's National Director for Policy Development during his presidential campaign. After Bush lost to Reagan, Halper worked as Reagan's Deputy Assistant Secretary of State - where he served under three different Secretaries .

    He then became a senior advisor to the Department of Defense and DOJ between 1984 and 2001. Halper's former father-in-law was Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA . He also allegedly spied on the Carter administration - collecting information on foreign policy (an account disputed by Ray Cline).

    Halper's involvement in surveilling the Trump campaign was exposed by the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross, who reported that the 74-year-old spook was enlisted by the FBI to befriend and spy on three members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election .

    Halper received a DoD contract from the Obama administration for $411,575 - made in two payments, and had a start date of September 26, 2016 - three days after a September 23 Yahoo! News article by Michael Isikoff about Trump aide Carter Page, which used information fed to Isikoff by "pissgate" dossier creator Christopher Steele . The FBI would use the Yahoo! article along with the unverified "pissgate" dossier as supporting evidence in an FISA warrant application for Page. Halper approached Page during an election-themed conference at Cambridge on July 11, 2016, six weeks after the September 26 DoD award start date. The two would stay in contact for the next 14 months, frequently meeting and exchanging emails .

    He said that he first encountered the informant during a conference in mid-July of 2016 and that they stayed in touch. The two later met several times in the Washington area. Mr. Page said their interactions were benign. - New York Times

    And as the Daily Caller reports, Halper used a decades-old association with Paul Manafort to break the ice with Page.

    In September 2016, the FBI would send Halper to further probe Trump aide George Papadopoulos on an allegation he made that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. According to Papadopoulos in an interview with Dan Bongino, Halper angrily accused him of working with Russia before storming out of a meeting.

    Halper essentially began interrogating Papadopoulos, saying that it's "obviously in your interest to be working with the Russians" and to "hack emails." " You're complicit with Russia in this, isn't that right George " Halper told him. Halper also inquired about Hillary's hacked emails, insinuating that Papadopoulos possessed them. Papadopoulos denied knowing anything about this and asked to be left alone. - Bongino.com

    https://youtu.be/45m5DP1xfRg

    Just don't call Halper a spy...

    hugin-o-munin , 1 hour ago link

    All of these blatant crimes done by the Democrat cheerleading swamp creatures NEVER get investigated and I am starting to wonder what the hell Trump is doing. Is he stupid or is all of this just a charade and they are all on the same team. How could this creep Rod Rosenstein have been left at his position until this time? It makes no sense to me. Sure all of these rodents have control files on each other but come on how scared are they? It's ridiculous. If Trump soon gets impeached I'll hold him responsible himself for not doing anything.

    schroedingersrat , 59 minutes ago link

    They are all on the same team. Trump was never your saviour. He was designed to be a distraction so the 0.01% that own both parties can rape you some more.

    hugin-o-munin , 57 minutes ago link

    Correct. It's all a big lie and show for the uninformed masses. God help these liars when all the Qanon followers wake up to this truth. All this 'tremendous winning' bs will boomerang back big time.

    donkey_shot , 5 hours ago link

    The above Halper story has been circulating for about a year now, so this isn`t actually big news. As for the FBI and the CIA subverting just about every political campaign or social movement in existence: Well, duh. The deep state and its satanic minions will remain in control as long as such "intelligence" and State Security agencies (the FBI is essentially nothing but a US version of the SS) are allowed to exist.

    youshallnotkill , 5 hours ago link

    Not a word on here on the breaking news in the Epstein case.

    https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5745926-Epstein-Order.html

    Typical.

    punchasocialist , 1 hour ago link

    Alex Acosta works out an illegal deal for Epstein = Trump gives Acosta a cabinet position = Trump is a protector of Pedo protectors = Trump doesn't give 2 shits about Pedos

    [Feb 22, 2019] And please refrain from that socialized, government organized power grid

    Feb 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Biff , says: February 22, 2019 at 2:15 am GMT

    @onebornfree You are probably the most whacked out idealist on this site. In your mind all the ills of society is because of socialism.

    Well next time your toilet backs up, don't use that socialist phone network to call a plumber to clean those socialized drainpipes that keeps your stinky shit flowing down hill and away to be socially treated – just move to certain parts of India where none of that takes place – it's your idealist utopia. Wallow in it.

    And please refrain from that socialized, government organized power grid – it's the only thing that keeps you on this site spewing your nonsense. And stay off those socialized roads.

    [Feb 22, 2019] The Assad apologist smear

    This neoliberal/neocon presstitutes really know which which side thier bread is buttered and like it this way. They just want more butter.
    Feb 22, 2019 | www.thedailybeast.com

    Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was greeted with a "warm aloha" on the The View Wednesday morning. But things didn't stay sunny for long.

    As the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate began to lay out how her time serving in Iraq has influenced her non-interventionist foreign policy position, Meghan McCain was just itching to push back. "Can I interrupt you?" she asked.

    After thanking Gabbard for her service, McCain told her, "When I hear the name Tulsi Gabbard, I think of Assad apologist. I think of someone who comes back to the United States and is spouting propaganda from Syria." The co-host was referring to a controversial trip Gabbard made to Syria two years ago. While there, she met with President Bashar al-Assad and defended him upon her return. More recently, she told MSNBC's Morning Joe , "Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States."

    "You have said that the Syrian president, Assad, is not the enemy of the United States," McCain continued, "yet he's used chemical weapons against his own people 300 times." When she says that "regime change" would be hurtful to that country but "gassing children isn't more hurtful, it's hard for me to understand where you would come from a humanitarian standpoint if you were to become president."

    In response, Gabbard accused McCain of "putting words in [her] mouth," but she did not alter her fundamental stance. Asked to clarify her position, she said, "An enemy of the United States is someone who threatens our safety and our security."

    "There is no disputing the fact that Bashar al-Assad and Syria is a brutal dictator," Gabbard added. "There's no disputing the fact that he has used chemical weapons and other weapons against his people. There are other terrorist groups in Syria who have used similar chemical weapons and other weapons of terror against the people of Syria."

    [Feb 21, 2019] Bottom feeders from The View try to bute Tulai. It did not work well

    Tulsi vs. the war propaganda machine of the US government and MIC. It was tough, but she made it (neocons are just MIC prostitutes; they have zero independent in their views). I wish we have several anti-war candidates for president, but we have only one and she has all my support.
    This idea of ruling the world after the collapse of the USSR the neolib/neocon elite in Washington pushed for the last 30 years proves to be a disaster for the country. See Neocon foreign policy is a disaster for the USA
    I hope that all those despicable warmongers (which happen to be women) are chronic alcoholics because that's the only reliable method to survive when you have no self-esteem and just parrot view of people who pay you money. That's just a different type of prostitution...
    Judging from her appearance, Megan McCain might have problem with substance abuse, though.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Meghan's father proudly advocated for the regime change wars in Iraq and Libya, both of which resulted in the deaths of millions of innocent civilians and gave rise to ISIS, which is still wreaking havoc in the Middle East today. He also advocated for the arming and funding of "moderate" rebels (a.k.a. terrorists) in Syria in an attempt to overthrow Assad. ..."
    "... Wow didn't expect this candidate to tell the truth about America's intervention in the World. So refreshing ! I understand now why Meghan doesn't like her. ..."
    Feb 21, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    TC Candler , 3 hours ago

    McCain is such an angry interviewer... always thinking about her next attacking retort without actually listening to the answer of a level-headed, thoughtful guest.

    TheRedWireBlueWire , 1 day ago

    Meghan McCain is insufferable, I love that laugh Tulsi gave. Meg always makes herself look foolish, and is carrying daddy's warmongering torch.

    Nessed Up , 1 day ago

    It's not Meghan's tough questions, because tough questions are much appreciated, its the condescension and the juvenile behaviour. Its cringey, sooo cringey.

    DesignerReaver , 1 day ago

    She's right. Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua, Syria, Lybia, Iraq for two decades, all fails.

    Kidd Klutch , 1 day ago

    She made Meghan look so ignorant which she is. They say if you argue with a fool from a distance no one knows who the fool is we know who the fool is this debate the undisputed queen of ignorance Meghan McCain.

    James Smith , 23 hours ago (edited)

    Meghan's father proudly advocated for the regime change wars in Iraq and Libya, both of which resulted in the deaths of millions of innocent civilians and gave rise to ISIS, which is still wreaking havoc in the Middle East today. He also advocated for the arming and funding of "moderate" rebels (a.k.a. terrorists) in Syria in an attempt to overthrow Assad.

    june song , 23 hours ago

    Thank you Tulsi for educating these elitist, who don't even know history!

    SS M , 21 hours ago

    She is speaking on things that would likely get her killed.. Brave woman indeed.. #TulsiforPresident

    Manoush b , 23 hours ago

    Wow didn't expect this candidate to tell the truth about America's intervention in the World. So refreshing ! I understand now why Meghan doesn't like her.

    [Feb 21, 2019] FBI s Top Lawyer Thought Hillary Clinton Should Be Criminally Prosecuted - Was Persuaded To Change His Mind

    When CIA does not want that FBI does not prosecute somebody they usually have their way.
    Robert Mueller is not only about Trump, he is also about scrubbing all the crimes committed by Clintons and Obama. That's a lot of crimes.
    Notable quotes:
    "... I think ultimately, the coverup of Clinton's emails was not to protect Clinton but to protect Obama, as he had communicated with her on the server ..."
    Feb 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
    The FBI's top lawyer, General Counsel James Baker, initially thought that Hillary Clinton should face criminal charges for transmitting classified information over her insecure, private email server, according to transcripts from a 2018 closed-door Congressional testimony reviewed by The Hill 's John Solomon.

    While being questioned by Rep. John Radcliffe (R-TX), Baker was clear that he thought Clinton should face criminal charges.

    "I have reason to believe that you originally believed it was appropriate to charge Hillary Clinton with regard to violations of law - various laws, with regard to mishandling of classified information. Is that accurate?" asked Ratcliffe, a former federal prosecutor.

    After a brief pause to consult with his attorney, Baker responded: "Yes."

    Baker later explained how he arrived at his conclusion, and how he was "persuaded" to change his mind.

    "So, I had that belief initially after reviewing, you know, a large binder of her emails that had classified information in them," said Baker. "And I discussed it internally with a number of different folks, and eventually became persuaded that charging her was not appropriate because we could not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that - we, the government, could not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that - she had the intent necessary to violate (the law). "

    Baker says he was persuaded to change his mind "pretty late in the process, because we were arguing about it, I think, up until the end. "

    Recall that in December, 2017 we learned that James Comey's original exoneration letter was drafted in a way that would have required criminal charges - changing Clinton's conduct from the legally significant "gross negligence" to "extremely careless" - which is not a legal term of art. This language - along with several other incriminating components was altered by former FBI counterintelligence agent and attorney, Peter Strzok.

    Baker made clear that he did not like the activity Clinton had engaged in: "My original belief after - well, after having conducted the investigation and towards the end of it, then sitting down and reading a binder of her materials - I thought that it was alarming, appalling, whatever words I said, and argued with others about why they thought she shouldn't be charged. "

    His boss, Comey, announced on July 5, 2016, that he would not recommend criminal charges. He did so without consulting the Department of Justice, a decision the department's inspector general (IG) later concluded was misguided and likely usurped the power of the attorney general to make prosecutorial decisions. Comey has said, in retrospect, he accepts that finding but took the actions he did because he thought "they were in the country's best interest." - The Hill

    Baker noted that had he been more convinced that there was evidence that Clinton intended to violate the law, "I would have argued that vociferously with him [Comey] and maybe changed his view."

    Justapleb , 2 minutes ago link

    Talk about old news.

    Comey made this announcement before election day 2016. We knew this excuse was obstruction of justice.

    They wanted to see if the public would stand for it, which they did. Most democrats are fine with a seditious, treasonous felon being president.

    A lot of Republicans are cool with it too, so long as they get their brand in there for Federal Pork.

    Navy62802 28 minutes ago

    I think ultimately, the coverup of Clinton's emails was not to protect Clinton but to protect Obama, as he had communicated with her on the server (even using an alias email, himself) even though he claimed to have learned of the server when everyone else did ... an obvious lie. So in order to avoid being a co-conspirator with someone violating the Espionage Act, Baker was "persuaded" not to charge Clinton.

    [Feb 21, 2019] Russiagate In Flames No Evidence Of Collusion, New Findings Challenge DNC Hack Narrative

    Feb 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Russiagate In Flames: No Evidence Of Collusion, New Findings Challenge DNC Hack Narrative

    by Tyler Durden Wed, 02/20/2019 - 18:50 791 SHARES

    Authored by Elizabeth Lea Vos via Disobedient Media ,

    In the last few weeks, we have witnessed two pillars of the Russiagate narrative continue to disintegrate and erode. First, we heard that a bipartisan inquiry by the Senate Intelligence Committee admitted that they have yet to find evidence indicating that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia in the run-up to the 2016 US Presidential election. Secondly, new light was shed on the process by which the DNC Emails published by WikiLeaks may have been sourced, thanks to two reports: one authored by former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney and former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, with the other work penned by Disobedient Media's Adam Carter.

    Of course, this does not entail that the establishment-backed media will stop promoting the neo-McCarthyist insanity that has held legacy press audiences captive for the last two and a half years.

    No Evidence For Trump-Russia Collusion

    A recent report from NBC related an admission from both Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, indicating that they have discovered no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion to date. NBC's report reads in part:

    "The Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the 2016 election has uncovered no direct evidence of the Trump campaign conspiring with Russia, Democrats and Republicans on the committee told NBC News. But different parties' investigators in the probe, which is winding down, disagree over the implications of a pattern of contacts between Trump associates and Russians."

    Let's review that again: the only thing the Democrats and Republicans disagree on is the significance of an alleged "Pattern of contacts between Trump associates and Russians."

    Note: the "pattern" here does not specify that the "Russians" in question were associated in any sense with the Russian government. One should not have to stress the significance of differentiating between a nationality versus affiliation with the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the characterization of "Trump associates" is entirely vague.

    To conclude from such sentiments that anyone who so much as has "contacts" with "Russians" (again, not the same thing as contacts with proxies or employees of the Russian state) must be working at the behest of Putin would represent an intense strain of xenophobia, if not outright racism.

    Independent journalist and comedian Jimmy Dore also commented on NBC's report, saying: "For two and a half years, [Rachel Maddow] has been an out-of-her-mind conspiracy theorist. She said that Russia is going to freeze you when it gets cold... These people are the biggest conspiracy liars in the world."

    One does not have to rely on the statements of the Senate Intelligence Committee to understand that no shred of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion has yet been shown to the public. Last month, The Nation's Aaron Mate wrote:

    "Not a single Trump official has been accused of colluding with the Russian government or even of committing any crimes during the 2016 campaign. As The New York Times recently noted, "no public evidence has emerged showing that [Trump's] campaign conspired with Russia."

    In the wake of the latest news regarding such lack of evidence, Mate wrote via Twitter :

    The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald also chimed in on NBC's report, writing via Twitter: "When even NBC, [Ken Dilanian] and Democrats (excuse the redundancy) are admitting this so clearly in the first paragraph of their article, it's time for people to start facing some facts about what they've been telling people."

    Of course, many have long pointed to evidence countering the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, expecting such contrary evidence to become the " death of Russiagate. " Unfortunately for the sake of truth and sanity, it seems that this writer's opinion on the immortality of Russiagate is going to continue to prove true, as long as the saga serves the establishment's need for deflection from real election interference and other pressing domestic issues.

    As this author opined last year :

    "Standing on the shoulders of this methodical evidence, it seems at this point that no amount of contrary evidence, exposure or implosion will ultimately kill the undead Russiagate monster. If that were possible, the Thing would have been put irrevocably into the ground over a year ago. Or six months ago. Or a few weeks ago."

    Russian Hacking Narrative Implodes

    The Russian hacking aspect of the scandal was also severely discredited in recent days, in the wake of two new reports . One article was authored by Disobedient Media's Adam Carter, with a separate piece published by Bill Binney and Larry Johnson . Binney is a former NSA Technical Director; Johnson an ex-CIA analyst. Both are active members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

    The two articles discussed revelations arising from studies of the DNC Emails released by WikiLeaks in 2016. We remind our readers that, while Adam Carter, Disobedient Media, The Forensicator, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, Stephen McIntyre, and others have regularly reported regarding documents published by the Guccifer 2.0 persona, the latest pieces focus instead on the DNC Emails as published days before the DNC convention.

    Though this writer will not attempt to present every aspect or technical detail contained in the articles, we will endeavor to make our readers aware of the essential points which Carter , Binney, and Johnson have raised.

    Carter's work suggests that the DNC Emails were originally accessed via a USB thumb drive or similar device, concluding: "The evidence strongly suggests that the first three batches of DNC emails were transferred via a USB storage device at some stage between acquisition and then subsequently being published by WikiLeaks."

    As noted by Carter, such a scenario aligns with allegations made by former UK Ambassador Craig Murray, who claimed that he was the recipient of the files via an intermediary rather than the original source. Carter adds: "However, transfer speeds observed for the batches with last-modified dates matching the dates of acquisition indicate that they were transferred at approximately 3 megabits/second, a lot slower than we would expect if it were a local or LAN transfer, so the transfer we're looking at likely involved a remote transfer at some point between acquisition and delivery ."

    Carter continued: "... It seems likely that the original emails were copied soon after acquisition... The (hypothetical) existence of an intermediary doesn't tell us anything about the individual (or individuals) who originally acquired the emails. Thus, this scenario does not necessarily rule out the possibility of an insider acquiring the emails. If we contemplate the intermediate use of cloud storage, this could have been used as a method to decouple the acquisition of the emails from delivery to another party that subsequently delivered them to Wikileaks."

    The article by Binney and Johnson also discusses the relevance of indications that the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were likely accessed via a storage device, rather than leaked. They state in part:

    "An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files do not support the claim that the emails were obtained via spearphishing. Instead, the evidence clearly shows that the emails posted on the Wikileaks site were copied onto an electronic media, such as a CD-ROM or thumb-drive before they were posted at Wikileaks... We believe that Special Counsel Robert Mueller faces major embarrassment if he decides to pursue the indictment he filed--which accuses 12 Russian GRU military personnel and an entity identified as, Guccifer 2.0, for the DNC hack -- because the available forensic evidence indicates the emails were copied onto a storage device."

    Binney and Johnson conclude: "Taken together, these disparate data points combine to paint a picture that exonerates alleged Russian hackers and implicates persons within our law enforcement and IC taking part in a campaign of misinformation, deceit and incompetence. It is not a pretty picture."

    The Real Cost Of Russiagate

    Though Russiagate may be summed up as a never-ending theatrical performance designed to hold attention rather than prove itself, that ineffability does not mean that the saga has had no tangible effects in the real world. Regardless of what one makes of the legitimacy of Russiagate or any one of its sub-narratives, we can all agree that it has wreaked havoc directly and indirectly on many fronts.

    Journalist and award-winning author Patrick Lawrence wrote a ground-breaking article with The Nation in August of 2017, covering a Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) memorandum to President Trump. The memo, and Lawrence's article, indicated that the Guccifer 2.0 persona had published documents that were likely accessed locally, rather than hacked remotely.

    The repercussions for Lawrence - professional, financial, personal - continued for many months. In an interview, Lawrence told Disobedient Media: "My working principle from the first is that disagreements and other such matters internal to a publication - any publication - shouldn't be aired outside the newsroom door. When I was trained, you'd be summarily fired if you went public with such a stunt. I thought this at the time my article came out, and on that same principle, I won't comment now." Lawrence concluded: "I should add I have no reason to retract a single syllable of what I wrote."

    A hit-piece authored last year by Duncan Campbell saw the doxxing of Disobedient Media's Adam Carter, putting his livelihood in jeopardy and conflating anonymity with wrongdoing, among other things. Campbell's text received much criticism from this outlet and others for its disastrously inaccurate depiction of the opinion of Bill Binney and other VIPS members.

    NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake was also quoted in the piece , comparing CIA veteran and VIPS co-founder Ray McGovern with George W. Bush's politicization of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

    Most readers do not require the reminder that McGovern and other members of VIPS were strongly opposed to the faulty intelligence used by the Bush administration as a pretext for the 2003 war in Iraq. This history makes Drake's comparison particularly odious and is additionally damaging because like McGovern, Drake is a respected member of VIPS. Disobedient Media reached out to Drake for comment on this point and others, to which we received no reply by the time of publication.

    McGovern spoke with Disobedient Media, saying:

    " I knew Tom Drake to be a straight shooter, an impression strengthened by our teamwork in Moscow presenting Ed Snowden with the Sam Adams integrity award that Tom himself had won two years before. I normally cut Tom some slack, in view of all he has been through. But when he belatedly took issue with the key VIPS memo of July 24, 2017 on "Russian hacking," and made claims unsupported by evidence (claims strongly challenged by his fellow NSA "alumni" in VIPS), I, as chair of that memo, had to call him out of order. He reacted poorly and seems now to be in for further embarrassment."

    Disobedient Media also spoke with Bill Binney, who told this author:

    "Tom has been a friend of mine for about 20 years. During that time he has demonstrated sound analytic judgment on technical issues with the exception of one. That is the issue of Russiagate and association with the Trump campaign and administration. In this case, I believe he has allowed himself to be diverted by the rather large hoard of emotionally motivated who are intent on associating the Russians with Trump to form the basis for impeachment. They have and continue to convict Trump based on statements made by large numbers of people - as if that were proof of anything. So, on this issue, a good chunk of the US population have lost their objectivity and instead of demanding proof based on observable facts (available to be inspected) they accept assertions generated by emotion. The true test will be in a court of law where all these assertions would be treated as hearsay and inadmissible as none are first-hand observers."

    Disobedient Media has been separately smeared by entities like Media Bias Fact Check , whose report appraising this outlet laughably alleged that we have been a "defender" of the Guccifer 2.0 persona. While such an absurd statement would carry no weight with even the most cursory of Disobedient Media's readers, it is nonetheless noteworthy in that it specifically uses a false neo-McCarthyist narrative to attempt to assassinate the credibility of this outlet.

    When asked about the real-world implications of Russiagate thus far, Ray McGovern - who, as we remind our readers, is a former CIA analyst with decades of experience during the cold war period - expressed deep concern, saying:

    "I worry about what conclusions President Putin may draw from attempts to demonize him and to make Russia a pariah. Inflammatory rhetoric can be prelude to war. Worse still, the temperament and hubris of President Trump's advisers are a far cry from the sage, sober advice Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson, for example, gave President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Shattered, at this point, is any residual hope Putin may have harbored that Trump would be able to improve ties with Russia. Trump is not his own man. Putin, thus, must prepare for the worst. This is the most serious damage from the Russia-gate narrative so far."

    Patrick Lawrence also appraised the damage done by Russiagate in a piece published via Consortium News, writing: "Numerous sets of sanctions against Russia, individual Russians, and Russian entities have been imposed on the basis of this great conjuring of assumption and presumption."

    As described by McGovern and Lawrence, the tensions raised between two major nuclear powers is perhaps the most important real-world result of over two years of neo-McCarthyist fervor in the US. However, the smearing of members of the independent press and the worsening division amongst VIPS members comprise additional serious damage stemming from a scandal-that-never-was.

    In terms of the larger political picture, Russiagate has been endlessly hyped to deflect from public outrage that rightfully erupted in response to overt election interference by the Democratic Party in the 2016 primary season. It has been used in an attempt to mask the failure of the Democrats and specifically Hillary Clinton as a Presidential candidate.

    As long as the legacy press continues to use Russiagate to gaslight the public from focusing on ongoing domestic election interference, it remains imperative to point out that Russiagate, to date, has no basis whatsoever in fact. For that reason, Disobedient Media will continue to report on the subject as it develops.

    youshallnotkill , 1 hour ago link

    Really have to admire what Burr did there.

    ... they have yet to find evidence indicating that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia in the run-up to the 2016 US Presidential election.

    He was very careful in saying that they did not find direct evidence. Knowing very well that it would be reported like this as the public does not know what this legal technical term means.

    And that is exactly what is needed right now to give Mueller the space he needs. Beautifully played.

    Schroedingers Cat , 2 hours ago link

    Don't you find it suspicious that Russiagate is abruptly winding down. Mueller waits until a week later to issue his non-report when nobody is paying attention. Russiagate is disappearing and the only reason big enough for that is WAR. They want "unity" between the parties so we can all be good patriots and start Iraq V2.0 or WWIII. The last time the parties buried the hatchet like this was before invading Iraq after 911 attacks.

    youshallnotkill , 1 hour ago link

    Don't you find it suspicious that Russiagate is abruptly winding down

    It isn't. It just looks that way.

    youshallnotkill , 2 hours ago link

    ongoing domestic election interference

    Like the election fraud in NC?

    https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article226492265.html

    brane pilot , 3 hours ago link

    The only collusion was between the FBI and a foreign national to create a phony dossier of bald faced lies in an attempt to take down the POTUS and invalidate a free and fair election.

    Somehow, the Leftist media does not think that is newsworthy.

    lowkeyjc , 3 hours ago link

    Seth Rich

    CatInTheHat , 3 hours ago link

    These narratives, like the build up to the Iraq war, have a foreign policy context to them, for which unsuspecting Americans know nothing about

    This war on Russia accelerated under Obama's watch.

    How many RUSSIAGATERS know about Obama/Nuland/McCain regime change in Ukraine that put neonazis on RUSSIAS border?

    How many Russiagaters know that Obama ordered the Ukies to blow up flight MH-17 with 298 people onboard in a false flag attack to justify FRAUDULENT sanctions on Russia?

    How many Russiagaters know that it is dual Israeli Democrats pushing this narrative most? Schumer, SCHIFF, CARDIN, who was responsible for the fraudulent Magnistsky Act, along with fraud Bill Browder, a CIA asset who owes hundreds of millions to the Russian government in back taxes ? There are more dual Israelis involved from Congress too.

    Lastly, how many Russiagaters know anything about foreign policy?

    What a convenient narrative to throw out in blaming Russia for Clinton's loss, but which serves the deep state well that has Russia on it's target list for regime change and balkanizing by a bunch of dual Israeli psychopaths & two whack Christian Zionist extremists (Pompeo, Pence)

    It always comes down to ISRAEL, doesn't it? Russia did the unthinkable in interfering in Greater Israhell! Stopping the US, Saudi Israhelli war on Syria.

    Most Russiagaters can't find Russia on a map

    I do wonder how many Americans really buy this ********

    100 million did not vote in 2016 and my guess is that most Americans don't give one hoot about Russia at all. Busy just trying to survive.

    A couple of years ago, CNN did a poll asking Americans how they see Russia, and most DID NOT care nor think about Russia. The reporter who helped with the poll laughed when asked why CNN continued to go on and on about Russia knowing people didn't care.

    Just laughed. Coming from the same crowd at CNN that called viewers dumbshits and were laughing about that too .I can't recall verbatim what they said but maybe someone here can recall better than I.

    Russiagate is a neocunt war narrative. Russiagate is a smokescreen for Israhelli influence in our government

    Russiagate is a cover-up for many crimes committed by Democrats and the DNC, including but not limited to primary rigging and election fraud and URANIUM ONE in which Mueller himself was involved .

    francis scott falseflag , 1 hour ago link

    foreign policy context

    more important than having a foreign policy context, is their

    "Totalitarianism for Dummies" aspect

    How many RUSSIAGATERS know about Obama/Nuland/McCain regime change

    how many russiagaters don't think there's anything hypocritical about Obama not returning the Peace Prize to the Nobels.

    it is dual Israeli Democrats pushing this narrative most? Schumer, SCHIFF, CARDIN,

    won't they be surprised when a new Israeli Government expects their support for some pro-Russian, anti-US controversy about foreign policy, trade, military, etc. legislation or action?

    can't find Russia on a map

    hyperbole

    I seem to agree with you on most of the important things, except for your ending.

    a smokescreen for Israhelli influence in our government

    I think God named the Jews His Chosen People, but He never mentions what they were chosen for or chosen to do. The point being that if you believe in God, then Jews' self-promoting, self-aggrandizing chosenness is irrefutable evidence of the Existence Of God.

    Not the God of Forgiveness like Christ. But the God of the Cities of the Plain.

    I wonder if Christians can ever accept the fact that the God that Christ became was first God the Creator, who gave mankind its choice between good and evil?

    Good and Evil. The two parts of <ONE GOD>

    Moving and Grooving , 3 hours ago link

    I'm going to see what's being reported in Moscow about this.

    iSage , 4 hours ago link

    More learning for ya

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsajeFETEWk

    StheNine , 4 hours ago link

    Send the bill for this clown show to the Clintons and Soros.

    East Indian , 4 hours ago link

    This world has indeed come to a fork in the road. If what is common knowledge to one set of people is "discovery" to another set, then they are not even living in the same universe. There are two roads here onwards. Either we eliminate the purveyors of false narratives or we are turning the population into ignorant masses again.

    lurker since 2012 , 4 hours ago link

    Rosenstein Mueller are unconstitutional Brief from Miller in regards to Mueller being duly appointed..........

    "

    1

    STATEMENT OF JURISDICTION

    The district court had subject-matter jurisdiction to enforce a subpoenaissued by the Special Counsel to Appellant to appear before the grand jury on June29, 2018. After denying the motion to quash the subpoena on July 31, 2018, thecourt issued a contempt order on August 10, 2018, but stayed the order pendingappeal. Appellant filed his notice of appeal on August 13, 2018. This Court has jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. 1291 to review the final order.

    STATEMENT OF THE ISSUES

    1. Whether Congress, under the Appointments Clause of Article II, § 2, of

    the U.S. Constitution, "established by law" the appointment of a private attorney toserve as a special counsel as an "Officer of the United States."

    2. Whether Special Counse

    l Robert S. Mueller III (the "Special Counsel")was unconstitutionally appointed because he is a "principal officer" under the

    Appointments Clause of Article II, and thus was required to be

    --

    but was not

    --

    appointed by the President with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.

    3. Whether Congress "by Law vest[ed] the Appointment" of the SpecialCounsel as an "inferior Officer []" in "Head of the [Justice] Department[ ]," andthus, under the "Excepting Clause," was unconstitutionally appointed because he

    2

    was required to be

    --

    but was not

    --

    appointed by Attorney General Jeff Sessionsrather than by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.""

    http://nlpc.org/2018/09/12/brief-makes-compelling-case-that-mueller-appointment-is-unconstitutional/

    bh2 , 4 hours ago link

    The War Party (AKA Democrats) do not regard inflaming tensions with a nuclear power abroad if the result is to deliver political power into their own hands at home.

    They are defective psychopaths, dangerous people who should be tried for treason and incarcerated for life as a merciful alternative to hanging in the gallows which they so richly deserve.

    William Dorritt , 4 hours ago link

    Who murdered Seth Rich ?

    The FBI never investigated the server break in, they took the DNCs word for it.

    Moving and Grooving , 3 hours ago link

    That has to be a piece of this. The entire affair had 'Clinton' all over it.

    iSage , 4 hours ago link

    Watch and learn folks

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7Y1g6amvPQ

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OECaqtQWqw

    pparalegal , 4 hours ago link

    Funny that we have not heard a peep from the usual klacking bullhorns Hillary and Obama.

    Yars Revenge , 4 hours ago link

    All the people responsible for Russiagate, politicians, rogue intelligence and the media, should be sent to Gitmo.

    Theyve brought the world to the edge of disaster through nuclear war and deserve to be punished accordingly.

    Lie_Detector , 4 hours ago link

    Long overdue. Get Mueller off the federal payroll!

    smacker , 4 hours ago link

    Yes, put him on the prison workgang payroll ;-)

    commiebastid , 4 hours ago link

    another will take its place

    Dickweed Wang , 4 hours ago link

    With the majority of the left and quite a few Republicans (who for all intents and purposes are Democrats with an "R" next to their name) Russiagate has become just like the man-made global warming scam. They continue to believe it like a religion, regardless of mounting facts to the contrary, because it serves a purpose for them.

    Cheap Chinese Crap , 4 hours ago link

    They don't believe it. You get to be a politician by being lazy, evil, and calculating-- not happily naive and trusting.

    The narrative is custom tailored to suit their purposes and veracity is not part of the calculation at all.

    fersur , 2 hours ago link

    Most all of them start out in Law school, their Lawyers by default, lesson number one, truths assided !

    DIGrif , 4 hours ago link

    WE THE PEOPLE, want our millions back that was spent on this ********. Deduct it from the Democrats paychecks.

    flatearther , 4 hours ago link

    Money? Hell! there will not even be an apology OR any admission it was a witch hunt. Such is the nature of our MASTERS.

    commiebastid , 4 hours ago link

    pocket change compared to the overall hoovering

    Herdee , 4 hours ago link

    Former CIA Officer explains:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOu4TpvydUI

    Occams_Razor_Trader_Part_Deux , 4 hours ago link

    Isn't about time for a "Stormy" sighting- or an allegation from the admitted liar Michael Cohen?

    south40_dreams , 4 hours ago link

    Democrat are ******* liars. The End.

    commiebastid , 4 hours ago link

    it is a bi partisan pastime

    2willies , 5 hours ago link

    Is that Richard Branson a psycho or what? he gives me the English willies

    Schroedingers Cat , 5 hours ago link

    Suddenly, the Democrats want to support Trump, the man they insisted was a dangerous foreign agent, in leading us to war with Venezuela. Demotards are truly insane fucked up little moppets with **** for brains!!!

    fersur , 5 hours ago link

    Haters Shoo' Shoo Fly Shoo, been bugging me, arms tired of giving a Whiping !

    aloha_snakbar , 5 hours ago link

    Uncle Scam needs to be put down like the rabid dog he has become...

    2willies , 5 hours ago link

    rabid dog is to nice

    Francis Marx , 5 hours ago link

    The Russian sanctions are a farce. I think they are using them so that Russia will hand over Snowden, nothing else. Its just kept quiet.

    [Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her ..."
    "... Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn. ..."
    "... The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you should all agree with Gabbard here. ..."
    Feb 19, 2019 | www.veteranstoday.com

    Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her. She said:

    " We must stand up against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage, new places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy, our security, and destroying our middle class."

    It is too early to formulate a complete opinion on Gabbard, but she has said the right thing so far. In fact, her record is better than numerous presidents, both past and present.

    As we have documented in the past, Gabbard is an Iraq war veteran, and she knew what happened to her fellow soldiers who died for Israel, the Neocon war machine, and the military industrial complex. She also seems to be aware that the war in Iraq alone will cost American taxpayers at least six trillion dollars. [1] She is almost certainly aware of the fact that at least "360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans may have suffered brain injuries." [2]

    Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn.

    The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you should all agree with Gabbard here.

    [Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

    Highly recommended!
    This is a powerful political statement... Someaht similar to Tucker Carlson stance...
    Feb 19, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    "We must stand up against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage, new places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy, our security, and destroying our middle class."

    [Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her ..."
    "... Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn. ..."
    "... The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you should all agree with Gabbard here. ..."
    Feb 19, 2019 | www.veteranstoday.com

    Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her. She said:

    " We must stand up against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage, new places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy, our security, and destroying our middle class."

    It is too early to formulate a complete opinion on Gabbard, but she has said the right thing so far. In fact, her record is better than numerous presidents, both past and present.

    As we have documented in the past, Gabbard is an Iraq war veteran, and she knew what happened to her fellow soldiers who died for Israel, the Neocon war machine, and the military industrial complex. She also seems to be aware that the war in Iraq alone will cost American taxpayers at least six trillion dollars. [1] She is almost certainly aware of the fact that at least "360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans may have suffered brain injuries." [2]

    Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn.

    The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you should all agree with Gabbard here.

    [Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

    Highly recommended!
    This is a powerful political statement... Someaht similar to Tucker Carlson stance...
    Feb 19, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    "We must stand up against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage, new places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy, our security, and destroying our middle class."

    [Feb 19, 2019] TULSI GABBARD For POTUS 2020! Congresswoman Gabbard Holds Meet And Greet In New Hampshire!

    All right words. But Obama also has also right words, but proved to be just a "bait and switch" artist. Still "Hope springs eternal"
    Feb 19, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    wolfbear7 , 2 months ago

    Tulsi is the person who can heal our deeply wounded national psyche due to the idiocy and ignorance of the Trump Regime. I have the same feeling watching her that I did when I saw Obama at the 2004 convention, only Tulsi is a progressive where I sadly learned Obama was way too corporate. I need to live to see Tulsi Gabbard in the White House. It's the same God, the Force in everything, and nobody should be forced away from their beliefs or non belief. It's Time To Show People That NOBODY IS NOBODY!

    318226 , 1 month ago

    Tulsi Gabbard, one of the very few good politicians. Too much focus on Left and Right views. It's time for Right and Wrong to come to the fore. Tulsi will try to clean up the mess that her predecessors have created. Stop the bullshit deep state wars. Sons and daughters being sacrificed for gas and oil profits. The benefits then ironically never come

    Doreene Close , 1 month ago

    I so want to support Tulsi. Shall we ever get a progressive enough candidate to get a real investigation on the events of 9/11...to determine why the dust of those buildings had military grade nano thermite, in which all the evidence suggests an intentional demolition of those towers, and when, oh when will we get a candidate that unequivocally works for all money out of campaigns and publicly funded elections like our Canadian neighbors.

    Ash n , 1 week ago

    This is my prediction - Tulsi Gabbard in 2020 election is like what Trump was in 2016 Election. Eventually, Tulsi is going to strike a chord with American people and almost all Democrats and Independents are going to vote her and few from Trump base is also going to vote her and eventually elect her as President in 2020 election. This is too early to make such prediction but I think majority of Americans are very fair minded people and will do the justice to her by electing her as President.

    [Feb 19, 2019] THE NEW YORK TIMES IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION

    That's too harsh, but the commenter has a point: NYT times is mostly a propaganda outlet. That does not exclude publishing rare objective articles.
    Feb 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Rational says: February 18, 2019 at 6:29 am GMT 100 Words

    Thanks for the article, Sir. Welcome to unz.com.

    The media in most countries report the news in a neutral manner. Since the Judaists bought the media, they turned media into weapons of terror, by:

    a. Fake news -- outright lies (eg. calling alien invaders "migrants").
    b. Manufacturing scandals that THEY make up eg. blackface.
    c. Harassing and abusing patriots and others and calling them racists, getting them fired from jobs, etc.

    None of these are legitimate jobs of the media. The New York Times and most Zionists controlled media in this country are therefore criminal enterprises and terrorist organizations and these criminals belong in prison.

    [Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Elizabeth Warren in 2020 Who Can Beat Trump

    May 11, 2017 | www.youtube.com

    BestAnimeFanservice , 1 year ago

    Tulsi Gabbard is courageous and stands up against her own party regardless of the political cost. Elizabeth Warren is a coward; she never stands up against her party; she only fights the easy fights (GOP,Trump). Elizabeth Warren was a college professor she knows the words the young kids want to listen and she says them often. Mark my words 'Elizabeth Warren in 2020 will be the Walter Mondale of 1984'

    Megan Parish , 1 year ago (edited)

    Tulsi Gabbard. She supports Medicare for all and Elizabeth Warren does not. She's also really pushing the fake Russia story all over MSNBC. Tulsi was the only one who didn't endorse Hillary.

    D. Martin , 1 year ago (edited)

    Liz voted to get rid of Habeas Corpus and we're going to put her up for president now? Bernie and Liz will certainly maintain the Democratic Party line on the Middle East.

    TheGr8stManEvr , 1 year ago (edited)

    I'll never trust Warren again. She's a Fauxgressive, just like Obama. #FoolMeOnce

    TheKeithvidz , 1 year ago (edited)

    tulsi %100 but Warren supported Ben Carson & Hillary Rodham - to be fair she's far from the worse.

    branden burks , 1 year ago

    Mike don't be naive. The Democratic Party has learned NOTHING! They'd definitely cheat a true progressive in 2020. Have you seen ANY changes? Do you hear what their lawyers say about cheating Sanders on the record?

    branden burks , 1 year ago

    I'd take Tulsi Gabbard over Elizabeth Warren. Warren showed her true colors. Always too little too late and she doesn't do it by mistake. Gabbard just does the right thing because it's right. I don't think Warren could beat Trump. He can poke way too many holes in her.

    [Feb 19, 2019] Foreign Policy is More Than Just War and Peace

    Notable quotes:
    "... Congress needs to take back the war powers. The fact that no one wants to be the one responsible for deciding to go to war might help slow down if not stop all these regime change wars. Maybe if Congress votes on it enough of them will be reluctant to make a yes vote. ..."
    "... how being a mercenary soldier/terrorist in other people's countries, murdering their people and destroying their infrastructure, for military and multinational corporate profits and Wall St., translates to "serving and sacrificing for the people of our country"? How do you make that weird leap in logic? ..."
    Nov 14, 2018 | www.youtube.com

    Foreign policy is more than just war and peace, it is a nuanced and complex issue that directly affects us here at home. In this interview, Dr. Jane Sanders sits down with Representative Tulsi Gabbard to talk about U.S. foreign policy and how it affects us here at home.

    oneofthesixbillion , 3 months ago (edited)

    Tulsi this is the first I've explored who you are. This conversation felt like a life giving refreshment. The constant war and regime change policy of every administration since I was a young child has been utterly confounding. We are bankrupting our society and civilization with military expenditure exactly like a life destroying heroin addict except it's on a global scale. These people in the powers that be together with the masses that back them are literal sociopaths and they're entirely in control at both the highest and base levels. The only other time I've felt as nourished by a public figure that somehow pierced through the mainstream media was Bernie Sanders actually expressing the fact that we are an oligarchy not a democracy. Like oligarchy, anti-war and imperialism is just not talked about. US Americans won't acknowledge the scale of our imperialism.

    Jonah Dubin , 3 months ago

    Tulsi should run and both Sanders should follow her lead. As much as I love him, Bernie's too old to be president - when it gets to the stage against Trump, we need a young, vibrant face. Add onto that the fact that she's a veteran who actually asked to be deployed in comparison to him, a draft dodger - he looks like an old fat pathetic septogenarian next to an early 40s real populist. Ultimately it is up to Sanders whether this whole thing is about a man or a movement. If he runs, he'll probably win the primary but it is not a guarantee that he'd win - Tulsi would win and she'd be around for decades to come as a standard barer too.

    Wayne Chapman , 2 months ago

    "Sensible politics" seems to be an oxymoron these days and pretty much throughout the history of our country. It's so refreshing to see a politician who has a vision for the future that the majority of us can get behind. It scares me though. I've read quite a bit about JFK the past few years, and he amassed a number of very powerful and dangerous enemies. They won't just stand by and allow someone in a position of influence to get the truth out about our immoral and illegal wars. Tulsi, I support your efforts to bring peace to the Middle East and elsewhere, but please do be careful. You're a fighter and I admire that, but we all want you to be safe and healthy for many years to come.

    George Crannell , 5 days ago

    Tulsi Gabbard, I am thrilled to have someone like you running for president. I am a fellow Veteran dealing with disability and I am glad to have a candidate who understands the issues Veterans are dealing with. I also realize that the voting public will support the person who resonates with their personal lives and issues that don't exist in their life they will disregard.Thank you for you're support.

    somedayalwaysnever , 4 days ago

    The DNC will lie cheat and steal the election from Tulsi Gabbard just like they did Bernie Sanders, and the 15 million Americans who Left the un-Democratic party will double and triple....DEMEXIT

    Robert Covarrubias , 1 week ago

    Tulsi Gabbard needs to be the president of the United States of America period. If she not the president of our country will not survive. That is a fact, how stupid can our government be. I guess very stupid, what else can I say. We don't hear that in main news media, the reason we do hear it the media . The news media is totally brought, the main news media love money and the devil, simple as that. How are you going to hear about wars from main news media. They do care about the citizens or the country. We really don't have a real news media, it all propaganda. All fake news, that why one doesn't hear anything from the new medias.

    Lee Alexander , 1 month ago

    Congress needs to take back the war powers. The fact that no one wants to be the one responsible for deciding to go to war might help slow down if not stop all these regime change wars. Maybe if Congress votes on it enough of them will be reluctant to make a yes vote.

    D Personal , 1 week ago

    WAKE UP, PEOPLE! Bernie is a sell-out - a sheeple-herder that never intended to win. He was a gatekeeper for Hillary because she is AIPAC-beloved and he is an Israel-firster. He threw his supporters under the bus as they told him in real time that the nomination was being stolen. He's part of the con, and the sooner we realize this, the better off we'll be. BERNIE WORKS FOR DEMOCRATS. Vote Third Party (REAL third parties, not the Bernie Sanders' kind).

    Kinky, 2 months ago

    Tulsi - re your comment about our veterans who have "served and sacrificed for their country," could you clarify how being a mercenary soldier/terrorist in other people's countries, murdering their people and destroying their infrastructure, for military and multinational corporate profits and Wall St., translates to "serving and sacrificing for the people of our country"? How do you make that weird leap in logic?

    [Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Reveals Amazing Progressive Legislative Agenda

    Feb 19, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    The Working Progressive , 5 months ago (edited)

    Jimmy, the whole Tulsi interview was a clinic on real journalism. It's efforts from TJDS like this that make me wish I had more $ to give to the show than I do. Thank you for the great work! And, while I was already a big supporter of Tulsi Gabbard, the way she spoke honestly & addressed some tough questions & uncomfortable truths about the party (& capitalism- that's what buying off pols is, an aspect of capitalism) just sent her credibility sky high with me. Thank you Tulsi, & thank you Jimmy & the crew at TJDS. Well done!

    Sherry Spectre , 5 months ago

    This entire interview, was nothing short of brilliant. Tulsi is the real deal. When Jimmy mentions her & Bernie start a new party, her face said it all. She seemed genuinely flattered and became very humble. Wish there was a "Tulsi Gabbard" in all 50 states. She gives hope to people. Peace. And, thank you.

    Moes1n , 5 months ago

    I hate to say it, but I remember another progressive politician who said all the right things, at the right time: Barack Obama. I drank up that kool aid by the gallon, and voted for him twice. Will Gabbard emerge from her first briefing as POTUS as a Stepford Wife of the MIC, as Obama did? Will it be "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" yet again? By 2013, specifically after Ukraine and vilification of Snowden (not to mention Libya, Syria, Iraq/ISIS, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, etc) I vowed to never vote for a Democrat again, after pulling the lever for dems my entire life. I would vote for Gabbard as an independent in a hot second, but unfortunately have no hope for her or her seemingly progressive agenda if she stays tied to the corrupt and warmongering DNC.

    [Feb 19, 2019] P>ositions - tulsi

    Notable quotes:
    "... Wants to ban super PACs and does not take any PAC money. ..."
    "... Supports sensible gun control. Has 7% rating from the NRA ..."
    "... Need fair immigration reform that doesn't break up families. ..."
    "... Reduce mandatory minimums for non-violent offenders ..."
    "... Cosponsor of H.R. 676 the Medicare for All Act ..."
    "... Supports diplomacy, ending the standoff and regime change wars including North Korea. ..."
    "... Committed to protecting Medicare and Social Security. Opposes Privatization. ..."
    "... End interventionist wars of regime change that cost lives and money and make things worse. ..."
    "... Has helped lead the opposition on this issue. ..."
    "... Reinstate Glass-Steagall Act, ban naked credit default swaps, and breakup big banks. ..."
    Feb 19, 2019 | www.reddit.com

    Policies and Issues of Tulsi Gabbard

    Issue Position Details
    Abortion Pro-Choice Tulsi has a 100% voting record with both Planned Parenthood and NARAL.
    Affordable Care Act Supports Protect and improve Obamacare until Single Payer plan can pass.
    Border Wall Opposes Dream Act must be independent of any border wall legistation
    Campaign Finance Supports Wants to ban super PACs and does not take any PAC money.
    Citizens United Opposes "The only way to restore public faith in our democracy is with citizen-led, grassroots-funded campaigns."
    Civil Rights Supports Federal protection for discrimination of national origin, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief , gender.
    Climate Change Green New Deal Tax incentives for wind, solar, biomass and wave energy. Regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
    Dakota Access Pipeline Opposes Visited and supported protestors at DAPL. Also opposed Keystone.
    Death Penalty - -
    GMO labeling Supports Let Americans have a choice in their food purchases.
    Green New Deal - -
    Gun Control Supports Supports sensible gun control. Has 7% rating from the NRA .
    Illegal Immigration Opposes Deportation Need fair immigration reform that doesn't break up families.
    Environmental Protections Supports Lifelong environmentalist who started an environmental non-profit as a teenager, and has a strong environmental record.
    Equal Pay Supports Supported legislation to level the playing field such as H.R.377 - Paycheck Fairness Act
    Internet Privacy Supports Restrict how Internet providers use and sell customer data
    LGBT Rights & Marriage Equality Supports Since being elected to Congress, Tulsi has been 100% pro-LGBT rights and for marriage equality.
    Marijuana Decriminalize & Legalize Introduced legislation to take off federal controlled substances list. Supports Legalization.
    Mandatory Minimums Opposes Reduce mandatory minimums for non-violent offenders
    Medicare-For-All Supports Cosponsor of H.R. 676 the Medicare for All Act.
    Minimum Wage $15 Supports Cosponsored the Minimum Wage Fairness Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act
    Net Neutrality Supports "Maintaining Net Neutrality is Cornerstone of Our Democracy"
    North Korea Talks Supports Supports diplomacy, ending the standoff and regime change wars including North Korea.
    NSA Mass Collection Surveillance Opposes Strongly pro civil liberties, and reigning in, stopping mass collection and defunding the NSA
    Nuclear Power Opposes Too dangerous and expensive. Better to phase it out and focus on clean, safe, renewable energy.
    PayGo Opposes "just three Democrats voted it down: Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez were joined by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii"
    Planned Parenthood Supports Supports funding and has 100% rating from them.
    Prisons For Profit Opposes Has called to end the use of private prisons nationwide.
    Refugee Ban Opposes Spoke against Trump's executive order banning refugees. Thinks vetting is sufficient.
    Saudi Arabia Arms Sales Opposes Condemned the Trump Administration's $460 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia
    Single-Payer Healthcare Supports Supports HR 676 and universal healthcare, Medicare and a public option
    Social Security Protect Committed to protecting Medicare and Social Security. Opposes Privatization.
    Space Exploration - -
    Syria End the War End interventionist wars of regime change that cost lives and money and make things worse.
    Trans-Pacific Partnership Opposes Has helped lead the opposition on this issue.
    Veterans Services Expand Let veterans see private physicians, improve the GI Bill, incentives to hire veterans
    Wall Street Regulation Supports Reinstate Glass-Steagall Act, ban naked credit default swaps, and breakup big banks.

    [Feb 19, 2019] Wow, I absolutely love every point she made, what a breath of fresh air

    Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Rick S 1 month ago

    Wow, I absolutely love every point she made, what a breath of fresh air. Our less popular presidents that have lost their second term elections have lost them because.. their opponent was a breath of fresh air. She's going to win by an embarrassing margin, wish her the best!

    [Feb 18, 2019] Do You Believe in the Deep State Now by Robert W. Merry

    Highly recommended!
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Be afraid. Be very afraid.

    That's a natural reaction to the revelation of Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy FBI director, that top Justice Department officials, alarmed by Donald Trump's firing of former Bureau director James Comey, explored a plan to invoke the 25th Amendment and kick the duly elected president out of office.

    According to New York Times reporters Adam Goldman and Matthew Haag, McCabe made the statement in an NBC 60 Minutes interview to be aired on Sunday. He also reportedly said that McCabe wanted the so-called Russia collusion investigation to go after Trump for obstructing justice in firing Comey and for any instances they could turn up of his working in behalf of Russia.

    The idea of invoking the 25th Amendment was discussed, it seems, at two meetings on May 16, 2017. According to McCabe, top law enforcement officials pondered how they might recruit Vice President Pence and a majority of cabinet members to declare in writing, to the Senate's president pro tempore and the House speaker, that the president was "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." That would be enough, under the 25th Amendment, to install the vice president as acting president, pushing aside Trump.

    But to understand what kind of constitutional crisis this would unleash and the precedent it would set, it's necessary to ponder the rest of this section of the 25th Amendment. The text prescribes that, if the president, after being removed, transmits to the same congressional figures that he is indeed capable of discharging his duties, he shall once again be president after four days. But if the vice president and the cabinet majority reiterate their declaration within those four days that the guy can't govern, Congress is charged with deciding the issue. It then takes a two-thirds vote of both houses to keep the president removed, which would have to be done within 21 days, during which time the elected president would be sidelined and the vice president would govern. If Congress can't muster the two-thirds majority within the prescribed time period, the president "shall resume the powers and duties of his office."

    It's almost impossible to contemplate the political conflagration that would ensue under this plan. Citizens would watch those in Washington struggle with the monumental question of the fate of their elected leader under an initiative that had never before been invoked, or even considered, in such circumstances. Debates would flare up over whether this comported with the original intent of the amendment; whether it was crafted to deal with physical or mental "incapacitation," as opposed to controversial actions or unsubstantiated allegations or even erratic decision making; whether such an action, if established as precedent, would destabilize the American republic for all time; and whether unelected bureaucrats should arrogate to themselves the power to set in motion the downfall of a president, circumventing the impeachment language of the Constitution.

    For the past two years, the country has been struggling to understand the two competing narratives of the criminal investigation of the president.

    One narrative -- let's call it Narrative A -- has it that honorable and dedicated federal law enforcement officials developed concerns over a tainted election in which nefarious Russian agents had sought to tilt the balloting towards the candidate who wanted to improve U.S.-Russian relations and who seemed generally unseemly. Thus did the notion emerge, quite understandably, that Trump had "colluded" with Russian officials to cadge a victory that otherwise would have gone to his opponent. This narrative is supported and protected by Democratic figures and organizations, by adherents of the "Russia as Threat" preoccupation, and by anti-Trumpers everywhere, particularly news outlets such as CNN, The Washington Post , and The New York Times .

    Trump, the FBI, and the Final Debasement of American Politics Unlike Nixon, Trump Will Not Go Quietly

    The other view -- Narrative B -- posits that certain bureaucratic mandarins of the national security state and the outgoing Obama administration resolved early on to thwart Trump's candidacy. After his election, they determined to undermine his political standing, and particularly his proposed policy toward Russia, through a relentless and expansive investigation characterized by initial misrepresentations, selective media leaks, brutal law enforcement tactics, and a barrage of innuendo. This is the narrative of most Trump supporters, conservative commentators, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, notably columnist Kimberley Strassel.

    The McCabe revelation won't affect the battle of the two narratives. As ominous and outrageous as this "deep state" behavior may seem to those who embrace Narrative B, it will be seen by Narrative A adherents as evidence that those law enforcement officials were out there heroically on the front lines protecting the republic from Donald J. Trump.

    And those Narrative A folks won't have any difficulty tossing aside the fact that McCabe was fired as deputy FBI director for violating agency policy in leaking unauthorized information to the news media. He then allegedly violated the law in lying about it to federal investigators on four occasions, including three times while under oath.

    Indeed, Narrative A people have no difficulty at all brushing aside serious questions posed by Narrative B people. McCabe is a likely liar and perjurer? Doesn't matter. Peter Strzok, head of the FBI's counterespionage section, demonstrated his anti-Trump animus in tweets and emails to Justice official Lisa Page? Irrelevant. Christopher Steele's dossier of dirt on Trump, including an allegation that the Russians were seeking to blackmail and bribe him, was compiled by a man who had demonstrated to a Justice Department official that he was "desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and passionate about him not being president"? Not important. The dossier was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party? Immaterial. Nothing in the dossier was ever substantiated? So what?

    Now we have a report from a participant of those meetings that top officials of the country's premier law enforcement entity sat around and pondered how to bring down a sitting president they didn't like. The Times even says that McCabe "confirmed" an earlier report that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein suggested wearing a wire in meetings with Trump to incriminate him and make him more vulnerable to the plot.

    There is no suggestion in McCabe's interview pronouncements or in the words of Scott Pelley, who conducted the interview and spoke to CBS This Morning about it, that these federal officials ever took action to further the aim of unseating the president. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that they approached cabinet members or the vice president about it. "They were speculating, 'This person would be with us, this person would not be,' and they were counting noses in that effort," said Pelley. He added, apparently in response to Rosenstein's insistence that his comments about wearing a wire were meant as a joke, "This was not perceived to be a joke."

    What are we to make of this? Around the time of the meetings to discuss the 25th Amendment plot, senior FBI officials also discussed initiating a national security investigation of the president as a stooge of the Russians or perhaps even a Russian agent. These talks were revealed by The New York Times and CNN in January, based on closed-door congressional testimony by former FBI general counsel James Baker. You don't have to read very carefully to see that the reporters on these stories brought to them a Narrative A sensibility. The Times headline: "F.B.I. Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia." CNN's: "Transcripts detail how FBI debated whether Trump was 'following directions' of Russia." And of course, whoever leaked those hearing transcripts almost surely did so to bolster the Narrative A version of events.

    The independent journalist Gareth Porter, writing at Consortium News, offers a penetrating exposition of the inconsistencies, fallacies, and fatuities of the Narrative A matrix, as reflected in how the Times and CNN handled the stories that resulted from what were clearly self-interested leaks.

    Porter notes that a particularly sinister expression in May 2017 by former CIA director John O. Brennan, a leading Trump antagonist, has precipitated echoes in the news media ever since, particularly in the Times . Asked in a committee hearing if he had intelligence indicating that anyone in the Trump campaign was "colluding with Moscow," Brennan dodged the question. He said his experience had taught him that "the Russians try to suborn individuals, and they try to get them to act on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly."

    Of course you can't collude with anybody unwittingly. But Brennan's fancy expression has the effect of expanding what can be thrown at political adversaries, to include not just conscious and nefarious collaboration but also policy advocacy that could be viewed as wrongheaded or injurious to U.S. interests. As Porter puts it, "The real purpose is to confer on national security officials and their media allies the power to cast suspicion on individuals on the basis of undesirable policy views of Russia rather than on any evidence of actual collaboration with the Russian government."

    That seems to be what's going on here. There's no doubt that McCabe and Rosenstein and Strzok and Brennan and Page and many others despised Trump and his resolve to thaw relations with Russia. They viewed him as a president "who needed to be reined in," as a CNN report described the sentiment among top FBI officials after the Comey firing.

    So they expanded the definition of collusion to include "unwitting" collaboration in order to justify their machinations. It's difficult to believe that people in such positions would take such a cavalier attitude toward the kind of damage they could wreak on the body politic.

    Now we learn that they actually sat around and plotted how to distort the Constitution, just as they distorted the rules of official behavior designed to hold them in check, in order to destroy a presidential administration placed in power by the American people. It's getting more and more difficult to dismiss Narrative B.

    Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

    Alternative Facts at the NYT James Polk's Realpolitik Hide 52 comments 52 Responses to Do You Believe in the Deep State Now? ← Older Comments

    Ken Zaretzke February 16, 2019 at 4:57 pm

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/trump-russia-collusion-investigation-criminalization-policy-disputes/

    Also very good is the blunt force trauma inflicted on the FBI in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by Kimberly Strassel.

    Fran Macadam , , February 15, 2019 at 2:19 pm
    You're right, it didn't change a thing in the full-throated support to depose an elected President they disagree with. The bureaucratic cabal has long had a more informal absolute veto over who can even run for President. This guy challenged that hegemony of insider power brokers, and caused the revelation that we have morphed into a Potemkin-style, managed democracy, in which we don't choose who gets to run, just which of their choices we are allowed to approve.

    Such is the decadent trajectory, of republics that transition into empires, where democratic accountabilty to the governed, domestic and foreign, decays in favor of empire administrators and their elite beneficiaries and their sinecures at the expense of the majority.

    People rail against Trump as some sort of would-be Caesar, but he is elected, while those permanent unaccountable "national security" czars acting in secrecy they are willing to transfer all power to, are not.

    No form of popular government can survive when secret police recording everything and spying on the population become the real power.

    This is a coup, in slow motion.

    Kent , , February 15, 2019 at 2:26 pm
    "It's difficult to believe that people in such positions would take such a cavalier attitude toward the kind of damage they could wreak on the body politic."

    What we don't want to recognize is that people in such positions are, in fact, just that dumb. It is unfortunately true. While not a Trump supporter, I would be out on the streets with them if these jacka$$es had tried to pull this off. They should ALL be immediately terminated and any benefits revoked.

    Kurt Gayle , , February 15, 2019 at 2:32 pm
    Last night (Feb 14, 2019) Tucker Carlson interviewed retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz (1:04-3:36):

    Carlson: "Professor, thanks very much for coming on. So now the suspicions of many are confirmed by one of the players in it. The Department of Justice discussed trying to remove the President using the 25 Amendment. What's your reaction to that?

    Dershowitz: "Well, if that's true, it is clearly an attempt at a coup d'état. Relating to what your former guest said, let's take the worst case scenario: Let's assume the President of the United States was in bed with the Russians, committed treason, committed obstruction of justice -- the 25 Amendment simply is irrelevant to that. That's why you have an impeachment provision. The 25th amendment is about Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It's about a president being shot and not being able to perform his office. It's not about the most fundamental disagreements. It's not about impeachable offenses. And any Justice Department official who even mentioned the 25th Amendment in the context of President Trump has committed a grievous offense against the Constitution. The framers of the 25th amendment had in mind something very specific. And trying to use the 25th amendment to circumvent the impeachment provisions, or to circumvent an election is a despicable act of unconstitutional power-grabbing. And you were right when you said it reminded me of what happens in third world countries. Look, these people may have been well-intentioned. They may believe that they were serving the interests of the United States. But you have to obey the law and the law is the Constitution and the 25th Amendment is as clear as could be: incapacity, unable to perform office. That's what you need. That's why you need 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate agreeing. And it has to be on the basis of a medical or psychological incapacity. Not on the basis of even the most extreme crimes -- which there is no evidence were committed -- but even if they were, that would not be basis for invoking the 25th Amendment. And I challenge any left-wing person to get on television and to defend the use of the 25th Amendment. I challenge any of my colleagues who are in the "Get Trump At Any Cost" camp to come on television and justify the use of the 25 Amendment other than for physical or psychiatric incapacity.

    Carlson: I bet they're doing that right now. This is an attack on our system, I would say, not just the President. Alan Dershowitz, thank you very much.

    Dershowitz: It is an attack on our system. It's an attack on the constitution. Thank you.

    Carlson: Scary.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q9OlUaeiQjQ?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    Bluestem , , February 15, 2019 at 2:42 pm
    How many millions of dollars did Bill and Hill receive from Russians? How much of America's uranium deposits did Hillary sell to Russians during her time in the Obama administration? The New York Times informs us:

    " . . . the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

    "As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

    "And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

    "At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company's assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show."

    (end of NY Times excerpt. Full story: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html )

    I wonder how much howling and how many allegations of "collusion" with Russia we'd be hearing if the name Clinton were removed from the NY Times article and the name Trump were inserted?

    curri , , February 15, 2019 at 3:08 pm

    Can't imagine why career law enforcement officials were concerned with a guy they knew to be a criminal taking over the office of the presidency.

    Oh, they just knew . Maybe they just knew he wasn't an obvious reliable puppet like W and Obama.

    Sid Finster , , February 15, 2019 at 3:16 pm
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/11/27/leaked-transcript-proves-russiagaters-have-been-right-all-along/

    About Those Russians.

    Stephen J. , , February 15, 2019 at 4:01 pm
    The article states: " top officials of the country's premier law enforcement entity sat around and pondered how to bring down a sitting president they didn't like."
    -- -- -- --
    Which makes one wonder if "The rule of law" is becoming the rule of outlaws? When the non-elected in the justice profession appear to have their own agenda.
    WorkingClass , , February 15, 2019 at 4:10 pm
    Y'all Never Trump Republicans have NO future in American electoral politics.
    Gerard , , February 15, 2019 at 4:22 pm
    Trump is an idiot, but his enemies in the lib-Dem-media Establishment are far worse: corrupt, deceitful, arrogant, and lawless. Exhibit A is Andrew McCabe.

    That's why I'll vote for the Idiot-in-Chief (again) in 2020. Because the alternative makes me vomit.

    polistra , , February 15, 2019 at 4:43 pm
    FBI has been destroying and paralyzing unwanted presidents forever. Lady Edgar did it far more effectively than her modern successors.
    aristotle , , February 15, 2019 at 5:19 pm
    "The pages of this publication drift further and further into utter insanity and despicable defense of Trump. Stand up for the values of the Constitution, or something, but not for this man who is no more than a self-enriching demagogue with no understanding of the reactionary politics he uses to delude the rubes and attract asinine threadbare pieces like this one."

    Actually no. Consider me the inverse of Peter. I didn't vote for Trump due to the character weaknesses Peter describes. However, what I see is a seriously flawed man who has served the useful purpose of revealing an echo chamber of flawed and self-serving biases shared by the media and political establishment of this country. I see CNN, the NY Times, the Washington Post, and even some key leaders of our security services in a completely different light than I did two years ago. I am thankful for the clarity. I consider Merry's article to be a contribution in that direction.

    Kouros , , February 15, 2019 at 5:38 pm
    Cannot agree more with Fran Macadam.

    On that note an interesting article by one of Mr. Putin's ideologues about Putinism and why Putinism might have more viability than the smoke and mirror exercise provided in established democracies:
    https://russia-insider.com/en/vladislav-surkovs-hugely-important-new-article-about-what-putinism-full-translation/ri26259

    The article admits that these bureaucracies are at times a nuisance and need to be dealt with appropriately...

    Arthur Sido , , February 15, 2019 at 5:38 pm
    "Peter" sez: "Can't imagine why career law enforcement officials were concerned with a guy they knew to be a criminal taking over the office of the presidency."

    Weird but no one has shown any actual criminal behavior by said President. Two years later still no charges. But Peter and these "career law enforcement officials" KNEW he was a criminal. Then Peter appeals to the Constitution, apparently oblivious to the fact that the Constitution doesn't make any provisions for plotting to remove the lawfully elected President because you don't like just because you "know" he is a "criminal", in spite of any actual evidence.

    JeffK , , February 15, 2019 at 5:53 pm
    "After his election, they (the deep state) determined to undermine his political standing, and particularly his proposed policy toward Russia, through a relentless and expansive investigation characterized by initial misrepresentations, selective media leaks, brutal law enforcement tactics, and a barrage of innuendo. This is the narrative of most Trump supporters, conservative commentators, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, notably columnist Kimberley Strassel."

    The trouble with that is it completely ignores the ton of evidence pointing to really nefarious stuff.

    Lots of times, when there's smoke, there's fire. And when the smoke is overwhelming there probably is a fire. A big one.

    Sid , , February 15, 2019 at 9:19 pm
    Trump has been going after the Russians since his inauguration. Therefore, those trying to remove him from office are likely the actual Russian agents. Of course they would need smoke and mirrors to hide that fact and deflect attention from themselves. It just so happens that Russian spies are trained by the FSB to accuse others of being a spy, for just this purpose. I'm looking at you, John O. (Oleg?) Brennan
    Sheila , , February 15, 2019 at 11:03 pm
    No matter who the President is, there is some group of people in Washington is ALWAYS trying to bring him down. Who those people are, and how large and powerful the group is, depends on a variety of factors. But a competent president manages to enact his agenda while staying one step ahead of his intriguers. Obama and GWB accomplished both, more or less because they were intelligent men of good character (though Obama was much smarter and better man than W)

    While Bill Clinton's character was too low to avoid impeachment he was a smart and able administrator. Trump has both low character and low intellect so it is not surprising A. that many people want to bring him down and B. that they have been pretty effective.

    Politics may be a blood sport in Washington but that's not the same as a "deep state". And Trump can't compete and win with anyone in Washington who doesn't grovel before him like the supine Senate Republicans. And that is no one's fault but his.

    You wanting Trump to be a Russian agent does not make him one. It never will. Get over it. , , February 16, 2019 at 12:08 am
    "If it turns out that Trump IS a Russian asset, will you apologize, Robert Merry? Because he certainly acts like one. And, as REAL Republicans used to say, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, maybe it's a duck."

    @One Guy Yeah, because sending deadly aid to Ukraine is so pro-Russian. What an idiot you are!

    VikingLS , , February 16, 2019 at 12:10 am
    "Can't imagine why career law enforcement officials were concerned with a guy they knew to be a criminal taking over the office of the presidency. Shame on them!"

    They also "knew" Martin Luther King Jr. was a Soviet agent.

    Just Curiosity , , February 16, 2019 at 12:38 am
    This article must have hit a nerve. Media Matters/Soros have sent out their "goons".

    {BTW, isn't it amazing that Media Matters/Soros never have to worry about having any advertisers boycotted.}

    {smirk}

    JK , , February 16, 2019 at 3:14 am
    The issue with the 25th amendment, is that the President's character flaws or mental deficiency were known and very visible before the election. Is it constitutionally proper for Congress to suspend a President for a preexisting condition that was known to and unhidden from voters? If Congress did that, it means Congress has a veto over who the public is allowed to vote in as President.
    Frank LaSaracina , , February 16, 2019 at 10:19 am
    Clear and convincing evidence of a silent coup by rogue IC / law enforcement community, the genesis of which was the Obama admin. Prima facie
    Oleg Gark , , February 16, 2019 at 10:40 am
    Forget the Covington students, Andrew McCabe and his lady co-workers have some pretty punchable faces. (Ok, I'm enough of a sexist to not punch a lady. I'd use eye-rolling and mocking gestures instead.)
    tjoe , , February 16, 2019 at 11:18 am
    These are the peeps that did 9.11 and took down 3 towers with 2 planes. or maybe you believe guys with box-cutters did it.
    Contra1789 , , February 16, 2019 at 12:07 pm
    The problem is not the existence of the deep state. It's inevitable that there will be unelected officials who will continue to shape policy regardless of who is elected President. The problem is that the deep state is blatantly working to undermine its elected leadership. If you can't in good conscience work with your President, the honorable thing to do is resign as some undoubtedly have. It's not an excuse for insubordination.

    [Feb 18, 2019] Joe Rogan Experience #1170 - Tulsi Gabbard

    Highly recommended!
    A very interesting interview. You need to listed to it in full to appreciates. Probably best interviewer so far interviewed Tulsi, and Tulsi is really impressive. Cool, definitely high intellect, deep understanding of current US problems
    Notable quotes:
    "... I'm not a Democrat. I would vote for this person. Just saying. Elizabeth Warren didn't even support Bernie while Tulsi resigned to support Bernie ..."
    "... Intellectually gifted. Well prepared. Emotionally stable. Able to change her ideas as life goes on, taking each issue as it comes. Vs a bunch of 70 year old maniacs who have never told the truth, never served, and have made deal with the devil to get where they are. Game over ..."
    "... If the establishment weren't smearing her, I wouldn't trust her. They are, which means that she'll fight for working people, and against the neoconservative chickenhawks! ..."
    "... Tulsi is the General Smedley Butler of today, someone who knows how war works and is brave enough to tell the truth. Please read his short book "War Is A Racket". Even though it was written in the 30's, as long as things are this way, it'll never go out of style. ..."
    "... Let's put our egos aside and work together as citizens! Tell your friends to do the same to overthrow corporate establishment Kamala ..."
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com
    Lex Blazer 1 month ago (edited)
    haha! Funny...looks like THIS podcast is about to become nationally relevant. She's running for president! Watching in 2019!

    Michael Pelak 3 weeks ago

    I'm a libertarian and love hearing Tulsi!! She's the antithesis of Hillary. Only dem I would support in 2020. Agree 100% with her foreign policy views.

    Shinra Holdings, 1 month ago

    I'm not a Democrat. I would vote for this person. Just saying. Elizabeth Warren didn't even support Bernie while Tulsi resigned to support Bernie

    Boi, 1 month ago

    The left is eating their own. Already attacking this woman. This is the person the Dems needed in 2016.

    Zachary Schulling 1 month ago

    I'm a Republican, but this woman has my vote in 2020

    tim oreilly 1 month ago

    Combat vet, Currently serving in the Guard, rank of Major. Intellectually gifted. Well prepared. Emotionally stable. Able to change her ideas as life goes on, taking each issue as it comes. Vs a bunch of 70 year old maniacs who have never told the truth, never served, and have made deal with the devil to get where they are. Game over

    B. Greene, 1 week ago

    If the establishment weren't smearing her, I wouldn't trust her. They are, which means that she'll fight for working people, and against the neoconservative chickenhawks!

    Howard Sexton, 2 months ago

    Damn! I am republican but she has my vote 🗳! I have never heard a politician talk this long without blaming the opposing party. Just impressed

    Zwart Poezeke, 1 week ago

    Man she's smart, critical and actually comes off as honest. She really would be an inspiring leader. Guys I'm from Belgium, so I can't vote, but do me a favor and vote for her

    a_g60, 2 weeks ago

    Tulsi Gabbard is the ultimate woman. That's why the DNC is colluding against her.

    she's articulate and highly educated
    she's extremely attractive
    she was a combat medic
    she's young
    she has a great family
    she gets all the attention of men
    she's presidential

    This is what a candidate looks like. Take notes!

    Matthew Mauldon, 1 month ago

    She is amazing and I would vote for her as president. It is very disturbing how she sheds light on how Saudi Arabia uses our us military and how Saudi Arabia murdered many innocents and we said nothing and continue to support them. Also the level of corruption of our politicians and how they mis use our troops without a care in the world. We need to wake up folks this is not right

    The Scapegoat Mechanism, 1 month ago

    Obama was the thesis. Trump was the antithesis. Gabbard will be the synthesis.

    Chris Jones, 5 months ago

    I absolutely adore this woman. She gave up her Vice chair position in the DNC when she saw they were stealing the nomination from Bernie. That's integrity.

    Paul Peart-Smith, 1 week ago

    Tulsi is the General Smedley Butler of today, someone who knows how war works and is brave enough to tell the truth. Please read his short book "War Is A Racket". Even though it was written in the 30's, as long as things are this way, it'll never go out of style.

    algo, 5 days ago

    See Joe, this woman has INTEGRITY, unlike that zionist warmongering shill Bari Weiss regurgitating her fed opinions which she didn't even know the meaning of!

    savita purohit, 2 months ago

    this is what 1st female president of US should be like, not Clinton or that virtue signaling Warren, not Nikki either

    Ryan Hamilton, 1 day ago (edited)

    I'm a conservative, Republican, combat vet. I would follow her into combat. I would vote for her because she's a pragmatist, puts America first, is skeptical of US foreign policy, and stands up for the little guy. There is some remarkable overlap between the anti establishment populist left and anti establishment populist right.

    Loro sono umano, 2 days ago

    Don't forget to change party to Democrat to vote her in the primaries if you're Green, libertarian, independent, or conservative, even if its temporary. Let's put our egos aside and work together as citizens! Tell your friends to do the same to overthrow corporate establishment Kamala. Dont let the establishment get their way

    Chico Christe Pace, 1 week ago

    damn, I never thot there is an American politician who thinks this way. she sees the whole picture and made sense to it. this lady is kick ass! :) you guys shd keep voting for her :) put her on the top seat, she can be the real hope for the US of A :)

    bestrainingtechnique, 4 months ago

    So let me get this straight I don't know much about this woman, but from what I've seen in this interview she seems to be very intelligent, rational, experienced, has military experience, extremely well spoken, and doesn't trust the mainstream media and realizes that there are elements of our government that are basically unhinged and looking for war?? And is there anyone on earth that wouldn't vote for her as president??? Would we really rather have an orange face reality star buffoon or a war mongering lunatic who has no real experience except being married to a former president?

    I really hope she runs as an independent, I think she would win in a landslide, since I think it is the perfect time in our country where I think a non-Republican or Democrat can definitely win! The two party system needs to go!

    Skemoo, 1 week ago

    I came back after MSM and Jews started smearing her including Sam Harris. I cant sense any form of malevolence or evil in her words or body language.. she seems like a sweet empathetic lady.

    Im fuking angry that these ppl are smearing her. Im not an american but you ppl better wake the fuk up and vote her into office i think she is fit to be the first female president. Hope Rogan doesnt do 180 and betray her . im surprized Sam harris hates her.

    David Paley, 1 week ago

    If they can keep everyone in need of working 3 jobs just to make ends meet, and make healthcare too expensive to afford proper care, the people will always be too busy, tired, and worn-out, to actively participate in the electoral process; the only thing that might change things for the better. The elites know exactly what they're doing, so now they see this woman as an existential threat, and the smear campaigns have already begun. I hope the sensible people in your country can support her as much as she is trying to support you. Good luck in 2020, both to Tulsi, and America.

    [Feb 18, 2019] Do You Believe in the Deep State Now by Robert W. Merry

    Highly recommended!
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Be afraid. Be very afraid.

    That's a natural reaction to the revelation of Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy FBI director, that top Justice Department officials, alarmed by Donald Trump's firing of former Bureau director James Comey, explored a plan to invoke the 25th Amendment and kick the duly elected president out of office.

    According to New York Times reporters Adam Goldman and Matthew Haag, McCabe made the statement in an NBC 60 Minutes interview to be aired on Sunday. He also reportedly said that McCabe wanted the so-called Russia collusion investigation to go after Trump for obstructing justice in firing Comey and for any instances they could turn up of his working in behalf of Russia.

    The idea of invoking the 25th Amendment was discussed, it seems, at two meetings on May 16, 2017. According to McCabe, top law enforcement officials pondered how they might recruit Vice President Pence and a majority of cabinet members to declare in writing, to the Senate's president pro tempore and the House speaker, that the president was "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." That would be enough, under the 25th Amendment, to install the vice president as acting president, pushing aside Trump.

    But to understand what kind of constitutional crisis this would unleash and the precedent it would set, it's necessary to ponder the rest of this section of the 25th Amendment. The text prescribes that, if the president, after being removed, transmits to the same congressional figures that he is indeed capable of discharging his duties, he shall once again be president after four days. But if the vice president and the cabinet majority reiterate their declaration within those four days that the guy can't govern, Congress is charged with deciding the issue. It then takes a two-thirds vote of both houses to keep the president removed, which would have to be done within 21 days, during which time the elected president would be sidelined and the vice president would govern. If Congress can't muster the two-thirds majority within the prescribed time period, the president "shall resume the powers and duties of his office."

    It's almost impossible to contemplate the political conflagration that would ensue under this plan. Citizens would watch those in Washington struggle with the monumental question of the fate of their elected leader under an initiative that had never before been invoked, or even considered, in such circumstances. Debates would flare up over whether this comported with the original intent of the amendment; whether it was crafted to deal with physical or mental "incapacitation," as opposed to controversial actions or unsubstantiated allegations or even erratic decision making; whether such an action, if established as precedent, would destabilize the American republic for all time; and whether unelected bureaucrats should arrogate to themselves the power to set in motion the downfall of a president, circumventing the impeachment language of the Constitution.

    For the past two years, the country has been struggling to understand the two competing narratives of the criminal investigation of the president.

    One narrative -- let's call it Narrative A -- has it that honorable and dedicated federal law enforcement officials developed concerns over a tainted election in which nefarious Russian agents had sought to tilt the balloting towards the candidate who wanted to improve U.S.-Russian relations and who seemed generally unseemly. Thus did the notion emerge, quite understandably, that Trump had "colluded" with Russian officials to cadge a victory that otherwise would have gone to his opponent. This narrative is supported and protected by Democratic figures and organizations, by adherents of the "Russia as Threat" preoccupation, and by anti-Trumpers everywhere, particularly news outlets such as CNN, The Washington Post , and The New York Times .

    Trump, the FBI, and the Final Debasement of American Politics Unlike Nixon, Trump Will Not Go Quietly

    The other view -- Narrative B -- posits that certain bureaucratic mandarins of the national security state and the outgoing Obama administration resolved early on to thwart Trump's candidacy. After his election, they determined to undermine his political standing, and particularly his proposed policy toward Russia, through a relentless and expansive investigation characterized by initial misrepresentations, selective media leaks, brutal law enforcement tactics, and a barrage of innuendo. This is the narrative of most Trump supporters, conservative commentators, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, notably columnist Kimberley Strassel.

    The McCabe revelation won't affect the battle of the two narratives. As ominous and outrageous as this "deep state" behavior may seem to those who embrace Narrative B, it will be seen by Narrative A adherents as evidence that those law enforcement officials were out there heroically on the front lines protecting the republic from Donald J. Trump.

    And those Narrative A folks won't have any difficulty tossing aside the fact that McCabe was fired as deputy FBI director for violating agency policy in leaking unauthorized information to the news media. He then allegedly violated the law in lying about it to federal investigators on four occasions, including three times while under oath.

    Indeed, Narrative A people have no difficulty at all brushing aside serious questions posed by Narrative B people. McCabe is a likely liar and perjurer? Doesn't matter. Peter Strzok, head of the FBI's counterespionage section, demonstrated his anti-Trump animus in tweets and emails to Justice official Lisa Page? Irrelevant. Christopher Steele's dossier of dirt on Trump, including an allegation that the Russians were seeking to blackmail and bribe him, was compiled by a man who had demonstrated to a Justice Department official that he was "desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and passionate about him not being president"? Not important. The dossier was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party? Immaterial. Nothing in the dossier was ever substantiated? So what?

    Now we have a report from a participant of those meetings that top officials of the country's premier law enforcement entity sat around and pondered how to bring down a sitting president they didn't like. The Times even says that McCabe "confirmed" an earlier report that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein suggested wearing a wire in meetings with Trump to incriminate him and make him more vulnerable to the plot.

    There is no suggestion in McCabe's interview pronouncements or in the words of Scott Pelley, who conducted the interview and spoke to CBS This Morning about it, that these federal officials ever took action to further the aim of unseating the president. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that they approached cabinet members or the vice president about it. "They were speculating, 'This person would be with us, this person would not be,' and they were counting noses in that effort," said Pelley. He added, apparently in response to Rosenstein's insistence that his comments about wearing a wire were meant as a joke, "This was not perceived to be a joke."

    What are we to make of this? Around the time of the meetings to discuss the 25th Amendment plot, senior FBI officials also discussed initiating a national security investigation of the president as a stooge of the Russians or perhaps even a Russian agent. These talks were revealed by The New York Times and CNN in January, based on closed-door congressional testimony by former FBI general counsel James Baker. You don't have to read very carefully to see that the reporters on these stories brought to them a Narrative A sensibility. The Times headline: "F.B.I. Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia." CNN's: "Transcripts detail how FBI debated whether Trump was 'following directions' of Russia." And of course, whoever leaked those hearing transcripts almost surely did so to bolster the Narrative A version of events.

    The independent journalist Gareth Porter, writing at Consortium News, offers a penetrating exposition of the inconsistencies, fallacies, and fatuities of the Narrative A matrix, as reflected in how the Times and CNN handled the stories that resulted from what were clearly self-interested leaks.

    Porter notes that a particularly sinister expression in May 2017 by former CIA director John O. Brennan, a leading Trump antagonist, has precipitated echoes in the news media ever since, particularly in the Times . Asked in a committee hearing if he had intelligence indicating that anyone in the Trump campaign was "colluding with Moscow," Brennan dodged the question. He said his experience had taught him that "the Russians try to suborn individuals, and they try to get them to act on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly."

    Of course you can't collude with anybody unwittingly. But Brennan's fancy expression has the effect of expanding what can be thrown at political adversaries, to include not just conscious and nefarious collaboration but also policy advocacy that could be viewed as wrongheaded or injurious to U.S. interests. As Porter puts it, "The real purpose is to confer on national security officials and their media allies the power to cast suspicion on individuals on the basis of undesirable policy views of Russia rather than on any evidence of actual collaboration with the Russian government."

    That seems to be what's going on here. There's no doubt that McCabe and Rosenstein and Strzok and Brennan and Page and many others despised Trump and his resolve to thaw relations with Russia. They viewed him as a president "who needed to be reined in," as a CNN report described the sentiment among top FBI officials after the Comey firing.

    So they expanded the definition of collusion to include "unwitting" collaboration in order to justify their machinations. It's difficult to believe that people in such positions would take such a cavalier attitude toward the kind of damage they could wreak on the body politic.

    Now we learn that they actually sat around and plotted how to distort the Constitution, just as they distorted the rules of official behavior designed to hold them in check, in order to destroy a presidential administration placed in power by the American people. It's getting more and more difficult to dismiss Narrative B.

    Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington journalist and publishing executive, is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century. MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

    Alternative Facts at the NYT James Polk's Realpolitik Hide 52 comments 52 Responses to Do You Believe in the Deep State Now? ← Older Comments

    Ken Zaretzke February 16, 2019 at 4:57 pm

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/trump-russia-collusion-investigation-criminalization-policy-disputes/

    Also very good is the blunt force trauma inflicted on the FBI in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by Kimberly Strassel.

    Fran Macadam , , February 15, 2019 at 2:19 pm
    You're right, it didn't change a thing in the full-throated support to depose an elected President they disagree with. The bureaucratic cabal has long had a more informal absolute veto over who can even run for President. This guy challenged that hegemony of insider power brokers, and caused the revelation that we have morphed into a Potemkin-style, managed democracy, in which we don't choose who gets to run, just which of their choices we are allowed to approve.

    Such is the decadent trajectory, of republics that transition into empires, where democratic accountabilty to the governed, domestic and foreign, decays in favor of empire administrators and their elite beneficiaries and their sinecures at the expense of the majority.

    People rail against Trump as some sort of would-be Caesar, but he is elected, while those permanent unaccountable "national security" czars acting in secrecy they are willing to transfer all power to, are not.

    No form of popular government can survive when secret police recording everything and spying on the population become the real power.

    This is a coup, in slow motion.

    Kent , , February 15, 2019 at 2:26 pm
    "It's difficult to believe that people in such positions would take such a cavalier attitude toward the kind of damage they could wreak on the body politic."

    What we don't want to recognize is that people in such positions are, in fact, just that dumb. It is unfortunately true. While not a Trump supporter, I would be out on the streets with them if these jacka$$es had tried to pull this off. They should ALL be immediately terminated and any benefits revoked.

    Kurt Gayle , , February 15, 2019 at 2:32 pm
    Last night (Feb 14, 2019) Tucker Carlson interviewed retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz (1:04-3:36):

    Carlson: "Professor, thanks very much for coming on. So now the suspicions of many are confirmed by one of the players in it. The Department of Justice discussed trying to remove the President using the 25 Amendment. What's your reaction to that?

    Dershowitz: "Well, if that's true, it is clearly an attempt at a coup d'état. Relating to what your former guest said, let's take the worst case scenario: Let's assume the President of the United States was in bed with the Russians, committed treason, committed obstruction of justice -- the 25 Amendment simply is irrelevant to that. That's why you have an impeachment provision. The 25th amendment is about Woodrow Wilson having a stroke. It's about a president being shot and not being able to perform his office. It's not about the most fundamental disagreements. It's not about impeachable offenses. And any Justice Department official who even mentioned the 25th Amendment in the context of President Trump has committed a grievous offense against the Constitution. The framers of the 25th amendment had in mind something very specific. And trying to use the 25th amendment to circumvent the impeachment provisions, or to circumvent an election is a despicable act of unconstitutional power-grabbing. And you were right when you said it reminded me of what happens in third world countries. Look, these people may have been well-intentioned. They may believe that they were serving the interests of the United States. But you have to obey the law and the law is the Constitution and the 25th Amendment is as clear as could be: incapacity, unable to perform office. That's what you need. That's why you need 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate agreeing. And it has to be on the basis of a medical or psychological incapacity. Not on the basis of even the most extreme crimes -- which there is no evidence were committed -- but even if they were, that would not be basis for invoking the 25th Amendment. And I challenge any left-wing person to get on television and to defend the use of the 25th Amendment. I challenge any of my colleagues who are in the "Get Trump At Any Cost" camp to come on television and justify the use of the 25 Amendment other than for physical or psychiatric incapacity.

    Carlson: I bet they're doing that right now. This is an attack on our system, I would say, not just the President. Alan Dershowitz, thank you very much.

    Dershowitz: It is an attack on our system. It's an attack on the constitution. Thank you.

    Carlson: Scary.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/Q9OlUaeiQjQ?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    Bluestem , , February 15, 2019 at 2:42 pm
    How many millions of dollars did Bill and Hill receive from Russians? How much of America's uranium deposits did Hillary sell to Russians during her time in the Obama administration? The New York Times informs us:

    " . . . the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

    "As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

    "And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

    "At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company's assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show."

    (end of NY Times excerpt. Full story: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html )

    I wonder how much howling and how many allegations of "collusion" with Russia we'd be hearing if the name Clinton were removed from the NY Times article and the name Trump were inserted?

    curri , , February 15, 2019 at 3:08 pm

    Can't imagine why career law enforcement officials were concerned with a guy they knew to be a criminal taking over the office of the presidency.

    Oh, they just knew . Maybe they just knew he wasn't an obvious reliable puppet like W and Obama.

    Sid Finster , , February 15, 2019 at 3:16 pm
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/11/27/leaked-transcript-proves-russiagaters-have-been-right-all-along/

    About Those Russians.

    Stephen J. , , February 15, 2019 at 4:01 pm
    The article states: " top officials of the country's premier law enforcement entity sat around and pondered how to bring down a sitting president they didn't like."
    -- -- -- --
    Which makes one wonder if "The rule of law" is becoming the rule of outlaws? When the non-elected in the justice profession appear to have their own agenda.
    WorkingClass , , February 15, 2019 at 4:10 pm
    Y'all Never Trump Republicans have NO future in American electoral politics.
    Gerard , , February 15, 2019 at 4:22 pm
    Trump is an idiot, but his enemies in the lib-Dem-media Establishment are far worse: corrupt, deceitful, arrogant, and lawless. Exhibit A is Andrew McCabe.

    That's why I'll vote for the Idiot-in-Chief (again) in 2020. Because the alternative makes me vomit.

    polistra , , February 15, 2019 at 4:43 pm
    FBI has been destroying and paralyzing unwanted presidents forever. Lady Edgar did it far more effectively than her modern successors.
    aristotle , , February 15, 2019 at 5:19 pm
    "The pages of this publication drift further and further into utter insanity and despicable defense of Trump. Stand up for the values of the Constitution, or something, but not for this man who is no more than a self-enriching demagogue with no understanding of the reactionary politics he uses to delude the rubes and attract asinine threadbare pieces like this one."

    Actually no. Consider me the inverse of Peter. I didn't vote for Trump due to the character weaknesses Peter describes. However, what I see is a seriously flawed man who has served the useful purpose of revealing an echo chamber of flawed and self-serving biases shared by the media and political establishment of this country. I see CNN, the NY Times, the Washington Post, and even some key leaders of our security services in a completely different light than I did two years ago. I am thankful for the clarity. I consider Merry's article to be a contribution in that direction.

    Kouros , , February 15, 2019 at 5:38 pm
    Cannot agree more with Fran Macadam.

    On that note an interesting article by one of Mr. Putin's ideologues about Putinism and why Putinism might have more viability than the smoke and mirror exercise provided in established democracies:
    https://russia-insider.com/en/vladislav-surkovs-hugely-important-new-article-about-what-putinism-full-translation/ri26259

    The article admits that these bureaucracies are at times a nuisance and need to be dealt with appropriately...

    Arthur Sido , , February 15, 2019 at 5:38 pm
    "Peter" sez: "Can't imagine why career law enforcement officials were concerned with a guy they knew to be a criminal taking over the office of the presidency."

    Weird but no one has shown any actual criminal behavior by said President. Two years later still no charges. But Peter and these "career law enforcement officials" KNEW he was a criminal. Then Peter appeals to the Constitution, apparently oblivious to the fact that the Constitution doesn't make any provisions for plotting to remove the lawfully elected President because you don't like just because you "know" he is a "criminal", in spite of any actual evidence.

    JeffK , , February 15, 2019 at 5:53 pm
    "After his election, they (the deep state) determined to undermine his political standing, and particularly his proposed policy toward Russia, through a relentless and expansive investigation characterized by initial misrepresentations, selective media leaks, brutal law enforcement tactics, and a barrage of innuendo. This is the narrative of most Trump supporters, conservative commentators, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, notably columnist Kimberley Strassel."

    The trouble with that is it completely ignores the ton of evidence pointing to really nefarious stuff.

    Lots of times, when there's smoke, there's fire. And when the smoke is overwhelming there probably is a fire. A big one.

    Sid , , February 15, 2019 at 9:19 pm
    Trump has been going after the Russians since his inauguration. Therefore, those trying to remove him from office are likely the actual Russian agents. Of course they would need smoke and mirrors to hide that fact and deflect attention from themselves. It just so happens that Russian spies are trained by the FSB to accuse others of being a spy, for just this purpose. I'm looking at you, John O. (Oleg?) Brennan
    Sheila , , February 15, 2019 at 11:03 pm
    No matter who the President is, there is some group of people in Washington is ALWAYS trying to bring him down. Who those people are, and how large and powerful the group is, depends on a variety of factors. But a competent president manages to enact his agenda while staying one step ahead of his intriguers. Obama and GWB accomplished both, more or less because they were intelligent men of good character (though Obama was much smarter and better man than W)

    While Bill Clinton's character was too low to avoid impeachment he was a smart and able administrator. Trump has both low character and low intellect so it is not surprising A. that many people want to bring him down and B. that they have been pretty effective.

    Politics may be a blood sport in Washington but that's not the same as a "deep state". And Trump can't compete and win with anyone in Washington who doesn't grovel before him like the supine Senate Republicans. And that is no one's fault but his.

    You wanting Trump to be a Russian agent does not make him one. It never will. Get over it. , , February 16, 2019 at 12:08 am
    "If it turns out that Trump IS a Russian asset, will you apologize, Robert Merry? Because he certainly acts like one. And, as REAL Republicans used to say, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, maybe it's a duck."

    @One Guy Yeah, because sending deadly aid to Ukraine is so pro-Russian. What an idiot you are!

    VikingLS , , February 16, 2019 at 12:10 am
    "Can't imagine why career law enforcement officials were concerned with a guy they knew to be a criminal taking over the office of the presidency. Shame on them!"

    They also "knew" Martin Luther King Jr. was a Soviet agent.

    Just Curiosity , , February 16, 2019 at 12:38 am
    This article must have hit a nerve. Media Matters/Soros have sent out their "goons".

    {BTW, isn't it amazing that Media Matters/Soros never have to worry about having any advertisers boycotted.}

    {smirk}

    JK , , February 16, 2019 at 3:14 am
    The issue with the 25th amendment, is that the President's character flaws or mental deficiency were known and very visible before the election. Is it constitutionally proper for Congress to suspend a President for a preexisting condition that was known to and unhidden from voters? If Congress did that, it means Congress has a veto over who the public is allowed to vote in as President.
    Frank LaSaracina , , February 16, 2019 at 10:19 am
    Clear and convincing evidence of a silent coup by rogue IC / law enforcement community, the genesis of which was the Obama admin. Prima facie
    Oleg Gark , , February 16, 2019 at 10:40 am
    Forget the Covington students, Andrew McCabe and his lady co-workers have some pretty punchable faces. (Ok, I'm enough of a sexist to not punch a lady. I'd use eye-rolling and mocking gestures instead.)
    tjoe , , February 16, 2019 at 11:18 am
    These are the peeps that did 9.11 and took down 3 towers with 2 planes. or maybe you believe guys with box-cutters did it.
    Contra1789 , , February 16, 2019 at 12:07 pm
    The problem is not the existence of the deep state. It's inevitable that there will be unelected officials who will continue to shape policy regardless of who is elected President. The problem is that the deep state is blatantly working to undermine its elected leadership. If you can't in good conscience work with your President, the honorable thing to do is resign as some undoubtedly have. It's not an excuse for insubordination.

    [Feb 18, 2019] Joe Rogan Experience #1170 - Tulsi Gabbard

    Highly recommended!
    A very interesting interview. You need to listed to it in full to appreciates. Probably best interviewer so far interviewed Tulsi, and Tulsi is really impressive. Cool, definitely high intellect, deep understanding of current US problems
    Notable quotes:
    "... I'm not a Democrat. I would vote for this person. Just saying. Elizabeth Warren didn't even support Bernie while Tulsi resigned to support Bernie ..."
    "... Intellectually gifted. Well prepared. Emotionally stable. Able to change her ideas as life goes on, taking each issue as it comes. Vs a bunch of 70 year old maniacs who have never told the truth, never served, and have made deal with the devil to get where they are. Game over ..."
    "... If the establishment weren't smearing her, I wouldn't trust her. They are, which means that she'll fight for working people, and against the neoconservative chickenhawks! ..."
    "... Tulsi is the General Smedley Butler of today, someone who knows how war works and is brave enough to tell the truth. Please read his short book "War Is A Racket". Even though it was written in the 30's, as long as things are this way, it'll never go out of style. ..."
    "... Let's put our egos aside and work together as citizens! Tell your friends to do the same to overthrow corporate establishment Kamala ..."
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com
    Lex Blazer 1 month ago (edited)
    haha! Funny...looks like THIS podcast is about to become nationally relevant. She's running for president! Watching in 2019!

    Michael Pelak 3 weeks ago

    I'm a libertarian and love hearing Tulsi!! She's the antithesis of Hillary. Only dem I would support in 2020. Agree 100% with her foreign policy views.

    Shinra Holdings, 1 month ago

    I'm not a Democrat. I would vote for this person. Just saying. Elizabeth Warren didn't even support Bernie while Tulsi resigned to support Bernie

    Boi, 1 month ago

    The left is eating their own. Already attacking this woman. This is the person the Dems needed in 2016.

    Zachary Schulling 1 month ago

    I'm a Republican, but this woman has my vote in 2020

    tim oreilly 1 month ago

    Combat vet, Currently serving in the Guard, rank of Major. Intellectually gifted. Well prepared. Emotionally stable. Able to change her ideas as life goes on, taking each issue as it comes. Vs a bunch of 70 year old maniacs who have never told the truth, never served, and have made deal with the devil to get where they are. Game over

    B. Greene, 1 week ago

    If the establishment weren't smearing her, I wouldn't trust her. They are, which means that she'll fight for working people, and against the neoconservative chickenhawks!

    Howard Sexton, 2 months ago

    Damn! I am republican but she has my vote 🗳! I have never heard a politician talk this long without blaming the opposing party. Just impressed

    Zwart Poezeke, 1 week ago

    Man she's smart, critical and actually comes off as honest. She really would be an inspiring leader. Guys I'm from Belgium, so I can't vote, but do me a favor and vote for her

    a_g60, 2 weeks ago

    Tulsi Gabbard is the ultimate woman. That's why the DNC is colluding against her.

    she's articulate and highly educated
    she's extremely attractive
    she was a combat medic
    she's young
    she has a great family
    she gets all the attention of men
    she's presidential

    This is what a candidate looks like. Take notes!

    Matthew Mauldon, 1 month ago

    She is amazing and I would vote for her as president. It is very disturbing how she sheds light on how Saudi Arabia uses our us military and how Saudi Arabia murdered many innocents and we said nothing and continue to support them. Also the level of corruption of our politicians and how they mis use our troops without a care in the world. We need to wake up folks this is not right

    The Scapegoat Mechanism, 1 month ago

    Obama was the thesis. Trump was the antithesis. Gabbard will be the synthesis.

    Chris Jones, 5 months ago

    I absolutely adore this woman. She gave up her Vice chair position in the DNC when she saw they were stealing the nomination from Bernie. That's integrity.

    Paul Peart-Smith, 1 week ago

    Tulsi is the General Smedley Butler of today, someone who knows how war works and is brave enough to tell the truth. Please read his short book "War Is A Racket". Even though it was written in the 30's, as long as things are this way, it'll never go out of style.

    algo, 5 days ago

    See Joe, this woman has INTEGRITY, unlike that zionist warmongering shill Bari Weiss regurgitating her fed opinions which she didn't even know the meaning of!

    savita purohit, 2 months ago

    this is what 1st female president of US should be like, not Clinton or that virtue signaling Warren, not Nikki either

    Ryan Hamilton, 1 day ago (edited)

    I'm a conservative, Republican, combat vet. I would follow her into combat. I would vote for her because she's a pragmatist, puts America first, is skeptical of US foreign policy, and stands up for the little guy. There is some remarkable overlap between the anti establishment populist left and anti establishment populist right.

    Loro sono umano, 2 days ago

    Don't forget to change party to Democrat to vote her in the primaries if you're Green, libertarian, independent, or conservative, even if its temporary. Let's put our egos aside and work together as citizens! Tell your friends to do the same to overthrow corporate establishment Kamala. Dont let the establishment get their way

    Chico Christe Pace, 1 week ago

    damn, I never thot there is an American politician who thinks this way. she sees the whole picture and made sense to it. this lady is kick ass! :) you guys shd keep voting for her :) put her on the top seat, she can be the real hope for the US of A :)

    bestrainingtechnique, 4 months ago

    So let me get this straight I don't know much about this woman, but from what I've seen in this interview she seems to be very intelligent, rational, experienced, has military experience, extremely well spoken, and doesn't trust the mainstream media and realizes that there are elements of our government that are basically unhinged and looking for war?? And is there anyone on earth that wouldn't vote for her as president??? Would we really rather have an orange face reality star buffoon or a war mongering lunatic who has no real experience except being married to a former president?

    I really hope she runs as an independent, I think she would win in a landslide, since I think it is the perfect time in our country where I think a non-Republican or Democrat can definitely win! The two party system needs to go!

    Skemoo, 1 week ago

    I came back after MSM and Jews started smearing her including Sam Harris. I cant sense any form of malevolence or evil in her words or body language.. she seems like a sweet empathetic lady.

    Im fuking angry that these ppl are smearing her. Im not an american but you ppl better wake the fuk up and vote her into office i think she is fit to be the first female president. Hope Rogan doesnt do 180 and betray her . im surprized Sam harris hates her.

    David Paley, 1 week ago

    If they can keep everyone in need of working 3 jobs just to make ends meet, and make healthcare too expensive to afford proper care, the people will always be too busy, tired, and worn-out, to actively participate in the electoral process; the only thing that might change things for the better. The elites know exactly what they're doing, so now they see this woman as an existential threat, and the smear campaigns have already begun. I hope the sensible people in your country can support her as much as she is trying to support you. Good luck in 2020, both to Tulsi, and America.

    [Feb 18, 2019] Support Tulsi Gabbard: it takes real political skills to succeed in America as a Hindu-nationalist, anti-gay racist, Putin toadie, and Assad apologist

    Funny, but "Black Santa" -- Barack Obama was against gay marriage before he became for..
    Feb 18, 2019 | twitter.com

    Tulsi Gabbard is a really next-level politician. Any amateur can be a traditional US racist politician, but it takes skill to succeed in America as a Hindu-nationalist racist / tankie Assad apologist.

    -- Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) January 11, 2019

    [Feb 18, 2019] Tulsi on the issues Run Tulsi Run - Tulsi Gabbard for President in 2020

    Feb 18, 2019 | runtulsirun.net

    Tulsi Gabbard's platform is closely aligned with Senator Bernie Sanders' platform – the platform supported by millions and millions of American working class during his 2016 presidential campaign.

    Some of Tulsi Gabbard's main issues:

    Click here for details of her positions on issues that impact you.

    [Feb 18, 2019] While highly unlikely Tulsi Gabbard might be able to do what Trump failed to do and appeals directly to the people of the USA to back her in a ruthless campaign to drain the swamp (meaning showing the door to the Neocons and their Deep State)

    it looks like alt-right is not that enthusiastic about Tulsi, but most will support it over Trump...
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.unz.com

    In fact, one of two things are most likely to happen next:

    Tulsi Gabbard remains true to her ideals and views and she gets no money for her campaign Tulsi Gabbard caves in to the Neocons and the Deep State and she become another Obama/Trump

    Okay, in theory, a third option is possible (never say never!) but I see that as highly unlikely: Tulsi Gabbard follows in the footsteps of Trump and gets elected in spite of a massive media hate-campaign against her and once she makes it to the White House she does what Trump failed to do and appeals directly to the people of the USA to back her in a ruthless campaign to "drain the swamp" (meaning showing the door to the Neocons and their Deep State). This is what Putin did, at least partially, when he came to power, by the way. Frankly, for all her very real qualities she does not strike me as a "US Putin" nor does she have the kind of institutional and popular backing Putin had. So while I will never say never, I am not holding my breath on this one

    Finally, if Gabbard truly is "for real" then the Deep State will probably "Kennedy" her and blame Russia or Iran for it.

    Still, while we try to understand what, if anything, Tulsi Gabbard could do for the world, she does do good posting messages like this one:

    I don't know about you, but I am rather impressed!

    At the very least, she does what "Occupy Wall Street" did with its "1%" which was factually wrong. The actual percentage is much lower but politically very effective. In this case, Gabbard speaks of both parties being alike and she popularizes concepts like " warmongers in ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage and new places for people to die ". This is all very good and useful for the cause of peace and anti-imperialism because when crimethink concepts become mainstream, then the mainstream is collapsing !

    The most important achievement of Tulsi Gabbard, at least so far, has been to prove that the so-called "liberals" don't give a damn about race, don't give a damn about gender, don't give a damn about minorities, don't give a damn about "thanking our veterans" or anything else. They don't even care about Israel all that much. But what they do care about is power, Empire and war. That they really care about.

    Tulsi Gabbard is the living proof that the US Democrats and other pretend "liberals" are hell bent on power, empire and war. They also will stop at nothing to prevent the USA from (finally!) becoming a "normal" country and they couldn't care less about the fate of the people of the USA. All they want is for us all to become their serfs.

    All of this is hardly big news. But this hysterical reaction to Gabbard's candidacy is a very powerful and useful proof of the fact that the USA is a foreign-occupied country with no real sovereignty or democracy. As for the US media, it would make folks like Suslov or Goebbels green with envy. Be it the ongoing US aggression against Venezuela or the reaction to the Tulsi Gabbard phenomenon, the diagnostics concur and we can use the typical medical euphemism and say with confidence: "the prognosis is poor".

    Adrian E. , says: February 15, 2019 at 7:33 am GMT

    In fact, one of two things are most likely to happen next:

    – Tulsi Gabbard remains true to her ideals and views and she gets no money for her campaign
    – Tulsi Gabbard caves in to the Neocons and the Deep State and she become another Obama/Trump

    I think it is unlikely that Tulsi Gabbard caves in so soon. The way she has started her campaign, she is certainly aware that she has cut off herself from the normal donors of Democrats, and the way she talks shows that she is not afraid of alienating them even more because she won't get money from them, anyway. The plan is to do the same like Bernie Sanders 2016 and raise small donations. Many Democratic candidates now say they don't take PAC money, but there are different ways of getting money from big donors – Tulsi Gabbard is probably one of those who are more serious about avoiding reliance on big donors. It could work. In 2016, during the primaries, Hillary Clinton regularly had to interrupt her campaign in order to attend dinners with superrich donors, while Bernie Sanders asked people to donate as a part of his campaign on social media, and Sanders regularly outraised Clinton. Of course, 2016, we just saw that for the primaries, but it might also work for the general election (and numbers are not everything, Hillary Clinton spent far more than Donald Trump and still lost, so even if small donations would lead to a somewhat lower sum, she could still win with a popular message). And not only could it work, I think it would be the only way for Tulsi Gabbard to succeed because she has probably already been too outspoken about some things to ever gain back the trust of the neocons and their allies in the media and the billionaire donor class.

    Of course, if Tulsi Gabbard advances in the primaries, she will be attacked most viciously in the media. I am not so sure what the effect will be. On one hand, Trump's victory in the primaries and the general election showed that being hated by mainstream media does not have to be an obstacle that cannot be surmounted, and as long as there are so many primary candidates, such vicious attacks can also make her seem more interesting to some people. On the other hand, her main hurdle are probably the Democratic primaries, and, according to polls, Democrats have lost trust in the mainstream media to a lesser degree than the general public. But then again, vilifying her too much in the liberal media (as it has already started) is also a certain risk for them because it could become too obvious to see that the decisive feature that leads to such attacks is that someone is not seen as reliably pro-neocon, and that could also lead to doubts about the media in leftists who readily accepted the attacks on Trump because they hated him for other reasons. Therefore, I think the main hope of the establishment is that Tulsi Gabbard can be treated as a „minor candidate" and won't get far, in case she becomes a serious contender for the nomination, they are in trouble.

    If Tulsi Gabbard wins the nomination, we can almost be certain that the pro-neocon establishment will a) see a re-election of Trump as the lesser evil and b) they will support a pro-establishment third party candidate (already last time, Michael Bloomberg threatened to run if the two major candidates are Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, now Howard Schultz seems to have positioned himself that way, though I think he is too ridiculous and ineffective and will be replaced by someone else if the establishment needs a third party candidate because they lose the Democratic primaries). Such a third party candidate probably increases the chances of Trump's re-election (probably a desired side-effect, many of these liberal oligarchs probably prefer Trump to Gabbard and Sanders by far, but it would be difficult for them to support Trump in public, supporting a third party candidate is much easier), but a populist campaign against both Trump and that third party candidate as representatives of a corrupt billionaire class might well be successful.

    Then, if Tulsi Gabbard is elected, she certainly runs the risk of ending like JFK, but the fact that so many people now already talk and write about this risk might also protect her to some degree – the danger is so obvious that many people won't believe theories about a lonewolf terrorist easily (and blaming Russia and Iran after Tulsi Gabbard had been vilified as an Assadist and Russian trolls' favorite candidate would also be difficult, if for some reasons relations with Saudi Arabia are not seen as so important any more, the more realistic option of blaming Saudi terrorists may be chosen). Another option would be to impeach her, though that could also be a big risk for the establishment, and depending on who would be her VP, it would not be enough. Of course, there could be bipartisan agreement about blocking all of her initiatives.

    Even if she is extremely smart and tough, alone against the united forces of the deep state, establishment media and the bipartisan war party, Tusli Gabbard probably could not achieve very much – of course, she would still be commander in chief and probably could prevent new wars, and she could open some people's eyes about who really holds power, but she could hardly achieve very much. The question is whether she still might get some institutional support like Putin when he became president. I think that is not so unlikely because there are indications that the deep state is internally divided (one small example is that the communications of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok were published) and that the neocons' grip on power is far from total. Therefore, it does not seem impossible that with a combination of support in the general public (and she certainly has the potential of becoming very popular) and the support of parts of the deep state that have not been subdued by the neocons, she might be successful – it would be a very harsh power struggle.

    As far as caving in to Israel is concerned, Tulsi Gabbard has never been too critical of Israel – there was some relatively mild criticism of attacks on Gaza (in a way that is fairly common among progressives), but in general, she has not been too critical of Israel and has also had some friendly contacts with the pro-Israel lobby. So, while she is very strong and consistent in rejecting neocons and their regime change wars, as far as Israel and Palestinians' rights are concerned, people should probably not expect too much from her. But if she is serious about fighting the neocons and limiting the power of the military-industrial complex and still could win an election, that would already be a big achievement.

    Biff , says: February 15, 2019 at 10:22 am GMT
    After witnessing the temper tirades and the teeth gnashing of the deep states media minions after the anti-war-lite Donald Trump got elected, I'm guessing Tulsi Gabbard is in for one of two things:

    1) The 2012 Ron Paul treatment – total media blackout
    Or
    2) A media Blitzkrieg that will depend on outright lies to discredit her – in which case she might as well bring a hat and a broom to most debates.

    I don't think American Democracy(AKA Empire) is in any mood for another spoiler

    Realist , says: February 15, 2019 at 10:43 am GMT

    By the way, check out how Rep. Ilhan Omar grills that sorry SOB Abrams here: http://thesaker.is/rep-ilhan-omar-vs-elliott-abrams/ . This young lady clearly has more courage and integrity that all her colleagues taken together!

    This is one of the few things I agree with Ilhan Omar about. Abrams is a felonious, warmongering prick.

    Rich1234 , says: February 15, 2019 at 12:10 pm GMT
    She is very photogenic. So is Kamala Harris.
    Projecting an anti-war position against promoting the bonafides of her army service will be quite the balancing act of cognitive dissonance, but opposite the hyper-masculine affect a candidate like Trump or Hillary must emote to neutralize an absence of military experience in their résumé.
    Then there's that first husband and her family's political machine.
    But damn, Tulsi and Kamala photograph impeccably well from every angle.
    What are the chances outside of India that three potential presidential candidates of the female persuasion all share a common ethnic background, Nimrata Haley, Tulsi and Kamala? No coincidence there.
    der einzige , says: Website February 15, 2019 at 1:44 pm GMT
    Saker is a serious analyst?

    Finding all this information below takes less time than burning a cigarette.

    United Christians for Israel, founded and led by pastor John Hagee, have millions of members and call themselves "the largest pro-Israel charity in the United States." The organization was an important factor in the decision of US President Donald Trump in 2017 to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to transfer the US embassy there.

    Gabbard sponsored the resolution of the Congress criticizing Amnesty International for revealing Israeli atrocities against civilians in his blitzkrieg in Gaza in 2014. The resolution stated that Israel "focuses on terrorist targets" and "goes to extraordinary efforts to attack only terrorist actors".
    https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/22/gaza-and-the-bi-partisan-war-on-human-rights/

    What it looked like "focusing on terrorist targets" according to Gabbard can be seen here
    https://www.google.pl/search?q=gaza+2014&source=lnms&tbm=isch

    Zionism and Islamophobia Gabbard have gained recognition and support from all kinds of unpalatable characters – like right-wing billionaire and Zionist Sheldon Adelson, who loudly declared that "all Muslims are terrorists".

    In addition to Israel's loyal defender, Gabbard has also proved to be a credible servant of Adelson's business interests. Introduced regulations against online gambling to protect the casino's empire from competition on the Internet. Adelson thanked her, giving her the Champion of Freedom award.
    http://time.com/3695948/sheldon-adelson-online-gambling/

    Her prejudices against Islam directly stem from her Hindu fundamentalism. Gabbard became one of the main American political supporters of Narendra Modi, the leader of the Hindu sectarian party Bharatiya Janata (BJP) and the current Prime Minister of India.

    Being the main minister of the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002, Modi helped spark a pogrom against Muslims, in which they killed 2,000 people and displaced over 200,000 people in the ethnic cleansing campaign. Since his victory in the 2014 elections, Modi has been a decidedly pro-Israeli Indian politician and has strong relations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    At the invitation of Modi, Gabbard traveled through India for three weeks during which various Hindu fundamentalists greeted her as their American master. In probably the worst part of the tour, the India Foundation, a formation tuned to the Hindu fascist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), hosted Gabbard to discuss the future of Indian-American relations. After the reactionary lovefest, the Indian newspaper Telegraph called it "the American Sangha mascot"
    https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/sangh-finds-a-mascot-in-american-tulsi/cid/1579985

    After returning to the USA, Gabbard defended Modi against any criticism. She was one of the few democrats who spoke against the federal government's decision to refuse a Modi visa in 2014 because of his abolition of religious freedom

    A year earlier, she carried out a successful campaign to abolish legislation calling on India to improve the treatment of religious minorities. Gabbard condemned the bill as an attempt to "influence the outcome of the national elections in India."
    https://www.alternet.org/2015/02/curious-islamophobic-politics-dem-congressmember-tulsi-gabbard/

    Gabbard's service for the most right-wing forces in Indian politics leaves no doubt about its Islamophobia.

    Gabbard supported Donald Trump's claim that Islam itself is the source of terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS. She claimed that Obama "completely misunderstands the rational Islamic ideology that drives these people."
    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/knives-are-out-hawaii-dem-faces-backlash-for-taking-on-obama-over-islamist-extremism

    As with other leading liberal democrats, Gabbard's alleged progressive values ​​do not extend to the Palestinian struggle for freedom. While she may support the resistance of Indian Native at Standing Rock, she will not support the indigenous people of Palestine and her struggle for self-determination against Israeli colonialism.
    http://socialistworker.org/2014/08/13/liberal-champions-of-apartheid

    RobinG , says: February 15, 2019 at 4:16 pm GMT
    @Rich1234

    an anti-war position against her army service will be cognitive dissonance..

    How so? There's a long tradition of this. See Smedley Butler.

    all share a common ethnic background, Nimrata Haley, Tulsi and Kamala?

    NO! No, no, no . for the umpteenth time. Tulsi has NO Indian heritage. She's only "non-white" because her dad is half Samoan (i.e. Polynesian).

    Ned Ludlam , says: February 15, 2019 at 4:47 pm GMT
    Yawn. Tulsi, Bernie, Corbyn – doesn't matter. The ruling elites have the power to co-opt, demonize or kill them. And, that regime is desperate enough to do this.

    We are all waiting for the tectonic impact of some external shocks. Because the system is fragile, over-ripe. Collapse of debt bubbles, an infectious disease epidemic, a rogue general fires off some nukes. Whatever. Just passes the Global Tipping Point, then, everything disintegrates. The centre cannot hold. And at that point the tensions release and people go nuts. The regime divides against itself; the roof falls in. The whole world is waiting, expecting this to happen in some way or form.

    Go and max out your credit card, get hard stuff, don't pay, stop buying anything. A few millions doing that. Empty your bank account. Stop paying your mortgage and car loan. Make them chase you. Work to precipitate the Big One. Help tear the fabric beyond its tensile strength. Do your bit.

    Don't expect to see Tulsi on your side of the barricades.

    sarz , says: February 15, 2019 at 5:30 pm GMT
    @Rich1234 Nimrata Randhawa Haley is of Punjabi Sikh ancestry on both sides, genetically closer to southern Europeans than to most Indians.

    Kamala Harris is descended from South Indian brahmins on her mother's side. You can't get more Aryan than that – look up the word. And she is Jamaican on her father's side. I haven't seen a picture of him but I imagine he's about as black as fellow Jamaican Colin Powell. An octoroon to use that old-fashioned term. But Negro blood was considered so polluting that just a smidgeon put you with the lower race. It's still working like that, but in victim politics less is more.

    Tulsi Gabbard had a WASP mother who became a member of Swami Bhaktivedanta's Krishna devotees. Her father was Polynesian. There's no genes from India. It's a mistake to think of her religion as Hindu, but it's her mistake as well as that of many Indians. Hinduism is not *a* religion because Hinduism is the liberating realization that the idea of *a* religion is very shallow. It is a pleasure to see Tulsi, in videos, going about her devotions.

    peterAUS , says: February 15, 2019 at 6:39 pm GMT
    Well, apart from obligatory Putin accolade, as

    .. "drain the swamp" (meaning showing the door to the Neocons and their Deep State). This is what Putin did, at least partially, when he came to power, by the way.

    a good article, overall.

    Especially:

    USA "liberals" do not refer to folks with liberal ideas, but to folks who are hell-bent on imperialism and war; folks who don't care one bit about any real "liberal" values and who use a pseudo-liberal rhetoric to advocate for war outside the USA and for a plutocratic dictatorship inside the USA.

    Apparently, US public figures like Gabbard and Trump still don't understand the simple fact that NO amount of grovelling will EVER appease the Neocons or the Ziolobby

    the so-called "liberals" don't give a damn about race, don't give a damn about gender, don't give a damn about minorities, don't give a damn about "thanking our veterans" or anything else. They don't even care about Israel all that much. But what they do care about is power, Empire and war. That they really care about.

    Hari Hari , says: February 15, 2019 at 6:41 pm GMT
    It's interesting to see the prompt [13] Democrat party oppo based on the "right-wing Indian agent" smear. It's exactly analogous to Democrat/CIA attack on "Russian puppet" Trump, when Democrats had absolutely nothing to offer in lieu of a famous loathsome TV asshole they hand-picked to beat like a drum and then lost to.

    If it were the case that Tulsi were an Indian fifth-column traitor, like Rubio is a Israeli fifth-column traitor, So what? Objective indicators of world-standard state responsibilities show that the state of India is more developed, more legitimate, and more entitled to responsible sovereignty than the US government. India exceeds US performance on most of the top-level human rights indicators.

    https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Indicators/Pages/HRIndicatorsIndex.aspx

    You can see for yourself, in whatever level of detail you desire, with NGO input exhaustively compiled by elected independent international experts acting in their personal capacity.

    Tulsi's exposure to superior Indian human-rights compliance is likely to build her capacity in terms of Responsibility to Protect Pillar 2. She will have a better understanding of rights and rule of law than provincial goober candidates with no international exposure. That will necessarily influence her evolving stance on systematic and widespread Israeli extermination of Palestinian indigenous peoples.

    Christian S. Miller , says: February 16, 2019 at 12:41 am GMT
    I have never voted for a Democrat. I plan to vote for Gabbard. I have contributed to her campaign. I cringe at her progressive agenda, but I fully support her positions on non-intervention.
    Australian lady , says: February 16, 2019 at 2:14 am GMT
    @der einzige Hope is such a frail and tenuous emotion.
    That said, l'm investing some of my dwindling reserves of hope in Tulsi. Your comments are very considered, and l share your concerns for peace with the current play of Theo-politics. Modi is an unapologetic Hindu chauvinist who has successfully incited brutal communalism for electoral gain. But my personal loathing of him has ameliorated over time (I shock myself!) because he has steered a pretty independent course for India, maintaining friendly relations with China for example,despite U.S. pressure to use India as a wedge. His Hinduva ideology appears to be a domestic political tool. This is a cunning but pragmatic approach and is distinct from a religious ideology with global ambitions. The latter is the province of Zionism which is not really a religion but has (other) religious affiliations or "allies",including Hinduism but most importantly Christian zionism (or evangelicism or dispensationalism et al). It seems to me that a lot of what Trump is doing re. "Jerusalem as the capital of Israel" is to appease the Christian Zionists who comprise a large chunk of his support base, and not American Jewry.(They are democrats as a foregone conclusion).There is great irony in this if you follow the fantastical narrative of the Christian evangelical apocalypse.
    Political ambitions are the scourge of religion.I attend an Anglican Church,very traditional, because my preferred form of worship is hymn singing-the sung mass for Eucharist.I do this in contradistinction(!) to evangelicism. Unfortunately Islam too undergone a political makeover in recent history which has led to un utter corruption of prophet Mohammad's words.It's apogee is Wahhabism, a fad made manifest through money and power and war. Shia is also Islam, but not according to Wahhabis,who do not even relate to Shia as "self-hating Moslems."And do not imagine that the Moslem brotherhood is any better for all the acceptable styling. Sunnism needs to detach itself from ideology.God is in the poetry and not the small print.
    Thanks for your patience with my digression. The Saker suggests we examine the Tulsi phenomenon as a diagnostic tool.
    This may be useful. But Tulsi as a Hindi wooden horse?
    WorkingClass , says: February 16, 2019 at 11:46 am GMT
    She cannot be anti war without being anti Israel. Her candidacy is going nowhere.

    It would be nice to have an anti war voice in the debates but Gabbard will be adrift in a sea of idiots. How many candidates will there be for the Democratic nomination? Twenty? Eighty? All of them competing for who hates whitey the most. Featuring as a side show Biden and Bernie expressing their shame at their skin color.

    If Gabbard wants to be heard she should switch parties and primary Trump. Let him defend his Israel first foreign policy.

    simple_pseudonymic_handle , says: February 16, 2019 at 7:56 pm GMT
    She is the only prominent politician in the commander-in-chief discussion who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Is there a poll on her standing with the military demographic? An argument can be made that her credibility on fighting more war or fighting less war is an order of magnitude higher than a dozen Trumps, Clintons, et al all put together.

    She has seen firsthand the pointlessness of the waste of blood and treasure. How can you root against Gabbard? She is near the only elected official to get any positive press at anitwar.com.

    Si1ver1ock , says: February 17, 2019 at 1:57 pm GMT
    I have a somewhat contrary analysis although admittedly, it's not based on much.

    Tulsi's speech patterns closely resemble Hillary Clinton's. I put this down to various leadership classes they attended which likely have a common source. I think we are seeing a divergence of opinion in the Deep State with some wanting Globalism, while others are unwilling to accept the destruction of the United States as a price for Globalism. Call them the Fortress America wing of the Deep State. They want to rebuild America and preserve its wealth and autonomy while moving toward a world government.

    In other words, Tulsi could emerge as the candidate of the MAGA section of the Deep State.

    As for Trump, he is waist deep in the Swamp fighting for his life against pretty much everybody. If Omar had her way he would be impeached. Trump's support among Republicans is the only thing keeping from being impeached. His partisan attacks are probably designed to signal his willingness to lead the fight for Republicans, hoping they will defend him in return.

    imbroglio , says: February 17, 2019 at 2:21 pm GMT
    You make such a convincing case that you've painted yourself into a corner. Your point is that the Ziocons or whatever you call them are so bent on war and empire that they'll destroy anyone who tries to get in their way.

    To be credible, because your claim is so extreme, you'd need to explain the abnormal psychology that drives this will to domination. Can you do that? If not, your article -- and a number of your others -- come off as routine Jew- and liberal-bashing. The bashing may or may not be deserved depending on your point of view. But that would be all it is: standard prejudice and bigotry in what you seem to take as a good cause.

    anonymous [340] Disclaimer , says: February 17, 2019 at 4:37 pm GMT
    @simple_pseudonymic_handle I'm not rooting against her. I'm not rooting at all.

    We see from where we've been. I supported Ron Paul. He was ignored, and then cheated.

    Voting for Washington wannabes is like watching just the "good programs" on TV, or patronizing the non-disgusting movies that manage to emerge from Hollywood. Those doing so endorse and prop up the tottering, rotten Establishment.

    chris , says: February 17, 2019 at 6:28 pm GMT
    Another very important thing Tulsi is doing is being a completely different person from Trump but hammering home the same Trump campaign message against the war-lusting elites.

    If it wasn't for her, the media and elite mafia could marginalize this entire argument. They'll never let the population vote on these points because then, the jig will be up.

    Sir Launcelot Canning , says: February 17, 2019 at 7:09 pm GMT
    A media blackout of Tulsi will only work if people continue to get their information from the boob tube and newspapers. Why is anyone still expecting to get the truth from the MSM? Anyone with half a brain and an internet connection should be able to follow her. Tell all of your grandparents, uncles, and other old fogies to throw away CNN, NYT, Fox, WaPo, NBC, etc. and find the truth online.
    Benjy , says: February 17, 2019 at 8:11 pm GMT
    @jacques sheete The Anti-federalist's never had a chance, nor would Aloha Tulsi. The Boston tea party itself was a false flag attempting to pass blame on to the Indians. How typically American. Lexington was caused by the that same Sam Adams and his free masons from the green dragon, who were firing at both the British and the Militia's, just like they did in Maidan 5 years ago. The US revolution in 1776 was just another Masonic color revolution on behalf of the Rothschild's. These are the same guys who killed Kennedy and pulled off 9/11. Now they have Trump 100% corralled and black balled, and he is one of them anyway.

    That was when Wonder Woman Tulsi came surfin' into the Washington swamp, all ready to drain it.

    Jake , says: February 17, 2019 at 9:46 pm GMT
    True – "The most important achievement of Tulsi Gabbard, at least so far, has been to prove that the so-called "liberals" don't give a damn about race, don't give a damn about gender, don't give a damn about minorities, don't give a damn about "thanking our veterans" or anything else. They don't even care about Israel all that much. But what they do care about is power, Empire and war. That they really care about. Tulsi Gabbard is the living proof that the US Democrats and other pretend "liberals" are hell bent on power, empire and war."

    The average Liberal voter thinks that Conservatives love Empire while Liberals oppose empires. Likewise, the average Middle American Republican voter thinks America is anything but the new British Empire and that America is always fighting against those bad empires and so must be very active globally to do good and prevent even worse bad.

    True – "As for the US media, it would make folks like Suslov or Goebbels green with envy."

    The Anglo-Zionist Empire: the inherent fruit of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism that was not stopped dead in its tracks.

    It will get worse before it can get better. It cannot be corrected without a rejection of WASP culture, which is replaced with an authentically Christian culture.

    Art , says: February 17, 2019 at 10:03 pm GMT
    GOOD! NO TO MORE NUKES!

    Tulsi Gabbard presents bill to stop Trump from pulling out of INF treaty

    Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has introduced a bill to Congress which would prevent President Donald Trump from withdrawing the US from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).

    Speaking at a press conference on Friday morning, Gabbard said that Trump's decision to pull out of the 1988 treaty was "reckless," was "exacerbating a new Cold War" with Russia, and could spark another arms race.

    "Walking away from this agreement doesn't solve our problems, it makes them worse. It doesn't bring us closer to peace, it moves us closer to war," she said.

    https://www.rt.com/usa/451577-tulsi-gabbard-stop-inf-pullout-trump/

    Think Peace -- Art

    George , says: February 17, 2019 at 10:16 pm GMT
    I am hoping that Gabbard is the next president because it would mean Hindus beat Jews to the White House, and if she serves a full term she will be the first nonprotestant* president to serve a full term, take that Catholics. She will be sworn in with her hand on the Bhagavad Gita, bah ha hah ha. The Evangelicals will go berserk (I hope). She declared herself Hindu as a teen, was she baptized?

    * Jimmy Carter was 'born again' so he might be the first non main line Protestant or even nonProtestant.

    Art , says: February 17, 2019 at 10:37 pm GMT
    @Sir Launcelot Canning A media blackout of Tulsi will only work if people continue to get their information from the boob tube and newspapers.

    Gabbard will only get media attention when she gets votes.

    She needs an ace campaign staff and time in voters faces.

    She will win people over.

    follyofwar , says: February 18, 2019 at 12:05 am GMT
    @JL I think both the anti-war Left and anti-war Right are sizeable and growing. Speaking of the Dissident Right, which I am more in tune with, we just need a courageous leader to rally around. Right now the Dissident Right is more reliably anti-war than any other faction.

    But, really, the dissident right is not doctrinaire right at all as they are against Big Business and reject Libertarianism. Tulsi probably doesn't even want the open support of the dissident right (very few are racist white supremacists, although the media has tarred us all with that brush)...

    Asagirian , says: Website February 18, 2019 at 2:21 am GMT
    @Biff 1) The 2012 Ron Paul treatment – total media blackout
    Or
    2) A media Blitzkrieg that will depend on outright lies to discredit her – in which case she might as well bring a hat and a broom to most debates.

    But what about social media? The MSM mostly ignored Bernie Sanders but he got a huge boost.

    I think the real problem with Tulsi is she comes across as too calm for politics. She's not low-energy like Jeb, but she lacks fire.

    Also, I'm not sure most progs would be interested in her anti-war platform. They liked Bernie because his message was mostly domestic: Free Stuff!

    Americans are anti-war only when too many Americans are getting killed overseas. In the Obama yrs, the US perfected a new way of Open Borders War where US uses proxies to destroy other nations. So, most Americans don't care.

    Carroll Price , says: February 18, 2019 at 4:25 pm GMT
    @Robert Bruce It's the same 'bait and switch' strategy, that occurs every 4 years. Why change a strategy when the old one works so well? To date, Trump holds the record for fooling the largest number of people, with anti-war candidate, John Kerry coming in a distant 2nd.
    c matt , says: February 18, 2019 at 7:59 pm GMT
    I suppose there is also a fourth option: Tulsi Gabbard keeps her no-war stance, and follows in the footsteps of Trump and gets elected in spite of a massive media hate-campaign against her and once she makes it to the White House she does what Trump did and caves.
    peterAUS , says: February 18, 2019 at 8:33 pm GMT
    @c matt Yep.

    Not a problem, though. 4 years after she gets tossed out of office. People vote the real deal then.
    Or so they think, because he/she caves in too.

    And all the while, the game of demographics goes on

    Nice, a?

    [Feb 18, 2019] TOP 24 QUOTES BY TULSI GABBARD A-Z Quotes

    Notable quotes:
    "... Every soldier knows this simple fact: If you don't know your enemy, you will not be able to defeat him. ..."
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.azquotes.com

    [Feb 18, 2019] Tulsi 2020 Anti-war Democrat says she s running for US president

    Notable quotes:
    "... Due to her antiwar stance in Syria, Gabbard was at one point rumored to be a potential candidate to head Trump's State Department, and even met with the president-elect at Trump Tower in November 2016, but nothing came of it. ..."
    "... In January 2017, she traveled to Syria on a fact-finding trip, outraging the Washington establishment. She has also proposed a bill to outlaw US weapons sales to terrorists. ..."
    "... It is unclear whether Gabbard will get much traction among the establishment Democrats, who she has frequently disagreed with on foreign policy issues. ..."
    "... So many entrenched bipartisan interests fear the foreign policy debate her presence on the campaign trail will provoke. Look for more obsessive attacks in Omidyar's the Interventionist, republished in his local Hawaii paper. ..."
    Jan 12, 2019 | www.rt.com

    Due to her antiwar stance in Syria, Gabbard was at one point rumored to be a potential candidate to head Trump's State Department, and even met with the president-elect at Trump Tower in November 2016, but nothing came of it.

    In January 2017, she traveled to Syria on a fact-finding trip, outraging the Washington establishment. She has also proposed a bill to outlaw US weapons sales to terrorists.

    Gabbard first sparked rumors of a 2020 run in December , when she toured Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to host nationwide party primary elections.

    Inspired by the party's strong showing in the November midterms, a number of Democrats are eager to challenge Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

    Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) announced on New Year's Eve that she was forming a presidential exploratory committee. Julian Castro, former Housing and Urban Development secretary in the Obama administration, has also toured Iowa and is expected to announce his candidacy this weekend.

    It is unclear whether Gabbard will get much traction among the establishment Democrats, who she has frequently disagreed with on foreign policy issues.

    Ostensibly, Tulsi Gabbard checks all the correct "diversity boxes" that Democrats claim they want: young, female, minority. But weirdly, she won't benefit from satisfying these (fake) criteria, because she's hated for unrelated political reasons. So that should be fun.

    -- Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 11, 2019

    Tulsi Gabbard is a really next-level politician. Any amateur can be a traditional US racist politician, but it takes skill to succeed in America as a Hindu-nationalist racist / tankie Assad apologist.

    -- Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) January 11, 2019

    Tulsi Gabbard doesn't have a base but she's someone people like the more they see her.

    Don't sleep on this one.

    Although if you follow Cernovich you remember I said over two years ago that she was the one to watch...

    -- Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) January 12, 2019

    Say what you want about Tulsi Gabbard (I have my own criticisms) but this is probably an accurate prediction of how opposition to her campaign from other Democrats will play out https://t.co/xEhdD1ZmyN

    -- Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) January 11, 2019

    I'd pay close attention to the financing of this campaign. https://t.co/DMiABthwNY

    -- Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) January 11, 2019

    Tired of Putin? Vote Assad 2020!!!!!!! https://t.co/aMMF71wz69

    -- Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) January 11, 2019

    So many entrenched bipartisan interests fear the foreign policy debate her presence on the campaign trail will provoke. Look for more obsessive attacks in Omidyar's the Interventionist, republished in his local Hawaii paper. Also, not sure what this means for a Bernie run. https://t.co/RD7pCRRkTW

    -- Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 12, 2019

    [Feb 18, 2019] Support Tulsi Gabbard: it takes real political skills to succeed in America as a Hindu-nationalist, anti-gay racist, Putin toadie, and Assad apologist

    Funny, but "Black Santa" -- Barack Obama was against gay marriage before he became for..
    Feb 18, 2019 | twitter.com

    Tulsi Gabbard is a really next-level politician. Any amateur can be a traditional US racist politician, but it takes skill to succeed in America as a Hindu-nationalist racist / tankie Assad apologist.

    -- Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) January 11, 2019

    [Feb 18, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard, A Rare Anti-War Democrat, Will Run For President by Kevin Gosztola

    Jan 14, 2019 | shadowproof.com
    Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii announced she will launch a presidential campaign for 2020. Her campaign is likely to distinguish itself from other Democratic campaigns by making wars and broader United States foreign policy a major issue.

    Gabbard was elected to the Hawaii state legislature in 2002. She joined the Hawaii Army National Guard a year later and voluntarily deployed to Iraq, where she completed two tours of duty in 2004 and 2005.

    She was elected to the House of Representatives in 2012, and according to her own website, she was "one of the first two female combat veterans to ever serve in the U.S. Congress, and also its first Hindu member."

    During Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, Gabbard gained notoriety after she resigned from her position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee so she could openly support Sanders. She spoke at Sanders campaign rallies to help him distinguish his foreign policy from the much more hawkish foreign policy of Hillary Clinton.

    Gabbard was overwhelmingly re-elected in 2018. She won 83 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary election.

    Most progressives are not as outspoken against U.S. military interventions or what she refers to as "regime change wars." She witnessed the impact of regime change on the people of Iraq, as well as U.S. troops, and that inspired her to talk more about the human cost of war and challenge the military industrial-complex.

    Gabbard has persistently called attention to the war in Syria. She traveled to Aleppo and Damascus in January 2017 to see some of the devastation Syrians have endured since 2011. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad invited her to a meeting, and she accepted.

    "Originally, I had no intention of meeting with Assad, but when given the opportunity, I felt it was important to take it. I think we should be ready to meet with anyone if there's a chance it can help bring about an end to this war, which is causing the Syrian people so much suffering," Gabbard declared .

    Supporters of the Syrian war -- the same people who do not want President Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. troops -- seized upon Gabbard's meeting with Assad to discredit her, and it has fueled the backlash among Western media pundits to her decision to run for president.

    Yet, in spite of a smear campaign encouraged by the political establishment, Gabbard has not backed down from protesting U.S. support for terrorists in Syria. She sponsored legislation, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act.

    During an interview for the Sanders Institute in September 2018, Gabbard said, "Since 2011, when the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and these other countries started this slow drawn-out regime change war in Syria, it is terrorist groups like al Qaida, al Nusra, and Hayat Tahrir al Sham, these different groups that have morphed and taken on names but essentially are all linked to al Qaida or al Qaida themselves that have proven to be the most effective ground force against the government in trying to overthrow the Syrian government."

    Gabbard opposes what she calls a "genocidal war" in Yemen, and she is one of the few representatives, who has worked to pass a war powers resolution in the House to end U.S. military involvement since Congress never authorized the war.

    "The United States is standing shoulder to shoulder supporting Saudi Arabia in this war as they commit these atrocities against Yemeni civilians," Gabbard said during the same Sanders Institute interview.

    Another war Gabbard questions is the war in Libya. In an interview for "The Jimmy Dore Show" on September 11, 2018, she spoke about the devastating consequences of pursuing regime change without considering what would happen after Muammar Gaddafi was removed from power.

    "After we led the war to topple Gaddafi, we have open human slave trading going on, in open market. In today's society, we have more terrorists in Libya today than there ever were before."

    Gabbard is also one of the few elected politicians to oppose weapons sales, especially to Saudi Arabia. She recognizes the military industrial-complex benefits the most from Congress not exercising its authority over war-making by presidents, whether they are Republican or Democrat.

    She spoke out against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when he refused to revoke support for Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen because it would jeopardize a $2 billion arms deal.

    Not many Democrats are willing to be optimistic on North Korea, but Gabbard sees potential for peace and does not view Trump's meeting with Kim Jong-un as an act of treason.

    Gabbard said during the Sanders Institute interview, "For years, I've been working in Congress and calling for direct engagement with North Korea with Kim Jong-un to be able to try to broker a peace agreement that will result in de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and and finally bring about an end to the Korean War."

    "So I think that the recent engagement that we have seen -- both the historic meeting between a sitting U.S. president and the leader of North Korea -- is certainly a positive step in the right direction. We have to be willing to have these conversation to promote peace," Gabbard said. And, "I think the continued engagement between North Korea and South Korea is positive."

    Gabbard acknowledged there are a lot of details that have to be worked out, but that does not make her hostile to the entire process, which is the attitude of many pundits and Democrats in the establishment.

    Joe Rogan interviewed Gabbard in September 2018. He raised the issue of Russian troll farms and Facebook's failure to deal with them. She had a sober response to his concerns.

    "The United States has been doing this for a very long time in countries around the world, both overtly and covertly, through these kinds of disinformation campaigns," Gabbard contended. "Not even counting like the regime change wars, like we're going to take you out."

    She continued, "I think it is very hypocritical for us to be discussing this issue as a country without actually being honest about how this goes both ways. So, yes, we need to stop these other foreign countries -- and Russia's not the only one; there are others -- from trying to influence the American people and our elections. We also need to stop doing the same thing in other countries."

    Such positions on war and U.S. foreign policy effectively make her a pariah to establishment media pundits and the political class. But her anti-establishment politics do not end there.

    Gabbard has advocated against superdelegates, which are Democratic party insiders that have an outsized role in influencing the outcome of presidential primaries. She favors open primaries and same-day voter registration. She is outspoken against the influence of money in politics, and she is audacious enough to question members of her own political party.

    "We have to dig a few layers deeper as people are running for office, say what do you actually stand for?" she said on "The Jimmy Dore Show." "What is your vision for this country? That's the debate that we will have to have in Congress should Democrats win over the House or win more seats in the Senate."

    "Otherwise, it will be more of the same status quo, where you'll have lobbyists who have more of a seat at the table writing policies that affect healthcare and education and Wall Street and everything else rather than having a true and representative government by and for the people," she concluded.

    She was also critical of self-described progressives, who are pro-war, while on "Jimmy Dore":

    You have these individuals and groups of people who call themselves progressive but are some of the first to call for more war in the guise of humanitarianism. They look at these poor people suffering -- and there are people suffering in the other parts of the world. Let's go drop more bombs and try to take away their suffering. And when you look at example after example after example, our actions, U.S. policy, interventionist regime change war policy, [has] made the lives of people in these other countries far worse off than they ever were before or would have been if we had just stayed out of it.

    ***

    Gabbard was much closer to an establishment politician prior to her resignation from the DNC. She accepted tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from political action committees (PACs).

    The Center for Responsive Politics noted, "One of the largest contributing sectors was the defense industry. While Gabbard has gained a following for her anti-interventionist stances , yet, her 2016 campaign was given $63,500 from the defense sector . In fact, the campaign received donations of $10,000 from the Boeing Corporation PAC and from Lockheed Martin's PAC, two of the biggest names in the military-industrial complex."

    In 2017, Gabbard announced she would no longer accept PAC money. She raised $37,000 from labor associations and trade unions.

    Gabbard was "conflicted" over whether to support the Senate report on CIA torture. She said in 2014 that she thought there were "things missing or it was incomplete." She also endorsed the "ticking time bomb" scenario that officials use to justify torture, and it is unclear what her view would be now, if asked about the issue.

    She has taken a position on Israeli occupation of Palestine that is common among Democrats. She supports a two-state solution and describes Israel as the U.S.' "strongest ally." But it may be shifting. In the last year, she condemned Israel for its violence against the people of Gaza, and she was reluctant to vote for a House resolution that condemned the UN Security Council for criticizing Israeli settlements.

    Journalist Eoin Higgins questioned Gabbard's support from the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which he described as right-wing. She has garnered criticism for her trip to India in 2014, when she met with India prime minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist.

    But HAF believes this criticism of Gabbard is unfair because other members of Congress, like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have attended gatherings with Modi. They also point to financial records and maintain they are a U.S. organization without ties to any organizations in India.

    When she was much younger, Gabbard helped her father's organization mobilize against a same-sex marriage in Hawaii. The organization, Alliance for Traditional Marriage, backed conversion therapy

    However, there is evidence to suggest that Gabbard has abandoned much of the bigotry that she probably learned from her father. She backed Edith Windsor when she challenged the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

    "Let me say I regret the positions I took in the past, and the things I said. I'm grateful for those in the LGBTQ+ community who have shared their aloha with me throughout my personal journey," Gabbard stated, responding to media coverage of this aspect of her past.

    She noted that she has since supported "the Equality Act, the repeal of DOMA, Restore Honor to Service members Act, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the Safe Schools Improvement Act, and the Equality for All Resolution," and added, "Much work remains to ensure equality and civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, and if elected President, I will continue to fight for equal rights for all."

    There are powerful forces in American politics that will seize upon her past opposition to LGBTQ rights and meeting with Assad to neutralize her presidential campaign before she even has an opportunity to tour the country and meet with potential supporters. They fear the impact she could have if voters gravitate to her campaign, which will likely promote her anti-imperialism.

    Often Democrats do not bother to connect foreign policy to domestic issues. Gabbard is likely to run a rare campaign, where she makes the case that they are intertwined -- that in order to make investments in universal health care, education, infrastructure, etc, the massive investment in war must be severely curtailed.

    Gabbard also aware of the disenchantment among voters, who do not believe either political party has the answers. She understands President Trump is a symptom of what ails the country.

    As she said on "Jimmy Dore," "If we look at the lead-up to the 2016 election, and if we actually listen to and examine why people chose to vote the way they did, it points to much bigger problems, a much bigger disaffection that has been building for quite some time, that voters have against the establishment of Washington, the political establishment within both parties."

    [Feb 18, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Smears Debunked by Jimmy Dore

    The problem here is the progressive votes is split between Bernie, Warren, and Tulsi. That means that all three of them now can be eliminated be invertionaist Dems.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Tulsi Gabbard is scary to Republicans because a lot of us center-right folks would be tempted to support her ..."
    "... Would love to see a Tulsi - Trump debate. She'd be a formidable opponent. ..."
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Kimberley Murphy , 1 week ago

    I actually trust her more than Bernie. Bernie endorsed HRC, Tulsi did not. She stuck to morals. I respect that.

    chadinem , 1 month ago

    Tulsi Gabbard is scary to Republicans because a lot of us center-right folks would be tempted to support her.

    CAY7607 , 1 week ago

    Would love to see a Tulsi - Trump debate. She'd be a formidable opponent.

    [Feb 18, 2019] Links below could be summed up Gabbard is not pro-Israel enough . But the real reason for such a hostility towards her is that she is against foreign wars of choice

    Feb 18, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Well, as we all saw, the putatively "liberal" legacy Ziomedia hates Tulsi Gabbard with a passion. Maybe not as much as that legacy Ziomedia hates Trump or Putin, but still – the levels of hostility against her are truly amazing. This may seem bizarre until you realize that, just like Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard has said all the right things about Israel, but that this was not nearly "enough" to please the US Ziolobby. Check out the kind of discussions about Gabbard which can be found in the Israeli and pro-Israeli press:

    This is just a small sample of what I found with a quick search. It could be summed up "Gabbard is not pro-Israel enough". But is that really The Main Reason for such a hostility towards her? I don't think so. I believe that Gabbard's real "ultimate sin" is that she is against foreign wars of choice. That is really her Crime Of Crimes!

    The AngloZionists wanted to tear Syria apart, break it up into small pieces, most of which would be run by Takfiri crazies and Tulsi Gabbard actually dared to go and speak to "animal Assad", the (latest) "New Hitler", who "gasses his own people". And this is an even worse crime, if such a thing can even be imagined! She dared to disobey her AngloZionist masters.

    So, apparently, opposing illegal wars and daring to disobey the Neocons are crimes of such magnitude and evil that they deserve the hysterical Gabbard-bashing campaign which we have witnessed in recent times. And even being non-Christian, non-White, non-male and "liberal" does not in any way compensate for the heinous nature of "crimes".

    What does this tell us about the real nature of the US society?

    It is also interesting to note that the most vicious (and stupid) attacks against Gabbard did not come from "conservative" media outlets or journalists. Not at all! Most of the attacks, especially the more vicious ones, came from supposedly "liberal" sources, which tell us that in 2019 USA "liberals" do not refer to folks with liberal ideas, but to folks who are hell-bent on imperialism and war; folks who don't care one bit about any real "liberal" values and who use a pseudo-liberal rhetoric to advocate for war outside the USA and for a plutocratic dictatorship inside the USA.

    [Feb 18, 2019] So how did the Israelis manage to shift US policy 180 degrees, like a parasite taking over the host's brain?

    Notable quotes:
    "... The turning point may well have been John F Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. After that event - which some say was organized by various individuals and groups, of which Mossad and the Israeli government may have been two co-conspirators -- a great deal changed. ..."
    Feb 18, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Trailer Trash , Feb 16, 2019 2:41:39 PM | link

    < >if we say fly mentally back to early nineteen sixties, the admiration>
    > for America was still very strong, even in the USSR.
    > Posted by: Robert Snefjella | Feb 16, 2019 1:34:44 PM | 38

    My uncle was in the US Navy in the early sixties. He made many ports of call in the Mediterranean basin, where he and his mates were warmly greeted. Not so much now, I'm sure.

    Some here might recall that Ike was extremely pissed off at the British, French, and Israelis for attacking Egypt and creating the 1956 Suez crisis. He threatened to dump UK bonds and crash their financial system. That's pretty serious stuff!

    So how did the Israelis manage to shift US policy 180 degrees, like a parasite taking over the host's brain? Perhaps the answer to that could yield clues as to how to remove said parasite without killing the host. Although the host is already brain-dead, so maybe it wouldn't matter...

    hopehely , Feb 16, 2019 3:18:17 PM | link

    Posted by: Trailer Trash | Feb 16, 2019 2:41:39 PM | 48

    So how did the Israelis manage to shift US policy 180 degrees, like a parasite taking over the host's brain?
    Chomsky answers it. For inpatient, the meat and marrow starts from 6' onward, but as always, it is better to hear it all.
    Jen , Feb 16, 2019 4:09:00 PM | link
    Trailer Trash @ 48:

    The turning point may well have been John F Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. After that event - which some say was organized by various individuals and groups, of which Mossad and the Israeli government may have been two co-conspirators -- a great deal changed.

    The US began to escalate its war in Vietnam and the cost of pursuing that war eventually led to the US government in 1971 taking the US dollar off the gold standard and allowing it to create fiat money.

    Something must have happened well before 1967 when the USS Liberty was strafed by Israeli fighter jets in the intent to destroy it and all its crew and the incident blamed on the Egyptians in an effort to draw the US into the Six Day War.

    [Feb 17, 2019] Was Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest?

    Highly recommended!
    Being pro-Zionism is New York way of being militarist
    Notable quotes:
    "... Trump just appointed John Bolton ! Trump has betrayed us ! How did they turned him ? Blah blah blah .. Forchrissake ! ..."
    "... It boggles the mind that even at this stage, so many peoples are still bamboozled by this duopoly dog and pony show , aka the mukkan election ! ..."
    Mar 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

    denk , March 23, 2018 at 4:44 am GMT

    Trump just appointed John Bolton ! Trump has betrayed us ! How did they turned him ? Blah blah blah .. Forchrissake !

    Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest,.

    It boggles the mind that even at this stage, so many peoples are still bamboozled by this duopoly dog and pony show , aka the mukkan election !

    hehehehhe

    [Feb 17, 2019] Trump is Russian asset memo is really neocon propaganda overkill

    Highly recommended!
    The ability of those in power to manipulate the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an inverted totalitarianism which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered by the interests of the common man.
    In neoliberal MSM there is positive feedback loop for "Trump is a Russian agent" stories. So the meme feeds on itself.
    Notable quotes:
    "... And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence agencies. ..."
    "... the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it's in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience. ..."
    "... Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he's a facilitator of America's permanent unelected government just like his predecessors, and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he's not that much different from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump hasn't even caught up to Obama's peak ICE deportation years ..."
    "... Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won't even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water ..."
    "... Now they're skipping the middle man and killing them directly by psychologically brutalizing them so aggressively that it ruins their health, all to ensure that Democrats support war and adore the U.S. intelligence community . ..."
    "... The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting U.S. government institutions. ..."
    "... The ability of those in power to manipulate the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an inverted totalitarianism which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered by the interests of the common man. ..."
    Jan 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    The always excellent Moon of Alabama blog has just published a sarcasm-laden piece documenting the many, many aggressive maneuvers that this administration has made against the interests of Russia, from pushing for more NATO funding to undermining Russia's natural gas interests to bombing Syria to sanctioning Russian oligarchs to dangerous military posturing.

    <picture deleted>

    And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence agencies.

    If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, there would be a lot less "Putin's puppet" talk and a lot more "Hey, maybe we should avoid senseless escalations which could end all life on earth" talk among news media consumers. But there isn't, because the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it's in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience.

    Like His Predecessors

    Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he's a facilitator of America's permanent unelected government just like his predecessors, and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he's not that much different from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump hasn't even caught up to Obama's peak ICE deportation years.

    If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, people would be no more worried about this administration than they were about the previous ones, because when it comes to his administration's actual behavior, he's just as reliable an upholder of the establishment-friendly status quo as his predecessors.

    Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won't even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water.

    Now they're skipping the middle man and killing them directly by psychologically brutalizing them so aggressively that it ruins their health, all to ensure that Democrats support war and adore the U.S. intelligence community .

    They do this for a reason, of course. The Yellow Vests protests in France have continued unabated for their ninth consecutive week , a decentralized populist uprising resulting from ordinary French citizens losing trust in their institutions and the official narratives which uphold them.

    The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting U.S. government institutions. Right now they've got Republicans cheering on the White House and Democrats cheering on the U.S. intelligence community, but that could all change should something happen which causes them to lose control over the thoughts that Americans think about their rulers.

    Propaganda is the single most-overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of human society. The ability of those in power to manipulate the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an inverted totalitarianism which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered by the interests of the common man.

    The only thing that will lead to real change is the people losing trust in corrupt institutions and rising like lions against them. That gets increasingly likely as those institutions lose control of the narrative, and with trust in the mass media at an all-time low, populist uprisings restoring power to the people in France, and media corporations acting increasingly weird and insecure , that looks more and more likely by the day.

    [Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

    Highly recommended!
    The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending wars are expensive was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
    Notable quotes:
    "... Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our republic. ..."
    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    KC February 15, 2019 at 11:16 pm

    The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives, create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class in US politics and culture.

    Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.

    Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
    ― George Orwell

    Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.

    Barry F Keane , says: February 15, 2019 at 7:11 pm
    Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our republic.

    Even you, Tucker Carlson, mock the efforts of Ilhan Omar for criticizing AIPAC and Elliott Abrams.

    I don't personally care for many of her opinions but that's not what matters: if we elect another neocon government we won't last another generation. Like the lady asked Ben Franklin "What kind of government have you bequeathed us?", and Franklin answered "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

    [Feb 17, 2019] Was Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest?

    Highly recommended!
    Being pro-Zionism is New York way of being militarist
    Notable quotes:
    "... Trump just appointed John Bolton ! Trump has betrayed us ! How did they turned him ? Blah blah blah .. Forchrissake ! ..."
    "... It boggles the mind that even at this stage, so many peoples are still bamboozled by this duopoly dog and pony show , aka the mukkan election ! ..."
    Mar 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

    denk , March 23, 2018 at 4:44 am GMT

    Trump just appointed John Bolton ! Trump has betrayed us ! How did they turned him ? Blah blah blah .. Forchrissake !

    Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest,.

    It boggles the mind that even at this stage, so many peoples are still bamboozled by this duopoly dog and pony show , aka the mukkan election !

    hehehehhe

    [Feb 17, 2019] Trump is Russian asset memo is really neocon propaganda overkill

    Highly recommended!
    The ability of those in power to manipulate the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an inverted totalitarianism which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered by the interests of the common man.
    In neoliberal MSM there is positive feedback loop for "Trump is a Russian agent" stories. So the meme feeds on itself.
    Notable quotes:
    "... And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence agencies. ..."
    "... the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it's in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience. ..."
    "... Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he's a facilitator of America's permanent unelected government just like his predecessors, and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he's not that much different from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump hasn't even caught up to Obama's peak ICE deportation years ..."
    "... Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won't even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water ..."
    "... Now they're skipping the middle man and killing them directly by psychologically brutalizing them so aggressively that it ruins their health, all to ensure that Democrats support war and adore the U.S. intelligence community . ..."
    "... The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting U.S. government institutions. ..."
    "... The ability of those in power to manipulate the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an inverted totalitarianism which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered by the interests of the common man. ..."
    Jan 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    The always excellent Moon of Alabama blog has just published a sarcasm-laden piece documenting the many, many aggressive maneuvers that this administration has made against the interests of Russia, from pushing for more NATO funding to undermining Russia's natural gas interests to bombing Syria to sanctioning Russian oligarchs to dangerous military posturing.

    <picture deleted>

    And yet the trending, most high-profile stories about Trump today all involve painting him as a Putin puppet who is working to destroy America by taking a weak stance against an alarming geopolitical threat. This has had the effect of manufacturing demand for even more dangerous escalations against a nuclear superpower that just so happens to be a longtime target of U.S. intelligence agencies.

    If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, there would be a lot less "Putin's puppet" talk and a lot more "Hey, maybe we should avoid senseless escalations which could end all life on earth" talk among news media consumers. But there isn't, because the mass media is not in the business of reporting facts, it's in the business of selling narratives. Even if those narratives are so shrill and stress-inducing that they imperil the health of their audience.

    Like His Predecessors

    Trump is clearly not a Russian asset, he's a facilitator of America's permanent unelected government just like his predecessors, and indeed as far as actual policies and administration behavior goes he's not that much different from Barack Obama and George W Bush. Hell, for all his demagogic anti-immigrant speech Trump hasn't even caught up to Obama's peak ICE deportation years.

    If the mass media were in the business of reporting facts, people would be no more worried about this administration than they were about the previous ones, because when it comes to his administration's actual behavior, he's just as reliable an upholder of the establishment-friendly status quo as his predecessors.

    Used to be that the U.S. mass media only killed people indirectly, by facilitating establishment war agendas in repeating government agency propaganda as objective fact and promulgating narratives that manufacture support for a status quo which won't even give Americans health insurance or safe drinking water.

    Now they're skipping the middle man and killing them directly by psychologically brutalizing them so aggressively that it ruins their health, all to ensure that Democrats support war and adore the U.S. intelligence community .

    They do this for a reason, of course. The Yellow Vests protests in France have continued unabated for their ninth consecutive week , a decentralized populist uprising resulting from ordinary French citizens losing trust in their institutions and the official narratives which uphold them.

    The social engineers responsible for controlling the populace of the greatest military power on the planet are watching France closely, and understand deeply what is at stake should they fail to control the narrative and herd ordinary Americans into supporting U.S. government institutions. Right now they've got Republicans cheering on the White House and Democrats cheering on the U.S. intelligence community, but that could all change should something happen which causes them to lose control over the thoughts that Americans think about their rulers.

    Propaganda is the single most-overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of human society. The ability of those in power to manipulate the ways ordinary people think, act and vote has allowed for an inverted totalitarianism which turns the citizenry into their own prison wardens, allowing those with real power to continue doing as they please unhindered by the interests of the common man.

    The only thing that will lead to real change is the people losing trust in corrupt institutions and rising like lions against them. That gets increasingly likely as those institutions lose control of the narrative, and with trust in the mass media at an all-time low, populist uprisings restoring power to the people in France, and media corporations acting increasingly weird and insecure , that looks more and more likely by the day.

    [Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

    Highly recommended!
    The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending wars are expensive was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
    Notable quotes:
    "... Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our republic. ..."
    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    KC February 15, 2019 at 11:16 pm

    The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives, create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class in US politics and culture.

    Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.

    Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
    ― George Orwell

    Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.

    Barry F Keane , says: February 15, 2019 at 7:11 pm
    Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our republic.

    Even you, Tucker Carlson, mock the efforts of Ilhan Omar for criticizing AIPAC and Elliott Abrams.

    I don't personally care for many of her opinions but that's not what matters: if we elect another neocon government we won't last another generation. Like the lady asked Ben Franklin "What kind of government have you bequeathed us?", and Franklin answered "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

    [Feb 17, 2019] One problem with neocons middle East policy

    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Bmc February 17, 2019 at 1:16 am

    Why would Max Boot and Bill Kristol want to conquer the middle east in order to spread Americanism while at the same time having nothing but disdain for actual Americans themselves?

    Hmm (strokes beard)

    Hmmmmm (strokes beard more rapidly)

    Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (tears out beard furiously without abandon)

    [Feb 17, 2019] Two Trump Cabinet Officials Were Ready To Support 25th Amendment Coup As Rosenstein Tallied Votes

    Notable quotes:
    "... Baker said McCabe was cool, calm and collected throughout the discussions, telling lawmakers: "At this point in time, Andy was unbelievably focused and unbelievably confident and squared away. I don't know how to describe it other than I was extremely proud to be around him at that point in time because I thought he was doing an excellent job at maintaining focus and dealing with a very uncertain and difficult situation. So I think he was in a good state of mind at this point in time." ..."
    "... According to McCabe, Rosenstein "raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort," adding that Rosenstein was "definitely very concerned about the president, about his capacity and about his intent at that point in time." ..."
    Feb 17, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Two Trump Cabinet officials were "ready to support" a DOJ scheme to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump , according to Bloomberg and Fox News , citing closed-door testimony from the FBI's former top lawyer, James Baker - who said that the claim came from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

    The testimony was delivered last fall to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Fox News has confirmed portions of the transcript. It provides additional insight into discussions that have returned to the spotlight in Washington as fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe revisits the matter during interviews promoting his forthcoming book. - Fox News

    While Baker did not identify the two Cabinet officials, he says that McCabe and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page approached him to relay their conversations with Rosenstein, including their discussions of the 25th Amendment scheme. "I was being told by some combination of Andy McCabe and Lisa Page, that, in a conversation with the Deputy Attorney General, he had stated that he -- this was what was related to me -- that he had at least two members of the president's Cabinet who were ready to support, I guess you would call it, an action under the 25th Amendment," Baker told the Congressional committees.

    The 25th Amendment allows for the removal of a sitting president from office through various mechanisms - including the majority of a president's Cabinet agreeing that the commander-in-chief is incapable of performing his duties.

    Rosenstein - who is slated to leave the Justice Department in the near future, has denied the claims. Baker said McCabe was cool, calm and collected throughout the discussions, telling lawmakers: "At this point in time, Andy was unbelievably focused and unbelievably confident and squared away. I don't know how to describe it other than I was extremely proud to be around him at that point in time because I thought he was doing an excellent job at maintaining focus and dealing with a very uncertain and difficult situation. So I think he was in a good state of mind at this point in time."

    McCabe, meanwhile told "60 Minutes" in an interview set to air Sunday night that Rosenstein was concerned about Trump's "capacity."

    According to McCabe, Rosenstein "raised the issue and discussed it with me in the context of thinking about how many other cabinet officials might support such an effort," adding that Rosenstein was "definitely very concerned about the president, about his capacity and about his intent at that point in time."

    "Rosenstein was actually openly talking about whether there was a majority of the cabinet who would vote to remove the president?" asks CBS News anchor Scott Pelly, to which McCabe replied: " That's correct. Counting votes or possible votes. "

    The New York Times first reported last year that McCabe alleged in memos that Rosenstein had talked about using the 25th Amendment to oust Trump -- or wearing a wire to surreptitiously monitor the president -- in the hectic days in May 2017 after Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director. At the time, Rosenstein disputed the reporting. - WaPo

    Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called the 25th Amendment scheme a " bureaucratic coup " led by enemies of President Trump. On Sunday morning, Graham said he would subpoena McCabe and Rosenstein "if that's what it takes" to get to the bottom of the 25th Amendment claim.

    On Thursday, the DOJ issued a statement claiming that Rosenstein rejects McCabe's version of events "as inaccurate and factually incorrect," and also denied that Rosenstein ever approved wearing a "wire" to record Trump.

    "The deputy attorney general never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references," reads the DOJ statement. "As the deputy attorney general previously has stated, based on his personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment, nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment."

    McCabe, meanwhile, walked back some of his "60 Minutes" statements . On Friday a spokeswoman for the former Deputy Director said: "Certain statements made by Mr. McCabe, in interviews associated with the release of his book, have been taken out of context and misrepresented," adding "To clarify, at no time did Mr. McCabe participate in any extended discussions about the use of the 25th Amendment, nor is he aware of any such discussions."

    Baker acknowledged during his testimony that he was not directly involved in the May 2017 discussions, rather, McCabe and Page approached him contemporaneously following a meeting with Rosenstein in the days following former FBI Director James Comey's firing.

    "I had the impression that the deputy attorney general had already discussed this with two members in the president's Cabinet and that they were onboard with this concept already," said Baker.

    Question: "Do you know what direction that went? Was it Mr. Rosenstein seeking out members of the Cabinet looking to pursue this 25th Amendment approach or was it the other way around?"

    Baker: "What I recall being said was that the Deputy Attorney General had two members of the Cabinet. So he – how they came to be had, I don't know, but "

    Question: "So he had two members, almost like he was taking the initiative and getting the members?"

    Baker: "That would be speculation on my part." - Via Fox News

    Baker also suggested that "Lisa and Andy" did not know the names of the Cabinet officials who were on board with the 25th Amendment scheme.

    Baker testified in October that the alleged discussions took place during an uncertain and anxious time at the FBI and DOJ after Comey's termination, and that the mood was "pretty dark":

    Question: "Did people tell you that the DAG (Deputy Attorney General) was upset?"

    Baker: "Yes."

    Question: "Did they tell you that he was making jokes?"

    Baker: "No."

    Question: "Did they tell you that..."

    Baker: " This was not a joking sort of time. This was pretty dark. " - Via Fox News

    Pretty dark indeed.

    Moneycircus , 6 minutes ago link

    John Judge, executive director of the Coalition on Political Assassinations , was the most insightful political analyst besides Mae Brussell.

    Speaking less than 6 months after 911, he understood more then than most commentators do now:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrFm1E74wYU

    "Our choice now seems to be between a "new war" and a new world. As always, the forces of reaction and wealth are telling us we have no choice but war, and no right or power to decide. They are calling for a secret investigation, a secret conviction, a secret method of execution, and a totally secret war abroad.

    "The American people as a whole are the only ones in the world who have the right to decide on a national response to this tragedy, and it must be one that takes into account the rights of all the other peoples and nations of the world."

    -- John Judge , 9/23/01

    https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/

    loop , 16 minutes ago link

    Funny to think that ***-lover Trump, with a JEWISH AGENDA , could have been brought down in a Jewish-led coup.

    Priceless.

    Sanity Bear , 24 minutes ago link

    "the claim came from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein"

    and we know that the claim was not a baldfaced lie... how?

    Moneycircus , 33 minutes ago link

    Always like this. Way Washington works. It's an oligarchy. Power = carrot and stick. Carrot = money to buy and bribe. Stick = kompromat and blackmail.

    Why was J. Edgar Hoover the most powerful man in America? Did FBI cease to be the political police when he died?

    Why are institutions like the CIA more influential than any politician? How was the public so easily misled about the coup that was Watergate?

    Mae Brussell laid it all out on the table 40 years ago. Understanding is within reach if you want it.

    http://www.worldwatchers.info/

    [Feb 17, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard evades the press, and for good reason.

    Great powers do not fight endless wars.
    This MSNC interview can be viewed at https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/rep-gabbard-assad-is-not-an-enemy-of-the-us-1438093891865
    Notable quotes:
    "... Morning Joe presents the largest collective of Media Shills that think with one Corporate brain(trust). MSNBC and CNN commits the greatest threat to the dumbing down of America, and in the longterm, nothing impacts our American freedoms and World Peace than such lowly, deceptive, shills. Everybody has to make a buck, but come on MSNBC; you guys could stand some old school mothering and have those dirty little pie-holes washed out with soap. ..."
    Feb 06, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Stuart Griffin , 14 hours ago

    The concerned look on everyone's face, acting like they are coming from a moral high ground because they support war. Corporate media is garbage! They will never cover her fairly so its up to us to do so!

    Bill Zhang , 13 hours ago

    Shame on MSNBC and the media!

    R. Lutece , 13 hours ago (edited)

    Tulsi is the only candidate who can reunite a fractured country- conservatives and progressives alike love her for different reasons

    Mia Lovely , 11 hours ago

    Tulsi looks so regal and elegant compared to all those neo-con/neo-lib war hawks. She is a Queen among peasants.

    antithetical 1 , 14 hours ago

    Saudi Arabia offered to pay for us to take down Syria. We are aiding Al Qaeda and their related groups, proxies for Saudi Arabia, in their war against Syria. It's about money and oil period. The 'humanitarian crisis' has nothing to do with this war and is just as likely to have been staged by Al Qaeda if not more likely.

    Ken Texican , 14 hours ago (edited)

    Morning Joe presents the largest collective of Media Shills that think with one Corporate brain(trust). MSNBC and CNN commits the greatest threat to the dumbing down of America, and in the longterm, nothing impacts our American freedoms and World Peace than such lowly, deceptive, shills. Everybody has to make a buck, but come on MSNBC; you guys could stand some old school mothering and have those dirty little pie-holes washed out with soap.

    [Feb 17, 2019] Why Conservative Media and the Far Right Love Tulsi Gabbard for President by Maxwell Tani, Kelly Weill

    Neoliberal Dems -- Clinton wing of the Party (and thedailybeast.com is Hillary bulletin board) doe no like Tulsi. that's expected.
    What what they really fear is that Tulsi can get support of considerable part of former Trump voters and repeat the maneuver that Trump accomplished in 2016 elections.
    Notable quotes:
    "... In a Monday evening segment, featuring anti-war leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald, the Fox News host argued that Gabbard had been unfairly maligned because of her deep skepticism about intervention in Syria and willingness to talk to Assad. ..."
    "... "There's something so stealthy and feline and dishonest about the way they're attacking her," Tucker said. "If you don't like her foreign policy views, let's just say so. But no one ever really wants to debate what our foreign policy should be. They just attack anyone who deviates from their own dumb ideas." ..."
    "... In May 2015, the National Review implored readers to "Meet the Beautiful, Tough Young Democrat Who's Turning Heads by Challenging Obama's Foreign Policy." The conservative outlet touted Gabbard as having "endeared herself to right-wing hawks" by challenging Obama's "rudderless" foreign policy. "I like her thinking a lot," American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks was quoted as saying. ..."
    "... And earlier this month, after she accused her fellow Democratic senators of engaging in "religious bigotry" for asking questions about a Trump judicial nominee's faith, she received yet another round of Fox News praise ..."
    Jan 15, 2019 | www.thedailybeast.com

    When she ran for re-election in 2018, she had the backing of liberal groups including the AFL-CIO and Planned Parenthood, yet she was briefly considered as a potential member for Trump's cabinet, and cheered on his diplomatic overtures to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

    Since announcing her bid for the presidency, Gabbard has faced a torrent of criticism for some of her more eccentric politics, zeroing in on her equivocations on Assad and her past homophobic comments .

    And, in the process, she has earned one prominent defender: Tucker Carlson.

    In a Monday evening segment, featuring anti-war leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald, the Fox News host argued that Gabbard had been unfairly maligned because of her deep skepticism about intervention in Syria and willingness to talk to Assad.

    "There's something so stealthy and feline and dishonest about the way they're attacking her," Tucker said. "If you don't like her foreign policy views, let's just say so. But no one ever really wants to debate what our foreign policy should be. They just attack anyone who deviates from their own dumb ideas."

    Gabbard first became an in-demand Fox News guest in 2015 after she criticized Barack Obama's unwillingness to use the label "radical Islamic terrorism." Her media tour explaining that position earned her positively-tilted coverage in right-wing outlets like Breitbart and The Daily Caller -- a trend that continued when she later expressed skepticism of Obama's Iran nuclear deal.

    One person with direct knowledge told The Daily Beast that in the wake of her Obama criticism of Obama, Gabbard became an increasingly requested guest for Fox News hosts and producers to appear on-air. They weren't the only ones in television news who took notice: senior executives at Sinclair Broadcasting made appeals for Gabbard to appear on their networks after she rebuked Obama.

    And her emergence as a left-wing Obama critic further put Gabbard on the map in conservative media.

    In May 2015, the National Review implored readers to "Meet the Beautiful, Tough Young Democrat Who's Turning Heads by Challenging Obama's Foreign Policy." The conservative outlet touted Gabbard as having "endeared herself to right-wing hawks" by challenging Obama's "rudderless" foreign policy. "I like her thinking a lot," American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks was quoted as saying.

    Gabbard has also maintained friendly relationships with high-profile, right-leaning television personalities, including Carlson and Fox News colleague Neil Cavuto, a long-time anchor and Trump skeptic who leans conservative on business issues.

    And earlier this month, after she accused her fellow Democratic senators of engaging in "religious bigotry" for asking questions about a Trump judicial nominee's faith, she received yet another round of Fox News praise. Todd Starnes, a Fox pundit with a long history of anti-gay comments, wrote in an op-ed that he found Gabbard's comments "encouraging."

    [Feb 17, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard explains why she will run for president

    Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) explains to CNN's Van Jones why she wants to run for president in 2020.
    Jan 12, 2019 | www.youtube.com
    charley15z 1 month ago The establishment left and blue checkmarks on Twitter are gonna go after her HARD. But I will support her, purely on her policies.

    Mike Fagan 1 month ago Gabbard IS everything Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, and Hillary Clinton isn't. Which is NOT BOUGHT. She got my vote. #Gabbard2020 #Sanders2020

    Marcy Clay 1 month ago She would get independents and some Republicans to cross over. She is already being attacked by the left, and right for some old remarks that were homophobic, and for meeting with Assad. I like her better than Warren or Harris by far..

    Abu Hurairah 1 month ago she is anti war. so cnn and fox will hate her. just wait....

    lrein077 1 month ago I had the opportunity to meet Tulsi in person and she was the most approachable & genuine person. Congratulations Tulsi.

    Jimmy Russle 1 month ago I'm a Trump supporter, but she certainly has a better resume than Trump. Her most important issue is peace among nations, I'm all on board. 27

    [Feb 17, 2019] H.R. 1249, the INF Treaty Compliance Act, to prevent taxpayer dollars from being used for weapons that would breach the INF treaty

    Feb 17, 2019 | twitter.com

    Tulsi Gabbard ‏ Verified account @ TulsiGabbard 7h 7 hours ago

    Thank you to @ RepMcGovern @ repmarkpocan & @ IlhanMN for cosponsoring H.R. 1249, the INF Treaty Compliance Act, to prevent taxpayer dollars from being used for weapons that would breach the INF treaty. This is one step Congress can & must take now toward national security and peace

    [Feb 17, 2019] About TULSI 2020

    Feb 17, 2019 | www.tulsi2020.com

    The Cost of War

    The first day Tulsi arrived at her camp in Iraq, she saw a large sign at one of the gates that read, "Is today the day?" It was a blunt reminder that today may be the day that any of the soldiers would be called to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country. It caused her to reflect on her own life and the reality that each of us could die at any moment.

    While serving in a base in the Sunni Triangle at the height of the war, Tulsi had the heart-wrenching daily responsibility of going through the list of every injury and casualty in the entire theatre of operations, looking to see if any soldiers in her unit were on the list, so she could ensure they received the care they needed and their families were notified.

    She was hit with the enduring pain and hardship of her brothers and sisters in uniform, and the stress and pressure on their families. She wondered if those who voted to send soldiers to Iraq really understood why they were there -- if lawmakers and the President reflected daily on each death, each injury, and the immeasurably high cost of war.

    Having experienced first-hand the true cost of war, she made a personal vow to find a way to ensure that our country doesn't continue repeating the mistakes of the past, sending our troops into war without a clear mission, strategy, or purpose. In Congress

    Serving over 6 years in Congress, and as a member of the Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs Committees, Tulsi has been a leading voice fighting to end regime change wars and instead focus our military efforts on defeating the terrorist groups that attacked and declared war on the United States. She has approached every issue through the lens of what will best serve the American people, secure our country, and promote peace.

    She is a champion for protecting our environment, ensuring clean water and air for generations to come, investing in infrastructure and a green energy economy, healthcare for all, civil liberties and privacy, support for small businesses, criminal justice reform, sustainable agriculture, breaking up the big banks and she needs your help!

    Regime change wars are bankrupting our country and our moral authority. We need to redirect those resources into a renewable, sustainable economy that works for everyone and bring about an era of peace. We must put service above self and reclaim our great democracy from the forces of hatred and division.

    Will you join us?

    [Feb 17, 2019] Tulsi sure is hated by the neocons and neolibral intelligentsia, but she would, more than any other candidate, actually start to heal this country

    This is a very important point. She can bring a large part of Trump voters (all anti-war votes and most of promiddle class voters) and part of Sanders voters together.
    Notable quotes:
    "... As long as we're talking Hawaii, I have found my candidate for President: Tulsi Gabbard. I guess I'm late to the party, and she sure is hated by the intelligentsia, boy do they hate her, but she's really, really electable for President and she would, more than any other candidate, actually start to heal this country. Aloha. ..."
    "... I don't believe the Democrats will nominate her. They'll use the electability canard to dismiss her candidacy, much like how Ron Paul was treated by the GOP. ..."
    Feb 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Bill Herschel , 6 hours ago

    As long as we're talking Hawaii, I have found my candidate for President: Tulsi Gabbard. I guess I'm late to the party, and she sure is hated by the intelligentsia, boy do they hate her, but she's really, really electable for President and she would, more than any other candidate, actually start to heal this country. Aloha.
    Jack -> Bill Herschel , 6 hours ago
    I don't believe the Democrats will nominate her. They'll use the electability canard to dismiss her candidacy, much like how Ron Paul was treated by the GOP.

    However, she seems to have an agenda I would back.

    [Feb 17, 2019] What a crew we have today: Bolton is evil, Pompeo is a liar, Pence is a moralizing buffoon

    And Trump?
    Notable quotes:
    "... At least Bolton embraces the fact that he is simply exerting power over others without the insufferable moralizing of a Mike Pence. ..."
    Feb 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Chris Chuba , 4 hours ago

    1. Bolton is evil, 2. Pompeo is a liar, 3. Pence is a moralizing buffoon.

    I detest them all but who do I hate the least? I'm going to go with Bolton.

    Since I believe that Pence is an honest man, it twists my mind how someone can stand on a stage and seriously believe that other countries have a moral obligation to obey the U.S. in who they do and don't do business with. How dare you undermine U.S. sanctions he thunders, and the look on his face, priceless.

    At least Bolton embraces the fact that he is simply exerting power over others without the insufferable moralizing of a Mike Pence.

    What a crew we have today.

    [Feb 17, 2019] Individuals whose predictions were right-on received absolutely no boost in prestige for their prescience. Ron Paul is the most obvious example. Every warning Paul made about these "interventions" happened.

    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Deacon Blue February 16, 2019 at 9:21 am

    And the corollary is true as well. Individuals whose predictions were right-on received absolutely no boost in prestige for their prescience. Ron Paul is the most obvious example. Every warning Paul made about these "interventions" happened.

    So those whose predictions were wrong, and whose policy recommendations turned out to be disasters and tragedies advance and suffer no consequences for being incredibly wrong. They still obtain high positions (See Bolton).

    Those who happened to be right – and took courageous, contrarian positions – are still outcasts and dismissed as "kooks" by the establishment. Sigh.

    [Feb 17, 2019] The question of accountability

    There is no accountability for CIA assets.
    That's probably why Max Boot is considered one of the "world's leading authorities on armed conflict,"y et never appears to have served in any branch of the armed forces
    Bottomfeeders like Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Max Boot are just peddlers of MIC interests. Perhaps the benjamins from another middle eastern nation, that can't be named, has something to do with their worthless opinions.
    They are not paid to be experts. They're paid to use thier meaningless credentials to enhance their credibility of MIC policies of perpetual war for perpetual peace. They're PROPAGANDISTS, not experts.
    The Bush/Clinton/Obama coalition runs DC – controls the federal workforce, and colludes to run the Federal government for themselves and MIC
    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Anne Mendoza

    February 15, 2019 at 2:10 am
    So why are these professional war peddlers still around? For the same reason that members of the leadership class who failed and continue to fail in the Middle East are still around. There has not been an accounting at any level. There is just more talk of more war.
    jk , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:53 am
    Just like Eliot Abrams, John McCain, GWB, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld or any other neocon, there is no justice or punishment or even well deserved humiliation for these parasites. They are always misinformed, misguided, or "well intentioned."

    The US can interfere with sovereign governments and elections at will I guess and not be responsible for the the unintended consequences such as 500k+ killed in the Middle East since the Iraq and Afghan debacle.

    There are sugar daddies from the MIC, the Natsec state (aka the Swamp), AIPAC, and even Jeff Bezos (benefactor of WaPo) that keep these guys employed.

    You need to be more critical of Trump also as he is the one hiring these clowns. But other than that, keep up the good work Mr. Carlson!

    Stephen J. , says: February 15, 2019 at 1:43 pm
    The article states: " but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. 'Qaddafi Must Go,' Boot declared in The Weekly Standard. In Boot's telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat to the American homeland."
    -- -- -
    There is reported evidence that Libya was a war crime. And the perpetrators are Free. See info below:

    "They Speak "

    "The destruction of Libya by NATO at the behest of the UK, the US and France was a crime, one dripping in the cant and hypocrisy of Western ideologues " John Wight, November 27, 2017.

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/27/libya-chose-freedom-now-it-has-slavery/

    They speak of "The Rule of Law" while breaking the law themselves
    They are the dangerous hypocrites that bombed Libya, and created hell
    Thousands upon thousands are dead in this unfortunate country
    Many would still be alive, if our "leaders" had not been down and dirty

    Libya is reportedly a war crime and the war criminals are free
    Some of them are seen posturing on the world stage and others are on T.V.
    Others have written books and others are retired from public office
    And another exclaimed: "We came, we saw, he died" as murder was their accomplice

    They even teamed up with terrorists to commit their bloody crimes
    And this went unreported in the "media": was this by design?
    There is a sickness and perversion loose in our society today
    When war crimes can be committed and the "law" has nothing to say

    Another "leader" had a fly past to celebrate the bombing victory in this illegal war
    Now Libya is in chaos, while bloody terrorists roam secure
    And the NATO gang that caused all this horror and devastation
    Are continuing their bloody bombings in other unfortunate nations

    The question must be asked: "Are some past and present leaders above the law?
    Can they get away with bombing and killing, are they men of straw?
    Whatever happened to law and order in the so- called "democracies"?
    When those in power can get away with criminality: Is that not hypocrisy?

    There is no doubt that Libya was better off, before the "liberators" arrived
    Now many of its unfortunate people are now struggling to exist and survive
    The future of this war torn country now looks very sad and bleak
    If only our "leaders" had left it alone; but instead hypocrisy: They Speak

    "The cause of the catastrophe in Libya in Libya was the seven month US-NATO blitzkrieg from March to October 2011 in which thousands of bombs and rockets rained down on that unfortunate land which was governed by President Muammar Ghaddafi whom the West was determined to overthrow by assisting a rebel movement." Brian Cloughley, 12.02.2019

    https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/02/12/in-libya-we-came-saw-he-died-will-there-repeat-in-venezuela.html

    [More info on all of this at link below]
    http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2019/02/they-speak.html

    [Feb 17, 2019] Bill Kristol and Max Boot are not an expect in military technology, or security issues. They are experts in peddling MIC product to the US public

    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Sid , February 15, 2019 at 7:27 pm

    The goal of any "peddler" is to move product. When perpetual war is the product, then any rationale that leads to more sales will do. Enemies become interchangeable. The only thing to apologize for is the lack of sales.

    These two hucksters are not experts on the product itself, but rather experts at selling the product.

    Pres. Eisenhower, a genuine "authority on armed conflict", warned us of such peddlers.

    [Feb 17, 2019] It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them.

    Notable quotes:
    "... It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them. ..."
    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    B February 15, 2019 at 6:22 pm

    It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them.

    And I say this as a Veteran that also thought Iraq was a good idea back in 2001. The difference is that I then went there to serve. As a result I have learned hard fought lessons. Tucker is spot on. Maybe the follow up article can be a piece that discusses why we need more "combat" Veterans up in the beltway. And it is good that more veterans are now serving in Congress but not all are combat veterans.

    [Feb 17, 2019] The goal of the neocons was to exploit 9/11 to destroy countries in the Middle East that posed a threat to Israel

    Notable quotes:
    "... Because DC is bought and paid for by the defense industry. Constant wars are good for the bottom line, so winning is not the right strategy. Loosing doesn't work either. A constant low level set of global conflicts is perfect. ..."
    "... The goal of any "peddler" is to move product. When perpetual war is the product, then any rationale that leads to more sales will do. Enemies become interchangeable. The only thing to apologize for is the lack of sales. ..."
    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Janwaar Bibi February 16, 2019 at 4:50 pm

    Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around? Pundits like Max Boot and Bill Kristol got everything after 9/11 wrong but are still considered "experts."

    1. The goal of the neocons was to exploit 9/11 to destroy countries in the Middle East that posed a threat to Israel. As Wesley Clarke told us a long time ago, they were going to "do" Iraq first, and after that, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon and finally Iran. Most of this has been accomplished. We are now in the end game and Iran is in their cross-hairs.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RC1Mepk_Sw

    From the perspective of the neocons, everything has gone their way.

    2. The only people who got everything thing wrong were useful idiots like Rod Dreher, Tucker Carlson and Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones who were too dense to see what the neocons were really up to. You did not a PhD from Harvard to see that Bush and Blair had no evidence to back up their claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or to figure out the true intentions of the neocons.

    So why are Boot and Kristol still around? Because Iran is not yet reduced to an ash-heap, courtesy of USA!USA!USA! so they still have work to do.

    Why have they paid no price? Let's all pretend like we don't know the answer to this. And don't forget to condemn Ilhan Omar for her tweets just to be on the safe side.

    john , says: February 16, 2019 at 12:32 pm
    It's difficult to live in a post-America America where American interests are subordinate to Israel and AIPAC and lunatics like Bolton and Pompeo, now have replaced the president in matters of foreign policy.

    Trump has done a 180 and given in completely.

    I like Tulsi Gabbard and hope that she might have a chance of winning the Democratic nomination in spite of the fact that she now is being attacked by members of her own party, along with the representative from Minnesota who has the courage to talk of the power of the Israel lobby that functions solely in the interest of Israel. It seems the Democrats are not so tolerant of strong women after all. And its time for everyone to stop being intimidated by the charge of anti-Semitism. When Israeli interests are not those of America and Americans.

    Ksw , says: February 16, 2019 at 3:54 pm
    Because DC is bought and paid for by the defense industry. Constant wars are good for the bottom line, so winning is not the right strategy. Loosing doesn't work either. A constant low level set of global conflicts is perfect.
    Sid , says: February 15, 2019 at 7:27 pm
    The goal of any "peddler" is to move product. When perpetual war is the product, then any rationale that leads to more sales will do. Enemies become interchangeable. The only thing to apologize for is the lack of sales.

    These two hucksters are not experts on the product itself, but rather experts at selling the product.

    Pres. Eisenhower, a genuine "authority on armed conflict", warned us of such peddlers.

    Barry F Keane , says: February 15, 2019 at 7:11 pm
    Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our republic.

    Even you, Tucker Carlson, mock the efforts of Ilhan Omar for criticizing AIPAC and Elliott Abrams.

    I don't personally care for many of her opinions but that's not what matters: if we elect another neocon government we won't last another generation. Like the lady asked Ben Franklin "What kind of government have you bequeathed us?", and Franklin answered "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

    [Feb 17, 2019] One problem with neocons middle East policy

    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Bmc February 17, 2019 at 1:16 am

    Why would Max Boot and Bill Kristol want to conquer the middle east in order to spread Americanism while at the same time having nothing but disdain for actual Americans themselves?

    Hmm (strokes beard)

    Hmmmmm (strokes beard more rapidly)

    Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (tears out beard furiously without abandon)

    [Feb 17, 2019] Wouldn't surprise me one bit if Kristol and Boot work for the CIA and MI6. They tend to lead with placed stories, either before or after events, helping to persuade those who have yet to make up their minds or those looking to have someone else do their thinking for them

    Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Renov8 February 16, 2019 at 8:01 am

    Wouldn't surprise me one bit if Kristol and Boot work for the CIA and MI6. They tend to lead with placed stories, either before or after events, helping to persuade those who have yet to make up their minds or those looking to have someone else do their thinking for them.

    With the ongoing internet reformation we are experiencing, its a lot easier for the masses to see the bigger picture, the parties involved and the corrupt characters playing the puppet strings for the media.

    Glad to see these shysters exposed for what they are propagandists.

    [Feb 17, 2019] There's No Denying It; It Was Never Anything But a Coup!

    Notable quotes:
    "... In interviews to boost his forthcoming book, fired former FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe confirms that Obama holdovers repeatedly discussed removing President Donald Trump under the pretext of the 25th Amendment, and that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein more than once seriously offered to "wear a wire" in meetings with the President. After Trump fired James Comey as FBI Director in May 2017, McCabe, Comey's deputy director, launched a phony "obstruction of justice" investigation, and said that he began to accumulate files of memos on that and the "Russia Collusion" investigation, to try to ensure that the investigations would continue if he were fired as well. ..."
    Feb 17, 2019 | larouchepub.com

    In interviews to boost his forthcoming book, fired former FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe confirms that Obama holdovers repeatedly discussed removing President Donald Trump under the pretext of the 25th Amendment, and that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein more than once seriously offered to "wear a wire" in meetings with the President. After Trump fired James Comey as FBI Director in May 2017, McCabe, Comey's deputy director, launched a phony "obstruction of justice" investigation, and said that he began to accumulate files of memos on that and the "Russia Collusion" investigation, to try to ensure that the investigations would continue if he were fired as well.

    Now, after its own two years of investigation and 200 interviews, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Richard Burr (R-NC) has said, "There is no factual evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia." Ranking Member Mark Warner (D-VA) said he disagrees with the way Burr characterized the evidence, but declined to give his own assessment.

    Veteran criminal attorney John Dowd, a member of Trump's legal team from June 2017 to March 2018, said,

    "I know exactly what he [Mueller] has. I know exactly what every witness said, what every document said. I know exactly what he asked. And I know what the conclusion or the result is."

    What will be the result of the probe?

    "It's been a terrible waste of time.... This is one of the greatest frauds the country has ever seen. I'm just shocked that Bob Mueller didn't call it that way and say, 'I'm being used.' I would've done that.

    "I'd have gone to [then Attorney General] Sessions and Rosenstein and said, 'Look. This is nonsense. We are being used by a cabal in the FBI to get even.' "

    Asked about Mueller's final report, he responded, "I will be shocked if anything regarding the President is made public, other than, 'We're done.' "

    At the same time, former NSA Technical Director William Binney has published new evidence which shows that the DNC documents posted by WikiLeaks in July 2016, were probably not hacked over the internet, by Russians or anyone else -- rather, the only available forensic evidence indicates that they were downloaded from within the DNC's network. His evidence is summarized in an article he co-authored with former CIA analyst Larry Johnson on Col. Pat Lang's "Sic Semper Tyrannis" blog yesterday.

    [Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must continue to trust them. ..."
    "... More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass media. ..."
    "... CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed 's when they wrongly reported that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks' DNC email archives prior to their 2016 publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by multiple people ..."
    "... The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage. ..."
    "... The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it doesn't mean it's not true. The only reason people don't rise up and use the power of their numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media's endless cultural engineering project . ..."
    "... They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Following what the Washington Post has described as "the highest-profile misstep yet for a news organization during a period of heightened and intense scrutiny of the press," mass media representatives are now flailing desperately for an argument as to why people should continue to place their trust in mainstream news outlets.

    On Thursday Buzzfeed News delivered the latest "bombshell" Russiagate report to fizzle within 24 hours of its publication, a pattern that is now so consistent that I've personally made a practice of declining to comment on such stories until a day or two after their release. "BOOM!" tweets were issued by #Resistance pundits on Twitter, "If true this means X, Y and Z" bloviations were made on mass media punditry panels, and for about 20 hours Russiagaters everywhere were riding the high of their lives, giddy with the news that President Trump had committed an impeachable felony by ordering Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a proposed Trump office tower in Moscow, a proposal which died within weeks and the Kremlin never touched .

    There was reason enough already for any reasonable person to refrain from frenzied celebration, including the fact that the story's two authors, Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier, were giving the press two very different accounts of the information they'd based it on, with Cormier telling CNN that he had not personally seen the evidence underlying his report and Leopold telling MSNBC that he had. Both Leopold and Cormier, for the record, have already previously suffered a Russiagate faceplant with the clickbait viral story that Russia had financed the 2016 election, burying the fact that it was a Russian election .

    Then the entire story came crashing down when Mueller's office took the extremely rare step of issuing an unequivocal statement that the Buzzfeed story was wrong , writing simply, "BuzzFeed's description of specific statements to the special counsel's office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen's congressional testimony are not accurate."

    According to journalist and economic analyst Doug Henwood, the print New York Times covered the Buzzfeed report on its front page when the story broke, but the report on Mueller's correction the next day was shoved back to page 11 . This appalling journalistic malpractice makes it very funny that NYT's Wajahat Ali had the gall to tweet , "Unlike the Trump administration, journalists are fact checking and willing to correct the record if the Buzzfeed story is found inaccurate. Not really the actions of a deep state and enemy of the people, right?"

    This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must continue to trust them.

    "Those trying to tar all media today aren't interested in improving journalism but protecting themselves," tweeted NBC's Chuck Todd.

    "There's a lot more accountability in media these days than in our politics. We know we live in a glass house, we hope the folks we cover are as self aware."

    More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass media.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/rMY-zTxPCuY

    "Mueller didn't do the media any favors tonight, and he did do the president one," griped the odious Chris Cuomo on CNN. "Because as you saw with Rudy Giuliani and as I'm sure you'll see with the president himself, this allows them to say 'You can't believe it! You can't believe what you read, you can't believe what you hear! You can only believe us. Even the Special Counsel says that the media doesn't get it right.'"

    "The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they're willing to lie to do it, and I don't think that's true" said Jeffrey Toobin on a CNN panel , adding "I just think this is a bad day for us."

    "It does reinforce bad stereotypes about the news media," said Brian Stelter on the same CNN panel.

    "I am desperate as a media reporter to always say to the audience, judge folks individually and judge brands individually. Don't fall for what these politicians out there want you to do. They want you to think we're all crooked. We're not. But Buzzfeed now, now the onus is on Buzzfeed. "

    CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed 's when they wrongly reported that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks' DNC email archives prior to their 2016 publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by multiple people.

    The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage.

    The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it doesn't mean it's not true. The only reason people don't rise up and use the power of their numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media's endless cultural engineering project .

    They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better.

    * * *

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet new merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

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    [Feb 16, 2019] Death Of Russiagate: Mueller Team Tied To Mifsud s Network

    Highly recommended!
    Looks like all of them were Brennan men. CIA used FBI counterintelligence and counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal.
    Notable quotes:
    "... We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members of Mueller's investigation. ..."
    "... If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange happened to George Papadopoulos during the campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with people who have intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice ..."
    "... A recent article in The Telegraph also alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations, doing counter-terrorism work for the Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal." ..."
    "... Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the investigation, saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos' activities look like they were something else. ..."
    "... It's more likely that the CIA played the FBI with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency." ..."
    "... Zainab Ahmad , a member of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed out by Blackburn , Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event in 2017 ..."
    "... "Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ..."
    "... I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as special counsel is also troubling ..."
    "... Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic and linked to the Clintons ..."
    "... Last year, Blackburn noted the connection between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei , writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel, works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy. Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US State too." ..."
    "... Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share 'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that " The Guardian reported Hannigan's announcement that he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017. ..."
    "... Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing "deemed so sensitive it was handled at director-level" is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner." ..."
    "... There are more and more articles saying that the FBI, CIA, M14 15,16 yada yada, were overly concerned about Trump. Their sin...caring too much for the USA. They attempted a coup de'etat for "our" own good...we... being "we the people". To quote Abe Lincoln "You will find that all the arguments in favour of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, -- not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." Lincoln did not mince words ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Via Disobedient Media

    In April last year, Disobedient Media broke coverage of the British involvement in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, asking why All Russiagate Roads Lead To London , via the quasi-scholar Joseph Mifsud and others.

    The issue was also raised by WikiLeaks's Julian Assange , just days before the Ecuadorian government silenced him last March. Assange's Twitter thread cited research by Chris Blackburn , who spoke with Disobedient Media on multiple occasions covering Joseph Mifsud's ties to British intelligence figures and organizations, as well as his links to Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, the FBI, CIA and the private cyber-security firm Crowdstrike.

    We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members of Mueller's investigation. What we are left with is an indication of collusion between factions of the US and UK intelligence community in fabricating evidence of Trump-Russia collusion: a scandal that would have rocked the legacy press to its core, if Western establishment-backed media had a spine.

    In Disobedient Media's previous coverage of Blackburn's work, he described his experience in intelligence:

    "I've been involved in numerous investigations that involve counter-intelligence techniques in the past. I used to work for the 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism , one of the biggest tort actions in American history. I helped build a profile of Osama bin Laden's financial and political network, which was slightly different to the one that had been built by the CIA's Alec Station , a dedicated task force which was focused on Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Alec Station designed its profile to hunt Osama bin Laden and disrupt his network. I thought it was flawed. It had failed to take into account Osama's historical links to Pakistan's main political parties or that he was the figurehead for a couple of organizations, not just Al-Qaeda."

    "I also ran a few conferences for US intelligence leaders during the Bush administration. After the 9/11 Commission published its report into the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon it created a public outreach program. The US National Intelligence Conference and Exposition ( Intelcon ) was one of the avenues it used. I was responsible for creating the 'View from Abroad' track. We had guidance from former Senator Slade Gorton and Jamie Gorelick, who both sat on the 9/11 Commission. We got leaders such as Sir John Chilcot and Baroness Pauline Neville Jones to come and help share their experiences on how the US would be able to heal the rifts after 9/11."

    "The US intelligence community was suffering from severe turf wars and firewalls, which were hampering counter-terrorism efforts. They were concentrating on undermining each other rather than tackling terrorism. I had mainly concentrated on the Middle East, but in 2003 I switched my focus to terrorism in South Asia."

    Counter Terrorism, Not Counter Intelligence, Sparked Probe

    In an article published by The Telegraph last November, the paper acknowledged the following:

    "It forces the spotlight on whether the UK played a role in the FBI's investigation launched before the 2016 presidential election into Trump campaign ties to the Kremlin... Mr. Trump's allies and former advisers are raising questions about the UK's role in the start of the probe, given many of the key figures and meetings were located in Britain... One former top White House adviser to Mr. Trump made similar insinuations, telling this newspaper: "You know the Brits are up to their neck." The source added on the Page wiretap application: "I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don't want to be implicated in, along with FBI, counter-terrorism and the CIA. " [Emphasis Added]

    The article cites George Papadopoulos, who asked why the "British intelligence apparatus was weaponized against Trump and his advisers." Papadopoulos has also addressed the issue at length via Twitter. In response to the Telegraph's coverage of the issue, Chris Blackburn wrote via Twitter :

    "The Telegraph story on Trump Russia acknowledges that activities involving counter-terrorism are at the heart of the scandal...not counter-intelligence. If the [London Centre for International Law Practice] was British state, not private, some Commonwealth countries are going to be seriously pissed off."

    Blackburn spoke with Disobedient Media, saying:

    " If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange happened to George Papadopoulos during the campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with people who have intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice.

    A recent article in The Telegraph also alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations, doing counter-terrorism work for the Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal." [Emphasis Added]

    Blackburn discussed this differentiation with Disobedient Media:

    "Counter-terrorism is obviously involved in more kinetic, violent political actions-concerning mass casualty events, bombings, assassinations, poisonings, and hacking. But, the lines are blurring between them. Counter-intelligence cases have been known to stretch for decades- often relying on nothing more than paranoia and suspicion to fuel investigations. Counter-terrorism is also a broader discipline as it involves tactical elements like hostage rescue, crime scene investigations, and explosive specialists. Counter-Terrorism is a collaborative effort with counter-terrorism officers working closely with local and regional police forces and civic organizations. There is also a wider academic field around countering violent, and radical ideology which promotes terrorism and insurgencies. Cybersecurity has become the third major discipline in intelligence. The London Center of International Law Practice, the mysterious intelligence company that employed both Papadopoulos and Mifsud , had also been working in that area."

    Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the investigation, saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos' activities look like they were something else.

    As counter-terrorism and counterintelligence are close in tactics and methods, it would seem that they were used because they share the same skill sets - covert evidence gathering and deception. It's basically sleight of hand. A piece of theatre would be more precise. However, we don't know if the FBI knew it was real or make-believe. It's more likely that the CIA played the FBI with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency."

    Mueller's Team And Joseph Mifsud

    Zainab Ahmad , a member of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed out by Blackburn , Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event in 2017. In recent days, Blackburn wrote via Twitter :

    "Zainab Ahmad is a major player in the Russiagate scandal at the DOJ. Does she work for SC Mueller? She was at a GCCS event in May 2017. Arvinder Sambei, a co-director of the [London Centre of International Law Practice], worked with Joseph Mifsud, [George Papadopoulos] and [Simona Mangiante]. She's a GCCS consultant."

    Blackburn told this author:

    "Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia."

    Zainab Ahmad (AHMAD). Image via the Combatting Terrorism Center, West Point

    "Richard Barrett, the Former Chief of Counter-Terrorism at MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence department traveled with Mifsud to Saudi Arabia to give a talk on terrorism in 2017. Ex-CIA officers, US Defense, and US Treasury officials were also there. The London Centre of International Law Practice's relationship to the Global Center had been established in 2014. The Global Center on Cooperative Security made Martin Polaine and Arvinder Sambei consultants, they then became directors at the London Centre of International Law Practice."

    "The Global Center on Cooperative Security's first major UK conference was at Joseph Mifsud's London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD). Mifsud then followed Arvinder Sambei and Nagi Idris over to the London Centre of International Law Practice. Sources have told me that Mifsud was moonlighting as a specialist on counter-terrorism and Islamism while working at LAD which explains why he went to work in counter-terrorism after LAD folded."

    "I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as special counsel is also troubling."

    Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic and linked to the Clintons. Critically, The Hill writes:

    "Those he briefed included Andrew Weissmann, then the head of DOJ's fraud section; Bruce Swartz, longtime head of DOJ's international operations, and Zainab Ahmad , an accomplished terrorism prosecutor who, at the time, was assigned to work with Lynch as a senior counselor. Ahmad and Weissmann would go on to work for Mueller, the special prosecutor overseeing the Russia probe." [Emphasis Added]

    This point is essential, as it not only describes Ahmad's role in Mueller's team but places her at a crucial pre-investigation meeting.

    Last year, Blackburn noted the connection between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei , writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel, works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy. Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US State too."

    Sambei has been described elsewhere as a "Former practising barrister, Senior Crown Prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service of England & Wales, and Legal Adviser at the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ), Ministry of Defence." [British spelling has been retained]

    Arvinder Sambei. Image via the Public International Law Advisory Group

    That Sambei has been so thoroughly linked to organizations where Mifsud was a central figure is yet another cause of suspicion regarding allegations that Joseph Mifsud was a shadowy, unknown Russian agent until the summer of 2016 . She is also a direct link between Robert Mueller and Mifsud.

    Blackburn wrote via Twitter : "Arvinder Sambei helped to organize LCILP's counter-terrorism and corruption events. She used her contacts in the US to bring in Middle Eastern government officials that were seen to be vulnerable to graft. Lisa Osofsky, former FBI Deputy General Counsel, was working with her." Below, Arvinder is pictured at a London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP) event.

    Arvinder Sambei, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter

    As Chris Blackburn told this author:

    " Mifsud and Papadopoulos's co-director Arvinder Sambei was also the former FBI British counsel working 9/11 cases for Robert Mueller. She also runs a consultancy which deals with Special Investigative Measure (SIMs) which is just a posh description for covert espionage and evidence gathering. She has worked for major intelligence and national law agencies in the past. She wore two hats as a director of London Centre and a consultant for the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), a counter-terrorism think tank which is sponsored by the Australia, Canada, UK and US governments. Alexander Downer's former Chief of Staff while at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade now works for the Global Center. Mifsud was also due to meet with Australian private intelligence figures in Adelaide in March 2016. So. Australia is certainly a major focus for the investigation." [Emphasis Added]

    Below, former FBI Deputy General Counsel Lisa Osofsky is pictured at a London Centre for International Law Practice event . Osofsky also served as the Money Laundering Reporting Officer with Goldman Sachs International. Since 2018, she has served as the Director of the UK's Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

    Lisa Osofsky, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter

    An Embarrassment For John Brennan?

    Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share 'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that " The Guardian reported Hannigan's announcement that he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017.

    Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing "deemed so sensitive it was handled at director-level" is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner."

    Blackburn told Disobedient Media:

    "Former Congressman Trey Gowdy, who has seen most of the information gathered by Congress from the intelligence community concerning the Russia investigation, said that if President Trump were to declassify files and present the truth to the American public, it would " embarrass John Brennan ." I think that is pretty concrete for me, but it's not definitive. I know the polarization and spin in Washington has become perverse, but that statement is pretty specific for me. If Brennan is involved, it is most probably through Papadopoulos who sparked off the 'official' investigation at the FBI. He also made sure the Steele dossier was spread through the US government."

    Blackburn added: "Chris Steele was also working on FIFA projects, and a source has told me that he was working to investigate the Russian and Qatari World Cup bids. The London Centre of International Law Practice has been working with Majed Garoub, the former Saudi legal representative of FIFA, the world governing body for soccer. He's also been working against the Qatari bid. Steele likes to get paid twice for his investigations."

    "Mifsud has also been associated with Prince Turki the former Saudi intelligence chief, Mifsud and the London Academy of Diplomacy used to train Saudi diplomats and intelligence figures while Turki was the Saudi Ambassador to London. Turki is a close friend of Bill Clinton and John Brennan. Nawaf Obaid was also courting Mifsud and tried to get him a cushy job working with CNN's Freedom Project at Link Campus in Rome. He also knows John Brennan. Intelligence agencies like to give out professional gifts like this plum academic position for completing missions. In the US, it is widely known that intelligence agencies gift the children of assets to get them into prestigious Ivy League schools."

    At minimum, we can surmise that Mifsud was not a Russian agent, but was an asset of Western intelligence agencies. We are left with the impression that the Mifsud saga served as a ploy, whether he participated knowingly or not. It seems reasonable to conclude that the gambit was initially developed with participation of John Brennan and UK intelligence. Following this, Mueller inherited and developed the Mifsud narrative thread into the collusion soap opera we know today.

    Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal to subvert a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power.

    snodgrass , 2 hours ago link

    What ********. Britain was part of the group pulling of 911 along with the American and Jewish establishment. Blackburn was the inside guy, posing as an outsider, to deflect attention from the real perpetrators. These people always have agents on both sides of every issue in the same way they fund two "opposing" political parties and fund two "opposing" sides in the media.

    freedommusic , 3 hours ago link

    Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal to subvert a US Presidency , and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power .

    It's called TREASON .

    Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies , giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere , is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years

    Jung , 3 hours ago link

    SteeleGate---his mate Skripal, boss Pablo Miller----novichok---Porton Down---anything to blame Russia in the end. After 30 dys of shutdown personnel of CIA, FBI and DOJ can be changed legally: draining of the swamp and DECLAS can begin with proper Military Tribunals in place. This according to Q who shared all of this, so it was not a conspiracy theory that the Q team exposed, but just MSM and Deep State in their last panic mode. Justice will now be able to follow: maybe rel end of endless wars too!

    boooyaaaah , 3 hours ago link

    There are more and more articles saying that the FBI, CIA, M14 15,16 yada yada, were overly concerned about Trump. Their sin...caring too much for the USA. They attempted a coup de'etat for "our" own good...we... being "we the people". To quote Abe Lincoln "You will find that all the arguments in favour of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, -- not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." Lincoln did not mince words

    So now we have an international conspiracy of care. Not one power grubber in the group. A syndicate of misunderstood do gooders.

    But not having the consent of the people, but rather trying to undo, and foil the consent of the people.

    This part of the Declaration applies

    That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

    Last of the Middle Class , 4 hours ago link

    Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal to subvert a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power..."

    Why do you not call it a coup d'etat? That is what it is, nothing less. If it were about something Trump did you would use the harshest possible language. Why not tell the truth here. Let the American people know what happened.

    [Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must continue to trust them. ..."
    "... More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass media. ..."
    "... CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed 's when they wrongly reported that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks' DNC email archives prior to their 2016 publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by multiple people ..."
    "... The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage. ..."
    "... The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it doesn't mean it's not true. The only reason people don't rise up and use the power of their numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media's endless cultural engineering project . ..."
    "... They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Following what the Washington Post has described as "the highest-profile misstep yet for a news organization during a period of heightened and intense scrutiny of the press," mass media representatives are now flailing desperately for an argument as to why people should continue to place their trust in mainstream news outlets.

    On Thursday Buzzfeed News delivered the latest "bombshell" Russiagate report to fizzle within 24 hours of its publication, a pattern that is now so consistent that I've personally made a practice of declining to comment on such stories until a day or two after their release. "BOOM!" tweets were issued by #Resistance pundits on Twitter, "If true this means X, Y and Z" bloviations were made on mass media punditry panels, and for about 20 hours Russiagaters everywhere were riding the high of their lives, giddy with the news that President Trump had committed an impeachable felony by ordering Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a proposed Trump office tower in Moscow, a proposal which died within weeks and the Kremlin never touched .

    There was reason enough already for any reasonable person to refrain from frenzied celebration, including the fact that the story's two authors, Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier, were giving the press two very different accounts of the information they'd based it on, with Cormier telling CNN that he had not personally seen the evidence underlying his report and Leopold telling MSNBC that he had. Both Leopold and Cormier, for the record, have already previously suffered a Russiagate faceplant with the clickbait viral story that Russia had financed the 2016 election, burying the fact that it was a Russian election .

    Then the entire story came crashing down when Mueller's office took the extremely rare step of issuing an unequivocal statement that the Buzzfeed story was wrong , writing simply, "BuzzFeed's description of specific statements to the special counsel's office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen's congressional testimony are not accurate."

    According to journalist and economic analyst Doug Henwood, the print New York Times covered the Buzzfeed report on its front page when the story broke, but the report on Mueller's correction the next day was shoved back to page 11 . This appalling journalistic malpractice makes it very funny that NYT's Wajahat Ali had the gall to tweet , "Unlike the Trump administration, journalists are fact checking and willing to correct the record if the Buzzfeed story is found inaccurate. Not really the actions of a deep state and enemy of the people, right?"

    This is the behavior of a media class that is interested in selling narratives, not reporting truth. And yet the mass media talking heads are all telling us today that we must continue to trust them.

    "Those trying to tar all media today aren't interested in improving journalism but protecting themselves," tweeted NBC's Chuck Todd.

    "There's a lot more accountability in media these days than in our politics. We know we live in a glass house, we hope the folks we cover are as self aware."

    More accountability in media than in politics, Chuck? Really? Accountability to whom? Your advertisers? Your plutocratic owners? Certainly not to the people whose minds you are paid exorbitant sums to influence; there are no public elections for the leadership of the mass media.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/rMY-zTxPCuY

    "Mueller didn't do the media any favors tonight, and he did do the president one," griped the odious Chris Cuomo on CNN. "Because as you saw with Rudy Giuliani and as I'm sure you'll see with the president himself, this allows them to say 'You can't believe it! You can't believe what you read, you can't believe what you hear! You can only believe us. Even the Special Counsel says that the media doesn't get it right.'"

    "The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they're willing to lie to do it, and I don't think that's true" said Jeffrey Toobin on a CNN panel , adding "I just think this is a bad day for us."

    "It does reinforce bad stereotypes about the news media," said Brian Stelter on the same CNN panel.

    "I am desperate as a media reporter to always say to the audience, judge folks individually and judge brands individually. Don't fall for what these politicians out there want you to do. They want you to think we're all crooked. We're not. But Buzzfeed now, now the onus is on Buzzfeed. "

    CNN, for the record, has been guilty of an arguably even more embarrassing Russiagate flub than Buzzfeed 's when they wrongly reported that Donald Trump Jr had had access to WikiLeaks' DNC email archives prior to their 2016 publication, an error that was hilariously due to to the simple misreading of an email date by multiple people.

    The mass media, including pro-Trump mass media like Fox News, absolutely deserves to be distrusted. It has earned that distrust. It had earned that distrust already with its constant promotion of imperialist wars and an oligarch-friendly status quo, and it has earned it even more with its frenzied promotion of a narrative engineered to manufacture consent for a preexisting agenda to shove Russia off the world stage.

    The mainstream media absolutely is the enemy of the people; just because Trump says it doesn't mean it's not true. The only reason people don't rise up and use the power of their numbers to force the much-needed changes that need to happen in our world is because they are being propagandized to accept the status quo day in and day out by the mass media's endless cultural engineering project .

    They are the reason why wars go unopposed, why third parties never gain traction, why people consent to money hemorrhaging upward to the wealthiest of the wealthy while everyone else struggles to survive. The sooner people wake up from the perverse narrative matrix of the plutocratic media, the better.

    * * *

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet new merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

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    [Feb 16, 2019] Death Of Russiagate: Mueller Team Tied To Mifsud s Network

    Highly recommended!
    Looks like all of them were Brennan men. CIA used FBI counterintelligence and counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal.
    Notable quotes:
    "... We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members of Mueller's investigation. ..."
    "... If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange happened to George Papadopoulos during the campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with people who have intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice ..."
    "... A recent article in The Telegraph also alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations, doing counter-terrorism work for the Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal." ..."
    "... Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the investigation, saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos' activities look like they were something else. ..."
    "... It's more likely that the CIA played the FBI with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency." ..."
    "... Zainab Ahmad , a member of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed out by Blackburn , Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event in 2017 ..."
    "... "Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ..."
    "... I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as special counsel is also troubling ..."
    "... Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic and linked to the Clintons ..."
    "... Last year, Blackburn noted the connection between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei , writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel, works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy. Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US State too." ..."
    "... Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share 'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that " The Guardian reported Hannigan's announcement that he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017. ..."
    "... Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing "deemed so sensitive it was handled at director-level" is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner." ..."
    "... There are more and more articles saying that the FBI, CIA, M14 15,16 yada yada, were overly concerned about Trump. Their sin...caring too much for the USA. They attempted a coup de'etat for "our" own good...we... being "we the people". To quote Abe Lincoln "You will find that all the arguments in favour of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, -- not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." Lincoln did not mince words ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Via Disobedient Media

    In April last year, Disobedient Media broke coverage of the British involvement in the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, asking why All Russiagate Roads Lead To London , via the quasi-scholar Joseph Mifsud and others.

    The issue was also raised by WikiLeaks's Julian Assange , just days before the Ecuadorian government silenced him last March. Assange's Twitter thread cited research by Chris Blackburn , who spoke with Disobedient Media on multiple occasions covering Joseph Mifsud's ties to British intelligence figures and organizations, as well as his links to Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign, the FBI, CIA and the private cyber-security firm Crowdstrike.

    We return, now, to this issue and specifically the research of Chris Blackburn, to place the final nail in the coffin of the Trump-Russia collusion charade. Blackburn's insights are incredible not only because they return us to the earliest reporting on the role of British intelligence figures in manufacturing the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, but because they also implicate members of Mueller's investigation. What we are left with is an indication of collusion between factions of the US and UK intelligence community in fabricating evidence of Trump-Russia collusion: a scandal that would have rocked the legacy press to its core, if Western establishment-backed media had a spine.

    In Disobedient Media's previous coverage of Blackburn's work, he described his experience in intelligence:

    "I've been involved in numerous investigations that involve counter-intelligence techniques in the past. I used to work for the 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism , one of the biggest tort actions in American history. I helped build a profile of Osama bin Laden's financial and political network, which was slightly different to the one that had been built by the CIA's Alec Station , a dedicated task force which was focused on Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Alec Station designed its profile to hunt Osama bin Laden and disrupt his network. I thought it was flawed. It had failed to take into account Osama's historical links to Pakistan's main political parties or that he was the figurehead for a couple of organizations, not just Al-Qaeda."

    "I also ran a few conferences for US intelligence leaders during the Bush administration. After the 9/11 Commission published its report into the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon it created a public outreach program. The US National Intelligence Conference and Exposition ( Intelcon ) was one of the avenues it used. I was responsible for creating the 'View from Abroad' track. We had guidance from former Senator Slade Gorton and Jamie Gorelick, who both sat on the 9/11 Commission. We got leaders such as Sir John Chilcot and Baroness Pauline Neville Jones to come and help share their experiences on how the US would be able to heal the rifts after 9/11."

    "The US intelligence community was suffering from severe turf wars and firewalls, which were hampering counter-terrorism efforts. They were concentrating on undermining each other rather than tackling terrorism. I had mainly concentrated on the Middle East, but in 2003 I switched my focus to terrorism in South Asia."

    Counter Terrorism, Not Counter Intelligence, Sparked Probe

    In an article published by The Telegraph last November, the paper acknowledged the following:

    "It forces the spotlight on whether the UK played a role in the FBI's investigation launched before the 2016 presidential election into Trump campaign ties to the Kremlin... Mr. Trump's allies and former advisers are raising questions about the UK's role in the start of the probe, given many of the key figures and meetings were located in Britain... One former top White House adviser to Mr. Trump made similar insinuations, telling this newspaper: "You know the Brits are up to their neck." The source added on the Page wiretap application: "I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don't want to be implicated in, along with FBI, counter-terrorism and the CIA. " [Emphasis Added]

    The article cites George Papadopoulos, who asked why the "British intelligence apparatus was weaponized against Trump and his advisers." Papadopoulos has also addressed the issue at length via Twitter. In response to the Telegraph's coverage of the issue, Chris Blackburn wrote via Twitter :

    "The Telegraph story on Trump Russia acknowledges that activities involving counter-terrorism are at the heart of the scandal...not counter-intelligence. If the [London Centre for International Law Practice] was British state, not private, some Commonwealth countries are going to be seriously pissed off."

    Blackburn spoke with Disobedient Media, saying:

    " If you factor in the dreadful reporting to discredit Joseph Mifsud and leaks, it is pretty clear something rather strange happened to George Papadopoulos during the campaign while he was shuttling around Europe and the Middle East. He was working with people who have intelligence links at the London Centre of International Law Practice.

    A recent article in The Telegraph also alludes to MI5, MI6, and CIA using counter-terrorism assets which would tie into the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), and its sister organizations, doing counter-terrorism work for the Australian, UK and US governments. They quote anonymous officials who believe that their intelligence agencies used counter-terrorism personnel to kick start the investigation/scandal." [Emphasis Added]

    Blackburn discussed this differentiation with Disobedient Media:

    "Counter-terrorism is obviously involved in more kinetic, violent political actions-concerning mass casualty events, bombings, assassinations, poisonings, and hacking. But, the lines are blurring between them. Counter-intelligence cases have been known to stretch for decades- often relying on nothing more than paranoia and suspicion to fuel investigations. Counter-terrorism is also a broader discipline as it involves tactical elements like hostage rescue, crime scene investigations, and explosive specialists. Counter-Terrorism is a collaborative effort with counter-terrorism officers working closely with local and regional police forces and civic organizations. There is also a wider academic field around countering violent, and radical ideology which promotes terrorism and insurgencies. Cybersecurity has become the third major discipline in intelligence. The London Center of International Law Practice, the mysterious intelligence company that employed both Papadopoulos and Mifsud , had also been working in that area."

    Continuing, Blackburn pinpointed the significance of defining counter-terrorism as the starting point of the investigation, saying: "It shows that there is a high probability that intelligence was deliberately abused to make Papadopoulos' activities look like they were something else.

    As counter-terrorism and counterintelligence are close in tactics and methods, it would seem that they were used because they share the same skill sets - covert evidence gathering and deception. It's basically sleight of hand. A piece of theatre would be more precise. However, we don't know if the FBI knew it was real or make-believe. It's more likely that the CIA played the FBI with the help of close allies who were suspicious and frightened of a Trump presidency."

    Mueller's Team And Joseph Mifsud

    Zainab Ahmad , a member of Mueller's legal team, is the former Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. As pointed out by Blackburn , Ahmad attended a Global Center on Cooperative Security event in 2017. In recent days, Blackburn wrote via Twitter :

    "Zainab Ahmad is a major player in the Russiagate scandal at the DOJ. Does she work for SC Mueller? She was at a GCCS event in May 2017. Arvinder Sambei, a co-director of the [London Centre of International Law Practice], worked with Joseph Mifsud, [George Papadopoulos] and [Simona Mangiante]. She's a GCCS consultant."

    Blackburn told this author:

    "Zainab Ahmad was one of the first DOJ prosecutors to have seen the Steele dossier. In May 2017, she attended a counter-terrorism conference in New York with the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), an organization which Joseph Mifsud, the alleged Russian spy, had been working within London and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia."

    Zainab Ahmad (AHMAD). Image via the Combatting Terrorism Center, West Point

    "Richard Barrett, the Former Chief of Counter-Terrorism at MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence department traveled with Mifsud to Saudi Arabia to give a talk on terrorism in 2017. Ex-CIA officers, US Defense, and US Treasury officials were also there. The London Centre of International Law Practice's relationship to the Global Center had been established in 2014. The Global Center on Cooperative Security made Martin Polaine and Arvinder Sambei consultants, they then became directors at the London Centre of International Law Practice."

    "The Global Center on Cooperative Security's first major UK conference was at Joseph Mifsud's London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD). Mifsud then followed Arvinder Sambei and Nagi Idris over to the London Centre of International Law Practice. Sources have told me that Mifsud was moonlighting as a specialist on counter-terrorism and Islamism while working at LAD which explains why he went to work in counter-terrorism after LAD folded."

    "I don't think it's a coincidence that Global Center on Cooperative Security is connected to various elements that popped up in the Papadopoulos case. The fact that a prosecutor on Mueller's team was at Global Center before Mueller was appointed as special counsel is also troubling."

    Days ago, The Hill reported on Congressional testimony by Bruce Ohr, revealing that when served as a DOJ official, he warned FBI and DOJ figures that the Steele dossier was problematic and linked to the Clintons. Critically, The Hill writes:

    "Those he briefed included Andrew Weissmann, then the head of DOJ's fraud section; Bruce Swartz, longtime head of DOJ's international operations, and Zainab Ahmad , an accomplished terrorism prosecutor who, at the time, was assigned to work with Lynch as a senior counselor. Ahmad and Weissmann would go on to work for Mueller, the special prosecutor overseeing the Russia probe." [Emphasis Added]

    This point is essential, as it not only describes Ahmad's role in Mueller's team but places her at a crucial pre-investigation meeting.

    Last year, Blackburn noted the connection between Mifsud and Arvinder Sambei , writing: "LCILP director and FBI counsel, works with Mike Smith at the Global Center. They ran joint counter-terrorism conferences and training with Mifsud's London Academy. Sambei then brought Mifsud over to the [London Centre of International Law Practice]. [Global Center works with Aussies, UK and US State too."

    Sambei has been described elsewhere as a "Former practising barrister, Senior Crown Prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service of England & Wales, and Legal Adviser at the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ), Ministry of Defence." [British spelling has been retained]

    Arvinder Sambei. Image via the Public International Law Advisory Group

    That Sambei has been so thoroughly linked to organizations where Mifsud was a central figure is yet another cause of suspicion regarding allegations that Joseph Mifsud was a shadowy, unknown Russian agent until the summer of 2016 . She is also a direct link between Robert Mueller and Mifsud.

    Blackburn wrote via Twitter : "Arvinder Sambei helped to organize LCILP's counter-terrorism and corruption events. She used her contacts in the US to bring in Middle Eastern government officials that were seen to be vulnerable to graft. Lisa Osofsky, former FBI Deputy General Counsel, was working with her." Below, Arvinder is pictured at a London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP) event.

    Arvinder Sambei, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter

    As Chris Blackburn told this author:

    " Mifsud and Papadopoulos's co-director Arvinder Sambei was also the former FBI British counsel working 9/11 cases for Robert Mueller. She also runs a consultancy which deals with Special Investigative Measure (SIMs) which is just a posh description for covert espionage and evidence gathering. She has worked for major intelligence and national law agencies in the past. She wore two hats as a director of London Centre and a consultant for the Global Center on Cooperative Security (GCCS), a counter-terrorism think tank which is sponsored by the Australia, Canada, UK and US governments. Alexander Downer's former Chief of Staff while at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade now works for the Global Center. Mifsud was also due to meet with Australian private intelligence figures in Adelaide in March 2016. So. Australia is certainly a major focus for the investigation." [Emphasis Added]

    Below, former FBI Deputy General Counsel Lisa Osofsky is pictured at a London Centre for International Law Practice event . Osofsky also served as the Money Laundering Reporting Officer with Goldman Sachs International. Since 2018, she has served as the Director of the UK's Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

    Lisa Osofsky, pictured at an LCILP event. Image via Chris Blackburn, Twitter

    An Embarrassment For John Brennan?

    Disobedient Media previously reported that Robert Hannigan, then head of British spy agency GCHQ, flew to Washington DC to share 'director-to-director' level intelligence with then-CIA Chief John Brennan in the summer of 2016. This writer noted that " The Guardian reported Hannigan's announcement that he would step down from his leadership position with the agency just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017.

    Jane Mayer, in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the New Yorker, also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan on alleged communications between the Trump campaign and Moscow. What is so curious about this briefing "deemed so sensitive it was handled at director-level" is why Hannigan was talking director-to-director to the CIA and not Mike Rogers at the NSA, GCHQ's Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partner."

    Blackburn told Disobedient Media:

    "Former Congressman Trey Gowdy, who has seen most of the information gathered by Congress from the intelligence community concerning the Russia investigation, said that if President Trump were to declassify files and present the truth to the American public, it would " embarrass John Brennan ." I think that is pretty concrete for me, but it's not definitive. I know the polarization and spin in Washington has become perverse, but that statement is pretty specific for me. If Brennan is involved, it is most probably through Papadopoulos who sparked off the 'official' investigation at the FBI. He also made sure the Steele dossier was spread through the US government."

    Blackburn added: "Chris Steele was also working on FIFA projects, and a source has told me that he was working to investigate the Russian and Qatari World Cup bids. The London Centre of International Law Practice has been working with Majed Garoub, the former Saudi legal representative of FIFA, the world governing body for soccer. He's also been working against the Qatari bid. Steele likes to get paid twice for his investigations."

    "Mifsud has also been associated with Prince Turki the former Saudi intelligence chief, Mifsud and the London Academy of Diplomacy used to train Saudi diplomats and intelligence figures while Turki was the Saudi Ambassador to London. Turki is a close friend of Bill Clinton and John Brennan. Nawaf Obaid was also courting Mifsud and tried to get him a cushy job working with CNN's Freedom Project at Link Campus in Rome. He also knows John Brennan. Intelligence agencies like to give out professional gifts like this plum academic position for completing missions. In the US, it is widely known that intelligence agencies gift the children of assets to get them into prestigious Ivy League schools."

    At minimum, we can surmise that Mifsud was not a Russian agent, but was an asset of Western intelligence agencies. We are left with the impression that the Mifsud saga served as a ploy, whether he participated knowingly or not. It seems reasonable to conclude that the gambit was initially developed with participation of John Brennan and UK intelligence. Following this, Mueller inherited and developed the Mifsud narrative thread into the collusion soap opera we know today.

    Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal to subvert a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power.

    snodgrass , 2 hours ago link

    What ********. Britain was part of the group pulling of 911 along with the American and Jewish establishment. Blackburn was the inside guy, posing as an outsider, to deflect attention from the real perpetrators. These people always have agents on both sides of every issue in the same way they fund two "opposing" political parties and fund two "opposing" sides in the media.

    freedommusic , 3 hours ago link

    Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal to subvert a US Presidency , and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power .

    It's called TREASON .

    Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies , giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere , is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years

    Jung , 3 hours ago link

    SteeleGate---his mate Skripal, boss Pablo Miller----novichok---Porton Down---anything to blame Russia in the end. After 30 dys of shutdown personnel of CIA, FBI and DOJ can be changed legally: draining of the swamp and DECLAS can begin with proper Military Tribunals in place. This according to Q who shared all of this, so it was not a conspiracy theory that the Q team exposed, but just MSM and Deep State in their last panic mode. Justice will now be able to follow: maybe rel end of endless wars too!

    boooyaaaah , 3 hours ago link

    There are more and more articles saying that the FBI, CIA, M14 15,16 yada yada, were overly concerned about Trump. Their sin...caring too much for the USA. They attempted a coup de'etat for "our" own good...we... being "we the people". To quote Abe Lincoln "You will find that all the arguments in favour of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, -- not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden." Lincoln did not mince words

    So now we have an international conspiracy of care. Not one power grubber in the group. A syndicate of misunderstood do gooders.

    But not having the consent of the people, but rather trying to undo, and foil the consent of the people.

    This part of the Declaration applies

    That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

    Last of the Middle Class , 4 hours ago link

    Ultimately, we are faced with the reality that British and US interests worked together to fabricate a collusion scandal to subvert a US Presidency, and in doing so, intentionally raised tensions between the West and a nuclear-armed power..."

    Why do you not call it a coup d'etat? That is what it is, nothing less. If it were about something Trump did you would use the harshest possible language. Why not tell the truth here. Let the American people know what happened.

    [Feb 16, 2019] "Semi-intelligence agences" is a very sad joke

    Jul 27, 2018 | thesaker.is

    Alex on October 09, 2017 , · at 3:08 pm EST/EDT

    Something tells me he doesn't want to push this too much as money for this film came from French and German sources. It is nice to see him sticking his neck out to uphold the Truth.

    When I watched the US rep. who supposedly investigated this Magnitzky affair for the US gov. state under oath that he never verified any of the info that Browder gave him, I kept thinking "Is this guy serious ?" But when you realize that they never did any investigation then it all seems logical.

    [Feb 16, 2019] Eugene McCarthy never became President, but he changed national politics. Gabbard could have a big impact even if she does not win.

    Feb 16, 2019 | www.unz.com
    Mark Thomason , says: February 16, 2019 at 5:47 pm GMT
    Eugene McCarthy never became President, but he changed national politics. Gabbard could have a big impact even if she does not win.

    She could also become VP, and at her age that might well be a stepping stone.

    [Feb 16, 2019] Do American people care enough about war to vote for Tulsi Gabbard

    Feb 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    HEL , says: February 16, 2019 at 6:26 pm GMT

    Gabbard is going nowhere, and while it's true that the powers that be will try to bury her, they don't need to. The simple truth is this: the American public largely doesn't care about the wars and never has. There hasn't been an anti-war movement of any significance since Bush left office, and that was mostly a phony anti-war movement in the first place. It was primarily an anti-Bush movement, and the bulk of the people screaming 'no blood for oil' would've just been screaming some other anti-Bush slogan had our current path of destruction through the Mideast never occurred.

    Yes, there has always been a small, independent-minded minority on both the right and left who genuinely oppose American interventionism.

    The vast majority of voters, though, don't care much, don't have strong opinions and will largely just follow their leaders. Rank and file Democrats now oppose drawing down from Syria and Afghanistan and want to 'contain' Russia.

    This is solely because Trump has made noises in the opposite direction, even if he hasn't done much of anything. And a good portion of the Republicans who say they want out of these wars would support them if Jeb or Rubio were in the White House.

    There is a fair bit more genuine antiwar sentiment on the right now than there was 15 years ago. But it's not a dominant issue for many people on the right who didn't always oppose the wars from the get-go. And the mainstream left, again, has totally abandoned the issue.

    Only a tiny proportion of the American public considers the endless wars to be the most important issue facing America today.

    You don't win campaigns focusing on issues that are regarded as unimportant and where most of the voters in your party oppose you on this point. There is no real antiwar movement. Another full-scale invasion of a previously stable country would generate some serious opposition, sure, but the current slow bleed of endless occupations and occasional opportunistic attacks on already destabilizing regimes can continue forever with little pushback from the public at large.

    How anyone could live through the last 15 years of American politics and not realize this is beyond me.

    KenH , says: February 16, 2019 at 6:26 pm GMT
    @Art

    That one trick happens to the most important trick that America is facing.

    No Art, that would be unchecked legal and illegal immigration and as far as I can tell Tulsi Gandhi is pretty dreadful on that subject. True, the likudniks in the diaspora don't like her because she would be bad for an expansionist Israel...

    If elected Tulsi would probably become a Jew tool just like Trump has become. If not, then they'll have another special counsel ready to take her down. That's how the (((deep state))) operates.

    [Feb 16, 2019] President Trump is Saudi Arabia's bitch Hawaii Rep SLAMS Trump

    dailymail.co.uk

    Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard attacked Donald Trump for his tweet praising Saudi Arabia after the CIA report which found the country's crown prince was behind the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

    Democratic Rep. Gabbard, a National Guard veteran who did two tours in the Middle East, branded the president 'Saudi Arabia's b**ch' after he announced the U.S. would stand by the nation.

    'Hey @realdonaldtrump: being Saudi Arabia's bitch is not '"America First,'" Gabbard tweeted.

    [Feb 16, 2019] Yea, John McCain was a truly historic person. So far, he was the only person in history who managed to totally disable an American aircraft carrier.

    Feb 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    AnonFromTN , says: February 16, 2019 at 6:43 pm GMT

    @Wally Yea, John McCain was a truly historic person. So far, he was the only person in history who managed to totally disable an American aircraft carrier. Of course, he was not found guilty of anything: after all, having Admirals for your dad and granddad counts for something in squeaky-clean military.

    [Feb 16, 2019] What other organization/group then CIA is capable of such as perfect job of covering their tracks

    Feb 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Peredur , says: February 12, 2019 at 11:02 pm GMT

    @ariadna "What other organization/group is capable of such as perfect job of covering their tracks."

    It is the organization that controls the government and the media that is capable of doing this. In other words, the same organization that was responsible for 9/11 and other major deceptions. It compartmentalizes knowledge of operational details using the need-to-know rule, but it can still be regarded as the same overall entity carrying out all of these deceptions, with the same general goals always applying.

    [Feb 16, 2019] There is a tendency, especially among dissenters and conspiracy theorists, to equate the Kennedy family with the Gracchi brothers of the great late Roman republic

    Feb 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Miville , says: Website February 12, 2019 at 8:29 pm GMT

    There is a tendency, especially among dissenters and conspiracy theorists, to equate the Kennedy family with the Gracchi brothers of the great late Roman republic, a model of a good opportunity for the Republic to evolve for the best and that was missed thanks to timely assassinations. Unfortunately that's not the case : JFK was rather a behavioural model of utter political servility, to the point of psychic codependence, towards the media sphere. He was actually the first American president to have been entirely made by the media, and especially by the most intensively Jewish ones as well as by the Hollywood actors' milieu : people even worse than the power elite proper. Anyway the American presidential institution was designed right from the start as a hidden imperial monarchy by adoption where none is admitted except from families having being initiated into the inner occult circles of the oligarchy and consecrated their whole progeny to come for one century and more : there never was the slightest risk that a US President disobey. The fact that the father had slight pro-Nazi inclinations should fool no one : Israel's Likud party has always collaborated with such figures among the non-Jews and anyway JFK's family is nearly Jewish on his mother's side. The American republic, though draping in Roman architecture and symbols, is clearly far more Carthaginian in outlook.

    If JFK is to be compared with a Roman character it would be more with a kind of Nero, judging by his general private conduct, his lavish use of public money for private luxuries, and his abundant use of secret services to dispose of no longer useful women. He was all shape and no substance, and also known for a preference for false flags as the royal way to disentangle all diplomatic quandaries, and some of those false flags were so ridiculous that they fell flat, like the Bay of Pigs operation where he had given the orders to simulate the return of Christ. JFK had been put into power to accomplish a very specific mission : highjacking the Catholic Church into a religion 100% compliant with American interests and values (not an easy task) and also with Zionist theology : a most preposterous (and pervert) task but which he carried out in a brillant way. Up to then that religion had been the most opposite to the American enterprise, even more so than the communist enterprise, after the VII Council which that president was made to supervise as a nominal Catholic, the religion was made into some kind of neo-episcopalian thing. JFK did it mostly through the assassinations of countless prelates who would oppose such a turn. JFK also launched the Moonlanding mission in perfect knowledge, through Van Allen and Von Braun, that it was not feasible due to the impossibility to send any living being into space beyond a quite low orbit : he just counted on Hollywood. What he didn't realize is that it would be simpler for the American secret services to ensure the perfect secrecy of his own scheme to eliminate him once all orders to make it work were given. Had he escaped or survived the assassination in Dallas he would have been rapidly known as the very disappointing false liberal and real decadent machiavellian prince he was, one year of tabloid media coverage would have revealed him as an embarrassment to America, even though he was most probably due to die from his chronic illness before campaining for reelection. Thanks to his assassination he was transfigurated from the Nero he was into a kind of perfect tragic hero he was to become in the American dreamworld. In brief he was killed for obeying just to well, to the point of being more useful after death as a model, not for dissent of any kind (even though like all corrupt politicians who feel death to be impending he started making timid regrets and confessions about the power structure around him just a few days before, but in doing so he did no better than for instance FBI's Hoover or France's Mitterrand or Israel's Sharon just before entering mysterious coma).

    Let us not be fooled by some allegations as to him having envisioned to do away with the FED by giving back the American state the right to print money : all he did in reality was allowing the American state to emit BONDS (not currency units) payable in metallic silver rather than in USD proper, a way different thing, actually a first move (by avowing the USD was subject to inflation in metallic terms as a judicial precedent to impose other decisions later on) to stealthily undo the convertibility of the dollar into precious metal as was to be finalized under Nixon. Let us not be deluded he envisioned doing away with the CIA : if anything JFK was an overuser of its assassination services, he just wished for the agency, which was then quite decentralized, to be eventually conflated with the FBI. And let us not imagine he was anti-Israel : when he refused Israel the authorization to go nuclear that was under the American Nuclear Industry Lobby's pressure which was then a more Jewish thing than its Israeli counterpart : Israel was seen as too young, too lefty, too hippie-like to be entrusted with everything at once, the real Jewish capital of the world was Manhattan, not Tel Aviv. Israel as an offshore power centre was still in construction and JFK's only concern, shared by his close Jewish appointees as well as by most conservative American Jews, was that it might fall under Soviet pressure for lack of maturity in operating secret services. In those kinds of affairs JFK heeded and obeyed the voice of best-established moneyed interests without delving too much deeply. Thanks to the JFK perfect model of media-tailored politicians the way was paved for Clinton and Obama to come thereafter as natural heirs.

    [Feb 16, 2019] The Broken Presidential Destiny of JFK, Jr. by Laurent Guyénot

    Feb 16, 2019 | www.unz.com
    JFK Jr. as conspiracy theorist

    Let's move on to the next question: how dedicated was John to getting to the bottom of his father's assassination?

    According to testimonies from his friends, John Junior was haunted by the death of his father and quite knowledgeable about independent investigations contradicting the Warren Report. In 1999, he was not a newcomer to JFK conspiracy theories; his quest for truth had started as early as the late 1970s. His old high school girlfriend Meg Azzoni, in her self-published book, 11 Letters and a Poem: John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Meg Azzoni (2007), writes that as a teenager, JFK, Jr. was questioning the official version of his father's death: "His heartfelt quest was to expose and bring to trial who killed his father, and covered it up." [28] Quoted in John Koerner, Exploding the Truth: The JFK Jr., Assassination, Chronos Books, 2018, kindle k. 540-45. Don Jeffries, author of Hidden History, claimed that "another friend of JFK, Jr.'s adult inner circle, who very adamantly requested to remain anonymous, verified that he was indeed quite knowledgeable about the assassination and often spoke of it in private." [29] Quoted in Koerner, Exploding the Truth, op. cit., k. 540-5. JFK Jr., said Jeffries in a radio interview, was on "a Shakespearian quest," "to avenge his father's death," like young Hamlet. [30] https://midnightwriternews.com/mwn-episode-093-donal...fk-jr/

    John is the only Kennedy to have shown a serious determination to pursue this truth, besides his uncle Bobby. And he took the risk of making his interest public in October 1998, when he released a special "Conspiracy Issue" of George magazine , which included an article by Oliver Stone titled "Our Counterfeit History," introduced on the cover as "Paranoid and Proud of It!"

    In an article published in 2009 , journalist Wayne Madsen claimed that, two weeks after John's death, "I was scheduled to meet with Kennedy at his magazine's offices in Washington, DC to discuss hiring on as one of a few investigative journalists Kennedy wanted to dig deep into a number of cases, but most importantly that of his father's assassination." [31] Wayne Madsen, "JFK Jr.'s Plane Crash Was Originally Treated As Murder Investigation," Wayne Madsen Report, August 12, 2009, on http://www.whale.to/c/jfk_jr5.html. Madsen told more details to Jeffries, who reports them in his book Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics, Skyhorse publishing, 2016, kindle k. 3981. (There is no confirmation of Madsen's claim.)

    Jake , says: February 11, 2019 at 2:30 pm GMT

    ... ... ..

    If Joe Kennedy Jr had not died in WW2, they would have killed him, because he was the smartest and toughest of the four brothers.

    The WASPs and their Jewish allies assumed they could control JFK because of his war injury and resulting lifetime of medication, as well as from his having chosen to be a playboy when he assumed Joe Jr would be President. But in the White House, JFK began to understand that US was going to have major troubles if it did not pull out of Vietnam sooner rather than later and it if did not rein in Israel. He likely would have dumped LBJ in '64, and that was enough to guarantee his death.

    Bobby Kennedy had to go because he was indispensable to John's movements in understanding how the Brits and their Jewish allies had cost the America that was neither WASP Elite nor Jewish a great deal. Plus, from his time working on organized crime, Bobby Kennedy knew that all big time organized crime was significantly funded by Jews and that at some point, virtually all major Jewish American big business and prominent law firms had direct ties to Jewish organized crime. And as President, Bobby Kennedy would have applied such knowledge to Israel. And so Bobby Kennedy had to be killed.

    I have long assumed that some alliance of CIA and Mossad, meaning WASP and Jewish, was behind Chappaquiddick. No need to kill Teddy, because he was the least intelligent Kennedy brother, as well as the only coward.

    Why risk JFK Jr? Get rid of him before he holds any office. Do not risk any movement growing up around him, because he might turn out to be some combo of his dad and dead uncles.

    So Bobb

    restless94110 , says: February 11, 2019 at 7:19 pm GMT
    @Jake

    I have long assumed that some alliance of CIA and Mossad, meaning WASP and Jewish, was behind Chappaquiddick. No need to kill Teddy, because he was the least intelligent Kennedy brother, as well as the only coward.

    What makes you think that he was not supposed to die in that crash? He got out by the skin of his teeth, could not save his companion. What would be a better smear on the Kennedys that Teddy died with some woman in his lap?

    As it turned out, he survived but forever smeared anyway

    SunBakedSuburb , says: February 11, 2019 at 8:29 pm GMT
    Interesting article. I believe JFK Jr.'s death was the result of a conspiracy, but the author's assertion that Mossad was responsible leaves me with doubt. Hillary Clinton was the person who had the most to gain from JFK Jr.'s demise; they were both on the same trajectory: the open New York senate seat, followed by a run to the White House. The Clintons have been shadow government players since at least the 1980s when, while governor, Bill helped facilitate the CIA's trafficking of guns and drugs in Arkansas, which is a state with a significant Rockefeller presence. The demoness Hillary is where investigators of JFK Jr.'s death should start. Whether that leads to the Mossad, I don't know. My guess would be a domestic CIA network.
    Steve Naidamast , says: February 11, 2019 at 8:30 pm GMT
    I very much like the writing by Laurent Guyénot and I have read all of the articles by him that I have come across including purchasing his book, "From Yaweh to Zion".

    And I have no doubt that some insidious form of foul play was what killed JFK Jr. and his wife.

    As one who flew aircraft many years ago I can attest to the fact that on a fog-ridden night it is very easy to succumb to vertigo and crash your plane into the ground. You can do this very easily as well with the current bevy of highly sophisticated aircraft simulations that are available.

    However, JFK Jr. was, to my knowledge, a consummate pilot and would have never attempted such a flight unless he was intsrument rated. As a result, he would have not succumbed to to the effects of vertigo since he would have been concentrating on his instruments.

    Also, I understand that this was basically a night flight, which by law required an instrument rating.

    From these generalizations alone one can see that JFK Jr. would have known how to fly his plane.

    If the eyewitnesses to the explosion are credible along with other supporting evidence than there is no way any legitimate investigation could have concluded with verdict of "pilot error", unless of course JFK Jr. knowingly took a bomb on board his plane with the intent of blowing himself and his passengers up. A highly unlikely scenario.

    If one were to look at the "only available picture" of JFK Jr.'s aircraft in this piece, even a layperson could see that there is no scarring anywhere to be seen on the debris, which would have been used then to support the stupidity of "pilot error".

    You can see the same nonsense with the 911 pictures of the Pentagon after it was struck. There is literally no debris in any of those pictures from an aircraft freshly blown to pieces by its strike on the E-wing of the Pentagon.

    Considering the insidiousness of the Clintons, especially Hillary herself, the author paints an excellent portrait of a likely pathway for the support and implementation of an assassination of JFK Jr through her. Given Hillary's background (and rabid incompetence) in nefarious operations such as the destruction of Libya, I wouldn't put it past this women to work with other planners to prevent JFK Jr. from obstructing her planned ascent into the US Senate from New York.

    Despite her popularity in New York State, which was somewhat overrated in the media, many never considered her a welcome representative of our state. And JFK Jr. would have wiped the floor with her in a political contest.

    Steve Naidamast , says: February 11, 2019 at 8:39 pm GMT
    @Achmed E. Newman Achmed

    As a former flyer myself, it is aviation law that you cannot fly any aircraft at night or non-VFR conditions without being instrument rated. If this was a night flight as stated then the moon could have been out lighting up every aspect of earth and still only instrument-rated pilots could fly.

    And the airport he flew out of would have never allowed such a flight-plan for a non-instrument rated pilot unless they wanted to lose their license to operate an airport.

    Cyrano , says: February 11, 2019 at 8:46 pm GMT
    If JFK Jr. could send a message from the other world – it should probably be: "Don't cry for me Argentina".

    Just because his father was a president (of dubious quality and of dubious control over the deep state – it probably was, as usual – vice versa, the deep state controlled him), doesn't mean that they had presidential DNA in their genes.

    Sons of presidents are usually worse than their fathers in the same role. I have only 2 examples but they are adequate enough to prove the point. GW Bush was 10 times the disaster of a president his father was. And also Justin Trudeau is not even 1% the prime minister his father was. In fact, if JFK jr, lived long enough to be elected a president – he probably would have been the American Justin Trudeau.

    Carlton Meyer , says: Website February 11, 2019 at 9:15 pm GMT
    Our media ignored breaking news a few years ago that Kennedy's TWA "conspiracy theory" was proven true. TWA Flight 800 did not explode in mid-air because of an electrical short. It was accidentally hit by a US Navy anti-aircraft missile during a training exercise.

    An outstanding 2013 documentary: "TWA Flight 800" appeared on Netflix, but was removed after just a few weeks. It featured two senior federal NTSB investigators of TWA 800 who declared the investigation was a cover-up by the Clinton administration, and waited until they retired to speak out. Several books have appeared that provide undeniable evidence, such as:

    http://militarycorruption.com/flight-800/

    DESERT FOX , says: February 11, 2019 at 9:29 pm GMT
    @SunBakedSuburb Agree, the book Compromised, Clinton, Bush and the CIA by Terry Reed shows the connection between the Bushes and Clintons and the CIA and FBI and their CIA hit teams, or just read the customer comments on the book at Amazon.com.
    renfro , says: February 11, 2019 at 9:50 pm GMT
    @Diversity Heretic As a 30 year instrument rated pilot myself I would agree except for .."and the overstressed airframe comes apart."
    In light civilian air craft that is very rare and usually caused by some defect already existing.
    Unless the NTSB itself is lying and the radar records and the recovery divers are lying I go with their determination.
    First, the debris field was only 120 feet, if the plane had exploded or broken up in the air it would have been scattered over a larger area.
    Second, records show the plane entered a banking turn in excess of 45 degrees, which is not recommended and dangerous .It can cause a accelerated stall and if you don't have the altitude to recover from it before you hit the ground or you panic you go 'spiraling' down and smash into whatever is below, you like the ocean.
    So I really am not into the plane being blown up theory.

    'A performance study of the radar data revealed that the target began a descent from 5,500 feet about 34 miles west of MVY. The speed during the descent was calculated to be about 160 knots indicated airspeed (KIAS), and the rate of descent was calculated to have varied between 400 and 800 feet per minute (fpm). About 2138, the target began a right turn in a southerly direction. About 30 seconds later, the target stopped its descent at 2,200 feet and began a climb that lasted another 30 seconds. During this period of time, the target stopped the turn, and the airspeed decreased to about 153 KIAS. About 2139, the target leveled off at 2,500 feet and flew in a southeasterly direction. About 50 seconds later, the target entered a left turn and climbed to 2,600 feet. As the target continued in the left turn, it began a descent that reached a rate of about 900 fpm. When the target reached an easterly direction, it stopped turning; its rate of descent remained about 900 fpm. At 2140:15, while still in the descent, the target entered a right turn. As the target's turn rate increased, its descent rate and airspeed also increased. The target's descent rate eventually exceeded 4,700 fpm. The target's last radar position was recorded at 2140:34 at an altitude of 1,100 feet. (For a more detailed description of the target's [accident airplane's] performance, see Section, "Tests and Research," Subsection, "Aircraft Performance Study.")

    WRECKAGE INFORMATION

    On July 20, 1999, the airplane wreckage was located by U.S. Navy divers from the recovery ship, USS Grasp, at a depth of about 120 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. According to the divers, the recovered wreckage had been distributed in a debris field about 120 feet long and was oriented along a magnetic bearing of about 010/190 degrees. The main cabin area was found in the middle of the debris field.
    At 2139:50, the airplane entered a left turn, while slightly increasing altitude to 2,600 feet. The airplane reached a maximum bank angle of 28 degrees left-wing-down (LWD) and a maximum vertical acceleration of 1.2 Gs in this turn. When the maximum LWD bank angle was obtained, the altitude started to decrease at a descent rate close to 900 fpm. The LWD attitude was maintained for approximately 15 seconds until the airplane was heading towards the east. At 2140:07, the airplane bank angle returned to wings level. At 2140:15, with the airplane continuing towards the east, it reestablished a descent close to 900 fpm and then started to increase its bank angle in a RWD direction at nearly a constant rate. As the airplane bank angle increased, the rate of descent increased, and the airspeed started to increase. By 2140:25, the bank angle exceeded 45 degrees , the vertical acceleration was 1.2 Gs, the airspeed increased through 180 knots, and the flightpath angle was close to 5 degrees airplane nose down. After 2140:25, the airplane's airspeed, vertical acceleration, bank, and dive angle continued to increase, and the right turn tightened until water impact

    https://www.ntsb.gov/about/employment/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/brief2.aspx?ev_id=20001212X19354&ntsbno=NYC99MA178&akey=1

    Rodney1111 , says: February 11, 2019 at 9:56 pm GMT
    Creating conspiracy theories is lots of fun, and sometimes can even be productive, but for this one you really do have to go overboard ignoring Occam's Razor:

    In reality, everyone who has ever acquired any kind of pilot's licence has been told repeatedly in training something like: "Understand, that without getting sufficient instruction to qualify for an instrument rating, if you lose visual reference to the ground, during the day or at night, you will be toast. Experiments have consistently shown that, even the world's most brilliant and experienced pilots, if they lose visual reference to the ground and cannot see the instruments to assess carefully what they are saying, in every case lose control of the aircraft in less than 45 seconds. And, having lost control, do not realize it, and are unable to figure out that they need to regain it, let alone what they need to do."

    Most people find this surprising, which is why in the later stages of basic training a demonstration is usually done in which the pilot wears a hood that prevents him from seeing outside the aircraft, and is instructed to maintain straight and level flight. The instructor removes the student's hood when the aircraft is in a rapidly accelerating, 45 degree bank, descending turn, when the pilot had imagined he was still flying straight and level. I can vouch that this is a persuasive demonstration!

    This isn't mere speculation. Loss of control is the inevitable consequence of a non-instrument rated pilot losing sight of the ground. It is enormously probable that this was JFK Jr's issue.

    AriusArmenian , says: February 11, 2019 at 9:59 pm GMT
    I remember a little after JFK was assassinated a report of a statement by an government official, I think someone in the FBI, saying there is evidence of a conspiracy to kill JFK and other Kennedy family members. What happens is that after an attack or bombing the media filters are not coordinated for hours or days but then controls and directives kick in the narratives get stabilized. I always watch the news reports right after the event to catch leaks. The above reported statement was never again reported by anyone.

    It is certainly looking like Israel had a hand in many operations inside the US to control its foreign policy and make sure major narratives are pro-Israel like the UK has a long history (at least from WW2 on) of using dirty tricks to control the US. Since US foreign policy is substantially controlled by the UK, Saudis, and Israel, we must suspect any of them of trying to keep control of the US with all sorts of dirty tricks. Israel in a prime candidate for assassinations and false flag operations in the US as they certainly knew by the 1960's that the survival of Israel depended on US support. There are just too many dual passport holders in these events to ignore this any longer.

    Peredur , says: February 11, 2019 at 10:01 pm GMT
    Implicitly, this article takes the position that Jackie Kennedy was not involved in the JFK assassination conspiracy, but there is an intriguing connection between the Bouvier family and the assassination via a person named George de Mohrenschildt, who was a close friend of both the Bouviers and Oswald.
    renfro , says: February 11, 2019 at 10:21 pm GMT
    @Steve Naidamast That isnt correct.
    There are 3 types of licenses a person can get:
    Sport Flyer license restricted to local area and only certain types of small aircraft.
    Recreational License restricted to local area and daylight hours only.
    Private Pilot License ..not restricted, can fly at night . at their own risk

    I did a lot of night time flying before I got my instrument rating. But wasn't stupid enough to fly in bad weather day or night.

    niteranger , says: February 11, 2019 at 10:31 pm GMT
    @Sean I have no idea if JFK Jr. was bombed out of the sky by our friends in the Mossad, CIA, or other wonderful entities. But years ago an ex CIA guy told me bluntly that the reason the CIA and intelligence agencies get away with stuff is because much of it no one would be believe they would even try thus the invention of the Conspiracy Theory.

    The Kennedys were family of egomaniacs and were often careless and their itinerary through life was filled with many people they destroyed and cast by the side of the road. They believed they were really the chosen ones and their opinion and their way of doing things were right and everyone else was wrong. So they mirrored the Jews except they were Irish.

    lysias , says: February 11, 2019 at 10:51 pm GMT
    @Peredur Mohrenschildt seems to have been Oswald's CIA handler for a while, but months before the JFK assassination he went off to Haiti. There's nothing to connect him with the JFK assassination, especially if -- as seems likely -- Oswald was not the shooter who killed JFK.
    anon [228] Disclaimer , says: February 11, 2019 at 10:54 pm GMT
    @Carlton Meyer TWA Flight 800 Investigators Claim the Official Crash Story Is a Lie
    A new film claims the official government report on the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 is an elaborate fabrication, but the most shocking part of the story is that charges are being leveled by the very investigators who put the report together.
    A new film claims the official government report on the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 is an elaborate fabrication, but the most shocking part of the story is that charges are being leveled by some of the very investigators who put the report together. Six experts who appear in the film were members of the National Transportation Safety Board investigation team that concluded the crash was an accident, but they now claim they were silenced by their superiors. The movies, "TWA Flight 800" will debut on EPIX TV next month, on the 17-year anniversary of the crash.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/twa-flight-800-film-coverup/314092/
    jeff stryker , says: February 11, 2019 at 11:24 pm GMT
    @Che Guava JFK junior was really just not that bright. He failed the bar exam at least once. As Larry Elders once said, the best thing you could say about JFK junior was that he was a down-to-earth guy who never pretended to be more than an average person who happened to be rich.

    Supposedly he loved alcohol and was obsessed with porn-he was friends with Irish-America's one porn mogul in a gallery of Jews, Larry Flint.

    He was handsome-some say that his father was Onassis and not Kennedy, believable considering his Mediterranean looks which were nothing like Kennedy's fair Irish looks (Though JFK junior was eternally proud of his Irish roots).

    His magazine was alright, supposedly advised under-the-table by Larry Flynt again.

    Anon [257] Disclaimer , says: February 12, 2019 at 1:30 am GMT
    @Che Guava The magazine was in big trouble financially. It never did break even although the Kennedy PR machine and the Kennedy worshiping media pushed it for years
    George was financed by the big French International publisher Hachette. Hachette was getting ready to stop financing a losing publication. The combination of People and New Republic just never worked.

    I don't remember any announcements that JFKjr planned to run for any office. It was just speculation and part of the endless media coverage of JFKjr which increased a thousand times after he got married

    Anon [257] Disclaimer , says: February 12, 2019 at 8:05 am GMT
    There's a book Nemesis that claims that Jackie visited Onassis on his yacht in September? October? 1963 and they arranged that Jackie would divorce jack and marry Onassis ic Hack lost the 64 election

    [Feb 16, 2019] Is Tulsi Gabbard for Real by Philip Giraldi

    Notable quotes:
    "... Tulsi's own military experience notwithstanding, she gives every indication of being honestly anti-war. In the speech announcing her candidacy she pledged "focus on the issue of war and peace" to "end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda." She referred to the danger posed by blundering into a possible nuclear war and indicated her dismay over what appears to be a re-emergence of the Cold War. ..."
    "... Gabbard has spoken at a conference of Christians United for Israel, which has defended Israel's settlement enterprise; has backed legislation that slashes funding to the Palestinians; and has cultivated ties with Boteach as well as with major GOP donor casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. She also attended the controversial address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2015, which many progressive Democrats boycotted. ..."
    "... Nevertheless, Tulsi supported Bernie Sanders' antiwar candidacy in 2016 and appears to be completely onboard and fearless in promoting her antiwar sentiments. Yes, Americans have heard much of the same before, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years. ..."
    "... What's her angle about immigration? This: https://votesmart.org/public-statement/1197137/rep-tulsi-gabbard-calls-on-congress-to-pass-the-dream-act#.XGXEplUza1s Not optimistic. ..."
    "... What's her angle about "outsourcing" jobs overseas? This: https://www.votetulsi.com/node/25011 Not bad, but, still .. ..."
    "... Regularly Americans vote for the less interventionist candidate. ..."
    "... Of course, it is impossible to predict whether it will be the same with Tulsi Gabbard, but unlike these other candidates in the past , she puts her rejection of neocons and regime change wars so much into the center of her campaign that it should be assumed that she is serious – otherwise it would be complete betrayal. ..."
    "... She'll be sabotaged by relentless smears and other dirty tricks. Only someone bought and owned will be allowed to be a candidate which means the MIC must continue being fed enormous amounts of money and war hysteria constantly being stoked. ..."
    "... Has anyone discussed the possibility of Tulsi being "marketed" or long-game "branded" through intentional theatre as "anti-war" ? ..."
    "... Any serious Democratic candidate, and to some extent any Republican, must fly through the flack of Deep State anti-populist guns. I am skeptical about Gabbard because her policy views are already too good to be true. She is "cruisin' for a bruisin'" and there is already a campaign to erase her from the debate in the manner in which Ron Paul was erased a few years back ..."
    "... Gabbard is an attractive woman and on camera she comes across as aggressive and a quick-thinking, highly articulate debater. Like Trump her instinct is to meet force with counter-force rather than roll with the punches and I think that is her best chance. ..."
    "... De ja vu. I remember reading these very similar (not exactly but similar) sentiments about Barack Obama back in 2008. What a load of crap that turned out to be ..."
    "... Don't know much about this lady. If she is "fair dinkum" in her anti war/anti-imperialism stance her only chance to get into power & then get things done will be to gain a massive, committed popular following. ..."
    Feb 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    The lineup of Democrats who have already declared themselves as candidates for their party's presidential nomination in 2020 is remarkable, if only for the fact that so many wannabes have thrown their hats in the ring so early in the process. In terms of electability, however, one might well call the seekers after the highest office in the land the nine dwarfs. Four of the would-be candidates – Marianne Williamson a writer, Andrew Yang an entrepreneur, Julian Castro a former Obama official, Senator Amy Klobuchar and Congressman John Delaney – have no national profiles at all and few among the Democratic Party rank-and-file would be able to detail who they are, where they come from and what their positions on key issues might be.

    Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has a national following but she also has considerable baggage. The recent revelation that she falsely described herself as "American Indian" back in 1986 for purposes of career advancement, which comes on top of similar reports of more of the same as well as other resume-enhancements that surfaced when she first became involved in national politics, prompted Donald Trump to refer to her as "Pocahontas." Warren, who is largely progressive on social and domestic issues, has been confronted numerous times regarding her views on Israel/Palestine and beyond declaring that she favors a "two state solution" has been somewhat reticent. She should be described as pro-Israel for the usual reasons and is not reliably anti-war. She comes across as a rather more liberal version of Hillary Clinton.

    And then there is New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, being touted as the "new Obama," presumably because he is both black and progressive. His record as Mayor of Newark New Jersey, which launched his career on the national stage, has both high and low points and it has to be questioned if America is ready for another smooth-talking black politician whose actual record of accomplishments is on the thin side. One unfortunately recalls the devious Obama's totally bogus Nobel Peace Prize and his Tuesday morning meetings with John Brennan to work on the list of Americans who were to be assassinated.

    Booker has carefully cultivated the Jewish community in his political career, to include a close relationship with the stomach-churning "America's Rabbi" Shmuley Boteach, but has recently become more independent of those ties, supporting the Obama deal with Iran and voting against anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) legislation in the Senate. On the negative side, the New York Times likes Booker, which means that he will turn most other Americans off. He is also 49 years old and unmarried, which apparently bothers some in the punditry.

    California Senator Kamala Harris is a formidable entrant into the crowded field due to her resume, nominally progressive on most issues, but with a work history that has attracted critics concerned by her hard-line law-and-order enforcement policies when she was District Attorney General for San Francisco and Attorney General for California. She has also spoken at AIPAC , is anti-BDS, and is considered to be reliably pro-Israel, which would rule her out for some, though she might be appealing to middle of the road Democrats like the Clintons and Nancy Pelosi who have increasingly become war advocates. She will have a tough time convincing the antiwar crowd that she is worth supporting and there are reports that she will likely split the black women's vote even though she is black herself, perhaps linked to her affair with California powerbroker Willie Brown when she was 29 and Brown was 61. Brown was married, though separated, to a black woman at the time. Harris is taking heat because she clearly used the relationship to advance her career while also acquiring several patronage sinecures on state commissions that netted her hundreds of thousands of dollars.

    The most interesting candidate is undoubtedly Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who is a fourth term Congresswoman from Hawaii, where she was born and raised. She is also the real deal on national security, having been-there and done-it through service as an officer with the Hawaiian National Guard on a combat deployment in Iraq. Though in Congress full time, she still performs her Guard duty.

    Tulsi's own military experience notwithstanding, she gives every indication of being honestly anti-war. In the speech announcing her candidacy she pledged "focus on the issue of war and peace" to "end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda." She referred to the danger posed by blundering into a possible nuclear war and indicated her dismay over what appears to be a re-emergence of the Cold War.

    Not afraid of challenging establishment politics, she called for an end to the "illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government," also observing that "the war to overthrow Assad is counter-productive because it actually helps ISIS and other Islamic extremists achieve their goal of overthrowing the Syrian government of Assad and taking control of all of Syria – which will simply increase human suffering in the region, exacerbate the refugee crisis, and pose a greater threat to the world." She then backed up her words with action by secretly arranging for a personal trip to Damascus in 2017 to meet with President Bashar al-Assad, saying it was important to meet adversaries "if you are serious about pursuing peace." She made her own assessment of the situation in Syria and now favors pulling US troops out of the country as well as ending American interventions for "regime change" in the region.

    In 2015, Gabbard supported President Barack Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran and more recently has criticized President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the deal. Last May, she criticized Israel for shooting "unarmed protesters" in Gaza, but one presumes that, like nearly all American politicians, she also has to make sure that she does not have the Israel Lobby on her back. Gabbard has spoken at a conference of Christians United for Israel, which has defended Israel's settlement enterprise; has backed legislation that slashes funding to the Palestinians; and has cultivated ties with Boteach as well as with major GOP donor casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. She also attended the controversial address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2015, which many progressive Democrats boycotted.

    Nevertheless, Tulsi supported Bernie Sanders' antiwar candidacy in 2016 and appears to be completely onboard and fearless in promoting her antiwar sentiments. Yes, Americans have heard much of the same before, but Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years.

    What Tulsi Gabbard is accomplishing might be measured by the enemies that are already gathering and are out to get her. Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept describes how NBC news published a widely distributed story on February 1 st , claiming that "experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard."

    But the expert cited by NBC turned out to be a firm New Knowledge, which was exposed by no less than The New York Times for falsifying Russian troll accounts for the Democratic Party in the Alabama Senate race to suggest that the Kremlin was interfering in that election. According to Greenwald, the group ultimately behind this attack on Gabbard is The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), which sponsors a tool called Hamilton 68 , a news "intelligence net checker" that claims to track Russian efforts to disseminate disinformation. The ASD website advises that "Securing Democracy is a Global Necessity."

    ASD was set up in 2017 by the usual neocon crowd with funding from The Atlanticist and anti-Russian German Marshall Fund. It is loaded with a full complement of Zionists and interventionists/globalists, to include Michael Chertoff, Michael McFaul, Michael Morell, Kori Schake and Bill Kristol. It claims, innocently, to be a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group that seeks to identify and counter efforts by Russia to undermine democracies in the United States and Europe but it is actually itself a major source of disinformation.

    For the moment, Tulsi Gabbard seems to be the "real thing," a genuine anti-war candidate who is determined to run on that platform. It might just resonate with the majority of American who have grown tired of perpetual warfare to "spread democracy" and other related frauds perpetrated by the band of oligarchs and traitors that run the United States. We the people can always hope.

    peterAUS , says: February 14, 2019 at 7:41 pm GMT

    For the moment, Tulsi Gabbard seems to be the "real thing," a genuine anti-war candidate who is determined to run on that platform.

    Be that as it may, what is conspicously missing from the article are some minor things:

    1. What's her angle about immigration? This: https://votesmart.org/public-statement/1197137/rep-tulsi-gabbard-calls-on-congress-to-pass-the-dream-act#.XGXEplUza1s Not optimistic.

    2. What's her angle about "outsourcing" jobs overseas? This: https://www.votetulsi.com/node/25011 Not bad, but, still ..

    Just those two. We can leave the rest of "globo-homo" agenda off the table, for the moment. And, the last but not the least, that nagging angle about automation and (paid) work in general. Let's not get too ambitious here. Those two, only, should suffice at the moment.

    Si1ver1ock , says: February 14, 2019 at 8:09 pm GMT
    I like Tulsi. but she hasn't been tested in a presidential campaign yet. At least we will have someone who could put peace on the ballot. She should write a book pulling her policies together and use it to get some publicity.
    Adrian E. , says: February 14, 2019 at 9:14 pm GMT
    Regularly Americans vote for the less interventionist candidate. 2008, an important reason for Obama's victory against Hillary Clinton and John McCain was that he had been against the Iraq war. 2000, George W. Bush said he was against nation building. Then, after they are elected, the neocons remain in power. Something similar again with Donald Trump who campaigned against stupid wars in the Middle East and now has surrounded himself with some of the most extreme neocons.

    Of course, it is impossible to predict whether it will be the same with Tulsi Gabbard, but unlike these other candidates in the past , she puts her rejection of neocons and regime change wars so much into the center of her campaign that it should be assumed that she is serious – otherwise it would be complete betrayal. However, if she is serious about this and is elected, she will be fought by the deep state and its allies in the media much more harshly than Trump, who isn't even consistently anti-neocons, just not reliably pro-neocon. What they would probably do to her would make spygate, the Russiagate conspiracy theory, and the Muller investigation look harmless. She might end like JFK (a VP who is just as anti-neocons might increase the chances of survival).

    But despite all the risks, I think it is worth trying. If the US was a parliamentary democracy with proportional representation and the neocons had their own party, it would hardly have more than a handful of seats in Congress. Although they don't have, a significant base of their own, neocons have remained in power for a long time, whoever was elected. At the moment, Tulsi Gabbard is probably the best hope for ending their long reign.

    anonymous [241] Disclaimer , says: February 15, 2019 at 12:30 am GMT
    She'll be sabotaged by relentless smears and other dirty tricks. Only someone bought and owned will be allowed to be a candidate which means the MIC must continue being fed enormous amounts of money and war hysteria constantly being stoked. She won't have a chance. Besides, the Dem party has gotten radical and out of touch with the majority of Americans so who really wants them in? There's no cause for optimism anywhere one looks.
    Gg Mo , says: February 15, 2019 at 3:21 am GMT
    @the grand wazoo

    Has anyone discussed the possibility of Tulsi being "marketed" or long-game "branded" through intentional theatre as "anti-war" ? Greenwald himself has questionable backers and the WWF good guy/bad guy character creations (like Trump's pre-election talking points concerning illegal wars , now stuffed down the memory holes of many), all the FAKE and distracting "fights" etc etc

    See Corbett/Sibel Edmonds on Greenwald

    jack daniels , says: February 15, 2019 at 3:48 am GMT
    @peterAUS

    Any serious Democratic candidate, and to some extent any Republican, must fly through the flack of Deep State anti-populist guns. I am skeptical about Gabbard because her policy views are already too good to be true. She is "cruisin' for a bruisin'" and there is already a campaign to erase her from the debate in the manner in which Ron Paul was erased a few years back.

    Gabbard is an attractive woman and on camera she comes across as aggressive and a quick-thinking, highly articulate debater. Like Trump her instinct is to meet force with counter-force rather than roll with the punches and I think that is her best chance. In that way she calls the bluff of her opponents: Just how confident are they that in the end the public will prefer war to peace? These points add up to a realistic chance of success but given the Deep State's stranglehold on the media she is definitely a long shot.

    Biff , says: February 15, 2019 at 4:04 am GMT
    De ja vu. I remember reading these very similar (not exactly but similar) sentiments about Barack Obama back in 2008. What a load of crap that turned out to be, but I do understand that not all politicians are cut from the same dung heap, so it is probably best to find out who is funding the little pricks while they are campaigning – for once they are elected, payback is due.

    In the case of Obama it was Robert Rubin( of Goldman Sachs) who bankrolled him, and of course, once elected it was bank bailout time. Then once Ghaddaffi's gold back Dinar became a monetary powerhouse, he committed another crime for the bankers.

    "Is she the real deal?"

    Elect her and you'll find out, and there lies the problem – you get to find out when it's too late. On the other hand, she could actually be honest and sincere, but that alone disqualifies her as a politician (the kind that Americans are used to anyway).

    NTL, she's got people's attention and if for anything else – the people are anti-war, but the monied power brokers are definitely not which begs the question – will democracy actually happen?

    animalogic , says: February 15, 2019 at 8:04 am GMT
    @Adrian E.

    Don't know much about this lady. If she is "fair dinkum" in her anti war/anti-imperialism stance her only chance to get into power & then get things done will be to gain a massive, committed popular following.

    She will need to use tactics from both the Sanders & Trump play-books. She will need to appeal to a good number in both the Sanders & Trump constituencies. Regardless, she will need an iron-will & tsunami of charisma .

    LondonBob , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:26 am GMT
    @Biff Obama was a creation of the Pritzker and Crowne families, although the puppet did decide he wanted to somewhat act on his own. Gabbard is certainly taking flak from the Israel firsters, and her debating Trump on foreign policy in a US Presidential election would be a real paradigm shift.
    RobinG , says: February 15, 2019 at 3:10 pm GMT
    @renfro Where do you get this "obsessive hatred of Muslims and Islam?"

    She's been [insistent and consistent] using the term 'radical Islamic terrorists' which, unfortunately, is an accurate description of ISIS (the bane of the ummah). OTOH, last year Tulsi was a featured speaker at a Moslem conference in NJ, and she has been outspoken about freedom of religion and mutual respect. If you've got some evidence that she excludes Islam from that, please show it.

    RobinG , says: February 15, 2019 at 3:35 pm GMT
    @jack daniels

    [Gabbard's] policy views are already too good to be true.

    Not really. Too good to be true would be if she understood Putin in the context of the US and oligarch rape of Russia in the 1990's and how he has restored the Russian economy and dignity; and if she recognized (openly) the US role in the Maidan coup and accepted the validity of the Crimean decision to return to Russia.

    Unfortunately, even though she's taken a brave position on ending US regime-change war on Syria, in many other respects she remains quite conventional. She also promotes fear of DPRK, and who knows what she thinks about China.

    she comes across as aggressive and a quick-thinking, highly articulate debater.

    Aggressive? Composed, confident, yes. Aggressive, no. Calm under fire is more like it. Take a look at the whole interview on Morning Joe. She really outclasses those squirming bitches. BUT, notice her (short) responses on Putin and Assad ("adversary" and "no"), real Judas moments. Does she believe that, or is she clinging to the Overton Window?
    https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/rep-gabbard-assad-is-not-an-enemy-of-the-us-1438093891865

    Forcible Overthrow time , says: February 15, 2019 at 5:41 pm GMT
    Tulsi's presidential timber but she's wasting her life with the Democrats. Their consulting apparatchiks are going to stuff a bunch of incoherent slogans up her butt. If she wants a real antiwar platform she should steal it wholesale from Stein and Ajamu Baraka. Baraka built a complete and consistent law-and-order platform. He's the only real antiwar candidate in this country.

    Of course the Democrat's CIA handlers will crush Tulsi if she starts to make sense, so she's going to have to take her supporters and jump to the Greens.

    She will lose, but arbitrary forcible repression of the party will discredit bullshit US electoral pageantry once and for all. Then we move into the parallel government zone in conformity with world-standard human rights law and destroy the parasitic kleptocratic USA.

    peterAUS , says: February 15, 2019 at 6:12 pm GMT
    @jack daniels You know .there IS one thing nobody wants, really, to talk about.

    .given the Deep State's stranglehold on the media she is definitely a long shot

    Why, in this age, the "stronghold on the media" is so decisive? A person who gets the most of media exposure wins? That's how it works?
    Or, do anyone reading and posting here gets his/her information from the "media"? I'd say not.

    Isn't the bottom, the very heart of the matter NOT a Deep State, Dem Joos, Anglo-Saxons, Masons, Illuminati and .whatever but simple, eternal, laziness and stupidity of an average person?
    Or, even worse: the real, true, needs and wants of an average person are simply "breads and circuses". Nothing more.
    Combine those two and here we are.

    I am aware that throws the spanner into works of those into Aryans, White supremacy, Western man and similar stuff, but, the conclusion seems inevitable.

    That's the heart of the problem "we" face at the moment. How to fix it, or even is it possible, I don't know. Have some ideas, of course.

    anon [194] Disclaimer , says: February 15, 2019 at 6:31 pm GMT
    @2stateshmustate

    If there was any justice in this country Mr. Chertoff would have long since been tried for treason for his involvement in the 911 attack.

    The arc of something or other is long but tends toward justice er something like that:

    Chertoff's business partner Mike Hayden had a stroke last November and is still "getting good care and working hard at therapy."

    No doubt US taxpayers are paying to rebuild Scumbag Hayden's fried circuits.
    Pity.

    never-anonymous , says: February 15, 2019 at 6:54 pm GMT
    CIA Giraldi probably has more Cherokee DNA than Warren. Another fact he failed to provide to the Government during the security clearance process. The troll has supported the republican establishment all his career, this distinguishes him from the trolls that support the democratic establishment all of their careers. The fact that people can debate the relative merits of political leaders from the dark lagoon reveals their complete lack of rational thought. No politician decides anything important.
    Tulip , says: February 15, 2019 at 7:39 pm GMT
    @Anonymous No, then she is toast in Hawaii politics, and she is probably running not because she plans on winning, but to raise her profile and perhaps open doors for herself on the national or state level, which won't happen if you shoot yourself in the foot at the same time.

    Besides, leaving aside Krishna consciousness, she is too close to Sanders to get any traction among the Republicans. I suppose getting the bipartisan support of the Internet kook vote is something, but hard to translate into political office.

    RobinG , says: February 15, 2019 at 8:19 pm GMT
    @Tulip

    ..getting the bipartisan support of the Internet kook vote is something, but hard to translate into political office.

    Brilliant.

    Dem Juche , says: February 16, 2019 at 12:25 am GMT
    You're never going to get anything worthwhile from a Democratic politician because they're indoctrinated worse that the brightest little Pioneer in Juche class. Take Ro Khana's meaningless pap.

    https://fellowtravelersblog.com/2018/10/23/ro-khanna-five-principles/

    What is this 'we should' crap? The law is perfectly clear. The right to self-defense is subject to necessity and proportionality tests, and invariably subject to UN Charter Chapter 7 in its entirety. See Article 51. Instead of this 'restraint' waffle, just say, the president must commit to faithfully execute the supreme law of the land, including UN Charter Chapter 7 and Article 2(4). That means refrain from use or threat of force. Period.

    Second, national security is not a loophole in human rights. Khana uses the legally meaningless CIA magic word 'threat.' Under universal jurisdiction law, it is a war crime to declare abolished, suspended or inadmissible in a court of law the rights and actions of the nationals of the hostile party. Domestic human rights are subject to ICCPR Article 4, HRC General Comment 29, and the Siracusa Principles. Instead of CIA's standard National Security get-out clause, state explicitly that US national security means respect, protection and fulfillment of all human rights. To enforce that, ratify the Rome Statute or GTFO.

    Third, internationalism is OK as far as it goes, but Ro Khana doesn't deal with the underlying problem: CIA has infested State with focal points and dotted-line reports, and demolished the department's capacity for pacific resolution of disputes. You have to explicitly tie State's mission to UN Charter Chapter 6, and criminalize placement of domestic CIA agents in State.

    Fourth, Congressional war-making powers are useless with Congress completely corrupted. Bring back the Ludlow Amendment, war by public referendum only, subject to Article 51.

    Rich , says: February 16, 2019 at 5:21 am GMT
    Tulsi is a far Left democrat. She supports raising taxes to pay for free college for people earning less than 125K and universal health care, she actually joined protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline, has a 100% rating from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, supports homosexual marriage (changed her previous position in 2012), and has an F rating from the NRA. She's a Lefty. Not for me, anyway.
    Ilyana_Rozumova , says: February 16, 2019 at 5:25 am GMT
    In any case she is less vulnerable. She can call any opposition a misogynist.
    Biff , says: February 16, 2019 at 5:30 am GMT
    @obwandiyag

    I like the one on here who says the Democrat party has "gotten radical."

    I assume this is sarcasm, but there is no denying the fact that the neocons(radical whack jobs) have jumped ship from the Republicans and attached themselves to the Democrats (although there are filtering back into the Trump administration – drunk with power they'll suck up to anyone)

    The DNC NeverTrump crowd is all but calling for a nuclear exchange with Russia because they colluded with Trump to throw the election, and they pose a National Security threat to the United States(in their head). Hillary also went on to say that Russians Hacking the DNC is another 9/11. The radical Antifa crowd is made up of 99.999999% of Democratic voters.

    [Feb 16, 2019] Libya was a war crime.

    Max Boot along with other neocons should be in jail.
    Feb 16, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Stephen J. , February 15, 2019 a t 1:43 pm

    The article states: " but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. 'Qaddafi Must Go,' Boot declared in The Weekly Standard. In Boot's telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat to the American homeland." -- -- - There is reported evidence that Libya was a war crime. And the perpetrators are Free. See info below:

    "They Speak "

    "The destruction of Libya by NATO at the behest of the UK, the US and France was a crime, one dripping in the cant and hypocrisy of Western ideologues " John Wight, November 27, 2017. https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/27/libya-chose-freedom-now-it-has-slavery/

    They speak of "The Rule of Law" while breaking the law themselves They are the dangerous hypocrites that bombed Libya, and created hell Thousands upon thousands are dead in this unfortunate country Many would still be alive, if our "leaders" had not been down and dirty

    Libya is reportedly a war crime and the war criminals are free Some of them are seen posturing on the world stage and others are on T.V. Others have written books and others are retired from public office And another exclaimed: "We came, we saw, he died" as murder was their accomplice

    They even teamed up with terrorists to commit their bloody crimes And this went unreported in the "media": was this by design? There is a sickness and perversion loose in our society today When war crimes can be committed and the "law" has nothing to say

    Another "leader" had a fly past to celebrate the bombing victory in this illegal war Now Libya is in chaos, while bloody terrorists roam secure And the NATO gang that caused all this horror and devastation Are continuing their bloody bombings in other unfortunate nations

    The question must be asked: "Are some past and present leaders above the law? Can they get away with bombing and killing, are they men of straw? Whatever happened to law and order in the so- called "democracies"? When those in power can get away with criminality: Is that not hypocrisy?

    There is no doubt that Libya was better off, before the "liberators" arrived Now many of its unfortunate people are now struggling to exist and survive The future of this war torn country now looks very sad and bleak If only our "leaders" had left it alone; but instead hypocrisy: They Speak

    "The cause of the catastrophe in Libya in Libya was the seven month US-NATO blitzkrieg from March to October 2011 in which thousands of bombs and rockets rained down on that unfortunate land which was governed by President Muammar Ghaddafi whom the West was determined to overthrow by assisting a rebel movement." Brian Cloughley, 12.02.2019 https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/02/12/in-libya-we-came-saw-he-died-will-there-repeat-in-venezuela.html

    [More info on all of this at link below] http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2019/02/they-speak.html

    [Feb 16, 2019] Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around? Pundits like Max Boot and Bill Kristol got everything after 9/11 wrong but are still considered experts. by Tucker Carlson

    Notable quotes:
    "... As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. ..."
    "... Boot's stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by The Washington Post as a columnist. The paper's announcement cited Boot's "expertise on armed conflict." ..."
    "... Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that. Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character. ..."
    "... Almost from the moment Operation Desert Storm concluded in 1991, Kristol began pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1997, The Weekly Standard ran a cover story titled "Saddam Must Go." If the United States didn't launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the lead editorial warned, the world should "get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the Gulf." ..."
    "... Under ordinary circumstances, Bill Kristol would be famous for being wrong. Kristol still goes on television regularly, but it's not to apologize for the many demonstrably untrue things he's said about the Middle East, or even to talk about foreign policy. Instead, Kristol goes on TV to attack Donald Trump. ..."
    "... Trump's election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at The Weekly Standard after more than 20 years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump. ..."
    "... By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he'd learned nothing at all. ..."
    "... Creating complex and convincing false narratives to support demonic purposes is HARD WORK, and requires big pay. ..."
    "... Lots of spilled ink here that's pretty meaningless without an answer to the following: Why does Trump employ John Bolton and Elliot Abrams? Explain Trump and Pence and Pompeo's Iran obsession and how it's any better than Kristol/Boot? ..."
    Feb 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They're happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there's no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans.

    Max Boot is living proof that it's happening in America.

    Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn't exist outside of a select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the "world's leading authorities on armed conflict."

    None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one ofthe world's Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don't need a track record of wise assessments or accurate predictions. All that's required are the circular recommendations of fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their ranks, you're in. That's good news for Max Boot.

    Boot first became famous in the weeks after 9/11 for outlining a response that the Bush administration seemed to read like a script, virtually word for word. While others were debating whether Kandahar or Kabul ought to get the first round of American bombs, Boot was thinking big. In October 2001, he published a piece in The Weekly Standard titled "The Case for American Empire."

    "The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition," Boot wrote. "The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation." In order to prevent more terror attacks in American cities, Boot called for a series of U.S.-led revolutions around the world, beginning in Afghanistan and moving swiftly to Iraq.

    "Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul," Boot wrote. "To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim. Is this an ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also without a doubt."

    In retrospect, Boot's words are painful to read, like love letters from a marriage that ended in divorce. Iraq remains a smoldering mess. The Afghan war is still in progress close to 20 years in. For perspective, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France, crowned himself emperor, defeated four European coalitions against him, invaded Russia, lost, was defeated and exiled, returned, and was defeated and exiled a second time, all in less time than the United States has spent trying to turn Afghanistan into a stable country.

    Things haven't gone as planned. What's remarkable is that despite all the failure and waste and deflated expectations, defeats that have stirred self-doubt in the heartiest of men, Boot has remained utterly convinced of the virtue of his original predictions. Certainty is a prerequisite for Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict.

    In the spring of 2003, with the war in Iraq under way, Boot began to consider new countries to invade. He quickly identified Syria and Iran as plausible targets, the latter because it was "less than two years" from building a nuclear bomb. North Korea made Boot's list as well. Then Boot became more ambitious. Saudi Arabia could use a democracy, he decided.

    "If the U.S. armed forces made such short work of a hardened goon like Saddam Hussein, imagine what they could do to the soft and sybaritic Saudi royal family," Boot wrote.

    Five years later, in a piece for The Wall Street Journal , Boot advocated for the military occupation of Pakistan and Somalia. The only potential problem, he predicted, was unreasonable public opposition to new wars.

    "Ragtag guerrillas have proven dismayingly successful in driving out or neutering international peacekeeping forces," he wrote. "Think of American and French troops blown up in Beirut in 1983, or the 'Black Hawk Down' incident in Somalia in 1993. Too often, when outside states do agree to send troops, they are so fearful of casualties that they impose rules of engagement that preclude meaningful action."

    In other words, the tragedy of foreign wars isn't that Americans die, but that too few Americans are willing to die. To solve this problem, Boot recommended recruiting foreign mercenaries. "The military would do well today to open its ranks not only to legal immigrants but also to illegal ones," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times . When foreigners get killed fighting for America, he noted, there's less political backlash at home.

    ♦♦♦

    American forces, documented or not, never occupied Pakistan, but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. "Qaddafi Must Go," Boot declared in The Weekly Standard . In Boot's telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat to the American homeland. "The only way this crisis will end -- the only way we and our allies can achieve our objectives in Libya -- is to remove Qaddafi from power. Containment won't suffice."

    In the end, Gaddafi was removed from power, with ugly and long-lasting consequences. Boot was on to the next invasion. By late 2012, he was once again promoting attacks on Syria and Iran, as he had nine years before. In a piece for The New York Times , Boot laid out "Five Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now."

    Overthrowing the Assad regime, Boot predicted, would "diminish Iran's influence" in the region, influence that had grown dramatically since the Bush administration took Boot's advice and overthrew Saddam Hussein, Iran's most powerful counterbalance. To doubters concerned about a complex new war, Boot promised the Syria intervention could be conducted "with little risk."

    Days later, Boot wrote a separate piece for Commentary magazine calling for American bombing of Iran. It was a busy week, even by the standards of a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Boot conceded that "it remains a matter of speculation what Iran would do in the wake of such strikes." He didn't seem worried.

    Listed in one place, Boot's many calls for U.S.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. ("I'll invade you!!!") Republicans in Washington didn't find any of it amusing. They were impressed. Boot became a top foreign policy adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign in 2008, to Mitt Romney in 2012, and to Marco Rubio in 2016.

    Everything changed when Trump won the Republican nomination. Trump had never heard of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He had no idea Max Boot was a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Trump was running against more armed conflicts. He had no interest in invading Pakistan. Boot hated him.

    As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. He called for effectively expelling Russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. The stakes were high, but with signature aplomb Boot assured readers it was "hard to imagine" the Russian government would react badly to the provocation. Those who disagreed Boot dismissed as "cheerleaders" for Putin and the mullahs in Iran.

    Boot's stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by The Washington Post as a columnist. The paper's announcement cited Boot's "expertise on armed conflict."

    It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. "We should never have been in Iraq," Trump announced, his voice rising. "We have destabilized the Middle East."

    Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: "They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none."

    Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts declared that the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and carried out.

    Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq war was a mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true.

    Rival Republicans denounced Trump as an apostate. Voters considered him brave. Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.

    Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that. Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character.

    ♦♦♦

    Bill Kristol is probably the most influential Republican strategist of the post-Reagan era. Born in 1954, Kristol was the second child of the writer Irving Kristol, one of the founders of neoconservatism.

    The neoconservatism of Irving Kristol and his friends was jarring to the ossified liberal establishment of the time, but in retrospect it was basically a centrist philosophy: pragmatic, tolerant of a limited welfare state, not rigidly ideological. By the time Bill Kristol got done with it 40 years later, neoconservatism was something else entirely.

    Almost from the moment Operation Desert Storm concluded in 1991, Kristol began pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1997, The Weekly Standard ran a cover story titled "Saddam Must Go." If the United States didn't launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the lead editorial warned, the world should "get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the Gulf."

    After the September 11 attacks, Kristol found a new opening to start a war with Iraq. In November 2001, he and Robert Kagan wrote a piece in The Weekly Standard alleging that Saddam Hussein hosted a training camp for Al Qaeda fighters where terrorists had trained to hijack planes. They suggested that Mohammad Atta, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was actively collaborating with Saddam's intelligence services. On the basis of no evidence, they accused Iraq of fomenting the anthrax attacks on American politicians and news outlets.

    Under ordinary circumstances, Bill Kristol would be famous for being wrong. Kristol still goes on television regularly, but it's not to apologize for the many demonstrably untrue things he's said about the Middle East, or even to talk about foreign policy. Instead, Kristol goes on TV to attack Donald Trump.

    Trump's election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at The Weekly Standard after more than 20 years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump.

    Before long he was ranting about the people who elected Trump. At an American Enterprise Institute panel event in February 2017, Kristol made the case for why immigrants are more impressive than native-born Americans. "Basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two, three, four generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever." Most Americans, Kristol said, "grew up as spoiled kids and so forth."

    In February 2018, Kristol tweeted that he would "take in a heartbeat a group of newly naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings" who supported Trump.

    By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he'd learned nothing at all.

    Tucker Carlson is the host of Fox News 's Tucker Carlson Tonight and author of Ship of Fools: How A Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution (Simon & Schuster). This excerpt is taken from that book.

    Patrick Constantine February 14, 2019 at 10:50 pm

    Trump isn't the only one hated by useless establishment Republicans – with essays like this so will Tucker. Thanks for this takedown of these two warmongering know-nothings. I wish Trump all the time was like he was at that debate in S Carolina where he said what every American knows: the Iraq invasion was stupid and we should not have done it!
    Anne Mendoza , says: February 15, 2019 at 2:10 am
    So why are these professional war peddlers still around? For the same reason that members of the leadership class who failed and continue to fail in the Middle East are still around. There has not been an accounting at any level. There is just more talk of more war.
    polistra , says: February 15, 2019 at 3:54 am
    Well, the headline pretty much answers its own question if you know the purpose of Experts. In any subject matter from science to economics to politics, Experts are paid to be wrong. Nobody has to be paid to observe reality accurately with his own senses and rational mind. Every living creature does that all the time. It's the basic requirement of survival.

    Creating complex and convincing false narratives to support demonic purposes is HARD WORK, and requires big pay.

    snake charmer , says: February 15, 2019 at 6:49 am
    ""The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition," Boot wrote. "The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.""

    In other words, if we had only squandered even more blood and treasure, why, everything would have been fine.

    Why do so many true believers end up with some variation on the true believer's wheeze: "Communism didn't fail ! It was never tried!" Then again one can't be sure that Boot is a true believer. He might be a treacherous snake trying to use American power to advance a foreign agenda.

    Mike , says: February 15, 2019 at 6:55 am
    This is an Exocet missile of an article. Both hulls compromised, taking water. Nice.
    John S , says: February 15, 2019 at 7:11 am
    This is beautiful, Boot has been rewarded for every horrible failure...
    Tom Gorman , says: February 15, 2019 at 8:36 am
    Mr. Carlson,

    Max Boot has indeed been an advocate of overseas intervention, but you fail to point out that he has recanted his support of the Iraq War. In his 2018 book "The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I left the American Right," he states:

    ". . . I can finally acknowledge the obvious: it (The Iraq War) was all a big mistake. Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost. It was a chastening lesson in the limits of American power."

    I'm glad to see that Boot, along with yourself and other Republicans, realize that American use of force must have a clear objective with reasonable chance of success. I suggest you send this article to John Bolton. I'm not sure he agrees with you.

    Dawg , says: February 15, 2019 at 9:29 am
    Great article, Mr. Tucker. I hope folks also read Mearsheimer & Walt on the Iraq War. From chapter 8 of their book: http://mailstar.net/iraq-war.html
    David LeRoy Newland , says: February 15, 2019 at 9:34 am
    Excellent article. It's a shame that the Bush era GOP took Boot and Kristol seriously. That poor judgment led Bush to make the kinds of mistakes that gave Democrats the opening they needed to gain power, which in turn led them to make even more harmful mistakes.
    Collin , says: February 15, 2019 at 9:55 am
    Being against the Iraq 2 I find this populist arguing very 'eye-rolling' as you were pimping this war to death back in the day. (In fact I remember Jon Stewart being one of the few 'pundits' that questioned the war in 2003 & 2004.) And has dovish as Trump as been, his administration is still filled with Hawks and if you are concerned about wars then maybe use your TV show for instead of whining for past mistakes:

    1) The administration action in Iran is aggressive and counter-productive to long term peace. The nuclear deal was an effective way of ensuring Iran controlling behavior for 15 years as the other parties, Europe and China, wanted to trade with Iran. (Additionally it makes our nation depend more on the Saudia relationship in which Washington should be slowly moving away from.)

    2) Like it or not, Venezuela is starting down the steps of mission creep for the Trump Administration. Recommend the administration stay away from peace keeping troops and suggest this is China's problem. (Venezuela in debt to their eyeballs with China.)

    3) Applaud the administration with peace talks with NK but warn them not to overstate their accomplishments. It is ridiculous that the administration signed big nuclear deals with NK that don't exist.

    John In Michigan , says: February 15, 2019 at 9:59 am
    I find it amazing that Boot is considered one of the "world's leading authorities on armed conflict,"yet never appears to have served in any branch of the armed forces, nor even heard a shot fired in anger. He is proof that academic credentials do not automatically confer "expertise."
    Packard Day , says: February 15, 2019 at 10:26 am
    Any war, anytime, any place, and cause just so long as American boys and girls can be in the middle of it.

    Welcome to the American NeoCon movement, recently joined by Republican Never Trumpers, elected Democrats, and a host of far too many underemployed Beltway Generals & Admirals.

    Joshua Xanadu , says: February 15, 2019 at 10:46 am
    From a reformed Leftist, thank you Tucker for calling out the stank from the Republicans. The detailed compilation of lowlights from Max Boot and Bill Kristol (don't forget Robert Kagan!) should be etched in the minds of the now pro-war Democratic Party establishment.
    Taras 77 , says: February 15, 2019 at 10:57 am
    Being a neocon war monger means that you will never have to say you are sorry. The press will give them a pass every single time.

    It is all about Israel-being wrong 100% of the time means it is all good because it was in the service of Israel.

    Paul Reidinger , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:07 am
    Yet another reason not to read the Washington Post.
    Anja Mast , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:13 am
    Tucker!!! When did you start writing for TAC?!?!

    I laughed out loud while reading this, and continued laughing through to the end, until I saw who had the audacity to tell the truth about these utter incompetent failures (who have failed upwards for more than a decade now) who call themselves "foreign policy experts." Yeah -- "experts" at being so moronically wrong that you really start wondering if perhaps the benjamins from another middle eastern nation, that can't be named, has something to do with their worthless opinions, which always seem to do made for the benifit of the nameless nation.

    So hurrah for you!!! Let the truth set us all free! Praise the Lord & Sing Songs of Praise to his Name!!!! Literally that's how great it is to hear the pure & unvarnished TRUTH spoken out loud in this publication!

    I hope you get such awesome feedback that you are asked to continue to bless us with more truths! Thank you! You totally made my day!

    And thank you for your service to this country, where it used to be considered patriotic to speak the truth honestly & plainly!

    Joe , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:14 am
    Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around? Simple, leaders like Trump keep them around, e.g. Pompeo, Bolton and Abrams.
    David Biddington , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:22 am
    John Bolton and Eliot Abrams on Team Trump, gearing up with Bibi to attack Iran is of no concern to sir?
    George Crosley , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:22 am
    "Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul," Boot wrote.

    To which the reader might reasonably reply, "What do you mean we , Paleface?"

    When I see Max Boot or Bill Kristol in uniform, carrying a rifle, and trudging with their platoon along the dusty roads of the Middle East, I'll begin to pay attention to their bleats and jeremiads.

    Until that day, I'll continue to view them as a pair of droning, dull-as-ditchwater members of the 45th Word-processing Brigade. (Company motto: "Let's you and him fight!")

    Frank Goodpasture III , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:29 am
    It is my understanding that HRC led the charge to overthrow and hang Gaddafi in spite of a reluctant Obama administration. Did Boot, in fact, influence her?
    marku52 , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:29 am
    "Most Americans, Kristol said, "grew up as spoiled kids and so forth."" Unintentional irony, one must presume. Still it is astonishing that it took someone as addled as DJT to point out the obvious–Invading Iraq was a massive mistake.

    Where were the rest of the "adults"

    Jimmy Lewis , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:41 am
    Boot, Kristal, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should all be in jail for war crimes.
    jk , says: February 15, 2019 at 11:53 am
    Just like Eliot Abrams, John McCain, GWB, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld or any other neocon, there is no justice or punishment or even well deserved humiliation for these parasites. They are always misinformed, misguided, or "well intentioned."

    The US can interfere with sovereign governments and elections at will I guess and not be responsible for the the unintended consequences such as 500k+ killed in the Middle East since the Iraq and Afghan debacle.

    There are sugar daddies from the MIC, the Natsec state (aka the Swamp), AIPAC, and even Jeff Bezos (benefactor of WaPo) that keep these guys employed.

    You need to be more critical of Trump also as he is the one hiring these clowns. But other than that, keep up the good work Mr. Carlson!

    Allen , says: February 15, 2019 at 12:09 pm
    These Chairborne Rangers in Washington know nothing about war. They are the flip side of the radical Dems. "Hey, we lost in 2016. Let's do MORE of what made us lose in the first place!"
    D , says: February 15, 2019 at 12:53 pm
    Would've been nice if you wrote this about Bolton, Adams, Pompeo, Pence, or any of the other sundry neocon lunatics in the Trump administration.

    Nonetheless, always good to see a takedown of Boot and Kristol.

    J Thomsen , says: February 15, 2019 at 1:07 pm
    The GOP is as much an enemy to the Trump revolution as the left. The Bush/Clinton/Obama coalition runs DC – controls the federal workforce, and colludes to run the Federal government for themselves and their pet constituents.

    Trump should have stuck it out on the shutdown until those federal workers left. I think it was called RIF wherein after 30 days, he could dump the lot of em.

    THE GOP IS NOT THE PARTY OF LESS GOVERNMENT. That's there motto for busy conservatives who don't have the time or inclination to monitor both sides of the swamp.

    THEY ALL HAVE GILLS . we need to starve em out.

    Joe from Pa , says: February 15, 2019 at 1:10 pm
    Lots of spilled ink here that's pretty meaningless without an answer to the following: Why does Trump employ John Bolton and Elliot Abrams? Explain Trump and Pence and Pompeo's Iran obsession and how it's any better than Kristol/Boot?

    What's going on in Yemen?

    sanford sklansky , says: February 15, 2019 at 1:18 pm
    Funny how when liberals said it was wrong to be in Iraq they were vilified. Yes some conservatives changed their minds. Trump however is all over the map when it comes to wars. http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176527/

    [Feb 15, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Pres. Trump -- STOP treating our troops as political pawns - YouTube

    Notable quotes:
    "... Establishment NeoCons and Neolibs are going to erase Tulsi's candidacy by not mentioning her, not including her in polls, and not letting into debates. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich received this treatment in 2008/2012 ... because of their Antiwar stance. ..."
    Feb 14, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    More on Tulsi Gabbard:

    https://www.tulsi2020.com/about

    Grey Skeptic , 18 hours ago

    Tulsi, I sincerely hope you go all the way. You embody what this country desperately needs. Keep fighting them against the smears.

    Lakshya Sharma , 18 hours ago

    People need leaders like you who address the real needs.

    man , 16 hours ago

    Best thing about tulsi is that she stood for Bernie when Bernie didn't stood for himself

    mattisava , 18 hours ago (edited)

    #Tulsi2020 #TULSIrEVOLution #MakeAntiwarGreatAgain

    Establishment NeoCons and Neolibs are going to erase Tulsi's candidacy by not mentioning her, not including her in polls, and not letting into debates. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich received this treatment in 2008/2012 ... because of their Antiwar stance.

    Gabriel Arcari , 17 hours ago

    Yes Tulsi!! That goes for corporate democrats as well...

    R R , 18 hours ago

    Make America honest again!!

    xXRAGING- DEATHXx , 18 hours ago

    A True Leader, right there. #TULSI2020

    Trident , 18 hours ago

    "America First" shoots missiles at Syria...

    Keith Gilbertson , 14 hours ago

    You're being blacklisted like a third party candidate. Might as well form a new party, Tulsi. Aloha Party.

    Barney Google , 16 hours ago

    America's worst enemies are in Washington and the MSM. LET'S TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK! NO MORE REGIME CHANGE WARS TULSI2020 FEEL THE ALOHA!

    Randy Hartono , 18 hours ago

    Wooooow it's true... Treated like a tools

    passane74 , 15 hours ago (edited)

    Damn ! Short and powerful true. May God bless President Tulsi 2020 and America.

    Benjamin Henderson , 13 hours ago

    Michigan loves you Tulsi

    Judicial78 , 11 hours ago

    I get goosebumps every time I listen to this lady speak, even without the dramatic music. Happy Valentines day to the heart of America, Tulsi Gabbard!!

    Judith Schwartzbacker , 15 hours ago

    tulsi/bernie2020.

    I really don't think Bernie is going to run. and tulsi should announce early on that her pick for vp is bernie. bernie for domestic solutions and tulsi for foreign ones. That's the winning ticket.

    If the dnc rigs the election again then i think the people should conduct our own regime change here with tulsi as our commander-in-chief of the peoples' army. this nonsense has to stop.

    [Feb 15, 2019] Morning Joe Attacks Tulsi For Opposing War - YouTube

    Notable quotes:
    "... I'm not American but after seeing how Tulsi Gabbard conducted herself in this (so called) interview I urge ALL thinking Americans to put all of their support behind her candidacy for the Presidency. ..."
    Feb 07, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Bob McDonnel , 1 week ago

    Lol the establishment is scared of her! Go Tulsi!

    Gary Purkeljc , 1 week ago (edited)

    Assad is an "adversary" to the US because Assad isn't controlled by Israel and Saudi Arabia.

    GoogIe+ , 6 days ago (edited)

    "What are Assad's interests?" - That's what I'd call, a knockout Tusi punch. Totally caught that reporter blind-sighted. Nice one Tulsi!

    Horatio Jones , 6 days ago

    I'm not American but after seeing how Tulsi Gabbard conducted herself in this (so called) interview I urge ALL thinking Americans to put all of their support behind her candidacy for the Presidency.

    Shane Baldwin , 6 days ago

    Tulsi Gabbard is the populist Progressive we've been looking for.

    Ana Suri , 1 week ago

    I am a Syrian and I appreciate everything Tulsi Gabbard is trying to do to stop regime change. The US media is criminal and responsible for the blood shed in Syria and many other places. Assad was never an enemy to the US or other western countries.

    Jay Smathers , 6 days ago (edited)

    Gabbard is young, but her metal shows in this clip as she just smiles at the msnbc stupidity. She doesn't even take these jokers seriously, and that is going to allow her to go over their heads and connect directly with the public. This is actually awesome.

    jim seko , 4 days ago

    If Russia was actually helping Tulsi Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, and Jill Stein etc, the Russians are the good guys.

    Unlawful_Falafel , 1 week ago

    you know what is sad? i trust RT more than MSM.

    Dakota Walker , 6 days ago

    These smears only drive me to vote for her.

    C.M. Butler , 1 week ago

    I am a Trump supporter on the right but truly appreciate Jimmy Dore. I am hopeful that the left & right can unite against these pro-war establishment propagandists. Let's stop foreign wars, neocon/neolib policies & MSM deceit ... then we can debate progressive vs conservative issues.

    linwood ellsworth , 3 days ago

    I'm a veteran and would agree 100% with Tulsi Gabbard. People are catching on. There are only 67 thumbs down. Great video.

    John Theos , 6 days ago (edited)

    Putin actually said that, other than the cold war, Russia and the U.S. have always been allies, and that's what he wants. I have two recent videos where Putin is calling for peace and good relations with America. Do I really need to find the links and post them here? I'm a busy man. Let's all help Jimmy, Ron and Steph by doing some homework. Americans should stop smearing good people and start applying some critical thinking skills. "Putin-puppets"?

    What about " military industrial complex puppets" who robotically repeat false Russian collusion accusations in order to silence honest dissent? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

    ArgentiumTea , 4 days ago

    It's funny Jimmy Dore, Secular Talk, The Humanist Report and others all support her but not The Young Turks "the home of the progressives"

    Paula Laflamme , 2 days ago

    Hey Jimmy, hey Jimmy! Have you seen the vid of Putin talking to the western press? I think it was 2015 or so. He's calmly talking about NATO and weapons being put on Russia's borders and how bad it would be if this goes ahead and Russia has to respond. He's practically pleading with them to let the American people know this doesn't have to happen. I saw him saying much the same thing in a Charlie Rose interview before Rose moved into the Big Bucks on network TV. Yet as things were heating up about Russia Rose never mentioned this as he sat at that morning show desk.

    Karl Letcher , 1 week ago (edited)

    Katie, who has never served, asks Tulsi, who has, to explain herself to the military. These people are as clueless as they are shameless.

    je suis Informaticien , 6 days ago

    america create their ennemies, all the wars just for isra hell

    Tony Skwara , 6 days ago

    I hate MSNBC

    Lirrulewon , 6 days ago

    She is one hot veteran if i may add

    Ken Texican , 4 days ago

    MSNBC and especially the panel of Morning Joe are some of the most shameless tools in America. If DC is a sewer inhabited by big fat sewer rats; then Kasie (and her ilk), are the plague-infected fleas that take their blood-meals from those rats.

    [Feb 15, 2019] Media Erasing Tulsi Gabbard From Presidential Campaign by The Jimmy Dore Show

    Feb 15, 2019 | The Jimmy Dore Show

    Become a Patron/Premium Member: https://www.patreon.com/jimmydore & http://bit.ly/JDPremium
    Schedule of Live Shows: http://bit.ly/2gRqoyL
    Check out our Merch Store: http://bit.ly/tjdsmerch or http://bit.ly/shopTJDS

    ScottTheAngel , 1 day ago

    This is a good reason to vote for her the only thing she represents is good and they want her gone it seems, she has the majority of America on her mind.

    Unlawful_Falafel , 1 day ago

    ok, it's official. i'm voting for tulsi gabbard, since clearly the corrupt establishment doesn't want me to and would rather i vote warren.

    kastlerock01 , 1 day ago

    They did the exact same thing to Ron Paul during his 2012 bid. There are so many videos showing how they cheated him it's almost comical.

    Joe Gibbs , 1 day ago

    It looks like your political system is very broken. Corrupted by money and greed.

    Laura LeDoux , 1 day ago

    I was a huge Bernie fan in the last election, but I would love it if he holds a huge press conference to announce his plans and instead gives a HUGE endorsement to Tulsi. That would be a great way to stick it to the media and give her more coverage.

    Syncopator , 1 day ago (edited)

    They need to make sure Tulsi won't make it to any debates, because they can't allow the discussion that would ensue about expensive, illegal and useless military adventures that we need to stop. And in a debate, they can't simply interrupt her like they can in an interview. That's not a discussion they can allow because people could think they might actually have a choice in the matter. For war mongers, they sure are chicken-shits who obviously don't even have any confidence in their own arguments in favor of it.

    Tony Quinn , 21 hours ago

    The media did they exact same thing to Ron Paul for the same reason. Bill O'Reilly hated Ron Paul.

    Sykes , 1 day ago

    Politics as usual. Voters always end up with two oligarch picks that have been groomed to mouth what they are told. MSM employees are not independent thinkers either. The two party system has been around for a long time, although in reality it is one party with a and b choices.

    MsLuath , 1 day ago

    She is smart, honest and courageous. Of course they will do all they can to dismiss her.

    [Feb 15, 2019] Israel lobby proves Ilhan Omar's point

    Feb 12, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    US Representative Ilhan Omar's (D-Minnesota) tweet is a critique of US-Israel collusion in the Middle East, Institute for Public Accuracy's Sam Husseini tells RT America's Manila Chan. #RTAmerica #InQuestionRT #QuestionMore

    [Feb 15, 2019] Glenn Greenwald Defends Rep. Ilhan Omar Criticizing Israeli Lobby AIPAC Is Not Anti-Semitic

    YouTube video
    Feb 11, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    https://democracynow.org

    Democratic Congressmember Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is facing criticism today after commenting on a tweet by Glenn Greenwald. On Sunday, Greenwald tweeted, "GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy threatens punishment for @IlhanMN and @RashidaTlaib over their criticisms of Israel.

    It's stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans." Rep. Omar retweeted his post and added the line: "It's all about the Benjamins baby."

    She later named AIPAC as the organization paying American politicians to be pro-Israel.

    [Feb 14, 2019] Rep. Tulsi Gabbard Urges Support for Paid Family and Medical Leave Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard

    Feb 14, 2019 | gabbard.house.gov
    Press Release Washington, DC -- Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) joined a coalition of over 160 lawmakers in introducing legislation that would create a national paid family and medical leave program. The Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, known as the FAMILY Act, would ensure that every American worker can take up to 12 weeks of paid leave for a pregnancy or the birth or adoption of a child, to recover from a serious illness, or to care for a seriously ill family member.

    Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said: "Across the country, people are working hard every day, living paycheck to paycheck, barely making enough to get by. When a crisis arises, like a parent who falls sick, a personal health crisis, or a newborn child, the demands of balancing a job and family needs can be too much. Without a national family leave policy, millions of Americans are forced to make an impossible choice between their family's health, and their financial security. Our legislation will provide the security our working families need to care for their loved ones, without risking their ability to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table."

    Background: The FAMILY Act establishes a national family and medical leave insurance program. Receiving paid leave benefits allows workers to take time away from their jobs to address their most-pressing needs. Specifically, the legislation would provide eligible employees up to 12 weeks of partial income to address:

    Follow Rep. Tulsi Gabbard on social media:

    [Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. ..."
    "... Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means. ..."
    "... Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI, and within the entire Democrat Party. ..."
    "... Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western world. ..."
    "... Stephen Cohen discusses how rational viewpoints are banned from the mainstream media, and how several features of US life today resemble some of the worst features of the Soviet system. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/12/stephen-cohen-on-war-with-russia-and-soviet-style-censorship-in-the-us/ ..."
    "... The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly 4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course. ..."
    "... Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically justified by its diabolical policies. ..."
    "... Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their Government Lackeys. ..."
    "... It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it to be so ..."
    "... If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation, propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. ..."
    "... See also this primer on Mueller's MO. ..."
    "... The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to increase military spending; and more, more, more war. ..."
    "... Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished. a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians. ..."
    "... At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already brainwashed population? ..."
    "... The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. ..."
    "... Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others, the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry. ..."
    Feb 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    For more than two years U.S. politicians, the media and some bloggers hyped a conspiracy theory. They claimed that Russia had somehow colluded with the Trump campaign to get him elected.

    An obviously fake 'Dirty Dossier' about Trump, commissioned by the Clinton campaign, was presented as evidence. Regular business contacts between Trump flunkies and people in Ukraine or Russia were claimed to be proof for nefarious deals. A Russian click-bait company was accused of manipulating the U.S. electorate by posting puppy pictures and crazy memes on social media. Huge investigations were launched. Every rumor or irrelevant detail coming from them was declared to be - finally - the evidence that would put Trump into the slammer. Every month the walls were closing in on Trump.

    https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/qjUvfZj-Fm0

    At the same time the very real Trump actions that hurt Russia were ignored.

    Finally the conspiracy theory has run out of steam. Russiagate is finished :

    After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016 election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats and Republicans on the committee.
    ...
    Democrats and other Trump opponents have long believed that special counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional investigators would unearth new and more explosive evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russians. Mueller may yet do so, although Justice Department and Congressional sources say they believe that he, too, is close to wrapping up his investigation.

    Nothing, zero, nada was found to support the conspiracy theory. The Trump campaign did not collude with Russia. A few flunkies were indicted for unrelated tax issues and for lying to the investigators about some minor details. But nothing at all supports the dramatic claims of collusion made since the beginning of the affair.

    In a recent statement House leader Nancy Pelosi was reduced to accuse Trump campaign officials of doing their job:

    "The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people. ...

    No one called her out for spouting such nonsense.

    Russiagate created a lot of damage.

    The alleged Russian influence campaign that never happened was used to install censorship on social media. It was used to undermine the election of progressive Democrats. The weapon salesmen used it to push for more NATO aggression against Russia. Maria Butina, an innocent Russian woman interested in good relation with the United States, was held in solitary confinement (recommended) until she signed a paper which claims that she was involved in a conspiracy.

    In a just world the people who for more then two years hyped the conspiracy theory and caused so much damage would be pushed out of their public positions. Unfortunately that is not going to happen. They will jump onto the next conspiracy train continue from there.

    Posted by b on February 12, 2019 at 01:38 PM | Permalink

    Comments next page " Legally, Maria Butina was suborned into signing a false declaration. If there were the rule of law, such party or parties that suborned her would be in gaol. Considering Mueller's involvement with Lockerbie, I am not holding my breath. FWIW the Swiss company that made the timers allegedly involved in Lockerbie have some comments of its own .

    james , Feb 12, 2019 2:00:14 PM | link

    thanks b..

    I will be really glad when this 'get Russia' craziness is over, but I suspect even if the Mueller investigation has nothing, all the same creeps will be pulling out the stops to generate something... Skripal, Integrity Initiative, and etc. etc. stuff like this just doesn't go away overnight or with the end of this 'investigation'... folks are looking for red meat i tell ya!

    as for Maria Butina - i look forward to reading the article.. that was a travesty of justice but the machine moves on, mowing down anyone in it's way... she was on the receiving end of all the paranoia that i have come to associate with the western msm at this point...

    Zanon , Feb 12, 2019 2:03:26 PM | link
    Considering Mueller hasn't produced its report nor the House dito, its way to early to say Russia gate is "finished".
    Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 2:11:44 PM | link
    And Russiagate was used ...
    ... by Hillary to justify her loss to Trump

    Hillary's loss is actually best explained as her throwing the election to Trump . The Deep State wanted a nationalist to win as that would best help meet the challenge from Russia and China - a challenge that they had been slow to recognize.

    =
    ... to smear Wikileaks as a Russian agent

    The DNC leak is best explained as a CIA false flag.

    =
    ... to remove and smear Michael Flynn

    Trump said that he fired Flynn for lying to VP Pence but Flynn's conversations with the Russian Ambassador after Obama threw them out for "meddling" in the US election was an embarrassment to the Administration as Putin's Putin's decision not to respond was portrayed as favoritism toward the Trump Administration.

    Rob , Feb 12, 2019 2:28:50 PM | link
    You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. This is typical behavior for conspiracy theorists.
    bj , Feb 12, 2019 2:30:41 PM | link
    Jimmy Dore on same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgBxfHdb4OU Enjoy!
    Ort , Feb 12, 2019 2:34:14 PM | link
    I hope that Russiagate is indeed "finished", but I think it needs to be draped with garlic-clove necklaces, shot up with silver bullets, sprinkled with holy water, and a wooden stake driven through its black heart just to make sure.

    I don't dispute the logical argument B. presents, but it may be too dispassionately rational. I know that the Russiagate proponents and enthralled supporters of the concept are too invested psychologically in this surrealistic fantasy to let go, even if the official outcome reluctantly admits that there's no "there" there.

    The Democratic Party, one of the major partners mounting the Russophobic psy-op, has already resolved to turn Democratic committee chairmen loose to dog the Trump administration with hearings aggressively flogging any and all matters that discredit and undermine Trump-- his business connections, social liaisons, etc.

    They may hope to find the Holy Grail: the elusive "bombshell" that "demands" impeachment, i.e., some crime or illicit conduct so heinous that the public will stand for another farcical impeachment proceeding. But I reckon that the Dems prefer the "soft" impeachment of harassing Trump with hostile hearings in hopes of destroying his 2020 electability with the death of a thousand innuendoes and guilt-by-association.

    Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means.

    Put more succinctly, I fear that Russiagate won't be finished until Rachel Maddow says it's finished. ;)

    worldblee , Feb 12, 2019 2:38:17 PM | link
    Once a hypothesis is fixed in people's minds, whether true or not, it's hard to get them to let go of it. And let's not forget how many times the narrative changed (and this is true in the Skripal case as well), with all past facts vanishing to accommodate a new narrative.

    So I, like others, expect the fake scandal to continue while many, many other real crimes (the US attempted coup in Venezuela and the genocidal war in Yemen, for instance) continue unabated.

    karlof1 , Feb 12, 2019 2:43:34 PM | link
    Putin solicits public input for essential national policy goals . If ever there was a template to follow for an actual MAGAgenda, Putin's Russia provides one. While US politicos argue over what is essentially Bantha Pudu, Russians are hard at work improving their nation which includes restructuring their economy.

    Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI, and within the entire Democrat Party.

    BlunderOn , Feb 12, 2019 2:48:51 PM | link
    mmm...

    I very much doubt it it is over. Trump is corrupt and has links to corrupt Russians. Collusion, maybe not, but several stinking individuals are in the frame for, guess what - ...bring it on... The fact that Hilary was arguably even worse (a point made ad-nauseum on here) is frankly irrelevant. The vilification of Trump will not affect the warmongers efforts. He is a useful idiot

    james , Feb 12, 2019 2:52:33 PM | link
    for a take on the alternative reality some are living in emptywheel has an article up on the nbc link b provides and the article on butina is discussed in the comments section... as i said - they are looking for red meat and will not be happy until they get some... they are completely zonkers...
    Blooming Barricade , Feb 12, 2019 2:55:18 PM | link
    Now that this racket has been admitted as such, I expect all of the media outlets that devoted banner headlines, hundreds of thousands of hours of cable TV time, thousands of trees, and free speech online to immediately fire all of their journalists and appoint Glenn Greenwald as the publisher of the New York Times, Michael Tracey at the Post, Aaron Matte at the Guardian, and Max Blumenthal at the Daily Beast.

    Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western world.

    jayc , Feb 12, 2019 3:03:51 PM | link
    Stephen Cohen discusses how rational viewpoints are banned from the mainstream media, and how several features of US life today resemble some of the worst features of the Soviet system. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/12/stephen-cohen-on-war-with-russia-and-soviet-style-censorship-in-the-us/
    Heath , Feb 12, 2019 3:18:29 PM | link
    It turned out getting rid of the Clintons has been a long term project.
    Harry Law , Feb 12, 2019 3:21:58 PM | link
    The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly 4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course.

    Then of course Russia has to be surrounded by NATO should they try and take over Europe by surging through the Fulda gap./s

    Then of course there are the professional pundits who have built careers on anti Russian propaganda, Rachel Maddow for instance who earns 30,000$ per day to spew anti Russian nonsense.

    folktruther , Feb 12, 2019 3:27:32 PM | link
    Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically justified by its diabolical policies.

    I'm sorry b is so down on Conspiracy Theories, since they reveal quite real staged homicidal false flag operations of US power. Feeding into the stigmatizing of the truth about reality is not in the interests of the earth's people.

    frances , Feb 12, 2019 3:31:11 PM | link
    somehow I see this "revelation: tied to Barr's approaching tenure. I think they (FBI/DOJ) didn't want his involvement in their noodle soup of an investigation and the best way to accomplish that was to end it themselves. I also suspect that a deal has been made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone.

    So we will see no investigation of Hillary, her 650,000 emails or the many crimes they detailed (according to NYPD investigation of Weiner's laptop) and the US will continue to be at war all day, every day. Team Swamp rules.

    Ash , Feb 12, 2019 3:35:06 PM | link
    Meanwhile, MSM is prepping its readers for the possibility that the Mueller report will never be released to us proles. If that's the case, I'm sure nobody will try to use innuendo to suggest it actually contains explosive revelations after all...
    Heath , Feb 12, 2019 3:38:37 PM | link
    @16

    Harry, its vitally important as the US desperately wants to keep Europe under its thumb and to stop this European army which means Europe lead by Paris and Berlin becomes a world power. Trump's attempts to make nice with Russia is to keep it out of the EU bloc.

    Anne Jaclard , Feb 12, 2019 3:54:47 PM | link
    Well, the liberal conspiracy car crash ensured downmarket Mussolini a second term, it appears...Hard Brexit Tories also look likely to win thanks to centrist sabatoge of the left. You reap what you sow, corporate presstitutes!
    wagelaborer , Feb 12, 2019 4:05:25 PM | link
    Sane people have predicted the end of Russiagate almost as many times as insane people have predicted that the "smoking gun that will get rid of Trump" has been found. And yet the Mighty Wurlitzer grinds on, while social media is more and more censored.

    I expect it all to continue until the 2020 election circus winds up into full-throated mode, and no one talks about anything but the next puppet to be appointed. Oops, I mean "elected".

    Jen , Feb 12, 2019 4:15:57 PM | link
    Ort @ 7:

    You also need to behead the corpse, stuff the mouth with a lemon and then place the head down in the coffin with the body in supine (facing up) position. Weight the coffin with stones and wild roses and toss it into a fast-flowing river.

    Russiagate won't be finished until a wall is built around Capitol Hill and all its inhabitants and worker bees declared insane by a properly functioning court of law.

    Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 4:16:59 PM | link
    frances @18:
    I also suspect that a deal has been made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone. So we will see no investigation of Hillary ...
    Underlying your perspective is the assumption that USA is a democracy where a populist "outsider" could be elected President, Yet you also believe that Hillary and the Deep State have the power to manipulate government and the intelligence agencies and propose a "conspiracy theory" based on that power.

    Isn't it more likely that Trump made it clear (behind closed doors, of course) that he was amenable to the goals of the Deep State and that the bogus investigation was merely done to: 1) cover their own election meddling; 2) eliminate threats like Flynn and Assange/Wikileaks; 3) anti-Russian propaganda?

    Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 4:33:16 PM | link
    Jen

    Steven Cohen once lamented that there were no "wise men" left in foreign policy. All the independent realists were shut out.

    Michael McNulty , Feb 12, 2019 4:49:32 PM | link
    US anti-Russian hysteria is moving into that grey area beyond McCarthyism approaching Nazism.
    Circe , Feb 12, 2019 4:58:40 PM | link
    Dowd, Trump's former lawyer on Russiagate stated there may not even be a report. If this is the case then the Zionist rulers have gotten to Mueller who no doubt figured out that the election collusion breadcrumbs don't lead to Putin, they lead to Netanyahu and Zionist billionaire friends! So Mueller may have to come up with a nothing burger to hide the truth.
    Danny , Feb 12, 2019 5:02:34 PM | link
    B is the only alternative media blogger I've followed for a significant amount of time without becoming disenfranchised. Not because he has no blind spot - his is just one I can deal with... optimism.

    hopehely , Feb 12, 2019 5:14:49 PM | link

    I will believe Russiagate is finished when expelled Russian staff gets back, when the US returns the seized Russian properties, when the consulate is Seattle reopens and when USA issues formal apology to Russia.

    Posted by: hopehely | Feb 12, 2019 5:14:49 PM | link

    bevin , Feb 12, 2019 5:16:18 PM | link
    Nobody has ever advanced the tiniest shred of credible evidence that 'Russia' or its government at any level was in any way implicated either in Wikileaks' acquisition of the DNC and Podesta emails or in any form of interference with the Presidential election.

    This has been going on for three years and not once has anything like evidence surfaced.

    On the other hand there has been an abundance of evidence that those alleging Russian involvement consistently refused to listen to explore the facts.

    Incredibly, the DNC computers were never examined by the FBI or any other agency resembling an official police agency. Instead the notorious Crowdstrike professionally russophobic and caught red handed faking data for the Ukrainians against Russia were commissioned to produce a 'report.'

    Nobody with any sense would have credited anything about Russiagate after that happened.

    Thgen there was the proof, from VIPS and Bill Binney (?) that the computers were not hacked at all but that the information was taken by thumbdrive. A theory which not only Wikileaks but several witnesses have offered to prove.

    Not one of them has been contacted by the FBI, Mueller or anyone else "investigating."

    In reality the charges from the first were ludicrous on their face. There is, as b has proved and every new day's news attests, not the slightest reason why anyone in the Russian government should have preferred Trump over Clinton. And that is saying something because they are pretty well indistinguishable. And neither has the morals or brains of an adolescent groundhog.

    Russiagate is over, alright, The Nothingburger is empty. But that means nothing in this 'civilisation': it will be recorded in the history books, still to be written, by historians still in diapers, that "The 2016 Presidential election, which ended in the controversial defeat of Hillary Clinton, was heavily influenced by Russian agents who hacked ..etc etc"

    What will not be remembered is that every single email released was authentic. And that within those troves of correspondence there was enough evidence of criminality by Clinton and her campaign to fill a prison camp.

    Another thing that will not be recalled is that there was once a young enthusiastic man, working for the DNC, who was mugged one evening after work and killed.

    Baron , Feb 12, 2019 5:16:49 PM | link
    The 'no collusion' result will only spur the 'beginning of the end' baboons to shout even more, they'll never stop until they die in their beds or the plebs of the Republic made them adore the street lamp posts, you'll see. The former is by far more likely, the unwashed of American have never had a penchant for foreign affairs except for the few spasms like Vietnam.
    Circe , Feb 12, 2019 5:20:11 PM | link
    There was collusion alright but the only Russians who helped Trump get elected and were in on the collusion are citizens of ISRAEL FIRST, likewise for the American billionaires who put Trump in the power perch. ISRAEL FIRST.

    That's why Trump is on giant billboards in Israel shaking hands with the Yahoo. Trump is higher in the polls in Israel than in the U.S. If it weren't that the Zionist upper crust need Trump doing their dirty work in America, like trying today get rid of Rep. Omar Ilhan, then Trump would win the elections in Ziolandia or Ziostan by a landslide cause he's been better for the Joowish state than all preceding Presidents put together. Mazel tov to them bullshet for the rest of us servile mass in the vassal West and Palestinians the most shafted class ever. Down with Venezuela and Iran, up with oil and gas. The billionare shysters' and Trump's payola is getting closer. Onward AZ Empire!

    Les , Feb 12, 2019 5:24:36 PM | link
    He proved himself so easy to troll during the election. It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate.
    Zachary Smith , Feb 12, 2019 5:38:03 PM | link
    @ Harry Law #16

    At least Germany has the good sense not to throw taxpayer money at the F-35. German F-35 decision sacrifices NATO capability for Franco-German industrial cooperation I don't know what they have in mind with a proposed airplane purchase. If they need fighters, buy or lease Sweden's Gripen. If attack airplanes are what they're after, go to Boeing and get some brand new F-15X models. If the prickly French are agreeable to build a 6th generation aircraft, that would be worth a try.

    Regarding Rachel Maddow, I recently had an encounter with a relative who told me 1) I visited too many oddball sites and 2) he considered Rachel M. to be the most reliable news person in existence. I think we're talking "true believer" here. :)

    Zachary Smith , Feb 12, 2019 5:43:19 PM | link
    @ Les @42
    It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate.

    Considering how those "intelligence agencies" are hard pressed to find their own tails, even if you allow them to use both hands, it would surprise me.

    That Trump would turn out to be a tub of jello in more than just a physical way has been a surprise to an awful lot of us.

    Pft , Feb 12, 2019 5:44:54 PM | link

    Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their Government Lackeys.

    It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it to be so

    Allowed the bipartisan support for the clamp down on alt media with censorship by social media (Deep State Tools) and funded by the Ministry of Truth set up by Obama in his last days in office to under the false pretense of protecting us from foreign governments interference in elections (except Israel of course) . Similar agencies have been set up or planned to be in other countries followig the US example such as UK, France, Russia, etc.

    Did anyone really expect Mr "Cover It Up " Mueller to find anything? Mueller is Deep State all the way and Trump is as well, not withstanding the "Fake Wrestling " drama that they are bitter enemies. All the surveillance done over the past 2-3 decades would have so much dirt on the Trumpet they could silence him forever . Trump knew that going in and I sometimes wonder if he was pressured to run as a condition to avoid prosecution. Pretty sure every President since Carter has been "Kompromat"

    Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 6:29:51 PM | link
    james, bevin

    If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation, propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

    stevelaudig , Feb 12, 2019 6:34:12 PM | link
    Russians and likely at the behest of the Russian state interfered and it was fair payback for Yeltsin's election. It is time to move on but not in feigned ignorance of what was done. Was it "outcome" affecting, possibly, but not clearly and if the US electoral college and electoral system generally is so decrepit that a second level power in the world can influence then its the US's fault.

    It's not like the 2000 election wasn't a warning shot about the rottenness of system and a system that doesn't understand a warning shot deserves pretty much what it gets. But there's enough non-hype evidence of acts and intent to say yes, the Russians tried and may have succeeded. They certainly are acting guilty enough. but still close the book move and move on to Trump's 'real' crimes which were done without a Russian assist.

    spudski , Feb 12, 2019 6:52:50 PM | link
    @38 bevin @47 james

    I seem to recall former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray saying that it was not a hack and that he had been handed a thumb drive in a field near American University by a disgruntled Democrat whistleblower. Further, I seem to recall William Binney, former NSA Technical Leader for intelligence, conducting an experiment to show that internet speeds at the time would not allow the information to be hacked - they knew the size of the files and the period over which they were downloaded. Plus, Seth Rich. So why does anyone even believe it was a hack, @32 THN?

    Johan Meyer , Feb 12, 2019 6:55:54 PM | link
    Just another comment re Mueller. There is a great documentary by (Dutch, not Israeli---different person) Gideon Levy, Lockerbie Revisited. The narration is in Dutch, but the interviews are in English, and there is a small segment of a German broadcast. The documentary ends abruptly where one set of FBI personnel contradict statements by another set of FBI personnel. See also this primer on Mueller's MO.
    frances , Feb 12, 2019 7:11:07 PM | link
    reply to Les 42
    "It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate."

    Not the intelligence agencies, the Military IMO. They knew HC for what she was; horrifically corrupt and,again IMO,they know she is insane.

    They saw and I think still see Trump as someone they could work with, remember Rogers (Navy) of the NSA going to him immediately once he was elected? That was the Military protecting him as best they could.

    They IMO have kept him alive and as long as he doesn't send any troops into "real" wars, they will keep on keeping him alive.
    This doesn't mean Trump hasn't gone over to the Dark Side, just that no military action will take place that the military command doesn't fully support.

    Again, I could be wrong, he could be backed by fiends from Patagonia for all I really know:)

    AriusArmenian , Feb 12, 2019 8:44:27 PM | link
    The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to increase military spending; and more, more, more war.
    james , Feb 12, 2019 9:34:59 PM | link
    ot - further to @65 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK5YFos56ZU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK5YFos56ZU

    as jr says - welcome to the rabbit hole..

    ben , Feb 12, 2019 10:11:05 PM | link
    Hope you're right b. Maybe now we can get on with some real truths.
    1. That there is really only one party with real influence, the party of $.
    2. That most of the Dems belong to that club, and virtually all the Repubs.
    3. That the U$A is not a real democracy, but an Oligarchy.
    4. That the corporate empire is the greatest purveyor of evil the world has ever known.

    And these are just a few truths. Thanks for the therapy b, hope you feel better...

    Circe , Feb 12, 2019 10:52:22 PM | link
    Boy, I hope Jackrabbit sees this. Everyone knows I believe Trump is the anointed chosen of the Zionist 1%. There was no Russia collusion; it was Zionist collusion with a Russian twist...
    Circe , Feb 12, 2019 11:11:17 PM | link
    Oh yeah! Forgot to mention the latest. Trump is asking Kim to provide a list of his nuclear scientists! Before Kim acts on this request, he should call up the Iranian government for advise 'cause they have lots of experience and can warn Kim of what will happen to each of those scientists. They'll be put on a kill-list and will be extrajudicially wacked as in executed. Can you believe the chutzpah? Trump must think Kim is really stupid to fall for that one!

    Aye! The thought of six more years of Zionist pandering Trump. Barf-inducing prospect is too tame.

    PHC , Feb 13, 2019 2:25:44 AM | link

    Russiagate is finished. So, now is the time to create Chinagate. But how ??

    V , Feb 13, 2019 2:25:48 AM | link
    The view from the hermitage is, we are in the age of distractions. Russiagate will be replaced with one of a litany of distractions, purely designed to keep us off target. The target being, corruption, vote rigging, illegal wars, war crimes, overthrowing sovereign governments, and political assasinations, both at home and abroad. Those so distracted, will focus on sillyness; not the genuine danger afoot around the planet. Get used to it; it's become the new normal.
    Circe , Feb 13, 2019 3:53:19 AM | link
    @76Hw
    I have yet to read anything more delusional, nay, utterly preposterous. Methinks you over-project too much. Even Trump would have a belly-ache laugh reading that sheeple spiel. You're the type that sees the giant billboard of Zionist Trump and Yahoo shaking hands and drones on and on that our lying eyes deceive us and it's really Trump playing 4-D chess. I suppose when he tried to pressure Omar Ilhan into resigning her seat in Congress yesterday, that too was reverse psychology?

    Trump instagramed the billboard pic, he tweeted it, he probably pasted it on his wall; maybe with your kind of wacky, Trump infatuation, you should too!

    Starring role

    Circe , Feb 13, 2019 4:15:37 AM | link
    Russiagate is finished because Mueller discovered an embarrassing fact: The collusion was and always will be with Israel. Here's Trump professing his endless love for Zionism: Trump Resign
    snake , Feb 13, 2019 5:13:14 AM | link

    Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished.
    a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians.

    Most designs of armed nation states provide the designers with information feedback and the designers use that information to appoint more obedient politicians and generals to run things, and to improve the design to better serve the designers. The armed rule making structure is designed to give the designers complete control over those targeted to be the governed. Why so stupid the governed? ; always they allow themselves to be manipulated like sheep.

    When 10 angry folks approach you with two pieces of ropes: one to throw over the tree branch under which your horse will be supporting you while they tie the noose around your neck and the other shorter piece of rope to tie your hands behind ..your back you need at that point to make your words count , if five of the people are black and five are white. all you need do is say how smart the blacks are, and how stupid the whites are, as the two groups fight each other you manage your escape. democrat vs republican= divide to conquer. gun, no gun = divide to conquer, HRC vs DJT = divide to conquer, abortion, no abortion = divide to conquer, Trump is a Russian planted in a high level USA position of power = divide to conquer, They were all in on it together,, Muller was in the white house to keep the media supplied with XXX, to keep the law enforcement agencies in the loop, and to advise trump so things would not get out of hand ( its called Manipulation and the adherents to the economic system called Zionism
    For the record, Zionism is not related to race, religion or intelligence. Zionism is a system of economics that take's no captives, its adherents must own everything, must destroy and decimate all actual or imaginary competition, for Zionist are the owners and masters of everything? Zionism is about power, absolute power, monopoly ownership and using governments everywhere to abuse the governed. Zionism has many adherents, whites, blacks, browns, Christians, Jews, Islamist, Indians, you name it among each class of person and walk of life can be found persons who subscribe to the idea that they, and only they, should own everything, and when those of us, that are content to be the governed let them, before the kill and murder us, they usually end up owning everything.

    snake , Feb 13, 2019 6:08:16 AM | link
    Here might the subject matter that Russia Gate sought to camouflage https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/02/13/588433/US-Saudi-Arabia-nuclear-deal-nuclear-weapons 'This comes as US Energy Secretary Rick Perry has been holding secret talks with Saudi officials on sharing US nuclear technology.'

    Finally, a hypothesis to explain

    1. why the Joint non nuclear agreement with Iran and the other nuclear power nations, that prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons, was trashed? Someone needs to be able to say Iran is developing ..., at the right time.

    2. Why Netanyohu made public a video that claimed Iran was developing nuclear stuff in violation of the Iran non nuclear agreement, and everybody laughed,

    3. Why the nuclear non proliferation agreement with Russia, that terminated the costly useless arms race a decade ago, has been recently terminated, to reestablish the nuclear arms race, no apparent reason was given the implication might be Russia could be a target, but

    4. why it might make sense to give nukes to Saudi Arabia or some other rogue nation, and

    5. why no one is allowed to have nuclear weapons except the Zionist owned and controlled nation states.

    Statement: Zionism is an economic system that requires the elimination of all competition of whatever kind. It is a winner get's all, takes no prisoners, targets all who would threaten or be a challenge or a threat; does not matter if the threat is in in oil and gas, technology or weapons as soon as a possibility exist, the principles of Zionism would require that it be taken out, decimated, and destroyed and made where never again it could even remotely be a threat to the Empire, that Zionism demands..

    Hypothesis: A claim that another is developing nuclear weapon capabilities is sufficient to take that other out?

    Kiza , Feb 13, 2019 8:26:29 AM | link
    I am glad that most commenters understand that Russiagate will not go away. But the majority appear to miss the real reason. Russiagate is not an accusation, it is the state of mind.

    At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already brainwashed population?

    The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. Of course, the most ironic in the affair is that it is the so called US "intellectuals", academics and other assorted cretins who are the most fervent proponents. If you were wondering how Russia can make such amazing defensive weapons that US can only deny exist and wet dream of having, there is your answer. It is the state of mind. The whole of US establishment are legends in their on lunch time and totally delusional about the reality surrounding them - both Russiagate and MAGA cretins, no report can help the Russiagate nation.

    Finally, I am thinking of that crazy and ugly professor bitch from the British Cambridge University who gives her lectures naked to protest something or other. I am so lucky that I do not have to go to a Western university ever again. What a catastrophic decline! No Brexit can help the Skripal nation.

    NemesisCalling , Feb 13, 2019 8:46:48 AM | link
    Russiagate is finished, but is DJT also among the rubble?

    Hardly any money for the border wall and still lingering in the ME?

    If Hoarsewhisperer proves to be correct above re: DJT, he will really have to knock our socks off before election 2020. To do this he will have to unequivocally and unceremoniously withdraw from the MENA and Afghanistan and possibly declare a National Emergency for more money for the wall.

    The problem is, when he does this, he will look impulsively dangerous and this may harm his mystique to the lemmings who need a president to be more "presidential."

    My money is on status quo all the way to 2020 and the rethugz hoping the Dems will eat their own in an orgy of warring identities.

    I would love to be proven wrong.

    morongobill , Feb 13, 2019 9:52:25 AM | link
    Rush Limbaugh has been on a roll with his analysis of Russiagate, in fact, his analysis is in line with the writer/editor here at MOA.
    Bart Hansen , Feb 13, 2019 10:52:12 AM | link
    The collusion story may be faltering, but the blame for Russia poisoning the Skripals lives on. The other night on The News Hour, "Judy" led off the program with this: "It has been almost a year since Kremlin intelligence officers attempted to kill a Russian defector in the British city of Salisbury by poisoning him with a nerve agent. That attack, and the subsequent death of a British woman, scared away tourists and shoppers, but authorities and residents are working to get the town's economy back on track. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports."
    Erelis , Feb 13, 2019 12:15:48 PM | link

    Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others, the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry.

    Here is one recent example. You know the measles outbreak in the US Pacific Northwest. Yup, the Russians. How do we know. A government funded research grant. The study found that 899 tweets caused people to doubt vaccines. Looks like money is to be had even by academics for the right results.

    Measles outbreak: Anti-vaccination misinformation fueled by Russian propagandists, study finds
    https://www.oregonlive.com/clark-county/2019/02/measles-outbreak-anti-vaccination-misinformation-fueled-by-russian-propagandists-study-finds.html

    [Feb 13, 2019] Making Globalism Great Again by C.J. Hopkins

    Highly recommended!
    Pretty biting satire
    Notable quotes:
    "... So how did Trump finally get the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He did that by acting like a fascist (i.e., like a "normal" president). Which is to say he did the bidding of the deep state goons and corporate mandarins that manage the global capitalist empire the smiley, happy, democracy-spreading, post-fascist version of fascism we live under. ..."
    "... Notwithstanding what the corporate media will tell you, Americans elected Donald Trump, a preposterous, self-aggrandizing ass clown, not because they were latent Nazis, or because they were brainwashed by Russian hackers, but, primarily, because they wanted to believe that he sincerely cared about America, and was going to try to "make it great again" (whatever that was supposed to mean, exactly). ..."
    "... Unfortunately, there is no America. There is nothing to make great again. "America" is a fiction, a fantasy, a nostalgia that hucksters like Donald Trump (and other, marginally less buffoonish hucksters) use to sell whatever they are selling themselves, wars, cars, whatever. What there is, in reality, instead of America, is a supranational global capitalist empire, a decentralized, interdependent network of global corporations, financial institutions, national governments, intelligence agencies, supranational governmental entities, military forces, media, and so on. If that sounds far-fetched or conspiratorial, look at what is going on in Venezuela. ..."
    "... And Venezuela is just the most recent blatant example of the empire in action. ..."
    Feb 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Maybe Donald Trump isn't as stupid as I thought. I'd hate to have to admit that publicly, but it does kind of seem like he has put one over on the liberal corporate media this time. Scanning the recent Trump-related news, I couldn't help but notice a significant decline in the number of references to Weimar, Germany, Adolf Hitler, and " the brink of fascism " that America has supposedly been teetering on since Hillary Clinton lost the election.

    I googled around pretty well, I think, but I couldn't find a single editorial warning that Trump is about to summarily cancel the U.S. Constitution, dissolve Congress, and proclaim himself Führer . Nor did I see any mention of Auschwitz , or any other Nazi stuff which is weird, considering that the Hitler hysteria has been a standard feature of the official narrative we've been subjected to for the last two years.

    So how did Trump finally get the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He did that by acting like a fascist (i.e., like a "normal" president). Which is to say he did the bidding of the deep state goons and corporate mandarins that manage the global capitalist empire the smiley, happy, democracy-spreading, post-fascist version of fascism we live under.

    I'm referring, of course, to Venezuela, which is one of a handful of uncooperative countries that are not playing ball with global capitalism and which haven't been "regime changed" yet. Trump green-lit the attempted coup purportedly being staged by the Venezuelan "opposition," but which is obviously a U.S. operation, or, rather, a global capitalist operation. As soon as he did, the corporate media immediately suspended calling him a fascist, and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, and so on, and started spewing out blatant propaganda supporting his effort to overthrow the elected government of a sovereign country.

    Overthrowing the governments of sovereign countries, destroying their economies, stealing their gold, and otherwise bringing them into the fold of the global capitalist "international community" is not exactly what most folks thought Trump meant by "Make America Great Again." Many Americans have never been to Venezuela, or Syria, or anywhere else the global capitalist empire has been ruthlessly restructuring since shortly after the end of the Cold War. They have not been lying awake at night worrying about Venezuelan democracy, or Syrian democracy, or Ukrainian democracy.

    This is not because Americans are a heartless people, or an ignorant or a selfish people. It is because, well, it is because they are Americans (or, rather, because they believe they are Americans), and thus are more interested in the problems of Americans than in the problems of people in faraway lands that have nothing whatsoever to do with America. Notwithstanding what the corporate media will tell you, Americans elected Donald Trump, a preposterous, self-aggrandizing ass clown, not because they were latent Nazis, or because they were brainwashed by Russian hackers, but, primarily, because they wanted to believe that he sincerely cared about America, and was going to try to "make it great again" (whatever that was supposed to mean, exactly).

    Unfortunately, there is no America. There is nothing to make great again. "America" is a fiction, a fantasy, a nostalgia that hucksters like Donald Trump (and other, marginally less buffoonish hucksters) use to sell whatever they are selling themselves, wars, cars, whatever. What there is, in reality, instead of America, is a supranational global capitalist empire, a decentralized, interdependent network of global corporations, financial institutions, national governments, intelligence agencies, supranational governmental entities, military forces, media, and so on. If that sounds far-fetched or conspiratorial, look at what is going on in Venezuela.

    The entire global capitalist empire is working in concert to force the elected president of the country out of office. The US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands, Israel, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Argentina have officially recognized Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, in spite of the fact that no one elected him. Only the empire's official evil enemies (i.e., Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and other uncooperative countries) are objecting to this "democratic" coup. The global financial system (i.e., banks) has frozen (i.e., stolen) Venezuela's assets, and is attempting to transfer them to Guaido so he can buy the Venezuelan military. The corporate media are hammering out the official narrative like a Goebbelsian piano in an effort to convince the general public that all this has something to do with democracy. You would have to be a total moron or hopelessly brainwashed not to recognize what is happening.

    What is happening has nothing to do with America the "America" that Americans believe they live in and that many of them want to "make great again." What is happening is exactly what has been happening around the world since the end of the Cold War, albeit most dramatically in the Middle East. The de facto global capitalist empire is restructuring the planet with virtual impunity. It is methodically eliminating any and all impediments to the hegemony of global capitalism, and the privatization and commodification of everything.

    Venezuela is one of these impediments. Overthrowing its government has nothing to do with America, or the lives of actual Americans. "America" is not to going conquer Venezuela and plant an American flag on its soil. "America" is not going to steal its oil, ship it "home," and parcel it out to "Americans" in their pickups in the parking lot of Walmart.

    What what about those American oil corporations? They want that Venezuelan oil, don't they? Well, sure they do, but here's the thing there are no "American" oil corporations. Corporations, especially multi-billion dollar transnational corporations (e.g., Chevron, ExxonMobil, et al.) have no nationalities, nor any real allegiances, other than to their major shareholders. Chevron, for example, whose major shareholders are asset management and mutual fund companies like Black Rock, The Vanguard Group, SSgA Funds Management, Geode Capital Management, Wellington Management, and other transnational, multi-trillion dollar outfits. Do you really believe that being nominally headquartered in Boston or New York makes these companies "American," or that Deutsche Bank is a "German" bank, or that BP is a "British" company?

    And Venezuela is just the most recent blatant example of the empire in action. Ask yourself, honestly, what have the "American" regime change ops throughout the Greater Middle East done for any actual Americans, other than get a lot of them killed? Oh, and how about those bailouts for all those transnational "American" investment banks? Or the billions "America" provides to Israel? Someone please explain how enriching the shareholders of transnational corporations like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin by selling billions in weapons to Saudi Arabian Islamists is benefiting "the American people." How much of that Saudi money are you seeing? And, wait, I've got another one for you. Call up your friendly 401K manager, ask how your Pfizer shares are doing, then compare that to what you're paying some "American" insurance corporation to not really cover you.

    For the last two-hundred years or so, we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as the citizens of a collection of sovereign nation states, as "Americans," "Germans," "Greeks," and so on. There are no more sovereign nation states. Global capitalism has done away with them. Which is why we are experiencing a "neo-nationalist" backlash. Trump, Brexit, the so-called "new populism" these are the death throes of national sovereignty, like the thrashing of a suffocating fish before you whack it and drop it in the cooler. The battle is over, but the fish doesn't know that. It didn't even realize there was a battle until it suddenly got jerked up out of the water.

    In any event, here we are, at the advent of the global capitalist empire. We are not going back to the 19th Century, nor even to the early 20th Century. Neither Donald Trump nor anyone else is going to "Make America Great Again." Global capitalism will continue to remake the world into one gigantic marketplace where we work ourselves to death at bullshit jobs in order to buy things we don't need, accumulating debts we can never pay back, the interest on which will further enrich the global capitalist ruling classes, who, as you may have noticed, are preparing for the future by purchasing luxury underground bunkers and post-apocalyptic compounds in New Zealand. That, and militarizing the police, who they will need to maintain "public order" you know, like they are doing in France at the moment, by beating, blinding, and hideously maiming those Gilets Jaunes (i.e., Yellow Vest) protesters that the corporate media are doing their best to demonize and/or render invisible.

    Or, who knows, Americans (and other Western consumers) might take a page from those Yellow Vests, set aside their political differences (or at least ignore their hatred of each other long enough to actually try to achieve something), and focus their anger at the politicians and corporations that actually run the empire, as opposed to, you know, illegal immigrants and imaginary legions of Nazis and Russians. In the immortal words of General Buck Turgidson, "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed," but, heck, it might be worth a try, especially since, the way things are going, we are probably going end up out there anyway.

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

    [Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... War with Russia. ..."
    "... Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union. ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... "Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... "The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate." ..."
    "... "When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media." ..."
    "... "And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything." ..."
    "... "That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that." ..."
    "... Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.. ..."
    Feb 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    On stage at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C. this past week was Princeton University Professor Emeritus Stephen Cohen, author of the new book, War with Russia: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.

    Cohen has largely been banished from mainstream media.

    "I had been arguing for years -- very much against the American political media grain -- that a new US/Russian Cold War was unfolding -- driven primarily by politics in Washington, not Moscow," Cohen writes in War with Russia. "For this perspective, I had been largely excluded from influential print, broadcast and cable outlets where I had been previously welcomed."

    On the stage at Busboys and Poets with Cohen was Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation magazine, and Robert Borosage, co-founder of the Campaign for America's Future.

    During question time, Cohen was asked about the extent of the censorship in the context of other Americans who had been banished from mainstream American media, including Ralph Nader, whom the liberal Democratic establishment, including Borosage and Vanden Heuvel, stiff armed when he crashed the corporate political parties in the electoral arena in 2004 and 2008.

    Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union.

    "Until some period of time before Trump, on the question of what America's policy toward Putin's Kremlin should be, there was a reasonable facsimile of a debate on those venues that had these discussions," Cohen said. "Are we allowed to mention the former Charlie Rose for example? On the long interview form, Charlie would have on a person who would argue for a very hard policy toward Putin. And then somebody like myself who thought it wasn't a good idea."

    "Occasionally that got on CNN too. MSNBC not so much. And you could get an op-ed piece published, with effort, in the New York Times or Washington Post ."

    "Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times six or seven years ago. But then it stopped. And to me, that's the fundamental difference between this Cold War and the preceding Cold War."

    "I will tell you off the record – no, I'm not going to do it," Cohen said. "Two exceedingly imminent Americans, who most op-ed pages would die to get a piece by, just to say they were on the page, submitted such articles to the New York Times , and they were rejected the same day. They didn't even debate it. They didn't even come back and say – could you tone it down? They just didn't want it."

    "Now is that censorship? In Italy, where each political party has its own newspaper, you would say – okay fair enough. I will go to a newspaper that wants me. But here, we are used to these newspapers."

    "Remember how it works. I was in TV for 18 years being paid by CBS. So, I know how these things work. TV doesn't generate its own news anymore. Their actual reporting has been de-budgeted. They do video versions of what is in the newspapers."

    "Look at the cable talk shows. You see it in the New York Times and Washington Post in the morning, you turn on the TV at night and there is the video version. That's just the way the news business works now."

    "The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate."

    "If you are not, then you struggle to create your own alternative media. It's new in my lifetime. I know these imminent Americans I mentioned were shocked when they were just told no. It's a lockdown. And it is a form of censorship."

    "When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media."

    "Dissidents created what is known as samizdat – that's typescript that you circulate by hand. Gorbachev, before he came to power, did read some samizdat. But it's no match for newspapers published with five, six, seven million copies a day. Or the three television networks which were the only television networks Soviet citizens had access to."

    "And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything."

    "That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that."

    Cohen appears periodically on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News. And that rankled one person in the audience at Busboys and Poets, who said he worried that Cohen's perspective on Russia can be "appropriated by the right."

    "Trump can take that and run on a nationalistic platform – to hell with NATO, to hell with fighting these endless wars, to do what he did in 2016 and get the votes of people who are very concerned about the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia," the man said.

    Cohen says that on a personal level, he likes Tucker Carlson "and I don't find him to be a racist or a nationalist."

    "Nationalism is on the rise around the world everywhere," Cohen said. "There are different kinds of nationalism. We always called it patriotism in this country, but we have always been a nationalistic country."

    "Fox has about three to four million viewers at that hour," Cohen said. "If I am not permitted to give my take on American/Russian relations on any other mass media, and by the way, possibly talk directly to Trump, who seems to like his show, and say – Trump is making a mistake, he should do this or do that instead -- I don't get many opportunities – and I can't see why I shouldn't do it."

    "I get three and a half to four minutes," Cohen said. "I don't see it as consistent with my mission, if that's the right word, to say no. These articles I write for The Nation , which ended up in my book, are posted on some of the most God awful websites in the world. I had to look them up to find out how bad they really are. But what can I do about it?"

    Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Russell Mokhiber

    Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter..

    [Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. ..."
    "... Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means. ..."
    "... Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI, and within the entire Democrat Party. ..."
    "... Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western world. ..."
    "... Stephen Cohen discusses how rational viewpoints are banned from the mainstream media, and how several features of US life today resemble some of the worst features of the Soviet system. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/12/stephen-cohen-on-war-with-russia-and-soviet-style-censorship-in-the-us/ ..."
    "... The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly 4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course. ..."
    "... Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically justified by its diabolical policies. ..."
    "... Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their Government Lackeys. ..."
    "... It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it to be so ..."
    "... If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation, propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. ..."
    "... See also this primer on Mueller's MO. ..."
    "... The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to increase military spending; and more, more, more war. ..."
    "... Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished. a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians. ..."
    "... At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already brainwashed population? ..."
    "... The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. ..."
    "... Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others, the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry. ..."
    Feb 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    For more than two years U.S. politicians, the media and some bloggers hyped a conspiracy theory. They claimed that Russia had somehow colluded with the Trump campaign to get him elected.

    An obviously fake 'Dirty Dossier' about Trump, commissioned by the Clinton campaign, was presented as evidence. Regular business contacts between Trump flunkies and people in Ukraine or Russia were claimed to be proof for nefarious deals. A Russian click-bait company was accused of manipulating the U.S. electorate by posting puppy pictures and crazy memes on social media. Huge investigations were launched. Every rumor or irrelevant detail coming from them was declared to be - finally - the evidence that would put Trump into the slammer. Every month the walls were closing in on Trump.

    https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/qjUvfZj-Fm0

    At the same time the very real Trump actions that hurt Russia were ignored.

    Finally the conspiracy theory has run out of steam. Russiagate is finished :

    After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016 election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats and Republicans on the committee.
    ...
    Democrats and other Trump opponents have long believed that special counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional investigators would unearth new and more explosive evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russians. Mueller may yet do so, although Justice Department and Congressional sources say they believe that he, too, is close to wrapping up his investigation.

    Nothing, zero, nada was found to support the conspiracy theory. The Trump campaign did not collude with Russia. A few flunkies were indicted for unrelated tax issues and for lying to the investigators about some minor details. But nothing at all supports the dramatic claims of collusion made since the beginning of the affair.

    In a recent statement House leader Nancy Pelosi was reduced to accuse Trump campaign officials of doing their job:

    "The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people. ...

    No one called her out for spouting such nonsense.

    Russiagate created a lot of damage.

    The alleged Russian influence campaign that never happened was used to install censorship on social media. It was used to undermine the election of progressive Democrats. The weapon salesmen used it to push for more NATO aggression against Russia. Maria Butina, an innocent Russian woman interested in good relation with the United States, was held in solitary confinement (recommended) until she signed a paper which claims that she was involved in a conspiracy.

    In a just world the people who for more then two years hyped the conspiracy theory and caused so much damage would be pushed out of their public positions. Unfortunately that is not going to happen. They will jump onto the next conspiracy train continue from there.

    Posted by b on February 12, 2019 at 01:38 PM | Permalink

    Comments next page " Legally, Maria Butina was suborned into signing a false declaration. If there were the rule of law, such party or parties that suborned her would be in gaol. Considering Mueller's involvement with Lockerbie, I am not holding my breath. FWIW the Swiss company that made the timers allegedly involved in Lockerbie have some comments of its own .

    james , Feb 12, 2019 2:00:14 PM | link

    thanks b..

    I will be really glad when this 'get Russia' craziness is over, but I suspect even if the Mueller investigation has nothing, all the same creeps will be pulling out the stops to generate something... Skripal, Integrity Initiative, and etc. etc. stuff like this just doesn't go away overnight or with the end of this 'investigation'... folks are looking for red meat i tell ya!

    as for Maria Butina - i look forward to reading the article.. that was a travesty of justice but the machine moves on, mowing down anyone in it's way... she was on the receiving end of all the paranoia that i have come to associate with the western msm at this point...

    Zanon , Feb 12, 2019 2:03:26 PM | link
    Considering Mueller hasn't produced its report nor the House dito, its way to early to say Russia gate is "finished".
    Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 2:11:44 PM | link
    And Russiagate was used ...
    ... by Hillary to justify her loss to Trump

    Hillary's loss is actually best explained as her throwing the election to Trump . The Deep State wanted a nationalist to win as that would best help meet the challenge from Russia and China - a challenge that they had been slow to recognize.

    =
    ... to smear Wikileaks as a Russian agent

    The DNC leak is best explained as a CIA false flag.

    =
    ... to remove and smear Michael Flynn

    Trump said that he fired Flynn for lying to VP Pence but Flynn's conversations with the Russian Ambassador after Obama threw them out for "meddling" in the US election was an embarrassment to the Administration as Putin's Putin's decision not to respond was portrayed as favoritism toward the Trump Administration.

    Rob , Feb 12, 2019 2:28:50 PM | link
    You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. This is typical behavior for conspiracy theorists.
    bj , Feb 12, 2019 2:30:41 PM | link
    Jimmy Dore on same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgBxfHdb4OU Enjoy!
    Ort , Feb 12, 2019 2:34:14 PM | link
    I hope that Russiagate is indeed "finished", but I think it needs to be draped with garlic-clove necklaces, shot up with silver bullets, sprinkled with holy water, and a wooden stake driven through its black heart just to make sure.

    I don't dispute the logical argument B. presents, but it may be too dispassionately rational. I know that the Russiagate proponents and enthralled supporters of the concept are too invested psychologically in this surrealistic fantasy to let go, even if the official outcome reluctantly admits that there's no "there" there.

    The Democratic Party, one of the major partners mounting the Russophobic psy-op, has already resolved to turn Democratic committee chairmen loose to dog the Trump administration with hearings aggressively flogging any and all matters that discredit and undermine Trump-- his business connections, social liaisons, etc.

    They may hope to find the Holy Grail: the elusive "bombshell" that "demands" impeachment, i.e., some crime or illicit conduct so heinous that the public will stand for another farcical impeachment proceeding. But I reckon that the Dems prefer the "soft" impeachment of harassing Trump with hostile hearings in hopes of destroying his 2020 electability with the death of a thousand innuendoes and guilt-by-association.

    Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means.

    Put more succinctly, I fear that Russiagate won't be finished until Rachel Maddow says it's finished. ;)

    worldblee , Feb 12, 2019 2:38:17 PM | link
    Once a hypothesis is fixed in people's minds, whether true or not, it's hard to get them to let go of it. And let's not forget how many times the narrative changed (and this is true in the Skripal case as well), with all past facts vanishing to accommodate a new narrative.

    So I, like others, expect the fake scandal to continue while many, many other real crimes (the US attempted coup in Venezuela and the genocidal war in Yemen, for instance) continue unabated.

    karlof1 , Feb 12, 2019 2:43:34 PM | link
    Putin solicits public input for essential national policy goals . If ever there was a template to follow for an actual MAGAgenda, Putin's Russia provides one. While US politicos argue over what is essentially Bantha Pudu, Russians are hard at work improving their nation which includes restructuring their economy.

    Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI, and within the entire Democrat Party.

    BlunderOn , Feb 12, 2019 2:48:51 PM | link
    mmm...

    I very much doubt it it is over. Trump is corrupt and has links to corrupt Russians. Collusion, maybe not, but several stinking individuals are in the frame for, guess what - ...bring it on... The fact that Hilary was arguably even worse (a point made ad-nauseum on here) is frankly irrelevant. The vilification of Trump will not affect the warmongers efforts. He is a useful idiot

    james , Feb 12, 2019 2:52:33 PM | link
    for a take on the alternative reality some are living in emptywheel has an article up on the nbc link b provides and the article on butina is discussed in the comments section... as i said - they are looking for red meat and will not be happy until they get some... they are completely zonkers...
    Blooming Barricade , Feb 12, 2019 2:55:18 PM | link
    Now that this racket has been admitted as such, I expect all of the media outlets that devoted banner headlines, hundreds of thousands of hours of cable TV time, thousands of trees, and free speech online to immediately fire all of their journalists and appoint Glenn Greenwald as the publisher of the New York Times, Michael Tracey at the Post, Aaron Matte at the Guardian, and Max Blumenthal at the Daily Beast.

    Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western world.

    jayc , Feb 12, 2019 3:03:51 PM | link
    Stephen Cohen discusses how rational viewpoints are banned from the mainstream media, and how several features of US life today resemble some of the worst features of the Soviet system. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/12/stephen-cohen-on-war-with-russia-and-soviet-style-censorship-in-the-us/
    Heath , Feb 12, 2019 3:18:29 PM | link
    It turned out getting rid of the Clintons has been a long term project.
    Harry Law , Feb 12, 2019 3:21:58 PM | link
    The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly 4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course.

    Then of course Russia has to be surrounded by NATO should they try and take over Europe by surging through the Fulda gap./s

    Then of course there are the professional pundits who have built careers on anti Russian propaganda, Rachel Maddow for instance who earns 30,000$ per day to spew anti Russian nonsense.

    folktruther , Feb 12, 2019 3:27:32 PM | link
    Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically justified by its diabolical policies.

    I'm sorry b is so down on Conspiracy Theories, since they reveal quite real staged homicidal false flag operations of US power. Feeding into the stigmatizing of the truth about reality is not in the interests of the earth's people.

    frances , Feb 12, 2019 3:31:11 PM | link
    somehow I see this "revelation: tied to Barr's approaching tenure. I think they (FBI/DOJ) didn't want his involvement in their noodle soup of an investigation and the best way to accomplish that was to end it themselves. I also suspect that a deal has been made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone.

    So we will see no investigation of Hillary, her 650,000 emails or the many crimes they detailed (according to NYPD investigation of Weiner's laptop) and the US will continue to be at war all day, every day. Team Swamp rules.

    Ash , Feb 12, 2019 3:35:06 PM | link
    Meanwhile, MSM is prepping its readers for the possibility that the Mueller report will never be released to us proles. If that's the case, I'm sure nobody will try to use innuendo to suggest it actually contains explosive revelations after all...
    Heath , Feb 12, 2019 3:38:37 PM | link
    @16

    Harry, its vitally important as the US desperately wants to keep Europe under its thumb and to stop this European army which means Europe lead by Paris and Berlin becomes a world power. Trump's attempts to make nice with Russia is to keep it out of the EU bloc.

    Anne Jaclard , Feb 12, 2019 3:54:47 PM | link
    Well, the liberal conspiracy car crash ensured downmarket Mussolini a second term, it appears...Hard Brexit Tories also look likely to win thanks to centrist sabatoge of the left. You reap what you sow, corporate presstitutes!
    wagelaborer , Feb 12, 2019 4:05:25 PM | link
    Sane people have predicted the end of Russiagate almost as many times as insane people have predicted that the "smoking gun that will get rid of Trump" has been found. And yet the Mighty Wurlitzer grinds on, while social media is more and more censored.

    I expect it all to continue until the 2020 election circus winds up into full-throated mode, and no one talks about anything but the next puppet to be appointed. Oops, I mean "elected".

    Jen , Feb 12, 2019 4:15:57 PM | link
    Ort @ 7:

    You also need to behead the corpse, stuff the mouth with a lemon and then place the head down in the coffin with the body in supine (facing up) position. Weight the coffin with stones and wild roses and toss it into a fast-flowing river.

    Russiagate won't be finished until a wall is built around Capitol Hill and all its inhabitants and worker bees declared insane by a properly functioning court of law.

    Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 4:16:59 PM | link
    frances @18:
    I also suspect that a deal has been made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone. So we will see no investigation of Hillary ...
    Underlying your perspective is the assumption that USA is a democracy where a populist "outsider" could be elected President, Yet you also believe that Hillary and the Deep State have the power to manipulate government and the intelligence agencies and propose a "conspiracy theory" based on that power.

    Isn't it more likely that Trump made it clear (behind closed doors, of course) that he was amenable to the goals of the Deep State and that the bogus investigation was merely done to: 1) cover their own election meddling; 2) eliminate threats like Flynn and Assange/Wikileaks; 3) anti-Russian propaganda?

    Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 4:33:16 PM | link
    Jen

    Steven Cohen once lamented that there were no "wise men" left in foreign policy. All the independent realists were shut out.

    Michael McNulty , Feb 12, 2019 4:49:32 PM | link
    US anti-Russian hysteria is moving into that grey area beyond McCarthyism approaching Nazism.
    Circe , Feb 12, 2019 4:58:40 PM | link
    Dowd, Trump's former lawyer on Russiagate stated there may not even be a report. If this is the case then the Zionist rulers have gotten to Mueller who no doubt figured out that the election collusion breadcrumbs don't lead to Putin, they lead to Netanyahu and Zionist billionaire friends! So Mueller may have to come up with a nothing burger to hide the truth.
    Danny , Feb 12, 2019 5:02:34 PM | link
    B is the only alternative media blogger I've followed for a significant amount of time without becoming disenfranchised. Not because he has no blind spot - his is just one I can deal with... optimism.

    hopehely , Feb 12, 2019 5:14:49 PM | link

    I will believe Russiagate is finished when expelled Russian staff gets back, when the US returns the seized Russian properties, when the consulate is Seattle reopens and when USA issues formal apology to Russia.

    Posted by: hopehely | Feb 12, 2019 5:14:49 PM | link

    bevin , Feb 12, 2019 5:16:18 PM | link
    Nobody has ever advanced the tiniest shred of credible evidence that 'Russia' or its government at any level was in any way implicated either in Wikileaks' acquisition of the DNC and Podesta emails or in any form of interference with the Presidential election.

    This has been going on for three years and not once has anything like evidence surfaced.

    On the other hand there has been an abundance of evidence that those alleging Russian involvement consistently refused to listen to explore the facts.

    Incredibly, the DNC computers were never examined by the FBI or any other agency resembling an official police agency. Instead the notorious Crowdstrike professionally russophobic and caught red handed faking data for the Ukrainians against Russia were commissioned to produce a 'report.'

    Nobody with any sense would have credited anything about Russiagate after that happened.

    Thgen there was the proof, from VIPS and Bill Binney (?) that the computers were not hacked at all but that the information was taken by thumbdrive. A theory which not only Wikileaks but several witnesses have offered to prove.

    Not one of them has been contacted by the FBI, Mueller or anyone else "investigating."

    In reality the charges from the first were ludicrous on their face. There is, as b has proved and every new day's news attests, not the slightest reason why anyone in the Russian government should have preferred Trump over Clinton. And that is saying something because they are pretty well indistinguishable. And neither has the morals or brains of an adolescent groundhog.

    Russiagate is over, alright, The Nothingburger is empty. But that means nothing in this 'civilisation': it will be recorded in the history books, still to be written, by historians still in diapers, that "The 2016 Presidential election, which ended in the controversial defeat of Hillary Clinton, was heavily influenced by Russian agents who hacked ..etc etc"

    What will not be remembered is that every single email released was authentic. And that within those troves of correspondence there was enough evidence of criminality by Clinton and her campaign to fill a prison camp.

    Another thing that will not be recalled is that there was once a young enthusiastic man, working for the DNC, who was mugged one evening after work and killed.

    Baron , Feb 12, 2019 5:16:49 PM | link
    The 'no collusion' result will only spur the 'beginning of the end' baboons to shout even more, they'll never stop until they die in their beds or the plebs of the Republic made them adore the street lamp posts, you'll see. The former is by far more likely, the unwashed of American have never had a penchant for foreign affairs except for the few spasms like Vietnam.
    Circe , Feb 12, 2019 5:20:11 PM | link
    There was collusion alright but the only Russians who helped Trump get elected and were in on the collusion are citizens of ISRAEL FIRST, likewise for the American billionaires who put Trump in the power perch. ISRAEL FIRST.

    That's why Trump is on giant billboards in Israel shaking hands with the Yahoo. Trump is higher in the polls in Israel than in the U.S. If it weren't that the Zionist upper crust need Trump doing their dirty work in America, like trying today get rid of Rep. Omar Ilhan, then Trump would win the elections in Ziolandia or Ziostan by a landslide cause he's been better for the Joowish state than all preceding Presidents put together. Mazel tov to them bullshet for the rest of us servile mass in the vassal West and Palestinians the most shafted class ever. Down with Venezuela and Iran, up with oil and gas. The billionare shysters' and Trump's payola is getting closer. Onward AZ Empire!

    Les , Feb 12, 2019 5:24:36 PM | link
    He proved himself so easy to troll during the election. It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate.
    Zachary Smith , Feb 12, 2019 5:38:03 PM | link
    @ Harry Law #16

    At least Germany has the good sense not to throw taxpayer money at the F-35. German F-35 decision sacrifices NATO capability for Franco-German industrial cooperation I don't know what they have in mind with a proposed airplane purchase. If they need fighters, buy or lease Sweden's Gripen. If attack airplanes are what they're after, go to Boeing and get some brand new F-15X models. If the prickly French are agreeable to build a 6th generation aircraft, that would be worth a try.

    Regarding Rachel Maddow, I recently had an encounter with a relative who told me 1) I visited too many oddball sites and 2) he considered Rachel M. to be the most reliable news person in existence. I think we're talking "true believer" here. :)

    Zachary Smith , Feb 12, 2019 5:43:19 PM | link
    @ Les @42
    It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate.

    Considering how those "intelligence agencies" are hard pressed to find their own tails, even if you allow them to use both hands, it would surprise me.

    That Trump would turn out to be a tub of jello in more than just a physical way has been a surprise to an awful lot of us.

    Pft , Feb 12, 2019 5:44:54 PM | link

    Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their Government Lackeys.

    It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it to be so

    Allowed the bipartisan support for the clamp down on alt media with censorship by social media (Deep State Tools) and funded by the Ministry of Truth set up by Obama in his last days in office to under the false pretense of protecting us from foreign governments interference in elections (except Israel of course) . Similar agencies have been set up or planned to be in other countries followig the US example such as UK, France, Russia, etc.

    Did anyone really expect Mr "Cover It Up " Mueller to find anything? Mueller is Deep State all the way and Trump is as well, not withstanding the "Fake Wrestling " drama that they are bitter enemies. All the surveillance done over the past 2-3 decades would have so much dirt on the Trumpet they could silence him forever . Trump knew that going in and I sometimes wonder if he was pressured to run as a condition to avoid prosecution. Pretty sure every President since Carter has been "Kompromat"

    Jackrabbit , Feb 12, 2019 6:29:51 PM | link
    james, bevin

    If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation, propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.

    stevelaudig , Feb 12, 2019 6:34:12 PM | link
    Russians and likely at the behest of the Russian state interfered and it was fair payback for Yeltsin's election. It is time to move on but not in feigned ignorance of what was done. Was it "outcome" affecting, possibly, but not clearly and if the US electoral college and electoral system generally is so decrepit that a second level power in the world can influence then its the US's fault.

    It's not like the 2000 election wasn't a warning shot about the rottenness of system and a system that doesn't understand a warning shot deserves pretty much what it gets. But there's enough non-hype evidence of acts and intent to say yes, the Russians tried and may have succeeded. They certainly are acting guilty enough. but still close the book move and move on to Trump's 'real' crimes which were done without a Russian assist.

    spudski , Feb 12, 2019 6:52:50 PM | link
    @38 bevin @47 james

    I seem to recall former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray saying that it was not a hack and that he had been handed a thumb drive in a field near American University by a disgruntled Democrat whistleblower. Further, I seem to recall William Binney, former NSA Technical Leader for intelligence, conducting an experiment to show that internet speeds at the time would not allow the information to be hacked - they knew the size of the files and the period over which they were downloaded. Plus, Seth Rich. So why does anyone even believe it was a hack, @32 THN?

    Johan Meyer , Feb 12, 2019 6:55:54 PM | link
    Just another comment re Mueller. There is a great documentary by (Dutch, not Israeli---different person) Gideon Levy, Lockerbie Revisited. The narration is in Dutch, but the interviews are in English, and there is a small segment of a German broadcast. The documentary ends abruptly where one set of FBI personnel contradict statements by another set of FBI personnel. See also this primer on Mueller's MO.
    frances , Feb 12, 2019 7:11:07 PM | link
    reply to Les 42
    "It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate."

    Not the intelligence agencies, the Military IMO. They knew HC for what she was; horrifically corrupt and,again IMO,they know she is insane.

    They saw and I think still see Trump as someone they could work with, remember Rogers (Navy) of the NSA going to him immediately once he was elected? That was the Military protecting him as best they could.

    They IMO have kept him alive and as long as he doesn't send any troops into "real" wars, they will keep on keeping him alive.
    This doesn't mean Trump hasn't gone over to the Dark Side, just that no military action will take place that the military command doesn't fully support.

    Again, I could be wrong, he could be backed by fiends from Patagonia for all I really know:)

    AriusArmenian , Feb 12, 2019 8:44:27 PM | link
    The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to increase military spending; and more, more, more war.
    james , Feb 12, 2019 9:34:59 PM | link
    ot - further to @65 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK5YFos56ZU and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK5YFos56ZU

    as jr says - welcome to the rabbit hole..

    ben , Feb 12, 2019 10:11:05 PM | link
    Hope you're right b. Maybe now we can get on with some real truths.
    1. That there is really only one party with real influence, the party of $.
    2. That most of the Dems belong to that club, and virtually all the Repubs.
    3. That the U$A is not a real democracy, but an Oligarchy.
    4. That the corporate empire is the greatest purveyor of evil the world has ever known.

    And these are just a few truths. Thanks for the therapy b, hope you feel better...

    Circe , Feb 12, 2019 10:52:22 PM | link
    Boy, I hope Jackrabbit sees this. Everyone knows I believe Trump is the anointed chosen of the Zionist 1%. There was no Russia collusion; it was Zionist collusion with a Russian twist...
    Circe , Feb 12, 2019 11:11:17 PM | link
    Oh yeah! Forgot to mention the latest. Trump is asking Kim to provide a list of his nuclear scientists! Before Kim acts on this request, he should call up the Iranian government for advise 'cause they have lots of experience and can warn Kim of what will happen to each of those scientists. They'll be put on a kill-list and will be extrajudicially wacked as in executed. Can you believe the chutzpah? Trump must think Kim is really stupid to fall for that one!

    Aye! The thought of six more years of Zionist pandering Trump. Barf-inducing prospect is too tame.

    PHC , Feb 13, 2019 2:25:44 AM | link

    Russiagate is finished. So, now is the time to create Chinagate. But how ??

    V , Feb 13, 2019 2:25:48 AM | link
    The view from the hermitage is, we are in the age of distractions. Russiagate will be replaced with one of a litany of distractions, purely designed to keep us off target. The target being, corruption, vote rigging, illegal wars, war crimes, overthrowing sovereign governments, and political assasinations, both at home and abroad. Those so distracted, will focus on sillyness; not the genuine danger afoot around the planet. Get used to it; it's become the new normal.
    Circe , Feb 13, 2019 3:53:19 AM | link
    @76Hw
    I have yet to read anything more delusional, nay, utterly preposterous. Methinks you over-project too much. Even Trump would have a belly-ache laugh reading that sheeple spiel. You're the type that sees the giant billboard of Zionist Trump and Yahoo shaking hands and drones on and on that our lying eyes deceive us and it's really Trump playing 4-D chess. I suppose when he tried to pressure Omar Ilhan into resigning her seat in Congress yesterday, that too was reverse psychology?

    Trump instagramed the billboard pic, he tweeted it, he probably pasted it on his wall; maybe with your kind of wacky, Trump infatuation, you should too!

    Starring role

    Circe , Feb 13, 2019 4:15:37 AM | link
    Russiagate is finished because Mueller discovered an embarrassing fact: The collusion was and always will be with Israel. Here's Trump professing his endless love for Zionism: Trump Resign
    snake , Feb 13, 2019 5:13:14 AM | link

    Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished.
    a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians.

    Most designs of armed nation states provide the designers with information feedback and the designers use that information to appoint more obedient politicians and generals to run things, and to improve the design to better serve the designers. The armed rule making structure is designed to give the designers complete control over those targeted to be the governed. Why so stupid the governed? ; always they allow themselves to be manipulated like sheep.

    When 10 angry folks approach you with two pieces of ropes: one to throw over the tree branch under which your horse will be supporting you while they tie the noose around your neck and the other shorter piece of rope to tie your hands behind ..your back you need at that point to make your words count , if five of the people are black and five are white. all you need do is say how smart the blacks are, and how stupid the whites are, as the two groups fight each other you manage your escape. democrat vs republican= divide to conquer. gun, no gun = divide to conquer, HRC vs DJT = divide to conquer, abortion, no abortion = divide to conquer, Trump is a Russian planted in a high level USA position of power = divide to conquer, They were all in on it together,, Muller was in the white house to keep the media supplied with XXX, to keep the law enforcement agencies in the loop, and to advise trump so things would not get out of hand ( its called Manipulation and the adherents to the economic system called Zionism
    For the record, Zionism is not related to race, religion or intelligence. Zionism is a system of economics that take's no captives, its adherents must own everything, must destroy and decimate all actual or imaginary competition, for Zionist are the owners and masters of everything? Zionism is about power, absolute power, monopoly ownership and using governments everywhere to abuse the governed. Zionism has many adherents, whites, blacks, browns, Christians, Jews, Islamist, Indians, you name it among each class of person and walk of life can be found persons who subscribe to the idea that they, and only they, should own everything, and when those of us, that are content to be the governed let them, before the kill and murder us, they usually end up owning everything.

    snake , Feb 13, 2019 6:08:16 AM | link
    Here might the subject matter that Russia Gate sought to camouflage https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/02/13/588433/US-Saudi-Arabia-nuclear-deal-nuclear-weapons 'This comes as US Energy Secretary Rick Perry has been holding secret talks with Saudi officials on sharing US nuclear technology.'

    Finally, a hypothesis to explain

    1. why the Joint non nuclear agreement with Iran and the other nuclear power nations, that prevented Iran from developing nuclear weapons, was trashed? Someone needs to be able to say Iran is developing ..., at the right time.

    2. Why Netanyohu made public a video that claimed Iran was developing nuclear stuff in violation of the Iran non nuclear agreement, and everybody laughed,

    3. Why the nuclear non proliferation agreement with Russia, that terminated the costly useless arms race a decade ago, has been recently terminated, to reestablish the nuclear arms race, no apparent reason was given the implication might be Russia could be a target, but

    4. why it might make sense to give nukes to Saudi Arabia or some other rogue nation, and

    5. why no one is allowed to have nuclear weapons except the Zionist owned and controlled nation states.

    Statement: Zionism is an economic system that requires the elimination of all competition of whatever kind. It is a winner get's all, takes no prisoners, targets all who would threaten or be a challenge or a threat; does not matter if the threat is in in oil and gas, technology or weapons as soon as a possibility exist, the principles of Zionism would require that it be taken out, decimated, and destroyed and made where never again it could even remotely be a threat to the Empire, that Zionism demands..

    Hypothesis: A claim that another is developing nuclear weapon capabilities is sufficient to take that other out?

    Kiza , Feb 13, 2019 8:26:29 AM | link
    I am glad that most commenters understand that Russiagate will not go away. But the majority appear to miss the real reason. Russiagate is not an accusation, it is the state of mind.

    At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already brainwashed population?

    The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. Of course, the most ironic in the affair is that it is the so called US "intellectuals", academics and other assorted cretins who are the most fervent proponents. If you were wondering how Russia can make such amazing defensive weapons that US can only deny exist and wet dream of having, there is your answer. It is the state of mind. The whole of US establishment are legends in their on lunch time and totally delusional about the reality surrounding them - both Russiagate and MAGA cretins, no report can help the Russiagate nation.

    Finally, I am thinking of that crazy and ugly professor bitch from the British Cambridge University who gives her lectures naked to protest something or other. I am so lucky that I do not have to go to a Western university ever again. What a catastrophic decline! No Brexit can help the Skripal nation.

    NemesisCalling , Feb 13, 2019 8:46:48 AM | link
    Russiagate is finished, but is DJT also among the rubble?

    Hardly any money for the border wall and still lingering in the ME?

    If Hoarsewhisperer proves to be correct above re: DJT, he will really have to knock our socks off before election 2020. To do this he will have to unequivocally and unceremoniously withdraw from the MENA and Afghanistan and possibly declare a National Emergency for more money for the wall.

    The problem is, when he does this, he will look impulsively dangerous and this may harm his mystique to the lemmings who need a president to be more "presidential."

    My money is on status quo all the way to 2020 and the rethugz hoping the Dems will eat their own in an orgy of warring identities.

    I would love to be proven wrong.

    morongobill , Feb 13, 2019 9:52:25 AM | link
    Rush Limbaugh has been on a roll with his analysis of Russiagate, in fact, his analysis is in line with the writer/editor here at MOA.
    Bart Hansen , Feb 13, 2019 10:52:12 AM | link
    The collusion story may be faltering, but the blame for Russia poisoning the Skripals lives on. The other night on The News Hour, "Judy" led off the program with this: "It has been almost a year since Kremlin intelligence officers attempted to kill a Russian defector in the British city of Salisbury by poisoning him with a nerve agent. That attack, and the subsequent death of a British woman, scared away tourists and shoppers, but authorities and residents are working to get the town's economy back on track. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports."
    Erelis , Feb 13, 2019 12:15:48 PM | link

    Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others, the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry.

    Here is one recent example. You know the measles outbreak in the US Pacific Northwest. Yup, the Russians. How do we know. A government funded research grant. The study found that 899 tweets caused people to doubt vaccines. Looks like money is to be had even by academics for the right results.

    Measles outbreak: Anti-vaccination misinformation fueled by Russian propagandists, study finds
    https://www.oregonlive.com/clark-county/2019/02/measles-outbreak-anti-vaccination-misinformation-fueled-by-russian-propagandists-study-finds.html

    [Feb 13, 2019] Making Globalism Great Again by C.J. Hopkins

    Highly recommended!
    Pretty biting satire
    Notable quotes:
    "... So how did Trump finally get the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He did that by acting like a fascist (i.e., like a "normal" president). Which is to say he did the bidding of the deep state goons and corporate mandarins that manage the global capitalist empire the smiley, happy, democracy-spreading, post-fascist version of fascism we live under. ..."
    "... Notwithstanding what the corporate media will tell you, Americans elected Donald Trump, a preposterous, self-aggrandizing ass clown, not because they were latent Nazis, or because they were brainwashed by Russian hackers, but, primarily, because they wanted to believe that he sincerely cared about America, and was going to try to "make it great again" (whatever that was supposed to mean, exactly). ..."
    "... Unfortunately, there is no America. There is nothing to make great again. "America" is a fiction, a fantasy, a nostalgia that hucksters like Donald Trump (and other, marginally less buffoonish hucksters) use to sell whatever they are selling themselves, wars, cars, whatever. What there is, in reality, instead of America, is a supranational global capitalist empire, a decentralized, interdependent network of global corporations, financial institutions, national governments, intelligence agencies, supranational governmental entities, military forces, media, and so on. If that sounds far-fetched or conspiratorial, look at what is going on in Venezuela. ..."
    "... And Venezuela is just the most recent blatant example of the empire in action. ..."
    Feb 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Maybe Donald Trump isn't as stupid as I thought. I'd hate to have to admit that publicly, but it does kind of seem like he has put one over on the liberal corporate media this time. Scanning the recent Trump-related news, I couldn't help but notice a significant decline in the number of references to Weimar, Germany, Adolf Hitler, and " the brink of fascism " that America has supposedly been teetering on since Hillary Clinton lost the election.

    I googled around pretty well, I think, but I couldn't find a single editorial warning that Trump is about to summarily cancel the U.S. Constitution, dissolve Congress, and proclaim himself Führer . Nor did I see any mention of Auschwitz , or any other Nazi stuff which is weird, considering that the Hitler hysteria has been a standard feature of the official narrative we've been subjected to for the last two years.

    So how did Trump finally get the liberal corporate media to stop calling him a fascist? He did that by acting like a fascist (i.e., like a "normal" president). Which is to say he did the bidding of the deep state goons and corporate mandarins that manage the global capitalist empire the smiley, happy, democracy-spreading, post-fascist version of fascism we live under.

    I'm referring, of course, to Venezuela, which is one of a handful of uncooperative countries that are not playing ball with global capitalism and which haven't been "regime changed" yet. Trump green-lit the attempted coup purportedly being staged by the Venezuelan "opposition," but which is obviously a U.S. operation, or, rather, a global capitalist operation. As soon as he did, the corporate media immediately suspended calling him a fascist, and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, and so on, and started spewing out blatant propaganda supporting his effort to overthrow the elected government of a sovereign country.

    Overthrowing the governments of sovereign countries, destroying their economies, stealing their gold, and otherwise bringing them into the fold of the global capitalist "international community" is not exactly what most folks thought Trump meant by "Make America Great Again." Many Americans have never been to Venezuela, or Syria, or anywhere else the global capitalist empire has been ruthlessly restructuring since shortly after the end of the Cold War. They have not been lying awake at night worrying about Venezuelan democracy, or Syrian democracy, or Ukrainian democracy.

    This is not because Americans are a heartless people, or an ignorant or a selfish people. It is because, well, it is because they are Americans (or, rather, because they believe they are Americans), and thus are more interested in the problems of Americans than in the problems of people in faraway lands that have nothing whatsoever to do with America. Notwithstanding what the corporate media will tell you, Americans elected Donald Trump, a preposterous, self-aggrandizing ass clown, not because they were latent Nazis, or because they were brainwashed by Russian hackers, but, primarily, because they wanted to believe that he sincerely cared about America, and was going to try to "make it great again" (whatever that was supposed to mean, exactly).

    Unfortunately, there is no America. There is nothing to make great again. "America" is a fiction, a fantasy, a nostalgia that hucksters like Donald Trump (and other, marginally less buffoonish hucksters) use to sell whatever they are selling themselves, wars, cars, whatever. What there is, in reality, instead of America, is a supranational global capitalist empire, a decentralized, interdependent network of global corporations, financial institutions, national governments, intelligence agencies, supranational governmental entities, military forces, media, and so on. If that sounds far-fetched or conspiratorial, look at what is going on in Venezuela.

    The entire global capitalist empire is working in concert to force the elected president of the country out of office. The US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands, Israel, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Argentina have officially recognized Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, in spite of the fact that no one elected him. Only the empire's official evil enemies (i.e., Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and other uncooperative countries) are objecting to this "democratic" coup. The global financial system (i.e., banks) has frozen (i.e., stolen) Venezuela's assets, and is attempting to transfer them to Guaido so he can buy the Venezuelan military. The corporate media are hammering out the official narrative like a Goebbelsian piano in an effort to convince the general public that all this has something to do with democracy. You would have to be a total moron or hopelessly brainwashed not to recognize what is happening.

    What is happening has nothing to do with America the "America" that Americans believe they live in and that many of them want to "make great again." What is happening is exactly what has been happening around the world since the end of the Cold War, albeit most dramatically in the Middle East. The de facto global capitalist empire is restructuring the planet with virtual impunity. It is methodically eliminating any and all impediments to the hegemony of global capitalism, and the privatization and commodification of everything.

    Venezuela is one of these impediments. Overthrowing its government has nothing to do with America, or the lives of actual Americans. "America" is not to going conquer Venezuela and plant an American flag on its soil. "America" is not going to steal its oil, ship it "home," and parcel it out to "Americans" in their pickups in the parking lot of Walmart.

    What what about those American oil corporations? They want that Venezuelan oil, don't they? Well, sure they do, but here's the thing there are no "American" oil corporations. Corporations, especially multi-billion dollar transnational corporations (e.g., Chevron, ExxonMobil, et al.) have no nationalities, nor any real allegiances, other than to their major shareholders. Chevron, for example, whose major shareholders are asset management and mutual fund companies like Black Rock, The Vanguard Group, SSgA Funds Management, Geode Capital Management, Wellington Management, and other transnational, multi-trillion dollar outfits. Do you really believe that being nominally headquartered in Boston or New York makes these companies "American," or that Deutsche Bank is a "German" bank, or that BP is a "British" company?

    And Venezuela is just the most recent blatant example of the empire in action. Ask yourself, honestly, what have the "American" regime change ops throughout the Greater Middle East done for any actual Americans, other than get a lot of them killed? Oh, and how about those bailouts for all those transnational "American" investment banks? Or the billions "America" provides to Israel? Someone please explain how enriching the shareholders of transnational corporations like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin by selling billions in weapons to Saudi Arabian Islamists is benefiting "the American people." How much of that Saudi money are you seeing? And, wait, I've got another one for you. Call up your friendly 401K manager, ask how your Pfizer shares are doing, then compare that to what you're paying some "American" insurance corporation to not really cover you.

    For the last two-hundred years or so, we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as the citizens of a collection of sovereign nation states, as "Americans," "Germans," "Greeks," and so on. There are no more sovereign nation states. Global capitalism has done away with them. Which is why we are experiencing a "neo-nationalist" backlash. Trump, Brexit, the so-called "new populism" these are the death throes of national sovereignty, like the thrashing of a suffocating fish before you whack it and drop it in the cooler. The battle is over, but the fish doesn't know that. It didn't even realize there was a battle until it suddenly got jerked up out of the water.

    In any event, here we are, at the advent of the global capitalist empire. We are not going back to the 19th Century, nor even to the early 20th Century. Neither Donald Trump nor anyone else is going to "Make America Great Again." Global capitalism will continue to remake the world into one gigantic marketplace where we work ourselves to death at bullshit jobs in order to buy things we don't need, accumulating debts we can never pay back, the interest on which will further enrich the global capitalist ruling classes, who, as you may have noticed, are preparing for the future by purchasing luxury underground bunkers and post-apocalyptic compounds in New Zealand. That, and militarizing the police, who they will need to maintain "public order" you know, like they are doing in France at the moment, by beating, blinding, and hideously maiming those Gilets Jaunes (i.e., Yellow Vest) protesters that the corporate media are doing their best to demonize and/or render invisible.

    Or, who knows, Americans (and other Western consumers) might take a page from those Yellow Vests, set aside their political differences (or at least ignore their hatred of each other long enough to actually try to achieve something), and focus their anger at the politicians and corporations that actually run the empire, as opposed to, you know, illegal immigrants and imaginary legions of Nazis and Russians. In the immortal words of General Buck Turgidson, "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed," but, heck, it might be worth a try, especially since, the way things are going, we are probably going end up out there anyway.

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

    [Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... War with Russia. ..."
    "... Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union. ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... "Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... "The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate." ..."
    "... "When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media." ..."
    "... "And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything." ..."
    "... "That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that." ..."
    "... Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.. ..."
    Feb 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    On stage at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C. this past week was Princeton University Professor Emeritus Stephen Cohen, author of the new book, War with Russia: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.

    Cohen has largely been banished from mainstream media.

    "I had been arguing for years -- very much against the American political media grain -- that a new US/Russian Cold War was unfolding -- driven primarily by politics in Washington, not Moscow," Cohen writes in War with Russia. "For this perspective, I had been largely excluded from influential print, broadcast and cable outlets where I had been previously welcomed."

    On the stage at Busboys and Poets with Cohen was Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation magazine, and Robert Borosage, co-founder of the Campaign for America's Future.

    During question time, Cohen was asked about the extent of the censorship in the context of other Americans who had been banished from mainstream American media, including Ralph Nader, whom the liberal Democratic establishment, including Borosage and Vanden Heuvel, stiff armed when he crashed the corporate political parties in the electoral arena in 2004 and 2008.

    Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union.

    "Until some period of time before Trump, on the question of what America's policy toward Putin's Kremlin should be, there was a reasonable facsimile of a debate on those venues that had these discussions," Cohen said. "Are we allowed to mention the former Charlie Rose for example? On the long interview form, Charlie would have on a person who would argue for a very hard policy toward Putin. And then somebody like myself who thought it wasn't a good idea."

    "Occasionally that got on CNN too. MSNBC not so much. And you could get an op-ed piece published, with effort, in the New York Times or Washington Post ."

    "Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times six or seven years ago. But then it stopped. And to me, that's the fundamental difference between this Cold War and the preceding Cold War."

    "I will tell you off the record – no, I'm not going to do it," Cohen said. "Two exceedingly imminent Americans, who most op-ed pages would die to get a piece by, just to say they were on the page, submitted such articles to the New York Times , and they were rejected the same day. They didn't even debate it. They didn't even come back and say – could you tone it down? They just didn't want it."

    "Now is that censorship? In Italy, where each political party has its own newspaper, you would say – okay fair enough. I will go to a newspaper that wants me. But here, we are used to these newspapers."

    "Remember how it works. I was in TV for 18 years being paid by CBS. So, I know how these things work. TV doesn't generate its own news anymore. Their actual reporting has been de-budgeted. They do video versions of what is in the newspapers."

    "Look at the cable talk shows. You see it in the New York Times and Washington Post in the morning, you turn on the TV at night and there is the video version. That's just the way the news business works now."

    "The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate."

    "If you are not, then you struggle to create your own alternative media. It's new in my lifetime. I know these imminent Americans I mentioned were shocked when they were just told no. It's a lockdown. And it is a form of censorship."

    "When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media."

    "Dissidents created what is known as samizdat – that's typescript that you circulate by hand. Gorbachev, before he came to power, did read some samizdat. But it's no match for newspapers published with five, six, seven million copies a day. Or the three television networks which were the only television networks Soviet citizens had access to."

    "And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything."

    "That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that."

    Cohen appears periodically on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News. And that rankled one person in the audience at Busboys and Poets, who said he worried that Cohen's perspective on Russia can be "appropriated by the right."

    "Trump can take that and run on a nationalistic platform – to hell with NATO, to hell with fighting these endless wars, to do what he did in 2016 and get the votes of people who are very concerned about the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia," the man said.

    Cohen says that on a personal level, he likes Tucker Carlson "and I don't find him to be a racist or a nationalist."

    "Nationalism is on the rise around the world everywhere," Cohen said. "There are different kinds of nationalism. We always called it patriotism in this country, but we have always been a nationalistic country."

    "Fox has about three to four million viewers at that hour," Cohen said. "If I am not permitted to give my take on American/Russian relations on any other mass media, and by the way, possibly talk directly to Trump, who seems to like his show, and say – Trump is making a mistake, he should do this or do that instead -- I don't get many opportunities – and I can't see why I shouldn't do it."

    "I get three and a half to four minutes," Cohen said. "I don't see it as consistent with my mission, if that's the right word, to say no. These articles I write for The Nation , which ended up in my book, are posted on some of the most God awful websites in the world. I had to look them up to find out how bad they really are. But what can I do about it?"

    Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Russell Mokhiber

    Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter..

    [Feb 13, 2019] Pro-Israel Lobby Caught Boasting of Its Influence in Washington by Ryan Grim

    Feb 13, 2019 | theintercept.com

    A debate about the power in Washington of the pro-Israel lobby is underway, after Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., responded sharply to reports that Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was targeting both Omar and fellow Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan.

    Omar quoted rap lyrics -- " It's all about the Benjamins baby " -- to suggest McCarthy's move was driven by the lobby's prolific spending. Asked specifically who she was referring to, Omar responded, " AIPAC !"

    The debate over the influence of pro-Israel groups could be informed by an investigation by Al Jazeera, in which an undercover reporter infiltrated the Israel Project, a Washington-based group, and secretly recorded conversations about political strategy and influence over a six-month period in 2016. That investigation, however, was never aired by the network -- suppressed by pressure from the pro-Israel lobby .

    In November, Electronic Intifada obtained and published the four-part series, but it did so during the week of the midterm elections, and the documentary did not get a lot of attention then.

    In it, leaders of the pro-Israel lobby speak openly about how they use money to influence the political process, in ways so blunt that if the comments were made by critics, they'd be charged with anti-Semitism.

    "Congressmen and senators don't do anything unless you pressure them."

    David Ochs, founder of HaLev, which helps send young people to American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual conference, described for the reporter how AIPAC and its donors organize fundraisers outside the official umbrella of the organization, so that the money doesn't show up on disclosures as coming specifically from AIPAC. He describes one group that organizes fundraisers in both Washington and New York. "This is the biggest ad hoc political group, definitely the wealthiest, in D.C.," Ochs says, adding that it has no official name, but is clearly tied to AIPAC. "It's the AIPAC group. It makes a difference; it really, really does. It's the best bang for your buck, and the networking is phenomenal." (Ochs and AIPAC did not immediately return The Intercept's requests for comment.)

    Without spending money, Ochs argues, the pro-Israel lobby isn't able to enact its agenda. "Congressmen and senators don't do anything unless you pressure them. They kick the can down the road, unless you pressure them, and the only way to do that is with money," he explains.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/XytkI7afHcQ

    He describes a fundraiser for Anthony Brown, a Democrat running for Congress in Maryland, as typical. "So we want the Jewish community to go face to face in this small environment, 50, 30, 40 people, and say, 'This is what's important to us. We want to make sure that if we give you money, that you're going to enforce the Iran deal.' That way, when they need something from him or her, like the Iran deal, they can quickly mobilize and say look, we'll give you 30 grand. They actually impact," Ochs tells the reporter.

    Such a claim is not so different from what Omar was describing, and for which she was roundly condemned. In the wake of Omar's tweets, the Washington Post, for instance, reported , "The American Jewish Committee demanded an apology, calling her suggestion that AIPAC is paying American politicians for their support 'demonstrably false and stunningly anti-Semitic.'" (On Monday, Omar apologized for her tweets, but insisted that AIPAC and other lobbyist groups are harmful to U.S. politics.)

    In the censored documentary, Ochs went on to describe a fundraiser hosted by Jeff Talpins , a hedge fund giant, as similar as well. "In New York, with Jeff Talpins, we don't ask a goddamn thing about the fucking Palestinians. You know why? 'Cause it's a tiny issue. It's a small, insignificant issue. The big issue is Iran. We want everything focused on Iran," Ochs says. "What happens is Jeff meets with the congressman in the back room, tells them exactly what his goals are -- and by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million -- basically they hand him an envelope with 20 credit cards, and say, 'You can swipe each of these credit cards for a thousand dollars each.'"

    Ochs explains that the club in New York required a minimum pledge of $10,000 to join and participate in such events. "It's a minimum commitment. Some people give a lot more than that."

    AIPAC, on its own website , recruits members to join its "Congressional Club," and commit to give at least $5,000 per election cycle.

    Eric Gallagher, a top official at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015, tells the Al Jazeera reporter that AIPAC gets results. "Getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did," he notes at one secretly recorded lunch. "Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress."

    The film, called "The Lobby," was produced by Al Jazeera's investigative unit, and features hidden-camera footage obtained by the reporter, who posed as a Jewish, pro-Israel activist from Britain who wanted to volunteer with the Israel Project. Join Our Newsletter Original reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. I'm in Outfitted with a luxury apartment in Dupont Circle, the reporter hosted multiple gatherings and otherwise socialized broadly within the pro-Israel community, winning the confidence of senior officials, who divulged insider details, many of which have been leaked and created international news.

    A companion version of the film, which looked at the Israel lobby's influence in the United Kingdom, did make it to air and was the subject of intense controversy. It exposed a plot by an Israeli embassy official in the United Kingdom to "take down" pro-Palestinian members of Parliament, leading to his resignation.

    That film, however, included a snippet of footage from the United States. Officials here quickly realized that they, too, had been infiltrated. In the U.K., the Israel lobby lodged an official complaint claiming the series was anti-Semitic, but the U.K.'s communications agency rejected the claim, finding that "the allegations in the programme were not made on the grounds that any of the particular individuals concerned were Jewish and noted that no claims were made relating to their faith."

    Pro-Israel officials in the United States, rather than file an official complaint, exerted political pressure. A bipartisan group of 19 lawmakers wrote to the Justice Department requesting an investigation into "the full range of activities undertaken by Al Jazeera in the United States," and suggesting that the organization be made to register as a foreign agent. Ultimately, Qatar bent to the pressure and killed the documentary.

    [Feb 13, 2019] Congress Has Not "By Law" Vested The Attorney General With Authority to Appoint the Special Counsel

    Notable quotes:
    "... Congress Has Not "By Law" Vested The Attorney General With Authority to Appoint the Special Counsel as an Inferior Officer. ..."
    Feb 13, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    col from oz , Feb 13, 2019 12:23:44 AM | link

    B you check out the brief awaiting adjudication, whereby they state that they will appeal to to SCOTUS. Mueller is unconstitutional and plausible criminal.
    67 pages

    ARGUMENT I.

    Congress Has Not "By Law" Vested The Attorney General With Authority to Appoint the Special Counsel as an Inferior Officer.

    The principal question before this Court is whether there is any statute that clearly conveys power to the Attorney General to appoint a private attorney as Special Counsel at the level of an inferior officer. The Special Counsel claims that §§ 515 and 533(1) do the job. But the Spe
    cial Counsel's "plain-text" analysis redrafts both provisions in material ways.

    He also places extensive reliance on historic practice and predecessor versions of § 515 to aid his redrafting.

    None of this squares with controlling and settled law. Here, the plain text of §§ 515 and 533(1) does not clearly confer authority to appoint any special counsel, much less one as an inferior officer.

    http://nlpc.org/2018/10/11/reply-brief-filed-in-constitutional-challenge-to-mueller/

    [Feb 13, 2019] Opinion The Empty Quarters of U.S. Politics by Paul Krugman

    Notable quotes:
    "... Voters support Elizabeth Warren's proposed tax on large fortunes by a three-to-one majority. Only a small minority want to see cuts in Medicaid, even though such cuts have been central to every G.O.P. health care proposal in recent years. ..."
    Feb 12, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

    Donald Trump, who ran on promises to expand health care and raise taxes on the rich , began betraying his working-class supporters the moment he took office, pushing through big tax cuts for the rich while trying to take health coverage away from millions.

    ... ... ...

    Meanwhile, the modern Republican Party is all about cutting taxes on the rich and benefits for the poor and the middle class. And Trump, despite his campaign posturing, has turned out to be no different.

    ... ... ...

    Polling is unambiguous here. If you define the "center" as a position somewhere between those of the two parties, when it comes to economic issues the public is overwhelmingly left of center; if anything, it's to the left of the Democrats. Tax cuts for the rich are the G.O.P.'s defining policy, but two-thirds of voters believe that taxes on the rich are actually too low, while only 7 percent believe that they're too high.

    Voters support Elizabeth Warren's proposed tax on large fortunes by a three-to-one majority. Only a small minority want to see cuts in Medicaid, even though such cuts have been central to every G.O.P. health care proposal in recent years.

    Why did Republicans stake out a position so far from voters' preferences? Because they could. As Democrats became the party of civil rights, the G.O.P. could attract working-class whites by catering to their social and racial illiberalism, even while pursuing policies that hurt ordinary workers.

    ... ... ...

    In any case, if there's a real opening for an independent, that candidate will look more like George Wallace than like Howard Schultz. Billionaires who despise the conventional parties should beware of what they wish for.

    Concerned Citizen Feb. 5 Times Pick

    I consider myself socially conservative and economically liberal and I very bitterly reject the idea that I am a "racist". The left has to stop tossing around the word "racist" to essentially mean "anything they dislike" and "anyone they disagree with". I am not a racist, and I defy anyone to prove I am. Dr. Krugman, if you are going to call 50% of the voters in the US "racists"....well, consider what happened when your pal Hillary called us "deplorables in a basket". How'd that work out for her?

    Trajan The Real Heartland Feb. 5 Times Pick

    Democrats love to eat their own. We have one of the most racist presidents to ever hold office in modern times, yet some Democrats are going after Northam over some dumb stunt that happened decades ago. Is he a good leader NOW? Does he support good policies NOW? Is Northam's behavior really any worse (blackface versus sexual misconduct) than someone who just got a seat on the Supreme Court? Wow, this is like watching an episode of The Twilight Zone. Republicans have a strategic advantage because, while Democrats get all twisted up in identity politics, Republican leaders are only tightly focused on serving the rich and powerful at the expense of average Americans. No party disunity there. Democrats need to start focusing on the basic, kitchen table issues that average Americans care about, like affordable health care, affordable housing and affordable higher education. With that strong streak of self-destruction that runs through Democrats, Nancy Pelosi is needed more than ever in the people's House where badly needed legislation has to move forward.

    Allright New york Feb. 5 Times Pick

    A Democrat could beat Trump if he was pro-single payer, pro family, pro-union, anti-war, and for the aggressive taxing of ultra high wealth if he could just shut down the flagrant abuse of our immigration laws and border. That candidate can't win the primary though because not welcoming the infinite number of suffering illegal immigrants to share these expensive benefits or wanting law and order to immigration earns a label of "racist" in the Democratic Party. Trump will win in 2020 unless dems stop with the wild misuse of the word racist.

    Patrick Wisconsin Feb. 5 Times Pick

    "Racial hostility" is what I, a white male, feel from the Democrats. It's a common thread among the reluctant Trump supporters I know - they are disgusted by Trump, but they won't support the Democrats for that reason. My 66-year-old father recently said to me, for the first time, "well, you know, I'm a racist."

    This man voted for Obama, but I wouldn't be surprised if he casts his vote for Trump in 2020 because the left has lost all credibility in his eyes. They call my dad a racist over and over, but he knows he's a fair person, so he's accepted that the "racist" label isn't that big of a deal.

    [Feb 13, 2019] Tulsi rocks

    Notable quotes:
    "... Trump doesn't have a clue about Foreign Policy ..."
    Feb 13, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    David G , February 12, 2019 at 11:26 am

    The inimitable CN commenting system just ate my detailed reply to your question of who else besides Gabbard has spoken up, and won't let me repost it. But the short version is that

    As far as I know, everybody else is on board the regime-change express, enjoying the bar car.

    Summary: Tulsi rocks.

    KiwiAntz, February 12, 2019 at 7:04 am

    Trump & his corrupt Administration with the Troika of morons such as Pompeo, Bolton & Abrams, are the most dangerous bunch of idiots ever to be in power?

    Hopelessly inept & out of his depth, Trump doesn't have a clue about Foreign Policy & his stupid Regime change antics are going to blow up in his & his meddling Nations face!

    This buffoonish Clown is really accelerating America's downfall & declining Hegemonic power & turning the World away from the corrupt US Dollar, Petrodollar system with other Countries, actively moving away from this tyranny?

    ... ... ...

    [Feb 13, 2019] The rules are different for members of Israel lobby.

    Notable quotes:
    "... But if someone has joint US/Israel citizenship I guess the rules are different as Rahm Emanuel served as White House chief of staff - can't get much higher level government job.. ..."
    Feb 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Pat Lang Mod -> Bill Herschel , 5 hours ago

    During the VN War Canada stripped Canadians of their citizenship if they fought for the US although they had had no problem having US citizens in their ranks in both world wars with no penalty from the US. One of my uncles did that in WW1. I did not know I was a Canadian citizen until after I had left active US government service and no longer had a US government information security clearance.

    It is possible to be a dual national in the US government but this requires individual judgments to be made by heads of agencies and it would probably bar someone from high level jobs.

    It used to be against US law to hold a second citizenship but the law changed to accommodate US/Israeli citizenship and of necessity now applies to all. If you act to the detriment of the US for the benefit of your second country I would say that is prima facie proof of dual loyalty.

    JoeC -> Pat Lang , 5 hours ago
    But if someone has joint US/Israel citizenship I guess the rules are different as Rahm Emanuel served as White House chief of staff - can't get much higher level government job..
    Pat Lang Mod -> JoeC , 4 hours ago
    You must be new here. We have been through the issue of US information security clearances several times. This security clearance system foe access to classified information is entirely an artifact of Executive Orders, not of laws. therefore the president as the ultimate executive can give anyone he wants access at any level.

    Members of congress and federal judges do not have access under this system.

    They have access by virtue of their constitutional office outside the Executive Branch.

    [Feb 13, 2019] There's Something Eerily Familiar About the West's Approach to Venezuela

    Notable quotes:
    "... Erdogan has used it in Turkey ( less than three years ago ) and it was a common line in the forgotten 1930s used by none other than Mussolini. And now I quote Trump's US secretary of state Michael Pompeo on Maduro : "Now it is time for every other nation to pick a side either you stand with the forces of freedom, or you're in league with Maduro and his mayhem." ..."
    "... Rigged elections? No doubt about it, although al-Sisi still maintains that his last triumph at the polls – a cracking 97 per cent – was a free and fair election. President Trump sent his "sincere congratulations" . Political prisoners? Well, the total is 60,000 and rising . Oh yes, and Maduro's last victory – a rigged election if ever there was one, of course – was a mere 67.84 per cent. ..."
    "... Now the Americans are negotiating with the "terrorist" Taliban in Qatar so they can get the hell out of the Graveyard of Empires after 17 years of military setbacks, scandals and defeats – not to mention running a few torture camps which even Maduro would cough to look at. ..."
    Feb 13, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    Erdogan has used it in Turkey ( less than three years ago ) and it was a common line in the forgotten 1930s used by none other than Mussolini. And now I quote Trump's US secretary of state Michael Pompeo on Maduro : "Now it is time for every other nation to pick a side either you stand with the forces of freedom, or you're in league with Maduro and his mayhem."

    You get the point. Now is the time for all good people to stand alongside the United States, the EU, the nations of Latin America – or do you support the Russkies, Chinese, Iranian headbangers, the perfidious Corbyn and (of all people) the Greeks? Talking of the Greeks, European pressure on Alexis Tsipras to conform to the EU's support for Guaido – proving that the EU can indeed bully its smaller members – is a good argument for Brexiteers (though far too complex for them to understand).

    But first, let's take a look at our favourite tyrant, in the words of all who oppose him. He's a powerful dictator, surrounded by generals, suppressing his people, using torture, mass arrests, secret police murders, rigged elections, political prisoners – so no wonder we gave our support to those who wish to overthrow this brutal man and stage democratic elections.

    Not a bad precis of our current policy towards the Maduro regime. But I am referring, of course, word-for-word, to the west's policy towards the Assad regime in Syria. And our support for opposition democracy there wasn't terribly successful.

    We were not solely responsible for the Syrian civil war – but we were not guiltless since we sent an awful lot of weapons to those trying to overthrow Assad. And last month the notepad of US national security advisor John Bolton appeared to boast a plan to send 5,000 US troops to Colombia

    And now let's tick the box on another Maduro-lookalike – at least from the west's simplistic point of view: the military-backed elected field marshal-president al-Sisi of Egypt, whom we love, admire and protect. Powerful dictator? Yup. Surrounded and supported by generals? You bet, not least because he locked up a rival general before the last election. Suppression? Absolutely – all in the interest of crushing "terrorism", of course.

    Mass arrests? Happily yes, for all the inmates of Egypt's savage prison system are "terrorists", at least according to the field marshal-president himself. Secret police murders? Well, even forgetting the young Italian student suspected by his government to have been allegedly tortured and bumped off by one of Sisi's top Egyptian cops, there's a roll call of disappeared activists.

    Rigged elections? No doubt about it, although al-Sisi still maintains that his last triumph at the polls – a cracking 97 per cent – was a free and fair election. President Trump sent his "sincere congratulations" . Political prisoners? Well, the total is 60,000 and rising . Oh yes, and Maduro's last victory – a rigged election if ever there was one, of course – was a mere 67.84 per cent.

    As the late sage of the Sunday Express , John Gordon, might have said: it makes you sit up a bit. So, too, I suppose, when we glance a bit further eastwards to Afghanistan, whose Taliban rulers were routed in 2001 by the US, whose post-9/11 troops and statesmen ushered in a new life of democracy, then corruption, warlordism and civil war.

    The "democracy" bit quickly came unstuck when "loya jurgas", grand councils, turned into tribal playpens and the Americans announced that it would be an exaggeration to think that we could achieve "Jeffersonian democracy" in Afghanistan. Too true.

    Now the Americans are negotiating with the "terrorist" Taliban in Qatar so they can get the hell out of the Graveyard of Empires after 17 years of military setbacks, scandals and defeats – not to mention running a few torture camps which even Maduro would cough to look at.

    Now all this may not encourage you to walk down memory lane. And I haven't even listed the sins of Saddam, let alone our continuing and cosy relationship – amazing as it still seems – with that Gulf state whose lads strangled, chopped up and secretly buried a US-resident journalist in Turkey.

    Now just imagine if Maduro, tired of a journalist critic slandering him in Miami, decided to lure him to the Venezuelan embassy in Washington and top the poor guy, slice him up and bury him secretly in Foggy Bottom. Well now, I have a feeling that sanctions might have been applied to Maduro a long time ago. But not to Saudi Arabia, of course, where we are very definitely not advocating democracy.

    "Now is the time for democracy and prosperity in Venezuela," quoth John Bolton this week. Oh, yes indeed. Maduro runs an oil-soaked nation yet its people starve. He is an unworthy, foolish and vain man, even if he's not Saddamite in his crimes. He was rightly described by a colleague as a dreary tyrant. He even looks like the kind of guy who tied ladies to railway lines in silent movies.

    So good luck to Guaido. Palpably a nice guy, speaks eloquently, wise to stick to aid for the poor and fresh elections rather than dwell on just how exactly Maduro and his military chums are going to be booted out.

    In other words, good luck – but watch out. Instead of pleading with those who will not support him – the Greeks, for example – he might take a closer look at who his foreign friends are. And do a quick track record on their more recent crusades for freedom, democracy and the right to life. And by the way, I haven't even mentioned Libya.

    [Feb 12, 2019] Tulsi was just on CNN talking about CIA funding of "terror-linked groups" in Syria

    Feb 12, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    James Thomas , 21 hours ago

    Tulsi was just on CNN talking about CIA funding of "terror-linked groups" in Syria:
    Play

    [Feb 12, 2019] AIPAC is not a PAC in American law and thus cannot make political contributions, but it illegally controls a lot of real PACs and has a lot of political influence in the Jewish community.

    Feb 12, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    - Ilhan Omar tweeted that AIPAC plays a role in encouraging a lot of Jewish Americans to contribute campaign funds to congressional candidates? Is that a serious question? AIPAC is not a PAC in American law and thus cannot make political contributions, but it illegally controls a lot of real PACs and has a lot of political influence in the Jewish community.

    - Ralph Northam said on TeeVee that the very first blacks brought to Virginia were initially considered to be "indentured servants" in English law? He is correct although within a few decades the colonists realized that it would be more profitable to keep them permanently as slaves. One must remember that Northam is only now learning some actual Virginia history

    - Lindsey Graham is IMO correct in suggesting that Trump should "pocket" the barrier money in the negotiated bill, keep the government fully open, and then proceed to used additional funds available to him as CinC to continue to build the barrier system.

    - The National Guard of several states is probably serving on the border with federal funding support although still under state control. There is a law which provides for that. If the governors order a withdrawal from the border, Trump should IMO call these National Guard forces into federal service. The governors would then have no control over this matter at all. pl

    jonst , 19 hours ago
    To me, repeat, to me, the issue is less,, much less, what AIPAC does, or Israelis, or American Jews do, than what the pols making policy do. I fully expect the three groups above will try their damndest to do what they believe is in Israel's interest . I get that. I might not like it that they are so damn successful...but that's another issue. But American pols that betray their own Nation's interest is what bugs me. They are the ones selling their people out. The Lobbyists are just doing their job. Dirty and counter productive job as I think it will prove to be in the long run...

    [Feb 12, 2019] The problem with the Florida senator is his absolute blind obedience towards the Zionist state, his engagement against the BDS movement and his loyalty to Israel's stalwarts in the US. He is not the only US politician in Congress who is in the pocket of the Zionist lobby. At least the American Middle Eastern policy is run by the Zionist Israel Lobby in the US.

    Feb 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Ludwig Watzal , says: Website February 12, 2019 at 11:16 am GMT

    With friends like Marco Rubio, the United States doesn't need enemies. I still remember very well, when then-candidate Donald Trump ridiculed Rubio as "little Marco" during the 2016 debates. He was perfectly right. Like Phil Giraldi demonstrated Rubio's "intellectual" capability, It seems he has a birdbrain. Joke aside, Rubio's political busyness Israel is concerned raises the question who owns his true loyalty. Instead of working for his constituency, he is on the road primarily for Israel. As it seems he loves Israel more than his birthplace the United States, and he despises Cuba that political system is more social-oriented that the American one.

    The problem with the Florida senator is his absolute blind obedience towards the Zionist state, his engagement against the BDS movement and his loyalty to Israel's stalwarts in the US. He is not the only US politician in Congress who is in the pocket of the Zionist lobby. At least the American Middle Eastern policy is run by the Zionist Israel Lobby in the US. But from all walks of life, their influence is also not to be underestimated.

    The so-called unbreakable bond between the US and Israel is mere rhetoric, but most members of Congress believe in this nonsense just out of mere political survival. Israel is not an ally but a massive liability to US national interest in the region. The Zionist political class uses the American political system to its advantage and pays nothing in return. The opposite is true. The State of Israel is massively spying on the US and cause the American people a lot of damage.

    There are not only the assassinations of JFK and RFK, but also the killing of JFK, Jr. who's private plane crashed into the sea right of the coast of Martha's Vineyard. It was the same cover-up as in the case of his father and his uncle. There are persistent rumors in the wind that the Israeli Mossad was behind it, such as Laurent Guyénot laid out in his two excellent articles on UNZ Review. Among large parts of the truther movement, some segments make a strong argument that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks, although with the collaboration of sections of the Bush/Cheney administration.

    To refer to Israel as a friend or ally such as Rubio does is just a joke. Israel is nothing more than an albatross like an ally. The whole American-Israeli relationship must be put to the test. There is no room for romance because such romanticism is for the sole detriment of the United States and the American People.

    Highly recommended articles by Laurent Guyénot:

    http://www.unz.com/article/the-broken-presidential-destiny-of-jfk-jr/
    https://www.unz.com/article/did-israel-kill-the-kennedies/

    lavoisier , says: Website February 12, 2019 at 12:37 pm GMT

    How such a lightweight came to be a Senator of the United States of America eludes me.

    I know this question is meant to be a bit rhetorical but let me try and answer it.

    This senator, and the vast majority of his ilk in the Congress, are venal lying whores in thrall to a foreign party and to money interests. He is not unique in this regard but only one of many lying whores in power.

    And the American people–by and large–are so dumbed down by a dumbed down culture and a dumbed down media that they cannot recognize these treacherous weasels for the traitors that they are.

    The Republic is in free fall.

    NoseytheDuke , says: February 12, 2019 at 12:40 pm GMT
    @RobinG What a shame that there aren't enough George Galloways to go around.
    EliteCommInc. , says: February 12, 2019 at 12:56 pm GMT
    I think we have gone over the edge.

    The Senator is using contentions meant to protect us citizens from unfair business practices by state and enterprise to launch protections against free speech for a foreign entity.

    That is painfully funny. I hope it is only a feeling, a sensation, but our political leadership seems to have abandoned their collective minds. But this is convenient for the Sen. because nullifying the constitution is one way of nullifying borders.

    DESERT FOX , says: February 12, 2019 at 1:52 pm GMT
    Zionists control our money via the unconstitutional FED and that gives the Zionist banking cabal total control over the U.S. government and we the goyim/proles!

    Nathan Rothschild infamously said, I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England for the man who controls the money supply controls the British Empire and I am that man!

    It is the same here in America and every country in the world that has a Zionist central bank and that is almost all of them!

    Rubio is just another puppet of the Zionist banking kabal and is just like the rest of congress and in fact congress would be better named as the lower house of the Knesset.

    Charles Pewitt , says: February 12, 2019 at 2:19 pm GMT
    Marco Rubio Is A Complete And Total Politician Whore For Jew Billionaires Norman Braman and Paul Singer and Shelly Adelson.

    Marco Rubio does the bidding of Jew Billionaires by putting the interests of Israel ahead of the interests of the United States.

    Jew Billionaires Norman Braman and Paul Singer and Shelly Adelson all push nation-wrecking mass legal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.

    Marco Rubio pushes nation-wrecking mass legal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.

    Jew Billionaires Shelly Adelson and Paul Singer and Norman Braman have bought the mass legal immigration policies and the amnesty for illegal alien invaders immigration policy of the Republican Party ruling class and Marco Rubio and Shyster Boy Trump.

    Marco Rubio and New York City Shyster Boy Trump have been bought and paid for like common whores by Jew Billionaires Shelly Adelson and Paul Singer and Norman Braman.

    Tweet from 2015:

    [Feb 12, 2019] Being Marco Rubio: The boyish senator from Florida is owned by the Israel Lobby by Philip Giraldi

    Israel is powerful only to extent its goals are well correlated with the goal of the US MIC. So like neocons Israel serves as a collective lobbyist of MIC. If this would not be the case, all power of AIPAC and similar organizations would disappear, and the organization itself would be put under FARA where it belongs.
    The same is true for Zionists billionaires. The minute they turn against MIC would the minute some dirty dealing and connections with organized crime would be exposed and some pedophile scandals put on the front pages of MSM.
    Notable quotes:
    "... There wouldn't be calls for BDS movement if the US wasn't providing 3.8 billion per to a country whose domestic policy is apartheid and foreign policy goal is an attack on Iran. ..."
    Feb 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Thomm , says: February 12, 2019 at 5:16 am GMT

    All these anti-Semitic articles fail a basic logical test :

    i) If gentiles are so smart, why are Zionists, whom gentiles outnumber 40:1 across the combined Western World, able to control everything? The entire premise of White Nationalism fails.
    ii) If Israel is able to manipulate the US government this totally, why can't someone like China, with deeper pockets, do the same? Conversely, why can't Israel manipulate Russia or the EU?
    iii) Virtually everything that White Nationalists say about Zionists is what blacks say about whites. Given the small number of Zionists and no prior history of enslavement, the WN claim is even weaker.

    There is a reason that the conspiracy theories regarding Zionists don't get any purchase outside of a small fringe.

    Thanks,
    -Ira Rabinowitz

    Nehlen , says: February 12, 2019 at 6:10 am GMT
    @Thomm i) It's not so surprising given the wholesale lies pedaled by the predominantly Zionists media and entertainment sectors of Western civilization, compounded by the outright censorship of opposing views by those same groups with the assistance of the ADL, SPLC, et al. Add to that the altruistic nature and generally independent spirit of Whites as opposed to the *dare I say tribal* nature of Zionists.

    ii) China's recent ascent to global dominance was not built on usury and manipulation of foreign nation states through a diaspora of what has been described as "nations within nations." I'd say Zionists in Russia (ever hear of the Holodomor?) manipulated that part of the world for over a century quite completely, and in Eastern Europe for slightly less time, to the tune of 100 million dead White Christians.

    iii) Interesting you bring up Blacks but leave out the part about Zionists manipulating Whites with "Birth of a Nation" being the first movie many arriving White immigrants viewed. Shock status: imagined. Clearly, that's but one of a laundry list of things any reasonably educated White person could hold up as an example of manipulation of public opinion.

    Calling truisms tropes doesn't absolve ... crimes committed against humanity.

    Every single day Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Han Chinese, are criticized and critiqued for all sorts of reasons and all manner of circumstances. Only one category of people is immune from criticism: Zionists. It's a double standard, and it must end.

    silviosilver , says: February 12, 2019 at 6:15 am GMT
    @Thomm

    > If gentiles are so smart, why are Zionists, whom gentiles outnumber 40:1 across the combined Western World, able to control everything? The entire premise of White Nationalism fails.

    WN's largely agree that Zionists are more intelligent, so they are not surprised that Zionists have been able to achieve outsized influence (to "control everything," in the language of this lame troll).

    ii) If Israel is able to manipulate the US government this totally, why can't someone like China, with deeper pockets, do the same? Conversely, why can't Israel manipulate Russia or the EU?

    If the Chinese attempted the same thing, Americans would be permitted to notice . Noticing Zionists political activity is "anti-semitic", so many Americans don't notice it (or pretend not to).

    There are far fewer Zionists in the EU and Russia, but they enjoy outsized influence in those lands too – just not to the same extent as in the U.S.

    iii) Virtually everything that White Nationalists say about Zionists is what blacks say about whites. Given the small number of Zionists and no prior history of enslavement, the WN claim is even weaker.

    Incorrect. WN's admit that Zionists are more intelligent than white gentiles; blacks who accuse whites of racism seldom admit that whites are more intelligent than blacks. Ultimately, WN's want separation from Zionists. Blacks who accuse whites of racism virtually never desire separation from whites. I'm not even a WN, but it really shouldn't be controversial to admit these obvious facts.

    Why does Phil have such a hard time banning moronic trolls like this clown? (Who everybody suspects is just a sad little hindoo, but it's possible is a deranged little zionut.)

    Mark James , says: February 12, 2019 at 9:16 am GMT
    There wouldn't be calls for BDS movement if the US wasn't providing 3.8 billion per to a country whose domestic policy is apartheid and foreign policy goal is an attack on Iran.

    I was disappointed to see that one of my two senators voted for the bill. And I would have to say the biggest surprise was Sen. Gillibrand who probably wanted to say 'aye' but didn't.

    The next step is likely to be that any public disagreement with the state of Israel is akin to antisemitism. Which I'm certain that the Republicans will be happy to throw at the Dem. congress.

    [Feb 12, 2019] Snowden revelations did not chnage thebahviour of JoeUser

    Feb 12, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Despite the Snowden revelations of the extent of official data gathering and storage on individuals, the overwhelming majority of citizens have not only resigned themselves to electronic surveillance but are putting themselves in a position to have their habits examined microscopically by bringing eavesdropping digital assistants into their home and buying "smart" home appliances.

    [Feb 12, 2019] Walter Jones, Congressman Behind Freedom Fries Who Turned Anti-War Firebrand, Dies At 76

    Notable quotes:
    "... However, he was one of the few politicians initially supporting the Iraq invasion to later express profound public regret over his decision , and went on to become a consistent advocate for ending regime change wars and Washington's military adventurism abroad. As part of these efforts, he was an original Board Member of the Ron Paul Institute. ..."
    Feb 12, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. died at the age of 76 on Sunday after an extended illness for which was a granted a leave of absence from Congress last year.

    The Republican representative for North Carolina's 3rd congressional district since 1995 had initially been a strong supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and even became well-known for getting french fries renamed as "freedom fries" in the House cafeteria as a protest against French condemnation of the US invasion.

    ... ... ...

    However, he was one of the few politicians initially supporting the Iraq invasion to later express profound public regret over his decision , and went on to become a consistent advocate for ending regime change wars and Washington's military adventurism abroad. As part of these efforts, he was an original Board Member of the Ron Paul Institute.

    Remembering Jones as a tireless advocate of peace, Ron Paul notes that he " turned from pro-war to an antiwar firebrand after he discovered how Administrations lie us into war . His passing yesterday is deeply mourned by all who value peace and honesty over war and deception." The Ron Paul Institute has also called him "a Hero of Peace" for both his voting record and efforts at shutting down the "endless wars".

    And Antiwar.com also describes Jones as having been among the "most consistently antiwar members of Congress" and a huge supporter of their work:

    By 2005, Jones had reversed his position on the Iraq War. Jones called on President George W. Bush to apologize for misinforming Congress to win authorization for the war. Jones said, "If I had known then what I know today, I wouldn't have voted for that resolution."

    Jones went on to become one of the most antiwar members of Congress, fighting for ending US involvement in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

    Also the BBC describes Rep. Jones' "dramatic change of heart" concerning the Iraq war starting in 2005, after which he began reaching out to thousands of people who had lost loves ones in combat.

    Rep. Walter Jones led an effort in the House to call French Fries "Freedom Fries" instead, but came to profoundly regret his role in supporting Bush's war.

    Noting that "no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq" and that the war was justified by the Bush administration based entirely on lies and false intelligence, the BBC describes:

    At the same time, Mr Jones met grieving families whose loved ones were killed in the war. This caused him to have a dramatic change of heart, and in 2005 he called for the troops to be brought home.

    He spoke candidly on several occasions about how deeply he regretted supporting the war, which led to the deaths of more than 140,000 Iraqi and American people.

    "I have signed over 12,000 letters to families and extended families who've lost loved ones in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars," he told NPR in 2017. "That was, for me, asking God to forgive me for my mistake."

    In total he represented his district for 34 years, first in the North Carolina state legislature, then in Congress. He took a leave of absence last year after a number of missed House votes due to declining health.

    [Feb 12, 2019] Rethinking America's Military Industrial Complex by Tim Kirby

    Notable quotes:
    "... The 1940s are the point where the permanent military industrial complex that we know of today starts to take hold. Slightly later it got the name by which we call it today thanks to a speech by President Eisenhower at the very tail end of his presidency in 1961. Sadly Mr. Eisenhower did nothing to stop the growth of the war-machine only choosing to warn us about it with nearly no time left in office. One would have expected bold action from a man known for his bravery and cunning ..."
    "... Washington chose to go with "Global Hegemon" America and has not looked back. But at this point massive military spending still required some sort of reason to spend hundreds of billions per year. Iraq and Afghanistan were enough justification to keep millions of men in uniforms on bases all over the world mostly doing pushups and cleaning the toilets in a "global war on terror". ..."
    "... Since war is no longer necessary to justify the MIC the US is much more free to not engage in warfare. In fact war is completely unnecessary. At some point advertisements for automobiles had to stop mentioning their superiority to horses. We are at the same point with the MIC. Politicians and the mainstream media do not need to search for/create enemies because they are no longer needed. The US military is to be forever massive and expensive and profitable and it may even become very peaceful because of this. Why work when you can make billions doing virtually nothing? ..."
    Feb 12, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Tim Kirby via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The US Military Industrial Complex no longer needs neither actual wars nor the threat of war for its own survival. This factor could actually change dynamic of this institution/bureaucracy in our lifetimes and it may actually be changing as we speak.

    Very often something will evolve and become ubiquitous to the degree that we forget its origin. Putting a dead tree in your house on Christmas is a good example, few people think of why this is done, they just do it because it has been done for a long time and thus seems completely natural and important to do so every year. A justification for doing it is no longer needed, it is something done by default. In some ways the necessity to start questionable wars of luxury is much like that Christmas tree – an odd tradition that is not of an importance or value anymore.

    In order to break this down we need to go back to the start.

    It is hard for people in our times, especially foreign people to understand the fact that the United States was not a massive military power until WWII. Today sole hyperpower was at a time not that long ago a much different nation militarily and foreign policy speaking. In 1914 at the start of the Great War in Europe the territorially massive United States had a total armed forces of around 166,000 men . From 1776 until that point the manpower of US forces was minimal by European standards . That America of those times was an isolated self-focused America that many today long for. When the US entered WWI shedding the binds of its isolationist tendencies it bulked up to nearly 3,000,000 soldiers by the end of 1918. However, directly after the Great War finally ended the military severely deflated itself back down much closer to its original size.

    "The Good War" in the 1940's was the final nail in the isolationist coffin as American forces would forever remain in the millions of men after the defeat of Germany and Japan by the Allies.

    The 1940s are the point where the permanent military industrial complex that we know of today starts to take hold. Slightly later it got the name by which we call it today thanks to a speech by President Eisenhower at the very tail end of his presidency in 1961. Sadly Mr. Eisenhower did nothing to stop the growth of the war-machine only choosing to warn us about it with nearly no time left in office. One would have expected bold action from a man known for his bravery and cunning.

    The ideological justification for retaining a massive US military in peacetime was Communism. A global Communist threat seemed like something grand enough to be worth throwing away a large portion of America's traditional (and very successful) identity.

    As time went on wars of questionable origins in Korea and Vietnam continued to provide proof of the need for massive military spending and continued expansion.

    With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90's American forces could have (in theory) reduced in size as there was no longer any real geopolitical competitor to the US. This was a "turning point" moment when America could possibly have gone back to being the America that was and scaled down to a few hundred thousand men under the umbrella of a few thousand nuclear warheads and enough billions of dollars to make sure that the US would never "fall behind" from a weapons standpoint.

    But this was not to be. Washington chose to go with "Global Hegemon" America and has not looked back. But at this point massive military spending still required some sort of reason to spend hundreds of billions per year. Iraq and Afghanistan were enough justification to keep millions of men in uniforms on bases all over the world mostly doing pushups and cleaning the toilets in a "global war on terror".

    Now there is a new "Russian threat" that is hard for politicians to define or prove exists but is just juicy enough for them it is still call for increasing defense spending or build system X in European country Y that they can't find on a map.

    As we can see since WWII, the US military has gone from dealing with direct threats (Germany, Japan) to direct threats via proxy (The Soviet Union in Korea/Vietnam) to overinflated threats (Iraq, Afghanistan) to fake threats (today's Russia). I would argue and even offer that at this point there is no political means nor will to ever go "back" to the isolated America. That America as a concept is dead and both the politicians and the public understand and support the US having a massive military. No threat is needed any more as having a massive military is no longer even a question. It is a default position like seeing the world as round – only a tiny handful of lunatics of zero influence could argue otherwise and debating with them is pointless.

    Furthermore as we have seen any politician who goes against the military industrial complex (MIC) is deemed a traitor and "against the troops".

    This current state of things is actually very good from the standpoint of peace and America's reputation. Since war is no longer necessary to justify the MIC the US is much more free to not engage in warfare. In fact war is completely unnecessary. At some point advertisements for automobiles had to stop mentioning their superiority to horses. We are at the same point with the MIC. Politicians and the mainstream media do not need to search for/create enemies because they are no longer needed. The US military is to be forever massive and expensive and profitable and it may even become very peaceful because of this. Why work when you can make billions doing virtually nothing?

    [Feb 11, 2019] Trump has tried to turn his presidency into a personality cult rather than MAGA

    Feb 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    TheBoom , says: September 29, 2018 at 8:55 am GMT

    Trump has tried to turn his presidency into a personality cult rather than MAGA. That is a mistake because Trump's campaign positions were more popular than Trump and it doesn't lift the entire party.

    Every Hillary voter I meet, male or female, buys every one of the stupid narratives being pushed and are fired up to vote. The Bernie voters don't automatically buy every narrative but they despise Trump and want him out and Democrats to regain control.

    I agree with Derb that the hearing may make up some of the enthusiasm gap. A lot of conservative men had to have been looking at that hearing and thinking how easy it would be for them to get similar treatment at work or school.I imagine a good number of conservative women don't want their husbands and sons to face similar inquisitions.

    [Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

    Highly recommended!
    We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now.
    Appointment on Bolton essentially confirms Fred Reed diagnose of Trump: "profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. ..."
    "... The problem with the current occupants of the White House is not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts. ..."
    "... Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law ..."
    "... A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda. ..."
    "... I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth ..."
    "... The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors. ..."
    Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. Today's administration would seem unwholesome in a New York bus station at three in the morning. They are not normal American politicians.

    In particular they seem to be pushing for war with Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. And -- this is important -- their behavior is not a matter of liberals catfighting with conservatives. All former presidents carefully avoided war with the Soviet Union, which carefully avoided war with America.

    It was Reagan, a conservative and responsible president, who negotiated the INF treaty, to eliminate short-fuse nuclear weapons from Europe. By contrast, Trump is scrapping it. Pat Buchanan, the most conservative man I have met, strongly opposes aggression against Russia. The problem with the current occupants of the White House is not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts.

    Donald the Cockatoo

    Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this. All politics being herd politics, the population has coalesced into herds fanatically pro-Trump and fanatically anti-Trump. Yet Trump's past is not a secret. Well-documented biographies describe his behavior in detail, but his supporters don't read them. The following is a bit long, but worth reading.

    From The Making of Donald Trump , Johnston, David Cay. (p. 23). Melville House. Kindle Edition.

    "I always get even," Trump writes in the opening line of that chapter. He then launches into an attack on the same woman he had denounced in Colorado. Trump recruited the unnamed woman "from her government job where she was making peanuts," her career going nowhere. "I decided to make her somebody. I gave her a great job at the Trump Organization, and over time she became powerful in real estate. She bought a beautiful home.

    "When Trump was in financial trouble in the early nineties .."I asked her to make a phone call to an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank and would have done what she asked. She said, "Donald, I can't do that." Instead of accepting that the woman felt that such a call would be inappropriate, Trump fired her. She started her own business. Trump writes that her business failed. "I was really happy when I found that out," he says.

    "She had turned on me after I did so much to help her. I had asked her to do me a favor in return, and she turned me down flat. She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad. Over the years many people have called me asking for a recommendation for her. I always gave her bad recommendation. I can't stomach disloyalty. ..and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable."

    All that because (if she exists) she declined to engage in corruption for the Donald. That is your President. A draft dodger, a pampered rich kid, and Ivy brat (Penn, Wharton). This increasingly is a pattern at the top: Ivy, money, no military service.

    Pussy John Bolton

    A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda.

    Pussy John, an Ivy flower (Yale) wrote in a reunion books that, during the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton explained that he decided to avoid service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from."

    This same Pussy John, unwilling to risk his valuable being in a war he could have attended, now wants war with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, and Afghanistan. In these wars millions would die while he waggled his silly lip broom in the West Wing. His truculence is pathological and dangerous.

    Here is PJ on Iran: which has not harmed and does not threaten America: "We think the government is under real pressure and it's our intention to squeeze them very hard," Bolton said Tuesday in Singapore. "As the British say, 'squeeze them until the pips squeak'."

    How very brave of him. He apparently feels sadistic delight at starving Venezuelans, inciting civil war, and ruining the lives of millions who have done nothing wrong. Whence the weird hostility of this empty jockstrap, the lack of humanity? Forgot his Midiol? Venezuela of course has done nothing to the US and couldn't if it wanted to. America under the Freak Show is destroying another country simply because it doesn't meekly obey. While PJ gloats.

    Bush II

    Another rich kid and Yalie, none too bright, amoral as the rest, another draft dodger, (he hid in the Air National Guard.) who got to the White House on daddy's name recognition. Not having the balls to fight in his own war, he presided over the destruction of Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands, for no reason. (Except oil, Israel, and Empire. Collectively, these amount to no reason.) He then had the effrontery to pose on the deck of an aircraft carrier and say, "Mission accomplished." You know, just like Alexander the Great. Amoral. No empathy. What a man.

    The striking pattern of the Ivy League avoiding the war confirmed then, as it does now, that our present rulers regard the rest of America as beings of a lower order. These armchair John Waynes might have called them "deplorables," though Hillary, another Yalie bowwow hawk, had not yet made the contempt explicit. This was the attitude of Pussy John, Bushy-Bushy Two, and Cockatoo Don. Compare this with the Falklands War in which Prince Andrew did what a country's leadership should do, but ours doesn't..

    Wikipedia: "He (Prince Andrew) holds the rank of commander and the honorary rank of Vice Admiral (as of February 2015) in the Royal Navy, in which he served as an active-duty helicopter pilot and instructor and as the captain of a warship. He saw active service during the Falklands War, flying on multiple missions including anti-surface warfare, Exocet missile decoy, and casualty evacuation"

    The Brits still have class. Compare Andrew with the contents of the Great Double-Wide on Pennsylvania Avernus.

    Gina

    A measure of the moral degradation of America: It is the only country that openly and proudly engages in torture. Many countries do it, of course. We admit it, and maintain torture prisons around the globe. Now we have a major government official, Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, a known sadist. "Bloody Gina." Is this who represents us? Would any other country in the civilized world put a sadist publicly in office?

    Think of Gina waterboarding some guy, or standing around and getting off on it. You don't torture people unless you like it. The guy is tied down, coughing, choking, screaming, begging, desperate, drowning, and Gina pours more water. The poor bastard vomits, chokes. Gina adds a little more water .

    What kind of woman would do this? Well, Gina's kind obviously. Does she then run off to her office and lock the door for half an hour? Maybe it starts early. One imagines her as a little girl, playing with her dolls. Cheerleader Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Klaus Barbie .

    Michael Pompeo

    Another pathologically aggressive chickenhawk. In a piece in Foreign Affairs he describes Iran as a "rogue state that America must eliminate for the sake of all that is good. Note that Pompeo presides over a foreign policy seeking to destroy Venezuela's economy and threatens military invasion, though Venezuela is no danger to the US and is not America's business; embargoes Cuba, which in no danger to the US and is not America's business; seeks to destroy Iran's economy, though Iran is no danger to the US and none of Americas business; sanctions Europe and meddles in its politics; sanctions Russia, which is not a danger to the United States, in an attempt to destroy its economy, pushes NATO up to Russia's borders, abandons the INF arms-control treaty and establishes a Space Command which will mean nuclear weapons on hair trigger in orbit, starts another nuclear arms race; wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress; sanctions North Korea; continues a seventeen-year policy of killing Afghans for no discernible purpose; wages a war against Syria; bombs Somalis; maintains unwanted occupation forces in Iraq; increasingly puts military forces in Africa; supports regimes with ghastly human-rights records such as Saudi Arabia and Israel; and looks for a war with China in the South China Sea, which is no more America's business than the Gulf of Mexico is China's.

    But Pompeo is not a loon, oh no, and America is not a rogue state. Perish forfend.

    Nikki Haley

    A negligible twit -- I choose my vowel carefully -- but characterized, like Trump, PJ, and Pompeo Mattis

    "After being promoted to lieutenant general, Mattis took command of Marine Corps Combat Development Command. On February 1, 2005, speaking at a forum in San Diego, he said "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."

    Perhaps in air-to-air combat you want someone who regards killing as fun, or in an amphibious assault. But in a position to make policy? Can you image Dwight Eisenhower talking about the fun of squaring a man's brains across the ground?

    The Upshot

    We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now. Again, it is not a matter of Republicans and Democrats. No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.

    Gene Su , says: February 8, 2019 at 3:07 am GMT

    I remember in high school one of my teachers stating how weird it seems that it would be the leadership of the US military who would call for the American government to intervene less in the affairs of other countries and to not be so quick to use military force. This was, of course, decades ago.

    A few years ago, I had a conversation with one of my colleages. He remarked how scary it was that so many American politicians were calling for war with Russia (with Hillary Clinton leading the pack?). I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth (Vietnam).

    animalogic , says: February 8, 2019 at 8:05 am GMT
    Fred is absolutely correct: the current administration is pathological & insane.

    However, it's worth remembering that their insane behavior is based on the same Imperial goals that have been in play since at least 1945.

    The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors.

    China & Russia are real novelties -- & as such, damn scary. Taken together, they are near equal military & economic rivals of the US.

    To US elites this is almost incomprehensible. How ? How did China suddenly become leaders in cutting edge tech? How did Russia suddenly appear with hypersonsic missiles ?

    It's impossible ! Given the already existing moral & psychological inadequacies of individual Trump team members, insanity & juvenile behavior are fairly predictable responses .

    MikeatMikedotMike , says: February 8, 2019 at 7:20 pm GMT
    The fact that you left Bill Clinton off this list (you know, the president that fired Tomahawk missiles into the country of Sudan to take attention away from the Lewinsky hearings, sexually assaulted subordinate women for decades, and spent time banging underage sex slaves via the Lolita Express, pardons a bunch of Puerto Rican terrorists in 2000 to help swing PR votes to his bag of shit wife in the New York Senate race and was, oh yeah, a draft dodger) is pathetic even for you , Kiko. I guess NAFTA makes up for all that rapey shit, huh?

    And when can we expect a detailed critique of the Mexican political climate, Kiko? Is it still never? A little too worried about that knock on the door if you bring up all the inconvenient murder going on down there, and all of the gutless politicians and law enforcement that turn a blind eye to it, you insufferable hypocrite?

    Reactionary Utopian , says: February 8, 2019 at 10:31 pm GMT

    No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.

    Now there, I will certainly agree with Mr. Reed, but in a qualified way. The Trump administration is somewhat more warlike and interventionist in its talk than previous ones have been. But, so far, all talk (except for its repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal, which is ominous).

    Also, even in terms of the bellicose hot air, the current regime's increase over its predecessors is a matter of degree, not of kind. Even the increase itself I'd call incremental.

    Also, I wrote, "So far, all talk." That doesn't mean I'm not concerned. As the man who jumped off a skyscraper said, when passing the 2nd floor, "All right so far!"

    Truth , says: February 9, 2019 at 1:28 am GMT
    @NoseytheDuke My friend, I understand what you are saying, but at some point the wise man stops playing checkers on the chessboard.

    There is, functionally, no difference between The Donna and Cackles.

    riversedge , says: February 9, 2019 at 1:43 am GMT
    So what's the difference between Trump's neocons and the neocons who would have run Hillary? Nothing. There is no one more chicken hawkish, and slavish to Israel than Hillary.
    Asagirian , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:11 am GMT
    Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects,

    Obama came AFTER Bush II and continued his Zionist-supremacist policies.

    Asagirian , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:14 am GMT
    Give Trump some credit. He tried to ease ties with Russia and end war in Syria. But look how the Jewish supremacists in media and Deep State goons all jumped on him. And almost no one in the Establishment came to his side.

    Obama and his goons pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax. Obama and Bush II have more in common.

    Trump tried but he's seen turned pussy.

    ThreeCranes , says: February 9, 2019 at 3:15 pm GMT
    @Sean wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress

    "About time too. Nixon deciding the US would getting pally with China was a hostile act as far as Russia was concerned."

    Exactly right. Glad someone else remembers things as they were. Getting pally with China will turn out to be the most disastrous mistake the USA has ever made in foreign policy.

    Arrogantly thinking that we could make them our junior partners we have given or sold them everything which made us great. Our industries, technology, patents, education at premier research institutions etc. Now, utilizing everything we provided them, they will surpass and then suppress us. Meanwhile our ignorant politicians, blinded by traitorous, dual-citizen economists and bankers who promised a new economy based upon finance and "information", plod along, single file, to oblivion.

    KenH , says: February 9, 2019 at 9:50 pm GMT

    Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this.

    Most of us knew that Trump is a flawed man but were willing to overlook that because he was the only one talking sense on immigration and offering solutions that would benefit white America. Of course, after two years Trump has been all tweet and little action on immigration and appears poised to sell out out to Javanka, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and the Business Roundtable.

    He's narcissistic and a bit of a con man but not profoundly ignorant. Profoundly ignorant people don't become billionaires and will themselves to the presidency.

    Trump has done a 180 on his campaign foreign policy and filled his administration with Israel first neocon retreads from the George W. Bush era instead of America firsters. People like Bolton deserve all the hate and condemnation heaped upon them by Fredrico.

    Fredrico just hates Trump because he doesn't worship Mexico and Mexicans like Fredrico does and spoke the truth about many Mexican illegals being predisposed to violent crime. Fredrico and his hispandering Bobbsey twin Ron Unz get easily triggered at the slightest criticism of hispanics, even if based in fact, and fly into a foaming at the mouth rage.

    Carroll Price , says: February 10, 2019 at 1:29 am GMT
    @KenH The first priority of any president is staying alive, which probably explains why every US president, including Donald Trump ends up doing the exact opposite of what they promise on the campaign trail. As to Trump's neocon advisors, I suspect they were appointed by the deep state, with him having no say in the matter.

    [Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

    Highly recommended!
    We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now.
    Appointment on Bolton essentially confirms Fred Reed diagnose of Trump: "profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. ..."
    "... The problem with the current occupants of the White House is not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts. ..."
    "... Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law ..."
    "... A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda. ..."
    "... I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth ..."
    "... The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors. ..."
    Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. Today's administration would seem unwholesome in a New York bus station at three in the morning. They are not normal American politicians.

    In particular they seem to be pushing for war with Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. And -- this is important -- their behavior is not a matter of liberals catfighting with conservatives. All former presidents carefully avoided war with the Soviet Union, which carefully avoided war with America.

    It was Reagan, a conservative and responsible president, who negotiated the INF treaty, to eliminate short-fuse nuclear weapons from Europe. By contrast, Trump is scrapping it. Pat Buchanan, the most conservative man I have met, strongly opposes aggression against Russia. The problem with the current occupants of the White House is not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts.

    Donald the Cockatoo

    Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this. All politics being herd politics, the population has coalesced into herds fanatically pro-Trump and fanatically anti-Trump. Yet Trump's past is not a secret. Well-documented biographies describe his behavior in detail, but his supporters don't read them. The following is a bit long, but worth reading.

    From The Making of Donald Trump , Johnston, David Cay. (p. 23). Melville House. Kindle Edition.

    "I always get even," Trump writes in the opening line of that chapter. He then launches into an attack on the same woman he had denounced in Colorado. Trump recruited the unnamed woman "from her government job where she was making peanuts," her career going nowhere. "I decided to make her somebody. I gave her a great job at the Trump Organization, and over time she became powerful in real estate. She bought a beautiful home.

    "When Trump was in financial trouble in the early nineties .."I asked her to make a phone call to an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank and would have done what she asked. She said, "Donald, I can't do that." Instead of accepting that the woman felt that such a call would be inappropriate, Trump fired her. She started her own business. Trump writes that her business failed. "I was really happy when I found that out," he says.

    "She had turned on me after I did so much to help her. I had asked her to do me a favor in return, and she turned me down flat. She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad. Over the years many people have called me asking for a recommendation for her. I always gave her bad recommendation. I can't stomach disloyalty. ..and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable."

    All that because (if she exists) she declined to engage in corruption for the Donald. That is your President. A draft dodger, a pampered rich kid, and Ivy brat (Penn, Wharton). This increasingly is a pattern at the top: Ivy, money, no military service.

    Pussy John Bolton

    A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda.

    Pussy John, an Ivy flower (Yale) wrote in a reunion books that, during the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton explained that he decided to avoid service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from."

    This same Pussy John, unwilling to risk his valuable being in a war he could have attended, now wants war with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, and Afghanistan. In these wars millions would die while he waggled his silly lip broom in the West Wing. His truculence is pathological and dangerous.

    Here is PJ on Iran: which has not harmed and does not threaten America: "We think the government is under real pressure and it's our intention to squeeze them very hard," Bolton said Tuesday in Singapore. "As the British say, 'squeeze them until the pips squeak'."

    How very brave of him. He apparently feels sadistic delight at starving Venezuelans, inciting civil war, and ruining the lives of millions who have done nothing wrong. Whence the weird hostility of this empty jockstrap, the lack of humanity? Forgot his Midiol? Venezuela of course has done nothing to the US and couldn't if it wanted to. America under the Freak Show is destroying another country simply because it doesn't meekly obey. While PJ gloats.

    Bush II

    Another rich kid and Yalie, none too bright, amoral as the rest, another draft dodger, (he hid in the Air National Guard.) who got to the White House on daddy's name recognition. Not having the balls to fight in his own war, he presided over the destruction of Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands, for no reason. (Except oil, Israel, and Empire. Collectively, these amount to no reason.) He then had the effrontery to pose on the deck of an aircraft carrier and say, "Mission accomplished." You know, just like Alexander the Great. Amoral. No empathy. What a man.

    The striking pattern of the Ivy League avoiding the war confirmed then, as it does now, that our present rulers regard the rest of America as beings of a lower order. These armchair John Waynes might have called them "deplorables," though Hillary, another Yalie bowwow hawk, had not yet made the contempt explicit. This was the attitude of Pussy John, Bushy-Bushy Two, and Cockatoo Don. Compare this with the Falklands War in which Prince Andrew did what a country's leadership should do, but ours doesn't..

    Wikipedia: "He (Prince Andrew) holds the rank of commander and the honorary rank of Vice Admiral (as of February 2015) in the Royal Navy, in which he served as an active-duty helicopter pilot and instructor and as the captain of a warship. He saw active service during the Falklands War, flying on multiple missions including anti-surface warfare, Exocet missile decoy, and casualty evacuation"

    The Brits still have class. Compare Andrew with the contents of the Great Double-Wide on Pennsylvania Avernus.

    Gina

    A measure of the moral degradation of America: It is the only country that openly and proudly engages in torture. Many countries do it, of course. We admit it, and maintain torture prisons around the globe. Now we have a major government official, Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, a known sadist. "Bloody Gina." Is this who represents us? Would any other country in the civilized world put a sadist publicly in office?

    Think of Gina waterboarding some guy, or standing around and getting off on it. You don't torture people unless you like it. The guy is tied down, coughing, choking, screaming, begging, desperate, drowning, and Gina pours more water. The poor bastard vomits, chokes. Gina adds a little more water .

    What kind of woman would do this? Well, Gina's kind obviously. Does she then run off to her office and lock the door for half an hour? Maybe it starts early. One imagines her as a little girl, playing with her dolls. Cheerleader Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Klaus Barbie .

    Michael Pompeo

    Another pathologically aggressive chickenhawk. In a piece in Foreign Affairs he describes Iran as a "rogue state that America must eliminate for the sake of all that is good. Note that Pompeo presides over a foreign policy seeking to destroy Venezuela's economy and threatens military invasion, though Venezuela is no danger to the US and is not America's business; embargoes Cuba, which in no danger to the US and is not America's business; seeks to destroy Iran's economy, though Iran is no danger to the US and none of Americas business; sanctions Europe and meddles in its politics; sanctions Russia, which is not a danger to the United States, in an attempt to destroy its economy, pushes NATO up to Russia's borders, abandons the INF arms-control treaty and establishes a Space Command which will mean nuclear weapons on hair trigger in orbit, starts another nuclear arms race; wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress; sanctions North Korea; continues a seventeen-year policy of killing Afghans for no discernible purpose; wages a war against Syria; bombs Somalis; maintains unwanted occupation forces in Iraq; increasingly puts military forces in Africa; supports regimes with ghastly human-rights records such as Saudi Arabia and Israel; and looks for a war with China in the South China Sea, which is no more America's business than the Gulf of Mexico is China's.

    But Pompeo is not a loon, oh no, and America is not a rogue state. Perish forfend.

    Nikki Haley

    A negligible twit -- I choose my vowel carefully -- but characterized, like Trump, PJ, and Pompeo Mattis

    "After being promoted to lieutenant general, Mattis took command of Marine Corps Combat Development Command. On February 1, 2005, speaking at a forum in San Diego, he said "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."

    Perhaps in air-to-air combat you want someone who regards killing as fun, or in an amphibious assault. But in a position to make policy? Can you image Dwight Eisenhower talking about the fun of squaring a man's brains across the ground?

    The Upshot

    We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now. Again, it is not a matter of Republicans and Democrats. No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.

    Gene Su , says: February 8, 2019 at 3:07 am GMT

    I remember in high school one of my teachers stating how weird it seems that it would be the leadership of the US military who would call for the American government to intervene less in the affairs of other countries and to not be so quick to use military force. This was, of course, decades ago.

    A few years ago, I had a conversation with one of my colleages. He remarked how scary it was that so many American politicians were calling for war with Russia (with Hillary Clinton leading the pack?). I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth (Vietnam).

    animalogic , says: February 8, 2019 at 8:05 am GMT
    Fred is absolutely correct: the current administration is pathological & insane.

    However, it's worth remembering that their insane behavior is based on the same Imperial goals that have been in play since at least 1945.

    The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors.

    China & Russia are real novelties -- & as such, damn scary. Taken together, they are near equal military & economic rivals of the US.

    To US elites this is almost incomprehensible. How ? How did China suddenly become leaders in cutting edge tech? How did Russia suddenly appear with hypersonsic missiles ?

    It's impossible ! Given the already existing moral & psychological inadequacies of individual Trump team members, insanity & juvenile behavior are fairly predictable responses .

    MikeatMikedotMike , says: February 8, 2019 at 7:20 pm GMT
    The fact that you left Bill Clinton off this list (you know, the president that fired Tomahawk missiles into the country of Sudan to take attention away from the Lewinsky hearings, sexually assaulted subordinate women for decades, and spent time banging underage sex slaves via the Lolita Express, pardons a bunch of Puerto Rican terrorists in 2000 to help swing PR votes to his bag of shit wife in the New York Senate race and was, oh yeah, a draft dodger) is pathetic even for you , Kiko. I guess NAFTA makes up for all that rapey shit, huh?

    And when can we expect a detailed critique of the Mexican political climate, Kiko? Is it still never? A little too worried about that knock on the door if you bring up all the inconvenient murder going on down there, and all of the gutless politicians and law enforcement that turn a blind eye to it, you insufferable hypocrite?

    Reactionary Utopian , says: February 8, 2019 at 10:31 pm GMT

    No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.

    Now there, I will certainly agree with Mr. Reed, but in a qualified way. The Trump administration is somewhat more warlike and interventionist in its talk than previous ones have been. But, so far, all talk (except for its repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal, which is ominous).

    Also, even in terms of the bellicose hot air, the current regime's increase over its predecessors is a matter of degree, not of kind. Even the increase itself I'd call incremental.

    Also, I wrote, "So far, all talk." That doesn't mean I'm not concerned. As the man who jumped off a skyscraper said, when passing the 2nd floor, "All right so far!"

    Truth , says: February 9, 2019 at 1:28 am GMT
    @NoseytheDuke My friend, I understand what you are saying, but at some point the wise man stops playing checkers on the chessboard.

    There is, functionally, no difference between The Donna and Cackles.

    riversedge , says: February 9, 2019 at 1:43 am GMT
    So what's the difference between Trump's neocons and the neocons who would have run Hillary? Nothing. There is no one more chicken hawkish, and slavish to Israel than Hillary.
    Asagirian , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:11 am GMT
    Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects,

    Obama came AFTER Bush II and continued his Zionist-supremacist policies.

    Asagirian , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:14 am GMT
    Give Trump some credit. He tried to ease ties with Russia and end war in Syria. But look how the Jewish supremacists in media and Deep State goons all jumped on him. And almost no one in the Establishment came to his side.

    Obama and his goons pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax. Obama and Bush II have more in common.

    Trump tried but he's seen turned pussy.

    ThreeCranes , says: February 9, 2019 at 3:15 pm GMT
    @Sean wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress

    "About time too. Nixon deciding the US would getting pally with China was a hostile act as far as Russia was concerned."

    Exactly right. Glad someone else remembers things as they were. Getting pally with China will turn out to be the most disastrous mistake the USA has ever made in foreign policy.

    Arrogantly thinking that we could make them our junior partners we have given or sold them everything which made us great. Our industries, technology, patents, education at premier research institutions etc. Now, utilizing everything we provided them, they will surpass and then suppress us. Meanwhile our ignorant politicians, blinded by traitorous, dual-citizen economists and bankers who promised a new economy based upon finance and "information", plod along, single file, to oblivion.

    KenH , says: February 9, 2019 at 9:50 pm GMT

    Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this.

    Most of us knew that Trump is a flawed man but were willing to overlook that because he was the only one talking sense on immigration and offering solutions that would benefit white America. Of course, after two years Trump has been all tweet and little action on immigration and appears poised to sell out out to Javanka, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and the Business Roundtable.

    He's narcissistic and a bit of a con man but not profoundly ignorant. Profoundly ignorant people don't become billionaires and will themselves to the presidency.

    Trump has done a 180 on his campaign foreign policy and filled his administration with Israel first neocon retreads from the George W. Bush era instead of America firsters. People like Bolton deserve all the hate and condemnation heaped upon them by Fredrico.

    Fredrico just hates Trump because he doesn't worship Mexico and Mexicans like Fredrico does and spoke the truth about many Mexican illegals being predisposed to violent crime. Fredrico and his hispandering Bobbsey twin Ron Unz get easily triggered at the slightest criticism of hispanics, even if based in fact, and fly into a foaming at the mouth rage.

    Carroll Price , says: February 10, 2019 at 1:29 am GMT
    @KenH The first priority of any president is staying alive, which probably explains why every US president, including Donald Trump ends up doing the exact opposite of what they promise on the campaign trail. As to Trump's neocon advisors, I suspect they were appointed by the deep state, with him having no say in the matter.

    [Feb 10, 2019] Deranged Madeline Albright famously told Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, due to Clinton s years of punative sanctions, was worth it

    Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    follyofwar , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:42 am GMT

    @Asagirian Clinton wasn't a lunatic? I wonder what Fred thinks about his deranged Jewish Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

    She famously told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, due to Clinton's years of punative sanctions, was "worth it."

    Doesn't seem like those preventable deaths of innocent children bothered Billy Boy too much. With the Clinton's, we get two lunatics for the price of one.

    [Feb 10, 2019] Deranged Madeline Albright famously told Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, due to Clinton s years of punative sanctions, was worth it

    Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    follyofwar , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:42 am GMT

    @Asagirian Clinton wasn't a lunatic? I wonder what Fred thinks about his deranged Jewish Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

    She famously told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, due to Clinton's years of punative sanctions, was "worth it."

    Doesn't seem like those preventable deaths of innocent children bothered Billy Boy too much. With the Clinton's, we get two lunatics for the price of one.

    [Feb 10, 2019] In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex.

    Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    anonymous [340] Disclaimer , says: February 9, 2019 at 9:35 am GMT

    @NoseytheDuke Face it -- he neither believed nor understood those Stephen Miller speeches. Coming from the mouth of Donald Trump, they were lies.

    Why do so many of you intelligent people still buy into the political puppet show, expecting BigGov to fix itself? Electoral politics, judicial confirmations, etc, are orchestrated conflict to keep dissidence channeled and harmlessly blown off as the Empire lurches along.

    There are other columnists here at Unz who have been calling the Beltway BS for years. For example:

    "In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.

    A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics."

    Linh Dinh, June 12, 2016

    [Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

    We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now.
    Appointment on Bolton essentially confirms Fred Reed diagnose of Trump: "profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law.
    Notable quotes:
    "... I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth ..."
    "... The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors. ..."
    Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. Today's administration would seem unwholesome in a New York bus station at three in the morning. They are not normal American politicians.

    In particular they seem to be pushing for war with Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. And -- this is important -- their behavior is not a matter of liberals catfighting with conservatives. All former presidents carefully avoided war with the Soviet Union, which carefully avoided war with America.

    It was Reagan, a conservative and responsible president, who negotiated the INF treaty, to eliminate short-fuse nuclear weapons from Europe. By contrast, Trump is scrapping it. Pat Buchanan, the most conservative man I have met, strongly opposes aggression against Russia. The problem with the current occupants of the White House is not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts.

    Donald the Cockatoo

    Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this. All politics being herd politics, the population has coalesced into herds fanatically pro-Trump and fanatically anti-Trump. Yet Trump's past is not a secret. Well-documented biographies describe his behavior in detail, but his supporters don't read them. The following is a bit long, but worth reading.

    From The Making of Donald Trump , Johnston, David Cay. (p. 23). Melville House. Kindle Edition.

    "I always get even," Trump writes in the opening line of that chapter. He then launches into an attack on the same woman he had denounced in Colorado. Trump recruited the unnamed woman "from her government job where she was making peanuts," her career going nowhere. "I decided to make her somebody. I gave her a great job at the Trump Organization, and over time she became powerful in real estate. She bought a beautiful home.

    "When Trump was in financial trouble in the early nineties .."I asked her to make a phone call to an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank and would have done what she asked. She said, "Donald, I can't do that." Instead of accepting that the woman felt that such a call would be inappropriate, Trump fired her. She started her own business. Trump writes that her business failed. "I was really happy when I found that out," he says.

    "She had turned on me after I did so much to help her. I had asked her to do me a favor in return, and she turned me down flat. She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad. Over the years many people have called me asking for a recommendation for her. I always gave her bad recommendation. I can't stomach disloyalty. ..and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable."

    All that because (if she exists) she declined to engage in corruption for the Donald. That is your President. A draft dodger, a pampered rich kid, and Ivy brat (Penn, Wharton). This increasingly is a pattern at the top: Ivy, money, no military service.

    Pussy John Bolton

    A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda.

    Pussy John, an Ivy flower (Yale) wrote in a reunion books that, during the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton explained that he decided to avoid service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to take it away from."

    This same Pussy John, unwilling to risk his valuable being in a war he could have attended, now wants war with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, and Afghanistan. In these wars millions would die while he waggled his silly lip broom in the West Wing. His truculence is pathological and dangerous.

    Here is PJ on Iran: which has not harmed and does not threaten America: "We think the government is under real pressure and it's our intention to squeeze them very hard," Bolton said Tuesday in Singapore. "As the British say, 'squeeze them until the pips squeak'."

    How very brave of him. He apparently feels sadistic delight at starving Venezuelans, inciting civil war, and ruining the lives of millions who have done nothing wrong. Whence the weird hostility of this empty jockstrap, the lack of humanity? Forgot his Midiol? Venezuela of course has done nothing to the US and couldn't if it wanted to. America under the Freak Show is destroying another country simply because it doesn't meekly obey. While PJ gloats.

    Bush II

    Another rich kid and Yalie, none too bright, amoral as the rest, another draft dodger, (he hid in the Air National Guard.) who got to the White House on daddy's name recognition. Not having the balls to fight in his own war, he presided over the destruction of Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands, for no reason. (Except oil, Israel, and Empire. Collectively, these amount to no reason.) He then had the effrontery to pose on the deck of an aircraft carrier and say, "Mission accomplished." You know, just like Alexander the Great. Amoral. No empathy. What a man.

    The striking pattern of the Ivy League avoiding the war confirmed then, as it does now, that our present rulers regard the rest of America as beings of a lower order. These armchair John Waynes might have called them "deplorables," though Hillary, another Yalie bowwow hawk, had not yet made the contempt explicit. This was the attitude of Pussy John, Bushy-Bushy Two, and Cockatoo Don. Compare this with the Falklands War in which Prince Andrew did what a country's leadership should do, but ours doesn't..

    Wikipedia: "He (Prince Andrew) holds the rank of commander and the honorary rank of Vice Admiral (as of February 2015) in the Royal Navy, in which he served as an active-duty helicopter pilot and instructor and as the captain of a warship. He saw active service during the Falklands War, flying on multiple missions including anti-surface warfare, Exocet missile decoy, and casualty evacuation"

    The Brits still have class. Compare Andrew with the contents of the Great Double-Wide on Pennsylvania Avernus.

    Gina

    A measure of the moral degradation of America: It is the only country that openly and proudly engages in torture. Many countries do it, of course. We admit it, and maintain torture prisons around the globe. Now we have a major government official, Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, a known sadist. "Bloody Gina." Is this who represents us? Would any other country in the civilized world put a sadist publicly in office?

    Think of Gina waterboarding some guy, or standing around and getting off on it. You don't torture people unless you like it. The guy is tied down, coughing, choking, screaming, begging, desperate, drowning, and Gina pours more water. The poor bastard vomits, chokes. Gina adds a little more water .

    What kind of woman would do this? Well, Gina's kind obviously. Does she then run off to her office and lock the door for half an hour? Maybe it starts early. One imagines her as a little girl, playing with her dolls. Cheerleader Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Klaus Barbie .

    Michael Pompeo

    Another pathologically aggressive chickenhawk. In a piece in Foreign Affairs he describes Iran as a "rogue state that America must eliminate for the sake of all that is good. Note that Pompeo presides over a foreign policy seeking to destroy Venezuela's economy and threatens military invasion, though Venezuela is no danger to the US and is not America's business; embargoes Cuba, which in no danger to the US and is not America's business; seeks to destroy Iran's economy, though Iran is no danger to the US and none of Americas business; sanctions Europe and meddles in its politics; sanctions Russia, which is not a danger to the United States, in an attempt to destroy its economy, pushes NATO up to Russia's borders, abandons the INF arms-control treaty and establishes a Space Command which will mean nuclear weapons on hair trigger in orbit, starts another nuclear arms race; wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress; sanctions North Korea; continues a seventeen-year policy of killing Afghans for no discernible purpose; wages a war against Syria; bombs Somalis; maintains unwanted occupation forces in Iraq; increasingly puts military forces in Africa; supports regimes with ghastly human-rights records such as Saudi Arabia and Israel; and looks for a war with China in the South China Sea, which is no more America's business than the Gulf of Mexico is China's.

    But Pompeo is not a loon, oh no, and America is not a rogue state. Perish forfend.

    Nikki Haley

    A negligible twit -- I choose my vowel carefully -- but characterized, like Trump, PJ, and Pompeo Mattis

    "After being promoted to lieutenant general, Mattis took command of Marine Corps Combat Development Command. On February 1, 2005, speaking at a forum in San Diego, he said "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."

    Perhaps in air-to-air combat you want someone who regards killing as fun, or in an amphibious assault. But in a position to make policy? Can you image Dwight Eisenhower talking about the fun of squaring a man's brains across the ground?

    The Upshot

    We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now. Again, it is not a matter of Republicans and Democrats. No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.

    Gene Su , says: February 8, 2019 at 3:07 am GMT

    I remember in high school one of my teachers stating how weird it seems that it would be the leadership of the US military who would call for the American government to intervene less in the affairs of other countries and to not be so quick to use military force. This was, of course, decades ago.

    A few years ago, I had a conversation with one of my colleages. He remarked how scary it was that so many American politicians were calling for war with Russia (with Hillary Clinton leading the pack?). I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth (Vietnam).

    animalogic , says: February 8, 2019 at 8:05 am GMT
    Fred is absolutely correct: the current administration is pathological & insane.

    However, it's worth remembering that their insane behavior is based on the same Imperial goals that have been in play since at least 1945.

    The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors.

    China & Russia are real novelties -- & as such, damn scary. Taken together, they are near equal military & economic rivals of the US.

    To US elites this is almost incomprehensible. How ? How did China suddenly become leaders in cutting edge tech? How did Russia suddenly appear with hypersonsic missiles ?

    It's impossible ! Given the already existing moral & psychological inadequacies of individual Trump team members, insanity & juvenile behavior are fairly predictable responses .

    MikeatMikedotMike , says: February 8, 2019 at 7:20 pm GMT
    The fact that you left Bill Clinton off this list (you know, the president that fired Tomahawk missiles into the country of Sudan to take attention away from the Lewinsky hearings, sexually assaulted subordinate women for decades, and spent time banging underage sex slaves via the Lolita Express, pardons a bunch of Puerto Rican terrorists in 2000 to help swing PR votes to his bag of shit wife in the New York Senate race and was, oh yeah, a draft dodger) is pathetic even for you , Kiko. I guess NAFTA makes up for all that rapey shit, huh?

    And when can we expect a detailed critique of the Mexican political climate, Kiko? Is it still never? A little too worried about that knock on the door if you bring up all the inconvenient murder going on down there, and all of the gutless politicians and law enforcement that turn a blind eye to it, you insufferable hypocrite?

    Reactionary Utopian , says: February 8, 2019 at 10:31 pm GMT

    No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.

    Now there, I will certainly agree with Mr. Reed, but in a qualified way. The Trump administration is somewhat more warlike and interventionist in its talk than previous ones have been. But, so far, all talk (except for its repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal, which is ominous).

    Also, even in terms of the bellicose hot air, the current regime's increase over its predecessors is a matter of degree, not of kind. Even the increase itself I'd call incremental.

    Also, I wrote, "So far, all talk." That doesn't mean I'm not concerned. As the man who jumped off a skyscraper said, when passing the 2nd floor, "All right so far!"

    Truth , says: February 9, 2019 at 1:28 am GMT
    @NoseytheDuke My friend, I understand what you are saying, but at some point the wise man stops playing checkers on the chessboard.

    There is, functionally, no difference between The Donna and Cackles.

    riversedge , says: February 9, 2019 at 1:43 am GMT
    So what's the difference between Trump's neocons and the neocons who would have run Hillary? Nothing. There is no one more chicken hawkish, and slavish to Israel than Hillary.
    Asagirian , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:11 am GMT
    Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects,

    Obama came AFTER Bush II and continued his Zionist-supremacist policies.

    Asagirian , says: February 9, 2019 at 2:14 am GMT
    Give Trump some credit. He tried to ease ties with Russia and end war in Syria. But look how the Jewish supremacists in media and Deep State goons all jumped on him. And almost no one in the Establishment came to his side.

    Obama and his goons pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax. Obama and Bush II have more in common.

    Trump tried but he's seen turned pussy.

    ThreeCranes , says: February 9, 2019 at 3:15 pm GMT
    @Sean wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress

    "About time too. Nixon deciding the US would getting pally with China was a hostile act as far as Russia was concerned."

    Exactly right. Glad someone else remembers things as they were. Getting pally with China will turn out to be the most disastrous mistake the USA has ever made in foreign policy.

    Arrogantly thinking that we could make them our junior partners we have given or sold them everything which made us great. Our industries, technology, patents, education at premier research institutions etc. Now, utilizing everything we provided them, they will surpass and then suppress us. Meanwhile our ignorant politicians, blinded by traitorous, dual-citizen economists and bankers who promised a new economy based upon finance and "information", plod along, single file, to oblivion.

    KenH , says: February 9, 2019 at 9:50 pm GMT

    Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this.

    Most of us knew that Trump is a flawed man but were willing to overlook that because he was the only one talking sense on immigration and offering solutions that would benefit white America. Of course, after two years Trump has been all tweet and little action on immigration and appears poised to sell out out to Javanka, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and the Business Roundtable.

    He's narcissistic and a bit of a con man but not profoundly ignorant. Profoundly ignorant people don't become billionaires and will themselves to the presidency.

    Trump has done a 180 on his campaign foreign policy and filled his administration with Israel first neocon retreads from the George W. Bush era instead of America firsters. People like Bolton deserve all the hate and condemnation heaped upon them by Fredrico.

    Fredrico just hates Trump because he doesn't worship Mexico and Mexicans like Fredrico does and spoke the truth about many Mexican illegals being predisposed to violent crime. Fredrico and his hispandering Bobbsey twin Ron Unz get easily triggered at the slightest criticism of hispanics, even if based in fact, and fly into a foaming at the mouth rage.

    Carroll Price , says: February 10, 2019 at 1:29 am GMT
    @KenH The first priority of any president is staying alive, which probably explains why every US president, including Donald Trump ends up doing the exact opposite of what they promise on the campaign trail. As to Trump's neocon advisors, I suspect they were appointed by the deep state, with him having no say in the matter.

    [Feb 09, 2019] Mueller Annoyed By Chipper, Overeager Adam Schiff Constantly Sending Him Evidence He's Already Uncovered

    Feb 09, 2019 | politics.theonion.com

    WASHINGTON -- Expressing frustration at the obnoxious, nonstop attempts to aid his investigation, special counsel Robert Mueller was reportedly annoyed Friday that a chipper, overeager Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) keeps constantly sending him evidence he's already uncovered. "Christ, he just emailed me ...

    [Feb 09, 2019] PRETTY FREAKY If America Turns to Fascism, Populism Will Be at Its Heart.

    Feb 09, 2019 | prettyfreaky.blogspot.com

    "If America Turns to Fascism, Populism Will Be at Its Heart."

    Several months ago, I wrote a book review (see Internet Review of Books and my review of "Fascism: Why Not Here?" by Brian E. Fogarty) about a political history that has made me think ever since. (Title quote is taken from Fogarty's excellent book http://internetreviewofbooks.com/mar10/fascism.html .)

    Lately, I keep seeing similar ideas popping up--mostly in response to the anti-intellectual, folksy, populist appeal of people such as Sarah Palin and up-and-coming Tea Party types.

    Aw, heck, who couldn't appreciate drinkin' a beer with a politician? That's what we want from those guys n' gals. We don't want them to be smarter than us or anythin', right? You betcha.

    Call me a snob (and I've been called a "snotty liberal elitist," lately, which I thought was very funny, actually, and it made me laugh an elitist snort of triumph); I really don't care.

    I demand more; I demand wisdom, good ideas, and a wide understanding of international politics as well as history; I demand people who can speak without dropping their g's (because that slangy, folksy gibberish just sounds, frankly, slow).

    Working with profoundly gifted kids (as I like to do) is like attending the smartest cocktail party you were ever invited to--sans cocktails. It's a tennis match of fascinating ideas about absolutely everything; it makes me hopeful for the future, and it challenges and amuses me at the same time.

    I don't feel that way when I watch any of these populist politicians on the news. Rather, I feel a sinking, ill feeling...could people really be that stupid? Apparently, yes, in some cases, they are.

    But I actually think there's a way out: it boils down to education and spreading the truth.

    Jon Meacham's editorial this week in NEWSWEEK (7/12/2010, "The Right Kind of American Populism") speaks to exactly the same issues.

    He explains how "...in the age of [Andrew] Jackson, American populism was about money; later, in the age of George Wallace and Richard Nixon, it became more about culture...Given the clinical economic and political facts of the hour, we should be living through a Jacksonian era of hostility to the rich and the well connected. Those whom Jackson called "the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers" ought to be generating substantial political pressure to exact reparations from, and impose severe new regulations on, the plutocratic few...And yet the pitchforks are being brandished not to encourage government to curb the excesses of the elite but to warn the citizenry that the government has turned into a socialistic threat to free enterprise."

    Meacham (with whom I do not always agree) nailed it, I think; the bottom line is that the "humble members" of society have been inundated with propaganda and fear-mongering lies by the very people who profit by keeping them down.

    Will they wake up and realize it and fight back (I mean "fight" in a good way--by voting)?

    Will government prove its viability by doing good for the people--finally?

    Maybe if that happens--if people let it happen--they will finally wake up and realize who's really been keeping them poor and oppressed and away from the American Dream.

    Maybe it's the "plutocratic few," but maybe it's also themselves.

    [Feb 09, 2019] Mueller Annoyed By Chipper, Overeager Adam Schiff Constantly Sending Him Evidence He's Already Uncovered

    Feb 09, 2019 | politics.theonion.com

    WASHINGTON -- Expressing frustration at the obnoxious, nonstop attempts to aid his investigation, special counsel Robert Mueller was reportedly annoyed Friday that a chipper, overeager Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) keeps constantly sending him evidence he's already uncovered. "Christ, he just emailed me ...

    [Feb 09, 2019] Tenth Circle Added To Rapidly Growing Hell

    This 20 year old satire looks like it was written yesterday...
    Notable quotes:
    "... In the past, the underworld was ill-equipped to handle the new breed of sinners flooding our gates -- downsizing CEOs, focus-group coordinators, telemarketing sales representatives, and vast hordes of pony-tailed entertainment-industry executives ..."
    "... Among the tortures the Corpadverticus Circle of Total Bastards boasts: the Never-Ending Drive-Thru Bank, the Bottomless Pit of Promotional Tie-In Keychains, and the dreaded Chamber of Emotionally Manipulative Home Shopping Network Products. ..."
    "... condemned TV-exercise-show personalities, clad in skin-tight Spandex outfits soaked in flesh-dissolving acid, are forced to exercise for centuries on end ..."
    "... In a nearby area, corporate raiders are forced to carry the golf clubs of uneducated Hispanic migrant workers from hole to hole for eternity, withering under a constant barrage of verbal abuse ..."
    "... "In life, I was a Salomon Brothers investment banker," one flame-blackened shade told reporters. "When I arrived here, they didn't know what to do with me. They put me in with those condemned to walk backwards with their heads turned all the way around on their necks, for the crime of attempting to see the future. But then I sent a couple of fruit baskets to the right people, and in no time flat, I secured a cushy spot for myself in the first circle of the Virtuous Unbaptized. Now that was a sweet deal. But before long, they caught on to my game and transferred me here to the realm of Total Bastards. I've been shrieking for mercy like a goddamn woman ever since." ..."
    Sep 23, 1998 | home.isi.org

    CITY OF DIS, NETHER HELL

    After nearly four years of construction at an estimated cost of 750 million souls, Corpadverticus, the new 10th circle of Hell, finally opened its doors Monday.

    Tenth Circle Added To Rapidly Growing Hell

    The Blockbuster Video-sponsored circle, located in Nether Hell between the former eighth and ninth levels of Malebolge and Cocytus, is expected to greatly alleviate the overcrowding problems that have plagued the infernal underworld in recent years. The circle is the first added to Hell in its countless-millennia history.

    "A nightmarishly large glut of condemned spirits in recent years necessitated the expansion of Hell," inferno spokesperson Antedeus said. "The traditional nine-tiered system had grown insufficient to accommodate the exponentially rising numbers of Hellbound."

    Adding to the need for expansion, Antedeus said, was the fact that a majority of the new arrivals possessed souls far more evil than the original nine circles were equipped to handle. "Demographers, advertising executives, tobacco lobbyists, monopoly-law experts retained by major corporations, and creators of office-based sitcoms–these new arrivals represent a wave of spiritual decay and horror the likes of which Hell has never before seen," Antedeus said.

    Despite the need for expansion, the plan faced considerable resistance, largely due to the considerable costs of insuring construction projects within the Kingdom Of Lies. Opposition also came from Hell purists concerned about the detrimental effect a tenth level would have on the intricate numerology of Hell's meticulously arranged allegorical structure. In 1994, however, funding was finally secured in a deal brokered between Blockbuster CEO Wayne Huizenga and Satan himself.

    Prior to the construction of the tenth circle, many among the new wave of sinners had been placed in such circles as Hoarders and Squanderers, Sowers of Discord, Flatterers and Seducers, Violent Against Art, and Hypocrites. Hell authorities, however, say that the new level, the Circle of Total Bastards, located at the site of the former Well of Giants just above the Frozen Lake at Hell's center, better suits their insidious brand of evil.

    Frigax The Vile, a leading demonic presence, is one of the most vocal supporters of the new circle.

    " In the past, the underworld was ill-equipped to handle the new breed of sinners flooding our gates -- downsizing CEOs, focus-group coordinators, telemarketing sales representatives, and vast hordes of pony-tailed entertainment-industry executives rollerblading and talking on miniaturized cell-phones at the same time. But now, we've finally got the sort of top-notch Pits of Doom necessary to give such repellent abominations the quality boilings they deserve."

    Pausing to tear off the limbs of an Access Hollywood host, Frigax added, "We're all tremendously excited about the many brand-new forms of torture and eternal pain this new level's state-of-the-art facilities will make possible."

    Among the tortures the Corpadverticus Circle of Total Bastards boasts: the Never-Ending Drive-Thru Bank, the Bottomless Pit of Promotional Tie-In Keychains, and the dreaded Chamber of Emotionally Manipulative Home Shopping Network Products.

    The Circle also features a Hall of Aerobics, where condemned TV-exercise-show personalities, clad in skin-tight Spandex outfits soaked in flesh-dissolving acid, are forced to exercise for centuries on end , covered in vomit and prodded with the distended ribs of skeletal, anorexic demons, accompanied by an unending, ear-splittingly loud dance-remix version of the 1988 Rick Astley hit "Together Forever."

    In a nearby area, corporate raiders are forced to carry the golf clubs of uneducated Hispanic migrant workers from hole to hole for eternity, withering under a constant barrage of verbal abuse from their former subservients as crows descend from trees to peck at their eyes. In one of the deepest and most profane portions of the circle, unspeakable acts are said to be committed with a mail-order Roly-Kit.

    "In life, I was a Salomon Brothers investment banker," one flame-blackened shade told reporters. "When I arrived here, they didn't know what to do with me. They put me in with those condemned to walk backwards with their heads turned all the way around on their necks, for the crime of attempting to see the future. But then I sent a couple of fruit baskets to the right people, and in no time flat, I secured a cushy spot for myself in the first circle of the Virtuous Unbaptized. Now that was a sweet deal. But before long, they caught on to my game and transferred me here to the realm of Total Bastards. I've been shrieking for mercy like a goddamn woman ever since."

    His face contorted in the Misery of the Damned, a Disney lawyer said: "It's hell here–there are no executive lounges, I can't get any decent risotto, and the suit I have to wear is a cheap Brooks Brothers knock-off. I'm beeped every 30 seconds, and there's no way to return the calls. Plus, I'm being boiled upside down in lard while jackals gnaw at the soles of my feet. If I could just reach the fax machine on that nearby rock, I could contact some well-placed associates and work something out, but it's just out of my grasp, and it's out of ink and constantly blinking the message, 'Replace Toner Cartridge, Replace Toner Cartridge, Replace Toner Cartridge.'"

    He then resumed screaming in agony.

    Grogar The Malefic, a Captain in Hell's elite Demon Corps and supervisor in charge of admissions for the new circle, said Hell's future looks bright, thanks to the new circle.

    "Things are definitely looking up," Grogar said. "We're now far better equipped, and we're ready to take on the most Unholy Atrocities humanity has to offer."

    "We're really on the grow down here," Grogar added. "This is an exciting time to be in Hell."

    [Feb 08, 2019] To understand Steele and the five eyes involvement in the Russia hoax you need to go to the library

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Soon you will begin to see that MI6 was there at the OSS and later CIA inceptions. ..."
    "... At the hidden deep levels, both these agencies serve the GLOBALIST' enterprise, and have since the start. ..."
    Feb 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

    RJJCDA , says: February 9, 2019 at 12:26 am GMT

    Go to a large library and cross-reference James Jesus Angleton, Kim Philby, Miles Copeland and Nicholas Elliott in the "spy" books. Soon you will begin to see that MI6 was there at the OSS and later CIA inceptions.

    At the hidden deep levels, both these agencies serve the GLOBALIST' enterprise, and have since the start.

    Then you will understand Steele and the "five eyes" involvement in the Russia hoax.

    [Feb 08, 2019] To understand Steele and the five eyes involvement in the Russia hoax you need to go to the library

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Soon you will begin to see that MI6 was there at the OSS and later CIA inceptions. ..."
    "... At the hidden deep levels, both these agencies serve the GLOBALIST' enterprise, and have since the start. ..."
    Feb 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

    RJJCDA , says: February 9, 2019 at 12:26 am GMT

    Go to a large library and cross-reference James Jesus Angleton, Kim Philby, Miles Copeland and Nicholas Elliott in the "spy" books. Soon you will begin to see that MI6 was there at the OSS and later CIA inceptions.

    At the hidden deep levels, both these agencies serve the GLOBALIST' enterprise, and have since the start.

    Then you will understand Steele and the "five eyes" involvement in the Russia hoax.

    [Feb 08, 2019] For a well-documented, quite different analysis of the Kennedy assassination see "Partners in Crime: The Rockefeller, CFR, CIA and Castro Connection to the Kennedy Assassination."

    Feb 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Pancho Perico , says: February 8, 2019 at 5:31 pm GMT

    @Sean According to this comment, "The government does not take orders from the CIA or the FBI. The President controls both." Well, only if the President is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Rockefeller's puppet. For a well-documented, quite different analysis of the Kennedy assassination see "Partners in Crime: The Rockefeller, CFR, CIA and Castro Connection to the Kennedy Assassination."

    [Feb 08, 2019] Amazing that a bunch of academics would "criticize" the CIA and leave out all the real facts about the CIA.

    Feb 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

    never-anonymous , says: Next New Comment February 8, 2019 at 9:26 pm GMT

    Edward Curtain writes for the CIA about the CIA. Amazing that a bunch of academics would "criticize" the CIA and leave out all the real facts about the CIA.

    ISIS, Al Qaeda, Pornhub, Facebook, Google – or whatever the CIA calls themselves and their weapons isn't in the business of informing you about anything at all.

    Read 1984, it will explain it to you, another psychological warfare treatise written by a Government agent.

    Agent76 , says: Next New Comment February 8, 2019 at 10:03 pm GMT
    Documentary: On Company Business [1980] FULL [Remaster]

    Rare award winning CIA documentary, On Company Business painfully restored from VHS.

    [Feb 08, 2019] The CIA Then and Now Old Wine in New Bottles by Edward Curtin

    Intelligence agencies like CIA is a threat to "normal" societies as they tend to acquire power with time and tail start wagging the dog. Mechanism of control are usually subverted and considerable part of their activities is dome without informing "supervisory" structures.
    In the USA sometimes CIA monitor Congress communications and tries to coerce them like was the case when the torture program was revealed. In other words intelligence agencies are the core neofascist structures in modern society and as such represent a distinct danger.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Organizations like the CIA are obviously fallible and have made many mistakes and failed to anticipate world events. But they are also very powerful, having great financial backing, and do the bidding of their masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc. They are the action arm of these financial elites, and are, as Douglass Valentine has written, organized criminals. ..."
    "... The corporate mass media take their orders, orders that need not be direct, but sometimes are, because these media are structured to do the bidding of the same elites that formed the CIA and own the media. And while their ostensible raison d'ȇtre is to provide intelligence to the nation's civilian leaders, this is essentially a cover story for their real work that is propaganda, killing, and conducting coups d'états at home and abroad. ..."
    "... Because they have deep pockets, they can afford to buy all sorts of people, people who pimp for the elites. Some of these people do work that is usually done by honest academics and independent intellectuals, a dying breed, once called free-floating intellectuals. These pimps analyze political, economic, technological, and cultural trends. They come from different fields: history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, linguistics, etc. They populate the think tanks and universities. They are often intelligent but live in bad faith, knowing they are working for those who are doing the devil's work. But they collect their pay and go their way straight to the bank, the devil's bank. They often belong to the Council of Foreign Relations or the Heritage Foundation. They are esteemed and esteem themselves. But they are pimps. ..."
    "... Infecting minds with such symbols and stories must be done directly and indirectly, as well as short-term and long-term. Long term propaganda is like a slowly leaking water pipe that you are vaguely aware of but that rots the metal from within until the pipe can no longer resist the pressure. Drip drop, drip drop, drip drop -- and the inattentive recipients of the propaganda gradually lose their mettle to resist and don't know it, and then when an event bursts into the news -- e.g. the attacks of September 11, 2001 or Russia-gate -- they have been so softened that their assent is automatically given. They know without hesitation who the devil is and that he must be fought. ..."
    "... The purpose of the long-term propaganda is to create certain predispositions and weaknesses that can be exploited when needed. Certain events can be the triggers to induce the victims to react to suggestions. When the time is ripe, all that is needed is a slight suggestion, like a touch on the shoulder, and the hypnotized one acts in a trance. ..."
    "... Very entertaining. Now tell us how all this works. And what the CIA gets out of it. I mean they surely don't do it for nothing do they? Does the CIA Director get rich for working for 'masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc'? Or is everyone under a giant Satanic Cult in the sky and the CIA is their headquarters on earth? ..."
    Feb 08, 2019 | www.unz.com
    Edward Curtin • January 31, 2019 • 3,100 Words • 24 Comments • Reply

    ...The Nazis had a name for their propaganda and mind-control operations: weltanschauungskrieg -- "world view warfare." As good students, they had learned many tricks of the trade from their American teachers, including Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who had honed his propagandistic skills for the United States during World War I and had subsequently started the public relations industry in New York City, an industry whose raison d'etre from the start was to serve the interests of the elites in manipulating the public mind.

    In 1941, U.S. Intelligence translated weltanschauungskrieg as "psychological warfare," a phrase that fails to grasp the full dimensions of the growing power and penetration of U.S. propaganda, then and now. Of course, the American propaganda apparatus was just then getting started on an enterprise that has become the epitome of successful world view warfare programs, a colossal beast whose tentacles have spread to every corner of the globe and whose fabrications have nestled deep within the psyches of many hundreds of millions of Americans and people around the world. And true to form in this circle game of friends helping friends, this propaganda program was ably assisted after WW II by all the Nazis secreted into the U.S. ("Operation Paperclip") by Allen Dulles and his henchmen in the OSS and then the CIA to make sure the U.S. had operatives to carry on the Nazi legacy (see David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and The Rise of America's Secret Government , an extraordinary book that will make your skin crawl with disgust).

    This went along quite smoothly until some people started to question the Warren Commission's JFK assassination story. The CIA then went on the offensive in 1967 and put out the word to all its people in the agency and throughout the media and academia to use the phrase "conspiracy theory" to ridicule these skeptics, which they have done up until the present day. This secret document -- CIA Dispatch 1035-960 -- was a propaganda success for many decades, marginalizing those researchers and writers who were uncovering the truth about not just President Kennedy's murder by the national security state, but those of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. Today, the tide is turning on this score, as recently more and more Americans are fed up with the lies and are demanding that the truth be told. Even the Washington Post is noting this, and it is a wave of opposition that will only grow.

    The CIA Exposed -- Partially

    But back in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, some covert propaganda programs run by the CIA were "exposed." First, the Agency's sponsorship of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, through which it used magazines, prominent writers, academics, et al. to spread propaganda during the Cold War, was uncovered. This was an era when Americans read serious literary books, writers and intellectuals had a certain cachet, and popular culture had not yet stupefied Americans. The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites. Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts And Letters , and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers, with particular emphasis on the complicity of the CIA and the famous literary journal The Paris Review.

    Then in 1975 the Church Committee hearings resulted in the exposure of abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. In 1977 Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire -- "The CIA and the Media" -- naming names of journalists and publications ( The New York Times, CBS , etc.) that worked with and for the CIA in propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world. (Conveniently, this article can be read on the CIA's website since presumably the agency has come clean, or, if you are the suspicious type, or maybe a conspiracy theorist, it is covering its deeper tracks with a "limited hangout," defined by former CIA agent Victor Marchetti, who went rogue, as "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting -- sometimes even volunteering -- some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.")

    Confess and Move On

    By the late 1970s, it seemed as if the CIA had been caught in flagrante delicto and disgraced, had confessed its sins, done penance, and resolved to go and sin no more. Seeming, however, is the nature of the CIA's game. Organized criminals learn to adapt to the changing times, and that is exactly what the intelligence operatives did. Since the major revelations of the late sixties and seventies -- MKUltra, engineered coups all around the world, assassinations of foreign leaders, spying on Americans, etc. -- no major program of propaganda has been exposed in the mainstream media. Revealing books about certain CIA programs have been written -- e.g. Douglas Valentine's important The Phoenix Program being one -- and dissenting writers, journalists, researchers, and whistleblowers (Robert Parry, Gary Webb, Julian Assange, James W. Douglass, David Ray Griffin, Edward Snowden, et al.) have connected the U.S. intelligence services to dirty deeds and specific actions, such as the American engineered coup d'état in Ukraine in 2013-14, electronic spying, and the attacks of September 11, 2001.

    But the propaganda has for the most part continued unabated at a powerful and esoteric cultural level, while illegal and criminal actions are carried out throughout the world in the most blatant manner imaginable, as if to say fuck you openly while insidiously infecting the general population through the mass electronic screen culture that has relegated intellectual and literary culture to a tiny minority.

    Planning Ahead

    Let me explain what I think has been happening.

    Organizations like the CIA are obviously fallible and have made many mistakes and failed to anticipate world events. But they are also very powerful, having great financial backing, and do the bidding of their masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc. They are the action arm of these financial elites, and are, as Douglass Valentine has written, organized criminals. They have their own military, are joined to all the armed forces, and are deeply involved in the drug trade. They control the politicians. They operate their own propaganda network in conjunction with the private mercenaries they hire for their operations. The corporate mass media take their orders, orders that need not be direct, but sometimes are, because these media are structured to do the bidding of the same elites that formed the CIA and own the media. And while their ostensible raison d'ȇtre is to provide intelligence to the nation's civilian leaders, this is essentially a cover story for their real work that is propaganda, killing, and conducting coups d'états at home and abroad.

    Because they have deep pockets, they can afford to buy all sorts of people, people who pimp for the elites. Some of these people do work that is usually done by honest academics and independent intellectuals, a dying breed, once called free-floating intellectuals. These pimps analyze political, economic, technological, and cultural trends. They come from different fields: history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, cultural studies, linguistics, etc. They populate the think tanks and universities. They are often intelligent but live in bad faith, knowing they are working for those who are doing the devil's work. But they collect their pay and go their way straight to the bank, the devil's bank. They often belong to the Council of Foreign Relations or the Heritage Foundation. They are esteemed and esteem themselves. But they are pimps.

    ... ... ...

    Methods of Propaganda

    Infecting minds with such symbols and stories must be done directly and indirectly, as well as short-term and long-term. Long term propaganda is like a slowly leaking water pipe that you are vaguely aware of but that rots the metal from within until the pipe can no longer resist the pressure. Drip drop, drip drop, drip drop -- and the inattentive recipients of the propaganda gradually lose their mettle to resist and don't know it, and then when an event bursts into the news -- e.g. the attacks of September 11, 2001 or Russia-gate -- they have been so softened that their assent is automatically given. They know without hesitation who the devil is and that he must be fought.

    The purpose of the long-term propaganda is to create certain predispositions and weaknesses that can be exploited when needed. Certain events can be the triggers to induce the victims to react to suggestions. When the time is ripe, all that is needed is a slight suggestion, like a touch on the shoulder, and the hypnotized one acts in a trance. The gun goes off, and the entranced one can't remember why (see: Sirhan Sirhan). This is the goal of mass hypnotization through long-term propaganda: confusion, memory loss, and automatic reaction to suggestion.

    Intelligence Pimps and Liquid Screen Culture

    When the CIA's dirty tricks were made public in the 1970s, it is not hard to imagine that the intellectual pimps who do their long-range thinking were asked to go back to the drawing board and paint a picture of the coming decades and how business as usual could be conducted without further embarrassment. By that time it had become clear that intellectual or high culture was being swallowed by mass culture and the future belonged to electronic screen culture and images, not words. What has come to be called "postmodernity" ensued, or what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls "liquid modernity" and Guy Debord "the society of the spectacle." Such developments, rooted in what Frederic Jameson has termed "the cultural logic of late capitalism," have resulted in the fragmentation of social and personal life into pointillistic moving pictures whose dots form incoherent images that sow mass confusion and do not cohere.

    ... ... ...

    Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

    renfro , says: February 8, 2019 at 6:53 am GMT

    But they are also very powerful, having great financial backing, and do the bidding of their masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc. They are the action arm of these financial elites, and are, as Douglass Valentine has written, organized criminals. They have their own military, are joined to all the armed forces, and are deeply involved in the drug trade. They control the politicians. They operate their own propaganda network in conjunction with the private mercenaries they hire for their operations. The corporate mass media take their orders, orders that need not be direct, but sometimes are, because these media are structured to do the bidding of the same elites that formed the CIA and own the media. And while their ostensible raison d'ȇtre is to provide intelligence to the nation's civilian leaders, this is essentially a cover story for their real work that is propaganda, killing, and conducting coups d'états at home and abroad.

    Very entertaining. Now tell us how all this works. And what the CIA gets out of it. I mean they surely don't do it for nothing do they? Does the CIA Director get rich for working for 'masters in banking, Wall St., finance, etc'? Or is everyone under a giant Satanic Cult in the sky and the CIA is their headquarters on earth?

    ... ... ...

    Michael Kenny , says: February 8, 2019 at 10:36 am GMT
    Is the author saying anything other than the CIA operates like all other intelligence agencies? Does he really think his readers don't know that?
    Commentator Mike , says: February 8, 2019 at 11:32 am GMT
    Under "The CIA Exposed" could have mentioned Philip Agee's "Inside the Company" as he was the Edward Snowden of his day.

    Interestingly, CIA agent Miles Copeland, Jr., the father of the drummer of the British band "The Police", said the book was "as complete an account of spy work as is likely to be published anywhere" and that it is "an authentic account of how an ordinary American or British 'case officer' operates

    All of it is presented with deadly accuracy."

    (ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Agee )

    Jake , says: February 8, 2019 at 2:22 pm GMT

    " Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who had honed his propagandistic skills for the United States during World War I and had subsequently started the public relations industry in New York City, an industry whose raison d'etre from the start was to serve the interests of the elites in manipulating the public mind.

    In 1941, U.S. Intelligence translated weltanschauungskrieg as "psychological warfare," a phrase that fails to grasp the full dimensions of the growing power and penetration of U.S. propaganda, then and now."

    The Yank propaganda machine always was an alliance between WASP Elites and Jews. Always. The Yank WASPs knew that Brit and British Commonwealth WASPs had done the same thing: make alliance to rule the world, which featured – not a bug but a feature – new ways to use psy ops to pervert the vast majority of white Christians they ruled.

    Until that is understood, which means accepting that WASP culture itself is a problem as big as Jews and Jewish culture, all that is done in opposition to all that is horrendously wrong today is wasted time and energy.

    Jake , says: February 8, 2019 at 2:28 pm GMT
    @DESERT FOX The CIA is a British creation, just like Israel's Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency.

    The CIA is a pure WASP Elite creation. It always has served the interests of the WASP Elite, in the UK and the rest of the Anglosphere as well the US. And the CIA always has served the interests of Jews and Israel, because that makes perfect sense for WASP culture, which was formed fully, completed, by the Judaizing heresy Anglo-Saxon Puritanism.

    Judaizing heresy guarantees pro-Jewish politics and culture.

    AWM , says: February 8, 2019 at 2:48 pm GMT
    James Jesus Angleton
    This guy had it figured out.
    Insert Fake Iriish Name here , says: February 8, 2019 at 3:38 pm GMT
    Sean, Who else, is here first with the CIA line, "CIA works for the president!" CIA shoehorned that into the Pike Committee report right after Don Gregg visited the committees and gave them an ultimatum: back off or it's martial law.

    Then Sean mouths a bit of bureaucratic bafflegab about feasibility.

    The feasibility of CIA crime is a product of CIA impunity. So next Sean feeds you more CIA boilerplate by trying to pathologize anyone who's aware of CIA impunity through formal legal pretexts in municipal law. John Bolton, Trump's CIA ventriloquist, had one prime directive as unauthorized UN ambassador: remove any reference to impunity from the Summit Outcome Document. To that end he submitted 600+ NeoSoviet amendments to paralyze the drafting process.

    That's how touchy CIA is about its impunity. CIA is the state, with illegal absolute sovereignty because they can kill you or torture you and get away with it.

    If you're John Kennedy, if you're Robert Kennedy, if you're Dag Hammarskjöld, if you're Judge Robert Vance. No matter who you are.

    [Feb 07, 2019] Government shutdown, Venezuela Donald Trump evolves into the best propagator of neoliberal fascism that tends to become a norm

    Notable quotes:
    "... The imperialists want to grab the rich oil fields for the US big oil cartel ..."
    "... Venezuela must not become an example for other countries in the region on social-programs policy ..."
    "... Venezuela must not turn to cooperation with rival powers like China and Russia. Such a prospect may give the country the ability to minimize the effects of the economic war ..."
    "... So, when Trump declared the unelected Juan Guaido as the 'legitimate president' of Venezuela, all the main neoliberal powers of the West rushed to follow the decision. ..."
    "... Donald Trump is the personification of an authoritarian system that increasingly unveils its true nature. The US empire makes the Venezuelan economy 'scream hard', as it did in Chile in 1973. The country then turned into the first laboratory of neoliberalism with the help of the Chicago Boys and a brutal dictatorship. So, as the big fraud is clear now, neoliberalism is losing ground and ideological influence over countries and societies, after decades of complete dominance. ..."
    Feb 07, 2019 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

    Even before the 2016 US presidential election, this blog supported that Donald Trump is a pure sample of neoliberal barbarism . Many almost laughed at this perception because Trump was being already promoted, more or less, as the 'terminator' of the neoliberal establishment. And many people, especially in the US, tired from the economic disasters, the growing inequality and the endless wars, were anxious to believe that this was indeed his special mission.

    Right after the elections, we supported that the US establishment gave a brilliant performance by putting its reserve, Donald Trump, in power, against the only candidate that the same establishment identified as a real threat: Bernie Sanders.

    Then, Trump sent the first shock wave to his supporters by literally hiring the Goldman Sachs banksters to run the economy. And right after that, he signed for more deregulation in favor of the Wall Street mafia that ruined the economy in 2008.

    In 2017 , Trump bombed Syria for the first time, resembling the lies that led us to the Iraq war disaster. Despite the fact that the US Tomahawk missile attack had zero value in operational level (the United States allegedly warned Russia and Syria, while the targeted airport was operating normally just hours after the attack), Trump sent a clear message to the US deep state that he is prepared to meet all its demands - and especially the escalation of the confrontation with Russia.

    Indeed, a year later, Trump built a pro-war team that includes the most bloodthirsty, hawkish neocons. And then, he ordered a second airstrike against Syria, together with his neocolonial friends.

    In the middle of all this 'orgy' of pro-establishment moves, Trump offered a controversial withdrawal of US forces from Syria and Afghanistan to save whatever was possible from his 'anti-interventionist' profile. And it was indeed a highly controversial action with very little value, considering all these US military bases that are still fully operational in the broader Middle East and beyond. Not to mention the various ways through which the US intervenes in the area (training proxies, equip them with heavy weapons, supporting the Saudis and contribute to war crimes in Yemen, etc.)

    And then , after this very short break, Trump returned to 'business as usual' to satisfy the neoliberal establishment with a 'glorious' record. He achieved a 35-day government shutdown, which is the "longest shutdown in US history" .

    Trump conducted the longest experiment on neoliberals' ultimate goal: abolishing the annoying presence of the state. And this was just a taste of what Trump is willing to do in order to satisfy all neoliberals' wet dreams.

    And now, we have the Venezuela issue. Since Hugo Chavez nationalized PDVSA, the central oil and natural gas company, the US empire launched a fierce economic war against the country. Yet, while all previous US administrations were trying to replace legitimate governments with their puppets as much silently as possible through slow-motion coup operations, Trump has no problem to do it in plain sight.

    And perhaps the best proof for that is a statement by one of the most warmongering figures of the neocon/neoliberal cabal, hired by Trump . As John Bolton cynically and openly admitted recently, " It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela. "

    Therefore, one should be very naive of course to believe that the Western imperialist gang seriously cares about the Venezuelan people and especially the poor. Here are three basic reasons behind the open US intervention in Venezuela:

    1. The imperialists want to grab the rich oil fields for the US big oil cartel, as well as the great untapped natural resources , particularly gold (mostly for the Canadian companies).
    2. Venezuela must not become an example for other countries in the region on social-programs policy, which is mainly funded by the oil production. The imperialists know that they must interrupt the path of Venezuela to real Socialism by force if necessary. Neoliberalism must prevail by all means for the benefit of the big banks and corporations.
    3. Venezuela must not turn to cooperation with rival powers like China and Russia. Such a prospect may give the country the ability to minimize the effects of the economic war. The country may find an alternative to escape the Western sanctions in order to fund its social programs for the benefit of the people. And, of course, the West will never accept the exploitation of the Venezuelan resources by the Sino-Russian bloc.

    So, when Trump declared the unelected Juan Guaido as the 'legitimate president' of Venezuela, all the main neoliberal powers of the West rushed to follow the decision.

    This is something we have never seen before. The 'liberal democracies' of the West - only by name - immediately, uncritically and without hesitation jumped on the same boat with Trump towards this outrageously undemocratic action. They recognized Washington's puppet as the legitimate president of a third country. A man that was never elected by the Venezuelan people and has very low popularity in the country. Even worse, the EU parliament approved this action , killing any last remnants of democracy in the Union.

    Yet, it seems that the US is finding increasingly difficult to force many countries to align with its agenda. Even some European countries took some distance from the attempted constitutional coup, with Italy even trying to veto EU's decision to recognize Guaido.

    Donald Trump is the personification of an authoritarian system that increasingly unveils its true nature. The US empire makes the Venezuelan economy 'scream hard', as it did in Chile in 1973. The country then turned into the first laboratory of neoliberalism with the help of the Chicago Boys and a brutal dictatorship. So, as the big fraud is clear now, neoliberalism is losing ground and ideological influence over countries and societies, after decades of complete dominance.

    This unprecedented action by the Western neoliberal powers to recognize Guaido is a serious sign that neoliberalism returns to its roots and slips towards fascism. It appears now that this is the only way to maintain some level of power.

    [Feb 07, 2019] Never underestimate the USA greed.

    Feb 07, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Vidi , says: February 7, 2019 at 10:25 pm GMT

    @Captain Willard

    We just got done conquering Iraq. We haven't stayed to loot the oil.

    The US has NOT successfully conquered Iraq (has not pacified the country). Oil is not like a bag of diamonds, which you can grab and run. In order to steal a worthwhile amount of the greasy stuff, you have to make a substantial investment up front, in wells and shipping terminals. Not even the greediest thief will risk his money if there is even the slightest chance that his wells and terminals will be blown up by righteous nationalists. This is why the US hasn't stolen much from Iraq.

    So now you believe we're going to Venezuela to take their crappy heavy oil?

    That the US hasn't been able to steal much from Iraq tells us little about whether the Americans have larcenous motives with regard to Venezuela. Especially as Trump has been talking loudly about the oil.

    It would be easier for us just to build a pipeline to Alberta and import all their cheap, shut-in heavy crude.

    Never underestimate the greed.

    [Feb 06, 2019] Bari Weiss Has the Stupidest Take on Tulsi Gabbard Yet

    Notable quotes:
    "... "Am I crazy?" -Bari Weiis Well Bari Weiis you're either crazy or you're a yet another worthless establishment shill whose job is spread deliberate misinformation about the most genuine anti-war candidate running at a time when the entire MSM, MIC, and the neoliberal rightwing establishment (including AIPAC) is deliberately smearing her to immediately kill her campaign. And you didn't come across as crazy so... ..."
    Feb 06, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    the op kingdom , 1 week ago (edited)

    This woman had NO CLUE what she was talking about. She thought she was on a show that would just tow the party line and let her get away with wrong statements. She's just repeating what critics say with no idea of the truth. What a fool. As a woman, THIS IS WHY I WON'T JUST VOTE FOR ANY WOMAN. We are just as capable of being stupid as anyone else.

    FrozenWolf150 , 1 week ago

    Bari: "I think Tulsi Gabbard is an Assad toadie." Joe: "What do you mean by toadie?" Bari: "Oh, I don't know what that means." Joe: "Okay, I looked it up, and it's like a sycophant." Bari: "Then Tulsi is like an Assad sycophant." Joe: "So what do you mean by that?" Bari: "I'm not sure what sycophant means either." Joe: "I looked up the definition, it's like a suck-up." Bari: "All right, Tulsi is an Assad suck-up." Joe: "Could you explain that further?" Bari: "I don't know what suck means." Joe: "It's what you're doing right now."

    Jeff Oloff , 1 week ago

    Bari Weiss is a tool of Zionist war mongers that promote perpetual war. She has no thoughts of her own.

    Joe Smith , 1 week ago

    I hate Bari Weiss....I just don't why.

    Nicholas Pniewski , 1 week ago

    Tulsi also recently clarified her position of Assad and Syria on CNN, where she said she would have diplomacy rather than war

    Captain Obvious , 1 week ago

    "Am I crazy?" -Bari Weiis Well Bari Weiis you're either crazy or you're a yet another worthless establishment shill whose job is spread deliberate misinformation about the most genuine anti-war candidate running at a time when the entire MSM, MIC, and the neoliberal rightwing establishment (including AIPAC) is deliberately smearing her to immediately kill her campaign. And you didn't come across as crazy so...

    [Feb 06, 2019] NYT Columnist Calls Tulsi Gabbard 'Assad Toady,' Can't Define or Spell Term

    I will be very surprised if neocons would not frame her Putin toady as well. This is how this system works. It eliminates undesirable to the neoliberals candidates with 100% efficiency.
    They serve as local STASI and some former STASI official might well envy neocons efficiency of silencing opponents (with much less blood and overt repression, by pure magic of neocon propaganda ).
    Notable quotes:
    "... She has "monstrous ideas, she's an Assad toady," Weiss tells Rogan. ..."
    "... Rogan then reads the definition: "Toadies. The definition of toadies: A person who flatters or defers to others for self-serving reasons." "A sycophant. So I did use it right!" Weiss exclaims. "So she's an Assad sycophant? Is that what you're saying?" "Yeah, that's, proven -- known -- about her." ..."
    "... When Rogan asks what Gabbard has said that qualifies her as a sycophant, Weiss replies: "I don't remember the details." ..."
    "... Gabbard, who announced her presidential campaign on January 11, has drawn incredible amounts of ire from mainstream Democrats tripping over themselves for war with Syria because in January 2017, Gabbard met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and denounced the opposition rebels in the country's civil war as "terrorists." ..."
    "... She has also expressed skepticism about accusations that Assad's government has used chemical weapons during the conflict and spoken out against cruise missile attacks by the US and its allies against the country. ..."
    Feb 06, 2019 | sputniknews.com
    Monday to discuss current events, but things got embarrassing when she went in on Gabbard, a progressive Democrat whose foreign policy positions have turned more than a few heads.

    Neocon NY Times columnist Bari Weiss smeared Tulsi Gabbard (who bravely opposed regime change and US support for Salafi-jihadist contras) as an "Assad toady," then couldn't spell/define toady or offer any evidence to prove her smear. Embarrassingly funny pic.twitter.com/m0MLaHFPiX

    -- Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 22, 2019

    ​She has "monstrous ideas, she's an Assad toady," Weiss tells Rogan.

    US Representative Tulsi Gabbard speaks during Day 2 of the Democratic National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 26, 2016 © AFP 2018 / Timothy A. CLARY Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard Speaks the Truth on Syria, Gets Smeared by the Mainstream Media

    When Rogan asks for clarification, she says, "I think that I used that word correctly." She then asks someone off camera to look up what toady means. "Like toeing the line," Rogan says, "is that what it means?" "No, I think it's like, uh " and Weiss drones off without an answer. She then attempts to spell it, and can't even do that. "T-O-A-D-I-E. I think it means what I think it means "

    Rogan then reads the definition: "Toadies. The definition of toadies: A person who flatters or defers to others for self-serving reasons." "A sycophant. So I did use it right!" Weiss exclaims. "So she's an Assad sycophant? Is that what you're saying?" "Yeah, that's, proven -- known -- about her."

    When Rogan asks what Gabbard has said that qualifies her as a sycophant, Weiss replies: "I don't remember the details."

    In this Nov. 6, 2018, file photo, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, greets supporters in Honolulu. Gabbard has announced she's running for president in 2020 © AP Photo / Marco Garcia 'Assad's Mouthpiece in Washington': Controversial Dem. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard Announces 2020 Run

    "We probably should say that before we say that about her -- we should probably read it, rather, right now, just so we know what she said," Rogan notes. "I think she's, like, the motherlode of bad ideas," Weiss then says. "I'm pretty positive about that, especially on Assad. But maybe I'm wrong. I don't think I'm wrong." It seems to us here at Sputnik that such claims should be made with a bit more confidence than this. So let's set the record straight.

    Gabbard, who announced her presidential campaign on January 11, has drawn incredible amounts of ire from mainstream Democrats tripping over themselves for war with Syria because in January 2017, Gabbard met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and denounced the opposition rebels in the country's civil war as "terrorists."

    She has also expressed skepticism about accusations that Assad's government has used chemical weapons during the conflict and spoken out against cruise missile attacks by the US and its allies against the country.

    A general view shows damaged buildings at al-Kalasa district of Aleppo, Syria in Aleppo, Syria, February 2, 2017 © REUTERS / Omar Sanadiki US Lawmakers Call for Syria Strategy Where Assad Leaving Post, Russian Military Pulls Out

    "Initially I hadn't planned on meeting him," Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran, told CNN's Jake Tapper following the meeting. "When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so, because I felt it's important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we've got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace. And that's exactly what we talked about."

    "I have seen this cost of war firsthand, which is why I fight so hard for peace," Gabbard said. "And that's the reality of the situation that we're facing here. It's why I have urged and continue to urge [US President Donald] Trump to meet with people like Kim Jong Un in North Korea, because we understand what's at stake here. The only alternative to having these kinds of conversations is more war."

    Moreover, in a March 2016 speech before Congress, Gabbard called Assad "a brutal dictator," noting that her opposition to what she called a "war bill" was over the legal ramifications that she feared would lead to the overthrow of Assad, which she opposes on anti-interventionist grounds.

    "[T]oppling ruthless dictators in the Middle East creates even more human suffering and strengthens our enemy, groups like ISIS and other terrorist organizations, in those countries," Gabbard said at the time.

    House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York speak to reporters about the Congressional Budget Office projection that 14 million people would lose health coverage under the House Republican bill dismantling former President Barack Obama's health care law, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, March, 13, 2017. © AP Photo/ J. Scott Applewhite House Democrats Will Expand Russiagate in 2019 to Push Trump Toward War

    Gabbard has been thoroughly demonized for her pro-peace views by global liberal media, as Trump has been for his moves to end the war in Syria and avoid another on the Korean Peninsula. For example, The Daily Beast's article announcing her candidacy called Gabbard "Assad's Favorite Democrat" in its headline; a Haaretz headline from last week say she had "Tea With Assad," and the Washington Post has called her "Assad's Mouthpiece in Washington." The UK Independent called her a "defender of dictators."

    It's not clear what Weiss had in mind when she called Gabbard a "sycophant" and a "toady," since the congresswoman's rhetoric about Assad has consisted of skepticism and opposition to intervention, and she hasn't hesitated to call the Syrian president a "brutal dictator." What Gabbard's treatment has demonstrated is that a Democrat who steps out of line from the party's pro-regime change agenda in Syria and who condemns Muslim extremists associated with Daesh and al-Qaeda should be prepared to suffer for it in the mainstream media.

    [Feb 06, 2019] Tulsi is a threat to the status quo...watch the DNC torpedo her candidacy

    Notable quotes:
    "... As a Trump supporter from 2016, this is probably the only Democratic candidate that I would seriously consider abandoning Trump over. The rest, I wouldn't give them the time of day - even Bernie. ..."
    Feb 06, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    

    James Schuhs , 1 week ago

    Tulsi is a threat to the status quo...watch the DNC torpedo her candidacy.

    Amir Fahmi , 1 week ago

    Israel war strategy ~ Onwards American soldiers.

    imnotmike , 1 week ago

    I trust Tulsi on foreign policy more than I trust just about anybody else. Some people don't like her because she won't just say that we should stop all military under any circumstances. She's been in the military. She understands the military. She understands that the military is not evil. Drones are not evil. They're just currently being misused. We need to cut military spending, but not eliminate it. We need to end offensive wars and withdraw from countries that aren't attacking us. But that doesn't mean we don't need a military and don't need to be ready to defend ourselves.

    paul battenbough , 1 week ago

    I'm from the Uk as soon as I heard Tulsi was running I got excited....a chance for real change and dismantling of the military industrial complex.....could it be?

    Troy Walker , 1 week ago

    thats the military industrial complex's plan, to make enemies to keep them in business.

    The Centrist , 1 week ago

    Why do you worship Bernie Sanders so much? What does he have that Tulsi Gabbard doesn't in terms of policy? May I note that Sanders is more pro-Israel and actually more for war than Gabbard is. It means something when it's coming from a vet who actually served and visited war-torn countries.

    Limedick Andrew , 6 days ago

    As a Trump supporter from 2016, this is probably the only Democratic candidate that I would seriously consider abandoning Trump over. The rest, I wouldn't give them the time of day - even Bernie. 

    Daniel , 1 week ago

    That's nice. I always liked her, but I was worried about her military policy, good that she got rid of that doubt right away. Now we just need these people to actually follow through and not become another Obama with his "change" and "hope". Not that any of this is going to really make a difference or anything unless all the sycophants in the opposition suddenly dies, but it' still nice that someone seems to care.

    [Feb 06, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Rips Interventionism In First Campaign Ad

    Feb 06, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    Tacet the Terror , 1 week ago

    Sanders/Gabbard 2020 is the only non-"lesser of two evils" choice.

    kamran5461 , 1 week ago

    Now you see why the establishment really hates her.

    Zero Divisor , 1 week ago

    Tulsi Gabbard went to Standing Rock. She has my support.

    it's show buiness kiddo , 1 week ago

    I wwant tulsi to defeat Kamala in the primaries. Kamala is a fake progressive and the establishment already coronated her. I can't trust her.

    Voitan , 1 week ago

    I'm voting Tulsi Gabbard. Uncompromising commitment to no more interventions and wars.

    malena garcia , 1 week ago

    I love Tulsi; her ad was great. She's the only dem I would vote for at this point. Kamala is an evil hypocrite. And Tulsi's right, love is the most powerful force in the planet.

    Jurgen K , 1 week ago

    Tulsi is hated by the establishment the most not Bernie , this is the reason I say Tulsi2020

    Jay Smathers , 1 week ago (edited)

    Wake up folks -Tulsi would not have run if Bernie was going run. Bernie will endorse her early on and she will have a much tougher fight than he did, because while Sanders caught the corporate establishment sleeping in 2016, they are now frightened and see Gabbard coming. They will use every dirty trick at their disposal to keep her from catching fire -and that begins with dividing progressives like us. Tulsi is not perfect because no one is perfect. But she is young, bright and fucking fearless compared to other politicians about putting the long term good of the American people above the moneyed interests who think they own our media and our government. This is why the establishment despises her more than even Sanders. 2020 will reveal weather or not we can retake ownership of our media and our government. That fight will require all of us - so Kyle get on the bus!

    FujiFire , 1 week ago

    Tulsi is an amazing candidate in her own right, but IMO she would be a perfect VP pick for Bernie. She has the amazing foreign policy cred and would really shore up Bernie's weakest areas.

    D. Martin , 1 week ago (edited)

    I remember Obama ripping interventionism too. And Trump.

    rolled oats , 1 week ago

    Tulsa Gabbard's ad doesn't mention the people who die in the countries we invade. That's 600k people in Iraq for example. A significant omission me thinks.

    Wayne Chapman , 1 week ago

    The Aloha Spirit Law is a big deal in Hawaii. Government officials are required to approach dignitaries from other countries or states with the spirit of aloha. "Aloha" means mutual regard and affection and extends warmth in caring with no obligation in return. Aloha is the essence of relationships in which each person is important to every other person for collective existence. I think that's what we want in a President or a diplomat.

    madara uchiha , 1 week ago

    She's great and unique as she doesnt fall back to identity politics and sjwism as much as the standard left politicians. I hope she doesnt bend her ethics when the sjws come for her. I'm putting my trust in her. I hope she wins. And if she isn't in the race, i wont be voting.

    David , 1 week ago (edited)

    The question I would love her to address specifically is will her campaign focus on decreasing military spending like Bernie Sanders? She has a military background and the US loves war. This ad is good but it is tip toing around the MIC ( military industrial complex) She can be non interventionist but not decrease military spending is what worries me

    GoLookAtJohn PodestasEmails , 1 week ago

    This is why we need Gabbard on the debate stage. She will push the Overton window on revealing to the public what our military is actually doing overseas. She's also a staunch progressive. Bernie/Tulsi 2020. Their weakness match well with each other, and Tulsi was one of the first to jump ship on the sinking DNC ship when Hillary got caught cheating being the DNC. Keep small donations going into your favorite progressive candidates to hear their voice. It doesn't work any other way folks.

    Geoff Daly , 1 week ago

    Intervention isn't only an issue about morality. As Dwight Eisenhower put it (even though he himself was far from an anti imperialist), you can't have an endless stream of money dedicated to military endeavors AND a sufficient investment in domestic public priorities. This easily explains why we have increasingly decrepit infrastructure, increasingly worse performing education, increasingly worse performing health care, absurdly insufficient regulation between government and business (although the pay to play system certainly is the top reason) and a generally decaying public atmosphere. Beyond the fact that getting involved everywhere creates humanitarian crises, countless dead people, hopelessly destroyed countries, and so much more, even if other countries haven't in return bombed our shores from sea to sea, even if generally speaking those who consider not only the US but Americans the "enemies" haven't overwhelmed with non stop attacks, this non stop and ever growing appetite for more money for more war priorities has created the very decline we see in our country today. Until there is a change in priorities in general, these problems in the US will only continue to get worse.

    Tom Pashkov , 1 week ago

    Gabbard for Sec. of Defense in the Sanders/Warren administration.

    Jacob Serrano , 1 week ago

    Man, Tulsi made me tear up. She's my girl. This message reminds me more of the message of Jesus than many of the fundamentalists. She's not even Christian, yet represents Christ very well. I love this woman.

    Ny3 43 , 1 week ago

    Prepare for BAE, Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other weapons corporations and their bum lickers to launch a viscous smear campaign against her suggesting she's somehow a Neo Nazi communist anti Semitic islamophobic islamist.

    Gem Girlla , 1 day ago (edited)

    Tulsi 2020 she's saying some of the same things Trump said in his 2016 campaign. Unfortunately, he didn't deliver. Per the corporate Democrates, making America better is a bad thing.

    GiantOctopus0101 , 1 day ago

    Tulsi can actually beat Trump...if she gets the nomination. The wars are the elephant in the room, and whoever is willing to take that on full force, can win.

    [Feb 06, 2019] Senate Investigating Mueller FBI's Prosecution Of Orgy Island Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein

    Feb 06, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    by Tyler Durden Wed, 02/06/2019 - 19:44 251 SHARES

    Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced New York financier who served 13 months in prison for soliciting an underaged girl for prostitution, has served his time, and despite all of the negative press surrounding his "Lolita Express" and the many celebrities and politicians - including former President Bill Clinton and disgraced actor Kevin Spacey - who have reportedly traveled to his "orgy island", he will likely live out his life as a free man (unless new offenses are committed).

    But thanks to a series published by the Miami Herald last year that delved into how prosecutors worked with powerful defense attorneys to ensure Epstein received such a lenient sentence. The expose shed a light on the role played by Alex Acosta, who went on to become Trump's Secretary of Labour, in handing down the light sentence. Acosta was the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida at the time Epstein's sentence was handed down.

    Now, thanks to those stories, the DOJ has reportedly opened an investigation into the conduct of DOJ attorneys in the case, and whether they committed "professional misconduct" in their working relationship with Epstein's attorneys.

    The probe was opened in response to a request lodged by Sen. Ben Sasse, a a Nebraska Republican and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who raised questions about the case after reading the Herald's stories about how Acosta and other DOJ attorneys worked with defense attorneys to cut a lenient plea deal for Epstein back in 2008, per the Herald.

    At the time, the FBI was run by Robert Mueller.

    Though the reasons for the lenient deal could be rooted in the natural advantages of the wealthy, one Twitter user who did a deep dive into a cache of redacted FBI Vault documents released last year raised the possibility that Epstein could have been an informant for the FBI, providing information on executives from failed investment bank Bear Stearns in exchange for the lenient sentence (though there's nothing in his guilty plea that suggested he provided information).

    To be sure, records show that Epstein passed a polygraph test showing that he didn't know any of the girls he solicited were under the age of 18 at the time. Also, the case has taken on renewed importance since opposition research shops tried to link President Trump to Epstein during the campaign.

    While that hasn't been conclusively proven, it could have been part of a separate agreement that has yet to be disclosed.

    PeaceForWorld , 24 seconds ago link

    It is very sad that FBI has decided to just prosecute this EVIL MAN and Child Pedophilia enabler, just because Muller is investigating Trump. They are all in on it. They are sick.

    If I was one of the victims or the mother, I would do anything to destroy this man. Yes, I know that Catholic church is also as guilty. But this sick faced Epstein with his evil smile, has ruined many lives for his famous clients.

    Child pedophilia is a disease wired in the brain and the only way to get rid of them, is to execute them. There is no other solution. Imagine about the father who walked into his house and witnessed his son getting raped by his sitter (man).

    From a personal experience, when a burglar came to rub our house "As a minor not even a teenage, I woke up with this stranger molesting me.". I had no idea what he was doing, but that event gave me insomnia for the rest of my life.

    Baron von Bud , 1 minute ago link

    So did Epstein provide the FBI with information for prosecutions? Doesn't seem like it. Epstein knows the Clintons, Prince Andrew, Trump, and many others and they pressured the govt to back off. Without any facts, the FBI cooperation story is just spin. His connected friends have a lot to lose if he talks. I doubt that Mr. Epstein will live a long life.

    East Indian , 2 minutes ago link

    Remember all those people on Clinton team who were interviewed by the FBI and granted immunity? I remember. The crowd here was excited - oh, they are going to indict her today, oh, they are going to drag her off tomorrow first thing... Turned out, all those immunities were granted to protect them from future prosecutions.

    Nothing may come out of this. Nothing, perhaps, will ever come out of this. The victim of all these witch hunting is sitting in the President's chair; and when he is not interested in getting justice for himself, or to uphold justice for the people, why should I worry about justice for this world?

    Know thy enemy , 20 minutes ago link

    Failed Bureau of Investigation. Once a political organization, always a political organization. I feel for the rank and file who's lives are determined by a few!

    Pendolino , 22 minutes ago link

    " Alex Acosta, who went on to become Trump's Secretary of Labour "

    Yeah, draining that ole swamp...

    MsCreant , 41 minutes ago link

    If this happened, if they focused on just WHAT THE **** HAPPENED in the Epstein case, I might be a believer in our justice system. Even if it was just a minute. It could sweep up Trump. It could flush the Clintons straight to hell.

    Got The Wrong No , 39 minutes ago link

    Trump threw Epstein out of Mar largo for messing with young girls. Fusion GPS tried to link Trump with Epstein ans failed.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-12/fusion-gps-tried-and-failed-link-trump-jeffrey-epstein

    [Feb 06, 2019] Ignore the Free-Riding International Peanut Gallery

    Notable quotes:
    "... Around the same time, an unnamed Israeli official was quoted as being "in shock" at the president's decision. Obviously Trump hadn't read his intelligence briefing, explained the Israeli: after all, there were Iranians in Syria! But so what? Perhaps President Trump decided that Washington doesn't have to do everything for everyone in the Middle East. There is a very powerful, nuclear-armed nation next door to Syria that so far has done quite well protecting itself. Perhaps that country could take care of the Iran-in-Syria problem, in the unlikely event that it poses a serious threat. ..."
    "... It is not just foreign leaders who complain about U.S. policy. There is hardly a war that some foreigner somewhere is not busy advocating that Washington join or start. ..."
    "... Financial Times ..."
    "... Truth be told, Iran is a weak regional power that uses irregular warfare because it lacks conventional strength. Missiles are its deterrence against better armed, threatening neighbors. It certainly doesn't endanger America, with the globe's greatest military. Israel, too, can launch a devastating retaliation against any attack. Saudi Arabia alone spends more than five times as much on its armed forces as Iran. ..."
    Feb 06, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Foreigners nudging America into their wars have brought us only debt and misery. By Doug Bandow • February 7, 2019

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    America's policymakers should ignore this advice, no matter how fervently it's offered. And if any president is willing to tell this self-interested chorus to shut up, it is Donald Trump.

    Among the notable nations lobbying for America's attention are Israel and Taiwan, otherwise isolated and vulnerable governments that seek Washington's military backing. Greece and Turkey have carried their battle in the eastern Mediterranean back to D.C., as they fight over America's role there. Kosovar insurgents worked with ethnic Albanians in the U.S. to push Washington into the Yugoslav civil war in 1999. Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, spread cash lavishly around the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to pressure American policymakers into such atrocities as the Yemen war.

    The consequences can be long-lasting. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the governments of the newly freed Eastern European states lobbied to join NATO. Their diasporas in the United States -- derisively called "hyphenated Americans" during World War I -- helped win Washington's support. The result was a rapid expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, compounding humiliation with hostility, which continues to bedevil the West's relations with Moscow today.

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    Sometimes foreigners talk as if they should be consulted and heeded whenever U.S. policymakers act. In many cases, Washington has created this problem. Alliances in which other states theoretically have authority over American military deployments encourage foreign meddling. For instance, the Obama administration intervened in Libya at least partially in response to pressure from Rome and Paris, which wanted to use the transatlantic alliance to oust Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi. Europeans were essentially returning the favor by which Washington had dragged them into the seemingly endless Afghan war, which never made sense for them.

    NATO is particularly problematic, since it's made ever less sense as foreign threats have diminished, Europeans' capabilities increased, and gaps between allies' interests expanded. Although America remains the big kahuna, recently empowered "friends" assert authority over U.S. decisions and behavior. Today, the transatlantic alliance is made up of one transcendent military power, America, and eight moderately important nations with serious, or at least potentially serious, militaries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

    The remaining score of NATO members are, well, largely irrelevant. That doesn't mean they don't contribute to and suffer losses in Western military operations -- as The Netherlands has, for example. But what they do doesn't and never will make much of a difference. Yet they sit at the NATO table as nominal equals. Of these 20, three have populations of less than one million, while another 11 come in at under 10 million. Incoming member (Northern) Macedonia barely breaks the two million barrier.

    Why the pretense that the opinions of micro-states Iceland, Luxembourg, and Montenegro matter to Washington? Why should governments with more than their shares of controversies -- Albania, Romania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and even Poland -- theoretically have a say on the use of the alliance's one military that really matters? Imagine if Georgia, which helped provoke war with Russia in 2008, and Ukraine, which ended up in conflict with Moscow after a street putsch backed by the West ousted their elected president, joined NATO. Tbilisi and Kiev would push to borrow the U.S. military to fight their wars. Who would blame them? But it certainly would not be in America's interest to let them.

    Today's NATO Mission is to Preserve Itself Afghanistan, the Longest War in American History

    This presumptuousness reaches beyond European security. French President Emmanuel Macron apparently called President Donald Trump to complain about the latter's decision to withdraw from Syria, which he said he "deeply" regretted. Added Macron, "An ally must be dependable," which apparently means that America must forever maintain a deployment illegal under both U.S. and international law. Macron said that French troops would remain, proclaiming: "To be allies is to fight shoulder to shoulder." But that fight should stop when the justification for fighting has ended.

    Around the same time, an unnamed Israeli official was quoted as being "in shock" at the president's decision. Obviously Trump hadn't read his intelligence briefing, explained the Israeli: after all, there were Iranians in Syria! But so what? Perhaps President Trump decided that Washington doesn't have to do everything for everyone in the Middle East. There is a very powerful, nuclear-armed nation next door to Syria that so far has done quite well protecting itself. Perhaps that country could take care of the Iran-in-Syria problem, in the unlikely event that it poses a serious threat.

    Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked complained that the withdrawal would hurt the Kurds, whom she characterized as "allies" and "great heroes." Moreover, the pull-out "strengthens [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, an antisemitic war criminal who carries out massacres of the Kurdish people, and does so with a wink from the international community." Well, why doesn't her country -- the one with nuclear weapons and a strong conventional military force -- rescue the Kurds? Israel is there and has far greater interests at stake than does America.

    It is not just foreign leaders who complain about U.S. policy. There is hardly a war that some foreigner somewhere is not busy advocating that Washington join or start.

    For instance, The Economist , a British magazine, recently headlined an article: "A deal to end the insurgency in Afghanistan would be wonderful: As long as it is not a figleaf to cover an American retreat." Really? After 17 years of unsuccessfully trying to plant a liberal democracy in Afghanistan, the only logical U.S. policy is to exit -- with figleaf if possible, but without if necessary.

    After the president announced his intent to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, the Financial Times , a United Kingdom newspaper, declared that the decision made America appear "erratic and inconsistent." Indeed, the United States needed a new defense secretary "to stand up to the president's wilder impulses," like making sure America stayed involved in the Syrian war as long as the FT thought necessary. The paper was horrified that the withdrawal "constitutes, too, an abandonment of key allies" and "signals, more broadly, a US retreat from the Middle East." Perhaps the anonymous FT writers should form a volunteer unit to patrol the Mideast in America's stead. After all, it was British and French line-drawing post-World War I that created the current national boundaries that are failing so badly.

    Roger Boyes, diplomatic editor of The Times of London, headlined his article: "Only the US can rein in ambitions of Iran." And not just "can." Boyes explained, "As the Syrian war nears its end, Trump must find ways to loosen Tehran's grip on the region." Frankly, I don't remember Americans asking him for his advice. Why the U.S.? Is there no one else available? Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey? That unnamed country that already possesses nukes? Toss in a little assistance from the Brits and French, too.

    Truth be told, Iran is a weak regional power that uses irregular warfare because it lacks conventional strength. Missiles are its deterrence against better armed, threatening neighbors. It certainly doesn't endanger America, with the globe's greatest military. Israel, too, can launch a devastating retaliation against any attack. Saudi Arabia alone spends more than five times as much on its armed forces as Iran.

    Perhaps Americans should be honored that so many overseas "friends" have so much free advice to offer. However, much of it is bad. Policy should be based on the interests of the U.S. -- protecting its people, territory, prosperity, and system of constitutional liberties. That means advancing peace first and making war a last resort. Desiring to do good abroad cannot justify sacrificing American lives, wealth, and security in never ending war.

    Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.

    [Feb 05, 2019] The neocon s strategy

    Highly recommended!
    1) continue to control the "prestige" outlets: academia, newspapers, major publishers,
    2) censor the huge online platforms like Twitter and YouTube,
    3) confine the samizdat to small-scale blogs and independent websites,
    4) crush any sort of opposition smearing it using anti-Semimuticm chanrge (to keep the opposition confined to online ghettos).
    5. ifrnore the rest
    It's not going to work, though.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Kristol sees the Empire as basically a galaxy-wide extrapolation of what he has long wanted the US to have over the Earth: what he has termed, "benevolent global hegemony." ..."
    "... In " The Case for the Empire ," Jonathan V. Last made a Kristolian argument that you can't make a "benevolent hegemony" omelet without breaking a few eggs. ..."
    "... A year after Kristol published Last's essay, large numbers of civilians were killed by American Imperial Stormtroopers in their actual Middle Eastern arid homeland of Iraq, thanks largely in part to the direct influence of neocons like Kristol and Last. ..."
    "... In reality Hussein had put a death warrant out on Zarqawi, who was hiding from Iraq's security forces under the protective aegis of the US Air Force in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region. It was only after the Empire precipitated the chaotic collapse of Iraq that Zarqawi's outfit was able to thrive and evolve into Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). And after the Empire precipitated the chaotic collapse of Syria, AQI further mutated into Syrian al-Qaeda (which has conquered much of Syria) and ISIS (which has conquered much of Syria and Iraq). ..."
    "... The Soviet menace had recently disappeared, and the Cold War along with it. The neocons were terrified that the American public would therefore jump at the chance to lay their imperial burdens down. Kristol and Kagan urged their readers to resist that temptation, and to instead capitalize on America's new peerless preeminence by making it a big-spending, hyper-active, busybody globo-cop. The newfound predominance must become dominance wherever and whenever possible. That way, any future near-peer competitors would be nipped in the bud, and the new "unipolar moment" would last forever. ..."
    "... What made this neocon dream seem within reach was the indifference of post-Soviet Russia. The year after the Berlin Wall fell, the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was the debut "police action" of unipolar "Team America, World Police." Paul Wolfowitz , the neocon and Iraq War architect, considered it a successful trial run. As Wesley Clark, former Nato Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, recalled : ..."
    "... Also in 1996, David Wurmser wrote a strategy document for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Titled, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," it was co-signed by Wurmser's fellow neocons and future Iraq War architects Richard Perle and Douglas Feith . "A Clean Break" called for regime change in Iraq as a "means" of "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." Syria itself was a target because it "challenges Israel on Lebanese soil." It primarily does this by, along with Iran, supporting the paramilitary group Hezbollah, which arose in the 80s out of the local resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and which continually foils Israel's ambitions in that country. ..."
    "... The neocons used to be Democrats in the big-government, Cold Warrior mold of Harry Truman and Henry "Scoop" Jackson. After the Vietnam War and the rise of the anti-war New Left, the Democratic Party's commitment to the Cold War waned, so the neocons switched to the Republicans in disgust. ..."
    "... According to investigative reporter Jim Lobe, the neocons got their first taste of power within the Reagan administration, in which positions were held by neocons such as Wolfowitz, Perle, Elliot Abrams , and Michael Ledeen . They were especially influential during Reagan's first term of saber-rattling, clandestine warfare, and profligate defense spending, which Kristol and Kagan remembered so fondly in their "Neo-Reaganite" manifesto. ..."
    Dec 28, 2018 | www.rightweb.irc-online.org
    Bill Kristol watches Star Wars movies, he roots for the Galactic Empire. The leading neocon recently caused a social media disturbance in the Force when he tweeted this predilection for the Dark Side following the debut of the final trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens .

    Kristol sees the Empire as basically a galaxy-wide extrapolation of what he has long wanted the US to have over the Earth: what he has termed, "benevolent global hegemony."

    Kristol, founder and editor of neocon flagship magazine The Weekly Standard, responded to scandalized critics by linking to a 2002 essay from the Standard's blog that justifies even the worst of Darth Vader's atrocities. In " The Case for the Empire ," Jonathan V. Last made a Kristolian argument that you can't make a "benevolent hegemony" omelet without breaking a few eggs.

    And what if those broken eggs are civilians, like Luke Skywalker's uncle and aunt who were gunned down by Imperial Stormtroopers in their home on the Middle Eastern-looking arid planet of Tatooine (filmed on location in Tunisia)? Well, as Last sincerely argued, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru hid Luke and harbored the fugitive droids R2D2 and C3P0; so they were "traitors" who were aiding the rebellion and deserved to be field-executed.

    A year after Kristol published Last's essay, large numbers of civilians were killed by American Imperial Stormtroopers in their actual Middle Eastern arid homeland of Iraq, thanks largely in part to the direct influence of neocons like Kristol and Last.

    That war was similarly justified in part by the false allegation that Iraq ruler Saddam Hussein was harboring and aiding terrorist enemies of the empire like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The civilian-slaughtering siege of Fallujah , one of the most brutal episodes of the war, was also specifically justified by the false allegation that the town was harboring Zarqawi.

    In reality Hussein had put a death warrant out on Zarqawi, who was hiding from Iraq's security forces under the protective aegis of the US Air Force in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region. It was only after the Empire precipitated the chaotic collapse of Iraq that Zarqawi's outfit was able to thrive and evolve into Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). And after the Empire precipitated the chaotic collapse of Syria, AQI further mutated into Syrian al-Qaeda (which has conquered much of Syria) and ISIS (which has conquered much of Syria and Iraq).

    And what if the "benevolent hegemony" omelet requires the breaking of "eggs" the size of whole worlds, like how high Imperial officer Wilhuff Tarkin used the Death Star to obliterate the planet Alderaan? Well, as Last sincerely argued, even Alderaan likely deserved its fate, since it may have been, "a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents " Last contended that Princess Leia was probably lying when she told the Death Star's commander that the planet had "no weapons."

    While Last was writing his apologia for global genocide, his fellow neocons were baselessly arguing that Saddam Hussein was similarly lying about Iraq not having a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. Primarily on that basis, the obliteration of an entire country began the following year.

    And a year after that, President Bush performed a slapstick comedy act about his failure to find Iraqi WMDs for a black-tie dinner for radio and television correspondents. The media hacks in his audience, who had obsequiously helped the neocon-dominated Bush administration lie the country into war, rocked with laughter as thousands of corpses moldered in Iraq and Arlington. A more sickening display of imperial decadence and degradation has not been seen perhaps since the gladiatorial audiences of Imperial Rome. This is the hegemonic "benevolence" and "national greatness" that Kristol pines for.

    "Benevolent global hegemony" was coined by Kristol and fellow neocon Robert Kagan in their 1996 Foreign Affairs article " Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy ." In that essay, Kristol and Kagan sought to inoculate both the conservative movement and US foreign policy against the isolationism of Pat Buchanan.

    The Soviet menace had recently disappeared, and the Cold War along with it. The neocons were terrified that the American public would therefore jump at the chance to lay their imperial burdens down. Kristol and Kagan urged their readers to resist that temptation, and to instead capitalize on America's new peerless preeminence by making it a big-spending, hyper-active, busybody globo-cop. The newfound predominance must become dominance wherever and whenever possible. That way, any future near-peer competitors would be nipped in the bud, and the new "unipolar moment" would last forever.

    What made this neocon dream seem within reach was the indifference of post-Soviet Russia. The year after the Berlin Wall fell, the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was the debut "police action" of unipolar "Team America, World Police." Paul Wolfowitz , the neocon and Iraq War architect, considered it a successful trial run. As Wesley Clark, former Nato Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, recalled :

    "In 1991, [Wolfowitz] was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy  --  the number 3 position at the Pentagon. And I had gone to see him when I was a 1-Star General commanding the National Training Center. ( )

    And I said, "Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm."

    And he said: "Yeah, but not really, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn't But one thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the region  --  in the Middle East  --  and the Soviets won't stop us. And we've got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes  --  Syria, Iran, Iraq  --  before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us."

    The 1996 "Neo-Reaganite" article was part of a surge of neocon literary activity in the mid-90s. It was in 1995 that Kristol and John Podhoretz founded The Weekly Standard with funding from right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

    Also in 1996, David Wurmser wrote a strategy document for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Titled, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," it was co-signed by Wurmser's fellow neocons and future Iraq War architects Richard Perle and Douglas Feith . "A Clean Break" called for regime change in Iraq as a "means" of "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." Syria itself was a target because it "challenges Israel on Lebanese soil." It primarily does this by, along with Iran, supporting the paramilitary group Hezbollah, which arose in the 80s out of the local resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and which continually foils Israel's ambitions in that country.

    Later that same year, Wurmser wrote another strategy document, this time for circulation in American and European halls of power, titled "Coping with Crumbling States: A Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant."

    In "A Clean Break," Wurmser had framed regime change in Iraq and Syria in terms of Israeli regional ambitions. In "Coping," Wurmser adjusted his message for its broader Western audience by recasting the very same policies in a Cold War framework.

    Wurmser characterized regime change in Iraq and Syria (both ruled by Baathist regimes) as " expediting the chaotic collapse " of secular-Arab nationalism in general, and Baathism in particular. He concurred with King Hussein of Jordan that, "the phenomenon of Baathism," was, from the very beginning, "an agent of foreign, namely Soviet policy." Of course King Hussein was a bit biased on the matter, since his own Hashemite royal family once ruled both Iraq and Syria. Wurmser argued that:

    " the battle over Iraq represents a desperate attempt by residual Soviet bloc allies in the Middle East to block the extension into the Middle East of the impending collapse that the rest of the Soviet bloc faced in 1989."

    Wurmser further derided Baathism in Iraq and Syria as an ideology in a state of "crumbling descent and missing its Soviet patron" and "no more than a Cold War enemy relic on probation."

    Wurmser advised the West to put this anachronistic adversary out of its misery, and to thus, in Kristolian fashion, press America's Cold War victory on toward its final culmination. Baathism should be supplanted by what he called the "Hashemite option." After their chaotic collapse, Iraq and Syria would be Hashemite possessions once again. Both would be dominated by the royal house of Jordan, which in turn, happens to be dominated by the US and Israel.

    Wurmser stressed that demolishing Baathism must be the foremost priority in the region. Secular-Arab nationalism should be given no quarter, not even, he added, for the sake of stemming the tide of Islamic fundamentalism.

    Thus we see one of the major reasons why the neocons were such avid anti-Soviets during the Cold War. It is not just that, as post-Trotskyites, the neocons resented Joseph Stalin for having Leon Trotsky assassinated in Mexico with an ice pick. The Israel-first neocons' main beef with the Soviets was that, in various disputes and conflicts involving Israel, Russia sided with secular-Arab nationalist regimes from 1953 onward.

    The neocons used to be Democrats in the big-government, Cold Warrior mold of Harry Truman and Henry "Scoop" Jackson. After the Vietnam War and the rise of the anti-war New Left, the Democratic Party's commitment to the Cold War waned, so the neocons switched to the Republicans in disgust.

    According to investigative reporter Jim Lobe, the neocons got their first taste of power within the Reagan administration, in which positions were held by neocons such as Wolfowitz, Perle, Elliot Abrams , and Michael Ledeen . They were especially influential during Reagan's first term of saber-rattling, clandestine warfare, and profligate defense spending, which Kristol and Kagan remembered so fondly in their "Neo-Reaganite" manifesto.

    It was then that the neocons helped establish the "Reagan Doctrine." According to neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer , who coined the term in 1985, the Reagan Doctrine was characterized by support for anti-communist (in reality often simply anti-leftist) forces around the whole world.

    Since the support was clandestine, the Reagan administration was able to bypass the "Vietnam Syndrome" and project power in spite of the public's continuing war weariness. (It was left to Reagan's successor, the first President Bush, to announce following his "splendid little" Gulf War that, "by God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!")

    Operating covertly, the Reaganites could also use any anti-communist group they found useful, no matter how ruthless and ugly: from Contra death squads in Nicaragua to the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen in Afghanistan. Abrams and Ledeen were both involved in the Iran-Contra affair, and Abrams was convicted (though later pardoned) on related criminal charges.

    Kristol's "Neo-Reaganite" co-author Robert Kagan gave the doctrine an even wider and more ambitious interpretation in his book A Twilight Struggle :

    "The Reagan Doctrine has been widely understood to mean only support for anticommunist guerrillas fighting pro-Soviet regimes, but from the first the doctrine had a broader meaning. Support for anticommunist guerrillas was the logical outgrowth, not the origin, of a policy of supporting democratic reform or revolution everywhere, in countries ruled by right-wing dictators as well as by communist parties."

    As this description makes plain, neocon policy, from the 1980s to today, has been every bit as fanatical, crusading, and world-revolutionary as Red Communism was in the neocon propaganda of yesteryear, and that Islam is in the neocon propaganda of today.

    The neocons credit Reagan's early belligerence with the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. But in reality, war is the health of the State, and Cold War was the health of Soviet State . The Soviets long used the American menace to frighten the Russian people into rallying around the State for protection.

    After the neocons lost clout within the Reagan administration to "realists" like George Schultz, the later Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev detente began. It was only after that detente lifted the Russian siege atmosphere and quieted existential nuclear nightmares that the Russian people felt secure enough to demand a changing of the guard.

    In 1983, the same year that the first Star Wars trilogy ended, Reagan vilified Soviet Russia in language that Star Wars fans could understand by dubbing it "the Evil Empire." Years later, having, in Kristol's words, "defeated the evil empire," the neocons that Reagan first lifted to power began clamoring for a "neo-Reaganite" global hegemony. And a few years after that, those same neocons began pointing to the sci-fi Galactic Empire that Reagan implicitly compared to the Soviets as a lovely model for America!

    Fast-forward to return to the neocon literary flowering of the mid-90s. In 1997, the year after writing "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy" together, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan co-founded The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The 20th century is often called "the American century," largely due to it being a century of war and American "victories" in those wars: the two World Wars and the Cold War. The neocons sought to ensure that through the never-ending exercise of military might, the American global hegemony achieved through those wars would last another hundred years, and that the 21st century too would be "American."

    The organization's founding statement of principles called for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity" and reads like an executive summary of the founding duo's "Neo-Reaganite" essay. It was signed by neocons such as Wolfowitz, Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Frank Gaffney ; by future Bush administration officials such as Dick Cheney , Donald Rumsfeld , Lewis "Scooter" Libby ; and by other neocon allies, such as Jeb Bush.

    Although PNAC called for interventions ranging from Serbia (to roll back Russian influence in Europe) to Taiwan (to roll back Chinese influence in Asia), its chief concern was to kick off the restructuring of the Middle East envisioned in "A Clean Break" and "Coping" by advocating its first step: regime change in Iraq.

    The most high-profile parts of this effort were two "open letters" published in 1998, one in January addressed to President Bill Clinton , and another in May addressed to leaders of Congress . As with its statement of principles, PNAC was able to garner signatures for these letters from a wide range of political luminaries, including neocons (like Perle), neocon allies (like John Bolton ), and other non-neocons (like James Woolsey and Robert Zoellick).

    The open letters characterized Iraq as "a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War," and buttressed this ridiculous claim with the now familiar allegations of Saddam building a WMD program.

    Thanks in large part to PNAC's pressure, regime change in Iraq became official US policy in October when Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. (Notice the Clinton-friendly "humanitarian interventionist" name in spite of the policy's conservative fear-mongering origins.)

    After the Supreme Court delivered George W. Bush the presidency, the neocons were back in the imperial saddle again in 2001: just in time to make their projected "New American Century" of "Neo-Reaganite Global Hegemony" a reality. The first order of business, of course, was Iraq.

    But some pesky national security officials weren't getting with the program and kept trying to distract the administration with concerns about some Osama bin Laden character and his Al Qaeda outfit. Apparently they were laboring under some pedestrian notion that their job was to protect the American people and not to conquer the world.

    For example, when National Security Council counterterrorism "czar" Richard Clarke was frantically sounding the alarm over an imminent terrorist attack on America,Wolfowitz was uncomprehending. As Clarke recalled, the then Deputy Defense Secretary objected :

    "I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden."

    Clarke informed him that:

    "We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al-Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States."

    This simply did not fit in the agenda-driven neocon worldview of Wolfowitz, who responded:

    "Well, there are others that do as well, at least as much. Iraqi terrorism for example."

    And as Peter Beinhart recently wrote :

    "During that same time period [in 2001], the CIA was raising alarms too. According to Kurt Eichenwald, a former New York Times reporter given access to the Daily Briefs prepared by the intelligence agencies for President Bush in the spring and summer of 2001, the CIA told the White House by May 1 that 'a group presently in the United States' was planning a terrorist attack. On June 22, the Daily Brief warned that al-Qaeda strikes might be 'imminent.'

    But the same Defense Department officials who discounted Clarke's warnings pushed back against the CIA's. According to Eichenwald's sources , 'the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat.'

    By the time Clarke and the CIA got the Bush administration's attention, it was already too late to follow any of the clear leads that might have been followed to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

    The terrorist attacks by Sunni Islamic fundamentalists mostly from the Saudi Kingdom hardly fit the neocon agenda of targeting the secular-Arab nationalist regimes of Iraq and Syria and the Shiite Republic of Iran: especially since all three of the latter were mortal enemies of bin Laden types.

    But the attackers were, like Iraqis, some kind of Muslims from the general area of the Middle East. And that was good enough for government work in the American idiocracy. After a youth consumed with state-compelled drudgery, most Americans are so stupid and incurious that such a meaningless relationship, enhanced with some fabricated "intelligence," was more than enough to stampede the spooked American herd into supporting the Iraq War.

    As Benjamin Netanyahu once said , "America is a thing you can move very easily."

    Whether steering the country into war would be easy or not, it was all neocon hands on deck. At the Pentagon there was Wolfowitz and Perle, with Perle-admirer Rumsfeld as SecDef. Feith was also at Defense, where he set up two new offices for the special purpose of spinning "intelligence" yarn to tie Saddam with al-Qaeda and to weave fanciful pictures of secret Iraqi WMD programs.

    Wurmser himself labored in one of these offices, followed by stints at State aiding neocon-ally Bolton and in the Vice President's office aiding neocon-ally Cheney along with Scooter Libby.

    Iran-Contra convict Abrams was at the National Security Council aiding Condoleezza Rice. And Kristol and Kagan continued to lead the charge in the media and think tank worlds.

    And they pulled it off. Wurmser finally got his "chaotic collapse" in Iraq. And Kristol finally had his invincible, irresistible, hyper-active hegemony looming over the world like a Death Star.

    The post-9/11 pretense-dropping American Empire even had Dick Cheney with his Emperor Palpatine snarl preparing Americans to accept torture by saying:

    "We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will."

    The Iraq War ended up backfiring on the neocons. It installed a new regime in Baghdad that was no more favorable toward Israel and far more favorable toward Israel's enemies Iran and Syria. But the important thing was that Kristol's Death Star was launched and in orbit. As long as it was still in proactive mode, there was nothing the neocons could not fix with its awful power.

    This seemed true even during the Obama presidency. On top of Iraq and Afghanistan, under Obama the American Death Star has demolished Yemen and Somalia. It also demolished both Syria and Libya, where it continues the Wurmsurite project of precipitating the chaotic collapse of secular-Arab nationalism. Islamic terror groups including al-Qaeda and ISIS are thriving in that chaos, but the American Death Star to this day has adhered to Wurmser's de-prioritization of the Islamist threat.

    As Yoda said, "Fear is the path to the Dark Side." The neocons have been able to use the fear generated by a massive Islamic fundamentalist terror attack to pursue their blood-soaked vendetta against secular-Arab nationalists, even to the benefit of the very Islamic fundamentalists who attacked us, because even after 12 years Americans are still too bigoted and oblivious to distinguish between the two groups.

    Furthermore, Obama has gone beyond Wurmser's regional ambitions and has fulfilled Kristol's busybody dreams of global hegemony to a much greater extent than Bush ever did. To appease generals and arms merchants worried about his prospective pull-outs from the Iraqi and Afghan theaters, Obama launched both an imperial "pivot" to Asia and a stealth invasion of Africa. The pull-outs were aborted, but the continental "pivots" remain. Thus Obama's pretenses as a peace President helped to make his regime the most ambitiously imperialistic and globe-spanning that history has ever seen.

    But the neocons may have overdone it with their Death Star shooting spree, because another great power now seems determined to put a stop to it. And who is foiling the neocons' Evil Empire? Why none other than the original "Evil Empire": the neocons' old nemesis Russia.

    In 2013, Russia's Putin diplomatically frustrated the neocons' attempt to deliver the coup de grâce to the Syrian regime with a US air war. Shortly afterward, Robert Kagan's wife Victoria Nuland yanked Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence by engineering a bloody coup in Kiev. Putin countered by bloodlessly annexing the Ukrainian province of Crimea. A proxy war followed between the US-armed and Western-financed junta in Kiev and pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.

    The US continued to intervene in Syria, heavily sponsoring an insurgency dominated by extremists including al-Qaeda and ISIS. But recently, Russia decided to intervene militarily. Suddenly, Wolfowitz's lesson from the Gulf War was up in smoke. The neocons cannot militarily do whatever they want in the Middle East and trust that Russia will stand idly by. Suddenly the arrogant Wolfowitz/Wurmser dream of crumbling then cleaning up "old Soviet client regimes" and "Cold War enemy relics" had gone poof. Putin decided that Syria would be one "Cold War relic" turned terrorist playground too many.

    Russia's entry into Syria has thrown all of the neocons' schemes into disarray.

    By actually working to destroy Syrian al-Qaeda and ISIS instead of just pretending to, as the US and its allies have, Russia threatens to eliminate the head-chopping bogeymen whose Live Leak-broadcasted brutal antics continually renew in Americans the war-fueling terror of 9/11. And after Putin had taken the US air strike option off the table, al-Qaeda and ISIS were the neocons most powerful tools for bringing down the Syrian regime. And now Russia is threatening to take those toys away too.

    If Hezbollah and Iran, with Russia's air cover, manage to help save what is left of Syria from the Salafist psychos, they will be more prestigious in both Syria and Lebanon than ever, and Israel may never be able to dominate its northern neighbors.

    The neocons are livid. After the conflicts over Syria and Ukraine in 2013, they had already started ramping up the vilification of Putin. Now the demonization has gone into overdrive.

    One offering in this milieu has been an article by Matthew Continetti in the neocon web site he edits, The Washington Free Beacon. Titled " A Reagan Doctrine for the Twenty-First Century ," it obviously aims to be a sequel to Kristol's and Kagan's "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." As it turns out, the Russian "Evil Empire" was not defeated after all: only temporarily dormant. And so Continetti's updated Reaganite manifesto is subtitled, "How to confront Vladimir Putin."

    The US military may be staggering around the planet like a drunken, bloated colossus. Yet Continetti still dutifully trots out all the Kristolian tropes about the need for military assertiveness (more drunken belligerence), massive defense spending (more bloating), and "a new American century." Reaganism is needed now just as much as in 1996, he avers: in fact, doubly so, for Russia has reemerged as:

    " the greatest military and ideological threat to the United States and to the world order it has built over decades as guarantor of international security."

    Right, just look at all that security sprouting out of all those bomb craters the US has planted throughout much of the world. Oh wait no, those are terrorists.

    Baby-faced Continetti, a Weekly Standard contributor, is quite the apprentice to Sith Lord Kristol, judging from his ardent faith in the "Benevolent Global Hegemony" dogma. In fact, he even shares Lord Kristol's enthusiasm for "Benevolent Galactic Hegemony." It was Continetti who kicked off the recent Star Wars /foreign policy brouhaha when he tweeted:

    "I've been rooting for the Empire since 1983"

    This elicited a concurring response from Kristol, which is what set Twitter atwitter. Of course the whole thing was likely staged and coordinated between the two neocon operatives.

    Unfortunately for the neocons, demonizing Putin over Syria is not nearly as easy as demonizing Putin over Ukraine. With Ukraine, there was a fairly straight-forward (if false) narrative to build of big bully Russia and plucky underdog Ukraine.

    However, it's pretty hard to keep a lid on the fact that Russia is attacking al-Qaeda and ISIS, along with any CIA-trained jihadist allies are nearby. And it's inescapably unseemly for the US foreign policy establishment to be so bent out of shape about Russia bombing sworn enemies of the American people, even if it does save some dictator most Americans don't care about one way or the other.

    And now that wildly popular wild card Donald Trump is spouting unwelcome common sense to his legions of followers about how standing back and letting Russia bomb anti-American terrorists is better than starting World War III over it. And this is on top of the fact that Trump is deflating Jeb Bush's campaign by throwing shade at his brother's neocon legacy, from the failures over 9/11 to the disastrous decision to regime change Iraq. And the neocon-owned Marco Rubio, who actually adopted "A New American Century" as his campaign slogan, is similarly making no headway against Trump.

    And Russia's involvement in Syria just keeps getting worse for the neocons. Washington threatened to withdraw support from the Iraqi government if it accepted help from Russia against ISIS. Iraq accepted Russian help anyway. Baghdad has also sent militias to fight under Russian air cover alongside Syrian, Iranian, and Hezbollah forces.

    Even Jordan, that favorite proxy force in Israel's dreams of regional dominance, has begun coordinating with Russia, in spite of its billion dollars a year of annual aid from Washington. Et tu Jordan?!

    Apparently there aren't enough Federal Reserve notes in Janet Yellen's imagination to pay Iraq and Jordan to tolerate living amid a bin Ladenite maelstrom any longer.

    And what is Washington going to do about it if the whole region develops closer ties with Russia? What are the American people going to let them get away with doing about it? A palace coup in Jordan? Expend more blood and treasure to overthrow the very same Iraqi government we already lost much blood and treasure in installing? Start a suicidal hot war with nuclear Russia?

    And the neocon's imperial dreams are coming apart at the seams outside of the war zones too. The new Prime Minister of Canada just announced he will pull out of America's war in the Levant. Europe wants to compromise with Russia on both Ukraine and Syria, and this willingness will grow as the refugee crisis it is facing worsens. Obama made a nuclear deal with Iran and initiated detente with Cuba. And worst of all for neocons, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is being de-legitimized by the bourgeoning BDS movement and by images of its own brutality propagating through social media, along with translations of its hateful rhetoric.

    The neocons bit off more than they could chew, and their Galactic Empire is falling apart before it could even fully conquer its first planet.

    Nearly all empires end due to over-extension. If brave people from Ottawa to Baghdad simply say "enough" within a brief space of time, hopefully this empire can dissolve relatively peacefully like the Soviet Empire did, leaving its host civilization intact, instead of dragging that civilization into oblivion along with it like the Roman Empire did.

    But beware, the imperial war party will not go quietly into the night, unless we in their domestic tax base insist that there is no other way. If, in desperation, they start calling for things like more boots on the ground, reinstating the draft, or declaring World War III on Russia and its Middle Eastern allies, we must stand up and say with firm voices something along the lines of the following:

    No. You will not have my son for your wars. And we will not surrender any more of our liberty. We will no longer yield to a regime led by a neocon clique that threatens to extinguish the human race. Your power fantasy of universal empire is over. Just let it go. Or, as Anakin finally did when the Emperor came for his son, we will hurl your tyranny into the abyss.

    [Feb 05, 2019] On Max Boot conversion to Neoliberal Democrats

    Notable quotes:
    "... The GOP has always been a fraud, philosophically.' ..."
    "... Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break compared with our home grown rightwingers. ..."
    "... Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn't know about Boot, namely, that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre community. Well, that explains so much, really: you'd be hard-pressed to find a more reactionary bloc in all of American politics. ..."
    Feb 05, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    Dr. Hilarius 01.25.19 at 11:31 pm (no link)

    Anyone who has spent time with Pentecostal/Evangelical Christians is familiar with public confessions of pre-Salvation sin. The greater the sinning, the more impressive and prized the conversion. If the sinner was a notable atheist, Satanist, evolutionist or communist, the story of his or her conversion can become a lucrative career on the church lecture circuit. (Pity the poor convert trying to attract attention with nothing more than a battle with youthful lust.)
    Mainmata 01.26.19 at 2:34 am (no link)
    This is a really good article (as usual). I think the essential core is that Boot misunderstood that conservatives and the GOP, in particular, were the party of ideas. Buckley summarized it best when he stated that the role of conservatives was to stand astride the course of history and stay "stop". The GOP has never been the party of ideas or at least not any ideas that are all rational or workable. They claimed to be about "small government" in an economy dominated by large multinational corporations and cartels. The GOP has always been a fraud, philosophically.' Nowadays, they're mainly about racism, misogyny and aggressive foreign policy.

    Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break compared with our home grown rightwingers.

    abd 01.26.19 at 4:35 am (no link)
    Norman Finkelstein's essay on the serial chameleon, Hitchens has many useful insights:

    A sharp political break must, for one living a political life, be a wrenching emotional experience. The rejection of one's core political beliefs can't but entail a rejection of the person holding them: if the beliefs were wrong, then one's whole being was wrong. Repudiating one's comrades must also be a sorrowful burden. It is not by chance that "fraternity" is a prized value of the left: in the course of political struggle, one forges, if not always literally, then, at any rate, spiritually, blood bonds No doubt he imagines it is testament to the mettle of his conviction that past loyalties don't in the slightest constrain him; in fact, it's testament to the absence of any conviction at all.

    Bob Michaelson 01.26.19 at 2:45 pm (no link)
    "Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book he never read."
    When Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss was a guest on the Dick Cavett Show he pointed out that when Buckley was a student of Yale he would typically talk about books that he had never actually read. Indeed Buckley continued to do so for the rest of his life.
    Jerry Vinokurov 01.28.19 at 2:22 pm (no link)
    Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn't know about Boot, namely, that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre community. Well, that explains so much, really: you'd be hard-pressed to find a more reactionary bloc in all of American politics. It's "funny" because many of them are plainly anti-religious but they make (wittingly or un-) common cause with evangelicals because they're virulently opposed to the very concept of a public good or an active state attempting to mitigate social ills. I need to finish the article before having further reactions, but this was a revelation to me.
    marcel proust 01.28.19 at 5:06 pm ( 24 )
    Jerry Vinokurov@ 23 : A small potatoes objection/question. Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community, including US born descendants of emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of individuals make up a more reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?
    Jerry Vinokurov 01.29.19 at 1:22 am ( 25 )

    Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community, including US born descendants of emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of individuals make up a more reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?

    It's hard for me to say because I don't really have much exposure this culture's Cuban counterparts. My impression with regard to a lot of the Cuban emigres is that they're substantially more socially conservative than those who came from the former USSR. Not that the latter group is any kind of bastion of wokeness, but for them most of the culture war stuff isn't a huge motivator. I can't think of anyone from this group who, for example, ever stated that abortion or opposition to gay marriage was the main motivator for any kind of vote or other political activity.

    They may not care much for it and I'm sure being e.g. LGBT in this community is no picnic, but it's not a driver for them that, say, anti-tax mania is. I can't possibly count how many conversations I've had with relatives complaining about this or that "onerous" regulation or tax or whatever that they have to pay and listen to the same "why are they wasting our money" and "I don't want to pay for this" tirade.

    Needless to say the vast majority of them, like most American in general, have only the foggiest notion of how American governments (federal, state, local, etc.) operate, but that doesn't stop them from hating it and knowing deep in their heart that whatever it's doing, it's doing it wrong.

    [Feb 05, 2019] If only Trump invades Venezuella neocons like Max Book will be with him in one headbeat

    Feb 05, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    derrida derider 01.27.19 at 11:21 pm 21

    Glen has it right. Trump is nasty and ignorant and a stunningly incompetent President (as he was an incompetent businessman) but his very disdain for high-falutin' principle is what makes him, in foreign policy, an old-fashioned Republican isolationist. And the imperialists in the GOP cannot stomach that, though they're happy to stomach his general nastiness and ignorance.

    [Feb 05, 2019] The Problem of Max Boot by Corey Robin

    Notable quotes:
    "... National Review ..."
    "... The Conscience of a Conservative ..."
    Feb 05, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    January 25, 2019 I've been thinking about political converts for a long time . At The New Yorker , I take up the problem of Max Boot, who probably needs no introduction, and Derek Black, who was a leading white supremacist and then renounced it all.

    Here's a taste:

    Max Boot, a longtime conservative who recently broke with the right over the nomination and election of Donald Trump , registered as a Republican in 1988. At the time, Boot writes in " The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right ," he wanted to join the "party of ideas." A movement of highbrows, conservatism was the work of the "learned, worldly, elitist, and eccentric lot" of writers at National Review , "far removed from the simple-minded, cracker-barrel populists who have taken control of the conservative movement today." It was a movement, Boot explains at the outset, "inspired by Barry Goldwater's canonical text from 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative . I believed in that movement, and served it my whole life."

    A hundred and seventy-five pages later, Boot inadvertently lets slip that reading Goldwater's "actual words" was something he hadn't done until after Trump's election. Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book he never read.

    But it turns out that the problem of Boot and Black goes much deeper than what books were or weren't read. If you compare the conversions from left to right -- think Arthur Koestler, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and so on -- with those from right to left, you find something interesting.
    Curiously, the movement from right to left has never played an equivalent role in modern politics. Not only are there fewer converts in that direction, but those conversions haven't plowed as fertile a field as their counterparts have.
    Why is that? Find out here .

    DocAmazing 01.25.19 at 8:37 pm (no link)

    As your piece alludes to but does not say outright, Boot was a right-wing intellectual because he said he was a right-wing intellectual. He celebrated, but hadn't actually read , Goldwater and Buckley; his grasp of his other icons was equally weak. I remember reading his stuff in UC Berkeley's The Daily Californian back in the middle 1980s and getting the impression that Boot was another dope-with-a-thesaurus like George F. Will, with added militarist bloodthirst.

    The bar for being a right-wing intellectual has traditionally been low, and in the present day we see examples like Jonah Goldberg and Megan McArdle putting out high school current-events assignments and being lauded as original thinkers. It's probably a reflection of the preferences of the people who own the presses.

    BruceJ 01.25.19 at 9:26 pm (no link)
    Personally, I rather doubt Boot is truly repenting, but is rather merely taking advantage of the zeitgeist.

    "Anti-Trump Repentant Right" sells books, gets him on teevee, etc. The proof of the pudding will be what he does when the neocons are ascendant again.

    The likes of Michael Gerson and David Frum sliding from the Bush II White House to "George Boosh?? Never heard of him!" critics of the right always seemed awfully convenient for their post-WH careers.

    As DocAmazing says, it's a reflection of the people who own the presses, of which there has always been an orders of magnitude greater number, prominence and paychecks on the right rather than the left.

    The vast ( hugely interconnected, almost incestuously so) network of RW "Think Tanks" and publishing houses funded by wealthy oligarchs pretty much guarantees a safe haven for Left->Right apostates.

    There really isn't such a network for the reverse. The L->R crownd don't have to spend the long years in the wilderness atoning for their sins, like the R->L side does. (And given the damage the Right has done over recent decades, there is much atonement needed )

    b9n10nt 01.25.19 at 11:25 pm (no link)
    Here's the lesson I'd expect from Corey: reactionaries need to continually contrive new rationalizations for reaction, and might thus be inspired by Leftist rhetoric for the task. The Left does not need to similarly borrow from the Right because there's no need to hide its pursuit of liberty, equality, and solidarity before a popular audience. Hence, left –> right converts are useful to the right in ways that right–>left converts are not. & then you've got your empirical evidence to support the theory.

    The emphasis, however, was on experience: the right needs to experience the vitality of revolution to understand it and inform counter-revolution. This seems like a weaker explanation, but perhaps the stronger argument would have seemed too shrill for the New Yorker?

    Mainmata 01.26.19 at 2:34 am (no link)
    This is a really good article (as usual). I think the essential core is that Boot misunderstood that conservatives and the GOP, in particular, were the party of ideas. Buckley summarized it best when he stated that the role of conservatives was to stand astride the course of history and stay "stop". The GOP has never been the party of ideas or at least not any ideas that are all rational or workable. They claimed to be about "small government" in an economy dominated by large multinational corporations and cartels. The GOP has always been a fraud, philosophically.'

    Nowadays, they're mainly about racism, misogyny and aggressive foreign policy.

    Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break compared with our home grown rightwingers.

    abd 01.26.19 at 4:35 am (no link)
    Norman Finkelstein's essay on the serial chameleon, Hitchens has many useful insights:

    A sharp political break must, for one living a political life, be a wrenching emotional experience. The rejection of one's core political beliefs can't but entail a rejection of the person holding them: if the beliefs were wrong, then one's whole being was wrong. Repudiating one's comrades must also be a sorrowful burden. It is not by chance that "fraternity" is a prized value of the left: in the course of political struggle, one forges, if not always literally, then, at any rate, spiritually, blood bonds No doubt he imagines it is testament to the mettle of his conviction that past loyalties don't in the slightest constrain him; in fact, it's testament to the absence of any conviction at all.

    Bob Michaelson 01.26.19 at 2:45 pm (no link)
    "Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book he never read."
    When Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss was a guest on the Dick Cavett Show he pointed out that when Buckley was a student of Yale he would typically talk about books that he had never actually read. Indeed Buckley continued to do so for the rest of his life.
    abd 01.26.19 at 8:34 pm (no link)
    @3 re neocons, this quote of Boot from Corey Robin's article:

    "That my parents and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet Jews were finally able to leave was due largely to neoconservative foreign policy," Boot writes. "In later life I would support giving moral concerns a prominent place in US foreign policy, a stance that has been associated with neoconservatism."

    reminded me of an answer that E.L. Doctorow gave to following question from Bill Moyers in 1988:

    How do you explain that so many intellectuals today are in service to orthodoxy?

    The third element is very interesting, and I think it's been under-reported–and that is the immense influence of the émigré, Eastern European intellectuals who've come over here in the past fifteen or twenty years. Many of them are quite brilliant writers and professors of different disciplines. They have tended to see American life in terms of their own background and suffering, which has been considerable, as people in exile from regimes that have done terrible things to them and their families. They come of the terrible European legacy of monarchism and the reaction to it. So every attempt we make to legislate some advance in our American society, some social enlightenment, they see as a dangerous left-wing weakness leading toward totalitarianism. They've had enormous influence in the American intellectual community. They tend to see things as either/or and feel that you must be rigidly against any idea of improvement because the idea of perfection is what kills society and creates totalitarianism. The Utopian ideal leads to revolution. They seem to forget we had our revolution two hundred years ago. Our history is not theirs.

    We've always gone out into the barn of the Constitution and tinkered. That's our very pragmatic history. I don't think these people understand that. So any time we tune something up and fix something and make it more just, make it work a little better, they become alarmed.

    Glen Tomkins 01.27.19 at 3:24 pm ( 20 )
    I don't know.

    I think the most reasonable account of Boot's conversion is that he hasn't converted. He's profoundly angry at Trump because Trump, to the everlasting shame of our side, is the first political figure in generations to dare to question US imperialism, and US imperialism is what Boot is really about. He's mostly a military enthusiast. Were Trump to gin up a war with Venezuela and/or Iran, Boot would be back on his side in a heartbeat. Blood and Iron!

    abd 01.26.19 at 8:49 am (no link)
    @13, You may have a point there, given the gullibility of folks in these parts. Finkelstein, almost admiringly, noted the case of "the Polish émigré hoaxer, Jerzy Kosinski, who, shrewdly siz[ed] up intellectual culture in America" and plied his rusty wares on the university lecture with brio until his past caught up with him (many other European émigrés, e.g. Man Ray, Bruno Bettelheim, etc. also come to mind; google for the sordid details).

    Heck, the moral beacon whom Corey Robin never tires of citing, Hannah Arendt, was also a habitual "lifter" of material from others laboring in the archives, not to mention the free ride , intellectually speaking, she got because of "the widespread belief that philosophical murkiness signals philosophical profundity."

    The direction in which the intellectual impostures listed by Pankaj Mishra below are "adjusting" to the prevailing winds is something to be expected from their ilk:

    Many journalists have been scrambling, more feverishly since Trump's apotheosis, to account for the stunningly extensive experience of fear and humiliation across racial and gender divisions; some have tried to reinvent themselves in heroic resistance to Trump and authoritarian 'populism'. David Frum, geometer under George W. Bush of an intercontinental 'axis of evil', now locates evil in the White House. Max Boot, self-declared 'neo-imperialist' and exponent of 'savage wars', recently claimed to have become aware of his 'white privilege'. Ignatieff, advocate of empire-lite and torture-lite, is presently embattled on behalf of the open society in Mitteleuropa. Goldberg, previously known as stenographer to Netanyahu, is now Coates's diligent promoter.

    Lee A. Arnold 01.26.19 at 1:15 pm ( 15 )
    DocAmazing #1: "The bar for being a right-wing intellectual has traditionally been low "

    Excepting for the brilliance of Corey Robin and a few others, it is no lower than the bar on the left, but I think you correctly point to the asymmetry in the general acceptance of the two piles of bosh that are usually produced. But going beyond BruceJ's fingering (at #3) of the presses and thinktanks for embracing the right bosh, there is a cause in the basic asymmetry of their political preferences, because the right justifies and praises the system, while the left does not. This makes it easier for the productions of the right to slide by, without critical inspection by the large mass of people who just want to get on with their lives.

    More complicated still: in our era the left (or most of it) doesn't want to tear down the system; it would prefer a mixed economy with more redistribution than we have at present, but not the destruction of private capitalism. This more nuanced preference can only explain itself by wading into the deeper ends of economic explanation, while it's still much easier for the moneyed right to demonize the left using the psychological critique of mere laziness or lack of initiative. This leaves the left with a more complex rhetorical problem in dealing with voter preferences than the right has, which, again, is another asymmetry.

    I think the winds are not merely shifting, but we are approaching a different and less stable era. The industrial economy is so successful that its winner-take-all mechanics is increasing inequality. In the US, the intellectual disaster of the right fabricated its bad policy of tax cuts and "smaller" government under Reagan, and the contradictions Reagan engineered took 30 years to crack up the Republican Party until a grifter named Trump could drive a plough through it. And he of course has come a cropper. At the same juncture, the presses and thinktanks have fallen in influence due to the internet where everyone is drowned out regardless of the viability of their ideas. In such a new, unstable, untested environment perhaps the best approach is the one taken by Warren, AOC, etc. -- hammer on a few big ideas with broad appeal.

    [Feb 05, 2019] NYTimes Journo Melts Down On Joe Rogan s Show

    Feb 05, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    nywvblue , 1 day ago

    Bari Weiss is the monstrous motherlode of ineptitude, it would appear.

    tom burton , 15 hours ago

    Bari Weiss's next column: Joe Rogan is a toady of Tulsi Gabbard.

    Robert Harper , 17 hours ago

    Now it is easy to understand why I stopped my nyt subscription.

    Mike Honcho , 17 hours ago

    Unbelievable! It's like Joe is interviewing an airhead middle school mean girl.

    [Feb 05, 2019] The Weekly Standard A Record of Failed Regime Change by Jacob Heilbrunn

    Notable quotes:
    "... No such glasnost ever took place in the pages of the Standard whose reputation has become indelibly wedded to its cheerleading for the calamitous 2003 Iraq War. The neocons had confused the Soviet Union's forfeiting of the cold war with American triumphalism, seizing upon its peaceful conclusion to search for new monsters to destroy abroad, whenever and wherever they could. The Standard itself constantly published taradiddles about the Middle East and Islam. Stephen F. Hayes, its last editor, lauded for his "integrity and courage" in the Trump era by David Brooks, wrote a phantasmagoric book called The Connection: How al Qaeda's Connection With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America , not to mention reverential biographies of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. ..."
    "... For his part, Kristol co-wrote a book with Lawrence F. Kaplan called The War Over Iraq that supported a worldwide crusade for democracy. Far from spreading democracy, the Iraq War ended up not only spreading chaos in the Middle East, but also enabling the rise of Trump. As Carlos Lozada recently observed in The Washington Post , "The Never Trumpers hold everyone culpable for the appeal of Trumpism except, in any worthwhile way, themselves." ..."
    "... For most neocons, however, journalism has never been more than a Leninist means to an end -- to form an intellectual vanguard. For it is political influence that the neocons crave. In his memoir, Boot proudly recounts that he served as an adviser to Senator Marco Rubio as well as to Mitt Romney during his run for the presidency in 2012. Kristol worked to destroy the 1993 Clinton Healthcare bill and sought to mold first Dan Quayle, then Sarah Palin, into his political homunculi. During the 2016 primary, he desperately cast about for a viable candidate to oppose Donald Trump and incurred much ridicule when he floated the name of David French, a writer for the National Review . ..."
    "... Kristol, Podhoretz, Boot, and others belong to a second generation of neocons that never drifted away from the Democrats toward the Republican Party. Instead, they were right from the beginning. While some have begun to duplicate the odyssey in reverse that neocon elder Norman Podhoretz chronicled in memoirs such as Breaking Ranks and Ex-Friends , many seem simply politically adrift, like Russian exiles stranded in Paris after the Bolshevik revolution pining for the ancien régime . ..."
    "... For his part, Kristol refused to concede that the GOP was irredeemably tainted by Trump. He acknowledged, "there are recessive genes in the GOP. They were always there and a lot of us didn't want to look too closely. There was a shining moment when the Bill Buckley conservatives came together with the neoconservatives and with Ronald Reagan," but "that went away quickly." Explaining his backing for Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate in 2008, he said: "The instinct I had was you had to have a more populist flavor That would be a way to incorporate populist discontent." He concluded, "It will be very different if this ends up being a parenthesis or this is an inflection point where it becomes the culmination, or end point. That's a very different story We're less doomed than what some people say as a party and a movement." ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | www.nybooks.com

    In April 2016, I attended a fortieth anniversary gala dinner in Washington, D.C., held by the Ethics and Public Policy Center at the St. Regis Hotel to honor House Speaker Paul Ryan. The master of ceremonies was William Kristol. Kristol noted that Donald Trump, who won the New York Republican primary that night to the dismay of the attendees who audibly groaned at the news, had described him as "dopey," the editor of a "slightly failing magazine," and "very embarrassed to even walk down the street" thanks to his refusal to endorse Trump. Kristol said, "It's been a tough two or three months of rehabilitation for me." After the audience stopped laughing, Kristol concluded: "This should be a Trump-free evening so that's enough Trump."

    It hasn't worked out that way. Instead, Kristol watched helplessly as Trump denounced the Iraq War as a fraud and trumpeted an America First doctrine that repudiated the neocon crusading foreign policy doctrine. This past Friday, the saga of the neocons took a fresh and unexpected turn with the demise of The Weekly Standard . Launched as a "redoubt of conservatism" by Kristol, Fred Barnes, and John Podhoretz, with the backing of the Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, the Standard , The New Yorker noted in May 1995 , "will become the nation's only weekly journal of conservative opinion yet it will rely for editorial inspiration on a liberal model: The New Republic . Just as Herbert Croly began The New Republic , in 1914, to conduct the intellectual debate at the climax of the Progressive Era, The Standard appears at the dawn of a conservative one."

    That was then. Now Colorado billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, who bought the magazine from Murdoch in 2007, has decided to pull the plug, in part over the brickbats the Standard lobbed at Trump. If so, his move has pleased the president. On Saturday, Trump tweeted : "The pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard, run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol (who, like many others, never had a clue), is flat broke and out of business. Too bad. May it rest in peace!"

    Even as Trump gloats over Anschutz's move, however, a chorus of neocons is indicting Anschutz for willfully ending a golden age of journalism. Alfred Kazin observed in A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment , "Jews on the American scene. The neoconservatives have made it right with the boss their grandfathers used to picket." But New York Times columnist David Brooks echoed Commentary editor John Podhoretz in angrily accusing Anschutz of, in effect, committing murder and behaving like a "run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire," On Monday, Podhoretz went on to deem Representative Steve King a "disgusting liar and a stain on American public life" for assenting with Trump's claims about the Standard . Meanwhile, Max Boot, the author of The Corrosion of Conservatism , wrote in The Washington Post , "I devoutly hope a new Standard will arise to lead the Republican Party out of the moral and political oblivion to which the president is consigning it."

    It's an unlikely prospect. The most provocative and inventive writing on the right about Trump doesn't come from the neocons -- who are essentially Johnny-come-latelies in their criticisms of the GOP -- but from publications such as The American Conservative , American Affairs, or even National Review . In The American Conservative , Daniel Larison pillories the Trump administration for its recklessly high military budget -- something no neocon would aver -- and for repudiating the Iran nuclear deal, while William Ruger deems neocon historian Robert Kagan's latest book, The Jungle Grows Back , a recipe for "forever war."

    At the same time, in The American Conservative 's latest issue , the historian Robert W. Merry declares that Trump will be a one-term president, partly because his foreign policy stands repudiate his campaign promises. His point is well-taken. It's ironic that the Standard has imploded at the very moment when the neocons' nemesis, Trump, has stolen their lunch money with an aggressively militarist foreign policy that is pro-Israel, hostile to Iran and China, and disdainful of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and other international institutions. The only thing missing from the Trump program is the patina of democracy promotion. Perhaps the neocons have become a victim of their own success; in Merry's words:

    Trump himself has already reversed his campaign stance regarding the country's foreign policy, having installed Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and John Bolton as national security adviser -- men who personify the prevailing establishment outlook of hegemonic liberalism. Thus, because of Trump's political and leadership shortcomings, Trump voters will see their hopes of a new direction for America trampled and thwarted.

    Julius Krein, the editor of American Affairs , disavowed his support for Trump after the Charlottesville demonstrations in The New York Times , but his journal continues to publish lengthy essays taking aim at neoliberal economic doctrines and includes well-known authors on the left such as John B. Judis . And in National Review , Michael Brendan Dougherty is attempting to formulate a populist approach toward workers and education. In a December 17 cover story , he politely acknowledges that the "Trump presidency is not what conservatives would have designed for themselves" but suggests "conservatives should allow themselves to see that America's great middle class was the vessel for its previous electoral victories and the preservation of the American order."

    No such glasnost ever took place in the pages of the Standard whose reputation has become indelibly wedded to its cheerleading for the calamitous 2003 Iraq War. The neocons had confused the Soviet Union's forfeiting of the cold war with American triumphalism, seizing upon its peaceful conclusion to search for new monsters to destroy abroad, whenever and wherever they could. The Standard itself constantly published taradiddles about the Middle East and Islam. Stephen F. Hayes, its last editor, lauded for his "integrity and courage" in the Trump era by David Brooks, wrote a phantasmagoric book called The Connection: How al Qaeda's Connection With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America , not to mention reverential biographies of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz.

    For his part, Kristol co-wrote a book with Lawrence F. Kaplan called The War Over Iraq that supported a worldwide crusade for democracy. Far from spreading democracy, the Iraq War ended up not only spreading chaos in the Middle East, but also enabling the rise of Trump. As Carlos Lozada recently observed in The Washington Post , "The Never Trumpers hold everyone culpable for the appeal of Trumpism except, in any worthwhile way, themselves."

    Indeed, it would be difficult to point to any significant essays that the Standard has published in recent years. Many of the more prominent neocons who originally wrote for it have moved on to more mainstream outlets. The Washington Post , whose editorial page championed the Iraq War, has become a kind of bulletin board for Never Trumpers, including Max Boot, a regular on CNN and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Jennifer Rubin, a former contributor to Human Events , Commentary , and the Standard . Both Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens decamped from The Wall Street Journal for higher profile jobs at The New York Times . Robert Kagan has long since left the Standard and the Project for the New American Century behind to become a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. David Frum, who regularly wrote for the Standard and was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a staff writer at The Atlantic .

    For most neocons, however, journalism has never been more than a Leninist means to an end -- to form an intellectual vanguard. For it is political influence that the neocons crave. In his memoir, Boot proudly recounts that he served as an adviser to Senator Marco Rubio as well as to Mitt Romney during his run for the presidency in 2012. Kristol worked to destroy the 1993 Clinton Healthcare bill and sought to mold first Dan Quayle, then Sarah Palin, into his political homunculi. During the 2016 primary, he desperately cast about for a viable candidate to oppose Donald Trump and incurred much ridicule when he floated the name of David French, a writer for the National Review .

    Kristol, Podhoretz, Boot, and others belong to a second generation of neocons that never drifted away from the Democrats toward the Republican Party. Instead, they were right from the beginning. While some have begun to duplicate the odyssey in reverse that neocon elder Norman Podhoretz chronicled in memoirs such as Breaking Ranks and Ex-Friends , many seem simply politically adrift, like Russian exiles stranded in Paris after the Bolshevik revolution pining for the ancien régime .

    A conference attended by about a hundred people last week at the Niskanen Center , a small think tank located near Capitol Hill, offered a timely reminder of their losses. The conference was not, as one might have expected in the past, held at the American Enterprise Institute, whose senior vice president, Danielle Pletka, has suggested that fears of climate change may be overblown, or the Heritage Foundation. Rather, it is the Niskanen Center that has become the unofficial headquarters of what amounts to a rebel alliance of Democrats and Republicans united against Trump. Over the past year, they have met on Tuesday mornings for off-the-record events under the auspices of a group called the Meeting of the Concerned, whose members include George Conway, the husband of Kellyanne, and David Frum. In November, the group released a formal statement in support of Special Counsel Robert Mueller that was signed by Mickey Edwards, the former chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, and Kristol, among others.

    The conference, which opened with moderate Republican Maryland Governor Larry Hogan reminding the attendees that his father, a congressman, had helped kickstart the impeachment hearings against Richard M. Nixon, was titled "Starting Over: the Center-Right After Trump." But Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Mona Charen, the author of a book about liberals during the cold war titled Useful Idiots , and Peter Wehner, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, grappled uneasily with the historical legacy of the GOP and its implications for Trump's rise.

    The center's president, Jerry Taylor, suggested, "There was a time not that long ago when you all had the commanding heights of the world of conservative public intellectuals. Today, that's not the case. You've have been displaced." Rubin was incredulous. "Displaced, displaced!" she expostulated. Then she went on to blame the GOP. "Intellectuals don't do well in a nativist, know-nothing party," said Rubin. "The party is not going to accept public intellectuals in the way it did."

    For his part, Kristol refused to concede that the GOP was irredeemably tainted by Trump. He acknowledged, "there are recessive genes in the GOP. They were always there and a lot of us didn't want to look too closely. There was a shining moment when the Bill Buckley conservatives came together with the neoconservatives and with Ronald Reagan," but "that went away quickly." Explaining his backing for Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate in 2008, he said: "The instinct I had was you had to have a more populist flavor That would be a way to incorporate populist discontent." He concluded, "It will be very different if this ends up being a parenthesis or this is an inflection point where it becomes the culmination, or end point. That's a very different story We're less doomed than what some people say as a party and a movement."

    So far, though, his efforts at regime change in Washington have proven as illusory as his dreams of transforming Iraq into a democracy overnight.

    December 18, 2018, 7:00 am

    [Feb 05, 2019] Tucker Carlson Dismantles Pro-War Stooge

    Notable quotes:
    "... Tucker is an interesting thinker who doesn't tow a party line. We need more people like Jimmy and Tucker in the news. This is easily the 10th video of Jimmy taking Tucker's side ..."
    Feb 05, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    j g , 1 month ago

    I don't agree with Jimmy Dore on much, but he and Tucker are 100% right about Syria. There is a segment of the left and right that aren't that far apart, but we keep getting manipulated to hate each other.

    The Fatty McGee , 1 month ago

    My boy is a marine. He was deployed to Syria and even he said that the troops never got a clear reason for being there

    grwizy , 1 month ago

    Creating terrorists means more money for military industrial complex.

    John Donne Show , 1 month ago

    MSM is cancer Propagandist on the Payroll of the Ruling Class 1% "The Fed."

    Ben Briggs , 1 month ago

    Jimmy, Just admit that you like and agree with Tucker. Every Tucker video has the premise of, "I disagree with 99% of what Tucker says" or "If Tucker sees this then everyone should see it." Tucker is an interesting thinker who doesn't tow a party line. We need more people like Jimmy and Tucker in the news. This is easily the 10th video of Jimmy taking Tucker's side .

    clamp down , 1 month ago

    come on jimmy acknowledge that tucker is doing a GREAT job, moderate conservative or not

    dlhoyes , 1 month ago

    Sounds like some liberals are waking up to what the conservatives have been saying for decades. We have to work together for freedoms sake.

    TBG_ Dies_1st , 1 month ago

    Tucker Carlson is the only one I deem worthy of my attention on Fox News. I guarantee it, I stand by that, that's a brand name.

    mads max , 1 month ago

    Why are we there? To destabilize and baulkanize the remaining Middle East Who are we there for? For the greater 1srae1 project. Who is isis? Massads people. What is our objective? Oil pipelines for 1srae1. Who are we going after next? Iran

    dlhoyes , 1 month ago

    Sounds like some liberals are waking up to what the conservatives have been saying for decades. We have to work together for freedoms sake.

    TBG_ Dies_1st , 1 month ago

    Tucker Carlson is the only one I deem worthy of my attention on Fox News. I guarantee it, I stand by that, that's a brand name.

    mads max , 1 month ago

    Why are we there? To destabilize and baulkanize the remaining Middle East Who are we there for? For the greater 1srae1 project. Who is isis? Massads people. What is our objective? Oil pipelines for 1srae1. Who are we going after next? Iran

    Guardiano , 1 month ago

    Jimmy Dore: the only leftist journalist with any integrity. I legitimately believe that while he's wrong all the time (to my far-right view), he's not lying.

    Rio Rin , 1 month ago

    Most important part in my opinion is comment about christians celebrating Christmass in Damascus. They wouldn't celebrate under Al Nusra or Isis or other wahabi supported fractions, but they are celebrating under Assad. By the way US government is in some way protecting HTS in Idlib wich is rebranded Al Nusra, Syrian ofshoot of Al Kaida so Assad army is not attacking them.

    oleeb , 1 month ago

    Pro war people don't just want to be there for the sake of it. They want to have US forces on the ground there for a whole host of reason all related to maintaining US hegemony wherever they can. We have forces deployed throughout the middle east because we want to be the primary hegemon in the middle east. Our primacy is threatened by no one nation but by a coalition of anti US nations particularly Iran, Syria and Syria's longstanding alliance with Russia.

    Loves Chocolate , 1 month ago (edited)

    I find it a shame that the western nations are vilifying Russia as Putin hates the globalists and is fighting against the terrorists. It appears that Russia should be our allies rather than Isra Hell and the Saudi regime. Putin was invited by Assad to help him rid his country of the terrorists but the US weren't asked and just illegally invaded. Out of interest why does the US support Isra hell when it has over 300 nukes but it thinks Iran is a problem? Isn't it more that Iran doesn't have a central (Rothschild) bank? Just like North Korea, Cuba and now, Russia due to paying them off and ridding his country of the Rotschilds! They don't own Russia like they do the US. Edited as I forgot to say I love Tucker and his common sense.

    Jay Bui , 1 month ago (edited)

    The best part by far of this was when Jimmy yelled, we are in these countries ILLEGALLY!! Jimmy I love you bc you are unbiased but for you to complain we are somewhere illegally is rich considering how much you defended ILLEGAL immigration in America. Must have been a freudian slip.

    Jay Bui , 1 month ago (edited)

    The best part by far of this was when Jimmy yelled, we are in these countries ILLEGALLY!! Jimmy I love you bc you are unbiased but for you to complain we are somewhere illegally is rich considering how much you defended ILLEGAL immigration in America. Must have been a freudian slip.

    Reckless Abandon , 1 month ago (edited)

    This guy can't admit that the Obama Administration started the Syrian civil war and created ISIS. What he really wants is to PROTECT ISIS because after Syria they were trained to attack Russia in the Caucasus. Russia is sensibly wiping out ISIS in Syria so they don't have to fight them in Chechnya. The Democrats and the neocons created Russiagate to prevent Trump from pulling out two years ago, now Trump doesn't care, because they will invent shit about him regardless.

    Sergei , 1 month ago

    Obama and Bush created ISIS and Russians, SAA, Iranians and Hezbollah destroyed ISIS. The US needs to GTFO of all countries it occupied.

    F M , 1 month ago (edited)

    You're missing a major point -- I S R A E L These neocon and establishment democrats have tightened ass cheeks because Trump's decision bypasses these Zionists' fervent wishes of keeping the US there in a proxy war as Israel's protectors.

    Reactionary Hermit , 1 month ago (edited)

    Tucker is slowly but surely becoming increasingly sympathetic towards the third position.He's the only figure on the MSM who thinks critically and asks uncomfortable questions. I wonder when the Zionists over at Fox News will pull the plug on him? You should have Tucker on if it's at all possible. He is actually aligned with the left somewhat on economic issues.

    blaze 2017 , 1 month ago

    Dont worry Lindsey Graham pranced in and convinced Trump to let us bleed and be stripped of our wealth.

    nh inpg , 1 month ago

    "Former Obama Campaign Adviser David Tafuri" -- Pretty much tells you all you need to know, right?

    [Feb 05, 2019] If only Trump invades Venezuella neocons like Max Book will be with him in one headbeat

    Feb 05, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    derrida derider 01.27.19 at 11:21 pm 21

    Glen has it right. Trump is nasty and ignorant and a stunningly incompetent President (as he was an incompetent businessman) but his very disdain for high-falutin' principle is what makes him, in foreign policy, an old-fashioned Republican isolationist. And the imperialists in the GOP cannot stomach that, though they're happy to stomach his general nastiness and ignorance.

    [Feb 05, 2019] The Problem of Max Boot by Corey Robin

    Notable quotes:
    "... National Review ..."
    "... The Conscience of a Conservative ..."
    Feb 05, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    January 25, 2019 I've been thinking about political converts for a long time . At The New Yorker , I take up the problem of Max Boot, who probably needs no introduction, and Derek Black, who was a leading white supremacist and then renounced it all.

    Here's a taste:

    Max Boot, a longtime conservative who recently broke with the right over the nomination and election of Donald Trump , registered as a Republican in 1988. At the time, Boot writes in " The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right ," he wanted to join the "party of ideas." A movement of highbrows, conservatism was the work of the "learned, worldly, elitist, and eccentric lot" of writers at National Review , "far removed from the simple-minded, cracker-barrel populists who have taken control of the conservative movement today." It was a movement, Boot explains at the outset, "inspired by Barry Goldwater's canonical text from 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative . I believed in that movement, and served it my whole life."

    A hundred and seventy-five pages later, Boot inadvertently lets slip that reading Goldwater's "actual words" was something he hadn't done until after Trump's election. Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book he never read.

    But it turns out that the problem of Boot and Black goes much deeper than what books were or weren't read. If you compare the conversions from left to right -- think Arthur Koestler, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and so on -- with those from right to left, you find something interesting.
    Curiously, the movement from right to left has never played an equivalent role in modern politics. Not only are there fewer converts in that direction, but those conversions haven't plowed as fertile a field as their counterparts have.
    Why is that? Find out here .

    DocAmazing 01.25.19 at 8:37 pm (no link)

    As your piece alludes to but does not say outright, Boot was a right-wing intellectual because he said he was a right-wing intellectual. He celebrated, but hadn't actually read , Goldwater and Buckley; his grasp of his other icons was equally weak. I remember reading his stuff in UC Berkeley's The Daily Californian back in the middle 1980s and getting the impression that Boot was another dope-with-a-thesaurus like George F. Will, with added militarist bloodthirst.

    The bar for being a right-wing intellectual has traditionally been low, and in the present day we see examples like Jonah Goldberg and Megan McArdle putting out high school current-events assignments and being lauded as original thinkers. It's probably a reflection of the preferences of the people who own the presses.

    BruceJ 01.25.19 at 9:26 pm (no link)
    Personally, I rather doubt Boot is truly repenting, but is rather merely taking advantage of the zeitgeist.

    "Anti-Trump Repentant Right" sells books, gets him on teevee, etc. The proof of the pudding will be what he does when the neocons are ascendant again.

    The likes of Michael Gerson and David Frum sliding from the Bush II White House to "George Boosh?? Never heard of him!" critics of the right always seemed awfully convenient for their post-WH careers.

    As DocAmazing says, it's a reflection of the people who own the presses, of which there has always been an orders of magnitude greater number, prominence and paychecks on the right rather than the left.

    The vast ( hugely interconnected, almost incestuously so) network of RW "Think Tanks" and publishing houses funded by wealthy oligarchs pretty much guarantees a safe haven for Left->Right apostates.

    There really isn't such a network for the reverse. The L->R crownd don't have to spend the long years in the wilderness atoning for their sins, like the R->L side does. (And given the damage the Right has done over recent decades, there is much atonement needed )

    b9n10nt 01.25.19 at 11:25 pm (no link)
    Here's the lesson I'd expect from Corey: reactionaries need to continually contrive new rationalizations for reaction, and might thus be inspired by Leftist rhetoric for the task. The Left does not need to similarly borrow from the Right because there's no need to hide its pursuit of liberty, equality, and solidarity before a popular audience. Hence, left –> right converts are useful to the right in ways that right–>left converts are not. & then you've got your empirical evidence to support the theory.

    The emphasis, however, was on experience: the right needs to experience the vitality of revolution to understand it and inform counter-revolution. This seems like a weaker explanation, but perhaps the stronger argument would have seemed too shrill for the New Yorker?

    Mainmata 01.26.19 at 2:34 am (no link)
    This is a really good article (as usual). I think the essential core is that Boot misunderstood that conservatives and the GOP, in particular, were the party of ideas. Buckley summarized it best when he stated that the role of conservatives was to stand astride the course of history and stay "stop". The GOP has never been the party of ideas or at least not any ideas that are all rational or workable. They claimed to be about "small government" in an economy dominated by large multinational corporations and cartels. The GOP has always been a fraud, philosophically.'

    Nowadays, they're mainly about racism, misogyny and aggressive foreign policy.

    Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break compared with our home grown rightwingers.

    abd 01.26.19 at 4:35 am (no link)
    Norman Finkelstein's essay on the serial chameleon, Hitchens has many useful insights:

    A sharp political break must, for one living a political life, be a wrenching emotional experience. The rejection of one's core political beliefs can't but entail a rejection of the person holding them: if the beliefs were wrong, then one's whole being was wrong. Repudiating one's comrades must also be a sorrowful burden. It is not by chance that "fraternity" is a prized value of the left: in the course of political struggle, one forges, if not always literally, then, at any rate, spiritually, blood bonds No doubt he imagines it is testament to the mettle of his conviction that past loyalties don't in the slightest constrain him; in fact, it's testament to the absence of any conviction at all.

    Bob Michaelson 01.26.19 at 2:45 pm (no link)
    "Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book he never read."
    When Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss was a guest on the Dick Cavett Show he pointed out that when Buckley was a student of Yale he would typically talk about books that he had never actually read. Indeed Buckley continued to do so for the rest of his life.
    abd 01.26.19 at 8:34 pm (no link)
    @3 re neocons, this quote of Boot from Corey Robin's article:

    "That my parents and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet Jews were finally able to leave was due largely to neoconservative foreign policy," Boot writes. "In later life I would support giving moral concerns a prominent place in US foreign policy, a stance that has been associated with neoconservatism."

    reminded me of an answer that E.L. Doctorow gave to following question from Bill Moyers in 1988:

    How do you explain that so many intellectuals today are in service to orthodoxy?

    The third element is very interesting, and I think it's been under-reported–and that is the immense influence of the émigré, Eastern European intellectuals who've come over here in the past fifteen or twenty years. Many of them are quite brilliant writers and professors of different disciplines. They have tended to see American life in terms of their own background and suffering, which has been considerable, as people in exile from regimes that have done terrible things to them and their families. They come of the terrible European legacy of monarchism and the reaction to it. So every attempt we make to legislate some advance in our American society, some social enlightenment, they see as a dangerous left-wing weakness leading toward totalitarianism. They've had enormous influence in the American intellectual community. They tend to see things as either/or and feel that you must be rigidly against any idea of improvement because the idea of perfection is what kills society and creates totalitarianism. The Utopian ideal leads to revolution. They seem to forget we had our revolution two hundred years ago. Our history is not theirs.

    We've always gone out into the barn of the Constitution and tinkered. That's our very pragmatic history. I don't think these people understand that. So any time we tune something up and fix something and make it more just, make it work a little better, they become alarmed.

    Glen Tomkins 01.27.19 at 3:24 pm ( 20 )
    I don't know.

    I think the most reasonable account of Boot's conversion is that he hasn't converted. He's profoundly angry at Trump because Trump, to the everlasting shame of our side, is the first political figure in generations to dare to question US imperialism, and US imperialism is what Boot is really about. He's mostly a military enthusiast. Were Trump to gin up a war with Venezuela and/or Iran, Boot would be back on his side in a heartbeat. Blood and Iron!

    abd 01.26.19 at 8:49 am (no link)
    @13, You may have a point there, given the gullibility of folks in these parts. Finkelstein, almost admiringly, noted the case of "the Polish émigré hoaxer, Jerzy Kosinski, who, shrewdly siz[ed] up intellectual culture in America" and plied his rusty wares on the university lecture with brio until his past caught up with him (many other European émigrés, e.g. Man Ray, Bruno Bettelheim, etc. also come to mind; google for the sordid details).

    Heck, the moral beacon whom Corey Robin never tires of citing, Hannah Arendt, was also a habitual "lifter" of material from others laboring in the archives, not to mention the free ride , intellectually speaking, she got because of "the widespread belief that philosophical murkiness signals philosophical profundity."

    The direction in which the intellectual impostures listed by Pankaj Mishra below are "adjusting" to the prevailing winds is something to be expected from their ilk:

    Many journalists have been scrambling, more feverishly since Trump's apotheosis, to account for the stunningly extensive experience of fear and humiliation across racial and gender divisions; some have tried to reinvent themselves in heroic resistance to Trump and authoritarian 'populism'. David Frum, geometer under George W. Bush of an intercontinental 'axis of evil', now locates evil in the White House. Max Boot, self-declared 'neo-imperialist' and exponent of 'savage wars', recently claimed to have become aware of his 'white privilege'. Ignatieff, advocate of empire-lite and torture-lite, is presently embattled on behalf of the open society in Mitteleuropa. Goldberg, previously known as stenographer to Netanyahu, is now Coates's diligent promoter.

    Lee A. Arnold 01.26.19 at 1:15 pm ( 15 )
    DocAmazing #1: "The bar for being a right-wing intellectual has traditionally been low "

    Excepting for the brilliance of Corey Robin and a few others, it is no lower than the bar on the left, but I think you correctly point to the asymmetry in the general acceptance of the two piles of bosh that are usually produced. But going beyond BruceJ's fingering (at #3) of the presses and thinktanks for embracing the right bosh, there is a cause in the basic asymmetry of their political preferences, because the right justifies and praises the system, while the left does not. This makes it easier for the productions of the right to slide by, without critical inspection by the large mass of people who just want to get on with their lives.

    More complicated still: in our era the left (or most of it) doesn't want to tear down the system; it would prefer a mixed economy with more redistribution than we have at present, but not the destruction of private capitalism. This more nuanced preference can only explain itself by wading into the deeper ends of economic explanation, while it's still much easier for the moneyed right to demonize the left using the psychological critique of mere laziness or lack of initiative. This leaves the left with a more complex rhetorical problem in dealing with voter preferences than the right has, which, again, is another asymmetry.

    I think the winds are not merely shifting, but we are approaching a different and less stable era. The industrial economy is so successful that its winner-take-all mechanics is increasing inequality. In the US, the intellectual disaster of the right fabricated its bad policy of tax cuts and "smaller" government under Reagan, and the contradictions Reagan engineered took 30 years to crack up the Republican Party until a grifter named Trump could drive a plough through it. And he of course has come a cropper. At the same juncture, the presses and thinktanks have fallen in influence due to the internet where everyone is drowned out regardless of the viability of their ideas. In such a new, unstable, untested environment perhaps the best approach is the one taken by Warren, AOC, etc. -- hammer on a few big ideas with broad appeal.

    [Feb 05, 2019] On Max Boot conversion to Neoliberal Democrats

    Notable quotes:
    "... The GOP has always been a fraud, philosophically.' ..."
    "... Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break compared with our home grown rightwingers. ..."
    "... Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn't know about Boot, namely, that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre community. Well, that explains so much, really: you'd be hard-pressed to find a more reactionary bloc in all of American politics. ..."
    Feb 05, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    Dr. Hilarius 01.25.19 at 11:31 pm (no link)

    Anyone who has spent time with Pentecostal/Evangelical Christians is familiar with public confessions of pre-Salvation sin. The greater the sinning, the more impressive and prized the conversion. If the sinner was a notable atheist, Satanist, evolutionist or communist, the story of his or her conversion can become a lucrative career on the church lecture circuit. (Pity the poor convert trying to attract attention with nothing more than a battle with youthful lust.)
    Mainmata 01.26.19 at 2:34 am (no link)
    This is a really good article (as usual). I think the essential core is that Boot misunderstood that conservatives and the GOP, in particular, were the party of ideas. Buckley summarized it best when he stated that the role of conservatives was to stand astride the course of history and stay "stop". The GOP has never been the party of ideas or at least not any ideas that are all rational or workable. They claimed to be about "small government" in an economy dominated by large multinational corporations and cartels. The GOP has always been a fraud, philosophically.' Nowadays, they're mainly about racism, misogyny and aggressive foreign policy.

    Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break compared with our home grown rightwingers.

    abd 01.26.19 at 4:35 am (no link)
    Norman Finkelstein's essay on the serial chameleon, Hitchens has many useful insights:

    A sharp political break must, for one living a political life, be a wrenching emotional experience. The rejection of one's core political beliefs can't but entail a rejection of the person holding them: if the beliefs were wrong, then one's whole being was wrong. Repudiating one's comrades must also be a sorrowful burden. It is not by chance that "fraternity" is a prized value of the left: in the course of political struggle, one forges, if not always literally, then, at any rate, spiritually, blood bonds No doubt he imagines it is testament to the mettle of his conviction that past loyalties don't in the slightest constrain him; in fact, it's testament to the absence of any conviction at all.

    Bob Michaelson 01.26.19 at 2:45 pm (no link)
    "Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book he never read."
    When Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss was a guest on the Dick Cavett Show he pointed out that when Buckley was a student of Yale he would typically talk about books that he had never actually read. Indeed Buckley continued to do so for the rest of his life.
    Jerry Vinokurov 01.28.19 at 2:22 pm (no link)
    Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn't know about Boot, namely, that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre community. Well, that explains so much, really: you'd be hard-pressed to find a more reactionary bloc in all of American politics. It's "funny" because many of them are plainly anti-religious but they make (wittingly or un-) common cause with evangelicals because they're virulently opposed to the very concept of a public good or an active state attempting to mitigate social ills. I need to finish the article before having further reactions, but this was a revelation to me.
    marcel proust 01.28.19 at 5:06 pm ( 24 )
    Jerry Vinokurov@ 23 : A small potatoes objection/question. Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community, including US born descendants of emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of individuals make up a more reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?
    Jerry Vinokurov 01.29.19 at 1:22 am ( 25 )

    Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community, including US born descendants of emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of individuals make up a more reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?

    It's hard for me to say because I don't really have much exposure this culture's Cuban counterparts. My impression with regard to a lot of the Cuban emigres is that they're substantially more socially conservative than those who came from the former USSR. Not that the latter group is any kind of bastion of wokeness, but for them most of the culture war stuff isn't a huge motivator. I can't think of anyone from this group who, for example, ever stated that abortion or opposition to gay marriage was the main motivator for any kind of vote or other political activity.

    They may not care much for it and I'm sure being e.g. LGBT in this community is no picnic, but it's not a driver for them that, say, anti-tax mania is. I can't possibly count how many conversations I've had with relatives complaining about this or that "onerous" regulation or tax or whatever that they have to pay and listen to the same "why are they wasting our money" and "I don't want to pay for this" tirade.

    Needless to say the vast majority of them, like most American in general, have only the foggiest notion of how American governments (federal, state, local, etc.) operate, but that doesn't stop them from hating it and knowing deep in their heart that whatever it's doing, it's doing it wrong.

    [Feb 05, 2019] When Conspiracy Is The Only Explanation For Failed Neo-Liberal Dreams by William S. Smith

    Muller investigation is at least 50% about the masking cracks in neoliberal facade with Russia interference smoke screen (and, especially Hillary fiasco as War Party candidate) , as it is about deposing of Trump. It also puts pressure of Trump to behave as War Party expect him, or...
    Looks like the "United War Party" (which encompass most Republicans and Democrats) felt the threat to the money flows and acted accordingly. Add to this interest of Deep State (especially CIA) are completely opposite to the end of foreign wars that Trump professed.
    Notable quotes:
    "... What causes otherwise intelligent people to put their faith in conspiracy theories? A common explanation on the Right is that these conspiracies are cynically concocted to overthrow the Trump presidency. Another explanation points to declining standards of journalism, i.e., reporters being too incompetent to refute groundless claims. Both reasons have merit yet both fail to explain the peculiar estrangement from reality that a belief in baseless conspiracies represents. ..."
    "... When the luminescence of France began to fade and the revolutionary army began to falter, the Jacobins felt there could only be one explanation: conspiracy. Only a deep-seated plot could be preventing France the Savior from vanquishing retrograde monarchs. From the beginning, the virtuous Jacobins saw themselves as fighting a conspiracy against the rights of humanity. Hence the Reign of Terror, with the guillotine deployed against priests and nobles who were seen as forming the core opposition to a better world. ..."
    "... Idealism and conspiracy theories are, it seems, opposite sides of the same coin. When the dream fails to materialize, its validity is not questioned; instead the search to find those who connived against it begins. ..."
    "... Fukuyama's Hegelianism was both warmed over and unmoored from reality. And yet the foreign policy establishment swooned over him. The Bush 43 administration fell so hard for him that they tried to give history a little push by invading Iraq. ..."
    "... Or consider the globalist dreaming of the elites that Samuel P. Huntington labeled "Davos men." In the Davos dream, culture, history, and religion are archaic relics of a world fading away. National borders are disappearing, and a new global order is emerging, led by secular multilateral institutions staffed by an all-knowing "cosmopolitan" elite ..."
    "... With cultures clashing, nationalism on the march, and religious wars raging, the Davos men continue to worship their dream from the safety of their Gulfstream jets. ..."
    "... And to the Davos men, only a conspiracy can explain the election of Donald Trump. How else could such a regressive development have occurred when history is cascading toward open borders, democracy, and international institutions? How could an American president question the value of NATO and other alliances whose glorious mission is to midwife the end of history by democratizing everything from Lisbon to the Urals? ..."
    "... But Trump and Putin will not be permitted to conspire against the dream. Their conspiracy must be destroyed, even at the risk of nuclear war. Special counsels must be created, eavesdropping must be expanded, foreign spies must be employed, and jackbooted agents must break down every door linked to this insidious conspiracy. The ruling elites are prepared to tear up the Constitution itself to save humanity from this diabolical cabal. ..."
    "... The resilience of the Russia conspiracy in the minds of our establishment should remind us that the primary obstacle to a sensible foreign policy is our ideologized culture, in which the Western outlook of common sense has been eroded by a Romantic utopian idealism. When people within reach of massive military power are this estranged from reality, the situation can only be described as frightening. ..."
    "... With you on "Davos Man" (Love that expression!) and the Trump conspiracy idiocy, though! Two thumbs up! ..."
    "... You are making this much too complicated. The cultural stuff had some importance, but much more fundamentally Trump threatened the money/power game of the War Party. They have just about won anyway, because Trump is stupid. So, maybe they will just let Russia-gate fade out. ..."
    "... Neolibs and neocons are . Dreamers. GIGO. Whoever wrote the headline and lede made sense, the author might want to match that. The text as is is a useful exhibit for: "to see the world how they wish it to be rather than how it is." Jacobins at Davos? Idealists with lots of loot? ..."
    "... At one time, any occurrence that the establishment of the day didn't like was automatically blamed on Jews. No evidence necessary. Because Jews. If you questioned the conspiracy theory, you were instantly accused of being in league with "them". Today's establishment does the same, except they substitute "Russia" for "Jews". Anything they don't like is automatically blamed on Russia. No evidence necessary. Because Russia. Question the conspiracy theory and get accused of being a "Russian troll". ..."
    "... If only HRC and her friends were in the White House all these current conspiracies and Mueller investigation wouldn't be an issue. Be the eighth wonder of the world, if Trump survives the deep state. ..."
    "... Unfortunately, this article overreaches. I agree that Russiagate is an excuse that liberals embrace to excuse the disastrous failures of Clinton and the Democratic Party, but you don't need to connect this with some grand theorizing about the history of conspiracy theories. People simply don't want to admit their side did anything wrong. ..."
    "... And as SteveK9 points out, it's really about how the mainstream War Party wants to keep Trump in line. Trump is a loose cannon. They want a steady reliable warmonger. ..."
    "... Call me a child, then, but wisdom often comes from the mouth of babes. There is no evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Read The phoney indictment of the Internet Research Institute. It admits it was a commercial enterprise. It was nothing but a commercial click bait operation. Similarly, the DNC was not hacked, the data was downloaded to a USB, probably by a disaffected Sanders supporter, possibly Seth Rich. Also, Germany, Macedonia, the Netherlands have investigated alleged Russian interference in their elections, and found none. ..."
    Feb 05, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    The Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald recently compiled a list of the top 10 "most embarrassing media failures on the Trump-Russia story." All of them exhibit a common theme: Russian conspiracies are undermining American interests everywhere. Greenwald's piece was followed by a bizarre New York Times story from January 16 with the headline: "Trump and Putin: Five Meetings Infused With Mystery." The story implied something sinister in undisclosed conversations between the two leaders while offering no evidence whatsoever.

    What causes otherwise intelligent people to put their faith in conspiracy theories? A common explanation on the Right is that these conspiracies are cynically concocted to overthrow the Trump presidency. Another explanation points to declining standards of journalism, i.e., reporters being too incompetent to refute groundless claims. Both reasons have merit yet both fail to explain the peculiar estrangement from reality that a belief in baseless conspiracies represents.

    In the early stages of the French Revolution, the Jacobins imagined that the beacon of a democratic France would shine across the world and tyrannical kings would topple before its luminescence. The Jacobin imagination was polluted by utopian idealism, the ideology that causes people to see the world how they wish it to be rather than how it is.

    When the luminescence of France began to fade and the revolutionary army began to falter, the Jacobins felt there could only be one explanation: conspiracy. Only a deep-seated plot could be preventing France the Savior from vanquishing retrograde monarchs. From the beginning, the virtuous Jacobins saw themselves as fighting a conspiracy against the rights of humanity. Hence the Reign of Terror, with the guillotine deployed against priests and nobles who were seen as forming the core opposition to a better world.

    Idealism and conspiracy theories are, it seems, opposite sides of the same coin. When the dream fails to materialize, its validity is not questioned; instead the search to find those who connived against it begins.

    Like the Jacobins, the foreign policy establishment in the United States has for decades hitched its wagons to idealistic dreaming. The Romantic ideas of Hegel and Rousseau permeate their thinking. Consider the establishment's obsequious reaction to Francis Fukuyama's " end of history " thesis. Fukuyama presented himself as the all-seeing gnostic who had divined the direction of all human history. One does not need the acumen of an Aristotle to know that this was far from an original thesis. Fukuyama's Hegelianism was both warmed over and unmoored from reality. And yet the foreign policy establishment swooned over him. The Bush 43 administration fell so hard for him that they tried to give history a little push by invading Iraq.

    Or consider the globalist dreaming of the elites that Samuel P. Huntington labeled "Davos men." In the Davos dream, culture, history, and religion are archaic relics of a world fading away. National borders are disappearing, and a new global order is emerging, led by secular multilateral institutions staffed by an all-knowing "cosmopolitan" elite .

    The reality of a borderless world is global migration that threatens to extinguish much of Western civilization in a generation or two. With cultures clashing, nationalism on the march, and religious wars raging, the Davos men continue to worship their dream from the safety of their Gulfstream jets.

    Venezuela Presents an Opportunity for Peace With Russia Russia Sure Behaves Strangely for a Country Bent on Conquest

    And to the Davos men, only a conspiracy can explain the election of Donald Trump. How else could such a regressive development have occurred when history is cascading toward open borders, democracy, and international institutions? How could an American president question the value of NATO and other alliances whose glorious mission is to midwife the end of history by democratizing everything from Lisbon to the Urals?

    For those in a dream world, the only possible explanation for Trump is a conspiracy. His presidency was hatched by Vladimir Putin, the world leader with the strongest reasons for slowing the progressive march of history. Trump won the election because Putin has the powers of a Rasputin. He can thwart history by crossing his eyes, pulling secret levers, and deploying hackers.

    But Trump and Putin will not be permitted to conspire against the dream. Their conspiracy must be destroyed, even at the risk of nuclear war. Special counsels must be created, eavesdropping must be expanded, foreign spies must be employed, and jackbooted agents must break down every door linked to this insidious conspiracy. The ruling elites are prepared to tear up the Constitution itself to save humanity from this diabolical cabal.

    The resilience of the Russia conspiracy in the minds of our establishment should remind us that the primary obstacle to a sensible foreign policy is our ideologized culture, in which the Western outlook of common sense has been eroded by a Romantic utopian idealism. When people within reach of massive military power are this estranged from reality, the situation can only be described as frightening.

    William S. Smith is research fellow at and managing director of the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at The Catholic University of America.

    cka2nd February 3, 2019 at 9:43 pm

    "In the early stages of the French Revolution, the Jacobins imagined that the beacon of a democratic France would shine across the world and tyrannical kings would topple before its luminescence. The Jacobin imagination was polluted by utopian idealism, the ideology that causes people to see the world how they wish it to be rather than how it is."

    And yet, idealism or not, republican ideals DID spread around the world and WERE taken up to oppose, undercut, reign in or overthrow monarchies from Latin America through the Middle East, and from Europe (e.g., the bourgeois members of the Duma singing "La Marseillaise" after the abdication of the Tsar) to Asia and Africa.

    "When the luminescence of France began to fade and the revolutionary army began to falter, the Jacobins felt there could only be one explanation: conspiracy. Only a deep-seated plot could be preventing France the Savior from vanquishing retrograde monarchs. From the beginning, the virtuous Jacobins saw themselves as fighting a conspiracy against the rights of humanity. Hence the Reign of Terror, with the guillotine deployed against priests and nobles who were seen as forming the core opposition to a better world."

    I don't doubt the pernicious influence of conspiracy theories, I really don't – I'm a Trotskyist, for Heaven's sake! – but the author might also acknowledge the reality of the threats that the Jacobins faced. The armies of the united crowned heads of Europe that had been sent against France, for instance. That the church and aristocracy WERE parts of the old order (official estates, remember?), some of whose members WERE actually fighting to restore the old regime and then drown, as they always drowned past peasant and popular rebellions, in blood.

    With you on "Davos Man" (Love that expression!) and the Trump conspiracy idiocy, though! Two thumbs up!

    SteveK9 , says: February 3, 2019 at 10:48 pm
    You are making this much too complicated. The cultural stuff had some importance, but much more fundamentally Trump threatened the money/power game of the War Party. They have just about won anyway, because Trump is stupid. So, maybe they will just let Russia-gate fade out.
    b. .. . ... ... . , says: February 4, 2019 at 9:51 am
    Neolibs and neocons are . Dreamers. GIGO. Whoever wrote the headline and lede made sense, the author might want to match that. The text as is is a useful exhibit for: "to see the world how they wish it to be rather than how it is." Jacobins at Davos? Idealists with lots of loot?
    Sid Finster , says: February 4, 2019 at 10:10 am
    At one time, any occurrence that the establishment of the day didn't like was automatically blamed on Jews. No evidence necessary. Because Jews. If you questioned the conspiracy theory, you were instantly accused of being in league with "them". Today's establishment does the same, except they substitute "Russia" for "Jews". Anything they don't like is automatically blamed on Russia. No evidence necessary. Because Russia. Question the conspiracy theory and get accused of being a "Russian troll".
    CLW , says: February 4, 2019 at 1:43 pm
    Are we supposed to take this seriously? Your entire "argument" against the so-called Russia Conspiracy is itself nothing more than a conspiracy theory: an overwrought, paranoid, absurd conspiracy theory involving The Establishment, Davos Elites, Neo Liberals, et al.

    There isn't enough publicly-disclosed evidence to support the claim that Russian interference tilted the 2016 election decisively in Trump's favor or that Trump has conspired with or been compromised by Russia. But only a child would believe that Russia didn't actively interfere in the election, or that various Trump associates didn't have inappropriate contacts and dealings with Russian entities, which they then lied about and continue to lie about.

    You can do better than this, TAC.

    fabian , says: February 4, 2019 at 2:20 pm
    SteveK, the military won but not because he is stupid. He just doesn't want to end up like JFK. Nor did Barrack by the way.
    , the , says: February 4, 2019 at 3:22 pm
    If only HRC and her friends were in the White House all these current conspiracies and Mueller investigation wouldn't be an issue. Be the eighth wonder of the world, if Trump survives the deep state.
    Sid Finster , says: February 4, 2019 at 4:13 pm
    CLW produces an argument from ignorance. "Just because we have no publicly available evidence to prove that Trump is in fact Mickey Mouse just means we need to look harder! In the meantime, we can safely assume that Trump has round black ears and a tail.".

    In the meantime, I suggest you learn about the burden of proof – the burden of proof is on those asserting the existence of a conspiracy (and you in particular are mighty short on details!) and not on those debunking it.

    Donald , says: February 4, 2019 at 6:49 pm
    Unfortunately, this article overreaches. I agree that Russiagate is an excuse that liberals embrace to excuse the disastrous failures of Clinton and the Democratic Party, but you don't need to connect this with some grand theorizing about the history of conspiracy theories. People simply don't want to admit their side did anything wrong.

    And as SteveK9 points out, it's really about how the mainstream War Party wants to keep Trump in line. Trump is a loose cannon. They want a steady reliable warmonger.

    S , says: February 5, 2019 at 4:43 am
    CLW says "But only a child would believe that Russia didn't actively interfere in the election, or that various Trump associates didn't have inappropriate contacts and dealings with Russian entities, which they then lied about and continue to lie about." It took a child to point out that the emperor had no clothes on, while the adults pretended that a falsehood was tru. Perhaps more children are needed today to point out the truth and ignore blatant propaganda.
    Brendan , says: February 5, 2019 at 1:42 pm
    Call me a child, then, but wisdom often comes from the mouth of babes. There is no evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Read The phoney indictment of the Internet Research Institute. It admits it was a commercial enterprise. It was nothing but a commercial click bait operation. Similarly, the DNC was not hacked, the data was downloaded to a USB, probably by a disaffected Sanders supporter, possibly Seth Rich. Also, Germany, Macedonia, the Netherlands have investigated alleged Russian interference in their elections, and found none.

    [Feb 05, 2019] SUBSCRIBE WITH GOOGLE

    Feb 05, 2019 | www.kansascity.com

    On Twitter and from the Senate floor, Paul made clear his distaste for McConnell's amendment that warns that "the precipitous withdrawal of United States' forces from either country could put at risk hard-won gains and United States national security."

    Paul, a non-interventionist, instead hailed Trump for being "bold enough and strong enough" to end the war in Afghanistan that began after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The senator argued there was no longer a military mission for U.S. troops to remain. He called McConnell's amendment an "insult" to Trump.

    "How do you leave precipitously after 17 years?" Paul asked. "We are no longer fighting anyone who attacked us on 9-11."

    Paul called the amendment -- which McConnell authored and is widely viewed as a rebuke to Trump's plans to withdraw troops from the two countries -- a product of a "war caucus" that Paul said includes Republicans and Democrats.


    Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article225518415.html#storylink=cpy

    javascript:false

    McConnell has been careful not to criticize Trump, instead focusing on some Democratic opposition. But the amendment cleared the Senate 90 minutes after Paul spoke with a 70 to 26 vote and support from senators from both parties.

    McConnell labeled the provision as an "opportunity for senators to go on the record about what the United States should be doing in Syria and Afghanistan."

    He'd made his views clear: "I believe the threats remain. ISIS and al Qaeda have yet to be defeated. And American national security interests require continued commitment to our missions there."

    Trump came under sharp criticism from his own party after claiming in a tweet in December that the U.S. had defeated ISIS in Syria and that he was ordering a "full" and "rapid" withdrawal of U.S. troops.

    Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, defended the amendment and criticized the press for casting it as a rebuke to Trump.

    "This is the process working the way it was intended to, for the (president) to raise these issues and then discussions take place," Risch said.

    Paul has been a longtime critic of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and last year dispatched his Senate committee staff to the country to document what he says is "wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars" and "rampant corruption."


    Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article225518415.html#storylink=cpy

    [Feb 05, 2019] Refusal to hand over Venezuelan gold means end of Britain as a financial center Prof. Wolff -- RT Business News

    Feb 05, 2019 | www.rt.com

    The freezing of Venezuelan gold by the Bank of England is a signal to all countries out of step with US interests to withdraw their money, according to economist and co-founder of Democracy at Work, Professor Richard Wolff. He told RT America that Britain and its central bank have shown themselves to be "under the thumb of the United States."

    "That is a signal to every country that has or may have difficulties with the US, [that they had] better get their money out of England and out of London because it's not the safe place as it once was," he said.

    [Feb 05, 2019] Sic Semper Tyrannis Is this the Trump Doctrine - TTG

    Notable quotes:
    "... Many of us, actually most of us, were pleased with candidate Trump's declared intent to end our involvement in endless foreign interventions. He would put America first and refrain from sending our troops where they don't belong. Once elected, his record was mixed. ..."
    "... PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: [W]e spent a fortune on building this incredible base. We might as well keep it. And one of the reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem. ..."
    "... There also appears to be an effort to keep the Rojava Kurds as a proxy force after our troops withdraw to Iraq. We continue sending combat and engineering equipment into Rojava and fully intend to continue providing air support to the YPG. We just can't let it go. ..."
    "... I see a confrontation in our future, especially with all the Iraqi PMS units in western Iraq. ..."
    Feb 05, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Many of us, actually most of us, were pleased with candidate Trump's declared intent to end our involvement in endless foreign interventions. He would put America first and refrain from sending our troops where they don't belong. Once elected, his record was mixed.

    We launched an ineffective volley of cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase in response to a trumped up gas attack, but we never sought to establish a no fly zone and risk war with Russia. For a while we were well on our way to establish an enduring client state in east Syria. We assumed this was all the doing of the cabal of manipulating neocons that Trump surrounded himself with. His call for immediate withdrawal of troops from Syria surely proved this true. Finally Trump was allowed to be Trump. He was even seeking a way out of Afghanistan, after a literal lifetime of war in that godforsaken land.

    The neocons are fighting back bigly. The pace of withdrawal from Syria was slowed and there is no indication we would ever give up our outpost on the Baghdad-Damascus highway at Tanf. Why? I think Trump laid out HIS thoughts on the matter during the traditional pre-super bowl presidential interview.

    -- -- -- --

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have to protect Israel. We have to protect other things that we have...

    MARGARET BRENNAN: But you want to keep troops there [Iraq] now?

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: [W]e spent a fortune on building this incredible base. We might as well keep it. And one of the reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem.

    MARGARET BRENNAN: Whoa, that's news. You're keeping troops in Iraq because you want to be able to strike in Iran?

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, because I want to be able to watch Iran. All I want to do is be able to watch. We have an unbelievable and expensive military base built in Iraq. It's perfectly situated for looking at all over different parts of the troubled Middle East rather than pulling up. And this is what a lot of people don't understand. We're going to keep watching and we're going to keep seeing and if there's trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things, we're going to know it before they do.

    -- -- -- --

    So, We are staying in Iraq to keep an eye on Iran and we are doing this to protect Israel. It was not any of the neocons who said this. It was Trump himself. So much for America first. There also appears to be an effort to keep the Rojava Kurds as a proxy force after our troops withdraw to Iraq. We continue sending combat and engineering equipment into Rojava and fully intend to continue providing air support to the YPG. We just can't let it go.

    However, Baghdad has thrown a monkey wrench into this developing Trump doctrine. Iraqi President Barham Salih has told Trump to slow his roll.

    -- -- -- --

    BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi President Barham Salih said on Monday that President Donald Trump did not ask Iraq's permission for U.S. troops stationed there to "watch Iran."

    Speaking at a forum in Baghdad, Salih was responding to a question about Trump's comments to CBS about how he would ask troops stationed in Iraq to "watch" Iran. U.S. troops in Iraq are there as part of an agreement between the two countries with a specific mission of combating terrorism, Salih said, and that they should stick to that. (Reuters)

    -- -- -- --

    I see a confrontation in our future, especially with all the Iraqi PMS units in western Iraq.

    TTG

    [Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

    Highly recommended!
    This article from 2017 looks like it was written yesterday. Trump betrayal of his elctorate on multiple levels, essentially on all key poin of his election program mkes him "Republican Obama".
    What is interesting about Trump foreign policy is his version of neoliberal "gangster capitalism" on foreign arena: might is right principle applied like universal opener. Previous administrations tried to put a lipstick on the pig. Trump does not even bother.
    In terms of foreign policy, and even during the transition before Trump's inauguration, there were other, more disturbing signs of where Trump would be heading soon. When Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016, Trump seemed jubilant as if he had somehow been vindicated, and took the opportunity to slander Castro as a "brutal dictator" who "oppressed his own people" and turned Cuba into a "totalitarian island".
    Notable quotes:
    "... However, when he delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the government's back on a long-standing policy of cultural imperialism , stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first". ..."
    "... Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office -- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat. ..."
    "... The entire conflict with Russia that has developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. ..."
    "... Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from wars for regime change, Trump sold out again. "I love WikiLeaks -- " -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding. ..."
    "... AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States? ..."
    "... AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing? ..."
    "... AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange? ..."
    "... While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US, witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to them. ..."
    "... Since NAFTA was implemented, migration from Mexico to the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately drove them away from agriculture ..."
    "... As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact, per capita GDP is nearly a flat line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures that have been implemented, the US leads the world . ..."
    "... To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only when the US reaps the greater share of benefits. ..."
    "... As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son -- then what an abysmally poor choice he is ..."
    "... On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism, which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced. ..."
    "... As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism . Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics. ..."
    "... As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition. ..."
    Aug 09, 2017 | zeroanthropology.net

    Trump could have kept quiet, and lost nothing. Instead what he was attacking -- and the irony was missed on his fervently right wing supporters -- was someone who was a leader in the anti-globalist movement, from long before it was ever called that. Fidel Castro was a radical pioneer of independence, self-reliance, and self-determination.

    Castro turned Cuba from an American-owned sugar plantation and brothel, a lurid backwater in the Caribbean, into a serious international actor opposed to globalizing capitalism. There was no sign of any acknowledgment of this by Trump, who instead chose to parrot the same people who would vilify him using similar terms (evil, authoritarian, etc.). Of course, Trump respects only corporate executives and billionaires, not what he would see as some rag-tag Third World revolutionary. Here Trump's supporters generally failed, using Castro's death as an opportunity for tribal partisanship, another opportunity to attack "weak liberals" like Obama who made minor overtures to Cuba (too little, too late).

    Their distrust of "the establishment" was nowhere to be found this time: their ignorance of Cuba and their resort to stock clichés and slogans had all been furnished to them by the same establishment they otherwise claimed to oppose.

    Just to be clear, the above is not meant to indicate any reversal on Trump's part regarding Cuba. He has been consistently anti-communist, and fairly consistent in his denunciations of Fidel Castro. What is significant is that -- far from overcoming the left-right divide -- Trump shores up the barriers, even at the cost of denouncing others who have a proven track record of fighting against neoliberal globalization and US interventionism. In these regards, Trump has no track record. Even among his rivals in the Republican primaries, senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul had more of an anti-interventionist track record.

    However, when he delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the government's back on a long-standing policy of cultural imperialism , stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first".

    Russia

    Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office -- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat.

    Instead, Trump continued the sanctions, as if out of meek deference to Obama's policy, one founded on lies and antagonism toward Trump himself. Rather than repair the foul attempt to sabotage the US-Russian relationship in preparation for his presidency, Trump simply abided and thus became an accomplice. To be clear, Trump has done precisely nothing to dampen the near mass hysteria that has been manufactured in the US about alleged -- indeed imaginary -- "Russian intervention".

    His comments, both during the electoral campaign and even early into his presidency, about wanting good relations with Russia, have been replaced by Trump's admissions that US relations with Russia are at a low point (Putin agreed: "I would say the level of trust [between Russia and the US] is at a workable level, especially in the military dimension, but it hasn't improved. On the contrary, it has degraded " and his spokesman called the relations " deplorable ".)

    Rather than use the power of his office to calm fears, to build better ties with Russia, and to make meeting with Vladimir Putin a top priority, Trump has again done nothing , except escalating tensions. The entire conflict with Russia that has developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. Russia had actively facilitated the US' war in Afghanistan for over a decade, and was a consistent collaborator on numerous levels. It is up to thinking American officials to honestly explain what motivated them to tilt relations with Russia, because it is certainly not Russia's doing. The only explanation that makes any sense is that the US leadership grew concerned that Russia was no longer teetering on the edge of total socio-economic breakdown, as it was under the neoliberal Boris Yeltsin, but has instead resurfaced as a major actor in international affairs, and one that champions anti-neoliberal objectives of enhanced state sovereignty and self-determination.

    WikiLeaks

    Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from wars for regime change, Trump sold out again. "I love WikiLeaks -- " -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding.

    After finding so much use for WikiLeaks' publication of the Podesta emails, which became incorporated into his campaign speeches, and which fuelled the writing and speaking of journalists and bloggers sympathetic to Trump -- he was now effectively declaring WikiLeaks to be both an enemy and a likely target of US government action, in even more blunt terms than we heard during the past eight years under Obama. This is not mere continuity with the past, but a dramatic escalation. Rather than praise Julian Assange for his work, call for an end to the illegal impediments to his seeking asylum, swear off any US calls for extraditing and prosecuting Assange, and perhaps meeting with him in person, Trump has done all of the opposite. Instead we learn that Trump's administration may file arrest charges against Assange . Mike Pompeo , chosen by Trump to head the CIA, who had himself cited WikiLeaks as a reliable source of proof about how the Democratic National Committee had rigged its campaign, now declared WikiLeaks to be a " non-state hostile intelligence service ," along with vicious personal slander against Assange.

    Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks was one that he defended in terms that were not just a deceptive rewriting of history, but one that was also fearful -- "I don't support or unsupport" WikiLeaks, was what Trump was now saying in his dash for the nearest exit. The backtracking is so obvious in this interview Trump gave to the AP , that his shoes must have left skid marks on the floor:

    AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States?

    TRUMP: When Wikileaks came out never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it. When Wikileaks came out, all I was just saying is, "Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff." You know, they tried to hack the Republican, the RNC, but we had good defenses. They didn't have defenses, which is pretty bad management. But we had good defenses, they tried to hack both of them. They weren't able to get through to Republicans. No, I found it very interesting when I read this stuff and I said, "Wow." It was just a figure of speech. I said, "Well, look at this. It's good reading."

    AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing?

    TRUMP: No, I don't support or unsupport. It was just information .

    AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange?

    TRUMP: I am not involved in that decision, but if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it's OK with me. I didn't know about that decision, but if they want to do it, it's OK with me.

    First, Trump invents the fictitious claim that WikiLeaks was responsible for hacking the DNC, and that WikiLeaks also tried to hack the Republicans. Second, he pretends to be an innocent bystander, a spectator, in his own administration -- whatever others decide, is "OK" with him, not that he knows about their decisions, but it's all up to others. He has no power, all of a sudden.

    Again, what Trump is displaying in this episode is his ultimate attachment to his class, with all of its anxieties and its contempt for rebellious, marginal upstarts. Trump shuns any sort of "loyalty" to WikiLeaks (not that they ever had a working relationship) or any form of gratitude, because then that would imply a debt and therefore a transfer of value -- whereas Trump's core ethics are those of expedience and greed (he admits that much). This move has come with a cost , with members of Trump's support base openly denouncing the betrayal. 6

    NAFTA

    On NAFTA , Trump claims he has not changed his position -- yet, from openly denouncing the free trade agreement and promising to terminate it, he now vows only to seek modifications and amendments, which means supporting NAFTA. He appeared to be awfully quick to obey the diplomatic pressure of Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and Mexico's President, Enrique Peña Nieto. Trump's entire position on NAFTA now comes into question.

    While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US, witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to them.

    This really deserves to be treated at length, separately from this article. However, for now, let's keep in mind that when Trump complains about Canadian softwood lumber and dairy exports to the US, his argument about NAFTA is without merit. Neither commodity is part of the NAFTA agreement.

    Moreover, where dairy is concerned, the problem is US overproduction. Wisconsin alone has more dairy cows than all of Canada . There is a net surplus , in the US' favour, with respect to US dairy exports to Canada. Overall, the US has a net surplus in the trade in goods and services with Canada. Regarding Mexico, the irony of Trump's denunciations of imaginary Mexican victories is that he weakens his own criticisms of immigration.

    Since NAFTA was implemented, migration from Mexico to the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately drove them away from agriculture.

    As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact, per capita GDP is nearly a flat line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures that have been implemented, the US leads the world .

    To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only when the US reaps the greater share of benefits.

    His arguments with respect to Canada are akin to those of a looter or raider. He wants to block lumber imports from Canada, at the same time as he wants to break the Canadian dairy market wide open to absorb US excess production. That approach is at the core of what defined the US as a "new empire" in the 1800s. In addition, while Trump was quick to tear up the TPP, he has said nothing about TISA and TTIP.

    Mexico

    Trump's argument with Mexico is also disturbing for what it implies. It would seem that any evidence of production in Mexico causes Trump concern. Mexico should not only keep its people -- however many are displaced by US imports -- but it should also be as dependent as possible on the US for everything except oil. Since Trump has consistently declared his antagonism to OPEC, ideally Mexico's oil would be sold for a few dollars per barrel.

    China

    Trump's turn on China almost provoked laughter from his many domestic critics. Absurdly, what figures prominently in most renditions of the story of Trump's change on China (including his own), is a big piece of chocolate cake. The missile strike on Syria was, according to Wilbur Ross, the " after-dinner entertainment ". Here, Trump's loud condemnations of China on trade issues were suddenly quelled -- and it is not because chocolate has magical properties. Instead it seems Trump has been willing to settle on selling out citizens' interests , and particularly those who voted for him, in return for China's assistance on North Korea. Let's be clear: countering and dominating North Korea is an established favourite among neoconservatives. Trump's priority here is fully "neocon," and the submergence of trade issues in favour of militaristic preferences is the one case where neoconservatives might be distinguished from the otherwise identical neoliberals.

    North Korea

    Where North Korea is concerned, Trump chose to manufacture a " crisis ". North Korea has actually done nothing to warrant a sudden outbreak of panic over it being supposedly aggressive and threatening. North Korea is no more aggressive than any person defending their survival can be called belligerent. The constant series of US military exercises in South Korea, or near North Korean waters, is instead a deliberate provocation to a state whose existence the US nearly extinguished. Even last year the US Air Force publicly boasted of having "nearly destroyed" North Korea -- language one would have expected from the Luftwaffe in WWII. The US continues to maintain roughly 60,000 troops on the border between North and South Korea, and continues to refuse to formally declare an end to the Korean War and sign a peace treaty . Trump then announced he was sending an "armada" to the Korean peninsula, and boasted of how "very powerful" it was. This was in addition to the US deploying the THAAD missile system in South Korea. Several of his messages in Twitter were written using highly provocative and threatening language. When asked if he would start a war, Trump glibly replied: " I don't know. I mean, we'll see ". On another occasion Trump stated, "There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely". When the world's leading military superpower declares its intention to destroy you, then there is nothing you can do in your defense which anyone could justly label as "over the top". Otherwise, once again Trump posed as a parental figure, the world's chief babysitter -- picture Trump, surrounded by children taking part in the "Easter egg roll" at the White House, being asked about North Korea and responding "they gotta behave". Trump would presume to teach manners to North Korea, using the only tools of instruction that seem to be the first and last resort of US foreign policy (and the "defense" industry): bombs.

    Syria

    Attacking Syria , on purportedly humanitarian grounds, is for many (including vocal supporters) one of the most glaring contradictions of Trump's campaign statements about not embroiling the US in failed wars of regime change and world policing. During the campaign, he was in favour of Russia's collaboration with Syria in the fight against ISIS. For years he had condemned Obama for involving the US in Syria, and consistently opposed military intervention there. All that was consigned to the archive of positions Trump declared to now be worthless. That there had been a change in Trump's position is not a matter of dispute -- Trump made the point himself :

    "I like to think of myself as a very flexible person. I don't have to have one specific way, and if the world changes, I go the same way, I don't change. Well, I do change and I am flexible, and I'm proud of that flexibility. And I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me -- big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I've been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn't get any worse than that. And I have that flexibility, and it's very, very possible -- and I will tell you, it's already happened that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much. And if you look back over the last few weeks, there were other attacks using gas. You're now talking about a whole different level".

    Bending to the will of the prevailing Cold War and neo-McCarthyist atmosphere in the US, rife with anti-Russian conspiracy theories, Trump found an easy opportunity to score points with the hostile media, ever so mindful as he is about approval ratings, polls, and media coverage. Some explain Trump's reversals as arising from his pursuit of public adulation -- and while the media play the key role in purveying celebrity status, they are also a stiff bastion of imperialist culture. Given his many years as a the host of a popular TV show, and as the owner of the Miss Universe Pageant, there is some logical merit to the argument. But I think even more is at work, as explained in paragraphs above. According to Eric Trump it was at the urging of Ivanka that Donald Trump decided to strike a humanitarian-militarist pose. He would play the part of the Victorian parent, only he would use missiles to teach unruly children lessons about violence. Using language typically used against him by the mainstream media, Trump now felt entitled to pontificate that Assad is "evil," an " animal ," who would have to go . When did he supposedly come to this realization? Did Assad become evil at the same time Trump was inaugurated? Why would Trump have kept so silent about "evil" on the campaign trail? Trump of course is wrong: it's not that the world changed and he changed with it; rather, he invented a new fiction to suit his masked intentions. Trump's supposed opponents and critics, like the Soros-funded organizer of the women's march Linda Sarsour, showed her approval of even more drastic action by endorsing messages by what sounded like a stern school mistress who thought that 59 cruise missiles were just a mere "slap on the wrist". Virtually every neocon who is publicly active applauded Trump, as did most senior Democrats. The loudest opposition , however, came from Trump's own base , with a number of articles featuring criticism from Trump's supporters , and one conservative publication calling him outright a " weakling and a political ingrate ".

    Members of the Trump administration have played various word games with the public on intervention in Syria. From unnamed officials saying the missile strike was a "one off," to named officials promising more if there were any other suspected chemical attacks (or use of barrel bombs -- and this while the US dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in existence on Afghanistan); some said that regime change was not the goal, and then others made it clear that was the ultimate goal ; and then Trump saying, "Our policy is the same, it hasn't changed. We're not going into Syria " -- even though Trump himself greatly increased the number of US troops he deployed to Syria , illegally, in an escalation of the least protested invasion in recent history. Now we should know enough not to count this as mere ambiguity, but as deliberate obfuscation that offers momentary (thinly veiled) cover for a renewal of neocon policy .

    We can draw an outline of Trump's liberal imperialism when it comes to Syria, which is likely to be applied elsewhere. First, Trump's interventionist policy regarding Syria is one that continues to treat that country as if it were terra nullius , a mere playground for superpower politics. Second, Trump is clearly continuing with the neoconservative agenda and its hit list of states to be terminated by US military action, as famously confirmed by Gen. Wesley Clark. Even Trump's strategy for justifying the attack on Syria echoed the two prior Bush presidential administrations -- selling war with the infamous "incubator babies" myth and the myth of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs). In many ways, Trump's presidency is thus shaping up to be either the seventh term of the George H.W. Bush regime, or the fifth straight term of the George W. Bush regime. Third, Trump is taking ownership of an extremely dangerous conflict, with costs that could surpass anything witnessed by the war on Iraq (which also continues). Fourth, by highlighting the importance of photographs in allegedly changing his mind, Trump has placed a high market value on propaganda featuring dead babies. His actions in Syria will now create an effective demand for the pornographic trade in pictures of atrocities. These are matters of great importance to the transnational capitalist class, which demands full global penetrability, diminished state power (unless in the service of this class' goals), a uniformity of expectations and conformity in behaviour, and an emphasis on individual civil liberties which are the basis for defending private property and consumerism.

    Venezuela

    It is very disturbing to see how Venezuela is being framed as ripe for US intervention, in ways that distinctly echo the lead up to the US war on Libya. Just as disturbing is that Trump's Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has a clear conflict of interest regarding Venezuela, from his recent role as CEO of Exxon and its conflict with the government of Venezuela over its nationalization of oil. Tillerson is, by any definition, a clear-cut member of the transnational capitalist class. The Twitter account of the State Department has a battery of messages sternly lecturing Venezuela about the treatment of protesters, while also pontificating on the Venezuelan Constitution as if the US State Department had become a global supreme court. What is impressive is the seamless continuity in the nature of the messages on Venezuela from that account, as if no change of government happened between Obama's time and Trump's. Nikki Haley, Trump's neocon ambassador to the UN, issued a statement that read like it had been written by her predecessors, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, a statement which in itself is an unacceptable intervention in Venezuelan internal affairs. For Trump's part, from just days before the election, to a couple of weeks after his inauguration, he has sent explicit messages of support for anti-government forces in Venezuela. In February, Trump imposed sanctions on Venezuela's Vice President. After Syria and North Korea, Venezuela is seeming the likely focus of US interventionism under Trump.

    NATO

    Rounding out the picture, at least for now (this was just the first hundred days of Trump's presidency), was Trump's outstanding reversal on NATO -- in fact, once again he stated the reversal himself, and without explanation either: " I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete ". This came just days after the US missile strike against Syria, and just as Ivanka Trump was about to represent his government at a meeting of globalist women, the W20 . NATO has served as the transnational military alliance at the service of the transnational capitalist class, and particularly the military and political members of the TCC. 7

    Saving Neoliberalism?

    Has Trump saved neoliberal capitalism from its ongoing demise? Has he sustained popular faith in liberal political ideals? Are we still in the dying days of liberalism ? If there had been a centrally coordinated plan to plant an operative among the ranks of populist conservatives and independents, to channel their support for nationalism into support for the persona of the plant, and to then have that plant steer a course straight back to shoring up neoliberal globalism -- then we might have had a wonderful story of a masterful conspiracy, the biggest heist in the history of elections anywhere. A truly "rigged system" could be expected to behave that way. Was Trump designated to take the fall in a rigged game, only his huge ego got in the way when he realized he could realistically win the election and he decided to really tilt hard against his partner, Hillary Clinton? It could be the basis for a novel, or a Hollywood political comedy. I have no way of knowing if it could be true.

    Framed within the terms of what we do know, there was relief by the ousted group of political elites and the liberal globalist media at the sight of Trump's reversals, and a sense that their vision had been vindicated. However, if they are hoping that the likes of Trump will serve as a reliable flag bearer, then theirs is a misguided wishful thinking. If someone so demonized and ridiculed, tarnished as an evil thug and racist fascist, the subject of mass demonstrations in the US and abroad, is the latest champion of (neo)liberalism, then we are certainly witnessing its dying days.

    Is Trump Beneficial for Anti-Imperialism?

    Once one is informed enough and thus prepared to understand that anti-imperialism is not the exclusive preserve of the left (a left which anyway has mostly shunned it over the last two decades), that it did not originate with the left , and that it has a long and distinguished history in the US itself , then we can move toward some interesting realizations. The facts, borne out by surveys and my own online immersion among pro-Trump social media users, is that one of the significant reasons why Trump won is due to the growth in popularity of basic anti-imperialist principles (even if not recognized under that name): for example, no more world policing, no transnational militarization, no more interventions abroad, no more regime change, no war, and no globalism. Nationalists in Europe, as in Russia, have also pushed forward a basic anti-imperialist vision. Whereas in Latin America anti-imperialism is largely still leftist, in Europe and North America the left-right divide has become blurred, but the crucial thing is that at least now we can speak of anti-imperialism gaining strength in these three major continents. Resistance against globalization has been the primary objective, along with strengthening national sovereignty, protecting local cultural identity, and opposing free trade and transnational capital. Unfortunately, some anti-imperialist writers (on the left in fact) have tended to restrict their field of vision to military matters primarily, while almost completely neglecting the economic and cultural, and especially domestic dimensions of imperialism. (I am grossly generalizing of course, but I think it is largely accurate.) Where structures such as NAFTA are concerned, many of these same leftist anti-imperialists, few as they are, have had virtually nothing to say. It could be that they have yet to fully recognize that the transnational capitalist class has, gradually over the last seven decades, essentially purchased the power of US imperialism. Therefore the TCC's imperialism includes NAFTA, just as it includes open borders, neoliberal identity politics, and drone strikes. They are all different parts of the same whole.

    As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son -- then what an abysmally poor choice he is. 8

    On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism, which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced. In addition to that, given that his candidacy aggravated internal divisions in the US, which have not subsided with his assumption of office, these domestic social and cultural conflicts cause a serious deficit of legitimacy, a loss of political capital. A declining economy will also deprive him of capital in the strict sense. Moreover, given the kind of persona the media have crafted, the daily caricaturing of Trump will significantly spur anti-Americanism around the world. If suddenly even Canadian academics are talking about boycotting the US, then the worm has truly turned. Trump can only rely on "hard power" (military violence), because "soft power" is almost out of the question now that Trump has been constructed as a barbarian. Incompetent and/or undermined governance will also render Trump a deficient upholder of the status quo. The fact that nationalist movements around the world are not centrally coordinated, and their fortunes are not pinned to those of Trump, establishes a well-defined limit to his influence. Trump's antagonism toward various countries -- as wholes -- has already helped to stir up a deep sediment of anti-Americanism. If Americanism is at the heart of Trump's nationalist globalism, then it is doing all the things that are needed to induce a major heart attack.

    As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism . Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics.

    As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition.

    [Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

    Highly recommended!
    This article from 2017 looks like it was written yesterday. Trump betrayal of his elctorate on multiple levels, essentially on all key poin of his election program mkes him "Republican Obama".
    What is interesting about Trump foreign policy is his version of neoliberal "gangster capitalism" on foreign arena: might is right principle applied like universal opener. Previous administrations tried to put a lipstick on the pig. Trump does not even bother.
    In terms of foreign policy, and even during the transition before Trump's inauguration, there were other, more disturbing signs of where Trump would be heading soon. When Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016, Trump seemed jubilant as if he had somehow been vindicated, and took the opportunity to slander Castro as a "brutal dictator" who "oppressed his own people" and turned Cuba into a "totalitarian island".
    Notable quotes:
    "... However, when he delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the government's back on a long-standing policy of cultural imperialism , stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first". ..."
    "... Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office -- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat. ..."
    "... The entire conflict with Russia that has developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. ..."
    "... Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from wars for regime change, Trump sold out again. "I love WikiLeaks -- " -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding. ..."
    "... AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States? ..."
    "... AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing? ..."
    "... AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange? ..."
    "... While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US, witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to them. ..."
    "... Since NAFTA was implemented, migration from Mexico to the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately drove them away from agriculture ..."
    "... As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact, per capita GDP is nearly a flat line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures that have been implemented, the US leads the world . ..."
    "... To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only when the US reaps the greater share of benefits. ..."
    "... As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son -- then what an abysmally poor choice he is ..."
    "... On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism, which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced. ..."
    "... As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism . Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics. ..."
    "... As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition. ..."
    Aug 09, 2017 | zeroanthropology.net

    Trump could have kept quiet, and lost nothing. Instead what he was attacking -- and the irony was missed on his fervently right wing supporters -- was someone who was a leader in the anti-globalist movement, from long before it was ever called that. Fidel Castro was a radical pioneer of independence, self-reliance, and self-determination.

    Castro turned Cuba from an American-owned sugar plantation and brothel, a lurid backwater in the Caribbean, into a serious international actor opposed to globalizing capitalism. There was no sign of any acknowledgment of this by Trump, who instead chose to parrot the same people who would vilify him using similar terms (evil, authoritarian, etc.). Of course, Trump respects only corporate executives and billionaires, not what he would see as some rag-tag Third World revolutionary. Here Trump's supporters generally failed, using Castro's death as an opportunity for tribal partisanship, another opportunity to attack "weak liberals" like Obama who made minor overtures to Cuba (too little, too late).

    Their distrust of "the establishment" was nowhere to be found this time: their ignorance of Cuba and their resort to stock clichés and slogans had all been furnished to them by the same establishment they otherwise claimed to oppose.

    Just to be clear, the above is not meant to indicate any reversal on Trump's part regarding Cuba. He has been consistently anti-communist, and fairly consistent in his denunciations of Fidel Castro. What is significant is that -- far from overcoming the left-right divide -- Trump shores up the barriers, even at the cost of denouncing others who have a proven track record of fighting against neoliberal globalization and US interventionism. In these regards, Trump has no track record. Even among his rivals in the Republican primaries, senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul had more of an anti-interventionist track record.

    However, when he delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the government's back on a long-standing policy of cultural imperialism , stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first".

    Russia

    Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office -- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat.

    Instead, Trump continued the sanctions, as if out of meek deference to Obama's policy, one founded on lies and antagonism toward Trump himself. Rather than repair the foul attempt to sabotage the US-Russian relationship in preparation for his presidency, Trump simply abided and thus became an accomplice. To be clear, Trump has done precisely nothing to dampen the near mass hysteria that has been manufactured in the US about alleged -- indeed imaginary -- "Russian intervention".

    His comments, both during the electoral campaign and even early into his presidency, about wanting good relations with Russia, have been replaced by Trump's admissions that US relations with Russia are at a low point (Putin agreed: "I would say the level of trust [between Russia and the US] is at a workable level, especially in the military dimension, but it hasn't improved. On the contrary, it has degraded " and his spokesman called the relations " deplorable ".)

    Rather than use the power of his office to calm fears, to build better ties with Russia, and to make meeting with Vladimir Putin a top priority, Trump has again done nothing , except escalating tensions. The entire conflict with Russia that has developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. Russia had actively facilitated the US' war in Afghanistan for over a decade, and was a consistent collaborator on numerous levels. It is up to thinking American officials to honestly explain what motivated them to tilt relations with Russia, because it is certainly not Russia's doing. The only explanation that makes any sense is that the US leadership grew concerned that Russia was no longer teetering on the edge of total socio-economic breakdown, as it was under the neoliberal Boris Yeltsin, but has instead resurfaced as a major actor in international affairs, and one that champions anti-neoliberal objectives of enhanced state sovereignty and self-determination.

    WikiLeaks

    Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from wars for regime change, Trump sold out again. "I love WikiLeaks -- " -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding.

    After finding so much use for WikiLeaks' publication of the Podesta emails, which became incorporated into his campaign speeches, and which fuelled the writing and speaking of journalists and bloggers sympathetic to Trump -- he was now effectively declaring WikiLeaks to be both an enemy and a likely target of US government action, in even more blunt terms than we heard during the past eight years under Obama. This is not mere continuity with the past, but a dramatic escalation. Rather than praise Julian Assange for his work, call for an end to the illegal impediments to his seeking asylum, swear off any US calls for extraditing and prosecuting Assange, and perhaps meeting with him in person, Trump has done all of the opposite. Instead we learn that Trump's administration may file arrest charges against Assange . Mike Pompeo , chosen by Trump to head the CIA, who had himself cited WikiLeaks as a reliable source of proof about how the Democratic National Committee had rigged its campaign, now declared WikiLeaks to be a " non-state hostile intelligence service ," along with vicious personal slander against Assange.

    Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks was one that he defended in terms that were not just a deceptive rewriting of history, but one that was also fearful -- "I don't support or unsupport" WikiLeaks, was what Trump was now saying in his dash for the nearest exit. The backtracking is so obvious in this interview Trump gave to the AP , that his shoes must have left skid marks on the floor:

    AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States?

    TRUMP: When Wikileaks came out never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it. When Wikileaks came out, all I was just saying is, "Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff." You know, they tried to hack the Republican, the RNC, but we had good defenses. They didn't have defenses, which is pretty bad management. But we had good defenses, they tried to hack both of them. They weren't able to get through to Republicans. No, I found it very interesting when I read this stuff and I said, "Wow." It was just a figure of speech. I said, "Well, look at this. It's good reading."

    AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing?

    TRUMP: No, I don't support or unsupport. It was just information .

    AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange?

    TRUMP: I am not involved in that decision, but if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it's OK with me. I didn't know about that decision, but if they want to do it, it's OK with me.

    First, Trump invents the fictitious claim that WikiLeaks was responsible for hacking the DNC, and that WikiLeaks also tried to hack the Republicans. Second, he pretends to be an innocent bystander, a spectator, in his own administration -- whatever others decide, is "OK" with him, not that he knows about their decisions, but it's all up to others. He has no power, all of a sudden.

    Again, what Trump is displaying in this episode is his ultimate attachment to his class, with all of its anxieties and its contempt for rebellious, marginal upstarts. Trump shuns any sort of "loyalty" to WikiLeaks (not that they ever had a working relationship) or any form of gratitude, because then that would imply a debt and therefore a transfer of value -- whereas Trump's core ethics are those of expedience and greed (he admits that much). This move has come with a cost , with members of Trump's support base openly denouncing the betrayal. 6

    NAFTA

    On NAFTA , Trump claims he has not changed his position -- yet, from openly denouncing the free trade agreement and promising to terminate it, he now vows only to seek modifications and amendments, which means supporting NAFTA. He appeared to be awfully quick to obey the diplomatic pressure of Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and Mexico's President, Enrique Peña Nieto. Trump's entire position on NAFTA now comes into question.

    While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US, witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to them.

    This really deserves to be treated at length, separately from this article. However, for now, let's keep in mind that when Trump complains about Canadian softwood lumber and dairy exports to the US, his argument about NAFTA is without merit. Neither commodity is part of the NAFTA agreement.

    Moreover, where dairy is concerned, the problem is US overproduction. Wisconsin alone has more dairy cows than all of Canada . There is a net surplus , in the US' favour, with respect to US dairy exports to Canada. Overall, the US has a net surplus in the trade in goods and services with Canada. Regarding Mexico, the irony of Trump's denunciations of imaginary Mexican victories is that he weakens his own criticisms of immigration.

    Since NAFTA was implemented, migration from Mexico to the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately drove them away from agriculture.

    As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact, per capita GDP is nearly a flat line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures that have been implemented, the US leads the world .

    To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only when the US reaps the greater share of benefits.

    His arguments with respect to Canada are akin to those of a looter or raider. He wants to block lumber imports from Canada, at the same time as he wants to break the Canadian dairy market wide open to absorb US excess production. That approach is at the core of what defined the US as a "new empire" in the 1800s. In addition, while Trump was quick to tear up the TPP, he has said nothing about TISA and TTIP.

    Mexico

    Trump's argument with Mexico is also disturbing for what it implies. It would seem that any evidence of production in Mexico causes Trump concern. Mexico should not only keep its people -- however many are displaced by US imports -- but it should also be as dependent as possible on the US for everything except oil. Since Trump has consistently declared his antagonism to OPEC, ideally Mexico's oil would be sold for a few dollars per barrel.

    China

    Trump's turn on China almost provoked laughter from his many domestic critics. Absurdly, what figures prominently in most renditions of the story of Trump's change on China (including his own), is a big piece of chocolate cake. The missile strike on Syria was, according to Wilbur Ross, the " after-dinner entertainment ". Here, Trump's loud condemnations of China on trade issues were suddenly quelled -- and it is not because chocolate has magical properties. Instead it seems Trump has been willing to settle on selling out citizens' interests , and particularly those who voted for him, in return for China's assistance on North Korea. Let's be clear: countering and dominating North Korea is an established favourite among neoconservatives. Trump's priority here is fully "neocon," and the submergence of trade issues in favour of militaristic preferences is the one case where neoconservatives might be distinguished from the otherwise identical neoliberals.

    North Korea

    Where North Korea is concerned, Trump chose to manufacture a " crisis ". North Korea has actually done nothing to warrant a sudden outbreak of panic over it being supposedly aggressive and threatening. North Korea is no more aggressive than any person defending their survival can be called belligerent. The constant series of US military exercises in South Korea, or near North Korean waters, is instead a deliberate provocation to a state whose existence the US nearly extinguished. Even last year the US Air Force publicly boasted of having "nearly destroyed" North Korea -- language one would have expected from the Luftwaffe in WWII. The US continues to maintain roughly 60,000 troops on the border between North and South Korea, and continues to refuse to formally declare an end to the Korean War and sign a peace treaty . Trump then announced he was sending an "armada" to the Korean peninsula, and boasted of how "very powerful" it was. This was in addition to the US deploying the THAAD missile system in South Korea. Several of his messages in Twitter were written using highly provocative and threatening language. When asked if he would start a war, Trump glibly replied: " I don't know. I mean, we'll see ". On another occasion Trump stated, "There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely". When the world's leading military superpower declares its intention to destroy you, then there is nothing you can do in your defense which anyone could justly label as "over the top". Otherwise, once again Trump posed as a parental figure, the world's chief babysitter -- picture Trump, surrounded by children taking part in the "Easter egg roll" at the White House, being asked about North Korea and responding "they gotta behave". Trump would presume to teach manners to North Korea, using the only tools of instruction that seem to be the first and last resort of US foreign policy (and the "defense" industry): bombs.

    Syria

    Attacking Syria , on purportedly humanitarian grounds, is for many (including vocal supporters) one of the most glaring contradictions of Trump's campaign statements about not embroiling the US in failed wars of regime change and world policing. During the campaign, he was in favour of Russia's collaboration with Syria in the fight against ISIS. For years he had condemned Obama for involving the US in Syria, and consistently opposed military intervention there. All that was consigned to the archive of positions Trump declared to now be worthless. That there had been a change in Trump's position is not a matter of dispute -- Trump made the point himself :

    "I like to think of myself as a very flexible person. I don't have to have one specific way, and if the world changes, I go the same way, I don't change. Well, I do change and I am flexible, and I'm proud of that flexibility. And I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me -- big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I've been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn't get any worse than that. And I have that flexibility, and it's very, very possible -- and I will tell you, it's already happened that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much. And if you look back over the last few weeks, there were other attacks using gas. You're now talking about a whole different level".

    Bending to the will of the prevailing Cold War and neo-McCarthyist atmosphere in the US, rife with anti-Russian conspiracy theories, Trump found an easy opportunity to score points with the hostile media, ever so mindful as he is about approval ratings, polls, and media coverage. Some explain Trump's reversals as arising from his pursuit of public adulation -- and while the media play the key role in purveying celebrity status, they are also a stiff bastion of imperialist culture. Given his many years as a the host of a popular TV show, and as the owner of the Miss Universe Pageant, there is some logical merit to the argument. But I think even more is at work, as explained in paragraphs above. According to Eric Trump it was at the urging of Ivanka that Donald Trump decided to strike a humanitarian-militarist pose. He would play the part of the Victorian parent, only he would use missiles to teach unruly children lessons about violence. Using language typically used against him by the mainstream media, Trump now felt entitled to pontificate that Assad is "evil," an " animal ," who would have to go . When did he supposedly come to this realization? Did Assad become evil at the same time Trump was inaugurated? Why would Trump have kept so silent about "evil" on the campaign trail? Trump of course is wrong: it's not that the world changed and he changed with it; rather, he invented a new fiction to suit his masked intentions. Trump's supposed opponents and critics, like the Soros-funded organizer of the women's march Linda Sarsour, showed her approval of even more drastic action by endorsing messages by what sounded like a stern school mistress who thought that 59 cruise missiles were just a mere "slap on the wrist". Virtually every neocon who is publicly active applauded Trump, as did most senior Democrats. The loudest opposition , however, came from Trump's own base , with a number of articles featuring criticism from Trump's supporters , and one conservative publication calling him outright a " weakling and a political ingrate ".

    Members of the Trump administration have played various word games with the public on intervention in Syria. From unnamed officials saying the missile strike was a "one off," to named officials promising more if there were any other suspected chemical attacks (or use of barrel bombs -- and this while the US dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in existence on Afghanistan); some said that regime change was not the goal, and then others made it clear that was the ultimate goal ; and then Trump saying, "Our policy is the same, it hasn't changed. We're not going into Syria " -- even though Trump himself greatly increased the number of US troops he deployed to Syria , illegally, in an escalation of the least protested invasion in recent history. Now we should know enough not to count this as mere ambiguity, but as deliberate obfuscation that offers momentary (thinly veiled) cover for a renewal of neocon policy .

    We can draw an outline of Trump's liberal imperialism when it comes to Syria, which is likely to be applied elsewhere. First, Trump's interventionist policy regarding Syria is one that continues to treat that country as if it were terra nullius , a mere playground for superpower politics. Second, Trump is clearly continuing with the neoconservative agenda and its hit list of states to be terminated by US military action, as famously confirmed by Gen. Wesley Clark. Even Trump's strategy for justifying the attack on Syria echoed the two prior Bush presidential administrations -- selling war with the infamous "incubator babies" myth and the myth of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs). In many ways, Trump's presidency is thus shaping up to be either the seventh term of the George H.W. Bush regime, or the fifth straight term of the George W. Bush regime. Third, Trump is taking ownership of an extremely dangerous conflict, with costs that could surpass anything witnessed by the war on Iraq (which also continues). Fourth, by highlighting the importance of photographs in allegedly changing his mind, Trump has placed a high market value on propaganda featuring dead babies. His actions in Syria will now create an effective demand for the pornographic trade in pictures of atrocities. These are matters of great importance to the transnational capitalist class, which demands full global penetrability, diminished state power (unless in the service of this class' goals), a uniformity of expectations and conformity in behaviour, and an emphasis on individual civil liberties which are the basis for defending private property and consumerism.

    Venezuela

    It is very disturbing to see how Venezuela is being framed as ripe for US intervention, in ways that distinctly echo the lead up to the US war on Libya. Just as disturbing is that Trump's Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has a clear conflict of interest regarding Venezuela, from his recent role as CEO of Exxon and its conflict with the government of Venezuela over its nationalization of oil. Tillerson is, by any definition, a clear-cut member of the transnational capitalist class. The Twitter account of the State Department has a battery of messages sternly lecturing Venezuela about the treatment of protesters, while also pontificating on the Venezuelan Constitution as if the US State Department had become a global supreme court. What is impressive is the seamless continuity in the nature of the messages on Venezuela from that account, as if no change of government happened between Obama's time and Trump's. Nikki Haley, Trump's neocon ambassador to the UN, issued a statement that read like it had been written by her predecessors, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, a statement which in itself is an unacceptable intervention in Venezuelan internal affairs. For Trump's part, from just days before the election, to a couple of weeks after his inauguration, he has sent explicit messages of support for anti-government forces in Venezuela. In February, Trump imposed sanctions on Venezuela's Vice President. After Syria and North Korea, Venezuela is seeming the likely focus of US interventionism under Trump.

    NATO

    Rounding out the picture, at least for now (this was just the first hundred days of Trump's presidency), was Trump's outstanding reversal on NATO -- in fact, once again he stated the reversal himself, and without explanation either: " I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete ". This came just days after the US missile strike against Syria, and just as Ivanka Trump was about to represent his government at a meeting of globalist women, the W20 . NATO has served as the transnational military alliance at the service of the transnational capitalist class, and particularly the military and political members of the TCC. 7

    Saving Neoliberalism?

    Has Trump saved neoliberal capitalism from its ongoing demise? Has he sustained popular faith in liberal political ideals? Are we still in the dying days of liberalism ? If there had been a centrally coordinated plan to plant an operative among the ranks of populist conservatives and independents, to channel their support for nationalism into support for the persona of the plant, and to then have that plant steer a course straight back to shoring up neoliberal globalism -- then we might have had a wonderful story of a masterful conspiracy, the biggest heist in the history of elections anywhere. A truly "rigged system" could be expected to behave that way. Was Trump designated to take the fall in a rigged game, only his huge ego got in the way when he realized he could realistically win the election and he decided to really tilt hard against his partner, Hillary Clinton? It could be the basis for a novel, or a Hollywood political comedy. I have no way of knowing if it could be true.

    Framed within the terms of what we do know, there was relief by the ousted group of political elites and the liberal globalist media at the sight of Trump's reversals, and a sense that their vision had been vindicated. However, if they are hoping that the likes of Trump will serve as a reliable flag bearer, then theirs is a misguided wishful thinking. If someone so demonized and ridiculed, tarnished as an evil thug and racist fascist, the subject of mass demonstrations in the US and abroad, is the latest champion of (neo)liberalism, then we are certainly witnessing its dying days.

    Is Trump Beneficial for Anti-Imperialism?

    Once one is informed enough and thus prepared to understand that anti-imperialism is not the exclusive preserve of the left (a left which anyway has mostly shunned it over the last two decades), that it did not originate with the left , and that it has a long and distinguished history in the US itself , then we can move toward some interesting realizations. The facts, borne out by surveys and my own online immersion among pro-Trump social media users, is that one of the significant reasons why Trump won is due to the growth in popularity of basic anti-imperialist principles (even if not recognized under that name): for example, no more world policing, no transnational militarization, no more interventions abroad, no more regime change, no war, and no globalism. Nationalists in Europe, as in Russia, have also pushed forward a basic anti-imperialist vision. Whereas in Latin America anti-imperialism is largely still leftist, in Europe and North America the left-right divide has become blurred, but the crucial thing is that at least now we can speak of anti-imperialism gaining strength in these three major continents. Resistance against globalization has been the primary objective, along with strengthening national sovereignty, protecting local cultural identity, and opposing free trade and transnational capital. Unfortunately, some anti-imperialist writers (on the left in fact) have tended to restrict their field of vision to military matters primarily, while almost completely neglecting the economic and cultural, and especially domestic dimensions of imperialism. (I am grossly generalizing of course, but I think it is largely accurate.) Where structures such as NAFTA are concerned, many of these same leftist anti-imperialists, few as they are, have had virtually nothing to say. It could be that they have yet to fully recognize that the transnational capitalist class has, gradually over the last seven decades, essentially purchased the power of US imperialism. Therefore the TCC's imperialism includes NAFTA, just as it includes open borders, neoliberal identity politics, and drone strikes. They are all different parts of the same whole.

    As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son -- then what an abysmally poor choice he is. 8

    On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism, which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced. In addition to that, given that his candidacy aggravated internal divisions in the US, which have not subsided with his assumption of office, these domestic social and cultural conflicts cause a serious deficit of legitimacy, a loss of political capital. A declining economy will also deprive him of capital in the strict sense. Moreover, given the kind of persona the media have crafted, the daily caricaturing of Trump will significantly spur anti-Americanism around the world. If suddenly even Canadian academics are talking about boycotting the US, then the worm has truly turned. Trump can only rely on "hard power" (military violence), because "soft power" is almost out of the question now that Trump has been constructed as a barbarian. Incompetent and/or undermined governance will also render Trump a deficient upholder of the status quo. The fact that nationalist movements around the world are not centrally coordinated, and their fortunes are not pinned to those of Trump, establishes a well-defined limit to his influence. Trump's antagonism toward various countries -- as wholes -- has already helped to stir up a deep sediment of anti-Americanism. If Americanism is at the heart of Trump's nationalist globalism, then it is doing all the things that are needed to induce a major heart attack.

    As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism . Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics.

    As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition.

    [Feb 04, 2019] Angry Bear " Reagan's Tax Cuts and the Volcker Recession

    Feb 04, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

    Reagan's Tax Cuts and the Volcker Recession

    Dan Crawford | January 30, 2019 11:35 am

    Politics Taxes/regulation (Dan here lifted from Robert's Stochastic Thoughts ) Reagan's Tax Cuts and the Volcker Recession Max Boot is a candidate member of the Rubin Gerson can't be a conservative anymore, because I always agree with them club of Washington Post columnists. But he is a bit confused about US macroeconmic history and macroeconomics. He wrote"The deficit spending of the Reagan years was at least justified because it boosted the economy out of a deep recession " As a matter of timing, this can't be right. The Kemp Roth tax cut was enacted in 1981. Real GDP peaked in 1981q3 -- the tax cut corresponds to the beginning of the recession not the end.

    The part that Boot misses (because it has been unimportant for the past 10 years) is monetary policy. It is possible to cause a severe recession in spite of fiscal stimulus by driving the Federal Funds rate up over 19 %. The combination of loose fiscal and very tight monetary policy caused huge real interest rates and a collapse of investment. It also caused an over-valued dollar, a huge surge in imports and deindustrialization.

    pgl, January 30, 2019 5:05 pm

    Towards the end of 1980 Volcker was backing off his initial tight monetary policy and the economy inched towards a recovery from that initial recession. But when Volcker saw Kemp-Roth, he feared excess aggregate demand and overreacted which led to the 1982. If Max Boot does not understand this – he is just another uninformed idiot. Now if he does get this – he is just another supply side liar.

    Likbez

    @pgl January 30, 2019, 5:05 pm

    > ...when Volcker saw Kemp-Roth, he feared excess aggregate demand and overreacted which led to the 1982. If Max Boot does not understand this – he is just another uninformed idiot. Now if he does get this – he is just another supply-side liar. "

    That's probably the most concise explanation which is enough for the given case. Thank you!

    Max Boots is a "wardog" --a rabid lobbyist of MIC, and, as such, is as far from economics (even voodoo supply side economics) as one can get.

    Also like all neocons, he is statist par excellence. If not MIC money, he would probably be forced to paint houses for a living, instead of writing nonsense in Bezos blog.

    [Feb 04, 2019] It case of Venzuella coup it looks like we are dealing with a "Skripal tactic": do something so ridiculously stupid and offensive that it places all your vassals before a stark choice: either submit and pretend like you did not notice or, alternatively, dare to say something and face with wrath of Uncle Shmuel (the Neocon's version of Uncle Sam) by The Saker

    Notable quotes:
    "... This reminds me of the gerontocrats of the Soviet Politburo in the worst stagnation years who had to appoint the likes of Chernenko to top positions. ..."
    "... The one thing the Mr MAGA's administration has in common with the late Brezhevian Politburo is its total inability to get anything done. My wife refers to the folks in the White House (since Dubya came to power) as the " gang that couldn't shoot straight " and she is right (she always is!): they just can't really get anything done anymore – all their half-assed pseudo-successes are inevitably followed by embarrassing failures. ..."
    Feb 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Remember the almost universal reaction of horror when Bolton was appointed as National Security Advisor? Well, apparently, either the Neocons completely missed that, which I doubt, or they did what they always do and decided to double-down by retrieving Elliott Abrams from storage and appointing him US Special Envoy to Venezuela. I mean, yes, of course, the Neocons are stupid and sociopathic enough not to ever care about others, but in this case I think that we are dealing with a "Skripal tactic": do something so ridiculously stupid and offensive that it places all your vassals before a stark choice: either submit and pretend like you did not notice or, alternatively, dare to say something and face with wrath of Uncle Shmuel (the Neocon's version of Uncle Sam).

    And it worked, in the name of "solidarity" or whatever else, the most faithful lackeys of the Empire immediate fell in line behind the latest US aggression against a sovereign nation in spite of the self-evident fact that this aggression violates every letter of the most sacred principles of international law. This is exactly the same tactic as when they make you clean toilets with a toothbrush or do push-ups in the mud during basic training: not only to condition you to total obedience, but to make you publicly give up any semblance of dignity.

    ...Finally, these appointments also show that the senior-Neocons are frightened and paranoid as there are still plenty of very sharp junior-Neocon folks to chose from in the US, yet they felt the need to get Abrams from conservation and place him in a key position in spite of the strong smell of naphthalene emanating from him. This reminds me of the gerontocrats of the Soviet Politburo in the worst stagnation years who had to appoint the likes of Chernenko to top positions.

    The one thing the Mr MAGA's administration has in common with the late Brezhevian Politburo is its total inability to get anything done. My wife refers to the folks in the White House (since Dubya came to power) as the " gang that couldn't shoot straight " and she is right (she always is!): they just can't really get anything done anymore – all their half-assed pseudo-successes are inevitably followed by embarrassing failures.

    [Feb 04, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Slams Neocon-Neolib Warmongers After NBC Propaganda Exposed

    Notable quotes:
    "... "As commander-in-chief, I will work to end the new cold war, nuclear arms race and slide into nuclear war. That is why the neocon/neolib warmongers will do anything to stop me . ..."
    "... In short; NBC relied on a known propagandist who created a Russian bot "false flag" to meddle in an election, who claims to track pro-Kremlin Twitter activity, in order to smear Tulsi Gabbard as a Putin puppet. ..."
    "... It's uncanny what lengths the establishment will go to in order to eliminate threats. For example, take a look at this Vanity Fair hit piece from Jan 30, which uses perhaps the most unflattering photo Gabbard has ever taken and starts off (emphasis not ours): ..."
    "... One question remains; will Gabbard become a Democrat puppet like Bernie Sanders if the DNC colludes with their chosen candidate to cheat against her? ..."
    "... Obey or die ... that's the ethos of the U.S. elite, these days ... Tulsi can't fight that. ..."
    "... I wonder if Ron Paul feels jealous that Tulsi is getting all the hate he used to get when HE ran for president on the peace platform? ..."
    "... I thought Social Security was "the third rail of politics" but obviously it is now "perpetual war". Anyone daring to touch it is going to be zapped by the corporate media, whose owners are likely majority stockholders of the military industrial complex. ..."
    "... Orange wants to run against some crazy like Hitlery... easy pickings ... he can't win against a sensible person ..."
    "... The term "neoliberal warmongers" is thus born ... ..."
    "... Yes, good to add that term to "neoconservative warmongers" because of the degree to which almost all successful politicians have become puppets of the best organized gangsters (due to the long history of the vicious feedback loops of the funding of all aspects of the political processes.) The false fundamental dichotomies and related impossible ideals associated with "liberal" versus conservative" are manifestations of the methods of divide and conquer, which methods are being pushed towards oblivion with their excessive indulgence in the demonization of Russia. ..."
    "... All of those may be viewed as manifestations of "false flag attacks" whereby the ruling classes drive the people they rule over to fight against boogie men, in ways which therefore backfire badly, by causing the "blowbacks" which those "false flag" presentations of the "public enemies" were originally designed to cause! ..."
    "... Tulsa Gabbard shares the same views on Israel that most of the world outside of the US hold ... that there really is zero difference between the apartheid South Africa regime of 3 decades ago and present day Israel. ..."
    "... Now that the evil SA apartheid is ended, the natives are rising up and showing their sadism and hatred for all manner of civilization. They sing and chant about how much they want to "kill de white man!" But they have NO IDEA what to do once they've done that. ..."
    "... Too bad, the rabid dogs are firmly in charge of the US government. ..."
    "... she could beat orange ... orange is afraid of her... so are the zio elite ..."
    Feb 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Tulsi Gabbard Slams "Neocon/Neolib Warmongers" After NBC Propaganda Exposed

    by Tyler Durden Mon, 02/04/2019 - 11:31 525 SHARES

    Tulsi Gabbard lashed out at "neocon" and "neolib warmongers" after NBC News was exposed trying to smear her as a Kremlin stooge. The network was called out over the weekend for relying on a Democrat-run firm that created fake Russian twitter bots to stage a "false flag" campaign against Republic Roy Moore in the 2017 Alabama special election - New Knowledge.

    To justify its claim that Tulsi Gabbard is the Kremlin's candidate, NBC writes:

    "analysts at New Knowledge, the company the Senate Intelligence Committee used to track Russian activities in the 2016 election, told NBC News they've spotted 'chatter' related to Gabbard in anonymous online message boards, including those known for fomenting right-wing troll campaigns."

    Only to be called out hard by journalist Glenn Greenwald:

    After Greenwald fingered NBC for relying on New Knowledge - run by Jonathan Morgan (who also developed the technology behind "Hamilton 68" Russian bot-tracking propaganda website that refuses to disclose its methods) - Gabbard chimed in, tweeting:

    "@ggreenwald exposes that @NBC used journalistic fraud to discredit our campaign. But more important is their motive: "to smear any adversary of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party – whether on the left or the right – as a stooge or asset of the Kremlin.""

    She later added:

    "As commander-in-chief, I will work to end the new cold war, nuclear arms race and slide into nuclear war. That is why the neocon/neolib warmongers will do anything to stop me .

    Disturbingly, the Senate Intelligence Committee has relied on a report by New Knowledge on Russian social media election interference, while the firm has created a "Hamilton 68" offshoot, "Disinfo2018" referenced in the NBC article, which claims that three of the top URLs propagated throughout social media by Kremlin bots were about Gabbard.

    In short; NBC relied on a known propagandist who created a Russian bot "false flag" to meddle in an election, who claims to track pro-Kremlin Twitter activity, in order to smear Tulsi Gabbard as a Putin puppet.

    It's uncanny what lengths the establishment will go to in order to eliminate threats. For example, take a look at this Vanity Fair hit piece from Jan 30, which uses perhaps the most unflattering photo Gabbard has ever taken and starts off (emphasis not ours):

    The presidential campaign of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the renegade Democrat known as much for her chummy relationship with Bashar al-Assad as for supporting Bernie Sanders , is beginning to resemble the candidate herself: confusing, disorganized, and, according to Politico , falling apart. - Vanity Fair

    One question remains; will Gabbard become a Democrat puppet like Bernie Sanders if the DNC colludes with their chosen candidate to cheat against her?

    DFGTC , 1 minute ago link

    Obey or die ... that's the ethos of the U.S. elite, these days ... Tulsi can't fight that.

    https://soundcloud.com/daniel-sullivan-505714723/little-saigon-report-16-obey-or-die?in=daniel-sullivan-505714723/sets/little-saigon-report

    fightapathy , 3 minutes ago link

    I wonder if Ron Paul feels jealous that Tulsi is getting all the hate he used to get when HE ran for president on the peace platform?

    fightapathy , 5 minutes ago link

    I thought Social Security was "the third rail of politics" but obviously it is now "perpetual war". Anyone daring to touch it is going to be zapped by the corporate media, whose owners are likely majority stockholders of the military industrial complex.

    napper , 11 minutes ago link

    Tulsi Gabbard for 2020 is not enough. You will also need a group of truly knowledgeable, experienced and courageous reformers to fill the cabinet. People who dare to take on the CIA, the MIC, and the pro-Israel lobby. People like Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange ...

    Omega_Man , 12 minutes ago link

    Orange wants to run against some crazy like Hitlery... easy pickings ... he can't win against a sensible person... mericans are tiring of orange... he may be one term if he doesn't deliver on ****.. just get some wall... cheap wall, any wall... move on

    Radical Marijuana , 14 minutes ago link

    The term "neoliberal warmongers" is thus born ...

    Yes, good to add that term to "neoconservative warmongers" because of the degree to which almost all successful politicians have become puppets of the best organized gangsters (due to the long history of the vicious feedback loops of the funding of all aspects of the political processes.) The false fundamental dichotomies and related impossible ideals associated with "liberal" versus conservative" are manifestations of the methods of divide and conquer, which methods are being pushed towards oblivion with their excessive indulgence in the demonization of Russia.

    Welcome To The Wile E Coyote Phase Of American History:

    All of those may be viewed as manifestations of "false flag attacks" whereby the ruling classes drive the people they rule over to fight against boogie men, in ways which therefore backfire badly, by causing the "blowbacks" which those "false flag" presentations of the "public enemies" were originally designed to cause!

    mendigo , 15 minutes ago link

    Running against the fake news is pretty effective. She's pretty effective at staying rational. She needs to establish a bipartisan core who will support her once elected. And some decent appointees. If she has family that she likes she'll need to get them in protective situation. And divest of any assets. I don't know why she would want this task - it's unwinnable.

    Rusticus2.0 , 24 minutes ago link

    Tulsa Gabbard shares the same views on Israel that most of the world outside of the US hold ... that there really is zero difference between the apartheid South Africa regime of 3 decades ago and present day Israel.

    With that said, there is fuckall chance of her ever getting either party's support.

    Sad, because if America changed course on their blind support of Israel today, the backlash would be less extreme than what the future holds when Americans finally realize that they've been duped into supporting a pariah state.

    RKae , 16 minutes ago link

    ...there really is zero difference between the apartheid South Africa regime of 3 decades ago and present day Israel.

    Yup. That would be the result when you're in the same region with a severely low IQ culture.

    Now that the evil SA apartheid is ended, the natives are rising up and showing their sadism and hatred for all manner of civilization. They sing and chant about how much they want to "kill de white man!" But they have NO IDEA what to do once they've done that.

    It's a failed state in the making, and it's happening FAST. If you wanted to horrify me by bringing up the wicked nasty apartheid of SA... Wow.

    Rusticus2.0 , 8 minutes ago link

    Ah, so they steal the land, put the indigenous people in "homelands" and then wonder why those same people are pissed ? I'm neither a black South African living under the Apartheid regime of yesteryear, or a Palestinian driven from his home; but I'm pretty certain that if I had been either; I would have been packing a AK47 and a limpet mine staking out the occupiers shopping malls.

    Stuto , 24 minutes ago link

    Rabid dogs need to be put down.

    napper , 16 minutes ago link

    Too bad, the rabid dogs are firmly in charge of the US government.

    Omega_Man , 28 minutes ago link

    she could beat orange ... orange is afraid of her... so are the zio elite

    Omega_Man , 24 minutes ago link

    mericans voted for orange for certain reasons... health care, no more war... he is not delivering very well... too much time on the wall.. orange is sucked into the wall **** by dems...

    TruthTeller360 , 25 minutes ago link

    Japan has medicare for all. Doctors and nurses are paid by the government. You are sick.. you go to the hospital.. you get treated..and you go home. There is nothing wrong with that. If Japan can pay the doctors, if Germany, France, Nederland, Sweden, England, China, etc, can pay the doctor's salaries, why can't the USA?

    Currently, they spent $50 billions a year destroying Syria. They spent trillion destroying Iraq. They spent billions a year maintaining a military base in Japan while Japanese foot the medical bills of its citizen. Don't you see there something wrong with this picture? If it's to deploy soldiers all around the world and kill people, we have the money. No one complains.

    Yes, medicare for all. Every developed nations does it. And their citizens are not sicker than us. Some of the French, Japanese, German living here in the USA, go home to get treated when they have serious illnesses. They don't want the huge medical bills.

    activisor , 28 minutes ago link

    She appears to speak for a great many Americans who have simply had enough of war, poverty, and fake news.

    [Feb 04, 2019] Iraqis Want No Part of Trump s Iran Obsession by Daniel Larison

    Notable quotes:
    "... An indefinite military presence in Iraq makes no more sense for the U.S. than it does to have one in Syria. Keeping troops in Iraq isn't going to give the U.S. any knowledge about what Iran's government is doing inside its borders, and announcing that their mission is an anti-Iranian one exposes them to potential attack from militias aligned with Tehran ..."
    "... Another country with a large permanent garrison of US Troops to join Japan, Germany, South Korea, etc. how long will this occupation of Iraq last? Five years? Fifty years? We have had Troops in Germany and Japan for 73 years. How long will this continue? For another 100 years? ..."
    "... The neocons will not rest until we have US boots on the ground in every nation on earth. Enough of this foolishness. ..."
    Feb 04, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Trump wants to keep U.S. forces in Iraq so they can "watch" Iran:

    President Trump plans to keep United States troops in Iraq to monitor and maintain pressure on neighboring Iran, committing to an American military presence in the region's war zones even as he moves to withdraw forces from Syria and Afghanistan.

    "I want to be able to watch Iran," Mr. Trump said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation." "We're going to keep watching and we're going to keep seeing and if there's trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things, we're going to know it before they do."

    An indefinite military presence in Iraq makes no more sense for the U.S. than it does to have one in Syria. Keeping troops in Iraq isn't going to give the U.S. any knowledge about what Iran's government is doing inside its borders, and announcing that their mission is an anti-Iranian one exposes them to potential attack from militias aligned with Tehran.

    Many Iraqis already want U.S. forces out of the country now that ISIS has been dealt with, and there will probably be even more demanding our withdrawal if Trump tries to keep U.S. forces there for this purpose.

    Trump's suggestion that Iran might "do nuclear weapons" is more of the same propaganda that he and his officials have been pushing for months. Iran is unable to develop and build nuclear weapons because it is complying with the nuclear deal that Trump reneged on. Thanks to the nuclear deal, the IAEA is able to conduct very intrusive inspections as part of the most rigorous verification regime, and they would be the first to know if Iran were violating the restrictions set down in the JCPOA.

    It is unlikely that the Iraqi government is going to agree to a U.S. presence that is being justified by hostility to its neighbor. Iraq's president has already said that the U.S. military presence is permitted in the country only for the purposes of counter-terrorism:

    Iraq's government wants to maintain good relations with Iran, and it isn't going to go along with an anti-Iranian agenda that can only harm Iraq's economic and security interests. Many of Iran's neighbors are not as obsessed with and hostile to Iran as the Trump administration, and Iraq definitely doesn't want to be a front-line state in some anti-Iranian coalition. Trump's proposal would needlessly put U.S. troops at greater risk in Iraq, and it would gain the U.S. nothing except more resentment from Iraqis.

    Uncle Billy February 4, 2019 at 10:59 am

    Another country with a large permanent garrison of US Troops to join Japan, Germany, South Korea, etc. how long will this occupation of Iraq last? Five years? Fifty years? We have had Troops in Germany and Japan for 73 years. How long will this continue? For another 100 years?

    The neocons will not rest until we have US boots on the ground in every nation on earth. Enough of this foolishness.

    Bill H , says: February 4, 2019 at 11:33 am
    Where in Iraq is he watching Iran from? One cannot help but think back to Sarah Palin's, "I can see Russia from my house."

    [Feb 04, 2019] Angry Bear " Reagan's Tax Cuts and the Volcker Recession

    Feb 04, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

    Reagan's Tax Cuts and the Volcker Recession

    Dan Crawford | January 30, 2019 11:35 am

    Politics Taxes/regulation (Dan here lifted from Robert's Stochastic Thoughts ) Reagan's Tax Cuts and the Volcker Recession Max Boot is a candidate member of the Rubin Gerson can't be a conservative anymore, because I always agree with them club of Washington Post columnists. But he is a bit confused about US macroeconmic history and macroeconomics. He wrote"The deficit spending of the Reagan years was at least justified because it boosted the economy out of a deep recession " As a matter of timing, this can't be right. The Kemp Roth tax cut was enacted in 1981. Real GDP peaked in 1981q3 -- the tax cut corresponds to the beginning of the recession not the end.

    The part that Boot misses (because it has been unimportant for the past 10 years) is monetary policy. It is possible to cause a severe recession in spite of fiscal stimulus by driving the Federal Funds rate up over 19 %. The combination of loose fiscal and very tight monetary policy caused huge real interest rates and a collapse of investment. It also caused an over-valued dollar, a huge surge in imports and deindustrialization.

    pgl, January 30, 2019 5:05 pm

    Towards the end of 1980 Volcker was backing off his initial tight monetary policy and the economy inched towards a recovery from that initial recession. But when Volcker saw Kemp-Roth, he feared excess aggregate demand and overreacted which led to the 1982. If Max Boot does not understand this – he is just another uninformed idiot. Now if he does get this – he is just another supply side liar.

    Likbez

    @pgl January 30, 2019, 5:05 pm

    > ...when Volcker saw Kemp-Roth, he feared excess aggregate demand and overreacted which led to the 1982. If Max Boot does not understand this – he is just another uninformed idiot. Now if he does get this – he is just another supply-side liar. "

    That's probably the most concise explanation which is enough for the given case. Thank you!

    Max Boots is a "wardog" --a rabid lobbyist of MIC, and, as such, is as far from economics (even voodoo supply side economics) as one can get.

    Also like all neocons, he is statist par excellence. If not MIC money, he would probably be forced to paint houses for a living, instead of writing nonsense in Bezos blog.

    [Feb 04, 2019] It case of Venzuella coup it looks like we are dealing with a "Skripal tactic": do something so ridiculously stupid and offensive that it places all your vassals before a stark choice: either submit and pretend like you did not notice or, alternatively, dare to say something and face with wrath of Uncle Shmuel (the Neocon's version of Uncle Sam) by The Saker

    Notable quotes:
    "... This reminds me of the gerontocrats of the Soviet Politburo in the worst stagnation years who had to appoint the likes of Chernenko to top positions. ..."
    "... The one thing the Mr MAGA's administration has in common with the late Brezhevian Politburo is its total inability to get anything done. My wife refers to the folks in the White House (since Dubya came to power) as the " gang that couldn't shoot straight " and she is right (she always is!): they just can't really get anything done anymore – all their half-assed pseudo-successes are inevitably followed by embarrassing failures. ..."
    Feb 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Remember the almost universal reaction of horror when Bolton was appointed as National Security Advisor? Well, apparently, either the Neocons completely missed that, which I doubt, or they did what they always do and decided to double-down by retrieving Elliott Abrams from storage and appointing him US Special Envoy to Venezuela. I mean, yes, of course, the Neocons are stupid and sociopathic enough not to ever care about others, but in this case I think that we are dealing with a "Skripal tactic": do something so ridiculously stupid and offensive that it places all your vassals before a stark choice: either submit and pretend like you did not notice or, alternatively, dare to say something and face with wrath of Uncle Shmuel (the Neocon's version of Uncle Sam).

    And it worked, in the name of "solidarity" or whatever else, the most faithful lackeys of the Empire immediate fell in line behind the latest US aggression against a sovereign nation in spite of the self-evident fact that this aggression violates every letter of the most sacred principles of international law. This is exactly the same tactic as when they make you clean toilets with a toothbrush or do push-ups in the mud during basic training: not only to condition you to total obedience, but to make you publicly give up any semblance of dignity.

    ...Finally, these appointments also show that the senior-Neocons are frightened and paranoid as there are still plenty of very sharp junior-Neocon folks to chose from in the US, yet they felt the need to get Abrams from conservation and place him in a key position in spite of the strong smell of naphthalene emanating from him. This reminds me of the gerontocrats of the Soviet Politburo in the worst stagnation years who had to appoint the likes of Chernenko to top positions.

    The one thing the Mr MAGA's administration has in common with the late Brezhevian Politburo is its total inability to get anything done. My wife refers to the folks in the White House (since Dubya came to power) as the " gang that couldn't shoot straight " and she is right (she always is!): they just can't really get anything done anymore – all their half-assed pseudo-successes are inevitably followed by embarrassing failures.

    [Feb 04, 2019] There are various elite groups jockeying for power, but Intelligence community remains tha core of the Deep State

    Feb 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    renfro , says: February 3, 2019 at 10:50 pm GMT

    @Carlton Meyer

    is the main weapon used by the Deep State

    LOL Deep State is a term used by the simple minded. There is no 'deep state' there is however a shadow government and it is made up of various groups all jockeying for their own interest.

    We have the 'Establishment..i.e. the two parties who want to maintain their political power. We have the Corporate Elites and Globalist ' who want to control the world's commerce and economies. We have Wall Street who doesnt want any restrictions on their financial crimes. We have Domestic Business Interest who want laws and policies favorable to them. We have Foreign Interest who want to use the US for their country.

    Sometimes they join forces when their interest coincide, sometimes they don't.

    Outside of this shadow government we have Ideological Activist of various kinds that can be useful or not to the Establishment, the Globalist, Wall Street, Domestic Business Interest and Foreign Interest.

    All of the above are why we cant and don't have coherent policies on anything foreign or domestic.

    People like you who want to ascribe everything to some giant conspiracy in the CIA help to dumb people down , its easier for the lazy to have one or two big scary entities to blame. You cant even explain what the CIA conspiracy is can you? Tell us how the CIA maintains their conspiracy against the US and what their goal is. How does the CIA maintain their secret agenda when the CIA is subject to new CIA directors with every change of presidents and parties?

    Come on tell us all how it is done.

    [Feb 04, 2019] A great example of waste and corruption in the US military is the plan to rebuild and reopen Tyndall Air Force base

    Notable quotes:
    "... Now add numerous different 'companies' with their own books and stupendous amounts of transfers between them. That in a nutshell is not just the Pentagon but the whole US financial economy. ..."
    "... It also smacks of distorted priorities when the US military can fund and construct a small town sized base with a private 18 hole golf course, a multi room cinema, a McDonalds and a Burger King in faraway Iraq while the US government can't find enough funds to re pave a major road just outside of Washington DC. ..."
    Feb 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Carlton Meyer , says: Website February 3, 2019 at 6:13 am GMT

    @bluedog There are thousands of examples, but here is a recent one from my blog:

    Feb 2, 2019 -- USAF to Reopen Unneeded Airbase

    A great example of waste and corruption in the US military is the plan to rebuild and reopen Tyndall Air Force base. The number of aircraft in the USAF has fallen nearly in half over the past 20 years, so it has far too many airbases that are expensive to operate. For example, after F-22 bases were selected only half as many F-22s were procured as planned, so all F-22 bases have ample room for more aircraft.

    Last year, Tyndall Air Force F-22 base in Florida was destroyed by a hurricane. Tyndall's F-22s were quickly relocated to other bases. Some questioned why such expensive aircraft were based in an area with hurricanes since several F-22s undergoing maintenance were destroyed. Nevertheless, the Air Force just announced at least $3 billion will be spent over five years to rebuild and reopen unneeded and poorly located Tyndall!

    Politics are important and the base is a mess, but the Air Force should have proposed spending a couple billion to clean up Tyndall and prepare it for industrial or other productive private sector uses. But our Congress and Pentagon are so selfish and corrupt they don't give a damn about wasting money. Just bill the taxpayers and always blame poor readiness and accidents on a lack of funding!

    Another Anon , says: February 3, 2019 at 12:25 pm GMT
    @bluedog As much as I support the notion that the Pentagon is awash in corruption, the media reports about missing trillions are incorrect and the result of either deliberate misrepresentation or (more likely) the lack of competence on the part of those reporting to comprehend complicated material.

    The reports originated from the recent audit work done on the Pentagon. I'm not sure exactly how long a period this covered (and to be honest, can't be bothered to look it up right now) but it was a 10-20 year period.

    Included in the preliminary reports was the unaccounted for adjustments totaling up to several trillions of dollars. Here's the thing most people reporting on this fail to grasp, adjustments are not expenditures. There a bookkeeping gimmick to balance the books.

    The debit and credit side need to be balanced out. This is what adjustments do. They balance the books. But as they can appear on either the credit or the debit side and on both sides at the same time, they can be used to artificially inflate the books (to make a company look more valuable than it is) or to hide real expenses. More likely in the case of the Pentagon, due to systemic failures of accurately forecasting (real) expenditures, inability to stick to budgets and ignoring (at least some) of the financial paperwork needed to satisfy the accountant, they had to make numerous adjustments all over the place to balance their books.

    In addition, it is highly likely that these trillions include the same adjustment multiple times, not because 'it' (what ever it is) happened multiple times, but because it is included in the books of each level in the Pentagon hierarchy that reports its finances independently.
    For example, a specific ship in the Navy spends more on their operational cruise than it should have. This means adjustments on its financial report. The fleet it belongs to also has to adjust its books. The US Navy also has to include the adjustment and ultimately the overall Pentagon books will include it too. The same adjustment reported multiple times.
    It also works if the ship spends LESS than was budgeted for. A surplus also requires an adjustment in the books with the same result as above.

    Last (purely theoretical) example; let's say you have 3 companies. You put $ 1 million in company A.

    You transfer this in batches to company B. You put in the books (of company A) as 'reservations', ie money to be spend later. When this comes into company B, you put it in the books as 'investments' ie implying the money is to used by company B for expenditures. Again you transfer this in batches, this time to company C, again as 'reservations'. You book them as 'investments' in company C and guess what, you then transfer these into company A as 'reservations'.

    Company A now has an additional $ 1M coming into it which you label 'investments'. The value of company A now appears to be $ 2M ($ 1M investments from company C and $ 1M in reservations) as it it not evident from the books of ONLY company A that it is the same $ 1M. You need to see all of the books to make sense of what is happening, in this case to distinguish between what are real revenue and expenses and what is just pumping around of the same money.

    Now add numerous different 'companies' with their own books and stupendous amounts of transfers between them. That in a nutshell is not just the Pentagon but the whole US financial economy.

    Note for the accountants out there, I know, the last example is extremely simplified. It merely serves to illustrate the subject in an easily understood manner.

    Amon , says: February 3, 2019 at 2:09 pm GMT
    @Johnny Rico I believe they are referring to the practice of diverting funds that would otherwise go to maintain vital infrastructure, health care services and sanitation to over purchase military equipment by the billions in order to maintain a high level of income for the armaments industry.

    It also smacks of distorted priorities when the US military can fund and construct a small town sized base with a private 18 hole golf course, a multi room cinema, a McDonalds and a Burger King in faraway Iraq while the US government can't find enough funds to re pave a major road just outside of Washington DC.

    They could also be talking about the weird practice of US tax money getting flushed down the toilet by funding one army project after another that always, always goes over budget, under delivers on promises, breaks down too easy and can't fight off decade old tech if they don't cancel it after a billion or so is lost.

    As for me, when I look at the US, I shake my head when I notice that the military industrial complex and the Government have become one and the same thanks to the revolving door between private companies and US Gov offices.

    MEFOBILLS , says: February 3, 2019 at 8:58 pm GMT
    @AnonFromTN Just imagine for a second that everything "Made in China" disappears from the US stores. Then ask: why is the superior indispensable democratic country cannot supply its citizens with all this crap? Why does it have to rely on communist dictatorship to produce so much, from nails, electric bulbs, and appliances to clothes?

    I can answer this, and it wasn't always that way. Listen to Linda Ronstadt's lyrics.

    The superior indispensable country became a liberal democracy in 1912 with the advent of Wilson's progressive era reforms. The 16'th amendment is used to back up the instability of banks -- remember TARP? 17'th is used to make Senators into populists and hence break state power. Senators then become easy to bribe and maneuver as they cannot be recalled by their state Legislature, and no longer do the bidding of their voters. Federal Reserve Act, IRS, March to War, and so on. Women's suffrage made easy to maneuver and emotionally driven women prey for the tribe.

    It takes awhile for some things to manifest. The U.S. export of Jobs and American Patrimony began under Clinton. The idea was for Wall Street to make some wage arbitrage. The Wall Street China/China gambit then began, and transplanted companies exported from China at just under the American price. The Patrimony of America was gifted to China, all of the knowledge from the past was monetized for today, so the future was screwed.

    This is yet another reason (how many do you need) for our hand rubbing friends to be disallowed from ever being near money or finance.

    Justinian of Byzantium prevented Jews from being in government, teaching in schools, or in counting houses -- what goes for banking today.

    This still didn't work for us, because their descendants from Pale of Settlement, immigrated to U.S. to become today's Neo-Cons.

    [Feb 04, 2019] Why does everyone make Trump out to be a victim, poor ol Trump, he's being screwed by all those people he himself appointed, poor ol persecuted Trump. Sounds like our Jewish friends with all the victimization BS.

    Notable quotes:
    "... Why does everyone make Trump out to be a victim, poor ol Trump, he's being screwed by all those people he himself appointed, poor ol persecuted Trump. Sounds like our Jewish friends with all the victimization BS. ..."
    "... I think Israel is just a capitalist creation, nothing to do with Jews, just a foothold in he middle east for Wall St to have a base to control the oil and gas there, they didn't create Israel until they discovered how much oil was there, and realized how much control over the world it would give them to control it. ..."
    "... It is the love of money, the same thing the Bible warned us about. Imperialism/globalism is the latest stage of capitalism, that is what all of this is about, follow the money. ..."
    Feb 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    redmudhooch , says: January 31, 2019 at 1:30 am GMT

    I heartily dislike and find despicable the socialist government of Maduro, just as I did Hugo Chavez when he was in power. I have some good friends there, one of whom was a student of mine when I taught in Argentina many years ago, and he and his family resolutely oppose Maduro. Those socialist leaders in Caracas are tin-pot dictator wannabees who have wrecked the economy of that once wealthy country; and they have ridden roughshod over the constitutional rights of the citizens. My hope has been that the people of Venezuela, perhaps supported by elements in the army, would take action to rid the country of those tyrants.

    Hard to take this guy seriously when he spouts Fox News level propaganda.

    Why does everyone make Trump out to be a victim, poor ol Trump, he's being screwed by all those people he himself appointed, poor ol persecuted Trump. Sounds like our Jewish friends with all the victimization BS.

    Its clear that voting no longer works folks, this is an undemocratic and illegitimate "government" we have here. We let them get away with killing JFK, RFK, MLK, Vietnam, we let them get away with 9/11, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria. They've made a mess in Africa. All the refugees into Europe, all the refugees from Latin America that have already come from CIA crimes, more will come.
    We wouldn't need a wall if Wall St would stop with their BS down there!

    You can't just blame Jews, yes there are lots of Jews in Corporate America, bu t not all of them are, and there are lots of Jews who speak out against this. We were doing this long before Israel came into existence. You can't just blame everything one one group, I think Israel/Zionist are responsible for a lot of BS, but you can't exclude CIA, Wall St, Corporations, Banks, The MIC either. Its not just one group, its all of them. They're all evil, they're imperialists and they're all capitalists.

    I think Israel is just a capitalist creation, nothing to do with Jews, just a foothold in he middle east for Wall St to have a base to control the oil and gas there, they didn't create Israel until they discovered how much oil was there, and realized how much control over the world it would give them to control it.

    Those people moving to Israel are being played, just like the "Christian Zionists" here are, its a cult. Most "Jews" are atheists anyhow, and it seems any ol greedy white guy can claim to be a Jew. So how do you solve a "Jewish Problem" if anybody can claim to be a Jew? I think solving the capitalist problem would be a little easier to enforce.

    All of the shills can scream about communists, socialists and marxists all they want. Capitalism is the problem always has been always will be. Its a murderous, immoral, unsustainable system that encourages greed, it is a system who's driving force is maximizing profits, and as such the State controlled or aligned with Corporations is the most advanced form of capitalism because it is the most profitable. They're raping the shit out of us, taking our money to fund their wars, so they can make more money while paying little to no taxes at all. Everything, everyone here complains about is caused by CAPITALISM, but nobody dares say it, they've been programmed since birth to think that way.

    We should nationalize our oil and gas, instead of letting foreigners come in and steal it, again paying little or no taxes on it, then selling the oil they took from our country back to us. Russia and Venezuela do it, Libya did it, Iraq did it, and they used the money for the people of the country, they didn't let the capitalists plunder their wealth like the traitors running our country. We're AT LEAST $21 trillion in the hole now from this wonderful system of ours, don't you think we should try something else? Duh!

    It is the love of money, the same thing the Bible warned us about. Imperialism/globalism is the latest stage of capitalism, that is what all of this is about, follow the money. Just muh opinion

    Regime Change and Capitalism: https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/07/regime-change-and-capitalism/

    [Feb 04, 2019] Trump logic of betrayal of his voters

    Feb 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    peterAUS , says: January 30, 2019 at 11:12 pm GMT

    @RVBlake

    A guy on ZH explained it well, I guess:

    The opposition hates me. I can do no right. The Trumptards blindly support me. I can do no wrong. There are not enough independent thinkers to make a difference as the two main sides bitterly fight each other over every minute, meaningless issue. I can pretty much do as I please without consequence ..like pay off all my buddies and pander to the jews/globalist/elites.
    I'd add: and by doing the last, I could cut a deal with the real TPTBs as to for what happens after I leave White House.

    [Feb 04, 2019] US Sanctions as a Tool To Perpetuate Neocolonialism

    Feb 04, 2019 | original.antiwar.com

    US Sanctions as a Tool To Perpetuate Neocolonialism

    by Nauman Sadiq Posted on February 02, 2019 January 31, 2019 It's an evident fact that neocolonial powers are ruled by behemoth corporations whose wealth is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, far more than the total GDP of many developing nations. The status of these multinational corporations as dominant players in international politics gets official imprimatur when the Western governments endorse the congressional lobbying practice of so-called "special interest" groups, which is a euphemism for corporate interests.

    Since the Western governments are nothing but the mouthpiece of business interests on international political and economic forums, therefore any national or international entity which hinders or opposes the agenda of corporate interests is either coerced into accepting their demands or gets sidelined.

    In 2013, the Manmohan Singh's government of India had certain objections to further opening up to the Western businesses. The Business Roundtable, which is an informal congregation of major US businesses and together holds a net wealth of $6 trillion, held a meeting with the representatives of the Indian government and literally coerced it into accepting unfair demands of the Western corporations.

    The developing economies, such as India and Pakistan, are always hungry for foreign direct investment (FDI) to sustain economic growth, and this investment mostly comes from the Western corporations. When the Business Roundtables or the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) form pressure groups and engage in "collective bargaining" activities, the nascent and fragile developing economies don't have a choice but to toe their line.

    State sovereignty, that sovereign nation states are at liberty to pursue independent policies, particularly economic and trade policies, is a myth. Just like the ruling elites of the developing countries which maintain a stranglehold and monopoly over domestic politics; similarly, the neocolonial powers and multinational corporations control international politics and the global economic order.

    Any state in the international arena which dares to transgress the trade and economic policies laid down by neocolonial powers and multinational corporations becomes an international pariah like Castro's Cuba, Mugabe's Zimbabwe; or more recently, Maduro's Venezuela.

    Venezuela has one of the largest known oil reserves in the world. Even though the mainstream media's pundits hold the socialist policies of President Nicolas Maduro responsible for economic mismanagement in Venezuela, fact of the matter is that hyperinflation in its economy is the effect of US sanctions against Venezuela which have been put in place since the time of late President Hugo Chavez.

    Another case in point is Iran which was cut off from the global economic system from 2006 to 2015, and then again after May last year when President Donald Trump annulled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), because of Iran's supposed nuclear ambitions. Good for Iran that it also has one of the largest oil and gas resources, otherwise it would have been insolvent by now.

    Such is the power of Washington-led global financial system, especially the banking sector, and the significance of petrodollar, because the global oil transactions are pegged in the US dollars all over the world, and all the major oil bourses are also located in the Western financial districts.

    The crippling "third party" economic sanctions on Iran from 2006 to 2015 have brought to the fore the enormous power that the Western financial institutions and the petrodollar as a global reserve currency wields over the global financial system.

    It bears mentioning that the Iranian nuclear negotiations were as much about Iran's nuclear program as they were about its ballistic missile program, which is an equally dangerous conventional threat to Israel and the Gulf's petro-monarchies, just across the Persian Gulf.

    Despite the sanctions being unfair, Iran felt the heat so much that it remained engaged in negotiations throughout the nearly decade-long period of sanctions, and such was the crippling effect of those "third party" sanctions on Iran's economy that had it not been for its massive oil and gas reserves, and some Russian, Chinese and Turkish help in illicitly buying Iranian oil, it could have defaulted due to the sanctions.

    Notwithstanding, after the brutal assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, and the clear hand of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the murder, certain naïve political commentators of the mainstream media came up with a ludicrous suggestion that Washington should impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia.

    As in the case of aforementioned Iran sanctions, sanctioning Saudi Arabia also seems plausible; however, there is a caveat: Iran is only a single oil-rich state which has 160 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day (mbpd) of crude oil.

    On the other hand, the Persian Gulf's petro-monarchies are actually three oil-rich states. Saudi Arabia with its 266 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and 10 mbpd of daily crude oil production, and UAE and Kuwait with 100 billion barrels of proven reserves, each, and 3 mbpd of daily crude oil production, each. Together, the share of the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) amounts to 466 billion barrels, almost one-third of the world's 1477 billion barrels of total proven oil reserves.

    Therefore, although imposing economic sanctions on the Gulf states might sound like a good idea on paper, the relationship between the Gulf's petro-monarchies and the industrialized world is that of a consumer-supplier relationship. The Gulf states are the suppliers of energy and the industrialized world is its consumer, hence the Western powers cannot sanction their energy suppliers and largest investors.

    If anything, the Gulf's petro-monarchies had "sanctioned" the Western powers in the past by imposing the oil embargo in 1973 after the Arab-Israel War. The 1973 Arab oil embargo against the West lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on the export of crude oil outside the US borders, and began keeping sixty-day stock of reserve fuel for strategic and military needs.

    Recently, some very upbeat rumors about the shale revolution have been circulating in the media. However, the shale revolution is primarily a natural gas revolution. It has increased the probable recoverable resources of natural gas by 30%. The shale oil, on the other hand, refers to two starkly different kinds of energy resources: firstly, the solid kerogen – though substantial resources of kerogen have been found in the US Green River formations, the cost of extracting liquid crude from solid kerogen is so high that it is economically unviable for at least a hundred years; secondly, the tight oil which is blocked by shale – it is a viable energy resource but the reserves are so limited, roughly 4 billion barrels in Texas and North Dakota, that it will run out in a few years.

    More than the size of oil reserves, it is about per barrel extraction cost, which determines the profits for the multinational oil companies. And in this regard, the Persian Gulf's crude oil is the most profitable. Further, regarding the supposed US energy independence after the purported shale revolution, the US produced 11 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil in the first quarter of 2014, which was more than the output of Saudi Arabia and Russia, each of which produces around 10 million bpd. But the US still imported 7.5 million bpd during the same period, which was more than the oil imports of France and Britain put together. More than the total volume of oil production, the volume which an oil-producing country exports determines its place in the hierarchy of petroleum and the Gulf's petro-monarchies constitute the top tier of that pyramid.

    Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.

    [Feb 03, 2019] Trump Should Call Congress's Bluff on Our Endless Wars by W. James Antle III

    Notable quotes:
    "... Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history, making any withdrawal seem anything but "precipitous." Syria hasn't even been authorized by Congress. In both cases, our men and women in the armed forces have already achieved the goals that are militarily attainable. "It doesn't get much more pathetic," Congressman Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, said of the Senate vote. ..."
    "... taken at face value, it inverts Congress's constitutional war powers by allowing lawmakers to shirk their power to declare war while frustrating presidential efforts to pursue peace. ..."
    "... When Trump twice bombed Syria without congressional approval, the Beltway applaude ..."
    "... The one bright spot in the Senate vote was that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar were all on the side of withdrawal. ..."
    "... Trump has heeded the hawks in his party -- and inside his own administration -- on Yemen, Iran, and perhaps soon Venezuela. Breaking free of their stranglehold could help put his presidency back on track. Otherwise he will end up ceding foreign policy to the progressives who want to usher him out of office either by impeachment or electoral defeat. ..."
    "... Trump's call to bring the troops home has left him isolated in Washington. If he makes withdrawal a priority in the State of the Union, he may find that he has more company throughout the country than he thinks. ..."
    "... Seriously, he's got too many warmongers in his administration to go after Congress. If he's serious about ending these wars he needs to clean house in his administration of the perpetual warmongers. Once he's done that then go after Congress. To do anything less is Trump talking it one way, while his administration does something completely different. ..."
    "... I believe the above quote shows that there are lawbreakers and warmongers in both political parties. None of the above countries "Afghanistan and Syria" invaded or attacked America. Therefore I believe they are in violation of international law. ..."
    Feb 03, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    The Senate has toothlessly disapproved of his troop withdrawals. At the State of the Union, he should respond.

    Will Trump Hold Firm on His Syria Pullout? Hawkish Democrats, Antiwar Republicans?

    Who says Democrats and Republicans can't agree on anything? Washington closed ranks Thursday behind two wars President Donald Trump has proposed winding down as the Senate voted 68-23 to advance a resolution warning against "precipitous withdrawal" from Afghanistan and Syria.

    Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history, making any withdrawal seem anything but "precipitous." Syria hasn't even been authorized by Congress. In both cases, our men and women in the armed forces have already achieved the goals that are militarily attainable. "It doesn't get much more pathetic," Congressman Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, said of the Senate vote.

    The resolution is non-binding, like the Democrats' toothless measures to stop George W. Bush's Iraq "surge" over a decade ago. Still, taken at face value, it inverts Congress's constitutional war powers by allowing lawmakers to shirk their power to declare war while frustrating presidential efforts to pursue peace.

    When Trump twice bombed Syria without congressional approval, the Beltway applaude d. Veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward's book repeats the president's probing questions about how long we must stay in Afghanistan with an air of disbelief better suited to "fake news" shared on Facebook. Trump's call late last year to bring troops home from both war-torn countries elicited bipartisan criticism and the abrupt resignation of Pentagon chief James Mattis.

    To make matters worse, only three Republican senators -- Ted Cruz of Texas, John Kennedy of Louisiana, and Mike Lee of Utah -- voted to stand with their president against these endless nation-building exercises. Kentucky's Rand Paul, who was not present for the vote, would surely have been a fourth. Even Chuck Schumer, the third straight Senate Democratic leader to have voted for the Iraq war, opposed this anti-withdrawal amendment.

    During the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Trump should call Congress's bluff. He should dare legislators to do their jobs and vote to authorize continuing these wars -- or he will end them. Put the onus on the House and Senate to fulfill their constitutional duties.

    Trump may find that he has unlikely allies in his would-be 2020 Democratic presidential foes. The one bright spot in the Senate vote was that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar were all on the side of withdrawal. How many ambitious Democrats will vote to give a Republican president a blank check for war as an election year approaches?

    GOP lawmakers will have to decide whether they stand with their president -- who wants to cut America's multi-trillion dollar losses in the Middle East -- and rank-and-file Republican voters in ending these wars. Those who want to stay in Syria and Afghanistan quite likely cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton.

    Will Trump Hold Firm on His Syria Pullout? Hawkish Democrats, Antiwar Republicans?

    Up until now, Trump's big fight with the establishment has been over immigration and the border wall. Amid his belated turn towards the more populist parts of his program, he should not forget to spend political capital on America's wars as well. Trump now says Republican congressional leaders misled him on the wall. It has been even worse on foreign policy.

    Partisans are dug in on the border. But on war, Trump has some opportunities to win over converts. Will House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sit stone-faced behind him as he agrees with the Progressive Caucus on foreign policy?

    Much is riding on whether a course correction is possible in Afghanistan and Syria. Trump has heeded the hawks in his party -- and inside his own administration -- on Yemen, Iran, and perhaps soon Venezuela. Breaking free of their stranglehold could help put his presidency back on track. Otherwise he will end up ceding foreign policy to the progressives who want to usher him out of office either by impeachment or electoral defeat.

    Trump's call to bring the troops home has left him isolated in Washington. If he makes withdrawal a priority in the State of the Union, he may find that he has more company throughout the country than he thinks.

    W. James Antle III is editor of .

    PAX February 1, 2019 at 12:56 pm

    Mearsheimer has some main tenets of realist foreign policy include:

    The lobby and its fellow travelers are not used to being told no. Time for them to create and fund volunteer corps and do their own dirty work on their dime and at their own risk.

    MikeCLT , , February 1, 2019 at 1:14 pm
    Trump should demand Congress debate and authorize the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. It would be good policy and good politics. And good for the Constitution.

    Fred Bowman , , February 1, 2019 at 1:20 pm

    Wouldn't hold my breath on Trump doing any such thing on ending of the Middle Eastern Wars. Seriously, he's got too many warmongers in his administration to go after Congress. If he's serious about ending these wars he needs to clean house in his administration of the perpetual warmongers. Once he's done that then go after Congress. To do anything less is Trump talking it one way, while his administration does something completely different.

    Stephen J. , , February 1, 2019 at 1:25 pm

    Very concise article.

    The article states: "Who says Democrats and Republicans can't agree on anything? Washington closed ranks Thursday behind two wars President Donald Trump has proposed winding down as the Senate voted 68-23 to advance a resolution warning against "precipitous withdrawal" from Afghanistan and Syria."

    -- -- -- -

    I believe the above quote shows that there are lawbreakers and warmongers in both political parties. None of the above countries "Afghanistan and Syria" invaded or attacked America. Therefore I believe they are in violation of international law. More info at link below.

    http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-facts-on-crimes-of-war-criminals.html

    Mark Thomason , , February 1, 2019 at 1:27 pm

    I am extremely disappointed that both of my State's Democratic Senators voted to keep the wars going.

    However, I'm sure they did so only to spite Trump.

    They don't either of them support more Long War. Of course, they don't want to be blamed either in the case of another terrorist attack for not being tough enough. But this vote was not one of principle.

    That means they would not fight for it. They just did it. I suspect much of the vote in the Senate was like that, and that the rather large number of non-votes is because of that.

    One Guy , , February 1, 2019 at 2:27 pm

    I agree that we should end the Middle East wars, but the idea of Trump pissing off his sycophants in the GOP Senate, amuses me.

    George Crosley , , February 1, 2019 at 3:01 pm

    During the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Trump should call Congress's bluff. He should dare legislators to do their jobs and vote to authorize continuing these wars -- or he will end them. Put the onus on the House and Senate to fulfill their constitutional duties.

    Would that he would but he won't.

    Mr. Trump shan't read this good advice because it seems he only reads what the Kushners put in front of him and (for the most part) hires only people who despise him–people who are married to the pro-war Blob in DC.

    What a way to operate!

    [Feb 03, 2019] Mocking Mueller's Collusion-Free Collusion Indictment Of Roger Stone

    Feb 03, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Mocking Mueller's Collusion-Free Collusion Indictment Of Roger Stone

    by Tyler Durden Sun, 02/03/2019 - 17:30 19 SHARES Authored by Andrew McCarthy via National Review,

    There was no crime until the investigations started...

    Special Counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of Roger Stone may be the most peculiar document to emerge from the Trump–Russia "collusion" saga. It is an instant classic in the Mueller genre: lots of heavy breathing, then sputtering anti-climax.

    After a 20-page narrative about Russian cyber-ops, WikiLeaks' role as a witting anti-American accomplice, and Trump supporters enthralled by thousands of hacked Democratic emails and visions of the Clinton campaign's implosion, Stone, a comically inept hanger-on, ends up charged with seven process crimes. No espionage, no conspiracy, no commission of any crime until the investigations started.

    This is not to say that obstruction of congressional investigations is trifling. Nor is it to say the accused has a good chance of beating the case. Some of Stone's alleged lies were mind-bogglingly stupid. Why deny written communications with people you've texted a zillion times? Why deny conversations with interlocutors (such as Trump-campaign CEO Steve Bannon) who have no reason to risk a perjury charge to protect you? And don't even get me started on the witness-tampering count, which, if I were Mueller, I'd have hesitated to include for fear of suggesting an insanity defense. ( Do it for Nixon? Pull a "Frank Pentangeli"? )

    That said, the case is overcharged. The tampering count carries a 20-year penalty. Adding an obstruction or false-statements count (five years each) would have given Stone (who is 66 years old) prison exposure of up to 25 years. The most central "colluder" in the Mueller firmament to be bagged so far, George Papadopoulos, was sentenced to a grand total of two weeks' imprisonment. Surely a quarter-century of "potential" incarceration would have sufficed to give prosecutors the "this is serious stuff" headline they crave while allowing for the more representative sentence Stone will eventually receive -- who knows, maybe three weeks? But true to form, Mueller instead included six of these five-year counts -- so the press can report that Stone faces up to 50 years in the slammer.

    This inflated portrait of Stone as a major criminal was further bloated by the scene of his arrest : a well-armed battalion of FBI agents sent to apprehend him as the media, conveniently on hand at 6 a.m., took it all in. But Stone is just a cameo. The big picture is the overarching Trump–Russia investigation. It's still being inflated, too.

    Prosecutors ordinarily do not write an elaborate narrative about crimes they cannot prove. Here, though, Mueller uses Stone as the pretext to spell out the Big Collusion Scheme: Candidate Donald Trump instructs Stone to coordinate with WikiLeaks on the dissemination of Clinton dirt stolen by Russia; Stone directs his associate, Jerome Corsi, to have Corsi's man in London, Ted Malloch, make contact with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, who is holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Malloch must have succeeded, because next thing you know, Corsi is reporting back to Stone: Our friends the Russian hackers have given WikiLeaks all this damaging information on Hillary, including the Podesta emails; it will all be rolled out in October, right before the election.

    It's a sensational story. Only . . . it's just a story.

    Mueller doesn't even pretend he can prove it. No shame in that: During a long investigation, prosecutors always develop a theory of the case. Often, the hypothesis doesn't pan out. No problem. You narrow your indictment down to what you can prove and call it a day. In Stone's case, that would dictate omitting the ambitious collusion narrative and stripping down to a two-page obstruction-of-Congress indictment. Instead, Mueller gives us the fever dream: Stone as a key cog in the collusion wheel. Where reality intrudes, the prosecutors float suggestions they cannot prove or leave out key details that blow up the narrative.

    The special counsel could have contented himself with easy-to-prove false-statements charges against Stone: lying about whether his WikiLeaks communications were documented in writing; lying about whether he asked his friend Randy Credico to pass a request for specific Hillary Clinton information to Assange; lying about whether he ever told the Trump campaign about his WikiLeaks conversations with Credico.

    But no, Mueller strains to accuse Stone of falsely denying that he had a second WikiLeaks "intermediary" -- whom the indictment indicates was Jerome Corsi , Stone's Infowars associate. Depending on how charitable you want to be, this claim is either risibly weak, flatly wrong, or dependent on a distortion of the word "intermediary." To repeat, the "intermediary" thread adds nothing to the case against Stone. It is a pretext for weaving the collusion narrative without having to prove it.

    To amplify the indictment a bit with reporting by the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross , Credico -- a left-wing comedian and radio host -- got access to Assange through a radical lawyer, Margaret Ratner Kunstler , who has done work for WikiLeaks. That apparently did not happen until shortly before August 25, 2016, when Assange appeared as a guest on Credico's radio show. According to the indictment, Credico first texted Stone about Assange's imminent appearance on August 19.

    Prosecutors, however, suggest that Stone had a line into Assange and WikiLeaks starting at least two months earlier. "By in or around June and July 2016," goes the slippery allegation, Stone was telling Trump officials he had information that WikiLeaks possessed damaging Hillary Clinton documents. In Mueller's telling, this makes Stone seem like a potentially valuable WikiLeaks insider when, on July 22, WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of DNC emails. Immediately, a "senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact STONE about any additional releases and what other damaging information [WikiLeaks] had regarding the Clinton campaign."

    If not from Credico, from whom, pray tell, did Stone learn what WikiLeaks was up to? Who is the other intermediary?

    In truth, he didn't need one. He had two sources of information about WikiLeaks -- neither of them Corsi, neither of them sensibly thought of as an "intermediary." These sources go unmentioned in the indictment. Worse, while the prosecutors finger Corsi as Stone's hidden "intermediary," their evidence does not support this claim -- and they know it, so they fudge it.

    Let's start with the two sources Mueller omits.

    Turns out it is not just Stone who was alerted long before the Democratic convention that WikiLeaks might have damaging information on Clinton. Everyone on the planet who cared to be informed about such things knew. On June 12, 2016, in an interview that was widely reported , Assange said that WikiLeaks planned to expose documents relating to Hillary Clinton that could affect the 2016 election. Was Stone, the self-styled dark-politics devotee, pressing sources for an entrée into WikiLeaks? Sure he was. But that doesn't mean he had one. And he didn't need one in order to direct the Trump campaign's attention to WikiLeaks; Assange was calling the world's attention to himself.

    The second omitted source? It was James Rosen, then a top reporter at Fox News -- though Rosen seems to have had no idea he was playing that role. To understand what happened, we need to consider the July 25 Stone–Corsi email that the indictment treats like a smoking gun -- but consider it in the context of an earlier July 25 email that the indictment fails to include.

    As noted above, on July 22, someone very high up in the Trump campaign -- perhaps the candidate himself, though we are not told -- ordered a top campaign official to reach out to Stone. Just three days later, Stone sent Corsi an email with the subject line "Get to [Assange]." Stone exhorted Corsi to try to reach the WikiLeaks leader "at Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending emails . . . they deal with the [Clinton] Foundation allegedly " (emphasis added).

    So why did Stone believe WikiLeaks had Clinton Foundation documents? Well, Stone is acquainted with Charles Ortel , an investor who dabbles in investigative journalism and has focused intently on the Clinton Foundation. Ortel has occasional correspondence with James Rosen. In an email exchange on July 25, Rosen told Ortel, "Am told WikiLeaks will be doing a massive dump of HRC emails related to the CF [i.e., the Clinton Foundation] in September." Ortel proceeded to forward this email to Stone. Only after seeing Rosen's email did Stone contact Corsi to say that Assange "allegedly" had Clinton Foundation emails that Corsi should try to acquire.

    Obviously, Stone did not need a WikiLeaks intermediary to give him a heads-up about a possible Clinton Foundation dump. He happened upon that information indirectly from a member of the press (Rosen), through an acquaintance (Ortel). And he did not need Corsi as an intermediary -- Stone is the one who alerted Corsi, not the other way around.

    The indictment says that, shortly after receiving Stone's July 25 email imploring him to make contact with Assange, Corsi forwarded it to a "supporter of the Trump campaign" in the United Kingdom -- reported by Chuck Ross to be Ted Malloch, a London-based American who used to be a business professor at Oxford and has ties to British populists. Subsequently, on Sunday July 31, Stone emailed Corsi to "call me MON," stressing that Corsi's associate should "see [Assange]."

    Well, did that happen? Did Corsi's man Malloch make contact with WikiLeaks?

    If you read nothing but Mueller's indictment, you assume he must have. After all, the next thing we are told about is Corsi's email report to Stone on Tuesday, August 2. Corsi (then vacationing in Italy) wrote: "Word is friend in embassy [i.e., Assange] plans 2 more dumps, one shortly after I'm back [which was to be in mid August]. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging." Corsi added:

    Time to let more than [Podesta] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC [Clinton]. That appears to be game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke -- neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for foundation debacle.

    The implication is clear: Malloch must have reached Assange, gotten the critical information, and passed it along to Corsi so it could be communicated to Stone and the Trump campaign. Corsi is the intermediary! Coordination! Collusion!

    But Mueller is hiding the ball again. The indictment makes no mention of the facts that Malloch denies knowing anything about WikiLeaks , that Corsi denies having any sources with inside knowledge about WikiLeaks, and that prosecutors appear to accept these denials.

    So how did Corsi get the "2 more dumps" of information (or gossip) that he dished to Stone? He made it up -- or, more benignly, he claims to have figured it out on his own. Reportedly , Mueller's prosecutors were as frustrated as they were incredulous over Corsi's unlikely claim. But they don't have a better explanation. In the negotiations over a plea offer (on a charge of lying to investigators), which Corsi has resisted, Mueller's prosecutors drafted an agreed-upon " Statement of the Offense ." In it, Corsi was to admit that "his representations to [Stone], beginning in August 2016, that he had a way of obtaining confidential information from [WikiLeaks] were false."

    Corsi is another strange character in this drama. He is a notorious bomb-thrower, and his memory is spotty. But one can understand why the special counsel seems to accept his story about not having a WikiLeaks source: His information was spectacularly wrong. He surmised that Assange would release information that Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, had serious medical problems; this would be a prelude to devastating disclosures about the Clinton Foundation. Corsi's fever dream never came true, either.

    But how can Corsi have been Stone's intermediary to WikiLeaks if he had no way of obtaining confidential information from WikiLeaks?

    Stone, meantime, points out that neither he nor Corsi made reference to Podesta's emails. He denies any awareness that Assange had them, and plausibly contends that the reference to Podesta in his conversation with Corsi (and in his later tweet on August 21 that "the Podesta's [ sic ] in the barrel" was coming) related to a lobbying company started by John Podesta and his brother Tony. That company had done work for the same Kremlin-backed Ukrainian political party served by Paul Manafort -- Trump's campaign manager, and Stone's former business partner. It was at the very time when Stone and Corsi were discussing WikiLeaks and Podesta that a July 31 New York Times exposé appeared, outlining Manafort's lobbying entanglements with these Ukrainians. Tellingly, Mueller does not contend that Stone's denial of foreknowledge about WikiLeaks' Podesta dump is false.

    Again, understand: It is not just that Mueller can't prove Corsi was Stone's intermediary. Mueller has no need to try to prove it. He has an overwhelming obstruction and witness-tampering case against Stone without it. The indictment's "intermediary" plot line is just a device for prosecutors to spin the Trump–Russia–WikiLeaks collusion yarn. They are careful not to plead it in a conspiracy count; just an "introductory" narrative -- no formal charge, no burden to prove it, and no need to reveal stubborn facts that undermine it. Since it is superfluous to the process charges against Stone, he may not even challenge it. Maybe he will plead guilty, and the narrative will stand as the government's unrebutted version of events.

    And this is just the indictment of a bit player. Makes you look forward to the special counsel's final report, no?

    NeverDemRino , 2 minutes ago link

    Rep.Matt Gaetz gets it, when he Twittered this video: Tucker says it all, about the duplicitous hypocrisy, here:

    https://twitter.com/RepMattGaetz/status/1088895788946804736/video/1

    sidfalco , 5 minutes ago link

    Gestapo Mueller disgraces America.

    Greendawg , 6 minutes ago link

    Mueller doesn't want to know the truth!!! It doesn't get any more black and white!!! https://twitter.com/kimdotcom/status/1015318349188759553?lang=en

    Stan Smith , 9 minutes ago link

    The left loves it's narratives, but leaves something to be desired on substance.

    847328_3527 , 10 minutes ago link

    You have to love this guy, Stone. I hope he continues making a mockery of the farce Meuller witch hunt that has cost taxpayers over $100 million:

    Roger Stone Explains How to Dress for Court

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg_gwyMCXBs

    truthalwayswinsout , 10 minutes ago link

    Mueller is famous for charging crimes that do not exist. The plurality of this cases are overturned on appeal. For those of you who wonder that is 75% plus.

    That alone begs the question of why he has not been disbarred.

    navy62802 , 15 minutes ago link

    Just accept it. The legal/justice system in the US is done. Time to bury it.

    [Feb 02, 2019] Brazil, Fascism and the Left Wing of Neoliberalism

    Huge external debt plus high unemployment represents two vital preconditions of rise far right nationalism and fascism in all its multiple incarnations. In this sence Ulrain, Argentina and Brasil are different links of the common chain of events.
    In a way fascism is a way of reaction of nation deeply in crisis. In essence this is introduction of war time restrictions on political speech and freedoms of the population. The Catch 22 is that often this is done not so much to fight external threat, but top preserve the power of existing financial oligarchy. Which fascist after coming to power quickly include in government and and desire of which are disproportionally obeyed by fascist state.
    What in new in XXI century is the huge growth of power on intelligence agencies which is way represent crippling fascism or neofascism. In a way, then intelligence agencies became political kingmakers (as was the case with the assassination of JFK, impeachment of Nixon, elections of Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, as well as establishing Mueller commission after Trump victory), we can speak about sliding the county of the county toward fascism.
    Notable quotes:
    "... In Italy in the 1920s, repayment of war debts from WWI led to austerity and recession that preceded the rise of fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In Germany, payment of war reparations and repayment of industrial loans limited the ability of the Weimar government to respond to the Great Depression. Liberal governments that facilitated the financialization of industrial economies in the 1920s were left to serve as debt collectors in the capitalist crisis that followed. ..."
    "... The practical problem with doing this is the power of creditors. Debtors that repudiate their debts are closed out of capital markets. The power to create money that is accepted in payment is a privilege of the center countries that also happen to be creditors. Capitalist expansion creates interdependencies that produce immediate, deep shortages if debts aren't serviced. Debt is a weapon whose proceeds can be delivered to one group and the obligation to repay it to another. The U.S. position was expressed when the IMF knowingly made unpayable loans to Ukraine to support a U.S. sponsored coup there in 2015 ..."
    "... Propaganda was developed and refined by Edward Bernays in the 1910s to help the Wilson administration sell WWI to a skeptical public. It has been used by the American government and in capitalist advertising since that time. The idea was to integrate psychology with words and images to get people to act according to the desires and wishes of those putting it forward. ..."
    "... The operational frame of propaganda is instrumental: to use people to achieve ends they had no part in conceiving. The political perspective is dictatorial, benevolent or otherwise. Propaganda has been used by the American government ever since. Similar methods were used by the Italian and German fascists in their to rise to power. ..."
    "... Following WWII, the U.S. brought 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers (and their families) to the U.S. to work for the Department of Defense and American industry through a program called Operation Paperclip . Many were dedicated and enthusiastic Nazis. Some were reported to have been bona fide war criminals. In contrast to liberal / neoliberal assertions that Nazism was irrational politics, the Nazi scientists fit seamlessly into American military production. There was no apparent contradiction between being a Nazi and being a scientist. ..."
    "... A dimensional tension of Nazism lay between romantic myths of an ancient and glorious past and the bourgeois task of moving industrialization and modernity forward. The focus of liberal and neoliberal analysis has been on this mythology as an irrational mode of reason. Missing is that Nazism wouldn't have moved past the German borders if it hadn't had bourgeois basis in the science and technology needed for industrial might. This keeps the broad project within the ontological and administrative premises of liberalism. ..."
    "... The way to fight fascists is to end the threat of fascism. This means taking on Wall Street and the major institutions of Western capitalism ..."
    Feb 02, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    Missing from explanations of the rise of Mr. Bolsonaro is that for the last decade Brazil has experienced the worst economic recession in the country's history (graph below). Fourteen million formerly employed, working age Brazilians are now unemployed. As was true in the U.S. and peripheral Europe from 2008 forward, the liberal response has been austerity as the Brazilian ruling class was made richer and more politically powerful.

    Since 2014, Brazil's public debt/GDP ratio has climbed from 20% to 75% proclaims a worried IMF. That some fair portion of that climb came from falling GDP due to economic austerity mandated by the IMF and Wall Street is left unmentioned. A decade of austerity got liberal President Dilma Rousseff removed from office in 2016 in what can only be called a Wall Street putsch. Perhaps Bolsonaro will tell Wall Street where to stick its loans (not).

    Back in the U.S., everyone knows that the liberalization of finance and trade in the 1990s was the result of political calculations. That this liberalization was/is bipartisan suggests that maybe the political calculations served certain economic interests. Never mind that these interests were given what they asked for and crashed the economy with it. If economic problems result from political calculations, the solution is political -- elect better leaders. If they are driven by economic interests, the solution is to change the way that economic relationships are organized.

    Between 1928 and 1932 German industrial production fell by 58%. By 1933, six million formerly employed German workers were begging in the streets and digging through garbage looking for items to sell. The liberal (Socialist Party) response was half-measures and austerity. Within the liberal frame, the Depression was a political problem to be addressed in the realm of the political. Centrist accommodation defined the existing realm. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the pit of the Great Depression.

    In Brazil in the early-mid 2000s, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, implemented a Left program that pulled twenty million Brazilians out of poverty. The Brazilian economy briefly recovered after Wall Street crashed it in 2008 before Brazilian public debt was used to force the implementation of austerity. Dilma Rousseff capitulated and Brazil re-entered recession. Rousseff was removed from power in 2016. Hemmed in by Wall Street and IMF mandated austerity , any liberal government that might be elected would meet the same fate as Rousseff.

    In Italy in the 1920s, repayment of war debts from WWI led to austerity and recession that preceded the rise of fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In Germany, payment of war reparations and repayment of industrial loans limited the ability of the Weimar government to respond to the Great Depression. Liberal governments that facilitated the financialization of industrial economies in the 1920s were left to serve as debt collectors in the capitalist crisis that followed.

    Since 2008, the fiscal structure of the EU (European Union) combined with wildly unbalanced trade relationships led to a decade of austerity, recession and depression for the European periphery. In the U.S., by 2009 Wall Street was pushing austerity and cuts to Social Security and Medicare as necessary to fiscal stability. The consequences of four decades of financialized neoliberal trade policies were by no means equally shared. Internal and external class relations were made evident through narrowly distributed booms followed by widely distributed busts.

    With the presumed shared goal of ending the threat of fascism:

    The ideological premises behind the logic that claims fascists as the explanation of fascism emerge from liberalism. The term here is meant as description. Liberalism proceeds from specific ontological assumptions. Within this temporal frame, a bit of social logic: If fascists already existed, why didn't fascism? The question of whether to fight fascists or fascism depends on the answer. The essentialist view is that characteristics intrinsic to fascists make them fascists. This is the basis of scientific racism. And it underlies fascist race theory.

    The theory of a strongman who exploits people who have a predisposition towards fascism is essentialist as well if receptivity is intrinsic, e.g. due to psychology, genetics, etc. Liberal-Left commentary in recent years has tended toward the essentialist view -- that fascists are born or otherwise predisposed toward fascism. Unconsidered is that non-fascists are equally determined in this frame. If 'deplorables' were born that way, four decades of neoliberalism is absolved.

    The problem of analogy, the question of what fascism is and how European fascism of the twentieth century bears relation to the present, can't be answered in the liberal frame. The rise and fall of a global radical right have been episodic. It has tied in history to the development of global capitalism in a center-and-periphery model of asymmetrical economic power. Finance from the center facilitates economic expansion until financial crisis interrupts the process. Peripheral governments are left to manage debt repayment with collapsed economies.

    Globally, debt has forced policy convergence between political parties of differing ideologies. European center-left parties have pushed austerity even when ideology would suggest the opposite. In 2015, self-identified Marxists in Greece's SYRIZA party capitulated to the austerity and privatization demands from EU creditors led by Germany. Even Lenin negotiated with Wall Street creditors (on behalf of Russia) in the months after the October Revolution. In a political frame, the solution from below is to elect leaders and parties who will act on their rhetoric.

    The practical problem with doing this is the power of creditors. Debtors that repudiate their debts are closed out of capital markets. The power to create money that is accepted in payment is a privilege of the center countries that also happen to be creditors. Capitalist expansion creates interdependencies that produce immediate, deep shortages if debts aren't serviced. Debt is a weapon whose proceeds can be delivered to one group and the obligation to repay it to another. The U.S. position was expressed when the IMF knowingly made unpayable loans to Ukraine to support a U.S. sponsored coup there in 2015.

    Fascist racialization has analog in existing capitalist class relations. Immigration status, race and gender define a social taxonomy of economic exploitation. Race was invented decades into the Anglo-American manifestation of slavery to naturalize exploitation of Blacks. Gender difference represents the evolution of unpaid to paid labor for women in the capitalist West. Claiming these as causing exploitation gets the temporal sequence wrong. These were / are exploitable classes before explanations of their special status were created.

    This isn't to suggest that capitalist class relations form a complete explanation of fascist racialization. But the ontological premise that 'freezes,' and thereby reifies racialization, is fundamental to capitalism. This relates to the point argued below that the educated German bourgeois, in the form of the Nazi scientists and engineers brought to the U.S. following WWII, found Nazi racialization plausible through what has long been put forward as an antithetical mode of understanding. Put differently, it wasn't just the rabble that found grotesque racial caricatures plausible. The question is why?

    Propaganda was developed and refined by Edward Bernays in the 1910s to help the Wilson administration sell WWI to a skeptical public. It has been used by the American government and in capitalist advertising since that time. The idea was to integrate psychology with words and images to get people to act according to the desires and wishes of those putting it forward.

    The operational frame of propaganda is instrumental: to use people to achieve ends they had no part in conceiving. The political perspective is dictatorial, benevolent or otherwise. Propaganda has been used by the American government ever since. Similar methods were used by the Italian and German fascists in their to rise to power.

    Since WWI, commercial propaganda has become ubiquitous in the U.S. Advertising firms hire psychologists to craft advertising campaigns with no regard for the concern that psychological coercion removes free choice from capitalism. The distinction between political and commercial propaganda is based on intent, not method. Its use by Woodrow Wilson (above) is instructive: a large and vocal anti-war movement had legitimate reasons for opposing the U.S. entry into WWI. The goal of Bernays and Wilson was to stifle political opposition.

    Following WWII, the U.S. brought 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers (and their families) to the U.S. to work for the Department of Defense and American industry through a program called Operation Paperclip . Many were dedicated and enthusiastic Nazis. Some were reported to have been bona fide war criminals. In contrast to liberal / neoliberal assertions that Nazism was irrational politics, the Nazi scientists fit seamlessly into American military production. There was no apparent contradiction between being a Nazi and being a scientist.

    The problem isn't just that many committed Nazis were scientists. Science and technology created the Nazi war machine. Science and technology were fully integrated into the creation and running of the Nazi concentration camps. American race 'science,' eugenics, formed the basis of Nazi race theory. Science and technology formed the functional core of Nazism. And the Nazi scientists and engineers of Operation Paperclip were major contributors to American post-war military dominance.

    A dimensional tension of Nazism lay between romantic myths of an ancient and glorious past and the bourgeois task of moving industrialization and modernity forward. The focus of liberal and neoliberal analysis has been on this mythology as an irrational mode of reason. Missing is that Nazism wouldn't have moved past the German borders if it hadn't had bourgeois basis in the science and technology needed for industrial might. This keeps the broad project within the ontological and administrative premises of liberalism.

    This is no doubt disconcerting to theorists of great difference. If Bolsonaro can impose austerity while maintaining an unjust peace, Wall Street and the IMF will smile and ask for more. American business interests are already circling Brazil, knowing that captive consumers combined with enforceable property rights and a pliable workforce means profits. Where were liberals when the Wall Street that Barack Obama saved was squeezing the people of Brazil, Spain, Greece and Portugal to repay debts incurred by the oligarchs? Liberalism is the link between capitalism and fascism, not its antithesis.

    Having long ago abandoned Marx, the American Left is lost in the temporal logic of liberalism. The way to fight fascists is to end the threat of fascism. This means taking on Wall Street and the major institutions of Western capitalism

    Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.

    [Feb 02, 2019] In Tit-For-Tat, Russia Suspends INF Treaty; Putin Slams US Demolishing Global Security

    Notable quotes:
    "... This included "unprecedented steps going far beyond our obligations," Lavrov said, and noted that part of Washington's "systematic" attempts to undermine the treaty included "testing drones that matched the characteristics" of ground-based cruise missiles banned in the treaty, as well as installing "MK 41 launching systems for the defense shield in Europe that can be used to fire mid-range Tomahawk cruise missiles without any modification." ..."
    "... Putin noted further in the midst of Lavrov's remarks, "This is a direct a violation of the INF." And Lavrov also added, "Such launchers have already been completed in Romania, more are scheduled to be put into service in Poland and Japan." ..."
    "... Alarmingly, Putin concluded his remarks by saying Washington could be imperiling in the long term the landmark New START treaty, set to expire in 2021. ..."
    Feb 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) has effectively collapsed following the US announcing Friday that it's suspending all obligations under the treaty. Predictably Moscow's response has been swift, with President Vladimir Putin saying in a meeting with his foreign and defense ministers that Russia will now pursue missile development previously banned under its terms .

    Putin said "ours will be a mirror response" in a tit-for-tat move that the Russian president ultimately blames on Washington's years-long "systematic" undermining of the agreement. "Our US partners say that they are ceasing their participation in the treaty, and we are doing the same," the Russian president said . "They say that they are doing research and testing [on new weapons] and we will do the same thing."

    Crucially, however, he noted that there were no plans to deploy short and mid-range missiles to Europe unless the US does it first -- a worst nightmare scenario that has rattled European leaders ever since talk began from Trump that the 1987 treaty could be scrapped.

    Putin still seemed to allow some degree space for last minute concessions as "still on the table" possibly in line with the Trump administration's desire to modernize and update a new treaty taking into account new technological and geopolitical realities, such as China's ballistic missile capabilities.

    "Let's wait until our partners mature sufficiently to hold a level, meaningful conversation on this topic, which is extremely important for us, them, and the entire world," Putin said. But also lashing out during the press conference that followed the meeting with top officials Putin described :

    Over many years, we have repeatedly suggested staging new disarmament talks, on all types of weapons. Over the last few years, we have seen our initiatives not supported. On the contrary, pretexts are constantly sought to demolish the existing system of international security .

    Specifically he and FM Sergei Lavrov referenced not only Trump's threats to quit the agreement, which heightened in December, but accusations leveled from Washington that the Kremlin was in violation. The White House has now affirmed the bilateral historic agreement signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan will be suspended for 180 days. Lavrov insisted that Moscow "attempted to do everything we could to rescue the treaty."

    This included "unprecedented steps going far beyond our obligations," Lavrov said, and noted that part of Washington's "systematic" attempts to undermine the treaty included "testing drones that matched the characteristics" of ground-based cruise missiles banned in the treaty, as well as installing "MK 41 launching systems for the defense shield in Europe that can be used to fire mid-range Tomahawk cruise missiles without any modification."

    Putin noted further in the midst of Lavrov's remarks, "This is a direct a violation of the INF." And Lavrov also added, "Such launchers have already been completed in Romania, more are scheduled to be put into service in Poland and Japan."

    Alarmingly, Putin concluded his remarks by saying Washington could be imperiling in the long term the landmark New START treaty, set to expire in 2021.

    brane pilot , 17 minutes ago link

    Putin is an island of calm in a sea of political insanity.

    He knows Trump is being gamed into absurd positions by mad dog Democrat politicians seeking a geopolitical scapegoat.

    I would call him a Statesman.

    SpanishGoop , 40 minutes ago link

    " as well as installing "MK 41 launching systems for the defense shield in Europe that can be used to fire mid-range Tomahawk cruise missiles without any modification."

    US trying to get from Russia top position first-response list and get Europe on that position.

    Putin is much to smart to fall for that.

    needtoshit , 44 minutes ago link

    Neocons should be remembered as oldcons because their bag of tricks is so well known that they don't fool anyone. Think about this Reagan era fossil who tries to arrange his little coup in Venezuela and will fall flat on his face. Think also about these Pompeo and Bolton who are so desperate that they didn't even spend the necessary time to learn the checkers rules before trying to take on Putin in his favorite chess play. No really, the level of mediocrity and the lack of strategy or even sheer preparedness of these dudes is so low that they may even be hung by their own subordinates who can't even stand that stench of fool play. Trump should be ashamed he hired these clowns to ride their one trick ponies while the titanic goes down. History will not be kind with him.

    Totally_Disillusioned , 49 minutes ago link

    Putin reads our CIA better than we do!

    Totally_Disillusioned , 49 minutes ago link

    Putin reads our CIA better than we do!

    Son of Captain Nemo , 1 hour ago link

    Everything you wanted to know about scuttling an INF Treaty but were afraid to ask ( https://www.rt.com/business/450123-nord-stream-2-ready/ )

    Cause when it gets completed without sabotage along the way... Those LNG delivery projects will see lots and lots of $USD heading home "FOR GOOD"!...

    Which means "other arrangements" will be necessary in order to make certain that another "hostage" crisis ( https://southfront.org/u-s-opted-to-leave-inf-few-years-ago-spent-this-time-developing-forbidden-missiles/ ) "doesn't go to waste"!!!

    Savvy , 1 hour ago link

    Yup.

    Shemp 4 Victory , 29 minutes ago link

    Additionally, just last week the Russian Ministry of Defense invited foreign military attachés and journalists to inspect the new Iskander 9M729 cruise missile. This is the one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of the US and NATO were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up.

    Interestingly, the 9M729 has a heavier warhead, and thus shorter range, than the older 9M728, which the US has not claimed violates the INF treaty. See it for yourself:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyH-I3rukPU (3 min. 12 sec. - English subtitles)

    Savvy , 14 minutes ago link

    This is the one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of the US and NATO were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up .

    About standard to ignore what doesn't fit the agenda.

    Son of Captain Nemo , 1 hour ago link

    Everything you wanted to know about scuttling an INF Treaty but were afraid to ask ( https://www.rt.com/business/450123-nord-stream-2-ready/ )

    Cause when it gets completed without sabotage along the way... Those LNG delivery projects will see lots and lots of $USD heading home "FOR GOOD"!...

    Which means "other arrangements" will be necessary in order to make certain that another "hostage" crisis ( https://southfront.org/u-s-opted-to-leave-inf-few-years-ago-spent-this-time-developing-forbidden-missiles/ ) "doesn't go to waste"!!!

    Savvy , 1 hour ago link

    Yup.

    Shemp 4 Victory , 29 minutes ago link

    Additionally, just last week the Russian Ministry of Defense invited foreign military attachés and journalists to inspect the new Iskander 9M729 cruise missile. This is the one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of the US and NATO were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up.

    Interestingly, the 9M729 has a heavier warhead, and thus shorter range, than the older 9M728, which the US has not claimed violates the INF treaty. See it for yourself:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyH-I3rukPU (3 min. 12 sec. - English subtitles)

    Savvy , 14 minutes ago link

    This is the one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of the US and NATO were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up .

    About standard to ignore what doesn't fit the agenda.

    yerfej , 1 hour ago link

    Instead of useless diatribe explain why you're all bent today about the INF?

    Gen. Ripper , 28 minutes ago link

    The INF Treaty allowed the inferior Soviet weapons to remain par to the USA, like how we've been giving the chinks $1T a year.

    Now no treaty allows the USA to naturally dominate CCCP and their chinky ching Chong CCP.

    [Feb 02, 2019] One Of The Biggest At-Home DNA Testing Companies Is Secretly Sharing Data With The FBI

    Feb 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Just one week ago, we warned that the government -- helped by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget) -- was embarking on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

    As it turns out we were right, but we forgot one key spoke of the government's campaign to collect genetic information from as many individuals as possible: "innocent", commercial companies, who not only collect DNA from willing clients, but are also paid for it.

    FamilyTreeDNA, one of the pioneers of the growing market for "at home", consumer genetic testing, confirmed a report from BuzzFeed that it has quietly granted the Federal Bureau of Investigation access to its vast trove of nearly 2 million genetic profiles.

    ... ... ...

    Worse, it did so secretly, without obtaining prior permission from its users.

    The move is of significant concern to much more than just privacy-minded FamilyTreeDNA customers. As Bloomberg notes, one person sharing genetic information also exposes those to whom they are closely related. That's how police caught the alleged Golden State Killer. And here is a stunning statistics - according to a 2018 study, only 2% of the population needs to have done a DNA test for virtually everyone's genetic information to be represented in that data.

    [Feb 02, 2019] European Companies Won t Dare Use SWIFT Alternative To Send Money To Iran

    Notable quotes:
    "... My 95 year old aunt here in NL lived thru the NAZI occupation. She said its sad that the nice decent Americans of 1945 have now become like the people we fought. ..."
    Feb 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    European Companies "Won't Dare" Use SWIFT Alternative To Send Money To Iran

    by Tyler Durden Sat, 02/02/2019 - 09:55 32 SHARES

    The launch of INSTEX -- "Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges" -- by France, Germany, and the UK this week to allow "legitimate trade" with Iran, or rather effectively sidestep US sanctions and bypass SWIFT after Washington was able to pressure the Belgium-based financial messaging service to cut off the access of Iranian banks last year, may be too little too late to salvage the Iran nuclear deal .

    Tehran will only immediately press that more than just the current "limited humanitarian" and medical goods can be purchased on the system, in accordance with fulfilling the EU's end of the 2015 JCPOA -- something which EU officials have promised while saying INSTEX will be "expansive" -- while European companies will likely continue to stay away for fear of retribution from Washington, which has stated it's "closely following" reports of the payment vehicle while reiterating attempts to sidestep sanctions will "risk severe consequences" .

    As a couple of prominent Iranian academics told Al Jazeera this week: "If [the mechanism] will permanently be restricted to solely humanitarian trade, it will be apparent that Europe will have failed to live up to its end of the bargain for Iran ," said political analyst Mohammad Ali Shabani. And another, Foad Izadi, professor at the University of Tehran, echoed what is a common sentiment among Iran's leaders: "I don't think the EU is either willing or able to stand up to Trump's threat," and continued, "The EU is not taking the nuclear deal seriously and it's not taking any action to prove to Iran otherwise... People are running out of patience."

    But Iranian leadership welcomed the new mechanism as merely a small first step: "It is a first step taken by the European side... We hope it will cover all goods and items," Iranian Deputy FM Abbas Araqchi told state TV, referencing EU promises to stick to its end of the nuclear deal.

    The European side also acknowledged it as a precondition to keeping the nuclear deal alive, which EU leaders sea as vital to their security and strategic interests : "We're making clear that we didn't just talk about keeping the nuclear deal with Iran alive, but now we're creating a possibility to conduct business transactions," German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told reporters on Thursday . "This is a precondition for us to meet the obligations we entered into in order to demand from Iran that it doesn't begin military uranium enrichment," Maas said.

    What is INSTEX?

    Technically US sanctions allow some limited humanitarian trade and limited goods; however the White House's "maximum pressure" campaign on Iran has still scared away European giants like Seimens, Maersk, Total, Daimler, Peugeot, Renault, and others.

    This brings up the central question of whether skittish European countries will actually return to doing business with Iran, the entire purpose on which the new mechanism rests. The dilemma was summarized at the start of this week by outspoken Iran hawk Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who told the AP "The choice is whether to do business with Iran or the United States." He warned, "I hope our European allies choose wisely."

    Thus far a number of analysts and observers have remained far less optimistic than the European sponsors of INSTEX. One particular interview with geopolitical analyst and journalist Luc Rivet, cited in Russian media, outlines the likelihood for failure of the new payment vehicle : "I don't know what companies will make use of that mechanism to sell to Iran," Rivet said, noting that countries still consider it "dangerous" to be caught working with Iran.

    Addressing the current restriction of INSTEX facilitating medical and pharmaceutical goods transactions, he continued:

    Who produces this equipment? You think that Siemens will sell to Iran? Never, because they sell to America many other things as well And Siemens is afraid of losing the American market.

    No matter if a handful of companies resume or continue business with Iran he explained that an "incredible number of companies" won't. He added: "It's much easier for Chinese and Russian companies to make deals with Iran. The Europeans are scared in an incredible way. The companies are afraid by ricochet of being in the eye of the storm with the Americans."

    He concluded, "That's very dangerous for European companies," and repeated, "I don't know anybody who will dare to go with this Instex system."

    And the New York Times in asking the same question -- But Will Anyone Use It? -- concludes similarly that "given that most large companies have significant business in the United States, very few -- if any -- are likely to use the trading mechanism for fear of incurring Washington's wrath."

    However, the test will be whether or not a steady trickle of small companies gives way to bigger companies. The NYT report continues :

    But the financial mechanism could make it easier for smaller companies with no exposure in the United States to trade with Iran and could promote trade in medicine and food, which are not subject to sanctions. European diplomats say that, in the beginning, the concentration will be on goods that are permitted by Washington, to avoid an early confrontation .

    But much could also depend on just how fierce the White House reaction will be. If the past months' Trump administration rhetoric is any indicator, it will keep large companies scared and on the sidelines.

    CarmenSandiego , 8 minutes ago link

    This is the first step? then a independent military? Without asking money bosses in the USA?

    alter , 34 minutes ago link

    Europe has had double the tariffs on American cars than we had for theirs. It's time for us to quadruple the tariff on European cars, to make up for the tariff imbalance that Europe has taken advantage of for decades.

    schroedingersrat , 1 hour ago link

    Multinationals surely wont use it. But its great for small businesses.

    Wantoknow , 1 hour ago link

    Before World War II the question was, "Who will stand up to the demands of Germany?" Now the question is, "Who will stand up to the demands of the United States?" It is clear that as far as means and methods are concerned Washington flies the swastika. History has come full circle.

    The following quote from J. R. R. Tolkien makes the point, "Always after a defeat and a respite," says Gandalf, "the shadow takes another shape and grows again." The irony of our times is that the shadow has moved from Germany to the US.

    Consternation and craven refusal to confront the reality of our times is again in vogue. We are walking towards madness crying, "Let the other fellow fix this!"

    Good Luck

    ExpatNL , 1 hour ago link

    My 95 year old aunt here in NL lived thru the NAZI occupation. She said its sad that the nice decent Americans of 1945 have now become like the people we fought.

    Einstein101 , 1 hour ago link

    "The EU is not taking the nuclear deal seriously and it's not taking any action to prove to Iran otherwise... People are running out of patience."

    So Iran is "running out of patience"? So what, what Iran will do? ...

    [Jan 31, 2019] Venezuela color revolution plot thickens

    Notable quotes:
    "... UN should be probing Washington and allies for regime-change crimes Identical condemnations from the US and allies and the synchronicity show that Venezuela is being targeted for regime change in a concerted plot led by Washington. ..."
    "... It is so disappointing that Americans yet to come to realization that this criminal Jewish Mafia does not standing at the end of the old republic. He is DEEPLY involved, but his STYLE is different. He kills and terrorize the same as Regan, Carter, Clinton, Bush, Obama who have killed millions of people. His sanction is the KILLING MACHINE to topple governments TO STEAL THEIR RESOURCES FOR THE DUMMIES. I have NO respect for the liars who are trying to paint a criminal as someone 'standing against' the deep state. TRUMP IS PART OF THE DEEP STATE, ONLY DUMMIES DO NOT GET IT. ..."
    "... No matter the situation in Venezuela, whatever the US government and media are saying is just hostile propaganda as they couldn't give a rat's ass about the people living there. The Libyan people were doing well out of their oil, as were the Iraqis, living in reasonable wealth and security, and look at them now after the US decided to meddle in their affairs. Now after all that, even if something the US government says may be true, why believe it? How many times do you need to be fooled to stop being a fool? ..."
    "... The nuttiest member of the Trump administration is UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Her latest neo-nazi stunt was to join protestors last week calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Venezuela. She grabbed a megaphone at a tiny New York rally and told the few "protesters" (organized by our CIA) to say the USA is working to overthrow their President. This was so bizarre that our corporate media refused to report it. ..."
    "... Why does everyone make Trump out to be a victim, poor ol Trump, he's being screwed by all those people he himself appointed, poor ol persecuted Trump. Sounds like our Jewish friends with all the victimization BS. ..."
    "... By now Trump must be near bat shit crazy. Imagine hundreds of vampires descending on every exposed artery and vein. Does he have a chance in 2020? Not with the people who are around him today ..."
    "... Regardless of what the MSM reports, the population is fed-up with all the malarkey, and the same old faces. ..."
    "... If he can he should issue an executive order allowing important items like immigration to go directly to public referendum, by passing congress. We're tired of idiots with personal grudges holding our President hostage. Stern times calls for sterner measures. ..."
    "... Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington's elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization. ..."
    Jan 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Agent76 says: January 30, 2019 at 7:21 pm GMT 100 Words Jan 24, 2019 Catastrophic Consequences What's Really Happening in Venezuela

    In this video, we give you the latest breaking news on the current situation in Venezuela with Maduro, the election, and Trump's response.

    UN should be probing Washington and allies for regime-change crimes Identical condemnations from the US and allies and the synchronicity show that Venezuela is being targeted for regime change in a concerted plot led by Washington.

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50989.htm

    AnonFromTN , says: January 30, 2019 at 7:58 pm GMT

    @Sergey Krieger Negotiations are not necessarily a sign of weakness. However, Maduro should negotiate with the puppet masters, not with the puppet. I don't think that killing that pathetic Guaido is a good strategy: you don't want to make a martyr out of nonentity.
    WorkingClass , says: January 30, 2019 at 8:02 pm GMT
    And, in effect, I wish for the success of Juan Guaido in his struggle with Maduro, and I support American diplomatic and economic pressure on Maduro to step down. After all, Venezuela is in our back yard with huge oil reserves.

    FUCK YOU! Venezuela is not "our" back yard. And the oil does not belong to "us".

    anonymous [204] Disclaimer , says: January 30, 2019 at 8:31 pm GMT
    [Donald Trump, for all that and for his various faults and miscues, is in reality the only thing standing in the way of the end of the old republic. ]

    It is so disappointing that Americans yet to come to realization that this criminal Jewish Mafia does not standing at the end of the old republic. He is DEEPLY involved, but his STYLE is different. He kills and terrorize the same as Regan, Carter, Clinton, Bush, Obama who have killed millions of people. His sanction is the KILLING MACHINE to topple governments TO STEAL THEIR RESOURCES FOR THE DUMMIES. I have NO respect for the liars who are trying to paint a criminal as someone 'standing against' the deep state. TRUMP IS PART OF THE DEEP STATE, ONLY DUMMIES DO NOT GET IT.

    The ignorant Jewish mafia 'president' IS MORE DANGEROUS because he like his 'advisors' is totally ILLITERATE. It is a family business dummies.

    Are dummies going to hold petty people like Bolton who lie to get money from MEK to buy a new suit and new shoes, is responsible for the policy of the Trump regime where he wages WARS, economic sanction, to starve children to surrender? Then NO ONE Trusts you. MEK people are not more than 20, but are funded by the US colony, Saudi Arabia where MBS transfers money to the Jewish mafia family funding US wars.

    Maduro has EVERY SINGLE RIGHT to arrest Juan Guiado, a gigolo who is taking orders from a US and an illiterate 'president', where its dark history known to every living creature on earth. US has massacred millions of people in all continents including Latin America.

    Maduro has every single right to arrest him and put on trail and execute him as a traitor and an enemy of the state. How many years the people in Venezuela should suffer for the US 'regime change' and its crimes against humanity in Venezuela to STEAL ITS RESOURCES.

    onebornfree , says: Website January 30, 2019 at 9:15 pm GMT
    "So let me get this straight: The Russians brought America to its knees with a few facebook ads, but Uncle Sam's concerted and ongoing efforts to overthrow governments around the world and interfere with elections is perfectly fine? Because democracy? Riiiiiiight." :

    https://www.corbettreport.com/election-interference-is-ok-when-uncle-sam-does-it-propagandawatch/

    Regards, onebornfree

    anonymous [204] Disclaimer , says: January 30, 2019 at 9:34 pm GMT
    [The last Venezuelan Presidential election was a joke. ]

    YOU ARE A JOKE ZIONIST IDIOT.

    The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela's Coup Leader

    [Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington's elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.]

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-making-of-juan-guaido-how-the-us-regime-change-laboratory-created-venezuelas-coup-leader/5666971

    Illiterate Jewish Mafia 'president' must be kicked out of the office. Hands of Israel is all over the SELECTION.

    The ignorant 'president' is MORE DANGEROUS THANT OTHER CRIMINAL US REGIMES because on top of being a criminal, he is ILLITERATE as well.

    [In 2009, the Generation 2007 youth activists staged their most provocative demonstration yet, dropping their pants on public roads and aping the outrageous guerrilla theater tactics outlined by Gene Sharp in his regime change manuals.This far-right group "gathered funds from a variety of US government sources, which allowed it to gain notoriety quickly as the hardline wing of opposition street movements," according to academic George Ciccariello-Maher's book, "Building the Commune."

    That year, Guaidó exposed himself to the public in another way, founding a political party to capture the anti-Chavez energy his Generation 2007 had cultivated.]

    Guaido's behind towards washington criminal elite

    map , says: January 30, 2019 at 9:36 pm GMT
    @By-tor See, this is the typical lie. Socialism fails, so the socialist blames the outside wrecker for causing the problem. If Moscow freezes, then it is because of the wreckers. If Moscow starves, then it is because of the wreckers.

    If Venezuela collapses, then it is because of "sanctions," not the failure of the new socialist economy.

    America has the right to lock anyone out of its economy that it wants, for whatever reasons. This should not matter because that nation can still trade with the rest of the world, like China. Venezuela could get everything it wants by simply selling oil to China in exchange for goods. The problem is, there is not enough oil production to do so and other nations are reluctant to replace American investment for fear of losing their assets as well.

    Think about how wrong-headed the Chavez policy has been. If the Venezuelans have problems with their local ruling class and want to get rid of them fine do so. But, why go after the American oil company? The Americans don't care who rules Venezuela as long as their contracts are honored. Chavez could have then been a true socialist an allocate a greater dividend to Venezuelans that was previously being hoarded by the ruling class an arrangement similar to what Alaskans have with American oil companies.

    But no there was an immediate seizure of assets because the only purpose of socialism is to make the socialist leaders rich. And Chavez and Maduro became very rich indeed.

    Hibernian , says: January 30, 2019 at 9:48 pm GMT
    @WorkingClass No other nation is in our back yard. They are near neighbors.
    Sergey Krieger , says: January 30, 2019 at 10:02 pm GMT
    @AnonFromTN I would happily martyr gorbachov , Yeltsin and all their gang. I think everybody would have been far better of then. Same is applied to the puppet. Nikolai II was martyred and things got a lot better. What is important is winning and final outcome, while making some martyrs in the process.
    RVBlake , says: January 30, 2019 at 10:11 pm GMT
    @Harold Smith Trump's personnel picks are mind-boggling. I cannot see how he disapproves Eliot Abrams for deputy SoS with one breath, then blandly allows Pompeo to appoint him an envoy to a trouble-spot. Bolton, Pompeo, Goldberg et al.
    El Dato , says: January 30, 2019 at 10:11 pm GMT
    @Sean

    NEOCON America does not want Russian bombers in South America.

    Real America doesn't give a f*ck. Bombers are so last century, might as well put up machine-gun equipped Union Pacific Big Boys to make it marginally more steampunk and become a real danger for the USA.

    EliteCommInc. , says: January 30, 2019 at 10:33 pm GMT
    @Tyrion 2 There is not a single complaint here that did not exist before the election or before Pres Chavez.

    There are poor management leaders all over the globe. That';s their business. Hey we have some right here in the US I take it your solution is a military coup or better yet a coup fostered by the EU or the OAS, or maybe ASEAN or SDG . . .

    jack daniels , says: January 30, 2019 at 10:40 pm GMT
    It would be nice if someone simply asked Trump why it is he originally wanted to get along with Russia and pull out of the middle east and generally opposed the "neoconservative" approach and now seems to be hiring neocons and doing what they want. Is he trying to placate Sheldon Adelson and Adelson's lackeys, or what? I don't know of his being asked about this directly.
    APilgrim , says: January 30, 2019 at 10:49 pm GMT
    Is President Nicolas Maduro stealing the strategic gold reserves of Venezuela?

    'Venezuela Has 20 Tons of Gold Ready to Ship. Address Unknown', Patricia Laya and Andrew Rosati, Bloomberg, January 30, 2019, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-20-tons-gold-ready-004013962.html

    Venezuelan lawmaker Jose Guerra dropped a bombshell on Twitter Tuesday: The Russian Boeing 777 that had landed in Caracas the day before was there to spirit away 20 tons of gold from the vaults of the country's central bank. Guerra is a former central bank economist who remains in touch with old colleagues there. A person with direct knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg News Tuesday that 20 tons of gold have been set aside in the central bank for loading. Worth some $840 million, the gold represents about 20 percent of its holdings of the metal in Venezuela.

    Commentator Mike , says: January 30, 2019 at 11:01 pm GMT
    @map

    No matter the situation in Venezuela, whatever the US government and media are saying is just hostile propaganda as they couldn't give a rat's ass about the people living there. The Libyan people were doing well out of their oil, as were the Iraqis, living in reasonable wealth and security, and look at them now after the US decided to meddle in their affairs. Now after all that, even if something the US government says may be true, why believe it? How many times do you need to be fooled to stop being a fool?

    Tyrion 2 , says: January 30, 2019 at 11:02 pm GMT
    @EliteCommInc.

    No, Chavez had popular legitimacy. Maduro has nothing but force to keep himself in power now. Yes, there's easy definition for the above but Chavismo is decrepit.

    Pressure for a reasonable Presidential election is based on that.

    peterAUS , says: January 30, 2019 at 11:12 pm GMT
    @RVBlake

    A guy on ZH explained it well, I guess:

    1. The opposition hates me. I can do no right.
    2. The Trumptards blindly support me. I can do no wrong.
    3. There are not enough independent thinkers to make a difference as the two main sides bitterly fight each other over every minute, meaningless issue.
    4. I can pretty much do as I please without consequence ..like pay off all my buddies and pander to the jews/globalist/elites.
      I'd add: and by doing the last, I could cut a deal with the real TPTBs as to for what happens after I leave White House.
    Hibernian , says: January 30, 2019 at 11:21 pm GMT
    @Tyrion 2

    Chavez had popular support . He felt the need to intimidate opponents from the beginning. Like Bill Bellicheck and Tom Brady feeling the need to cheat.

    Pft , says: January 30, 2019 at 11:32 pm GMT
    @APilgrim

    Makes sense. They owe a big chunk of money to Russia and a payment of 100 million is coming due. Russia gets security for future payments while it holds their gold in a safe place. They may ship the rest to China if they are smart

    renfro , says: January 30, 2019 at 11:41 pm GMT
    @Carlton Meyer

    The nuttiest member of the Trump administration is UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Her latest neo-nazi stunt was to join protestors last week calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Venezuela. She grabbed a megaphone at a tiny New York rally and told the few "protesters" (organized by our CIA) to say the USA is working to overthrow their President. This was so bizarre that our corporate media refused to report it.

    She's being paid no doubt by the usual suspects. She is personally 1 million in debt and has signed with a Speakers agency to give speeches for 200,000 a pop.

    COLUMBIA, S.C. (WCIV)

    "Haley is currently quoting $200,000 and the use of a private jet for domestic speaking engagements, according to CNBC
    In October 2018, when Haley resigned, she said, she would be taking a "step up" into the private sector after leaving the U.N. According to a public financial disclosure report based on 2017 data, at the rate quoted for her engagements, just a handful would pay down more than $1 million in outstanding debt that was accrued during her 14 years

    renfro , says: January 30, 2019 at 11:43 pm GMT
    @peterAUS

    3. There are not enough independent thinkers to make a difference as the two main sides bitterly fight each other over every minute, meaningless issue.

    Well that is true.

    renfro , says: January 30, 2019 at 11:59 pm GMT
    Well people you need to explore this move to take over Venezuela in the context of what having that oil control will mean for the US and Israel in the increasingly likely event we blow up Iran and up end the ME for Israel.

    Despite Trump selling off half of our US oil reserves last year .. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-oil-reserve/u-s-sells-11-million-barrels-of-oil-from-reserve-to-exxon-five-other-firms-idUSKCN1LG2WT ..the US doesn't currently, at present anyway, need to control Venezuela's oil .

    So what could happen that might make control of oil rich Venezuela necessary? Why has Venezuela become a Bolton and Abrams project? Why is Netanyahu putting himself into the Venezuela crisis ?

    We, otoh, would need all the oil we could get if we blew up the ME, specifically Iran, figuratively or literally. The US signed a MOU with Israel in 1973 obligating us to supply Israel with oil ( and ship it to them) if they couldn't secure any for themselves.

    Z-man , says: January 31, 2019 at 12:11 am GMT
    @Hibernian I hate those two guys so much, and the owner Kraft also. I'm hoping for a helmet to helmet collision for Brady early in the second quarter with his bell ringing for the rest of the game. (Evil grin)
    Z-man , says: January 31, 2019 at 12:14 am GMT
    @renfro I have nothing but ill will for that mutt Haley.
    By-tor , says: January 31, 2019 at 12:41 am GMT
    @Tyrion 2 Yes, the int'l monitors said the elections were fair as Maduro received over 60% of the vote. You think the 'deplorables' of venezuela elected the known US-Wall Street neo-liberal puppet Guaido? No, the US Tape Worm groomed this twerp, all-the-while his backers and paymasters in the American neo-Liberal ruling class claim Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections. The shamelessness and hypocrisy is astounding.
    EliteCommInc. , says: January 31, 2019 at 12:47 am GMT
    @Tyrion 2 Pres Hugo Chavez's admin was very controversial. And the conditions you speak of have plagued Venezuela even before Pres Chavez came to government.

    This really is none of our affair. We don't have a mandate to go about the planet tossing out whoever we think is crazy. He is not a threat to the US. There's no indication that he intends to harm US businesses.

    Their polity means their polity. You'll have to do better than he's crazy, mean, a despot, etc. That's for them to resolve.

    Johnny Walker Read , says: January 31, 2019 at 12:50 am GMT
    @Commentator Mike Seems some will never learn the definition of insanity, especially the NeoCons who have been running America for far too long. I recommend John Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" for the less informed among us here today. Maybe at some point they will get a clue.
    redmudhooch , says: January 31, 2019 at 1:30 am GMT

    I heartily dislike and find despicable the socialist government of Maduro, just as I did Hugo Chavez when he was in power. I have some good friends there, one of whom was a student of mine when I taught in Argentina many years ago, and he and his family resolutely oppose Maduro. Those socialist leaders in Caracas are tin-pot dictator wannabees who have wrecked the economy of that once wealthy country; and they have ridden roughshod over the constitutional rights of the citizens. My hope has been that the people of Venezuela, perhaps supported by elements in the army, would take action to rid the country of those tyrants.

    Hard to take this guy seriously when he spouts Fox News level propaganda.

    Why does everyone make Trump out to be a victim, poor ol Trump, he's being screwed by all those people he himself appointed, poor ol persecuted Trump. Sounds like our Jewish friends with all the victimization BS.

    Its clear that voting no longer works folks, this is an undemocratic and illegitimate "government" we have here. We let them get away with killing JFK, RFK, MLK, Vietnam, we let them get away with 9/11, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria. They've made a mess in Africa. All the refugees into Europe, all the refugees from Latin America that have already come from CIA crimes, more will come.
    We wouldn't need a wall if Wall St would stop with their BS down there!

    You can't just blame Jews, yes there are lots of Jews in Corporate America, bu t not all of them are, and there are lots of Jews who speak out against this. We were doing this long before Israel came into existence. You can't just blame everything one one group, I think Israel/Zionist are responsible for a lot of BS, but you can't exclude CIA, Wall St, Corporations, Banks, The MIC either. Its not just one group, its all of them. They're all evil, they're imperialists and they're all capitalists. I think Israel is just a capitalist creation, nothing to do with Jews, just a foothold in he middle east for Wall St to have a base to control the oil and gas there, they didn't create Israel until they dicovered how much oil was there, and realized how much control over the world it would give them to control it. Those people moving to Israel are being played, just like the "Christian Zionists" here are, its a cult. Most "Jews" are atheists anyhow, and it seems any ol greedy white guy can claim to be a Jew. So how do you solve a "Jewish Problem" if anybody can claim to be a Jew? I think solving the capitalist problem would be a little easier to enforce.

    All of the shills can scream about communists, socialists and marxists all they want. Capitalism is the problem always has been always will be. Its a murderous, immoral, unsustainable system that encourages greed, it is a system who's driving force is maximizing profits, and as such the State controlled or aligned with Corporations is the most advanced form of capitalism because it is the most profitable. They're raping the shit out of us, taking our money to fund their wars, so they can make more money while paying little to no taxes at all. Everything, everyone here complains about is caused by CAPITALISM, but nobody dares say it, they've been programmed since birth to think that way.

    We should nationalize our oil and gas, instead of letting foreigners come in and steal it, again paying little or no taxes on it, then selling the oil they took from our country back to us. Russia and Venezuela do it, Libya did it, Iraq did it, and they used the money for the people of the country, they didn't let the capitalists plunder their wealth like the traitors running our country. We're AT LEAST $21 trillion in the hole now from this wonderful system of ours, don't you think we should try something else? Duh!

    It is the love of money, the same thing the Bible warned us about. Imperialism/globalism is the latest stage of capitalism, that is what all of this is about, follow the money. Just muh opinion

    Regime Change and Capitalism
    https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/07/regime-change-and-capitalism/

    bluedog , says: January 31, 2019 at 1:36 am GMT
    @Tyrion 2 From the people fool not by the C.I.A. declaring that well we like the other fellow best for president,after all using the logic you fail to have Hillary could have said call me madam president and leave the orange clown out in the dark,stupid,stupid people
    RobinG , says: January 31, 2019 at 2:10 am GMT
    @anonymous

    "And, in effect, I wish for the success of Juan Guaido in his struggle with Maduro, and I support American diplomatic and economic pressure on Maduro to step down. After all, Venezuela is in our back yard with huge oil reserves."

    OMG, Cathey really said that. Is he always such a shit? He certainly has Venezuela completely wrong.

    The Making of Juan Guaidó: How the US Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela's Coup Leader https://grayzoneproject.com/2019/01/29/the-making-of-juan-guaido-how-the-us-regime-change-laboratory-created-venezuelas-coup-leader/

    Larry Wilkerson on the special meeting of the Security Council

    Many Countries at UN Oppose Trump Interference in Venezuela

    Sergey Krieger , says: January 31, 2019 at 2:15 am GMT
    @AnonFromTN This phylosophical questions should not led to no actions. Modern Russia is actually in much better position now than it was in 1913. True. There is never final. Sorry for wrong words choice. Dialectics.
    RobinG , says: January 31, 2019 at 2:20 am GMT
    @AnonFromTN Tyrion and Sean are both sicko Zio-trolls.
    Asagirian , says: January 31, 2019 at 2:25 am GMT
    Why not just install the Deep State as president for life? It'd be more honest.
    EliteCommInc. , says: January 31, 2019 at 2:38 am GMT
    @Wizard of Oz The scenario you describe is an accurate. And requires me to make judgments about a dynamic I am unfamiliar with -- no bite. Several sides to this tale and I have heard and seen it before.

    I may however make a call.

    In 2017 2/3 of the states in the region chose not to interfere. They have not changed their minds on intervention.

    ohh by the way I did ask and here's the familial response:

    https://brewminate.com/venezuelans-want-maduro-out-but-oppose-military-intervention-to-remove-him/

    EliteCommInc. , says: January 31, 2019 at 2:47 am GMT
    @Wizard of Oz https://www.thequint.com/news/world/venezuelans-want-prez-maduro-out-but-oppose-foreign-intervention

    https://grayzoneproject.com/2019/01/29/venezuelans-oppose-intervention-us-sanctions-poll/

    https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-news/2019/01/29/new-poll-shows-venezuelans-overwhelmingly-oppose-military-intervention-and-us-sanctions/

    Just to be fair:

    https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/venezuelans-multinational-intervention-president-nicolas-maduro-economic-situation/2018/09/17/id/882143/

    But reading the data sets makes it clear that what they want is some humanitarian relief. B y and large I have the family telling me to mind my own business, but they would like a meal, some medicine and some water.

    Asking helps figuring out what to do.

    the grand wazoo , says: January 31, 2019 at 2:59 am GMT
    By now Trump must be near bat shit crazy. Imagine hundreds of vampires descending on every exposed artery and vein. Does he have a chance in 2020? Not with the people who are around him today.

    Regardless of what the MSM reports, the population is fed-up with all the malarkey, and the same old faces.

    In Trump's remaining 2 years he must throw off the parasites, bring in real men, and go to work on infrastructure, health care, and real jobs. He has to out the naysayers, the creeps and the war mongers. Throw Bolton from the train, and divorce Netanyahu and Israel. Appeal directly to the public.

    If he can he should issue an executive order allowing important items like immigration to go directly to public referendum, by passing congress. We're tired of idiots with personal grudges holding our President hostage. Stern times calls for sterner measures.

    AnonFromTN , says: January 31, 2019 at 3:08 am GMT
    @RobinG That would be an easy, almost optimistic explanation: some people are venal enough to say or write anything for money. Pessimistic explanation is that some people who can read and write are nonetheless dumb or brainwashed enough to sincerely believe the BS they are writing.
    Anonymous [362] Disclaimer , says: January 31, 2019 at 4:19 am GMT
    @therevolutionwas

    Can you define what capitalism is ? Once that idea is refined, finessed, and compared to multiple color changes of capitalism, it becomes easier who to fit in the plastic infinitely expandable box of ideas of capitalism starting with the chartered company to patient laws to companies making military hardwares paid by tax payers to tax cut by government to seizure of foreign asset by US-UK to protection of the US business by military forces to selling military gadgets to the countries owned by families like Saudi royals Gulf monarchs and to the African ( American installed ) dictators to printing money .

    tac , says: January 31, 2019 at 4:58 am GMT
    A great article I posted in another thread few days ago dives deep into who Juan Guaido is and his past grooming for the past 10+ years:

    Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington's elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.

    https://grayzoneproject.com/2019/01/29/the-making-of-juan-guaido-how-the-us-regime-change-laboratory-created-venezuelas-coup-leader/

    Here is another:

    A great documentary on the 2002 coup d'etat of Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Chavez, The 2002 Coup

    [Jan 31, 2019] Former FBI agents played a role in the JFK assassination

    Jan 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    librul , Jan 30, 2019 6:11:35 PM | 7 ">link

    Former FBI agents played a role in the JFK assassination.

    H.L. Hunt hired former FBI agents for his own personal police force.

    Hunt's main office overlooked Dealey Plaza.

    Hunt had massive land holdings in numerous states.

    H.L. had his own radio shows to disseminate his conservative views.

    A couple of days after JFK was assassinated Hunt took his whole family to Mexico, "under the advice of the FBI" as he "was receiving death threats".

    His hired hands FBI offered the pretext for going to Mexico.

    He had a tough guy, Texas conservative, persona to protect but he fled the country. Looks whimpy, no? His own police force (and ex-FBI) with huge ranches he could hold up in, but he flees to Mexico. His family was there for a month.

    Why? 12-man play.

    Notre Dame once won a football game by putting an extra man in the play - a 12th man. After the touchdown succeeded Notre Dame then immediately emptied their bench onto the playing field so the refs could not count the players (this was well before instant replay was used).

    Lamar Hunt had fled to Mexico and was a sore thumb, odd man stands out, being there by himself. Thus H.L. Hunt sent his entire family to Mexico to cover for his son Lamar. 12-man play.

    The fact that Lamar had fled to Mexico by himself would stick out like a soar thumb. But thanks to the 12-man play he was just another member of the family that had gone to Mexico.

    Lamar had been escorting a mafia hitman, James Braden, plus a friend of Braden's, around Dealey Plaza. A few minutes after the assassination the friend had packed up and left town. Lamar Hunt also left a few minutes after the assassination - for Mexico. James Braden was arrested coming out of an elevator in one of the buildings lining Dealey Plaza. He was fingered as a suspicious person that had no known business on one of the upper floors. He said he was "looking for a pay phone to call his mother".

    Former FBI agents joined the Hunt family in Mexico.

    Last week the New England Patriots won the Lamar Hunt Trophy and the right to be in this weekend's Super Bowl.

    [Jan 31, 2019] Sic Semper Tyrannis

    Notable quotes:
    "... See my essay linked below on "Artists and Bureaucrats." ..."
    "... Trump seemed always intent to challenge any type of détente between the US and Iran. Am I missing something? ..."
    "... I believe that's the zionist influence showing. ..."
    "... As I have said before, Trump as a sole proprietor businessman, treats all these government people as dispensable flunkies, In his former world the analogy would be "consultant advisers." People who you pay for their work and/or advice but whose opinions are not better than yours. They probably taught him something like that at Wharton. ..."
    "... Thus, the many thousand people of the IC agencies have opinions that, while interesting, mean nothing if he has a gut feeling contrary to that. That being the case - in the end the truth is that the main question is whether they or he is/are correct in their opinions. ..."
    "... For governing and leading on the national level, I don't think one man's gut is enough, especially with the zionist and neocon forces informing his gut for the last two years. ..."
    "... And with daughter and son-in-law as ardent Israel First Jews who are playing very prominent roles in the White House. ..."
    Jan 31, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Trump and the Spookery. Static.politico.com

    "Trump and his top aides have taken a hard line on Iran, implying that the Islamist-led country still poses a nuclear threat despite its adherence to a 2015 accord that put curbs on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Trump withdrew the U.S. from that nuclear deal, and has reimposed sanctions, although other international allies have stayed committed to the pact.

    During the hearing, Coats said Iran isn't taking any steps to make a nuclear weapon. "We do not believe Iran is currently undertaking the key activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device," he said.

    CIA Director Gina Haspel, who also spoke at the hearing, said Tehran, " at the moment, technically they're in compliance" with the deal.

    But Coats also noted that Iranian officials have "publicly threatened to push the boundaries" of the nuclear deal if it did not see any benefits from it." politico

    ------------

    Well, pilgrims, I have resolutely maintained on SST that Iran has not had a nuclear WEAPONS program since 2003, having cancelled their research program then with the disappearance of the Iraqi threat. The 2007 NIE on Iran stated that explicitly but the Zionist lobby has blocked publication of an unclassified summary of subsequent judgments on this subject. Why? It is Israel's policy that Iran must be prevented from becoming strong enough to become the major hegemonic power in the ME. Trump's ignorance of realities in the region has enabled The Lobby to distort US policy to serve its purposes. To my surprise the IC chiefs had the guts to tell the world what is true about Iran and to point out other areas in which their agencies differ in judgment from the administration, but the Iran judgement is IMO the most important. Neocons like Pompeo, Bolton and E. Abrams do not reason from evidence. They reason from ideology and their shared hostility to anyone who does not bow down to the US. They and The Lobby currently control Trump's foreign policy especially in the ME.

    At the same time we must remember that these agencies are "mature bureaucracies." That means they have existed long enough to have become "self licking ice cream cones." These are organizations for which institutional survival and the welfare of the all important leader of each agency are primary interests. You don't think so? Just remember that the grandees at the top of these agencies are totally dependent on their directors for success in the their careers.

    That is what makes the performance of Coats and Haspel so impressive. Bravo! pl

    See my essay linked below on "Artists and Bureaucrats."

    James Thomas , a day ago

    At the other end of the spectrum, the Jerusalem Post reports that Nikki Haley is currently in Israel and charging $200,000 per speech.
    ancient archer -> Pat Lang , 7 hours ago
    Haley is getting paid for services already rendered. (Un)fortunately you haven't served those folks too well!! And you can be proud of that!
    Pat Lang Mod , an hour ago
    Trump now says that Coats and Haspel completely agree with him. That did not take long.
    English Outsider , 10 hours ago
    " The same kind of "thinking" has caused the clandestine services to rely far too much on "liaison" relationships with foreign intelligence services as a substitute for conducting American run espionage against difficult targets. The reason? Disclosure of foreign operations does not entail the career risk for the "managers" that the failure of an American operation would bring. "

    (From the second reference above.)

    Could this, over a long period of time, lead to a passive or uncritical acceptance of intelligence from foreign sources? It would also serve as protection against enquiry or blowback if those foreign sources were discredited.

    The use of Dutch or Estonian or, more significantly, UK sources that were said to have kicked off the Russiagate scandal might show this.

    I ask because enquiry into the Steele affair seems to stop when it comes to examining the sources and methods of the foreign intelligence services that had an input, if sometimes indirect, in that case.

    TTG -> English Outsider , 5 hours ago
    A passive or uncritical acceptance of intelligence from any source is bad. As Colonel Lang noted, skepticism is a necessary part of good intelligence. Deception and the current in vogue term of perception management are in wide practice by allies and adversaries. This is always a threat in HUMINT. It is also a threat in SIGINT and any other INT. As the good Colonel said, the "devil's advocate" performs a needed function in intelligence. In the case of "L'Affaire Russe," I think the strong pushback against the official IC and SCO line by many Trump and Russia supporters is serving that vital function.
    English Outsider -> TTG , 3 hours ago
    Serving that function in the States.

    One often sees complaints that officials in the States are keeping information back but it is in fact quite astonishing how much has been disclosed - from revelations about sources to that odd series of Walter Mitty messages from the former Chief of the Counterespionage Section to his girl friend. And it's taken for granted by all that however much they might redact or withhold they're not going to fake.

    So whatever these officials are up to they're doing it by the book and are in fact letting a lot out. To a foreign outsider it looks quite impressive - if not very conclusive.

    Cross the Atlantic and it's a dead blank. Speculation about the Hannigan resignation, a dismissive reference from Sir Richard Dearlove - but there's been no counterpart here to the turmoil of investigation and enquiry in the States.

    Since they're not going to get to the bottom of the Steele affair without at least some disclosure of what was happening at that time at this end it's quite possible that they're not going to get to the bottom of it at all. The UK end is, to put it bluntly, being used as the memory hole for the US Intelligence Community.

    That's a hell of a comedown for the so called "Special Relationship". So much so that one wonders whether we in the UK still have a functioning Intelligence Service in this area. Or just a bunch of chancers happy to go along with whatever boneheaded schemes the big boys call them in for.

    Mad_Max22 -> English Outsider , 2 hours ago
    The responsible standard for appraising information obtained from an informant (criminal matters) or a live asset (intelligence/counter intelligence matters) is under virtually all circumstances a required knowledge of the identity of the person who is the source of the information. In banking, when the money laundering legislation beefed up, it was know your customer.

    Only with detailed knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the assets acquisition of the information, from whom, how, when, where, why the asset has the information, why he is coming forward with the information, can the information be appraised. Other considerations that should be brought to bear are how often the asset has provided information in the past, has his information ever been discredited, what have been the outcomes from his previously furnished information. Are there ulterior motives? Could the information be disinformation?

    We can see that not knowing the identity of the source gravely impedes characterizing information and determining whether and how it should be used.
    With regard to the Steele information used in the Carter Page FISA affidavit and to predicate the Russian collusion adventure, I, at any rate, am unaware of any information in the public domain to indicate that US authorities even knew who the claimed Russian sources were let alone had direct access to them or had the ability to conduct inquiries to corroborate any of the circumstances attending their claimed possession of the relevant information.

    I will say that that Robert Hannsen espionage case offers an exceptional case. Hannsen had devised a scheme where he provided the Russians information anonymously, until he was caught. The Russians evidently authenticated his information on sheer quantity and content.

    The prudent practice is the more you know and the longer you have been directly engaged with your source, the better off you are, certainly if you are contemplating conducting an investigation of a Presidential candidate or a President elect.

    I'm still waiting to see when all the facts come out whether we are looking at malfeasance, misfeasance, plain old incompetence, or some combination thereof.

    Stueeeeee , 11 hours ago
    Pres. Trump is politically wounded. He capitulated on the government shutdown/wall and SOTU address. No doubt the IC chiefs have recognized that and would short term sacrifice a little truth to further weaken the President.

    Trump used to tweet his way out of his errors, but his tweets have lost their novelty. He can't even declare a national emergency for the wall as it would be done out of weakness. The courts would likely create a new fandangled interpretation of the law to counter it.

    It is strange to me, that of all things, Trump's lack of assertiveness in exercising executive authority seems to be doing him in.

    Pat Lang Mod -> Stueeeeee , 10 hours ago
    He never ran a large organization in which everyone was not subject to him directly. These people think they have some relatively autonomous existence.
    Felix A. , 13 hours ago
    Trump seemed always intent to challenge any type of détente between the US and Iran. Am I missing something?
    Nick Sobkowiak -> Felix A. , 6 hours ago
    I believe that's the zionist influence showing.
    Pat Lang Mod , a day ago
    As I have said before, Trump as a sole proprietor businessman, treats all these government people as dispensable flunkies, In his former world the analogy would be "consultant advisers." People who you pay for their work and/or advice but whose opinions are not better than yours. They probably taught him something like that at Wharton.

    Thus, the many thousand people of the IC agencies have opinions that, while interesting, mean nothing if he has a gut feeling contrary to that. That being the case - in the end the truth is that the main question is whether they or he is/are correct in their opinions.

    TTG -> Pat Lang , 21 hours ago
    He has a world of experience in real estate development and self promotion to inform that gut. It stands him well in politics. For governing and leading on the national level, I don't think one man's gut is enough, especially with the zionist and neocon forces informing his gut for the last two years.
    blue peacock -> TTG , 18 hours ago
    "....especially with the zionist and neocon forces informing his gut for the last two years."

    And with daughter and son-in-law as ardent Israel First Jews who are playing very prominent roles in the White House.

    MP98 , a day ago
    The "intelligence" community is just another swamp bureaucracy with the difference that they are VERY important people who "risk their lives" for our freedom....or something like that. With their track record, why would we believe them now?
    Pat Lang Mod -> MP98 , a day ago
    SOME of them risk their lives. That depends on your job. IMO DIA has a much better track record than the other analytic agencies. NSA is NOT an analytic agency. It collects signal data and gives it to the others.
    MP98 -> Pat Lang , a day ago
    Since you're of that world, you would know (a lot) more about this than me. I remember a long time ago attending a Christmas party in Athens at which there was a bunch of US diplomats and military and some other clowns who when asked what they do there would say "they CALL me a vice consul" and laugh.
    Pat Lang Mod -> MP98 , a day ago
    Immature very junior CIA spooks from the embassy. A lot of these characters are tossed out early based on behavior and performance.

    [Jan 30, 2019] The US is needing a war to rally its people around the flag and to attempt to keep its hand on the Rudder of the world.

    Is Trump a possible "War president?"
    Jan 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Pestercorn , Jan 29, 2019 10:21:08 PM | link

    It's not hard to see the parallels of how the US is treating China today compared with Japan in 1939. The US sanctioned Japan and stopped them from importing Iron and Oil and today China is being technologically sanctioned throughout the West with Huawei.

    The US is bludgeoning every Govt throughout the world to get its own way both allied and contested. This attitude can only lead to War eventually. Venezuela today, Iran tomorrow which will continue to box in China and Russia.

    The US is needing a war to rally its people around the flag and to attempt to keep its hand on the Rudder of the world.

    China will be forced to sink an American ship or shoot down an American Jet to save face re Taiwan and their Islands in the China Sea.
    The West is begging for war and the parallels now and before WW11 is scary.

    [Jan 30, 2019] It has only recently become clear (to most) that Trump is a faux populist frontman ... the Republican Obama.

    Jan 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Jan 29, 2019 9:01:10 PM | link

    bevin @46

    Why Venezuela? ... It seems to me that the major blocs might be pulling back, and settling for easy gains.

    An unjustified equivalence that attempts to justify what is outrageous.

    Why now? ... the neo-conservative axis has only recently re-established full spectrum domination over the White House.

    No. it has only recently become clear (to most) that Trump is a faux populist frontman ... the Republican Obama.

    [Jan 30, 2019] Just one more to a long list of Trump appointments. I believe Trump is some kind of pervert, like the ones that like to get whipped, only Trump likes to get stabbed in the back

    PT Barnum was right. A sucker is born everyday.
    Jan 30, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Just one more to a long list of Trump appointments. I believe Trump is some kind of pervert, like the ones that like to get whipped, only Trump likes to get stabbed in the back.

    Betrayed

    He does what Sheldon and Bibi tell him.

    You think you're so ******* smart, but this some how eludes you?

    napper , 3 hours ago (Edited)

    Donald Trump's House of Cons, Clowns, Crappolas, Criminals, and Conspirators:

    1. Mike Pence
    2. Mike Pompeo
    3. Steven Mnuchin
    4. John Bolton
    5. Elliot Abrams
    6. Nikki Haley
    7. Gina Haspel
    8. Peter Navarro
    9. Wilbur Ross
    10. Kirstjen Nielsen
    11. Robert Lighthizer
    12. Dan Coats

    and Donkey Drumpf managed to convince a big bunch of brainless sheeple that he's going to make America great again with the help of those career swamp dwellers???

    Gotta give it to the Donkey. He's good at acting at least.

    TGF Texas, 3 hours ago

    Shitty appointment, you bet! Regime Change, back on, after a 2 yr vacation, time will tell, but it sure looks that way! Remembering, Seth Rich, and the Guy who shot himself in the head, twice with a revolver, and the Clintons had the cops rule it a suicide, or the fact that she actually asked people if we could drone Assage...

    And I am back to sanity!

    [Jan 30, 2019] National socialism vs Marxist socialism

    Notable quotes:
    "... We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one. ..."
    Jan 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    vk , Jan 29, 2019 5:44:46 PM | link

    I don't know if I have already posted this here in this blog in the past, but it's as actual as ever: an interview with Adolf Hitler, by journalist George Sylvester Viereck, in 1923 (the NSDAP was founded in 1920). Viereck was himself a Nazi:

    'No room for the alien, no use for the wastrel'

    Here's an interesting excerpt of the interview:

    "Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"

    "Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

    "Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.

    "We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."

    [Jan 29, 2019] After hiring Abrams the next logical step for Trump would be hiring Hillary or Wolfowitz

    Highly recommended!
    As George Carlin observed, it's a big club and you aren't in it. Hiring Elliott Abrams makes Trump a variation on theme of Bush II: the more things change that more they stay the same. BTW Bush also campaigned on withdrew troops and no national building .
    Notable quotes:
    "... When did he hire Hillary? ..."
    "... There is not much difference between Hillary and Pompeo. Pompeo is basically Hillary with a **** and a religious twist ..."
    "... Who knew that in electing Trump we were electing the ultimate politician? His "art of the deal" is nothing but politics 101: Blame both sides, apologize for your side, and immediately surrender your stronger points while praising the weak points of your opponent. And when you have a chance, give up; sacrifice your friends and appoint their enemies, and, last but not least, look everybody in the eye and say, "I didn't steal the money, "mistakes were made." ..."
    Jan 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
    schroedingersrat, 5 hours ago

    Trump is a psychopath and he loves to hire even bigger psychopaths. Your whole admin is a swamp of sociopaths, psychopaths and other sick deranged people.

    TGF Texas, 5 hours ago link

    When did he hire Hillary?

    schroedingersrat, 38 minutes ago link

    There is not much difference between Hillary and Pompeo. Pompeo is basically Hillary with a **** and a religious twist

    bshirley1968, 2 hours ago

    Thinking? Well that's a stretch of the imagination, but let me suggest this......

    1. The opposition hates me. I can do no right.
    2. The Trumptards blindly support me. I can do no wrong.
    3. There are not enough independent thinkers to make a difference as the two main sides bitterly fight eachother over every minute, meaningless issue.
    4. I can pretty much do as I please without consequence.....like pay off all my buddies and pander to the jews/globalist/elites.

    That could be what he is thinking. But I can bet you anything that there isn't a Trumptard out there that can comment here and give us a rational reason for this appointment. Oh, they can down vote because they don't like being called Trumptards. .....but they don't mind being one.

    NAV, 2 hours ago

    Who knew that in electing Trump we were electing the ultimate politician? His "art of the deal" is nothing but politics 101: Blame both sides, apologize for your side, and immediately surrender your stronger points while praising the weak points of your opponent. And when you have a chance, give up; sacrifice your friends and appoint their enemies, and, last but not least, look everybody in the eye and say, "I didn't steal the money, "mistakes were made."

    williambanzai7, 4 hours ago

    Wondering who is getting fucked?

    NAV

    We are.

    [Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they come across a particularly adorable baby. ..."
    "... I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's books and media appearances. ..."
    "... George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one). ..."
    "... That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems these people don't have a conscience. ..."
    "... Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking, oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's. ..."
    "... The Deep State Guardian. Why don't they just change their name to 'The Daily Thatcherite' and have done with it. ..."
    "... They should just show it's full title: The Guardian Of The Establishment ..."
    "... well, yeah. but for us mad people it goes deeper even than that: https://geopolitics.co/2018/12/02/in-memoriam-george-h-scherff-jr-aka-george-hw-bush-sr/ ..."
    Dec 22, 2018 | off-guardian.org

    Oslo - Norway, Dec 4, 2018

    Let's never forget George H W Bush's love for incubator babies. He loved fake incubator babies.

    The incubator baby actress wasn't just any 15 year old, she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Canada –

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/cqiq8P8dRtY?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    Philpot, Dec 4, 2018
    British and most western media are either in the direct or indirect pay of their governments. What journalist can expose this for us? Any of you willing to make the biggest scoop of the 21st century? Tom Bradbury at ITN must be on the spook payroll, for starters? MI6 had foreign correspondents for years, but domestic mouthpieces must now be on the take too? All paid to demonise Russia and Putin.
    harry stotle, Dec 4, 2018

    The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they come across a particularly adorable baby.

    Simon 'white helmets' Tisdall is especially egregious – one can imagine him throwing darts at a picture of Putin while producing his latest homily to the murderous actions of gangsters like Bush and his crime family.

    Its hard not to despair now this has become the official face of Britains so-called liberal media.

    Yarkob, Dec 4, 2018
    I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's books and media appearances. As with Michael White, with whom I had a very illuminating argument via email a few years back. He *is* an asset, not a journalist (and a massive dick, to boot)
    George cornell, Dec 4, 2018
    I thought the attitude of the Bush family to their fellow Americans was best illustrated by Barbara's response to the plight of the homeless victims of Katrina who had been transported to the Houston domed stadium. They spent their nights there sleeping on hard benches and when good ole Babs heard of it, she opined that they probably had never had it so good so why were they complaining. Could Mother Theresa have had greater generosity of spirit?
    Gekaufte Journalisten (bought journalism), Dec 4, 2018
    Not just one article, the awful Guardian is full of contents eulogising [yet another] mongrel of a president.

    But look at conservative media. The crazy Infowars.com described this Bush as an Anti-American Globalist and Traitor!! .. and zerohedge.com is celebrating: "The Evil Has Died" and "In 2016 he voted for Hillary Clinton, because the Deep State Swamp sticks together". https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-02/exploring-dark-side-bush-41

    Just tell me, who is the rabid neo-con right-wing rag that is glorifying wars and mass murderers?

    Norcal, Dec 4, 2018
    Speaking of neighbors you might appreciate this excellent Journalism by Robert Parry: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/03/bush-41s-october-surprise-denials-2/
    DunGroanin, Dec 4, 2018
    The late Robert Parry, sad to say. Maybe that now both the 'MacBeths' are stains on the tarmac – Parry's notes of the bloodstained legacy of that dynasty can finally be displayed? That Barbara was one cold blooded mother! Would have happily pulled a trigger on JFK, MLK herself (some think).

    Just about the whole century from the setup of the Fed, the two world wars, the depression, Hitler, Korea, Cuba all of it, had a a Bush hand in it. He was the self crowned Caesar having publicly executed the whole of Camelot and left us with a poison toad, reminds us how low the Bush's took the USA.

    David Eire, Dec 3, 2018
    George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one).
    Loverat, Dec 4, 2018
    That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems these people don't have a conscience. If you surround yourself with people of similar mindset and in a climate where war is considered obligatory for US Presidents, you go into self denial. Wars are probably like an addiction for these people and once you get to that stage you no longer have a conscience.

    During John McCain's funeral where all living ex-presidents were in attendance, someone remarked on Twitter, 'Quick, lock the church doors and hold the war crimes trial in the church!'. This was a far more realistic observation than the sickening McCain apologist BBC coverage we were subjected to.

    At the weekend I went to the place where Oliver Cromwell lived. There was an American tourist who told us she was shocked about Oliver Cromwell being dug up from his grave and his head stuck on a pike. She said it was gruesome. I was tempted to say that at least that was 350 years ago, and similar things are happening today in Iraq, Syria and Libya – all places where the US has instigated the chaos and supports the perpretators. I resisted the temptation.

    I note that Cromwell thought he was chosen by God to do what he did. But again that was in different times and there were some redeeming factors in what he did, Probably on par with Obama – who wreaked havoc on the Middle East but reached agreements on Iran and Cuba. Plus Obama looked cool while killing and droning.

    But what goes around comes around. I sense the pure evil involved in the current regime change wars, government, media etc will pay a heavy price – whether in this life or the next.

    mark, Dec 4, 2018
    The state controlled BBC has just done another puff piece on McCain saying what a splendid chap and great statesman and all round good egg he was.

    The MSM likes to slag off Vlad The Bad by droning on about how he was in the KGB. But Bush wasn't just IN the CIA, he was the BOSS of the CIA, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Central American peasant farmers and Indians were being killed by CIA trained and orchestrated death squads.

    Gezzah Potts, Dec 4, 2018
    Mark: jayzus Mark, don't you just want to projectile vomit when you see all this absolute bullshit, just straight out revising of history, just the lies, on and on . I was involved in a Central American solidarity group in the 1980s – early 90s here in Aussie, found out then all about U.S style 'democracatic values' and 'human rights concerns' and death squads and various fascists fully supported by the United States, and places like Guatemala and Nicaragua. Its all an illusion for 'polite society' and the gullible to believe in. Sigh
    mark, Dec 5, 2018
    I can't remember the exact figures but I think it was over 200,000 murdered in Guatemala out of a population of 4 million. It was the same story in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia. And of course the CIA satrap Noriega was hauled off in chains when that country was invaded. But Uncle Sam is finally paying a price for his antics south of the border. Those societies were wrecked and brutalised beyond repair. There is now an unbelievably high murder rate of women in Guatemala. Millions of those people have sought some kind of refuge in the belly of the beast, causing an immigration crisis, with an illegal immigrant population that may be as high as 30 million. Hence all the uproar over Trump's wall. The immigration crisis was a factor in Trump's election, just as the tidal wave of migrants from the destroyed countries of the Middle East was a factor in Brexit. Cameron, Sarko and Clinton thought it was a spiffing idea and quite a wizard wheeze to bomb Libya back to the Stone Age. So we now have a Mad Max failed state complete with warlords and slave markets just across the Med. What goes around, comes around. You can't expect to export violence and mayhem abroad and remain immune to it at home.
    Gezzah Potts, Dec 5, 2018
    Mark: after Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup in Guatemala in 1982, US Ambassador Frederick Chapin declared that thanks to the coup of Rios Montt "the Guatemalan Govt has come out of the darkness into the light". That sums it up in one sentence, and you're probably aware of the mass killing and disappearances under his genocidal tyranny. Reagan kindly submitted that Rios Montt was 'getting a bum rap on human rights, the same Reagan who declared the Contra's were 'The moral equal of our founding fathers'. In El Salvador, the same mass slaughter, the same mass upheaval, and even murdering Archbishop Romero. You only need to look at what happened in Central & South America to understand what the United States really represents.
    Jen, Dec 4, 2018
    I would have bypassed the war crimes trial, locked the church and then built a moat stocked with crocodiles and piranhas around it.
    mark, Dec 4, 2018
    That's entirely right. People understandably despise and revile people like Brady and Hindley, Sutcliffe, Dahmer, Bundy and the like. But they killed a handful of people and were often very damaged individuals to begin with. And at least they did their own dirty work. Subhuman scum sucking filth like Bush, Bush 2, Obama, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Blair, Straw and Campbell are a thousand times worse. They kill millions without getting their hands dirty, and preen and posture as great statesmen and public servants, expecting deference and state funerals and puff piece obituaries from nauseating, loathsome, lickspittle media hacks like Tisdall.
    Caitlin Ni Chonaill, Dec 6, 2018
    You left out Kissinger and Albright.
    Gezzah Potts, Dec 3, 2018
    Nailed it Kit. The attempt at revionism and rewriting history by these craven creatures, these sycophantic slimebag shills for Imperialism and War and the Anglo Zionist Empire. They don't speak truth to power, they protect and grovel to the powerful. The eulogising and fawning of Bush was stomach churning, as it was for the arch Imperialist McCain when he croaked. Thank God for alternative news sites, and yeah Caitlin Johnston @ medium nailed it as well, as Fair Dinkum mentioned. Where's John Pilger when you need him?
    Badger Down, Dec 3, 2018
    GBH Bush's Highway of Death deserves mention. I'll spare you the pictures.
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=highway+of+death+desert+storm&t=h_&atb=v92-2_f&ia=web
    systemicfraud, Dec 3, 2018
    What no one seems to realize is that the VP often takes charge of the US National Security Council when POTUS is not able to attend meetings, which are held weekly. Under Eisenhower it was Richard Nixon who often took charge of the meetings -- Tim Weiner's book "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" gives some details on this. Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking, oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's.
    Fair dinkum, Dec 3, 2018
    Caitlin sums it up: https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/12/01/if-you-murdered-a-bunch-of-people-mass-murder-is-your-single-defining-legacy/
    Simon Hodges, Dec 3, 2018
    The Deep State Guardian. Why don't they just change their name to 'The Daily Thatcherite' and have done with it.
    Frankly Speaking, Dec 4, 2018
    They should just show it's full title: The Guardian Of The Establishment
    kevin morris, Dec 3, 2018
    'Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years' by Russ Baker -- a fascinating account of the Bush family's involvement in a great deal of nefarious activity. Bush senior is one of the few people who didn't remember where he was when Kennedy was shot. Baker puts him in Dallas.
    lysias, Dec 4, 2018
    Now that G.H.W. Bush hss died, is there anybody suspected of involvement in the JFK assassination still alive?
    kevin morris, Dec 4, 2018
    I don't know but as a fairly apolitical individual, I never much bothered with the Kennedy Assasination. All that changed when during the fiftieth anniversary, BBC Radio Four ran a program which included an interview with the Dallas police officer who was handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. The consensus of that program was that the case was open shut and Oswald did it. Around that time, several newspapers in the UK featured articles claiming that Oswald acted alone.

    Whether or not anyone actively involved still lives, their descendants still do and the probable organising body too. There still appears to be determination in some quarters to spread disinformation about the case. Given that as long ago as the late seventies the House of Representatives Assassination Committee concluded that JFK's death was probably the consequence of a conspiracy, determination amongst the mainstream media to lay Kennedy's death at the hands of Oswald alone suggests that there is still determination that the truth never becomes public.

    Frankly Speaking, Dec 3, 2018
    Exactly what i was thinking!

    I'm sickened by the Guardian's and BBC's obedience to the US neocon project to seek, or create, and destroy "enemies" and whilst ignoring all the disgusting atrocities that arise as a consequence.

    The Guardian is not even worth the paper it's printed on. It's become The Guardian Of The Establishment rather than of the Truth which it used to proclaim.

    George cornell, Dec 4, 2018
    It is in danger of losing its budgie-cage-liner status. If budgies can talk they may refuse to evacuate on it. What kind of person maintains ties to such a a poor excuse for cage toiletry. The moral crunch time for their journalists (actually their opinionists) came and went a long time ago.
    Brutally Remastered, Dec 3, 2018
    What a great piece. My parents knew them in New York and they came over once and left behind an embossed packet of White House cigs. I asked my father (before he died) what he thought of them and all he ever said was he thought that Barbara was the intellect in the family.
    Bloody annoying, thanks Pater.
    Marianne Birkby, Dec 3, 2018
    From 2004

    "The induction of DU weapons in 1991 in Iraq broke a 46-year taboo. This Trojan Horse of nuclear war continues to be used more and more. DU remains radioactive longer than the age of the earth (estimated at 4.5 billion years). The long-term effects from over a decade of DU exposures are devastating. The increased quantities of radioactive material used in Afghanistan are 3 to 5 times greater than Iraq, 1991. In Iraq, 2003, they are already estimated to be 6 to 10 times 1991, and will travel through a larger area and affect many more people, babies and unborn. Countries within a 1000-mile radius of Baghdad and Kabul are being affected by radiation poisoning

    Badger Down, Dec 3, 2018
    "DU remains radioactive longer than [ ] 4.5 billion years." It's worse than that. It loses half of its radioactivity in that time. The good news is that that slow release means "D"U doesn't zap you much. The bad news is it's chemically toxic, like a heavy metal (which it is).
    nwwoods, Dec 3, 2018
    Also no mention of the body of circumstantial evidence linking Bush to JFK's murder, though Bush repeatedly insisted that he couldn't recall his whereabouts that day (I can precisely recall where I was, and I was 9 years old in 1963), in spite of the fact that solid documentary evidence exists that puts him in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963.
    Norcal, Dec 4, 2018
    The very first Google Search I did was this, (George H.W. Bush+November 22, 1963) and it yielded a page like the following link, which began my research into the JFK Assassination.

    http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewstory.php?storyid=5420

    nomad, Dec 3, 2018

    well, yeah. but for us mad people it goes deeper even than that: https://geopolitics.co/2018/12/02/in-memoriam-george-h-scherff-jr-aka-george-hw-bush-sr/

    Bush Sr. : Crypto-Nazi patriarch and his disciples
    https://eclinik.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/barbara-bush-funeral-four-presidents-four-first-ladies.jpg?w=672&h=372&crop=1

    [Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they come across a particularly adorable baby. ..."
    "... I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's books and media appearances. ..."
    "... George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one). ..."
    "... That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems these people don't have a conscience. ..."
    "... Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking, oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's. ..."
    "... The Deep State Guardian. Why don't they just change their name to 'The Daily Thatcherite' and have done with it. ..."
    "... They should just show it's full title: The Guardian Of The Establishment ..."
    "... well, yeah. but for us mad people it goes deeper even than that: https://geopolitics.co/2018/12/02/in-memoriam-george-h-scherff-jr-aka-george-hw-bush-sr/ ..."
    Dec 22, 2018 | off-guardian.org

    Oslo - Norway, Dec 4, 2018

    Let's never forget George H W Bush's love for incubator babies. He loved fake incubator babies.

    The incubator baby actress wasn't just any 15 year old, she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Canada –

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/cqiq8P8dRtY?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

    Philpot, Dec 4, 2018
    British and most western media are either in the direct or indirect pay of their governments. What journalist can expose this for us? Any of you willing to make the biggest scoop of the 21st century? Tom Bradbury at ITN must be on the spook payroll, for starters? MI6 had foreign correspondents for years, but domestic mouthpieces must now be on the take too? All paid to demonise Russia and Putin.
    harry stotle, Dec 4, 2018

    The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they come across a particularly adorable baby.

    Simon 'white helmets' Tisdall is especially egregious – one can imagine him throwing darts at a picture of Putin while producing his latest homily to the murderous actions of gangsters like Bush and his crime family.

    Its hard not to despair now this has become the official face of Britains so-called liberal media.

    Yarkob, Dec 4, 2018
    I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's books and media appearances. As with Michael White, with whom I had a very illuminating argument via email a few years back. He *is* an asset, not a journalist (and a massive dick, to boot)
    George cornell, Dec 4, 2018
    I thought the attitude of the Bush family to their fellow Americans was best illustrated by Barbara's response to the plight of the homeless victims of Katrina who had been transported to the Houston domed stadium. They spent their nights there sleeping on hard benches and when good ole Babs heard of it, she opined that they probably had never had it so good so why were they complaining. Could Mother Theresa have had greater generosity of spirit?
    Gekaufte Journalisten (bought journalism), Dec 4, 2018
    Not just one article, the awful Guardian is full of contents eulogising [yet another] mongrel of a president.

    But look at conservative media. The crazy Infowars.com described this Bush as an Anti-American Globalist and Traitor!! .. and zerohedge.com is celebrating: "The Evil Has Died" and "In 2016 he voted for Hillary Clinton, because the Deep State Swamp sticks together". https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-02/exploring-dark-side-bush-41

    Just tell me, who is the rabid neo-con right-wing rag that is glorifying wars and mass murderers?

    Norcal, Dec 4, 2018
    Speaking of neighbors you might appreciate this excellent Journalism by Robert Parry: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/03/bush-41s-october-surprise-denials-2/
    DunGroanin, Dec 4, 2018
    The late Robert Parry, sad to say. Maybe that now both the 'MacBeths' are stains on the tarmac – Parry's notes of the bloodstained legacy of that dynasty can finally be displayed? That Barbara was one cold blooded mother! Would have happily pulled a trigger on JFK, MLK herself (some think).

    Just about the whole century from the setup of the Fed, the two world wars, the depression, Hitler, Korea, Cuba all of it, had a a Bush hand in it. He was the self crowned Caesar having publicly executed the whole of Camelot and left us with a poison toad, reminds us how low the Bush's took the USA.

    David Eire, Dec 3, 2018
    George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one).
    Loverat, Dec 4, 2018
    That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems these people don't have a conscience. If you surround yourself with people of similar mindset and in a climate where war is considered obligatory for US Presidents, you go into self denial. Wars are probably like an addiction for these people and once you get to that stage you no longer have a conscience.

    During John McCain's funeral where all living ex-presidents were in attendance, someone remarked on Twitter, 'Quick, lock the church doors and hold the war crimes trial in the church!'. This was a far more realistic observation than the sickening McCain apologist BBC coverage we were subjected to.

    At the weekend I went to the place where Oliver Cromwell lived. There was an American tourist who told us she was shocked about Oliver Cromwell being dug up from his grave and his head stuck on a pike. She said it was gruesome. I was tempted to say that at least that was 350 years ago, and similar things are happening today in Iraq, Syria and Libya – all places where the US has instigated the chaos and supports the perpretators. I resisted the temptation.

    I note that Cromwell thought he was chosen by God to do what he did. But again that was in different times and there were some redeeming factors in what he did, Probably on par with Obama – who wreaked havoc on the Middle East but reached agreements on Iran and Cuba. Plus Obama looked cool while killing and droning.

    But what goes around comes around. I sense the pure evil involved in the current regime change wars, government, media etc will pay a heavy price – whether in this life or the next.

    mark, Dec 4, 2018
    The state controlled BBC has just done another puff piece on McCain saying what a splendid chap and great statesman and all round good egg he was.

    The MSM likes to slag off Vlad The Bad by droning on about how he was in the KGB. But Bush wasn't just IN the CIA, he was the BOSS of the CIA, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Central American peasant farmers and Indians were being killed by CIA trained and orchestrated death squads.

    Gezzah Potts, Dec 4, 2018
    Mark: jayzus Mark, don't you just want to projectile vomit when you see all this absolute bullshit, just straight out revising of history, just the lies, on and on . I was involved in a Central American solidarity group in the 1980s – early 90s here in Aussie, found out then all about U.S style 'democracatic values' and 'human rights concerns' and death squads and various fascists fully supported by the United States, and places like Guatemala and Nicaragua. Its all an illusion for 'polite society' and the gullible to believe in. Sigh
    mark, Dec 5, 2018
    I can't remember the exact figures but I think it was over 200,000 murdered in Guatemala out of a population of 4 million. It was the same story in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia. And of course the CIA satrap Noriega was hauled off in chains when that country was invaded. But Uncle Sam is finally paying a price for his antics south of the border. Those societies were wrecked and brutalised beyond repair. There is now an unbelievably high murder rate of women in Guatemala. Millions of those people have sought some kind of refuge in the belly of the beast, causing an immigration crisis, with an illegal immigrant population that may be as high as 30 million. Hence all the uproar over Trump's wall. The immigration crisis was a factor in Trump's election, just as the tidal wave of migrants from the destroyed countries of the Middle East was a factor in Brexit. Cameron, Sarko and Clinton thought it was a spiffing idea and quite a wizard wheeze to bomb Libya back to the Stone Age. So we now have a Mad Max failed state complete with warlords and slave markets just across the Med. What goes around, comes around. You can't expect to export violence and mayhem abroad and remain immune to it at home.
    Gezzah Potts, Dec 5, 2018
    Mark: after Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup in Guatemala in 1982, US Ambassador Frederick Chapin declared that thanks to the coup of Rios Montt "the Guatemalan Govt has come out of the darkness into the light". That sums it up in one sentence, and you're probably aware of the mass killing and disappearances under his genocidal tyranny. Reagan kindly submitted that Rios Montt was 'getting a bum rap on human rights, the same Reagan who declared the Contra's were 'The moral equal of our founding fathers'. In El Salvador, the same mass slaughter, the same mass upheaval, and even murdering Archbishop Romero. You only need to look at what happened in Central & South America to understand what the United States really represents.
    Jen, Dec 4, 2018
    I would have bypassed the war crimes trial, locked the church and then built a moat stocked with crocodiles and piranhas around it.
    mark, Dec 4, 2018
    That's entirely right. People understandably despise and revile people like Brady and Hindley, Sutcliffe, Dahmer, Bundy and the like. But they killed a handful of people and were often very damaged individuals to begin with. And at least they did their own dirty work. Subhuman scum sucking filth like Bush, Bush 2, Obama, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Blair, Straw and Campbell are a thousand times worse. They kill millions without getting their hands dirty, and preen and posture as great statesmen and public servants, expecting deference and state funerals and puff piece obituaries from nauseating, loathsome, lickspittle media hacks like Tisdall.
    Caitlin Ni Chonaill, Dec 6, 2018
    You left out Kissinger and Albright.
    Gezzah Potts, Dec 3, 2018
    Nailed it Kit. The attempt at revionism and rewriting history by these craven creatures, these sycophantic slimebag shills for Imperialism and War and the Anglo Zionist Empire. They don't speak truth to power, they protect and grovel to the powerful. The eulogising and fawning of Bush was stomach churning, as it was for the arch Imperialist McCain when he croaked. Thank God for alternative news sites, and yeah Caitlin Johnston @ medium nailed it as well, as Fair Dinkum mentioned. Where's John Pilger when you need him?
    Badger Down, Dec 3, 2018
    GBH Bush's Highway of Death deserves mention. I'll spare you the pictures.
    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=highway+of+death+desert+storm&t=h_&atb=v92-2_f&ia=web
    systemicfraud, Dec 3, 2018
    What no one seems to realize is that the VP often takes charge of the US National Security Council when POTUS is not able to attend meetings, which are held weekly. Under Eisenhower it was Richard Nixon who often took charge of the meetings -- Tim Weiner's book "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" gives some details on this. Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking, oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's.
    Fair dinkum, Dec 3, 2018
    Caitlin sums it up: https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/12/01/if-you-murdered-a-bunch-of-people-mass-murder-is-your-single-defining-legacy/
    Simon Hodges, Dec 3, 2018
    The Deep State Guardian. Why don't they just change their name to 'The Daily Thatcherite' and have done with it.
    Frankly Speaking, Dec 4, 2018
    They should just show it's full title: The Guardian Of The Establishment
    kevin morris, Dec 3, 2018
    'Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years' by Russ Baker -- a fascinating account of the Bush family's involvement in a great deal of nefarious activity. Bush senior is one of the few people who didn't remember where he was when Kennedy was shot. Baker puts him in Dallas.
    lysias, Dec 4, 2018
    Now that G.H.W. Bush hss died, is there anybody suspected of involvement in the JFK assassination still alive?
    kevin morris, Dec 4, 2018
    I don't know but as a fairly apolitical individual, I never much bothered with the Kennedy Assasination. All that changed when during the fiftieth anniversary, BBC Radio Four ran a program which included an interview with the Dallas police officer who was handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. The consensus of that program was that the case was open shut and Oswald did it. Around that time, several newspapers in the UK featured articles claiming that Oswald acted alone.

    Whether or not anyone actively involved still lives, their descendants still do and the probable organising body too. There still appears to be determination in some quarters to spread disinformation about the case. Given that as long ago as the late seventies the House of Representatives Assassination Committee concluded that JFK's death was probably the consequence of a conspiracy, determination amongst the mainstream media to lay Kennedy's death at the hands of Oswald alone suggests that there is still determination that the truth never becomes public.

    Frankly Speaking, Dec 3, 2018
    Exactly what i was thinking!

    I'm sickened by the Guardian's and BBC's obedience to the US neocon project to seek, or create, and destroy "enemies" and whilst ignoring all the disgusting atrocities that arise as a consequence.

    The Guardian is not even worth the paper it's printed on. It's become The Guardian Of The Establishment rather than of the Truth which it used to proclaim.

    George cornell, Dec 4, 2018
    It is in danger of losing its budgie-cage-liner status. If budgies can talk they may refuse to evacuate on it. What kind of person maintains ties to such a a poor excuse for cage toiletry. The moral crunch time for their journalists (actually their opinionists) came and went a long time ago.
    Brutally Remastered, Dec 3, 2018
    What a great piece. My parents knew them in New York and they came over once and left behind an embossed packet of White House cigs. I asked my father (before he died) what he thought of them and all he ever said was he thought that Barbara was the intellect in the family.
    Bloody annoying, thanks Pater.
    Marianne Birkby, Dec 3, 2018
    From 2004

    "The induction of DU weapons in 1991 in Iraq broke a 46-year taboo. This Trojan Horse of nuclear war continues to be used more and more. DU remains radioactive longer than the age of the earth (estimated at 4.5 billion years). The long-term effects from over a decade of DU exposures are devastating. The increased quantities of radioactive material used in Afghanistan are 3 to 5 times greater than Iraq, 1991. In Iraq, 2003, they are already estimated to be 6 to 10 times 1991, and will travel through a larger area and affect many more people, babies and unborn. Countries within a 1000-mile radius of Baghdad and Kabul are being affected by radiation poisoning

    Badger Down, Dec 3, 2018
    "DU remains radioactive longer than [ ] 4.5 billion years." It's worse than that. It loses half of its radioactivity in that time. The good news is that that slow release means "D"U doesn't zap you much. The bad news is it's chemically toxic, like a heavy metal (which it is).
    nwwoods, Dec 3, 2018
    Also no mention of the body of circumstantial evidence linking Bush to JFK's murder, though Bush repeatedly insisted that he couldn't recall his whereabouts that day (I can precisely recall where I was, and I was 9 years old in 1963), in spite of the fact that solid documentary evidence exists that puts him in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963.
    Norcal, Dec 4, 2018
    The very first Google Search I did was this, (George H.W. Bush+November 22, 1963) and it yielded a page like the following link, which began my research into the JFK Assassination.

    http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewstory.php?storyid=5420

    nomad, Dec 3, 2018

    well, yeah. but for us mad people it goes deeper even than that: https://geopolitics.co/2018/12/02/in-memoriam-george-h-scherff-jr-aka-george-hw-bush-sr/

    Bush Sr. : Crypto-Nazi patriarch and his disciples
    https://eclinik.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/barbara-bush-funeral-four-presidents-four-first-ladies.jpg?w=672&h=372&crop=1

    [Jan 29, 2019] So which of Trump s nominees gets kneecapped by Deep State first? Michael Flynn

    Dec 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    pogohere , Dec 15, 2018 5:57:43 PM | link

    jackrabbit @ 28

    activist potato @ 78

    Re: "The possibility that MAGA was, in fact, a sly misdirection to co-opt the fervour of re-ignited passions in a disenfranchised segment of the America people - to re-capture the kind of patriotic commitment and ardor that drove the war effort in two world wars - into a renewed Imperial adventure was obviated, in my view, by Trump's loud and overt criticism of past Imperial adventures such as the Iraq war and Obama's inaction regarding ISIS (the accusation that Obama "created" ISIS was a bombshell, in my opinion).

    Trump engaged in a bare, pointed, often crass and bordering on contemptuous criticism of his predecessors' foreign policy. The irreverent tone was unprecedented in recent campaign history and was so plain and completely at odds with Hilary's stated positions that it essentially committed him (in my eyes anyway) to following through, or to make all efforts to follow through. If not, he would set one of the worst examples of a duplicitous politician, perhaps ever. The same applies to other bold campaign positions, such as the border wall, for example.

    But when viewed in the context of a deep state "policy change," such a clear and utter denunciation and discrediting of the former policy would be necessary to shift the National mindset and would not necessarily preclude Trump from engaging in further Imperial adventures, as long as they were different from the discredited policy."

    So which of Trump's nominees gets kneecapped first? Michael Flynn Former Military Chief: Iraq War Was A 'Failure' That Helped Create ISIS

    12-19-16

    Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who came up through intelligence positions in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that the George W. Bush administration's Iraq war was a tremendous blunder that helped to create the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS.

    "It was a huge error," Flynn said about the Iraq war in a detailed interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel published Sunday.

    "As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him," Flynn went on to say. "The same is true for Moammar Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision."

    When told by Der Spiegel reporters Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark that the Islamic State would not "be where it is now without the fall of Baghdad," Flynn, without reservations, said: "Yes, absolutely."

    Read the entire interview here: https://tinyurl.com/zmxd3uf

    Flynn, who served in the U.S. Army for more than 30 years, also said that the American military response following 9/11 was not well thought-out at all and based on significant misunderstandings.

    BTW:

    Hold the Phone on Flynn Sentencing – Judge Emmet Sullivan Has Questions

    12-12-18

    Interesting, very interesting. As noted in the Flynn sentencing memo last night there were some curiously framed explanations of events surrounding his FBI inquisition.

    Now Judge Emmet Sullivan wants expanded information, and wishes to see the actual notes (FD-302) that were mentioned by Flynn; and Judge Sullivan is directing the special counsel to provide all documents created by the FBI surrounding the Flynn interview:

    from the comments:

    Curt says:
    December 12, 2018 at 9:56 pm
    This could be big news! Judge Emmet Sullivan was the same judge that had prosecutors investigated for criminal actions they took in the Sen. Ted Stevens FALSE prosecution. Some on Mueller's team, including Weinstein, were held in contempt. One prosecutor committed suicide. Others threatened with disbarment and some were suspended. "A federal judge dismissed the ethics conviction of former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska on Tuesday after taking the extraordinary step of naming a special prosecutor to investigate whether the government lawyers who ran the Stevens case (2008) should themselves be prosecuted for criminal wrongdoing. Mueller was also involved in that horrible attempt by prosecutors to frame Sen. Ted Stevens. Judge Sullivan has absolutely no use for this group of prosecutors. He smells a rat here and is asking for all investigative materials, including 302s. This judge will not hesitate to take action against these crooked prosecutors if he finds evidence of ANY wrong doing.


    See: Cautionary Tale: The Ted Stevens Prosecution

    On April 7, 2009, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia unleashed his fury before a packed courtroom. For 14 minutes, he scolded. He chastised. He fumed. "In nearly 25 years on the bench," he said, "I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case.

    . . .

    For months Judge Sullivan had warned U.S. prosecutors about their repeated failure to turn over evidence. Then, after the jury convicted Stevens, the Justice Department discovered previously unrevealed evidence. Meanwhile, a prosecution witness and an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) came forward alleging prosecutorial misconduct. Finally, newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that he had had enough and recommended that the seven-count conviction against the former Alaska senator be dismissed.

    On April 7, Judge Sullivan did just that. But he was far from done.

    In an extraordinarily rare move, he ordered an inquiry into the prosecutors' handling of the case. Judge Sullivan insisted that the misconduct allegations were "too serious and too numerous" to be left to an internal Justice Department investigation. He appointed Washington lawyer Henry F. Schuelke III of Janis, Schuelke & Wechsler to investigate whether members of the trial team should be prosecuted for criminal contempt.

    Judge sentencing . . . Michael Flynn orders special counsel to hand over all 302s"


    12-13-18 Following the allegations, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan yesterday ordered that both the Mueller investigation and the Flynn team turn over all documents [the "302s"] relating to the fateful interview, including all contemporaneous notes, before 3pm Friday.

    DiGenova slams Mueller's handling of Flynn FBI meeting

    4:04

    Rumor has it the next chapter of this story unfolds Monday, 17 Dec '18.

    [Jan 29, 2019] Once Barr is installed in office, stand by. The Department of Justice and the FBI will received the equivalent of a high powered enema. Both are sick institutions and need to have the feces flushed out

    Notable quotes:
    "... Then a funny thing happened. Robert Mueller's press guy issued an unprecedented statement calling the Buzzfeed story pure, unadulterated bullshit. Whoops!! ..."
    "... How many of of the FBI and DOJ's top leadership from the Obama administration have gotten fired and are being investigated for criminal conduct? ..."
    "... Enema works for me but reading reports on the analysis of Ohr's transcript, I'm not even sure an enema is going to be enough for the fbi. I think the only solution is liquidation. ..."
    "... Bill Barr clean out the DOJ? I wouldn't count on it. He is a member in good standing of the swamp ..."
    Jan 19, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Remember when Dan Rather self-immolated his credibility in a desperate attempt to take out George W. Bush? The Killian documents controversy (also referred to as Memogate or Rathergate) involved six purported documents critical of U.S. President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73.

    Four of these documents[1] were presented as authentic in a 60 Minutes II broadcast aired by CBS on September 8, 2004, less than two months before the 2004 presidential election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate the documents.[2][3][4] Subsequently, several typewriter and typography experts concluded the documents were forgeries.[5][6]

    Well, looks like Buzzfeed did not learn from history. Buzzfeed set the media world on fire on Friday with a story that appeared well sourced that claimed Donald Trump had directed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal that never came to fruition. The mainstream media went into hyper impeachment drive.

    This was the nail in the Trump coffin as far as they were concerned. Trump was as good as dead.

    Then a funny thing happened. Robert Mueller's press guy issued an unprecedented statement calling the Buzzfeed story pure, unadulterated bullshit. Whoops!!

    The Trump is dead meme quickly evaporated. Why did Mueller do this? The answer is simple. Bill Barr.

    The soon to be new Attorney General is known as a man of impeccable integrity with a minimal tolerance for bullshit. Mueller, as an old friend of Barr, knew that he had to do something dramatic to distance himself and his staff from this toxic story.

    Once Barr is installed in office, stand by. The Department of Justice and the FBI will received the equivalent of a high powered enema. Both are sick institutions and need to have the feces flushed out.

    Jack , 19 hours ago

    "...Bill Barr. The soon to be new Attorney General is known as a man of impeccable integrity with a minimal tolerance for bullshit."

    Mr. Barr seems as swampy as they get. He played a key role in the mass surveillance of all Americans and is the classic beltway sophist who has done much to reinterpret the constitution eviscerating the Bill of Rights. His past actions don't make him a man of integrity unless of course being in service to the national security state is considered virtuous.

    I believe Mr. Johnson's optimism of Barr's nomination leading to a "high powered enema" at the DOJ & FBI is unfounded. IMO, none of the seditionists will be held to account. In any case POTUS Trump seems quite content with tweeting witch hunt rather than declassifying and ordering a prosecutor convene a grand jury and have Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and all the other putschists testify.

    Fred -> Jack , 12 hours ago
    "He played a key role in the mass surveillance of all Americans"

    He served under H.W. Bush who lost to Clinton. Obama did just what, beside get great protection from Brennan, Clapper, Comey and a list of others you haven't named yet. How many of of the FBI and DOJ's top leadership from the Obama administration have gotten fired and are being investigated for criminal conduct? What kind of support do you think the Trump administration was getting from those outstanding civil servants for the past two years?

    blue peacock -> Fred , 9 hours ago
    "What kind of support do you think the Trump administration was getting from those outstanding civil servants for the past two years?"

    Well, it is the Trump administration that nominated Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray and now Barr. How many of those fired have testified to a grand jury? They're nicely ensconced with their lucrative sinecures until the next Borg administration. Mueller has spent tens of millions in going after Trump campaign minions. Where is the witch hunt against Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Lynch, et al? Of course its not that POTUS has no agency here. He can order declassification and the appointment of a prosecutor with a stroke of pen. Tweeting however is more like his pace.

    Pat Lang Mod , a day ago
    Rather interviewed me in the library of the Army and Navy Club in DC at the height of the excitement over the obviously approaching US invasion of Iraq in 2002. At one point he asked me if the Bushies were going to invade Iraq. I told himthat should not even be a question. He did not believe me.
    Bill H , 10 hours ago
    The only difference is that Rather had some small degree of credibility before the incident in question. I don't believe that Buzzfeed has ever had a shred of credibility to anyone with the slightest ability to think.
    Taras77 , a day ago
    Enema works for me but reading reports on the analysis of Ohr's transcript, I'm not even sure an enema is going to be enough for the fbi. I think the only solution is liquidation.

    This is a tragedy for past good /honest fbi agents but the fbi currently is a pestilence on this country which claims to be a nation of laws.

    MP98 , a day ago
    Bill Barr clean out the DOJ? I wouldn't count on it. He is a member in good standing of the swamp

    [Jan 29, 2019] Scheer The Illegal CIA Operation That Brought Us 9-11

    Jan 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Scheer: The Illegal CIA Operation That Brought Us 9/11

    by Tyler Durden Sun, 01/27/2019 - 23:50 360 SHARES Authored by Robert Scheer via TruthDig.com,

    Was it conspiracy or idiocy that led to the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to detect and prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon headquarters? That's one of the questions at the heart of "The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror," by John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. In their careful and thorough investigation of the events leading up to the attacks, the authors uncover a story about the Central Intelligence Agency's neglect, possible criminal activities and a cover-up that may have allowed al-Qaida to carry out its plans uninhibited by government officials.

    In the latest installment of "Scheer Intelligence," the journalists tell Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer how an interview with Richard Clarke, the counterterror adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, led them to a jaw-dropping revelation regarding two hijackers involved in the infamous attacks. As it turns out, Khalid Muhammad Abdallah al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two men linked to al-Qaida, were staying at an FBI informant's home in San Diego in 2000, and they were being tracked by the National Security Agency. Despite knowledge of the men's ties to the terrorist organization responsible for 9/11, neither was investigated by the FBI. Clarke and others believe that this may have had to do with a CIA attempt to turn the two men into agency informants.

    "When we sat down with Clarke he told us he couldn't see any other explanation but that there was an op [and] that it never made it to the White House because it would have had to go through him," says Nowosielski.

    "And his friend [then CIA Director] George Tenet was responsible for malfeasance and misfeasance in the runup to 9/11."

    Once the plans for the 9/11 attack must have become clear to the CIA, why didn't the agency prevent it from taking place? Duffy and Nowosielski come to the simple, shocking conclusion that because the CIA is prohibited from operating on U.S. soil, those involved in the operation chose to avoid prosecution rather than come clean.

    In a well-documented case study that touches senior government officials, including current special counsel Robert Mueller and other high-level individuals, crucial questions arise about who is responsible for allowing "a plot that resulted in 3,000 murders" and led to ongoing U.S. military entanglements in the Middle East to move forward.

    However, our country's recent crimes and the people behind them, including President Bush, are currently being "whitewashed" by our national obsession with Donald Trump, the authors warn.

    "All the crimes of the war on terror, the torture, Abu Ghraib, it's all just gone -- the unnecessary invasion of the war in Iraq, it's all just sort of under the rug now because of Trump," Duffy says.

    Listen to their discussion to learn more about the stunning investigation into the tragedy that changed the course of our nation's history and the Americans who could have thwarted the attacks but decided to cover their own backs instead. You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player .

    https://www.kcrw.com/embed-player?api_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kcrw.com%2Fculture%2Fshows%2Fscheer-intelligence%2Fthe-illegal-cia-operation-that-brought-us-9-11%2Fplayer.json&autoplay=false

    RS : Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of "Scheer Intelligence," where the intelligence comes from my guests. And the title is really appropriate for the book we're going to talk about today, "The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror." And the authors are John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. And they are investigative reporters, and the watchdogs here are the people in our intelligence agencies that are supposed to be protecting the nation. And this book cuts very deeply into the unsolved mystery of how 9/11 happened. Why weren't we better prepared to prevent it? It's one of the most important events in American history; it certainly has shaped our lives in terms of a surveillance state, our rights and everything else, up to the present. And this book, I think, represents the most exhaustive and well-documented effort to get to the bottom of the whole thing. You're very careful in what you do and do not assert about 9/11, what we don't know about it, and particularly the role of George Tenet, who was then head of the CIA, and the role of the CIA in -- what is the right word? -- obscuring the story, even keeping information from the White House, from the FBI. So give me the gist of the book.

    RN : This is Ray. The book is largely about looking at this case study of the failure leading up to 9/11, the people who were involved in that failure, how that came about, and how they were successful, to the present day, in managing to obscure the public from really fully understanding that this was, in the words of one of our sources, really just a handful of people. And the most jarring thing is that they're still, in some cases, working today in I guess Trump's CIA. And we sort of document through the second half of the book what damage was done to America because they remained in their positions.

    JD: This is John. And intelligence was gathered around the time of the millennium that led people in the Bin Laden unit at the CIA to monitor a meeting in Malaysia that was a gathering of these al-Qaida figures. In monitoring this --

    RS : That was in the year 2000, right?

    JD : Yes. Right at the outset of the year. In monitoring this meeting, they became aware of the fact that one of the attendees had a multiple-entry visa to the United States. That man's name was Khalid al-Mihdhar. He would eventually be on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon; he was one of the hijackers. So this starts the whole thing there, the fact that the CIA becomes aware of this information; the Bin Laden unit, counterterror center, and then all the way up to George Tenet are aware of this information. There's a lot of ins, outs, and what-have-yous about where that information goes, but it ultimately does not go over to the FBI's counterterror division in New York, much to the protest of the FBI agents who were detailed to the CIA's Bin Laden unit. And it did not make it to the White House counterterror czar, Richard Clarke, who very much finds this to be, like, the crux of the whole story -- the fact that this information was kept from his office for basically a year and eight months, up until the success of the attacks. The crux is there, that they had this information, these guys were coming into the country, they had just left the terror planning summit, and this information was being held close by the Bin Laden unit, by the counterterror center, and by George Tenet. The reason for that is unknown; the speculation that Richard Clarke has was that George Tenet and these people in the Bin Laden unit and counterterror center thought having these al-Qaida people in the United States, they could possibly go through Allied proxies in the Saudi intelligence to try to get close to these guys, monitor them, potentially find out information from them or even try to flip them. That's Richard Clarke's speculation as to why this was kept from him for so long. Ultimately, the attack was successful; that they all just did their best to bury all this and, you know, hope no one noticed.

    RS : Let me just start off with something that was confusing to me in reading your book. Because the FBI generally comes off looking pretty good in your book, and the real problem is with the CIA, and to a lesser degree, with the NSA. And in the San Diego story, and this is covered in the 9/11 Commission Report and others, the two San Diego guys -- they are staying at the home of an FBI informant at first. So when you say the FBI was not informed, weren't some of these calls actually made from the home of an FBI asset?

    RN : It's interesting when you know, A, that according to our NSA sources they were able to be pinged every time that Mihdhar and Hazmi, the two hijackers, called from that house that you mentioned in San Diego, back to Yemen. That somebody in the NSA was getting an alert as that was happening each time, and was aware of those connections. But that the house that was being used for the phone call was that of an FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh. And Abdussattar was somebody the FBI recruited who was inside a popular mosque in San Diego, and who they thought might be able to feed them warnings of anybody who might be a radical Muslim terrorist. And Abdussattar claims that he simply missed the warning signs of the two tenants that he had in his home. I mean, it's kind of interesting. He's also, he's not just an FBI informant, he's also a Saudi, which kind of points to Richard Clarke's conjecture, which he first laid out to us when we sat down in his office in 2009. And that was that once the CIA monitored the meeting in Malaysia, knew that these two guys were connected to Bin Laden and were of interest, and saw that they were heading to the United States, in Clarke's words, they might well have thought that the best way to try to recruit these guys to feed information was not to send a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, American CIA agent to go to meet them. But, instead, to use our partners in Saudi Arabia and Saudi intelligence -- which George Tenet, the head of the CIA, happened to be very close with -- to try to recruit them. So I actually focus more on the fact that this guy was introduced to this house by a gentleman who's been determined to be a Saudi agent, a guy named Omar al-Bayoumi, and that this guy then was perhaps working dually for Saudi intel and as an FBI asset. And everyone sort of focuses on, oh, Abdussattar Shaikh was an FBI asset, so that seems to put blame at the feet of the FBI. Could be; could be, but I would also focus on that Saudi angle, because it recurs so often.

    RS : Well, it also goes to the question of the efficiency of the surveillance society. Because after all, these phone calls could be intercepted. You know, they did; they could follow this trail. And phone calls are being made back to a suspect residence in Yemen and so forth, from the home of an FBI recruit. And I'm just wondering, there's been a lot of discussion, some of the people that you quote in your book have made this point -- you collect this haystack of information that doesn't lead you to the needle in the haystack. And so here these phone calls were, clearly could be intercepted. They didn't require any special act of Congress or anything else. This was not a case of their arms being tied, the intelligence agencies. But they're not even looking at their own data. Isn't that the takeaway from the first part of this story? These guys are acting suspiciously in San Diego, they have a suspicious background, they've participated in a suspicious conference, they're staying at the home of an FBI informant, and they're making calls that would basically outline what was going to happen in this disastrous attack -- and no one noticed. Or the ones who noticed didn't tell other people.

    JD : I think what is likely to have happened there is, so those calls were going back, and I think it was about seven or eight calls. And Khalid al-Mihdhar's wife still lived at that house, and he was calling her from San Diego. So I don't think any deep operational details were being discussed in those calls, but that doesn't really matter; the fact that they're calling that home from America is a big deal. And how that would work at the NSA is there's someone who is tasked all day with basically monitoring the electronic signals going into and out of this house in Yemen, and when they see this coming in from the United States, that should ring a really big alarm bell. Now, that person working that desk would have to seek approval from the chop chain, which are these NSA managers. In order for anything to happen with that information, it has to get passed up and then brought to a FISA court, brought to the FBI. And if these managers within the NSA basically say, don't worry about it, sit on it, just collect it, sit on it -- and if they don't allow any action, then there will be no action. And it's just going to stay housed right there, in that particular data stovepipe at the NSA. If Richard Clarke's speculation is true, that there was this attempt to recruit these guys in the U.S. with Saudi proxies, part of that plan would have been George Tenet speaking to someone at the NSA, or one of George Tenet's people speaking to someone at the NSA. Basically saying, hey, before you go out getting any FISA warrants or chasing anything down regarding this specific house, come to us first. So if there is some operation going on, it would stand to reason that part of that operation would be not allowing these pings at this particular desk to turn into any action.

    RS : For people listening, let me make clear, this is an incredibly detailed, researched book, which relies very heavily on intelligence veterans. No one less so than Richard Clarke, who's come up so far; another is former colonel Larry Wilkerson, obviously a key person. And what is very dramatic in your book is, where your story really comes to life for you guys as journalists, is when Richard Clarke -- you say you go in there to interview him, and you tell your crew, put the sound on as we go in. And you go in, and you think you're going to have to ask a lot of questions to get -- and for people who don't know, Richard Clarke ever since the early '70s was a major figure in the intelligence community. And at this point, when you're talking to him, he's been around the block, he's seen everything. And he was a close friend of George Tenet, who was head of the CIA; they considered themselves allies. And you're going in to get this interview, and you think you're going to have to weasel information out of him. And he just hits you over the head with an assertion that, really, is the thrust of this book. So why don't you take us to that moment?

    RN : What we discovered on the day that we walked into Richard Clarke's conference room was that he'd been ready for probably about a year to talk about this, and no major journalists had called him up to ask him about this subject. Nobody had ever asked him. So going back, you know, he started in the Reagan State Department; he worked under George H.W.; Clinton, when these Al Qaeda terrorist attacks began in the early nineties, recognized that there needed to be a new position within his Cabinet, and he called it the counterterror czar, the counterterror adviser. And he created that position for Richard Clarke. As you mentioned, Clarke was close friends with George Tenet, who also was sort of on the National Security Council under Clinton early on, and then got named the head of the CIA in the midst of Clinton's first term. George W. Bush and company come in, early 2001; as it turned out, nine months ahead of this ticking clock towards 9/11. And Richard Clarke is told that he's essentially being demoted. He's still going to be the counterterror advisor, but it's not a Cabinet-level position. And so now he's kind of essentially going through the extra layer of Condoleezza Rice. But George Tenet still very much has Bush's ear. And that's kind of the back story there; then after, you know, on 9/11 Richard Clarke by nearly all accounts was running the response that morning, on that critical day; he was the top man for counterterror. Over time, he starts to get rubbed the wrong way by the fact that the Bush administration inexplicably is not really terribly still concerned about Al Qaeda after 9/11. But then Clarke leaves, and he writes a bestselling book. And he testifies before the 9/11 commission and becomes the only person to apologize to the families, to admit that there was a failure at all. But cut to a few years down the line, and he releases another book in 2008 that doesn't become a bestseller. And it's called "Your Government Failed You." And it includes a section on Mihdhar and Hazmi that he calls "Straining Credulity," in which he says that he does not believe in conspiracy theories, but in this one particular case, he's weighed it every which way and he can't see another way to explain it but by. But he sort of saved us speculation, and so we saw that part in his book and we thought, well, we've been itching -- we'd collected enough info by that time, and talked with enough people, that we thought: something happened here with these two hijackers that flew over to the U.S. Something happened when they arrived. And the big question was, if this was an operation by the CIA, did they let Clinton know? Did they then let Bush know when he came in? What was the deal there? And Richard Clarke would be the man in a position to answer that. And so you're right, that's where our journey really -- that's where we launched. Because we'd been looking into it for a few years, but when we sat down with Clarke, that was when he told us he couldn't see any other explanation but that there was an op, that it never made it to the White House because it would have had to go through him. And his friend George Tenet was responsible for malfeasance and misfeasance in the runup to 9/11.

    JD : And he also, in part of that description, said that a lot of the CIA reports that would have, any other day, come directly to his computer -- when he flicked it on in the morning, it would be right there waiting for him -- just on this specific case with these two individuals, he was removed from the chain of information. And so he felt that he was getting minutiae concerning terrorism from around the world in, like, tiny micro-detail on everything except this, and that must have meant he was intentionally pulled out of the chain by someone. And that that would have taken high-level order. And when asked, you know, how high level, he said that it must have come from the director, referring to George Tenet.

    RS : So let's cut to the chase here. There's an old caution, don't attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by ordinary stupidity. Or laziness, or incompetence. Is this a case where George Tenet, the admired at that time head of the CIA, was just incompetent, stupid, indifferent? Is there something more at work? Did the CIA welcome such an attack as a boon for the military-industrial complex, as some people allege? What's going on here? How could this major tragedy event be visited upon the United States, the head of our intelligence agency knows that there are these suspect characters there, and he doesn't bother to tip off the FBI, let alone the White House? And after all, the FBI is in charge of domestic surveillance; they're the ones that have to go arrest these guys, you know, at least confront them, see what they're doing. I have to tell people listening to this, this is a very careful, indeed conservative, in the best sense of the word, book. This is not a book you can just dismiss by saying it's got some wild, interesting theory. No -- you err, I would say, on the side of caution, in a way.

    JD : We err on the side of caution all the time, and we're not going to try to say something that we can't really, really defend. If we start from a position that there's some level of merit to what Clarke is suggesting, that there is this operation going on to try to monitor these hijackers domestically by the CIA, as opposed to handing it off to the FBI -- presuming he's right on that, there is this --

    RS : Can I just add a little note that Wilkerson actually goes further.

    JD : Wilkerson later suggests that he heard it mentioned after the fact, in about 2003 or 2004, when he is at the CIA. The invasion of Iraq has begun, and they're waiting for updated satellite information, everyone's kind of standing around just kind of BS'ing. And he basically overhears a conversation about how, oh man, Tenet tried to flip these guys in the U.S. and then had to hide it because it all went wrong, and it would have come back to bite him. And yeah, Wilkerson basically claims to have overheard high-level people speaking about that, just sort of in a B.S. session.

    RN : Well, and not really, not overheard; it's more like, he claimed multiple, very high-level under Tenet sources, that he was close with at that time, who were in these "yak-yak sessions," that he calls them. And they each claimed to be aware of the reality of this, supposedly.

    JD : You're asking, like, how nefarious it is. In the first period of all this, presuming that it's true, presuming that there's this operation going on to try to flip these guys or follow them or whatever, gather information on them domestically, you can imagine that, OK, they're going to have some sort of setup in which to monitor these guys, or they're using Saudi proxies perhaps, or other proxies, and they're following them. Then we get to this point where, well, the attack succeeds on September 11, so how the heck does that happen? If you have this, if you're monitoring these guys and then they do this, where does the ball get dropped? And our book does go into that a bit, and we definitely say, like, there's this moment where they must have said: OK. This isn't working, it's not happening, there has got to be a point where they say, abandon ship. But what do they do? How do they abandon ship? They need to somehow turn this over to the FBI to wrap it up for them. And the way they seem to do this is not by being honest and saying, hey, we were trying to do this and it didn't work, but here's the information -- go get 'em. They definitely don't do that.

    RS : The "trying to do this" -- you mean to turn these terrorists into agents for themselves? --

    JD : So what I'm saying is, if at some point when it's not working, when the flip hasn't happened, when whatever goal they set for themselves, when they haven't achieved it, a time must come for them to wrap up this operation. A time must -- you can't just let them go all the way and succeed in their attack, you would think.

    RN : But I think what you're asking is the intention of the operation, which would seem -- well, the CIA was created in order to prevent future Pearl Harbors. So I guess, giving them the benefit of the doubt, the intention of the operation would theoretically have been to monitor these guys so as to figure out what they're doing here in the U.S.

    JD : Yes, yes. We're giving them the benefit of the doubt there. And then we look at the emails and cable traffic we can find in that summer, and we watch as -- there's no search for these guys, there's no FBI search for these guys until August 23rd of 2001. And that's the point where, surreptitiously, someone stationed at Alec Station, the Bin Laden unit, CIA, who's going through old cable traffic, goes: Oh my gosh! I found a cable that these guys came to the United States. And she alerts the FBI, and the FBI begins their domestic search. I guess what I'm suggesting is, a time would have come when they, when whoever is running this operation at the CIA, whatever the architecture of that operation looks like, they would have seen these things happening. They would have seen the connections they were making with these other guys coming to the United States. And a time would have come for them to say: OK. We have to pass this off to the FBI to shut it down. And it does --

    RS : But wait a minute. When you say OK, and they've seen things -- they see people who are identified as terrorists, part of this terrorist network, traces back to Al Qaeda. And they are learning about airplanes and how to fly them, and flight paths, and everything. And you're telling me that they say, well, you know, maybe we're not going to actually recruit them, maybe we're -- we better do something. Why aren't they saying, holy cow, these guys can do great damage to this country! We got to call, what, the local San Diego police, at least, to get them to check them out! No?

    RN : OK, so these guys arrive in early 2000. What happens in October 2000? The U.S.S. Cole is attacked in Yemen. FBI agents working that from top levels of the New York office of the FBI find a very direct connection not only to Al Qaeda, but to that same planning meeting that the CIA monitored. The same one where Mihdhar and Hazmi were at that planning meeting. So not only do you have an inclination -- oh, these guys are Al Qaeda, they're probably not here to, in the words of one person, go to f'ing Disneyland. They're here for something nefarious -- but now, after October 2000, for the entire year up to 9/11, the CIA has the knowledge that these two individuals that were at this meeting, that the meeting spawned the U.S.S. Cole attack, which killed 17 dead servicemen. So I think at that point, yeah, calling the local San Diego police would probably make a lot of sense.

    RS : OK, and what about the FBI informant who was their link in San Diego? Why isn't he telling anyone, or why doesn't the FBI know?

    JD : You have to be careful to separate what's going on at different agencies. An FBI informant's not necessarily reporting to the CIA, and the CIA informant's not reporting to the FBI. And then you also have to understand that the FBI has national headquarters and then a bunch of different field offices throughout the country. And you have field office reports coming in, like the Phoenix memo from Ken Williams mentioning that there's these, all these Muslim guys trying to learn to fly. You've got what Coleen Rowley exposes out of Minnesota, when they bust Zacarias Moussaoui, and how they're trying to get into his laptop, and they're being hampered by FBI headquarters. So I mean, you don't know what came from Abdussattar. But I don't want to move too far into the weeds and off the general thrust of your original question. And I think what you come down to is a fork in the road. At some point, either the CIA running this operation has to wrap it up, or this major attack is going to succeed. If you ask yourself, well, why didn't they wrap it up -- because obviously they didn't, and the attack did succeed–so if you ask yourself why didn't they, there's one potential answer, which is that they were afraid of being prosecuted. Because they had been running an illegal operation in the United States. So their own fear for their own lives, freedom, careers, all that stuff–

    RS : For people who don't understand the law, you have to explain, the CIA was prevented from running this kind of operation domestically. This is supposed to be up to the FBI.

    JD : It is a crime for them to operate within the United States.

    RN : And what Richard Clarke told us, we don't know how much of the information, like the Phoenix memo and these other things that Duffy just mentioned, got to George Tenet. But what we do know, the existence of Mihdhar and Hazmi in this country should have made it to him by that point. Because his own CIA counterterror office had informed the FBI in August, and a search had begun. So that information should have been in Tenet's head. We know that he was briefed about Zacarias Moussaoui acting weird at a flight school in Minnesota. And he comes to the -- oh, man --

    JD : September 4th principals meeting.

    RN : -- September 4th principals meeting in the White House. Clarke has been pushing the entire Bush administration, the entire eight, nine months, to be able to brief them on Al Qaeda and make the case for why the administration should take this seriously. And he's finally got that meeting, and George Tenet is sitting there, and he doesn't say a word. And he was later asked by investigators why not, and he gave this really bizarre non-answer, which was just like: it just wasn't the right time, right place, I just can't take you any further than that. And they let him get away with leaving it at that, but Richard Clarke says the reason he doesn't tell us at that point, he believes, is because Clarke would have had him brought up on charges that day for malfeasance and misfeasance in withholding that information. Because remember, that would also make his people culpable for the Cole, because they would have known about the planning session for the Cole nine months before that one happened, too. So it looks like --

    JD : And then they would have been guilty of obstruction of justice for all of the hiding of these figures once the FBI investigation into the Cole happened. So they have a long list of things they become guilty of should they just turn this over and say, like: Ah, hey guys, there's these guys, you should probably go do something about it. Now, that's one explanation. Other people have other explanations. But as I said, we don't make accusations that we cannot really, firmly back up. So this time, that's pretty much the one we typically go with.

    RS : Two people in your book who take it further are Richard Clarke and Larry Wilkerson. Two of the most highly experienced, knowledgeable individuals to come out of our whole military intelligence complex. And they, put it in human terms, they say they don't know how these people sleep at night. Wilkerson, even more than Clarke, suggests that these people could have prevented 9/11, and knew about it. Now, I just want to ask you about one other person. Again, the book is devastating; it's called "The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror," John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. But let me push it one step further to the contemporary moment. The book is kind of easy on the FBI. But the fact is the FBI was really the agency that should have been following these terrorists when they're in the United States. But one guy who comes up in current making of history, and who was head of the FBI at a critical point, is Mueller, who's now running the Russian, interference in our election investigation. What was his role? I'd like to conclude on that, because he's a major figure right now, the head of this special investigation. What was his role in this?

    RN : I mean, it is important to remember that the guy came in, I think it was maybe 10 days before 9/11, and took over the FBI. So he was, among the CIA, NSA, and FBI, he was able to be the only one at the leadership helm in the post-9/11 days and months who you couldn't really lay any culpability at his door for any kind of failure. Remember, the CIA director George Tenet, he's right at the table with the President; he's a Cabinet-level guy. The FBI director, it's not the same way. The FBI director reports to the Attorney General in the Department of Justice, and the Attorney General gets the direct seat. We make the case in the book that when George Tenet, in the week after 9/11, made the big play, the big power grab for the CIA, what we call the wish list of every CIA director accumulated over the whole history of the agency, and essentially puts it out there to Bush and says, these are the powers we need now to make sure this kind of thing doesn't happen -- he gets his green light. Mueller, on the other hand -- well, a couple things happen. For one thing, the stories–the CIA is better at keeping their skeletons hidden, for a while. So the first stories that come out that start to paint a picture of blame regarding 9/11, they're all pointing towards the FBI. Coleen Rowley comes out, and she points a finger at Mueller in May of 2002, and that sort of gets the ball rolling on the "it was the FBI's fault" story, which really didn't get corrected for quite a number of years. So our sources tell us Mueller was playing defense, he was willing to kind of go along as the Bush administration pushed that–we kind of know what happened here, so we don't need to investigate this much further; you should be putting your FBI resources towards preventing future attacks. And I can certainly understand why a man like Robert Mueller in that position would say, would not want to be the guy that missed the next one. So from what we can tell, and from what our sources told us, it does seem that he sort of wrapped up the 9/11 investigation, or just ended it midway. But what was happening was, we talked with Pat DeMoro -- he was one of our sources -- and he took us inside, he ran the 9/11 criminal investigation; remember, this was a crime, right. At least 19 guys, probably a lot more, were involved in a plot that resulted in 3,000 murders. So he was investigating that, and he was finding over about a two-year period, there would be leads that would point towards Saudi facilitators to the hijackers, Saudi helpers, Saudi royal money coming over. And every time he found these, he had to report them up to Bob Mueller. Bob Mueller would theoretically report them to the Attorney General, who would theoretically report them to Bush. And yet the end result of this was that Bush invades Iraq, and the U.S. public never heard about these Saudi connections until, officially, until just a couple of years ago, really.

    JD : And you have said that our book comes off pretty light on the FBI, and I think the crucial difference to make clear is that most of the people we're talking about within the FBI are from particularly one field office. We're talking about John O'Neill's people out of New York, who are counterterror investigators. That's most of the people we're dealing -- we're not, we mention a few other people from FBI headquarters, but we don't necessarily mention them in the best light. And one of the big failures of the FBI is the search to find al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, once they are made aware that they're in the country a couple weeks before 9/11. And that is a huge story there, and we could only write so much book. So we don't want to just sit here and say, like, oh, the FBI is great and did everything right; we focus specifically on a handful of people who did do their damnedest to unearth the conspirators behind the Cole attack, and to pass information about the presence of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi over to FBI investigators in New York in the runup to 9/11. So we don't want to necessarily sit here and say the FBI was perfect and did everything right; we're talking about a handful of individuals.

    RS : And as you've just indicated, your style and the character of this book is quite scholarly. It's very thoughtful, it's incredibly well documented. And you got people really on the inside, in the know, to trust you and to talk honestly about it. You've done the gumshoe journalism, you took 10 years, you checked every record. What has been the critical response?

    RN : Well, we should have put Trump's picture on the cover. [Laughs] I think that would have helped.

    RS : That's a pretty profound observation, in a way. Because there's a whole bunch of people now who think all of our troubles in this country started and will end with Trump. And it really whitewashes everybody else.

    JD : It's whitewashing a lot of people. There's, all of a sudden people who a few years ago we were like, this is the worst person on earth! -- like George W. Bush, is now just being embraced by Democrats as some, like, affable guy. All the crimes of the war on terror, the torture, Abu-Ghraib, it's all just gone -- the unnecessary invasion of the war in Iraq, it's all just sort of under the rug now because of Trump.

    RS : Yeah, those were the adults watching the store. Everybody is angry that Trump doesn't have adults watching the store, and now he just got in trouble with his Secretary of Defense, pushing him out, and now that guy is whitewashed, right? He was considered a mad dog at one point. So you're right; your book has run into a head storm of indifference to anything that happened before Trump. But I'm asking a very pointed question. What happens? You guys spent over 10 years on this, right?

    RN : Yeah. And you know, our goal was not to get famous. [Laughs] We really did want accountability for this small group of people that we thought, these people cannot stay in the CIA, right? We're not going to keep letting them run the War on Terror, are we? And maybe if people just know about this, or if we can just prove it–if we talk with enough insiders, if we get enough documents together, if we write a book. It turns out, no. There's going to be no accountability, and they're going to, the few that remain now at high levels of the CIA are going to continue to do what they do, and no one's going to know about it except for folks that listen to your show, so thank you.

    RS : Well, they're going to write the history. I mean, the amazing thing–you think of a movie like "Zero Dark Thirty," you know; and you quote John Kiriakou in your book, and he was in the CIA; he was actually very successful in being involved with the capture of the highest person connected with al-Qaida, and so forth. And they spun a myth that the torture worked, and you needed torture, and blah blah blah. And it basically went unchallenged. So these people who either lied, or just lied by not talking, even to the FBI or the White House -- they get to control the narrative. And then a book like yours comes out, and -- I'm asking a very serious question. What has been the response of The New York Times, The Washington Post?

    JD : [Laughing] We're still waiting to hear what The Washington Post and The New York Times think. We've gotten a lot of praise from people who have read it, but we're not getting any really major national or international reviews. Well, one thing we like to do, you mentioned "Zero Dark Thirty." And the main character, played by Jessica Chastain, is sort of an amalgamation of a handful of people who did work at the CIA, most prominently a woman by the name of Alfreda Bikowsky, who is mentioned very prominently in our book. We want people to know her name, Alfreda Bikowsky, because it's a name that was sort of an open secret in the media in, you know, New York, Washington, for many, many years. Her involvement goes from the pre-9/11 period there at Alec Station through torture and drone killings, and we want to make sure that her name gets out there so she can't hide in the shadows.

    RN : Her name was never mentioned in any media until it came out on our website. It was 11 years, 10 months from the first alleged crime she'd committed that we documented, until her name came out on our website.

    JD : We just like to throw her name out there every once in a while, and make sure more and more people hear it.

    RS : Ah, that should be enough to inspire people to get a copy of "The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror." It's written by John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski. It's a very, very important book. This is the yeoman journalistic work on the story, and it's informed by people on the inside who really witnessed it, and were shocked by what they saw, high-level people. So I recommend the book. I want to thank you guys for coming on. OK, that's it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. Our engineers at KCRW are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz. Our producers are Joshua Scheer and Isabel Carreon. I'm Robert Scheer, and we're doing this broadcast from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where Sebastian Grubaugh, as he often does, has made the show work, and I want to thank him.

    [Jan 29, 2019] FBI, CIA [supposedly] Told WaPo They Doubted Key Allegation In Steele Dossier but Wapo still run their own anti-Trump campaign popularizing Steele dossier.

    Hand of Brennan? Hand of MI6?
    From comments: "Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down once you focus on individual claims. " What?!?
    Notable quotes:
    "... FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn't believe a key claim contained in the "Steele Dossier ..."
    "... The Post 's Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats, reports the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross. ..."
    "... Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down once you focus on individual claims. ..."
    "... Steele, using Kremlin sources, claimed in his dossier that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin officials for the purpose of discussing "deniable cash payments" made in secret so as to cover up "Moscow's secret liaison with the TRUMP team." ..."
    Dec 16, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    FBI and CIA sources told a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter that they didn't believe a key claim contained in the "Steele Dossier," the document the Obama FBI relied on to obtain a surveillance warrant on a member of the Trump campaign.

    The Post 's Greg Miller told an audience at an October event that the FBI and CIA did not believe that former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen visited Prague during the 2016 election to pay off Russia-linked hackers who stole emails from key Democrats, reports the Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross.

    "We've talked to sources at the FBI and the CIA and elsewhere -- they don't believe that ever happened," said Miller during the October event which aired Saturday on C-SPAN.

    We literally spent weeks and months trying to run down... there's an assertion in there that Michael Cohen went to Prague to settle payments that were needed at the end of the campaign. We sent reporters to every hotel in Prague, to all over the place trying to - just to try to figure out if he was ever there, and came away empty . -Greg Miller

    Ross notes that WaPo somehow failed to report this information, nor did Miller include this tidbit of narrative-killing information in his recent book, "The Apprentice: Trump, Russia, and the Subversion of American Democracy."

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/7GvXI61p21k

    Miller also admits that the dossier's broad claims are more closely aligned with reality, but that the document breaks down once you focus on individual claims.

    Steele, using Kremlin sources, claimed in his dossier that Cohen and three associates went to Prague in August 2016 to meet with Kremlin officials for the purpose of discussing "deniable cash payments" made in secret so as to cover up "Moscow's secret liaison with the TRUMP team."

    Cohen's alleged Prague visit captured attention largely because the former Trump fixer has vehemently denied it, and also because it would seem to be one of the easier claims in Steele's 35-page report to validate or invalidate.

    Debate over the salacious document was reignited when McClatchy reported April 15 that special counsel Robert Mueller had evidence Cohen visited Prague. No other news outlets have verified the reporting, and Cohen denied it at the time.

    Cohen last denied the dossier's allegations in late June, a period of time when he was gearing up to cooperate with prosecutors against President Donald Trump . Cohen served as a cooperating witness for prosecutors in both New York and the special counsel's office. - Daily Caller

    Cohen's attorney and longtime Clinton pal Lanny Davis vehemently denied on August 22, one day after Cohen pleaded guilty in his New York case - that Cohen had never been to Prague, telling Bloomberg " Thirteen references to Mr. Cohen are false in the dossier, but he has never been to Prague in his life ."

    youshallnotkill , 19 minutes ago link

    Trump never ceases to crack me up. While his (terrible) current lawyer, declares on TV that there was collusion but it just didn't last long, Trump calls his former lawyer/fixer at "Rat".

    This is just too funny, I mean this is the President of the United States calling his former personal lawyer a "Rat" which of course is a common mob term for a witness testifying against you.

    monkeyshine

    Of course it never happened, just like Manafort didn't make 3 trips to London to meet Julian Assange. These fictions were just used as a pretext for diving into the backgrounds of Trump's political supporters and find crimes to charge them with.

    The Cohen raid was particularly egregious, a likely violation of attorney-client privilege. Not suprisingly the American Bar Association is silent.

    brewing_it

    So here is a WaPo reporter saying they sent reporters to every hotel in Prague to find out if Cohen had been there, they spent weeks and weeks researching, interviewing, and nothing. What they are not saying is that they also spent shitloads of Bezo's money exploring all the other fake dossier claims.

    And nothing.....all you hillarytards have been completely scammed by, your pulses sent aflutter with clickbait and page views and thats it. So sorry you losers.

    Demologos

    Yeah, like rubles are worth anything outside of Russia. Gold on the other hand ...

    But seriously, you two should get a room. If you can't see the conspiracy in the Strzok/Page texts, the setup of Papadapoulous by the Brits, the phony FISA warrant using the FBI informant, the setup of General Flynn, and the seedy cast of characters in the DOJ breaking laws right and left, you should be checked for brain wave activity. You probably think the Russians paid for all of the above too. Go suck a bag of Russian dicks.

    [Jan 29, 2019] Protection rackets reach new heights. US debt is growing exponentially, until it doesn't. What then? The Yugoslavia solution, 50 odd countries from the no longer united states?

    Notable quotes:
    "... Do the warmongers think that nuclear winter is bogus? ..."
    "... Looks like Russia and China's plan to do a reverse USSR bankruptcy on the US is bearing fruit. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Harry Law , Jan 18, 2019 1:50:16 PM | link

    Why not spread a huge trampoline over the US and bounce those missiles back to their origin. That is probably more feasible than the theory that because the US has a 10 to 4 preponderance of nuclear weapons over [say Russia] then the US can destroy Russia 10 times over, whereas the Russians can only destroy the US 4 times over. Some crazies think those odds are good.

    Russ , Jan 18, 2019 2:00:51 PM | link
    This kind of thing must give the Demtards some major cognitive dissonance (insofar as they have any cognition). They're the worst jingoes in wanting to push the confrontation with Russia to the very brink and beyond, so they would be the normal target audience for this kind of sham "missile defense" propaganda, certainly if a Democrat or less hated Republican president proposed it. But they have such Trump Derangement Psychosis, they'll have to denounce this even though it's for their yearned-for nuclear war.

    As for the SDI technology, they'd be better off with Opus's proposal to put a thick ring of $1000 bills in space to block the missiles. Might work for asteroids and flying saucers too.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 18, 2019 2:19:28 PM | link
    Protection rackets reach new heights.
    Zachary Smith , Jan 18, 2019 2:22:21 PM | link
    Trump used the occasion of the MDR launch to exaggerate the possibilities of new missile defense systems...

    Trump was again making a public demonstration that he is an ignorant loudmouth. I skimmed that Missile Defense Review and saw the equivalent of a research paper written by a lazy college student. Huge margins, many space-eating illustrations, and much repetition helped to "catapult the propaganda". It was 108 pages of nonsense designed to give the impression we need to throw more taxpayer money to Big Weapons Companies.

    The cost to put 1 kilogram into low-earth orbit are some $5,000-$20,000.
    I'm afraid these numbers are seriously outdated.

    This graph shows the declining costs of launching people and cargo into space.

    Unfortunately those "rods from god" don't have to be the size of telephone poles. A 2 inch thick and 72 inch long bar of tungsten moving along at 2 miles/second would destroy any armored vehicle it hit, and also a great many other things. If one of them struck the generator at the electrical power plant, there isn't going to be any electricity from that plant for a long while.

    I don't know why these things haven't been deployed, but it might come down to common sense and low profit. The US has opened a can of worms with weapon-carrying drones, and doing this with a simple and inexpensive orbital weapon might have been recognized as 'undesirable'. Big Weapons Companies don't stand to roll in the big bucks like they do with the USS Ford or the F-35. And possibly nobody could make them work. I just don't know.

    Once again, that new Missile Defense Review was a combination of really stupid and amazingly dishonest. It could also get us all killed well before the worst effects of climate change arrive.

    chet380 , Jan 18, 2019 2:26:25 PM | link
    Will the captive Corporate Media ever free itself to the extent that the American voting public will be thoroughly educated as to the costs to the social fabric that these monstrous military projects entail? -- to healthcare, to the infrastructure, to education, to Social Security, and the list goes on and on.
    lysias , Jan 18, 2019 2:36:38 PM | link
    Do the warmongers think that nuclear winter is bogus?
    JohninMK , Jan 18, 2019 3:44:04 PM | link
    Looks like Russia and China's plan to do a reverse USSR bankruptcy on the US is bearing fruit.

    Putin's announcement of all those advanced weapons, few of which are actually being rolled out, was just what the US MIC was looking to push for the next round of juicy R&D contracts. It could almost have been made to measure for hungry DC lobbyists. Maybe it was.

    US debt is growing exponentially, until it doesn't. What then? The Yugoslavia solution, 50 odd countries from the no longer united states?

    james , Jan 18, 2019 4:02:32 PM | link Harry Law , Jan 18, 2019 4:03:04 PM | link
    What's wrong with you snowflakes, we have to worry more about a 'mine shaft gap' Russia probably has far more mine shafts than the US, but don't worry in the event of a nuclear war all is not lost, with more mine shafts "and with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say ten females to each male they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within 20 years". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybSzoLCCX-Y
    karlof1 , Jan 18, 2019 4:16:32 PM | link
    JohninMK @16--

    Yes, it's possible Putin's 1 March announcement was a counterattack in the Hybrid Third World War aimed at the fiscal ruination of the Outlaw US Empire.

    Some may recall Putin asking Slick Willie to join NATO in 2000. Well, it turns out that request was made once before in 1954 , a fact I was unaware of until today. One must ponder the reasons why Molotov's request was nixed in 1954 despite willingness to negotiate regarding the stated objections. I wonder if Ike was even informed of this development given the extremely evil Dulles brothers were in charge of State and CIA at the time. I'm sure I'm not the only one who missed the revelation of that fact. It appears the elimination of Russia as a nation-state has always been the goal, just as it was for the British.

    Steven Starr , Jan 18, 2019 4:42:39 PM | link
    Re: Lysias @11 Do the warmongers think that nuclear winter is bogus?
    and Anne Jaclard @ 15.

    Yes, Anne Jaclard is correct.US political and military leaders have either ignored or rejected the peer-reviewed studies on the long-term environmental consequences of nuclear war. They don't fit the agenda.
    For more details, please see the article that I wrote for the Federation of American Scientists, Turning A Blind Eye Toward Armageddon -- US Leaders Reject Nuclear Winter Studies

    karlof1 , Jan 18, 2019 5:15:21 PM | link
    Steven Starr @21--

    Thanks for providing the link to your article. In it I note the same tactics utilized by tobacco causes cancer and climate change deniers to smear the studies and deny any potential Nuclear Winter. Clearly, the people involved in such denialism are the most immoral people one might imagine. Unfortunately, I see no evidence to soften your assessment:

    "My own personal assessment of the state of the nuclear danger today is that it is profound. The United States is sleepwalking towards nuclear war. Our leaders have turned a blind eye to the scientifically predicted consequences of nuclear war, and our military appears to be intent on making "Russia back down." This is a recipe for unlimited human disaster."

    As you probably know, Putin has said Russia is ready and will not back down, that it is up to the Outlaw US Empire to alter its aggressive, provocative behaviors and policies. Brinksmanship is clearly occurring, but as you observe, there's no discussion of that fact happening within the Outlaw US Empire; although now with the INF Treaty pullout, a few voices in Europe are finally being raised.

    vk , Jan 18, 2019 5:50:55 PM | link
    China's note about it:

    US missile defense plan reveals illusion disguised as safety net

    Don , Jan 18, 2019 5:53:33 PM | link
    @25

    Of course we still have a shuttle program. It's an unmanned shuttle program that does not depend on Russian engines: wiki/Boeing_X-37

    mauisurfer , Jan 18, 2019 6:10:58 PM | link
    thank you very much Steven Starr @21
    worth remembering the studies done by JFK govt after the Cuban Missile Crisis
    William R Polk writes that they war gamed nuclear conflict, and the conclusion reached was that once USA (or Russia, or now China) used a nuke, then the result would be escalation until all nukes had been used.
    Leaders disbelieved this result, and redid the war games over and over again, but the result was the same. It does not matter if one nation only intended a "limited" or strategic attack, escalation is inevitable, and it would be the end of human civilization as we know it.

    Take a look at Polk's article here:
    www.williampolk.com/assets/the-cuban-missile-crisis-in-reverse.pdf

    quote
    1)
    it
    is
    almost
    certain
    that
    neither
    the
    American
    nor
    the
    Russian
    government
    could
    accept
    even
    a
    limited
    attack
    without
    responding;
    2)
    there
    is
    no
    reason
    to
    believe
    that
    a
    Russian
    government,
    faced
    with
    defeat
    in
    conventional
    weapons,
    would
    be
    able
    to
    avoid
    using
    nuclear
    weapons;
    3)
    whatever
    attempts
    are
    made
    to
    limit
    escalation
    are
    likely
    to
    fail
    and
    in
    failing
    lead
    to
    all
    out
    war;
    and
    4)
    the
    predictable
    consequences
    of
    a
    nuclear
    war
    are
    indeed
    an
    unimaginable
    catastrophe.

    fast freddy , Jan 18, 2019 6:47:04 PM | link
    What prevents the space gun from shooting itself backward into deeper space from the recoil of firing the projectile?
    karlof1 , Jan 18, 2019 6:48:08 PM | link
    Pft @26--

    The 2018 National Defense Strategy produced by Mattis was published on 19 January 2018, far in advance of Putin's 1 March 2018 address, and advocated for additional expenditures beyond what was legislated. IOW, Putin's speech had no bearing on the increase in weapons procurement as such was already planned. Furthermore, it's little secret that a technological breakthrough is being counted on to recharge the Outlaw US Empire's languishing tech sector whose only viable R&D arm for decades is DARPA; thus, the call for revamping Star Wars ought to be seen as part of that effort.

    dh , Jan 18, 2019 7:24:31 PM | link
    @31 I think it is more likely the recoil will cause it to spin around like a Catherine wheel firing off Rods from God in all directions. It will be like the Fourth of July.
    SteveK9 , Jan 18, 2019 7:44:28 PM | link
    You can get into all kinds of detail, but the bottom line is that offense is much cheaper than defense. This was true before and probably even more true now. Unlimited range nuclear cruise missiles and underwater drones, relatively tiny hypersonic glide vehicles changing course erratically while falling out of the sky at Mach 27 (latest test) are going to be very expensive to stop if at all. If it costs you 100 million to defend yourself from a 1 million dollar missile ... well the other guy just builds more missiles.
    Zachary Smith , Jan 18, 2019 8:54:58 PM | link
    @ SteveK9 #34
    You can get into all kinds of detail, but the bottom line is that offense is much cheaper than defense.

    In my opinion you've nailed it. All the defensive systems I know of are constructed like a house of cards. They're vulnerable to every kind of disruption, and against a competent opponent none of them are going to work. But never fear - there is big money in pretending to try.

    Intercepting a ballistic missile with an anti-missile has been likened to "hitting a bullet with a bullet." Imagine if the bullet were taking evasive action.

    I used an extract from the link rather than the article title because that title is quite deceptive.

    Only two methods of pure defense come to mind. First would be a Science Fiction "blaster" like in Asimov's Foundation series. The closest we have to them are lasers, and present day models don't have enough power or the ability to blast through nasty weather. I suspect that tipping the interceptor rockets with small nukes would stop the hypersonic devices in their tracks. The downside of these is something called EMP, or ElectroMagnetic Pulse. High altitude bursts will probably do at least as much damage to the US as would the bombs aboard the hypersonic gliders, and quite possibly more.

    Because of the demands of the US Empire, the US can't play nice with the rest of the world. But some of us can most definitely make immense profits from the situation. The ABM (Anti Ballistic Missile) industry may get to join the makers of the F-35 and the barely floating new Navy ships in the drive for massive profits.

    ben , Jan 18, 2019 9:11:43 PM | link
    the pair @4 said in part;""war is a racket" as the saying goes. it's usually less about actual capability than it is keeping all the usual suspects latched firmly on the "military industrial" teat. it's basically the world's largest welfare program disguised as "national defense" and - coupled with financial fraud/smoke and mirrors -"

    Agreed..

    slit , Jan 18, 2019 9:16:19 PM | link
    Gates to hell are open, Satan's elves know only death economy stock but backs, not the laws of physics!

    "One figure who has benefited financially from the crisis, according to Evans, is Prime Minister Theresa May's husband, whose employer Capital Group owns a large amount of shares in a weapons manufacturer that supplies the Saudi military. The company's shares in Lockheed Martin, an arms-dealer who produces laser-guided missiles such as the one that blew up a bus full of school children in Yemen last year, was worth about $6.5 billion as of last March."

    https://on.rt.com/9mjv

    Zachary Smith , Jan 18, 2019 9:18:23 PM | link
    Just read a headline suggesting the apartheid Jewish state is wanting to join up with the ABM grifting.

    US army eyes $373 million purchase of Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system

    My calculator says that this amount of money divided by the 240 little missiles which will come as part of the deal is $1.5 million bucks. That's a lot of taxpayer dollars for something which basically doesn't work. The next link is from 2013, but I doubt if much has changed, for this Iron Dome business was always more about soothing Apartheid State civilians than actually working.

    Iron Dome System Failed Miserably

    Yeah, even if they've doubled the "success" rate of that Iron Dome to 10%, it's still almost as useless as teats on a rooster.

    pretzelattack , Jan 18, 2019 10:18:47 PM | link
    @ 34 right, and the defense didn't even work; they rigged the tests.
    flayer , Jan 19, 2019 8:41:16 AM | link
    feel fairly certain that the US will create their own illusion of security and then, from within that bubble, they will become even more aggressive in pursuing "regime change" and other globalist matters as countries will continue to refuse to bend to their will. We've seen how the Republicans reacted to an "apologetic" Obama when he traveled abroad: labeling him a foreigner. We've seen how the Democrats reacted to the simple act of hacking an e-mail server and publicizing the data: it's 9/11! And we've seen them respond to Trump: labeling him beholden to foreign interests. I can only see this type of thing escalating in the future. It's depressing to think about it.

    If the US feels like they've secured themselves against any potential missiles, there's nothing stopping them from trying to break up Russia or vaporizing the coastline of China aside from their own sensibilities. Which seem to have gone out the window entirely, based on the latest Buzzfeed coverage.

    jadan , Jan 19, 2019 9:24:01 AM | link
    I quit! We know that a "limited nuclear war" is an illusion. The effects of a nuclear accident at Fukushima have been ignored, denied, covered up or rationalized as the collateral damage of global warming/climate change. The use of "tactical" nukes will create similar effects that are also ignored. Nuclear restraint will be an invitation to a lack of restraint as this military "necessity" transforms into full blown insanity. The terminal irony is that we're already at the point of full blown insanity for failing to impose any limits on the proliferation of nuclear war fantaseis. Therefore, I quit! I refuse to participate in the generation of more verbiage on this subject. We must demand the strict control of all nuclear weapons and research through an international program of demilitarization. The first step is to take the political promoters of this madness away from the microphones. We need a full frontal assault on militarism as the true enemy of the people. To participate in discussions of the feasibility of further nuclear elaboration is to become part of the insanity. I quit!
    john , Jan 19, 2019 9:57:25 AM | link
    not that many years ago, no matter who you asked or where you sourced it, the consensus was pretty much that surface-to-air missile defense systems were not particularly effective. then came the war in Syria and suddenly incoming missiles were being shot out of the air with remarkable rates of success. 50%, 60%, 70%, sometimes even 100%! and this was presumably without engaging the vaunted s-300, s-400 systems. then, of course, Putin declared his new array of super-duper hypersonic missiles...against which there is presently, apparently, no defense. but then i read that Lockheed Martin was awarded a 2.9 billion dollar contract to develop Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared Satellites, designed to fill the gap that exists for early hypersonic detection, and i gotta wonder. and then i think of an anomaly like the 21 trillion unaccounted for down at DOD and i try to extrapolate the limitations on R & D.

    ka-ching, ka-ching.

    donkeytale , Jan 19, 2019 10:17:11 AM | link
    John @ 59

    ka-ching, ka-ching.

    That is sound of the "new cold war," don't you know?

    Lol

    Zachary Smith , Jan 19, 2019 1:17:21 PM | link
    At the Counterpunch site is a takedown of Donald Trump and his "war cabinet" .
    The Pentagon has been playing games over the years with its testing program for missile defense. Targets typically follow a preprogrammed flight path to a designated position; interceptor missiles also fly to a preprogrammed position. Global positioning satellite receivers are placed on the target to send its position to ground control, and the necessary target location is downloaded to a computer in the kill vehicle. Finally, decoys are given a significantly different thermal signature than the target, making it easier for sensors on the kill vehicle to distinguish between objects.

    I knew there had been cheating going on, but not that it had been quite this bad.

    Star Wars Revisited: One More Nightmare From Trump

    Russ , Jan 19, 2019 2:19:22 PM | link
    Posted by: Zachary Smith | Jan 19, 2019 1:17:21 PM | 66

    "I knew there had been cheating going on, but not that it had been quite this bad."

    In this kind of corporate-controlled hierarchy (which is more or less every hierarchy), how could there not be cheating, whatever level of cheating is necessary to give the desired result. In this case there's tremendous pressure on those conducting the war game to set it up so it produces the result wanted by the weapons contractors: The government should buy these systems.

    Personnel are selected according to their sincere belief in this framework. They don't even consider it cheating, but the rightful way of the world. And if someone is enough of a rogue (they'll consider HIM the rogue) to want a "real" answer, he'll just be replaced by someone who believes in the corporate imperative.

    It's the same as how most STEM types sincerely believe science exists to serve corporate imperatives. Thus for example every system-conducted food safety test is designed to give the result desired by agribusiness. And if against the odds the test gives adverse data, researchers have multiple rationales for excluding it as "irrelevant".

    And of course that kind of manipulation is so rife in drug trials that even the mainstream media couldn't keep it from becoming a public scandal. They're still keeping the lid on the systematic fraud of food testing though.

    So it's no wonder that capitalism reaches exactly the end point its critics always forecast - extremely expensive weapons that don't work, extremely expensive drugs that don't work and are often harmful, extremely expensive food (artificially kept cheap at the retail checkout via massive government subsidies) that doesn't work (poor nutritional value, empty calories) and is loaded with poison.

    So the ticking clocks are in a race. What'll it be, nuclear war, mass death from poisoned food, mass death from the generally toxified environment. And a big part of it is that under late capitalism, professional cadres not only have no integrity but are devout believers in the religion of corporate rule and how from these benevolent despots manna will trickle down to all.

    But the only real trickling down is the acid rain, the volatile pesticide and radiation fallout, and the missiles.

    Piotr Berman , Jan 19, 2019 2:51:21 PM | link
    Liberal part of American elite never formulated a coherent rebuke to the insanity of Star Wars. The assumptions of Star Wars are too close to their common wisdom, namely that USA should pursue what it richly deserves, the position of an unquestioned sole superpower on the globe that sets the rules for the rest, at collects some tribute from the lesser in the form of fines for violation of the rules that are imposed on the rest. MAD does not have place is such a world so should be eliminated.

    The concept that pursuit of this ideal is futile, expensive and diverts energies and minds in USA from solving actual life problems of Americans, not to mention those in other nations is alien to our elite thinking. We are the force for good, so the stronger our force the better.

    In the meantime we have problems like this one. Moscow subway is very proud that its system expands by 5-10% every year and the percentage of delayed trains is 5 times smaller than in Paris. They do not compare themselves to NYC where the subway system hardly expands and the percentage of delayed trains is about 30% rather than 1% in Paris and 0.2% in Moscow. NYC system also consumes an amazing amount of money. The arts of corruption, mismanagement and achieving very little for a lot are more widely spread than MIC.

    Zachary Smith , Jan 19, 2019 3:01:55 PM | link
    Don't know why there is a sudden rash of ABM stores, but they are surely a lot of them out there. The Defense One site has two!

    The New Missile-Defense Policy Won't Maker Us Safer

    This first one is more of an editorial telling why the whole idea is generally a bad one.

    Trump's New Missile Policy Relies Heavily on Largely Unproven Technologies

    The second one is more specific. Example:

    But the new missile-defense strategy rests most of its hopes on other technologies that essentially do not exist, and may never do so. The review says, for example, that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could be networked with new sensors and outfitted with new missiles to take out adversary missiles on the launch pad. Tests have shown that the F-35 can do this. But the distance is the larger problem: the jet basically has to be in the enemy's airspace already.

    The notion of multiple F-35s loitering over China and Russia waiting to kneecap rockets during liftoff is a fantasy.

    When I read that new " Missile Defense Review" report this is one of the absurd claims which had me shaking my head. The F-35 isn't invisible. In the unlikely event it could even reach enemy launch sites, a good radar would know it was there. A keen set of eyes or ears could possibly hear the howl of the engine or just spot it. And a VERY average infra-red detector could detect that super-hot engine. One of the many problems with the airplane is its short range. Even if it could somehow get there, it can't stay. The plane will need fuel. The pilot will need to eat, potty, and eventually sleep. Build a special hyper-expensive robot model and it still won't work. But the neocons seem to have sold it to President Gullible, and that's all that matters.

    c1ue , Jan 19, 2019 3:15:01 PM | link
    The kinetic weapons aren't a cost issue. A single Tomahawk is $1M - nor do you need a telephone pole sized projectile to do a lot of damage.

    The real issue is targeting and survivability. Hitting something from even low earth orbit is non-trivial, particularly if it is a purely ballistic system unless the target is both stationary and very large. And, as the author mentions, these systems are notably easy to hit if they are on low earth orbit.

    telescope , Jan 19, 2019 5:35:01 PM | link
    I wouldn't worry about the US military capabilities anymore. There is steady erosion across the board, from quality of personnel to the capabilities of weaponry. While still formidable, America's forces are becoming less so with each passing year. In all face-to-face mock-up competitions, American soldiers, sailors and airmen always finish next to last. Every invitation by Russia to participate in such exercises (from Aviadarts to Tank Biathlon to Army Games) is invariably declined by the Pentagon, lest it leads to an embarassing display of borderline incompetence.

    Russia, on the other hand, is improving rapidly in all areas.

    Add to it the yawning gap in fiscal health (Russia is as sound as the US is sick), and it's getting clear that all of Trump's posturing is nothing but a desperate bluff. It worked once by inducing outright panic into the decrepit Soviet leadership in the late 1980s, so why not try it again...?

    Putin is no Brezhnev, however. And America is a very different country also (not in a good way). Nothing of substance will come of it this time around. Russians are already preparing for the inevitable collapse of the START treaty. They will be going back to tens of thousands of strategic nukes and beyond, until the West either collapses or sues for peace.

    foolisholdman , Jan 19, 2019 6:42:16 PM | link
    Fallout from Chernobyl rendered Welsh sheep too radioactive to eat for a good many years. Recently, (last couple of years) I was told by a Bavarian that they still could not eat wild boar in Bavaria for the same reason.
    Zachary Smith , Jan 19, 2019 11:22:13 PM | link
    @ c1ue #72

    As you suggest, a purely ballistic system is nearly worthless. The flying crowbar (or telephone pole) would have turned into a guided munition. Getting a signal through the plasma sheath surrounding weapon has been a big problem. Lots of people have been working on solutions, and the Russians claim to have found one. From a Popular Science story:

    To get the signal to make the short leap to the spacecraft, the Russian researchers propose blasting the resonating plasma layer with radio waves generated from the spacecraft. Like the signal from earth, some will be absorbed and some reflected back to the spacecraft. But the reflected waves should be modulated by changes in the electric field caused by the signal sent from earth. Meaning the signals returning to the spacecraft should carry a ghost of the signal sent form earth and absorbed by the plasma.

    A search turned up several different proposals, so person has to assume one or more of them is going to work. One reason to worry about this is the possibility of attacking missile silo ICBMs. Until very recently it was thought only a nuclear weapon would destroy one of these, but a properly sized kinetic impactor would surely do just as well. Worst of all, the warning time from when the impactors were detected on radar until they hit would be really short.

    There are other possibilities which had best be left untouched in deference to the sensitivities of The Surveillance State.

    [Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal?

    Highly recommended!
    Can the elite be afflicted by some mass disease. Is Neoconservatism a deadly infection ?
    Theoretically Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based on that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information ever gets broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and irresponsibility. In other words they spearheaded a dangerous disease to stay in power. And eventually got infected themselves.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their folly and change course?" ..."
    "... That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune to challenge. ..."
    "... The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere citizens having influencing decisions like that. ..."
    "... An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated. ..."
    "... As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil - begin to have real effect. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Kent January 18, 2019 at 11:30 am

    "But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their folly and change course?"

    What if, on election day, you only have a choice between 2 candidates. Both favoring all the wrong choices, but one tends to talk up Christianity and family and the other talks up diversity.

    And both get their funding from the very wealthy and corporations. And any 3rd choices would be "throwing your vote away". How would you ever get to vote for someone who might change course?

    Democracy has little to actually do with choice or power.

    mlopez, January 18, 2019 at 6:22 pm

    GB may not have been any utopia in 1914, but it was certainly geo-politically dominant. It's common people's social, economic and cultural living standards most assuredly was vastly improved over Russian, or European peasants. There can be no serious comparison with third world countries and regions.

    As for the US, there can be absolutely no debate about its own dominance, or material standard of living after 1945 as compared to any where else in the world. More importantly, even uneducated and very contemporary observers were capable of recognizing how our elites had sold out their interests in favor of the furtherance of their own.

    If we are on about democratic government, then it's been generations since either country and their peoples have had any real democracy. Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based on that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information ever gets broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and irresponsibility.

    That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune to challenge.

    Hello / Goodbye, January 19, 2019 at 11:40 am

    The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere citizens having influencing decisions like that.

    Patzinak, January 19, 2019 at 5:07 pm

    What ineffable flummadiddle!

    Prominent Brexiteers include Boris Johnson (dual UK/US citizenship, educated in Brussels and at Eton and Oxford, of mixed ancestry, including a link - by illegitimate descent - to the royal houses of Prussia and the UK); Jacob Rees-Mogg (son of a baron, educated at Eton and Oxford, amassed a solid fortune via hedge fund management); Arron Banks (millionaire, bankroller of UKIP, made to the Brexit campaign the largest ever political donation in UK politics).

    So much for "the elite" being against Brexit!

    But the main problem with Brexit is this. Having voted by a slim margin in favour of Brexit, the Great British Public then, in the general election, denied a majority to the government that had undertaken to implement it, and elected a Parliament of whom, by a rough estimate, two thirds oppose Brexit.

    It ain't that "the elite" got "things wrong". It's that bloody Joe Public can't make his mind what to do - and go through with it.

    Rossbach, January 20, 2019 at 2:14 pm

    "Whether the imagined utopia of a dominant Great Britain prior to 1914 or a dominant America after 1945 ever actually existed is beside the point."

    It wasn't to restore any defunct utopia that led people to vote for Brexit or Donald Trump; it was to check the descent of the Anglosphere into the totalitarian dystopia of forced multi-cultural globalism that caused voters to reject the EU in Britain and Hillary Clinton in the US. It is because they believed that only with the preservation of their national independence was there any chance or hope for a restoration of individual liberty that our people voted as they did.

    Ratings System, January 17, 2019 at 1:27 pm

    It's why they won't enjoy their privileges much longer. That stale charade can't and won't last.

    We don't have a meritocracy. We have a pseudo-meritocracy with an unduly large contingent of aliens, liars, cheats, frauds, and incompetents. They give each other top marks, speak each other's PC language, and hire each other's kids. And they don't understand why things are falling apart, and why they are increasingly hated by real Americans.

    A very nasty decade or two is coming our way, but after we've swept out the filth there will be a good chance that Americans will be Americans again.

    Paul Reidinger, January 17, 2019 at 2:03 pm

    An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated.

    As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil - begin to have real effect. The new dark age is no longer imminent. It is here, and it is them. I see no way to rectify the damage. When minds are ruined young, they remain ruined.

    [Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal?

    Highly recommended!
    Can the elite be afflicted by some mass disease. Is Neoconservatism a deadly infection ?
    Theoretically Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based on that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information ever gets broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and irresponsibility. In other words they spearheaded a dangerous disease to stay in power. And eventually got infected themselves.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their folly and change course?" ..."
    "... That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune to challenge. ..."
    "... The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere citizens having influencing decisions like that. ..."
    "... An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated. ..."
    "... As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil - begin to have real effect. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Kent January 18, 2019 at 11:30 am

    "But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their folly and change course?"

    What if, on election day, you only have a choice between 2 candidates. Both favoring all the wrong choices, but one tends to talk up Christianity and family and the other talks up diversity.

    And both get their funding from the very wealthy and corporations. And any 3rd choices would be "throwing your vote away". How would you ever get to vote for someone who might change course?

    Democracy has little to actually do with choice or power.

    mlopez, January 18, 2019 at 6:22 pm

    GB may not have been any utopia in 1914, but it was certainly geo-politically dominant. It's common people's social, economic and cultural living standards most assuredly was vastly improved over Russian, or European peasants. There can be no serious comparison with third world countries and regions.

    As for the US, there can be absolutely no debate about its own dominance, or material standard of living after 1945 as compared to any where else in the world. More importantly, even uneducated and very contemporary observers were capable of recognizing how our elites had sold out their interests in favor of the furtherance of their own.

    If we are on about democratic government, then it's been generations since either country and their peoples have had any real democracy. Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based on that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information ever gets broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and irresponsibility.

    That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune to challenge.

    Hello / Goodbye, January 19, 2019 at 11:40 am

    The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere citizens having influencing decisions like that.

    Patzinak, January 19, 2019 at 5:07 pm

    What ineffable flummadiddle!

    Prominent Brexiteers include Boris Johnson (dual UK/US citizenship, educated in Brussels and at Eton and Oxford, of mixed ancestry, including a link - by illegitimate descent - to the royal houses of Prussia and the UK); Jacob Rees-Mogg (son of a baron, educated at Eton and Oxford, amassed a solid fortune via hedge fund management); Arron Banks (millionaire, bankroller of UKIP, made to the Brexit campaign the largest ever political donation in UK politics).

    So much for "the elite" being against Brexit!

    But the main problem with Brexit is this. Having voted by a slim margin in favour of Brexit, the Great British Public then, in the general election, denied a majority to the government that had undertaken to implement it, and elected a Parliament of whom, by a rough estimate, two thirds oppose Brexit.

    It ain't that "the elite" got "things wrong". It's that bloody Joe Public can't make his mind what to do - and go through with it.

    Rossbach, January 20, 2019 at 2:14 pm

    "Whether the imagined utopia of a dominant Great Britain prior to 1914 or a dominant America after 1945 ever actually existed is beside the point."

    It wasn't to restore any defunct utopia that led people to vote for Brexit or Donald Trump; it was to check the descent of the Anglosphere into the totalitarian dystopia of forced multi-cultural globalism that caused voters to reject the EU in Britain and Hillary Clinton in the US. It is because they believed that only with the preservation of their national independence was there any chance or hope for a restoration of individual liberty that our people voted as they did.

    Ratings System, January 17, 2019 at 1:27 pm

    It's why they won't enjoy their privileges much longer. That stale charade can't and won't last.

    We don't have a meritocracy. We have a pseudo-meritocracy with an unduly large contingent of aliens, liars, cheats, frauds, and incompetents. They give each other top marks, speak each other's PC language, and hire each other's kids. And they don't understand why things are falling apart, and why they are increasingly hated by real Americans.

    A very nasty decade or two is coming our way, but after we've swept out the filth there will be a good chance that Americans will be Americans again.

    Paul Reidinger, January 17, 2019 at 2:03 pm

    An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated.

    As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil - begin to have real effect. The new dark age is no longer imminent. It is here, and it is them. I see no way to rectify the damage. When minds are ruined young, they remain ruined.

    [Jan 25, 2019] Clinton Emails Reveal France, U.S. Looted Oil Gold In Libya

    Jan 13, 2016 | www.youtube.com

    New emails published by the U.S. Department of State reveal the real motives behind the international invasion of Libya.

    The new emails of Hillary Clinton reveal that the real reason behind the invasion were primarily the countries large gold and oil reserves, and the extension of French influence in North Africa.

    Fort Russ reports:
    The U.S. State Department has published a series of emails that reveal the volume of gold reserves of Gaddafi. According to the documents, the reserves are so great that they could become the basis for creating a pan-African currency, which, in turn, could compete with the dollar in the region.

    Also, the reasons for intervention were identified as the major oil reserves of Libya and the strengthening of French influence in North Africa. However, in 2011, Western leaders welcomed the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime as a democratic step. "Long live Benghazi, long live Libya, long live the friendship between France and Libya!", – said French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

    "You showed the world that you can overthrow the dictator and have chosen freedom!" – said the Prime Minister of Great Britain David Cameron, speaking to the Libyan people."The people of Libya got rid of a dictator. Now it has a chance," claimed the Vice-President of USA Joe Biden.

    In the past five years, the violence and chaos in Libya has not stopped. In the background of this, "Islamic State" is gaining momentum in the country and has captured new territory. In January 2016, dozens of people were killed as a result of terrorist.

    Previously, "Islamic State" had claimed responsibility for the attack on a training camp in Zliten. According to the correspondent of the newspaper The Jerusalem Post Ariel Ben Solomon, from the outset it was obvious that intervention in Libya would lead to negative consequences for the country.

    "The email to Clinton is confirmed by the results of studies that began to appear after the invasion of Libya, organized by France with U.S. support. Major oil reserves of the country were the main reason for intervention. Dictators lead many African countries, but the West is in no hurry to intervene in each of them. The Obama administration from the beginning was guided by rather naive misconceptions on the actions that needed to be taken to resolve the situation in Libya after the war," said RT political analyst Ariel Ben Solomon.
    Source:
    http://yournewswire.com/clinton-email... Ozzie Crosby 2 years ago America needs war to survive. The United States IS the infidel. It's not just propaganda. pav_k2007 2 years ago modern day robbers! K Lyall 2 years ago Imagine a NWO puppet like her in the White House for 4 more years!

    10 11

    View reply Hide replies 1979USHI 2 years ago The Western nations governments are totally out of order and need to be taken to a real world court. Notta Dr 2 years ago incredibly disgusting what we are learning about warmongering corporate globalist elites. there is a strong move starting in the other direction....more conservative nationalist leaders are rising up everywhere. these monsters ask need to be arrested, tried and severely punished....held to the highest level of accountability.

    [Jan 25, 2019] Re-Colonisation

    Jan 25, 2019 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

    January 25, 2019 For Thierry Meyssan, one of the consequences of the successive ends of the bipolar and unipolar world is the re-establishment of colonial projects. One after the other, the French, Turkish and English have publicly declared the return of their colonial ambitions. We still need to know what form they will adopt in the 21st century.
    by Thierry Meyssan
    Part 3 - The British Empire
    As for the United Kingdom, it has been hesitating for two years about its future after the Brexit.
    A little after the arrival of Donald Trump at the White House, Prime Minister Theresa May went to the United States. Speaking to the representatives of the Republican Party, she proposed re-establishing the Anglo-Saxon leadership of the rest of the world. But President Trump has been elected to liquidate these imperial dreams, not to share them.
    Disappointed, Theresa May then travelled to China in order to propose that President Xi Jinping share control of international exchanges. The City, she said, was ready to ensure the convertibility of Western currencies into Yuan. But President Xi had not been elected to do business with an heiress of the power which had dismantled his country and imposed on the Chinese their opium war.
    Theresa May tried a third version with the Commonwealth. Some of the ex-colonies of the Crown, like India, are today enjoying powerful growth and could become precious commercial partners. Symbolically, the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Charles, was raised to the Presidency of this association. Mrs. May announced that we are on our way to a Global Britain.
    In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph on 30 December 2018, the British Minister for Defence, Gavin Williamson, published his analysis of the situation. Since the fiasco of the Suez Canal in 1956, the United Kingdom has implemented a policy of decolonisation, and has withdrawn its troops from the rest of the world. Today, it conserves permanent military bases only in Gibraltar, Cyprus, Diego Garcia and the "Falklands", to give these islands their imperial title.
    For the last 63 years, London has been oriented towards the European Union, invented by Winston Churchill, but to which, initially, he never imagined that England would belong. The Brexit "tears this policy to shreds". From now on, "the United Kingdom is back as a global power".
    London is planning to open two permanent military bases. The first will probably be in Asia (Singapore or Brunei), and the second in Latin America - most likely in Guyana, in order to participate in the new stage of the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski strategy of the destruction of those regions of the world which are not connected to globalisation. After the "African Great Lakes", the "Greater Middle East", it's time for the "Caribbean Basin". The war will probably start with an invasion of Venezuela by Colombia (pro-US), Brazil (pro-Israëli) and Guyana (pro-British).

    [Jan 25, 2019] The 'Springtime for Strongmen' and the Myth of Retrenchment by Daniel Larison

    If you have neither talent, nor education, but you have family connections you can always became political commentator in the USA.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Kagan's argument would be slightly more persuasive if the U.S. were pursuing a policy of global retrenchment. Since that isn't happening, his explanation doesn't make any sense. ..."
    "... Middle-class voters in many democratic states started rejecting mass democracy more than a decade ago and more because they were opposed to the empowerment of poorer voters, and that was already happening when Bush was still prattling about the "freedom agenda." ..."
    "... It is essential to Kagan's larger case for a hyperactivist U.S. foreign policy that liberal democracy around the world and U.S. activism are inextricably intertwined ..."
    "... The biggest problem with Kagan's story is that it mostly ignores the political conditions in the countries where authoritarian strongmen are consolidating power and in the countries where they have been losing it. U.S. support for many authoritarian rulers is undesirable and should be ended, but it doesn't account for the intensifying repression in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. ..."
    "... Kagan rarely if ever makes any sense! This is standard for all neo/zio cons. The all important narrative does not rely upon facts, as a matter of course, facts and truth usually get in the way. ..."
    "... Thank you Daniel Larison for your quick rebuttal to the ilk like Kagan, Boot, Applebaum and Rubin. Their dangerous ideas keep floating out in the policy sphere, and it's an admittedly mundane task to fact-check their writing each time some publications allow these hucksters to spread their bad ideas. Also, you deserve some type of prize for being the only writer who consistently focuses on the horrors in Yemen. ..."
    "... Kagan will make up any story to keep American military engaged, mostly in the Middle East. Aside from the changes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are aimed at repressing homegrown religious nationalism, the wave of so-called anti-democractic movements in Europe are responces to popular sentiments of national identity. ..."
    Jan 25, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
    makes a very questionable claim about U.S. foreign policy:

    Autocracy flourished in 2018 because when Washington pursues a so-called realist policy of global retrenchment, it looks for dictators it thinks it can rely on.

    Kagan's argument would be slightly more persuasive if the U.S. were pursuing a policy of global retrenchment. Since that isn't happening, his explanation doesn't make any sense. The argument would also be a little stronger if the U.S. didn't look for dictators it thinks it can rely on at all times . If the U.S. isn't retrenching, and if the U.S. is always in the market for cooperative authoritarian rulers, those things can't be major reasons why authoritarian governments have been gaining ground in recent years.

    There has been an increase in illiberal democracies, one-party states, and authoritarian regimes over the last 10-15 years, and most of that has happened in the wake of the economic and political shocks caused by the 2008 financial crisis.

    Middle-class voters in many democratic states started rejecting mass democracy more than a decade ago and more because they were opposed to the empowerment of poorer voters, and that was already happening when Bush was still prattling about the "freedom agenda."

    Kagan is eager to tie the fortunes of liberal democracy around the world to the extent of U.S. involvement abroad, but the former doesn't actually depend on the latter. He has to fall back on the myth of "global retrenchment" by the U.S. when no such thing has happened, because he needs that to be true to account for the growth of authoritarianism (or what he anachronistically insists on calling autocracy). It is essential to Kagan's larger case for a hyperactivist U.S. foreign policy that liberal democracy around the world and U.S. activism are inextricably intertwined, but they aren't. Kagan's analysis doesn't hold up because authoritarianism may wax or wane in various places around the world no matter what the U.S. is or isn't doing abroad, and those changes are almost entirely beyond our control.

    The biggest problem with Kagan's story is that it mostly ignores the political conditions in the countries where authoritarian strongmen are consolidating power and in the countries where they have been losing it. U.S. support for many authoritarian rulers is undesirable and should be ended, but it doesn't account for the intensifying repression in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The U.S. has backed the Egyptian dictatorship and Saudi monarchy for decades, so that doesn't tell us why the Sisi dictatorship and Mohammed bin Salman's de facto rule are so much more repressive and abusive than their predecessors'. That intensifying repression is one of the reasons why the U.S. should stop supporting these regimes, but we shouldn't assume that the repression will lessen once our support is withdrawn. Ethiopia is a recent counterexample to the trend of growing authoritarianism, and the reasons for that are internal to Ethiopia.

    Kagan is so determined to lay the "springtime for strongmen" at the door of the "so-called realist policy of global retrenchment" that he isn't paying attention to local causes for these political changes that have little or nothing to do with us. That may be useful for promoting his alarmism about the return of "the jungle," but his explanation for why these things have been happening is based on a fantasy.

    Sid Finster January 23, 2019 at 12:49 pm

    Boy, I so am glad that the United States never ever would countenance a strongman, a tyrant, a theocrat, like, say, in Saudi Arabia.

    Our principles! Principles! are just too important.

    Oh wait .

    Taras 77 , says: January 23, 2019 at 4:01 pm
    Kagan rarely if ever makes any sense! This is standard for all neo/zio cons. The all important narrative does not rely upon facts, as a matter of course, facts and truth usually get in the way.
    Xanadu , says: January 23, 2019 at 4:37 pm
    Thank you Daniel Larison for your quick rebuttal to the ilk like Kagan, Boot, Applebaum and Rubin. Their dangerous ideas keep floating out in the policy sphere, and it's an admittedly mundane task to fact-check their writing each time some publications allow these hucksters to spread their bad ideas. Also, you deserve some type of prize for being the only writer who consistently focuses on the horrors in Yemen.
    Lobman , says: January 23, 2019 at 4:42 pm
    Kagan will make up any story to keep American military engaged, mostly in the Middle East. Aside from the changes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are aimed at repressing homegrown religious nationalism, the wave of so-called anti-democractic movements in Europe are responces to popular sentiments of national identity.

    The justifications for military engagement by the neocons are obvious and comic, while the cowardly writers who give them their patina of legitimacy are laughable and probably more dangerous.

    [Jan 25, 2019] Big Tech Merging With Big Brother Is A Big Problem

    Jan 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Big Tech Merging With Big Brother Is A Big Problem

    by Tyler Durden Thu, 01/24/2019 - 23:25 48 SHARES Authored by David Samuels, Excerpted from Wired.com,

    A FRIEND OF mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People's Republic of China, was walking to work.

    WHEN HE OFFERED to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she explained that she "needed the steps" on her Fitbit to sign in to her social media accounts. If she fell below the right number of steps, it would lower her health and fitness rating, which is part of her social rating , which is monitored by the government. A low social rating could prevent her from working or traveling abroad.

    China's social rating system, which was announced by the ruling Communist Party in 2014, will soon be a fact of life for many more Chinese.

    By 2020, if the Party's plan holds, every footstep, keystroke, like, dislike, social media contact, and posting tracked by the state will affect one's social rating.

    Personal "creditworthiness" or "trustworthiness" points will be used to reward and punish individuals and companies by granting or denying them access to public services like health care, travel, and employment, according to a plan released last year by the municipal government of Beijing. High-scoring individuals will find themselves in a "green channel," where they can more easily access social opportunities, while those who take actions that are disapproved of by the state will be "unable to move a step."

    Big Brother is an emerging reality in China. Yet in the West, at least, the threat of government surveillance systems being integrated with the existing corporate surveillance capacities of big-data companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon into one gigantic all-seeing eye appears to trouble very few people -- even as countries like Venezuela have been quick to copy the Chinese model.

    Still, it can't happen here, right? We are iPhone owners and Amazon Prime members, not vassals of a one-party state. We are canny consumers who know that Facebook is tracking our interactions and Google is selling us stuff.

    Yet it seems to me there is little reason to imagine that the people who run large technology companies have any vested interest in allowing pre-digital folkways to interfere with their 21st-century engineering and business models , any more than 19th-century robber barons showed any particular regard for laws or people that got in the way of their railroads and steel trusts.

    Nor is there much reason to imagine that the technologists who run our giant consumer-data monopolies have any better idea of the future they're building than the rest of us do.

    Facebook, Google, and other big-data monopolists already hoover up behavioral markers and cues on a scale and with a frequency that few of us understand . They then analyze, package, and sell that data to their partners.

    A glimpse into the inner workings of the global trade in personal data was provided in early December in a 250-page report released by a British parliamentary committee that included hundreds of emails between high-level Facebook executives. Among other things, it showed how the company engineered sneaky ways to obtain continually updated SMS and call data from Android phones . In response, Facebook claimed that users must "opt-in" for the company to gain access to their texts and calls.

    The machines and systems that the techno-monopolists have built are changing us faster than they or we understand. The scale of this change is so vast and systemic that we simple humans can't do the math -- perhaps in part because of the way that incessant smartphone use has affected our ability to pay attention to anything longer than 140 or 280 characters.

    As the idea of a "right to privacy," for example, starts to seem hopelessly old-fashioned and impractical in the face of ever-more-invasive data systems -- whose eyes and ears, i.e., our smartphones, follow us everywhere -- so has our belief that other individual rights, like freedom of speech , are somehow sacred.

    Being wired together with billions of other humans in vast networks mediated by thinking machines is not an experience that humans have enjoyed before. The best guides we have to this emerging reality may be failed 20th-century totalitarian experiments and science fiction. More on that a little later.

    The speed at which individual-rights-and-privacy-based social arrangements collapse is likely to depend on how fast Big Tech and the American national security apparatus consummate a relationship that has been growing ever closer for the past decade. While US surveillance agencies do not have regular real-time access to the gigantic amounts of data collected by the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon -- as far as we know, anyway -- there is both anecdotal and hard evidence to suggest that the once-distant planets of consumer Big Tech and American surveillance agencies are fast merging into a single corporate-bureaucratic life-world, whose potential for tracking, sorting, gas-lighting, manipulating, and censoring citizens may result in a softer version of China's Big Brother.

    These troubling trends are accelerating in part because Big Tech is increasingly beholden to Washington, which has little incentive to kill the golden goose that is filling its tax and political coffers. One of the leading corporate spenders on lobbying services in Washington, DC, in 2017 was Google's parent company, Alphabet, which, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, spent more than $18 million . Lobbying Congress and government helps tech companies like Google win large government contracts. Perhaps more importantly, it serves as a shield against attempts to regulate their wildly lucrative businesses.

    If anything, measuring the flood of tech dollars pouring into Washington, DC, law firms, lobbying outfits, and think tanks radically understates Big Tech's influence inside the Beltway. By buying The Washington Post , Amazon's Jeff Bezos took direct control of Washington's hometown newspaper. In locating one of Amazon's two new headquarters in nearby Northern Virginia, Bezos made the company a major employer in the area -- with 25,000 jobs to offer.

    Who will get those jobs? Last year, Amazon Web Services announced the opening of the new AWS Secret Region, the result of a 10-year, $600 million contract the company won from the CIA in 2014. This made Amazon the sole provider of cloud services across "the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret," according to an Amazon corporate press release.

    Once the CIA's Amazon-administered self-contained servers were up and running, the NSA was quick to follow suit, announcing its own integrated big-data project. Last year the agency moved most of its data into a new classified computing environment known as the Intelligence Community GovCloud, an integrated "big data fusion environment," as the news site NextGov described it, that allows government analysts to "connect the dots" across all available data sources, whether classified or not.

    The creation of IC GovCloud should send a chill up the spine of anyone who understands how powerful these systems can be and how inherently resistant they are to traditional forms of oversight, whose own track record can be charitably described as poor .

    Amazon's IC GovCloud was quickly countered by Microsoft's secure version of its Azure Government cloud service, tailored for the use of 17 US intelligence agencies. Amazon and Microsoft are both expected to be major bidders for the Pentagon's secure cloud system, the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative -- JEDI -- a winner-take-all contract that will likely be worth at least $10 billion.

    With so many pots of gold waiting at the end of the Washington, DC, rainbow, it seems like a small matter for tech companies to turn over our personal data -- which legally speaking, is actually their data -- to the spy agencies that guarantee their profits. This is the threat that is now emerging in plain sight. It is something we should reckon with now, before it's too late.

    IN FACT, BIG tech and the surveillance agencies are already partners...

    ...

    THE FLIP SIDE of that paranoid vision of an evolving American surveillance state is the dream that the new systems of analyzing and distributing information may be forces for good, not evil. What if Google helped the CIA develop a system that helped filter out fake news, say, or a new Facebook algorithm helped the FBI identify potential school shooters before they massacred their classmates? If human beings are rational calculating engines, won't filtering the information we receive lead to better decisions and make us better people?

    Such fond hopes have a long history. Progressive techno-optimism goes back to the origins of the computer itself, in the correspondence between Charles Babbage, the 19th-century English inventor who imagined the "difference engine" -- the first theoretical model for modern computers -- and Ada Lovelace, the brilliant futurist and daughter of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron.

    "The Analytical Engine," Lovelace wrote, in one of her notes on Babbage's work, "might act upon other things besides number, where objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."

    This is a pretty good description of the principles of digitizing sound; it also eerily prefigures and predicts the extent to which so much of our personal information, even stuff we perceive of as having distinct natural properties, could be converted to zeros and ones.

    The Victorian techno-optimists who first envisioned the digital landscape we now inhabit imagined that thinking machines would be a force for harmony, rather than evil, capable of creating beautiful music and finding expressions for "fundamental relations" of any kind according to a strictly mathematical calculus.

    The idea that social engineering could help produce a more efficient and equitable society was echoed by early 20th-century American progressives. Unlike 19th- and early 20th-century European socialists, who championed the organic strength of local communities, early 20th-century American progressives like Herbert Croly and John Dewey put their faith in the rise of a new class of educated scientist-priests who would re-engineer society from the top down according to a strict utilitarian calculus.

    The lineage of these progressives -- who are not identical with the "progressive" faction of today's Democratic Party -- runs from Woodrow Wilson to champions of New Deal bureaucracy like Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes. The 2008 election of Barack Obama, a well-credentialed technocrat who identified very strongly with the character of Spock from Star Trek , gave the old-time scientistic-progressive religion new currency on the left and ushered in a cozy relationship between the Democratic Party and billionaire techno-monopolists who had formerly fashioned themselves as government-skeptical libertarians.

    "Amazon does great things for huge amounts of people," Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer told Kara Swisher of Recode in a recent interview , in which he also made approving pronouncements about Facebook and Google. "I go to my small tech companies and say, 'How does Google treat you in New York?' A lot of them say, 'Much more fairly than we would have thought.'"

    Big Tech companies and executives are happy to return the favor by donating to their progressive friends, including Schumer .

    But the cozy relationship between mainstream Democrats and Silicon Valley hit a large-sized bump in November 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton -- in part through his mastery of social media platforms like Twitter. Blaming the election result on Russian bots or secret deals with Putin betrayed a shock that what the left had regarded as their cultural property had been turned against them by a right-wing populist whose authoritarian leanings inspired fear and loathing among both the technocratic elite and the Democratic party base.

    Yet in the right hands, progressives continued to muse, information monopolies might be powerful tools for re-wiring societies malformed by racism, sexism, and transphobia. Thinking machines can be taught to filter out bad information and socially negative thoughts. Good algorithms, as opposed to whatever Google and Facebook are currently using, could censor neo-Nazis, purveyors of hate speech, Russian bots, and transphobes while discouraging voters from electing more Trumps .

    The crowdsourced wisdom of platforms like Twitter, powered by circles of mutually credentialing blue-checked "experts," might mobilize a collective will to justice, which could then be enforced on retrograde institutions and individuals . The result might be a better social order, or as data scientist Emily Gorcenski put it , "revolution."

    The dream of centralized control over monopolistic information providers can be put to more prosaic political uses, too -- or so politicians confronted by a fractured and tumultuous digital media landscape must hope. In advance of next year's elections for the European Parliament, which will take place in May, French President Emmanuel Macron signed a deal with Facebook in which officials of his government will meet regularly with Facebook executives to police "hate speech."

    The program, which will continue through the May elections, apparently did little to discourage fuel riots by the " gilets jaunes ," which have set Paris and other French cities ablaze, even as a claim that a change in Facebook's local news algorithm was responsible for the rioting was quickly picked up by French media figures close to Macron.

    At root, the utopian vision of AI-powered information monopolies programmed to advance the cause of social justice makes sense only when you imagine that humans and machines "think" in similar ways. Whether machines can "think," or -- to put it another way, whether people think like machines -- is a question that has been hotly debated for the past five centuries. Those debates gave birth to modern liberal societies, whose foundational assumptions and guarantees are now being challenged by the rise of digital culture.

    ...

    THE ORIGIN OF the utilitarian social calculus and its foundational account of thinking as a form of computation is social contract theory. Not coincidentally, these accounts evolved during the last time western societies were massively impacted by a revolution in communications technology, namely the introduction of the printing press , which brought both the text of the Bible and the writings of small circles of Italian and German humanists to all of Europe. The spread of printing technologies was accompanied by the proliferation of the simple hand mirror , which allowed even ordinary individuals to gaze at a "true reflection" of their own faces, in much the same way that we use iPhones to take selfies.

    Nearly every area of human imagination and endeavor -- from science to literature to painting and sculpture to architecture -- was radically transformed by the double-meteor-like impact of the printing press and the hand mirror , which together helped give rise to scientific discoveries, great works of art, and new political ideas that continue to shape the way we think, live, and work.

    The printing press fractured the monopoly on worldly and spiritual knowledge long held by the Roman Catholic Church, bringing the discoveries of Erasmus and the polemics of Martin Luther to a broad audience and fueling the Protestant Reformation, which held that ordinary believers -- individuals, who could read their own Bibles and see their own faces in their own mirrors -- might have unmediated contact with God. What was once the province of the few became available to the many, and the old social order that had governed the lives of Europe for the better part of a millennium was largely demolished.

    In England, the broad diffusion of printing presses and mirrors led to the bloody and ultimately failed anti-monarchical revolution led by Oliver Cromwell. The Thirty Years' War, fought between Catholic and Protestant believers and hired armies in Central and Eastern Europe, remains the single most destructive conflict, on a per capita basis, in European history, including the First and Second World Wars.

    The information revolution spurred by the advent of digital technologies may turn out to be even more powerful than the Gutenberg revolution; it is also likely to be bloody. Our inability to wrap our minds around a sweeping revolution in the way that information is gathered, analyzed, used, and controlled should scare us. It is in this context that both right- and left-leaning factions of the American elite appear to accept the merger of the US military and intelligence complex with Big Tech as a good thing, even as centralized control over information creates new vulnerabilities for rivals to exploit .

    The attempt to subject the American information space to some form of top-down, public-private control was in turn made possible -- and perhaps, in the minds of many on both the right and the left, necessary -- by the collapse of the 20th-century American institutional press. Only two decades ago, the social and political power of the institutional press was still so great that it was often called "the Fourth Estate" -- a meaningful check on the power of government. The term is rarely used anymore, because the monopoly over the printed and spoken word that gave the press its power is now gone.

    Why? Because in an age in which every smartphone user has a printing press in their pocket, there is little premium in owning an actual, physical printing press . As a result, the value of "legacy" print brands has plummeted. Where the printed word was once a rare commodity, relative to the sum total of all the words that were written in manuscript form by someone, today nearly all the words that are being written anywhere are available somewhere online. What's rare, and therefore worth money, are not printed words but fractions of our attention .

    The American media market today is dominated by Google and Facebook, large platforms that together control the attention of readers and therefore the lion's share of online advertising. That's why Facebook, probably the world's premier publisher of fake news, was recently worth $426 billion, and Newsweek changed hands in 2010 for $1, and why many once-familiar magazine titles no longer exist in print at all .

    The operative, functional difference between today's media and the American media of two decades ago is not the difference between old-school New York Times reporters and new-media bloggers who churn out opinionated "takes" from their desks. It is the difference between all of those media people, old and new, and programmers and executives at companies like Google and Facebook. A set of key social functions -- communicating ideas and information -- has been transferred from one set of companies, operating under one set of laws and values, to another, much more powerful set of companies, which operate under different laws and understand themselves in a different way .

    According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, information service providers are protected from expensive libel lawsuits and other forms of risk that publishers face. Those protections allowed Google and Facebook to build their businesses at the expense of "old media" publishers, which in turn now find it increasingly difficult to pay for original reporting and writing.

    The media once actively promoted and amplified stories that a plurality or majority of Americans could regard as "true." That has now been replaced by the creation and amplification of extremes . The overwhelming ugliness of our public discourse is not accidental; it is a feature of the game, which is structured and run for the profit of billionaire monopolists, and which encourages addictive use .

    The result has been the creation of a socially toxic vacuum at the heart of American democracy, from which information monopolists like Google and Facebook have sucked out all the profit, leaving their users ripe for top-down surveillance, manipulation, and control.

    TODAY, THE PRINTING press and the mirror have combined in the iPhone and other personal devices, which are networked together. Ten years from now, thanks to AI, those networks, and the entities that control them -- government agencies, private corporations, or a union of both -- may take on a life of their own.

    Perhaps the best way to foresee how this future may play out is to look back at how some of our most far-sighted science fiction writers have wrestled with the future that is now in front of us.

    ...

    Yet even classic 20th-century dystopias like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or George Orwell's 1984 tell us little about the dangers posed to free societies by the fusion of big data, social networks, consumer surveillance, and AI.

    Perhaps we are reading the wrong books.

    Instead of going back to Orwell for a sense of what a coming dystopia might look like, we might be better off reading We , which was written nearly a century ago by the Russian novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin. We is the diary of state mathematician D-503, whose experience of the highly disruptive emotion of love for I-330, a woman whose combination of black eyes, white skin, and black hair strike him as beautiful. This perception, which is also a feeling, draws him into a conspiracy against the centralized surveillance state.

    The Only State, where We takes places, is ruled by a highly advanced mathematics of happiness, administered by a combination of programmers and machines. While love has been eliminated from the Only State as inherently discriminatory and unjust, sex has not. According to the Lex Sexualis, the government sex code, "Each number has a right towards every other number as a sex object." Citizens, or numbers, are issued ration books of pink sex tickets. Once both numbers sign the ticket, they are permitted to spend a "sex hour" together and lower the shades in their glass apartments.

    Zamyatin was prescient in imagining the operation and also the underlying moral and intellectual foundations of an advanced modern surveillance state run by engineers. And if 1984 explored the opposition between happiness and freedom, Zamyatin introduced a third term into the equation, which he believed to be more revolutionary and also more inherently human: beauty. The subjective human perception of beauty, Zamyatin argued, along lines that Liebniz and Searle might approve of, is innately human, and therefore not ultimately reconcilable with the logic of machines or with any utilitarian calculus of justice.

    ...

    Against a centralized surveillance state that imposes a motionless and false order and an illusory happiness in the name of a utilitarian calculus of "justice," Basile concludes, Zamyatin envisages a different utopia: "In fact, only within the 'here and now' of beauty may the equation of happiness be considered fully verified." Human beings will never stop seeking beauty, Zamyatin insists, because they are human. They will reject and destroy any attempt to reorder their desires according to the logic of machines.

    A national or global surveillance network that uses beneficent algorithms to reshape human thoughts and actions in ways that elites believe to be just or beneficial to all mankind is hardly the road to a new Eden. It's the road to a prison camp. The question now -- as in previous such moments -- is how long it will take before we admit that the riddle of human existence is not the answer to an equation. It is something that we must each make for ourselves, continually, out of our own materials, in moments whose permanence is only a dream.

    Read the full, ominous report here...

    [Jan 24, 2019] Max Boot Is Sorry for Backing the GOP and Iraq War by Peter Maass

    Neocons are "enemies of the people" independent of their party affiliation. Nuremberg principles were written not for nothing.
    Notable quotes:
    "... he thought Ahmed Chalabi was "the most unfairly maligned man on the planet" long after the Iraqi exile's dissembling was apparent to everyone except the staff of Commentary magazine; and as Boot notes in his mea culpa, he totally failed to notice the dark side of the GOP. "It's amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed," he squeaks. ..."
    "... The problem here isn't really Boot. It's the eternal forgiveness that journalists and intellectuals bestow upon colleagues who should be cast out for errors of immense and tragic consequence. ..."
    Oct 13, 2018 | theintercept.com

    There is an unforgettable passage in Graham Greene's classic "The Quiet American" in which the title character, a CIA agent named Alden Pyle, admits that Vietnam is much more complicated than he'd imagined. "I had not realized how tribal politics was and how divorced it could be from principles or conviction," Pyle says. Surveying the wreckage of the American war effort, he adds, "Looking back with greater introspection and humility after the passage of more than fifteen years, I can finally acknowledge the obvious: it was all a big mistake."

    Greene's admirers will recognize that these lines do not actually come from his 1955 novel. They are from Max Boot's new book, " The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right ." Boot, a leading intellectual in the conservative movement for the past two decades, is now apologizing for nearly everything he has done and abided. He is denouncing not just Donald Trump, but the Republican Party as a whole. "Upon closer examination," he writes in his 260-page atonement, "it's obvious that the whole history of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance, isolationism, and know-nothingism."

    The temptation is to say, Bravo, here at last is a Republican willing to admit the emperor has no clothes. That's the reaction of lots of journalists and pundits who have flipped through Boot's book. Jacob Heilbrunn wrote in the Washington Monthly that Boot's "readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable." Adam Serwer, writer at The Atlantic, tweeted , "You don't want to punish people for getting the right answer." Boot is no longer a Republican (he quit the party after Trump's election) but he is hardly an outcast in the political world -- he is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a CNN analyst. Such is the sweet life of a born-again intellectual.

    It's easy to understand why a penitent like Boot appeals to liberals and other members of the Trump resistance. He ratifies their sense of having been correct from the start, and his confession is enunciated in perfect sound bites, with just the right dose of abasement. Boot is an irresistible spectacle -- the sinner with tears running down his cheeks dropping to his knees at the altar of all that is good, proclaiming that he has seen the light and wants to join the army of righteousness. But here's the thing: Boot is only half-apologizing. And because he's been wrong so many times and with so many ill consequences, he should be provided with nothing more than a polite handshake as he's led out of the sanctuary of politics, forever.

    When I say wrong, I mean Guinness World Records wrong. In his first book, " Out of Order ," Boot argued that the Supreme Court erred when it ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation violated the Constitution ("I am not proud of 'Out of Order,'" he now says); he was a key proponent of the invasion of Iraq ("Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul," he proclaimed in 2001);

    he thought John Bolton was treated unfairly when Democrats opposed his 2005 nomination for ambassador to the United Nations ("He seems like a good choice to help drain the U.N. cesspool of corrupt bureaucrats and self-serving tyrants");

    he thought Ahmed Chalabi was "the most unfairly maligned man on the planet" long after the Iraqi exile's dissembling was apparent to everyone except the staff of Commentary magazine; and as Boot notes in his mea culpa, he totally failed to notice the dark side of the GOP. "It's amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed," he squeaks.

    That's a lot of wrong. It's so much wrong that I can't imagine how or why anyone could look at Boot and think, "Ah, here's a man we should listen to." I can pre-empt Boot's response to this -- in his book, he complains that "doctrinaire leftists" will be satisfied with nothing less than his "ritual suicide" for the war crimes he's committed. I've exchanged a few cordial emails with Boot (we both graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, a few years apart, and worked at its student newspaper, the Daily Californian ), and I can honestly say he seems a nice and bright enough fellow to whom I wish no physical harm. But like Alden Pyle, he has helped create so much havoc, he has been wrong so completely, that it would be the definition of insanity to treat his ideas as fodder for anything other than a shredder. Here's a real line from "The Quiet American," spoken about Pyle by the novel's weary narrator, that suits Boot perfectly: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." Pyle's innocence, the book explains, "is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

    The problem here isn't really Boot. It's the eternal forgiveness that journalists and intellectuals bestow upon colleagues who should be cast out for errors of immense and tragic consequence.

    Boot is a perfect example, because he has been wrong so many times in such major ways and is actually willing to admit it. But there are vast numbers of pundits , masters of spin , and alleged intellectuals who have been wrong enough on enough big things (not just war, but climate change and more) to merit laughter rather than praise. Yet there they are, stroking their chins on our finest op-ed pages and cable news channels. Mutual forgiveness is a necessity among pundits who are stuffed with nonsense much of the time; without mercy on demand, they might all be out of jobs.

    It's no surprise that Boot's book arrives with admiring blurbs from D.C. heavyweights James Fallows, Jon Meacham, and David Corn, among others.

    [Jan 24, 2019] The New Gray Lady is a Comfort Woman for the War Party

    Jan 15, 2019 | original.antiwar.com

    ... ... ...

    Why, it is apparently the following, which is surely a red hot smoking gun. That is, one that condemns the FBI, not Trump; and shows that the NYT , which once courageously published the Pentagon Papers and had earned the above sobriquet for its journalistic stateliness, sense of responsibility and possession of high virtue, has degenerated into a War Party shill – not to say the journalistic equivalent of a comfort woman:

    Mr. Trump had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.

    Well, for crying out loud!

    Any journalist worth his salt would know that Trump's July 2016 shout-out to the Russians was a campaign joke. At best, it was merely an attempt to cleverly state in one more way the running GOP theme about Hillary's missing 30,000 emails. How many times before that had Sean Hannity delivered his riff about Hillary's alleged hammer-smashing of 13 devices and acid-washing with BleachBit of the missing emails?

    [Jan 24, 2019] The Iraq War cheerleaders who are still around 15 years later by Sarah Wasko

    The Iraq War cheerleaders who are still around 15 years later
    Notable quotes:
    "... Bolton was President George W. Bush's Undersecretary of State for Arms Control when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... Kudlow was economics editor of National Review and a co-host of CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... National Review ..."
    "... National Review ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Boot, also an author , was a contributing editor and columnist for The Weekly Standard when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... The Weekly Standard ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Cohen was a Washington Post columnist when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... The Washington Post ..."
    "... The Washington Post ..."
    "... Flesicher served as President Bush's press secretary as the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... Hannity was also a syndicated talk radio host and a Fox News host when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... Hannity & Colmes ..."
    "... The Sean Hannity Show ..."
    "... Weekly Standard ..."
    "... Hayes was a senior writer at The Weekly Standard when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... The Weekly Standard ..."
    "... The Connection: How Al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Hiatt has been editorial page director of The Washington Post since 1999. ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Weekly Standard ..."
    "... Kristol was a co-founder of Project for a New American Century, a neo-conservative think-tank Kristol used to crusade for the Iraq War. ..."
    "... The Weekly Standard ..."
    "... Wall Street Journal ..."
    "... Gigot has been the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal since 2001. ..."
    "... Miller was a New York Times reporter when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... New York Times ..."
    "... New York Times ..."
    "... Scarborough was hired by MSNBC as the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... New York Times ..."
    "... Stephens was editor of The Jerusalem Post when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... The New Yorker ..."
    "... Jerusalem Post ..."
    "... The Jerusalem Post ..."
    "... Frum was a speechwriter for President Bush when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... Lake was a State Department correspondent for United Press International (UPI) when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... Cohen was a co-founder of Project for the New American Century. ..."
    "... Coulter was a prominent conservative author and commentator when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... Limbaugh was also host of his own radio show when the Iraq War began. ..."
    "... Wallace was George W. Bush's communications director as the Iraq War began. ..."
    Mar 20, 2018 | www.mediamatters.org

    March 20, 2018, marks the 15th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. While the American footprint in Iraq has drastically changed over 15 years, a significant number of the original cheerleaders for the invasion still hold prominent roles in the media today:

    John Bolton, Fox News contributor

    Bolton was President George W. Bush's Undersecretary of State for Arms Control when the Iraq War began.

    Bolton was a huge backer of the Iraq War:

    Bolton backed an Iraq invasion as early as 1998, when he signed a letter from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a neoconservative group led by William Kristol, urging then-President Bill Clinton to attack Saddam Hussein. As the State Department's top arms-control official during President Bush's first term, Bolton played a role in pushing the allegation that Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa.

    "We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq." [BBC, 11/20/02 ]

    "I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct." [Talking Points Memo, 5/14/15 ]

    Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior contributor

    Kudlow was economics editor of National Review and a co-host of CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer when the Iraq War began.

    "Could it be that a lack of decisive follow-through in the global war on terrorism is the single biggest problem facing the stock market and the nation today? I believe it is. The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand points." [ National Review , 6/26/02 ]

    "Every day we wait for the impending invasion of Iraq is a day Saddam Hussein grows stronger, a day our national security is threatened, and a day our economic security is jeopardized." [ National Review , 2/6/03 ]

    Max Boot, Washington Post columnist

    Boot, also an author , was a contributing editor and columnist for The Weekly Standard when the Iraq War began.

    John Ganz wrote of Boot's warmongering:

    Boot's bloodthirstiness is united with a peculiar naïveté about America; it must be said that in this respect he is not unlike Lansdale. Could it really have been, as Boot wrote in 2017, that only Trump opened his eyes to the fact that it's a bit easier to be a white guy in America, that "I benefitted from my skin color and my gender -- and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it"? Good for Max if he's had a change of heart and seen the world through more empathetic eyes; one only wishes he could've had those moments of reflection, which seem so modest and so reasonable, circa 2001. But that might not have changed anything. He wrote as recently as 2013 that he feels "No Need to Repent for Support of the Iraq War." He declares, "I feel no shame being part of the 75 percent of Americans who believed at the beginning that this was a war worth waging." This move is not quite honest: Boot wants to submerge himself into the center of a crowd, one of the democratic mass, when in fact he was at its vanguard, pushing for the Iraq War early and often.

    "Once Afghanistan has been dealt with, America should turn its attention to Iraq." [ The Weekly Standard , 10/15/01 ]

    "In places like Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and very shortly Iraq, ordinary people clamor for American intervention, and welcome U.S. troops as liberators." [Nimitz Memorial Lecture at University of California, Berkeley, 3/12/03 ]

    "No need to repent for support of [the] Iraq war." [ Commentary , 3/18/13 ]

    "But how exactly does the Iraq War differ from previous wars? From World War I, when the Great Powers were said to have 'sleepwalked' into a conflict that no one really wanted?" [ Commentary , 7/6/16 ]

    Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist

    Cohen was a Washington Post columnist when the Iraq War began.

    "Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise." [ The Washington Post , 2/6/03 ]

    "Initially, I thought bringing down Saddam Hussein was a good cause. I was wrong -- not about the cause, but about its practicality." [ The Washington Post , 4/1/08 ]

    Ari Fleischer, Fox News contributor

    Flesicher served as President Bush's press secretary as the Iraq War began.

    "My point is, the likelihood is much more like Afghanistan, where the people who live right now under a brutal dictator will view America as liberators, not conquerors." [ The New York Times , 10/12/02 ]

    "There's no question that if force is used, it will achieve the objective of preserving the peace far faster than the current path that we're on." [White House press briefing, 2/14/03 ]

    "Given the chance to throw off a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein, people will rejoice." [White House press briefing, 3/21/03 ]

    "I think that if you look at the Iraqi people, the Iraqi people are overwhelmingly pleased with the fact the United States has helped them to get rid of the Saddam Hussein regime. That was clear from their dancing in the streets, from the way they tore down the statues. And I think that is the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people." [White House press briefing, 7/1/03 ]

    Sean Hannity, Fox News host

    Hannity was also a syndicated talk radio host and a Fox News host when the Iraq War began.

    "We're going to find all the weapons of mass destruction." [Fox News, Hannity & Colmes , 2/19/03, via Nexis]

    "I was a real believer in the Iraq War. I still am to this day. I still feel that there were probably weapons of mass destruction. I do believe they were likely moved to Syria in the long lead-up to the war." [Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show , 9/7/16 ]

    Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard editor-in-chief

    Hayes was a senior writer at The Weekly Standard when the Iraq War began.

    "Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda." [ The Weekly Standard , 11/24/03 ]

    Hayes' 2004 book was titled The Connection: How Al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America . [ Media Matters , 6/30/04 ]

    Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial director

    Hiatt has been editorial page director of The Washington Post since 1999.

    As Media Matters has documented , the Washington Post editorial page -- headed by Hiatt since 1999 -- repeatedly echoed the Bush administration's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. A February 6, 2003, editorial began, "After Secretary Of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."

    The Post 's editorial page also linked the need to invade Iraq to the 9/11 attacks:

    During the past decade the United States vowed many times to disarm Saddam Hussein, who made no secret of his hatred and enmity toward the United States; but when the Iraqi dictator resisted, the United States chose to abandon its vows rather than use the force that would have been needed to enforce them. In every case, the calculation, stated or unstated, was the same: Pay tribute, don't make trouble, and maybe nothing worse will happen.

    In the ruins of Lower Manhattan in September 2001, most Americans saw evidence that this calculation was incorrect as well as craven. The nation's enemies would not be deterred or mollified by a gentle response; they would be emboldened. President Bush rightly concluded that the nation had to defend itself more vigilantly but also that no defense could succeed unless accompanied by an offensive against the terrorists and the states that sheltered them.

    Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard editor-at-large

    Kristol was a co-founder of Project for a New American Century, a neo-conservative think-tank Kristol used to crusade for the Iraq War.

    Saddam Hussein "will not disarm peacefully. And he must be disarmed. So war will come. The war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime." [ The Weekly Standard , 3/17/03 ]

    Kristol bragged that the war would last just two months:

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/nONm4myKwY8

    In 2015, Kristol defended the decision to invade Iraq:

    Even with the absence of caches of weapons of mass destruction, and the mistakes we made in failing to send enough troops at first and to provide security from the beginning for the Iraqi people, we were right to persevere through several difficult years. We were able to bring the war to a reasonably successful conclusion in 2008.

    Paul Gigot, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor

    Gigot has been the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal since 2001.

    Under Gigot, the editorial page frequently hyped the likelihood that Saddam Hussein was close to producing or obtaining a nuclear weapon. The Journal forwarded alarmist claims about Iraq's nuclear capabilities on numerous occasions:

    Judith Miller, Fox News contributor

    Miller was a New York Times reporter when the Iraq War began.

    Miller produced a series of now-debunked reports that the Bush administration used to buttress its claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. As Franklin Foer wrote for New York magazine:

    During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein's ambition and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by [Ahmad] Chalabi and his allies -- almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.

    For the past year, the Times has done much to correct that coverage, publishing a series of stories calling Chalabi's credibility into question. [ New York magazine, 6 /7/04 ]

    In a 2004 interview, she told The New York Review of Books: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal."

    Former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller discussed Miller's Iraq War reporting with Media Matters in 2011:

    New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller says one of his biggest mistakes as editor was not addressing the paper's misleading pre-Iraq War coverage sooner, including the reporting of former Times writer Judy Miller.

    Keller tells Media Matters that he is "not at all" surprised that Miller ended up at the "conservative" Fox News Channel after she left the Times under a cloud of controversy related to her Iraq reporting.

    Keller, who announced Thursday that in September he will leave the post he has held since July 2003, said: "Judy was the author of a lot of those stories, and I should have dealt with the stories and with her I think as the sort of first order of business when I took the job rather than waiting until the following year."

    Keller was referring to the unusual editor's note the Times published on May 26, 2004, in which it admitted many of its pre-war stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- a number of which were reported by Miller -- misrepresented the situation before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

    "The whole Judy Miller WMD experience was ... one of the low points of the last eight years," Keller said.

    Joe Scarborough, MSNBC host

    Scarborough was hired by MSNBC as the Iraq War began.

    Joe Scarborough repeatedly cheered on the Iraq War and attacked people who criticized it.

    "Congressman [Jack] Kingston [R-GA], give me a quick response. How could there be anyone left on the planet today that doesn't believe that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction?" [MSNBC, MSNBC Reports , 3/5/03, via Nexis]

    Toppling Saddam Hussein "will mean the end of his weapons of mass destruction." [MSNBC, MSNBC Reports , 3/11/03, via Nexis]

    "I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types . I just wonder, who's going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: 'Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong'? Maybe the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war .

    "Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief UN weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr. Ritter actually told a French radio network that -- quote, 'The United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs, defeated.' Sorry, Scott. I think you've been chasing the wrong tail, again.

    "Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them 'elitists' for nothing." [MSNBC 4/10/03 via FAIR ]

    Bret Stephens, New York Times columnist and MSNBC contributor

    Stephens was editor of The Jerusalem Post when the Iraq War began.

    As The New Yorker noted , in 2003 Stephens' Jerusalem Post "named one of the Iraq War's chief architects, Paul Wolfowitz, its 'man of the year.'"

    "Saddam may unveil, to an astonished world, the Arab world's first nuclear bomb." [ The Jerusalem Post , 11/15/02 ]

    Stephens criticized the Obama administration's case for military intervention in Syria by contrasting it with Bush's decision to invade Iraq, which he claimed was made based on "highly detailed" intelligence revealing weapons of mass destruction. Stephens claimed that the "testimony of U.N. inspectors like Hans Blix" supported the Bush administration's case for war, and accusations that the Bush administration lied were "libel" and "cheap slander." In fact, Blix told CNN in 2004 that the Bush administration "chose to ignore" his team's concerns about the lack of solid evidence in favor of war, and that prior to the invasion the evidence of WMDs in Iraq was revealed to be "shaky." [ Media Matters , 4/13/17 ]

    David Frum, Atlantic senior editor

    Frum was a speechwriter for President Bush when the Iraq War began.

    Frum is renowned for writing George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech. Alex Nichols described Frum's Iraq boosterism in 2017:

    Bush chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, a fellow fanatical interventionist and veteran of the neoconservative underworld, tapped Frum for the speechwriting team in 2000. His greatest accomplishment was the authorship of Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech, now known for its most famous phrase, "axis of evil." The axis was a grouping of three countries -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- that were implicit allies in a plot to destroy America. The supposed ties between the three mostly came down to their mutual love for imaginary "weapons of mass destruction" and non-existent collaboration with al-Qaeda. As Trump threatens war crimes against civilians in Iraq and Syria, sanctions Iran despite its compliance with our nuclear agreement and threatens "fire and fury" for North Korea, Frum must be held accountable for cementing them as boogeymen in the public imagination.

    Frum resigned his post in February 2002 in order to join the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank then working in close association with the Bush administration. With them, he emerged as one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the War on Terror. In 2004, Frum and former adviser to the Bush Department of Defense Richard Perle published a book titled An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. Its text was as audacious as its title. "An End to Evil will define the conservative point of view on foreign policy for a new generation -- and shape the agenda for the 2004 presidential-election year and beyond," a description of it reads. By this time, the Iraq War was in full swing, and Frum and Perle offered full-throated apologia. Under the assumptions that the war would bring stable democracy to Iraq and that the imaginary WMDs would be located soon enough, they called for similar action against North Korea and Iran.

    Eli Lake, Bloomberg View columnist

    Lake was a State Department correspondent for United Press International (UPI) when the Iraq War began.

    As noted by Adam Weinstein for Gawker, Lake argued for the legality of the Iraq War in a 2003 column for UPI:

    "On the facts of the case, it is hard to argue that Iraq has given up its weapons of mass destruction. ... With this kind of evidence, far from being an international outlaw, the United States would be a the (sic) defender of the entire institution of international (sic) should it lead a war to disarm Iraq."

    Eliot Cohen, Atlantic contributing editor

    Cohen was a co-founder of Project for the New American Century.

    MSNBC's Zachary Roth described Cohen's role in boosting the Iraq War in 2013:

    [Cohen] was a key agitator for an Iraq invasion and for a maximalist response to the 9/11 attacks. In a November 2001 op-ed in which he called the War on Terror "World War IV," Cohen argued that the US. should "target" Iraq because it had "helped al Qaeda" and "developed weapons of destruction." Not long after, he touted a spurious connection between Muhammed Atta, the chief 9/11 hijacker, and Saddam's regime. In Congressional testimony in 2002, Cohen framed a stark choice for policymakers: Allow Saddam "to acquire weapons of mass destruction or to take action to overthrow him." In 2007, Cohen became a top adviser to Condoleezza Rice at the State Department.

    Ann Coulter

    Coulter was a prominent conservative author and commentator when the Iraq War began.

    Coulter, alongside Sean Hannity, pushed lies about Army Ranger Pat Tillman's opposition to the Iraq War. Asawin Suebsaeng wrote in 2017 for The Daily Beast about Coulter's Iraq War boosterism and how she has pivoted away from it under Trump:

    "I think Iraq was a crucial part of the war on terrorism -- if you had to choose between Iraq and Afghanistan, I'd take Iraq over Afghanistan," Coulter said on a Fox Business panel, debating anti-war libertarians, in late 2011. "PATRIOT Act, fantastic, Gitmo, fantastic, waterboarding, not bad, though [even harsher] torture would've been better."

    Coulter went on to tell a bewildered John Stossel and Matt Welch that "[Iraq] is a fantastic country for regime change," that "torture works beautifully," and that position regarding potential blowback or unintended negative consequences to the war were merely a "crazy ACLU argument."

    Rush Limbaugh

    Limbaugh was also host of his own radio show when the Iraq War began.

    On April 7, 2003, Rush Limbaugh said , "We're discovering WMDs all over Iraq." On September 26, 2007, Limbaugh called soldiers who advocated withdrawal from Iraq "phony soldiers." Limbaugh has subsequently tried to justify the Iraq War, even declaring that President Bush should be added to Mount Rushmore . In January 2018, Limbaugh accused the "deep state" of faking weapons of mass destruction evidence in Iraq to damage Bush.

    Nicole Wallace, MSNBC host

    Wallace was George W. Bush's communications director as the Iraq War began.

    "[Obama's] legacy on foreign policy is going to be that he didn't start a war in Iraq. He wasn't the president, thank God, in the years after 9/11." [MSNBC, 5/30/14 ]

    [Jan 24, 2019] Trump Derangement Syndrome and the NATO Fetish of the Progressive Left by David Stockman

    Notable quotes:
    "... As we have explained elsewhere, the cost of Empire is now nearing $1 trillion per year when you count foreign aid and security assistance, homeland security, the $200 billion Veterans budget and debt service on past wars. Add that to $2.5 trillion of entitlements that neither party will touch and what will soon by $1 trillion per year of interest expense and you have nothing less than a Fiscal Doomsday machine. ..."
    "... That is, spending that will be pushing 25-30% of GDP and a revenue base that amounts to less than 17% of GDP. Literally, the nation's fiscal accounts are being drawn and quartered by the dual menace of the Welfare State and Warfare State. ..."
    "... In fact, during the past 27 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914. ..."
    "... Needless to say, there is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington – not Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or Raqqah. The former has become a global menace owing to what didn't happen in 1991. ..."
    "... So doing he should have demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; slashed the US standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s. ..."
    "... Unfortunately, George H.W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision or even mediocre intelligence. He was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who single-handedly blew the peace when he plunged America into a petty argument between the impetuous dictator of Iraq and the greedy Emir of Kuwait that was none of our business. ..."
    Jan 21, 2019 | original.antiwar.com

    We've got NATO on our mind today because we learned this morning that the mere suggestion this obsolete relic of the Cold War should be abandoned tends to trigger an absolutely virulent outburst of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the mainstream media.

    As it happened we were appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to promote our new book called, PEAK TRUMP: The Undrainable Swamp and the Fantasy of MAGA .

    So long as we were talking about the folly of Trump-O-Nomics and the Donald's rookie mistake in embracing an egregious stock market bubble that is destined to crash and a failing, geriatric business cycle that at age 115 months has "recession ahead" written all over its forehead, our host, Mika Brzezinski, was happy to nod approvingly.

    But when we veered off into approval of the Donald's efforts to rein in the Empire and make peace with the Russkies, it was an altogether different matter. We no more than launched the thought of it than Mika was sputtering in disbelief – as if we had committed a grotesque sacrilege in public:

    STOCKMAN: Beyond that – beyond that, trump tried to do the right thick with America first. He's been stymied at every turn of the road. He was right. They wouldn't let him do it. He was right. NATO is obsolete. We should get rid of it. Everybody went after him for he's trying to do the right thing in Korea and yet they keep coming after him on the basis of the status quo, which has been wrong for last 60 years. So on the one hand, his economic policy is a failure. On the other hand, his effort to rein in the empires I call it and get to something we can afford is being stymied. And then he's filled the swamp with $100 billion more for the Pentagon that is doesn't need. That's the deep end of the swamp."

    BRZEZINSKI: "David, David, hold on a second, hold on, hold on. You did a lot."

    STOCKMAN: "Yes."

    BRZEZINSKI: "I just want to like hone in on one – are you saying we should pull out of NATO?" [crosstalk]

    STOCKMAN: "Sure. NATO is obsolete."

    BRZEZINSKI: "What?"

    STOCKMAN: "NATO is obsolete. It was only set up to stop the Soviet Union and 50,000 tanks on the Warsaw front. That ended 25 years ago. We don't need NATO. Europe can take care of itself. Russia's a pint-sized economy, 7 percent of size of U.S. economy. NATO, US GDP combined is $36 trillion, Russia's $1.5 trillion. You think the Europeans can't handle it? Germany spends 1 percent only of GDP on defense. If they really thought that the Russians were heading through the Brandenburg Gate, they would be providing for their own defense. They're not pacifists.

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

    So if you wonder why we insist that a fiscal calamity is barreling down the pike – just consider the implications of this exchange. MSNBC is ground zero for the so-called progressive Left. Yet it has become so deranged by the Donald and convinced that he was elected not because the electorate rejected its threadbare agenda, but because Putin and the Russkies threw the election to him, that it has become a full-fledged champion of the War Party.

    As we have explained elsewhere, the cost of Empire is now nearing $1 trillion per year when you count foreign aid and security assistance, homeland security, the $200 billion Veterans budget and debt service on past wars. Add that to $2.5 trillion of entitlements that neither party will touch and what will soon by $1 trillion per year of interest expense and you have nothing less than a Fiscal Doomsday machine.

    That is, spending that will be pushing 25-30% of GDP and a revenue base that amounts to less than 17% of GDP. Literally, the nation's fiscal accounts are being drawn and quartered by the dual menace of the Welfare State and Warfare State.

    Yet with respect to the latter, the last time we checked the old Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history 28 years ago. Shortly thereafter the 50,000 Red Army tanks, which had been arrayed menacingly (and unbeknownst to the CIA, largely without spare fuel) behind the Iron Curtain, were mostly melted down for scrap by the destitute statelets of the Warsaw Pact (Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania etc.) and 14 ex-Soviet Republics (like Belarus, Moldova, Tajikistan, Ukraine, etc.)

    What was left of the Soviet Empire was the rump state of Russia – shorn of much of its industrial base and with an aging population of just 140 million compared to the 425 million souls who had been incarcerated in Stalin's dystopia.

    So, yes, there was every reason to declare "mission accomplished" and disband NATO because the much exaggerated conventional military threat of the Soviet Union had literally vanished from the face of the earth. At that point, NATO was, in fact, pointless.

    So when President George Bush the Elder, who was no wimpy Yale pacifist, promised Gorbachev in 1989 that in return for his acquiescence to the reunification of Germany that NATO would no move " a single inch to the east", he wasn't exactly selling the "free world" (as they called it) down the drain.

    In fact, as the above map unfolded, the 77-Years War that had incepted in August 1914 was finally over. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations which germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into the second world war and cold war which followed inexorably thereupon.

    To wit, upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped-out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.

    So finally the time had come for Washington to lead the world into a golden age of peace, disarmament and prosperous commerce among the nations.

    Yet there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac after the 77 Years War ended. The great general and president, Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the "military-industrial complex" in his farewell address.

    But that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word "congressional" in a gesture of comity to the legislative branch. So restore Ike's deleted reference to the legislative pork barrels and Sunday afternoon warriors of Capitol Hill and toss in the legions of beltway busybodies that constituted the civilian branches of the cold war armada (CIA, State, AID, NED etc.) and the circle would have been complete.

    It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized world.

    In a word, the real threat to world peace circa 1991 was that Pax Americana would not go away quietly into the good night.

    In fact, during the past 27 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914.

    Needless to say, there is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington – not Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or Raqqah. The former has become a global menace owing to what didn't happen in 1991.

    What needed to happen back in 1991 was for Bush the Elder to declare "mission accomplished" and slash the Pentagon budget from $600 billion to $250 billion.

    So doing he should have demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; slashed the US standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s.

    Unfortunately, George H.W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision or even mediocre intelligence. He was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who single-handedly blew the peace when he plunged America into a petty argument between the impetuous dictator of Iraq and the greedy Emir of Kuwait that was none of our business.

    By contrast, even though liberal historians have reviled Warren G. Harding as some kind of dumbkopf politician, he well understood that the Great War had been for naught, and that to insure it never happened again the nations of the world needed to rid themselves of their huge navies and standing armies.

    To that end, he achieved the largest global disarmament agreement ever made during the Washington Naval conference of 1921, which halted the construction of new battleships for more than a decade.

    And while he was at it, President Harding also pardoned Eugene Debs. He thereby gave witness to the truth that the intrepid socialist candidate for president and vehement antiwar protester, who Wilson had thrown in prison for exercising his first amendment right to speak against US entry into a pointless European war, had been right all along.

    In short, Warren G. Harding knew the war was over, and the folly of Wilson's 1917 plunge into Europe's bloodbath should not be repeated at all hazards.

    The Unforgiveable Sins 0f George H.W. Bush

    Not George H.W. Bush. The man should never be forgiven for enabling the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Gates and their neocon pack of jackals to come to power – even if he did denounce them in his bumbling old age.

    Even more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the Persian Gulf in 1991 he opened the gates to an unnecessary confrontation with Islam. In turn, that nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the world today – save for forces unleashed by George H.W. Bush's petulant quarrel with Saddam Hussein.

    We will address more fully on another occasion the 45-year-old error that holds the Persian Gulf is an American Lake and that energy security requires it be patrolled by the Fifth Fleet. As history proves, the real answer to high oil prices everywhere and always is high oil prices and the wonders they work to rebalance the global energy market.

    But first it is well to remember that there was no plausible threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and security of the citizens of Springfield MA, Lincoln NE or Spokane WA when the cold war ended.

    But rather than dismantling the NATO machinery, virtually the opposite happened. NATO has been expanded to 29 countries including such powers as Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and now the statelet of Montenegro that has a military half the size of the police force of Philadelphia.

    In the context of this relentless and pointless NATO expansion to the very borders of the shrunken Russian state, Washington not only sponsored and funded the overthrow of Ukraine's constitutionally elected government in February 2014. But once it had unleashed a devastating civil war, it relentlessly blocked the obvious alternative to the bloodshed that has claimed 10,000 civilian and military casualties.

    That is, it's partition of its population among the Russian speaking provinces in the Donbas and Crimea and Ukrainians in the west. After all, partition was accomplished peacefully in the artificial state of Czechoslovakia and at the insistence of NATO bombers in the short-lived nation of Yugoslavia.

    Had not the Donald been stopped cold by the hail of hysteria which emanated from the War Party and their dutiful stenographers in the main stream media, the next step after his historic meeting with Putin in Helsinki would have been to take up where George H.W. Bush faltered in 1991.

    That is, on the dismantlement and interment of NATO and the reopening of Europe to peaceful commerce among all the nation's that had been artificially separated by the now long departed Iron Curtain.

    The fact is, Washington doesn't need its budget-busting $720 billion defense budget to defend Europe from Russia, nor should it be endlessly haranguing those nations to waste more of their own money on defense than they already are.

    That's because there is absolutely no reason to believe that Russia wants to attack Germany or any other country in Europe. Indeed, the very idea is just plain madness.

    As shown by the table below, the NATO-28 (excluding the US) are now actually spending $250 billion per year on defense (2017). That's 4X Russia's entire military budget of $61 billion .

    Likewise, the GDP of Russia is but $1.5 trillion compared to $18 trillion for the NATO-28. So is Cool Hand Vlad so completely foolish and reckless as to think that he could invade and occupy territories that have an economy 13X bigger than that of Russia?

    Actually, it's far more ludicrous than that. The rump of Russia today is a giant hydrocarbon province attached to some wheat fields, timber lands and mineral deposits – all dependent upon an aging work force afflicted with an undue fondness for Vodka etc.

    What that means is that Russia must export its commodities big time or die. In fact, during 2017 Russian exports totaled $357 billion or 26% of its GDP. And 55% of that went to Europe!

    Moreover, when you breakdown Russian exports it is plain to see that the industrial maw of Europe is the port of first call for its vast tonnages of exported commodities. These included $173 billion of oil and gas and $60 billion of iron, steel, aluminum, precious metals, forest products, fertilizers, grains and copper, among others.

    Finally, the table on defense spending by country below speaks for itself as to the purported Russian threat. If the German government really feared that Russian tanks would be soon rolling through the Brandenburg Gates, it would have more than 20 operational tanks, and it would spend far more than $40.6 billion or 1.2% of GDP to defend itself.

    And the same is even more true of the former Warsaw pact countries that are located cheek-by-jowl on Russia's border. Yet Romania spends the tiny sum of $2.8 billion or 1.2% of GDP on its military.

    Likewise, the figure for Hungary, which learned all about Soviet-style invasions in 1956, spends only $1.2 billion or barely 1.0% of GDP. And besides that, its intrepid leader, Viktor Orban, doesn't even support NATO's ridiculous sanctions on Putin's cronies and allies.

    And as for the allegedly threatened Baltic states, their combined defense budgets are less than $1.5 billion, representing a minuscule 1.7% of combined GDP; and Bulgaria, fast upon the Russian Lake called the Black Sea, spends only $660 million or 1.4% of its GDP.

    In short, European policy action on the defense spending front trumps all the hot air that wafts from NATO's spanking new Brussels headquarters. Their governments and parliaments positively do not think they are threatened by the Russian Bear because they aren't.

    What would help a lot, therefore, is for the Great Disrupter to forget about his unfortunate infatuation with the idea that bigger is always better, and do what no other American politician in thrall to the Warfare State has been unable to do since 1991 when the Soviet Union vanished.

    That is, declare "mission accomplished" with respect to NATO and disband it forthwith.

    You could call it a Mercy Killing. Indeed, a couple more NATO summits at which they are browbeat to waste ever more money on defense, and the Europeans themselves may well start begging for exactly that.

    Then again, could you imagine how loudly the progressive left would be screaming if the Donald even entertained the thought deep beneath his bedraggled Orange Comb-Over?

    David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He's the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed , The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin And How to Bring It Back . He also is founder of David Stockman's Contra Corner and David Stockman's Bubble Finance Trader .

    Read more by David Stockman

    [Jan 24, 2019] This write-up is an uncanny coincidence for me as I just watched the four part movie The Lobby (UK) yesterday. As I watched the maneuvers of the israeli's lobby groups and their wilful political accomplices, I kept smiling seeing how much they are putting into an unwinnable war. They seem not to learn from history.

    Jan 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    William Bowles , Jan 23, 2019 4:59:21 AM | link

    < Good one b!!!>

    and especially in the US, where any criticism of Israel is regularly treated as 'anti-semitism', just as it is here in the UK. I have never recognised the state of Israel, even though my mother's family was exterminated almost in its entirety during WWII. And I don't even know where or when my aunts, uncles, cousins et al vanished, even 70 yrs later. Oft times I'm ashamed to be considered Jewish and see very little difference between Hitler's Nazis and the so-called Jewish state that treats Palestinians as untermensch.

    See for example: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-election-ad-boasts-gaza-bombed-back-stone-ages

    Steve , Jan 23, 2019 8:07:39 AM | link

    This write-up is an uncanny coincidence for me as I just watched the four part movie The Lobby (UK) yesterday. As I watched the maneuvers of the israeli's lobby groups and their wilful political accomplices, I kept smiling seeing how much they are putting into an unwinnable war. They seem not to learn from history. Michelle Alexander would be vilified and demonized but I think she will live in peace with herself. The Apartheid-Israel is indeed a horrendous shame.

    Don Bacon , Jan 23, 2019 11:45:33 AM | link

    I falsely said earlier that every Congress-person is on the payroll but only 269 (62%) of the 435 voting House delegates received pro-Israel money, an average of $23,220 each. . . here

    [Jan 24, 2019] Max Boot Is Sorry for Backing the GOP and Iraq War by Peter Maass

    Neocons are "enemies of the people" independent of their party affiliation. Nuremberg principles were written not for nothing.
    Notable quotes:
    "... he thought Ahmed Chalabi was "the most unfairly maligned man on the planet" long after the Iraqi exile's dissembling was apparent to everyone except the staff of Commentary magazine; and as Boot notes in his mea culpa, he totally failed to notice the dark side of the GOP. "It's amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed," he squeaks. ..."
    "... The problem here isn't really Boot. It's the eternal forgiveness that journalists and intellectuals bestow upon colleagues who should be cast out for errors of immense and tragic consequence. ..."
    Oct 13, 2018 | theintercept.com

    There is an unforgettable passage in Graham Greene's classic "The Quiet American" in which the title character, a CIA agent named Alden Pyle, admits that Vietnam is much more complicated than he'd imagined. "I had not realized how tribal politics was and how divorced it could be from principles or conviction," Pyle says. Surveying the wreckage of the American war effort, he adds, "Looking back with greater introspection and humility after the passage of more than fifteen years, I can finally acknowledge the obvious: it was all a big mistake."

    Greene's admirers will recognize that these lines do not actually come from his 1955 novel. They are from Max Boot's new book, " The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right ." Boot, a leading intellectual in the conservative movement for the past two decades, is now apologizing for nearly everything he has done and abided. He is denouncing not just Donald Trump, but the Republican Party as a whole. "Upon closer examination," he writes in his 260-page atonement, "it's obvious that the whole history of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance, isolationism, and know-nothingism."

    The temptation is to say, Bravo, here at last is a Republican willing to admit the emperor has no clothes. That's the reaction of lots of journalists and pundits who have flipped through Boot's book. Jacob Heilbrunn wrote in the Washington Monthly that Boot's "readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable." Adam Serwer, writer at The Atlantic, tweeted , "You don't want to punish people for getting the right answer." Boot is no longer a Republican (he quit the party after Trump's election) but he is hardly an outcast in the political world -- he is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a CNN analyst. Such is the sweet life of a born-again intellectual.

    It's easy to understand why a penitent like Boot appeals to liberals and other members of the Trump resistance. He ratifies their sense of having been correct from the start, and his confession is enunciated in perfect sound bites, with just the right dose of abasement. Boot is an irresistible spectacle -- the sinner with tears running down his cheeks dropping to his knees at the altar of all that is good, proclaiming that he has seen the light and wants to join the army of righteousness. But here's the thing: Boot is only half-apologizing. And because he's been wrong so many times and with so many ill consequences, he should be provided with nothing more than a polite handshake as he's led out of the sanctuary of politics, forever.

    When I say wrong, I mean Guinness World Records wrong. In his first book, " Out of Order ," Boot argued that the Supreme Court erred when it ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation violated the Constitution ("I am not proud of 'Out of Order,'" he now says); he was a key proponent of the invasion of Iraq ("Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul," he proclaimed in 2001);

    he thought John Bolton was treated unfairly when Democrats opposed his 2005 nomination for ambassador to the United Nations ("He seems like a good choice to help drain the U.N. cesspool of corrupt bureaucrats and self-serving tyrants");

    he thought Ahmed Chalabi was "the most unfairly maligned man on the planet" long after the Iraqi exile's dissembling was apparent to everyone except the staff of Commentary magazine; and as Boot notes in his mea culpa, he totally failed to notice the dark side of the GOP. "It's amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed," he squeaks.

    That's a lot of wrong. It's so much wrong that I can't imagine how or why anyone could look at Boot and think, "Ah, here's a man we should listen to." I can pre-empt Boot's response to this -- in his book, he complains that "doctrinaire leftists" will be satisfied with nothing less than his "ritual suicide" for the war crimes he's committed. I've exchanged a few cordial emails with Boot (we both graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, a few years apart, and worked at its student newspaper, the Daily Californian ), and I can honestly say he seems a nice and bright enough fellow to whom I wish no physical harm. But like Alden Pyle, he has helped create so much havoc, he has been wrong so completely, that it would be the definition of insanity to treat his ideas as fodder for anything other than a shredder. Here's a real line from "The Quiet American," spoken about Pyle by the novel's weary narrator, that suits Boot perfectly: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." Pyle's innocence, the book explains, "is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

    The problem here isn't really Boot. It's the eternal forgiveness that journalists and intellectuals bestow upon colleagues who should be cast out for errors of immense and tragic consequence.

    Boot is a perfect example, because he has been wrong so many times in such major ways and is actually willing to admit it. But there are vast numbers of pundits , masters of spin , and alleged intellectuals who have been wrong enough on enough big things (not just war, but climate change and more) to merit laughter rather than praise. Yet there they are, stroking their chins on our finest op-ed pages and cable news channels. Mutual forgiveness is a necessity among pundits who are stuffed with nonsense much of the time; without mercy on demand, they might all be out of jobs.

    It's no surprise that Boot's book arrives with admiring blurbs from D.C. heavyweights James Fallows, Jon Meacham, and David Corn, among others.

    [Jan 24, 2019] Intelligence agency officials carefully monitor the activities of the two main parties, keeping a vigilant eye out for any deviations from the national security consensus in Washington

    Essentially they are trying to control the US foreign policy. That's a sign of the slide to neofascism as under neofascism intelligence agencies have a political role and are instrumental in crashing the dissent.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Times article goes on to describe how FBI officials monitored the platform adopted at the Republican National Convention, reporting that the spy agency "watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia." That is, the nation's top police agency was concerned that the positions adopted contravened certain basic tenets of dominant sections of the foreign policy establishment. ..."
    "... By what constitutional authority can the FBI, based on political positions adopted by one or the other of the two main capitalist parties, open up a secret investigation into treason and conspiracy? Such an operation bespeaks a police state and recalls the methods of the Stalinist NKVD. ..."
    "... The operations of the FBI, encouraged, aided and abetted by the Times , recall the paranoid rantings of the John Birch Society, the ultra-right group formed in the 1950s, whose founder, Robert Welch, notoriously claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former World War II commander of Allied forces in Europe, was a "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy." ..."
    "... Claims that once were the province of an extremist group, on the fringes of American politics, are now embraced by the military-intelligence apparatus, appear on the front page of the most influential American daily newspaper, and dominate the network and cable television news. ..."
    "... But these allegations have no credibility. Why should anyone believe claims that Trump, at age 70, after decades as a real estate mogul, con man and media celebrity, with a billion-dollar fortune, suddenly decided to throw in his lot with Vladimir Putin? Even the Times report itself concedes, in a single sentence buried in the 2,000-word text, "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials." ..."
    Jan 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    The Times claims that Trump "had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton." Given that this was a sarcastic campaign remark directed against Clinton's use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, and delivered at a public news conference, Trump's sally can hardly be construed as evidence of a conspiracy.

    The Times article goes on to describe how FBI officials monitored the platform adopted at the Republican National Convention, reporting that the spy agency "watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia." That is, the nation's top police agency was concerned that the positions adopted contravened certain basic tenets of dominant sections of the foreign policy establishment.

    By what constitutional authority can the FBI, based on political positions adopted by one or the other of the two main capitalist parties, open up a secret investigation into treason and conspiracy? Such an operation bespeaks a police state and recalls the methods of the Stalinist NKVD.

    The agency also investigated four of Trump's campaign aides over possible ties to Russia, and even made use of the notorious Steele dossier, consisting of anti-Trump gossip collated from Russian sources by a former British intelligence agent on the payroll of the Democratic Party.

    After Trump fired Comey, according to the Times , "law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president's behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence."

    The operations of the FBI, encouraged, aided and abetted by the Times , recall the paranoid rantings of the John Birch Society, the ultra-right group formed in the 1950s, whose founder, Robert Welch, notoriously claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former World War II commander of Allied forces in Europe, was a "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy."

    Claims that once were the province of an extremist group, on the fringes of American politics, are now embraced by the military-intelligence apparatus, appear on the front page of the most influential American daily newspaper, and dominate the network and cable television news.

    But these allegations have no credibility. Why should anyone believe claims that Trump, at age 70, after decades as a real estate mogul, con man and media celebrity, with a billion-dollar fortune, suddenly decided to throw in his lot with Vladimir Putin? Even the Times report itself concedes, in a single sentence buried in the 2,000-word text, "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials."

    While there is no evidence of a conspiracy between Trump and Moscow, the Times report itself is evidence of a conspiracy involving the intelligence agencies and the corporate media to overturn the 2016 presidential election - which Trump won, albeit within the undemocratic framework of the Electoral College - and install a government that would differ from Trump's chiefly in being more committed to military confrontation with Russia in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere.

    A secret security investigation by a powerful police agency directed against an elected president or prime minister can be described as nothing other than the antechamber to a coup by the military or intelligence services.

    Historically, the FBI has been at the center of such dangers in the United States. Its founding director, J. Edgar Hoover, was notorious for his unchecked power, particularly during the period of the McCarthy anticommunist witch hunt, when he accumulated dossiers on virtually every Democratic and Republican politician and authorized widespread spying on civil rights and antiwar groups.

    President John F. Kennedy was so concerned that he installed his brother Robert as attorney general - and nominal superior to Hoover - to keep watch over the bureau. That did not save Kennedy from assassination in 1963 , an event linked in still undisclosed ways to ultra-right circles, including Cuban exiles embittered by the Bay of Pigs disaster, Southern segregationists, and sections of the military-intelligence apparatus up in arms over Kennedy's signing of a nuclear test ban treaty with Moscow.

    The New York Times report - and a companion piece published Sunday in the Washington Post claiming that Trump has kept secret key details of his private conversations with Putin - serve to legitimize antidemocratic and unconstitutional conduct by the military-intelligence apparatus .

    These reports shed light on the striking complacency in the "mainstream" media over Trump's threats to declare a national emergency, using the pretext of his conflict with congressional Democrats over funding of a border wall, which has led to a three-week-long partial shutdown of the federal government.

    If one takes for good coin the main contention of the reports by the two newspapers, their acquiescence in a potential Trump declaration of emergency rule is inexplicable. After all, if Trump is Putin's agent, then a Trump declaration of a state of emergency, giving him sweeping, near-absolute authority, would put the United States under the control of Moscow.

    The explanation is that the Times and the Post welcome the discussion of emergency rule, to prepare the forces of the state for coming conflicts with the working class. Their only disagreement with Trump is over which faction of the ruling elite, Trump or his opponents in the Democratic Party, should direct the repression.

    One thing is certain: if Trump declares a national emergency, or if, as the Post suggested in an editorial, his opponents in the ruling elite declare a national emergency over alleged Russian "meddling" as part an effort to remove him, it will represent an irrevocable break with democracy.

    It is impossible to determine which side in this sordid conflict is more reactionary. The working class is confronted with two alternatives :

    [Jan 24, 2019] The Integrity Initiative web site has been scrubbed and their twitter acct is now by invitation only

    Jan 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Bart Hansen , Jan 23, 2019 12:03:08 PM | link

    RT is reporting that the Integrity Initiative web site has been scrubbed and their twitter acct is now by invitation only.

    [Jan 23, 2019] Worst secret agent ever

    No, please no Max Boot anymore. This neocon clown should switch to painting houses as Tucker Carlson suggested, not write "national security" commentary in Bezos blog (is this CIA blog or Besos? ;-)
    I am with tucker Carlson: painting Houses is probably the most quality job Max book can perform with acceptable quality. The only danger is that he might steal some paint :-)
    Why so many "national security" commentators are in reality national security parasites? Why national security attracts bottomfeeders? This is an interesting question to ponder.As Samuel Johnson observed in 1775 "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Nothing changes since that time
    Notable quotes:
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Bild am Sonntag ..."
    Jan 15, 2019 | irrussianality.wordpress.com
    January 15, 2019 PaulR 113 Comments The Washington Post has been banging the 'Trump is a Russian agent' drum incessantly, and was at it again this week, with an article by that well-known bastion of common sense and accurate analysis, Max Boot, entitled 'Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian agent'. Boot's article doesn't actually provide any evidence concretely linking Trump with the Russian intelligence agencies, but that's pretty much par for the course. Boot ends with the words:

    Now that we've listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian assets, let's look at the exculpatory evidence:

    [This page intentionally left blank]

    I can't think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grapsing what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. If Trump isn't actually a Russian agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one.

    So what does a 'pretty good imitation' of a Russian agent look like in real life? To answer that we have to find examples of the Trump adminstration's policies towards Russia, and fortunately the international press has just provided us with a good example. The German paper Bild am Sonntag reported on Sunday that the American ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, sent letters to companies participating in the North Stream 2 gas pipeline project in which he told them that, 'We emphasize that companies involved in Russian energy exports are taking part in something that could prompt a significant risk of sanctions.' A spokesman for Grenell subsequently clarified the Ambassador's letter by saying that it was not a threat, just a 'clear message of US policy', though I have to say that the distinction is lost on me. Grenell's letter didn't come out of the blue. The United States has long been doing all it can to sabotage North Stream 2. And Trump himself is fully signed up to the policy. At a meeting with the presidents of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia last year, the US president declared his opposition to North Stream 2, declaring :

    Germany hooks up a pipeline into Russia, where Germany is going to be paying billions of dollars for energy into Russia. And I'm saying, 'What's going on with that? How come Germany is paying vast amounts of money to Russia when they hook up a pipeline?' That's not right.

    This is indeed a 'pretty good imitation' of a Russian agent. There's no doubt about it – Trump is working for the Russians. Why else would he doing his damnedest to destroy one of the Russian Federation's most valuable international trade projects? Does that make sense to you? It doesn't to me. If Donald Trump is indeed a Russian agent, I have to conclude that he's got to be the worst secret agent ever.

    [Jan 23, 2019] Curious Bedfellows The Neocon And Progressive Alliance To Destroy Donald Trump by Philip Giraldi

    Notable quotes:
    "... In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora ..."
    "... The neocons initially found a home with Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, but they moved on in the 1970s and 1980s to prosper under Ronald Reagan as well as under Democrat Bill Clinton. Their ability to shape policy peaked under George W. Bush, when they virtually ran the Pentagon and were heavily represented in both the national security apparatus and in the White House. They became adept at selling their mantra of "strong national defense" to whomever was buying, including to President Obama, even while simultaneously complaining about his administration's "weakness." ..."
    "... When Trump was elected, it, therefore, seemed that the reign of the neocons had ended, but chameleonlike, they have changed shape and are now ensconced both in some conservative as well as in an increasing number of progressive circles in Washington and in the media. Against all odds, they have even captured key posts in the White House itself with the naming of John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Bolton's Chief of Staff is Fred Fleitz , a leading neocon and Islamophobe while last week Trump added Iran hawk Richard Goldberg to the National Security Council as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. Goldberg is an alumnus of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is the leading neocon think tank calling incessantly for war with Iran. ..."
    "... One of the most active groups attacking President Trump is "Republicans for the Rule of Law," founded by Bill Kristol in January 2018, as a component of Defending Democracy Together (DDT), a 501(c)4 lobbying group that also incorporates projects called The Russia Tweets and Republicans Against Putin. Republicans Against Putin promotes the view that President Trump is not "stand[ing] up to [Vladimir] Putin" and calls for more aggressive investigation of the Russian role in the 2016 election . ..."
    "... Omidyar is a political liberal who has given millions of dollars to progressive organizations and individuals since 1999. Indeed, he is regarded as a top funder of liberal causes in the United States and even globally together with Michael Bloomberg and George Soros. His Democracy Fund awarded $9 million in grants in 2015 alone. ..."
    "... Last week, the Omidyar-Kristol connection may have deepened with an announcement regarding the launch of the launch of a new webzine The Bulwark , which would clearly be at least somewhat intended to take the place of the recently deceased Weekly Standard. It is promoting itself as the center of the "Never Trump Resistance" and it is being assumed that at least some of the Omidyar money is behind it . ..."
    "... That hatred is the tie that binds and it is why Bill Kristol, a man possessing no character and values whatsoever, is willing to take Pierre Omidyar's money while Pierre is quite happy to provide it to destroy a common enemy, the President of the United States of America. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

    The Roman poet Ovid's masterful epic The Metamorphoses includes the memorable opening line regarding the poem's central theme of transformation. He wrote In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora , which has been translated as "Of shapes transformed to bodies strange, I purpose to entreat "

    Ovid framed his narrative around gods, heroes and quasi-historical events but if he were around today, he would no doubt be fascinated by the many transformations of the group that has defined itself as neoconservative.The movement began in a cafeteria in City College of New York in the 1930s, where a group of radical Jewish students would meet to discuss politics and developments in Europe. Many of the founders were from the far left, communists of the Trotskyite persuasion, which meant that they believed in permanent global revolution led by a vanguard party. The transformation into conservatives of a neo-persuasion took place when they were reportedly "mugged by reality" into accepting that the standard leftist formulae were not working to transform the world rapidly enough. As liberal hawks, they then hitched their wagon to the power of the United States to bring about transformation by force if necessary and began to infiltrate institutions like the Pentagon to give themselves the tools to achieve their objectives, which included promotion of regime change wars, full spectrum global dominance and unconditional support for Israel.

    The neocons initially found a home with Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, but they moved on in the 1970s and 1980s to prosper under Ronald Reagan as well as under Democrat Bill Clinton. Their ability to shape policy peaked under George W. Bush, when they virtually ran the Pentagon and were heavily represented in both the national security apparatus and in the White House. They became adept at selling their mantra of "strong national defense" to whomever was buying, including to President Obama, even while simultaneously complaining about his administration's "weakness."

    The neoconservatives lined up behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, appalled by Donald Trump's condemnation of their centerpiece war in Iraq and even more so by his pledge to end the wars in Asia and nation-building projects while also improving relations with the Russians. They worked actively against the Republican candidate both before he was nominated and elected and did everything they could to stop him, including libeling him as a Russian agent.

    When Trump was elected, it, therefore, seemed that the reign of the neocons had ended, but chameleonlike, they have changed shape and are now ensconced both in some conservative as well as in an increasing number of progressive circles in Washington and in the media. Against all odds, they have even captured key posts in the White House itself with the naming of John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Bolton's Chief of Staff is Fred Fleitz , a leading neocon and Islamophobe while last week Trump added Iran hawk Richard Goldberg to the National Security Council as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. Goldberg is an alumnus of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is the leading neocon think tank calling incessantly for war with Iran.

    Meanwhile, the neocon metamorphosis is nearly complete as many of the neocons, who started out as Democrats, have returned home, where they are being welcomed for their hardline foreign policy viewpoint. Glenn Greenwald reports that , based on polling of party supporters, the Democrats have gone full-Hillary and are now by far more hawkish than the Republicans, unwilling to leave either Syria or Afghanistan.

    The neocon survival and rejuvenation is particularly astonishing in that they have been wrong about virtually everything, most notably the catastrophic Iraq War. They have never been held accountable for anything, though one should note that accountability is not a prominent American trait, at least since Vietnam. What is important is that neocon views have been perceived by the media and punditry as being part of the Establishment consensus, which provides them with access to programming all across the political spectrum. That is why neocon standard-bearers like Bill Kristol and Max Boot have been able to move effortlessly from Fox News to MSNBC where they are fêted by the likes of Rachel Maddow. They applauded the Iraq War when the Establishment was firmly behind it and are now trying to destroy Donald Trump's presidency because America's elite is behind that effort.

    Indeed, the largely successful swing by the neocons from right to left has in some ways become more surreal, as an increasing number of progressive spokesmen and institutions have lined up behind their perpetual warfare banner. The ease with which the transformation took place reveals, interestingly, that the neocons have no real political constituency apart from voters who feel threatened and respond by supporting perpetual war, but they do share many common interests with the so-called liberal interventionists. Neocons see a global crisis for the United States defined in terms of power while the liberals see the struggle as a moral imperative, but the end result is the same: intervention by the United States. This fusion is clearly visible in Washington, where the Clintons' Center for American Progress (CAP) is now working on position papers with the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

    One of the most active groups attacking President Trump is "Republicans for the Rule of Law," founded by Bill Kristol in January 2018, as a component of Defending Democracy Together (DDT), a 501(c)4 lobbying group that also incorporates projects called The Russia Tweets and Republicans Against Putin. Republicans Against Putin promotes the view that President Trump is not "stand[ing] up to [Vladimir] Putin" and calls for more aggressive investigation of the Russian role in the 2016 election .

    DDT is a prime example of how the neoconservatives and traditional liberal interventionists have come together as it is in part funded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire co-founder of eBay who has provided DDT with $600,000 in two grants through his Democracy Fund Voice , also a 501(c)4.

    Omidyar is a political liberal who has given millions of dollars to progressive organizations and individuals since 1999. Indeed, he is regarded as a top funder of liberal causes in the United States and even globally together with Michael Bloomberg and George Soros. His Democracy Fund awarded $9 million in grants in 2015 alone.

    Last week, the Omidyar-Kristol connection may have deepened with an announcement regarding the launch of the launch of a new webzine The Bulwark , which would clearly be at least somewhat intended to take the place of the recently deceased Weekly Standard. It is promoting itself as the center of the "Never Trump Resistance" and it is being assumed that at least some of the Omidyar money is behind it .

    Iranian-born Omidyar's relationship with Kristol is clearly based on the hatred that the two share regarding Donald Trump.

    Omidyar has stated that Trump is a "dangerous authoritarian demagogue endorsing Donald Trump immediately disqualifies you from any position of public trust."

    He has tweeted that Trump suffers from "failing mental capacity" and is both "corrupt and incapacitated."

    Omidyar is what he is – a hardcore social justice warrior who supports traditional big government and globalist liberal causes, most of which are antithetical to genuine conservatives.

    But what is interesting about the relationship with Kristol is that it also reveals what the neoconservatives are all about. Kristol and company have never been actual conservatives on social issues, a topic that they studiously avoid, and their foreign policy is based on two principles: creating a state of perpetual war based on fearmongering about foreign enemies while also providing unlimited support for Israel. Kristol hates Trump because he threatens the war agenda while Omidyar despises the president for traditional progressive reasons.

    That hatred is the tie that binds and it is why Bill Kristol, a man possessing no character and values whatsoever, is willing to take Pierre Omidyar's money while Pierre is quite happy to provide it to destroy a common enemy, the President of the United States of America.

    [Jan 23, 2019] The powerful wider Lobby didn't waste a minute in destroying Occupy Wall Street, and now they're going after every movement that aligns itself with Palestinian rights and trying to destroy the fledgling careers of two powerful pro-Palestinian female voices in Congress.

    Jan 23, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Kalen , Jan 23, 2019 2:17:04 AM | link

    Delegitimization of Israel?

    There was one man who completely delegitimized state of Israel and who, under political pressure from Polish Government conducting political purge of Jews, Polish workers party members, was fired from his job as director of hospital and pushed to leave country for Israel and to denounce Polish Citizenship.

    He, a Jew, in 1969 refused to immigrate to Israel because as he described it, Israel was apartheid country run by Jewish Nazi collaborators and American Zionists.

    This man was Marek Edelman, one of leaders of Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April 1943.

    No need for further delegitimization of state of Israel.

    iv> Two newly-elected Democrats in the House, Rhashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar also represent a sea change with regards to open, vociferous criticism of Israel. Omar was just appointed to the Foreign Affairs Committee--that should be interesting. Tlaib was appointed to the powerful Oversight Committee. Let's see if she can help rid the White House of the Zionist Manchurian Candidate.

    Your pal, your buddy that you like to defend so much around here, Trump, appointed Kenneth Marcus, a rabid BDS watchdog to the civil rights office of the Education Department as a check and slayer of the growing BDS movement in Academia.

    https://mondoweiss.net/2018/09/provoked-campaign-administration/

    Tlaib and Omar have already been outspoken on Israel and are getting trounced by the Zionist gatekeeper media and Lobby.

    Maybe she's being tarred and feathered because she called the new high priest of Zionism, Trump... Gee I wish I said it first!

    Even the leader of the Women's March is getting painted with the Scarlett letters AS (anti-Semite). Obviously, because, like Black Lives Matter, they are two powerful activist movements sympathetic to Palestinian rights.

    Women's March anti-Semitic

    Okay, so if you bothered to peruse these articles you'll hopefully understand why I bring up Zionism often in these threads as a force for evil on many fronts in this world.

    The powerful wider Lobby didn't waste a minute in destroying Occupy Wall Street, and now they're going after every movement that aligns itself with Palestinian rights and trying to destroy the fledgling careers of two powerful pro-Palestinian female voices in Congress. A pox on Zionism for the evil it does! ">link

    Two newly-elected Democrats in the House, Rhashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar also represent a sea change with regards to open, vociferous criticism of Israel. Omar was just appointed to the Foreign Affairs Committee--that should be interesting. Tlaib was appointed to the powerful Oversight Committee. Let's see if she can help rid the White House of the Zionist Manchurian Candidate.

    Your pal, your buddy that you like to defend so much around here, Trump, appointed Kenneth Marcus, a rabid BDS watchdog to the civil rights office of the Education Department as a check and slayer of the growing BDS movement in Academia.

    https://mondoweiss.net/2018/09/provoked-campaign-administration/

    Tlaib and Omar have already been outspoken on Israel and are getting trounced by the Zionist gatekeeper media and Lobby.

    Maybe she's being tarred and feathered because she called the new high priest of Zionism, Trump... Gee I wish I said it first!

    Even the leader of the Women's March is getting painted with the Scarlett letters AS (anti-Semite). Obviously, because, like Black Lives Matter, they are two powerful activist movements sympathetic to Palestinian rights.

    Women's March anti-Semitic

    Okay, so if you bothered to peruse these articles you'll hopefully understand why I bring up Zionism often in these threads as a force for evil on many fronts in this world.

    The powerful wider Lobby didn't waste a minute in destroying Occupy Wall Street, and now they're going after every movement that aligns itself with Palestinian rights and trying to destroy the fledgling careers of two powerful pro-Palestinian female voices in Congress. A pox on Zionism for the evil it does! ">link

    [Jan 23, 2019] Worst secret agent ever

    No, please no Max Boot anymore. This neocon clown should switch to painting houses as Tucker Carlson suggested, not write "national security" commentary in Bezos blog (is this CIA blog or Besos? ;-)
    I am with tucker Carlson: painting Houses is probably the most quality job Max book can perform with acceptable quality. The only danger is that he might steal some paint :-)
    Why so many "national security" commentators are in reality national security parasites? Why national security attracts bottomfeeders? This is an interesting question to ponder.As Samuel Johnson observed in 1775 "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Nothing changes since that time
    Notable quotes:
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Bild am Sonntag ..."
    Jan 15, 2019 | irrussianality.wordpress.com
    January 15, 2019 PaulR 113 Comments The Washington Post has been banging the 'Trump is a Russian agent' drum incessantly, and was at it again this week, with an article by that well-known bastion of common sense and accurate analysis, Max Boot, entitled 'Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian agent'. Boot's article doesn't actually provide any evidence concretely linking Trump with the Russian intelligence agencies, but that's pretty much par for the course. Boot ends with the words:

    Now that we've listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian assets, let's look at the exculpatory evidence:

    [This page intentionally left blank]

    I can't think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grapsing what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. If Trump isn't actually a Russian agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one.

    So what does a 'pretty good imitation' of a Russian agent look like in real life? To answer that we have to find examples of the Trump adminstration's policies towards Russia, and fortunately the international press has just provided us with a good example. The German paper Bild am Sonntag reported on Sunday that the American ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, sent letters to companies participating in the North Stream 2 gas pipeline project in which he told them that, 'We emphasize that companies involved in Russian energy exports are taking part in something that could prompt a significant risk of sanctions.' A spokesman for Grenell subsequently clarified the Ambassador's letter by saying that it was not a threat, just a 'clear message of US policy', though I have to say that the distinction is lost on me. Grenell's letter didn't come out of the blue. The United States has long been doing all it can to sabotage North Stream 2. And Trump himself is fully signed up to the policy. At a meeting with the presidents of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia last year, the US president declared his opposition to North Stream 2, declaring :

    Germany hooks up a pipeline into Russia, where Germany is going to be paying billions of dollars for energy into Russia. And I'm saying, 'What's going on with that? How come Germany is paying vast amounts of money to Russia when they hook up a pipeline?' That's not right.

    This is indeed a 'pretty good imitation' of a Russian agent. There's no doubt about it – Trump is working for the Russians. Why else would he doing his damnedest to destroy one of the Russian Federation's most valuable international trade projects? Does that make sense to you? It doesn't to me. If Donald Trump is indeed a Russian agent, I have to conclude that he's got to be the worst secret agent ever.

    [Jan 23, 2019] Curious Bedfellows The Neocon And Progressive Alliance To Destroy Donald Trump by Philip Giraldi

    Notable quotes:
    "... In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora ..."
    "... The neocons initially found a home with Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, but they moved on in the 1970s and 1980s to prosper under Ronald Reagan as well as under Democrat Bill Clinton. Their ability to shape policy peaked under George W. Bush, when they virtually ran the Pentagon and were heavily represented in both the national security apparatus and in the White House. They became adept at selling their mantra of "strong national defense" to whomever was buying, including to President Obama, even while simultaneously complaining about his administration's "weakness." ..."
    "... When Trump was elected, it, therefore, seemed that the reign of the neocons had ended, but chameleonlike, they have changed shape and are now ensconced both in some conservative as well as in an increasing number of progressive circles in Washington and in the media. Against all odds, they have even captured key posts in the White House itself with the naming of John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Bolton's Chief of Staff is Fred Fleitz , a leading neocon and Islamophobe while last week Trump added Iran hawk Richard Goldberg to the National Security Council as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. Goldberg is an alumnus of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is the leading neocon think tank calling incessantly for war with Iran. ..."
    "... One of the most active groups attacking President Trump is "Republicans for the Rule of Law," founded by Bill Kristol in January 2018, as a component of Defending Democracy Together (DDT), a 501(c)4 lobbying group that also incorporates projects called The Russia Tweets and Republicans Against Putin. Republicans Against Putin promotes the view that President Trump is not "stand[ing] up to [Vladimir] Putin" and calls for more aggressive investigation of the Russian role in the 2016 election . ..."
    "... Omidyar is a political liberal who has given millions of dollars to progressive organizations and individuals since 1999. Indeed, he is regarded as a top funder of liberal causes in the United States and even globally together with Michael Bloomberg and George Soros. His Democracy Fund awarded $9 million in grants in 2015 alone. ..."
    "... Last week, the Omidyar-Kristol connection may have deepened with an announcement regarding the launch of the launch of a new webzine The Bulwark , which would clearly be at least somewhat intended to take the place of the recently deceased Weekly Standard. It is promoting itself as the center of the "Never Trump Resistance" and it is being assumed that at least some of the Omidyar money is behind it . ..."
    "... That hatred is the tie that binds and it is why Bill Kristol, a man possessing no character and values whatsoever, is willing to take Pierre Omidyar's money while Pierre is quite happy to provide it to destroy a common enemy, the President of the United States of America. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

    The Roman poet Ovid's masterful epic The Metamorphoses includes the memorable opening line regarding the poem's central theme of transformation. He wrote In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora , which has been translated as "Of shapes transformed to bodies strange, I purpose to entreat "

    Ovid framed his narrative around gods, heroes and quasi-historical events but if he were around today, he would no doubt be fascinated by the many transformations of the group that has defined itself as neoconservative.The movement began in a cafeteria in City College of New York in the 1930s, where a group of radical Jewish students would meet to discuss politics and developments in Europe. Many of the founders were from the far left, communists of the Trotskyite persuasion, which meant that they believed in permanent global revolution led by a vanguard party. The transformation into conservatives of a neo-persuasion took place when they were reportedly "mugged by reality" into accepting that the standard leftist formulae were not working to transform the world rapidly enough. As liberal hawks, they then hitched their wagon to the power of the United States to bring about transformation by force if necessary and began to infiltrate institutions like the Pentagon to give themselves the tools to achieve their objectives, which included promotion of regime change wars, full spectrum global dominance and unconditional support for Israel.

    The neocons initially found a home with Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, but they moved on in the 1970s and 1980s to prosper under Ronald Reagan as well as under Democrat Bill Clinton. Their ability to shape policy peaked under George W. Bush, when they virtually ran the Pentagon and were heavily represented in both the national security apparatus and in the White House. They became adept at selling their mantra of "strong national defense" to whomever was buying, including to President Obama, even while simultaneously complaining about his administration's "weakness."

    The neoconservatives lined up behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, appalled by Donald Trump's condemnation of their centerpiece war in Iraq and even more so by his pledge to end the wars in Asia and nation-building projects while also improving relations with the Russians. They worked actively against the Republican candidate both before he was nominated and elected and did everything they could to stop him, including libeling him as a Russian agent.

    When Trump was elected, it, therefore, seemed that the reign of the neocons had ended, but chameleonlike, they have changed shape and are now ensconced both in some conservative as well as in an increasing number of progressive circles in Washington and in the media. Against all odds, they have even captured key posts in the White House itself with the naming of John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Bolton's Chief of Staff is Fred Fleitz , a leading neocon and Islamophobe while last week Trump added Iran hawk Richard Goldberg to the National Security Council as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. Goldberg is an alumnus of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is the leading neocon think tank calling incessantly for war with Iran.

    Meanwhile, the neocon metamorphosis is nearly complete as many of the neocons, who started out as Democrats, have returned home, where they are being welcomed for their hardline foreign policy viewpoint. Glenn Greenwald reports that , based on polling of party supporters, the Democrats have gone full-Hillary and are now by far more hawkish than the Republicans, unwilling to leave either Syria or Afghanistan.

    The neocon survival and rejuvenation is particularly astonishing in that they have been wrong about virtually everything, most notably the catastrophic Iraq War. They have never been held accountable for anything, though one should note that accountability is not a prominent American trait, at least since Vietnam. What is important is that neocon views have been perceived by the media and punditry as being part of the Establishment consensus, which provides them with access to programming all across the political spectrum. That is why neocon standard-bearers like Bill Kristol and Max Boot have been able to move effortlessly from Fox News to MSNBC where they are fêted by the likes of Rachel Maddow. They applauded the Iraq War when the Establishment was firmly behind it and are now trying to destroy Donald Trump's presidency because America's elite is behind that effort.

    Indeed, the largely successful swing by the neocons from right to left has in some ways become more surreal, as an increasing number of progressive spokesmen and institutions have lined up behind their perpetual warfare banner. The ease with which the transformation took place reveals, interestingly, that the neocons have no real political constituency apart from voters who feel threatened and respond by supporting perpetual war, but they do share many common interests with the so-called liberal interventionists. Neocons see a global crisis for the United States defined in terms of power while the liberals see the struggle as a moral imperative, but the end result is the same: intervention by the United States. This fusion is clearly visible in Washington, where the Clintons' Center for American Progress (CAP) is now working on position papers with the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

    One of the most active groups attacking President Trump is "Republicans for the Rule of Law," founded by Bill Kristol in January 2018, as a component of Defending Democracy Together (DDT), a 501(c)4 lobbying group that also incorporates projects called The Russia Tweets and Republicans Against Putin. Republicans Against Putin promotes the view that President Trump is not "stand[ing] up to [Vladimir] Putin" and calls for more aggressive investigation of the Russian role in the 2016 election .

    DDT is a prime example of how the neoconservatives and traditional liberal interventionists have come together as it is in part funded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire co-founder of eBay who has provided DDT with $600,000 in two grants through his Democracy Fund Voice , also a 501(c)4.

    Omidyar is a political liberal who has given millions of dollars to progressive organizations and individuals since 1999. Indeed, he is regarded as a top funder of liberal causes in the United States and even globally together with Michael Bloomberg and George Soros. His Democracy Fund awarded $9 million in grants in 2015 alone.

    Last week, the Omidyar-Kristol connection may have deepened with an announcement regarding the launch of the launch of a new webzine The Bulwark , which would clearly be at least somewhat intended to take the place of the recently deceased Weekly Standard. It is promoting itself as the center of the "Never Trump Resistance" and it is being assumed that at least some of the Omidyar money is behind it .

    Iranian-born Omidyar's relationship with Kristol is clearly based on the hatred that the two share regarding Donald Trump.

    Omidyar has stated that Trump is a "dangerous authoritarian demagogue endorsing Donald Trump immediately disqualifies you from any position of public trust."

    He has tweeted that Trump suffers from "failing mental capacity" and is both "corrupt and incapacitated."

    Omidyar is what he is – a hardcore social justice warrior who supports traditional big government and globalist liberal causes, most of which are antithetical to genuine conservatives.

    But what is interesting about the relationship with Kristol is that it also reveals what the neoconservatives are all about. Kristol and company have never been actual conservatives on social issues, a topic that they studiously avoid, and their foreign policy is based on two principles: creating a state of perpetual war based on fearmongering about foreign enemies while also providing unlimited support for Israel. Kristol hates Trump because he threatens the war agenda while Omidyar despises the president for traditional progressive reasons.

    That hatred is the tie that binds and it is why Bill Kristol, a man possessing no character and values whatsoever, is willing to take Pierre Omidyar's money while Pierre is quite happy to provide it to destroy a common enemy, the President of the United States of America.

    [Jan 22, 2019] Washington Monthly Neocons Paved the Way for Trump. Finally, One Admits It

    So neoconservatives return to the Democratic Party in which they were hatched. When the party became the second War Partty in Washington. nice...
    Notable quotes:
    "... Boot's dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony, he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks "displayed my precocity, my attachment to Israel, a country I had not yet visited -- and my questionable judgment, since the invasion would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire." ..."
    "... his true aspiration was to become an editor for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side economics and a hawkish foreign policy. ..."
    "... Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy. ..."
    "... The Corrosion of Conservatism ..."
    "... A Choice Not an Echo ..."
    "... In his view, "[t]he rise of Palin and now Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger." Boot himself warned against the rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | washingtonmonthly.com

    The NeverTrumpers may have failed to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, but he has been a godsend for their public reputations. Instead of remaining in the wilderness, the neoconservatives who make up the bulk of the NeverTrump movement have fitfully begun to move back toward, or at least flirt with, the Democratic Party, which is where the original neocon journey began. Among some of their longtime detractors, it's creating a vertiginous sensation. James Wolcott, for example, recently observed in Vanity Fair , "One of the chewier ironies of the Trump interregnum is finding that I'm following former foes on Twitter and elsewhere that I once mocked, reviled, and cast into outer darkness during the Bush presidency, especially after the invasion of Iraq."

    Coot Cover

    The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left The Right by Max Boot

    Now that the neocons have, in a manner of speaking, been born again, they are once more crusading for regime change against an authoritarian foe, only this time on the home front. Trump, not Saddam Hussein, is the main object of their ire, and they are earning quite a hearing in mainstream liberal outlets. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum regularly appear in the Atlantic . Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss have decamped from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times . William Kristol and Jennifer Rubin are regulars on MSNBC.

    And then there is Max Boot, a columnist for the Washington Post and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Unlike Kristol or Stephens, Boot's breach with the Republican Party is complete. He does not believe that the party can be redeemed, and he isn't sure that he should call himself a conservative anymore. The day after the 2016 election, after a lifetime of backing the GOP, he re-registered as an independent. In August, he posted on Twitter a screenshot of a fundraising pitch that read, "Hey, this is Newt Gingrich. President Trump needs your help to elect more Republicans in 2018. Will you make a 4X matched donation today?," with this accompanying text: "Hey, this is Max Boot. Hell no." His sallies have earned him brickbats from the right; the pro-Trump website American Greatness has branded him a "soulless, craven opportunist."

    Boot's defection from conservative orthodoxy carries a particular sting because he was once the most explicit exponent of American greatness. After 9/11, he endorsed American imperialism in a Weekly Standard cover story. The benighted countries of the Middle East, he announced, "cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." His name became a synonym for neocon warmonger, and he went on to advise the George W. Bush administration and presidential aspirants such as Senator Marco Rubio.

    In the past two years, however, Boot has not merely parted with the conservative stances that he previously espoused, but has been actively assailing them, whether the issue is race, gun control, or the Iraq War. Indeed, as a columnist for the Washington Post , Boot has relentlessly attacked Trump and his enablers. "If there has been an outcry against Trump's virulent racism from the right, I must have missed it," he wrote in August. "The only conservatives who are willing to regularly call out Trump's bigotry are those of us who are #NeverTrumpers -- and, as I constantly hear online, we aren't 'real' conservatives because we do not worship at the orange altar."

    Now, in The Corrosion of Conservatism , Boot charts his ideological odyssey. He deftly recounts his early attraction to the conservative cause and his revulsion at its embrace of Trump. For Boot, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union as a child, the 2016 election felt like back to the future. As Trump sailed toward the Republican nomination, Boot's Twitter account and email began to fill up with anti-Semitic, pro-Trump messages. He became increasingly alienated from the conservatives who ended up trying to curry favor with Trump, ranging from Rubio to Paul Ryan. He had naively expected them to repudiate Trump's authoritarianism. When they didn't, he felt betrayed.

    For Boot, it was personal. Joining the conservative movement had been part of coming to America. It gave a young immigrant from Moscow a sense of identity and mission. In contrast to Kristol, who has already begun plotting to stymie Trump in the 2020 primaries, or Frum, who has sought to chart the ideological course of the GOP in books like Dead Right , Boot was never a Republican operative. He isn't trying to rescue the GOP to restore the old order. Instead, he is a historian who has always relished being an intellectual dissident. His basic temperament hasn't changed at all, which is why he may be the ultimate neocon.

    The value of Boot's book does not rest in any original political analysis. Instead, he explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative madrassa. In describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide of the right.

    Now it's the Republican Party, not the left, that is in his sights. He understands that he missed the real danger to freedom that was right in front of his nose: a party that flirted with white nationalism, cozied up to Russian autocracy, and toppled into obsessive conspiracy mongering. And he is haunted by a question: "Did I somehow contribute to the rise of this dark force in American life with my advocacy for conservatism?"

    Unlike previous accounts of breaking with the right, such as Garry Wills's Confessions of a Conservative , the value of Boot's book does not rest in any original political analysis. Instead, he explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative madrassa. In describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide of the right, offering fascinating insights into the psychology of a true believer. His fervor for explaining why the right is wrong brings to mind Arthur Koestler's remark in The God That Failed : "When all is said, we ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it's all about."

    B oot, who was born in 1969 in Moscow, had firsthand experience with communism and was deeply shaped by the persecution of Soviet Jews. His parents divorced when he was two, but both later immigrated to America. Boot's father, Alexander, was a dissident who distributed samizdat and managed to get out in 1973. His mother emigrated with Max in 1976 and then taught Russian in California.

    Boot makes it clear that his enthusiasm for his father -- a self-described monarchist who now lives in England and devotes his time to denouncing atheism and the welfare state -- is quite constrained. But Alexander's gift of a National Review subscription to Max when he was thirteen left a lasting imprint. The younger Boot absorbed the worldview of its writers, ranging from the reactionary Austrian aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn to William F. Buckley Jr. himself. Boot also read up on the standard conservative texts: Whittaker Chambers's Witness , F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom , and Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind . Ronald Reagan, who inveighed against the "evil empire" that Max and his parents had fled, was Boot's contemporary hero. The liberals who preached détente with the Soviet Union, or even accommodation, were the new appeasers.

    Boot's dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony, he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks "displayed my precocity, my attachment to Israel, a country I had not yet visited -- and my questionable judgment, since the invasion would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire."

    As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Boot played the part of adversary, battling against the campus left. Upon graduation, he went to work at the Christian Science Monitor . But his true aspiration was to become an editor for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side economics and a hawkish foreign policy.

    Boot says that in 1994 he received a call that Bartley wanted to meet with him. He reckoned that Bartley would want to talk about his political philosophy. Instead, Bartley mentioned that he had two positions open, one for an editorial writer on economic issues, another as an assistant op-ed writer. Boot explained that he knew nothing about economics. This pleased Bartley. "I later learned," Boot writes, "that he liked to take writers who did not know much about the subject and train them in his way of thinking."

    In the end, Boot took the latter position, and quickly plunged into the social whirl of the cloistered New York conservative world. He attended dinners at the Manhattan Institute and went to the monthly "Monday Meeting," where conservative activists promoted everything from the gold standard to Central Park's horse-drawn carriages. He says he became a "made man" in 2007 when he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, which was established by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and is bestowed annually on a writer who exhibits a "love of country and its democratic institutions" and "bears witness to the evils of totalitarianism."

    B ut Boot had contrarian instincts from the outset at the Journal . He once invited a Princeton professor named Paul Krugman to write an op-ed critical of supply-side economics, which almost prompted Bartley to fire him. Needless to say, it never ran. "This was an early indication," Boot writes, "that groupthink could be just as tenacious on the right as on the left." Boot also confesses that he found it difficult to decipher the baroque conspiracy theories that Bartley and his acolytes concocted about Bill and Hillary Clinton involving Whitewater, the airport in Mena, Arkansas, and the death of Vince Foster. "I thought he was a deeply flawed man," Boot says of Clinton, "but I appreciated the achievements of his presidency." But Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy.

    One of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot's acknowledgment that Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. "There is no doubt that there has always been a dark underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to ignore," he writes. For all the political right's hosannas for Buckley, he established the revanchist conservatism that views compromise, either at home or abroad, as tantamount to treason. It's important to remember that Buckley began his career by supporting the iniquitous Joseph McCarthy -- a sentiment he never repudiated -- and that he viewed Dwight Eisenhower as a dangerous establishment Republican who refused to liberate eastern Europe militarily and failed to roll back the New Deal. Nor was this all. Buckley also opposed the civil rights movement and for decades supported the apartheid regime in South Africa. Even as they decried the Soviet Union and China for human rights violations, Buckley and other conservatives were remorseless apologists for one of the most odious regimes in the world.

    After McCarthy's demise, the GOP remained addicted to conspiracy mongering. Boot usefully reminds us that Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 best-selling tract A Choice Not an Echo suggested that hidden kingmakers were preventing Republican presidential candidates from winning. "It wasn't any accident," she claimed. "It was planned that way" by New York financiers who supported "a continuation of the Roosevelt–Harry Dexter White–Averell Harriman–Dean Acheson–Dean Rusk policy of aiding and abetting Red Russia and her satellites." The failure to distinguish between White, who was a Soviet agent, and Acheson, who was not, wasn't any accident, either. The message was that egghead liberals, whatever they might say about battling communism, were, at bottom, traitors.

    One of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot's acknowledgment that Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. "There is no doubt that there has always been a dark underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to ignore," he writes.

    The populist style often played a key role in helping Republican candidates win elections. But Boot distinguishes between a populist pose and actual populism. For him, the breaking point began with Sarah Palin and ended with Trump. In his view, "[t]he rise of Palin and now Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger." Boot himself warned against the rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal column in which he maintained that the GOP should not " 'Rush' to embrace talk show democracy." He now denounces Fox News and figures like Dinesh D'Souza and Ann Coulter for peddling conspiracy theories on Trump's behalf.

    Perhaps the most notable part of Boot's book is his willingness to face up to the fiasco that was the Iraq War. He notes that for years he felt defensive about his support for it and was too stubborn to cede any ground to his critics. "It is not nearly as easy to remake a foreign land by force as I had naively imagined in 2003," he writes. And he recognizes that the catastrophic policies he espoused helped create the terrain for Trump to rumble to victory. In listening to Trump's national security advisor, John Bolton, Boot says that he recognizes "my callow, earlier self. Bolton, a conservative firebrand since his days as a student at Yale University in the early 1970s, is whom I used to be."

    Boot thus differs from the many other NeverTrumpers who often fail to recognize that belligerent policies have led to disaster at home as well as abroad. He issues a scorching indictment of the GOP: "I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and devastating defeats. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be any chance to build a reasonable center-right political party out of the ashes." Indeed, he concludes, "having escaped the corrosion of conservatism, I am a political Ronin, and will swear allegiance to no master in the future. I will fight for my principles wherever they may lead me."

    There's a whiff of grandiosity in this declaration. Like Whittaker Chambers, who pioneered the breaking-ranks genre in Witness , Boot takes an apocalyptic view of politics. But his readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable. If it ends up prompting him to sign up as a Democrat, then his neocon journey will have come full circle.

    [Jan 22, 2019] The Corrosion of Conservatism Why I Left the Right

    Notable quotes:
    "... Max Boot saw the light when it was too late. As an advocate for America's reckless wars after 9/11, he bears moral responsibility for the degrading of conservatism into a hate-filled cult. ..."
    "... Boot, and others like him, need to spend a few more years in purgatory for the mess that he put us in. ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    2N2Make4 2.0 out of 5 stars November 29, 2018

    Max's long overdue awakening

    I wanted to like this book and Max Boot but couldn't. I'm an 'old white guy' who grew up in an Eisenhower Republican family but switched allegiance to the Democrats during the civil rights battles in the 60s. I was hoping to read about someone who went through a similar transformation but Max's journey falls short.

    The book is part autobiographical: Max was born in Russia into a Jewish family in 1969. His family was allowed to leave the USSR and immigrate to the US in 1976 after pressure was placed on the Communist government by the United States. Max states that the Boots survived here in part on payments from Social Security for which Max says "Thank you, America" but ignores that this support was from a program that was developed by liberals and that has been regularly attacked by conservative Republicans.
    His mother was employed by the University of California, a state university, and Max received his undergraduate education at UC Berkeley. While he notes that it "cost next to nothing" at the time, he doesn't point out that his tuition was low thanks to subsidies that were paid by the taxes of the citizens of the State of California. The UC system is also a product of progressive thinking and is partly responsible for the economic growth in California. It's paid for itself many times over by developing a highly educated work force that supports the many high paying, high skilled jobs in the state.

    Max began his conversion to right wing politics at age 13 when he received a subscription to the New Republic magazine. I suppose you can't expect much critical thinking from an adolescent, but you would think that it would have taken less than 36 years to realize that conservative Republican values and policies weren't conducive to helping people who have needs similar to those of his family. Especially since Max seems certain that he is among the most intelligent people to walk among us.

    He states that he now sees that the messages of conservative Republicans were often "coded racial appeals – those dog whistles" and that liberals have recognized this for decades. He just didn't believe the liberals or bother to honestly evaluate their warnings.
    Max can't refrain from making the ad hominem attacks so prevalent among right wing pundits. Most of these are directed at Donald Trump, whom he describes as a "liar, an ignoramus, and a moral abomination". He also includes a chapter about the "Trump Toadies".

    Max "loved the attention and notoriety" his conservative views generated in his youth. He now recognizes that he has been a part of a movement that has been "morally and intellectually bankrupt".

    He also states that he no longer receives any pay from any conservative organization. Is this the reason that he is looking for another group to hook up with? Or is he worried that since he was not born in the United States his citizenship might be revoked and he might be sent back to Russia if the anti-Semitic members of the right wing get their way?

    So Max comes across as quite shallow even while showing off his extravagant vocabulary. While he was quite willing to accept the offerings of a liberal society, he's been unwilling to consider any responsibility to provide similar benefits to those who came after him.

    The book is well written and is a quick read. Ultimately it's one man's awakening to the awful realities of what conservative Republicanism has become. It doesn't really break any new ground for those who have been following politics for any length of time.

    In the epilogue Max lists his current beliefs and many of them are liberal. He states he is pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-environment, pro-gun control, pro-immigration including offering a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and he is also in favor of free speech. He and I might disagree on the details about how to reach some of these goals but in these areas we would be pointing at similar directions.

    But then Max attacks other progressive programs. For example, he states that single payer medical insurance – Medicare for all – would cost too much and cause insurance companies to go bankrupt or "find a new business model". Frankly if a company that makes its money by increasing the cost of our health care has to "find a new business model", I believe that would be a good thing for the health of our economy and of our people. As to the insurance company employees, since claims would still have to be processed I suspect that the people processing claims for the insurance companies would be able to make the switch to work for a government agency processing claims easily, so they should be ok.

    I hope that Max's rejection of conservative Republicanism is actually a genuine realization that ALL people are entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" including getting affordable medical care. If that's the case, I would be happy to welcome him to join those of us who vote for politicians who truly represent these values.

    But I am not convinced by this book that he has truly escaped the "corrosion of conservatism". Let's see if time will prove me wrong.

    skeptic

    Thank you for your review. Much appreciated...

    I would add that it is important to understand that Max Boot is not an intellectual, he is essentially a well-paid MIC lobbyist who pretends to be an intellectual. He does not have convictions per se, only the burning desire to belong to the winning and/or better paid party.

    The fact that he realized from which side the bread is buttered at early age just confirms what he always valued money more then ideas.

    Mark bennett 1.0 out of 5 stars October 25, 2018

    A Lyndon Johnson Democrat goes home

    The politics of the cold war created many political anomalies in the United States. One of the biggest was the migration of the cold war hawks after 1968 from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. For many of them, it was less about a broad vision of politics than narrow concerns over Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The alliance functioned up until the end of the cold war and the establishment of republican control in the Senate and House. Then it broke down completely during the Presidential Term of George W. Bush.

    After a decade out of power and as a hanger-on in three failed presidential campaigns, Max Boot has written this book which is sort of a combination of angry farewell letter and maoist self-criticism covering his entire political career to 2016 or so.

    The problems start at the beginning of the book. He defines "conservative" to mean to him "incremental policy making based on empirical study". His conservative beliefs, in contrast to what he considers "European" beliefs, rejects the nation-state and the idea of an American identity. The only limit to the "social safety net" in his mind is when that safety net begins to impact "individual initiative". He makes a special point of saying that what has united the country since the beginning is not belief in a nation, but rather belief in ideas or "self evident truths".

    The problem with all that is that his ideas of conservatism are in fact liberalism. Incremental government policy to incrementally perfect society is not a remotely conservative concept. Further, when you conclude as he does that American Soil has no meaning and American Blood shed has no value, you have to really wonder about how exactly he justifies his belief in foreign wars. Are Americans who have served in the military just suckers? or slaves in Pharaoh's army? Where is patriotism in his vision of what "conservative" means? Did people in wars die for "self evident truths" rather than the flag?

    He drifts further into liberal thought with his idea that there is more to the constitution than what is in the constitution. Rather than just the text and intent, Boot finds unwritten "norms" hidden within the constitution which he holds American Citizens should respect equally with the constitution. This is not a new idea. Its the old idea of the "living" constitution which only elite oracles can present to us its true hidden meaning.

    Then, like many people, he claims that his ideas are those of Barry Goldwater in 1960. But they are absolutely not. The ideas that Max Boot stands for are the ideas of Lyndon Johnson. The ideas of using the power of government for social engineering. The idea of fighting crusades for ideas overseas in places like Vietnam. A general rejection of any sort of morality or patriotism in politics. Worst of all, the tendency to see the United States of America as an intellectual crusade for justice in the world rather than as a country.

    A large portion of the book is given over to complaints about Trump. But the problem is that Max Boot's ideas and his idea of what a conservative is go far beyond just being for or against Trump. In a very real sense, he represents the discredited politics of George W. Bush who have no support among any party and only tend to have followers in places like the pages of "The Atlantic". The question isn't really what happened to the republican party, but more how someone with the outright liberal political worldview of someone like Max Boot ever thought that those ideas are what conservative meant. He tries to attach himself to men of the past like Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan. But he fails to realize that he would not fit in with the politics of any of those man. Perhaps he would have best fit with the old Rockefeller Republicans but to me even that is far from certain.

    Max Boot has in the past been critical of Ronald Reagan's decision not to fight a war in Lebanon in the 1980s associating it with American "weakness" that led to 9/11. He blamed Eisenhower's decision not to support the British/French invasion of Egypt in 1956 as starting a "pattern of weakness" in America's dealing with the middle east which was not corrected until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its equally doubtful that Max Boot would have supported the ideas of Barry Goldwater over those of Lyndon Johnson.

    The bulk of the book him talking about his favorite topic: himself. He proves once again that he isn't any sort of intellectual or man of ideas. He complains about trump. He complains about various republicans who he clearly expected to follow him out of the republican party but did not.

    There are some incredible claims in the book such as claiming that the welfare state is what ensures the success of free market. He just loves Black Lives Matter and suddenly after a long career, race is suddenly something he cars about while the police are now the bad guys. He also discovered after the election of Trump that sexism is a problem in America. He can't really explain why he didn't care about these issues for decades before Trump and now cares about deeply after Trump. I don't think he really cares about much of anything other than boots on the ground in the middle east or preparing for war with China.

    He ends the book with a conclusion titled "the vital center". The title is of course a shout-out to old school liberal (and kennedy henchmen) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. In it, he tells us that he is "socially liberal", He believes in fiscal responsibility but not if it involves cutting the welfare state & along those lines supports "Simpson Bowles" which called for fixing the deficit with higher taxes and a "public option" for health insurance. He supports the welfare state because to him its the basis for the free market. He supports gun control. He wants more immigration to deal with our "labor shortage". He sees China and Russia as defense threats along with a list of other countries.

    He concludes with a "moderate" (ironic of course) call for everyone to vote every single republican out of office until Trump is out of office or removed as president. And while he makes it (finally) clear at the end that he just loved Hillary Clinton and her brand of politics, he could never become a democrat because of the threat of bernie sanders. His vision is a party of what he calls "centerists" which would seemingly favor a policy of expanding the welfare state while fighting wars overseas to save the world. But Max Boot's politics don't represent the center of anything. Whatever the bad of Trump, Max Boot represents something just as bad or worse.

    David L. Parnell 1.0 out of 5 stars November 17, 2018

    Max Boot's recognition of racism in the GOP is late...decades late...

    Corrosion is a slow process but early in the 1960's the GOP sucked almost all of the racists out of the Democratic Party right into the Republican Party just to elect Richard Nixon with the GOP "Southern Strategy." Men like the followers of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms in the rural south rushed to vote for the "Sanitary Republican Party."

    Sanitary was old Jim Crow code for "whites only." If any business identified itself with "sanitary" in its name, that was a warning for "whites only."

    Strom Thurmond had earlier literally executed the longest filibuster in Congressional history to oppose a vote on a civil rights legislation promoted by Democrats.

    Then Ronald Reagan and the George Bush used Lee Atwater and Richard Quinn (a South Carolina leader of the neo-Confederacy movement) to craft overt racist strategies, narratives, and TV advertisements. The Southern Partisan was a publication aimed at legitimating racism and opposition to civil rights for blacks. This block of GOP consultants used the Southern Partisan publication to create a core database of neo-Confederacy racists which was so reliably Republican that both John McCain and George W. Bush used Richard Quinn's backing in their election efforts.

    Around 1981 Clemson University founded the "Strom Thurmond Institute" to co-opt this public university to historically immortalize the papers and sentiments of Strom Thurmond in a revisionist manner.

    Another product of Richard Quinn was young Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who grew up working in his parent's business in Central South Carolina, the "Sanitary Cafe," a bar, grill, and pool hall establishment. Lindsey Graham was mentored into South Carolina politics by Richard Quinn who supplied Graham with a heroic hard knocks narrative which never mentioned the neo-Confederacy roots of both men. Now if you review the Congressional Record you see Lindsey Graham's voting record follows a Republican Southern Strategy which Nixon, Reagan, George Bush, Strom Thurmond, and Jesse Helms would have been proud of. These racist political narratives can be mapped to every Republican strategist and their GOP candidate product. Max Boot ignores this historical behavior infused into the Republican Party since before 1963.

    Donald Trump is only different in that he has Tweeted these sentiments ad nauseam and publicly voiced them expressly in his political appearances and news conferences. If you are honest, the "N" word has been "whispered" (Jim DeMint) as an "IN" word in secret congregations of Republicans for decades. Lindsey Graham has created a consistent attempt at humor where he frequently quips "white man" jokes while supporting voter suppression and gerrymandering by his party.

    Max Boot is correct that this racism has moved from the backrooms under the cover of Donald Trump, but, to deny that this these sentiments have not been part of the Republican infrastructure for decades is rude hypocrisy. As you read this book, to load this burden on Donald Trump alone is to deny history and the public record. Donald Trump merely harnessed this latent DNA of the Republican party while masterfully marketing himself as a new Republican unbound by swamp politics (a political breed which does not exist in the Republican Party.) Look at Ben Sasse, he writes as a centrist yet votes as a Trump man. Look at Lindsey Graham's descriptions of Trump in 2016 and now listen to his praise of Trump today. Yet, Max Boot sees this as a recent development in the Republican Party when it has been part of the GOP DNA which has produced a racist voting record as each generation of Republicans is sworn in.

    Joseph Hawkins 1.0 out of 5 stars October 25, 2018

    Disingenuous

    Max Boot saw the light when it was too late. As an advocate for America's reckless wars after 9/11, he bears moral responsibility for the degrading of conservatism into a hate-filled cult.

    A month after 9/11, he called for the invasion of Iraq. Did he not think that almost two decades of continuous war fighting would not radicalize the American populace? He's making amends by writing a book, for which he probably received a hefty advance and will make money off of from royalties. Should donate the proceeds to charity.

    Amazon Customer 1.0 out of 5 stars Marx, Lenin and Gramsci come Alive! November 7, 2018

    Max Boot is another smug, arrogant, self righteous, Gramscian, ruling class communist, that's trying convince the "Base" that he knows what's best for them; all while devowing the little bit of wealth they might have left to live on. Why?

    Because the "Base" are the slaves of the "Superstructure" ruling class. Remember, as Stalin put it, "the middle class is the enemy" to the socialist. America is on slow-drip to Totalitarianism. And Max Boot is just one more in the camp on the transition.

    BB876 1.0 out of 5 stars October 26, 2018

    Nothing New

    I didn't feel this book offered anything new that nearly every other pundit on TV talks about 24/7 regarding "leaving the right"

    txtxyeha 2.0 out of 5 stars November 11, 2018

    Please give me a check to cash

    My translation of this book, free of charge.

    "Hi, I'm a bonafide conservative and here are the ways Trump has embarrassed The Cause as defined by Ronald Reagan. Since I refuse to kiss Trump's ring, I still gotta eat so I'm going to grandly announce that I have left the Republican Party in the form of this book and hope you will give me a check to cash. Thank you."

    I know that's a harsh assessment of a book that I agree with 98% of what's written, Mr. Boot offers no insight. Not once did I think, "Ah, good point. I didn't think of that."

    It's simply a rehashing of Mr. Trump's ridiculous gaffs (hell, I could have done that, there are sooo many to choose from) and at the very end a very lame path out of this quagmire (spoiler alert: we just need someone else as charismatic as Trump that's not [insert negative adjectives here] because the Republicans have proven they will follow ANYBODY over a cliff).

    I finished this book (though skipped many chapters because it was simply rehashing Trump's train wrecks) and said, "That's all you got? [sigh of resignation]"

    Jensen Cross Integrated Solutions 1.0 out of 5 stars December 22, 2018

    Conflicted words by a mockingbird media asset

    I never searched this book on Amazon, however, I did write a tweet about Max Boot, so I guess Twitter shares with Amazon. To the review, however -- this is written by a person who writes that Trump has failed us by leaving troops in war, and just 6 months later, writes an article that totally contradicts the earlier statement, stating that Trump can never do anything right because he is pulling troops out of war. Which is it? I would not line a birdcage with this garbage.

    Strike Me Down Now! 1.0 out of 5 stars December 16, 2018

    Boot helped break it and now he wants to blame Trump

    Trump is just a symptom; an easy scapegoat because he's a twit. Boot helped create and perpetuate the monster that the GOP became. Boot, and others like him, need to spend a few more years in purgatory for the mess that he put us in.

    james c. 2.0 out of 5 stars October 9, 2018

    Self serving title

    Unfortunately the author is venting his personal dislike of the current administration without addressing the previous administrations attempt to divide the country by any means possibly and subsequently putting the American people into a politically charged environment that the author is trying to capitalize on.

    [Jan 22, 2019] They're back Here's how the neocons are regaining power in Trump's America – Alternet.org

    Notable quotes:
    "... As Stephen Wertheim argues in The New York Review of Books , the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump's America, reasserting themselves within GOP and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the "neo-neoconservatives" or "post-neoconservatives," as he's dubbed them. ..."
    "... "For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance," he observes. "Trump elevated 'globalism' from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics." ..."
    "... Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering foreign policy advice to the party's leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for American Progress are partnering with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home within the Democratic Party? Wertheim's conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting. ..."
    "... "What best explains centrist Democrats' rapprochement with neoconservatives isn't an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style," he writes. "Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats' fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history." ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | www.alternet.org

    In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq...

    In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq, The Weekly Standard released its final issue . Two years removed from Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election, one might be forgiven for concluding the publication's demise sounded the final death knell of neoconservatism -- an ideology that has been soundly defeated at the polls and appears to lack even a constituency, the ubiquity of Bill Kristol on cable news notwithstanding.

    If only. As Stephen Wertheim argues in The New York Review of Books , the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump's America, reasserting themselves within GOP and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the "neo-neoconservatives" or "post-neoconservatives," as he's dubbed them.

    "Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent organs of opinion," Wertheim writes. "The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post."

    In his essay, Wertheim traces the history of the movement from World War II through the Cold War and up to 9/11, which allowed Kristol and Commentary's Norman Podhoretz, among others, to forge an existential threat in the form of "Islamofascism." Indeed, neoconservatism draws from the philosophical tradition of Leo Strauss, who wrote in the "The City and Man" that "the crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose." For the Straussians and their intellectual descendants, military conflict offered that sense of purpose, whether the enemy was Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Al-Qaeda.

    Trump's presidency has proved a clarifying moment. "[He] has forced neoconservatives to decide, for the first time, whether they are more against 'totalitarianism' or 'globalism,'" continues Wertheim. "If anti-totalitarians take Trump to be perverting what they hold dear, anti-globalist neocons have found in Trump a kindred spirit and vehicle for power. Yet, even as they are fracturing, neocons are flourishing. They have bypassed the political wilderness and vaulted themselves to the vanguard on either side of the Trump divide."

    Within Trump's cabinet, neoconservatism remains represented by national security adviser John Bolton, who has served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan. Wertheim contends that while right-wing non-interventionism is typically attributed to paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, neoconservatives have also historically taken aim at global institutions, if not globalism itself. Few have embodied this notion more than Bolton, who has made a career of bashing both the United Nations and its Security Council. During the Obama administration, Wertheim notes, he regularly sounded the alarm that "leftists like Obama were attempting to give away American sovereignty, bit by bit, to international bodies."

    "For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance," he observes. "Trump elevated 'globalism' from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics."

    Which brings us to neoconservatives' suddenly lofty perch outside of the Trump administration. For Republican apostates like Jennifer Rubin, David Frum and Max Boot, Wertheim contends, the president has offered the "next best thing" to a foreign dictator: "an enemy within." His personal degeneracy and unabashed corruption have allowed them to "reclaim their preferred role as the moral truth-tellers in America."

    "More surprising, perhaps, is that Democrats and outlets of the anti-Trump resistance have welcomed these neocons into their fold," Wertheim observes. "Boot, Kristol, Rubin, and former advisers of George W. Bush and Senator John McCain appear daily on MSNBC to excoriate Trump and Trumpism. David Frum, who coined the 'axis of evil' as George W. Bush's speechwriter, earns resistance retweets by warning of 'this hour of liberal peril' in The Atlantic. In 2017, The New York Times hired Bret Stephens from The Wall Street Journal in an effort to 'broaden the range of Times debate about consequential questions,' a curious rationale given that Stephens represented just the kind of Never Trump pundit repudiated by GOP voters and did nothing to change the op-ed page's lack of a single Trump-supporting columnist."

    Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering foreign policy advice to the party's leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for American Progress are partnering with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home within the Democratic Party? Wertheim's conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting.

    "What best explains centrist Democrats' rapprochement with neoconservatives isn't an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style," he writes. "Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats' fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history."

    Read Wertheim's essay at The New York Review of Books .

    [Jan 22, 2019] At the end of the day, Trump Tower Moscow has never happened - and Trump himself has turned out to be the worst Putin Puppet ever after slapping heavy sanctions on Moscow and selling Ukraine weapons that the Obama administration wouldn t.

    Jan 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    BuzzFeed Throws Hail Mary: Publishes New Trump Tower Moscow Docs

    After last week's embarrassing debacle in which special counsel Robert Mueller issued a rare statement calling bullshit on BuzzFeed over their Trump Tower Moscow report that Trump ordered his attorney Michael Cohen to lie about the timeline, the beleaguered news outlet has taken a second bite at the apple with a new report (oddly written by a completely different journalist) refuting comments by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani that "no plans were ever made" for the project.

    Not so fast Rudy ...

    In their new report, BuzzFeed claims that the Trump Tower Moscow idea was "led by Trump's then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his associate Felix Sater" despite writing in November that Sater both thought of and spearheaded the idea , turning to Cohen to "get it off the ground" while overpromising that he could seal the deal through his Russian connections that never panned out.

    Sater, a brash real estate promoter who pleaded guilty to racketeering in 1998 and became a longtime asset to US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, had worked with the Trump Organization on deals in the past and said he came up with the idea. Cohen, Sater recalled, said, "Great idea." - BuzzFeed

    Today's "gotcha," however is that the project had progressed much further than Giuliani claimed on Monday when he told the New Yorker "no plans were ever made. There were no drafts. Nothing in the file."

    Not true , writes BuzzFeed' s Azeen Ghorayshi.

    The president and his representatives have dismissed the project as little more than a notion -- a rough plan led by Trump's then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, and his associate Felix Sater, of which Trump and his family said they were only loosely aware as the election campaign gathered pace.

    On Monday, his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani , said "the proposal was in the earliest stage," and he went on to tell the New Yorker that "no plans were ever made. There were no drafts. Nothing in the file."

    However, hundreds of pages of business documents, emails, text messages, and architectural plans, obtained by BuzzFeed News over a year of reporting, tell a very different story. Trump Tower Moscow was a richly imagined vision of upscale splendor on the banks of the Moscow River. - BuzzFeed

    Trump Tower Moscow hasn't exactly been a secret, admits BuzzFeed , noting that Donald Trump tweeted about it following the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, and writing in his book The Art of the Deal that he had been trying to expand his business empire into Russia for over 30 years.

    me title=

    Over the last week, Giuliani admitted to the New York Times that the Trump Tower Moscow discussions were "going on from the day I announced to the day I won," Giuliani quoted Trump as saying. He then walked back those comments , claiming in a statement: "My recent statements about discussions during the 2016 campaign between Michael Cohen and then-candidate Donald Trump about a potential Trump Moscow 'project' were hypothetical and not based on conversations I had with the President."

    In other words, Giuliani is a walking gaffe machine - which we already knew.

    That said, the Trump Tower moscow project appears to have been much more developed than anyone in the Trump camp has acknowledged.

    According to a finalized letter of intent signed by Donald Trump on Oct. 28, 2015, the tower would have "approximately 250 first class, luxury residential condominiums."

    It would be located in Moscow City, a former industrial complex outside of the city center that has since been converted into an ambitious commercial district clustered with several of the tallest skyscrapers in Europe.

    Its hotel portion would feature "approximately 15 floors" and contain "not fewer than 150 hotel rooms," the letter of intent stated. The building would feature a luxury spa and fitness center, a commercial component "consistent with the overall luxury level of the Property," and an office space "consistent with Class A luxury office properties," as well as "luxury" parking. - BuzzFeed

    Also in the plan was "The Spa By Ivanka Trump," as well as a $50 million penthouse suite that they would give to Russian President Vladimir Putin. "My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units," Sater told BuzzFeed in November. "All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin."

    Show Trump the money

    The Trump Organization stood to make $4 million on an up-front payment for the deal; 25% of which would be paid upon execution of the licensing agreement, another quarter when they finalized a location, and the other half a week before the project's groundbreaking - or two years after the execution of the licensing agreement, whichever came first.

    From there on out, Trump's company would also get a cut of all the condominium sales at the tower, the agreement stated. From the total selling price of each unit, his company would get 5% for sales up to $100 million, 4% for the next bracket up to $250 million, 3% for anything between that and $500 million, 2% for anything up to $1 billion, and thereafter, a solid cut of 1%. For commercial and office spaces, it would get a 3% cut of all the rent. It'd get another 3% of sales on food and beverages, spa and fitness center use, and conference fees.

    The deal also stipulated how much Trump's management company would get paid for running operations at Trump Tower Moscow over 25 years. For the first five years, it would get 3% of all revenue generated by operating the hotel per month. Over the next two decades, it'd receive a flat 4%. In addition, the management company would also receive a monthly "incentive fee" -- an additional 20% of the gross operating profit for the hotel -- subject to annual negotiations. - BuzzFeed

    At the end of the day, Trump Tower Moscow has never happened - and Trump himself has turned out to be the worst "Putin Puppet" ever after slapping heavy sanctions on Moscow and selling Ukraine weapons that the Obama administration wouldn't.

    "Let's make this happen and build a Trump Moscow," wrote Sater to Cohen in October of 2015. "And possibly fix relations between the countries by showing everyone that commerce & business are much better and more practical than politics. Help world peace and make a lot of money, I would say that's a great lifetime goal for us to go after."

    Teeter , 6 minutes ago link

    Talk about trying to make something out of nothing... what's the crime? So lame.

    Oboneterm , 9 minutes ago link

    STOP THE ******* PRESSES..........BOMB SHELL......BOMB SHELL REPORT...THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN....ORANGE HAIR PRESIDENT SOON TO BE WARING ORANGE JUMPSUIT....

    Dateline Moscow 2013........

    The crime:

    American Developer explores possibilities of building a hotel in Moscow.

    StarGate , 10 minutes ago link

    There is NO Moscow Trump Tower.

    No mountain.

    Not even a molehill.

    Buzzfeed is frantically trying to gain relevance on this fantasy non-existent tower story. It's a big "So What?"

    glenlloyd , 13 minutes ago link

    Big deal. Rudy needs to be more careful about what he says but WTF does it matter that Trump's people tried to get the tower project done there?

    How does any of this mean anything? So what if he did try and build it? This was ages before he ever thought about running for President.

    All these leftists are hanging their hat (and hopes and dreams) on something that just didn't happen.

    Sorry all you leftist loonies, there's nothing in that Mueller report to get excited about. I just hope that a lot of you crazies can handle that.

    hanekhw , 17 minutes ago link

    The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.

    inosent , 17 minutes ago link

    zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.

    And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe actually took place between the bribor and bribee.

    I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.

    Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born. And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.

    The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.

    ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.

    Pure, 100% commie bulls-.

    These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.

    We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!

    And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed, they move in for the kill - literally.

    The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".

    Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government, we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.

    Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.

    hanekhw , 17 minutes ago link

    The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.

    inosent , 17 minutes ago link

    zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.

    And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe actually took place between the bribor and bribee.

    I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.

    Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born. And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.

    The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.

    ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.

    Pure, 100% commie bulls-.

    These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.

    We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!

    And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed, they move in for the kill - literally.

    The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".

    Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government, we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.

    Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.

    hanekhw , 17 minutes ago link

    The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.

    inosent , 17 minutes ago link

    zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.

    And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe actually took place between the bribor and bribee.

    I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.

    Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born. And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.

    The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.

    ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.

    Pure, 100% commie bulls-.

    These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.

    We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!

    And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed, they move in for the kill - literally.

    The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".

    Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government, we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.

    Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.

    hanekhw , 17 minutes ago link

    The media won't understand talking to Russians to build in Russia and not talking to George Soros first is NOT a crime. Just because that's what THEY do concerning everything doesn't mean Trump has to also.

    inosent , 17 minutes ago link

    zzzzzzzzzz, but the ****-0-craps will be all rage and fury over some sort of fantasy land egotistical it'll never happen building in Moscow. Pretty pictures, though.

    And to the idiot poster who keeps claiming this is 'bribery', that means 1) there would have to be something to be given in return that was unlawful on some level, and 2) there was intent, and 3) a discussion about the nature and quality of the bribe actually took place between the bribor and bribee.

    I get the uniparty thing, but some of the leftie dickheads that post here are really stupid. Colossally dumb.

    Somebody said below we get nothing but bolshevik-speak from these marxists. They open the mouth and voila! a 'fact' is born. And on that basis a conviction. Matters not if the 'fact' disappears someday, so long as today the 'fact' gives them the pretense to destroy someone that gets in their way.

    The 60's hippies 'left' was all down on the 'man'. 'I just want to be freeeeeeee man' they would say.

    ha, such bulls-. The truth is they are all lining up at the govt trough to get their piece of the action. It doesn't matter that they f- people over, destroy lives, and freedom for all, so long as they get a juicy title, paycheck and pension.

    Pure, 100% commie bulls-.

    These people need to put on a red shirt and a bulls' eye, have a war against them declared, and then they can be mowed down one at a time until they run away from govt and never return, or they are all gone.

    We are no doubt headed for all out neo-USSA communism. Better make sure you keep your guns!

    And when (not if) the ****-0-craps have total power, the first thing they'll do is make it impossible to get a gun, and then find a means to confiscate them. Before any tyranny we always see the new tyrant go after the guns. Then when the ppl are unarmed, they move in for the kill - literally.

    The commie jackass 'leaders' always talk about this it's for the children, safety, etc. But we all know that is a farce. The real purpose is to disarm. Culturally, they have made us all capitulate to deviancy, where nobody dares question the immoral homosexual behavioral choice. That is the kind of world we live in. Next stop, pedoland. "Don't judge me bro'".

    Given that we now know (if we did not know already) that at LEAST 65% of the population is completely dependent on the government, we live in a land where there are ultimate sheep, demented immoral sheep, government dependent and not productive sheep. We are surrounded by people who are totally brainwashed, are easily swept up with the latest new world order dogma, and won't fight back against anything, but accept everything, and do as they are told - for a morsel of bread.

    Not sure what the solution is, but if you are a person with a moral compass in fairly good working order, and don't want your pocket picked, and your business totally compromised by some bureaucrat. best be looking for one.

    Justin Case

    Keep shoveling that Russia this, that, manure narrative for general consumption. What sanctions? Umm, I'll get back to you after we extradite the Huawei CEO and extort billions from the corporation for doing business with our (Israel's) adversary.

    You voted for this? He talks out of both sides of his mouth. Why do people vote to have someone rule over them?

    [Jan 22, 2019] Bottomfeeder neocon Kristol make a mark again by smearing white kids

    This bottom feeder never apologized for helping to get the country into Iraq War iether. Money don't smell. I just imagine how his pressitute would react if kids attacked by black supremacists were Jewish.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Bill Kristol asked his Twitter followers to consider "the contrast between the calm dignity and quiet strength of Mr. Phillips and the behavior of MAGA brats who have absorbed the spirit of Trumpism." ..."
    "... And then when the actual facts emerged, Kristol quietly deleted his tweet. He never apologized, of course. He hasn't apologized for the Iraq war, either. There's no need. People keep giving him money. ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | www.foxnews.com

    But in case you think the response was entirely from the left, you should know that the abuse was bipartisan. This wasn't just left versus right. It was the people in power attacking those below them as a group. Plenty of Republicans in Washington were happy to savage the Covington kids, probably to inoculate themselves from charges of improper thought.

    Bill Kristol asked his Twitter followers to consider "the contrast between the calm dignity and quiet strength of Mr. Phillips and the behavior of MAGA brats who have absorbed the spirit of Trumpism."

    So what's actually going on here? Well, it's not really about race. In fact, most of the stories about race really aren't about race. And this is no different. This story is about the people in power protecting their power, and justifying their power, by destroying and mocking those weaker than they are.

    And then when the actual facts emerged, Kristol quietly deleted his tweet. He never apologized, of course. He hasn't apologized for the Iraq war, either. There's no need. People keep giving him money.

    The National Review, meanwhile, ran a story entitled, "The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross." That story has since been pulled too, but not before the author admitted he never even bothered to watch all the videos. He knew what he knew. That was enough.

    [Jan 22, 2019] Benito Mussolini defined fascism as "Barely able to slip a cigarette paper between business and government."

    Jan 22, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

    William Anthony -> BoneyOCoonassa , 15 Jan 2019 09:40

    We've known since WW2, that fighting fascism is difficult. Benito Mussolini defined fascism as "Barely able to slip a cigarette paper between business and government." And when business runs government, we have even exceeded fascism. The new battle against fascism is not going to be easy.

    [Jan 22, 2019] The Fetishization of the Corporate Media by C.J. Hopkins

    Among few good things that Trump have done to the USA is that he destoryed credibility of neoliberal MSM. They all are now firmly belong to the "fake news" catagory.
    Notable quotes:
    "... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

    So the corporate media have gone and done it again. As they have, repeatedly, for the last two and half years, they shook the earth with a "bombshell" story proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton, or at least committed an impeachable felony in connection with something to do with the Russians, or Ukrainians, or other Slavic persons which story turned out to be inaccurate, or not entirely accurate, or a bunch of horseshit.

    This time it was BuzzFeed's Jason Leopold, " a reporter with a checkered past " (i.e., a history of inventing his sources ) who broke the "bombshell" Russiagate story that turned out to be a bunch of horseshit. Leopold, and his colleague Anthony Cormier, reported that Trump had directed his attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about plans to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow, thus suborning perjury and obstructing justice. Their sources for this "bombshell" story were allegedly "two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter."

    Approximately twenty-four hours later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office (i.e., the office "involved in an investigation of the matter") stated that the BuzzFeed story was "not accurate," which is a legal term meaning "a bunch of horseshit." BuzzFeed is standing by its story , and is working to determine what, exactly, Mueller's office meant by "not accurate." Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's Editor-in-Chief, has called on Mueller "to make clear what he's disputing."

    Liberals and other Trump-obsessives have joined in the effort to interpret the Special Counsel's office's cryptic utterance. French hermeneuticists have been reportedly called in to deconstruct the meaning of "accurate." Professional Twitter semioticians are explaining that "not accurate" doesn't mean "wrong," but, rather, refers to something that is "accurate," but which the user of the word doesn't want to disclose publicly, or that legal terms don't mean what they mean or something more or less along those lines.

    Glenn Greenwald, in August 2018, reporting on another "bombshell" story that turned out to be a bunch of horseshit , compiled a partial list of Russiagate stories that the corporate media had published and promoted over the course of the previous eighteen months which turned out to be a bunch of horseshit (i.e., the stories did, not Greenwald's list). In the wake of this latest horseshit story, Greenwald revised and renamed this list " The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump/Russia Story. "

    But Greenwald's list is just a small sample of the Russiagate stories that have turned out to be horseshit. For the record, here are several more:

    "Seventeen intelligence agencies" confirm Russia interfered in the U.S. elections ( New York Times ) Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum ( The Guardian ) Russia interfered in the German elections ( Reuters ) Russia hacked the French elections ( Politico and numerous other outlets ) Michael Cohen conspired with the Russians in Prague ( BuzzFeed )

    My personal favorite remains the one about how Hillary Clinton may have been poisoned by Putinist operatives back in 2016. And then there's the pot-smoking, prostitute-banging, incompetent Novichok perfume assassins , the African American-brainwashing memes , the Putin-orchestrated Yellow Vest rebellion , the brain-eating Russian-Cubano crickets , and various other bunches of horseshit.

    I am using the terms "horseshit" and "a bunch of horseshit" (as opposed to terms like "failures" and "errors"), not just to be gratuitously vulgar, but, also, to try to make a point. One is not supposed to use these terms in connection with "serious," "respected" news outlets. Which is why journalists like Greenwald and Aaron Maté (who have extensively reported on the corporate media's ongoing production and dissemination of horseshit) do not use such terms in the course of their reporting, and instead use less inflammatory terms like "false," "inaccurate," "mistake," and "error." Principled journalists like Greenwald and Maté are constrained by (a) their journalistic ethics, (b) their integrity, and (c) their belief in the idea of a "free and independent press," which is one of the pillars of Western democracy.

    Being neither a respected journalist nor a believer in the existence of an "independent press," I am under no such constraints. Because I'm not trying to get or keep a job, or maintain a "respectable" reputation, I'm free to call a spade a spade and a bunch of horseshit a bunch of horseshit. I am also free to describe "journalists" like Leopold, Luke Harding , Craig Timberg , Franklin Foer , and many of their corporate media colleagues (not to mention TV clowns like Rachel Maddow ) as the liars and rank propagandists they are. I don't need to pretend their fabricated stories are simply the result of "shoddy journalism," or "over-reliance on official sources," or any other type of "error" or "failure." These people know exactly what they are doing, and are being extremely well paid to do it. They went to school to learn how to do it. Then they butt-sucked and back-stabbed their way up the ladder of establishment power to be able to do it.

    Yes, of course, there are still principled journalists working for the corporate media, but they are doing so by walking a very fine line. No one has to tell them where it is. Every professional journalist knows precisely where it is, and what it is there for. Though they are permitted to walk right up to it, occasionally (to keep them from feeling like abject whores), one step over it and they will be cast into the Outer Darkness of the Blogosphere and excommunicated from the Church of Respectable Journalism. If you don't believe me, just ask Seymour Hersh, or John Pilger, or any other journalistic heretic.

    If Russiagate serves no other useful purpose, it is at least exposing the corporate media as the propaganda factories that they are. Given the amount of obviously fabricated horseshit they have disseminated during the last two years, you'd have to be a total moron or a diehard neoliberal cultist not to recognize the function they perform within the global capitalist ruling establishment (which is essentially no different than the function the establishment media perform in any other society, namely, to disseminate, maintain, and reify the official narrative of its ruling classes).

    Sadly, there's no shortage of morons and cultists. I don't blame the morons, because well, they're morons. The cultists are another species entirely. These are people who, no matter how often the corporate media feed them another "explosive," "bombshell" Russiagate story that turns out to be a bunch of horseshit, will defend the concept of the "independent media" like head-shaven, bug-eyed Manson followers. Confront them with facts contradicting their beliefs and they close their eyes and start chanting and humming and repetitiously babbling banishing spells. The notion that the Western corporate media may serve the interests of the ruling establishment (just like the media in every other society serve that society's ruling classes) is unimaginable and tantamount to heresy.

    This fetishization of "the independent press" is a phenomenon unique to Western capitalism. Basically, it's a childish fairy tale, like believing that Santa Claus is an actual person or that voting in elections in a corporate oligarchy has anything to do with actual democracy. Think about it dispassionately for a minute. Why would any ruling establishment permit a genuinely "independent" press to disseminate ideas and information willy-nilly throughout society? If it did, it wouldn't last very long.

    Most people understand this intuitively, which is why the corporate media relentlessly repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press," over, and over, and over again. Seriously, switch on NPR, or have a look at The Guardian or the Washington Post, or any of the other corporate media repeatedly reminding you how "independent," "free" and "democratic" they are. It's essentially Neuro-linguistic programming.

    So let's not be shocked when the corporate media continue to bombard us with "bombshell" stories about Trump and Russia that turn out to be horseshit. Personally, I welcome these stories. The more corporate media horseshit the better! Who knows, if they dish out enough blatant horseshit, more people might lose their "trust in the media," and begin to investigate matters themselves. I know, that makes me a Nazi, right? Or at least a Russian propagandist? I mean, encouraging folks to distrust the corporate media? Isn't there some kind of law against that? Or have they not quite gotten around to that yet?

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

    Godfree Roberts , says: January 22, 2019 at 1:32 am GMT

    The Associated Press (AP) reports the latest bad news for the press: " Just 6 Percent of People Say They Trust the Media ."

    Carole Feldman and Emily Swanson began: Trust in the news media is being eroded by perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans' skepticism about what they read on social media. Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public's view of other institutions.

    Biff , says: January 22, 2019 at 1:41 am GMT

    Most people understand this intuitively, which is why the corporate media relentlessly repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press,"

    People inversely brag about their short comings.
    Militarized police states brag about their freedom.
    A well heeled synchophant brags about his independence.
    Dudes with small dicks -- big belt buckle and big hat.

    Fidelios Automata , says: January 22, 2019 at 3:14 am GMT
    I used to listen to the BBC and NPR until the corporo-globalist bias became unbearable. I laughed at incidents such as Marketplace mocking the public's concern about GMO's. But it went off the rails in 2016. They may have backed off from Trump Derangement Syndrome a bit since then, but I've noticed that they have to call themselves "credible." Maybe if they say that enough times we'll believe it, eh?
    Bragadocious , says: January 22, 2019 at 4:32 am GMT
    The Greenwald link is pretty important and I bookmarked it. These fake news outlets do everything in their power to scrub these mistakes from the Google machine once they happen. They remove stories, videos -- everything, in the hopes of shoving it all down the memory hole. And since other fake news outlets don't hold them accountable, they get away with it. This is why it's important to take screen shots of fake news and download videos if possible, to create a record that's permanent and useful when you need it.
    Richard Wicks , says: January 22, 2019 at 5:48 am GMT
    @Godfree Roberts 6%? I rather doubt that.

    More than 6% of the population are technically, and this is the technical term, retarded -- they are mentally disabled.

    I know it's obvious our media is propaganda, but I don't think it's quite so obvious such that adults watching Sesame Street who fully enjoy it (nothing wrong with that!) are aware of it.

    I would like to think it's true, but I think the Associated Press article is not true, after all, can you identify their funding sources?

    utu , says: January 22, 2019 at 7:22 am GMT

    This fetishization of "the independent press" is a phenomenon unique to Western capitalism. Basically, it's a childish fairy tale, like believing that Santa Claus is an actual person or that voting in elections in a corporate oligarchy has anything to do with actual democracy.

    Great article. Articles on this theme should be published daily. The fetish must be destroyed.

    jeff stryker , says: January 22, 2019 at 10:55 am GMT
    I don't think the MSM has the power and influence it had in the Big Three Networks Era before the internet.

    In those days, the minds of the public were more controlled and underground newspapers were barely read.

    These days, more people read websites like this than watch any particular channel.

    Print journalism had a massive hold on the world up to 1997 when the internet came into the mainstream.

    Not no more.

    jacques sheete , says: January 22, 2019 at 12:06 pm GMT
    Ah, elegant!

    What a pleasure to read this article!

    There is at least one other person who calls corporate media what it is, and it ain't "mainstream."

    "Sparkie" ain't gonna be happy about it either."Sparky" chewed me out good for correcting the incomparable and always superb Linh Dinh for using the disgusting and inaccurate term, "mainstream" when referring to coprophilic media. Oh, and speaking of "horseshit" one wag suggested we call it main steam media, for accuracy as well as for giggles and that's fine by me.

    the corporate media relentlessly repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press," over, and over, and over again. Seriously, switch on NPR, or have a look at The Guardian or the Washington Post, or any of the other corporate media repeatedly reminding you how "independent," "free" and "democratic" they are. It's essentially Neuro-linguistic programming.

    It's blatantly obvious that the same can be said about the self-legitimizing term, "mainstream," too, so bless you sir, and to (bleep) with the Sparkies of the world.

    Digital Samizdat , says: January 22, 2019 at 12:36 pm GMT

    Confront them with facts contradicting their beliefs and they close their eyes and start chanting and humming and repetitiously babbling banishing spells.

    Orange Man bad! Mueller saves! -NPC

    Jake , says: January 22, 2019 at 12:46 pm GMT
    Not only is Hopkins correct, but what he says about corporate media is not new. The Civil Rights movement presented by the media was false. The media promotion of the US re-engaging in Europe in the post WW1 period so we could defend dear ole England and sacred democracy. The media preparing us for our need to fight WW1 so we could end all wars was false. The media stirring us to go into Cuba and end the awfully evil Spanish Empire so we could start the process of ending all empires

    Large numbers of newspapers located within the non January 22, 2019 at 3:13 pm GMT

    @jacques sheete

    Ah, elegant!

    What a pleasure to read this article!

    N o doubt it is a pleasure for you because C.J. Hopkins managed to scribble 1500 words about fake news without even once mentioning the CIA.

    "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

    -- CIA Director, William Casey

    Of course, our resident Bumpkin of Unz would have you believe that the CIA is a corporation.

    "The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."

    -- former CIA Director William Colby

    So you see Sheete, the term "corporate media" is entirely inaccurate -- a red herring, a misleading label, a pig in a poke -- because it entirely excludes, avoids, overlooks, and completely dismisses the role of our intelligence agencies in creating fake news , a.k.a. disinformation and propaganda.

    Hail , says: Website January 22, 2019 at 3:38 pm GMT

    The notion that the Western corporate media may serve the interests of the ruling establishment (just like the media in every other society serve that society's ruling classes) is unimaginable and tantamount to heresy.

    This comes close to the term "regime media," which I like as a replacement for the clunky-but-common terms "Mainstream Media" or MSM. "

    Hopkins uses "corporate media," which appears fifteen times here including in the title.

    Several commenters have noted the problems with the term "mainstream media":

    the self-legitimizing term, "mainstream,"

    While better than "mainstream media," I'm not sure "corporate media" is sufficient.

    "Corporate media," as a term, may wrongly convey the notion that the 'media' in question complaisantly both [1] broadcasts the ruling ideology (interventionist capitalist liberal democracy and multicultacracy) and [2] 'megaphones' (Steve Sailer's useful term) against enemies thereto, coordinating our regular Two-Minute Hates.

    That characterization misses an important point, to wit:

    The 'media' (in the sense of the "MSM") as we know it today, is itself consciously part of the ruling apparatus . Not complaisantly, but actively; not lackeys on the side, but right at the regime's core. A useful distinction. Hence "regime media."

    Agent76 , says: January 22, 2019 at 3:41 pm GMT
    Jun. 14, 2012 These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America

    That's consolidated from *50* companies back in 1983. But the fact that a few companies own everything demonstrates "the illusion of choice," Frugal Dad says.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6

    Church Committee Testimony

    Tom Charles Huston testified before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee, on the 43-page plan he presented to the President Nixon and others on ways to collect information about anti-war and "radical" groups, including burglary, electronic surveillance, and opening of mail.

    https://www.c-span.org/video/?408953-1/tom-charles-huston-testimony-church-committee

    Sean , says: January 22, 2019 at 4:13 pm GMT
    The Basic Problem of Democracy
    by Walter Lippmann
    The Atlantic Monthly, November 1919, pp. 616-627

    http://sonicacts.com/portal/anthropocene-objects-art-and-politics-1

    Lippmann-Dewey debate, which is known to academics but not the general public in the United States, the home country of both authors. Obviously, John Dewey is famous as one of the most important American philosophers, and for his international influence in the field of education. By contrast, Walter Lippmann has been somewhat forgotten, though he was a major journalist in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a widely familiar author at the time, and wrote some cynical things about American democracy. The story America tells itself politically is that since we're a democracy in which the citizens rule themselves, there is a paramount need for an excellent public education so that the citizens can vote wisely. We ourselves are the leaders. But of course it doesn't work that way in practice. We actually have a surplus of ignorant and uninformed people who pay no attention to the nuances of policy, and who vote based on the workings of demagoguery and short-sighted self-interest. Any number of foolish decisions have been made by the American public. This leads Lippmann to take the somewhat cynical line that America is destined to be ruled by technocrats. We need experts to run things; the people are too clueless to rule themselves. We'll pretend we have a democracy, but we actually don't. Now, Dewey reads this, and he is temperamentally more optimistic, and he thinks: 'This is a really stimulating book, but Lippmann is wrong. He is setting the bar too high for the people. People were never supposed to be educated in depth about every issue, which is an impossible demand. Even Lippmann doesn't have the time to master every issue, and he covers politics for a living. Instead, Dewey says, political issues generate their own publics in each case. I might care deeply about seven political issues. I might care about national health insurance, but I don't care about gay marriage, or vice versa. So I get involved in one debate and not the other. I take the trouble of becoming informed about issues that interest me.

    onebornfree , says: Website January 22, 2019 at 4:14 pm GMT
    @Hail Hail says: "The 'media' (in the sense of the "MSM") as we know it today, is itself consciously part of the ruling apparatus. Not complaisantly, but actively; not lackeys on the side, but right at the regime's core ":

    Exactly. The MSM is the government [CIA/NSA/ etc. etc.] grinning right at you as it continually lies , albeit behind a very thin veil of supposed integrity/respectability that the general public still refuses to see through.

    By way of illustration of this "outrageous" assertion of mine, here is part of a video analysis of the original 5 channel US MSM "live" coverage of the morning of Sept. 11 2001, which clearly demonstrates that on that morning, all 5 US networks broadcast entirely fake "live" footage [ i.e. C.G.I. prefabricated imagery] for about 102 minutes :

    Regards, onebornfree

    jacques sheete , says: January 22, 2019 at 4:23 pm GMT
    @Sparkon

    So you see Sheete, the term "corporate media" is entirely inaccurate

    I never claimed it was perfect. I do claim that the term, "mainstream," in this context is entirely inaccurate and misleading. And you should be nice, as you admonished me, regarding the author of this article. As for your complaint that he didn't mention the CIA, may I remind you that he wrote, as you noticed, an article, not an encyclopedia.

    Anyway, you have yet to establish that the CIA and our corporate masters are entirely separate entities. Even a Dumb Sheete such as myself would find it somewhat, if not entirely, incredible if they were.

    But of course too everyone knows by now that Jews, Israel and Mossad did 9/11 all by their lonesomes, and the CIA and the Air Force had nothing to do with it.

    Ahem, you forgot to mention big, coprophilic, media. Please try to practice the inclusiveness that you preach.

    Nancy Pelosi's Latina Maid , says: January 22, 2019 at 4:30 pm GMT

    one step over [the line] and they will be cast into the Outer Darkness of the Blogosphere and excommunicated from the Church of Respectable Journalism. If you don't believe me, just ask Seymour Hersh, or John Pilger, or any other journalistic heretic.

    To this list I might also add CBS' Sharyl Attkisson, and Larry Conners of KMOV-TV, who had the big brass balls to question the $85 million the Obamas spent on vacations.

    NR kicked Derb to the curb, but that gutter's littered with Internet flotsam who presumed integrity.

    onebornfree , says: Website January 22, 2019 at 4:35 pm GMT
    @Sean Sean says: "Lippmann-Dewey debate, which is known to academics but not the general public in the United States, the home country of both authors. "

    Debate summary: 2 know-it-alls debating about how "best" to run everybody else's lives [and with straight faces, I've no doubt].

    Two sides of the same [pro-statist] coin, in other words. Oh, and one minor issue one "thinks" that a ruling technocracy is "the answer".

    Sean says: "Obviously, John Dewey is famous as one of the most important American philosophers, and for his international influence in the field of education."

    You mean: Dewey was important in the field of "public education" , otherwise known as brainwashing.

    " important American philosopher" my a$$.

    Gawd help us all.

    And so it goes

    [Jan 22, 2019] Here are 11 questions you should ask Libertarians to see if they're hypocrites by RJ Eskow

    Notable quotes:
    "... Are unions, political parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples of "spontaneous order" -- and if not, why not? ..."
    "... Is a libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded? ..."
    "... Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also employing market forces? ..."
    "... Is our libertarian willing to admit that a "free market" needs regulation? ..."
    "... Does our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain what's wrong with governments that regulate. ..."
    "... Does our libertarian use wealth that wouldn't exist without government in order to preach against the role of government? ..."
    "... Does our libertarian reject any and all government protection for his intellectual property? ..."
    "... Does our libertarian recognize that democracy is a form of marketplace? ..."
    "... Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a threat to our freedoms? ..."
    "... Does he think that Rand was off the mark on this one, or does he agree that historical figures like King and Gandhi were "parasites"? ..."
    "... If you believe in the free market, why weren't you willing to accept as final the judgment against libertarianism rendered decades ago in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas? ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.alternet.org
    We aren't suggesting every libertarian is a hypocrite, but there's an easy way to find out. Libertarians have a problem. Their political philosophy all but died out in the mid- to late-20th century, but was revived by billionaires and corporations that found them politically useful. And yet libertarianism retains the qualities that led to its disappearance from the public stage, before its reanimation by people like the Koch brothers: It doesn't make any sense.

    They call themselves "realists" but rely on fanciful theories that have never predicted real-world behavior. They claim that selfishness makes things better for everybody, when history shows exactly the opposite is true. They claim that a mythical "free market" is better at everything than the government is, yet when they really need government protection, they're the first to clamor for it.

    That's no reason not to work with them on areas where they're in agreement with people like me. In fact, the unconventionality of their thought has led libertarians to be among this nation's most forthright and outspoken advocates for civil liberties and against military interventions.

    Merriam-Webster defines "hypocrisy" as "feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not." We aren't suggesting every libertarian is a hypocrite. But there's an easy way to find out.

    The Other Libertarianism

    First, some background. There is a kind of libertarianism that's nothing more or less than a strain in the American psyche, an emotional tendency toward individualism and personal liberty. That's fine and even admirable.

    We're talking about the other libertarianism, the political philosophy whose avatar is the late writer Ayn Rand. It was once thought that this extreme brand of libertarianism, one that celebrates greed and even brutality, had died in the early 1980s with Rand herself. Many Rand acolytes had already gone underground, repressing or disavowing the more extreme statements of their youth and attempting to blend in with more mainstream schools of thought in respectable occupations.

    There was a good reason for that. Randian libertarianism is an illogical, impractical, inhumane, unpopular set of Utopian ravings which lacks internal coherence and has never predicted real-world behavior anywhere. That's why, reasonably enough, the libertarian movement evaporated in the late 20th century, its followers scattered like the wind.

    Pay to Play

    But the libertarian movement has seen a strong resurgence in recent years, and there's a simple reason for that: money, and the personal interests of some people who have a lot of it. Once relegated to drug-fueled college-dorm bull sessions, political libertarianism suddenly had pretensions of legitimacy. This revival is Koch-fueled, not coke-fueled, and exists only because in political debate, as in so many other walks of life, cash is king.

    The Koch brothers are principal funders of the Reason Foundation and Reason magazine. Exxon Mobil and other corporate and billionaire interests are behind the Cato Institute, the other public face of libertarianism. Financiers have also seeded a number of economics schools, think tanks, and other institutions with proponents of their brand of libertarianism. It's easy to explain why some of these corporate interests do it. It serves the self-interest of the environmental polluters, for example, to promote a political philosophy which argues that regulation is bad and the market will correct itself. And every wealthy individual benefits from tax cuts for the rich. What better way to justify that than with a philosophy that says they're rich because they're better -- and that those tax cuts help everybody ?

    The rise of the Silicon Valley economy has also contributed to the libertarian resurgence. A lot of Internet billionaires are nerds who suddenly find themselves rich and powerful, and they're emotionally and intellectually inclined toward libertarianism's geeky and unrealistic vision of a free market. In their minds its ideas are "heuristic," "autologous" and "cybernetic" -- all of which has inherent attraction in their culture.

    The only problem is: It's only a dream. At no time or place in human history has there been a working libertarian society which provided its people with the kinds of outcomes libertarians claim it will provide. But libertarianism's self-created mythos claims that it's more realistic than other ideologies, which is the opposite of the truth. The slope from that contradiction to the deep well of hypocrisy is slippery, steep -- and easy to identify.

    The Libertarian Hypocrisy Test

    That's where the Libertarian Hypocrisy Test comes in. Let's say we have a libertarian friend, and we want to know whether or not he's hypocritical about his beliefs. How would we go about conducting such a test? The best way is to use the tenets of his philosophy to draw up a series of questions to explore his belief system.

    The Cato Institute's overview of key libertarian concepts mixes universally acceptable bromides like the "rule of law" and "individual rights" with principles that are more characteristically libertarian -- and therefore more fantastical. Since virtually all people support the rule of law and individual rights, it is the other concepts which are uniquely libertarian and form the basis of our first few questions.

    The Institute cites "spontaneous order," for example, as "the great insight of libertarian social analysis." Cato defines that principle thusly:

    " (O)rder in society arises spontaneously, out of the actions of thousands or millions of individuals who coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes."

    To which the discerning reader might be tempted to ask: Like where , exactly? Libertarians define "spontaneous order" in a very narrow way -- one that excludes demonstrations like the Arab Spring, elections which install progressive governments, or union movements, to name three examples. And yet each of these things are undertaken by individuals who "coordinated their actions with those of others" to achieve our purposes.

    So our first hypocrisy test question is, Are unions, political parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples of "spontaneous order" -- and if not, why not?

    Cato also trumpets what it calls "The Virtue of Production" without ever defining what production is. Economics defines the term, but libertarianism is looser with its terminology. That was easier to get away with in the Industrial Age, when "production" meant a car, or a shovel, or a widget.

    Today nearly 50 percent of corporate profits come from the financial sector -- that is, from the manipulation of money. It's more difficult to define "production," and even harder to find its "virtue," when the creation of wealth no longer necessarily leads to the creation of jobs, or economic growth, or anything except the enrichment of a few.

    Which seems to be the point. Cato says, "Modern libertarians defend the right of productive people to keep what they earn, against a new class of politicians and bureaucrats who would seize their earnings to transfer them to nonproducers."

    Which gets us to our next test question: Is a libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded?

    Retail stores like Walmart and fast-food corporations like McDonalds cannot produce wealth without employees. Don't those employees have the right to "coordinate their actions with those of others in order to achieve their purposes" -- for example, in unions? You would think that free-market philosophers would encourage workers, as part of a free-market economy, to discover the market value for their services through negotiation.

    Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also employing market forces?

    The bankers who collude to deceive their customers, as US bankers did with the MERS mortgage system, were permitted to do so by the unwillingness of government to regulate them. The customers who were the victims of deception were essential to the production of Wall Street wealth. Why don't libertarians recognize their role in the process, and their right to administer their own affairs?

    That right includes the right to regulate the bankers who sell them mortgages. Libertarians say that the "free market" will help consumers. "Libertarians believe that people will be both freer and more prosperous if government intervention in people's economic choices is minimized," says Cato.

    But victims of illegal foreclosure are neither "freer" nor "more prosperous" after the government deregulation which led to their exploitation. What's more, deregulation has led to a series of documented banker crimes that include stockholder fraud and investor fraud. That leads us to our next test of libertarian hypocrisy: Is our libertarian willing to admit that a "free market" needs regulation?

    Digital Libertarians

    But few libertarians are as hypocritical as the billionaires who earned their fortunes in the tech world. Government created the Internet. Government financed the basic research that led to computing itself. And yet Internet libertarians are among the most politically extreme of them all.

    Perhaps none is more extreme than Peter Thiel, who made his fortune with PayPal. In one infamous rant, Thiel complained about allowing women and people he describes as "welfare beneficiaries" (which might be reasonably interpreted as "minorities") to vote. "Since 1920," Thiel fulminated, "the extension of the franchise to (these two groups) have turned 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron."

    With this remark, Thiel let something slip that extreme libertarians prefer to keep quiet: A lot of them don't like democracy very much. In their world, democracy is a poor substitute for the iron-fisted rule of wealth, administered by those who hold the most of it. Our next test, therefore, is: Does our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain what's wrong with governments that regulate.

    On this score, at least, Thiel is no hypocrite. He's willing to freely say what others only think: Democracy should be replaced by the rule of wealthy people like himself.

    But how did Peter Thiel and other Internet billionaires become wealthy? They hired government-educated employees to develop products protected by government copyrights. Those products used government-created computer technology and a government-created communications web to communicate with government-educated customers in order to generate wealth for themselves, which was then stored in government-protected banks -- after which they began using that wealth to argue for the elimination of government.

    By that standard, Thiel and his fellow "digital libertarians" are hypocrites of genuinely epic proportion. Which leads us to our next question: Does our libertarian use wealth that wouldn't exist without government in order to preach against the role of government?

    Many libertarians will counter by saying that government has only two valid functions: to protect the national security and enforce intellectual property laws. By why only these two? If the mythical free market can solve any problem, including protecting the environment, why can't it also protect us from foreign invaders and defend the copyrights that make these libertarians wealthy?

    For that matter, why should these libertarians be allowed to hold patents at all? If the free market can decide how best to use our national resources, why shouldn't it also decide how best to use Peter Thiel's ideas, and whether or not to reward him for them? After all, if Thiel were a true Randian libertarian he'd use his ideas in a more superior fashion than anyone else -- and he would be more ruthless in enforcing his rights to them than anyone else. Does our libertarian reject any and all government protection for his intellectual property?

    Size Matters

    Our democratic process is highly flawed today, but that's largely the result of corruption from corporate and billionaire money. And yet, libertarians celebrate the corrupting influence of big money. No wonder, since the same money is keeping their movement afloat and paying many of their salaries. But, aside from the naked self-interest, their position makes no sense. Why isn't a democratically elected government the ultimate demonstration of "spontaneous order"? Does our libertarian recognize that democracy is a form of marketplace?

    We're told that "big government" is bad for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is too large to be responsive. But if big governments are bad, why are big corporations so acceptable? What's more, these massive institutions have been conducting an assault on the individual and collective freedoms of the American people for decades. Why isn't it important to avoid the creation of monopolies, duopolies and syndicates that interfere with the free market's ability to function?

    Libertarians are right about one thing: Unchecked and undemocratic force is totalitarian. A totalitarian corporation, or a totalitarian government acting in concert with corporations, is at least as effective at suppressing the "spontaneous order" as a non-corporate totalitarian government. Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a threat to our freedoms?

    Extra Credit Questions

    Most libertarians prefer not to take their philosophy to its logical conclusions. While that may make them better human beings, it also shadows them with the taint of hypocrisy.

    Ayn Rand was an adamant opponent of good works, writing that "The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves." That raises another test for our libertarian: Does he think that Rand was off the mark on this one, or does he agree that historical figures like King and Gandhi were "parasites"?

    There's no reason not to form alliances with civil libertarians, or to shun them as human beings. Their erroneous thinking often arises from good impulses. But it is worth asking them one final question for our test.

    Libertarianism would have died out as a philosophy if it weren't for the funding that's been lavished on the movement by billionaires like Thiel and the Kochs and corporations like ExxonMobil. So our final question is: If you believe in the free market, why weren't you willing to accept as final the judgment against libertarianism rendered decades ago in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas?

    [Jan 22, 2019] Warning Neocons Joining Democrats to Support War by Martin Armstrong

    Jan 22, 2019 | www.investmentwatchblog.com

    I have previously written that all wars have been started by the Democrats with the single exception of the Iraq War under Dick Cheney and the Neocons . Now after Trump has pulled out of Syria, the Neocons are meeting with the Democrats to retake the White House and restore the effort to bring World War III to the Middle East. This is by no means something I care to have to write about. But there is a very dark cloud rising and all the people who hate Trump so much are clueless that he is actually trying to prevent these people from creating war. The hatred they are spreading about Russia is a deliberate attempt to paint them as evil to gain support for a war.

    One of the leading Neocons is Bill Kristol. I have previously written that back in 1976, Bill Kristol worked for Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan's United States Senate campaign. Later, in 1988, Kristol was the campaign manager for black Republican Alan Keyes's unsuccessful Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes. So Kristol was on both sides of the aisle.

    It was the Neocon Kristol wrote the War Over Iraq : Saddam's Tyranny And America's Mission with his co-author Lawrence F. Kaplan, which was published on February 1st, 2003, one month and change BEFORE the invasion to support Cheney. Today, Kristol is very much anti-Trump. He is a true Neocon and wants to see conservatives challenge Trump for the 2020 nomination. He argues that the conservatives/ Neocons need to seize control to reestablish the economic, national security and his brand of moral principles to take over the Republican Party. Kristol argues that Trump's support among the rank and file will diminish over time and they are really too stupid to know what is best for the country.

    The British Magazine, the Economist , call Kristol and crew the Never Trumpers. These Never Trumpers, claim to be Republicans but are really Neocons who have no problem watching your children die for their political experiments. They are Trump's critics from within the Republican Party and are vocal to advocate war after Trump pulled out of Syria. This group of critics is led by conservative pundits such as Max Boot, David Brooks, Bill Kristol, David Frum, and George Will. That may appear to be few in number, but they are only the tip of the iceberg.

    If you pick up the rug to look at the dirt hidden below, you will find also Lindsey Graham and Hillary Clinton. Both are the most reliable warmongers. Thank God John McCain is dead, he would have invaded Canada if you could argue there was one terrorist lurking somewhere enjoying the skying. Hillary, you might recall, repeatedly criticized Obama being too soft on military options. Both have come out and condemned Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria using the Terrorist Card as always.

    Americans, in general, have been historically isolationists. The Europeans who fled to America were adamantly against both World War I and World War II. Roosevelt had to go to Boston and lied to the people there to get support for sending arms to Britain. He swore no troops would EVER be sent to Europe. Most were Irish there who were insulted by the idea that their boys would go back and defend the British after what they did to Ireland. It has always been the politicians who have lied about each and every war to get involved from Johnson admitting the Vietnamese never fired on Americans at Tokin Gulf to weapons of mass destruction.

    The Neocons actually delude themselves thinking they can create democracies in the Middle East by force and this will end all wars. It is kind of like Napoleon who also claimed he could end all wars by conquering everything. This is the same nonsense behind the EU – eliminate the sovereignty of all member nations in Europe and then one government in Brussels will end all wars.

    Nevertheless, their policy to justify war is always the same – this will be the war to end all wars.

    [Jan 22, 2019] Banned by Facebook for Telling the Truth by Israel Shamir

    Jan 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

    There is not a single newspaper in the US that supports the views of the US President. Nobody defended him when he was accused , brazenly, in-your-face, of being a Russian agent. Nobody supported him when he called to bring the troops home from Syria. Nobody came to his aid when he mulled parting with NATO. There are tens of millions of men and women who voted for him, but he has only his Twitter account at his disposal.

    The media accuses Trump of paying too little attention to Israel's needs. Israel needs US troops in Syria and in Germany, US jets in Spain and Qatar, US ships in Italy and the Gulf. Israel needs the US to lead NATO to contain Russia. If Israel needs it, the US should provide, says Daniel Shapiro, the ex-ambassador. Not a single American newspaper, not a single US statesman cared to reply that President Trump had been elected by the American people to do what is needed for them, not for Israel

    [Jan 22, 2019] The Corrosion of Conservatism Why I Left the Right

    Notable quotes:
    "... Max Boot saw the light when it was too late. As an advocate for America's reckless wars after 9/11, he bears moral responsibility for the degrading of conservatism into a hate-filled cult. ..."
    "... Boot, and others like him, need to spend a few more years in purgatory for the mess that he put us in. ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    2N2Make4 2.0 out of 5 stars November 29, 2018

    Max's long overdue awakening

    I wanted to like this book and Max Boot but couldn't. I'm an 'old white guy' who grew up in an Eisenhower Republican family but switched allegiance to the Democrats during the civil rights battles in the 60s. I was hoping to read about someone who went through a similar transformation but Max's journey falls short.

    The book is part autobiographical: Max was born in Russia into a Jewish family in 1969. His family was allowed to leave the USSR and immigrate to the US in 1976 after pressure was placed on the Communist government by the United States. Max states that the Boots survived here in part on payments from Social Security for which Max says "Thank you, America" but ignores that this support was from a program that was developed by liberals and that has been regularly attacked by conservative Republicans.
    His mother was employed by the University of California, a state university, and Max received his undergraduate education at UC Berkeley. While he notes that it "cost next to nothing" at the time, he doesn't point out that his tuition was low thanks to subsidies that were paid by the taxes of the citizens of the State of California. The UC system is also a product of progressive thinking and is partly responsible for the economic growth in California. It's paid for itself many times over by developing a highly educated work force that supports the many high paying, high skilled jobs in the state.

    Max began his conversion to right wing politics at age 13 when he received a subscription to the New Republic magazine. I suppose you can't expect much critical thinking from an adolescent, but you would think that it would have taken less than 36 years to realize that conservative Republican values and policies weren't conducive to helping people who have needs similar to those of his family. Especially since Max seems certain that he is among the most intelligent people to walk among us.

    He states that he now sees that the messages of conservative Republicans were often "coded racial appeals – those dog whistles" and that liberals have recognized this for decades. He just didn't believe the liberals or bother to honestly evaluate their warnings.
    Max can't refrain from making the ad hominem attacks so prevalent among right wing pundits. Most of these are directed at Donald Trump, whom he describes as a "liar, an ignoramus, and a moral abomination". He also includes a chapter about the "Trump Toadies".

    Max "loved the attention and notoriety" his conservative views generated in his youth. He now recognizes that he has been a part of a movement that has been "morally and intellectually bankrupt".

    He also states that he no longer receives any pay from any conservative organization. Is this the reason that he is looking for another group to hook up with? Or is he worried that since he was not born in the United States his citizenship might be revoked and he might be sent back to Russia if the anti-Semitic members of the right wing get their way?

    So Max comes across as quite shallow even while showing off his extravagant vocabulary. While he was quite willing to accept the offerings of a liberal society, he's been unwilling to consider any responsibility to provide similar benefits to those who came after him.

    The book is well written and is a quick read. Ultimately it's one man's awakening to the awful realities of what conservative Republicanism has become. It doesn't really break any new ground for those who have been following politics for any length of time.

    In the epilogue Max lists his current beliefs and many of them are liberal. He states he is pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-environment, pro-gun control, pro-immigration including offering a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and he is also in favor of free speech. He and I might disagree on the details about how to reach some of these goals but in these areas we would be pointing at similar directions.

    But then Max attacks other progressive programs. For example, he states that single payer medical insurance – Medicare for all – would cost too much and cause insurance companies to go bankrupt or "find a new business model". Frankly if a company that makes its money by increasing the cost of our health care has to "find a new business model", I believe that would be a good thing for the health of our economy and of our people. As to the insurance company employees, since claims would still have to be processed I suspect that the people processing claims for the insurance companies would be able to make the switch to work for a government agency processing claims easily, so they should be ok.

    I hope that Max's rejection of conservative Republicanism is actually a genuine realization that ALL people are entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" including getting affordable medical care. If that's the case, I would be happy to welcome him to join those of us who vote for politicians who truly represent these values.

    But I am not convinced by this book that he has truly escaped the "corrosion of conservatism". Let's see if time will prove me wrong.

    skeptic

    Thank you for your review. Much appreciated...

    I would add that it is important to understand that Max Boot is not an intellectual, he is essentially a well-paid MIC lobbyist who pretends to be an intellectual. He does not have convictions per se, only the burning desire to belong to the winning and/or better paid party.

    The fact that he realized from which side the bread is buttered at early age just confirms what he always valued money more then ideas.

    Mark bennett 1.0 out of 5 stars October 25, 2018

    A Lyndon Johnson Democrat goes home

    The politics of the cold war created many political anomalies in the United States. One of the biggest was the migration of the cold war hawks after 1968 from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. For many of them, it was less about a broad vision of politics than narrow concerns over Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The alliance functioned up until the end of the cold war and the establishment of republican control in the Senate and House. Then it broke down completely during the Presidential Term of George W. Bush.

    After a decade out of power and as a hanger-on in three failed presidential campaigns, Max Boot has written this book which is sort of a combination of angry farewell letter and maoist self-criticism covering his entire political career to 2016 or so.

    The problems start at the beginning of the book. He defines "conservative" to mean to him "incremental policy making based on empirical study". His conservative beliefs, in contrast to what he considers "European" beliefs, rejects the nation-state and the idea of an American identity. The only limit to the "social safety net" in his mind is when that safety net begins to impact "individual initiative". He makes a special point of saying that what has united the country since the beginning is not belief in a nation, but rather belief in ideas or "self evident truths".

    The problem with all that is that his ideas of conservatism are in fact liberalism. Incremental government policy to incrementally perfect society is not a remotely conservative concept. Further, when you conclude as he does that American Soil has no meaning and American Blood shed has no value, you have to really wonder about how exactly he justifies his belief in foreign wars. Are Americans who have served in the military just suckers? or slaves in Pharaoh's army? Where is patriotism in his vision of what "conservative" means? Did people in wars die for "self evident truths" rather than the flag?

    He drifts further into liberal thought with his idea that there is more to the constitution than what is in the constitution. Rather than just the text and intent, Boot finds unwritten "norms" hidden within the constitution which he holds American Citizens should respect equally with the constitution. This is not a new idea. Its the old idea of the "living" constitution which only elite oracles can present to us its true hidden meaning.

    Then, like many people, he claims that his ideas are those of Barry Goldwater in 1960. But they are absolutely not. The ideas that Max Boot stands for are the ideas of Lyndon Johnson. The ideas of using the power of government for social engineering. The idea of fighting crusades for ideas overseas in places like Vietnam. A general rejection of any sort of morality or patriotism in politics. Worst of all, the tendency to see the United States of America as an intellectual crusade for justice in the world rather than as a country.

    A large portion of the book is given over to complaints about Trump. But the problem is that Max Boot's ideas and his idea of what a conservative is go far beyond just being for or against Trump. In a very real sense, he represents the discredited politics of George W. Bush who have no support among any party and only tend to have followers in places like the pages of "The Atlantic". The question isn't really what happened to the republican party, but more how someone with the outright liberal political worldview of someone like Max Boot ever thought that those ideas are what conservative meant. He tries to attach himself to men of the past like Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan. But he fails to realize that he would not fit in with the politics of any of those man. Perhaps he would have best fit with the old Rockefeller Republicans but to me even that is far from certain.

    Max Boot has in the past been critical of Ronald Reagan's decision not to fight a war in Lebanon in the 1980s associating it with American "weakness" that led to 9/11. He blamed Eisenhower's decision not to support the British/French invasion of Egypt in 1956 as starting a "pattern of weakness" in America's dealing with the middle east which was not corrected until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its equally doubtful that Max Boot would have supported the ideas of Barry Goldwater over those of Lyndon Johnson.

    The bulk of the book him talking about his favorite topic: himself. He proves once again that he isn't any sort of intellectual or man of ideas. He complains about trump. He complains about various republicans who he clearly expected to follow him out of the republican party but did not.

    There are some incredible claims in the book such as claiming that the welfare state is what ensures the success of free market. He just loves Black Lives Matter and suddenly after a long career, race is suddenly something he cars about while the police are now the bad guys. He also discovered after the election of Trump that sexism is a problem in America. He can't really explain why he didn't care about these issues for decades before Trump and now cares about deeply after Trump. I don't think he really cares about much of anything other than boots on the ground in the middle east or preparing for war with China.

    He ends the book with a conclusion titled "the vital center". The title is of course a shout-out to old school liberal (and kennedy henchmen) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. In it, he tells us that he is "socially liberal", He believes in fiscal responsibility but not if it involves cutting the welfare state & along those lines supports "Simpson Bowles" which called for fixing the deficit with higher taxes and a "public option" for health insurance. He supports the welfare state because to him its the basis for the free market. He supports gun control. He wants more immigration to deal with our "labor shortage". He sees China and Russia as defense threats along with a list of other countries.

    He concludes with a "moderate" (ironic of course) call for everyone to vote every single republican out of office until Trump is out of office or removed as president. And while he makes it (finally) clear at the end that he just loved Hillary Clinton and her brand of politics, he could never become a democrat because of the threat of bernie sanders. His vision is a party of what he calls "centerists" which would seemingly favor a policy of expanding the welfare state while fighting wars overseas to save the world. But Max Boot's politics don't represent the center of anything. Whatever the bad of Trump, Max Boot represents something just as bad or worse.

    David L. Parnell 1.0 out of 5 stars November 17, 2018

    Max Boot's recognition of racism in the GOP is late...decades late...

    Corrosion is a slow process but early in the 1960's the GOP sucked almost all of the racists out of the Democratic Party right into the Republican Party just to elect Richard Nixon with the GOP "Southern Strategy." Men like the followers of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms in the rural south rushed to vote for the "Sanitary Republican Party."

    Sanitary was old Jim Crow code for "whites only." If any business identified itself with "sanitary" in its name, that was a warning for "whites only."

    Strom Thurmond had earlier literally executed the longest filibuster in Congressional history to oppose a vote on a civil rights legislation promoted by Democrats.

    Then Ronald Reagan and the George Bush used Lee Atwater and Richard Quinn (a South Carolina leader of the neo-Confederacy movement) to craft overt racist strategies, narratives, and TV advertisements. The Southern Partisan was a publication aimed at legitimating racism and opposition to civil rights for blacks. This block of GOP consultants used the Southern Partisan publication to create a core database of neo-Confederacy racists which was so reliably Republican that both John McCain and George W. Bush used Richard Quinn's backing in their election efforts.

    Around 1981 Clemson University founded the "Strom Thurmond Institute" to co-opt this public university to historically immortalize the papers and sentiments of Strom Thurmond in a revisionist manner.

    Another product of Richard Quinn was young Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who grew up working in his parent's business in Central South Carolina, the "Sanitary Cafe," a bar, grill, and pool hall establishment. Lindsey Graham was mentored into South Carolina politics by Richard Quinn who supplied Graham with a heroic hard knocks narrative which never mentioned the neo-Confederacy roots of both men. Now if you review the Congressional Record you see Lindsey Graham's voting record follows a Republican Southern Strategy which Nixon, Reagan, George Bush, Strom Thurmond, and Jesse Helms would have been proud of. These racist political narratives can be mapped to every Republican strategist and their GOP candidate product. Max Boot ignores this historical behavior infused into the Republican Party since before 1963.

    Donald Trump is only different in that he has Tweeted these sentiments ad nauseam and publicly voiced them expressly in his political appearances and news conferences. If you are honest, the "N" word has been "whispered" (Jim DeMint) as an "IN" word in secret congregations of Republicans for decades. Lindsey Graham has created a consistent attempt at humor where he frequently quips "white man" jokes while supporting voter suppression and gerrymandering by his party.

    Max Boot is correct that this racism has moved from the backrooms under the cover of Donald Trump, but, to deny that this these sentiments have not been part of the Republican infrastructure for decades is rude hypocrisy. As you read this book, to load this burden on Donald Trump alone is to deny history and the public record. Donald Trump merely harnessed this latent DNA of the Republican party while masterfully marketing himself as a new Republican unbound by swamp politics (a political breed which does not exist in the Republican Party.) Look at Ben Sasse, he writes as a centrist yet votes as a Trump man. Look at Lindsey Graham's descriptions of Trump in 2016 and now listen to his praise of Trump today. Yet, Max Boot sees this as a recent development in the Republican Party when it has been part of the GOP DNA which has produced a racist voting record as each generation of Republicans is sworn in.

    Joseph Hawkins 1.0 out of 5 stars October 25, 2018

    Disingenuous

    Max Boot saw the light when it was too late. As an advocate for America's reckless wars after 9/11, he bears moral responsibility for the degrading of conservatism into a hate-filled cult.

    A month after 9/11, he called for the invasion of Iraq. Did he not think that almost two decades of continuous war fighting would not radicalize the American populace? He's making amends by writing a book, for which he probably received a hefty advance and will make money off of from royalties. Should donate the proceeds to charity.

    Amazon Customer 1.0 out of 5 stars Marx, Lenin and Gramsci come Alive! November 7, 2018

    Max Boot is another smug, arrogant, self righteous, Gramscian, ruling class communist, that's trying convince the "Base" that he knows what's best for them; all while devowing the little bit of wealth they might have left to live on. Why?

    Because the "Base" are the slaves of the "Superstructure" ruling class. Remember, as Stalin put it, "the middle class is the enemy" to the socialist. America is on slow-drip to Totalitarianism. And Max Boot is just one more in the camp on the transition.

    BB876 1.0 out of 5 stars October 26, 2018

    Nothing New

    I didn't feel this book offered anything new that nearly every other pundit on TV talks about 24/7 regarding "leaving the right"

    txtxyeha 2.0 out of 5 stars November 11, 2018

    Please give me a check to cash

    My translation of this book, free of charge.

    "Hi, I'm a bonafide conservative and here are the ways Trump has embarrassed The Cause as defined by Ronald Reagan. Since I refuse to kiss Trump's ring, I still gotta eat so I'm going to grandly announce that I have left the Republican Party in the form of this book and hope you will give me a check to cash. Thank you."

    I know that's a harsh assessment of a book that I agree with 98% of what's written, Mr. Boot offers no insight. Not once did I think, "Ah, good point. I didn't think of that."

    It's simply a rehashing of Mr. Trump's ridiculous gaffs (hell, I could have done that, there are sooo many to choose from) and at the very end a very lame path out of this quagmire (spoiler alert: we just need someone else as charismatic as Trump that's not [insert negative adjectives here] because the Republicans have proven they will follow ANYBODY over a cliff).

    I finished this book (though skipped many chapters because it was simply rehashing Trump's train wrecks) and said, "That's all you got? [sigh of resignation]"

    Jensen Cross Integrated Solutions 1.0 out of 5 stars December 22, 2018

    Conflicted words by a mockingbird media asset

    I never searched this book on Amazon, however, I did write a tweet about Max Boot, so I guess Twitter shares with Amazon. To the review, however -- this is written by a person who writes that Trump has failed us by leaving troops in war, and just 6 months later, writes an article that totally contradicts the earlier statement, stating that Trump can never do anything right because he is pulling troops out of war. Which is it? I would not line a birdcage with this garbage.

    Strike Me Down Now! 1.0 out of 5 stars December 16, 2018

    Boot helped break it and now he wants to blame Trump

    Trump is just a symptom; an easy scapegoat because he's a twit. Boot helped create and perpetuate the monster that the GOP became. Boot, and others like him, need to spend a few more years in purgatory for the mess that he put us in.

    james c. 2.0 out of 5 stars October 9, 2018

    Self serving title

    Unfortunately the author is venting his personal dislike of the current administration without addressing the previous administrations attempt to divide the country by any means possibly and subsequently putting the American people into a politically charged environment that the author is trying to capitalize on.

    [Jan 22, 2019] Washington Monthly Neocons Paved the Way for Trump. Finally, One Admits It

    So neoconservatives return to the Democratic Party in which they were hatched. When the party became the second War Partty in Washington. nice...
    Notable quotes:
    "... Boot's dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony, he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks "displayed my precocity, my attachment to Israel, a country I had not yet visited -- and my questionable judgment, since the invasion would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire." ..."
    "... his true aspiration was to become an editor for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side economics and a hawkish foreign policy. ..."
    "... Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy. ..."
    "... The Corrosion of Conservatism ..."
    "... A Choice Not an Echo ..."
    "... In his view, "[t]he rise of Palin and now Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger." Boot himself warned against the rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | washingtonmonthly.com

    The NeverTrumpers may have failed to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, but he has been a godsend for their public reputations. Instead of remaining in the wilderness, the neoconservatives who make up the bulk of the NeverTrump movement have fitfully begun to move back toward, or at least flirt with, the Democratic Party, which is where the original neocon journey began. Among some of their longtime detractors, it's creating a vertiginous sensation. James Wolcott, for example, recently observed in Vanity Fair , "One of the chewier ironies of the Trump interregnum is finding that I'm following former foes on Twitter and elsewhere that I once mocked, reviled, and cast into outer darkness during the Bush presidency, especially after the invasion of Iraq."

    Coot Cover

    The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left The Right by Max Boot

    Now that the neocons have, in a manner of speaking, been born again, they are once more crusading for regime change against an authoritarian foe, only this time on the home front. Trump, not Saddam Hussein, is the main object of their ire, and they are earning quite a hearing in mainstream liberal outlets. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum regularly appear in the Atlantic . Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss have decamped from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times . William Kristol and Jennifer Rubin are regulars on MSNBC.

    And then there is Max Boot, a columnist for the Washington Post and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Unlike Kristol or Stephens, Boot's breach with the Republican Party is complete. He does not believe that the party can be redeemed, and he isn't sure that he should call himself a conservative anymore. The day after the 2016 election, after a lifetime of backing the GOP, he re-registered as an independent. In August, he posted on Twitter a screenshot of a fundraising pitch that read, "Hey, this is Newt Gingrich. President Trump needs your help to elect more Republicans in 2018. Will you make a 4X matched donation today?," with this accompanying text: "Hey, this is Max Boot. Hell no." His sallies have earned him brickbats from the right; the pro-Trump website American Greatness has branded him a "soulless, craven opportunist."

    Boot's defection from conservative orthodoxy carries a particular sting because he was once the most explicit exponent of American greatness. After 9/11, he endorsed American imperialism in a Weekly Standard cover story. The benighted countries of the Middle East, he announced, "cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." His name became a synonym for neocon warmonger, and he went on to advise the George W. Bush administration and presidential aspirants such as Senator Marco Rubio.

    In the past two years, however, Boot has not merely parted with the conservative stances that he previously espoused, but has been actively assailing them, whether the issue is race, gun control, or the Iraq War. Indeed, as a columnist for the Washington Post , Boot has relentlessly attacked Trump and his enablers. "If there has been an outcry against Trump's virulent racism from the right, I must have missed it," he wrote in August. "The only conservatives who are willing to regularly call out Trump's bigotry are those of us who are #NeverTrumpers -- and, as I constantly hear online, we aren't 'real' conservatives because we do not worship at the orange altar."

    Now, in The Corrosion of Conservatism , Boot charts his ideological odyssey. He deftly recounts his early attraction to the conservative cause and his revulsion at its embrace of Trump. For Boot, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union as a child, the 2016 election felt like back to the future. As Trump sailed toward the Republican nomination, Boot's Twitter account and email began to fill up with anti-Semitic, pro-Trump messages. He became increasingly alienated from the conservatives who ended up trying to curry favor with Trump, ranging from Rubio to Paul Ryan. He had naively expected them to repudiate Trump's authoritarianism. When they didn't, he felt betrayed.

    For Boot, it was personal. Joining the conservative movement had been part of coming to America. It gave a young immigrant from Moscow a sense of identity and mission. In contrast to Kristol, who has already begun plotting to stymie Trump in the 2020 primaries, or Frum, who has sought to chart the ideological course of the GOP in books like Dead Right , Boot was never a Republican operative. He isn't trying to rescue the GOP to restore the old order. Instead, he is a historian who has always relished being an intellectual dissident. His basic temperament hasn't changed at all, which is why he may be the ultimate neocon.

    The value of Boot's book does not rest in any original political analysis. Instead, he explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative madrassa. In describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide of the right.

    Now it's the Republican Party, not the left, that is in his sights. He understands that he missed the real danger to freedom that was right in front of his nose: a party that flirted with white nationalism, cozied up to Russian autocracy, and toppled into obsessive conspiracy mongering. And he is haunted by a question: "Did I somehow contribute to the rise of this dark force in American life with my advocacy for conservatism?"

    Unlike previous accounts of breaking with the right, such as Garry Wills's Confessions of a Conservative , the value of Boot's book does not rest in any original political analysis. Instead, he explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative madrassa. In describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide of the right, offering fascinating insights into the psychology of a true believer. His fervor for explaining why the right is wrong brings to mind Arthur Koestler's remark in The God That Failed : "When all is said, we ex-communists are the only people on your side who know what it's all about."

    B oot, who was born in 1969 in Moscow, had firsthand experience with communism and was deeply shaped by the persecution of Soviet Jews. His parents divorced when he was two, but both later immigrated to America. Boot's father, Alexander, was a dissident who distributed samizdat and managed to get out in 1973. His mother emigrated with Max in 1976 and then taught Russian in California.

    Boot makes it clear that his enthusiasm for his father -- a self-described monarchist who now lives in England and devotes his time to denouncing atheism and the welfare state -- is quite constrained. But Alexander's gift of a National Review subscription to Max when he was thirteen left a lasting imprint. The younger Boot absorbed the worldview of its writers, ranging from the reactionary Austrian aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn to William F. Buckley Jr. himself. Boot also read up on the standard conservative texts: Whittaker Chambers's Witness , F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom , and Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind . Ronald Reagan, who inveighed against the "evil empire" that Max and his parents had fled, was Boot's contemporary hero. The liberals who preached détente with the Soviet Union, or even accommodation, were the new appeasers.

    Boot's dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony, he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks "displayed my precocity, my attachment to Israel, a country I had not yet visited -- and my questionable judgment, since the invasion would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire."

    As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Boot played the part of adversary, battling against the campus left. Upon graduation, he went to work at the Christian Science Monitor . But his true aspiration was to become an editor for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side economics and a hawkish foreign policy.

    Boot says that in 1994 he received a call that Bartley wanted to meet with him. He reckoned that Bartley would want to talk about his political philosophy. Instead, Bartley mentioned that he had two positions open, one for an editorial writer on economic issues, another as an assistant op-ed writer. Boot explained that he knew nothing about economics. This pleased Bartley. "I later learned," Boot writes, "that he liked to take writers who did not know much about the subject and train them in his way of thinking."

    In the end, Boot took the latter position, and quickly plunged into the social whirl of the cloistered New York conservative world. He attended dinners at the Manhattan Institute and went to the monthly "Monday Meeting," where conservative activists promoted everything from the gold standard to Central Park's horse-drawn carriages. He says he became a "made man" in 2007 when he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, which was established by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and is bestowed annually on a writer who exhibits a "love of country and its democratic institutions" and "bears witness to the evils of totalitarianism."

    B ut Boot had contrarian instincts from the outset at the Journal . He once invited a Princeton professor named Paul Krugman to write an op-ed critical of supply-side economics, which almost prompted Bartley to fire him. Needless to say, it never ran. "This was an early indication," Boot writes, "that groupthink could be just as tenacious on the right as on the left." Boot also confesses that he found it difficult to decipher the baroque conspiracy theories that Bartley and his acolytes concocted about Bill and Hillary Clinton involving Whitewater, the airport in Mena, Arkansas, and the death of Vince Foster. "I thought he was a deeply flawed man," Boot says of Clinton, "but I appreciated the achievements of his presidency." But Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy.

    One of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot's acknowledgment that Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. "There is no doubt that there has always been a dark underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to ignore," he writes. For all the political right's hosannas for Buckley, he established the revanchist conservatism that views compromise, either at home or abroad, as tantamount to treason. It's important to remember that Buckley began his career by supporting the iniquitous Joseph McCarthy -- a sentiment he never repudiated -- and that he viewed Dwight Eisenhower as a dangerous establishment Republican who refused to liberate eastern Europe militarily and failed to roll back the New Deal. Nor was this all. Buckley also opposed the civil rights movement and for decades supported the apartheid regime in South Africa. Even as they decried the Soviet Union and China for human rights violations, Buckley and other conservatives were remorseless apologists for one of the most odious regimes in the world.

    After McCarthy's demise, the GOP remained addicted to conspiracy mongering. Boot usefully reminds us that Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 best-selling tract A Choice Not an Echo suggested that hidden kingmakers were preventing Republican presidential candidates from winning. "It wasn't any accident," she claimed. "It was planned that way" by New York financiers who supported "a continuation of the Roosevelt–Harry Dexter White–Averell Harriman–Dean Acheson–Dean Rusk policy of aiding and abetting Red Russia and her satellites." The failure to distinguish between White, who was a Soviet agent, and Acheson, who was not, wasn't any accident, either. The message was that egghead liberals, whatever they might say about battling communism, were, at bottom, traitors.

    One of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot's acknowledgment that Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. "There is no doubt that there has always been a dark underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to ignore," he writes.

    The populist style often played a key role in helping Republican candidates win elections. But Boot distinguishes between a populist pose and actual populism. For him, the breaking point began with Sarah Palin and ended with Trump. In his view, "[t]he rise of Palin and now Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger." Boot himself warned against the rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal column in which he maintained that the GOP should not " 'Rush' to embrace talk show democracy." He now denounces Fox News and figures like Dinesh D'Souza and Ann Coulter for peddling conspiracy theories on Trump's behalf.

    Perhaps the most notable part of Boot's book is his willingness to face up to the fiasco that was the Iraq War. He notes that for years he felt defensive about his support for it and was too stubborn to cede any ground to his critics. "It is not nearly as easy to remake a foreign land by force as I had naively imagined in 2003," he writes. And he recognizes that the catastrophic policies he espoused helped create the terrain for Trump to rumble to victory. In listening to Trump's national security advisor, John Bolton, Boot says that he recognizes "my callow, earlier self. Bolton, a conservative firebrand since his days as a student at Yale University in the early 1970s, is whom I used to be."

    Boot thus differs from the many other NeverTrumpers who often fail to recognize that belligerent policies have led to disaster at home as well as abroad. He issues a scorching indictment of the GOP: "I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and devastating defeats. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be any chance to build a reasonable center-right political party out of the ashes." Indeed, he concludes, "having escaped the corrosion of conservatism, I am a political Ronin, and will swear allegiance to no master in the future. I will fight for my principles wherever they may lead me."

    There's a whiff of grandiosity in this declaration. Like Whittaker Chambers, who pioneered the breaking-ranks genre in Witness , Boot takes an apocalyptic view of politics. But his readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable. If it ends up prompting him to sign up as a Democrat, then his neocon journey will have come full circle.

    [Jan 22, 2019] They're back Here's how the neocons are regaining power in Trump's America – Alternet.org

    Notable quotes:
    "... As Stephen Wertheim argues in The New York Review of Books , the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump's America, reasserting themselves within GOP and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the "neo-neoconservatives" or "post-neoconservatives," as he's dubbed them. ..."
    "... "For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance," he observes. "Trump elevated 'globalism' from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics." ..."
    "... Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering foreign policy advice to the party's leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for American Progress are partnering with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home within the Democratic Party? Wertheim's conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting. ..."
    "... "What best explains centrist Democrats' rapprochement with neoconservatives isn't an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style," he writes. "Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats' fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history." ..."
    Jan 22, 2019 | www.alternet.org

    In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq...

    In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq, The Weekly Standard released its final issue . Two years removed from Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election, one might be forgiven for concluding the publication's demise sounded the final death knell of neoconservatism -- an ideology that has been soundly defeated at the polls and appears to lack even a constituency, the ubiquity of Bill Kristol on cable news notwithstanding.

    If only. As Stephen Wertheim argues in The New York Review of Books , the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump's America, reasserting themselves within GOP and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the "neo-neoconservatives" or "post-neoconservatives," as he's dubbed them.

    "Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent organs of opinion," Wertheim writes. "The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post."

    In his essay, Wertheim traces the history of the movement from World War II through the Cold War and up to 9/11, which allowed Kristol and Commentary's Norman Podhoretz, among others, to forge an existential threat in the form of "Islamofascism." Indeed, neoconservatism draws from the philosophical tradition of Leo Strauss, who wrote in the "The City and Man" that "the crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose." For the Straussians and their intellectual descendants, military conflict offered that sense of purpose, whether the enemy was Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Al-Qaeda.

    Trump's presidency has proved a clarifying moment. "[He] has forced neoconservatives to decide, for the first time, whether they are more against 'totalitarianism' or 'globalism,'" continues Wertheim. "If anti-totalitarians take Trump to be perverting what they hold dear, anti-globalist neocons have found in Trump a kindred spirit and vehicle for power. Yet, even as they are fracturing, neocons are flourishing. They have bypassed the political wilderness and vaulted themselves to the vanguard on either side of the Trump divide."

    Within Trump's cabinet, neoconservatism remains represented by national security adviser John Bolton, who has served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan. Wertheim contends that while right-wing non-interventionism is typically attributed to paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, neoconservatives have also historically taken aim at global institutions, if not globalism itself. Few have embodied this notion more than Bolton, who has made a career of bashing both the United Nations and its Security Council. During the Obama administration, Wertheim notes, he regularly sounded the alarm that "leftists like Obama were attempting to give away American sovereignty, bit by bit, to international bodies."

    "For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance," he observes. "Trump elevated 'globalism' from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics."

    Which brings us to neoconservatives' suddenly lofty perch outside of the Trump administration. For Republican apostates like Jennifer Rubin, David Frum and Max Boot, Wertheim contends, the president has offered the "next best thing" to a foreign dictator: "an enemy within." His personal degeneracy and unabashed corruption have allowed them to "reclaim their preferred role as the moral truth-tellers in America."

    "More surprising, perhaps, is that Democrats and outlets of the anti-Trump resistance have welcomed these neocons into their fold," Wertheim observes. "Boot, Kristol, Rubin, and former advisers of George W. Bush and Senator John McCain appear daily on MSNBC to excoriate Trump and Trumpism. David Frum, who coined the 'axis of evil' as George W. Bush's speechwriter, earns resistance retweets by warning of 'this hour of liberal peril' in The Atlantic. In 2017, The New York Times hired Bret Stephens from The Wall Street Journal in an effort to 'broaden the range of Times debate about consequential questions,' a curious rationale given that Stephens represented just the kind of Never Trump pundit repudiated by GOP voters and did nothing to change the op-ed page's lack of a single Trump-supporting columnist."

    Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering foreign policy advice to the party's leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for American Progress are partnering with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home within the Democratic Party? Wertheim's conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting.

    "What best explains centrist Democrats' rapprochement with neoconservatives isn't an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style," he writes. "Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats' fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history."

    Read Wertheim's essay at The New York Review of Books .

    [Jan 22, 2019] At least we get technology development, an industrial base and decent manufacturing jobs out of DoD

    Jan 22, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    S Brennan , Jan 21, 2019 6:13:14 PM | link

    The CIA acts like their shit doesn't stink, "we can't tell you about our successes..ha ha ha" they say.

    Nor can the CIA tell you that they are spending 1/5 what the DoD spends to create shit-holes across the globe...and supreme ignorance in the world's oldest Democracy. Nope, the CIA man/woman always knows best..."if you only knew what I knew [but can't tell you] you'd realize we really are the smartest in the room" CIA apparatchiks are often known to say.

    At least we get technology development, an industrial base and decent manufacturing jobs out of DoD, but with the wanton waste at CIA all we get, for the hundreds of billions spent every year, is a world-wide wasteland of shit-holes and...grotesque stream of misinformation that weakens the country with every passing year.

    [Jan 22, 2019] The National Security Agency Is A Criminal Organization by Paul Craig Roberts

    Notable quotes:
    "... As Binney had no documents to give to the media, blowing the whistle had no consequence for NSA. This is the reason that Snowden released the documents that proved NSA to be violating both law and the Constitution, but the corrupt US media focused blame on Snowden as a "traitor" and not on NSA for its violations. ..."
    "... Whistleblowers are protected by federal law. Regardless, the corrupt US government tried to prosecute Binney for speaking out, but as he had taken no classified document, a case could not be fabricated against him. ..."
    "... Binney blames the NSA's law-breaking on Dick "Darth" Cheney. He says NSA's violations of law and Constitution are so extreme that they would have to have been cleared at the top of the government. ..."
    Jan 17, 2019 | www.unz.com
    Paul Craig Roberts

    Years before Edward Snowden provided documented proof that the National Security Agency was really a national insecurity agency as it was violating law and the US Constitution and spying indiscriminately on American citizens, William Binney, who designed and developed the NSA spy program revealed the illegal and unconstitutional spying.

    Binney turned whistleblower, because NSA was using the program to spy on Americans. As Binney was well known to the US Congress, he did not think he needed any NSA document to make his case. But what he found out was

    "Congress would never hear me because then they'd lose plausible deniability. That was really their key. They needed to have plausible deniability so they can continue this massive spying program because it gave them power over everybody in the world.

    Even the members of Congress had power against others [in Congress]; they had power on judges on the Supreme Court, the federal judges, all of them. That's why they're so afraid. Everybody's afraid because all this data that's about them, the central agencies  --  the intelligence agencies  --  they have it. And that's why Senator Schumer warned President Trump earlier, a few months ago, that he shouldn't attack the intelligence community because they've got six ways to Sunday to come at you. That's because it's like J. Edgar Hoover on super steroids. . . . it's leverage against every member of parliament and every government in the world."

    To prevent whistle-blowing, NSA has "a program now called 'see something, say something' about your fellow workers. That's what the Stasi did. That's why I call [NSA] the new New Stasi Agency. They're picking up all the techniques from the Stasi and the KGB and the Gestapo and the SS. They just aren't getting violent yet that we know of  --  internally in the US, outside is another story."

    As Binney had no documents to give to the media, blowing the whistle had no consequence for NSA. This is the reason that Snowden released the documents that proved NSA to be violating both law and the Constitution, but the corrupt US media focused blame on Snowden as a "traitor" and not on NSA for its violations.

    Whistleblowers are protected by federal law. Regardless, the corrupt US government tried to prosecute Binney for speaking out, but as he had taken no classified document, a case could not be fabricated against him.

    Binney blames the NSA's law-breaking on Dick "Darth" Cheney. He says NSA's violations of law and Constitution are so extreme that they would have to have been cleared at the top of the government.

    Binney describes the spy network, explains that it was supposed to operate only against foreign enemies, and that using it for universal spying so overloads the system with data that the system fails to discover many terrorist activities. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50932.htm

    Apparently, the National Security Agency values being able to blackmail citizens and members of government at home and abroad more than preventing terrorist attacks.

    Unfortunately for Americans, there are many Americans who blindly trust the government and provide the means, the misuse of which is used to enslave us. A large percentage of the work in science and technology serves not to free people but to enslave them. By now there is no excuse for scientists and engineers not to know this. Yet they persist in their construction of the means to destroy liberty.

    [Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

    Highly recommended!
    Jan 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Glenn Greenwald via The Intercept,

    Buzzfeed was once notorious for traffic-generating "listicles" , but has since become an impressive outlet for deep investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story that, like so many others of its kind, blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the extremely rare step to label its key claims "inaccurate."

    But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news, the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets (particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end with (dis)honorable mention status.

    Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories. That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors" went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the same agenda and script:

    10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)

    On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false :

    9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)

    On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S. electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:

    8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)

    On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."

    Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note in memory appended to the top of the article (but not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the media ecosystem):

    7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)

    On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network.

    6. Russia Attacked U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)

    On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea what to make of it.

    But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds" the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean male cricket during mating season.

    5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)

    4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)

    On November 27, 2018, the Guardian published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators exploded.

    Seven weeks later, no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged; the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:

    3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)

    On July 27, 2018, CNN published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that "contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however, to this date has refused to do either:

    2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)

    1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)

    The morning of December 9, 2017, launched one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public. Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC videos here ).

    There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before. Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all got the date of the email wrong.

    To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple, independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating – and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.

    Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously is:

    Dishonorable Mention:

    Special mention:

    As I've said many times, the U.S. media has become quite adept at expressing extreme indignation when people criticize them; when politicians conclude that it is advantageous to turn the U.S. media into their main adversary; and when people turn to "fake news" sites.

    If, however, they were willing to devote just a small fraction of that energy to examining their own conduct, perhaps they would develop the tools necessary to combat those problems instead of just denouncing their critics and angrily demanding that politicians and news consumers accord them the respect to which they believe they are entitled.

    [Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

    Highly recommended!
    Jan 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Glenn Greenwald via The Intercept,

    Buzzfeed was once notorious for traffic-generating "listicles" , but has since become an impressive outlet for deep investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story that, like so many others of its kind, blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the extremely rare step to label its key claims "inaccurate."

    But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news, the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets (particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end with (dis)honorable mention status.

    Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories. That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors" went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the same agenda and script:

    10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)

    On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false :

    9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)

    On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S. electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:

    8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)

    On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being "routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."

    Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note in memory appended to the top of the article (but not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the media ecosystem):

    7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)

    On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network.

    6. Russia Attacked U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)

    On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea what to make of it.

    But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds" the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean male cricket during mating season.

    5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)

    4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)

    On November 27, 2018, the Guardian published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators exploded.

    Seven weeks later, no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged; the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:

    3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)

    On July 27, 2018, CNN published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that "contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however, to this date has refused to do either:

    2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)

    1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)

    The morning of December 9, 2017, launched one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public. Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC videos here ).

    There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before. Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all got the date of the email wrong.

    To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple, independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating – and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.

    Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously is:

    Dishonorable Mention:

    Special mention:

    As I've said many times, the U.S. media has become quite adept at expressing extreme indignation when people criticize them; when politicians conclude that it is advantageous to turn the U.S. media into their main adversary; and when people turn to "fake news" sites.

    If, however, they were willing to devote just a small fraction of that energy to examining their own conduct, perhaps they would develop the tools necessary to combat those problems instead of just denouncing their critics and angrily demanding that politicians and news consumers accord them the respect to which they believe they are entitled.

    [Jan 21, 2019] Control of money and control of information are two keys to the making other states vassals. The American military and CIA have provided most of the overt and covert 'muscle' for that control system.political power

    Jan 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Robert Snefjella , says: January 18, 2019 at 4:57 pm GMT

    The MSM and its allies in the controlled alternative media, and the global private-interest financial, investment and banking system, are a tag-team, indispensable to each other. Control of money and control of information. The first narrowly concentrates wealth and thus power and influence. The second through agenda-driven selection, lies, censorship, spin, misdirection and so on – disinformation – controls people's sense of what is real and possible, thus dis-empowering them.

    The American military and CIA have provided most of the overt and covert 'muscle' for that control system.

    The combined effort of narrowly controlled and narrowly advantaging globe straddling finance, media, and muscle has facilitated the development of a near global Empire. In common with traditional Empires this new Empire had totalitarian ambitions: but since its reach was global, this is really a first attempt at global totalitarian control.

    Russia under Putin – leaving aside China – has developed enough strength to attempt alternative modes of communication and finance and development, not as adjuncts or subordinates to the Empire's efforts in those regards. And their military is antidote and opposition to the totalitarian project.

    The forgoing is pretty obvious stuff, but I think that the Saker's concluding paragraph provides a limiting summary of how the issue can play out.

    "But fundamentally the Russian people need to decide. Do they really want to live in a
    western-style capitalist society (with all the russophobic politics and the adoption
    of the terminally degenerate "culture" such a choice implies), or do they want a
    "social society" (to use Putin's own words) – meaning a society in which social and economic
    justice and the good of the country are placed above corporate and personal profits.

    You could say that this is a battle of greed vs ethics."

    This is a simplistic way of looking at the choices available. We are all caught up in transitional culture processes, no matter where we live. The conjunction of the cornucopia of new technology and unprecedented environmental and social challenges is everywhere at play, leading who knows where?

    What the Russian people have been given, and this is near singular on Earth, is a protected and enhanced opportunity of developing a culture in which honest national discourse is a predominant feature. This is in complete contrast to the predominant 'fake news' system of discourse control that is in place in so many countries. And full and honest discourse will create its own original cultural developments.

    The Russian adoption of more honest discourse is already having global influence. An example is Russia Today, which far from perfect and all that, still provides an enormous advance over the extremely controlled western mass media, and a powerful foe to 'fake news'.

    Perhaps the most visible exemplar of rationale discourse has been Putin himself, with for example his marathon annual Q and A with the Russian people, or his articulate well considered sallies on many issues

    And with that – if Russia can use unfettered reason writ large as a prime ingredient of cultural and political development, as a basic developmental 'steering tool' – then the simple dichotomy of "western-style capitalist society" vs "a society in which social and economic justice and the good of the country are placed above corporate and personal profits" , as much as I'm sympathetic to the latter, seems to me to be a limiting way of expressing the range of potential beneficent possibilities.

    [Jan 21, 2019] Anti-Trump Frenzy Threatens to End Superpower Diplomacy by Stephen F. Cohen

    The problem is not Russia; the problem is the crisis of neoliberalism in the USA. And related legitimization of neoliberal elite, which now Deep State is trying ot patch with anti-Russian hysteria
    Notable quotes:
    "... That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the "secrecy of presidential private meetings has been the rule, not the exception." He continues, "There's nothing unusual about withholding information from the bureaucracy about the president's private meetings with foreign leaders . Sometimes they would dictate a memo afterward, sometimes not." Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US "bureaucracy," sometimes met privately with Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev's translator was present. ..."
    Jan 16, 2019 | www.thenation.com

    Baseless Russiagate allegations continue to risk war with Russia. Anti-Trump Frenzy Threatens to End Superpower Diplomacy | The Nation The New Year has brought a torrent of ever-more-frenzied allegations that President Donald Trump has long had a conspiratorial relationship -- why mince words and call it "collusion"? -- with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.

    Why the frenzy now? Perhaps because Russiagate promoters in high places are concerned that special counsel Robert Mueller will not produce the hoped-for "bombshell" to end Trump's presidency. Certainly, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt seems worried, demanding, "The president must go," his drop line exhorting, "What are we waiting for?" (In some countries, articles like his, and there are very many, would be read as calling for a coup.) Perhaps to incite Democrats who have now taken control of House investigative committees. Perhaps simply because Russiagate has become a political-media cult that no facts, or any lack of evidence, can dissuade or diminish.

    And there is no new credible evidence, preposterous claims notwithstanding. One of The New York Times ' own recent "bombshells," published on January 12, reported, for example, that in spring 2017, FBI officials "began investigating whether [President Trump] had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests." None of the three reporters bothered to point out that those "agents and officials" almost certainly included ones later reprimanded and retired by the FBI itself for their political biases. (As usual, the Times buried its self-protective disclaimer deep in the story: "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.")

    Whatever the explanation, the heightened frenzy is unmistakable, leading the "news" almost daily in the synergistic print and cable media outlets that have zealously promoted Russiagate for more than two years, in particular the Times , The Washington Post , MSNBC, CNN, and their kindred outlets. They have plenty of eager enablers, including the once-distinguished Strobe Talbott, President Bill Clinton's top adviser on Russia and until recently president of the Brookings Institution. According to Talbott , "We already know that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker . Trump has been colluding with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency." In fact, we do not "know" any of this. These remain merely widely disseminated suspicions and allegations.

    In this cult-like commentary, the "threat" of "a hostile Russia" must be inflated along with charges against Trump. (In truth, Russia represents no threat to the United States that Washington itself did not provoke since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.) For its own threat inflation, the Times featured not an expert with any plausible credentials but Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer with no known Russia expertise, and who was one of those reprimanded by the agency for anti-Trump political bias. Nonetheless, the Times quotes Page at length : "In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability to spread our democratic ideals." Perhaps we should have guessed that the democracy-promotion genes of J. Edgar Hoover were still alive and breeding in the FBI, though for the Times , in its exploitation of the hapless and legally endangered Page, it seems not to matter.

    Which brings us, or rather Russiagate zealots, to the heightened "threat" represented by "Putin's Russia." If true, we would expect the US president to negotiate with the Kremlin leader, including at summit meetings, as every president since Dwight Eisenhower has done. But, we are told, we cannot trust Trump to do so, because, according to The Washington Post , he has repeatedly met with Putin alone, with only translators present, and concealed the records of their private talks, sure signs of "treasonous" behavior, as the Russiagate media first insisted following the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018.

    It's hard to know whether this is historical ignorance or Russiagate malice, though it is probably both. In any event, the truth is very different. In preparing US-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits since the 1950s, aides on both sides have arranged "private time" for their bosses for two essential reasons: so they can develop sufficient personal rapport to sustain any policy partnership they decide on; and so they can alert one another to constraints on their policy powers at home, to foes of such détente policies often centered in their respective intelligence agencies. (The KGB ran operations against Nikita Khrushchev's détente policies with Eisenhower, and, as is well established, US intelligence agencies have run operations against Trump's proclaimed goal of "cooperation with Russia.")

    That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the "secrecy of presidential private meetings has been the rule, not the exception." He continues, "There's nothing unusual about withholding information from the bureaucracy about the president's private meetings with foreign leaders . Sometimes they would dictate a memo afterward, sometimes not." Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US "bureaucracy," sometimes met privately with Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev's translator was present.

    Nor should we forget the national-security benefits that have come from private meetings between US and Kremlin leaders. In October 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met alone with their translators and an American official who took notes -- the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished. The result, in 1987, was the first and still only treaty abolishing an entire category of such weapons, the exceedingly dangerous intermediate-range ones. (This is the historic treaty Trump has said he may abrogate.)

    And yet, congressional zealots are now threatening to subpoena the American translator who was present during Trump's meetings with Putin. If this recklessness prevails, it will be the end of the nuclear-superpower summit diplomacy that has helped to keep America and the world safe from catastrophic war for nearly 70 years -- and as a new, more perilous nuclear arms race between the two countries is unfolding. It will amply confirm a thesis set out in my book War with Russia? -- that anti-Trump Russiagate allegations have become the gravest threat to our security.

    The following correction and clarification were made to the original version of this article on January 17: Reagan and Gorbachev met privately with translators during their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, not February, and Reagan was also accompanied by an American official who took notes. And it would be more precise to say that the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished.

    Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU and author of the new book War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate . This commentary is based on the most recent of his weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War with the host of the John Batchelor radio show. (The podcast is here . Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com . )

    [Jan 20, 2019] Dear [neoliberal] elites

    Notable quotes:
    "... Nonetheless we've had a vote and decided that we will indeed go ahead and make these changes. Sorry about your luck. What? You don't agree! Don't you believe in democracy? You hypocrite you! ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Brad F January 18, 2019 at 10:26 am

    Dear Elites

    We appreciate that you have built a successful career and/or business under the prevailing laws, and that changing these laws would cause the destruction and/or appropriation of much of your wealth (while costing us little).

    Nonetheless we've had a vote and decided that we will indeed go ahead and make these changes. Sorry about your luck. What? You don't agree! Don't you believe in democracy? You hypocrite you!

    [Jan 20, 2019] The USA LGBT political correctness bites Tulsi

    Notable quotes:
    "... I venture to guess, since Anne goes here several times. The 'militarists', unrelated to LGBT, faction of the DNC will use LGBT comments from Gabbard's past...... to show she is not liberal enough to defend the party's permanent war profiteering plank! ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

    Fred C. Dobbs , January 18, 2019 at 01:52 PM

    Tulsi Gabbard, Democratic Presidential Candidate,
    Apologizes for Anti-Gay Past https://nyti.ms/2HhUDev
    NYT - Liam Stack - Jan. 17, 2019

    Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who last week announced she was running for president, apologized Thursday for her history of anti-gay statements and her past work for an anti-gay advocacy group -- issues that have emerged as an early obstacle as she pursues a long-shot bid for the Democratic Party's nomination.

    ... ... ...

    ilsm -> EMichael... , January 19, 2019 at 06:24 AM
    read!

    I venture to guess, since Anne goes here several times. The 'militarists', unrelated to LGBT, faction of the DNC will use LGBT comments from Gabbard's past...... to show she is not liberal enough to defend the party's permanent war profiteering plank!

    [Jan 20, 2019] WikiLeaks disturbing and hopeful findings on Tulsi Gabbard s path to progressiveness

    Notable quotes:
    "... Darnell Strom, a Hillary Clinton fundraiser , sent an email to Tulsi Gabbard on Feb. 2016 to express his big disappointment about the fact that she had chosen to endorse Bernie Sanders. ..."
    "... The tone of writing reveals a lot of anger for the fact that Gabbard had clearly chosen to join the Bernie Sanders camp instead of that of Hillary Clinton. And it's quite impressive that in the end, Strom straightly clarifies that he will not help Gabbard to raise money for her campaign! Strom wrote (emphasis added): ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

    Searching the Podesta emails inside WikiLeaks we found a rather disturbing fact about Tulsi Gabbard who recently announced that she will run for the 2020 US presidency. Iraq War Veteran, Jon Soltz, chairman at VoteVets at the time, sent an email on Aug. 2012 to Hillary Clinton top lobbyist, John Podesta, in order to thank him for his contribution to Gabbard's campaign in Hawaii.

    Soltz wrote (emphasis added):

    This morning, we are one step closer to making history. In Hawaii, VoteVets PAC-endorsed Iraq veteran Tulsi Gabbard has won her primary, in a stunning come-from-behind victory. If she wins in November, she along with Tammy Duckworth (who we also feel very good about), would be the first female combat veteran ever elected to Congress in United States history! This is happening because of you. Your tens of thousands of dollars in donations for Tulsi's campaign, through VoteVets PAC , allowed her to run a first-rate effort.
    [...]

    VoteVets Action Fund was the first group to step up to help her close that gap. In all, VoteVets Action Fund spent over $317,000 promoting Tulsi's incredible biography . Now, we're even closer to sending another incredible veteran to Congress, to add to the growing voice of today's progressive veterans in the halls of power. From all of us at VoteVets.org, I want to thank you for helping to make this all possible .

    Full email:
    https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/33260

    While it's quite annoying the fact that one of the most promising progressives for the US presidency, have won back then, to some extent, thanks to Podesta's money, it is clear that she didn't receive that money directly from Clinton's top lobbyist.

    The money was used by VoteVets Action Fund to boost Gabbard's campaign, and there is no evidence that she had direct connections with the Clinton mechanism.

    Furthermore, there is additional evidence about the fact that Gabbard upset the elites inside the Democratic party, as she has subsequently chosen to adopt more progressive positions and join permanently the Bernie Sanders progressive faction.

    For example, Darnell Strom, a Hillary Clinton fundraiser , sent an email to Tulsi Gabbard on Feb. 2016 to express his big disappointment about the fact that she had chosen to endorse Bernie Sanders.

    The tone of writing reveals a lot of anger for the fact that Gabbard had clearly chosen to join the Bernie Sanders camp instead of that of Hillary Clinton. And it's quite impressive that in the end, Strom straightly clarifies that he will not help Gabbard to raise money for her campaign!
    Strom wrote (emphasis added):

    We were very disappointed to hear that you would resign your position with the DNC so you could endorse Bernie Sanders, a man who has never been a Democrat before . When we met over dinner a couple of years ago I was so impressed by your intellect, your passion, and commitment to getting things done on behalf of the American people.

    For you to endorse a man who has spent almost 40 years in public office with very few accomplishments , doesn't fall in line with what we previously thought of you.

    Hillary Clinton will be our party's nominee and you standing on ceremony to support the sinking Bernie Sanders ship is disrespectful to Hillary Clinton . A woman who has spent the vast majority of her life in public service and working on behalf of women, families, and the underserved. You have called both myself and Michael Kives before about helping your campaign raise money, we no longer trust your judgement so will not be raising money for your campaign .

    Full email:

    https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3609

    This is probably the best proof that, at that moment, Tulsi Gabbard had cut ties with the Clinton mechanism permanently. A very hopeful sign.
    Recall that Gabbard introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists act to prohibit taxpayer dollars for being used to support terrorists. She is probably the only one from the US Congress who dared to tell the truth about Syria by stating that " ... the US government has been violating this law for years, directly and indirectly supporting allies and partners of groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, with money, weapons, intelligence and other support in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government. "

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/uKV1sTw8zOc

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/vp9YdZwawWQ

    [Jan 20, 2019] Gabbard seems to think of international relations in a different register, seeing states as rational agents pursuing their national interests mainly in self-preservation and self-defense

    Notable quotes:
    "... If Gabbard's candidacy catches on enough for her to become a threat to prevailing interests within the Democratic Party, expect to hear more about how her policies are of a piece with Assad's, the demon of the hour, and also, of course with Vladimir Putin's, the devil incarnate in the eyes not just of Clintonite liberals, but also of the anti-Trump "conservatives" who have overrun CNN and MSNBC (=MSDNC), and of the national security state "experts" whom one sees at all hours of the day and night on those increasingly unbearable cable networks. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    "The Tulsi Gabbard Factor" [ Counterpunch ].

    "Gabbard seems to think of international relations in a different register, seeing states as rational agents pursuing their national interests – mainly in self-preservation and self-defense. Academics call this way of thinking about geopolitics 'realism'; it is old-fashioned Realpolitik projected onto the global stage .

    If Gabbard's candidacy catches on enough for her to become a threat to prevailing interests within the Democratic Party, expect to hear more about how her policies are of a piece with Assad's, the demon of the hour, and also, of course with Vladimir Putin's, the devil incarnate in the eyes not just of Clintonite liberals, but also of the anti-Trump "conservatives" who have overrun CNN and MSNBC (=MSDNC), and of the national security state "experts" whom one sees at all hours of the day and night on those increasingly unbearable cable networks.

    Worse still, expect to hear more about how Gabbard's views coincide with Trump's. If anyone really is the devil incarnate, he's the man. But face it: when he's right, he's right, and compared to Clintonite Democrats, on more issues than foreign affairs – on trade, for example -- he's often more right than they. Better a leftwing realist, which is what Gabbard seems to be, than a Clintonite moralist." • Indeed.

    "New Trump campaign hires to focus on convention delegates, party organization" [ Politico ]. "The new hires will help run the campaign's delegate and party organization arm, which is waging an elaborate nationwide campaign to ensure the delegates selected to attend the nominating convention are staunch White House allies -- not Never Trump Republicans.

    The group will be focused on delving into the granular state-by-state battles that will ensue in the coming months and which will determine the composition of the convention delegation."

    [Jan 20, 2019] Buzzfeed, Question Time the purpose of Fake News by Kit Knightly

    Notable quotes:
    "... The point of this practice is to propagate lies into the public consciousness. It's a method that can be used to distract and disseminate and divide. The accuracy of the statement is immaterial. ..."
    "... The point is, once it has been said it cannot be unsaid. There are countless examples: "Assange was working for Russia", "Trump ordered Cohen to lie to Congress", "Russia hacked the US election", "Donald Trump worked for the KGB", "Assad gassed his own people", "Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite". The list goes on and on and on. None these have been proven. All were asserted without evidence, fiercely defended as facts, and then discretely qualified. ..."
    "... The lie was told, the audience laughed, the reality was created. "Labour are behind in the polls, anybody who says otherwise is a laughingstock" . The lie goes around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on. That's why fake news is so important to them, and so dangerous us. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    ... ... ...

    Trump has been a disappointment to his base and is yet to implement half the policies he discussed on the campaign trail, but he's not fully and totally being controlled by the warhawking Deep State yet, either. His policy of peace with North Korea and decisions to pull out of Syria and Afghanistan show that there is a tug-of-war ongoing inside the administration. It's probably no coincidence that this latest of many "bombshells" comes so quickly on the heels of Trump's announcement of the Syria withdrawal. Careful "leaks", planted stories and social media witch-hunts remind Trump how precarious his position is, whilst simultaneously distracting the public – both pro-Trump and anti-Trump – from real issues.

    The case-specific "why?" doesn't matter so much as the general aim of this type of manipulation. The important question is: Why does the media tell lies if they know they will be revealed as such? Clearly, the lies serve a purpose, regardless of their retraction or qualification. Telling a lie loudly and then taking it back quietly is an old propaganda trick – it allows the paper to maintain a facade of "accountability".

    The point of this practice is to propagate lies into the public consciousness. It's a method that can be used to distract and disseminate and divide. The accuracy of the statement is immaterial.

    The point is, once it has been said it cannot be unsaid. There are countless examples: "Assange was working for Russia", "Trump ordered Cohen to lie to Congress", "Russia hacked the US election", "Donald Trump worked for the KGB", "Assad gassed his own people", "Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite". The list goes on and on and on. None these have been proven. All were asserted without evidence, fiercely defended as facts, and then discretely qualified.

    That is the purpose of "fake news", to forge the Empire's "created reality" , and force us all to live in it. These are world-shaping, policy-informing, news-dominating narratives and are nothing but feathers in the wind .

    A perfect exemplar of this occurred just two days ago on the BBC's flagship Political debate show Question Time : me title= The (notionally impartial) host not only sided with right-wing author Isabel Oakeshott in criticising Labour's polling, but then joined in mocking the Labour MP Diane Abbott for attempting to correct the record. Both Oakeshott and Fiona Bruce, the host, were factually incorrect – as shown a hundred times over since. But that doesn't matter.

    The lie was told, the audience laughed, the reality was created. "Labour are behind in the polls, anybody who says otherwise is a laughingstock" . The lie goes around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on. That's why fake news is so important to them, and so dangerous us.

    Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he's forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.

    [Jan 20, 2019] This organisation and all of those part of it should be treated as enemies of the people, as they have attacked, disingenuously and using smears

    Notable quotes:
    "... Sedition is a crime and it is clear that the multiple seditious acts of II and IfS toward many countries and with their band of controlled journalists was a deliberate and planned activity. ..."
    "... I don't expect any prosecutions but there is a chance of promotional impediments applying to some of those named. At least for the next month. Every named employee of II and IfS is an enemy of democracy and its people ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Anne Jaclard , Jan 20, 2019 6:02:29 PM | link

    On Integrity Initiative Endgame:

    From Consortium News

    It should be pointed out that the Integrity Initiative recently claimed on Twitter that some of the documents leaked in batch #4 were not theirs and had been misrepresented as part of the organisation.

    It doesn't really matter, though: all that we know, anti-socialist shills writing propaganda on behalf of II (Nimmo, Cohen, Reid-Ross) have confirmed their own roles, and the Twitter account was proven to have pushed out slanderous material on Jeremy Corbyn.

    Note that "misrepresented" could have referred to the inclusion of the Corbyn slide show document which was presented at but created by the II.

    This organisation and all of those part of it should be treated as enemies of the people, as they have attacked, disingenuously and using smears,

    -Yellow Vests
    – Jill Stein
    -Jeremy Corbyn
    -George Galloway
    -Seuams Milne
    -German Left Party
    -French Left Party
    -French Communist Party
    -Greek Communist Party
    -Podemos
    -Norwegian Red Party
    -Norwegian Socialist Left Party
    -Swedish Left Party
    -Swedish Greens
    -International Anti-NATO Groups
    -Greyzone Project
    -Julian Assange
    -MintPressNews

    Via

    -Infiltrating Corbyn and Sanders campaigns
    -Inserting propaganda anonymously into local media including the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, The Times, the Guardian, and more
    -Using social media to orchestrate hate and dismissal campaigns against those mentioned above
    -Hosting events for collaboration between members
    -Building online "clusters" to deploy and shape discourse in the media and elsewhere

    By repeating or openly collaborating with:

    -Ben Nimmo
    -Oz Katergi
    -Anne Applebaum
    -Peter Pomerantsev
    -Bellingcat
    -Atlantic Council
    -Carole Cadwalladr
    -David Aaronovitch
    -Center For A Stateless Society
    -PropOrNot
    -Alexander Reid-Ross
    -Nick Cohen
    -Michael Weiss
    -Jamie Fly
    -Jamie Kirchick

    Directed by:

    -Tory Government
    -NATO
    -Facebook
    -German Multinationals

    uncle tungsten | Jan 20, 2019 6:18:59 PM | 16

    Thank you Anne Jaclard @ | 14

    Sedition is a crime and it is clear that the multiple seditious acts of II and IfS toward many countries and with their band of controlled journalists was a deliberate and planned activity.

    I don't expect any prosecutions but there is a chance of promotional impediments applying to some of those named. At least for the next month. Every named employee of II and IfS is an enemy of democracy and its people.

    [Jan 20, 2019] I used to worry that a president Hillary Clinton would make Democratic Party a party of neocons. It turns out Donald did the trick by Jack Hunter

    Jan 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Originally from: Hawkish Democrats, Anti-War Republicans Thank Trump

    Imagine if, during President George W. Bush's occupation of Iraq, someone had predicted that in about a decade, Republican voters would oppose war more than Democrats. Few would have believed it.

    Yet according to new polling, it's happening. It might even be President Donald Trump's greatest accomplishment to date.

    The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald broke down this new data in a recent piece in which he claims Democrats are " becoming far more militaristic and pro-war than Republicans ." Greenwald says that while the overwhelming majority of Washington elites opposed -- or, more accurately, had a total meltdown over -- Trump's December announcement that he would withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, polling data from Morning Consult/ Politico shows that 49 percent of Americans support the decision while 33 percent oppose it.

    Pluralities or majorities of Americans being tired of war is not new . This is: "[W]hat is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents overwhelming favor their removal," Greenwald writes.

    "The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it," he notes.

    And then the kicker: "Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent."

    Seventy-six percent? Think about that number. More than three quarters of GOP voters today want to support the troops by bringing them home. A position that was once denounced as " unpatriotic " is now apparently part of making America great again.

    Greenwald also notes that the poll shows similar results among those who voted Democrat in the midterm election, with 28 percent supporting withdrawal and 54 percent opposing it.

    Jack Hunter is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Senator Rand Paul.

    [Jan 20, 2019] Has the USA become an elite club for financial bandits manipulating sheep under the name "American Nation".

    Jan 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    CatinThe Hat 3 hours ago

    Taking Stock of Ukraine's Achievements Amidst Russia's Aggression

    Five years ago, the Ukrainian people staged a peaceful "revolution of dignity" against a corrupt regime sponsored by the Kremlin. They stood firm even under gunfire and it was the discredited President Viktor Yanukovych who eventually retreated and took refuge in Russia. With Moscow engaging in renewed attacks against Ukraine in the Sea of Azov it is important to take stock of Ukraine's achievements since those fateful days in Kyiv's Independence Square."

    Talk about Orwellian double speak. Only Russiagaters would eat that **** up in their stupidity .

    pparalegal 10 hours ago (Edited)

    Oligarchs, corporations and want to be psychopathic rulers East and West run the political/ think tank know-it-all class. All profit by it. Governments start wars, not people.

    I am still waiting for an explanation of how the mythical beast New Russia will own the USA and what they will do with it after that. If we don't bomb the s**t out of some third country because we can. I am much more concerned about the in house mad cows we have elected to boss the American public and take the gold out of my teeth for the greater good..

    Helg Saracen 10 hours ago (Edited)

    I'm just curious. How many real estate over the past 15 years has been bought by the Chinese in New York, Chicago and California? How many brands, businesses were bought by the Chinese from the Americans? How many were "borrowed" technology? And how many Russians bought (rich Jews from Russia cannot be taken into account, they came to their relatives, well, they bought a little of everything)? :( 30 years ago, the USSR was communist, and the US was capitalist, now Russia has become capitalist, and the USA (I don't even know how to say) has become an elite club for financial bandits manipulating sheep under the name "American Nation".

    Mantis964 6 hours ago

    and the USA (I don't even know how to say) has become an elite club for financial bandits manipulating sheep under the name "American Nation".

    Wouldn't you call that Fascism ?

    [Jan 20, 2019] Even as an old timer, I am drawn to the arguments made by our "Dissident Right"(DR), who seek to find a Third Way between destructive international capitalism and destructive international socialism

    Jan 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

    follyofwar , says: January 20, 2019 at 4:30 pm GMT

    Even as an old timer, I am drawn to the arguments made by our "Dissident Right"(DR), who seek to find a Third Way between destructive international capitalism and destructive international socialism. That movement is Nationalism. Some might call it Fascism, though that loaded term has become far too pejorative. It is not surprising that one of the heroes of the US DR is Mr. Putin.

    The people making the best oral arguments for this third way that I've listened to thus far are Mike Enoch and Eric Striker. Do not dismiss them lightly. They are obviously highly intelligent and their movement is growing. As young white males are increasingly marginalized and oppressed by the dominant culture, they have nowhere else to go. Old-time GOP civic nationalism is dead, killed by the Diversity Cult that they foolishly embraced. On their own, after Trump, and given the snowballing demographic catastrophe, the GOP could never again win another national election. At some point there will be an uprising, unless young indoctrinated males have been become like frogs in slowly boiling water, who don't realize they are being scalded alive until it is too late.

    [Jan 20, 2019] In fact, we don't have a real democracy anymore. We have a Potemkin Village democracy.

    Notable quotes:
    "... In addition, Trump is a pretend President. He doesn't control his own government. Hell, a single judge anywhere in the hinterlands evidently has the power to veto pretty much whatever the Trumpster does. It's clear that the real power resides in the hands of the Ruling Class, most of whom are unelected and unaccountable. Judges. Bureaucrats. Regulators. The Deep State. They now run the show. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Gerard January 17, 2019 at 3:12 pm

    Great article and right on target. In fact, we don't have a real democracy anymore. We have a Potemkin Village democracy. Our national legislature is paralyzed and impotent. And honestly, that's the way its membership likes it. Pretend to govern. Hold tight to the seats of privilege and status.

    In addition, Trump is a pretend President. He doesn't control his own government. Hell, a single judge anywhere in the hinterlands evidently has the power to veto pretty much whatever the Trumpster does. It's clear that the real power resides in the hands of the Ruling Class, most of whom are unelected and unaccountable. Judges. Bureaucrats. Regulators. The Deep State. They now run the show.

    Meanwhile, the mainstream media plays the role of Orwell's Squealer the Pig from Animal Farm. Propagandists. Purveyors of fake news and fake truth. This is not going to end well. The only question is how and when the ending comes.

    [Jan 20, 2019] Degeneration of the US neoliberal elite can be partially attributed to the conversion of neoliberal universities into indoctrination mechanism, rather then institutions for fostering critical thinking

    Notable quotes:
    "... An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated. ..."
    "... As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think -- to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil -- begin to have real effect. ..."
    Jan 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Paul Reidinger, January 17, 2019 at 2:03 pm

    An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated.

    As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think -- to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil -- begin to have real effect. The new dark age is no longer imminent. It is here, and it is them. I see no way to rectify the damage. When minds are ruined young, they remain ruined.

    [Jan 20, 2019] The desperate efforts of the Western neoliberal establishment to build a new propaganda machine by globinfo freexchange

    Notable quotes:
    "... Recall that, leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal Integrity Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military intelligence specialists. Politicians and academics have reacted with fury to news a covert Government-funded unit had been attacking the official opposition in Parliament. ..."
    Dec 25, 2018 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

    propaganda machine

    The UK government and other Western governments and the US in recent years have had increasing difficulties persuading enough of their populations as to the legitimacy of the foreign policies that they have been pursuing. And at the same time, Western countries have been going through a period of political crisis and economic crisis.

    Piers Robinson, Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of Sheffield, further explains:

    I think a lot of this drive is as much about trying to shore up shaky official narratives and trying to shore up political systems in a situation of political crisis, as it is actually about countering Russian propaganda. I would suspect that that's a little bit of an excuse here to really what's going on of problems much closer to home.
    This is not just to do to UK, this is Europe-wide. And there are also indications from the documents that they are intending to start to have some kind of impact within the United States. So, it's a very wide-ranging network that seems to be established. The reason why it needs to be covert, of course, is that if a media organization, or if a journalist is to let on that he, or she, is involved in a program, which quite clearly is pushing a particular agenda, then the credibility of that journalist will be damaged.

    And this is really what is very deceptive about the Integrity Initiative . It's about co-opting journalists and academics into, essentially, a campaign, which appears to be a propaganda campaign, in order to manipulate opinions. And the only way that can really work effectively, is if readers and viewers don't know that what they're reading is something which has emerged from a particular political agenda.

    Integrity Initiative 'Army of propagandists disguised as anti-propagandists' - YouTube

    Recall that, leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal Integrity Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military intelligence specialists. Politicians and academics have reacted with fury to news a covert Government-funded unit had been attacking the official opposition in Parliament.

    So, it's not accidental that the organized and systematic propaganda campaign against labour party has actually started under Corbyn's leadership. And that the campaign contains a lot of personal attacks against the leader of the Labour party. That's because, of course, Jeremy Corbyn is driving the party out of the neoliberal machine that has been dominating the UK politics for decades.

    But it seems that the agents of the neoliberal establishment are really desperate as they see that the new narratives are not particularly successful.
    It would not be exaggerating to suggest that the attacks against Leftist leaders like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders essentially bring the opposite effect. That's because especially the younger generations have turned their back to the mainstream media.

    And they understand that the more the media attack Corbyn and Sanders, the stronger the indication that these leaders are not part of the neoliberal establishment that ruined their lives becomes.

    [Jan 20, 2019] I've been wondering what's fueling Israel anti-Iran obsession, given that Iran has never threatened Israel. The dominant factor which comes to mind is the Holocaust Conference held in Tehran in 2006 to examine the numerous inconsistencies in the Official Narrative.

    Jan 20, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 18, 2019 10:24:47 PM | link

    You know there's a lot of rampant insanity sloshing around when every time there's a debate about potential threats to the US, whether it starts with Russia, China, NK, or (?), the Neocons rarely fail to include Iran.

    I've been wondering what's fueling their obsession, given that Iran has never threatened "Israel." The dominant factor which comes to mind is the Holocaust Conference held in Tehran in 2006 to examine the numerous inconsistencies in the Official Narrative.

    The conference was organised as a series lectures based on detailed research undertaken by the speaker, or a spokesman for an organisation which had undertaken research into the subject.

    Much of the info consisted of statistical analysis of pre & post Holocaust population factors which cast 'doubt' on the magnitude of various and varying claims made in the Official Story.

    At the end of the conference all of the 'papers' delivered during the conference were published online and some of them were very well researched and very persuasive. In the aftermath there were many objections from the 'usual suspects' which, instead of attempting to refute the published findings, confined themselves to smearing the convenors and participants. I found this response to be disappointing, lazy and stupid; and tantamount to an endorsement, by default, of the findings.
    It was NEVER the subject of public debate of any note or duration and was quickly 'forgotten' by the MSM. However, despite the forgetfulness, Iran appears not to have been forgiven.

    Jen , Jan 18, 2019 11:36:14 PM | link

    Hoarsewhisperer @ 47:

    Iran has the second largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel. The general opinion among Iranian Jews is that Tehran accepts them and allows them to worship as they wish, though they experience some limitations and there have been violent incidents targeting Jews in the past.
    https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/world/inside-iran/2018/08/29/iran-jewish-population-islamic-state/886790002/

    If a country ruled by a Muslim theocracy tolerates large numbers of Jews living in its territory, that in itself contradicts Israel's claim to be the only country in the Middle East that offers Jews the freedom, stability and security to worship as they wish. Israel offered money to Iranian Jews to move but the Iranian Jewish community rebuffed the offer, saying it considers itself Iranian first and Jewish second and its identity is not for sale.
    https://www.haaretz.com/1.4952371

    The fact that a Muslim theocratic state hosts a large Jewish community represents an existential threat to Israel. Why does Israel need to exist for then, if other countries can host Jewish communities so well that they don't feel they need to move?

    I remember reading several years ago that Israel offered cash incentives to the French Jewish community and that community also knocked back the offers. Since then France has had a number of terrorist attacks - guess what those have done to the French Jewish community?
    https://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/22/middleeast/france-israel-jews-immigration/index.html

    Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 19, 2019 12:53:50 AM | link
    Iran has the second largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel.
    ...
    Posted by: Jen | Jan 18, 2019 11:36:14 PM | 48

    Thanks for the timely reminder.
    I forgot all about Iran's Jewish citizens but, now that you've jogged my memory, I do recall looking it up in 2006 and discovering the fact you've reiterated.
    It begs a lot of questions about Jewish Unity, doesn't it?
    It also reminds me of a rant by Gilad Atzmon called Judea Declares War On Obama. I haven't posted a link because it's easy to find on the www. Suffice to say that it's about the prelude to the Holocaust and is ... unflattering...

    Pft , Jan 19, 2019 2:25:37 AM | link
    Jen@48, Hoarsewhisperer

    I dont call 12-15K Jews in a large country an existential threat to Israel.

    Zionism was unpopular among most Jews, orthodox and assimilated Jews alike, up until the holocaust. Without Hitler there never would be an Israel today

    [Jan 19, 2019] According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The first, directed outward, finds its expression in the global War on Terror and in the Bush Doctrine that the United States has the right to launch preemptive wars. This amounts to the United States seeing as illegitimate the attempt by any state to resist its domination. ..."
    "... The second dynamic, directed inward, involves the subjection of the mass of the populace to economic "rationalization", with continual "downsizing" and "outsourcing" of jobs abroad and dismantling of what remains of the welfare state created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Neoliberalism is an integral component of inverted totalitarianism. The state of insecurity in which this places the public serves the useful function of making people feel helpless, therefore making it less likely they will become politically active and thus helping maintain the first dynamic. ..."
    "... By using managerial methods and developing management of elections, the democracy of the United States has become sanitized of political participation, therefore managed democracy is "a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control". ..."
    "... Under managed democracy, the electorate is prevented from having a significant impact on policies adopted by the state because of the opinion construction and manipulation carried out by means of technology, social science, contracts and corporate subsidies. ..."
    Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Jan 15, 2019 9:31:08 PM | lin k

    karlof1

    According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks, as summarized at Wikipedia, the United States has two main totalizing dynamics:

    The first, directed outward, finds its expression in the global War on Terror and in the Bush Doctrine that the United States has the right to launch preemptive wars. This amounts to the United States seeing as illegitimate the attempt by any state to resist its domination.

    The second dynamic, directed inward, involves the subjection of the mass of the populace to economic "rationalization", with continual "downsizing" and "outsourcing" of jobs abroad and dismantling of what remains of the welfare state created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Neoliberalism is an integral component of inverted totalitarianism. The state of insecurity in which this places the public serves the useful function of making people feel helpless, therefore making it less likely they will become politically active and thus helping maintain the first dynamic.

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    Wolin's Inverted Totalitarianism provides the ground work for my suspicions regarding faux populists Obama and Trump:

    By using managerial methods and developing management of elections, the democracy of the United States has become sanitized of political participation, therefore managed democracy is "a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control".

    Under managed democracy, the electorate is prevented from having a significant impact on policies adopted by the state because of the opinion construction and manipulation carried out by means of technology, social science, contracts and corporate subsidies.

    [Jan 19, 2019] According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The first, directed outward, finds its expression in the global War on Terror and in the Bush Doctrine that the United States has the right to launch preemptive wars. This amounts to the United States seeing as illegitimate the attempt by any state to resist its domination. ..."
    "... The second dynamic, directed inward, involves the subjection of the mass of the populace to economic "rationalization", with continual "downsizing" and "outsourcing" of jobs abroad and dismantling of what remains of the welfare state created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Neoliberalism is an integral component of inverted totalitarianism. The state of insecurity in which this places the public serves the useful function of making people feel helpless, therefore making it less likely they will become politically active and thus helping maintain the first dynamic. ..."
    "... By using managerial methods and developing management of elections, the democracy of the United States has become sanitized of political participation, therefore managed democracy is "a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control". ..."
    "... Under managed democracy, the electorate is prevented from having a significant impact on policies adopted by the state because of the opinion construction and manipulation carried out by means of technology, social science, contracts and corporate subsidies. ..."
    Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Jan 15, 2019 9:31:08 PM | lin k

    karlof1

    According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks, as summarized at Wikipedia, the United States has two main totalizing dynamics:

    The first, directed outward, finds its expression in the global War on Terror and in the Bush Doctrine that the United States has the right to launch preemptive wars. This amounts to the United States seeing as illegitimate the attempt by any state to resist its domination.

    The second dynamic, directed inward, involves the subjection of the mass of the populace to economic "rationalization", with continual "downsizing" and "outsourcing" of jobs abroad and dismantling of what remains of the welfare state created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Neoliberalism is an integral component of inverted totalitarianism. The state of insecurity in which this places the public serves the useful function of making people feel helpless, therefore making it less likely they will become politically active and thus helping maintain the first dynamic.

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    Wolin's Inverted Totalitarianism provides the ground work for my suspicions regarding faux populists Obama and Trump:

    By using managerial methods and developing management of elections, the democracy of the United States has become sanitized of political participation, therefore managed democracy is "a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control".

    Under managed democracy, the electorate is prevented from having a significant impact on policies adopted by the state because of the opinion construction and manipulation carried out by means of technology, social science, contracts and corporate subsidies.

    [Jan 19, 2019] Putin Asks And Trump Delivers - A List Of All The Good Things Trump Did For Russia

    Way too any pleasured for Putin from Trump administration... Just look at this perma-pleasing face of Pompeo.
    Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Putin Asks And Trump Delivers - A List Of All The Good Things Trump Did For Russia

    Slate's Fred Kaplan writes :

    The Washington Post's Greg Miller reported Sunday that President Donald Trump's confiscation of the translator's notes from a one-on-one conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017 was "unusual." This is incorrect. It was unprecedented. There is nothing like it in the annals of presidential history.

    Not really. Other U.S. leaders held long private meetings with their counterparts without notes being taken.

    When Richard Nixon met Leonid Brezhnev he did not even bring his own interpreter:

    George Szamuely @GeorgeSzamuely - 20:57 utc - 14 Jan 2019

    Nixon would meet Brezhnev alone, the only other person in attendance being Viktor Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter. "Our first meeting in the Oval Office was private, except for Viktor Sukhodrev, who, as in 1972, acted as translator." Nixon on Brezhnev's 1973 visit. RN, p.878 . Therefore, the only "notes" that would exist would be those of the Soviet interpreter. Not sure he would have time to make notes and translate and, even if he did so, whether those notes would be housed in any US archive.

    Nixon's White House office was bugged. There are probably tape recordings of the talks. There might also be recordings of the Trump-Putin talks.

    At their 1986 Reykjavik summit Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev talked without their notetakers :

    Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev began their second day of talks with a private meeting that had been scheduled to last 15 minutes but ran for nearly 70 minutes, with only interpreters present . They met in a small room in the Soviet Mission , with the Soviet leader seated in a small armchair and Mr. Reagan on a sofa.

    In the afternoon, they meet alone for a little over 20 minutes and then again for 90 minutes. All told, the two leaders have spent 4 hours and 51 minutes alone , except for interpreters, over the two days here.

    The archives of the Reykjavik talks do not include any notes of those private talks.

    But, who knows, maybe Nixon and Reagan where also on the Russian payroll, just like Donald Trump is today.


    bigger

    Only that Trump is controlled by Putin can explain why the FBI opened a counter-intelligence investigation against Trump (see section three).

    That the FBI agents involved in the decision were avid haters of Russia and of Trump has surely nothing to do with it. That the opening of a counter-intelligence investigation gave them the legal ability under Obama's EO12333 to use NSA signal intelligence against Trump is surely irrelevant.

    What the FBI people really were concerned about is Trump's public record of favoring Russia at each and every corner.

    Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of Russian influence over him is surely justified.

    Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of Russian influence over him is surely justified.

    When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Russia, than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin's influence, knowingly or unwittingly, could he end up doing Russia so many favors.

    Not.

    Posted by b at 02:12 PM | Comments (121)

    [Jan 19, 2019] We are being played Judging from his appointment Trump is really a Republican Obama

    Notable quotes:
    "... We saw the exact same dynamic when Obama was the populist hero. As Obama betrayed his base and acted against what people had expected from him, Obamabots insisted that Obama was playing 11-dimensional chess and that their hero's intentions were pure. It was all bullshit. ..."
    "... Trump brought on Nikki Haley, Bolton, and Pompeo. Trump nominated Gina Haspel, acolyte of his supposed nemesis Brennan, for CIA director. Trump approved termination of JCPOA. ..."
    "... And Trump's duplicity extends beyond Russia and Syria. He pretended to make a peace deal with North Korea but refuses to complete it. He railed against TPP but included TPP provisions in the new North America free-trade agreement. He said he would prosecute Hillary but backed within days of being elected saying: "the Clintons have been through enough" (what have they been through?!?), he said he would "drain the swamp" but has added to it, he put Jared Kushner - a supporter of illegal settlement building - in charge of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, etc. ..."
    "... It was obvious from jumpstreet what Obama was all about! I never for once believed anything ..."
    "... It is very unusual for a populist to win office in USA. I would say that today it is virtually impossible due to the money-based US electoral system. Once this fact is understood, it becomes clear that BOTH Trump and Obama are each faux populists ..."
    "... The faux populist leader model is actually well suited for an inverted totalitarian government like USA. And I've previously described a number of elements that make up this model such as the need for partisans (Obamabots/Trumptards) that vehemently defend the popular hero as he betrays his base while bogus accusations from political opponents spark a knee-jerk reaction in the hero's base and prepare the ground for the next faux populist leader. ..."
    "... In 2008, the Deep State needed to "turn the page" from Bushes militarism and Obama embodied that "change". In 2016, the Deep State needed a nationalist that could revive patriotism in order to meet the challenge from Russia and China. I don't think this was accidental. ..."
    Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    , Jan 15, 2019 5:24:49 PM | link

    We are being played

    Pat Buchanan gets it (ht Zerohedge): Is Bolton Steering Trump into War with Iran? Bolton Steering Trump into War with Iran?

    There are other signs a confrontation is coming soon. The U.S. has objected to Iran's pending launch of two space satellites, saying these look like tests of missiles designed to deliver nuclear warheads....

    In short, forces are moving in this country and in Israel to bring about a U.S. confrontation with Iran -- before our troops leave Syria [NYT says troop withdrawal is estimated to take 4-6 months] .

    But the real questions here are not about Bolton or Pompeo.

    They are about Trump .

    We saw the exact same dynamic when Obama was the populist hero. As Obama betrayed his base and acted against what people had expected from him, Obamabots insisted that Obama was playing 11-dimensional chess and that their hero's intentions were pure. It was all bullshit.

    Trump brought on Nikki Haley, Bolton, and Pompeo. Trump nominated Gina Haspel, acolyte of his supposed nemesis Brennan, for CIA director. Trump approved termination of JCPOA.

    And Trump's administration claims to have defeated ISIS. They say that USA actions were responsible for 99% of the anti-ISIS effort. Why make such a claim after Trump said in his campaign: "Let Russia take care of ISIS"? My best guess: They want to portray themselves as the 'good guy' to Western audiences and when they act against Syria in the future, they will attempt to convince the Syrian people that the 'Assad must go' Coalition was responsible for eliminating ISIS.

    And Trump's duplicity extends beyond Russia and Syria. He pretended to make a peace deal with North Korea but refuses to complete it. He railed against TPP but included TPP provisions in the new North America free-trade agreement. He said he would prosecute Hillary but backed within days of being elected saying: "the Clintons have been through enough" (what have they been through?!?), he said he would "drain the swamp" but has added to it, he put Jared Kushner - a supporter of illegal settlement building - in charge of Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, etc.

    Welcome to the rabbit hole.

    William Bowles , Jan 15, 2019 5:46:38 PM | link
    Jackrabbit | Jan 15, 2019 5:24:49 PM | 20
    We saw the exact same dynamic when Obama was the populist hero. As Obama betrayed his base and acted against what people had expected from him, Obamabots insisted that Obama was playing 11-dimensional chess and that their hero's intentions were pure. It was all bullshit.

    It was obvious from jumpstreet what Obama was all about! I never for once believed anything he said but I looked at what he did. A gangster from Chicago. In some respects he was a black Carter, designed to act as an interregnum. It was Carter who kickstarted the occupation of Afghanistan. It was Carter who bumped up the nuclear weapons programme.

    Trump is just a naked version of every prior US prez.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 15, 2019 6:20:14 PM | link
    William Bowles @22:
    Trump is just a naked version of every prior US prez.
    It is very unusual for a populist to win office in USA. I would say that today it is virtually impossible due to the money-based US electoral system. Once this fact is understood, it becomes clear that BOTH Trump and Obama are each faux populists .

    The faux populist leader model is actually well suited for an inverted totalitarian government like USA. And I've previously described a number of elements that make up this model such as the need for partisans (Obamabots/Trumptards) that vehemently defend the popular hero as he betrays his base while bogus accusations from political opponents spark a knee-jerk reaction in the hero's base and prepare the ground for the next faux populist leader.

    I've made a substantial case for Trump's having been chosen to follow Obama . I look forward to any comments you may have regarding that the argument that I've set forth.

    Fec , Jan 15, 2019 5:54:25 PM | link
    Ted Koppel: "I don't need you guys anymore," Trump told me.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-expect-trump-to-go-quietly/2019/01/14/d8104e3a-1458-11e9-b6ad-9cfd62dbb0a8_story.html

    "Untethered from any political responsibility whatsoever, he can be expected to capitalize fully on his new status as political martyr and leader of a new "resistance" that will make today's look supine."

    Fec , Jan 15, 2019 6:33:16 PM | link
    @ 24

    Kudos for alluding to Wolin, shunned by his Princeton colleagues after publishing Democracy, Inc.

    Trump is a black swan summoned by Hillary Clinton.

    Unfortunately, the Left has not handled the loss well.

    See Ted Koppel above.

    Don Bacon , Jan 15, 2019 7:27:41 PM | link
    @ Jackrabbit | Jan 15, 2019 6:20:14 PM | 24

    Trump campaigned as a populist, the principal time the term applies, and also as president. Witness the current impasse over a border wall which is an appeal to the ordinary people who elected Trump, and he often wears that silly MAGA cap which appeals to his electorate.

    populist: a person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

    Trump on the campaign trail was a populist as you admit at your link: "Trump was the ONLY populist on the Republican side (out of 19 contenders!)." That's how he got nominated and then elected in a huge upset, appealing to ordinary people which the other candidates couldn't do. Trump wasn't chosen by anybody, but he was (and is) ridiculed by many.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 15, 2019 8:22:18 PM | link
    Don Bacon @26:

    How Trump and Obama got elected is clear. But just because they ran as populists doesn't mean that they have a populist agenda. I think I've been pretty clear that they have each made decisions and taken actions that furthered the establishment over the people.

    And running as a populist doesn't mean an automatic 'win'. For example, voters are going to be skeptical about the motives of a billionaire running for office, question the ability of a novice politician, and be distrustful of a man who has had 3 wives and 4 bankruptcies.

    In 2008, the Deep State needed to "turn the page" from Bushes militarism and Obama embodied that "change". In 2016, the Deep State needed a nationalist that could revive patriotism in order to meet the challenge from Russia and China. I don't think this was accidental.

    Don Bacon , Jan 15, 2019 8:53:38 PM | link
    @ karlof1 | Jan 15, 2019 8:29:05 PM | 30
    Which are more salient--domestically: The attacks on Russia or those against Trump?
    Of course the attacks against Trump by the establishment are more important, designed to bring him down. The American people have been conditioned by the press in American Exceptionalism, so they expect that those people in the world who were not wise enough to be born Americans ought to suffer for it especially if they are -- yuk -- Russian. So anything the US government does against Russia is accepted as a given, no big deal, run-of-the-mill.
    hihi , Jan 15, 2019 9:56:56 PM | link
    When is Trump's "delivering" for Israel (i.e. not Russia) going to be examined?

    Ah, sorry, that's not allowed - right?

    At least, so the ADL racketeers always tell us.......

    Don Bacon , Jan 15, 2019 10:04:06 PM | link
    @ hihi | Jan 15, 2019 9:56:56 PM | 37

    When is Trump's "delivering" for Israel (i.e. not Russia) going to be examined?

    Let's examine it -- Trump is delivering a crushing defeat to Israel by backing out of Syria, and thereby conceding the "Shia Crescent" to Iran, backed by Russia and Turkey.

    uncle tungsten , Jan 15, 2019 10:36:05 PM | link
    Thanks b that sets out the nature of the great distraction and the transparent BS that it represents. So now that USAians can see the nonsense could they please get on with the substance of making change and making USA great again by taking to the streets. Its about time for a large wage increase and dropping taxes that impact on low to medium wage people.

    Given the special role played by France in the USA struggle for independence, its about time the the Gillet Jaune manifested in the USA. The low and middle income people already Occupy the nation so now they should demand reform. Those few old and new progressive leftish congresscritters should don the yellow vest and meet their allies on the street corners for discussions and talk of equity and wage and tax justice. Its Rules for Radicals time or its going nowhere time. Will they choose? May I suggest the first Rule for Radicals could be the wearing of a yellow vest by the Congressional and Senate supporters of wage and tax justice at the next and all subsequent pressers and attendances.

    If not I gather they have all guzzled the cool aid and are content with the noise emitted from the great distractor.

    Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 15, 2019 10:48:23 PM | link
    ...

    I've made a substantial case for Trump's having been chosen to follow Obama. I look forward to any comments you may have regarding that the argument that I've set forth.
    Posted by: Jackrabbit | Jan 15, 2019 6:20:14 PM | 24

    That was a joke, right?

    Anyone so hampered by dotage that he forgets, several times a day, that he's already repeated the substance of his 'newest' meme several times in the same thread, and a majority of others, should probably consider getting a good night's sleep as an anti-dote.

    Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 15, 2019 10:58:52 PM | link
    Trump, unlike his detractors, is an Old Dog with an unlimited supply of New Tricks.
    Jackrabbit , Jan 15, 2019 11:00:07 PM | link
    Hoarsewhisperer @40

    As people discuss different versions of the dog and pony show, I tailor my point(s) accordingly.

    :)

    uncle tungsten , Jan 15, 2019 11:00:14 PM | link
    Don Bacon | Jan 15, 2019 10:04:06 PM | 38

    "crushing defeat"? what utter provocative BS Don! Trump withdrawal leaves all the local belligerents and malign Syria haters to do the job any way they wish. This fantasy that Trump has abandoned Israel's regional domination is totally unsupported by fact and sounds to me like a typical AIPAC alarmist trope.

    Trump has being saying for some years now that others need to shoulder the burden.

    Lets look at what the burden in Syria is shall we. Not only does USA give billions to Israel to guarantee the colony but it also fights its wars for it in Syria. Then there are all those charities raising money in the USA for the IDF. Then there is all the armaments transfers by numerous clandestine channels to head choppers trying to destroy the Syrian people's government and society. Many of those armaments transfers are paid with by USA black dollars possibly to be accounted for in that $21 trillion fund that the USA Defense Department has been wallowing in.

    It is bleedingly obvious to me that Israel in not being crushingly defeated by anyone. Syria nearly was!!!!!

    When a self professed progressive country such as Israel is incapable of getting on with the most religiously diverse border nation as Syria or Lebanon then there is a hoax somewhere in the dialogue. The manifestation of a Shia crescent (a BS straw man)is because the belligerent nations self defeated their allies: the Sunni murderers.

    Mind you Don, I don't see any Shia crescent, I see a few nations bombed and shot to hell desperately trying to establish normalcy of some sort BECAUSE of the manipulations of Saudi and Israel governments and their pawns.

    [Jan 19, 2019] Did Israel won or lost by unleashing civil war in Syria with its Washington boss and protector

    Looks like when it will all shake out, the net result will not be in the favor of the US-Israel-Saudi axis. That will be the new "normalcy of some sort."
    Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
    karlof1 , Jan 16, 2019 12:11:28 AM | 52

    "Essentially, the Creditor Class and their allies--which have existed for several thousand years--constitute a real life Hydra that must be slain, as was recognized by the Greeks who first told the whole story."

    In doing research for a dinosaur novel I'm planning to write, I was pleased to learn that the feature of the hydra sprouting multiple heads to replace each one severed wasn't part of the original myth, but was added later during the decadent stage of Greek culture. That ancient perception tallies well with the cultural-economic decadence of this collapsing civilization.

    BTW I got my copy of Spirit in the Gene and look forward to reading it.

    james , Jan 16, 2019 2:14:40 AM | link
    @65 pyschohistorian.. that is a good personal story of yours from today.. it is an easy analogy and many people will understand it.. one person at a time maybe...
    uncle tungsten , Jan 16, 2019 4:01:01 AM | link
    james | Jan 16, 2019 2:14:40 AM | 67

    More than one person at a time came out to hear Bernie Sanders deliver that message. There is no doubt they heard it vaguely via the US media but that was enough, they came in their tens of thousands. Such was the response that the Sanders campaign had to sometimes book bigger venues and truck in extra PA and video gear to broadcast to crowds outside.

    The yankee establishment is just desperate to smash any chance of this growing a second time. Come on Bernie and Tulsi Gabbard and all those newly elected put on the yellow vest. I dare you. Millions of Americans are willing. Ditto throughout the world millions of people are waiting to mock the BS colour revolutions and have a real one.

    Socialism and thoughts of socialist economic management spread like pheromones on the wind.

    Gezzah Potts , Jan 16, 2019 4:39:36 AM | link
    Its all like living on the film set of Alice In Wonderland while reading 1984 and Brave New World at the same time while overdosing on chocolate. Just batshit surreal, and the presstitutes keep pushing the World to the edge of the abyss in their continuous Russia and Putin bashing. And the vast majority in the West are completely oblivious to what is going on in the World, and completely oblivious to what is coming. And it will not be pleasant.
    Montreal , Jan 16, 2019 5:15:56 AM | link
    @57 James
    Did anyone notice an article copied from the Guardian by Information Clearing House entitled "Brought to Jesus - the evangelic grip on the Trump administration"? "Pense and Pompeo both call evangelical theology a powerful motivating force". "Evangelics now see the US locked into a holy war against the forces of evil who they see embodied by Iran". It is a never-ending struggle until.... the rapture." It is a chilling read, especially when it comes to their belief in the role of Zion. Extremely dangerous because entirely irrational.
    William Bowles , Jan 16, 2019 5:31:35 AM | link
    Right on Uncle Tungsten!
    William Bowles , Jan 16, 2019 5:32:36 AM | link
    Ditto the Bush posse!
    john , Jan 16, 2019 5:33:11 AM | link
    Jackrabbit says:

    As people discuss different versions of the dog and pony show, I tailor my point(s) accordingly

    your point(s) is tailored like a condom...one size fits all.

    john , Jan 16, 2019 5:49:11 AM | link
    psychohistorian says:

    I also want to see it [yellow vest] on the tower of london, somewhere in rome, fluttering in the Swiss alps, in china near the sacred city, in Russia, in India........

    apparently you missed the fact that an anti-establishment, anti-euro(thus threatening global bond markets) government was elected here in Italy last summer, precluding the necessity for protests in the streets. for the moment you might say we're riding the avant-garde.

    Yeah, Right , Jan 16, 2019 6:11:11 AM | link
    @61 NemesisCalling "Saw that Blackwater founder did an interview explaining that they can also replace the role of US troops in Syria."

    They would fit the definition of a Mercenary in Article 47 of the Geneva Conventions.
    As such they would not be afforded the protections of Geneva Convention III.

    "Fine by me, as long as the US offers no protection or no-fly-zone for them."

    I believe that Prince is advocating his own private mercenary airforce to provide support for his own mercenary army. Might work as far as ground support goes, but not against SU-35 fighter jets.

    So, yes, if Trump agrees to this proposal then it is inevitable that he will end up either providing a no-fly-zone for them or be accused of leaving these brave, brave boys to be slaughtered.

    I would assume that the Pentagon has told him that, but I make no assumption that he is paying that advice any attention.

    "Open season on all guns for hire. In Afghanistan, too."

    Well, yes, that's what International Humanitarian Law says.

    William Bowles , Jan 16, 2019 7:11:08 AM | link
    Yeah, Right | Jan 16, 2019 6:11:11 AM | 74

    Trump and Prince are old pals

    ADKC , Jan 16, 2019 10:15:44 AM | link
    So today we have US service men killed in Manbij and ISIS claim responsibility. It is reasonable to suspect that this is a false flag (with actual deaths) in order to create political justification for US to stay in Syria. Many commentators here view ISIS as being effectively a US proxy force.

    In my view the only real evidence that the US would be leaving Syria would involve direct negotiations with the Syrian government. In this case the US could leave saving face and securing some concessions that reflect their interests. The alternative is that the US would leave with their tails between their legs being bombed out, very ignoble and looking like the withdrawal from Vietnam; it is just not plausible that the US would leave in this way.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 16, 2019 10:32:49 AM | link
    ADKC

    Yes. What better way to demonstrate that ISIS is not defeated and the US "job" in Syria is not done.

    I suspect that Trump's rhetoric will not change. He will continue to insist that he is/will 'pull out' of Syria .... it's just gonna take longer. Just how long will remain a mystery.

    mauisurfer , Jan 16, 2019 10:48:00 AM | link

    The Vice President's Men

    Seymour M. Hersh

    https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n02/seymour-m-hersh/the-vice-presidents-men

    ADKC , Jan 16, 2019 11:01:37 AM | link
    Jackrabbit @78

    I see you have been accused of having a one sized fits all condom!😁

    Your theory, unfairly, gets short shrift whereas ideas like "Trump is doing all the right things, but is frustrated at every turn by the deep state" is just accepted unquestioningly.

    However, the Syrian withdrawal could happen and this would not necessarily be incompatible with your theory; there may be tactical reasons. Whatever, the idea that the US is just going to retreat and leave the Middle East alone is so far fetched that I am staggered that people see this as a real possibility.

    Personally, I think the US have a strategy for the world based on the model they created in Congo, South America, Libya and Afganistan. All of these areas are hugely profitable for the Empire because "controlled" chaos allows cheap extraction of resources and control of the world drug trade. This is what I believe the Empire has in mind for the Middle East, everywhere along OBOR and, also, Europe (and, perhaps, the US itself?).

    Don Bacon , Jan 16, 2019 11:05:00 AM | link
    from Asia Times, quote:
    On a mission from God: Pompeo messages evangelicals from the Middle East
    The US secretary of state was communicating to an audience back home on his Middle East tour, the key Trump constituency of evangelical Christians.
    In Cairo: "This trip is especially meaningful for me as an evangelical Christian, coming so soon after the Coptic Church's Christmas celebrations. This is an important time. We're all children of Abraham: Christians, Muslims, Jews. In my office, I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and His Word, and The Truth." . . here
    Bob In Portland , Jan 16, 2019 11:28:02 AM | link
    Trump is being prosecuted by Robert Swan Mueller III, who entire career has been him covering up and fixing cases which involved CIA criminality. Now William Barr is Trump's own choice for Attorney General. Barr spent the mid-1970s in the CIA. While there he got his degree in law, suggesting his career path was being drawn by his employer. Unsurprisingly, GHW Bush moved him along until he became Bush's AG.

    Trump is either more demented than many have thought, he's in on the whole charade of his Presidency or he's in deep trouble with the Deep State. The strings all lead back to Langley.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 16, 2019 11:43:33 AM | link
    john @73

    Discussions here and elsewhere are often centered on the theme that Trump is a populist maverick that is in conflict with the Deep State.

    This MSM-infused belief is so pervasive that many regard it as a "truth" and look askance at anyone questioning this obvious reality.

    But logic and reality tell a very different story:

    >mauisurfer @79 links to a Seymour Hersh report that shows how the Deep State actively works to circumvent Democratic constraints.

    > Obama's fake populism and Obama-era MSM narratives that supported his bullshit are instructive. Only now is the truth about Obama being discussed in MSM , and then only gingerly.

    > Starting with Reagan, every President and/or VP has had, or rumored to have had, links to CIA: Bush Sr. had led the CIA; Clinton allowed CIA flights into Arkansas; Obama's grandfather/mother. Questions have also been raised about Trump - the first casino he purchase was rumored to have been involved in CIA money laundering (prior to Trump's purchase).

    > Wolin, a respected Princeton University academic, described how the ruling establishment engages in "managed democracy" to retain control. A key part of that management is the money-based electoral system which ensures that no real populist is elected President.


    If you enjoy the Kool-Aid then just pass over my comments.
    Jackrabbit , Jan 16, 2019 11:46:35 AM | link
    Bob In Portland @82

    Yes! Why nominate Barr for AG? Why nominate Gina Haspel for CIA? Why bring on Bolton? These choices make no sense for a President that is supposedly at war with the Deep State.

    ADKC , Jan 16, 2019 12:12:18 PM | link
    Jackrabbit @84

    Also, why rollover so quickly on Michael Flynn's removal? It's not as if Trump had anyone else of much value on his team! Perhaps because Flynn was a

    ADKC , Jan 16, 2019 12:14:15 PM | link
    @84 cont...

    Perhaps because Flynn was actually going to take on those deep state vested interests?

    Noirette , Jan 16, 2019 12:56:56 PM | link
    Great list, b. Another. From the top of google (enter co name or part of post in goog for details.)

    Afaik (please correct if), Trump tried to do biz in Russia but more or less failed or gave up or didn't get anywhere much, nothing major transpired.

    "There are 517 McDonald's restaurants in Russia, 73 of which were opened in 2014. The company's total revenue for 2014 in Russia was 65.8 billion rubles.. the chain has been operating in Russia independently for 22 years."

    "PepsiCo reported that in 2017, its Russian operations generated net revenue of $3.23 billion, which made up 5.1 percent of the company's total net revenue."

    Apple revenues in Russia, + 23% in 2017.

    https://www.telecompaper.com/news/apple-revenue-climbs-23-in-russia-in-2017--1254617

    Philip Morris has good sales in Russia. Cisco Systems (idk about this, look it up.) Abbot Labs (US) sells generic drugs in Russia. Ford is still selling cars there.

    The leading Chocolate co. in Russia is Mondelez (should be another topic .. )

    https://www.mondelezinternational.com/about-us

    Starbucks celebrated its 100 stores in Russia in 2015.

    The CEOs of these cos. + their shareholders, employees, are in bed w. Russia and undermining US Democracy, interfering in people's choices, the true shining light on the hill, or what? It is collusion! They meet and deal with Russians, all the time.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 16, 2019 1:03:27 PM | link
    ADKC

    I don't think so. Flynn was about settling scores. Flynn's candid revelation that Obama made a "wilful decision" to allow ISIS to grow was anathema.

    Flynn had to be made an example of.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 16, 2019 1:11:57 PM | link
    Note: Flynn revelation was likely just a tip of the iceberg. It was from his agency (DIA) that Judicial Watch got the memo (via FOIA) that talked of how US allies wanted to establish a Caliphate.

    These were important to understanding ISIS as a proxy force, not the grass-roots group of Jihadi hoodlums that the Obama Administration wanted us to believe. Obama infamously called ISIS al Queda's "JV team" to explain why he was essentially ignoring it's rise.

    Later, the story changed to "ISIS was created by Assad." LOL.

    james , Jan 16, 2019 1:12:29 PM | link
    @68 uncle tungsten.. i wish you all the best trying to take back control of the gov't, or following thru on the yellow jacket demonstrations... i am with you in spirit..

    @70 montreal.. something is driving these folks... some whacky evangelical fantasy sounds about right... i can't believe how easily duped people are with fundamental religion of all stripes...

    @74 john.. you probably would have voted for frank zappa if he was running in the italian elections!

    john , Jan 16, 2019 1:13:19 PM | link
    Jackrabbit

    i've never embraced the argument that Trump is a president who is at war with the deep state. i've only said that this sort of yammering is all conjecture and as such will never be sufficient grounds for proof...that it doesn't really matter anyway.

    for all i know every incoming president is given a private screening of the zapruder film and the rest is left to his imagination.

    i don't drink Kool-Aid, and if i passed over your comments i wouldn't know that they pretty much all say the same thing.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 16, 2019 1:46:54 PM | link
    john

    Fair enough! But what should be done about the many people that HAVE drunk the Kool-Aid and believe the Trump vs. Deep State narrative?

    I think some amount of repetition is unavoidable. Especially since the Trump vs. Deep State narrative is repeated ad nauseum by MSM and even independent bloggers (that haven't thought it through).

    Montreal , Jan 16, 2019 1:51:45 PM | link
    @90 James.
    As someone said, history doesn't always repeat itself but sometimes rhymes....... in India, in the early nineteenth century, the British presence consisted largely of lowland Scots - evangelical Presbyterians. People like Dalhousie and Grant. They managed to combine an iron conviction in their own Godly righteousness - and duty to improve the benighted heathen - with a sincere belief that there was nothing wrong in robbing the natives blind whilst improving them. Their arrogance and greed led directly to the disaster of the First Afghan War and subsequently the First Indian War of Independence (or Indian Mutiny depending on your point of view). Maybe Presbyterian Evangelical certainty will be the American downfall as well. I do often hope so.
    john , Jan 16, 2019 1:53:26 PM | link
    james

    lol. yeah, Franco Zappa, the man from utopia

    do you know the story of when once president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, appointed Frank as Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture and Tourism , much to the chagrin of then U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker?

    apparently Baker declared, 'You can do business with the United States or you can do business with Frank Zappa.'

    james , Jan 16, 2019 1:57:34 PM | link
    @93 montreal.. i was unaware of the specifics on the history in india as you note.. thanks for sharing that.. i just assumed it was the british empire mindset, without looking more closely at the details of it..
    james , Jan 16, 2019 1:59:37 PM | link
    @94 john.. lol! cool pic - man from utopia... i do recall frank getting that appointment from vaclav havel, but this is the first time i heard of james bakers response! james baker is long forgotten, but frank zappa is a cultural icon that will be remembered for a long time!
    chimero , Jan 16, 2019 2:05:50 PM | link
    Superbowl democracy : pick the red team or pick the blue, really doesn't matter which you do, none of the wrestling is really true, just a snare of a circus we're forced to view, where puppets pose and pretend to duel, and the House will always win...
    john , Jan 16, 2019 2:15:24 PM | link
    james says:

    james baker is long forgotten, but frank zappa is a cultural icon that will be remembered for a long time

    nicely put.

    Bart Hansen , Jan 16, 2019 3:39:02 PM | link
    84 - Why nominate Barr, etc.? Just remember that trump does not have "binders full" of applicants.
    xLemming , Jan 16, 2019 3:46:37 PM | link
    @55

    Looks like someone already took a crack at Gilet Jaune Statue de la Liberté

    ">link

    Don Bacon , Jan 15, 2019 11:19:31 PM | link

    @ uncle tungsten | Jan 15, 2019 11:00:14 PM | 43

    Don't just take it from me. . .

    Elijah Magnier

    Indeed the Levant is returning to the centre of Middle East and world attention in a stronger position than in 2011. Syria has advanced precision missiles that can hit any building in Israel. Assad also has an air defence system he would have never dreamed of before 2011 -- thanks to Israel's continuous violation of its airspace, and its defiance of Russian authority. Hezbollah has constructed bases for its long and medium range precision missiles in the mountains and has created a bond with Syria that it could never have established -- if not for the war. Iran has established a strategic brotherhood with Syria, thanks to its role in defeating the regime change plan. . . here

    Alastair Crooke

    NATO's support for the growth of ISIS has created a bond between Syria and Iraq that no Muslim or Baathist link could ever have created: Iraq has a "carte blanche" to bomb ISIS locations in Syria without the consent of the Syrian leadership, and the Iraqi security forces can walk into Syria anytime they see fit to fight ISIS. The anti-Israel axis has never been stronger than it is today. That is the result of 2011-2018 war imposed on Syria". . . here

    Don Bacon , Jan 15, 2019 11:28:41 PM | link
    @ uncle tungsten | Jan 15, 2019 11:00:14 PM | 43

    And then add to that the current hectic itinerary of pompous Pompeo to explain the defeat to eight Middle East countries in eight days, highlighted by his feeble pleas to Qatar to join with Saudi Arabia against Iran. Solidity is crucial! Pompeo says, to which Qatar which shares a huge gas field with Iran gave pompous the middle finger. Another factor is the Turkey-Qatar alliance promoting the Muslim Brotherhood, anathema to the Saudi despots. This will all shake out, not to the favor of the US-Israel-Saudi axis. That will be the new "normalcy of some sort."

    Circe , Jan 15, 2019 11:46:02 PM | link
    First of all, if Trump is so bad with and Russia, why are you and others here always loving on him, singing his praises and defending him like he's still a naive schoolboy in short pants that the big boys are picking on?

    @21 Jackrabbit

    Bolton's not steering Trump into war with Iran, Trump hired Bolton so he'd have someone to blame and take the heat when he greenlights war with Iran and things go bad; which they will.

    Trump was an Iran hawk from start. He's been railing against Iran since he got off the Trump Tower escalator and stepped behind the AIPAC podium.

    @43 uncle tungsten

    Wow, I mean wow. That's a bull's eye zinger. DB was really off the mark.

    Circe , Jan 16, 2019 12:10:26 AM | link
    @45 DB

    Yeah, and Israel still has one of the most powerful arsenals in the world funded to the tune of $38 billion, the largest aid package to Israel in U.S. history delivered by Trump. and Israel has hundreds of nukes, still occupies Palestine and the Golan Heights, and still has the Empire's bases where it wants them, and now has the GCC in its corner all in, and Trump has delivered on so many promises already: tearing up the Iran deal, defunding aid to Palestinians, closing the Palestinians D.C. mission office, moving the U.S. Embassy and declaring Jerusalem capital of Israel, and sabotaging a Resolution at the U.N condemning settlements when he wasn't even President yet. Poor Israel, so abandoned by Trump...NOT.

    karlof1 , Jan 16, 2019 12:11:28 AM | link
    Jared @28--

    You ask the question: "How will we ever gain control of our country."

    As psychohistorian intones, private financial casinos and their ilk need to become public utilities to fund public activities and protect the resources on which they're based, while the political/philosophical change to create that paradigm metes our justice and cleans The Swamp. To discover the veracity of our prescription, one need only read Michael Hudson's works , although there're others we might also cite. Essentially, the Creditor Class and their allies--which have existed for several thousand years--constitute a real life Hydra that must be slain, as was recognized by the Greeks who first told the whole story.

    Of course, the end is far easier than the road to get there. But as the polling link I provided upthread and others show, the public is roused and of greater solidarity for the first time this century. Why do ya think the Deep State's trying so hard to limit and falsify information I an overt manner!

    Don Bacon , Jan 16, 2019 12:24:26 AM | link
    @ Circe | Jan 16, 2019 12:10:26 AM | 51
    Poor Israel, so abandoned by Trump...NOT.
    I never said Israel was abandoned by Trump, so I was never "really off the mark," was I. If Trump is doing any abandoning anywhere, it's in Syria, Israel's enemy, now stronger due to Obama's mistake, one of many. Trump is a late arrival.
    Jackrabbit , Jan 16, 2019 12:25:38 AM | link
    Don Bacon

    Aren't you getting a little ahead of yourself. US troops are still there. NY Times says the 'pull out' is expected to take 4-6 months.

    How many times has US been rumored to be leaving Afghanistan?

    US still has troops in Iraq! Years after Obama was forced (yes, forced) to remove the bulk of the forces in that country.

    And what good is the 'pull out' if US keeps mercenaries/special forces in the country to fight with SDF? The plan seems to be retain control of Syrian territory via proxies. There is NO TALK of a hand over to SAA.

    uncle tungsten , Jan 16, 2019 12:39:23 AM | link
    karlof1 | Jan 16, 2019 12:11:28 AM | 52

    Thanks karlof1 I will explore that Michael Hudson link it looks good from first scan.

    Generally: I don't do graphics but I think a statue of liberty with a yellow vest would be a good theme for a behind the scenes 'competition' submitted via email to b (if willing) then published here for a discussion and 'vote' would be a great aid to mirth. I won't be in your revolution if I can't dance - sort of thing. Maybe its been done by now ?

    karlof1 , Jan 16, 2019 12:46:00 AM | link
    james @33--

    I rarely harangue at US Exceptionalism like I did when I first began commenting here as it gets in the way of highlighting other points, and with me it's a priori along with its kin Manifest Destiny. It should also be observed that all Imperialist Nations share both to differing degrees and becomes part of Elite "Magic Mirror" persona--Mirror, mirror on the wall; who's the fairest of them all..."--generating the deadliest of snobbishness. When I taught, I took pains to properly explain the Outlaw US Empire's Mythos and show where it's present in everyday life--The Few; The Proud; The Marines. He's shooting the ball. (You throw the damn thing; do baseball pitchers shoot their pitch!?)

    The Canadian domestic situation differs from the USA's in numerous ways, but it faces the same forces trying to keep citizens from gaining control over their destiny and that of their nation. And Canadians share much of the same negative American baggage. Both nation's citizens would benefit by knowing the true nature of their past which would aid them greatly in their current struggle.

    james , Jan 16, 2019 12:53:39 AM | link
    don

    @43 uncle tungsten is bang on... for some reason - maybe you need to read a tao te ching verse before i say this to you! - you can't seriously believe trump has changed his fealty to israel? that is just not the reality as i see it.. the whole of the usa establishment are completely subservient to israel.. take a look at trumps daughter and son in law.. what the fuck is that?

    trump is also totally down with war on iran.. why is that? was a little zionist birdie talking in his ear, or not? sure looks like 24/7 fealty to israel is spite of whatever bullshit trump is tweeting about..

    james , Jan 16, 2019 12:56:35 AM | link
    @56 karlof1... thanks.. i agree with you and see what you are saying... it seems though on one small level canucks are not always thinking we are the fucking greatest.. that is the one difference i would point to.. so if that isn't exceptionalism rearing it's ugly head, i don't know what to call it.. other then that - i agree with you and i suppose your point is that the concept of exceptionalism is just another distraction..
    psychohistorian , Jan 16, 2019 1:01:51 AM | link
    @ karlof1 with the hat tip about gaining control of "our" country....thanks.

    I am with uncle tungsten with wanting to put a yellow vest on the statue of liberty and especially the dance part because I already do that twice a week. I also want to see it on the tower of london, somewhere in rome, fluttering in the Swiss alps, in china near the sacred city, in Russia, in India........you get the picture.

    We are entering that cleft of time where psychohistorian is suppose to wave its magic wand and greatly reduce the time before "real change". Ok, so I did that. But that still means that others will need to play their roles as well for the change to occur. We all need to continue the zombie awakening so that when the time comes for "we the people" to make a collective "sound", it comes out as beautiful music that we can all dance to.

    karlof1 , Jan 16, 2019 1:06:32 AM | link
    uncle tungsten @55--

    This is a good place to begin at Hudson's site as it explains a great many things about the recent past and present. I would suggest this page next . His opus, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire ought to be in every respectable library, for which the videos here provide a bit of context. If I add another link, this might be construed as spam, so I'll also highly suggest Life & Thought: An Autobiography from last August. Enjoy!

    NemesisCalling , Jan 16, 2019 1:11:16 AM | link
    Saw that Blackwater founder did an interview explaining that they can also replace the role of US troops in Syria.

    Fine by me, as long as the US offers no protection or no-fly-zone for them.

    Remember the episode where 100+ Russian contractors were strafed fighting alongside SAA by USAF? Open season on all guns for hire. In Afghanistan, too.

    uncle tungsten , Jan 16, 2019 1:24:46 AM | link
    psychohistorian | Jan 16, 2019 1:01:51 AM | 59

    YES!and some really good (short)5second? video to stream via whatever those social media platforms are. One on each of the religious icons of whatever would be inviting.

    Je suis Gillet Jaune!! is irresistable.

    james , Jan 16, 2019 1:44:10 AM | link
    quote from orlov..

    "The fact that what amounts to palace intrigue -- the fracas between the White House, the two houses of Congress and a ghoulish grand inquisitor named Mueller -- has taken center stage is uncannily reminiscent of various earlier political collapses, such as the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire or of the fall and the consequent beheading of Louis XVI. The fact that Trump, like the Ottoman worthies, stocks his harem with East European women, lends an eerie touch. That said, most people in the US seem blind to the nature of their overlords in a way that the French, with their Gilets Jaunes movement (just as an example) are definitely not."

    https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-five-stages-of-collapse-2019-update.html

    Hem Lock , Jan 16, 2019 2:00:43 AM | link
    By now everybody knows that Netanyahu asks and Trump delivers. The servility of US politicians and media to Israel is so obvious that they world laughs at the "superpower USA, that is being rough shod" by a toy shit entity called Israel. THE GREATEST TREASON OF ALL "Israel first"
    psychohistorian , Jan 16, 2019 2:09:25 AM | link
    @ james who quoted Orlov:
    "
    That said, most people in the US seem blind to the nature of their overlords in a way that the French, with their Gilets Jaunes movement (just as an example) are definitely not."
    "

    This is part of the elite massaging of nationalism narratives. There is still too much "frontier" in America that blind many to not feeling part of a government controlled community. I talked to a young guy today with 3 kids and living in a mobile home on property in the sticks so he doesn't have problems with neighbors and government. I think I got my message across when I pointed out that the roads he drives on to his house, the power and water he gets are forms of socialism and I just want the tools of finance to be public-minded like that.

    Russ , Jan 16, 2019 2:13:40 AM | link

    [Jan 19, 2019] Putin Asks And Trump Delivers - A List Of All The Good Things Trump Did For Russia

    Way too any pleasured for Putin from Trump administration... Just look at this perma-pleasing face of Pompeo.
    Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Putin Asks And Trump Delivers - A List Of All The Good Things Trump Did For Russia

    Slate's Fred Kaplan writes :

    The Washington Post's Greg Miller reported Sunday that President Donald Trump's confiscation of the translator's notes from a one-on-one conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017 was "unusual." This is incorrect. It was unprecedented. There is nothing like it in the annals of presidential history.

    Not really. Other U.S. leaders held long private meetings with their counterparts without notes being taken.

    When Richard Nixon met Leonid Brezhnev he did not even bring his own interpreter:

    George Szamuely @GeorgeSzamuely - 20:57 utc - 14 Jan 2019

    Nixon would meet Brezhnev alone, the only other person in attendance being Viktor Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter. "Our first meeting in the Oval Office was private, except for Viktor Sukhodrev, who, as in 1972, acted as translator." Nixon on Brezhnev's 1973 visit. RN, p.878 . Therefore, the only "notes" that would exist would be those of the Soviet interpreter. Not sure he would have time to make notes and translate and, even if he did so, whether those notes would be housed in any US archive.

    Nixon's White House office was bugged. There are probably tape recordings of the talks. There might also be recordings of the Trump-Putin talks.

    At their 1986 Reykjavik summit Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev talked without their notetakers :

    Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev began their second day of talks with a private meeting that had been scheduled to last 15 minutes but ran for nearly 70 minutes, with only interpreters present . They met in a small room in the Soviet Mission , with the Soviet leader seated in a small armchair and Mr. Reagan on a sofa.

    In the afternoon, they meet alone for a little over 20 minutes and then again for 90 minutes. All told, the two leaders have spent 4 hours and 51 minutes alone , except for interpreters, over the two days here.

    The archives of the Reykjavik talks do not include any notes of those private talks.

    But, who knows, maybe Nixon and Reagan where also on the Russian payroll, just like Donald Trump is today.


    bigger

    Only that Trump is controlled by Putin can explain why the FBI opened a counter-intelligence investigation against Trump (see section three).

    That the FBI agents involved in the decision were avid haters of Russia and of Trump has surely nothing to do with it. That the opening of a counter-intelligence investigation gave them the legal ability under Obama's EO12333 to use NSA signal intelligence against Trump is surely irrelevant.

    What the FBI people really were concerned about is Trump's public record of favoring Russia at each and every corner.

    Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of Russian influence over him is surely justified.

    Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of Russian influence over him is surely justified.

    When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Russia, than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin's influence, knowingly or unwittingly, could he end up doing Russia so many favors.

    Not.

    Posted by b at 02:12 PM | Comments (121)

    [Jan 19, 2019] The central political question in all Western societies is -- how far will the masses be able to control the naturally-abusive tendencies of the elite?

    Notable quotes:
    "... Robert Henderson [ Email him ] ..."
    "... is a retired civil servant living in London and consequently old enough to remember what life was like before political correctness. He runs the Living In A Madhouse and England Calling blogs. ..."
    Jan 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

    So what is really happening -- in the U.K. and the U.S.?

    The Deep State is often portrayed as a conspiracy. In fact, it is better thought of as a blind sociological event. There is no group of conscious conspirators, simply people being groomed to have the same opinions or at least saying they do.

    Link Bookmark What has happened in the UK (and the rest for the West to varying degrees) is the success of the long march through the institutions . That is what ultimately has given the UK an elite ( politicians , mediafolk , teachers etc) who are overwhelmingly Politically Correct internationalists. And it's those people who are at the forefront of the attempts to sabotage Brexit.

    How did it come about? A German student leader of the 1960s Rudi Dutschke, echoing the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci , put forward the idea whereby societies could be subverted from within by those of an internationalist bent who would patiently work to gain positions of power and influence. Eventually there would be enough of such people to change the policies of Western societies from national to internationalist ones. That point was reached in the UK at least 50 years ago and the Politically Correct stranglehold on our society is now complete.

    The capture of Western societies by internationalists has allowed them to permit and even overtly encourage mass immigration of people from different cultures, denigrate their own societies, traduce the West and its native populations generally and introduce gradually the pernicious Totalitarian creed of Cultural Marxism which has "anti-racism" (in reality anti-white racism) at its heart. The last brick in the Politically Correct building is the increasingly draconian treatment of anyone who refuses to toe the line -- increasingly including the use of the criminal law and imprisonment.

    That is why Western politics until recently has been so ideologically monotone. Brexit was a revolt against that mentality.

    Most MPs overtly or tacitly supported the idea of the referendum and its result by promising it in election manifestos, in Parliament and through their passage by large majorities of the legislation needed to both set up the referendum and make provision for its implementation.

    But by doing so, MPs forfeited their right to do anything other honour the result of the referendum. That applies just as much to Remainer MPs as Leaver MPs.

    Sadly, the behaviour of the most committed Remainers with power and influence (including many MPs and peers in the House of Lords) has shattered utterly the idea that the UK is a fully functioning democracy. Rather, it is an elective oligarchy whereby the electorate are offered an opportunity every few years to choose between competing parts of the elite -- an elite in the UK whose general political ideas are largely held in common and go against the interests and wishes of most of the electorate.

    None of this should be a surprise. The sad truth: the central political question in all Western societies is -- how far will the masses be able to control the naturally-abusive tendencies of the elite?

    Robert Henderson [ Email him ] is a retired civil servant living in London and consequently old enough to remember what life was like before political correctness. He runs the Living In A Madhouse and England Calling blogs.

    [Jan 19, 2019] The Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be

    Jan 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Rurik , says: April 10, 2018 at 2:46 pm GMT

    @jacques sheete

    the Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be."

    -David Graham Phillips, Cosmopolitan magazine, February 1906

    and to think that was over a hundred years ago

    ... ... ...

    [Jan 19, 2019] Integrity Initiative was formed soon after Kissinger's Op-Ed in August 2014 and before Trump began his run for President.

    Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Jan 19, 2019 8:32:00 PM | link

    bevin: Suppose that ...

    Suppose that ... CIA-MI6 were trying to ensure the election of Trump, not Hillary. As I described in previous comments , Trump's election followed a logical progression that, in sum, indicate manipulation on his behalf. Hal Duell @21 mentions some of the psyop reality-making: White Helmets, MH-17, Skripal, etc. Karlof1 @30 notes the absolute hubris of the Empire's "we make our own reality".

    Lets say Integrity Initiative, working with CIA and MI6, wanted to use the 2016 election to cast aspersion on the Russians. A populist running against Hillary was the logical choice. The narrative: only with Russian help could a challenger hope to win against Hillary. "Russian meddling" and Wikileaks as Russian agent are major "wins" for the establishment. Integrity Initiative was formed soon after Kissinger's Op-Ed in August 2014 and before Trump began his run for President.

    [Jan 19, 2019] Treatment of Russians in the US MSM echoes the German Nazis their treatment of Slavs in thisr media (slaves, unter menchen)

    Notable quotes:
    "... The current round of bullshit is not about justifying the investigation, it is about concealing MI6 taking a leading role in the attempted coup. ..."
    Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Sally Snyder , Jan 15, 2019 2:59:27 PM | link

    As shown in this article, a recent Senate bill shows clearly how Washington has a two-faced approach when it comes to dealing with Russia and Syria:

    https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-united-states-senate-saving-syria.html

    Congress, with or without Donald Trump's influence, has proven that it simply doesn't care about the geopolitical repercussions of its actions.

    Erelis , Jan 15, 2019 3:42:28 PM | link

    A few more just for kicks.
    AshenLight , Jan 15, 2019 3:52:13 PM | link
    @ NoOneYouKnow | Jan 15, 2019 2:20:33 PM | 2

    In my experience, just about everyone here, including hordes of supposedly educated people who really should know better, believe it. They really do. However, most of them don't care--it's merely something to snark about or score points in a political conversation with, not anything they perceive as an actual threat to their way of life.

    William Bowles , Jan 15, 2019 4:01:45 PM | link
    It's nothing more than the undying legacy of anti-communism and racism thrown in for good measure. It echoes the German Nazis and their treatment of Slavs (slaves, unter menchen). We need only look at how the US viewed the Japanese (and the Germans) during WWII, with Roosevelt calling for their extermination (I'll find the source).

    And of course, there's US slavery and extermination of the original inhabitants that also feeds into the psychosis.

    Peter VE , Jan 15, 2019 4:12:40 PM | link
    But, Rachel Maddow told me that Trump is Putin's puppet. It was on TV, so it must be true.
    ashley albanese , Jan 15, 2019 4:19:37 PM | link
    William Bowles 8

    London was said to be very subdued the day news came through that Sweden's Charles the twelfth had been crushed at Poltava in 1709 . North Western European economic interests have clashed with Russian across many centuries. Had Charles been successful in the Ukraine a new level of English and Swedish alliance was in the offing .

    James sullivan , Jan 15, 2019 4:22:27 PM | link
    I just read about Trump's AG candidate, commenting on the 'Russian interference' in US elections ....and i'm struck that these are not stupid people....they are either totally IGNORANT of the facts and analysis .....or they are good ol boys, ready to tow the deep state lie, so they too can feed at the trough. It saddens me in either case ....what hope can one entertain when such cretins and low lifes are the supposed LEADERS of the democratic west. I hold no hopes.
    Jackrabbit , Jan 15, 2019 4:48:13 PM | link
    Proof by absurdity. Trump and Deep State work together. MAGA is a policy choice as much as it is a campaign slogan. Everyone wants to rail against the anti-Trump forces. Oh it feels so good. That Trump has proven to be a faux populist like Obama is ignored. WTF? Welcome to the rabbit hole.
    karlof1 , Jan 15, 2019 4:54:00 PM | link
    I didn't live through the entire Anti-Communist Crusade, but was certainly cognitively aware of it from JFK's inauguration in 1961 until the USSR's dissolution. I very closely studied the events that led to an emergent Russian Federation and the device meant to corral the "Near-Abroad"--The Commonwealth of Independent States. Admittedly, I was somewhat horrified by Yeltsin's attack on Russia's Duma's White House in 1993 and eagerly read Kargalitsky's account as it was the only one written by a Parliamentarian in English and published in 1994. It was possible to discern the outright looting of Russia and former Soviet nations, but the depth of evil involved wasn't made clear until some publications in the late 1990s documenting the Rape of Russia; all of which made clear what the underlying intent of the Anti-Communist Crusade entailed, and that that Crusade wouldn't end until Russia was absolutely broken and enslaved by NATO/Outlaw US Empire. As many have opined, the Cold War/Anti-Communist Crusade never ended; rather, it just entered a new phase/chapter, and that's what we're living through today. But as b portrays, the level of hysterics paraded via BigLie Media go far beyond anything from the previous chapter and probably outweigh those employed during Red Scares I and II combined.

    It seems fairly plain to see that delusional madness and anger have combined as the motivating factors, but why/what sparked them and when? IMO, when was during Carter's presidency with the why/what being several seemingly disparate but connected happenings: Church Committee Hearings; Stagflation; Iranian Islamic Revolution; OPEC actions; losing grip on Latin America; informal end to War on Poverty, and institution of Neoliberalism and Zerosumism; changing of Coldwarrior Guard to Israel First Coldwarrior Guard. The culmination was CIA gaining control of Executive with DCI GHW Bush becoming Veep to senile, dementia addled POTUS Reagan.

    Interconnected with the above is the prepping of the World Trade Center buildings for demolition during Clinton's 2nd term, the operative question being: Would the False Flag be perpetrated by Gore/Liberman, or was Bush/Cheney deemed to do the deed by Deep State actors; or does this aspect even matter--Liberman was as much of a Neocon as Cheney, all 4 are Israel Firsters, and Gore was already a War Criminal due to his participation in Clinton's numerous illegalities. Sure, the Bush/Cheney cabal was more radical; but given what we observed during Clinton/Gore, Deep State support was quite abundant. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was finished and Kosovo created, Afghanistan was already targeted and Joint Vision 2010 --the blueprint for the Outlaw US Empire's Full Spectrum Dominance Policy--was published in 1996. Interestingly, at no time known to me has the Policy articulated by the authors of Joint Vision 2010 or its update Joint Vision 2020 been announced by any POTUS or senior member of the Duopoly as THE #1 policy goal of the Outlaw US Empire despite both papers being available to the public. (If he were still alive, IF Stone would have written about both umpteen numbers of times; while true to form, BigLie media remains 100% mute.) Despite all the preparations and Trillions of dollars spent and looted, The failure to implement the Yinon Plan seems to be directed at Russia, although it was indigenous Iraqis who are responsible for the plan's defeat.

    So, is the lying vitriol we're subjected to the result of Russian actions or the inability to attain the #1 policy goal due to mistakes made at all levels--Deep State and Federal Government? Recall that Russia/Putin didn't start to actively parry Outlaw Empire moves until 2008, well after the Yinon Plan's defeat by Iraqis.

    Blooming Barricade , Jan 15, 2019 5:02:35 PM | link
    This inane narrative has gone too far. It's actually threatening chances for human survival with its nationalism, poor focus, and banality:

    --

    "The key focus of the so-called "left" in the world's most polluting country, run by an ecocidal vandal who deserves to be in the running for most destructive rulers of all time, is whether or not that vandal is taking orders from the Russian Federation.

    Let me repeat that: in the most wasteful society in human history, the forces designated to oppose the rape of the planet and corporate slavery are concerned with treason and betrayal of the "nation."

    MSNBC: "The worst case scenario that we`ve all been talking about, which is the possibility that the president had somehow been co-opted and was in the pocket of the Russians."

    THIS is the "worst case scenario" according to the "social justice" network of the American "left?"

    If we were to step back and look at this terrible situation honestly, we could only conclude that American liberals, and the Democratic Party, are right-wing nationalist forces concerned with geopolitical gambits and preservation of military alliances.

    This isn't the politics of 2019, or 1999. It's the politics of 1819 - but even then, it's the right wing politics of 1819, as there was already a left dedicated to popular solidarity and social ownership existing, clandestinely, in the shadows of European cities.

    It's worth analyzing how a "Seattle" would play out if it were to occur in the context of today's US political discourse: the protestors would be seen as nationalist anti-Semites doing the bidding of Putin, and perhaps Xi Jinping. The leaking of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment would be condemned instantly as "information warfare." A focus on environmental issues would be viewed in the context of "energy geopolitics." Indymedia would be shut down by the authorities as a vehicle for "sowing discord" in Europe against NATO and liberalism."

    Anon , Jan 15, 2019 5:08:17 PM | link
    The current round of bullshit is not about justifying the investigation, it is about concealing MI6 taking a leading role in the attempted coup.
    james , Jan 15, 2019 5:09:32 PM | link
    @14 karlof1... good post.. i don't know the answer to your questions, but it seems like a bit of both but mostly the later... i am unaware of this joint vision 2010 paper..
    bevin , Jan 15, 2019 5:15:14 PM | link
    As b points out, and Erelis @6, among others confirms, Kaplan's article in Slate is worthless. Discredited by everything that has happened over the past two years.

    The question is whether it matters. Who reads Slate? Are those who follow Kaplan anything more than partisans, far beyond the reach of logical argument, committed to the Zionist project and US hegemony, who read him for comfort and laughs rather than critically.

    Kaplan, after twenty odd years of consistently being wrong and consistently impelling the United States into foreign disasters, costly in lives and treasure, is a busted flush politically. The only people his ravings effect are the true believers who are simply looking for someone to articulate their idiotic prejudices.

    This, after all is a man whose wife, an Obama/ Clinton favourite, parodying Marie Antionette, midwifed the Bandera Reich in Kiev.

    There is little point in arguing with him, just feed him ever more rope and he will hang himself, his spouse, his country(s) and the Ukraine and its allies too.

    Jared , Jan 15, 2019 8:06:04 PM | link
    Given the part we know about how self serving, corrupt and incompetent our IC is I fear it is the tip of the iceberg. So many decades they have learned they can do as they will with impunity. If I am not mistaken they are partly self financing through likely illegal and unethical activities. They have gone rogue. Currently the dems think it's fitting however they will also feel the bite. How will we ever gain control of our country.
    karlof1 , Jan 15, 2019 8:29:05 PM | link
    Which are more salient--domestically: The attacks on Russia or those against Trump? Lots of Trumpian, GOP and Corporate Democrat policy ploys go against the majority of the polity and the National Interest. Unfortunately, the bloc known as the Resistance includes a 5th Column consisting of most Corporate Democrats, who are essentially Republicans wearing donkey heads. BigLie Media wants to promote the GOP & Corporate Democrat policy ploys, so the anti-Russian news assault serves to cover-up popular domestic issues, like this one regarding taxation and related income disparity . (Amazing that 60 Minutes provided Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez airtime to outline her proposals--airtime that was meant to cut her down to size but backfired.)

    As I outlined earlier, what I see as the struggle is for control of the Federal Government--CIA/Deep State vs the American People--with the Anti-Communist Crusade used as cover to diminish rights while enriching actors controlling government, which is exactly what we see now. Yes, Trump's a player, but with few friends and little coaching. Arguably, his only asset is the position he occupies.

    slit , Jan 15, 2019 11:16:29 PM | link
    Peter Ve @9

    Heres another cartoon meme that was doing the rounds in 2016:

    https://pics.onsizzle.com/donald-trump-is-putins-puppet-the-puppeteer-red-panels-com-5254201.png

    [Jan 19, 2019] The Mockingbird Media lies and equivocates about everything. Insofar as the deep state spider's web of hegemony spreads all over the world and becomes more odious, the lies become more copious and more predictable, and their acceptance more and more relies upon the lever of public credulity and Neoliberal Newspeak

    Jan 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Mulegino1 , says: April 10, 2018 at 4:49 am GMT

    A great man once wrote that the "big lie" had a force of credulity among the broad masses, as the latter were wont to engage in lying about minor quotidian matters of little or no significance while the big lies were engaged in by the mainstream press, dominated by the usual tribal suspects.

    It was the case with blaming General Ludendorff for Germany's defeat, and it is the same case today, 100 years after the fact.

    The Mockingbird Media lies and equivocates about everything. Insofar as the deep state spider's web of hegemony spreads all over the world and becomes more odious, the lies become more copious and more predictable, and their acceptance relies upon the lever of public credulity and kosher Newspeak.

    What the unconditional and incorrigible Trumpetistas do not realize is that those of us- a very large plurality of of Trump supporters- voted for him because he was not Hillary Clinton and had pledged to keep us out of foreign wars. We will neither support, nor abet, foreign wars for the sake of Israel, whether they are started by Trump or anyone else. Intervention in Syria against the Assad regime is a no go. Trump cannot hope to compare himself to Assad, since the latter has formed a real and effective alliance against the Christian hating head choppers with Russia and Iran. Trump is totally clueless with respect to geopolitics. He is a rank amateur.

    Jon Baptist , says: April 10, 2018 at 5:27 am GMT
    It makes complete sense if one simply looks at the British Establishment's prior behavior of intentionally starting world wars at the order of the Society of the Elect. It's all in the CFR's archives. Their guilt in starting WW1 is emphatically admitted and documented in roughly the first 200 pages of the following book. http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf

    Who is in the Society of the Elect? Read the back pages of http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/The_Anglo-American_Establishment.pdf

    Anonymous [280] Disclaimer , says: April 10, 2018 at 5:33 am GMT
    It's surreal to watch such staggering levels of dishonest incompetence among our globalist "elites".

    This is worrying. Nobody is that stupid so it's more like they don't care about credibility going forward. Like it won't matter.

    annamaria , says: April 10, 2018 at 5:52 am GMT
    "In 2016 an official British government inquiry determined that Bush and Blair had indeed together rushed to war. The Global Establishment has nevertheless rewarded Tony Blair for his loyalty with Clintonesque generosity. He has enjoyed a number of well-paid sinecures and is now worth in excess of $100 million."

    -- The character of Blair and the Establishment is well established: Blair is a major war criminal supported by the major war profiteers. His children and grandchildren are a progeny of a horrible criminal.

    What is truly amazing is the complacency of the Roman Catholic Church that still has not excommunicated and anathematized the mass murderer. Blair should be haunted and hunted for his crimes against humanity.

    With age, Blair's face has become expressively evil. His wife Theresa Cara "Cherie" Blair shows the same acute ugliness coming from her rotten soul of a war profiteer.

    Blanco Watts , says: April 10, 2018 at 6:34 am GMT
    The UK is governed by the same Neo-liberal psychotic cabal that runs the US, Israel and France.
    quasi_verbatim , says: April 10, 2018 at 7:01 am GMT
    The Skripals are to be disappeared. Their home, the pub and the restaurant are to be demolished. This is a Tarantino cleanup. Move on
    JR , says: April 10, 2018 at 7:06 am GMT
    Keep in mind how long ago all this is:
    Skripal was recruited around 1990 and arrested in 2004. Guess that the Russian attitude towards Skripal took the chaos of the 90's as mitigating circumstances into account.
    Skripal served his sentence of only 13 years till 2010 when he was pardoned and given the option to leave. Russia did not revoke Skripal's citizenship. The UK issued Skripal a passport too. On arrival in the UK Skripak was extensively debriefed by UK intelligence services. Skripal has lived for 8 years in the UK now.

    And now out of the blue this incident nicely dovetailing with May ratcheted up anti Russia language only a few months before this false flag incident and the rapidly failing traction of the Steele/Orbis/MI6 instigated Russia collusion story on the basis of that fake Trump Dossier. By the way Orbis affiliated Steele and Miller have been among Skripal's handlers.

    Realist , says: April 10, 2018 at 7:49 am GMT
    Why anyone would believe anything Western governments say is beyond me.
    animalogic , says: April 10, 2018 at 8:28 am GMT
    Good article.
    The Skipnal affair has been an utter disgrace from day one. May & Boris are a shame on the UK fully reminesent of that utter dog, Blair.
    The fact that the msm still babbles on about Russia & Skipnal is indicative of their monumental contempt for the public & factual balanced reporting .well what's new, I guess ?
    Ronald Thomas West , says: Website April 10, 2018 at 8:43 am GMT
    From the Steele dossier lies falling apart to the Skripal lies falling apart to the 'Assad did it' lies falling apart:

    https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2018/04/08/open-letter-to-die-linke/

    ^

    Paul Craig Roberts is correct when quoting The Saker:

    "The Russian view is simple: the West is ruled by a gang of thugs supported by an infinitely lying and hypocritical media while the general public in the West has been hopelessly zombified." -- The Saker

    I expect that makes the Russians right

    OMG , says: April 10, 2018 at 10:35 am GMT
    These ridiculous, suicidal gas attacks by Assad seem to coincide not only with battleground victories against the head-choppers, but co-incidentally with Israel's murderous attacks on unarmed Palestinians "throwing stones".

    What nobody seems to have picked up is the emphasis – and red lines – on Gas; gas, gas attacks. Why is gas so much worse than being dismembered, disembowelled, and mutilated by high explosives? Certainly I would favour unconsciousness and death by gas before being smashed to pieces by depleted uranium.

    These relentlessly repeated claims are an exercise with the dual purpose of providing a subliminal message about the greatest tragedy in human history, repeated ad nauseam. The massive 'gassing' of European Jews some 65 years ago. Lest we forget.

    Anonymous [249] Disclaimer , says: April 10, 2018 at 10:43 am GMT
    What makes you think the Skripals are still alive? The entire British charade stinks to high heaven.
    Escher , says: April 10, 2018 at 11:06 am GMT
    What is surprising is how the MSM is able to lead along so many supposedly educated people, with at least some critical thinking skills.
    All we like sheep , says: April 10, 2018 at 11:13 am GMT
    Compared with the Litvinenko umbrella attack with its tip having been dipped in an Amazonian Indians' style curare variant of Polonium the intelligence level of the MI6 & CIA seems to have hit the ground with the twofold miracle of the dead being raised. Now the miracles are posing a big problem for the demonizers of Russia & President Putin: how to spirit these two living & talking people away, who have returned from the dead, where they were supposed to be so safe and well for all truth-loving investigators. This whole story seems to unfold like a Jesus Christ Superstar sequel with James Bond appetizers having been added. At present the roles have been reversed: the Russians being the champions of free will and the Western intelligence services being the Joker.
    Greg Bacon , says: Website April 10, 2018 at 11:14 am GMT
    Until some kind of sanity returns to this planet and war mongering gangsters like the Bush and Clinton Mobs, Blair, Obama and a host of Pentagon generals, along with their boot-licking MSM are indicted, tried for crimes against humanity and war crimes, found guilty and sentences carried out, there will be no peace on Earth, just an endless series of False Flags, hysterical reactions by the ones who were behind the False Flags and more wars.
    Simon in London , says: April 10, 2018 at 11:25 am GMT
    It does look rather like those Syrian chemical weapon attacks that happen whenever the rebels are about to be defeated.

    I am pretty sure that it was not ordered within the British government and that most of the British government don't know where it came from, but are willing to believe it was Russia.

    While the CIA does have plenty of form on assassinations, the risk if they were found to be assassinating in Britain seems quite high due to the close CIA links with the UK intelligence sector. But CIA agents could have paid someone else to do it.

    Mossad is the one group that can act freely in the UK, has a record of assassinating scientists, engineers etc here, and unlike CIA, can take the risk of being caught. So it's a possibility – OTOH Israel has shown a lot less anti-Russian hatred than the US Deep State has.

    Normally I'd assume it was indeed Russia – I thought there was plenty of evidence the Polonium poisoning was Russia – and it still seems possible, but US or Mossad must be at least equally likely in this case. It's just possible it could have been British initiated but I doubt it.

    I do think it's most likely the person who actually poisoned them was not an employee of any agency.

    Jake , says: April 10, 2018 at 11:38 am GMT
    Theresa May as more evil than Bill Clinton? That will sound odd to some, but I think it is true. Hillary is the pure evil half of the Clinton marriage. Bill is simply charming and filled with a desire to amass enough power to have a group adore him as he finds new panties to explore.

    May is English, and she has the very long line of Brit Empire secret service evil at her disposal. And her move is a bold one. What it means is that she is signaling that at least if she is PM, the UK could replace the US as Fearless Leader of the actual New World Order, which is the WASP Empire with Israel and worldwide Jewry as Junior Partner #1 and Saudi Arabia elevated to Junior Partner #2 in an insane attempt to make Israel secure forever.

    The English have never been happy that the lowly Americans leaped them as A-#1 of the WASP Empire, and being English they have no permanent alliances, no permanent allies, not even kin (perhaps especially kin – which type and degree of ruthlessness impresses all Semites).

    This alliance was sealed by none other than the very epitome of WASP culture: Mr. Archetypal WASP himself, Oliver Cromwell. The Anglo-Saxon alliance with Jews precisely to wage wars against non-WASP white Christians was the logical (and inevitable if WASP culture were to acquire large scale political power) .

    By the Victorian era, virtually all Elite Brit WASPs were knowing philoSemites. The new twist was that a growing number of them were becoming obsessed with Arabs and/or Islam. decades before the Balfour Declaration, the Brit WASP Elites were wrangling among themselves over how best to use the largest and wealthiest Empire in world history to express its philoSemtism.

    The solution recently agreed upon was to elevate the Saudis. The assumption is that as the Saudis control the actual land of Mohammed, if they are elevated to suzerainty over not merely all Arabs but the entire Islamic Middle East, then the entire Islamic world can be controlled, including to allow Israel to exist in 'peace.'

    And that means all that oil is under the indirect, but very firm, control of the WASP Empire, or as The Saker calls it: the Anglo-Zionist Empire.

    Of course, the Saudi royal family is the most amorally vicious power party in the Middle East. They would slaughter half the Sunni Arabs in order to become unrivaled suzerain over the entire Islamic world. Such monstrousness makes the House of Saud exactly the type partner that those who control the WASP Empire want as partners.

    The Russians are in the way of that beautiful plan of world domination. Russians have common sense and, much worse, they express it, even publicly. Russians know that Sunni Islam is a much worse threat to the world than is Shiite Islam. The Russians know that the Iranians are much more honorable and moral than are the Saudis. The Russians know that as bad as the Turks are, they are more honorable and trustworthy than the Saudis.

    And the Russians also know that the Anglo-Zionist Empire would be tickled pink to make all non-WASP Elite whites – all in the world – a permanent serf class, treated the way Cromwell treated the Irish, the way the Israelis treat the Palestinians.

    Randal , says: April 10, 2018 at 11:48 am GMT
    @Corvinus Corvinus, George Galloway has a message addressed directly to you:

    It's harsh, but one has to concede it is also a fair assessment.

    Giuseppe , says: April 10, 2018 at 12:10 pm GMT
    I challenge anyone to name a modern war prosecuted by the US government and its allies that did not involve at its root the direct fabrication of blatant lies on enormous levels, both as a casus belli and also to manipulate public opinion in favor of hostilities.

    The clandestine activity represented by these *provocations* isn't even good spycraft. The Skripal case and the latest use of chlorine gas in Syria are risible, clumsy, amateur attempts to wangle the empire into war that the callowest rube could see through. And yet, it's working its magic on the media. The politicians, suborned by the war machine, give unanimous bipartisan assent.

    What the hell is going on?

    JoaoAlfaiate , says: April 10, 2018 at 12:35 pm GMT
    @Giuseppe Saddam's WMD, Gulf of Tonkin, etc., etc. And now a ridiculous false flag attack in Syria. Did it take place at all? But the narrative is all. The press in the USA is more effectively controlled and conformist than in Germany in the late 1930s and nobody goes around beating up journalists or sending them to a KZ. The Syrian Gov't is winning the civil war, things are going well but what Assad really needs is to have the crap bombed out of his military by Uncle Sam. What transparent bullshit.
    tjm , says: April 10, 2018 at 1:08 pm GMT
    @DESERT FOX Agreed to all you said, but I would include the assassination of JFK and his brother, and likely Martin Luther King Jr.

    And each time they took out a great American, they used that assassination to push a destructive narrative: With the killing of MLK they pinned the killing on a white southern man, thus pushing their white hate narrative.

    With 9/11 is was all about stoking hate of Muslims

    These creatures lie as easily as breath, and they have all the money in the world to push their lies.

    JoaoAlfaiate , says: April 10, 2018 at 2:40 pm GMT
    @jacques sheete The intent of my post was to show that the MSM here is conformist and doesn't like to stray far from what the USG is claiming and what other journalists are writing. Rather than explore the topics you raise, as worthy of exploration as they might be, I thought I'd offer what newspapers around the USA were saying about Saddam's WMD after Powell's UNSC speech; seems a bit more germane.

    The Powell evidence will be persuasive to anyone who is still persuadable.

    The Wall Street Journal

    Piling fact upon fact, photo upon photo Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell methodically demonstrated why Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein remains dangerous to his own people, Iraq's neighbors

    The Los Angeles Times

    On Wednesday, America's most reluctant warrior, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, presented succinct and damning evidence of Saddam's enormous threat to world peace.

    Arizona Republic

    Saddam Hussein's illicit arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, as well as the equally illicit means that he possesses to deliver them, poses a tangible and urgent danger to U.S. and world security. Millions of innocent lives are at risk.

    Dallas Morning News

    At some point, the world chooses to believe President George W. Bush and Secretary Powell or the international community chooses to side with Saddam Hussein and those who broadcast his lies to the world. Powell has painstakingly presented a strong case against Iraq.

    Greenville News/South Carolina

    Iraq is busted. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell laid out the case clearly. No one hearing Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council could doubt Iraq's actions and intentions.

    Jacksonville Times-Union/Florida

    The threat is real and at our door. Sept. 11, 2001, stripped away the belief that the United States can peacefully coexist with evil. Prove it, they said. Powell has.

    Charleston Daily Mail/West Virginia

    We are a country always loath to fight unless provoked. The reluctance of Americans to initiate a war needlessly does the nation credit. But this is not a needless war, nor is it unprovoked. Powell laid out the need, and explained the provocation, in step-by-step fashion that cannot be refuted without resorting to fantasy.

    Chicago Sun-Times

    The Dispatch repeatedly has called on the Bush administration to make a compelling case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is developing weapons of mass destruction and hiding these efforts from U.N. inspectors. Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell made that case before the Security Council.

    Columbus Dispatch

    Powell has methodically proved Iraq's failure to comply with U.N. mandates. With each passing day, Iraq's own choices move it closer to a war that full compliance would prevent.

    Indianapolis Star

    Secretary of State Colin Powell's 90-minute presentation to the U.N. Security Council, buttressed with surveillance photographs and recorded phone conversations, should remove all doubt that Iraq's Saddam Hussein has developed and hides weapons of mass destruction, in violation of U.N. resolutions.

    Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

    Powell's speech to the U.N. Security Council presented not just one 'smoking gun' but a battery of them, more than sufficient to dispel any lingering doubt about the threat the Iraqi dictator poses.

    Denver Post

    The United States has made a compelling case that Iraq has failed to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction. This failure violates the U.N. Security Council resolution of late last year which ordered Iraq to disarm. As a consequence and it is a grave one, the Security Council must act now to disarm Iraq by force.

    Salt Lake City Tribune

    Powell has connected enough dots to tie Iraq to al-Qaeda and show that this alliance is a threat to all of Europe as well as the United States.

    Manchester Union Leader

    In fact, the speech provided proof that Saddam continues to refuse to obey U.N. resolutions. Any amount of time he has now to comply fully and openly with U.N. demands should be measured in days or a few weeks – and no longer.

    Portland Press-Herald/Maine

    [Jan 19, 2019] Oh, nothing new; extortion, perjury, forty per cent, face-grinding.

    Jan 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Mike Sylwester says: Website April 10, 2018 at 12:43 pm GMT The Moon of Alabama website has been doing great work criticizing the Skripal yarn.

    http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/04/the-best-explanation-for-the-skripal-drama-is-food-poisoning.html#more

    jacques sheete , says: April 10, 2018 at 12:50 pm GMT

    @Giuseppe

    What the hell is going on?

    Nothing new. Same ol same ol.

    But how are things going up here? what is Athens about?

    Phi. Oh, nothing new; extortion, perjury, forty per cent, face-grinding.

    -Lucian of Samosata, MENIPPUS, A NECROMANTIC EXPERIMENT, ~150 AD
    http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/luc/wl1/wl176.htm

    [Jan 18, 2019] On the British Establishment

    Notable quotes:
    "... The British Establishment has done with the concepts of honor. The loudest lying voices against Russia belong either to the whoring "aristocrats," who found that war profiteering (by any means) pays well, or the opportunistic parvenu like Gavin Williamson representing the vulgarity and intellectual inadequacy of the Establishment. ..."
    Jan 18, 2019 | www.unz.com

    annamaria says: April 10, 2018 at 2:44 pm GMT 100 Words On the British Establishment:
    The Skripal affair is better understood in the context of "sir" Savile' knighthood -- when the influential pedophile had been raping and molesting kids for 40 years and none stood up to the criminal. The BBC has dutifully refused to publish anything that would upset "sir" Savile. The Scotland Yard looked the other way -- precisely as the Establishment ordered them to do.
    Savile' specialty were orphans. He was the embodiment of British Establishment.

    The British Establishment has done with the concepts of honor. The loudest lying voices against Russia belong either to the whoring "aristocrats," who found that war profiteering (by any means) pays well, or the opportunistic parvenu like Gavin Williamson representing the vulgarity and intellectual inadequacy of the Establishment.

    [Jan 17, 2019] Seymour Hersh George H.W. Bush Team Leaked To Media To Reveal CIA's Iran-Contra Affair

    Notable quotes:
    "... London Review of Books ..."
    Jan 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    bevin , Jan 17, 2019 3:05:49 PM | link

    A new piece by Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books gives some insight into secret U.S. operations during the Reagan administration. The Vice President's Men includes a quite sensational claim of who revealed the Iran-Contra affair.

    According to the conventional wisdom, as reflected in Wikipedia, an Iranian operator revealed to a Lebanese paper that the U.S. was selling weapons to Iran in the hope to get hostages in Lebanon released:

    After a leak by Mehdi Hashemi, a senior official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa exposed the arrangement on 3 November 1986. This was the first public report of the weapons-for-hostages deal.

    People is the National Security Council used profits from these weapon sales to illegally arm and finance CIA run anti-government gangs in Nicaragua. Both, the weapon sales to Iran and the weapon delivery to guerilla in Nicaragua, were illegal under U.S. law. The leak to Lebanese paper blew up both operations.

    That Mehdi Hashemi, the Iranian operative, leaked the affair is only supported by second hand hearsay from a dubious source. Seymour Hersh reports of a very different culprit.

    According to his sources former CIA director George H.W. Bush, who was then Reagan's vice president, ran his own secret operations through a special office in the Pentagon. It was led by Vice-Admiral Arthur Moreau. The office and its operations were kept outside of congressional oversight. Neither the CIA nor the Joint Chief's of Staff were aware of its doing. During some 30 different operations the Bush team used small groups of U.S. marines to effect Soviet operations in foreign countries and to get rid of unwanted foreign politicians. Bush essentially ran the prequel of the 'war on/of terror' which today is run by the CIA and the Joint Special Forces Command.

    Bush disliked William Casey, who Reagan had named as new CIA director. Casey was a business man who got the job after he managed Ronald Reagan's election campaign. Bush thought that he was too incompetent to run the clandestine service.

    One of the operations run under Bush also involved Nicaragua, but had nothing to do with the later Iran-Contra scandal. At the same time the CIA director William Casey was drumming up support for the Contras in Nicaragua. The two operations collided when Lieutenant Colonel Oliver (Ollie) North at the National Security Council used the proceeds from the weapon sales to Iran to illegally finance the CIA's Contras in Nicaragua. While North was also a confident of the Bush/Moreau's operations, he allegedly freelanced and eventually deserted to the CIA side.

    According to a former officer involved in Bush's operations office, Bush and Moreau feared that the CIA's widely expanding Iran-Contra operation run by Oliver North would become a threat to their own operations. They decided to blow it up:

    'Ollie brings in Dick Secord and Iranian dissidents and money people in Texas to the scheme, and it's gotten totally out of control,' the officer said. 'We're going nuts. If we don't manage this carefully, our whole structure will unravel. And so we' – former members of Moreau's team who were still working for Bush – 'leaked the story to the magazine in Lebanon.' He was referring to an article, published on 3 November 1986 by Ash-Shiraa magazine in Beirut, that described the arms for hostages agreement. He would not say how word was passed to the magazine, ...

    According to Hersh's source the effect of the leak to the Lebanese paper was foreseen and intended:

    The officer explained that it was understood by all that the scandal would unravel in public very quickly, and Congress would get involved. ' Our goals were to protect the Moreau operation, to limit the vice president's possible exposure, and to convince the Reagan administration to limit Bill Casey's management of covert operations. It only took a match to light the fire. It was: "Oh my god. We were paying ransom for the hostages – to Iran."'

    If Hersh's anonymous source is correct, which I have no reason to doubt, the Iranian Mehdi Hashemi did not leak the issue. It was bureaucratic infighting between a former CIA director, who continued to run secret operations, and a sitting one, who was deemed incompetent by the former, that led to the disclosure of the Iran-Contra affair.

    Seymour Hersh is known to have lots of contacts with former officials and officers. According to his on telling he is actively seeking them out as soon as they retire. Old men like to tell war stories, but dislike to damage their still living friends. George H.W. Bush died last November. Hersh likely knew the story long ago but is only now allowed to tell it.

    The new Hersh/LRB piece is quite long and the details seems to have little relevance for current affairs. But his sources tell an interesting story about the backstage fights that went on between the various branches of the national security bureaucracy during the Reagan presidency. There is no doubt that similar fights, including intentional leaks to damage competing officials, continue today.

    Posted by b at 02:11 PM | Comments (36) Interesting too that Hersh cannot finds a publisher in the United States. The fact that this is in the LRB-where I just read it- tells you all you need to know about, for example, the New Yorker, The Atlantic and Harpers. As to the newspapers, they are a lost cause.
    Now let us see if there is any follow up in the MSM..anywhere. My guess is that RT will cover it.
    Congratulations, again to b, for spotting the stories that matter and making sure that the imperialist media cannot suppress them.

    Cherrycoke , Jan 17, 2019 3:13:47 PM | link

    "That Mehdi Hashemi, the Iranian operative, leaked the affair is only supported by second hand hearsay from a dubious source."

    That dubious source is George Cave aka Ibrahim Razin aka Oswald LeWinter, poet, Shakespeare expert, and involved since the Sixties in disinformation of the highest order. He had a role -- mainly as disinformant, I believe -- in at least the following cases: Charlie Manson, Propaganda Due, Iran-Contra, Olof Palme, Princess Diana, Lockerbie. LeWinter turns up in Francovich's Gladio as well as his Lockerbie movie.

    See Wiki and: http://www.leopoldreport.com/LRsajt74.html

    LeWinter died a few years ago. A piece of work.

    snake , Jan 17, 2019 3:14:26 PM | link
    I think the take home is how agency structure at different levels is used to circumvent relevant laws and public awareness. An auditor applying normal audit technique under contract to one agency would be hard pressed to find this kind of activity because it exist in another agency at a different level. My question is how could this have been discovered at the time it happened? What formula, question or technique could produce a discovery that would lead to the existence of this kind of activity? Even more important did the auditors discover the activity and fail to report it or did they have the data to discover it and just missed it. The audit firm involved might owe the government some money.

    Reconciling the actually delivery of assets deployed to the funds that were used to acquire and transport them might have produced a discovery result.?

    Red Ryder , Jan 17, 2019 3:15:46 PM | link
    If you search the most nefarious and deadly covert operations, you will usually find Naval Intelligence deeply involved.

    Bush-CIA was always a cover for Bush-Naval Intel.

    The Kennedy Assassination plot overlord was Naval Intelligence.

    The most pervasive war-mongering by the Hegemon is led by US Naval Intelligence.

    See Bob Woodward's background, even Steve Bannon's CV.

    The US Navy projects US hegemonic power and is decisive for Logistical transport of war efforts.

    The most elite of SOF is Navy SEALS. SEALS are always sent on the most sensitive missions.

    The Rumsfeld-Cebrowski doctrine followed this century to destroy the sovereignty of third world states is the masterplan of Cebrowski, an Admiral. Thierry Meyssan always refers to it as the strategic basis for the chaos in MENA and coming to Africa and Latin America.

    From the USS Maine in Havana harbor, to Pearl Harbor, to Iran-Contra, to Iraq,Libya, Syria, the handprint is there.

    [Jan 17, 2019] The Kennedy Assassination plot overlord was Naval Intelligence.

    Jan 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Red Ryder , Jan 17, 2019 3:15:46 PM | link

    If you search the most nefarious and deadly covert operations, you will usually find Naval Intelligence deeply involved.

    Bush-CIA was always a cover for Bush-Naval Intel.

    The Kennedy Assassination plot overlord was Naval Intelligence.

    The most pervasive war-mongering by the Hegemon is led by US Naval Intelligence.

    See Bob Woodward's background, even Steve Bannon's CV.

    The US Navy projects US hegemonic power and is decisive for Logistical transport of war efforts.

    The most elite of SOF is Navy SEALS. SEALS are always sent on the most sensitive missions.

    The Rumsfeld-Cebrowski doctrine followed this century to destroy the sovereignty of third world states is the masterplan of Cebrowski, an Admiral. Thierry Meyssan always refers to it as the strategic basis for the chaos in MENA and coming to Africa and Latin America.

    From the USS Maine in Havana harbor, to Pearl Harbor, to Iran-Contra, to Iraq,Libya, Syria, the handprint is there.

    [Jan 17, 2019] Yinon Plan, Israeli strategic plan to ensure regional superiority, stipulates that Israel must balkanize neighboring Arab states

    Jan 17, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Chupacabra-322, 21 minutes ago link

    The Zionist Plan for the Middle East, also known as the Yinon Plan, is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.

    The reach of a "Greater Israel", as described in the Yinon plan.

    When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria, not to mention the process of regime change in Egypt, must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli expansionist project.

    "Greater Israel" consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates.

    Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one Shiite and the other Sunni.

    The Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military's Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside from a divided Iraq, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The Yinon Plan also calls for color revolutions (Arab Spring) North Africa and forecasts it as starting from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.

    "Greater Israel" requires the breaking up of the existing Arab states into small states. The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must

    1. become an imperial regional power, and
    2. must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states.

    Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel's satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme.

    Viewed in this context, the war on Syria is part of the process of Israeli territorial expansion. Israeli intelligence working hand in glove with the US, Turkey and NATO is directly supportive of the Al Qaeda terrorist mercenaries inside Syria.

    The Zionist Project also requires the destabilization of Egypt, the creation of factional divisions within Egypt as instrumented by the "Arab Spring" leading to the formation of a sectarian based State dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

    [Jan 17, 2019] Managerialism is synonym for corporatism

    Jan 17, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

    JulesBywaterLees -> Zagradotryad , 29 Nov 2018 08:29

    Managerialism is a state of European/Western politics, power has moved to large corporations. In 2008 the finance industry held countries to ransom...
    Zagradotryad , 29 Nov 2018 08:03

    power that has become too distant from the people.

    That's the problem.

    It's not technology, or Russians, or Trump or any other of the things you throw up to convince yourself the problem is external.

    Managerialism has merely delivered gross inequality. The tools don't matter.

    [Jan 17, 2019] The Coke or Pepsi and parties is a perfect corporatist arrangement, which guarantee filtering out any opposition to the oligarchy in 99 percent of elections

    Only a severe political crisi can shake this "controlled duopoly" of the US coporatism.
    Jan 16, 2019 | theguardian.com

    William Williamson, 15 Jan 2019 10:38

    Well put. All the USA has is Coke or Pepsi. With a lot of masquerading in between. A couple people who aren't on THE payroll, or wanting to be.
    MyGenericUsername , 15 Jan 2019 07:38
    Half of Americans don't bother voting for president. Why is the American media full only of people who insist that the country is divided in half between Democrat and Republican supporters? Where are the people of influence who think it's a problem and reflects poorly on the country that half of eligible voters don't see a reason to participate, and that it's worth changing things in order to get more people to change their minds about that?

    Both parties are content with being unpopular, but with political mechanisms ensuring they stay in power anyway. The Democrats aren't concerned with being popular. They're content with being a token opposition party that every once in a while gets a few token years with power they don't put to any good anyway. It pays more, I guess.

    CanSoc , 15 Jan 2019 07:34
    It still looks like if Americans want to live in a progressive country, they'll have to move to one. But as it is clear that the neoliberalism of establishment Democrats has little or nothing to offer the poor and working class, or to non-wealthy millennials, the times they are a-changing.

    [Jan 17, 2019] The rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 30s had many causes and some surprising supporters

    Jan 17, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

    RogerPalmer -> 5nufk1n4prez , 29 Nov 2018 07:30

    True but incredibly naive.

    The rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 30s had many causes and some surprising supporters.

    Part of the problem was undeniably the crippling reparations for WWI forced on Germany by the victorious allies.

    Part of the problem was communism strengthening in Russia and a growing communist threat in Germany.

    Part of the problem was a desire by the entrenched elites to use the National Socialists as a counter to challenge the populism of the communism.

    There are many contributing factors and the responsibility for the Nazis reaches far beyond the German border.

    [Jan 17, 2019] The Deep State is not monolithic

    Notable quotes:
    "... It does appear that a portion of the Deep State was really disappointed and didn't give up when other billionaires got Trump elected. ..."
    Jan 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    gepay , Jan 17, 2019 8:53:55 PM | 34 ">link

    The Deep State is not monolithic. I would not be surprised that at the same time as Iran Contra there were other large scale covert operations going on.

    There certainly are ongoing operations that are directed at keeping actual nationalists (like I believe Putin to be) from gaining power in important resource countries in Africa and other continents

    Llike the operation that brought down Gough Whitlam without the need for Perkin's (Economic hitman) jackals which were probably used to kill Olof Palme.

    It does appear that a portion of the Deep State was really disappointed and didn't give up when other billionaires got Trump elected.

    [Jan 17, 2019] What makes folks think that the Bush secret cabal has gone away?

    Apparently papa Bush was a dirtbag.
    Jan 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Pft , Jan 17, 2019 6:36:28 PM | link

    psychohistorian , Jan 17, 2019 5:54:09 PM | link

    What makes folks think that the Bush secret cabal has gone away?

    I see a splintering or bankruptcy of many elite coming as part of the new order.....cull the herd...... If only the elite would take each other down in this event I would be pleased.....grin

    Leave the rest of us to pick up the pieces and move on with life after our global private finance/God of Mammon world collapses.

    I agree with comment #2 Richard Steven Hack that Hersh is playing his role of keeping focus off more recent crimes against humanity by exposing the deeds of the dead but staying tight lipped about deeds of the living.

    lysias , Jan 17, 2019 6:08:17 PM | link

    If Hersh is now revealing secrets he couldn't while Bush was still alive, I wish he would tell us what connection there was between Bush and the JFK assassination. Unfortunately, Hersh's disgraceful book "The Dark Side of Camelot," suggests he will not. That book reflects thinking by Hersh's CIA and Secret Service sources that Kennedy was such a bad person and president that it's a good thing he was killed. The book never explicitly says this, but it's the underlying thought.
    Hersh seems to be engaged in a bit of revisionism to whitewash Bush's role on Iran-Contra. Probably he has been strong armed, like so many others today

    President Bush decapitated the Iran-Contra investigation by pardoning 6 figures including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, whose trial was about to begin, with Bush himself likely called to testify. ." Bush first consulted his attorney general at the time, William Barr. Barr has just been named by Trump as attorney general.

    Interesting article on Barr here (i broke the link with space). The swamp just keeps getting nastier

    https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1994/eirv21n42-19941021
    /eirv21n42-19941021_029-william_barr_the_bush_clique_and.pdf


    Bush was basically the acting President during the Reagan years like Cheney was during his sons regime. Cheney and Bush go way back. Bush like Cheney knew everything going on.

    "On May 14, 1982, Vice President Bush's position as chief of all U.S. covert action was formalized in a secret memorandum (signed "for the President" by Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser William P. Clark and declassified during the congressional Iran-Contra hearings)."

    [Jan 17, 2019] Another bit of evidence backing my hypothesis that the CIA quickly gained control of the Executive branch of the Federal government soon after its inception.

    Jan 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    karlof1 , Jan 17, 2019 3:22:19 PM | 8 ">link

    Gee, what a surprise, GHW Bush committing ongoing acts of treason, first as DCI then, Veep, then POTUS. Yet another bit of evidence backing my hypothesis that the CIA quickly gained control of the Executive branch of the Federal government soon after its inception.

    It would be tempting to call it the Mafiosi States of America except that so few Italians or Sicilians are involved.

    Saker's Anglo-Zionist Empire is quite close to reality, although I prefer my own Outlaw US Empire.

    What I was trained to portray the USA as to students is a massive lie, some of which I knew at the time, but not to the extent I now know. Frankly, I'm rather glad my elders have all passed--to be told you've been living a lie your entire life is an affront to one's dignity that's hard to top.

    [Jan 17, 2019] Longtime Reporter Leaves NBC, Accuses Media of Lionizing Destructive Organizations Like the FBI

    Notable quotes:
    "... By Thomas Neuberger. Originally published at DownWithTyranny! ..."
    "... I'd argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn't missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. -- William Arkin, former NBC war reporter ..."
    "... Former CIA Director John Brennan the latest superspook," they said, "to be reborn as a TV newsie . He just cashed in at NBC News as a 'senior national security and intelligence analyst' and served his first expert views on Meet the Press . The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN , which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity. ..."
    "... Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV's grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert Mueller; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC ; and Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser under Bush. ..."
    "... At this point Arkin is selling the idea, with which I agree, that the security state has become so powerful that it's able to use the news networks, who compete for "spook parity," as their sales platforms. ..."
    "... And there's no real evidence that the FBI is either -- is that competent of an institution, to begin with, in terms of even pursuing the prosecutions that it's pursuing. But yet we lionize them. We hold them up on a pedestal, that somehow they are the truth tellers , that they're the ones who are getting to the bottom of things, when there's just no evidence that that's the case. ..."
    "... And we tend, again, to say "Donald Trump's Homeland Security Department." Donald Trump couldn't find the Department of Homeland Security if somebody set him on the streets of New York -- of Washington, D.C. So it's not Donald Trump's Homeland Security Department. It's our Homeland Security Department. And I think it's important for us to recognize that this is a department that is really operating on its own behalf and out of control . ..."
    "... if a President Sanders attempted to do all that, what would be the response of the national security apparatus, guardians of the status quo? Whom would they serve, the billionaire owners of the established, corrupt-but-lucrative bipartisan state, or the Sanders-led revolutionary FDR-style government they're constitutionally sworn to defend? ..."
    "... The Guard had the power to "make or break emperors." Are we growing our own Praetorian Guard, or giving them leave to grow, under cover of their anti-Trump "resistance"? If I were one of the national security superspooks, I'd want nothing better than to be welcomed -- and washed clean -- by acceptance into that well-praised effort. Doors would open publicly that before were open only in secret. ..."
    "... the form of government he leaves behind may be worse, especially if he cements in the public mind the rightness of superspooks acting as new-minted kingmakers. Sanders supporters, take note. ..."
    Jan 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Posted on January 15, 2019 by Yves Smith By Thomas Neuberger. Originally published at DownWithTyranny!

    The Praetorian Guard declares a cowering Claudius emperor after murdering Caligula (from a painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema)

    I'd argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn't missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. -- William Arkin, former NBC war reporter

    File this under "Praetorian Guard Watch."

    William Arkin is a longtime NBC reporter, primarily covering war and national security news. He recently quit NBC, offering his reasons in an online " departure letter ." There he castigated the media's coverage of the president, calling them at one point "prisoners of Donald Trump."

    "Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor," Arkin wrote. "And yet I'm alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn't get out Syria? We shouldn't go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really earn for the Cold War? And don't even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?"

    Please notice the last sentences above, about the growth in reputation -- and irreproachability -- of the national security state: "And don't even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?"

    Then he gave an interview to Democracy Now 's Amy Goodman. Part of that interview went this way (emphasis mine throughout):

    AMY GOODMAN: So, you talked about the people who populate the networks as pundits, and you've been a fierce critic of the national security state, or at least understanding who it is who is explaining things to us.

    Reading from Politico , " Former CIA Director John Brennan the latest superspook," they said, "to be reborn as a TV newsie . He just cashed in at NBC News as a 'senior national security and intelligence analyst' and served his first expert views on Meet the Press . The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN , which employs former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden in a similar capacity.

    Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV's grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert Mueller; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC ; and Fran Townsend, homeland security adviser under Bush."

    And it goes on and on and on. These are now the pundits. And so, when you have a situation like President Trump announcing he will immediately withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and halve the troops that are in Afghanistan, you have this massive attack on him that's actually led by the permanent national security state under the guise of pundits on television .

    At this point Arkin is selling the idea, with which I agree, that the security state has become so powerful that it's able to use the news networks, who compete for "spook parity," as their sales platforms.

    But in doing so, he's making another point as well, if not mindfully -- that the national security state is approaching (or has approached) the status of a latter-day Praetorian Guard, a military organization without whose approval no one can become or remain president.

    He gets there in stages. First, this:

    WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, I think that you've -- I mean, what you said stands for itself, Amy. But I would add to it that I think the real crisis is that when we have a panel discussion on television, in the mainstream press, and even in the mainstream newspapers, we don't populate that panel with people who are in opposition. We have a single war party in the United States, and it's the only one that is given voice.

    And I think that probably because of the phenomenon of Donald Trump -- let's just be honest about it -- really what we see on TV now is former Obama administration officials masquerading as analysts who are nonpartisan, when in fact they are partisan .

    Brennan, Clapper (he who lied to Congress but, as an approved insider, was forgiven), and a number of other "former Obama administration officials" are not just partisan, pro-endless war advocates "masquerading as analysts"; they are "analysts" working to delegitimize Donald Trump. Whether not Trump is a legitimate president, that "partisan superspooks" are uncritically accepted as part of the takedown operation should be concerning.

    Arkin seems to recognize this. Later in the interview he's asked to explain his comment about the FBI, which I noted above.

    AMY GOODMAN: And, William Arkin, you also write, "don't [even] get me started with the FBI : What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?"

    WILLIAM ARKIN: Well, there's a crazy collateral damage of Donald Trump. And that is that there are a lot of liberals in America who believe that the CIA and the FBI is going to somehow save the country from Donald Trump .

    Well, I'm sorry, I'm not a particular fan of either the CIA or the FBI . And the FBI , in particular, has a deplorable record in American society, from Martin Luther King and the peace movements of the 1960s all the way up through Wen Ho Lee and others who have been persecuted by the FBI .

    And there's no real evidence that the FBI is either -- is that competent of an institution, to begin with, in terms of even pursuing the prosecutions that it's pursuing. But yet we lionize them. We hold them up on a pedestal, that somehow they are the truth tellers , that they're the ones who are getting to the bottom of things, when there's just no evidence that that's the case.

    AMY GOODMAN:     And what do you mean by the "creeping fascism of homeland security"?

    WILLIAM ARKIN: You know, I was against the creation of the Homeland Security Department in 2003, to begin with. First of all, don't like the word. "Homeland security" sounds a little bit brown-shirty to me. But, second of all, it was created to be a counterterrorist organization, a domestic counterterrorist organization. And all during the Obama administration, we heard Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, saying, "You know, we are counterterrorism." But since then, we've seen they're creeping into cybersecurity. We've seen them creeping into election security. We've seen ICE and TSA become the second and third largest federal law enforcement agencies in the country. And so, now homeland security sort of has become a domestic intelligence agency with really an unclear remit, really with broad powers that we don't fully understand .

    And we tend, again, to say "Donald Trump's Homeland Security Department." Donald Trump couldn't find the Department of Homeland Security if somebody set him on the streets of New York -- of Washington, D.C. So it's not Donald Trump's Homeland Security Department. It's our Homeland Security Department. And I think it's important for us to recognize that this is a department that is really operating on its own behalf and out of control .

    I'd like you to ask yourself this. If a President Bernie Sanders wanted better relations with Russia and North Korea, and went about it in a smart, safe way; wanted to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. by smartly but radically renegotiating our billionaire- and corporate-friendly trade deals; wanted to radically reduce spending on the national security apparatus , on our endless wars, and spend instead on government-provided services like Medicare for All (which, by the way, would devastate several powerful, well-funded industries and bipartisan donor constituencies) and for good measure, started jailing bankers again

    if a President Sanders attempted to do all that, what would be the response of the national security apparatus, guardians of the status quo? Whom would they serve, the billionaire owners of the established, corrupt-but-lucrative bipartisan state, or the Sanders-led revolutionary FDR-style government they're constitutionally sworn to defend?

    As a reminder : The Praetorian Guard was an elite unit of the Imperial Roman army whose members served as personal bodyguards to the Roman emperors. [T]he Guard became notable for its intrigue and interference in Roman politics, to the point of overthrowing emperors and proclaiming their successors. In 312, the Guard was disbanded by Constantine the Great [after defeating them and their latest declared emperor at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge ].

    The Guard murdered Caligula -- insane, incompetent and dangerous -- and declared Claudius emperor, the first of its many "interferences." After Claudius was poisoned, they transferred allegiance to Nero. It went like this for centuries (of which we have none, by the way).

    The Guard had the power to "make or break emperors." Are we growing our own Praetorian Guard, or giving them leave to grow, under cover of their anti-Trump "resistance"? If I were one of the national security superspooks, I'd want nothing better than to be welcomed -- and washed clean -- by acceptance into that well-praised effort. Doors would open publicly that before were open only in secret.

    In that sense, Trump may be even more dangerous than he's now considered to be. What he may do while still with us may be frightful to consider. But the form of government he leaves behind may be worse, especially if he cements in the public mind the rightness of superspooks acting as new-minted kingmakers. Sanders supporters, take note.

    [Jan 17, 2019] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-10/f-35-program-costs-jump-to-406-billion-in-new-pentagon-estimate

    Jan 17, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

    What a bunch of fools. As Tucker Carlson aptly said

    Most terrifying of all, the crew has become incompetent. They have no idea how to sail. They're spinning the ship's wheel like they're playing roulette and cackling like mental patients.

    The boat is listing, taking on water, about to sink. They're totally unaware that any of this is happening. As waves wash over the deck, they're awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. You look on in horror, helpless and desperate. You have nowhere to go. You're trapped on a ship of fools.

    Plato imagined this scene in The Republic. He never mentions what happened to the ship. It would be nice to know. What was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves.

    The people who did it don't seem aware of what they've done. They don't want to know, and they don't want you to tell them. Facts threaten their fantasies. And so they continue as if what they're doing is working, making mistakes and reaping consequences that were predictable even to Greek philosophers thousands of years before the Internet.
    They're fools. The rest of us are their passengers.

    [Jan 17, 2019] We are disenfranchised by what the elites are saying because the elites control the narrative in a way that makes sure the power will always reside with them.

    One of the main power weapons of the elite is the control over the information flows
    Jan 17, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

    Albert Ravey , 29 Nov 2018 10:45

    Some highlights from this thread (no names, no pack drill):

    Populism is a kickback and correction to the forty years of political correctness where the white masses of Europe and America were forbidden by the liberal establishment to be their real selves

    People are fed up with the elite consensus because of the failures of the elites.

    Perhaps the reason that "populism" is thriving is that the liberal elites who ruled us in the entire post war period became complacent out of touch with those they were meant to represent.

    there are millions of others whose voices have been ignored or silenced by the mainstream news

    We are disenfranchised by what the elites are saying because the elites control the narrative in a way that makes sure the power will always reside with them.

    The MSM has always been biased-

    Why is democracy booming the article asks.
    Well because the lies and bullshit of the liberal elite are there for all to see.

    Take a look at what the MSM refuses to report, or what it deliberately distorts,

    You can see the problem. It's like they are all reading from the same limited script which has been handed to them. Given the freedom to express our opinions, we are regurgitating what someone else has told us to say.

    Maybe we should not be too pessimistic. The levels of opportunity for expression that the internet and social media have given us might currently have exceeded our ability to think critically about whatever bullshit we are being fed, but future generations may be better. After all, it's only a small step from doubting whatever mainstream thought tells you, to starting to wonder who is telling you to doubt those things and why and then to actually go back and think for yourself about the issues.

    TheBorderGuard -> SomlanderBrit , 29 Nov 2018 10:44

    ... the white masses of Europe and America were forbidden by the liberal establishment to be their real selves.

    Lifted straight from the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter , I suspect.

    TheBorderGuard , 29 Nov 2018 10:43
    Some people are more attracted to certainties than subtleties -- and I suspect such people are ideologues in general and populists in particular.
    DanInTheDesert , 29 Nov 2018 09:46
    Sigh.

    So Corbyn and Trump are the same because they both have shirts. Well, color me convinced!

    Like so many of these articles -- including the long but uninformative 'long read' on the same topic -- there is no mention of the failures of the elites.

    Clinton sold us a false bill of goods. The Washington Consensus on economics would make the country richer and, after some 'pain', would benefit the working class. Sure you wouldn't be making cars but after some retraining you would work in tech.

    This was a broken promise -- de industrialization has devastated the upper midwest. The goods are made in China and the money goes to Bezos. People are rightly upset.

    The Washington Consensus on war sold us a false bill of goods. Instead of peace through strength we have seen a century of endless conflict. We have been caught in state of constant killing since 2001 and we are no safer for it. Indeed the conflicts have created new enemies and the only solution on offer is a hair of the dog solution.

    People are fed up with the elite consensus because of the failures of the elites. Nowhere are the repeated failures of the elites, the decades of broken promises mentioned in the articles. Instead, those of us who prefer Sanders to Clinton, Corbyn to Blair are mesmerized by emotional appeals and seduced by simplistic appeals to complex problems. And they wonder why we don't accept their analyses . . .

    TL;DR -- clickbait didn't get us here. The broken promises of the Washington consensus did.

    [Jan 16, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard knew that Hillary Clinton was a real menace so she not only endorsed Bernie Sanders but quit her vice-chair post at the DNC in order to do so since the DNC laws insisted that the DNC stay neutral

    Wall Street gives money to the Dems not to help Dems win; it's to make sure Wall Street doesn't lose.
    Notable quotes:
    "... I like Tulsi Gabbard a lot. She knew that Hillary Clinton was a real menace so she not only endorsed Bernie Sanders but quit her vice-chair post at the DNC in order to do so since the DNC laws insisted that the DNC stay neutral (if only she knew then what we know now). Also, it will be delicious to watch the Hillary mouthpieces and stooges - who contended that any criticism of Hillary Clinton was just down to her being female - attackdog Tulsi Gabbard, oblivious to their rancid hypocrisy. ..."
    "... Warren's got many bridges and fences to mend with the US left but I think that she knows and that's why she's declared early. I think that she'll be the last progressive standing; that she should run with Sanders as her vice-president for 2020 and then with the now-of-age Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as vice-president for her second term. ..."
    "... Tulsi Gabbard for president! Nobody's perfect but at least she isn't a lawyer! ..."
    "... As well, such a law should permanently eliminate the revolving door through which many politicians scamper to become a lobbyist for Wall Street after he "retires" from politics and the law should block all former lobbyists from running for an office that would have a bearing on legislation that would affect the corporation for which he or she worked. ..."
    "... Wall Street gives money to the Dems not to help Dems win; it's to make sure Wall Street doesn't lose. ..."
    Jan 16, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

    Haigin88 , 15 Jan 2019 07:17

    "... That will allow capitalists to focus their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries ......".

    Yes and who's been on the end of media hit pieces recently? Not Booker, Harris, Gillibrand and the like but Sanders, Warren and Gabbard.

    I like Tulsi Gabbard a lot. She knew that Hillary Clinton was a real menace so she not only endorsed Bernie Sanders but quit her vice-chair post at the DNC in order to do so since the DNC laws insisted that the DNC stay neutral (if only she knew then what we know now). Also, it will be delicious to watch the Hillary mouthpieces and stooges - who contended that any criticism of Hillary Clinton was just down to her being female - attackdog Tulsi Gabbard, oblivious to their rancid hypocrisy.

    There actually is plenty to go on - Gabbard's links to Modi; her past comments about guns, about immigration, about gay rights when she was under the wing of her Dad's jaundiced outlook and her appalling comments about torture and that fictional 'ticking time bomb' scenario - but that's as nothing (and a lot of it probably has crossover appeal and shows an independent mind) compared to Hillary's decades of moral bankruptcy. Yet critiques of Clinton were inherently sexist, apparently.

    They've never forgiven Gabbard for her righteous stand against the moral hazard of the Clintons. I think, and as others have said, that she's probably running for vice-president, at best, or to lay the groundwork for future runs and/or obtain a cabinet position. For 2020, Democrats will make it their business to take her down after they've invalidated Bernie Sanders. The current trick is beautiful in its simplicity. They shriek that Sanders will be divisive and their shrieking will be proof of that contention: quod erat demonstrandum. Sanders and Gabbard would have a much, much easier time in the general election than in the 'kill switch' Democratic primaries. Those primaries will be brutal beyond belief.

    Warren's got many bridges and fences to mend with the US left but I think that she knows and that's why she's declared early. I think that she'll be the last progressive standing; that she should run with Sanders as her vice-president for 2020 and then with the now-of-age Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as vice-president for her second term.

    Tiny Toy , 15 Jan 2019 11:35
    Tulsi Gabbard for president! Nobody's perfect but at least she isn't a lawyer!
    memo10 -> TempsdesRoses , 15 Jan 2019 11:25

    ID,
    Could you be a conservative projecting your desire for the Dems to select a more conservative candidate?

    A progressive would stomp Trump in the rust belt if they ran on the issues where the public agrees with progressives. Medicare for all. No more bullshit foreign wars. Do something about higher education cost/debt. Decriminalize low-level pot offenses. Etc.

    All it takes is disobeying the laws that corporate/Wall Street write for Dem candidates.

    memo10 -> BoneyOCoonassa , 15 Jan 2019 10:58

    I'm sure Wall Street will be quite happy to see the Republicans face some purer-than-pure left wing candidate at the next Presidential election.

    Bernie would have cleaned Trump's clock in the 2016 general election and Wall Street knows it.

    Trump would get curb-stomped by a genuinely left and competent candidate. It's the standard issue GOP-Lite Democrat that will have a harder time against him (although probably still win).

    HobbesianWorlds , 15 Jan 2019 10:37
    The best way to determine if one claims to be a Progressive is to fact-check the candidate's claim.

    The first and foremost question that should be asked and researched: Does this candidate have as one of his or her top priorities to eliminate corporate/private/labor money in politics? This would require a major federal campaign finance reform law that would establish public funding for all campaigns, permanently bar corporate/labor union/private-entity money (including funding media-attack ads) from any political influence and require all broadcast/cable networks to allow every candidate equal air time to state his opinions, policies, promises, and to state why he believes he is the best candidate for the working class and/or corporations.

    As well, such a law should permanently eliminate the revolving door through which many politicians scamper to become a lobbyist for Wall Street after he "retires" from politics and the law should block all former lobbyists from running for an office that would have a bearing on legislation that would affect the corporation for which he or she worked.

    As well, such a law should bar any politicians or family members from purchasing or selling stocks in corporate entities that would be affected by the legislation on which the politician is working (insider trading).

    Think about it. The lure of big bucks can, and does, corrupt politicians such that they will work mainly for the donor (corporate, labor, and/or private) and provide for just enough benefit politicians' the voters (America's working class) to make them think he cares most about them. Much of that money is hidden in super-pacs where the donor's identity is hidden. Too, super-pacs would have to be eliminated.

    A Progressive should advocate for a large infrastructure project . Our bridges and highways are now in a state of disrepair. Other nations such as Japan now have high-speed bullet trains, the fastest so far is Shanghai Maglev and can travel 267.8 mph. The U.S. has none.

    Poverty would be a major focus of Progressives. Corporations will pay as little as they can get by paying. So there must be a minimum wage boost to a living wage. To keep corporations from moving to a part-time labor force with less pay, part-time workers must make the same hourly wage as full time workers. As well, universal, proactive healthcare must become law (Medicare for all).

    Another major way to eliminate poverty would be to reform the income tax structure such that those individuals whose income exceeds ~$10 million would be taxed at 70%. I would also suggest that every dollar exchanged on the Stock Exchange would be taxed at 3%.

    Using a greater influx of money into the public coffers, education should be a top priority for lawmakers. College tuition in public schools would be no cost, thus providing completely tuition free higher education and allowing every student equal access. A major bill should be passed to provide money to modernize/upgrade all secondary schools to provide a better learning environment for study. Every primary school should have a child psychologist on staff. Every High School a psychologist as well as every public college.

    There are other Progressive policies--such as reversing the conservative's trickle-down economics (also called supply-side economics) such that we return to demand-side economics--that would be highly beneficial to the working class and to the future intellectual strength of the U.S., especially by providing a course structure that equips students to face the quick shift of industry to electronics and robotics. Currently, those will little technical training are being left behind. We must end this or face a HUGE poorly educated working class that will have no place to work.

    Quite likely, both the RNC and the DNC (Wall Street's favorite politicians) will be against such measures. They'd rather have more billionaires and an unfettered Wall Street than eliminate poverty. The only way, however, to have a truly just society is to push for and vote for a progressive government. But before any of the above can happen, we MUST eliminate corporate/private/labor money from our government.

    BaronVonAmericano , 15 Jan 2019 10:37
    The money is to ensure the rich do well whoever wins the general.

    They do the same in congressional races. If the Democrats who win the primaries are in their pocket, it doesn't matter who wins the general .

    Wall Street gives money to the Dems not to help Dems win; it's to make sure Wall Street doesn't lose.

    [Jan 16, 2019] Corporatism is the control of government by big business. This is what we have in the USA today. The main difference between corporatism and fascism is the level of repressions against opposition. Corporatism now tales forma of inverted totalitarism and use ostracism instead of phycal repressions

    Jan 16, 2019 | profile.theguardian.com

    ChesBay -> KMdude 15 Jan 2019 10:07

    That is why we need a Constitutional amendment to get the money OUT of politics. Make bribery illegal. THEN, we will not need Wall Street, which doesn't serve MOST of the population of this country, and is mostly responsible for the wealth gap and lack of opportunities for most of the population.
    ChesBay , 15 Jan 2019 10:05
    I'm not fooled. These are not progressives, they are corporatists, beholden to their donors. They have no courage, no interest in serving their constituencies, but are only interested in the power and money. What our country , and the world, needs is radical change from the profit-first point of view. I won't support either one of them.
    William Anthony , 15 Jan 2019 09:28
    It comes as no surprise that Wall Street runs the US Government.

    Benito Mussolini defined fascism as "Barely able to slip a cigarette paper between business and government."

    The US is a de-facto fascism.

    [Jan 15, 2019] State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent

    Notable quotes:
    "... Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract. ..."
    "... While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent. ..."
    Jan 15, 2019 | grayzoneproject.com

    Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal. Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team member:

    Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with "counter-propaganda," the State Department's Global Engagement Center has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My old job at the State Department was as chief propagandist," confessed former Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don't necessarily think it's that awful."

    Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal appeared in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world. Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation. His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the messenger.

    Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal appeared in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world. Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation. His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the messenger.

    Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract.

    While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.

    [Jan 15, 2019] Here's a good reason to support Tulsi Gabbard. Look at who opposes her

    Notable quotes:
    "... Here's a good reason to support Tulsi Gabbard. Look at who opposes her. Jacob Wohl Claims Everyone In The Pro-Israel Lobby, Including Himself, Will Interfere With Tulsi Gabbard's Campaign She's taking flak from the Enemy of Mankind. ..."
    Jan 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    any_mouse , 58 minutes ago link

    Here's a good reason to support Tulsi Gabbard. Look at who opposes her. Jacob Wohl Claims Everyone In The Pro-Israel Lobby, Including Himself, Will Interfere With Tulsi Gabbard's Campaign She's taking flak from the Enemy of Mankind.

    [Jan 15, 2019] Apparently, the FBI, and not the CIA, are the real government by Colonel Pat Lang

    More correctly is probably say that FBI and CIA can act as a single agency when their interests are threatened. And based on the fact that investigation was run by FBI counterintelligence division, which is a branch of CIA (with dotted line reporting) it was CIA (Brennan and Obama) which was at the helm. The problem with powerful intelligence agencies that very soon the tail starts wag the dog. Which happened in the USA around 1963.
    Clearly this was a soft coup, organized along color revolution schema, so well known by both State Department and CIA, and adapted to the USA government structure. Mueller investigation was a classic move designed to paralyze and undermine the President.
    Jan 15, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Just to review the situation:

    1. The president of the US was made head of the Executive Branch (EC) of the federal government by Article 2 of the present constitution of the US. He is also Commander in Chief of the armed forces of the federal government. As head of the EC, he is head of all the parts of the government excepting the Congress and the Federal courts which are co-equal branches of the federal government. The Department of Justice is just another Executive Branch Department subordinate in all things to the president. The FBI is a federal police force and counter-intelligence agency subordinate to the Department of Justice and DNI and therefore to the president in all things. The FBI actually IMO has no legal right whatever to investigate the president. He is the constitutionally elected commander of the FBI. Does one investigate one's commander? No. The procedures for legally and constitutionally removing a president from office for malfeasance are clear. He must be impeached by the House of Representatives for "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" and then tried by the US Senate on the charges. Conviction results in removal from office.

    2. According to these transcripts of congressional testimony by some of the participants, the FBI decided all by itself after Comey was fired to consider acting against Trump by pursuing him for suspicion of conspiracy with Russia to give the Russians the president of the US that they supposedly wanted. Part of the discussions among senior FBI people had to do with whether or not the president had the legal authority to remove from office an FBI Director. Say what? Where have these dummies been all their careers? Do they not teach anything about this at the FBI Academy? The US Army lectures its officers at every level of schooling on the subject of the constitutional and legal basis and limits of their authority.

    3. Following these seditious and IMO illegal discussions the FBI and Sessions/Rosenstein's Justice Department sought FISA Court warrants for surveillance against associates of Trump and members of his campaign for president. Their application for warrants were largely based on unsubstantiated "opposition research" funded by the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign. The judge who approved the warrants was not informed of the nature of the evidence. These warrants provided an authority for surveillance of the Trump campaign.

    4. IMO this collection of actions when added to whatever Clapper, Brennan and "the lads" of the Deep State were doing with the British intelligence services amount to an attempted "soft coup" against the constitution and from the continued stonewalling of the FBI and DoJ the coup is ongoing. pl

    [Jan 15, 2019] The Trump-Russia Scam - How Obama Enabled The FBI To Spy On Trump

    Mueller investigation is a continuation of JFK assassination by other means.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Now, as the 'Russian influence' narrative is dying down, the anti-Trump - anti-Russian campaign is moving to new grounds. ..."
    "... Initiating a counter-intelligence investigation, for which there was no basis, gave the FBI, and later the Mueller investigation, unfettered access to NSA 'signals intelligence' that could then possibly be used to incriminate Trump or his associates. ..."
    "... It was the Obama administration which had given the FBI access to this tool : ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Trump is no populist. A populist can't be elected by the money-based US political system. Trump's election was almost certainly arranged ..."
    "... Then why did Trump nominate Gina Haspel as head of the CIA? She is the acolyte of Trump nemesis Brennan. Why does Trump choose people like Nikki Halley, Pompeo, Bolton? ..."
    "... "I very much dislike most of Trump's domestic and foreign policy. But he was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people." ..."
    "... the assassination of JFK opened the floodgates of blatant depravity perpetrated by those whose greed and lust for power will ultimately destroy us. ..."
    "... There are trends: A growing US citizen realization that their political system prior to Trump was nearly completely corrupt; the Clintons are more broadly understood as the pathological criminals that they are; the Podesta emails with their sick connotations remain 'in the air' - See Ben Swann's work, for example. The Clinton Foundation is far more broadly understood as a massive criminal enterprise. ..."
    "... "Pompeo met on October 24 [at Trump's request] with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community's official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year's theft of data from DNC computers. Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was "leaked," not hacked, "by a person with physical access" to the DNC's computer system." ..."
    "... In short the last two years have been about trying to defeat Trump but the attackers are looking more and more wounded, and Trump, well, he's hanging in there. General Kelly and others have described Trump's work ethic as exhausting. ..."
    "... Trump has been put under intense investigation by Deep State hacks who are determined to see him impeached. And all they have come up with is that he is a compulsive pussy-grabber (no shit, hey?). ..."
    "... Well, if he has then he has hidden them extraordinarily well, because Mueller with all his resources hasn't found any. Indeed, Mueller's investigation is so well-resourced that the only conclusion I can reach is that Trump has no such skeletons. ..."
    "... "Simply put, the Russia NIA is not an "IC-coordinated" assessment -- the vehicle for such coordination, the NIC, was not directly involved in its production, and no NIO was assigned as the responsible official overseeing its production. Likewise, the Russia NIA cannot be said to be the product of careful coordination between the CIA, NSA and FBI -- while analysts from all three agencies were involved in its production, they were operating as part of a separate, secretive task force operating under the close supervision of the Director of the CIA, and not as an integral part of their home agency or department." ..."
    "... Escalation towards war with Russia was a matter of public record in late pre-election 2016, thanks to Clinton News Network ... now ask yourselves where is that general in the press conference nowadays? ..."
    "... For a thorough update on the Integrity Initiative and its offshoots, check out the latest from legal investigator Barbara Boyd. ..."
    "... To defeat the "Deep State" in the U.S., it is essential to understand the role of British Intelligence. While it is essential to know the role of Hillary Clinton, Obama, Comey, DOJ/FBI operatives, et.al., it is even more important to understand the geopolitical assumptions behind Russiagate. And for that, one must turn to the British. ..."
    "... The aim of the counterintelligence operation and of the Russiagate hoax was not to build a prosecution case against President Trump. It was to put the United States in constitutional limbo by creating a parallel and competing center of constitutional legitimacy. ..."
    "... Very difficult to judge: what is the result of infighting in the US vs. any agreed-on never mind coherent foreign policy? That the question is even asked - all over the world now - spells stage one collapse. ..."
    "... Trump's nationalist credentials are further belied by such things as: adding TPP provisions to the new North American trade agreement; attacking Syria based on false flags; arming Ukraine; pulling out of the INF treaty and engaging in an unnecessary and costly arms race; actively seeking to overthrow the governments of Iran and Venezuela; etc. ..."
    "... My own theory about 2016 is that everybody miscalculated. Trump was (IMO) running as an ego-building publicity stunt. Hillary (and her Deep State sponsors) had actively helped Trump get the nomination with hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity which also enhanced the bottom lines of Big Media. His multiple flaws were airbrushed away. ..."
    Jan 15, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Despite the loss of major narratives, the war of the deep state against U.S. President Trump continues unabated. The main of tool in this war are allegations of relations between Trump and anything Russia. The war runs along several parallel paths.

    The narrative war in the media is most visible one. When any of the fake stories about Trump and Russia gets debunked and disposed, new ones are created or others intensified.

    In parallel to these propaganda efforts the deep state created an investigation that Trump has no way to escape from. Enabled by one of the Obama administrations last acts the investigation is using signal intelligence to entrap and flip the people surrounding Trump (see section three below). The big price will be Trump himself. Here we take a look at what transpired during the last weeks.


    One major anti-Trump narrative was that 'Russian influence' helped to put him into office. This was based on the alleged nefarious influence a Russian clickbait company, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) in St. Peterburg, had on the U.S. electorate. That explanation never made sense. Little of the IRA activities had to do with the election. It used sockpuppets on Facebook and Twitter to attract people to websites filled with puppy pictures or similar nonsense. The IRA would then sell advertisement and promotions on these sites.

    This was obvious for anyone following the factual content of the news instead of the 'opinions' a whole bunch of anti-Trump 'experts' and the media formed around them.

    That the Mueller investigation finally indicted several of the IRA's officers over minor financial transactions was seen as a confirmation of the political aspects of the IRA activities. But nearly all the reporting left out that Mueller confirmed the commercial intent behind the IRA and its activities. There is nothing political in the accusations. Indeed point 95 of the Mueller indictment of the IRA says:

    Defendants and their co-conspirators also used the accounts to receive money from real U.S. persons in exchange for posting promotions and advertisements on the ORGANIZATION-controlled social media pages. Defendants and their co-conspirators typically charged certain U.S. merchants and U.S. social media sites between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content on their popular false U.S. persona accounts , including Being Patriotic, Defend the 2nd, and Blacktivist.

    Part of the false narrative of a political influence campaign was the claim that the $100,000 the IRA spent for advertisement to promote its clickbait webpages through Facebook ads somehow moved people to vote for Trump. But 56% of the IRA ads ran after the election, 25% of all its ads were never seen by anyone. How a few $10,000 for ads only few saw moved an election that was fought with several billions spent by each candidate's campaign was left unexplained.

    This week, only fifteen month after this site came to the conclusion that IRA was a commercial clickbait business , the Washington Post finally admitted that the alleged political targeting of voters by the IRA never happened:

    [T]he common understanding is that Russia's interference efforts included sophisticated targeting of specific voting groups on Facebook, which could have made the difference in states that Trump narrowly won on his way to an electoral-vote victory.

    That understanding about Russia's sophisticated targeting, though, is not supported by the evidence -- if it's not flat-out wrong.
    ...
    Most of the ads purchased by the Russians didn't specify a geographic target smaller than the United States on the whole, according to a Post review of the ads released by the House Intelligence Committee. Those that did target specific states heavily targeted those that weren't really considered targets of the 2016 election, such as Missouri and Maryland. And of those ads that did target specific states, most happened well before or well after the final weeks of the campaign.

    All the claims that some Russian sockpuppets influenced the 2016 elections were and are nonsense. The IRA sockpuppets never had any political intent.

    Likewise the allegations that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC and Clinton crony Podesta's email are mere assertions for which no hard evidence was ever provided. The only known fact is that the emails and papers were real, and that there content revealed the shoddiness of Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and her campaign.

    Now, as the 'Russian influence' narrative is dying down, the anti-Trump - anti-Russian campaign is moving to new grounds. Last week the New York Times claimed that Paul Manafort, who for some time ran the Trump election campaign, gave public and internal polling data to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska: Manafort Accused of Sharing Trump Polling Data With Russian Associate . A day after that sensational claim made a large splash throughout U.S. media the New York Times recanted:

    Kenneth P. Vogel @kenvogel - 18:39 utc - 9 Jan 2019

    CORRECTION: PAUL MANAFORT asked KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK to pass TRUMP polling to the Ukrainian oligarchs SERHIY LYOVOCHKIN & RINAT AKHMETOV, & not to OLEG DERIPASKA, as originally reported. We have corrected the story & I deleted a tweet repeating the error.

    Duh. Manafort gave polling data to his Ukrainian fixer Konstantin Kilimnik with the request to pass it along to Ukrainian oligarchs for who he had worked before joining the Trump campaign. Kilimnik had long worked for the International Republican Institute office in Moscow. The IRI is a CIA offshot under Republican Party tutelage that is used to influence politics abroad. Its long time head was the deceased hawkish Senator John McCain. While he worked with Kilimnik in the Ukraine, Manafort concentrated on moving the Ukraine towards the European Union and away from Russia. His and Kilimnik efforts were always opposed to Russian interests. But the NYT and others falsely try to pass them off as the opposite with the sole purpose of feeding the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign.

    Another anti-Trump/anti-Russian propaganda effort is a new sensational NYT piece on obvious misbehavior in the upper rows of the FBI :

    In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president's behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests , according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

    The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence.

    The NYT lets it seem as if the decision to launch a counter-intelligence investigation related to Trump was as based on some reasonable suspicion the FBI had. It was not. This was an act of revenge by the upper anti-Trump echelons in the FBI with which they attempted to undermine Trump's presidency. Note what the claimed suspicion was based on:

    Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump had refused to criticize Russia on the campaign trail, praising President Vladimir V. Putin. And investigators had watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.

    Other factors fueled the F.B.I.'s concerns, according to the people familiar with the inquiry. Christopher Steele, a former British spy who worked as an F.B.I. informant, had compiled memos in mid-2016 containing unsubstantiated claims that Russian officials tried to obtain influence over Mr. Trump by preparing to blackmail and bribe him.

    Trump made a joke during the election campaign asking Russia to release the 30,000 emails Hillary Clinton had deleted from her illegal private email server. There is no requirement, as far as I know, for any candidate to criticize this or that country. How can not following the non existing requirement to criticize Russia be suspicious? The Republican Party did not soften its convention platform on Ukraine. It rejected an amendment that would have further sharpened it. Overall the Republican platform was more hawkish than the Democratic one. The Steele dossier was of course from A to Z made up nonsense paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

    It is non sensible to claim that these were reasonable suspicions sufficient to open a counter-intelligence investigation. The hasty FBI move to launch a counter-intelligence operation obviously had a different motive and aim.

    After Trump fired FBI director Comey, the FBI was led by Andrew McCabe, later also fired for leaking to the media and lying about it. His legal council was Lisa Page who exchange tons of anti-Trump SMS messages with her lover, the FBI agent Peter Strozk. These are the people who initiated the counter-intelligence investigation :

    Strzok and Page sent other text messages that raise the possibility they were discussing opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Trump before Comey's firing.

    "And we need to open the case we've been waiting on now while Andy is acting ," Strzok wrote to Page on the day of Comey's ouster.

    Andy is Andrew McCabe, who served as deputy FBI director.

    Page gave some indication in her congressional testimony in July 2018 that the text message was a reference to an investigation separate from the obstruction probe that has already been reported.

    Normally the FBI needs to clear such counter-intelligence investigations with the Justice Department. In this case it did not do so at all :

    In the case of the investigation into Trump, the FBI's decision to open a file on the president so quickly after Comey's firing in May 2017 was a source of concern for some officials at the Justice Department because the FBI acted without first consulting leadership at the department . But those worries were allayed when, days later, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was appointed to oversee the Russia probe ...

    After Comey was fired, the FBI made a very hasty move, without reasonable suspicion and without informing the Justice Department, to launch a counter-intelligence operation involving the sitting president and his administration. What was the real purpose of this move?

    Initiating a counter-intelligence investigation, for which there was no basis, gave the FBI, and later the Mueller investigation, unfettered access to NSA 'signals intelligence' that could then possibly be used to incriminate Trump or his associates.

    It was the Obama administration which had given the FBI access to this tool :

    The Hoarse Whisperer @HoarseWisperer - 4:05 utc - 12 Jan 2019

    On his way out the door, we all were wallowing in our winter of discontent, Obama signed an executive order...
    ...
    The order revised the rules around intelligence sharing among our intel community. Specifically, it made the firehose of raw intelligence collected by the NSA directly accessible to the FBI and CIA. Instead of having to ask for intel and getting what they filtered down the FBI and CIA could directly access the unfiltered "SigInt" or signals intelligence. Intercepted phone calls, emails, raw intel from human sources. Everything our vast intelligence vacuum hoovers up, available directly... but only for counterintel and foreign intel purposes .

    The NSA can sit on virtually every communication into and out of the U.S. that takes place over networks. Obama made it possible for the FBI to directly access everything they had on Trump, et al. Obama supercharged the FBI's ability to investigate Trump.

    The Obama administration enacted the changed executive order EO 12333 in early January 2017, shortly before Trump took over:

    Previously, the N.S.A. filtered information before sharing intercepted communications with another agency, like the C.I.A. or the intelligence branches of the F.B.I. and the Drug Enforcement Administration. The N.S.A.'s analysts passed on only information they deemed pertinent, screening out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information.

    Now, other intelligence agencies will be able to search directly through raw repositories of communications intercepted by the N.S.A. and then apply such rules for "minimizing" privacy intrusions.
    ...
    [T]he 12333 sharing procedures allow analysts, including those at the F.B.I., to search the raw data using an American's identifying information only for the purpose of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence investigations , not for ordinary criminal cases. And they may do so only if one of several other conditions are met, such as a finding that the American is an agent of a foreign power.

    However, under the rules, if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department.

    At that time Peter Lee, aka Chinahand, already had the suspicion that Obama was behind the FBI campaign against Trump.

    With the changes in EO 12333 Obama gave the FBI the ability to launch a world wide snooping operation against the incoming Trump administration under the guise of a 'counter-intelligence' operation. The hasty FBI move after Comey was fired activated this instrument. The Mueller investigation has since used it extensively. 'Crimes' revealed through the snooping operation are turned over to the Justice Department.

    The NYT claim that the counter-intelligence investigation was initiated because of reasonable suspicion of Russian influence over Trump is nonsense. It was initiated to get access to a set of tools that would allow unlimited access to communication of Trump and anyone related to him. It was Obama who on his way out of the door gave the FBI these capabilities.

    There are signs that the unlimited access the FBI and Mueller investigation have to signal intelligence is used to create prosecutions via ' parallel construction ':

    The Hoarse Whisperer @HoarseWisperer - 18:50 utc - 12 Jan 2019

    An active counterintel investigation means the Trump Administration's crimes were only as secure as the weakest link in their weakest moment. We got hints of this early. Our intelligence folks picked up "signals intelligence" or SigInt from Russians talking to Russians.
    Those "signals" aren't the kind of evidence that finds its way into a courtroom. In fact, it's important that it doesn't. It would burn sources and methods. It lays out the crimes and the players though... and then prosecutors find ways to make triable cases other ways .
    The public sees cases for specific charges carrying significant prison time without ever knowing that the NSA and prosecutors knew so much more than they ever revealed. Now, apply those principles to the cases we've seen Mueller bring forward so far.

    Mike Flynn: pleaded out to a minor charge, rolled over in full and then produced five rounds of documents. Likely: Flynn was confronted with the intel they had on him and knew he was cooked. They knew the crimes. They heard and saw everything. There'd be no escape.

    By flipping and pleading out Flynn, all of that secret intel stays secret. Our intelligence efforts are protected. And Flynn goes down. And he cooks a bunch of other gooses. He's savvy enough to know that once they have the intel, all that's left to do is make the case.
    ...

    The 'crime' that di Flynn in was misremembering a phone call he had with the Russian ambassador. Similar happened with Rick Gates, Paul Manafort's righthand man and a member of Trump's transition team. Then it happened to Paul Manafort himself and to George Papadopoulos.

    The Mueller investigation, thanks to the snooping Obama and the FBI enabled, knows the content of every phonecall, chat and email any member of the Trump administration made and make to someone abroad (and likely also within the U.S.). It invites people as witnesses and asks them about the content of a specific calls they made. If they misremember or lie - bang - Mueller has the transcript ready. A crime has been created and an indictment for lying to the FBI will follow. This is what happened to Flynn and the others the Mueller investigation entrapped and convicted.

    Because of the counter-intelligence investigation the anti-Trump gang in the FBI hastened to initiate, the investigators got hands on signal intelligence - phone calls, chats and emails - that allowed them to indict minor people for petty crimes and to flip them to talk to the investigation.

    The aim, in the end, was and is to build a prosecution case against President Trump for whatever minor and petty half-backed illegal doing there may be.


    To make such a prosecution and an indictment publicly palpable the media is assigned with launching story after story about nefarious relations between Trump and anything Russia.

    As we have seen above with the IRA story, the retracted NYT 's Manafort bang, and the NYT's false claims about the motive of the FBI's counter-intelligence investigation, none of these stories hold up to diligent scrutiny. Today's Washington Post adds another example of no-beef stories that insinuate mystic 'Russian influence' over Trump:

    Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in administration .

    The first graph claims:

    President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin , including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

    The rest of the story largely refutes the claim made in its headline and very first sentence:

    Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
    ...
    Trump generally has allowed aides to listen to his phone conversations with Putin ..
    ...
    In an email, Tillerson said that he " was present for the entirety of the two presidents' official bilateral meeting in Hamburg,"...

    After Trump had a first White House meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Washington, lots of leaks about the talk appeared in the DC media. Trump was accused of giving information about an ISIS plot to the Russians that was allegedly secret. It was not . Since then Trump clamped down on the number of participants, briefings and readouts for such talks. That is simply a necessary and laudable behavior. Now the media try to construct that into 'Trump is concealing details' about talks with Russia even when the U.S. Secretary of State and others are present in these.


    Ever since Trump won the Republican primaries, the Clinton campaign, the Obama administration and the U.S. and British intelligence services prepared to prevent a successful Trump presidency. The Steele dossier, created by 'former' British intelligence agents and paid for by the Clinton campaign, was the basis for an FBI investigation that was seen as an insurance against a Trump win. Any possible Russia relations Trump might have came under scrutiny. This prevented him from fulfilling his campaign promise of coming to better relations with Russia.

    Shortly before Obama left the office he created the tool the FBI needed to put its investigation on steroids. When Trump fired Comey for his handling of the Clinton email affair, the FBI put that tool into action. With unfettered access to signal intelligence the Mueller investigation was able to entrap a number of Trump related people and to flip them to its side. It will use any information they give up to find some angle under which Trump can be prosecuted and eventually impeached. Even if nothing comes off this investigations, the media reports and slander all this created may well be enough to prevent an election of Trump for a second term.

    I very much dislike most of Trump's domestic and foreign policy. But he was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people. Unfortunately I see no way that Trump could escape from the hold it has gained over him. Exposing it as much as possible might well be his best defense.

    Jose Garcia , Jan 13, 2019 1:51:10 PM | link

    It is information that is put out there that is never cross checked by the American people. They are too busy, too involved with other things or too stupid to find out the true facts. It is hard to predict what will occur next year. I feel it all depends who wins the primary on the Democrat side.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 13, 2019 2:32:02 PM | link
    I have to take issue with a few points, b.

    [Trump] ... was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people.

    There is a major flaw in reasoning here. Trump is no populist. A populist can't be elected by the money-based US political system. Trump's election was almost certainly arranged:

    • The anti-Russia campaign began in earnest in 2014 (well before the 2016 election);
    • Trump's pre-election relationship to the Clinton's is highly suspect: they were likely to be much closer than we have been led to believe;
    • An FBI informant worked for Trump for over 10 years - during the time that Mueller was FBI director;
    • Trump was the ONLY populist on the Republican side (out of 19 contenders!);
    • Sanders was a 'sheepdog' and Hillary ran a terrible campaign in which she made obvious mistakes that a seasoned campaigner like herself would never make;
    • British involvement in the election (Fusion GPS, Cambridge Analytica, a Brit 'spy' in the Sanders campaign, etc.) suggests CIA-MI6 working together;
    • Trump Administration policies are consistent those of Clinton-Bush-Obama:
    > Obamacare was not repealed "on day one" - it has been strengthened by not defending coverage for prior conditions;

    > Trump put TPP provisions into his new North American trade deal;

    > Trump continues ME meddling;

    > Trump continues militarism and tax cutting;

    > Etc.

    The only major "difference" that I can think of are Trump's Wall and China tariffs. But these are consistent with the 'Deep State' goals.
    Surveys show that the "will of the people" is very different than the neoliberal, neoconservative policies that the establishment fosters upon us.

    MAGA is a POLICY CHOICE as much as it is a campaign slogan. It is designed to meet the challenge posed by Russia and China and 'turn the page' on the deceit and duplicity of the Obama Administration just as Obama's "Change You Can Believe In" was designed to turn the page on the the militarism of the Bush Administration. These BI-PARTISAN page-turnings ensure that there is no accountability and provides each new Administration with a new sly story line that the public readily swallows. Each new Presidential charade entertains and misdirects as the interests of the Empire are advanced with a refreshed box of tricks and dishonest narratives.

    ...war of the deep state against U.S. President Trump continues unabated.

    Then why did Trump nominate Gina Haspel as head of the CIA? She is the acolyte of Trump nemesis Brennan. Why does Trump choose people like Nikki Halley, Pompeo, Bolton?

    The war of the Deep State is a psyop to crush dissent as the butt-hurt Deep State continues to pursue their dream of global hegemony. Anyone that believes that Trump is no part of that psyop is delusional.

    radiator , Jan 13, 2019 2:36:06 PM | link
    Wow, man. Thanks to you and all the regulars here who contribute to gathering relevant info from all kinds of sources. I hate to repeat myself, but I feel that a little praise every 3 or 6 months is not too much spamming. This is what serious journalism looks like.
    Jackrabbit , Jan 13, 2019 2:43:34 PM | link
    Zachary Smith @2: ... I just don't buy into the "insurance" theory.

    And I don't buy the theory that Hillary is hell bent on war. The Clinton's are very rational and calculating and no President has the freedom that your theory suggests. IMO what the Deep State has done under their man Trump is very similar to what the Deep State would have done if they had selected Clinton instead. The fact is, a populist nationalist is what was deemed necessary to meet the challenge from Russia and China. And that is what we got (surprise!).

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    Furthermore, focusing on personality and Party is just what they want

    "Watch what they do, not what they say" has a corollary: pay attention to the polices, not the politicians.

    jacktheokie , Jan 13, 2019 3:01:49 PM | link
    MoA's final paragraph is just about how I feel.

    "I very much dislike most of Trump's domestic and foreign policy. But he was duly elected under the existing rules. The campaign the media and the intelligence services have since run against him undermines the will of the people."

    This pretty well sums it up for me. Being old enough to remember FDR and the brief rise of the middle class in the 40's, 50's and 60's (and having benefited from that attempt at leveling the playing field), I am more than saddened at the downward spiral of our nation. Politics have obviously never been clean and fair, but the assassination of JFK opened the floodgates of blatant depravity perpetrated by those whose greed and lust for power will ultimately destroy us.

    donkeytale , Jan 13, 2019 3:19:32 PM | link
    Of course b you have nothing here to offer except your opinion. Your views regarding the relentlessness of the US criminal justice system are on target, just ask the underclasses about that. Once in view, you are never let be and in the US everyone can be found guilty of something.

    Rather nice to see the pampered son of inherited tax-free wealth on the receiving end for once, in my opinion.

    Trump is a crook. Russian collusion is his smokescreen. His crimes have already been demonstrated through what little we already know and there is still much we don't know and probably never will know.

    This essay reads something like a veiled mea culpa from you.

    You were wrong about Trump from the get go. Why not just admit it and move along? Why remain steadfastly in thrall to any shred of rightwing, authoritarianism of the elite masquerading as populism?

    Whatever Trump gets from the criminal justice system, Congress or the voters appears to be well-deserved. He has brought this on himself and really there is no one else to blame even as he never will accept responsibility. He is stupid at best, dishonest at best, a useful idiot at best.

    Trump saved his ass financially after a series of disastrous business bankruptcies by accepting what appears by all indications to be laundered money from literally hundreds of anonymous shell companies investing in his condos since at least 2008.

    He has run roughshod over the emoluments clause quite openly.

    I do believe, knowing what we know now, he will probably avoid indictment and escape impeachment, maybe only through resignation/pardon but more likely the old fashioned way: defeat at the polls in 2020.

    In many ways Trump has done some good by reinvigorating the US left (such as it is) and bringing at least enough cohesion in the ranks of a badly splintered populace mainly among white females and white college educated voters who now reject the GOP, or at least the GOP of Trump.

    Whether this will lead to badly needed fixes for the heinous wealth inequality (started with Reagan) is doubtful but at least the conversation is now underway (started with Bernie) which is the first step.

    Tax increases, social security stabilisation, re-funneling wasted MIC billions to domestic programs for the poor, etc.

    It is a start. Will it become a solution or a revolution in time?

    That is up to the people who are still under the yoke of neoliberalism and global capital flight.

    Don Bacon , Jan 13, 2019 3:29:06 PM | link
    re:
    Mike Flynn: pleaded out to a minor charge, rolled over in full and then produced five rounds of documents. Likely: Flynn was confronted with the intel they had on him and knew he was cooked. They knew the crimes. They heard and saw everything. There'd be no escape.
    By flipping and pleading out Flynn, all of that secret intel stays secret. Our intelligence efforts are protected. And Flynn goes down. And he cooks a bunch of other gooses. He's savvy enough to know that once they have the intel, all that's left to do is make the case.//

    So the situation is worse than I thought. The clear inference is that (1) Flynn (and others) really did commit some major crimes, and then (2) got off easy by admitting to a memory lapse (3) while cooking a bunch of other gooses.

    Flynn does the easy (2) and gets away with (1) and (3), both very serious. This is justice?

    Zachary Smith , Jan 13, 2019 3:42:11 PM | link
    @ Jackrabbit #6

    Well sir, opinions certainly do vary on this issue.

    As you may recall, the woman threatened conflict on cyberattacks.

    "As president, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just like any other attack," the Democratic presidential nominee said. "We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses."

    Regarding the Deep State and Trump, Syria is in the process of winning against the neocons. And Iran has not yet been attacked. Hillary has a record, and for the most part hasn't even tried to run away from it.

    Hillary Clinton's War Record – 100% For Genocide

    If you know of any instances of the woman speaking against the War Solution to problems, kindly tell me about them.

    Trump is an incomparable jerk, but perhaps not quite as bad as HRC.

    james , Jan 13, 2019 3:43:30 PM | link
    thanks b... the topic is so very tiring.. i am sick of hearing about it.. if the usa fell off a cliff and never came back again - i would be fine with that.. thank you regardless, for taking it apart and trying ti dispel the bullshite.. it is so thick, it defies logic.. i agree with @1 jose garcia, and @4 radiator...

    trump is a crook... so what? most of the business class in the west are at this point! politics and crookery go hand in hand... i would be surprised if it was any different at this point in time.. how about the intel agencies? you want to sleep with them? lol..

    Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 13, 2019 3:57:17 PM | link
    There's either something wrong with this assumption, or something we're not being told...

    The Mueller investigation, thanks to the snooping Obama and the FBI enabled, knows the content of every phonecall, chat and email any member of the Trump administration made and make to someone abroad (and likely also within the U.S.). It invites people as witnesses and asks them about the content of a specific calls they made. If they misremember or lie - bang - Mueller has the transcript ready. A crime has been created and an indiction for lying to the FBI will follow. This is what happened to Flynn and the others the Mueller investigation entrapped and convicted.

    Option 1. Something wrong? If you're being cross-examined in a court or pseudo-legal forum about things you may or may not remember, you have the right to decline to answer a question, or to preface any and every answer with the phrase "If I remember correctly blah blah blah..."

    Option 2. Something we're not being told? If the interrogators were able to ambush Flynn, then it's probably because they didn't acquaint him with all of his rights, or he didn't have a lawyer with him.

    Trump's not stupid. He won't blunder into a situation bereft of any semblance of legal Human Rights protections designed to ambush him. And if he can't have a lawyer with him when the questions start, then he can probably refuse to attend without breaking any law.

    Tess Ting , Jan 13, 2019 3:57:41 PM | link
    @donkeytale There has been close to three years of serious investigative intent to lay a glove on Trump (HRC's team, the FBI and Mueller) and there is only the merest scratch of a womaniser (which with three marriages doesn't come as a surprise). What is quite remarkable, despite all the investigative effort, is how clean Trump has managed to keep himself despite building a fortune in one of the toughest cities in the world, building himself up through the eras of the five families, junk bonds and ponzi schemes and soviet union mobsters, not to mention the corruption of the poltical classes and regulatory abuses and unionised labor.

    For the world's he moves in, the only explanation that gives him enough protection is that for a long time Trump has been a protected FBI asset for one of the field offices, possibly now senior service figures. And it's this deep relationship with well connected parts of the FBI or other secret services that has given him the ability to steer past the various attempts by the deep state. Why, for instance, do we have such a lot of leakage of the inner workings of the anti-Trump FBI? Some part of the deep state has become disgusted at the spying (eg on congress), the blackmailing, the warmongering, and deep corruption of the anti-constitutionalists, and Trump is their vengence. You just have to decide which side you are on...

    Zachary Smith , Jan 13, 2019 4:06:26 PM | link
    "Tess Ting" #14

    I read that as Testing - perhaps a trial/demonstration as a professional troll for somebody or other. How else to interpret "only the merest scratch of a womaniser" or "how clean Trump has managed to keep himself". Maybe I'm surprised not to also see praise for the clever Government Shutdown.

    Peter AU 1 , Jan 13, 2019 4:11:46 PM | link
    Hoarsewhisperer 13 I think it unlikely that the likes of Flynn would not know their basic legal rights.
    brian , Jan 13, 2019 4:17:24 PM | link
    meanwhile..trump and his appointees attack legitimacy of Venezuela govt.
    Trump is in bad odor at home while seeking to attack other govts.

    ' Washington has explicitly expressed its support for a potential coup against the elected Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, by offering its backing to the opposition and stating outright it was time for a "new government."

    "The Maduro regime is illegitimate and the United States will continue ... to work diligently to restore a real democracy" to Venezuela, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters on his trip to the Middle East on Saturday, adding that Washington would attempt to make the Latin American nations "come together to deliver that."'
    https://www.rt.com/news/448673-us-venezuela-time-new-government/

    Peter AU 1 , Jan 13, 2019 4:25:14 PM | link
    One thing the US deep state and their muller proxy would have on Trump, and most if not all of Trump's team, is collusion with Israel (can this convert into charges of treason as threats). A weapon that is good for threats against and turning those around Trump, and possibly used in as a last resort to remove Trump.
    Peter AU 1 , Jan 13, 2019 4:33:00 PM | link
    Adding to my post @ 18
    Pat Lang has a post up "What is wrong with Trump?" "But, how does one explain his lack of action on the border? Does someone or some thing in Russia, Israel, the UK, his former business associates, have something really juicy on Trump, something that he fears to unleash through decisive action? pl"

    Collusion with Israel is something neither side - team Trump and the deep state - would wish to bring into the open, but this may be the only thing they have on Trump.

    Robert Snefjella , Jan 13, 2019 4:43:58 PM | link
    Great journalism b!

    A few more points: from: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/

    "On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met with President-Elect Donald Trump.

    On Friday November 18th The Washington Post reported on a recommendation in "October" that [NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers] Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position:

    The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security
    Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.

    In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers, without notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower.

    Occam's Razor. NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers didn't want to participate in the spying scheme [on Trump]

    (Clapper, Brennan, Etc.), which was the baseline for President Obama's post presidency efforts to undermine Donald Trump and keep Trump from digging into [who knows what crimes]"

    After the visit by Rogers, Trump vacated Trump Towers. There is considerable irony in the Mueller 'probe' and the continuing avalanche of MSM lies and evasions and spin etc pertaining to Trump.

    There are trends: A growing US citizen realization that their political system prior to Trump was nearly completely corrupt; the Clintons are more broadly understood as the pathological criminals that they are; the Podesta emails with their sick connotations remain 'in the air' - See Ben Swann's work, for example. The Clinton Foundation is far more broadly understood as a massive criminal enterprise.

    Serious criminality at the highest levels of the FBI is now far more obvious to far more people

    MSM as evil propaganda is more widely understood.

    It is understood widely that the DNC material to Wikileaks was not 'hacked' (Binney)

    From the theintercept.com :

    "Pompeo met on October 24 [at Trump's request] with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community's official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year's theft of data from DNC computers. Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was "leaked," not hacked, "by a person with physical access" to the DNC's computer system."

    In short the last two years have been about trying to defeat Trump but the attackers are looking more and more wounded, and Trump, well, he's hanging in there. General Kelly and others have described Trump's work ethic as exhausting.

    Brendan , Jan 13, 2019 5:12:30 PM | link
    The Internet Research Agency (IRA) paid $100,000 for Facebook ads and then charged its customers for the clickbait service (between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content). So even if the IRA didn't manage to make a profit, the net cost for them must have been much lower than $100,000. Does anyone know how much revenue it made from that operation? Facebook must know but they've kept quiet about it. Same with Mueller.
    juliania , Jan 13, 2019 5:17:56 PM | link
    Thank you, b. I am so glad I did not vote for Obama a second time around. A very rotten duopoly has taken over the US government, all based on the premise that money is speech and money runs government, the people be damned. Hence the shutdown being orchestrated by money, with Trump in the crosshairs.

    I also very much adhere to your final paragraph's sentences. Let no one be in any doubt - what is underway is no less than traitorous activity, a clear violation of the US Constitution, motivated by corrupt individuals whose meanness is beyond dispute. How it can be redressed at this very late stage beggars the mind; I can only hope it be done as peacefully as possible.

    vk , Jan 13, 2019 5:19:18 PM | link
    If this is really true, then it's a clear sign of decline: Obama sacrificed a huge chunk of American freedom just for the sake of personal political revenge. The USA is transitioning from a laissez faire to a highly burocratized, byzantine economy.
    Hal Duell , Jan 13, 2019 6:27:54 PM | link
    Shortly after the USSR's experiment with communism collapsed, I read an article which suggested that if the noise from that fall was loud, even louder will be the noise when the second shoe (the American experiment with capitalism) falls. And this is the crux of why I appreciate The Donald. His is the most honest face the US can present to the world at this point in time. So look at it closely, and marvel at where we have come to.
    Zachary Smith , Jan 13, 2019 6:47:25 PM | link
    @ juliania #23
    I am so glad I did not vote for Obama a second time around.

    LOL (first time I've ever written this!)

    You made the same mistake I did in 2008. The deck was really stacked in that election, though I was too blind to see it at the time. Smiling & smooth-talking black face issuing zillions of promises, and this was right after the Codpiece Commander. It took me a whole year to realize I'd been suckered, and by 2012 understood the fix was STILL on. Obama had lost most all of his glitter by then, so the Power Elites arranged his opposition to be a financial predator/Mormon bishop paired up with the most awful Libertarian POS I've ever seen. Speaking the honest truth here, I'd prefer to have Sarah Palin as POTUS to Paul Ryan. What a combo! That's why I offered anybody I met 10:1 odds on Obama winning. Hillary thought she had had seen a winning pattern from all that, and arranged to have as her opponent a fellow named Donald Trump.

    Yeah, Right , Jan 13, 2019 8:35:30 PM | link
    @15 Zachary Smith "How else to interpret 'only the merest scratch of a womaniser' or 'how clean Trump has managed to keep himself'."

    Zachary Smith, I have been posting here for a number of years, and on this I have to agree with the newcomer Tess Ting

    Trump has been put under intense investigation by Deep State hacks who are determined to see him impeached. And all they have come up with is that he is a compulsive pussy-grabber (no shit, hey?).

    To my mind Trump is a very offensive human being, but that isn't an impeachable character trait. I had assumed that he would have skeletons in his cupboard that would be grounds for impeachment.

    Well, if he has then he has hidden them extraordinarily well, because Mueller with all his resources hasn't found any. Indeed, Mueller's investigation is so well-resourced that the only conclusion I can reach is that Trump has no such skeletons.

    As I say, that is extraordinary. But - apparently - also true.

    Blooming Barricade , Jan 13, 2019 9:21:09 PM | link
    Astonishing how out in the open the military coup plotting against Venezuela is right now, it was consisted an outrage to overthrow Allende and that was even before direct proof of US involvement, now the anti-war and left wing consciousness of the public and the intellectual class has been so corroded that nobody care and many even see an attempted coup as a god thing. The ideological counter revolution in full swing.
    psychohistorian , Jan 13, 2019 9:48:09 PM | link
    @ Yeah, Right who wrote:
    "
    Indeed, Mueller's investigation is so well-resourced that the only conclusion I can reach is that Trump has no such skeletons.
    "

    I would just bring your attention to the possibility that bringing Trump down brings them down as well. Your assertion that Trump doesn't have any skeletons in the closet is laughable.

    Also consider that most of what is known comes from compromised sources and much of the house of cards we live is built on sketchy assumptions.

    Cui Bono for Trump?

    I am beginning to understand how Trump fits the elite plan and instead of your "grab them by the pussy" thought change it to "they have him by the balls". They played his ego to get him to run the race and then, gee, he won.

    I now see Trump as the last great hope of the elite to carve out as big a chunk as they can of the new world....and try and hold onto it. The ongoing proxy conflicts will keep the musical chair game playing for a bit more but then something is going to stop the music.

    A shrink told me once that after fire came music. What comes after music?

    NemesisCalling , Jan 13, 2019 10:18:57 PM | link
    @3 jr

    How did I know that you would be first up after b's exhaustive story on the IC's corruption and utterly obvious attempt to take Trump down to cry, "Fiction."

    Here is a reply to all your points:

    - yes, the Russia-bad narrative was picking up steam before Trump's election. The MSM and TPTB incorrectly surmised that there would be enough anti-Russia fervor among the masses that pinning the accusation on Trump would stick. It did not. It is evidence of THEIR stupidity.
    - you must have never heard of keeping your enemies close. The Clintons are powerbrokers. Trump used them. Maybe he did like them at one point, but clearly shat on his relationship with them and since the election they have truly been trashed and unable to recover any good fortune or power. The Dems made a mistake will backing HRC. They weren't acting under Deep State orders once again, Occam's Razor dictates that stupidity is the culprit here.
    - How does FBI informant in campaign neccessarily implicate Trump in conspiracy and not confirm IC's weasely attempts to dig up dirt?
    - Look at prior Repub primaries? Notice anything? Populists don't float in the Yacht Club Party, do they? Trump was an anomoly indicitive of the times (again, Occam's Razor).
    - Again, it is absolutely absurd and suspicious that you can not admit that the Dems are a party of retards and that they consistently step over quarters to pick up pennies.
    - Your opinion that Trump's policies do not differ from the Dems needs qualifying. I don't agree that his domestic policies align and verdict is still out on his FP. We know he is not a True-Believer, which is good.
    - British involvement again suggests that the IC is compromised and globalized yielding national sovereignty to centralized planning. Trump deserves that ire and proves that there is a contest afoot.

    Jen , Jan 13, 2019 10:32:05 PM | link
    Tess Ting @ 14, Zachary Smith (really?!) @ 15, Yeah, Right @ 28, Psychohistorian @ 30:

    Donald Trump has declared six business bankruptcies and there is considerable information on these bankruptcies if you Google for information on them, such as the article linked to here:
    https://www.thoughtco.com/donald-trump-business-bankruptcies-4152019

    If Trump's corporate bankruptcies are so well-known, and picked over several times by different media sources (even Snopes has covered them), surely any other behaviour or incident that might call Trump's character or ethics into question must have been uncovered by Robert Mueller by now?

    ab initio , Jan 13, 2019 11:03:11 PM | link
    I can't imagine the scale of exploding heads among the media talking heads and the establishment of the two parties, IF, Trump gets re-elected. DC would be in serious melt down. After 4 years of continuous assault the voters may actually repudiate the corporate media and the DC elites in the 2020 elections.

    In any case with the Democrat candidates starting to announce we are essentially into the next presidential campaign. I don't think it is smart to under-estimate Trump's electoral chances.

    slit , Jan 13, 2019 11:05:10 PM | link
    Great work, B!

    "Normally the FBI needs to clear such counter-intelligence investigations with the Justice Department. In this case it did not do so at all:"This sounds like the same "kangaroo court" MO Scott Ritter detailed a few years ago:

    "Simply put, the Russia NIA is not an "IC-coordinated" assessment -- the vehicle for such coordination, the NIC, was not directly involved in its production, and no NIO was assigned as the responsible official overseeing its production. Likewise, the Russia NIA cannot be said to be the product of careful coordination between the CIA, NSA and FBI -- while analysts from all three agencies were involved in its production, they were operating as part of a separate, secretive task force operating under the close supervision of the Director of the CIA, and not as an integral part of their home agency or department."

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/did-17-intelligence-agencies-really-come-to-consensus-on-russia/

    slit , Jan 13, 2019 11:25:22 PM | link
    Zachary @2, JackRabbit:

    Why does it have to be either-or?; it could have been for insurance AND warmongering narrative/dog whistling.

    Escalation towards war with Russia was a matter of public record in late pre-election 2016, thanks to Clinton News Network ... now ask yourselves where is that general in the press conference nowadays?

    DNC Russia Hotwar

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dIYHje-rv5w

    Jackrabbit , Jan 14, 2019 1:19:29 AM | link
    NemesisCalling @31: Here is a reply to all your points

    Well, you haven't replied to all my points, nor have you addressed the the thrust of my remarks. But I'll answer the issues that you raised so my view is clear to everyone.

    =
    - yes, the Russia-bad narrative was picking up steam before Trump's election. The MSM and TPTB incorrectly surmised that there would be enough anti-Russia fervor among the masses that pinning the accusation on Trump would stick. It did not. It is evidence of THEIR stupidity.
    Wrong. Firstly, I was referring to the anti-Russia imperative in official circles NOT to the propaganda effort. That imperative intensified greatly after Russia blocked USA-proxy takeover of Syria (2013), and Crimea and Donbas (2014). In fact, Kissinger wrote a WSJ Op-Ed in Aug 2014 that issued a cryptic call for MAGA.

    "picking up steam before Trump's election" needs some unpacking. The anti-Russia fervor among the masses has been entirely concocted, and mostly AFTER 2014.

    Nothing has stuck to Trump because there's no substance to the allegations.

    =
    - you must have never heard of keeping your enemies close. The Clintons are powerbrokers. Trump used them. Maybe he did like them at one point, but clearly shat on his relationship with them and since the election they have truly been trashed and unable to recover any good fortune or power. The Dems made a mistake will backing HRC. They weren't acting under Deep State orders once again, Occam's Razor dictates that stupidity is the culprit here.
    What does Occam's Razor have to say about the remarkable continuity of US foreign and domestic policy for the last 30 years?

    Trump and the Clintons were known to be close. Even their daughter's were/are close.

    Are you unaware of the CIA connections of Clinton, Bush, and Obama? Should we assume that Trump is free of any such connection?

    =
    - How does FBI informant in campaign neccessarily implicate Trump in conspiracy and not confirm IC's weasely attempts to dig up dirt?
    The FBI informant (Felix Sater) worked for Trump from about 2001 to 2013. This was essentially the same period in which Mueller was FBI Director. Mueller and Comey are close and are connected to the Clinton's.

    The informant wasn't investigating Trump or digging up dirt on him, he was informing on the Russian mob, and probably using employment by Trump to get closer to the mob. FBI/counter intel might have also used info provided to turn some of the Russians into US intel assets.

    =
    - Look at prior Repub primaries? Notice anything? Populists don't float in the Yacht Club Party, do they? Trump was an anomoly indicitive of the times (again, Occam's Razor).
    Have you heard of the Tea Party? Have you heard of Obama using the IRS against the Tea Party? Seems that a Republican populist would get a lot of votes against the hated Hillary who championed Obama's "legacy".

    - Again, it is absolutely absurd and suspicious that you can not admit that the Dems are a party of retards and that they consistently step over quarters to pick up pennies.
    You can't admit that the Dem's have failed the left so consistently that it is unlikely to be due to their mental capacity or an accident of circumstance.

    =
    - Your opinion that Trump's policies do not differ from the Dems needs qualifying. I don't agree that his domestic policies align and verdict is still out on his FP. We know he is not a True-Believer, which is good.
    I didn't say that they don't differ from the Dems, I said that Trump policies are consistent with policies of previous Administrations and that Hillary likely would've ruled in much the same way.

    =
    - British involvement again suggests that the IC is compromised and globalized yielding national sovereignty to centralized planning. Trump deserves that ire and proves that there is a contest afoot
    The US IC is undoubtedly primary and universally acknowledged to be the lead in the US-Brit Intel relationship.

    The only 'contest' I can discern is how best to fool the people.

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    You seem to believe that a populist outsider can be elected President. And, you also believe that a US President can be both all powerful (Obama) or constrained by Deep State whim (Trump).

    You also seem to believe that Trump's rhetoric is gospel-truth and means what you think it does. Surprise! "Negotiation with Russia" doesn't mean peace. Troop 'pull out' doesn't mean it'll happen any time soon (and possibly never). Anti-TPP doesn't mean he won't implement TPP provisions in other trade agreements. Etc.

    PS The establishment doesn't benefit DESPITE our populist President's, they benefit BECAUSE we are willing to believe that our populist President's work for US.

    NemesisCalling , Jan 14, 2019 2:14:54 AM | link
    Jr, it was a fruitless endeavor, to be sure, but I gave it a shot.

    For the record, I never counted Trump as savior, although he could very well be if he continues on getting caught with his dick in his hand as the empire around him crumbles. He's not a true believer, but he can at the very least be a useful idiot for the real anti-imperialists in the world.

    bryan hemming , Jan 14, 2019 7:05:34 AM | link
    It is of note that Oleg Deripaska is not a stranger to the world of politics and politicians. Before his fortunes changed dramatically, Oleg Deripaska was well-known for entertaining world politicians on his luxury yacht moored off Kassiopi in the northwest corner of the Greek Island of Corfu.

    The Rothschilds have an estate outside Kassiopi. Among the many high-powered friends and guests of Deripaska was UK Tory politician, George Osborne, who visited him on his yacht at Kassiopi while still British Chancellor of the Exchequer. Osborne and EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, a powerful force in Tony Blair's government, were both guests at a function held aboard the yacht in 2008. Baron Mandelson's position in the EU, at the time, led to accusations of a conflict of interest.

    Among other movers and shakers, John McCain was also a friend of Oleg Deripaska, but that friendship may have soured after the virtual collapse of the Russian billionaire companies. McCain was more a fairweather friend than a stalwart ally through thick and thin. The reason I mention these tidbits is because the corporate media fails to join all the pieces that show just how corrupt Western politicians have become.

    Harley Schlanger , Jan 14, 2019 7:06:30 AM | link
    For a thorough update on the Integrity Initiative and its offshoots, check out the latest from legal investigator Barbara Boyd.

    To defeat the "Deep State" in the U.S., it is essential to understand the role of British Intelligence. While it is essential to know the role of Hillary Clinton, Obama, Comey, DOJ/FBI operatives, et.al., it is even more important to understand the geopolitical assumptions behind Russiagate. And for that, one must turn to the British.

    https://larouchepac.com/20190110/part-ii-integrity-initiatives-foreign-agents-influence-invade-united-states

    Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 14, 2019 7:36:44 AM | link
    It would help to get a handle on the precise nature and format of these FBI "under oath" fishing expeditions if the FBI released transcripts of a few of the recent hi-profile Q & A sessions. If suspects are being convicted for misdemeanors of dubious relevance to the stated aim of the Mueller Crusade then transcripts would allow inconsistencies to be counted and evaluated. It would also be interesting to discover whether the FBI uses a seductive approach to questioning, or a confrontational approach, given the petty nature of the 'crimes' exposed to date.
    Petri Krohn , Jan 14, 2019 8:58:50 AM | link
    The aim of the counterintelligence operation and of the Russiagate hoax was not to build a prosecution case against President Trump. It was to put the United States in constitutional limbo by creating a parallel and competing center of constitutional legitimacy.

    The Obama Administration would live on in the structure of this "investigation", without ever having to relinquish power to Trump. The investigation would form the center of "The Resistance", with the ability to question the legitimacy of the Trump Administration.

    donkeytale , Jan 14, 2019 9:43:31 AM | link
    Jackrabbit @ 37

    I didn't say that they don't differ from the Dems, I said that Trump policies are consistent with policies of previous Administrations and that Hillary likely would've ruled in much the same way.

    This is very true but only in the same sort of overgeneralised sense with you populate your latest CT. That is, sweep any of the plainly ridiculous assumptions in your theory under the widest possible rug available to conspiratards.

    At least you aint exactly drinking the Orange Kool-Aid like so many of the posters on this thread. That's a big positive in my book. As for them, it's more a reflection of the love for rightwing authoritarianism than for Trump himself. What they really wish for is a crafier, shrewder Amerikkkan version of Putin, but they accept Trump because his bumbling is the existential proof of US decline in relative power, as if such proof was necessary.

    And if you overlook all Trump's achievements (such as they are):

    1. Obamacare/Medicaid expansion repeal and subsequent degradation of the enrollment and funding processes by executive degree when appeal failed thanks only to McCain's "in yo office sucka" thumbs down vote.

    2. Tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations (basically same thing)

    3. SCOTUS and federal bench selections


    The US system is meant to create a uniparty environment whereby opposing views are compromised into a "third way" legislative process.

    I grok this system is broken and completely controlled by the wealthiest (show me a political system anywhere that you prefer that is not controlled by the wealthiest) but the funding mechanisms need changing before there will ever be significant change to governing processes.

    Trump through his ignorance, corruption and loose lips has tilted the playing field left. Hilliary through her elitism, arrogance, corruption and lack of retail political skills gets a big assist in the same tilting.

    Those who believe (if any truly do) that Trump represents anything more than the end of Reaganist conservatism are "wishin' and hopin'" as Dusty Springfield would say.

    I do applaud those who are willing to show in the comments that they suffer from the real "Trump Derangement Syndrome," such as your good buddy James. They're all crooks, in his opinion.

    So what is it Jim? Do you excuse Trump only or do you excuse them all? LMAO

    Peter AU 1 , Jan 14, 2019 9:45:39 AM | link
    Putin January 2017 - "You know, there is a category of people who leave without saying goodbye, out of respect for the situation that has evolved, so as not to upset anything. And then there are people who keep saying goodbye but don't leave. I believe the outgoing administration belongs to the second category.

    What are we seeing in the United States? We are seeing the continuation of an acute internal political struggle despite the fact that the presidential election is over and it ended in Mr Trump's convincing victory. Nevertheless, in my opinion, several goals are being set in this struggle. Maybe there are more, but some of them are perfectly obvious."

    The first is to undermine the legitimacy of the US president-elect. By the way, in this regard, I would like to point out that whether deliberately or not, these people are causing enormous damage to US interests. Simply enormous. The impression is that, after a practice run in Kiev, they are now ready to organise a Maidan in Washington to prevent Trump from taking office."

    Peter AU 1 , Jan 14, 2019 9:46:40 AM | link
    The link for my post @45
    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53744

    Posted by: pretzelattack , Jan 14, 2019 10:05:43 AM | link

    sure, no doubt trump has been involved in financial improprieties; this in no way means he colluded with Russia to fix the election, or that russia on its own hacked the election, or any of the other false narratives the ic is trying to cram down our throats with the connivance of the msm and (mostly, but there are some republicans pushing it, too) the "centrist" dems.

    And the clintons have their own skeletons, but they seem to be judgement proof with the aid of comey et al.

    donkeytale , Jan 14, 2019 10:22:40 AM | link
    pretzelattack @ 47

    The only real difference between Trump and the Clintons at end of the day is they are smart lawyers who obviously better understand how to navigate the treacherous legal waters surrounding them.

    They also know what the definition of "is, is" and how to carefully craft their words in public, while Trump is all loose cannon all the time ahd his legal representation appears to follow his lead, IE Giuliani and Cohen.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 14, 2019 10:53:12 AM | link
    Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Jan 14, 2019 9:45:39 AM | 45:
    We are seeing the continuation of an acute internal political struggle despite the fact that the presidential election is over and it ended in Mr Trump's convincing victory.
    Not really. What we are seeing is Deep State controlled media force-feeding the public a toxic concoction: the narrative of a political struggle that centers on anti-Russia hysteria.

    Maybe you missed Romney's Op-Ed in which he praised Trump's pro-establishment policies while attacking his Russia-friendly 'pull out' from Syria. That's the best example of the two-faced establishment bullsh*t.

    Welcome to the rabbit hole.

    Robert Snefjella , Jan 14, 2019 10:57:29 AM | link
    What is loosely called 'globalism', consisting of various trends and ideologies and practices: the EU and the aborted for now 'North American Union' and satellites, and cell phones able to instantly transmit images from the other side of the planet, and so on, has also importantly aimed at and advocated for and implemented various means by which national sovereignty was eroded.

    And this erosion meant a reduction of the ability of a country's people to wield an effective national politics, let alone something vaguely democratic, or to implement policies which were at odds with the various globalist institutions and imperatives and programs. So we've seen on numerous occasions, for example, the IMF impose its globalist economic 'recipe' on a nation's economic policies.

    And even the destruction of Libya in 2011 was primarily or importantly directed at preventing Libya from implementing a national financial strategy intended to give African countries an alternative to the depredations of global financial 'business as usual'.

    But over the last two years the movement to restore or renovate national sovereignty has made something of a comeback.

    So for example, Macron as recently as roughly two years ago was being lauded as a great new leader of the globalist project, and both he and Merkel have gone on record decrying the very concept of national sovereignty.

    But now Macron and Merkel are largely reviled, especially Macron, by their people, and 'populist' enthusiasm strengthens. You can see the same trend in virtually every European country.

    And in the United States, the tens of millions of 'deplorables' backing Trump are doing so partly, perhaps mostly, because he champions the restoration of national sovereignty and has questioned dominant globalist institutions.

    Now for those who are committed to the view that Trump doesn't really mean it, that he isn't really an American nationalist, and so on, well, fine, believe what you like. But in the end, Trump's base of support is nationalistic, and that is as I noted above a very general trend that is quickly manifesting.

    pretzelattack , Jan 14, 2019 11:17:45 AM | link
    https://theintercept.com/2019/01/14/the-fbis-investigation-of-trump-as-a-national-security-threat-is-itself-a-serious-danger-but-j-edgar-hoover-pioneered-the-tactic/
    Noirette , Jan 14, 2019 12:00:27 PM | link
    Collapse ctd.

    Re. the USA, when the handmaidens of power, aka politicians, the servant class in an oligarchic corporatist 'state,' are alarmingly seen to fight to the death in public it is crystal clear that control (which may take the shape of relatively informal and obscure networks ) is lost, .. > the 'fight' will only serve to weaken all parties.

    Trump is loathed because he upset the apple cart and revealed weakness and fissures in the system. (+ possibly because he is an upstart, from the wrong side of whatever, has bad hair, is dumb, a thief, more )

    He ran as an anti-establishment maverick:

    - and was elected only for that reason. It was disconcertingly easy to do, which is also terrifying to the PTB. Plus, election/voter fraud did not perform as expected - help !! The MSM promoted him with mega 24/24 coverage - help !!

    As the no. 1 disruptive foe is merely an elderly scummy biz type, an intruder, some other entity like malignant agressive Russia had to be associated with him. (Yes, is was Obama-Clinton who started the highjinks + the following Mueller investig.; see b at top - also, bashing Russia gradually took wing as it recovered under Putin, the Ukraine plots did not work out, etc. *Crimea!* the last straw! ..)

    If Obama had announced that 2K USA personnel were to be withdrawn from Syria because the good folks want their wonderful husbands and wives, great ppl, our folks, home soon, they have dutifully served, etc. the MSM and anyone who bothered to digest that news would have clapped and sent off pixel sparkles and sweet tweets.

    Very difficult to judge: what is the result of infighting in the US vs. any agreed-on never mind coherent foreign policy? That the question is even asked - all over the world now - spells stage one collapse.

    Jackrabbit , Jan 14, 2019 12:23:45 PM | link
    Robert Snefjella @50:
    Now for those who are committed to the view that Trump doesn't really mean it, that he isn't really an American nationalist, and so on, well, fine, believe what you like. But in the end, Trump's base of support is nationalistic ..."

    Did Obama really mean it when he touted "Change You Can Believe In"? No. His rhetoric was meant to turn the page from the Bush Administration excesses and convince the world that USA was not the threat that they perceived us to be. In fact, he was given a Nobel Prize for essentially not being Bush. But it was all psyop. Obama refused to hold CIA accountable for rendition and torture, refused to stop NSA pervasive spying, conducted covert wars and regime change ops, bragged of his drone targeting skills, made Bush tax cuts permanent, bailed out bankers, etc.

    Does Trump really mean his nationalism? Only to the extent that a nationalist was needed to meet the challenge from Russia and China. People don't fight for globalist principals.

    US is still a member of NATO, still involved in the Middle East, still has hundreds of bases around the world.

    Trump's nationalist credentials are further belied by such things as: adding TPP provisions to the new North American trade agreement; attacking Syria based on false flags; arming Ukraine; pulling out of the INF treaty and engaging in an unnecessary and costly arms race; actively seeking to overthrow the governments of Iran and Venezuela; etc.

    Welcome to the rabbit hole.

    Peter AU 1 , Jan 14, 2019 12:41:01 PM | link
    dahoit 53

    Is there a requirement for an open trial on these sort of things. I'm not sure about the US, but normally gag orders are all that's required to keep something quiet. All the people around Trump could be taken down in this way with charges that would stick.
    Apparently the only one they cannot take down in this way is the president (Another post up now at SST on the legalities of investigating the president). As far as I know, the president can only be taken down by impeachment so I guess they wouldn't try to use collusion with Israel for that unless they could keep what they were impeaching him for secret.

    donkeytale , Jan 14, 2019 1:18:09 PM | link
    Snefjella @ 50

    And in the United States, the tens of millions of 'deplorables' backing Trump are doing so partly, perhaps mostly, because he champions the restoration of national sovereignty and has questioned dominant globalist institutions.

    Yes, "Amerikkka First" represents nationalism for sure. Many, maybe most Amerikkkans have always been nationalistic and detest globalist structures because they view them as limiting Amerikkka's rightful global sovereignty. This is a fine distinction I believe gets lost in commentary such as yours. Trump isn't looking to retreat from Amerikkkan Exceptionalism at all, it his raison d etre for the tariffs and increases in military spending.

    The movement which elected Trump represents the nostalgic view of a lost Amerikkkan dominance over the globe, which of course they blame on those hated Democratic and Republican establishment globalists, Bushes, Clintons and Obama.

    donkeytale , Jan 14, 2019 1:23:22 PM | link
    And I meant "rightful" in quotation marks not that I believe it is rightful but is the opinion of the "Deplorables".
    Zachary Smith , Jan 14, 2019 1:43:05 PM | link
    @ Jackrabbit #28
    You see all that and then assume that the Hillary-Trump contest was genuine?

    Why not assume that the Deep State's candidate won in every election since Carter and work from there.

    That first is a difficult one to answer, for I quite agree with you on the second part. Rigged elections from Carter on to the present day matches my own thoughts as well. In 2000 "they" had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get their man in office, but GWB did indeed move into the White House.

    My own theory about 2016 is that everybody miscalculated. Trump was (IMO) running as an ego-building publicity stunt. Hillary (and her Deep State sponsors) had actively helped Trump get the nomination with hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity which also enhanced the bottom lines of Big Media. His multiple flaws were airbrushed away. Hillary ran a horrible campaign because she is an arrogant and "entitled" woman. The incompetence of that campaign simply didn't uncover the extent to which she was hated by so many people. (myself included, but I didn't vote for the torture-loving Trump, either)

    The biggest mistake of all was not having any plan in place to use the touch-screen voting systems (think "Diebold") to nail down her victory. Again an opinion, but I think that was judged to be a little too risky plus the fact it was obviously totally unnecessary. Hillary didn't have a "loss" speech prepared, and Trump didn't have a "victory" one.

    This is why I call Trump an "accidental" President. I'll admit the Deep State has reacted pretty well since 2016, but they're still playing catchup. Israel - to name just one - remains in shell shock.

    In summary, I think we barely disagree. :)

    vk , Jan 14, 2019 1:55:56 PM | link
    I think Trump's election was a miscalculation of the American elites...
    Robert Snefjella , Jan 14, 2019 2:54:31 PM | link
    Further to American's general support for Trump's declared intention of reduction of troops in Syria and Afghanistan, the Daily Caller on the 9th of January 2019 cited 56 % in support, 20 % not sure, and 27 % opposing. This is after MSM and general national political outrage and 'deep concern' over Trump's decision.

    Note that US involvement in Syria has been justified by the most lurid of lies and disinfo continually poured for years into American's psyches. For Tulsi Gabbard to have a direct conversation with Assad (the designated 'butcher of Damascus', the 'horrid monstrous dictator' accused over and over of attacking his own people, often with chemical weapons from barrel bombs, and especially targeting children and hospitals: the man can have no soul, no heart! We must help the Syrians in their struggle against this animal!) was an outrage!

    So not only do most Americans want American troops out of Syria, it would seem that there is some growing immunity among the people of the United States to their diet of diseased propaganda.

    karlof1 , Jan 14, 2019 3:16:31 PM | link
    Just finished b's excellent recap and the entire affair reeks of Treason -- not against Trump, but against the Nation.
    Jackrabbit , Jan 14, 2019 4:57:11 PM | link
    Posted by: vk | Jan 14, 2019 1:55:56 PM | 60

    Donald Trump as an outsider of the GOP

    The populist hero must be portrayed as an "outsider" that takes on the establishment. Obama was positioned in much the same way.

    Trump is no "outsider". He is very establishment. Even before running for President, he had access that ordinary people never get.

    Trump only won because of a bizarre technicality of the American electoral system.

    You are directing our attention to what the establishment wants us to see. It ignores Hillary's spectacular failure: snubbing of Sanders progressives; Cold shoulder to black voters; insult to white voters ("deplorables"); choosing not to campaign in crucial states; the wierdness of Bill Clinton being discovered meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch (Bill Clinton is one of the most recognizable people in America - why why why would be meeting with the Attorney General on an airport tarmac?), etc.

    If the race were easy, Trump woundn't be a populist hero, would he? And Hillary's winning the popular vote is a nice consolation prize to the Clinton's. Plus, it nicely sets up the fake Deep State vs. Trump conflict.

    Linda Amick , Jan 14, 2019 8:22:16 PM | link
    While Trump is a member of the elite establishment that practically owns the country he has always been a pariah for one main reason. He does not honor the unspoken code of never exposing inside information about other elite members. He is a big mouth.

    Given that, the establishment and their propaganda arm of the media have been out to get him even before he was elected. His presidency has largely been an inside struggle. However, Trump is clever and crafty. During his tenure he has been give access to tremendous amounts of information about his political enemies and he continues to bait, insult and fire them, pushing them deeper and deeper into insanity.

    He will fight fire with fire. If they attempt to impeach him he will tit for tat release information incriminating his enemies. I view this as a positive direction for the US in the long run. ALL of these people need to be banished to "Elba". Maybe they will fight to the death of both sides. One can dream.

    [Jan 15, 2019] The man behind the Russiagate hoax set to resign (Video)

    Jan 15, 2019 | theduran.com

    A source close to Rosenstein said he intends to stay on until Mueller submits a report to the Justice Department on the Russian meddling investigation. The source said that would mean Rosenstein would remain until early March. Several legal sources have said they expect the Mueller team to submit its report by mid-to-late February, although they said that timeline could change based on unforeseen investigative developments.

    Rosenstein had long intended to serve about two years as the Justice Department's No. 2 official, these officials say. They add that this is his own plan and that he is not being forced out by the White House. That's despite the fact that he's been a frequent target of criticism from President Donald Trump on Twitter.

    The administration officials say he plans to remain on the job until after a new attorney general is confirmed. After pushing out Jeff Sessions in November, Trump nominated William Barr, who planned to be at the Capitol on Wednesday, beginning a round of courtesy calls with senators ahead of his confirmation hearing, which begins Jan. 15.

    White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday on Fox News: "I know the deputy attorney general has always planned to roughly stay around two years. My guess is that he is making room for the new attorney general to build a team that he wants around him."

    Rosenstein's intentions were first reported by ABC News. He did not respond to questions Wednesday morning.

    Rosenstein considered resigning last fall, after a report surfaced that he had advocated secretly recording Trump, but he decided to stay on the job. Aides said he made a comment about having someone "wear a wire" around the president as a joke during a meeting.

    Rosenstein had been overseeing the Mueller's investigation into possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice because Sessions recused himself because of his role in the Trump campaign. And even with the arrival of acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, who took over the probe, Rosenstein has continued to help supervise it.

    If Barr is confirmed, as seems likely, he will fully take over the investigation. Several legal sources have said it appears that the Mueller investigation is entering its final stages. But Barr would play a key role in deciding whether and how to share Mueller's expected report with Congress and whether to make all or part of it public.

    Responding to news of Rosenstein's impending departure, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia told CNN's "New Day" that he has "deep concern" about how Barr will handle the Mueller probe. He referred to a memo Barr wrote in which he was critical of the investigation.

    "William Barr was sending freelance memos to the Trump administration making a case to undercut the Mueller investigation," Kaine said. "So the deep concern will be if he comes in and Rosenstein is gone, is this just a preface to either undercutting the investigation or trying to keep the results of it hidden from the American public."

    Rosenstein has been a consistent defender of Mueller and the Justice Department, responding to attacks from Republicans in Congress. He told a Law Day conference last May that the department "is not going to be extorted," after some House Republicans raised the prospect of seeking Rosenstein's impeachment.

    The attacks from Congress and the White House were a jolt for Rosenstein, who enjoyed bipartisan support for most of his three decades as a federal prosecutor. But his congressional support faltered when he wrote a memo providing a rationale for Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey.

    By appointing Mueller to take over the Russia investigation as a special counsel, Rosenstein won back Democrats but angered the president, who tweeted, "I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt."

    [Jan 14, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard, A Rare Anti-War Democrat, Will Run For President

    Highly recommended!
    American are so tired of foreign wars, that if DNC will not derail her with some "Putin agent" smears, and she wins the Primary, she has a chance against Donald Trump, who completely discredited himself by his actions and can defeat only opponent to the right of him (which with Hillary absence for the race now is difficult to find) like Obama against Romnay
    Notable quotes:
    "... During an interview for the Sanders Institute in September 2018, Gabbard said, "Since 2011, when the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and these other countries started this slow drawn-out regime change war in Syria, it is terrorist groups like al Qaida, al Nusra, and Hayat Tahrir al Sham, these different groups that have morphed and taken on names but essentially are all linked to al Qaida or al Qaida themselves that have proven to be the most effective ground force against the government in trying to overthrow the Syrian government." ..."
    Jan 14, 2019 | shadowproof.com
    Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii announced she will launch a presidential campaign for 2020. Her campaign is likely to distinguish itself from other Democratic campaigns by making wars and broader United States foreign policy a major issue.

    Gabbard was elected to the Hawaii state legislature in 2002. She joined the Hawaii Army National Guard a year later and voluntarily deployed to Iraq, where she completed two tours of duty in 2004 and 2005.

    She was elected to the House of Representatives in 2012, and according to her own website, she was "one of the first two female combat veterans to ever serve in the U.S. Congress, and also its first Hindu member."

    During Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, Gabbard gained notoriety after she resigned from her position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee so she could openly support Sanders. She spoke at Sanders campaign rallies to help him distinguish his foreign policy from the much more hawkish foreign policy of Hillary Clinton.

    Gabbard was overwhelmingly re-elected in 2018. She won 83 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary election.

    Most progressives are not as outspoken against U.S. military interventions or what she refers to as "regime change wars." She witnessed the impact of regime change on the people of Iraq, as well as U.S. troops, and that inspired her to talk more about the human cost of war and challenge the military industrial-complex.

    Gabbard has persistently called attention to the war in Syria. She traveled to Aleppo and Damascus in January 2017 to see some of the devastation Syrians have endured since 2011. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad invited her to a meeting, and she accepted.

    "Originally, I had no intention of meeting with Assad, but when given the opportunity, I felt it was important to take it. I think we should be ready to meet with anyone if there's a chance it can help bring about an end to this war, which is causing the Syrian people so much suffering," Gabbard declared .

    Supporters of the Syrian war -- the same people who do not want President Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. troops -- seized upon Gabbard's meeting with Assad to discredit her, and it has fueled the backlash among Western media pundits to her decision to run for president.

    Yet, in spite of a smear campaign encouraged by the political establishment, Gabbard has not backed down from protesting U.S. support for terrorists in Syria. She sponsored legislation, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act.

    During an interview for the Sanders Institute in September 2018, Gabbard said, "Since 2011, when the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and these other countries started this slow drawn-out regime change war in Syria, it is terrorist groups like al Qaida, al Nusra, and Hayat Tahrir al Sham, these different groups that have morphed and taken on names but essentially are all linked to al Qaida or al Qaida themselves that have proven to be the most effective ground force against the government in trying to overthrow the Syrian government."

    Gabbard opposes what she calls a "genocidal war" in Yemen, and she is one of the few representatives, who has worked to pass a war powers resolution in the House to end U.S. military involvement since Congress never authorized the war.

    "The United States is standing shoulder to shoulder supporting Saudi Arabia in this war as they commit these atrocities against Yemeni civilians," Gabbard said during the same Sanders Institute interview.

    Another war Gabbard questions is the war in Libya. In an interview for "The Jimmy Dore Show" on September 11, 2018, she spoke about the devastating consequences of pursuing regime change without considering what would happen after Muammar Gaddafi was removed from power.

    "After we led the war to topple Gaddafi, we have open human slave trading going on, in open market. In today's society, we have more terrorists in Libya today than there ever were before."

    Gabbard is also one of the few elected politicians to oppose weapons sales, especially to Saudi Arabia. She recognizes the military industrial-complex benefits the most from Congress not exercising its authority over war-making by presidents, whether they are Republican or Democrat.

    She spoke out against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when he refused to revoke support for Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen because it would jeopardize a $2 billion arms deal.

    Not many Democrats are willing to be optimistic on North Korea, but Gabbard sees potential for peace and does not view Trump's meeting with Kim Jong-un as an act of treason.

    Gabbard said during the Sanders Institute interview, "For years, I've been working in Congress and calling for direct engagement with North Korea with Kim Jong-un to be able to try to broker a peace agreement that will result in de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and and finally bring about an end to the Korean War."

    "So I think that the recent engagement that we have seen -- both the historic meeting between a sitting U.S. president and the leader of North Korea -- is certainly a positive step in the right direction. We have to be willing to have these conversation to promote peace," Gabbard said. And, "I think the continued engagement between North Korea and South Korea is positive."

    Gabbard acknowledged there are a lot of details that have to be worked out, but that does not make her hostile to the entire process, which is the attitude of many pundits and Democrats in the establishment.

    Joe Rogan interviewed Gabbard in September 2018. He raised the issue of Russian troll farms and Facebook's failure to deal with them. She had a sober response to his concerns.

    "The United States has been doing this for a very long time in countries around the world, both overtly and covertly, through these kinds of disinformation campaigns," Gabbard contended. "Not even counting like the regime change wars, like we're going to take you out."

    She continued, "I think it is very hypocritical for us to be discussing this issue as a country without actually being honest about how this goes both ways. So, yes, we need to stop these other foreign countries -- and Russia's not the only one; there are others -- from trying to influence the American people and our elections. We also need to stop doing the same thing in other countries."

    Such positions on war and U.S. foreign policy effectively make her a pariah to establishment media pundits and the political class. But her anti-establishment politics do not end there.

    Gabbard has advocated against superdelegates, which are Democratic party insiders that have an outsized role in influencing the outcome of presidential primaries. She favors open primaries and same-day voter registration. She is outspoken against the influence of money in politics, and she is audacious enough to question members of her own political party.

    "We have to dig a few layers deeper as people are running for office, say what do you actually stand for?" she said on "The Jimmy Dore Show." "What is your vision for this country? That's the debate that we will have to have in Congress should Democrats win over the House or win more seats in the Senate."

    "Otherwise, it will be more of the same status quo, where you'll have lobbyists who have more of a seat at the table writing policies that affect healthcare and education and Wall Street and everything else rather than having a true and representative government by and for the people," she concluded.

    She was also critical of self-described progressives, who are pro-war, while on "Jimmy Dore":

    You have these individuals and groups of people who call themselves progressive but are some of the first to call for more war in the guise of humanitarianism. They look at these poor people suffering -- and there are people suffering in the other parts of the world. Let's go drop more bombs and try to take away their suffering. And when you look at example after example after example, our actions, U.S. policy, interventionist regime change war policy, [has] made the lives of people in these other countries far worse off than they ever were before or would have been if we had just stayed out of it.

    ***

    Gabbard was much closer to an establishment politician prior to her resignation from the DNC. She accepted tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from political action committees (PACs).

    The Center for Responsive Politics noted, "One of the largest contributing sectors was the defense industry. While Gabbard has gained a following for her anti-interventionist stances , yet, her 2016 campaign was given $63,500 from the defense sector . In fact, the campaign received donations of $10,000 from the Boeing Corporation PAC and from Lockheed Martin's PAC, two of the biggest names in the military-industrial complex."

    In 2017, Gabbard announced she would no longer accept PAC money. She raised $37,000 from labor associations and trade unions.

    Gabbard was "conflicted" over whether to support the Senate report on CIA torture. She said in 2014 that she thought there were "things missing or it was incomplete." She also endorsed the "ticking time bomb" scenario that officials use to justify torture, and it is unclear what her view would be now, if asked about the issue.

    She has taken a position on Israeli occupation of Palestine that is common among Democrats. She supports a two-state solution and describes Israel as the U.S.' "strongest ally." But it may be shifting. In the last year, she condemned Israel for its violence against the people of Gaza, and she was reluctant to vote for a House resolution that condemned the UN Security Council for criticizing Israeli settlements.

    Journalist Eoin Higgins questioned Gabbard's support from the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which he described as right-wing. She has garnered criticism for her trip to India in 2014, when she met with India prime minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist.

    But HAF believes this criticism of Gabbard is unfair because other members of Congress, like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have attended gatherings with Modi. They also point to financial records and maintain they are a U.S. organization without ties to any organizations in India.

    When she was much younger, Gabbard helped her father's organization mobilize against a same-sex marriage in Hawaii. The organization, Alliance for Traditional Marriage, backed conversion therapy

    However, there is evidence to suggest that Gabbard has abandoned much of the bigotry that she probably learned from her father. She backed Edith Windsor when she challenged the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

    "Let me say I regret the positions I took in the past, and the things I said. I'm grateful for those in the LGBTQ+ community who have shared their aloha with me throughout my personal journey," Gabbard stated, responding to media coverage of this aspect of her past.

    She noted that she has since supported "the Equality Act, the repeal of DOMA, Restore Honor to Service members Act, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the Safe Schools Improvement Act, and the Equality for All Resolution," and added, "Much work remains to ensure equality and civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, and if elected President, I will continue to fight for equal rights for all."

    There are powerful forces in American politics that will seize upon her past opposition to LGBTQ rights and meeting with Assad to neutralize her presidential campaign before she even has an opportunity to tour the country and meet with potential supporters. They fear the impact she could have if voters gravitate to her campaign, which will likely promote her anti-imperialism.

    Often Democrats do not bother to connect foreign policy to domestic issues. Gabbard is likely to run a rare campaign, where she makes the case that they are intertwined -- that in order to make investments in universal health care, education, infrastructure, etc, the massive investment in war must be severely curtailed.

    Gabbard also aware of the disenchantment among voters, who do not believe either political party has the answers. She understands President Trump is a symptom of what ails the country.

    As she said on "Jimmy Dore," "If we look at the lead-up to the 2016 election, and if we actually listen to and examine why people chose to vote the way they did, it points to much bigger problems, a much bigger disaffection that has been building for quite some time, that voters have against the establishment of Washington, the political establishment within both parties."

    [Jan 14, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard, A Rare Anti-War Democrat, Will Run For President

    Highly recommended!
    American are so tired of foreign wars, that if DNC will not derail her with some "Putin agent" smears, and she wins the Primary, she has a chance against Donald Trump, who completely discredited himself by his actions and can defeat only opponent to the right of him (which with Hillary absence for the race now is difficult to find) like Obama against Romnay
    Notable quotes:
    "... During an interview for the Sanders Institute in September 2018, Gabbard said, "Since 2011, when the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and these other countries started this slow drawn-out regime change war in Syria, it is terrorist groups like al Qaida, al Nusra, and Hayat Tahrir al Sham, these different groups that have morphed and taken on names but essentially are all linked to al Qaida or al Qaida themselves that have proven to be the most effective ground force against the government in trying to overthrow the Syrian government." ..."
    Jan 14, 2019 | shadowproof.com
    Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii announced she will launch a presidential campaign for 2020. Her campaign is likely to distinguish itself from other Democratic campaigns by making wars and broader United States foreign policy a major issue.

    Gabbard was elected to the Hawaii state legislature in 2002. She joined the Hawaii Army National Guard a year later and voluntarily deployed to Iraq, where she completed two tours of duty in 2004 and 2005.

    She was elected to the House of Representatives in 2012, and according to her own website, she was "one of the first two female combat veterans to ever serve in the U.S. Congress, and also its first Hindu member."

    During Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, Gabbard gained notoriety after she resigned from her position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee so she could openly support Sanders. She spoke at Sanders campaign rallies to help him distinguish his foreign policy from the much more hawkish foreign policy of Hillary Clinton.

    Gabbard was overwhelmingly re-elected in 2018. She won 83 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary election.

    Most progressives are not as outspoken against U.S. military interventions or what she refers to as "regime change wars." She witnessed the impact of regime change on the people of Iraq, as well as U.S. troops, and that inspired her to talk more about the human cost of war and challenge the military industrial-complex.

    Gabbard has persistently called attention to the war in Syria. She traveled to Aleppo and Damascus in January 2017 to see some of the devastation Syrians have endured since 2011. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad invited her to a meeting, and she accepted.

    "Originally, I had no intention of meeting with Assad, but when given the opportunity, I felt it was important to take it. I think we should be ready to meet with anyone if there's a chance it can help bring about an end to this war, which is causing the Syrian people so much suffering," Gabbard declared .

    Supporters of the Syrian war -- the same people who do not want President Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. troops -- seized upon Gabbard's meeting with Assad to discredit her, and it has fueled the backlash among Western media pundits to her decision to run for president.

    Yet, in spite of a smear campaign encouraged by the political establishment, Gabbard has not backed down from protesting U.S. support for terrorists in Syria. She sponsored legislation, the Stop Arming Terrorists Act.

    During an interview for the Sanders Institute in September 2018, Gabbard said, "Since 2011, when the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and these other countries started this slow drawn-out regime change war in Syria, it is terrorist groups like al Qaida, al Nusra, and Hayat Tahrir al Sham, these different groups that have morphed and taken on names but essentially are all linked to al Qaida or al Qaida themselves that have proven to be the most effective ground force against the government in trying to overthrow the Syrian government."

    Gabbard opposes what she calls a "genocidal war" in Yemen, and she is one of the few representatives, who has worked to pass a war powers resolution in the House to end U.S. military involvement since Congress never authorized the war.

    "The United States is standing shoulder to shoulder supporting Saudi Arabia in this war as they commit these atrocities against Yemeni civilians," Gabbard said during the same Sanders Institute interview.

    Another war Gabbard questions is the war in Libya. In an interview for "The Jimmy Dore Show" on September 11, 2018, she spoke about the devastating consequences of pursuing regime change without considering what would happen after Muammar Gaddafi was removed from power.

    "After we led the war to topple Gaddafi, we have open human slave trading going on, in open market. In today's society, we have more terrorists in Libya today than there ever were before."

    Gabbard is also one of the few elected politicians to oppose weapons sales, especially to Saudi Arabia. She recognizes the military industrial-complex benefits the most from Congress not exercising its authority over war-making by presidents, whether they are Republican or Democrat.

    She spoke out against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when he refused to revoke support for Saudi Arabia and the war in Yemen because it would jeopardize a $2 billion arms deal.

    Not many Democrats are willing to be optimistic on North Korea, but Gabbard sees potential for peace and does not view Trump's meeting with Kim Jong-un as an act of treason.

    Gabbard said during the Sanders Institute interview, "For years, I've been working in Congress and calling for direct engagement with North Korea with Kim Jong-un to be able to try to broker a peace agreement that will result in de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and and finally bring about an end to the Korean War."

    "So I think that the recent engagement that we have seen -- both the historic meeting between a sitting U.S. president and the leader of North Korea -- is certainly a positive step in the right direction. We have to be willing to have these conversation to promote peace," Gabbard said. And, "I think the continued engagement between North Korea and South Korea is positive."

    Gabbard acknowledged there are a lot of details that have to be worked out, but that does not make her hostile to the entire process, which is the attitude of many pundits and Democrats in the establishment.

    Joe Rogan interviewed Gabbard in September 2018. He raised the issue of Russian troll farms and Facebook's failure to deal with them. She had a sober response to his concerns.

    "The United States has been doing this for a very long time in countries around the world, both overtly and covertly, through these kinds of disinformation campaigns," Gabbard contended. "Not even counting like the regime change wars, like we're going to take you out."

    She continued, "I think it is very hypocritical for us to be discussing this issue as a country without actually being honest about how this goes both ways. So, yes, we need to stop these other foreign countries -- and Russia's not the only one; there are others -- from trying to influence the American people and our elections. We also need to stop doing the same thing in other countries."

    Such positions on war and U.S. foreign policy effectively make her a pariah to establishment media pundits and the political class. But her anti-establishment politics do not end there.

    Gabbard has advocated against superdelegates, which are Democratic party insiders that have an outsized role in influencing the outcome of presidential primaries. She favors open primaries and same-day voter registration. She is outspoken against the influence of money in politics, and she is audacious enough to question members of her own political party.

    "We have to dig a few layers deeper as people are running for office, say what do you actually stand for?" she said on "The Jimmy Dore Show." "What is your vision for this country? That's the debate that we will have to have in Congress should Democrats win over the House or win more seats in the Senate."

    "Otherwise, it will be more of the same status quo, where you'll have lobbyists who have more of a seat at the table writing policies that affect healthcare and education and Wall Street and everything else rather than having a true and representative government by and for the people," she concluded.

    She was also critical of self-described progressives, who are pro-war, while on "Jimmy Dore":

    You have these individuals and groups of people who call themselves progressive but are some of the first to call for more war in the guise of humanitarianism. They look at these poor people suffering -- and there are people suffering in the other parts of the world. Let's go drop more bombs and try to take away their suffering. And when you look at example after example after example, our actions, U.S. policy, interventionist regime change war policy, [has] made the lives of people in these other countries far worse off than they ever were before or would have been if we had just stayed out of it.

    ***

    Gabbard was much closer to an establishment politician prior to her resignation from the DNC. She accepted tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from political action committees (PACs).

    The Center for Responsive Politics noted, "One of the largest contributing sectors was the defense industry. While Gabbard has gained a following for her anti-interventionist stances , yet, her 2016 campaign was given $63,500 from the defense sector . In fact, the campaign received donations of $10,000 from the Boeing Corporation PAC and from Lockheed Martin's PAC, two of the biggest names in the military-industrial complex."

    In 2017, Gabbard announced she would no longer accept PAC money. She raised $37,000 from labor associations and trade unions.

    Gabbard was "conflicted" over whether to support the Senate report on CIA torture. She said in 2014 that she thought there were "things missing or it was incomplete." She also endorsed the "ticking time bomb" scenario that officials use to justify torture, and it is unclear what her view would be now, if asked about the issue.

    She has taken a position on Israeli occupation of Palestine that is common among Democrats. She supports a two-state solution and describes Israel as the U.S.' "strongest ally." But it may be shifting. In the last year, she condemned Israel for its violence against the people of Gaza, and she was reluctant to vote for a House resolution that condemned the UN Security Council for criticizing Israeli settlements.

    Journalist Eoin Higgins questioned Gabbard's support from the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), which he described as right-wing. She has garnered criticism for her trip to India in 2014, when she met with India prime minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist.

    But HAF believes this criticism of Gabbard is unfair because other members of Congress, like Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have attended gatherings with Modi. They also point to financial records and maintain they are a U.S. organization without ties to any organizations in India.

    When she was much younger, Gabbard helped her father's organization mobilize against a same-sex marriage in Hawaii. The organization, Alliance for Traditional Marriage, backed conversion therapy

    However, there is evidence to suggest that Gabbard has abandoned much of the bigotry that she probably learned from her father. She backed Edith Windsor when she challenged the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

    "Let me say I regret the positions I took in the past, and the things I said. I'm grateful for those in the LGBTQ+ community who have shared their aloha with me throughout my personal journey," Gabbard stated, responding to media coverage of this aspect of her past.

    She noted that she has since supported "the Equality Act, the repeal of DOMA, Restore Honor to Service members Act, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the Safe Schools Improvement Act, and the Equality for All Resolution," and added, "Much work remains to ensure equality and civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, and if elected President, I will continue to fight for equal rights for all."

    There are powerful forces in American politics that will seize upon her past opposition to LGBTQ rights and meeting with Assad to neutralize her presidential campaign before she even has an opportunity to tour the country and meet with potential supporters. They fear the impact she could have if voters gravitate to her campaign, which will likely promote her anti-imperialism.

    Often Democrats do not bother to connect foreign policy to domestic issues. Gabbard is likely to run a rare campaign, where she makes the case that they are intertwined -- that in order to make investments in universal health care, education, infrastructure, etc, the massive investment in war must be severely curtailed.

    Gabbard also aware of the disenchantment among voters, who do not believe either political party has the answers. She understands President Trump is a symptom of what ails the country.

    As she said on "Jimmy Dore," "If we look at the lead-up to the 2016 election, and if we actually listen to and examine why people chose to vote the way they did, it points to much bigger problems, a much bigger disaffection that has been building for quite some time, that voters have against the establishment of Washington, the political establishment within both parties."

    [Jan 14, 2019] Ship of Fools How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution by Tucker Carlson

    Jan 14, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    Amazon Customer 5.0 out of 5 stars October 2, 2018

    Don't drink and read

    Don't drink wine and read this book, you'll get angry and make posts on social media that are completely accurate and your friends will hate you.

    [Jan 14, 2019] I feel like the U.S. is an occupied country, invaded by corporate lobbyists. We have the kind of crap government you get from occupations.

    Notable quotes:
    "... Why did Trump appoint Bolton? ..."
    "... I think Bolton is a sop to Sheldon Aldelson. He may be playing a similar role to "The Mooch", I hope. ..."
    "... Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that like a feudal fiefdom? ..."
    Jan 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Edward , , January 14, 2019 at 1:01 pm

    I feel like the U.S. is an occupied country, invaded by corporate lobbyists. We have the kind of crap government you get from occupations.

    Ignim Brites , , January 14, 2019 at 7:36 am

    Why did Trump appoint Bolton? A saying of LBJ, I believe attributed to Sam Rayburn, might illuminate. "It is better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."

    Edward , , January 14, 2019 at 8:26 am

    I think Bolton is a sop to Sheldon Aldelson. He may be playing a similar role to "The Mooch", I hope.

    Allegorio , , January 14, 2019 at 12:49 pm

    Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that like a feudal fiefdom?

    Carolinian , , January 14, 2019 at 8:33 am

    Why did Trump appoint Bolton?

    Not to be a broken record but should we blame the Dems? Arguably Trump's "out there" gestures to the right are because he has to keep the Repubs on his side given the constant threat of impeachment from the other side. Extremes beget extremes. There's also the Adelson factor.

    Of course this theory may be incorrect and he and Bolton are ideological soul mates, but Trump's ideology doesn't appear to go much beyond a constant diet of Fox News. He seems quite capable of pragmatic gestures which are then denounced by a horrified press.

    [Jan 14, 2019] The L>obby at work

    Notable quotes:
    "... Since the announcement (but no real follow through) to end our military involvement in Syria what passes for our statesmen - John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - have been ignored, mocked or both. ..."
    "... When was the last time you heard of a major US political figure go overseas and be refused a meeting with a foreign head of state, publicly upbraided and sent home like an irrelevant flunkie? ..."
    "... The insult couldn't be plainer. The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel. ..."
    Jan 14, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Something has changed in U.S. politics. And it may finally signal something changing for the better. Since the announcement (but no real follow through) to end our military involvement in Syria what passes for our statesmen - John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - have been ignored, mocked or both.

    Bolton attempted to box Trump in on not leaving Syria while Israel chest-thumped about how they will not yield an inch to Iran. Turkish President Erdogan publicly lambasted him with no response from President Trump. Or anyone else for that matter.

    When was the last time you heard of a major US political figure go overseas and be refused a meeting with a foreign head of state, publicly upbraided and sent home like an irrelevant flunkie?

    I can't think of one. Bolton came into the Middle East and made demands like he was the President which Bolton knew were clearly red lines for Erdogan -- guaranteeing the safety of the Syrian Kurds. And he did this from Jerusalem.

    The insult couldn't be plainer. The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel.

    africoman , 59 minutes ago link

    Why Israel so bent on hell to take Syrian sovereign territory of Golan Height seized on so calleds

    the Six-Day War in 1967, they did strategic move, still occupied and considers its own,

    OIL is the last reason to occupy it and is it related to coming antichrist ?

    I think it's more of spiritual than resource control. There are something more

    For interested, Check this out:

    Circle of Og : Return of the Nephilim and golan heights

    yerfej , 37 minutes ago link

    Excuse me but Israel won the war and as such can keep the gains.

    africoman , 32 minutes ago link

    No. In November 2018, the US rejected a symbolic UN resolution calling on Israel to end its occupation of the Golan Heights. The resolution passed with 151 votes in favor, 14 abstentions and only two votes against – the US and Israel itself They call it, "Occupied" for no reason. Gaza also an example but joos kept slicing it out ever since installed there.

    yerfej , 12 minutes ago link

    Well yes and I held a conference with resolutions in my backyard over some beers and it resulted in calling out the occupation as the spoils of war. The Syrians will just have to suck it up. Everyone else who pays attention to the bleating of ****** morons at the UN should realize the backyard beer occupation resolution trumps all.

    fiddy pence haff pound , 1 hour ago link

    "The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel. "

    This fits into my theory regarding Trump as a good boss. He obviously could not avoid hiring Bolton, as Trump's balancing act goes on. Bolton is an old PNAC petty potentate, and he obviously believes that triumphalist drivel from 2000. So, Bolton obviously thought he could deke around Trump and defy him and walked right into this act of political suicide. He'l be fired when the time is right. He's too connected to get beat up like Sessions. Trump will have to lever Bolton out using his own mustache and with the appropriate backing. That's going to easier now that Bolton danced a jig in Jerusalm.

    [Jan 14, 2019] I feel like the U.S. is an occupied country, invaded by corporate lobbyists. We have the kind of crap government you get from occupations.

    Notable quotes:
    "... Why did Trump appoint Bolton? ..."
    "... I think Bolton is a sop to Sheldon Aldelson. He may be playing a similar role to "The Mooch", I hope. ..."
    "... Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that like a feudal fiefdom? ..."
    Jan 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Edward , , January 14, 2019 at 1:01 pm

    I feel like the U.S. is an occupied country, invaded by corporate lobbyists. We have the kind of crap government you get from occupations.

    Ignim Brites , , January 14, 2019 at 7:36 am

    Why did Trump appoint Bolton? A saying of LBJ, I believe attributed to Sam Rayburn, might illuminate. "It is better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."

    Edward , , January 14, 2019 at 8:26 am

    I think Bolton is a sop to Sheldon Aldelson. He may be playing a similar role to "The Mooch", I hope.

    Allegorio , , January 14, 2019 at 12:49 pm

    Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that like a feudal fiefdom?

    Carolinian , , January 14, 2019 at 8:33 am

    Why did Trump appoint Bolton?

    Not to be a broken record but should we blame the Dems? Arguably Trump's "out there" gestures to the right are because he has to keep the Repubs on his side given the constant threat of impeachment from the other side. Extremes beget extremes. There's also the Adelson factor.

    Of course this theory may be incorrect and he and Bolton are ideological soul mates, but Trump's ideology doesn't appear to go much beyond a constant diet of Fox News. He seems quite capable of pragmatic gestures which are then denounced by a horrified press.

    [Jan 14, 2019] The Russia Hoax The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump by Gregg Jarrett

    The books does not answer the key question: if it was not Russian influence, who of forign powers tried to influence the election: GB, Israel, Saudi, or all three. We have solid evidence of interference of British intelligence services into the election. Which means May government interference.
    Also important to understand that FBI from the very beginning was apolitical tool. Nothing new here.
    This dirty political witch hunt has one major goal to cement the cracks in neoliberal society that appear after 2008 Financial crash. This attempt failed and Pateigenosse Mueller is unable to change that. Confidence in the ruling neoliberal oligarchy collapsed and problem with the inequality laid now bare.
    Jan 14, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    KB from Illinois 5.0 out of 5 stars Very detailed. Raises many questions about politically motivated investigations. September 14, 2018 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

    My interest in this book occurred by chance. Over the past couple years reading news stories on sites like Yahoo News I sensed a very overt stance against President Trump. It appeared very obvious to me, but I wanted some confirmation whether these views may have validity, or perhaps not. So I started to investigate other opinions via some of the conservative talk radio shows. Up until this time, I rarely listened to them. One was the Sean Hannity Show and Gregg Jarrett was sitting in for Sean on one of the shows. He mentioned his book and I thought it sounded interesting. My basic assumption even prior to reading this book was I never felt there was any illegal Trump/Russian collusion in our recent election. I couldn't see how it would ever be done in such a way that would actually affect the voting outcome (other than if it were some kind of ballot box type fraud). So I had doubts about all the related investigations. When this book was mentioned I figured it would offer some factual information to help me understand the investigations better. It did accomplish that. And much more awareness.

    One of the major items about this book is that it is well researched and documented. This made me feel somewhat comfortable about its content. There is so much misinformation making its rounds today that knowing what is truthful and what isn't can become a real guessing game. I could even ask 'Did Mr. Jarrett fabricate his sources'? At this point I will go on faith that they are real.

    Based on that assumption, he presents a very hard case about the Russian collusion investigation as not being quite what the U.S.A. people are being led to believe by the media outlets. So much so, I hope this book could be a catalyst for other investigations (assuming that isn't already being planned). As summarized in this book, a major point is about federal investigative departments having integrity in performing their duties, and doing so legally and without prejudice or political partisanship. This book does raise some real concerns.

    The author states at the end of the book "The people who should read this book, probably won't". Unfortunately he is probably correct. As a country we seem so divided today politically. It is my impression that anti-Trumpers will probably not want to acknowledge any conflicting thoughts or facts to their beliefs. But this book could be a great exercise in broadening one's knowledge regarding the investigations on Trump. It would show a different viewpoint than that being touted by much of the media, and has the facts backing it up. At the very least, it can provide some food for thought.

    Grady T. Birdsong 5.0 out of 5 stars Tells the honest truth about corruption in our Government November 23, 2018 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

    As Gregg Jarrett states in the Epilogue of this book, "The people who should read this book, probably won't... they are intellectually dishonest in believing that the president must have committed some crime in connection with Russia...There was never any plausible evidence that Trump or his campaign collaborated with Russia to win the presidency... Comey's scheme to trigger the appointment of his friend as special counsel was a devious maneuver by an unscrupulous man..."
    As many of these events unfolded I have watched closely and performed my own "tests of reasonableness" from facts presented. Utilizing logic and common sense I often wondered if I was missing something? What crystal ball would have predicted that Donald Trump would run for the presidency? One example: The press told us he had been a political asset for many years and had been exchanging Intel with the Russians...
    Then I heard about this book, purchased it and began reading it... I could hardly put it down... The information in it is astonishing! It is all to clear now...
    Jarrett has researched, compiled and formatted an almost air-tight legal case (within this book) for prosecuting these "weasels." The astonishing levels of corruption and crimes committed by those in the highest levels of the DOJ and FBI are unprecedented. He has compiled an extraordinary amount of source information to back up his many claims throughout the book. I am totally perplexed that our so-called leaders in Congress are allowing this abuse to go unpunished... baffling? This disgraceful abuse of power documented by Jarrett will come back to haunt us! A well written expose by Mr. Jarrett!

    E. Christine Hess 5.0 out of 5 stars Mueller, Rosenstein & the members of the Special Council SHOULD be on trial! November 24, 2018 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

    Gregg Jarrett's research leaves NO DOUBT that drastic action needs to be taken to hold these people- PRETENDING to represent the law- accountable & end their "assassination" tactics on our tax dollar.
    This is not Halloween, not a play. This is REALITY with our laws running amok!
    And our Congress - our elected officials, supposedly servants of We, the People, - is not taking action?
    How is this possible?

    Amazon Customer 5.0 out of 5 stars The deep bias rooted in the Deep State, better known now as The Swamp October 8, 2018 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

    Incredibly well researched and well written book which explains methodically in an easy to read style the undeniable deep seated bias against President Trump at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and the FBI. They tried to first prevent him from being elected by exonerating Hillary Clinton of a long list of crimes committed during her tenure as Secretary of State and then smearing him with a politically motivated fake "Dossier". When that didn't work, they have tried to undermine his presidency from the start with an equally politically motivated Special Prosecutor investigating "Collusion with Russia" in an investigation which had no crime to investigate from the start. A must read for all Americans.

    Andrew Maile 5.0 out of 5 stars A very informative, but yet digestible, read........ September 30, 2018 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

    This author writes with a very smooth, easy, but detailed style. The book brings in much law for the reader to digest, but, somehow, does not get a reader tangled up in the weeds. As for the thrust of the book: A detailed 'tick tock' of the day by day events that have taken America to the point we are today on this entire question of Trump, Russia, and the 2016 election.
    This book really is vivid proof that the 'deep state' does emphatically exist. Not as a structure or organization with secret meetings,rituals or handshakes. But as a mentality, or common political/social view of government, stemming from the longevity of bureaucracy to feel invulnerable to popular will because of their simple edict that 'we'll still be here after you're long gone'. And from this, these bureaucrats build liaisons with favoring political elites that lead to deep, hidden, obscure --shall we say 'deep state'-- actions to pervert the popular will for the ends of a few.
    This book vividly displays why bureaucrats (whose lifeblood is to promote more government) so turn their collective hand to supporting Democrats, the party of government. Yates covering for Comey and the blackmailing of Gen. Flynn, Comey leaking to a friend in Academia that provokes the appointment of his (Comey's) close associate --indeed, his mentor-- Robert Mueller. Senior bureaucrats (McCabe, Strzok) playing inside baseball to maneuver themselves for promotion in the expected new (Democratic) administration that they so much support and wish for. Indeed friendships with FISA judges to assure bogus warrants can be obtained against political enemies.
    Where money and power are traded as coin of the realm in a way that is so antiseptic and hidden. Nobody says 'How much money will it take'; instead it's 'I can help you fund raise'. Rod Blagojevich was foolish enough to call a bribe a bribe...well, he's in jail, but Strzok's wife isn't.
    It just goes on and on................it's simple corruption!!! And the band plays on......the human comedy continues........

    JG Kuhl 5.0 out of 5 stars How about a media complicity sequel? September 3, 2018 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

    Excellent detailed and researched book that simply amazes me. Lynch, Comey, Clinton, Stzrok, Orr, Rosenstein, McCabe, Reid and Brennen all worked seamlessly to install Hillary and have a backup plan B to lay the groundwork to impeach Trump in case she doesn't make it. All under the oversight of Obama. Neat trick, but what follows is even more orchestrated: MEDIA COMPLICITY! You can't pull this off unless you have the full cooperation willingly or otherwise of: NBC, CBS, NPR, ABC, MSNBC, and most of all CNN, the New York Times, and Washington Post! Here's where the real story lies. The media and the Democrat party are simpatico, joint at the brain and mouth and one other orifice. This is the real story that Jarrett only pays passing attention to. Sequel maybe, I hope so. Jon Kuhl Papillion, NE & New England

    Amazon Customer 5.0 out of 5 stars The Deep State Is Real September 14, 2018 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

    This book is very thorough and completely exposes the Deep State. If there were any doubts about the conspiracy to depose President Trump before reading this book, there certainly aren't any afterwards. After reading the book, I am very disappointed and discouraged to find that our government has such liars and criminals in the FBI, the DOJ, and the Congress. I have completely lost any confidence I had in the U.S. government and will never believe in it again, unless there is a complete house-cleaning in the FBI and the DOJ.

    S. Martin Shelton 4.0 out of 5 stars This attack to undermine our democracy is unparalleled in the history of our republic. October 1, 2018 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

    Jarrett pens a comprehensive review of the Deep State's inordinate fraud on our Constitution -- perhaps the greatest attack on our constitutional republic in the history of our country. He writes in clear and empathetic style. His narrative evolves in a coherent and logical progression that details the conspirators' skullduggery in an "ABC" type of progression. He cites exactly who violated the relevant federal statute and why and how it was violated. Unfortunately, as of 30 September 2018 -- the date I'm preparing the review -- none of the miscreants have been indicted even though the documentation of evidence is ponderous.

    Larry A. Whited 4.0 out of 5 stars One Less than Five Stars August 8, 2018 Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

    Gregg Jarrett's study -- and that is what this book is, a study -- covers two main aspects of recent history. First and foremost it is an in-depth look at the tactics and forces arrayed against President Trump. Intertwined with this comes by necessity a parallel look at Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, her presidential run, as well as a broader look at the activities of the Clintons with the nearly full support of those same forces that are now aligned against the presidency of Donald Trump. The nature of the often overlapping issues and the personnel involved has resulted in a fair amount of repetition of key points. This was not a lazy attempt to achieve a book-length manuscript, as Jarrett's original copy by his own admission in the acknowledgments was a hefty 100,000 words before the publisher encouraged him to trim things down.

    It is unfortunate that this book will be dismissed by so many who are unwilling to understand and accept that the pervasive high-level animosity against President Trump has evolved into a direct and active threat against our country -- and this threat is compounded by a complicit media that is eager to pounce. The rule of law has been twisted and contorted if not completely abandoned. Trump is the primary target, but whether by design or happenstance it is the U.S. Constitution that is being the most assaulted. The danger of this cannot be overemphasized -- we are at a critical crossroads. Gregg Jarret understands this and was motivated to bring this truth to light. He is no sycophant of President Trump. His loyalty is to the rule of law and to our Constitution rather than to political agendas on either side.

    I withheld one star because a great opportunity was lost. This book will never appear in classrooms, and it will likely be stocked in few law libraries. It most certainly should be, and it needs to be read and studied. The flagrant abuses of power by the DOJ, the FBI, and others need to be brought out into a bright light and the corruption purged. As a people we need to get our head out of the sand and realize what has been going on behind closed doors -- our future is most definitely at stake. The lost opportunity that I am alluding to comes down to the expressed (albeit well deserved) disdain and disgust that Gregg Jarrett now has towards those who are participating in this hoax that he has so thoroughly revealed. I fear even the preface itself will turn away those who most need to read this book.

    What will be perceived as bias before the facts are presented and developed will allow or even cause those who need to read this book to close their minds, giving them the excuse they want to dismiss the evidence. If strictly the evidence and history had alone been presented with Jarrett's (again, well-deserved) animosity being held in check and edited out, then perhaps this book could have become a classic for later generations to study assuming that we survive these perilously subversive times. I did the math, and there are 771 supporting references -- an average of 70 per chapter -- documenting Jarrett's research, plus 12 references even in the epilogue. Obviously, we are not talking about willfully blind opinion with no basis in fact.

    The antagonists who post their 1-star reviews with almost all of them having obviously never read the book (Re. few verified purchases) reveal a dangerous willful ignorance that they are happy to embrace. Their mindset should concern us all.

    [Jan 14, 2019] Lobby at work

    Jan 14, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Something has changed in U.S. politics. And it may finally signal something changing for the better. Since the announcement (but no real follow through) to end our military involvement in Syria what passes for our statesmen - John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - have been ignored, mocked or both.

    Bolton attempted to box Trump in on not leaving Syria while Israel chest-thumped about how they will not yield an inch to Iran. Turkish President Erdogan publicly lambasted him with no response from President Trump.

    Or anyone else for that matter.

    When was the last time you heard of a major U.S. political figure go overseas and be refused a meeting with a foreign head of state, publicly upbraided and sent home like an irrelevant flunkie?

    I can't think of one.

    Bolton came into the Middle East and made demands like he was the President which Bolton knew were clearly red lines for Erdogan -- guaranteeing the safety of the Syrian Kurds.

    And he did this from Jerusalem.

    The insult couldn't be plainer. The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel.

    africoman , 59 minutes ago link

    Why Israel so bent on hell to take Syrian sovereign territory of Golan Height seized on so calleds

    the Six-Day War in 1967, they did strategic move, still occupied and considers its own,

    Bolton to Netanyahu: We have the best US-Israel relations in history

    'Golan Heights forever ours!' Israel praises US for its vote against UN anti-occupation resolution

    Damascus slams Israel's 'Judaization plans & illegal elections' in occupied Golan Heights

    Netanyahu wants to redraw map in the Golan, Russia says – go to the UNSC

    OIL is the last reason to occupy it and is it related to coming antichrist ?

    I think it's more of spiritual than resource control. There are something more

    For interested, Check this out:

    Circle of Og : Return of the Nephilim and golan heights

    GILGAL REPHAIM, CIRCLE OF OG KING OF BASHAN | - Fallen Angels

    Circle of Og, Return of the Nephilm, Circle of the Giants

    'Wheel Of Giants' And Mysterious Complex Of Circles - Prehistoric ...

    did biblical giants build the circle of the refaim? - Christian Churches of ...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QLz2H8xjc0

    Deuteronomy 4:43 Bezer in the wilderness on the plateau belonging ...

    What do the Golan Heights, Hebron and the Gaza Strip have in ...

    yerfej , 37 minutes ago link

    Excuse me but Israel won the war and as such can keep the gains.

    africoman , 32 minutes ago link

    No,

    In November 2018, the US rejected a symbolic UN resolution calling on Israel to end its occupation of the Golan Heights.

    The resolution passed with 151 votes in favor, 14 abstentions and only two votes against – the US and Israel itself

    They call it, "Occupied" for no reason

    Gaza also an example but joos kept slicing it out ever since intalled there.

    yerfej , 12 minutes ago link

    Well yes and I held a conference with resolutions in my backyard over some beers and it resulted in calling out the occupation as the spoils of war. The Syrians will just have to suck it up. Everyone else who pays attention to the bleating of ****** morons at the UN should realize the backyard beer occupation resolution trumps all.

    fiddy pence haff pound , 1 hour ago link

    " The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel. "

    This fits into my theory regarding Trump as a good boss. He obviously could not avoid

    hiring Bolton, as Trump's balancing act goes on. Bolton is an old PNAC petty potentate,

    and he obviously believes that triumphalist drivel from 2000. So, Bolton obviously

    thought he could deke around Trump and defy him and walked right into this act

    of political suicide.

    He'l be fired when the time is right. He's too connected to get beat up like Sessions.

    Trump will have to lever Bolton out using his own mustache and with the appropriate

    backing. That's going to easier now that Bolton danced a jig in Jerusalm.

    [Jan 14, 2019] Deep State is a new "Inner Party"

    Notable quotes:
    "... With Warren wanting to be at the table with the elites, perhaps she took the advice of Larry Summers. In her memoir, "A Fighting Chance", she mentions a dinner conversation where she was told by him 'I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. ..."
    "... Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. ..."
    "... Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People -- powerful people -- listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders.' ..."
    Jan 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    The Rev Kev , , January 11, 2019 at 1:26 am

    With Warren wanting to be at the table with the elites, perhaps she took the advice of Larry Summers. In her memoir, "A Fighting Chance", she mentions a dinner conversation where she was told by him 'I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider.

    Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them.

    Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People -- powerful people -- listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders.'

    https://billmoyers.com/2014/09/05/i-had-been-warned/

    [Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

    Highly recommended!
    All links are going to Brennan and CIA. Rosenstein was just a tool, necessary to appoint the Special Prosecutor. And launching the prove was the meaning of "insurance" that Strock mentioned to his mistress. Both Strzok and McCabe have their liasons (read bosses) at CIA, so in essence they were "CIA infiltration group" within the FBI. And it is also important to understand that Obama was just a CIA snowperson.
    There is Stalin's NKVD chief Beria shadow over CIA and FBI now. He famously said "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime."
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross has made a brilliant observation, noting Peter Strzok - then the FBI's deputy chief of counterintelligence, admitted to his FBI lawyer mistress, Lisa Page, that there was no merit to the investigation. ..."
    "... Interestingly, another series of Strzok-Page texts refers to "coordinating investigation" after Strzok apparently met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who both recommended Comey's firing, then authorized the special counsel probe ..."
    "... As Ross notes in The Daily Caller , there were other text messages that between Strzok and Page which raise suspicion over whether the FBI was working on a "gotcha" against Trump. ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    As FBI Ramped Up "Witch Hunt" When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

    A Friday report in the New York Times revealing that the FBI supercharged its Trump-Russia collusion investigation after President Trump fired FBI director James Comey appears to have backfired - especially when one reviews internal FBI communications from the time period in question.

    The Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross has made a brilliant observation, noting Peter Strzok - then the FBI's deputy chief of counterintelligence, admitted to his FBI lawyer mistress, Lisa Page, that there was no merit to the investigation.

    Nine days after Comey was fired and the DOJ "sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia," Strzok texted Page on May 18, 2017: "You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely I'd be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there. "

    It is unclear from The Times report what information was used as a predicate to open the investigation. The article suggests that the FBI had long considered the move and that Comey's firing and Trump's subsequent comments marked a tipping point.

    ...

    A source close to Strzok told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Jan. 26, 2018, shortly after the text was released, that the message reflected Strzok's concern that the FBI would not find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia . - Daily Caller

    The Times' explanation for the FBI's rationale that Trump may have been a Russian asset consists of Trump's call for Moscow to release Hillary Clinton's emails an election debate, and allegations contained within the unverified Steele Dossier. The Times was also quick to note that Trump may have "unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence," to temper the accusation that he was an agent of a foreign power. In short, weak sauce.

    It's no wonder Strzok was hesitant to join Mueller's team.

    Interestingly, another series of Strzok-Page texts refers to "coordinating investigation" after Strzok apparently met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who both recommended Comey's firing, then authorized the special counsel probe.

    As Ross notes in The Daily Caller , there were other text messages that between Strzok and Page which raise suspicion over whether the FBI was working on a "gotcha" against Trump.

    " And we need to open the case we've been waiting on now while Andy is acting ," Strzok texted Page the day Comey was fired, referring to then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe.

    Meanwhile, Page - who served as McCabe's deputy, provided some additional color on the text messages during her July 2018 congressional testimony, suggesting that the "case we've been waiting on" text referred to an investigation separate of the obstruction probe we already knew about.

    "Well, other than obstruction, what could it have been?" one lawmaker asked Page in her interview, details of which were published by The Epoch Times on Friday.

    " I can't answer that, sir. I'm sorry ," she replied.

    "If I was able to explain in more depth why the Director firing precipitated this text, I would," she continued while declining to say if the text message referred to an obstruction of justice investigation or something more. - Daily Caller

    That said, Page admitted that Comey's firing prompted the text exchange.

    "So the firing of Jim Comey was the precipitating event as opposed to the occupant of the Director's office?" asked one lawmaker.

    "Yes, that's correct," replied Page.

    Meanwhile, The Times went to great lengths to imply that the FBI was justified in their ratcheted-up collusion investigation - failing to mention who started the probe, who led it, and more importantly - waiting until the 9th paragraph to mention the fact that it turned up nothing .

    "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials. An F.B.I. spokeswoman and a spokesman for the special counsel's office both declined to comment."

    VideoEng_NC

    "It is unclear from The Times report what information was used as a predicate to open the investigation."

    Should be pretty simple with one question. "Was it Hillary who was the responsible party to open an investigation on Trump?". About as direct as it gets & we already know the answer.

    adampeart

    TDS sufferers hate Trump so bad that they have become (at 70%) pro-warmonger. Pathetic. I guess that I shouldn't be surprised. They were fine with Black Jesus starting wars, overthrowing governments and bombing brown people for 8 years.

    Teeter

    McCabe initiated the investigation. Nobody likes McCabe, so he is likely to be the one guy that gets thrown under the bus. Of course what he knows may protect him to some extent... they won't want a trial.

    Duc888

    Sedition? Treason?

    Yippie21

    7 Days in May.... except for current version we use the DOJ and FBI! Interesting times.

    [Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

    Highly recommended!
    All links are going to Brennan and CIA. Rosenstein was just a tool, necessary to appoint the Special Prosecutor. And launching the prove was the meaning of "insurance" that Strock mentioned to his mistress. Both Strzok and McCabe have their liasons (read bosses) at CIA, so in essence they were "CIA infiltration group" within the FBI. And it is also important to understand that Obama was just a CIA snowperson.
    There is Stalin's NKVD chief Beria shadow over CIA and FBI now. He famously said "Show me the man and I'll find you the crime."
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross has made a brilliant observation, noting Peter Strzok - then the FBI's deputy chief of counterintelligence, admitted to his FBI lawyer mistress, Lisa Page, that there was no merit to the investigation. ..."
    "... Interestingly, another series of Strzok-Page texts refers to "coordinating investigation" after Strzok apparently met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who both recommended Comey's firing, then authorized the special counsel probe ..."
    "... As Ross notes in The Daily Caller , there were other text messages that between Strzok and Page which raise suspicion over whether the FBI was working on a "gotcha" against Trump. ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    As FBI Ramped Up "Witch Hunt" When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

    A Friday report in the New York Times revealing that the FBI supercharged its Trump-Russia collusion investigation after President Trump fired FBI director James Comey appears to have backfired - especially when one reviews internal FBI communications from the time period in question.

    The Daily Caller 's Chuck Ross has made a brilliant observation, noting Peter Strzok - then the FBI's deputy chief of counterintelligence, admitted to his FBI lawyer mistress, Lisa Page, that there was no merit to the investigation.

    Nine days after Comey was fired and the DOJ "sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia," Strzok texted Page on May 18, 2017: "You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely I'd be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there's no big there there. "

    It is unclear from The Times report what information was used as a predicate to open the investigation. The article suggests that the FBI had long considered the move and that Comey's firing and Trump's subsequent comments marked a tipping point.

    ...

    A source close to Strzok told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Jan. 26, 2018, shortly after the text was released, that the message reflected Strzok's concern that the FBI would not find evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia . - Daily Caller

    The Times' explanation for the FBI's rationale that Trump may have been a Russian asset consists of Trump's call for Moscow to release Hillary Clinton's emails an election debate, and allegations contained within the unverified Steele Dossier. The Times was also quick to note that Trump may have "unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence," to temper the accusation that he was an agent of a foreign power. In short, weak sauce.

    It's no wonder Strzok was hesitant to join Mueller's team.

    Interestingly, another series of Strzok-Page texts refers to "coordinating investigation" after Strzok apparently met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who both recommended Comey's firing, then authorized the special counsel probe.

    As Ross notes in The Daily Caller , there were other text messages that between Strzok and Page which raise suspicion over whether the FBI was working on a "gotcha" against Trump.

    " And we need to open the case we've been waiting on now while Andy is acting ," Strzok texted Page the day Comey was fired, referring to then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe.

    Meanwhile, Page - who served as McCabe's deputy, provided some additional color on the text messages during her July 2018 congressional testimony, suggesting that the "case we've been waiting on" text referred to an investigation separate of the obstruction probe we already knew about.

    "Well, other than obstruction, what could it have been?" one lawmaker asked Page in her interview, details of which were published by The Epoch Times on Friday.

    " I can't answer that, sir. I'm sorry ," she replied.

    "If I was able to explain in more depth why the Director firing precipitated this text, I would," she continued while declining to say if the text message referred to an obstruction of justice investigation or something more. - Daily Caller

    That said, Page admitted that Comey's firing prompted the text exchange.

    "So the firing of Jim Comey was the precipitating event as opposed to the occupant of the Director's office?" asked one lawmaker.

    "Yes, that's correct," replied Page.

    Meanwhile, The Times went to great lengths to imply that the FBI was justified in their ratcheted-up collusion investigation - failing to mention who started the probe, who led it, and more importantly - waiting until the 9th paragraph to mention the fact that it turned up nothing .

    "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials. An F.B.I. spokeswoman and a spokesman for the special counsel's office both declined to comment."

    VideoEng_NC

    "It is unclear from The Times report what information was used as a predicate to open the investigation."

    Should be pretty simple with one question. "Was it Hillary who was the responsible party to open an investigation on Trump?". About as direct as it gets & we already know the answer.

    adampeart

    TDS sufferers hate Trump so bad that they have become (at 70%) pro-warmonger. Pathetic. I guess that I shouldn't be surprised. They were fine with Black Jesus starting wars, overthrowing governments and bombing brown people for 8 years.

    Teeter

    McCabe initiated the investigation. Nobody likes McCabe, so he is likely to be the one guy that gets thrown under the bus. Of course what he knows may protect him to some extent... they won't want a trial.

    Duc888

    Sedition? Treason?

    Yippie21

    7 Days in May.... except for current version we use the DOJ and FBI! Interesting times.

    [Jan 13, 2019] Deep State neutered Trump: I have been FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President

    He essentially became a Republican Obama, save Nobel Peace Price. If Obama was/is a CIA-democrat, this guy is a Deep State controlled republican. In any case he betrayed his voters in a way that resembles Obama betrayal. One has a fake slogan "change we can believe in" that other equally fake "Make [middle] America Great Again" (which means restoration of well-being of middle class and working class in my book, not the continuation of Obama foreign wars, and tax cuts for for corporations and super rich.
    And that means that he lost a considerable part of his electorate: the anti-war republicans and former Sanders supporters. He might do good and not to try to run in 2020. He definitely is no economic nationalist. Compare his policies with Tucker Carlson Jan 2, 2019 speech to see the difference. He is "national neoliberal" which rejects parts of neoliberal globalization based on treaties and prefer to bully nations to compliance that favor the US interests instead of treaties.
    And his "fight" with the Deep State resemble so closely to complete and unconditional surrender, that you might have difficulties to distinguish between the two.
    Most of his appointees would make Hillary proud. That that extends beyond rabid neocons like Haley, Mattis, Bolton and Pompeo.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Washington Post is without a doubt the most pro-establishment among all large mainstream publications, not only do they defend the narratives of the Deep State but actively attacks anyone who challenges them. ..."
    "... Jeff Bezos owner of the Washington Post is also a contractor with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board all part of doing everything he can to cozy up and ingratiate himself to the establishment on which his empire is built. ..."
    "... It's really sad that people in the public believe this stuff. It's insane and ridiculous. We're living in an Insane Asylum and the ones who should be there for the safety of themselves and others are walking around giving orders to Media and USG, fomenting war and making a mockery of laws and "normal behaviors. ..."
    "... They flooded the news with the old Helsinki/Putin stuff to hide the real news. Lisa Page's testimony revealed that John Carlin, Mueller's former chief of staff was running the Russia investigation from the DOJ end, showing another conflict of Mueller's. Now Mueller is covering for two best friends, Comey and Carlin and he has to frame Trump to save them. ..."
    "... The testimony also showed FBI David Bowditch was heavily involved, and Bowditch is now 2nd in command at the FBI and blocking the public release of witness testimony, and one reason for it is it reveals his involvement. ..."
    "... It is also now revealed that John Brennan CIA had the dossier before the FBI, and the dossier was likely written by Nellie Ohr, who belonged to a CIA group, and then the dossier was laundered by Steele to look like foreign intelligence to get the Crossfire Hurricane investigation started on Trump. You would think it would be big news that Russians may have had nothing to do with the dossier but the media doesn't see it that way ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
    Washington Post stating that he "has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details" of his discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin - telling Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in a phone interview that he would be willing to release the details of a private conversation in Helsinki last summer.

    "I would. I don't care," Trump told Pirro, adding: "I'm not keeping anything under wraps. I couldn't care less."

    "I mean, it's so ridiculous, these people making up," Trump said of the WaPo report.

    The president referred to his roughly two-hour dialogue with Putin in Helsinki -- at which only the leaders and their translators were present -- as "a great conversation" that included discussions about "securing Israel and lots of other things."

    "I had a conversation like every president does," Trump said Saturday. "You sit with the president of various countries. I do it with all countries." - Politico

    In July an attempt by House Democrats to subpoena Trump's Helsinki interpreter was quashed by Republicans.

    "The Washington Post is almost as bad, or probably as bad, as the New York Times," Trump said.

    When Pirro asked Trump about a Friday night New York Times report that the FBI had opened an inquiry into whether he was working for Putin, Pirro asked Trump "Are you now or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?"

    "I think it's the most insulting thing I've ever been asked," Trump responded. "I think it's the most insulting article I've ever had written."

    Trump went on an epic tweetstorm Saturday following the Times article, defending his 2017 firing of former FBI Director James Comey, and tweeting that he has been "FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President. At the same time, & as I have often said, getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. I fully expect that someday we will have good relations with Russia again!"

    rumcho

    Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for Washington Post, five years later he gets a government contract with the CIA for $600 million. Are you connecting the dots? You do the numbers. This is how fascism works. Bezos is a crony capitalist joker.

    Anunnaki

    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/01/the-trump-russia-scam-how-obama-enabled-the-fbi-to-spy-on-trump.html#more

    is Trump waiting for Mueller to lay down his cards? Head him off at the pass and arrest Obama, Rice, Jarrett, Lynch, Comey, Rosenstein and McCabe all on day 1

    best defense is a good offense. Make the narrative about Dem sedition not impending House impeachment hearings.

    You are President, start acting like it. Make them fear you.

    your re-election depends on Mike Obama not being your opponent.

    Let it Go

    WaPo, again?

    The Washington Post is without a doubt the most pro-establishment among all large mainstream publications, not only do they defend the narratives of the Deep State but actively attacks anyone who challenges them.

    Jeff Bezos owner of the Washington Post is also a contractor with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board all part of doing everything he can to cozy up and ingratiate himself to the establishment on which his empire is built. The article below delves into how WaPo is behind many of the big stories that manipulate America and moves the needle of public opinion in huge ways.

    http://Washington-post-influence-and-power.html

    MoralsAreEssential

    It's really sad that people in the public believe this stuff. It's insane and ridiculous. We're living in an Insane Asylum and the ones who should be there for the safety of themselves and others are walking around giving orders to Media and USG, fomenting war and making a mockery of laws and "normal behaviors.

    shadow54

    They flooded the news with the old Helsinki/Putin stuff to hide the real news. Lisa Page's testimony revealed that John Carlin, Mueller's former chief of staff was running the Russia investigation from the DOJ end, showing another conflict of Mueller's. Now Mueller is covering for two best friends, Comey and Carlin and he has to frame Trump to save them.

    The testimony also showed FBI David Bowditch was heavily involved, and Bowditch is now 2nd in command at the FBI and blocking the public release of witness testimony, and one reason for it is it reveals his involvement.

    It is also now revealed that John Brennan CIA had the dossier before the FBI, and the dossier was likely written by Nellie Ohr, who belonged to a CIA group, and then the dossier was laundered by Steele to look like foreign intelligence to get the Crossfire Hurricane investigation started on Trump. You would think it would be big news that Russians may have had nothing to do with the dossier but the media doesn't see it that way.

    Then there is the news that Fusion GPS worked with the Democracy Integrity Project and Knew Knowledge to run a fake Russian bots campaign against Roy Moore. The Democracy Integrity Project was started by Feinstein's aide and with New Knowledge wrote a report on Russian bots for the Senate Intelligence Committee. So the Senate Intelligence Committee hired creators of fake Russian bots to write a report on Russian bots.

    [Jan 13, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard's running in 2020

    Jan 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Aloha,

    Earlier tonight I spoke with my friend Van Jones about the challenges we face and the future of our country.

    He asked me bluntly whether I'll run for president, and I told him straight: I've decided to run and will make a formal announcement next week.

    There are many reasons I'm offering to serve you as President -- to ensure every American gets the healthcare they need, to bring about comprehensive immigration reform, to make sure we have clean water and clean air for generations to come, to fix our broken criminal justice system, to end the corrupt influence of special interests in Washington, and so much more.

    But the main reason I'm running has to do with an issue that is central to the rest -- war and peace. I look forward to talking with you more about this in the coming days.

    When we stand together, united by our love for each other and for our country, there is no challenge we cannot overcome.

    Aloha,

    Tulsi

    ************************

    I received this email from Tulsi Gabbard's office tonight. No, we don't know each other. I signed up for her updates over two years ago because of my interest in her. We've talked about her over the years within this committee of correspondence, always on a positive note as I recall.

    As I'm sure you remember, she left the DNC leadership in 2016 because of their high-handed treatment of Bernie Sanders. She caused quite a stir for meeting with Bashar Assad when she visited Syria in early 2017. She is still an Army major in the Hawaiian National Guard and advocates for a strong defense, including a robust ballistic missile defense. Not unusual considering she represents Hawaii's 2nd Congressional District. As a Progressive, she calls for an end to all our overseas wars including Syria and Yemen. But I think she's more of a Teddy Roosevelt Progressive

    Before delving into her politics, I recommend an article Tulsi wrote back in October 2017 entitled "My Spiritual Journey." I think it says a lot about her and her upbringing. She is definitely a committed member of the Hawaiian ohana.

    In my few short years there, I was most impressed by this spirit. I saw it in my neighbors in Mililani Town, my friends and counterparts in Company C, 1/299 Infantry (HI ARNG) on Maui and in the pig hunters/pakalolo growers of the Koolau Mountains. I think the DC swamp can use a little more aloha spirit. Shaka, brah!

    TTG

    Posted at 12:46 AM in Politics , TTG | Permalink | 31 Comments

    [Jan 13, 2019] NSA Director Mike Rogers visit to Donald Trump

    Notable quotes:
    "... On Friday November 18th The Washington Post reported on a recommendation in "October" that [NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers] Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position: The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed. ..."
    "... After the visit by Rogers, Trump vacated Trump Towers. ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Robert Snefjella , Jan 13, 2019 4:43:58 PM | link

    Great journalism b!

    A few more points: from: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/

    "On Thursday November 17th, 2016, NSA Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York and met with President-Elect Donald Trump.

    On Friday November 18th The Washington Post reported on a recommendation in "October" that [NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers] Mike Rogers be removed from his NSA position: The heads of the Pentagon and the nation's intelligence community have recommended to President Obama that the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.

    In a move apparently unprecedented for a military officer, Rogers, without notifying superiors, traveled to New York to meet with Trump on Thursday at Trump Tower.

    Occam's Razor. NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers didn't want to participate in the spying scheme [on Trump]

    (Clapper, Brennan, Etc.), which was the baseline for President Obama's post presidency efforts to undermine Donald Trump and keep Trump from digging into [who knows what crimes]"

    After the visit by Rogers, Trump vacated Trump Towers.

    There is considerable irony in the Mueller 'probe' and the continuing avalanche of MSM lies and evasions and spin etc pertaining to Trump.

    There are trends: A growing US citizen realization that their political system prior to Trump was nearly completely corrupt; the Clintons are more broadly understood as the pathological criminals that they are; the Podesta emails with their sick connotations remain 'in the air' - See Ben Swann's work, for example. The Clinton Foundation is far more broadly understood as a massive criminal enterprise.

    Serious criminality at the highest levels of the FBI is now far more obvious to far more people

    MSM as evil propaganda is more widely understood.

    It is understood widely that the DNC material to Wikileaks was not 'hacked' (Binney)

    From the theintercept.com :

    "Pompeo met on October 24 [at Trump's request] with William Binney, a former National Security Agency official-turned-whistleblower who co-authored an analysis published by a group of former intelligence officials that challenges the U.S. intelligence community's official assessment that Russian intelligence was behind last year's theft of data from DNC computers. Binney and the other former officials argue that the DNC data was "leaked," not hacked, "by a person with physical access" to the DNC's computer system."

    In short the last two years have been about trying to defeat Trump but the attackers are looking more and more wounded, and Trump, well, he's hanging in there. General Kelly and others have described Trump's work ethic as exhausting.

    [Jan 13, 2019] What is wrong with Trump

    Trump was elected using Adelson money. That;s probably is what is wrong with Trump.
    Is Trump a Republican Obama? As in "Brain dead Dems kept saying Obama would do the right thing by the nation, that he was playing 4D chess, up till the moment he was no longer president, and in the end he was a narcisstic, self-aggrandizing politician who transferred trillions to the 0.1% and made America worse by any standard."
    Notable quotes:
    "... The struggle between the neocons and Trump over control of foreign policy has become ridiculous. One must remember that he can dismiss them all with the stroke of a pen, just he can dismiss his non civil service tormentors in the justice department and the FBI. ..."
    "... Bolton has tried to countermand Trump's decision in Syria. His attempt and that of Jeffrey were rebuked in Ankara and DoD then announced an immediate commencement of the withdrawal. ..."
    "... And yet the unholy trio of Pompeo (first in the hearts of his USMA class), Jeffrey, a career neocon hack at State, and Bolton (the mustachioed menace) are still in their jobs? Say what? ..."
    "... And then there is the Great Southern Border Crisis. The Democrats have repeatedly voted for a great deal of money for barrier systems on the border. Chancy (Chuck and Nancy) were in the lead in such votes over the years. Now Nancy (who may not remember her votes) is denying Trump "a single dollar" for border barriers. ..."
    "... To say that barriers are ineffective is dishonest. By now Trump knows that he can declare a national emergency and fund the barriers after however much litigation the Dems can arrange. There is ample money available for the purpose. So, why does he not do it? ..."
    "... I voted for Trump. He lost me when he filled his cabinet with swamp creatures and then further when he replaced the generals with neo-cons like Bolton. You cant change the government if you don't understand how the government works - its not a real estate business that you can declare bankruptcy to make a buck. ..."
    "... Brain dead Dems kept saying Obama would do the right thing by the nation, that he was playing 4D chess, up till the moment he was no longer president, and in the end he was a narcisstic, self-aggrandizing politician who transferred trillions to the 0.1% and made America worse by any standard. ..."
    "... If he cared about illegal immigration, how about enforcing laws against employing illegal immigrants ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    According to Hido, Washington's Special Representative for Syria, James Jeffrey, delivered several messages to the leadership of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) demanding them to slow down the negotiations with Damascus and promising to discuss the idea of establishing a no-fly zone over northeastern Syria.

    The Kurdish political described Jeffery's messages as "disturbing" and called on the Kurdish leadership to deal with them in careful manner.

    Furthermore, Hido stressed that the SDF should take a decision on the talks with the Damascus government as soon as possible and regretted that some Kurdish officials are still pinning their hopes on a possible change in the U.S. decision to withdraw from Syria .

    "Talks with the Syrian government are still ongoing in a positive atmosphere," RT quoted Hido as saying.

    Jeffrey made a visit to Turkey recently, where he tried to strike a deal with Ankara over northeastern Syria. However, Turkey's plans to attack US-backed Kurdish forces and invade the region hindered his efforts.

    It appears to be that the SDF's only real option is the deal with Damascus as any U.S. solution would likely involve Turkey, which has demonstrated its agressive attitude towards Syrian Kurdish groups during its operation in Afrin in 2018." SF

    ------------

    The struggle between the neocons and Trump over control of foreign policy has become ridiculous. One must remember that he can dismiss them all with the stroke of a pen, just he can dismiss his non civil service tormentors in the justice department and the FBI.

    Bolton has tried to countermand Trump's decision in Syria. His attempt and that of Jeffrey were rebuked in Ankara and DoD then announced an immediate commencement of the withdrawal.

    What could that have been other than a renewed presidential order to the Defense Department? And yet the unholy trio of Pompeo (first in the hearts of his USMA class), Jeffrey, a career neocon hack at State, and Bolton (the mustachioed menace) are still in their jobs? Say what?

    And then there is the Great Southern Border Crisis. The Democrats have repeatedly voted for a great deal of money for barrier systems on the border. Chancy (Chuck and Nancy) were in the lead in such votes over the years. Now Nancy (who may not remember her votes) is denying Trump "a single dollar" for border barriers.

    BTW, any soldier will tell you that the purpose of barriers IS NOT to stop all movement. No, it is to slow up movement and canalize it so that Quick Reaction Forces (QRF) can get there first with the most. To say that barriers are ineffective is dishonest. By now Trump knows that he can declare a national emergency and fund the barriers after however much litigation the Dems can arrange. There is ample money available for the purpose. So, why does he not do it?

    On Smerconish's show today, Bob Baer, spy extraordinaire, (read his books) asserted that the various bits and pieces of circumstantial "evidence" about Trump's contacts with and attitude toward Russia, as well as those of his flunkies and relatives amount to a "good enough" case for Trump being a Russian agent of influence. That is how a HUMINT spook judges such things. It is a matter of probabilities, not hard evidence. Assets of an alien government are not always witting (understanding) of their status from the POV of the foreign government, but that does not necessarily make other than agents. Sometimes they think they are merely cooperating in a good and normal way when, in fact, the relationship is much deeper. Jane Fonda in North Vietnam would be an example.

    OTOH the president is responsible for the conduct of US foreign policy and is not under an obligation to accept the perhaps hackneyed views of his subordinates. Perhaps his world view is quite different and he is not mesmerized by the group think of the Borg. If that is so ...

    But, how does one explain his lack of action on the border? Does someone or some thing in Russia, Israel, the UK, his former business associates, have something really juicy on Trump, something that he fears to unleash through decisive action? pl

    https://southfront.org/kurdish-politician-washington-trying-to-sabotage-talks-between-sdf-and-damascus/

    Eric Newhill , a day ago

    Sir, I think he's just being cautious and exhausting all other options because half of the country has been made to believe he's a dictator. He's being sensitive to that. He will act. Give it time.
    ISL -> Eric Newhill , 17 hours ago
    Sensitive? Cautious? Caring about Americans not in his base (whatever his base means)? Doesnt sounds like president Donald Trump the last two years. He acts more like he is confused about what the president's powers are while the wormtongues he appointed and replaces with more of the same continue to whisper in his ear.
    Eric Newhill -> ISL , 10 hours ago
    Contrary to all the TDS out there, maybe he prefers to do things the right way and have Congress make laws and budgets that work for all of us whether or not we all understand how.
    ISL -> Eric Newhill , 3 hours ago
    If that was the case, why so many signing statements (particularly since republicans control congress ). He is on target to pass Obama. who also preferred not to do things by laws. http://www.coherentbabble.c... Its just that the trend towards an imperial, unitary presidency keeps getting worse with full acquiescence of congress who suckles on the corporate money teat, under both Dems and Repubs.

    I voted for Trump. He lost me when he filled his cabinet with swamp creatures and then further when he replaced the generals with neo-cons like Bolton. You cant change the government if you don't understand how the government works - its not a real estate business that you can declare bankruptcy to make a buck.

    Brain dead Dems kept saying Obama would do the right thing by the nation, that he was playing 4D chess, up till the moment he was no longer president, and in the end he was a narcisstic, self-aggrandizing politician who transferred trillions to the 0.1% and made America worse by any standard.

    -----
    Here's a nice plot - US apprehensions comparable to 1970 when the US had a much smaller population.

    ISL -> ISL , 3 hours ago
    Now if Trump shut the govt down until congress did something about big pharma and the opioid crisis because Congress is in their pocket he would have my support. But then the republicans and dems would jointly impeach him to keep the money spigot flowing.

    Decreasing life expectancy is what happens in the sh-tholes to use his term. If he cared about illegal immigration, how about enforcing laws against employing illegal immigrants. Don't republicans who theoretically support capitalism (as opposed to crony capitalism) understood supply and demand? (If there is a demand, then supply will meet it)

    Oh, because illegal immigrants are good for the bottom line of people, like, well, Trump:

    https://www.washingtonpost....

    [Jan 13, 2019] So even if the IRA didn't manage to make a profit, the net cost for them must have been much lower than $100,000

    Notable quotes:
    "... Does anyone know how much revenue it made from that operation? Facebook must know but they've kept quiet about it. Same with Mueller. ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Brendan , Jan 13, 2019 5:12:30 PM | link

    The Internet Research Agency (IRA) paid $100,000 for Facebook ads and then charged its customers for the clickbait service (between 25 and 50 U.S. dollars per post for promotional content). So even if the IRA didn't manage to make a profit, the net cost for them must have been much lower than $100,000.

    Does anyone know how much revenue it made from that operation? Facebook must know but they've kept quiet about it. Same with Mueller.

    [Jan 13, 2019] Mitt Romney, Commander of the Fake Internationalists by Doug Bandow

    Notable quotes:
    "... Mitt Romney, Commander of the Fake Internationalists Newly-inaugurated Senator has been promoted to standard-bearer for the bipartisan War Party, filling in for John McCain. ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of ..."
    Jan 10, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
    Mitt Romney, Commander of the Fake Internationalists Newly-inaugurated Senator has been promoted to standard-bearer for the bipartisan War Party, filling in for John McCain.

    No surprise: Senator Mitt Romney does not like President Donald Trump, as he recently explained in The Washington Post . But what, one wonders, was the former GOP presidential candidate thinking two years ago when he supped with the man he now claims to deplore while seeking an appointment as secretary of state?

    Much of Romney's complaint is over manners. Yes, the president is a boor. Most people, including many of Trump's supporters, recognize that. Trump won not because of his etiquette but because of what he stood for -- and against.

    Romney also defended The Blob, Washington's bipartisan foreign policy establishment. In his article attacking the president, he offered the usual vacuous bromides that characterize the interventionist consensus, which poses as internationalism but with plenty of bombing raids, illegal occupations, and nation-building. Most importantly, this perspective presumes permanent American domination, irrespective of cost.

    Romney wrote: "America has long been looked to for leadership. Our economic and military strength was part of that, of course, but our enduring commitment to principled conduct in foreign relations, and to the rights of all people to freedom and equal justice, was even more esteemed." Indeed, "The world needs American leadership, and it is in America's interest to provide it. A world led by authoritarian regimes is a world -- and an America -- with less prosperity, less freedom, less peace."

    In fact, Romney appears more committed to dependence on allies than American leadership. For him, these are two sides of the same coin. The only alternative he sees to Washington in control is the bad guys leading.

    Related is Romney's apparent belief that foreign policy is fixed, irrespective of circumstance: the very same U.S.-dominated alliances created in 1950 are needed today. Although America's friends have raced ahead economically, politically, even militarily, Washington must forever treat them as helpless derelicts. For instance, Russia, a weakened declining power, faces the U.S. and Europe -- which together have more than 20 times its GDP. Yet Romney sees Moscow as the greatest threat facing America. It is 1945 all over again.

    Romney's most important omission is Iraq. After the war there turned bad, he remained silent about his support for it. The Iraq disaster is an important reason why Trump won and other Republicans, including Romney, lost. In 2008, Americans rejected John McCain, the very symbol of promiscuous war-making. Four years later, Romney criticized President Barack Obama for leaving Iraq too soon, by which the Republican nominee probably meant leaving at any time. In saying he would keep more troops in Iraq, he ignored the fact that the Iraqis had refused to negotiate a status of forces agreement with the Bush administration.

    Romney also failed to mention Afghanistan, both as a presidential candidate in 2012 and senator in 2019. After all, what good can be said for entering the 18th year of nation-building in a region of little strategic interest? As for Syria, last November, Romney predictably denounced as "recklessness in the extreme" exiting a multi-sided civil war in a country never important to America.

    Whose Side is Mitt Romney On? Robert Kagan's Jungle Book of Forever War

    Now Romney is being touted as the new standard-bearer for the bipartisan War Party, filling in for John McCain. Bloomberg columnist Hal Brands theorized that Romney was attempting to "position himself as heir to John McCain as the congressional conscience of U.S. diplomacy" (defined as advocating policies designed to prolifically kill and destroy).

    Towards this effort, Romney is articulating "a renewed Republican internationalism based on opposition to aggressive authoritarian regimes." Brands celebrates Romney's Russophobia, saying he "deserves credit for being anti-Russia before being anti-Russia was cool." No hint that the U.S. might have contributed to Moscow's hostility through the aggressive "internationalism" of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama -- violating commitments not to expand NATO, dismantling Moscow's Slavic friend Serbia, and encouraging violent regime change against an elected government that neighbored Russia. After all, equivalent Russian intervention in Mexico would have triggered an extremely hostile reaction in Washington.

    Neoconservative Max Boot lauded Romney for throwing "down the gauntlet to President Trump." Indeed, argued Boot, "it now falls upon Romney to champion the cause of principled conservatism in Washington." Boot hoped the freshman senator would lead a general opposition and seemed especially pleased at Romney's support for the interventionist status quo.

    Yet the passion-less Romney is a poor substitute for the perennially angry McCain. It is difficult to imagine Romney leading Lindsey Graham and Joseph Lieberman on another apocalyptic ride, demanding that death and destruction be visited upon an enemy du jour. Indeed, Romney admitted as much, complained The New York Times , which noted that he said he "would only speak out against Mr. Trump on issues of 'great significance,' which means not much."

    Worse, Romney is a typical denizen of Washington and lacks any connection to the disastrous consequences of his policies. Give McCain credit: he and his sons served in the military. Not Romney. He received four deferments during the Vietnam War, explaining that he "had other plans." This sounds eerily like Dick Cheney, who said his five deferments reflected "other priorities."

    Moreover, none of Romney's five sons served. That is, of course, their prerogative. But their decision further insulated Romney from any consequences of his policies. His response to questions about their lack of service: "One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I'd be a great president." Did Romney believe working for him was as dangerous as fighting Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah? Or that his personal interest in winning the election was as important as the nation winning a war?

    My friend William Smith at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University argued that Romney's article "is another clear sign that the bipartisan political establishment is largely oblivious to the terrible tragedy of wartime casualties disproportionately inflicted on certain communities." Candidate Trump did particularly well in states that so suffered. Complained Smith: "What is astonishing is that, after all this tragedy, Romney offers only cliched neoconservative bromides to the many heartbroken communities across the nation."

    However, The Blob, which dominates foreign policy under both parties, poses an even larger problem. These policymakers consider permanent war to be America's natural condition. They seek to suppress dissident views to ensure united support for permanent war. Anyone who hesitates to back every proposed new intervention is demonized and marginalized.

    The favorite technique, recently employed by Frederick Kagan in The Hill, is to call opponents, irrespective of their actual positions, "isolationists." Thus did Kagan urge left and right "internationalists" -- meaning military interventionists -- to work together to defend "the principle that the United States must remain actively engaged in the world," by which he meant warring without end on multiple countries.

    Exclaimed Kagan: "The isolationists who have condemned the United States involvement in the Middle East and the rest of the world for decades are about to get their wish. We will witness what the world looks like when left to its own devices."

    Egads. Imagine what might have happened had the U.S. not intervened in the Lebanese Civil War, armed Turkey to kill tens of thousands of Kurds and destroy thousands of Kurdish villages, invaded Iraq and triggered sectarian conflict, fostered civil war in Libya and the chaos that followed, supported decades of violent occupation over millions of Palestinians by Israel, backed murderous Saudi Arabia in Bahrain and Yemen, supported a coup against Iran's democratically elected government and a brutal invasion backed by chemical weapons against Iran's Islamist regime, actively underwritten tyranny across the Middle East, and tried to sort out the Syrian Civil War. Something bad might have happened.

    Yeah.

    In Syria, Kagan views as "isolationist" the withdrawal of an illegal military deployment that risks violent confrontation with Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Russia over minor stakes. In contrast, "internationalism" means war everywhere all the time, especially in a country like Syria.

    Trump, complained Kagan, is leaving "Afghanistan for no clear reason whatsoever." No reason other than Washington long ago having achieved its objective of degrading and displacing al-Qaeda and punishing the Taliban for hosting al-Qaeda. And eventually having recognized, after more than 17 years passed, trillions of dollars were spent, and thousands of lives were lost, that using force to create a liberal democracy in Central Asia is a fool's errand. Why leave, indeed?

    It has oft been recognized that Donald Trump is a flawed vehicle to achieve almost any foreign policy end. However, he still possesses far more common sense than Mitt Romney. It is time to rescue "internationalism" from those who love humanity so much that they would destroy the world in order to save it.

    Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire . MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

    Attack of the Pork Hawks Does It Really Matter If North Korea Denuclearizes? Hide 20 comments 20 Responses to Mitt Romney, Commander of the Fake Internationalists

    EliteCommInc. January 9, 2019 at 11:01 pm

    "No reason other than Washington long ago having achieved its objective of degrading and displacing al-Qaeda and punishing the Taliban for hosting al-Qaeda."

    One should avoid the back pedal here. the Taliban did not host Al Quaeda in the manner your reference suggests.

    John_M , , January 9, 2019 at 11:06 pm
    I truly voted against Romney when he ran for president because of his omnidirectional belligerence. I also didn't like his vulture capitalism style (and I did technical due diligence for venture capital activities as a side line).

    I don't see that he has gotten any wiser.

    Own Goal , , January 10, 2019 at 2:22 am
    Romney just guaranteed that he won't get the nomination. Amazing, really, stupid and gratuitous.

    He could at the least have shown a little "growth" in the direction of populist disgust with the wasteful, reckless, failed wars, not to mention concerns about the growth of government and corporate mass surveillance of the public, and the continuing unholy collaboration between Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington in ripping off taxpayers and importing cheap labor to take American jobs.

    Not Mitt. He seems to think he's running for president of our utterly discredited, pseudo-meritocratic "Establishment".

    steve mckinney , , January 10, 2019 at 2:48 am
    Let's all thank the knuckle-headed Utahns for delivering another unimaginative empty suit to the Nation's State House. Sure, Trump is often a boor, and unmistakably human, but give me a man-child with conviction and Devil-may-care determination over a dapper dolt whose ideas are contrived platitudes and whose passion is a Macbeth-like obsession with stature and power any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Well written Mr. Bandow! Keep fighting the good fight.
    polistra , , January 10, 2019 at 4:10 am
    I get the sense that the "isolationist" line doesn't work any more. It was a commonly used rhetorical weapon 10 years ago, and it effectively silenced opposition. Now it's not used much, and it seems to be ignored or derided when it is used. Most Americans understand now that maintaining and expanding an empire is destroying us.
    Aunt Lila , , January 10, 2019 at 7:44 am
    You really don't get Romney, do you. Who are you to decided what anyone sees or feels. Do you think you could use the word seems like a professional journalist. I don't construe
    Romney that way. You SEEM to put words in his mouth and thought in his head. Please be professional.
    Dan Green , , January 10, 2019 at 8:12 am
    My take is Mitt see's himself as a Gerald Ford calming effect, for this 4 year disruption, the Swamp battles with. The Deep state needs an impeachment win and soon. With that said it will be ever difficult for the Beltway to change Americans perception , they don't trust the government.
    Kolya Krassotkin , , January 10, 2019 at 10:23 am
    For someone so smart Romney should realize that Americans will reject him (again), when he takes up the mantle of McCain (again) as quickly as they did the last time. But that he fails to realize that substance trumps form, which is why 67 million Americans voted for the President, demonstrates what a shallow narcisst and sociopath he is. I mean, it's okay to rob your neighbor so long as you say "please" and "thank you," isn't it?
    Stephen J. , , January 10, 2019 at 11:31 am
    The writer states: "Now Romney is being touted as the new standard-bearer for the bipartisan War Party, filling in for John McCain."

    I believe The "War Party" are:
    "The Maniacs of Militarism"

    The maniacs of militarism are creating wars
    Countries are bombed by warmongering whores
    Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other countries too
    Are hell holes of the earth, "The work," of this insane crew

    Enabled by politicians in positions of power
    These well dressed war criminals hide and cower
    The generals salute their political masters
    Then the brainwashed obey these bemedaled disasters

    Cities are destroyed and reduced to rubble
    Where are the perpetrators that created all this trouble?
    They are residing in luxury and given fancy titles
    War crimes trials are needed, and are so vital

    But this is not happening: the system is corrupted
    And these evil beings, by some are worshiped
    Blood-soaked villains that never do the fighting
    They are the "experts" that do the inciting

    They are the producers of death and destruction
    Others are profiteers of all the bloody actions
    Missiles, bombs and horrendous weapons
    There is no end to the endless aggression

    Millions are dead, and millions are homeless
    Millions are refugees, and all this is atrocious
    Once they had jobs, families, and homes as well
    Then their countries were bombed by the agents from hell

    Setting the world on fire is what these war arsonists do
    The money for their depredations comes from me and you
    They have made us all accessories to their criminal acts
    Our Taxes are the blood money and that is a fact

    Will the people ever say: "We have had enough"?
    And put all these villains in secure handcuffs
    Then lock them up in maximum security prisons
    Then, we can say "goodbye" to the maniacs of militarism
    [more info at link below]
    http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-maniacs-of-militarism.html
    -- --
    And:
    "More War "

    More war is needed to keep armies trained and employed
    More wars are needed so that countries can be destroyed
    More killing, bombing, destruction and death
    More of this is needed until the victims have nothing left
    [read more at link below]

    https://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/08/more-war.html

    prodigalson , , January 10, 2019 at 1:21 pm
    Romney is such an empty suit i'm not sure if he isn't weakening his position just by virtue that, he Romney, supports it.

    Does this guy inspire anyone to any emotion other than revulsion? Along with Hillary, they both strike me both as elites who want to become president, not from any actual passions or desires, but because they've run out of other things to add to their C.V.

    The only thing I can say with certainty that Mitt Romney believes in, is Mitt Romney. So I'm intensely skeptical that ANYONE in America, aside from the most firebrand resistance types, are going to take anything coming out of this corporate drone's mouth with any seriousness. And even for the resistance types the support would equally follow a labrador retriever, just so long as it opposed Trump, so Mitt doesn't even have that thin thread of loyatly going for him.

    I guess that leaves him with the neocons as BFFs. They're welcome to each other.

    One Guy , , January 10, 2019 at 1:32 pm
    Why are we ragging on Romney? Is it because he had the audacity to criticize Trump? Shouldn't we wait until he actually does something bad before ragging on him? Has he lied 6,000 times in the last few years, for example? Did he refuse to rake the forests?
    Mike Clements , , January 10, 2019 at 2:54 pm
    Such trashing of Romney becomes a real challenge for me.

    I can't decide if it's the fevered imaginings or the straw man arguments that disappoint me the most.

    Tim , , January 10, 2019 at 3:34 pm
    I think Romney is simply miffed that the boorish Trump became president and he did not and sadly, he may be running for president again. I think someone used the word revulsion about Romney. I approve. It's ironic the boorish Trump isn't nearly as revolting as the urbane Mitt.
    Jeeves , , January 10, 2019 at 4:09 pm
    @Mike Clements
    For me it's the straw man arguments that are most egregious. As an Arizonan, I knew John McCain, and Romney is no McCain (whose like we will never see again, if we're lucky).

    Just to single out one objection to Mr. Bandow's argument: Romney didn't refer to the SOFA, which supposedly required Obama to abandon Iraq, for the very good reason that Leon Panetta, who should know, has said that Obama, with plenty of time to do it, made no effort whatsoever to re-negotiate the SOFA 2011 deadline. Panetta regrets this and so do I.

    fabian , , January 10, 2019 at 4:34 pm
    Romney is the epitome of the decay of the USA. Further, he shows the complete inability of the Republican party to choose the correct casting. After Bush and Iraq they propose McPain. After the Great Financial Crisis they propose Mittens. It's akin to cast Dany de Vito to play Casanova. When Trump is gone, this party is finished.
    Kolya Krassotkin , , January 10, 2019 at 5:06 pm
    I approve. It's ironic the boorish Trump isn't nearly as revolting as the urbane Mitt.

    That Americans are revolted more by Romney than by Trump, in fact, speaks well for them. All morally mature folk should be repelled more by a polite, urbane, well-scrubbed pirate, who made his fortune destroying people's lives and wealth than by a loud-talking, crude womanizer, who creates wealth and, in fact, shows his concern for the people below him more than the polite, charming, well-bred pirate.

    Bacon , , January 10, 2019 at 10:11 pm
    As I understand it, Romney's saying we need more Middle East wars, more Wall Street bailouts, and more immigrants.

    I think we already knew that Romney wants those things. It's why we don't want Romney.

    Also, it's its unnecessary to counter Kagan's arguments. He's not taken seriously any more. Too many bad and wrong judgments about important things.

    rta , , January 11, 2019 at 10:09 am
    @Jeeves, Obama would have stayed in Iraq if the Iraqi's had allowed us to continue to kill with impunity. Thankfully, they said no. And why on earth would you regret us not negotiating a new SOFA?
    kswc , , January 11, 2019 at 11:24 am
    Mitt Romney is the Republican's answer to the Democrat's John Kerry.
    WorkingClass , , January 11, 2019 at 5:06 pm
    If Utah has a problem with Trump they could have elected a Democrat.

    Romney is obsolete. Never Trump Republicans are sinking in a tar pit. Romney cannot be nominated much less elected even if Trump does not run. He can help with the impeachment of Trump if it comes to that. But again, a Democrat would be more useful.

    [Jan 13, 2019] Those Porky Pentagon Earmarks Never Really Went Away

    Notable quotes:
    "... What's 5 billion dollars for a largely useless wall compared to this. The mind boggles. ..."
    "... "People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy. They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy; it is 'Don't interrupt the money flow, add to it.'" -Col. John R. Boyd (USAF Ret.) John Boyd (Fighter Pilot, Tactician, Strategist, Conceptual Designer, Reformer) died in 1997. ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    about:blank

    Those Porky Pentagon Earmarks Never Really Went Away In fact, the new scheme is even more venal, underhanded, and wasteful. By Winslow T. Wheeler • January 11, 2019

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    Michael Hogue In past years, Congress has become notorious for adding dubious items we call "pork" to spending bills. That way, senators and House members can advertise themselves to their constituents as bringing home the bacon, while picking up a few campaign contributions from thankful contractors along the way.

    This practice was particularly notorious in defense bills, especially, and only became worse during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After they were exposed spending billions of taxpayer dollars for earmarked projects like museums, artificial lungs, and VIP air transports for senior generals, bureaucrats, and lawmakers, Congress supposedly reformed the practice of earmarking -- first in 2007 by the Democrats in the majority, and again in 2011 by the Republicans in the majority, who claimed to have banned them altogether.

    In truth, both parties in Congress have simply swapped the pork system for a scheme that is even more venal and underhanded. They've circumvented their own rules and are putting even more pork in defense bills than before. They hypocritically proclaim that their bills are earmark-free, while simultaneously boasting about the pork to constituents. They deceptively pay for the hidden earmarks by raiding essential accounts for soldiers' pay and military readiness, and they readily accept hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from the very contractors who received huge chunks of the billions of dollars that Congress added.

    The new pork system is deceptive and complex. It took all of my 31 years of experience on Capitol Hill to fully unravel it, with the help of some excellent research from two outstanding watchdog groups, Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.

    Advertisement

    To explain, let's start with one of the more brazen acts of hypocrisy.

    On October 22, Niels Lesniewski reported in Roll Call that 10 senators from both parties announced in a letter to the House and Senate leadership that they wanted to strengthen the existing ban on earmarks and make it impossible for anyone to "bring back earmarks" as President Donald Trump and others have suggested . Their new bill , they said, would impose even more serious procedural blocks on any earmark in any bill. But the bill, the senators' press release, and their letter are a sham. Another Roll Call reporter pointed out that gimmicks and various porky items in a new Department of Defense appropriations bill gave the lie to the idea that contemporary bills were free of earmarks. And Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance noted at the same time that the new DoD appropriations bill, just signed into law, was already stuffed with hundreds of earmarks costing billions of dollars.

    The explanation of Congress's new, more deceptive and expensive pork system starts with Trump declaring that "America is being respected again" on September 28, while signing an appropriations bill into law that provided $675 billion to the Pentagon. The bill was passed in the House of Representatives with the vote of four of every five House members and in the Senate with almost nine of every 10 senators.

    Speech after speech credited the bill with solving the problem of planes that cannot fly, ships with repairs delayed for years, and pay increases for soldiers who deserve more for their service.

    Mattis: One More General for the 'Self Licking Ice Cream Cone' Why the Regulators Went Soft on Monopolies

    Notably, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top-ranking Democrat on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, praised the bill he helped to write, saying , "The priority of this defense bill is supporting our troops . This bill shows what Democrats and Republicans can accomplish when we work across the aisle to solve problems." The chairman of the subcommittee, Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, who had an even larger hand in shaping the bill, said , "I am proud to present this legislation to my colleagues and urge their strong support."

    The issues they didn't talk about

    Despite numerous speeches in the congressional record praising the defense spending bill, important details attracted not one word of discussion. The bill was riddled with earmarks, and the very pay and military readiness accounts that member after member praised were being raided to pay for it. This is hardly new. In my three decades on Capitol Hill, this behavior was typical -- and even self-styled "pork busters" including, I regret to say, the recently passed Senator John McCain, were known to participate. Despite the rule changes in 2007 and 2011, nothing ultimately changed for the better. Today, the money flow for earmarks has greatly increased, and the process that was once evident with a little inspection has been almost totally obscured.

    What earmarks? The legislation has none; it says so. The joint explanatory statement (JES) for the defense spending bill, which purports to clarify the statutory text, contains the following on page two : "The conference agreement does not contain any congressional earmarks as defined by clause 9 of rule XXI of the Rules of the House of Representatives."

    That rule defines an earmark as spending specifically requested by a member of Congress for "an entity, or targeted to a specific State, locality or congressional district ." But simply fuzz up the authorship, recipient, or location of an added spending item, and it transforms from an earmark to a "congressional special interest item." There are hundreds of those, most of them buried in sparsely worded tables in the JES.

    But these congressional special interest items are important: the conference committee that wrote the JES went to some length to cite them to the Pentagon for special treatment; they made the congressional special interest items subject to special rules to prevent DoD from reducing the amount to be spent. That conference committee, appointed to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill, consisted of senior members of the same House and Senate defense appropriations subcommittees who wrote the original bills, such as Senators Durbin and Shelby.

    Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) reported that 68 procurement programs in this defense bill received $7.5 billion in new, unrequested spending, a large portion going to the Lockheed Corporation. These are blatant earmarks, as explained by TCS, which also pointed out that the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee added $5.6 billion to the procurement account for these items, while its Senate counterpart added a more generous $6.2 billion. The bill was "compromised" by the conference committee at a level above both: $7.5 billion.

    The Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) tabulated all the add-ons in the bill -- not just the 68 in Procurement -- above the Pentagon's request. Again, the Senate Defense Subcommittee proved more generous than the House, and again the final conference was higher than either subcommittee's recommendation. TPA found 679 earmarks costing $19.3 billion.

    Pigs in a poke

    Are these earmarks all pork, that is, poorly justified spending slipped into bills to enable a member to boast that he or she can "bring home the bacon" for jobs back home or to appease defense corporations?

    The authors of this bill don't want you to know. In the past, earmarks would specify things like "Intrepid Naval Museum," "Fort Richardson Running Trail," or "Fort Huachuca Readiness Center" as the recipient, and for a short period, committee reports identified them and their House or Senate sponsors.

    Now, none of that is done. Instead, sparsely worded tables contain vague entries like "Program Increase." Many add a hint such as designating the increase for "modernization" or "silicon fiber research." But there is nothing to indicate the state or district, the contractor, or any other specifics. Hence, they do not technically qualify as "earmarks." However, after the bill is law, congressional staff contact the Pentagon to make sure it knows where the money is to go -- and what will happen if it doesn't.

    The rules meant to reform earmarking have made the practice worse. It is now more opaque, and it gobbles up more money than ever. The $19.3 billion TPA found in 2019 absolutely dwarfs the amounts that I and others, such as the Congressional Research Service and the Committee Against Government Waste , found in these bills before the so-called reforms took hold.

    Perhaps the biggest joke is the recent debate on whether it would be a good idea to "bring back earmarks." They never went away. The hypocrisy of the members who opine on this is only exceeded by the cluelessness of the press and the president, who raised it as something to ponder. Then there's the mendacity of those 10 senators who designed their phony legislation to pretend earmarks are gone and must not be allowed to come back. The last section of their bill reads as follows : "(e) APPLICATION. -- This section shall not apply to any authorization of appropriations to a Federal entity if such authorization is not specifically targeted to a State, locality, or congressional district."

    Yes, you are reading that right: the bill exempts any earmark that fuzzes up the targeted location, and under the existing system that would be all of them. The 10 authors of this fraud are the following: Senators Claire McCaskill, Jeff Flake, Pat Toomey, Mike Lee, Ben Sasse, Rob Portman, Joni Ernst, James Lankford, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz.

    Too big to be hidden

    Despite the carefully applied opacity, some of the biggest giveaways and their authors are clear. The House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee chairwoman, Texas Republican Kay Granger, was widely identified as behind $726 million added for six additional F-35Cs to be built by Lockheed in her Fort Worth congressional district.

    But is this an example of pork? Granger and official Pentagon witnesses would surely testify that more F-35Cs are urgently needed. Others, including myself and colleagues at the Project on Government Oversight, will tell you that the F-35 is an ineffective boondoggle and is not ready for initial operational testing, let alone expanded production. However, despite many critical Government Accountability Office evaluations and embarrassing official and leaked reports from the Pentagon, the majority of Congress rejects such advice and welcomes more F-35 spending. Pork is in the eye of the beholder.

    However, such easily identified earmarks are few and far between.

    Trump requested $676 billion for the defense bill; the final Conference Report reduced that by $1.1 billion to $674.9 billion. How was the additional $19.3 billion found by TPA for 679 earmarks stuffed into a bill that cut spending?

    While publicly touting the "largest pay raise for troops in nearly a decade" and claiming the bill "improves military readiness," Defense Subcommittee Chairman Shelby, Ranking Member Durbin, and other authors actually cut the budget for both.

    They reduced the Pentagon's request for military pay, the Military Personnel account, by $2.1 billion. That's right: while praising themselves for supporting higher pay, they actually cut the budget for it. The request was $148.2 billion; the bill provided $146.1 billion.

    Praising their handiwork on supporting military readiness, they cut the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) request from the Pentagon by $5.8 billion. O&M is a huge diverse account, but it is also the heart and core of spending for training, maintenance, spare parts, military depots, and everything else that means "readiness." The Pentagon requested $199.5 billion; it got $193.7 billion.

    The way they cut both the Military Personnel and O&M accounts was notably duplicitous. A veteran journalist, John M. Donnelly, reported in Roll Call that most cuts were obtusely justified with explanations such as "Revised Estimate," "Historical Unobligated Balances," and "Not Properly Accounted."

    My own research shows $809 million of cuts in those "Revised Estimates." They are completely unexplained in any text and neither committee report from the House or Senate appropriations committees mentions any such reduction. They appear to have been an invention of the conference committee.

    When I worked for a Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee member (Republican Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico), I observed staffers being instructed to phony up reductions with just such a ruse. In one case, to make room for all senators' earmarks, the subcommittee chairman, Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, directed the staff to use the earmark dollar total to determine the cuts to be announced. I suspect this crude offset technique underlies the "revised estimates" that appeared out of nowhere.

    In both R&D and Procurement, they cut $1.5 billion using "Historical Unobligated Balances" or "Historical Unobligations" as a reason. An unobligated balance is money that DoD has planned but not yet spent: the program may be behind schedule, or it may be on schedule, but the timetable for sending out the money has not occurred yet. Here, some unidentified actor took the money away without a word of explanation as to what parts of the program were being lost or why.

    The "Not Properly Accounted" justification meant $706 million in unexplained cuts.

    Another term in the bill is "Rate Adjustments"; they cut $124 million. How is this different from "Revised Estimate" or "Historical Unobligated Balances?" The House Defense Subcommittee contains not a word of explanation. The Senate Defense Subcommittee report contains assertions of "Improving funds management: Rate adjustments," but that is all the explanation you get.

    Further indecipherable cuts included "Unjustified Growth," another $1.1 billion; "Excess Growth," $468 million; "Underexecution," $134 million; and "Insufficient Justification," $35 million.

    Yet another ruse was to transfer $2 billion out of the O&M budget to Title IX of the bill that funds the "Global War on Terrorism." But there, only $1.4 billion of the transferred $2 billion is actually retained. The transfer is a shell game.

    There are other ruses in other parts of the bill; the details are mind-bending, but you get the point.

    They were cutting military pay and readiness accounts so they could add to the DoD Research and Development (R&D) and the Procurement accounts. That's where the vast majority of the earmarks -- rather, congressional special interest items -- are.

    In R&D they added $3.9 billion to the Pentagon's request. The account went from $91 billion to $94.9 billion. In Procurement, they added $4.8 billion to the Pentagon's request of $130.6 billion. Some of the earmarks in these accounts were huge. The controversial F-35 got over $2 billion in several earmarks, the notorious Littoral Combat Ship got $950 million, unrequested C-130s got $640 million, and so on.

    Other unspoken consequences

    While money over the years was being redirected to earmarks, something very different was happening at the other end of the world -- among our operating military forces.

    On January 8, 2014, 29-year-old Liuetenant Wes Van Dorn died when his MH-53E Sea Dragon helicopter, beset with maintenance problems the Navy had deferred, caught fire due to frayed wires and a leaking fuel line. He had been battling for three years to get adequate spare parts and much-needed refurbishment work to bring these old and unreliable helicopters up to minimally safe flying condition. His was only one of several lethal accidents involving the MH-53E resulting from inadequate maintenance, as reported by Mike Hixenbaugh and others in the The Virginian-Pilot and in a new documentary by investigative reporter Zachary Stauffer.

    Such accidents resulted from raiding O&M money, such as in 2010 when, for example, Democratic Defense Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha of Pennsylvania cut O&M by a net $2.3 billion to stuff money into earmarks.

    Advertising the earmarks they said didn't exist

    Though their legislation proclaims earmarks banned, the authors of the defense bill changed their tune when they self-advertised to constituents.

    In a press release from his personal office, Senator Dick Durbin declared , "From Rock Island Arsenal to Scott Airforce Base and Naval Station Great Lakes, Illinois [t]his bill safeguards Illinois defense jobs by continuing investments in our state's defense installations and initiatives." Durbin took credit for funding nine programs in Illinois, costing $2.8 billion, most of it for Boeing -- headquartered in Chicago and the producer of the Navy's F/A-18 Super Hornet and MQ-25 Stingray refueling drone.

    Subcommittee Chairman Shelby claimed he helped acquire $8.3 billion for 25 projects in Alabama.

    Granger claimed she helped win over $12.3 billion for Fort Worth -- including $9.4 billion for Lockheed's F-35, $1.8 billion for Lockheed's C-130J, and $1.1 billion for the Bell Boeing V-22.

    Note that they each claimed credit not just for their add-ons but for the entire program expense, including both the Pentagon-requested money and money spent outside their states or districts. For example, the C-130 is assembled in Marietta, Georgia, not Durbin's Illinois, and the F-18's engines are contracted by General Electric in Ohio. In fact, the entire F-18 is fabricated in Missouri; Durbin is advertising himself not to workers but to the Boeing headquarters.

    The ranking member on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Pete J. Visclosky of Indiana, did not participate in these overblown claims. His website shows no press release listing defense budget goodies for his Indiana district.

    The under the table incentives

    On the other hand, Visclosky was no shrinking violet when it came to accepting campaign contributions from the corporations benefiting from the legislation's earmarks. OpenSecrets.org, a project of the Center for Responsive Politics that documents federal campaign contributions, shows that for his 2018 reelection campaign, Visclosky accepted $347,933 from defense-related donors, $59,800 of it from Lockheed . The $347,933 constituted 27 percent of Visclosky's total campaign contributions , reported as of November 2018. For these and other efforts, Visclosky is getting a promotion: with the Democrats taking over the House next year, he is slated to be defense subcommittee chairman.

    Chairwoman Granger accepted $397,560 from defense aerospace and electronics donors, constituting 17 percent of her larger total of $2,371,044 in reported contributions. Granger's contributions from Lockheed were more than twice Visclosky's: $136,360 .

    The Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member, Senator Durbin, does not run for reelection until 2020. The OpenSecrets.org data on his last election in 2014 show that Durbin accepted $236,549 from defense aerospace donors, making him the Senate's top beneficiary of such donations at the time. Adding other defense contribution categories, he took in $455,799 .

    Senator Shelby's total reported defense-related contributions for his reelection in 2016, before he became defense subcommittee chairman, were $334,800. Commensurate with his elevation to chairman in 2018, he received $1,048,000 , nearly tripling his defense-related total, and he is four years away from his next campaign in 2022.

    Granger, Durbin, and the others will resent any implication that their actions are influenced by the generosity of Lockheed or other defense contractors, lobbyists, and PACs. Indeed, campaign finance laws, as written by Congress, make it hard to conclude that contributions illegally influence congressional decision-making, and a recent Supreme Court ruling makes it even more difficult.

    The bottom line

    All this adds up to a Pentagon budget process in Congress that is:

    Dishonest : The bill and its authors proclaim it is free of earmarks, but it has 679 of them costing $19.3 billion according to research from an independent group. Deceptive : The bill's authors, with huge support from the rest of Congress, proclaim their dedication to better pay for the troops and military readiness, and yet cut those very accounts by almost $8 billion. The reductions are arbitrary and vague, and are used to offset those 679 earmarks. The senators and representatives circumvent their own rules on earmarks by fuzzing up sponsors, recipients, and locations, making the entire process opaque. Hypocritical : Imagine the gall of nine Republicans and one Democrat with their bill to profess earmarks gone and making sure they don't "come back." There is nothing new about members of Congress posing as pork reformers and actually being pork enablers; however, these 10 assume an unprecedented level of cluelessness among the press; in some but not all corners, they were right to do so. Mercenary : $19.3 billion in earmarks makes rich material for senators and representatives to advertise themselves, with considerable exaggeration, as successful porkers for their states and districts. They also accept hundreds of thousands of dollars from the contractors, lobbyists, and PACs that benefit from the millions, if not billions, of dollars that the Pentagon never requested.

    All this is not illegal, but according to common English, it is venal.

    Winslow T. Wheeler worked in the U.S. Senate for Republican and Democratic senators and in the Government Accountability Office on national security issues for 31 years. After he left the Senate in 2002, he ran the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information, which moved to the Project on Government Oversight in 2012. He retired in 2016.

    about:blank

    HenionJD January 11, 2019 at 4:43 pm

    What's 5 billion dollars for a largely useless wall compared to this. The mind boggles.
    Minnesota Mary , , January 11, 2019 at 5:13 pm
    This is a rather long article but well worth reading. I am sick of the Washington 2-Step dance.
    Ed Lindgren , , January 11, 2019 at 7:48 pm
    "People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy. They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy; it is 'Don't interrupt the money flow, add to it.'" -Col. John R. Boyd (USAF Ret.) John Boyd (Fighter Pilot, Tactician, Strategist, Conceptual Designer, Reformer) died in 1997.
    Taras 77 , , January 11, 2019 at 11:16 pm
    This is a solid article by a very respected critic of the obscene defense spending and weapons programs. I believe Mr Wheeler early on was on this F-35 debacle, labeling it the flying swiss army knife. (aplogies to the manufacturer of the knife and its fans.) Notable of recent are a series of feel good reports that the F-35 is combat ready, etc. Hopefully, the pilots of the F-35's will never have to face the real test.

    Thank you, Mr Wheeler, for the continuation of exposing this fraud.

    EliteCommInc. , , January 12, 2019 at 1:26 am
    Deeply appreciated this article.
    Brendan Sexton , , January 13, 2019 at 1:56 pm
    Now that we are well into this new era of draining the swamp, we are all over our heads in muck and democracy AND prosperity are in danger of drowning. Venal is awfully polite.

    [Jan 13, 2019] Until we have more action on this than just some furious tweets, it doesn't matter

    Notable quotes:
    "... Yes, plus they could have at least tied in the Rosenstein attempt to wear a wire to trap Trump via the 25th amendment as hatched by McCabe too. Lousy article. ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    navy62802 , 1 hour ago link

    Until we have more action on this than just some furious tweets, it doesn't matter.

    notfeelinthebern , 1 hour ago link

    OLD news. This was established long ago by looking at the time line of events.

    SDShack , 1 hour ago link

    Yes, plus they could have at least tied in the Rosenstein attempt to wear a wire to trap Trump via the 25th amendment as hatched by McCabe too. Lousy article.

    [Jan 13, 2019] RFK knew how it works. RFK junior explained the reason for RFK's focus on organized-crime until CIA whacked him. That's why his book was made to sink without a ripple.

    Jan 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

    MK-DELTABURKE , says: July 23, 2018 at 12:40 pm GMT

    @Cagey Beast Yup. Furthermore, CIA is organized crime and organized crime is CIA. CIA recruits and runs agents in favored criminal syndicates in every illicit trade: drugs, child sexual trafficking, arms, fraud, bustouts, extortion, money laundering. Their purpose is not to interdict the trade but to control it.

    CIA manages transnational organized crime to top up their budget for unauthorized clandestine operations, like killing JFK.

    CIA protects its criminal proteges with their chartered impunity. They call off law enforcement with the magic words national security or 'sources and methods.' If the plan gets exposed, CIA's criminal cutouts insulate the agency from exposure.

    RFK knew how it works. RFK junior explained the reason for RFK's focus on organized-crime until CIA whacked him. That's why his book was made to sink without a ripple.

    https://popularresistance.org/the-mass-media-will-not-review-rfk-jr-s-book-why/

    Evenfurthermore, CIA is the government and the government is CIA. Decades ago Fletcher Prouty showed that CIA's deepest-cover illegal moles are embedded in our own government. Every agency with repressive capacity is infiltrated with focal points, who report to CIA handlers without the other agency's knowledge.

    https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/ST.html

    Of course Israel is trying to infiltrate it -- they understand the levers of power.

    Assange has got some mighty stinkers in his insurance file. All we can do is hope they're enough to destabilize the CIA Reich that has ruled America since 1949.

    [Jan 13, 2019] CIA is boosting the volume of its anti-Russian vilification because more and more CIA assets are getting flushed out. Stephan Halper is an obvious spook. Page is the corniest traitor since Lee Harvey Oswald

    Notable quotes:
    "... CIA is boosting the volume of its anti-Russian vilification because more and more CIA assets are getting flushed out. Stephan Halper is an obvious spook. Page is the corniest traitor since Lee Harvey Oswald ..."
    "... Strzok has clearly got a dotted-line report to his real boss in CIA ..."
    "... Publius Tacitus is incorrect, though, in making a distinction between the Obama administration and the intelligence community. Obama is a third-generation CIA spook he's a CIA spokesmodel, not a head of state (see Andrew Krieg's Presidential Puppetry.) ..."
    "... To add to the list of things that the Russians had on Hillary . IIRC, she was Sec of State at the time the US election-meddling-and-color-revolution brigade tried to rig the Russian elections against Putin. ..."
    "... Putin does not seem to be the sort to let emotion be more important than policy, but I've always wondered that to the small extent the Russians did take a pop at Hillary's campaign, if it didn't bring a bit of a smile to Putin's face to know he was just giving back the hits he'd already taken from her. ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Halper , says: July 23, 2018 at 6:52 pm GMT

    CIA is boosting the volume of its anti-Russian vilification because more and more CIA assets are getting flushed out. Stephan Halper is an obvious spook. Page is the corniest traitor since Lee Harvey Oswald .

    https://dailystormer.name/is-carter-page-a-cia-spook/

    Strzok has clearly got a dotted-line report to his real boss in CIA :

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/07/22/a-review-of-the-doj-fbi-fisa-application-release/

    http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/fisa-fraud-by-obamas-doj-and-intel-community-by-publius-tacitus.html

    Publius Tacitus is incorrect, though, in making a distinction between the Obama administration and the intelligence community. Obama is a third-generation CIA spook he's a CIA spokesmodel, not a head of state (see Andrew Krieg's Presidential Puppetry.)

    Daniel Rich , says: July 23, 2018 at 10:35 pm GMT
    @peterAUS It's impossible to asses [correctly] who's influenced by what, but it seems that telling lies doesn't work that well any longer. You can find some numbers in the following article: Democracy Dies in Debt? US News Outlets Slashing Staff Left and Right -- Link to Sputnik.

    Excerpt : "A Pew Research analysis on Monday found that more than a third of the US' largest newspapers and more than a fifth of its largest digital outlets experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018."

    Bill the Cat , says: July 24, 2018 at 12:06 am GMT
    To add to the list of things that the Russians had on Hillary . IIRC, she was Sec of State at the time the US election-meddling-and-color-revolution brigade tried to rig the Russian elections against Putin.

    Putin does not seem to be the sort to let emotion be more important than policy, but I've always wondered that to the small extent the Russians did take a pop at Hillary's campaign, if it didn't bring a bit of a smile to Putin's face to know he was just giving back the hits he'd already taken from her.

    Hillary of course was incompetent in having America interfere in Russian elections. That campaign never had a chance as Putin is a lot more popular in Russia than Hillary is in America. So, she took a pot shot at a rival world leader knowing (or at least some smart people did) that it would have no effect and that Putin would win that election anyways. And of course Hillary the Arrrogant could never imagine that another player in the game would get to take a turn, and that others might interfere in her election, and she knew she'd run and she knew she'd rig the Dem party to get the nod, in the same way the NED and the Soros NGO's tried to interfere in Russia.

    skrik , says: July 24, 2018 at 1:59 pm GMT
    @Northgunner

    'ruling class', 'elites'

    I share your sentiments [in a slightly different vernacular]; of course they, the usurping 'rulers' are neither a class nor in any way 'elite,' but who/what ever they are [jews, oligarchs, 'simply' psychopaths or 'true' spawn of Satan], they do seem to be 'in control.' Proof of that is the coordinated criminal actions of 'the West.'

    Find "CIA is the government and the government is CIA" above; it's the obvious place to expect a ccc = covert criminal cabal to establish itself. Add to that the truly weird concept of having spies a) out of all control and b) with apparently unlimited power. We 'shall know them by their deeds' which is almost unrelievedly a 'bad look.' Odd is that the 1st mention of any conspiracy that I heard of was that of 'jewish banksters ruling the world.' We since know that such was pilloried by the CIA, but it seems to me to be a case of the tar-baby: The more they [CIA, jews] howl/deny, the guiltier they prove themselves to be. rgds

    Mulegino1 , says: July 24, 2018 at 9:55 pm GMT
    I would say that what is affecting the western establishment elites at this juncture is not mere dementia but the madness which arises from acts of pure, hellish evil. These people are the Gadarine swine of the contemporary era; a good portion of them appear to be Satanic perverts and pedophiles, if we are to judge from recent revelations. I am not being hyperbolic when I write that Antichrist's reign has been postponed. They had imagined it would be installed by November of 2016 and this is driving them to despair. They hate Trump because his election blocked their lord and master's ascent and they hate Putin because he represents the great restraining power.
    Cagey Beast , says: July 24, 2018 at 10:16 pm GMT
    @yurivku He's of course is a bone in DC's throat, but his level of intelligence and real power seem to be extremely low.

    Yes, he's a golden chandelier stuck in the belly of the Beast. I think he's quite smart, in his own way, but can only do so much on his own. He also has some bad ideas and makes enemies when it isn't necessary but he's still the only hope for change at the centre of the American empire.

    Jeff Stryker , says: July 25, 2018 at 4:12 am GMT
    @skrik Be that as it may, Romper Stomper took place 30 years after the Vietnam War began. The reverberations of the war were felt in Australia long afterwards.
    Jeff Stryker , says: July 25, 2018 at 4:27 am GMT
    @peterAUS That's an armchair rugby referee for you, encouraging a Civil War in a country he's probably never set foot. What do you believe would change its policy towards Oz.

    If you remember when Reagan broke the air-traffic control union strikes and 30,000 of them immigrated to Oz in 1981, what would happen would be that many qualified Americans would come to Australia and take Australian jobs.

    That's how such unrest would affect you.

    At any rate, the US would still have the same grip on popular culture (If not financial markets) and Vegemite would not suddenly replace McDonald's everywhere.

    Also, though the Asians seem to slowly taking over your economy anyhow, if the US military was busy suppressing a civil war and Asian countries might get aggressive towards you militarily.

    Jeff Stryker , says: July 25, 2018 at 4:31 am GMT
    @peterAUS The Asians might get more aggressive if the US military suddenly found itself preoccupied with a Civil War.

    Asia is taking over your country economically anyhow but they might get a bit anti-social if suddenly the US were to lose all capacity to maintain its presence in your hemisphere.

    peterAUS , says: July 25, 2018 at 5:12 am GMT
    @Jeff Stryker O.K.

    Good luck.

    skrik , says: July 25, 2018 at 6:15 am GMT
    @peterAUS

    I know, for your types. Feels comfortable

    Aw, don't go all wussy -- you're acting like a wounded suitor. I suppose it was my rejection of your

    I'd need to trust you and then we'd have a long chat somewhere in open public place

    Similr to which you you offered Backstay

    Have a quiet chat somewhere in a park, for example. Just two of us. Two

    Try this google ; that the sort of place you had in mind? It's also reputedly a secret entrance to an ASIO bunker but I suppose you know that; I call attempted entrapment.

    RobinG , says: July 25, 2018 at 6:18 am GMT
    @skrik . ? ccc = 'great financial consortiums' ?

    "As a matter of fact, the composition of the governments is predetermined, and their actions are controlled by great financial consortiums."

    J. V. Stalin, Questions & Answers to American Trade Unionists: Stalin's Interview With the First American Trade Union Delegation to Soviet Russia
    Pravda September 15, 1927 ___________(h/t, J.S.)

    yurivku , says: July 25, 2018 at 6:52 am GMT
    @Cagey Beast

    think he's quite smart, in his own way, but can only do so much on his own

    But I think he's stupid, ignorant, spineless (as well as most of POTUSes), the only difference is -- he's not completely belongs to DC. Probably it's better than if Clinton was on his place, but who knows, Trump can make any stupid thing

    standall , says: July 25, 2018 at 7:39 am GMT
    @exiled off mainstreet I agree.
    skrik , says: July 25, 2018 at 9:31 am GMT
    @RobinG

    ccc = 'great financial consortiums' ?

    G'day, q.possibly and glad you responded. Yeah sure, Stalin is 'close;' it's why some suggest oligarchs, but it demonstrably falls a bit short. My ccc = covert criminal cabal, each word of the highest significance; let's examine each one:

    [COED:] covert = not openly acknowledged or displayed -- this is 100% true, since they operate from 'behind a curtain' of deliberate secrecy. Not declaring who they are is a lie of omission, then see after cabal below. Before moving on, let's consult Cicero:

    mendaci neque quum vera dicit, creditor

    = A liar is not to be believed, even when speaking the truth. That's never a 'good look,' and leads to the next:

    criminal -- self-evident, then:

    [COED:] cabal = a secret political clique or faction. Øarchaic a secret intrigue .

    ORIGIN
    C16 (denoting the Kabbalah): from French cabale, from medieval Latin cabala (see Kabbalah).

    Finally [COED:] Kabbalah (also Kabbala, Cabbala, Cabala, or Qabalah = the ancient Jewish tradition of mystical interpretation of the Bible .

    I allow myself to propose an exactly apposite example of the latter: 'Xxx promised it to us!' -- Where Xxx comes directly from some "mystical interpretation of the Bible." 'Nuff said?

    More? IF it were only "great financial consortiums" THEN one would need to explain the criminality, since I'm pretty sure oligarchs *could* work legally. Then, the 'normal' consortiums' business is to 'make money' [and cheating and/or theft may be sort of 'normal'], but the ccc goes *far* past that into [mass-]murdering for spoil, quite/most often for oil and/or *soil* . The latter is within Nuremberg class = supreme international criminality. That may complete the loop and explain why covert in the 1st place.

    I wrote above that I would 'revisit' lies; here's a partial quote:

    But it remained for the yyy, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood,

    Feel free to 'guess' at the yyy, then I assert QED rgds

    Anon [243] Disclaimer , says: July 25, 2018 at 2:30 pm GMT
    Great article. Good to read someone not suffering from dementia!
    Jeff Stryker , says: July 25, 2018 at 3:00 pm GMT
    @peterAUS Good luck?
    EugeneGur , says: July 25, 2018 at 3:18 pm GMT
    @peterAUS

    Or who are the guys, in Ukrainian Armed Forces, presently engaged against Donbass?

    Besides those in "volunteer battalions", which tend to be nationalistic with distinct Nazi overtones, people in the regular Armed Forces are there for the money. There are very few paying jobs in today's Ukraine, so men enlist and hope for the best.

    the ratio hate/don't care shall shift, hard and fast. Not in Russian favor, I suspect.

    That could've been the case in 2014. Today I very much doubt it. Even the Right Sector people are fed up with the current power in Kiev, and even the dumbest nationalists are beginning to realize what a deep hole the country is in. Normal people all over the South-East are hoping and praying for the Russians to come. The problem is the Russians aren't coming.

    Poupon Marx , says: July 25, 2018 at 5:05 pm GMT
    The moniker "journalist" should immediately by banished by replacement of "reporter", as in report the facts and observations, not interpretations or personal opinions.
    Eagle Eye , says: July 25, 2018 at 5:18 pm GMT
    @Authenticjazzman

    I am not a Scientologist, but I consider [L. Ron Hubbard] to be one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century

    Interesting point. Serious question -- in your view, what else (other than psychotropic medication) was Hubbard "brilliant" about?

    Authenticjazzman , says: July 25, 2018 at 6:51 pm GMT
    @Eagle Eye " In your view what else was Hubbard brilliant about?"

    Well for example his bizarre sounding concepts regarding the sources of mankind, and the history of this insane planet, which are repeatedly ridiculed and labeled as absurd by the PTB, who of course have their own turf to defend, and their own concepts which they do not want to be brought into question.

    AJM

    peterAUS , says: July 25, 2018 at 6:53 pm GMT
    @EugeneGur Well can't say I disagree with the comment.
    Or, better, can't provide any concrete evidence to the contrary, especially re the second paragraph.

    The thing is, nationalism is a peculiar feeling.
    So, while this

    Normal people all over the South-East are hoping and praying for the Russians to come.

    could be true, the rest of Ukraine could get into quite the opposite.

    But, as you say

    The problem is the Russians aren't coming.

    so it's all academic.

    Now, speaking of

    people are fed up with the current power .

    one could feel, probably, the same in Donbass.
    Things aren't great there either.

    In any case the conflict is there, frozen for the moment (not for the people along the front line) and can erupt, again, when the US Deep State wants it.

    Interesting times.

    Cratylus , says: July 26, 2018 at 5:49 am GMT
    @Michael Kenny If one wants a clear example of the Russophobic or Putinophobic hysteria infecting the West, one need go no further than this demented fellow. And to that he adds a conspiracy theory about the gangsters ruling over it all.
    Uncle Bee , says: July 26, 2018 at 12:06 pm GMT
    @Cyrano Imagine if the WMDs get you attacked rule applied to Israel?
    Jeff Davis , says: July 26, 2018 at 3:17 pm GMT
    @seeing-thru You got it 100% Right my friend. That's the best reality-connected assessment of the Donald's performance that I've read. I'm going to swipe it for reuse elsewhere. Thank you, and may the force be with you.
    seeing-thru , says: July 26, 2018 at 5:58 pm GMT
    @Jeff Davis Glad you liked it. Yeah, go ahead use it any which way. BTW, my fear is that the Donald may not be able to succeed because of the massive line-up of forces against him. The whole lunatic asylum is out of their cages, snarling and clawing and planning all sorts of stuff to bring him down. Let us wish him success.
    Apolonius , says: July 26, 2018 at 9:54 pm GMT
    @Vojkan Bravo Vojkane!
    Jeff Davis , says: July 27, 2018 at 6:24 pm GMT
    @Lauri Törni

    So standing up for American citizens is considered a "mentally insane" thing?

    You are utterly and completely out of your mind, virtually from another planet, another reality. A textbook example of insanity. The fact that you don't recognize it, simply confirms the fact.

    The Deep state is not, repeat not , the American people.

    Regarding the Intel community: There are the guys in the trenches. these are honorable guys. Then there is the leadership. The current leadership is on notice to behave itself, on account of the new "Sheriff" in town. The corrupt politicized leadership from the Clinton/Bush/Obama regimes however, now out of power, are attempting to overthrow the legitimately elected president of the United States. In so doing, they are pursuing treason-lite.

    Clapper, Brennan, and Hayden are already full-on war criminals: Iraq & torture. Now, in their attempt to destroy the Trump presidency, they are adding betrayal of democracy and betrayal of the Constitution of the United States to their criminal resume. These are evil men who think it is their job to run the United States from behind a malleable (gutless?) figurehead who does what they tell him to do.

    As I said in my original post, it is fascinating to observe people like you, utterly dominated -- brain-raped really -- by a neocon/neoliberal narrative that has reduced them to robotic -- even willing -- slaves of the 1%. Good for you. Enjoy. The others, who prefer self-mastery to self-enslavement, will benefit from your choice of enslavement.

    That is what all of this boils down to; Trump treating Americans like s*hit in front of the whole world, while praising Russia and Russians.

    The IC war criminals/traitors should not be equated with or allowed to hide anonymous behind the majority population of decent Americans. Which is what simpletons like you enable and then fall for.

    I fully understood all the concerns for what the Left is doing to people and to the society.

    Trump praises Israel and says that, "Securing Israel's safety is our most important task" not a peep comes from the Trump-supporters?!

    Some Trump supporters do object. Others however grasp the political reality of Jewish political influence in the US. Politically incompetent simpletons like yourself think Trump should commit political suicide by taking on the Jews.

    The Jews/Israel will be dealt with -- or not -- later, when Trump has secured his presidency. And then, the rebalancing of the US-Israeli relationship will not be grounded in hostility to the Jews, but will be more along the lines of America First.

    Never ever did I expect, that it would be the Trump-supporters surfacing as the fifth column, giving the "finishing touch" to the destruction of American citizens.

    The above is pure paranoid, "the sky is falling", TDS whackadoodle.

    The Liberals seem to have woken up,

    The country is in the throes of a cultural war between the bubble-wrapped snowflakes and "real" people. Thankfully, the "real" people will win, precisely because they have the advantage of being reality-connected. The snowflakes will benefit as well -- you will benefit -- by the resulting opportunity to reconnect with reality.

    Good luck, best wishes, Trump is rapidly changing the world for the better.

    And let me add: The Soviet Union is a quarter century gone, and with it Soviet Communism. Putin is the preeminent statesman of our times. Go to YouTube and listen to what he says. He and Trump, aligned, are a force for good in the world. Peace with Russia is coming, and with it a new era of peace and prosperity in the world.

    Which leaves me to echo your closing comment:

    Are you ever going to be able to comprehend this?

    (Answer: Probably not for another six years, if ever.)

    Malcontent , says: July 29, 2018 at 8:59 pm GMT
    @Cyrano Are you joking? Russia is the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world.
    Malcontent , says: July 29, 2018 at 9:01 pm GMT
    @Jeff Davis Bravo! Exactly my thoughts!
    peterAUS , says: July 29, 2018 at 9:27 pm GMT
    @Jeff Davis

    Thankfully, the "real" people will win, precisely because they have the advantage of being reality-connected.

    Ah, good.

    The last time when "real" people won against the US "Deep State" was let me see .well shame on me, can't think of it.

    Let's see after the fall of the Wall:
    Yugoslavia, then Serbia proper .no
    Afghanistan .no .
    Ah Iraq .no ..
    Lybia no .
    Syria well not so sure.

    Ah, yes, those weren't Americans. Yeah.

    I got concerned for a bit; all good now.
    No need to think about M.A.D. anymore. (Re)focus on fishing. Snapper, preferably.

    Jeff Stryker , says: July 30, 2018 at 8:09 am GMT
    @peterAUS Australia's problem is going to be an Asian economic overclass you Australians always obsess about country's located halfway around the world first the UK now the US.

    you're worried about blacks in the US in the ghetto's wealth inequality while Chinese business elite reduce you to paupers IN Australia and eventually you go the way of the black aborigines.

    But you cannot see that because you're focused on US cultural colonization or things you have seen in Hollywood films.

    Jeff Stryker , says: July 30, 2018 at 8:15 am GMT
    @peterAUS Sorry, countries not country's.

    Point is that in the sixties you were still obsessed with the British Empire though you are a bit of a lost colony now you are obsessed with the United States, another waning Empire.

    Pretty soon the Chinese will have you sleeping in your cars and you will still be focused on the state of blacks in the US ghetto and inequality in America.

    But see, the US won't be the problem in Australia. China will.

    You compare yourself to the United States because it is a similar former British colony and white settler nation but it is Asia that will stomp you.

    James Bacque , says: Website July 31, 2018 at 7:16 pm GMT
    She is most likely onto something important. My solution is that most people are double-minded because it suits us to lazily allow our leaders to control us while we (somewhat) hypocritically condemn them for faults and errors which profit us.

    St Paul, Shakespeare and Montaigne all complained of their own double-mindedness.

    I hope that a column of mine on this topic will appear soon in The U.R.

    James Bacque Penetanguishene ON

    peterAUS , says: July 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm GMT
    @James Bacque

    most people are double-minded because it suits us to lazily allow our leaders to control us while we (somewhat) hypocritically condemn them for faults and errors which profit us ..

    I guess you are onto something here.

    It could go a bit deeper, though, as:

    . most people are double-minded because it suits us to allow our betters to lead us while we (somewhat) hypocritically condemn them for their and our faults and errors which profit us.

    skrik , says: August 1, 2018 at 3:18 pm GMT
    @Jeff Stryker

    But you cannot see that because you're focused on US cultural colonization or things you have seen in Hollywood films You compare yourself to the United States because it is a similar former British colony and white settler nation

    If I may intercede, no, and that twice.

    1. peterAUS, if my interpretation is correct, sees the world through 'military blinkers,' is assumed not to notice China et al. except as one 'enemy' among many, and probably thinks that ~100 F35s, xxx new warships, yyy new submarines and zzz new 'armoured cars,' costing the Aus-taxpayer nose-bleeding squillions will 'save his/their bacon.' As such, peterAUS cannot be addressed as any valid representative of 'the great Aus-unwashed.'

    2. That great Aus-unwashed, hoovering up the trash err, sorry for the US-speak; hoovering up the horrendous rubbish 'presented' to them via their '1984-style telescreens' err, one-finger flat-screen distraction devices [when not actual television sets], is largely unconscious of any 'real world.'

    Since the CIA-sponsored coup of 1975, the country has been 'going to the dogs' at an increasing rate. The sheople glory under their 'Lucky Country' delusion, not even knowing its full import: Lucky not to be even partly aware. Yeah sure, the corrupt&venal MSM+PFBCs [= publicly financed broadcasters] try to revive 'the yellow peril' scare, but that's just standard 'Bernays haze' scare mongering, to keep the proles from thinking: Der, they [as peterAUS] didn't think. rgds

    PS The great Aus-unwashed, as any 'Western' citizen, has zero choice; so-called 'Western democracy' allows for as good as zero 'citizen input.' The 'choice' of Trump should be put down to an aberration -- some 'clever-clogs' manipulators -- *not* Russians -- pulled off a coup. But as they used to say: "Better red than dead;" better Trump than HRC.

    Johnj , says: August 2, 2018 at 11:48 pm GMT
    Do we have a democracy? Or even representative government? So what happened to our jobs off-shored. Who approved that? Who approved 100 million legal immigrants in the last 50 years?

    Why does anyone accept our stilted self-image, especially Diana?

    Johnj , says: August 3, 2018 at 12:10 am GMT
    @Lauri Törni Good God, this Lauri reads the NYT and has the gall to post it as proof of her opinions. So that means she is nuts and brainwashed.
    Ace , says: September 15, 2018 at 5:55 pm GMT
    Outstanding article.

    On the point about the "world's greatest prison population" note that some one-third of the federal prison population consists of illegal alien criminals and the large U.S. black criminal underclass commits crimes at a higher rate than everyone else, so there are more blacks in our prisons. Oh, the horror.

    If other nations enjoyed large illegal immigrant populations and a large black criminal underclass we would see similar inflated prison populations.

    Spare us the silliness on this score as well as the "regular massacres of school children" garbage. No doubt you'll enlighten us with your anti-gun views on American gun nuts at a later time. I wait with bated breath.

    Still, you almost got a lock on insightful commentary these days.

    Ace , says: September 15, 2018 at 7:59 pm GMT
    @Lauri Törni Liberals fight for the existence of Americans?

    Amazing. Do you intend to live on our planet or are you just visiting?

    james bacque , says: Website October 24, 2018 at 6:51 pm GMT
    Ron Unz

    This is a very good blog, column, whatever, because it illuminates with the light of reason the mass madness of the Washington crowd, and probably much of the American population. See the New Yorker article in the current issue about the utility of caregivers lying to and/or deceiving demented patients to keep them content. That is what is happening now in the USA and your failure to understand my explanation for it, in my essay on double-mindedness, which I sent you last summer, I mind very much. You could lead the way out of the mess if you would re-read that essay and try to understand it.

    I am a very ordinary guy and I understand it. Please try again. The world needs this.

    Jim Bacque

    [Jan 13, 2019] The only reason the evil bastards who control our society can get away with their treachery is because most of the American people are out to lunch on the most important issues of our time.

    Notable quotes:
    "... This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in the American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation" associations. ..."
    "... They are CIA assets who do what they're told. ..."
    "... There is an unrecognized plague in our society called antidepressants. More than ten per cent of the people in the industrialized world take drugs which interfere with self doubt. They don't ask themselves whether an idea in their minds is true, fair or kind. They only ask if they believe it. And since the chemical they ingest prevents them from assessing the idea from all sides they always believe that if they think something it must be true. ..."
    "... Other symptoms of antidepressant use include high levels of free floating anxiety (because useful anxiety is suppressed) and restlessness. ..."
    "... I am still asking myself what motivated a veteran politician like Hillary Clinton to violate a cardinal rule of politics by attacking not her opponent but his supporters with the "basket of deplorable" comment in the closing days of the 2016 campaign except chemically induced madness. ..."
    "... If history has recorded that the Roman Empire collapsed due to lead poisoning from the water pipes a future time may also conclude the US Empire was destroyed due to antidepressants. ..."
    "... The psychology of the mass of Americans with it's self-righteousness and self-centerdness is really amazing. Just in the last seventeen years the US has invaded or otherwise attacked numerous countries and has caused millions of people to die, become miserable refugees, become orphans and all other manner of evil. ..."
    "... Not least of all has been it's creation and patronage of ISIS, one of the most heinous groups in history. Yet Americans have this massive blind spot to the war criminality of all this that their country has committed against the peace of the world. Instead they're being stampeded into some irrational Russia-phobia. It's the US that's been on the march everywhere, labeling those countries that resist it's aggression as being aggressors for being willing to defend themselves. It's all upside-down. ..."
    "... "I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics." ..."
    "... I'd really like to know who wrote that line for the Prez. (Since I think it unlikely that he wrote that, or any of his "prepared remarks".) Stephen Miller? Whoever. But it was a genius comment. ..."
    "... "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad" obviously the Gods want to destroy the so called western man ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

    lavoisier , says: Website July 23, 2018 at 11:47 am GMT

    @peterAUS

    Anyone with an average intelligence can, in two hours trawling of Internet, get how false all that is. And, yet, here we are.
    The same people who can spend hours on social media, shopping and entertainment online can't, for SOME reason, figure all that out.

    Easy to blame "them" and media/academia/whatever. Maybe it's time to start passing a bit of blame to people in general. Not holding my breath.

    I fully agree with this sentiment. The only reason the evil bastards who control our society can get away with their treachery is because most of the American people are out to lunch on the most important issues of our time. If the sheeple were to take responsibility to inform themselves of what is happening today they would be able to see the lies they are being constantly exposed to as just that -- lies. And then, they could put down the beer and turn off the damn sports channel and get angry at what has happened to their country.

    The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for ignorant people to remain ignorant.

    Giuseppe , says: July 23, 2018 at 1:01 pm GMT

    This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in the American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation" associations.

    They are CIA assets who do what they're told.

    Gordon Pratt , says: July 23, 2018 at 2:49 pm GMT
    There is an unrecognized plague in our society called antidepressants. More than ten per cent of the people in the industrialized world take drugs which interfere with self doubt. They don't ask themselves whether an idea in their minds is true, fair or kind. They only ask if they believe it. And since the chemical they ingest prevents them from assessing the idea from all sides they always believe that if they think something it must be true.

    This is the perfect environment for the virus of groupthink to spread.

    And since our leaders, both on the left and the right, may be ahead of the curve on drug usage the neocons and the politically correct may use antidepressants at greater levels than 10 per cent.

    Other symptoms of antidepressant use include high levels of free floating anxiety (because useful anxiety is suppressed) and restlessness.

    I am still asking myself what motivated a veteran politician like Hillary Clinton to violate a cardinal rule of politics by attacking not her opponent but his supporters with the "basket of deplorable" comment in the closing days of the 2016 campaign except chemically induced madness.

    If history has recorded that the Roman Empire collapsed due to lead poisoning from the water pipes a future time may also conclude the US Empire was destroyed due to antidepressants.

    AnonFromTN , says: July 23, 2018 at 3:09 pm GMT
    @Gordon Pratt I think you are mistaken trying to rationalize the behavior of the political class and their puppet masters. I believe the real driver are not antidepressants, but an obscene greed, which is so blinding that it made MIC profiteers forget that to enjoy the fruits of their thievery they have to be alive.
    anonymous [339] Disclaimer , says: July 23, 2018 at 3:49 pm GMT
    The psychology of the mass of Americans with it's self-righteousness and self-centerdness is really amazing. Just in the last seventeen years the US has invaded or otherwise attacked numerous countries and has caused millions of people to die, become miserable refugees, become orphans and all other manner of evil.

    Not least of all has been it's creation and patronage of ISIS, one of the most heinous groups in history. Yet Americans have this massive blind spot to the war criminality of all this that their country has committed against the peace of the world. Instead they're being stampeded into some irrational Russia-phobia. It's the US that's been on the march everywhere, labeling those countries that resist it's aggression as being aggressors for being willing to defend themselves. It's all upside-down.

    Jeff Davis , says: July 23, 2018 at 5:01 pm GMT

    "I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."

    I'd really like to know who wrote that line for the Prez. (Since I think it unlikely that he wrote that, or any of his "prepared remarks".) Stephen Miller? Whoever. But it was a genius comment.

    Respect , says: July 23, 2018 at 5:10 pm GMT
    QUOS VULT IUPITER PERDERE DEMENTAT PRIUS

    "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad" obviously the Gods want to destroy the so called western man

    Jeff Davis , says: July 23, 2018 at 5:28 pm GMT
    @Lauri Törni

    Feel free to attack me.

    TDS is a convenient shorthand for this form of disconnect from reality. That said it is absolutely fascinating to see and puzzle over this geopolitical tectonic event. The old narrative is crumbling, with the result that people like Lauri are fighting desperately to preserve their "sanity", dependent as it is on their tribal submission to the old order and its old narrative (its timeworn lies).

    "Science advances one funeral at a time."
    Max Planck

    By which he means that people persist in believing in those "truths" (their belief system) they have held for a lifetime. Only when they die out will a new, revised belief system replaced the old. The same in geopolitics as in science.

    Jeff Davis , says: July 23, 2018 at 5:34 pm GMT
    @Tulips "Malefactors of great wealth."
    Simple Pseudonym , says: July 23, 2018 at 5:58 pm GMT
    American dementia is not new. It is current but after the false flags of almost all of our (US) wars going back as far as the Barbary Pirates, Americans have thrived on being the good guys in an evil world. We are SO GOOD, and the world thinks we are perfect and want to be part of US so much, that any other thought is treasonous.

    The fact that getting along with Russia is necessary to NOT create armageddon, is irrelevant to the typical citizen because no matter how wrong, we are blessed and perfect in the eyes of the gawd we pretend to believe in.

    So, same old same old

    [Jan 13, 2019] The USA repeats the history of the later Roman empire, with the army and intelligence agencies firmly in control

    Intelligence agencies are a new Praetorian Guard
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

    jilles dykstra , says: July 23, 2018 at 7:30 am GMT

    In my opinion, no dementia. Too many careers and institutions are built on continuing hostility towards Russia. First ECB President Duisenberg's ph d thesis had as title 'The economic consequences of peace', something like that, his conclusion was that demilitarization was possible economically, when controlled sensibly.

    Did anyone read 'The Iron Mountain Report', I never quite knew what to make of it, but it also is about if demilitarization is possible. Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990 describes how the USA weapons industry skillfully prevents that spending on useless weapons diminishes. The history of the later Roman empire, the army in control.

    [Jan 13, 2019] Republican politicians may invoke the rhetoric of free markets to justify cutting taxes for the rich and benefits for the poor, or removing environmental regulations that hurt polluters' profits, but they don't really care about free markets per se. After all, the party had little problem lining up behind Trump's embrace of tariffs

    Notable quotes:
    "... If anything, Trump and the GOP have finally shown common decent folk what the democratic experiment in America has become: a system that looks alot like feudal systems of the past. Including walls! ..."
    "... There is no such thing as a free market. Let me repeat it again for effect: there is NO such thing as a free market. Whether one calls it libertarianism or neoliberalism, the idea is pretty much the same: if we just unleash the power of human greed, the market will equal everything out, and we'll all be freer because of it. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Our government gives huge incentives to large corporations with the idea that wealth will trickle down into middle class jobs and prosperity. But guess what? Those corporations keep most of the incentives and profits for themselves and their shareholders. The comparatively minuscule recent tax cuts for the middle class pale in comparison to the huge corporate cuts that added $2 trillion to our national deficit. The only thing stopping corporate excess and monopolies is government. Many libertarians cry "starve the beast." Well, they shouldn't complain if they get food poisoning because their food wasn't properly inspected by a government they loath. And neither should President Trump complain, if, like most Americans, his next Big Mac doesn't agree with him. ..."
    "... Anarchy is oligarchy. The rule of law -- law crafted by dedicated public servants, who are elected by sober and informed citizens -- is the closest we can come to freedom. ..."
    "... The libertarian philosophy is this: while you're young and healthy and productive, you can help make money for your boss. However, once you are old and no longer capable of making a contribution to someone else, it is your obligation to simply die. ..."
    "... Privatizing Social Security so that investment firms can get a piece of the action, privatizing Medicare so that insurance companies can get a piece of the action, and privatizing the military, so that private paramilitary companies can get more than their fair share of the action. It's theft in plain sight. We can't believe it, because it's so obvious. ..."
    "... Paraphrasing Marie Antoinette "Let them eat contaminated cake" ..."
    "... Funny how libertarians never argue for privatizing the military, or law enforcement. ..."
    "... I cannot enumerate the number of rich Republicans who tried to get the government to support their elderly while the children of those elderly got the money. I could tell you stories, including one about a certain Republican Governor of Pennsylvania who tried to put his adult, but mentally handicapped child on Medicaid. ..."
    "... Cutting tax rates on the wealthy are stealing from the rest of us. We make contributions every hour of every day which are hoovered up by the wealthy and the powerful. Meanwhile we cannot afford the cost of living, which has skyrocketed vs wages and benefits. The cost of an apartment is exorbitant. The cost of health care is exorbitant. Meanwhile the commons suffer. Infrastructure suffers. Sidewalks are a menace. There is lead in the water. Rich people who do not pay their fair share of taxes are stealing from the people in so many ways it's impossible to count them. But count them in years lost, in lives cut short, in lives blighted. ..."
    "... Republicans aren't against government, it has grown more under every Republican president including Reagan himself. They simply have their preferences as to who benefits from it. ..."
    "... As the saying goes, you never miss your water until your well runs dry. ..."
    Jan 13, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

    That said, the truth is that libertarian ideology isn't a real force within the G.O.P.; it's more of a cover story for the party's actual agenda.

    In the case of the party establishment, that agenda is about redistributing income up the scale, and in particular helping important donor interests. Republican politicians may invoke the rhetoric of free markets to justify cutting taxes for the rich and benefits for the poor, or removing environmental regulations that hurt polluters' profits, but they don't really care about free markets per se. After all, the party had little problem lining up behind Trump's embrace of tariffs.

    Meanwhile, the philosophy of the party's base is, in essence, big government for me but not for thee. Stick it to the bums on welfare, but don't touch those farm subsidies. Tellingly, the centerpiece of the long G.O.P. jihad against Obamacare was the false claim that it would hurt Medicare.

    And as it happens, many of the spending cuts being forced by the shutdown fall heavily and obviously on base voters. Small business owners are much more conservative than the nation as a whole, but they really miss those government loans. Rural voters went Republican during a Democratic midterm blowout, but they want those checks. McConnell may have trash-talked food stamps in the past, but a sudden cutoff would have a catastrophic effect on the most Republican parts of his home state.

    C Wolfe Bloomington IN Jan. 10

    I had an idiot,er, libertarian friend once who actually believed the market would take care of food safety, because people wouldn't buy food from a source if that source was known to have sold tainted food. "What about the people who die in the meantime?" I asked. "Well, it's up to people to decide what to eat. The government shouldn't tell people what to eat." "But how are you supposed to know? How much tainted food has to be sold and eaten before people even know to avoid it? People get sick or die.

    What about people's lives?" "Argh, 'people's lives.'" (Eye roll.) "Liberals are always talking about 'people's lives.'" I swear this is an actual conversation that I repeated so many times I have it memorized.

    AndyE Berkley MI Jan. 10

    Ironically, the likelihood of chronic dependency on federal dollars is directly proportional to the redness of the state.

    DB NC Jan. 11 Times Pick

    One of the big obstacles I've observed is that conservatives, in general, have to experience negative consequences directly to understand the link between cause and effect. Liberals, in general, are better at imagining negative consequences and taking preventive action before they directly experience it. It has to do with empathy and solidarity, I think. Liberals see someone suffering, and they think, "We should find out what caused that and fix it so it doesn't happen to the rest of us." Conservatives see someone suffering, and they think, "That guy must be a terrible person. He totally deserves what happened to him. It can never happen to me because I'm a good guy." It is only when the negative thing does directly happen to the conservative that he may reconsider. That's when it is important to find a scapegoat- illegal immigrants, minorities, Jews- to blame in order to obscure the causal link.

    Socrates Downtown Verona. NJ Jan. 10

    Libertarianism attracts the finest stunted teenaged and hypocritical minds that are either disconnected from reality or that suffer from cognitive dissonance that allows hypocrisy and selfishness to flourish like mutant bacteria. Taxes and good government are the price of any decent civilization...and both of these concepts are completely demonized by Republicans even though Republicans are some of the greatest welfare queens in the nation. Productive, modern, blue Democratic state federal tax dollars have long subsidized rural, religious Republican states that hate the federal government....they curse they horse that feeds them and then they curse even more when the federal teat is turned off. America's 0.1% Robber Barons and crony vulture capitalists curse 'high tax rates' that aren't particularly high compared to the rest of the world while using America's infrastructure, legal system, government-funded research and technology, and corrupted electoral system to make parasitic profits that dwarf those of foreign corporations who pay their fair share of taxes to countries with increasingly better infrastructure and educational systems. The libertarian theology followed to fruition is Somalia-like; an unregulated anarchy of human misery. Decent human beings understand that healthy taxes produce healthy civilization. Today's version of libertarian Republicanism is a demented form of arrested emotional development that's been destroying the USA since 1980. Nice GOPeople.

    Larry St. Paul, MN Jan. 11 Times Pick

    Those who believe, like Ronald Reagan, that government is the problem, are about to discover that the absence of government is an even worse problem.

    Wilbray Thiffault Ottawa. Canada Jan. 10

    Senator Mitch McConnel said that the food stamp program is "making it excessively easy to be non productive." Well, Mitch McConnel is not on the food stamp program and he manages to be one of the most "non productive" senator in the history of the US Senate. Congratulation Senator!

    Eric Bremen Jan. 11 Times Pick

    Almost unfailingly, the stoutest Republican supporters seem to be the biggest beneficiaries of government: the military, farmers, pensioners or small business owners. Growing up in a military family, I remember subsidized gas, medical treatment for free and school trips paid by the DoD. Yet anytime there was a Democratic president, it sounded like there would be a coup when our military parents met at picnicks and had a few beers. If anything, Trump and the GOP have finally shown common decent folk what the democratic experiment in America has become: a system that looks alot like feudal systems of the past. Including walls!

    jrinsc South Carolina Jan. 11 Times Pick

    There is no such thing as a free market. Let me repeat it again for effect: there is NO such thing as a free market. Whether one calls it libertarianism or neoliberalism, the idea is pretty much the same: if we just unleash the power of human greed, the market will equal everything out, and we'll all be freer because of it. Sorry, but it doesn't work that way. Our government gives huge incentives to large corporations with the idea that wealth will trickle down into middle class jobs and prosperity. But guess what? Those corporations keep most of the incentives and profits for themselves and their shareholders. The comparatively minuscule recent tax cuts for the middle class pale in comparison to the huge corporate cuts that added $2 trillion to our national deficit. The only thing stopping corporate excess and monopolies is government. Many libertarians cry "starve the beast." Well, they shouldn't complain if they get food poisoning because their food wasn't properly inspected by a government they loath. And neither should President Trump complain, if, like most Americans, his next Big Mac doesn't agree with him.

    TM Muskegon, MI Jan. 10

    For those who despise government regulations, I offer 3 observations: 1. I lived near Muskegon, MI, prior to the EPA, when 3 foundries were constantly belching smoke and foundry dust into the air. Breathing the air was equivalent to smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day.

    2. I lived in Cairo, Egypt for 3 years. I purchased 4 pairs of prescription eyeglasses before finally giving up. None of them were right - and no regulations meant that I had no recourse.

    3. I lived in Accra, Ghana for 3 years. No construction codes meant that the brand new luxury apartment building I moved into suffered numerous problems with plumbing, resulting in mold, flooded floors and sudden loss of water pressure.

    In Cairo and in Accra, there was no social safety net. Beggars were a constant. Often they would be horribly disfigured and with no family what were they to do? I am happily retired now, back in Western Michigan, thoroughly enjoying the clean air, safe food, and clean parks. Obama said it best - it's not the size of government, it's the effectiveness of it. And if it's not working, that's on us - we're the ones who put those people in office. 2020 can't arrive soon enough.

    Lex DC Jan. 10

    The Trump voter in my family was a libertarian before switching to the Party of Trump and still believes that government is an interference. One conversation we had was about electricians needing to be licensed. He said electricians did not need to be licensed because if their work led to customers being injured or killed due to a fire, that information would circulate and those electricians would be forced out of the market. I asked him if he cared about the people injured or killed, he shrugged his shoulders and said that's just the way things are. I then asked him what if he was one the customers injured or killed. He looked rather shocked at that question and immediately dropped the subject. That is all that I ever needed to know about libertarianism.

    Michael W. Espy Flint, MI Jan. 11 Times Pick

    I like to pay taxes, I get civilization in return.

    Pat Somewhere Jan. 10

    "Libertarianism" according to the GOP means that YOU need the discipline of the "free market," but I deserve all the protections and support of the nanny state (financed with your tax dollars, thank you very much.)

    Goodglud Flagstaff, AZ Jan. 10

    As George Lakoff reminded us, what the anti-government folks call "regulations" are, for the most part, "protections." We shouldn't let the Kochs, Trumps, McConnells, and Ryans frame the discussion. "The term "regulation" is framed from the viewpoint of corporations and other businesses. From their viewpoint, "regulations" are limitations on their freedom to do whatever they want no matter who it harms. But from the public's viewpoint, a regulation is a protection against harm done by unscrupulous corporations seeking to maximize profit at the cost of harm to the public." https://georgelakoff.com/2017/01/28/the-publics-viewpoint-regulations-are-protections

    Michael McLemore Athens, Georgia Jan. 11 Times Pick

    At some point the American people need to realize that conservative/libertarian pundits are just on-air hucksters selling a product. Instead of selling Vegematics, Ginsu knives or non-stick cookware, they are peddling right-wing bile for a profit. And the profits derived from their corporate advertisers are huge. Forget truth or journalism, Rush Linbaugh openly proclaims himself to be an "entertainer" and not a "journalist" (mainly to make it more difficult to sue him for falsehood). Ann Coulter similarly declares herself a "polemicist". Forget for a moment the subversive influence of Russian money and hacking on American politics. Our own homegrown corporate advertisers are eagerly subverting America by underwriting glib purveyors of corrosive right-wing propaganda, who will slyly proclaim the gospel of unbridled greed and not of social responsibility. Of course drug companies don't want the FDA. Why would they want oversight to keep the public safe, when safety costs them money? Why would banks want regulation to safeguard the financial system and consumers, when regulation interferes with short-term profits? The Koch brothers don't want pesky interference from the EPA in regulating their mega-refinery in Minnesota. Their family homes are in Aspen, Palm Beach and Manhattan, so why should it concern them if effluent rolls through St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans? Don't dare call this something so plain as "greed". Wrap it in a bow and call it "libertarianism".

    FunkyIrishman member of the resistance Jan. 11 Times Pick

    Republican mantra (even Libertarian) is to be left alone, so long as THEIR way of life is left alone, and they are subsidized by you for living that way. That may mean a MASSIVE military to be a deterrent, or to go invade some other country to keep the oil flowing. That may mean subsidizing all sorts of industries, businesses and the like, because they cannot compete at all on a truly free open market. That might mean support for all sorts of social programs, health programs, education programs and the like as well, because bootstraps only take you so far. I would use the word hypocrisy, but that would entail that many know what they speak of when describing what Libertarian, or Socialist. or another ''ist'' form of government actually means. We are all in this together or we are not. There is no in between, but many would have you believe it is possible. It is not.

    earlyman Portland Jan. 10

    @Bill Once you our you loved one eats salmonella contaminated lettuce and nearly dies, good luck going after, or even finding, the agra-business across the country who caused it.

    Linda Sausalito, CA Jan. 10

    European food is heavily regulated, uh, by governments. Much tastier and doesn't contain known carcinogens. Watching the train wreck of the United States.

    Will Schmidt perlboy on a ranch 6 miles from Ola, AR Jan. 10

    @C Wolfe This rings so true for me too. I majored in economics at UICC in the early seventies. My favorite prof was a PhD candidate at U of Chicago, and one of his advisors was Milton Friedman. Being at UICC, I did not study under the great man, but I did under one of his acolytes, who was close to tenure (ABD, if I remember correctly), and I thought, a very intelligent one. One of his two areas of doctoral specialty (you had to have two; his other was labor) was macro, and I took him for among other things, money & banking. In fact, I took M&B twice, because the first time (I got an A) was from a Keynesian, and I wanted to get it from a Quantity Theory guy; another A.) Because my prof was a diciple of M.F., I got to attend several special lectures at UC, and partake of the kool-aid. Well, I heard directly from the horse's mouth how consumers would boycotte inferior suppliers and only the best would survive. The free market would favor the best and punish the worst. Of course, this required perfect information. Unfortunately, no good case was made how a perfect information economy could be achieved nor how consumers could afford to acquire perfect information. The price of discovering bad suppliers of tainted food would surely include the deaths of some number of consumers before that information became generally available. We debated perfect markets and perfect information but never did get a convincing case for abandoning government inspection of food products.

    Michael Kelly Bellevue, Nebraska Jan. 10

    The famous Republican philosopher Grover Norquist once said that he's want to have government so small that one could drown it in the bathtub. Right now, nearly one million government workers are facing the prospect of drowning in debt. Trump suggests that they could make do like he always used to, namely declare bankruptcy or go to daddy for a loan. All this while court jester Pence 'handles' the negotiations. His idea is to make more requests while staying firm on a wall.

    LT Chicago Jan. 10

    Perhaps the GOP base will finally learn just how dependent they really are on the government they profess to hate. Trump loving farmers and small town business owners are in for a particularly nasty surprise. It's not just farm subsidies. As described by Michael Lewis in "The Fifth Risk": "As the U.S.D.A.'s loans were usually made through local banks, the people on the receiving end of them were often unaware of where the money was coming from. There were many stories very like the one Tom Vilsack told, about a loan they had made, in Minnesota, to a government-shade-throwing, Fox News-watching, small-town businessman. The bank held a ceremony and the guy wound up being interviewed by the local paper. "He's telling the reporter how proud he is to have done it on his own," said Vilsack. "The U.S.D.A. person goes to introduce herself, and he says, 'So who are you?' She says, 'I'm the U.S.D.A. person.' He asks, 'What are you doing here?' She says, 'Well, sir, we supplied the money you are announcing.' He was white as a sheet." There are rural counties in this country that are only viable with government money. Trump counties. It's going to be an expensive and painful education. Trump University lives.

    Norm Weaver Buffalo NY Jan. 10

    If ever there was a group that lives in a fantasy world, it's the libertarians. In another article in another newspaper that dealt with "intrusive" government, I submitted a comment saying that I wouldn't be surprised if Libertarians would be opposed to STOP signs and traffic lights because these would constitute an unnecessary infringement on their freedom. Wouldn't you know that a person of that persuasion actually replied to my comment and confirmed my suspicion. Working in an IT position for three decades I dealt with this type daily. Many were 30-something white males, often both cognitively and physically well above average, who had learned to program computers. They were blessed with being raised in two-parent families. I acknowledge the hard work they did to learn to wrestle with computers, but they lacked the perspective to realize that they had not hit a home run but rather had been born on second or third base due to the intellectual and physical gifts they possess that many others don't.They could not understand why others in society could not emulate their success. In one conversation about affirmative action, one such person asked "Why do we need that anymore? There are laws against discrimination.". Many of this type get bit in the behind when some government regulation is repealed then it turns out that THEY are the ones adversely affected by the repeal. But don't waste your breath trying to pierce the fantasy balloon. They hold tight to those fantasies.

    George Chicago Jan. 10

    I'm waiting for Grover Norquist and the other small government proponents to relocate to Somalia, home of no real government. Why it's not thriving without the yoke of onerous regulations is surprising.

    Red Sox, '04, '07, '13, '18, Boston Jan. 10

    "...making it excessively easy to be non-productive." -- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The irony is too rich here. While he and his president and the "non-productive" Republican Senators draw a paycheck for soaking up the public dime, kids will go hungry; start-up hopefuls will lose loans; farmers will feel the bite; food will become contaminated and people will fill hospital ER's and strain their health insurance. For openers. The Right is getting its own back on FDR's New Deal. All because "government is the problem." Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Dominic Holland San Diego Jan. 10

    A relatively minor point: "Maybe you believe that private companies could take over the F.D.A.'s role in keeping food safe, but such companies don't exist now and can't be conjured up in a matter of weeks." Such inspection companies could only exist if they were funded by the food companies they were inspecting. Competition among inspection companies would then obviously lead to grade inflation: hire some other company that is more likely to give you a passing grade, who in turn will be happy to lower standards to attract more customers. This is not an avenue for effective replacement of the FDA. Libertarianism is for chumps and fanatics, no one else.

    Paul K Michigan USA Jan. 11 Times Pick

    We lived in a small West African nation for 25 years. There were no collectable taxes because the tax collectors kept what they could extort from poor people, no safety nets such as social security or medicaid/medicare, no fire fighters, no functional road departments, no regulation of pharmaceuticals, an unprepared and unarmed military, no paid federal, regional of local police forces, no judges who were not bought by the highest bidder, no standards for the public hospitals, no communication systems, no running water in major cities, no electric power that functioned more than 4-6 hours a day, and not a single government official who was not on the take.

    What we did have were cholera epidemics that killed 5000 people, annual measle epidemics that killed children under 5 years old , villages burned to the ground by wildfire, a school system which did not pay its teachers and finally a 12 year civil war which killed over 200,000 people and a [post war ebola epidemic which killed 12,000 more.

    The proper use of taxes was not even a dream. Now in the USA, the "leadership" under its current president and his sycophants are playing personal and infantile grade school games with your and my tax dollars and the congress is helping them do it. Amazing! I feel like I am back home in my 3rd world village .

    Tom B New York Jan. 11 Times Pick

    Anarchy is oligarchy. The rule of law -- law crafted by dedicated public servants, who are elected by sober and informed citizens -- is the closest we can come to freedom. Governance that provides basic order and rules and a safety net for when people fail (either from behavior that is unwise or from ill fortune) is part of the rule of law. There are also necessary things that the government can provide (without a profit motive) better than either charity of for profit organizations. Roads and basic science are good examples. Other things are best left alone by government -- things like sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. These should be principles that we all can live by, but it seems like the so-called conservatives believe quite the opposite. They believe in unregulated guns, flows of money to unregulated trusts, defunded public goods, and violent repression of sex, drugs, and free expression.

    Kinsale Charlottesville, VA Jan. 10

    @earlyman correct. The first thing those large corporations responsible will do is use their lobbying power to legislate liability caps on what they have to pay in settlement costs. That's the way the real world works. We're not living in some libertarian utopia.

    James Wallis Martin Christchurch, New Zealand Jan. 10

    Problems with the food industry in the US isn't just a new issue since the Trump administration, it has been an issue for decades. The problems of Big Ag and Food Manufacturers lobbying has been so bad, that whenever I see doctors in Germany and New Zealand, the first question they ask is have I been and eaten food in the US in the last six months, when they are trying to ascertain health issues". When the medical community around the world asks about US food intake, you know corporate libertarianism has run afoul and at the cost of the health of America. The fact that foods that can't be sold in Europe for health reasons are dumped in the US just highlights how it is no longer the United States of America, but rather the Corporate States of America. When will the people demand for Separation of Corporation and State?

    John Moran Tennessee Jan. 11

    I had serious Libertarian leanings up until a few years ago when my family and I moved to Bangalore, India to work for three years. It was an eye opening experience to see what actually happens when you don't have a strong central government regulating things like the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the food you eat.

    Bangalore was once known as the Garden City and is considered the Silicon Valley of India, but corporate greed, unchecked expansion, and government corruption, along with no meaningful environmental laws that are actually enforced, has turned it into a nightmare-- or maybe into what Libertarianism looks like in the real world, outside of Ayn Rand novels.

    The river beside our street was so polluted it had layers of chemical foam that would reach ten feet in height and blow across the road, stopping traffic.

    The nearby lake would literally catch on fire, burning for days. Open sewers ran into nearby water sources. Forget tap water, it would make Flint, Michigan's water crisis seem desirable by comparison. Food safety? Roll the dice and take your chances.

    Within a year any trace of Libertarian beliefs were wiped clean from my mind and I longed for strong government regulations to protect me and my family. This U.S. shutdown isn't even a minor taste of what it truly means to live without powerful and enforceable government regulations and protections.

    Pete Victoria, BC Jan. 10

    @Bill it is important to keep in mind that contaminated food can kill you before you even have a chance to pursue remedies. The critical elements for us now leaving much longer than our ancestors involve personal and public hygiene (e.g. safe food, sewer systems), medicine and healthy environments (e.g. pollution controls). I recommend watching the Trashopolis series, its quite informative.

    Thomas Zaslavsky Binghamton, N.Y. Jan. 10

    @C Wolfe Decades ago I had a very similar conversation with a doctrinaire libertarian, though it was about a less essential question. I also repeated it many times. The incredulity factor is large. I mean, I couldn't believe the degree to which rationality disappeared.

    Karen Garcia New York Jan. 10

    On the bright side, a federal judge just ruled Iowa's so-called Ag-Gag law to be unconstitutional, making it easier to expose the filthy and inhumane conditions on factory farms. So agribusiness will be smacked with the double whammy of losing their corporate welfare checks and bribery payments, and having their own cruelty exposed at the same time.

    It's obvious that Trump's tantrum of a shutdown is the latest episode of disaster capitalism, or what Naomi Klein has dubbed the Shock Doctrine. Create a crisis, like neglecting New Orleans levees, or most recently, the criminally negligent homicides of Hurricane Maria victims in Puerto Rico, and you allow the vulture capitalists to swoop in and cash in. The entire school system of N.O. is now privatized, and libertarian billionaires are buying up huge chunks of Puerto Rico at bargain basement prices to create palaces. With walls, of course. The trash and overflowing toilets at our national parks are just the ticket for corporations to take them over and charge exorbitant admissions... before selling out to ranchers and drillers to further speed up the Anthropocene. The other semi-bright upshot of this disaster capitalism is that rich conservatives will get just as sick from eating tainted food as the poor. Trump probably figures he is immune, because he likes the polluting cow flesh he consumes to be well-done to burnt. But without getting paid, how long will the White House chefs continue to serve him? : -)

    Chris Hunter WA State Jan. 10

    Exactly so. It has been my experience that my libertarian friends are only able to be libertarian because they have been protected all their lives (at great expense, they would argue) by the very government they deride.

    hen3ry Westchester, NY Jan. 10

    What's fascinating about all of this is how the Gutless Obnoxious Popinjays refuse to take any responsibility at all for the problems. It's always the Democrats fault. I'm surprised that none of them have pointed a finger at Obama. After all, he didn't try to build a wall so it must be his fault that Trump is demanding money for a beautiful wall that will protect all Americans from the outside world. It's fascinating to realize that McConnell, Pence, Trump, and the rest of the obnoxious crowd are getting paid by the government they want to drown. They are contributing to the very cycles of misfortune that they blame people for. Are they going to write letters for every federal employee who loses a home, falls farther behind on loan payments than they should, who can't afford to pay for medical care or the premium? No. The GOP has no plans to share the misery it's causing. Trump doesn't understand or care. This is what happens when a complete incompetent is elected to run a country: chaos, uncertainty, and worse. The party that abhorred communism and the Russians now has a president who may be owned by the Russians. Even if he's not, the entire debacle that is Trump's presidency must warming the hearts of Putin and his "friends" each day it continues. As Obama said, elections have consequences. This is one of them. I don't know about the GOP and the libertarians but I prefer to eat, drink, and breathe safely. It's why I like a functioning government.

    Mark McHenry Jan. 10

    The libertarian philosophy is this: while you're young and healthy and productive, you can help make money for your boss. However, once you are old and no longer capable of making a contribution to someone else, it is your obligation to simply die.

    If you look at all the proposals of the Republicans, this seems to be the guiding force. Privatizing Social Security so that investment firms can get a piece of the action, privatizing Medicare so that insurance companies can get a piece of the action, and privatizing the military, so that private paramilitary companies can get more than their fair share of the action. It's theft in plain sight. We can't believe it, because it's so obvious.

    Lake trash Lake ozarks Jan. 10

    It's the chaos this president keeps thrusting on all of us. We can't keep up day to day of his lack of self control, his lack of understanding how government works, the principles of the constitution, the rule of law that has sustained us through the years. He seems to believe that he has the support to destroy everything that keeps us safe. The foundation that made this a great country is at risk. I'm old now and can not believe what I see every day from this American President.

    Cowsrule SF CA Jan. 11

    @Zhou "I'll sue the company producing it". How will you do that in the absence of any governmental mechanism to enforce compliance with a law suit? And how will you prove contamination in the absence of any recognized standard to show it is present?

    Aram Hollman Arlington, MA Jan. 10

    @Bill So, you prefer the pound of cure known as a lawsuit to a regulatory ounce of prevention. Personally, I'd prefer to avoid both the discomfort of food poisoning and the expense of a lawsuit. Besides, do you really think you'd win? None of the many people poisoned by contaminated vegetables at Taco Bell stores a few years ago had any chance of even bringing a lawsuit, much less winning one and gettting compensation. It took regulatory agencies, public health departments, and the national Center for Disease Control simply to track down the offending vegetables and force Taco Belll to clean up its act. As for your checks and balances, most of the checks go from lobbyists to congressmen, and that throws any balances way out of whack. Your annual deficit figure of $1 trillion is out of date. The latest Trump tax cuts raised it to $1.5 trillion. So, start worrying real fast. But, I'd start worrying more not merely about the deficit, but about how money is being spent. You seem to worry more about the comparative peanuts spent on the FDA (which, by the way, also regulates drugs and medical devices) or the USDA (which also helps regulate food safety). than on the far larger amounts spent on the military (e.g. latest technology F-35 jets that can't fly in the rain), US taxpayer funding of arms sales to foreign countries that neither share our values nor help keep us safe (e.g. Saudi Arabia).

    Otis-T Los Osos, CA Jan. 10

    I work with alot of big Ag companies -- they're constantly raging about government regs and the red tape, etc, etc., but they have HUGE lobby and political power. On an average year, they get an amazing amount of subsidies coming in all kinds of forms, from direct compensation packages to float an industry a la corn, or from electric rates that are lower for them at the expense of the other rate classes. And when any hint of hardship comes, nevermind true hardship, they're front and center for the hand-outs. And they get plenty. All this before we even address immigrant labor! Ha! Libertarian Ag would look WAY different out in the fields. And one thing that would surely be needed: Cheap immigrant (sometimes illigal) labor. You get what you vote for.

    JaneF Denver Jan. 10

    @michjas Except the Republicans could reopen the government if they chose to. They could pass the same bill they passed in December, and then override the President's veto. Their conspiracy is that they won't do that.

    John Quixote NY Jan. 10

    So the party of fiscal responsibility which is already running up the deficit insists on building a wall over 2000 miles of border, seizing private property along the way . When we stopped teaching Geography and Citizenship and dismissed literature as irrelevant to getting a good job, we created an electorate that could be gulled by such propaganda and conned into thinking that fear is our avatar: fear of otherness, fear of government, fear of taxes, fear of liberals, fear of fear itself.

    Cathy NJ Jan. 10

    @Aoy when food is contaminated, the FDA is able to locate "ground zero" with utmost efficiency--Food Science 101. Without the FDA--which was established under T. Roosevelt's administration--there is no coordination between the food chain and the population. You can wash your lettuce to your heart's content, but if it was grown in contaminated soil, the cells within are contaminated. So, yes, the FDA is extremely necessary.

    Jake Reeves Atlanta Jan. 10

    "Government," declared Ronald Reagan in his first Inaugural Address, "is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Yup, Republicans say government is the problem and then they get in power and prove it. The Party of Problem Government.

    keith San Miguel de Allende Jan. 11 Times Pick

    Anyone who thinks enforced food safety is unnecessary should go to India and eat in a restaurant anywhere but a first-tier hotel for foreigners. Your odds of getting sick are very high. Ditto in Alexandria, Egypt, and other places I've experienced where profit is important and product is, well, less so. Remedies? Seriously? How will you prove anything? Especially when all the restaurants have the same cavalier attitude toward washing food and hands. You ate the salad? More fool you.

    Castor Troy D.C. Jan. 10

    I wish that shutdowns were actually that-- shut things down. That means no air traffic controllers, no TSA, no border agents. Wonder how quickly the politicians would solve their differences if they couldn't rely on slave labor from unpaid federal employees forced to work?

    alank Wescosville, PA Jan. 11 Times Pick

    Paraphrasing Marie Antoinette "Let them eat contaminated cake"

    Ecce Homo Jackson Heights Jan. 10

    Funny how libertarians never argue for privatizing the military, or law enforcement. When they think it's really important, even libertarians come running back to government. The facts are that markets are only free if they are transparent, and in all of history nobody has come up with a better way than government regulation to make markets transparent. We tried unregulated markets in food production, and it was a disaster - which is why we have federal regulation of food production today. We tried unregulated labor markets and it was also a disaster - which is why we have child labor laws, minimum wage laws, and the full range of other labor regulations we have today. politicsbyeccehomo.wordpress.com

    Ben Chicago Jan. 10

    People forget that government workers are themselves participants in the economy. They buy cars and houses. They go to the grocery and the hardware store. When they don't get paid, the businesses they patronize -- private businesses -- also go without. Yesterday, I had lunch at a famous old restaurant right near the federal plaza in Chicago's Loop. One of the workers there told me that because of the shutdown the place's business had fallen way off. (And that's with the federal courthouse still open. Just wait until the courts shut, too.) It's a closed system, folks.

    Cal Prof Berkeley, USA Jan. 10

    Spot on. Naïveté about libertarianism runs deep. It was brought home to me when I worked with programmers in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. A fair number espoused libertarian ideas. Yet they had all had their computer science degrees paid for by the Defense Department, many at state universities. I was not too sophisticated myself but even I could see the disconnect between the ideas they were pushing and the real world implications.

    Tom B New York Jan. 10

    Have you ever actually tried a personal injury case? For a food borne illness? I ask those questions rhetorically because I can tell from your comment that you haven't. As a lawyer, who doesn't often get involved in personal injury cases, I can tell you that people often think they aren't hurting anyone by cutting corners, and are only restrained from doing things like serving contaminated food or doing illegal gas line plumbing by the threat of fines if caught cutting those corners. It's not the lawsuit that makes them take care.

    Rich Davidson Lake Forest, IL Jan. 10

    The gilded age of the 1890's seem like a wonderful time for libertarians. The productivity of the nation was high and gaining. But, it came with dirty air and water, bad food and medicine, quackery and robber barons. It was followed by the Roaring 20's where stocks grew without limits and borrowed money paid for it. That did not end well, either. Finally, in FDR's first 100 days, government stepped in and wrote the rules that made life good for most of us. The GOP does not know history and forgot what happened when there was a libertarian society. They are getting an education, finally.

    Linda Oklahoma Jan. 10

    One of the things that might end is the Indian Health Services. The government made contracts with tribes that in exchange for their land, the federal government would provide education and healthcare. It's not a welfare program. It is payment for millions of acres of land. If Indian Health Services ends, that's the same as reneging on a contract. Trump may see tribes going to court to get what was promised to them in exchange for land and lifestyle. If the shutdown continues, lots of people may be taking Trump to court.

    Yuri Asian Bay Area Jan. 10

    Do you believe in magic? Religious extremists do. So do Libertarians. And so do Republicans though what they believe is a variant of magic that might be called delusion or magic mixed with whisky and soda, which we call cynicism. What they all have in common is a collective inability to see the forest from the trees: central to their emptiness is the absence of humanity and all the messy ambiguity that entails, instead substituting a bogus certainty that's nothing more than a palliative for existential panic at the absence of self identity grounded in community. Bertrand Russell called it cosmic anxiety. It drives the compulsion for religion, ideology, in fact all systems of coping that avoid the crushing weight of freedom that comes without compass or owner's manual. Whether the god of the invisible hand that directs the market, or the god of clubs with exclusive membership and status, or the god of ancient fables told and retold for a millennium of successive generations, all are rationales for the irrational aversion of responsibility to do the work necessary to make freedom meaningful without making it meaningless for others. The two bargain bins in the basement of modern life are religion and ideology. Libertarianism can be found on the clearance rack for one size fits all.

    OUTsider deep south Jan. 10

    Paul, you included this quote from Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader... When talking about Food Stamps he has denounced the program for "making it excessively easy to be nonproductive." He has no business being so judgmental. Being productive implies a positive result for society. When it comes to being productive, his entire career is in question.

    Elizabeth Moore Pennsylvania Jan. 11

    @ebmem You don't know anything. For one thing, you are DEAD WRONG. Medicare DOES NOT PAY FOR NURSING HOME CARE AT ALL! MEDICAID DOES, but only for the poor. It is WEALTHY REPUBLICANS who "Medicaid Plan" their assets so the government will cover their living expenses so they can preserve wealth for their heirs. How do I know this to be the truth? I spend 23 years as a government regulator for Medicaid (Medical Assistance) in the state of Pennsylvania.

    I cannot enumerate the number of rich Republicans who tried to get the government to support their elderly while the children of those elderly got the money. I could tell you stories, including one about a certain Republican Governor of Pennsylvania who tried to put his adult, but mentally handicapped child on Medicaid.

    Sherry Washington Jan. 10

    It is remarkable how farmers, who are particularly reliant on federal government programs to buy seed, equipment, get loans, get crop subsidies, and market their food, still support Trump, even though these programs are shut down and he's started a trade war. One farmer in today's issue supports Trump, saying "we need some border security", even though it means he might lose his farm. What kind of politics is this where people support a President who intentionally ruins their prospects and their way of life? It reminds me how dictators keep power through propaganda, rewriting history and painting its leadership as heroic. Fox News is like North Korean TV rewiring Republican brains to believe that Republicans, no matter how bone-headed, are always good, and Democrats are always bad, so much so they are willing to lose the farm, like North Koreans are willing to starve.

    Will Hogan USA Jan. 11

    @Mark Nuckols all the government programs that help business mean that the wealthy owe some money back. when 5000 workers of a large corporation all drive the company trucks on free public roads built with tax dollars, when those roads need repair, it sure should be taxes on the company that helps pay, along with the gas tax we all pay. Your mistake is in thinking that the income of the company owner was earned by him and him alone, but in reality, the taxpayers helped him plenty every step of the way. You just did not see it all.

    ridgeguy No. CA Jan. 10

    The article focuses on food inspections, but what about drug inspections? Is the FDA inspecting pharma manufacturing houses? Are they inspecting precursor chemicals commonly imported from, say, China? Libertarians (along with the rest of us) may be in for much more consequential disappointments than bad lettuce.

    Chris DC Jan. 10

    Well, at this point it certainly comes as no surprise that the narrowly tailored ideological conceit republicans like to think of as - laughably - 'Libertarianism' was little more than an economic grubsteak to the plutocratic interests. Indeed, it makes my head spin to think how quickly the so-called libertarians of the republican party would support rollbacks on women's reproductive liberties, not to mention the liberties of minorities and the LGBTQ community, not to mention how they would import the Christian Right's version of theology into the public domain. (Ah yes, get government off our backs, but shove God into every home.) The issue that looms broadly over all this, however, is the republican's intent to liquidate this nation's status as technologically advanced, industrialized liberal democracy. Apparently the maintenance/perpetuation of modernity is not compatible with right wing notions of 'liberty,' let alone libertarianism.

    Areader Huntsville Jan. 10

    The first libertarian I knew was a slum landlord who did not want the Government regulations concerning maintenance of apartments and the like. This seems like a common trait among the political group as I think libertarians are more interested in profit.

    Peter CT Jan. 10

    No one complains more loudly and more often about attempts to curtail his first amendment rights "guaranteed by the constitution," than my libertarian friend, who refuses to pay taxes, then expects the government he won't support to protect his freedoms. If you really miss those debate club arguments from jr. high school, go try to talk sense to some libertarians. For the rest of us, plain old Republicans are a perfectly adequate source of flawed reasoning.

    Sophia chicago Jan. 11

    @Mark Nuckols Wrong! Cutting tax rates on the wealthy are stealing from the rest of us. We make contributions every hour of every day which are hoovered up by the wealthy and the powerful. Meanwhile we cannot afford the cost of living, which has skyrocketed vs wages and benefits. The cost of an apartment is exorbitant. The cost of health care is exorbitant. Meanwhile the commons suffer. Infrastructure suffers. Sidewalks are a menace. There is lead in the water. Rich people who do not pay their fair share of taxes are stealing from the people in so many ways it's impossible to count them. But count them in years lost, in lives cut short, in lives blighted.

    sapere aude Maryland Jan. 10

    Republicans aren't against government, it has grown more under every Republican president including Reagan himself. They simply have their preferences as to who benefits from it.

    Helena Princeton New Jersey Jan. 10

    I'm surprised that the air traffic controllers haven't all called in sick. They have the collective power to bring air travel to a standstill. I've long felt that a general nationwide strike would finally get the attention of our corporate overlords. After all, all they care about is money--just like Trump and the GOP.

    YoursTruly Pakistan Jan. 11 Times Pick

    When two elephants fight, its the grass that gets uprooted. In this show of arrogance and egos its the lives of many ordinary Americans that is adversely affected. I only wish that this crisis comes to an end soon to the relief of many.

    dpaqcluck Cerritos, CA Jan. 10

    @jrinsc, exactly right with an academic exception. Adam Smith and his ideas of free market competition assumed that there would be large number of companies competing with each other with their sole means of competition being consumer satisfaction, price and employee efficiency. Anyone who couldn't compete went out of business, hence "free market". The government's only role is to enforce anti-trust laws to keep businesses small and competitive, and assure that the competitive triangle of business, labor, and consumer are kept in balance. Fundamentally big business is bad, always! What real "free markets" DO NOT include is the idea that a small number of huge companies pay the government to create a competition free environment. The term "free market" has been stolen to mean that companies can do anything they want to succeed, including creating laws with profitable loopholes, laws to inhibit labor participation in the competition, and laws that inhibit consumers from using fraud laws to suppress shoddy products. In reality there is no "free market", as @jrinsc said, except to mean that big companies are free to do whatever they want to be profitable.

    PB USA Jan. 10

    My first lecture in economics dealt with free. The professor, then the Chief Economist at the Cleveland Fed, made the point that nothing was free: no free lunch; no free air; no free love. The point that he made was that somebody always pays. For everything; maybe not you, not now; but somebody does. So every time that I hear this Republican rant about free markets, I begin to laugh.

    White Buffalo SE PA Jan. 11

    @dpaqcluck Adam Smith believed corporate entities needed to be regulated. something always left out.

    J. Benedict Bridgeport, Ct Jan. 10

    I am wondering if Mitch McConnell and his close Republican allies have been living off food stamps because it seems to me they all have been incredibly unproductive for years which he sights as a consequence of anyone using food stamps.

    John California California Jan. 11

    @Joel Sanders This is completely specious reasoning. There are any number of non-state food groups that compete to set, e.g., organic, standards for food... for their participants. And they can restrict anyone from using their seal of approval without meeting their requirements. What they can't do, and the State can, is to require tainted products to be removed from distribution. Having the power of the State depends on law that transcends private agreement. And in the case of food, drugs, highways, airlines, and a number of other avenues of social life, that strikes me as a valuable thing. Why is this SO difficult for you, Mr. Sanders?

    James Lee Arlington, Texas Jan. 11

    I once heard a conservative economist give a speech in which he denounced the FDA for its suppression of competition in the pharmaceutical industry. I asked him what would protect the consumer if the market replaced the Feds as regulator of new drugs. He responded that, if my wife died from the effects of a toxic drug, I could always sue the firm that produced it. I found this notion deeply comforting. I might lose my wife, but the drug company would have to compensate me with a pile of dollars, assuming I could prove its negligence. For this libertarian, a life and money weighed equally in the scales of justice.

    Aubrey Alabama Jan. 10

    The people who support libertarianism are like those who support biblical literalism (fundamentalism). The libertarians want to get rid of some laws and regulations but not all of them. Just the ones they don't like. Usually these are laws which make corporations and businesses sell clean and safe food, treat employees fairly, pay taxes, etc. The libertarians don't want to get rid of laws which help business, corporations, and the well-to-do. They want to be sure that Boeing, Lockheed, and others get cushy defense contracts, the petroleum companies get subsidies, Big Pharma gets to charge a lot for drugs, etc. It is just a new name for the same old playbook -- make things tough on the weak and poor -- those with dark skins, immigrants, etc. All the while being solicitous for the well-off and powerful. Religious literalist do the same -- pick out the Bible verses which support the desired message. Ignore those which don't. So many things don't change. We get give them a new name.

    Stan Sutton Westchester County, NY Jan. 10

    Actually, Krugman didn't confuse Libertarians and Republicans. He said that Republicans used Libertarian rhetoric but weren't true Libertarians, and he didn't accuse Libertarians of favoring Republican policies across the board.

    RLiss Fleming Island, Florida Jan. 11

    @Bill: See Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9, which covers the Flint water crisis in depth. These people didn't even know they were drinking contaminated water until a health worker broke ranks and made it public. THEN nothing was done.....(Oh, the state provided bottled water for a while, to drink).... The children of Flint were suffering IRREVERSIBLE brain damage due to lead in the water.....would suing 20 years later fix that? AND why did this happen at all? The Republican governor of the state wanted to help his buddies make a lot of money....

    DB NC Jan. 10

    @Goodglud Excellent link! We need to call it what it is. No more reduce "regulations" which people hear as reducing red tape. Make them advocate to "reduce protections."

    Red Sox, '04, '07, '13, '18, Boston Jan. 10

    @AndyE, Berkley, MI: Nice turn on Jennings' corollary to Murphy's Law (the chances of the toast falling buttered side down on the carpet is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet).

    Buck Santa Fe, NM Jan. 10

    @Mamawalrus72 We are living Government by the Kochs now. We have been living Government by corporations for some time.

    NM NY Jan. 10

    Money talks louder than reason. So long as moneyed libertarians like the Koch Brothers buy political influence, they will purchase an agenda to benefit themselves at our expense.

    Chris Toronto Jan. 10

    "In the case of the party establishment, that agenda is about redistributing income up the scale, and in particular helping important donor interests. Republican politicians may invoke the rhetoric of free markets to justify cutting taxes for the rich and benefits for the poor, or removing environmental regulations that hurt polluters' profits, but they don't really care about free markets per se." Head of nail, meet hammer. The US used to be the world's beacon of democratic values. No longer. The political system has been severely corrupted by PACs, Super PACs, self-funding billionaire politicians, skewed campaign funding rules, cynical electoral manipulation, self-interest and a lack of statesmanship amongst the political classes. You'd think a credible third political party would be able to drive a bus straight through the middle of this division. Two choices, left or right, just can't be enough to sustain a democracy.

    Richard NM Jan. 10

    @Will Schmidt perlboy "We debated perfect markets ..." Like in engineering somebody would design a car without engine because there is no friction and you just have to give it a push to get around. I am so happy I am an engineer, forces me into reality.

    Audrey Germany Jan. 11

    "Knowing that the food you're eating is now more likely than before to be contaminated, does that potential contamination smell to you like freedom?" Exactly. One of the most thing I appreciated of being in the EU is a strong consumer protection and safety regulations. But I guess, it's to "socialist" for some. Let's wait and see how the UK consumers will enjoy post-Brexit "freedom".

    Mike Albany, New York Jan. 10

    In answer to to Bill from Michigan, the problem with food and water contamination is that it may take years to find out that the food or water is actually contaminated, and then additional time for the public to be informed. After all this time passes, the damage is already done and lives are irreversibly damaged. As an example, the FDA has very strict limits on the amount of mycotoxin and bacterial contamination in our food supply. While E. coli contamination may be detected due to severe acute health effects, the carcinogenic effects of mycotoxin contamination may not be detected in years. The Flint Michigan lead contamination occurred in 2014 and wasn't declared an emergency until two years later, when public health officials alerted the public in 2016. Although this was largely a local issue, the H.R. 4470, the Safe Drinking Water Act Improved Compliance Awareness Act, mandates that consumers be informed. So, personally I'd rather have the Federal Government be on the side of the public and not rely on greedy lawyers.

    JRM Melbourne Jan. 11

    @ebmem Republicans get in office and go to work to prove that Government doesn't work and is the problem. Government works fine as long as Republicans are not in charge. The sabotage any effort to resolve or solve a problem. They complain about the debt and deficit until they are in office and then they blow the budget to smithereens with invented reasons for war so they can enrich themselves. They are the problem, not Government.

    SandraH. California Jan. 11

    @Bill, good luck with that. If you survive long enough to sue--and if you can prove the source of your cancer or other illness--you'll find that personal injury lawsuits get you nowhere. The big boys always win. Your best remedy is prevention. Don't let yourself or your loved ones ingest or breathe toxins. Don't let toxins into your groundwater or soil. How do you do that without government regulation?

    ben220 brooklyn Jan. 10

    Today, medical expenses are stratospheric. Meanwhile, the conservative movement strangles the welfare state so that nearly everyone in the middle class (regardless of political affiliation) who wants to live on more than $900 a month must go through legalized fiscal contortions to be able to pay for adequate care.

    Robert David South Watertown NY Jan. 11

    @TM Exactly the correct response to libertarians. They like to talk about what "would" happen, as though lack of government were a theoretical that can be calculated. There are plenty of real world examples of what "would" happen. There are historical examples too, but they "would" be different, of course.

    Socrates Downtown Verona. NJ Jan. 10

    @Aubrey Excellent analogy, although we can also use a good old-fashioned term to describe these 'libertarians', 'conservatives' and religious types -- -- hypocrites ..... of the highest despicable order.

    Buttons Cornell Toronto, Canada Jan. 11

    What courts? Courts are set up, run by and paid for by government. No government means no court system. You, the little, dying from tainted food, up against a huge agricultural corporation with deep pockets. Libertarianism is a bully system. Those with the money win and the rest die. That's it.

    george Iowa Jan. 11

    @jrinsc How quickly we forget, of course sometimes it isn`t that we forget but rather our memory is clouded by the smoke from the fires set by vulture capitalism. Upton Sinclair The Jungle should be required reading for all congress critters and all incoming Presidents. The Jungle is a mirror to where todays American Nobility, the 21st century Robber Barons, would like to take us. A disposable population for profit.

    HN Philadelphia, PA Jan. 10

    Where you see Libertarians, I see people who are so self-unaware and entitled that they believe the only apt government subsidies are the ones that benefit them. Remember the ACA debate line - "keep government out of my medicare?" Most people have no idea of what the government does! What about the staunch GOP voters who nonetheless complain when the government doesn't provide immediate aid to them after a disaster, but hesitate when the aid is going to others? And do they comprehend that all disasters - even those claimed to be "natural" - are actually man made? And do those that value privacy and their right to do what they want - do they really think that corporations and businesses will keep their products fair and safe? No, because corporations and businesses take the short view, while fairness and safety - both of which contribute to the health of the nation and its people - take the long view. Libertarians and their ilk are self-entitled peoples who only think about the immediate impact on themselves and their wallets. They change their tunes quickly when government is needed to help their bottom line.

    Independent the South Jan. 11

    @Bill The idea is not to sue after you get sick but to prevent you from getting sick. And if you want to reduce deficits, vote for Democrats.

    Son Of Liberty nyc Jan. 10

    What people with GOP/libertarian leanings should realize is that government regulations were ONLY put into place in response to the horrifying abuses of laissez faire capitalism.

    Elizabeth Moore Pennsylvania Jan. 11

    @Bill You keep right on believing. THE FACTS ARE that people who would sell you contaminated food have ways of covering up all the evidence. Besides, they could always hide behind the fact that the USDA and FDA inspectors weren't working and "they didn't know" because of that. You would lose any lawsuit because the inspectors didn't reveal any problems and the business owner "did not know to the best of his/her knowledge." EVERYTHING would be blamed on the shutdown, and you would LOSE>

    Nova yos Galan California Jan. 10

    @Goodglud Yes, regulations are limitations on their freedom to pollute.

    Mark Rubin Tucson, AZ Jan. 10

    Boy howdy, but it's easy to spout the libertarian line when the FDA, FTC, SEC, EPA, etc. do what they do, day in and day out. Government succeeds quietly! Many post smack about what seem like excesses, while they enjoy safe food and drugs, modest limits on fraudsters, clean air and water, etc.: Now, maybe, we'll see what happens when those who mouth off get the freedom they have demanded for decades. With a months' long shutdown lives will be lost, but those who disparage the regulatory state might get their come-uppance. The coming months, if they involve a partial shutdown, will highlight the value government offers. Opportunities like this one don't appear often. This writer, for one, hopes it represents a crisis which won't be wasted.

    gbb Boston, MA Jan. 10

    Government in this country seems to me to be run pretty well. I wish that more businesses were run as well as the US Postal Service.

    JS Boston Ma Jan. 11

    @C Wolfe I made friends with Libertarian from Texas in college my freshman year. He got me to read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. My first take was that Ayn Rand was a pretty weak writer and clearly had serious empathy issues to the point of being a bit creepy. My friend insisted that everyone should be self reliant and was responsible for their own destiny until the day he flunked out because his academically weak high school left him unprepared to survive in our highly selective college. I really felt sorry for him but he was so far behind I could not help him. I have no idea where he ended up.

    Lawyermama Buffalo Jan. 10

    As the saying goes, you never miss your water until your well runs dry. A very big part of me says this is the only way red states will learn how to stop biting the hand that feeds them: they've been blindly following a party that made no secret that it wished to "starve the beast". This is what it looks like. This new perspective has delighted me even as I worry for my friends, family and colleagues who are feeling the effects. I hope our nation survives this president and learns from the mistakes.

    Jim Brokaw California Jan. 10

    The problem I have with libertarian utopias is that 'the market' isn't going to work to address all conflicts. So you need to hire enforcement, since government isn't doing it... or are we keeping the courts? And if the courts rule for you, and the other party just refuses to pay, now you have to go get your payment. Good luck with that. It all seems likely to devolve into a 'might makes right' series of standoffs, until people band together into unified groups to collectively agree to a set of rules, and work together with those rules. Sounds a lot like government. Or you can just hire some soldiers and go take what you want. Dare the other guys to take it back. Sounds a lot like anarchy. Libertarians always seems to me like trying to cherry-pick what they like about government, what benefits them, and then dump the rest, the stuff that costs them but they can't see the benefit for. Maybe they'll understand better if they get some contaminated lettuce next time they go grocery shopping...

    Pat Stonington, CT Jan. 11

    @Bill Who exactly administers said courts that you would turn to for justice? Oh that's right, the government. I hope the irony is not lost on you. Libertarians seem to forgot that no man is an island to himself.

    Steve Nirvana Jan. 10

    The people I have met who (loudly) espouse libertarian ideas tend to be of three types - all of whom benefit from this philosophy at the expense of others: 1) wealthy heirs like tRump who don't want to pay their taxes since it reduces their ability to live large AND pass on a dynasty to their heirs. 2) those with the luck to obtain the particular skills and education that provide a secure job with high remuneration. (Yes, it is usually a lot of luck) 3) good looking women who are confident that they can latch on to one of those described in 1) or in a pinch, 2) 2) will complain bitterly when the job market shifts - as it did for many in computer science after the glory years of the 80s. 3) will complain if their lawyer doesn't get them a big enough divorce settlement and their looks will no longer give them a second chance. A good economic system works equally for all people, not just those benefiting as members of the lucky gene club.

    Spiro Jetti Jan. 11

    @Socrates Amen. Something also came to mind in reading your comment: Productive modern blue states subsidize receiving red states, who then, thanks to their outsize representation via the electoral college, bludgeon the blue states with red policies like deregulation and taking of health care etc. Like I am paying someone to punch me. "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

    SunnyG Kentucky Jan. 10

    We don't see the few inspectors who quietly keep our food safe, the EPA folks testing our air and rivers. The impact will be felt much later, and with no one to do the forensics, the story won't be told until well after the shutdown ends. I'm wondering how long the shutdown will last when visible folks start to go on strike. Will the federal employees who will perform the promised IRS, Food Stamp and farm distributions go to work, or ally themselves with their less visible brethren? With transportation, chaos will be most evident. After no paycheck on Friday, what if TSA doesn't shows or they picket Atlanta, OHare, JFK, SFO, IAD and DFW? Ditto for their compatriots in the Control Towers. Chaos. Who benefits? Perhaps we'll learn from Michael Cohen.

    Rick Cedar Hill, TX Jan. 10

    We as a nation are in this condition because the American character is one of greed, selfishness, one who does not think for himself/herself, and one that is controlled through fear. Maybe once our empire crumbles it will be divided into smaller countries that are easier to manage like the western European countries. I will move to one of the new countries that support a balanced budget, hates the concept of Citizens United and K Street lobbyists, wants to educate their masses, and provides healthcare for everyone rich and not so rich. An ignorant populous is easier to control and manhandle. The US is a good example.

    Rima Regas Southern California Jan. 10

    @hen3ry "It's fascinating to realize that McConnell, Pence, Trump, and the rest of the obnoxious crowd are getting paid by the government they want to drown." When you go the rest of the way you finally get a true sense of how perverted these people are.

    javierg Miami, Florida Jan. 10

    Thank you Dr. Krugman for a great perspective. It reminds me of the saying "be careful of what you wish for" ... for it may actually come true. Save for the sacrifice of many good Americans who depend on jobs and government benefits and the public in general, this may be the medicine those Republicans need to cure themselves of their hands off philosophy.

    Ron Silverlake WA Jan. 11

    @Bill I don't believe for a nano-second you would be willing to expose your family to contaminated or adulterated food on the chance you might be able sue someone after the fact. It could take you years and many thousands of dollars to get justice that way. There is a good reason we have agencies like the FDA. Many years before you were born, we in fact had the very situation you say you would be fine with. It was buyer beware for all foodstuffs. You could not trust food producers to put on the label what was actually in the can or bottle. Meat packers were packing and sending out absolute filth. If you want a hint of what it would be like here without these protective agencies, do a little research on food safety in China. It will make you sick when you see what the Chinese are exposed to.

    Jody Quincy, IL Jan. 10

    @C Wolfe Libertarian or not, in this country money is always more valued than human life. Again, it took Western Europe more than 2,000 years to become somewhat civilized and it will take this continent at least that long.

    Thomas Zaslavsky Binghamton, N.Y. Jan. 10

    @Eleanor How will you get around this? Reagan said, 'The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."'

    Anne CA Jan. 10

    Does the shutdown mean that government will stop collecting tax money while services are suspended? Does it work both ways?

    Teresa MN Jan. 11

    @ebmem I am an employee of Medicaid who sees countless fellow workers toil long after quitting time to cover the most people, with the least potential harm or burden to them, to get the best services and quality of life possible, AND doing all that earning maybe half the compensation of a comparable private sector position. It saddens me that even the program ensuring our loved ones - or ourselves! - have care at the end of life is not safe from this kind of bitter, distorted partisan anger.

    James K. Lowden Camden, Maine Jan. 11

    @Bill Two words for you: Blue Milk. Look it up. Food contamination is an old story, as old as tort law. The FDA was created because tort law was unequal to the task. If you think the modern day is different, how is that romaine lettuce lawsuit going for you? As far as I know, no one knows where the contamination came from, much less who to sue. The romaine situation illustrates another flaw in your libertarian fantasy. The individual harm is collectively huge but individually small. Any action -- preventive or retributive -- requires collective action. Which, actually, is what democracy is, and why democracy created the FDA.

    Joe Glendale, Arizona Jan. 11

    @Linda You said it, Linda. I just returned from Europe. And I could not believe again how much tastier the meat and produce was - not only in restaurants but in humble meals in the country. Commercial food produced in the United States is terrible, tasteless, and full of pernicious additives. Ma and Pa Kettle have become inured to it, and don't know any better.

    Blue Moon Old Pueblo Jan. 11

    @Wilbray Thiffault "Well, Mitch McConnell is not on the food stamp program, and he manages to be one of the most 'non productive' senators in the history of the US Senate." Correction: Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans are indeed on the food stamp program, the best one ever, and the government shutdown is not preventing them all from being paid. They will never give it up willingly.

    Sunny NYC Jan. 10

    Prof. Krugman says, "Meanwhile, the philosophy of the party's base is, in essence, big government for me but not for thee." I totally agree. It is indeed Trump and the Republican party who is disrupting the free market. The free market can be sustained only when it is run by smart and fair-minded people including top-notched economists and politicians. Otherwise, the socialism-monster would threaten and collapse the free market anytime. What I mean by 'the socialism-monster' is not the economies of Northern European countries such as the Netherlands, Sweden, etc. Some Americans call their economies 'socialism', but that's very wrong; their economies are indeed one of the most advanced capitalistic systems. How can't they be? Capitalism in a sense started from there, i.e., the business markets of the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal, etc. Only when capitalism is truly advanced can well-rounded safety nets exist. In any case, genuinely socialist countries such as North-Korea and China do not protect human rights and thus prohibit freedom. The real problem with Trump and his allies is that they offer the strongest momentum for socialism by killing the chance for developing truly healthy free market. Trump, with Putin, is turning the whole world back into the days of nationalism, ideologism, and colonialism. They all champion big , huge, monstrous government. If there is any American crisis, it is not border security but gun violence. But Trump underwrites the NRA.

    [Jan 12, 2019] Some were even more laconic, summarizing the "scoop" as "anybody who fires corrupt Comey must be a Russian spy

    This is the typical level of repression that exist in Police State: any politician who deviates from the "Inner Party" (aka Deep State) course is branded as Russian spy and "counterintelligence" dogs are send to sniff any dirty clothing that might exist to and this politician career.
    Notable quotes:
    "... counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence. ..."
    "... "anybody who fires corrupt Comey must be a Russian spy." ..."
    "... Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin' James Comey, a total sleaze! ..."
    Jan 12, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    President Trump on Saturday lashed out after a Friday evening report in the New York Times that US law enforcement officials " became so concerned by the president's behavior " in the days after Trump fired James Comey as FBI director, that "t hey began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests. "

    According to the NYT, agents and senior F.B.I. officials " had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump's ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign " but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude.

    What happened next? Well, a collusion narrative was born and carefully crafted as the paper explains:

    The president's activities before and after Mr. Comey's firing in May 2017, particularly two instances in which Mr. Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect of the inquiry, the people said.

    The odd inquiry carried "explosive implications" as counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president's own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow's influence.

    The criminal and counterintelligence elements were coupled together into one investigation, former law enforcement officials said in interviews in recent weeks, because if Mr. Trump had ousted the head of the F.B.I. to impede or even end the Russia investigation, that was both a possible crime and a national security concern. The F.B.I.'s counterintelligence division handles national security matters.

    Even so, "...some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening it ."

    Then, in paragraph nine we read " No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials. " Or, as The Washington Examiner 's Byron York sums it up:

    Some were even more laconic, summarizing the "scoop" as "anybody who fires corrupt Comey must be a Russian spy."

    Put another way:

    Responding to the "bombshell" NYT report - which curiously resurrects the "Russian collusion" narrative right as Trump is set to test his Presidential authority over the border wall, the president lashed out over Twitter .

    Wow, just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof, after I fired Lyin' James Comey, a total sleaze!"

    Funny thing about James Comey. Everybody wanted him fired, Republican and Democrat alike. After the rigged & botched Crooked Hillary investigation, where she was interviewed on July 4th Weekend, not recorded or sworn in, and where she said she didn't know anything (a lie), the FBI was in complete turmoil (see N.Y. Post) because of Comey's poor leadership and the way he handled the Clinton mess (not to mention his usurpation of powers from the Justice Department).

    My firing of James Comey was a great day for America. He was a Crooked Cop who is being totally protected by his best friend, Bob Mueller, & the 13 Angry Democrats - leaking machines who have NO interest in going after the Real Collusion (and much more) by Crooked Hillary Clinton, her Campaign, and the Democratic National Committee. Just Watch!

    I have been FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President. At the same time, & as I have often said, getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. I fully expect that someday we will have good relations with Russia again!

    Lyin' James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter S and his lover, agent Lisa Page, & more, all disgraced and/or fired and caught in the act. These are just some of the losers that tried to do a number on your President. Part of the Witch Hunt. Remember the "insurance policy?" This is it! -Donald Trump

    Update: Comey has responded over Twitter with a pithy FDR quote:

    Although we seem to recall that Democrats were Comey's enemy when he reopened Hillary Clinton's email investigation during the election.

    While there is nothing new here confirming Trump was colluding with Russia, as Byron York asks following the article, was the New York Times story about Trump, or about FBI malfeasance?

    [Jan 12, 2019] CLASSIFIED The most powerful investor you never heard of by globalintelhub

    Jan 12, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Pre IPO Swap New York, NY 1/12/2019

    Did you know that the CIA has its own Venture Fund? And did you know that Venture fund was key in starting Facebook and Google? As explained in the book Splitting Pennies – the world is not as it seems.

    For many readers especially on this comes as no surprise, as you are well aware of the octopus that wraps its tentacles around the globe. But it may surprise you how active In-Q-Tel is and how chummy they are with the rest of the VC community. It's as if they are just another VC, but with another purpose. Let's look at some of the stats, from Crunchbase:

    Here's a list of recent investments

    If you dig back you won't see Google or Facebook on there – which is company policy for retail consumer investments that can impact the public (it's kept secret behind an NDA). Here's how it works – In-Q-Tel may invest in your startup but there's a big catch. First, you have to sign an NDA which is enforced strongly – that you are not to disclose your partner. Second, you must agree to 'cooperation' when it comes to information sharing now or down the road, such as location data on people using Facebook, Google, or other systems – perhaps only to feed it into a big data brain at Palantir. Or perhaps for more street level surveillance. The surveillance is known by fact, not conspiracy theory – but by fact – due to the disclosure of classified documents by Edward Snowden. If it were not for Snowden, we could only guess about this. The name of the main program is PRISM but there are many others.

    For those in the VC community that are deep in the know- the "Deep VCs" like Peter Thiel for example, the Snowden revelations would come as no surprise. MUST READ – No Place To Hide – the story of the NSA, PRISM, and Snowden (written by Greenwald).

    But for others, it may come as a surprise that not only the CIA has its own VC fund, but that it sits on many corporate boards alongside many Wall St. firms and other VCs.

    And of course, they always do well.

    Let's consider the doors they opened for Google, or in the case of Google it was more like the doors that were closed. Google was not the best search engine, it was not superior technology – it wasn't even really very good. It just became a monopoly and crushed the competition. Many wonder how they were able to do it, and that this is part of the Entrepreneur "Magic" that few have. Well we can say in the case of Google there was no Magic they had a helping hand from a friend in the deep shadows. Google wanted to become huge – the CIA wants information (they always do, so we don't use the past tense 'wanted'). So it was a cozy and rational partnership – in exchange for making the right handshakes at the right time, allowing Google to become a global behemoth, all they needed to do was share a little information about users. Actually, a lot of information. No harm in that, right?

    But in doing so Google violated itself as well as prostituted its model and its users. Google still does this and is not nearly as flagrant as its brother Facebook, however Google shares more detailed 'meta data' which is actually more useful to Echelon systems like Palantir that rely on big data, not necessarily photos of what you ate for breakfast (but that can be helpful too, they say).

    The metaphor is making a deal with the devil; you get what you want but it comes at a price. And that's the price users pay to Google – they get service 'free' but at a huge cost, their privacy. Of course – this is all based on the concept of Freedom which really does exist in USA. You don't have to use Google – there are many alternatives like the rising star Duck Duck Go :

    But who cares about privacy; only criminals, hackers, programmers, super wealthy (UHNWI) and a few philosophers.

    Google remains the dominant search platform and much more. Google exploits niche by niche even competing with Amazon's Alexa service.

    The argument here is that Google wouldn't be Google without the help of the CIA. This isn't our idea it's a fact, you can read about it here on qz.com:

    Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google's ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online. The intelligence community hoped that the nation's leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.

    There you have it – Google is the child of the digital revolution of the surveillance state. Why spy, when you can collect data electronically and analyze with machine learning?

    The new spy is the web bot.

    And the investors in Google did well – so that's the investing story that matters here. It pays well to have friends in high places, and in dark places. Of all the investments In-Q-Tel made, almost all of them have done very well. That doesn't mean that Palantir is going to grow to the size of Google, but it does provide natural support should a company backed by In-Q-Tel run into problems.

    By the time Facebook came out, digital surveillance was already in the n-th generation of evolution, and they really stepped up their game. In the creepiest examples, Facebook doesn't necessarily (and primarily) collect data on Facebook users – it does this too. But that's just a given – you don't need to perform surveillance on someone who gives all their data to the system willingly – you always know where they are and what they are doing at any given moment. The trick is to get information about those who may try to hide their activities, whether they are real terrorists or just paranoid geniuses.

    How does Facebook do this? There are literally hundreds of programs running – but in one creepy example, Facebook collects photos that users take to analyze the environment surrounding. Incidentally, the location data is MUCH MORE accurate than you see on the retail front end. So you get the newspaper and see a gift in your mailbox for your birthday – you take a photo because the ribbons are hanging out. What shows up in the background? All kinds of information. What the neighbor is doing. License plate of the car driving by. Trash waiting to be picked up by the street. A child's toy left by the sidewalk. You get the picture. Facebook users have been turned into sneaky little digital spies! While they are walking around with their 'smartphones' (should be called 'dumbphones') scrolling their walls and snapping photos away – they are taking photos of you too. That means, Facebook collects data for the CIA about users who don't have Facebook accounts. This is the huge secret that the mainstream media doesn't want to tell you. Deleting your Facebook account will do nothing – every time you go out in public you are being photographed, video recorded, and more – all going into big data artificial intelligence for analysis.

    But here's the best part. You own it! The CIA may have a bad reputation but it is part of the US Government, and thus – profits go back to the Treasury (those which are declared) or at least they are supposed to. Considering this, why is there a stigma about even talking about In-Q-Tel when in fact we should be more involved in any US Government operation when it is technically owned by the people and funded by taxpayers? Meaning, do taxpayers have rights to know what goes in in taxpayer funded entities, like In-Q-Tel? The big difference between In-Q-Tel and the CIA is that In-Q-Tel functions just like any other VC – they disclose most of their investments, they attend conferences, they accept business plans. You can literally submit your idea to In-Q-Tel and get funding. Of course, like any VC there's a very small chance of being funded.

    So what's an investor's take on this story? In-Q-Tel is not Freddie Mac there is nor a quasi-government entity; it's not an NGO and there is no implicit guarantee that In-Q-Tel's deals will do any better than Andreessen Horowitz .

    However, their deals do very well. Companies they fund not only have the backing of the CIA explicitly, it's not only about business – it's about national security! Under that guise, it's no wonder that companies like Google and Facebook rocket to the top.

    We are not suggesting that investors double down on In-Q-Tel bets. We are only suggesting that at a minimum, we follow what they do. It's a data point – a good source of information. And the best part is that it's public.

    Their most recent investment is in a virtual reality company in Boca Raton, FL called Immersive Wisdom:

    Immersive Wisdom® is an enterprise software platform that allows users to collaborate in real-time upon diverse data sets and applications within a temporal and geospatially-aware Virtual, Mixed, and Augmented Reality space. Immersive Wisdom is hardware-agnostic and runs on VR, AR, as well as 2D displays. Regardless of geographic location , multiple users can be together in a shared virtual workspace, standing on maps, with instant access to relevant information from any available source. Users can simultaneously, and in real time, visualize, fuse, and act upon sensor inputs, cyber/network data, IoT feeds, enterprise applications, telemetry, tagged assets, 3D Models, LiDAR, imagery and UAV footage/streaming video, providing an omniscient, collaborative view of complex environments. Immersive Wisdom also acts as a natural human interface to multi-dimensional data sets generated by AI and machine learning systems. The platform includes a powerful SDK (Software Developer Kit) that enables the creation of customer-specific workflows as well as rapid integration with existing data sources/applications.

    Cool stuff for sure – but it's in early stages. Pre IPO Swap suggests real Pre IPO 'unicorns' not because of size, but because of the right mix of risk and reward. https://preiposwap.com/pitch " style="color:#0d2e46; text-decoration:underline">See why we think so in our pitch.

    In any analysis, it's worth watching In-Q-Tel, which is a top source of funding and investment data we watch on www.preiposwap.com/ ">https:// www.preiposwap.com/ " style="color:#0d2e46; text-decoration:underline">Pre IPO Swap.

    To get real-time updates on companies like this, companies that In-Q-Tel invests in - www.preiposwap.com/follow ">http:// www.preiposwap.com/follow ">follow our blog free.

    [Jan 12, 2019] Mass Dementia in the Western Establishment by Diana Johnstone

    A mind is a terrible thing to lose
    Any unbiased observer would suspect that considerable part of US Congress consists of senile gerantocrats...
    Notable quotes:
    "... You can accuse only the elites of dementia: they forgot that to enjoy the fruits of your thievery you have to be alive. ..."
    "... They tricked us the last time, I hope that the people have learned their lesson – not to trust them anymore. ..."
    "... Thank you, this is an excellent summary of the situation right now. It's worth noting too just how disconnected the establishment is from the wider public. They have enormous financial resources and access to the entire legacy media ..."
    "... Let's stop using the word "elites". That sounds too positive, as though they have some admirable traits acquired by hard work, as in "elite athletes". Instead, let's call them "oligarchs" so that we get the right nuances of wealth and power, and get the correct emotional connotations of our disgust with them. We should label them with labels that they will dislike: oligarchs, mob bosses, etc. ..."
    "... This is not irrational. The screaming, the hysteria, this is the utterly rational, breathtakingly brutal reaction of a ruling elite that has the moral sense of a reptile. And it's working. All of Trump's campaign promises to stop wasting trillions on pointless winless foreign wars of choice, and instead spend that on our own country? Gone. And so much else besides. ..."
    "... It's dangerous to underestimate an enemy. The useful idiot foot soldiers, screaming in mindless herd instinct, are one thing. The people behind them – the Koch brothers, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, others – there is nothing at all mindless or demented about them. ..."
    Jan 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Where to begin to analyze the madness of mainstream media in reaction to the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki? By focusing on the individual, psychology has neglected the problem of mass insanity, which has now overwhelmed the United States establishment, its mass media and most of its copycat European subsidiaries. The individuals may be sane, but as a herd they are ready to leap off the cliff.

    For the past two years, a particular power group has sought to explain away its loss of power – or rather, its loss of the Presidency, as it still holds a predominance of institutional power – by creation of a myth. Mainstream media is known for its herd behavior, and in this case the editors, commentators, journalists have talked themselves into a story that initially they themselves could hardly take seriously.

    Donald Trump was elected by Russia ?

    On the face of it, this is preposterous. Okay, the United States can manage to rig elections in Honduras, or Serbia, or even Ukraine, but the United States is a bit too big and complex to leave the choice of the Presidency to a barrage of electronic messages totally unread by most voters. If this were so, Russia wouldn't need to try to "undermine our democracy". It would mean that our democracy was already undermined, in tatters, dead. A standing corpse ready to be knocked over by a tweet.

    Even if, as is alleged without evidence, an army of Russian bots (even bigger than the notorious Israeli army of bots) was besieging social media with its nefarious slanders against poor innocent Hillary Clinton, this could determine an election only in a vacuum, with no other influences in the field. But there was a lot of other stuff going on in the 2016 election, some for Trump and some for Hillary, and Hillary herself scored a crucial own goal by denigrating millions of Americans as "deplorables" because they didn't fit into her identity politics constituencies.

    The Russians could do nothing to build support for Trump, and there is not a hint of evidence that they tried. They might have done something to harm Hillary, because there was so much there: the private server emails, the Clinton foundation, the murder of Moammer Gaddafi, the call for a no-fly zone in Syria they didn't have to invent it. It was there. So was the hanky panky at the Democratic National Committee, on which the Clintonite accusations focus, perhaps to cause everyone to forget much worse things.

    When you come to think of it, the DNC scandal focused on Debbie Wasserman Schultz, not on Hillary herself. Screaming about "Russian hacking the DNC" has been a distraction from much more serious accusations against Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders supporters didn't need those "revelations" to make them stop loving Hillary or even to discover that the DNC was working against Bernie. It was always perfectly obvious.

    So at worst, "the Russians" are accused of revealing some relatively minor facts concerning the Hillary Clinton campaign. Big deal.

    But that is enough, after two years of fakery, to send the establishment into a frenzy of accusations of "treason" when Trump does what he said he would do while campaigning, try to normalize relations with Russia.

    This screaming comes not only from the US mainstream, but also from that European elite which has been housebroken for seventy years as obedient poodles, dachshunds or corgis in the American menagerie, via intense vetting by US trans-Atlantic "cooperation" associations. They have based their careers on the illusion of sharing the world empire by following U.S. whims in the Middle East and transforming the mission of their armed forces from defense into foreign intervention units of NATO under U.S. command. Having not thought seriously about the implications of this for over half a century, they panic at the suggestion of being left to themselves.

    The Western elite is now suffering from self-inflicted dementia.

    Donald Trump is not particularly articulate, navigating through the language with a small repetitive vocabulary, but what he said at his Helsinki press conference was honest and even brave. As the hounds bay for his blood, he quite correctly refused to endorse the "findings" of US intelligence agencies, fourteen years after the same agencies "found" that Iraq was bursting with weapons of mass destruction. How in the world could anyone expect anything else?

    But for the mainstream media, "the story" at the Helsinki summit, even the only story, was Trump's reaction to the, er, trumped up charges of Russian interference in our democracy. Were you or were you not elected thanks to Russian hackers? All they wanted was a yes or no answer. Which could not possibly be yes. So they could write their reports in advance.

    Anyone who has frequented mainstream journalists, especially those who cover the "big stories" on international affairs, is aware of their obligatory conformism, with few exceptions. To get the job, one must have important "sources", meaning government spokesmen who are willing to tell you what "the story" is, often without being identified. Once they know what "the story" is, competition sets in: competition as to how to tell it. That leads to an escalation of rhetoric, variations on the theme: "The President has betrayed our great country to the Russian enemy. Treason!"

    This demented chorus on "Russian hacking" prevented mainstream media from even doing their job. Not even mentioning, much less analyzing, any of the real issues at the summit. To find analysis, one must go on line, away from the official fake news to independent reporting. For example, "the Moon of Alabama" site offers an intelligent interpretation of the Trump strategy , which sounds infinitely more plausible than "the story". In short, Trump is trying to woo Russia away from China, in a reverse version of Kissinger's strategy forty years ago to woo China away from Russia, thus avoiding a continental alliance against the United States. This may not work because the United States has proven so untrustworthy that the cautious Russians are highly unlikely to abandon their alliance with China for shadows. But it makes perfect sense as an explanation of Trump's policy, unlike the caterwauling we've been hearing from Senators and talking heads on CNN.

    Those people seem to have no idea of what diplomacy is about. They cannot conceive of agreements that would be beneficial to both sides. No, it's got to be a zero sum game, winner take all. If they win, we lose, and vice versa.

    They also have no idea of the harm to both sides if they do not agree. They have no project, no strategy. Just hate Trump.

    He seems totally isolated, and every morning I look at the news to see if he has been assassinated yet.

    It is unimaginable for our Manichean moralists that Putin might also be under fire at home for failing to chide the American president for U.S. violations of human rights in Guantanamo, murderous drone strikes against defenseless citizens throughout the Middle East, the destruction of Libya in violation of the UN mandate, interference in the elections of countless countries by government-financed "non-governmental organizations" (the National Endowment of Democracy), worldwide electronic spying, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the world's greatest prison population and regular massacres of school children. But the diplomatic Russians know how to be polite.

    Still, if Trump actually makes a "deal", there may be losers – neither the U.S. nor Russia but third parties. When two great powers reach agreement, it is often at somebody else's expense. The West Europeans are afraid it will be them, but such fears are groundless. All Putin wants is normal relations with the West, which is not much to ask.

    Rather, candidate number one for paying the price are the Palestinians, or even Iran, in marginal ways. At the press conference, asked about possible areas of cooperation between the two nuclear powers, Trump suggested that the two could agree on helping Israel:

    "We both spoke with Bibi Netanyahu. They would like to do certain things with respect to Syria, having to do with the safety of Israel. In that respect, we absolutely would like to work in order to help Israel. Israel will be working with us. So both countries would work jointly."

    In political terms, Trump knows where political power lies, and is counting on the influence of the pro-Israel lobby, which recognizes the defeat in Syria and the rising influence of Russia, to save him from the liberal imperialists – a daring bet, but he does not have much choice.

    On another subject, Trump said that "our militaries" get along with the Russians "better than our politicians". This is another daring bet, on military realism that could somehow neutralize military industrial congressional complex lobbying for more and more weapons.

    In short, the only chance to end the nuclear war threat may depend on support for Trump from Israel and the Pentagon!

    The hysterical neoliberal globalists seem to have ruled out any other possibility – and perhaps this one too.

    "Constructive dialogue between the United States and Russia forwards the opportunity to open new pathways toward peace and stability in our world" Trump declared "I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics."

    That is more than his political enemies can claim.

    Mass Dementia in the Western Establishment

    exiled off mainstreet , says: July 20, 2018 at 7:02 am GMT

    This is a frightening, accurate commentary on what we face as a result of an unaccountable power structure resorting to any and all means to retain power which, if this structure continues to exercise it, will lead to our extinction.
    Donatella , says: July 21, 2018 at 2:08 pm GMT
    Thanks to say things that make me feel not alone.
    AnonFromTN , says: July 22, 2018 at 3:30 am GMT
    In the establishment, it's not dementia as such, it's just serving the highest bidder. You can accuse only the elites of dementia: they forgot that to enjoy the fruits of your thievery you have to be alive. If only they die, it would be a great service to the humanity. Unfortunately, the way things go, they might take us all with them.
    Cyrano , says: July 22, 2018 at 8:42 am GMT
    This mass hysteria over a country hostile to both democracy and gay rights (it's hard to tell which one is worse) has been seen in the west before.

    It's very reminiscent of the lead-up to Iraq war in 2003. I mean what's next? Are they gonna accuse Russia of having WMD's too?

    They are pretty good at providing false evidence of WMD's, I wouldn't be surprised if they stage another presentation of evidence of Russian WMD's at UN, complete with satellite images of mobile trucks equipped with Uranium enrichment technology and all that.

    That Nikki Halley can be quite persuasive, you know. I just hope that the world doesn't buy that BS again. Russia having WMD's? That's preposterous. They tricked us the last time, I hope that the people have learned their lesson – not to trust them anymore.

    Cagey Beast , says: July 22, 2018 at 11:18 am GMT
    Thank you, this is an excellent summary of the situation right now. It's worth noting too just how disconnected the establishment is from the wider public. They have enormous financial resources and access to the entire legacy media but seem to have almost no real base of support. Remember how the Never Trumpers had no one more prominent and well-known than Evan McMullan (!!) to run as their candidate? Note too the tiny number of views the YouTube videos of the Aspen Institute get: https://www.youtube.com/user/AspenInstitute/videos .

    On its own, these things aren't conclusive proof but together they add up. The Aspen Institute crowd is an almost entirely self-contained subculture. They seem to have no base of support, beyond their stacks of money, job titles and the power that come with the various offices they hold. That's probably why they can never stop calling their opponents "populists" or why Bill Kristol keeps tweeting about encountering scrappy shoeshine boys who shout "give Trump hell, Mr Kristol!" as he goes about his urban peregrinations.

    Anonymous [115] Disclaimer , says: July 22, 2018 at 11:54 am GMT
    OT

    Diana Johnstone is not alone. Others on the alt-Left are starting to wake up, too. This is Joaquín Flores:

    People are seeing through dishonesty, and the old language traps are used up and done for. If reconquista is the goal, then we need to have an honest conversation about that. If there's a Latino nation with self determination in the south-west US, or rights 'back' to the south-west US, then let's speak of it in such terms. Because then we'd be looking at a Euro-American nation also. Now of course there's issues of interpenetrated peoples, and identities we carry in our minds in diverse urban centers. But the point here is that we have to have an honest discourse, and stop hiding reconquista sentiments under the rubric of 'human rights'. Because European-Americans don't have right of return to Europe, so the left is promoting what will ultimately be a race war, full scale, if they don't chill the fuck out and back off this disingenuous approach to policy-wonkism on immigration.

    The paradigmatic question today is, how is wealth made, and where does wealth come from? What is the balance of trade and debts, and how is that is no longer manageable? The US empire and NATO is no longer manageable. Trump is unwinding NATO. That can't be a bad thing.

    https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/07/explaining-trump-to-socialist-liberals-flores/

    Fort Russ News is really turning out to be a leading voice of the Third Way movement.

    Tulips , says: July 22, 2018 at 7:31 pm GMT
    @AnonFromTN Let's stop using the word "elites". That sounds too positive, as though they have some admirable traits acquired by hard work, as in "elite athletes". Instead, let's call them "oligarchs" so that we get the right nuances of wealth and power, and get the correct emotional connotations of our disgust with them. We should label them with labels that they will dislike: oligarchs, mob bosses, etc.
    AnonFromTN , says: July 22, 2018 at 9:44 pm GMT
    @Tulips You are right, of course, the word "elites" has too many positive connotations. In fact, they are oligarchs, mega-thieves, or something on those lines. Functionally, in our society they are puppet masters of all the venal puppets (politicians, journos, etc.).
    TG , says: July 23, 2018 at 4:56 am GMT
    I hear you, and I sympathize, but this is not mass dementia. The oligarchy that runs the United States was worried that Donald Trump might actually (!!) take some consideration for the national interest of the people of the United States of America. That will never do.

    This is not irrational. The screaming, the hysteria, this is the utterly rational, breathtakingly brutal reaction of a ruling elite that has the moral sense of a reptile. And it's working. All of Trump's campaign promises to stop wasting trillions on pointless winless foreign wars of choice, and instead spend that on our own country? Gone. And so much else besides.

    It's dangerous to underestimate an enemy. The useful idiot foot soldiers, screaming in mindless herd instinct, are one thing. The people behind them – the Koch brothers, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, others – there is nothing at all mindless or demented about them.

    peterAUS , says: July 23, 2018 at 5:48 am GMT
    @TG Agree.

    Having a title "Mass Dementia in the Western Establishment" and approaching this effort as "mass insanity", "demented chorus" etc. is simply delusional.

    They know exactly what they are doing and, it appears, they are doing it well. The are able to create their own reality. What puzzles me a bit isn't "them" or their servants (media etc.). It's people in general. They appear to be buying that manufactured reality with ease. In this era of instant communications it's .sobering. This constant shitting on "them" and their servants is fine and dandy but feels as just a feel good exercise. Perhaps some effort could be spared in trying to analyze and explain common people approach to all this. The buying, hook and sinker, that manufacture.

    Anyone with an average intelligence can, in two hours trawling of Internet, get how false all that is. And, yet, here we are.
    The same people who can spend hours on social media, shopping and entertainment online can't, for SOME reason, figure all that out.

    Easy to blame "them" and media/academia/whatever. Maybe it's time to start passing a bit of blame to people in general.

    Not holding my breath.

    jilles dykstra , says: July 23, 2018 at 7:31 am GMT
    @Tulips I suggest 'ruling class'
    Anon [122] Disclaimer , says: July 23, 2018 at 8:07 am GMT
    @Daniel Rich The Russians are by nature cautious. They are a conglomerate of individuals, many of whom remember times when they would be sent by communist tyrants to a gulag for Wrongthink. Of course they're cautious.
    Daniel Rich , says: July 23, 2018 at 8:13 am GMT
    H.E. Mr. Putin clearly knows what the USA/West is about – Link to Youtube [03:42]
    nagra , says: July 23, 2018 at 8:34 am GMT
    How Hillary Clinton could even run for presidency after the murder of Moammer Gaddafi and Libya destruction, in any decent civilisation and society.
    That's planetary shame and the most important question, not DNC hack or anything else, which just trace in wrong direction.

    So, Trump should grow some balls and arrest not just her but Barack Obama as well on the same charges, as war criminals as they are, and prove that he really deserves to be trusted. And sacrifice himself in the process if needed as that would do any honest true US president, and he knew what to expect from such position from the start.

    It's not TV reality show, as still it is. All he cares about is his ego and popularity, and he is loosing both.

    Israel lobby finally see that they put their money in the wrong bank. I intend to believe more that West, namely USA and UK the most, keeps them more hostage in uncertainty for decades than in some Jewish conspiracy. Also, I also believe that only Russia can guaranty Israel security and peace in the region.

    Sean , says: July 23, 2018 at 10:12 am GMT

    In political terms, Trump knows where political power lies, and is counting on the influence of the pro-Israel lobby, which recognizes the defeat in Syria and the rising influence of Russia, to save him from the liberal imperialists – a daring bet, but he does not have much choice.

    Saudi Arabia spent 40 billion dollars helping Saddam's Iraq in its war against Iran, the cost of US efforts in the Syria civil war have largely been met by the Saudis. The coming attack on Iran will be as much to please the Saudis as to lock Israel into West Bank Arab expulsion mode. The Israel Lobby will is not pushing Donald Trump, they are playing catch up with him. Trump has already shown with the Jerusalem recognition that he is encouraging Israel in unilateral courses of action.

    Cagey Beast , says: July 23, 2018 at 10:42 am GMT
    @TG No, I agree with the assessment in this article and its title: the establishment is dangerously detached from reality right now. Our stagnant and locked-down political culture in the West allowed the "elite" to develop a false sense of security and and certainty. They thought they had things pretty much figured out a few years ago but now they're genuinely panicked.
    yurivku , says: July 23, 2018 at 10:43 am GMT
    Looking to this circus from Russia, to those insane speaches, insulting caricatures in MSM, I understand the huge amount of rotteness of Western society, mainly its high top part, but not only. Even here in comments (not in this particularly article) the percentage of trolls and brainwashed idiots exceeds all I could've imagined. So I stopped writing here – no sense, I beleive that something can change only after the dramatic changes in US/West society and that is possible only after a big war/revolution.
    So, I'm afraid our future is vague

    [Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project ..."
    "... The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US. ..."
    Jan 11, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project

    The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US.

    A bombshell domestic spy scandal has been unfolding in Britain, after hacked internal communications exposed a covert UK state military-intelligence psychological warfare operation targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied NATO countries under the cover of fighting "Russian disinformation."

    The leaked documents revealed a secret network of spies, prominent journalists and think-tanks colluding under the umbrella of a group called "Integrity Initiative" to shape domestic opinion -- and to smear political opponents of the right-wing Tory government, including the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

    Until now, this Integrity Initiative domestic spy scandal has been ignored in the American media, perhaps because it has mostly involved British names. But it is clear that the influence operation has already been activated in the US. Hacked documents reveal that the Integrity Initiative is cultivating powerful allies inside the State Department, top DC think tanks, the FBI and the DHS, where it has gained access to Katharine Gorka and her husband, the fascist-linked cable news pundit Sebastian Gorka .

    The Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its network across the US, meddling in American politics and recruiting "a new generation of Russia watchers" behind the false guise of a non-partisan charity. Moreover, the group has hired one of the most notorious American "perception management" specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of pundits and cultivate relationships with the media.

    Back in the UK, Member of Parliament Chris Williamson has clamored for an investigation into the Integrity Initiative's abuse of public money.

    In a recent editorial , Williamson drew a direct parallel between the group's collaboration with journalists and surreptitious payments the CIA made to reporters during the Cold War.

    "These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool," Williamson wrote.

    "They manipulated the news agenda by recruiting leading journalists to write stories with the express purpose of influencing public opinion in a particular way," the Labour parliamentarian continued. "Now it seems the British Establishment have dusted off the CIA's old playbook and is intent on giving it another outing on this side of the Atlantic."

    Unmasking a British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine

    The existence of the Integrity Initiative was virtually unknown until this November, when the email servers of a previously obscure British think tank called the Institute for Statecraft were hacked, prompting allegations of Russian intrusion. When the group's internal documents appeared at a website hosted by Anonymous Europe, the public learned of a covert propaganda network seed-funded to the tune of over $2 million dollars by the Tory-controlled UK Foreign Office, and run largely by military-intelligence officers.

    Through a series of cash inducements, off the record briefings and all-day conferences, the Integrity Initiative has sought to organize journalists across the West into an international echo chamber hyping up the supposed threat of Russian disinformation -- and to defame politicians and journalists critical of this new Cold War campaign.

    A bid for funding submitted by the Integrity Initiative in 2017 to the British Ministry of Defense promised to deliver a "tougher stance on Russia" by arranging for "more information published in the media on the threat of Russian active measures."

    The Integrity Initiative has also worked through its fronts in the media to smear political figures perceived as a threat to its militaristic agenda. Its targets have included a Spanish Department of Homeland Security appointee, Pedro Banos, whose nomination was scuttled thanks a media blitz it secretly orchestrated; Jeremy Corbyn, whom the outfit and its media cutouts painted as a useful idiot of Russia; and a Scottish member of parliament, Neil Findlay, whom one of its closest media allies accused of adopting "Kremlin messaging" for daring to protest the official visit of the far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy -- the founder of two neo-Nazi parties and author of a white nationalist memoir, "View From The Right."

    These smear campaigns and many more surreptitiously orchestrated by the Integrity Initiative offer a disturbing preview of the reactionary politics it plans to inject into an already toxic American political environment.

    Lessons from "The Man Who Sold the War"

    A newly released Integrity Initiative document reveals that the outfit plans an aggressive expansion across the US.

    The Integrity Initiative claims to have already established a "simple office" in Washington DC, though it does not say where. It also boasts of partnerships with top DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, CNA, and close relationships with US officials.

    A major hub of Integrity Initiative influence is the State Department's Global Engagement Center, a de facto US government propaganda operation that was established by President Barack Obama to battle online ISIS recruitment, but which was rapidly repurposed to counter Russian disinformation following the election of Trump.

    The Integrity Initiative has also recruited one of the most infamous American PR men to organize its clusters of journalists and political figures.

    He is John Rendon, best known as "The Man Who Sold The War" -- several wars, in fact, but most notoriously the Iraq invasion. Rendon was the self-described "information warrior" who planted fake news in the major US-UK media about non-existent WMD threats. With deep ties to the CIA and other military-intelligence agencies, his PR firm was paid $100 million to organize and sell Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. In 2002, the New York Times exposed a Pentagon program using Rendon to plant "disinformation" -- including "false stories" and "the blackest of black PR" -- in media outlets around the world, in order to shape public opinion and sell the Iraq invasion.

    John Rendon (left) with Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass, US Africa Command Chief of Staff (photo by US Africom Public Affairs)

    Journalist James Bamford outlined a catalogue of disinformation feats Rendon performed for the Pentagon, such as identifying "the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships." Bamford also found proposals and programs Rendon was involved in that aimed to "'coerce' foreign journalists and plant false information overseas [and] find ways to 'punish' those who convey the 'wrong message.'"

    These tactics seem particularly relevant to his work with the Integrity Initiative, especially considering the internal documents that reveal further Rendon-style plans to produce reports and studies to be "fed anonymously into local media." (Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily.)

    Keeping Up with the Gorkas

    Internal documents also refer to interactions between Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly and top Trump officials like Katharine Gorka , a vehemently anti-Muslim Department of Homeland Security official, as well as her husband, Sebastian, who earned right-wing fame during his brief tenure in Trump's White House.

    The latter Gorka is an open supporter of the Hungarian Vitezi Rend, a proto-fascist order that collaborated with Nazi Germany during its occupation of Hungary. Following Trump's election victory in 2016, Gorka appeared for televised interviews in a black Vitezi Rend uniform.

    Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb, with his wife, Katharine, on Election Night

    Gorka was among the first figures listed on an itinerary for Donnelly to Washington this September 18 to 22. The itinerary indicates that the two had breakfast before Donnelly delivered a presentation on "Mapping Russian Influence Activities" at the federally funded military research center, CNA .

    According to the itinerary, Donnelly was granted access to Pentagon officials like Mara Karlin , an up-and-coming neoconservative cadre , and John McCain Institute executive director Kurt Volker , another neoconservative operative who also serves as the US Special Representative for Ukraine. Numerous meetings with staffers inside the State Department's Office of Global Engagement were also detailed.

    A Foreign Agent in the State Department?

    Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal. Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team member:

    Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with "counter-propaganda," the State Department's Global Engagement Center has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My old job at the State Department was as chief propagandist," confessed former Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don't necessarily think it's that awful."

    Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal appeared in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world. Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation. His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the messenger.

    Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract.

    While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.

    As a cut-out of the British Foreign Office and Defense Ministry, the Integrity Initiative's work with current and former US officials and members of the media raises certain legal questions. For one, there is no indication that the group has registered under the Justice Department's Foreign Agent Registration Act, as most foreign agents of influence are required to do.

    Grants from the Neocons' Favorite Foundation

    An Integrity Initiative memo states that the right-wing Smith Richardson Foundation has also committed to ponying up funding for its US network as soon as the group receives 501 c-3 non-profit status. The foundation has already provided it with about $56,000 for covert propaganda activities across Europe.

    The Smith Richardson Foundation has old ties to the US intelligence community and controversial cold war influence operations. According to reporter Russ Bellant , the foundation was secretly bankrolling radical right-wing "indoctrination campaigns for the American public on cold war and foreign policy issues" -- programs that got the attention of Senator William Fulbright, who warned then-President Kennedy of their dangers. At one of these indoctrination seminars, a Smith Richardson Foundation director "told attendees that 'it is within the capacity of the people in this room to literally turn the State of Georgia into a civil war college,' in order to overcome their opponents."

    Smith Richardson has funded a who's who of the neoconservative movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War. "To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement," wrote journalist Kelley Vlahos.

    Besides Smith Richardson, the Integrity Initiative has stated its intention to apply for grants from the State Department "to expand the Integrity Initiative activities both within and outside of the USA." This is yet another indicator that the US government is paying for propaganda targeting its own citizens.

    The "Main Event" in Seattle

    An Integrity Initiative internal document argues that because "DC is well served by existing US institutions, such as those with which the Institute [for Statecraft] already collaborates," the organization should "concentrate on extending the work of the Integrity Initiative into major cities and key State capitals [sic] across the USA."

    This December 10, the Integrity Initiative organized what it called its "main event" in the US. It was a conference on disinformation held in Seattle, Washington under the auspices of a data firm called Adventium Labs. Together with the Technical Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, the Integrity Initiative listed Adventium Labs as one of its "first partners outside DC."

    Adventium is Minneapolis-based research and development firm that has reaped contracts from the US military, including a recent $5.4 million cyber-security grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

    Inside a modest-sized hotel conference room, the Adventium/Integrity event began with a speech by the Integrity Initiative's Simon Bracey-Lane. Two years prior, Bracey-Lane appeared on the American political scene as a field worker for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential primary run, earning media write-ups as the "Brit for Bernie." Now, the young operator was back in the US as the advance man for a military-intelligence cut-out that specialized in smearing left-wing political figures like Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader widely regarded as the British version of Sanders.

    Bracey-Lane opened his address by explaining that Integrity Initiative director Chris Donnelly had been unable to appear at the event, possibly because he was bogged down in the scandal back home. He proceeded to read remarks prepared by Donnelly that offered a window into the frighteningly militaristic mindset the Integrity Initiative aims to impose on the public through their media and political allies.

    According to Donnelly's comments, the West was no longer in a "peace time, rules based environment." From the halls of government to corporate boardrooms to even the UK's National Health System, "the conclusion is that we have to look for people who suit a wartime environment rather than peacetime."

    During Q&A, Bracey-Lane remarked that "we have to change the definition of war to encompass everything that war now encompasses," referring vaguely to various forms of "hybrid warfare."

    "There is a great deal to be done in communicating that to young people," he continued. "When we mean being at war we don't mean sending our boys off to fight. It's right here in our homes."

    The emphasis on restructuring society along martial lines mirrored the disturbing thinking also on display in notes of a private meeting between Donnelly and Gen. Richard Barrons in 2016. During that chat, the two officers decided that the British military should be removed from democratic supervision and be able to operate as "an independent body outside politics."

    While Bracey-Lane's presentation perfectly captured the military mindset of the Integrity Initiative, the speakers that followed him offered a diverse array of perspectives on the concept of disinformation, some more nuanced than others. But one talk stood out from the rest -- not because of its quality, but because of its complete lack thereof.

    Reanimating the "Red-Brown" Grifter

    Alexander Reid Ross (left) and Emmi Bevensee at the Integrity Initiative's "main event" in Seattle

    The presentation was delivered by Alexander Reid Ross, a half-baked political researcher who peddles computer-generated spiderweb relationship charts to prove the existence of a vast hidden network of "red-brown" alliances and "syncretic media" conspiracies controlled by puppeteers in Moscow.

    Ross is a lecturer on geography at Portland State University with no scholarly or journalistic credentials on Russia. His students have given him dismal marks at Rate My Professors, complaining about his "terrible monotone lectures" and his penchant for "insert[ing] his own ideologies into our class." But with a book, "Against the Fascist Creep," distributed by the well-known anarchist publishing house, AK Press, the middling academic has tried to make his name as a maverick analyst.

    Before the Integrity Initiative was exposed as a military-intelligence front operation, Ross was among a small coterie of pundits and self-styled disinformation experts that followed the group's Twitter account. The Integrity Initiative even retweeted his smear of War Nerd podcast co-host John Dolan.

    In a series of articles for the Southern Poverty Law Center last year, Ross attempted to bring his warmed-over Cold War theories to the broader public. He wound up trashing everyone from the co-author of this piece, Max Blumenthal, to Nation magazine publisher Katrina Vanden Heuvel to Harvard University professor of international relations Stephen Walt as hidden shadow-fascists secretly controlled by the Kremlin.

    The articles ultimately generated an embarrassing scandal and a series of public retractions by the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen. And then, like some Dr. Frankenstein for discredited and buried journalism careers, the British Ministry of Defense-backed Integrity Initiative moved in to reanimate Ross as a sought-after public intellectual.

    Before the Integrity Initiative-organized crowd, Ross offered a rambling recitation of his theory of a syncretic fascist alliance puppeteered by Russians: "The alt right takes from both this 'red-brown,' it's called, or like left-right syncretic highly international national of nationalisms, and from the United States' own paleoconservative movement, and it's sort of percolated down through college organizing, um, and anti-interventionism meets anti-imperialism. Right?"

    In a strange twist, Ross appeared on stage at the Integrity Initiative's Seattle event alongside Emmi Bevensee , a contributor to the left-libertarian Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank, whose tagline, "a left market anarchist think-tank" expresses its core aim of uniting far-left anarchists with free-market right-libertarians.

    Bevensee , a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona and self-described "Borderlands anarcho into tech and crypto," concluded her presentation by asserting a linkage between the alternative news site, Zero Hedge, and the "physical militarized presence in the borderlands" of anti-immigrant vigilantes. Like Bevensee, Ross has written for C4SS in the past.

    The irony of contributors to an anarchist group called the "Center for a Stateless Society" auditioning before The State – the most jackbooted element of it, in fact – for more opportunities to attack anti-war politicians and journalists, can hardly be overstated.

    But closer examination of the history of C4SS veers from irony into something much darker and more unsettling.

    Pedophile Co-Founder, White Nationalist Associates

    C4SS was co-founded in 2006 by a confessed child rapist and libertarian activist, Brad Spangler, who set the group up to promote "Market anarchism" to "replace Marxism on the left."

    When Spangler's child rape confessions emerged in 2015, the Center for Stateless Society founder was finally drummed out by his colleagues.

    There's more: Spangler's understudy and deputy in the C4SS, Kevin Carson -- currently listed as the group's "Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory" -- turned out to be a longtime friend and defender of white nationalist Keith Preston. Preston's name is prominently plastered on the back of Kevin Carson's book, hailing the C4SS man as "the Proudhon of our time" -- a loaded compliment, given Proudhon's unhinged anti-Semitism . Carson only disowned Preston in 2009, shortly before Preston helped white nationalist leader Richard Spencer launch his alt-right webzine, Alternative Right.

    The C4SS group currently participates in the annual Koch-backed International Students For Liberty conference in Washington DC, LibertyCon, a who's who of libertarian think-tank hacks and Republican Party semi-celebrities like Steve Forbes, FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and Alan Dershowitz.

    In 2013, C4SS's Kevin Carson tweeted out his dream fantasy that four Jewish leftists -- Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Corey Robin, and Mark Potok -- would die in a plane crash while struggling over a single parachute. Potok was an executive editor at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which last year retracted every one of the crank articles that Alexander Reid Ross published with them and formally apologized for having run them.

    For some reason, the super-sleuth Ross conveniently failed to investigate the libertarian group, C4SS, that he has chosen to partner with and publish in. That ability to shamelessly smear and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links to the far-right -- while cozying up to groups as sleazy as C4SS and authoritarian as the Integrity Initiative -- is the sort of adaptive trait that MI6 spies and the Rendon Group would find useful in a covert domestic influence operation.

    Ross did not respond to our request for comment on his involvement with the Integrity Initiative and C4SS.

    Disinformation for Democracy

    As it spans out across the US, the Integrity Initiative has stated its desire to "build a younger generation of Russia watchers." Toward this goal, it is supplementing its coterie of elite journalists, think tank hacks, spooks and State Department info-warriors with certifiable cranks like Ross.

    Less than 24 hours after Ross's appearance at the Integrity Initiative event in Seattle, he sent a menacing email to the co-author of this article, Ames, announcing his intention to recycle an old and discredited smear against him and publish it in the Daily Beast -- a publication that appears to enjoy a special relationship with Integrity Initiative personnel.

    Despite the threat of investigation in the UK, the Integrity Initiative's "network of networks" appears to be escalating its covert, government-funded influence operation, trashing the political left and assailing anyone that gets in its way -- all in the name of fighting foreign disinformation.

    "We have to win this one," Integrity Initiative founder Col. Chris Donnelly said , "because if we don't, democracy will be undermined."

    Disturbed Voter , January 10, 2019 at 4:26 am

    This is why you don't put spooks in charge. They are paid to be paranoid.

    pretzelattack , January 10, 2019 at 5:18 am

    making up lies to get paid. james angleton was paranoid (not that it seemed to make him more effective in counterintelligence)–these people are just con artists, paid to be con artists.
    i'm just waiting for "we have to undermine democracy in order to save it".

    Pym of Nantucket , January 10, 2019 at 5:46 pm

    Agreed. Not only are they paid to make things up, but they have an ingenious scheme for paying themselves from narcotics and arms dealing.

    The most amazing feat of confidence artistry (apart from maybe the TARP bailout (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program ) is their remarkable ability to convince the population they are needed and working on our behalf instead of being in jail where they belong.

    nobody , January 10, 2019 at 6:06 am

    I first heard about this enterprise/outfit from 21st Century Wire .

    Peter , January 10, 2019 at 6:40 am

    hat story has been around since at least December 17. https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/12/17/inside-the-temple-of-covert-propaganda-the-integrity-initiative-and-the-uks-scandalous-information-war/
    maybe you should change your sources

    Richard H Caldwell , January 10, 2019 at 6:52 am

    Gotta love Mark Ames

    jsn , January 10, 2019 at 6:55 am

    b at Moon of Alabama posted on this on the 4th.

    David , January 10, 2019 at 7:01 am

    I submitted a long comment on this about an hour ago, which seems to have been eaten by the system. I won't repost it now, but I'll do so later if it doesn't surface.

    PlutoniumKun , January 10, 2019 at 7:58 am

    This is something that has repeatedly happened to me too recently – it often takes 2 or more hours for most of my recent posting to surface on the site. It rarely disappears altogether, so I would assume your post will eventually arrive.

    hemeantwell , January 10, 2019 at 9:25 am

    Same here on the delays. Keep a copy.
    But anyway, very glad you posted this piece. Whatever we make of Patreon, it's one way to support Mark Ames' work.

    flora , January 10, 2019 at 9:13 pm

    Me, too. Though not on this post. Me thinks much sp@m and tr0llery happening behind the scenes that the mods have to wade through comment by comment.

    jCandlish , January 10, 2019 at 7:50 am

    Sir Alan Duncan, responding on behalf of the Government to Emily Thornberry's urgent question (Dec 12) on recent allegations that the Foreign Office funded a company which carried out a smear campaign against the official Opposition.

    Chilling indeed.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBOwO-MAPKI

    RBHoughton , January 10, 2019 at 10:06 pm

    What a frightful fellow that Alan Duncan is eh? Talks like a Mafia lawyer and he's supposed to be a national leader. He reminds that other MP, the POS who interrogated David Kelly on TV, they both use the same style. Is it a qualification for legislator?

    The Rev Kev , January 10, 2019 at 8:23 am

    Just a minor note to start off. That image of "Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb". I think that Vitezi Rend actually refers to the medal he wears on the left. The jacket itself more resembles the patrol jacket that British officers wore in the 19th century. Moving on! Notice how the same players keep on coming up again and again in all these stories of skulduggery? John Rendon, the Atlantic Council, Ajit Pai and Alan Dershowitz – the same scum-bags with a few new wannabe players. As an example.
    The penchant that Brad Spangler, C4SS co-founder, has for under-age girls is disgusting of course but you have to put it into the context of the people that you are talking about. If Spengler was more rich or more powerful, you might see his name on a manifest for the "Lolita Express" but his activities would not be splashed about in an article like this one. That sort of activity is given a level of protection if you are in the right group. And it is a good thing that that British General Richard Barrons is retired as his comments are deserving of being cashiered.
    Funny how a group that claims to be about protecting democracy wants to push it aside and install propaganda on a "1984" level in the pursuit of their aims. I cannot decide if their target of Russia is a means or an end. If it is a means, that means using the boogy-man of Russia to radically restructure western society to their tastes. If it is an end, well, it is true that Russia has about $75 trillion in resources, mostly in Siberia and the east, so if it was broken up eventually, that would be a bonanza of wealth appropriation.
    I was thinking about the activities of this group and how they go about their activities, especially the smearing of anybody that talks truth to power. I wonder if anybody here made the connection with this story and the PropOrNot website that came out of nowhere about two years ago and that had the stamp of approval of the Washington Post. I would not be surprised if it turns out to be that PropOrNot was a trial balloon in the United States for the Integrity Initiative to establish what it was capable of. Just a thought.

    Martin Finnucane , January 10, 2019 at 9:39 am

    Vitezi Rend garb

    He looks like an extra from Star Wars – one of those nazi guys working the bridge of the Death Star. The "look and feel" of a lot of pre-war fascism strikes us as silly in retrospect, though it really wasn't at the time.

    EoH , January 10, 2019 at 10:35 am

    That tailored black jacket Sebastian wears looks like something Winston Churchill would have changed out of before that last cavalry charge at Omdurman. It seems intentionally designed to mimic 19th century great power imperial army officer garb. Nostalgia for the good times, apparently. Goes with his fascist priorities.

    bob , January 10, 2019 at 11:36 am

    " my father was Moonraker and that is part of my origin story "

    NSFW

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbQx0NTV4TU

    Tomonthebeach , January 10, 2019 at 9:25 pm

    Let us not get carried away with the exuberance of discovering skulduggery among fascist elements of the media and politics. This does not mean that the conspiracy means Russia is thereby a Goodie Twoshoes. It also does not mean that Russia is any less a pain in the ass than it has heretorfore be characterized.

    It does mean that there is less reason (any?) than ever to put much faith in FoxNews (already a mere propaganda machine) or other orgs. I am uncomfortable hearing CNA is caught up in this as they are a pseudo government thinktank with some Pentagon influence.

    If true, the story should be used to clear out some journalists and analyst riffraff. However, this story is surely not going to restore, much less create, any integrity among the Beltway Punditry.

    Off The Street , January 10, 2019 at 8:56 am

    The article and related matters may also shed more light on the abrupt resignation of Robert Hannigan from the leadership of GCHQ in January 2017 a few days after Trump's inauguration. Given previous revelations about GCHQ and NSA spying on each other's citizens, what else is next in the UK and in the US and elsewhere?

    After reading about that Carson character and others I am ready for a shower to try to wash off the disgust.

    DJG , January 10, 2019 at 9:01 am

    Yves Smith: Thanks for this. I am wondering about two stories that have been flapping around here for a few days: That odd New Knowledge company that produced the report about Russian influence on the elections as well as the story about the case before the Supreme Court of the US in which a company is invoking claims of sovereign immunity.

    I have a feeling that New Knowledge definitely fits into the framework outlined by Ames above. A contractor that appears out of nowhere with a "distinguished" board of concerned semi-liberals (at the trough)?

    But what do I know? Some guy named Volodya showed up at my house and bought my vote in 2016 for two bottles of pickled mushrooms

    diptherio , January 10, 2019 at 9:32 am

    Kevin Carson is always showing up in my twitter feed. I knew there was something I didn't like about that guy, anarchist or no.

    jfleni , January 10, 2019 at 9:38 am

    Perfideus Albion is not just a neat saying, but a truth that the Irish, French and
    Germans (etc.) have known forever, the people don't deserve it, but the
    jumped up Tories do in spades.

    pjay , January 10, 2019 at 9:48 am

    Thank you for highlighting this article! It names names and connects some dots, including some connections reaching into the U.S. It also describes propaganda mechanisms that have been around forever but have become pervasive today. A few protruding tips of a massive iceberg, in my view. I'm sure *this* "bombshell" story will get the massive coverage it deserves in the MSM -- not!

    diptherio , January 10, 2019 at 10:43 am

    Here's the response from C4SS, if anyone is interested:
    https://c4ss.org/content/51563

    jsn , January 10, 2019 at 1:11 pm

    That was interesting. Well argued all the way through I thought, but they could take a closer look at the unwinding of Yugoslavia; what Serbia and Syria have in common is having been targeted by outside state powers for dissolution, responses did vary.

    pjay , January 10, 2019 at 2:27 pm

    Thank you diptherio for posting the C4SS response. Such responses are helpful in evaluating issues like this, and we should always be open to the other side when they take the time to reply. However, I can't agree that the response was "well argued." The author does make some valid points, but mainly she resorts to ad hominem attacks on Ames (based on some juvenile antics at eXile that are often used to smear him), or on both authors because they may have agreed with "Assadists" like Ambassador Peter Ford or "9/11 Truthers" like Piers Robinson, whose claims about Syria or the White Helmets are, of course, Kremlin propaganda. Which brings up why Blumenthal would have changed his position on Syria; it was not because of his gradual understanding of what was really happening there. Rather, while he had once grasp the truth of the "revolution," he made the mistake of going to a Kremlin gala and the Rooskies (and RT) got to him. Now he is just another propagandist. Nowhere that I can see does the author discuss the major claims made in Ames and Blumenthal's article, or the evidence cited (except to say that if it was in RT or Sputnik, we can ignore it anyway as propaganda). Nor does she address the actual defamation made by Alexander Ross-Reid through the SPLC that pissed off Blumenthal in the first place. There are other problems (don't get me started on the "red-brown" smear), but that's enough.

    Having said all that, I do think that in their criticism of C4SS, Ames and Blumenthal perhaps did some unnecessary punching down. They could have made clearer the distinction between organizations like the Integrity Initiative, that are pretty clearly intelligence operatives or cut-outs, versus groups like C4SS that function more like "useful idiots" because of their ideological position (e.g. equating U.S. and Russian imperialism in this case in their "anarchist" appeal). The latter are in no way as evil as the former, in my mind.

    jsn , January 10, 2019 at 3:18 pm

    You are clearly much more engaged with the related debates than I. I read the piece as a response to the punching down you mention in your last paragraph and felt like I got a respectable read on someone still developing their arguments. I'm not informed enough to argue with much of it, but having read Diana Johnstone's "Fools Crusade", the Syria/Serbia bit stuck in my craw.

    I had thought about commenting on the ad hominems directed at Ames, but didn't want to get into the whole identity argument embedded in much of the language of the post. While I disagree with many of her positions and attitudes on the state actions she criticizes without, in my opinion, adequate grounding, I judged it a mostly good faith effort trying to find solid footing in a world increasingly thick with distorted narratives.

    It's hard to argue now, from anywhere with out power, without being someone's "useful idiot": trust has decayed to the point where language impedes communication in the political sphere.

    pjay , January 10, 2019 at 5:01 pm

    It's funny you should mention Johnstone's book. I normally would not use the derogatory term "useful idiot" for the very reason you imply; most such people are acting in good faith. I admit that her comments on Syria irritated me. But the reason I sometimes overreact to that sort of narrative is because of my own experiences as a useful idiot, starting with Yugoslavia. I fell for the liberal "humanitarian" argument hook, line, and sinker in the 1990s, even though I considered myself a knowledgeable progressive at the time. It wouldn't be the last time I was duped, but I'd like to think I'm a little wiser today.

    I appreciate your comment. We definitely need to distinguish empire propagandists from the beliefs of people honestly trying to find their way.

    rojo , January 10, 2019 at 6:41 pm

    I thought the later part of Ames' piece was unnecessary. It's kind of the same sort of guilt-by-attending-same-conference thing that I find annoying about the Russophobes.

    Keep focused on government malfeasance, not basement brown-shirts.

    Ignacio , January 10, 2019 at 11:00 am

    Oh well, there would be a lot to argue here. In one side it is nice to see that the "Initiative" is being exposed although it doesn't appear yet to trigger any significant response from supposedly democratic institutions like, let's say the english parliament (at ransom by brexit).

    Just to demonstrate how this article is well focused and pointed I wanted to comment on this bit:

    (Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily .)

    YES! iIt is so true that the former "center-left" –if you wish– daily that years ago was a must read but has been degraded to levels that I wouldn't have imagined, in a case that makes the Guardian as the "guardian of reporting-as-it should-be". One has to bear in mind that the current most important shareholder of Grupo Prisa (owner of El Pais) is an english hedge fund Amber Capital whose CEO, Joseph Oughorlian is chairman at Grupo Prisa and probably responsible for the Russia!Russia!Russia! campaign observed in this medium that surprised me so much. You don't find nothing similar in Spain even in rigth and rigth of the rigth news outlets.

    I believe this UK-based shareholder is clearly associated with the peculiar Russia!Russia!Russia! stance of the supposedly centre-left daily.

    juliania , January 10, 2019 at 12:24 pm

    For those of us from way back way back, these kooks relate to offshoots of the Watergate scandal, the original one, where people working on those burglaries of psychiatrist's offices and Democratic headquarters got their start organizing small gangs of crooks to infiltrate what was then a porous but trustable system of government – on they went to propose surveillance and collection of data that was at first publicly laughed about but on they went. On they went. Technology with all its pluses has these minuses we at first were able to counter (Church hearings) but the rats have scurried into all the back alleys and secretive pathways that need a thorough cleanup. It can be done, but it needs to be done periodically. Hopefully this is finally the year when that will happen.

    Thank you, Yves. I believe these folk don't end up in a good place, but meanwhile they are wreaking havoc. The place to start, after the brooms and mops, is to get money OUT of politics and restore a verifiable voting system that happens methodically and is trustworthy. The citizenry will be behind this. We the people don't care how long it takes to vote or to find out who won. We don't! Haste makes waste in more ways than we know.

    Let's do this. And please, judges, do your duty or go to jail yourselves.

    Andrew Watts , January 10, 2019 at 1:37 pm

    It's obvious that neither Ames or Blumenthal read the actual documents they're quoting from. Which is a shame considering the relevant one involving the CIA's Operation Mockingbird comparison was only seven pages long. The CIA were merely imitating British intelligence during the war and it is clearly stated as such when one of the replies involving General Sir Richard Barrons states that they've done this before during the 1930s. The US didn't possess a foreign intelligence agency at the time and I'd fervently argue that we still don't to this day.

    but I've already commented about British Security Coordination in the aftermath of PropOrNot though and I'm reluctant to beat a dead horse.

    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/links-12312016.html#comment-2736471
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/100755.html#comment-2737564
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/links-11217.html#comment-2742827
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/links-5-21-18.html#comment-2971759

    It's hard to be modest when you're this good.

    Roady , January 10, 2019 at 4:02 pm

    I wish I could be like Andrew Watts

    Chauncey Gardiner , January 10, 2019 at 3:27 pm

    Ah, the smell (or should we say stench) of domestic propaganda in the morning, ironically by some of the same individuals who brought us Iraq WMDs. While First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and other civil rights must be protected, it seems to me that a careful balance can be drawn under new legislation that insulates us from such government-sponsored propaganda. We should be able to rely on our government's representations. Instead, as with a former president who openly acknowledged, "My job is to catapult the propaganda," the reverse, together with a related loss of trust, unfortunately seems to be increasingly the case. Stop lying! What part of "of the People, by the People, for the People," is difficult to understand?

    [Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are. ..."
    "... If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. ..."
    "... Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.) ..."
    "... No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors." ..."
    "... These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose. ..."
    "... "It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any debate in Congress or the media." ..."
    "... To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand. ..."
    "... So Trump did morph into Hillary. Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State calling the shots. ..."
    "... The Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018 equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within. ..."
    "... The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative. ..."
    "... I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!). ..."
    Jan 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    It's fact: Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump's foreign policy.

    A couple of months back, Bloomberg's Eli Lake let it know he was in neoconservative nirvana:

    " for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. 'The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,' Trump said. 'We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'"

    "For a moment," swooned Lake , "I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting."

    Onward to Venezuela! Mr. Lake, a neoconservative, was loving every moment. In error, he and his kind confuse an expansionist foreign policy with "American exceptionalism." It's not.

    As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are.

    So, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have enlisted the West in "a proxy Sunni-Shia religious war," Riyadh's ultimate aim. Donald Trump has been perfectly willing to partake. After a campaign of "America First," the president sided with Sunni Islam while demonizing Iran. Iranians have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between 1975-2015; Saudi Arabians murdered 2369 !

    Iranians recently reelected a reformer. Pray tell who elected the Gulf petrostate sheiks?

    Moderates danced in the streets of Tehran when President Hassan Rouhani was reelected. Curiously, they're currently rioting.

    If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. For the Left and the pseudo-Right, this is a look-away issue. As the left-liberal establishment lectures daily, to question the Central Intelligence Agency -- its spooks are also agitating against all vestiges of President Trump's original "America First" plank -- is to "undermine American democracy."

    Besides, "good" Americans know that only the Russians "meddle."

    In Saudi Arabia, a new, more-dangerous regime is consolidating regional power. Almost overnight has the kingdom shifted from rule by family dynasty (like that of the Clintons and the Bushes), to a more authoritarian style of one-man rule .

    When it comes to the Saudi-Israeli-American-Axis-of-Angels, the Kushner-Trump Administration -- is that another bloodline in-the-making? -- has not broken with America's ruling dynastic families (the Clintons and the Bushes, aforementioned).

    It's comforting to know Saudi Arabia plays a crucial role in the UN's human rights affairs. In January of last year, the Kingdom executed 47 people in one day, including a rather benign Shiite cleric. Fear not, they went quickly, beheaded with a sword .

    Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.)

    Our bosom buddies, the Saudi's, are currently barricading Yemeni ports. No aid gets through her hermetically sealed ports. Yemenis are dying. Some Twitter followers twittered with joy at the sight of starving Yemeni babies, like this one . Oh well, Yemeni babies can be sinister.

    No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors."

    These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose.

    "It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any debate in Congress or the media."

    Indeed, while outlining his "new" Afghanistan plan, POTUS had conceded that "the American people are weary of war without victory." (Make that war, full-stop.) Depressingly, the president went on to promise an increase in American presence in Afghanistan. By sending 4000 additional soldiers there, President Trump alleged he was fighting terrorism, yet not undertaking nation building.

    This is tantamount to talking out of both sides of one's mouth.

    Teasing apart these two elements is near-impossible. Send "4,000 additional soldiers to add to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan," and you've done what Obama and Bush before you did in that blighted and benighted region: muddle along; kill some civilians mixed in with some bad guys; break bread with tribal leaders (who hate your guts); mediate and bribe.

    Above all, spend billions not your own to perfect the credo of a global fighting force that doesn't know Shiite from Shinola .

    The upshot? It's quite acceptable, on the Left and the pseudo-Right, to casually quip about troops in Niger and Norway . "We have soldiers in Niger and Norway? Of course we do. We need them."

    With neoconservatism normalized, there is no debate, disagreement or daylight between our dangerously united political factions.

    This is the gift President Trump has given mainstream neoconservatives -- who now comfortably include neoliberals and all Conservatism Inc., with the exceptions of Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.

    How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism: In 2016, liberals accused candidate Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives -- aka Conservatism Inc. -- did the same.

    Having consistently complained of his isolationism , the Left and the phony Right cannot but sanction President Trump's interventionism . The other option is to admit that we of the callused Old Right, who rejoiced at the prospects and promise of non-interventionism, were always right.

    Not going to happen.

    To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand.

    Ilana Mercer has been writing a paleolibertarian column since 1999, and is the author of " The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed " (June, 2016) & " Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa " (2011). Follow her on Twitter , Facebook , Gab & YouTube . How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism, by Ilana Mercer - The Unz Review

    utu , says: January 5, 2018 at 5:57 am GMT

    You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

    But you can fool the whole country all the time in American bi-partisan system. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump each were brought to power by fooling their electorate.

    Biff , says: January 5, 2018 at 9:02 am GMT
    So Trump did morph into Hillary. Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State calling the shots.

    I'm waiting for another one of those "Trump's Truth in Action" moments when describes the real political atmosphere in Washington. Trump was asked about something he said in a previous interview: "When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do." "You'd better believe it," Trump said. "If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of the people on this stage I've given to, just so you understand, a lot of money."

    EliteCommInc. , says: January 5, 2018 at 9:11 am GMT
    I think its time to dump the label "neoconservative". The appropriate term is "interventionists without a cause" (IWAC or IWC) or some other descriptor.

    The real problem that Pres Trump has and I remain a Pres Trump supporter is two fold:

    1. He seems to have forgotten he won the election.

    2. He seems to have forgotten what he was elected to do.

    And nearly everyone of these issues on foreign policy the answer rests in respecting sovereignty – that of others and our own.

    I didn't need to read,"Adios, America" to comprehend the deep state damage our careless immigration policy has on the country. I don't need to reread, "Adios, America" to grasp that our policies of intervening in the affairs of other states undermines our own ability to make the same case at home.

    If I weren't already trying to plow my way through several other books, documentaries and relapsing to old school programming such as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and now the Dick Van Dyke show, i would reread,

    "Adios , America."

    In Col. Bacevich's book,

    Washington Rules, he posits a distressing scenario that the foreign policy web is so tangled and entrenched, the executive branch is simply out his league. The expectation was that Pres trump had the will to turn the matter. I hold out hope, but maybe not. There's time.

    I agree, at least build the darn wall.

    Lincoln Blockface Squarebeard III , says: January 5, 2018 at 10:01 am GMT
    @J.Ross The Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018 equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within.
    anonymous Disclaimer , says: January 5, 2018 at 11:03 am GMT
    Told you so. Cf., "The Winning Trump Ticket & Cabinet (Part I)," published here February 6, 2016. (Ms. Mercer never got to Part II.)

    Elections at the USG level allow the ruled to harmlessly let off steam.

    The Alarmist , says: January 5, 2018 at 11:39 am GMT
    It's life imitating art: Trump reprises the role of Professor/Führer John Gill in Star Trek episode 50, Patterns of Force.
    neutral , says: January 5, 2018 at 11:56 am GMT
    The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative.

    I have a question for all the Trump supporters still in denial, what will it take to break your delusions? He is not going to build a wall, mass immigration is up, the left wing are mass censoring and essentially running everything now, his foreign policy is now endorsed by the all the never Trumpers – so what is your limit, is there anything he must do to lose your support?

    Anonymous Disclaimer , says: January 5, 2018 at 1:17 pm GMT
    @Anonymous

    Jews and the Jewish Media normalized Jewish NeoCons by guaranteeing that they always have a voice and airtime in American culture and media. Never called out by the WashingtonPost and NY Times for their previous blunders, they continue to shape American foreign policy. And, of course, the end game here is Israel and the Israeli agenda at all costs, you Jews are one issue folk. And You definitely do your part, with the subtle subterfuge at work in the articles that you write.

    No one should be surprised by Trump promoting Israeli interests über alles. For decades he was so involved in Israel events in New York I debated whether he was actually Jewish or not. Bannon said the embassy move to Jerusalem was at the behest of Adelson, Trump's old casino buddy. In the campaign Trump got a lot of support from NY Jewish billionaires (Icahn, Feinberg, Paulson, et al.). They know him and how he operates.

    But being pro-Israel doesn't necessarily equate to neocon. The neocons are the dumb Jews with serious inadequacy issues who could never make it in business and instead went into politics and journalism. The latter are still staunchly opposed to Trump even after a lot of pro-Israel moves. They might warm up to Trump's bellicosity towards a lot of Israel's enemies (a long list with degrees of separation), but so far they've simply moved left.

    I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!).

    Lastly, I like to think Trump surrounded himself with neocons (McMaster, Haley, et al.) to placate the GOP establishment because he knows he has to play the game.

    anonymous Disclaimer , says: January 5, 2018 at 1:42 pm GMT
    @Lincoln Blockface Squarebeard III Very well put.

    People are inclined to believe that any activity -- in this instance, voting for the red/blue puppets in Washington -- in which their participation is patronized must be legitimate and effectual. Many duped in November 2016, even those who now feel betrayed by that farce, were still around here a few weeks ago acting like a Senator Moore in Alabama would be pivotal to reform, his defeat devastating.

    That's how Ms. Mercer and her pundit ilk (Buchanan, Napolitano, etc.) thrive -- supporting the Empire by never questioning its legitimacy, just taking sides within the Establishment. And they'll be buying into the 2018 congressional contests, ad nauseum.

    Of course, what is done to us, and to others in our name and with our money, never changes to any meaningful degree. Americans might realize this if they thought critically about it, so they don't. Instead, they lap up the BS and vote for who tells them the lie they like to hear. When there are identity politics involved, the delusion seems even deeper. There are self-styled "progressives" who used to advocate single-payer, nationalized health care who are elated over the retention of so-called "Obamacare," the legislation for which was written by and for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

    Me? I cope by boycotting national elections and mass media, participating in forums like this, and hoping that when the tottering tower of debt and gore tips over, as few innocents and as many guilty as practicable are among those crushed.

    DESERT FOX , says: January 5, 2018 at 1:49 pm GMT
    The Zionist neocons and Israel did 911 and got away with it and everyone in the U.S. gov knows it and they tried to sink the USS LIBERTY and got away with it and so normal is an Orwellian society where Zionists can kill Americans and destroy the Mideast and nobody does jack shit about it.

    The neocons are Satanists warmongers and will destroy America.

    WorkingClass , says: Website January 5, 2018 at 1:51 pm GMT
    Neocons are Zionists. Trump, Bannon and Kushner are Zionists. Israel continues to wag the dog.
    Jake , says: January 5, 2018 at 2:48 pm GMT
    Neocons are about as evil as proudly proclaimed Leftists, and they are obviously more duplicitous.

    Either Neocons will be refuted and publicly rebuked and rejected, or Neocons will eventually destroy the country. Their long term fruits are destruction of that which they have used to destroy so many others.

    Jake , says: January 5, 2018 at 2:56 pm GMT
    @anonymous Far from all Neocons are Jews. However, virtually all Neocons are militantly pro-Israel to the point of making Israel's foreign policy desires central to their assessment of what America needs in foreign policy.

    And the source is Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing heresy. Judaizing heresy necessarily produces pro-Jewish culture. WASP culture is inherently pro-Jewish, as much as it is anti-Catholic and anti-French and and anti-Spanish and anti-Irish, etc.

    And all that means that WASP is opposed to the nest interests of the vast majority of white Christians while being pro-Jewish.

    Jews did not cause any of that. Anglo-Saxon Puritan heretics did.

    ElitecommInc. , says: January 5, 2018 at 4:22 pm GMT
    @neutral Pres Trump is a situational leader. It's a rare style, for good reason. However, he is openly situational. That was clear during the campaign season. however,

    I thought his positions were sincere. I don't think that this was any kind of slight of hand, "watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat". His positions on Israel, same sex behavior, marijuana, healthcare remain what they were going in. His foreign policy and immigration positions have been buffered and he seems incapable of standing where he came in.

    It was no secret he intended an assertive military. However, he seems easily convinced that strong means aggressive, and that needlessly aggressive policy is a substitute for a strong US -- that is a mistake. Syria cruise strike was the first sign that he was giving in to the men whom he chose as advisers. As it it turns out winning the election has been easier than governing. I assumed he had a much stronger backbone, than he has been willing to exhibit in office.

    Alden , says: January 5, 2018 at 7:09 pm GMT
    @Jake The Israeli/AIPAC bribery of American bible thumper preachers, especially in the fundamentalist southern American states has more to do with it than the reformation.

    The preachers get huge donations to pay for their churches and TV shows. They get free trips to Israel for themselves and their families all the time.

    On their Israel trips they pay more attention to the OT Jewish and holocaust sites than the Christian ones

    It's true that the reformation was a return to Judaism and a rejection of Christianity, but that was 500 years ago.

    What's important now is the vast amounts of money the Israeli government and the lobby funnels into those fundamentalist churches.

    If the southern fundamentalists only knew what Jews think of them. I really got an earful of Jewish scorn and hate for southerners and fundamentalists during the recent Roy Moore election.

    Read Jewish publications if you want to learn what they think of southern fundamentalists

    renfro , says: January 6, 2018 at 2:13 am GMT
    @Twodees Partain Trump appointed Haley because Sheldon Adelson told him to.
    And contrary to the myth of trump funding his own campaign he did not the only money he put in his campaign was a 1o million loan to it. Adelson was his biggest contributor just like Saban was Hillary's.

    Nikki Haley: Neocon Heartthrob

    Not coincidentally, however, neocon hopes may lie as well with the generous political funding provided to Haley by Sheldon Adelson, the GOP's and Trump's single biggest donor.

    Between May and June, 2016, Sheldon Adelson contributed $250,000 to Haley's 527 political organization, A Great Day, funds that she used to target four Republican state senate rivals in primaries. (Only one was successfully defeated.) Adelson was the largest contributor to her group,
    which raised a total of $915,000.

    This powerful Adelson-funded Israel lobby could soon rival AIPAC's
    https://www.haaretz.com › U.S. News
    Oct 31, 2017 – Sheldon Adelson(L), The 3rd annual IAC National Conference, in September, 2016, and Nikki Haley. . will feature, for the first time ever, a prominent speaker from the ranks of the U.S. government: U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who is a favorite among the right-leaning "pro-Israel" crowd.

    The Jews have bought this government and trump and Haley are nothing but junk yard dogs.
    Not that there are good alternatives but anyone who stills supports trump is as crazy as he is.

    renfro , says: January 6, 2018 at 2:18 am GMT
    @Alden

    What's important now is the vast amounts of money the Israeli government and the lobby funnels into those fundamentalist churches.

    You have it completely backwards .the evangelicals, particularly Roberson donate money for Israeli settlements.

    Grandpa Charlie , says: January 6, 2018 at 3:58 am GMT
    @Alden

    The title is ridiculous. Neo conservatives have been normal for decades.

    The neocon movement was normalized in 2001 by the PATRIOT Act. The domestic side of the neocon worldview -- or world-system -- was joined with the international or interventionist side, just as anti-Palestinian actions by Israel were joined by way of repression of free speech with the Charlottesville protest by conservatives of the desecration of monuments.

    Alden , says: January 6, 2018 at 4:45 am GMT
    @renfro I'm sure the evangelical preachers con their followers into donating money to Israel. I've seen those late night ads begging for donations to feed ancient old holocaust survivors in Israel.

    But the Israelis pay for all those luxury trips to Israel And a lot of the money to start those TV shows and for the big salaries come from Israel and AIPAC so does the money to set up those big churches that just appear from nowhere

    polskijoe , says: January 6, 2018 at 3:15 pm GMT
    @Grandpa Charlie I have always wondered why its okay to say WASP but not Jew in public.
    One is more pc, the other is not allowed.
    I have seen some articles about Jews replacing wasp, even from Jewish authors.

    As for Neoconservatives. It depends how we define it.
    I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large overlap, but not always.
    From what I know modern Neoconservativism started somewhere around the 70s,80s? Became dominant around the Bush years. (during Reagan years they got rid of many Paleocons).

    TT , says: January 6, 2018 at 7:08 pm GMT
    @Twodees Partain Not only Nikki is a prank, she is also a godsend. Now the world get to see USG naked without usual pretension.

    Trumps is probably the most honest Potus with highest integrity & bravery in American history(stupid aside). He means what he said without mind boggling hypocrite lies, he tried fulfilling all his election promises, fighting bravely with his only little weapon tweeter besiege by entire states organs, CIA/FBI, both parties, MSM, world allies,

    He put US Embassy in Jerusalem that all other Potus promised but never keep, he tried to revise immigration policy that people blocked, building prototype wall now, try befriend Russia become a treason act, reneged nuclear agreement with Iran, make US military great(of course need hyper tension like nuclear NK), scraped Obacare, TTP, Climate deal, try to grab Killary, bring back jobs with tax heaven .

    Mann, this is really a man of his word. Didn't these are what you people voted him for, to drain the swamp? He gotta shock the entire MSM brainwashed nation up to see the deeply corrupted USG, collapse it quickly for a new one to move in(by whoever after his prank). As Trumps had asked:"what you got to lose to vote me?"

    TT , says: January 6, 2018 at 10:26 pm GMT
    @Twodees Partain Yes..ues i admit, don't shoot. Im just been sarcastic, USG is in such a laughing stock to the world now, many americans probably are exasperated if not yet numb. I am not judging he is good, DT is just less evil typical business man..imo

    But frankly, i do see why people are voting DT now. He is at least more entertaining and blunt to screw up WH deep states show. Per msm (fake news), he is honouring all his campaign promises rt? So that make him above hypocrite liar Obama who speak on peace(Nobel prize), but drenched in Libyan and Syrians blood.

    US msm brainwashed people need lot of shock & awe to wake up to reality, then they might have hope to drain the swamp in unity or just await to implode and suck down whole world.

    Erebus , says: January 7, 2018 at 9:51 am GMT

    No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy.

    Well, some better minds than mine do deny that very thing. Three of them follow below.

    Gilbert Doctorow at: http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2017/12/20/kissinger-s-fingerprints-on-the-trump-security-doctrine-2017-1161961.html

    What we see in the NSS is prioritization and true strategic vision as opposed to ideological cant and ad hoc responses to global developments

    Patrick Armstrong at: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/01/02/trump-cuts-gordian-knot-foreign-entanglements.html

    Trump has little interest in the obsessions of the neocon and humanitarian intervention crowd.

    Finally, Andrew Korybko puts it all together at: https://orientalreview.org/2017/12/27/trump-agent-chaos-k-kraken/

    Believing that the current world system no longer sufficiently advances American interests ever since Washington lost control of its institutional tools, and that the eventual outcome of this increasingly multipolar state of affairs is that the US will in turn lose its global empire, Trump has decided to become the Agent of Chaos in bringing about its destruction.

    Steve Gittelson , says: January 8, 2018 at 6:32 pm GMT
    @Ilyana_Rozumova

    I know with certainty that Hillary is a beast from depth of hell.

    Meh, hyperbole.

    Hillary is no different from most politicians. She's in it for the wealth and power. She got herself a real smart, duplicitous, pussy-chasing beast of a husband, and made the most of the opportunity.

    People -- the American people -- should be able to see this rather-evident characteristic of politicians. They should be adequately educated, at least to the extent of being able to detect the base chicanery and corruption that radiates from political personalities.

    But, they don't. They don't see the evil. The media deftly conceals it, because the beasts of the media, like jackals, feed on the morsels of wealth that fall to the ground as the politicians devour the carcass of well, hell, freedom and democracy is as useful a metaphor as any.

    ILANA MERCER , says: Website January 9, 2018 at 6:15 am GMT
    @anonymous Thank you for the opportunity to share, once again, a magnificent column, published on the Unz Review and elsewhere.

    "The Curious Case Of WND's Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian" ( http://www.unz.com/imercer/the-curious-case-of-wnds-vanishing-veteran-paleolibertarian/ ) addressed, for once and for all, a small, shrinking community's stunning and consistent displays of intellectual dishonesty, over the years.

    In this context, I am reminded of British comedian Alexei Sayle. When asked what he does when he watches a really talented satirist performing, Sayle replied: "I go back stage and tell him he'll never make it."

    Indeed, the attitude to my work over 20 years has been the best proof of its quality.

    If the Comments threads about "ilana mercer," on the Unz Review, prove anything (other than that anti-Semitism lives), it is that mediocre "men" (for the most) hate a woman who can out-think them. As a defender of men, this saddens me, but it is, nevertheless, true.

    So here is the link to "The Curious Case Of WND's Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian," which the venomous mediocrity commenting here so rudely derided, but refrained from linking, for obvious reasons: http://www.unz.com/imercer/the-curious-case-of-wnds-vanishing-veteran-paleolibertarian/

    Ron Unz, our wonderful editor, chose the image appended to the column. (The brilliant Mr. Unz is one of the few intellectually honest individuals I know in this biz. He, columnist Jack Kerwick, and a handful of others.)

    In reply to kunckle-dragger's sniveling: I'll continue to refrain from interacting with his ilk ("fanboys") on my column's thread. But this particular dreadful cur (with apologies to dogs, which I love) further embarrasses himself when he offers up the non sequitur that engaging him is the litmus test for being a "good writer."

    dfordoom , says: Website January 10, 2018 at 12:07 am GMT
    @polskijoe

    I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large overlap, but not always.

    Agreed. American imperialism has a long long history (going back to at least the mid-19th century). That's why the neocons were able to gain so much influence. They were appealing to a pre-existing imperialist sentiment.

    dfordoom , says: Website January 10, 2018 at 12:11 am GMT
    @Ilyana_Rozumova

    There is a large group of US politician non Jews
    who also are pushing this policies. So these two groups together would be called Neocons.
    There is a large group in US population, that find this idea very appealing.

    That's why Make America Great Again was such a popular slogan. It appeals to mindless American jingoism and imperialism.

    dfordoom , says: Website January 10, 2018 at 12:14 am GMT
    @Twodees Partain

    There are people who claim to have high IQs who are totally stupid in practical matters.

    I'd almost go so far as to suggest that there's a direct correlation between high IQ and stupidity in practical matters.

    Talha , says: January 10, 2018 at 4:18 am GMT
    @dfordoom Edward Dutton stated that it was a trade-off between intelligence on one side and instinct on another – both are necessary for survival. For me, intelligence does not seem to correlate directly to wisdom.

    Peace.

    renfro , says: January 10, 2018 at 6:13 pm GMT
    @Twodees Partain

    If so, that reinforces my view that Trump doesn't know anybody in the Swamp

    You are exactly right.

    Trump really knew no one to hire or appoint to anything except his NY cronies , mainly his Jewish lawyers and Kushner contacts.
    So he appointed anyone they and his biggest donors recommended to him.
    His ego and insecurity demanded he surround himself with his NY cohorts and close family.

    dfordoom , says: Website January 11, 2018 at 1:59 am GMT
    @Authenticjazzman

    " It appeals to mindless American jingoism and imperialism" = "Make America great again"

    So you would prefer : "Make America powerless and insignificant again"

    How about "Make America a normal nation that respects other nations' sovereignty, that doesn't plant military bases on foreign soil, that doesn't bomb other people's countries, doesn't try to impose its views and its culture on the rest of the world, doesn't undermine the governments of other countries and doesn't threaten any country that dares to disagree with it." Would that be too much to ask?

    I would have thought that someone "Mensa" qualified since 1973 could understand that greatness should not be equated with behaving like a thug or a schoolyard bully. America's aggression does tend to look like the manifestation of a massive inferiority complex.

    HogHappenin , says: January 11, 2018 at 4:32 am GMT
    I commend Ms. Mercer for publishing this which will no doubt bring to light an ugly truth about many of her own tribesmen since there many of her other views which I wholly or partially disagree with

    And as was said sometime before, the thought process of earlier elites (the banking, Hollywood and the neo-con, neo-lib crowd which was almost exclusively Zio-Jewish and is disproportionately still is) has creeped into the very being of what constitutes to be an "elite" in the west these days. Unlimited warfare and welfare using fraudulent money, disturbing the social and sexual fabric of a society! Satan would be quite proud of this scum bunch

    So the zionist cabal still calls the shots and the slavish goyim second tier elites now willingly go along and in fact share the same mentality

    [Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior. ..."
    "... That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did. ..."
    "... So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. ..."
    "... The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether. ..."
    "... Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. ..."
    Jan 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Earlier this week, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:

    "Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a glorious end!"

    The tweet was warmly received and celebrated by Trump's supporters, despite the fact that it says essentially nothing since "eventually" could mean anything.

    Indeed, it's looking increasingly possible that nothing will come of the president's stated agenda to withdraw troops from Syria other than a bunch of words which allow his anti-interventionist base to feel nice feelings inside. Yet everyone laps it up, on both ends of the political aisle, just like they always do:

    How are such wildly different pictures being painted about the same non-event? By the fact that both sides of the Trump-Syria debate have thus far been reacting solely to narrative.

    This has consistently been the story throughout Trump's presidency: a heavy emphasis on words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions. A rude tweet can dominate headlines for days, while the actual behaviors of this administration can go almost completely ignored. Trump continues to more or less advance the same warmongering Orwellian globalist policies and agendas as his predecessors along more or less the same trajectory, but frantic mass media narratives are churned out every day painting him as some unprecedented deviation from the norm. Trump himself, seemingly aware that he's interacting entirely with perceptions and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often claims he's "never said" things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don't matter in this media environment, only narrative does.

    Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior.

    That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did.

    So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. With the nuclear brinkmanship this administration has been playing with its only nuclear rival on the planet, it would be so incredibly easy for Trump's opposition to attack him on his insanely hawkish escalation of a conflict which could easily end all life on earth if any little thing goes wrong, but they don't. Because this is all about narrative and not facts, Democrats have been paced into supporting even more sanctioning, proxy conflicts and nuclear posturing while loudly objecting to any sign of communication between the two nuclear superpowers, while Republicans are happy to see Trump increase tensions with Moscow because it combats the collusion narrative. Now both parties are supporting an anti-Russia agenda which existed in secretive US government agencies long before the 2016 election .

    And this to me is the most significant thing about Trump's presidency. Not any of the things people tell me I'm supposed to care about, but the fact that the age of Trump has been highlighting in a very clear way how we're all being manipulated by manufactured narratives all the time.

    Humanity lives in a world of mental narrative . We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and attention than the actual data itself. We use labels and stories for a reason: without them it would be impossible to share abstract ideas and information with each other about what's going on in our world. But those labels and stories get imbued with an intense amount of belief and identification; we form tight, rigid belief structures about our world, our society, and our very selves that can generate a lot of fear, hatred and suffering. Which is why it feels so nice to go out into nature and relax in an environment that isn't shaped by human mental narrative.

    This problem is exponentially exacerbated by the fact that these stories and labels are wildly subjective and very easily manipulated. Powerful people have learned that they can control the way everyone else thinks, acts and votes by controlling the stories they tell themselves about what's going on in the world using mass media control and financial political influence, allowing ostensible democracies to be conducted in a way which serves power far more efficiently than any dictatorship.

    So now America has a president who is escalating a dangerous cold war against Russia , who is working to prosecute Julian Assange and shut down WikiLeaks , who is expanding the same war on whistleblowers and Orwellian surveillance network that was expanded by Bush and Obama before him, who has expanded existing wars and made no tangible move as yet to scale them back, who is advancing the longstanding neocon agenda of regime change in Iran with starvation sanctions and CIA covert ops , and yet the two prevailing narratives about him are that he's either (A) a swamp-draining, establishment-fighting hero of peace or that he's (B) a treasonous Putin lackey who isn't nearly hawkish enough toward Russia.

    See how both A and B herd the public away from opposing the dangerous pro-establishment agendas being advanced by this administration? The dominant narratives could not possibly be more different from what's actually going on, and the only reason they're the dominant narratives is because an alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies exerts an immense amount of influence over the stories that are told by the political/media class.

    The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether.

    Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. It is possible that this is what it looks like when a thinking species evolves into a sane and healthy relationship with thought. Perhaps the cracks that are appearing all over official narratives today are like the first cracks appearing in an eggshell as a bird begins to hatch into the world.

    * * *

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet new merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

    [Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project ..."
    "... The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US. ..."
    Jan 11, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project

    The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US.

    A bombshell domestic spy scandal has been unfolding in Britain, after hacked internal communications exposed a covert UK state military-intelligence psychological warfare operation targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied NATO countries under the cover of fighting "Russian disinformation."

    The leaked documents revealed a secret network of spies, prominent journalists and think-tanks colluding under the umbrella of a group called "Integrity Initiative" to shape domestic opinion -- and to smear political opponents of the right-wing Tory government, including the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

    Until now, this Integrity Initiative domestic spy scandal has been ignored in the American media, perhaps because it has mostly involved British names. But it is clear that the influence operation has already been activated in the US. Hacked documents reveal that the Integrity Initiative is cultivating powerful allies inside the State Department, top DC think tanks, the FBI and the DHS, where it has gained access to Katharine Gorka and her husband, the fascist-linked cable news pundit Sebastian Gorka .

    The Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its network across the US, meddling in American politics and recruiting "a new generation of Russia watchers" behind the false guise of a non-partisan charity. Moreover, the group has hired one of the most notorious American "perception management" specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of pundits and cultivate relationships with the media.

    Back in the UK, Member of Parliament Chris Williamson has clamored for an investigation into the Integrity Initiative's abuse of public money.

    In a recent editorial , Williamson drew a direct parallel between the group's collaboration with journalists and surreptitious payments the CIA made to reporters during the Cold War.

    "These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool," Williamson wrote.

    "They manipulated the news agenda by recruiting leading journalists to write stories with the express purpose of influencing public opinion in a particular way," the Labour parliamentarian continued. "Now it seems the British Establishment have dusted off the CIA's old playbook and is intent on giving it another outing on this side of the Atlantic."

    Unmasking a British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine

    The existence of the Integrity Initiative was virtually unknown until this November, when the email servers of a previously obscure British think tank called the Institute for Statecraft were hacked, prompting allegations of Russian intrusion. When the group's internal documents appeared at a website hosted by Anonymous Europe, the public learned of a covert propaganda network seed-funded to the tune of over $2 million dollars by the Tory-controlled UK Foreign Office, and run largely by military-intelligence officers.

    Through a series of cash inducements, off the record briefings and all-day conferences, the Integrity Initiative has sought to organize journalists across the West into an international echo chamber hyping up the supposed threat of Russian disinformation -- and to defame politicians and journalists critical of this new Cold War campaign.

    A bid for funding submitted by the Integrity Initiative in 2017 to the British Ministry of Defense promised to deliver a "tougher stance on Russia" by arranging for "more information published in the media on the threat of Russian active measures."

    The Integrity Initiative has also worked through its fronts in the media to smear political figures perceived as a threat to its militaristic agenda. Its targets have included a Spanish Department of Homeland Security appointee, Pedro Banos, whose nomination was scuttled thanks a media blitz it secretly orchestrated; Jeremy Corbyn, whom the outfit and its media cutouts painted as a useful idiot of Russia; and a Scottish member of parliament, Neil Findlay, whom one of its closest media allies accused of adopting "Kremlin messaging" for daring to protest the official visit of the far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy Parubiy -- the founder of two neo-Nazi parties and author of a white nationalist memoir, "View From The Right."

    These smear campaigns and many more surreptitiously orchestrated by the Integrity Initiative offer a disturbing preview of the reactionary politics it plans to inject into an already toxic American political environment.

    Lessons from "The Man Who Sold the War"

    A newly released Integrity Initiative document reveals that the outfit plans an aggressive expansion across the US.

    The Integrity Initiative claims to have already established a "simple office" in Washington DC, though it does not say where. It also boasts of partnerships with top DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, CNA, and close relationships with US officials.

    A major hub of Integrity Initiative influence is the State Department's Global Engagement Center, a de facto US government propaganda operation that was established by President Barack Obama to battle online ISIS recruitment, but which was rapidly repurposed to counter Russian disinformation following the election of Trump.

    The Integrity Initiative has also recruited one of the most infamous American PR men to organize its clusters of journalists and political figures.

    He is John Rendon, best known as "The Man Who Sold The War" -- several wars, in fact, but most notoriously the Iraq invasion. Rendon was the self-described "information warrior" who planted fake news in the major US-UK media about non-existent WMD threats. With deep ties to the CIA and other military-intelligence agencies, his PR firm was paid $100 million to organize and sell Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. In 2002, the New York Times exposed a Pentagon program using Rendon to plant "disinformation" -- including "false stories" and "the blackest of black PR" -- in media outlets around the world, in order to shape public opinion and sell the Iraq invasion.

    John Rendon (left) with Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass, US Africa Command Chief of Staff (photo by US Africom Public Affairs)

    Journalist James Bamford outlined a catalogue of disinformation feats Rendon performed for the Pentagon, such as identifying "the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships." Bamford also found proposals and programs Rendon was involved in that aimed to "'coerce' foreign journalists and plant false information overseas [and] find ways to 'punish' those who convey the 'wrong message.'"

    These tactics seem particularly relevant to his work with the Integrity Initiative, especially considering the internal documents that reveal further Rendon-style plans to produce reports and studies to be "fed anonymously into local media." (Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily.)

    Keeping Up with the Gorkas

    Internal documents also refer to interactions between Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly and top Trump officials like Katharine Gorka , a vehemently anti-Muslim Department of Homeland Security official, as well as her husband, Sebastian, who earned right-wing fame during his brief tenure in Trump's White House.

    The latter Gorka is an open supporter of the Hungarian Vitezi Rend, a proto-fascist order that collaborated with Nazi Germany during its occupation of Hungary. Following Trump's election victory in 2016, Gorka appeared for televised interviews in a black Vitezi Rend uniform.

    Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb, with his wife, Katharine, on Election Night

    Gorka was among the first figures listed on an itinerary for Donnelly to Washington this September 18 to 22. The itinerary indicates that the two had breakfast before Donnelly delivered a presentation on "Mapping Russian Influence Activities" at the federally funded military research center, CNA .

    According to the itinerary, Donnelly was granted access to Pentagon officials like Mara Karlin , an up-and-coming neoconservative cadre , and John McCain Institute executive director Kurt Volker , another neoconservative operative who also serves as the US Special Representative for Ukraine. Numerous meetings with staffers inside the State Department's Office of Global Engagement were also detailed.

    A Foreign Agent in the State Department?

    Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal. Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team member:

    Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with "counter-propaganda," the State Department's Global Engagement Center has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My old job at the State Department was as chief propagandist," confessed former Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don't necessarily think it's that awful."

    Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal appeared in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world. Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation. His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the messenger.

    Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract.

    While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.

    As a cut-out of the British Foreign Office and Defense Ministry, the Integrity Initiative's work with current and former US officials and members of the media raises certain legal questions. For one, there is no indication that the group has registered under the Justice Department's Foreign Agent Registration Act, as most foreign agents of influence are required to do.

    Grants from the Neocons' Favorite Foundation

    An Integrity Initiative memo states that the right-wing Smith Richardson Foundation has also committed to ponying up funding for its US network as soon as the group receives 501 c-3 non-profit status. The foundation has already provided it with about $56,000 for covert propaganda activities across Europe.

    The Smith Richardson Foundation has old ties to the US intelligence community and controversial cold war influence operations. According to reporter Russ Bellant , the foundation was secretly bankrolling radical right-wing "indoctrination campaigns for the American public on cold war and foreign policy issues" -- programs that got the attention of Senator William Fulbright, who warned then-President Kennedy of their dangers. At one of these indoctrination seminars, a Smith Richardson Foundation director "told attendees that 'it is within the capacity of the people in this room to literally turn the State of Georgia into a civil war college,' in order to overcome their opponents."

    Smith Richardson has funded a who's who of the neoconservative movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War. "To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement," wrote journalist Kelley Vlahos.

    Besides Smith Richardson, the Integrity Initiative has stated its intention to apply for grants from the State Department "to expand the Integrity Initiative activities both within and outside of the USA." This is yet another indicator that the US government is paying for propaganda targeting its own citizens.

    The "Main Event" in Seattle

    An Integrity Initiative internal document argues that because "DC is well served by existing US institutions, such as those with which the Institute [for Statecraft] already collaborates," the organization should "concentrate on extending the work of the Integrity Initiative into major cities and key State capitals [sic] across the USA."

    This December 10, the Integrity Initiative organized what it called its "main event" in the US. It was a conference on disinformation held in Seattle, Washington under the auspices of a data firm called Adventium Labs. Together with the Technical Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, the Integrity Initiative listed Adventium Labs as one of its "first partners outside DC."

    Adventium is Minneapolis-based research and development firm that has reaped contracts from the US military, including a recent $5.4 million cyber-security grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

    Inside a modest-sized hotel conference room, the Adventium/Integrity event began with a speech by the Integrity Initiative's Simon Bracey-Lane. Two years prior, Bracey-Lane appeared on the American political scene as a field worker for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential primary run, earning media write-ups as the "Brit for Bernie." Now, the young operator was back in the US as the advance man for a military-intelligence cut-out that specialized in smearing left-wing political figures like Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader widely regarded as the British version of Sanders.

    Bracey-Lane opened his address by explaining that Integrity Initiative director Chris Donnelly had been unable to appear at the event, possibly because he was bogged down in the scandal back home. He proceeded to read remarks prepared by Donnelly that offered a window into the frighteningly militaristic mindset the Integrity Initiative aims to impose on the public through their media and political allies.

    According to Donnelly's comments, the West was no longer in a "peace time, rules based environment." From the halls of government to corporate boardrooms to even the UK's National Health System, "the conclusion is that we have to look for people who suit a wartime environment rather than peacetime."

    During Q&A, Bracey-Lane remarked that "we have to change the definition of war to encompass everything that war now encompasses," referring vaguely to various forms of "hybrid warfare."

    "There is a great deal to be done in communicating that to young people," he continued. "When we mean being at war we don't mean sending our boys off to fight. It's right here in our homes."

    The emphasis on restructuring society along martial lines mirrored the disturbing thinking also on display in notes of a private meeting between Donnelly and Gen. Richard Barrons in 2016. During that chat, the two officers decided that the British military should be removed from democratic supervision and be able to operate as "an independent body outside politics."

    While Bracey-Lane's presentation perfectly captured the military mindset of the Integrity Initiative, the speakers that followed him offered a diverse array of perspectives on the concept of disinformation, some more nuanced than others. But one talk stood out from the rest -- not because of its quality, but because of its complete lack thereof.

    Reanimating the "Red-Brown" Grifter

    Alexander Reid Ross (left) and Emmi Bevensee at the Integrity Initiative's "main event" in Seattle

    The presentation was delivered by Alexander Reid Ross, a half-baked political researcher who peddles computer-generated spiderweb relationship charts to prove the existence of a vast hidden network of "red-brown" alliances and "syncretic media" conspiracies controlled by puppeteers in Moscow.

    Ross is a lecturer on geography at Portland State University with no scholarly or journalistic credentials on Russia. His students have given him dismal marks at Rate My Professors, complaining about his "terrible monotone lectures" and his penchant for "insert[ing] his own ideologies into our class." But with a book, "Against the Fascist Creep," distributed by the well-known anarchist publishing house, AK Press, the middling academic has tried to make his name as a maverick analyst.

    Before the Integrity Initiative was exposed as a military-intelligence front operation, Ross was among a small coterie of pundits and self-styled disinformation experts that followed the group's Twitter account. The Integrity Initiative even retweeted his smear of War Nerd podcast co-host John Dolan.

    In a series of articles for the Southern Poverty Law Center last year, Ross attempted to bring his warmed-over Cold War theories to the broader public. He wound up trashing everyone from the co-author of this piece, Max Blumenthal, to Nation magazine publisher Katrina Vanden Heuvel to Harvard University professor of international relations Stephen Walt as hidden shadow-fascists secretly controlled by the Kremlin.

    The articles ultimately generated an embarrassing scandal and a series of public retractions by the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen. And then, like some Dr. Frankenstein for discredited and buried journalism careers, the British Ministry of Defense-backed Integrity Initiative moved in to reanimate Ross as a sought-after public intellectual.

    Before the Integrity Initiative-organized crowd, Ross offered a rambling recitation of his theory of a syncretic fascist alliance puppeteered by Russians: "The alt right takes from both this 'red-brown,' it's called, or like left-right syncretic highly international national of nationalisms, and from the United States' own paleoconservative movement, and it's sort of percolated down through college organizing, um, and anti-interventionism meets anti-imperialism. Right?"

    In a strange twist, Ross appeared on stage at the Integrity Initiative's Seattle event alongside Emmi Bevensee , a contributor to the left-libertarian Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank, whose tagline, "a left market anarchist think-tank" expresses its core aim of uniting far-left anarchists with free-market right-libertarians.

    Bevensee , a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona and self-described "Borderlands anarcho into tech and crypto," concluded her presentation by asserting a linkage between the alternative news site, Zero Hedge, and the "physical militarized presence in the borderlands" of anti-immigrant vigilantes. Like Bevensee, Ross has written for C4SS in the past.

    The irony of contributors to an anarchist group called the "Center for a Stateless Society" auditioning before The State – the most jackbooted element of it, in fact – for more opportunities to attack anti-war politicians and journalists, can hardly be overstated.

    But closer examination of the history of C4SS veers from irony into something much darker and more unsettling.

    Pedophile Co-Founder, White Nationalist Associates

    C4SS was co-founded in 2006 by a confessed child rapist and libertarian activist, Brad Spangler, who set the group up to promote "Market anarchism" to "replace Marxism on the left."

    When Spangler's child rape confessions emerged in 2015, the Center for Stateless Society founder was finally drummed out by his colleagues.

    There's more: Spangler's understudy and deputy in the C4SS, Kevin Carson -- currently listed as the group's "Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory" -- turned out to be a longtime friend and defender of white nationalist Keith Preston. Preston's name is prominently plastered on the back of Kevin Carson's book, hailing the C4SS man as "the Proudhon of our time" -- a loaded compliment, given Proudhon's unhinged anti-Semitism . Carson only disowned Preston in 2009, shortly before Preston helped white nationalist leader Richard Spencer launch his alt-right webzine, Alternative Right.

    The C4SS group currently participates in the annual Koch-backed International Students For Liberty conference in Washington DC, LibertyCon, a who's who of libertarian think-tank hacks and Republican Party semi-celebrities like Steve Forbes, FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and Alan Dershowitz.

    In 2013, C4SS's Kevin Carson tweeted out his dream fantasy that four Jewish leftists -- Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Corey Robin, and Mark Potok -- would die in a plane crash while struggling over a single parachute. Potok was an executive editor at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which last year retracted every one of the crank articles that Alexander Reid Ross published with them and formally apologized for having run them.

    For some reason, the super-sleuth Ross conveniently failed to investigate the libertarian group, C4SS, that he has chosen to partner with and publish in. That ability to shamelessly smear and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links to the far-right -- while cozying up to groups as sleazy as C4SS and authoritarian as the Integrity Initiative -- is the sort of adaptive trait that MI6 spies and the Rendon Group would find useful in a covert domestic influence operation.

    Ross did not respond to our request for comment on his involvement with the Integrity Initiative and C4SS.

    Disinformation for Democracy

    As it spans out across the US, the Integrity Initiative has stated its desire to "build a younger generation of Russia watchers." Toward this goal, it is supplementing its coterie of elite journalists, think tank hacks, spooks and State Department info-warriors with certifiable cranks like Ross.

    Less than 24 hours after Ross's appearance at the Integrity Initiative event in Seattle, he sent a menacing email to the co-author of this article, Ames, announcing his intention to recycle an old and discredited smear against him and publish it in the Daily Beast -- a publication that appears to enjoy a special relationship with Integrity Initiative personnel.

    Despite the threat of investigation in the UK, the Integrity Initiative's "network of networks" appears to be escalating its covert, government-funded influence operation, trashing the political left and assailing anyone that gets in its way -- all in the name of fighting foreign disinformation.

    "We have to win this one," Integrity Initiative founder Col. Chris Donnelly said , "because if we don't, democracy will be undermined."

    Disturbed Voter , January 10, 2019 at 4:26 am

    This is why you don't put spooks in charge. They are paid to be paranoid.

    pretzelattack , January 10, 2019 at 5:18 am

    making up lies to get paid. james angleton was paranoid (not that it seemed to make him more effective in counterintelligence)–these people are just con artists, paid to be con artists.
    i'm just waiting for "we have to undermine democracy in order to save it".

    Pym of Nantucket , January 10, 2019 at 5:46 pm

    Agreed. Not only are they paid to make things up, but they have an ingenious scheme for paying themselves from narcotics and arms dealing.

    The most amazing feat of confidence artistry (apart from maybe the TARP bailout (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program ) is their remarkable ability to convince the population they are needed and working on our behalf instead of being in jail where they belong.

    nobody , January 10, 2019 at 6:06 am

    I first heard about this enterprise/outfit from 21st Century Wire .

    Peter , January 10, 2019 at 6:40 am

    hat story has been around since at least December 17. https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/12/17/inside-the-temple-of-covert-propaganda-the-integrity-initiative-and-the-uks-scandalous-information-war/
    maybe you should change your sources

    Richard H Caldwell , January 10, 2019 at 6:52 am

    Gotta love Mark Ames

    jsn , January 10, 2019 at 6:55 am

    b at Moon of Alabama posted on this on the 4th.

    David , January 10, 2019 at 7:01 am

    I submitted a long comment on this about an hour ago, which seems to have been eaten by the system. I won't repost it now, but I'll do so later if it doesn't surface.

    PlutoniumKun , January 10, 2019 at 7:58 am

    This is something that has repeatedly happened to me too recently – it often takes 2 or more hours for most of my recent posting to surface on the site. It rarely disappears altogether, so I would assume your post will eventually arrive.

    hemeantwell , January 10, 2019 at 9:25 am

    Same here on the delays. Keep a copy.
    But anyway, very glad you posted this piece. Whatever we make of Patreon, it's one way to support Mark Ames' work.

    flora , January 10, 2019 at 9:13 pm

    Me, too. Though not on this post. Me thinks much sp@m and tr0llery happening behind the scenes that the mods have to wade through comment by comment.

    jCandlish , January 10, 2019 at 7:50 am

    Sir Alan Duncan, responding on behalf of the Government to Emily Thornberry's urgent question (Dec 12) on recent allegations that the Foreign Office funded a company which carried out a smear campaign against the official Opposition.

    Chilling indeed.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBOwO-MAPKI

    RBHoughton , January 10, 2019 at 10:06 pm

    What a frightful fellow that Alan Duncan is eh? Talks like a Mafia lawyer and he's supposed to be a national leader. He reminds that other MP, the POS who interrogated David Kelly on TV, they both use the same style. Is it a qualification for legislator?

    The Rev Kev , January 10, 2019 at 8:23 am

    Just a minor note to start off. That image of "Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb". I think that Vitezi Rend actually refers to the medal he wears on the left. The jacket itself more resembles the patrol jacket that British officers wore in the 19th century. Moving on! Notice how the same players keep on coming up again and again in all these stories of skulduggery? John Rendon, the Atlantic Council, Ajit Pai and Alan Dershowitz – the same scum-bags with a few new wannabe players. As an example.
    The penchant that Brad Spangler, C4SS co-founder, has for under-age girls is disgusting of course but you have to put it into the context of the people that you are talking about. If Spengler was more rich or more powerful, you might see his name on a manifest for the "Lolita Express" but his activities would not be splashed about in an article like this one. That sort of activity is given a level of protection if you are in the right group. And it is a good thing that that British General Richard Barrons is retired as his comments are deserving of being cashiered.
    Funny how a group that claims to be about protecting democracy wants to push it aside and install propaganda on a "1984" level in the pursuit of their aims. I cannot decide if their target of Russia is a means or an end. If it is a means, that means using the boogy-man of Russia to radically restructure western society to their tastes. If it is an end, well, it is true that Russia has about $75 trillion in resources, mostly in Siberia and the east, so if it was broken up eventually, that would be a bonanza of wealth appropriation.
    I was thinking about the activities of this group and how they go about their activities, especially the smearing of anybody that talks truth to power. I wonder if anybody here made the connection with this story and the PropOrNot website that came out of nowhere about two years ago and that had the stamp of approval of the Washington Post. I would not be surprised if it turns out to be that PropOrNot was a trial balloon in the United States for the Integrity Initiative to establish what it was capable of. Just a thought.

    Martin Finnucane , January 10, 2019 at 9:39 am

    Vitezi Rend garb

    He looks like an extra from Star Wars – one of those nazi guys working the bridge of the Death Star. The "look and feel" of a lot of pre-war fascism strikes us as silly in retrospect, though it really wasn't at the time.

    EoH , January 10, 2019 at 10:35 am

    That tailored black jacket Sebastian wears looks like something Winston Churchill would have changed out of before that last cavalry charge at Omdurman. It seems intentionally designed to mimic 19th century great power imperial army officer garb. Nostalgia for the good times, apparently. Goes with his fascist priorities.

    bob , January 10, 2019 at 11:36 am

    " my father was Moonraker and that is part of my origin story "

    NSFW

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbQx0NTV4TU

    Tomonthebeach , January 10, 2019 at 9:25 pm

    Let us not get carried away with the exuberance of discovering skulduggery among fascist elements of the media and politics. This does not mean that the conspiracy means Russia is thereby a Goodie Twoshoes. It also does not mean that Russia is any less a pain in the ass than it has heretorfore be characterized.

    It does mean that there is less reason (any?) than ever to put much faith in FoxNews (already a mere propaganda machine) or other orgs. I am uncomfortable hearing CNA is caught up in this as they are a pseudo government thinktank with some Pentagon influence.

    If true, the story should be used to clear out some journalists and analyst riffraff. However, this story is surely not going to restore, much less create, any integrity among the Beltway Punditry.

    Off The Street , January 10, 2019 at 8:56 am

    The article and related matters may also shed more light on the abrupt resignation of Robert Hannigan from the leadership of GCHQ in January 2017 a few days after Trump's inauguration. Given previous revelations about GCHQ and NSA spying on each other's citizens, what else is next in the UK and in the US and elsewhere?

    After reading about that Carson character and others I am ready for a shower to try to wash off the disgust.

    DJG , January 10, 2019 at 9:01 am

    Yves Smith: Thanks for this. I am wondering about two stories that have been flapping around here for a few days: That odd New Knowledge company that produced the report about Russian influence on the elections as well as the story about the case before the Supreme Court of the US in which a company is invoking claims of sovereign immunity.

    I have a feeling that New Knowledge definitely fits into the framework outlined by Ames above. A contractor that appears out of nowhere with a "distinguished" board of concerned semi-liberals (at the trough)?

    But what do I know? Some guy named Volodya showed up at my house and bought my vote in 2016 for two bottles of pickled mushrooms

    diptherio , January 10, 2019 at 9:32 am

    Kevin Carson is always showing up in my twitter feed. I knew there was something I didn't like about that guy, anarchist or no.

    jfleni , January 10, 2019 at 9:38 am

    Perfideus Albion is not just a neat saying, but a truth that the Irish, French and
    Germans (etc.) have known forever, the people don't deserve it, but the
    jumped up Tories do in spades.

    pjay , January 10, 2019 at 9:48 am

    Thank you for highlighting this article! It names names and connects some dots, including some connections reaching into the U.S. It also describes propaganda mechanisms that have been around forever but have become pervasive today. A few protruding tips of a massive iceberg, in my view. I'm sure *this* "bombshell" story will get the massive coverage it deserves in the MSM -- not!

    diptherio , January 10, 2019 at 10:43 am

    Here's the response from C4SS, if anyone is interested:
    https://c4ss.org/content/51563

    jsn , January 10, 2019 at 1:11 pm

    That was interesting. Well argued all the way through I thought, but they could take a closer look at the unwinding of Yugoslavia; what Serbia and Syria have in common is having been targeted by outside state powers for dissolution, responses did vary.

    pjay , January 10, 2019 at 2:27 pm

    Thank you diptherio for posting the C4SS response. Such responses are helpful in evaluating issues like this, and we should always be open to the other side when they take the time to reply. However, I can't agree that the response was "well argued." The author does make some valid points, but mainly she resorts to ad hominem attacks on Ames (based on some juvenile antics at eXile that are often used to smear him), or on both authors because they may have agreed with "Assadists" like Ambassador Peter Ford or "9/11 Truthers" like Piers Robinson, whose claims about Syria or the White Helmets are, of course, Kremlin propaganda. Which brings up why Blumenthal would have changed his position on Syria; it was not because of his gradual understanding of what was really happening there. Rather, while he had once grasp the truth of the "revolution," he made the mistake of going to a Kremlin gala and the Rooskies (and RT) got to him. Now he is just another propagandist. Nowhere that I can see does the author discuss the major claims made in Ames and Blumenthal's article, or the evidence cited (except to say that if it was in RT or Sputnik, we can ignore it anyway as propaganda). Nor does she address the actual defamation made by Alexander Ross-Reid through the SPLC that pissed off Blumenthal in the first place. There are other problems (don't get me started on the "red-brown" smear), but that's enough.

    Having said all that, I do think that in their criticism of C4SS, Ames and Blumenthal perhaps did some unnecessary punching down. They could have made clearer the distinction between organizations like the Integrity Initiative, that are pretty clearly intelligence operatives or cut-outs, versus groups like C4SS that function more like "useful idiots" because of their ideological position (e.g. equating U.S. and Russian imperialism in this case in their "anarchist" appeal). The latter are in no way as evil as the former, in my mind.

    jsn , January 10, 2019 at 3:18 pm

    You are clearly much more engaged with the related debates than I. I read the piece as a response to the punching down you mention in your last paragraph and felt like I got a respectable read on someone still developing their arguments. I'm not informed enough to argue with much of it, but having read Diana Johnstone's "Fools Crusade", the Syria/Serbia bit stuck in my craw.

    I had thought about commenting on the ad hominems directed at Ames, but didn't want to get into the whole identity argument embedded in much of the language of the post. While I disagree with many of her positions and attitudes on the state actions she criticizes without, in my opinion, adequate grounding, I judged it a mostly good faith effort trying to find solid footing in a world increasingly thick with distorted narratives.

    It's hard to argue now, from anywhere with out power, without being someone's "useful idiot": trust has decayed to the point where language impedes communication in the political sphere.

    pjay , January 10, 2019 at 5:01 pm

    It's funny you should mention Johnstone's book. I normally would not use the derogatory term "useful idiot" for the very reason you imply; most such people are acting in good faith. I admit that her comments on Syria irritated me. But the reason I sometimes overreact to that sort of narrative is because of my own experiences as a useful idiot, starting with Yugoslavia. I fell for the liberal "humanitarian" argument hook, line, and sinker in the 1990s, even though I considered myself a knowledgeable progressive at the time. It wouldn't be the last time I was duped, but I'd like to think I'm a little wiser today.

    I appreciate your comment. We definitely need to distinguish empire propagandists from the beliefs of people honestly trying to find their way.

    rojo , January 10, 2019 at 6:41 pm

    I thought the later part of Ames' piece was unnecessary. It's kind of the same sort of guilt-by-attending-same-conference thing that I find annoying about the Russophobes.

    Keep focused on government malfeasance, not basement brown-shirts.

    Ignacio , January 10, 2019 at 11:00 am

    Oh well, there would be a lot to argue here. In one side it is nice to see that the "Initiative" is being exposed although it doesn't appear yet to trigger any significant response from supposedly democratic institutions like, let's say the english parliament (at ransom by brexit).

    Just to demonstrate how this article is well focused and pointed I wanted to comment on this bit:

    (Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily .)

    YES! iIt is so true that the former "center-left" –if you wish– daily that years ago was a must read but has been degraded to levels that I wouldn't have imagined, in a case that makes the Guardian as the "guardian of reporting-as-it should-be". One has to bear in mind that the current most important shareholder of Grupo Prisa (owner of El Pais) is an english hedge fund Amber Capital whose CEO, Joseph Oughorlian is chairman at Grupo Prisa and probably responsible for the Russia!Russia!Russia! campaign observed in this medium that surprised me so much. You don't find nothing similar in Spain even in rigth and rigth of the rigth news outlets.

    I believe this UK-based shareholder is clearly associated with the peculiar Russia!Russia!Russia! stance of the supposedly centre-left daily.

    juliania , January 10, 2019 at 12:24 pm

    For those of us from way back way back, these kooks relate to offshoots of the Watergate scandal, the original one, where people working on those burglaries of psychiatrist's offices and Democratic headquarters got their start organizing small gangs of crooks to infiltrate what was then a porous but trustable system of government – on they went to propose surveillance and collection of data that was at first publicly laughed about but on they went. On they went. Technology with all its pluses has these minuses we at first were able to counter (Church hearings) but the rats have scurried into all the back alleys and secretive pathways that need a thorough cleanup. It can be done, but it needs to be done periodically. Hopefully this is finally the year when that will happen.

    Thank you, Yves. I believe these folk don't end up in a good place, but meanwhile they are wreaking havoc. The place to start, after the brooms and mops, is to get money OUT of politics and restore a verifiable voting system that happens methodically and is trustworthy. The citizenry will be behind this. We the people don't care how long it takes to vote or to find out who won. We don't! Haste makes waste in more ways than we know.

    Let's do this. And please, judges, do your duty or go to jail yourselves.

    Andrew Watts , January 10, 2019 at 1:37 pm

    It's obvious that neither Ames or Blumenthal read the actual documents they're quoting from. Which is a shame considering the relevant one involving the CIA's Operation Mockingbird comparison was only seven pages long. The CIA were merely imitating British intelligence during the war and it is clearly stated as such when one of the replies involving General Sir Richard Barrons states that they've done this before during the 1930s. The US didn't possess a foreign intelligence agency at the time and I'd fervently argue that we still don't to this day.

    but I've already commented about British Security Coordination in the aftermath of PropOrNot though and I'm reluctant to beat a dead horse.

    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/links-12312016.html#comment-2736471
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/100755.html#comment-2737564
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/01/links-11217.html#comment-2742827
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/links-5-21-18.html#comment-2971759

    It's hard to be modest when you're this good.

    Roady , January 10, 2019 at 4:02 pm

    I wish I could be like Andrew Watts

    Chauncey Gardiner , January 10, 2019 at 3:27 pm

    Ah, the smell (or should we say stench) of domestic propaganda in the morning, ironically by some of the same individuals who brought us Iraq WMDs. While First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and other civil rights must be protected, it seems to me that a careful balance can be drawn under new legislation that insulates us from such government-sponsored propaganda. We should be able to rely on our government's representations. Instead, as with a former president who openly acknowledged, "My job is to catapult the propaganda," the reverse, together with a related loss of trust, unfortunately seems to be increasingly the case. Stop lying! What part of "of the People, by the People, for the People," is difficult to understand?

    [Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are. ..."
    "... If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. ..."
    "... Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.) ..."
    "... No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors." ..."
    "... These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose. ..."
    "... "It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any debate in Congress or the media." ..."
    "... To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand. ..."
    "... So Trump did morph into Hillary. Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State calling the shots. ..."
    "... The Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018 equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within. ..."
    "... The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative. ..."
    "... I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!). ..."
    Jan 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    It's fact: Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump's foreign policy.

    A couple of months back, Bloomberg's Eli Lake let it know he was in neoconservative nirvana:

    " for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. 'The United States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,' Trump said. 'We are prepared to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'"

    "For a moment," swooned Lake , "I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard editorial meeting."

    Onward to Venezuela! Mr. Lake, a neoconservative, was loving every moment. In error, he and his kind confuse an expansionist foreign policy with "American exceptionalism." It's not.

    As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are.

    So, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have enlisted the West in "a proxy Sunni-Shia religious war," Riyadh's ultimate aim. Donald Trump has been perfectly willing to partake. After a campaign of "America First," the president sided with Sunni Islam while demonizing Iran. Iranians have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between 1975-2015; Saudi Arabians murdered 2369 !

    Iranians recently reelected a reformer. Pray tell who elected the Gulf petrostate sheiks?

    Moderates danced in the streets of Tehran when President Hassan Rouhani was reelected. Curiously, they're currently rioting.

    If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. For the Left and the pseudo-Right, this is a look-away issue. As the left-liberal establishment lectures daily, to question the Central Intelligence Agency -- its spooks are also agitating against all vestiges of President Trump's original "America First" plank -- is to "undermine American democracy."

    Besides, "good" Americans know that only the Russians "meddle."

    In Saudi Arabia, a new, more-dangerous regime is consolidating regional power. Almost overnight has the kingdom shifted from rule by family dynasty (like that of the Clintons and the Bushes), to a more authoritarian style of one-man rule .

    When it comes to the Saudi-Israeli-American-Axis-of-Angels, the Kushner-Trump Administration -- is that another bloodline in-the-making? -- has not broken with America's ruling dynastic families (the Clintons and the Bushes, aforementioned).

    It's comforting to know Saudi Arabia plays a crucial role in the UN's human rights affairs. In January of last year, the Kingdom executed 47 people in one day, including a rather benign Shiite cleric. Fear not, they went quickly, beheaded with a sword .

    Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.)

    Our bosom buddies, the Saudi's, are currently barricading Yemeni ports. No aid gets through her hermetically sealed ports. Yemenis are dying. Some Twitter followers twittered with joy at the sight of starving Yemeni babies, like this one . Oh well, Yemeni babies can be sinister.

    No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors."

    These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose.

    "It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any debate in Congress or the media."

    Indeed, while outlining his "new" Afghanistan plan, POTUS had conceded that "the American people are weary of war without victory." (Make that war, full-stop.) Depressingly, the president went on to promise an increase in American presence in Afghanistan. By sending 4000 additional soldiers there, President Trump alleged he was fighting terrorism, yet not undertaking nation building.

    This is tantamount to talking out of both sides of one's mouth.

    Teasing apart these two elements is near-impossible. Send "4,000 additional soldiers to add to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan," and you've done what Obama and Bush before you did in that blighted and benighted region: muddle along; kill some civilians mixed in with some bad guys; break bread with tribal leaders (who hate your guts); mediate and bribe.

    Above all, spend billions not your own to perfect the credo of a global fighting force that doesn't know Shiite from Shinola .

    The upshot? It's quite acceptable, on the Left and the pseudo-Right, to casually quip about troops in Niger and Norway . "We have soldiers in Niger and Norway? Of course we do. We need them."

    With neoconservatism normalized, there is no debate, disagreement or daylight between our dangerously united political factions.

    This is the gift President Trump has given mainstream neoconservatives -- who now comfortably include neoliberals and all Conservatism Inc., with the exceptions of Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.

    How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism: In 2016, liberals accused candidate Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives -- aka Conservatism Inc. -- did the same.

    Having consistently complained of his isolationism , the Left and the phony Right cannot but sanction President Trump's interventionism . The other option is to admit that we of the callused Old Right, who rejoiced at the prospects and promise of non-interventionism, were always right.

    Not going to happen.

    To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand.

    Ilana Mercer has been writing a paleolibertarian column since 1999, and is the author of " The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed " (June, 2016) & " Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa " (2011). Follow her on Twitter , Facebook , Gab & YouTube . How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism, by Ilana Mercer - The Unz Review

    utu , says: January 5, 2018 at 5:57 am GMT

    You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

    But you can fool the whole country all the time in American bi-partisan system. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump each were brought to power by fooling their electorate.

    Biff , says: January 5, 2018 at 9:02 am GMT
    So Trump did morph into Hillary. Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State calling the shots.

    I'm waiting for another one of those "Trump's Truth in Action" moments when describes the real political atmosphere in Washington. Trump was asked about something he said in a previous interview: "When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do." "You'd better believe it," Trump said. "If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of the people on this stage I've given to, just so you understand, a lot of money."

    EliteCommInc. , says: January 5, 2018 at 9:11 am GMT
    I think its time to dump the label "neoconservative". The appropriate term is "interventionists without a cause" (IWAC or IWC) or some other descriptor.

    The real problem that Pres Trump has and I remain a Pres Trump supporter is two fold:

    1. He seems to have forgotten he won the election.

    2. He seems to have forgotten what he was elected to do.

    And nearly everyone of these issues on foreign policy the answer rests in respecting sovereignty – that of others and our own.

    I didn't need to read,"Adios, America" to comprehend the deep state damage our careless immigration policy has on the country. I don't need to reread, "Adios, America" to grasp that our policies of intervening in the affairs of other states undermines our own ability to make the same case at home.

    If I weren't already trying to plow my way through several other books, documentaries and relapsing to old school programming such as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and now the Dick Van Dyke show, i would reread,

    "Adios , America."

    In Col. Bacevich's book,

    Washington Rules, he posits a distressing scenario that the foreign policy web is so tangled and entrenched, the executive branch is simply out his league. The expectation was that Pres trump had the will to turn the matter. I hold out hope, but maybe not. There's time.

    I agree, at least build the darn wall.

    Lincoln Blockface Squarebeard III , says: January 5, 2018 at 10:01 am GMT
    @J.Ross The Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018 equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within.
    anonymous Disclaimer , says: January 5, 2018 at 11:03 am GMT
    Told you so. Cf., "The Winning Trump Ticket & Cabinet (Part I)," published here February 6, 2016. (Ms. Mercer never got to Part II.)

    Elections at the USG level allow the ruled to harmlessly let off steam.

    The Alarmist , says: January 5, 2018 at 11:39 am GMT
    It's life imitating art: Trump reprises the role of Professor/Führer John Gill in Star Trek episode 50, Patterns of Force.
    neutral , says: January 5, 2018 at 11:56 am GMT
    The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative.

    I have a question for all the Trump supporters still in denial, what will it take to break your delusions? He is not going to build a wall, mass immigration is up, the left wing are mass censoring and essentially running everything now, his foreign policy is now endorsed by the all the never Trumpers – so what is your limit, is there anything he must do to lose your support?

    Anonymous Disclaimer , says: January 5, 2018 at 1:17 pm GMT
    @Anonymous

    Jews and the Jewish Media normalized Jewish NeoCons by guaranteeing that they always have a voice and airtime in American culture and media. Never called out by the WashingtonPost and NY Times for their previous blunders, they continue to shape American foreign policy. And, of course, the end game here is Israel and the Israeli agenda at all costs, you Jews are one issue folk. And You definitely do your part, with the subtle subterfuge at work in the articles that you write.

    No one should be surprised by Trump promoting Israeli interests über alles. For decades he was so involved in Israel events in New York I debated whether he was actually Jewish or not. Bannon said the embassy move to Jerusalem was at the behest of Adelson, Trump's old casino buddy. In the campaign Trump got a lot of support from NY Jewish billionaires (Icahn, Feinberg, Paulson, et al.). They know him and how he operates.

    But being pro-Israel doesn't necessarily equate to neocon. The neocons are the dumb Jews with serious inadequacy issues who could never make it in business and instead went into politics and journalism. The latter are still staunchly opposed to Trump even after a lot of pro-Israel moves. They might warm up to Trump's bellicosity towards a lot of Israel's enemies (a long list with degrees of separation), but so far they've simply moved left.

    I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!).

    Lastly, I like to think Trump surrounded himself with neocons (McMaster, Haley, et al.) to placate the GOP establishment because he knows he has to play the game.

    anonymous Disclaimer , says: January 5, 2018 at 1:42 pm GMT
    @Lincoln Blockface Squarebeard III Very well put.

    People are inclined to believe that any activity -- in this instance, voting for the red/blue puppets in Washington -- in which their participation is patronized must be legitimate and effectual. Many duped in November 2016, even those who now feel betrayed by that farce, were still around here a few weeks ago acting like a Senator Moore in Alabama would be pivotal to reform, his defeat devastating.

    That's how Ms. Mercer and her pundit ilk (Buchanan, Napolitano, etc.) thrive -- supporting the Empire by never questioning its legitimacy, just taking sides within the Establishment. And they'll be buying into the 2018 congressional contests, ad nauseum.

    Of course, what is done to us, and to others in our name and with our money, never changes to any meaningful degree. Americans might realize this if they thought critically about it, so they don't. Instead, they lap up the BS and vote for who tells them the lie they like to hear. When there are identity politics involved, the delusion seems even deeper. There are self-styled "progressives" who used to advocate single-payer, nationalized health care who are elated over the retention of so-called "Obamacare," the legislation for which was written by and for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

    Me? I cope by boycotting national elections and mass media, participating in forums like this, and hoping that when the tottering tower of debt and gore tips over, as few innocents and as many guilty as practicable are among those crushed.

    DESERT FOX , says: January 5, 2018 at 1:49 pm GMT
    The Zionist neocons and Israel did 911 and got away with it and everyone in the U.S. gov knows it and they tried to sink the USS LIBERTY and got away with it and so normal is an Orwellian society where Zionists can kill Americans and destroy the Mideast and nobody does jack shit about it.

    The neocons are Satanists warmongers and will destroy America.

    WorkingClass , says: Website January 5, 2018 at 1:51 pm GMT
    Neocons are Zionists. Trump, Bannon and Kushner are Zionists. Israel continues to wag the dog.
    Jake , says: January 5, 2018 at 2:48 pm GMT
    Neocons are about as evil as proudly proclaimed Leftists, and they are obviously more duplicitous.

    Either Neocons will be refuted and publicly rebuked and rejected, or Neocons will eventually destroy the country. Their long term fruits are destruction of that which they have used to destroy so many others.

    Jake , says: January 5, 2018 at 2:56 pm GMT
    @anonymous Far from all Neocons are Jews. However, virtually all Neocons are militantly pro-Israel to the point of making Israel's foreign policy desires central to their assessment of what America needs in foreign policy.

    And the source is Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing heresy. Judaizing heresy necessarily produces pro-Jewish culture. WASP culture is inherently pro-Jewish, as much as it is anti-Catholic and anti-French and and anti-Spanish and anti-Irish, etc.

    And all that means that WASP is opposed to the nest interests of the vast majority of white Christians while being pro-Jewish.

    Jews did not cause any of that. Anglo-Saxon Puritan heretics did.

    ElitecommInc. , says: January 5, 2018 at 4:22 pm GMT
    @neutral Pres Trump is a situational leader. It's a rare style, for good reason. However, he is openly situational. That was clear during the campaign season. however,

    I thought his positions were sincere. I don't think that this was any kind of slight of hand, "watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat". His positions on Israel, same sex behavior, marijuana, healthcare remain what they were going in. His foreign policy and immigration positions have been buffered and he seems incapable of standing where he came in.

    It was no secret he intended an assertive military. However, he seems easily convinced that strong means aggressive, and that needlessly aggressive policy is a substitute for a strong US -- that is a mistake. Syria cruise strike was the first sign that he was giving in to the men whom he chose as advisers. As it it turns out winning the election has been easier than governing. I assumed he had a much stronger backbone, than he has been willing to exhibit in office.

    Alden , says: January 5, 2018 at 7:09 pm GMT
    @Jake The Israeli/AIPAC bribery of American bible thumper preachers, especially in the fundamentalist southern American states has more to do with it than the reformation.

    The preachers get huge donations to pay for their churches and TV shows. They get free trips to Israel for themselves and their families all the time.

    On their Israel trips they pay more attention to the OT Jewish and holocaust sites than the Christian ones

    It's true that the reformation was a return to Judaism and a rejection of Christianity, but that was 500 years ago.

    What's important now is the vast amounts of money the Israeli government and the lobby funnels into those fundamentalist churches.

    If the southern fundamentalists only knew what Jews think of them. I really got an earful of Jewish scorn and hate for southerners and fundamentalists during the recent Roy Moore election.

    Read Jewish publications if you want to learn what they think of southern fundamentalists

    renfro , says: January 6, 2018 at 2:13 am GMT
    @Twodees Partain Trump appointed Haley because Sheldon Adelson told him to.
    And contrary to the myth of trump funding his own campaign he did not the only money he put in his campaign was a 1o million loan to it. Adelson was his biggest contributor just like Saban was Hillary's.

    Nikki Haley: Neocon Heartthrob

    Not coincidentally, however, neocon hopes may lie as well with the generous political funding provided to Haley by Sheldon Adelson, the GOP's and Trump's single biggest donor.

    Between May and June, 2016, Sheldon Adelson contributed $250,000 to Haley's 527 political organization, A Great Day, funds that she used to target four Republican state senate rivals in primaries. (Only one was successfully defeated.) Adelson was the largest contributor to her group,
    which raised a total of $915,000.

    This powerful Adelson-funded Israel lobby could soon rival AIPAC's
    https://www.haaretz.com › U.S. News
    Oct 31, 2017 – Sheldon Adelson(L), The 3rd annual IAC National Conference, in September, 2016, and Nikki Haley. . will feature, for the first time ever, a prominent speaker from the ranks of the U.S. government: U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who is a favorite among the right-leaning "pro-Israel" crowd.

    The Jews have bought this government and trump and Haley are nothing but junk yard dogs.
    Not that there are good alternatives but anyone who stills supports trump is as crazy as he is.

    renfro , says: January 6, 2018 at 2:18 am GMT
    @Alden

    What's important now is the vast amounts of money the Israeli government and the lobby funnels into those fundamentalist churches.

    You have it completely backwards .the evangelicals, particularly Roberson donate money for Israeli settlements.

    Grandpa Charlie , says: January 6, 2018 at 3:58 am GMT
    @Alden

    The title is ridiculous. Neo conservatives have been normal for decades.

    The neocon movement was normalized in 2001 by the PATRIOT Act. The domestic side of the neocon worldview -- or world-system -- was joined with the international or interventionist side, just as anti-Palestinian actions by Israel were joined by way of repression of free speech with the Charlottesville protest by conservatives of the desecration of monuments.

    Alden , says: January 6, 2018 at 4:45 am GMT
    @renfro I'm sure the evangelical preachers con their followers into donating money to Israel. I've seen those late night ads begging for donations to feed ancient old holocaust survivors in Israel.

    But the Israelis pay for all those luxury trips to Israel And a lot of the money to start those TV shows and for the big salaries come from Israel and AIPAC so does the money to set up those big churches that just appear from nowhere

    polskijoe , says: January 6, 2018 at 3:15 pm GMT
    @Grandpa Charlie I have always wondered why its okay to say WASP but not Jew in public.
    One is more pc, the other is not allowed.
    I have seen some articles about Jews replacing wasp, even from Jewish authors.

    As for Neoconservatives. It depends how we define it.
    I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large overlap, but not always.
    From what I know modern Neoconservativism started somewhere around the 70s,80s? Became dominant around the Bush years. (during Reagan years they got rid of many Paleocons).

    TT , says: January 6, 2018 at 7:08 pm GMT
    @Twodees Partain Not only Nikki is a prank, she is also a godsend. Now the world get to see USG naked without usual pretension.

    Trumps is probably the most honest Potus with highest integrity & bravery in American history(stupid aside). He means what he said without mind boggling hypocrite lies, he tried fulfilling all his election promises, fighting bravely with his only little weapon tweeter besiege by entire states organs, CIA/FBI, both parties, MSM, world allies,

    He put US Embassy in Jerusalem that all other Potus promised but never keep, he tried to revise immigration policy that people blocked, building prototype wall now, try befriend Russia become a treason act, reneged nuclear agreement with Iran, make US military great(of course need hyper tension like nuclear NK), scraped Obacare, TTP, Climate deal, try to grab Killary, bring back jobs with tax heaven .

    Mann, this is really a man of his word. Didn't these are what you people voted him for, to drain the swamp? He gotta shock the entire MSM brainwashed nation up to see the deeply corrupted USG, collapse it quickly for a new one to move in(by whoever after his prank). As Trumps had asked:"what you got to lose to vote me?"

    TT , says: January 6, 2018 at 10:26 pm GMT
    @Twodees Partain Yes..ues i admit, don't shoot. Im just been sarcastic, USG is in such a laughing stock to the world now, many americans probably are exasperated if not yet numb. I am not judging he is good, DT is just less evil typical business man..imo

    But frankly, i do see why people are voting DT now. He is at least more entertaining and blunt to screw up WH deep states show. Per msm (fake news), he is honouring all his campaign promises rt? So that make him above hypocrite liar Obama who speak on peace(Nobel prize), but drenched in Libyan and Syrians blood.

    US msm brainwashed people need lot of shock & awe to wake up to reality, then they might have hope to drain the swamp in unity or just await to implode and suck down whole world.

    Erebus , says: January 7, 2018 at 9:51 am GMT

    No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy.

    Well, some better minds than mine do deny that very thing. Three of them follow below.

    Gilbert Doctorow at: http://usforeignpolicy.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2017/12/20/kissinger-s-fingerprints-on-the-trump-security-doctrine-2017-1161961.html

    What we see in the NSS is prioritization and true strategic vision as opposed to ideological cant and ad hoc responses to global developments

    Patrick Armstrong at: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/01/02/trump-cuts-gordian-knot-foreign-entanglements.html

    Trump has little interest in the obsessions of the neocon and humanitarian intervention crowd.

    Finally, Andrew Korybko puts it all together at: https://orientalreview.org/2017/12/27/trump-agent-chaos-k-kraken/

    Believing that the current world system no longer sufficiently advances American interests ever since Washington lost control of its institutional tools, and that the eventual outcome of this increasingly multipolar state of affairs is that the US will in turn lose its global empire, Trump has decided to become the Agent of Chaos in bringing about its destruction.

    Steve Gittelson , says: January 8, 2018 at 6:32 pm GMT
    @Ilyana_Rozumova

    I know with certainty that Hillary is a beast from depth of hell.

    Meh, hyperbole.

    Hillary is no different from most politicians. She's in it for the wealth and power. She got herself a real smart, duplicitous, pussy-chasing beast of a husband, and made the most of the opportunity.

    People -- the American people -- should be able to see this rather-evident characteristic of politicians. They should be adequately educated, at least to the extent of being able to detect the base chicanery and corruption that radiates from political personalities.

    But, they don't. They don't see the evil. The media deftly conceals it, because the beasts of the media, like jackals, feed on the morsels of wealth that fall to the ground as the politicians devour the carcass of well, hell, freedom and democracy is as useful a metaphor as any.

    ILANA MERCER , says: Website January 9, 2018 at 6:15 am GMT
    @anonymous Thank you for the opportunity to share, once again, a magnificent column, published on the Unz Review and elsewhere.

    "The Curious Case Of WND's Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian" ( http://www.unz.com/imercer/the-curious-case-of-wnds-vanishing-veteran-paleolibertarian/ ) addressed, for once and for all, a small, shrinking community's stunning and consistent displays of intellectual dishonesty, over the years.

    In this context, I am reminded of British comedian Alexei Sayle. When asked what he does when he watches a really talented satirist performing, Sayle replied: "I go back stage and tell him he'll never make it."

    Indeed, the attitude to my work over 20 years has been the best proof of its quality.

    If the Comments threads about "ilana mercer," on the Unz Review, prove anything (other than that anti-Semitism lives), it is that mediocre "men" (for the most) hate a woman who can out-think them. As a defender of men, this saddens me, but it is, nevertheless, true.

    So here is the link to "The Curious Case Of WND's Vanishing, Veteran Paleolibertarian," which the venomous mediocrity commenting here so rudely derided, but refrained from linking, for obvious reasons: http://www.unz.com/imercer/the-curious-case-of-wnds-vanishing-veteran-paleolibertarian/

    Ron Unz, our wonderful editor, chose the image appended to the column. (The brilliant Mr. Unz is one of the few intellectually honest individuals I know in this biz. He, columnist Jack Kerwick, and a handful of others.)

    In reply to kunckle-dragger's sniveling: I'll continue to refrain from interacting with his ilk ("fanboys") on my column's thread. But this particular dreadful cur (with apologies to dogs, which I love) further embarrasses himself when he offers up the non sequitur that engaging him is the litmus test for being a "good writer."

    dfordoom , says: Website January 10, 2018 at 12:07 am GMT
    @polskijoe

    I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large overlap, but not always.

    Agreed. American imperialism has a long long history (going back to at least the mid-19th century). That's why the neocons were able to gain so much influence. They were appealing to a pre-existing imperialist sentiment.

    dfordoom , says: Website January 10, 2018 at 12:11 am GMT
    @Ilyana_Rozumova

    There is a large group of US politician non Jews
    who also are pushing this policies. So these two groups together would be called Neocons.
    There is a large group in US population, that find this idea very appealing.

    That's why Make America Great Again was such a popular slogan. It appeals to mindless American jingoism and imperialism.

    dfordoom , says: Website January 10, 2018 at 12:14 am GMT
    @Twodees Partain

    There are people who claim to have high IQs who are totally stupid in practical matters.

    I'd almost go so far as to suggest that there's a direct correlation between high IQ and stupidity in practical matters.

    Talha , says: January 10, 2018 at 4:18 am GMT
    @dfordoom Edward Dutton stated that it was a trade-off between intelligence on one side and instinct on another – both are necessary for survival. For me, intelligence does not seem to correlate directly to wisdom.

    Peace.

    renfro , says: January 10, 2018 at 6:13 pm GMT
    @Twodees Partain

    If so, that reinforces my view that Trump doesn't know anybody in the Swamp

    You are exactly right.

    Trump really knew no one to hire or appoint to anything except his NY cronies , mainly his Jewish lawyers and Kushner contacts.
    So he appointed anyone they and his biggest donors recommended to him.
    His ego and insecurity demanded he surround himself with his NY cohorts and close family.

    dfordoom , says: Website January 11, 2018 at 1:59 am GMT
    @Authenticjazzman

    " It appeals to mindless American jingoism and imperialism" = "Make America great again"

    So you would prefer : "Make America powerless and insignificant again"

    How about "Make America a normal nation that respects other nations' sovereignty, that doesn't plant military bases on foreign soil, that doesn't bomb other people's countries, doesn't try to impose its views and its culture on the rest of the world, doesn't undermine the governments of other countries and doesn't threaten any country that dares to disagree with it." Would that be too much to ask?

    I would have thought that someone "Mensa" qualified since 1973 could understand that greatness should not be equated with behaving like a thug or a schoolyard bully. America's aggression does tend to look like the manifestation of a massive inferiority complex.

    HogHappenin , says: January 11, 2018 at 4:32 am GMT
    I commend Ms. Mercer for publishing this which will no doubt bring to light an ugly truth about many of her own tribesmen since there many of her other views which I wholly or partially disagree with

    And as was said sometime before, the thought process of earlier elites (the banking, Hollywood and the neo-con, neo-lib crowd which was almost exclusively Zio-Jewish and is disproportionately still is) has creeped into the very being of what constitutes to be an "elite" in the west these days. Unlimited warfare and welfare using fraudulent money, disturbing the social and sexual fabric of a society! Satan would be quite proud of this scum bunch

    So the zionist cabal still calls the shots and the slavish goyim second tier elites now willingly go along and in fact share the same mentality

    [Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior. ..."
    "... That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did. ..."
    "... So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. ..."
    "... The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether. ..."
    "... Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. ..."
    Jan 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Earlier this week, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:

    "Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a glorious end!"

    The tweet was warmly received and celebrated by Trump's supporters, despite the fact that it says essentially nothing since "eventually" could mean anything.

    Indeed, it's looking increasingly possible that nothing will come of the president's stated agenda to withdraw troops from Syria other than a bunch of words which allow his anti-interventionist base to feel nice feelings inside. Yet everyone laps it up, on both ends of the political aisle, just like they always do:

    How are such wildly different pictures being painted about the same non-event? By the fact that both sides of the Trump-Syria debate have thus far been reacting solely to narrative.

    This has consistently been the story throughout Trump's presidency: a heavy emphasis on words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions. A rude tweet can dominate headlines for days, while the actual behaviors of this administration can go almost completely ignored. Trump continues to more or less advance the same warmongering Orwellian globalist policies and agendas as his predecessors along more or less the same trajectory, but frantic mass media narratives are churned out every day painting him as some unprecedented deviation from the norm. Trump himself, seemingly aware that he's interacting entirely with perceptions and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often claims he's "never said" things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don't matter in this media environment, only narrative does.

    Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior.

    That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did.

    So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. With the nuclear brinkmanship this administration has been playing with its only nuclear rival on the planet, it would be so incredibly easy for Trump's opposition to attack him on his insanely hawkish escalation of a conflict which could easily end all life on earth if any little thing goes wrong, but they don't. Because this is all about narrative and not facts, Democrats have been paced into supporting even more sanctioning, proxy conflicts and nuclear posturing while loudly objecting to any sign of communication between the two nuclear superpowers, while Republicans are happy to see Trump increase tensions with Moscow because it combats the collusion narrative. Now both parties are supporting an anti-Russia agenda which existed in secretive US government agencies long before the 2016 election .

    And this to me is the most significant thing about Trump's presidency. Not any of the things people tell me I'm supposed to care about, but the fact that the age of Trump has been highlighting in a very clear way how we're all being manipulated by manufactured narratives all the time.

    Humanity lives in a world of mental narrative . We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and attention than the actual data itself. We use labels and stories for a reason: without them it would be impossible to share abstract ideas and information with each other about what's going on in our world. But those labels and stories get imbued with an intense amount of belief and identification; we form tight, rigid belief structures about our world, our society, and our very selves that can generate a lot of fear, hatred and suffering. Which is why it feels so nice to go out into nature and relax in an environment that isn't shaped by human mental narrative.

    This problem is exponentially exacerbated by the fact that these stories and labels are wildly subjective and very easily manipulated. Powerful people have learned that they can control the way everyone else thinks, acts and votes by controlling the stories they tell themselves about what's going on in the world using mass media control and financial political influence, allowing ostensible democracies to be conducted in a way which serves power far more efficiently than any dictatorship.

    So now America has a president who is escalating a dangerous cold war against Russia , who is working to prosecute Julian Assange and shut down WikiLeaks , who is expanding the same war on whistleblowers and Orwellian surveillance network that was expanded by Bush and Obama before him, who has expanded existing wars and made no tangible move as yet to scale them back, who is advancing the longstanding neocon agenda of regime change in Iran with starvation sanctions and CIA covert ops , and yet the two prevailing narratives about him are that he's either (A) a swamp-draining, establishment-fighting hero of peace or that he's (B) a treasonous Putin lackey who isn't nearly hawkish enough toward Russia.

    See how both A and B herd the public away from opposing the dangerous pro-establishment agendas being advanced by this administration? The dominant narratives could not possibly be more different from what's actually going on, and the only reason they're the dominant narratives is because an alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies exerts an immense amount of influence over the stories that are told by the political/media class.

    The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether.

    Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. It is possible that this is what it looks like when a thinking species evolves into a sane and healthy relationship with thought. Perhaps the cracks that are appearing all over official narratives today are like the first cracks appearing in an eggshell as a bird begins to hatch into the world.

    * * *

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , purchasing some of my sweet new merchandise , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

    [Jan 11, 2019] As Democratic Elites Reunite With Neocons, The Party's Voters Are Becoming Far More Militaristic And Pro-War Than Republicans by Glenn Greenwald

    Clinton Democrats (DemoRats) are so close to neocons that the current re-alliance is only natural and only partially caused by Trump. Under Obama some of leading figures of his administration were undistinguishable from neocons (Samantha Power is a good example here -- she was as crazy as Niki Haley, if not more). There is only one "war party in the USA which continently consists of two wings: Repugs and DemoRats.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Both GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham , one of the country's most reliable war supporters, and Hillary Clinton , who repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama for insufficient hawkishness, condemned Trump's decision in very similar terms, invoking standard war on terror jargon. ..."
    "... That's not surprising given that Americans by a similarly large plurality agree with the proposition that "the U.S. has been engaged in too many military conflicts in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for too long and should prioritize getting Americans out of harm's way" ..."
    "... But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent. ..."
    "... This case is even more stark since Obama ran in 2008 on a pledge to end the war in Afghanistan and bring all troops home. Throughout the Obama years, polling data consistently showed that huge majorities of Democrats favored a withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan ..."
    "... While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year on whether the U.S. should continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining ..."
    "... At the same time, Democratic policy elites in Washington are once again formally aligning with neoconservatives , even to the point of creating joint foreign policy advocacy groups (a reunion that predated Trump ). The leading Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, donated $200,000 to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and has multilevel alliances with warmongering institutions. ..."
    "... By far the most influential [neo]liberal media outlet, MSNBC, is stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents , while even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a "national security liberal" who was "all about counterterrorism"). ..."
    "... All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of conscience. It's inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation -- which will endure long after Trump is gone -- is well under way. ..."
    Jan 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Via Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP'S December 18 announcement that he intends to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria produced some isolated support in the anti-war wings of both parties , but largely provoked bipartisan outrage among in Washington's reflexively pro-war establishment.

    Both GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the country's most reliable war supporters, and Hillary Clinton, who repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama for insufficient hawkishness, condemned Trump's decision in very similar terms, invoking standard war on terror jargon.

    But while official Washington united in opposition, new polling data from Morning Consult/Politico shows that a large plurality of Americans support Trump's Syria withdrawal announcement: 49 percent support to 33 percent opposition.

    That's not surprising given that Americans by a similarly large plurality agree with the proposition that "the U.S. has been engaged in too many military conflicts in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for too long and should prioritize getting Americans out of harm's way" far more than they agree with the pro-war view that "the U.S. needs to keep troops in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan to help support our allies fight terrorism and maintain our foreign policy interests in the region."

    But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent.

    A similar gap is seen among those who voted Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections (28 percent support withdrawal while 54 percent oppose it), as opposed to the widespread support for withdrawal among 2018 GOP voters: 74 percent to 18 percent.

    Identical trends can be seen on the question of Trump's announced intention to withdraw half of the U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, where Democrats are far more supportive of keeping troops there than Republicans and independents.

    This case is even more stark since Obama ran in 2008 on a pledge to end the war in Afghanistan and bring all troops home. Throughout the Obama years, polling data consistently showed that huge majorities of Democrats favored a withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan:

    With Trump rather than Obama now advocating troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, all of this has changed. The new polling data shows far more support for troop withdrawal among Republicans and independents, while Democrats are now split or even opposed . Among 2016 Trump voters, there is massive support for withdrawal: 81 percent to 11 percent; Clinton voters, however, oppose the removal of troops from Afghanistan by a margin of 37 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed.

    This latest poll is far from aberrational. As the Huffington Post's Ariel Edwards-Levy documented early this week , separate polling shows a similar reversal by Democrats on questions of war and militarism in the Trump era.

    While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year on whether the U.S. should continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining. "Those who voted for Democrat Clinton now said by a 42-point margin that the U.S. had a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria involving ISIS," Edwards-Levy wrote, "while Trump voters said by a 16-point margin that the nation had no such responsibility." (Similar trends can be seen among GOP voters, whose support for intervention in Syria has steadily declined as Trump has moved away from his posture of the last two years -- escalating bombings in both Syria and Iraq and killing far more civilians , as he repeatedly vowed to do during the campaign -- to his return to his other campaign pledge to remove troops from the region.)

    This is, of course, not the first time that Democratic voters have wildly shifted their "beliefs" based on the party affiliation of the person occupying the Oval Office. The party's base spent the Bush-Cheney years denouncing war on terror policies, such as assassinations, drones, and Guantánamo as moral atrocities and war crimes, only to suddenly support those policies once they became hallmarks of the Obama presidency .

    But what's happening here is far more insidious. A core ethos of the anti-Trump #Resistance has become militarism, jingoism, and neoconservatism. Trump is frequently attacked by Democrats using longstanding Cold War scripts wielded for decades against them by the far right: Trump is insufficiently belligerent with U.S. enemies; he's willing to allow the Bad Countries to take over by bringing home U.S. soldiers; his efforts to establish less hostile relations with adversary countries is indicative of weakness or even treason.

    At the same time, Democratic policy elites in Washington are once again formally aligning with neoconservatives , even to the point of creating joint foreign policy advocacy groups (a reunion that predated Trump ). The leading Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, donated $200,000 to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and has multilevel alliances with warmongering institutions.

    By far the most influential [neo]liberal media outlet, MSNBC, is stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents , while even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a "national security liberal" who was "all about counterterrorism").

    All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of conscience. It's inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation -- which will endure long after Trump is gone -- is well under way.

    [Jan 11, 2019] The ticking time bomb is because a large part of young people working now are working on non – permanent contracts that don t pay benefits. These people won t have any pension at all and there are a lot of them

    Naomi Klein's book "Shock Doctrine", encapsulated by this post as "global elites used periods of crisis around the world to force damaging neoliberal policies derived from the Chicago School and Washington Consensus upon unhappy populations that suffered greatly as a result."
    Notable quotes:
    "... Eventually, Poland emerged as the major US agent of influence within the EU (along with GB) with the adamant anti-Russian stance. Which taking into account the real state of Polish manufacturing deprived of the major market is very questionable. Later by joining sanctions, they lost Russian agricultural market (including all apple market in which they have a prominent position). ..."
    "... Gowan's book, Global Gamble, is also good on the details of shock therapy in the former Warsaw Pact nations. One key problem was that shock therapy partly rested on he assumption that western European buyers would want to invest in modernizing plant and equipment in industries they acquired, but it quickly turned out that the German and other western buyers were really interested only in acquiring new MARKETS for their own products. ..."
    "... I remember a couple of paragraphs about Poland in my Economics 101 course, some 20 years ago. Was it in in Mankiw's book? or Lipsey-Chrystal? I do not remember anymore. One of those vicious neoliberal propaganda mouthpieces, anyway. The textbook pitched Poland's success story against Russia's abject failure, claiming that the former had dismantled and shut down all its inefficient state-run companies, while the latter still kept its unprofitable heavy industry on life support. ..."
    "... Somehow neoclassical economists always distort history into a cartoonish parody that confirms their models. ..."
    "... If you looked carefully, you could still find older books, barely touched, that touted Albania as a neoliberal success story along the same lines as Poland. Albania almost collapsed in civil war in 1998. ..."
    "... The author's criticism doesn't really address Klein's central points at all, which would be that the crisis was used as leverage to ram through otherwise politically unpalatable change, and that a great deal of the constraint forcing that was provided by actors both undemocratic and external. He seems to be of the school that regards such niceties as beside the point, as long as various macroaggregates eventually rose. ..."
    "... Any discussion of the Polish economy that completely ignores this massive level of economic outmigration, and it's continued rise among the young, misses a great deal. In a vibrant economy, it seems unlikely that so many educated Poles would find, for example, lower tier jobs in Britain to be their best path forward. ..."
    "... Out-migration is a huge factor in eastern and central Europe and without it, the picture would look entirely different. The Baltics, Bulgaria and Romania are even more affected. ..."
    "... Inter-war Poland is celebrated a lot in Poland these days, conveniently ignoring the facts it was really a totalitarian state – when Czechoslovakia was Muniched in 1938, Poles (and Hugarians) were quick to grab bits of territory right after that. ..."
    "... Poland has taken around a million Ukrainians over the past ten years so while many Poles are emigrating to Europe, they are being replaced by Ukrainians, who are ethnically and linguistically fairly similar to Poles. ..."
    Jan 11, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    The argument largely seems to hold for the original poster boy example in Chile with the Pinochet coup against the socialist Allende regime. A military coup replaced a democratically government. Whiole Chlle was experiencing a serious inflation, it was not in a full-blown economic collapse. The coup was supported by US leaders Nixon and Kissinger, who saw themselves preventing the emergence of pro-Soviet regime resembling Castro's Cuba. Thousands were killed, and a sweeping set of laisssez faire policies were imposed with the active participation of "Chicago Boys" associated with Milton Friedman. In fact, aside from bringing down inflation these rreforms did not initially improve economic performance, even as foreign capital flowed in, especially into the copper industry, although the core of that industry remained nationalized. After several years the Chicago Boys were sent away and more moderate policies, including a reimposition of controls on foreign capital flows, the economy did grow quite rapidly. But this left a deeply unequal income distribution in place, which would largely remain the case even after Pinochet was removed from power and parliamentary democracy returned.

    This scenario was argued to happen in many other narions, especially those in the former Sovit bloc as the soviet Union disintegrated and its successor states and the former members of the Soviet bloc in the CMEA and Warsaw Pact also moved to some sort of market capitalism imposed from outside with policies funded by the IMF and following the Washington Consensus. Although he has since expressed regret for this role in this, a key player linking what was done in several Latin American nations and what went down after 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe was Jeffrey Sachs. Klein's discussion especially of what went down in Russia also looks pretty sound by and large, wtthout dragging through the details, although in these cases the political shift was from dictatorships run by Communist parties dominated out of Moscow to at least somewhat more democratic governments, although not in all of the former Soviet republics such as in Central Asia and with many of these later backsliding towards more authoritarian governments later. In Russia and in many oothers large numbers of people were thrown into poverty from which they have not recovered. Klein has also extended this argument to other nations, including South Africa after the end of apartheid.

    likbez

    The level of the naivety of Barkley Rosser is astounding.

    Poland was a political project, the showcase for the neoliberal project in Eastern Europe and the USSR. EU was pressed to provide large subsidies, and that marionette complied. The commenter ilpalazzo (above) is right that there has been " a tremendous development in real estate and infrastructure mostly funded by the EU that has been a serious engine of growth." Like in Baltics and Ukraine, German, French, Swedish and other Western buyers were most interested in opening market for their products and getting rid of local and xUSSR competitors (and this supported and promoted Russophobia). With very few exceptions. University education system also was partially destroyed, but still fared better than most manufacturing industries.

    I remember talking to one of the Polish professors of economics when I was in Poland around 1992. He said that no matter how things will develop, the Polish economy will never be allowed to fail as the USA is interested in propelling it at all costs. That means that there was no CIA activity to undermine the financial system, deindustrialize the country, and possibly to partition the county like it was in Russia with Harvard mafia (Summers, Shleifer, etc.)

    Still, they lost quite a bit of manufacturing: for example all shipbuilding, which is ironic as Lech Wałęsa and Solidarity emerged in this industry.

    Eventually, Poland emerged as the major US agent of influence within the EU (along with GB) with the adamant anti-Russian stance. Which taking into account the real state of Polish manufacturing deprived of the major market is very questionable. Later by joining sanctions, they lost Russian agricultural market (including all apple market in which they have a prominent position).

    But they have a large gas pipeline on their territory, so I suspect that like Ukraine they make a lot of money via transit fees simply due to geographic. So they parochially live off rent -- that why they bark so much at North Stream 2.

    Polish elite is a real horror show, almost beyond redemption, and not only in economics. I do not remember, but I think it was Churchill who said " Poland is a greedy hyena of Europe." This is as true now as it was before WWII.

    Now they are propelled by cheap labor from Ukraine, which they helped to destroy (along with Sweden and Germany)

    ilpalazzo , , January 10, 2019 at 3:04 pm

    My post seem to have vanished into oblivion so I'm pasting from the clipboard.

    I am a Pole and have been a daily reader here since 2008. I hope a better versed compatriot will come out of the closet and give a better picture (I know there are a few).

    Let's just say the shock was pretty bad. In terms of amount of human suffering the worst was dissolving state owned farms. Hundreds of thousands of people were just let go without any help, although many farms were profitable and others could be restructured or converted into collectives etc. I live in a small town where there was a huge state farm and I can see former employees started to recover and get by just recently judging by the looks of their dwellings.

    Most of the manufacturing and heavy industry was sold off and extinguished. We used to have pretty decent capital producing capabilities like tooling etc. Not a trace of that now. There is a lot being manufactured now here but mostly simple components for german industry to assemble.

    Pension system was thoroughly looted by you know who and is a ticking time bomb. Most of it was quasi privatized – that is managed by western companies but still part of the state system. There were supposed to be individual saving accounts managed by sophisticated investment specialists but the money ended up invested in state bonds, issued to subsidize it. Managing fee 7 – 10 percent charge on every payment into the system, regardless of performance, anyone? It was a heist of the century.

    The ticking time bomb is because a large part of young people working now are working on non – permanent contracts that don't pay benefits. These people won't have any pension at all and there are a lot of them.

    Healthcare is single payer fund but heavily underfunded. Private practice and hospitals are allowed and skim most profitable procedures leaving the rest to public fund. There are unrealistic limits on number of procedures so if you need to see a specialist in July or later prepare to pay cash or wait till January.

    Municipal service companies, at least the most lucrative ones have ben sold off to foreign investment funds. A few of our cities' municipal companies, like central heating or energy have been sold off to german municipal companies (!). State telecom has been sold off to french state telecom (and one of the biggest and most famous fortunes made).

    Local printed press is 90% german corps owned.

    This is a map of state rail company railways in 1988 and 2009 . It has been a meme here for some time. It is true. Cancelled lines are the subsidized ones workers relied on to get to job. I closely know a thousand years old town that had rail built in 1860 by germans and liquidated right in 1990. The populace is now halved, all young emigrated, businesses dead. There have been a huge investment in freeways and other kind of roads so every one has to own a car to get to her job. Most cars are used 10+ year old german imports. Polish car mechanic and body shops are the best in the world specialists of german automotive produce.

    I live in a small contry town that was a home to a wealthy aristocrat. There is a beautiful baroque palace and huge park, the complex is literally a third part of town. After the war it was nationalized, there were sporting facilities built in the park for locals and school pupils to use. The palace was re-purposed as medical facility and office complex for state farm management. In the nineties the whole thing was given back to aristocrat descendants – a shady bunch hiding in Argentina AFAIR. They couldn't afford to keep it so they sold it to a nouveau – riche real estate developer. He fenced the whole thing off and refurbished into a sort of conference complex – it is underway and still not clear what's gonna happen with it. The effect is that a third of my town that used to be public space is fenced off and off limits now.

    To conclude, there has been a tremendous development in real estate and infrastructure mostly funded by the EU that has been a serious engine of growth. Lot of people got mortgage and financed homes or flats and there has been a whole industry created around it. A few crown jewel companies (copper mining, petroleum and other chemistry) are state owned. But most of the sophisticated furnishings used in real estate are german made (there is german made nat gas furnace in 95% of newly built homes) etc. Two million young people emigrated to work mostly to UK and Ireland. I'd lived in Dublin for a year in 2003 and there were Chinese people as salespersons in groceries and seven – elevens everywhere, now there are Poles instead.

    Recommended reading about the transformation years dealing is this book:

    https://monthlyreview.org/product/from_solidarity_to_sellout/

    The author is Kalecki's pupil.

    Darthbobber , , January 10, 2019 at 5:21 pm

    Thanks for this. Gowan's book, Global Gamble, is also good on the details of shock therapy in the former Warsaw Pact nations. One key problem was that shock therapy partly rested on he assumption that western European buyers would want to invest in modernizing plant and equipment in industries they acquired, but it quickly turned out that the German and other western buyers were really interested only in acquiring new MARKETS for their own products.

    And in agriculture, they both insisted on the elimination of subsidies within the eastern nations, and proceeded to use the area as a dumping ground for their own (often subsidized) agricultural surpluses.

    JTMcPhee , , January 10, 2019 at 6:51 pm

    All this gets back, in my minuscule view, to failure to have a decent answer to one little question:

    What kind of political economy do "we, the mopes" want to live within?

    And related to that, what steps can and must "we, the mopes" take to get to that hopefully wiser, more decent, more homeostatic and sustainable, political economy?

    And it likely doesn't matter for us old folks (obligatory blast at Boomers as cause of all problems and distresses, dismissing the roots and branches of "civilization," current patterns of consumption, and millennia of Progress), given what is "baked in" and the current distribution of weatlhandpower. But maybe "we, the mopes" can at least go down fighting. Gilets Jaunes, 150 million Indians, all that

    But without an answer to the first question, though, not much chance of "better," is there? Except maybe locally, for the tiny set of us mopes who know how to do community and commensalism and some other "C" words

    "We, the mopes" could make some important and effective changes. Enough of us, and soon enough, to avoid or mitigate the Jackpot?

    Unna , , January 10, 2019 at 4:09 pm

    Thanks very much for this. Very graphic. So, if you would, could you explain who the Law and Justice Party is, and why they won the election, and what exactly are they doing to make themselves popular? Are they in fact enacting certain social programs that we can read about or are they primarily relying on something else, like mainly Catholic traditionalism, for their political power?

    disc_writes , , January 10, 2019 at 4:33 pm

    I remember a couple of paragraphs about Poland in my Economics 101 course, some 20 years ago. Was it in in Mankiw's book? or Lipsey-Chrystal? I do not remember anymore. One of those vicious neoliberal propaganda mouthpieces, anyway. The textbook pitched Poland's success story against Russia's abject failure, claiming that the former had dismantled and shut down all its inefficient state-run companies, while the latter still kept its unprofitable heavy industry on life support.

    It is unsurprising to read that Poland followed a more nuanced approach. Somehow neoclassical economists always distort history into a cartoonish parody that confirms their models.

    That was in the early 2000s. The university was then brand new and was still filling the shelves of the library. If you looked carefully, you could still find older books, barely touched, that touted Albania as a neoliberal success story along the same lines as Poland. Albania almost collapsed in civil war in 1998.

    todde , , January 10, 2019 at 5:08 pm

    Yellow Vests knock out 60% of traffic cameras

    smart move. Or at least I would say so.

    Darthbobber , , January 10, 2019 at 5:08 pm

    Klein at least provided footnotes, and sources for her claims. Which are conspicuously absent from this piece.

    The World Bank, (World Development Indicators, 2006), one of Klein's sources, has a nationwide poverty rate only for 1993, and has it at 23% at that point, or between 2.3 times and more than 4 time the most common estimate he cites under the ancient regime.

    The same source has unemployment averaging 19.9% in 1990-92, and 19% in 2000-2004.

    As to the later poverty rate, Klein's source is Przemyslaw Wielgosz, then editor of the Polish edition of le Monde Diplomatique, who gives this: " Poles living below the 'social minimum' (defined as a living standard of £130 (192,4 EUR) per person and £297 (440,4 EUR) for a three person family per month) affecting 15% of the population in 1989 to 47% in 1996, and 59% in 2003." but whence he obtains these figures he does not say. Given that it falls in a period when unemployment was pushing 20% for a prolonged period, and that both the EU's subsidies and outmigration to the EU as an escape valve only start to kick in in 2003, the figure seems not wildly implausible.

    The author's criticism doesn't really address Klein's central points at all, which would be that the crisis was used as leverage to ram through otherwise politically unpalatable change, and that a great deal of the constraint forcing that was provided by actors both undemocratic and external. He seems to be of the school that regards such niceties as beside the point, as long as various macroaggregates eventually rose.

    The contrast between what was done, and what Solidarnosc had claimed to be all about when in opposition is incredibly striking, basically the difference between libertarian Communism and uber Dirigisme style capitalism.

    Darthbobber , January 10, 2019 at 10:27 am

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrations_from_Poland_since_EU_accession

    Any discussion of the Polish economy that completely ignores this massive level of economic outmigration, and it's continued rise among the young, misses a great deal. In a vibrant economy, it seems unlikely that so many educated Poles would find, for example, lower tier jobs in Britain to be their best path forward.

    Yes, your unemployment and poverty rates are lower if a significant fraction of the population works elsewhere in the EU, and reatriates the money. Though the pattern may cause a few other problems. (while many nations like to export their unemployment, not everybody wants to import it.)

    upstater , January 10, 2019 at 11:28 am

    You beat me to the punch

    Out-migration is a huge factor in eastern and central Europe and without it, the picture would look entirely different. The Baltics, Bulgaria and Romania are even more affected.

    vlade , January 10, 2019 at 2:01 pm

    The migration from Poland does not have only economic reasons. A lot of Poles migrate because they find the polish society (especially small towns and rural) very stiffling.

    A friend of mine left Poland the moment she got her MSc – literally, the same day she was on a bus to Germany. She's now a sucessfull woman, director level at a large consultancy. Yet her father calls her "old spinster" (this is the polite version), as she wasn't maried by 30, and she basically avoids going to Poland.

    She says she could never be as sucessfull in Poland, being a woman, and not being keen on marrying. I've heard similar stories from young Poles, not just women.

    Inter-war Poland is celebrated a lot in Poland these days, conveniently ignoring the facts it was really a totalitarian state – when Czechoslovakia was Muniched in 1938, Poles (and Hugarians) were quick to grab bits of territory right after that.

    Kasia, January 10, 2019 at 5:17 pm

    Poland has taken around a million Ukrainians over the past ten years so while many Poles are emigrating to Europe, they are being replaced by Ukrainians, who are ethnically and linguistically fairly similar to Poles.

    So Poland is proof that nationalist, populist policies can indeed work. Poland has had to taken rough measures with our judicial system and media to ensure globalist forces do not undermine our successes. No one, I mean no one, in Poland mouths the words, "diversity is our strength". Internationalist, liberal minded people who are so susceptible to globalist propaganda, are generally the ones leaving the nation. Indigenous Western Europeans who are suffering the joys of cultural enrichment and vibrant diversity are starting to buy property in Eastern Europe - more Hungary than Poland - but as the globalists push even more multiculturalism and continue to impoverish indigenous Europeans, Eastern Europe will become a shining beacon on the hill free of many of the evils of globalisation.

    [Jan 11, 2019] That is another surefire sign of degeneracy: when a regime can only produce incompetent, often old, leaders who are completely out of touch with reality and who blame their own failures on everyone but themselves

    Jan 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    jacques sheete , says: Next New Comment January 11, 2019 at 1:04 pm GMT

    That is another surefire sign of degeneracy: when a regime can only produce incompetent, often old, leaders who are completely out of touch with reality and who blame their own failures on [everyone but themselves].

    Another sign of degeneracy is that masses of people put their faith in such human garbage and fantasize that the essentially effortless task of casting ballots every few years will somehow, perhaps magically, improve their situations. Even more telling is the infantilism demonstrated by the attitude that they're special and "da gweatist" and that the world should cater to their every whim just like mommy and daddy did.

    Dream on, darlings!

    macilrae , says: Next New Comment January 11, 2019 at 3:29 pm GMT

    Unlike the Titanic, most collapsed regimes don't fully sink. They remain about half under water, and half above, possibly with an orchestra still playing joyful music. And in the most expensive top deck cabins, a pretty luxurious lifestyle can be maintained by the elites.

    A clever metaphor.

    incompetent, often old, leaders who are completely out of touch with reality and who blame their own failures on internal ("deplorables") and external ("the Russians") factors.

    Just so.

    Dmitry Orlov's assessment rings dead true to me. The most terrifying factor is that a doomed and demented US administration may resort to the use of its vast air and missile power to save itself.

    [Jan 11, 2019] Rosenstein expected to leave Justice Department; Barr tells lawmakers he won't interfere with Mueller

    Notable quotes:
    "... Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the most visible Justice Department protector of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation and a frequent target of President Donald Trump's wrath, is expected to leave his position soon after Trump's nominee for attorney general is confirmed. ..."
    "... In September, Rosenstein went to the White House expecting to be fired after news reports that he had discussed secretly recording Trump and invoking a constitutional amendment to remove Trump as unfit for office. He was ultimately allowed to stay on after private conversations with Trump and John Kelly, then chief of staff. ..."
    "... Trump also shared a photo on Twitter in November showing Rosenstein and others criticized by the president behind bars, calling for them to be tried for "treason." ..."
    Jan 11, 2019 | www.chicagotribune.com
    Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the most visible Justice Department protector of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation and a frequent target of President Donald Trump's wrath, is expected to leave his position soon after Trump's nominee for attorney general is confirmed.

    The departure creates uncertainty about the oversight of Mueller's team as it enters what may be its final months of work. But the attorney general nominee, William Barr, moved quickly Wednesday to quell concerns that his arrival could endanger the probe, telling lawmakers during Capitol Hill visits ahead of his confirmation hearing that he has a high opinion of Mueller.

    "He had absolutely no indication he was going to tell Bob Mueller what to do or how to do it," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will question Barr next Tuesday.

    If confirmed by the Republican-led Senate, Barr could be in place at the Justice Department by February. Rosenstein is expected to leave his position soon after that, though he is not being forced out, said a person familiar with the plans who was not authorized to discuss them on the record and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

    The departure is not surprising given that Rosenstein has been deputy for almost two years. It is common for new attorneys general to have their own deputies and Barr has told people close to him that he wanted his own No. 2.

    It was unclear who might replace Rosenstein, though Barr has some ideas for a selection, Graham said, without elaborating. The deputy position requires Senate confirmation. It was also not immediately clear whether Rosenstein's top deputy, Edward O'Callaghan, who has a prominent role overseeing Mueller's investigation, might remain in his role.

    Rosenstein's departure is noteworthy given his appointment of Mueller and close supervision of his work. He's also endured a tenuous relationship with Trump, who has repeatedly decried Rosenstein's decision to appoint Mueller, and with congressional Republicans who accused him of withholding documents from them and not investigating aggressively enough what they contend was political bias within the FBI.

    In September, Rosenstein went to the White House expecting to be fired after news reports that he had discussed secretly recording Trump and invoking a constitutional amendment to remove Trump as unfit for office. He was ultimately allowed to stay on after private conversations with Trump and John Kelly, then chief of staff.

    Trump also shared a photo on Twitter in November showing Rosenstein and others criticized by the president behind bars, calling for them to be tried for "treason."

    Mueller is investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 election and contacts with the Trump campaign. Rosenstein and his chief deputy have continued to maintain day-to-day oversight over the probe, a senior Justice Department official told reporters last month.

    [Jan 10, 2019] How the Hawks Prevailed on Syria by Daniel Larison

    Notable quotes:
    "... Behind the candidate's rhetoric there never was enough strategic sense, necessary knowledge, or even caring about foreign affairs to ward off the maneuvers of a determined hawk like Bolton once he was in position to do damage. ..."
    Jan 09, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    Pillar comments on Bolton's maneuvers to keep us at war in Syria:

    The episode involving withdrawal and non-withdrawal of U.S. troops in Syria should be a lesson for those who mistakenly placed hopes in Trump for a more restrained and less militaristic U.S. foreign policy. Applause lines on the campaign trail have been mistaken for deeper thought. Behind the candidate's rhetoric there never was enough strategic sense, necessary knowledge, or even caring about foreign affairs to ward off the maneuvers of a determined hawk like Bolton once he was in position to do damage.

    If the first two years of Trump's presidency didn't already make it clear, the last few weeks should have laid to rest any suspicions that the Trump administration is going to put an end to unnecessary foreign wars. It isn't happening. For one thing, everyone around Trump doesn't want those wars to end and will go to considerable lengths to ensure that they continue. That is a result of Trump's own poor personnel choices and bad judgment. It isn't possible to have a "more restrained and less militaristic U.S. foreign policy" when the president's national security team is dominated by reflexive hawks that have never seen a military intervention they didn't want to support. Trump put Bolton in the position he now occupies, and unless he wants to start in on his fourth National Security Advisor within two years we are going to be stuck with the unfortunate consequences of that bad decision for a while longer.

    Pillar writes:

    The de facto reversal of Trump's withdrawal decision is a victory only for those who -- like Bolton, who still avers that the Iraq War was a good idea -- never met a U.S. military intervention in the Middle East they didn't like and never stop seeing regimes they would like to change with force.

    One big problem with the Trump administration is that it is filled with the people who never met an intervention they didn't like. People like that have been the ones shaping administration policies in the region for the last two years, and on Syria they have prevailed once again. It could scarcely be otherwise when there is essentially no one willing or able to make the arguments for the other side of these issues. It is extremely difficult for hawks to lose an internal administration debate when there is no one in the administration that opposes hawkish policies.

    SteveJ January 9, 2019 at 10:41 pm

    I'm going to give Trump until the end of the year to get us out of these places.

    If he doesn't have the backbone for it, like the previous 2 Presidents, then screw him.

    [Jan 10, 2019] Stuff To Read Integrity Initiative, Skripal, Kaspersky ...

    Notable quotes:
    "... Neither Rob nor I have a sound theory of what really happened in Salisbury. There are many possible explanations, but none for which there is sufficient evidence. What we do know is that the British government lied and lies about the case from A to Z. ..."
    "... This wasn't an accident blamed on Putin but a planned semi-assassination in which at least one of the victims was unaware of the plan designed from the beginning to be used in the rolling anti-Putin regime change operation. ..."
    Jan 10, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Stuff To Read: Integrity Initiative, Skripal, Kaspersky ...

    The is no original piece ready to post today, but here are some interesting links:

    There are several new stories about the Integrity Initiative though still none in any mainstream media.

    Apropos Skripal

    Use as open thread ...

    Posted by b at 12:58 PM | Comments (55)

    bevin | Jan 9, 2019 1:19:20 PM | 1

    Comments I posted this comment at Off Guardian. There are a couple of points that may be of interest:

    The essential feature of this "Integrity Initiative" is that it is purportedly a charity or an NGO. Like Atlantic Council, or Bellingcat, it is funded by government(s) but it has, as this video demonstrates, the capacity to distance itself from government, Deniability.

    Deniability is the central feature of all British regime change operations since 1945. The UK takes (took?) the UN Charter and Nuremberg seriously. Not in the sense that it follows the rules but in so far as it tries not to get caught waging aggressive wars and interfering in sovereign states by carrying out regime change operations.

    Britain has become very good not just at keeping its secret operations secret and deniable. But, through its controls over the media, stopping leaks by ensuring that whistle blowers are not heard.

    What this case indicates is that people like Donnelly, contemptible careerists playing games with humanity's very existence, have prevailed over the more cautious and sensible Civil Servants in the Foreign Office, who used to keep a lid on the irrepressible folly of psychopaths like Christopher Nigel, and have been given license not only to kill but to do so without reference to 'M' and Whitehall.

    In this case, thanks to the weakness and demoralised state of the current government what has happened is that Donnelly has improved on the rolling regime change operation against Russia, (consisting of taking advantage of opportunities to castigate the Kremlin and blaming Putin for everything that goes wrong, every Russian expatriate's death, every botched poison gas gambit by the White Helmets (another one of these NGOs run by 'retired MI types),).. improved on it to the extent that, now, rather than waiting to comment on, and build frames around such events as Litvinenko's death, they are constructing them out of whole cloth.
    The key word here is bricolage, as used by Levi Strauss to describe one of the characteristic reactions of traditional societies to the irruption of western imperialism.

    Donnelly, his acolytes and his dupes in the media are taking whatever they find lying around in the world and twisting it together to form apparent events. The White Helmets, for example, attempt a chlorine gas attack on Syrian forces. It fails but rather than deny that it ever happened British Intelligence convinces the media that, in fact the attack was not by the Jihadists but upon them. The media dutifully takes its cues, from the clusters and, almost before you know it, the US is bombing Damascus on the ground that Assad is carrying out poison gas attacks.

    The MH17 affair is another instance: an airliner gets shot down, whether deliberately or not doesn't matter, and Russia is blamed. All manner of phony 'evidence' is publicised. The real evidence such as Air Traffic Control records is suppressed. Sanctions are imposed. Russia further isolated etc. Then we had the DNC emails, again, a leak probably by a decent person disgruntled by the utter cynicism and criminality of the DNC's tactics in the primary elections. Twisted into something resembling a Russian conspiracy against Clinton. Not one that anyone with enough brain to tie his shoelaces would credit but just enough to set the media lynch mobs, led by their clusters, into operation.

    All of which leads inexorably to Salisbury and the Skripals.

    And here perhaps there is more than bricolage: rather than picking up what providence has delivered and making a passably plausible story of it, here, one suspects, the matter was put together in advance. This wasn't an accident blamed on Putin but a planned semi-assassination in which at least one of the victims was unaware of the plan designed from the beginning to be used in the rolling anti-Putin regime change operation..

    Which, and this is something that the old FO mandarins knew would happen if policy were left in the hands of Donnelly and Co, (straight out of schoolboy comics like Magnet or Hotspur), has proved to be exactly what Russia needed: a series of kicks at the Kremlin which drove it into the arms of Beijing and forced it to form an iron alliance which will lead not to regime change in Moscow but to the destruction of the Atlantic empire.

    George Lane , Jan 9, 2019 1:30:15 PM | link
    Just would like to point out a small, interesting parallel between these Integrity Initiative documents and some of the mainstream academic literature in the US about democracy, namely the use of the phrase "malign influence" to describe the influence of Russia (and China). If one reads the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy (which names the NED as a partner or some such) or the latest Freedom House report, one will find the academic version of the language used by mainstream journalism, warning of the threat that Russia and China pose to the Western liberal democratic way of life.
    Hausmeister , Jan 9, 2019 4:38:00 PM | link
    james | Jan 9, 2019 4:12:38 PM | 14

    Sorry for that.

    I would call them a country run fully by intel agencies. I made a game today. Google research results are personalized. I asked several friends to search Google for „Integrity Iniative". All the screenshots showed the same. One sputnik-Link, one to Nachdenkseiten, the rest international. Not one single main stream medium was mentioned. Since November! There has been even a debate in the British parliament. If this is no top-down organized consulting machine what is such a machine then?

    james , Jan 9, 2019 4:49:08 PM | link
    @19 russ.. thanks.. here is a link to their site.. http://www.medialens.org/

    ... ... ...

    somebody , Jan 9, 2019 5:16:32 PM | link
    The Guardian now has an obituary on the Integrity Initiative . They seem to have decided that they cannot silence the case.
    Tony_0pmoc , Jan 9, 2019 5:48:51 PM | link
    @26 Ross Stanford. I had been posting on Craig Murray's website for nearly 10 years since I read his book Murder in Samarkand, and very nearly turned up at the House of Commons as a witness - but he asked can anyone record this - which I did. I have never actually met him. bevin posted for maybe a couple of years a couple of years ago. bevin wrote about The French political situation, before it kicked off.

    He is a very clever man, and to delete someone so intelligent who was almost literally predicting what was likely to happen with yellow vests etc, seems a little bit both arrogant and immature in my my view. However all of us regardless of our political views accept the Craig Murray is a Man of Great Integrity and Courage, even though on a lot of political issues I disagree with him. Surely thats O.K. disagreeing about politics?

    "Craig Murray - Torture 1 of 7" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF9spgagSHI

    Tony

    dh , Jan 9, 2019 5:59:56 PM | link
    @30 The basic line seems to be that the West is vulnerable to Russian attacks because we have a free press. So why did it take the free press such a long time to come up with a response? James Ball does admit that a secretive organization using government funding to slander Jeremy Corbyn might not have been a great idea.
    Jen , Jan 9, 2019 6:12:15 PM | link
    Posted this over at Mark Chapman's The New Kremlin Stooge blog:

    The latest news from Salisbury: first, the park bench and the dining table walked the Path of Fire, then the guinea pigs and a cat followed, a house may soon do so as well, and the latest perhaps to join the queue

    "Amesbury ambulance station may never reopen after nerve agent attack": https://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/news/17343540.amesbury-ambulance-station-may-never-reopen-after-nerve-agent-attack/

    and then at some point in the future: "Revised plan to redevelop Salisbury's Maltings unveiled"
    https://www.spirefm.co.uk/news/local-news/2707454/revised-plan-to-redevelop-salisburys-maltings-unveiled/

    "Salisbury's shopping centre to be given £69million makeover and major rebrand after infamous Novichok poisonings": https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6275651/Salisburys-shopping-centre-given-69million-makeover-infamous-Novichok-poisonings.html

    Several comments attached to that post are of "wish we had Novichok in our shopping centre" or "they planned this all along" type. It seems that Salisbury shopping centre as it is has not been doing well because of high rents previously imposed by Wiltshire Council and it desperately needs a makeover. Call me cynical but maybe Wiltshire Council is using the poisoning incident to bring forward its redevelopment plans for the Salisbury shopping centre that will all but kill off local businesses.

    Blooming Barricade , Jan 9, 2019 6:17:08 PM | link
    @3
    The irony is that, with a genuinely free press, RT would cease to have any appeal. The corporate media is hopelessly biased against Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, as well as pro-war, opposed to anarchism, openly pro-capitalism, and fails to report on issues like fracking, oligarchic trade deals Palestinian struggles, police state brutality against left, and almost every other topic the public would want to know about.

    Projects like PropOrNot and the Intgerity Initiative exist solely to prevent the public from knowing about those things by locking down the information sphere against independent media (today they claimed that "neoliberalism" and "neoconservatism" aren't real concepts but Russian-invented insults against the rules-based liberal world order.

    karlof1 , Jan 9, 2019 6:35:16 PM | link
    George Galloway weighs in on the chaos engulfing the Empire in Washington, London and Paris. The Neoliberal ship is foundering while the uplifting of people-based policies of Russia and China keep them on track to reach their aims. Soon, if Trump keeps the government shutdown, those idled federal workers just might be seen in the streets. George has a penchant for connecting things, and had this to say about Macron:

    "The very conditions Macron strove so very hard to bring about in Damascus and that France DID help bring about in Kiev are now rocking the very foundations of the French Republic."

    The false flag of Austerity--Neoliberalism preying on its own as was predicted at its beginnings is what we're witnessing, while the actors that created the situation cling with bloody hands to the ship of state unwilling to surrender the wheel to those who might salvage the situation. Metaphorically, Rome burns while Nero and his Senators fiddle.

    Peter Schmidt , Jan 9, 2019 6:50:14 PM | link
    The Guardian has produced an article about Integrity Initiative. It was so poorly written that they had to close the comment section after 138 comments. People do know a lot more than the Guardian thinks.
    pretzelattack , Jan 9, 2019 6:57:42 PM | link
    the guardian never keeps comment sections open long if too many posters start disagreeing with their preferred line. their other tactic is simply never to open comments on posts where they think this is likely to happen. and of course they haven't even acknowledged the luke harding travesty, as they continue to beg for donations to support their fearless independent journalism.
    dh , Jan 9, 2019 7:15:58 PM | link
    I thought James Ball made a gallant effort to exonerate Western media considering he probably had a team of editors breathing down his neck. It's the lack of transparency that seems to upset him most. Perhaps his next article will be an in depth look at how Integrity Initiative got government funding.

    [Jan 10, 2019] Rosenstein Protected Mueller by Bending Justice Department Rules

    Rosenstein was a puppet on more powerful forces, which were hell-bent on deposing Trump. And those included Intelligence agencies brass, Clinton clan and UK government.
    Jan 10, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com
    leave as expected when a new U.S. attorney general is confirmed. Rosenstein broke the normal rules to save a shred of normality. Usually that kind of compromise doesn't work. In this case, it did -- mostly.

    Rosenstein is going to be remembered first for naming Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election. Because Attorney General Jeff Sessions was recused from anything Russia related, because of his false statements to Congress during his confirmation process about his Russian contacts, Rosenstein also had the task of supervising Mueller. Rosenstein's second important accomplishment was to successfully protect Mueller from being fired by President Donald Trump, despite repeated threats and attacks on the investigation from the White House.

    But Rosenstein should never have been in a position either to appoint Mueller or to supervise his investigation. He should've been recused from both tasks.

    To begin with, the event that triggered Mueller's appointment was Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey. Rosenstein played a central role in that process: He drafted a memo providing reasons to fire Comey that Trump relied on, whether in good faith or otherwise.

    If you've advised the president on how to perform an act that is going to come under investigation, you really shouldn't choose the investigator or supervise the investigation. That's classic grounds for recusal. Indeed, back in June 2017, when Trump tweeted that he was effectively being investigated by Rosenstein for conduct Rosenstein had advised, it seemed obvious to me that Rosenstein would have to recuse himself.

    He didn't.

    Then, in September 2018, it came out that Rosenstein was so troubled by Trump's conduct around the Comey firing that he had discussed wearing a wire to record the president. He had also reportedly discussed having the cabinet invoke the 25th Amendment and declare the president unfit for office. This made it clearer still that Rosenstein should recuse himself.

    Once again, he didn't.

    Under normal circumstances, Rosenstein's failure to recuse himself would stand as a serious blot on his otherwise excellent reputation as a nonpartisan career prosecutor and Department of Justice professional. Prosecutors especially, but also other top Justice Department officials, gain their professional and moral authority from following the rules all the time, not some of the time.

    Prosecutors hold tremendous power, greater than any other actor within our federal system, including judges. If you're prosecuted, your life is going to change drastically. Guilty or innocent, you're going to have to spend all your resources on defense. Most of the time, you will be guilty of something. The U.S. code criminalizes so much activity that prosecutors can typically find some area where you've broken some law -- and hold you accountable.

    Given that prosecutors have extraordinarily broad discretion to decide whom to charge and what crimes to charge them with, prosecutors need to be paragons of rule-following. In other areas of life, bending the rules is sometimes necessary or desirable. In a prosecutor, it's the cardinal sin. And Rosenstein definitely bent the rules by not recusing himself.

    Yet, from the perspective of two years, Rosenstein's rule-bending was probably justified -- because Mueller's investigation is necessary to assuring that the rule of law plays a role in making sense of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

    Without Rosenstein's appointment of Mueller, there might have been no special prosecutor at all. Or the person appointed might have been weaker or less competent than Mueller. Or the person appointed might have been more susceptible to pressure from the Trump White House.

    It's also easy to imagine that without Rosenstein, another Justice Department official might have interfered with Mueller's investigation at the urging of the White House or even fired Mueller. Ask yourself: Do you have any faith that acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker would have resisted Trump's pressure for two years?

    Now that Mueller has been able to operate for two years, and a new attorney general has been nominated, it's totally reasonable for Rosenstein to plan to step down.

    If confirmed, William Barr will take over supervision of Mueller. Technically, Trump handed over that supervisory role to Whitaker after Sessions was fired -- but Rosenstein needed to stick around because Whitaker's appointment was itself legally questionable and because Whitaker isn't especially trustworthy as an independent actor.

    In contrast, Barr, whatever his views on executive power and the Mueller investigation, would at least be a credible attorney general. He served in that role under President George H.W. Bush. At that time, there was no serious talk of firing independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, whose investigation of the Iran-Contra affair was getting close to the president.

    A new attorney general should be able to recommend his own deputy. Rosenstein is free to step down because, in essence, his job is done. Mueller survived. The ends arguably justified the means. That's not a sentence I'm very happy to write when it comes to prosecution and the Department of Justice. But that will probably be the judgment of history this time.

    [Jan 09, 2019] What is absolutely remarkable to me in a very bad way is that this piece of trash received 681 reviews on Amazon, only 21 with one star and the balance above that for an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5

    Jan 09, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Taras77 says: January 7, 2019 at 4:49 am GMT 100 Words

    What is absolutely remarkable to me in a very bad way is that this piece of trash received 681 reviews on Amazon, only 21 with one star and the balance above that for an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5.

    Absolutely remarkable, again, but it is reflective of the brain dead sheeple currently doing any reading at all of books by the rabid neo cons. I hesitate to guess what some extreme alarm sounding diatribe by Wolfowitz or the current "main man," max boot would register. Maybe Romney can lead us out of the wilderness (sarc)>

    I know that this is Amazon and when it comes to the standards of what passes as accurate reporting and journalistic standards,"wapo and bezos leads the pack into the sewer. REPLY AGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. THIS COMMENTER

    Sean , says: January 7, 2019 at 5:15 am GMT

    @eah

    While secretary of state Hillary actually compared Putin to Hitler.

    Sean , says: January 7, 2019 at 5:35 am GMT
    @El Dato an American puppet inasmuch as he had Americans masterminding his political PR campaigns) start giving ground that the situation becomes fluid.

    Albright (and Nuland) had no idea what Russia as a normal nation state could be expected to put up with, because all they had to go on was Yelstyn who was drunk most days. So the US was slowly but surely drawn into the power vacuum in the territories the USSR withdrew from and Albright thought that was the way things were going to continue to be. The domestic situation in America was also one where the elite had things their own way to an unsustainable extent. What Albright does not like is the facts of life.

    nickels , says: January 7, 2019 at 4:48 pm GMT

    The whole discussion is so asinine.
    Facism is not a form of government that can just be inserted or deleted.
    It is a very specific reaction to the communist takeover of a nation.
    At that point, other forms of government are no longer viable: totalitarianism of one kind of another becomes an absolute necessity to rule.
    We see western governments coming to this point-the moral law is lost, corruption reigns, and only pure force has currency.
    So at this point you only have one of two choices, there simply are no alternatives:
    communism or facism.
    And it is quite clear that facism is a more reasonable and less murderous choice.

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website January 7, 2019 at 6:00 pm GMT
    @Taras77

    for as long as neo con history is a subject for study (she has plenty of competition for that recognition).

    Most "history" taught in the US (and combined West) is one or another iteration (sometimes extreme, sometimes less so) of US exceptionalism. Even American so called "realism" is built around exceptionalism. American military doctrines are written primarily on exceptionalism basis. Results are easily observable.

    [Jan 09, 2019] What is absolutely remarkable to me in a very bad way is that this piece of trash received 681 reviews on Amazon, only 21 with one star and the balance above that for an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5

    Jan 09, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Taras77 says: January 7, 2019 at 4:49 am GMT 100 Words

    What is absolutely remarkable to me in a very bad way is that this piece of trash received 681 reviews on Amazon, only 21 with one star and the balance above that for an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5.

    Absolutely remarkable, again, but it is reflective of the brain dead sheeple currently doing any reading at all of books by the rabid neo cons. I hesitate to guess what some extreme alarm sounding diatribe by Wolfowitz or the current "main man," max boot would register. Maybe Romney can lead us out of the wilderness (sarc)>

    I know that this is Amazon and when it comes to the standards of what passes as accurate reporting and journalistic standards,"wapo and bezos leads the pack into the sewer. REPLY AGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. THIS COMMENTER

    Sean , says: January 7, 2019 at 5:15 am GMT

    @eah

    While secretary of state Hillary actually compared Putin to Hitler.

    Sean , says: January 7, 2019 at 5:35 am GMT
    @El Dato an American puppet inasmuch as he had Americans masterminding his political PR campaigns) start giving ground that the situation becomes fluid.

    Albright (and Nuland) had no idea what Russia as a normal nation state could be expected to put up with, because all they had to go on was Yelstyn who was drunk most days. So the US was slowly but surely drawn into the power vacuum in the territories the USSR withdrew from and Albright thought that was the way things were going to continue to be. The domestic situation in America was also one where the elite had things their own way to an unsustainable extent. What Albright does not like is the facts of life.

    nickels , says: January 7, 2019 at 4:48 pm GMT

    The whole discussion is so asinine.
    Facism is not a form of government that can just be inserted or deleted.
    It is a very specific reaction to the communist takeover of a nation.
    At that point, other forms of government are no longer viable: totalitarianism of one kind of another becomes an absolute necessity to rule.
    We see western governments coming to this point-the moral law is lost, corruption reigns, and only pure force has currency.
    So at this point you only have one of two choices, there simply are no alternatives:
    communism or facism.
    And it is quite clear that facism is a more reasonable and less murderous choice.

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website January 7, 2019 at 6:00 pm GMT
    @Taras77

    for as long as neo con history is a subject for study (she has plenty of competition for that recognition).

    Most "history" taught in the US (and combined West) is one or another iteration (sometimes extreme, sometimes less so) of US exceptionalism. Even American so called "realism" is built around exceptionalism. American military doctrines are written primarily on exceptionalism basis. Results are easily observable.

    [Jan 09, 2019] Mattis One More General For The Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

    Jan 09, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Mattis: One More General For The "Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone"

    by Tyler Durden Wed, 01/09/2019 - 21:55 20 SHARES Authored by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos via The American Conservative,

    Big brass and government executives play both sides of the military revolving door, including "the only adult in the room."

    Before he became lionized as the "only adult in the room" capable of standing up to President Trump, General James Mattis was quite like any other brass scoping out a lucrative second career in the defense industry. And as with other military giants parlaying their four stars into a cushy boardroom chair or executive suite, he pushed and defended a sub-par product while on both sides of the revolving door. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that contract turned out to be an expensive fraud and a potential health hazard to the troops.

    According to a recent report by the Project on Government Oversight, 25 generals, nine admirals, 43 lieutenant generals, and 23 vice admirals retired to become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for the defense industry between 2008 and 2018. They are part of a much larger group of 380 high-ranking government officials and congressional staff who shifted into the industry in that time.

    To get a sense of the demand, according to POGO, which had to compile all of this information through Freedom of Information requests, there were 625 instances in 2018 alone in which the top 20 defense contractors (think Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin) hired senior DoD officials for high-paying jobs -- 90 percent of which could be described as "influence peddling."

    Back to Mattis. In 2012, while he was head of Central Command, the Marine General pressed the Army to procure and deploy blood testing equipment from a Silicon Valley company called Theranos. He communicated that he was having success with this effort directly to Theranos's chief executive officer. Even though an Army health unit tried to terminate the contract due to it's not meeting requirements, according to POGO, Mattis kept the pressure up. Luckily, it was never used on the battlefield.

    Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise but upon retirement in 2013, Mattis asked a DoD counsel about the ethics guiding future employment with Theranos. They advised against it. So Mattis went to serve on its board instead for a $100,000 salary. Two years after Mattis quit to serve as Trump's Pentagon chief in 2016, the two Theranos executives he worked with were indicted for "massive" fraud , perpetuating a "multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors, doctors and patients," and misrepresenting their product entirely. It was a fake.

    But assuming this was Mattis's only foray into the private sector would be naive. When he was tapped for defense secretary -- just three years after he left the military -- he was worth upwards of $10 million . In addition to his retirement pay, which was close to $15,000 a month at the time, he received $242,000 as a board member, plus as much as $1.2 million in stock options in General Dynamics, the Pentagon's fourth largest contractor. He also disclosed payments from other corporate boards, speech honorariums -- including $20,000 from defense heavyweight Northrop Grumman -- and a whopping $410,000 from Stanford University's public policy think tank the Hoover Institution for serving as a "distinguished visiting fellow."

    Never for a moment think that Mattis won't land softly after he leaves Washington -- if he leaves at all. Given his past record, he will likely follow a very long line, as illustrated by POGO's explosive report, of DoD officials who have used their positions while inside the government to represent the biggest recipients of federal funding on the outside. They then join ex-congressional staffers and lawmakers on powerful committees who grease the skids on Capitol Hill. And then they go to work for the very companies they've helped, fleshing out a small army of executives, lobbyists, and board members with direct access to the power brokers with the purse strings back on the inside.

    Welcome to the Swamp

    "[Mattis's' career course] is emblematic of how systemic the problem is," said Mandy Smithberger, POGO's lead on the report and the director of its Center for Defense Information.

    "Private companies know how to protect their interests. We just wish there were more protections for taxpayers."

    When everything is engineered to get more business for the same select few, "when you have a Department of Defense who sees it as their job to promote arms sales does this really serve the interest of national security?"

    That is something to chew on. If a system is so motivated by personal gain (civil servants always mindful of campaign contributions and private sector job prospects) on one hand, and big business profits on the other, is there room for merit or innovation? One need only look at Lockheed's F-35 joint strike fighter, the most expensive weapon system in history, which was relentlessly promoted over other programs by members of Congress and within the Pentagon despite years of test failures and cost overruns , to see what this gets you: planes that don't fly, weapons that don't work, and shortfalls in other parts of the budget that don't matter to contractors like pilot training and maintenance of existing systems.

    "It comes down to two questions," Smithberger noted in an interview with TAC.

    " Are we approving weapons systems that are safe or not? And are we putting [servicemembers'] lives on the line" to benefit the interests of industry?

    All of this is legal, she points out. Sure, there are rules -- "cooling off" periods before government officials and members of Congress can lobby, consult, or work on contracts after they leave their federal positions, or when industry people come in through the other side to take positions in government. But Smithberger said they are "riddled with loopholes" and lack of enforcement.

    Case in point: current acting DoD Secretary Patrick Shanahan spent 31 years working for Boeing , which gets about $24 billion a year as the Pentagon's second largest contractor. He was Boeing's senior vice president in 2016 just before he was confirmed as Trump's deputy secretary of defense in 2017. Last week he recused himself from all matters Boeing, but he wasn't always so hands off. At one point, he "prodded" for the purchase of 12 $1.2 billion Boeing F-15X fighter planes, according to Bloomberg.

    But the revolving door is so much more pervasive and insidious than POGO could possibly catalogue. So says Franklin "Chuck" Spinney , who worked as a civilian and military officer in the Pentagon for 31 years, beginning in 1968. He calls the military industrial complex a "quasi-isolated political economy" that is in many ways independent from the larger domestic economy. It has its own rules, norms, and culture, and unlike the real world, it is self-sustaining -- not by healthy competition and efficiency, but by keeping the system on a permanent war footing, with money always pumping from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon to the private sector and then back again. Left out are basic laws of supply and demand, geopolitical realities, and the greater interest of society.

    "That's why we call it a self-licking ice cream cone," Spinney explained to TAC.

    " [This report] is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more subtle stuff going on. When you are in weapons development like I was at the beginning of my career, you learn about this on day one, that having cozy relationships with contractors is openly encouraged. And then you get desensitized. I was fortunate because I worked for people who did not like it and I caught on quickly."

    While the culture has evolved, basic realities have persisted since the massive build-up of the military and weapons systems during the Cold War. The odds of young officers in the Pentagon making colonel or higher are slim. They typically retire out in their 40s. They know implicitly that their best chance for having a well-paid second career is in the only industry they know -- defense. Most take this calculation seriously, moderating their decisions on program work and procurement and communicating with members of Congress as a matter of course.

    " Let's just say there's a problem [with a program]. Are you going to come down hard on a contractor and try to hold his feet to the fire? Are you going to risk getting blackballed when you are out there looking for a job ? Sometimes there is no word communicated, you just don't want to be unacceptable to anyone," said Spinney. It's ingrained, from the rank of lieutenant colonel all the way up to general.

    So the top five and their subsidiaries continue to get the vast majority of work, usually in no-bid contracts ($100 billion worth in 2016 alone) , and with cost-plus structures that critics say encourage waste and never-ending timetables, like the $1.5 trillion F-35. "The whole system is wired to get money out the door," said Spinney. "That is where the revolving door is most pernicious. It's everywhere."

    The real danger is that under this pressure, parties work to keep bad contracts alive even if they have to cook the books. "Essentially from the standpoint of Pentagon contracting you are not going to have people writing reports saying this product is a piece of shit," said Spinney. Worse, evaluations are designed to deflect criticism if not oversell success in order to keep the spigot open. The most infamous example of this was the rigged tests that kept the ill-fated "Star Wars" missile defense program going in the 1980s.

    * * *

    Everyone talks about generals like Mattis as though they're warrior-gods. But for decades, many of them have turned out to be different creatures altogether - creatures of a semi-independent ecosystem that operates outside of the normal rules and benefits only a powerful minority subset: the military elite, defense contractors, and Congress. More recently, the defense-funded think tank world has become part of this ecology, providing the ideological grist for more spending and serving as a way-station for operators moving in and out of government and industry.

    Call it the Swamp, the Borg, or even the Blob, but attempting to measure or quantify the revolving door in the military-industrial complex can feel like a fool's errand. Groups like POGO have attempted to shine light on this dark planet for years. Unfortunately, there is little incentive in Capitol Hill or at the Pentagon to do the very least: pull the purse strings, close loopholes, encourage real competition, and end cost-plus practices.

    "We generally need to see more (political) championing on this issue," Smithberger said. Until then, all outside efforts "can't result in any meaningful change."

    Son of Captain Nemo , 4 minutes ago link

    So tell me again how "Mad Pedo" evaded Obama's axing of all the non-compliant General(s) and Admiral(s) in charge of the U.S. strategic command?!!!

    Answered my own question. He's like the rest of them since the Balkans that just does counter insurgencies!...

    "SUCCESS" in every direction on the weather vane you look!!!

    Or... Another way of saying it.

    How to build your successful U.S. military career turning $8 trillion in unfunded liability debt into $200 trillion in unfunded liability debt in less than 20 years!

    Who wants to line up for that 'self help book"?!!!

    MusicIsYou , 9 minutes ago link

    Mattis is just another self serving cockroach in a U.S uniform.

    __name___3O4jF">Realname Wild tree , 31 minutes ago link

    It has nothing to do with the defense of our nation, or the unnecessary spilling of the blood of our nation.

    It has everything to do with greed at the expense of our youths blood and the nations security. Follow the money.

    As the light of truth shines as this article illustrates, the cockroaches scurry. Rumsfield's DoD 2 trillion missing comment the day before 9/11 comes to mind. Wonder how he knew.......

    Wild tree , 31 minutes ago link

    It has nothing to do with the defense of our nation, or the unnecessary spilling of the blood of our nation.

    It has everything to do with greed at the expense of our youths blood and the nations security. Follow the money.

    As the light of truth shines as this article illustrates, the cockroaches scurry. Rumsfield's DoD 2 trillion missing comment the day before 9/11 comes to mind. Wonder how he knew.......

    hotrod , 39 minutes ago link

    All this corruption in so nauseating. Yet Americans do nothing

    peippe , 39 minutes ago link

    These generals have been in the military a long time.

    Not long enough to remember winning a real war....

    Mr. Kwikky , 25 minutes ago link

    It was and is never about winning, but keeping the US in perpetual war state (report from iron moutain). Cui bono? the mic

    [Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the Skripal attack? -- ..."
    "... The Skripal Files ..."
    Jan 08, 2019 | sputniknews.com

    Hacking syndicate Anonymous has just released its fourth tranche of documents hacked from the internal servers of the Institute for Statecraft and its subsidiary, the Integrity Initiative. Several explosive files raise serious questions about the shadowy British state and NATO-funded 'think tank' and its connections with the Skripal affair.

    The files were released just after 2:30pm GMT on January 4 -- I've barely scratched the surface of the content, but what I've seen so far contains a panoply of bombshell revelations -- to say the least, the organization(s) now have serious questions to answer about what role they played in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in March, and its aftermath both nationally and internationally.

    Sinister Timeline

    One file apparently dating to "early 2015" -- "Russian Federation Sanctions" -- written by the Institute's Victor Madeira outlines "potential levers" to achieve Russian "behaviour change", "peace with Ukraine", "return [of] Crimea", "regime change" or "other?". The suggested "levers" span almost every conceivable area, including "civil society", "sports", "finance" and "technology".

    In the section marked "intelligence", Madeira suggests simultaneously expelling "every RF [Russian Federation] intelligence officer and air/defense/naval attache from as many countries as possible". In parentheses, it references 'Operation Foot' , the expulsion of over 1000 Soviet officials from the UK in September 1971, the largest expulsion of intelligence officials by any government in history.

    The section on sports also suggests "advocating the view [Russia] is unworthy of hosting [sporting] events" -- and the section marked "information" recommends the sanctioning of 'Russian' media "in West for not complying with regulators' standards".

    2015 File Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions 2015 File Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions

    In April that year, Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly was promoted to Honorary Colonel of SGMI (Specialist Group Military Intelligence), and in October he met with General Sir Richard Barrons. Notes from the meeting don't make clear who said what, but one despaired that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political space."

    "We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. We did this in the 1930s. My conclusion is it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside government. We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national capabilities [and/or] capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to do it? We need this debate now. There is not a moment to be lost," they said.

    Operation IRIS Begins

    On 4 March 2018, former Russian military officer and double agent for MI6 Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England.

    Within days, the Institute had submitted a proposal to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, "to study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.

    The bid was accepted, and the Initiative's 'Operation Iris' was launched. Under its auspices, the Institute employed 'global investigative solutions' firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity related to Skripal the world over.

    It also conducted media monitoring of its own, with Institute 'research fellow' Simon Bracey-Lane producing regular 'roundups' of media coverage overseas, based on insights submitted by individuals connected to the Initiative living in several countries. One submission, from an unnamed source in Moldova, says they "cannot firmly say" whether the country's media had its "own point of view" on the issue, or whether news organizations had taken "an obvious pro-Russian or pro-Western position", strongly suggesting these were key questions for the Initiative.

    Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal Incident Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal Incident

    Moreover though, there are clear indications the Institute sought to shape the news narrative on the attack -- and indeed the UK government's response. One file dated March 11 appears to be a briefing document on the affair to date, with key messages bolded throughout.

    It opens by setting out "The Narrative" of the incident -- namely "Russia has carried out yet another brutal attack, this time with a deadly nerve agent, on someone living in Britain".

    "Use of the nerve agent posed a threat to innocent British subjects, affecting 21 people and seriously affecting a police officer. This is not the first time such an attack has been carried out in the UK 14 deaths are believed to be attributable to the Kremlin Russia has poisoned its enemies abroad on other occasions, most notably then-candidate for the Presidency of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been poisoned twice; and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also poisoned and later shot dead. Since Putin has been running Russia, the Kremlin has a history of poisoning its opponents in a gruesome way," the "narrative" reads.

    The file goes on to declare the British response has been "far too weak it's essential the government makes a much stronger response this time" -- and then lists "possible, realistic, first actions", including banning RT and Sputnik from operating in the UK, boycotting the 2018 World Cup, withdrawing the UK ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador to the UK, and refusing/revoking visas to leading Russians within Vladimir Putin's "circle", and their families.

    Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative

    It's not clear who the document was distributed to -- but it may have been given to journalists within the Initiative's UK 'cluster', if not others. This may explain why the Institute's "narrative", and its various recommended "responses" utterly dominated mainstream media reporting of the affair for months afterwards, despite the glaring lack of evidence of Russian state involvement in the attack.

    It's extremely curious so many of the briefing document's recommendations almost exactly -- if not exactly -- echo several of the suggested "levers" outlined in the 2015 document. It's also somewhat troubling the "Global Operation Foot" spoken of in that file duly came to pass on March 28 2018, with over 20 countries expelling over 100 Russian diplomats.

    Likewise, it's striking Victor Madeira, the Institute staffer who made the recommendations in 2015, made many media appearances discussing the poisoning following the incident routinely documented by the Institute. Security consultant Dan Kaszeta also wrote a number of articles for the Integrity Initiative website about chemical weapons following the attack -- including a July 14 article, How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the Skripal attack? -- receiving 40 pence per word .

    Invoice submitted to Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Invoice submitted to Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections

    The Institute's bizarrely intimate connections with the incident don't end there. Another document apparently dating to July 2018 contains the contact details of Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and -- unbelievably -- neighbor in Salisbury. Anonymous claims the document is an invitee list for a meeting the Institute convened between a number of individuals and Syria's highly controversial White Helmets group, but this is yet to be verified.

    Whatever the truth of the matter, the latest document dump raises yet further questions about how and why it was BBC Diplomatic and Defense Editor Mark Urban -- who was in the same tank regiment as Miller after leaving University -- came to meet with Skripal in the year before his poisoning. When I attended the launch of his book on the affair in October -- The Skripal Files -- he was evasive on whether he played a role in connecting him with Skripal, and denied Miller was Skripal's recruiter.

    The latest trove also raises yet further questions about the activities of the Institute for Statecraft and Integrity Initiative. In light of these revelations, reading the record of Donnelly's meeting with General Barrons takes on an acutely chilling quality. It may be that purely serendipitously the pair got their "catastrophe", their "something dreadful", which "[woke] people up" and made the government "realise the problem" posed by Russia -- or it could be they one way or another played a facilitative role of some kind.

    After months of refusing to answer the vast number of questions I and thousands of others have submitted to the paired organizations, it's high time for them to break cover, and be honest with the public.

    [Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

    Highly recommended!
    Images removed. Please brose the original to view them.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "Russian disinformation." ..."
    "... "network of networks" ..."
    "... It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence. ..."
    "... "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" ..."
    "... "global investigative solutions" ..."
    "... What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow.... ..."
    "... "pro-Russia troll accounts" ..."
    "... "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case." ..."
    "... Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" ..."
    "... These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK." ..."
    "... "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" ..."
    "... "threat Russia poses." ..."
    "... This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning ..."
    "... One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot. ..."
    "... "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history." ..."
    "... "Makes you think " ..."
    "... The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute. ..."
    "... It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair. ..."
    "... £2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019 ..."
    "... It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance. ..."
    Jan 05, 2019 | www.defenddemocracy.press

    The Integrity Initiative, a UK-funded group exposed in leaked files as psyop network, played a key role in monitoring and molding media narratives after the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal, newly-dumped documents reveal. Created by the NATO-affiliated, UK-funded Institute for Statecraft in 2015, the Integrity Initiative was unmasked in November after hackers released documents detailing a web of politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics involved in purportedly fighting "Russian disinformation."

    The secretive, government-bankrolled "network of networks" has found itself under scrutiny for smearing UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a Kremlin stooge – ostensibly as part of its noble crusade against anti-Russian disinformation. Now, new leaks show that the organization played a central role in shaping media narratives after Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were mysteriously poisoned in Salisbury last March.

    It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence.

    Operation Iris

    Days after the Skripals were poisoned, the Institute solicited its services to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, offering to "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.

    After receiving the government's blessing, the Integrity Initiative (II) launched 'Operation Iris,' enlisting "global investigative solutions" firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity related to Skripal.

    Kit Klarenberg @KitKlarenberg

    What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow....

    264 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    However, Harod's confidential report did more than just parse social media reactions to the Skripal affair: It compiled a list of alleged "pro-Russia troll accounts" accused of "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case."

    Among those who found themselves listed as nefarious thought-criminals were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a gentleman from Kent who goes by Ian56 on Twitter.

    Ian56 @Ian56789 · Jan 4, 2019 # IntegrityInitiative "

    Top Kremlin Trolls" aka Truth Tellers. Congratulations if you made the list.

    https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring/appendix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring.pdf

    Neocon Fascist, al-Qaeda Supporting Treasonous Scumbag @ Benimmo is having a laugh with £2m of Taxpayers money. Nimmo should be IN JAIL for Fraud & Treason

    Ian56 @Ian56789 # IntegrityInitiative

    examples of Logical, Critical Thinking & Objective Analysis by yours truly Ian56.

    https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-r---ian56789-example-tweets/appendix-r---ian56789-example-tweets.pdf

    They didn't even include my best ones and they didn't show the pic that went with each tweet. I wonder why?

    # Skripal # Novichok # FalseFlag pic.twitter.com/Zq8W9iJshk 41 1:39 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    34 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy
    Moon of Alabama @MoonofA · Jan 4, 2019 @ Ian56789 @ MarkSleboda1 @ Malinka1102 @ ValLisitsa @ NinaByzantina

    Folks, you are all noted as "trolls" in some of the files of the new # IntegrityInitiative release

    https://www. cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation -integrity-initiative-british-informational-war-against-all-part-4/ https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring/appendix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring.pdf https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-p---troll-accounts-mutual-connections-graph/appendix-p---troll-accounts-mutual-connections-graph.pdf https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-q---troll-geolocation-graph/appendix-q---troll-geolocation-graph.pdf

    Operation 'Integrity Initiative': British informational war against all. Part 4

    Greetings! We are Anonymous.We have warned the UK government that it must conduct an honest and transparent investigation into the activity of the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statec cyberguerrilla.org

    Ruslana Boshirova @ValLisitsa

    Wanna see something funny?

    "The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and Petrovas GRU agents" - has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French yellow jackets. I kid you not.

    https:// twitter.com/Antifake_Russi a/status/1073112488072437760?s=19 Antifake @Antifake_Russia СМИ выдали за манифест "желтых жилетов" твиты украинской пианистки с ником "Руслана Боширова" https:// theins.ru/antifake/131804 116 3:21 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    94 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    Pushing a narrative

    Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" of the Skripal incident, which blames Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally, as well as containing a number of recommended actions.

    These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK."

    Other suggestions included propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" and getting members of parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses." It's not clear who the document was drawn up for, but it may have been provided to II-affiliated journalists in the UK and other countries.

    This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning – which the UK and its allies unanimously blamed on Moscow.

    Ahead of its time?

    One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot.

    Coincidentally, more than 100 Russian diplomats were expelled from 20 Western countries in an apparently show of solidarity with the UK following the Skripal attack. At the time, UK Prime Minister Theresa May welcomed what she said was "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history."

    Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents, written long before the Salisbury events, also call for the arrest of RT and Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding: "Makes you think "

    George Galloway ✔ @georgegalloway

    So: # IntegrityInitiative funded by the British Govt called for the arrest of people like me like @ afshinrattansi @ JohnWight1 @ NeilClark66 et al in the event of an "incident" like the # Skripal affair.

    Written incidentally before the # Salisbury events. Makes you think...

    @ RT_com 688 12:53 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    606 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    A curious connection

    The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute.

    Moon of Alabama @MoonofA

    It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair.

    # SergeiSkripal # Disinformation # Propaganda # InformationWar 283 2:38 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    241 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy
    Fvnk @WhatTheFvnk

    EXPLOSIVE: @ DanKaszeta of @ Strongpoint_UK invoiced @ InitIntegrity # IntegrityInitiative

    £2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019

    188 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance.

    Read also:

    [Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman

    Highly recommended!
    Financialization is a new type of racket...
    Notable quotes:
    "... Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman ..."
    "... 'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body' ..."
    "... This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world. ..."
    "... To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth. ..."
    "... But there is also a second way to make money. That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his power to claim economic benefit. ..."
    "... For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere. ..."
    "... It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole. ..."
    "... In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up. ..."
    "... Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent. ..."
    "... Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google , Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose. ..."
    "... Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger. ..."
    "... Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US. ..."
    "... Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box. ..."
    "... The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts. ..."
    "... One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality. ..."
    Mar 30, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

    Rutger Bregman

    Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman

    Comments 890

    'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body'.

    This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world.

    Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded – the philosophy of the left is that the strongest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden, while the right fears high taxes will blunt enterprise – but across the spectrum virtually all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.

    So entrenched is this assumption that it's even embedded in our language. When economists talk about "productivity", what they really mean is the size of your paycheck. And when we use terms like " welfare state ", "redistribution" and "solidarity", we're implicitly subscribing to the view that there are two strata: the makers and the takers, the producers and the couch potatoes, the hardworking citizens – and everybody else.

    In reality, it is precisely the other way around. In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we hail as "successful" and "innovative" are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about it. Even for politicians on the left, it's a non-issue.

    To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.

    But there is also a second way to make money. That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.

    'From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.'

    For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.

    There is no longer a sharp dividing line between working and rentiering. In fact, the modern-day rentier often works damn hard. Countless people in the financial sector, for example, apply great ingenuity and effort to amass "rent" on their wealth. Even the big innovations of our age – businesses like Facebook and Uber – are interested mainly in expanding the rentier economy. The problem with most rich people therefore is not that they are coach potatoes. Many a CEO toils 80 hours a week to multiply his allowance. It's hardly surprising, then, that they feel wholly entitled to their wealth.

    It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole.

    Don't get me wrong. Banks can help to gauge risks and get money where it is needed, both of which are vital to a well-functioning economy. But consider this: economists tell us that the optimum level of total private-sector debt is 100% of GDP. Based on this equation, if the financial sector only grows, it won't equal more wealth, but less. So here's the bad news. In the United Kingdom, private-sector debt is now at 157.5% . In the United States, the figure is 188.8% .

    In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.

    The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximizing the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means of earning rent. So for those who believe that pay ought to be proportionate to the value of work, the conclusion we have to draw is that many bankers should be earning a negative salary; a fine, if you will, for destroying more wealth than they create.

    Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent.

    But here comes the rub. Most rentiers are not as easily identified as the greedy banker or manager. Many are disguised. On the face of it, they look like industrious folks, because for part of the time they really are doing something worthwhile. Precisely that makes us overlook their massive rent-seeking.

    Take the pharmaceutical industry. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer regularly unveil new drugs, yet most real medical breakthroughs are made quietly at government-subsidised labs. Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we've already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years. In other words, the vast revenues of the pharmaceutical industry are the result of a tiny pinch of innovation and fistfuls of rent.

    Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google , Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose.

    Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger.

    Aptly characterising this "platform capitalism" in an article, Tom Goodwin writes : "Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate."

    Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'Every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll.' Photograph: Regis Duvignau/Reuters

    So what do these companies own? A platform. A platform that lots and lots of people want to use. Why? First and foremost, because they're cool and they're fun – and in that respect, they do offer something of value. However, the main reason why we're all happy to hand over free content to Facebook is because all of our friends are on Facebook too, because their friends are on Facebook because their friends are on Facebook.

    Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US.

    But don't Google and Facebook make anything useful at all? Sure they do. The irony, however, is that their best innovations only make the rentier economy even bigger. They employ scores of programmers to create new algorithms so that we'll all click on more and more ads. Uber has usurped the whole taxi sector just as Airbnb has upended the hotel industry and Amazon has overrun the book trade. The bigger such platforms grow the more powerful they become, enabling the lords of these digital feudalities to demand more and more rent.

    Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody who passed by pay. Today's tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway. Using technology funded by taxpayers, they build tollgates between you and other people's free content and all the while pay almost no tax on their earnings.

    This is the so-called innovation that has Silicon Valley gurus in raptures: ever bigger platforms that claim ever bigger handouts. So why do we accept this? Why does most of the population work itself to the bone to support these rentiers?

    I think there are two answers. Firstly, the modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it. But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a credit default swap , or a collateralised debt obligation ? Or the revenue model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don't the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too? Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?

    Maybe not. The typical workday of Goldman Sachs' CEO may be worlds away from that of King Louis XIV, but their revenue models both essentially revolve around obtaining the biggest possible handouts. "The world's most powerful investment bank," wrote the journalist Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs , "is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

    But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker. He goes to great lengths to present himself as a "job creator" and an "investor" who "earns" his income by virtue of his high "productivity". Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.

    However, it would be wrong to think that all this is part of some ingenious conspiracy. Many modern rentiers have convinced even themselves that they are bona fide value creators. When current Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was asked about the purpose of his job, his straight-faced answer was that he is " doing God's work ". The Sun King would have approved.

    The second thing that keeps rentiers safe is even more insidious. We're all wannabe rentiers. They have made millions of people complicit in their revenue model. Consider this: What are our financial sector's two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.

    Recent decades have seen more and more people contract debts to buy a home, and naturally it's in their interest if house prices continue to scale new heights (read: burst bubble upon bubble). The same goes for pensions. Over the past few decades we've all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank. Now pension funds are under immense pressure to ally with the biggest exploiters in order to ensure they pay out enough to please their investors.

    The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts. En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees.

    Don't get me wrong, most homeowners and retirees are not benefiting from this situation. On the contrary, the banks are bleeding them far beyond the extent to which they themselves profit from their houses and pensions. Still, it's hard to point fingers at a kleptomaniac when you have sticky fingers too.

    So why is this happening? The answer can be summed up in three little words: Because it can.

    Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box.

    The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.

    One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality.

    What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers and ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more powerful.

    Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society's biggest freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through a system of, say, employee shares, or a universal basic income .

    But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the old-fashioned faith in "solidarity" with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders of society's strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.

    And, yes, by that I mean the waste collectors, the nurses, the cleaners – theirs are the shoulders that carry us all.

    • Pre-order Utopia for Realists and How Can We Get There by Rutger Bregman

    • Translated from the original Dutch by Elizabeth Manton

    See also:

    [Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the Skripal attack? -- ..."
    "... The Skripal Files ..."
    Jan 08, 2019 | sputniknews.com

    Hacking syndicate Anonymous has just released its fourth tranche of documents hacked from the internal servers of the Institute for Statecraft and its subsidiary, the Integrity Initiative. Several explosive files raise serious questions about the shadowy British state and NATO-funded 'think tank' and its connections with the Skripal affair.

    The files were released just after 2:30pm GMT on January 4 -- I've barely scratched the surface of the content, but what I've seen so far contains a panoply of bombshell revelations -- to say the least, the organization(s) now have serious questions to answer about what role they played in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in March, and its aftermath both nationally and internationally.

    Sinister Timeline

    One file apparently dating to "early 2015" -- "Russian Federation Sanctions" -- written by the Institute's Victor Madeira outlines "potential levers" to achieve Russian "behaviour change", "peace with Ukraine", "return [of] Crimea", "regime change" or "other?". The suggested "levers" span almost every conceivable area, including "civil society", "sports", "finance" and "technology".

    In the section marked "intelligence", Madeira suggests simultaneously expelling "every RF [Russian Federation] intelligence officer and air/defense/naval attache from as many countries as possible". In parentheses, it references 'Operation Foot' , the expulsion of over 1000 Soviet officials from the UK in September 1971, the largest expulsion of intelligence officials by any government in history.

    The section on sports also suggests "advocating the view [Russia] is unworthy of hosting [sporting] events" -- and the section marked "information" recommends the sanctioning of 'Russian' media "in West for not complying with regulators' standards".

    2015 File Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions 2015 File Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions

    In April that year, Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly was promoted to Honorary Colonel of SGMI (Specialist Group Military Intelligence), and in October he met with General Sir Richard Barrons. Notes from the meeting don't make clear who said what, but one despaired that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political space."

    "We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. We did this in the 1930s. My conclusion is it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside government. We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national capabilities [and/or] capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to do it? We need this debate now. There is not a moment to be lost," they said.

    Operation IRIS Begins

    On 4 March 2018, former Russian military officer and double agent for MI6 Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England.

    Within days, the Institute had submitted a proposal to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, "to study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.

    The bid was accepted, and the Initiative's 'Operation Iris' was launched. Under its auspices, the Institute employed 'global investigative solutions' firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity related to Skripal the world over.

    It also conducted media monitoring of its own, with Institute 'research fellow' Simon Bracey-Lane producing regular 'roundups' of media coverage overseas, based on insights submitted by individuals connected to the Initiative living in several countries. One submission, from an unnamed source in Moldova, says they "cannot firmly say" whether the country's media had its "own point of view" on the issue, or whether news organizations had taken "an obvious pro-Russian or pro-Western position", strongly suggesting these were key questions for the Initiative.

    Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal Incident Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal Incident

    Moreover though, there are clear indications the Institute sought to shape the news narrative on the attack -- and indeed the UK government's response. One file dated March 11 appears to be a briefing document on the affair to date, with key messages bolded throughout.

    It opens by setting out "The Narrative" of the incident -- namely "Russia has carried out yet another brutal attack, this time with a deadly nerve agent, on someone living in Britain".

    "Use of the nerve agent posed a threat to innocent British subjects, affecting 21 people and seriously affecting a police officer. This is not the first time such an attack has been carried out in the UK 14 deaths are believed to be attributable to the Kremlin Russia has poisoned its enemies abroad on other occasions, most notably then-candidate for the Presidency of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been poisoned twice; and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also poisoned and later shot dead. Since Putin has been running Russia, the Kremlin has a history of poisoning its opponents in a gruesome way," the "narrative" reads.

    The file goes on to declare the British response has been "far too weak it's essential the government makes a much stronger response this time" -- and then lists "possible, realistic, first actions", including banning RT and Sputnik from operating in the UK, boycotting the 2018 World Cup, withdrawing the UK ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador to the UK, and refusing/revoking visas to leading Russians within Vladimir Putin's "circle", and their families.

    Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative

    It's not clear who the document was distributed to -- but it may have been given to journalists within the Initiative's UK 'cluster', if not others. This may explain why the Institute's "narrative", and its various recommended "responses" utterly dominated mainstream media reporting of the affair for months afterwards, despite the glaring lack of evidence of Russian state involvement in the attack.

    It's extremely curious so many of the briefing document's recommendations almost exactly -- if not exactly -- echo several of the suggested "levers" outlined in the 2015 document. It's also somewhat troubling the "Global Operation Foot" spoken of in that file duly came to pass on March 28 2018, with over 20 countries expelling over 100 Russian diplomats.

    Likewise, it's striking Victor Madeira, the Institute staffer who made the recommendations in 2015, made many media appearances discussing the poisoning following the incident routinely documented by the Institute. Security consultant Dan Kaszeta also wrote a number of articles for the Integrity Initiative website about chemical weapons following the attack -- including a July 14 article, How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the Skripal attack? -- receiving 40 pence per word .

    Invoice submitted to Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Invoice submitted to Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections

    The Institute's bizarrely intimate connections with the incident don't end there. Another document apparently dating to July 2018 contains the contact details of Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and -- unbelievably -- neighbor in Salisbury. Anonymous claims the document is an invitee list for a meeting the Institute convened between a number of individuals and Syria's highly controversial White Helmets group, but this is yet to be verified.

    Whatever the truth of the matter, the latest document dump raises yet further questions about how and why it was BBC Diplomatic and Defense Editor Mark Urban -- who was in the same tank regiment as Miller after leaving University -- came to meet with Skripal in the year before his poisoning. When I attended the launch of his book on the affair in October -- The Skripal Files -- he was evasive on whether he played a role in connecting him with Skripal, and denied Miller was Skripal's recruiter.

    The latest trove also raises yet further questions about the activities of the Institute for Statecraft and Integrity Initiative. In light of these revelations, reading the record of Donnelly's meeting with General Barrons takes on an acutely chilling quality. It may be that purely serendipitously the pair got their "catastrophe", their "something dreadful", which "[woke] people up" and made the government "realise the problem" posed by Russia -- or it could be they one way or another played a facilitative role of some kind.

    After months of refusing to answer the vast number of questions I and thousands of others have submitted to the paired organizations, it's high time for them to break cover, and be honest with the public.

    [Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

    Highly recommended!
    Images removed. Please brose the original to view them.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "Russian disinformation." ..."
    "... "network of networks" ..."
    "... It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence. ..."
    "... "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" ..."
    "... "global investigative solutions" ..."
    "... What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow.... ..."
    "... "pro-Russia troll accounts" ..."
    "... "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case." ..."
    "... Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" ..."
    "... These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK." ..."
    "... "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" ..."
    "... "threat Russia poses." ..."
    "... This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning ..."
    "... One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot. ..."
    "... "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history." ..."
    "... "Makes you think " ..."
    "... The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute. ..."
    "... It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair. ..."
    "... £2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019 ..."
    "... It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance. ..."
    Jan 05, 2019 | www.defenddemocracy.press

    The Integrity Initiative, a UK-funded group exposed in leaked files as psyop network, played a key role in monitoring and molding media narratives after the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal, newly-dumped documents reveal. Created by the NATO-affiliated, UK-funded Institute for Statecraft in 2015, the Integrity Initiative was unmasked in November after hackers released documents detailing a web of politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics involved in purportedly fighting "Russian disinformation."

    The secretive, government-bankrolled "network of networks" has found itself under scrutiny for smearing UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as a Kremlin stooge – ostensibly as part of its noble crusade against anti-Russian disinformation. Now, new leaks show that the organization played a central role in shaping media narratives after Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were mysteriously poisoned in Salisbury last March.

    It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence.

    Operation Iris

    Days after the Skripals were poisoned, the Institute solicited its services to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, offering to "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.

    After receiving the government's blessing, the Integrity Initiative (II) launched 'Operation Iris,' enlisting "global investigative solutions" firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity related to Skripal.

    Kit Klarenberg @KitKlarenberg

    What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow....

    264 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    However, Harod's confidential report did more than just parse social media reactions to the Skripal affair: It compiled a list of alleged "pro-Russia troll accounts" accused of "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case."

    Among those who found themselves listed as nefarious thought-criminals were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a gentleman from Kent who goes by Ian56 on Twitter.

    Ian56 @Ian56789 · Jan 4, 2019 # IntegrityInitiative "

    Top Kremlin Trolls" aka Truth Tellers. Congratulations if you made the list.

    https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring/appendix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring.pdf

    Neocon Fascist, al-Qaeda Supporting Treasonous Scumbag @ Benimmo is having a laugh with £2m of Taxpayers money. Nimmo should be IN JAIL for Fraud & Treason

    Ian56 @Ian56789 # IntegrityInitiative

    examples of Logical, Critical Thinking & Objective Analysis by yours truly Ian56.

    https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-r---ian56789-example-tweets/appendix-r---ian56789-example-tweets.pdf

    They didn't even include my best ones and they didn't show the pic that went with each tweet. I wonder why?

    # Skripal # Novichok # FalseFlag pic.twitter.com/Zq8W9iJshk 41 1:39 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    34 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy
    Moon of Alabama @MoonofA · Jan 4, 2019 @ Ian56789 @ MarkSleboda1 @ Malinka1102 @ ValLisitsa @ NinaByzantina

    Folks, you are all noted as "trolls" in some of the files of the new # IntegrityInitiative release

    https://www. cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation -integrity-initiative-british-informational-war-against-all-part-4/ https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring/appendix-o---russian-propaganda-troll-sites-for-monitoring.pdf https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-p---troll-accounts-mutual-connections-graph/appendix-p---troll-accounts-mutual-connections-graph.pdf https://www. pdf-archive.com/2018/12/28/app endix-q---troll-geolocation-graph/appendix-q---troll-geolocation-graph.pdf

    Operation 'Integrity Initiative': British informational war against all. Part 4

    Greetings! We are Anonymous.We have warned the UK government that it must conduct an honest and transparent investigation into the activity of the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statec cyberguerrilla.org

    Ruslana Boshirova @ValLisitsa

    Wanna see something funny?

    "The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and Petrovas GRU agents" - has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French yellow jackets. I kid you not.

    https:// twitter.com/Antifake_Russi a/status/1073112488072437760?s=19 Antifake @Antifake_Russia СМИ выдали за манифест "желтых жилетов" твиты украинской пианистки с ником "Руслана Боширова" https:// theins.ru/antifake/131804 116 3:21 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    94 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    Pushing a narrative

    Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" of the Skripal incident, which blames Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally, as well as containing a number of recommended actions.

    These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK."

    Other suggestions included propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" and getting members of parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses." It's not clear who the document was drawn up for, but it may have been provided to II-affiliated journalists in the UK and other countries.

    This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning – which the UK and its allies unanimously blamed on Moscow.

    Ahead of its time?

    One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot.

    Coincidentally, more than 100 Russian diplomats were expelled from 20 Western countries in an apparently show of solidarity with the UK following the Skripal attack. At the time, UK Prime Minister Theresa May welcomed what she said was "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history."

    Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents, written long before the Salisbury events, also call for the arrest of RT and Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding: "Makes you think "

    George Galloway ✔ @georgegalloway

    So: # IntegrityInitiative funded by the British Govt called for the arrest of people like me like @ afshinrattansi @ JohnWight1 @ NeilClark66 et al in the event of an "incident" like the # Skripal affair.

    Written incidentally before the # Salisbury events. Makes you think...

    @ RT_com 688 12:53 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    606 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    A curious connection

    The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute.

    Moon of Alabama @MoonofA

    It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair.

    # SergeiSkripal # Disinformation # Propaganda # InformationWar 283 2:38 PM - Jan 4, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    241 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy
    Fvnk @WhatTheFvnk

    EXPLOSIVE: @ DanKaszeta of @ Strongpoint_UK invoiced @ InitIntegrity # IntegrityInitiative

    £2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019

    188 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance.

    Read also:

    [Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman

    Highly recommended!
    Financialization is a new type of racket...
    Notable quotes:
    "... Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman ..."
    "... 'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body' ..."
    "... This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world. ..."
    "... To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth. ..."
    "... But there is also a second way to make money. That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his power to claim economic benefit. ..."
    "... For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere. ..."
    "... It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole. ..."
    "... In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up. ..."
    "... Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent. ..."
    "... Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google , Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose. ..."
    "... Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger. ..."
    "... Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US. ..."
    "... Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box. ..."
    "... The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts. ..."
    "... One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality. ..."
    Mar 30, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

    Rutger Bregman

    Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman

    Comments 890

    'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body'.

    This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world.

    Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded – the philosophy of the left is that the strongest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden, while the right fears high taxes will blunt enterprise – but across the spectrum virtually all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.

    So entrenched is this assumption that it's even embedded in our language. When economists talk about "productivity", what they really mean is the size of your paycheck. And when we use terms like " welfare state ", "redistribution" and "solidarity", we're implicitly subscribing to the view that there are two strata: the makers and the takers, the producers and the couch potatoes, the hardworking citizens – and everybody else.

    In reality, it is precisely the other way around. In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we hail as "successful" and "innovative" are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about it. Even for politicians on the left, it's a non-issue.

    To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.

    But there is also a second way to make money. That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.

    'From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.'

    For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.

    There is no longer a sharp dividing line between working and rentiering. In fact, the modern-day rentier often works damn hard. Countless people in the financial sector, for example, apply great ingenuity and effort to amass "rent" on their wealth. Even the big innovations of our age – businesses like Facebook and Uber – are interested mainly in expanding the rentier economy. The problem with most rich people therefore is not that they are coach potatoes. Many a CEO toils 80 hours a week to multiply his allowance. It's hardly surprising, then, that they feel wholly entitled to their wealth.

    It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole.

    Don't get me wrong. Banks can help to gauge risks and get money where it is needed, both of which are vital to a well-functioning economy. But consider this: economists tell us that the optimum level of total private-sector debt is 100% of GDP. Based on this equation, if the financial sector only grows, it won't equal more wealth, but less. So here's the bad news. In the United Kingdom, private-sector debt is now at 157.5% . In the United States, the figure is 188.8% .

    In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.

    The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximizing the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means of earning rent. So for those who believe that pay ought to be proportionate to the value of work, the conclusion we have to draw is that many bankers should be earning a negative salary; a fine, if you will, for destroying more wealth than they create.

    Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent.

    But here comes the rub. Most rentiers are not as easily identified as the greedy banker or manager. Many are disguised. On the face of it, they look like industrious folks, because for part of the time they really are doing something worthwhile. Precisely that makes us overlook their massive rent-seeking.

    Take the pharmaceutical industry. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer regularly unveil new drugs, yet most real medical breakthroughs are made quietly at government-subsidised labs. Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we've already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years. In other words, the vast revenues of the pharmaceutical industry are the result of a tiny pinch of innovation and fistfuls of rent.

    Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google , Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose.

    Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger.

    Aptly characterising this "platform capitalism" in an article, Tom Goodwin writes : "Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate."

    Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'Every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll.' Photograph: Regis Duvignau/Reuters

    So what do these companies own? A platform. A platform that lots and lots of people want to use. Why? First and foremost, because they're cool and they're fun – and in that respect, they do offer something of value. However, the main reason why we're all happy to hand over free content to Facebook is because all of our friends are on Facebook too, because their friends are on Facebook because their friends are on Facebook.

    Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US.

    But don't Google and Facebook make anything useful at all? Sure they do. The irony, however, is that their best innovations only make the rentier economy even bigger. They employ scores of programmers to create new algorithms so that we'll all click on more and more ads. Uber has usurped the whole taxi sector just as Airbnb has upended the hotel industry and Amazon has overrun the book trade. The bigger such platforms grow the more powerful they become, enabling the lords of these digital feudalities to demand more and more rent.

    Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody who passed by pay. Today's tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway. Using technology funded by taxpayers, they build tollgates between you and other people's free content and all the while pay almost no tax on their earnings.

    This is the so-called innovation that has Silicon Valley gurus in raptures: ever bigger platforms that claim ever bigger handouts. So why do we accept this? Why does most of the population work itself to the bone to support these rentiers?

    I think there are two answers. Firstly, the modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it. But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a credit default swap , or a collateralised debt obligation ? Or the revenue model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don't the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too? Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?

    Maybe not. The typical workday of Goldman Sachs' CEO may be worlds away from that of King Louis XIV, but their revenue models both essentially revolve around obtaining the biggest possible handouts. "The world's most powerful investment bank," wrote the journalist Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs , "is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

    But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker. He goes to great lengths to present himself as a "job creator" and an "investor" who "earns" his income by virtue of his high "productivity". Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.

    However, it would be wrong to think that all this is part of some ingenious conspiracy. Many modern rentiers have convinced even themselves that they are bona fide value creators. When current Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was asked about the purpose of his job, his straight-faced answer was that he is " doing God's work ". The Sun King would have approved.

    The second thing that keeps rentiers safe is even more insidious. We're all wannabe rentiers. They have made millions of people complicit in their revenue model. Consider this: What are our financial sector's two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.

    Recent decades have seen more and more people contract debts to buy a home, and naturally it's in their interest if house prices continue to scale new heights (read: burst bubble upon bubble). The same goes for pensions. Over the past few decades we've all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank. Now pension funds are under immense pressure to ally with the biggest exploiters in order to ensure they pay out enough to please their investors.

    The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts. En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees.

    Don't get me wrong, most homeowners and retirees are not benefiting from this situation. On the contrary, the banks are bleeding them far beyond the extent to which they themselves profit from their houses and pensions. Still, it's hard to point fingers at a kleptomaniac when you have sticky fingers too.

    So why is this happening? The answer can be summed up in three little words: Because it can.

    Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box.

    The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.

    One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality.

    What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers and ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more powerful.

    Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society's biggest freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through a system of, say, employee shares, or a universal basic income .

    But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the old-fashioned faith in "solidarity" with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders of society's strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.

    And, yes, by that I mean the waste collectors, the nurses, the cleaners – theirs are the shoulders that carry us all.

    • Pre-order Utopia for Realists and How Can We Get There by Rutger Bregman

    • Translated from the original Dutch by Elizabeth Manton

    See also:

    [Jan 08, 2019] Sic Semper Tyrannis - IMO Senate anti-BDS bill is an Israeli effort to kill free speech in the US

    Jan 08, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    IMO Senate anti-BDS bill is an Israeli effort to kill free speech in the US

    "Pro-Israel lawmakers in Washington, undeterred by the partial shutdown of the United States government, are pursuing their agenda full speed with the introduction of the first piece of legislation before the 116th Senate -- a bill that aims to stifle the free-speech rights of American critics of apartheid Israel.

    The Republican-controlled Senate's first bill (S.1) would enact penalties on entities that engage in boycotts of Israel -- one of many measures in the United States intended to push back on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

    BDS seeks to place economic pressure on companies and institutions that support Israeli ones operating in illegally occupied areas in Palestine, in order to pressure the Israeli government into compliance with international law and to cease its practices of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the ongoing encroachment of Israeli settlements." Alexander Rubenstein

    ------------

    Even as this travesty of law is driven forward in the senate, US senators Cruz and Cotton are in Israel supporting Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and official American recognition of the annexation. These Syrian lands were seized in war by Israel in 1967 and occupied ever since.

    IMO this bill, if it became law, would be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.

    pl

    https://www.mintpressnews.com/new-senate-anti-bds-bill-unconstitutional-and-ineffective-at-curbing-israel-boycotts/253598/


    A.Martyanov (aka smoothieX12)     , 6 hours ago

    Absolutely disgraceful. Christian Zionism is like a cancer and it metastasized.

    Divadab Newton , 8 hours ago

    Servants of a foreign power and enemies of the Constitution. Disgraceful. The Republic has been utterly corrupted and these traitors should all be in jail.

    TTG , 3 hours ago

    Seems this Senate bill goes far beyond trying to muzzle our free speech. It attempts to force us to buy Israeli products and invest in Israeli companies and institutions. There's going to be some serious civil disobedience if this piece of crap passes.

    Barbara Ann , 7 hours ago

    Good to see the new Congress has got its priorities straight with 'Strengthening Israel's America's Security in the Middle East Act of 2019'. The anti-BDS bit is an abomination. As it is not yet illegal to petition your senator, and with our host's permission, I'd urge everyone to make use of the ACLU's pro-forma message of objection to the bill. Just fill in the form online:

    https://action.aclu.org/sen...

    Ryan , 4 hours ago

    Unfortunately this is probably not unconstitutional. It won't be illegal to call for a boycott of Israel, it will just be illegal to boycott Israel. An analogy: it's not illegal to say "don't hire black people," but it is illegal to not hire black people.

    Also, I bet South Africa wishes they had a better lobby.

    Eugene Owens , 10 hours ago

    How do Cruz and Cotton get around the UN resolutions that recognize the Golan as Syrian territory? And if they are successful what would that do to US relations with Jordan, the Saudis, and the Gulf States?

    I suspect Cruz and Cotton are just playing to that part of their evangelical base like Jeffress and others that seem obsessed with apocalyptic literature.

    James Thomas -> Eugene Owens , 3 hours ago

    Recognizing Taiwan involved similar problems but we finessed it - I think Israel's friends in Congress can come up with something similar for "de facto but not official recognition" of Golan as Israeli territory. The Izzies will be happy - they like to take things inch by inch.

    As for Jordan, KSA, and the Gulfies - they have had to swallow more bitter medicine in the past, and they will again in the future. They have nowhere to go.

    Pat Lang Mod -> James Thomas , 3 hours ago

    We recognized mainland China, not Taiwan. We did our best to walk away from them after a long held alliance.

    [Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another. ..."
    "... The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.' ..."
    "... There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech. ..."
    "... I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. ..."
    "... Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome. ..."
    Jan 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Pat Lang Mod -> David Habakkuk , 2 months ago

    After contemplating the likely intelligence and propaganda efforts of HMG over the last 15 years or so I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little to do with the welfare of Britain. Why? I suppose that the same question can be asked for the US and I have.

    In re "Our man in Havana" I think there are many issues raised in the work that apply directly to the trade of espionage.

    David Habakkuk -> Pat Lang , 2 months ago
    Colonel Lang,

    The question why? is a very interesting but also very dispiriting one, but also one which it is quite hard to get one's head round. I hope to have something more coherent to say about it.

    Among many reasons, however, there has been a kind of intellectual disintegration.

    If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another.

    The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.'

    Subsequently, of course, he set about colluding in the process. And, sixteen years later, Dearlove is still at it, with 'Russiagate' -- and the product being actually accepted much more uncritically by the MSM than it was then.

    And that is one of the problems -- nobody any longer pays any penalty for failure, or indeed feels any sense of shame about it..

    johnf -> David Habakkuk , 2 months ago
    DH

    I agree with this.

    There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech.

    As the Colonel eloquently asks:

    "I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little todo with the welfare of Britain. Why?"

    I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

    Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome.

    (I don't include the Maurice Cowling-ites in this fandango because they strike me as more Little Englanders. Though Peterhouse is of course, shamefully, the HQ of the Henry Jackson Society).

    [Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another. ..."
    "... The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.' ..."
    "... There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech. ..."
    "... I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. ..."
    "... Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome. ..."
    Jan 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Pat Lang Mod -> David Habakkuk , 2 months ago

    After contemplating the likely intelligence and propaganda efforts of HMG over the last 15 years or so I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little to do with the welfare of Britain. Why? I suppose that the same question can be asked for the US and I have.

    In re "Our man in Havana" I think there are many issues raised in the work that apply directly to the trade of espionage.

    David Habakkuk -> Pat Lang , 2 months ago
    Colonel Lang,

    The question why? is a very interesting but also very dispiriting one, but also one which it is quite hard to get one's head round. I hope to have something more coherent to say about it.

    Among many reasons, however, there has been a kind of intellectual disintegration.

    If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another.

    The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.'

    Subsequently, of course, he set about colluding in the process. And, sixteen years later, Dearlove is still at it, with 'Russiagate' -- and the product being actually accepted much more uncritically by the MSM than it was then.

    And that is one of the problems -- nobody any longer pays any penalty for failure, or indeed feels any sense of shame about it..

    johnf -> David Habakkuk , 2 months ago
    DH

    I agree with this.

    There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech.

    As the Colonel eloquently asks:

    "I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little todo with the welfare of Britain. Why?"

    I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

    Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome.

    (I don't include the Maurice Cowling-ites in this fandango because they strike me as more Little Englanders. Though Peterhouse is of course, shamefully, the HQ of the Henry Jackson Society).

    [Jan 06, 2019] Neocons in US universities: the fact that obviously deranged fanatic Albright has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents.

    Notable quotes:
    "... The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents. ..."
    "... "political science" is not a science but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and provide fundamental knowledge. ..."
    Jan 06, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website January 5, 2019 at 7:02 pm GMT

    Early on in her book, Albright says: My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic

    Marked in bold is the most terrifying thing about Albright's book and I am not even going to read her pseudo-intellectual excrement.

    The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents.

    This is apart from the fact that "political science" is not a science but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and provide fundamental knowledge.

    [Jan 06, 2019] Neocons in US universities: the fact that obviously deranged fanatic Albright has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents.

    Notable quotes:
    "... The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents. ..."
    "... "political science" is not a science but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and provide fundamental knowledge. ..."
    Jan 06, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Andrei Martyanov , says: Website January 5, 2019 at 7:02 pm GMT

    Early on in her book, Albright says: My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic

    Marked in bold is the most terrifying thing about Albright's book and I am not even going to read her pseudo-intellectual excrement.

    The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents.

    This is apart from the fact that "political science" is not a science but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and provide fundamental knowledge.

    [Jan 06, 2019] Integrity Initiative - New Documents From Shady NGO Released

    Notable quotes:
    "... The British Private Eye finds a relation between the Integrity Initiative and the Rendon Group which drove the propaganda for the Iraq invasion. ..."
    Jan 04, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Forgot to link this: The Briefing note on the Integrity Initiative by Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason and Piers Robinson is the most complete analysis of the Integrity Initiative papers.

    The British Private Eye finds a relation between the Integrity Initiative and the Rendon Group which drove the propaganda for the Iraq invasion.

    I'll have to say more on the issue. For some fun, check the attachment to this tweet. (Klarenberg writes for Sputnik.)

    Kit Klarenberg @KitKlarenberg - 19:51 utc - 5 Jan 2019

    Head of @InitIntegrity's German cluster says he's going to bring criminal charges against me for accessing II internal files.

    In the process helpfully confirming many of the people I contacted in the cluster for comment ARE collaborating with the organization!!

    Cheers pal!

    [Jan 06, 2019] Intelligence stooges dominate Western MSM or How Putin s Russia Weaponizes Everything

    "Jornos for hire" are now mainstream. Much like escort services.
    Again, it's pure projection. These vermin are literally incapable of looking at anything except in terms of how it can be used as a weapon (or how it can be destroyed), so they automatically attribute that fundamentalist way of looking at things to everyone else, and especially to the "enemy". So by definition anything Putin and the Russians do is some kind of "weaponization".
    Notable quotes:
    "... Yes! All true! But I weaponised Vladimir Putin to make media profits, newspapers (Guardian!), radio (BBC), internet (Bellingcat). Evidently only the Brits understand me. The US does the same in a different style. ..."
    "... Here is what Americans really think about the anti-Russia hysteria coming from Washington: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/08/americans-on-russia-will-of-people.html Washington has completely lost touch with what Main Street America really believes. ..."
    "... And besides humor I am sure Putin is also weaponizing calendars, at least in Japan. Maybe in exchange for keeping the Kuril islands: Putin calendar sales surpassing those of Japanese stars in Japan What I am wondering is, if the socalled "Western Elite" maybe actually believe what they are saying and are not aware that it is a self-created illusion they are chaught in. Otherwise I can not understand why they are again and again surprised if Russia is not behaving they way they expected. ..."
    "... Yes, these are projections, and they tell us the final world war, a war of aggression by the US against China and Russia, will be a total war beyond our imaginations. (Unless real leftists and real lovers of peace can stop it.) ..."
    "... I think this insane epidemic illustrates the degree to which the Western propaganda system has completely decoupled the population from reality. ..."
    "... The underlying problem: Russia has weaponized telling the truth. ..."
    "... Yes, I'd agree that's part of its purpose -- to prevent the unification of Eurasia, which as I wrote last week's proceeding apace. They're trying to wall off Japan too, so I wonder if Japanese media's as flush with the same garbage as BigLie Media. ..."
    "... Although likely covered by weaponizing incompetence and stupidity, Putin has certainly weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's appalling lack of a professional diplomatic corp--just look at who he gets Trump to nominate to key diplomatic positions. ..."
    "... Hey guys, guys, you are not getting the point man. There is something really creepy about this Russia place, like Midas. Everything they touch turns to weapons. ..."
    "... But since the fall of Communism in Russia, I have lost all belief in anything like a new Cold War. After all, when I was in parochial school, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. Now, that has been accomplished. Russia's government is more Christian than Western governments ..."
    "... Truth weaponized. Five eyes pulling out all stops in its propaganda campaign to defeat it. ..."
    Dec 17, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Russ , Dec 17, 2018 9:26:23 AM | link

    Q: What do humor, health information, giant squids, robotic cockroaches, tedium and postmodernism have in common?

    A: Russia weaponized them.

    Back in March 2016 we created a list of news items that accused Russia and its bear riding president Vladimir Putin of weaponizing things.

    Others have since copied the idea .

    Several of the pieces listed in it are products of the recently uncovered British government financed disinformation campaign , or of similar efforts by other governments. But these are only a part of the general anti-Russian reflex that is ingrained in our 'western' culture. Nothing else can explain the craziness of these 'weaponizing' claims.

    The updated list with some 65 issues, ideas and things that Russia allegedly 'weaponizes' will hopefully help to convince people that most of what is said or written about Russia is likewise blatant nonsense.

    Posted by b on December 17, 2018 at 09:20 AM | Permalink

    Comments next page "

    Quentin , Dec 17, 2018 9:40:02 AM | link

    Yes! All true! But I weaponised Vladimir Putin to make media profits, newspapers (Guardian!), radio (BBC), internet (Bellingcat). Evidently only the Brits understand me. The US does the same in a different style.
    Sally Snyder , Dec 17, 2018 9:44:29 AM | link
    Here is what Americans really think about the anti-Russia hysteria coming from Washington: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/08/americans-on-russia-will-of-people.html Washington has completely lost touch with what Main Street America really believes.
    old Bill , Dec 17, 2018 9:47:49 AM | link
    until the US actually incorporates term limits the same corruption will continue unabated
    TJ , Dec 17, 2018 10:01:04 AM | link
    The BBC has become Monty Python I await the BBC report on Putins weaponizzation of silly walks.
    Fran , Dec 17, 2018 10:20:44 AM | link

    And besides humor I am sure Putin is also weaponizing calendars, at least in Japan. Maybe in exchange for keeping the Kuril islands: Putin calendar sales surpassing those of Japanese stars in Japan What I am wondering is, if the socalled "Western Elite" maybe actually believe what they are saying and are not aware that it is a self-created illusion they are chaught in. Otherwise I can not understand why they are again and again surprised if Russia is not behaving they way they expected.

    fairleft , Dec 17, 2018 10:28:53 AM | link

    Yes, these are projections, and they tell us the final world war, a war of aggression by the US against China and Russia, will be a total war beyond our imaginations. (Unless real leftists and real lovers of peace can stop it.)

    William Bowles , Dec 17, 2018 10:48:39 AM | link

    I think this insane epidemic illustrates the degree to which the Western propaganda system has completely decoupled the population from reality. Now whether it's believed or not is neither here nor there as it's built upon decades of anti-communism and the inherent racism of the Anglo-Saxon Empire that has demonized the Russians as essentially backward peasants who cannot be trusted. Worse still, the Russkies have ginormous weapons!

    It would be ludicrous if it wasn't so dangerous.

    Peter VE , Dec 17, 2018 10:59:02 AM | link
    The underlying problem: Russia has weaponized telling the truth.
    BRF , Dec 17, 2018 11:04:59 AM | link
    I agree that both 'sides' in a phony cold war 2.0 weaponize just about anything of a controversial nature or event in civilization. Both sides are advancing agenda that are leading humanity in the same direction even as they create a false adversarial paradigm.

    This has been termed non linear psychological warfare under which such a confusing array of created realities leaves the greater public unable to define what is real or a fabrication. It takes at least two or more to create the illusions and the 'other' can simply be created/funded as controlled opposition and then even this can be published to further create more confusion within the confusion. Carl Rove told us this. He just didn't tell us that the 'Empire' also includes Russia, China and any number of other corporate national jurisdictions.

    vk , Dec 17, 2018 11:19:06 AM | link
    It seems Russia has weaponized the African-Americans too: Russian Effort to Influence 2016 Election Targeted African-Americans
    Putin , Dec 17, 2018 11:23:05 AM | link
    More seriously, this is not "stupidity" of the political class, as some pundits would have you believe. It is a well thought-out retrenchment plan of attempting to institute a new "iron curtain" to separate Europe from Asia after the demise of unipolarity.
    Jackrabbit , Dec 17, 2018 11:58:37 AM | link
    Putin | Dec 17, 2018 11:23:05 AM | 23: new "iron curtain"
    karlof1 , Dec 17, 2018 12:16:12 PM | link
    Putin @23--

    Yes, I'd agree that's part of its purpose -- to prevent the unification of Eurasia, which as I wrote last week's proceeding apace. They're trying to wall off Japan too, so I wonder if Japanese media's as flush with the same garbage as BigLie Media.

    Russia's weaponized Arctic Ocean or perhaps Russia's weaponized the lack of proper marine maintenance. Russia's also weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's lack of naval or other Arctic Ocean land-based infrastructure -- there's zip to support any off-shore drilling from Alaska's coastline. IOW, Russia's weaponizing a plethora of Outlaw US Empire weaknesses.

    jrkrideau , Dec 17, 2018 12:56:26 PM | link
    @ 27 karlof1

    And what the Sputnik article refers to as the heavy US icebreaker Polar Star is more roughly one half the size of the nuclear powered Russian icebreaker 50 Years of Victory, 50 лет Победы . I suspect the Russians would call the Polar Star a light icebreaker. Sputnik probably probably being polite.

    GeorgeV , Dec 17, 2018 1:00:57 PM | link
    Way back in the 1950s the Pentagon (specifically the Air Force) was all atwitter over unsubstantiated reports (again leaked by the Air Force) that the Soviets (read: the Russians) were building a nuclear powered strategic bomber that would have unlimited range and flight time. Well now. You know what that means? We gotta have one too! So guess what. The Air Force dutifully volunteered to save the US and Western civilization from being bombed back to the stone age and godless communism all at the same time by building a nuclear powered bomber of our own. To make a long story short the effort failed miserably. The project managed to last into the Kennedy administration but was cancelled in favor of developing submarine launched ICBMs. While the nuclear bomber program died it's spirit lived on. During the Carter administration the then chief of Air Force intelligence (yes I know there's no such thing) became convinced that the russkies were building ground-based and orbiting death ray machines to use against US satellites and ICBMs. Thus was born "Star Wars." Of course this fit in perfectly with the Reagan administration's defense views even though the engineering and science simply didn't exist then of now. Well as the french say the "more things change the more they remain the same"
    snake , Dec 17, 2018 1:15:43 PM | link
    Some people get weaponized on business trips to Moscow. This video shows how they do it... https://youtu.be/8cs4tKdiiI4 Posted by: dh | Dec 17, 2018 10:36:48 AM | 15

    Move over Russia make room for the Chinese weapon program.. its much more dangerous than the Russian disinformation program, unlike Russia, the Chinese circumvent the USA Senate, the President, and the SCOUS and go directly to the poor, innocent governed humans, lending them money, creating for them jobs and developing infra structure to make life easier; such will be the end of us all. WE MUST REMEMBER Aake news and made up fictions are produced by the six entities that own 92 of the media. Without the Internet and other public infra structure, the media could not smear you with its dirty tricks. Someone please pass the soap.

    the pair , Dec 17, 2018 1:17:03 PM | link
    "weaponizing terrorism "? because until Putin all "terrorists" sat around talking and sipping tea like the goddamn mclaughlin group? then again, given the outsize influence of objectively insane think tanks in DC, maybe they were onto something.

    funny how this can also be seen as what psychology types call "projection". in a culture like the west's (especially the states) where the economies are built on warfare and financial voodoo, everything is either "weaponized" or collateralized. look at anything on that list and it's something from which someone "atlantic" has tried or will try to make money. of course, many things start out weaponized and are then collateralized . weaponized taxes? weaponized corporate welfare?

    the pair , Dec 17, 2018 1:28:55 PM | link
    @#33 see also : https://www.voanews.com/a/putin-rap-must-be-controlled-not-banned/4702678.html

    hey, if a bunch of white/israeli suburbanite music executives in LA can control rap, it should be pretty easy. side note: rap is officially banned in iran. some say it's been deemed "satanic". Years ago when i was grooving to das efx or public enemy i'd have disagreed but now that the big names are drake, minaj and meek mill...only malevolent supernatural evil can explain that.

    Glenn Brown , Dec 17, 2018 2:08:07 PM | link
    I'm shocked to learn that "Russia is weaponizing its Coast Guard", https://warisboring.com/russia-is-weaponizing-its-coast-guard/ The author seems quite angry the Russians are using their "Coast Guard" of all things, to defend their coast. He thinks they should have used their Navy instead!

    "The use of the Russian Federation Navy to close the strait would have been more likely to escalate because it would have been a military-on-military clash. In contrast, using the Russian coast guard made it a law enforcement issue rather than a military-sanctioned act of war. Russia is adept at using legal channels to pursue violations of justice. It now appears willing to use its coast guard for this purpose.

    Onshore, the situation in eastern Ukraine has been stuck in a rut. Perhaps the escalation in the Sea of Azov was seen by the Russians as a means to break the impasse, using the flimsy legal cover provided by the coast guard. No similar terrestrial options exist, as the Russians have exhausted their plausible deniability for operations by police, volunteers and undercover "little green men."

    While Russian seizure of the Azov coast was anticipated, it was not expected to use its coast guard. Utilizing the Russian coast guard in this way opens a new range of options for Moscow, in the Sea of Azov and beyond."

    lysias , Dec 17, 2018 2:34:37 PM | link
    Easy way for an author to get an article published.
    karlof1 , Dec 17, 2018 2:38:03 PM | link
    Although likely covered by weaponizing incompetence and stupidity, Putin has certainly weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's appalling lack of a professional diplomatic corp--just look at who he gets Trump to nominate to key diplomatic positions. Indeed, perhaps this ought to be enlarged to include weaponizing mediocrity as portrayed by Trump's entire Cabinet. We can also see the great strides Putin's made in making the Outlaw US Empire appear as the Ogre it is by weaponizing Anglo-American Exceptionalism. It seems, given the above list and its additions via comments, that the Outlaw US Empire is most exceptional at being incapable of weaponizing anything aside from its #1 go-to--The BigLie.
    dh , Dec 17, 2018 3:00:26 PM | link
    @45 They look like happy smiley people untroubled by any ethical issues... https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/
    Strategic Message Code One , Dec 17, 2018 3:04:33 PM | link
    Hey guys, guys, you are not getting the point man. There is something really creepy about this Russia place, like Midas. Everything they touch turns to weapons. I seen it here as well, every Russia thing is trouble of some kind, like there is nothing else that comes from there. I seen Russian people and they ok, but now I'm frightened to get close to them in case I turn into a weapon. Aan here too guys, Russia touches the west an the west as consequence are all buying weapons an using them everywhere, they cant do nothing cause Russia makes them weaponators too. Oh my, we are doomed man and waponized press freakin me out aaaaaaahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    bjd , Dec 17, 2018 3:48:24 PM | link
    A quote from the report mentioned in (50): "Although the NDS generally reflects the right priorities and objectives, it is not supported by adequate investments. It is beyond the scope of this Commission's work to identify the exact dollar amount required to fully fund the military's needs, but the available means are clearly insufficient to fulfill the strategy's ends. This is true despite the two-year funding increase for FY2018 and FY2019 provided by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018."
    john , Dec 17, 2018 4:14:53 PM | link
    weaponize this .
    Zanon , Dec 17, 2018 4:19:22 PM | link
    The Russia "did it" is part of The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49060.htm
    Zanon , Dec 17, 2018 4:24:15 PM | link

    Seems like the renewed anti Russian psyops is a cover for the possible Ukrainian false flag/war coming weeks:

    "Russia deploys ten fighter jets to Crimea amid rising tensions with Ukraine "
    https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/12/17/583233/Russia-fighter-jets-Crimea-armed-provocation

    Josh , Dec 17, 2018 4:26:27 PM | link
    What would be particularly interesting is also to see how the money flow is helping the (we all know it) struggling news organizations. I believe many of these quasi-journalists are going hat in hand to various agencies that have some of that propaganda money. Most of them would need to work for weeks getting paid a measly amount, but doing a couple of these anti-Russia pieces gets them paid well. I certainly think the Guardian has such an arrangement with MI5/6.

    The recipe is using the wonderwords like Putin, Russia, 'weaponizing', hackers, cyber, fake news...

    jrkrideau , Dec 17, 2018 4:31:02 PM | link
    40 Glenn Brown

    I'm shocked to learn that "Russia is weaponizing its Coast Guard", https://warisboring.com/russia-is-weaponizing-its-coast-guard/

    I believe the Saker was pointing out a few days ago that the Border Guards were often more like spetsnaz than what we in the west think of as a border patrol. The Russian Coast Guard has probably maintained the tradition.

    karlof1 , Dec 17, 2018 4:47:55 PM | link
    I see culture's already been deemed weaponized, but here's Putin's actual plan he laid out in his speech to a meeting of the Presidential Council for Culture and Art in St Petersburg two days ago. Introductory remarks:

    "... global competition in creating best conditions for self-fulfilment and revealing the potential of each individual is growing, and the world's leading powers including Russia, rightly see it as a key to the future. Of course, a significant role here will belong to establishing a vibrant, rich cultural space, which will be interesting and attractive not only for the citizens of our country but also for the whole world."

    Meanwhile within the Outlaw US Empire, Boy Scouts of America is about to file for bankruptcy thanks to the many sexual abuse lawsuits it now faces. This leads me to declare yet another Russian accomplishment: Putin has weaponized Machiavellian divide and rule by enticing the Outlaw US Empire's Deep State -- years prior to his birth! -- to promote and escalate what's known as the Culture Wars used to ensure a continuing inability to achieve solidarity by the USA's polity.

    William Bowles , Dec 17, 2018 5:04:28 PM | link
    Posted by: Anaya | Dec 17, 2018 2:52:00 PM | 45

    Anaya, I take it you took a look-see at its staff and there's a lot of them! Yeah, that's what prompted my own feelings about it. The report has apparently been published but I've not yet seen it.

    The '150 million' influenced by those scheming Russkies, has been floating for awhie. I first saw it used in a Euro-based setup, funded by NATO I think. I'll try and dig it out as I remember writing something about.

    Babyl-on , Dec 17, 2018 5:12:15 PM | link
    This kind of "Weaponization" is far less expensive than say an F35 or a 13bn Ford class Aircraft carrier, but the more of them you build the safer you will be from the "Weaponization" of coloring books. Nuke crayons now! The state of the US and its military in my view is that they can't win a war against anyone, all they can do is blow up the world with nukes - the only question is will they deny the world to everyone if they can't own it.
    karlof1 , Dec 17, 2018 5:15:00 PM | link
    It's a shame we can't massively disseminate our weaponization of ridicule contained in b's article and our commentary. I wonder how many comedians are making good money ridiculing the entire weaponization meme, and not just in English.

    What I'd like to see at all US government pressers is for uncontrollable laughter to break out amongst the press when the spokesperson begins speaking and continue until it leaves the podium, followed by the press exiting the room.

    Jen , Dec 17, 2018 6:05:03 PM | link
    Karlof1 @ 69:

    In case you haven't yet heard, Heather Nauert replaces Nutty Nikki as US ambassador to the UN so 'tis there that Matt Lee and his fellow journos must trek (it's gonna be a long way to NYC) to get their regular dose of laughter.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-d-day-america-germany-strong-relationship-state-department-spokeswoman-heather-nauert-a8387221.html

    Bart Hansen , Dec 17, 2018 6:12:43 PM | link
    Here in my exceptional country it is customary at the end of each year to declare a "word of the year", some from past years were truthiness, Y2K and hashtag.

    For 2018 will it be "weaponize"?

    Curtis , Dec 17, 2018 6:28:52 PM | link
    and then today I hit ZH and this headline: Soviet Dissidents, America's Academia, & The Weaponization Of Psychiatry https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-16/soviet-dissidents-americas-academia-weaponization-psychiatry

    but it didn't go after the current Russian govt. It pointed out how the US imitates the Soviets in weaponizing psychiatry by declaring dissidents crazy. You have to be insane to disagree with TPTB.

    Curtis , Dec 17, 2018 6:30:11 PM | link
    It looks like our media has weaponized their obsession with all things Putin and Russia.
    Curtis , Dec 17, 2018 6:33:53 PM | link
    and last but not least, Russia is blamed for inflaming the protests in France: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-14/france-turmoil-blame-russia

    It reminds me of the meme taken from The Brady Bunch instead of "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" it's "Russia, Russia, Russia."

    Zanon , Dec 17, 2018 6:55:47 PM | link
    France: No signs of russian involvement found. https://sptnkne.ws/kq53
    karlof1 , Dec 17, 2018 6:57:54 PM | link
    Jen @71--

    I'm sure the comedian replacing Nauert will be just as distracting and of similar character.

    Did you happen to read Caitlin Johnstone's Twenty-One Thoughts On The Persecution Of Julian Assange , particularly #s 8-10 as they relate to her essay about narratives? All our rather witty ridicule is almost totally wasted on us--we don't need to hear it; it's those people Caitlin refers to in her 8-10 that require the deep pin-prick of ridicule to snap them from their torpor and return them to reality and to rational thinking.

    Lozion , Dec 17, 2018 7:08:38 PM | link
    @18 Best comment so far! Truth as the Weapon of Choice..
    Cyril , Dec 17, 2018 7:10:06 PM | link
    @Peter VE | Dec 17, 2018 10:59:02 AM | 18

    The underlying problem: Russia has weaponized telling the truth.

    That's the truth!

    time2wakeup , Dec 17, 2018 7:43:08 PM | link
    Next thing you know, the media will be weaponizing all their available weapons of mass distraction

    Oh wait.....bit late for that.

    psychohistorian , Dec 17, 2018 8:41:27 PM | link
    The biggest weapon in the West arsenal is private finance. Private finance is the jackboot that keep nations/governments/individuals in line. Private finance has been the primary weapon of control for centuries. China/Russia are trying to weaponize alternative finance......and succeeding......which is why the world is all in a tither.
    lysias , Dec 17, 2018 10:36:33 PM | link
    @ Jen 82

    I think it has to do with what one has studied. I have four university degrees: B.A. in Classics from Princeton, A.B. in Classics from Oxford, Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard, and a J.D. from Yale. I spent a lot of time in the U.S. military: four years in the active duty U.S. Air Force, plus something like 15 years in the reserves, largely of the U.S. Navy. For as long as the original Cold War lasted and Communism ruled Russia, I was a true believer in the Cold War. It now looks to me as if I was misguided at the time, but that is what I believed, whether despite or because of my education, I don't know which.

    But since the fall of Communism in Russia, I have lost all belief in anything like a new Cold War. After all, when I was in parochial school, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. Now, that has been accomplished. Russia's government is more Christian than Western governments. I think someone with a classical education like the one I got is more capable of thinking for himself. I don't think my education disabled me from thinking critically and independently.

    Peter AU 1 , Dec 18, 2018 3:11:59 AM | link

    BB 93 Truth weaponized. Five eyes pulling out all stops in its propaganda campaign to defeat it.

    Hoarsewhisperer 95 He may well be, but with the passing of several years and his actions in that time appear to be ardent zionist. The swamp to him are those that frittered away US unilateral power and those that did not sufficiently support Israel. What Trump views as the swamp is not what most of us view as the swamp. Kissinger was not forced upon Trump, rather his thinking is in line with that of Kissinger.

    [Jan 06, 2019] Integrity initiative is Gladio 2.0 in disguise

    Notable quotes:
    "... To get an idea of how Gladio 2.0 is now investing each corner of our lives, including art and education, I saw recently on the flyer of a sculpture exhibition in a 5-eyes country that two artists, one born in 1901 and one in 1914 were "famous Cold War artists". Of course, there was nothing political in their work, the first died in 1966 and the other in 2003... ..."
    Jan 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Mina , Dec 17, 2018 1:19:30 PM | link

    To get an idea of how Gladio 2.0 is now investing each corner of our lives, including art and education, I saw recently on the flyer of a sculpture exhibition in a 5-eyes country that two artists, one born in 1901 and one in 1914 were "famous Cold War artists". Of course, there was nothing political in their work, the first died in 1966 and the other in 2003...

    In EU universities you now see all sorts of "labs" popping out, with EU funding from the "digital" budget. They are trying to recruit people with a very odd profile: ambitious, ONG oriented, IT familiar. The reason why these labs insist on the ONG type activities is dubious. An example of US/EU sponsored project involving refugees in Greece, neurosciences and mobile phones (check Harvard/Data&Society: Refugee Connectivity)

    Jackrabbit , Dec 17, 2018 11:58:37 AM | link
    Putin | Dec 17, 2018 11:23:05 AM | 23: new "iron curtain"

    [Jan 06, 2019] Is Integrity Initiative controls the USA media as well ?

    Jan 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    alaff , Dec 17, 2018 8:20:19 PM | link

    Check it out & add to your nice collection, if you want.

    Russia is:

    * Weaponizing 'technology':
    https://www.axios.com/russia-misinformation-campaigns-us-elections-83428979-b184-4ed6-b153-25ed72d2f993.html

    * Weaponizing 'the continent / Venezuela':
    https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2018/12/11/russia-places-nuclear-capable-bombers-venezuela/
    https://www.krediblepolitics.com/cs/article/breitbart-russia-places-nuclear-capable-bombers-in-venezuela
    (December 11, 2018)

    * Weaponizing 'Interpol red notices':
    https://www.newsweek.com/russian-interpol-president-putting-fox-charge-hen-house-experts-say-1224160
    (November 20, 2018)

    * Weaponizing 'Heather Nauert':
    https://qz.com/1468983/russian-hackers-are-weaponizing-heather-nauert-a-trump-pick-for-un-ambassador/
    (November 18, 2018)

    * Weaponizing 'Social media hate':
    https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/10/02/the-last-jedi-study-blames-russian-trolls-for-weaponizing-social-media-hate
    (October 2, 2018)

    * Weaponizing 'Debt':
    https://sputniknews.com/us/201806191065559610-us-debt-dollar/
    (June 19, 2018)
    https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/30/investing/russia-us-debt-treasury/index.html
    (July 30, 2018)

    * Weaponizing 'leaks':
    https://www.wired.com/2017/05/russian-hackers-using-tainted-leaks-sow-disinformation/
    (May 25, 2017)

    * Weaponizing 'History':
    https://codastory.com/disinformation-crisis/information-war/weaponizing-history-world-war-ii-memorial-attackers-aim-to-divide-poland-and-ukraine
    (February 27, 2017)

    [Jan 06, 2019] Is BBC a part of Integrity Initiative ?

    Jan 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jen , Dec 17, 2018 5:57:48 PM | link

    News that the BBC is trying to tie the Gilets Jaunes movement to the Kremlin reaches the Russian Foreign Ministry. Betting that Lavrov, Zakharova and company are all having a laugh as well.

    "Russia to turn to OSCE over reports on BBC's trying to prove Moscow behind 'Yellow Vests'"
    http://tass.com/politics/1036309

    "BBC Seeks To Link 'Yellow Vests' To Kremlin"
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YknwBSjJZWc

    Just when you think British news media couldn't fall any deeper into their rabbit hole ... down, down farther they go into the abyss ... aaarrgghhh ...

    [Jan 06, 2019] "Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project" might well be tied to "Integrity Initiative".

    Notable quotes:
    "... Some of the people at the Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are banal presstitutes ready to oblige the top clients (management) for a modest pay, whereas others are real criminals whose ideas and orders have been endangering the western civilization -- and humankind at large. ..."
    "... People are building their careers on this garbage! ..."
    Jan 06, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org
    Anaya , Dec 17, 2018 2:52:00 PM | link
    The Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are run by people.

    These people display a stunning level of immorality by lying and war-mongering.

    Some of the people at the Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are banal presstitutes ready to oblige the top clients (management) for a modest pay, whereas others are real criminals whose ideas and orders have been endangering the western civilization -- and humankind at large.

    It would be proper to publish a roster of the presstitutes and their idiotic managers working at the Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project

    bjd , Dec 17, 2018 3:43:06 PM | link
    Bipartisan panel: US must prepare for "horrendous," "devastating" war with Russia and China:
    https://off-guardian.org/2018/12/17/bipartisan-panel-us-must-prepare-for-horrendous-devastating-war-with-russia-and-china/

    librul , Dec 17, 2018 11:12:26 AM | link

    About half an hour ago I opened News.Google.Com these are some of their major headlines:

    I opened the one from the Washington Post:

    The headline is meant to give the impression that the report was prepared at *The Behest* of the Senate. If you read the article it would have you believe that it *was* written at the behest of the Senate but does not say that specifically.

    Well? Was it? I have tried to track it down and could use some assistance.

    Buried in a CBS NEWS version of the article is this sentence: "The Committee welcomed the research effort without endorsing either report's findings."

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-reports-detail-sophistication-of-russian-influence-efforts-in-u-s/

    USA TODAY says it *was* "Senate Reports". The lead paragraph is this: "WASHINGTON – The Senate released Monday a pair of reports that found Russia engaged in an all-out social media campaign on Donald Trump's behalf during the 2016 election and continued to support him after he took office."

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/17/russia-social-media-senate-report/2334382002/

    All these articles reference some of the authors as: "Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project"

    My question is whether "Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project" is tied to "Integrity Initiative".

    William Bowles , Dec 17, 2018 11:35:31 AM | link
    And the BBC, had this to say today:

    https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/

    https://www.graphika.com/solutions/

    People are building their careers on this garbage!

    Zanon , Dec 17, 2018 3:49:51 PM | link
    "Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project" is funded by European union!

    See last block of text here: http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-11-03-top-democracy-award-fake-news-research-project.

    Zanon , Dec 17, 2018 5:03:20 PM | link
    This is what it is all about: Money :

    William Bowles said at #16

    "People are building their careers on this garbage!"

    Josh said at #60

    "What would be particularly interesting is also to see how the money flow is helping the (we all know it) struggling news organizations. I believe many of these quasi-journalists are going hat in hand to various agencies that have some of that propaganda money. Most of them would need to work for weeks getting paid a measly amount, but doing a couple of these anti-Russia pieces gets them paid well. I certainly think the Guardian has such an arrangement with MI5/6.
    The recipe is using the wonderwords like Putin, Russia, 'weaponizing', hackers, cyber, fake news..."

    [Jan 05, 2019] Everything Madeleine Albright Doesn t Like is Fascism by Guillaume Durocher

    Elements of fascism doctrine are noe constituent part of any Western national security state. In a sense fascism as a derivative of corporatism (control of the state by finance and large industrialists and in turn enforcing policies beneficial for this group) won in the form of "inverted totalitarism". So dominance of intelligence agencies was preserved and amplified, but the political mobilization of masses are discouraged under neoliberalism. Go shopping was famous Bush II recommendation to US citizens after the 9/11. Use of fascism in propaganda purposes more often then not constitute project.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people don't like. ..."
    "... Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. ..."
    "... In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability. This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. ..."
    "... It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and power of the community as a whole ..."
    "... Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime? ..."
    Jan 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

    It is always gratifying when one's intuition is confirmed. I had the impression, picking up Madeleine Albright's book Fascism: A Warning , that I would be treated to an exercise of "Fascism is bad. And everything I don't like is Fascism!" The former secretary of State, a Jewish liberal originally hailing from Czechoslovakia, did not disappoint.

    The book is essentially a set of portraits of various movements and leaders Albright considers to be "Fascist" ( contra convention, she capitalizes even when not referring to Mussolini's National Fascist Party) and/or vaguely fascistic.

    Albright warns early on that people use "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people don't like. She proposes a somewhat reasonable definition of fascism and then goes on to do exactly what she warned against, covering not only Mussolini and Hitler, but also Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and communist Czechoslovakia in her Fascist(ish) portraits.

    To be fair, these vignettes are often quite informative. The chapters on Hugo Chávez, Recep Erdoğan, and the Kims of North Korea in particular showcase a diplomat's sensitivity and nuance, making an effort to understand the motivations and appeal of these men (and the movements and/or systems they represent), as well as their considerable failings.

    However, to lump all of these under the broad heading "quasi-fascist" only makes sense in terms of branding. Since World War II, people have been taught to consider authoritarianism, fascism, "Nazism," nationalism, racism, and eugenics as the supreme evils. In fact, these things are quite different (there were democratic countries systematically practicing eugenics and racism, while Fascist Italy if anything was quite slow to adopt such policies). These things are not really distinguished in people's minds however but form a kind of hideous potpourri of sadistic bullying [1] Albright even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying." and senseless suffering, basically a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, embodying their deepest fears as human beings. Emotionally it is very powerful and it is understandable that Albright would want to misleadingly brand all her opponents as (quasi-)Fascists.

    Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

    Nor is there much mention of China and Singapore, two countries which as capitalist one-party [2] I know Singapore allows some minor parties to exist notionally, but power is dominated by the People's Action Party. states actually are much closer to historic fascism than any of her candidates. Perhaps she ignores them so that people do not get the idea that fascistic government can actually be quite competent and public-spirited, and not necessarily lead to constant warfare.

    Strikingly, the word "Netanyahu" does not appear in the book's Index at all. The existence of a democratic ethno-nationalist state goes against her whole narrative. For what it's worth, I suspect most people in European nationalist parties and in the Alt-Right would be happy to preserve democracy if they could have their own Netanyahus, with the establishment of Western ethnostates dedicated to their own people, with the explicit goal of preserving or restoring ethnic European demographic supermajorities.

    This selectivity will encourage the impression that the State Department's talk of "human rights" has less to do with upholding universal moral principles than with demonizing the United States' geopolitical opponents du jour . The American Establishment does not bully China as much as Russia, despite being obviously more authoritarian. I suspect this is because China is already too big to bully, while Russia can still be pushed around and serve as a useful bogeyman (always useful to the Military-Industrial Complex, the National Security State, and for all the Establishmentarians who need a scapegoat for the rise of populism). On that note, I suspect most diplomatic conflicts today have less to do with "realist" international power dynamics than with the utility of foreign enemies for governments domestically.

    Personally I prefer a republican government under the rule of law. But it would be dishonest to deny that authoritarian governments present certain advantages. In times of crisis, all governments tend to revert to authoritarianism to get the job done (e.g.: Lincoln, De Gaulle . . .). In the future, I'll write something on the merits and demerits of liberty and authority, and on the liberal claims of being "non-authoritarian."

    In the meantime, I'll just ask: "What have the Romans ever done for us?"

    Where would you rather be born:

    Try to be honest (with yourself).

    I will not quibble about the book's one-sided point of view, sometimes questionable assertions, and various hypocrisies typical of U.S. foreign policy (on which see the book review already up by Morris V. de Camp on Counter-Currents ). I'd rather take the subject head-on: the merits and demerits of fascism, which I think are an interesting subject.

    The biggest and really inexcusable intellectual weakness of Albright's book is in lazily equating or associating the various illiberal democratic regimes (meaning nothing more than democratic regimes liberals don't agree with) with fascist ones. It fails to recognize that democracy causes populism . If you have democracy – with real freedom of speech and not a dictatorship of the money-men and of the mainstream media which the postwar American generations were used to – you will get Trumps and Bolsonaros and Corbyns and Erdoğans. This kind of mess is a feature, not a bug, of real democracy.

    The governments of illiberal democracies, it seems to me, also behave more badly because they have to worry about getting reelected. Unlike dictatorships, these governments are insecure, if they lose one election, they risk losing everything. As a result, they seem to me to be more erratic and have more of a taste for (often damaging) spectacle and demagogic measures than does the average dictatorship. (Again: compare the peace and orderliness of Cuba with the violence and chaos of Venezuela.)

    Fascism entails a one-party state under the authority of a charismatic dictator, typically with a commitment to national independence and power. The fascist claims that the right people, in practice the men willing to go out there and risk their lives to beat up communists, ought to be in charge. The biggest risk, as in all personal dictatorships, is that the country's development is put at the mercy of the wisdom and the stability of the leader. There have been plenty of competent dictators: Franco, Chiang Kai-shek, Lee Kuan Yew, etc. Hitler's personal contempt for the Slavs, more than anything else, caused his downfall – if he'd toned that back, and just that might have been enough – I'd probably be typing in German today.

    The Belgian fascist Léon Degrelle signed up to the Waffen-SS because he wanted Europe to be a mighty empire rather than a glorified supermarket.

    In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability. This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. As Lee Kuan Yew , my favorite antidote to the political childishness that prevails in the West today, said concerning his multiracial state of Singapore: "We had to lock up people, without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, or religious extremists. If you don't do that the country would be in ruins today!" Few things have been as murderous as the promotion of "democracy" in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, a policy which, not coincidentally, has destroyed several geopolitical opponents of Israel.

    The government can furthermore take decisive actions where necessary. Fascism rose in Italy because veterans and others could see that the parliamentary democracy was unable to stop communist-inspired chaos and was generally ineffectual. The Germans voted for Hitler so as to free Germany from the chaos of Western financial capitalism and to overturn the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles. Does anyone think the divided, social-democratic Weimar Republic could have overturned Versailles as quickly as the Third Reich did?

    The lack of elections means political leaders have no need to pander to the 51% every couple of years. The rulers can adopt far-sighted and sustainable policies without worrying about electoral change or unpopularity (the European Union follows this line anti-democratic line of argument concerning macroeconomics, a field in which it is attempting to eliminate the influence of elected politicians altogether, so as to ensure only "responsible" budgetary and monetary decisions are taken). The government can furthermore promote a uniform set of values, in the case of fascism, this tends to be things like national power, independence, and individual self-sacrifice for the community – but in principle these can be anything, such as equality, eugenics, or ecology.

    Fascism does not necessarily mean racism, eugenics, anti-Semitism, or perpetual warfare. Italian Fascism really should set the bar in this area. As Albright admits, if Mussolini had chosen to join the winning side in World War II, fascism would not be a swear word today. Mussolini only sided with Hitler because of the Anglo-French's opposition to his invasion of Ethiopia, which he thought quite hypocritical, given that Britain and France already had vast colonial empires of their own.

    Fascism is often quite inclusive: involving the masses, educating them, giving them access to culture, economic welfare, tourism, and healthcare. In general, these systems try to be meritocratic (like any honest bureaucracy really), letting all apply and, if found competent and appropriate, hired and promoted through the ranks. In short, a degree of socialism, but without slaughtering your upper-classes, starving your Kulaks, or waging war against your own population.

    Saddam Hussein's long-time foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was a non-Arab Christian. It is also also notorious that the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria were/are more tolerant of ethnic and religious minorities than have been the various Islamist rebel groups – specializing in enslaving Yazidis and destroying priceless Greco-Roman architecture.

    Fascism, in short, is a nation making an effort , according to whatever goals have been set (e.g. having more babies, training a powerful army, reducing dependence on foreign imports . . .). Democracy is the pursuit of comfiness. An eco-fascism probably could have prevented climate change.

    It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and power of the community as a whole.

    Personally, I think ancient republican theory is distinctly superior to the modern (I can barely read Locke and Rousseau). I am an Aristotelian: I favor whatever promotes the collective flourishing of the community and of the species. e.g.: I support an individual right if and only if it promotes the common good. Wrap your head around that.

    I can't say how a Fascist Italy would have evolved had it won besides the other Allies or remained neutral in World War II. Let us suppose a middling route: Italy would have maintained its colonial empire for far longer, it would have probably maintained a much higher birth rate, it would have worked much harder to maintain economic independence (and had some means, via the empire, to do so, especially in terms of oil), and would generally be a far more independent and powerful country than has been the supine and corrupt Italian Republic, good for nothing except getting milked for usurious interests rates by international financiers, a glorified museum and holiday resort. By way of comparison, look at how peaceful, healthy, and independent Cuba is compared to the average Latin American country – even managing to send 25,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1970s to fight Apartheid. Now imagine that, but a Fascist postwar Italy of 75 million.

    Fascism certainly does not solve all problems. Even 20 years of fascism failed to turn Italy into a warrior nation, whereas 7 years was enough for Germany. Furthermore, there is no doubt that America's particular brand of individualist republicanism has been a great source of national power .

    More generally, you still have your basic human capital (a nation of inbred idiots will remain a nation of inbred idiots unless you have an effective eugenics program). After colonial independence, most of the Third World was actually governed by kind-of-fascist nationalist and socialist dictatorships, who had the merit of trying to ensure some level of stability and wealth-sharing. Of course they tended to also be corrupt and incompetent, but regime type doesn't seem to matter much in that respect.

    Ever since the French Revolution, liberals and democrats have sought to impose their ideological preferences on the entire world. Unless you adopt their ever-changing and quite arbitrary list of rights, you are "evil" as far as they are concerned. As Edmund Burke already saw back then, the imposition of such norms on other, vastly different societies is a recipe for chaos. Many millions of people have died in the demoliberals' quest to impose their ideology on the whole world and I have no doubt that many more millions will die in the future.

    White liberals lack empathy for "fascists" and "racists" of their own race, although they are quite capable of considering the merits and demerits of such positions when these concern other nations or science fiction settings.

    Given fascism's importance in the history of the twentieth century, people owe it to themselves to look at what the fascists themselves had to say about their values: Mussolini's Doctrine of Fascism (co-authored with philosopher Giovanni Gentile) is a concise and serious declaration of political principles.

    The same goes for postwar white nationalism: How do George Lincoln Rockwell's words make you feel?

    Taking the long view, the democratization of Europe coincided almost perfectly with the Continent's collapse into irrelevance. In 1914, Europeans and people of European descent – the people who had for all intents and purposes created modern civilization – dominated virtually the entire globe and made up a third of the world's population. Less than 150 years after the triumph of democracy, these same people will have not only lost their global empires but are set to even lose control of their own nations, by becoming minorities in North America, Australasia, and even their historic, millennia-old homelands in Western Europe. They will have dwindled to less than 5% of the world population and may well become under siege, like the Christians of Lebanon or the Serbs of Kosovo. Surely we deserve a Cosmic Darwin Award for this.

    To nationalists, postwar "democracy" was the regime which persecutes nationalists and systematically ignores the will of the people on the critical issue of immigration. It appears no more than a sham to them. Albright acknowledges that Americans before agreed more because a narrower media class carefully curated what Americans were allowed to see and read and think. To address this, she wants to "put a saddle on the bucking bronco we call the Internet." So much for democracy and free speech.

    Liberal-democracy means majority rule . . . except when liberals strongly disagree with the majority (then, they believe, the action should be unconstitutional and/or the media-political class have a solemn duty to shut down the issue). In reality, all regimes, including "democratic" ones, have official or unofficial Platonic Guardians enforcing certain values and ideas. The question is not whether something is "democratic" but whether the values and ideas promoted by the Guardians are true.

    Early on in her book, Albright says:

    My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure of a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the surface. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democracy.

    I believe that is the fundamental issue: Albright fears an organized mass of people with a strong emotional connection with a charismatic leader, one who could actually shake up the system. This reminds me of that Jewish journalist who was offended because French President François Mitterrand seemed to care more about the millions of Frenchmen who died in World War I than the millions of his fellow Jews who died in the Shoah : "[Mitterrand] became again, in these movements, that Gaulish chieftain that I did not like very much."

    No sir, they don't like European chieftains leading impassioned followers. That could lead to a pogrom . . . or worse. Certainly, the current absurdly skewed and unjust situation in the Ivy Leagues (see the graphs in particular) , the Democratic Party , and much of the elite and audiovisual media would probably be shut down. We can ask whether Albright's fears reflect universal morality – as she claims – or simply a natural desire to defend one's ethnic interests and privileges.

    Albright's alarmism about every tepid manifestation of Western civic nationalism and her casual ignoring of Jewish ethnonationalism – funded at American taxpayers' expense and driving much of the murderous insanity of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including under her tenure as secretary of State – is a hypocrisy sadly typical of many American liberal Jews. Influential Jewish groups like the ADL in America and the CRIF in France have promoted immigration and multiculturalism in the West all the while demanding support for Israel as a Jewish ethnostate. Growing awareness of this hypocrisy is contributing to the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment across the West today. Many liberals and/or Jews simply cannot comprehend that this is happening. But it is.

    The sooner we can discuss all issues and acknowledge untruths and injustices on all sides, the sooner we will be able to find equitable and peaceful solutions to these problems. At least, that is my hope.

    Notes

    [1] Albright even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying."

    [2] I know Singapore allows some minor parties to exist notionally, but power is dominated by the People's Action Party.

    Bournite , says: January 5, 2019 at 8:24 pm GMT

    Albright's relationship to fascism was broadly advertised for about 10 years. From 1999 until Obama's first midterm a photo of Albright and Hosni Mubarak in a warm embrace circulated on the internet. It's caption unironically feature "celebrating freedom to the Balkans" circa post Serbian bombing campaign. Freedom along the Nile never came up on the, apparently, defunct website. Just before the "Arab Spring" the photo disappeared from the internet. Here's what a google search turns up:
    Showing results for madeleine albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"
    Search instead for madelin albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"

    No results containing all your search terms were found.

    The Alarmist says: January 5, 2019 at 9:37 pm GMT

    Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime?

    [Jan 05, 2019] Everything Madeleine Albright Doesn t Like is Fascism by Guillaume Durocher

    Elements of fascism doctrine are noe constituent part of any Western national security state. In a sense fascism as a derivative of corporatism (control of the state by finance and large industrialists and in turn enforcing policies beneficial for this group) won in the form of "inverted totalitarism". So dominance of intelligence agencies was preserved and amplified, but the political mobilization of masses are discouraged under neoliberalism. Go shopping was famous Bush II recommendation to US citizens after the 9/11. Use of fascism in propaganda purposes more often then not constitute project.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people don't like. ..."
    "... Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. ..."
    "... In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability. This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. ..."
    "... It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and power of the community as a whole ..."
    "... Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime? ..."
    Jan 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

    It is always gratifying when one's intuition is confirmed. I had the impression, picking up Madeleine Albright's book Fascism: A Warning , that I would be treated to an exercise of "Fascism is bad. And everything I don't like is Fascism!" The former secretary of State, a Jewish liberal originally hailing from Czechoslovakia, did not disappoint.

    The book is essentially a set of portraits of various movements and leaders Albright considers to be "Fascist" ( contra convention, she capitalizes even when not referring to Mussolini's National Fascist Party) and/or vaguely fascistic.

    Albright warns early on that people use "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people don't like. She proposes a somewhat reasonable definition of fascism and then goes on to do exactly what she warned against, covering not only Mussolini and Hitler, but also Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and communist Czechoslovakia in her Fascist(ish) portraits.

    To be fair, these vignettes are often quite informative. The chapters on Hugo Chávez, Recep Erdoğan, and the Kims of North Korea in particular showcase a diplomat's sensitivity and nuance, making an effort to understand the motivations and appeal of these men (and the movements and/or systems they represent), as well as their considerable failings.

    However, to lump all of these under the broad heading "quasi-fascist" only makes sense in terms of branding. Since World War II, people have been taught to consider authoritarianism, fascism, "Nazism," nationalism, racism, and eugenics as the supreme evils. In fact, these things are quite different (there were democratic countries systematically practicing eugenics and racism, while Fascist Italy if anything was quite slow to adopt such policies). These things are not really distinguished in people's minds however but form a kind of hideous potpourri of sadistic bullying [1] Albright even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying." and senseless suffering, basically a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, embodying their deepest fears as human beings. Emotionally it is very powerful and it is understandable that Albright would want to misleadingly brand all her opponents as (quasi-)Fascists.

    Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

    Nor is there much mention of China and Singapore, two countries which as capitalist one-party [2] I know Singapore allows some minor parties to exist notionally, but power is dominated by the People's Action Party. states actually are much closer to historic fascism than any of her candidates. Perhaps she ignores them so that people do not get the idea that fascistic government can actually be quite competent and public-spirited, and not necessarily lead to constant warfare.

    Strikingly, the word "Netanyahu" does not appear in the book's Index at all. The existence of a democratic ethno-nationalist state goes against her whole narrative. For what it's worth, I suspect most people in European nationalist parties and in the Alt-Right would be happy to preserve democracy if they could have their own Netanyahus, with the establishment of Western ethnostates dedicated to their own people, with the explicit goal of preserving or restoring ethnic European demographic supermajorities.

    This selectivity will encourage the impression that the State Department's talk of "human rights" has less to do with upholding universal moral principles than with demonizing the United States' geopolitical opponents du jour . The American Establishment does not bully China as much as Russia, despite being obviously more authoritarian. I suspect this is because China is already too big to bully, while Russia can still be pushed around and serve as a useful bogeyman (always useful to the Military-Industrial Complex, the National Security State, and for all the Establishmentarians who need a scapegoat for the rise of populism). On that note, I suspect most diplomatic conflicts today have less to do with "realist" international power dynamics than with the utility of foreign enemies for governments domestically.

    Personally I prefer a republican government under the rule of law. But it would be dishonest to deny that authoritarian governments present certain advantages. In times of crisis, all governments tend to revert to authoritarianism to get the job done (e.g.: Lincoln, De Gaulle . . .). In the future, I'll write something on the merits and demerits of liberty and authority, and on the liberal claims of being "non-authoritarian."

    In the meantime, I'll just ask: "What have the Romans ever done for us?"

    Where would you rather be born:

    Try to be honest (with yourself).

    I will not quibble about the book's one-sided point of view, sometimes questionable assertions, and various hypocrisies typical of U.S. foreign policy (on which see the book review already up by Morris V. de Camp on Counter-Currents ). I'd rather take the subject head-on: the merits and demerits of fascism, which I think are an interesting subject.

    The biggest and really inexcusable intellectual weakness of Albright's book is in lazily equating or associating the various illiberal democratic regimes (meaning nothing more than democratic regimes liberals don't agree with) with fascist ones. It fails to recognize that democracy causes populism . If you have democracy – with real freedom of speech and not a dictatorship of the money-men and of the mainstream media which the postwar American generations were used to – you will get Trumps and Bolsonaros and Corbyns and Erdoğans. This kind of mess is a feature, not a bug, of real democracy.

    The governments of illiberal democracies, it seems to me, also behave more badly because they have to worry about getting reelected. Unlike dictatorships, these governments are insecure, if they lose one election, they risk losing everything. As a result, they seem to me to be more erratic and have more of a taste for (often damaging) spectacle and demagogic measures than does the average dictatorship. (Again: compare the peace and orderliness of Cuba with the violence and chaos of Venezuela.)

    Fascism entails a one-party state under the authority of a charismatic dictator, typically with a commitment to national independence and power. The fascist claims that the right people, in practice the men willing to go out there and risk their lives to beat up communists, ought to be in charge. The biggest risk, as in all personal dictatorships, is that the country's development is put at the mercy of the wisdom and the stability of the leader. There have been plenty of competent dictators: Franco, Chiang Kai-shek, Lee Kuan Yew, etc. Hitler's personal contempt for the Slavs, more than anything else, caused his downfall – if he'd toned that back, and just that might have been enough – I'd probably be typing in German today.

    The Belgian fascist Léon Degrelle signed up to the Waffen-SS because he wanted Europe to be a mighty empire rather than a glorified supermarket.

    In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability. This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. As Lee Kuan Yew , my favorite antidote to the political childishness that prevails in the West today, said concerning his multiracial state of Singapore: "We had to lock up people, without trial, whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, or religious extremists. If you don't do that the country would be in ruins today!" Few things have been as murderous as the promotion of "democracy" in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, a policy which, not coincidentally, has destroyed several geopolitical opponents of Israel.

    The government can furthermore take decisive actions where necessary. Fascism rose in Italy because veterans and others could see that the parliamentary democracy was unable to stop communist-inspired chaos and was generally ineffectual. The Germans voted for Hitler so as to free Germany from the chaos of Western financial capitalism and to overturn the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles. Does anyone think the divided, social-democratic Weimar Republic could have overturned Versailles as quickly as the Third Reich did?

    The lack of elections means political leaders have no need to pander to the 51% every couple of years. The rulers can adopt far-sighted and sustainable policies without worrying about electoral change or unpopularity (the European Union follows this line anti-democratic line of argument concerning macroeconomics, a field in which it is attempting to eliminate the influence of elected politicians altogether, so as to ensure only "responsible" budgetary and monetary decisions are taken). The government can furthermore promote a uniform set of values, in the case of fascism, this tends to be things like national power, independence, and individual self-sacrifice for the community – but in principle these can be anything, such as equality, eugenics, or ecology.

    Fascism does not necessarily mean racism, eugenics, anti-Semitism, or perpetual warfare. Italian Fascism really should set the bar in this area. As Albright admits, if Mussolini had chosen to join the winning side in World War II, fascism would not be a swear word today. Mussolini only sided with Hitler because of the Anglo-French's opposition to his invasion of Ethiopia, which he thought quite hypocritical, given that Britain and France already had vast colonial empires of their own.

    Fascism is often quite inclusive: involving the masses, educating them, giving them access to culture, economic welfare, tourism, and healthcare. In general, these systems try to be meritocratic (like any honest bureaucracy really), letting all apply and, if found competent and appropriate, hired and promoted through the ranks. In short, a degree of socialism, but without slaughtering your upper-classes, starving your Kulaks, or waging war against your own population.

    Saddam Hussein's long-time foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was a non-Arab Christian. It is also also notorious that the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria were/are more tolerant of ethnic and religious minorities than have been the various Islamist rebel groups – specializing in enslaving Yazidis and destroying priceless Greco-Roman architecture.

    Fascism, in short, is a nation making an effort , according to whatever goals have been set (e.g. having more babies, training a powerful army, reducing dependence on foreign imports . . .). Democracy is the pursuit of comfiness. An eco-fascism probably could have prevented climate change.

    It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and power of the community as a whole.

    Personally, I think ancient republican theory is distinctly superior to the modern (I can barely read Locke and Rousseau). I am an Aristotelian: I favor whatever promotes the collective flourishing of the community and of the species. e.g.: I support an individual right if and only if it promotes the common good. Wrap your head around that.

    I can't say how a Fascist Italy would have evolved had it won besides the other Allies or remained neutral in World War II. Let us suppose a middling route: Italy would have maintained its colonial empire for far longer, it would have probably maintained a much higher birth rate, it would have worked much harder to maintain economic independence (and had some means, via the empire, to do so, especially in terms of oil), and would generally be a far more independent and powerful country than has been the supine and corrupt Italian Republic, good for nothing except getting milked for usurious interests rates by international financiers, a glorified museum and holiday resort. By way of comparison, look at how peaceful, healthy, and independent Cuba is compared to the average Latin American country – even managing to send 25,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1970s to fight Apartheid. Now imagine that, but a Fascist postwar Italy of 75 million.

    Fascism certainly does not solve all problems. Even 20 years of fascism failed to turn Italy into a warrior nation, whereas 7 years was enough for Germany. Furthermore, there is no doubt that America's particular brand of individualist republicanism has been a great source of national power .

    More generally, you still have your basic human capital (a nation of inbred idiots will remain a nation of inbred idiots unless you have an effective eugenics program). After colonial independence, most of the Third World was actually governed by kind-of-fascist nationalist and socialist dictatorships, who had the merit of trying to ensure some level of stability and wealth-sharing. Of course they tended to also be corrupt and incompetent, but regime type doesn't seem to matter much in that respect.

    Ever since the French Revolution, liberals and democrats have sought to impose their ideological preferences on the entire world. Unless you adopt their ever-changing and quite arbitrary list of rights, you are "evil" as far as they are concerned. As Edmund Burke already saw back then, the imposition of such norms on other, vastly different societies is a recipe for chaos. Many millions of people have died in the demoliberals' quest to impose their ideology on the whole world and I have no doubt that many more millions will die in the future.

    White liberals lack empathy for "fascists" and "racists" of their own race, although they are quite capable of considering the merits and demerits of such positions when these concern other nations or science fiction settings.

    Given fascism's importance in the history of the twentieth century, people owe it to themselves to look at what the fascists themselves had to say about their values: Mussolini's Doctrine of Fascism (co-authored with philosopher Giovanni Gentile) is a concise and serious declaration of political principles.

    The same goes for postwar white nationalism: How do George Lincoln Rockwell's words make you feel?

    Taking the long view, the democratization of Europe coincided almost perfectly with the Continent's collapse into irrelevance. In 1914, Europeans and people of European descent – the people who had for all intents and purposes created modern civilization – dominated virtually the entire globe and made up a third of the world's population. Less than 150 years after the triumph of democracy, these same people will have not only lost their global empires but are set to even lose control of their own nations, by becoming minorities in North America, Australasia, and even their historic, millennia-old homelands in Western Europe. They will have dwindled to less than 5% of the world population and may well become under siege, like the Christians of Lebanon or the Serbs of Kosovo. Surely we deserve a Cosmic Darwin Award for this.

    To nationalists, postwar "democracy" was the regime which persecutes nationalists and systematically ignores the will of the people on the critical issue of immigration. It appears no more than a sham to them. Albright acknowledges that Americans before agreed more because a narrower media class carefully curated what Americans were allowed to see and read and think. To address this, she wants to "put a saddle on the bucking bronco we call the Internet." So much for democracy and free speech.

    Liberal-democracy means majority rule . . . except when liberals strongly disagree with the majority (then, they believe, the action should be unconstitutional and/or the media-political class have a solemn duty to shut down the issue). In reality, all regimes, including "democratic" ones, have official or unofficial Platonic Guardians enforcing certain values and ideas. The question is not whether something is "democratic" but whether the values and ideas promoted by the Guardians are true.

    Early on in her book, Albright says:

    My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure of a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the surface. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democracy.

    I believe that is the fundamental issue: Albright fears an organized mass of people with a strong emotional connection with a charismatic leader, one who could actually shake up the system. This reminds me of that Jewish journalist who was offended because French President François Mitterrand seemed to care more about the millions of Frenchmen who died in World War I than the millions of his fellow Jews who died in the Shoah : "[Mitterrand] became again, in these movements, that Gaulish chieftain that I did not like very much."

    No sir, they don't like European chieftains leading impassioned followers. That could lead to a pogrom . . . or worse. Certainly, the current absurdly skewed and unjust situation in the Ivy Leagues (see the graphs in particular) , the Democratic Party , and much of the elite and audiovisual media would probably be shut down. We can ask whether Albright's fears reflect universal morality – as she claims – or simply a natural desire to defend one's ethnic interests and privileges.

    Albright's alarmism about every tepid manifestation of Western civic nationalism and her casual ignoring of Jewish ethnonationalism – funded at American taxpayers' expense and driving much of the murderous insanity of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including under her tenure as secretary of State – is a hypocrisy sadly typical of many American liberal Jews. Influential Jewish groups like the ADL in America and the CRIF in France have promoted immigration and multiculturalism in the West all the while demanding support for Israel as a Jewish ethnostate. Growing awareness of this hypocrisy is contributing to the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment across the West today. Many liberals and/or Jews simply cannot comprehend that this is happening. But it is.

    The sooner we can discuss all issues and acknowledge untruths and injustices on all sides, the sooner we will be able to find equitable and peaceful solutions to these problems. At least, that is my hope.

    Notes

    [1] Albright even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying."

    [2] I know Singapore allows some minor parties to exist notionally, but power is dominated by the People's Action Party.

    Bournite , says: January 5, 2019 at 8:24 pm GMT

    Albright's relationship to fascism was broadly advertised for about 10 years. From 1999 until Obama's first midterm a photo of Albright and Hosni Mubarak in a warm embrace circulated on the internet. It's caption unironically feature "celebrating freedom to the Balkans" circa post Serbian bombing campaign. Freedom along the Nile never came up on the, apparently, defunct website. Just before the "Arab Spring" the photo disappeared from the internet. Here's what a google search turns up:
    Showing results for madeleine albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"
    Search instead for madelin albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"

    No results containing all your search terms were found.

    The Alarmist says: January 5, 2019 at 9:37 pm GMT

    Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime?

    [Jan 05, 2019] Obama as the agent of the Deep State consciously deciving his voters with faux populism promises which he never intended to follow

    Obama strategy in Syria was replica of Clinton strategy in Yugoslavia during the Balkan Wars. Divide everybody up by ethnicity or religion (Croats are Catholics, Serbians are Orthodox not to mention the various Muslims and Albanians lurking about), arm them, create false flags to set them at each other's throats. Enjoy the results.
    Obama like Clinton before him was a real wolve in sheep's clothing
    Notable quotes:
    "... Jackrabbit, I agree with Bevin. Obama was really useful to the deep state because, as the "First Black President" he was widely popular, not just inside the US but outside it as well. Before the 2016 election, there was a widespread hope inside the US elite that Hillary Clinton, as the "First Woman President" would be able to serve a similar function in giving US imperialism a pleasing face. ..."
    "... Trump, by contrast, hurts the US deep state because his true nature as a greedy, incompetent egotist is just too blatantly obvious to too many people. And he won't follow a script, the way GW Bush usually did. That's why we see major sections of the US deep state going out of their way to be publically hostile towards Trump. ..."
    Jan 05, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Jan 5, 2019 6:10:33 PM | 17

    bevin @10:

    But the notion that it is part of a complex and tightly scripted conspiracy in which he plays his public part and the deep state play theirs, pretending to be at odds with each other, is bizarre.
    I would've agreed with you before Obama. I followed the criticisms of Obama from true progressives closely. It was clear within 2 or 3 years that Obama was betraying his 'base'.

    His lofty rhetoric didn't match his actions. His Nobel Peace Prize can only be viewed today as a ruse. He talked of peace and fairness but worked behind the scenes to further the establishment.

    Fast forward to the 2016 election where Sanders was a sheepdog and Hillary ran a terrible campaign. It's difficult to look back and not be at least somewhat suspicious of the 2016 election. A populist nationalist was what the Deep State NEEDED to face the threat from Russia and China to their NWO project. And that is what they got. After recognizing the threat in 2013-14 (when Russia countered the Empire in Syria and Ukraine).

    Similar excuses are made for both Obama and Trump. We are told that they were FORCED to succumb to Deep State scheming and political power. But a much more logical view is that these "populists" know exactly what they are doing: they know what their 'job' is to serve the establishment and act as the leader of the Deep State's political arm. In return they get financial gain, social standing, and life long protection. Sweet.

    Obama 'turned the page' on the Bush Administration's warmongering. He promised a more peaceful USA. But he conducted covert wars and bragged of his drone targeting.

    Trump 'turned the page' on Obama's deceitfulness. He promised to put 'America First' but within months attacked Syria with missiles "for the babies". Evidence that his first attack was prompted by a false flag didn't deter him from attacking AGAIN - also based on a false flag. Trump is still helping the Saudis in Yemen. And he's not doing what's necessary to get peace in Korea.

    Obama promised 'transparency' ("Sunlight is the best disinfectant") but 'no drama' Obama protected CIA torturers, NSA spies, and bankers. Trump promised to "drain the swamp" but has welcomed oligarchs and neocons into his Administration.

    How much sly BS do we have to see before people connect the dots? A real populist will NEVER be elected in USA unless there is a revolution; USA political elites are fully committed to a neoliberal economics that make society neofeudal, and a neoconservative-driven foreign policy that demands full spectrum dominance that brooks no opposition to its NWO goals.

    Anyone who believes otherwise has drunk the Kool-Aid, an addictive, saccharine concoction, provided without charge and in abundance.

    Glenn Brown | Jan 5, 2019 10:27:14 PM |

    39@ 10 17

    Jackrabbit, I agree with Bevin. Obama was really useful to the deep state because, as the "First Black President" he was widely popular, not just inside the US but outside it as well. Before the 2016 election, there was a widespread hope inside the US elite that Hillary Clinton, as the "First Woman President" would be able to serve a similar function in giving US imperialism a pleasing face.

    Trump, by contrast, hurts the US deep state because his true nature as a greedy, incompetent egotist is just too blatantly obvious to too many people. And he won't follow a script, the way GW Bush usually did. That's why we see major sections of the US deep state going out of their way to be publically hostile towards Trump.

    Yes, their public rejection of Trump is partly motivated by the need to be able to claim that Trump is an aberration from all previous US Presidents, as opposed to Trump and his policies being just a particularly explicit continuation of the same underlying trends.

    But I see no reason to doubt that the US elites really wish they had someone as President who was better at supplying the right propaganda and less obviously an incompetent fool. So I don't understand why you think the US oligarchy and deep state would have thought they needed someone like Trump, or would have greatly preferred him to Hillary Clinton.

    [Jan 05, 2019] Are Trump's senior people going rogue?

    Numerous MSM articles appear about Trump's standing up to the Generals: Mattis, Kelly, Dunford, etc. Yet Bolton feels free to conspire against the President's agenda? The narrative that Trump is fighting for his campaign promises, but allows Bolton and Pompeo to scheme against him does not make any sense.
    A more realistic take is that rump is a faux populist. He is the Republican Obama - pretending to be a populist peacemaker while working for the establishment. The "populist hero" is a gimmick that reinforces people's belief in USA democracy and the righteousness of USA actions. The Trump/Deep-State conflict is a propaganda psy-op.
    The major inconsistency here is why the Deep State is hell bent of deposing him. Is The Trump/Deep-State conflict is a propaganda psy-op? I do no not think so.
    Trump is certainly a 'faux populist' as all right wing populists are: promises to the people while promoting the interests of the 1%. But there is a genuine struggle going on within the ruling class due to the crisis of neoliberal governance. The world is a complex place and Washington's influence is declining. No surprise that parts of the US elite that got used to "full spectrum dominance" are panicking. And it is all real.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "The president's statement offered the latest illustration of the dramatic gyrations that have characterized his foreign policy and fueled questions about whether his senior advisers are implementing his policies or pursuing their own agendas." ..."
    "... Here we have the question asked, in effect: Are Trump's senior people going rogue? Does the master of spin Washington Post, by putting the question in a manner sympathetic to Trump and unsympathetic to Bolton and Pompeo, and by extension the hordes denouncing Trump's decision to reduce US involvement in Syria suggest a new orientation in the Mockingbird media? ..."
    Jan 05, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Robert Snefjella , Jan 5, 2019 10:21:56 PM | link

    The Washington Post article that b links to ("never signed off") has the headline " 'They can do what they want' Trump's Iran comments defy his top aids"

    The "They" in the quote in the headline is a reference to Iran in Syria. "President Trump stuck a dagger in a major initiative advanced by his foreign policy team:
    Iran's leaders, the president said, "can do what they want" in Syria.

    With a stray remark, Trump snuffed out a plan from his national security adviser, John Bolton, who this fall vowed that the United States would not leave Syria
    "as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders." Pompeo has of course also obsessed over Iran.

    Now the next paragraph in the WP piece is I think quite remarkable: "The president's statement offered the latest illustration of the dramatic gyrations that have characterized his foreign policy and fueled questions about whether his senior advisers are implementing his policies or pursuing their own agendas."

    Here we have the question asked, in effect: Are Trump's senior people going rogue? Does the master of spin Washington Post, by putting the question in a manner sympathetic to Trump and unsympathetic to Bolton and Pompeo, and by extension the hordes denouncing Trump's decision to reduce US involvement in Syria suggest a new orientation in the Mockingbird media?

    Also note that acting Defense Sec Patrick Shanahan, who was injected immediately into his position when Trump gave Mattis the boot, is becoming part of the strategic scene.

    From the NYT: "He is the brightest and smartest guy I worked with at Boeing," said Carolyn Corvi, a former executive at the company. "He has the ability to see over the horizon and {implement needed change]."

    "Ana Mari Cauce, the president of University of Washington, worked with Mr. Shanahan .... She said his outsider perspective was helpful in questioning old practices, forcing people to look at problems in different ways."

    [Jan 05, 2019] 'Operation Iris' more New documents tie Integrity Initiative to spin of Skripal affair

    Notable quotes:
    "... "Institute for Statecraft," ..."
    "... "mainstream & social media analysis" ..."
    "... "Operation Iris." ..."
    "... "Russian trolls" ..."
    "... "ban RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK." ..."
    "... "threat Russia poses." ..."
    "... "good sources of further information" ..."
    "... "Makes you think " ..."
    "... Like this story? Share it with a friend! ..."
    Jan 05, 2019 | www.rt.com

    Hackers who leaked documents from the Integrity Initiative, a shadowy outfit funded by the UK government, claim they show its connections to the March 2018 alleged poisoning attack in Salisbury and proposed actions against Russia. The Integrity Initiative (II) was set up in 2015 by the equally shadowy "Institute for Statecraft," according to the documents published online in November by hackers calling themselves a part of the Anonymous collective. While Anonymous has denied the group was behind the leak, the Institute confirmed the authenticity of the first batch of documents.

    The hackers posted a fresh batch of documents purportedly from the Initiative and the Institute on Friday, hinting that both outfits had connections with Western media coverage of the March 2018 alleged poisoning of former Russian spy Sergey Skripal, and the actions against Russia taken subsequently by the UK government and its allies.

    What role did #IntegrityInitiative play in the #Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow.... https://t.co/cH2gXItRy7 #SergeiSkripal #Disinformation #Propaganda #InformationWar

    -- Kit Klarenberg (@KitKlarenberg) January 4, 2019

    One of the documents is the confidential report by Harod Associates, a company hired by the Initiative to conduct "mainstream & social media analysis" of the Skripal scandal coverage. The entire undertaking was dubbed "Operation Iris."

    Among those who found themselves named "Russian trolls" and Kremlin agents in the report were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa and a gentleman from Kent who goes by Ian56 on Twitter.

    #IntegrityInitiative examples of Logical, Critical Thinking & Objective Analysis by yours truly Ian56. https://t.co/mwGEOUBjaX

    They didn't even include my best ones and they didn't show the pic that went with each tweet.
    I wonder why? #Skripal #Novichok #FalseFlag pic.twitter.com/Zq8W9iJshk

    -- Ian56 (@Ian56789) January 4, 2019

    Wanna see something funny? 🤣
    "The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and Petrovas GRU agents" - has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French yellow jackets. I kid you not. https://t.co/I3X4ypylAP

    -- Ruslana Boshirova (@ValLisitsa) January 4, 2019

    Another document , dated March 11, 2018, contains a "Narrative" of the Skripal incident, blaming Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally and containing a number of recommended actions, such as boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany and block Russian access to SWIFT international banking system, but also to "ban RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK."

    Other suggestions include propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicise what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion" (sic) and getting members of Parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses."

    Also on rt.com Was 'Institute for Statecraft' behind Ofcom's targeting of RT? Sleuths point to yes

    The document dump also contains the April 14, 2018 email from Andy Pryce, whom the hackers describe as "chief propaganda man" at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, containing the official government narrative of the Skripal affair and the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria. Pryce ends the email by recommending "good sources of further information" on alleged Russian propaganda, including the Atlantic Council's DFR Lab, Bellingcat and Stopfake.

    Documents obtained and published by the hackers also show connections between Skripal's recruiter and neighbor Pablo Miller, the Institute for Statecraft, and the so-called rescue group White Helmets, created in militant-held areas of Syria by a former British official in 2013.

    It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended #IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair. https://t.co/Xv29Uk9z3e

    -- Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) January 4, 2019

    There are also several invoices from Dan Kaszeta of the Institute for Statecraft, for articles he wrote as supposedly a chemical weapons expert advancing the Institute's narrative on both the Skripals and Syria.

    EXPLOSIVE: @DanKaszeta of @Strongpoint_UK invoiced @InitIntegrity #IntegrityInitiative £2,276.80 in July 2018 during the #Skripal #Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & #PortonDown @RTUKproducer pic.twitter.com/V35PemrN9E

    -- Fvnk (@WhatTheFvnk) January 4, 2019

    The most intriguing, however, is a document from 2015 , in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot. One of the actions by the UK, US and several other NATO countries in the wake of claims that Russia used a nerve agent against Skripal was a mass expulsion of Russian diplomats.

    Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents written long before the Salisbury events call for arrests of RT and Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding, "Makes you think "

    So: #IntegrityInitiative funded by the British Govt called for the arrest of people like me like @afshinrattansi @JohnWight1 @NeilClark66 et al in the event of an "incident" like the #Skripal affair. Written incidentally before the #Salisbury events. Makes you think... @RT_com

    -- George Galloway (@georgegalloway) January 4, 2019

    Previously published documents have revealed the Initiative and the Institute as being involved in widespread propaganda operations targeting not only foreign countries and media outlets – as one might expect from someone doing the bidding of the Foreign Office – but also domestic political figures , such as Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

    Like this story? Share it with a friend!

    [Jan 04, 2019] Return of the Neocons

    Jan 04, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Realignment and Legitimacy

    "Return of the Neocons" [Stephen Wertheim, New York Review of Books ]. "In Washington, D.C., liberal foreign policy hands have reacted to Trump's presidency less by reaching out to ordinary citizens than by crossing K Street to make common cause with their neighborhood neocons. Among other efforts , the Center for American Progress (CAP), the leading Clintonian policy shop, is now issuing joint reports with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the leading neocon incubator, which this year sent John Bolton to be National Security Adviser. CAP donated $200,000 to AEI in 2017. " • Neera Tanden even now making sure that Wertheim never eats brunch in this town again .

    [Jan 04, 2019] There's only one thing necessary to maintain the respect and affection of DC's ruling political and media class: affirm standard precepts of US imperialism and militarism

    Jan 04, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

    anne , January 02, 2019 at 07:05 AM

    https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1080434469167906816

    Glenn Greenwald‏ @ggreenwald

    There's only one thing necessary to maintain the respect and affection of DC's ruling political and media class: affirm standard precepts of US imperialism & militarism. You can work for Trump, or cheer menacing authoritarians, and you'll still be revered as long as you do that:

    Nikki Haley @NikkiHaley

    Congratulations to Brazil's new President Bolsonaro. It's great to have another U.S.-friendly leader in South America, who will join the fight against dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba, and who clearly understands the danger of China's expanding influence in the region.

    4:03 AM - 2 Jan 2019

    [Jan 04, 2019] Eric Dubelier emerges as Robert Mueller's top courtroom adversary by Rowan Scarborough

    Notable quotes:
    "... Mr. Dubelier has depicted Mr. Mueller as a rogue prosecutor willfully ignoring Justice Department guidelines. ..."
    "... He has accused Mr. Mueller of creating a "make-believe crime" against his Russian client, Concord Management and Consulting, which is accused of funding a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election. ..."
    "... " Mr. Dubelier is exactly right on Mr. Mueller 's motives and tactics," said Sidney Powell, whose book "License to Lie" exposes years of Justice Department scandals. "His lieutenant Weissmann is the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct and has no regard for the facts or the law. He will make up whatever he wants to win, and the entire like-minded team views as an accomplishment everyone whose life they destroy in pursuit of their objective." ..."
    "... The Washington defense attorney seemed to catch the Mueller team off guard by immediately demanding disclosure of evidence. Disclosure, Mr. Dubelier argues, is a sacred legal right in America, even for the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, Concord 's chief with close ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. ..."
    "... Mr. Dubelier argues that people are free to create fake accounts. It's done all the time, he says. "When it comes to political speech, one is free to pretend to be whomever he or she wants to be and to say whatever he or she wants to say," he said at an Oct. 15 hearing. ..."
    "... "That's why in this case this special counsel made up a crime to fit the facts that they have," Mr. Dubelier said. "And that's the fundamental danger with the entire special counsel concept: that they operate outside the parameters of the Department of Justice in a way that is absolutely inconsistent with the consistent behavior of the Department of Justice in these cases for the past 30 years." ..."
    "... But he wasn't done. There is an ongoing battle over Concord 's access to "sensitive" evidence that Mr. Mueller won't let its officers see because they are Russians with ties to Mr. Putin. Mr. Dubelier has expressed exasperation. "This equates to the burden of preparing for trial without any ability to discuss the evidence with the client who is to be put on trial," he said. "This has never happened before in reported case law because the notion is too ludicrous to contemplate." ..."
    "... On another matter, Mr. Dubelier is accusing the Mueller team of skullduggery. Judge Friedrich last summer approved the prosecutor's request for a "firewall counsel" to review evidence for its national security implications. ..."
    "... In another pre-trial argument, Mr. Dubelier is the first defense attorney to ask this question: Why isn't British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who was paid by Democrats to obtain anti- Trump information from the Kremlin to influence 2016 voting, being investigated by the Justice Department for election interference just like the Russians? ..."
    "... Mr. Steele didn't register under the Justice Department 's Foreign Agent Registration Act, under which Mr. Mueller has brought charges against a number of defendants, including the Concord team. Judge Friedrich rejected Mr. Dubelier 's argument of "selective prosecution." ..."
    Jan 01, 2019 | www.washingtontimes.com

    A former federal prosecutor has emerged as special counsel Robert Mueller 's most persistent courtroom critic. It's not Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney and now President Trump 's ubiquitous defender, or any of cable TV's prosecutors-turned-pundits. He is Eric A. Dubelier , a litigator for the Reed Smith law firm who knows international law and the D.C. playing field. He served eight years prosecuting cases as a Justice Department assistant U.S. attorney in Washington. He refers to his former employer as "the real Justice Department ," implying that Mr. Mueller 's team is something less. His biting remarks have come in months of court filings and oral arguments. Mr. Dubelier has depicted Mr. Mueller as a rogue prosecutor willfully ignoring Justice Department guidelines.

    He has accused Mr. Mueller of creating a "make-believe crime" against his Russian client, Concord Management and Consulting, which is accused of funding a troll farm that interfered in the 2016 election.

    So far, the federal judge presiding over the case has sided with Mr. Mueller .

    Mr. Dubelier charges that the Mueller team violated the confidentially of Concord 's counter evidence while hiding documents Concord needs for its defense. The prosecutor wants to "whisper secrets to the judge," Mr. Dubelier says, as Mr. Mueller is calculating the "short-term political value of a conviction" and not worrying about an appeals court defeat years later. An example: In a Dec. 20 motion, Mr. Dubelier resurrected a botched case spearheaded by Mr. Mueller 's top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann.

    Mr. Weissmann headed the Justice Department 's Enron task force nearly two decades ago. He won a conviction against the accounting firm Arthur Andersen for shredding the defunct energy firm's financial documents. Years later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed the conviction. The 2005 decision effectively said that Andersen, by then out of business and its 28,000 employees gone, hadn't committed a crime.

    "Mr. Dubelier is exactly right on Mr. Mueller 's motives and tactics," said Sidney Powell, whose book "License to Lie" exposes years of Justice Department scandals. "His lieutenant Weissmann is the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct and has no regard for the facts or the law. He will make up whatever he wants to win, and the entire like-minded team views as an accomplishment everyone whose life they destroy in pursuit of their objective."

    'Made up a crime to fit the facts'

    Concord Management and Consulting is an unlikely client. Legal observers opined that when Mr. Mueller brought charges against various Russians who hacked computers and trolled the 2016 election, no defendant would travel the nearly 5,000 miles to show up for trial.

    No defendant has personally arrived. But Concord did appear quickly after the February indictment. Of 28 Russian individuals and firms charged with election interference by Mr. Mueller , only Concord has appeared in U.S. District Court, in this instance in the person of the aggressive Mr. Dubelier .

    The Washington defense attorney seemed to catch the Mueller team off guard by immediately demanding disclosure of evidence. Disclosure, Mr. Dubelier argues, is a sacred legal right in America, even for the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, Concord 's chief with close ties to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

    Concord is accused of an elaborate conspiracy with another Russian operation, the Internet Research Agency. The indictment accuses Concord of providing the troll farm $1.2 million monthly to defraud the U.S. The two firms set up fake personas and false Twitter accounts, Facebook ads and other social media posts mostly to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump .

    In a separate case, Mr. Mueller brought charges in July against 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic computers, stealing emails and funneling them to three websites for distribution.

    Mr. Dubelier argues that people are free to create fake accounts. It's done all the time, he says. "When it comes to political speech, one is free to pretend to be whomever he or she wants to be and to say whatever he or she wants to say," he said at an Oct. 15 hearing.

    "That's why in this case this special counsel made up a crime to fit the facts that they have," Mr. Dubelier said. "And that's the fundamental danger with the entire special counsel concept: that they operate outside the parameters of the Department of Justice in a way that is absolutely inconsistent with the consistent behavior of the Department of Justice in these cases for the past 30 years."

    Mr. Dubelier lost that argument with U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, who rejected his bid to dismiss the case.

    But he wasn't done. There is an ongoing battle over Concord 's access to "sensitive" evidence that Mr. Mueller won't let its officers see because they are Russians with ties to Mr. Putin. Mr. Dubelier has expressed exasperation. "This equates to the burden of preparing for trial without any ability to discuss the evidence with the client who is to be put on trial," he said. "This has never happened before in reported case law because the notion is too ludicrous to contemplate."

    What Mr. Mueller has turned over is often irrelevant to mounting a defense, such as promotion emails for airlines and personal naked selfie photographs, Mr. Dubelier said in a December filing. The special counsel is keeping most relevant information between himself and Judge Friedrich, excluding Mr. Dubelier .

    Why no probe of dossier writer?

    Mr. Mueller won the argument over "sensitive" material. He now wants to hold closed sessions with the judge over classified information -- again, without Mr. Dubelier .

    Mr. Dubelier responded in a Dec. 27 filing: "The Special Counsel has made up a crime that has never been prosecuted before in the history of the United States, and now seeks to make up secret procedures for communicating ex parte [meaning no defense counsel present] to the court which have never been employed in any reported criminal case not involving classified discovery."

    The defense attorney admitted his motion is "likely fruitless" because Judge Friedrich previously has ruled against Concord . Many documents are in Russian, a culturally different language than English. One Russian word, Mr. Dubelier says, "can be translated into the English words 'chief,' 'boss' or 'chef' -- a distinction that is critically important since international media often refers to Mr. Prigozhin as 'Putin's chef.'"

    On another matter, Mr. Dubelier is accusing the Mueller team of skullduggery. Judge Friedrich last summer approved the prosecutor's request for a "firewall counsel" to review evidence for its national security implications.

    Mr. Dubelier said he submitted evidence to the firewall lawyer only to see it fall into the hands of Mr. Mueller 's team, who began using it to further investigate Concord . "Surely a remarkable coincidence," Mr. Dubelier said.

    In another pre-trial argument, Mr. Dubelier is the first defense attorney to ask this question: Why isn't British ex-spy Christopher Steele, who was paid by Democrats to obtain anti- Trump information from the Kremlin to influence 2016 voting, being investigated by the Justice Department for election interference just like the Russians?

    Mr. Steele didn't register under the Justice Department 's Foreign Agent Registration Act, under which Mr. Mueller has brought charges against a number of defendants, including the Concord team. Judge Friedrich rejected Mr. Dubelier 's argument of "selective prosecution."

    Mr. Mueller 's counter-motion boils down to this: Mr. Prigozhin is a criminal fugitive who blatantly interfered in the U.S. election and is not entitled to sensitive national security information he would share with the Kremlin intelligence. In a new battleground, the Mueller team wants to show the judge top secret material to persuade her to keep it from the defense. "Disclosure of such information could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security," the Mueller filing stated. Judge Friedrich ruled in June that Mr. Prigozhin is prohibited from viewing non-classified sensitive information that details how the government obtained evidence.

    The Mueller team argued: "Discovery in this case contains sensitive information about investigative techniques and cooperating witnesses that goes well beyond the information that will be disclosed at trial Information within this case's discovery identifies sources, methods, and techniques used to identify the foreign actors behind these interference operations the government has particularized concerns about discovery in this case being disclosed to Russian intelligence services."

    Mr. Mueller says that as long as Mr. Prigozhin, whom the U.S. sanctioned and then indicted for election interference, remains in Russia, he isn't entitled to see sensitive evidence.

    Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC.

    [Jan 04, 2019] Trump Fought For His Withdrawal For a Year by Willy B

    Notable quotes:
    "... Very interesting. It is understandable that Trump does not read briefings, if all he is fed is a variety of permanent war options at odds with his strategic goals. ..."
    "... Trump had lunch with Lindsay Graham who has allegedly said that Trump is "reconsidering ". The Neocons haven't given up.. ..."
    Jan 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Gareth Porter, in an article published in the American Conservative, definitively shows that Trump's Dec. 19 announcement of the US withdrawal from Syria was, in fact, the end of a fight of at least a year, between Trump on the one side and his national security team, lead by Mattis and Dunford on the other. Published accounts of the policy process over the past year "show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria ," Porter writes. "The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone . The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state."

    Porter cites an April 2018 Associated Press account of an NSC meeting at which Trump's impatience with his national security team boiled over. At that meeting, Trump ordered them unequivocally to accept a fundamentally different Syria deployment policy. Instead, they framed the options as a binary choice -- either an immediate pullout or an indefinite presence in order to ensure the complete and permanent defeat of Islamic State. Mattis and Dunford, Porter continues, were consciously exploiting Trump's own defensiveness about a timeline–he had attacked Obama during the 2016 campaign for imposing a timeline in Afghanistan–"to press ahead with their own strategy unless and until Trump publicly called them on it."

    "The Syria withdrawal affair is a dramatic illustration of the fundamental quandary of the Trump presidency in regard to ending the state of permanent war that previous administrations created. Although a solid majority of Americans want to rein in U.S. military deployments in the Middle East and Africa, Trump's national security team is committed to doing the opposite, " Porter concludes. "Trump is now well aware that it is virtually impossible to carry out the foreign policy that he wants without advisors who are committed to the same objective. That means that he must find people who have remained outside the system during the permanent war years while being highly critical of its whole ideology and culture. If he can fill key positions with truly dissident figures, the last two years of this term in office could decisively clip the wings of the bureaucrats and generals who have created the permanent war state we find ourselves in today."

    Trump has called the bluff of the permanent warfare crowd and now has his decision, but the possibility of sabotage by that crowd's assets inside the Pentagon cannot yet be discounted. This is indicated by an exclusive Reuters report claiming that planners at the Pentagon are proposing that the YPG be allowed to keep the heavy weapons that the US has supplied it with, though Reuters' sources stress that the planning is still at an early stage and nothing's been decided yet. And yet, there must be a reason why this is being reported now. It obviously would throw a monkey wrench in the arrangements that Trump is trying to make with Erdogan to keep eastern Syria stable in the wake of the US withdrawal. It would also represent a back down from US promises made earlier to the Turks to retrieve the weapons and Erdogan would throw a fit. Certainly, the idea that the U.S. military can retrieve all of the weapons that it handed over is a dubious one, at best , and there are legitimate questions about whether or not Turkish troops could really operate in the Middle Euphrates valley near the Iraqi border, hundreds of kilometers from the Turkish border.

    But the key to the proposal is this: The recommendation "is a rejection of Trump's policy to withdraw from Syria," a person familiar with the discussions told Reuters. So, really, it is an attempt at sabotage.

    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/trump-scores-breaks-generals-50-year-war-record-syria-mattis-dunford/

    https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-u-commanders-recommend-letting-kurdish-fighters-syria-233235271.html

    Barbara Ann , 6 days ago

    Very interesting. It is understandable that Trump does not read briefings, if all he is fed is a variety of permanent war options at odds with his strategic goals. The Syrian war that matters is clearly now being fought within the USG and Trump has won the latest battle. As Porter says, this war will only be won if Trump can successfully replace key Borg positions with people of his own.

    If the pullout can be completed without being sabotaged, Russia ought to be able to seamlessly step in guarantor of peace - and the SAG and Iraq between then can finish IS. The permanent war crowd with then just have to vent their frustrations elsewhere. A good outcome for all.

    Pat Lang Mod -> Barbara Ann , 6 days ago
    He was IMO suckered into taking a lot of these people because he didn't know anyone in government. His problem will be to find people not already working for the other side.
    Walrus , 5 days ago
    Trump had lunch with Lindsay Graham who has allegedly said that Trump is "reconsidering ". The Neocons haven't given up..
    John Waddell , 5 days ago
    "that the YPG be allowed to keep the heavy weapons that the US has supplied it with"

    I would love to find out what those "heavy weapons" were exactly. I have been putting up comments all over the place saying that as far as I have been able to find out the US has not supplied anything with a barrel bigger than an 80mm mortar or a vehicle heavier than a MRAP. Up to now no-one has contradicted me. The reason the US did this was precisely this situation, not to upset the Turks if gear was left behind.

    Am I wrong? Is this equipment now regarded as "heavy weapons"?

    Taras77 , 5 days ago
    I have looked as to where I might post my comment on this important site; this article seems to be the best fit for my comment on another site about the retirement of Gen Kelly and a link to an interview with Gen Kelly (I hope Col Lang will be lenient in allowing a secondary posting of my comment from another site):

    __________________________________________________________

    My original comment follows:

    On the subject of trump this AM, zerohedge has a summary of an interview with Gen Kelly which occurred just prior to his departure-to say that it was "bone crushing hard" probably is a long way from describing the difficulty of that Chief of Staff job in a chaotic white house working for a chaotic individual.

    I have just a ton of respect for Gen Kelly-even in this totally mucked up country with all of its unending flustercucks, there are individuals still willing to step up and try, emphasis on try, to restore some sanity to the situations. God speed, Gen Kelly!!

    https://www.zerohedge.com/n...

    English Outsider -> Taras77 , 3 days ago
    Should he not have resigned earlier, or even not taken the job, if he was so opposed to his boss's policy?
    Stumpy , 6 days ago
    Two factors not mentioned are the SAA and support from Russia. Turkey may be somewhat off the hook for a deep thrust if Syrian forces move in and convince the YPG to stand down, by force or otherwise. As Col. Lang points out, starving the YPG of ammunition is a practical approach. If the PMU links up with Syrian forces to secure the eastern border areas, the Kurdish interests should be balanced out. My point being that the so-called vacuum left for Iran to fill is an overplayed shadow puppet.

    [Jan 04, 2019] Trump Walks Back Syria Pullout As Noose Tightens

    Jan 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Tom Luongo,

    If anyone still thinks that Donald Trump has some master plan to kill off his Deep State adversaries they should check themselves into therapy. I know withdrawal is hard, but admitting you have a problem is the first step to curing it.

    He doesn't have a plan. He may fight them but it won't be with any kind of master plan to trap them in some beautiful bit of political judo.

    Frankly, Vladimir Putin he is not.

    No, Trump is winging things at this point. While he still has the office he's trying to do some of the things he promised. Doing that may keep him in power for a few more months.

    But with his walking back the timetable for pulling troops out of Syria after a visit from Lindsay Graham (R-MIC/AIPAC) should tell you all you need to know about Trump's willingness to stand up to the pressure he's under.

    Add to that the opening salvo from Mitt Romney (R-Wall St.) and it becomes pretty clear that Trump was told what the score really is. When, not if, the Democrats push for impeachment or a 25th Amendment proceeding against him Graham and Romney will lead a GOP revolt against him, siding with Senate Democrats to get rid of him.

    That's been the point of this from the beginning. Pat Buchanan and I both talked about this from the moment he was elected. Pat reminding us of what happened to Nixon who was hounded out of office because he did the unthinkable -- ending the Vietnam War.

    I've been simply looking at this from the standard libertarian perspective that "War is the health of the state" and Trump's opposition to our Middle East follies would net him nothing but contempt.

    The Makinder "Heartland" view of Geopolitics holds complete sway in Washington, Downing St. and the Pentagon. And as such, the Middle East is the access point to the Heartland and that means destroying both Russia and Iran to ensure that Germany never joins them.

    This is why The Swamp will not let Trump make nice with Putin. It's why the British deep state and intelligence community was so eager to help Hillary Clinton fabricate the Russiagate controversy through the creation of the Steele Dossier.

    It's why outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, would only entertain a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as the U.S. maintained all of its military presence there.

    In other words, accept our colonial presence here to ensure you stay in the 19th century and we no longer have to fight openly.

    If for nothing else, Trump's firing Dunford was a brief bit of joy that may outlive his presidency. Not much else will.

    Look, the Deep State is vast and cruel. Nancy Pelosi's first act as Speaker of the House was to declare open season on Trump. She'll wait until the Mueller report to start the process but she seems pretty confident she'll get what she needs.

    Michael Cohen likely provided the road map to Trump's shady business dealings (far beyond his pecadillos) which will be used against him. Impeachment isn't a legal proceeding, it's a purely political one.

    There is no standard of proof. If you're hated by enough of the right people, you're done. That's it. In a time of unlimited corruption counting on people to act honorably is a fool's game.

    And Trump at this point is the head fool.

    You don't announce something like the withdrawal from Syria and all that that entails only to walk it back 10 days later because someone threatened you.

    In fact, Trump's best, and frankly, only course of action now is to go on the offensive. And Elizabeth Warren memes, no matter how entertaining, are not getting this done.

    As I lay out in this video, the threat of exposing all of the corruption is his best play. It may cost him everything but if he's going down the best thing he can do to MAGA is take as many of them down as possible.

    Otherwise, turn the lights out before you leave.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/Pcia3eP64TI

    Tags Politics

    Posa , 29 minutes ago link

    Spot on Tom. Ending a Predator Class war for global hegemony (the Makinder World Island quest) is a capital offense for any President. That's why JFK was offed... (the Nixon tale is not credible... Nixon sabotaged LBJ's negotiations with the N. Vietnamese and with Kissinger dragged on the war until the US was kicked out in '75).

    Trump could appeal to the American people over Syria and Afghanistan claiming that as the Peace President he is being threatened... Maybe DoJ gets cleaned out; Mueller has nothing.

    William Dorritt , 31 minutes ago link

    TRUMP NEEDS TO STOP ******* AROUND

    Order the acting AG to appoint Special Prosecutors for Clinton, Feinstein and Pelosi and others for their treason and their Chinese Business Dealings

    Declassify all of the JFK and other documents that you promised to release, the Mexican stand off ends the day Trump leaves office and they bankrupt and imprison him and his family.

    Name the CFR, and all other Globalist Organizations and NeoCons, as Foreign Agents and force register all of their members as Foreign Agents.

    Pull the Security clearances from all people not currently employed by the Govt, especially the CFR members and similar organization.

    Name the ADL and SPLC as Hate Groups and appoint a special prosecutor to go after them.

    PS Stop appointing people who want you dead in the key positions in your government

    PPS Pardon Assange and give him diplomatic passage to some country that won't extradite him like Iceland or perhaps Switzerland.

    Dr. Acula , 30 minutes ago link

    Trump is buddies with Guardian of Zion John Bolton and "pull it" Guiliani

    Fireman , 35 minutes ago link

    Is it good for the juice? That is the only policy that Golem Don is expected to carry out.

    USSA must cure the disease at the heart of this collapsing anglzionazi empire of ****, then all else will follow.

    Golem Don was never up to it and never will be. USSANS have been Obummered yet again. Live with it already.

    The Lobby Part One

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9dv6_h9Vp0

    The Lobby Part Two

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQfZL9tm2tM

    The Lobby Part Three

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ixdl7lcLjk

    The Lobby Part Four

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiZCTH-CS0c

    commiebastid , 33 minutes ago link

    We will stay because our Israeli bought government wants it. They will never allow Trump to exit Syria.

    Here is a list of politicians who carry Israeli Citizenship ... Good to know and explains a lot

    112 CONGRESS
    THE US SENATE [13]

    Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) Barbara Boxer (D-CA) Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) Al Franken (D-MN) Herb Kohl (D-WI) Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) Joseph Lieberman (Independent-CT) Carl Levin (D-MI) Charles Schumer (D-NY) Ron Wyden (D-OR) Michael Bennet (D-CO)

    HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES [27]

    Gary Ackerman (D-NY) Shelley Berkley (D-NV) Howard Berman (D-CA) Eric Cantor (R-VA) David Cicilline (D-RI) Stephen Cohen (D-TN) Susan Davis (D-CA) Ted Deutch (D-FL) Eliot Engel (D-NY) Bob Filner (D-CA) Barney Frank (D-MA) Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) Jane Harman (D-CA) Steve Israel (D-NY) Sander Levin (D-MI) Nita Lowey (D-NY) Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) Jared Polis (D-CO) Steve Rothman (D-NJ) Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) Allyson Schwartz (D-PA) Adam Schiff (D-CA) Brad Sherman (D-CA) Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) Henry Waxman (D-CA) Anthony Weiner (D-NY) John Yarmuth (D-KY)

    Here is a list of Israel's 'contributions' to US senators

    https://static.wrmea.org/pdf/2016pac_charts_senators.pdf

    Dr. Acula , 40 minutes ago link

    >he's trying to do some of the things he promised

    Day 713

    Still in Afghanistan

    Still in Iraq

    Still in Syria

    Didn't lock her up

    Didn't end Obamacare

    Money for Israel

    No money for wall

    [Jan 03, 2019] Twenty-one days after NSAM 263 and the State Department memo, President Diem is overthrown, and twenty-one days later, President Kennedy is overthrown.

    Jan 03, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    sgt_doom , , October 12, 2017 at 1:49 pm

    Since this occurs within a similar timeframe to this most outstanding article and since yesterday was the 54th anniversary of October 11, 1963, this might also prove helpful:

    21 Days . . . . .

    On p. 255 of Geoffrey Shaw's fascinating book, The Lost Mandate From Heaven , he writes:

    But did the president realize that the reporter's influence on policy had been given to him, at least in part, by State Department officials ?

    Of course, Shaw was speaking of President John F. Kennedy, soon to be assassinated, whose policy was being attacked by David Halberstam, in complete lockstep with the State Department official who was feeding him that information: Averell Harriman.

    Or that Robert Lovett, who had been his advisor on those appointments, was a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation? (I'm sure JFK was aware that Lovett was an active partner with Brown Brothers Harriman -- Averell Harriman's partly owned firm with the Brown family -- but did JFK know that Lovett had married into the Brown family?)

    On Oct. 11, 1963, President Kennedy signed NSAM 263, which set the stage for the withdrawal of American military advisors from South Vietnam.

    After President Kennedy signed NSAM 263, he issued a memo to the State Department and some of their overseas offices, detailing the planned complete withdrawal of military advisors from South Vietnam, to begin in late November of 1963, and completed before the upcoming presidential election.

    This memo was declassified by President Clinton in the late 1990s, but reclassified by President George W. Bush sometime in 2000. (I would have downloaded a copy, but never once considered that something which had been declassified would be reclassified -- something to my knowledge which had never occurred before. And having been a past holder of Top Secret Crypto and Satellite clearances, I have some familiarity with classification procedures.)

    So twenty-one days after NSAM 263 and the State Department memo, President Diem is overthrown, and twenty-one days later, President Kennedy is overthrown.

    21 Days . . . . .

    Recommended Reading:

    [Jan 03, 2019] Russia-mania takes over the world

    Russophobia is the standard deflection trick, designed to cement cracks in neoliberal society facade. And deep distrust of common people toward neoliberal elite. With neoliberal elite completely immersed in its own groupthink, which reaches the level "Let them eat cakes".
    Notable quotes:
    "... We have seen this play out in the US in the continuing obsession, fronted by Troll-Finder General Robert Mueller, over alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. And the same obsession has emerged in the UK, too, with politicians and pundits claiming that a shadowy network of Russian influence tipped the EU referendum in favour of Leave. ..."
    "... It is never quite clear how the 'Russians' or 'Putin' did all this, beyond Facebook ads and decidedly dubious talk of so-called dark money. But then clarity is not the point for this stripe of Russia-maniac. He or she simply wants to believe that Trump or Brexit were not what they were. Not expressions of popular will. Not manifestations of popular discontent. Not democratic exercises. ..."
    Jan 03, 2019 | theduran.com

    While Russia-mania is widespread among today's political and cultural elites, it is not uniform.

    For an older, right-wing section of the Western political and media class, otherwise known as the Cold War Re-Enactment Society, Russia looms large principally as a military, quasi-imperial threat. Jim Mattis, the former US marine and general, and now US defence secretary, said Russia was responsible for 'the biggest attack [on the world order] since World War Two'. Whether this is true or not is beside the point. What matters is that Russia appears as a military aggressor. What matters is that Russia's actions in Ukraine – which were arguably a defensive reaction to NATO and the EU's expansion into Russia's traditional ally – are grasped as an act of territorial aggrandisement. What matters is that Russia's military operations in Syria – which, again, were arguably a pragmatic intervention to stabilise the West-stoked chaos – are rendered as an expression of imperial aggression. What matters is that Russian state involvement in the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury – which, given its failure, proved Russian incompetence – is presented as 'part of a pattern of Russian aggression against Europe and its near neighbours, from the western Balkans to the Middle East', to quote Theresa May.

    And it matters because, if Russia is dressed up as the West's old Cold War adversary, just with a new McMafia logo, then the crumbling, illegitimate and increasingly pointless postwar institutions through which Western elites have long ordered the world, suddenly look just that little bit more solid, legitimate and purposeful. And none more so than NATO.

    This is why NATO has this year been accompanying its statements warning Russia to 'stop its reckless pattern of behaviour' with some of the largest military exercises since the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly three decades ago. Including one in November in Norway, involving 50,000 troops, 10,000 vehicles, 250 aircraft and 60 warships.

    Then there is the newer form of Russia-mania. This has emerged from within the political and cultural elite that came to power after the Cold War, ploughing an uninspiring third way between the seeming extremes of the 20th century's great ideologies. Broadly social democratic in sentiment, and elitist and aloof in practice, this band of merry technocrats and their middle-class supporters have found in 'Russia' a way to avoid having to face up to what the populist revolt reveals – that the majority of Western citizens share neither their worldview nor their wealth. Instead, they use 'Russia' to displace the people as the source of discontent and political revolt.

    We have seen this play out in the US in the continuing obsession, fronted by Troll-Finder General Robert Mueller, over alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. And the same obsession has emerged in the UK, too, with politicians and pundits claiming that a shadowy network of Russian influence tipped the EU referendum in favour of Leave.

    It is never quite clear how the 'Russians' or 'Putin' did all this, beyond Facebook ads and decidedly dubious talk of so-called dark money. But then clarity is not the point for this stripe of Russia-maniac. He or she simply wants to believe that Trump or Brexit were not what they were. Not expressions of popular will. Not manifestations of popular discontent. Not democratic exercises.

    No, they were the result, as one Tory MP put it , of 'the covert and overt forms of malign influence used by Moscow'.

    Or, in the words of an Observer columnist, 'a campaign that purported to be for the "left behind" was organised and funded by men with links across the global network of far-right American demagogues and kleptomaniac dictators such as Putin'.

    Such has been the determination to blame 'Russia' or 'Putin' for the political class's struggles, that in August Tom Watson, Labour's conspiracy-theory-peddling deputy leader, called for a public inquiry into an alleged Russian Brexit plot. '[Voters] need to know whether that referendum was stolen or not', he said.

    Such a call ought to be mocked. After all, it is absurd to think 'Russia', 'Putin' and the trolls are the power behind every populist throne. But the claims aren't mocked – they're taken as calls to action. Think of anything viewed as a threat to our quaking political and cultural elites in the West, and you can bet your bottom ruble that some state agency or columnist is busy identifying Putin or one of his legion of bots and trolls as the source. The gilet jaunes protests in France? Check . Climate change? Check . Italy's Five Star Movement? Check .

    And all this from a nation with a GDP equivalent to Spain, an ageing, declining population, and a failing infrastructure. The reality of Russia is not that of a global threat, but of a struggling state. Russia is weak. Yet in the minds of those clinging desperately to the status quo, 'Russia' has never been more powerful.

    [Jan 03, 2019] John Helmer- Lunatic Russia-Hating in Washington Is 70 Years Old. It Started with Joseph Alsop, George Kennan and the Washington Post

    The USA is treating Russia the same way it treated the USSR and run all kind of subversive operations against it.
    Notable quotes:
    "... This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 1440 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page , which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we're doing this fundraiser, what we've accomplished in the last year and our current goal, more original reporting . ..."
    "... By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears ..."
    "... In June 1933, he bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction, for $825,000 ..."
    "... It [USA] has always been fighting on foreign soil since it was formed by violence against a lawful sovereign. ..."
    "... This Vast Southern Empire ..."
    "... A mentor in shamelessness: the man who taught Trump the power of publicity Roy Cohn, the lawyer who embraced infamy during the McCarthy hearings and Rosenberg trial, influenced Donald Trump to turn the tabloids into a soapbox ..."
    "... Angels in America ..."
    "... For the life of me, I still cannot figure out why people are in an absolute panic over Russian "agents" buying $100,000.00, or whatever, worth of advertising promoting either or both sides of the election when U.S.citizens and Political Parties spent over $1.6 billion. ..."
    "... Are American citizens really so stupid as to fall for the amazingly, brilliantly conceived and placed $100K worth of Russian advertising, so clever that it superseded $1.6 billion worth of U.S. citizen ads? ..."
    "... Or (to misquote Shakespeare/Macbeth) is it a tale told by propagandists, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? ..."
    "... Don't confuses them with the facts. ..."
    Jan 03, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    John Helmer: Lunatic Russia-Hating in Washington Is 70 Years Old. It Started with Joseph Alsop, George Kennan and the Washington Post Posted on October 12, 2017 by Yves Smith

    This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 1440 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page , which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we're doing this fundraiser, what we've accomplished in the last year and our current goal, more original reporting .

    Yves here. An important bit of history that can't be repeated too often: when the Clinton Administration decided to move NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries, violating a understanding made as part of the peaceful dissolution, George Kennan said it would prove to be the worst geopolitical mistake the US ever made.

    By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

    Joseph Alsop and George Kennan started the kind of Russia-hating in Washington which, today, President Vladimir Putin, like the businessmen around him, think of as a novelty that cannot last for long.

    Alsop was a fake news fabricator, and such a narcissist as to give the bow-ties he wore a bad name. Kennan was a psychopath who alternated bouts of aggression to prove himself with bouts of depression over his cowardice. For them, Russia was a suitable target. The Washington Post was the newspaper which gave their lunacy public asylum. This, according to a fresh history by a university professor from California, started in 1947, long before the arrival in Washington of the anti-communist phobia known after the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

    Russia-hating was an American upper-class phenomenon, cultivated in the offices, cocktail parties, clubs, and mansions of the deep state, as it emerged out of World War II. It needed a new enemy to thrive; it fastened on Russia (aka the Soviet Union) as the enemy.

    McCarthyism was an American lower-class phenomenon. It focused on the loyalty or disloyalty of the upper-class deep-staters. That wasn't the same thing as Russia-hating; Wall Street bankers, Boston lawyers, homosexuals, Jews, communists, were all the enemy. As the Senator from Wisconsin characterized it himself in 1952, "McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled." He implied – without a middle-class tie; certainly not an upper-class bow-tie.

    Russia was not an enemy which united the two American lunacies, for they hated each other much more than they hated the Russians. The Soviet Politburo understood this better then than the Kremlin does now.

    Gregg Herken's The Georgetown Set , is so named because it records the activities of Alsop, Kennan and several other State Department, Central Intelligence Agency and White House officials who lived as neighbours in the Georgetown district of the capital city, together with Katharine (Kay) and Philip Graham, proprietor managers of the Washington Post. The district – once a chartered city of Maryland and river port, which was absorbed into the federal District of Columbia in 1871 -- was expensive, relatively speaking then; more so now. The richest of the set, including Alsop, had town houses in Georgetown, and rural retreats in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.

    They were a set because because, as Herken said succinctly to an interviewer , "they got together every Sunday for supper and, basically, they ran the country from those meetings." As the book elaborates, they thought they were running the world. With a longer time lapse in which to view the evidence, they were also losing it.

    Newspapers exposed in the book for collaborating in all the deceits, failures and war crimes of the history have reacted by calling Herken's effort a "provincial corner". The New Yorker opined that the Russia-hating and Russia war-making which Herken retells are dead and gone. "The guests at the Sunday soirées no doubt felt that they were in the cockpit of history. But the United States is a democracy, not a Wasp Ascendancy There was once an atmosphere of willingness that made a system of bribes and information exchanges seem, to the people involved, simply a way of working together for a common cause in a climate of public opinion that, unfortunately, required secrecy. No one got rich from the arrangement. People just lost track of what was inside their bubble and what was outside, as people tend to do. Vietnam was the reality check. 'I've Seen the Best of It' was the title Alsop gave to his memoirs. Things hadn't been the same since, he felt. He was right about that, and we should be thankful." In the New York media business these days it's possible to publish a selfie of pulling your own leg.

    The Washington Post has deflected the indictment against itself by describing Herken's work as "a very strange book (A) a rehash of the history of the Cold War as experienced in certain Washington circles and (B) an almost obsessive recapitulation of the life and journalism of Joseph Alsop." Alsop is dismissed as unworthy of a history at all because he was "utterly repellent: arrogant, patronizing, imperious, uninterested in anyone except himself."

    That's the truth about Alsop. The truth about the Washington Post is buried in this line by the Post's books editor about the hand that fed him: "it must be very hard for people who did not live through the '50s and '60s to understand how obsessed the American people were with the threat from Moscow." That line appeared in print on November 7, 2014. It was already history, that's to say, a misjudgement. How monumentally mistaken is obvious now.

    In covering the period from 1946 to 1975, Herken's research does repeat much of the history of the Cold War which has been told elsewhere. It starts on February 22, 1946, the date of the "Long Telegram", No. 511 -- Kennan's despatch from the US Embassy in Moscow to the State Department, setting out his strategy of so-called containment and much more besides. Read it in the declassified original . Most of the war-fighting and other war crimes which the telegram set in motion under Kennan's 1948 rubrics, "organized political warfare" and "preventive direct action", are reported in Herken's book; so too are Kennan's frequent funks, failures of conviction, reversals of judgement, and pleas for help.

    The book ends on December 30, 1974, the date of Alsop's last column. Alsop concluded with the line: "I have never known the American people to be really badly wrong, if only they were correctly and fully informed."

    Herken shows how self-deluded and professionally delusional that was -- not because of Alsop's character but because of his sources. Herken documents that they ran upwards from foot-soldiers (also lubricious sailors) to presidents and cabinet secretaries. Herken doesn't think the same of Kennan, who gets to walk off stage, aged 101, sounding more sceptical of overthrowing Saddam Hussein than he ever was in his prime and in power to direct schemes of what we call state terrorism today.


    Left to right: Kennan died in 2005, aged 101; Alsop died in 1989 aged 78; Frank Wisner died in 1965 aged 56. The deeper Herken gets into the private papers, the more he refers to his subjects by their diminutives and nicknames – Joe, Oppie, Beetle, Dickie, the Crocodile, Wig, Jack, Wiz, Soozle, Vangie, et al.

    What is fresh about the sources is that Herken has had access to the private notes, letters and diaries of the Alsop family; the Kennan diaries and letters; and the private papers of Frank Wisner, the first director of covert operations against Russia. Wisner went mad and killed himself, as did Graham. There's no doubt about the suicide outcome of their madness.

    In the case of the mad ex-Defence Secretary James Forrestal his fatal jump from the window of the Navy hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, in May 1949 might have been a homicidal push. Herken concludes that Forrestal's death was "the first senior-ranking American casualty of the Cold War." Herken thinks of their madness as anomalies. The history shows they were normalities.

    Missing from this history is any reference to official documents, now declassified; press reporting of the time; or interviews with veterans of the same events but on other sides – Russian and Soviet; British; German; French; Polish; Vietnamese; Chinese. This isn't so much a fatal flaw in Herken's (right) book as the reason why his history is repeating itself today. Call this a variation on Karl's Marx's apothegm that history starts as tragedy and repeats itself as farce. Herken's blindness to this is as revealing as the Washington Post's madness, not yet as suicidal as its former proprietor's, today.

    So mesmerized is Herken by the moneyed backgrounds of his subjects and sources, and by the amount of black cash from the US Government they spent on operations, he forgets to report what they did to fill their own pockets. The claim by the New Yorker that "no one got rich from the arrangement" – Alsop's fake news fabrications – is false, but Herken touches only in passing on how they made (or kept) their money. Alsop's column, for example, was sold to 200 newspapers, and at one time claimed a readership of 25 million. His family inheritance is recorded, but not its annual revenue value. Alsop's payola included silk shirts from Alfred Kohlberg, a textile importer from China who backed Chiang Kai-shek against Mao Tse-tung, as did Alsop. Alsop's patrons included Convair (General Dynamics), the company building the US Air Force Atlas missile for procurement of which Alsop reported fictions about Soviet missile strength.

    In the US power which Alsop, Kennan and Wisner believed without hesitation, Herken is not less a believer. "Anything could be achieved", Herken quotes a New York Times reporter quoting Wisner. When the US force multiple changed, however, and US allies or agents were outgunned, outspent, outnumbered, or outwitted, they were unable to acknowledge miscalculation, attributing defeat instead to the superior force or guile of their adversaries, especially the Russians.

    This is madness, and there is good reason for recognizing the symptoms again. In 1958, when Herken says Wisner's paranoid manias were becoming obvious to his friends and colleagues, "Frank put forward a theory that the careless comment which had gotten George Kennan kicked out of the Soviet Union was evidence the Soviets had succeeded in an area where the CIA's own scientists had failed: mind control. Some agency hands alleged that Wisner attributed his own increasingly bizarre behaviour to the Kremlin's sly manipulation."


    A cell from the comic "Is This Tomorrow? America Under Communism"(1947). Test your mind, read more: https://archive.org/details/IsThisTomorrowAmericaUnderCommunismCatecheticalGuild

    From Washington in 1958, fast forward to Washington in 2017; for mind control and sly manipulation, read Russian hacking and cyber warfare. From Wisner's and Kennan's balloon drops of leaflets and broadcasts by Radio Free Europe, fast forward to Russia Today Television and Russian infiltrations of Twitter, Google, the Democratic National Committee, and the Trump organization.

    It stands to reason (ahem!) that if you think what the US Government and its journalists were doing then was mad, you are might conclude that what they is doing now is just as mad – and not very different. When the incumbent president and his Secretary of State publicly call for IQ tests on each other, all reason has failed. "The nation," as Alsop had written, "had simply taken leave of all sense of proportion." That was in March 1954.

    If you fast forward to now, there's one difference. Today the lunatic Russia warfighters don't retire. They also don't fade away. Today's sleek successors to mad Wisner and mad Graham sleep easily in their beds a-nights. For what they've done and do, they wouldn't dream of taking shotguns to their heads.

    Herken retells the story of the campaign Alsop waged against McCarthyism at the State Department, against McCarthy himself, and the vulnerability Alsop himself presented until the Boston lawyer Joseph Welch put an end to McCarthy on June 9, 1954 : "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Welch famously said. "Have you left no sense of decency?" The recurring history reveals why, even if there are plenty of people to say the same thing today to the Washington Post, New York Times, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the madness will continue repeating itself.

    Colonel Smithers , October 12, 2017 at 10:42 am

    Thank you, Yves.

    A couple of tidbits:

    Wisner's son married the stepmother of Nicolas Sarkozy. This facilitated the Sarkozy family's links with Wall Street (Guillaume at Credit Suisse and Carlyle and Nicolas' stepdaughter Judith Martin (daughter of France's Bruce Forsyth and Cecilia Albeniz) at Morgan Stanley, the latter at Canary Wharf).

    A year ago, before his elimination in the Republicain primary, Sarko met executives from Goldman Sachs to discuss a move from London to Paris due to Brexit. Sarko promised bespoke personal and corporate tax arrangements in return for a relocation and fanfare. Sarko was keen on the fanfare and planned to exploit that, thinking it would be a PR coup soon between his election and the August shut down.

    Kay Graham was the daughter of a former partner at Lazard Freres. Her father bought the WaPo after his retirement. The family and its plaything rag formed part of Operation Mockingbird.

    djrichard , October 12, 2017 at 12:51 pm

    Also worth mentioning that he purchased the WaPo in 1933. Per wikipedia, " In June 1933, he bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction, for $825,000 ".

    Pre-sages Bezos buying the WaPo on the cheap too. Can't say I would have thought of Bezos as being a Russia scare-monger. I guess it's the flip-side of regime change. If you're in the regime preservation business, perhaps that means regime changing your enemies. In which case, never let a good crisis go to waste. And if a crisis isn't available well if a newspaper can't figure out how to manufacture a crisis out of the available pool of evil-doers, then really why even have a newspaper?

    Bezos to Russia, "It's nothing personal, it's just business". Bezos to Trump, "It's personal."

    funemployed , October 13, 2017 at 7:00 am

    The CIA did give jeff 600 million dollars shortly after his acquisition of wapo

    Scott , October 13, 2017 at 12:39 pm

    Seems like that is the under the radar amount of supposed funding for Fronts.

    Slowly it dawned on me, or I simply put two and two together realizing I was working for a CIA/MI6 Front. Explained why mediocrities, liars & thieves had secure jobs.

    American Airlines is most probably the inheritor of Air America's freight operations, station agents, & to pilots a great system for overt & covert operations gets 685 million a year.

    IN-Q-TEL the CIA retirement benefits fund for agents gets 685 million as well.

    I don't remember where I read the figures. See what you find out?
    When I worked the independent movie scene in NYC all the budgets were 100 thousand dollars.

    Now how you know, or the commentators know what they are saying here, I don't know. We are aware that the US power structure found it convenient to blame, or imply the blame for all that was stupid and violent in politics in the US on the Russians who as a secretive organization by habit made the picture plausible.

    If oligarchs money fleeing Russia came to America and was a source of Industrial Service Banking it would be a victory. As it is the working classes in the US and Russia end up with the same leaders only different.

    As it is the game is the same with it being real estate and art.
    If there is one thing about Russians, they lust to possess beauty.
    Otherwise from my experience they are difficult to do business with and you get more respect when you up front don't trust them so they can act like Russians.

    I pitched to the Atlantic "Statehood for Russia" when the Cold War supposedly ended.
    With the propaganda going into what Americans look at and voter system hacking it is evident they want to be a state.

    sgt_doom , October 12, 2017 at 1:42 pm

    Outstanding article and excellent commentary points and to elaborate just on several facts stated: ("Wisner went mad and killed himself, as did Graham.") -- this might have been the case, but most curiously, both Wisner and Graham were first treated at Chestnut Lodge Sanitarium in Rockville, MD at the CIA's MK ULTRA wing, then they both would return home and commit suicide?! This was also the facility where the CIA would send a research nutritionist (do not know whether they connived her, or it was against her will, etc., but she did not work for the Agency) who was researching an Amazonian plant with unique properties, and after her treatment, she never mentioned said plant or research ever again?!.

    Also, this is where Richard Helms, then CIA director, had his famous auto accident right before giving testimony before the Church Committee (when he perjured himself and later was officially censured by Congress). Helms claimed he was seeing a psychoanalyst (basis for a simpleton movie from Hollywood called "The President's Analyst" -- probably involved Harry Weinstein) -- but it was because Helms was shredding all the MK ULTRA files kept there prior to appearing before the Church Committee.

    And Joe Alsop was cousin to several CIA dudes, Kermit Roosevelt and Archibald Roosevelt, whereupon he received his "tips" or misinformation.

    And the Colonel explains Sarkozy's familial background quite nicely, but to further add it was Wisner and John Negroponte, working through the Franco-American Foundation, who were supposed to be behind the concocted false scandals against Sarkozy's presidential opponent which allowed Sarkozy to win the election the first time. (The second time, Sarkozy was behind that NYC airport "incident" which blow up in his face, resulting in a Hollande victory.)

    Vatch , October 12, 2017 at 1:55 pm

    "The President's Analyst" is an outstanding satire from 1967. The Church committee hearings were in 1975.

    Enquiring Mind , October 12, 2017 at 3:12 pm

    There are further Wall Street links in the Sarkozy family. Olivier, half-brother of Nicolas, was at CS First Boston and worked briefly with our company on an engagement some years ago. His colleagues remarked on his pedigree and ability to open doors where others couldn't.

    Patrick Donnelly , October 12, 2017 at 10:53 am

    So the USA had no hand in arming Japan and encouraging them to attack Russia, successfully in 1904? Who stirred up Japan, forcing them with battleships to trade, actually firing on Japan. USA has always had war plans for the invasion of every country on Earth, since the Civil War, if not before.

    It has always been fighting on foreign soil since it was formed by violence against a lawful sovereign. Except for 20 years!!!

    WWII was a result of rearmament of Germany, by USA and its banker allies. They wanted USSR in ashes. In the end they had to rescue Germany, failing in that and losing half of Europe. That must be smart!

    Vatch , October 12, 2017 at 12:05 pm

    It [USA] has always been fighting on foreign soil since it was formed by violence against a lawful sovereign.

    The monarchy of George III? Lawful sovereign? Who elected George III? Nobody. Who elected the members of Parliament? Nobody in America, and only adult males who could meet stringent properly requirements in Britain. Britain in 1775/1776 was definitely not a lawful sovereign over any territory in the North American continent.

    Carolinian , October 12, 2017 at 12:57 pm

    Don't forget Woody Wilson sending the troops to Vladivostok after WW1. Communism was always regarded as an existential threat by the then WASPy, now not so WASPy elites.

    And re Kennan, the recent Ken Burns Vietnam documentary shows him casting doubts on the Vietnam intervention at a Congressional hearing. Kennan said the policy was like the elephant being terrified of the mouse. So his Russia obsession does seem to have been more about power rivalry than ideological apostasy.

    David , October 12, 2017 at 1:40 pm

    They wanted USSR in ashes.

    If this is true, why did the US send 17.5 M tons of material to the USSR, through Lend Lease , during WW2?

    Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from January 1942 to May 1945.

    One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company's River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.

    Wasn't Henry Ford supposed to be a Na*i?

    While repayment of the interest-free loans was required after the end of the war under the act, in practice the U.S. did not expect to be repaid by the USSR after the war. The U.S. received $2M in reverse Lend-Lease from the USSR. This was mostly in the form of landing, servicing, and refueling of transport aircraft; some industrial machinery and rare minerals were sent to the U.S. The U.S. asked for $1.3B at the cessation of hostilities to settle the debt, but was only offered $170M by the USSR. The dispute remained unresolved until 1972, when the U.S. accepted an offer from the USSR to repay $722M linked to grain shipments from the U.S., with the remainder being written off.

    So $722M in 1972 dollars for $11B in 1947 dollars?

    hemeantwell , October 12, 2017 at 4:09 pm

    They wanted USSR in ashes.

    If this is true, why did the US send 17.5 M tons of material to the USSR, through Lend Lease, during WW2?

    They suspended their death wish because without the USSR they could very well have lost to the Nazis. Short of a successful invasion of Britain, the availability to the Nazis of a small portion of the tank and aerial forces that were getting chewed up in the Soviet Union would have led to the easy conquest of North Africa and the loss of the Suez canal. That would have been hard for the Allies to recover from. Once the war was won it was time to shift back into playing the innocent party responding to Soviet aggression.

    Vatch , October 12, 2017 at 4:27 pm

    The U.S. also sent $20 million in food aid to the Soviets during the famine of 1921-1922. The U.S. attitude towards Russia / Soviet Union is complex and contradictory. Members of the U.S. establishment mostly opposed the Soviets, but future President Herbert Hoover's role in the famine relief project shows that there were exceptions.

    By the 1930s, the behavior of Stalin justified opposition to the Soviets, although I think that for a long time, many (perhaps most) of the Americans who opposed them did so for the wrong reasons.

    Bigfoot , October 13, 2017 at 10:59 am

    Did he send food aid to the Soviets?

    Hoover's role in famine relief was about more than food distribution. By 1911-1912 or so he was director of the Russo-Asiatic Corporation and had extensive oil, mining, and timber interests in Russia, all of which made him very, very wealthy. These interests were relinquished prior to the Revolution, which Hoover vehemently opposed. According to Sayers and Kahn in The Great Conspiracy Against Russia, "He was to remain one of the world's bitterest foes of the Soviet Government for the rest of his life. It is a fact, whatever his personal motive may have been, that American food sustained the White Russians and fed the storm troops of the most reactionary regimes in Europe which were engaged in suppressing the upsurge of democracy after the First World War. Thus American relief became a weapon against the peoples' movements in Europe."

    This is Disaster Capitalism 100 years ago.

    The quote is footnoted. The footnote reads: "Herbert Hoover's activities as Food Relief Administrator were directed toward giving aid to the White Russians and withholding all supplies to the Soviets. Hundreds of thousands starved in Soviet territory. When, finally, Hoover bowed to public pressure and sent some food to the Soviets he continued according to a statement by a Near East Relief official in the New York World in April, 1922 -- to 'interfere with the collection of funds for famine-stricken Russia.' In February, 1992, when Hoover was Secretary of Commerce, the New York Globe made this editorial comment: 'Bureaucrats centered throughout the Department of Justice, the Department of State and the Department of Commerce for purposes of publicity are carrying on a private war with the Bolshevist Government Washington propaganda has grown to menacing proportions Messrs. Hughes and Hoover and Dougherty will do well to clean their houses before public irritation reaches too high a point. The American people will not long endure a presumptuous bureaucracy which for its own wretched purposes is willing to let millions of innocent people die."

    Pages 36-37 of Sayers and Kahn:

    https://www.scribd.com/document/239748857/Herbert-Hoovers-Billion-Dollars-in-Russia?ad_group=725X175Xd393bbb985be6bbdd9f1080622142345&campaign=Skimbit%2C+Ltd.&content=10079&irgwc=1&keyword=ft750noi&medium=affiliate&source=impactradius

    Vatch , October 13, 2017 at 12:54 pm

    In 1919, when the American Relief Administration first offered to help Russia, it's very plausible that they only wanted to help the regions under White control. But the Soviets refused foreign assistance at that time. In 1921, when the famine was worse, the Whites didn't control much outside of portions of Siberia. I think the worst areas of famine were in eastern Ukraine and the nearby parts of Russia. I don't think the Whites controlled any of that territory any longer, but I could be wrong. I think that Hoover's aid helped a lot of people in Soviet areas. And yes, he was anti-communist.

    ex-PFC Chuck , October 12, 2017 at 7:18 pm

    Also there was considerable sympathy towards Germany among the Latin American elites. Several countries, such as Paraguay and Argentina, would likely have jumped aboard the Axis bandwagon if it began to look like they'd come out on top.

    ex-PFC Chuck , October 12, 2017 at 7:40 pm

    The percentage of battle deaths incurred by the Germans on the Eastern front was at a minimum 70%, and by some counts over 90%. If Operation Barbarosa had not been launched in 1941 and a truce had held on that front it is unlikely that the Anglo-American alliance could have sustained a a landing on continental Europe in the west. This would have especially been the case if the Germans, instead of putting their chips on Barbarosa, had been able to successfully shut off British use of the Suez Canal, and thus deprive them of ready access to the resources from India and especially the oil from Iran. Given British naval dominance of the Mediterranean, however, this would have been difficult unless they were able to negotiate passage to the Levant by land through Turkey and the Balkans.

    Bigfoot , October 13, 2017 at 11:07 am

    Jacob Schiff was instrumental in this as he helped raise hundreds of millions for Japan. http://jewishcurrents.org/august-10-jacob-schiff-russo-japanese-war/

    Lambert Strether , October 13, 2017 at 2:38 pm

    > every country on Earth, since the Civil War, if not before

    Every country? Surely not. See This Vast Southern Empire , pre-Civil War. We had designs on "our own" hemisphere, but every country? No.

    Vatch , October 12, 2017 at 11:54 am

    "Kennan was a psychopath who alternated bouts of aggression to prove himself with bouts of depression over his cowardice."

    A little evidence would be nice. This appears to be one of those violations of Naked Capitalism policy: making stuff up.

    hemeantwell , October 12, 2017 at 4:20 pm

    Agreed. Instead of peddling diagnoses he would do well to stick with the attacking the crudity of Kennan's view of world affairs. Kennan saw the Soviets as akin to "windup toys" that were somehow driven to expand. In this he completely failed to account for the fact that the Soviets were potentially autarchic, while the capitalist West was governed by accumulation imperatives that pushed for market expansion. He doesn't bother himself with the problem but jumps right into rationalizing base construction and an arms race. That Kennan is seen as a kind of geostrategic genius speaks volumes regarding the self-deluded mindlessness of US foreign policy.

    Andrew Watts , October 12, 2017 at 4:52 pm

    This article sounds more like an angry emotional outburst from Helmer. It wouldn't surprise me if he's one of the people taking a lot of crap in all this Russian propaganda hysteria.

    Lambert Strether , October 13, 2017 at 2:43 pm

    Kennan certainly suffered from bouts of depression . I have never read a Kennan biography, so I can't vouch for the rest. Perhaps some other reader has.

    Vatch , October 14, 2017 at 12:41 pm

    Yes, I know about his depression. But the claim that he was a psychopath? That stretches believability. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy were examples of psychopaths. I don't think that George Kennan was like them.

    EmilianoZ , October 12, 2017 at 12:14 pm

    Russia-phobia is actually 100 years old. Strangely, I haven't seen any commemoration of the centenary of 1917 Revolution. Nobody can deny that it was a world-changing event.

    Disturbed Voter , October 12, 2017 at 12:25 pm

    The Bolshevik Revolution, that overtook the Kerensky Revolution shocked the world to the core, particularly the Church. It quickly alienated even syndicalists and anarchists, because it developed into a strong centralized state, not the bottom up movement that Lenin found when he entered Petrograd.

    The last 4 years of Nato intervention in the Baltics, Poland and the Ukraine have shown that the world has never recovered from that shock. British opposition to Russia goes even deeper, back to the Great Game and the Crimean War. Without Churchill vehemently opposing Russia in general and Stalin in particular would there even be a Nato? History is more about continuity than discontinuity.

    justanotherprogressive , October 12, 2017 at 1:33 pm

    I'm glad you mentioned Churchill. Since the first Directors of the OSS and the CIA were complete Anglophiles and modeled their collection techniques on Britian's SIS (MI-6) (until, of course, those famous British spies were uncovered), it is not surprising that our first after the war "enemies" were the same as Churchill's enemies

    Norb , October 12, 2017 at 2:06 pm

    I have a sneaking suspicion that the troubles of the world have such a basic foundation that if they are ever solved, people will look back, marveling at the simplicity of the answers.

    Humans have always faced the dilemma of how to organize society. The main sticking points being how to control personal ambition in ones own group and how to get the work done that needs doing- including protecting oneself form ones neighbors who are dealing with the same issues.

    Capitalism, and the west in general, seem to turn personal ambition loose. It takes a persons personal confrontation and experience with the universe and makes that the primary motivator for organization. It serves to reward the aggressive while insulating failure as a personal shortcoming, not a flaw in the system. The Catholic religion, which underpins such a system by giving it a spiritual legitimacy. The individual can have a personal relationship with the creator of the universe- with the moderating teaching of caring for the poor to curb excessive personal ambition or too close a connection. That hasn't worked out so well as the poor are with us still and the argument is given that the poor will be with us forever. The Divine right of Kings and all that.

    Godless Communists challenged all that and the results still haven't worked themselves out.

    Endless wars seem to be an excuse to justify recurring cycles of hate. Love your God, and spite your enemies.

    The promise of Socialism is that the tools of science and reason can be used to relieve human suffering and provide for a meaningful life. That vision remains unborn because those sentiments are always snuffed out as quickly as they take hold.

    Jeff W , October 12, 2017 at 5:53 pm

    I have a sneaking suspicion that the troubles of the world have such a basic foundation that if they are ever solved, people will look back, marveling at the simplicity of the answers.

    I have the exact same suspicion. We might, in fact, understand the basic foundation and already have the solutions but, to use your words, they are always snuffed out as quickly as they take hold -- which is itself its own intractable problem.

    JTMcPhee , October 12, 2017 at 12:35 pm

    Interesting observation about McCarthyism as a feature of the lower classes. Particularly about what the hate and fear was directed against: bankers, lawyers, Jews, homosexuals, communists One of the big actors in that great national drama was a fella named Roy Cohn, who kind of fell into almost all of those categories (except maybe "communist", though with Cohn, who was also a mob lawyer and buddy of J. Edgar Hoover, who knows?).

    And for Trump haters, or those who are trying to "understand" the guy, there's even a great big Cohn Connection, which is fun to read about here: " A mentor in shamelessness: the man who taught Trump the power of publicity
    Roy Cohn, the lawyer who embraced infamy during the McCarthy hearings and Rosenberg trial, influenced Donald Trump to turn the tabloids into a soapbox     " , https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/20/roy-cohn-donald-trump-joseph-mccarthy-rosenberg-trial

    H.Alexander Ivey , October 12, 2017 at 7:01 pm

    Interesting observation about McCarthyism as a feature of the lower classes.

    I noted that too. It gives credence to Matt Stoller's observation that the elites / 1%ers are not monolithic but are fractions that can and do fight each other.

    Lambert Strether , October 13, 2017 at 2:50 pm

    Tangentially, I saw the Angels in America in London, which includes a vivid portrait of Roy Cohn. On his deathbed, watched over by Ethel Rosenberg, Cohn dekes Rosenberg into singing him off to his last sleep out of pity A touching moment until Cohn sits up and yells "Fooled ya!" (paraphrasing).

    Norb , October 12, 2017 at 1:12 pm

    America was born of conquest. The North American continent is/was vast in scale and resources. The vision was never to live in such a place as more to conquer it and extract its resources. That mentality is still prominent as the resource base has not been depleted yet and energies are directed to further exploitation- fracking and the opening of the arctic regions. Even now, an argument can be made that American corporations are more concerned about exploiting their customers for profit, than the health of the citizenry. That is the motivational force behind our governing elite, not some attachment to the land and its people and the desire to make the world a better place.

    American Exceptionalism is based on conquest and the right for individuals to exploit those resources to their own end. By that standard it continues to be a success. Communism, in principle, was an ideology opposed to that vision. Under no circumstances can such an ideology be allowed to exist, so was set for extermination by force and disinformation. Once that process takes hold, you live in a world devoid of reality. It is fantasy.

    Naked greed cannot be justified for long without some form of damage taking place in the human psyche. Reflection is not prevalent in the American creed. The rise of American Corporations to the detriment of the nations citizens is a confirmation of that fact. For how can a nation be "Great" if its citizens are driven into poverty?

    You become a Nation of crazy people.

    Greed and misuse of Power lead to crazy. Instead of trying to talk sense to crazy people, sanity lies in the opposite direction. Less greed and an articulation of the proper use of power. Implementation is another matter.

    Chris , October 12, 2017 at 4:50 pm

    Yes, well said, Norb.

    The fact that our corporations' only social responsibility is to make money says heaps

    Juliania , October 12, 2017 at 2:49 pm

    Many thanks,Yves and especially to you, sgt_doom.

    Truth has a clarity no conspiracy theory can emulate

    ex-PFC Chuck , October 12, 2017 at 8:36 pm

    Thanks for the reading suggestions, and I especially second the the mention of Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable. TTBOMK although it's nearly ten years old it's the best analysis out there of the John Kennedy assassination.

    clarky90 , October 12, 2017 at 4:56 pm

    Saying "Russia (aka the Soviet Union)" (as Helmer does) is akin to saying "California (aka The United States". It is a false statement.

    The Soviet Union (1917-1991) was a materialist anti-christian, anti religious totalitarian State. Godlessness was the ruling precept of Soviet society.

    In 1923, Lenin created the first Soviet Concentration Camp, at the "re-purposed", Russian Orthodox Solovetsky Monastery. Solovetsky was used as the prototype for the Gulag network of camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solovki_prison_camp

    Ultimately the Gulag would grow to 30,000 concentration camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gulag_camps

    IMO, today, the USA is the World Epicenter of materialism, internationalism, greed and godlessness.

    Conversely, Russia (2017) is a Nationalist, Orthodox Christian Democracy. No wonder our materialistic rulers are so "hysterically", (The APA says, "conversion disorder". Casual psychiatric diagnosis of opponents is a breeze now!), fearful of Russia, and the Biblical, little David, with his sling and stone (Putin).

    Yves Smith , October 12, 2017 at 6:36 pm

    I agree Helmer should have been clearer. Helmer is saying that the US is treating Russia in the same way it treated the USSR, at least messaging-wise.

    MarkE , October 12, 2017 at 7:27 pm

    There is a vast body of scholarly work on the origins of the Cold War from many different perspectives, into which context this analysis is trivial and downright loopy. The Georgetown Set got us into it? It was "mad" to oppose the Soviet Union and now Russia? Oh, please.

    Western opposition to Russian communism pre-dates Joe Alsop and his bowties by decades. The revolutionary regime that weakened the WWI alliance and prolonged that bloody war by making a separate peace with Germany wasn't going to be well-liked by its former allies in the first place. The same regime preached the violent overthrow of democratically-elected western governments, who reacted as one might expect, including the (poorly-considered) intervention of 1918-1920.

    Stalin then gave the world many, many reasons not to trust Russia – brutal repression on a hitherto unheard of scale, mass murder, disastrous economic policies leading to mass famine, show trials and active promotion of Soviet-style take-overs elsewhere. Even before WWII and the start of the Cold War there was plenty not to like. During the war, Western governments bowed to geopolitical reality and allied with the USSR, despite Stalin's cynical deal with Hitler to divide Poland just before, but Poland provides one of the best samplings of why opposing the USSR/Russia after geopolitical realities changed at the end of the war was not only understandable but a very good idea. Shortly after Russia took over in eastern Poland the NKVD rounded up and brutally murdered 22,000 military officers, police officers, public officials and assorted intellectuals, i.e. anyone who could think independently and oppose Russian rule, and threw the bodies into pits dug in the Katyn Forest. The Soviets denied this for decades, blaming it on the Nazi's, but finally fessed up in 1990 during perestroika, now best understood as a brief twinkling of light in Russia's dark history. Reports had leaked out of the massacre and other Soviet atrocities during the war, which played a large role in mobilizing another major force in U.S. politics that was deeply skeptical of the USSR after the war – ethnic Eastern Europeans.

    The West and Russia did do deals at Yalta and Tehran on spheres of influence, but there was ambiguity as to what that meant and words were thrown in about national self-determination and free elections. After the war the West (mostly) promoted democratic government, at least in Europe, while the Soviets laughed at the joke and imposed their brutal regimes anywhere they could. Stalin's last living legacy is the horror show in North Korea, where he installed a Soviet agent as head of the regime, now a dynasty. Kennan's Long Cable/Article X, which is still well worth reading, dealt with the causes of Soviet expansionism as part of Russia's long, troubled history and urged containment as an alternative to more active opposition ("roll-back"), which largely worked in Europe. As the counterpoint to containment, when Sec State Dean Acheson omitted Korea from the U.S. "defensive perimeter" in his January 1950 speech, the North invaded the South with Soviet support five months later. It was after that experience that containment went global.

    With the exception of Kennan, the people mentioned may have had influence but were not the real policy makers. Truman, George Marshall and Dean Acheson were the primary architects of U.S postwar policy. Only Acheson lived in Georgetown, and he thought Alsop was a "pest." Acheson took on Kennan as his staff chief because he had deep expertise on Russia and largely made sense. The off-hand comments in the article about Kennan being a psychopath and coward were made with no support and are at odds with his reputation as a pragmatist and traditionalist in foreign policy. He was recently most well known for his quaint view that the U.S. should declare wars as required by the Constitution before getting into them. Alsop was a commentator not a policy maker and was regarded as somewhat of a fringe character, not least because he was gay in the 1950s. As for the rest of the U.S. elite at the time, far more of them had been sympathetic to Russia in their youths than rabid anti-communists. The typical Cold Warrior was made that way not by bowtie-wearing but by sober, mature observation of what the Soviet regime was all about.

    So let's do fast-forward to the present day. No one with an objective understanding of Russian history is at all surprised that a regime headed by one of their former secret policemen is tampering with elections, fomenting political divisions and trying to disrupt the western alliance. All the evidence supports those conclusions and more comes out every day. Facebook, Google, the scope is astounding. In Helmer's piece we see the birth of a new phenomenon, on the same intellectual level as climate-change denial. It's electing-tampering denial.

    olga , October 13, 2017 at 9:18 pm

    I think if NC-ers wanted to read official propaganda, they could just subscribe to NYT. The only thing that your comment demonstrates is that you've no idea what "objective understanding of Russian history" could possibly be.

    MarkE , October 14, 2017 at 9:56 am

    Was that an argument? The problem Russian apologists have is that periodically, after years or decades of denial, the truth finally comes out from a Russian source, usually when it's convenient to blame their predecessor. Khrushchev finally admitted Stalin's "mistakes", like anyone really needed confirmation that his regime had murdered millions. Gorbachev finally had the guts to admit the NKVD liquidated the Polish elite, which everyone else (except the "useful idiots") had known for a long time, etc. That was the context of the Cold War and the original posting. U.S. containment policy responded to real actions and constant lying by the USSR as it imposed totalitarian regimes throughout Eastern Europe and elsewhere, not some goofy chatter at Georgetown cocktail parties. Every one of those countries, as soon as they had freedom to choose, bolted for the West and NATO.

    As for election-tampering denial, sure looks like it's real. This was a new twist – deny something simply because it's been reported in the NYT (Russian sources, and Donald Trump, being so much more credible). But some other historical truth-telling pertains here. If you want to understand what Vladimir Putin and his fellow secret policemen did in East Germany, despite decades of denial, you can now go to the Stasi archives. It's a museum that documents 44 years of soul-crushing repression, cynical manipulation of neighbor against neighbor and systematic subversion of anyone or any group that might speak up against the state. It's not hard at all to believe that someone who came of age with that background would take advantage of such an easy way to undermine their U.S. adversaries. In fact, it's hard to believe they wouldn't.

    Adams , October 12, 2017 at 9:22 pm

    Well said. Thank you. My comment was much shorter, but said many of the same things. It was censored. Much shorter version: Asserting that George Kennan was a lunatic is lunacy.

    JCC , October 13, 2017 at 9:35 am

    For the life of me, I still cannot figure out why people are in an absolute panic over Russian "agents" buying $100,000.00, or whatever, worth of advertising promoting either or both sides of the election when U.S.citizens and Political Parties spent over $1.6 billion.

    Are American citizens really so stupid as to fall for the amazingly, brilliantly conceived and placed $100K worth of Russian advertising, so clever that it superseded $1.6 billion worth of U.S. citizen ads?

    Or (to misquote Shakespeare/Macbeth) is it a tale told by propagandists, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?

    Donald , October 12, 2017 at 11:37 pm

    "After the war the West (mostly) promoted democratic government, at least in Europe, "

    Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

    I am surprised no one else responded to this screed. I agree that the Soviet Union had a horrific human rights record, but that little snippet I quote above is like a relic from the silliest days of Cold War propaganda. As for Russian meddling, the evidence is that probably something happened, in my opinion, but if people were serious they would keep some sense of proportion. I read the NYT articles and melodramatic language is doing an awful lot of work with regards to the Facebook claims.

    If I accepted everything I have read at face value our democracy was so fragile literally anyone willing to hire some hackers and spend a minuscule amount of money could have destroyed it. Heck, if I and a few friends were willing to mortgage our homes and cash in our retirement funds we could fund its destruction ourselves.

    Bigfoot , October 13, 2017 at 11:52 am

    Richard Spence, professor of history at the University of Idaho, has just published "Wall Street and the Russian Revolution: 1905 – 1925." This is a fascinating book that I would think at least some of the above commenters would be interested in. Spence has updated Anthony Sutton's earlier work with new/more archival research and access to new/more recently declassified documents.

    I haven't finished it as it came in the mail yesterday, but it does have a few interesting comments about George Kennan not the above George Kennan but his distant cousin who in 1891 published a book entitled "Siberia and the Exile System." So it seems that Russia-hating ran in the family. The cousin Kennan claimed to have assisted in the distribution of a ton and a half of literature to Russian POWs in Japan during the Russo-Japanese War. This, according to Kennan, was financed by Jacob Schiff and caused many of the POWs to become liberals and revolutionaries opposed to the Tsar.

    Fleshing out the role of capitalist/financial interests in the Revolution is certainly important. These were the deep state actors of 100 years ago. The names of the people and the interests they represent may have changed, but the chicanery hasn't.

    Jamie , October 13, 2017 at 1:09 pm

    "It's important that Americans understand that Putin wants to bring us down. He was an old KGB agent."

    – Crooked Hillary

    Olaf Lukk , October 13, 2017 at 5:37 pm

    " the Clinton administration decided to move NATO into former Warsaw Pact nations, violating a understanding made as part of the peaceful dissolution". The "peaceful dissolution" of the Soviet "union", I presume?

    NATO was formed in 1948 in response to the Soviet refusal to withdraw from the Eastern European nations it continued to control with puppet governments and Soviet troops after WWll. The Soviets responded by forming the Warsaw Pact -- consisting of those very same nations: (East) Germany, Poland, Czechoslavakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. The only time Warsaw Pact troops were used militarily was against its own members -- Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslavakia in 1968.

    The collapse of the USSR started in 1989, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and culminated in 1991 with the failed coup by hardliners against Gorbachev in August of 1991, though the official end did not come until the formal dissolution on December 26, 1991.

    In the following years, all of the Warsaw Pact nations, plus the illegally annexed and occupied Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, having regained their sovereignty, all made a point of joining NATO -- to make sure that the Russian bear did not return to do even more damage.

    What "understanding" was violated? It is a popular myth that the Russians were "promised" that NATO would not expand to the east. Who made this promise to who, and under what authority? Did the nations of Eastern Europe, after half a century of Russian control, voluntarily cede the power to determine their future alliances to the Clinton Administration? The premise is absurd on its face. In any case, how do you keep a "promise" to a political entity- the USSR- which no longer exists?

    Russian interference in Ukraine, and the forced annexation of Crimea (reminiscent of Stalin's annexation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1940), has validated the pragmatism of its former vassal states in joining NATO. Russia is not being threatened by its neighbor's membership in NATO; to them, Russia is the threat.

    olga , October 13, 2017 at 9:28 pm

    You should ask Jim Baker, who had confirmed that an agreement regarding NATO was made. In addition to many other people present at the time Why try at revisionist history now ?

    And FIY, Estonia, Latvia, and Litva were a part of the czarist Russia for more than 300 yrs. Soviet Union gave up the territories in the terrible peace it had to sign with Germany before the end of WWI. After the next war, which it won, it simply took back the areas – kinda like the French took back Alsace-Lorraine, after victory over German in WWI. Knowing history is really a good thing

    BoycottAmazon , October 13, 2017 at 10:50 pm

    +1

    Don't confuses them with the facts.

    More Russians troops are buried in the soil of the Crimea than the US lost in Europe during WWI &WWII as well. The West or it's proxies have been after it for nearly as long as The Great Game has been in play. But that's what Russia gets for helping Lincoln by keeping France and Britain from actively coming in on the side of the Confederates. Never help an ingrate.

    MarkE , October 14, 2017 at 10:00 am

    That's two misreadings of history. There was no agreement not to expand NATO, which is confirmed by both Jim Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev, the other guy there at the table. The only agreement made was that NATO would not put nuclear weapons or non-German troops in the former GDR. That agreement has been kept.

    The Baltic states had all declared their independence from Russia before the Russian peace with Germany, so they weren't anyone's to give. If they were ever "transferred" to Germany they didn't stay German for long – in fact a couple of them defeated German armies in battle towards the end of WWI. They were all independent by 1920, part of the wave of national self-determination after WWI that saw the liberation of lots of smaller countries that had been dominated by one of the defunct empires. Lithuania, of course, hadn't always been so small – at one point it was the largest country in Europe and included parts of what became Russia. Comparisons with Alsace are absurd on several levels.

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    "... Sociology of Imperialism ..."
    "... "The bourgeoisie did not simply supplant the sovereign, nor did it make him its leader, as did the nobility. It merely wrested a portion of its power from him and for the rest submitted to him. It did not take over from the sovereign the state as an abstract form of organization. The state remained a special social power, confronting the bourgeoisie. In some countries it has continued to play that role to the present day. It is in the state that the bourgeoisie with its interests seeks refuge, protection against external and even domestic enemies. The bourgeoisie seeks to win over the state for itself, and in return serves the state and state interests that are different from its own." ..."
    "... Democratic elections have become the means for installing leaders with little respect for democratic values. The tolerance, openness and inclusiveness on which modern democracy is founded are being rejected by candidates and voters in favor of sectarian, parochial fears and interests. The role of the free press as an impartial arbiter of facts is being undermined by the rise of private and public news media conglomerates purveying political preference as fact combined with a blinding blizzard of fake news. Party politics has been polarized into a winner-take-all fight to the finish by vested-interests and impassioned extremist minorities trying to impose their agendas on a complacent majority. Corporate power and money power are transforming representative governments into plutocratic pseudo-democracies. Fundamentalists are seizing the instruments of secular democracy to impose intolerant linguistic, racial and religious homogeneity in place of the principles of liberty and harmonious heterogeneity that are democracy's foundation and pinnacle of achievement." ..."
    "... http://www.cadmusjournal.org/article/volume-3/issue-3/political-economy-neoliberalism-and-illiberal-democracy ..."
    "... "Suppose the election was declared free and fair and those elected are "racists, fascists, separatists, who are publicly opposed to [peace and reintegration]. That is the dilemma." ..."
    "... "Fascism may be defined as the subordination of every part of the State to a totalitarian and nihilistic ideology. I argue that neoliberalism is a species of fascism because the economy has brought under subjection not only the government of democratic countries but also every aspect of our thought. The state is now at the disposal of the economy and of finance, which treat it as a subordinate and lord over it to an extent that puts the common good in jeopardy." ..."
    "... Lectures on Fascism, ..."
    "... Neoliberalism has been more successful than most past ideologies in redefining subjectivity, in making people alter their sense of themselves, their personhood, their identities, their hopes and expectations and dreams and idealizations. Classical liberalism was successful too, for two and a half centuries, in people's self-definition, although communism and fascism succeeded less well in realizing the "new man." It cannot be emphasized enough that neoliberalism is not classical liberalism, or a return to a purer version of it, as is commonly misunderstood; it is a new thing, because the market, for one thing, is not at all free and untethered and dynamic in the sense that classical liberalism idealized it. ..."
    "... "In some parts of Europe, and in the United States, anti-foreigner rhetoric full of unbridled vitriol and hatred, is proliferating to a frightening degree, and is increasingly unchallenged. The rhetoric of fascism is no longer confined to a secret underworld of fascists, meeting in ill-lit clubs or on the 'deep net'. It is becoming part of normal daily discourse." ..."
    "... The Global Rise of Populism ..."
    "... The risk democratic formations continually face is internal disintegration such that the heterogeneous elements of the social order not only fail to come together within some principle of or for unity, but actively turn against one another. In this case, a totally unproductive revolution takes place. Rather than subversion of the normative order causing suffering, rebellion or revolution that might establish a new nomos of shared life as a way of establishing a new governing logic, the dissociated elements of disintegrating democratic formations identify with the very power responsible for their subjection–capital, the state and, the strong leader. Thus the possibility of fascism is not negated in neoliberal formations but is an ever present possibility arising within it. Because the value of the social order as such is never in itself sufficient to maintain its own constitution, it must have recourse to an external value, which is the order of the sacred embodied by the sovereign. ..."
    "... Can the World be Wrong ..."
    "... "Even mature democracies show signs of degenerating into their illiberal namesakes. The historical record confirms that peaceful, prosperous, free and harmonious societies can best be nurtured by the widest possible distribution of all forms of power -- political, economic, educational, scientific, technological and social -- to the greatest extent to the greatest number. The aspiration for individual freedom can only be realized and preserved when it is married with the right to social equality. The mutual interdependence of the individual and the collective is the key to their reconciliation and humanity's future. ..."
    "... Beset by stagnant wage growth, less than half of respondents in America, Britain and France believe that globalisation is a "force for good" in the world. Westerners also say the world is getting worse. Even Americans, generally an optimistic lot, are feeling blue: just 11% believe the world has improved in the past year. The turn towards nationalism is especially pronounced in France, the cradle of liberty. Some 52% of the French now believe that their economy should not have to rely on imports, and just 13% reckon that immigration has a positive effect on their country. France is divided as to whether or not multiculturalism is something to be embraced. Such findings will be music to the ears of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, France's nationalist, Eurosceptic party. Current (and admittedly early) polling has her tied for first place in the 2017 French presidential race. ..."
    "... "Populism is not Fascism: But it could be a Harbinger" ..."
    "... Foreign Affairs ..."
    "... Structural Exploitation under the Neoliberal Social Contract ..."
    "... "a property of institutions or systems in which the "rules of the game" unfairly benefit one group of people to the detriment of another" ..."
    "... The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere ..."
    "... The Trickle Down Delusion ..."
    "... "Real hourly compensation of production, nonsupervisory workers who make up 80 percent of the workforce, also shows pay stagnation for most of the period since 1973, rising 9.2 percent between 1973 and 2014.Net productivity grew 1.33 percent each year between 1973 and 2014, faster than the meager 0.20 percent annual rise in median hourly compensation. In essence, about 15 percent of productivity growth between 1973 and 2014 translated into higher hourly wages and benefits for the typical American worker. Since 2000, the gap between productivity and pay has risen even faster. The net productivity growth of 21.6 percent from 2000 to 2014 translated into just a 1.8 percent rise in inflation-adjusted compensation for the median worker (just 8 percent of net productivity growth).Since 2000, more than 80 percent of the divergence between a typical (median) worker's pay growth and overall net productivity growth has been driven by rising inequality (specifically, greater inequality of compensation and a falling share of income going to workers relative to capital owners).Over the entire 1973–2014 period, rising inequality explains over two-thirds of the productivity–pay divergence. ..."
    "... "Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker's Pay Why It Matters and Why It's Real" ..."
    "... "The fact that our society places no limit on wealth while making it accessible to all helps account for the 'feverish' quality Tocqueville sensed in American civilization." Culture Against Man ..."
    "... Neoliberal Hegemony ..."
    "... Toward a 21st Century Social Contract" ..."
    "... "A 21 st Century Social Contract" ..."
    "... "The nature of work is changing very rapidly. Old models of lifelong employment via business and a predictable safety net provided by government are no longer assured in a new demographic, economic, and political environment. We see these trends most clearly in the rise of the "gig economy," in which contingent workers (freelancers, independent contractors, consultants, or other outsourced and non-permanent workers) are hired on a temporary or part-time basis. These workers make up more than 90 percent of new job creation in European countries, and by 2020, it is estimated that more than 40 percent of the U.S. workforce will be in contingent jobs." ..."
    "... " Turning the Social Contract Inside Out: Neoliberal Governance and Human Capital in Two Days, One Night" ..."
    "... 'knowledge based economy' ..."
    "... "The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, pulled out all 43,060 multinational corporations and the share ownerships linking them to construct a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.The model revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms, the "real" economy, representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a super-entity of 147 even more tightly knit companies (all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity) that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network." ..."
    "... https://weeklybolshevik.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/imperialism-and-the-concentration-of-capital/ ..."
    "... "Neoliberalism and technology: Perpetual innovation or perpetual crisis?" ..."
    "... Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism ..."
    "... "The Corporate Contradictions of Neoliberalism" ..."
    "... "Neoliberalism was born in reaction against totalitarian statism, and matured at the University of Chicago into a program of state-reduction that was directed not just against the totalitarian state and the socialist state but also (and especially) against the New Deal regulatory and welfare state. It is a self-consciously reactionary ideology that seeks to roll back the status quo and institutionalize (or, on its own understanding, re-institutionalize) the "natural" principles of the market. But the contradiction between its individualist ideals and our corporate reality means that the effort to institutionalize it, oblivious to this contradiction, has induced deep dysfunction in our corporate system, producing weakened growth, intense inequality, and coercion. And when the ideological support of a system collapses -- as appears to be happening with neoliberalism -- then either the system will collapse, or new levels of coercion and manipulation will be deployed to maintain it. This appears to be the juncture at which we have arrived." ..."
    "... lumpenproletariat ..."
    "... "Sociology and the Critique of Neoliberalism" ..."
    "... The Social Nature of Cryptocurrencies ..."
    "... The Denationalization of Money ..."
    "... Austerity: The Lived Experience ..."
    "... Neoliberalism, Economic Radicalism, and the Normalization of Violence ..."
    "... "Over the past twenty years, the IMF has been strengthened enormously. Thanks to the debt crisis and the mechanism of conditionality, it has moved from balance of payments support to being quasi-universal dictator of so-called "sound" economic policies, meaning of course neo-liberal ones. The World Trade Organisation was finally put in place in January 1995 after long and laborious negotiations, often rammed through parliaments which had little idea what they were ratifying. Thankfully, the most recent effort to make binding and universal neo-liberal rules, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, has failed, at least temporarily. It would have given all rights to corporations, all obligations to governments and no rights at all to citizens. The common denominator of these institutions is their lack of transparency and democratic accountability. This is the essence of neo-liberalism. It claims that the economy should dictate its rules to society, not the other way around. Democracy is an encumbrance, neo-liberalism is designed for winners, not for voters who, necessarily encompass the categories of both winners and losers." ..."
    "... https://www.tni.org/en/article/short-history-neoliberalism ..."
    "... "When elected governments break the "representative covenant" and show complete indifference to the sufferings of citizens, when democracy is downgraded to an abstract set of rules and deprived of meaning for much of the citizenry, many will be inclined to regard democracy as a sham, to lose confidence in and withdraw their support for electoral institutions. Dissatisfaction with democracy now ranges from 40 percent in Peru and Bolivia to 59 percent in Brazil and 62 percent in Colombia. ..."
    "... Exploitation; What is it and why it is Wrong ..."
    "... Shadow Sovereigns: How Global Corporations are seizing Power ..."
    "... Publics around the globe are generally unhappy with the functioning of their nations' political systems. Across the 36 countries asked the question, a global median of 46% say they are very or somewhat satisfied with the way their democracy is working, compared with 52% who are not too or not at all satisfied. Levels of satisfaction vary considerably by region and within regions. Overall, people in the Asia-Pacific region are the most happy with their democracies. At least half in five of the six Asian nations where this question was asked express satisfaction. Only in South Korea is a majority unhappy (69%). ..."
    "... Communication and the Globalization of Culture ..."
    "... Class Politics and the Radical Right ..."
    "... In 2012 the United States spent an estimated 19.4% of GDP on such social expenditures, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based industrial country think tank. Denmark spent 30.5%, Sweden 28.2% and Germany 26.3%. All of these nations have a lower central government debt to GDP ratio than that of the United States. Why the United States invests relatively less in its social safety net than many other countries and why those expenditures are even at risk in the current debate over debt reduction reflect Americans' conflicted, partisan and often contradictory views on fairness, inequality, the role and responsibility of government and individuals in society and the efficacy of government action. Rooted in value differences, not just policy differences, the debate over the U.S. social contract is likely to go on long after the fiscal cliff issue has been resolved." ..."
    "... Popper, Hayek and the Open Society ..."
    "... Social Exclusion, Popular Resistanceand the Future of Neoliberalism ..."
    "... Social Exclusion ..."
    "... London Labour and the London Poor ..."
    "... The German Ideology ..."
    "... "Labour Relations and Social Movements in the 21st Century" ..."
    "... "The panorama of a deep economic crisis which in the last few decades has hit Europe and its Welfare state in particular has had an unprecedented impact on employment and social policies. The neoliberal model and the effects of deregulated and global finance not only question the "European social model" but push sectors of the labour force – with the youngest and well-qualified being prominent – into unemployment or precarious jobs. the sociological and potential socio-political significance of these actionsparticularly as a result of the interconnections that such movements express, both in the sphere of the workplace and industrial system or whether with broader social structures, with special emphasis on the middle classes and the threats of 'proletarianization' that presently hang over them. labour relations of our time are crossed by precariousness and by a new and growing "precariat" which also gave rise to new social movements and new forms of activism and protest." ..."
    "... Personal Insolvency in the 21st Century: A Comparative Analysis of the US and Europe, ..."
    "... "Working-class participation, middle-class aspiration? Value, upward mobility and symbolic indebtedness in higher education."The Sociological Review ..."
    "... The Financialization of Capitalism: 'Profiting without producing' ..."
    "... European Network and Debt and Development ..."
    "... "Do you enjoy rising prices? Everybody talks about commodities – with the Agriculture Euro Fund you can benefit from the increase in value of the seven most important agricultural commodities." With this advertisement the Deutsche Bankt tried in spring 2008 to attract clients for one of its investment funds. At the same time, there were hunger revolts in Haiti, Cameroon and other developing countries, because many poor could no longer pay the exploding food prices. In fact, between the end of 2006 and March 2008 the prices for the seven most important commodities went up by 71 per cent on average, for rice and grain the increase was 126 per cent. The poor are most hit by the hike in prices. Whereas households in industrialised countries spend 10 -20 per cent for food, in low-income countries they spend 60 – 80 per cent. As a result, the World Bank forecasts an increase in the number of people falling below the absolute poverty line by more than 100 million. Furthermore, the price explosion has negative macroeconomic effects: deterioration of the balance of payment, fuelling inflation and new debt." ..."
    "... Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street ..."
    "... "The Politics of Public Debt: Neoliberalism, capitalist development, and the restructuring of the state", ..."
    "... "Why should the new oligarchs be interested in their countries' future productive capacities and present democratic stability if, apparently, they can be rich without it, processing back and forth the synthetic money produced for them at no cost by a central bank for which the sky is the limit, at each stage diverting from it hefty fees and unprecedented salaries, bonuses and profits as long as it is forthcoming -- and then leave their country to its remaining devices and withdraw to some privately owned island? ..."
    "... http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/02/the-politics-of-public-debt/ ..."
    "... "The Worldwide Class Struggle" ..."
    "... Neoliberalism and the Making of the Subprime Borrower ..."
    "... The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition ..."
    "... Debt: the First 5000 Years ..."
    "... "Torturing the Poor, German-Style" ..."
    "... "Germany's chancellor [Gerhard] Schröder (SPD) –known as the "Comrade of the Bosses"– no longer sought to integrate labour into capitalism, at least not the Lumpenproletariat or ..."
    "... . These sections of society are now deliberately driven into mass poverty, joining the growing number of working poor on a scale not seen in Germany perhaps since the 1930s." ..."
    "... Alternative fur Deutchland ..."
    "... Grassroots Resistance to Neoliberalism ..."
    "... Homeless Workers' Movement and Landless Workers' Movement), ..."
    "... (Abahlali baseMjondolo, Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, Landless Peoples' Movement), ..."
    "... (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), ..."
    "... (Fanmi Lavalas) ..."
    "... (Narmada Bachao Andolan). ..."
    "... "Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor" ..."
    "... "100 countries have undergone grave economic decline over the past three decades. Per capita income in these 100 countries is now lower than it was 10, 15, 20 or in some cases even 30 years ago. In Africa, the average household consumes 20 percent less today than it did 25 years ago. Worldwide, more than 1 billion people saw their real incomes fall during the period 1980-1993." ..."
    "... http://www.mit.edu/~thistle/v13/2/imf.html ..."
    "... Democracy against Neoliberalism in Argentina and Brazil, ..."
    "... Double Jeopardy: The Impact of Neoliberalism on Care Workers in the United States and South Africa" ..."
    "... The BRICS: Challenges to the Global Status Quo" ..."
    "... Landless Workers Movement ..."
    "... Partido dos Trabalhadores ..."
    "... The Drug War in Mexico: Hegemony and Global Capitalism ..."
    "... Justice in El Barrio ..."
    "... Black Lives Matter ..."
    "... Occupy Wall Street ..."
    "... 'De-democratization' under Neoliberalism ..."
    "... Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution ..."
    "... "If the core of neoliberalism is a natural fact, as suggested by the ideology already embedded deep within our collective psyche, who can change it? Can you live without breathing, or stop the succession of days and nights? This is why Western democracy chooses among the many masks behind which is essentially the same liberal party. Change is not forbidden, change is impossible. Some consider this feature to be an insidious form of invisible totalitarianism. ..."
    "... "The unholy alliance of neoliberalism and postmodernism" ..."
    "... "undermine the immune system of society, neoliberalism by commercialization of even the most sacred domains and postmodernism by its super-relativism and refusal to recognize any hierarchy in value or belief systems." ..."
    "... "Neoliberalism as Political Theology of Chance: the politics of divination." ..."
    "... Revoking the Moral Order: The Ideology of Positivism and the Vienna Circle ..."
    "... "Neoliberalism and its Threat to Moral Agency" ..."
    "... Virtue and Economy ..."
    "... The Neoliberal Pattern of Domination: Capital's Reign in Decline, ..."
    "... The Future of Neoliberalism ..."
    "... Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession and the Uses and Misuses of History ..."
    "... Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization ..."
    "... Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization ..."
    "... Christian Science Monitor ..."
    "... "Worldwide, it has been a rough years for democracy. The UK, the United States and Colombia made critical decisions about their nations' future, and – at least from the perspective of liberal values and social justice – they decided poorly. Beyond the clear persistence of racism, sexism and xenophobia in people's decision-making, scholars and pundits have argued that to understand the results of recent popular votes, we must reflect on neoliberalism. International capitalism, which has dominated the globe for the past three decades, has its winners and its losers. And, for many thinkers, the losers have spoken. My fieldwork in South America has taught me that there are alternative and effective ways to push back against neoliberalism. These include resistance movements based on pluralism and alternative forms of social organisation, production and consumption." ..."
    "... Neoliberalism, Social Exclusion, and Social Movements ..."
    "... The Politics of Thatcherism ..."
    "... "The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics" ..."
    "... "A sure sign of the declining influence of neoliberalism is the rising chorus of intellectual voices raised against it. From the mid-70s through the 80s, the economic debate was increasingly dominated by monetarists and free marketeers." ..."
    Jan 18, 2018 | countercurrents.org
    The creation of large enterprises gave rise not only to an organized labor movement, but to a larger bureaucratic regulatory state with agencies intended to help stabilize and grow capitalism while keeping the working class loyal to the social contract. Crisis in public confidence resulted not only from economic recessions and depressions built into the economy, but the contradictions capitalism was fostering in society as the benefits in advances in industry, science and technology accrued to the wealthy while the social structure remained hierarchical.

    Ever since 1947 when the ideological father of neoliberalism Friedrich von Hayek called a conference in Mont Pelerin to address how the new ideology would replace Keynesianism, neoliberals have been promising to address these contradictions, insisting that eliminating the social welfare state and allowing complete market dominationthat would result in society's modernization and would filter down to all social classes and nations both developed and developing. Such thinking is rooted in the modernization theory that emerged after WWII when the US took advantage of its preeminent global power to impose a transformation model on much of the non-Communist world. Cold War liberal economist Walt Rostow articulated the modernization model of development in his work entitled The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto , 1960. By the 1970s, neoliberals adapted Rostow's modernization theory as their bible and the core of the social contract. (Evans Rubara, "Uneven Development: Understanding the Roots of Inequality"

    https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/uneven-development-understanding-roots-inequality

    The challenge for the political class has always been and remains to mobilize a popular base that would afford legitimacy to the social contract. The issue for mainstream political parties is not whether there is a systemic problem with the social contract intended to serve the capitalist class, but the degree to which the masses can be co-opted through various methods to support the status quo. "A generation ago, the country's social contract was premised on higher wages and reliable benefits, provided chiefly by employers. In recent decades, we've moved to a system where low wages are supposed to be made bearable by low consumer prices and a hodgepodge of government assistance programs. But as dissatisfaction with this arrangement has grown, it is time to look back at how we got here and imagine what the next stage of the social contract might be."

    https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/the-past-and-future-of-americas-social-contract/282511/

    Considering that Keynesianism and neoliberalism operate under the same social structure and differ only on how best to achieve capital formation while retaining sociopolitical conformity, the article above published in The Atlantic illustrates how analysts/commentators easily misinterpret nuances within a social contract for the covenant's macro goals. A similar view as that expressed in The Atlantic is also reflected in the New America Foundation's publications, identifying specific aspects of Arthur Schlesinger's Cold War militarist policies enmeshed with social welfare Keynesianism as parts of the evolving social contract.

    https://www.newamerica.org/economic-growth/policy-papers/the-american-public-and-the-next-social-contract/

    Identifying the social contract with a specific set of policies under different administrations evolving to reflect the nuances of political class and economic elites,some analysts contend that there is a European Union-wide social contract to which nationally-based social contracts must subordinate their sovereignty. This model has evolved to accommodate neoliberal globalism through regional trade blocs on the basis of a 'patron-client'integration relationship between core and periphery countries.

    A European export and integral part of cultural hegemony in the non-Western world, the liberal-bourgeois social contract for the vast majority of Africans has failed to deliver on the promise of socioeconomic development, social justice and national sovereignty since independence from colonial rule. Just as in Africa, the Asian view of the social contract is that it entails a liberal model of government operating within the capitalist system rather than taking into account social justice above all else. Embracing pluralism and diversity while shedding aspects of authoritarian capitalism associated with cronyism and the clientist state, the view of the Asian social contract is to subordinate society to neoliberal global integration and work within the framework of Western-established institutions. In each country, traditions governing social and political relationships underlie the neoliberal model. (Sanya Osha, The Social Contract in Africa , 2014;

    https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2013/html/sp130302.en.html ; http://www.mei.edu/content/map/myanmar-transition-social-control-social-contract )

    Despite far reaching implications for society and despite the political and business class keen awareness of neoliberalism, most people around the world are almost as perplexed by the term neoliberalism as they are with social contract theory that is outside the public debate confined to the domain of political philosophy. Many associate neoliberalism withRonald Reagan supporter Milton Friedman and the 'Chicago School', rarely mentioning the political dimension of the economic philosophy and its far-reaching implications for all segments of society. In an article entitled "Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems" The Guardian columnist George Monbiot raised a few basic questions about the degree to which the public is misinformed when it comes to the neoliberal social contract under which society operates.

    " Neoliberalism: do you know what it is? Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007-2008, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

    Advocates of neoliberalism, both from the pluralist-social welfare wing and the rightwing populist camp, have succeeded in institutionalizing the new social contract which has transformed the historically classical notion of individual freedombased on the Enlightenment concept of natural rights into freedom of capitalist hegemony over the state and society. Whether operating under the political/ideological umbrella of pluralism-environmentalism in Western nations, combined with some version of a Keynesian social welfare pluralist model, with rightwing populism or authoritarianism in one-party state, political and corporate elites advancing the neoliberal model share the same goal with regard to capital formation and mainstream institutions.

    http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920516668386 ; https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/23/culture-of-cruelty-the-age-of-neoliberal-authoritarianism/ ; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0896920516668386

    Weakening the social welfare corporatist state model by reaching political consensus among mainstream political parties by the late 1980s-early 1990s, whether operating under a centrist-pluralist or conservative party, neoliberals have been using the combination of massive deregulation with the state providing a bailout mechanism when crisis hits; fiscal policy that transfers income from workers and the middle class – raising the public debt to transfer wealth from the bottom 90% to the wealthiest 10% -; providing corporate subsidies and bailouts; and privatizing public projects and services at an immense cost to the declining living standards for the middle class and workers.

    As much in the US as in other developed nations beginning in the 1980s, the neoliberal state has become status quo by intentionally weakening the social welfare state and redefining the social contract throughout the world. Working with large banks and multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank that use loans as leverage to impose neoliberal policies around the world in debtor nations desperate to raise capital for the state and attract direct foreign investment, the advanced capitalist countries impose the neoliberal social contract on the world.

    As reflected in the integrated global economy, the neoliberal model was imbedded in IMF stabilization and World Bank development loans since the late 1940s. After the energy crisis of the mid-1970s and the revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua in 1979, international developments that took place amid US concerns about the economy under strain from rising balance payments deficits that could not accommodate both 'military Keynesianism' (deficit spending on defense as a means of boosting the economy) and the social welfare system, neoliberalism under the corporate welfare state emerged as the best means to continue strengthening capitalism. (J. M. Cypher, "From Military Keynesianism to Global-Neoliberal Militarism" , Monthly Review Vol. 59, No. 2, 2007; Jason Hickel, A Short History ofNeoliberalism ,

    http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/a_short_history_of_neoliberalism_and_how_we_can_fix_it

    Everything from government agencies whose role is strengthening capital, to public schools and hospitals emulating the market-based management model and treating patients and students as customers, the neoliberal goal is comprehensive market domination of society. Advocates of the neoliberal social contract no longer conceal their goals behind rhetoric about liberal-democratic ideals of individual freedom and the state as an arbiter to harmonize the interests of social classes. The market unequivocally imposes its hegemony not just over the state but on all institutions, subordinating peoples' lives to market forces and equating those forces with democracy and national sovereignty. In pursuit of consolidating the neoliberal model on a world scale, the advocates of this ideology subordinate popular sovereignty and popular consent from which legitimacy of the state emanates to capital. http://www.rhizomes.net/issue10/introren.htm

    As an integral part of the social environment and hegemonic culture reflecting the hierarchical class structure and values based on marginalization, the neoliberal social contract has become institutionalized in varying degrees reflecting the more integrative nature of capitalism after the fall of the Communist bloc coinciding with China's increased global economic integration. Emboldened that there was no competing ideology from any government challenging capitalism, neoliberals aggressively pursued globalization under the deregulation-corporate welfare anti-labor model.

    Some countries opted for mixed policies with a dose of quasi-statist policies as in the case of China. Others retained many aspects of the social welfare state as in the case of EU members, while some pursue authoritarian capitalism within a pluralistic model. Still other nations in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia where pluralism and multi-party traditions are not very strong, neoliberal policies are tailored to clientist politics and crony capitalism. In all cases, 'market omnipotence theory' is the catalyst under the umbrella of the neoliberal social contract.

    http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/11/12/the-mother-of-all-experiments-in-authoritarian-capitalism-is-about-to-begin/

    Ideology, the Neoliberal State, and the Social Contract

    Just as religion was universally intertwined with identity, projection of self-image in the community and the value system in the Age of Faith (500-1500), secular ideology in the modern world fulfills somewhat a similar goal. Although neoliberalism has been criticized as a secular religion precisely because of its dogmatism regarding market fundamentalism, especially after 2013 when Pope Francis dismissed it as idolatry of money that attempts to gloss over abject socioeconomic inequality on a world scale, capitalistsand the political class around the world have embraced some aspects if not wholeheartedly neoliberal ideology. https://economicsociology.org/2014/12/25/pope-francis-against-neoliberalism-finance-capitalism-consumerism-and-inequality/

    In the early 21 st century arguments equating the rich with societal progress and vilifying the poor as social stigma indicative of individual failure are no different than arguments raised by apologists of capitalism in the early 19 th century when the British Parliament was debating how to punish the masses of poor that the industrial revolution had created. In defending tax cuts to the wealthy, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley stated: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing -- as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it's on booze or women or movies." https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/grassley-estate-taxes-booze-women_us_5a247d89e4b03c44072e5a04 ; The US senator's argument could easily be heard in early 19 th century England. Blaming the poor for structural poverty which capitalism causes has become widespreadsince the early 1980s. This is because of government efforts to dismantle the welfare state as a social safety net and transfer resources for tax cuts to the wealthiest individuals. https://www.globalresearch.ca/blaming-the-poor-for-poverty/535675

    Rooted in classical liberal ideology, neoliberalism rests on laissez-faire and social Darwinist principles that affirm societal progress as defined by materialist self-interest. Because private financial gain is the sole measure of success and virtue, neoliberals demand that the state and international organizations must remove impediments to capital accumulationnationally and internationally no matter the consequences to the non-propertied classes. Aiming for more than mere mechanical compliance, the goal of the ideology is to create the illusion of the neoliberal self that lives, breathes, and actualizes neoliberal myths in every aspect of life from a person as a worker to consumer and citizen.

    Jim Mcguigan argues that "the transition from organised capitalism to neoliberal hegemony over the recent period has brought about a corresponding transformation in subjectivity. Leading celebrities, most notably high-tech entrepreneurs, for instance, operate in the popular imagination as models of achievement for the aspiring young. They are seldom emulated in real life, however, even unrealistically so. Still, their famed lifestyles and heavily publicised opinions provide guidelines to appropriate conduct in a ruthlessly competitive and unequal world." (Jim McGuigan: 'The Neoliberal Self',Culture Unbound, Volume 6, 2014; http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v6/a13/cu14v6a13.pdf

    By offering the illusion of integration to those that the social structure has marginalized while trying to indoctrinate the masses that the corporate state is salvation and the welfare state is the enemy to default all of society's problems, the neoliberal ideology has captured the imagination of many in the middle class and even some in the working class not just in the West but around the world and especially in former Communist bloc countries where people entertained an idealized version of bourgeois liberal society. (S. Gill, "Pessimism of Intelligence, Optimism of Will" in Perspectives on Gramsci , ed. by Joseph Francene 2009)

    Similar to liberalism in so far as it offers something for which to hope, neoliberalism is a departure when it decries the state as an obstacle to capitalist growth not only because of regulatory mechanisms and as an arbiter in society that must placate the masses with social programs, but even as a centralized entity determining monetary and fiscal policy. Proponents of neoliberalism demand turning back the clock to the ideology that prevailed among capitalists and their political supporters at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when there were no state mechanisms to regulate labor conditions, mining operations and the environment, food and drugs, etc. From a dogmatic market fundamentalist perspective, the market transcends national borders and supersedes the state, thus the principal form of governance revolves around furthering capital accumulation.

    Not only is there an absence of a social conscience not so different than what prevailed in the nascent phase of industrial capitalism, but there is disdain of social responsibility on the part of capital beyond the realm of tax-deductible charity donations and voluntarism. More significant, neoliberals believe that capital is entitled to appropriate whatever possible from society because the underlying assumption of corporate welfare entitlement is built into the neoliberal ideology that identifies the national interest with capital and labor as the enemy of capital accumulation. (K. Farnsworth, Social vs. Corporate Welfare , 2012)

    The irony in all of this is that in 2008 the world experienced the largest and deepest recession since the 1930s precisely because of neoliberal policies. However, its advocates insisted that the recession was causedwe did not have enough deregulation, privatization, corporate welfare and low taxes on capital rather than going too far with such an extreme ideology whose legal and illegal practices that led to the global recession. Even more ironic neoliberal ideology blames the state – central banks, legislative branch and regulatory agencies – rather than the economic system for the cyclical crisis. https://cgd.leeds.ac.uk/events/2008-global-financial-crisis-in-a-long-term-perspective-the-failure-of-neo-liberalism-and-the-future-of-capitalism-2/

    Because the state puts the interests of a tiny percentage of the population above the rest of society, it is a necessary structure only in so far as it limits its role to promoting capital formation by using any means to achieve the goal. Whether under a pluralistic-diversity political model or an authoritarian one, neoliberalism is anti-democratic because as Riad Azar points out, "The common denominator is the empowering of elites over the masses with the assistance of international forces through military action or financial coercion -- a globalized dialectic of ruling classes."

    http://newpol.org/content/neoliberalism-austerity-and-authoritarianism

    From conservative and liberal to self-described Socialist, political parties around the world have moved ideologically farther to the right in order to accommodate neoliberalism as part of their platform. The challenge of the political class is to keep people loyal to the neoliberal ideology; a challenge that necessarily forces political parties to be eclectic in choosing aspects of other ideological camps that appeal to voters. While embracing corporate welfare, decrying social welfare is among the most glaring neoliberal contradiction of an ideology that ostensibly celebrates non-state intervention in the private sector. This contradiction alone forces neoliberal politicians of all stripes and the media to engage in mass distraction and to use everything from identity politics ideologies to cult of personality,and culture wars and 'clash of civilization' theories. https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/How-the-Democrats-Became-The-Party-of-Neoliberalism-20141031-0002.html ; https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/paul-emery/why-on-earth-would-socialists-support-neoliberal-undemocratic-eu

    To justify why self-proclaimed socialist and democratic parties have embraced neoliberalism, many academics have provided a wide range of theories which have in fact helped solidify the neoliberal ideology into the political mainstream. Among the countless people swept up by the enthusiasm of the Communist bloc's fall and China's integration into the world capitalist economy, Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (2000), argued that the world returned to old religious and ethnic conflicts around which ideologies of the new century were molded.

    Encouraged by China's integration into the global capitalist system, in September 2006 Bell wrote : "It's the end of ideology in China. Not the end of all ideology, but the end of Marxist ideology. China has many social problems, but the government and its people will deal with them in pragmatic ways, without being overly constrained by ideological boundaries. I still think there's a need for a moral foundation for political rule in China – some sort of guiding ideal for the future – but it won't come from Karl Marx." https://prezi.com/kha1ketnfjtd/ideology-in-everyday-life/

    Such hasty pronouncements and others in works like Francis Fukuyama's The End of History expressed the Western bourgeois sense of relief of an integrated world under the Western-dominated neoliberal ideology that would somehow magically solve problems the Cold War had created. While Bell, Fukuyama and others celebrated the triumphant era of neoliberal ideology, they hardly dealt with the realities that ideology in peoples' lives emanates from mainstream institutions manifesting irreconcilable contradictions. A product molded by the hegemonic political culture, neoliberal ideology has been a factor in keeping the majority in conformity while a small minority is constantly seeking outlets of social resistance, some within the neoliberal rightwing political mold. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/21/bring-back-ideology-fukuyama-end-history-25-years-on

    As catalyst to mobilize the masses, nationalism remains a strong aspect of ideological indoctrination that rightwing populist neoliberals have used blaming immigrants, Muslims, women, gays, environmentalists, and minorities for structural problems society confronts resulting from the political economy. Although there are different political approaches about how best to achieve neoliberal goals, ideological indoctrination has always played an essential role in keeping people loyal to the social contract. However, the contradiction in neoliberal ideology is the need for a borderless world and the triumph of capital over the nation-state while state policies harmonize disparate capitalist interests within the nation-state and beyond it. If neoliberal ideology tosses aside nationalism then it deprives itself of a mechanism to mobilize the masses behind it. https://left-flank.org/2011/01/16/the-curious-marriage-of-neoliberalism-and-nationalism/

    Arguing that the 'Ideological State Apparatuses' (ISA) such as religious and educational institutions among others in the private sector perpetuate the ideology of the status quo, Louis Pierre Althusser captured the essence of state mechanisms to mobilize the masses. However, ideology is by no means the sole driving force in keeping people loyal to the social contract. While peoples' material concerns often dictate their ideological orientation, it would be hasty to dismiss the role of the media along with hegemonic cultural influences deeply ingrained into society shaping peoples' worldview and keeping them docile.

    Building on Althusser's theory of how the state maintains the status quo, Goran Therborn ( Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology , 1999) argues that the neoliberal state uses ideological domination as a mechanism to keep people compliant. Combined with the state's repressive mechanisms – police and armed forces – the ideological apparatus engenders conformity wherein exploitation and repression operate within the boundaries that the state defines as 'legal', thus 'normal' for society. A desirable goal of regimes ranging from parliamentary to Mussolini's Fascist Italy (1922-1943) and clerical Fascism under Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's Portugal (1932-1968), legalized repressive mechanisms have become an integral part of neoliberal ideological domination.

    ( http://notevenpast.org/louis-althusser-on-interpellation-and-the-ideological-state apparatus/ ; https://isreview.org/issue/99/althussers-theory-ideology ; Jules Boykoff, "Limiting Dissent: The Mechanisms of State Repression in the USA" Social Movement Studies," Vo. 6, No 3, 2007)

    It is part of the neoliberal ideology that markets dictate the lives of people in every respect from cradle to grave where self and identity are inexorably intertwined. Striving to determine public policy in all its phases of the individual\s life, of localities, nationally and internationally, the market has no other means to retain hegemony in society and pursue capital formation with the fewest possible obstacles. Neoliberals justify such an ideology on the basis that modernization of society transcends not just social justice but societal collective welfare when measured against private gain. https://www.salon.com/2016/03/27/good_riddance_gig_economy_uber_ayn_rand_and_the_awesome_collapse_of_silicon_valleys_dream_of_destroying_your_job/ ; https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/neoliberalism-has-eviscerated-the-fabric-of-social-life/

    The unchecked role of neoliberal capitalism in every aspect of the social fabric runs the risk of at the very least creating massive social, economic and political upheaval as was the case with the great recession of 2008 preceded by two decades of neoliberal capitalism taking precedence over the welfare regulatory state whose role is to secure and/or retain equilibrium in global markets. In The Great Transformation , (1944)", Karl Polanyi argued that: "To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment would result in the demolition of society."

    Because Polanyi lived through the Great Depression era of the New Deal and the rise and fall of the Axis Powers, he was optimistic that a return to the 1920s would not take root after WWII. Polanyi accepted Hegel's view of the social contract that the state preserves society by safeguarding general or universal interests against particular ones. However, we have been witnessing the kind of demolition of society Polanyi feared because of unchecked market forces. This is in part because the demise of the Communist bloc and the rise of China as a major economic power emboldened advocates of neoliberal ideology.

    With the realization of US long road to decline at the end of the Vietnam War, neoliberal elites prevailed that the crisis of American leadership could be met with the elimination of Keynesian ideology and the adoption of neoliberalism as tested by the Chicago School in Chile under the US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990. That the neoliberal ideology became an experiment tested in a US-backed military dictatorship in South America is itself revealing about what the nature of the social contract once implemented even in pluralistic societies where there was popular and political support for Keynesianism. Characteristic of a developing nation like Chile was external dependence and a weak state structure, thus easily manipulated by domestic and foreign capital interested in deregulation and further weakening of the public sector as the core of the social contract.

    https://www.thenation.com/article/the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll/ ; https://www.salon.com/2010/03/02/chicago_boys_and_the_chilean_earthquake/

    "The withering away of national states and the wholesale privatization of state-owned enterprises and state-administered services transferred highly profitable monopolies to capitalists, and guaranteed the repayment of the foreign debt-contracted, as in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay-by irresponsible, corrupt, and de facto military rulers. Neoliberalism supplied the general justification for the transfer of public assets and state-owned enterprises, paid for with public savings, even in areas considered "taboo" and untouchable until a few years ago, such as electricity, aviation, oil, or telecommunications. (Atilio A. Boron, "Democracy or Neoliberalism?" http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR21.5/boron.html

    Advocating the systematic dismantling of the social welfare state in the name of upholding the virtues of individualism while strengthening of corporate welfare capitalism in the name of economic growth on global scale, advocates of neoliberal ideology were emboldened by the absence of a competing ideology after the fall of the Soviet bloc and China's capitalist integration. As the income gap widened and globalization resulted in surplus labor force amid downward pressure on wages, a segment of the social and political elites embraced a rightwing populist ideology as a means of achieving the neoliberal goals in cases where the pluralist ideological model was not working. The failure of neoliberal policies led some political and business elites to embrace rightwing populism in order to save neoliberalism that had lost support among a segment of society because of its association with centrist and reformist cultural-diversity pluralist neoliberals. This trend continues to gain momentum exposing the similarities between neoliberalism and Fascism. (David Zamora, "When Exclusion Replaces Exploitation: The Condition of the Surplus-Population under Neoliberalism" http://nonsite.org/feature/when-exclusion-replaces-exploitation .

    Neoliberalism and Fascism

    1. The role of the state

    Unprecedented for a former president, on 10 December 2017 Barak Obama warned Americans not to follow a Nazi path. A clear reference to president Trump and the Republican Party leading America in that direction with rhetoric and policies that encourage 'culture war' ( kulturkampf – struggle between varieties of rightwingers from evangelicals to neo-Nazis against secular liberals), Obama made reference to socioeconomic polarization at the root of political polarization.

    "The combination of economic disruption, cultural disruption ― nothing feels solid to people ― that's a recipe for people wanting to find security somewhere. And sadly, there's something in all of us that looks for simple answers when we're agitated and insecure. The narrative that America at its best has stood for, the narrative of pluralism and tolerance and democracy and rule of law, human rights and freedom of the press and freedom of religion, that narrative, I think, is actually the more powerful narrative. The majority of people around the world aspire to that narrative, which is the reason people still want to come here." https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-warns-americans-against-following-in-the-path-of-nazi germany_us_5a2c032ce4b0a290f0512487

    Warning about the road to Nazism, Obama drew distinctions between the Democratic Party's brand of pluralist neoliberalism and Trump's rightwing populist model. Naturally, Obama did not mention that both models seek the same goals, or that policies for which he and his predecessor Bill Clinton pursued drove a segment of the population toward the authoritarian neoliberal model that offers the illusion of realizing the American Dream. Distancing themselves from neo-Fascists, mainstream European political leaders embracing the pluralist model under neoliberalism have been as condemnatory as Obama of rightwing populism's pursuit of 'culture war' as a precursor to Fascism.

    Accusing Trump of emboldening varieties of neo-Fascists not just in the US and EU but around the globe, European neoliberal pluralists ignored both the deep roots of Fascism in Europe and their own policies contributing to the rise of neo-Fascism. Just as with Obama and his fellow Democrats, European neoliberal pluralists draw a very sharp distinction between their version of neoliberalism and rightwing populism that either Trump or Hungary's Viktor Orban pursue. Neoliberal pluralists argue that rightwing populists undercut globalist integration principles by stressing economic nationalism although it was right nationalists Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan that engaged in wholesale implantation of neoliberal policies. https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2017/02/28/the-myths-of-far-right-populism-orbans-fence-and-trumps-wall/

    Rightwing populism under Ronald Reagan as the first president to implement neoliberal policies emerged as a reaction to the prospect that the Western-basedcore of capitalism was weakening as a result of a multi-polar world economy. Whereas in the middle of the 20 th century the US enjoyed balance of payments surpluses and was a net creditor with the dollar as the world's strongest reserve currency and the world's strongest manufacturing sector, in 2017 the US is among the earth's largest debtor nations with chronic balance of payments deficits, a weak dollar with a bleak future and an economy based more on parasitic financial speculation and massive defense-related spending and less on productive sectors that are far more profitable in Asia and developing nations with low labor costs. (Jon Kofas, Independence from America: Global Integration and Inequality , 2005, 40-54)

    Exerting enormous influence by exporting its neoliberal ideological, political, economic and cultural influence throughout the world, the US-imposed transformation model has resulted in economic hardships and political and social instability in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Institutionalizing neoliberalism under rightwing populism and using Trump as the pretext to do so, the US is leading nations around the world to move closer to neo-Fascism, thus exposing neoliberalism as totalitarian.The recognition by the political class and business class that over-accumulation is only possible by continued downward wage pressure has been a key reason that a segment of the population not just in the US but across EU has supported populist rightwing and/or neo-fascists.

    https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2015/01/24/exporting-fascism-us-imperialism-in-latin-america/ ; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/americanism-us-writers-imagine-fascist-future-fiction ; http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Corporatism/neofascism.shtml ; Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America , 1999.

    Rejecting the claim of any similarities between neoliberalism and Fascism, neoliberal apologists take pride that their apparent goal is to weaken the state, by which they mean the Keynesian welfare state, not the 'military Keynesian' and corporate welfare state. By contrast, Fascists advocated a powerful state – everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. American neoliberals of both the pluralist and rightwing camps have created a societal model not just in one nation like Mussolini and Hitler but globally with the result of: "everything within neoliberalism, nothing against neoliberalism, nothing outside neoliberalism.

    Neoliberal totalitarianism finds different expression in the US than in India, in Hungary than in Israel. In " Neoliberal Fascism: Free Markets and the Restructuring of Indian Capitalism," Shankar Gopalakrishnan observed that exclusive Hindu nationalism has been the catalyst for rightwing neoliberalism to mobilize popular support. "Hindutva [ a term coined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923 to assert exclusive Hindu dominance] is seen as an effort by neoliberalism, or perhaps more broadly by capitalism, to divert attention from class conflict, to divide and weaken working class struggles and to deflect class-driven anxieties on to minority communities. This approach is problematic in two senses. First, it does not explain why Hindutva organisations are able to develop a mass base, except to the extent that they are seen to be appealing to "historical identity" or "emotive" issues. The state exists only as the expression and guarantor of a collectivity founded around a transcendent principle : The ideal state is the guarantor of the Hindu rashtra, a "nation" that exists as an organic and harmonious unity between "Hindus."

    https://mronline.org/2008/11/14/neoliberalism-and-hindutva-fascism-free-markets-and-the-restructuring-of-indian-capitalism/

    Whereas under Ronald Reagan's neoliberal populist policies (Reaganism) under a rightwing political umbrella the state structure was strengthened in the US, in the process of implementing neoliberal policies state bureaucratic functions have been outsourced to private companies thus keeping with the spirit of corporate-welfare goals. Other countries followed a path similar to the one of the US. Contrary to the claims of many neoliberal scholars, politicians and commentators, neoliberalism has not weakened the state simply because the ideology lays claims to a hegemonic private sector and weak state. It is true that the Keynesian-welfare state structure has been weakened while the corporate-welfare-militarist-police-state structure has been strengthened. However, in the less developed capitalist countries the public sector has weakened as a result of the US and EU imposing the neoliberal model which drains the public sector of any leverage in stimulating economic and social development investment because of the transfer of public assets and public services to the private sector.( http://jgu.edu.in/article/indias-neoliberal-path-perdition ; Monica Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets , 2006)

    Gaspar Miklos Tamas, a Romanian political philosopher of the George Lukacs-inspired Budapest School, argues that global division of labor in the neoliberal era has not only resulted in wealth transfer from the bottom up but it has diminished national sovereignty and citizenship for those in less developed (periphery) nations. "The new dual sate is alive and well: Normative State for the core populations of the capitalist center, and another State of arbitrary decrees for the non-citizens who are the rest. Unlike in classical fascism, this second State is only dimly visible from the first. The radical critique protesting that liberty within the Normative State is an illusion, although understandable, is erroneous. The denial of citizenship based not on exploitation, oppression and straightforward discrimination, but on mere exclusion and distance, is difficult to grasp, because the mental habits of liberation struggle for a more just redistribution of goods and powers are not applicable. The problem is not that the Normative State is becoming more authoritarian: rather, that it belongs only to a few." https://www.opendemocracy.net/people-newright/article_306.jsp

    If the normative state is the domain of the very few with the rest under the illusion of inclusion, Miklos Tamas concludes that we are living in a global post-fascist era which is not the same as the interwar totalitarian model based on a mass movement of Fascism. Instead, neoliberal totalirarianism categorically rejects the Enlightenment tradition of citizenship which is the very essence of the bourgeois social contract. While the normative state in advanced countries is becoming more authoritarian with police-state characteristics, the state in the periphery whether Eastern Europe, Latin America or Africa is swept along by neoliberal policies that drive it toward authoritarianism as much as the state in Trump's America as in parts of Europe to the degree that in January 2018 Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) faced the prospect either of new elections or entering into a coalition with the neo-Nazi Alternative fur Deutchalnd (AfD). https://www.prosper.org.au/2010/05/25/the-counter-enlightenment/

    The rightwing course of the Western World spreading into the rest of the world is not only because of IMF austerity used as leverage to impose neoliberalism in developing nations. Considering that countries have been scrambling to attract foreign investment which carries neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatization, weak trade unions and low taxes as a precondition, the entire world economic system is the driving force toward a form of totalitarianism. As Miklos Tamas argues, this has diluted national sovereignty of weaker countries, allowing national capitalists and especially multinational corporations to play a determining role in society against the background of a weak state structure. Along with weakened national sovereignty, national citizenship in turn finds expression in extreme rightwing groups to compensate for loss of independence as the bourgeois social contract presumably guarantees. (Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty , 2006; http://www.e-ir.info/2012/08/22/globalization-does-not-entail-the-weakening-of-the-liberal-state/

    It is undeniable that there is a qualitative difference in Berlin and Rome under neoliberal regimes today than it was under Fascism. It would be a mistake to lump a contemporary neoliberal society together with the Third Reich and Fascist Italy, a dreadful and costly mistake that Stalinists made in the 1930s. Interwar totalitarianism existed under one-party state with a popular base operating as a police state. Although many countries under varieties of neoliberal regimes have an electoral system of at least two parties alternating power, the ruling parties pursue neoliberal policies with variations on social and cultural issues (identity politics), thus operating within the same policy framework impacting peoples' living standards.

    Not just leftist academic critics, but even the progressive democratic Salon magazine recognized during the US election of 2016 that the neoliberal state would prevail regardless of whether Trump or Clinton won the presidential contest. " Neoliberalism presumes a strong state, working only for the benefit of the wealthy, and as such it has little pretence to neutrality and universality, unlike the classical liberal state. I would go so far as to say that neoliberalism is the final completion of capitalism's long-nascent project, in that the desire to transform everything -- every object, every living thing, every fact on the planet -- in its image had not been realized to the same extent by any preceding ideology.

    https://www.salon.com/2016/06/06/this_is_our_neoliberal_nightmare_hillary_clinton_donald_trump_and_why_the_market_and_the_wealthy_win_every_time/

    In neoliberal society either of the pluralist-diversity or of the authoritarian political camp there are elements of polizeistaat though not nearly full blown as in the Third Reich. While conformity to the status quo and self-censorship is the only way to survive, modern means of communication and multiple dissident outlets attacking the status quo from the right, which is far more pervasive and socio-politically acceptable than doing so from the left, has actually facilitated the evolution of the new totalitarian state. http://www.thegreatregression.eu/progressive-neoliberalism-versus-reactionary-populism-a-hobsons-choice/

    Whereas big business collaborated closely with Fascist dictators from the very beginning to secure the preeminence of the existing social order threatened by the crisis of democracy created by capitalism, big business under the neoliberal social contract has the same goal, despite disagreement on the means of forging political consensus. Partly because neoliberalism carries the legacy of late 19 th century liberalism and operates in most countries within the parliamentary system, and partly because of fear of grassroots social revolution, a segment of the capitalist class wants to preserve the democratic façade of the neoliberal social contract by perpetuating identity politics. In either case, 'economic fascism' as the essence of neoliberalism, or post-fascism as Miklos Tamas calls it, is an inescapable reality. (Andrea Micocci and Flavia Di Mario, The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism , 2017).

    In distinguishing the composition and goals of theparliamentary state vs. the Fascist one-party state, Italian Fascism's theoretician Giovanni Gentile characterizedit as 'totalitario'; a term also applied to Germany's Third Reich the latter which had the added dimension of anti-Semitism as policy. Arguing that ideology in the Fascist totalitarian state had a ubiquitous role in every aspect of life and power over people, Gentile and Mussolini viewed such state as the catalyst to a powerful nation-state that subordinates all institutions and the lives of citizens to its mold. In "La Dottrina del Fascismo" (Gentile and Mussolini, 1932), Musolini made famous the statement: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state," although Hitler's polizeistaat was more totalitarian because it had the means to achieve policy goals stated in Mein Kampf .

    The convergence of neoliberalism and Fascism is hardly surprising when one considers that both aim at a totalitarian society of different sorts, one of state-driven ideology and the other market-driven with the corporate welfare state behind it. In some respects, Sheldon Wolin's the "inverted totalitarianism" theory places this issue into another perspective, arguing that despite the absence of a dictator the corporate state behind the façade of 'electoral democracy' is an instrument of totalitarianism. Considering the increased role of security-intelligence-surveillance agencies in a presumably open society, it is not difficult to see that society has more illiberal than classic liberal traits. Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, 2008)

    More powerful than the Axis Powers combined, American "Inverted totalitarianism" was internationalized during the Cold War and became more blatant during the war on terror, in large measure used as a pretext to impose neoliberalism in the name of national security. As the police-state gradually became institutionalized in every respect from illegal surveillance of citizens to suppressing dissent to the counterterrorism-neoliberal regime, it was becoming clearer to many scholars that a version of fascism was emerging in the US which also sprang up around the world. (Charlotte Heath-Kelly et al. eds., Neoliberalism and Terror: Critical Engagements , 2016; https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?15074-Chris-Hedges-The-Great-Unraveling-USA-on-the-brink-of-neo-fascist-police-state#.WifwyLBrzIU

    Almost a century after the era of Fascist totalitarianism that led to WWII, the transition of capitalism's global structure with a shifting core from the US and northwest Europe to East Asia has entailed intense global competition for capital accumulation to the degree that the advanced countries have been pushing living standards downward to compete with low-wage global markets. The process of draining greater surplus value from labor especially from the periphery countries where IMF-style austerity policies have resulted in massive capital transfer to the core countries has taken place under the neoliberal social contract that has striking similarities with Fascism.

    Backed by the state in the advanced capitalist countries, international organizations among them the IMF have been promoting economic fascism under the label of 'neoliberal reforms', thus molding state structures accordingly. Neoliberal totalitarianism is far more organized and ubiquitous than interwar Fascism not only because of the strong national state structure of core countries and modern technology and communications networks that enables surveillance and impose subtle forms of indoctrination, but also because the international agencies established by the US under the Bretton Woods system help to impose policies and institutions globally.

    1. Characteristics of the Illiberal Neoliberal Society

    The genesis of illiberal politics can be traced back to the end of WWI when Europeans witnessed the unraveling of the rationalist order of the Enlightenment rooted in Lockean liberalism. Influenced by the wars of imperialism that led the First World War at the end of which Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks to a revolutionary victory over Czarist Russia, Joseph Schumpeter like many European scholars was trying to make sense of how capitalism's forcible geographic expansion (imperialism) led to such global disasters that undermined the rationalist assumptions of the Enlightenment about society and its institutions. In his Sociology of Imperialism (1919), he wrote the following about the relationship of the bourgeoisie with the state.

    "The bourgeoisie did not simply supplant the sovereign, nor did it make him its leader, as did the nobility. It merely wrested a portion of its power from him and for the rest submitted to him. It did not take over from the sovereign the state as an abstract form of organization. The state remained a special social power, confronting the bourgeoisie. In some countries it has continued to play that role to the present day. It is in the state that the bourgeoisie with its interests seeks refuge, protection against external and even domestic enemies. The bourgeoisie seeks to win over the state for itself, and in return serves the state and state interests that are different from its own."

    The strong state structure of the imperial state that the bourgeoisie supported as a vehicle of expanding their interests globally while maintaining the social order at the national level held true only for the advanced capitalist countries eagerly trying to secure international markets at any cost including armed conflict. While essential for capital integration and expansion, the strong state structure was and remains an anathema to the bourgeoisie, if its role is to make political, economic and social concessions to the laboring and middle classes which are the popular base for bourgeois political parties. While classical liberal theory expresses the interests of capitalism its role is not to serve in furtherance of political equality for the simple reason that capitalism cannot exist under such a regime. Both John Locke and John Stuart Mill rejected political egalitarianism, while Schumpeter viewed democratic society with egalitarianism as an integral part of democracy. Rejecting Locke's and Mill's abstract receptiveness to egalitarianism, neoliberals of either the pluralist or authoritarian camp are blatantly adopt illiberal policies that exacerbate elitism, regardless of the rhetoric they employ to secure mass popular support.

    Characterized by elitism, class, gender, racial and ethnic inequality, limits on freedom of expression, on human rights and civil rights, illiberal politics thrives on submission of the masses to the status quo. In his essay The Political Economy of Neoliberalism and Illiberal Democracy, Garry Jacobs, an academic/consultant who still believes in classical liberal economics operating in a pluralistic and preferably non-militaristic society, warns that world-wide democracy is under siege. " Democratic elections have become the means for installing leaders with little respect for democratic values. The tolerance, openness and inclusiveness on which modern democracy is founded are being rejected by candidates and voters in favor of sectarian, parochial fears and interests. The role of the free press as an impartial arbiter of facts is being undermined by the rise of private and public news media conglomerates purveying political preference as fact combined with a blinding blizzard of fake news. Party politics has been polarized into a winner-take-all fight to the finish by vested-interests and impassioned extremist minorities trying to impose their agendas on a complacent majority. Corporate power and money power are transforming representative governments into plutocratic pseudo-democracies. Fundamentalists are seizing the instruments of secular democracy to impose intolerant linguistic, racial and religious homogeneity in place of the principles of liberty and harmonious heterogeneity that are democracy's foundation and pinnacle of achievement."

    http://www.cadmusjournal.org/article/volume-3/issue-3/political-economy-neoliberalism-and-illiberal-democracy

    While neoliberals in the populist rightwing wholeheartedly share and promote such views, those who embrace the pluralist-identity politics camp are just as supportive of many aspects of the corporate welfare-police-counterterrorism state as a means to engender domestic sociopolitical conformity and to achieve closer global economic integration. The question is not so much what each political camp under the larger neoliberal umbrella pursues as a strategy to mobilize a popular base but whether the economic-social policies intertwined with a corporate-welfare-police-counterterrorism state is the driving force toward a Fascist model of government. In both the pluralist model with some aspects of the social safety net, and the rightwing populist version neoliberalism's goal is rapid capital accumulation on a world scale, institutional submission of the individual and molding the citizen's subjective reality around the neoliberal ideology.

    Illiberal politics in our time is partly both symptomatic of and a reaction to neoliberal globalism and culture wars that serve to distract from the intensified class struggle boiling beneath the surface. Rhetorically denouncing globalist neoliberalism, populist rightwing politicians assert the importance of national capitalism but always within the perimeters of neoliberal policies. Hence they co-opt the socio-cultural positions of nationalist extremists as a political strategy to mobilize the masses. Scholars, journalists and politicians have speculated whether the rising tide of rightwing populism pursuing neoliberalism under authoritarian models not just in the Western World, but Eastern Europe, South Asia and Africa reflects the rejection of liberal democracy and the triumph of illiberal politics that best reflects and serves the political economy. Unquestionably, there is a direct correlation between the internationalization of the Western neoliberal transformation model imposed on the world in the post-Soviet era and the rise of rightwing populism reacting to the gap between the promises of what capitalism was supposed to deliver and the reality of downward pressures on living standards. http://www.counterfire.org/interview/18068-india-s-nightmare-the-extremism-of-narendra-modi ; http://ac.upd.edu.ph/index.php/news-announcements/1201-southeast-asian-democracy-neoliberalism-populism-vedi-hadiz ; http://balticworlds.com/breaking-out-of-the-deadlock-of-neoliberalism-vs-rightwing-populism/

    Not just the US, but Europe has been flirting with 'illiberal democracy' characterized by strong authoritarian-style elected officials as Garry Jacobs has observed. Amid elections in Bosnia in 1996, US diplomat Richard Holbrooke wondered about the rightwing path of former Yugoslav republics. "Suppose the election was declared free and fair and those elected are "racists, fascists, separatists, who are publicly opposed to [peace and reintegration]. That is the dilemma." Twenty years after what Holbrooke dreaded election outcomes in Yugoslavia, the US elected a rightwing neoliberal populist leading the Republican Party and making culture wars a central theme to distract from the undercurrent class struggle in the country. A structural issue that transcends personalities, this reality in America is symptomatic of the link between neoliberalism and the rise of illiberal democracy in a number of countries around the world. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1997-11-01/rise-illiberal-democracy

    Some political observers analyzing the rightist orientation of neoliberal policies have concluded that neoliberalism and Fascism have more in common than people realize. In 2016, Manuela Cadelli, President of the Magistrates Union of Belgium, wrote a brief article arguing that Neoliberalism is indeed a form of Fascism; a position people seem to be willing to debate after the election of Donald Trump pursuing neoliberal policies with a rightwing populist ideological and cultural platform to keep a popular base loyal to the Republican Party. "Fascism may be defined as the subordination of every part of the State to a totalitarian and nihilistic ideology. I argue that neoliberalism is a species of fascism because the economy has brought under subjection not only the government of democratic countries but also every aspect of our thought. The state is now at the disposal of the economy and of finance, which treat it as a subordinate and lord over it to an extent that puts the common good in jeopardy." http://www.defenddemocracy.press/president-belgian-magistrates-neoliberalism-form-fascism/

    It is ironic that neoliberal society is 'a species of fascism', but there no widespread popular opposition from leftist groups to counter it. People remain submissive to the neoliberal state that has in fact eroded much of what many in the pluralist camp hail as liberal democratic institutions. Most adapt to the status quo because to do otherwise means difficulty surviving today just as it was difficult to survive under Fascism for those in opposition; as Palmiro Togliatti noted ( Lectures on Fascism, 1935) when he cautioned about castigating workers who joined the party simply because they placed survival of their family above any progressive ideology. Because evidence of systemic exploitation ingrained into society passes as the 'norm', and partly because repression targets minority groups, migrants, and the working class, especially those backing trade unions and progressive political parties, people support the neoliberal state that they see as the constitutional entity and the only means for survival.

    The media, government and mainstream institutions denounce anyone crying out for social justice, human rights and systemic change. Such people are 'trendy rebels', as though social justice is a passing fad like a clothing line, misguided idealists or treasonous criminals. Considering that the corporate-owned and state media validates the legitimacy of the neoliberal social contract, the political class and social elites enjoy the freedom to shape the state's goals in the direction toward a surveillance police-state. All of this goes without notice in the age when it is almost expected because it is defaulted to technology making easy to detect foreign and domestic enemies while using the same technology to shape the citizen's subjective reality.

    Partly because of the communications revolution in the digital age, neoliberalism has the ability to mold the citizen beyond loyalty to the social contract not just into mechanical observance but total submission to its institutions by reshaping the person's values and identity. In this respect, neoliberalism is not so different from Fascism whose goal was to mold the citizen. " Neoliberalism has been more successful than most past ideologies in redefining subjectivity, in making people alter their sense of themselves, their personhood, their identities, their hopes and expectations and dreams and idealizations. Classical liberalism was successful too, for two and a half centuries, in people's self-definition, although communism and fascism succeeded less well in realizing the "new man." It cannot be emphasized enough that neoliberalism is not classical liberalism, or a return to a purer version of it, as is commonly misunderstood; it is a new thing, because the market, for one thing, is not at all free and untethered and dynamic in the sense that classical liberalism idealized it.

    https://www.salon.com/2016/06/06/this_is_our_neoliberal_nightmare_hillary_clinton_donald_trump_and_why_the_market_and_the_wealthy_win_every_time/

    Although people go about their daily lives focused on their interests, they operate against the background of neoliberal institutions that determine their lives in every respect from chatting on their cell phones to how they live despite their illusions of free will. As the world witnessed a segment of the population openly embracing fascism from movement to legitimate political party in interwar Europe, a corresponding rise in racism and ethnocentrism under the umbrella of rightwing neoliberal populism has taken place in the first two decades of the 21 st century.

    Representing the UN Human Rights agency, Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad al-Hussein stated that 2016 was disastrous for human rights, as the 'clash of civilizations' construct has become ingrained into the political mainstream in Western countries. "In some parts of Europe, and in the United States, anti-foreigner rhetoric full of unbridled vitriol and hatred, is proliferating to a frightening degree, and is increasingly unchallenged. The rhetoric of fascism is no longer confined to a secret underworld of fascists, meeting in ill-lit clubs or on the 'deep net'. It is becoming part of normal daily discourse." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/united-nations-chilling-warning-rise-fascism-human-rights-prince-zeid-a7464861.html

    Because neoliberalism has pushed all mainstream bourgeois political parties to the right, the far right no longer seems nearly as extreme today as it did during the Vietnam War's protest generation who still had hope for a socially just society even if that meant strengthening the social welfare system. The last two generations were raised knowing no alternative to neoliberalism; the panacea for all that ails society is less social welfare and privatization of public services within the framework of a state structure buttressing corporate welfare. The idea that nothing must be tolerated outside the hegemonic market and all institutions must mirror the neoliberal model reflects a neo-totalitarian society where sociopolitical conformity follows because survival outside the system is not viable.

    Although Western neoconservatives have employed the term 'neo-totalitarian' to describe Vladimir Putin's Russia, the term applies even more accurately to the US and someEuropean nations operating under neoliberal-military-police state structures with as much power than the Russian bureaucratic state has at its disposal.The contradiction of neoliberalism rests in the system's goal of integrating everyone into the neo-totalitarian mold. Because of the system's inherent hierarchical structure, excluding most from the institutional mainstream and limiting popular sovereignty to the elites exposes the exploitation and repression goals that account for the totalitarian nature of the system masquerading as democratic where popular sovereignty is diffused. The seemingly puzzling aspect of the rise in rightwing populism across the globe that rests in marginalization of a segment of the population and the support for it not just from certain wealthy individuals financing extremist movements, but from a segment of the middle class and even working class lining up behind it because they see their salvation with the diminution of weaker social groups. This pattern was also evident in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and pro-Nazi authoritarian regimes of the interwar era. https://www.demdigest.org/neo-totalitarian-russia-potent-existential-threat-west/ ; Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism (2017.

    Because of contradictions in bourgeois liberal democracy where capital accumulation at any social cost is the goal, the system produced the current global wave of rightwing populism just as capitalism in the interwar era gave rise to Fascism. As one analyst put it, " The risk democratic formations continually face is internal disintegration such that the heterogeneous elements of the social order not only fail to come together within some principle of or for unity, but actively turn against one another. In this case, a totally unproductive revolution takes place. Rather than subversion of the normative order causing suffering, rebellion or revolution that might establish a new nomos of shared life as a way of establishing a new governing logic, the dissociated elements of disintegrating democratic formations identify with the very power responsible for their subjection–capital, the state and, the strong leader. Thus the possibility of fascism is not negated in neoliberal formations but is an ever present possibility arising within it. Because the value of the social order as such is never in itself sufficient to maintain its own constitution, it must have recourse to an external value, which is the order of the sacred embodied by the sovereign. http://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/41987-neoliberalism-fascism-and-sovereignty /

    Public opinion surveys of a number of countries around the world, including those in the US, indicated that most people do not favor the existing social contract rooted in neoliberal policies that impact everything from living standards and labor policy to the judicial system and foreign affairs. Instead of driving workers toward a leftwing revolutionary path, many support rightwing populism that has resulted in the rise of even greater oppression and exploitation. Besides nationalism identified with the powerful elites as guardians of the national interest, many among the masses believe that somehow the same social contract responsible for existing problems will provide salvation they seek. While widespread disillusionment with neoliberal globalization seems to be at the core in the rise of rightwing populism, the common denominator is downward social mobility. (Doug Miller, Can the World be Wrong ? 2015)

    As Garry Jacobs argues, "Even mature democracies show signs of degenerating into their illiberal namesakes. The historical record confirms that peaceful, prosperous, free and harmonious societies can best be nurtured by the widest possible distribution of all forms of power -- political, economic, educational, scientific, technological and social -- to the greatest extent to the greatest number. The aspiration for individual freedom can only be realized and preserved when it is married with the right to social equality. The mutual interdependence of the individual and the collective is the key to their reconciliation and humanity's future. http://www.cadmusjournal.org/article/volume-3/issue-3/political-economy-neoliberalism-and-illiberal-democracy

    Just as in the interwar era when many Europeans lost confidence in the rationalism of the Enlightenment and lapsed into amorality and alienation that allowed for even greater public manipulation by the hegemonic culture, in the early 21 st the neoliberal social contract with a complex matrix of communications at its disposal is able to indoctrinate on a mass scale more easily than ever. Considering the low level of public trust in the mainstream media that most people regardless of political/ideological position view as propaganda rather than informational, cynicism about national and international institutions prevails. As the fierce struggle for power among mainstream political parties competing to manage the state on behalf of capital undercuts the credibility of the political class, rightwing elements enter the arena as 'outsider' messiahs above politics (Bonapartism in the 21 st century) to save the nation, while safeguarding the neoliberal social contract. This is as evident in France where the pluralist political model of neoliberalism has strengthened the neo-Fascist one that Marine Le Pen represents, as in Trump's America where the Democratic Party's neoliberal policies helped give rise to rightwing populism.

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/macronism-neoliberal-triumph-or-next-stage-in-frances-political-crisis/5596722 ; https://socialistworker.org/2016/12/05/the-18th-brumaire-of-trump

    As the following article in The Economist points out, widespread disillusionment with globalist neoliberal policies drove people to the right for an enemy to blame for all the calamities that befall society. " Beset by stagnant wage growth, less than half of respondents in America, Britain and France believe that globalisation is a "force for good" in the world. Westerners also say the world is getting worse. Even Americans, generally an optimistic lot, are feeling blue: just 11% believe the world has improved in the past year. The turn towards nationalism is especially pronounced in France, the cradle of liberty. Some 52% of the French now believe that their economy should not have to rely on imports, and just 13% reckon that immigration has a positive effect on their country. France is divided as to whether or not multiculturalism is something to be embraced. Such findings will be music to the ears of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, France's nationalist, Eurosceptic party. Current (and admittedly early) polling has her tied for first place in the 2017 French presidential race. https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/11/daily-chart-12

    Similar to deep-rooted cultural and ideological traits of Nazism in German society, there are similar traits in contemporary US, India and other countries where rightwing populism has found a receptive public. Although there are varieties of populism from Lepenism (Marine Le Pen's National Front) to Trumpism (US Republican Donald Trump) to Modism (India's Narendra Modi), they share common characteristics, including cult of personality as a popular rallying catalyst, promoting hatred and marginalization of minority groups, and promising to deliver a panacea to "society" when in fact their policies are designed to strengthen big capital.

    Rightwing populist politicians who pursue neoliberal policies are opportunistically pushing the political popular base toward consolidation of a Fascist movement and often refer to themselves as movement rather than a party. Just as there were liberals who refused to accept the imminent rise of Fascism amid the parliamentary system's collapse in the 1920s, there are neoliberals today who refuse to accept that the global trend of populism is a symptom of failed neoliberalism that has many common characteristics with Fascism. In an article entitled "Populism is not Fascism: But it could be a Harbinger" by Sheri Berman, the neoliberal journal Foreign Affairs , acknowledged that liberal bourgeois democracy is losing its luster around the world. However, the author would not go as far as to examine the structural causes for this phenomenon because to do so would be to attack the social contract within which it operates. Treating rightwing populism as though it is a marginal outgrowth of mainstream conservatism and an aberration rather than the outgrowth of the system's core is merely a thinly veiled attempt to defend the status quo of which rightwing populism is an integral part.

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-10-17/populism-not-fascism

    Structural Exploitation under the Neoliberal Social Contract

    Structural exploitation – "a property of institutions or systems in which the "rules of the game" unfairly benefit one group of people to the detriment of another" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exploitation/ – has been an incontrovertible reality of all class-based societiesfrom the establishment of the earliest city-states in Mesopotamia until the present.Usually but not always intertwined with social oppression, structural exploitation entails a relationship of social dominance of an elite group over the rest of society subordinated for the purpose of economic, social, political, and cultural exploitation. Legitimized by the social contract, justifications for institutional exploitation include safety and security of country, eliminating impediments to progress, and emulating nature's competitive forces that exist in the animal kingdom and reflect human nature.

    From Solon's laws in 6 th century BC Athens until our contemporary neoliberal era, social contract theory presumes that the state is the catalyst for social harmony if not fairness and not for a privileged social class to exploit the rest of society. No legal system has ever been codified that explicitly states its goal is to use of the state as an instrument of exploitation and oppression. In reality however, from ancient Babylon when King Hammurabi codified the first laws in 1780 B.C. until the present when multinational corporations and wealthy individuals directly or through lobbyists exert preponderate influence in public policy the theoretical assumption is one of fairness and justice for all people as a goal for the social contract.

    In the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – biotechnology, nanotechnology, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence – presumably to serve mankind as part of the social contract rather than to exploit more thoroughly and marginalize a large segment of humanity, the persistence of structural exploitation and oppression challenges those with a social conscience and morality rooted in humanist values to question what constitutes societal progress and public interest. Liberal and Christian-Libertarian arguments about free will notwithstanding, it has always been the case that mainstream institutions and the dominant culture indoctrinate people into believing that ending exploitation by changing the social contract is a utopian dream; a domain relegated to poets, philosophers and song writers lacking proper grounding in the reality of mainstream politics largely in the service of the dominant socioeconomic class. The paradox in neoliberal ideology is its emphasis on free choice, while the larger goal is to mold the subjective reality within the neoliberal institutional structure and way of life. The irreconcilable aspects of neoliberalism represent the contradictory goals of the desire to project democratic mask that would allow for popular sovereignty while pursuing capital accumulation under totalitarian methods. http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_contractarianism.html ' http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2017/05/15/indoctrination-and-free-will/

    Social cooperation becomes dysfunctional when distortions and contradictions within the system create large-scale social marginalization exposing the divergence between the promise of the neoliberal social contract and the reality in peoples' lives. To manage the dysfunction by mobilizing popular support, the political elites of both the pluralist and the authoritarian-populist wing operating under the neoliberal political umbrella compete for power by projecting the image of an open democratic society. Intra-class power struggles within the elite social and political classes vying for power distracts from social exploitation because the masses line behind competing elites convinced such competition is the essence of democracy. As long as the majority in society passively acquiesces to the legitimacy of the social contract, even if in practice society is socially unjust, the status quo remains secure until systemic contradictions in the political economy make it unsustainable. https://mises.org/library/profound-significance-social-harmony

    In the last three centuries, social revolutions, upheavals and grassroots movements have demonstrated that people want a social contract that includes workers, women, and marginalized groups into the mainstream and elevates their status economically and politically. In the early 21 st century, there are many voices crying out for a new social contract based on social justice and equality against neoliberal tyranny. However, those faint voices are drowned against the preponderate neoliberal public policy impacting every sector while shaping the individual's worldview and subjective reality. The triumph of neoliberal orthodoxy has deviated from classical liberalism to the degree that dogmatism 'single-thought' process dominates not just economics, not just the social contract, but the very fabric of our humanity. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21598282.2013.761449?journalCode=rict20 ; https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world

    Under neoliberalism, "Uberization" as a way of life is becoming the norm not just in the 'financialization' neoliberal economy resting on speculation rather than productivity but in society as well. The neoliberal ideology has indoctrinated the last two generations that grew up under this system and know no other reality thus taking for granted the neoliberal way of life as natural as the air they breathe. Often working two jobs, working overtime without compensation or taking work home just to keep the job has become part of chasing the dream of merely catching up with higher costs of living. People have accepted perpetual work enmeshed with the capitalist ideology of perpetual economic growth perversely intertwined with progress of civilization. The corporate ideology of "grow or die" at any cost is in reality economic growth confined to the capitalist class, while fewer and fewer people enjoy its fruits and communities, cities, entire countries under neoliberal austerity suffer.

    Carl Boggs, The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere , 2000; https://monthlyreview.org/2007/04/01/the-financialization-of-capitalism/ ; https://permaculturenews.org/2012/06/15/myth-of-perpetual-growth-is-killing-america/

    The incentive for conformity is predicated on the belief that the benefits of civilization would be fairly distributed if not in the present then at some point in the future for one's children or grandchildren; analogous to living a virtuous life in order to enjoy the rewards after death. As proof that the system works for the benefit of society and not just the capitalist class, neoliberal apologists point to stock market gains and surprisingly there is a psychological impact – the wealth effect – on the mass consumer who feels optimistic and borrows to raise consumption. Besides the fact that only a very small percentage of people on the planet own the vast majority of securities, even in the US there is no correlation between stock market performance and living standards. (John Seip and Dee Wood Harper, The Trickle Down Delusion , 2016)
    If we equate the stock market with the 'wealth of the nation', then in 1982 when the S & P index stood at 117 rising to 2675 in December 2017, the logical conclusion is that living standards across the US rose accordingly. However, this is the period when real incomes for workers and the middle class actually declined despite sharp rise in productivity and immense profits reflected in the incomes gap reflected in the bottom 90% vs. the top 10%. This is also the period when we see the striking divergence between wealth accumulation for the top 1% and a relative decline for the bottom 90%. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/upshot/income-inequality-united-states.html ; https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality/

    A research study compiled by the pro-organized labor non-profit think tank 'Economic Policy Institute' stresses the divergence between productivity and real wages. While the top 0.01% of America's experienced 386% income growth between 1980 and 1914, the bottom 90% suffered 3% real income drop. Whereas in 1980 income share for the bottom 90% stood at 65% and for the top 1% it stood at 10%, by 2014 the bottom 90% held just half of the income, while the top 1% owned 21%. This dramatic income divergence, which has been shown in hundreds of studies and not even neoliberal billionaires deny their validity, took place under the shift toward the full implementation of the neoliberal social contract. It is significant to note that such income concentration resulting from fiscal policy, corporate subsidy policy, privatization and deregulation has indeed resulted in higher productivity exactly as neoliberal apologists have argued. However, higher worker productivity and higher profits has been made possible precisely because of income transfer from labor to capitalist. http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ ; https://aneconomicsense.org/2015/07/13/the-highly-skewed-growth-of-incomes-since-1980-only-the-top-0-5-have-done-better-than-before/

    "Real hourly compensation of production, nonsupervisory workers who make up 80 percent of the workforce, also shows pay stagnation for most of the period since 1973, rising 9.2 percent between 1973 and 2014.Net productivity grew 1.33 percent each year between 1973 and 2014, faster than the meager 0.20 percent annual rise in median hourly compensation. In essence, about 15 percent of productivity growth between 1973 and 2014 translated into higher hourly wages and benefits for the typical American worker. Since 2000, the gap between productivity and pay has risen even faster. The net productivity growth of 21.6 percent from 2000 to 2014 translated into just a 1.8 percent rise in inflation-adjusted compensation for the median worker (just 8 percent of net productivity growth).Since 2000, more than 80 percent of the divergence between a typical (median) worker's pay growth and overall net productivity growth has been driven by rising inequality (specifically, greater inequality of compensation and a falling share of income going to workers relative to capital owners).Over the entire 1973–2014 period, rising inequality explains over two-thirds of the productivity–pay divergence. " (Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel, "Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker's Pay Why It Matters and Why It's Real" in Economic Policy Institute, 2015, http://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-divergence-between-productivity-and-a-typical-workers-pay-why-it-matters-and-why-its-real/

    The average corporate tax rate in the world has been cut in half in the last two decades from about 40% to 22%, with the effective rate actually paid lower than the official rate. This represents a massive transfer of wealth to the highest income brackets drained from the working class. More than half-a-century ago, American anthropologist Jules Henry wrote that: "The fact that our society places no limit on wealth while making it accessible to all helps account for the 'feverish' quality Tocqueville sensed in American civilization." Culture Against Man (1963). The myth that the neoliberal policies in the information age lead toward a society richer for all people is readily refuted by the reality of huge wealth distribution gaps resulting from 'informational capitalism' backed by the corporate welfare state.

    Capital accumulation not just in the US but on a world scale without a ceiling has resulted in more thorough exploitation of workers and in a less socially just society today than in the early 1960s when Jules Henry was writing and it is headed increasingly toward authoritarian models of government behind the very thin veneer of meaningless elections. Against this background of unfettered neoliberalism, social responsibility is relegated to issues ranging from corporate-supported sustainable development in which large businesses have a vested interest as part of future designs on capital accumulation, to respecting lifestyle and cultural and religious freedoms within the existing social contract. (Dieter Plehwe et al. eds., Neoliberal Hegemony , 2006; Carl Ferenbach and Chris Pinney, " Toward a 21st Century Social Contract" Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Vol. 24, No 2, 2012; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-6622.2012.00372.x/abstract

    At its Annual conference in 2017 where representatives from the 'Fortune 500', academia, think tanks, NGOs, and government, business consultancy group BSR provided the following vision under the heading "A 21 st Century Social Contract" : "The nature of work is changing very rapidly. Old models of lifelong employment via business and a predictable safety net provided by government are no longer assured in a new demographic, economic, and political environment. We see these trends most clearly in the rise of the "gig economy," in which contingent workers (freelancers, independent contractors, consultants, or other outsourced and non-permanent workers) are hired on a temporary or part-time basis. These workers make up more than 90 percent of new job creation in European countries, and by 2020, it is estimated that more than 40 percent of the U.S. workforce will be in contingent jobs." https://bsr17.org/agenda/sessions/the-21st-century-social-contract

    Representing multinational corporate members and proud sponsors of sustainable development solutions within the neoliberal model, BSR applauded the aspirations and expectations of today's business people that expect to concentrate even more capital as the economy becomes more 'UBERized' and reliant on the new digital technology. Despite fear and anxiety about a bleak techno-science future as another mechanism to keep wages as close to subsistence if not below that level as possible, peoples' survival instinct forces them to adjust their lives around the neoliberal social contract. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531726/technology-and-inequality/

    Reflecting the status quo, the media indoctrinate people to behave as though systemic exploitation, oppression, division, and marginalization are natural while equality and the welfare of the community represent an anathema to bourgeois civilization. What passes as the 'social norm', largely reflects the interests of the socioeconomic elites propagating the 'legitimacy' of their values while their advocates vilify values that place priority on the community aspiring to achieve equality and social justice. (Robert E. Watkins, " Turning the Social Contract Inside Out: Neoliberal Governance and Human Capital in Two Days, One Night" , 2016).

    The neoliberal myth that the digital technological revolution and the 'knowledge based economy' (KBE) of endless innovation is the catalyst not only to economic growth but to the preservation of civilization and welfare of society has proved hollow in the last four decades. Despite massive innovation in the domain of the digital and biotech domains, socioeconomic polarization and environmental degradation persist at much higher rates today than in the 1970s. Whether in the US, the European Union or developing nations, the neoliberal promise of 'prospering together' has been a farce. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tsq.12106/full ; http://www.ricerchestoriche.org/?p=749

    Neoliberal myths about upward linear progress across all segments of society and throughout the world notwithstanding, economic expansion and contraction only result in greater capital concentration. "The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, pulled out all 43,060 multinational corporations and the share ownerships linking them to construct a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.The model revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms, the "real" economy, representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a super-entity of 147 even more tightly knit companies (all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity) that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network." https://weeklybolshevik.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/imperialism-and-the-concentration-of-capital/ http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf .

    With each passing recessionary cycle of the past four decades working class living standards have retreated and never recovered. Although the techno-science panacea has proved a necessary myth and a distraction from the reality of capital concentration, considering that innovation and technology are integral parts of the neoliberal system, the media, politicians, business elites, corporate-funded think tanks and academics continue to promote the illusive 'modernist dream' that only a small segment of society enjoys while the rest take pride living through it vicariously. ( Laurence Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynski, "Neoliberalism and technology: Perpetual innovation or perpetual crisis?"

    https://www.academia.edu/1937914/Neoliberalism_and_technology

    Rooted in militarism and police-state policies, the culture of fear is one of the major ways that the neoliberal regime perpetually distracts people from structural exploitation and oppression in a neoliberal society that places dogmatic focus on atomism. Despite the atomistic value system as an integral part of neoliberalism, neoliberals strongly advocate a corporate state welfare system. Whether supporting pluralism and diversity or rightwing populists, neoliberals agree that without the state buttressing the private sector, the latter will collapse. Author of Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (2007) David Ciepley argues in "The Corporate Contradictions of Neoliberalism" that the system's contradictions have led to the authoritarian political model as its only option moving forward.

    "Neoliberalism was born in reaction against totalitarian statism, and matured at the University of Chicago into a program of state-reduction that was directed not just against the totalitarian state and the socialist state but also (and especially) against the New Deal regulatory and welfare state. It is a self-consciously reactionary ideology that seeks to roll back the status quo and institutionalize (or, on its own understanding, re-institutionalize) the "natural" principles of the market. But the contradiction between its individualist ideals and our corporate reality means that the effort to institutionalize it, oblivious to this contradiction, has induced deep dysfunction in our corporate system, producing weakened growth, intense inequality, and coercion. And when the ideological support of a system collapses -- as appears to be happening with neoliberalism -- then either the system will collapse, or new levels of coercion and manipulation will be deployed to maintain it. This appears to be the juncture at which we have arrived." https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/corporate-contradictions-neoliberalism/

    Adhering to a tough law-and-order policy, neoliberals have legalized large-scale criminal activity perpetrated by capitalists against society while penalizing small-scale crimes carried out mostly by people in the working class and the marginalized lumpenproletariat . Regardless of approaches within the neoliberal social contract, neoliberal politicians agree on a lengthy prison sentences for street gangs selling narcotics while there is no comparable punishment when it comes to banks laundering billions including from narcotics trafficking, as Deutsche Bank among other mega banks in the US and EU; fixing rates as Barclays among others thus defrauding customers of billions; or creating fake accounts as Wells Fargo , to say nothing of banks legally appropriating billions of dollars from employees and customers and receiving state (taxpayer) funding in times of 'banking crises'. Although it seems enigmatic that there is acquiescence for large scale crimes with the institutional cover of 'legitimacy' by the state and the hegemonic culture, the media has conditioned the public to shrug off structural exploitation as an integral part of the social contract. http://theweek.com/articles/729052/brief-history-crime-corruption-malfeasance-american-banks ; https://www.globalresearch.ca/corruption-in-the-european-union-scandals-in-banking-fraud-and-secretive-ttip-negotiations/5543935

    Neoliberalism's reach does not stop with the de-criminalization of white-collar crime or the transfer of economic policy from the public sector to corporations in order to reverse social welfare policies. Transferring sweeping policy powers from the public to the corporate sector, neoliberalism's tentacles impact everything from labor and environment to health, education and foreign policy into the hands of the state-supported corporate sector in an effort to realize even greater capital concentration at an even greater pace. This has far reaching implications in peoples' lives around the world in everything from their work and health to institutions totalitarian at their core but projecting an image of liberal democracy on the surface. (Noam Chomsky and R. W. McChesney, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order , 2011; Pauline Johnson, "Sociology and the Critique of Neoliberalism" European Journal of Social Theory , 2014

    http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1368431014534354?journalCode=esta

    Comprehensive to the degree that it aims to diminish the state's role by having many of its functions privatized, neoliberalism's impact has reached into monetary policy trying to supplant it with rogue market forces that test the limits of the law and hard currencies. The creation of cryptocurrencies among them BITCOIN that represents the utopian dream of anarcho-libertarians interested in influencing if not dreaming of ultimately supplanting central banks' role in monetary policy is an important dimension of neoliberal ideology. Techno-utopians envisioning the digital citizen in a neoliberal society favor a 'gypsy economy' operating on a digital currency outside the purview of the state's regulatory reach where it is possible to transfer and hide money while engaging in the ultimate game of speculation. ( https://btctheory.com ; Samuel Valasco and Leonardo Medina, The Social Nature of Cryptocurrencies , 2013)

    Credited as the neoliberal prophet whose work and affiliate organizations multinational corporations funded, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek favored market forces to determine monetary policy rather than having government in that role working behind central banks. Aside from the fact that central banks cater to capital and respond to markets and no other constituency, Hayek's proposal ( The Denationalization of Money , 1976) was intended to permit the law of the 'free market' (monetary speculation) determine policy that would impact peoples' living standards. Hence capital accumulation would not be constrained by government regulatory measures and the coordination of monetary policy between central banks. In short, the law of unfettered banking regulation would theoretically result in greater economic growth, no matter the consequences owing to the absence of banking regulatory measures that exacerbate contracting economic cycles such as in 2008. www.voltaire.org/article30058.html )

    In December 2017, the UK and EU warned that cryptocurrencies are used in criminal enterprises, including money laundering and tax evasion. Nevertheless, crypto-currency reflects both the ideology and goals of capital accumulation of neoliberals gaining popularity among speculators in the US and other countries. Crypto-currencyfulfills the neoliberal speculator's dream by circumventing the IMF basket of reserved currencies on which others trade while evading regulatory constraints and all mechanisms of legal accountability for the transfer of money and tax liability.

    Although a tiny fraction of the global monetary system, computer networks make crypto-currency a reality for speculators, tax evaders, those engaged in illegal activities and even governments like Venezuela under Nocolas Maduro trying to pump liquidity into the oil-dependent economy suffering from hyperinflation and economic stagnation If the crypto-currency system can operate outside the purview of the state, then the neoliberal ideology of trusting the speculator rather than the government would be proved valid about the superfluous role of central banks and monetary centralization, a process that capitalism itself created for the harmonious operation of capitalism. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/04/bitcoin-uk-eu-plan-cryptocurrency-price-traders-anonymity ; http://www.lanacion.com.ar/2099017-venezuela-inflacion-nicolas-maduro-crisis-precios

    Indicative of the success of the neoliberal ideology's far reaching impact in economic life cryptocurrencies' existencealso reflects the crisis of capitalism amid massive assaults on middle class and working class living standards in the quest for greater capital concentration. In an ironic twist, the very neoliberal forces that promote cryptocurrencies decry their use by anti-Western nations – Iran, Venezuela, and Russia among others.The criticism of anti-Western governments resorting to cryptocurrenciesis based on their use as a means of circumventing the leverage that reserve currencies like the dollar and euro afford to the West over non-Western nations. This is only one of a few contradictions that neoliberalism creates and undermines the system it strives to build just as it continues to foster its ideology as the only plausible one to pursue globally. Another contradiction is the animosity toward crypto-currencies from mainstream financial institutions that want to maintain a monopoly on government-issued currency which is where they make their profits. As the world's largest institutional promoter of neoliberalism, the IMF has cautioned not to dismiss cryptocurrencies because they could have a future, or they may actually 'be the future'. https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-unlimited-potential-lies-in-apolitical-core/ ; http://fortune.com/2017/10/02/bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-imf-christine-lagarde/

    After the "Washington Consensus" of 1989, IMF austerity policies are leverage to impose neoliberal policies globally have weakened national institutions from health to education and trade unions that once formed a social bond for workers aspiring to an integrative socially inclusive covenant in society rather than marginalization. The IMF uses austerity policies for debt relief as leverage to have the government provide more favorable investment conditions and further curtail the rights of labor with everything from ending collective bargaining to introducing variations of "right-to-work" laws" that prohibit trade unions from forcing collective strikes, collecting dues or signing the collective contract. Justified in the name of 'capitalist efficiency', weakening organized labor and its power of collective bargaining has been an integral part of the neoliberal social contract as much in the US and UK as across the rest of the world, invariably justified by pointing to labor markets where workers earn the lowest wages. (B. M. Evans and S. McBride, Austerity: The Lived Experience , 2017; Vicente Berdayes, John W. Murphy, eds. Neoliberalism, Economic Radicalism, and the Normalization of Violence , 2016).

    Although many in the mainstream media took notice of the dangers of neoliberalism leading toward authoritarianism after Trump's election, a few faint voices have been warning about this inevitability since the early 1990s. Susan George, president of the Transnational Institute, has argued that neoliberalism is contrary to democracy, it is rooted in Social Darwinism, it undermines the liberal social contract under which that people assume society operates, but it is the system that governments and international organization like the IMF have been promoting.

    "Over the past twenty years, the IMF has been strengthened enormously. Thanks to the debt crisis and the mechanism of conditionality, it has moved from balance of payments support to being quasi-universal dictator of so-called "sound" economic policies, meaning of course neo-liberal ones. The World Trade Organisation was finally put in place in January 1995 after long and laborious negotiations, often rammed through parliaments which had little idea what they were ratifying. Thankfully, the most recent effort to make binding and universal neo-liberal rules, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, has failed, at least temporarily. It would have given all rights to corporations, all obligations to governments and no rights at all to citizens. The common denominator of these institutions is their lack of transparency and democratic accountability. This is the essence of neo-liberalism. It claims that the economy should dictate its rules to society, not the other way around. Democracy is an encumbrance, neo-liberalism is designed for winners, not for voters who, necessarily encompass the categories of both winners and losers."

    https://www.tni.org/en/article/short-history-neoliberalism

    Those on the receiving end of neoliberalism's Social Darwinist orientation are well aware of public policy's negative impact on their lives but they feel helpless to confront the social contract. According to opinion polls, people around the world realize there is a huge gap between what political and business leaders, and international organizations claim about institutions designed to benefit all people and the reality of marginalization. The result is loss of public confidence in the social contract theoretically rooted in consent and democracy. "When elected governments break the "representative covenant" and show complete indifference to the sufferings of citizens, when democracy is downgraded to an abstract set of rules and deprived of meaning for much of the citizenry, many will be inclined to regard democracy as a sham, to lose confidence in and withdraw their support for electoral institutions. Dissatisfaction with democracy now ranges from 40 percent in Peru and Bolivia to 59 percent in Brazil and 62 percent in Colombia. (Boron, "Democracy or Neoliberalism", http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR21.5/boron.html )

    Not just in developing nations operating under authoritarian capitalist model to impose neoliberal policies, but in advanced countries people recognize that the bourgeois freedom, democracy and justice are predicated on income. Regardless of whether the regime operates under a pluralistic neoliberal regime or rightwing populist one, the former much more tolerant of diversity than the latter, the social contract goals are the same. In peoples' lives around the world social exploitation has risen under neoliberal policies whether imposed the nation-state, a larger entity such as the EU, or international organizations such as the IMF. Especially for the European and US middle class, but also for Latin American and African nations statistics show that the neoliberal social contract has widened the poor-rich gap.

    In a world where the eight wealthiest individuals own as much wealth as the bottom 50% or 3.6 billion people, social exploitation and oppression has become normal because the mainstream institutions present it in such light to the world and castigate anyone critical of institutionalized exploitation and oppression. Rightwing populist demagogues use nationalism, cultural conservatism and vacuous rhetoric about the dangers of big capital and 'liberal elites' to keep the masses loyal to the social contract by faulting the pluralist-liberal politicians rather than the neoliberal social contract. As the neoliberal political economy has resulted in a steady rising income gap and downward social mobility in the past three decades, it is hardly surprising that a segment of the masses lines behind rightwing populist demagogues walking a thin line between bourgeois democracy and Fascism.

    (Alan Wertheimer, Exploitation , 1999; Ruth J. Sample, Exploitation; What is it and why it is Wrong , 2003; http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/31/investing/wells-fargo-fake-accounts/index.html ; https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/5/14/1662227/-Was-suicide-of-Deutsche-Bank-executive-linked-to-Trump-and-Russia-money-laundering

    Seizing power from sovereign states, multinational corporation are pursuing neoliberal policy objectives on a world scale, prompting resistance to the neoliberal social contract which rarely class-based and invariably identity-group oriented manifested through environmental, gender, race, ethnicity, gay, religious and minority groups of different sorts. Regardless of the relentless media campaign to suppress class consciousness, workers are aware that they have common interests and public opinion studies reveal as much. (Susan George, Shadow Sovereigns: How Global Corporations are seizing Power , 2015)

    According to the Pew Research center, the world average for satisfaction with their governments are at 46%, the exact percentage as in the US that ranks about the same as South Africa and much lower than neighboring Canada at 70% and Sweden at 79%. " Publics around the globe are generally unhappy with the functioning of their nations' political systems. Across the 36 countries asked the question, a global median of 46% say they are very or somewhat satisfied with the way their democracy is working, compared with 52% who are not too or not at all satisfied. Levels of satisfaction vary considerably by region and within regions. Overall, people in the Asia-Pacific region are the most happy with their democracies. At least half in five of the six Asian nations where this question was asked express satisfaction. Only in South Korea is a majority unhappy (69%).

    http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/10/16/many-unhappy-with-current-political-system/

    As confounding as it appears that elements of the disillusioned middle class and working class opt either for the exploitation of pluralist neoliberalism or the exploitation and oppression of rightwing populism expressed somewhat differently in each country, it is not difficult to appreciate the immediacy of a person's concerns for survival like all other species above all else. The assumption of rational behavior in the pursuit of social justice is a bit too much to expect considering that people make irrational choices detrimental to their best interests and to society precisely because the dominant culture has thoroughly indoctrinated them. It seems absurd that indirectly people choose exploitation and oppression for themselves and others in society, but they always have as the dominant culture secular and religious indoctrinates them into accepting exploitation and oppression. (Shaheed Nick Mohammed, Communication and the Globalization of Culture , 2011)

    Throughout Western and Eastern Europe rightwing political parties are experiencing a resurgence not seen since the interwar era, largely because the traditional conservatives moved so far to the right. Even the self-baptized Socialist parties are nothing more than staunch advocates of the same neoliberal status quo as the traditional conservatives. The US has also moved to the right long before the election of Donald Trump who openly espouses suppression of certain fundamental freedoms as an integral part of a pluralistic society. As much as in the US and Europe as in the rest of the world, analysts wonder how could any working class person champion demagogic political leaders whose vacuous populist rhetoric promises 'strong nation" for all but their policies benefit the same socioeconomic elites as the neoliberal politicians.(J. Rydgren (Ed.), Class Politics and the Radical Right , 2012)

    Rooted onclassical liberal values of the Enlightenment, the political and social elites present a social contract that is theoretically all-inclusive and progressive, above all 'fair' because it permits freedom to compete, when in reality the social structure under which capitalism operates necessarily entails exploitation and oppression that makes marginalization very clear even to its staunchest advocates who then endeavor to justify it by advancing theories about individual human traits.

    In 2012 the United States spent an estimated 19.4% of GDP on such social expenditures, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based industrial country think tank. Denmark spent 30.5%, Sweden 28.2% and Germany 26.3%. All of these nations have a lower central government debt to GDP ratio than that of the United States. Why the United States invests relatively less in its social safety net than many other countries and why those expenditures are even at risk in the current debate over debt reduction reflect Americans' conflicted, partisan and often contradictory views on fairness, inequality, the role and responsibility of government and individuals in society and the efficacy of government action. Rooted in value differences, not just policy differences, the debate over the U.S. social contract is likely to go on long after the fiscal cliff issue has been resolved." http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/01/15/public-attitudes-toward-the-next-social-contract/

    The neoliberal model of capitalism spewing forth from core countries to the periphery and embraced by capitalists throughout the world has resulted in greater social inequality, exploitation and oppression, despite proclamations that by pluralist-diversity neoliberals presenting themselves as remaining true to 'democracy'. The tilt to the right endorsed at the ballot box by voters seeking solutions to systemic problems and a more hopeful future indicates that some people demand exclusion and/or punishment of minority social groups in society, as though the exploitation and oppression of 'the other' would vicariously elevate the rest of humanity to a higher plane. Although this marks a dangerous course toward authoritarianism and away from liberal capitalism and Karl Popper's 'Open Society' thesis operating in a pluralistic world against totalitarianism, it brings to surface the essence of neoliberalism which is totalitarian, the very enemy Popper and his neoconservative followers were allegedly trying to prevent. (Calvin Hayes, Popper, Hayek and the Open Society , 2009)

    Social Exclusion, Popular Resistanceand the Future of Neoliberalism

    Social Exclusion

    Every sector of society from the criminal justice system to elderly care has been impacted by neoliberal social marginalization. More significant than any other aspect of neoliberalism, the creation of a chronic debtor classwithout any assets is floating a step above the structurally unemployed and underemployed.The Industrial revolution exacerbated social exclusion producing an underclass left to its own fate by a state that remained faithful to the social contract's laissez philosophy. Composed of vagrants, criminals, chronically unemployed, and people of the streets that British social researcher Henry Mayhew described in London Labour and the London Poor , a work published three years after the revolutions of 1848 that shattered the liberal foundations of Europe, the lumpenproletariat caught the attention of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ( The German Ideology ) interested in the industrial working class movement as the vanguard of the revolution.

    Lacking a class consciousness thus easily exploited by the elites the lumpenproletariat were a product of industrial capitalism's surplus labor that kept wages at or just above subsistence levels, long before European and American trade union struggles were able to secure a living wage.In the last four decades neoliberal policies have created a chronic debtor working class operating under the illusion of integration into the mainstream when in fact their debtor status not only entails social exclusion but relegated to perpetual servitude dependence and never climbing out of it. The neoliberal state is the catalyst to the creation of this new class. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-20/a-164-year-old-idea-helps-explain-the-huge-changes-sweeping-the-world-s-workforce

    In an essay entitled "Labour Relations and Social Movements in the 21st Century"

    Portuguese social scientists Elísio Estanque and Hermes Augusto Costa argue that the manner that neoliberalism has impacted Europe's social structure in both core and periphery countries has given rise to the new precarious working class, often college-degreed, overqualified, and struggling to secure steady employment especially amid recessionary cycles that last longer and run deeper.

    "The panorama of a deep economic crisis which in the last few decades has hit Europe and its Welfare state in particular has had an unprecedented impact on employment and social policies. The neoliberal model and the effects of deregulated and global finance not only question the "European social model" but push sectors of the labour force – with the youngest and well-qualified being prominent – into unemployment or precarious jobs. the sociological and potential socio-political significance of these actionsparticularly as a result of the interconnections that such movements express, both in the sphere of the workplace and industrial system or whether with broader social structures, with special emphasis on the middle classes and the threats of 'proletarianization' that presently hang over them. labour relations of our time are crossed by precariousness and by a new and growing "precariat" which also gave rise to new social movements and new forms of activism and protest." http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/34149/InTech-Labour_relations_and_social_movements_in_the_21st_century.pdf

    'Proletarization' of the declining middle class and downward income pressure for the working class and middle classhas been accompanied by the creation of a growing chronic debtor class in the Western World. Symptomatic of the neoliberal globalist world order, the creation of the debtor class and more broadly social exclusion transcends national borders, ethnicity, gender, culture, etc. Not just at the central government level, but at the regional and local levels, public policy faithfully mimics the neoliberal model resulting in greater social exclusion while there is an effort to convince people that there is no other path to progress although people were free to search; a dogma similar to clerical intercession as the path to spiritual salvation. http://www.isreview.org/issues/58/feat-economy.shtml

    The neoliberal path to salvation has resulted in a staggering 40% of young adults living with relatives out of financial necessity. The number has never been greater at any time in modern US history since the Great Depression, and the situation is not very different for Europe. Burdened with debt, about half of the unemployed youth are unable to find work and most that work do so outside the field of their academic training. According to the OECD, youth unemployment in the US is not confined only to high school dropouts but includes college graduates. Not just across southern Europe and northern Africa, but in most countries the neoliberal economy of massive capital concentration has created a new lumpenproletariat that has no assets and carries debt. Owing to neoliberal policies, personal bankruptcies have risen sharply in the last four decades across the Western World reflecting the downward social mobility and deep impact on the chronically indebted during recessionary cycles. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/53-of-recent-college-grads-are-jobless-or-underemployed-how/256237/ ; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/for-young-americans-living-with-their-parents-is-now-the-norm/ ; Iain Ramsay, Personal Insolvency in the 21st Century: A Comparative Analysis of the US and Europe, 2017)

    Historically, the safe assumption has been that higher education is the key to upward social mobility and financial security, regardless of cyclical economic trends. However, the laws of overproduction apply not only to commodities but to the labor force, especially as the information revolution continues to chip away at human labor. College education is hardly a guarantee to upward social mobility, but often a catalyst to descent into the debtor unemployed class,or minimum wage/seasonalpart time job or several such jobs. The fate of the college-educated falling into the chronic debtor class is part of a much larger framework, namely the 'financialization' of the economy that is at the core of neoliberalism. ( Vik Loveday, "Working-class participation, middle-class aspiration? Value, upward mobility and symbolic indebtedness in higher education."The Sociological Review , September 2014) Beyond the simplisticsuggestion of 'more training' to keep up with tech changes, the root cause of social exclusion and the chronic debtor class revolves around the 'financialization' of the neoliberal globalist economy around which central banks make monetary policy. Since the beginning of the Thatcher-Reagan era, advanced capitalist countries led by the US conducted policy to promote the centrality of financial markets as the core of the economy. This entails resting more on showing quarterly profit even at the expense of taking on debt, lower productivity and long-term sustainability, or even breaking a company apart and dismissing workers because it would add shareholder value. Therefore, the short-term financial motives and projection of market performance carry far more weight than any other consideration.

    Symptomatic of a combination of deregulation and the evolution of capitalism especially in core countries from productive to speculative, financialization has transformed the world economy. Enterprises from insurance companies to brokerage firms and banks like Goldman Sachs involved in legal and quasi-legal practices, everything from the derivatives market to helping convert a country's sovereign debt into a surplus while making hefty profits has been part of the financialization economy that speeds up capital concentration and creates a wider rich-poor gap. Housing, health, pension systems, health care and personal consumption are all impacted by financialization that concentrates capital through speculation rather than producing anything from capital goods to consumer products and services. (Costas Lapavitsas, The Financialization of Capitalism: 'Profiting without producing' http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2013.853865

    Billionaire speculator George Soros has observed that market speculation not only drives prices higher, especially of commodities on a world scale, but the inevitability of built-in booms and busts are disruptive simply because a small group of people have secured a legal means for capital accumulation. At the outbreak of the US stock market collapse followed by the 'great recession' of 2008, the European Network and Debt and Development (EURODAD) published an article critical of financialization and its impact on world hunger.

    "Do you enjoy rising prices? Everybody talks about commodities – with the Agriculture Euro Fund you can benefit from the increase in value of the seven most important agricultural commodities." With this advertisement the Deutsche Bankt tried in spring 2008 to attract clients for one of its investment funds. At the same time, there were hunger revolts in Haiti, Cameroon and other developing countries, because many poor could no longer pay the exploding food prices. In fact, between the end of 2006 and March 2008 the prices for the seven most important commodities went up by 71 per cent on average, for rice and grain the increase was 126 per cent. The poor are most hit by the hike in prices. Whereas households in industrialised countries spend 10 -20 per cent for food, in low-income countries they spend 60 – 80 per cent. As a result, the World Bank forecasts an increase in the number of people falling below the absolute poverty line by more than 100 million. Furthermore, the price explosion has negative macroeconomic effects: deterioration of the balance of payment, fuelling inflation and new debt." http://eurodad.org/uploadedfiles/whats_new/news/food%20speculation%202%20pager%20final.pdf

    Someone has to pay for the speculative nature of financialization, and the labor force in all countries is the first to do so through higher indirect taxes, cuts in social programs and jobs and wages for the sake of stock performance. Stock markets around which public policy is conducted have eroded the real economy while molding a culture of financialization of the last two generations a large percentage of which has been swimming in personal debt reflecting the debt-ridden financialization economy. Contrary to claims by politicians, business leaders and the media that the neoliberal system of financialization is all about creating jobs and helping to diffuse income to the middle class and workers, the only goal of financialization is wealth concentration while a larger debtor class and social marginalization are the inevitable results. It is hardly surprising that people world-wide believe the political economy is rigged by the privileged class to maintain its status and the political class is the facilitator. http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41359-financialization-has-turned-the-global-economy-into-a-house-of-cards-an-interview-with-gerald-epstein ; Costas Lapavitsa, Financialization in Crisis, 2013; Rona Foroohar, Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street , 2016)

    Despite efforts by pluralist and populist neoliberals throughout the world to use 'culture wars' and identity politics as distractionwhile deemphasizing the role of the state as the catalyst in the neoliberal social contract, the contradictions that the political economy exposes the truth about the socially unjustsociety that marginalizes the uneducated poor and college-educated indebted alike.Not to deemphasize the significance of global power distribution based on the Westphalian nation-state model and regional blocs such as the European Union, but neoliberals are the ones who insist on the obsolete nation-state that the international market transcends, thus acknowledging the preeminence of capitalism in the social contract and the subordination of national sovereignty to international capital and financialization of the economy. After all, the multinational corporation operating in different countries is accountable only to its stockholders, not to the nation-state whose role is to advance corporate interests.

    No matter how rightwing populists try to distract people from the real cause of social exclusion and marginalization by focusing onnationalist rhetoric, marginalized social groups and Muslim or Mexican legal or illegal immigrantshave no voice in public policy but financialization speculators do. In an article entitled "The Politics of Public Debt: Neoliberalism, capitalist development, and the restructuring of the state", Wolfgang Streeck concludes that neoliberalism's systemic rewards provide a disincentive for capitalists to abandon financialization in favor of productivity. "Why should the new oligarchs be interested in their countries' future productive capacities and present democratic stability if, apparently, they can be rich without it, processing back and forth the synthetic money produced for them at no cost by a central bank for which the sky is the limit, at each stage diverting from it hefty fees and unprecedented salaries, bonuses and profits as long as it is forthcoming -- and then leave their country to its remaining devices and withdraw to some privately owned island?

    http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/02/the-politics-of-public-debt/

    An important difference between pluralists and rightwing populists in their approach to the state's role is that the former advocate for a strong legislative branch and weaker executive, while rightwing populists want a strong executive and weak legislative. However, both political camps agree about advancing market hegemony nationally and internationally and both support policies that benefit international and domestic capital, thus facilitating the convergence of capitalist class interests across national borders with the symptomatic results of social exclusion. ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718508000924 ; Vicente Navarro, "The Worldwide Class Struggle" https://monthlyreview.org/2006/09/01/the-worldwide-class-struggle/

    Regardless of vacuous rhetoric about a weak state resulting from neoliberal policies, the state in core countries where financialization prevailshas been and remains the catalyst for class hegemony as has been the case since the nascent stage of capitalism. Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan strengthened the corporate welfare state while openly declaring war against trade unions and by extension on the working class that neoliberals demonize as the enemy of economic progress. As statistics below illustrate, the debtor class expanded rapidly after 1980 when the financialization economy took off, reaching its highest point after the subprime-induced great recession in 2008. Under neoliberal globalist policies, governments around the world followed theReagan-Thatcher model to facilitate over-accumulation of capital in the name of competition. (Montgomerie Johnna, Neoliberalism and the Making of the Subprime Borrower , 2010)

    Whether the state is promoting neoliberal policies under a pluralist or authoritarian models, the neoliberal culture has designated labor as the unspoken enemy, especially organized labor regardless of whether the ruling parties have co-opted trade unions. In the struggle for capital accumulation under parasitic financialization policies, the state's view of labor as the enemy makes social conflict inevitable despite the obvious contradiction that the 'enemy-worker' is both the mass consumer on whom the economy depends for expansion and development. Despite this contradiction, neoliberals from firms such as Goldman Sachs has many of its former executives not just in top positions of the US government but world-wide, no matter who is in power. Neoliberal policy resulting in social exclusion starts with international finance capitalism hiding behind the pluralist and rightwing populist masks of politicians desperately vying for power to conduct public policy.

    https://www.investopedia.com/news/26-goldman-sachs-alumni-who-run-world-gs/

    Just as the serfs were aware in the Middle Ages that Lords and Bishops determined the fate of all down here on earth before God in Heaven had the last word, people today realize the ubiquitous power of capitalists operating behind the scenes, and in some case as with Trump in the forefront of public-policy that results in social exclusion and rising inequality in the name of market fundamentalism promising to deliver the benefits to all people. Neoliberalism has created a chronicdebtor class that became larger after the 2008 recession and will continue growing with each economic contracting cycle in decades to come. Despite its efforts to keep one step ahead of bankruptcy, the identity of the new chronic debtor class rests with the neoliberal status quo, often with the rightwing populist camp that makes rhetorical overtures to the frustrated working classthat realize financialization benefits a small percentage of wealthy individuals.

    Personal debt has skyrocketed, reaching $12.58 trillion in the US in 2016, or 80% of GDP. The irony is that the personal debt level is 2016 was the highest since the great recession of 2008 and it is expected to continue much higher, despite the economic recovery and low unemployment. Wage stagnation and higher costs of health, housing and education combined with higher direct and indirect taxes to keep public debt at manageable levels will continue to drive more people into the debtor class. Although some European countries such as Germany and France have lower household debt relative to GDP, all advanced and many developing nations have experienced a sharp rise in personal debt because of deregulation, privatization, and lower taxes on the wealthy with the burden falling on the mass consumer. Hence the creation of a permanent debtor class whose fortunes rest on maintaining steady employment and/or additional part-time employment to meet loan obligations and keep one step ahead of declaring bankruptcy. Austerity policies imposed either by the government through tight credit in advanced capitalist countries or IMF loan conditionality in developing and semi-developed nations the result in either case is lower living standards and a rising debtor class. http://fortune.com/2017/02/19/america-debt-financial-crisis-bubble/

    Maurizio Lazzarato's The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition argues that neoliberalism has created a debtor-creditorrelationship which has supplanted the worker-capitalist dichotomy, an argument that others focusing on the financialization of the economy have made as well. Although in Keynesian economics public and private debt was a stimulant for capitalist growth amid the contracting cycle of the economy, the neoliberal era created the permanent chronic debtor class that finds it difficult to extricate itself from that status. Evident after the deep recession of the subprime-financialization-induced recession in 2008, this issue attracted the attention of some politicians and political observers who realized theconvergence of the widening debtor class with the corresponding widening of the rich-poor income gap.

    By making both private and public debt, an integral part of the means of production, the neoliberal system has reshaped social life and social relationships because the entire world economy is debt-based. Servicing loans entails lower living standards for the working class in advanced capitalist countries, and even lower in the rest of the world, but it also means integrating the debtor into the system more closely than at any time in history. While it is true that throughout the history of civilization human beings from China and India to Europe have used various systems of credit to transact business (David Graeber, Debt: the First 5000 Years , 2014), no one would suggest reverting back to debt-slavery as part of the social structure. Yet, neoliberalism has created the 'indebted man' as part of a policythat has resulted in social asymmetrical power,aiming to speed up capital accumulation and maintain market hegemony in society while generating greater social exclusion. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2013/87E0

    Ever since the British Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807, followed by a number of other European governments in the early 1800s, there was an assumption that slave labor is inconsistent with free labor markets as well as with the liberal social contract rooted in individual freedom. Nevertheless, at the core of neoliberal capitalismUS consumer debt as of October 2017 stood at $3.8 trillion in a 419 trillion economy. Debt-to-personal income ratio is at 160%; college student debt runs at approximately $1.5 trillion, with most of that since 2000; mortgage debt has tripled since 1955, with an alarming 8 million people delinquent on their payments and the foreclosure rate hovering at 4.5% or three times higher than postwar average; consumer debt has risen 1,700 since 1971 to above $1 trillion, and roughly half of Americans are carrying monthly credit debt with an average rate of 14%. The debt problem is hardly better for Europe where a number of countries have a much higher personal debt per capita than the US.In addition to personal debt, public debt has become a burden on the working class in so far as neoliberal politicians and the IMF are using as a pretext to impose austerity conditions, cut entitlements and social programs amid diminished purchasing power because of inflationary asset values and higher taxes. https://www.thebalance.com/consumer-debt-statistics-causes-and-impact-3305704 ; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/business/dealbook/household-debt-united-states.html

    While personal debt is often but not always a reflection of a consumerist society, personal debt encompasses everything from education to health care costs in times when the digital/artificial intelligence economy is creating a surplus labor force that results in work instability and asymmetrical social relations. Technology-automation-induced unemployment driving down living standards creates debtor-workers chasing the technology to keep up with debt payments in order to survive until the next payment is due. Considering the financial system backed by a legal framework is established to favor creditors, especially given the safeguards and protections accorded to creditors in the past four decades, there are many blatant and overt ways that the state uses to criminalize poverty and debt. In 2015, for example, Montana became the first state not to take the driver's license of those delinquent on their student debt, thus decriminalizing debt in this one aspect, though hardly addressing the larger issue of the underlying causes of debt and social exclusion. https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:4b8gtht779 ; https://lumpenproletariat.org/tag/neoliberalism/

    In an article entitled "Torturing the Poor, German-Style" , Thomas Klikauer stressed that the weakening of the social welfare state took place under the Social Democratic Party (SPD)-Green Party coalition (1998-2005) government pursuing pluralist neoliberal policies. Although historically the SPD had forged a compromise that would permit for the social inclusion of labor into the institutional mainstream, by the 1990s, theSPD once rooted in socialism had fully embraced neoliberalism just as the British Labour Party and all socialist partiers of Europe pursuing social exclusion. Klilauer writes: "Germany's chancellor [Gerhard] Schröder (SPD) –known as the "Comrade of the Bosses"– no longer sought to integrate labour into capitalism, at least not the Lumpenproletariat or precariate . These sections of society are now deliberately driven into mass poverty, joining the growing number of working poor on a scale not seen in Germany perhaps since the 1930s." https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/20/torturing-the-poor-german-style/

    No different than working class people in other countries need more than one job to keep up with debt and living expenses, so do three million Germans (rising from 150,000 in 2003) that have the privilege of living in Europe's richest nation. Just as the number of the working poor has been rising in Germany, so have they across the Western World. Social exclusion and the expansion of the debtor class in Germany manifested itself in the national elections of 2017 where for the first time since the interwar era a political party carrying the legacy of Nazism, the Alternative fur Deutchland (AfD), founded by elite ultra-conservatives, captured 13% of the vote to become third-largest party and giving a voice of neo-Nazis who default society's neoliberal ills to Muslims and immigrants. Rejecting the link between market fundamentalism that both the SPD and German conservatives pursued in the last three decades, neoliberal apologists insist that the AfD merely reflects a Western-wide anti-Muslim trend unrelated to social exclusion and the policies that have led to Germany's new lumpenproletariat and working poor. https://crimethinc.com/2017/10/01/the-rise-of-neo-fascism-in-germany-alternative-fur-deutschland-enters-the-parliament ; https://www.jku.at/icae/content/e319783/e319785/e328125/wp59_ger.pdf

    Interestingly, US neoliberal policies also go hand-in-hand with Islamophobia and the war on terror under both Democrat and Republican administrations, although the pluralist-diversity neoliberals have been more careful to maintain a politically-correct rhetoric. Just as in Germany and the rest of Europe, there is a direct correlation in the US between the rise in social exclusion ofMuslim and non-Muslim immigrants and minorities and the growing trend of rightwing populism. There is no empirical foundationto arguments that rightwing populism whether in Germany or the US has no historical roots and it is unconnected both to domestic and foreign policies. Although the neoliberal framework in which rightwing populism operates and which creates social exclusion and the new chronic debtor class clashes with neoliberal pluralism that presents itself as democratic, structural exploitation is built into the social contract thus generating grassroots opposition.

    https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/neoliberal-policies-go-hand-in-hand-with-social-exclusion/

    Grassroots Resistance to Neoliberalism

    Even before the great recession of 2008, there were a number of grassrootsgroups against neoliberal globalism both in advanced and developing nations. Some found expression in social media, others at the local level focused on the impact of neoliberal policies in the local community, and still others attempted to alter public policy through cooperation with state entities and/or international organizations. The most important anti-neoliberal grassroots organizations have been in Brazil ( Homeless Workers' Movement and Landless Workers' Movement), South Africa (Abahlali baseMjondolo, Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, Landless Peoples' Movement), Mexico (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), Haiti (Fanmi Lavalas) and India (Narmada Bachao Andolan).

    The vast majority of organizations claiming to be fighting against neoliberal policies are appendages either of the pluralist or the rightwing populist political camp both whose goal is to co-opt the masses as part of their popular base. The anti-globalization movement and by implication anti-neoliberal includes elements from the entire political spectrum from left to ultra-right. From India, to Bangladesh, from South Africa to Brazil, and from the US, France, and the UK, working class resistance to neoliberal globalism has been directly or indirectly co-opted and often de-politicized by corporate-funded or government-funded NGOs and by 'reformist' local and international organizations.

    https://ssir.org/articles/entry/a_neoliberal_takeover_of_social_entrepreneurship ; http://anticsr.com/ngos-csr/

    By promoting measures invariably in the lifestyle domain but also some social welfare and civil rights issues such as women's rights, renter's rights, etc, the goals of organizations operating within the neoliberal structure is not social inclusion by altering the social contract, but sustaining the status quo by eliminating popular opposition through co-optation. It is hardly a coincidence that the rise of the thousands of NGOs coincided with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, most operating under the guise of aiding the poor, protecting human rights and the environment, and safeguarding individualism. Well-funded by corporations, corporate foundations and governments, NGOs are the equivalent of the 19 th century missionaries, using their position as ideological preparatory work for Western-imposed neoliberal policies. http://socialistreview.org.uk/310/friends-poor-or-neo-liberalism ; https://zeroanthropology.net/2014/08/28/civil-society-ngos-and-saving-the-needy-imperial-neoliberalism/

    On the receiving end of corporate and/or government-funded NGOs promoting the neoliberal agenda globally, some leading grassroots movements that advocate changing the neoliberal status quo contend that it is better to 'win' on a single issue such as gay rights, abortion, higher minimum wage, etc. at the cost of co-optation into neoliberal system than to have nothing at all looking in from the outside. Their assumption is that social exclusion can be mitigated one issue at a time through reform from within the neoliberal institutional structure that grassroots organizations deem as the enemy. This is exactly what the pluralist neoliberals are promoting as well to co-opt grassroots opposition groups.

    https://ecpr.eu/Events/PaperDetails.aspx?PaperID=34958&EventID=96

    Partly because governmental and non-governmental organizations posing as reformist have successfully co-opted grassroots movements often incorporating them into the neoliberal popular base, popular resistance has not been successful despite social media and cell phones that permit instant communication. This was certainly the case with the Arab Spring uprisings across North Africa-Middle East where genuine popular opposition to neoliberal policies of privatization, deregulation impacting everything from health care toliberalizing rent controls led to the uprising. In collaboration with the indigenous capitalists, political and military elites, Western governments directly and through NGOs were able to subvert and then revert to neoliberal policies once post-Arab Spring regimes took power in the name of 'reform' invariably equated with neoliberal policies. https://rs21.org.uk/2014/10/06/adam-hanieh-on-the-gulf-states-neoliberalism-and-liberation-in-the-middle-east/

    In "Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor" Jim Yong Kim ed., 2000) contributing authors illustrate in case studies of several countries how the neoliberal status quo has diminished the welfare of billions of people in developing nations for the sake of growth that simply translates into even greater wealth concentration and misery for the world's poor. According to the study: "100 countries have undergone grave economic decline over the past three decades. Per capita income in these 100 countries is now lower than it was 10, 15, 20 or in some cases even 30 years ago. In Africa, the average household consumes 20 percent less today than it did 25 years ago. Worldwide, more than 1 billion people saw their real incomes fall during the period 1980-1993." http://www.mit.edu/~thistle/v13/2/imf.html

    Anti-neoliberal groups assume different forms, depending on the nation's history, social and political elites, the nature of institutions and the degree it has been impacted by neoliberal policies that deregulate and eliminate as much of the social safety net as workers will tolerate. Even the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) that experienced rapid growth from the early 1990s until the great recession of 2008 have not escaped mass opposition to neoliberalism precisely because the impact on workers and peasants has been largely negative. https://www.cpim.org/views/quarter-century-neo-liberal-economic-policies-unending-distress-and-peasant-resistance ; Juan Pablo Ferrero, Democracy against Neoliberalism in Argentina and Brazil, 2014; Mimi Abramovitz and Jennifer Zelnick, " Double Jeopardy: The Impact of Neoliberalism on Care Workers in the United States and South Africa" , http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2190/HS.40.1.f

    Grassroots organizations opposed to policies that further integrate their countries into the world economy and marginalize the working class have been especially persistent in South Africa, Brazil, and India. To assuage if not co-opt the masses the BRICS followed a policy mix that combines neoliberalism, aspects of social welfare and statism. Combined with geopolitical opposition to US-NATO militarism and interventionism, the BRICS policies were an attempt to keep not just the national bourgeois loyal but the broader masses by projecting a commitment to national sovereignty.

    In Brazil, India and South Africa internal and external corporate pressure along with US, EU, and IMF-World Bank pressures have been especially evident to embrace neoliberal policies and confront grassroots opposition rather than co-opt it at the cost of making concessions to labor. Considering that the development policies of the BRICS in the last three decades of neoliberal globalism accommodated domestic and foreign capital and were not geared to advance living standards for the broader working class and peasantry, grassroots opposition especially in Brazil, India and South Africa where the state structure is not nearly as powerful as in Russia and China manifested itself in various organizations.

    http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12129 ; Walden Bello, The BRICS: Challenges to the Global Status Quo" , in https://www.thenation.com/article/brics-challengers-global-status-quo/

    One of the grassroots organizations managing to keep its autonomy is Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST)skillfully remaining independent of both former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. Although the MST supported some policies of theformer presidents who presented themselves as champions of labor rather than capital, both Lula and Rousseff made substantial policy compromises with the neoliberal camp and were eventually implicated in corruption scandals revealing opportunism behind policy-making. While the record of their policies on the poor speaks for itself, the Lula-Rousseff era of Partido dos Trabalhadores was an improvement over previous neoliberal president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003). https://monthlyreview.org/2017/02/01/the-brazilian-crisis/

    The MST persisted with the struggle against neoliberal policies that have contributed to rising GDP heavily concentrated among the national and comprador bourgeoisie and foreign corporations. Other Latin American grassroots movements have had mixed results not much better than those in Brazil. Ecuador under president Rafael Correa tried to co-opt the leftby yielding on some policy issues as did Lula and Rousseff, while pursuing a neoliberal development model as much as his Brazilian counterparts. With its economy thoroughly integrated into the US economy, Mexico is a rather unique case where grassroots movements against neoliberalism are intertwined with the struggle against official corruption and the narco-trade resulting in the assassination of anti-neoliberal, anti-drug activists. (William Aviles, The Drug War in Mexico: Hegemony and Global Capitalism ;

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231966134_Grassroots_Movements_and_Political_Activism_in_Latin_America_A_Critical_Comparison_of_Chile_and_Brazil ;

    Anti-neoliberal resistance in the advanced countries has not manifested itself as it has in the developing nations through leftist movements such as South Africa's Abahlali baseMjondolo or Latin American trade unions that stress a working class philosophy of needs rather than the one of rights linked to middle class property and identity politics. https://roarmag.org/essays/south-africa-marikana-anc-poor/ Popular resistance to neoliberalism in the US has been part of the anti-globalization movement that includes various groups from environmentalists to anti-IMF-World Bank and anti-militarism groups.

    Although there are some locally based groups like East Harlem-based Justice in El Barrio representing immigrants and low-income people, there is no national anti-neoliberal movement. Perhaps because of the war on terror, various anti-establishment pro-social justice groups assumed the form of bourgeois identity politics of both the Democratic Party and the Republican where some of the leaders use rightwing populism as an ideological means to push through neoliberal policies while containing grassroots anger resulting from social exclusion and institutional exploitation. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/the-legacy-of-anti-globalization

    Black Lives Matter revolving around the systemic racism issue and Occupy Wall Street anti-capitalist group fell within the left orbit of the Democratic Party (Senator Bernie Sanders) who is an advocate of the pluralist-diversity model, opposes market fundamentalism,and proposes maintaining some vestiges of the Keynesian welfare state. With the exception of isolated voices by a handful of academics and some criticsusing social media as a platform, there is no anti-neoliberal grassroots movement that Democrats or Republicans has not successfully co-opted. Those refusing to be co-opted are invariably dismissed as everything from idealists to obstructionists. Certainlythere is nothing in the US like the anti-neoliberal groups in Brazil, India, Mexico, or South Africa operating autonomously and resisting co-optation by political parties. The absence of such movements in the US is a testament to the strong state structure andthe institutional power of the elites in comparison with many developing nations and even some parts of Europe. https://www.salon.com/2015/08/15/black_lives_matter_joins_a_long_line_of_protest_movements_that_have_shifted_public_opinion_most_recently_occupy_wall_street/

    As an integrated economic bloc, Europe follows uniform neoliberal policies using as leverage monetary and trade policy but also the considerable EU budget at its disposal for subsidies and development. A number of European trade unions and leftist popular groups fell into the trap of following either Socialist or centrist parties which are pluralist neoliberal and defend some remnants of Keynesianism. Those disillusioned with mainstream Socialist Parties pursue the same neoliberal policies of social exclusion as the conservatives fell in line behind newly formed non-Communist reformist parties (PODEMOS in Spain, SYRIZA in Greece, for example) with a Keynesian platform and socialist rhetoric.

    As the government of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras proved once in power in 2015, self-baptized 'leftist' parties areleftist in rhetoric only. When it comes to policy they are as neoliberal as the opposition they criticize; even more dangerous because they have deceived people to support them as the alternative to neoliberal conservatives. Because grassroots movements andthe popular base of political parties that promise 'reform' to benefit the masses are co-opted by centrists, center-left or rightwing political parties, social exclusion becomes exacerbated leading to disillusionment.

    Consequently,people hoping for meaningful change become apathetic or they become angry and more radicalized often turning to rightwing political parties. Although there is a long-standing history of mainstream political parties co-opting grassroots movements, under neoliberalism the goal is to shape them intoan identity politics mold under the pluralist or rightwing populist camp. Behind the illusion of choice and layers of bourgeois issues ranging from property rights and individual rights rests a totalitarian system whose goal is popular compliance. https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/eliane-glaser/elites-right-wing-populism-and-left ;

    http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol11/vol11_no1_Left_mythology_and_neoliberal_globalization_Syriza_and_Podemos.html

    'De-democratization' under Neoliberalism

    More subtly and stealthily interwoven into the institutional structure than totalitarian regimes of the interwar era, neoliberal totalitarianism has succeeded not because of the rightwing populist political camp but because of the pluralist one that supports both militarism in foreign affairs and police-state methods at home as a means of maintaining the social order while projecting the façade of democracy. Whereas the neoliberal surveillance state retains vestiges of pluralism and the façade of electoral choice, the police state in interwar Germany and Italy pursued blatant persecution of declared ideological dogmatism targeting 'enemies of the state' and demanding complete subjugation of citizens to theregime. Just as people were manipulated in interwar Europeinto accepting the totalitarian state as desirable and natural, so are many in our time misguided into supporting neoliberal totalitarianism.

    In her book entitled Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (2015), Wendy Brown argues that not just in the public sector, but in every sector of society neoliberal ideology of 'de-democratization' prevails. Extensions of a hierarchical economic system rather than citizens with civil and human rights guaranteed by a social contract aimed at the welfare of the collective, human beings are more commoditized today than they were in the nascent phase of industrial capitalism. The kind of ubiquitous transformation of the individual's identity with the superstructure and the 'de-democratization' of society operating under massively concentrated wealth institutionally intertwined with political power in our contemporary erawas evident in totalitarian countries during the interwar era.

    Whereas protest and resistance, freedom of expression and assembly were not permitted by totalitarian regimes in interwar Europe, they are permitted in our time. However, they are so marginalized and/or demonized when analyzing critically mainstream institutions and the social contract under which they operate that they are the stigmatizedas illegitimate opposition. Permitting freedom of speech and assembly, along with due process and electoral politicsbest servesneoliberal socioeconomic totalitarianism because its apologists can claim the system operates in an 'open society'; a term that Karl Popper the ideological father of neo-conservatism coined to differentiate the West from the former Communist bloc closed societies.

    As Italian journalist Claudio Hallo put it: "If the core of neoliberalism is a natural fact, as suggested by the ideology already embedded deep within our collective psyche, who can change it? Can you live without breathing, or stop the succession of days and nights? This is why Western democracy chooses among the many masks behind which is essentially the same liberal party. Change is not forbidden, change is impossible. Some consider this feature to be an insidious form of invisible totalitarianism. " https://www.rt.com/op-edge/171240-global-totalitarianism-change-neoliberalism/

    Post-modern consumerist culture has inculcated into peoples' minds that they have never been so free yet they have never felt so helpless, as Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has commented. Freedom is quantitatively measured based on materialist criteria at the individual rather than collective level and at a cost not just to the rest of society but to one's humanity and any sense of social responsibility sacrificed in the quest for atomistic pursuit.Not only the media, but government at all levels, educational institutions and the private sector incessantly reinforce the illusion of individual freedom within the context of the neoliberal totalitarian institutional structure. This is a sacred value above all others, including knowledge, creativity, and the welfare of society as a whole (public interest supplanted by private profit), as though each individual lives alone on her/his planet. https://thehumanist.com/magazine/march-april-2015/arts_entertainment/what-about-me-the-struggle-for-identity-in-a-market-based-society ; https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/04/american-nightmare-the-depravity-of-neoliberalism/ ; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/neoliberalism-economic-system-ethics-personality-psychopathicsthic ; https://www.academia.edu/28509196/Neoliberal_Illusions_of_Freedom

    In an essay entitled "The unholy alliance of neoliberalism and postmodernism" , Hans van Zon argues that as the Western World'sdominant ideologies since the 1980s, "undermine the immune system of society, neoliberalism by commercialization of even the most sacred domains and postmodernism by its super-relativism and refusal to recognize any hierarchy in value or belief systems." http://www.imavo.be/vmt/13214-van%20Zon%20postmodernism.pdf . Beyond undermining society's immune system and the open society under capitalism, asHans van Zon contends, the convergence of these ideologies have contributed to the 'de-democratization' of society,the creation of illiberal institutions and collective consciousness of conformity to neoliberal totalitarianism. The success of neoliberalism inculcated into the collective consciousness is partly because of the long-standing East-West confrontation followed by the manufactured war on terror. However, it is also true that neoliberal apologists of both the pluralist and rightwing camp present the social contract as transcending politics because markets are above states, above society as 'objective' thus they can best determine the social good on the basis of commoditized value. (Joshua Ramsay, "Neoliberalism as Political Theology of Chance: the politics of divination." https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201539

    An evolutionary course, the 'de-democratization' of society started in postwar US that imposed transformation policy on the world with the goal of maintaining its economic, political, military and cultural superpower hegemony justified in the name of anti-Communism. Transformation policy was at the root of the diffusion of the de-democratization process under neoliberalism, despite the European origin of the ideology. As it gradually regained its status in the core of the world economy after the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957, northwest Europe followed in the path of the US. http://www.eurstrat.eu/the-european-neoliberal-union/

    Ten years before the Treaty of Rome that created the EEC,Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek gathered a number of scholars in Mont Pelerin where they founded the neoliberal society named after the Swiss village. They discussed strategies of influencing public policy intended to efface the Keynesian model on which many societies were reorganized to survive the Great Depression. Financed by some of Europe's wealthiest families, the Mont Pelerin Society grew of immense importance after its first meeting which coincided with the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, the Truman Doctrine formalizing the institutionalization of the Cold War, and the Marshall Plan intended to reintegrate Europe and its colonies and spheres of influence under the aegis of the US. Helped along by the IMF, World Bank, and the International Agreement on Tariffs and Trade established in 1947, US transformation policy was designed to shape the world to its own geopolitical and economic advantage based on a neo-classical macroeconomic and financial theoretical model on which neoliberal ideology rested. http://fpif.org/from_keynesianism_to_neoliberalism_shifting_paradigms_in_economics/

    Considering that millionaires and billionaires providefunding for the Mont Pelerin Society and affiliates, this prototype neoliberal think tank became the intellectual pillar of both the pluralist and rightwing neoliberal camps by working with 460 think tanks that have organizations in 96 countries where they influence both centrist and rightwing political parties. Whether Hillary Clinton's and Emmanuel Macron's pluralist neoliberal globalist version or Donald Trump's and Narendra Modi's rightwing populist one, the Mont Pelerin Society and others sharing its ideology and goals exercise preeminent policy influence not on the merit of its ideas for the welfare of society but because the richest people from rightwing Czech billionaire Andrej Babisto liberal pluralist billionaireseither support its principles and benefit from their implementation into policy. (J. Peterson, Revoking the Moral Order: The Ideology of Positivism and the Vienna Circle , 1999; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/rise-of-the-davos-class-sealed-americas-fate

    If the neoliberal social contract is the answer to peoples' prayers world-wide as Hayek's followers insist, why is there a need on the part of the state, international organizations including UN agencies, billionaire and millionaire-funded think tanks, educational institutions and the corporate and state-owned media to convince the public that there is nothing better for society than massive capital concentration and social exclusion, and social conditions that in some respects resemble servitude in Medieval Europe? Why do ultra-rightwing Koch brothers and the Mercer family, among other billionaires and millionaires fromNorth America, Europe, India, South Korea and Latin America spend so much money to inculcate the neoliberal ideology into the collective consciousness andto persuade the public to elect neoliberal politicians either of the pluralist camp or the authoritarian one?

    http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-bloomberg-forbes-rupert-murdoch-billionaires-2011-3 ; https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/no-one-knows-what-the-powerful-mercers-really-want/514529/

    Seventy years after Hayek formed the Mont Leperin Societyto promotea future without totalitarianism, there are elected neoliberal politicians from both the pluralist and authoritarian camps with ties to big capital and organized crime amid the blurring lines between legal and illegal economic activities that encompasses everything from crypto-currency and insider trading to offshore 'shell corporations' and banks laundering money for drug lords and wealthy tax evaders. Surrender of popular sovereignty through the social contract now entails surrender to a class of people who are criminals, not only based on a social justice criteria but on existing law if it were only applied to them as it does to petty thieves. In the amoral Machiavellian world of legalized "criminal virtue" in which we live these are the leaders of society.Indicative of the perversion of values now rooted in atomism and greed, the media reports with glowingly admiring terms that in 2017 the world's 500 richest people became richer by $1 trillion, a rise that represents one-third of Africa's GDP and just under one-fifth of Latin America's. Rather than condemning mal-distribution ofincome considering what it entails for society, the media and many in the business of propagating for neoliberalism applaud appropriation within the legal framework of the social contract as a virtue. http://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/500-richest-people-became-1-trillion-richer-in-2017-mukesh-ambani-tops-indian-list/story-JcNXhH9cCp2pzRopkoFdfL.html ; Bob Brecher, "Neoliberalism and its Threat to Moral Agency" in Virtue and Economy . ed. Andrius Bielskis and Kelvin Knight, 2015)

    Neoliberalism has led to the greater legitimization of activities that would otherwise be illegal to the degree that the lines between the legitimate economy and organized criminal activity are blurred reflecting the flexible lines between legally-financed millionaire-backed elected officials and those with links to organized crime or to illegal campaign contributions always carrying an illegal quid-pro-quo legalized through public policy. Beyond the usual tax-haven suspects Panama, Cyprus, Bermuda, Malta, Luxemburg, among othersincluding states such as Nevada and Wyoming, leaders from former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to President Donald Trump with reputed ties to organized criminal networks have benefited from the neoliberal regime that they served. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254953831_Economic_Crime_and_Neoliberal_Modes_of_Government_The_Example_of_the_Mediterranean )

    Self-righteous pluralist neoliberals castigate rightwing billionaires for funding rightwing politicians. However, there is silence when it comes to the millions amassed by pluralist neoliberals as the infamous "Panama Papers" revealed in 2016. Despite the institutionalized kleptocracy, the mediahas indoctrinated the public to accept as 'normal' the converging interests of the capitalist class and ruling political class just as it has indoctrinated the public to accept social exclusion, social inequality, and poverty as natural and democratic; all part of the social contract.( http://revistes.uab.cat/tdevorado/article/view/v2-n1-armao ; Jose Manuel Sanchez Bermudez, The Neoliberal Pattern of Domination: Capital's Reign in Decline, 2012; https://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberalisms-world-of-corruption-money-laundering-corporate-lobbying-drug-money/5519907

    The Future of Neoliberalism

    After the great recession of 2008, the future of neoliberalism became the subject of debate among politicians, journalists and academics. One school of thought was that the great recession had exposed the flaws in neoliberalism thus marking the beginning of its demise. The years since 2008 proved that in a twist of irony, the quasi-statist policies of China with its phenomenal growth have actually been responsible for sustaining neoliberalism globally and not just because China has been financing US public debt by buying treasuries while the US buys products made in China. This view holds that neoliberalism will continue to thrive so as long as China continues its global ascendancy, thus the warm reception to Beijing as the new globalist hegemonic power after Trump's noise about pursuing economic nationalism within the neoliberal model. (Barry Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession and the Uses and Misuses of History , 2016; http://www.e-ir.info/2011/08/23/has-the-global-financial-crisis-challenged-us-power-in-international-finance/ )

    China is not pursuing the kind of neoliberal model that exists in the US or the EU, but its economy is well integrated with the global neoliberal system and operates within those perimeters despite quasi-statist policies also found in other countries to a lesser degree. Adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), China's current share of world GDP stands at 16% and at annual growth above 6% it is expected to reach 20%, by 2020. This in comparison with only 1.9% in 1979 and it explains why its currency is now among the IMF-recognized reserved currencies. With about half-a-million foreign companies in China and an average of 12,000 new companies entering every day, capitalists from all over the world are betting heavily on China's future as the world's preeminent capitalist core country in the 21 st century. China will play a determining role in the course of global neoliberalism, and it is politically willing to accept the US as the military hegemon while Beijing strives for economic preeminence. Interested in extracting greater profits from China while tempering its race to number one, Western businesses and governmentshave been pressuring Beijing to become more immersed in neoliberal policies and eliminate all elements of statism. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-09/22/content_15775312.htm ; https://en.portal.santandertrade.com/establish-overseas/china/foreign-investment

    Although the US that has 450,000 troops in 800 foreign military bases in more than 150 countries and uses its military muscle along with 'soft-power' policies including sanctions as leverage for economic power, many governments and multinational corporations consider Beijing not Washington as a source of global stability and growth. With China breathing new life into neoliberalism on the promise of geographic and social convergence, it is fantasy to speculate that neoliberalism is in decline when in fact it is becoming more forcefully ubiquitous. However, China like the West that had promised geographic and social convergence in the last four decades of neoliberalism will not be any more successful in delivering on such promises. The resultof such policies will continue to be greater polarization and social exclusion and greater uneven development, with China and multinationals investing in its enterprises becoming richer while the US will continue to use militarism as leverage to retain global economic hegemony rapidly eroding from its grip. ( http://www.businessinsider.com/us-military-deployments-may-2017-5 ; http://www.zapruderworld.org/welfare-state-decline-and-rise-neoliberalism-1980s-some-approaches-between-latin-americas-core-and ; Dic Lo, Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization , 2012)

    Between China and the US, the world can expect neoliberal globalization to continue under the pluralist and populist rightwing models in different countries with the two converging and reflecting the totalitarian essence of the system at its core.Characterized by rapid development and sluggish growth in Japan and Western core countries, neoliberal globalization has entailed lack of income convergence between the developed and developing world where uneven export-oriented growth based on the primary sector keeps developingnations perpetually dependent and poor. Interestingly, the trend of falling incomes characteristic of the developing nations from 1980 to 2000 was just as true in Western countries. It was during these two decades of ascendant neoliberalism that rightwing populist movements began to challenge the pluralist neoliberal political camp and offering nationally-based neoliberal solutions, further adding to the system's existing contradictions. (Dic Lo, Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization , 2012)

    The debate whether the rise of populism or perhaps the faint voices of anti-capitalism will finally bring about the end of neoliberalism often centers on the digital-biotech revolution often blamed for exacerbating rather than solving social problems owing to uneven benefits accruing across social classes. It is somewhat surprising that IMF economists have questioned the wisdom of pursuing unfettered neoliberalism where there is a trade-off between economic growth andsocial exclusion owing to growing income inequality. Naturally, the IMF refrains from self-criticism and it would never suggest that neoliberal globalization that the Fund has been promoting is responsible for the rise of rightwing populism around the world.

    Within the neoliberal camp, pluralist-diversity advocatesare satisfied they have done their part in the 'fight for democracy' when in fact their stealthy brand of the neoliberal social contract isin some respects more dangerous than the populist camp which is unapologetically candid about its pro-big business, pro-monopoly, pro-deregulation anti-social welfare platform. Shortly after Trump won the presidential election with the help of rightwing billionaires and disillusioned workers who actually believed that he represented them rather than the billionaires, an article appearing in the Christian Science Monitor is typical of how pluralist neoliberals view the global tide of rightwing populism.

    "Worldwide, it has been a rough years for democracy. The UK, the United States and Colombia made critical decisions about their nations' future, and – at least from the perspective of liberal values and social justice – they decided poorly. Beyond the clear persistence of racism, sexism and xenophobia in people's decision-making, scholars and pundits have argued that to understand the results of recent popular votes, we must reflect on neoliberalism. International capitalism, which has dominated the globe for the past three decades, has its winners and its losers. And, for many thinkers, the losers have spoken. My fieldwork in South America has taught me that there are alternative and effective ways to push back against neoliberalism. These include resistance movements based on pluralism and alternative forms of social organisation, production and consumption." https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Breakthroughs-Voices/2016/1206/Opposing-neoliberalism-without-right-wing-populism-A-Latin-American-guide

    Without analyzing the deeper causes of the global tide of rightwing populism promoting neoliberalism under an authoritarian political platform, pluralist-diversity neoliberals continue to promote socioeconomic policies that lead to social exclusion, inequality, and uneven development as long as they satisfy the cultural-lifestyle and corporate-based sustainable-development aspects of the social contract.Tolend legitimacy and public acceptance among those expecting a commitment to pluralism, the neoliberal pluralists embrace the superficialities and distraction of diversity and political correctness. Ironically, the political correctness trend started during theReagan administration's second term and served as a substitute for social justice that the government and the private sector were rapidly eroding along with the social welfare state and trade union rights. As long as there is'politically correctness', in public at least so that people feel they are part of a 'civilized' society, then public policy can continue on the barbaric path of social exclusion, police-state methods, and greater economic inequality.

    https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/fighting-trump-right-wing-populism-vs-neoliberalism/ ; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305117733226

    The future of neoliberalism includes the inevitability that social exclusion will lead to social uprisings especially as even some billionaires readily acknowledge the social contract favors them to the detriment of society. As the voices against systemic exploitation become louder,the likelihood will increase for authoritarian-police state policies if not regimes reflecting the neoliberal social contract's ubiquitous stranglehold on society. Although resistance to neoliberalism will continue to grow, the prospects for a social revolution in this century overturning the neoliberal order in advanced capitalist countries is highly unlikely. Twentieth century revolutions succeeded where the state structure was weak and people recognized that the hierarchical social order was the root cause of the chasm between the country's vast social exclusion coupled with stagnation vs. its potential for a more inclusive society where greater social equality and social justice would bean integral part of the social contract. (Donna L. Chollett, Neoliberalism, Social Exclusion, and Social Movements , 2013)

    Despite everything pointing to the dynamics of a continued neoliberal social contract, diehard pluralists like British academic Martin Jacques and American economist Joseph Stiglitz insist there is hope for reformist change. In The Politics of Thatcherism (1983) Jacques applauded neoliberalism, but during the US presidential election in 2016 he had changed his mind, predicting neoliberalism's demise. He felt encouraged that other pluralist neoliberals like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz were voicing their concerns signaling an interest in the debate about social inequality. In an article entitled "The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics" , he wrote: "A sure sign of the declining influence of neoliberalism is the rising chorus of intellectual voices raised against it. From the mid-70s through the 80s, the economic debate was increasingly dominated by monetarists and free marketeers." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/21/death-of-neoliberalism-crisis-in-western-politics

    Along with Krugman, Stiglitz and others in the pluralist camp favoring a policy mix that includes Keynesianism,Martin Jacques, Thomas Picketty and others like them around the world doenjoy some small influence with the pluralist-diversity camp. However, the demise of neoliberalism will not result from intellectual critiques regardless of the merits. On the contrary, the neoliberal social contract is solidifying not evolving toward dissolution. This is largely because the dynamics of the social order continue to favor it and the opposition is split between ultra-right nationalists, pluralists of varying sorts resting on hope of restoring Keynesian rationalism in the capitalist system, and the very weak and divided leftists in just about every country and especially the core ones. https://theconversation.com/if-we-are-reaching-neoliberal-capitalisms-end-days-what-comes-next-72366

    Neoliberalism's inherent contradictions will result in its demise andthe transition into a new phase of capitalism. Among the most obvious and glaring contradictions is that the ideology promotes freedom and emancipation when in practice it is a totalitarian system aimed to mold society and the individual into conformity of its dogmatic market fundamentalism.Another contradiction is the emphasis of a borderless global market, while capitalists operate within national borders and are impacted by national policies that often collide at the international level as the competition intensifies for market share just as was the case in the four decades before the outbreak of WWI. Adding to the list of contradictions that finds expression the debate between neoliberal rightwingers and pluralists is the issue of "value-free" market fundamentalism while at the same time neoliberals conduct policy that has very strong moral consequences in peoples' lives precisely because of extremely uneven income distribution.

    The enigma in neoliberalism's futureis the role of grassroots movements that are in a position to impact change but have failed thus far to make much impact. Most people embrace the neoliberal political parties serving the same capitalist class, operating under the illusion of a messiah politician delivering the promise of salvation either from the pluralist or authoritarian wing of neoliberalism. The turning point for systemic change emanates from within the system that fails to serve the vast majority of the people as it is riddled with contradictions that become more evident and the elites become increasingly contentious about how to divide the economic pie and how to mobilize popular support behind mainstream political parties so they can maintain the social order under an unsustainable political economy. At that juncture, the neoliberal social contract suffersan irrevocable crisis of public confidence on a mass scale. Regardless under which political regime neoliberalism operates, people will eventually reject hegemonic cultural indoctrination. A critical mass in society has not reached this juncture. Nevertheless, social discontinuity is an evolutionary process and the contradictions in neoliberalism will continue to cause political disruption, economic disequilibrium and social upheaval.

    Jon V. Kofas , Ph.D. – Retired university professor of history – author of ten academic books and two dozens scholarly articles. Specializing in International Political economy, Kofas has taught courses and written on US diplomatic history, and the roles of the World Bank and IMF in the world.

    [Jan 03, 2019] Five Political Predictions for 2019 by Daniel R. DePetris

    Jan 01, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
    4. Matt Whitaker will block public release of the Mueller report.

    Special counsel Robert Mueller will finalize his investigation and send his report to Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker, who has never been supportive of the inquiry. Using his powers as attorney general, Whitaker will block public disclosure of Mueller's conclusions and release a sanitized summary detailing no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Democrats will be outraged -- as will be Bob Mueller, who will proceed to give his first on-air, primetime interview detailing what he did and did not find. The next week, the House Judiciary Committee will debate opening an impeachment inquiry based solely on Mueller's interview.

    [Jan 03, 2019] Graham and Our Confused Syria Policy by DANIEL LARISON

    Notable quotes:
    "... Graham is an interventionist fanatic, so it should raise red flags about the supposed Syria withdrawal that he is no longer concerned about it. ..."
    "... If U.S. forces are still supposed to remain in Syria long enough to make sure that "Iran doesn't fill in the back end," that is essentially indistinguishable from the earlier Bolton position of an indefinite military presence until Iranian forces leave. It makes no difference to U.S. security whether or not Iran keeps some of its forces in Syria or "fills in the back end" after our withdrawal, and it is not our government's responsibility to police any part of Syria for any length of time. ..."
    "... It's no secret that Netanyahu doesn't and never has cared about legality or the US Constitution. Our Constitution and laws are just a goddamned inconvenience as far as he's concerned. They're in the way , and to make matters worse, Adelson's complaining that the cost of US politicians like Durbin, Cotton, and Rubio is going through the roof. ..."
    "... Congress is supposed to authorize use of military force. Not agitate to prevent it from ending. ..."
    "... If those neocons and "humanitarian" interventionist set on US hegemony can't hem in Trump politically to stay in Syria do expect another 'false flag' to force Trump. ..."
    "... I'm not saying I agree with Mattis' military advice, quite the contrary. But to project onto Trump some sort of principled and thoughtful policy here would be just that a projection. ..."
    December 31, 2018

    Adam Taylor comments on Lindsey Graham's recent claims about Syria policy:

    What explains Graham's newfound optimism about Trump's plan to leave Syria?

    Well, there is one big but rather confusing reason. In Graham's retelling, Trump's plan to leave Syria sounds suspiciously like a plan to stay in Syria -- one that could be extended indefinitely, too. Speaking to reporters Sunday, Graham described Trump's Syria plan as a "pause situation" rather than a withdrawal.

    Graham is an interventionist fanatic, so it should raise red flags about the supposed Syria withdrawal that he is no longer concerned about it. It is possible that Graham is spinning what Trump told him and trying to box the president in with these public statements, but if that were the case Trump would presumably reject Graham's interpretation in a series of angry tweets. The fact that Trump hasn't done that suggests that Syria withdrawal isn't happening or will happen so slowly as to make little difference. Graham describes Trump's Syria policy this way:

    Lindsey Graham ✔ @LindseyGrahamSC

    I learned a lot from President @ realDonaldTrump about our efforts in Syria that was reassuring. (1/3)

    16K 6:08 PM - Dec 30, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy
    6,960 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    Taylor observes:

    Considering these three elements, a full withdrawal would not be possible in the immediate future.

    If U.S. forces are still supposed to remain in Syria long enough to make sure that "Iran doesn't fill in the back end," that is essentially indistinguishable from the earlier Bolton position of an indefinite military presence until Iranian forces leave. It makes no difference to U.S. security whether or not Iran keeps some of its forces in Syria or "fills in the back end" after our withdrawal, and it is not our government's responsibility to police any part of Syria for any length of time.

    It can't be stressed enough how unnecessary and illegal an American military presence in Syria is. Keeping troops there has nothing to do with U.S. or allied security, and the most vocal advocates of keeping them there indefinitely are driven by an obsessive hostility to Iran that blinds them to the costs and risks of further involvement in Syria. Congress never authorized any U.S. mission in Syria against anyone, and no president had the authority to order U.S. forces into harm's way in that country. Our Syria policy for at least the last four years has been in flagrant violation of the Constitution and international law, and it has been divorced from U.S. interests from the very beginning.

    Ashdown MD December 31, 2018 at 1:43 pm

    Graham's playing him from the outside, Pompeo and Bolton are playing him from the inside, and Netanyahu's calling the shots.

    It's no secret that Netanyahu doesn't and never has cared about legality or the US Constitution. Our Constitution and laws are just a goddamned inconvenience as far as he's concerned. They're in the way , and to make matters worse, Adelson's complaining that the cost of US politicians like Durbin, Cotton, and Rubio is going through the roof.

    Orange Co. , says: January 1, 2019 at 12:19 am

    Graham has lost his way. He should wake up and start doing his duty. Congress is supposed to authorize use of military force. Not agitate to prevent it from ending.

    In this respect at least, Trump is starting to look like the only adult in the room, the only one capable of restraint.

    JR , says: January 1, 2019 at 4:30 am

    If those neocons and "humanitarian" interventionist set on US hegemony can't hem in Trump politically to stay in Syria do expect another 'false flag' to force Trump.

    rayray , says: January 1, 2019 at 6:10 pm

    @Orange Co.

    I think you're projecting meaning onto Trump's actions that aren't there. Trump has no problem at all with military action in Syria and actions to contain Iran; he's even ordered such action before.

    His recent withdrawal order, (and this is likely to come out when Mattis writes his memoirs if he does) was from animus towards Mattis whose notions of service and native intelligence were starting to make Trump feel insecure and maybe dumb.

    I'm not saying I agree with Mattis' military advice, quite the contrary. But to project onto Trump some sort of principled and thoughtful policy here would be just that a projection.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Atlantic Council ..."
    "... Alliance for Securing Democracy. ..."
    "... Alliance for Securing Democracy ..."
    "... That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases. ..."
    "... For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity. ..."
    "... American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. ..."
    "... In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public. ..."
    "... The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. ..."
    "... The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing. ..."
    "... I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection. ..."
    "... The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions. ..."
    "... Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. ..."
    "... The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the "security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure evil (TPTB contend). ..."
    "... Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with. ..."
    "... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
    "... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
    "... Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists one. ..."
    "... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
    "... The US is progressing toward a fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin. The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of "aggression." And so on ..."
    "... The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys." ..."
    "... Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest). ..."
    "... Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and paranoia. ..."
    "... Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States. ..."
    "... One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion of secure employment. Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction ..."
    "... The anti-russian think tanks, msm, bellingcat etc push this too much, making them look stupid. ..."
    "... Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the other forces at play." ..."
    Feb 20, 2018J | www.moonofalabama.org

    The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the uncritical acceptance of an algorithm they do not want to understand and which is known to produce fake results.

    See for example these three stories:

    From the last link:

    SAN FRANCISCO -- One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.

    The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

    In other words - the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive issues.

    Those claims are based on this propaganda project:

    Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.

    The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is run by military lobbyists, CIA minions and neo-conservative propagandists. Its claimed task is:

    ... to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.

    There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin ever made or makes such efforts.

    The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items" and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It claims that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News, two general news sites sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3. accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and 2 tweet about.

    Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one "openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.

    On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who - according to NYT - want to sow divisiveness and subvert democracy, wished everyone a #MerryChristmas.


    bigger

    The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all of these accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably nefarious:

    Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.

    The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag , ...

    The Daily Beast reported earlier that the last claim is definitely false :

    Twitter's internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo . There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

    The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.

    The Dutch IT expert and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch keywords and hashtags showed up on the Hamilton 68 "Russian bots" dashboard. He found ( Dutch , English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud:

    In recent weeks, I have been keeping a close eye on Hamilton 68. Every time a Dutch hashtag was shown on the website, I made a screenshot. Then I noted what was playing at that moment and I watched the Tweets with this hashtag. Again I could not find any Tweet that seemed to be from a Russian troll.

    In all cases, the hash tags that Hamilton 68 reported were trending topics in the Netherlands . In all cases there was much to do around the subject of the hashtag in the Netherlands. Many people were angry or shared their opinion on the subject on Twitter. And even if there were a few tweets with Russian connections between them, the effect is zero. Because they do not stand out among the many other, authentic Tweets.

    Van den Berg lists a dozen examples he analyzed in depth.

    The anti-Russian Bellingcat group around couch blogger Eliot Higgins is sponsored by the NATO propaganda shop Atlantic Council . It sniffs through open source stuff to blame Russia or Syria wherever possible. Bellingcat was recently a victim of the "Russian bots" - or rather of the ASD website. On February 10 the hashtag #bellingcat trended to rank 2 of the dashboard.


    bigger

    Bellingcat was thus, according to the Hamilton 68 claims, under assault by hordes of nefarious Russian government sponsored bots.

    The Bellingcat folks looked into the issue and found that only six people on Twitter, none of them an automated account , had used the #bellingcat hashtag in the last 48 hours. Some of the six may have opinions that may be "pro-Russian", but as Higgins himself says :

    [I]n my opinion, it's extremely unlikely the people listed are Russian agents

    The pro-NATO propaganda shop Bellingcat thus debunked the pro-NATO propaganda shop Alliance for Securing Democracy.

    The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with rather normal people from all over the world who's opinions they personally dislike. Those then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.

    Moreover - what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the dashboard?

    But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.

    This is nuts.

    Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the only site critical of it. It predicted :

    The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.

    It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are normal people.

    The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence" into U.S. media. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false "Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, - CNN, Wired, the New York Times - are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package the venom and spread it to the public.

    How long will it take until people die from it?

    Posted by b on February 20, 2018 at 03:15 PM | Permalink

    Comments next page " It's all too reminiscent of Duck Soup:

    Clueless Joe , Feb 20, 2018 3:45:14 PM | link

    "to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe."

    That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases.

    ken , Feb 20, 2018 3:46:05 PM | link
    For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity.
    xor , Feb 20, 2018 4:11:10 PM | link
    The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.
    karlof1 , Feb 20, 2018 4:30:11 PM | link
    Gee, what could go wrong formulating policy founded upon a series of Big Lies? Kim Dotcom says he has important info the FBI refuses to hear. At the Munich Security Conference , neocon Nicholas Burns, former US Ambassador to NATO, details my assertion's factual basis that current policy is being formed on a series of Big Lies: "Will NATO strengthen itself to contain Russian power in Eastern Europe giving what Russian [sic] has done illegally in Crimea, in the Donbass, and in Georgia ?" [Bolded text are the Big Lies.]

    Clearly, this entire psyop was premeditated and its design was hastily done contemporaneously with Russia's Syria intervention. NSA/CIA/FBI knew of HRC's security breeches and rightly assumed their contents would find their way into the election, so the general plan was ready to go prior to WikiLeaks publications. b has uncovered much, and I hope he's planning to publish a book about the entire affair.

    Jen , Feb 20, 2018 4:54:59 PM | link
    Ken @ 4: There doesn't necessarily need to be One Major Reason for going to war. There may be several reasons all feeding and reinforcing one another and creating a psychological climate in which Going To War is seen as the only solution and is inevitable. The reasons are not just economic and political but cultural and historical.

    In some countries allied with the US, the politicians in power are the ideological descendants of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany - so in a sense they are committed to "correcting" what they see as wrong. In the case of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, he is the grandson of a former prime minister who once served in General Tojo's World War II cabinet.
    https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/26/national/formed-in-childhood-roots-of-abes-conservatism-go-deep/#.WoyZCG9uaUk

    That's why pinning down the reason for wanting a war against Russia is so difficult.

    Partisan , Feb 20, 2018 5:06:58 PM | link
    The whole piece is just hilarious and I laughed out loud all time while reading it.

    https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/16/nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story/

    Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally.

    Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police.

    As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."

    james , Feb 20, 2018 5:17:19 PM | link
    thanks b!

    muddy waters.. paid for propaganda.... look at all the russian bots, lol... cold war 2 / mccarthyism 2 is in effect... the historic parallels are marked. thank you neo cons! it's working... the ordinary person in the usa can't be this stupid can they?

    when does ww3 kick in? is that really what these idiots want? or is it just to prolong the huge defense budget?

    Mike Maloney , Feb 20, 2018 5:24:03 PM | link
    This is about conditioning voters in Europe and the United States for a long war with Russia and China. In other words, a return to the 1950s. It is not working and becoming increasingly hysterical because societies are not nearly as cohesive as they once were, and the mainstream political parties, while better funded and more top-down organized, are basically hollow. The collapse is coming. Four years or ten, take your pick.
    dh , Feb 20, 2018 5:32:10 PM | link
    @4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."

    Most Americans probably don't. Just the chosen few with the deepest fall-out shelters. The idea is to keep piling the pressure on to countries like Iran and Russia in the hope that their populations will rise up and demand the freedoms that we enjoy in the West....things like uncensored wardrobe malfunctions and transgender washrooms.

    Partisan , Feb 20, 2018 6:02:58 PM | link
    "Most Americans probably don't."

    not true.

    let's imagine that we have the pyramid of evilness, by which we measure bestiality of one regime and its constituency. my firm belief is that us would be on the top of that pyramid. Only dilemma would be between Zionist entity and the US.

    "How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?" was the question Wilhelm Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree, February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar Republic's democratic constitution.

    Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933 and Reich was trying to grapple with the fact that the German people had apparently chosen the authoritarian politics promoted by National Socialism against their own political interests.

    Ever since, the question of fascism, or rather the question of why might people vote for their own oppression, has never ceased to haunt political philosophy.2 With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become a pressing one.

    An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime.

    CarlD , Feb 20, 2018 6:06:06 PM | link
    Remember the "USS MAINE"! Media have long agitated for War in US History. Nothing sells newspapers like a good ole war! Demonizing is a way to achieve it. What is sure is that this is a one way street. Once over the cliff, there is no turning back.

    How do you tell people that, at the flick of your magic switch, Putin is in fact a swell guy and wonderful human being? Once love is gone who goes back to the filthy, abhorrent and estranged spouse?

    Surely the US establishment is playing with fire thinking they will successfully ride out any conflict and come out on top secure in their newly reestablished hegemony on the smoldering ruins of Humanity.

    Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as tomorrow word will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.

    "Freedom of speech"...

    dh , Feb 20, 2018 6:14:14 PM | link
    @15 "An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime."

    I'm not so sure. I think there are many Americans who deeply distrust their government. But of course they don't want to appear unpatriotic. There are also many who are apathetic and many simply don't know how to change things.

    SteveK9 , Feb 20, 2018 6:35:58 PM | link
    It's horrible I know to quote a Nazi, but Goring had this right:

    Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

    Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

    Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

    WorldBLee , Feb 20, 2018 6:36:51 PM | link
    American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. The skills required to repeat the text verbatim serve them well in both cases. Skepticism is only reserved to anyone who tries to introduce logic or facts into the equation--such as when Jill Stein was interviewed on MSNBC recently. How dare Ms. Stein try to bring FACTS into the discussion!
    chet380 , Feb 20, 2018 6:41:04 PM | link
    In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public.
    Sinc , Feb 20, 2018 6:41:57 PM | link
    See info on US 'Twitter' manipulation campaign
    Sinc , Feb 20, 2018 6:44:16 PM | link
    Sorry, link here
    ken , Feb 20, 2018 6:59:01 PM | link
    Thanks Jen. It still makes no sense. As a veteran of the Vietnam fiasco, I was pretty much government oriented until McNamara outed the whole thing whining about haw sorry he was. 59,000 dead and he's sorry. They were able to hide the Gulf of Tonkin BS until then. After that I researched the reasons for each war/conflict the USA started and could find no logical reasons except hunger for power. But the little sandbox wars won't destroy the world like a major war/conflict with Russia and it goes nuclear. Almost every politician, and major news organizations are pushing for a war/conflict with Russia. This is insanity as no one will win a war like this and I am sure they know that,,, but they keep the war drums beating anyhow. It simply doesn't make sense. But Thanks again.

    Same for dh, #14. Things are soooo stupid, your joking may be closer to the truth than you know. :-)

    Skip , Feb 20, 2018 6:59:35 PM | link
    @SteveK9 #19

    Thank you for the post. I will save it and use it liberally, with proper attributions. When one challenges the tribe on places like Twitter, it is hard to tell who is a real idiot and who is a bot. How do you know? Maybe that the bots go away fairly quickly and the idiots hang around to argue ad infinitum.

    oldenyoung , Feb 20, 2018 7:06:23 PM | link
    The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. The public perception that "russia did it!!" continues to rise. I wonder what the public acceptance level needs to be for them to execute a MAJOR false flag event. They seem to think they are still on target, and its just a short matter or time...

    They are going to do this when the perception management is complete... We really do not need another one of their disasters

    Grieved , Feb 20, 2018 7:37:47 PM | link
    The bully pushes and pushes until stopped by the first serious push back. The dynamic of the west and the neocon/Zionists at the core is essentially that of the bully. Nations like Venezuela and the Philippines have started to push back, and I hope and feel fairly confident that they will both survive the rage of the US. In some part, they have begun to show the actual powerlessness of the bully.

    But the really killer nations - Russia and China - are holding their water as they strengthen their force. I believe that one very serious push back from either of them in the right circumstances will stop the bully. And yet, as they bide their time, we see a curious phenomenon wherein the US is destroying itself from the inside.

    It's as if all of the forces that exist to control the country - the lockstep media, the fully rigged markets, the hysterical military, the bought legislature and the crooked courts - are all acting far more strongly than should be necessary. The entire system is over-reacting, over-reaching, over-boiling. And in the course of this, the US is actually shedding power, and at an amazing rate. But not from the action of Russia but from its non-action, the empty space that that allows the bully's dynamic to over-reach, all the way to complete failure.

    Is it possible that deep in the security states of Russia and China there's even a study and a model for this? Is the collapse of the US actually being gamed by Russia and China - and through the totally counter-intuitive action of non-action?

    Just a thought.

    Ghost Ship , Feb 20, 2018 7:51:03 PM | link
    >>>> xor | Feb 20, 2018 4:11:10 PM | 6
    The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.

    I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection.

    WG , Feb 20, 2018 7:52:38 PM | link
    Hey b,
    Just wanted to let you know that Joe Lauria mentioned your blog and the article you wrote on the indictment of the 13 Russians. He was on Loud and Clear (Sputnik Radio, Washington DC) today and brought you up at the start of the program.
    Glad to see you get some recognition for all the great work you've been doing :)
    Mike , Feb 20, 2018 7:53:24 PM | link
    Meanwhile, back in 2010:
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/when-campaigns-manipulate-social-media/66351/
    Jen , Feb 20, 2018 7:53:43 PM | link
    Ken @ 24: The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions.

    Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. https://archive.org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda

    Bernays' books influenced Nazi and Soviet propaganda and Bernays himself was hired by the US government to justify in the public mind the 1954 US invasion of Guatemala.

    You may be aware that Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation which owns the Wall Street Journal, FOX News and 20th Century Fox studios, is also on the Board of Directors of Genie Energy which owns a subsidiary firm that was granted a licence by an Israeli court to explore and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's (and Israeli-occupied) Golan Heights.

    simjam , Feb 20, 2018 7:59:21 PM | link
    The national media speaks as one -with one consistent melody day after day. Who is the conductor? When will one representative of the mainstream media sing solo? There must be a Ray McGovern somewhere among the flock.
    V. Arnold , Feb 20, 2018 8:05:33 PM | link
    Grieved | Feb 20, 2018 7:37:47 PM | 27

    Many of my thoughts as well. The U.S.'s greatest fault is its tacit misunderstanding of just what russia is in fact. They utterly fail to understand the Russian character; forged over 800 years culminating with the defeat of Nazi Germany, absorbing horrific losses; the U.S. fails to understand the effect upon the then Soviets, become todays Russians. Even the god's have abandoned the west...

    Debsisdead , Feb 20, 2018 8:53:42 PM | link
    I watched bbc news this am in the hope that I would get to see the most awful creature at the 2018 olympics cry her croc tears (long story - a speed skater who cuts off the opposition but has been found out so now when she swoops in front of the others they either skate over her leading to tearful whines from perp about having been 'pushed', or gets disqualified for barging. Last night she got disqualified so as part of my study on whether types like this believe their own bullshit I thought I'd tune in but didn't get that far into the beebs lies)

    The bulk of the bulletin was devoted to a 'lets hate Russia' session which featured a quisling who works for the russian arm of BBC (prolly just like cold war days staffed exclusively by MI6/SIS types). This chap, using almost unintelligible english, claimed he had proof at least 50 Russian Mercenaries (question - why are amerikan guns for hire called contractors [remember the Fallujah massacre of 100,000 civilians because amerikan contractors were stupid] yet Russian contractors are called mercenaries by the media?) had been killed in Syria last week. The bloke had evidence of one contractor's death not 50 - the proof was a letter from the Russian government to the guy's mother telling her he didn't qualify for any honours because he wasn't in the Russian military.

    The quisling (likely a Ukranian I would say) went on to rabbit about the bloke having also fought in Donbass under contract - to which the 'interviewer (don't ya love it when media 'interview' their own journos - a sure sign that a snippet of toxic nonsense is being delivered) led about how the deceitful Russians had claimed the only Russians fighting in Donbass were contractors - yeah well this bloke was a contractor surely that proves the Russians were telling the truth.

    It's not what these propagandists say; they adopt a tone and the audience is meant to hate based on that even when the facts as stated conflict with the media outlet's point of view. Remember the childhood trick of saying "bad dog" ter yer mutt in loving tones - the dog comes to ya tail wagging & licks yer hand. This is that.

    The next item was more Syria lies - white helmets footage (altho the beeb is now mostly giving them an alternative name to dodge the facts about white helmets) of bandaged children with flour tipped on their heads.

    The evil Syrians and Russians are bombarding Gouta - nary a word about the continuous artillery barrage Gouta has subjected the citizens of Damascus to for the past 4 years, or that the Syrians have repeatedly offered truces and safe passage for civilians. Any injured children need to ask their parents why they weren't allowed to take advantage of the frequent offers of transport out. Maybe the parents are worried 'the resistance' will do its usual and blow up the busloads of children after luring them over with candy.

    Anyway I switched off after that so never did learn if little miss cheat had a cry.

    ben , Feb 20, 2018 9:17:54 PM | link
    Reposting from TRNN: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:21178:Why-is-a-Russian-Troll-Farm-Being-Compared-to-911%3F
    integer , Feb 20, 2018 9:23:42 PM | link
    Thank you for reporting on this. The people behind the so-called Alliance for Securing Democracy need to be exposed for the warmongering frauds that they are. Regardless of what one thinks of him, Trump was correct when he said that NATO is obsolete.
    Don Bacon , Feb 20, 2018 10:12:52 PM | link
    The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the "security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure evil (TPTB contend).

    So the whole scenario makes perfect sense from that standpoint.

    Petri Krohn , Feb 20, 2018 10:17:36 PM | link
    The news stories become far easier to understand if you replace the word " Russia " with the word " truth ".
    bevin , Feb 20, 2018 11:45:45 PM | link
    re Felix E. Dzerzhinsky: Ukrainian fascists have a particular hatred of Felix because he was both a Bolshevik and a Pole.

    I hate to do this but I just posted this elsewhere, at Off Guardian, where the Guardian is back into its highest gears promoting war.

    "The wardrums are beating in a way not heard since 1914-there is no reason for war except the best reason of all: an imperial ruling class sees its grip slipping and will chance everything rather than endure the humiliation of adjusting to reality.

    "China is in the position that the US was in 1914-it can prevent the war or wait until the combatants are too exhausted to defend their paltry gains.

    Given the realities of nuclear warfare-which seem not to have sunk in among the Americans, perhaps because they mistake a bubble for a bomb shelter- the wise option is to prevent war by publicly warning against it. In the hope that brought face to face with reality the masses will besiege their governments, as we can easily do, and prevent war.'

    See also http://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/02/20/the-coming-wars-to-end-all-wars/

    V. Arnold , Feb 21, 2018 12:32:43 AM | link
    Debsisdead | Feb 20, 2018 8:53:42 PM | 35

    I have no idea who you are talking about; care to say?

    Jeff Kaye , Feb 21, 2018 12:36:59 AM | link
    Great analysis! Can't imagine how you continue to put out quality work day after day! Your question at the close speaks to stakes involved in this.
    foo , Feb 21, 2018 1:53:45 AM | link
    @ 10 - 4

    Resources boils down to money. Of course. I don't think any power would lose from tapping a source of resource.

    DidierF , Feb 21, 2018 2:03:08 AM | link
    Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with.

    The horrible thing with the US attitude is that you do a white thing, you're attacking them and if you do a black thing, you're attacking them too. This attitude is building hostility against Russia. It's like programming a pet to be afraid of something. The western people are being programmed into hating Russia, dehumanizing her people, cutting every tie with Russia and transforming any information from Russia into life threatening propaganda. A war for our hearts is running. The US population is being coerced into believing that war against Russia is a vital necessity.

    It will be a war of choice from the US "elites". Clinton announced it and the population had chosen Trump for that reason.

    You're wondering why they're doing it. I suppose that their narrative is losing its grip on the western populations. They're also conscious of it. If they lose it, they'll have to face very angry mobs and face the void of their lives. Everything they did was either useless or poisonous. It means to be in a very bad spot. They're are therefore under an existential threat.

    Russia proved time and again that it's possible to get out of their narrative. Remember their situation when Eltsin was reelected with the western help.

    The Chicago boys were telling the Russian authorities how to run the economy and they made out of the word democrat a synonym of thief. They were in the narrative and the result was a disaster. Then, they woke up and started to clean the house. I remember the "hero" of democracy whose name was "Khodorovsky (?)". In the west he was a freedom fighter and in Russia he stole something like Rosneft. This guy and others of the same sort were described in the west as heroes, pionniers and so on. They were put back into submission to the law. The western silence about their stealings, lies and cheating is still deafening me.

    It was the first Russian crime. The second one was to survive the first batch of sanctions against them (I forgot the reason of the sanctions). They not only survived they thrived. It was against the western leading economic ideology. A third crime was to push back Saakachvili and his troops with success.

    The fourth was to put back into order the Tchechen. Russia was back into the world politics and history. They were not following the script written for them in Washington and Brussels. They were having a political system putting limits to the big companies. And, worst of it, it works.
    Everybody in the west who can read and listen would have noticed that they are making it.

    More, with RT and Sputnik giving info outside the allowed ones or asking annoying questions (western journalists lost that habit with their new formation in the schools of journalism - remember the revolution in their education was criticised and I missed why - very curious to discover why), they were exposing weaknesses of the western narrative. On the other side their narrative became so poor and so limited that any regular reader would feel bored reading the same things time and again and being asked to pay for it at a time his salary was decreased in the name of competitivity. The threat to their narrative was ready. They had to fight it.

    It's becoming a crime to think outside their marks. It's becoming a crime to read outside their marks. I don't even talk about any act outside their marks. Now, it's going to be a crime of treason to them in war time.

    I do feel sadness because many will die from their fear of losing their grip on our minds. I do feel sadness because they have lost and are in denial about it. I do feel sadness because those death aren't necessary. I do feel sadness because those people can't face the consequences of their actions. They don't have the necessary spine. Their lives were useless and even toxic. They could start repairing or mitigating their damages but it would need a very different worldview, a complete conversion to another meaning of life outside the immediate and maximal profit.

    V. Arnold , Feb 21, 2018 2:13:54 AM | link
    DidierF | Feb 21, 2018 2:03:08 AM | 46

    You have aptly described the most dangerous country on this planet. That country must not be appeased, at any cost, because it would surely end us forever...

    Fran , Feb 21, 2018 2:53:24 AM | link
    I wonder if this is true: STUNNING: Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article I wouldn't be surprised if it is true. It would give the entire story a whole new touch. I wanted to write a new smell, but it would be rather stink.
    Partisan , Feb 21, 2018 3:38:27 AM | link
    https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/12/russia-malware-ip-hack/

    Conclusion regarding IP address data: What we're seeing in this IP data is a wide range of countries and hosting providers. 15% of the IP addresses are Tor exit nodes. These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be anonymous online, including malicious actors.

    Overall Conclusion: The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15% of IP addresses that are Tor exit nodes.

    The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any website.

    fairleft , Feb 21, 2018 5:28:09 AM | link
    Partisan @15: "With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become a pressing one."

    The above is entirely backwards. The bottom 2/3rds is frustrated by the LACK of democracy in the US and that's a major reason many voted against the (in fact anti-democratic) elite's desired candidate, Hillary.

    70% of the voting age public was dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with both candidates, and 40% of Americans didn't vote, so that means whichever of Clinton/Trump won, she/he would win with approval of only 10% of the electorate. That's the best example possible of our anti-democratic reality (it's not a worry or a threat, it's already here).

    In the case of both Europe and the US, many people are generally very dissatisfied with the anti-democratic response by the elite to 'the will of the people' that there be much less immigration into countries with high unemployment and 'race to the bottom' labor conditions. That's nearly the entire basis of what the corporate media calls 'the move right'... When in fact restricting immigration is a pro-labor and therefore 'left' policy ... Except in the confused and deliberately stupid political discourse the elite media pushes so hard.

    Lea , Feb 21, 2018 6:16:53 AM | link
    Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all.

    That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media.

    One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality. One wonders what they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a fearless anti-Putin crusader?

    Another example of the narrative gone mad: they are sending CNN journos to meet pro-Trump folks who "have been influenced by Russian trolls on social media". https://twitter.com/yashalevine/status/966177091875168256

    Partisan , Feb 21, 2018 6:20:19 AM | link
    "The above is entirely backwards."

    Well, it is not...if you are believer in "democracy". Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists one.

    One way or other result is the same, it is: Barbarism.

    ralphieboy , Feb 21, 2018 6:27:23 AM | link
    When "trending on Twitter" became a news item in and of itself, I began to despair for the future of reporting, political discourse and ultimately, democracy in America. Twitter and FB are at best a source of information for news reporting, but not a source of news in themselves.

    We made ourselves vulnerable to any and every sort of pernicious manipulation and in the end, we just about deserve everything we get.

    WJ , Feb 21, 2018 6:38:11 AM | link
    War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality.
    Partisan , Feb 21, 2018 6:41:09 AM | link
    there is something illogical in your comment.

    but one should never forget:

    The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.

    Karl Marx

    Ger , Feb 21, 2018 7:52:44 AM | link
    Dan @ 4

    It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia. They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the looting .........connect the dots.

    Anon , Feb 21, 2018 8:08:35 AM | link
    Media and its politicians have lost it completely, and if you criticize them, well then of course you are a... "russian bot". Unfortunately 90% of westerners buy this western MSM influence propaganda campaign, WW3 with Russia will come easy.
    Florin , Feb 21, 2018 9:00:03 AM | link
    News "Meet The Cabal That Are Framing Domestic American Activism As "Russian Influence" and "Fake News"
    https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/01/meet-the-cabal-that-are-framing-domestic-american-activism-as-russian-influence-and-fake-news/

    At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.

    It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?

    I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum, however bloody and expensive.

    Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/12/us-caught-faking-it-in-syria/

    ex-SA , Feb 21, 2018 9:17:53 AM | link
    Chris Hedges has an article on the similar situation in Germany almost 100 years ago. "In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. ...." https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-we-fight-fascism/
    fairleft , Feb 21, 2018 10:26:45 AM | link
    Partisan @54: The facts contradict the statement in the quote that Trump was "openly campaigning for less democracy." He wasn't. He in fact campaigned in part as a populist who would oust (or at least repeatedly ridicule) an anti-democratic elite. If you've overlooked that and believe more or less the opposite, you can't understand the 2016 election or the elite's virulently anti-democratic reaction to it.
    Oui , Feb 21, 2018 11:18:34 AM | link
    NEW CENSORSHIP - HAMILTON68 DASHBOARD

    From the website of Hamilton68 :: Tracking Russian influence operations on Twitter

    So easy to signal this group as a fraud, I wrote an article recently

    ○ G W F and McCarthyism In A Digital Age - Part 2

    [G W F – German Marshall Fund]

    Earlier I wrote about the following relationship: Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society (UK) .

    With Bush and the Iraq War, Dutch PM Balkenende and FM de Hoop Scheffer were seen as the poodle of the White House. In recent years PM Mark Rutte [of MH-17 crash fame] can be considered its puppy. Perhaps a parrot would suit better.

    I noticed a former journalist Hubert Smeets hs partnered with some people to found a "knowledge center" Window on Russia [Raam op Rusland]. Laughable, funded by the Dutch Foreign Ministry and a Dutch-Russia cultural exchange Fund. Preposturous in its simplicity and harm for honest reporting.

    Noirette , Feb 21, 2018 11:38:52 AM | link
    US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)

    Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses (neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.

    The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for 'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.

    Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.

    Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc. having any clue.

    james , Feb 21, 2018 1:03:45 PM | link
    i got a kick out of cluborlov's post from yesterday.. -
    http://cluborlov.blogspot.ca/2018/02/make-russia-great-again-through.html

    The accusation is a lot like accusing somebody of despoiling an outhouse by crapping in it, along with everyone else, but the outhouse in question had a sign on its door that read "No Russians!" and the 13 Russians just ignored it and crapped in it anyway.

    The reason the Outhouse of American Democracy is posted "No Russians!" is because Russia is the enemy. There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy, and treating it as such is incredibly foolish and dangerous, but that's beside the point. Painting Russia as the enemy serves a psychological need rather than a rational one: Americans desperately need some entity onto which they can project their own faults.

    The US is progressing toward a fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin. The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of "aggression." And so on

    Don Bacon , Feb 21, 2018 6:35:10 PM | link
    @Noirette 70
    Yes, claiming that Russians are promoting polical division is silly -- the divisions were already there.
    gizmodo , Jun 12, 2014:
    It's Been 150 Years Since the U.S. Was This Politically Polarized

    Nevertheless, now in WIRED magazine: Their [Agency] goal was to enflame "political intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation, and oppositional social movements."

    OJS , Feb 21, 2018 8:27:10 PM | link

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-21/they-had-more-information-us-sanders-blames-clinton-not-exposing-russian-meddling

    "They Had More Information Than Us" - Sanders Blames Clinton For Not Exposing Russian Meddling

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=WRnBPKFcAKo

    Bernie Sanders said he on Wednesday, "felt compelled to address Russian interference during the US election. Sunday.... he was not aware and believes Russian bot promoting him and went as far to said WikiLeaks published Hillary's email stolen by the Russia....."

    Can you really trust that lying basted? I'm probably one of the few MoA refused to believe and trust Bernie Sanders and the fuckup Democrats .

    ben , Feb 21, 2018 9:24:01 PM | link
    Anti-Russia Think Tanks in US: Who Funds Them? By Bryan MacDonald http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48755.htm
    daffyDuct , Feb 21, 2018 9:46:49 PM | link
    Excellent article summarizing much of what B has posted and more.

    "Finally, and as long was we are on the topic, here is what a real troll farm looks like. [Picture of NSA] Yet this vast suite of offices in Fort Meade, Maryland, where 20,000 SIGINT spies and technicians work for the NSA, is only the tip of the iceberg.

    The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys."

    http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/muellers-comic-book-indictment-how-to-prosecute-a-great-big-nothingburger/

    Daniel , Feb 22, 2018 12:47:29 AM | link
    Great article. Great comments. I LOVE MoA! And it's great to see b getting recognition.

    james wrote: "There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy"

    You know the following; I think you're just too decent a human being to understand how psychopaths operate. Russia is a huge area with enormous natural resources as well as a large, educated populace. Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest).

    Ziggy also noted that once Russia was incorporated, China is the next, and largely last target.

    Jen: NICE JOB putting together a big picture, from Bernays' control of the masses all the way to Genie Energy. Add in Oded Yinon and PNAC and the "foreign policy blunders" that led to the present situation in MENA look like a carefully-constructed, long-game being played "by the book."

    Fairleft. Any leftist/socialist movement which is not global is doomed to failure. This has always been true, but with "offshoring" of manufacturing jobs and the internet untethering many "white collar" jobs from any given geological location(s), workers must see ourselves as a global entity rather than national or regional players - because that is certainly how the 0.01% see us (and themselves).

    "Workers of the world UNITE" is more true today than a century and a half ago.

    Ghost Ship , Feb 22, 2018 5:28:36 AM | link
    Did the Titanic just sink Bild ?
    Partisan , Feb 22, 2018 6:20:18 AM | link
    https://youtu.be/GN-tf3HM9ao New Yorker Reporter Debunks Russia Twitter Panic
    ralphieboy , Feb 22, 2018 7:31:36 AM | link
    @fairleft 85

    nations that do not have to face costs arising from environmental, health or safety legislation will almost always prevail in the world market over those that have some concern for the environment and the workers.

    That is the main issue I have with globalization.

    Competing on wages is one thing; that can be a great impetus to become more efficient and productive, but if we do nothing to force other countries to clean up their act, they will have no impetus to do so and we will continue to lose jobs to the international competition, no matter how efficiently we work.

    test , Feb 22, 2018 7:32:53 AM | link
    Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and paranoia.
    Partisan , Feb 22, 2018 9:02:22 AM | link
    "....borderless globalization has been a catastrophe for most of the underdeveloped world's businesses and workers."

    it is always annoying when I see the 'globalization" argument is used whether from the right or left. The globalization has started by the moment when us humans begin to roaming on this planet. there are millions of examples yet somehow globalization is of recent phenomenon. Lapis Lazuli mineral used in making blue color and paint is found on clay pottery in Mesopotamia's ancient city of Ur. That city is also place where many legend originated which were taken by major religion and can be found in their holy books. See even the myth are globalizied from very early on.

    Most of the people do not even know what it is, not those who are writing about it.

    Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States.

    One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion of secure employment.

    Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction

    test , Feb 22, 2018 10:02:35 AM | link
    The anti-russian think tanks, msm, bellingcat etc push this too much, making them look stupid.
    john , Feb 22, 2018 10:30:32 AM | link
    Tannenhouser

    the observable and demonstrable attempts are clearly futile, and have been pretty much reduced to spasms and tantrums, largely devoid of cognizance, not to mention legality, but certainly dangerous nonetheless.

    no sir ree bob, we get our multipolar world or we scavenge a dead landscape of Alamogordo glass .

    Tannenhouser , Feb 22, 2018 11:23:44 AM | link
    John@96. We are on the same page then. I see it more like this. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1991370.The_Cool_War
    karlof1 , Feb 22, 2018 4:18:56 PM | link
    Really enjoyed Julian Assange's explanation of Mueller's nothingburger.

    Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the other forces at play."

    [Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

    Highly recommended!
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    Cybersecurity "experts" in the United States have long alleged that "Russian bots" were used to meddle in the 2016 elections.

    But, as it turns out, the authors of a Senate report on "Russian election meddling" actually ran the false flag meddling operation themselves.

    A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors , New Knowledge , quickly became a household name. Described by the New York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the U.S. military and the intelligence agencies.

    The CEO and co-founder of New Knowledge, Jonathon Morgan, had previously worked for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) , the U.S. military's advanced research agency known for horrific ideas on how to control humanity . Morgan's partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the NSA (National Security Agency) who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of authoritarian investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone, according to a report by RT .

    Morgan and Fox have both struck gold in the " Russiagate " scheme, which sprung into being after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan, for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. And also worth mentioning, that dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by NATO (North AtTreaty Tready Organization) and USAID (United States Agency for International Development).

    It is worth noting that the 600 " Russia-linked " Twitter accounts monitored by the dashboard is not disclosed to the public either, making it impossible to verify these claims. This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry journalists, however. Yet on December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created the fake army of Russian bots, as well as several fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate.

    Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead . In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had " orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet ." – RT

    This scandal is being perpetrated by the United States media and has so far deceived millions, if not more. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones , which based its story on "expert opinion" from Morgan's dubious creation, Hamilton 68.

    Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Tim es piece, had known about the meddling for months because he spoke at an event where the organizers boasted about it!

    Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican votes, "enrage " Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a " false flag " to hurt Moore. He dubbed it " Project Birmingham ." -RT

    There really was meddling in American democracy by " Russian bots. " Except those bots weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the " Russiagate " hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection , brainwashing, and Nazi-style propaganda campaigns.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

    Highly recommended!
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Fran , Feb 21, 2018 2:53:24 AM | link

    I wonder if this is true: STUNNING: Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article I wouldn't be surprised if it is true.

    It would give the entire story a whole new touch. I wanted to write a new smell, but it would be rather stink.

    [Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
    "... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
    "... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Lea , Feb 21, 2018 6:16:53 AM | link

    Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all.

    That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media.

    One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality.

    One wonders what they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a fearless anti-Putin crusader?

    Another example of the narrative gone mad: they are sending CNN journos to meet pro-Trump folks who "have been influenced by Russian trolls on social media". https://twitter.com/yashalevine/status/966177091875168256

    WJ , Feb 21, 2018 6:38:11 AM | link
    War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality.
    Ger , Feb 21, 2018 7:52:44 AM | link
    Dan @ 4

    It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia. They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the looting .........connect the dots.

    Guy Thornton , Feb 21, 2018 9:10:47 AM | link
    Watching the USA these days is like watching a loved one with progressive dementia. I've reached the stage where I think the sooner it's over the better for everyone.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Atlantic Council ..."
    "... Alliance for Securing Democracy. ..."
    "... Alliance for Securing Democracy ..."
    "... That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases. ..."
    "... For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity. ..."
    "... American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. ..."
    "... In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public. ..."
    "... The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. ..."
    "... The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing. ..."
    "... I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection. ..."
    "... The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions. ..."
    "... Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. ..."
    "... The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the "security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure evil (TPTB contend). ..."
    "... Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with. ..."
    "... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
    "... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
    "... Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists one. ..."
    "... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
    "... The US is progressing toward a fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin. The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of "aggression." And so on ..."
    "... The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys." ..."
    "... Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest). ..."
    "... Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and paranoia. ..."
    "... Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States. ..."
    "... One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion of secure employment. Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction ..."
    "... The anti-russian think tanks, msm, bellingcat etc push this too much, making them look stupid. ..."
    "... Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the other forces at play." ..."
    Feb 20, 2018J | www.moonofalabama.org

    The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the uncritical acceptance of an algorithm they do not want to understand and which is known to produce fake results.

    See for example these three stories:

    From the last link:

    SAN FRANCISCO -- One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.

    The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

    In other words - the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive issues.

    Those claims are based on this propaganda project:

    Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian influence campaign.

    The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is run by military lobbyists, CIA minions and neo-conservative propagandists. Its claimed task is:

    ... to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.

    There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin ever made or makes such efforts.

    The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items" and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It claims that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News, two general news sites sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3. accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and 2 tweet about.

    Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one "openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.

    On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who - according to NYT - want to sow divisiveness and subvert democracy, wished everyone a #MerryChristmas.


    bigger

    The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters, Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all of these accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably nefarious:

    Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl, #standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.

    The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag , ...

    The Daily Beast reported earlier that the last claim is definitely false :

    Twitter's internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo . There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

    The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.

    The Dutch IT expert and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch keywords and hashtags showed up on the Hamilton 68 "Russian bots" dashboard. He found ( Dutch , English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud:

    In recent weeks, I have been keeping a close eye on Hamilton 68. Every time a Dutch hashtag was shown on the website, I made a screenshot. Then I noted what was playing at that moment and I watched the Tweets with this hashtag. Again I could not find any Tweet that seemed to be from a Russian troll.

    In all cases, the hash tags that Hamilton 68 reported were trending topics in the Netherlands . In all cases there was much to do around the subject of the hashtag in the Netherlands. Many people were angry or shared their opinion on the subject on Twitter. And even if there were a few tweets with Russian connections between them, the effect is zero. Because they do not stand out among the many other, authentic Tweets.

    Van den Berg lists a dozen examples he analyzed in depth.

    The anti-Russian Bellingcat group around couch blogger Eliot Higgins is sponsored by the NATO propaganda shop Atlantic Council . It sniffs through open source stuff to blame Russia or Syria wherever possible. Bellingcat was recently a victim of the "Russian bots" - or rather of the ASD website. On February 10 the hashtag #bellingcat trended to rank 2 of the dashboard.


    bigger

    Bellingcat was thus, according to the Hamilton 68 claims, under assault by hordes of nefarious Russian government sponsored bots.

    The Bellingcat folks looked into the issue and found that only six people on Twitter, none of them an automated account , had used the #bellingcat hashtag in the last 48 hours. Some of the six may have opinions that may be "pro-Russian", but as Higgins himself says :

    [I]n my opinion, it's extremely unlikely the people listed are Russian agents

    The pro-NATO propaganda shop Bellingcat thus debunked the pro-NATO propaganda shop Alliance for Securing Democracy.

    The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with rather normal people from all over the world who's opinions they personally dislike. Those then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.

    Moreover - what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the dashboard?

    But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.

    This is nuts.

    Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the only site critical of it. It predicted :

    The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.

    It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are normal people.

    The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence" into U.S. media. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false "Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, - CNN, Wired, the New York Times - are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package the venom and spread it to the public.

    How long will it take until people die from it?

    Posted by b on February 20, 2018 at 03:15 PM | Permalink

    Comments next page " It's all too reminiscent of Duck Soup:

    Clueless Joe , Feb 20, 2018 3:45:14 PM | link

    "to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe."

    That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases.

    ken , Feb 20, 2018 3:46:05 PM | link
    For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity.
    xor , Feb 20, 2018 4:11:10 PM | link
    The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.
    karlof1 , Feb 20, 2018 4:30:11 PM | link
    Gee, what could go wrong formulating policy founded upon a series of Big Lies? Kim Dotcom says he has important info the FBI refuses to hear. At the Munich Security Conference , neocon Nicholas Burns, former US Ambassador to NATO, details my assertion's factual basis that current policy is being formed on a series of Big Lies: "Will NATO strengthen itself to contain Russian power in Eastern Europe giving what Russian [sic] has done illegally in Crimea, in the Donbass, and in Georgia ?" [Bolded text are the Big Lies.]

    Clearly, this entire psyop was premeditated and its design was hastily done contemporaneously with Russia's Syria intervention. NSA/CIA/FBI knew of HRC's security breeches and rightly assumed their contents would find their way into the election, so the general plan was ready to go prior to WikiLeaks publications. b has uncovered much, and I hope he's planning to publish a book about the entire affair.

    Jen , Feb 20, 2018 4:54:59 PM | link
    Ken @ 4: There doesn't necessarily need to be One Major Reason for going to war. There may be several reasons all feeding and reinforcing one another and creating a psychological climate in which Going To War is seen as the only solution and is inevitable. The reasons are not just economic and political but cultural and historical.

    In some countries allied with the US, the politicians in power are the ideological descendants of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany - so in a sense they are committed to "correcting" what they see as wrong. In the case of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, he is the grandson of a former prime minister who once served in General Tojo's World War II cabinet.
    https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/26/national/formed-in-childhood-roots-of-abes-conservatism-go-deep/#.WoyZCG9uaUk

    That's why pinning down the reason for wanting a war against Russia is so difficult.

    Partisan , Feb 20, 2018 5:06:58 PM | link
    The whole piece is just hilarious and I laughed out loud all time while reading it.

    https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/16/nyts-really-weird-russiagate-story/

    Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally.

    Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police.

    As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."

    james , Feb 20, 2018 5:17:19 PM | link
    thanks b!

    muddy waters.. paid for propaganda.... look at all the russian bots, lol... cold war 2 / mccarthyism 2 is in effect... the historic parallels are marked. thank you neo cons! it's working... the ordinary person in the usa can't be this stupid can they?

    when does ww3 kick in? is that really what these idiots want? or is it just to prolong the huge defense budget?

    Mike Maloney , Feb 20, 2018 5:24:03 PM | link
    This is about conditioning voters in Europe and the United States for a long war with Russia and China. In other words, a return to the 1950s. It is not working and becoming increasingly hysterical because societies are not nearly as cohesive as they once were, and the mainstream political parties, while better funded and more top-down organized, are basically hollow. The collapse is coming. Four years or ten, take your pick.
    dh , Feb 20, 2018 5:32:10 PM | link
    @4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."

    Most Americans probably don't. Just the chosen few with the deepest fall-out shelters. The idea is to keep piling the pressure on to countries like Iran and Russia in the hope that their populations will rise up and demand the freedoms that we enjoy in the West....things like uncensored wardrobe malfunctions and transgender washrooms.

    Partisan , Feb 20, 2018 6:02:58 PM | link
    "Most Americans probably don't."

    not true.

    let's imagine that we have the pyramid of evilness, by which we measure bestiality of one regime and its constituency. my firm belief is that us would be on the top of that pyramid. Only dilemma would be between Zionist entity and the US.

    "How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?" was the question Wilhelm Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree, February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar Republic's democratic constitution.

    Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933 and Reich was trying to grapple with the fact that the German people had apparently chosen the authoritarian politics promoted by National Socialism against their own political interests.

    Ever since, the question of fascism, or rather the question of why might people vote for their own oppression, has never ceased to haunt political philosophy.2 With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become a pressing one.

    An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime.

    CarlD , Feb 20, 2018 6:06:06 PM | link
    Remember the "USS MAINE"! Media have long agitated for War in US History. Nothing sells newspapers like a good ole war! Demonizing is a way to achieve it. What is sure is that this is a one way street. Once over the cliff, there is no turning back.

    How do you tell people that, at the flick of your magic switch, Putin is in fact a swell guy and wonderful human being? Once love is gone who goes back to the filthy, abhorrent and estranged spouse?

    Surely the US establishment is playing with fire thinking they will successfully ride out any conflict and come out on top secure in their newly reestablished hegemony on the smoldering ruins of Humanity.

    Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as tomorrow word will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.

    "Freedom of speech"...

    dh , Feb 20, 2018 6:14:14 PM | link
    @15 "An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime."

    I'm not so sure. I think there are many Americans who deeply distrust their government. But of course they don't want to appear unpatriotic. There are also many who are apathetic and many simply don't know how to change things.

    SteveK9 , Feb 20, 2018 6:35:58 PM | link
    It's horrible I know to quote a Nazi, but Goring had this right:

    Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

    Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

    Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

    WorldBLee , Feb 20, 2018 6:36:51 PM | link
    American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. The skills required to repeat the text verbatim serve them well in both cases. Skepticism is only reserved to anyone who tries to introduce logic or facts into the equation--such as when Jill Stein was interviewed on MSNBC recently. How dare Ms. Stein try to bring FACTS into the discussion!
    chet380 , Feb 20, 2018 6:41:04 PM | link
    In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public.
    Sinc , Feb 20, 2018 6:41:57 PM | link
    See info on US 'Twitter' manipulation campaign
    Sinc , Feb 20, 2018 6:44:16 PM | link
    Sorry, link here
    ken , Feb 20, 2018 6:59:01 PM | link
    Thanks Jen. It still makes no sense. As a veteran of the Vietnam fiasco, I was pretty much government oriented until McNamara outed the whole thing whining about haw sorry he was. 59,000 dead and he's sorry. They were able to hide the Gulf of Tonkin BS until then. After that I researched the reasons for each war/conflict the USA started and could find no logical reasons except hunger for power. But the little sandbox wars won't destroy the world like a major war/conflict with Russia and it goes nuclear. Almost every politician, and major news organizations are pushing for a war/conflict with Russia. This is insanity as no one will win a war like this and I am sure they know that,,, but they keep the war drums beating anyhow. It simply doesn't make sense. But Thanks again.

    Same for dh, #14. Things are soooo stupid, your joking may be closer to the truth than you know. :-)

    Skip , Feb 20, 2018 6:59:35 PM | link
    @SteveK9 #19

    Thank you for the post. I will save it and use it liberally, with proper attributions. When one challenges the tribe on places like Twitter, it is hard to tell who is a real idiot and who is a bot. How do you know? Maybe that the bots go away fairly quickly and the idiots hang around to argue ad infinitum.

    oldenyoung , Feb 20, 2018 7:06:23 PM | link
    The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. The public perception that "russia did it!!" continues to rise. I wonder what the public acceptance level needs to be for them to execute a MAJOR false flag event. They seem to think they are still on target, and its just a short matter or time...

    They are going to do this when the perception management is complete... We really do not need another one of their disasters

    Grieved , Feb 20, 2018 7:37:47 PM | link
    The bully pushes and pushes until stopped by the first serious push back. The dynamic of the west and the neocon/Zionists at the core is essentially that of the bully. Nations like Venezuela and the Philippines have started to push back, and I hope and feel fairly confident that they will both survive the rage of the US. In some part, they have begun to show the actual powerlessness of the bully.

    But the really killer nations - Russia and China - are holding their water as they strengthen their force. I believe that one very serious push back from either of them in the right circumstances will stop the bully. And yet, as they bide their time, we see a curious phenomenon wherein the US is destroying itself from the inside.

    It's as if all of the forces that exist to control the country - the lockstep media, the fully rigged markets, the hysterical military, the bought legislature and the crooked courts - are all acting far more strongly than should be necessary. The entire system is over-reacting, over-reaching, over-boiling. And in the course of this, the US is actually shedding power, and at an amazing rate. But not from the action of Russia but from its non-action, the empty space that that allows the bully's dynamic to over-reach, all the way to complete failure.

    Is it possible that deep in the security states of Russia and China there's even a study and a model for this? Is the collapse of the US actually being gamed by Russia and China - and through the totally counter-intuitive action of non-action?

    Just a thought.

    Ghost Ship , Feb 20, 2018 7:51:03 PM | link
    >>>> xor | Feb 20, 2018 4:11:10 PM | 6
    The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.

    I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection.

    WG , Feb 20, 2018 7:52:38 PM | link
    Hey b,
    Just wanted to let you know that Joe Lauria mentioned your blog and the article you wrote on the indictment of the 13 Russians. He was on Loud and Clear (Sputnik Radio, Washington DC) today and brought you up at the start of the program.
    Glad to see you get some recognition for all the great work you've been doing :)
    Mike , Feb 20, 2018 7:53:24 PM | link
    Meanwhile, back in 2010:
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/11/when-campaigns-manipulate-social-media/66351/
    Jen , Feb 20, 2018 7:53:43 PM | link
    Ken @ 24: The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions.

    Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. https://archive.org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda

    Bernays' books influenced Nazi and Soviet propaganda and Bernays himself was hired by the US government to justify in the public mind the 1954 US invasion of Guatemala.

    You may be aware that Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation which owns the Wall Street Journal, FOX News and 20th Century Fox studios, is also on the Board of Directors of Genie Energy which owns a subsidiary firm that was granted a licence by an Israeli court to explore and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's (and Israeli-occupied) Golan Heights.

    simjam , Feb 20, 2018 7:59:21 PM | link
    The national media speaks as one -with one consistent melody day after day. Who is the conductor? When will one representative of the mainstream media sing solo? There must be a Ray McGovern somewhere among the flock.
    V. Arnold , Feb 20, 2018 8:05:33 PM | link
    Grieved | Feb 20, 2018 7:37:47 PM | 27

    Many of my thoughts as well. The U.S.'s greatest fault is its tacit misunderstanding of just what russia is in fact. They utterly fail to understand the Russian character; forged over 800 years culminating with the defeat of Nazi Germany, absorbing horrific losses; the U.S. fails to understand the effect upon the then Soviets, become todays Russians. Even the god's have abandoned the west...

    Debsisdead , Feb 20, 2018 8:53:42 PM | link
    I watched bbc news this am in the hope that I would get to see the most awful creature at the 2018 olympics cry her croc tears (long story - a speed skater who cuts off the opposition but has been found out so now when she swoops in front of the others they either skate over her leading to tearful whines from perp about having been 'pushed', or gets disqualified for barging. Last night she got disqualified so as part of my study on whether types like this believe their own bullshit I thought I'd tune in but didn't get that far into the beebs lies)

    The bulk of the bulletin was devoted to a 'lets hate Russia' session which featured a quisling who works for the russian arm of BBC (prolly just like cold war days staffed exclusively by MI6/SIS types). This chap, using almost unintelligible english, claimed he had proof at least 50 Russian Mercenaries (question - why are amerikan guns for hire called contractors [remember the Fallujah massacre of 100,000 civilians because amerikan contractors were stupid] yet Russian contractors are called mercenaries by the media?) had been killed in Syria last week. The bloke had evidence of one contractor's death not 50 - the proof was a letter from the Russian government to the guy's mother telling her he didn't qualify for any honours because he wasn't in the Russian military.

    The quisling (likely a Ukranian I would say) went on to rabbit about the bloke having also fought in Donbass under contract - to which the 'interviewer (don't ya love it when media 'interview' their own journos - a sure sign that a snippet of toxic nonsense is being delivered) led about how the deceitful Russians had claimed the only Russians fighting in Donbass were contractors - yeah well this bloke was a contractor surely that proves the Russians were telling the truth.

    It's not what these propagandists say; they adopt a tone and the audience is meant to hate based on that even when the facts as stated conflict with the media outlet's point of view. Remember the childhood trick of saying "bad dog" ter yer mutt in loving tones - the dog comes to ya tail wagging & licks yer hand. This is that.

    The next item was more Syria lies - white helmets footage (altho the beeb is now mostly giving them an alternative name to dodge the facts about white helmets) of bandaged children with flour tipped on their heads.

    The evil Syrians and Russians are bombarding Gouta - nary a word about the continuous artillery barrage Gouta has subjected the citizens of Damascus to for the past 4 years, or that the Syrians have repeatedly offered truces and safe passage for civilians. Any injured children need to ask their parents why they weren't allowed to take advantage of the frequent offers of transport out. Maybe the parents are worried 'the resistance' will do its usual and blow up the busloads of children after luring them over with candy.

    Anyway I switched off after that so never did learn if little miss cheat had a cry.

    ben , Feb 20, 2018 9:17:54 PM | link
    Reposting from TRNN: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:21178:Why-is-a-Russian-Troll-Farm-Being-Compared-to-911%3F
    integer , Feb 20, 2018 9:23:42 PM | link
    Thank you for reporting on this. The people behind the so-called Alliance for Securing Democracy need to be exposed for the warmongering frauds that they are. Regardless of what one thinks of him, Trump was correct when he said that NATO is obsolete.
    Don Bacon , Feb 20, 2018 10:12:52 PM | link
    The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the "security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure evil (TPTB contend).

    So the whole scenario makes perfect sense from that standpoint.

    Petri Krohn , Feb 20, 2018 10:17:36 PM | link
    The news stories become far easier to understand if you replace the word " Russia " with the word " truth ".
    bevin , Feb 20, 2018 11:45:45 PM | link
    re Felix E. Dzerzhinsky: Ukrainian fascists have a particular hatred of Felix because he was both a Bolshevik and a Pole.

    I hate to do this but I just posted this elsewhere, at Off Guardian, where the Guardian is back into its highest gears promoting war.

    "The wardrums are beating in a way not heard since 1914-there is no reason for war except the best reason of all: an imperial ruling class sees its grip slipping and will chance everything rather than endure the humiliation of adjusting to reality.

    "China is in the position that the US was in 1914-it can prevent the war or wait until the combatants are too exhausted to defend their paltry gains.

    Given the realities of nuclear warfare-which seem not to have sunk in among the Americans, perhaps because they mistake a bubble for a bomb shelter- the wise option is to prevent war by publicly warning against it. In the hope that brought face to face with reality the masses will besiege their governments, as we can easily do, and prevent war.'

    See also http://www.greanvillepost.com/2018/02/20/the-coming-wars-to-end-all-wars/

    V. Arnold , Feb 21, 2018 12:32:43 AM | link
    Debsisdead | Feb 20, 2018 8:53:42 PM | 35

    I have no idea who you are talking about; care to say?

    Jeff Kaye , Feb 21, 2018 12:36:59 AM | link
    Great analysis! Can't imagine how you continue to put out quality work day after day! Your question at the close speaks to stakes involved in this.
    foo , Feb 21, 2018 1:53:45 AM | link
    @ 10 - 4

    Resources boils down to money. Of course. I don't think any power would lose from tapping a source of resource.

    DidierF , Feb 21, 2018 2:03:08 AM | link
    Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with.

    The horrible thing with the US attitude is that you do a white thing, you're attacking them and if you do a black thing, you're attacking them too. This attitude is building hostility against Russia. It's like programming a pet to be afraid of something. The western people are being programmed into hating Russia, dehumanizing her people, cutting every tie with Russia and transforming any information from Russia into life threatening propaganda. A war for our hearts is running. The US population is being coerced into believing that war against Russia is a vital necessity.

    It will be a war of choice from the US "elites". Clinton announced it and the population had chosen Trump for that reason.

    You're wondering why they're doing it. I suppose that their narrative is losing its grip on the western populations. They're also conscious of it. If they lose it, they'll have to face very angry mobs and face the void of their lives. Everything they did was either useless or poisonous. It means to be in a very bad spot. They're are therefore under an existential threat.

    Russia proved time and again that it's possible to get out of their narrative. Remember their situation when Eltsin was reelected with the western help.

    The Chicago boys were telling the Russian authorities how to run the economy and they made out of the word democrat a synonym of thief. They were in the narrative and the result was a disaster. Then, they woke up and started to clean the house. I remember the "hero" of democracy whose name was "Khodorovsky (?)". In the west he was a freedom fighter and in Russia he stole something like Rosneft. This guy and others of the same sort were described in the west as heroes, pionniers and so on. They were put back into submission to the law. The western silence about their stealings, lies and cheating is still deafening me.

    It was the first Russian crime. The second one was to survive the first batch of sanctions against them (I forgot the reason of the sanctions). They not only survived they thrived. It was against the western leading economic ideology. A third crime was to push back Saakachvili and his troops with success.

    The fourth was to put back into order the Tchechen. Russia was back into the world politics and history. They were not following the script written for them in Washington and Brussels. They were having a political system putting limits to the big companies. And, worst of it, it works.
    Everybody in the west who can read and listen would have noticed that they are making it.

    More, with RT and Sputnik giving info outside the allowed ones or asking annoying questions (western journalists lost that habit with their new formation in the schools of journalism - remember the revolution in their education was criticised and I missed why - very curious to discover why), they were exposing weaknesses of the western narrative. On the other side their narrative became so poor and so limited that any regular reader would feel bored reading the same things time and again and being asked to pay for it at a time his salary was decreased in the name of competitivity. The threat to their narrative was ready. They had to fight it.

    It's becoming a crime to think outside their marks. It's becoming a crime to read outside their marks. I don't even talk about any act outside their marks. Now, it's going to be a crime of treason to them in war time.

    I do feel sadness because many will die from their fear of losing their grip on our minds. I do feel sadness because they have lost and are in denial about it. I do feel sadness because those death aren't necessary. I do feel sadness because those people can't face the consequences of their actions. They don't have the necessary spine. Their lives were useless and even toxic. They could start repairing or mitigating their damages but it would need a very different worldview, a complete conversion to another meaning of life outside the immediate and maximal profit.

    V. Arnold , Feb 21, 2018 2:13:54 AM | link
    DidierF | Feb 21, 2018 2:03:08 AM | 46

    You have aptly described the most dangerous country on this planet. That country must not be appeased, at any cost, because it would surely end us forever...

    Fran , Feb 21, 2018 2:53:24 AM | link
    I wonder if this is true: STUNNING: Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article I wouldn't be surprised if it is true. It would give the entire story a whole new touch. I wanted to write a new smell, but it would be rather stink.
    Partisan , Feb 21, 2018 3:38:27 AM | link
    https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/12/russia-malware-ip-hack/

    Conclusion regarding IP address data: What we're seeing in this IP data is a wide range of countries and hosting providers. 15% of the IP addresses are Tor exit nodes. These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be anonymous online, including malicious actors.

    Overall Conclusion: The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15% of IP addresses that are Tor exit nodes.

    The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any website.

    fairleft , Feb 21, 2018 5:28:09 AM | link
    Partisan @15: "With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become a pressing one."

    The above is entirely backwards. The bottom 2/3rds is frustrated by the LACK of democracy in the US and that's a major reason many voted against the (in fact anti-democratic) elite's desired candidate, Hillary.

    70% of the voting age public was dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with both candidates, and 40% of Americans didn't vote, so that means whichever of Clinton/Trump won, she/he would win with approval of only 10% of the electorate. That's the best example possible of our anti-democratic reality (it's not a worry or a threat, it's already here).

    In the case of both Europe and the US, many people are generally very dissatisfied with the anti-democratic response by the elite to 'the will of the people' that there be much less immigration into countries with high unemployment and 'race to the bottom' labor conditions. That's nearly the entire basis of what the corporate media calls 'the move right'... When in fact restricting immigration is a pro-labor and therefore 'left' policy ... Except in the confused and deliberately stupid political discourse the elite media pushes so hard.

    Lea , Feb 21, 2018 6:16:53 AM | link
    Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all.

    That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media.

    One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality. One wonders what they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a fearless anti-Putin crusader?

    Another example of the narrative gone mad: they are sending CNN journos to meet pro-Trump folks who "have been influenced by Russian trolls on social media". https://twitter.com/yashalevine/status/966177091875168256

    Partisan , Feb 21, 2018 6:20:19 AM | link
    "The above is entirely backwards."

    Well, it is not...if you are believer in "democracy". Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists one.

    One way or other result is the same, it is: Barbarism.

    ralphieboy , Feb 21, 2018 6:27:23 AM | link
    When "trending on Twitter" became a news item in and of itself, I began to despair for the future of reporting, political discourse and ultimately, democracy in America. Twitter and FB are at best a source of information for news reporting, but not a source of news in themselves.

    We made ourselves vulnerable to any and every sort of pernicious manipulation and in the end, we just about deserve everything we get.

    WJ , Feb 21, 2018 6:38:11 AM | link
    War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality.
    Partisan , Feb 21, 2018 6:41:09 AM | link
    there is something illogical in your comment.

    but one should never forget:

    The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.

    Karl Marx

    Ger , Feb 21, 2018 7:52:44 AM | link
    Dan @ 4

    It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia. They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the looting .........connect the dots.

    Anon , Feb 21, 2018 8:08:35 AM | link
    Media and its politicians have lost it completely, and if you criticize them, well then of course you are a... "russian bot". Unfortunately 90% of westerners buy this western MSM influence propaganda campaign, WW3 with Russia will come easy.
    Florin , Feb 21, 2018 9:00:03 AM | link
    News "Meet The Cabal That Are Framing Domestic American Activism As "Russian Influence" and "Fake News"
    https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/01/meet-the-cabal-that-are-framing-domestic-american-activism-as-russian-influence-and-fake-news/

    At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.

    It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?

    I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum, however bloody and expensive.

    Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/12/us-caught-faking-it-in-syria/

    ex-SA , Feb 21, 2018 9:17:53 AM | link
    Chris Hedges has an article on the similar situation in Germany almost 100 years ago. "In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. ...." https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-we-fight-fascism/
    fairleft , Feb 21, 2018 10:26:45 AM | link
    Partisan @54: The facts contradict the statement in the quote that Trump was "openly campaigning for less democracy." He wasn't. He in fact campaigned in part as a populist who would oust (or at least repeatedly ridicule) an anti-democratic elite. If you've overlooked that and believe more or less the opposite, you can't understand the 2016 election or the elite's virulently anti-democratic reaction to it.
    Oui , Feb 21, 2018 11:18:34 AM | link
    NEW CENSORSHIP - HAMILTON68 DASHBOARD

    From the website of Hamilton68 :: Tracking Russian influence operations on Twitter

    So easy to signal this group as a fraud, I wrote an article recently

    ○ G W F and McCarthyism In A Digital Age - Part 2

    [G W F – German Marshall Fund]

    Earlier I wrote about the following relationship: Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter - Henry Jackson Society (UK) .

    With Bush and the Iraq War, Dutch PM Balkenende and FM de Hoop Scheffer were seen as the poodle of the White House. In recent years PM Mark Rutte [of MH-17 crash fame] can be considered its puppy. Perhaps a parrot would suit better.

    I noticed a former journalist Hubert Smeets hs partnered with some people to found a "knowledge center" Window on Russia [Raam op Rusland]. Laughable, funded by the Dutch Foreign Ministry and a Dutch-Russia cultural exchange Fund. Preposturous in its simplicity and harm for honest reporting.

    Noirette , Feb 21, 2018 11:38:52 AM | link
    US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)

    Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses (neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.

    The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for 'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.

    Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.

    Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc. having any clue.

    james , Feb 21, 2018 1:03:45 PM | link
    i got a kick out of cluborlov's post from yesterday.. -
    http://cluborlov.blogspot.ca/2018/02/make-russia-great-again-through.html

    The accusation is a lot like accusing somebody of despoiling an outhouse by crapping in it, along with everyone else, but the outhouse in question had a sign on its door that read "No Russians!" and the 13 Russians just ignored it and crapped in it anyway.

    The reason the Outhouse of American Democracy is posted "No Russians!" is because Russia is the enemy. There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy, and treating it as such is incredibly foolish and dangerous, but that's beside the point. Painting Russia as the enemy serves a psychological need rather than a rational one: Americans desperately need some entity onto which they can project their own faults.

    The US is progressing toward a fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin. The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of "aggression." And so on

    Don Bacon , Feb 21, 2018 6:35:10 PM | link
    @Noirette 70
    Yes, claiming that Russians are promoting polical division is silly -- the divisions were already there.
    gizmodo , Jun 12, 2014:
    It's Been 150 Years Since the U.S. Was This Politically Polarized

    Nevertheless, now in WIRED magazine: Their [Agency] goal was to enflame "political intensity through supporting radical groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation, and oppositional social movements."

    OJS , Feb 21, 2018 8:27:10 PM | link

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-21/they-had-more-information-us-sanders-blames-clinton-not-exposing-russian-meddling

    "They Had More Information Than Us" - Sanders Blames Clinton For Not Exposing Russian Meddling

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=WRnBPKFcAKo

    Bernie Sanders said he on Wednesday, "felt compelled to address Russian interference during the US election. Sunday.... he was not aware and believes Russian bot promoting him and went as far to said WikiLeaks published Hillary's email stolen by the Russia....."

    Can you really trust that lying basted? I'm probably one of the few MoA refused to believe and trust Bernie Sanders and the fuckup Democrats .

    ben , Feb 21, 2018 9:24:01 PM | link
    Anti-Russia Think Tanks in US: Who Funds Them? By Bryan MacDonald http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48755.htm
    daffyDuct , Feb 21, 2018 9:46:49 PM | link
    Excellent article summarizing much of what B has posted and more.

    "Finally, and as long was we are on the topic, here is what a real troll farm looks like. [Picture of NSA] Yet this vast suite of offices in Fort Meade, Maryland, where 20,000 SIGINT spies and technicians work for the NSA, is only the tip of the iceberg.

    The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys."

    http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/muellers-comic-book-indictment-how-to-prosecute-a-great-big-nothingburger/

    Daniel , Feb 22, 2018 12:47:29 AM | link
    Great article. Great comments. I LOVE MoA! And it's great to see b getting recognition.

    james wrote: "There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy"

    You know the following; I think you're just too decent a human being to understand how psychopaths operate. Russia is a huge area with enormous natural resources as well as a large, educated populace. Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest).

    Ziggy also noted that once Russia was incorporated, China is the next, and largely last target.

    Jen: NICE JOB putting together a big picture, from Bernays' control of the masses all the way to Genie Energy. Add in Oded Yinon and PNAC and the "foreign policy blunders" that led to the present situation in MENA look like a carefully-constructed, long-game being played "by the book."

    Fairleft. Any leftist/socialist movement which is not global is doomed to failure. This has always been true, but with "offshoring" of manufacturing jobs and the internet untethering many "white collar" jobs from any given geological location(s), workers must see ourselves as a global entity rather than national or regional players - because that is certainly how the 0.01% see us (and themselves).

    "Workers of the world UNITE" is more true today than a century and a half ago.

    Ghost Ship , Feb 22, 2018 5:28:36 AM | link
    Did the Titanic just sink Bild ?
    Partisan , Feb 22, 2018 6:20:18 AM | link
    https://youtu.be/GN-tf3HM9ao New Yorker Reporter Debunks Russia Twitter Panic
    ralphieboy , Feb 22, 2018 7:31:36 AM | link
    @fairleft 85

    nations that do not have to face costs arising from environmental, health or safety legislation will almost always prevail in the world market over those that have some concern for the environment and the workers.

    That is the main issue I have with globalization.

    Competing on wages is one thing; that can be a great impetus to become more efficient and productive, but if we do nothing to force other countries to clean up their act, they will have no impetus to do so and we will continue to lose jobs to the international competition, no matter how efficiently we work.

    test , Feb 22, 2018 7:32:53 AM | link
    Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and paranoia.
    Partisan , Feb 22, 2018 9:02:22 AM | link
    "....borderless globalization has been a catastrophe for most of the underdeveloped world's businesses and workers."

    it is always annoying when I see the 'globalization" argument is used whether from the right or left. The globalization has started by the moment when us humans begin to roaming on this planet. there are millions of examples yet somehow globalization is of recent phenomenon. Lapis Lazuli mineral used in making blue color and paint is found on clay pottery in Mesopotamia's ancient city of Ur. That city is also place where many legend originated which were taken by major religion and can be found in their holy books. See even the myth are globalizied from very early on.

    Most of the people do not even know what it is, not those who are writing about it.

    Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States.

    One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion of secure employment.

    Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction

    test , Feb 22, 2018 10:02:35 AM | link
    The anti-russian think tanks, msm, bellingcat etc push this too much, making them look stupid.
    john , Feb 22, 2018 10:30:32 AM | link
    Tannenhouser

    the observable and demonstrable attempts are clearly futile, and have been pretty much reduced to spasms and tantrums, largely devoid of cognizance, not to mention legality, but certainly dangerous nonetheless.

    no sir ree bob, we get our multipolar world or we scavenge a dead landscape of Alamogordo glass .

    Tannenhouser , Feb 22, 2018 11:23:44 AM | link
    John@96. We are on the same page then. I see it more like this. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1991370.The_Cool_War
    karlof1 , Feb 22, 2018 4:18:56 PM | link
    Really enjoyed Julian Assange's explanation of Mueller's nothingburger.

    Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the other forces at play."

    [Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

    Highly recommended!
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    Cybersecurity "experts" in the United States have long alleged that "Russian bots" were used to meddle in the 2016 elections.

    But, as it turns out, the authors of a Senate report on "Russian election meddling" actually ran the false flag meddling operation themselves.

    A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors , New Knowledge , quickly became a household name. Described by the New York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the U.S. military and the intelligence agencies.

    The CEO and co-founder of New Knowledge, Jonathon Morgan, had previously worked for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) , the U.S. military's advanced research agency known for horrific ideas on how to control humanity . Morgan's partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the NSA (National Security Agency) who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of authoritarian investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone, according to a report by RT .

    Morgan and Fox have both struck gold in the " Russiagate " scheme, which sprung into being after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan, for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. And also worth mentioning, that dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by NATO (North AtTreaty Tready Organization) and USAID (United States Agency for International Development).

    It is worth noting that the 600 " Russia-linked " Twitter accounts monitored by the dashboard is not disclosed to the public either, making it impossible to verify these claims. This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry journalists, however. Yet on December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created the fake army of Russian bots, as well as several fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate.

    Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead . In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had " orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet ." – RT

    This scandal is being perpetrated by the United States media and has so far deceived millions, if not more. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones , which based its story on "expert opinion" from Morgan's dubious creation, Hamilton 68.

    Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Tim es piece, had known about the meddling for months because he spoke at an event where the organizers boasted about it!

    Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican votes, "enrage " Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a " false flag " to hurt Moore. He dubbed it " Project Birmingham ." -RT

    There really was meddling in American democracy by " Russian bots. " Except those bots weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the " Russiagate " hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection , brainwashing, and Nazi-style propaganda campaigns.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

    Highly recommended!
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Fran , Feb 21, 2018 2:53:24 AM | link

    I wonder if this is true: STUNNING: Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article I wouldn't be surprised if it is true.

    It would give the entire story a whole new touch. I wanted to write a new smell, but it would be rather stink.

    [Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
    "... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
    "... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Lea , Feb 21, 2018 6:16:53 AM | link

    Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all.

    That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media.

    One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality.

    One wonders what they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a fearless anti-Putin crusader?

    Another example of the narrative gone mad: they are sending CNN journos to meet pro-Trump folks who "have been influenced by Russian trolls on social media". https://twitter.com/yashalevine/status/966177091875168256

    WJ , Feb 21, 2018 6:38:11 AM | link
    War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality.
    Ger , Feb 21, 2018 7:52:44 AM | link
    Dan @ 4

    It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia. They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the looting .........connect the dots.

    Guy Thornton , Feb 21, 2018 9:10:47 AM | link
    Watching the USA these days is like watching a loved one with progressive dementia. I've reached the stage where I think the sooner it's over the better for everyone.

    [Jan 02, 2019] American People Admit Having Facebook Data Stolen Kind Of Worth It To Watch That Little Fucker Squirm

    Jan 02, 2019 | www.theonion.com

    CHICAGO -- Saying it was ultimately a small price to pay in exchange for the splendid spectacle that has followed, millions of Americans admitted Thursday that they didn't really mind having their Facebook data stolen if it meant getting to watch that little fucker squirm.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Meet The Cabal That Are Framing Domestic American Activism As "Russian Influence" and "Fake News"

    Notable quotes:
    "... At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like. ..."
    "... I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum, however bloody and expensive. ..."
    "... Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud. ..."
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Florin , Feb 21, 2018 9:00:03 AM | link

    News "Meet The Cabal That Are Framing Domestic American Activism As "Russian Influence" and "Fake News"
    https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/01/meet-the-cabal-that-are-framing-domestic-american-activism-as-russian-influence-and-fake-news/

    At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.

    It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?

    I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum, however bloody and expensive.

    Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/12/us-caught-faking-it-in-syria/

    [Jan 02, 2019] American People Admit Having Facebook Data Stolen Kind Of Worth It To Watch That Little Fucker Squirm

    Jan 02, 2019 | www.theonion.com

    CHICAGO -- Saying it was ultimately a small price to pay in exchange for the splendid spectacle that has followed, millions of Americans admitted Thursday that they didn't really mind having their Facebook data stolen if it meant getting to watch that little fucker squirm.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Buchanan How The War Party Lost The Middle East

    Jan 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    So read the headline in The Washington Post , Aug. 18, 2011.

    The story quoted President Barack Obama directly:

    "The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way... the time has come for President Assad to step aside."

    France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's David Cameron signed on to the Obama ultimatum: Assad must go!

    Seven years and 500,000 dead Syrians later, it is Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron who are gone. Assad still rules in Damascus, and the 2,000 Americans in Syria are coming home. Soon, says President Donald Trump.

    But we cannot "leave now," insists Sen. Lindsey Graham, or "the Kurds are going to get slaughtered."

    Question: Who plunged us into a Syrian civil war, and so managed the intervention that were we to go home after seven years our enemies will be victorious and our allies will "get slaughtered"?

    Seventeen years ago, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban for granting sanctuary to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.

    U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad is today negotiating for peace talks with that same Taliban. Yet, according to former CIA director Mike Morell, writing in The Washington Post today, the "remnants of al-Qaeda work closely" with today's Taliban.

    It would appear that 17 years of fighting in Afghanistan has left us with these alternatives :

    Who got us into this debacle?

    After Trump flew into Iraq over Christmas but failed to meet with its president, the Iraqi Parliament, calling this a "U.S. disregard for other nations' sovereignty" and a national insult, began debating whether to expel the 5,000 U.S. troops still in their country.

    George W. Bush launched Operation Iraq Freedom to strip Saddam Hussein of WMD he did not have and to convert Iraq into a democracy and Western bastion in the Arab and Islamic world.

    Fifteen years later, Iraqis are debating our expulsion.

    Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric with American blood on his hands from the fighting of a decade ago, is leading the charge to have us booted out. He heads the party with the largest number of members in the parliament.

    Consider Yemen. For three years, the U.S. has supported with planes, precision-guided munitions, air-to-air refueling and targeting information, a Saudi war on Houthi rebels that degenerated into one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.

    Belatedly, Congress is moving to cut off U.S. support for this war. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, its architect, has been condemned by Congress for complicity in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the consulate in Istanbul. And the U.S. is seeking a truce in the fighting.

    Who got us into this war? And what have years of killing Yemenis, in which we have been collaborators, done to make Americans safer?

    Consider Libya. In 2011, the U.S. attacked the forces of dictator Moammar Gadhafi and helped to effect his ouster, which led to his murder.

    Told of news reports of Gadhafi's death, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, "We came, we saw, he died."

    The Libyan conflict has since produced tens of thousands of dead. The output of Libya's crucial oil industry has collapsed to a fraction of what it was. In 2016, Obama said that not preparing for a post-Gadhafi Libya was probably the "worst mistake" of his presidency.

    The price of all these interventions for the United States?

    Some 7,000 dead, 40,000 wounded and trillions of dollars.

    For the Arab and Muslim world, the cost has been far greater. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, civilian and soldier alike, pogroms against Christians, massacres, and millions uprooted and driven from their homes.

    How has all this invading, bombing and killing made the Middle East a better place or Americans more secure? One May 2018 poll of young people in the Middle East and North Africa found that more of them felt that Russia was a closer partner than was the United States of America.

    The fruits of American intervention?

    We are told ISIS is not dead but alive in the hearts of tens of thousands of Muslims, that if we leave Syria and Afghanistan, our enemies will take over and our friends will be massacred, and that if we stop helping Saudis and Emiratis kill Houthis in Yemen, Iran will notch a victory.

    In his decision to leave Syria and withdraw half of the 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, Trump enraged our foreign policy elites , though millions of Americans cannot get out of there soon enough.

    In Monday's editorial celebrating major figures of foreign policy in the past half-century, The New York Times wrote,

    "As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new generation to find a way forward from the wreckage Mr. Trump has already created."

    Correction:

    Make that "the wreckage Mr. Trump inherited."

    [Jan 02, 2019] Mideast wars were cooked up by loyal-to-Israel neocons

    Probably not. It is just the the USA imperial interest and Israeli interests highly correlate in this region.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Those who get their daily dose of lies from the NYTimes will believe what's written, as they believed Judith Miller's lies that helped get us into the Iraq war for the sake of Israel. ..."
    "... And other lies by other liars for Mideast wars cooked up by loyal-to-Israel neocons. No Israel, no war. It's as simple as that. ..."
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

    T. Weed , says: January 1, 2019 at 8:32 pm GMT

    Mr. Giraldi ends on a hopeful note, that readers of Bret Stephen's article will conclude not that Trump is bad for Israel, but that Israel is bad for America. Alas, wishful thinking.

    Those who get their daily dose of lies from the NYTimes will believe what's written, as they believed Judith Miller's lies that helped get us into the Iraq war for the sake of Israel.

    And other lies by other liars for Mideast wars cooked up by loyal-to-Israel neocons. No Israel, no war. It's as simple as that.

    [Jan 02, 2019] IOW time is running out for the neo-cons, and they're only going to get Iran destroyed and hold onto power in the US through an outright Bolshevik style coup against the public (some kind of fabricated National Emergency)

    Jan 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Digital Samizdat , says: January 1, 2019 at 7:28 pm GMT

    @Miro23

    IOW time is running out for the neo-cons, and they're only going to get Iran destroyed and hold onto power in the US through an outright Bolshevik style coup against the public (some kind of fabricated National Emergency).

    Well, we already had one "fabricated national emergency" -- the 9/11 false flag. Do you think there'll be yet another? I mean something big, not like the Skripal thing.

    [Jan 02, 2019] T>he NY Times exposes how aligned the globalist leftist elite is with the NEOCON globalist elite.

    Jan 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Danielson , says: January 1, 2019 at 5:17 am GMT

    As usual Philip Giraldi out writes the NYT hacks. Stephens and his cohorts at the Times are constantly kvetching about Israel then they scream anti-Semitism if it's pointed out. It's exhausting. I'm exhausted with neocons.
    wayfarer , says: January 1, 2019 at 5:46 am GMT

    Trotskyism : the political, economic, and social principles advocated by Trotsky especially the theory and practice of communism developed by or associated with Trotsky and usually including adherence to the concept of worldwide revolution as opposed to socialism in one country.

    source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotskyism

    Wally , says: January 1, 2019 at 5:54 am GMT
    Excellent timing as I just found this at http://www.antiwar.com

    !! American Legion Joins VFW in Calling for Congressional Investigation of Israel's Attack on USS Liberty !!

    Contains significant text, images, &videos:
    ex.:

    https://hubpages.com/politics/American-Legion-Joins-VFW-in-Calling-for-Congressional-USS-Liberty-Investigation

    Paul , says: January 1, 2019 at 6:40 am GMT
    Pro-Zionist liberals such as those at the New York Times have the dilemma of how to oppose President Trump, who pursues pro-Zionist policies. A solution seems to be to argue that Trump is not really that pro-Zionist.
    Low Voltage , says: January 1, 2019 at 6:52 am GMT

    American journalism has become in its mainstream exponents a compendium of half-truths and out-and-out lies.

    When was it ever any different?

    Israel is Bad for America, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz Review
    Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website January 1, 2019 at 10:35 am GMT
    Israel Is Bad for America

    Inspired by the Scofield Bible, it is, regrettably, a fundamental belief of millions of voters that Israel is good for America. In John Hagee's words , '50 million evangelical bible-believing Christians unite with five million American Jews standing together on behalf of Israel.'

    The linked article concludes: 'Not least among the many victims of the Scofield Bible are 5 million Palestinian refugees whose right to return is fervently opposed by America's Zionized Christians. Thanks to their indoctrination by Scofield's unholy book, they believe that Palestine belongs not to the Palestinians -- many of whom are fellow Christians -- but exclusively to "God's chosen people".'

    Mark James , says: January 1, 2019 at 11:05 am GMT
    I'm pleased to say I was not for moving the embassy and as for the Iran deal it was better than the alternative, with the potential for further talks down the road. Stephens didn't approve but both aspects of US foreign policy were good for the US. So why would we expect him to?

    Where the clash is going to come is the Democratic party is not going to put up with this rubbish anymore. Yes there will be some holdovers (Schumer, Cardin et al.) but blanket support is not going to play with the next congress. They will lose donor support as well as media acceptance –from the Times– but Christian Zionism isn't a factor for Dem's and constituents see that a brutal Israeli government that is focusing on attaching itself to kindred spirit states led by strongman types, doesn't deserve support.

    Franz , says: January 1, 2019 at 11:10 am GMT
    Try "bad for the world."

    "Israel is the sputtering fuse of World War III"

    – Wilmot Robertson, December, 1981, The Dispossessed Majority

    Israel is Bad for America, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz Review
    Johnny Walker Read , says: January 1, 2019 at 1:36 pm GMT
    Does anyone else remember when liberal's were anti-war and despised the military?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=170&v=gv1KEF8Uw2k

    Israel is Bad for America, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz Review
    JC , says: January 1, 2019 at 1:41 pm GMT
    when we here about israel as the problem it is really not israel the country but israel the people. they are spread out over many countries but all still believe in their cult of israel i have read many times how the majority of them are not even ancestors of israel but are instead converts form centuries ago there are lawsutis in the US against the government aid to israel which vilotlates US law on providing aid to an undeclares nuke power,,,and against aipac for not registering FARA,,,they have gone nowhere In my opinion, their whole power comes from media control when the media goes on and on about bogus Russian influence and says nothing of israel influence you know you have a problem
    Hamed Ghashghavi , says: Website January 1, 2019 at 1:55 pm GMT
    The World will never be free and peaceful until we can liberate AMERICAN & European politcal, economic, military, intelligentsia, educational & cultural DECISION MAKING CENTERS from destructive & inhuman ZIONIST lobby. As Stephen Walt & John Mearsheimr wrote in their unique & worldwide known "US FOREIGN POLICY AND ISRAEL LOBBY" not only these lobbying organizations are anti US interests but they are as well against the long term interests of ISRAEL itself.

    Briefly we should free mind of American people before all to have a ideal and productive world.

    Hamed from Tehran

    AkumalJack , says: January 1, 2019 at 2:04 pm GMT
    Social Media has opened the door and continues to pave the path for the world to see the truth of the Apartheid State of Israel and the struggle of the Palestinian People. Most Americans are struggling themselves, so many won't make the effort to learn what's happening to foreigners living half a world away. It's perfectly understandable. On the other hand, there are others of us–and the number is growing exponentially–who feel a human bond with the suffering and humiliation Palestinian People experience daily from an Apartheid "ally" who we–through our American taxes–support. Our representatives in congress are heavily influenced to vote for measures to support Netanyahu's Apartheid Regime. Use your power of the pen to reach out to your local representative in congress to stop now. And keep it up my Brothers and Sisters. Social Media is the Way!
    AkumalJack , says: January 1, 2019 at 2:04 pm GMT
    Social Media has opened the door and continues to pave the path for the world to see the truth of the Apartheid State of Israel and the struggle of the Palestinian People. Most Americans are struggling themselves, so many won't make the effort to learn what's happening to foreigners living half a world away. It's perfectly understandable. On the other hand, there are others of us–and the number is growing exponentially–who feel a human bond with the suffering and humiliation Palestinian People experience daily from an Apartheid "ally" who we–through our American taxes–support. Our representatives in congress are heavily influenced to vote for measures to support Netanyahu's Apartheid Regime. Use your power of the pen to reach out to your local representative in congress to stop now. And keep it up my Brothers and Sisters. Social Media is the Way!
    Z-man , says: January 1, 2019 at 2:25 pm GMT
    This is what I said on Pat Buchanan's page about a comment, very apropos to this article, also from the NY Times "That comment from the NY Times exposes how aligned the globalist leftist elite is with the NEOCON globalist elite. There's 'no daylight' between characters like 'Linda' Graham and 'Up Chuck' Schumer when it comes to globalist hegemony. Thank God for Donald and keep America First!" The comment that Pat made his point on was this: 'In Monday's editorial celebrating major figures of foreign policy in the past half-century, The New York Times wrote', "As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new generation to find a way forward from the wreckage Mr. Trump has already created." This is what Pat attacked in his column.

    Correct me if I'm wrong but America still has NO formal alliance treaty with the Jewish State, no?

    And finally 'Bret Stephens'; How clever they are with their names.

    Z-man , says: January 1, 2019 at 2:34 pm GMT
    @Hamed Ghashghavi The problem 'Hamed from Tehran' is that the Main Stream Media and the political class in the USA is almost completely owned by the rich 'Zionist Lobby'.
    bucky , says: January 1, 2019 at 2:34 pm GMT
    @anon It is a lot more than 4 billion a year.

    For example: aid to Egypt is necessary because of Israel. It is how we pay off the dictatorship for not pressing the Palestinian issue. So add another 1.5 billion.

    Aid to Palestinians: another $500 million.

    Tax deductible funds going towards settlement expansion: several hundreds of million if not billion.

    Aid to Jordan. Aid to Lebanon.

    Add it all up and it probably is $20 billion each and every year.

    Carroll Price , says: January 1, 2019 at 2:50 pm GMT
    I wish the hell Trump was "bad for Israel", but unfortunately, he's not.
    ChuckOrloski , says: January 1, 2019 at 3:05 pm GMT
    @Mark James New Year greetings, Mark James.

    I predict proactive Jewish Lobby Stink-Think Tanks have engineered plans to dramatically influence Democrat Congress & presidential candidate elections, and which are underway now.

    Elections come and go but the Zio stump-song remains the same.

    First, and as you should well understand Mark, particular campaigns for US Senate cost $millions simply to get a candidate's mere "name" in front of ever longing & frustrated American voters.

    Of course, such efforts are enhanced by manifold "special interests" and billionaire campaign contributions.

    Regrettably, U.S. election campaign "donor support" (uh, speech?) trumps the will of the paltry amount of Americans who indulge voting, and our Zionist Corporate Media obliges the biggest beneficiary winner$, and can finagle ideologically blind & typically GOP-Christian Zionist's to bloc vote for, i.e., brand-name & repackaged Zio Democrats, Pocahontas, Bloomberg, Biden, Bob Casey, etcetera.

    In short, Mark, the "brutal Israeli government" expertly followed Protocols of Zion by neutering U.S. Congressional & Presidential democratic elections, and the Zionist Corporate Media entertainingly promotes the THEATER.

    National rejection of the great "rubbish" work of, for one little example, NYT's Bret Stephens, is a giant step toward how America could become gallant/noble again, and afterward repent & focus upon strivation to "greatness."

    Thanks, M.J., uh, not Jordan sneaker Nikes!

    bucky , says: January 1, 2019 at 3:05 pm GMT
    The proximate reason why Iran is a problem in this region is because Israel cannot resolve the Palestinian issue. Iran is basically a gigantic wag the dog. Without this external ginned up threat, Israel is simply stuck in a Palestinian mire.

    A war with Iran would also serve as a pretext and cover for Israel to expel its remaining Palestinians.

    This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the United States into a war with Iran. Fundamentally because they refuse to take responsibility for the Palestinian issue that they created.

    JoaoAlfaiate , says: January 1, 2019 at 6:36 pm GMT
    Just what US interests in Syria justify the risk of war with Russia? Absolutely none! Bret is an israel Firster thru and thru.
    bike-anarkist , says: January 1, 2019 at 7:16 pm GMT
    "I still say that US and Russia should come to Israels help in hour of need.
    But Israel also should stop behaving like rotten spoiled child."

    Russia can provide the "Jewish Autonomous Oblast" (already exists), and the U$A can provide the means to move them there. Of course the FORMER Israel will have to pay for everything.

    JLK , says: January 1, 2019 at 7:21 pm GMT
    @EliteCommInc.

    I support Great Britain and France, that does not mean I approve of colonial behavior or trouncing British or French identity. I can certainly support the existence of Is areal and chagrin their attacks and encroachments onto Palestine uninvited and without compensation or shooting protectors for the matter.

    I tend to agree with you on this. No matter what one thinks of the morality of the events of 1948, most of today's Israeli Jews were born on the land and have a right to live there. They're no more responsible for the sins of their grandfathers than a modern German, except to the extent that they help perpetuate continued injustice.

    With that said, what frightens me is the extent to which some of them have been emboldened by a combination of unchecked ethnocentrism and a sense of immunity from scrutiny and criticism. Particularly in the realm of ethnic bioweapons. Most of the leading DNA analysis companies seem to be Jewish-owned. It seems to be an area of emphasis with them. It was reported 20 years ago that Israel has an anti-Arab virus. Who else might be a target?

    Israeli participation in spyware and their access to raw NSA data is also concerning. How do we know that the data isn't be used to intimidate Americans from speaking out, or to siphon money from ordinary investors by insider trading?

    [Jan 02, 2019] Israel is hardly a normal country. It is an Apartheid Colony

    Jan 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

    Ron T , says: January 1, 2019 at 5:37 pm GMT

    @polistra Israel is hardly a normal country. It is an Apartheid Colony. That's why it needs American support and will need it for the foreseeable future. It uses its co-religionists in the US to maintain an iron grip on US mideast policy, making sure that it is at the heart of it and that almost no dissenting voices can ever be elected in the US or get any mainstream media access. If that sounds like a normal country to you, I have a bridge for sale.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Israel is not interested in fighting this fight alone. It has dragged others into it, including the US.

    Jan 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

    anon [119] Disclaimer , says: January 1, 2019 at 3:44 pm GMT

    Bret Stephens and all his fellow Israel loving Zionists are foreign agents who should be stripped of their US citizenship.
    geokat62 , says: January 1, 2019 at 3:45 pm GMT
    @Adir

    but as far your critisisms of Israel policy and 'undemocratic' and 'illiberal' stances and actions.
    well guess what

    You're missing the thrust of Giraldi's position. Israel can do whatever it likes as long as it doesn't entangle the US in their fight. But, as you well know, Israel is not interested in fighting this fight alone. It has dragged others into it, including the US. As long as the American taxpayer is forced to pay an annual tribute of ~$4B, they have every right to condemn Israeli policies that clearly don't align with their values. So, get used to it.

    DESERT FOX , says: January 1, 2019 at 3:45 pm GMT
    Israel is no friend of America , never was , never has been and never will be, and just a few examples, JFK was shot and killed in full view of Americans for his executive order 11110 which would have restored America to constitutional money bypassing the FED, who benefits?

    The USS Liberty was attacked by Israel killing 34 and wounding 174 in an attempt to blame the attack on Egypt and bring the U.S. into the war against Egypt and of course Israel lied about the attack and got away with it!

    ... ... ...

    Israel is Bad for America, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz Review
    The Alarmist , says: January 1, 2019 at 3:51 pm GMT
    You have to hand it to the Israelis for conquering like Romans.

    As for the US in Syria, it has always had the potential for handing us a "Charge of the Light Brigade" moment where, like in the Crimean War, we manage to keep the Russians and the Iranians checked in the region for a few years, but at a cost where even the dulled senses of the US voter can't escape the toll taken to achieve this fleeting "strategic objective."

    ChuckOrloski , says: January 1, 2019 at 4:10 pm GMT
    @bucky Aware, Bucky said: "This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the United States into a war with Iran."

    Appreciate your posting of the wise sentences, above, bucky. Thanks.

    Israel will never allow their territory expansion/M.E. hegemon goals to get interrupted by mere U.S. elections.

    The will and desires of American voters are easily manageable, manipulated, & another major & fear-provoking "Homeland" False Flag attack, and voila, it's Fire & Fury upon Syria and Iran.

    Esaka , says: January 1, 2019 at 4:40 pm GMT
    @polistra

    Well, Israel itself isn't bad for us. Israel is a normal country defending its own interests fiercely. Every country SHOULD defend its own interests fiercely

    But it is HOW they defend those interests that is problematic. Hungary has insisted that they will never tolerate a large number of migrants in their country. Hungary will be for Hungarians. They do not wage wars, they do not commit ethnic cleansing in other people's lands. They have merely closed their borders and that is a peaceful way in which they fiercely protect their interests. The same goes for Japan. Despite a stagnating economy caused by plummeting birth rates, the Japanese insist on a strict no immigrant policy. That is a peaceful way of fiercely protecting their interests.

    Israel on the other hand is anything but peaceful. They engage in ethnic cleansing and drag the US (and whoever else they can con) into their conflicts. If we are looking for a foreign example to emulate, there's no question about it – we should emulate Japan and not Israel. Japan is a civilized nation where the people genuinely love their country. Israel is a thuggish and fascist state that justly deserves all the opprobrium they shamelessly whine about.

    [Jan 02, 2019] The proximate reason why Iran is a problem in this region is because Israel cannot resolve the Palestinian issue. Iran is basically a gigantic wag the dog. Without this external ginned up threat, Israel is simply stuck in a Palestinian mire

    The level of alienation of Palestians probably reached that stage at which reconciliation is impossible.
    Notable quotes:
    "... This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the United States into a war with Iran. Fundamentally because they refuse to take responsibility for the Palestinian issue that they created. ..."
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

    bucky , says: January 1, 2019 at 3:05 pm GMT

    The proximate reason why Iran is a problem in this region is because Israel cannot resolve the Palestinian issue. Iran is basically a gigantic wag the dog. Without this external ginned up threat, Israel is simply stuck in a Palestinian mire.

    A war with Iran would also serve as a pretext and cover for Israel to expel its remaining Palestinians.

    This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the United States into a war with Iran. Fundamentally because they refuse to take responsibility for the Palestinian issue that they created.

    Israel is Bad for America

    bucky , says: January 1, 2019 at 2:34 pm GMT

    @anon It is a lot more than 4 billion a year.

    For example: aid to Egypt is necessary because of Israel. It is how we pay off the dictatorship for not pressing the Palestinian issue. So add another 1.5 billion.

    Z-man , says: January 1, 2019 at 3:11 pm GMT
    @bucky It's more that that, specifically to Izruel . If you include 'Non Governmental Agencies', the 'Charaties' and hedge funds funneling unknown amounts of ZOG bucks to the land of Zion plus other underhanded methods of getting money to their Zionist bretheren, it's in the tens of billions .
    Carroll Price , says: January 1, 2019 at 3:20 pm GMT
    @anon

    Other than brain-dead Christian fundamentalist, it come's as no surprise that Jews who wrote the Old and New Testament, granted themselves special permission to violate virtually every moral law and restriction known to mankind, including the right to steal land and resources belonging to others. While, at the same time, giving themselves the right to condemn anyone daring to point-out their lying and deceptive ways.

    Realist, January 1, 2019 at 7:44 pm GMT

    @bucky

    Add it all up and it probably is $20 billion each and every year.

    Middle East involvement costs trillions of dollars.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Britain must surely be in the running for the Wooden Spoon award doe 2018

    Notable quotes:
    "... Britain must surely be in the running for many reasons: among others, the sheer disaster that is Theresa May's government (and the various clowns and thuggish goons that constitute her Cabinet), the Brexit mess, the Skripal poisoning circus, Britain's own collapse in controlling the propaganda narrative on Syria and the revelations about Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, and their ties to the British military establishment. ..."
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jen , Dec 31, 2018 3:36:34 PM | link

    If Syria wins the award for Country of the Year 2018, I'd hate to see who gets the Wooden Spoon for 2018. There must be quite a few serious contenders for that prize!

    Britain must surely be in the running for many reasons: among others, the sheer disaster that is Theresa May's government (and the various clowns and thuggish goons that constitute her Cabinet), the Brexit mess, the Skripal poisoning circus, Britain's own collapse in controlling the propaganda narrative on Syria and the revelations about Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, and their ties to the British military establishment.

    [Jan 02, 2019] The demonization of Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela might be connected with oil depletion

    Notable quotes:
    "... Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some point the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and borrowing capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they would become bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics manufacture, herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial Civilisation. ..."
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Palloy , Feb 20, 2018 8:52:02 PM | link

    @4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."

    Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some point the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and borrowing capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they would become bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics manufacture, herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial Civilisation.

    In anticipation of increasing Crude Oil imports, Nixon stopped the convertibility of Dollars into Gold, thus making the Dollar entirely fiat, allowing them to print as much of the currency as they needed.

    They also began a system of obscuring oil production data, involving the DoE's EIA and the OECD's IEA, by inventing an ever-increasing category of Undiscovered Oilfields in their predictions, and combining Crude Oil and Condensate (from gas fields) into one category (C+C) as if they were the same thing. As well the support of the ethanol-from-corn industry began, even though it was uneconomic. The Global Warming problem had to be debunked, despite its sound scientific basis. Energy-intensive manufacturing work was off-shored to cheap labour+energy countries, and Just-in-Time delivery systems were honed.

    In 2004 the price of Crude Oil rose from $28 /barrel up to $143 /b in mid-2008. This demonstrated that there is a limit to how much business can pay for oil (around $100 /b). Fracking became marginally economic at these prices, but the frackers never made a profit as over-production meant prices fell to about $60 /b. The Government encourages this destructive industry despite the fact it doesn't make any money, because the alternative is the end of Industrial Civilisation.

    Eventually though, there must come a time when there is not enough oil to power all the cars and trucks, bulldozers, farm tractors, airplanes and ships, as well as manufacture all the wind turbines and solar panels and electric vehicles, as well as the upgraded transmission grid. At that point, the game will be up, and it will be time for WW3. So we need to line up some really big enemies, and develop lots of reasons to hate them.

    Thus you see the demonisation of Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela for reasons that don't make sense from a normal perspective.

    Ger , Feb 21, 2018 7:52:44 AM | link
    Dan @ 4

    It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia. They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the looting .........connect the dots.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Election tampering via false identity by Democratic operatives: The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing.

    Notable quotes:
    "... a text book case of "projection" by demorats -their own crimes of sedition and treason projected onto trump via the russians. ..."
    "... The thing that is most difficult for Americans to grasp is that they do not control their own government and have not for many decades. ..."
    Jan 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
    Oldguy05 , 31 minutes ago link

    George Carlin on some cultural issues.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLuZjpxmsZQ

    vampirekiller , 35 minutes ago link

    "The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Demorats Experts masquerading as progressive Republicans and Democrats"............FIFY

    It's all they have left after being rendered politically irrelevant and statistically insignificant in November 2016 by the deplorables. ROFLMAO.........this civil war needs to die in federal government so we do not waste money in mass deportations to an established island nation surrounded by 1000 nautical miles of water.

    Baron Samedi , 1 hour ago link

    "Election tampering via false identity" sounds like the right kind of language for a federal law -- but I'm betting there is something already out there (at state/fed level), and am not wild about yet more laws (which [[[they]]] get to ignore anyway).

    bh2 , 1 hour ago link

    "tech specialists who lean Democratic," Tech specialists who lean criminal. A distinction without a difference, of course.

    hooligan2009 , 2 hours ago link

    a text book case of "projection" by demorats -their own crimes of sedition and treason projected onto trump via the russians.

    one can only hope that Mueller has found the proof that DemoRats were responsible for attempts to rig the presidential elections - aided and abetted by criminal journalists also guilty of sedition and treason.

    I Am Jack's Macroaggression , 2 hours ago link

    The Moon of A on Hamilton 68: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/russian-bots-how-an-anti-russian-lobby-creates-fake-news.html

    A new and improved version of H68 coming soon! https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/hamilton-68/

    it's a bunch of Ultra-Zionist Jews, which is the only reason their ******** gets published all over the (((media))) as if at all credible.

    https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/about-us/advisory-council/

    I mean, ******* Chertoff and Kristol's involvement says it all.

    OT : Trump Gives US Troops Four Months to Leave Syria – Report I would not be surprised if US troops in Manbij are attacked/killed soon and immediate blame put on the SAA.

    lincolnsteffens , 1 hour ago link

    Didn't look it up but someone told me that Kristol's parents were passionate Marxists.

    dcmbuffy , 2 hours ago link

    democrats are corrupt- plain and simple- shameful and with no regard to who knows that are corrupt- no shame- "I'm Gettn' mines!!!"

    navy62802 , 2 hours ago link

    As if it ******* matters at this point. Get real. We are watching a display of raw power right now. Well connected individuals are calling the shots right now, well outside of the legal system. If you haven't realized that over the past 2 years, you haven't been paying attention. Furthermore, no amount of factual proof is going to result in the actual criminals being held to account. The thing that is most difficult for Americans to grasp is that they do not control their own government and have not for many decades. They do not have an equal system of justice. Instead, the US is ruled by a secret oligarchy which exists above the US legal code. This is the harsh reality we are watching be revealed right now.

    jughead , 2 hours ago link

    We're watching an attempted display of raw power...that hasn't been going as planned. If it had, Trump would either be gone or automagically transformed into the next iteration of BushBama. We are fly in the ointment...buzz buzz

    loveyajimbo , 2 hours ago link

    No prosecution... our DOJ does not prosecute anything political... no matter how serious the felony. Just ask the ***-maggots Hillary, Brennan, Comey, Clapper and Lynch.

    Lord Raglan , 2 hours ago link

    Wow! What does Sherlock Holmes Mueller think of this? This story makes Mueller out to be the biggest fraud of all time and his attorneys tantamount to the Keystone Cops. Where are they on all this?

    chunga , 2 hours ago link

    It's too bad there isn't any opposition to these "Democrat Operatives".

    SmackDaddy , 2 hours ago link

    There was. We fire bombed the **** out of them in 1945.

    philipat , 2 hours ago link

    Strange that this story has not featured prominently on the front pages of NYT/WaPo or on CNN?

    [Jan 02, 2019] Russia has really become the all-purpose pouvantail scarecrow, specter of doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled - massive social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.

    Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Noirette , Feb 21, 2018 11:38:52 AM | link

    US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)

    Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses (neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.

    The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for 'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.

    Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.

    Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc. having any clue.

    [Jan 01, 2019] Israel is Bad for America by Philip Giraldi

    Notable quotes:
    "... They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... Donald Trump is Bad for Israel ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
    Jan 01, 2019 | www.unz.com

    American journalism has become in its mainstream exponents a compendium of half-truths and out-and-out lies. The public, though poorly informed on most issues as a result, has generally figured out that it is being hoodwinked and trust in the Fourth Estate has plummeted over the past twenty years. The skepticism about what is being reported has enabled President Donald Trump and other politicians to evade serious questions about policy by claiming that what is being reported is little more than "fake news."

    No news is more fake than the reporting in the U.S. media that relates to the state of Israel. Former Illinois congressman Paul Findley in his seminal book They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby observed that nearly all the foreign press correspondents working out of Israel are Jewish while most of the editors that they report to at news desks are also Jews, guaranteeing that the articles that eventually surface in the newspapers will be carefully constructed to minimize any criticism of the Jewish state. The same goes for television news, particularly on cable news stations like CNN.

    A particularly galling aspect of the sanitization of news reports regarding Israel is the underlying assumption that Israelis share American values and interests, to include freedom and democracy. This leads to the perception that Israelis are just like Americans with Israel's enemies being America's enemies. Given that, it is natural to believe that the United States and Israel are permanent allies and friends and that it is in the U.S. interest to do whatever is necessary to support Israel, including providing billions of dollars in aid to a country that is already wealthy as well as unlimited political cover in international bodies like the United Nations.

    That bogus but nevertheless seemingly eternal bond is essentially the point from which a December 26 th op-ed in The New York Times departs. The piece is by one of the Times' resident opinion writers Bret Stephens and is entitled Donald Trump is Bad for Israel .

    Stephens gets to the point rather quickly, claiming that "The president has abruptly undermined Israel's security following a phone call with an Islamist strongman in Turkey. So much for the idea, common on the right, that this is the most pro-Israel administration ever. I write this as someone who supported Trump moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and who praised his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal as courageous and correct . I also would have opposed the president's decision to remove U.S. forces from Syria under nearly any circumstances. Contrary to the invidious myth that neoconservatives always put Israel first, the reasons for staying in Syria have everything to do with core U.S. interests. Among them: Keeping ISIS beaten, keeping faith with the Kurds, maintaining leverage in Syria and preventing Russia and Iran from consolidating their grip on the Levant."

    The beauty of Stephens overwrought prose is that the careful reader might realize from the git-go that the argument being promoted makes no sense. Bret has a big heart for the Kurds but the Palestinians are invisible in his piece while his knowledge of other developments in the Middle East is superficial. First of all, the phone call with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had nothing to do with "undermining Israel's security." It concerned the northern border of Syria, which Turkey shares, and arrangements for working with the Kurds, which is a vital interest for both Ankara and Washington. And it might be added that from a U.S. national security point of view Turkey is an essential partner for the United States in the region while Israel is not, no matter what it pretends to be.

    Stephens then goes on to demonstrate what he claims to be a libel, that for him and other neocons Israel always comes first, an odd assertion given the fact that he spends 80% of his article discussing what is or isn't good for Israel. He supports the U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem, the end of the nuclear agreement with Iran, both of which were applauded in Israel but which are extremely damaging to American interests. He attacks the planned withdrawal from Syria because it is a "core interest" for the U.S., which is complete nonsense.

    Contrary to Stephens' no evidence assertion, Russia and Iran have neither the resources nor the desire to "consolidate[e] their grip on the Levant" while it is the United States has no right and no real interest to "maintain leverage" on Syria by invading and occupying the country. But, of course, invading and occupying are practices that Israel is good at, so Stephens' brain fart on the issue can perhaps be attributed to confusion over whose bad policies he was defending. Stephens also demonstrate confusion over his insistence that the U.S. must "resist foreign aggressors the Russians and Iranians in Syria in this decade," suggesting that he is unaware that both nations are providing assistance at the request of the legitimate government in Damascus. It is the U.S. and Israel that are the aggressors in Syria.

    Stephens then looks at the situation from the "Israeli standpoint," which is presumably is easy for him to do as that is how he looks at everything given the fact that he is far more concerned about Israel's interests than those of the United States. Indeed, all of his opinions are based on the assumption that U.S. policy should be supportive of a rightwing Israeli government, that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has recently been indicted for corruption and has called for an early election to subvert the process.

    Bret finally comes to the point, writing that "What Israel most needs from the U.S. today is what it needed at its birth in 1948: an America committed to defending the liberal-international order against totalitarian enemies, as opposed to one that conducts a purely transactional foreign policy based on the needs of the moment or the whims of a president."

    Stephens then expands on what it means to be liberal-international: "It means we should oppose militant religious fundamentalism, whether it is Wahhabis in Riyadh or Khomeinists in Tehran or Muslim Brothers in Cairo and Ankara. It means we should advocate human rights, civil liberties, and democratic institutions, in that order."

    Bret also throws America's two most recent presidents under the bus in his jeremiad, saying "During the eight years of the Obama presidency, I thought U.S. policy toward Israel -- the hectoring , the incompetent diplomatic interventions , the moral equivocations , the Iran deal , the backstabbing at the U.N. -- couldn't get worse. As with so much else, Donald Trump succeeds in making his predecessors look good." He then asks "Is any of this good for Israel?" and he answers "no."

    Bret Stephens in his complaining reveals himself to be undeniably all about Israel, but consider what he is actually saying. He claims to be against "militant religious fundamentalism," but isn't that what Israeli Zionism is all about, with more than a dash of racism and fanaticism thrown in for good measure? One Israeli Chief Rabbi has called black people "monkeys" while another has declared that gentiles cannot live in Israel. Right-wing religious fundamentalist parties currently are in power with Netanyahu and are policy making for the Israeli Government: Shas, Jewish Home, and United Torah Judaism. None of them could be regarded as a moderating influence on their thuggish serial financial lawbreaker Prime Minister.

    And isn't Israel's record on human rights and civil liberties among the worst in the world? Here is the Human Rights Watch's assessment of Israel :

    "Israel maintains entrenched discriminatory systems that treat Palestinians unequally. Its 50-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza involves systematic rights abuses, including collective punishment, routine use of excessive lethal force, and prolonged administrative detention without charge or trial for hundreds. It builds and supports illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, expropriating Palestinian land and imposing burdens on Palestinians but not on settlers, restricting their access to basic services and making it nearly impossible for them to build in much of the West Bank without risking demolition. Israel's decade-long closure of Gaza, supported by Egypt, severely restricts the movement of people and goods, with devastating humanitarian impact."

    Israel, if one is considering the entire population under its rule, is among the most undemocratic states that chooses to call itself democratic. Much of the population living in lands that Israel claims cannot vote, they have no freedom of movement in their homeland, and they have no right of return to homes that they were forced to abandon. Israeli army snipers blithely shoot unarmed demonstrators while Netanyahu's government kills, beats and imprisons children. And the Jewish state does not even operate very democratically even inside Israel itself, with special rights for Jewish citizens and areas and whole towns where Muslims or Christians are not allowed to buy property or reside.

    It is time for American Jews like Bret Stephens to come to the realization that not everything that is good for Israel is good for the U.S. The strategic interests of the two countries, if they were openly discussed in either the media or in congress, would be seen to be often in direct conflict. Somehow in Stephens' twisted mind the 1948 theft of Palestinian lands and the imposition of an apartheid system to control the people is in some way representative of a liberal world order.

    If one were to suggest that Stephens should move to Israel since his primary loyalty clearly lies there, there would be accusations of anti-Semitism, but in a sense, it is far better to have him stick around blathering from the pulpit of The New York Times . When he writes so ineptly about how Donald Trump Is Bad for Israel the real message that comes through loud and clear is how bad Israel is for America.

    Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] .

    [Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

    Highly recommended!
    Dec 30, 2018 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

    At the inception of this entire RussiaGate spectacle I suggested that it was a political distraction to take the attention away from the rejection by the people of neoliberalism which has been embraced by the establishments of both political parties.

    And that the result of the investigation would be indictments for perjury in the covering up of illicit business deals and money laundering. But that 'collusion to sway the election' was without substance, if not a joke.

    Everything that has been revealed to date tends to support that.

    One thing that Aaron overlooks is the evidence compiled by William Binney and associates that strongly suggests the DNC hack was no hack at all, but a leak by an insider who was appalled by the lies and double dealing at the DNC.

    In general, RussiaGate is a farcical distraction from other issues as they say in the video. And this highlights the utterly Machiavellian streak in the corporate Democrats and the Liberal establishment under the Clintons and their ilk who care more about money and power than the basic principles that historically sustained their party. I have lost all respect for them.

    But unfortunately this does open the door for those who use this to approve of the Republican establishment, which is 'at least honest' about being substantially corrupt servants to Big Money who care nothing about democracy, the Constitution, or the public. The best of them are leaving or have already left, and their party is ruined beyond repair.

    This all underscores the paucity of the Red v. Blue, monopoly of two parties, 'lesser of two evils' model of political thought which has come to dominate the discussion in the US.

    We are heavily propagandized by the owners of the corporate media and influencers of the narrative, and a professional class that has sold its soul for economic advantage and access to money and power.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/2HBA3Zm3dGM

    And here is a bit more from Nate Silver --

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/SETw5GLF8mU

    [Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

    Highly recommended!
    Dec 30, 2018 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

    At the inception of this entire RussiaGate spectacle I suggested that it was a political distraction to take the attention away from the rejection by the people of neoliberalism which has been embraced by the establishments of both political parties.

    And that the result of the investigation would be indictments for perjury in the covering up of illicit business deals and money laundering. But that 'collusion to sway the election' was without substance, if not a joke.

    Everything that has been revealed to date tends to support that.

    One thing that Aaron overlooks is the evidence compiled by William Binney and associates that strongly suggests the DNC hack was no hack at all, but a leak by an insider who was appalled by the lies and double dealing at the DNC.

    In general, RussiaGate is a farcical distraction from other issues as they say in the video. And this highlights the utterly Machiavellian streak in the corporate Democrats and the Liberal establishment under the Clintons and their ilk who care more about money and power than the basic principles that historically sustained their party. I have lost all respect for them.

    But unfortunately this does open the door for those who use this to approve of the Republican establishment, which is 'at least honest' about being substantially corrupt servants to Big Money who care nothing about democracy, the Constitution, or the public. The best of them are leaving or have already left, and their party is ruined beyond repair.

    This all underscores the paucity of the Red v. Blue, monopoly of two parties, 'lesser of two evils' model of political thought which has come to dominate the discussion in the US.

    We are heavily propagandized by the owners of the corporate media and influencers of the narrative, and a professional class that has sold its soul for economic advantage and access to money and power.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/2HBA3Zm3dGM

    And here is a bit more from Nate Silver --

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/SETw5GLF8mU

    [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

    Highly recommended!
    Is this shadow of Integrity Initiative in the USA ? This false flag open the possibility that other similar events like DNC (with very questionable investigation by Crowdstrike, which was a perfect venue to implement a false flag; cybersecurity area is the perfect environment for planting false flags), MH17 (might be an incident but later it definitely was played as a false flag), Skripals (Was Skripals poisoning a false flag decided to hide the fact that Sergey Skripal was involved in writing Steele dossier?) and Litvinenko (probably connected with lack of safety measures in the process of smuggling of Plutonium by Litvinenko himself, but later played a a false flag). All of those now should be re-assessed from the their potential of being yet another flag flag operation against Russia. While Browder was a MI6 operation from the very beginning (and that explains why he abdicated the US citizenship more convincingly that the desire to avoid taxes) .
    Notable quotes:
    "... Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior. ..."
    "... Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign). ..."
    "... By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling." ..."
    "... The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true). ..."
    Dec 29, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    For over two years now, the concepts of "Russian collusion" and "Russian election meddling" have been shoved down our throats by the mainstream media (MSM) under the guise of legitimate concern that the Kremlin may have installed a puppet president in Donald Trump.

    Having no evidence of collusion aside from a largely unverified opposition-research dossier fabricated by a former British spy, the focus shifted from "collusion" to "meddling" and "influence." In other words, maybe Trump didn't actually collude with Putin, but the Kremlin used Russian tricks to influence the election in Trump's favor. To some, this looked like nothing more than an establishment scheme to cast a permanent spectre of doubt over the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump.

    Election meddling "Russian bots" and "troll farms" became the central focus - as claims were levied of social media operations conducted by Kremlin-linked organizations which sought to influence and divide certain segments of America.

    And while scant evidence of a Russian influence operation exists outside of a handful of indictments connected to a St. Petersburg "Troll farm" (which a liberal journalist cast serious doubt ov er), the MSM - with all of their proselytizing over the "threat to democracy" that election meddling poses, has largely decided to ignore actual evidence of "Russian bots" created by Democrat IT experts, used against a GOP candidate in the Alabama special election, and amplified through the Russian bot-detecting "Hamilton 68" dashboard developed by the same IT experts.

    Jonathon Morgan ✔ @jonathonmorgan

    Russian trolls tracked by # Hamilton68 are taking an interest in the AL Senate race. What a surprise.

    298 4:02 PM - Nov 10, 2017

    Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior.

    As Russian state-owned RT puts it - and who could blame them for being a bit pissed over the whole thing, "it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy by "Russian bots." Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection. "

    A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.

    Described by the New York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies. Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agenc y. His partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone.

    ...

    On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate.

    Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead.

    In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."

    It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones, which based its story on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious creation, Hamilton 68. - RT

    Moore ended up losing the Alabama special election by a slim margin of just

    In other words: In November 2017 – when Moore and his Democratic opponent were in a bitter fight to win over voters – Morgan openly promoted the theory that Russian bots were supporting Moore's campaign . A year later – after being caught red-handed orchestrating a self-described "false flag" operation – Morgan now says that his team never thought that the bots were Russian and have no idea what their purpose was . Did he think no one would notice? - RT

    Dan Cohen ✔ @dancohen3000 Replying to @dancohen3000

    Disinformation warrior @ jonathonmorgan attempts to control damage by lying. He now claims the "false flag operation" never took place and the botnet he promoted as Russian-linked (based on phony Hamilton68 Russian troll tracker he developed) wasn't Russian https://www. newknowledge.com/blog/about-ala bama

    89 2:23 AM - Dec 29, 2018

    Even more strange is that Scott Shane - the journalist who wrote the New York Times piece exposing the Alabama "Russian bot" scheme, knew about it for months after speaking at an event where the organizers bragged about the false flag on Moore .

    Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hrt Moore. He dubbed it "Project Birmingham." - RT

    Dan Cohen ✔ @dancohen3000 · Dec 28, 2018 Replying to @dancohen3000

    This gets even weirder: NYT reporter @ ScottShaneNYT , who broke the Alabama disinfo op story, learned of it in early September when he spoke at an off-the-record event organized by one of the firms that perpetrated the deception https://www. buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs ilverman/alabama-dirty-tricksters-invited-a-new-york-times-reporter

    NY Times Reporter Briefed Alabama Special Election Dirty Tricksters

    New York Times reporter Scott Shane spoke at an event organized by the group who ran a disinformation op aimed at helping defeat Roy Moore in Alabama.

    A lightly-redacted copy of the internal @ NewKnowledgeAI report has been leaked and claims at least partial credit for Doug Jones' victory. Details follow https:// medium.com/@jeffgiesea/br eaking-heres-the-after-action-report-from-the-alabama-senate-disinformation

    10 12:09 PM - Dec 28, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    Shane told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, though hid behind a nondisclosure agreement at the request of American Engagement Technologies (AET). He instead chose to spin the New Knowledge "false flag" operation on Moore as "limited Russian tactics" which were part of an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 - and which had no effect on the election.

    New Knowledge suggested that the false flag operation was simply a "research project," which Morgan suggested was designed "to better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation."

    View image on Twitter
    Jonathon Morgan ✔ @jonathonmorgan

    My statement on this evening's NYT article.

    94 9:17 PM - Dec 19, 2018
    465 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard to give his "false flag" more credibility – misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was fake.

    New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which announced last week that five accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior." - RT

    They knew exactly what they were doing

    While Morgan and New Knowledge sought to frame the "Project Birmingham" as a simple research project, a leaked copy of the operation's after-action report reveals that they knew exactly what they were doing .

    "We targeted 650,000 like AL voters, with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification and targeted advertising," reads the report published by entrepreneur and executive coach Jeff Giesea.

    Jeff Giesea ✔ @jeffgiesea

    BREAKING: Here's the after-action report from the AL Senate disinfo campaign.

    **an exclusive release by @ JeffGiesea https:// medium.com/@jeffgiesea/br eaking-heres-the-after-action-report-from-the-alabama-senate-disinformation-campaign-e3edd854f17d

    1,658 8:49 PM - Dec 27, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy BREAKING: Here's The After-Action Report From the Alabama Senate Disinformation Campaign

    EXCLUSIVE RELEASE FROM JEFF GIESEA

    medium.com
    1,381 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    The rhetorical question remains, why did the MSM drop this election meddling story like a hot rock after the initial headlines faded away?

    criminal election meddling, but then who the **** is going to click on some morons tactic and switch votes?

    anyone basing any funding, whether it is number of facebook hits or attempted mind games by egotistical cuck soyboys needs a serious psychological examination. fake news is fake BECAUSE IT ISNT REAL AND DOES NOT MATTER TO ANYONE but those living in the excited misery of their tiny bubble world safe spaces. SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CON AND IS NOT IMPORTANT OR RELEVANT TO ANYONE.

    far more serious is destroying ballots, writing in ballots without consent, bussing voters around to vote multiple times in different districts, registering dead voters and imperosnating the corpses, withholding votes until deadlines pass - making them invalid.

    Herdee , 10 minutes ago

    NATO on behalf of the Washington politicians uses the same bullsh*t propaganda for continual war.

    Mugabe , 20 minutes ago

    Yup "PROJECTION"...

    Yippie21 , 21 minutes ago

    None of this even touches on the 501c3 or whatever that was set up , concerned Alabama voters or somesuch, and was funneled a **** load of money to be found to be in violation of the law AFTER the election and then it all just disappeared. Nothing to see here folks, Democrat won, let's move on. There was a LOT of " tests " for the smart-set in that election and it all worked. We saw a bunch of it used in 2018, especially in Texas with Beto and down-ballot races. Democrats cleaned up like crazy in Texas, especially in Houston.

    2020 is going to be a hot mess. And the press is in on it, and even if illegal or unseemly things are done, as long as Democrats win, all good... let's move on. Crazy.

    LetThemEatRand , 21 minutes ago

    The fact that MSM is not covering this story -- which is so big it truly raises major questions about the entire Russiagate conspiracy including why Mueller was appointed in the first place -- is proof that they have no interest in journalism or the truth and that they are 100% agenda driven liars. Not that we needed more proof, but there it is anyway.

    Oldguy05 , 19 minutes ago

    Dimz corruption is a nogo. Now if it were conservatives.......

    CosineCosineCosine , 23 minutes ago

    I'm not a huge fan, but Jimmy Dore has a cathartic and entertaining 30 minutes on this farce. Well worth the watch:

    h https://youtu.be/hqLIJznUNVw

    LetThemEatRand , 27 minutes ago

    Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign).

    By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling."

    The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true).

    dead hobo , 30 minutes ago

    I've been watching Scandal on Netflix. Still only in season 2. Amazing how nothing changes.They nailed it and memorialized it. The MSM are useful idiots who are happy to make money publicizing what will sell the best.

    chunga , 30 minutes ago

    The media is biased and sucks, yup.

    The reason the reds lost the house is because they went along with this nonsense and did nothing about it, like frightened baby chipmunks.

    JRobby , 33 minutes ago

    Only when "the opposition" does it is it illegal. Total totalitarian state wannabe stuff.

    divingengineer , 22 minutes ago

    Amazing how people can contort reality to justify their own righteous cause, but decry their opposition for the EXACT same thing. See trump visit to troops signing hats as most recent proof. If DJT takes a piss and sprinkles the seat, it's a crime.

    DarkPurpleHaze , 33 minutes ago

    They're afraid to expose themselves...unlike Kevin Spacey. Trump or Whitaker will expose this with one signature. It's coming.

    divingengineer , 20 minutes ago

    Spacey has totally lost it. See his latest video, it will be a powerful piece of evidence for an insanity plea.

    CosineCosineCosine , 10 minutes ago

    Disagree strongly. I think it was excellent - perhaps you misunderstood the point? 6 minutes Diana Davidson look at it clarifies

    https://youtu.be/_il_NBq0Ec8

    [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

    Highly recommended!
    Is this shadow of Integrity Initiative in the USA ? This false flag open the possibility that other similar events like DNC (with very questionable investigation by Crowdstrike, which was a perfect venue to implement a false flag; cybersecurity area is the perfect environment for planting false flags), MH17 (might be an incident but later it definitely was played as a false flag), Skripals (Was Skripals poisoning a false flag decided to hide the fact that Sergey Skripal was involved in writing Steele dossier?) and Litvinenko (probably connected with lack of safety measures in the process of smuggling of Plutonium by Litvinenko himself, but later played a a false flag). All of those now should be re-assessed from the their potential of being yet another flag flag operation against Russia. While Browder was a MI6 operation from the very beginning (and that explains why he abdicated the US citizenship more convincingly that the desire to avoid taxes) .
    Notable quotes:
    "... Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior. ..."
    "... Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign). ..."
    "... By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling." ..."
    "... The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true). ..."
    Dec 29, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    For over two years now, the concepts of "Russian collusion" and "Russian election meddling" have been shoved down our throats by the mainstream media (MSM) under the guise of legitimate concern that the Kremlin may have installed a puppet president in Donald Trump.

    Having no evidence of collusion aside from a largely unverified opposition-research dossier fabricated by a former British spy, the focus shifted from "collusion" to "meddling" and "influence." In other words, maybe Trump didn't actually collude with Putin, but the Kremlin used Russian tricks to influence the election in Trump's favor. To some, this looked like nothing more than an establishment scheme to cast a permanent spectre of doubt over the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump.

    Election meddling "Russian bots" and "troll farms" became the central focus - as claims were levied of social media operations conducted by Kremlin-linked organizations which sought to influence and divide certain segments of America.

    And while scant evidence of a Russian influence operation exists outside of a handful of indictments connected to a St. Petersburg "Troll farm" (which a liberal journalist cast serious doubt ov er), the MSM - with all of their proselytizing over the "threat to democracy" that election meddling poses, has largely decided to ignore actual evidence of "Russian bots" created by Democrat IT experts, used against a GOP candidate in the Alabama special election, and amplified through the Russian bot-detecting "Hamilton 68" dashboard developed by the same IT experts.

    Jonathon Morgan ✔ @jonathonmorgan

    Russian trolls tracked by # Hamilton68 are taking an interest in the AL Senate race. What a surprise.

    298 4:02 PM - Nov 10, 2017

    Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior.

    As Russian state-owned RT puts it - and who could blame them for being a bit pissed over the whole thing, "it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy by "Russian bots." Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection. "

    A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.

    Described by the New York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies. Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agenc y. His partner, Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone.

    ...

    On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate.

    Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead.

    In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."

    It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones, which based its story on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious creation, Hamilton 68. - RT

    Moore ended up losing the Alabama special election by a slim margin of just

    In other words: In November 2017 – when Moore and his Democratic opponent were in a bitter fight to win over voters – Morgan openly promoted the theory that Russian bots were supporting Moore's campaign . A year later – after being caught red-handed orchestrating a self-described "false flag" operation – Morgan now says that his team never thought that the bots were Russian and have no idea what their purpose was . Did he think no one would notice? - RT

    Dan Cohen ✔ @dancohen3000 Replying to @dancohen3000

    Disinformation warrior @ jonathonmorgan attempts to control damage by lying. He now claims the "false flag operation" never took place and the botnet he promoted as Russian-linked (based on phony Hamilton68 Russian troll tracker he developed) wasn't Russian https://www. newknowledge.com/blog/about-ala bama

    89 2:23 AM - Dec 29, 2018

    Even more strange is that Scott Shane - the journalist who wrote the New York Times piece exposing the Alabama "Russian bot" scheme, knew about it for months after speaking at an event where the organizers bragged about the false flag on Moore .

    Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hrt Moore. He dubbed it "Project Birmingham." - RT

    Dan Cohen ✔ @dancohen3000 · Dec 28, 2018 Replying to @dancohen3000

    This gets even weirder: NYT reporter @ ScottShaneNYT , who broke the Alabama disinfo op story, learned of it in early September when he spoke at an off-the-record event organized by one of the firms that perpetrated the deception https://www. buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs ilverman/alabama-dirty-tricksters-invited-a-new-york-times-reporter

    NY Times Reporter Briefed Alabama Special Election Dirty Tricksters

    New York Times reporter Scott Shane spoke at an event organized by the group who ran a disinformation op aimed at helping defeat Roy Moore in Alabama.

    A lightly-redacted copy of the internal @ NewKnowledgeAI report has been leaked and claims at least partial credit for Doug Jones' victory. Details follow https:// medium.com/@jeffgiesea/br eaking-heres-the-after-action-report-from-the-alabama-senate-disinformation

    10 12:09 PM - Dec 28, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy

    Shane told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, though hid behind a nondisclosure agreement at the request of American Engagement Technologies (AET). He instead chose to spin the New Knowledge "false flag" operation on Moore as "limited Russian tactics" which were part of an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 - and which had no effect on the election.

    New Knowledge suggested that the false flag operation was simply a "research project," which Morgan suggested was designed "to better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation."

    View image on Twitter
    Jonathon Morgan ✔ @jonathonmorgan

    My statement on this evening's NYT article.

    94 9:17 PM - Dec 19, 2018
    465 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard to give his "false flag" more credibility – misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was fake.

    New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which announced last week that five accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior." - RT

    They knew exactly what they were doing

    While Morgan and New Knowledge sought to frame the "Project Birmingham" as a simple research project, a leaked copy of the operation's after-action report reveals that they knew exactly what they were doing .

    "We targeted 650,000 like AL voters, with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification and targeted advertising," reads the report published by entrepreneur and executive coach Jeff Giesea.

    Jeff Giesea ✔ @jeffgiesea

    BREAKING: Here's the after-action report from the AL Senate disinfo campaign.

    **an exclusive release by @ JeffGiesea https:// medium.com/@jeffgiesea/br eaking-heres-the-after-action-report-from-the-alabama-senate-disinformation-campaign-e3edd854f17d

    1,658 8:49 PM - Dec 27, 2018 Twitter Ads info and privacy BREAKING: Here's The After-Action Report From the Alabama Senate Disinformation Campaign

    EXCLUSIVE RELEASE FROM JEFF GIESEA

    medium.com
    1,381 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy

    The rhetorical question remains, why did the MSM drop this election meddling story like a hot rock after the initial headlines faded away?

    criminal election meddling, but then who the **** is going to click on some morons tactic and switch votes?

    anyone basing any funding, whether it is number of facebook hits or attempted mind games by egotistical cuck soyboys needs a serious psychological examination. fake news is fake BECAUSE IT ISNT REAL AND DOES NOT MATTER TO ANYONE but those living in the excited misery of their tiny bubble world safe spaces. SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CON AND IS NOT IMPORTANT OR RELEVANT TO ANYONE.

    far more serious is destroying ballots, writing in ballots without consent, bussing voters around to vote multiple times in different districts, registering dead voters and imperosnating the corpses, withholding votes until deadlines pass - making them invalid.

    Herdee , 10 minutes ago

    NATO on behalf of the Washington politicians uses the same bullsh*t propaganda for continual war.

    Mugabe , 20 minutes ago

    Yup "PROJECTION"...

    Yippie21 , 21 minutes ago

    None of this even touches on the 501c3 or whatever that was set up , concerned Alabama voters or somesuch, and was funneled a **** load of money to be found to be in violation of the law AFTER the election and then it all just disappeared. Nothing to see here folks, Democrat won, let's move on. There was a LOT of " tests " for the smart-set in that election and it all worked. We saw a bunch of it used in 2018, especially in Texas with Beto and down-ballot races. Democrats cleaned up like crazy in Texas, especially in Houston.

    2020 is going to be a hot mess. And the press is in on it, and even if illegal or unseemly things are done, as long as Democrats win, all good... let's move on. Crazy.

    LetThemEatRand , 21 minutes ago

    The fact that MSM is not covering this story -- which is so big it truly raises major questions about the entire Russiagate conspiracy including why Mueller was appointed in the first place -- is proof that they have no interest in journalism or the truth and that they are 100% agenda driven liars. Not that we needed more proof, but there it is anyway.

    Oldguy05 , 19 minutes ago

    Dimz corruption is a nogo. Now if it were conservatives.......

    CosineCosineCosine , 23 minutes ago

    I'm not a huge fan, but Jimmy Dore has a cathartic and entertaining 30 minutes on this farce. Well worth the watch:

    h https://youtu.be/hqLIJznUNVw

    LetThemEatRand , 27 minutes ago

    Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign).

    By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling."

    The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true).

    dead hobo , 30 minutes ago

    I've been watching Scandal on Netflix. Still only in season 2. Amazing how nothing changes.They nailed it and memorialized it. The MSM are useful idiots who are happy to make money publicizing what will sell the best.

    chunga , 30 minutes ago

    The media is biased and sucks, yup.

    The reason the reds lost the house is because they went along with this nonsense and did nothing about it, like frightened baby chipmunks.

    JRobby , 33 minutes ago

    Only when "the opposition" does it is it illegal. Total totalitarian state wannabe stuff.

    divingengineer , 22 minutes ago

    Amazing how people can contort reality to justify their own righteous cause, but decry their opposition for the EXACT same thing. See trump visit to troops signing hats as most recent proof. If DJT takes a piss and sprinkles the seat, it's a crime.

    DarkPurpleHaze , 33 minutes ago

    They're afraid to expose themselves...unlike Kevin Spacey. Trump or Whitaker will expose this with one signature. It's coming.

    divingengineer , 20 minutes ago

    Spacey has totally lost it. See his latest video, it will be a powerful piece of evidence for an insanity plea.

    CosineCosineCosine , 10 minutes ago

    Disagree strongly. I think it was excellent - perhaps you misunderstood the point? 6 minutes Diana Davidson look at it clarifies

    https://youtu.be/_il_NBq0Ec8

    [Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Pity of It All : A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 ..."
    "... Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine. ..."
    "... The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results. ..."
    "... Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal emphasis on an American dominated global empire. ..."
    "... Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. ..."
    "... Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. ..."
    "... Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed. Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis. ..."
    "... Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia. Or you can count their billions. ..."
    "... The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop, confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality. ..."
    "... Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country. They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on. ..."
    "... "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper" ..."
    "... "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. " ..."
    "... Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention. ..."
    "... " (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper does not say that." ..."
    "... But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld? ..."
    "... Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS. ..."
    "... But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence of the manifest destiny. ..."
    May 06, 2014 | mondoweiss.net

    At the Huffington Post, Jim Sleeper addresses "A Foreign-Policy Problem No One Speaks About," and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives. Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, even if he's not a warmongering neocon himself. The Yale lecturer's jumping-off point are recent statements by Leon Wieseltier and David Brooks lamenting the decline of American power.

    In addition to Wieseltier and Brooks, the "blame the feckless liberals" chorus has included Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, David Frum, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and many other American neoconservatives. Some of them have been chastened, or at least been made more cautious, by their grand-strategic blunders of a few years ago ..

    I'm saying that they've been fatuous as warmongers again and again and that there's something pathetic in their attempts to emulate Winston Churchill, who warned darkly of Hitler's intentions in the 1930s. Their blind spot is their willful ignorance of their own complicity in American deterioration and their over-compensatory, almost pre-adolescent faith in the benevolence of a statist and militarist power they still hope to mobilize against the seductions and terrors rising all around them.

    At bottom, the chorus members' recurrent nightmares of 1938 doom them to reenact other nightmares, prompted by very similar writers in 1914, on the eve of World War I. Those writers are depicted chillingly, unforgettably, in Chapter 9, "War Fever," of Amos Elon's The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. Elon's account of Germany's stampede into World War I chronicles painfully the warmongering hysterics of some Jewish would-be patriots of the Kaiserreich who exerted themselves blindly, romantically, to maneuver their state into the Armageddon that would produce Hitler himself.

    This is the place to emphasize that few of Wilhelmine German's warmongers were Jews and that few Jews were or are warmongers. (Me, for example, although my extended-family history isn't much different from Brooks' or Wieseltier's.) My point is simply that, driven by what I recognize as understandable if almost preternatural insecurities and cravings for full liberal-nationalist belonging that was denied to Jews for centuries in Europe, some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves into the Iraq War, and they have continued, again and again, to employ modes of public discourse and politics that echo with eerie fidelity that of the people described in Elon's book. The Americans lionized George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and many others as their predecessors lionized Kaiser Wilhelm, von Bethmann-Hollweg, and far-right nationalist associates who hated the neo-cons of that time but let them play their roles .

    Instead of acknowledging their deepest feelings openly, or even to themselves, the writers I've mentioned who've brought so much folly and destruction upon their republic, are doubling down, more nervous and desperate than ever, looking for someone else to blame. Hence their whirling columns and rhythmic incantations. After Germany lost World War I, many Germans unfairly blamed their national folly on Jews, many of whom had served in it loyally but only a few of whom had been provocateurs and cheerleaders like the signatories of [Project for New American Century's] letter to Bush. Now neo-cons, from Wieseltier and Brooks to [Charles] Hill, are blaming Obama and all other feckless liberals. Some of them really need to take a look in Amos Elon's mirror.

    Interesting. Though I think Sleeper diminishes Jewish agency here (Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban are no one's proxy) and can't touch the Israel angle. The motivation is not simply romantic identification with power, it's an ideology of religious nationalism in the Middle East, attachment to the needs of a militarist Sparta in the Arab world. That's another foreign policy problem no one speaks about.

    Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:11 pm

    "Democracy in in the Middle East" was always just a weasel-word saying of "let's try to improve Israel's strategic position by changing their neighbours".

    The neocons basically took a hardline position on foreign interventionism based out of dual loyalty. This is the honest truth. For anti-Semites, a handful of neocons will always represent "The Jews" as a collective. For many Jews, the refusal to come to grips with the rise of the neocons and how the Jewish community (and really by "community" I mean the establishment) failed to prevent them in their own midst, is also a blemish.

    Of course, Jim Sleeper is doing these things now. He should have done them 15-20 years ago or so. But better late than never, I guess.

    Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:16 pm

    P.S. While we talk a lot about neocons as a Jewish issue, it's also important to put them in perspective. The only war that I can truly think of that they influenced was the Iraq war, which was a disaster, but it also couldn't have happened without 9/11, which was a very rare event in the history of America. You have to go back to Pearl Harbor to find something similar, and that wasn't technically a terrorist attack but rather a military attack by Japan.

    Leading up to the early 2000s, they were mostly ignored during the 1990s. They did take over the GOP media in the early 90s, using the same tactics used against Hagel, use social norms as a cover but in actuality the real reason is Israel.

    Before the 90s, in the 70s and 80s, the cold war took up all the oxygen.
    So yeah, the neocons need to be talked about. But comparing what they are trying to do with a World War is a bit of a stretch.

    Finally, talking about Israel – which Sleeper ignored – and the hardline positions that the political class in America have adopted, if you want to look who have ensured the greatest slavishness to Israel, liberal/centrist groups like ADL, AJC and AIPAC(yes, they are mostly democrats!) have played a far greater role than the neocons.

    But I guess, Sleeper wasn't dealing with that, because it would ruin his view of the neocons as the bogeymen.

    Just like "liberal" Zionists want to blame Likud for everything, overlooking the fact that Labor/Mapai has had a far greater role in settling/colonizing the Palestinian land than the right has, and not to speak about the ethnic cleansing campaigns of '48 and '67 which was only done by the "left", so too the neocons often pose as a convenient catch-all target for the collective Jewish failure leading up to Iraq.

    And I'm using the words "collective Jewish failure" because I actually don't believe, unlike Mearsheimer/Walt, that the war would not have gone ahead unless there was massive support by the Israel/Jewish lobby. If Jews had decided no, it would still have gone ahead. This is also contrary to Tom Friedman's famous saying of "50 people in DC are responsible for this war".
    I also think that's an oversimplification.

    But I focus more on the Jewish side because that's my side. And I want my community to do better, and just blaming the neocons is something I'm tired of hearing in Jewish circles. The inability to look at liberal Jewish journalists and their role in promoting the war to either gentile or Jewish audiences.

    Kathleen, May 6, 2014, 6:53 pm

    There was talk about this last night (Monday/5th) on Chris Matthew's Hardball segment on Condi "mushroom cloud" Rice pulling out of the graduation ceremonies at Rutger's. David Corn did not say much but Eugene Robinson and Chris Matthews were basically talking about Israel and the neocons desires to rearrange the middle east "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad" conversation.

    Bumblebye, May 6, 2014, 2:33 pm

    "some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves into the Iraq War"

    Have to take issue with that – the neo-cons hurled young American (and foreign) servicemen and women into that war, many to their deaths, along with throwing as much taxpayer money as possible. They stayed ultra safe and grew richer for their efforts.

    Citizen, May 7, 2014, 9:03 am

    @ Bumblebye

    Good point. During WW1, as I read the history, the Jewish Germans provided their fair share of combat troops. If memory serves, despite Weimar Germany's later "stab in the back" theory, e.g., Hitler himself was given a combat medal thanks to his Jewish senior officer. In comparison to the build-up to Shrub Jr's war on Iraq, the Jewish neocons provided very few Jewish American combat troops.

    It's hard to get reliable stats on Jewish American participation in the US combat arms during the Iraq war. For all I've been able to ascertain, more have joined the IDF over the years. At any rate, it's common knowledge that Shrub's war on Iraq was instigated and supported by chicken hawks (Jew or Gentile) at a time bereft of conscription. They built their sale by ignoring key facts, and embellishing misleading and fake facts, as illustrated by the Downing Street memo.

    Keith, May 6, 2014, 7:47 pm

    PHIL- Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine.

    The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results.

    Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal emphasis on an American dominated global empire.

    So yes, the nationalistic emphasis is an anachronism, however, the decline of the US in conjunction with the extension of a system of globalized domination should hardly be of concern to elite power-seekers who will benefit. In fact, the new system of corporate/financial control will be beyond the political control of any nation, even the US. If they can pull it off. An interesting topic no doubt, but one which I doubt is suitable for extended discussion on Mondoweiss. As for power-seeking as a consequence of a uniquely Jewish experience, perhaps the less said the better.

    ToivoS, May 7, 2014, 8:10 pm
    Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes that 10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition with them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on the same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.

    Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support the political movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty antisemite whose followers killed many thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those left behind perished during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any of them would identify with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.

    In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with the Bandera brigades.

    RudyM, May 7, 2014, 9:36 pm
    Interesting, meaty analysis here of the various players in Ukraine. This is unequivocally from a Russian perspective, incidentally:

    link to wikispooks.com

    (I know I'm always grabbing OT threads of discussion, but when it comes down to it, I know much less about Zionism and Israel/Palestine than many, if not most of the regular commenters here.)

    I also am going to drift further off-topic by saying there is strong evidence that the slaughter in Odessa last Friday was highly orchestrated and not solely the result of spontaneous mob violence. Very graphic and disturbing images in all of these links:

    I have only glanced at these:

    American, May 6, 2014, 9:23 pm
    " and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives. Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, ..>>

    Stop it Sleeper. Do not continue to use the victim card ' to explain' the trauma, the insecurities, the nightmares, the angst, the feelings, the sensitivities, blah blah, blah of Zionist or Israel.

    That is not what they are about. These are power mad psychos like most neocons, period.

    And even if it were, and even if all the Jews in the world felt the same way, the bottom line would still be they do not have the right to make others pay in treasure and blood for their nightmares and mental sickness.

    Citizen May 7, 2014, 9:46 am
    @ yonah fredman

    "The freedom of Ukraine is a worthy goal."

    As near as I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong), the Ukrainians themselves are about half and half pro Russia and Pro NATO. Your glance at the history of the region as to why this is so, and your text on historical Ukranian suffering and POTV on MW commentary on this –did not help your analysis and its conclusion.

    There's a difference between isolationism and defensive intervention, and even more so, re isolationism v. pro-active interventionism "in the name of pursuing the democratic ideal". See Ron Paul v. PNAC-style neocons and liberal Zionists.

    Also, if you were Putin, how would you see the push of NATO & US force posts ever creeping towards Russia and its local environment? Look at the US military postings nearing Russia per se & those surrounding Iran. Compare Russia's.

    And note the intent to wean EU from Russian oil, and as well, the draconian sanctions on Iran, and Obama's latest partnering sanctions on Russia.

    Imagine yourself in Putin's shoes, and Iran's.

    Don't abuse your imagination only by imagining yourself in Netanyahu's shoes, which is the preoccupation of AIPAC and its whores in the US Congress.

    ToivoS, May 7, 2014, 8:49 pm

    Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes that 10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition with them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on the same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.

    Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support the political movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty anti-Semite whose followers killed many thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those left behind perished during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-Zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any of them would identify with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.

    In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with the Bandera brigades.

    ToivoSMay 7, 2014, 9:39 pm
    Yonah writes The freedom of Ukraine is a worthy goal. If the US is not able to back up our attempt to help them gain their freedom it is not something to celebrate, but something to lament.

    What are you saying? Ukraine has been an independent nation for 22 years. What freedom is this? What we have witnessed is that one half of Ukraine has gotten tired that the other half keeps on electing candidates that represent those Ukrainians that identify with Russian culture. They (the western half) successfully staged a coup and purged the other (eastern half) from the government. You call that "freedom". Doesn't it embarrass you, Yonah, that the armed militias that conducted that coup are descendants of the Bandera organization.

    Does that ring a bell? These are the Ukrainians that were involved in the holocaust. Does Babi Yar stir any memories Yohan? It was a massacre of 40,000 Jews just outside of Kiev in 1942. It was the single largest massacre of Jews during WWII. The massacre was led by the Germans ( Einsatzgruppe C officers) but was carried out with the aid of 400 Ukrainian Auxillary Police. These were later incorporated into the 14th SS-Volunteer Division "Galician" made up mostly Ukrainians. The division flags are to this day displayed at Right Sector rallies in western Ukraine.

    Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed. Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis.

    piotrMay 7, 2014, 10:18 pm
    Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia. Or you can count their billions. In any case, the neutral posture is sensible for Israel here. Which is highly uncharacteristic for that government.

    yonah fredman, May 7, 2014, 10:38 pm

    Toivo S- The history of Jew hatred by certain anti Russian elements in the Ukraine is not encouraging and nothing that I celebrate. Maybe I have been swayed by headlines and a superficial reading of the situation.

    If indeed I am wrong regarding the will of the Ukrainian people, I can only be glad that my opinion is just that, my opinion and not US or Israel or anyone's policy but my own. I assume that a majority of Ukrainians want to maintain independence of Russia and that the expressions of rebellion are in that vein.

    My people were murdered by the einsatzgruppen in that part of the world and so maybe I have overcompensated by trying not to allow my personal history to interfere with what I think would be the will of the majority of the Ukraine.

    But Toivo S. please skip the "doesn't it embarrass you" line of thought. Just put a sock in it and skip it.

    ToivoSMay 8, 2014, 12:51 am

    Well thanks for that Yonah. My wife's family descended from Jewish communities in Odessa and Galicia. They emigrated to the US between 1900 and 1940. After WWII none of their relatives left behind were ever heard from again. Perhaps you have family that experienced similar stories. What caused me to react to your post above is that you are describing the current situation in Ukraine as a "freedom" movement by the Ukrainians when the political forces there descended from the same people that killed my inlaws family (and apparently yours to). Why do you support them?

    yonah fredmanMay 8, 2014, 1:30 am

    ToivoS- I support them because I trust/don't trust Putin. I trust him to impose his brand of leadership on Ukraine, I don't trust him to care a whit about freedom. It is natural that the nationalist elements of Ukraine would descend from the elements that expressed themselves the last time they had freedom from the Soviet Union, that is those forces that were willing to join with the Nazis to express their hatred for the communist Soviet Union's rule over their freedom. That's how history works. The nationalists today descend from the nationalists of yesterday.

    But it's been 70 years since WWII and the Ukrainians ought to be able to have freedom even if the parties that advocate for freedom are descended from those that supported the Nazis. (I know once i include the Nazi part of history any analogies are toxic, but if I am willing to grant Hamas its rights as an expression of the Palestinian desire for freedom, why would I deny the Ukrainian foul nationalist parties their rights to express their people's desire for freedom.)

    Political parties are not made in a sterile laboratory, they evolve over history and most specifically they emerge from the past. I accept that Ukrainian nationalism has not evolved much, but nonetheless not having read any polls I assume that the nationalists are the representatives of the people's desire for freedom. And because Putin strikes me as something primitive, I accept the Ukrainian desire for freedom.

    CitizenMay 8, 2014, 9:18 am

    @ yonah f

    What are you supporting? Let me refresh your historic memory: Black's Transfer Agreement. Now apply analogy, responding to ToivoS. Might help us all to understand, explore more skillfully, Israel's current stance on the Putin-Ukranian matter .?

    (I think Nuland's intervention caught on tape, combined with who she is married to, already explores with great clarification what the US is doing.

    irishmosesMay 8, 2014, 12:32 pm

    Yonah said:

    "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. Most people here would probably disagree with Sleeper, because he does not deny that the world needs a cop, nor that the US would play a positive role, if it only had the means and the desire to do so. People here (overwhelmingly) see the US role as a negative one (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world,"

    The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop, confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality.

    Contrast that with the realist or realism approach recommended by George Kennan, and followed by this country successfully through the end of the Cold War. That approach is conservative and contends we should stay out of wars unless the vital national security interests of the US are at stake, like protecting WESTERN Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Western Hemisphere. This meant we could sympathize with the plight of all the eastern Europeans oppressed by the Soviets, but would not defend militarily the Hungarians (1956) or the Czechs (1968). It also meant we wouldn't send US troops into North Vietnam because we didn't want to go to war with the Chinese over a country that was at best tangential to US interests. When we varied from that policy (Vietnam and Iraq wars, Somalia) we paid a very heavy price while doing nothing to advance or protect our vital national security interests.

    The sooner this country can return to our traditional realism-based foreign policy the better. Part of that policy would be to disassociate the US from its entangling alliance with Likud Israel and its US Jewish supporters that espouse the Likud Greater Israel line.

    Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country. They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on.

    Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews. It is also directed at Neoconservative foreign policy advocates, comprised of Jews and non-Jews, and overlap between the two groups. Please also note my use of the term "major role", and that I am not saying the Neocons and their supporters (Jewish or non) were solely responsible for our involvement in the Iraq war. I am offering these caveats in the hope that the usual changes of antisemitism can be avoided in your or anyone else's response to my arguments.

    The influence of Neocons on US foreign policy has been very harmful to this country and poses a grave danger to its future. It would be wise for you to reflect on that harm and those dangers and decide whether you belong in the realist camp or want to continue running with the Neocons.

    seanmcbride, May 8, 2014, 1:01 pm

    irishmoses,

    Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews.

    What about the role of *liberal Zionists*, like Hillary Clinton, in supporting and promoting the Iraq War? Clinton still hasn't offered an apology for helping to drive the United States in a multi-trillion dollar foreign policy disaster - and she has threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran.

    What about Harry Reid's lavish praise of Sheldon Adelson?

    "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has for some time billed the Koch brothers as public enemy No.1 .

    But billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson? He's just fine, Reid says.

    "I know Sheldon Adelson. He's not in this for money," the Nevada Democrat said of Adelson, the Vegas casino magnate who reportedly spent close to $150 million to support Republicans in the 2012 presidential election."

    link to politico.com

    Are there really any meaningful distinctions between neoconservatives in the Republican Party and liberal Zionists in the Democratic Party?

    talknic, May 7, 2014, 3:24 am

    @ yonah fredman "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper"

    Strange

    "state into the Armageddon .. "

    "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. "

    Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention.

    " (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper does not say that."

    You do tho, without quoting anyone "here".

    BTW Pajero, strawmen no matter how lengthy and seemingly erudite, rarely walk anywhere

    JeffB, May 7, 2014, 9:06 am

    I'm going to put this down as Jewish navel gazing.

    Jews are disproportionately liberal. Jews make up a huge chunk of the peace movement. Jews are relative to their numbers on the left of most foreign policy positions.

    Iraq was unusual in that Jews were not overwhelming opposed to the invasion, but it is worth noting the invasion at the time was overwhelming popular. Frankly given the fact that Jews are now considered white people and the fact that Jews are almost all middle class they should be biased conservative. There certainly is no reason they should be more liberal than Catholics. Yet they are. It is the degree of Jewish liberalism not the degree of Jewish conservatism that is striking.

    But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld?

    lysias, May 7, 2014, 10:55 am

    The neocons lost one last night: Antiwar Rep. Walter Jones Beats Neocon-Backed GOP Rival:

    Strongly antiwar incumbent Rep. Walter Jones (R – NC) has won a hotly contested primary tonight, defeating a challenge from hawkish challenger and former Treasury Dept. official Taylor Griffin 51% to 45%.

    American, May 7, 2014, 11:24 am

    Yep.

    Voter turn out was light .. tea party types did a lot of lobbying for Griffin here .but Jones prevailed. Considering the onslaught of organized activity against him by ECI and the tea partiers for the past month he did well.

    Citizen, May 8, 2014, 9:24 am

    @ lysias
    Let's refresh our look at what Ron Paul had to say about foreign policy and foreign aid. Then, let's compare what his son has said, and take a look of his latest bill in congress to cut off aid to Palestine. Yes, you read that right; it's not a bill to cut off any aid to Israel.

    Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS.

    traintosiberia, May 8, 2014, 9:12 am

    Stockman's Corner

    Bravo, Rep. Walter Jones -- Primary Win Sends Neocons Packing

    by David Stockman • May 7, 2014 link to davidstockmanscontracorner.com

    The heavy artillery included the detestable Karl Rove, former Governor and RNC Chair Haley Barber and the War Party's highly paid chief PR flack, Ari Fleischer.

    But it was Neocon central that hauled out the big guns. Bill Kristol was so desperate to thwart the slowly rising anti-interventionist tide within the GOP that he even trotted out Sarah Palin to endorse Jones's opponent"

    But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence of the manifest destiny.

    [Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Pity of It All : A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 ..."
    "... Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine. ..."
    "... The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results. ..."
    "... Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal emphasis on an American dominated global empire. ..."
    "... Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. ..."
    "... Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. ..."
    "... Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed. Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis. ..."
    "... Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia. Or you can count their billions. ..."
    "... The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop, confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality. ..."
    "... Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country. They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on. ..."
    "... "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper" ..."
    "... "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. " ..."
    "... Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention. ..."
    "... " (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper does not say that." ..."
    "... But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld? ..."
    "... Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS. ..."
    "... But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence of the manifest destiny. ..."
    May 06, 2014 | mondoweiss.net

    At the Huffington Post, Jim Sleeper addresses "A Foreign-Policy Problem No One Speaks About," and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives. Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, even if he's not a warmongering neocon himself. The Yale lecturer's jumping-off point are recent statements by Leon Wieseltier and David Brooks lamenting the decline of American power.

    In addition to Wieseltier and Brooks, the "blame the feckless liberals" chorus has included Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, David Frum, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and many other American neoconservatives. Some of them have been chastened, or at least been made more cautious, by their grand-strategic blunders of a few years ago ..

    I'm saying that they've been fatuous as warmongers again and again and that there's something pathetic in their attempts to emulate Winston Churchill, who warned darkly of Hitler's intentions in the 1930s. Their blind spot is their willful ignorance of their own complicity in American deterioration and their over-compensatory, almost pre-adolescent faith in the benevolence of a statist and militarist power they still hope to mobilize against the seductions and terrors rising all around them.

    At bottom, the chorus members' recurrent nightmares of 1938 doom them to reenact other nightmares, prompted by very similar writers in 1914, on the eve of World War I. Those writers are depicted chillingly, unforgettably, in Chapter 9, "War Fever," of Amos Elon's The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. Elon's account of Germany's stampede into World War I chronicles painfully the warmongering hysterics of some Jewish would-be patriots of the Kaiserreich who exerted themselves blindly, romantically, to maneuver their state into the Armageddon that would produce Hitler himself.

    This is the place to emphasize that few of Wilhelmine German's warmongers were Jews and that few Jews were or are warmongers. (Me, for example, although my extended-family history isn't much different from Brooks' or Wieseltier's.) My point is simply that, driven by what I recognize as understandable if almost preternatural insecurities and cravings for full liberal-nationalist belonging that was denied to Jews for centuries in Europe, some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves into the Iraq War, and they have continued, again and again, to employ modes of public discourse and politics that echo with eerie fidelity that of the people described in Elon's book. The Americans lionized George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and many others as their predecessors lionized Kaiser Wilhelm, von Bethmann-Hollweg, and far-right nationalist associates who hated the neo-cons of that time but let them play their roles .

    Instead of acknowledging their deepest feelings openly, or even to themselves, the writers I've mentioned who've brought so much folly and destruction upon their republic, are doubling down, more nervous and desperate than ever, looking for someone else to blame. Hence their whirling columns and rhythmic incantations. After Germany lost World War I, many Germans unfairly blamed their national folly on Jews, many of whom had served in it loyally but only a few of whom had been provocateurs and cheerleaders like the signatories of [Project for New American Century's] letter to Bush. Now neo-cons, from Wieseltier and Brooks to [Charles] Hill, are blaming Obama and all other feckless liberals. Some of them really need to take a look in Amos Elon's mirror.

    Interesting. Though I think Sleeper diminishes Jewish agency here (Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban are no one's proxy) and can't touch the Israel angle. The motivation is not simply romantic identification with power, it's an ideology of religious nationalism in the Middle East, attachment to the needs of a militarist Sparta in the Arab world. That's another foreign policy problem no one speaks about.

    Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:11 pm

    "Democracy in in the Middle East" was always just a weasel-word saying of "let's try to improve Israel's strategic position by changing their neighbours".

    The neocons basically took a hardline position on foreign interventionism based out of dual loyalty. This is the honest truth. For anti-Semites, a handful of neocons will always represent "The Jews" as a collective. For many Jews, the refusal to come to grips with the rise of the neocons and how the Jewish community (and really by "community" I mean the establishment) failed to prevent them in their own midst, is also a blemish.

    Of course, Jim Sleeper is doing these things now. He should have done them 15-20 years ago or so. But better late than never, I guess.

    Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:16 pm

    P.S. While we talk a lot about neocons as a Jewish issue, it's also important to put them in perspective. The only war that I can truly think of that they influenced was the Iraq war, which was a disaster, but it also couldn't have happened without 9/11, which was a very rare event in the history of America. You have to go back to Pearl Harbor to find something similar, and that wasn't technically a terrorist attack but rather a military attack by Japan.

    Leading up to the early 2000s, they were mostly ignored during the 1990s. They did take over the GOP media in the early 90s, using the same tactics used against Hagel, use social norms as a cover but in actuality the real reason is Israel.

    Before the 90s, in the 70s and 80s, the cold war took up all the oxygen.
    So yeah, the neocons need to be talked about. But comparing what they are trying to do with a World War is a bit of a stretch.

    Finally, talking about Israel – which Sleeper ignored – and the hardline positions that the political class in America have adopted, if you want to look who have ensured the greatest slavishness to Israel, liberal/centrist groups like ADL, AJC and AIPAC(yes, they are mostly democrats!) have played a far greater role than the neocons.

    But I guess, Sleeper wasn't dealing with that, because it would ruin his view of the neocons as the bogeymen.

    Just like "liberal" Zionists want to blame Likud for everything, overlooking the fact that Labor/Mapai has had a far greater role in settling/colonizing the Palestinian land than the right has, and not to speak about the ethnic cleansing campaigns of '48 and '67 which was only done by the "left", so too the neocons often pose as a convenient catch-all target for the collective Jewish failure leading up to Iraq.

    And I'm using the words "collective Jewish failure" because I actually don't believe, unlike Mearsheimer/Walt, that the war would not have gone ahead unless there was massive support by the Israel/Jewish lobby. If Jews had decided no, it would still have gone ahead. This is also contrary to Tom Friedman's famous saying of "50 people in DC are responsible for this war".
    I also think that's an oversimplification.

    But I focus more on the Jewish side because that's my side. And I want my community to do better, and just blaming the neocons is something I'm tired of hearing in Jewish circles. The inability to look at liberal Jewish journalists and their role in promoting the war to either gentile or Jewish audiences.

    Kathleen, May 6, 2014, 6:53 pm

    There was talk about this last night (Monday/5th) on Chris Matthew's Hardball segment on Condi "mushroom cloud" Rice pulling out of the graduation ceremonies at Rutger's. David Corn did not say much but Eugene Robinson and Chris Matthews were basically talking about Israel and the neocons desires to rearrange the middle east "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad" conversation.

    Bumblebye, May 6, 2014, 2:33 pm

    "some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves into the Iraq War"

    Have to take issue with that – the neo-cons hurled young American (and foreign) servicemen and women into that war, many to their deaths, along with throwing as much taxpayer money as possible. They stayed ultra safe and grew richer for their efforts.

    Citizen, May 7, 2014, 9:03 am

    @ Bumblebye

    Good point. During WW1, as I read the history, the Jewish Germans provided their fair share of combat troops. If memory serves, despite Weimar Germany's later "stab in the back" theory, e.g., Hitler himself was given a combat medal thanks to his Jewish senior officer. In comparison to the build-up to Shrub Jr's war on Iraq, the Jewish neocons provided very few Jewish American combat troops.

    It's hard to get reliable stats on Jewish American participation in the US combat arms during the Iraq war. For all I've been able to ascertain, more have joined the IDF over the years. At any rate, it's common knowledge that Shrub's war on Iraq was instigated and supported by chicken hawks (Jew or Gentile) at a time bereft of conscription. They built their sale by ignoring key facts, and embellishing misleading and fake facts, as illustrated by the Downing Street memo.

    Keith, May 6, 2014, 7:47 pm

    PHIL- Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine.

    The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results.

    Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal emphasis on an American dominated global empire.

    So yes, the nationalistic emphasis is an anachronism, however, the decline of the US in conjunction with the extension of a system of globalized domination should hardly be of concern to elite power-seekers who will benefit. In fact, the new system of corporate/financial control will be beyond the political control of any nation, even the US. If they can pull it off. An interesting topic no doubt, but one which I doubt is suitable for extended discussion on Mondoweiss. As for power-seeking as a consequence of a uniquely Jewish experience, perhaps the less said the better.

    ToivoS, May 7, 2014, 8:10 pm
    Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes that 10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition with them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on the same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.

    Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support the political movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty antisemite whose followers killed many thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those left behind perished during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any of them would identify with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.

    In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with the Bandera brigades.

    RudyM, May 7, 2014, 9:36 pm
    Interesting, meaty analysis here of the various players in Ukraine. This is unequivocally from a Russian perspective, incidentally:

    link to wikispooks.com

    (I know I'm always grabbing OT threads of discussion, but when it comes down to it, I know much less about Zionism and Israel/Palestine than many, if not most of the regular commenters here.)

    I also am going to drift further off-topic by saying there is strong evidence that the slaughter in Odessa last Friday was highly orchestrated and not solely the result of spontaneous mob violence. Very graphic and disturbing images in all of these links:

    I have only glanced at these:

    American, May 6, 2014, 9:23 pm
    " and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives. Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, ..>>

    Stop it Sleeper. Do not continue to use the victim card ' to explain' the trauma, the insecurities, the nightmares, the angst, the feelings, the sensitivities, blah blah, blah of Zionist or Israel.

    That is not what they are about. These are power mad psychos like most neocons, period.

    And even if it were, and even if all the Jews in the world felt the same way, the bottom line would still be they do not have the right to make others pay in treasure and blood for their nightmares and mental sickness.

    Citizen May 7, 2014, 9:46 am
    @ yonah fredman

    "The freedom of Ukraine is a worthy goal."

    As near as I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong), the Ukrainians themselves are about half and half pro Russia and Pro NATO. Your glance at the history of the region as to why this is so, and your text on historical Ukranian suffering and POTV on MW commentary on this –did not help your analysis and its conclusion.

    There's a difference between isolationism and defensive intervention, and even more so, re isolationism v. pro-active interventionism "in the name of pursuing the democratic ideal". See Ron Paul v. PNAC-style neocons and liberal Zionists.

    Also, if you were Putin, how would you see the push of NATO & US force posts ever creeping towards Russia and its local environment? Look at the US military postings nearing Russia per se & those surrounding Iran. Compare Russia's.

    And note the intent to wean EU from Russian oil, and as well, the draconian sanctions on Iran, and Obama's latest partnering sanctions on Russia.

    Imagine yourself in Putin's shoes, and Iran's.

    Don't abuse your imagination only by imagining yourself in Netanyahu's shoes, which is the preoccupation of AIPAC and its whores in the US Congress.

    ToivoS, May 7, 2014, 8:49 pm

    Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes that 10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition with them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on the same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.

    Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support the political movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty anti-Semite whose followers killed many thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those left behind perished during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-Zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any of them would identify with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.

    In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with the Bandera brigades.

    ToivoSMay 7, 2014, 9:39 pm
    Yonah writes The freedom of Ukraine is a worthy goal. If the US is not able to back up our attempt to help them gain their freedom it is not something to celebrate, but something to lament.

    What are you saying? Ukraine has been an independent nation for 22 years. What freedom is this? What we have witnessed is that one half of Ukraine has gotten tired that the other half keeps on electing candidates that represent those Ukrainians that identify with Russian culture. They (the western half) successfully staged a coup and purged the other (eastern half) from the government. You call that "freedom". Doesn't it embarrass you, Yonah, that the armed militias that conducted that coup are descendants of the Bandera organization.

    Does that ring a bell? These are the Ukrainians that were involved in the holocaust. Does Babi Yar stir any memories Yohan? It was a massacre of 40,000 Jews just outside of Kiev in 1942. It was the single largest massacre of Jews during WWII. The massacre was led by the Germans ( Einsatzgruppe C officers) but was carried out with the aid of 400 Ukrainian Auxillary Police. These were later incorporated into the 14th SS-Volunteer Division "Galician" made up mostly Ukrainians. The division flags are to this day displayed at Right Sector rallies in western Ukraine.

    Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed. Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis.

    piotrMay 7, 2014, 10:18 pm
    Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia. Or you can count their billions. In any case, the neutral posture is sensible for Israel here. Which is highly uncharacteristic for that government.

    yonah fredman, May 7, 2014, 10:38 pm

    Toivo S- The history of Jew hatred by certain anti Russian elements in the Ukraine is not encouraging and nothing that I celebrate. Maybe I have been swayed by headlines and a superficial reading of the situation.

    If indeed I am wrong regarding the will of the Ukrainian people, I can only be glad that my opinion is just that, my opinion and not US or Israel or anyone's policy but my own. I assume that a majority of Ukrainians want to maintain independence of Russia and that the expressions of rebellion are in that vein.

    My people were murdered by the einsatzgruppen in that part of the world and so maybe I have overcompensated by trying not to allow my personal history to interfere with what I think would be the will of the majority of the Ukraine.

    But Toivo S. please skip the "doesn't it embarrass you" line of thought. Just put a sock in it and skip it.

    ToivoSMay 8, 2014, 12:51 am

    Well thanks for that Yonah. My wife's family descended from Jewish communities in Odessa and Galicia. They emigrated to the US between 1900 and 1940. After WWII none of their relatives left behind were ever heard from again. Perhaps you have family that experienced similar stories. What caused me to react to your post above is that you are describing the current situation in Ukraine as a "freedom" movement by the Ukrainians when the political forces there descended from the same people that killed my inlaws family (and apparently yours to). Why do you support them?

    yonah fredmanMay 8, 2014, 1:30 am

    ToivoS- I support them because I trust/don't trust Putin. I trust him to impose his brand of leadership on Ukraine, I don't trust him to care a whit about freedom. It is natural that the nationalist elements of Ukraine would descend from the elements that expressed themselves the last time they had freedom from the Soviet Union, that is those forces that were willing to join with the Nazis to express their hatred for the communist Soviet Union's rule over their freedom. That's how history works. The nationalists today descend from the nationalists of yesterday.

    But it's been 70 years since WWII and the Ukrainians ought to be able to have freedom even if the parties that advocate for freedom are descended from those that supported the Nazis. (I know once i include the Nazi part of history any analogies are toxic, but if I am willing to grant Hamas its rights as an expression of the Palestinian desire for freedom, why would I deny the Ukrainian foul nationalist parties their rights to express their people's desire for freedom.)

    Political parties are not made in a sterile laboratory, they evolve over history and most specifically they emerge from the past. I accept that Ukrainian nationalism has not evolved much, but nonetheless not having read any polls I assume that the nationalists are the representatives of the people's desire for freedom. And because Putin strikes me as something primitive, I accept the Ukrainian desire for freedom.

    CitizenMay 8, 2014, 9:18 am

    @ yonah f

    What are you supporting? Let me refresh your historic memory: Black's Transfer Agreement. Now apply analogy, responding to ToivoS. Might help us all to understand, explore more skillfully, Israel's current stance on the Putin-Ukranian matter .?

    (I think Nuland's intervention caught on tape, combined with who she is married to, already explores with great clarification what the US is doing.

    irishmosesMay 8, 2014, 12:32 pm

    Yonah said:

    "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. Most people here would probably disagree with Sleeper, because he does not deny that the world needs a cop, nor that the US would play a positive role, if it only had the means and the desire to do so. People here (overwhelmingly) see the US role as a negative one (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world,"

    The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop, confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality.

    Contrast that with the realist or realism approach recommended by George Kennan, and followed by this country successfully through the end of the Cold War. That approach is conservative and contends we should stay out of wars unless the vital national security interests of the US are at stake, like protecting WESTERN Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Western Hemisphere. This meant we could sympathize with the plight of all the eastern Europeans oppressed by the Soviets, but would not defend militarily the Hungarians (1956) or the Czechs (1968). It also meant we wouldn't send US troops into North Vietnam because we didn't want to go to war with the Chinese over a country that was at best tangential to US interests. When we varied from that policy (Vietnam and Iraq wars, Somalia) we paid a very heavy price while doing nothing to advance or protect our vital national security interests.

    The sooner this country can return to our traditional realism-based foreign policy the better. Part of that policy would be to disassociate the US from its entangling alliance with Likud Israel and its US Jewish supporters that espouse the Likud Greater Israel line.

    Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country. They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on.

    Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews. It is also directed at Neoconservative foreign policy advocates, comprised of Jews and non-Jews, and overlap between the two groups. Please also note my use of the term "major role", and that I am not saying the Neocons and their supporters (Jewish or non) were solely responsible for our involvement in the Iraq war. I am offering these caveats in the hope that the usual changes of antisemitism can be avoided in your or anyone else's response to my arguments.

    The influence of Neocons on US foreign policy has been very harmful to this country and poses a grave danger to its future. It would be wise for you to reflect on that harm and those dangers and decide whether you belong in the realist camp or want to continue running with the Neocons.

    seanmcbride, May 8, 2014, 1:01 pm

    irishmoses,

    Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews.

    What about the role of *liberal Zionists*, like Hillary Clinton, in supporting and promoting the Iraq War? Clinton still hasn't offered an apology for helping to drive the United States in a multi-trillion dollar foreign policy disaster - and she has threatened to "totally obliterate" Iran.

    What about Harry Reid's lavish praise of Sheldon Adelson?

    "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has for some time billed the Koch brothers as public enemy No.1 .

    But billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson? He's just fine, Reid says.

    "I know Sheldon Adelson. He's not in this for money," the Nevada Democrat said of Adelson, the Vegas casino magnate who reportedly spent close to $150 million to support Republicans in the 2012 presidential election."

    link to politico.com

    Are there really any meaningful distinctions between neoconservatives in the Republican Party and liberal Zionists in the Democratic Party?

    talknic, May 7, 2014, 3:24 am

    @ yonah fredman "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper"

    Strange

    "state into the Armageddon .. "

    "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. "

    Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention.

    " (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper does not say that."

    You do tho, without quoting anyone "here".

    BTW Pajero, strawmen no matter how lengthy and seemingly erudite, rarely walk anywhere

    JeffB, May 7, 2014, 9:06 am

    I'm going to put this down as Jewish navel gazing.

    Jews are disproportionately liberal. Jews make up a huge chunk of the peace movement. Jews are relative to their numbers on the left of most foreign policy positions.

    Iraq was unusual in that Jews were not overwhelming opposed to the invasion, but it is worth noting the invasion at the time was overwhelming popular. Frankly given the fact that Jews are now considered white people and the fact that Jews are almost all middle class they should be biased conservative. There certainly is no reason they should be more liberal than Catholics. Yet they are. It is the degree of Jewish liberalism not the degree of Jewish conservatism that is striking.

    But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld?

    lysias, May 7, 2014, 10:55 am

    The neocons lost one last night: Antiwar Rep. Walter Jones Beats Neocon-Backed GOP Rival:

    Strongly antiwar incumbent Rep. Walter Jones (R – NC) has won a hotly contested primary tonight, defeating a challenge from hawkish challenger and former Treasury Dept. official Taylor Griffin 51% to 45%.

    American, May 7, 2014, 11:24 am

    Yep.

    Voter turn out was light .. tea party types did a lot of lobbying for Griffin here .but Jones prevailed. Considering the onslaught of organized activity against him by ECI and the tea partiers for the past month he did well.

    Citizen, May 8, 2014, 9:24 am

    @ lysias
    Let's refresh our look at what Ron Paul had to say about foreign policy and foreign aid. Then, let's compare what his son has said, and take a look of his latest bill in congress to cut off aid to Palestine. Yes, you read that right; it's not a bill to cut off any aid to Israel.

    Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS.

    traintosiberia, May 8, 2014, 9:12 am

    Stockman's Corner

    Bravo, Rep. Walter Jones -- Primary Win Sends Neocons Packing

    by David Stockman • May 7, 2014 link to davidstockmanscontracorner.com

    The heavy artillery included the detestable Karl Rove, former Governor and RNC Chair Haley Barber and the War Party's highly paid chief PR flack, Ari Fleischer.

    But it was Neocon central that hauled out the big guns. Bill Kristol was so desperate to thwart the slowly rising anti-interventionist tide within the GOP that he even trotted out Sarah Palin to endorse Jones's opponent"

    But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence of the manifest destiny.

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

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

    in Uncategorized by craig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... In his just published book, War With Russia? ..."
    "... To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition." ..."
    "... Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared. ..."
    "... The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned. ..."
    www.theamericanconservative.com
    Dec 22, 2018 |

    Throughout the long Cold War Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University was a voice of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to blind him to Washington's contribution to the conflict and to criticize only the Soviet contribution. Cohen's interest was not to blame the enemy but to work toward a mutual understanding that would remove the threat of nuclear war. Although a Democrat and left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in the Reagan administration, as Reagan's first priority was to end the Cold War. I know this because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan will tell you the same thing.

    In 1974 a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter, absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat. As the CIA had every incentive for reasons of budget and power to overestimate the Soviet threat, and today the "Russian threat," Wohlstetter's accusation made no sense on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up enough concern that CIA director George H.W. Bush, later Vice President and President, agreed to a Team B to investigate the CIA's assessment, headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets thought they could win a nuclear war and were building the forces with which to attack the US.

    The report was mainly nonsense, and it must have have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the setback to negotiations that Team B caused.

    Today Cohen is stressed that it is the United States that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington speaks openly of using "low yield" nuclear weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace negotiations with Russia with a propaganda campaign against Russia of demonization, vilification, and transparent lies, while installing missile bases on Russia's borders and while talking of incorporating former parts of Russia into NATO. In his just published book, War With Russia? , which I highly recommend, Cohen makes a convincing case that Washington is asking for war.

    I agree with Cohen that if Russia is a threat it is only because the US is threatening Russia. The stupidity of the policy toward Russia is creating a Russian threat. Putin keeps emphasizing this. To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition."

    Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared.

    The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned.

    The demonization of Russia is also aided and abetted by the Democrats' hatred of Trump and anger from Hillary's loss of the presidential election to the "Trump deplorables." The Democrats purport to believe that Trump was installed by Putin's interference in the presidential election. This false belief is emotionally important to Democrats, and they can't let go of it.

    Although Cohen as a professor at Princeton and NYU never lacked research opportunities, in the US Russian studies, strategic studies, and the like are funded by the military/security complex whose agenda Cohen's scholarship does not serve. At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where I held an independently financed chair for a dozen years, most of my colleagues were dependent on grants from the military/security complex. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where I was a Senior Fellow for three decades, the anti-Soviet stance of the Institution reflected the agenda of those who funded the institution.

    I am not saying that my colleagues were whores on a payroll. I am saying that the people who got the appointments were people who were inclined to see the Soviet Union the way the military/security complex thought it should be seen.

    As Stephen Cohen is aware, in the original Cold War there was some balance as all explanations were not controlled. There were independent scholars who could point out that the Soviets, decimated by World War 2, had an interest in peace, and that accommodation could be achieved, thus avoiding the possibility of nuclear war.

    Stephen Cohen must have been in the younger ranks of those sensible people, as he and President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matloff, seem to be the remaining voices of expert reason on the American scene.

    If you care to understand the dire threat under which you live, a threat that only a few people, such as Stephen Cohen, are trying to lift, read his book.

    If you want to understand the dire threat that a bought-and-paid-for American media poses to your existence, read Cohen's accounts of their despicable lies. America has a media that is synonymous with lies.

    If you want to understand how corrupt American universities are as organizations on the take for money, organizations to whom truth is inconsequential, read Cohen's book.

    If you want to understand why you could be dead before Global Warming can get you, read Cohen's book.

    Enough said.

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

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

    in Uncategorized by craig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... In his just published book, War With Russia? ..."
    "... To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition." ..."
    "... Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared. ..."
    "... The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned. ..."
    www.theamericanconservative.com
    Dec 22, 2018 |

    Throughout the long Cold War Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University was a voice of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to blind him to Washington's contribution to the conflict and to criticize only the Soviet contribution. Cohen's interest was not to blame the enemy but to work toward a mutual understanding that would remove the threat of nuclear war. Although a Democrat and left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in the Reagan administration, as Reagan's first priority was to end the Cold War. I know this because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan will tell you the same thing.

    In 1974 a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter, absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat. As the CIA had every incentive for reasons of budget and power to overestimate the Soviet threat, and today the "Russian threat," Wohlstetter's accusation made no sense on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up enough concern that CIA director George H.W. Bush, later Vice President and President, agreed to a Team B to investigate the CIA's assessment, headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets thought they could win a nuclear war and were building the forces with which to attack the US.

    The report was mainly nonsense, and it must have have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the setback to negotiations that Team B caused.

    Today Cohen is stressed that it is the United States that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington speaks openly of using "low yield" nuclear weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace negotiations with Russia with a propaganda campaign against Russia of demonization, vilification, and transparent lies, while installing missile bases on Russia's borders and while talking of incorporating former parts of Russia into NATO. In his just published book, War With Russia? , which I highly recommend, Cohen makes a convincing case that Washington is asking for war.

    I agree with Cohen that if Russia is a threat it is only because the US is threatening Russia. The stupidity of the policy toward Russia is creating a Russian threat. Putin keeps emphasizing this. To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition."

    Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared.

    The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned.

    The demonization of Russia is also aided and abetted by the Democrats' hatred of Trump and anger from Hillary's loss of the presidential election to the "Trump deplorables." The Democrats purport to believe that Trump was installed by Putin's interference in the presidential election. This false belief is emotionally important to Democrats, and they can't let go of it.

    Although Cohen as a professor at Princeton and NYU never lacked research opportunities, in the US Russian studies, strategic studies, and the like are funded by the military/security complex whose agenda Cohen's scholarship does not serve. At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where I held an independently financed chair for a dozen years, most of my colleagues were dependent on grants from the military/security complex. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where I was a Senior Fellow for three decades, the anti-Soviet stance of the Institution reflected the agenda of those who funded the institution.

    I am not saying that my colleagues were whores on a payroll. I am saying that the people who got the appointments were people who were inclined to see the Soviet Union the way the military/security complex thought it should be seen.

    As Stephen Cohen is aware, in the original Cold War there was some balance as all explanations were not controlled. There were independent scholars who could point out that the Soviets, decimated by World War 2, had an interest in peace, and that accommodation could be achieved, thus avoiding the possibility of nuclear war.

    Stephen Cohen must have been in the younger ranks of those sensible people, as he and President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matloff, seem to be the remaining voices of expert reason on the American scene.

    If you care to understand the dire threat under which you live, a threat that only a few people, such as Stephen Cohen, are trying to lift, read his book.

    If you want to understand the dire threat that a bought-and-paid-for American media poses to your existence, read Cohen's accounts of their despicable lies. America has a media that is synonymous with lies.

    If you want to understand how corrupt American universities are as organizations on the take for money, organizations to whom truth is inconsequential, read Cohen's book.

    If you want to understand why you could be dead before Global Warming can get you, read Cohen's book.

    Enough said.

    [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! ..."
    "... the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites? ..."
    "... Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies. ..."
    "... Integrity Initiative ..."
    "... From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth. ..."
    "... He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI). ..."
    "... This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine. ..."
    "... That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" ..."
    "... In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea: ..."
    "... Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia? ..."
    "... Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda ..."
    "... Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures ..."
    "... Russian information warfare - airbrushing reality ..."
    "... Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria ..."
    "... Russian penetration in Germany ..."
    "... Russian conspiracy theory and foreign policy ..."
    "... Mapping Russia's whole influence machine ..."
    "... Military Review ..."
    "... BBC Newsnight ..."
    "... The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it. ..."
    "... Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart. ..."
    "... McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters. ..."
    "... Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force. ..."
    "... It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit ..."
    "... This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state. ..."
    "... it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy. ..."
    "... It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism. ..."
    "... Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art. ..."
    "... Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller? ..."
    "... Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians. ..."
    "... Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM ..."
    "... The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions. ..."
    "... right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with ..."
    "... Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy. ..."
    "... 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy ..."
    Dec 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
    uncle tungsten , Dec 15, 2018 6:28:07 PM | 41

    Labour is not "silent". Apart from Thornberry's questioning already mentioned in another post here, the party's newspaper published a news about it:

    Government admits that Institute of Statecraft was funded through CSSF , by Lamiat Sabin, 14th December 2018.

    Mark2 , Dec 15, 2018 7:12:28 PM | link
    Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! How many billions is that guna save us all ! not to mention lives saved.
    NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 7:42:22 PM | link
    @45 jr

    Wrong JR. It seems quite the obvious that the big boy in the west, the US, would seem to be the one spearheading the whole globalist agenda.

    But this is a retarded proposition.

    The US is nothing more than a Golem. It has been reduced to somnambulism and hijacked, utilized for the ends of these Non-National elites. Sure, like many posters here, it feels good to blame the US for everything. But the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites?

    Or are we just arguing semantics?

    NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 7:44:57 PM | link
    Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies.
    Uncle $cam , Dec 15, 2018 8:06:15 PM | link
    Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the decider aka Bush Jr. having had a shoe thrown at him.

    'For the sake of Iraq': Bush shoe-thrower running for parliament refuses to exploit 'hero image'

    Muntadhar al-Zaidi was arrested and tortured for it...

    "They broke my teeth, my nose, my leg, they electrocuted me, lashed me, they would beat me, they even broke a table or a chair over my back. I don't know, they had my eyes covered," al-Zaidi recalled. "This was one thing I never experienced before. Torture by the authorities, by the rule of law."

    I wish it had been a hand grenade.

    The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading anti-Russian propaganda and with influencing the public, military and governments of a number of countries. What follows is an incomplete analysis of the third batch of the Initiative's papers which was dumped yesterday.

    Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot Integrity Initiative . The Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".

    The Integrity Initiative does this by planting disinformation about alleged Russian influence through journalists 'clusters' throughout Europe and the United States.

    Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.

    Among the documents lifted by some anonymous person from the servers of the Institute we find several papers about Donnelly as well as some memos written by him. They show a russophobe mind with a lack of realistic strategic thought.

    There is also a file (pdf) with a copy of his passport:


    bigger

    From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth.

    He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI).

    During his time as military intelligence analyst in the 1980s Donnelly wrote several books and papers about the Soviet Union and its military.

    Donnelly seems to be obsessed with the 'Russian threat' and is determined to fight it by all means. His paranoia is obvious in a "private - confidential" report by the Statecraft Institute on The Challenge of Brexit to the UK: Case study – The Foreign and Commonwealth Offices (pdf):

    Our problem is that, for the last 70 years or so, we in the UK and Europe have been living in a safe, secure rules-based system which has allowed us to enjoy a holiday from history.

    ... ... ...

    Unfortunately, this state of affairs is now being challenged. A new paradigm of conflict is replacing the 19th & 20th Century paradigm.

    ... ... ...

    In this new paradigm, the clear distinction which most people have been able to draw between war and peace, their expectation of stability and a degree of predictability in life, are being replaced by a volatile unpredictability, a permanent state of instability in which war and peace become ever more difficult to disentangle . The "classic" understanding of conflict being between two distinct players or groups of players is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all". The Western rules-based system, which most westerners take for granted and have come to believe is "normal", is under attack from countries and organisations which wish to replace our system with theirs. This is not a crisis which faces us; it is a strategic challenge, and from several directions simultaneously.

    In reality the "Western rules-based system", fully implemented after the demise of the Soviet Union, is a concept under which 'the west' arbitrarily makes up rules and threatens to kill anyone who does not follow them. Witness the wars against Serbia, the war on Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the western led coup in Ukraine and the war by Jihadi proxies against the people of Syria and Iraq. None of these actions were legal under international law. Demanding a return to strict adherence to the rule of international law, as Russia, China and others now do, it is not an attempt to replace "our system with theirs". It is a return to the normal state of global diplomacy. It is certainly not a "Darwinian competition".

    In October 2016 Donnelly had a Private Discussion with Gen Sir Richard Barrons (pdf), marked as personal and confidential. Barrons is a former commander of the British Joint Forces Command. The nonsensical top line is: "The UK defence model is failing. UK is at real risk."

    Some interesting nuggets again reveal a paranoid mindset. The talk also includes some realistic truthiness about the British military posture Barrons and others created:

    There has been a progressive, systemic demobilisation of NATO militarily capability and a run down of all its members' defences
    ...
    We are seeing new / reinvented ways of warfare – hybrid , plus the reassertion of hard power in warfare
    ...
    Aircraft Carriers can be useful for lots of things, but not for war v China or Russia, so we should equip them accordingly. ...
    The West no longer has a military edge on Russia. ...
    Our Nuclear programme drains resources from conventional forces and hollows them out. ...
    The UK Brigade in Germany is no good as a deterrent against Russia. ...
    Our battalion in Estonia are hostages, not a deterrent. ...

    The general laments the lack of influence the military has on the British government and its people. He argues for more government financed think tank research that can be fed back into the government:

    So, if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political space. We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. NB We did this in the 1930s

    My conclusion is that it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside government .

    ...

    We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national capabilities / capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to do it? We need this debate NOW. There is not a moment to be lost.

    This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine.

    That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" .


    bigger

    Asking for government finance to influence the government to take a "tougher stand towards Russia" seems a bit circular. But this is consistent with the operation of other Anglo-American think tanks and policy initiatives in which one part of the government, usually the hawkish one, secretly uses NGO's and think-tanks to lobby other parts of the government to support their specific hobbyhorse and budget.

    Here is how it is done. The 'experts' of the 'charity' Institute for Statecraft and Integrity Initiative testified in the British parliament. While they were effectively paid by the government they lobbied parliament under the cover of their NGO. This circularity also allows to use international intermediates. Members of the Spanish cluster (pdf) of the Initiative testified in the British Parliament about the Catalan referendum and related allegations against Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. (It is likely that this testimony led to the change in the position of the Ecuadorian government towards Assange.)


    Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. Chris Donnelly, despite a life long experience in military intelligence, has obviously zero competence as a military strategist or planner.

    In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea:

    If I were in charge I would get the following implemented asp
    1. Set up a cordon sanitaire across the Crimean Isthmus and on the coast N. of Crimea with troops and mines
    2. Mine Sevastopol harbour/bay. Can be done easily using a car ferry if they have no minelayers. Doesn't need a lot of mines to be effective. They could easily buy some mines.
    3. Get their air force into the air and activate all their air defences. If they can't fly the Migs on the airfield in Crimea those should be destroyed as a gesture that they are serious. Going "live" electronically will worry the Russians as the Ukrainians have the same electronic kit. If the Russians jam it they jam their own kit as well.
    4. Ukraine used to have some seriously important weapons, such as a big microwave anti-satellite weapon. If they still have this, they should use it.
    5. The government needs a Strategic communication campaign-so far everything is coming from Moscow. They need to articulate a long-term vision that will inspire the people, however hard that is to do. Without it, what have people to fight for?
    6. They should ask the west now to start supplying Oil and gas. There is plenty available due to the mild winter.

    I am trying to get this message across

    Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia?

    Such half-assed thinking is typical for the Institute and its creation of propaganda. One of its employees/contractors is Hugh Benedict Nimmo who the Initiative paid to produce anti-Russian propaganda that was then disseminated through various western publications.

    According to the (still very incomplete) Initiative files Ben Nimmo received a monthly consultancy fee of £2.500 between December 2015 and March 2016. In August 2016 he sent an invoice (pdf) of £5,000 for his "August work on Integrity Initiative". A Production Timetable (pdf) for March to June 2016 lists the following Nimmo outputs and activities:

    One wonders how often Ben Nimmo double billed his various sponsors for these copy-paste fantasy pamphlets.

    In late 2017 Ben Nimmo and Guardian 'journalist' Carole Cadwalladr disseminated allegations that Russia used Facebook ads to influence the Brexit decision. Cadwalladr even received a price for her work. Unfortunately the price was not revoked when Facebook revealed that "Russia linked" accounts had spend a total of 97 cents on Brexit ads. It is unexplained how that was enough to achieve their alleged aim.

    Cadwalladr is listed as a speaker (pdf) at a "skill sharing" conference the Institute organized for November 1-2 under the headline: "Tackling Tools of Malign Influence - Supporting 21st Century Journalism".

    This year Ben Nimmo became notorious for claiming that several real persons with individual opinions were "Russian trolls". As we noted :

    Nimmo, and several other dimwits quoted in the piece, came to the conclusion that Ian56 is a Kremlin paid troll, not a real person. Next to Ian56 Nimmo 'identified' other 'Russian troll' accounts:

    Ben Nimmo @benimmo - 10:50 UTC - 24 Mar 2018

    One particularly influential retweeter (judging by the number of accounts which then retweeted it) was @ValLisitsa, which posts in English and Russian. Last year, this account joined the troll-factory #StopMorganLie campaign.

    Had Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson, had some decent education he would have know that @ValLisitsa, aka Valentina Lisitsa , is a famous American- Ukrainian pianist. Yes, she sometimes tweets in Russian language to her many fans in Russia and the Ukraine. Is that now a crime? The videos of her world wide performances on Youtube have more than 170 million views. It is absurd to claim that she is a 'Russian troll' and to insinuate that she is taking Kremlin money to push 'Russian troll' opinions.

    The Institute for Statecraft Expert Team (pdf) list several people with military intelligence backgrounds as well as many 'journalists'. One of them is:

    Mark Galeotti
    Specialist in Russian strategic thinking; the application of Russian disinformation and hybrid warfare; the use of organised crime as a weapon of hybrid warfare. Educational and mentoring skills, including in a US and E European environment, and the corporate world.
    Russian linguist

    Galeotti is the infamous inventor of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' and of the propaganda about Russia's alleged 'hybrid' warfare. In February 2013 the Russian General Valery Gerasimov, then Russia's chief of the General Staff, published a paper that analysed the way the 'west' is waging a new type of war by mixing propaganda, proxy armies and military force into one unified operation.

    Galeotti claimed that Gerasimov's analysis of 'western' operations was a new Russian doctrine of 'hybrid war'. He invented the term 'Gerasimov doctrine' which then took off in the propaganda realm. In February 2016 the U.S. Army Military Review published a longer analysis of Gerasimov's paper that debunked the nonsense (pdf). It concluded:

    Gerasimov's article is not proposing a new Russian way of warfare or a hybrid war, as has been stated in the West.

    But anti-Russian propagandist repeated Galeotti's nonsense over and over. Only in March 2018, five years after Galeotti invented the 'Germasimov doctrine' and two years after he was thoroughly debunked, he finally recanted :

    Everywhere, you'll find scholars, pundits, and policymakers talking about the threat the "Gerasimov doctrine" -- named after Russia's chief of the general staff -- poses to the West. It's a new way of war, "an expanded theory of modern warfare," or even "a vision of total warfare."

    There's one small problem. It doesn't exist. And the longer we pretend it does, the longer we misunderstand the -- real, but different -- challenge Russia poses.

    I feel I can say that because, to my immense chagrin, I created this term, which has since acquired a destructive life of its own, lumbering clumsily into the world to spread fear and loathing in its wake.

    The Institute for Statecraft's "Specialist in Russian strategic thinking", an expert of disinformation and hybrid warfare, created a non-existing Russian doctrine out of hot air and used it to press for anti-Russian measures. Like Ben Nimmo he is an aptly example of the quality of the Institute's experts and work.


    One of the newly released documents headlined CND Gen list 2 (pdf) (CND= Chris Nigel Donnelly) includes the names and email addresses of a number of military, government and think tank people. The anonymous releaser of the documents claims that the list is "of employees who attended a closed-door meeting with the white helmets". (No document has been published yet that confirms this.) One name on the list is of special interest:


    bigger

    Pablo Miller was the handler and friend of Sergej Skripal, the British double agent who was "novichoked" in Salisbury. When Miller's name was mentioned in the press the British government issued a D-Notice to suppress its further publishing,


    bigger

    As we wrote in April:

    Pablo Miller, a British MI6 agent, had recruited Sergej Skripal. The former MI6 agent in Moscow, Christopher Steele, was also involved in the case. Skripal was caught by the Russian security services and went to jail. Pablo Miller, the MI6 recruiter, was also the handler of Sergej Skripal after he was released by Russia in a spy swap. He reportedly also lives in Salisbury. Both Christopher Steele and Pablo Miller work for Orbis Business Intelligence which created the "Dirty Dossier" about Donald Trump.

    In 1979, before becoming a spy, Pablo Miller served at the 4th Royal Tank Regiment . ( BBC Newsnight 'journalist' Mark Urban, who later published a book based on interviews with Skripal , served together with Miller in the same regiment.) The 4th regiment's motto was "Fear Naught". Pablo Miller's email address given in the Chris Donnelly list is [email protected].

    At the very beginning of the Skripal affair, before there was any talk of 'Novichok', we asked if Skripal was involved in creating the now debunked "Dirty Dossier" and if that was a reason for certain British insiders to move him out of the way:

    Here are some question: If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me, then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.

    The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it.

    After two years the Muller investigation found zero evidence for the 'collusion' between Russia and the Trump campaign that the fake Steele dossier suggested. The whole collusion claim is a creation by 'former' British intelligence operatives who likely acted on request of U.S. intelligence leaders Clapper and Brennan. How deep was the Russia specialist Chris Donnelly and his Institute for Statecraft involved in this endeavor?


    Checking through all the released Initiative papers and lists one gets the impression of a secret military intelligence operation, disguised as a public NGO. Financed by millions of government money the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative work under a charity label to create and disseminate disinformation to the global public and back into the government and military itself.

    The paranoia about Russia, which does way less harm than the 'western' "rules based system" constantly creates, is illogical and not based on factual analysis. It creates Russia as an "enemy" when it is none. It hypes a "threat" out of hot air. The only people who profit from this are the propagandists and the companies and people who back them.

    The Initiatives motto "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation" is a truly Orwellian construct. By disseminating propaganda and using it to influence the public, parliament, the military and governments, the Institute actively undermines the democratic process that depends on the free availability of truthful information.

    It should be shut down immediately.

    ---
    Note: There have already been attempts to delete the released files from the Internet. A complete archive of all Integrity Initiative files published so far is here . Should the public links cease to work, you can contact the author of this blog for access to private backups.

    flayer , Dec 15, 2018 11:49:39 AM | link

    Aside from the fact that the government itself funds this organization, the creepiest thing about it is that the "non-governmental individuals" that help fund it are the same people that run the think tanks: a bunch of Rhodesians.

    Russ , Dec 15, 2018 11:59:03 AM | link

    "Such half-assed thinking...Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "gestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea."

    It sure seems like this half-assed thinking isn't just the domain of a fringe element, but is increasingly mainstream among the elites. Doesn't bode well.

    Roy G , Dec 15, 2018 12:10:11 PM | link
    Thank you B. It is truly amazing to watch the UK elites unravel as they have become truly unhinged by their own connivances. It is a bad joke at the commoner's expense that they propagandize and demonize in the name of the 'Western rules based system' even as they are busy shooting themselves in both feet by committing Brexit. Although there are legitimate grievances with the EU, it is clear that Brexit is a Tory power play that is all politics and zero governance. Alas, Perfidious Albion has succumbed to Mad Cow disease.
    Sally Snyder , Dec 15, 2018 12:10:23 PM | link
    Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart.
    bjd , Dec 15, 2018 12:46:08 PM | link
    Thanks, b.

    What remains mysterious (not really) is why --if these initiatives are truly meant to save and strengthen democracy-- they aren't proudly proclaimed and advertised, in the open, transparent, for everyone one to see and judge, like an adult democracy that they claim to stand for might want to debate and form an opinion on.

    The fact that it isn't, is testimony to the nefarious anti-democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian streak that runs in between every two lines that they put on paper.

    Jackrabbit , Dec 15, 2018 12:58:35 PM | link
    McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters.

    Every time one scratches the surface of such smears, it seems there is a connection to US/British MIC, Ukraine, or Israel - essentially, those who benefit (financially or otherwise) from greater tensions with Russia.

    At what point does neocon doubling-down on failed foreign policy become more than just picking our pockets and warping our minds? At what point do they start killing our kids in another unnecessary war?

    Clueless Joe , Dec 15, 2018 1:01:40 PM | link
    Cold War has been over for nearly 30 years. It's time enough for Western countries to send into real retirement every single cold-warrior, their time is over, their mindset is quaint and useless, if not downright dangerous and counter-productive.
    Mark2 , Dec 15, 2018 1:11:36 PM | link
    Thank you 'b'
    I'll just say -- - there is safety in numbers ! Already valuable information, important to the public good and democracy has been spread wide enough to be certain, this gene won't go back in the bottle ! D notice or no ! And by doing that, has made the fearless journalists and investigators lives all the safer ! Safety in numbers, spread this wide everyone?

    Are these people above the law ? ...

    psychohistorian , Dec 15, 2018 1:12:59 PM | link
    Thanks for the continued exposition of this story b.....may it go viral

    I want to comment on some of the wording you quote Donnelly as writing

    " .....is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all". "

    This is Donnelly's characterization of a world in which finance is a public utility instead of the private jackboot that it currently is. This is the delusion these people have been led to believe.

    So instead of his "war of all against all" that some might call human cooperation on the basis of merit we have a mythical God of Mammon religion that continues to instantiate the private finance led world of the West with it parasitic elite and fawning acolytes.

    Kadath , Dec 15, 2018 1:34:30 PM | link
    Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force.

    Thankfully it wasn't done but the fact this was even discussed by senior figures confirms that there was at least a sizable minority pushing for it. 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Western elite have truly abandoned all sense of reality and embraced a consequence free view of the use of force. After Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya they haven't learned a thing! I'm becoming more and more certain that a peaceful transition to the multipolar world is impossible and that it will only happen after the US or one of its' vassal states blunder into a proxy war and get utterly and comprehensively defeated, forcing a radical world realignment, but with nuts like John Bolton and the neocons in the Whitehouse it could easily lead to a nuclear war

    Mina , Dec 15, 2018 1:45:39 PM | link
    It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit

    The grumpy general at Turcopolier has skept the II topic entirely.

    TJ , Dec 15, 2018 1:53:44 PM | link
    @13 psychohistorian

    " we have a mythical God of Mammon religion" I hope you're not here in dear old Blighty, as you'll probably get arrested for antisemitism

    Peter AU 1 , Dec 15, 2018 2:13:14 PM | link
    This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state.
    exiled off mainstreet , Dec 15, 2018 2:22:39 PM | link
    As an aside this happens to be "Bill of Rights Day", the anniversary of the passage of the Bill of Rights as amendments to the yankee constitution. This reveals again how far from the rule of law the yankee imperium, now the key element of the British Empire they supposedly seceded from, has strayed, since it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy.

    It has also ensured that the victorious candidate has been neutered and faithfully follows the world control line put forward by the five eyes spy-masters making up the empire in its present iteration. This also shows what a farce the regime, based on the rule of law, now presents.

    It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism.

    GeorgeV , Dec 15, 2018 2:27:49 PM | link
    The "Western-based rules system" described in this article reminds me of a game called "Calvin Ball" which appeared in the former comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes." In the strip Calvin a wildly imaginative adolescent boy who plays a free-form of football with his imaginary pet toy tiger (Hobbes). Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art.
    bjd , Dec 15, 2018 2:38:50 PM | link
    b, I downloaded the zip file, and had also downloaded all the PDF's from pdf-archive yesterday. There are more files in the zip, but the following were on pdf-archive and are NOT in the zip:
    sejomoje , Dec 15, 2018 3:06:48 PM | link
    Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller?
    jayc , Dec 15, 2018 4:05:08 PM | link
    Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians.
    Emmanuel Goldstein , Dec 15, 2018 4:21:51 PM | link
    The transcript of his conversation with the general shows very starkly that we would last about two minutes in a nuclear exchange, but about half a day in a conventional one. No reserves, no equipment stockpiles, a navy consisting of two fat targets, neither of which has any aircraft and some destroyers which have propulsion problems, a smallish air force and very small numbers of troops. The tripwire force in Estonia is wholly sacrificial. In fact he lays bare the whole fallacy of biting the bear. With the armed forces in the state he describes, and with the recruitment and retention problems, wouldn't it be better, as one defense minister said, 'to go away and shut up'...
    uncle tungsten , Dec 15, 2018 4:27:59 PM | link
    Thanks b and especially the link to Valentina Lisitsa who I had tinkling in the background as I read your grand expose. These people are seditious morons, parasites infesting the state apparatus. Shut these fools down. Nice touch publishing the passport image. I can just imagine the frenzied aftermath of Kit's visit to the basement. Big thanks to anonymous and Craig Murray too. Their IT personel are probably visiting Devil's Island or Diego Garcia as we read.
    Sasha , Dec 15, 2018 5:00:51 PM | link
    Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM

    The British and US connections to loot and evade Russian riches and funds are exposed, as well as the origin of sanctions, supposed "alt-media" "truth-seakers" like Meduza...or supposed "pro-Russian" US intelligence operatives married to Russian women....

    Sasha , Dec 15, 2018 5:32:32 PM | link
    @Posted by: Mina | Dec 15, 2018 1:45:39 PM | 18

    Amongst the many issues he usually passes over trying to make himself the fool, while at the same time trying to convince us of the oustanding intellectual capacities, honesty and classy stance of him and his "comittee"...

    https://www.stalkerzone.org/an-american-military-attache-held-a-closed-meeting-with-uaf-commanders-in-mariupol/

    For that travel, to end bluntly and in such public view siding with the nazis of the "Azov Regiment" and other criminals of war, there was no need of so many saddlebags, so as pretending that the people who supported Trump as if there was no tomorrow, were enlightened people who only wanted to rescue "America" for the "Americans", as if there would not be a sign of blatant exceptionalism in appropriating of the term "Americans" for themselves in such a huge continent....

    NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 5:44:31 PM | link
    In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of chicken with Russia.

    The FP pre-Soviet collapse consisted of one MO: GET THE COMMIES!

    Since then, Neocons and Neolibs which are frontmen for this Non-National Globalized Elite, have hijacked our country's military and have steered it to a Global agenda where dominance in the ME means either superiority for these EURO elites or Vassal-hood.

    The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions.

    The average American could care less about the ME and the US would be 1000x better-off reverting to an isolationist stance.

    But this will not happen so long as Nationalism in the US and UK is repeatedly put-down. It seems as though there is going to be another Brexit vote. Does anyone doubt that miraculously the people by then will have second-guessed their will to Brexit and so will vote against it given another crack at a vote?

    Sickening.

    slit , Dec 15, 2018 6:04:29 PM | link
    "Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. "

    Incompetence in general and IT and data analysis, physics 101, etc.:

    Cry boo hoo hoo to wake up with indigenous capacity decades behind world players like Russia, China, India, etc who operate on fractional budgets...

    But this drama also exposes ashura/emigods intra necine warfare: right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with , but it invites other questions, insofar as UK is Her Majesty's Service, so are we to read this with Prince Harry or Philip's culture, or a "consent by silence") in mind? Defending crown or EU "Saturnus Sattelitus"?

    MadMax2 , Dec 15, 2018 6:28:58 PM | link
    @Nemisis

    Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy.

    Good to see Trump finally give it a face... 'you need freedom and security now pay up bitches'

    Jackrabbit , Dec 15, 2018 6:38:00 PM | link
    NemesisCalling | Dec 15, 2018 5:44:31 PM | 37
    In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of chicken with Russia.... Globalist Agenda
    I think the opposite is true.

    The US-led Empire and their globalist sycophants seek to weaken Europe so that it can not act independently in its own best interests. They will do what ever they can to ensure that the vassals never join with Russia/China and the SCO.

    Russian scare-mongering and immigration have been effective in furthering this agenda. Also note: what USA has termed "new Europe" - eastern European states like Poland and Ukraine - are solidly pro-American.

    John2o2o , Dec 15, 2018 6:56:17 PM | link
    'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy

    Perfect description.

    Why has this ageing nutjob been allowed to secretly dictate British foreign policy? He's clearly insane.

    vk , Dec 15, 2018 6:58:49 PM | link
    @

    [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! ..."
    "... the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites? ..."
    "... Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies. ..."
    "... Integrity Initiative ..."
    "... From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth. ..."
    "... He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI). ..."
    "... This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine. ..."
    "... That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" ..."
    "... In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea: ..."
    "... Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia? ..."
    "... Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda ..."
    "... Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures ..."
    "... Russian information warfare - airbrushing reality ..."
    "... Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria ..."
    "... Russian penetration in Germany ..."
    "... Russian conspiracy theory and foreign policy ..."
    "... Mapping Russia's whole influence machine ..."
    "... Military Review ..."
    "... BBC Newsnight ..."
    "... The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it. ..."
    "... Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart. ..."
    "... McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters. ..."
    "... Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force. ..."
    "... It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit ..."
    "... This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state. ..."
    "... it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy. ..."
    "... It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism. ..."
    "... Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art. ..."
    "... Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller? ..."
    "... Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians. ..."
    "... Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM ..."
    "... The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions. ..."
    "... right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with ..."
    "... Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy. ..."
    "... 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy ..."
    Dec 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
    uncle tungsten , Dec 15, 2018 6:28:07 PM | 41

    Labour is not "silent". Apart from Thornberry's questioning already mentioned in another post here, the party's newspaper published a news about it:

    Government admits that Institute of Statecraft was funded through CSSF , by Lamiat Sabin, 14th December 2018.

    Mark2 , Dec 15, 2018 7:12:28 PM | link
    Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! How many billions is that guna save us all ! not to mention lives saved.
    NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 7:42:22 PM | link
    @45 jr

    Wrong JR. It seems quite the obvious that the big boy in the west, the US, would seem to be the one spearheading the whole globalist agenda.

    But this is a retarded proposition.

    The US is nothing more than a Golem. It has been reduced to somnambulism and hijacked, utilized for the ends of these Non-National elites. Sure, like many posters here, it feels good to blame the US for everything. But the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites?

    Or are we just arguing semantics?

    NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 7:44:57 PM | link
    Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies.
    Uncle $cam , Dec 15, 2018 8:06:15 PM | link
    Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the decider aka Bush Jr. having had a shoe thrown at him.

    'For the sake of Iraq': Bush shoe-thrower running for parliament refuses to exploit 'hero image'

    Muntadhar al-Zaidi was arrested and tortured for it...

    "They broke my teeth, my nose, my leg, they electrocuted me, lashed me, they would beat me, they even broke a table or a chair over my back. I don't know, they had my eyes covered," al-Zaidi recalled. "This was one thing I never experienced before. Torture by the authorities, by the rule of law."

    I wish it had been a hand grenade.

    The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading anti-Russian propaganda and with influencing the public, military and governments of a number of countries. What follows is an incomplete analysis of the third batch of the Initiative's papers which was dumped yesterday.

    Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot Integrity Initiative . The Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".

    The Integrity Initiative does this by planting disinformation about alleged Russian influence through journalists 'clusters' throughout Europe and the United States.

    Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.

    Among the documents lifted by some anonymous person from the servers of the Institute we find several papers about Donnelly as well as some memos written by him. They show a russophobe mind with a lack of realistic strategic thought.

    There is also a file (pdf) with a copy of his passport:


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    From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth.

    He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI).

    During his time as military intelligence analyst in the 1980s Donnelly wrote several books and papers about the Soviet Union and its military.

    Donnelly seems to be obsessed with the 'Russian threat' and is determined to fight it by all means. His paranoia is obvious in a "private - confidential" report by the Statecraft Institute on The Challenge of Brexit to the UK: Case study – The Foreign and Commonwealth Offices (pdf):

    Our problem is that, for the last 70 years or so, we in the UK and Europe have been living in a safe, secure rules-based system which has allowed us to enjoy a holiday from history.

    ... ... ...

    Unfortunately, this state of affairs is now being challenged. A new paradigm of conflict is replacing the 19th & 20th Century paradigm.

    ... ... ...

    In this new paradigm, the clear distinction which most people have been able to draw between war and peace, their expectation of stability and a degree of predictability in life, are being replaced by a volatile unpredictability, a permanent state of instability in which war and peace become ever more difficult to disentangle . The "classic" understanding of conflict being between two distinct players or groups of players is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all". The Western rules-based system, which most westerners take for granted and have come to believe is "normal", is under attack from countries and organisations which wish to replace our system with theirs. This is not a crisis which faces us; it is a strategic challenge, and from several directions simultaneously.

    In reality the "Western rules-based system", fully implemented after the demise of the Soviet Union, is a concept under which 'the west' arbitrarily makes up rules and threatens to kill anyone who does not follow them. Witness the wars against Serbia, the war on Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the western led coup in Ukraine and the war by Jihadi proxies against the people of Syria and Iraq. None of these actions were legal under international law. Demanding a return to strict adherence to the rule of international law, as Russia, China and others now do, it is not an attempt to replace "our system with theirs". It is a return to the normal state of global diplomacy. It is certainly not a "Darwinian competition".

    In October 2016 Donnelly had a Private Discussion with Gen Sir Richard Barrons (pdf), marked as personal and confidential. Barrons is a former commander of the British Joint Forces Command. The nonsensical top line is: "The UK defence model is failing. UK is at real risk."

    Some interesting nuggets again reveal a paranoid mindset. The talk also includes some realistic truthiness about the British military posture Barrons and others created:

    There has been a progressive, systemic demobilisation of NATO militarily capability and a run down of all its members' defences
    ...
    We are seeing new / reinvented ways of warfare – hybrid , plus the reassertion of hard power in warfare
    ...
    Aircraft Carriers can be useful for lots of things, but not for war v China or Russia, so we should equip them accordingly. ...
    The West no longer has a military edge on Russia. ...
    Our Nuclear programme drains resources from conventional forces and hollows them out. ...
    The UK Brigade in Germany is no good as a deterrent against Russia. ...
    Our battalion in Estonia are hostages, not a deterrent. ...

    The general laments the lack of influence the military has on the British government and its people. He argues for more government financed think tank research that can be fed back into the government:

    So, if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political space. We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. NB We did this in the 1930s

    My conclusion is that it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside government .

    ...

    We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national capabilities / capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to do it? We need this debate NOW. There is not a moment to be lost.

    This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine.

    That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" .


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    Asking for government finance to influence the government to take a "tougher stand towards Russia" seems a bit circular. But this is consistent with the operation of other Anglo-American think tanks and policy initiatives in which one part of the government, usually the hawkish one, secretly uses NGO's and think-tanks to lobby other parts of the government to support their specific hobbyhorse and budget.

    Here is how it is done. The 'experts' of the 'charity' Institute for Statecraft and Integrity Initiative testified in the British parliament. While they were effectively paid by the government they lobbied parliament under the cover of their NGO. This circularity also allows to use international intermediates. Members of the Spanish cluster (pdf) of the Initiative testified in the British Parliament about the Catalan referendum and related allegations against Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. (It is likely that this testimony led to the change in the position of the Ecuadorian government towards Assange.)


    Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. Chris Donnelly, despite a life long experience in military intelligence, has obviously zero competence as a military strategist or planner.

    In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea:

    If I were in charge I would get the following implemented asp
    1. Set up a cordon sanitaire across the Crimean Isthmus and on the coast N. of Crimea with troops and mines
    2. Mine Sevastopol harbour/bay. Can be done easily using a car ferry if they have no minelayers. Doesn't need a lot of mines to be effective. They could easily buy some mines.
    3. Get their air force into the air and activate all their air defences. If they can't fly the Migs on the airfield in Crimea those should be destroyed as a gesture that they are serious. Going "live" electronically will worry the Russians as the Ukrainians have the same electronic kit. If the Russians jam it they jam their own kit as well.
    4. Ukraine used to have some seriously important weapons, such as a big microwave anti-satellite weapon. If they still have this, they should use it.
    5. The government needs a Strategic communication campaign-so far everything is coming from Moscow. They need to articulate a long-term vision that will inspire the people, however hard that is to do. Without it, what have people to fight for?
    6. They should ask the west now to start supplying Oil and gas. There is plenty available due to the mild winter.

    I am trying to get this message across

    Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia?

    Such half-assed thinking is typical for the Institute and its creation of propaganda. One of its employees/contractors is Hugh Benedict Nimmo who the Initiative paid to produce anti-Russian propaganda that was then disseminated through various western publications.

    According to the (still very incomplete) Initiative files Ben Nimmo received a monthly consultancy fee of £2.500 between December 2015 and March 2016. In August 2016 he sent an invoice (pdf) of £5,000 for his "August work on Integrity Initiative". A Production Timetable (pdf) for March to June 2016 lists the following Nimmo outputs and activities:

    One wonders how often Ben Nimmo double billed his various sponsors for these copy-paste fantasy pamphlets.

    In late 2017 Ben Nimmo and Guardian 'journalist' Carole Cadwalladr disseminated allegations that Russia used Facebook ads to influence the Brexit decision. Cadwalladr even received a price for her work. Unfortunately the price was not revoked when Facebook revealed that "Russia linked" accounts had spend a total of 97 cents on Brexit ads. It is unexplained how that was enough to achieve their alleged aim.

    Cadwalladr is listed as a speaker (pdf) at a "skill sharing" conference the Institute organized for November 1-2 under the headline: "Tackling Tools of Malign Influence - Supporting 21st Century Journalism".

    This year Ben Nimmo became notorious for claiming that several real persons with individual opinions were "Russian trolls". As we noted :

    Nimmo, and several other dimwits quoted in the piece, came to the conclusion that Ian56 is a Kremlin paid troll, not a real person. Next to Ian56 Nimmo 'identified' other 'Russian troll' accounts:

    Ben Nimmo @benimmo - 10:50 UTC - 24 Mar 2018

    One particularly influential retweeter (judging by the number of accounts which then retweeted it) was @ValLisitsa, which posts in English and Russian. Last year, this account joined the troll-factory #StopMorganLie campaign.

    Had Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson, had some decent education he would have know that @ValLisitsa, aka Valentina Lisitsa , is a famous American- Ukrainian pianist. Yes, she sometimes tweets in Russian language to her many fans in Russia and the Ukraine. Is that now a crime? The videos of her world wide performances on Youtube have more than 170 million views. It is absurd to claim that she is a 'Russian troll' and to insinuate that she is taking Kremlin money to push 'Russian troll' opinions.

    The Institute for Statecraft Expert Team (pdf) list several people with military intelligence backgrounds as well as many 'journalists'. One of them is:

    Mark Galeotti
    Specialist in Russian strategic thinking; the application of Russian disinformation and hybrid warfare; the use of organised crime as a weapon of hybrid warfare. Educational and mentoring skills, including in a US and E European environment, and the corporate world.
    Russian linguist

    Galeotti is the infamous inventor of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' and of the propaganda about Russia's alleged 'hybrid' warfare. In February 2013 the Russian General Valery Gerasimov, then Russia's chief of the General Staff, published a paper that analysed the way the 'west' is waging a new type of war by mixing propaganda, proxy armies and military force into one unified operation.

    Galeotti claimed that Gerasimov's analysis of 'western' operations was a new Russian doctrine of 'hybrid war'. He invented the term 'Gerasimov doctrine' which then took off in the propaganda realm. In February 2016 the U.S. Army Military Review published a longer analysis of Gerasimov's paper that debunked the nonsense (pdf). It concluded:

    Gerasimov's article is not proposing a new Russian way of warfare or a hybrid war, as has been stated in the West.

    But anti-Russian propagandist repeated Galeotti's nonsense over and over. Only in March 2018, five years after Galeotti invented the 'Germasimov doctrine' and two years after he was thoroughly debunked, he finally recanted :

    Everywhere, you'll find scholars, pundits, and policymakers talking about the threat the "Gerasimov doctrine" -- named after Russia's chief of the general staff -- poses to the West. It's a new way of war, "an expanded theory of modern warfare," or even "a vision of total warfare."

    There's one small problem. It doesn't exist. And the longer we pretend it does, the longer we misunderstand the -- real, but different -- challenge Russia poses.

    I feel I can say that because, to my immense chagrin, I created this term, which has since acquired a destructive life of its own, lumbering clumsily into the world to spread fear and loathing in its wake.

    The Institute for Statecraft's "Specialist in Russian strategic thinking", an expert of disinformation and hybrid warfare, created a non-existing Russian doctrine out of hot air and used it to press for anti-Russian measures. Like Ben Nimmo he is an aptly example of the quality of the Institute's experts and work.


    One of the newly released documents headlined CND Gen list 2 (pdf) (CND= Chris Nigel Donnelly) includes the names and email addresses of a number of military, government and think tank people. The anonymous releaser of the documents claims that the list is "of employees who attended a closed-door meeting with the white helmets". (No document has been published yet that confirms this.) One name on the list is of special interest:


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    Pablo Miller was the handler and friend of Sergej Skripal, the British double agent who was "novichoked" in Salisbury. When Miller's name was mentioned in the press the British government issued a D-Notice to suppress its further publishing,


    bigger

    As we wrote in April:

    Pablo Miller, a British MI6 agent, had recruited Sergej Skripal. The former MI6 agent in Moscow, Christopher Steele, was also involved in the case. Skripal was caught by the Russian security services and went to jail. Pablo Miller, the MI6 recruiter, was also the handler of Sergej Skripal after he was released by Russia in a spy swap. He reportedly also lives in Salisbury. Both Christopher Steele and Pablo Miller work for Orbis Business Intelligence which created the "Dirty Dossier" about Donald Trump.

    In 1979, before becoming a spy, Pablo Miller served at the 4th Royal Tank Regiment . ( BBC Newsnight 'journalist' Mark Urban, who later published a book based on interviews with Skripal , served together with Miller in the same regiment.) The 4th regiment's motto was "Fear Naught". Pablo Miller's email address given in the Chris Donnelly list is [email protected].

    At the very beginning of the Skripal affair, before there was any talk of 'Novichok', we asked if Skripal was involved in creating the now debunked "Dirty Dossier" and if that was a reason for certain British insiders to move him out of the way:

    Here are some question: If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me, then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.

    The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it.

    After two years the Muller investigation found zero evidence for the 'collusion' between Russia and the Trump campaign that the fake Steele dossier suggested. The whole collusion claim is a creation by 'former' British intelligence operatives who likely acted on request of U.S. intelligence leaders Clapper and Brennan. How deep was the Russia specialist Chris Donnelly and his Institute for Statecraft involved in this endeavor?


    Checking through all the released Initiative papers and lists one gets the impression of a secret military intelligence operation, disguised as a public NGO. Financed by millions of government money the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative work under a charity label to create and disseminate disinformation to the global public and back into the government and military itself.

    The paranoia about Russia, which does way less harm than the 'western' "rules based system" constantly creates, is illogical and not based on factual analysis. It creates Russia as an "enemy" when it is none. It hypes a "threat" out of hot air. The only people who profit from this are the propagandists and the companies and people who back them.

    The Initiatives motto "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation" is a truly Orwellian construct. By disseminating propaganda and using it to influence the public, parliament, the military and governments, the Institute actively undermines the democratic process that depends on the free availability of truthful information.

    It should be shut down immediately.

    ---
    Note: There have already been attempts to delete the released files from the Internet. A complete archive of all Integrity Initiative files published so far is here . Should the public links cease to work, you can contact the author of this blog for access to private backups.

    flayer , Dec 15, 2018 11:49:39 AM | link

    Aside from the fact that the government itself funds this organization, the creepiest thing about it is that the "non-governmental individuals" that help fund it are the same people that run the think tanks: a bunch of Rhodesians.

    Russ , Dec 15, 2018 11:59:03 AM | link

    "Such half-assed thinking...Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "gestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea."

    It sure seems like this half-assed thinking isn't just the domain of a fringe element, but is increasingly mainstream among the elites. Doesn't bode well.

    Roy G , Dec 15, 2018 12:10:11 PM | link
    Thank you B. It is truly amazing to watch the UK elites unravel as they have become truly unhinged by their own connivances. It is a bad joke at the commoner's expense that they propagandize and demonize in the name of the 'Western rules based system' even as they are busy shooting themselves in both feet by committing Brexit. Although there are legitimate grievances with the EU, it is clear that Brexit is a Tory power play that is all politics and zero governance. Alas, Perfidious Albion has succumbed to Mad Cow disease.
    Sally Snyder , Dec 15, 2018 12:10:23 PM | link
    Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart.
    bjd , Dec 15, 2018 12:46:08 PM | link
    Thanks, b.

    What remains mysterious (not really) is why --if these initiatives are truly meant to save and strengthen democracy-- they aren't proudly proclaimed and advertised, in the open, transparent, for everyone one to see and judge, like an adult democracy that they claim to stand for might want to debate and form an opinion on.

    The fact that it isn't, is testimony to the nefarious anti-democratic, authoritarian and totalitarian streak that runs in between every two lines that they put on paper.

    Jackrabbit , Dec 15, 2018 12:58:35 PM | link
    McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters.

    Every time one scratches the surface of such smears, it seems there is a connection to US/British MIC, Ukraine, or Israel - essentially, those who benefit (financially or otherwise) from greater tensions with Russia.

    At what point does neocon doubling-down on failed foreign policy become more than just picking our pockets and warping our minds? At what point do they start killing our kids in another unnecessary war?

    Clueless Joe , Dec 15, 2018 1:01:40 PM | link
    Cold War has been over for nearly 30 years. It's time enough for Western countries to send into real retirement every single cold-warrior, their time is over, their mindset is quaint and useless, if not downright dangerous and counter-productive.
    Mark2 , Dec 15, 2018 1:11:36 PM | link
    Thank you 'b'
    I'll just say -- - there is safety in numbers ! Already valuable information, important to the public good and democracy has been spread wide enough to be certain, this gene won't go back in the bottle ! D notice or no ! And by doing that, has made the fearless journalists and investigators lives all the safer ! Safety in numbers, spread this wide everyone?

    Are these people above the law ? ...

    psychohistorian , Dec 15, 2018 1:12:59 PM | link
    Thanks for the continued exposition of this story b.....may it go viral

    I want to comment on some of the wording you quote Donnelly as writing

    " .....is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all". "

    This is Donnelly's characterization of a world in which finance is a public utility instead of the private jackboot that it currently is. This is the delusion these people have been led to believe.

    So instead of his "war of all against all" that some might call human cooperation on the basis of merit we have a mythical God of Mammon religion that continues to instantiate the private finance led world of the West with it parasitic elite and fawning acolytes.

    Kadath , Dec 15, 2018 1:34:30 PM | link
    Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force.

    Thankfully it wasn't done but the fact this was even discussed by senior figures confirms that there was at least a sizable minority pushing for it. 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Western elite have truly abandoned all sense of reality and embraced a consequence free view of the use of force. After Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya they haven't learned a thing! I'm becoming more and more certain that a peaceful transition to the multipolar world is impossible and that it will only happen after the US or one of its' vassal states blunder into a proxy war and get utterly and comprehensively defeated, forcing a radical world realignment, but with nuts like John Bolton and the neocons in the Whitehouse it could easily lead to a nuclear war

    Mina , Dec 15, 2018 1:45:39 PM | link
    It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit

    The grumpy general at Turcopolier has skept the II topic entirely.

    TJ , Dec 15, 2018 1:53:44 PM | link
    @13 psychohistorian

    " we have a mythical God of Mammon religion" I hope you're not here in dear old Blighty, as you'll probably get arrested for antisemitism

    Peter AU 1 , Dec 15, 2018 2:13:14 PM | link
    This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state.
    exiled off mainstreet , Dec 15, 2018 2:22:39 PM | link
    As an aside this happens to be "Bill of Rights Day", the anniversary of the passage of the Bill of Rights as amendments to the yankee constitution. This reveals again how far from the rule of law the yankee imperium, now the key element of the British Empire they supposedly seceded from, has strayed, since it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy.

    It has also ensured that the victorious candidate has been neutered and faithfully follows the world control line put forward by the five eyes spy-masters making up the empire in its present iteration. This also shows what a farce the regime, based on the rule of law, now presents.

    It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism.

    GeorgeV , Dec 15, 2018 2:27:49 PM | link
    The "Western-based rules system" described in this article reminds me of a game called "Calvin Ball" which appeared in the former comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes." In the strip Calvin a wildly imaginative adolescent boy who plays a free-form of football with his imaginary pet toy tiger (Hobbes). Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art.
    bjd , Dec 15, 2018 2:38:50 PM | link
    b, I downloaded the zip file, and had also downloaded all the PDF's from pdf-archive yesterday. There are more files in the zip, but the following were on pdf-archive and are NOT in the zip:
    sejomoje , Dec 15, 2018 3:06:48 PM | link
    Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller?
    jayc , Dec 15, 2018 4:05:08 PM | link
    Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians.
    Emmanuel Goldstein , Dec 15, 2018 4:21:51 PM | link
    The transcript of his conversation with the general shows very starkly that we would last about two minutes in a nuclear exchange, but about half a day in a conventional one. No reserves, no equipment stockpiles, a navy consisting of two fat targets, neither of which has any aircraft and some destroyers which have propulsion problems, a smallish air force and very small numbers of troops. The tripwire force in Estonia is wholly sacrificial. In fact he lays bare the whole fallacy of biting the bear. With the armed forces in the state he describes, and with the recruitment and retention problems, wouldn't it be better, as one defense minister said, 'to go away and shut up'...
    uncle tungsten , Dec 15, 2018 4:27:59 PM | link
    Thanks b and especially the link to Valentina Lisitsa who I had tinkling in the background as I read your grand expose. These people are seditious morons, parasites infesting the state apparatus. Shut these fools down. Nice touch publishing the passport image. I can just imagine the frenzied aftermath of Kit's visit to the basement. Big thanks to anonymous and Craig Murray too. Their IT personel are probably visiting Devil's Island or Diego Garcia as we read.
    Sasha , Dec 15, 2018 5:00:51 PM | link
    Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM

    The British and US connections to loot and evade Russian riches and funds are exposed, as well as the origin of sanctions, supposed "alt-media" "truth-seakers" like Meduza...or supposed "pro-Russian" US intelligence operatives married to Russian women....

    Sasha , Dec 15, 2018 5:32:32 PM | link
    @Posted by: Mina | Dec 15, 2018 1:45:39 PM | 18

    Amongst the many issues he usually passes over trying to make himself the fool, while at the same time trying to convince us of the oustanding intellectual capacities, honesty and classy stance of him and his "comittee"...

    https://www.stalkerzone.org/an-american-military-attache-held-a-closed-meeting-with-uaf-commanders-in-mariupol/

    For that travel, to end bluntly and in such public view siding with the nazis of the "Azov Regiment" and other criminals of war, there was no need of so many saddlebags, so as pretending that the people who supported Trump as if there was no tomorrow, were enlightened people who only wanted to rescue "America" for the "Americans", as if there would not be a sign of blatant exceptionalism in appropriating of the term "Americans" for themselves in such a huge continent....

    NemesisCalling , Dec 15, 2018 5:44:31 PM | link
    In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of chicken with Russia.

    The FP pre-Soviet collapse consisted of one MO: GET THE COMMIES!

    Since then, Neocons and Neolibs which are frontmen for this Non-National Globalized Elite, have hijacked our country's military and have steered it to a Global agenda where dominance in the ME means either superiority for these EURO elites or Vassal-hood.

    The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions.

    The average American could care less about the ME and the US would be 1000x better-off reverting to an isolationist stance.

    But this will not happen so long as Nationalism in the US and UK is repeatedly put-down. It seems as though there is going to be another Brexit vote. Does anyone doubt that miraculously the people by then will have second-guessed their will to Brexit and so will vote against it given another crack at a vote?

    Sickening.

    slit , Dec 15, 2018 6:04:29 PM | link
    "Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. "

    Incompetence in general and IT and data analysis, physics 101, etc.:

    Cry boo hoo hoo to wake up with indigenous capacity decades behind world players like Russia, China, India, etc who operate on fractional budgets...

    But this drama also exposes ashura/emigods intra necine warfare: right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with , but it invites other questions, insofar as UK is Her Majesty's Service, so are we to read this with Prince Harry or Philip's culture, or a "consent by silence") in mind? Defending crown or EU "Saturnus Sattelitus"?

    MadMax2 , Dec 15, 2018 6:28:58 PM | link
    @Nemisis

    Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy.

    Good to see Trump finally give it a face... 'you need freedom and security now pay up bitches'

    Jackrabbit , Dec 15, 2018 6:38:00 PM | link
    NemesisCalling | Dec 15, 2018 5:44:31 PM | 37
    In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of chicken with Russia.... Globalist Agenda
    I think the opposite is true.

    The US-led Empire and their globalist sycophants seek to weaken Europe so that it can not act independently in its own best interests. They will do what ever they can to ensure that the vassals never join with Russia/China and the SCO.

    Russian scare-mongering and immigration have been effective in furthering this agenda. Also note: what USA has termed "new Europe" - eastern European states like Poland and Ukraine - are solidly pro-American.

    John2o2o , Dec 15, 2018 6:56:17 PM | link
    'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy

    Perfect description.

    Why has this ageing nutjob been allowed to secretly dictate British foreign policy? He's clearly insane.

    vk , Dec 15, 2018 6:58:49 PM | link
    @

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [Dec 14, 2018] Vetting NYT materials by CIA reflects full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the neoliberal MSM

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Having said that, still worrying that the CIA devotes time to finding out what Maureen Dowd might write! ..."
    "... It is true that Mazzetti's emails with the CIA do not shock or surprise in the slightest. But that's the point. With some noble journalistic exceptions (at the NYT and elsewhere), these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as "watchdogs" over them." ..."
    "... A few years ago the New York Times reported that there had been a successful coup in Venezuela - toppling Chavez. The story turned out to be inaccurate. The NY Times finally revealed their source - US State Dept... who were using NYT to give critical mass and support to their dream end to a thorn in their side. ..."
    "... The New York Times-all the news the CIA decided is fit to print. ..."
    Dec 01, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
    Pouzar99 , 29 Aug 2012 17:36
    Great column. The NYT does do some good things, such as give us Paul Krugman three times a week, some important reporting and articulate editorial opposition to the republican nightmare, but they are much, much too close to the government, as evidenced by their asking for permission to print news the White House disapproves of.

    They are also devoted to denying their readers an accurate picture of American foreign policy. I frequently comment on threads there and my contributions nearly always get posted, except when I use the word empire. I have never succeeded in getting that word onto their website , nor have I seen it make it into anyone else's comment. It is like the famous episode of Fawlty Towers. "Don't mention the empire.'' Stories and commentaries sometimes describe specific aspects of US policy in negative terms, but connecting the dots is obviously forbidden.

    Bill Keller is like a character from The Wire. The perfect example of the kind of authority-revering careerist that butt-kisses his way to the top in institutions.

    Burgsmueller -> Fulton , 29 Aug 2012 17:25
    Shouldn't it be a bigger surprise that the CIA still needs to ask someone connected to find out what somebody else wrote on any electronic device?

    In related news: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/08/29/spyware-can-take-over-iphone-and-blackberry-new-study-reveals/

    Fulton , 29 Aug 2012 17:16

    most of the story seems to come down to the usual kind of thing we see from Judicial Watch - manufactured outrage over almost nothing

    I think part of the outrage here is the extent to which it's almost hard to muster the energy because it's become so much the norm for the NYTimes to be in bed with whoever is in power in Washington at any given time. It's the sort of thing that should be "they did what!!!!?" but instead it's "yeah, well, Judith Miller, Wen Ho Lee, etcetc ... >long drawn-out sigh<." So, perhaps there is some manufacturing of outrage, but not unreasonably so if you take a step back and look at what's going on.

    Having said that, still worrying that the CIA devotes time to finding out what Maureen Dowd might write!

    JoeFromBrooklyn -> worldcurious , 29 Aug 2012 17:10
    Learn to read. From the column:

    "This cynicism – oh, don't be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely what enables such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.

    It is true that Mazzetti's emails with the CIA do not shock or surprise in the slightest. But that's the point. With some noble journalistic exceptions (at the NYT and elsewhere), these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as "watchdogs" over them."

    gunnison , 29 Aug 2012 17:05

    Once a corrupt practice is sufficiently perceived as commonplace, then it is transformed in people's minds from something objectionable into something acceptable. Indeed, many people believe it demonstrates their worldly sophistication to express indifference toward bad behavior by powerful actors on the ground that it is so prevalent. This cynicism – oh, don't be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely what enables such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.

    This is extremely important, and manifestly true. One runs into such people all the time. I haven't read any comments yet, but it would not surprise me to find some of them already here.

    Even worse, I've done it myself on occasion, most recently just the other day on a Cif thread. Though I will say this; this kind of bullshit is not so much "transformed in people's minds from something objectionable into something acceptable ", as grudgingly transformed into something unstoppable , but still toxic and objectionable.

    That's mighty thin gruel as an alibi, but the reality for a lot of ordinary working people is they get fucking tired of it, and yes, they do get discouraged, then cynical and hardened to it all. That, of course, is part of the plan.

    Keep swinging Glenn. This shit matters.

    Anotherevertonian , 29 Aug 2012 16:42
    The NYT is as stuffed-full of spook urinals, bottom-feeders and intelligence officers as...The Guardian?

    I'm more shocked than I can feign.

    Montecarlo2 -> jaytingle , 29 Aug 2012 16:42

    "The optics aren't what they look like." Is Dean Baquet related to Yogi Berra?

    Yogi Berra anticipated this problem: "You can observe a lot by watching".

    Ahzeld , 29 Aug 2012 16:33
    I'm unaware of a "source" being a person who requests documents from the reporter for doing damage control on behalf of the boss. (Not that I'd worry about Dowd either.) How exactly is this secret national intel? I'm glad this came out. We are being manipulated by the govt. through its minions in the media. The entire incident, from the glorious movie to this revelation is a fraud.

    I found this interesting example of media manipulation at nakedcapitalsim.org: "Pro-marijuana group endorses Obama The Hill. This purported group, which claims 10,000 members, appears to be just one guy with a PO Box and a press list. But don't count on your average reporter digging deeper than the news release.": Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/links-82812.html#717LX1oL7dfPsb7I.99

    The breadth and depth of propagandizing of citizens is astounding. I wonder what it's like to have so little integrity. What kind of person so readily sells out their fellow citizen with lies? It's scary because people read these things and they have no idea they are lies. People are making decisions based on manufactured "facts". It's very difficult to find actual information and I can tell you from personal experience, Obama supporters cling desperately to "authorities" like the NYTimes to maintain their belief in the goodness of dear leader.

    jaytingle , 29 Aug 2012 16:31
    "The optics aren't what they look like."
    Is Dean Baquet related to Yogi Berra?
    paperclipper , 29 Aug 2012 16:15
    This weird big-brother relationship goes both ways. A few years ago the New York Times reported that there had been a successful coup in Venezuela - toppling Chavez. The story turned out to be inaccurate. The NY Times finally revealed their source - US State Dept... who were using NYT to give critical mass and support to their dream end to a thorn in their side.

    Nice investigative journalism. A couple of years ago the NYTmade a big deal of publicly firing a low level writer for making up articles from his NY apt when he was supposed to be in the field. He was hardly the worst of the bunch.

    brianboru1014 , 29 Aug 2012 16:07
    Great article and thankfully I do not trust big newspapers in the USA especially the New York Times since it has being caught lying about Weapons of Mass Destructions in Iraq to justify the Iraq War. Judith Millar was the liar then. Read CounterPunch and smaller publications for the truth. The NYT is all about selling ads on a Sunday. It really is a corrupt rag.
    GlennGreenwald -> MonaHol , 29 Aug 2012 16:04
    MonaHol

    Ooh la-la. Snooty! Can Greenwald survive the devastatingly profound criticisms being lobbed in his new venue?

    Who will be the first commenter to leave the classic devastating critique:

    "The author fails to present a balanced view, showing only one side. The author's argument has no substance and is not really worth anything."

    JinTexas , 29 Aug 2012 16:02
    "The New York Times-all the news the CIA decided is fit to print."
    JinTexas , 29 Aug 2012 16:00
    "the optics aren't what they look like" – is one of the most hilariously incoherent utterances seen in some time."

    Strategery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOUuKQlGdEs

    AhBrightWings , 29 Aug 2012 15:59

    "this didn't come from me and please delete after you read." -- Mazzetti

    This could serve as the epitaph for our times. This (Shock and Awe, drones, the Apache Massacre, Guantanamo, killing children, etc.) didn't come from US (even though it did) because ...our crimes can be deleted through that magical "we're too big and bad to fail" button.

    See, nothing to worry about.

    (Except future historians who will not be blindfolded and gagged and who will therefore have some choice things to say about the journalists who were fully complicit in the crimes of this lawless era.)

    [Dec 14, 2018] The dirty propaganda games NYT play

    Highly recommended!
    They are not only presstitutes, they are degenerative presstitutes...
    Notable quotes:
    "... I love how the NYT mentions how no public evidence has emerged, to skirt around the fact that if there were internal evidence (from some gov agency or private citizen) it would've leaked by now. There is no such thing as evidence which hasn't been leaked in an alleged scandal of this size. ..."
    "... Further, the corporate news media gave Trump something like $2 billion dollars worth of advertising in free airtime. That's a much larger impact -- around 20 times Clinton's campaign costs IIRC -- than any alleged hacked e-mails (though the e-mails were leaked not hacked, and that played a role. As well as the FBI's investigation into Clinton's illegal email server which was public fact at the time) or social media interference. ..."
    "... Banks, defense contractors and oil companies decide who the President is and what their Cabinet will look like (see Obama's leaked CitiBank memo "recommending" executives to his 2009 Cabinet). Russians and the American people do not. ..."
    "... John Pilger's essay: Hold the Front Page, the Reporters are Missing appropriately describes this BigLie media item b dissected, while also observing, "Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years," prior to providing Why this is so. ..."
    "... but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. ..."
    "... The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo. [My emphasis] ..."
    "... on journalism and it being usurped by social media behemoths google, facebook, twitter and etc - i found this cbc radio) interview last night worth recommending.. ..."
    "... That New York Times piece was amazing. Belief anything the US Gov't/anti-Russian lobby and other nut cases tell you, unquestioningly. Investigative journalism at its best! ..."
    "... Accept the most stupid evidence with blinking an eye. Even if one believes the collusion argument, try to be a bit critical. And always believe that a GRU hacker will put Felix Dzerzinnsky's name in their program. For heaven's sake he was Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, not the GRU which was military intelligence. ..."
    Sep 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    daffyDuct , Sep 20, 2018 8:21:06 PM | link

    Woodward, "Fear" pg 82-85

    "After the security briefing and everyone cleared out, McCabe shut the door to Priebus's office. This is very weird, thought Priebus, who was standing by his desk.

    "You know this story in The New York Times?" Priebus knew it all too well.

    McCabe was referring to a recent Times story of February 14 that stated, "Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the elections, according to four current and former American officials."

    The story was one of the first bombs to go off about alleged Trump-Russian connections after Flynn's resignation.

    "It's total bullshit," McCabe said. "It's not true, and we want you to know that. It's grossly overstated."

    Oh my God, thought Priebus. "Andrew," he said to the FBI deputy, "I'm getting killed." The story about Russia and election meddling seemed to be running 24/7 on cable news, driving Trump bananas and therefore driving Priebus bananas. "This is crazy," Trump had told Priebus. "We've got to stop it. We need to end the story." McCabe had just walked in with a big gift, a Valentine's Day present. I'm going to be the hero of this entire West Wing, Priebus thought.

    "Can you help me?" Priebus asked. "Could this knockdown of the story be made public?"

    "Call me in a couple of hours," McCabe said. "I will ask around and I'll let you know. I'll see what I can do."

    Priebus practically ran to report to Trump the good news that the FBI would soon be shooting down the Times story

    Two hours passed and no call from McCabe. Priebus called him."I'm sorry, I can't," McCabe said. "There's nothing I can do about it. I tried, but if we start issuing comments on individual stories, we'll be doing statements every three days." The FBI could not become a clearinghouse for the accuracy of news stories. If the FBI tried to debunk certain stories, a failure to comment could be seen as a confirmation.

    "Andrew, you're the one that came to my office to tell me this is a BS story, and now you're telling me there's nothing you can do?" McCabe said that was his position.

    "This is insanity," Priebus said. "What am I supposed to do? Just suffer, bleed out?" "Give me a couple more hours." Nothing happened. No call from the FBI. Priebus tried to explain to Trump, who was waiting for a recanting. It was another reason for Trump to distrust and hate the FBI, a pernicious tease that left them dangling.

    About a week later on February 24 CNN reported an exclusive: "FBI Refused White House Request to Knock Down Recent Trump-Russia Story." Priebus was cast as trying to manipulate the FBI for political purposes.

    The White House tried and failed to correct the story and show that McCabe had initiated the matter.

    Four months later on June 8, Comey testified under oath publicly that the original New York Times story on the Trump campaign aides' contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials "in the main was not true."

    BM , Sep 21, 2018 8:38:36 AM | link

    The Mueller Hoax is unraveling.
    Posted by: Sid2 | Sep 20, 2018 3:03:44 PM | 3

    The Mueller Hoax is unraveling, and concommittently the NYT is digging in; ergo , the NYT is also unravelling! The NYT will permanently damage its reputation with its own readers.

    David , Sep 20, 2018 4:37:34 PM | link
    I love how the NYT mentions how no public evidence has emerged, to skirt around the fact that if there were internal evidence (from some gov agency or private citizen) it would've leaked by now. There is no such thing as evidence which hasn't been leaked in an alleged scandal of this size.

    Further, the corporate news media gave Trump something like $2 billion dollars worth of advertising in free airtime. That's a much larger impact -- around 20 times Clinton's campaign costs IIRC -- than any alleged hacked e-mails (though the e-mails were leaked not hacked, and that played a role. As well as the FBI's investigation into Clinton's illegal email server which was public fact at the time) or social media interference.

    Banks, defense contractors and oil companies decide who the President is and what their Cabinet will look like (see Obama's leaked CitiBank memo "recommending" executives to his 2009 Cabinet). Russians and the American people do not.

    karlof1 , Sep 20, 2018 4:40:58 PM | link
    John Pilger's essay: Hold the Front Page, the Reporters are Missing appropriately describes this BigLie media item b dissected, while also observing, "Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years," prior to providing Why this is so.
    karlof1 , Sep 20, 2018 4:59:56 PM | link
    15 Cont'd:

    Want to highlight this additional bit from Pilger:

    "Journalism students should study this [New book from Media Lens Propaganda Blitz ] to understand that the source of "fake news" is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it.

    The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo. [My emphasis]

    IMO, the bolded text well describes BigLie Media. I wonder what George Seldes would say differently from Pilger if he were alive. Unfortunately, Pilger failed to include MoA as a source in his short list of sites having journalistic integrity.

    karlof1 , Sep 20, 2018 4:59:56 PM | link james , Sep 20, 2018 5:04:45 PM | link
    on journalism and it being usurped by social media behemoths google, facebook, twitter and etc - i found this cbc radio) interview last night worth recommending..
    jrkrideau , Sep 20, 2018 5:46:02 PM | link
    That New York Times piece was amazing. Belief anything the US Gov't/anti-Russian lobby and other nut cases tell you, unquestioningly. Investigative journalism at its best!

    Accept the most stupid evidence with blinking an eye. Even if one believes the collusion argument, try to be a bit critical. And always believe that a GRU hacker will put Felix Dzerzinnsky's name in their program. For heaven's sake he was Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, not the GRU which was military intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [Dec 14, 2018] Vetting NYT materials by CIA reflects full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the neoliberal MSM

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Having said that, still worrying that the CIA devotes time to finding out what Maureen Dowd might write! ..."
    "... It is true that Mazzetti's emails with the CIA do not shock or surprise in the slightest. But that's the point. With some noble journalistic exceptions (at the NYT and elsewhere), these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as "watchdogs" over them." ..."
    "... A few years ago the New York Times reported that there had been a successful coup in Venezuela - toppling Chavez. The story turned out to be inaccurate. The NY Times finally revealed their source - US State Dept... who were using NYT to give critical mass and support to their dream end to a thorn in their side. ..."
    "... The New York Times-all the news the CIA decided is fit to print. ..."
    Dec 01, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
    Pouzar99 , 29 Aug 2012 17:36
    Great column. The NYT does do some good things, such as give us Paul Krugman three times a week, some important reporting and articulate editorial opposition to the republican nightmare, but they are much, much too close to the government, as evidenced by their asking for permission to print news the White House disapproves of.

    They are also devoted to denying their readers an accurate picture of American foreign policy. I frequently comment on threads there and my contributions nearly always get posted, except when I use the word empire. I have never succeeded in getting that word onto their website , nor have I seen it make it into anyone else's comment. It is like the famous episode of Fawlty Towers. "Don't mention the empire.'' Stories and commentaries sometimes describe specific aspects of US policy in negative terms, but connecting the dots is obviously forbidden.

    Bill Keller is like a character from The Wire. The perfect example of the kind of authority-revering careerist that butt-kisses his way to the top in institutions.

    Burgsmueller -> Fulton , 29 Aug 2012 17:25
    Shouldn't it be a bigger surprise that the CIA still needs to ask someone connected to find out what somebody else wrote on any electronic device?

    In related news: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/08/29/spyware-can-take-over-iphone-and-blackberry-new-study-reveals/

    Fulton , 29 Aug 2012 17:16

    most of the story seems to come down to the usual kind of thing we see from Judicial Watch - manufactured outrage over almost nothing

    I think part of the outrage here is the extent to which it's almost hard to muster the energy because it's become so much the norm for the NYTimes to be in bed with whoever is in power in Washington at any given time. It's the sort of thing that should be "they did what!!!!?" but instead it's "yeah, well, Judith Miller, Wen Ho Lee, etcetc ... >long drawn-out sigh<." So, perhaps there is some manufacturing of outrage, but not unreasonably so if you take a step back and look at what's going on.

    Having said that, still worrying that the CIA devotes time to finding out what Maureen Dowd might write!

    JoeFromBrooklyn -> worldcurious , 29 Aug 2012 17:10
    Learn to read. From the column:

    "This cynicism – oh, don't be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely what enables such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.

    It is true that Mazzetti's emails with the CIA do not shock or surprise in the slightest. But that's the point. With some noble journalistic exceptions (at the NYT and elsewhere), these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as "watchdogs" over them."

    gunnison , 29 Aug 2012 17:05

    Once a corrupt practice is sufficiently perceived as commonplace, then it is transformed in people's minds from something objectionable into something acceptable. Indeed, many people believe it demonstrates their worldly sophistication to express indifference toward bad behavior by powerful actors on the ground that it is so prevalent. This cynicism – oh, don't be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely what enables such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.

    This is extremely important, and manifestly true. One runs into such people all the time. I haven't read any comments yet, but it would not surprise me to find some of them already here.

    Even worse, I've done it myself on occasion, most recently just the other day on a Cif thread. Though I will say this; this kind of bullshit is not so much "transformed in people's minds from something objectionable into something acceptable ", as grudgingly transformed into something unstoppable , but still toxic and objectionable.

    That's mighty thin gruel as an alibi, but the reality for a lot of ordinary working people is they get fucking tired of it, and yes, they do get discouraged, then cynical and hardened to it all. That, of course, is part of the plan.

    Keep swinging Glenn. This shit matters.

    Anotherevertonian , 29 Aug 2012 16:42
    The NYT is as stuffed-full of spook urinals, bottom-feeders and intelligence officers as...The Guardian?

    I'm more shocked than I can feign.

    Montecarlo2 -> jaytingle , 29 Aug 2012 16:42

    "The optics aren't what they look like." Is Dean Baquet related to Yogi Berra?

    Yogi Berra anticipated this problem: "You can observe a lot by watching".

    Ahzeld , 29 Aug 2012 16:33
    I'm unaware of a "source" being a person who requests documents from the reporter for doing damage control on behalf of the boss. (Not that I'd worry about Dowd either.) How exactly is this secret national intel? I'm glad this came out. We are being manipulated by the govt. through its minions in the media. The entire incident, from the glorious movie to this revelation is a fraud.

    I found this interesting example of media manipulation at nakedcapitalsim.org: "Pro-marijuana group endorses Obama The Hill. This purported group, which claims 10,000 members, appears to be just one guy with a PO Box and a press list. But don't count on your average reporter digging deeper than the news release.": Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/links-82812.html#717LX1oL7dfPsb7I.99

    The breadth and depth of propagandizing of citizens is astounding. I wonder what it's like to have so little integrity. What kind of person so readily sells out their fellow citizen with lies? It's scary because people read these things and they have no idea they are lies. People are making decisions based on manufactured "facts". It's very difficult to find actual information and I can tell you from personal experience, Obama supporters cling desperately to "authorities" like the NYTimes to maintain their belief in the goodness of dear leader.

    jaytingle , 29 Aug 2012 16:31
    "The optics aren't what they look like."
    Is Dean Baquet related to Yogi Berra?
    paperclipper , 29 Aug 2012 16:15
    This weird big-brother relationship goes both ways. A few years ago the New York Times reported that there had been a successful coup in Venezuela - toppling Chavez. The story turned out to be inaccurate. The NY Times finally revealed their source - US State Dept... who were using NYT to give critical mass and support to their dream end to a thorn in their side.

    Nice investigative journalism. A couple of years ago the NYTmade a big deal of publicly firing a low level writer for making up articles from his NY apt when he was supposed to be in the field. He was hardly the worst of the bunch.

    brianboru1014 , 29 Aug 2012 16:07
    Great article and thankfully I do not trust big newspapers in the USA especially the New York Times since it has being caught lying about Weapons of Mass Destructions in Iraq to justify the Iraq War. Judith Millar was the liar then. Read CounterPunch and smaller publications for the truth. The NYT is all about selling ads on a Sunday. It really is a corrupt rag.
    GlennGreenwald -> MonaHol , 29 Aug 2012 16:04
    MonaHol

    Ooh la-la. Snooty! Can Greenwald survive the devastatingly profound criticisms being lobbed in his new venue?

    Who will be the first commenter to leave the classic devastating critique:

    "The author fails to present a balanced view, showing only one side. The author's argument has no substance and is not really worth anything."

    JinTexas , 29 Aug 2012 16:02
    "The New York Times-all the news the CIA decided is fit to print."
    JinTexas , 29 Aug 2012 16:00
    "the optics aren't what they look like" – is one of the most hilariously incoherent utterances seen in some time."

    Strategery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOUuKQlGdEs

    AhBrightWings , 29 Aug 2012 15:59

    "this didn't come from me and please delete after you read." -- Mazzetti

    This could serve as the epitaph for our times. This (Shock and Awe, drones, the Apache Massacre, Guantanamo, killing children, etc.) didn't come from US (even though it did) because ...our crimes can be deleted through that magical "we're too big and bad to fail" button.

    See, nothing to worry about.

    (Except future historians who will not be blindfolded and gagged and who will therefore have some choice things to say about the journalists who were fully complicit in the crimes of this lawless era.)

    [Dec 14, 2018] The dirty propaganda games NYT play

    Highly recommended!
    They are not only presstitutes, they are degenerative presstitutes...
    Notable quotes:
    "... I love how the NYT mentions how no public evidence has emerged, to skirt around the fact that if there were internal evidence (from some gov agency or private citizen) it would've leaked by now. There is no such thing as evidence which hasn't been leaked in an alleged scandal of this size. ..."
    "... Further, the corporate news media gave Trump something like $2 billion dollars worth of advertising in free airtime. That's a much larger impact -- around 20 times Clinton's campaign costs IIRC -- than any alleged hacked e-mails (though the e-mails were leaked not hacked, and that played a role. As well as the FBI's investigation into Clinton's illegal email server which was public fact at the time) or social media interference. ..."
    "... Banks, defense contractors and oil companies decide who the President is and what their Cabinet will look like (see Obama's leaked CitiBank memo "recommending" executives to his 2009 Cabinet). Russians and the American people do not. ..."
    "... John Pilger's essay: Hold the Front Page, the Reporters are Missing appropriately describes this BigLie media item b dissected, while also observing, "Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years," prior to providing Why this is so. ..."
    "... but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. ..."
    "... The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo. [My emphasis] ..."
    "... on journalism and it being usurped by social media behemoths google, facebook, twitter and etc - i found this cbc radio) interview last night worth recommending.. ..."
    "... That New York Times piece was amazing. Belief anything the US Gov't/anti-Russian lobby and other nut cases tell you, unquestioningly. Investigative journalism at its best! ..."
    "... Accept the most stupid evidence with blinking an eye. Even if one believes the collusion argument, try to be a bit critical. And always believe that a GRU hacker will put Felix Dzerzinnsky's name in their program. For heaven's sake he was Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, not the GRU which was military intelligence. ..."
    Sep 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    daffyDuct , Sep 20, 2018 8:21:06 PM | link

    Woodward, "Fear" pg 82-85

    "After the security briefing and everyone cleared out, McCabe shut the door to Priebus's office. This is very weird, thought Priebus, who was standing by his desk.

    "You know this story in The New York Times?" Priebus knew it all too well.

    McCabe was referring to a recent Times story of February 14 that stated, "Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the elections, according to four current and former American officials."

    The story was one of the first bombs to go off about alleged Trump-Russian connections after Flynn's resignation.

    "It's total bullshit," McCabe said. "It's not true, and we want you to know that. It's grossly overstated."

    Oh my God, thought Priebus. "Andrew," he said to the FBI deputy, "I'm getting killed." The story about Russia and election meddling seemed to be running 24/7 on cable news, driving Trump bananas and therefore driving Priebus bananas. "This is crazy," Trump had told Priebus. "We've got to stop it. We need to end the story." McCabe had just walked in with a big gift, a Valentine's Day present. I'm going to be the hero of this entire West Wing, Priebus thought.

    "Can you help me?" Priebus asked. "Could this knockdown of the story be made public?"

    "Call me in a couple of hours," McCabe said. "I will ask around and I'll let you know. I'll see what I can do."

    Priebus practically ran to report to Trump the good news that the FBI would soon be shooting down the Times story

    Two hours passed and no call from McCabe. Priebus called him."I'm sorry, I can't," McCabe said. "There's nothing I can do about it. I tried, but if we start issuing comments on individual stories, we'll be doing statements every three days." The FBI could not become a clearinghouse for the accuracy of news stories. If the FBI tried to debunk certain stories, a failure to comment could be seen as a confirmation.

    "Andrew, you're the one that came to my office to tell me this is a BS story, and now you're telling me there's nothing you can do?" McCabe said that was his position.

    "This is insanity," Priebus said. "What am I supposed to do? Just suffer, bleed out?" "Give me a couple more hours." Nothing happened. No call from the FBI. Priebus tried to explain to Trump, who was waiting for a recanting. It was another reason for Trump to distrust and hate the FBI, a pernicious tease that left them dangling.

    About a week later on February 24 CNN reported an exclusive: "FBI Refused White House Request to Knock Down Recent Trump-Russia Story." Priebus was cast as trying to manipulate the FBI for political purposes.

    The White House tried and failed to correct the story and show that McCabe had initiated the matter.

    Four months later on June 8, Comey testified under oath publicly that the original New York Times story on the Trump campaign aides' contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials "in the main was not true."

    BM , Sep 21, 2018 8:38:36 AM | link

    The Mueller Hoax is unraveling.
    Posted by: Sid2 | Sep 20, 2018 3:03:44 PM | 3

    The Mueller Hoax is unraveling, and concommittently the NYT is digging in; ergo , the NYT is also unravelling! The NYT will permanently damage its reputation with its own readers.

    David , Sep 20, 2018 4:37:34 PM | link
    I love how the NYT mentions how no public evidence has emerged, to skirt around the fact that if there were internal evidence (from some gov agency or private citizen) it would've leaked by now. There is no such thing as evidence which hasn't been leaked in an alleged scandal of this size.

    Further, the corporate news media gave Trump something like $2 billion dollars worth of advertising in free airtime. That's a much larger impact -- around 20 times Clinton's campaign costs IIRC -- than any alleged hacked e-mails (though the e-mails were leaked not hacked, and that played a role. As well as the FBI's investigation into Clinton's illegal email server which was public fact at the time) or social media interference.

    Banks, defense contractors and oil companies decide who the President is and what their Cabinet will look like (see Obama's leaked CitiBank memo "recommending" executives to his 2009 Cabinet). Russians and the American people do not.

    karlof1 , Sep 20, 2018 4:40:58 PM | link
    John Pilger's essay: Hold the Front Page, the Reporters are Missing appropriately describes this BigLie media item b dissected, while also observing, "Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years," prior to providing Why this is so.
    karlof1 , Sep 20, 2018 4:59:56 PM | link
    15 Cont'd:

    Want to highlight this additional bit from Pilger:

    "Journalism students should study this [New book from Media Lens Propaganda Blitz ] to understand that the source of "fake news" is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it.

    The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo. [My emphasis]

    IMO, the bolded text well describes BigLie Media. I wonder what George Seldes would say differently from Pilger if he were alive. Unfortunately, Pilger failed to include MoA as a source in his short list of sites having journalistic integrity.

    karlof1 , Sep 20, 2018 4:59:56 PM | link james , Sep 20, 2018 5:04:45 PM | link
    on journalism and it being usurped by social media behemoths google, facebook, twitter and etc - i found this cbc radio) interview last night worth recommending..
    jrkrideau , Sep 20, 2018 5:46:02 PM | link
    That New York Times piece was amazing. Belief anything the US Gov't/anti-Russian lobby and other nut cases tell you, unquestioningly. Investigative journalism at its best!

    Accept the most stupid evidence with blinking an eye. Even if one believes the collusion argument, try to be a bit critical. And always believe that a GRU hacker will put Felix Dzerzinnsky's name in their program. For heaven's sake he was Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, not the GRU which was military intelligence.

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

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

    blue peacock , 12 hours ago

    Col. Lang

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

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

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

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

    blue peacock , 12 hours ago

    Col. Lang

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

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

    [Dec 09, 2018] Die Weltwoche Weltwoche Online – www.weltwoche.ch Tucker Carlson Trump is not capable Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 49-2018

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... He hasn't? ..."
    "... I've come to believe that Trump's role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does. I don't think he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the system. I don't think the Congress is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him. He's not going to do that. ..."
    "... I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration before Trump arrived in Washington. ..."
    "... Trump asked basic questions like' "Why don't our borders work?" "Why should we sign a trade agreement and let the other side cheat?" Or my favorite of all, "What's the point of NATO?" The point of NATO was to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe but they haven't existed in 27 years, so what is the point? These are obvious questions that no one could answer. ..."
    "... I mean let me just be clear. I'm not against an aristocratic system. I'm not against a ruling class. I think that hierarchies are natural, people create them in every society. I just think the system that we have now the meritocracy, which is based really on our education system, on a small number of colleges has produced a ruling class that doesn't have the self-awareness that you need to be wise. ..."
    "... it was only after the financial crisis of 08 that I noticed that something was really out of whack, because Washington didn't really feel the crisis. ..."
    "... If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west, you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There's nothing. They have not recovered. I remember driving out there one day, maybe eight or nine years ago and thinking, boy, this is a disaster. ..."
    "... That's kind of strange since we're the capital city in charge of making policy for everybody else... Massive inequality does not work in a democracy... ..."
    "... If you make above a certain income, or if you live in my neighborhood, you have zero physical contact with other Americans. In other words, the elite in our country is physically separated in a way that's very unhealthy for a democracy, very unhealthy. ..."
    "... The Democratic Party, which for 100 years was the party of average people is now the party of the rich. ..."
    "... He served the purpose of bringing the middle class into the Republican Party, which had zero interest, no interest in representing them at all. Trump is intuitive, he felt, he could smell that there was this large group of voters who had no one representing them and he brought them to the Republican side, but the realignment is still ongoing. ..."
    "... In other words, the Democratic Party used to represent the middle class, it no longer does, it now hates the middle class. ..."
    "... I do think, going forward the Republican Party will wake up and realize these are our voters and we're going to represent them whether we want it or not. ..."
    "... I am deeply suspicious of foreign adventurism, voluntary wars, wars of self-defense are not controversial, I'm for them completely, there's an invasion repellent. The idea that you would send 100,000 troops to a country to improve its political system is grotesque to me. It would've been grotesque to them. ..."
    "... The Vietnam War was horrifying to them because it was a voluntary war, waged for theoretical reasons, geostrategic reasons which they rejected, and I do too. ..."
    "... We can make autonomous choices about how we respond to market forces. People get crushed beneath its wheels. ..."
    "... Capitalism drives change, innovation change, the old ways give way to new ways of doing things, and in the process of change the weak get hurt always, this was true in industrialization 100 years ago and it's true in the digital revolution now. What's changed is that nobody is standing up on behalf of the people who are being crushed by the change. ..."
    "... In your book, you say they've vanishing but they seem to come back again. ..."
    "... Have you ever seen this amount of discontent and aggression here in your lifetime? ..."
    "... How close to a revolution is your country? ..."
    "... The country is getting redder and bluer. ..."
    "... Do you think that Europe will get in control of the migration? ..."
    Dec 09, 2018 | www.weltwoche.ch

    The Swiss are very suspicious of anybody who is boastful. That's why I have a question about Trump

    I hate that about him. I hate that it's not my culture. I didn't grow up like that.

    In your book you speak a lot about people who attack Trump, but you actually don't say very much about Trump's record.

    That's true.

    Do you think he has kept his promises? Has he achieved his goals?

    No. He hasn't?

    No. His chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund planned parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn't done any of those things. There are a lot of reasons for that, but since I finished writing the book, I've come to believe that Trump's role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does. I don't think he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the system. I don't think the Congress is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him. He's not going to do that.

    I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration before Trump arrived in Washington. People were bothered about it in different places in the country. It's a huge country, but that was not a staple of political debate at all. Trump asked basic questions like' "Why don't our borders work?" "Why should we sign a trade agreement and let the other side cheat?" Or my favorite of all, "What's the point of NATO?" The point of NATO was to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe but they haven't existed in 27 years, so what is the point? These are obvious questions that no one could answer.

    Apart from asking these very important questions has he really achieved nothing?

    Not much. Not much. Much less than he should have. I've come to believe he's not capable of it.

    Why should he be not capable?

    Because the legislative process in this country by design is highly complex, and it's designed to be complex as a way of diffusing power, of course, because the people who framed our Constitution, founded our country, were worried about concentrations of power. They balanced it among the three branches as you know and they made it very hard to make legislation. In order to do it you really have to understand how it works and you have to be very focused on getting it done, and he knows very little about the legislative process, hasn't learned anything, hasn't and surrounded himself with people that can get it done, hasn't done all the things you need to do so. It's mostly his fault that he hasn't achieved those things. I'm not in charge of Trump.

    The title of your book is "Ship of Fools". You write that an irresponsible elite has taken over America. Who is the biggest fool?

    I mean let me just be clear. I'm not against an aristocratic system. I'm not against a ruling class. I think that hierarchies are natural, people create them in every society. I just think the system that we have now the meritocracy, which is based really on our education system, on a small number of colleges has produced a ruling class that doesn't have the self-awareness that you need to be wise. I'm not arguing for populism, actually. I'm arguing against populism. Populism is what you get when your leaders fail. In a democracy, the population says this is terrible and they elect someone like Trump.

    When did you first notice that this elite is getting out of touch with the people?

    Well, just to be clear, I'm not writing this from the perspective of an outsider. I mean I've lived in this world my whole life.

    Which world exactly?

    The world of affluence and the high level of education and among-- I grew up in a town called La Jolla, California in the south. It was a very affluent town and then I moved as a kid to Georgetown here in Washington. I've been here my whole life. I've always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class, and it was only after the financial crisis of 08 that I noticed that something was really out of whack, because Washington didn't really feel the crisis.

    If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west, you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There's nothing. They have not recovered. I remember driving out there one day, maybe eight or nine years ago and thinking, boy, this is a disaster. Rural America, America outside three or four cities is really falling apart. I thought if you're running the country, you should have a sense of that. I remember thinking to myself, nobody I know has any idea that this is happening an hour away. That's kind of strange since we're the capital city in charge of making policy for everybody else... Massive inequality does not work in a democracy... You become Venezuela.

    You write about vanishing middle class. When you were born over 60 % of Americans ranked middle class. Why and when did it disappear?

    If you make above a certain income, or if you live in my neighborhood, you have zero physical contact with other Americans. In other words, the elite in our country is physically separated in a way that's very unhealthy for a democracy, very unhealthy.

    The Democratic Party is out of touch with the working class.

    Well, that's the remarkable thing. For 100 years the Democratic Party represented wage earners, working people, normal people, middle class people, then somewhere around-- In precisely peg it to Clinton's second term in the tech boom in the Bay Area in Francisco and Silicon Valley, the Democratic Party reoriented and became the party of technology, of large corporations, and of the rich. You've really seen that change in the last 20 years where in the top 10 richest zip codes in the United States, 9 of them in the last election just went for Democrats. Out of the top 50, 42 went for Democrats. The Democratic Party, which for 100 years was the party of average people is now the party of the rich.

    Donald Trump, who is often seen as this world-changing figure is actually a symptom of something that precedes him that I sometimes wonder if he even understands which is this realignment. He served the purpose of bringing the middle class into the Republican Party, which had zero interest, no interest in representing them at all. Trump is intuitive, he felt, he could smell that there was this large group of voters who had no one representing them and he brought them to the Republican side, but the realignment is still ongoing.

    In other words, the Democratic Party used to represent the middle class, it no longer does, it now hates the middle class. The Republican Party which has never represented the middle class doesn't want to. That is the source of really all the confusion and the tension that you're seeing now. I do think, going forward the Republican Party will wake up and realize these are our voters and we're going to represent them whether we want it or not.

    They have to, or they will lose.

    They have to, or they will die. Yes.

    You're writing in an almost nostalgic tone about the old liberals? People like Miss Raymond, your first-class teacher. You describe her wonderfully in the book. You say that they have vanished. What happened?

    I find myself in deep sympathy with a lot of the aims of 1970s liberals. I believe in free speech, and I instinctively side with the individual against the group. I think that the individual matters, I am deeply suspicious of foreign adventurism, voluntary wars, wars of self-defense are not controversial, I'm for them completely, there's an invasion repellent. The idea that you would send 100,000 troops to a country to improve its political system is grotesque to me. It would've been grotesque to them.

    The Vietnam War was horrifying to them because it was a voluntary war, waged for theoretical reasons, geostrategic reasons which they rejected, and I do too. They were also suspicious of market capitalism. They thought that somebody needed to push back against the forces of the market, not necessarily because capitalism was bad, capitalism is not bad, it's also not a religion. We don't have to follow it blindly. We can make autonomous choices about how we respond to market forces. People get crushed beneath its wheels.

    Capitalism drives change, innovation change, the old ways give way to new ways of doing things, and in the process of change the weak get hurt always, this was true in industrialization 100 years ago and it's true in the digital revolution now. What's changed is that nobody is standing up on behalf of the people who are being crushed by the change.

    Is that really so? Look at the grassroot movement on the left: Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and her socialist group. It is probably a 100 years ago when Americans last saw a socialist movement of substance emerging?

    Yes. You're absolutely right. That's the future.

    In your book, you say they've vanishing but they seem to come back again.

    Well, you're absolutely right. You're incisive correct to say that the last time we saw this was 100 years ago, which was another pivot point in our economic and social history. Where, after 10,000 years of living in an Agrarian society, people moved to the cities to work in factories and that upended the social order completely. With that came huge political change and a massive reaction.

    In the United States and in Western Europe labor unions moderated the forces of change and allowed us to preserve capitalism in the form that we see it now... You're seeing the exact same dynamic play out today, we have another, as I said, economic revolution, the digital age, which is changing how people work, how they make money, how families are structured. There is a huge reaction to that, of course, because there always is, because normal people can't handle change at this pace. People are once again crying out for some help. They feel threatened by the change. What bothers me is that there is no large group of sensible people asking, how can we buffer this change? How can we restrain it just enough, not to stop it, but to keep people from overreacting and becoming radical?

    Talking about radical. Recently, a radical left-wing group have threatened to storm your Washington home. How is your wife? How is your family?

    They are fine, they're pretty tough. They're rattled.

    The Antifa-mob came right to the door of your home?

    Yes, they did and threatened my wife.

    Which must have been absolutely scary?

    Yes, it was. My wife was born in the city, my four children were born here, we're not moving.

    Your attackers have a goal, they're trying to silence you.

    Of course. I would never, of course, that's a cornerstone of Western civilization is expression and freedom of conscience. You can tell me how to behave, you can force me not to sleep or take my clothes off in public, that's fine. Every society has the right to control behavior. But no one has the right to control what you believe. You can't control my conscience, that's mine alone. Only totalitarian movements do that, and that's what they're attempting. Of course, I would die first I'm never going to submit to that.

    Have you ever seen this amount of discontent and aggression here in your lifetime?

    No, I've never seen anything like this. What's so striking is that [chuckles] this is really... The radicalism is not on behalf of people who are actually suffering, fellow Americans who are suffering, on behalf of the 70,000 people who died of drug ODs last year, or on behalf of the people displaced by automation in GM, or whatever, on behalf of those dying American low class, it's really on behalf of theoretical goals.

    They're saying that I [Tucker Carlson] am saying naughty things that shouldn't be allowed to be expressed in public. Basically, it's a totalitarian movement. Totally unhelpful. I would say childish. What they're really doing is defending the current order. They're the shock troops of the elites actually. Actually, what you're seeing is something amazing, you're seeing for the first time in history a revolution being waged against the working class. When does that happen?

    Your way of debating is very tough. You're sitting there, hammering your guests. Sometimes we have a bit of a problem to understand that. For us it's a bit disturbing.

    Of course, it is. It's disturbing for me too!

    How tough do you need to be nowadays to have an audience?

    Less, I think than sometimes we put into it or I put into it. I'm actually, in my normal life, I think a pretty gentle person. I've never had a yelling fight with my wife in 34 years. I mean, I've never yelled at my children. No, I don't ever.

    Never?

    Not one time. No, it's not how I communicate. I never want to be impolite. I have been impolite. I've lost my temper a couple times, but I don't want to. I don't like that. I believe in civility.

    ... ... ...

    How close to a revolution is your country?

    By revolution, let me be clear, I don't think that we're anywhere near an outbreak of civil war, armed violence between two sides for a bunch of different reasons... Testosterone levels are so low and marijuana use is so high that I think the population is probably too ... What you don't have, prerequisite fall revolution, violent revolution, is a large group of young people who are comfortable with violence and we don't have that. Maybe that will change. I hope it doesn't. I don't want violence for violence. I appall violence, but I just don't see that happening. What I see happening most likely is a kind of gradual separation of the states.

    If you look at the polling on the subject, classically, traditionally, Americans had antique racial attitudes. If you say, "Would you be okay with your daughter marrying outside her race?" Most Americans, if they're being honest, would say, "no, I'm not okay with that. I'm not for that." Now the polling shows people are much more comfortable with a child marrying someone of a different race than they are marrying someone of a different political persuasion.

    "I'd rather my daughter married someone who's Hispanic than liberal", someone might say. That is one measure. There are many measures, but that's one measure of how politically divided we are and I just think that over time, people will self-segregate. It's a continental country. It's a very large piece of land and you could see where certain states just become very, very different. Like if you're Conservative, are you really going to live in California in 10 years? Probably not.

    Orange County is now purely Democrat.

    That's exactly right. You're going to move and if you're very liberal, are you really going to want to live in Idaho? Probably not.

    The country is getting redder and bluer.

    Exactly.

    This revolution you are warning about - What needs to be done to stop it from happening?

    Just the only thing you can do in a democracy which is address the legitimate concerns of the population and think more critically and be more wise in your decision making. Get a handle on technology. Technology is the driver of the change, so sweep aside the politics, the fundamental fact about people is they can't metabolize change at this pace because as an evolutionary matter, they're not designed to, they're not. If you asked your average old person what's the most upsetting thing about being old? You expect them to say, "Well, my friends are dead". But that's not what they say. Or "I have to go to the bathroom six times a night". That's not what they say.

    You know what they say? "Things are too different. This is not the country I grew up in. I don't recognize this." All people hate that. It doesn't mean you're a bigot, it means you're human. Unless you want things to fall apart, become so volatile that you can't have a working economy, you need to get a handle on the pace of change. You have to slow it down.

    How important is migration in terms of change?

    It's central because nothing changes the society more quickly or more permanently than bringing in a whole new population and that's not an attack on anybody. There are lots of populations- there are lots of immigrants who are much more impressive than I am. I have no doubt about that. I'm not attacking immigrants. I'm merely saying that the effect on the people who already live here is real and they're not bigots for feeling that way.
    You come from an ancient country with a series of ancient cultures within it and if you woke up one morning and everyone was speaking Amharic and you didn't recognize any of your surroundings, that would be deeply upsetting to you.

    What you saying, it's necessary to slow it down, control it?

    You have to slow it down. Look at the Chinese. I abhor, I despise the Chinese government. However, I'm willing to acknowledge wise behavior when I see it. The Chinese would never accept this pace of demographic change not simply because they're racist, though of course, they are, but that's not the point. The point is because they don't want their society to fall apart because they're in charge of it.

    The childlike faith that we have in America, and America is the worst at this, that all change is good and that progress is inevitable and if something is new and fresh and more expensive, it's got to be better.

    It is kind of refreshing for Europeans that even Hillary Clinton tells Europeans, "You have got to stop this. You've got to get control of migration or you disintegrate."

    John Kerry said the same thing, amazingly. They're telling the truth.

    Do you think Europe is going to be able to get in control of that? We have 28 countries in the EU. And Switzerland is not a member?

    So smart, so smart... You know why? Because they're mountain people. Love them. You know why? Because they're suspicious, that's what I like about them.
    [laughter]

    Do you think that Europe will get in control of the migration?

    The EU has been doomed since the first day because it's inconsistent with human nature. The reason we have nation states is because people wanted them, it's organic. A nation-state is just a larger tribe and it's organized along lines that make sense. They evolved over thousands of years. To ignore it and destroy it because you think that you've got a better idea, is insane!

    [And with that, our interview concludes. It has already run far past the allotted 40 minutes. I offer to take Carlson, who seems to be very passionate about Switzerland, on a ski run in our Alps soon. Perhaps a smoke in one of the outdoor saunas I tell him smell like rotten eggs. Ambassador Grenell is on the phone line patiently waiting.]

    [Dec 09, 2018] Die Weltwoche Weltwoche Online – www.weltwoche.ch Tucker Carlson Trump is not capable Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 49-2018

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... He hasn't? ..."
    "... I've come to believe that Trump's role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does. I don't think he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the system. I don't think the Congress is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him. He's not going to do that. ..."
    "... I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration before Trump arrived in Washington. ..."
    "... Trump asked basic questions like' "Why don't our borders work?" "Why should we sign a trade agreement and let the other side cheat?" Or my favorite of all, "What's the point of NATO?" The point of NATO was to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe but they haven't existed in 27 years, so what is the point? These are obvious questions that no one could answer. ..."
    "... I mean let me just be clear. I'm not against an aristocratic system. I'm not against a ruling class. I think that hierarchies are natural, people create them in every society. I just think the system that we have now the meritocracy, which is based really on our education system, on a small number of colleges has produced a ruling class that doesn't have the self-awareness that you need to be wise. ..."
    "... it was only after the financial crisis of 08 that I noticed that something was really out of whack, because Washington didn't really feel the crisis. ..."
    "... If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west, you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There's nothing. They have not recovered. I remember driving out there one day, maybe eight or nine years ago and thinking, boy, this is a disaster. ..."
    "... That's kind of strange since we're the capital city in charge of making policy for everybody else... Massive inequality does not work in a democracy... ..."
    "... If you make above a certain income, or if you live in my neighborhood, you have zero physical contact with other Americans. In other words, the elite in our country is physically separated in a way that's very unhealthy for a democracy, very unhealthy. ..."
    "... The Democratic Party, which for 100 years was the party of average people is now the party of the rich. ..."
    "... He served the purpose of bringing the middle class into the Republican Party, which had zero interest, no interest in representing them at all. Trump is intuitive, he felt, he could smell that there was this large group of voters who had no one representing them and he brought them to the Republican side, but the realignment is still ongoing. ..."
    "... In other words, the Democratic Party used to represent the middle class, it no longer does, it now hates the middle class. ..."
    "... I do think, going forward the Republican Party will wake up and realize these are our voters and we're going to represent them whether we want it or not. ..."
    "... I am deeply suspicious of foreign adventurism, voluntary wars, wars of self-defense are not controversial, I'm for them completely, there's an invasion repellent. The idea that you would send 100,000 troops to a country to improve its political system is grotesque to me. It would've been grotesque to them. ..."
    "... The Vietnam War was horrifying to them because it was a voluntary war, waged for theoretical reasons, geostrategic reasons which they rejected, and I do too. ..."
    "... We can make autonomous choices about how we respond to market forces. People get crushed beneath its wheels. ..."
    "... Capitalism drives change, innovation change, the old ways give way to new ways of doing things, and in the process of change the weak get hurt always, this was true in industrialization 100 years ago and it's true in the digital revolution now. What's changed is that nobody is standing up on behalf of the people who are being crushed by the change. ..."
    "... In your book, you say they've vanishing but they seem to come back again. ..."
    "... Have you ever seen this amount of discontent and aggression here in your lifetime? ..."
    "... How close to a revolution is your country? ..."
    "... The country is getting redder and bluer. ..."
    "... Do you think that Europe will get in control of the migration? ..."
    Dec 09, 2018 | www.weltwoche.ch

    The Swiss are very suspicious of anybody who is boastful. That's why I have a question about Trump

    I hate that about him. I hate that it's not my culture. I didn't grow up like that.

    In your book you speak a lot about people who attack Trump, but you actually don't say very much about Trump's record.

    That's true.

    Do you think he has kept his promises? Has he achieved his goals?

    No. He hasn't?

    No. His chief promises were that he would build the wall, de-fund planned parenthood, and repeal Obamacare, and he hasn't done any of those things. There are a lot of reasons for that, but since I finished writing the book, I've come to believe that Trump's role is not as a conventional president who promises to get certain things achieved to the Congress and then does. I don't think he's capable. I don't think he's capable of sustained focus. I don't think he understands the system. I don't think the Congress is on his side. I don't think his own agencies support him. He's not going to do that.

    I think Trump's role is to begin the conversation about what actually matters. We were not having any conversation about immigration before Trump arrived in Washington. People were bothered about it in different places in the country. It's a huge country, but that was not a staple of political debate at all. Trump asked basic questions like' "Why don't our borders work?" "Why should we sign a trade agreement and let the other side cheat?" Or my favorite of all, "What's the point of NATO?" The point of NATO was to keep the Soviets from invading western Europe but they haven't existed in 27 years, so what is the point? These are obvious questions that no one could answer.

    Apart from asking these very important questions has he really achieved nothing?

    Not much. Not much. Much less than he should have. I've come to believe he's not capable of it.

    Why should he be not capable?

    Because the legislative process in this country by design is highly complex, and it's designed to be complex as a way of diffusing power, of course, because the people who framed our Constitution, founded our country, were worried about concentrations of power. They balanced it among the three branches as you know and they made it very hard to make legislation. In order to do it you really have to understand how it works and you have to be very focused on getting it done, and he knows very little about the legislative process, hasn't learned anything, hasn't and surrounded himself with people that can get it done, hasn't done all the things you need to do so. It's mostly his fault that he hasn't achieved those things. I'm not in charge of Trump.

    The title of your book is "Ship of Fools". You write that an irresponsible elite has taken over America. Who is the biggest fool?

    I mean let me just be clear. I'm not against an aristocratic system. I'm not against a ruling class. I think that hierarchies are natural, people create them in every society. I just think the system that we have now the meritocracy, which is based really on our education system, on a small number of colleges has produced a ruling class that doesn't have the self-awareness that you need to be wise. I'm not arguing for populism, actually. I'm arguing against populism. Populism is what you get when your leaders fail. In a democracy, the population says this is terrible and they elect someone like Trump.

    When did you first notice that this elite is getting out of touch with the people?

    Well, just to be clear, I'm not writing this from the perspective of an outsider. I mean I've lived in this world my whole life.

    Which world exactly?

    The world of affluence and the high level of education and among-- I grew up in a town called La Jolla, California in the south. It was a very affluent town and then I moved as a kid to Georgetown here in Washington. I've been here my whole life. I've always lived around people who are wielding authority, around the ruling class, and it was only after the financial crisis of 08 that I noticed that something was really out of whack, because Washington didn't really feel the crisis.

    If you leave Washington and drive to say Pittsburgh, which is a manufacturing town about three and a half hours to the west, you drive through a series of little towns that are devastated. There are no car dealerships, there are no restaurants. There's nothing. They have not recovered. I remember driving out there one day, maybe eight or nine years ago and thinking, boy, this is a disaster. Rural America, America outside three or four cities is really falling apart. I thought if you're running the country, you should have a sense of that. I remember thinking to myself, nobody I know has any idea that this is happening an hour away. That's kind of strange since we're the capital city in charge of making policy for everybody else... Massive inequality does not work in a democracy... You become Venezuela.

    You write about vanishing middle class. When you were born over 60 % of Americans ranked middle class. Why and when did it disappear?

    If you make above a certain income, or if you live in my neighborhood, you have zero physical contact with other Americans. In other words, the elite in our country is physically separated in a way that's very unhealthy for a democracy, very unhealthy.

    The Democratic Party is out of touch with the working class.

    Well, that's the remarkable thing. For 100 years the Democratic Party represented wage earners, working people, normal people, middle class people, then somewhere around-- In precisely peg it to Clinton's second term in the tech boom in the Bay Area in Francisco and Silicon Valley, the Democratic Party reoriented and became the party of technology, of large corporations, and of the rich. You've really seen that change in the last 20 years where in the top 10 richest zip codes in the United States, 9 of them in the last election just went for Democrats. Out of the top 50, 42 went for Democrats. The Democratic Party, which for 100 years was the party of average people is now the party of the rich.

    Donald Trump, who is often seen as this world-changing figure is actually a symptom of something that precedes him that I sometimes wonder if he even understands which is this realignment. He served the purpose of bringing the middle class into the Republican Party, which had zero interest, no interest in representing them at all. Trump is intuitive, he felt, he could smell that there was this large group of voters who had no one representing them and he brought them to the Republican side, but the realignment is still ongoing.

    In other words, the Democratic Party used to represent the middle class, it no longer does, it now hates the middle class. The Republican Party which has never represented the middle class doesn't want to. That is the source of really all the confusion and the tension that you're seeing now. I do think, going forward the Republican Party will wake up and realize these are our voters and we're going to represent them whether we want it or not.

    They have to, or they will lose.

    They have to, or they will die. Yes.

    You're writing in an almost nostalgic tone about the old liberals? People like Miss Raymond, your first-class teacher. You describe her wonderfully in the book. You say that they have vanished. What happened?

    I find myself in deep sympathy with a lot of the aims of 1970s liberals. I believe in free speech, and I instinctively side with the individual against the group. I think that the individual matters, I am deeply suspicious of foreign adventurism, voluntary wars, wars of self-defense are not controversial, I'm for them completely, there's an invasion repellent. The idea that you would send 100,000 troops to a country to improve its political system is grotesque to me. It would've been grotesque to them.

    The Vietnam War was horrifying to them because it was a voluntary war, waged for theoretical reasons, geostrategic reasons which they rejected, and I do too. They were also suspicious of market capitalism. They thought that somebody needed to push back against the forces of the market, not necessarily because capitalism was bad, capitalism is not bad, it's also not a religion. We don't have to follow it blindly. We can make autonomous choices about how we respond to market forces. People get crushed beneath its wheels.

    Capitalism drives change, innovation change, the old ways give way to new ways of doing things, and in the process of change the weak get hurt always, this was true in industrialization 100 years ago and it's true in the digital revolution now. What's changed is that nobody is standing up on behalf of the people who are being crushed by the change.

    Is that really so? Look at the grassroot movement on the left: Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and her socialist group. It is probably a 100 years ago when Americans last saw a socialist movement of substance emerging?

    Yes. You're absolutely right. That's the future.

    In your book, you say they've vanishing but they seem to come back again.

    Well, you're absolutely right. You're incisive correct to say that the last time we saw this was 100 years ago, which was another pivot point in our economic and social history. Where, after 10,000 years of living in an Agrarian society, people moved to the cities to work in factories and that upended the social order completely. With that came huge political change and a massive reaction.

    In the United States and in Western Europe labor unions moderated the forces of change and allowed us to preserve capitalism in the form that we see it now... You're seeing the exact same dynamic play out today, we have another, as I said, economic revolution, the digital age, which is changing how people work, how they make money, how families are structured. There is a huge reaction to that, of course, because there always is, because normal people can't handle change at this pace. People are once again crying out for some help. They feel threatened by the change. What bothers me is that there is no large group of sensible people asking, how can we buffer this change? How can we restrain it just enough, not to stop it, but to keep people from overreacting and becoming radical?

    Talking about radical. Recently, a radical left-wing group have threatened to storm your Washington home. How is your wife? How is your family?

    They are fine, they're pretty tough. They're rattled.

    The Antifa-mob came right to the door of your home?

    Yes, they did and threatened my wife.

    Which must have been absolutely scary?

    Yes, it was. My wife was born in the city, my four children were born here, we're not moving.

    Your attackers have a goal, they're trying to silence you.

    Of course. I would never, of course, that's a cornerstone of Western civilization is expression and freedom of conscience. You can tell me how to behave, you can force me not to sleep or take my clothes off in public, that's fine. Every society has the right to control behavior. But no one has the right to control what you believe. You can't control my conscience, that's mine alone. Only totalitarian movements do that, and that's what they're attempting. Of course, I would die first I'm never going to submit to that.

    Have you ever seen this amount of discontent and aggression here in your lifetime?

    No, I've never seen anything like this. What's so striking is that [chuckles] this is really... The radicalism is not on behalf of people who are actually suffering, fellow Americans who are suffering, on behalf of the 70,000 people who died of drug ODs last year, or on behalf of the people displaced by automation in GM, or whatever, on behalf of those dying American low class, it's really on behalf of theoretical goals.

    They're saying that I [Tucker Carlson] am saying naughty things that shouldn't be allowed to be expressed in public. Basically, it's a totalitarian movement. Totally unhelpful. I would say childish. What they're really doing is defending the current order. They're the shock troops of the elites actually. Actually, what you're seeing is something amazing, you're seeing for the first time in history a revolution being waged against the working class. When does that happen?

    Your way of debating is very tough. You're sitting there, hammering your guests. Sometimes we have a bit of a problem to understand that. For us it's a bit disturbing.

    Of course, it is. It's disturbing for me too!

    How tough do you need to be nowadays to have an audience?

    Less, I think than sometimes we put into it or I put into it. I'm actually, in my normal life, I think a pretty gentle person. I've never had a yelling fight with my wife in 34 years. I mean, I've never yelled at my children. No, I don't ever.

    Never?

    Not one time. No, it's not how I communicate. I never want to be impolite. I have been impolite. I've lost my temper a couple times, but I don't want to. I don't like that. I believe in civility.

    ... ... ...

    How close to a revolution is your country?

    By revolution, let me be clear, I don't think that we're anywhere near an outbreak of civil war, armed violence between two sides for a bunch of different reasons... Testosterone levels are so low and marijuana use is so high that I think the population is probably too ... What you don't have, prerequisite fall revolution, violent revolution, is a large group of young people who are comfortable with violence and we don't have that. Maybe that will change. I hope it doesn't. I don't want violence for violence. I appall violence, but I just don't see that happening. What I see happening most likely is a kind of gradual separation of the states.

    If you look at the polling on the subject, classically, traditionally, Americans had antique racial attitudes. If you say, "Would you be okay with your daughter marrying outside her race?" Most Americans, if they're being honest, would say, "no, I'm not okay with that. I'm not for that." Now the polling shows people are much more comfortable with a child marrying someone of a different race than they are marrying someone of a different political persuasion.

    "I'd rather my daughter married someone who's Hispanic than liberal", someone might say. That is one measure. There are many measures, but that's one measure of how politically divided we are and I just think that over time, people will self-segregate. It's a continental country. It's a very large piece of land and you could see where certain states just become very, very different. Like if you're Conservative, are you really going to live in California in 10 years? Probably not.

    Orange County is now purely Democrat.

    That's exactly right. You're going to move and if you're very liberal, are you really going to want to live in Idaho? Probably not.

    The country is getting redder and bluer.

    Exactly.

    This revolution you are warning about - What needs to be done to stop it from happening?

    Just the only thing you can do in a democracy which is address the legitimate concerns of the population and think more critically and be more wise in your decision making. Get a handle on technology. Technology is the driver of the change, so sweep aside the politics, the fundamental fact about people is they can't metabolize change at this pace because as an evolutionary matter, they're not designed to, they're not. If you asked your average old person what's the most upsetting thing about being old? You expect them to say, "Well, my friends are dead". But that's not what they say. Or "I have to go to the bathroom six times a night". That's not what they say.

    You know what they say? "Things are too different. This is not the country I grew up in. I don't recognize this." All people hate that. It doesn't mean you're a bigot, it means you're human. Unless you want things to fall apart, become so volatile that you can't have a working economy, you need to get a handle on the pace of change. You have to slow it down.

    How important is migration in terms of change?

    It's central because nothing changes the society more quickly or more permanently than bringing in a whole new population and that's not an attack on anybody. There are lots of populations- there are lots of immigrants who are much more impressive than I am. I have no doubt about that. I'm not attacking immigrants. I'm merely saying that the effect on the people who already live here is real and they're not bigots for feeling that way.
    You come from an ancient country with a series of ancient cultures within it and if you woke up one morning and everyone was speaking Amharic and you didn't recognize any of your surroundings, that would be deeply upsetting to you.

    What you saying, it's necessary to slow it down, control it?

    You have to slow it down. Look at the Chinese. I abhor, I despise the Chinese government. However, I'm willing to acknowledge wise behavior when I see it. The Chinese would never accept this pace of demographic change not simply because they're racist, though of course, they are, but that's not the point. The point is because they don't want their society to fall apart because they're in charge of it.

    The childlike faith that we have in America, and America is the worst at this, that all change is good and that progress is inevitable and if something is new and fresh and more expensive, it's got to be better.

    It is kind of refreshing for Europeans that even Hillary Clinton tells Europeans, "You have got to stop this. You've got to get control of migration or you disintegrate."

    John Kerry said the same thing, amazingly. They're telling the truth.

    Do you think Europe is going to be able to get in control of that? We have 28 countries in the EU. And Switzerland is not a member?

    So smart, so smart... You know why? Because they're mountain people. Love them. You know why? Because they're suspicious, that's what I like about them.
    [laughter]

    Do you think that Europe will get in control of the migration?

    The EU has been doomed since the first day because it's inconsistent with human nature. The reason we have nation states is because people wanted them, it's organic. A nation-state is just a larger tribe and it's organized along lines that make sense. They evolved over thousands of years. To ignore it and destroy it because you think that you've got a better idea, is insane!

    [And with that, our interview concludes. It has already run far past the allotted 40 minutes. I offer to take Carlson, who seems to be very passionate about Switzerland, on a ski run in our Alps soon. Perhaps a smoke in one of the outdoor saunas I tell him smell like rotten eggs. Ambassador Grenell is on the phone line patiently waiting.]

    [Dec 08, 2018] Internet as a perfect tool of inverted totalitarism: it stimulates atomizatin of individuals, creates authomatic 24x7 surveillance over population, suppresses solidarity by exceggerating non-essential differences and allow more insidious brainwashing of the population

    Highly recommended!
    Dec 08, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Livius Drusus , December 8, 2018 at 7:20 am

    I think the Internet and the infotech revolution in general have been largely negative in their impact on the world. Ian Welsh has a blog post that largely sums up my views on the issue.

    https://www.ianwelsh.net/what-the-infotechtelecom-revolution-has-actually-done/

    Contrary to what many people say I think large organizations like governments and corporations have significantly more power now than before and ordinary people have less power. The Internet has made it easier to get information but you have to sift through tons of junk to get to anything decent. For every website like Naked Capitalism there are thousands pushing nonsense or trying to sell you stuff.

    And even if you are more knowledgeable, so what? If you cannot put that knowledge to use what good is it? At best it makes you more well-rounded, interesting and harder to fool but in political terms knowing a lot of stuff doesn't make you more effective. In the past people didn't have access to nearly as much information but they were more willing and able to organize and fight against the powerful because it was easier to avoid detection/punishment (that is where stuff like widespread surveillance tech comes in) and because they still had a vibrant civic life and culture.

    I actually think people are more atomized now than in the past and the Internet and other technologies have probably fueled this process. Despite rising populism, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Yellow Jackets in France, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA this is all a drop in the bucket compared to just the massive social movements of the 1960s much less earlier periods. Robert Putnam argued that television, the Internet and other technologies likely helped to produce the collapse of civic life in the United States by "individualizing" people's leisure time and personally I think Putnam is right. Civic life today is very weak and I think the Internet is partially to blame.

    Mark , December 8, 2018 at 12:10 pm

    And even if you are more knowledgeable, so what? If you cannot put that knowledge to use what good is it?

    Agreed. If anything these more knowledgeable people had a greater audience prior to the internet. Whether you were a journalist, a great economist, a great author, or a great orator you need to persist and show intellect and talent to have your message heard wide and broad.
    (This is probably a little idealistic, but I think there is truth there.)

    Now you need very little of this. If your most famous asset is your attractive body you can attract a greater audience than great scholars and politicians.

    Rosario , December 8, 2018 at 2:56 pm

    I can't speak much on authoritarianism since whatever form it takes on today is wildly different from what it was in the past. Unfortunately, it is hard to convince many people living in western societies that they are living in an authoritarian system because their metal images are goose-stepping soldiers and Fraktur print posters.

    I suppose the way I can assure myself that we are living in an authoritarian society is by analyzing the endless propaganda spewed from countless, high-viewership media and entertainment outlets. It is quite simple, if the media and entertainment narratives are within a very narrow intellectual window (with lots of 600 lb. gorillas sitting in corners) than the culture and politics are being defined by powerful people with a narrow range of interests. This is not to say that forming public opinion or preferring particular political views is a new thing in Western media and entertainment, just that its application, IMO, is far more effective and subtle (and becoming more-so by the day) than it ever was in, say, NAZI Germany or the Soviet Union.

    I'd put my money down that most educated Germans during NAZI rule were well aware that propaganda was being utilized to "manufacture consent" but they participated and accepted this despite the content for pragmatic/selfish reasons. Much of the NAZI propaganda played on existing German/European cultural narratives and prejudices. Leaveraging existing ideology allowed the party to necessitate their existence by framing the German as juxtaposed against the impure and unworthy. Again, ideologies that existed independent of the party not within it. Goebbels and company were just good at utilizing the technology of the time to amplify these monstrosities.

    I question that being the case today. It is far more complicated. Technology is again the primary tool for manipulation, but it is possible that current technology is allowing for even greater leaps in reason and analysis. The windows for reflection and critical thought close as soon as they are opened. Seems more like the ideology is manufactured on the fly. For example, the anti-Russia narrative has some resonance with baby boomers, but how the hell is it effective with my generation (millennial) and younger? The offhand references to Putin and Russian operatives from my peers are completely from left field when considering our life experience. People in my age group had little to say about Russia three years ago. It says volumes on the subtle effectiveness of Western media machines if you can re-create the cold war within two years for an entire generation.

    In addition and related to above, the West's understanding of "Freedom of Speech" is dated by about 100 years. Governments are no longer the sole source of speech suppression (more like filtering and manipulation), and the supremacy of the free-market coupled with the erroneously perceived black-and-white division between public and private have convinced the public (with nearly religious conviction) that gigantic media and entertainment organizations do not have to protect the free speech of citizens because they are not government. Public/Private is now an enormous blob. With overlapping interests mixed in with any antagonisms. It is ultimately dictated by capital and its power within both government and business. Cracking this nut will be a nightmare.

    Yes, this is an authoritarian world, if measured by the distance between the populace and its governing powers, but it is an authoritarianism operating in ways that we have never seen before and using tools that are terribly effective.

    [Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

    Highly recommended!
    You can read online at epdf.tips
    Dec 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Richard , Dec 7, 2018 2:50:07 PM | link

    Came across this book which gives some excellent background to where we're at today:

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Postmodern-Imperialism-Geopolitics-Great-Games/dp/098335393X

    There may be a pdf available if you search.

    "The game motif is useful as a metaphor for the broader rivalry between nations and economic systems with the rise of imperialism and the pursuit of world power. This game has gone through two major transformations since the days of Russian-British rivalry, with the rise first of Communism and then of Islam as world forces opposing imperialism. The main themes of Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games include:

    This work brings these elements together in historical perspective with an understanding from the Arab/ Muslim world's point of view, as it is the main focus of all the "Great Games"."

    Jay Dyer discusses the book here, its strengths and weaknesses:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcmrBD4Ez2c

    [Dec 08, 2018] Internet as a perfect tool of inverted totalitarism: it stimulates atomizatin of individuals, creates authomatic 24x7 surveillance over population, suppresses solidarity by exceggerating non-essential differences and allow more insidious brainwashing of the population

    Highly recommended!
    Dec 08, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    Livius Drusus , December 8, 2018 at 7:20 am

    I think the Internet and the infotech revolution in general have been largely negative in their impact on the world. Ian Welsh has a blog post that largely sums up my views on the issue.

    https://www.ianwelsh.net/what-the-infotechtelecom-revolution-has-actually-done/

    Contrary to what many people say I think large organizations like governments and corporations have significantly more power now than before and ordinary people have less power. The Internet has made it easier to get information but you have to sift through tons of junk to get to anything decent. For every website like Naked Capitalism there are thousands pushing nonsense or trying to sell you stuff.

    And even if you are more knowledgeable, so what? If you cannot put that knowledge to use what good is it? At best it makes you more well-rounded, interesting and harder to fool but in political terms knowing a lot of stuff doesn't make you more effective. In the past people didn't have access to nearly as much information but they were more willing and able to organize and fight against the powerful because it was easier to avoid detection/punishment (that is where stuff like widespread surveillance tech comes in) and because they still had a vibrant civic life and culture.

    I actually think people are more atomized now than in the past and the Internet and other technologies have probably fueled this process. Despite rising populism, the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Yellow Jackets in France, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the DSA this is all a drop in the bucket compared to just the massive social movements of the 1960s much less earlier periods. Robert Putnam argued that television, the Internet and other technologies likely helped to produce the collapse of civic life in the United States by "individualizing" people's leisure time and personally I think Putnam is right. Civic life today is very weak and I think the Internet is partially to blame.

    Mark , December 8, 2018 at 12:10 pm

    And even if you are more knowledgeable, so what? If you cannot put that knowledge to use what good is it?

    Agreed. If anything these more knowledgeable people had a greater audience prior to the internet. Whether you were a journalist, a great economist, a great author, or a great orator you need to persist and show intellect and talent to have your message heard wide and broad.
    (This is probably a little idealistic, but I think there is truth there.)

    Now you need very little of this. If your most famous asset is your attractive body you can attract a greater audience than great scholars and politicians.

    Rosario , December 8, 2018 at 2:56 pm

    I can't speak much on authoritarianism since whatever form it takes on today is wildly different from what it was in the past. Unfortunately, it is hard to convince many people living in western societies that they are living in an authoritarian system because their metal images are goose-stepping soldiers and Fraktur print posters.

    I suppose the way I can assure myself that we are living in an authoritarian society is by analyzing the endless propaganda spewed from countless, high-viewership media and entertainment outlets. It is quite simple, if the media and entertainment narratives are within a very narrow intellectual window (with lots of 600 lb. gorillas sitting in corners) than the culture and politics are being defined by powerful people with a narrow range of interests. This is not to say that forming public opinion or preferring particular political views is a new thing in Western media and entertainment, just that its application, IMO, is far more effective and subtle (and becoming more-so by the day) than it ever was in, say, NAZI Germany or the Soviet Union.

    I'd put my money down that most educated Germans during NAZI rule were well aware that propaganda was being utilized to "manufacture consent" but they participated and accepted this despite the content for pragmatic/selfish reasons. Much of the NAZI propaganda played on existing German/European cultural narratives and prejudices. Leaveraging existing ideology allowed the party to necessitate their existence by framing the German as juxtaposed against the impure and unworthy. Again, ideologies that existed independent of the party not within it. Goebbels and company were just good at utilizing the technology of the time to amplify these monstrosities.

    I question that being the case today. It is far more complicated. Technology is again the primary tool for manipulation, but it is possible that current technology is allowing for even greater leaps in reason and analysis. The windows for reflection and critical thought close as soon as they are opened. Seems more like the ideology is manufactured on the fly. For example, the anti-Russia narrative has some resonance with baby boomers, but how the hell is it effective with my generation (millennial) and younger? The offhand references to Putin and Russian operatives from my peers are completely from left field when considering our life experience. People in my age group had little to say about Russia three years ago. It says volumes on the subtle effectiveness of Western media machines if you can re-create the cold war within two years for an entire generation.

    In addition and related to above, the West's understanding of "Freedom of Speech" is dated by about 100 years. Governments are no longer the sole source of speech suppression (more like filtering and manipulation), and the supremacy of the free-market coupled with the erroneously perceived black-and-white division between public and private have convinced the public (with nearly religious conviction) that gigantic media and entertainment organizations do not have to protect the free speech of citizens because they are not government. Public/Private is now an enormous blob. With overlapping interests mixed in with any antagonisms. It is ultimately dictated by capital and its power within both government and business. Cracking this nut will be a nightmare.

    Yes, this is an authoritarian world, if measured by the distance between the populace and its governing powers, but it is an authoritarianism operating in ways that we have never seen before and using tools that are terribly effective.

    [Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

    Highly recommended!
    You can read online at epdf.tips
    Dec 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Richard , Dec 7, 2018 2:50:07 PM | link

    Came across this book which gives some excellent background to where we're at today:

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Postmodern-Imperialism-Geopolitics-Great-Games/dp/098335393X

    There may be a pdf available if you search.

    "The game motif is useful as a metaphor for the broader rivalry between nations and economic systems with the rise of imperialism and the pursuit of world power. This game has gone through two major transformations since the days of Russian-British rivalry, with the rise first of Communism and then of Islam as world forces opposing imperialism. The main themes of Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games include:

    This work brings these elements together in historical perspective with an understanding from the Arab/ Muslim world's point of view, as it is the main focus of all the "Great Games"."

    Jay Dyer discusses the book here, its strengths and weaknesses:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcmrBD4Ez2c

    [Dec 07, 2018] Brexit Theresa May Goes Greek! by Brett Redmayne

    Highly recommended!
    " The Fleeting Illusion of Election Night Victory." that phrase sums up the situation very succinctly
    Notable quotes:
    "... " A Brexit Lesson In Greek: Hopes and Votes Dashed on Parliamentary Floors," ..."
    "... "Brexit means Brexit!" ..."
    Dec 07, 2018 | www.unz.com

    It has become all too easy for democracy to be turned on its head and popular nationalist mandates, referenda and elections negated via instant political hypocrisy by leaders who show their true colours only after the public vote. So it has been within the two-and-a-half year unraveling of the UK Brexit referendum of 2016 that saw the subsequent negotiations now provide the Brexit voter with only three possibilities. All are a loss for Britain.

    One possibility, Brexit, is the result of Prime Minister, Theresa May's negotiations- the "deal"- and currently exists in name only. Like the PM herself, the original concept of Brexit may soon lie in the dust of an upcoming UK Parliament floor vote in exactly the same manner as the failed attempt by the Greeks barely three years ago. One must remember that Greece on June 27, 2015 once voted to leave the EU as well and to renegotiate its EU existence as well in their own "Grexit" referendum. Thanks to their own set of underhanded and treasonous politicians, this did not go well for Greece. Looking at the Greek result, and understanding divisive UK Conservative Party control that exists in the hearts of PMs on both sides of the House of Commons, this new parliamentary vote is not looking good for Britain. Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek! "deal" -- would thus reveal the life-long scars of their true national allegiance gnawed into their backs by the lust of their masters in Brussels. Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review

    Ironically, like a cluster bomb of white phosphorous over a Syrian village, Cameron's Brexit vote blew up spectacularly in his face. Two decades of ongoing political submission to the EU by the Cons and "new" labour had them arrogantly misreading the minds of the UK voter.

    So on that incredible night, it happened. Prime Minister David Cameron the Cons New Labour The Lib- Dems and even the UK Labour Party itself, were shocked to their core when the unthinkable nightmare that could never happen, did happen . Brexit had passed by popular vote!

    David Cameron has been in hiding ever since.

    After Brexit passed the same set of naïve UK voters assumed, strangely, that Brexit would be finalized in their national interest as advertised. This belief had failed to read Article 50 - the provisos for leaving the EU- since, as much as it was mentioned, it was very rarely linked or referenced by a quotation in any of the media punditry. However, an article published four days after the night Brexit passed, " A Brexit Lesson In Greek: Hopes and Votes Dashed on Parliamentary Floors," provided anyone thus reading Article 50, which is only eight pages long and double-spaced, the info to see clearly that this never before used EU by-law would be the only route to a UK exit. Further, Article 50 showed that Brussels would control the outcome of exit negotiations along with the other twenty-seven member nations and that effectively Ms May and her Tories would be playing this game using the EU's ball and rules, while going one-on-twenty-seven during the negotiations.

    In the aftermath of Brexit, the real game began in earnest. The stakes: bigger than ever.

    Forgotten are the hypocritical defections of political expediency that saw Boris Johnson and then Home Secretary Theresa May who were, until that very moment, both vociferously and very publicly against the intent of Brexit. Suddenly they claimed to be pro- Brexit in their quest to sleep in Cameron's now vacant bed at No. 10 Downing Street. Boris strategically dropped out to hopefully see, Ms May, fall on her sword- a bit sooner. Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review

    So, the plucky PM was left to convince the UK public, daily, as the negotiations moved on, that "Brexit means Brexit!" A UK media that is as pro-EU as their PM chimed in to help her sell distortions of proffered success at the negotiating table, while the rise of "old" Labour, directed by Jeremy Corbyn, exposed her "soft" Brexit negotiations for the litany of failures that ultimately equaled the "deal" that was strangely still called "Brexit."

    Too few, however, examined this reality once these political Chameleons changed their colours just as soon as the very first results shockingly came in from Manchester in the wee hours of the morning on that seemingly hopeful night so long ago: June 23, 2016. For thus would begin a quiet, years-long defection of many more MPs than merely these two opportunists.

    What the British people also failed to realize was that they and their Brexit victory would also be faced with additional adversaries beyond the EU members: those from within their own government. From newly appointed PM May to Boris Johnson, from the Conservative Party to the New Labour sellouts within the Labour Party and the Friends of Israel , the quiet internal political movement against Brexit began. As the House of Lords picked up their phones, too, for very quiet private chats within House of Commons, their minions in the British press began their work as well.

    Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review

    jim jones , says: December 5, 2018 at 4:55 am GMT

    Government found guilty of Contempt of Parliament:

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2018/12/04/uk-govt-forced-to-publish-full-brexit-legal-documents-after-losing-key-vote/

    Brabantian , says: December 5, 2018 at 7:17 am GMT
    This article by Brett Redmayne is certainly right re the horrific sell-out by the Greek government of Tsipras the other year, that has left the Greek citizenry in enduring political despair the betrayal of Greek voters indeed a model for UK betrayal of Brexit voters

    But Redmayne is likely very mistaken in the adulation of Jeremy Corbyn as the 'genuine real deal' for British people

    Ample evidence points to Corbyn as Trojan horse sell-out, as covered by UK researcher Aangirfan on her blogs, the most recent of which was just vapourised by Google in their censorship insanity

    Jeremy Corbyn was a childhood neighbour of the Rothschilds in Wiltshire; with Jeremy's father David Corbyn working for ultra-powerful Victor Rothschild on secret UK gov scientific projects during World War 2

    Jeremy Corbyn is tied to child violation scandals & child-crime convicted individuals including Corbyn's Constituency Agent; Corbyn tragically ignoring multiple earnest complaints from child abuse victims & whistleblowers over years, whilst "child abuse rings were operating within all 12 of the borough's children's homes" in Corbyn's district not very decent of him

    And of course Corbyn significantly cucked to the Israel lobby in their demands for purge of the Labour party alleged 'anti-semites'

    The Trojan Horse 'fake opposition', or fake 'advocate for the people', is a very classic game of the Powers That Be, and sadly Corbyn is likely yet one more fake 'hero'

    niceland , says: December 6, 2018 at 9:13 am GMT
    My theory is, give "capitalism" and financial interests enough time, they will consume any democracy. Meaning: the wealth flows upwards, giving the top class opportunity to influence politics and the media, further improving their situation v.s. the rest, resulting in ever stronger position – until they hold all the power. Controlling the media and therefore the narrative, capable to destroy any and all opposition. Ministers and members of parliaments, most bought and paid for one way or the other. Thankfully, the 1% or rather the 0.1% don't always agree so the picture can be a bit blurred.

    You can guess what country inspired this "theory" of mine. The second on the list is actually the U.K. If a real socialist becomes the prime minister of the U.K. I will be very surprised. But Brexit is a black swan like they say in the financial sector, and they tend to disrupt even the best of theories. Perhaps Corbin is genuine and will become prime minister! I am not holding my breath.

    However, if he is a real socialist like the article claims. And he becomes prime minister of the U.K the situation will get really interesting. Not only from the EU side but more importantly from U.K. best friend – the U.S. Uncle Sam will not be happy about this development and doesn't hesitate to crush "bad ideas" he doesn't like.

    Case in point – Ireland's financial crisis in 2009;

    After massive expansion and spectacular housing bubble the Irish banks were in deep trouble early into the crisis. The EU, ECB and the IMF (troika?) met with the Irish government to discuss solutions. From memory – the question was how to save the Irish banks? They were close to agreement that bondholders and even lenders to the Irish banks should take a "haircut" and the debt load should be cut down to manageable levels so the banks could survive (perhaps Michael Hudson style if you will). One short phone call from the U.S Secretary of the treasury then – Timothy Geithner – to the troika-Irish meeting ended these plans. He said: there will be no haircut! That was the end of it. Ireland survived but it's reasonable to assume this "guideline" paved the road for the Greece debacle.

    I believe Mr. Geithner spoke on behalf of the financial power controlling – more or less-our hemisphere. So if the good old socialist Corbin comes to power in the U.K. and intends to really change something and thereby set examples for other nations – he is taking this power head on. I think in case of "no deal" the U.K. will have it's back against the wall and it's bargaining position against the EU will depend a LOT on U.S. response. With socialist in power there will be no meaningful support from the U.S. the powers that be will to their best to destroy Corbin as soon as possible.

    I hope I am wrong.

    niceland , says: December 6, 2018 at 10:07 am GMT
    My right wing friends can't understand the biggest issue of our times is class war. This article mentions the "Panama papers" where great many corporations and wealthy individuals (even politicians) in my country were exposed. They run their profits through offshore tax havens while using public infrastructure (paid for by taxpayers) to make their money. It's estimated that wealth amounting to 1,5 times our GDP is stored in these accounts!

    There is absolutely no way to get it through my right wing friends thick skull that off-shore accounts are tax frauds. Resulting in they paying higher taxes off their wages because the big corporations and the rich don't pay anything. Nope. They simply hate taxes (even if they get plenty back in services) and therefore all taxes are bad. Ergo tax evasions by the 1% are fine – socialism or immigrants must be the root of our problems. MIGA!

    Come to think of it – few of them would survive the "law of the jungle" they so much desire. And none of them would survive the "law of the jungle" if the rules are stacked against them. Still, all their political energy is aimed against the ideas and people that struggle against such reality.

    I give up – I will never understand the right. No more than the pure bread communist. Hopeless ideas!

    jilles dykstra , says: December 6, 2018 at 11:27 am GMT
    " This is because the deal has a provision that would still keep the UK in the EU Customs Union (the system setting common trade rules for all EU members) indefinitely. This is an outrageous inclusion and betrayal of a real Brexit by Ms May since this one topic was the most contentious in the debate during the ongoing negotiations because the Customs Union is the tie to the EU that the original Brexit vote specifically sought to terminate. "

    Here I stopped reading, maybe later more.
    Nonsense.

    What USA MSM told in the USA about what ordinary British people said, those who wanted to leave the EU, I do not know, one of the most often heard reasons was immigration, especially from E European countries, the EU 'free movement of people'.
    "Real' Britons refusing to live in Poland.
    EP member Verhofstadt so desperate that he asked on CNN help by Trump to keep this 'one of the four EU freedoms'.
    This free movement of course was meant to destroy the nation states

    What Boris Johnson said, many things he said were true, stupid EU interference for example with products made in Britain, for the home market, (he mentioned forty labels in one piece of clothing), no opportunity to seek trade without EU interference.
    There was irritation about EU interference 'they even make rules about vacuum cleaners', and, already long ago, closure, EU rules, of village petrol pumps that had been there since the first cars appeared in Britain, too dangerous.
    In France nonsensical EU rules are simply ignored, such as countryside private sewer installations.

    But the idea that GB could leave, even without Brussels obstruction, the customs union, just politicians, and other nitwits in economy, could have such ideas.
    Figures are just in my head, too lazy to check.
    But British export to what remains of the EU, some € 60 billion, French export to GB, same order of magnitude, German export to GB, far over 100 billion.
    Did anyone imagine that Merkel could afford closing down a not negligible part of Bayern car industry, at he same time Bayern being the Land most opposed to Merkel, immigration ?

    This Brexit in my view is just the beginning of the end of the illusion EU falling apart.
    In politics anything is connected with anything.
    Britons, again in my opinion, voted to leave because of immigration, inside EU immigration.
    What GB will do with Marrakech, I do not know.

    Marrakech reminds me of many measures that were ready to be implemented when the reason to make these measures no longer existed.
    Such as Dutch job guarantees when enterprises merged, these became law when when the merger idiocy was over.
    The negative aspects of immigration now are clear to many in the countries with the imagined flesh pots, one way or another authorities will be obliged to stop immigration, but at that very moment migration rules, not legally binding, are presented.

    As a Belgian political commentator said on Belgian tv 'no communication is possible between French politicians and French yellow coat demonstrators, they live in completely different worlds'.
    These different worlds began, to pinpoint a year, in 2005, when the negative referenda about the EU were ignored. As Farrage reminded after the Brexit referendum, in EP, you said 'they do not know what they're doing'
    But now Macron and his cronies do not know what to do, now that police sympathises with yellow coat demonstrators.

    For me THE interesting question remains 'how was it possible that the Renaissance cultures manoevred themselves into the present mess ?'.

    jilles dykstra , says: December 6, 2018 at 11:40 am GMT
    @Digital Samizdat Corbyn, in my opinion one of the many not too bright socialists, who are caught in their own ideological prison: worldwide socialism is globalisation, globalisation took power away from politicians, and gave it to multinationals and banks.
    jilles dykstra , says: December 6, 2018 at 12:27 pm GMT
    @niceland The expression class war is often used without realising what the issue is, same with tax evasion.
    The rich of course consume more, however, there is a limit to what one can consume, it takes time to squander money.
    So the end of the class war may make the rich poor, but alas the poor hardly richer.

    About tax evasion, some economist, do not remember his name, did not read the article attentively, analysed wealth in the world, and concluded that eight % of this wealth had originated in evading taxes.
    Over what period this evasion had taken place, do not remember this economist had reached a conclusion, but anyone understands that ending tax evasion will not make all poor rich.

    There is quite another aspect of class war, evading taxes, wealth inequality, that is quite worrying: the political power money can yield.
    Soros is at war with Hungary, his Open University must leave Hungary.
    USA MSM furious, some basic human right, or rights, have been violated, many in Brussels furious, the 226 Soros followers among them, I suppose.
    But since when is it allowed, legally and/or morally, to try to change the culture of a country, in this case by a foreigner, just by pumping money into a country ?
    Soros advertises himself as a philantropist, the Hungarian majority sees him as some kind of imperialist, I suppose.

    Tyrion 2 , says: December 6, 2018 at 12:49 pm GMT
    @Simon in London 90% Labour party members supported remain, as did 65% of their voters and 95% of their MPs.
    Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: December 6, 2018 at 12:53 pm GMT
    For me THE interesting question remains 'how was it possible that the Renaissance cultures manoevred themselves into the present mess ?'.

    Well , I am reading " The occult renaissance church of Rome " by Michael Hoffman , Independent History and research . Coeur d`Alene , Idaho . http://www.RevisionistHistory.org
    I saw about this book in this Unz web .

    I used to think than the rot started with protestantism , but Hoffman says it started with catholic Renaissance in Rome itself in the XV century , the Medici , the Popes , usury

    Mike P , says: December 6, 2018 at 1:20 pm GMT
    This whole affair illustrates beautifully the real purpose of the sham laughingly known as "representative democracy," namely, not to "empower" the public but to deprive it of its power.

    With modern means of communication, direct democracy would be technically feasible even in large countries. Nevertheless, practically all "democratic" countries continue to delegate all legislative powers to elected "representatives." These are nothing more than consenting hostages of those with the real power, who control and at the same time hide behind those "representatives." The more this becomes obvious, the lower the calibre of the people willing to be used in this manner – hence, the current crop of mental gnomes and opportunist shills in European politics.

    Wizard of Oz , says: December 6, 2018 at 1:48 pm GMT
    I would only shout this rambling ignoramus a beer in the pub to stop his mouth for a while. Some of his egregious errors have been noted. and Greece, anyway, is an irrelevance to the critical decisions on Brexit.

    Once Article 50 was invoked the game was over. All the trump cards were on the EU side. Now we know that, even assuming Britain could muster a competent team to plan and negotiate for Brexit that all the work of proving up the case and negotiating or preparing the ground has to be done over years leading up to the triggering of Article 50. And that's assuming that recent events leave you believing that the once great Britain is fit to be a sovereign nation without adult supervision.

    As it is one has to hope that Britain will not be constrained by the total humbug which says that a 51 per cent vote of those choosing to vote in that very un British thing, a referendum, is some sort of reason for not giving effect to a more up to date and better informed view.

    Stebbing Heuer , says: Website December 6, 2018 at 1:57 pm GMT
    @Digital Samizdat Erm Varoufakis didn't knuckle under. He resigned in protest at Tsipras' knuckling under.
    anon [108] Disclaimer , says: December 6, 2018 at 2:28 pm GMT
    @Digital Samizdat Hypothesis: The British masses would fare better without a privatized government.

    "Corbyn may prove to be real .. .. old-time Labour platform [leadership, capable to].. return [political, social and financial] control back to the hands of the UK worker".. [but the privateers will use the government itself and mass media to defeat such platforms and to suppress labor with new laws and domestic armed warfare]. Why would a member of the British masses allow [the Oligarch elite and the[ir] powerful business and foreign political interests restrain democracy and waste the victims of privately owned automation revolution? .. ..

    [Corbyn's Labour platform challenges ] privatized capitalist because the PCs use the British government to keep imprisoned in propaganda and suppressed in opportunity, the masses. The privateers made wealthy by their monopolies, are using their resources to maintain rule making and enforcement control (via the government) over the masses; such privateers have looted the government, and taken by privatization a vast array of economic monopolies that once belonged to the government. If the British government survives, the Privateers (monopoly thieves) will continue to use the government to replace humanity, in favor of corporate owned Robots and super capable algorithms.

    Corbyn's threat to use government to represent the masses and to suppress or reduce asymmetric power and wealth, and to provide sufficient for everyone extends to, and alerts the masses in every capitalist dominated place in the world. He (Corbyn) is a very dangerous man, so too was Jesus Christ."

    There is a similar call in France, but it is not yet so well led.

    Michael Kenny , says: December 6, 2018 at 2:29 pm GMT
    This sounds like a halfway house between hysterical panic and sour grapes. The author clearly believes that Brexit is going to fail.
    T.T , says: December 6, 2018 at 2:32 pm GMT
    Every working Dutch person is "owed" 50k euro from the bailout of Greece, not that Greece will ever pay this back, and not as if Greece ever really got the money as it just went straight to northern European banks to bail them out. Then we have the fiscal policy creating more money by the day to stimulate the economy, which also doesn't reach the countries or people just the banks. Then we have the flirting with East-European mobsters to pull them in the EU sphere corrupting top EU bureaucrats. Then we have all of south Europe being extremely unstable, including France, both its populations and its economy.

    It's sad to see the British government doesn't see the disaster ahead, any price would be cheaper then future forced EU integration. And especially at this point, the EU is so unstable, that they can't go to war on the UK without also committing A kamikaze attack.

    Brett Redmayne-Titley , says: Website December 6, 2018 at 2:36 pm GMT
    @Brabantian Thank you for your comment and addition to my evaluation of Corbyn. I do agree with you that Corbyn has yet to be tested for sincerity and effectiveness as PM, but he will likely get his chance and only then will we and the Brits find out for sure. The main point I was hoping to make was that: due to the perceived threat of Labour socialist reform under Corbyn, he has been an ulterior motive in the negotiations and another reason that the EU wants PM May to get her deal passed. Yes, I too am watching Corbyn with jaundiced optimism. Thank you.

    [Dec 07, 2018] Brexit Theresa May Goes Greek! by Brett Redmayne

    Highly recommended!
    " The Fleeting Illusion of Election Night Victory." that phrase sums up the situation very succinctly
    Notable quotes:
    "... " A Brexit Lesson In Greek: Hopes and Votes Dashed on Parliamentary Floors," ..."
    "... "Brexit means Brexit!" ..."
    Dec 07, 2018 | www.unz.com

    It has become all too easy for democracy to be turned on its head and popular nationalist mandates, referenda and elections negated via instant political hypocrisy by leaders who show their true colours only after the public vote. So it has been within the two-and-a-half year unraveling of the UK Brexit referendum of 2016 that saw the subsequent negotiations now provide the Brexit voter with only three possibilities. All are a loss for Britain.

    One possibility, Brexit, is the result of Prime Minister, Theresa May's negotiations- the "deal"- and currently exists in name only. Like the PM herself, the original concept of Brexit may soon lie in the dust of an upcoming UK Parliament floor vote in exactly the same manner as the failed attempt by the Greeks barely three years ago. One must remember that Greece on June 27, 2015 once voted to leave the EU as well and to renegotiate its EU existence as well in their own "Grexit" referendum. Thanks to their own set of underhanded and treasonous politicians, this did not go well for Greece. Looking at the Greek result, and understanding divisive UK Conservative Party control that exists in the hearts of PMs on both sides of the House of Commons, this new parliamentary vote is not looking good for Britain. Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek! "deal" -- would thus reveal the life-long scars of their true national allegiance gnawed into their backs by the lust of their masters in Brussels. Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review

    Ironically, like a cluster bomb of white phosphorous over a Syrian village, Cameron's Brexit vote blew up spectacularly in his face. Two decades of ongoing political submission to the EU by the Cons and "new" labour had them arrogantly misreading the minds of the UK voter.

    So on that incredible night, it happened. Prime Minister David Cameron the Cons New Labour The Lib- Dems and even the UK Labour Party itself, were shocked to their core when the unthinkable nightmare that could never happen, did happen . Brexit had passed by popular vote!

    David Cameron has been in hiding ever since.

    After Brexit passed the same set of naïve UK voters assumed, strangely, that Brexit would be finalized in their national interest as advertised. This belief had failed to read Article 50 - the provisos for leaving the EU- since, as much as it was mentioned, it was very rarely linked or referenced by a quotation in any of the media punditry. However, an article published four days after the night Brexit passed, " A Brexit Lesson In Greek: Hopes and Votes Dashed on Parliamentary Floors," provided anyone thus reading Article 50, which is only eight pages long and double-spaced, the info to see clearly that this never before used EU by-law would be the only route to a UK exit. Further, Article 50 showed that Brussels would control the outcome of exit negotiations along with the other twenty-seven member nations and that effectively Ms May and her Tories would be playing this game using the EU's ball and rules, while going one-on-twenty-seven during the negotiations.

    In the aftermath of Brexit, the real game began in earnest. The stakes: bigger than ever.

    Forgotten are the hypocritical defections of political expediency that saw Boris Johnson and then Home Secretary Theresa May who were, until that very moment, both vociferously and very publicly against the intent of Brexit. Suddenly they claimed to be pro- Brexit in their quest to sleep in Cameron's now vacant bed at No. 10 Downing Street. Boris strategically dropped out to hopefully see, Ms May, fall on her sword- a bit sooner. Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review

    So, the plucky PM was left to convince the UK public, daily, as the negotiations moved on, that "Brexit means Brexit!" A UK media that is as pro-EU as their PM chimed in to help her sell distortions of proffered success at the negotiating table, while the rise of "old" Labour, directed by Jeremy Corbyn, exposed her "soft" Brexit negotiations for the litany of failures that ultimately equaled the "deal" that was strangely still called "Brexit."

    Too few, however, examined this reality once these political Chameleons changed their colours just as soon as the very first results shockingly came in from Manchester in the wee hours of the morning on that seemingly hopeful night so long ago: June 23, 2016. For thus would begin a quiet, years-long defection of many more MPs than merely these two opportunists.

    What the British people also failed to realize was that they and their Brexit victory would also be faced with additional adversaries beyond the EU members: those from within their own government. From newly appointed PM May to Boris Johnson, from the Conservative Party to the New Labour sellouts within the Labour Party and the Friends of Israel , the quiet internal political movement against Brexit began. As the House of Lords picked up their phones, too, for very quiet private chats within House of Commons, their minions in the British press began their work as well.

    Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!, by Brett Redmayne-Titley - The Unz Review

    jim jones , says: December 5, 2018 at 4:55 am GMT

    Government found guilty of Contempt of Parliament:

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2018/12/04/uk-govt-forced-to-publish-full-brexit-legal-documents-after-losing-key-vote/

    Brabantian , says: December 5, 2018 at 7:17 am GMT
    This article by Brett Redmayne is certainly right re the horrific sell-out by the Greek government of Tsipras the other year, that has left the Greek citizenry in enduring political despair the betrayal of Greek voters indeed a model for UK betrayal of Brexit voters

    But Redmayne is likely very mistaken in the adulation of Jeremy Corbyn as the 'genuine real deal' for British people

    Ample evidence points to Corbyn as Trojan horse sell-out, as covered by UK researcher Aangirfan on her blogs, the most recent of which was just vapourised by Google in their censorship insanity

    Jeremy Corbyn was a childhood neighbour of the Rothschilds in Wiltshire; with Jeremy's father David Corbyn working for ultra-powerful Victor Rothschild on secret UK gov scientific projects during World War 2

    Jeremy Corbyn is tied to child violation scandals & child-crime convicted individuals including Corbyn's Constituency Agent; Corbyn tragically ignoring multiple earnest complaints from child abuse victims & whistleblowers over years, whilst "child abuse rings were operating within all 12 of the borough's children's homes" in Corbyn's district not very decent of him

    And of course Corbyn significantly cucked to the Israel lobby in their demands for purge of the Labour party alleged 'anti-semites'

    The Trojan Horse 'fake opposition', or fake 'advocate for the people', is a very classic game of the Powers That Be, and sadly Corbyn is likely yet one more fake 'hero'

    niceland , says: December 6, 2018 at 9:13 am GMT
    My theory is, give "capitalism" and financial interests enough time, they will consume any democracy. Meaning: the wealth flows upwards, giving the top class opportunity to influence politics and the media, further improving their situation v.s. the rest, resulting in ever stronger position – until they hold all the power. Controlling the media and therefore the narrative, capable to destroy any and all opposition. Ministers and members of parliaments, most bought and paid for one way or the other. Thankfully, the 1% or rather the 0.1% don't always agree so the picture can be a bit blurred.

    You can guess what country inspired this "theory" of mine. The second on the list is actually the U.K. If a real socialist becomes the prime minister of the U.K. I will be very surprised. But Brexit is a black swan like they say in the financial sector, and they tend to disrupt even the best of theories. Perhaps Corbin is genuine and will become prime minister! I am not holding my breath.

    However, if he is a real socialist like the article claims. And he becomes prime minister of the U.K the situation will get really interesting. Not only from the EU side but more importantly from U.K. best friend – the U.S. Uncle Sam will not be happy about this development and doesn't hesitate to crush "bad ideas" he doesn't like.

    Case in point – Ireland's financial crisis in 2009;

    After massive expansion and spectacular housing bubble the Irish banks were in deep trouble early into the crisis. The EU, ECB and the IMF (troika?) met with the Irish government to discuss solutions. From memory – the question was how to save the Irish banks? They were close to agreement that bondholders and even lenders to the Irish banks should take a "haircut" and the debt load should be cut down to manageable levels so the banks could survive (perhaps Michael Hudson style if you will). One short phone call from the U.S Secretary of the treasury then – Timothy Geithner – to the troika-Irish meeting ended these plans. He said: there will be no haircut! That was the end of it. Ireland survived but it's reasonable to assume this "guideline" paved the road for the Greece debacle.

    I believe Mr. Geithner spoke on behalf of the financial power controlling – more or less-our hemisphere. So if the good old socialist Corbin comes to power in the U.K. and intends to really change something and thereby set examples for other nations – he is taking this power head on. I think in case of "no deal" the U.K. will have it's back against the wall and it's bargaining position against the EU will depend a LOT on U.S. response. With socialist in power there will be no meaningful support from the U.S. the powers that be will to their best to destroy Corbin as soon as possible.

    I hope I am wrong.

    niceland , says: December 6, 2018 at 10:07 am GMT
    My right wing friends can't understand the biggest issue of our times is class war. This article mentions the "Panama papers" where great many corporations and wealthy individuals (even politicians) in my country were exposed. They run their profits through offshore tax havens while using public infrastructure (paid for by taxpayers) to make their money. It's estimated that wealth amounting to 1,5 times our GDP is stored in these accounts!

    There is absolutely no way to get it through my right wing friends thick skull that off-shore accounts are tax frauds. Resulting in they paying higher taxes off their wages because the big corporations and the rich don't pay anything. Nope. They simply hate taxes (even if they get plenty back in services) and therefore all taxes are bad. Ergo tax evasions by the 1% are fine – socialism or immigrants must be the root of our problems. MIGA!

    Come to think of it – few of them would survive the "law of the jungle" they so much desire. And none of them would survive the "law of the jungle" if the rules are stacked against them. Still, all their political energy is aimed against the ideas and people that struggle against such reality.

    I give up – I will never understand the right. No more than the pure bread communist. Hopeless ideas!

    jilles dykstra , says: December 6, 2018 at 11:27 am GMT
    " This is because the deal has a provision that would still keep the UK in the EU Customs Union (the system setting common trade rules for all EU members) indefinitely. This is an outrageous inclusion and betrayal of a real Brexit by Ms May since this one topic was the most contentious in the debate during the ongoing negotiations because the Customs Union is the tie to the EU that the original Brexit vote specifically sought to terminate. "

    Here I stopped reading, maybe later more.
    Nonsense.

    What USA MSM told in the USA about what ordinary British people said, those who wanted to leave the EU, I do not know, one of the most often heard reasons was immigration, especially from E European countries, the EU 'free movement of people'.
    "Real' Britons refusing to live in Poland.
    EP member Verhofstadt so desperate that he asked on CNN help by Trump to keep this 'one of the four EU freedoms'.
    This free movement of course was meant to destroy the nation states

    What Boris Johnson said, many things he said were true, stupid EU interference for example with products made in Britain, for the home market, (he mentioned forty labels in one piece of clothing), no opportunity to seek trade without EU interference.
    There was irritation about EU interference 'they even make rules about vacuum cleaners', and, already long ago, closure, EU rules, of village petrol pumps that had been there since the first cars appeared in Britain, too dangerous.
    In France nonsensical EU rules are simply ignored, such as countryside private sewer installations.

    But the idea that GB could leave, even without Brussels obstruction, the customs union, just politicians, and other nitwits in economy, could have such ideas.
    Figures are just in my head, too lazy to check.
    But British export to what remains of the EU, some € 60 billion, French export to GB, same order of magnitude, German export to GB, far over 100 billion.
    Did anyone imagine that Merkel could afford closing down a not negligible part of Bayern car industry, at he same time Bayern being the Land most opposed to Merkel, immigration ?

    This Brexit in my view is just the beginning of the end of the illusion EU falling apart.
    In politics anything is connected with anything.
    Britons, again in my opinion, voted to leave because of immigration, inside EU immigration.
    What GB will do with Marrakech, I do not know.

    Marrakech reminds me of many measures that were ready to be implemented when the reason to make these measures no longer existed.
    Such as Dutch job guarantees when enterprises merged, these became law when when the merger idiocy was over.
    The negative aspects of immigration now are clear to many in the countries with the imagined flesh pots, one way or another authorities will be obliged to stop immigration, but at that very moment migration rules, not legally binding, are presented.

    As a Belgian political commentator said on Belgian tv 'no communication is possible between French politicians and French yellow coat demonstrators, they live in completely different worlds'.
    These different worlds began, to pinpoint a year, in 2005, when the negative referenda about the EU were ignored. As Farrage reminded after the Brexit referendum, in EP, you said 'they do not know what they're doing'
    But now Macron and his cronies do not know what to do, now that police sympathises with yellow coat demonstrators.

    For me THE interesting question remains 'how was it possible that the Renaissance cultures manoevred themselves into the present mess ?'.

    jilles dykstra , says: December 6, 2018 at 11:40 am GMT
    @Digital Samizdat Corbyn, in my opinion one of the many not too bright socialists, who are caught in their own ideological prison: worldwide socialism is globalisation, globalisation took power away from politicians, and gave it to multinationals and banks.
    jilles dykstra , says: December 6, 2018 at 12:27 pm GMT
    @niceland The expression class war is often used without realising what the issue is, same with tax evasion.
    The rich of course consume more, however, there is a limit to what one can consume, it takes time to squander money.
    So the end of the class war may make the rich poor, but alas the poor hardly richer.

    About tax evasion, some economist, do not remember his name, did not read the article attentively, analysed wealth in the world, and concluded that eight % of this wealth had originated in evading taxes.
    Over what period this evasion had taken place, do not remember this economist had reached a conclusion, but anyone understands that ending tax evasion will not make all poor rich.

    There is quite another aspect of class war, evading taxes, wealth inequality, that is quite worrying: the political power money can yield.
    Soros is at war with Hungary, his Open University must leave Hungary.
    USA MSM furious, some basic human right, or rights, have been violated, many in Brussels furious, the 226 Soros followers among them, I suppose.
    But since when is it allowed, legally and/or morally, to try to change the culture of a country, in this case by a foreigner, just by pumping money into a country ?
    Soros advertises himself as a philantropist, the Hungarian majority sees him as some kind of imperialist, I suppose.

    Tyrion 2 , says: December 6, 2018 at 12:49 pm GMT
    @Simon in London 90% Labour party members supported remain, as did 65% of their voters and 95% of their MPs.
    Anon [424] Disclaimer , says: December 6, 2018 at 12:53 pm GMT
    For me THE interesting question remains 'how was it possible that the Renaissance cultures manoevred themselves into the present mess ?'.

    Well , I am reading " The occult renaissance church of Rome " by Michael Hoffman , Independent History and research . Coeur d`Alene , Idaho . http://www.RevisionistHistory.org
    I saw about this book in this Unz web .

    I used to think than the rot started with protestantism , but Hoffman says it started with catholic Renaissance in Rome itself in the XV century , the Medici , the Popes , usury

    Mike P , says: December 6, 2018 at 1:20 pm GMT
    This whole affair illustrates beautifully the real purpose of the sham laughingly known as "representative democracy," namely, not to "empower" the public but to deprive it of its power.

    With modern means of communication, direct democracy would be technically feasible even in large countries. Nevertheless, practically all "democratic" countries continue to delegate all legislative powers to elected "representatives." These are nothing more than consenting hostages of those with the real power, who control and at the same time hide behind those "representatives." The more this becomes obvious, the lower the calibre of the people willing to be used in this manner – hence, the current crop of mental gnomes and opportunist shills in European politics.

    Wizard of Oz , says: December 6, 2018 at 1:48 pm GMT
    I would only shout this rambling ignoramus a beer in the pub to stop his mouth for a while. Some of his egregious errors have been noted. and Greece, anyway, is an irrelevance to the critical decisions on Brexit.

    Once Article 50 was invoked the game was over. All the trump cards were on the EU side. Now we know that, even assuming Britain could muster a competent team to plan and negotiate for Brexit that all the work of proving up the case and negotiating or preparing the ground has to be done over years leading up to the triggering of Article 50. And that's assuming that recent events leave you believing that the once great Britain is fit to be a sovereign nation without adult supervision.

    As it is one has to hope that Britain will not be constrained by the total humbug which says that a 51 per cent vote of those choosing to vote in that very un British thing, a referendum, is some sort of reason for not giving effect to a more up to date and better informed view.

    Stebbing Heuer , says: Website December 6, 2018 at 1:57 pm GMT
    @Digital Samizdat Erm Varoufakis didn't knuckle under. He resigned in protest at Tsipras' knuckling under.
    anon [108] Disclaimer , says: December 6, 2018 at 2:28 pm GMT
    @Digital Samizdat Hypothesis: The British masses would fare better without a privatized government.

    "Corbyn may prove to be real .. .. old-time Labour platform [leadership, capable to].. return [political, social and financial] control back to the hands of the UK worker".. [but the privateers will use the government itself and mass media to defeat such platforms and to suppress labor with new laws and domestic armed warfare]. Why would a member of the British masses allow [the Oligarch elite and the[ir] powerful business and foreign political interests restrain democracy and waste the victims of privately owned automation revolution? .. ..

    [Corbyn's Labour platform challenges ] privatized capitalist because the PCs use the British government to keep imprisoned in propaganda and suppressed in opportunity, the masses. The privateers made wealthy by their monopolies, are using their resources to maintain rule making and enforcement control (via the government) over the masses; such privateers have looted the government, and taken by privatization a vast array of economic monopolies that once belonged to the government. If the British government survives, the Privateers (monopoly thieves) will continue to use the government to replace humanity, in favor of corporate owned Robots and super capable algorithms.

    Corbyn's threat to use government to represent the masses and to suppress or reduce asymmetric power and wealth, and to provide sufficient for everyone extends to, and alerts the masses in every capitalist dominated place in the world. He (Corbyn) is a very dangerous man, so too was Jesus Christ."

    There is a similar call in France, but it is not yet so well led.

    Michael Kenny , says: December 6, 2018 at 2:29 pm GMT
    This sounds like a halfway house between hysterical panic and sour grapes. The author clearly believes that Brexit is going to fail.
    T.T , says: December 6, 2018 at 2:32 pm GMT
    Every working Dutch person is "owed" 50k euro from the bailout of Greece, not that Greece will ever pay this back, and not as if Greece ever really got the money as it just went straight to northern European banks to bail them out. Then we have the fiscal policy creating more money by the day to stimulate the economy, which also doesn't reach the countries or people just the banks. Then we have the flirting with East-European mobsters to pull them in the EU sphere corrupting top EU bureaucrats. Then we have all of south Europe being extremely unstable, including France, both its populations and its economy.

    It's sad to see the British government doesn't see the disaster ahead, any price would be cheaper then future forced EU integration. And especially at this point, the EU is so unstable, that they can't go to war on the UK without also committing A kamikaze attack.

    Brett Redmayne-Titley , says: Website December 6, 2018 at 2:36 pm GMT
    @Brabantian Thank you for your comment and addition to my evaluation of Corbyn. I do agree with you that Corbyn has yet to be tested for sincerity and effectiveness as PM, but he will likely get his chance and only then will we and the Brits find out for sure. The main point I was hoping to make was that: due to the perceived threat of Labour socialist reform under Corbyn, he has been an ulterior motive in the negotiations and another reason that the EU wants PM May to get her deal passed. Yes, I too am watching Corbyn with jaundiced optimism. Thank you.

    [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out? ..."
    Dec 05, 2018 | www.unz.com
    121 Comments Reply

    And there are other friends in unlikely places. Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate. The real problem is that the documents apparently don't expose anything done by the Russians.

    Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?

    So how about it? Teenagers who get in trouble often have to ditch their bad friends to turn their lives around. There is still a chance for the United States if we keep our distance from the bad friends we have been nurturing all around the world, friends who have been convincing us to make poor choices. Get rid of the ties the bind to the Saudis, Israelis, Ukrainians, Poles, and yes, even the British. Deal fairly with all nations and treat everyone the same, but bear in mind that there are only two relationships that really matter – Russia and China. Make a serious effort to avoid a war by learning how to get along with those two nations and America might actually survive to celebrate a tricentennial in 2076.

    The Alarmist , says: December 4, 2018 at 10:39 am GMT
    You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections. Why, if the beneficiary was anyone other than a Democrat, much less one named Clinton, someone might actually appoint a Special Counsel to look into it, not to mention the misdeeds of the various agencies and departments who aided and abetted it.
    anon [178] Disclaimer , says: December 4, 2018 at 11:43 am GMT
    "You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections."

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

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

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

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

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

    Johnny Walker Read , says: December 4, 2018 at 1:38 pm GMT
    Like a friends divorce lawyer told him: You go to bed with a nasty bitch, you wake up with a nasty bitch.
    Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website December 4, 2018 at 1:46 pm GMT
    a plot by the British intelligence and security services to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?

    Deep State and Establishment stooge Donald Trump.

    There is still a chance for the United States if we

    declare independence from the Jewish Empire.

    [Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power. Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.) ..."
    "... Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together either. ..."
    "... American Jewish Committee ..."
    "... Contemporary Jewish Record ..."
    "... If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying . And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren ..."
    "... Goyenot traces the Neocon's origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called "the Straussians.") Leo Strauss is a great admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him "uniquely effective," and, "the ideal patriot." He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech. ..."
    "... believes that Truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved for superior minds. ..."
    "... nations derive their strength from their myths , which are necessary for government and governance. ..."
    "... national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality: they are socio-cultural constructions that the State has a duty to disseminate . ..."
    "... to be effective, any national myth must be based on a clear distinction between good and evil ; it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation. ..."
    "... deception is the norm in political life ..."
    "... Office of Special Plans ..."
    "... The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy. ..."
    "... the "chosen people" myth (God likes us best, we are better than you) ..."
    "... the Holy Land myth (one area of real estate is more holy than another) ..."
    "... General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists "that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran". ..."
    "... Among them are brilliant strategists ..."
    "... They operate unrestrained by the most basic moral principles upon which civilization is founded. They are undisturbed by compassion for the suffering of others. ..."
    "... They use consciously and skillfully use deception and "myth-making" to shape policy ..."
    "... They have infiltrated the highest levels of banking, US military, NATO and US government. ..."
    Dec 11, 2015 | Peak Prosperity

    Mememonkey pointed my to a 2013 essay by Laurent Guyenot, a French historian and writer on the deep state, that addresses the question of "Who Are The Neoconservatives." If you would like to know about that group that sends the US military into battle and tortures prisoners of war in out name, you need to know about these guys.

    First, if you are Jewish, or are a GREEN Meme, please stop and take a deep breath. Please put on your thinking cap and don't react. We are NOT disrespecting a religion, spiritual practice or a culture. We are talking about a radical and very destructive group hidden within a culture and using that culture. Christianity has similar groups and movements--the Crusades, the KKK, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, etc.

    My personal investment: This question has been a subject of intense interest for me since I became convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Iraq war was waged for reasons entirely different from those publically stated. I have been horrified to see such a shadowy, powerful group operating from a profoundly "pre-moral" developmental level-i.e., not based in even the most rudimentary principles of morality foundational to civilization.

    Who the hell are these people?!

    Goyenot's main points (with a touch of personal editorializing):

    1. The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power. Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.)

    Neoconservativism is essentially a modern right wing Jewish version of Machiavelli's political strategy. What characterizes the neoconservative movement is therefore not as much Judaism as a religious tradition, but rather Judiasm as a political project, i.e. Zionism, by Machiavellian means.

    This is not a religious movement though it may use religions words and vocabulary. It is a political and military movement. They are not concerned with being close to God. This is a movement to expand political and military power. Some are Christian and Mormon, culturally.

    Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together either.

    He points out dual-citizen (Israel / USA) members and self proclaimed Zionists throughout cabinet level positions in the US government, international banking and controlling the US military. In private writings and occasionally in public, Neocons admit that America's war policies are actually Israel's war goals. (Examples provided.)

    2. Most American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal and do NOT share the perspective of the radical Zionists.

    The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than "conservative") Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary, a media arm of the American Jewish Committee, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward, the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: "If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren".

    3. Intellectual Basis and Moral developmental level

    Goyenot traces the Neocon's origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called "the Straussians.") Leo Strauss is a great admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him "uniquely effective," and, "the ideal patriot." He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.

    Other major points:

    4. The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy.

    [The]Pax Judaica will come only when "all the nations shall flow" to the Jerusalem temple, from where "shall go forth the law" (Isaiah 2:1-3). This vision of a new world order with Jerusalem at its center resonates within the Likudnik and neoconservative circles. At the Jerusalem Summit, held from October 12th to 14th, 2003 in the symbolically significant King David Hotel, an alliance was forged between Zionist Jews and Evangelical Christians around a "theopolitical" project, one that would consider Israel "the key to the harmony of civilizations", replacing the United Nations that's become a "a tribalized confederation hijacked by Third World dictatorships": "Jerusalem's spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world's unity. [...] We believe that one of the objectives of Israel's divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets". Three acting Israeli ministers spoke at the summit, including Benjamin Netanyahu, and Richard Perle.

    Jerusalem's dream empire is expected to come through the nightmare of world war. The prophet Zechariah, often cited on Zionist forums, predicted that the Lord will fight "all nations" allied against Israel. In a single day, the whole earth will become a desert, with the exception of Jerusalem, who "shall remain aloft upon its site" (14:10).

    With more than 50 millions members, Christians United for Israel is a major political force in the U.S.. Its Chairman, pastor John Haggee, declared: "The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West, [...] a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ".

    And Guyenot concludes:

    Is it possible that this biblical dream, mixed with the neo-Machiavellianism of Leo Strauss and the militarism of Likud, is what is quietly animating an exceptionally determined and organized ultra-Zionist clan? General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists "that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran".

    Is it just a coincidence that the "seven nations" doomed to be destroyed by Israel form part of the biblical myths? [W]hen Yahweh will deliver Israel "seven nations greater and mightier than yourself [ ] you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them."

    My summary:

    [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out? ..."
    Dec 05, 2018 | www.unz.com
    121 Comments Reply

    And there are other friends in unlikely places. Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate. The real problem is that the documents apparently don't expose anything done by the Russians.

    Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?

    So how about it? Teenagers who get in trouble often have to ditch their bad friends to turn their lives around. There is still a chance for the United States if we keep our distance from the bad friends we have been nurturing all around the world, friends who have been convincing us to make poor choices. Get rid of the ties the bind to the Saudis, Israelis, Ukrainians, Poles, and yes, even the British. Deal fairly with all nations and treat everyone the same, but bear in mind that there are only two relationships that really matter – Russia and China. Make a serious effort to avoid a war by learning how to get along with those two nations and America might actually survive to celebrate a tricentennial in 2076.

    The Alarmist , says: December 4, 2018 at 10:39 am GMT
    You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections. Why, if the beneficiary was anyone other than a Democrat, much less one named Clinton, someone might actually appoint a Special Counsel to look into it, not to mention the misdeeds of the various agencies and departments who aided and abetted it.
    anon [178] Disclaimer , says: December 4, 2018 at 11:43 am GMT
    "You don't say; British Collusion to influence the 2016 US Presidential elections."

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

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

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

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

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

    Johnny Walker Read , says: December 4, 2018 at 1:38 pm GMT
    Like a friends divorce lawyer told him: You go to bed with a nasty bitch, you wake up with a nasty bitch.
    Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website December 4, 2018 at 1:46 pm GMT
    a plot by the British intelligence and security services to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?

    Deep State and Establishment stooge Donald Trump.

    There is still a chance for the United States if we

    declare independence from the Jewish Empire.

    [Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power. Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.) ..."
    "... Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together either. ..."
    "... American Jewish Committee ..."
    "... Contemporary Jewish Record ..."
    "... If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying . And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren ..."
    "... Goyenot traces the Neocon's origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called "the Straussians.") Leo Strauss is a great admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him "uniquely effective," and, "the ideal patriot." He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech. ..."
    "... believes that Truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved for superior minds. ..."
    "... nations derive their strength from their myths , which are necessary for government and governance. ..."
    "... national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality: they are socio-cultural constructions that the State has a duty to disseminate . ..."
    "... to be effective, any national myth must be based on a clear distinction between good and evil ; it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation. ..."
    "... deception is the norm in political life ..."
    "... Office of Special Plans ..."
    "... The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy. ..."
    "... the "chosen people" myth (God likes us best, we are better than you) ..."
    "... the Holy Land myth (one area of real estate is more holy than another) ..."
    "... General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists "that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran". ..."
    "... Among them are brilliant strategists ..."
    "... They operate unrestrained by the most basic moral principles upon which civilization is founded. They are undisturbed by compassion for the suffering of others. ..."
    "... They use consciously and skillfully use deception and "myth-making" to shape policy ..."
    "... They have infiltrated the highest levels of banking, US military, NATO and US government. ..."
    Dec 11, 2015 | Peak Prosperity

    Mememonkey pointed my to a 2013 essay by Laurent Guyenot, a French historian and writer on the deep state, that addresses the question of "Who Are The Neoconservatives." If you would like to know about that group that sends the US military into battle and tortures prisoners of war in out name, you need to know about these guys.

    First, if you are Jewish, or are a GREEN Meme, please stop and take a deep breath. Please put on your thinking cap and don't react. We are NOT disrespecting a religion, spiritual practice or a culture. We are talking about a radical and very destructive group hidden within a culture and using that culture. Christianity has similar groups and movements--the Crusades, the KKK, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, etc.

    My personal investment: This question has been a subject of intense interest for me since I became convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, that the Iraq war was waged for reasons entirely different from those publically stated. I have been horrified to see such a shadowy, powerful group operating from a profoundly "pre-moral" developmental level-i.e., not based in even the most rudimentary principles of morality foundational to civilization.

    Who the hell are these people?!

    Goyenot's main points (with a touch of personal editorializing):

    1. The American Neocons are Zionists (Their goal is expanding political / military power. Initially this is focused on the state of Israel.)

    Neoconservativism is essentially a modern right wing Jewish version of Machiavelli's political strategy. What characterizes the neoconservative movement is therefore not as much Judaism as a religious tradition, but rather Judiasm as a political project, i.e. Zionism, by Machiavellian means.

    This is not a religious movement though it may use religions words and vocabulary. It is a political and military movement. They are not concerned with being close to God. This is a movement to expand political and military power. Some are Christian and Mormon, culturally.

    Obviously , if Zionism is synonymous with patriotism in Israel, it cannot be an acceptable label in American politics, where it would mean loyalty to a foreign power. This is why the neoconservatives do not represent themselves as Zionists on the American scene. Yet they do not hide it all together either.

    He points out dual-citizen (Israel / USA) members and self proclaimed Zionists throughout cabinet level positions in the US government, international banking and controlling the US military. In private writings and occasionally in public, Neocons admit that America's war policies are actually Israel's war goals. (Examples provided.)

    2. Most American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal and do NOT share the perspective of the radical Zionists.

    The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than "conservative") Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary, a media arm of the American Jewish Committee, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward, the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: "If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it. It's a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants' grandchildren".

    3. Intellectual Basis and Moral developmental level

    Goyenot traces the Neocon's origins through its influential writers and thinkers. Highest on the list is Leo Strauss. (Neocons are sometimes called "the Straussians.") Leo Strauss is a great admirer of Machiavelli with his utter contempt for restraining moral principles making him "uniquely effective," and, "the ideal patriot." He gushes over Machiavelli praising the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.

    Other major points:

    4. The Zionist/Neocons are piggy-backing onto, or utilizing, the religious myths of both the Jewish and Christian world to consolidate power. This is brilliant Machiavellian strategy.

    [The]Pax Judaica will come only when "all the nations shall flow" to the Jerusalem temple, from where "shall go forth the law" (Isaiah 2:1-3). This vision of a new world order with Jerusalem at its center resonates within the Likudnik and neoconservative circles. At the Jerusalem Summit, held from October 12th to 14th, 2003 in the symbolically significant King David Hotel, an alliance was forged between Zionist Jews and Evangelical Christians around a "theopolitical" project, one that would consider Israel "the key to the harmony of civilizations", replacing the United Nations that's become a "a tribalized confederation hijacked by Third World dictatorships": "Jerusalem's spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world's unity. [...] We believe that one of the objectives of Israel's divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets". Three acting Israeli ministers spoke at the summit, including Benjamin Netanyahu, and Richard Perle.

    Jerusalem's dream empire is expected to come through the nightmare of world war. The prophet Zechariah, often cited on Zionist forums, predicted that the Lord will fight "all nations" allied against Israel. In a single day, the whole earth will become a desert, with the exception of Jerusalem, who "shall remain aloft upon its site" (14:10).

    With more than 50 millions members, Christians United for Israel is a major political force in the U.S.. Its Chairman, pastor John Haggee, declared: "The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West, [...] a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second Coming of Christ".

    And Guyenot concludes:

    Is it possible that this biblical dream, mixed with the neo-Machiavellianism of Leo Strauss and the militarism of Likud, is what is quietly animating an exceptionally determined and organized ultra-Zionist clan? General Wesley Clark testified on numerous occasions before the cameras, that one month after September 11th, 2001 a general from the Pentagon showed him a memo from neoconservative strategists "that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran".

    Is it just a coincidence that the "seven nations" doomed to be destroyed by Israel form part of the biblical myths? [W]hen Yahweh will deliver Israel "seven nations greater and mightier than yourself [ ] you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them."

    My summary:

    [Dec 02, 2018] Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award by Ray McGovern

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... As for the self-licking ice cream cone that "mainstream media" have become, and how they overlook little peccadilloes like feeding at the government PR trough and helping Cheney and Bush attack Iraq, well – now, now – let's not be nasty. Here's how Jill Abramson, The New York Times Washington Bureau Chief from 2000 to 2003, while the Times acted as drum major for the war, lets Bob Woodward off the hook for his own abysmal investigative performance. ..."
    "... Are we to believe that the Abramsons, Woodwards, et al. of the media elite simply missed the WMD deception? ..."
    Nov 29, 2018 | www.antiwar.com
    Dishonest (not "mistaken") intelligence greased the skids for the widespread killing and maiming in the Middle East that began with the Cheney/Bush "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq. The media reveled in the unconscionable (but lucrative) buzzword "shock-and-awe" for the initial attack. In retrospect, the real shock lies in the awesome complicity of virtually all "mainstream media" in the leading false predicate for this war of aggression – weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

    Only one major media group, Knight Ridder, avoided the presstitution, so to speak. It faced into the headwinds blowing from the "acceptable" narrative, did the investigative spadework, and found patriotic insiders who told them the truth. Karen Kwiatkowski, who had a front-row seat at the Pentagon, was one key source for the intrepid Knight Ridder journalists. Karen tells us that her actual role is accurately portrayed by the professional actress in the Rob Reiner's film Shock and Awe .

    Other members of the Sam Adams Associates were involved as well, but we will leave it to them to share on Saturday evening how they helped Knight Ridder accurately depict the prewar administration/intelligence/media fraud.

    Intelligence Fraud

    More recently, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper added a coda to pre-Iraq-War intelligence performance. Clapper was put in charge of imagery analysis before the Iraq war and was able to conceal the fact that there were were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In his memoir, Clapper writes that Vice President Cheney "was pushing" for imagery analysis "to find (emphasis in original) the WMD sites."

    For the record, none were found because there were none, although Clapper &#150; "eager to help" – gave it the old college try. Clapper proceeds, in a matter-of-fact way, to blame not only pressure from the Cheney/Bush administration, but also "the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn't really there."

    Regarding those Clapper-produced "artist renderings" of "mobile production facilities for biological agents"? Those trucks "were in fact used to pasteurize and transport milk," Clapper admits nonchalantly. When challenged on all this while promoting his memoir at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, Clapper gave not the slightest hint that it occurred to him his performance was somewhat lacking.

    Media: Consequential Malfeasance

    As for the self-licking ice cream cone that "mainstream media" have become, and how they overlook little peccadilloes like feeding at the government PR trough and helping Cheney and Bush attack Iraq, well – now, now – let's not be nasty. Here's how Jill Abramson, The New York Times Washington Bureau Chief from 2000 to 2003, while the Times acted as drum major for the war, lets Bob Woodward off the hook for his own abysmal investigative performance.

    Reviewing Woodward's recent book on the Trump White House, Abramson praises his "dogged investigative reporting," noting that he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, and adds: "His work has been factually unassailable." Then she (or perhaps an editor) adds in parenthesis: "(His judgment is certainly not perfect, and he has been self-critical about his belief, based on reporting before the Iraq War, that there were weapons of mass destruction.)"

    Are we to believe that the Abramsons, Woodwards, et al. of the media elite simply missed the WMD deception? (Hundreds of insiders knew of it, and some were willing to share the truth with Knight Ridder and some other reporters.) Or did the media moguls simply hunker down and let themselves be co-opted into helping Cheney/Bush start a major war? The latter seems much more likely: and transparent attempts to cover up for one another, still, is particularly sad – and consequential. Having suffered no consequences (for example, in 2003 Abramson was promoted to Managing Editor of the NYT ), the "mainstream media" appear just as likely to do a redux on Iran.

    This is why there will be a premium on honest insider patriots, like Karen Kwiatkowski, to rise to the occasion and try to prevent the next war. Bring along your insider friends on Saturday; they need to know about Karen and about Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

    Please do come and join us in congratulating Karen Kwiatkowski and the other SAAII members who also helped Knight Ridder get the story right. (Those others shall remain unnamed until Saturday.) And let insiders know this: they are not likely to hear about all this otherwise.

    Date : Saturday, December 8, 2018

    Time : 6:30 PM Showing of film, "Shock and Awe" – 8:00 PM Presentation 17th annual Sam Adams Award – Ceremony will include remarks by Larry Wilkerson, 7th SAAII awardee (in 2009)

    Place : The Festival Center, 1640 Columbia Road, NW, Washington, DC 20009

    FREE : But RSVP, if you can, to give us an idea of how many to expect; email: [email protected]

    ALL WELCOME : Lots of space in main conference room

    Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). William Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA. Reprinted with permission from Consortium News .

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

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

    Mad_Max22 , 12 hours ago

    Very informative post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    blue peacock , 21 hours ago

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

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

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

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

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

    [Dec 02, 2018] Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award by Ray McGovern

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... As for the self-licking ice cream cone that "mainstream media" have become, and how they overlook little peccadilloes like feeding at the government PR trough and helping Cheney and Bush attack Iraq, well – now, now – let's not be nasty. Here's how Jill Abramson, The New York Times Washington Bureau Chief from 2000 to 2003, while the Times acted as drum major for the war, lets Bob Woodward off the hook for his own abysmal investigative performance. ..."
    "... Are we to believe that the Abramsons, Woodwards, et al. of the media elite simply missed the WMD deception? ..."
    Nov 29, 2018 | www.antiwar.com
    Dishonest (not "mistaken") intelligence greased the skids for the widespread killing and maiming in the Middle East that began with the Cheney/Bush "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq. The media reveled in the unconscionable (but lucrative) buzzword "shock-and-awe" for the initial attack. In retrospect, the real shock lies in the awesome complicity of virtually all "mainstream media" in the leading false predicate for this war of aggression – weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

    Only one major media group, Knight Ridder, avoided the presstitution, so to speak. It faced into the headwinds blowing from the "acceptable" narrative, did the investigative spadework, and found patriotic insiders who told them the truth. Karen Kwiatkowski, who had a front-row seat at the Pentagon, was one key source for the intrepid Knight Ridder journalists. Karen tells us that her actual role is accurately portrayed by the professional actress in the Rob Reiner's film Shock and Awe .

    Other members of the Sam Adams Associates were involved as well, but we will leave it to them to share on Saturday evening how they helped Knight Ridder accurately depict the prewar administration/intelligence/media fraud.

    Intelligence Fraud

    More recently, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper added a coda to pre-Iraq-War intelligence performance. Clapper was put in charge of imagery analysis before the Iraq war and was able to conceal the fact that there were were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In his memoir, Clapper writes that Vice President Cheney "was pushing" for imagery analysis "to find (emphasis in original) the WMD sites."

    For the record, none were found because there were none, although Clapper &#150; "eager to help" – gave it the old college try. Clapper proceeds, in a matter-of-fact way, to blame not only pressure from the Cheney/Bush administration, but also "the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn't really there."

    Regarding those Clapper-produced "artist renderings" of "mobile production facilities for biological agents"? Those trucks "were in fact used to pasteurize and transport milk," Clapper admits nonchalantly. When challenged on all this while promoting his memoir at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, Clapper gave not the slightest hint that it occurred to him his performance was somewhat lacking.

    Media: Consequential Malfeasance

    As for the self-licking ice cream cone that "mainstream media" have become, and how they overlook little peccadilloes like feeding at the government PR trough and helping Cheney and Bush attack Iraq, well – now, now – let's not be nasty. Here's how Jill Abramson, The New York Times Washington Bureau Chief from 2000 to 2003, while the Times acted as drum major for the war, lets Bob Woodward off the hook for his own abysmal investigative performance.

    Reviewing Woodward's recent book on the Trump White House, Abramson praises his "dogged investigative reporting," noting that he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, and adds: "His work has been factually unassailable." Then she (or perhaps an editor) adds in parenthesis: "(His judgment is certainly not perfect, and he has been self-critical about his belief, based on reporting before the Iraq War, that there were weapons of mass destruction.)"

    Are we to believe that the Abramsons, Woodwards, et al. of the media elite simply missed the WMD deception? (Hundreds of insiders knew of it, and some were willing to share the truth with Knight Ridder and some other reporters.) Or did the media moguls simply hunker down and let themselves be co-opted into helping Cheney/Bush start a major war? The latter seems much more likely: and transparent attempts to cover up for one another, still, is particularly sad – and consequential. Having suffered no consequences (for example, in 2003 Abramson was promoted to Managing Editor of the NYT ), the "mainstream media" appear just as likely to do a redux on Iran.

    This is why there will be a premium on honest insider patriots, like Karen Kwiatkowski, to rise to the occasion and try to prevent the next war. Bring along your insider friends on Saturday; they need to know about Karen and about Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.

    Please do come and join us in congratulating Karen Kwiatkowski and the other SAAII members who also helped Knight Ridder get the story right. (Those others shall remain unnamed until Saturday.) And let insiders know this: they are not likely to hear about all this otherwise.

    Date : Saturday, December 8, 2018

    Time : 6:30 PM Showing of film, "Shock and Awe" – 8:00 PM Presentation 17th annual Sam Adams Award – Ceremony will include remarks by Larry Wilkerson, 7th SAAII awardee (in 2009)

    Place : The Festival Center, 1640 Columbia Road, NW, Washington, DC 20009

    FREE : But RSVP, if you can, to give us an idea of how many to expect; email: [email protected]

    ALL WELCOME : Lots of space in main conference room

    Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). William Binney worked for NSA for 36 years, retiring in 2001 as the technical director of world military and geopolitical analysis and reporting; he created many of the collection systems still used by NSA. Reprinted with permission from Consortium News .

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

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

    Mad_Max22 , 12 hours ago

    Very informative post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    blue peacock , 21 hours ago

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

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

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

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

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

    [Nov 30, 2018] US Warlords now and at the tome Miill's Poer Elite was published

    Highly recommended!
    This is from 1999 and in 2018 we see that Mills was right.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Personnel were constantly shifting back and forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. ..."
    "... the military had become an active political force. Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference. And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military. ..."
    "... Mills believed that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life constituted a substantial attack on the isolationism which had once characterized public opinion. He argued that "the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large." ..."
    "... In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what the military definition of reality forbids. If the changes described by Mills were indeed permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical, and depressing, transformation of the nature of the United States. ..."
    "... The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. ..."
    "... Mills's prediction that both the economy and the political system of the United States would come to be ever more dominated by the military ..."
    "... Business firms, still the most powerful force in American life, are increasingly global in nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps only a minority of their employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice between invading another country and investing in its industries and they will nearly always choose the latter over the former. ..."
    "... Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. ..."
    May-June 1 1999, | prospect.org

    Originally from: The Power Elite Now

    ... ... ...

    The Warlords

    One of the crucial arguments Mills made in The Power Elite was that the emergence of the Cold War completely transformed the American public's historic opposition to a permanent military establishment in the United States. In deed, he stressed that America's military elite was now linked to its economic and political elite. Personnel were constantly shifting back and forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. And while all these links between the economy and the military were being forged, the military had become an active political force. Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference. And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military.

    Mills believed that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life constituted a substantial attack on the isolationism which had once characterized public opinion. He argued that "the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large." Their goal was nothing less than a redefinition of reality -- one in which the American people would come to accept what Mills called "an emergency without a foreseeable end." "

    War or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States,"

    Mills wrote. In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what the military definition of reality forbids. If the changes described by Mills were indeed permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical, and depressing, transformation of the nature of the United States.

    Much as Mills wrote, it remains true today that Congress is extremely friendly to the military, at least in part because the military has become so powerful in the districts of most congressmen. Military bases are an important source of jobs for many Americans, and government spending on the military is crucial to companies, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which manufacture military equipment. American firms are the leaders in the world's global arms market, manufacturing and exporting weapons everywhere. Some weapons systems never seem to die, even if, as was the case with a "Star Wars" system designed to destroy incoming missiles, there is no demonstrable military need for them.

    Yet despite these similarities with the 1950s, both the world and the role that America plays in that world have changed. For one thing, the United States has been unable to muster its forces for any sustained use in any foreign conflict since Vietnam. Worried about the possibility of a public backlash against the loss of American lives, American presidents either refrain from pursuing military adventures abroad or confine them to rapid strikes, along the lines pursued by Presidents Bush and Clinton in Iraq. Since 1989, moreover, the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe has undermined the capacity of America's elites to mobilize support for military expenditures. China, which at the time Mills wrote was considered a serious threat, is now viewed by American businessmen as a source of great potential investment. Domestic political support for a large and permanent military establishment in the United States, in short, can no longer be taken for granted.

    The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. At the time Mills wrote, defense expenditures constituted roughly 60 percent of all federal outlays and consumed nearly 10 percent of the U. S. gross domestic product. By the late 1990s, those proportions had fallen to 17 percent of federal outlays and 3.5 percent of GDP. Nearly three million Americans served in the armed forces when The Power Elite appeared, but that number had dropped by half at century's end. By almost any account, Mills's prediction that both the economy and the political system of the United States would come to be ever more dominated by the military is not borne out by historical developments since his time.

    And how could he have been right? Business firms, still the most powerful force in American life, are increasingly global in nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps only a minority of their employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice between invading another country and investing in its industries and they will nearly always choose the latter over the former.

    Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. Now it would be more correct to say that America's economic elite finds more in common with economic elites in other countries than it does with the military elite of its own....

    [Nov 30, 2018] US Warlords now and at the tome Miill's Poer Elite was published

    Highly recommended!
    This is from 1999 and in 2018 we see that Mills was right.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Personnel were constantly shifting back and forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. ..."
    "... the military had become an active political force. Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference. And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military. ..."
    "... Mills believed that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life constituted a substantial attack on the isolationism which had once characterized public opinion. He argued that "the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large." ..."
    "... In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what the military definition of reality forbids. If the changes described by Mills were indeed permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical, and depressing, transformation of the nature of the United States. ..."
    "... The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. ..."
    "... Mills's prediction that both the economy and the political system of the United States would come to be ever more dominated by the military ..."
    "... Business firms, still the most powerful force in American life, are increasingly global in nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps only a minority of their employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice between invading another country and investing in its industries and they will nearly always choose the latter over the former. ..."
    "... Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. ..."
    May-June 1 1999, | prospect.org

    Originally from: The Power Elite Now

    ... ... ...

    The Warlords

    One of the crucial arguments Mills made in The Power Elite was that the emergence of the Cold War completely transformed the American public's historic opposition to a permanent military establishment in the United States. In deed, he stressed that America's military elite was now linked to its economic and political elite. Personnel were constantly shifting back and forth from the corporate world to the military world. Big companies like General Motors had become dependent on military contracts. Scientific and technological innovations sponsored by the military helped fuel the growth of the economy. And while all these links between the economy and the military were being forged, the military had become an active political force. Members of Congress, once hostile to the military, now treated officers with great deference. And no president could hope to staff the Department of State, find intelligence officers, and appoint ambassadors without consulting with the military.

    Mills believed that the emergence of the military as a key force in American life constituted a substantial attack on the isolationism which had once characterized public opinion. He argued that "the warlords, along with fellow travelers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large." Their goal was nothing less than a redefinition of reality -- one in which the American people would come to accept what Mills called "an emergency without a foreseeable end." "

    War or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States,"

    Mills wrote. In this state of constant war fever, America could no longer be considered a genuine democracy, for democracy thrives on dissent and disagreement, precisely what the military definition of reality forbids. If the changes described by Mills were indeed permanent, then The Power Elite could be read as the description of a deeply radical, and depressing, transformation of the nature of the United States.

    Much as Mills wrote, it remains true today that Congress is extremely friendly to the military, at least in part because the military has become so powerful in the districts of most congressmen. Military bases are an important source of jobs for many Americans, and government spending on the military is crucial to companies, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which manufacture military equipment. American firms are the leaders in the world's global arms market, manufacturing and exporting weapons everywhere. Some weapons systems never seem to die, even if, as was the case with a "Star Wars" system designed to destroy incoming missiles, there is no demonstrable military need for them.

    Yet despite these similarities with the 1950s, both the world and the role that America plays in that world have changed. For one thing, the United States has been unable to muster its forces for any sustained use in any foreign conflict since Vietnam. Worried about the possibility of a public backlash against the loss of American lives, American presidents either refrain from pursuing military adventures abroad or confine them to rapid strikes, along the lines pursued by Presidents Bush and Clinton in Iraq. Since 1989, moreover, the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe has undermined the capacity of America's elites to mobilize support for military expenditures. China, which at the time Mills wrote was considered a serious threat, is now viewed by American businessmen as a source of great potential investment. Domestic political support for a large and permanent military establishment in the United States, in short, can no longer be taken for granted.

    The immediate consequence of these changes in the world's balance of power has been a dramatic decrease in that proportion of the American economy devoted to defense. At the time Mills wrote, defense expenditures constituted roughly 60 percent of all federal outlays and consumed nearly 10 percent of the U. S. gross domestic product. By the late 1990s, those proportions had fallen to 17 percent of federal outlays and 3.5 percent of GDP. Nearly three million Americans served in the armed forces when The Power Elite appeared, but that number had dropped by half at century's end. By almost any account, Mills's prediction that both the economy and the political system of the United States would come to be ever more dominated by the military is not borne out by historical developments since his time.

    And how could he have been right? Business firms, still the most powerful force in American life, are increasingly global in nature, more interested in protecting their profits wherever they are made than in the defense of the country in which perhaps only a minority of their employees live and work. Give most of the leaders of America's largest companies a choice between invading another country and investing in its industries and they will nearly always choose the latter over the former.

    Mills believed that in the 1950s, for the first time in American history, the military elite had formed a strong alliance with the economic elite. Now it would be more correct to say that America's economic elite finds more in common with economic elites in other countries than it does with the military elite of its own....

    [Nov 27, 2018] The political fraud of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal"

    Highly recommended!
    After Democratic party was co-opted by neoliberals there is no way back. And since Obama the trend of Democratic Party is toward strengthening the wing of CIA-democratic notthe wing of the party friendly to workers. Bought by Wall Street leadership is uncable of intruting any change that undermine thier current neoliberal platform. that's why they criminally derailed Sanders.
    Notable quotes:
    "... When you think about the issue of how exactly a clean-energy jobs program would address the elephant in the room of private accumulation and how such a program, under capitalism, would be able to pay living wages to the people put to work under it, it exposes how non threatening these Green New Deals actually are to capitalism. ..."
    "... To quote Trotsky, "These people are capable of and ready for anything!" ..."
    "... "Any serious measures to stop global warming, let alone assure a job and livable wage to everyone, would require a massive redistribution of wealth and the reallocation of trillions currently spent on US imperialism's neo-colonial wars abroad." ..."
    "... "It includes various left-sounding rhetoric, but is entirely directed to and dependent upon the Democratic Party." ..."
    "... "And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical policy is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and exploiting you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth face today -- falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of world war." - New York Times tries to shame "disillusioned young voters" into supporting the Democrats ..."
    "... It is an illusion that technical innovation within the capitalist system will magically fundamentally resolve the material problems produced by capitalism. But the inconvenient facts are entirely ignored by the corporate shills in the DSA and the whole lot of establishment politicians, who prefer to indulge their addiction to wealth and power with delusions of grandeur, technological utopianism, and other figments that serve the needs of their class. ..."
    "... First it was Obama with his phoney "hope and change" that lured young voters to the Dumbicrats and now it's Ocacia Cortez promising a "green deal" in order to herd them back into the Democratic party--a total fraud of course--totally obvious! ..."
    "... from Greenwald: The Democratic Party's deceitful game https://www.salon.com/2010/... ..."
    Nov 27, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    Raymond Colison • 4 days ago

    they literally ripped this out of the 2016 Green Party platform. Jill Stein spoke repeatedly about the same exact kind of Green New Deal, a full-employment, transition-to-100%-renewables program that would supposedly solve all the world's problems.

    When you think about the issue of how exactly a clean-energy jobs program would address the elephant in the room of private accumulation and how such a program, under capitalism, would be able to pay living wages to the people put to work under it, it exposes how non threatening these Green New Deals actually are to capitalism.

    In 2016, when the Greens made this their central economic policy proposal, the Democrats responded by calling that platform irresponsible and dangerous ("even if it's a good idea, you can't actually vote for a non-two-party candidate!"). Why would they suddenly find a green new deal appealing now except for its true purpose: left cover for the very system destroying the planet.

    To quote Trotsky, "These people are capable of and ready for anything!"

    Greg • 4 days ago
    "Any serious measures to stop global warming, let alone assure a job and livable wage to everyone, would require a massive redistribution of wealth and the reallocation of trillions currently spent on US imperialism's neo-colonial wars abroad."

    Their political position not only lacks seriousness, unserious is their political position.

    "It includes various left-sounding rhetoric, but is entirely directed to and dependent upon the Democratic Party."

    For subjective-idealists, what you want to believe, think and feel is just so much more convincing than objective reality. Especially when it covers over single-minded class interests at play.

    "And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical policy is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and exploiting you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth face today -- falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of world war." - New York Times tries to shame "disillusioned young voters" into supporting the Democrats

    Penny Smith • 4 days ago
    It is an illusion that technical innovation within the capitalist system will magically fundamentally resolve the material problems produced by capitalism. But the inconvenient facts are entirely ignored by the corporate shills in the DSA and the whole lot of establishment politicians, who prefer to indulge their addiction to wealth and power with delusions of grandeur, technological utopianism, and other figments that serve the needs of their class.
    Jim Bergren • 4 days ago
    First it was Obama with his phoney "hope and change" that lured young voters to the Dumbicrats and now it's Ocacia Cortez promising a "green deal" in order to herd them back into the Democratic party--a total fraud of course--totally obvious!

    Only an International Socialist program led by Workers can truly lead a "green revolution" by expropriating the billionaire oil barons of their capital and redirecting that wealth into the socialist reconstruction of the entire economy.

    Master Oroko • 4 days ago
    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" is a nice laugh. Really, it sure is funny hearing these lies given any credence at all. This showmanship belongs in a fantasy book, not in real life. The Democratic Party as a force for good social change Now that's a laugh!
    Vivek Jain • 4 days ago
    from Greenwald: The Democratic Party's deceitful game https://www.salon.com/2010/...
    лидия • 5 days ago
    "Greenwashing" of capitalism (and also of Zionist apartheid colony in Palestine) is but one of dirty tricks by Dems and their "left" backers.
    Kalen • 5 days ago
    Lies, empty promises, meaningless tautologies and morality plays, qualified and conditional declarations to be backpedalled pending appropriate political expediencies, devoid any practical content that is what AOC, card carrying member of DSA, and in fact young energetic political apparatchik of calcified political body of Dems establishment, duty engulfs. And working for socialist revolution is no one of them.

    What kind of socialist would reject socialist revolution, class struggle and class emancipation and choose, as a suppose socialist path, accommodation with oligarchic ruling elite via political, not revolutionary process that would have necessarily overthrown ruling elite.

    What socialist would acquiesce to legalized exploitation of people for profit, legalized greed and inequality and would negotiate away fundamental principle of egalitarianism and working people self rule?

    Only National Socialist would; and that is exactly what AOC campaign turned out to be all about.

    National Socialism with imperial flavor is her affiliation and what her praises for Pelosi, wife of a billionaire and dead warmonger McCain proved.

    Now she is peddling magical thinking about global change and plunge herself into falacy of entrepreneurship, Market solution to the very problem that the market solutions were designed to create and aggravate namely horrific inequality that is robbing people from their own opportunities to mitigate devastating effects of global change.

    The insidiousness of phony socialists expresses itself in the fact that they lie that any social problem can be fixed by current of future technical means, namely via so called technological revolution instead by socialist revolution they deem unnecessary or detrimental.

    Me at home Kalen • 4 days ago
    The technical means for achieving socialism has existed since the late 19th century, with the telegraph, the coal-powered factory, and modern fertilizer. The improvements since then have only made socialism even more streamlined and efficient, if such technologies could only be liberated from capital! The idea that "we need a new technological revolution just to achieve socialism" reflects the indoctrination in capitalism by many "socialist" theorists because it is only in capitalism where "technological growth" is essential simply to maintain the system. It is only in capitalism (especially America, the most advanced capitalist nation, and thus, the one where capitalism is actually closest towards total crisis) where the dogma of a technological savior is most entrenched because America cannot offer any other kind of palliative to the more literate and productive sections of its population. Religion will not convince most and any attempt at a sociological or economic understanding would inevitably prove the truth of socialism.

    [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

    Highly recommended!
    Skripal events probably helped to advance this line of investigation. So in a way UK intelligence services put their own stooge on the line of fire.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering ..."
    "... The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively. ..."
    "... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did. ..."
    "... The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials. ..."
    "... The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up. ..."
    "... Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
    "... The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition. ..."
    "... Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets. ..."
    "... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
    Nov 19, 2018 | www.rt.com
    Kremlin critic Bill Browder may have given the order for his employee Sergei Magnitsky to be poisoned with a rare toxin in a Russian prison cell, along with other suspects in a tax-evasion probe against him, prosecutors have said. British financier Browder was once a well-connected investor in post-Soviet Russia, but he became a fugitive from the law in the country after being accused of financial crimes. In the West, however, he is best known as the employer of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who died in police custody while being investigated in connection to the Browder case. Magnitsky's death became an international scandal, with Browder accusing Russian officials of killing him.

    Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering.

    The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively.

    Korobeinikov died after falling off a high-rise building, while the others had health complications. The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a rare water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths, while Korobeinikov had traces of it in his liver, according to a post mortem. An investigation into four possible murders has been opened.

    Read more
    UK 'fraudster' Browder briefly detained in Spain on Russian warrant, tweets from police car

    Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did.

    The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials.

    The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up.

    Last year, Browder was sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison for tax evasion. The trial was held in absentia and Moscow failed to have him extradited to serve the term. The prosecutors said that they will renew attempts to get custody of Browder as part of the new criminal case, using a UN convention on fighting transnational crime to have him arrested.

    Browder is a US-born British financier, whose change of citizenship had the benefit of allowing him to avoid paying tax on foreign earnings. However, he claimed the switch was prompted by his family being persecuted in the US during the McCarthyism witch hunt, while the UK seemed like the land of law and order.

    Read more

    Magnitsky Act mastermind seeks to stop Cyprus from revealing his offshore assets to Russia

    He made a fortune in Russia during the country's chaotic transition to a market economy, having invested before there was a stock exchange in Moscow. His Hermitage Capital Management fund was a leading foreign investment entity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

    Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    The transformation of his public image from a financial shark into a human rights crusader started when Browder himself entered the spotlight of Russian law enforcement. In 2007, the foundation he ran was targeted by a probe into possible large-scale embezzlement of Russian taxpayers' money. Magnitsky, who worked for Browder and had knowledge of his firms' finances, was arrested and held in pre-trial detention until his death in November 2009. The British businessman insisted that the entire case was fabricated and that Magnitsky had been assassinated for exposing a criminal scheme involving several Russian tax officials.

    The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition.

    Browder's new-found status as a rights advocate and self-proclaimed worst enemy of Putin helps him deflect Russia's attempts to prosecute him. On several occasions, Russia filed international arrest warrants against him with Interpol, which even led to his brief detention in Spain last May.

    Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets.

    If you like this story, share it with a friend!

    [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. ..."
    "... Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. ..."
    "... George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification." ..."
    "... Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country. ..."
    "... Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime. ..."
    "... Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face). ..."
    "... America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics. ..."
    Nov 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

    President Donald Trump's recent statement on the Jamal Khashoggi killing by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince might well be considered a metaphor for his foreign policy. Several commentators have suggested that the text appears to be something that Trump wrote himself without any adult supervision, similar to the poorly expressed random arguments presented in his tweeting only longer. That might be the case, but it would not be wise to dismiss the document as merely frivolous or misguided as it does in reality express the kind of thinking that has produced a foreign policy that seems to drift randomly to no real end, a kind of leaderless creative destruction of the United States as a world power.

    Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of Britain in the mid nineteenth century, famously said that "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests."The United States currently has neither real friends nor any clearly defined interests. It is, however, infested with parasites that have convinced an at-drift America that their causes are identical to the interests of the United States. Leading the charge to reduce the U.S. to "bitch" status, as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has artfully put it , are Israel and Saudi Arabia, but there are many other countries, alliances and advocacy groups that have learned how to subvert and direct the "leader of the free world."

    Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. It is difficult to find a part of the world where an actual American interest is being served by Washington's foreign and global security policies. Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. The fact that no one is the media or in political circles is even talking about that terrible danger suggests that war has again become mainstreamed, tacitly benefiting from bipartisan acceptance of it as a viable foreign policy tool by the media, in the U.S. Congress and also in the White House.

    The part of the world where American meddling coupled with ignorance has produced the worst result is inevitably the Middle East...

    ... ... ...

    All of the White House's actions have one thing in common and that is that they do not benefit Americans in any way unless one works for a weapons manufacturer, and that is not even taking into consideration the dead soldiers and civilians and the massive debt that has been incurred to intervene all over the world. One might also add that most of America's interventions are built on deliberate lies by the government and its associated media, intended to increase tension and create a casus belli where none exists.

    So what is to be done as it often seems that the best thing Trump has going for him is that he is not Hillary Clinton? First of all, a comprehensive rethink of what the real interests of the United States are in the world arena is past due. America is less safe now than it was in 2001 as it continues to make enemies with its blundering everywhere it goes. There are now four times as many designated terrorists as there were in 2001, active in 70 countries. One would quite plausibly soon arrive at George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."

    George Washington or any of the other Founders would be appalled to see an America with 800 military bases overseas, allegedly for self-defense. The transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the military industrial complex and related entities like Wall Street has been catastrophic. The United States does not need to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia, two countries that are armed to the teeth and well able to defend themselves. Nor does it have to be in Syria and Afghanistan. And

    If the United States were to withdraw its military from the Middle East and the rest of Asia tomorrow, it would be to nearly everyone's benefit. If the armed forces were to be subsequently reduced to a level sufficient to defend the United States it would put money back in the pockets of Americans and end the continuous fearmongering through surfacing of "threats" by career militarists justifying the bloated budgets.

    ... ... ...

    Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests [email protected] .

    anon [355] Disclaimer , says: November 27, 2018 at 5:38 am GMT

    US foreign policy is controlled by a few key ethnic groups and (to a lesser degree) the military-industrial complex.
    Justsaying , says: November 27, 2018 at 6:04 am GMT

    but even small steps in the right direction could initiate a gradual process of turning the United States into a more normal country in its relationships with the rest of the world rather than a universal predator and bully.

    Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country.

    To expect mutations -- no matter how slow or fast in a trait that appears deeply embedded in our DNA is to be naive. Add to that the intractable stranglehold Zionists and organized world Jewry has on our nuts and decision making. A more congruent convergence of histories and DNAs would be hard to come by among other nations. Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime.

    Z-man , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:11 am GMT
    Great article and I will spread it around.

    Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face).

    Hey, how about a Rand Paul-Tulsi Gabbard fusion ticket in 2024, not a bad idea, IMHO.

    Going back to the Administration you can see the slimy Zionist hands of Steven Miller on all of those foreign policy statements. Trump is allowing this because he has to protect his flanks from Zionists, Christian or otherwise. He might be just giving Miller just enough rope to jettison him (wishful thinking on my part). Or he doesn't care or is unaware of the texts, a possibility.

    anon [336] Disclaimer , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:26 am GMT
    1. Because that defies human nature. See all of history if you disagree.

    2. America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics.

    jilles dykstra , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:30 am GMT
    The beginning of USA foreign policy for me is the 1820 or 1830 Monroe Declaration: south America is our backyard, keep out. Few people know that at the time European countries considered war on the USA because of this beginning of world domination. When I told this to a USA correspondent the reply was 'but this declaration still is taught here in glowing terms'.

    What we saw then was the case until Obama, USA foreign policy was for internal political reasons. As Hollings stated in 2004 'Bush promising AIPAC the war on Iraq, that is politics'. No empire ever, as far as I know, ever was in the comfortable position to be able to let foreign policy to be decided (almost) completely by internal politics.

    This changed during the Obama reign, the two war standard had to be lowered to one and a half. All of a sudden the USA had to develop a foreign policy, a policy that had to take into consideration the world outside the USA. Not the whole USA understands this, the die hards of Deep State in the lead.

    What a half war accomplishes we see, my opinion, in Syria, a half war does not bring victory on an enemy who wages a whole war.
    Assad is still there, Russia has airforce and naval bases in Syria.

    Normally, as any history book explains, foreign policy of a country is decided on in secret by a few people. British preparations for both WWI and WWII included detailed technical talks with both the USA and France, not even all cabinet members knew about it. One of Trump's difficulties is that Deep State does not at all has the intention of letting the president decide on foreign policy, at the time of FDR he did what he liked, though, if one reads for example Baruch's memoirs, in close cooperation with the Deep State that then existed.

    The question 'why do we not leave the rest of the world alone', hardly ever asked. The USA is nearly autarcic, foreign trade, from memory, some five percent of national income, a very luxurious position. But of course, leaving the rest of the world alone, huge internal consequences, as Hinckley explains with an example, politically impossible to stop the development of a bomber judged to be superfluous.

    Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990

    Jim Christian , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:43 am GMT
    Good luck. A fight over resources with the biggest consumer of resources, the People That Kill People and all their little buddies in the Alphabet Soup of Law Enforcement and Intelligence Depravity..

    That could get a fella hurt. Ask Jack and Bob Kennedy.

    Michael Kenny , says: November 27, 2018 at 10:10 am GMT
    "The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia is now worse than it was towards the end of the Cold War". Classic American cold warrior mentality. The present-day Russian Federation is assimilated to the former Soviet Union.
    Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website November 27, 2018 at 11:31 am GMT
    Tragically for America, and the West in general, President Trump is unrecognizable from candidate Trump :

    'This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government. The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry Their financial resources are virtually unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depths of their immorality is absolutely unlimited.'

    [Nov 27, 2018] The political fraud of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal"

    Highly recommended!
    After Democratic party was co-opted by neoliberals there is no way back. And since Obama the trend of Democratic Party is toward strengthening the wing of CIA-democratic notthe wing of the party friendly to workers. Bought by Wall Street leadership is uncable of intruting any change that undermine thier current neoliberal platform. that's why they criminally derailed Sanders.
    Notable quotes:
    "... When you think about the issue of how exactly a clean-energy jobs program would address the elephant in the room of private accumulation and how such a program, under capitalism, would be able to pay living wages to the people put to work under it, it exposes how non threatening these Green New Deals actually are to capitalism. ..."
    "... To quote Trotsky, "These people are capable of and ready for anything!" ..."
    "... "Any serious measures to stop global warming, let alone assure a job and livable wage to everyone, would require a massive redistribution of wealth and the reallocation of trillions currently spent on US imperialism's neo-colonial wars abroad." ..."
    "... "It includes various left-sounding rhetoric, but is entirely directed to and dependent upon the Democratic Party." ..."
    "... "And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical policy is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and exploiting you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth face today -- falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of world war." - New York Times tries to shame "disillusioned young voters" into supporting the Democrats ..."
    "... It is an illusion that technical innovation within the capitalist system will magically fundamentally resolve the material problems produced by capitalism. But the inconvenient facts are entirely ignored by the corporate shills in the DSA and the whole lot of establishment politicians, who prefer to indulge their addiction to wealth and power with delusions of grandeur, technological utopianism, and other figments that serve the needs of their class. ..."
    "... First it was Obama with his phoney "hope and change" that lured young voters to the Dumbicrats and now it's Ocacia Cortez promising a "green deal" in order to herd them back into the Democratic party--a total fraud of course--totally obvious! ..."
    "... from Greenwald: The Democratic Party's deceitful game https://www.salon.com/2010/... ..."
    Nov 27, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    Raymond Colison • 4 days ago

    they literally ripped this out of the 2016 Green Party platform. Jill Stein spoke repeatedly about the same exact kind of Green New Deal, a full-employment, transition-to-100%-renewables program that would supposedly solve all the world's problems.

    When you think about the issue of how exactly a clean-energy jobs program would address the elephant in the room of private accumulation and how such a program, under capitalism, would be able to pay living wages to the people put to work under it, it exposes how non threatening these Green New Deals actually are to capitalism.

    In 2016, when the Greens made this their central economic policy proposal, the Democrats responded by calling that platform irresponsible and dangerous ("even if it's a good idea, you can't actually vote for a non-two-party candidate!"). Why would they suddenly find a green new deal appealing now except for its true purpose: left cover for the very system destroying the planet.

    To quote Trotsky, "These people are capable of and ready for anything!"

    Greg • 4 days ago
    "Any serious measures to stop global warming, let alone assure a job and livable wage to everyone, would require a massive redistribution of wealth and the reallocation of trillions currently spent on US imperialism's neo-colonial wars abroad."

    Their political position not only lacks seriousness, unserious is their political position.

    "It includes various left-sounding rhetoric, but is entirely directed to and dependent upon the Democratic Party."

    For subjective-idealists, what you want to believe, think and feel is just so much more convincing than objective reality. Especially when it covers over single-minded class interests at play.

    "And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical policy is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and exploiting you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth face today -- falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of world war." - New York Times tries to shame "disillusioned young voters" into supporting the Democrats

    Penny Smith • 4 days ago
    It is an illusion that technical innovation within the capitalist system will magically fundamentally resolve the material problems produced by capitalism. But the inconvenient facts are entirely ignored by the corporate shills in the DSA and the whole lot of establishment politicians, who prefer to indulge their addiction to wealth and power with delusions of grandeur, technological utopianism, and other figments that serve the needs of their class.
    Jim Bergren • 4 days ago
    First it was Obama with his phoney "hope and change" that lured young voters to the Dumbicrats and now it's Ocacia Cortez promising a "green deal" in order to herd them back into the Democratic party--a total fraud of course--totally obvious!

    Only an International Socialist program led by Workers can truly lead a "green revolution" by expropriating the billionaire oil barons of their capital and redirecting that wealth into the socialist reconstruction of the entire economy.

    Master Oroko • 4 days ago
    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" is a nice laugh. Really, it sure is funny hearing these lies given any credence at all. This showmanship belongs in a fantasy book, not in real life. The Democratic Party as a force for good social change Now that's a laugh!
    Vivek Jain • 4 days ago
    from Greenwald: The Democratic Party's deceitful game https://www.salon.com/2010/...
    лидия • 5 days ago
    "Greenwashing" of capitalism (and also of Zionist apartheid colony in Palestine) is but one of dirty tricks by Dems and their "left" backers.
    Kalen • 5 days ago
    Lies, empty promises, meaningless tautologies and morality plays, qualified and conditional declarations to be backpedalled pending appropriate political expediencies, devoid any practical content that is what AOC, card carrying member of DSA, and in fact young energetic political apparatchik of calcified political body of Dems establishment, duty engulfs. And working for socialist revolution is no one of them.

    What kind of socialist would reject socialist revolution, class struggle and class emancipation and choose, as a suppose socialist path, accommodation with oligarchic ruling elite via political, not revolutionary process that would have necessarily overthrown ruling elite.

    What socialist would acquiesce to legalized exploitation of people for profit, legalized greed and inequality and would negotiate away fundamental principle of egalitarianism and working people self rule?

    Only National Socialist would; and that is exactly what AOC campaign turned out to be all about.

    National Socialism with imperial flavor is her affiliation and what her praises for Pelosi, wife of a billionaire and dead warmonger McCain proved.

    Now she is peddling magical thinking about global change and plunge herself into falacy of entrepreneurship, Market solution to the very problem that the market solutions were designed to create and aggravate namely horrific inequality that is robbing people from their own opportunities to mitigate devastating effects of global change.

    The insidiousness of phony socialists expresses itself in the fact that they lie that any social problem can be fixed by current of future technical means, namely via so called technological revolution instead by socialist revolution they deem unnecessary or detrimental.

    Me at home Kalen • 4 days ago
    The technical means for achieving socialism has existed since the late 19th century, with the telegraph, the coal-powered factory, and modern fertilizer. The improvements since then have only made socialism even more streamlined and efficient, if such technologies could only be liberated from capital! The idea that "we need a new technological revolution just to achieve socialism" reflects the indoctrination in capitalism by many "socialist" theorists because it is only in capitalism where "technological growth" is essential simply to maintain the system. It is only in capitalism (especially America, the most advanced capitalist nation, and thus, the one where capitalism is actually closest towards total crisis) where the dogma of a technological savior is most entrenched because America cannot offer any other kind of palliative to the more literate and productive sections of its population. Religion will not convince most and any attempt at a sociological or economic understanding would inevitably prove the truth of socialism.

    [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

    Highly recommended!
    Skripal events probably helped to advance this line of investigation. So in a way UK intelligence services put their own stooge on the line of fire.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering ..."
    "... The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively. ..."
    "... Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did. ..."
    "... The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials. ..."
    "... The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up. ..."
    "... Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
    "... The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition. ..."
    "... Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets. ..."
    "... If you like this story, share it with a friend! ..."
    Nov 19, 2018 | www.rt.com
    Kremlin critic Bill Browder may have given the order for his employee Sergei Magnitsky to be poisoned with a rare toxin in a Russian prison cell, along with other suspects in a tax-evasion probe against him, prosecutors have said. British financier Browder was once a well-connected investor in post-Soviet Russia, but he became a fugitive from the law in the country after being accused of financial crimes. In the West, however, he is best known as the employer of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian accountant who died in police custody while being investigated in connection to the Browder case. Magnitsky's death became an international scandal, with Browder accusing Russian officials of killing him.

    Russian prosecutors on Monday claimed that Magnitsky and several other people familiar with Browder's illicit activities in Russia may have been killed on his order. They said a new criminal case has been opened against Browder in Russia, and that Moscow will seek his extradition as an alleged ringleader of an international criminal enterprise involved in money laundering.

    The prosecutors identified four people who were suspects in the Browder case, all of whom died over the course of less than two years as the investigation against him unfolded. Oktay Gasanov was the first of the four, dying in October 2007; while Magnitsky's death in November 2009 was the last. By the time of his death, Magnitsky had spent almost a year in pre-trial detention. The two others were Valery Kurochkin and Sergey Korobeinikov, who died in April 2008 and September 2008, respectively.

    Korobeinikov died after falling off a high-rise building, while the others had health complications. The Russian prosecutors believe all four of them may have been killed with a rare water-soluble compound of aluminum. Each of the men showed symptoms consistent with being poisoned by the toxin prior to their deaths, while Korobeinikov had traces of it in his liver, according to a post mortem. An investigation into four possible murders has been opened.

    Read more
    UK 'fraudster' Browder briefly detained in Spain on Russian warrant, tweets from police car

    Considering that the three individuals, with the exception of Magnitsky, died within months of each other while being investigated as part of Browder's case, "it is highly likely that they were killed to get rid of accomplices who could give an incriminating testimony against Browder," a senior official with the Russian General Prosecutor's office told journalists. The same may be true for Magnitsky, he said. The prosecutor stressed that Russia didn't conduct detailed studies into how the suspected poison affects living organisms, but several research institutions based in the US, France and Italy did.

    The prosecutors claim that Browder was the party who benefited most from the death of Magnitsky. They cited journalist Oleg Lurie, who shared a prison cell with Magnitsky before the latter's death. Speaking under oath during a court hearing in New York, Lurie said that his cellmate had complained to him that Browder's lawyers were pressuring him into signing a false statement. Magnitsky's testimony claimed that he had uncovered a conspiracy to embezzle taxpayers' money involving Russian officials.

    The Russian prosecutors said Browder allegedly wanted to silence his employee after obtaining the false claim. The statement itself was used to blame Russian officials for Magnitsky's death and accuse the Russian government of a cover-up.

    Last year, Browder was sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison for tax evasion. The trial was held in absentia and Moscow failed to have him extradited to serve the term. The prosecutors said that they will renew attempts to get custody of Browder as part of the new criminal case, using a UN convention on fighting transnational crime to have him arrested.

    Browder is a US-born British financier, whose change of citizenship had the benefit of allowing him to avoid paying tax on foreign earnings. However, he claimed the switch was prompted by his family being persecuted in the US during the McCarthyism witch hunt, while the UK seemed like the land of law and order.

    Read more

    Magnitsky Act mastermind seeks to stop Cyprus from revealing his offshore assets to Russia

    He made a fortune in Russia during the country's chaotic transition to a market economy, having invested before there was a stock exchange in Moscow. His Hermitage Capital Management fund was a leading foreign investment entity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

    Described by critics as a 'vulture capitalist,' Browder seemed quite comfortable earning millions of dollars in the financial wild west. In 2005, as fallen oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was standing trial for tax evasion, Browder scolded him on the BBC for using personal wealth to grasp at political power, and for leaving "in his wake aggrieved investors too numerous to count." He was also a staunch public supporter of the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    The transformation of his public image from a financial shark into a human rights crusader started when Browder himself entered the spotlight of Russian law enforcement. In 2007, the foundation he ran was targeted by a probe into possible large-scale embezzlement of Russian taxpayers' money. Magnitsky, who worked for Browder and had knowledge of his firms' finances, was arrested and held in pre-trial detention until his death in November 2009. The British businessman insisted that the entire case was fabricated and that Magnitsky had been assassinated for exposing a criminal scheme involving several Russian tax officials.

    The investor then reinvented himself as an anti-Putin figure, using the death of Magnitsky to lobby various countries to impose sanctions on the Russian officials he blamed for his employee's death. The US Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing people accused by Washington of human rights violations to be targeted. However, it is perceived by the Kremlin as just a tool to restrain Russia for the sake of global political and economic competition.

    Browder's new-found status as a rights advocate and self-proclaimed worst enemy of Putin helps him deflect Russia's attempts to prosecute him. On several occasions, Russia filed international arrest warrants against him with Interpol, which even led to his brief detention in Spain last May.

    Among Browder's latest exploits is playing a role in the 'Russiagate' story. A key part of the elusive search for collusion between US President Donald Trump and the Russian government is a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer. The meeting was apparently organized with a view to lobbying for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. Its architect, Browder, has therefore been eager to lend his expertise on 'Russian machinations' to US lawmakers and media outlets.

    If you like this story, share it with a friend!

    [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. ..."
    "... Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. ..."
    "... George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification." ..."
    "... Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country. ..."
    "... Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime. ..."
    "... Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face). ..."
    "... America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics. ..."
    Nov 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

    President Donald Trump's recent statement on the Jamal Khashoggi killing by Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince might well be considered a metaphor for his foreign policy. Several commentators have suggested that the text appears to be something that Trump wrote himself without any adult supervision, similar to the poorly expressed random arguments presented in his tweeting only longer. That might be the case, but it would not be wise to dismiss the document as merely frivolous or misguided as it does in reality express the kind of thinking that has produced a foreign policy that seems to drift randomly to no real end, a kind of leaderless creative destruction of the United States as a world power.

    Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of Britain in the mid nineteenth century, famously said that "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests."The United States currently has neither real friends nor any clearly defined interests. It is, however, infested with parasites that have convinced an at-drift America that their causes are identical to the interests of the United States. Leading the charge to reduce the U.S. to "bitch" status, as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has artfully put it , are Israel and Saudi Arabia, but there are many other countries, alliances and advocacy groups that have learned how to subvert and direct the "leader of the free world."

    Trump's memo on the Saudis begins with the headline "The world is a very dangerous place!" Indeed, it is and behavior by the three occupants of the White House since 2000 is largely to blame. It is difficult to find a part of the world where an actual American interest is being served by Washington's foreign and global security policies. Indeed, a national security policy that sees competitors and adversaries as enemies in a military sense has made nuclear war, unthinkable since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, thinkable once again. The fact that no one is the media or in political circles is even talking about that terrible danger suggests that war has again become mainstreamed, tacitly benefiting from bipartisan acceptance of it as a viable foreign policy tool by the media, in the U.S. Congress and also in the White House.

    The part of the world where American meddling coupled with ignorance has produced the worst result is inevitably the Middle East...

    ... ... ...

    All of the White House's actions have one thing in common and that is that they do not benefit Americans in any way unless one works for a weapons manufacturer, and that is not even taking into consideration the dead soldiers and civilians and the massive debt that has been incurred to intervene all over the world. One might also add that most of America's interventions are built on deliberate lies by the government and its associated media, intended to increase tension and create a casus belli where none exists.

    So what is to be done as it often seems that the best thing Trump has going for him is that he is not Hillary Clinton? First of all, a comprehensive rethink of what the real interests of the United States are in the world arena is past due. America is less safe now than it was in 2001 as it continues to make enemies with its blundering everywhere it goes. There are now four times as many designated terrorists as there were in 2001, active in 70 countries. One would quite plausibly soon arrive at George Washington's dictum in his Farewell Address , counseling his countrymen to "observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all." And Washington might have somehow foreseen the poisonous relationships with Israel and the Saudis when he warned that " a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."

    George Washington or any of the other Founders would be appalled to see an America with 800 military bases overseas, allegedly for self-defense. The transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the military industrial complex and related entities like Wall Street has been catastrophic. The United States does not need to protect Israel and Saudi Arabia, two countries that are armed to the teeth and well able to defend themselves. Nor does it have to be in Syria and Afghanistan. And

    If the United States were to withdraw its military from the Middle East and the rest of Asia tomorrow, it would be to nearly everyone's benefit. If the armed forces were to be subsequently reduced to a level sufficient to defend the United States it would put money back in the pockets of Americans and end the continuous fearmongering through surfacing of "threats" by career militarists justifying the bloated budgets.

    ... ... ...

    Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests [email protected] .

    anon [355] Disclaimer , says: November 27, 2018 at 5:38 am GMT

    US foreign policy is controlled by a few key ethnic groups and (to a lesser degree) the military-industrial complex.
    Justsaying , says: November 27, 2018 at 6:04 am GMT

    but even small steps in the right direction could initiate a gradual process of turning the United States into a more normal country in its relationships with the rest of the world rather than a universal predator and bully.

    Cautious optimism may be better than none, but futile nonetheless. Bullying, dispossession, slavery and genocide constitute the very bedrock, the essence and soul of the founding of our country.

    To expect mutations -- no matter how slow or fast in a trait that appears deeply embedded in our DNA is to be naive. Add to that the intractable stranglehold Zionists and organized world Jewry has on our nuts and decision making. A more congruent convergence of histories and DNAs would be hard to come by among other nations. Truth be told we simply know of no other kinder, gentler alternatives to perpetual war and destruction as the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Normality? Not in my lifetime.

    Z-man , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:11 am GMT
    Great article and I will spread it around.

    Your CNI and 'If Americans Knew' informed me about Rand Paul's courageous move. I plan to call his office today to give him encouragement and call my Senators and Representative to urge them to support him (fat chance of that but I have to stick it in their face).

    Hey, how about a Rand Paul-Tulsi Gabbard fusion ticket in 2024, not a bad idea, IMHO.

    Going back to the Administration you can see the slimy Zionist hands of Steven Miller on all of those foreign policy statements. Trump is allowing this because he has to protect his flanks from Zionists, Christian or otherwise. He might be just giving Miller just enough rope to jettison him (wishful thinking on my part). Or he doesn't care or is unaware of the texts, a possibility.

    anon [336] Disclaimer , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:26 am GMT
    1. Because that defies human nature. See all of history if you disagree.

    2. America doesn't have a policy because America is no longer a real nation. It's an empire filled with diverse groups of peoples who all hate each other and want to use the power of the government for the benefit of their overseas co-ethnics.

    jilles dykstra , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:30 am GMT
    The beginning of USA foreign policy for me is the 1820 or 1830 Monroe Declaration: south America is our backyard, keep out. Few people know that at the time European countries considered war on the USA because of this beginning of world domination. When I told this to a USA correspondent the reply was 'but this declaration still is taught here in glowing terms'.

    What we saw then was the case until Obama, USA foreign policy was for internal political reasons. As Hollings stated in 2004 'Bush promising AIPAC the war on Iraq, that is politics'. No empire ever, as far as I know, ever was in the comfortable position to be able to let foreign policy to be decided (almost) completely by internal politics.

    This changed during the Obama reign, the two war standard had to be lowered to one and a half. All of a sudden the USA had to develop a foreign policy, a policy that had to take into consideration the world outside the USA. Not the whole USA understands this, the die hards of Deep State in the lead.

    What a half war accomplishes we see, my opinion, in Syria, a half war does not bring victory on an enemy who wages a whole war.
    Assad is still there, Russia has airforce and naval bases in Syria.

    Normally, as any history book explains, foreign policy of a country is decided on in secret by a few people. British preparations for both WWI and WWII included detailed technical talks with both the USA and France, not even all cabinet members knew about it. One of Trump's difficulties is that Deep State does not at all has the intention of letting the president decide on foreign policy, at the time of FDR he did what he liked, though, if one reads for example Baruch's memoirs, in close cooperation with the Deep State that then existed.

    The question 'why do we not leave the rest of the world alone', hardly ever asked. The USA is nearly autarcic, foreign trade, from memory, some five percent of national income, a very luxurious position. But of course, leaving the rest of the world alone, huge internal consequences, as Hinckley explains with an example, politically impossible to stop the development of a bomber judged to be superfluous.

    Barbara Hinckley Sheldon Goldman, American Politics and Government, Glenview Ill.,1990

    Jim Christian , says: November 27, 2018 at 9:43 am GMT
    Good luck. A fight over resources with the biggest consumer of resources, the People That Kill People and all their little buddies in the Alphabet Soup of Law Enforcement and Intelligence Depravity..

    That could get a fella hurt. Ask Jack and Bob Kennedy.

    Michael Kenny , says: November 27, 2018 at 10:10 am GMT
    "The bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Russia is now worse than it was towards the end of the Cold War". Classic American cold warrior mentality. The present-day Russian Federation is assimilated to the former Soviet Union.
    Johnny Rottenborough , says: Website November 27, 2018 at 11:31 am GMT
    Tragically for America, and the West in general, President Trump is unrecognizable from candidate Trump :

    'This is a crossroads in the history of our civilization that will determine whether or not we the people reclaim control over our government. The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry Their financial resources are virtually unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depths of their immorality is absolutely unlimited.'

    [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Telegraph adds that the UK's dispute with the Trump administration is so politically sensitive that staff within the British Embassy in D.C. have been barred from discussing it with journalists. Theresa May has also "been kept at arms-length and is understood to have not raised the issue directly with the US president ." ..."
    "... In September , we reported that the British government "expressed grave concerns" over the material in question after President Trump issued an order to the DOJ to release a wide swath of materials, "immediately" and "without redaction." ..."
    "... Trump walked that order back days later after the UK begged him not to release them. ..."
    "... MI6 agents have a reputation for writing fiction. Ian Fleming comes to mind. Its is interesting to reflect on the similarities of fiction and so called intelligence. ..."
    "... Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA's Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself. ..."
    "... To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ ..."
    "... The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial of two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump associates. ..."
    "... GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping surveillance on Trump associates. ..."
    "... The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. ..."
    "... The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised. ..."
    "... Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner. ..."
    "... After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian lawyer at the meeting Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK, federal sources said. ..."
    "... By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole to wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones and emails of U.S. citizens inside the United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil at Fort Meade. ..."
    "... The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the evidence is considered "poisoned fruit. ..."
    "... Add: GCHQ (UK NSA) was in agreement with HilBarry Inc to block the US 2016 election for U.K. candidate Hillary aka Clinton 'Rhodes scholar' Brit colonial agent. Study who 'Rhodes' was. CIA and MI6 are UK siblings. Note nickname for CIA is "Langley" = 'The English' in French L'Anglai. Trump Tower - Russkie atty Natalia met with Simpson GPS Fusion to debrief before & after meeting. Natalia was granted US entry by Mueller Spec Counsel teamster Preet Baharara (conflict in that Preet is compromised witness and also SC "investigator"). Russkie Ahkmedishin met with Obama WH in prep for meeting (see Jan 2016 WH log). The 'translator' at meeting was Obama WH translator. ..."
    "... The evidence for false Trump Russkie bank connections is a phony server set up by CIA agent McMullen that robo scammed Russian Alfa Bank to robo talk to the phony server the CIA named with miss-spell Trump OrGAINization. See godaddy domain registration. Hillary slandered Trump with this scam on Twitter Oct 31, 2016 - her witchy day. ..."
    "... Obama used the intelligence agencies to spy on all political opponents, not just the Trump campaign and eventually the administration. NSA databases were being queried by Democrat contractors with content feed to Obama's National Security staff where communications were "unmasked" by Rice and others. Rodgers shut down the scheme. So much Marxist criminality and fraud left unpunished. ..."
    "... George Papadopoulos was not the reason the FBI opened their 2016 Counterintelligence Investigation into the Trump Campaign. John Brennan was the reason. ..."
    "... Brennan was the man pushing the entire Russian Narrative that consumed Washington D.C. – and ultimately led to the Mueller Investigation. He did this based on little or no evidence. The Electronic Communication should prove interesting. John Brennan's Role in the FBI's Trump-Russia Investigation ..."
    "... In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with then-CIA Head John Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump Campaign and Moscow. ..."
    "... @Chupacabra-322 URL s/b " https://themarketswork.com/2018/04/09/john-brennans-role-in-the-fbis-trump-russia-investigation/ " ..."
    "... The Trump Team was being surveiled the entire time by Breanan via the GCHQ. The CIA are Analysts. That's it. They had to involve the FBI to begin the Surveillance & Criminal Investigation into the Counter Intelligence Operation. Thus, Criminal at Large Breanan's trip up to Capital Hill to meet with Harry Reid to brief him on Steele. Brennan the "Puppet Master" has been quarter backing the entire Deep State Intelligence Psychological Operation & Parallel Construction Surveillance from the very start. ..."
    "... They've been reverse engineering their lies ever since they lost the election to cover their tracks and use the excuse of "Plausible Deniability" as the Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Seditious Psychopaths at the CIA always claim. ..."
    "... Why get a FISA warrant for Cater Paige after he left the Trump Team? Because folks, the FISA Warrant is RETROACTIVE. ..."
    Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation, according to The Telegraph , stating that any disclosure would "undermine intelligence gathering if he releases pages of an FBI application to wiretap one of his former campaign advisers."

    Trump's allies, however, are fighting back - demanding transparency and suggesting that the UK wouldn't want the documents withheld unless it had something to hide.

    The Telegraph has talked to more than a dozen UK and US officials, including in American intelligence, who have revealed details about the row.

    British spy chiefs have "genuine concern" about sources being exposed if classified parts of the wiretap request were made public, according to figures familiar with discussions.

    " It boils down to the exposure of people ", said one US intelligence official, adding: " We don't want to reveal sources and methods ." US intelligence shares the concerns of the UK.

    Another said Britain feared setting a dangerous "precedent" which could make people less likely to share information, knowing that it could one day become public. - The Telegraph

    The Telegraph adds that the UK's dispute with the Trump administration is so politically sensitive that staff within the British Embassy in D.C. have been barred from discussing it with journalists. Theresa May has also "been kept at arms-length and is understood to have not raised the issue directly with the US president ."

    In September , we reported that the British government "expressed grave concerns" over the material in question after President Trump issued an order to the DOJ to release a wide swath of materials, "immediately" and "without redaction."

    Trump walked that order back days later after the UK begged him not to release them.

    Mr Trump wants to declassify 21 pages from one of the applications. He announced the move in September, then backtracked, then this month said he was "very seriously" considering it again. Both Britain and Australia are understood to be opposing the move.

    Memos detailing alleged ties between Mr Trump and Russia compiled by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer , were cited in the application, which could explain some of the British concern. - The Telegraph

    The New York Times reported at the time that the UK's concern was over material which " includes direct references to conversations between American law enforcement officials and Christopher Steele ," the former MI6 agent who compiled the infamous "Steele Dossier." The UK's objection, according to former US and British officials, was over revealing Steele's identity in an official document, "regardless of whether he had been named in press reports."

    We noted in September, however, that Steele's name was contained within the Nunes Memo - the House Intelligence Committee's majority opinion in the Trump-Russia case.

    Steele also had extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie , who - along with Steele - was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump called for the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly reveal more about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of Justice for lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS.

    Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016 . Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to meet with).

    Also recall that CIA/FBI "informant" (spy) Stefan Halper met with both Carter Page and Papadopoulos in London.

    Halper, a veteran of four Republican administrations, reached out to Trump aide George Papadopoulos in September 2016 with an offer to fly to London to write an academic paper on energy exploration in the Mediterranean Sea.

    Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of Democrats' emails.

    Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a government-sanctioned surveillance operation. - Daily Caller

    In total, Halper received over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for "research," over $400,000 of which was granted before and during the 2016 election season.

    Papadopoulos, who was sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying about his conversations with a shadowy Maltese professor and self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation , has publicly claimed he was targeted by UK spies, and told The Telegraph that he demands transparency. Trump's allies in Washington, meanwhile, have suggested that the facts laid out before us mean that the ongoing Russia investigation was invalid from the start .

    In short, it's understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the "witch hunt" of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a set-up from the start .

    Steele's ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true.

    Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele's unauthorized contacts with the press.

    He shared results of his investigation into Trump's links to Russia with the FBI beginning in early July 2016.

    The FBI relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to fill out applications for four FISA warrants against Page. Page has denied the dossier's claims, which include that he was the Trump campaign's back channel to the Kremlin. - Daily Caller

    That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious.

    Anunnaki , 3 minutes ago link

    Trump talks the talk but so far no walking of the walk. Not falling for it anymore, Tyler. No Swamp Draining from Pres. Cheeto anymore than we got Hope or Change from Superfly

    Kefeer , 28 minutes ago link

    When fraud is coming to light, the cockroaches scramble. The so-called intelligence agencies have run amuck for way too long and leave a trail of lies, murder and deception.

    custard , 1 hour ago link

    That is the reason Obama and Clinton went to New Zealand and Australia. They have access to the Five Eyes network in New Zealand and Australia without their requests being recorded whereas if they had asked in the US their requests and all documents given to them would have been recorded. . They are both traitors to not only the sitting President and the US people but also to the United States.

    Synoia , 1 hour ago link

    That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious.

    MI6 agents have a reputation for writing fiction. Ian Fleming comes to mind. Its is interesting to reflect on the similarities of fiction and so called intelligence.

    STONEHILLADY , 1 hour ago link

    I think we all know now that the UK not Russia was the dirtbags working for Obama/HRC to trap Trump. Release the declass Trump and let's start cleaning up the swamp. Let the SHTF those Brits have never been friends to freedom.

    fleur de lis , 1 hour ago link

    @European American,

    If they released audio-video evidence of public officials indulging in cannibalistic pedophilia at their state desks, they would still get off the hook.

    Their MSM fiends oops I meant friends would scramble to the rescue and create another AV to counter the actual one, and their idiot Democrat audiences would fall for it.

    No matter what is exposed on 5 December the perps will get off the hook.

    Chupacabra-322 , 2 hours ago link
    StarGate , 1 hour ago link

    Add: GCHQ (UK NSA) was in agreement with HilBarry Inc to block the US 2016 election for U.K. candidate Hillary aka Clinton 'Rhodes scholar' Brit colonial agent. Study who 'Rhodes' was. CIA and MI6 are UK siblings. Note nickname for CIA is "Langley" = 'The English' in French L'Anglai. Trump Tower - Russkie atty Natalia met with Simpson GPS Fusion to debrief before & after meeting. Natalia was granted US entry by Mueller Spec Counsel teamster Preet Baharara (conflict in that Preet is compromised witness and also SC "investigator"). Russkie Ahkmedishin met with Obama WH in prep for meeting (see Jan 2016 WH log). The 'translator' at meeting was Obama WH translator.

    GPS Fusion wrote the Dossier with UK spy Steele and was paid by Hillary/DNC.

    The evidence for false Trump Russkie bank connections is a phony server set up by CIA agent McMullen that robo scammed Russian Alfa Bank to robo talk to the phony server the CIA named with miss-spell Trump OrGAINization. See godaddy domain registration. Hillary slandered Trump with this scam on Twitter Oct 31, 2016 - her witchy day.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/hillaryclinton/status/793234169576947712?lang=en

    WorkingFool , 1 hour ago link

    Obama used the intelligence agencies to spy on all political opponents, not just the Trump campaign and eventually the administration. NSA databases were being queried by Democrat contractors with content feed to Obama's National Security staff where communications were "unmasked" by Rice and others. Rodgers shut down the scheme. So much Marxist criminality and fraud left unpunished.

    Chupacabra-322 , 2 hours ago link

    George Papadopoulos was not the reason the FBI opened their 2016 Counterintelligence Investigation into the Trump Campaign. John Brennan was the reason.

    Brennan was the man pushing the entire Russian Narrative that consumed Washington D.C. – and ultimately led to the Mueller Investigation. He did this based on little or no evidence. The Electronic Communication should prove interesting. John Brennan's Role in the FBI's Trump-Russia Investigation

    April 9, 2018 by Jeff Carlson, CFA

    In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with then-CIA Head John Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump Campaign and Moscow.

    That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level", face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. The meeting between Hannigan and Brennan appears somewhat unusual.

    The US and the UK are two of the so-called Five Eyes -- along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- that share a broad range of intelligence through a formalized alliance.

    The GCHQ is responsible for Britain's Signals Intelligence. The NSA is responsible for the United States' Signals Intelligence. Hannigan's U.S. counterpart was not CIA Director Brennan. Hannigan's U.S. counterpart was NSA Director Mike Rogers. Luke Harding of the Guardian originally reported the meeting in an April 13, 2017 article on Britain's spy agencies early role in the Trump-Russia investigation:

    GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious "interactions" between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information

    Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians.

    https://www.themarketswork.com/2018/04/09/john-brennans-role-in-the-fbi

    StarGate , 1 hour ago link

    See above about phony robot "suspicious communications" set up by CIA McMullen to smear Trump with Trump Tower falsely named server and data created in robo call response with Russian Alfa bank.

    Russian "communications" was e-data of the Russkie Bank and the non-Trump server named "Trump OrGAINization". It was just two robo-computers pinging back and forth.

    smacker , 1 hour ago link

    @Chupacabra-322 URL s/b " https://themarketswork.com/2018/04/09/john-brennans-role-in-the-fbis-trump-russia-investigation/ "

    Chupacabra-322 , 2 hours ago link

    The Trump Team was being surveiled the entire time by Breanan via the GCHQ. The CIA are Analysts. That's it. They had to involve the FBI to begin the Surveillance & Criminal Investigation into the Counter Intelligence Operation. Thus, Criminal at Large Breanan's trip up to Capital Hill to meet with Harry Reid to brief him on Steele. Brennan the "Puppet Master" has been quarter backing the entire Deep State Intelligence Psychological Operation & Parallel Construction Surveillance from the very start.

    They've been reverse engineering their lies ever since they lost the election to cover their tracks and use the excuse of "Plausible Deniability" as the Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Seditious Psychopaths at the CIA always claim.

    Feb 13th, Don Bongino Podcast.

    "I'll include an article from NPR. NPR, not a by any stretch a right Wing outlet. Ok? But it's actually a decent piece. Now, it describes the three hop rule. It's from 2013, but it describes it very shortly & ce scintillating in about 400 words. And it's done well so I'll include it in todays show notes.

    Remember, It's now the "Two Hop Rule" but you just have to know what a "Hop" is to understand how dangerous this is.

    Here's how they explain it.

    It says, "testimony before Congress on Wednesday, remember this is written in 2013 Joe. Showed how easy it is for Americans, with no connection to Terrorism to unwittingly have their calling patterns analyzed by the Government." This is really wacko stuff. It hinges on what is known as a "Hop."

    Or chain analysis. When the NSA identifies a suspect, it can look not just at his phone records Joe, but also the records of everyone he calls, everyone who calls those people and everyone who calls those people." Chain Migration.

    You ain't kidding! Right!? Chain spying!

    It goes on...though....this is good.

    "If the average person Joe, called 40 unique people. "Three Hop Analysts" would allow the Government to mine the records....this is a staggering number...of 2.5 Million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist."

    "Holy Moly!" Holly Moly is right.

    Why get a FISA warrant for Cater Paige after he left the Trump Team? Because folks, the FISA Warrant is RETROACTIVE.

    All the the emails he sent in the past to Trump Team members, combine that with "Two Hops" you basically have everybody in the known universe that could of ever contacted the Trump Team.

    Paige sends an email, whatever to Kushner. I don't know who he sends emails to. He probably didn't. But you get the point. Then you go to another "Hop." Kushner, who'd he send an email to? Now you got the while Trump Team.

    That's the whole point. That's why I constantly say to you that they were trying to put a legal face on this thing after they realized the election was coming up and they could lose.

    They were like. Man, we've been spying on these people the whole time. We already got most of their emails and their communications. How do we legally do it now?

    Oh, we get a FISA Warrant, we use couple of "Hops" and we're Golden."

    [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim. ..."
    "... The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region ..."
    "... The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies." ..."
    Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" published a trove of documents on November 5 which it claims exposes a UK-based psyop to create a " large-scale information secret service " in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election.

    The primary objective of the " Integrity Initiative " - established in 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft - is "to provide a coordinated Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare."

    And while the notion of Russian disinformation has become the West's favorite new bogeyman to excuse things such as Hillary Clinton's historic loss to Donald Trump, we note that "Anonymous" was called out by WikiLeaks in October 2016 as an FBI cutout, while the report on the Integrity Initiative that Anonymous exposed comes from Russian state-owned network RT - so it's anyone's guess whose 400lb hackers are at work here.

    Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.

    The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin, with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to "change attitudes in Russia itself" as well as influencing Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked documents states. - RT

    The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region .

    The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies."

    The initiative has received £168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and £250,000 from the US State Department , the documents allege.

    Some of its purported members include British MPs and high-profile " independent" journalists with a penchant for anti-Russian sentiment in their collective online oeuvre, as showcased by a brief glance at their Twitter feeds. - RT

    Noted examples of "inedependent" anti-Russia journalists:

    Spanish "Op"

    In one example of the group's activities, a "Moncloa Campaign" was successfully conducted by the group's Spanish cluster to block the appointment of Colonel Pedro Banos as the director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took just seven-and-a-half hours to accomplish, brags the group in the documents .

    "The [Spanish] government is preparing to appoint Colonel Banos, known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin positions in the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts, as Director of the Department of Homeland Security, a key body located at the Moncloa," begins Nacho Torreblanca in a seven-part tweetstorm describing what happened.

    Others joined in. Among them – according to the leaks – academic Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, who wrote that "Mr. Banos is to geopolitics as a homeopath is to medicine." Appointing such a figure would be "a shame." - RT

    The operation was reported in Spanish media, while Banos was labeled "pro-Putin" by UK MP Bob Seely.

    In short, expect anything counter to predominant "open-border" narratives to be the Kremlin's fault - and not a natural populist reflex to the destruction of borders, language and culture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


    bigger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


    Chris Donnelly - Pic via Euromaidanpress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:

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

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


    bigger

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


    bigger - bigger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.

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

    Comments Perfidious ALbion!

    When will we learn?

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

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

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

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

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

    For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also. ..."
    "... Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. ..."
    "... This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts. ..."
    Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    HowdyDoody , 7 hours ago link

    One of the documents lists a series of propaganda weapons to be used against Russia. One is use of the church as a weapon. That has already been started in Ukraine with Poroshenko buying off regligious leader to split Ukraine Orthodoxy from Russian Orthodoxy. It also explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a 'Dirty Trick' against Russia.

    activisor , 10 hours ago link

    The British political system is on the verge of collapse. BREXIT has finally demonstrated that the Government/ Opposition parties are clearly aligned against the interests of the people. The EU is nothing more than an arm of the Globalist agenda of world domination.

    The US has shown its true colours - sanctioning every country that stands for independent sovereignty is not a good foreign policy, and is destined to turn the tide of public opinion firmly against global hegemony, endless wars, and wealth inequity.

    The old Empire is in its death throes. A new paradigm awaits which will exclude all those who have exploited the many, in order to sit at the top of the pyramid. They cannot escape Karma.

    smacker , 11 hours ago link

    The Western world needs to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Today, Russia is led by Putin and he obviously has objectives as any national leader has.

    Western "leaders" need to decide whether Putin:

    1. Is trying to create Soviet Union 2.0, to have a 2nd attempt at ruling the world thru communism and to do this by holding the world to ransom over oil/gas supplies. OR
    2. Is wanting Russia to become a member of the family of nations and of a multi-polar world to improve the lives of Russian people, but is being blocked at every twist and turn by manufactured events like Russia-gate and the Skripal affair and now this latest revelation of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns being coordinated and run out of London.

    Both of the above cannot be true because there are too many contradictions. Which is it??

    Lokiban , 13 hours ago link

    Yes because imagine that that we lived in 1940 without any means to inform ourselves and that media was still in control over the information that reaches us. We would already be in a fullblown war with Russia because of it but now with the Internet and information going around freely only a whimpy 10% of we the people stand behind their desperately wanted war. Imagine that, an informed sheople.
    Can't have that, they cannot do their usual stuff anymore.... good riddance.

    LOL123 , 14 hours ago link

    "250,000 from the US State Department , the documents allege."....... Interesting.

    "During the third Democratic debate on Saturday night, Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like project" to break encrypted terrorist communications. The project would "bring the government and the tech communities together" to find a way to give law enforcement access to encrypted messages, she said. It's something that some politicians and intelligence officials have wanted for awhile,"........

    ***wasn't the Manhatten project a secret venture?????? Hummmmm"

    Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI's . "Encryption keys" is a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.

    The convoluted structure managed by the "Federal Common Policy" group has ceded to companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose Law Firm."- patriots4truth

    artistant , 14 hours ago link

    But, but some people keep getting away with it.

    hooligan2009 , 15 hours ago link

    When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also.

    larryriedel , 15 hours ago link

    FBI/Anonymous can use this story to support a narrative that social media bots posting memes is a problem for everybody, and it's not a partisan issue. The idea is that fake news and unrestricted social media are inherently dangerous, and both the West and Russia are exploiting that, so governments need to agree to restrict the ability to use those platforms for political speech, especially without using True Names.

    Baron Samedi , 15 hours ago link

    Oilygawkies in the UK and USSA seem to be letting their spooks have a good-humored (rating here on the absurd transparency of these ops) contest to see who can come up with the most surreal propaganda psy-ops.

    But they probably also serve as LHO distractions from something genuinely sleazy.

    headless blogger , 15 hours ago link

    Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. Anything that is remotely like Nationalism is the true enemy of these Globalist/Internationalists, which is what the Top-Ape Bolshevik promoted: see Vladimir Lenin and his quotes on how he believed fully in "internationalism" for a world without borders. Ironic how they Love the butchers of the Soviet Union but hate Russia. It is ALL ABOUT IDEOLOGY to these people and "the means justify the ends".

    They are frightening people.

    Push , 15 hours ago link

    Basically, if one acquires factual information from an internet source, which leads to overturning the propaganda to which we're all subjected, then it MUST have come from Putin. This is the direction they're headed. Anyone speaking out against the official story is obviously a Russian spy.

    Xena fobe , 15 hours ago link

    "Instutute for Statecraft"? Seriously?

    OverTheHedge , 11 hours ago link

    "Substitute for Statecraft"

    Fify ;-)

    koan , 16 hours ago link

    The UK is waging psyop against their own people using the Russians as an excuse to further oppress the population, especially the white population.

    FIFY.

    East Indian , 16 hours ago link

    Never thought Putin would be the symbol of free speech! The totalitarian EU and Deep State can come out of closet and denounce their predecessors.

    brewing_it , 17 hours ago link

    If you call ******** on the whole Russia cyberscare, you will be labeled a puppet of Putin.

    The establishment is afraid of free thinking men and women that can call ******** when they see and hear it.

    AriusArmenian , 17 hours ago link

    Better to call it the Anti-Integrity Initiative. UK cretins up to their usual dirty tricks - let them choke on their poison. The judgement of history will eventually catch up with them.

    Mike Rotsch , 17 hours ago link

    A good 'ole economic collapse will give western countries a chance to purge their crazy leaders before they involve us all in a thermonuclear war. Short everything with your entire accounts.

    RealistDuJour , 17 hours ago link

    This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts.

    Isn't it just as likely someone in the WEST planted this cache, intending Anonymous to find it?

    HRClinton , 18 hours ago link

    When two sides fight - especially white v white - the hidden 3rd party (((instigator))) wins.

    How dumb and mallaleable can these goys be? Pretty dumb and mallaleable, it seems.

    J S Bach , 18 hours ago link

    Any propaganda coming from the UK or US is strictly zionist. EVERYTHING they put out is to the benefit of Israel and the "lobby". Russia isn't perfect, but if they're an enemy of the latter, then they should NOT be considered a foe to all thinking and conscientious people.

    OverTheHedge , 11 hours ago link

    Yesterday, the BBC had a thing on Thai workers in Israel, and how they keep dying of accidents, their general level of slavery etc. Very odd to have a negative Israel story, so I wonder who upset whom, and what the ongoing status will be.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-46311922/thai-labourers-in-israel-tell-of-harrowing-conditions

    Thai labourers in Israel tell of harrowing conditions

    A year-long BBC investigation has discovered widespread abuse of Thai nationals living and working in Israel - under a scheme organized by the two governments.

    Many are subjected to unsafe working practices and squalid, unsanitary living conditions. Some are overworked, others underpaid and there are dozens of unexplained deaths.

    Herdee , 18 hours ago link

    England and the U.S. don't like their very poor and rotten social conditions put out for the public to see. Both countries have severely deteriorating problems on their streets because of bankrupt governments printing money for foreign wars.

    Quadruple_Rainbow , 18 hours ago link

    More of the same fraudulent duality while alleged so called but not money etc continues to flow (everything is criminal) and the cesspool of a hierarchy pretends it's business as usual.

    This isn't about maintaining balance in a lie this is about disclosing the truth and agendas (Agenda 21 now Agenda 2030 = The New Age Religion is Never Going To Be Saturnism). The layers of the hierarchy are a lie so unless the alleged so called leaders of those layers are publicly providing testimony and confession then everything that is being spoon fed to the pablum puking public through all sources is a lie.

    Herdee , 18 hours ago link

    They're afraid of stories like this: https://www.rt.com/news/444737-uk-funded-campaign-russia-leaks/

    HRClinton , 17 hours ago link

    Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of (((local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics))).

    The (((team))) is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.

    gatorengineer , 18 hours ago link

    Do Neocons get time and half for Overtime, they sure have been putting in a bunch lately.

    [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Telegraph adds that the UK's dispute with the Trump administration is so politically sensitive that staff within the British Embassy in D.C. have been barred from discussing it with journalists. Theresa May has also "been kept at arms-length and is understood to have not raised the issue directly with the US president ." ..."
    "... In September , we reported that the British government "expressed grave concerns" over the material in question after President Trump issued an order to the DOJ to release a wide swath of materials, "immediately" and "without redaction." ..."
    "... Trump walked that order back days later after the UK begged him not to release them. ..."
    "... MI6 agents have a reputation for writing fiction. Ian Fleming comes to mind. Its is interesting to reflect on the similarities of fiction and so called intelligence. ..."
    "... Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA's Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself. ..."
    "... To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ ..."
    "... The decision to insert GCHQ as a back door to eavesdrop was sparked by the denial of two FISA Court warrant applications filed by the FBI to seek wiretaps of Trump associates. ..."
    "... GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping surveillance on Trump associates. ..."
    "... The illegal wiretaps were initiated months before the controversial Trump dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. ..."
    "... The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised. ..."
    "... Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner. ..."
    "... After the concocted meeting by the Deep State, the British spy agency could officially justify wiretapping Trump associates as an intelligence front for NSA because the Russian lawyer at the meeting Natalia Veselnitskaya was considered an international security risk and prior to the June sit down was not even allowed entry into the United States or the UK, federal sources said. ..."
    "... By using GCHQ, the NSA and its intelligence partners had carved out a loophole to wiretap Trump without a warrant. While it is illegal for U.S. agencies to monitor phones and emails of U.S. citizens inside the United States absent a warrant, it is not illegal for British intelligence to do so. Even if the GCHQ was tapping Trump on U.S. soil at Fort Meade. ..."
    "... The wiretaps, secured through illicit scheming, have been used by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe of alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, even though the evidence is considered "poisoned fruit. ..."
    "... Add: GCHQ (UK NSA) was in agreement with HilBarry Inc to block the US 2016 election for U.K. candidate Hillary aka Clinton 'Rhodes scholar' Brit colonial agent. Study who 'Rhodes' was. CIA and MI6 are UK siblings. Note nickname for CIA is "Langley" = 'The English' in French L'Anglai. Trump Tower - Russkie atty Natalia met with Simpson GPS Fusion to debrief before & after meeting. Natalia was granted US entry by Mueller Spec Counsel teamster Preet Baharara (conflict in that Preet is compromised witness and also SC "investigator"). Russkie Ahkmedishin met with Obama WH in prep for meeting (see Jan 2016 WH log). The 'translator' at meeting was Obama WH translator. ..."
    "... The evidence for false Trump Russkie bank connections is a phony server set up by CIA agent McMullen that robo scammed Russian Alfa Bank to robo talk to the phony server the CIA named with miss-spell Trump OrGAINization. See godaddy domain registration. Hillary slandered Trump with this scam on Twitter Oct 31, 2016 - her witchy day. ..."
    "... Obama used the intelligence agencies to spy on all political opponents, not just the Trump campaign and eventually the administration. NSA databases were being queried by Democrat contractors with content feed to Obama's National Security staff where communications were "unmasked" by Rice and others. Rodgers shut down the scheme. So much Marxist criminality and fraud left unpunished. ..."
    "... George Papadopoulos was not the reason the FBI opened their 2016 Counterintelligence Investigation into the Trump Campaign. John Brennan was the reason. ..."
    "... Brennan was the man pushing the entire Russian Narrative that consumed Washington D.C. – and ultimately led to the Mueller Investigation. He did this based on little or no evidence. The Electronic Communication should prove interesting. John Brennan's Role in the FBI's Trump-Russia Investigation ..."
    "... In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with then-CIA Head John Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump Campaign and Moscow. ..."
    "... @Chupacabra-322 URL s/b " https://themarketswork.com/2018/04/09/john-brennans-role-in-the-fbis-trump-russia-investigation/ " ..."
    "... The Trump Team was being surveiled the entire time by Breanan via the GCHQ. The CIA are Analysts. That's it. They had to involve the FBI to begin the Surveillance & Criminal Investigation into the Counter Intelligence Operation. Thus, Criminal at Large Breanan's trip up to Capital Hill to meet with Harry Reid to brief him on Steele. Brennan the "Puppet Master" has been quarter backing the entire Deep State Intelligence Psychological Operation & Parallel Construction Surveillance from the very start. ..."
    "... They've been reverse engineering their lies ever since they lost the election to cover their tracks and use the excuse of "Plausible Deniability" as the Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Seditious Psychopaths at the CIA always claim. ..."
    "... Why get a FISA warrant for Cater Paige after he left the Trump Team? Because folks, the FISA Warrant is RETROACTIVE. ..."
    Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, has been scrambling to prevent President Trump from publishing classified materials linked to the Russian election meddling investigation, according to The Telegraph , stating that any disclosure would "undermine intelligence gathering if he releases pages of an FBI application to wiretap one of his former campaign advisers."

    Trump's allies, however, are fighting back - demanding transparency and suggesting that the UK wouldn't want the documents withheld unless it had something to hide.

    The Telegraph has talked to more than a dozen UK and US officials, including in American intelligence, who have revealed details about the row.

    British spy chiefs have "genuine concern" about sources being exposed if classified parts of the wiretap request were made public, according to figures familiar with discussions.

    " It boils down to the exposure of people ", said one US intelligence official, adding: " We don't want to reveal sources and methods ." US intelligence shares the concerns of the UK.

    Another said Britain feared setting a dangerous "precedent" which could make people less likely to share information, knowing that it could one day become public. - The Telegraph

    The Telegraph adds that the UK's dispute with the Trump administration is so politically sensitive that staff within the British Embassy in D.C. have been barred from discussing it with journalists. Theresa May has also "been kept at arms-length and is understood to have not raised the issue directly with the US president ."

    In September , we reported that the British government "expressed grave concerns" over the material in question after President Trump issued an order to the DOJ to release a wide swath of materials, "immediately" and "without redaction."

    Trump walked that order back days later after the UK begged him not to release them.

    Mr Trump wants to declassify 21 pages from one of the applications. He announced the move in September, then backtracked, then this month said he was "very seriously" considering it again. Both Britain and Australia are understood to be opposing the move.

    Memos detailing alleged ties between Mr Trump and Russia compiled by Christopher Steele, a former MI6 officer , were cited in the application, which could explain some of the British concern. - The Telegraph

    The New York Times reported at the time that the UK's concern was over material which " includes direct references to conversations between American law enforcement officials and Christopher Steele ," the former MI6 agent who compiled the infamous "Steele Dossier." The UK's objection, according to former US and British officials, was over revealing Steele's identity in an official document, "regardless of whether he had been named in press reports."

    We noted in September, however, that Steele's name was contained within the Nunes Memo - the House Intelligence Committee's majority opinion in the Trump-Russia case.

    Steele also had extensive contacts with DOJ official Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie , who - along with Steele - was paid by opposition research firm Fusion GPS in the anti-Trump campaign. Trump called for the declassification of FBI notes of interviews with Ohr, which would ostensibly reveal more about his relationship with Steele. Ohr was demoted twice within the Department of Justice for lying about his contacts with Fusion GPS.

    Perhaps the Brits are also concerned since much of the espionage performed on the Trump campaign was conducted on UK soil throughout 2016 . Recall that Trump aid George Papadopoulos was lured to London in March, 2016, where Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud fed him the rumor that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was later at a London bar that Papadopoulos would drunkenly pass the rumor to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (who Strzok flew to London to meet with).

    Also recall that CIA/FBI "informant" (spy) Stefan Halper met with both Carter Page and Papadopoulos in London.

    Halper, a veteran of four Republican administrations, reached out to Trump aide George Papadopoulos in September 2016 with an offer to fly to London to write an academic paper on energy exploration in the Mediterranean Sea.

    Papadopoulos accepted a flight to London and a $3,000 honorarium. He claims that during a meeting in London, Halper asked him whether he knew anything about Russian hacking of Democrats' emails.

    Papadopoulos had other contacts on British soil that he now believes were part of a government-sanctioned surveillance operation. - Daily Caller

    In total, Halper received over $1 million from the Obama Pentagon for "research," over $400,000 of which was granted before and during the 2016 election season.

    Papadopoulos, who was sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying about his conversations with a shadowy Maltese professor and self-professed member of the Clinton Foundation , has publicly claimed he was targeted by UK spies, and told The Telegraph that he demands transparency. Trump's allies in Washington, meanwhile, have suggested that the facts laid out before us mean that the ongoing Russia investigation was invalid from the start .

    In short, it's understandable that the UK would prefer to hide their involvement in the "witch hunt" of Donald Trump since much of the counterintelligence investigation was conducted on UK soil. And if the Brits had knowledge of the operation, it will bolster claims that they meddled in the 2016 US election by assisting what appears to have been a set-up from the start .

    Steele's ham-handed dossier is a mere embarrassment, as virtually none of the claims asserted by the former MI6 agent have been proven true.

    Steele, a former MI6 agent, is the author of the infamous and unverified anti-Trump dossier. He worked as a confidential human source for the FBI for years before the relationship was severed just before the election because of Steele's unauthorized contacts with the press.

    He shared results of his investigation into Trump's links to Russia with the FBI beginning in early July 2016.

    The FBI relied heavily on the unverified Steele dossier to fill out applications for four FISA warrants against Page. Page has denied the dossier's claims, which include that he was the Trump campaign's back channel to the Kremlin. - Daily Caller

    That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious.

    Anunnaki , 3 minutes ago link

    Trump talks the talk but so far no walking of the walk. Not falling for it anymore, Tyler. No Swamp Draining from Pres. Cheeto anymore than we got Hope or Change from Superfly

    Kefeer , 28 minutes ago link

    When fraud is coming to light, the cockroaches scramble. The so-called intelligence agencies have run amuck for way too long and leave a trail of lies, murder and deception.

    custard , 1 hour ago link

    That is the reason Obama and Clinton went to New Zealand and Australia. They have access to the Five Eyes network in New Zealand and Australia without their requests being recorded whereas if they had asked in the US their requests and all documents given to them would have been recorded. . They are both traitors to not only the sitting President and the US people but also to the United States.

    Synoia , 1 hour ago link

    That said, Steele hasn't worked for the British government since 2009, so for their excuse focusing on the former MI6 agent while ignoring the multitude of events which occurred on UK soil, is curious.

    MI6 agents have a reputation for writing fiction. Ian Fleming comes to mind. Its is interesting to reflect on the similarities of fiction and so called intelligence.

    STONEHILLADY , 1 hour ago link

    I think we all know now that the UK not Russia was the dirtbags working for Obama/HRC to trap Trump. Release the declass Trump and let's start cleaning up the swamp. Let the SHTF those Brits have never been friends to freedom.

    fleur de lis , 1 hour ago link

    @European American,

    If they released audio-video evidence of public officials indulging in cannibalistic pedophilia at their state desks, they would still get off the hook.

    Their MSM fiends oops I meant friends would scramble to the rescue and create another AV to counter the actual one, and their idiot Democrat audiences would fall for it.

    No matter what is exposed on 5 December the perps will get off the hook.

    Chupacabra-322 , 2 hours ago link
    StarGate , 1 hour ago link

    Add: GCHQ (UK NSA) was in agreement with HilBarry Inc to block the US 2016 election for U.K. candidate Hillary aka Clinton 'Rhodes scholar' Brit colonial agent. Study who 'Rhodes' was. CIA and MI6 are UK siblings. Note nickname for CIA is "Langley" = 'The English' in French L'Anglai. Trump Tower - Russkie atty Natalia met with Simpson GPS Fusion to debrief before & after meeting. Natalia was granted US entry by Mueller Spec Counsel teamster Preet Baharara (conflict in that Preet is compromised witness and also SC "investigator"). Russkie Ahkmedishin met with Obama WH in prep for meeting (see Jan 2016 WH log). The 'translator' at meeting was Obama WH translator.

    GPS Fusion wrote the Dossier with UK spy Steele and was paid by Hillary/DNC.

    The evidence for false Trump Russkie bank connections is a phony server set up by CIA agent McMullen that robo scammed Russian Alfa Bank to robo talk to the phony server the CIA named with miss-spell Trump OrGAINization. See godaddy domain registration. Hillary slandered Trump with this scam on Twitter Oct 31, 2016 - her witchy day.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/hillaryclinton/status/793234169576947712?lang=en

    WorkingFool , 1 hour ago link

    Obama used the intelligence agencies to spy on all political opponents, not just the Trump campaign and eventually the administration. NSA databases were being queried by Democrat contractors with content feed to Obama's National Security staff where communications were "unmasked" by Rice and others. Rodgers shut down the scheme. So much Marxist criminality and fraud left unpunished.

    Chupacabra-322 , 2 hours ago link

    George Papadopoulos was not the reason the FBI opened their 2016 Counterintelligence Investigation into the Trump Campaign. John Brennan was the reason.

    Brennan was the man pushing the entire Russian Narrative that consumed Washington D.C. – and ultimately led to the Mueller Investigation. He did this based on little or no evidence. The Electronic Communication should prove interesting. John Brennan's Role in the FBI's Trump-Russia Investigation

    April 9, 2018 by Jeff Carlson, CFA

    In the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, head of Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) traveled to Washington D.C. to meet with then-CIA Head John Brennan regarding alleged communications between the Trump Campaign and Moscow.

    That summer, GCHQ's then head, Robert Hannigan, flew to the US to personally brief CIA chief John Brennan. The matter was deemed so important that it was handled at "director level", face-to-face between the two agency chiefs. The meeting between Hannigan and Brennan appears somewhat unusual.

    The US and the UK are two of the so-called Five Eyes -- along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand -- that share a broad range of intelligence through a formalized alliance.

    The GCHQ is responsible for Britain's Signals Intelligence. The NSA is responsible for the United States' Signals Intelligence. Hannigan's U.S. counterpart was not CIA Director Brennan. Hannigan's U.S. counterpart was NSA Director Mike Rogers. Luke Harding of the Guardian originally reported the meeting in an April 13, 2017 article on Britain's spy agencies early role in the Trump-Russia investigation:

    GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious "interactions" between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information

    Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians.

    https://www.themarketswork.com/2018/04/09/john-brennans-role-in-the-fbi

    StarGate , 1 hour ago link

    See above about phony robot "suspicious communications" set up by CIA McMullen to smear Trump with Trump Tower falsely named server and data created in robo call response with Russian Alfa bank.

    Russian "communications" was e-data of the Russkie Bank and the non-Trump server named "Trump OrGAINization". It was just two robo-computers pinging back and forth.

    smacker , 1 hour ago link

    @Chupacabra-322 URL s/b " https://themarketswork.com/2018/04/09/john-brennans-role-in-the-fbis-trump-russia-investigation/ "

    Chupacabra-322 , 2 hours ago link

    The Trump Team was being surveiled the entire time by Breanan via the GCHQ. The CIA are Analysts. That's it. They had to involve the FBI to begin the Surveillance & Criminal Investigation into the Counter Intelligence Operation. Thus, Criminal at Large Breanan's trip up to Capital Hill to meet with Harry Reid to brief him on Steele. Brennan the "Puppet Master" has been quarter backing the entire Deep State Intelligence Psychological Operation & Parallel Construction Surveillance from the very start.

    They've been reverse engineering their lies ever since they lost the election to cover their tracks and use the excuse of "Plausible Deniability" as the Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous Seditious Psychopaths at the CIA always claim.

    Feb 13th, Don Bongino Podcast.

    "I'll include an article from NPR. NPR, not a by any stretch a right Wing outlet. Ok? But it's actually a decent piece. Now, it describes the three hop rule. It's from 2013, but it describes it very shortly & ce scintillating in about 400 words. And it's done well so I'll include it in todays show notes.

    Remember, It's now the "Two Hop Rule" but you just have to know what a "Hop" is to understand how dangerous this is.

    Here's how they explain it.

    It says, "testimony before Congress on Wednesday, remember this is written in 2013 Joe. Showed how easy it is for Americans, with no connection to Terrorism to unwittingly have their calling patterns analyzed by the Government." This is really wacko stuff. It hinges on what is known as a "Hop."

    Or chain analysis. When the NSA identifies a suspect, it can look not just at his phone records Joe, but also the records of everyone he calls, everyone who calls those people and everyone who calls those people." Chain Migration.

    You ain't kidding! Right!? Chain spying!

    It goes on...though....this is good.

    "If the average person Joe, called 40 unique people. "Three Hop Analysts" would allow the Government to mine the records....this is a staggering number...of 2.5 Million Americans when investigating one suspected terrorist."

    "Holy Moly!" Holly Moly is right.

    Why get a FISA warrant for Cater Paige after he left the Trump Team? Because folks, the FISA Warrant is RETROACTIVE.

    All the the emails he sent in the past to Trump Team members, combine that with "Two Hops" you basically have everybody in the known universe that could of ever contacted the Trump Team.

    Paige sends an email, whatever to Kushner. I don't know who he sends emails to. He probably didn't. But you get the point. Then you go to another "Hop." Kushner, who'd he send an email to? Now you got the while Trump Team.

    That's the whole point. That's why I constantly say to you that they were trying to put a legal face on this thing after they realized the election was coming up and they could lose.

    They were like. Man, we've been spying on these people the whole time. We already got most of their emails and their communications. How do we legally do it now?

    Oh, we get a FISA Warrant, we use couple of "Hops" and we're Golden."

    [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim. ..."
    "... The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region ..."
    "... The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies." ..."
    Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    The hacking collective known as "Anonymous" published a trove of documents on November 5 which it claims exposes a UK-based psyop to create a " large-scale information secret service " in Europe in order to combat "Russian propaganda" - which has been blamed for everything from Brexit to US President Trump winning the 2016 US election.

    The primary objective of the " Integrity Initiative " - established in 2015 by the Institute for Statecraft - is "to provide a coordinated Western response to Russian disinformation and other elements of hybrid warfare."

    And while the notion of Russian disinformation has become the West's favorite new bogeyman to excuse things such as Hillary Clinton's historic loss to Donald Trump, we note that "Anonymous" was called out by WikiLeaks in October 2016 as an FBI cutout, while the report on the Integrity Initiative that Anonymous exposed comes from Russian state-owned network RT - so it's anyone's guess whose 400lb hackers are at work here.

    Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics. The team is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs , while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.

    The UK establishment appears to be conducting the very activities of which it and its allies have long-accused the Kremlin, with little or no corroborating evidence. The program also aims to "change attitudes in Russia itself" as well as influencing Russian speakers in the EU and North America, one of the leaked documents states. - RT

    The Integrity Initiative "clusters" currently operate out of Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, Norway, Lithuania and the netherlands. According to the leak by Anonymous, the Integrity Initiative is working to aggressively expand its sphere of influence throughout eastern Europe, as well as the US, Canada and the MENA region .

    The work done by the Initiative - which claims it is not a government body, is done under "absolute secrecy via concealed contacts embedded throughout British embassies," according to the leak. It does, however, admit to working with unnamed British "government agencies."

    The initiative has received £168,000 in funding from HQ NATO Public Diplomacy and £250,000 from the US State Department , the documents allege.

    Some of its purported members include British MPs and high-profile " independent" journalists with a penchant for anti-Russian sentiment in their collective online oeuvre, as showcased by a brief glance at their Twitter feeds. - RT

    Noted examples of "inedependent" anti-Russia journalists:

    Spanish "Op"

    In one example of the group's activities, a "Moncloa Campaign" was successfully conducted by the group's Spanish cluster to block the appointment of Colonel Pedro Banos as the director of Spain's Department of Homeland Security. It took just seven-and-a-half hours to accomplish, brags the group in the documents .

    "The [Spanish] government is preparing to appoint Colonel Banos, known for his pro-Russian and pro-Putin positions in the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts, as Director of the Department of Homeland Security, a key body located at the Moncloa," begins Nacho Torreblanca in a seven-part tweetstorm describing what happened.

    Others joined in. Among them – according to the leaks – academic Miguel Ángel Quintana Paz, who wrote that "Mr. Banos is to geopolitics as a homeopath is to medicine." Appointing such a figure would be "a shame." - RT

    The operation was reported in Spanish media, while Banos was labeled "pro-Putin" by UK MP Bob Seely.

    In short, expect anything counter to predominant "open-border" narratives to be the Kremlin's fault - and not a natural populist reflex to the destruction of borders, language and culture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


    bigger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


    Chris Donnelly - Pic via Euromaidanpress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Another subitem notes how the Initiative secretly influences foreign governments:

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

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


    bigger

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


    bigger - bigger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    We hope that this piece contributes to such embarrassment.

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

    Comments Perfidious ALbion!

    When will we learn?

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

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

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

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

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

    For M16 to expose this level of stupidity is stunning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also. ..."
    "... Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. ..."
    "... This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts. ..."
    Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    HowdyDoody , 7 hours ago link

    One of the documents lists a series of propaganda weapons to be used against Russia. One is use of the church as a weapon. That has already been started in Ukraine with Poroshenko buying off regligious leader to split Ukraine Orthodoxy from Russian Orthodoxy. It also explicitly states that the Skripal incident is a 'Dirty Trick' against Russia.

    activisor , 10 hours ago link

    The British political system is on the verge of collapse. BREXIT has finally demonstrated that the Government/ Opposition parties are clearly aligned against the interests of the people. The EU is nothing more than an arm of the Globalist agenda of world domination.

    The US has shown its true colours - sanctioning every country that stands for independent sovereignty is not a good foreign policy, and is destined to turn the tide of public opinion firmly against global hegemony, endless wars, and wealth inequity.

    The old Empire is in its death throes. A new paradigm awaits which will exclude all those who have exploited the many, in order to sit at the top of the pyramid. They cannot escape Karma.

    smacker , 11 hours ago link

    The Western world needs to come to terms with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath. Today, Russia is led by Putin and he obviously has objectives as any national leader has.

    Western "leaders" need to decide whether Putin:

    1. Is trying to create Soviet Union 2.0, to have a 2nd attempt at ruling the world thru communism and to do this by holding the world to ransom over oil/gas supplies. OR
    2. Is wanting Russia to become a member of the family of nations and of a multi-polar world to improve the lives of Russian people, but is being blocked at every twist and turn by manufactured events like Russia-gate and the Skripal affair and now this latest revelation of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns being coordinated and run out of London.

    Both of the above cannot be true because there are too many contradictions. Which is it??

    Lokiban , 13 hours ago link

    Yes because imagine that that we lived in 1940 without any means to inform ourselves and that media was still in control over the information that reaches us. We would already be in a fullblown war with Russia because of it but now with the Internet and information going around freely only a whimpy 10% of we the people stand behind their desperately wanted war. Imagine that, an informed sheople.
    Can't have that, they cannot do their usual stuff anymore.... good riddance.

    LOL123 , 14 hours ago link

    "250,000 from the US State Department , the documents allege."....... Interesting.

    "During the third Democratic debate on Saturday night, Hillary Clinton called for a "Manhattan-like project" to break encrypted terrorist communications. The project would "bring the government and the tech communities together" to find a way to give law enforcement access to encrypted messages, she said. It's something that some politicians and intelligence officials have wanted for awhile,"........

    ***wasn't the Manhatten project a secret venture?????? Hummmmm"

    Hillary Clinton has all of our encryption keys, including the FBI's . "Encryption keys" is a general reference to several encryption functions hijacked by Hillary and her surrogate ENTRUST. They include hash functions (used to indicate whether the contents have been altered in transit), PKI public/private key infrastructure, SSL (secure socket layer), TLS (transport layer security), the Dual_EC_DRBG NSA algorithm and certificate authorities.

    The convoluted structure managed by the "Federal Common Policy" group has ceded to companies like ENTRUST INC the ability to sublicense their authority to third parties who in turn manage entire other networks in a Gordian knot of relationships clearly designed to fool the public to hide their devilish criminality. All roads lead back to Hillary and the Rose Law Firm."- patriots4truth

    artistant , 14 hours ago link

    But, but some people keep getting away with it.

    hooligan2009 , 15 hours ago link

    When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots "psyops", you tend to come up with plots for "psyops". The word "entrapment" comes to mind. Probably "self-serving" also.

    larryriedel , 15 hours ago link

    FBI/Anonymous can use this story to support a narrative that social media bots posting memes is a problem for everybody, and it's not a partisan issue. The idea is that fake news and unrestricted social media are inherently dangerous, and both the West and Russia are exploiting that, so governments need to agree to restrict the ability to use those platforms for political speech, especially without using True Names.

    Baron Samedi , 15 hours ago link

    Oilygawkies in the UK and USSA seem to be letting their spooks have a good-humored (rating here on the absurd transparency of these ops) contest to see who can come up with the most surreal propaganda psy-ops.

    But they probably also serve as LHO distractions from something genuinely sleazy.

    headless blogger , 15 hours ago link

    Anti-Russian is just a code word for Globalist, Internationalist. Anything that is remotely like Nationalism is the true enemy of these Globalist/Internationalists, which is what the Top-Ape Bolshevik promoted: see Vladimir Lenin and his quotes on how he believed fully in "internationalism" for a world without borders. Ironic how they Love the butchers of the Soviet Union but hate Russia. It is ALL ABOUT IDEOLOGY to these people and "the means justify the ends".

    They are frightening people.

    Push , 15 hours ago link

    Basically, if one acquires factual information from an internet source, which leads to overturning the propaganda to which we're all subjected, then it MUST have come from Putin. This is the direction they're headed. Anyone speaking out against the official story is obviously a Russian spy.

    Xena fobe , 15 hours ago link

    "Instutute for Statecraft"? Seriously?

    OverTheHedge , 11 hours ago link

    "Substitute for Statecraft"

    Fify ;-)

    koan , 16 hours ago link

    The UK is waging psyop against their own people using the Russians as an excuse to further oppress the population, especially the white population.

    FIFY.

    East Indian , 16 hours ago link

    Never thought Putin would be the symbol of free speech! The totalitarian EU and Deep State can come out of closet and denounce their predecessors.

    brewing_it , 17 hours ago link

    If you call ******** on the whole Russia cyberscare, you will be labeled a puppet of Putin.

    The establishment is afraid of free thinking men and women that can call ******** when they see and hear it.

    AriusArmenian , 17 hours ago link

    Better to call it the Anti-Integrity Initiative. UK cretins up to their usual dirty tricks - let them choke on their poison. The judgement of history will eventually catch up with them.

    Mike Rotsch , 17 hours ago link

    A good 'ole economic collapse will give western countries a chance to purge their crazy leaders before they involve us all in a thermonuclear war. Short everything with your entire accounts.

    RealistDuJour , 17 hours ago link

    This is such BS. Since when does Russia have the resources to pull all this off? They have such a complex program that they need the coordinated efforts of all the resources of the WEST? This is nuts.

    Isn't it just as likely someone in the WEST planted this cache, intending Anonymous to find it?

    HRClinton , 18 hours ago link

    When two sides fight - especially white v white - the hidden 3rd party (((instigator))) wins.

    How dumb and mallaleable can these goys be? Pretty dumb and mallaleable, it seems.

    J S Bach , 18 hours ago link

    Any propaganda coming from the UK or US is strictly zionist. EVERYTHING they put out is to the benefit of Israel and the "lobby". Russia isn't perfect, but if they're an enemy of the latter, then they should NOT be considered a foe to all thinking and conscientious people.

    OverTheHedge , 11 hours ago link

    Yesterday, the BBC had a thing on Thai workers in Israel, and how they keep dying of accidents, their general level of slavery etc. Very odd to have a negative Israel story, so I wonder who upset whom, and what the ongoing status will be.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-middle-east-46311922/thai-labourers-in-israel-tell-of-harrowing-conditions

    Thai labourers in Israel tell of harrowing conditions

    A year-long BBC investigation has discovered widespread abuse of Thai nationals living and working in Israel - under a scheme organized by the two governments.

    Many are subjected to unsafe working practices and squalid, unsanitary living conditions. Some are overworked, others underpaid and there are dozens of unexplained deaths.

    Herdee , 18 hours ago link

    England and the U.S. don't like their very poor and rotten social conditions put out for the public to see. Both countries have severely deteriorating problems on their streets because of bankrupt governments printing money for foreign wars.

    Quadruple_Rainbow , 18 hours ago link

    More of the same fraudulent duality while alleged so called but not money etc continues to flow (everything is criminal) and the cesspool of a hierarchy pretends it's business as usual.

    This isn't about maintaining balance in a lie this is about disclosing the truth and agendas (Agenda 21 now Agenda 2030 = The New Age Religion is Never Going To Be Saturnism). The layers of the hierarchy are a lie so unless the alleged so called leaders of those layers are publicly providing testimony and confession then everything that is being spoon fed to the pablum puking public through all sources is a lie.

    Herdee , 18 hours ago link

    They're afraid of stories like this: https://www.rt.com/news/444737-uk-funded-campaign-russia-leaks/

    HRClinton , 17 hours ago link

    Operating on a budget of £1.9 million (US$2.4 million), the secretive Integrity Initiative consists of "clusters" of (((local politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics))).

    The (((team))) is dedicated to searching for and publishing "evidence" of Russian interference in European affairs, while themselves influencing leadership behind the scenes, the documents claim.

    gatorengineer , 18 hours ago link

    Do Neocons get time and half for Overtime, they sure have been putting in a bunch lately.

    [Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

    Highly recommended!
    Mueller is in the cave just below the Clinton foundation" sign. Entrance is behind the bag with the dollars ;-)
    Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

    Highly recommended!
    Mueller is in the cave just below the Clinton foundation" sign. Entrance is behind the bag with the dollars ;-)
    Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

    Highly recommended!
    Nov 22, 2018 | www.unz.com

    geokat62 , says: November 21, 2018 at 3:27 am GMT

    @jilles dykstra

    How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.

    This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in 2001?

    His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some totally obscure Jewish activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee. If that doesn't qualify him as an "insider," I don't know what does.

    Excerpts from The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy :

    Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

    Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly. We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario, the great material wealth of the Jewish community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.

    Jewish voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms us.

    All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no melting pot!

    For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Jewish community is thus in a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans, Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.

    Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Jewish legislative representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S. Senates with 10 Jewish members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will go to Israel?

    https://cis.org/Report/Jewish-Stake-Americas-Changing-Demography

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... What struck me in one of his articles is how he sees the holocaust story as essential to Zionist power in the USA. ..."
    Nov 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

    geokat62 , says: November 21, 2018 at 3:27 am GMT

    @jilles dykstra

    How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.

    This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in 2001?

    His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some totally obscure Zionist activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Zionist Committee. If that doesn't qualify him as an "insider," I don't know what does.

    Excerpts from The Zionist Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy :

    Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

    Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly. We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario, the great material wealth of the Zionist community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.

    Zionist voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms us.

    All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no melting pot!

    For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Zionist community is thus in a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans, Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.

    Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Zionist legislative representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S. Senates with 10 Zionist members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will go to Israel?

    https://cis.org/Report/ Zionist-Stake-Americas-Changing-Demography

    jilles dykstra , says: November 21, 2018 at 10:49 am GMT

    @geokat62

    If Steinlight was obscure or not, I do not know. What struck me in one of his articles is how he sees the holocaust story as essential to Zionist power in the USA.

    Also in that article he wondered if at some point in time Jews might be driven out of the USA, 'but, there is always the life boat Israel'. That Israel will collapse the minute Zionist power in the USA [eventually] ends, he seems unable to see this. About your quote, it seems to have been written before it became clear to the world that western power is diminishing.

    So even if Zionist power over the West remains, Zionist power in the world is diminishing too. NATO, EU, Pentagon, neocons, whatever, may still want war with Russia, my idea is that on the other hand that more and more people see this intention, and are absolutely against.

    While western influence is receding, Assad still is there, Russia has bases in Syria, Erdogan, on what side is he ?; and so on and so forth.

    The battle cry 'no more war for Israel' exists for a long time in the USA. And I interpret discussions on this side of the Atlantic about increasing anti-Semitism as the acknowledgement of the fact that more and more people on this side begin to criticize Zionists, especially with regard to Palestinians.

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

    Highly recommended!
    Nov 22, 2018 | www.unz.com

    geokat62 , says: November 21, 2018 at 3:27 am GMT

    @jilles dykstra

    How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.

    This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in 2001?

    His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some totally obscure Jewish activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Jewish Committee. If that doesn't qualify him as an "insider," I don't know what does.

    Excerpts from The Jewish Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy :

    Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

    Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly. We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario, the great material wealth of the Jewish community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.

    Jewish voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms us.

    All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no melting pot!

    For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Jewish community is thus in a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans, Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.

    Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Jewish legislative representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S. Senates with 10 Jewish members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will go to Israel?

    https://cis.org/Report/Jewish-Stake-Americas-Changing-Demography

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... What struck me in one of his articles is how he sees the holocaust story as essential to Zionist power in the USA. ..."
    Nov 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

    geokat62 , says: November 21, 2018 at 3:27 am GMT

    @jilles dykstra

    How long jews can maintain their political power, not just in the USA, but in the whole west, I have no idea, there is not much that points to an important change soon.

    This, of course, is the $64,000 question. Rather than us Dumb Goyim speculating about it, why not listen to what a political insider had to say about this issue back in 2001?

    His name is Dr. Stephen Steinlight. And although Ron Unz has characterized him as "some totally obscure Zionist activist" he was was for more than five years Director of National Affairs (domestic policy) at the American Zionist Committee. If that doesn't qualify him as an "insider," I don't know what does.

    Excerpts from The Zionist Stake in America's Changing Demography: Reconsidering a Misguided Immigration Policy :

    Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

    Not that it is the case that our disproportionate political power (pound for pound the greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America) will erode all at once, or even quickly. We will be able to hang on to it for perhaps a decade or two longer. Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete , an extremely unlikely scenario, the great material wealth of the Zionist community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel , a high wall of church/state separation, and social liberalism combined with selective conservatism on criminal justice and welfare issues.

    Zionist voter participation also remains legendary; it is among the highest in the nation. Incredible as it sounds, in the recent presidential election more Jews voted in Los Angeles than Latinos. But should the naturalization of resident aliens begin to move more quickly in the next few years, a virtual certainty -- and it should -- then it is only a matter of time before the electoral power of Latinos, as well as that of others, overwhelms us.

    All of this notwithstanding, in the short term, a number of factors will continue to play into our hands, even amid the unprecedented wave of continuous immigration. The very scale of the current immigration and its great diversity paradoxically constitutes at least a temporary political asset. While we remain comparatively coherent as a voting bloc, the new mostly non-European immigrants are fractured into a great many distinct, often competing groups, many with no love for each other. This is also true of the many new immigrants from rival sides in the ongoing Balkan wars, as it is for the growing south Asian population from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. They have miles and miles to go before they overcome historical hatreds, put aside current enmities and forgive recent enormities, especially Pakistani brutality in the nascent Bangladesh. Queens is no melting pot!

    For perhaps another generation, an optimistic forecast, the Zionist community is thus in a position where it will be able to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas. But the day will surely come when an effective Asian-American alliance will actually bring Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and the rest closer together. And the enormously complex and as yet significantly divided Latinos will also eventually achieve a more effective political federation. The fact is that the term "Asian American" has only recently come into common parlance among younger Asians (it is still rejected by older folks), while "Latinos" or "Hispanics" often do not think of themselves as part of a multinational ethnic bloc but primarily as Mexicans, Cubans, or Puerto Ricans.

    Even with these caveats, an era of astoundingly disproportionate Zionist legislative representation may already have peaked. It is unlikely we will ever see many more U.S. Senates with 10 Zionist members. And although had Al Gore been allowed by the Supreme Court to assume office, a Jew would have been one heartbeat away from the presidency, it may be we'll never get that close again. With the changes in view, how long do we actually believe that nearly 80 percent of the entire foreign aid budget of the United States will go to Israel?

    https://cis.org/Report/ Zionist-Stake-Americas-Changing-Demography

    jilles dykstra , says: November 21, 2018 at 10:49 am GMT

    @geokat62

    If Steinlight was obscure or not, I do not know. What struck me in one of his articles is how he sees the holocaust story as essential to Zionist power in the USA.

    Also in that article he wondered if at some point in time Jews might be driven out of the USA, 'but, there is always the life boat Israel'. That Israel will collapse the minute Zionist power in the USA [eventually] ends, he seems unable to see this. About your quote, it seems to have been written before it became clear to the world that western power is diminishing.

    So even if Zionist power over the West remains, Zionist power in the world is diminishing too. NATO, EU, Pentagon, neocons, whatever, may still want war with Russia, my idea is that on the other hand that more and more people see this intention, and are absolutely against.

    While western influence is receding, Assad still is there, Russia has bases in Syria, Erdogan, on what side is he ?; and so on and so forth.

    The battle cry 'no more war for Israel' exists for a long time in the USA. And I interpret discussions on this side of the Atlantic about increasing anti-Semitism as the acknowledgement of the fact that more and more people on this side begin to criticize Zionists, especially with regard to Palestinians.

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation graveyard of social protest movements, and for good reason

    Highly recommended!
    The Democrats are politically responsible for the rise of Trump.
    Notable quotes:
    "... As Obama said following Trump's election, the Democrats and Republicans are "on the same team" and their differences amount to an "intramural scrimmage." They are on the team of, and owned lock stock and barrel by, the American corporate-financial oligarchy, personified by Trump. ..."
    "... The Democrats are, moreover, politically responsible for the rise of Trump. The Obama administration paved the way for Trump by implementing the pro-corporate (Wall Street bailout), pro-war (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, drone killings) and anti-democratic (mass surveillance, persecution of Snowden, Assange, Manning) policies that Trump is continuing and intensifying. And by breaking all his election promises and carrying out austerity policies against the working class, Obama enabled the billionaire gangster Trump to make an appeal to sections of workers devastated by deindustrialization, presenting himself as the anti-establishment spokesman for the "forgotten man." ..."
    "... This was compounded by the right-wing Clinton candidacy, which exuded contempt for the working class and appealed for support to the military and CIA and wealthy middle-class layers obsessed with identity politics. Sanders' endorsement of Clinton gave Trump an open field to exploit discontent among impoverished social layers. ..."
    Nov 02, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    Pelosi's deputy in the House, Steny Hoyer, sums up the right-wing policies of the Democrats, declaring: "His [Trump's] objectives are objectives that we share. If he really means that, then there is an opening for us to work together."

    So much for the moral imperative of voting for the Democrats to stop Trump! As Obama said following Trump's election, the Democrats and Republicans are "on the same team" and their differences amount to an "intramural scrimmage." They are on the team of, and owned lock stock and barrel by, the American corporate-financial oligarchy, personified by Trump.

    The Democrats are, moreover, politically responsible for the rise of Trump. The Obama administration paved the way for Trump by implementing the pro-corporate (Wall Street bailout), pro-war (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, drone killings) and anti-democratic (mass surveillance, persecution of Snowden, Assange, Manning) policies that Trump is continuing and intensifying. And by breaking all his election promises and carrying out austerity policies against the working class, Obama enabled the billionaire gangster Trump to make an appeal to sections of workers devastated by deindustrialization, presenting himself as the anti-establishment spokesman for the "forgotten man."

    This was compounded by the right-wing Clinton candidacy, which exuded contempt for the working class and appealed for support to the military and CIA and wealthy middle-class layers obsessed with identity politics. Sanders' endorsement of Clinton gave Trump an open field to exploit discontent among impoverished social layers.

    The same process is taking place internationally. While strikes and other expressions of working class opposition are growing and broad masses are moving to the left, the right-wing policies of supposedly "left" establishment parties are enabling far-right and neo-fascist forces to gain influence and power in countries ranging from Germany, Italy, Hungary and Poland to Brazil.

    As for Gay's injunction to vote "pragmatically," this is a crude promotion of the bankrupt politics that are brought forward in every election to keep workers tied to the capitalist two-party system. "You have only two choices. That is the reality, whether you like it or not." And again and again, in the name of "practicality," the most unrealistic and impractical policy is promoted -- supporting a party that represents the class that is oppressing and exploiting you! The result is precisely the disastrous situation working people and youth face today -- falling wages, no job security, growing repression and the mounting threat of world war.

    The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation "graveyard of social protest movements," and for good reason. From the Populist movement of the late 19th century, to the semi-insurrectional industrial union movement of the 1930s, to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, to the mass anti-war protest movements of the 1960s and the eruption of international protests against the Iraq War in the early 2000s -- every movement against the depredations of American capitalism has been aborted and strangled by being channeled behind the Democratic Party.

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won't be any of them left. ..."
    "... Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil. ..."
    "... Veterans Day, like so very, very much in American culture, is a propaganda construct designed to lubricate the funneling of human lives into the chamber of a gigantic gun. It glorifies evil, stupid, meaningless acts of mass murder to ensure that there will always be recruits who are willing to continue perpetrating it, and to ensure that the US public doesn't wake up to the fact that its government's insanely bloated military budget is being used to unleash unspeakable horrors upon the earth. ..."
    "... Your rulers have never feared the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the terrorists, the Iranians, the Chinese or the Russians. They fear you. They fear the American public suddenly waking up to the evil things that are being done in your name and using your vast numbers to shrug off the existing power structures without firing a shot, as easily as removing a heavy coat on a warm day. If enough of you loudly withdraw your consent for their insatiable warmongering, that fear will be enough to keep them in check. ..."
    Nov 12, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    The US will be celebrating Veterans Day, and many a striped flag shall be waved. The social currency of esteem will be used to elevate those who have served in the US military, thereby ensuring future generations of recruits to be thrown into the gears of the globe-spanning war machine

    Veterans Day is not a holiday to honor the men and women who have dutifully protected their country. The youngest Americans who arguably defended their nation from a real threat to its shores are in their nineties, and soon there won't be any of them left.

    Every single person who has served in the US military since the end of the second World War has protected nothing other than the agendas of global hegemony, resource control and war profiteering. They have not been fighting and dying for freedom and democracy, they have been fighting and dying for imperialism, Raytheon profit margins, and crude oil.

    I just said something you're not supposed to say. People have dedicated many years of their lives to the service of the US military; they've given their limbs to it, they've suffered horrific brain damage for it, they've given their very lives to it. Families have been ripped apart by the violence that has been inflicted upon members of the US Armed Forces; you're not supposed to let them hear you say that their loved one was destroyed because some sociopathic nerds somewhere in Washington decided that it would give America an advantage over potential economic rivals to control a particular stretch of Middle Eastern dirt. But it is true, and if we don't start acknowledging that truth lives are going to keep getting thrown into the gears of the machine for the power and profit of a few depraved oligarchs. So I'm going to keep saying it.

    Last week I saw the hashtag #SaluteToService trending on Twitter. Apparently the NFL had a deal going where every time someone tweeted that hashtag they'd throw a few bucks at some veteran's charity. Which sounds sweet, until you consider three things:

    1. The NFL's ten wealthiest team owners are worth a combined $61 billion .

    2. The NFL has taken millions of dollars from the Pentagon for displays of patriotism on the field, including for the policy of bringing all players out for the national anthem every game starting in 2009 (which led to Colin Kaepernick's demonstrations and the obscene backlash against him).

    3. VETERANS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO RELY ON FUCKING CHARITY.

    Seriously, how is "charity for veterans" a thing, and how are people not extremely weirded out by it? How is it that you can go out and get your limbs blown off for slave wages after watching your friends die and innocent civilians perish, come home, and have to rely on charity to get by? How is it that you can risk life and limb killing and suffering irreparable psychological trauma for some plutocrat's agendas, plunge into poverty when you come home, and then see the same plutocrat labeled a "philanthropist" because he threw a few tax-deductible dollars at a charity that gave you a decent prosthetic leg?

    Taking care of veterans should be factored into the budget of every act of military aggression . If a government can't make sure its veterans are housed, healthy and happy in a dignified way for the rest of their lives, it has no business marching human beings into harm's way. The fact that you see veterans on the street of any large US city and people who fought in wars having to beg "charities" for a quality mechanical wheelchair shows you just how much of a pathetic joke this Veterans Day song and dance has always been.

    They'll send you to mainline violence and trauma into your mind and body for the power and profit of the oligarchic rulers of the US-centralized empire, but it's okay because everyone gets a long weekend where they're told to thank you for your service. Bullshit.

    Veterans Day, like so very, very much in American culture, is a propaganda construct designed to lubricate the funneling of human lives into the chamber of a gigantic gun. It glorifies evil, stupid, meaningless acts of mass murder to ensure that there will always be recruits who are willing to continue perpetrating it, and to ensure that the US public doesn't wake up to the fact that its government's insanely bloated military budget is being used to unleash unspeakable horrors upon the earth.

    The only way to honor veterans, really, truly honor them, is to help end war and make sure no more lives are put into a position where they are on the giving or receiving end of evil, stupid, meaningless violence. The way to do that is to publicly, loudly and repeatedly make it clear that you do not consent to the global terrorism being perpetrated in your name. These bastards work so hard conducting propaganda to manufacture your consent for endless warmongering because they need that consent . So don't give it to them.

    Your rulers have never feared the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the terrorists, the Iranians, the Chinese or the Russians. They fear you. They fear the American public suddenly waking up to the evil things that are being done in your name and using your vast numbers to shrug off the existing power structures without firing a shot, as easily as removing a heavy coat on a warm day. If enough of you loudly withdraw your consent for their insatiable warmongering, that fear will be enough to keep them in check.

    This Veterans Day, don't honor those who have served by giving reverence and legitimacy to a war machine which is exclusively used for inflicting great evil. Honor them by disassembling that machine.

    * * *

    Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website , which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following my antics on Twitter , checking out my podcast , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone , or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers .

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    [Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

    Highly recommended!
    So the USA Congress operates under CIA surveillance... Due to CIA access to Saudi money the situation is probably much worse then described as CIA tried to protect both its level of influence and shadow revenue streams.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing. ..."
    "... I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community Inspector General 2014 ..."
    "... The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly," wrote Grassley in a statement. ..."
    "... According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with "bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper." ..."
    "... Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications ..."
    "... CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director ..."
    "... During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance," said Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016. ..."
    Nov 02, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Sharyl Attkisson,

    Newly-declassified documents show the CIA intercepted sensitive Congressional communications about intelligence community whistleblowers.

    The intercepts occurred under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The new disclosures are contained in two letters of "Congressional notification" originally written to key members of Congress in March 2014, but kept secret until now.

    In the letters, then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough tells four key members of Congress that during "routing counterintelligence monitoring of Government computer systems," the CIA collected emails between Congressional staff and the CIA's head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough states that he's concerned "about the potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent 'chilling effect' that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing."

    The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing.

    "Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints," McCullough states in his letters to lead Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees at the time: Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia); and Representatives Michael Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Maryland). McCullough adds that the type of monitoring that occurred was "lawful and justified for [counterintelligence] purposes" but

    "I am not confident that Congressional staff fully understood that their whistleblower-related communications with my Executive Director of whistleblowing might be reviewed as a result of routine [CIA counterintelligence] monitoring." -- Intelligence Community Inspector General 2014

    The disclosures from 2014 were released late Thursday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). "The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading Congressional staff's emails about intelligence community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns as well as potential Constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly," wrote Grassley in a statement.

    According to Grassley, he originally began trying to have the letters declassified more than four years ago but was met with "bureaucratic foot-dragging, led by Brennan and Clapper."

    Grassley adds that he repeated his request to declassify the letters under the Trump administration, but that Trump intelligence officials failed to respond. The documents were finally declassified this week after Grassley appealed to the new Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson.

    History of alleged surveillance abuses

    Back in 2014, Senators Grassley and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) had asked then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper about the possibility of the CIA monitoring Congressional communications. A Congressional staffer involved at the time says Clapper's response seemed to imply that if Congressional communications were "incidentally" collected by the CIA, the material would not be saved or reported up to CIA management.

    "In the event of a protected disclosure by a whistleblower somehow comes to the attention of personnel responsible for monitoring user activity," Clapper wrote to Grassley and Wyden on July 25, 2014, "there is no intention for such disclosure to be reported to agency leadership under an insider threat program."

    However, the newly-declassified letters indicate the opposite happened in reality with the whistleblower-related emails:

    "CIA security compiled a report that include excerpts of whistleblower-related communications and this reports was eventually shared with the Director of the Office of Security and the Chief of the Counterintelligence Center" who "briefed the CIA Deputy Director, Deputy Executive Director, and the Chiefs of Staff for both the CIA Director and the Deputy Director."

    Clapper has previously come under fire for his 2013 testimony to Congress in which he denied that the national Security Agency (NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Weeks later, Clapper's statement was proven false by material leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

    "During Director Clapper's tenure, senior intelligence officials engaged in a deception spree regarding mass surveillance," said Wyden upon Clapper's retirement in 2016.

    "Top officials, officials who reported to Director Clapper, repeatedly misled the American people and even lied to them."

    Clapper has repeatedly denied lying, and said that any incorrect information he provided was due to misunderstandings or mistakes.

    Clapper and Brennan have also acknowledged taking part in the controversial practice of "unmasking" the protected names of U.S. citizens - including people connected to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump - whose communications were "incidentally" captured in US counterintelligence operations. Unmaskings within the US intelligence community are supposed to be extremely rare and only allowed under carefully justified circumstances. This is to protect the privacy rights of American citizens. But it's been revealed that Obama officials requested unmaskings on a near daily basis during the election year of 2016.

    Clapper and Brennan have said their activities were lawful and not politically motivated. Both men have become vocal critics of President Trump.

    * * *

    Order the New York Times bestseller "The Smear" today online or borrow from your library

    Keter , 5 hours ago link

    "ah, ah, ah, em, not intentionally." Clapper - ROFL

    numapepi , 9 hours ago link

    Can you imagine what kind of place the US would have been under Clinton?!!!!!!

    All the illegality, spying, conniving, dirty tricks, arcancides, selling us out to the highest bidder and full on attack against our Constitution would be in full swing!

    Chaotix , 9 hours ago link

    When intel entities can operate unimpeded and un-monitored, it spells disaster for everyone and everything outside that parameter. Their operations go unnoticed until some stray piece of information exposes them. There are many facilities that need to be purged and audited, but since this activity goes on all over the world, there is little to stop it. Even countries that pledge allegiance and cooperation are blindsiding their allies with bugs, taps, blackmails, and other crimes. Nobody trusts nobody, and that's a horrid fact to contend with in an 'advanced' civilization.

    numapepi , 9 hours ago link

    Almost sounds like the Praetorian guard?

    The real power behind the throne.

    Rhys12 , 10 hours ago link

    Forget the political parties. When the intelligence agencies spy on everyone, they know all about politicians of both parties before they ever win office, and make sure they have enough over them to control them. They were asleep at the switch when Trump won, because no one, including them, believed he would ever win. Hillary was their candidate, the State Department is known overseas as "the political arm of the CIA". They were furious when she lost, hence the circus ever since.

    iAmerican10 , 11 hours ago link

    From its founding by the Knights of Malta the JFK&MLK-assassinating, with Mossad 9/11-committing CIA has been the Vatican's US Fifth Column action branch, as are the FBI and NSA: with an institutional hiring preference for Roman Catholic "altared boy" closet-queen psychopaths "because they're practiced at keeping secrets."

    Think perverts Strzok, Brennan, and McCabe "licked it off the wall?"

    Smi1ey , 11 hours ago link

    We need to bring back FOIA.

    Too much secrecy.

    And how is that Pentagon audit doing, btw?

    Chaotix , 9 hours ago link

    I agree with you 100%. Problem is, tons of secret technology and information have been passed out to the private sector. And the private sector is not bound to the FOIA requests, therefore neutralizing the obligation for government to disclose classified material. They sidestepped their own policies to cooperate with corrupt MIC contractors, and recuse themselves from disclosing incriminating evidence.

    archie bird , 12 hours ago link

    Everyone knows that spying runs in the fam. 44th potus Mom and Gma BOTH. An apple doesn't fall from the tree. If ppl only knew the true depth of the evil and corruption we would be in the hospital with a heart attack. Gilded age is here and has been, since our democracy was hijacked (McCain called it an intervention) back in 1963. Unfortunately it started WAY back before then when (((they))) stole everything with the installation of the Fed.

    Dornier27 , 15 hours ago link

    The FBI and CIA have long since slipped the controls of Congress and the Constitution. President Trump should sign an executive order after the mid terms and stand down at least the FBI and subject the CIA to a senate investigation.

    America needs new agencies that are accountable to the peoples elected representatives.

    greasyknees , 16 hours ago link

    Not news. The CIA likely has had access to any and all electronic communication for at least a decade.

    Lord JT , 19 hours ago link

    what? clapper and brennan being dirty hacks behind the scenes while parading around as patriots? say it aint so!

    Racin Rabitt , 20 hours ago link

    A determined care has been used to cultivate in D.C., a system that swiftly decapitates the whistleblowers. Resulting in an increasingly subservient cadre of civil servants who STHU and play ostrich, or drool at what scraps are about to roll off the master's table as the slide themselves into a better position, taking advantage to sell vice, weapons, and slaves.

    Westcoastliberal , 21 hours ago link

    What the hell does the CIA have to do with ANYTHING in the United States? Aren't they limited to OUTSIDE the U.S.? So why would they be involved in domestic communications for anything? These clowns need to be indicted for TREASON!

    5onIt , 22 hours ago link

    Clapper and Brennan, Brennan and Clapper. These two guys are the damn devil.

    It makes me ill.

    MuffDiver69 , 22 hours ago link

    I'll take " Police State" for five hundred Alex

    [Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress. ..."
    "... Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary. ..."
    "... "Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it." ..."
    "... "While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the £4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women ..."
    "... The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it. ..."
    "... While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE. ..."
    "... Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony." ..."
    "... In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage] ..."
    "... The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945 ..."
    "... I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism ..."
    "... What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to! ..."
    "... Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned. ..."
    "... Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded! ..."
    "... Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire" ..."
    "... While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned. ..."
    "... As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood. ..."
    Feb 20, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    Wnt1 • a month ago

    This is one of the most sensible editorials on the Russia issue I've seen, and it is true, insofar as it goes. There is something very, very COINTELPRO about the idea of "protecting" Americans from "foreign influence", and that should give liberals the heebie-jeebies. There is also an ongoing structural witch-hunt effect, unchanged from the McCarthy era, when internet firm heads are called to testify before congress.

    That said, I wouldn't dismiss the effect of the Russian involvement, or the relevance of the charges against Trump and his people. Bear in mind that the Party of McCarthy has been all about spying on its opponents from the days of HUAC. Nixon's break-in at the Watergate Hotel didn't singlehandedly decide the election ... but who would believe that was the only underhanded tactic he used? Republicans believe that if you're not cheating, you're not trying -- holding out for any ethical standard makes you inherently disloyal and unworthy of support. Something like Kavanaugh's involvement in the hacking of Democrats in 2003 ( http://www.foxnews.com/poli... ) should be no surprise; neither should the "Guccifer" hack that put the Democrats' data in the hands of Wikileaks. (Their subsequent attempts to demand Wikileaks not publish such a newsworthy leak, of course, is the sort of thing that undermines their position with me!)

    Bottom line - the Russians may have had no more effect on the election than the loose change in your house has on your salary.

    But if you go back in your house after the Republicans were minding it, don't be surprised if together with the missing couch change you notice some missing silverware, your kitchen tap has been sawed off, and the laptop is short half its RAM. By the time you've catalogued everything missing, the stolen brass part from the gas main downstairs might have blown you to smithereens.

    Greg • 8 months ago
    "Even more extreme measures are being planned and implemented, motivated by the basic principle that the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it."

    There are many reasons the bourgeoisie is unfit to rule. Each one of them is bound up with the lies required to enforce its rule. The greater its unfitness, "the greater the lie, the more aggressive the methods required to enforce it.

    "While the extortionate salaries commanded by the BBC's biggest stars are justified by "market rates," this underlying premise is never challenged by the women who are leading the gender pay fight. They don't oppose the capitalist market; they just want a bigger slice of the pie, with the working class footing the bill via contributions to the £4 billion annual license fee." - BBC gender pay row: Selective outrage of wealthy women

    The greater the inequality, the greater the lie to enforce it.

    Alan MacDonald • 8 months ago
    While WSWS was uniquely correct in exposing Bush, Powell, and the ruling-elite structure of the U.S. as using deceit and lies to start an 'aggressive war' (the ultimate war crime), your description of this corrupt system of global power headquartered in the U.S. did not fully diagnose and expose it for what it was; a disguised global capitalist EMPIRE.

    Your description could have more effectively warned American citizen/'subjects' and the world that "Rather, it is a war of colonial (Empire) conquest, driven by a series of economic and geo-political aims that center on the seizure of Iraq's oil resources and the assertion of US global (Empire, not merely) hegemony."

    In any case, Andre and Joseph, thanks for reminding readers of this dark and deceitful moment of U.S. history in starting another 'aggressive war' almost two decades ago --- which wars will unfortunately continue until Americans themselves expose and ignite an essential Second America "Revolution Against Empire" [Justin duRivage]

    Ambricourt -> Alan MacDonald • 8 months ago
    The Anglo-American-Israelite Empire is globally entrenched and enjoying expansion since 1945. It is time radical critiques of its values, power and methods should call it by its right name.
    Bob Marley • 8 months ago
    I must admit myself I am disturbed by the sheer volume of unchallenged propaganda regarding these claims in the past few months. The media talking heads and various analysts don't ever really say what the implication of what their claims really mean-war. We are in an age of new mccarthyism
    michaelroloff • 8 months ago
    What was amazing about Powell's charade was that even if Old Bad Ass as I call Saddam had had some Wombars of Mass Destruction they posed no danger whatsoever! It was obvious 9/11 had put the masses into a tizzy and they would have attacked Mars if told to!
    Terry Lawrence -> michaelroloff • 8 months ago
    Yes, the "New Pearl Harbour" called for and carried out by the authors of the "Project for a New American Century" worked as planned.
    michaelroloff -> Terry Lawrence • 8 months ago
    don't tell me that you think that the blow-back that was 9/11 is a conspiracy - if you do, be so kind as to mention specific conspirators!
    Terry Lawrence -> michaelroloff • 8 months ago
    Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, are a few obvious ones, . . . and that famous CIA asset, Bin Laden, to recruit the expendable hijackers.
    michaelroloff -> Terry Lawrence • 8 months ago
    just because it was a convenient act for them to do what they wanted in conquering iraq is not reason that idiots like that are capable of planning and concealing the numerous co-conspirators to arrange something like 9..11. imperialism can always count on blowback to have occasion for further crimes. there is the slim chance that they knew what was being planned and that they let it happen - except that none of those folks is evil enough for that. not even dick cheney. what i love about all conspiracy theories of the american kind is that they never nam or show an actual conspirator conspiring. look at one of the truly great failed conspiracy, that of the 20th july 1944 in germany that was meant to kill hitler and how many people were arrested in no time at all and executed..
    Terry Lawrence michaelroloff • 8 months ago
    A "conspiracy" is just any two or more people getting together to discuss something affecting one or more other people without them being party to the discussion. Like a surprise birthday party, for instance. Obviously the "official" version of the 9/11 events is also a "conspiracy theory" that 19 mostly Saudi Arabians led by a guy hiding in a cave in Afghanistan conspired to carry out co-ordinated attacks that just happened to coincide with most of the USAF being conveniently off in Alaska and northern Canada on an exercise that day, and another "coinciding exercise" simulating a multiple hijacking being carried out in the northeast US thereby confusing the Air Traffic Controllers as to whether the hijackings were "real world or exercise", significantly delaying the response, among other things.

    Do you really believe that WTC 7, a steel frame building which was not adjacent to WTC 1 & 2, and was NOT hit by any airplanes, coincidentally collapsed due to low temperature paper and furniture office fires? Something that has never happened before or since? Or that such low temperature fires would cause the massive heavily reinforced concrete central core/elevator shaft to collapse first, pulling the rest of the building inward onto it in classic controlled demolition technique?

    It is getting more difficult to find the videos showing that now as Google, as with WSWS articles, is pushing them off the front pages of results, while Snopes has put out a some very misleading reports that set up false "straw man" claims and then "disprove" them. Even the "disproofs" are false.

    For instance, a Snopes report on the WTC 7 collapse states: "relied heavily on discredited claims, none of which were new, including:

    Jet fuel cannot melt steel beams (This claim is misleading, as steel beams do to not need to melt completely to be compromised structurally).

    A sprinkler system would have prevented temperatures from rising high enough to cause to cause structural damage. (This claim ignores the fact that a crash from a 767 jet would likely destroy such a system.)

    The structural system would have been protected by fireproofing material (similarly, such a system would have been damaged in a 767 crash). "

    Jet fuel, which is Kerosene, burns at around 575º in open air, which was the case in WTC buildings 1 & 2. Most of it was vaporized by the impact with the buildings and burned of within minutes. At any rate, 575º is far below the point at which structural steel specifically designed to withstand high temperature fires like that used in the World Trade Centre buildings is weakened.

    All of which is irrelevant, as are the other "points" made by Snopes, because Building 7 was not hit by an airplane and there was no jet fuel involved. Something conveniently "overlooked" by Snopes and other similar misleading "disproofs". Not to mention that the Intelligence establishment is busy putting out false trails constantly which use, for instance, obviously faked photos or videos of the three WTC buildings collapsing to discredit the real videos and photos by setting up "straw men" they can then "disprove" and point to as "evidence" that people who don't believe the official version are "creating fake news".

    liz_imp Terry Lawrence • 8 months ago
    Brilliant points!! :)
    Carolyn Zaremba Terry Lawrence • 8 months ago
    Quite right. My late father was a structural design engineer, specializing in large steel structures like the WTC and he called it as soon as the buildings imploded!
    Terry Lawrence michaelroloff • 8 months ago
    "The perpetrators and their conspiracy is not a theory since it has been proved."

    By "proved" I assume you are referring to "proofs" such as the fantastical claim that Mohammed Atta's passport was allegedly and fortuitously "found" when it supposedly survived the 600 mph impact of the 767 he was supposedly piloting with a huge steel and concrete building, survived the huge fireball it was supposedly in the middle of unscorched, and conveniently fluttered to the ground intact to land at the feet of an FBI agent who immediately realized it must have belonged to one of the hijackers!

    Even Hans Christian Andersen couldn't invent Fairy Tales like that.

    Carolyn Zaremba michaelroloff • 8 months ago
    See my comment above. It is the "official" explanation that is a fantasy.
    michaelroloff Carolyn Zaremba • 8 months ago
    the best that conspiracy theorist can do is, invariably, to call proven facts "just another theory " which only proves that they are actually aware that they are full of hot air! zarembas father as a structural engineer unless a fantasy is certainly better off among the dead than among the living and perpetrating his ignorance of steel and weight and fire onto the world!
    clubmarkgirard michaelroloff • 8 months ago
    Just because all the details aren't known as to who conspired and why there's enough holes in the "official conspiracy theory" of 19 hijackers to conclude that this could not have been pulled off without some conspiring on the American side. Certainly the the neocons benefited greatly from these attacks. So motive is there for sure.
    Alan MacDonald michaelroloff • 8 months ago
    Yes, Michael, the 'media/propaganda-sector' of this seven-sectored Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE is currently the most effective sector --- but the other six; corporate, financial, militarist, extra-legal, CFR 'Plot-Tanks', and of course the dual-party Vichy-political facade of the 'rougher-talking' neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the 'smoother-lying' neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party are all helping to keep the Empire sound, hidden, and empowered over the only American citizen/'subjects' who could possibly form a "Political Revolution against Empire"
    Kalen • 8 months ago
    While it is true that D.C. is run by delusional psychotics that does not mean they are irrational as far as their greed is concerned.

    There is nothing to win in global nuke war, all know it while the outcome would be surely the current global oligarchy loosing grip on population destroying the system that works for them so well giving chance to what they dread socialist revolution they would have been much weaker to counter.

    Regional conflicts are just positioning of oligarchy for management of global oligarchic country club while strict class morality is maintained.

    What I do not we are conditions for war (split of global ruling elites) while what I see is broad propaganda of war as a excuse to clamp down on fake enemy in order to control respective populations while there is factual unity among world oligarchy.

    As R. Luxemburg pleaded that WWI was not "our" war but war of bunch of aristocrats wanting to divide colonies and bunch of bankers wanted their bad speculative loans repaid, using working class flesh and blood.

    She died abandoned by those on the left who embraced the war for their political aspirations, she was murdered for her true internationalism i.e. No war fought between working people of one country and working people of another country.

    Alan MacDonald Kalen • 8 months ago
    Kalen, it's only effective to use the correct and understandable term 'Empire' in exposing, warning, and motivating average Americans --- since very few even know what words like; oligarchy, plutocracy, fascism, authoritarianism, corporate-state, or Wolin's 'inverted totalitarianism' mean --- let alone could ever serve as rallying cries for the coming essential Second American Revolution against EMPIRE.

    As Pat would have shouted if Tom had taken the Paine to edit his call, "Give me Liberty over EMPIRE, or Give me Death!"

    Carolyn Zaremba Alan MacDonald • 8 months ago
    Do you really believe that average Americans are that stupid? Shame on you!
    Alan MacDonald Carolyn Zaremba • 8 months ago
    "Sweet Carolyn" OH OH OH --- Yes, only a very small percentage of Americans understand that our former country, the U.S. of America, is categorically, provably, and absolutely a new form of Empire, and is inexorably the first in world history an; 'effectively-disguised', 'truly-global', 'dual-party Vichy', and 'capitalist-fueled' EMPIRE --- an EMPIRE, really just an EMPIRE!

    Just do an honest survey, "Sweet Carolyn", yourself, and if you're not a "Sweet Liarlyn", you will have to admit that essentially ZERO of the first 1000 people you ask, will say --- "Oh ya, Carolyn, of course I know that this whole effin 'system' that others less informed may still be so stupid that they think they live in a real country, when I (enter their name) do solemnly swear is just an effin EMPIRE, which is so well disguised, that these few idiots who don't understand that they are just citizen/'subjects' of this monsterous EMPIRE."

    Do the survey, "Sweet Carolyn" and if you don't lie to yourself --- which maybe you do, because HELL, your job is to lie to others (so it's quite likely that you'll lie about anything) --- you'll find that exactly zero average Americans have the effin slightest idea in the world that their great 'country' is actually an effin EMPIRE.

    HELL, Carolyn, almost half the Americans repeatedly yell, "We're number ONE", "We're number ONE", that their brains would rather rattle themselves to death than even let logic, history, knowledge, or anything into their addled and propaganda filled heads!

    liz_imp Alan MacDonald • 8 months ago
    Personal attacks are not allowed on this site.
    Alan MacDonald liz_imp • 8 months ago
    Sorry, Liz-imp, are you a friend of "Sweet Carolyn" --- or some other relation? Perhaps working together?
    dmorista • 8 months ago
    Excellent article, and it did a particularly good job of tying together the foreign policy and domestic policy stratagems of a major faction of the U.S. ruling class. I, for one, do not doubt that the Russians conduct some sort of cyber warfare against the U.S.; but that must be understood by considering the fact that every major governmental, political, military, and business organization on the face of the Earth must now operate in this manner. A friend of mine's son, who was in the Army, pointed out that the big players, by a wide margin, in spying on and to some degree interfering in the U.S. domestic scene are China and Israel. Kevin Barrett has written and said on various radio shows that much of what is attributed to the "Russians" are actually the actions of Russian/Israeli dual citizens, many of whom move freely between the U.S., Russia, and Israel. And, of course, the U.S. runs major spy and manipulation operations in more countries than any other nation of Earth, and U.S. based corporations are busy both inside the U.S. and in foreign places in similar activities.

    It is clearly a desire of significant sectors, of the Capitalist rulers of the U.S., to repress dissent and political activities that oppose their agendas. It took them a few years to realize that their old methods using TV, hate radio, magazines, direct mail, and newspapers were losing their effectiveness. They have been increasing their attacks on leftist websites, hacking into websites, closing websites using phonied-up "national security" justifications, employing numerous trolls, and establishing and funding more far right websites, such as Breitbart and Infowars. These efforts are most effective when they are not overpowering and heavy handed.

    The classic book on this was the 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann. Rob Williams has updated the concept for the internet age in
    <http: www.vermontindependent.org ="" the-post-truth-world-reviving-the-propaganda-model-of-news-for-our-digital-age=""/>.

    The strategy is nothing new, the methods are merely updated and use the latest technologies.

    Maxwell dmorista • 8 months ago
    Superb post.

    I guess the lesson to be learned here is that rigging elections through byzantine electoral laws and billion dollar corporate slush funds is a thing of the past. All you need now is 13 amateur IT goomba's with a marketing scheme and twitter accounts. Well, sure is a fragile "World's Sole Superpower" we got here. Go Team?

    [Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... You know something is fundamentally wrong when the average high school drop-out MAGA-hat-wearing Texan or Alabaman working a blue collar job has more sense, can SEE much more clearly, than the average university-educated, ideology-soaked, East Coast liberal. ..."
    "... Trump is a "nationalist". More or less every administration previous to his, going back at least 100 years, was "globalist". For much of its history, the USA has been known around the world as a very patriotic (i.e., nationalist) country. Americans in general had a reputation for spontaneous chants of "USA! USA! USA!", flying the Stars And Stripes outside their houses and being very proud of their country. Sure, from time to time, that pissed off people a little in other countries but, by and large, Americans' patriotism was seen as endearing, if a little naive, by most foreigners. ..."
    "... Globalism, on the other hand, as it relates to the USA, is the ideology that saturates the Washington establishment think-tanks, career politicians and bureaucrats, who are infected with the toxic belief that America can and should dominate the world . This is presented to the public as so much American largess and magnanimity, but it is, in reality, a means to increasing the power and wealth of the Washington elite. ..."
    "... Consider Obama's two terms, during which he continued the massively wasteful (of taxpayer's money) and destructive (of foreigners' lives and land) "War on Terror". Consider that he appointed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who proceeded to joyfully bomb Libya back to the stone age and murder its leader. Consider that, under Obama, US-Russia relations reached an all-time low, with repeated attacks (of various sorts) on the Russian president, government and people, and the attempted trashing of Russia's international reputation in the eyes of the American people. Consider the Obama regime's hugely destructive war waged (mostly by proxy) on the Syrian people. Consider the Obama era coup in Ukraine that, in a few short months, set that country's prospects and development back several decades and further soured relations with Russia. ..."
    "... The problem however, is that the Washington elite want - no, NEED - the American people to support such military adventurism, and what better way to do that than by concocting false "Russian collusion" allegations against Trump and having the media program the popular mind with exactly the opposite of the truth - that Trump was a "traitor" to the American people. ..."
    "... The only thing Trump is a traitor to is the self-serving globally expansionist interests of a cabal of Washington insiders . This little maneuver amounted to a '2 for 1' for the Washington establishment. They simultaneously demonized Trump (impeding his 'nationalist' agenda) while advancing their own globalist mission - in this case aimed at pushing back Russia. ..."
    "... The US 'Deep State' did this in response to the election of Trump the "nationalist" and their fears that their globalist, exceptionalist vision for the USA - a vision that is singularly focused on their own narrow interests at the expense of the American people and many others around the world - would be derailed by Trump attempting to put the interests of the American people first . ..."
    Nov 08, 2018 | www.sott.net
    Billed as a 'referendum on Trump's presidency', the US Midterm Elections drew an unusually high number of Americans to the polls yesterday. The minor loss, from Trump's perspective, of majority Republican control of the lower House of Representatives, suggests, if anything, the opposite of what the media and establishment want you to believe it means.

    An important clue to why the American media has declared permanent open season on this man transpired during a sometimes heated post-elections press conference at the White House yesterday. First, CNN's obnoxious Jim Acosta insisted on bringing up the patently absurd allegations of 'Russia collusion' and refused to shut up and sit down. Soon after, PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor joined her colleagues in asking Trump another loaded question , this time on the 'white nationalism' canard:

    Alcindor : On the campaign trail you called yourself a nationalist. Some people saw that as emboldening white nationalists...

    Trump : I don't know why you'd say this. It's such a racist question.

    Alcindor : There are some people who say that now the Republican Party is seen as supporting white nationalists because of your rhetoric. What do you make of that?

    Trump : Why do I have among the highest poll numbers with African Americans? That's such a racist question. I love our country. You have nationalists, and you have globalists . I also love the world, and I don't mind helping the world, but we have to straighten out our country first. We have a lot of problems ...

    The US media is still "not even wrong" on Trump and why he won the 2016 election. You know something is fundamentally wrong when the average high school drop-out MAGA-hat-wearing Texan or Alabaman working a blue collar job has more sense, can SEE much more clearly, than the average university-educated, ideology-soaked, East Coast liberal.

    Trump is a "nationalist". More or less every administration previous to his, going back at least 100 years, was "globalist". For much of its history, the USA has been known around the world as a very patriotic (i.e., nationalist) country. Americans in general had a reputation for spontaneous chants of "USA! USA! USA!", flying the Stars And Stripes outside their houses and being very proud of their country. Sure, from time to time, that pissed off people a little in other countries but, by and large, Americans' patriotism was seen as endearing, if a little naive, by most foreigners.

    Globalism, on the other hand, as it relates to the USA, is the ideology that saturates the Washington establishment think-tanks, career politicians and bureaucrats, who are infected with the toxic belief that America can and should dominate the world . This is presented to the public as so much American largess and magnanimity, but it is, in reality, a means to increasing the power and wealth of the Washington elite.

    Consider Obama's two terms, during which he continued the massively wasteful (of taxpayer's money) and destructive (of foreigners' lives and land) "War on Terror". Consider that he appointed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who proceeded to joyfully bomb Libya back to the stone age and murder its leader. Consider that, under Obama, US-Russia relations reached an all-time low, with repeated attacks (of various sorts) on the Russian president, government and people, and the attempted trashing of Russia's international reputation in the eyes of the American people. Consider the Obama regime's hugely destructive war waged (mostly by proxy) on the Syrian people. Consider the Obama era coup in Ukraine that, in a few short months, set that country's prospects and development back several decades and further soured relations with Russia.

    These are but a few examples of the "globalism" that drives the Washington establishment. Who, in their right mind, would support it? (I won't get into what constitutes a 'right mind', but we can all agree it does not involve destroying other nations for profit). The problem however, is that the Washington elite want - no, NEED - the American people to support such military adventurism, and what better way to do that than by concocting false "Russian collusion" allegations against Trump and having the media program the popular mind with exactly the opposite of the truth - that Trump was a "traitor" to the American people.

    The only thing Trump is a traitor to is the self-serving globally expansionist interests of a cabal of Washington insiders . This little maneuver amounted to a '2 for 1' for the Washington establishment. They simultaneously demonized Trump (impeding his 'nationalist' agenda) while advancing their own globalist mission - in this case aimed at pushing back Russia.

    Words and their exact meanings matter . To be able to see through the lies of powerful vested interests and get to the truth, we need to know when those same powerful vested interests are exploiting our all-too-human proclivity to be coerced and manipulated by appeals to emotion.

    So the words "nationalist" and "nationalism", as they relate to the USA, have never been "dirty" words until they were made that way by the "globalist" element of the Washington establishment (i.e., most of it) by associating it with fringe Nazi and "white supremacist" elements in US society that pose no risk to anyone, (except to the extent that the mainstream media can convince the general population otherwise). The US 'Deep State' did this in response to the election of Trump the "nationalist" and their fears that their globalist, exceptionalist vision for the USA - a vision that is singularly focused on their own narrow interests at the expense of the American people and many others around the world - would be derailed by Trump attempting to put the interests of the American people first .

    [Nov 07, 2018] America's Vote of No Confidence in Trump by Daniel Larison

    Highly recommended!
    The typical scheme of politic life in US under neoliberalism is as following:: candidate for President promises something reasonable, like to end foreign wars and improve the sliding standard of living of the middle class and/or cut outsourcing and offshoring. Gullible voters elect him. He governs as worst of his predecessors and start cutting benefits for the middle class and workers. . In two years voters start realizing that they were deceived and elect House or Senate or both from another party, not realizing that the difference is minimal, if exists at all.
    This cycle of election fraud can continue indefinitely.
    Notable quotes:
    "... "and with those gains voters have delivered a sharp rebuke to the president and his party." ..."
    "... The problem with health care in America is not the cost of insurance, it's the cost of health care services. Moving the "who pays" food around the plate accomplishes nothing. A "Medicare for All" plan under the existing fee for service model will only increase the pathological per capita health care cost in the U.S. ..."
    "... Forget what Trump said as a candidate. Every winning candidate since arguably 1988 ("kinder, gentler America") has run as a non-interventionist and promised to restore jobs, then immediately morphed into John McCain the moment they took the Oath of Office. Instead, watch what Trump has done since getting elected. From that perspective, it is obvious that there is no such thing as "Trumpism", only a meaner, more dysfunctional, more reckless version of Dubya. ..."
    Nov 07, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com
    won control of the House again, ending an eight-year stint in the minority:

    The US Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections, dealing a serious blow to President Donald Trump.

    While the GOP is poised to add to its Senate majority, yesterday's election was the best midterm result for the Democrats since 2006. They flipped dozens of Republican-held seats, including some that they were not expected to win (e.g., IL-06, OK-05), and with those gains voters have delivered a sharp rebuke to the president and his party. It is normal for the president's party to lose seats in the first midterm following a presidential election, and Democratic gains were in line with pre-election predictions. The striking thing about this year's result is that the president's party has lost so much ground despite relatively good economic conditions. Republicans had an extremely favorable Senate map, and despite that they barely managed to eke out a win in Texas of all places. It was not as thorough of a repudiation as the GOP deserved, but it was a significant rejection all the same.

    The president's poor approval ratings and his unimpressive record to date have further dragged down a Republican Party that wasn't very popular to begin with. Americans seem to lose patience with unified government fairly quickly. Yesterday voters gave the Democratic Party an opportunity to put the president in check and hold him accountable for his overreaching and illegal wars. Trump and his officials should expect to face much more rigorous oversight and scrutiny from relevant Congressional committees, and Trump's haphazard and incompetent conduct of foreign policy should run into much stronger resistance from the Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees. Trump won't be able to count on the leadership in the House to roll over for him over the next two years, and he and his Cabinet members are likely to be facing one investigation after another.

    Losing control of one house of Congress under current circumstances is a huge vote of no confidence in Trump and the GOP, and it could not have come a moment too soon.

    Two More Years November 7, 2018 at 9:15 am

    I voted for him in 2016, but I lost confidence in him as he started doing favors for Wall Street, Israel, and Saudi Arabia instead of doing the job we hired him for, the job he promised to do during the campaign: deport the illegals, stop immigration and foreign work visas, get us out of the Middle East, rebuild US infrastructure, i.e. "America First".

    Yesterday I voted against the only national GOP politician I could get my hands on. He lost, and I'm glad, especially because he was a Tea Party Republican who betrayed our Tea Party principles by voting for Trump's out of control deficit spending and for more stupid Mideast wars.

    We've got a lady Democrat now, but she looks fairly sane. We'll see. The problem with Democrat politicians is that a lot of them only pretend to be normal until they get to Washington.

    bkh , , November 7, 2018 at 9:23 am
    I am no Trump fan, but what is going to change? It will still be a do nothing Congress. The wars will still go on and the health-care dilemma will still be ever-present. It is sad that the past 2 years have been wasted. Even if the Republican Congress could not do something about health-care due to the size of the problem, they could have at least done something about infrastructure, immigration, and these dumb wars. The failure is just as much Paul Ryan's fault as it is Trump's. I watched last night with far more interest than 2016 and am amazed that so many old Boomers were elected given the supposed youth movement. It never occurred to me that there are alot of Septuagenarian war-mongers who should have retired a decade ago still receiving votes. The Democrats took the House, but what is left of this nation is toast regardless.
    EliteCommInc. , , November 7, 2018 at 9:32 am
    "Losing control of one house of Congress under current circumstances is a huge vote of no confidence in Trump and the GOP, and it could not have come a moment too soon."

    How much of this was national in nature is unclear. Many of the republicans that lost were "Never Trump" advocates or very "lukewarm" at best. I think this reflects more failure on the local level to turn or translate the positives into something beneficial locally.

    I am just surprised the Republicans managed to lose the house given the economic numbers (though I remain deeply distrustful of them -- given exports) and what has been repeated stumbles by democrats.

    Texas, is a perfect example. While Sen Cruz was not a never Trumper, he was mild fair in the president's corner. His election was about him, not the president. And I think the vote reflected less confidence in his leadership. Neither Texas nor Sen Cruze are as conservative as believed or at least not as they once were considered. Unfortunately, what carried him over the top was ethnicity, not his leadership.

    It's probably too early to tell, just how big a factor the president was in the election or how much change will result. Thus far, the establishment that existed previously remains despite the presidential election that was intended to reshape or at least curb its self serving appetite --

    Given the the money at play -- it is doubtful that that things are going to change much. Now that I put at the admin door step. Because his folded a lot against the reasons he was elected, during the last two years.

    SteveM , , November 7, 2018 at 9:33 am
    Re: "and with those gains voters have delivered a sharp rebuke to the president and his party."

    And with what promises did the Democrats win those votes? Why with the bogus "Medicare for All" and the equally bogus "Free College Education for All".

    The problem with health care in America is not the cost of insurance, it's the cost of health care services. Moving the "who pays" food around the plate accomplishes nothing. A "Medicare for All" plan under the existing fee for service model will only increase the pathological per capita health care cost in the U.S. Too bad the MSM in love with Nitwit Newbie Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is too stupid to connect the dots.

    And higher ed is unaffordable simply because it's also over priced. Using government subsidies to sustain a bankrupt higher ed model amounts to re-arranging even more deck chairs on the Titanic.

    The Democrats are the Party of Free Lunch and Free War. While the Republicans are the Party of Free War and Free Lunch.

    Pick one

    rayray , , November 7, 2018 at 10:44 am
    @SteveM
    The fact is that any "solution" to health care that has any integrity to it is a single payer solution. That's also probably the only solution that reduces, as you accurately state, the pathological per capita health care cost.

    And to be clear, in terms of fiscal viability, the party of reducing taxes and raising budgets is currently and has been historically the GOP. The current administration has picked up that baton as well.

    One final thing, I wouldn't count out Ocasio-Cortes as a nitwit. I've been reading her white papers and following her evolution and she makes 95% of the current GOP crop seem like toddlers. Yes, her idealism will backfire hard as it always does. But what's the other option? Endless corrupt cynicism? She's impressive. I'm pulling for her to stay focused and do well.

    Sid Finster , , November 7, 2018 at 10:46 am
    Forget what Trump said as a candidate. Every winning candidate since arguably 1988 ("kinder, gentler America") has run as a non-interventionist and promised to restore jobs, then immediately morphed into John McCain the moment they took the Oath of Office. Instead, watch what Trump has done since getting elected. From that perspective, it is obvious that there is no such thing as "Trumpism", only a meaner, more dysfunctional, more reckless version of Dubya.
    Oblomov , , November 7, 2018 at 11:06 am
    The alternative to Ocasio-Cortez style state worship is the simple wisdom that governments are neither efficient nor effective at delivering what she proposes.

    [Nov 05, 2018] Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power" warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner's sadistic leer

    Highly recommended!
    Nov 05, 2018 | www.truthdig.com

    Extracted from Scum vs. Scum by Chris Hedge

    Of course, we are all supposed to vote Democratic to halt the tide of Trump fascism. But should the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, hate speech and violence as a tool for intimidation and control will increase, with much of it directed, as we saw with the pipe bombs intended to decapitate the Democratic Party leadership, toward prominent Democratic politicians and critics of Donald Trump. Should the white man's party of the president retain control of the House and the Senate, violence will still be the favored instrument of political control as the last of democratic protections are stripped from us. Either way we are in for it.

    Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux populism is a sham. Only the rich like his tax cuts, his refusal to raise the minimum wage and his effort to destroy Obamacare. All he has left is hate. And he will use it. Which is not to say that, if only to throw up some obstacle to Trump, you shouldn't vote for the Democratic scum, tools of the war industry and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic control of the House will do very little to halt our descent into corporate tyranny, especially with another economic crisis brewing on Wall Street. The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.

    The Democrats, who refuse to address the social inequality they helped orchestrate and that has given rise to Trump, are the party of racial and ethnic inclusivity, identity politics, Wall Street and the military. Their core battle cry is: We are not Trump! This is ultimately a losing formula. It was adopted by Hillary Clinton, who is apparently weighing another run for the presidency after we thought we had thrust a stake through her political heart. It is the agenda of the well-heeled East Coast and West Coast elites who want to instill corporate fascism with a friendly face.

    Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power" warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner's sadistic leer. Janus-like, fascism seeks to present itself to a captive public as a force for good and moral renewal. It promises protection against enemies real and invented. But denounce its ideology, challenge its power, demand freedom from fascism's iron grip, and you are mercilessly crushed. Gross knew that if the United States' form of fascism, expressed through corporate tyranny, was able to effectively mask its true intentions behind its "friendly" face we would be stripped of power, shorn of our most cherished rights and impoverished. He has been proved correct.

    "Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America," Gross wrote. "Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion."

    No totalitarian state has mastered propaganda better than the corporate state. Our press has replaced journalism with trivia, feel-good stories, jingoism and celebrity gossip. The banal and the absurd, delivered by cheery corporate courtiers, saturate the airwaves. Our emotions are skillfully manipulated around manufactured personalities and manufactured events. We are, at the same time, offered elaborate diversionary spectacles including sporting events, reality television and absurdist political campaigns. Trump is a master of this form of entertainment. Our emotional and intellectual energy is swallowed up by the modern equivalent of the Roman arena. Choreographed political vaudeville, which costs corporations billions of dollars, is called free elections. Cliché-ridden slogans, which assure us that the freedoms we cherish remain sacrosanct, dominate our national discourse as these freedoms are stripped from us by judicial and legislative fiat. It is a vast con game.

    You cannot use the word "liberty" when your government, as ours does, watches you 24 hours a day and stores all of your personal information in government computers in perpetuity. You cannot use the word "liberty" when you are the most photographed and monitored population in human history. You cannot use the word "liberty" when it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or General Dynamics. You cannot use the word "liberty" when the state empowers militarized police to use indiscriminate lethal force against unarmed citizens in the streets of American cities. You cannot use the word "liberty" when 2.3 million citizens, mostly poor people of color, are held in the largest prison system on earth. This is the relationship between a master and a slave. The choice is between whom we want to clamp on our chains -- a jailer who mouths politically correct bromides or a racist, Christian fascist. Either way we are shackled.

    Gross understood that unchecked corporate power would inevitably lead to corporate fascism. It is the natural consequence of the ruling ideology of neoliberalism that consolidates power and wealth into the hands of a tiny group of oligarchs. The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin , refining Gross' thesis, would later characterize this corporate tyranny or friendly fascism as "inverted totalitarianism." It was, as Gross and Wolin pointed out, characterized by anonymity. It purported to pay fealty to electoral politics, the Constitution and the iconography and symbols of American patriotism but internally had seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen impotent. Gross warned that we were being shackled incrementally. Most would not notice until they were in total bondage. He wrote that "a friendly fascist power structure in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, or today's Japan would be far more sophisticated than the 'caesarism' of fascist Germany, Italy, and Japan. It would need no charismatic dictator nor even a titular head it would require no one-party rule, no mass fascist party, no glorification of the State, no dissolution of legislatures, no denial of reason. Rather, it would come slowly as an outgrowth of present trends in the Establishment."

    Gross foresaw that technological advances in the hands of corporations would be used to trap the public in what he called "cultural ghettoization" so that "almost every individual would get a personalized sequence of information injections at any time of the day -- or night." This is what, of course, television, our electronic devices and the internet have done. He warned that we would be mesmerized by the entertaining shadows on the wall of the Platonic cave as we were enslaved.

    Gross knew that the most destructive force against the body politic would be the war profiteers and the militarists. He saw how they would siphon off the resources of the state to wage endless war, a sum that now accounts for half of all discretionary spending. And he grasped that warfare is the natural extension of corporatism. He wrote:

    Under the militarism of German, Italian, and Japanese fascism violence was openly glorified. It was applied regionally -- by the Germans in Europe and England, the Italians in the Mediterranean, the Japanese in Asia. In battle, it was administered by professional militarists who, despite many conflicts with politicians, were guided by old-fashioned standards of duty, honor, country, and willingness to risk their own lives.

    The emerging militarism of friendly fascism is somewhat different. It is global in scope. It involves weapons of doomsday proportions, something that Hitler could dream of but never achieve. It is based on an integration between industry, science, and the military that the old-fashioned fascists could never even barely approximate. It points toward equally close integration among military, paramilitary, and civilian elements. Many of the civilian leaders -- such as Zbigniew Brzezinski or Paul Nitze -- tend to be much more bloodthirsty than any top brass. In turn, the new-style military professionals tend to become corporate-style entrepreneurs who tend to operate -- as Major Richard A. Gabriel and Lieutenant Colonel Paul L. Savage have disclosed -- in accordance with the ethics of the marketplace. The old buzzwords of duty, honor, and patriotism are mainly used to justify officer subservience to the interests of transnational corporations and the continuing presentation of threats to some corporate investments as threats to the interest of the American people as a whole. Above all, in sharp contrast with classic fascism's glorification of violence, the friendly fascist orientation is to sanitize, even hide, the greater violence of modern warfare behind such "value-free" terms as "nuclear exchange," "counterforce" and "flexible response," behind the huge geographical distances between the senders and receivers of destruction through missiles or even on the "automated battlefield," and the even greater psychological distances between the First World elites and the ordinary people who might be consigned to quick or slow death.

    We no longer live in a functioning democracy. Self-styled liberals and progressives, as they do in every election cycle, are urging us to vote for the Democrats, although the Democratic Party in Europe would be classified as a right-wing party, and tell us to begin to build progressive movements the day after the election. Only no one ever builds these movements. The Democratic Party knows there is no price to pay for selling us out and its abject service to corporations. It knows the left and liberals become supplicants in every election cycle. And this is why the Democratic Party drifts further and further to the right and we become more and more irrelevant. If you stand for something, you have to be willing to fight for it. But there is no fight in us.

    The elites, Republican and Democrat, belong to the same club. We are not in it. Take a look at the flight roster of the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein , who was accused of prostituting dozens of underage girls and ended up spending 13 months in prison on a single count. He flew political insiders from both parties and the business world to his secluded Caribbean island, known as "Orgy Island," on his jet, which the press nicknamed "the Lolita Express." Some of the names on his flight roster, which usually included unidentified women, were Bill Clinton, who took dozens of trips, Alan Dershowitz , former Treasury Secretary and former Harvard President Larry Summers, the Candide -like Steven Pinker , whose fairy dust ensures we are getting better and better, and Britain's Prince Andrew. Epstein was also a friend of Trump, whom he visited at Mar-a-Lago.

    We live on the precipice, the eve of the deluge. Past civilizations have crumbled in the same way, although as Hegel understood, the only thing we learn from history is "that people and governments never have learned anything from history." We will not arrest the decline if the Democrats regain control of the House. At best we will briefly slow it. The corporate engines of pillage, oppression, ecocide and endless war are untouchable. Corporate power will do its dirty work regardless of which face -- the friendly fascist face of the Democrats or the demented visage of the Trump Republicans -- is pushed out front. If you want real change, change that means something, then mobilize, mobilize, mobilize, not for one of the two political parties but to rise up and destroy the corporate structures that ensure our doom.

    [Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

    Highly recommended!
    UK politicians in Skripal story behaved by cheap clowns. Their story with door knob was pathetic. They tried to invent the legend with poisoning on the fly and that shows. There is definitely something else brewing here and Shamir proposed his version with Skripal double dealings or something along those line is quite plausible.
    We will never know, but I think British discredited themselves for the whole world in this story. Trump was not better will using this tory to impose additional sanctions on Russia. This is just another proof that he is another neocon who during election campaign like Obama played the role of isolationalist and then appointed Haley to UN and hired Pompeo as his Secretary of state and Bolton as his security advisor -- a typical "bat and switch" operation in US politics.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Vrublevsky thinks that British intelligence convinced the GRU (probably we should say that GRU is not called GRU anymore but GU, the Chief Directorate of the General Staff, but it hardly matters) that Mr Skripal wanted to return home to Russia. Probably they were told that Mr Skripal intended to bring some valuable dowry with him, including Porton Down data and the secrets of the Golden Rain dossier. It is possible that Skripal had been played, too; perhaps he indeed wanted to go back to Russia, the country he missed badly. ..."
    "... As we had learned from videos and stills published by the Brits, the two men had been carefully followed from the beginning to the end. Meanwhile, British intelligence staged a 'poisoning' of Skripal and his daughter, and the two agents quickly returned home. ..."
    "... There is not a single man close to Russian intelligence who thinks that Skripal had actually been poisoned by the Russians. First, there was absolutely no reason to do it, and second, if the Russians would poison him, he would stay poisoned, like the Ukrainian Quisling Stepan Bandera was. ..."
    "... However, by playing this card, the British secret service convinced the Foreign Office to expel all diplomats who had contacts and connection to the exposed GRU agents. The massive expulsion of 150 diplomats caused serious damage to the Russian secret services. ..."
    "... Such a massive operation against Russian agents and their contacts could signal forthcoming war. In normal circumstances, states do not reveal their full knowledge of enemy agents. ..."
    "... I do not know what is the truth. At this point I no longer care because we will never know but it will be the British version that will be the most popular. I like most people like good stories. Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors. ..."
    Oct 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

    ... ... ...

    Vrublevsky thinks that British intelligence convinced the GRU (probably we should say that GRU is not called GRU anymore but GU, the Chief Directorate of the General Staff, but it hardly matters) that Mr Skripal wanted to return home to Russia. Probably they were told that Mr Skripal intended to bring some valuable dowry with him, including Porton Down data and the secrets of the Golden Rain dossier. It is possible that Skripal had been played, too; perhaps he indeed wanted to go back to Russia, the country he missed badly.

    Two GRU agents, supposedly experts on extraction (they allegedly sneaked the Ukrainian president Yanukovych from Ukraine after the coup and saved him from lynching mob) were sent to Salisbury to test the ground and make preparations for Skripal's return. As we had learned from videos and stills published by the Brits, the two men had been carefully followed from the beginning to the end. Meanwhile, British intelligence staged a 'poisoning' of Skripal and his daughter, and the two agents quickly returned home.

    There is not a single man close to Russian intelligence who thinks that Skripal had actually been poisoned by the Russians. First, there was absolutely no reason to do it, and second, if the Russians would poison him, he would stay poisoned, like the Ukrainian Quisling Stepan Bandera was.

    However, by playing this card, the British secret service convinced the Foreign Office to expel all diplomats who had contacts and connection to the exposed GRU agents. The massive expulsion of 150 diplomats caused serious damage to the Russian secret services.

    Still, the Russians had no clue how the West had learned identities of so many diplomats connected to GRU. They suspected that there was a mole, and a turncoat who delivered the stuff to the enemy.

    That is why Vladimir Putin decided to dare them. As he knew that the two men identified by the British service had no connection to the alleged poisoning, he asked them to appear on the RT in an interview with Ms Simonyan. By acting as village hicks, they were supposed to provoke the enemy to disclose its source. The result was unexpected: instead of revealing the name of a turncoat, the Belling Cat, a site used by the Western Secret Services for intentional leaks, explained how the men were traced by using the stolen databases. Putin's plan misfired.

    The Russian secret service is not dead. Intelligence services do suffer from enemy action from time to time: the Cambridge Five infiltrated the upper reaches of the MI-5 and delivered state secrets to Moscow for a long time, but the Intelligence Service survived. Le Carre's novels were based on such a defeat of the intelligence. However they have a way to recover. Identity of their top agents remain secret, and they are concealed from the enemy's eyes.

    But in order to function properly, the Russians will have to clean their stables, remove their databases from the market place and keep its citizenry reasonably safe. Lax, and not-up-to-date agents do not apparently understand the degree the internet is being watched. Considering it should have been done twenty years ago, and meanwhile a new generation of Russians has came of age, perfectly prepared to sell whatever they can for cash, it is a formidable task.

    There is an additional reason to worry. Such a massive operation against Russian agents and their contacts could signal forthcoming war. In normal circumstances, states do not reveal their full knowledge of enemy agents. It made president Putin worry; and he said this week: we'll go to heaven as martyrs, the attackers will die as sinners. In face of multiple and recent threats, this end of the world is quite possible.

    utu , says: October 20, 2018 at 4:23 am GMT

    Great story. If told many people would believe it. But now it is kind of late. So why it wasn't told within few days or weeks of Skripal affair? Why it is the British media that has initiative and Russian media is reactive and defensive? The story that Skripal wanted to return and that two agents were lured in there should have been told right away and that it turned out be MI5 provocation should have been insinuated. And the two agents should have been interviewed on Russian media. Instead we get defensive inept and indolent Russian reactions.

    I do not know what is the truth. At this point I no longer care because we will never know but it will be the British version that will be the most popular. I like most people like good stories. Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors.

    jilles dykstra , says: October 20, 2018 at 7:25 am GMT
    @utu " Instead we get defensive inept and indolent Russian reactions."
    The reaction 'if we want to kill somebody that somebody does not survive' I cannot see as inept and indolent.
    Malaysian Truther , says: October 20, 2018 at 8:24 am GMT
    Excellent piece by Israel Shamir which I think gives the correct explanation of the Skripal poisoning. This was a classic fishing, 'click bait' operation which produced a very valuable haul for Western Intelligence. The only question is whether Skripal cooperated with it – which I think he did – not knowing that both he and his daughter were meant to die. Hence Putin's rage against Skripal a few weeks ago ( calling him a scumbag traitor etc, etc) after the Russian operatives were identified because retired agents are supposed to stay retired.

    Russia made a very serious mistake with the RT interview with the 2 operatives. Better not to say anything if you can't give the whole story. The GU weren't happy to show their incompetence, but compounded the original mistake with obvious lying. That was a propaganda gift to the Western media and has helped convince original disbelievers of Russian perfidy.

    Russia needs to step up its game especially in the media dept.

    Tom Welsh , says: October 20, 2018 at 9:38 am GMT
    "Unfortunately for Russia the Brits have better script writers, director and actors".

    Maybe, if your taste runs to "Dr Who" or "Carry On Spying". That's about the level of the Skripal nonsense.

    If it was meant for public consumption, the British government's opinion of the British people is much lower than mine.

    jilles dykstra , says: October 20, 2018 at 10:33 am GMT
    @Anatoly Karlin " British or American human capital, but there are certainly consummate professionals relative to what passes for today's Russian intelligence services. "

    On what this 'certainly' is based, I see no argument whatsoever.
    Already a long time ago, I must admit, the CIA director had to admit to senator Moynihan that he had lied about the CIA not laying mines in Havana harbour.
    A professional in espionage does not get caught.
    Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 'Secrecy', New Haven 1998
    Anyone acquinted with Sept 11 understands that the USA's secret army, the CIA, was involved.
    Another blunder.
    As far as I know British secret services never get caught.
    How clever the Russians are, suppose quite clever, I for one do not think that the stupid stories about for example Skripal have any truth in them.
    Until now the asserted Russian meddling in USA elections have not been proved.
    Do not know of anything credible that Russian intelligence people are said to have done.
    But of course Russian intelligence does exist.

    Fatima Manoubia , says: October 20, 2018 at 11:18 am GMT
    @Anatoly Karlin

    "A related problem is that since there is now a free market economy, with many more attractive career options for talented people, the high quality people go to work in other spheres, leaving the intelligence agencies with the dregs;" .

    A direct result of erasing ideology so as to erase personality cult towards highly respected people in former USSR .When you have no ideology ( or worst, share ideology with your opponent, i.e free market .) all what you have, from values to secrets, from scientific human capital to secret service officials, are out there in the global market for possible selling to the best postor .this is the principle of capitalism .. after all, it is said, almost everybody has a price .The challenge is finding out where that little bunch who have not are ..Obviously, in this scenario, the one who has the printing machine has a "little" advantage How to overcome this would be part of "what is to be done" ..

    Ilyana_Rozumova , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:07 pm GMT
    If the Russians wanted to kill them they would be dead. Period. It is all FN hoax.
    The latest English came up with was that poison was smeared on the door handle and that both touched the door handle. Give me a break. Such a idiocy. Just imagine the exit procedure where both are touching the door knob.
    And than both Russians went to garbage dump carrying the little bottle and thru it there.
    What an exemplary citizen neat behavior by Russians,
    All English story is such a stupid idiocy that it turns my stomach.
    All we like sheep , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:14 pm GMT

    However, the presence of Russian spies in Salisbury can be explained by its nearness to Porton Down, the secret British chemical lab and factory for manufacturing chemical weapons applied by the White Helmets in Syria in their false-flag operation in Douma and other places. It is possible that a resident of Salisbury (Mr Skripal?) had delivered samples from Porton Down to the Russian intelligence agents. This makes much more sense than the dubious story of Russians trying to poison an old ex-spy who did his stretch in a Russian jail.

    If Mr. Skripal has been poisoned by the stuff of which he himself took samples in Porton Down, this would run completely parallel to the earlier poisoning of Mr. Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, who also became ill because of carrying poison (polonium) around.

    Eagle Eye , says: October 20, 2018 at 12:54 pm GMT

    If [Yulia Skripal] had not had the courage to make this call while slipping the observance of British intelligence, she would probably be dead by now.

    Both Skripals are most likely DEAD, murdered by British "intelligence" services.

    The formulaic and curiously uninterested treatment of the matter in the British media seems inconsistent with the Skripals still being alive.

    The article above suggests that the Skripals were unwitting or witting participants in a sting to expose Russian intelligence agents. More importantly, Sergey Skripal appears to have had a role in the creation of the DNC's "dossier" to undermine the Trump presidencey.

    Whatever the background, Sergey Skripal became privy to important secrets that the Brits and their seditious allies in the U.S. Deep State do not want exposed.

    macilrae , says: October 20, 2018 at 2:38 pm GMT
    In the Skripal case the British have not explained why, after claiming to have found the closest approach to a smoking gun in the form of traces of novichok in that hotel room, the hotel was not then immediately quarantined.

    And assuredly, with Putin's name on the line, the Russians have to do a better job if they are to refute the standing accusations – the RT interview was something of a PR disaster.

    The Belloncat data, although superficially convincing, could so easily have been faked by anybody with reasonable knowledge of Russian internet infrastructure and some proficiency in Photoshop.

    CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:21 pm GMT
    @utu

    But now it is kind of late. So why it wasn't told within few days or weeks of Skripal affair?

    It's still not being told – believe it or not, Israel Shamir is not Sergei Lavrov. I hypothesized to the same state of affairs in early September re: Skripals.

    But I did not know about these massive intelligence security breaches in Russia. Wow, that's huge. Even though it's not clear to me how this indicates Putin's plan misfired. If anything he got exactly what he wanted: confirmation that the "West" had access to the entire passport database. Knowing what your enemy has in intelligence is a huge win, now they can work on correcting it (hard as it may be, it would be impossible without knowing).

    CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:24 pm GMT
    @macilrae You are right, it could have been faked, anything can be faked today, even a video of Putin speaking (search for "deep fakes" and watch the video at https://www.wsj.com/articles/deepfake-videos-are-ruining-lives-is-democracy-next-1539595787 ).

    But the fact is Russia has not really disputed the results so I am fairly confident that not only was Belling Cat right, but Israel is right, and now we have the situation where Russia knows that Western intelligence has full access to Russia's passport database.

    wayfarer , says: October 20, 2018 at 3:55 pm GMT
    @Tyrion 2 Had some experiences with Chinese and Mossad spies, not to mention Russian Jewish hard-drug dealers.

    Here are a few examples.

    There was an AMES postdoc at UCSD, a Chinese applied-math brain who had a 10-plus female handler. She'd stop by occasionally to check up on him. He always get extremely anxious when she was around. Couldn't figure out if it was fear, sexual excitement, or a combination of both.

    There was an old Chinese man and his foxy young female protege, who enjoyed filming U.S. military maneuvers along the San Diego coast. I observed their operation for days.

    There was a swing-shift cleaning crew in a Southern California high-tech mfg facility that was all Chinese, in an area that typically employed Latin American crews. Its head honcho was a beautiful Chinese lady. They made it their job to sort through trash bins and save papers. The feds busted them.

    As far as the Mossad, I spent two years on a rental property in SD county, which was occupied by them as well. Mostly Israeli kids using the property and a local Israeli-owned vegetarian restaurant as their "scorpion den." Got fairly familiar with some of their espionage work and methods.

    I don't go looking for this stuff. I'm just able to recognize it. As an empath I can read people, quite well. It's a natural gift.

    Can't stomach Israel's insensitive nature. That's why you'll typically find me pointing out their self-serving bullshit.

    source: https://themindunleashed.com/2013/10/30-traits-of-empath.html

    FB , says: October 20, 2018 at 4:13 pm GMT
    This is a pretty good article but also falls on its face at the end

    Mr Shamir's 'inside' information confirms my own take on Petrov and Boshirov which I published a few days after that RT interview with Ms Simonyan I wrote this on Col Lang's blog on Sept 14

    'Yeah those two 'tourists' do look the part don't they I would say they are probably GRU or something similar but nobody 'poisoned' the Skripals that's total kabuki theater another Potemkin village production from the reality masters

    Something is afoot here though perhaps these two were lured to Salisbury as part of a frame up plot, perhaps by Skripal himself or perhaps the Brits caught wind of their plans to visit [on some standard spying mission, certainly not assassination] and put in motion the elaborate hoax

    Everybody there protested loudly including Andrey Martyanov [Smoothie] I also added this

    ' I disagree with everyone here it seems these guys aren't tourists but they also didn't try to kill anyone that's stupid

    It's some sort of spy game

    Here's one scenario double agent Skripal makes convincing noises about flipping back someone at GRU [or some similar outfit] sends these two to Salisbury to check it out a very stupid move which is why Putin is now miffed enough to display these guys publicly and their field career surely over also a slap in the face to the silly Limeys for playing dirty pool even in the cloak and dagger game there are unwritten rules '

    This is now exactly the story that Mr Shamir is presenting here but he is a day late and a dollar short

    I also don't agree with his take that this is all somehow a big loss for Russian intel the Brits are the ones who have painted themselves in a corner their Skripal story is a wet paper bag waiting to fall apart the fact that they lured the Russians to Salisbury, under whatever pretext, be it Skripal or Porton Down/white helmets etc was their only small tactical victory because they could then later expose those two after months of Russian denials in order to show the Russians were in fact somehow involved

    But that exposure came months later all that time the Russians would have known that Boshirov and Petrov had been captured on candid camera and would have had time to work on their countermove

    Mr Shamir writes this like the game is over that is ridiculous the Brits have no way out of the Skripal hoax there was never any poisoning the original diagnosis of the Skripals in the Salisbury hospital was opioid overdose that came out in the first BBC interview with the hospital staff months after the 'poisoning'

    It was not until 48 hours after the Skripals were admitted to hospital and the convenient intervention of Porton Down that the medical diagnosis was 'changed' to nerve agent poisoning

    BUT this is an unsustainable story that WILL FALL APART the simple reason is medical and chemical fact both nerve agents and agricultural pesticides are based on the exact same chemical compound organophosphates

    It just so happens that organophsphate poisoning is 'one of the most common causes of poisoning worldwide '

    'There are nearly 3 million poisonings per year resulting in two hundred thousand deaths.'

    That is the simple reason why emergency doctors EVERYWHERE are trained to recognize and treat this kind of poisoning especially in rural, agricultural areas like Salisbury

    That is why it took months for media to gain access to the medical staff at that hospital the British spooks needed to do a lot of 'persuading' with medical professionals that would have wanted no part in such trickery and fakery

    But this is a ticking time bomb that is bound to blow up in the faces of the very stupid Brits

    So yes they pulled off a minor coup in luring those two to Salisbury but the game is very very far from over

    As for Skripal he is in on it for sure as I speculated in my original comment on the matter..the Russian intel services are perfectly aware of this, yet Mr Shamir's supposedly well connected source has zero knowledge of this which tells me this source is actually a useless clown who 'knows' exactly what an internet commenter [myself] already knew two months ago

    PS the fact that the Brits supposedly have all kinds of database info on the Russian intel apparatus and personnel files etc doesn't mean anything the author is a making a big deal out of this, but his story lacks meat on its bones most 'intel' is open source material anyway

    As for sensitive stuff that may have been 'sold' by 'corrupt' bureaucrats one must ask if such 'info' is actually real or a clever plant providing fake info is the oldest spy trick in the book and this article simply takes for granted that such a trick would not have been employed why not ?

    CalDre , says: October 20, 2018 at 5:30 pm GMT
    @FB How would a fake database leak include the real data on the two GRU agents that just happened to be sent to UK? Maybe it was to make the data leak seem real?

    In spycraft it is always impossible to know how deep the deception goes. That's why the very article to which you are responding started with:

    It is hard to evaluate the exact measure of things in the murky world of spies and counter-spies, but it appears that the Western spies have had extraordinary success in the subterranean battle.

    An acknowledgement you stubbornly ignore.

    M Edward , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:01 pm GMT
    None of this matters.

    All governments are corrupt and have no interest in the welfare of the native populations.

    All this he said she said crap is irrelevant, in the end we all will end up under a totalitarian police state run out of Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.

    Cyrano , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:06 pm GMT
    I think that a clear strategy by the western "intelligence" services is starting to emerge vis-a-vis the Russians. By accusing any Russian that they can get their hands on, of being a spy, they want to scare the ordinary Russians from visiting the west, so afterwards any Russian actually caught traveling to the west can be safely assumed to be a spy – since by the calculations of the clever western intelligence – only someone who is actually a spy while at the same time being Russian, would dare to travel to the west. How smart is that?

    Joking aside, it really is becoming unsafe for Russian nationals to travel to the west. Even though the west reserves the generosity of calling somebody equal only for those that are from the 3rd world – Russians clearly don't deserve such generosity.

    Despite this, exceptions can be made and some unfortunate Russian soul could be accused of being equal with those highly evolved westerners and against their will can be offered protection from Mother Russia.

    Pretty much like it happened to Yulia Skripal. She was only visiting her gastarbeiter father in GB, who apparently expressed desire to return to Russia, against pretty much everybody's wishes, and all of a sudden Yulia Skripal found herself bestowed with the western generosity of being declared equal, and was disappeared from public eye in order to protect her from those with whom she is clearly not equal – the Russians.

    Thank God at least MI-6 proved equal to the task and discovered her equalness in a nick of time and saved her. The moral of the story: Only democracy has the power to recognize who is equal and who is not. Then, on the other hand, capitalism can keep acquiring new monikers such as "democracy" – all they want, Russia still has better quality of equality, despite ditching socialism.

    FB , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:24 pm GMT
    @CalDre Yes I 'stubbornly' refuse to take at face value this silly statement

    it appears that the Western spies have had extraordinary success in the subterranean battle.'

    Because it's not backed up by anything other than hot air as for that supposed 'data' about Petrov and Boshirov that was put out by Bellingcat

    Ie mickey mouse stuff as with everything these clowns do, it is meant only to bamboozle the most utterly stupid bipeds

    A very nice clue is the fact that a Russian website called 'The Insider' is Bellingcat's acknowledged partner here

    If you read the article in English they claim to have 'dug' up a lot of info from various sources such the central Russian resident database and passenger check in data for their flight to the UK

    Big deal that Shamir is building a mountain out of a molehill is more than clear

    In fact this entire Shamir tale appears to have one subtle purpose to publicize and glorify the Bellingcat outfit

    which irredeemably lost any credibility a few weeks back when illiterate poofter Eliott Higgins refused a debate challenge by the distinguished MIT physicist and former presidential advisor Ted Postol actually calling Postol an 'idiot' a move that astounded even those willing to entertain Higgins on a semi-credible level

    peterAUS , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:39 pm GMT
    @Anatoly Karlin Be that as it may, the "Western side" had (publicly known) Aldrich, Hanssen and Benghazi fiasco.

    Boils down to, from the comment below:

    When you have no ideology ( or worst, share ideology with your opponent, i.e free market .) all what you have, from values to secrets, from scientific human capital to secret service officials, are out there in the global market for possible selling to the best postor .this is the principle of capitalism .. after all, it is said, almost everybody has a price..

    and

    Obviously, in this scenario, the one who has the printing machine has a "little" advantage.

    And, on top of it, in West, since the fall of The Wall, we've been having "Cooking the Intelligence to Fit the Political Agenda".

    Incompetence vs blatant lying?
    What a choice.

    Kubarking , says: October 20, 2018 at 6:43 pm GMT
    This commenter begs to differ with M. Karlin's assessment (8) of the relative competence of Russian sovok and CIA. "consummate professionals relative to what passes for today's Russian intelligence services"? Mais non.

    CIA always gets caught. All they do is step on their crank, again and again. They depend not on professionalism but on what Russ Baker describes as a strange mix of ruthlessness and ineptitude. Both stem from impunity in municipal law.

    For example: CIA torture and coercive interference got comprehensively exposed, worldwide, in the '70s. What happened? Don Gregg gave the Church and Pike committees an ultimatum: Back off or it's martial law. CIA got busted again in the '80s for the criminal enterprises under the Iran/Contra rubric. By then CIA had installed Tom Polgar, Former Saigon Station Chief, as chief investigator for the cognizant Senate Select committee, and Polgar assured Gregg that his hearings would not be a repeat of the abortive Pike and Church flaps.

    So CIA are clowns. They can afford to be clowns because they know they can get away with it. Getting away with it is their only skill, and the only skill they need.

    The persistent category error at this site is failing to realize that CIA is the state. They rule the USA.

    [Oct 16, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon

    Highly recommended!
    The question is why the Deep State still is trying to depose him, if he essentially obeys the dictate of the Deep State ?
    Notable quotes:
    "... The Wall Street Journal ..."
    "... Actually that's Trump. He demands total and utter loyalty from his people and gives none in return. ..."
    "... The significance here is that Bolton and Pompeo represent just about everything Trump ran against during his 2016 presidential campaign. He ran against the country's foreign policy establishment and its rush to war in Iraq; its support of NATO's provocative eastward expansion; its abiding hostility toward Russia; its destabilization of the Middle East through ill-conceived and ill-fated activities in Iraq, Libya, and Syria; its ongoing and seemingly endless war in Afghanistan; and its enthusiasm for regime change and nation-building around the world. Bolton and Pompeo represent precisely those kinds of policies and actions as well as the general foreign policy outlook that spawned them. ..."
    "... Trump gave every indication during the campaign that he would reverse those policies and avoid those kinds of actions. He even went so far, in his inimitable way, of accusing the Bush administration of lying to the American people in taking the country to war in Iraq, as opposed to making a reckless and stupid, though honest, mistake about that country's weapons of mass destruction. He said it would be great to get along with Russia and criticized NATO's aggressive eastward push. He said our aim in Syria should be to combat Islamist extremism, not depose Bashar al-Assad as its leader. In promulgating his America First approach, he specifically eschewed any interest in nation-building abroad. ..."
    "... Still, generally speaking, anyone listening to Trump carefully before the election would have been justified in concluding that, if he meant what he said, he would reverse America's post-Cold War foreign policy as practiced by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. ..."
    "... Thus any neutral observer, at the time of Mattis's selection as defense secretary, might have concluded that he was more bent on an adventurous American foreign policy than his boss. But it turned out to be just the opposite. There are two reasons for this. First, Mattis is cautious by nature, and he seems to have taken Trump at his word that he didn't want any more unnecessary American wars of choice. Hence he opposed the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal prior to Trump's decision to pull America out of it. That action greatly increased the chances that America and Iran could find themselves on a path to war. Mattis also redeployed some military resources from the Middle East to other areas designed to check actions by Russia and China, which he considered greater threats to U.S. security. ..."
    "... That seems to have presented a marvelous opportunity to Bolton and Pompeo, whose philosophy and convictions are stark and visible to all. Bolton has made clear his desire for America to bring about regime change in Iran and North Korea. He supported the Iraq war and has never wavered in the face of subsequent events. He has advocated a preemptive strike against North Korea. Pompeo harbors similar views. He favored withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and has waxed bellicose on both Iran and Russia. ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... Bolton was put in power to ensure unswerving loyalty to the dictates of Bibi Netanyahu and local neocons. Have we forgotten Iraq and endless wars since? ..."
    "... this is all about Israel's hold on the Oval Office. Bolton and Pompeo are far, far closer to Israel than Mattis and that's a problem for him. Sorry Robert Merry, but you clearly didn't catch Trump's first foreign "policy" speech in 2016. He suddenly revealed his priorities for all to see. There are four words that Trump apologists simply cannot bring themselves to utter: "Trump is a neo-con". Suckers. ..."
    "... Military adventurism is another disappointment. We can't afford more neocon disasters. We don't need to be the world's police force. We should be shrinking the military budgets. It is dismaying to watch the neocons gaining power after the catastrophic failures of recent decades. ..."
    "... "Still, generally speaking, anyone listening to Trump carefully before the election would have been justified in concluding that, if he meant what he said, he would reverse America's post-Cold War foreign policy as practiced by George W. Bush and Barack Obama." ..."
    "... Come on, anyone listening to Trump before the election realized that he said whatever drew the most applause from the crowd. He never, in his entire life, has meant what he said. ..."
    "... He will continue down the neo-con line until Fox News and NY Times run front-page articles about how Bolton and Pompeo are manipulating him and actually running US foreign policy, at which time he will dump them and make up something else. ..."
    "... Arrest the warmongering "leaders" who create havoc around the world ..."
    "... I guess DJT offered you a "Bad Deal" then? Past performance does predict future results. ..."
    Oct 16, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    In covering President Donald Trump's recent pregnant comments about Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, The Wall Street Journal tucked away in its story an observation that hints at the president's foreign policy direction. In an interview for CBS's 60 Minutes , the president described Mattis as "sort of a Democrat if you want to know the truth" and suggested he wouldn't be surprised if his military chief left his post soon. After calling him "a good guy" and saying the two "get along very well," Trump added, "He may leave. I mean, at some point, everybody leaves . That's Washington."

    Actually that's Trump. He demands total and utter loyalty from his people and gives none in return. In just his first 14 months as president, he hired three national security advisors, reflecting the unstable relationships he often has with his top aides. Following the 60 Minutes interview, Washington was of course abuzz with speculation about what all this might mean for Mattis's fate and who might be the successor if Mattis were to quit or be fired. It was just the kind of fodder Washington loves -- human drama revealing Trump's legendary inconstancy amid prospective new turmoil in the capital.

    But far more significant than Mattis's future or Trump's love of chaos was a sentence embedded in the Journal 's report. After noting that recent polls indicated that Mattis enjoys strong support from the American people, reporter Nancy A. Youssef writes: "But his influence within the administration has waned in recent months, particularly following the arrival of John Bolton as national security adviser and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo as secretary of state."

    The significance here is that Bolton and Pompeo represent just about everything Trump ran against during his 2016 presidential campaign. He ran against the country's foreign policy establishment and its rush to war in Iraq; its support of NATO's provocative eastward expansion; its abiding hostility toward Russia; its destabilization of the Middle East through ill-conceived and ill-fated activities in Iraq, Libya, and Syria; its ongoing and seemingly endless war in Afghanistan; and its enthusiasm for regime change and nation-building around the world. Bolton and Pompeo represent precisely those kinds of policies and actions as well as the general foreign policy outlook that spawned them.

    Trump gave every indication during the campaign that he would reverse those policies and avoid those kinds of actions. He even went so far, in his inimitable way, of accusing the Bush administration of lying to the American people in taking the country to war in Iraq, as opposed to making a reckless and stupid, though honest, mistake about that country's weapons of mass destruction. He said it would be great to get along with Russia and criticized NATO's aggressive eastward push. He said our aim in Syria should be to combat Islamist extremism, not depose Bashar al-Assad as its leader. In promulgating his America First approach, he specifically eschewed any interest in nation-building abroad.

    The one area where he seemed to embrace America's post-Cold War aggressiveness was in his attitude toward Iran. But even there he seemed less bellicose than many of his Republican opponents in the 2016 primaries, who said they would rip up the Iran nuclear deal on their first day in office. Trump, by contrast, said it was a bad deal but one he would seek to improve.

    Still, generally speaking, anyone listening to Trump carefully before the election would have been justified in concluding that, if he meant what he said, he would reverse America's post-Cold War foreign policy as practiced by George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

    Now we know he didn't mean what he said, and the latest tiff over the fate of Mattis crystallizes that reality. It's not that Mattis represents the kind of anti-establishment outlook that Trump projected during the campaign; in fact, he is a thoroughgoing product of that establishment. He said Iran was the main threat to stability in the Middle East. He supported sending arms to the Syrian rebels. He decried Russia's intent to "break NATO apart."

    Thus any neutral observer, at the time of Mattis's selection as defense secretary, might have concluded that he was more bent on an adventurous American foreign policy than his boss. But it turned out to be just the opposite. There are two reasons for this. First, Mattis is cautious by nature, and he seems to have taken Trump at his word that he didn't want any more unnecessary American wars of choice. Hence he opposed the withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal prior to Trump's decision to pull America out of it. That action greatly increased the chances that America and Iran could find themselves on a path to war. Mattis also redeployed some military resources from the Middle East to other areas designed to check actions by Russia and China, which he considered greater threats to U.S. security.

    And second, it turns out that Trump has no true convictions when it comes to world affairs. He brilliantly discerned the frustrations of many Americans over the foreign policy of the previous 16 years and hit just the right notes to leverage those frustrations during the campaign. But his actual foreign policy has manifested a lack of consistent and strong philosophy. Consider his approach to NATO. During the campaign he criticized the alliance's eastward push and aggressive approach to Russia; then as president he accepted NATO's inclusion of tiny Montenegro, a slap at the Russians; then later he suggested Montenegro's NATO status could force the U.S. into a major conflagration if that small nation, which he described as aggressive, got itself into a conflict with a non-NATO neighbor. Such inconsistencies are not the actions of a man with strong convictions. They are hallmarks of someone who is winging it on the basis of little knowledge.

    That seems to have presented a marvelous opportunity to Bolton and Pompeo, whose philosophy and convictions are stark and visible to all. Bolton has made clear his desire for America to bring about regime change in Iran and North Korea. He supported the Iraq war and has never wavered in the face of subsequent events. He has advocated a preemptive strike against North Korea. Pompeo harbors similar views. He favored withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and has waxed bellicose on both Iran and Russia.

    Thus a conflict was probably inevitable between Mattis and these more recent administration arrivals. The New York Times speculates that Bolton likely undermined Mattis's standing in Trump's eyes. Writes the paper: "Mr. Bolton, an ideological conservative whose views on foreign policy are more hawkish than those of Mr. Mattis, appears to have deepened the president's suspicions that his defense secretary's view of the world is more like those of Democrats than his own."

    The paper didn't clarify the basis of this speculation, but it makes sense. Bolton and Pompeo are gut fighters who go for the jugular. Trump is malleable, susceptible to obsequious manipulation. Mattis is an old-style military man with a play-it-straight mentality and a discomfort with guile. Thus it appears we may be seeing before our eyes the transformation of Trump the anti-establishment candidate into Trump the presidential neocon.

    Robert W. Merry, longtime Washington, D.C. journalist and publishing executive, is a writer-at-large for . His latest book is President McKinley: Architect of the American Century .

    General Manager October 15, 2018 at 11:30 pm

    Bolton was put in power to ensure unswerving loyalty to the dictates of Bibi Netanyahu and local neocons. Have we forgotten Iraq and endless wars since? We need more folks like Phil Giraldi at TAC. Love him or hate him – but please bring him back. The First Amendment needs him. And many of us still long for his direct and well-informed comments.
    George Hoffman , says: October 16, 2018 at 5:27 am
    "Come on now!" as sports analysts say in a sarcastic segment about football blunders on ESPN. Did GWB really make just an honest mistake based upon faulty intelligence? Does this writer really believe his assertion? This intellectually dishonest essay comes on the heels of a puff piece by another so-called "conservative" writer who asserted that had JFK not been assassinated and won a second term, he would have surely withdrawn American soldiers from South Vietnam. And then later in this essay the writer finally admits that these wars in the global war on terror, excluding the war in Afghanistan, were unnecessary. But if these other wars were unnecessary, then it historically follows they were illegal wars of aggression against humanity. That was the legal basis under which we tried Nazi leaders as war criminals at Numenberg. By the way, if Trump does get rid of Mattis, there are plenty more, one could even say they are a dime a dozen, at the Pentagon who would be willing to toe the line under Trump. They're basically professional careerists, corporate suits with misto salads of colorful medals on their uniforms. They take their marching orders from the military/industrial complex. I'm a Vietnam vet and realized long ago how clueless these generals actually are when we crossed our Rubicon in Vietnam. The war on terror now rivals the Vietnam War as a major foreign policy debacle. All these other unnecessary wars are part of the endgame as we continue our decline as a constitutional republic and we eventually hit bottom and go bankrupt by 2030.
    jd , says: October 16, 2018 at 9:37 am
    Absolutely right General Manager, this is all about Israel's hold on the Oval Office. Bolton and Pompeo are far, far closer to Israel than Mattis and that's a problem for him. Sorry Robert Merry, but you clearly didn't catch Trump's first foreign "policy" speech in 2016. He suddenly revealed his priorities for all to see. There are four words that Trump apologists simply cannot bring themselves to utter: "Trump is a neo-con". Suckers.
    Kirt Higdon , says: October 16, 2018 at 10:23 am
    When was Trump's foreign policy anything but Neo-con? Oh, he had a few good lines when he was running – that was the "con" part. I didn't fall for it but many did. But since he took office, he's been across-the-board anti-Russian, anti-Iran, pro-Saudi, uber-Zionist, and enthusiastic shill for the military-industrial complex.
    Patricus , says: October 16, 2018 at 10:35 am
    Trump surprised many of us with some very positive conservative actions but has also disappointed smaller government conservatives. The deficits and debt grows as the economy improves. What in the world happens in the next recession?

    Military adventurism is another disappointment. We can't afford more neocon disasters. We don't need to be the world's police force. We should be shrinking the military budgets. It is dismaying to watch the neocons gaining power after the catastrophic failures of recent decades.

    TheSnark , says: October 16, 2018 at 11:05 am
    "Still, generally speaking, anyone listening to Trump carefully before the election would have been justified in concluding that, if he meant what he said, he would reverse America's post-Cold War foreign policy as practiced by George W. Bush and Barack Obama."

    Come on, anyone listening to Trump before the election realized that he said whatever drew the most applause from the crowd. He never, in his entire life, has meant what he said.

    He will continue down the neo-con line until Fox News and NY Times run front-page articles about how Bolton and Pompeo are manipulating him and actually running US foreign policy, at which time he will dump them and make up something else.

    swb , says: October 16, 2018 at 11:34 am
    Hmm

    And second, it turns out that Trump has no true convictions when it comes to world affairs.

    Fixed:

    And second, it turns out that Trump has no true convictions.

    This is another article that attempts to overlay some sort of actual logical policy or moral framework over the top of Trumps actions. Please stop. Next week or next month this whole line of reasoning will be upended again and you will have to start over with another theory that contradicts this one.

    BradleyD , says: October 16, 2018 at 11:40 am
    @R Dodge

    Are are you implying that Mattis is a slacker? Like, he isn't doing a good job? And, specially, what is he failing to do?

    Even if he wasn't doing anything at all, you don't fire Mattis. He is beloved among the military. While a fair number revere and maybe even keep their own little "St. Mattis" shrine as a joke, it is only half a joke.

    Mattis is one of the few modern military generals with a cult of personality who, I have little doubt, could declare crossing the Rubicon and would get a good number of veterans and active marching in support.

    Stephen J. , says: October 16, 2018 at 11:48 am
    I believe a good peaceful and appropriate "Foreign Policy" would be to:

    "Arrest Them"

    Arrest all those responsible for the plight of the Refugees
    These people are in camps, or drowning in unfriendly seas
    And when these unwanted, reach "safety," or a foreign land
    They are treated like garbage and the rulers want them banned

    Arrest these "rulers" who created this hell on earth
    Who act, that human lives, don't have any worth
    They are examples of evil and should not be in power
    They really are disgraceful and an awful bloody shower

    Arrest the warmongering "leaders" who create havoc around the world
    Authorizing bombings and killings these "leaders" should be reviled
    Instead we give them fancy titles and homes to park their asses
    Will there ever be a day of reckoning and a rise up of the masses?

    Arrest the financiers of these bloody wars of destruction
    This is how these blood sucking parasites get their satisfaction
    Drag them away in chains and handcuffs, and orange prison attire
    These are the corporate cannibals who set the world on fire

    Arrest the fat and plump little "honourable" Ministers of Wars
    They are the "useful idiots" for the leading warmongering whores
    They never fight in battle or sacrifice any of their rotten lives
    They get others to do their evil work while they themselves thrive

    Arrest the corporate chieftains who feed off death and destruction
    And who count their bloodstained profits with smiling satisfaction
    These are the well dressed demons who call their investments "creating jobs"
    Meanwhile, around the world the oppressed are crying, and nobody hears their sobs

    Arrest the uniformed generals who blindly obey their marching orders
    To bomb, kill, maim and destroy: they are the brainwashed enforcers
    Years ago there were trials for war crimes committed by those in charge
    Now we need them again for we have war criminals at large

    Arrest all the aforementioned, and help clean up the world
    We cannot afford these people in power: Are they mentally disturbed?
    They are a danger to all of us and we better wake up
    Is it time to arrest all of them: Have you had enough?
    [more info at links below]

    http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2015/09/arrest-them.html
    -- --

    https://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-great-satan-and-his-satanic-gang-of.html
    -- –
    https://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-satanic-savages-in-suits-and-dresses.html

    FJR Atlanta , says: October 16, 2018 at 12:13 pm
    Hillary was right when she called Trump a puppet. She just had the puppeteers wrong.
    Doswell , says: October 16, 2018 at 1:04 pm
    "The significance here is that Bolton and Pompeo represent just about everything Trump ran against during his 2016 presidential campaign. "

    Yes. Those two names are the main reason that this lifelong Republican is voting against Trump and the GOP in a few weeks. I voted against this kind of crap in 2016.

    Sid Finster , says: October 16, 2018 at 1:09 pm
    Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated. That is obvious. What blows my mind is how many people refuse to admit this obvious fact.
    b. , says: October 16, 2018 at 1:11 pm
    "[G]enerally speaking, anyone listening [..] before the election would have been justified in concluding [Trump] would reverse America's post-Cold War foreign policy as practiced by George W. Bush and Barack Obama."

    What did Judas Goat 43 say again?

    "Fool me once, shame on me. Full me twice in the long run we'll all be dead."

    I guess DJT offered you a "Bad Deal" then? Past performance does predict future results.

    Cape Fear , says: October 16, 2018 at 1:13 pm
    If Trump loses at least one house of Congress this year, he can put it down to 1) failure on immigration and border control, 2) failure to control government spending, and 3) failure to get us out of the Middle East.

    His new neocon friends are responsible for 3) and couldn't care less about 1) and 2).

    One Guy , says: October 16, 2018 at 1:24 pm
    "Now we know he didn't mean what he said "

    No, Mr. Merry. We knew that long ago. I don't know how much attention you've been paying, but it's been so obvious for so long. But better late than never, I suppose.

    Myron Hudson , says: October 16, 2018 at 1:56 pm
    The only thing that surprises me is that anyone is surprised.

    [Oct 10, 2018] A Decalogue of American Empire-Building A Dialogue by James Petras

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC ..."
    "... This is not new and has been going for at least a century. And the US elites have a long tradition of false flags to to get the people of America riled up for war. ..."
    "... As Petras says: "The ten theses define the nature of 21st century imperialism" because, I feel, they are the same values that defined the British Colonial Empire. ..."
    Oct 10, 2018 | www.unz.com

    Introduction

    Few, if any, believe what they hear and read from leaders and media publicists. Most people choose to ignore the cacophony of voices, vices and virtues.

    This paper provides a set of theses which purports to lay-out the basis for a dialogue between and among those who choose to abstain from elections with the intent to engage them in political struggle.

    Thesis 1

    US empire builders of all colors and persuasion practice donkey tactics; waving the carrot and wielding the whip to move the target government on the chosen path.

    In the same way, Washington offers dubious concessions and threatens reprisals, in order to move them into the imperial orbit.

    Washington applied the tactic successfully in several recent encounters. In 2003 the US offered Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi a peaceful accommodation in exchange for disarmament, abandonment of nationalist allies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. In 2011, the US with its European allies applied the whip – bombed Libya, financed and armed retrograde tribal and terrorist forces, destroyed the infrastructure, murdered Gaddafi and uprooted millions of Africans and Libyans. . . who fled to Europe. Washington recruited mercenaries for their subsequent war against Syria in order to destroy the nationalist Bashar Assad regime.

    Washington succeeded in destroying an adversary but did not establish a puppet regime in the midst of perpetual conflict.

    The empire's carrot weakened its adversary, but the stick failed to recolonize Libya ..Moreover its European allies are obligated to pay the multi-billion Euro cost of absorbing millions of uprooteded immigrants and the ensuing domestic political turmoil.

    Thesis 2

    Empire builders' proposal to reconfigure the economy in order to regain imperial supremacy provokes domestic and overseas enemies. President Trump launched a global trade war, replaced political accommodation with economic sanctions against Russia and a domestic protectionist agenda and sharply reduced corporate taxes. He provoked a two-front conflict. Overseas, he provoked opposition from European allies and China, while facing perpetual harassment from domestic free market globalists and Russo-phobic political elites and ideologues.

    Two front conflicts are rarely successful. Most successful imperialist conquer adversaries in turn – first one and then the other.

    Thesis 3

    Leftists frequently reverse course: they are radicals out of office and reactionaries in government, eventually falling between both chairs. We witness the phenomenal collapse of the German Social Democratic Party, the Greek Socialist Party (PASOK), (and its new version Syriza) and the Workers Party in Brazil. Each attracted mass support, won elections, formed alliances with bankers and the business elite – and in the face of their first crises, are abandoned by the populace and the elite.

    Shrewd but discredited elites frequently recognize the opportunism of the Left, and in time of distress, have no problem in temporarily putting up with Left rhetoric and reforms as long as their economic interests are not jeopardized. The elite know that the Left signal left and turn right.

    Thesis 4

    Elections, even ones won by progressives or leftists, frequently become springboards for imperial backed coups. Over the past decade newly elected presidents, who are not aligned with Washington, face congressional and/or judicial impeachment on spurious charges. The elections provide a veneer of legitimacy which a straight-out military-coup lacks.

    In Brazil, Paraguay and Venezuela, 'legislatures' under US tutelage attempted to ouster popular President. They succeeded in the former and failed in the latter.

    When electoral machinery fails, the judicial system intervenes to impose restraints on progressives, based on tortuous and convoluted interpretation of the law. Opposition leftists in Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador have been hounded by ruling party elites.

    Thesis 5

    Even crazy leaders speak truth to power. There is no question that President Trump suffers a serious mental disorder, with midnight outbursts and nuclear threats against, any and all, ranging from philanthropic world class sports figures (LeBron James) to NATO respecting EU allies.

    Yet in his lunacy, President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and ongoing fabrications of the mass media. Never before has a President so forcefully identified the lies of the leading print and TV outlets. The NY Times , Washington Post , the Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the larger public. They have lost legitimacy and trust. Where progressives have failed, a war monger billionaire has accomplished, speaking a truth to serve many injustices.

    Thesis 6

    When a bark turns into a bite, Trump proves the homely truth that fear invites aggression. Trump has implemented or threatened severe sanctions against the EU, China, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, North Korea and any country that fails to submit to his dictates. At first, it was bombast and bluster which secured concessions.

    Concessions were interpreted as weakness and invited greater threats. Disunity of opponents encouraged imperial tacticians to divide and conquer. But by attacking all adversaries simultaneously he undermines that tactic. Threats everywhere limits choices to dangerous options at home and abroad.

    Thesis 7

    The master meddlers, of all times, into the politics of sovereign states are the Anglo-American empire builders. But what is most revealing is the current ploy of accusing the victims of the crimes that are committed against them.

    After the overthrow of the Soviet regime, the US and its European acolytes 'meddled' on a world-historic scale, pillaging over two trillion dollars of Soviet wealth and reducing Russian living standards by two thirds and life expectancy to under sixty years – below the level of Bangladesh.

    With Russia's revival under President Putin, Washington financed a large army of self-styled 'non-governmental organizations' (NGO) to organize electoral campaigns, recruited moguls in the mass media and directed ethnic uprisings. The Russians are retail meddlers compared to the wholesale multi-billion-dollar US operators.

    Moreover, the Israelis have perfected meddling on a grand scale – they intervene successfully in Congress, the White House and the Pentagon. They set the Middle East agenda, budget and priorities, and secure the biggest military handouts on a per-capita basis in US history!

    Apparently, some meddlers meddle by invitation and are paid to do it.

    Thesis 8

    Corruption is endemic in the US where it has legal status and where tens of millions of dollars change hands and buy Congress people, Presidents and judges.

    ORDER IT NOW

    In the US the buyers and brokers are called 'lobbyists' – everywhere else they are called fraudsters. Corruption (lobbying) grease the wheels of billion dollars military spending, technological subsidies, tax evading corporations and every facet of government – out in the open, all the time and place of the US regime.

    Corruption as lobbying never evokes the least criticism from the mass media.

    On the other hand, where corruption takes place under the table in Iran, China and Russia, the media denounce the political elite – even where in China over 2 million officials, high and the low are arrested and jailed.

    When corruption is punished in China, the US media claim it is merely a 'political purge' even if it directly reduces elite conspicuous consumption.

    In other words, imperial corruption defends democratic value; anti-corruption is a hallmark of authoritarian dictatorships.

    Thesis 9

    Bread and circuses are integral parts of empire building – especially in promoting urban street mobs to overthrow independent and elected governments.

    Imperial financed mobs – provided the cover for CIA backed coups in Iran (1954), Ukraine (2014), Brazil (1964), Venezuela (2003, 2014 and 2017), Argentina (1956), Nicaragua (2018), Syria (2011) and Libya (2011) among other places and other times.

    Masses for empire draw paid and voluntary street fighters who speak for democracy and serve the elite. The "mass cover" is especially effective in recruiting leftists who look to the street for opinion and ignore the suites which call the shots.

    Thesis 10

    The empire is like a three-legged stool it promotes genocide, to secure magnicide and to rule by homicide. Invasions kills millions, capture and kill rulers and then rule by homicide – police assassinating dissenting citizens.

    The cases are readily available: Iraq and Libya come to mind. The US and its allies invaded, bombed and killed over a million Iraqis, captured and assassinated its leaders and installed a police state.

    A similar pattern occurred in Libya: the US and EU bombed, killed and uprooted several million people, assassinated Ghadaffy and fomented a lawless terrorist war of clans, tribes and western puppets.

    "Western values" reveal the inhumanity of empires built to murder "a la carte" – stripping the victim nations of their defenders, leaders and citizens.

    Conclusion

    The ten theses define the nature of 21 st century imperialism – its continuities and novelties.

    The mass media systematically write and speak lies to power: their message is to disarm their adversaries and to arouse their patrons to continue to plunder the world.

    Jeff Stryker , says: August 11, 2018 at 4:26 am GMT

    When was the last time "Nation building" resulted in a livable country. Iraq? Libya? Americans, and I am one, can barely keep their own country from sinking into a pit of decay.

    Why "deliver Democracy" when Dubai makes much of the US look like shit in terms of infrastructure, crime and poverty.

    RealAmericanValuesCirca1776Not1965 , says: August 11, 2018 at 6:57 am GMT
    @Jeff Stryker

    When was the last time "Nation building" resulted in a livable country.

    Why "deliver Democracy" when Dubai makes much of the US look like shit

    Because what a ZOG does with it's host nation has nothing to do with improving anything for the occupied peoples.

    Think of it like the Communist Manifesto. They thump it around, preaching utopia and equality and all that sugar and honey. This is because they want you to buy what they are selling. But they don't have any intention of ever delivering. None whatsoever.

    All they're really trying to do is whip up an army of useful idiots to be used as blunt instruments. And once these useful idiots are done fulfilling their role in the redistribution of wealth and power, they are discarded only to realize too little too late that they have been working against their own interests all along.

    The same thing goes for exporting Democracy. It's never been about improving anyone's lives. In the West or any of their target nations. It's been about whipping useful idiots up into an army that can be used as a blunt instrument against the obstacles in the way of (((someone's))) geopolitical ambitions.

    ... ... ..

    Malla , says: August 11, 2018 at 6:58 am GMT
    This is not new and has been going for at least a century. And the US elites have a long tradition of false flags to to get the people of America riled up for war.

    False Flag Events Behind the Six Major Wars

    False flags to fool Americans into the Spanish American War, WW1, WW2, Korean War, Vietnam War and the War on terror.

    jilles dykstra , says: August 11, 2018 at 7:28 am GMT
    Interesting is that a USA textbook already describes USA imperialism, without using the word: Barbara Hinckley, Sheldon Goldman, 'American Politics and Government, Structure, Processes, Institutions and Policies', Glenview Ill., 1990
    jilles dykstra , says: August 11, 2018 at 7:37 am GMT
    @Jeff Stryker Ockam's Razor: the simplest theory that explains the facts is the best.

    There is no effort to create livable countries, the objective is to destroy them.

    Under Saddam's dictatorschip Iraq was a prosperous country, without liberty, true.

    Under old Assad, I visited Syria in the mid eighties, the same, though less prosperous, at the time, as far as I know, no Syrian oil or gas.

    Aleppo, a cosmolitan and lively city, the suq, now destroyed, a great thing to have seen, medieval, but with happy looking people.

    ... ... ...

    Den Lille Abe , says: August 11, 2018 at 8:10 am GMT
    Nation building? When did that happen? I must have been asleep for 60 years.
    Jeff Stryker , says: August 11, 2018 at 11:20 am GMT
    @RealAmericanValuesCirca1776Not1965 Geopolitical ambitions?

    Vietnam was a mess for a decade at least and created an immigration crisis in Australia. The US had a surplus budget when Clinton left office. When Bush left office, oil prices were sky-high and the economy was dreadful. Who benefits. Israel? Syria is a mess that threatens their borders.

    annamaria , says: August 11, 2018 at 11:31 am GMT
    A great comment with the proper name calling for the ZUSA in relation to the current situation in Turkey: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/08/how-turkeys-currency-crisis-came-to-pass.html#comments
    Excerpts:
    " The Dollar op indicates that the USA ( or rather those who pull the strings in the US ) finally admits that our Ally is responsible for almost all mischievous events which took place in Turkey.
    The USA is not a country, but rather a useful contract killer on a larger scale compared to the PKK-FETO-ISIS etc.
    The US is now stepping forward fearlessly because 'the arms of the octopus', as Erdogan put last week, has been severed in Turkey."

    These two definitions do stick:
    1. the US is manipulated by the puppeteers -- people (the US citizenry at large) have no saying in the US decisions (mostly immoral and often imbecile); the well-being of the US is not a factored in the decisions
    2. the US has become a "contract killer" for the voracious puppeteers

    JackOH , says: August 11, 2018 at 11:38 am GMT
    Prof. Petras, thanks. A while back I read something called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (?) in which the writer describes his efforts to put other nations into debt to American institutions and American-controlled or -influenced international institutions for the ulterior purpose of political control. Sounded plausible enough, and I saw the author speak on TV on his book tour.

    How do any of us know we're living in a country gone massively wobbly? Can a German sipping wine in Koblenz in 1936 even imagine Hitler's Germany will be a staple of American cable shows eighty years hence, and not in a good way? Can a Russian in the same year imagine that the latest round of arrests won't be leading to a Communist utopia now, or ever?

    FWIW-my guess is America's imperial adventures are heavily structural, being that foreign policy is strongly within the President's purview, and Congress can be counted on to rubber-stamp military expeditions. Plus, empire offers a good distraction from domestic politics, which are an intractable mess of rent-seeking, racial animus, and corporate interests.

    I don't like it much having to live in a racketeerized America, but there's not a whole lot we can do.

    Ilyana_Rozumova , says: August 11, 2018 at 12:11 pm GMT
    Professor Petras glasses are becoming little bit foggy, but his scalpel still cuts to the bone. But this article is lecture for beginner class, or the aliens visitors who just landed on Earth
    jacques sheete , says: August 11, 2018 at 12:55 pm GMT

    Yet in his lunacy, President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and ongoing fabrications of the mass media.

    A damned good article, Sir! And bless you for calling bankster propaganda anything but "mainstream."

    Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

    -Walter Lippman, A Preface to Politics ( 1913 ), quoted in The Essential Lippmann, pp. 516-517

    Lippman was an Allied propagandist among many other things.

    Anonymous [317] Disclaimer , says: August 11, 2018 at 12:57 pm GMT
    The 10 theories that led Petras to conclude "{the message is "to disarm their adversaries and to arouse their patrons" to continue to plunder the world}" is an example, that the American people are clueless about how events documented by Petras research, led Petras to conclude the USA is about plunder of the world .

    There is a distinct difference between USA governed Americans and the 527 persons that govern Americans.

    Access by Americans to the USA 1) in person with one of its 527 members, 2) by communication or attempted communication via some type of expression or 3) by constitutionally allowed regime change at election time. None of these methods work very well for Americans , if at all; but they serve the entrenched members of the USA, massive in size corporations and upstream wealthy owners, quite well.

    Secondly, IMO, Mr. Petras either does not understand democracy or has chosen to make a mockery of it? The constitution that produced the USA produced not a democracy, but a Republic. A republic which authorized a group ( an handful of people) to rule America by rules the USA group decides to impose. Since the group can control the meaning of the US Constitution as well as change it's words, the group has, unlimited power to rule, no matter the subject matter or method (possible exceptions might be said to be within the meaning of the bill of rights; but like all contract clauses, especially a contract of the type where one side can amend, ignore, change or replace or use its overwhelming military and police powers to enforce against the other side, leaving the other side no recourse, is not really a contract; it might better be called an instrument announcing the assumption of power which infringes inalienable human rights).

    Therefore just because 527 members of the USA government might between themselves practice Democracy does not mean the governed enjoy the same freedoms.

    So the USA is ruled by puppets, 527 of them, puppets of the Oligarchs. Since the ratification of the USA constitution, Americans have been governed by the USA [The US constitution (ratified 1778) overthrew and disposed of the Articles of Confederation (Government of America founded 1776). Not a shot was fired, but there was a war none-the-less (read Federalist vs Anti-Federalist and have a look at the first few acts of the USA).

    (Note: The AOC, was the American government that defeated the British Armies [1776-1783], the 1776 American AOC American Government was the government that surveyed all of the land taken from the British by the AOC after it defeated the entire British military and stopped the British aristocrat owed, privately held corporate Empires from their continuous raping of America and abuse of Americans. those who did the work.

    The AOC was the very same American Government that hired G. Washington to defeat and chase the British Aristocratic Corporate Colonial Empires out of America. The 1776 American AOC Government was the very same government that granted freedom to its people (AOC really did practice democracy, and really did try to divide and distribute the vast American lands taken from the British Corporate Colonial Empire equally among the then living Americans. The AOC ceased to exist when the US Constitution installed the USA by a self proclaimed regime change process , called ratification). There were 11 presidents of the AOC, interestingly enough, few have heard of them.

    Once again the practice of political self-determination democracy is limited to the 525 USA members who have seats in the halls of the Congress of the USA or who occupy the offices of the President of USA or the Vice-President of the USA. All persons in America, not among the 527 salaried, elected members of the USA, are governed by the USA.

    jilles dykstra , says: August 11, 2018 at 3:22 pm GMT
    @Heisendude Israel has no constitution, and therefore no borders. A constitution also describes borders. An Israeli jew one asked Ben Gurion why Israel has no defined borders, the answer was something like 'we do not want to define borders, if we did, we cannot expand'.
    AnonFromTN , says: August 11, 2018 at 4:50 pm GMT
    @Jeff Stryker Why does Israel assist all sorts of bandits, including, but not limited to, ISIS, in Syria? Just recently Israel helped in extracting the White Helmets, a PR wing of Nusra (Syrian branch of Al Qaida) from South Syria. Please explain.
    AnonFromTN , says: August 11, 2018 at 4:56 pm GMT
    @Anonymous Those 527 are bought and paid for lackeys. We don't know how many real owners of the USA there are, don't know many of their names, but we do know that when those lackeys imagine that they are somebodies and try to govern, they are eliminated (John Kennedy is the most unambiguous example).
    RealAmericanValuesCirca1776Not1965 , says: August 11, 2018 at 6:01 pm GMT
    @Jeff Stryker

    Geopolitical ambitions?

    You may have heard of it. Globalism, N(J)ew World Order. That which the (((internationalists))) are always working towards. A one world government with them at the top, the ruling class.

    Vietnam was a mess for a decade at least and created an immigration crisis in Australia.

    Australia is a white nation. All white nations are supposed to suffer and ultimately collapse upon the creation of their New World Order. Vietnam was a complete success for the one's who really wanted that war.

    The US had a surplus budget when Clinton left office. When Bush left office, oil prices were sky-high and the economy was dreadful.

    Bush was a neocon, wars for Israel with that 'surplus' were the intention all along. As wars under Hillary would have been as well. And as they potentially could still be if Trump proves to be a lap dog for Israel as well. He campaigned on no pointless wars, but there's no saying for sure until he either brings all our troops home or capitulates and signs Americans up to be cash cows and cannon fodder for more Israeli geopolitical ambitions.

    Who benefits.

    Those same rootless cosmopolitans that always benefit from playing both sides of the field, seeding conflict and then cashing in on the warmongering, genocidal depopulation and population displacement in the name of their geopolitical ambitions.

    Israel? Syria is a mess that threatens their borders.

    Israel made that mess. Threatened their borders with war. Land theft. Y'know. Golan Heights. Genocide land theft and displacement are all Israel does. Their borders have expanded every year since their creation.

    Everything that's happening in the Middle East is because of the Rothschild terror state of Israel and the Zionist Jews who reside in it .. as well as in our various western ZOGs.

    Have you really never heard of the Oded Yinon Plan ? Their genocidal outline for waging wars of aggression for the purpose of expanding their borders and becoming the dominant regional superpower by balkanizing the surrounding Arab world.

    The only nations of significance left on their check list are as follows : Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia. And many will argue that the House of Saud has always been crypto, helping Israel behind the scenes. Their sudden post-coup cooperation with their former 'enemies' is little more than a sign that they are needed as a wartime ally more in the current phase of their Yinon Plan than as controlled opposition funding and arming ISIS while keeping the public eye off of Israel's role in their creation and direction. Sure enough, it seems there is a rather strong push for an alliance between KSA, Israel and the US for war with Iran.

    Here you go:

    https://archive.fo/U7XTH

    Ilyana_Rozumova , says: August 11, 2018 at 6:59 pm GMT
    Technological progress, particularly the progress in information technology is pushing mankind with accelerated speed toward final solution and final settlement.
    renfro , says: August 11, 2018 at 8:34 pm GMT
    Good article

    Corruption is endemic in the US where it has legal status and where tens of millions of dollars change hands and buy Congress people, Presidents and judges.

    Yep. I have been ranting for years calling for a Anti-Corruption Political Party Platform by some group.
    The corruption of our politicians is the cause of all the problems everyone else is ranting about.

    In some ways I think most people deserve what they are going to get eventually because they ignore the corruption of their heroes .whether it be Trump, Hillary or any other.

    I tell you sheeple .if someone will cheat and lie to others they will do the same thing to you ..you are stone cold stupid if you think other wise.

    Jim Bob Lassiter , says: August 12, 2018 at 1:09 am GMT
    @Biff Jeff and Mikeat are both correct if my friend's account of his participation in a recent trade show there is true. My friend's wife is a ding bat Hillarybot and she got to yammering to me after returning about all the wonderful diversity she saw in the streets of Dubai, but I shut her down pretty quickly by pointing out that the diversity darlings in Dubai were paid help for the Sheikdom and weren't even second class temporary residents by US standards; that they can be (and are) summarily deported to some slave market in Yemen if they don't mind their Ps and Qs VERY carefully in that society. She's also a wino, but confessed that the Trader Joe's box grade merlot sold for about US$18 to $25 a goblet in a tourist zone food and beverage joint. (and that didn't slow her down one bit) Hubby had to watch her close, as obvious public drunkenness (even in the tourist zone) has high potential for extreme justice.

    The New Economy plan being promoted there is the development of a sort of Disneyworld on steroids international vacation attraction, as the leaders seem to think that their oil is going to run out soon.

    jilles dykstra , says: August 12, 2018 at 7:50 am GMT
    @peterAUS CNN, Washpost and NYT since a very long time suffer from a serious mental disorder.
    It reminds me of Orwell's The Country of the Blind.
    When the man who could see was cured all was well.
    Anon [317] Disclaimer , says: August 12, 2018 at 12:31 pm GMT
    @DESERT FOX While the Fed is a focal point, it is not the central issue. If Americans, were actually in voting control of the central issue Americans could and probably would abolish the fed and destroy its income by removing the income tax laws, very early on.

    But if the Fed and Income taxes are not the central issue, what is the central issue? Could it be majority will "control of the structure and staffing of that structure" that often people call government? Look back to the creation of the US Constitution! There the central issue for the old British Aristocracy accustomed to having their way, was: can Aristocrats stay in control (of the new American democracy) and if so, how should "such control" be established so that British corporate power, British Aristocratic wealth and British Class Privilege can all survive the American revolution? {PWP}.

    The question was answered by developing a form of government that enabling the Oligarch few to make the rules [rule of law] that could control the masses and to produce a government that had a monopoly on the use of power, so that it could enforce the laws it makes, against against the masses and fend off all challenges. The constitution blocked the people's right to self determination; it empowered the privileged, it favored the wealthy, and most of all it protected and saved pre-war British owned PWP as post war PWP.

    Today those who operate the government do so in near perfect secrecy (interrupted only occasionally by Snowden, Assange, and a few brave others). It spies on each person, records each human breath taken by the masses, relates relationships between the masses, because those in charge fear the power of the masses should the masses somehow find a way to impose their will on how things are to be. How can rules made by Aristocrats in secret, be considered to be outcomes established by self- determination of the masses who are to be governed?

    Ratification is the process that abolished Democracy in America. The story of those who imposed ratification has not yet been told. Ratification was used to justify the overthrow of the Articles of the Confederation (AOC was America's government from 1776 to 1789). To defeat the British empire the AOC hired the most wealthy man it could find to organize an Army capable to defeat the British Military. The AOC warred on the British Armies with the intent to stop colonial corporate empires from continuing to rape American productivity and exploit the resources in America for the benefit of the British Corporate Empires [Read the Declaration of Independence].

    You might research.. How did George Washington achieve his massive, for its time, wealth? I don't think tossing coins across the mile wide Potomac made him a dime? How did GW attain such wealth in British owned, corporately controlled Colonial America? Why was George Washington able to keep that British earned wealth after the British were chased out of America? More importantly many gave their all, life, liberty and property to help chase the British out, GW gave ..?

    Title by land grants [Virginia and West Virginia] are traceable to GWs estate.

    What the land grant landowners feared most was that the new American democracy, might allow the masses to revoke or deny titles to real estate in America, if such title derived from a foreign government (land grant). The Articles of Confederation government was talking about dividing up all of the lands in America, and parceling it out, in equal portions, to all living AOC governed America. Deeds from kings and queens of England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands to land in America would not be recognized in the chain of title? Such lands would belong to the new AOC government or to the states who were members of the AOC.

    You might check out Article 6, (Para 1) of the US Constitution.. it says in part
    " All Debts contracted and Engagements[land grants and British Corporate Charters] entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the confederation.

    (meaning loans to British Banks would be repaid and land deals made with foreign nations and corporations including those that resulted in creating a land Baron in British Colonial America, were to be treated as valid land titles by US Constitution. Consider the plight of Ex British Land Grant Barron Aristocrat [EBLGBA] who finds himself in now independent democratic America? Real Americans might decide EBLGBAs were some kind of terrorist, or spies. Under such circumstances, the EBLGA might look at Americans as a threat to their Aristocracy, a threat to their PWP..

    Example: A Spanish Land Grant property in America ( King of Spain gave 5 million acres of land in America to ZZ in 1720 (ZZ is a Spanish Corporation ZZ doing business in America), the land transaction was recognized as valid under British Colonial Law in America. But would Independent AOC America recognize a deed issued by a Spanish King, or British Queen to Real Estate in America?

    After the Revolution, the question does a EBLGBA retain ownership in the American located land that is now part of Independent America? Ain't no dam deed from a Spanish government going to be valid in America. King of England cannot give a deed to land that is located in independent America.

    So if, a corporation, incorporated under British Law, claims it owns 5 million acres of American land because the Queen of England deeded it the the corporation: does that mean the 5 million acres still belongs to British Corporation X, and of course to the person made Aristocrat by virtue of ownership of the British Corporation). Is a British Corporation now to be an American Corporation? British Landed Gentry (land grant owners) in independent post war America, were quick to lobby for the constitution because the constitution protected their ownership in land granted to them by a foreign king or queen in fact the constitution protected the PWP.

    I agree with your Zionist communist observation. It is imperative for all persons interested in what is happening to study the takeover of Russia from the Tzar by Lenin and his Zionist Communist because what the Zionist did to the Christians in Russia in 1917 seems to be approaching for it to happen here in America and because that revolution was a part of the organized Zionist [1896, Hertzl] movement to take control of all of the oil in the world. Let us not forget, Lenin and crew exterminated 32 million White Russians nearly all of whom were educated Christians living in the Ukraine.

    As Petras says: "The ten theses define the nature of 21st century imperialism" because, I feel, they are the same values that defined the British Colonial Empire.

    jacques sheete , says: August 12, 2018 at 12:32 pm GMT
    @Anonymous

    So the USA is ruled by puppets, 527 of them, puppets of the Oligarchs. Since the ratification of the USA constitution, Americans have been governed by the USA [The US constitution (ratified 1778) overthrew and disposed of the Articles of Confederation (Government of America founded 1776). Not a shot was fired, but there was a war none-the-less (read Federalist vs Anti-Federalist and have a look at the first few acts of the USA).

    What a relief to find that there are a few (very few) others who have a clue. The "constitution" was effectively a coup d'etat. We proles, peasants and other pissants have been tax and debt slaves ever since, and the situation has continuously worsened. Lincoln's war against Southern independence, establishment of the Federal Reserve, Wilson's and especially FDR's wars, and infiltration of the US government and industry by Commies, Zionists and other Eastern European goon-mafiosi scum have completely perverted what this country is supposedly about.

    I doubt the situation will ever begin to improve unless and until the mass of brainwashed dupes understand what you wrote.

    jacques sheete , says: August 12, 2018 at 1:17 pm GMT
    @Anon Please comment more often. Excellent info there.

    You might research.. How did George Washington achieve his massive, for its time, wealth?

    True. Especially since the guy was a third rate, (probably mostly incompetent), Brit military officer and terrorist who treated the men under his command like sh!t.

    Reminds me of Ol Johnny Boy McCain and other such scum.

    annamaria , says: August 12, 2018 at 8:53 pm GMT
    @jilles dykstra "Ben Gurion: 'we do not want to define borders, if we did, we cannot expand'. -- Right. Hence the mass slaughter in the Middle East.
    Hapless Canada is going to accept the "humanitarian" terrorists from While Helmets organization. The rescue is a joint Israel-Canada enterprise: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/435670-white-helmets-canada-syria/
    -- -- -- -
    Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland (a committed banderist and admirer of Ukrainian neo-Nazis) and Robin Wettlaufer (Canada's representative to the Syrian Opposition and a harsh critic of Assad "regime") have been playing a key role in the evacuation of the White Helmets. But there are some questions to Robin: "Did Canadians get to vote on whether or not to bring potential terrorists or supporters of terrorists to Canada? No. No vote in the Parliament, no public discussion. Why did the Canadian government refuse the entry of 100 injured Palestinian children from Gaza in 2014, a truly humanitarian effort, and yet will fast-track the entry of potentially dangerous men with potential ties to terrorists?" https://www.rt.com/op-ed/435670-white-helmets-canada-syria/
    -- Guess Robin Wettlaufer, due to her ethnic solidarity, would be fine with these injured Palestinian children being smothered by someone, but the well-financed White Helmets are the extremely valuable material for realizing Oded Yinon plan for Eretz Israel (see Ben Gurion answer).
    Kratoklastes , says: August 17, 2018 at 12:20 am GMT
    @Jeff Stryker

    The US had a surplus budget when Clinton left office

    It turns out that 'budget surplus' does not mean what most people think it means. When your household has a budget surplus, its rate of debt accumulation reverses (i.e., the total value of household debt falls). Credit cards get paid down, mortgages get paid off, and eventually you end up with a large and growing positive net worth. That's what running a 'budget surplus' means , right?

    Not so for governments : the US government could run perpetual budget 'surpluses' and still grow government debt without bound – because they do not account for things the way they insist that we serfs account for things there are a bunch of their expenditures that they simply don't count in their 'budget'.

    It's a bit like if you were to only count the amount your household spent on groceries , and declare your entire budget to be in 'surplus' or 'deficit' based on whether or not there's change after you do your weekly shopping. Meanwhile, you're spending more than you earn overall, and accumulating debt at an expanding rate.

    Runaway debt is what destroys – whether it's families or countries.

    There has only been one year since 1960 in which the US Federal Debt has fallen : 1969 .

    During the much-touted "Clinton Surpluses", the US Federal Debt rose by almost a quarter- trillion dollars . The first two Bush years had larger surpluses than either of the two Clinton surpluses – but still added $160 billion to the Federal debt.

    I know those don't sound like big numbers anymore – much given that Bush added $602 billion per year on average, and Obama added twice Bush 's amount (1.19 trillion per year).

    [Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out in my book The Myth of Homeland Security ..."
    "... "The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance. ..."
    "... One thing that did ..."
    "... US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point. ..."
    "... My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection." ..."
    "... All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault 7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. ..."
    "... the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET -- Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ] ..."
    "... It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being prepared for cyberwar. ..."
    "... it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools. ..."
    "... My observation is that the NSA and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese? ..."
    "... The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are much smaller operations? ..."
    "... That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other processors have similar backdoors. ..."
    "... There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at all. ..."
    "... So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order to justify its actions and defend its budget. ..."
    "... What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes. ..."
    "... Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of same. ..."
    Oct 07, 2018 | freethoughtblogs.com

    Bob Moore asks me to comment on an article about propaganda and security/intelligence. [ article ] This is going to be a mixture of opinion and references to facts; I'll try to be clear which is which.

    Yesterday several NATO countries ran a concerted propaganda campaign against Russia. The context for it was a NATO summit in which the U.S. presses for an intensified cyberwar against NATO's preferred enemy.

    On the same day another coordinated campaign targeted China. It is aimed against China's development of computer chip manufacturing further up the value chain. Related to this is U.S. pressure on Taiwan, a leading chip manufacturer, to cut its ties with its big motherland.

    It is true that the US periodically makes a big push regarding "messaging" about hacking. Whether or not it constitutes a "propaganda campaign" depends on how we choose to interpret things and the labels we attach to them -- "propaganda campaign" has a lot of negative connotations and one person's "outreach effort" is an other's "propaganda." An ultra-nationalist or an authoritarian submissive who takes the government's word for anything would call it "outreach."

    There has been an ongoing campaign on the part of the US, to get out the idea that China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have massive armies of hackers that are constantly looking to steal American secrets. The absurdity of the US' claims is pretty obvious. As I pointed out in my book The Myth of Homeland Security (2004) [ wc ] claims such as that the Chinese had "40,000 highly trained hackers" are flat-out absurd and ignore the reality of hacking; that's four army corps. Hackers don't engage in "human wave" attacks.

    "The Great US/China Cyberwar of 2010" is one cyberwar that didn't happen, but was presaged with a run-up of lots of claims that the Chinese were hacking all over the place. I'm perfectly willing to accept the possibility that there was Chinese hacking activity, but in the industry there was no indication of an additional level of attack or significance.

    One thing that did happen in 2010 around the same time as the nonexistent cyberwar was China and Russia proposed trilateral talks with the US to attempt to define appropriate limits on state-sponsored hacking. The US flatly rejected the proposal, but there was virtually no coverage of that in the US media at the time. The UN also called for a cyberwar treaty framework, and the effort was killed by the US. [ wired ] What's fascinating and incomprehensible to me is that, whenever the US feels that its ability to claim pre-emptive cyberwar is challenged, it responds with a wave of claims about Chinese (or Russian or North Korean) cyberwar aggression.

    John Negroponte, former director of US intelligence, said intelligence agencies in the major powers would be the first to "express reservations" about such an accord.

    US ideology is that "we don't start wars" -- it's always looking for an excuse to go to war under the rubric of self-defense, so I see these sorts of claims as justification in advance for unilateral action. I also see it as a sign of weakness; if the US were truly the superpower it claims it is, it would simply accept its imperial mantle and stop bothering to try to justify anything. I'm afraid we may be getting close to that point.

    My assumption has always been that the US is projecting its own actions on other nations. At the time when the US was talking the loudest about Chinese cyberwar, the US and Israel had launched STUXNET against the Iranian enrichment plant at Natanz, and the breeder reactor at Bushehr (which happens to be just outside of a large city; the attack took some of its control systems and backup generators offline). Attacks on nuclear power facilities are a war crime under international humanitarian law, which framework the US is signatory to but has not committed to actually follow. This sort of activity happens at the same time that the US distributes talking-points to the media about the danger of Russian hackers crashing the US power grid. I don't think we can psychoanalyze an entire government and I think psychoanalysis is mostly nonsense -- but it's tempting to accuse the US of "projection."

    The anti-Russian campaign is about alleged Russian spying, hacking and influence operations. Britain and the Netherland took the lead. Britain accused Russia's military intelligence service (GRU) of spying attempts against the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague and Switzerland, of spying attempts against the British Foreign Office, of influence campaigns related to European and the U.S. elections, and of hacking the international doping agency WADA. British media willingly helped to exaggerate the claims: [ ]

    The Netherland [sic] for its part released a flurry of information about the alleged spying attempts against the OPCW in The Hague. It claims that four GRU agents traveled to The Hague on official Russian diplomatic passports to sniff out the WiFi network of the OPCW. (WiFi networks are notoriously easy to hack. If the OPCW is indeed using such it should not be trusted with any security relevant issues.) The Russian officials were allegedly very secretive, even cleaning out their own hotel trash, while they, at the same, time carried laptops with private data and even taxi receipts showing their travel from a GRU headquarter in Moscow to the airport. Like in the Skripal/Novichok saga the Russian spies are, at the same time, portrayed as supervillains and hapless amateurs. Real spies are neither.

    The U.S. Justice Department added to the onslaught by issuing new indictments (pdf) against alleged GRU agents dubiously connected to several alleged hacking incidents . As none of those Russians will ever stand in front of a U.S. court the broad allegations will never be tested.

    There's a lot there, and I think the interpretation is a bit over-wrought, but it's mostly accurate. The US and the UK (and other NATO allies, as necessary) clearly coordinate when it comes to talking points. Claims of Chinese cyberwar in the US press will be followed by claims in the UK and Australian press, as well. My suspicion is that this is not the US Government and UK Government coordinating a story -- it's the intelligence agencies doing it. My opinion is that the intelligence services are fairly close to a "deep state" -- the CIA and NSA are completely out of control and the CIA has gone far toward building its own military, while the NSA has implemented completely unrestricted surveillance worldwide.

    All of this stuff happens against the backdrop of Klein, Binney, Snowden, and the Vault 7 revelations, as well as solid attribution identifying the NSA as "equation group" and linking the code-tree of NSA-developed malware to STUXNET, FLAME, and DUQU. While the attribution that "Fancy Bear is the GRU" has been made and is probably fairly solid, the attribution of NSA malware and CIA malware is rock solid; the US has even admitted to deploying STUXNET -- Obama bragged about it. When Snowden's revelations outlined how the NSA had eavesdropped on Angela Merkel's cellphone, the Germans expressed shock and Barack Obama remarkably truthfully said "that's how these things are done" and blew the whole thing off by saying that the NSA wasn't eavesdropping on Merkel any more. [ bbc ]

    It's hard to keep score because everything is pretty vague, but it sounds like the US has been dramatically out-spending and out-acting the other nations that it accuses of being prepared for cyberwar. I tend to be extremely skeptical of US claims because: bomber gap, missile gap, gulf of Tonkin, Iraq WMD, Afghanistan, Libya and every other aggressive attack by the US which was blamed on its target. The reason I assume the US is the most aggressive actor in cyberspace is because the US has done a terrible job of protecting its tool-sets and operational security: it's hard not to see the US is prepared for cyberwar, when both the NSA and the CIA leak massive collections of advanced tools.

    Meanwhile, where are the leaks of Russian and Chinese tools? They have been few and far between, if there have been any at all. Does this mean that the Russians and Chinese have amazingly superior tradecraft, if not tools? I don't know. My observation is that the NSA and CIA have been horribly sloppy and have clearly spent a gigantic amount of money preparing to compromise both foreign and domestic systems -- that's bad enough. With friends like the NSA and CIA, who needs Russians and Chinese?

    The article does not have great depth to its understanding of the situation, I'm afraid. So it comes off as a bit heavy on the recent news while ignoring the long-term trends. For example:

    The allegations of Chinese supply chain attacks are of course just as hypocritical as the allegations against Russia. The very first know case of computer related supply chain manipulation goes back to 1982 :

    A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas pipeline, it emerged yesterday.

    I wrote a piece about the "Farewell Dossier" in 2004. [ mjr ] Re-reading it, it comes off as skeptical but waffly. I think that it's self-promotion by the CIA and exaggerates considerably ("look how clever we are!") at a time when the CIA was suffering an attention and credibility deficit after its shitshow performance under George Tenet. But the first known cases of computer related supply chain manipulation go back to the 70s and 80s -- the NSA even compromised Crypto AG's Hagelin M-209 system (a mechanical ciphering machine) in order to read global communications encrypted with that product. You can imagine Crypto AG's surprise when the Iranian secret police arrested one of their sales reps for selling backdoor'd crypto -- the NSA had never told them about the backdoor, naturally. The CIA was also on record for producing Xerox machines destined for the USSR, which had recorders built into them So, while the article is portraying the historical sweep of NSA dirty tricks, they're only looking at the recent ones. Remember: the NSA also weakened the elliptic curve crypto library in RSA's Bsafe implementation, paying RSADSI $13 million to accept their tweaked code.

    Why haven't we been hearing about the Chinese and Russians doing that sort of thing? There are four options:

    1. The Russians and Chinese are doing it, they're just so darned good nobody has caught them until just recently.
    2. The Russians and Chinese simply resort to using existing tools developed by the hacking/cybercrime community and rely on great operational security rather than fancy tools.
    3. The Russian and Chinese efforts are relatively tiny compared to the massive efforts the US expends tens of billions of dollars on. The US spends about $50bn on its intelligence agencies, while the entire Russian Department of Defense budget is about $90bn (China is around $139bn) -- maybe the Russians and Chinese have such a small footprint because they are much smaller operations?
    4. Something else.

    That brings us to the recent kerfuffle about taps on the Supermicro motherboards. That's not unbelievable at all -- not in a world where we discover that Intel has built a parallel management CPU into every CPU since 2008, and that there is solid indications that other processors have similar backdoors.

    Was the Intel IME a "backdoor" or just "a bad idea"? Well, that's tricky. Let me put my tinfoil hat on: making a backdoor look like a sloppily developed product feature would be the competent way to write a backdoor. Making it as sneaky as the backdoor in the Via is unnecessary -- incompetence is eminently believable.

    &

    (kaspersky)

    I believe all of these stories (including the Supermicro) are the tip of a great big, ugly iceberg. The intelligence community has long known that software-only solutions are too mutable, and are easy to decompile and figure out. They have wanted to be in the BIOS of systems -- on the motherboard -- for a long time. If you go back to 2014, we have disclosures about the NSA malware that hides in hard drive BIOS: [ vice ] [ vice ] That appears to have been in progress around 2000/2001.

    Of note, the group recovered two modules belonging to EquationDrug and GrayFish that were used to reprogram hard drives to give the attackers persistent control over a target machine. These modules can target practically every hard drive manufacturer and brand on the market, including Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba, Corsair, Hitachi and more. Such attacks have traditionally been difficult to pull off, given the risk in modifying hard drive software, which may explain why Kaspersky could only identify a handful of very specific targets against which the attack was used, where the risk was worth the reward.

    But Equation Group's malware platforms have other tricks, too. GrayFish, for example, also has the ability to install itself into computer's boot record -- software that loads even before the operating system itself -- and stores all of its data inside a portion of the operating system called the registry, where configuration data is normally stored.

    EquationDrug was designed for use on older Windows operating systems, and "some of the plugins were designed originally for use on Windows 95/98/ME" -- versions of Windows so old that they offer a good indication of the Equation Group's age.

    This is not a very good example of how to establish a "malware gap" since it just makes the NSA look like they are incapable of keeping a secret. If you want an idea how bad it is, Kaspersky labs' analysis of the NSA's toolchain is a good example of how to do attribution correctly. Unfortunately for the US agenda, that solid attribution points toward Fort Meade in Maryland. [kaspersky]

    Let me be clear: I think we are fucked every which way from the start. With backdoors in the BIOS, backdoors on the CPU, and wireless cellular-spectrum backdoors, there are probably backdoors in the GPUs and the physical network controllers, as well. Maybe the backdoors in the GPU come from the GRU and maybe the backdoors in the hard drives come from NSA, but who cares? The upshot is that all of our systems are so heinously compromised that they can only be considered marginally reliable. It is, literally, not your computer: it's theirs. They'll let you use it so long as your information is interesting to them.

    Do I believe the Chinese are capable of doing such a thing? Of course. Is the GRU? Probably. Mossad? Sure. NSA? Well-documented attribution points toward NSA. Your computer is a free-fire zone. It has been since the mid 1990s, when the NSA was told "no" on the Clipper chip and decided to come up with its own Plan B, C, D, and E. Then, the CIA came up with theirs. Etc. There are probably so many backdoors in our systems that it's a miracle it works at all.

    From my 2012 RSA conference lecture "Cyberwar, you're doing it wrong."

    The problem is that playing in this space is the purview of governments. Nobody in the cybercrime or hacking world need tools like these. The intelligence operatives have huge budgets, compared to a typical company's security budget, and it's unreasonable to expect any business to invest such a level of effort on defending itself. So what should companies do? They should do exactly what they are doing: expect the government to deal with it; that's what governments are for. The problem with that strategy is that their government isn't on their side, either! It's Hobbes' playground.

    In case you think I am engaging in hyperbole, I assure you I am not. If you want another example of the lengths (and willingness to bypass the law) "they" are willing to go, consider 'stingrays' that are in operation in every major US city and outside of every interesting hotel and high tech park. Those devices are not passive -- they actively inject themselves into the call set-up between your phone and your carrier -- your data goes through the stingray, or it doesn't go at all. If there are multiple stingrays, then your latency goes through the roof. "They" don't care. Are the stingrays NSA, FBI, CIA, Mossad, GRU, or PLA? Probably a bit of all of the above depending on where and when.

    Whenever the US gets caught with its pants down around its ankles, it blames the Chinese or the Russians because they have done a good job of building the idea that the most serious hackers on the planet at the Chinese. I don't believe that we're seeing complex propaganda campaigns that are tied to specific incidents -- I think we see ongoing organic propaganda campaigns that all serve the same end: protect the agencies, protect their budgets, justify their existence, and downplay their incompetence.

    So, with respect to "propaganda" I would say that the US intelligence community has been consistently pushing a propaganda agenda against the US government, and the citizens in order to justify its actions and defend its budget.

    The government also engages in propaganda, and is influenced by the intelligence community's propaganda as well. And the propaganda campaigns work because everyone involved assumes, "well, given what the NSA has been able to do, I should assume the Chinese can do likewise." That's a perfectly reasonable assumption and I think it's probably true that the Chinese have capabilities. The situation is what Chuck Spinney calls "A self-licking ice cream cone" -- it's a justifying structure that makes participation in endless aggression seem like a sensible thing to do. And, when there's inevitably a disaster, it's going to be like a cyber-9/11 and will serve as a justification for even more unrestrained aggression.

    Want to see what it looks like? A thousand thanks to Commentariat member [redacted] for this link. If you don't like video, there's an article here. [ toms ]

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

    Is this an NSA backdoor, or normal incompetence? Is Intel Management Engine an NSA-inspired backdoor, or did some system engineers at Intel think that was a good idea? There are other scary indications of embedded compromise: the CIA's Vault7 archive included code that appeared to be intended to embed in the firmware of "smart" flatscreen TVs. That would make every LG flat panel in every hotel room, a listening device just waiting to be turned on.

    We know the Chinese didn't do that particular bug but why wouldn't they do something similar, in something else? China is the world's oldest mature culture -- they literally wrote the book on strategy -- Americans acting as though it's a great surprise to learn that the Chinese are not stupid, it's just the parochialism of a 250 year-old culture looking at a 3,000 year-old culture and saying "wow, you guys haven't been asleep at the switch after all!"

    WIRED on cyberspace treaties [ wired ]

    Comments

    1. Pierce R. Butler says

      October 6, 2018 at 1:31 pm

      What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes.

      Funny how those obsessed with "false flag" operations work so hard to invite more of same.

    2. Marcus Ranum says

      October 6, 2018 at 2:28 pm

      Pierce R. Butler@#1:
      What little I've been able to find out the new Trump™ cybersecurity plan is that it doesn't involve any defense, just massive retribution against (perceived) foes.

      Yes. Since 2001, as far as most of us can tell, federal cybersecurity spend has been 80% offense, 20% defense. And a lot of the offensive spend has been aimed at We, The People.

    3. Cat Mara says

      October 6, 2018 at 5:20 pm

      Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running troll farms on social media). I mean, I've seen interviews with retired US intelligence people since the 90s complain that since the late 1980s, the intelligence agencies have been crippled by management in love with hi-tech "SIGINT" solutions to problems that never deliver and neglecting old-fashioned "HUMINT" intelligence-gathering.

      The thing is, Kevin Mitnick got away with a lot of what he did because people didn't take security seriously then, and still don't. On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of the researchers who helped in the analysis of the Morris worm that took down a significant chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a year or so afterwards and some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it still hadn't patched the holes that had let the worm infect them in the first place.

    4. Marcus Ranum says

      October 6, 2018 at 9:20 pm

      Cat Mara@#3:
      Your mention of Operation Sundevil and Kevin Mitnick in a previous post made me think that maybe the reason we haven't seen the kind of leaks from the Russian and Chinese hacking operations that we've seem from the NSA is that they're running a "Kevin Mitnick style" operation; that is, relying less on technical solutions and using instead old-fashioned "social engineering" and other low-tech forms of espionage (like running troll farms on social media).

      I think that's right, to a high degree. What if Edward Snowden was an agent provocateur instead of a well-meaning naive kid? A tremendous amount of damage could be done, as well as stealing the US' expensive toys. The Russians have been very good at doing exactly that sort of operation, since WWII. The Chinese are, if anything, more subtle than the Russians.

      The Chinese attitude, as expressed to me by someone who might be a credible source is, "why are you picking a fight with us? We don't care, you're too far away for us to threaten you, we both have loads of our own fish to fry. To them, the US is young, hyperactive, and stupid.

      The FBI is not competent, at all, against old-school humint intelligence-gathering. Compared to the US' cyber-toys, the old ways are probably more efficient and cost effective. China's intelligence community is also much more team-oriented than the CIA/NSA; they're actually a disciplined operation under the strategic control of policy-makers. That, by the way, is why Russians and Chinese stare in amazement when Americans ask things like "Do you think Putin knew about this?" What a stupid question! It's an autocracy; they don't have intelligence operatives just going an deciding "it's a nice day to go to England with some Novichok." The entire American attitude toward espionage lacks maturity.

      On a similar nostalgia vibe, I remember reading an article by Keith Bostic (one of the researchers who helped in the analysis of the Morris worm that took down a significant chunk of the Internet back in 1988) where he did a follow-up a year or so afterwards and some depressing number of organisations that had been hit by it still hadn't patched the holes that had let the worm infect them in the first place.

      That as an exciting time. We were downstream from University of Maryland, which got hit pretty badly. Pete Cottrel and Chris Torek from UMD were also in on Bostic's dissection. We were doing uucp over TCP for our email (that changed pretty soon after the worm) and our uucp queue blew up. I cured the worm with a reboot into single-user mode and a quick 'rm -f' in the uucp queue.

    5. Bob Moore says

      October 7, 2018 at 9:18 am

      Thanks. I appreciate your measured analysis and the making explicit of the bottom line: " agencies, protect their budgets, justify their existence, and downplay their incompetence."

    [Oct 04, 2018] Brett Kavanaugh's 'revenge' theory spotlights past with Clintons by Lisa Mascaro

    Highly recommended!
    Oct 03, 2018 | www.chicagotribune.com

    But in blaming "revenge on behalf of the Clintons" for the sexual misconduct allegations against him, the Supreme Court nominee is drawing new attention to his time on the Kenneth Starr team investigating Bill Clinton. And in doing so, he's shown he can deliver a Trump-like broadside against detractors even if it casts him in a potentially partisan light.

    As a young lawyer, Kavanaugh played a key role on Starr's team investigating sexual misconduct by then-President Bill Clinton, helping to shape one of the most salacious chapters in modern political history.

    Kavanaugh spent a good part of the mid-1990s jetting back and forth to Little Rock, Arkansas, digging into the Clintons' background, according to documents that were made public as part of his nomination to the Supreme Court

    [Oct 02, 2018] Recovered memory is a Freudian voodoo. Notice how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Their testimony was usually highly emotional and impassioned, leaving an impression very similar to that conveyed last night by Dr. Ford. ..."
    "... The "Recovered" (or "False") Memory Syndrome movement emerged in the midst of the steadily radicalizing Feminist Movement in the United States, probably at the very apogee of its extreme evolution, and was a movement in which Freudian therapy was central and Freudian therapists came to play the leading role. ..."
    "... It was only after they had been subjected to extensive pseudo-scientific Freudian "therapy," in which sex always lay prominently at the center, that virtually all of these women came forward with these stories. ..."
    "... nd, in this dispute the American ultra-Feminists chose to believe and preach the worst, most salacious, and most vicious possible interpretation of Dr. Freud's highly speculative, evidence-less, and – as subsequent study has overwhelmingly shown – completely contrived diagnoses. ..."
    "... Beginning with a conviction that cocaine could provide a substantial therapeutic base for solving psychological problems, Freud seems himself to have become for a period a regular consumer of that drug, but subsequently altered the focus of his therapy to hypnosis. After realizing certain limitations to this approach, he shifted again, turning to the so-called "Talking Cure" rooted in provoking word associations, which provided the basis for the classic Freudian method of popular imagination – with the patient reclining on a couch and the good Dr. seated behind with his notebook and pen in hand. This is the method he retained for the rest of his life. ..."
    "... The primary fault which has been cited for Freud's methods generally, but which has been particularly critiqued in both hypnosis and the "Talking Cure" as a reason for their invalidation, is the claim that both – at least inadvertently – incorporate the high probability of suggestion from the therapist. ..."
    "... Analysis thus follows a circular course, the analyst's theoretical surmise being first subtly communicated to the patient, then confirmed by the patient's casting of his (or, more often her) own ideas within the framework which had been suggested by the analyst. In the end, nothing new is actually discovered. The patient merely replicates the expressed Freudian doctrine. ..."
    "... Those women patients, and a few men, became their victims, but in turn became the perpetrators in the savaging of numerous men's lives, as these men were subjected to the most vicious accusations imaginable. Most of these accusations were, in retrospect, clearly fantasies in a ruthless mid-20th century male-witch hunt. ..."
    "... Into this popular intellectual desert walks Dr. Ford, both whose personal history and her strange physical mannerisms in testimony before the Senate clearly indicate she has unfortunately suffered some form of serious psychological disturbance. ..."
    "... Seemingly alienated from her own parents and most immediate family members, she has made her home as far away from the Washington, DC area ..."
    "... In 2012 she underwent some sort of psychological counseling with her husband, though the details as far as I know have not emerged. But, it hardly seems likely coincidental that her first documentable expressions of antipathy to Judge Kavanaugh occurred in that year, when it was announced that Judge Kavanaugh was considered the likely Supreme Court appointee should Mit Romney win the Presidential election. Her expressions of antipathy to him have only grown from there. ..."
    "... Use of weapons and tactics, of which the defender is unprepared for, is a good offense. ..."
    "... Are Republicans et al. unable to understand basic military strategy? Do we lack the ability to conceive of new tactics and weapons to use against Democrats and Globalists? ..."
    "... I realize that it is unacceptable to attack this poor helpless victim so the "it can't be corroborated" card has to be played. However, who else notices how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged. ..."
    "... She always takes everybody on some emotional ride right up to the point where she could be exposed but never with enough information so somebody could come out of the woodwork and prove she is a liar. ..."
    "... We also have the infamous letter where we are repeatedly reminded she mailed it BEFORE Kavanaugh was picked. Of course, we only have Feinstein's word for that since nobody saw it until after this crap started. The delay was used to push up the story with new revelation about Mike Judge in a grocery store that shied away from her – again with no specific date so Judge could prove she is a liar. ..."
    "... We also have all of our own recollections of high school insecurities and male-female interactions. What freshman or sophomore girl didn't get all giddy at the thought of the older guys hitting on her so she could tell all her friends about her older boyfriend ..."
    "... Outside doors enter public areas kitchen sunroom living rooms not bedrooms. An outside door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment ..."
    "... Your post is very perceptive and just might be how it all went down. With the complications of couples' counseling over her demand for the bizarre double main entry doors. (lulz) Though I would think any family that built an illegal in-law apartment into their Palo Alto house and deployed it, would be ratted out by their neighbors. ..."
    Oct 02, 2018 | www.unz.com

    Nicephorus says: September 29, 2018 at 7:58 am GMT 2,000 Words

    We still have to wait to see whether Judge Kavanaugh's appointment will go through, so the most important practical consequence of this shameful exercise in character assassination is as yet unknown. I'm pretty sure he'll eventually be appointed.

    But, I think some critical theoretical aspects of the context in which this battle was waged were definitively clarified in the course of this shameful and hugely destructive effort by the Democrat leadership to destroy Judge Kavanaugh's reputation in pursuit of narrow political advantage. On balance, although Judge Kavanaugh and his family were the ones who had to pay the price for this bitter learning experience, all of us should be the long-term beneficiaries of this contest's central but often hidden issues being brought to light and subjected to rational analysis. I want to show what I think these hidden issues are.

    What this sordid affair was all about was the zombie-like return-from-the-dead of a phenomenon exposed and pretty much completely invalidated more than thirty years ago, which never should have been permitted to raise its ugly head before an assembly of rational, educated Americans: the "Recovered Memory" (aka "False Memory") Syndrome movement of the 1980s, in which numerous troubled, frequently mentally off-balance, women (and a few men) came forward to declare that they had been the victims of incestual sexual abuse – most often actual sexual intercourse – at the hands of mature male family members; usually fathers but sometimes uncles, grandfathers, or others.

    Their testimony was usually highly emotional and impassioned, leaving an impression very similar to that conveyed last night by Dr. Ford. Many hearers were completely convinced that these events had occurred. I recall having a discussion in the 1990s with two American women who swore up and down that they believed fully 25% of American women had been forced into sexual intercourse with their fathers. I was dumbfounded that they could believe such a thing. But, vast numbers of American women did believe this at that time, and many – perhaps most – may never have looked sufficiently into the follow-up to these testimonials to realize that the vast majority of such bizarre claims had subsequently been definitively proven invalid.

    The "Recovered" (or "False") Memory Syndrome movement emerged in the midst of the steadily radicalizing Feminist Movement in the United States, probably at the very apogee of its extreme evolution, and was a movement in which Freudian therapy was central and Freudian therapists came to play the leading role.

    It was only after they had been subjected to extensive pseudo-scientific Freudian "therapy," in which sex always lay prominently at the center, that virtually all of these women came forward with these stories. A major controversy, which arose within the ranks of the Freudians themselves over what was the correct understanding of the Master's teachings, lay at the core of the whole affair. A nd, in this dispute the American ultra-Feminists chose to believe and preach the worst, most salacious, and most vicious possible interpretation of Dr. Freud's highly speculative, evidence-less, and – as subsequent study has overwhelmingly shown – completely contrived diagnoses.

    It's now known that Dr. Freud's journey to the theoretical positions which had become orthodoxy among his followers by the mid-20th century had followed a strange, little known, possibly deliberately self-obscured, and clearly unorthodox course. Beginning with a conviction that cocaine could provide a substantial therapeutic base for solving psychological problems, Freud seems himself to have become for a period a regular consumer of that drug, but subsequently altered the focus of his therapy to hypnosis. After realizing certain limitations to this approach, he shifted again, turning to the so-called "Talking Cure" rooted in provoking word associations, which provided the basis for the classic Freudian method of popular imagination – with the patient reclining on a couch and the good Dr. seated behind with his notebook and pen in hand. This is the method he retained for the rest of his life.

    The primary fault which has been cited for Freud's methods generally, but which has been particularly critiqued in both hypnosis and the "Talking Cure" as a reason for their invalidation, is the claim that both – at least inadvertently – incorporate the high probability of suggestion from the therapist. In this view, patient testimony moves subtly, and probably without the patient's awareness, from whatever his or her own understanding might originally have been to the interpretation implicitly propounded by the analyst. Analysis thus follows a circular course, the analyst's theoretical surmise being first subtly communicated to the patient, then confirmed by the patient's casting of his (or, more often her) own ideas within the framework which had been suggested by the analyst. In the end, nothing new is actually discovered. The patient merely replicates the expressed Freudian doctrine.

    The particular doctrine at hand was undergoing a critical reworking at this very time, and this important reconsideration of the Master's meaning almost certainly constituted a major, likely the predominating, factor which facilitated the emergence of the Recovered Memory Syndrome movement. Freudian orthodoxy at that time included as an important – seemingly its key – component the conviction of a child's (even an infant's) sexuality, as expressed through the hypothesized Oedipus Complex for males, and the corresponding Electra Complex for females. In these complexes, Freud speculated that sexually-based neuroses derived from the child's (or infant's) fear of imagined enmity and possible physical threat from the same-sex parent, because of the younger individual's sexual longing for the opposite-sex parent.

    This Freudian idea, entirely new to European, American, and probably most other cultures, that children, even infants, were the possessors of an already well-developed sexuality had been severely challenged by Christian and some other traditional authorities, and had been met with repugnance from many individuals in Western society. But, the doctrine, as it then stood, was subject to a further major questioning in the mid-1980s from Freudian historical researcher Jeffrey Masson, who postulated, after examining a collection of Freud's personal writings long kept from popular examination, that the Child Sexual Imagination thesis itself was a pusillanimous and ethically-unjustified retreat from an even more sinister thesis the Master had originally held, but which he had subsequently abandoned because of the controversy and damage to his own career its expression would likely cause. This was the belief, based on many of his earlier interviews of mostly women patients, that it wasn't their imaginations which lay behind their neuroses. They had told him that they had actually been either raped or molested as infants or young girls by their fathers. This was the secret horror hidden away in those long-suppressed writings, now brought into the light of day by Prof. Masson.

    Masson's research conclusions were initially widely welcomed within the psychoanalytical fraternity/sorority and shortly melded with the already raging desire of many ultra-Feminist extremists to place the blame for whatever problems and dissatisfactions women in America were encountering in their lives upon the patriarchal society by which they claimed to be oppressed. The problem was men. Countless fathers were raping their daughters. Wow! What an incentive to revolutionary Feminist insurrection! You couldn't find a much better justification for their man-hate than that. Bring on the Feminist Revolution! Men are not only a menace, they are no longer even necessary for procreation, so let's get rid of them entirely. This is the sort of extreme plan some radical Feminists advocated. Many psychoanalysts became their professional facilitators, providing the illusion of medical validation to the stories the analysts themselves had largely engendered. Those women patients, and a few men, became their victims, but in turn became the perpetrators in the savaging of numerous men's lives, as these men were subjected to the most vicious accusations imaginable. Most of these accusations were, in retrospect, clearly fantasies in a ruthless mid-20th century male-witch hunt.

    This radical ideology is built upon the conviction that Dr. Freud, in at least this one of his several historical phases of interpretative psychological analysis, was really on to something. But, subsequent evaluation has largely shown that not to be the case. The same critique which had been delivered against the Child Sexual Imagination version of Freud's "Talking Cure" analytical method was equally relevant to this newly discovered Father Molestation thesis: all such notions had been subtly communicated to the patient by the analyst in the course of the interview. Had thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of European and American women really been raped or molested by their fathers? Freud offered no corroborating evidence of any kind, and I think it's the consensus of most competent contemporary psychoanalysts to reject this idea. Those few who retain a belief in it betray, I think, an ideological commitment to Radical Feminism, for whose proponents such a view offers an ever tempting platform to justify their monstrous plans for the future of a human race in which males are subjected to the status of slaves or are entirely eliminated.

    But, the judicious conclusions of science often – perhaps usually – fail to promptly percolate down to the comprehension of common humanity on the street, and within the consequent vacuum of understanding scheming politicians can frequently find opportunity to manipulate, obfuscate, and distort facts in order to facilitate their own devious and often highly destructive schemes. Such, I fear, is the situation which has surrounded Dr. Ford. The average American of either sex has absolutely no familiarity with the history, character, or ultimate fate of the Recovered Memory Syndrome movement, and may well fail to realize that the phenomenon has been nearly entirely disproved.

    Into this popular intellectual desert walks Dr. Ford, both whose personal history and her strange physical mannerisms in testimony before the Senate clearly indicate she has unfortunately suffered some form of serious psychological disturbance.

    Seemingly alienated from her own parents and most immediate family members, she has made her home as far away from the Washington, DC area where she was born as possible within the territorial limits of the continental United States. The focus of her professional research and practice in the field of psychology has lain in therapeutic treatment to overcome mental and emotional trauma, a problem she has acknowledged has been her own disturbing preoccupation for many decades. In 2012 she underwent some sort of psychological counseling with her husband, though the details as far as I know have not emerged. But, it hardly seems likely coincidental that her first documentable expressions of antipathy to Judge Kavanaugh occurred in that year, when it was announced that Judge Kavanaugh was considered the likely Supreme Court appointee should Mit Romney win the Presidential election. Her expressions of antipathy to him have only grown from there.

    Dr. Ford is clearly an unfortunate victim of something or someone, but I don't believe it was Judge Kavanaugh. Almost certainly she has been influenced in her denunciations against him by both that long-term preoccupation with her own sense of psychological injury, whatever may have been its cause, and her professional familiarization with contemporary currents of psychological theory, however fallacious, likely mediated by the ministrations of that unnamed counselor in 2012. Subsequently, she has clearly been exploited mercilessly by the scheming Democratic Party officials who have viciously plotted to turn her plight to their own cynical advantage. As in so many cases during the 1980s Recovered Memory movement, she has almost certainly been transformed by both the scientifically unproven doctrines and the conscienceless practitioners of Freudian mysticism from being merely an innocent victim into an active victimizer – doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the pain inherent in her own tragic situation and aggressively projecting it upon helpless others, in this case Judge Kavanaugh and his entire family. She is not a heroine.

    PiltdownMan , says: September 29, 2018 at 9:01 am GMT

    A recovered memory from more than five decades ago. Violet Elizabeth, a irritating younger child who tended to tag along, often wore expensive Kate Greenaway dresses. Her family was new money. William was no misogynist, though. He liked and respected Joan, who was his friend. The second William book is online.

    https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17125/17125-h/17125-h.htm

    Coemgen , says: September 29, 2018 at 10:35 am GMT
    Rules-of-thumb
    -- -- -- -- -- -- -
    1. A good offense is the best defense.
    2. An ambush backed up by overwhelming force is a good offense.
    3. Use of weapons and tactics, of which the defender is unprepared for, is a good offense.

    Are Republicans et al. unable to understand basic military strategy? Do we lack the ability to conceive of new tactics and weapons to use against Democrats and Globalists?

    MarkinLA , says: September 29, 2018 at 12:49 pm GMT
    I realize that it is unacceptable to attack this poor helpless victim so the "it can't be corroborated" card has to be played. However, who else notices how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged.

    She always takes everybody on some emotional ride right up to the point where she could be exposed but never with enough information so somebody could come out of the woodwork and prove she is a liar.

    We also have the infamous letter where we are repeatedly reminded she mailed it BEFORE Kavanaugh was picked. Of course, we only have Feinstein's word for that since nobody saw it until after this crap started. The delay was used to push up the story with new revelation about Mike Judge in a grocery store that shied away from her – again with no specific date so Judge could prove she is a liar. This all reeks of testimony gone over and coached by a team of lawyers.

    We also have all of our own recollections of high school insecurities and male-female interactions. What freshman or sophomore girl didn't get all giddy at the thought of the older guys hitting on her so she could tell all her friends about her older boyfriend and possibility of going to the prom as a lower classman? All he had to do (assuming he wasn't repulsive physically and he was a bit of a jock) was make the usual play of pretending to be interested and he likely would have been at least getting to first base at the party.

    From her pictures she was no Pamela Anderson and would likely have been flattered. The idea that you rape someone without trying to get the milk handed to you on a silver platter is ridiculous.

    This is another female driven hysteria based on lies like the child molestation and satanic cult hysterias of years past. Those were all driven by crazy or politically motivated women who whipped up the rest of the ignorant females.

    Clyde , says: September 29, 2018 at 12:58 pm GMT
    @Anon

    Outside doors enter public areas kitchen sunroom living rooms not bedrooms. An outside door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment

    Your post is very perceptive and just might be how it all went down. With the complications of couples' counseling over her demand for the bizarre double main entry doors. (lulz) Though I would think any family that built an illegal in-law apartment into their Palo Alto house and deployed it, would be ratted out by their neighbors.

    [Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?

    Highly recommended!
    An interesting hypothesis. CIA definitly became a powerful political force in the USA -- a rogue political force which starting from JFK assasination tries to control who is elected to important offices. But in truth Cavanaugh is a pro-CIA candidate so to speak. So why CIA would try to derail him.
    Notable quotes:
    "... I think I've figured out why they had to go to couples counseling about an outside door and why she came up with claim that she needed an outside bedroom door because she'd been assaulted 37 years ago. The Palo Alto building codes for single family homes were created to make sure single family homes remained single family and weren't chopped up into apartments. ..."
    "... An outside door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment ..."
    "... So she wants the door. Husband says waste of money and trouble. Contractor says call me when you're ready. So they go to counseling Husband explains why the door's unreasonable. Therapist asks wife why she " really deep down" needs the door. Wife makes up the story about attempted rape 35 years ago flashbacks If only there were 2 doors in that imaginary bedroom she could have escaped. ..."
    "... Kacanaugh was nominated. CIA searched for sex problems in his working life. Found nothing Searched law school and college found nothing. In desperation searched high school found nothing. Searched CIA personnel records which go back to grade school and found one of their own employees was about Kavanaugh's age and attended a high school near his and the students socialized. ..."
    "... She's 3rd generation CIA. grandfather assistant director. Father CIA contractor who managed CIA unofficial band accounts. And she runs a CIA recruitment office. ..."
    Oct 02, 2018 | www.unz.com

    Anon [257] Disclaimer says: September 29, 2018 at 8:28 am GMT 400 Words

    I think I've figured out why they had to go to couples counseling about an outside door and why she came up with claim that she needed an outside bedroom door because she'd been assaulted 37 years ago. The Palo Alto building codes for single family homes were created to make sure single family homes remained single family and weren't chopped up into apartments.

    Outside doors enter public areas kitchen sunroom living rooms not bedrooms. An outside door into a master bedroom with attached bathroom is a red flag that it's intended for an illegal what's called in law apartment

    There's a unit It's a stove 2 ft counter space and sink. The stoves electric and plugs into an ordinary household electricity. It's backed against the bathroom wall. Break through the wall, connect the pipes running water for the sink. Add an outside door and it's a small apartment.

    Assume they didn't want to make it an apartment just a master bedroom. Usually the contractor pulls the permits routinely. But an outside bedroom door is complicated. The permits will cost more. It might require an exemption and a hearing They night need a lawyer. And they might not get the permit.

    So she wants the door. Husband says waste of money and trouble. Contractor says call me when you're ready. So they go to counseling Husband explains why the door's unreasonable. Therapist asks wife why she " really deep down" needs the door. Wife makes up the story about attempted rape 35 years ago flashbacks If only there were 2 doors in that imaginary bedroom she could have escaped.

    Kacanaugh was nominated. CIA searched for sex problems in his working life. Found nothing Searched law school and college found nothing. In desperation searched high school found nothing. Searched CIA personnel records which go back to grade school and found one of their own employees was about Kavanaugh's age and attended a high school near his and the students socialized.

    She's 3rd generation CIA. grandfather assistant director. Father CIA contractor who managed CIA unofficial band accounts. And she runs a CIA recruitment office.

    I'm puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?

    [Sep 29, 2018] The Schizophrenic Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease by Charles Hugh Smith

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... "a key feature of the Roman Empire in its final slide to collapse ... shared values and consensus which had held the Empire's core together dissolved, leaving petty fiefdoms to war among themselves for what power and swag remained." ..."
    "... If we understand the profound political disunity fracturing the nation and its Imperial Project, we understand the Deep State must also fracture along the same fault lines. ..."
    "... If we consider the state of the nation from 40,000 feet, several key indicators of profound political disunity within the elites pop out: ..."
    "... Psychopaths with no moral principles. The nation's elites are not just divided--they're exhibiting signs of schizophrenic breakdown : disassociation and a loss of the ability to discern the difference between reality and their internal fantasies. ..."
    "... A funny thing happens when a nation allows itself to be ruled by Imperial kleptocrats: such rule is intrinsically destabilizing, as there is no longer any moral or political center to bind the nation together. The public sees the value system at the top is maximize my personal profit by whatever means are available , i.e. complicity, corruption, monopoly and rentier rackets , and they follow suit by pursuing whatever petty frauds and rackets are within reach: tax avoidance, cheating on entrance exams, gaming the disability system, lying on mortgage and job applications, and so on. ..."
    "... But the scope of the rentier rackets is so large, the bottom 95% cannot possibly keep up with the expanding wealth and income of the top .1% and their army of technocrats and enablers, so a rising sense of injustice widens the already yawning fissures in the body politic. ..."
    "... As the Power Elites squabble over the dwindling crumbs left by the various rentier rackets, there's no one left to fight for the national interest because the entire Status Quo of self-interested fiefdoms and cartels has been co-opted and is now wedded to the Imperial Oligarchy as their guarantor of financial security. ..."
    "... The divided Deep State is a symptom of this larger systemic political disunity. I have characterized the divide as between the Wall Street-Neocon-Globalist Neoliberal camp--currently the dominant public face of the Deep State, the one desperately attempting to exploit the "Russia hacked our elections and is trying to destroy us" narrative--and a much less public, less organized "rogue Progressive" camp, largely based in the military services and fringes of the Deep State, that sees the dangers of a runaway expansionist Empire and the resulting decay of the nation's moral/political center. ..."
    Jul 31, 2018 | russia-insider.com

    "a key feature of the Roman Empire in its final slide to collapse ... shared values and consensus which had held the Empire's core together dissolved, leaving petty fiefdoms to war among themselves for what power and swag remained."

    If we understand the profound political disunity fracturing the nation and its Imperial Project, we understand the Deep State must also fracture along the same fault lines.

    If we consider the state of the nation from 40,000 feet, several key indicators of profound political disunity within the elites pop out:

    1. The overt politicization of the central state's law enforcement and intelligence agencies: it is now commonplace to find former top officials of the CIA et al. accusing a sitting president of treason in the mainstream media. What was supposed to be above politics is now nothing but politics.
    2. The overt politicization of the centralized (corporate) media: evidence that would stand up in a court of law is essentially non-existent but the interpretations and exaggerations that fit the chosen narrative are ceaselessly promoted--the classic definition of desperate propaganda by those who have lost the consent of the governed.
    Psychopaths with no moral principles.
    The nation's elites are not just divided--they're exhibiting signs of schizophrenic breakdown : disassociation and a loss of the ability to discern the difference between reality and their internal fantasies.

    I've been writing about the divided Deep State for a number of years, for example, The Conflict within the Deep State Just Broke into Open Warfare . The topic appears to be one of widespread interest, as this essay drew over 300,000 views.

    It's impossible to understand the divided Deep State unless we situate it in the larger context of profound political disunity , a concept I learned from historian Michael Grant, whose slim but insightful volume The Fall of the Roman Empire I have been recommending since 2009.

    As I noted in my 2009 book Survival+ , this was a key feature of the Roman Empire in its final slide to collapse. The shared values and consensus which had held the Empire's core together dissolved, leaving petty fiefdoms to war among themselves for what power and swag remained.

    A funny thing happens when a nation allows itself to be ruled by Imperial kleptocrats: such rule is intrinsically destabilizing, as there is no longer any moral or political center to bind the nation together. The public sees the value system at the top is maximize my personal profit by whatever means are available , i.e. complicity, corruption, monopoly and rentier rackets , and they follow suit by pursuing whatever petty frauds and rackets are within reach: tax avoidance, cheating on entrance exams, gaming the disability system, lying on mortgage and job applications, and so on.

    But the scope of the rentier rackets is so large, the bottom 95% cannot possibly keep up with the expanding wealth and income of the top .1% and their army of technocrats and enablers, so a rising sense of injustice widens the already yawning fissures in the body politic.

    Meanwhile, diverting the national income into a few power centers is also destabilizing , as Central Planning and Market Manipulation (a.k.a. the Federal Reserve) are intrinsically unstable as price can no longer be discovered by unfettered markets. As a result, imbalances grow until some seemingly tiny incident or disruption triggers a cascading collapse, a.k.a. a phase shift or system re-set.

    As the Power Elites squabble over the dwindling crumbs left by the various rentier rackets, there's no one left to fight for the national interest because the entire Status Quo of self-interested fiefdoms and cartels has been co-opted and is now wedded to the Imperial Oligarchy as their guarantor of financial security.

    The divided Deep State is a symptom of this larger systemic political disunity. I have characterized the divide as between the Wall Street-Neocon-Globalist Neoliberal camp--currently the dominant public face of the Deep State, the one desperately attempting to exploit the "Russia hacked our elections and is trying to destroy us" narrative--and a much less public, less organized "rogue Progressive" camp, largely based in the military services and fringes of the Deep State, that sees the dangers of a runaway expansionist Empire and the resulting decay of the nation's moral/political center.

    What few observers seem to understand is that concentrating power in centralized nodes is intrinsically unstable. Contrast a system in which power, control and wealth is extremely concentrated in a few nodes (the current U.S. Imperial Project) and a decentralized network of numerous dynamic nodes.

    The disruption of any of the few centralized nodes quickly destabilizes the entire system because each centralized node is highly dependent on the others. This is in effect what happened in the 2008-09 Financial Meltdown: the Wall Street node failed and that quickly imperiled the entire economy and thus the entire political order, up to and including the Global Imperial Project.

    Historian Peter Turchin has proposed that the dynamics of profound political disunity (i.e. social, financial and political disintegration) can be quantified in a Political Stress Index, a concept he describes in his new book Ages of Discord .

    If we understand the profound political disunity fracturing the nation and its Imperial Project, we understand the Deep State must also fracture along the same fault lines. There is no other possible output of a system of highly concentrated nodes of power, wealth and control and the competing rentier rackets of these dependent, increasingly fragile centralized nodes.

    [Sep 29, 2018] Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy by Dan Sanchez

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Trump's nationalist fans are sick of the globalist wars that America never seems to win. They are hardly against war per se. They are perfectly fine with bombing radical Islamists, even if it means mass innocent casualties. But they have had enough of expending American blood and treasure to overthrow secular Arab dictators to the benefit of Islamists; so, it seemed, was Trump. They also saw no nationalist advantage in the globalists' renewed Cold War against Assad's ally Russian president Vladimir Putin, another enemy of Islamists. ..."
    "... The Syrian pivot also seemed to fulfill the hopes and dreams of some antiwar libertarians who had pragmatically supported Trump. For them, acquiescing to the unwelcome planks of Trump's platform was a price worth paying for overthrowing the establishment policies of regime change in the Middle East and hostility toward nuclear Russia. While populism wasn't an unalloyed friend of liberty, these libertarians thought, at least it could be harnessed to sweep away the war-engineering elites. And since war is the health of the state, that could redirect history's momentum in favor of liberty. ..."
    "... But then it all evaporated. Shortly after Bannon's ouster from the NSC, in response to an alleged, unverified chemical attack on civilians, Trump bombed one of Assad's airbases (something even globalist Obama had balked at doing when offered the exact same excuse), and regime change in Syria was top priority once again. The establishment media swooned over Trump's newfound willingness to be "presidential." ..."
    "... Since then, Trump has reneged on one campaign promise after another. He dropped any principled repeal of Obamacare. He threw cold water on expectations for prompt fulfillment of his signature promise: the construction of a Mexico border wall. And he announced an imminent withdrawal from NAFTA, only to walk that announcement back the very next day. ..."
    "... Poor white people, "the forgotten men and women of our country," have been forgotten once again. Their "tribune" seems to be turning out to be just another agent of the power elite. ..."
    "... Who yanked his chain? Was there a palace coup? Was the CIA involved? Has Trump been threatened? ..."
    "... Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy ..."
    "... Even in a political system based on popular sovereignty, Michels pointed out that, "the sovereign masses are altogether incapable of undertaking the most necessary resolutions." This is true for simple, unavoidable technical reasons: "such a gigantic number of persons belonging to a unitary organization cannot do any practical work upon a system of direct discussion." ..."
    "... " while Trump might be able to seize the presidency in spite of establishment opposition, he will never be able to wield it without establishment support." ..."
    May 02, 2017 | original.antiwar.com
    Did the Deep State deep-six Trump's populist revolution?

    Many observers, especially among his fans, suspect that the seemingly untamable Trump has already been housebroken by the Washington, "globalist" establishment. If true, the downfall of Trump's National Security Adviser Michael Flynn less than a month into the new presidency may have been a warning sign. And the turning point would have been the removal of Steven K. Bannon from the National Security Council on April 5.

    Until then, the presidency's early policies had a recognizably populist-nationalist orientation. During his administration's first weeks, Trump's biggest supporters frequently tweeted the hashtag #winning and exulted that he was decisively doing exactly what, on the campaign trail, he said he would do.

    In a flurry of executive orders and other unilateral actions bearing Bannon's fingerprints, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, declared a sweeping travel ban, instituted harsher deportation policies, and more.

    These policies seemed to fit Trump's reputation as the " tribune of poor white people ," as he has been called; above all, Trump's base calls for protectionism and immigration restrictions. Trump seemed to be delivering on the populist promise of his inauguration speech (thought to be written by Bannon), in which he said:

    "Today's ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

    For too long, a small group in our nation's Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

    The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

    That all changes – starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.

    It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country.

    What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.

    Everyone is listening to you now." [Emphasis added.]

    After a populist insurgency stormed social media and the voting booths, American democracy, it seemed, had been wrenched from the hands of the Washington elite and restored to "the people," or at least a large, discontented subset of "the people." And this happened in spite of the establishment, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and "polite opinion" throwing everything it had at Trump.

    The Betrayal

    But for the past month, the administration's axis seems to have shifted. This shift was especially abrupt in Trump's Syria policy.

    Days before Bannon's fall from grace, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley declared that forcing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power was no longer top priority. This too was pursuant of Trump's populist promises.

    Trump's nationalist fans are sick of the globalist wars that America never seems to win. They are hardly against war per se. They are perfectly fine with bombing radical Islamists, even if it means mass innocent casualties. But they have had enough of expending American blood and treasure to overthrow secular Arab dictators to the benefit of Islamists; so, it seemed, was Trump. They also saw no nationalist advantage in the globalists' renewed Cold War against Assad's ally Russian president Vladimir Putin, another enemy of Islamists.

    The Syrian pivot also seemed to fulfill the hopes and dreams of some antiwar libertarians who had pragmatically supported Trump. For them, acquiescing to the unwelcome planks of Trump's platform was a price worth paying for overthrowing the establishment policies of regime change in the Middle East and hostility toward nuclear Russia. While populism wasn't an unalloyed friend of liberty, these libertarians thought, at least it could be harnessed to sweep away the war-engineering elites. And since war is the health of the state, that could redirect history's momentum in favor of liberty.

    But then it all evaporated. Shortly after Bannon's ouster from the NSC, in response to an alleged, unverified chemical attack on civilians, Trump bombed one of Assad's airbases (something even globalist Obama had balked at doing when offered the exact same excuse), and regime change in Syria was top priority once again. The establishment media swooned over Trump's newfound willingness to be "presidential."

    Since then, Trump has reneged on one campaign promise after another. He dropped any principled repeal of Obamacare. He threw cold water on expectations for prompt fulfillment of his signature promise: the construction of a Mexico border wall. And he announced an imminent withdrawal from NAFTA, only to walk that announcement back the very next day.

    Here I make no claim as to whether any of these policy reversals are good or bad. I only point out that they run counter to the populist promises he had given to his core constituents.

    Poor white people, "the forgotten men and women of our country," have been forgotten once again. Their "tribune" seems to be turning out to be just another agent of the power elite.

    Who yanked his chain? Was there a palace coup? Was the CIA involved? Has Trump been threatened? Or, after constant obstruction, has he simply concluded that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em?

    The Iron Law of Oligarchy

    Regardless of how it came about, it seems clear that whatever prospect there was for a truly populist Trump presidency is gone with the wind. Was it inevitable that this would happen, one way or another?

    One person who might have thought so was German sociologist Robert Michels, who posited the "iron law of oligarchy" in his 1911 work Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy .

    Michels argued that political organizations, no matter how democratically structured, rarely remain truly populist, but inexorably succumb to oligarchic control.

    Even in a political system based on popular sovereignty, Michels pointed out that, "the sovereign masses are altogether incapable of undertaking the most necessary resolutions." This is true for simple, unavoidable technical reasons: "such a gigantic number of persons belonging to a unitary organization cannot do any practical work upon a system of direct discussion."

    This practical limitation necessitates delegation of decision-making to officeholders. These delegates may at first be considered servants of the masses:

    "All the offices are filled by election. The officials, executive organs of the general will, play a merely subordinate part, are always dependent upon the collectivity, and can be deprived of their office at any moment. The mass of the party is omnipotent."

    But these delegates will inevitably become specialists in the exercise and consolidation of power, which they gradually wrest away from the "sovereign people":

    "The technical specialization that inevitably results from all extensive organization renders necessary what is called expert leadership. Consequently the power of determination comes to be considered one of the specific attributes of leadership, and is gradually withdrawn from the masses to be concentrated in the hands of the leaders alone. Thus the leaders, who were at first no more than the executive organs of the collective will, soon emancipate themselves from the mass and become independent of its control.

    Organization implies the tendency to oligarchy. In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of the kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly."

    Trumped by the Deep State

    Thus elected, populist "tribunes" like Trump are ultimately no match for entrenched technocrats nestled in permanent bureaucracy. Especially invincible are technocrats who specialize in political force and intrigue, i.e., the National Security State (military, NSA, CIA, FBI, etc.). And these elite functionaries don't serve "the people" or any large subpopulation. They only serve their own careers, and by extension, big-money special interest groups that make it worth their while: especially big business and foreign lobbies. The nexus of all these powers is what is known as the Deep State.

    Trump's more sophisticated champions were aware of these dynamics, but held out hope nonetheless. They thought that Trump would be an exception, because his large personal fortune would grant him immunity from elite influence. That factor did contribute to the independent, untamable spirit of his campaign. But as I predicted during the Republican primaries:

    " while Trump might be able to seize the presidency in spite of establishment opposition, he will never be able to wield it without establishment support."

    No matter how popular, rich, and bombastic, a populist president simply cannot rule without access to the levers of power. And that access is under the unshakable control of the Deep State. If Trump wants to play president, he has to play ball.

    On these grounds, I advised his fans over a year ago, " don't hold out hope that Trump will make good on his isolationist rhetoric " and anticipated, "a complete rapprochement between the populist rebel and the Republican establishment." I also warned that, far from truly threatening the establishment and the warfare state, Trump's populist insurgency would only invigorate them:

    "Such phony establishment "deaths" at the hands of "grassroots" outsiders followed by "rebirths" (rebranding) are an excellent way for moribund oligarchies to renew themselves without actually meaningfully changing. Each "populist" reincarnation of the power elite is draped with a freshly-laundered mantle of popular legitimacy, bestowing on it greater license to do as it pleases. And nothing pleases the State more than war."

    Politics, even populist politics, is the oligarchy's game. And the house always wins.

    Dan Sanchez is the Digital Content Manager at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), developing educational and inspiring content for FEE.org , including articles and courses. The originally appeared on the FEE website and is reprinted with the author's permission.

    [Sep 27, 2018] Hiding in Plain Sight Why We Cannot See the System Destroying Us

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... But strangely most of us are much readier to concede the corrupting influence of the relatively small power of individuals than we are the rottenness of vastly more powerful institutions and structures. We blame the school teacher or the politician for abusing his or her power, while showing a reluctance to do the same about either the education or political systems in which they have to operate. ..."
    "... It is relatively easy to understand that your line manager is abusing his power, because he has so little of it. His power is visible to you because it relates only to you and the small group of people around you ..."
    "... It is a little harder, but not too difficult, to identify the abusive policies of your firm – the low pay, cuts in overtime, attacks on union representation ..."
    "... It is more difficult to see the corrupt power of large institutions, aside occasionally from the corruption of senior figures within those institutions, such as a Robert Maxwell or a Richard Nixon ..."
    "... But it is all but impossible to appreciate the corrupt nature of the entire system. And the reason is right there in those aphorisms: absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption. If that were not the case, we wouldn't be dealing with serious power – as should be obvious, if we pause to think about it ..."
    "... The current neoliberal elite who effectively rule the planet have reached as close to absolute power as any elite in human history. And because they have near-absolute power, they have a near-absolute control of the official narratives about our societies and our "enemies", those who stand in their way to global domination ..."
    "... What is clear, however, is that the British intelligence services have been feeding the British corporate media a self-serving, drip-drip narrative from the outset – and that the media have shown precisely no interest at any point in testing any part of this narrative or even questioning it. They have been entirely passive, which means that we their readers have been entirely passive too ..."
    "... Journalists typically have a passive relationship to power, in stark contrast to their image as tenacious watchdog. But more fundamental than control over narrative is the ideology that guides these narratives. Ideology ensures the power-system is invisible not only to us, those who are abused and exploited by it, but also to those who benefit from it. ..."
    "... It is precisely because power resides in structures and ideology, rather than individuals, that it is so hard to see. And the power-structures themselves are made yet more difficult to identify because the narratives created about our societies are designed to conceal those structures and ideology – where real power resides – by focusing instead on individuals ..."
    "... Before neoliberalism there were other systems of rule. There was, for example, feudalism that appropriated a communal resource – land – exclusively for an aristocracy. It exploited the masses by forcing them to toil on the land for a pittance to generate the wealth that supported castles, a clergy, manor houses, art collections and armies. For several centuries the power of this tiny elite went largely unquestioned ..."
    "... Neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, plutocratic rule by corporations – whatever you wish to call it – has allowed a tiny elite to stash away more wealth and accrue more power than any feudal monarch could ever have dreamt of. And because of the global reach of this elite, its corruption is more endemic, more complete, more destructive than any ever known to mankind ..."
    "... A foreign policy elite can destroy the world several times over with nuclear weapons. A globalised corporate elite is filling the oceans with the debris from our consumption, and chopping down the forest-lungs of our planet for palm-oil plantations so we can satisfy our craving for biscuits and cake. And our media and intelligence services are jointly crafting a narrative of bogeymen and James Bond villains – both in Hollywood movies, and in our news programmes – to make us fearful and pliable ..."
    "... The system – whether feudalism, capitalism, neoliberalism – emerges out of the real-world circumstances of those seeking power most ruthlessly. In a time when the key resource was land, a class emerged justifying why it should have exclusive rights to control that land and the labour needed to make it productive. When industrial processes developed, a class emerged demanding that it had proprietary rights to those processes and to the labour needed to make them productive. ..."
    "... In these situations, we need to draw on something like Darwin's evolutionary "survival of the fittest" principle. Those few who are most hungry for power, those with least empathy, will rise to the top of the pyramid, finding themselves best-placed to exploit the people below. They will rationalise this exploitation as a divine right, or as evidence of their inherently superior skills, or as proof of the efficiency of the market. ..."
    "... And below them, like the layers of ball bearings, will be those who can help them maintain and expand their power: those who have the skills, education and socialisation to increase profits and sell brands. ..."
    "... None of this should surprise us either. Because power – not just the people in the system, but the system itself – will use whatever tools it has to protect itself. It is easier to deride critics as unhinged, especially when you control the media, the politicians and the education system, than it is to provide a counter-argument. ..."
    "... so neoliberalism is driven not by ethics but the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of the planet. ..."
    "... The only truth we can know is that the western power-elite is determined to finish the task of making its power fully global, expanding it from near-absolute to absolute. It cares nothing for you or your grand-children. It is a cold-calculating system, not a friend or neighbour. It lives for the instant gratification of wealth accumulation, not concern about the planet's fate tomorrow. ..."
    Sep 27, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

    I rarely tell readers what to believe. Rather I try to indicate why it might be wise to distrust, at least without very good evidence, what those in power tell us we should believe.

    We have well-known sayings about power: "Knowledge is power", and "Power tends to corrupt, while absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." These aphorisms resonate because they say something true about how we experience the world. People who have power – even very limited power they hold on licence from someone else – tend to abuse it, sometimes subtly and unconsciously, and sometimes overtly and wilfully.

    If we are reasonably self-aware, we can sense the tendency in ourselves to exploit to our advantage whatever power we enjoy, whether it is in our dealings with a spouse, our children, a friend, an employee, or just by the general use of our status to get ahead.

    This isn't usually done maliciously or even consciously. By definition, the hardest thing to recognise are our own psychological, emotional and mental blind spots – and the biggest, at least for those born with class, gender or race privileges, is realising that these too are forms of power.

    Nonetheless, they are all minor forms of power compared to the power wielded collectively by the structures that dominate our societies: the financial sector, the corporations, the media, the political class, and the security services.

    But strangely most of us are much readier to concede the corrupting influence of the relatively small power of individuals than we are the rottenness of vastly more powerful institutions and structures. We blame the school teacher or the politician for abusing his or her power, while showing a reluctance to do the same about either the education or political systems in which they have to operate.

    Similarly, we are happier identifying the excessive personal power of a Rupert Murdoch than we are the immense power of the corporate empire behind him and on which his personal wealth and success depend.

    And beyond this, we struggle most of all to detect the structural and ideological framework underpinning or cohering all these discrete examples of power.

    Narrative control

    It is relatively easy to understand that your line manager is abusing his power, because he has so little of it. His power is visible to you because it relates only to you and the small group of people around you.

    It is a little harder, but not too difficult, to identify the abusive policies of your firm – the low pay, cuts in overtime, attacks on union representation.

    It is more difficult to see the corrupt power of large institutions, aside occasionally from the corruption of senior figures within those institutions, such as a Robert Maxwell or a Richard Nixon.

    But it is all but impossible to appreciate the corrupt nature of the entire system. And the reason is right there in those aphorisms: absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption. If that were not the case, we wouldn't be dealing with serious power – as should be obvious, if we pause to think about it.

    Real power in our societies derives from that which is necessarily hard to see – structures, ideology and narratives – not individuals. Any Murdoch or Trump can be felled, though being loyal acolytes of the power-system they rarely are, should they threaten the necessary maintenance of power by these interconnected institutions, these structures.

    The current neoliberal elite who effectively rule the planet have reached as close to absolute power as any elite in human history. And because they have near-absolute power, they have a near-absolute control of the official narratives about our societies and our "enemies", those who stand in their way to global domination.

    No questions about Skripals

    One needs only to look at the narrative about the two men, caught on CCTV cameras, who have recently been accused by our political and media class of using a chemical agent to try to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia back in March.

    I don't claim to know whether Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov work for the Russian security services, or whether they were dispatched by Vladimir Putin on a mission to Salisbury to kill the Skripals.

    What is clear, however, is that the British intelligence services have been feeding the British corporate media a self-serving, drip-drip narrative from the outset – and that the media have shown precisely no interest at any point in testing any part of this narrative or even questioning it. They have been entirely passive, which means that we their readers have been entirely passive too.

    That there are questions about the narrative to be raised is obvious if you turn away from the compliant corporate media and seek out the views of an independent-minded, one-time insider such as Craig Murray.

    A former British ambassador, Murray is asking questions that may prove to be pertinent or not. At this stage, when all we have to rely on is what the intelligence services are selectively providing, these kinds of doubts should be driving the inquiries of any serious journalist covering the story. But as is so often the case, not only are these questions not being raised or investigated, but anyone like Murray who thinks critically – who assumes that the powerful will seek to promote their interests and avoid accountability – is instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or in Putin's pocket.

    That is no meaningful kind of critique. Many of the questions that have been raised – like why there are so many gaps in the CCTV record of the movements of both the Skripals and the two assumed assassins – could be answered if there was an interest in doing so. The evasion and the smears simply suggest that power intends to remain unaccountable, that it is keeping itself concealed, that the narrative is more important than the truth.

    And that is reason enough to move from questioning the narrative to distrusting it.

    Ripples on a lake

    Journalists typically have a passive relationship to power, in stark contrast to their image as tenacious watchdog. But more fundamental than control over narrative is the ideology that guides these narratives. Ideology ensures the power-system is invisible not only to us, those who are abused and exploited by it, but also to those who benefit from it.

    It is precisely because power resides in structures and ideology, rather than individuals, that it is so hard to see. And the power-structures themselves are made yet more difficult to identify because the narratives created about our societies are designed to conceal those structures and ideology – where real power resides – by focusing instead on individuals.

    That is why our newspapers and TV shows are full of stories about personalities – celebrities, royalty, criminals, politicians. They are made visible so we fail to notice the ideological structures we live inside, which are supposed to remain invisible.

    News and entertainment are the ripples on a lake, not the lake itself. But the ripples could not exist without the lake that forms and shapes them.

    Up against the screen

    If this sounds like hyperbole, let's stand back from our particular ideological system – neoliberalism – and consider earlier ideological systems in the hope that they offer some perspective. At the moment, we are like someone standing right up against an IMAX screen, so close that we cannot see that there is a screen or even guess that there is a complete picture. All we see are moving colours and pixels. Maybe we can briefly infer a mouth, the wheel of a vehicle, a gun.

    Before neoliberalism there were other systems of rule. There was, for example, feudalism that appropriated a communal resource – land – exclusively for an aristocracy. It exploited the masses by forcing them to toil on the land for a pittance to generate the wealth that supported castles, a clergy, manor houses, art collections and armies. For several centuries the power of this tiny elite went largely unquestioned.

    But then a class of entrepreneurs emerged, challenging the landed artistocracy with a new means of industrialised production. They built factories and took advantage of scales of economy that slightly widened the circle of privilege, creating a middle class. That elite, and the middle-class that enjoyed crumbs from their master's table, lived off the exploitation of children in work houses and the labour of a new urban poor in slum housing.

    These eras were systematically corrupt, enabling the elites of those times to extend and entrench their power. Each elite produced justifications to placate the masses who were being exploited, to brainwash them into believing the system existed as part of a natural order or even for their benefit. The aristocracy relied on a divine right of kings, the capitalist class on the guiding hand of the free market and bogus claims of equality of opportunity.

    In another hundred years, if we still exist as a species, our system will look no less corrupt – probably more so – than its predecessors.

    Neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, plutocratic rule by corporations – whatever you wish to call it – has allowed a tiny elite to stash away more wealth and accrue more power than any feudal monarch could ever have dreamt of. And because of the global reach of this elite, its corruption is more endemic, more complete, more destructive than any ever known to mankind.

    A foreign policy elite can destroy the world several times over with nuclear weapons. A globalised corporate elite is filling the oceans with the debris from our consumption, and chopping down the forest-lungs of our planet for palm-oil plantations so we can satisfy our craving for biscuits and cake. And our media and intelligence services are jointly crafting a narrative of bogeymen and James Bond villains – both in Hollywood movies, and in our news programmes – to make us fearful and pliable.

    Assumptions of inevitability

    Most of us abuse our own small-power thoughtlessly, even self-righteously. We tell ourselves that we gave the kids a "good spanking" because they were naughty, rather than because we established with them early on a power relationship that confusingly taught them that the use of force and coercion came with a parental stamp of approval.

    Those in greater power, from minions in the media to executives of major corporations, are no different. They are as incapable of questioning the ideology and the narrative – how inevitable and "right" our neoliberal system is – as the rest of us. But they play a vital part in maintaining and entrenching that system nonetheless.

    David Cromwell and David Edwards of Media Lens have provided two analogies – in the context of the media – that help explain how it is possible for individuals and groups to assist and enforce systems of power without having any conscious intention to do so, and without being aware that they are contributing to something harmful. Without, in short, being aware that they are conspiring in the system.

    The first :

    When a shoal of fish instantly changes direction, it looks for all the world as though the movement was synchronised by some guiding hand. Journalists – all trained and selected for obedience by media all seeking to maximise profits within state-capitalist society – tend to respond to events in the same way.

    The second :

    Place a square wooden framework on a flat surface and pour into it a stream of ball bearings, marbles, or other round objects. Some of the balls may bounce out, but many will form a layer within the wooden framework; others will then find a place atop this first layer. In this way, the flow of ball bearings steadily builds new layers that inevitably produce a pyramid-style shape. This experiment is used to demonstrate how near-perfect crystalline structures such as snowflakes arise in nature without conscious design.

    The system – whether feudalism, capitalism, neoliberalism – emerges out of the real-world circumstances of those seeking power most ruthlessly. In a time when the key resource was land, a class emerged justifying why it should have exclusive rights to control that land and the labour needed to make it productive. When industrial processes developed, a class emerged demanding that it had proprietary rights to those processes and to the labour needed to make them productive.

    Our place in the pyramid

    In these situations, we need to draw on something like Darwin's evolutionary "survival of the fittest" principle. Those few who are most hungry for power, those with least empathy, will rise to the top of the pyramid, finding themselves best-placed to exploit the people below. They will rationalise this exploitation as a divine right, or as evidence of their inherently superior skills, or as proof of the efficiency of the market.

    And below them, like the layers of ball bearings, will be those who can help them maintain and expand their power: those who have the skills, education and socialisation to increase profits and sell brands.

    All of this should be obvious, even non-controversial. It fits what we experience of our small-power lives. Does bigger power operate differently? After all, if those at the top of the power-pyramid were not hungry for power, even psychopathic in its pursuit, if they were caring and humane, worried primarily about the wellbeing of their workforce and the planet, they would be social workers and environmental activists, not CEOs of media empires and arms manufacturers.

    And yet, base your political thinking on what should be truisms, articulate a worldview that distrusts those with the most power because they are the most capable of – and committed to – misusing it, and you will be derided. You will be called a conspiracy theorist, dismissed as deluded. You will be accused of wearing a tinfoil hat, of sour grapes, of being anti-American, a social warrior, paranoid, an Israel-hater or anti-semitic, pro-Putin, pro-Assad, a Marxist.

    None of this should surprise us either. Because power – not just the people in the system, but the system itself – will use whatever tools it has to protect itself. It is easier to deride critics as unhinged, especially when you control the media, the politicians and the education system, than it is to provide a counter-argument.

    In fact, it is vital to prevent any argument or real debate from taking place. Because the moment we think about the arguments, weigh them, use our critical faculties, there is a real danger that the scales will fall from our eyes. There is a real threat that we will move back from the screen, and see the whole picture.

    Can we see the complete picture of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury; or the US election that led to Trump being declared president; or the revolution in Ukraine; or the causes and trajectory of fighting in Syria, and before it Libya and Iraq; or the campaign to discredit Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party; or the true implications of the banking crisis a decade ago?

    Profit, not ethics

    Just as a feudal elite was driven not by ethics but by the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of land; just as early capitalists were driven not by ethics but by the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of mechanisation; so neoliberalism is driven not by ethics but the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of the planet.

    The only truth we can know is that the western power-elite is determined to finish the task of making its power fully global, expanding it from near-absolute to absolute. It cares nothing for you or your grand-children. It is a cold-calculating system, not a friend or neighbour. It lives for the instant gratification of wealth accumulation, not concern about the planet's fate tomorrow.

    And because of that it is structurally bound to undermine or discredit anyone, any group, any state that stands in the way of achieving its absolute dominion.

    If that is not the thought we hold uppermost in our minds as we listen to a politician, read a newspaper, watch a film or TV show, absorb an ad, or engage on social media, then we are sleepwalking into a future the most powerful, the most ruthless, the least caring have designed for us.

    Step back, and take a look at the whole screen. And decide whether this is really the future you wish for your grand-children.

    Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are " Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and " Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair " (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

    [Sep 27, 2018] The power elites goal is to change its appearance to look like something new and innovative to stay ahead of an electorate who are increasingly skeptical of the neoliberalism and globalism that enrich the elite at their expense.

    Highly recommended!
    Sep 27, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
    james , Sep 26, 2018 10:19:13 PM | link

    Pft , Sep 26, 2018 9:58:02 PM | link

    In my own words then. According to Cook the power elites goal is to change its appearance to look like something new and innovative to stay ahead of an electorate who are increasingly skeptical of the neoliberalism and globalism that enrich the elite at their expense.

    Since they do not actually want change they find actors who pretend to represent change , which is in essence fake change. These then are their insurgent candidates

    Trump serves the power elite , because while he appears as an insurgent against the power elite he does little to change anything

    Trump promotes his fake insurgency on Twitter stage knowing the power elite will counter any of his promises that might threaten them

    As an insurgent candidate Trump was indifferent to Israel and wanted the US out of Syria. He wanted good relations with Russia. He wanted to fix the health care system, rebuild infrastructure, scrap NAFTA and TTIPS, bring back good paying jobs, fight the establishment and Wall Street executives and drain the swamp. America First he said.

    Trump the insurgent president , has become Israel's biggest cheerleader and has launched US missiles at Syria, relations with Russia are at Cold War lows, infrastructure is still failing, the percentage of people working is now at an all time low in the post housewife era, he has passed tax cuts for the rich that will endanger medicare, medicaid and social security and prohibit infrastructure spending, relaxed regulations on Wall Street, enhanced NAFTA to include TTIPS provisions and make US automobiles more expensive, and the swamp has been refilled with the rich, neocons , Koch associates, and Goldman Sachs that make up the power elites and Deep State Americas rich and Israel First

    @34 pft... regarding the 2 cook articles.. i found they overly wordy myself... however, for anyone paying attention - corbyn seems like the person to vote for given how relentless he is being attacked in the media... i am not so sure about trump, but felt cook summed it up well with these 2 lines.. "Trump the candidate was indifferent to Israel and wanted the US out of Syria. Trump the president has become Israel's biggest cheerleader and has launched US missiles at Syria." i get the impression corbyn is legit which is why the anti-semitism keeps on being mentioned... craig murrary is a good source for staying on top of uk dynamics..

    Piotr Berman , Sep 26, 2018 10:23:41 PM | link

    For Trump to be "insurgent" he should

    (a) talk coherently
    (b) have some kind of movement consisting of people that agree with what is says -- that necessitates (a)

    Then he could staff his Administration with his supporters rather than a gamut of conventional plutocrats, neocons, and hacks from the Deep State (intelligence, FBI and crazies culled from Pentagon). As it is easy to see, I am describing an alternate reality. Who is a Trumpian member of the Administration? His son-in-law?

    karlof1 , Sep 26, 2018 11:42:43 PM | link
    Pft @34--

    Yes. just like Obama before him--another snake in the swamp!

    Pft , Sep 27, 2018 12:53:59 AM | link
    Karlof1@39

    The swamps been filled with all kinds of vile creatures since the Carter administration. This is when the US/UK went full steam ahead with neoliberal globalism with Israel directing the war on terror for the Trilateral Empire (following Bibis Jerusalem conference so as to fulfill the Yinon plan). 40 years of terror and financial mayhem following the coup that took place from 1963-1974. After Nixons ouster they were ready to go once TLC Carter/Zbig kicked off the Trilateral era. Reagan then ran promising to oust the TLC swamp but broke his promise, as every President has done since .

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    [Sep 24, 2018] Given Trumps kneeling to the British Skripal poisoning 'hate russia' hoax I suspect there is no chance he will go after Christopher Steele or any of the senior demoncrat conspirers no matter how much he would love to sucker punch Theresa May and her nasty colleagues.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... If Trump backs the British looneys in the UN security council in a day or two we can all be sure he is now a puppet on a British string and that point will be seen by USA voters. ..."
    "... Any leader that lets a foreign nation, Britain, try to destroy his family, presidential campaign and now presidency by assembling and publishing a dirt dossier without response is a coward. If Trump wont stand up to Hillary Clinton, Theresa May, or any of the dossier conspirators, then he is useless. The USA voters see that no matter what the spin but the swing voters more than any other actually discriminate and make judgements based on actions ..."
    "... They are in a quandary and only Trump can cement their support by going after the perpetrators NOW and telling the EU loonies like Britain and France to F off with their belligerent war mongering. I wouldn't count on it. ..."
    Sep 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    uncle tungsten , Sep 22, 2018 6:34:26 PM | 32

    More notions on USA election so excuse a repeat post all. I figure an enormous number of voters reeled in horror at the prospect of a Hillary Clinton president and voted for Trump. Will that horror revert to more democrat support now?

    Are those swing voters now uncertain if the $hillary will stage a come back. Nothing absolute has been stated and the demoncrats go through the motions of 'thinking about' another stooge like creepy Joe Biden. The USA is not liberated from the 'Clinton option' yet.

    More to the point though is that repeatedly implied and sometimes stated 'certainty' that the DOJ/FBI under its new Trumpian management has a thousand grand jury indictments pending to be actioned in October or something. The Trumpers are certain that their hero is about to slay the many headed dragon and they have been anticipating that move for some time. Sure there appears to be sufficient evidence to draw and quarter a couple of seriously stupid clowns.

    Given Trumps kneeling to the British Skripal poisoning 'hate russia' hoax I suspect there is no chance he will go after Christopher Steele or any of the senior demoncrat conspirers no matter how much he would love to sucker punch Theresa May and her nasty colleagues. If Trump backs the British looneys in the UN security council in a day or two we can all be sure he is now a puppet on a British string and that point will be seen by USA voters.

    Any leader that lets a foreign nation, Britain, try to destroy his family, presidential campaign and now presidency by assembling and publishing a dirt dossier without response is a coward. If Trump wont stand up to Hillary Clinton, Theresa May, or any of the dossier conspirators, then he is useless. The USA voters see that no matter what the spin but the swing voters more than any other actually discriminate and make judgements based on actions .

    They are in a quandary and only Trump can cement their support by going after the perpetrators NOW and telling the EU loonies like Britain and France to F off with their belligerent war mongering. I wouldn't count on it.

    [Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be. ..."
    "... The US Senate has just passed Trump's mammoth military spending increase by a landslide 92–8 vote . The eight senators who voted "nay"? Seven Republicans, and Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget since the height of the Iraq war . Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential damage that can be done by a president they've been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they've been actively increasing his power as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen. ..."
    "... They're on the same team, wearing different uniforms. ..."
    "... US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give the illusion of competition. ..."
    "... In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it's pretending to care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video game remote won't impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push. ..."
    "... The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride toward war, ecocide and oppression. ..."
    "... Reprinted with author's permission from Medium.com . ..."
    "... Support Ms. Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal ..."
    Sep 21, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    A new article from the Wall Street Journal reports that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lied to congress about the measures Saudi Arabia is taking to minimize the civilian casualties in its catastrophic war on Yemen, and that he did so in order to secure two billion dollars for war profiteers.

    This is about as depraved as anything you could possibly imagine. US-made bombs have been conclusively tied to civilian deaths in a war which has caused the single worst humanitarian crisis on earth, a crisis which sees scores of Yemeni children dying every single day and has placed five million children at risk of death by starvation in a nation where families are now eating leaves to survive . CIA veteran Bruce Riedel once said that "if the United States of America and the United Kingdom tonight told King Salman that this war has to end, it would end tomorrow, because the Royal Saudi Airforce cannot operate without American and British support." Nobody other than war plutocrats benefits from the US assisting Saudi Arabia in its monstrous crimes against humanity, and yet Pompeo chose to override his own expert advisors on the matter for fear of hurting the income of those very war plutocrats.

    If the so-called "Resistance" to Trump was ever actually interested in opposing this administration in any meaningful way, this would be the top trending news story in America for days, like how "bombshell" revelations pertaining to the made-up Russiagate narrative trend for days. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and it won't be.

    It would be so very, very easy for Democratic party leaders and Democrat-aligned media to hurt this administration at the highest level and cause irreparable political damage based on this story. All they'd have to do is give it the same blanket coverage they've given the stories about Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort which end up leading nowhere remotely near impeachment or proof of collusion with the Russian government. The footage of the starving children is right there, ready to be aired to pluck at the heart strings of rank-and-file Americans day after day until Republicans have lost all hope of victory in the midterms and in 2020; all they'd have to do is use it. But they don't. And they won't.

    The US Senate has just passed Trump's mammoth military spending increase by a landslide 92–8 vote . The eight senators who voted "nay"? Seven Republicans, and Independent Bernie Sanders. Every single Democrat supported the most bloated war budget since the height of the Iraq war . Rather than doing everything they can to weaken the potential damage that can be done by a president they've been assuring us is a dangerous hybrid of equal parts Benedict Arnold and Adolf Hitler, they've been actively increasing his power as Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force the world has ever seen.

    The reason for this is very simple: President Trump's ostensible political opposition does not oppose President Trump. They're on the same team, wearing different uniforms. This is the reason they attack him on Russian collusion accusations which the brighter bulbs among them know full well will never be proven and have no basis in reality. They don't stand up to Trump because, as Julian Assange once said , they are Trump.

    In John Steinbeck's The Pearl, there are jewelry buyers set up around a fishing community which are all owned by the same plutocrat, but they all pretend to be in competition with one another. When the story's protagonist discovers an enormous and valuable pearl and goes to sell it, they all gather round and individually bid far less than it is worth in order to trick him into giving it away for almost nothing. US politics is pretty much the same; two mainstream parties owned by the same political class, engaged in a staged bidding war for votes to give the illusion of competition.

    In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play. No matter who they vote for they get an Orwellian warmongering government which exists solely to advance the agendas of a plutocratic class which has no loyalties to any nation; the only difference is sometimes that government is pretending to care about women and minorities and sometimes it's pretending to care about white men. In reality, all the jewelers work for the same plutocrat, and that video game remote won't impact the outcome of the game no matter how many buttons you push.

    The only way to effect real change is to stop playing along with the rigged system and start waking people up to the lies. As long as Americans believe that the mass media are telling them the truth about their country and their partisan votes are going somewhere useful, the populace whose numbers should give it immense influence is nullified and sedated into a passive ride toward war, ecocide and oppression.

    If enough of us keep throwing sand in the gears of the lie factory, we can wake the masses up from the oligarchic lullaby they're being sung. And then maybe we'll be big enough to have a shot at grabbing one of the real video game controllers.

    Reprinted with author's permission from Medium.com .

    Support Ms. Johnstone's work on Patreon or Paypal

    [Sep 16, 2018] Looks like the key players in Steele dossier were CIA assets

    Highly recommended!
    'Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.
    'What exactly might an "insurance policy" against Donald Trump look like?'
    All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.
    Notable quotes:
    "... A great deal of evidence, I think, suggests that practically all those involved in 'Russiagate' were caught totally unprepared by Trump's victory, that they then went rushing around like headless chickens, and that part of this process involved a decision being taken to publish the dossier, without consulting British intelligence. If people like Younger were not consulted, then it would seem to me unlikely that Steele was. ..."
    "... And I have immense difficulty seeing how any competent media lawyer would not have recommended, at the minimum, the redaction of the names of Aleksej Gubarev and his company from the final December 2016 memorandum. This would have made legal action unlikely, without greatly diminishing the effect of the claims. ..."
    "... But if this was so, and if what they thought was accurate information was actually disinformation, the likely conduit would not have been through Steele, but from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts. ..."
    "... It it is I think material that intelligence agencies commonly include a great variety of people, ranging from very able analysts and operators to complete dolts. So, the CIA has employed both Philip Giraldi and John Brennan, MI6 both Alastair Crooke and also Christopher Steele and Alex Younger. ..."
    "... It is however somewhat revealing that one now finds Giraldi and Crooke appearing on a Russian site, 'Strategic Culture Foundation', while Brennan and Younger are treated as authoritative figures by the MSM. ..."
    "... My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate measures to cover their backsides. ..."
    "... There are many aspects to this story that don't make any sense to me if one looks at it from a rational perspective. One of course being concerns about libel litigation and the related legal discovery that you note. The second being no real contingency planning in the event Hillary loses the election. Admittedly they must have bought the media line and Nate Silver's forecast of a greater than 75% probability of a Hillary win. ..."
    "... The purported "arms length" relationships don't make any sense. There's Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson playing a central role. They hire Nellie Ohr, a possible CIA asset and the wife of Bruce Ohr, the 4th highest ranking official at the DOJ. ..."
    "... Glenn Simpson also hires Christopher Steele who he knows from previous "spook" associations. Steele had numerous and continuous communications including telephone, Skype, email and personal meetings with Bruce and Nellie Ohr during all this. ..."
    "... Then there is Mifsud and Halper. Apparently both are CIA and FBI assets. ..."
    "... You have Brennan ginning up concerns giving super secret and individual briefings to the Gang of 8 in Congress. There's Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the minority leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee texting and calling Adam Waldman, Deripaska's US attorney about setting up clandestine meetings with Steele. ..."
    "... Not to be left behind there's Sen. McCain doing the same. His top aide even travels to London to meet Steele. And then there's Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page busily spending every waking moment texting each other about every twist and turn in all the political games being played. Of course there's Admiral Rogers investigating unusual searches by FBI officials and contractors on the NSA database. And he briefs President-elect Trump at Trump Tower which prompts the entire transition team to move to Trump's golf course in NJ. ..."
    "... In fact the IG report on the Clinton "investigation" states that many at the FBI were accepting "gifts" from various media personalities for a quid pro quo ..."
    "... There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele. Of course he knew nothing but signed the FISA application on Carter Page. ..."
    "... At this point I don't buy that Christopher Steele dug up real intelligence from his contacts at the highest levels of the Russian government, which caught Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Lynch's pants on fire, who then launched a formal investigation of Russia collusion with Trump. Many things just don't pass the smell test. Now of course I have no qualifications nor experience in spookdom. ..."
    "... I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time. ..."
    "... I ask because, if one tries to look at it in a non-partisan way, the Western IC seemed to be a failure when it came to predicting Russian reactions in the Donbass, the Crimea, and it seems in Syria. I link this to various comments from Colonel Lang indicating that true experts were replaced over the years by less experienced and knowledgeable people. Does being "highly politicised" mean that they're not up to much when it comes to minding the shop? ..."
    "... I thought I detected a protest against the politicisation of the US in the world some years ago. And we must not forget that Gen Flynn (DIA) and Adm Rogers (NSA) acted strongly against this. Flynn was the first casualty of the Trump/Russia hysteria and the Clapper claque tried to fire Rogers. ..."
    "... I was born in the Depression and have seen vitriolic politics but never have seen such a massive opposition by the media, the pundits and the establishment of both parties. Over 500 print publications endorsed Hillary. Only some 20 endorsed Trump. Yet he confounds the pundits by winning the election. Clearly many voters are at odds with the political media class. ..."
    "... I think there is an ideological background to this, on which the piece by Alastair Crooke – himself former MI6 – to which Patrick Armstrong links, and the piece by James George Jatras to which Crooke links, are both to the point. The 'end of history' crowd thought they were inhabiting a realised utopia, and cannot cope with the fact that their dream is collapsing. ..."
    "... In relation to the millenarian undercurrents on which Crooke focuses, however, it is also worth noting that a traditional conservative suspicion has been that millenarianism is naturally linked to antinomianism: the belief that the moral law is not binding on the elect. ..."
    "... It is obviously possible that Ohr did not report up the chain of command, and if so, he and his wife become pivotal figures in the conspiracy. Alternatively, it could be that Rosenstein is lying – in which case, we have large questions about who else is implicated, and specifically whether the termination of Steele by the FBI was anything more than a ruse. ..."
    "... 'Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. "Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.," Ohr scribbled in his notes.' ..."
    "... And it confirms my strong suspicion that the dossier is actually a composite product, much of it assembled at Fusion, which could indeed contain material from a range of people from the former Soviet space, who could living in the United States, Britain, or elsewhere – Ukraine and the Baltics being obvious possibilities. ..."
    "... So Sergei Skripal and Sergei Millian, neither of whom fit the description by Simpson, have been mentioned as possible sources, and there is also the very curiously ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin. ..."
    "... All these people, obviously, could simply have fabricated material or retailed gossip, and Steele himself was involved in fabricating material on an industrial scale to cover up what actually happened to Alexander Litvinenko. ..."
    "... All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele. ..."
    "... Apparently that organisation is doing rather well in sustaining the claiming that 'fair report privilege' could circumvent any requirement to prove truth – and a key question now is whether documents which the DOJ is being forced to produce will establish that the dossier was being used by officials in ways that would trigger the privilege as of 10 January 2017. ..."
    "... That said, what Ohr reports Simpson as telling him raises fundamental questions about how anyone could have relied upon the dossier for anything – and should push people back to actually asking hard questions about its origins. ..."
    "... To add: Steele was on the FBI's payroll, in addition to being on Fusion GPS's payroll. And on the payroll of Her Majesty's Government. After he got caught leaking to the media he was apparently "fired" by the FBI. But he was continuing to communicate and brief through Bruce Ohr at the DOJ. ..."
    "... I think the circle of Glenn Simpson. Chris Steele, Bruce & Nellie Ohr, Adam Waldman. Peter Strzok, and Sen. Mark Warner will be very interesting to pursue. ..."
    "... The other circle that should be investigated is the Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Comey, Yates, Susan Rice. ..."
    "... No investigation can exclude the active participation of key people from the media complex including people like Comey's good friend Benjamin Wittes. ..."
    "... In its original version, the 'Statement of Principles' explained, among other things, that the Society: 'Believes that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organization which admits undemocratic states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.' ..."
    "... Ironically, it was shortly after the publication of the dossier that Anatol Lieven published in the 'National Interest' an article entitled 'Is America Becoming a Third World Country?' (See https://nationalinterest.or... .) ..."
    "... Also in June, Sergei Karaganov published a piece in 'Russia in Global Affairs', of which he is publisher, entitled 'Ideology of Eastward Turn.' ..."
    "... I do not think Karaganov's article is simply a reflection of changes in Russian attitudes. The changes, it seems to me, are global. ..."
    "... I do think that we in the West really blew it. In 1990, we could have said, in all humility, that our way of life (IMO the key word is pluralism) had proven more survivable. So we should welcome the others into the tent. Instead, we were right and that was that. ..."
    "... Just as you're asking about the origins of the dossier I wonder if it was orchestrated or something that evolved organically? If it was orchestrated, then who was the mastermind? Did Brennan, Clapper and Come sit down and hatch it or was Simpson the brains? What is astounding is the scale. So many people involved. Were they all motivated by ideology or by the need to protect their racket? ..."
    "... It seems there are many sub-plots. There's the Deripaska, Steele, Waldman, Mueller, Sen. Warner angle. Then there's the Simpson, Steele, Ohr, Strzok, Page, McCabe angle. There's also the Simpson, Steele, media reporters angle. Then there's the whole Mifsud, Halper, Carter Page, Papadopolous, Downer bit. There's the Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok FISA application piece. Then there's all the stuff happening in the UK including Hannigan's resignation as soon as Trump is elected. Of course the whole Mueller appointment and the obstruction of justice thread to tie Trump's hand. There are so many elements. Who initiated and coordinated? Was each element separate? ..."
    "... Together, these methods are likely to have produced a mass of information. It is important to remember, for example, that at the time of his mysterious death on 23 March 2013 Boris Berezovsky was negotiating to return to Russia, and that his head of security, Sergei Sokolov did return, with a 'cache' of documents. ..."
    "... The purpose was to demonstrate that Alexei Navalny was the instrument of a 'régime change' plot in which William Browder was acting as an agent of MI6. ..."
    "... An important role in the Apelbaum piece is played by the private security company Hakluyt. A quick look at the entries on Wikipedia and Powerbase will make clear that, if there is a British 'deep state', this is likely to be at its core. ..."
    "... It is against this background that on has to see a specific claim which Apelbaum makes, for which I do not think any evidence is produced, about two figures whose role in 'Russiagate' is clearly central. So Luke Harding is described as 'A Guardian reporter and a Hakluyt and Orbis contractor' (note word.) Meanwhile, Edward Baumgartner is described as 'Co-founder of Edward Austin. Contractor at Orbis and Hakluyt.' ..."
    "... That Harding is corrupt, as also Sir Robert Owen's 'Inquiry' into the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, I can prove. When Owen's report was published in January 2016, a preliminary response by me was posted here on SST, which among other things listed some of the evidence establishing that the interviews supposedly recorded with Litvinenko by Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt immediately before his death were blatant forgeries. ..."
    "... In relation to that part of the evidence discussed in my January 2016 post which exposes the fumbling attempts by Steele and his colleagues to cover up the truth about when and how Litvinenko travelled into central London on the day he was supposedly killed, most of this had been among a mass of material submitted by me to the Inquiry Team, which I have e-mails to prove was read. ..."
    "... Further study of Owen's report has confirmed my suspicion that a strong 'prima facie case' of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice exists against very many of those involved in it. ..."
    "... At the same time, materials produced on the Russian side have confirmed my suspicion that the reason why Steele and others have been able to get away with their cover-up is that the Russian intelligence services are no more enthusiastic than their British counterparts about having anything like the whole truth about how Litvinenko lived and died made public. ..."
    "... Additionally, the text itself displays an odd parallelism with his assertion regarding the Steele Dossier- that is, the likelihood of multiple authors, of diverse origins. ..."
    "... My curiosity about who Apelbaum might be is reinforced by the fact that the intimations he gives about his background in his responses to comments, while not incompatible with what he has said in the past, do not sit so easily with it. ..."
    "... So, questions naturally arise about Apelbaum's intelligence career, in particular, who he is likely to have been employed by, and associated with, in the past, and whether he is still involved with any of those agencies which have employed him. ..."
    "... 'Also, there is a large Hakluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US that regularly services political and federal agencies and has the power to summon Nazgûls the likes of John Brennan. So Steele is not the new kid on the block, he has been doing this type of work long before 2016. This is also why he has such a cozy relationship with the brass at the DOJ and state.' ..."
    "... This is that he, the Ukrainian nationalist former KGB person Yuri Shvets, the convicted Italian disinformation peddler Mario Scaramella, and quite possibly the sometime key FBI expert on Mogilevich, Robert 'Bobby' Levinson, were involved in trying to suggest that Mogilevich was an instrument of a plot by Putin to equip Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb.' ..."
    "... In his prepared statement, Lugovoi claimed that his supposed victim used to say that everyone in Britain were ''retards', to use the translation submitted in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, or 'idiots', to use that by RT. And according to this version, the British believed in everything that 'we' – that is, the Berezovky group – said was happening in Russia. ..."
    "... Whether or not Litvinenko expressed this cynical contempt, the credulity with which the claims of the 'information operations' people around Berezovsky have been accepted – well illustrated by Owen's report and perhaps most ludicrous in Harding's journalism – makes clear it is justified. ..."
    "... Perhaps then, cartoons about Trump as a puppet, with the strings pulled by another puppet representing Manafort, whose strings are in turn pulled by Putin, should be replaced by ones in which Mueller is seen as a puppet manipulated by the ghost of Boris Berezovsky. ..."
    "... But that is the irony. The relationship with Berezovsky blew up in the faces of all concerned, when in the wake of the successsful corruption of the investigation into the death of Litvinenko by him and his 'information operations' people, he attempted to recoup his fortunes by suing Roman Abramovich, and got taken to pieces by Lord Sumption. ..."
    "... The 'Vesti Nedeli' piece uses what Elizaveta Berezovskaya says in support of the claim that Berezovsky was murdered by British 'special forces', because he was planning to return to Russia, and he 'knew too much about them.' ..."
    "... One of the things I've never understood about the Trump Dossier story is the lack of any forensic analysis of its content and style anywhere in the media, even the alt media. Who was supposed to have actually written it? Steele? The style does not match someone of his background and education, and the formatting and syntax were atrocious. The font actually varied from "report" to "report." It certainly did not give me the impression of being the product of a high-end, Belgravia consultancy. ..."
    "... I wonder whether it was produced by an American of one sort or another and then "laundered" by being accorded association with the UK firm. Given that Steele just happened to be hired by the USG to help in the anti-FIFA skulduggery, he and his firm seem very much to be a concern that does dirty little jobs that need discretely to be done, though in this case, the discretion was undermined. ..."
    "... Most of the memos were issued before October and Fusion/Simpson authorized Steele to release information to the FBI starting in July. The question is why the memos were released after the election when a release before the election would have been enough to sink Trump. Instead the FBI and presumably those paying Fusion on Hillarys behalf sat on it, and Comey comes out days before the election ..."
    "... Kind of looks like they all wanted Trump in office and the disclosure was to give Trump the excuse needed to back track on his promises to improve relations with Russia and blame that on pressure from the Deep State and Russia Gate. ..."
    "... Looking at Trumps history with Sater (FBI/CIA asset) and his political aspirations that began following his Moscow visit in 1987 it seems likely Trump has been a Deep State asset for 30 years and fed intelligence to CIA/FBI on Russian oligarchs and mafia . Indeed he may well have duped Russians into believing he was working for them when in fact it was the CIA/FBI who had the best Kompromat with US RICO laws that could have beggared him ..."
    "... One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.) ..."
    "... I suspect the decision to publish the dossier was political. It was required to enable Clapper, Brennan, and others to opine on national media and create further media hysteria prior to the vote as well as to justify the counter-intelligence investigations underway. They were throwing the kitchen sink to sink Trump's electoral chances. I don't think a lot of thought was given about the legal ramifications. ..."
    "... This seems to be a pattern. Leak information. Then use the leaked story to justify actions like apply for a FISA warrant or fan the media flames. ..."
    "... I find it incredulous that former leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained paid access to powerful media platforms and they have used it to launch vicious attacks on a POTUS. ..."
    "... I find it amazing that McCabe and Peter Strzok are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media platforms. ..."
    "... If the GOP retains the House and Jim Jordan becomes speaker, then there may be a possibility that Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray may be fired and another special counsel appointed who will then convene a grand jury. ..."
    Aug 23, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    My strong impression is that nobody on the British side vetted the dossier for publication. A striking feature of the early news coverage is that there appeared to be total confusion, with some of the reporting suggesting that the sources quoted wanted to hang him out to dry, others that they wanted to defend him.

    An interesting aspect is that not only were anonymous sources linked to MI6 quoted on both sides of the argument -- which could have been explained by disagreements within the organisation: in different stories, not however far apart in date, its head, Sir Alex Younger, was portrayed as holding radically different views.

    When CNN publicised the existence of the dossier on 10 January 2017, the same day that it was published by 'BuzzFeed', it suggested that the author was British. The following day, the WSJ named Steele.

    On 13 January, Martin Robinson, UK Chief Reporter for 'Mail Online', published a report whose headlines seem worth quoting in full:

    'I introduced him to my wife as James Bond': Former spy Chris Steele's friends describe a "show-off" 007 figure but MI6 bosses brand him "an idiot" for an "appalling lack of judgement" over the Trump "dirty dossier": Intelligence expert Nigel West says friend is like Ian Fleming's famous character; He said: "He's James Bond. I actually introduced him to my wife as James Bond'; Mr West says Steele dislikes Putin and Kremlin for ignoring rules of espionage; Angry spy source calls him 'idiot' and blasts decision to take on the Trump work; Current MI6 boss Sir Alex Younger is said to be livid about reputation damage.'

    (See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/... . )

    On 15 January, however, Kim Sengupta, Defence Editor of the 'Independent', produced a report headlined: 'Head of MI6 used information from Trump dossier in first public speech; Warnings on cyberattacks show ex-spy's work is respected.'

    (See https://www.independent.co.... .)

    A great deal of evidence, I think, suggests that practically all those involved in 'Russiagate' were caught totally unprepared by Trump's victory, that they then went rushing around like headless chickens, and that part of this process involved a decision being taken to publish the dossier, without consulting British intelligence. If people like Younger were not consulted, then it would seem to me unlikely that Steele was.

    This leads me on to another puzzle about the dossier to which I have been having a difficulty finding a solution. Long years ago I was reasonably familiar with libel law in relation to journalism. Anyone who 'served indentures', as very many of us did in those days, had to study it. Later, I got involved in a protracted libel suit -- successfully, I hasten to add -- in relation to a programme I made, and had the sobering experience of having a top-class libel barrister requiring me to justify every assertion I had made.

    In the jargon then, a crucial question when an article, or programme, was being 'vetted' before publication was whether it represented a 'fair business risk.' This involved both the technical legal issues, and also judgements as to whether people were likely to sue, and how if they did the case would be likely to pan out.

    On the face of things, one would not have expected that people at 'BuzzFeed' would have gone ahead and make the dossier public, without having it 'vetted' by competent lawyers. And I have difficulty seeing how, if they did, the advice could have been to publish what they published.

    I have some difficulty seeing how the advice could have been to include the memorandum with the claims about the Alfa Group oligarchs, unless either these could be seriously defended or it was assumed that contesting them effectively would involve revealing more 'dirty linen' than these wanted to see aired in public.

    And I have immense difficulty seeing how any competent media lawyer would not have recommended, at the minimum, the redaction of the names of Aleksej Gubarev and his company from the final December 2016 memorandum. This would have made legal action unlikely, without greatly diminishing the effect of the claims.

    Trying to make sense of why such an obvious precaution was not taken, I find myself wondering whether, in fact, the reason may have been that the people responsible for the dossier may have actually believed this part of it at least.

    If that is so, however, the most plausible explanation I can see is that while other claims in the dossier may well be total fabrication, either by the people at Fusion and Steele or by some of their questionable contacts, this information at least did come from what Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr et al thought were reliable Russian government sources.

    But if this was so, and if what they thought was accurate information was actually disinformation, the likely conduit would not have been through Steele, but from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts.

    I think that the cases involving Karim Baratov and Dmitri Dokuchaev and his colleagues may be much more complex than is apparent from what looks to me like patent disinformation put out both on the Western and Russian sides.

    It it is I think material that intelligence agencies commonly include a great variety of people, ranging from very able analysts and operators to complete dolts. So, the CIA has employed both Philip Giraldi and John Brennan, MI6 both Alastair Crooke and also Christopher Steele and Alex Younger.

    It is however somewhat revealing that one now finds Giraldi and Crooke appearing on a Russian site, 'Strategic Culture Foundation', while Brennan and Younger are treated as authoritative figures by the MSM.

    If you want to get a clear picture of quite how low-grade the latter figure is, incidentally, it is worth looking at the speech to which Kim Sengupta refers.

    (See https://www.sis.gov.uk/medi... .)

    A favourite line of mine comes in Younger's discussion of the -- actually largely mythical -- notion of 'hybrid warfare': 'In this arena, our opponents are often states whose very survival owes to the strength of their security capabilities; the work is complex and risky, often with the full weight of the State seeking to root us out.'

    Leaving aside the fact that this is borderline illiterate, what it amazing is Younger's apparent blindness to clearly unintended implications of what he writes. If indeed, the 'very survival' of the Russian state 'owes to the strength of [its] security capabilities', the conclusions, seen from a Russian point of view, would seem rather obvious: vote Putin, and give medals to Patrushev and Bortnikov.

    My strong suspicion is that 'Russiagate' is a kind of nemesis, arising from the fact that key figures in British and American intelligence have, over a protracted period of time, got involved in intrigues where they are way out of their depth. The unintended consequences of these have meant that people like Brennan and Younger, and also Hannigan, have ended up having to resort to desperate measures to cover their backsides.

    Posted at 01:19 PM in Habakkuk , Intelligence | Permalink

    Jack , 4 days ago

    David

    There are many aspects to this story that don't make any sense to me if one looks at it from a rational perspective. One of course being concerns about libel litigation and the related legal discovery that you note. The second being no real contingency planning in the event Hillary loses the election. Admittedly they must have bought the media line and Nate Silver's forecast of a greater than 75% probability of a Hillary win.

    The purported "arms length" relationships don't make any sense. There's Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson playing a central role. They hire Nellie Ohr, a possible CIA asset and the wife of Bruce Ohr, the 4th highest ranking official at the DOJ.

    Glenn Simpson also hires Christopher Steele who he knows from previous "spook" associations. Steele had numerous and continuous communications including telephone, Skype, email and personal meetings with Bruce and Nellie Ohr during all this. They even have discussions about Deripaska and about his visa application to visit the US. Bruce is a conduit to Strzok at FBI. Glenn Simpson also is part of these discussions with Steele and the Ohrs.

    Simpson also arranges for Steele to brief "reporters" like David Corn and others at the NY Times, WaPo, WSJ, Politico and others. Then there is Mifsud and Halper. Apparently both are CIA and FBI assets. They are communicating with Carter Page and Papadopolous, who in turn is drinking and yapping with Aussie ambassador Downer.

    You have Brennan ginning up concerns giving super secret and individual briefings to the Gang of 8 in Congress. There's Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the minority leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee texting and calling Adam Waldman, Deripaska's US attorney about setting up clandestine meetings with Steele. There's Sen. Harry Reid passing on the Steele "dossier" to Comey.

    Not to be left behind there's Sen. McCain doing the same. His top aide even travels to London to meet Steele. And then there's Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page busily spending every waking moment texting each other about every twist and turn in all the political games being played. Of course there's Admiral Rogers investigating unusual searches by FBI officials and contractors on the NSA database. And he briefs President-elect Trump at Trump Tower which prompts the entire transition team to move to Trump's golf course in NJ.

    Oh, there is also Nellie Ohr setting up ham radio to avoid detection in her communications with Steele. Then we have everyone leaking and spinning to their "cohorts" in the premier media like the NY Times, CNN and WaPo.

    Comey even has his buddy a professor and ostensibly his legal counsel on the payroll of the FBI as a contractor with access to all the sensitive databases leaking to the media.

    Andy McCabe has his legal counsel Lisa Page spin stories around his wife's huge campaign contributions from Clinton consigliere McAuliffe.

    In fact the IG report on the Clinton "investigation" states that many at the FBI were accepting "gifts" from various media personalities for a quid pro quo.

    As if all this was not enough there's AG Loretta Lynch, meeting with Bill Clinton on a tarmac ostensibly to discuss their grandkids. Not to forget there were these "unmaskings" of surveillance information by Susan Rice, Samantha Power.

    There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele. Of course he knew nothing but signed the FISA application on Carter Page. Then there are the FISC judges who never believed their mandate required them to verify the evidence before issuing sweeping surveillance warrants. Now all this is what I as an old farmer and winemaker have read. Those more in tune would easily add to these convoluted machinations.

    I don't know how to make sense of all this. All I see is the extent of effort to prevent Donald Trump from being elected and after he won from governing. The most obvious observation is that the leadership in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies are so busy politicking spinning and leaking they have neither the time or the inclination let alone competence to do their real job for which they get paid a handsome wage and sterling benefits.

    At this point I don't buy that Christopher Steele dug up real intelligence from his contacts at the highest levels of the Russian government, which caught Brennan, Clapper, Comey and Lynch's pants on fire, who then launched a formal investigation of Russia collusion with Trump. Many things just don't pass the smell test. Now of course I have no qualifications nor experience in spookdom.

    If you have any speculative theories that connects some of the dots it would be my great pleasure to read.

    Patrick Armstrong -> Jack , 3 days ago

    I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time.

    Confident that their horse is going to win the race and that the media will cover it all up and nobody will ever hear anything about anything. Now that the unexpected happened, they're just spinning and denying faster hoping the Dems win in Nov and stop all the investigations. And, they're getting nervous wondering who's going to sell out whom next. Up and down, around and around. Gerbils -- there really isn't anything very consistent, planned or thought-out.

    In this respect, this piece attempts to make sense (on a very large scale) of their panic. https://www.strategic-cultu...

    English Outsider -> Patrick Armstrong , a day ago

    "I agree that it (and Skripalmania) are almost impossible to make sense of unless you think of a bunch of highly politicised not very bright people sinking deeper and deeper into what looked like a bright idea at the time."

    I believe your summary of what's happening is more accurate than Alastair Crooke's as set out in the article linked to.

    But bright or not, what are these people in the IC doing being "highly politicised"? Does that not render them considerably less efficient?

    I ask because, if one tries to look at it in a non-partisan way, the Western IC seemed to be a failure when it came to predicting Russian reactions in the Donbass, the Crimea, and it seems in Syria. I link this to various comments from Colonel Lang indicating that true experts were replaced over the years by less experienced and knowledgeable people. Does being "highly politicised" mean that they're not up to much when it comes to minding the shop?

    Patrick Armstrong -> English Outsider , 5 hours ago

    I thought I detected a protest against the politicisation of the US in the world some years ago. And we must not forget that Gen Flynn (DIA) and Adm Rogers (NSA) acted strongly against this. Flynn was the first casualty of the Trump/Russia hysteria and the Clapper claque tried to fire Rogers.

    https://russia-insider.com/...

    Jack -> Patrick Armstrong , 3 days ago

    Patrick

    Usually the incumbent party loses the mid-term election. The Democrats lost big in Obama's first mid-term. The Republicans won the House and gained six senators. While the punditry claims a Blue Wave and Nate Silver is giving the Dems the odds. I'm not so sure. I think the GOP will increase their majority in the Senate putting any conviction of Trump out of question.

    I was born in the Depression and have seen vitriolic politics but never have seen such a massive opposition by the media, the pundits and the establishment of both parties. Over 500 print publications endorsed Hillary. Only some 20 endorsed Trump. Yet he confounds the pundits by winning the election. Clearly many voters are at odds with the political media class.

    Patrick Armstrong -> Jack , 2 days ago

    Yeah. My bet is that the Repubs hold onto both. 1) the economy is getting better 2) what do the Dems have to offer other than this crazy Trump/Russia thing?

    Rob -> Patrick Armstrong , a day ago

    Economy will slow down sharply in 2019 but there should be enough momentum to help with the mid-terms. Trump needs to stop with the endless sanction stuff. The House does look like a close one.

    Pat Lang Mod -> Rob , a day ago

    what is the evidence for a slowdown in 2019?

    Rob -> Pat Lang , a day ago

    With all the caveats that apply to financial forecasting copper, monetary indicators and equity markets are all flagging a slowdown is upon us.

    David Habakkuk -> Jack , 3 days ago

    Jack,

    At a very general level, a 'speculative theory' which I have been mulling over for some time was rather well set out in a commentary in 'The Hill' on 9 August by Sharyl Attkisson, which opens:

    'Let's begin in the realm of the fanciful.

    'Assume, for the sake of argument, that powerful, connected people in the intelligence community and in politics worried that a wildcard Trump presidency, unlike another Clinton or Bush, might expose a decade-plus of questionable practices. Disrupt long-established money channels. Reveal secret machinations that could arguably land some people in prison.

    'What exactly might an "insurance policy" against Donald Trump look like?'

    And Attkisson goes on to outline precisely the developments that appear to have happened.

    (See http://thehill.com/opinion/... .)

    I think there is an ideological background to this, on which the piece by Alastair Crooke – himself former MI6 – to which Patrick Armstrong links, and the piece by James George Jatras to which Crooke links, are both to the point. The 'end of history' crowd thought they were inhabiting a realised utopia, and cannot cope with the fact that their dream is collapsing.

    In relation to the millenarian undercurrents on which Crooke focuses, however, it is also worth noting that a traditional conservative suspicion has been that millenarianism is naturally linked to antinomianism: the belief that the moral law is not binding on the elect. And in turn, according to a familiar skeptical view, antinomianism can easily end up in in straightforward rascality.

    On the rascality – to which Attkisson is pointing – I am working on how parts of the picture can be fleshed out. A few preliminary points raised by your remarks.

    As you note, 'There's Rod Rosenstein, Bruce Ohr's direct boss who testifies he knew nothing about Ohr being a conduit to Strzok for Steele.' So, we know that Ohr and Steele were conspiring together to ensure that the latter could continue to be intimately involved in the Mueller investigation, despite the FBI termination,

    It is obviously possible that Ohr did not report up the chain of command, and if so, he and his wife become pivotal figures in the conspiracy. Alternatively, it could be that Rosenstein is lying – in which case, we have large questions about who else is implicated, and specifically whether the termination of Steele by the FBI was anything more than a ruse.

    If, as seems to me likely, although not certain, the second possibility is closer to the truth than the former, then before Ohr testifies on 28 August before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees he will have to consider whether he is prepared to 'take the rap' for his superiors, or 'sing sweetly.'

    The fact that in a report in 'The Hill', I think on the same day as the Attkisson piece, John Solomon was quoting from Ohr's handwritten notes of a meeting with Glenn Simpson in December 2016 makes me wonder whether he may not already have made a decision. A key paragraph from the report:

    'Yet, Simpson allegedly acknowledged that most of the information Fusion GPS and British intelligence operative Christopher Steele developed did not come from sources inside Moscow. "Much of the collection about the Trump campaign ties to Russia comes from a former Russian intelligence officer (? not entirely clear) who lives in the U.S.," Ohr scribbled in his notes.'

    (See http://thehill.com/hilltv/r... .)

    There is I think a need for caution here. There is no guarantee that Simpson was telling the literal truth to Ohr, or indeed the latter reproducing with absolute accuracy with he was told (handwritten notes can be disposed of easily, but they can also be rewritten.)

    One is I think on firmer ground in relation to what it suggests was not the case – that there is any substance whatsoever in the ludicrous story of someone running a private security company in London sending out hired employees who then gain access to top Kremlin insiders, with these, of course, telling them precisely what they actually think.

    And it confirms my strong suspicion that the dossier is actually a composite product, much of it assembled at Fusion, which could indeed contain material from a range of people from the former Soviet space, who could living in the United States, Britain, or elsewhere – Ukraine and the Baltics being obvious possibilities.

    So Sergei Skripal and Sergei Millian, neither of whom fit the description by Simpson, have been mentioned as possible sources, and there is also the very curiously ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin.

    All these people, obviously, could simply have fabricated material or retailed gossip, and Steele himself was involved in fabricating material on an industrial scale to cover up what actually happened to Alexander Litvinenko.

    That said, I continue to think it possible that both the second and final memoranda may incorporate some 'glitter', as well as 'chickenfeed' fed from FSB cybersecurity people to their FBI counterparts, to hark back to George Smiley says to the Minister, quite possibly included in the hope that the BS involved would be reproduced in contexts where it could provoke legal action.

    All this leads me back to the suspicion that Steele's involvement may have been less in crafting the dossier, than making it possible to conceal its actual origins while giving it an appearance of credibility. It could also be the case that Nellie Ohr's sudden interest in radio transmissions had to do with communications inside the United States, rather than with Steele.

    It could then be that Steele has been, in effect, hoist with his own petard, in that he is having to sustain the fiction that he had some kind of grounds for making the claims about Aleksej Gubarev and XBT. How far this matters, at least in relation to the action bought against 'BuzzFeed' in Florida, remains moot at the moment.

    Apparently that organisation is doing rather well in sustaining the claiming that 'fair report privilege' could circumvent any requirement to prove truth – and a key question now is whether documents which the DOJ is being forced to produce will establish that the dossier was being used by officials in ways that would trigger the privilege as of 10 January 2017.

    That said, what Ohr reports Simpson as telling him raises fundamental questions about how anyone could have relied upon the dossier for anything – and should push people back to actually asking hard questions about its origins.

    fanto -> David Habakkuk , 2 days ago

    Mr Habakkuk, you mention "ambiguous role of Rinat Akhmetshin" - I am not sure if you meant Akhmetov.

    I am surprised and curious about you mentioning him - if you meant Akhmetov - because that is one name among all the oligarchs which has so far not been prominent. Thank you for your posts, these posts and the SST comments could and should serve as help to the congressional investigations and hearings.

    blue peacock -> Jack , 4 days ago

    Jack

    To add: Steele was on the FBI's payroll, in addition to being on Fusion GPS's payroll. And on the payroll of Her Majesty's Government. After he got caught leaking to the media he was apparently "fired" by the FBI. But he was continuing to communicate and brief through Bruce Ohr at the DOJ.

    I think the circle of Glenn Simpson. Chris Steele, Bruce & Nellie Ohr, Adam Waldman. Peter Strzok, and Sen. Mark Warner will be very interesting to pursue.

    The other circle that should be investigated is the Brennan, Clapper, Lynch, Comey, Yates, Susan Rice.

    No investigation can exclude the active participation of key people from the media complex including people like Comey's good friend Benjamin Wittes.

    Patrick Armstrong , 3 days ago

    Younger isn't the brightest bulb in the box, is he?

    "If you doubt the link between legitimacy and effective counter-terrorism, then – albeit negatively – the unfolding tragedy in Syria will, I fear, provide proof. I believe the Russian conduct in Syria, allied with that of Assad's discredited regime, will, if they do not change course, provide a tragic example of the perils of forfeiting legitimacy. In defining as a terrorist anyone who opposes a brutal government, they alienate precisely that group that has to be on side if the extremists are to be defeated. Meanwhile, in Aleppo, Russia and the Syrian regime seek to make a desert and call it peace. The human tragedy is heart-breaking"

    David Habakkuk -> Patrick Armstrong , 3 days ago

    Patrick,

    Those were indeed some of the most inane comments in an inane piece.

    But then, if you read an interview given to Jay Elwes of 'Prospect' magazine in May last year by Younger's predecessor Sir Richard Dearlove, who looks to have been a significant background presence in what has been going on, you will find that, although he is much more coherent than than his successor, it is almost as inane.

    (See https://www.prospectmagazin... . )

    As it happens, Dearlove was one of the signatories of the 'Statement of Principles' of something called the 'Henry Jackson Society.'

    This was founded in 2005, in Cambridge, by a group in whom acolytes of an historian called Maurice Cowling were prominent – Dearlove is himself a graduate in history from that university.

    In its original version, the 'Statement of Principles' explained, among other things, that the Society: 'Believes that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that any international organization which admits undemocratic states on an equal basis is fundamentally flawed.'

    (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... .)

    Ironically, it was shortly after the publication of the dossier that Anatol Lieven published in the 'National Interest' an article entitled 'Is America Becoming a Third World Country?' (See https://nationalinterest.or... .)

    Among other things, he harked back to the way that, in 1648, a century and a half of bloody ideological strife in Europe had been ended with a recognition that the legitimacy of different state forms had to be accepted, if a kind of 'war of all against all' was to be avoided.

    And Lieven went on to reflect on the way that, at what was then widely seen as the end of the Cold War, the abandonment of universalisitic pretensions by Russia and China was interpreted as justifying an embrace of these by the the West.

    This, he went on to argue, had actually had the paradoxical effect of relegitimising 'régimes' which do not conform to Western 'democratic' models, concluding by noting what appears to our new, quasi-Soviet, preference for not letting experience interfere with ideological dogma:

    'Finally – even after the catastrophes of Iraq and Libya – there is almost no awareness among US policymakers of the fact that US attempts to change the regimes of other countries are likely to be seen not only by the elites of those countries but also by their populations as leading to – and intended to lead to – the destruction of the state itself, leading to disaster for its society and population. When the Communist regime in the USSR collapsed (though only in part under Western pressure), it took the Soviet state with it. The Russian state came close to following suit in the years that followed, Russia was reduced to impotence on the world stage, and large parts of the Russian and other populations suffered economic and social disaster. Remembering their own past experiences with state collapse, warlordism, famine and foreign invasion, Chinese people looked at this awful spectacle and huddled closer to the Chinese state – one that they may dislike in many ways, but which they certainly trust more than anything America has to offer – especially given the apparent decay of democracy throughout the West.'

    ( https://nationalinterest.or... .)

    I read with interest your piece back in June entitled 'Putin Once Dreamed the American Dream', reprinting Charles Heberle's account of the 'Transforming Subjects Into Citizens' project, and the attitude of some people close to Putin to it.

    (See https://patrickarmstrong.ca... .)

    One of the things which struck me was that the question why the American Revolution succeeded, and so many others failed, which was concerning the intellectuals to whom Heberle talked, is one of the central questions of modern political thought, from Tocqueville on.

    (Indeed, the question of the preconditions for what might be called 'constitutional' government, has been central to 'republican' thought, ever since it was revived by Italian thinkers, including prominently Machiavelli, when the 'Renaissance' made them reactivate and rework debates from ancient Rome and Greece.)

    However, to hark back to the anxieties expressed by Lieven, nothing in the analysis of the great French thinker necessary guarantees that the success of 'Democracy in America' is stable and permanent, or indeed that the relatively civilised order of the post-war 'Pax Americana' is necessarily durable in Western Europe.

    Also in June, Sergei Karaganov published a piece in 'Russia in Global Affairs', of which he is publisher, entitled 'Ideology of Eastward Turn.' A paragraph that struck me:

    'Russian society should by no means abdicate from its mostly European culture. But it should certainly stop being afraid, let alone feel ashamed, of its Asianism. It should be remembered that from the standpoint of prevailing social mentality and society's attitude to the authorities Russia, just as China and many other Asian states, are offspring of Chengiss Khan's Empire. This is no reason for throwing up hands in despair or for beginning to despise one's own people, contrary to what many members of intelligencia sometimes do. It should be accepted as a fact of life and used as a strength. The more so, since amid the harsh competitive environment of the modern world the authoritarian type of government – in the context of a market economy and equitable military potentials – is certainly far more effective than modern democracy. This is what our Western partners find so worrisome. Of course, we should bear in mind that authoritarianism – just like democracy – may lead to stagnation and degradation. Russia is certainly confronted with such a risk.'

    Unlike you, I cannot claim serious expertise on Russia. But, as a reasonably alert generalist television current affairs producer, I took note of the indications which were emerging in the course of 1987 that the Gorbachev 'new thinking' was underpinned by a realisation that Soviet institutions and ideas had become fundamentally dysfunctional, to which you have referred repeatedly over the years.

    And, after long tedious months trying interest the powers that were in British broadcasting in what was happening, I ended up producing a couple of programmes for BBC Radio in February/March 1989 in which we interviewed some of the leading 'new thinkers', among them Karaganov's then immediate superior at the Institute of Europe, Vitaly Zhurkin.

    At the Institute for the USA and Canada, by contrast, we did not interview its head, Georgiy Arbatov, but his deputy, Andrei Kokoshin, and one of the latter's mentors on military matters and collaborators General-Mayor Valentin Larionov, who I later realised had earlier been one of the foremost Soviet nuclear strategists. (At the Institute for World Economy and International Relations, we interviewed Arbatov's son, Alexei.)

    Talking to these people we got a sense, although it had to be fleshed out later, of the scale of the disillusion with Soviet models, and indeed – which began to frighten me not long after – of the way many of them were romanticising the West.

    What Karaganov now writes is I think a hardly very surprising reaction to the way that the Western powers responded to the 'new thinking.' Moreover, it seems to me that the disillusionment involved is in no sense particular Russian, but rather global.

    If one regards 'democracy' as though it were quoted on the stock exchange, before 1914 there were very many buyers, including among the Russian élite. By 1931, in very many places, including large sections of the 'intelligentsia' in Western countries, it was a sellers' market, to put it mildly.

    After 1945, a kind of long 'bull market' in 'democracy' started: for very good reasons.

    The – largely but very far from entirely – peaceful retreat and collapse of Soviet power was to a very significant extent the product of this. The subsequent behaviour of Western élites has generated a vicious 'bear market', a fact they appear unable to understand.

    I do not think Karaganov's article is simply a reflection of changes in Russian attitudes. The changes, it seems to me, are global.

    Patrick Armstrong -> David Habakkuk , 3 days ago

    I do think that we in the West really blew it. In 1990, we could have said, in all humility, that our way of life (IMO the key word is pluralism) had proven more survivable. So we should welcome the others into the tent. Instead, we were right and that was that.

    PS, in light of the Henry Jackson society and all Younger's references to "values" this one rather stands out "A vital lesson I take from the Chilcot Report is the danger of group think."

    Yeah. Group think, the very opposite of what I mean by pluralism.

    Jack -> David Habakkuk , 3 days ago

    David,

    Sharyl Atkinson describes well the conspiracy. When one steps back and look at all the machinations we know now, it seems incredible.

    Just as you're asking about the origins of the dossier I wonder if it was orchestrated or something that evolved organically? If it was orchestrated, then who was the mastermind? Did Brennan, Clapper and Come sit down and hatch it or was Simpson the brains? What is astounding is the scale. So many people involved. Were they all motivated by ideology or by the need to protect their racket?

    It seems there are many sub-plots. There's the Deripaska, Steele, Waldman, Mueller, Sen. Warner angle. Then there's the Simpson, Steele, Ohr, Strzok, Page, McCabe angle. There's also the Simpson, Steele, media reporters angle. Then there's the whole Mifsud, Halper, Carter Page, Papadopolous, Downer bit. There's the Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok FISA application piece. Then there's all the stuff happening in the UK including Hannigan's resignation as soon as Trump is elected. Of course the whole Mueller appointment and the obstruction of justice thread to tie Trump's hand. There are so many elements. Who initiated and coordinated? Was each element separate?

    There's no doubt a political thriller movie could be made.

    FB -> Patrick Armstrong , 3 days ago

    Thanks for the quote...LOL

    I guess the comedy part is that there actually exist people with medically functioning brains, who are somehow able to contort such a worldview...Aleppo as peaceful 'desert' indeed...who knew that having bearded fanatics in charge is somehow 'better'...[and not 'heart-breaking']...

    Michael Regan , 2 days ago

    Some here may find blogpost from March of this year interesting as it speaks to the production of the Steele dossier. I have not seen it mentioned here before and a site search produced no results. https://apelbaum.wordpress.... Some sections seem to have gotten David Cay Johnston's hackles up.

    David Habakkuk -> Michael Regan , a day ago

    Michael Regan,

    I had seen Yaacov Apelbaum's piece referred to by Clarice Feldman in a post on the 'American Thinker' site a few days back, but not looked at it properly.

    It is indeed fascinating, and clearly repays a closer study than I have so far had time to give it. I was however relieved to find that what Apelbaum writes 'meshes' quite well with my own views of the likely authorship of the dossier.

    A question I have is whether the monumental amount of labour involved in producing it can really be the work of a single IT person – however wide-ranging his abilities and interests. My suspicion is that there may be input from Russian intelligence.

    This is not said in order to discredit Apelbaum's work. In matters where I have had occasion critically to examine claims from official Russian sources, I have found several unsurprising, but recurring, patterns. Sometimes, the information provided can be shown to be essentially accurate, and it is reasonably clear how it has been obtained.

    At other times, claims are made which information from other sources suggests either are, or may well be, true, but the 'sources and methods' involved are deliberately obscured, making evaluation more difficult.

    And then, there are many occasions when what one gets is quite patently a mixture of accurate information and disinformation. Analysing these can be very productive, if one can both sift out the accurate information, and attempt to see what the disinformation is designed to obscure.

    One thing of which I am absolutely certain is that the networks which are outlined by Apelbaum are precisely those which Russian intelligence will have spent a great deal of time and ingenuity penetrating.

    This will have been attempted by 'SIGINT' and surveillance methods, and also through infiltrating agents and turning people. (There are often grounds to suspect that some of those most vociferously denouncing Putin are colluding with Russian intelligence.)

    Together, these methods are likely to have produced a mass of information. It is important to remember, for example, that at the time of his mysterious death on 23 March 2013 Boris Berezovsky was negotiating to return to Russia, and that his head of security, Sergei Sokolov did return, with a 'cache' of documents.

    Some of these were used back in April 2016 in a 'Vesti Nedeli' edition presented by Dmitry Kiselyov, who manages Russia's informational programming resources, and an accompanying documentary on the 'Pervyi Kanal' station.

    The purpose was to demonstrate that Alexei Navalny was the instrument of a 'régime change' plot in which William Browder was acting as an agent of MI6.

    There is a good discussion of this, which highlights some of the problems with the documents, by Gilbert Doctorow, and Sokolov appears to have been involved in some murky activities since.

    (See https://russia-insider.com/... ; https://en.crimerussia.com/... .)

    But whatever the credibility or lack of it of the material, its appearance illustrates a general pattern, where the political disintegration of the London-based opposition to Putin has meant that more and more people involved in it have been supplying information to the Russians.

    If, as I strongly suspect, there is fire beneath the smoke in those Russian television programmes, and if a great part of a series of projects of a related kind orchestrated in conjunction by elements in American and British intelligence were actually large run from this side, this will be creating headaches for people in Washington, as well as London.

    An important role in the Apelbaum piece is played by the private security company Hakluyt. A quick look at the entries on Wikipedia and Powerbase will make clear that, if there is a British 'deep state', this is likely to be at its core.

    (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... ; http://powerbase.info/index... .)

    It is against this background that on has to see a specific claim which Apelbaum makes, for which I do not think any evidence is produced, about two figures whose role in 'Russiagate' is clearly central. So Luke Harding is described as 'A Guardian reporter and a Hakluyt and Orbis contractor' (note word.) Meanwhile, Edward Baumgartner is described as 'Co-founder of Edward Austin. Contractor at Orbis and Hakluyt.'

    That Harding is corrupt, as also Sir Robert Owen's 'Inquiry' into the death of the late Alexander Litvinenko, I can prove. When Owen's report was published in January 2016, a preliminary response by me was posted here on SST, which among other things listed some of the evidence establishing that the interviews supposedly recorded with Litvinenko by Detective Inspector Brent Hyatt immediately before his death were blatant forgeries.

    If this is the case, then questions are raised about how much of the apparently compelling forensic evidence is forged – and close examination suggests that key parts of it are.

    (See http://turcopolier.typepad.... .)

    In relation to that part of the evidence discussed in my January 2016 post which exposes the fumbling attempts by Steele and his colleagues to cover up the truth about when and how Litvinenko travelled into central London on the day he was supposedly killed, most of this had been among a mass of material submitted by me to the Inquiry Team, which I have e-mails to prove was read.

    Likewise, also in January 2016, I sent the key relevant evidence on this crucial matter to Harding and senior figures at the 'Guardian', and have reason to believe it was read.

    Further study of Owen's report has confirmed my suspicion that a strong 'prima facie case' of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice exists against very many of those involved in it.

    At the same time, materials produced on the Russian side have confirmed my suspicion that the reason why Steele and others have been able to get away with their cover-up is that the Russian intelligence services are no more enthusiastic than their British counterparts about having anything like the whole truth about how Litvinenko lived and died made public.

    Given the central role which Steele has now assumed in what looks like one of the biggest political scandals in American history, and the fact that in his book 'Collusion' Harding was again coming out in support of him, it would be of the greatest possible interest if indeed the latter had combined being a senior 'Guardian' correspondent with being paid by both Orbis and – even more important – Hakluyt.

    And, particularly given the peculiar ambiguities of the role both of Fusion GPS and Baumgartner in the 'Trump Tower' meeting, it would be of great interest if the latter could be tied not only to Fusion, but to Orbis and – again even more important – Hakluyt.

    This in turn might be relevant in trying to make sense of whether the fact that he and Simpson appear to have been working against Trump and Browder at the same time was or was not part of an elaborate ploy to give credibility to 'information operations' against the former.

    There are accordingly two possibilities. It may be that, while much else in the Apelbaum material can be shown to be accurate, such accurate information is being used to give credibility to disinformation.

    Alternatively, he is being used as a conduit for accurate and really explosive information about the British end of 'Russiagate', which he is unlikely to have unearthed all by himself, and the actual sources of which are – for very understandable reasons – being obscured.

    Michael Regan -> David Habakkuk , a day ago

    Mr Habakkuk-

    Thank you for your reply. You have given me much to think about and I am very grateful that you took the time to respond in such a comprehensive manner, and that you have provided me and others here with some really compelling information and notions.

    In particular, the issue of sources and methods you note seems spot on. The author(s)'s information gathering methodologies and expertise are certainly not those of the laiety. In fact in the comments below his post YA mentions intelligence work.

    Additionally, the text itself displays an odd parallelism with his assertion regarding the Steele Dossier- that is, the likelihood of multiple authors, of diverse origins.

    One thing that did catch my eye was a response he made to David Cay Johnston's pissy request for a retraction about Jacoby involvement. YA included a quote in Latin from Cicero's accusations against Cataline. Here is the English: What is there that you did last night, what the night before -- where is it that you were -- who was there that you summoned to meet you -- what design was there which was adopted by you, with which you think that any one of us is unacquainted?

    While this sort of riposte isn't exactly hyper-erudite, it ain't chopped liver either. What I mean to say is that exceptional cyber skills, algorithm coding (I'm guessing crawlers) are not commonly coupled with that sort of classical formation. His recourse to various biblical quotes suggests an unusual level of education as well. And no way is he younger than 38 or so.

    At any rate, thank you for the article and your kind and informative reply.

    David Habakkuk -> Michael Regan , a day ago

    Michael Regan,

    Thanks. I have now read both a good few of Apelbaum's earlier posts, and also the comments on his discussion of the dossier. Given the importance of his analysis of that document closer study is clearly needed of all this material, but I have some preliminary reactions.

    My curiosity about who Apelbaum might be is reinforced by the fact that the intimations he gives about his background in his responses to comments, while not incompatible with what he has said in the past, do not sit so easily with it.

    In a July 2010 post, he explained that: 'In my previous life, I was a civil engineer. I worked for a large power marine construction company doing structural design and field engineering.' According to the account he gave then, he subsequently shifted to software development.

    (See https://apelbaum.wordpress.... .)

    What he now tells us is that: 'As far as how I first started, I do have an intelligence background and have been developing OSINT/cyber/intelligence platforms for many years.'

    That makes sense in terms of the analysis, which – whatever other inputs there may or may not have been – looks to me like the work of someone who has a serious background in these kinds of methodology, and moreover, is clearly not any kind of 'Fachidiot.'

    So, questions naturally arise about Apelbaum's intelligence career, in particular, who he is likely to have been employed by, and associated with, in the past, and whether he is still involved with any of those agencies which have employed him.

    Even if he is not, questions would obviously rise about present connections arising from past work. This is in addition to the possibility that the logic of events may have provoked him to collaborate with those who might earlier have been his adversaries.

    Reading Apelbaum's work, I am reminded of another interesting intervention in an embittered argument relating to the Middle East and the post-Soviet space, from what turned out to be an unexpected source.

    In the period following the 'false flag' sarin attack at Ghouta on 21 August 2013 an incisive demolition of the conventional wisdom was provided in the 'crowdsourced' investigation masterminded by one 'sasa wawa' on a site entitled 'Who Attacked Ghouta?'

    (See http://whoghouta.blogspot.com .)

    And then, in December 2016, an Israeli high technology entrepreneur called Saar Wilf, a former employee of Unit 8200, that country's equivalent of the NSA or GCHQ, who had subsequently made a great deal of money when he and his partner sold their company to Paypal, co-founded a site called 'Rootclaim.'

    (See https://www.rootclaim.com .)

    The site, it was explained, was dedicated to applying Bayesian statistics to 'current affairs' problems. This is a methodology, whose modern form owes much to work done at Bletchley Park in the war, which is invaluable in 'SIGINT' analysis and also combating online fraud.

    At the outset, 'Rootclaim' posted a recycled version of some of the key material from the 'Who Attacked Ghouta?' investigation. So, it seems likely, if not absolutely certain, that Saar Wilf and 'sasa wawa' are one and the same.

    Following the Salisbury incident on 4 March, a blogger using the name 'sushi' produced a series of eleven posts under the title 'A Curious Incident' on the 'Vineyard of the Saker' blog.

    (See https://thesaker.is/tag/sushi/ .)

    Again, there are some very clear resemblances to 'sasa wawa' and Saar Wilf, which made me wonder whether the same person may be reappearing under yet another 'moniker.'

    While the 'flavour' of Apelbaum seems to be different, the combination of what looks like serious technical expertise in IT techniques relating to intelligence with broad general intellectual interests looks to me similar.

    I was amused by the combination of his quotation of the words from John 8:32 etched into the wall of the original CIA headquarters – 'And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free' – and the following remarks:

    'The June 2016 start date of Steele's contract with Fusion GPS is the start of the "billable" activity, not the beginning of the research. Steele and Simpson/Jacoby have been collaborating on Trump/Russia going back to 2009.

    'Also, there is a large Hakluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US that regularly services political and federal agencies and has the power to summon Nazgûls the likes of John Brennan. So Steele is not the new kid on the block, he has been doing this type of work long before 2016. This is also why he has such a cozy relationship with the brass at the DOJ and state.'

    As it happens, I think that many of the collaborations involved may have started significantly earlier than this. In his response to David Cay Johnston, Apelbaum links to an April 2007' WSJ' article by Simpon and Jacoby which, among other things, deals with Semyon Mogilevich.

    This is behind a paywall, but, fortunately, the fact that Ukrainian nationalists have had an obvious interest in treating it as a source of reliable information has meant that it is easily accessible.

    (See www.madcowprod.com/wp-conte... )

    It should I think be clear from my January 2016 post why I find this particularly interesting, in that it has to be interpreted in the context of a crucial 'key' to the mystery of the death of Alexander Litvinenko.

    This is that he, the Ukrainian nationalist former KGB person Yuri Shvets, the convicted Italian disinformation peddler Mario Scaramella, and quite possibly the sometime key FBI expert on Mogilevich, Robert 'Bobby' Levinson, were involved in trying to suggest that Mogilevich was an instrument of a plot by Putin to equip Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb.'

    So, I then come back to the question of whether this notion of a 'large Haluyt/Orbis "commercial intelligence" network in the US', playing the role of Sauron with Brennan, perhaps, as the 'Witch-king of Angmar', does or does not have substance.

    If it does, there would be very good reasons for a variety of people, with a range of different attitudes to events in the post-Soviet space and the Middle East, to think that they had an interest in collaborating with Russian intelligence against a common enemy.

    If it does not, then there is a real possibility that Apelbaum may be involved in using accurate intelligence to disseminate inaccurate. (It seems to me that he is much too intelligent to be a plausible candidate for the role of 'useful idiot.')

    One further point that may, or may not, be relevant. Many of the most influential American and British Jews, for reasons which I find somewhat hard to understand, seem to have decided that the heirs of the architects of the Lvov pogrom are nice and cuddly.

    So, for example, Chrystia Freeland, the unrepentant granddaughter of the notorious Nazi collaborator Michael Chomiak, has been able to end up as Canadian Foreign Minister because made a successful journalistic career on the London 'Financial Times', a paper with a strong Jewish presence.

    That the editorial staff of such a paper thought it appropriate to have someone like Freeland as their Moscow correspondent gives you a good insight into how moronic British élites have become. This may well be relevant, in trying to evaluate claims about Hakluyt and other matters.

    In relation to Apelbaum, it may be quite beside the point that other Jews from a Russian/East European background, both in Russia, Israel, and the United States, have very different views on Ukraine, Russia, and the dangers posed – not least to Israel – by jihadists. It is however a fact which needs to be born in mind, when one comes across people whose views cut across conventional dividing lines in the United States and Britain.

    Beside the point in relation to Apelbaum, I am confident, but also needing to be kept in mind, is the possibility that elements in the United States 'intelligence community', seeing the 'writing on the wall', may think it appropriate to shift from trying to pass the buck by blaming the Russians to doing so by blaming the Brits.

    Michael Regan -> David Habakkuk , a day ago

    It seems apparent that Putin's reordering of the Russian economy after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, Republic Bank's difficulites and the death of Edmund Safra left a bitter taste in the mouths of many who had hoped to exercise rentier rights over the Russian economy and resources. Why so much US resources and energy have been committed to recovering a contested deed is a real conundrum.

    I was unaware of Freeland's grandfather and his lamentable CV. Thank you. It's funny that you mentioned both the Ghouta post and the Vineyard of the Saker. I recall reading those and thinking- this is not like common fare on the intertubes.

    Your last points about failings in the quality of elite decision-making is extremely important. This dynamic of the dumb (US, UK, EU) at the wheel is, for me, the most frightening feature of the current state of play. In the worst moments I fear we are all on a bus driven by a drunk monkey, careening through the Andes. It's going to hurt all the way to the bottom.

    Again, I am very grateful for your replies and all the great information and thought.

    David Habakkuk -> Michael Regan , 2 hours ago

    Michael Regan,

    I think the question of why large elements in both American and British élites got so heavily invested, in essence, in supporting the oligarchs who refused Putin's terms in what turned into a kind of 'bare knuckles' struggle they were always likely to lose is a very interesting one.

    It has long seemed to me that, even if one looked at matters from the most self-interested and cynical point of view, this represented a quite spectacular error of judgement. And, viewing the way in which 'international relations' are rearranging themselves, I am reasonably confident that this was one matter on which I got things right.

    A central reason for this, I have come to think, is that Berezovsky and the 'information operations' people round him – Litvinenko is important, but the pivotal figure, the 'mastermind', if you will, was clearly Alex Goldfarb, and Yuri Shvets and Yuri Felshtinsky both played and still play important supporting roles – were telling people in the West what these wanted to hear.

    It is a truth if not quite 'universally acknowledged', at least widely recognised by those who have acquired some 'worldly wisdom', that intellectually arrogant people, with limited experience of the world and a narrow education, can commonly be 'led by the nose' by figures who have more of the relevant kinds of intelligence and experience, and few scruples.

    This rather basic fact is central to understanding the press conference on 31 May 2007 where the figure whom the Berezovsky group and Christopher Steele had framed in relation to the death of Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, responded to the Crown Prosecution Service request for his extradition.

    In his prepared statement, Lugovoi claimed that his supposed victim used to say that everyone in Britain were ''retards', to use the translation submitted in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, or 'idiots', to use that by RT. And according to this version, the British believed in everything that 'we' – that is, the Berezovky group – said was happening in Russia.

    (For the RT translation, see https://www.rt.com/news/and... .)

    Whether or not Litvinenko expressed this cynical contempt, the credulity with which the claims of the 'information operations' people around Berezovsky have been accepted – well illustrated by Owen's report and perhaps most ludicrous in Harding's journalism – makes clear it is justified.

    What moreover became very evident, when Glenn Simpson testified to the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees, was that he was once again recycling the Berezovsky's group's version of Putin 'sistema' as the 'return of Karla.'

    Given what has been emerging on the ways in which Fusion GPS and Steele were both integrated into networks involving top-level people in the FBI, DOJ, State Department and CIA, it seems clear that the 'retards'/'idiots' label is as applicable to people on your side as to people on ours.

    Perhaps then, cartoons about Trump as a puppet, with the strings pulled by another puppet representing Manafort, whose strings are in turn pulled by Putin, should be replaced by ones in which Mueller is seen as a puppet manipulated by the ghost of Boris Berezovsky.

    But that is the irony. The relationship with Berezovsky blew up in the faces of all concerned, when in the wake of the successsful corruption of the investigation into the death of Litvinenko by him and his 'information operations' people, he attempted to recoup his fortunes by suing Roman Abramovich, and got taken to pieces by Lord Sumption.

    As to what happened next, a recent item on 'Russian Insider', providing a link to and transcript of a more recent piece presented by Dmitry Kiselyov on 'Vesti Nedeli is a good illustration of where accurate information and disinformation can be mixed in material from Russian sources.

    (See https://russia-insider.com/... .)

    The piece, which appeared in July, discusses, and quotes from, an interview given the previous month to Dmitry Gordon, who runs a Ukrainian nationalist site, by Berezovsky's daughter Elizaveta. Among other things, this deals with Berezovsky's death.

    (See https://gordonua.com/public... . A little manipulation will get you a reasonably serviceable English translation, although it becomes comic because Berezovsky is referred to as 'pope'.)

    The 'Vesti Nedeli' piece uses what Elizaveta Berezovskaya says in support of the claim that Berezovsky was murdered by British 'special forces', because he was planning to return to Russia, and he 'knew too much about them.'

    As it happens, this is a patently tendentious reading of what she says. However, interesting features of the actual text of the interview are 1. that it does provide what to my mind is compelling evidence that her father was murdered, and 2. while she clearly suggests that this was covered up by the British, she is not suggesting that they were responsible – but also not making Putin 'prime suspect.'

    Whether the suggestion by his daughter that her father might have been murdered by people who knew that by so doing they might get control of assets he might otherwise recoup has any merit I cannot say: I doubt it but cannot simply rule the possibility out.

    What remains the case is that at that point there were very many people, including but in no way limited to elements in Western intelligence agencies, who had strong interests in avoiding a return by Berezovsky to Russia.

    And the same people had the strongest possible interest in avoiding his being treated at the Inquest into Litvinenko's death by a competent barrister representing the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation in the way he had been treated by Lord Sumption.

    Ironically, it may have been partly because Lugovoi had made a dramatic announcement that he was withdrawing from the proceedings less than a fortnight before Berezovsky's death that before this happened a lot of people were staring at an absolutely worst-case scenario.

    Time and again, in Owen's report, one finds matters where he recycles patent disinformation, which a well-briefed barrister acting for the ICRF could have easily ripped to shreds. At the same time, in this situation, the Russians could most probably have made a reasonable fist of coping with the multiple contradictions in claims made on their own side.

    And, crucially, their patent weak suit – the need to obscure the actual role of Russian intelligence in the smuggling of the polonium into London, which had nothing to do with any murder plot – could have been reasonably well 'covered.'

    Precisely because of these facts, the one scenario which can very easily be completely ruled out is that which is basic to the 'information operations' now coming out of London and Washington. In this, Berezovsky's death is portrayed as a key element in a systematic attempt by the Putin 'sistema' to eradicate the supposedly heroic opposition, much of it located in London.

    That sustaining this fable is critical to defending the credibility of Steele, and therefore of the whole 'Russiagate' narrative, is quite evident from the 'From Russia With Blood' materials published by 'BuzzFeed' in July last year.

    (See https://www.buzzfeed.com/he... .)

    This, however, leads on to a paradox, which is highlighted by a piece posted by James George Jatras on the 'Strategic Culture Foundation' site on 18 August, entitled 'Have You Committed Your Three Felonies Today?'

    (See https://www.strategic-cultu... .)

    Among the points Jatras – who I think is an Orthodox Christian – makes is that the logic of contesting the 'Russiagate' narrative has had some strange consequences. Among these, there is one on which the actual history of the activities of Berezovsky and his 'information operations' people bears directly:

    'Flipping the "Russians did it" narrative: Among the President's defenders, on say Fox News, no less than among his detractors, Russia is the enemy who (altogether now!) "interfered in our elections" in order to "undermine our democracy." Mitt Romney was right! The only argument is over who was the intended beneficiary of Muscovite mendacity, Trump or Hillary – that's the variable. The constant is that Putin is Hitler and only a traitor would want to get along with him. All sides agree that the Christopher Steele dossier is full of "Russian dirt" – though there's literally zero actual evidence of Kremlin involvement but a lot pointing to Britain's MI6 and GCHQ.'

    (See https://www.strategic-cultu... .)

    For reasons I have already discussed, I think what while Jatras is substantially right, 'zero evidence' is only partially correct: It seems to me that disinformation supplied by elements in Russian intelligence could quite possibly have found its way into the second and final memoranda.

    That said, Jatras has pointed to a fundamental feature of the current situation, which involves multiple ironies.

    The total destruction of Steele's credibility could easily be achieved by anyone who was interested in looking at the evidence about the life and death of the late Alexander Litvinenko seriously. However, because a central tactic of most of those who are attacking the 'Russiagate' narrative has generally been 'Flipping the "Russians did it" narrative', they are like people who ought to be able to see Steele's 'Achilles' heel', but in practice, often end up attacking him where his armour is, without being, not at its weakest.

    Meanwhile, as I have already stressed, the ability of the Russian authorities to undermine the 'narrative' produced by the 'information operations' people around Berezovsky, of whom the most important are Alex Goldfarb and Yuri Shvets, is compromised by their fear of having to 'own up to' their actual role in the smuggling of the polonium into London in October-November 2007.

    The person who had a strong interest in blowing this structure of illusion to pieces was actually Lugovoi. But it seems to me at least possible that there has been a kind of disguised covert conspiracy by elements in Western and Russian intelligence to ensure there was no risk of him doing so.

    Steve Smith , 3 days ago

    One of the things I've never understood about the Trump Dossier story is the lack of any forensic analysis of its content and style anywhere in the media, even the alt media. Who was supposed to have actually written it? Steele? The style does not match someone of his background and education, and the formatting and syntax were atrocious. The font actually varied from "report" to "report." It certainly did not give me the impression of being the product of a high-end, Belgravia consultancy.

    I wonder whether it was produced by an American of one sort or another and then "laundered" by being accorded association with the UK firm. Given that Steele just happened to be hired by the USG to help in the anti-FIFA skulduggery, he and his firm seem very much to be a concern that does dirty little jobs that need discretely to be done, though in this case, the discretion was undermined.

    Paul M , 3 days ago

    Most of the memos were issued before October and Fusion/Simpson authorized Steele to release information to the FBI starting in July. The question is why the memos were released after the election when a release before the election would have been enough to sink Trump. Instead the FBI and presumably those paying Fusion on Hillarys behalf sat on it, and Comey comes out days before the election

    Saying he was reopening the HC email investigation.

    Kind of looks like they all wanted Trump in office and the disclosure was to give Trump the excuse needed to back track on his promises to improve relations with Russia and blame that on pressure from the Deep State and Russia Gate.

    Looking at Trumps history with Sater (FBI/CIA asset) and his political aspirations that began following his Moscow visit in 1987 it seems likely Trump has been a Deep State asset for 30 years and fed intelligence to CIA/FBI on Russian oligarchs and mafia . Indeed he may well have duped Russians into believing he was working for them when in fact it was the CIA/FBI who had the best Kompromat with US RICO laws that could have beggared him

    richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

    One thing to remember about the FBI is Sy Hersh. Hersh claims the FBI has been sitting on a report for two years that fingers murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the Wikileaks DNC email leaker (or one of them, at least.)

    Now can we imagine that not everyone in a senior position at the FBI knows about that report? I can't. Literally everyone from the supervisor of the Special Agent or computer forensic investigator who examined Rich's computer right up to the Director HAD to know that report exists - and covered it up.

    That right there is obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Literally everyone at the FBI who can't PROVE he didn't know about that report will be going to jail. The entire top administration of the FBI is going to go down.

    And how many people at the Department of Justice are aware of that report? Did Rosenstein know? Who else in the Obama administration knew?

    That would be motivation for a lot of desperate maneuvering. Add to that who was really behind the Steele Dossier and even more people are likely to end up in jail.

    Pat Lang Mod -> richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

    What is the link for Hersh saying that?

    richardstevenhack -> Pat Lang , 3 days ago

    You haven't heard that yet? It's the infamous audio tape that Hersh was caught on discussing it. He's since obfuscated what he said, but the tape stands on its own, and he has never said that anything he said on the tape wasn't true, despite that a lot of Democrats and Trump-bashers claim he has.

    Here's one source on Youtube:

    Seymour Hersh discussing Wikileaks DNC leaks Seth Rich & FBI report

    https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FgYzB96_EK7s%3Ffeature%3Doembed&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DgYzB96_EK7s&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FgYzB96_EK7s%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

    Pat Lang Mod -> richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

    I have told you several times and I will tell you again probably hopelessly that Hersh PERSONALLY has told me that the "tape" was made without his permission or knowledge when he was aimlessly speculating on possibilities.

    richardstevenhack -> Pat Lang , 3 days ago

    I am unaware of your explicitly telling me that he personally told you that the tape was "aimless speculation." My apologies if I missed that response.

    Of course the tape was made without his permission. We all know that. It's irrelevant to what he said on the tape.

    What I'm saying is that despite what he may have told you, nothing on that tape sounds like "aimless speculation".

    When you consider that he has four good reasons for dissembling about the tape, I view it as far more likely that everything he said was true.

    1) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his FBI contact. Not good for his line of work.

    2) If what he said is true, compromising that contact may well make all his other contacts wary about talking to him in the future - a bad deal for a journalist who relies on his contacts.

    3) If what he said is true, he may have compromised his ability to get his "long form journalism" article published - a problem he already has had in the past.

    4) If what he said is true, he's accusing the FBI of sitting on that report for two years, which might well make him a target of retaliation in some way.

    If you believe that everything he said on the tape is untrue and that is what he explicitly told you, fine. I'm waiting for his "long form journalism" report to explain it. So far everything he has said publicly about it has not contradicted what he said on the tape, but merely waved his hands about it.

    Pat Lang Mod -> richardstevenhack , 3 days ago

    Sy Hersh talks a lot both loudly and profanely. He never intended to tell Buttowski that there was more than a possibility that the FBI held more than a rumor that this might be true. He talked to Buttowski because a mutual friend of him and me asked him to do so for no good reason. Please go talk to all the other people you pester and not on SST. You are an argumentative nuisance.

    Aukuu Makule -> Pat Lang , 3 days ago

    I have no stake in the debate about Rich, DNC, wikileaks.
    But I do notice some loose ends. Hersh may well have engaged in speculation, but it is interesting speculation:
    quote:
    55. During his conversation with Butowsky, Mr. Hersh claimed that he had received information from an "FBI report." Mr. Hersh had not seen the report himself, but explained: "I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. And I know this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He's a very high level guy."

    56. According to Mr. Hersh, his source told him that the FBI report states that, shortly after Seth Rich's murder, the D.C. police obtained a warrant to search his home. When they arrived at the home, the D.C. police found Seth Rich's computer, but were unable to access it.The computer was then provided to the D.C. police Cyber Unit, who also were unable to access the computer. At that point, the D.C. police contacted the Cyber Unit at the FBI's Washington D.C. field office. Again, according to the supposed FBI report, the Washington D.C. field office was able to get into the computer and found that in "late spring early summer [2016], [Seth Rich][made] contact with Wikileaks." "They found what he had done. He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some juicy emails from the DNC." Mr. Hersh told Butowsky that Seth Rich "offered a sample [to WikiLeaks][,] an extensive sample, you know I'm sure dozens, of emails, and said I want money."
    . . .
    "I hear gossip," Hersh tells NPR on Monday. "[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it."
    . . .
    The clip is definitely worth listening to in its entirety if you haven't already. Hersh is heard telling Butowsky that he had a high-level insider read him an FBI file confirming that Seth Rich was known to have been in contact with WikiLeaks prior to his death, which is not even a tiny bit remotely the same as having "heard rumors". Hersh's statements in the audio recording and his statement to NPR cannot both be true.
    endquote
    https://medium.com/@caityjo...

    blue peacock , 3 days ago

    All

    An interview of Rep. John Ratcliffe who will lead the questioning of Bruce Ohr.

    https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2Fqn23H0vMCsM%3Ffeature%3Doembed&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dqn23H0vMCsM&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2Fqn23H0vMCsM%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=21d07d84db7f4d66a55297735025d6d1&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

    Rob , 3 days ago

    I suspect Buzzfeed were in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and perhaps you overestimate their professionalism.

    David Habakkuk -> Rob , 3 days ago

    Rob,

    You may very well be right. There may be a large element of 'amateur night out' about this.

    But then I come back to the question of who decided that the dossier be published, and who, if anyone, was consulted before the decision was made. For the reasons I gave, I am reasonably confident that those on this side who had been in one way or another complicit in its production and covert dissemination were taken aback by the publication.

    It is not clear to me whether anything significant can be inferred from the publicly available evidence about whether those on your side who had been complicit were involved in the decision to publish without taking even elementary precautions, or whether the 'Buzzfeed' people just had a rush of blood to the head.

    blue peacock -> David Habakkuk , 3 days ago

    David

    I suspect the decision to publish the dossier was political. It was required to enable Clapper, Brennan, and others to opine on national media and create further media hysteria prior to the vote as well as to justify the counter-intelligence investigations underway. They were throwing the kitchen sink to sink Trump's electoral chances. I don't think a lot of thought was given about the legal ramifications.

    This seems to be a pattern. Leak information. Then use the leaked story to justify actions like apply for a FISA warrant or fan the media flames.

    Cynthia Anne , 4 days ago

    And now they are turning on one another. Hayden just slammed Clapper for making too much of losing the security clearance the he abuse for political reasons.

    Pat Lang Mod -> Cynthia Anne , 4 days ago

    Looks like both Clapper and Haydon made the same comment about Brennan. they said "his rhetoric was becoming a problem. Ah, the USAF intel rats are swimming for the shore. Lets see how many others (not all USAF) decide to try to save themselves.

    blue peacock -> Pat Lang , 4 days ago

    Col. Lang

    I find it incredulous that former leaders of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies have gained paid access to powerful media platforms and they have used it to launch vicious attacks on a POTUS.

    I find it amazing that McCabe and Peter Strzok are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media platforms.

    IMO, everyone on the list that Sarah Sanders noted, should not just lose their clearance but should be testifying to a grand jury.

    MP98 -> blue peacock , 3 days ago

    Not really incredulous. Just expected behavior from swamp creatures whose self-assumed importance and "rights" (that the rest of us peasants don't have) are coming under threat.

    David Habakkuk -> blue peacock , 3 days ago

    blue peacock

    It seems to me absolutely appalling, and I am also appalled that people on this side appear to have been playing a central role in all this.

    One question. It seems to me that if what seems likely to be true does prove true, a range of these people must have committed very serious offences indeed.

    However, I am too ignorant to know what precisely those offences might be. If you, or anyone else, had a clear understanding, I would be interested.

    English Outsider -> David Habakkuk , 3 days ago

    "It seems to me absolutely appalling, and I am also appalled that people on this side appear to have been playing a central role in all this."

    That says it all. We got the more discreditable side of the affair outsourced to us. Ugh. Is that all we're fit for now in the UK? White helmets and Khan Sheikhoun and Steele, all the scrubby stuff? Is that what the famous "Special Relationship" now consists of? We get to do the scrubby stuff because it's what we're fit for and we can be relied upon to keep it quiet?

    Because at least on the American side there are people concerned about the political/PR involvement of parts of their own Intelligence Community, and seeking to have it looked into. Here - am I right? - it's dead silence.

    I've been permitted to say before on SST that I don't think the Americans are going to resolve this affair satisfactorily until more light is cast on the UK side. But I also think that, for our own sakes, we should be looking at what exactly our IC does, and in particular, how much UK political involvement there was in what is now clear was a direct PR attack on an American President.

    Pat Lang Mod -> English Outsider , 3 days ago

    I strongly suspect that Steele has a future as a novelist.

    blue peacock -> David Habakkuk , 3 days ago

    David

    I'm not a lawyer and have no experience with the federal criminal statutes. Having said that I suspect that the following could be considered crimes:

    There may also be certain professional agreements with the government that may have been violated. The only way any of these people will face a grand jury is if Donald Trump chooses to take action. Left to the natural devices of the law enforcement institutions nothing will happen and they will sweep everything under the rug. The intensity of Trump's tweets and the accusations therein are rising. If the GOP retains the House and Jim Jordan becomes speaker, then there may be a possibility that Sessions, Rosenstein and Wray may be fired and another special counsel appointed who will then convene a grand jury.

    Considering what has been uncovered by Congressional investigators and the DOJ IG, I am truly surprised that Sessions has resisted the appointment of a special counsel. But of course that could go the way of the Owens inquiry in your country.

    [Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though, "Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear that the Russians were coming. ..."
    "... That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989, followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America. ..."
    "... With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula). ..."
    "... Before long, it became clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself. ..."
    "... That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on. ..."
    "... The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded, fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria. ..."
    "... Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts in the UK and other allied nations. ..."
    "... How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims! ..."
    "... They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel ..."
    "... Cold War revivalists can therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth. ..."
    "... Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American "democracy" can plausibly allege. ..."
    "... Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons, liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State – that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east. ..."
    "... The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one that emerged after World War II. ..."
    "... However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism, suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a demonstrably aggressive "free world." ..."
    "... That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they" are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that ensued. ..."
    "... The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved." ..."
    "... Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free. ..."
    "... From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies. ..."
    "... Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified. But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a vote for catastrophe. ..."
    "... For now, though, the hard and very relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm, Russia. ..."
    "... It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been. ..."
    "... If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for America and its allies but for Russia too. ..."
    Aug 03, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

    There is less shame in being undone by a "master of deceit." When J. Edgar Hoover coined that description, he had Communists in mind. Back then, though, "Ruskies" and "Commies" – it was all the same. Americans were conditioned to live in fear that the Russians were coming.

    That nonsense should have ended when Communism more or less officially expired in 1989, followed two years later by the demise of the Soviet Union itself. For a long time, it seemed that it had. At first, the reaction in Western, especially American, political and media circles was triumphalist. The war was over and our side won. Beneath the surface, however, there was mourning in America.

    With the Cold War, the death merchants, the masters of war, the neocons, and a host of others had had a good thing going. Having been born into it, the political class was comfortable with the status quo too; and generations of Americans had grown up imbibing Russophobia in their mother's milk (or infant formula).

    It turned out, though, that American triumphalism was only a phase. Before long, it became clear that our economic and political masters had nothing to worry about, that Cold War anti-Communism was more robust than Communism itself.

    However, in the final days of Bush 41 and then at the dawn of the Clinton era, nobody knew that. Nobody gave America's propaganda system the credit it deserved.

    Also, nobody quite realized how devastating Russia's regression to capitalism would be, and nobody quite grasped the savagery of the kleptocrats who had taken charge of what remained of the Russian state.

    For more than a decade, the situation in that late great superpower was too dire to sustain the old fears and animosities. Capitalism had made Russia wretched again.

    That suited Bill Clinton and his First Lady, the former Goldwater Girl. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's leader, was their man. He was a godsend, a Trump-like cartoon character and a drunkard to boot – with an economy in tatters, and no rightwing base egging him on.

    But anti-Communism (without Communism) and its close cousin, Russophobia, could not remain in remission forever. The need for them was too great.

    In the Age of Obama, the Global War on Terror, with or without that ludicrous Bush 43-era name, wasn't cutting it anymore. It was, and still is, good for keeping America's perpetual war regime going and for undoing civil liberties, but there had never been much glory in it, only endless misery for all. Also it was getting old and increasingly easy to see through.

    The time was therefore right for a return of the repressed -- for full-blooded, fifties-style, anti-Communist (= anti-Russian) hysteria, or, since that still seemed far-fetched, for anti-Communist (= anti-Chinese) hysteria.

    This was not the only factor behind the Obama administration's "pivot towards Asia," its largely failed attempt to take China down a notch or two, but it was an important part of the story.

    However, by the time Obama and his team decided to pivot, China had become too important to the United States economically to make a good Cold War enemy. Worse still, it had for too long been an object of pity and contempt, not fear.

    When the Soviet Union was an enemy, China was an enemy too, most glaringly during the Korean War. It remained an enemy even after the Sino-Soviet split became too obvious to deny. However, unlike post-1917 Russia, it had never quite become an historical foe.

    Moreover, as Russia began to recover from the Yeltsin era, the Russian political class, and many of the oligarchs behind them, sensing the popular mood, decided that the time was ripe "to make Russia great again." Putin is not so much a cause as he is a symptom – and symbol – of this aspiration.

    And so, there it was: the longed for new Cold War would be much like the one that seemed over a quarter century ago.

    ***

    As everyone who has seen, heard or read anything about the 2016 election "knows," Russian intelligence services (= Putin) meddled. Everyone also "knows" that, with midterm elections looming, they are at it again.

    This, according to the mainstream consensus view, is a bona fide casus belli , a justification for war. To be sure, what they want is a war that remains cold; ending life on earth, as we know it, is not on their agenda.

    But inasmuch as cold wars can easily turn hot, this hardly mitigates the recklessness of their machinations. Humankind was extraordinarily lucky last time; there is no guarantee that all that luck will hold.

    Exactly what "Putin," the shorthand name for all that is Russian and nefarious, did, or is still doing, remains unclear. But this does not seem to bother purveyors of the conventional wisdom. Neither is ostensibly informed public opinion fazed by the fact that the evidence supporting the consensus view comes mainly from American intelligence services and from their counterparts in the UK and other allied nations.

    Time was when anyone with any sense understood that these intelligence services, the American ones especially, are second to none in meddling in the affairs of other nations, and that the American national security state – essentially our political police -- is comprised, by design, of liars and deceivers.

    How ironic therefore that nowadays it is mainly bamboozled Trump supporters in the Fox News demographic -- people who could care less about peace or, for that matter, about truth -- who are wary of the CIA and skeptical of the FBI's claims!

    Try as they might, the manufacturers and guardians of conventional wisdom have so far been unable to concoct a plausible story in which Russian meddling affected the outcome of the 2016 election in any serious way. The idea that the Russians defeated Hillary, not Hillary herself, is, to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Bentham, "nonsense on stilts." Leading Democrats and their media flacks don't seem to mind that either.

    They do not even seem to notice that what they allege, vague as it is, is trifling compared to the massive and very open meddling of American plutocrats, Republican vote suppressers and gerrymanderers, and the governments of supposedly friendly nations – like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel.

    Nevertheless, it probably is true that the Russians meddled. Cold War revivalists can therefore rest easy, confident that their propagandists will have at least a few facts with which they can work to restore the perils of their vanished youth.

    Even so, the level of their hypocrisy is appalling. Russia, along with former Soviet republics and former members of the Warsaw Pact, has been bearing the brunt of far worse American meddling for far longer than anything sanctimonious defenders of so-called American "democracy" can plausibly allege.

    Moreover, it should go without saying that the democracy they purport to care so much about has almost nothing to do with "the rule of the demos." It doesn't even have much to do with free and fair competitive elections – unless "free and fair" means that anything goes, so long as the principals and perpetrators are homegrown or citizens of favored nations.

    Self-righteous posturing aside, Putin's real sin in the eyes of the American power elite is that, in his own small way, he has been defying America's "right" to run the world as it sees fit.

    When Clinton was president, Serbia did that, and lived to regret it. Cuba has been suffering for nearly six decades for the same reason, and now Venezuela is paying its dues. The empire is merciless towards nations that rebel.

    With Soviet support and then with sheer determination and grit, Cuba has been able to withstand the onslaught to some extent from Day One. Venezuela may not be so lucky – especially now that Republicans and Democrats feel threatened by the growing number of "democratic socialists" in their midst. Already, the propaganda system is targeting Venezuelan "socialism," blaming it for that country's woes, and warning that if our newly minted, homegrown socialists prevail, a similar fate will be in store for us.

    This is ludicrous, of course – American hostility and the vagaries of the global oil market deserve the lion's share of the blame. But the on-going propaganda blitz could nevertheless pave the way for horrors ahead, should Trump decide to start a war America could actually win.

    Inconsequential Russian meddling is a big deal on the "liberal" cable networks, on NPR, and in the "quality" press. Democrats and a few Republicans love to bleat on about it. But it is Ukraine that made Russia our "adversary" and its president Public Enemy Number One.

    Hypocrisy reigns here too. It was the Obama administration – run through with neocons, liberal imperialists, and other holdovers from Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State – that did all it could to exacerbate longstanding tensions between that country's Ukrainian and Russian speaking populations, the better to complete NATO's encirclement of the Russian federation. And it was American meddling that led to the empowerment of virulently anti-Russian, fascisant Ukrainian politicians, much to the detriment of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east.

    But never mind: Putin – that is, the Russia government – violated international law by sending troops briefly into beleaguered Russian-speaking parts of the country. That they were generally welcomed by the people living there is of no importance.

    Worst of all, Russia annexed Crimea – a territory integral to the Russian empire since the eighteenth century. Since long before the Russian Revolution, Crimea has been home to a huge naval base vital to Russia's strategic defense.

    The story line back in the day was that anything that could be described as Russian aggression outside the Soviet Union's agreed upon sphere of influence had to do with spreading Communism. In fact, the Soviets did everything they could to keep Communist and other insurgencies from upending the status quo. The mainstream narrative was wrong.

    Now Communism is gone and nothing has taken its place. Even so, the idea that Russia has designs on its neighbors for ideological reasons is hard to shake – in part because it is actively promoted by propagandists who have suddenly and uncharacteristically become defenders of international law.

    Meanwhile, of course, the hypocrisies keep piling on. It is practically a tenet of the American civil religion that international law applies to others, not to the United States. This is why, when it suits some perceived purpose, America flaunts its violations shamelessly.

    Thus nothing the Russians did or are ever likely to do comes close to the shenanigans Bill Clinton displayed – successfully, for the most part – in his efforts to tear Kosovo away from Serbia. Clinton even went so far as to bomb Belgrade; Putin never bombed Kiev.

    The Cold War that began after World War II involved a clash of rival political economic systems. The Cold War that reignited a few years ago involves a clash of rival imperialist centers. Its world more nearly resembles the one that existed before World War I than the one that emerged after World War II.

    However, the difference may be more superficial than it seems. The ease with which Cold War revivalists have been able to get the Cold War up and running again, even without Communism, suggests what a few observers have long maintained -- that the Cold War, on Russia's part, had little, if anything, to do with spreading Communism around the world, and everything to do with maintaining a cordon sanitaire around Russia's borders in order to protect against a demonstrably aggressive "free world."

    George W. Bush claimed that 9/11 happened because "they hate our freedom." "They" would be radical Islamists of the kind stirred into action in Afghanistan by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his co-thinkers in the Carter administration. Their objective was to undermine the Soviet Union by getting it bogged down in a quagmire like the one that did so much harm to the United States in Vietnam.

    That part of Brzezinski's plan was at least a partial success. But inasmuch as Bush's "they" are still there, still spreading murder and mayhem throughout the Greater Middle East, America and the world has been paying a high price for the benefits, such as they were, that ensued.

    The never-ending wars set in motion by the "pivot" towards radical Islamism decades ago never quite succeeded in producing an enemy as serviceable as the USSR. But now that Putin's Russia has been pressed into service, that problem is potentially "solved."

    However, the American public is not as naïve as it used to be, and it is impossible to say, at this point, how well this new story line will work.

    Efforts to recycle Bush's "they hate our freedom" nonsense ought to be non-starters. But this is the best Cold War revivalists have come up with so far. The Russians, they say, simply cannot deal with the fact that we Americans are so damned free.

    It is hard to believe, but there are people who are actually buying this but, with a lot of corporate media assistance, there are. No matter how clear it is that they are not worth being taken seriously, Cold War mythologies just won't die.

    However, it is worth pondering why today's Russia would do what it is alleged to have done; and why, as is also alleged, it is still doing it.

    From a geopolitical point of view, Russia does have an interest in doing all it can to ward off Western aggression. It also has an interest in undermining strategic alliances aimed at blocking anything and everything that challenges American supremacy. And, until sanity prevails in Washington and other Western capitals, it arguably also has an interest in aiding and abetting rightwing nationalists in order to exacerbate tensions within Western societies.

    However, in view of prevailing power relations, these are interests it cannot do much to advance. Acting as if this were not the case only puts Russia in a bad light -- not for meddling, but for meddling stupidly.

    No doubt, for reasons both fair and foul, Putin wanted Hillary to lose the election two years ago. So, but for one little problem, would anyone whose head is screwed on right. That problem's name is Donald Trump.

    Clinton is bad, but Trump is worse -- not just by most measures but by all. Her fondness for war and preparations for war was alarming; she was bellicosity personified. But it was plain even before the election that Trump, a mentally unhinged narcissist, would be even more likely than she to bring on massive devastation. A vote for Trump was and still is a vote for catastrophe.

    Putin's enemy was Trump's enemy, and it is axiomatic that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" -- except sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, my enemy's enemy is an enemy far worse.

    For reasons that remain obscure, Putin and Trump seem to have a "thing" going on between them. Some day perhaps we will know what that is all about. For now, though, the hard and very relevant fact is that Trump has done nothing to help, and quite a few things to harm, Russia.

    It isn't just ordinary Russians who have been made worse off. Trump has been at least as hard on oligarchs close to Putin as Clinton would have been.

    If those damned Russians were half as smart as they are made out to be, they would have realized long ago that, for getting anything done that bucks the tide, Trump is too inept to be of any use at all; and that anything he sets out to do is likely to turn out badly not just for America and its allies but for Russia too.

    Therefore, if there really was Russian meddling, as there probably was, Putin should be ashamed – not so much for the DNC reasons laid out 24/7 on MSNBC and CNN, but for overestimating Trump's abilities and for underestimating the extent to which what started out as a maneuver of Hillary Clinton's, concocted to excuse her incompetence, would take a perilously "viral" turn, becoming a major threat to peace in a political culture that never quite got beyond the lunacy of the First Cold War.

    Andrew Levine is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

    [Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Most here voted for or supported Obama whose record of incarcerating and persecuting journalists, punishing whistle-blowers, extra-judicial executions including citizens of the United States, placing children in cages, violent regime change abroad, spying on citizens, and expanding the security state was as bad or worse as that of Bush and Trump, in some cases by some margin. ..."
    "... The current heroes of the 'resistance' lied America into Iraq or Libya, hacked into the computers of the elected representatives/lied about it, and support torture/enhanced interrogations, all under Obama. 'Liberals' lionize these clown criminals along with 'responsible' republicans whilst embracing open bigots such as Farrakhan. And, yes, if one is willing to share the podium with Farrakhan that's tacit support of his views. ..."
    Sep 16, 2018 | crookedtimber.org

    Thomas Beale 09.13.18 at 9:58 am ( 16 )

    I'd suggest that the two strains of 'conservatism' that matter are:

    a) maintaining oppression/rule over subordinate classes to prevent them up-ending the status quo (the Robin view) and

    b) maintaining philosophical +/- cultural values fundamental to a civilised society, typically so-called enlightenment values, freedom of mind, body and property etc. These are understood in a wide spectrum of concrete interpretations, from free-market purists to social democrats, and don't therefore correspond to one kind of on-the-ground politics.

    Progressives tend attack a) (a non-philosophical form of conservatism – it's just about preserving a power structure), and usually claim that b) (the one that matters) doesn't exist or isn't 'conservative', or else ignore it.

    We have the basic problem of same term, variable referents

    Lobsterman 09.13.18 at 10:27 pm ( 40 )

    (b) doesn't exist. Conservatives are, as a group, in eager favor of concentration camps for toddlers, the drug war, unrestrained surveillance, American empire, civil forfeiture, mass incarceration, extrajudicial police execution, etc. etc. They have internal disagreements on how much to do those things, but the consensus is for all of them without meaningful constraint. And they are always justified in terms of (a).

    ph 09.14.18 at 11:50 am ( 58 )

    @40

    Most here voted for or supported Obama whose record of incarcerating and persecuting journalists, punishing whistle-blowers, extra-judicial executions including citizens of the United States, placing children in cages, violent regime change abroad, spying on citizens, and expanding the security state was as bad or worse as that of Bush and Trump, in some cases by some margin.

    The current heroes of the 'resistance' lied America into Iraq or Libya, hacked into the computers of the elected representatives/lied about it, and support torture/enhanced interrogations, all under Obama. 'Liberals' lionize these clown criminals along with 'responsible' republicans whilst embracing open bigots such as Farrakhan. And, yes, if one is willing to share the podium with Farrakhan that's tacit support of his views.

    Conservative as a political category post 1750 works and the basic argument of the OP holds. The comments not so much.

    [Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception. ..."
    "... This anonymous enemy of amorality claims to approve of all the most extreme right-wing measures of the Trump administration as "bright spots": deregulation, tax reform, a more robust military, "and more" – cleverly omitting mention of Trump's immigration policy which could unduly shock the New York Times' liberal readers. The late Senator John McCain, the model of bipartisan bellicosity, is cited as the example to follow. ..."
    "... The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the facets of Trump's foreign policy which White House insiders are said to be working diligently to undermine: peaceful relations with Russian and North Korea. ..."
    "... Trump's desire to avoid war is transformed into "a preference for autocrats and dictators". (Trump gets no credit for his warlike rhetoric against Iran and close relations with Netanyahu, even though they must please Anonymous.) ..."
    "... The purpose of this is stunningly obvious. The New York Times has already done yeoman service in rounding up liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents in the anti-Trump lynch mob. But now the ploy is to rally conservative Republicans to the same cause of overthrowing the elected President. The letter amounts to an endorsement of future President Pence. ..."
    "... This is the Iago ploy. Shakespeare's villain destroyed Othello by causing him to distrust those closest to him, his wife and closest associates. Like Trump in Washington, Othello, the "Moor" of Venice, was an outsider, that much easier to deceive and betray. ..."
    "... The New York Times is playing Iago, whispering that Putin in the Kremlin is surrounded by secret "informants", and that Trump in the White House is surrounded by people systematically undermining his presidency. Putin is not likely to be impressed, but the trick might work with Trump, who is truly the target of open and covert enemies and whose position is much more insecure. There is certainly some undermining going on. ..."
    "... Was the New York Times oped written by the paper's own writers or by the CIA? It hardly matters since they are so closely entwined. ..."
    "... The military-industrial-congressional-deep state-media complex is holding its breath to breathe that great sigh of relief. The intruder is gone. Hurrah! Now we can go right on teaching the public to hate and fear the Russian enemy, so that arms contracts continue to blossom and NATO builds up its aggressive forces around Russia in hopes that this may frighten the Russians into dumping Putin in favor of a new Boris Yeltsin, ready to let the United States pursue the Clintonian plan of breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, like the former Yugoslavia, in order to take them over one by one, with all their great natural resources. ..."
    "... When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States. ..."
    Sep 07, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    The New York Times continues to outdo itself in the production of fake news. There is no more reliable source of fake news than the intelligence services, which regularly provide their pet outlets (NYT and WaPo) with sensational stories that are as unverifiable as their sources are anonymous. A prize example was the August 24 report that US intelligence agencies don't know anything about Russia's plans to mess up our November elections because "informants close to Putin and in the Kremlin" aren't saying anything. Not knowing anything about something for which there is no evidence is a rare scoop.

    A story like that is not designed to "inform the public" since there is no information in it. It has other purposes: to keep the "Russia is undermining our democracy" story on front pages, with the extra twist in this case of trying to make Putin distrustful of his entourage. The Russian president is supposed to wonder, who are those informants in my entourage?

    But that was nothing compared to the whopper produced by the "newpaper of record" on September 5. (By the way, the "record" is stuck in the same groove: Trump bad, Putin bad – bad bad bad.) This was the sensational oped headlined "I am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration", signed by nobody.

    The letter by Mister or Ms Anonymous is very well written. By someone like, say, Thomas Friedman. That is, someone on the NYT staff. It is very cleverly composed to achieve quite obvious calculated aims. It is a masterpiece of treacherous deception.

    The fictional author presents itself as a right-wing conservative shocked by Trump's "amorality" – a category that outside the Washington swamp might include betraying the trust of one's superior.

    This anonymous enemy of amorality claims to approve of all the most extreme right-wing measures of the Trump administration as "bright spots": deregulation, tax reform, a more robust military, "and more" – cleverly omitting mention of Trump's immigration policy which could unduly shock the New York Times' liberal readers. The late Senator John McCain, the model of bipartisan bellicosity, is cited as the example to follow.

    The "resistance" proclaimed is solely against the facets of Trump's foreign policy which White House insiders are said to be working diligently to undermine: peaceful relations with Russian and North Korea.

    Trump's desire to avoid war is transformed into "a preference for autocrats and dictators". (Trump gets no credit for his warlike rhetoric against Iran and close relations with Netanyahu, even though they must please Anonymous.)

    The purpose of this is stunningly obvious. The New York Times has already done yeoman service in rounding up liberal Democrats and left-leaning independents in the anti-Trump lynch mob. But now the ploy is to rally conservative Republicans to the same cause of overthrowing the elected President. The letter amounts to an endorsement of future President Pence. Just get rid of Trump and you'll have a nice, neat, ultra-right-wing Republican as President.

    The Democrats may not like Pence, but they are so demented by hatred of Trump that they are visibly ready to accept the Devil himself to get rid of the sinister clown who dared defeat Hillary Clinton. Down with democracy; the votes of deplorables shouldn't count.

    That is treacherous enough, but even more despicable is the insidious design to destabilize the presidency by sowing distrust. Speaking of Trump, Mr and/or Ms Anonymous declare: "The dilemma – which he does not fully grasp – is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations" (meaning peace with Russia).

    This is the Iago ploy. Shakespeare's villain destroyed Othello by causing him to distrust those closest to him, his wife and closest associates. Like Trump in Washington, Othello, the "Moor" of Venice, was an outsider, that much easier to deceive and betray.

    The New York Times is playing Iago, whispering that Putin in the Kremlin is surrounded by secret "informants", and that Trump in the White House is surrounded by people systematically undermining his presidency. Putin is not likely to be impressed, but the trick might work with Trump, who is truly the target of open and covert enemies and whose position is much more insecure. There is certainly some undermining going on.

    Was the New York Times oped written by the paper's own writers or by the CIA? It hardly matters since they are so closely entwined.

    No trick is too low for those who consider Trump an intolerable intruder on THEIR power territory. The New York Times "news" that Trump is surrounded by traitors is taken up by other media who indirectly confirm the story by speculating on "who is it?" The Boston Globe (among others) eagerly rushed in, asking:

    "So who's the author of the op-ed? It's a question that has many people poking through the text, looking for clues. Meanwhile, the denials have come thick and fast. Here's a brief look at some of the highest-level officials in the administration who might have a motive to write the letter."

    Isn't it obvious that all this is designed to make Trump distrust everyone around him? Isn't that a way to drive him toward that "crazy" where they say he already is, and which is fallback grounds for impeachment when the Mueller investigation fails to come up with nothing more serious than the fact that Russian intelligent agents are intelligent agents?

    The White House insider (or insiders, or whatever) use terms like "erratic behavior" and "instability" to contribute to the "Trump is insane" narrative. Insanity is the alternative pretext to the Mueller wild goose chase for divesting Trump of the powers of the presidency. If Trump responds by accusing the traitors of being traitors, that will be final proof of his mental instability. The oped claims to provide evidence that Trump is being betrayed, but if he says so, that will be taken as a sign of mental derangement. To save our exemplary democracy from itself, the elected president must be thrown out.

    The military-industrial-congressional-deep state-media complex is holding its breath to breathe that great sigh of relief. The intruder is gone. Hurrah! Now we can go right on teaching the public to hate and fear the Russian enemy, so that arms contracts continue to blossom and NATO builds up its aggressive forces around Russia in hopes that this may frighten the Russians into dumping Putin in favor of a new Boris Yeltsin, ready to let the United States pursue the Clintonian plan of breaking up the Russian Federation into pieces, like the former Yugoslavia, in order to take them over one by one, with all their great natural resources.

    And when this fails, as it has been failing, and will continue to fail, the United States has all those brand new first strike nuclear weapons being stationed in European NATO countries, aimed at the Kremlin. And the Russian military are not just sitting there with their own nuclear weapons, waiting to be wiped out. When nobody, not even the President of the United States, has the right to meet and talk with Russian leaders, there is only one remaining form of exchange. When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States.

    [Sep 03, 2018] www.informationclearinghouse.info/50168.htm In Memoriam by Paul Edwards

    Highly recommended!
    Sep 03, 2018 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

    The commedia dell'arte mourning of McCain is in full bloom. In a vulgar orgy of pompous, bathetic praise from Congress and the media, he is being piously canonized. To counter this shameless obsequy by attacking him for what he actually was would be an exercise in futility, just as the endless ad hominem hatchet jobs on Trump accomplish nothing.

    It's more useful to examine the grisly American disease of which he was a champion and cynosure. The son and grandson of Admirals, a bred-in-the-bone military man, he flew a fighter in Vietnam. Shot down -- and amazingly not summarily executed -- he was held as a POW, and became a lifelong advocate of unlimited use of military force for American world domination.

    Nothing unusual in that. It is and has been the baseline political credo of all American politicians since Monroe, at least, up to and including Trump, Hillary, Sanders, and Warren. The surest way to the graveyard for political hopefuls is to be seen or slimed as "soft on defense".

    The fact that actual defense of the country has not been necessary since the War of 1812, and is not now, and that the hoax only exists to suck our national wealth into the War Machine has not been effectively articulated. The idea, false to its core, that America must spend astronomic sums to "defend" its polity and its people has taken on the character of revealed religion in a country where multitudes believe in angels and Endtimes.

    This appropriation of the wealth of the people by the corporate forces of imperial murder has not come suddenly. Oceans of innocent blood have drenched the world from our military violence since Quincy Adams said of America that "she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy".

    World War II proved to Eisenhower's Military/Industrial/Congressio nal Complex the obscene profit to be had from annihilating people, cities, and countries. Schumpeter defined the War Machine far better than Ike did: "Created by the wars that required it, it now creates the wars it requires."

    Since 1945, America, by then firmly in its grasp, has relentlessly scoured the world behind the gross and cynical lie of defense of freedom, to foment, ignite, and expand the brutal, devastating, shock-and-awe gorefests the War Machine has to have. That Korea, Vietnam, and the catalog of Middle Eastern horrors the US perpetrated were failures on a cosmic scale except as cash cows for the War Machine has been of little concern to the most somnolent, propagandized, passive public since that of the Third Reich. These national mass murder atrocities were sold to Americans as defense of our indispensable "homeland" from barbarian, sub-human "others". Some, such as Al Qaida were, absurdly, our Deep State's own creations.

    It is commonly said and believed that the American public is not at fault for its profound, intractable moral cowardice since War Machine swag has kept them in a combination insane asylum, crack house, and human zoo. How else could they have lived with the intolerably bitter truth that their country is the serial violator and exterminator, the voracious destroyer, of so many millions of simple, guiltless, victim peoples?

    This is where John McCain and his ilk comes in. Exploiting his bogus and accidental credentials, he became a pitch man for the massive con of American purity and idealism as a front for imperialist greed, and made a career promoting and lionizing the War Machine as it raped the peoples of earth and robbed Americans blind in pursuit of its cancerous enrichment.

    Still, McCain was only a cracked and bent tool. He was always an effect, a symptom; never a cause. The real driver of the War Machine is heartless, soulless, predatory Capitalism. Its credo is exploitation of everything to maximize profit. In a closed system, competing capital conflicts, collides. Greed eclipses reason and war results. The greatest capital concentration requires the most terrible military, in which violence displaces conscience. There never has been, and never can be, Capitalism without war.

    Indoctrinated, baffled, saddled with a cesspool Congress and the deeply stupid, vulgarian Trump, centrist Americans, desperate for refuge, rush mindlessly to the new War Party, Democrats eager to use McCain's $700 billion dollar hogwallow "defense" bill, to insult and provoke China and Russia, and to attack Iran. Hubris, false bravado, and panic rule; nowhere is there self knowledge and with it, long overdue, sorrow, regret, and shame.

    Karmic retribution--the pitiless hand of Nemesis--is all America deserves.

    Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: [email protected]

    [Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

    Highly recommended!
    Aug 30, 2018 | www.voltairenet.org

    Mister President,

    The crimes of 11 September 2001 have never been judged in your country. I am writing to you as a French citizen, the first person to denounce the inconsistencies of the official version and to open the world to the debate and the search for the real perpetrators.

    In a criminal court, as the jury, we have to determine whether the suspect presented to us is guilty or not, and eventually, to decide what punishment he should receive. When we suffered the events of 9/11, the Bush Junior administration told us that the guilty party was Al-Qaïda, and the punishment they should receive was the overthrow of those who had helped them – the Afghan Taliban, then the Iraqi régime of Saddam Hussein.

    However, there is a weight of evidence which attests to the impossibility of this thesis. If we were members of a jury, we would have to declare objectively that the Taliban and the régime of Saddam Hussein were innocent of this crime. Of course, this alone would not enable us to name the real culprits, and we would thus be frustrated. But we could not conceive of condemning parties innocent of such a crime simply because we have not known how, or not been able, to find the guilty parties.

    We all understood that certain senior personalities were lying when the Secretary of State for Justice and Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, revealed the names of the 19 presumed hijackers, because we already had in front of us the lists disclosed by the airline companies of all of the passengers embarked - lists on which none of the suspects were mentioned.

    From there, we became suspicious of the " Continuity of Government ", the instance tasked with taking over from the elected authorities if they should be killed during a nuclear confrontation. We advanced the hypothesis that these attacks masked a coup d'état, in conformity with Edward Luttwak's method of maintaining the appearance of the Executive, but imposing a different policy.

    In the days following 9/11, the Bush administration made several decisions:

    - the creation of the Office of Homeland Security and the vote for a voluminous anti-terrorist Code which had been drawn up long beforehand, the USA Patriot Act. For affairs which the administration itself qualifies as " terrorist ", this text suspends the Bill of Rights which was the glory of your country. It unbalances your institutions. Two centuries later, it validates the triumph of the great landowners who wrote the Constitution, and the defeat of the heroes of the War of Independence who demanded that the Bill of Rights must be added.

    - The Secretary for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, created the Office of Force Transformation, under the command of Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who immediately presented a programme, conceived a long time earlier, planning for the control of access to the natural resources of the countries of the geopolitical South. He demanded the destruction of State and social structures in the half of the world which was not yet globalised. Simultaneously, the Director of the CIA launched the " Worldwide Attack Matrix ", a package of secret operations in 85 countries where Rumsfeld and Cebrowski intended to destroy the State structures. Considering that only those countries whose economies were globalised would remain stable, and that the others would be destroyed, the men from 9/11 placed US armed forces in the service of transnational financial interests. They betrayed your country and transformed it into the armed wing of these predators.

    For the last 17 years, we have witnessed what is being given to your compatriots by the government of the successors of those who drew up the Constitution and opposed at that time - without success – the Bill of Rights. These rich men have become the super-rich, while the middle class has been reduced by a fifth and poverty has increased.

    We have also seen the implementation of the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski strategy – phoney " civil wars " have devastated almost all of the Greater Middle East. Entire cities have been wiped from the map, from Afghanistan to Libya, via Saudi Arabia and Turkey, who were not themselves at war.

    In 2001, only two US citizens denounced the incoherence of the Bush version, two real estate promoters – the Democrat Jimmy Walter, who was forced into exile, and yourself, who entered into politics and was elected President.

    In 2011, we saw the commander of AfriCom relieved of his mission and replaced by NATO for having refused to support Al-Qaïda in the liquidation of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Then we saw NATO's LandCom organise Western support for jihadists in general and Al-Qaïda in particular in their attempt to overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic.

    So the jihadists, who were considered as " freedom fighters " against the Soviets, then as " terrorists " after 9/11, once again became the allies of the deep state, which, in fact, they have always been.

    So, with an immense upsurge of hope, we have watched your actions to suppress, one by one, all support for the jihadists. It is with the same hope that we see today that you are talking with your Russian counterpart in order to bring back life to the devastated Middle East. And it is with equal anxiety that we see Robert Mueller, now a special prosecutor, pursuing the destruction of your homeland by attacking your position.

    Mister President, not only are you and your compatriots suffering from the diarchy which has sneaked into power in your country since the coup d'état of 11 September 2001, but the whole world is a victim.

    Mister President, 9/11 is not ancient history. It is the triumph of transnational interests which are crushing not only your people, but all of humanity which aspires to freedom.

    Thierry Meyssan brought to the world stage the debate on the real perpetrators of 11 September 2001. He has worked as a political analyst alongside Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mouamar Kadhafi. He is today a political refugee in Syria.

    Thierry Meyssan

    See : Memoranda for the President on 9/11: Time for the Truth -- False Flag Deep State Truth! , by : Kevin Barrett; Scott Bennett; Christopher Bollyn; Fred Burks; Steve De'ak; A. K. Dewdney; Gordon Duff; Aero Engineer; Greg Felton; James Fetzer; Richard Gage; Tom-Scott Gordon; David Ray Griffin; Sander Hicks; T. Mark Hightower; Barbara Honegger; Eric Hufschmid; Ed Jewett; Nicholas Kollerstrom; John Lear; Susan Lindauer; Joe Olson; Peter Dale Scott; Robert David Steele; and indirectly, Victor Thorn and Judy Wood.

    Thierry Meyssan Political consultant, President-founder of the Réseau Voltaire ( Voltaire Network ). Latest work in French – Sous nos Yeux. Du 11-Septembre à Donald Trump (Right Before our Eyes. From 9/11 to Donald Trump).

    [Aug 28, 2018] A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Here is an except from "A Colony in a Nation" by Chris Hayes that she recently discussed (Chris Hayes is also the author of Twilight of the Elites ) ..."
    "... ...we have built a colony in a nation, not in the classic Marxist sense but in the deep sense we can appreciate as a former colony ourselves: A territory that isn't actually free. A place controlled from outside rather than within. A place where the mechanisms of representation don't work enough to give citizens a sense of ownership over their own government. A place where the law is a tool of control rather than a foundation for prosperity. ..."
    "... A Colony in a Nation is not primarily a history lesson, though it does provide a serious, empathetic look at the problems facing the Colony, as well as at the police officers tasked with making rapid decisions in a gun-rich environment. ..."
    "... Elsewhere, Hayes examines his own experiences with the law, such as an incident when he was almost caught accidentally smuggling "about thirty dollars' worth of marijuana stuffed into my eyeglass case" into the 2000 Republican National Convention. Hayes got away without so much as a slap on the wrist, protected by luck, circumstances and privilege. ..."
    Mar 23, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
    "Listening to this show by MSNB is so disguising that I lost any respect for it. "

    I actually jumped the gun. That's does not mean that it should not be viewed. There are some positive aspects of MSNBC http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show

    Here is an except from "A Colony in a Nation" by Chris Hayes that she recently discussed (Chris Hayes is also the author of Twilight of the Elites )

    ...we have built a colony in a nation, not in the classic Marxist sense but in the deep sense we can appreciate as a former colony ourselves: A territory that isn't actually free. A place controlled from outside rather than within. A place where the mechanisms of representation don't work enough to give citizens a sense of ownership over their own government. A place where the law is a tool of control rather than a foundation for prosperity.

    ... ... ...

    A Colony in a Nation is not primarily a history lesson, though it does provide a serious, empathetic look at the problems facing the Colony, as well as at the police officers tasked with making rapid decisions in a gun-rich environment.

    Hayes takes us through his less-than-successful experience putting himself in the latter's shoes by trying out an unusual training tool, a virtually reality simulator: "We're only one scene in, and already the self-righteous liberal pundit has drawn his weapon on an unarmed man holding a cinder block."

    Elsewhere, Hayes examines his own experiences with the law, such as an incident when he was almost caught accidentally smuggling "about thirty dollars' worth of marijuana stuffed into my eyeglass case" into the 2000 Republican National Convention. Hayes got away without so much as a slap on the wrist, protected by luck, circumstances and privilege.

    For black men living in the Colony, encounters with the police are much more fraught. Racial profiling and minor infractions can lead to "being swept into the vortex of a penal system that captures more than half the black men his age in his neighborhood... an adulthood marked by prison, probation, and dismal job prospects...."

    [Aug 24, 2018] The priorities of the deep state and its public face the MSM

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Trump is being promoted by the MSM as the leader of the deplorables – an orange straw man. I support him to the degree that he is confounding the deep state elites and social engineering. ..."
    Aug 24, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

    PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 5:19 pm

    Here is my take on the priorities of the deep state and its public face – the MSM:

    1. stopping the deplorable rebellion
    2. cutting off the head of the rebellion – perceived as Trump
    3. reinstating the Cold War in an effort to derail Rusisa's recovery and international leadership role
    4. bitch slapping China

    The rest involves turning unsustainable debt into establishment of a feudal world comprised of elites living on Mount Olympus, legions of vassals and a vast sea of cerebrally castrated peasants to serve as a reservoir for any imaginable exploitation.

    Won't happen, not even close.

    PATIENT OBSERVER August 23, 2018 at 7:29 pm

    Upon further reflection, Trump is being promoted by the MSM as the leader of the deplorables – an orange straw man. I support him to the degree that he is confounding the deep state elites and social engineering.

    [Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter: ..."
    "... For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird. ..."
    "... Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner. ..."
    "... However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II ..."
    "... And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections." ..."
    "... We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance." ..."
    "... "Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows ..."
    Aug 18, 2018 | www.unz.com

    William Blum shares with us his correspondence with Washington Post presstitute Michael Birnbaum. As you can tell from Birnbaum's replies, he comes across as either very stupid or as a CIA asset.

    When I received my briefing as staff associate, House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which required top secret clearance, I was told by senior members of the staff that the Washington Post was a CIA asset. Watching the Washington Post's takedown of President Richard Nixon with the orchestrated Watergate story, that became obvious. President Nixon had made too many overtures to the Soviets and too many arms limitations agreements, and he opened to China. Watching President Nixon's peace initiatives water down the threat level from the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the military/security complex saw a threat to its budget and power and decided that Nixon had to go. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy had resulted in far too much skepticism about the Warren Commission Report, so the CIA decided to use the Washington Post to get rid of Nixon. To keep the clueless American left hating Nixon, the CIA used its assets in the leftwing to keep Nixon blamed for the Vietnam war, a war that Nixon inherited and did not want.

    The CIA knew that Nixon's problem was that he could not exit the war without losing his conservative base, which was convinced of the nonsensical "Domino Theory." I have always wondered if the CIA concocted the "Domino Theory," as it so well served them. Unable to get rid of the war "with honor," Nixon was driven to brutal methods to force the North Vietnamese to accept a situation that he could depart without defeat and soiling America's "honor" and losing his conservative support base. The North Vietnamese wouldn't bend, but the US Congress did, and so the CIA succeeded in discrediting among both the leftwing and righwing Nixon's war management. With no one to defend him, Nixon was an easy target for the CIA.

    Here is Blum's exchange with Birnbaum. It is possible that Birnbaum is neither stupid nor a CIA asset, but just a person wanting to hold on to a job. The last thing he can afford to do is to disabuse readers of the "Russian Threat" when Bezos' Amazon and Washington Post properties are dependent on the CIA's annual subsidy of $600 million disquised as a "contract." https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-20/cia-washington-post-and-russia-what-youre-not-being-told

    The Anti-Empire Report # 159
    Willian Blum

    The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter:
    July 18, 2018

    Dear Mr. Birnbaum,

    You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure. Therefore ?

    If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in Mexico?
    William Blum

    Dear Mr. Blum,

    Thanks for your note. "America's adventures in the Ukraine": what are you talking about? Last time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn't the Americans who did it.

    It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014, according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts.
    Best, Michael Birnbaum

    To MB,

    I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next president. And he's the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a while.
    William Blum

    To WB,

    I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to the actual actors on the ground myself – that's my job.

    And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan – but encouraging the protests, as she clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for overthrowing the government. I'm not saying the United States wasn't involved in trying to shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver's seat the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych in November 2013; he's not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet – don't stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific. Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides.
    Best, Michael Birnbaum

    ======================= end of exchange =======================

    Right, the United States doesn't play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments; never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT "reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time." "All the time", no less! That should make it easy to give some examples.

    For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem – Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird.

    To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner.

    The Russians did it (cont.)
    Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I'm looking for evidence – real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something logical and rational – to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK. But I do not find such evidence.

    Each day brings headlines like these:

    These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article, but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY. Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia's preference of Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn't begin to explain how Russia could pull off any of the electoral magic it's accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.

    There's the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads The people who are influenced by this story – have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many are both; many are neither. It's one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I've read is that they come from money-making websites, "click-bait" sites as they're known, which earn money simply by attracting visitors.

    As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow – of which all of Russia was immensely proud – to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.

    However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.

    But we're the Good Guys, ain't we?

    For a defender of US foreign policy there's very little that causes extreme heartburn more than someone implying a "moral equivalence" between American behavior and that of Russia. That was the case during Cold War I and it's the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the wall.

    After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to register as a "foreign agent", the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to require foreign media to register as a "foreign agent". Senator John McCain denounced the new Russian law, saying there is "no equivalence" between RT and networks such as Voice of America, CNN and the BBC, whose journalists "seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments accountable." By contrast, he said, "RT's propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin's agenda."

    And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) – last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered 'aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections."

    "Is this moral equivalence fair?" Malinowski asked and answered: "In short, no. Russia's interference in the United States' 2016 election could not have been more different from what the United States does to promote democracy in other countries."

    How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?

    We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance."

    "Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows. The authors continue: "This narrative is churned out by propaganda outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station]. it is deployed by isolationists who propound a U.S. retreat from global leadership."

    "Isolationists" is what [neo]conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they can't easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don't want the US to be involved in anything abroad.

    And "global leadership" is what they call being first in election-interferences and government-overthrows.

    https://williamblum.org/aer/read/159

    [Aug 22, 2018] Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts - US Propaganda Stays Alive

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Internet Research Agency ..."
    "... The anti-Russian mania in U.S. politics gives social media companies a welcome excuse to clamp down on promotional schemes for sites like Liberty Front Press by claiming that these are disinformation campaigns run by the U.S. enemy of the day . ..."
    "... Moon of Alabama ..."
    "... Moon of Alabama ..."
    "... Well this surely shows that Facebook/Twitter is run through the help of US/Western intelligence ..."
    "... Sorry, but, if you let any opinion on Facebook or Twitter sway your politics, you're an idiot. ..."
    "... fireEye, google, yahoo, facebook and so many other tech companies are all in a few miles radius of one another in San Jose area of California ..."
    "... In the battles over ideas, printing presses were often targeted for destruction so ideas could be restricted -- what's happening with Twitter and Facebook is merely an updated version of such repression. ..."
    "... Blogs today represent yesterday's broadsheets, and by using social media, they can increase their exposure to a wider audience. Thus, social media represents a point-of-control for those trying to shape/frame discourse/content. They may be private companies, but they interact with public discourse and ought to be subjected to Free Speech controls like the USA's 1st Amendment. ..."
    "... Very many hi-tech companies in the US are working with the CIA. Such as Oracle that has an office on the east coast of the US that keeps a very low profile inside the company. ..."
    "... Robert Bridge provides us with a timely written article dealing with the issue at hand: "And if US intel is in bed with Hollywood you can be damn sure they're spending time in the MSM whorehouse as well." ..."
    "... IMHO, it would be foolish to presume that the CIA would simply discontinue and to walk away from (as it claims!) a program like Operation Mockingbird. Government agencies have famously infiltrated the Quakers (ferchrissakes!). Facebook was funded and developed by a CIA front shop. Zuckerburg is a dopey kid and a frontispiece. ..."
    "... The danger of course is when people start to conclude that any media site permitted by FB or SM is Sanctioned by the Propaganda department of the Ministry of Truth and ignored. ..."
    "... Trump would be hailed a savior if he were to morph into President Taft and Bust the Trusts like BigLie Media, its allied telecoms and social media corps. ..."
    "... As to a lack authenticity, what about the tweets from outside Egypt pushing and reporting on the "Arab Spring" protests there. We have other examples of "inauthentic" social messaging on other agendas pushed like Syria. What about "A Gay Girl in Damascus?" ..."
    "... who still uses facebook? The only people i know who still are active users are senior citizens. ..."
    Aug 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    The creation of digital content led to the re-establishment of claqueurs :

    By 1830 the claque had become an institution. The manager of a theatre or opera house was able to send an order for any number of claqueurs. These were usually under a chef de claque (leader of applause), who judged where the efforts of the claqueurs were needed and to initiate the demonstration of approval. This could take several forms. There would be commissaires ("officers/commissioner") who learned the piece by heart and called the attention of their neighbors to its good points between the acts. Rieurs (laughers) laughed loudly at the jokes. Pleureurs (criers), generally women, feigned tears, by holding their handkerchiefs to their eyes. Chatouilleurs (ticklers) kept the audience in a good humor, while bisseurs (encore-ers) simply clapped and cried "Bis! Bis!" to request encores.

    Today anyone can create content and rent or buy virtual claqueurs in from of "likes" on Facebook or "followers" on Twitter to increase its distribution.

    An alternative is to create artificial social media personas who then promote ones content. That is what the Internet Research Agency , the Russian "troll factory" from St. Petersburg, did. The fake personas it established on Facebook promoted IRA created clickbait content like puppy picture pages that was then marketed to sell advertisements .

    The profit orientated social media giants do not like such third party promotions. They prefer that people pay THEM to promote their content. Selling advertisements is Facebook's business. Promotional accounts on its own platform are competition.

    The anti-Russian mania in U.S. politics gives social media companies a welcome excuse to clamp down on promotional schemes for sites like Liberty Front Press by claiming that these are disinformation campaigns run by the U.S. enemy of the day .

    Yesterday Facebook announced that it deleted a number of user accounts for "inauthentic behavior":

    We've removed 652 Pages, groups and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, UK and US. FireEye, a cybersecurity firm, gave us a tip in July about "Liberty Front Press," a network of Facebook Pages as well as accounts on other online services.
    ...
    We are able to link this network to Iranian state media through publicly available website registration information, as well as the use of related IP addresses and Facebook Pages sharing the same admins. For example, one part of the network, "Quest 4 Truth," claims to be an independent Iranian media organization, but is in fact linked to Press TV, an English-language news network affiliated with Iranian state media.
    The FireEye report Facebook acted on notes:
    FireEye has identified a suspected influence operation that appears to originate from Iran aimed at audiences in the U.S., U.K., Latin America, and the Middle East. This operation is leveraging a network of inauthentic news sites and clusters of associated accounts across multiple social media platforms to promote political narratives in line with Iranian interests. These narratives include anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes, as well as support for specific U.S. policies favorable to Iran, such as the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) .
    ...
    Based on an investigation by FireEye Intelligence's Information Operations analysis team, we assess with moderate confidence that this activity originates from Iranian actors.

    The evidence FireEye presents is quite thin. The purpose of its inquest and report is obviously self-promotion.

    Moon of Alabama is also promoting anti-Saudi , anti-Israeli , and pro-Palestinian themes. It supports the JCPOA deal. This is, according to FireEye, "in line with Iranian interests". It may well be. But does that make Moon of Alabama a "suspected influence operation"? Is it an "inauthentic news site"?

    Is the @MoonofA Twitter account showing "coordinated inauthentic behavior" when it promotes the pieces presented on this site? We, by the way, assess with high confidence that that this activity originates from a German actor. Is that a reason to shut it down?

    Who will shut down the tons of "inauthentic" accounts U.S. spies , the British military and Israeli propaganda organisations run?

    Here is another high confidence tip for FireEye. There is proof, and even an admission of guilt, that a hostile government financed broadcasting organization is creating inauthentic Facebook accounts to disseminate disinformation. These narratives include anti-Russian, anti-Syrian, and pro-Saudi views, as well as support for specific U.S. policies favorable to Israel, such as its financing of the anti-Iranian headscarf campaign .

    This year the U.S. government run Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) will spend more than $23 million for its Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB). OCB administers Radio and Television (TV) Martí programs directed at the Cuban public. In its 2019 budget request to Congress (pdf) the BBG admits that it creates inauthentic Facebook accounts to increase the distribution of its dreck:

    In FY 2018, OCB is establishing on island digital teams to create non-branded local Facebook accounts to disseminate information . Native pages increase the chances of appearing on Cuban Facebook users newsfeeds. The same strategy will be replicated on other preferred social media networks.

    How is this different from what the PressTV may have done? When will Facebook shut those inauthentic BBG accounts down?


    ---
    h/t to Left I on the News

    Comments

    jo6pac , Aug 22, 2018 1:31:58 PM | 1

    The truth hurts the 1%

    Thanks b

    librul , Aug 22, 2018 1:48:13 PM | 2

    Before most of us had ever heard of "Putin's Chef", the Pentagon was bragging publicly that it was using Facebook click-bait for propaganda.

    https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2017/09/analysts-are-quitting-state-departments-anti-propaganda-team/140936/

    At the Defense One Summit last November [2016], former GEC director Michael Lumpkin [GEC, Pentagon propaganda department] described how the Center was using the data it received as a Facebook advertiser to maximize the effectiveness of its own targeted appeals.

    "Using Facebook ads, I can go within Facebook, I can go grab an audience, I can pick Country X, I need age group 13 to 34, I need people who have liked -- whether it's Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi or any other set -- I can shoot and hit them directly with messaging," Lumpkin said. He emphasized that with the right data, effective message targeting could be done for "pennies a click."

    Chipnik , Aug 22, 2018 1:50:52 PM | 4
    Ironically, when I created a FB page hangout for my foreign students to disseminate topical educational materials that were freely available as PDF links, or free 'loss-leader' lessons from for-profits, or Khan Academy free lesson links ... in other words, organizing a docent-guided free education feed for terribly poor 3W students ...

    FB informed me that this was an 'illegal' business activity, lol. They shut it down with *zero* warning. One moment it was a beautiful colorful uplifting education resource, the next it was burnt to ashes. 404.

    ATM, on an Anony FB page I launched to reconnect with my students, after a couple ill-advised comments to their thread posts, discussing what's *really* going on in the world, FB has blocked any posts that I might want to make. They just never show up when I hit enter. Like training a bad puppy, lol. All FB lets me do is 'like' or emoji or 'wave' to my students, so it's a semaphore that I still exist, even in FB lockup.

    But I think I'll stop. It's bread-crumbing them to FBs candy-cane house and the boiling cauldron that awaits. Frog in a Pot!

    Ianovskii , Aug 22, 2018 2:16:03 PM | 5
    Regarding 4:

    Chipnik, Open a VK account and invite your students! No more censorship!

    Bart Hansen , Aug 22, 2018 2:30:32 PM | 7
    "...we assess with moderate confidence that this activity originates from Iranian actors." Jeez, can't they at least produce a "highly likely" for us? On the intelligence community's confidence scale, "moderate" has to be just above "wishful" and "doubtful"
    fastfreddy , Aug 22, 2018 2:32:46 PM | 8
    One of the tricks of corporate propaganda: Often, when exposed to capitalist propaganda, a socialist gets the impression that he can have the best of both worlds! - the perceived benefits of capitalism as he keeps his beloved social benefits.

    It isn't until some time after the bmobing has stopped, that he realizes that he has lost ALL his former social benefits and what he has thereafter is hard capitalism and no money.

    Zanon , Aug 22, 2018 2:45:53 PM | 9
    Well this surely shows that Facebook/Twitter is run through the help of US/Western intelligence. Only way is to fight back or you will eventually have fines and end up in jail for thoughtcrimes.

    This site and us here commenting is of course already targeted by these scums, besides, sites like this will certainly be shut down sooner or later.

    Remember Facebook also attacked Venezuela recently, "Why Did Facebook Purge TeleSUR English?"

    TeleSUR English is a rare voice of dissent to US foreign policy. Is that why Facebook deleted its page?
    https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Why-Did-Facebook-Purge-TeleSUR-English-20180816-0016.html
    ben , Aug 22, 2018 2:47:13 PM | 10
    Sorry, but, if you let any opinion on Facebook or Twitter sway your politics, you're an idiot. At the very least, naive to a fault.

    Claqueurs is a new word for me b, thanks for the education.

    Zanon , Aug 22, 2018 2:49:46 PM | 11
    ben

    Its not facebook itself this is about but views, freedom of speech itself - that is what being attacked.

    james , Aug 22, 2018 3:20:48 PM | 12
    b.. thanks... your first paragraph giving context to how the public was swayed going back close to 200 years ago was very interesting..

    The usa gov't has something to sell and something to buy.. fireEye, google, yahoo, facebook and so many other tech companies are all in a few miles radius of one another in San Jose area of California.. If Russia was to bomb somewhere in the usa - that would be one good place to start!

    They are all selling to the usa gov't at this point... the usa devotes so much to propaganda and these corps all try to peddle the needed tools to keep the fearmongering going, when they're not snooping of course! hey - they can do both - snoop and sell!!

    karlof1 , Aug 22, 2018 3:31:39 PM | 14
    Long ago before the Hydrocarbon Epoch, the Broadsheet was your typical newscast assembled by the local printer who was often reporter and editor, and even in small towns there was competition, with readers of news gathering in coffee shops to discuss their contents. The vociferousness of many publications was extreme, but as Jefferson observed in the 1790s, easily disproved hyperbole was far more desirable than censorship -- people were deemed capable of determining a publication's veracity for themselves and thus their success or failure would be determined by the marketplace of ideas.

    In the battles over ideas, printing presses were often targeted for destruction so ideas could be restricted -- what's happening with Twitter and Facebook is merely an updated version of such repression. With the advent of the personal computer and internet, ease of publishing exploded, which presented elites determined to control the overall discourse with a huge problem they are still grappling with. One of the aims of the Independent Media Center on its founding in 1999 was to turn every activist into a reporter and every computer into a printing press with contents published collectively at regional Media Centers. Unfortunately, after a promising first several years, the nascent movement failed and remains in dormancy, being mostly replaced by personal blogs.

    Blogs today represent yesterday's broadsheets, and by using social media, they can increase their exposure to a wider audience. Thus, social media represents a point-of-control for those trying to shape/frame discourse/content. They may be private companies, but they interact with public discourse and ought to be subjected to Free Speech controls like the USA's 1st Amendment.

    AriusArmenian , Aug 22, 2018 4:30:10 PM | 15
    Very many hi-tech companies in the US are working with the CIA. Such as Oracle that has an office on the east coast of the US that keeps a very low profile inside the company. In fact the first contract that launched the company was a contract with the CIA to implement the IBM SQL standard. I shouldn't have to explain to anyone here why the CIA would use a relational database (have to keep all those subversive secret ops in order). Similar connection to CIA for Google, Facebook, Symantec, etc.

    If you are using US software (very likely) then assume CIA and NSA back-doors. Some solutions are to use Linux and VPNs, and Yandex for cloud storage. Get away from US software.

    karlof1 , Aug 22, 2018 5:13:35 PM | 17
    Robert Bridge provides us with a timely written article dealing with the issue at hand: "And if US intel is in bed with Hollywood you can be damn sure they're spending time in the MSM whorehouse as well."
    karlof1 , Aug 22, 2018 5:28:53 PM | 18
    Sorry, should have included this in 17. As many know, Caitlin Johnstone, a Truth Seeker par excellence, has also been censored, but prior to that wrote this essay on the subject at hand, which is all about manufacturing consent as she sees it:

    "This is a setup. Hit the soft target so your oligarch-friendly censorship doesn't look like what it is, then once you've manufactured consent, go on to shut down the rest of dissenting media bit by bit."

    This is a US government ordered setup supported by the evidence she presents in her intro, but not by Trump!

    fast freddy , Aug 22, 2018 5:53:49 PM | 20
    IMHO, it would be foolish to presume that the CIA would simply discontinue and to walk away from (as it claims!) a program like Operation Mockingbird. Government agencies have famously infiltrated the Quakers (ferchrissakes!). Facebook was funded and developed by a CIA front shop. Zuckerburg is a dopey kid and a frontispiece.
    Pft , Aug 22, 2018 7:06:53 PM | 22
    The danger of course is when people start to conclude that any media site permitted by FB or SM is Sanctioned by the Propaganda department of the Ministry of Truth and ignored. Then these few truthful media sites that are unbanned will need to beg these social media giants to ban them so as to restablish credibility. FB and SM will then need to ban a few controlled MSM sites so people will believe they are credible and read the propaganda

    I guess we are not there yet, or are we? I do not use FB or other SM for news or anything else, although I do occasionally click on links to them from a web page, but I guess a lot of people do. Maybe that will change.

    karlof1 , Aug 22, 2018 7:13:05 PM | 23
    The battle over Net Neutrality is related to this. Recently, Verizon blackmailed a California fire department engaged in fighting the state's largest ever wildfire by throttling its data feed thus threatening public safety for a Few Dollars More.

    Trump would be hailed a savior if he were to morph into President Taft and Bust the Trusts like BigLie Media, its allied telecoms and social media corps.

    Curtis , Aug 22, 2018 7:21:01 PM | 24
    Claqueurs. One of the earliest versions of the annoying "laugh track" used in television. Like Ben 10, I learned something new today.

    As to a lack authenticity, what about the tweets from outside Egypt pushing and reporting on the "Arab Spring" protests there. We have other examples of "inauthentic" social messaging on other agendas pushed like Syria. What about "A Gay Girl in Damascus?"

    As usual, thanks for pointing out the hypocrisy of US govt/media.

    pB , Aug 22, 2018 8:41:56 PM | 25
    who still uses facebook? The only people i know who still are active users are senior citizens.

    [Aug 18, 2018] Corporate Media the Enemy of the People by Paul Street

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The dominant corporate U.S. media routinely exaggerates the degree of difference and choice between the candidates run by the nation's two corporate-dominated political organizations, the Democrats and the Republicans. It never notes that the two reigning parties agree about far more than they differ on, particularly when it comes to fundamental and related matters of business class power and American Empire. It shows U.S. protestors engaged in angry confrontations with police and highlights isolated examples of protestor violence but it downplays peaceful protest and never pays serious attention to the important societal and policy issues that have sparked protest or to the demands and recommendations advanced by protest movements. ..."
    "... Newscasters who want to keep their careers afloat learn the fine art of evasion with great skill they skirt around the most important parts of a story. With much finesse, they say a lot about very little, serving up heaps of junk news filled with so many empty calories and so few nutrients. Thus do they avoid offending those who wield politico-economic power while giving every appearance of judicious moderation and balance. It is enough to take your breath away ..."
    "... In U.S. "mainstream" media, Washington's aims are always benevolent and democratic. Its clients and allies are progressive, its enemies are nefarious, and its victims are invisible and incidental. The U.S. can occasionally make "mistakes" and "strategic blunders" on the global stage, but its foreign policies are never immoral, criminal, or imperialist in nature as far as that media is concerned. This is consistent with the doctrine of "American Exceptionalism," according to which the U.S., alone among great powers in history, seeks no selfish or imperial gain abroad. It is consistent also with "mainstream" U.S. media's heavy reliance on "official government sources" (the White House, the Defense Department, and the State Department) and leading business public relations and press offices for basic information on current events. ..."
    "... U.S. citizens regularly see images of people who are angry at the U.S. around the world. The dominant mass media never gives them any serious discussion of the US policies and actions that create that anger. Millions of Americans are left to ask in childlike ignorance "Why do they hate us? What have we done?" ..."
    "... If transmitting Washington's lies about Iraq were something to be fired about, then U.S. corporate media authorities would have to get rid of pretty much of all their top broadcasters. ..."
    "... The U.S. corporate media's propagandistic service to the nation's reigning and interrelated structures of Empire and inequality is hardly limited to its news and public affairs wings. Equally if not more significant in that regard is that media's vast "entertainment" sector, which is loaded with political and ideological content ..."
    "... Seen broadly in its many-sided and multiply delivered reality, U.S. corporate media's dark, power-serving mission actually goes further than the manufacture of consent. A deeper goal is the manufacture of mass idiocy, with "idiocy" understood in the original Greek and Athenian sense not of stupidity but of childish selfishness and willful indifference to public affairs and concerns. (An "idiot" in Athenian democracy was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private instead of public affairs.). As the U.S. Latin Americanist Cathy Schneider noted, the U.S.-backed military coup and dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet "transformed Chile, both culturally and politically, from a country of active participatory grassroots communities, to a land of disconnected, apolitical individuals"[7] – into a nation of "idiots" understood in this classic Athenian sense. ..."
    "... To be sure, a narrow and reactionary sort of public concern and engagement does appear and take on a favorable light in this corporate media culture. It takes the form of a cruel, often even sadistically violent response to unworthy and Evil Others who are perceived as failing to obey prevalent national and neoliberal cultural codes. Like the U.S. ruling class that owns it, the purportedly anti-government corporate media isn't really opposed to government as such. It's opposed to what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "the left hand of the state" – the parts of the public sector that serve the social and democratic needs of the non-affluent majority. ..."
    "... The generation of mass idiocy in the more commonly understood sense of sheer stupidity is also a central part of U.S. "mainstream" media's mission. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the constant barrage of rapid-fire advertisements that floods U.S. corporate media. ..."
    "... There's nothing surprising about the fact that the United States' supposedly "free" and "independent" media functions as a means of mass indoctrination for the nation's economic and imperial elite ..."
    "... A second explanation is the power of advertisers. U.S. media managers are naturally reluctant to publish or broadcast material that might offend the large corporations that pay for broadcasting by purchasing advertisements. ..."
    "... A third great factor is U.S. government media policy and regulation on behalf of oligopolistic hyper-concentration. The U.S. corporate media is hardly a "natural" outcome of a "free market." It's the result of government protections and subsidies that grant enormous "competitive" advantages to the biggest and most politically/plutocratically influential media firms. ..."
    "... In this writer's experience, the critical Left analysis of the U.S. "mainstream" media as a tool for "manufacturing consent" and idiocy developed above meets four objections from defenders of the U.S. media system, A first objection notes that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times (FT), the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and other major U.S. corporate media outlets produce a significant amount of, informative, high-quality and often candid reporting and commentary that Left thinkers and activists commonly cite to support their cases for radical and democratic change. ..."
    "... The observation that Leftists commonly use and cite information from the corporate media they harshly criticize is correct but it is easy to account for the apparent anomaly within the critical Left framework by noting that that media crafts two very different versions of U.S. policy, politics, society, "life," and current events for two different audiences. Following the work of the brilliant Australian propaganda critic Alex Carey, we can call the first audience the "grassroots."[14] It comprises the general mass of working and lower-class citizens. ..."
    "... The second target group comprises the relevant political class of U.S. citizens from at most the upper fifth of society. This is who reads the Times, the Post, WSJ, and FT, for the most part. Call this audience (again following Carey) the "treetops": the "people who matter" and who deserve and can be trusted with something more closely approximating the real story because their minds have been properly disciplined and flattered by superior salaries, significant on-the-job labor autonomy, and "advanced" and specialized educational and professional certification. ..."
    "... To everyday Americans' credit, corporate media has never been fully successful in stamping out popular resistance and winning over the hearts and minds of the U.S. populace. ..."
    "... The U.S. elite is no more successful in its utopian (or dystopian) quest to control every American heart and mind than it is in its equally impossible ambition of managing events across a complex planet from the banks of the Potomac River in Washington D.C ..."
    Aug 18, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

    "Homeland" Distortion

    Consistent with its possession as a leading and money-making asset of the nation's wealthy elite, the United States corporate and commercial mass media is a bastion of power-serving propaganda and deadening twaddle designed to keep the U.S. citizenry subordinated to capital and the imperial U.S. state. It regularly portrays the United States as a great model of democracy and equality. It sells a false image of the U.S. as a society where the rich enjoy opulence because of hard and honest work and where the poor are poor because of their laziness and irresponsibility. The nightly television news broadcasts and television police and law and order dramas are obsessed with violent crime in the nation's Black ghettoes and Latino barrios, but they never talk about the extreme poverty, the absence of opportunity imposed on those neighborhoods by the interrelated forces of institutional racism, capital flight, mass structural unemployment, under-funded schools, and mass incarceration. The nightly television weather reports tells U.S. citizens of ever new record high temperatures and related forms of extreme weather but never relate these remarkable meteorological developments to anthropogenic climate change.

    The dominant corporate U.S. media routinely exaggerates the degree of difference and choice between the candidates run by the nation's two corporate-dominated political organizations, the Democrats and the Republicans. It never notes that the two reigning parties agree about far more than they differ on, particularly when it comes to fundamental and related matters of business class power and American Empire. It shows U.S. protestors engaged in angry confrontations with police and highlights isolated examples of protestor violence but it downplays peaceful protest and never pays serious attention to the important societal and policy issues that have sparked protest or to the demands and recommendations advanced by protest movements.

    As the prolific U.S. Marxist commentator Michael Parenti once remarked, US "Newscasters who want to keep their careers afloat learn the fine art of evasion with great skill they skirt around the most important parts of a story. With much finesse, they say a lot about very little, serving up heaps of junk news filled with so many empty calories and so few nutrients. Thus do they avoid offending those who wield politico-economic power while giving every appearance of judicious moderation and balance. It is enough to take your breath away." [1]

    Selling Empire

    U.S. newscasters and their print media counterparts routinely parrot and disseminate the false foreign policy claims of the nation's imperial elite. Earlier this year, U.S. news broadcasters dutiful relayed to U.S. citizens the Obama administration's preposterous assertion that social-democratic Venezuela is a repressive, corrupt, and authoritarian danger to its own people and the U.S. No leading national U.S. news outlet dared to note the special absurdity of this charge in the wake of Obama and other top U.S. officials' visit to Riyadh to guarantee U.S. support for the new king of Saudi Arabia, the absolute ruler of a leading U.S. client state that happens to be the most brutally oppressive and reactionary government on Earth.

    In U.S. "mainstream" media, Washington's aims are always benevolent and democratic. Its clients and allies are progressive, its enemies are nefarious, and its victims are invisible and incidental. The U.S. can occasionally make "mistakes" and "strategic blunders" on the global stage, but its foreign policies are never immoral, criminal, or imperialist in nature as far as that media is concerned. This is consistent with the doctrine of "American Exceptionalism," according to which the U.S., alone among great powers in history, seeks no selfish or imperial gain abroad. It is consistent also with "mainstream" U.S. media's heavy reliance on "official government sources" (the White House, the Defense Department, and the State Department) and leading business public relations and press offices for basic information on current events.

    As the leading Left U.S. intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman showed in their classic text Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Orwellian double standards are rife in the dominant U.S. media's coverage and interpretation of global affairs. Elections won in other countries by politicians that Washington approves because those politicians can be counted on to serve the interests of U.S. corporations and the military are portrayed in U.S. media as good and clean contests. But when elections put in power people who can't be counted on to serve "U.S. interests," (Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro for example), then U.S. corporate media portrays the contests as "rigged" and "corrupt." When Americans or people allied with Washington are killed or injured abroad, they are "worthy victims" and receive great attention and sympathy in that media. People killed, maimed, displaced and otherwise harmed by the U.S. and U.S. clients and allies are anonymous and "unworthy victims" whose experience elicits little mention or concern.[2]

    U.S. citizens regularly see images of people who are angry at the U.S. around the world. The dominant mass media never gives them any serious discussion of the US policies and actions that create that anger. Millions of Americans are left to ask in childlike ignorance "Why do they hate us? What have we done?"

    In February of 2015, an extraordinary event occurred in U.S. news media – the firing of a leading national news broadcaster, Brian Williams of NBC News. Williams lost his position because of some lies he told in connection with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A naïve outsider might think that Williams was fired because he repeated the George W. Bush administration's transparent fabrications about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's supposed connection to 9/11. Sadly but predictably enough, that wasn't his problem. Williams lost his job because he falsely boasted that he had ridden on a helicopter that was forced down by grenade fire during the initial U.S. invasion. If transmitting Washington's lies about Iraq were something to be fired about, then U.S. corporate media authorities would have to get rid of pretty much of all their top broadcasters.

    More than Entertainment

    The U.S. corporate media's propagandistic service to the nation's reigning and interrelated structures of Empire and inequality is hardly limited to its news and public affairs wings. Equally if not more significant in that regard is that media's vast "entertainment" sector, which is loaded with political and ideological content but was completely ignored in Herman and Chomsky's groundbreaking Manufacturing Consent. [3] One example is the Hollywood movie "Zero Dark Thirty," a 2012 "action thriller" that dramatized the United States' search for Osama bin-Laden after the September 11, 2001 jetliner attacks. The film received critical acclaim and was a box office-smash. It was also a masterpiece of pro-military, pro-CIA propaganda, skillfully portraying U.S. torture practices "as a dirty, ugly business that is necessary to protect America" (Glenn Greenwald[4]) and deleting the moral debate that erupted over the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques." Under the guise of a neutral, documentary-like façade, Zero Dark Thirty normalized and endorsed torture in ways that were all the more effective because of its understated, detached, and "objective" veneer. The film also marked a distressing new frontier in U.S. military-"embedded" filmmaking whereby the movie-makers receive technical and logistical support from the Pentagon in return for producing elaborate public relations on the military's behalf.

    The 2014-15 Hollywood blockbuster American Sniper is another example. The film's audiences is supposed to marvel at the supposedly noble feats, sacrifice, and heroism of Chris Kyle, a rugged, militantly patriotic, and Christian-fundamentalist Navy SEALS sniper who participated in the U.S. invasion of Iraq to fight "evil" and to avenge the al Qaeda jetliner attacks of September 11, 2001. Kyle killed 160 Iraqis over four tours of "duty" in "Operational Iraqi Freedom." Viewers are never told that the Iraqi government had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks or al Qaeda or that the U.S. invasion was one of the most egregiously criminal and brazenly imperial and mass-murderous acts in the history of international violence. Like Zero Dark Thirty's apologists, American Sniper's defenders claim that the film takes a neutral perspective of "pure storytelling," with no ideological bias. In reality, the movie is filled with racist and imperial distortions, functioning as flat-out war propaganda.[5]

    These are just two among many examples that could be cited of U.S. "entertainment" media's regular service to the American Empire. Hollywood and other parts of the nation's vast corporate entertainment complex plays the same power-serving role in relation to domestic ("homeland") American inequality and oppression structures of class and race. [6]

    Manufacturing Idiocy

    Seen broadly in its many-sided and multiply delivered reality, U.S. corporate media's dark, power-serving mission actually goes further than the manufacture of consent. A deeper goal is the manufacture of mass idiocy, with "idiocy" understood in the original Greek and Athenian sense not of stupidity but of childish selfishness and willful indifference to public affairs and concerns. (An "idiot" in Athenian democracy was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private instead of public affairs.). As the U.S. Latin Americanist Cathy Schneider noted, the U.S.-backed military coup and dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet "transformed Chile, both culturally and politically, from a country of active participatory grassroots communities, to a land of disconnected, apolitical individuals"[7] – into a nation of "idiots" understood in this classic Athenian sense.

    In the U.S., where violence is not as readily available to elites as in 1970s Latin America, corporate America seeks the same terrible outcome through its ideological institutions, including above all its mass media. In U.S. movies, television sit-coms, television dramas, television reality-shows, commercials, state Lottery advertisements, and video games, the ideal-type U.S. citizen is an idiot in this classic sense: a person who cares about little more than his or her own well-being, consumption, and status. This noble American idiot is blissfully indifferent to the terrible prices paid by others for the maintenance of reigning and interrelated oppressions structures at home and abroad.

    A pervasive theme in this media culture is the notion that people at the bottom of the nation's steep and interrelated socioeconomic and racial pyramids are the "personally irresponsible" and culturally flawed makers of their own fate. The mass U.S. media's version of Athenian idiocy "can imagine," in the words of the prolific Left U.S. cultural theorist Henry Giroux "public issues only as private concerns." It works to "erase the social from the language of public life so as to reduce" questions of racial and socioeconomic disparity to "private issues of individual character and cultural depravity. Consistent with "the central neoliberal tenet that all problems are private rather than social in nature," it portrays the only barriers to equality and meaningful democratic participation as "a lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility" and bad personal choices by the oppressed. Government efforts to meaningfully address and ameliorate (not to mention abolish) societal disparities of race, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and the like are portrayed as futile, counterproductive, naïve, and dangerous.[8]

    To be sure, a narrow and reactionary sort of public concern and engagement does appear and take on a favorable light in this corporate media culture. It takes the form of a cruel, often even sadistically violent response to unworthy and Evil Others who are perceived as failing to obey prevalent national and neoliberal cultural codes. Like the U.S. ruling class that owns it, the purportedly anti-government corporate media isn't really opposed to government as such. It's opposed to what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "the left hand of the state" – the parts of the public sector that serve the social and democratic needs of the non-affluent majority. It celebrates and otherwise advances the "right hand of the state"[9]: the portions of government that serve the opulent minority, dole out punishment for the poor, and attacks those perceived as nefariously resisting the corporate and imperial order at home and abroad. Police officers, prosecutors, military personnel, and other government authorities who represent the "right hand of the state" are heroes and role models in this media. Public defenders, other defense attorneys, civil libertarians, racial justice activists, union leaders, antiwar protesters and the like are presented at best as naïve and irritating "do-gooders" and at worst as coddlers and even agents of evil.

    The generation of mass idiocy in the more commonly understood sense of sheer stupidity is also a central part of U.S. "mainstream" media's mission. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the constant barrage of rapid-fire advertisements that floods U.S. corporate media. As the American cultural critic Neil Postman noted thirty years ago, the modern U.S. television commercial is the antithesis of the rational economic consideration that early Western champions of the profits system claimed to be the enlightened essence of capitalism. "Its principal theorists, even its most prominent practitioners," Postman noted, "believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well-informed, and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest." Commercials make "hash" out of this idea. They are dedicated to persuading consumers with wholly irrational claims. They rely not on the reasoned presentation of evidence and logical argument but on suggestive emotionalism, infantilizing manipulation, and evocative, rapid-fire imagery.[10]

    The same techniques poison U.S. electoral politics. Investment in deceptive and manipulative campaign commercials commonly determines success or failure in mass-marketed election contests between business-beholden candidates that are sold to the audience/electorate like brands of toothpaste and deodorant. Fittingly enough, the stupendous cost of these political advertisements is a major factor driving U.S. campaign expenses so high (the 2016 U.S. presidential election will cost at least $5 billion) as to make candidates ever more dependent on big money corporate and Wall Street donors.

    Along the way, mass cognitive competence is assaulted by the numbing, high-speed ubiquity of U.S. television and radio advertisements. These commercials assault citizens' capacity for sustained mental focus and rational deliberation nearly sixteen minutes of every hour on cable television, with 44 percent of the individual ads now running for just 15 seconds. This is a factor in the United States' long-bemoaned epidemic of "Attention Deficit Disorder."

    Seventy years ago, the brilliant Dutch left Marxist Anton Pannekoek offered some chilling reflections on the corporate print and broadcast media's destructive impact on mass cognitive and related social resistance capacities in the United States after World War II:

    "The press is of course entirely in hands of big capital [and it] dominates the spiritual life of the American people. The most important thing is not even the hiding of all truth about the reign of big finance. Its aim still more is the education to thoughtlessness. All attention is directed to coarse sensations, everything is avoided that could arouse thinking. Papers are not meant to be read – the small print is already a hindrance – but in a rapid survey of the fat headlines to inform the public on unimportant news items, on family triflings of the rich, on sexual scandals, on crimes of the underworld, on boxing matches. The aim of the capitalist press all over the world, the diverting of the attention of the masses from the reality of social development, nowhere succeed with such thoroughness as in America."

    "Still more than by the papers the masses are influenced by broadcasting and film. These products of most perfect science, destined at one time to the finest educational instruments of mankind, now in the hands of capitalism have been turned into the strongest means to uphold its rule by stupefying the mind. Because after nerve-straining fatigue the movie offers relaxation and distraction by means of simple visual impressions that make no demand on the intellect, the masses get used to accepting thoughtlessly all its cunning and shrewd propaganda. It reflects the ugliest sides of middle-class society. It turns all attention either to sexual life, in this society – by the absence of community feelings and fight for freedom – the only source of strong passions, or to brute violence; masses educated to rough violence instead of to social knowledge are not dangerous to capitalism "[11]

    Pannekoek clearly saw an ideological dimension (beyond just diversion and stupefaction) in U.S. mass media's "education to thoughtlessness" through movies as well as print sensationalism. He would certainly be impressed and perhaps depressed by the remarkably numerous, potent, and many-sided means of mass distraction and indoctrination that are available to the U.S. and global capitalist media in the present digital and Internet era.

    The "entertainment" wing of its vast corporate media complex is critical to the considerable "soft" ideological "power" the U.S. exercises around the world even as its economic hegemony wanes in an ever more multipolar global system (and as its "hard" military reveals significant limits within and beyond the Middle East). Relatively few people beneath the global capitalist elite consume U.S. news and public affairs media beyond the U.S., but "American" (U.S.) movies, television shows, video games, communication devices, and advertising culture are ubiquitous across the planet.

    Explaining "Mainstream" Media Corporate Ownership

    There's nothing surprising about the fact that the United States' supposedly "free" and "independent" media functions as a means of mass indoctrination for the nation's economic and imperial elite. The first and most important explanation for this harsh reality is concentrated private ownership – the fundamental fact that that media is owned primarily by giant corporations representing wealthy interests who are deeply invested in U.S. capitalism and Empire. Visitors to the U.S. should not be fooled by the large number and types of channels and stations on a typical U.S. car radio or television set or by the large number and types of magazines and books on display at a typical Barnes & Noble bookstore. Currently in the U.S., just six massive and global corporations – Comcast, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS, The News Corporation and Disney – together control more than 90 percent of the nation's print and electronic media, including cable television, airwaves television, radio, newspapers, movies, video games, book publishing, comic books, and more. Three decades ago, 50 corporations controlled the same amount of U.S. media.

    Each of the reigning six companies is a giant and diversified multi-media conglomerate with investments beyond media, including "defense" (the military). Asking reporters and commentators at one of those giant corporations to tell the unvarnished truth about what's happening in the U.S. and the world is like asking the company magazine published by the United Fruit Company to the tell the truth about working conditions in its Caribbean and Central American plantations in the 1950s. It's like asking the General Motors company newspaper to tell the truth about wages and working conditions in GM's auto assembly plants around the world.

    As the nation's media becomes concentrated into fewer corporate hands, media personnel become ever more insecure in their jobs because they have fewer firms to whom to sell their skills. That makes them even less willing than they might have been before to go outside official sources, to question the official line, and to tell the truth about current events and the context in which they occur.

    Advertisers

    A second explanation is the power of advertisers. U.S. media managers are naturally reluctant to publish or broadcast material that might offend the large corporations that pay for broadcasting by purchasing advertisements. As Chomsky has noted in a recent interview, large corporations are not only the major producers of the United States' mass and commercial media. They are also that media's top market, something that deepens the captivity of nation's supposedly democratic and independent media to big capital:

    "The reliance of a journal on advertisers shapes and controls and substantially determines what is presented to the public the very idea of advertiser reliance radically distorts the concept of free media. If you think about what the commercial media are, no matter what, they are businesses. And a business produces something for a market. The producers in this case, almost without exception, are major corporations. The market is other businesses – advertisers. The product that is presented to the market is readers (or viewers), so these are basically major corporations providing audiences to other businesses, and that significantly shapes the nature of the institution."[12]

    At the same time, both U.S. corporate media managers and the advertisers who supply revenue for their salaries are hesitant to produce content that might alienate the affluent people who count for an ever rising share of consumer purchases in the U.S. It is naturally those with the most purchasing power who are naturally most targeted by advertisers.

    Government Policy

    A third great factor is U.S. government media policy and regulation on behalf of oligopolistic hyper-concentration. The U.S. corporate media is hardly a "natural" outcome of a "free market." It's the result of government protections and subsidies that grant enormous "competitive" advantages to the biggest and most politically/plutocratically influential media firms. Under the terms of the 1934 Communications Act and the 1996 Telecommunications Act, commercial, for-profit broadcasters have almost completely free rein over the nation's airwaves and cable lines. There is no substantive segment of the broadcast spectrum set aside for truly public interest and genuinely democratic, popular not-for profit media and the official "public" broadcasting networks are thoroughly captive to corporate interests and to right-wing politicians who take giant campaign contributions from corporate interests. Much of the 1996 bill was written by lobbyists working for the nations' leading media firms. [13]

    A different form of state policy deserves mention. Under the Obama administration, we have seen the most aggressive pursuit and prosecution in recent memory of U.S. journalists who step outside the narrow parameters of pro-U.S. coverage and commentary – and of the whistleblowers who provide them with leaked information. That is why Edward Snowden lives in Russia, Glenn Greenwald lives in Brazil, Chelsea Manning is serving life in a U.S. military prison, and Julian Assange is trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. A leading New York Times reporter and author, James Risen, has been threatened with imprisonment by the White House for years because of his refusal to divulge sources.

    Treetops v. Grassroots Audiences

    In this writer's experience, the critical Left analysis of the U.S. "mainstream" media as a tool for "manufacturing consent" and idiocy developed above meets four objections from defenders of the U.S. media system, A first objection notes that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times (FT), the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and other major U.S. corporate media outlets produce a significant amount of, informative, high-quality and often candid reporting and commentary that Left thinkers and activists commonly cite to support their cases for radical and democratic change. Left U.S. media critics like Chomsky and Herman are said to be hypocrites because they obviously find much that is of use as Left thinkers in the very media that they criticize for distorting reality in accord with capitalist and imperial dictates.

    The observation that Leftists commonly use and cite information from the corporate media they harshly criticize is correct but it is easy to account for the apparent anomaly within the critical Left framework by noting that that media crafts two very different versions of U.S. policy, politics, society, "life," and current events for two different audiences. Following the work of the brilliant Australian propaganda critic Alex Carey, we can call the first audience the "grassroots."[14] It comprises the general mass of working and lower-class citizens. As far as the business elites who own and manage the U.S. mass media and the corporations that pay for that media with advertising purchases are concerned, this "rabble" cannot be trusted with serious, candid, and forthright information. Its essential role in society is to keep quiet, work hard, be entertained (in richly propagandistic and ideological ways, we should remember), buy things, and generally do what they're told. They are to leave key societal decisions to those that the leading 20th century U.S. public intellectual and media-as-propaganda enthusiast Walter Lippman called "the responsible men." That "intelligent," benevolent, "expert," and "responsible" elite (responsible, indeed, for such glorious accomplishments as the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq, the Great Recession, global warming, and the rise of the Islamic State) needed, in Lippman's view, to be protected from what he called "the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd."[15] The deluded mob, the sub-citizenry, the dangerous working class majority is not the audience for elite organs like the Times, the Post, and the Journal.

    The second target group comprises the relevant political class of U.S. citizens from at most the upper fifth of society. This is who reads the Times, the Post, WSJ, and FT, for the most part. Call this audience (again following Carey) the "treetops": the "people who matter" and who deserve and can be trusted with something more closely approximating the real story because their minds have been properly disciplined and flattered by superior salaries, significant on-the-job labor autonomy, and "advanced" and specialized educational and professional certification. This elite includes such heavily indoctrinated persons as corporate managers, lawyers, public administrators, and (most) tenured university professors. Since these elites carry out key top-down societal tasks of supervision, discipline, training, demoralization, co-optation, and indoctrination – all essential to the rule of the real economic elite and the imperial system – they cannot be too thoroughly misled about current events and policy without deleterious consequences for the smooth functioning of the dominant social and political order. They require adequate information and must not be overly influenced by the brutal and foolish propaganda generated for the "bewildered herd." At the same time, information and commentary for the relevant and respectable business and political classes and their "coordinator class" servants and allies often contains a measure of reasoned and sincere intra-elite political and policy debate – debate that is always careful not to stray beyond narrow U.S. ideological parameters. That is why a radical Left U.S. thinker and activist can find much that is of use in U.S. "treetops" media. Such a thinker or activist would, indeed, be foolish not to consult these sources.

    "P"BS and N"P"R

    A second objection to the Left critique of U.S. "mainstream" media claims that the U.S. public enjoys a meaningful alternative to the corporate media in the form of the nation's Public Broadcasting Service (television) and National Public Radio (NPR). This claim should not be taken seriously. Thanks to U.S. "public" media's pathetically weak governmental funding, its heavy reliance on corporate sponsors, and its constant harassment by right wing critics inside and beyond the U.S. Congress, N"P"R and "P"BS are extremely reluctant to question dominant U.S. ideologies and power structures.

    The tepid, power-serving conservatism of U.S. "public" broadcasting is by longstanding political and policy design. The federal government allowed the formation of the "public" networks only on the condition that they pose no competitive market or ideological challenge to private commercial media, the profits system, and U.S. global foreign policy. "P"BS and N"P"R are "public" in a very limited sense. They not function for the public over and against corporate, financial, and imperial power to any significant degree.

    "The Internet Will Save Us"

    A third objection claims that the rise of the Internet creates a "Wild West" environment in which the power of corporate media is eviscerated and citizens can find and even produce all the "alternative media" they require. This claim is misleading but it should not be reflexively or completely dismissed. In the U.S. as elsewhere, those with access to the Internet and the time and energy to use it meaningfully can find a remarkable breadth and depth of information and trenchant Left analysis at various online sites. The Internet also broadens U.S. citizens and activists' access to media networks beyond the U.S. – to elite sources that are much less beholden of course to U.S. propaganda and ideology. At the same time, the Internet and digital telephony networks have at times shown themselves to be effective grassroots organizing tools for progressive U.S. activists.

    Still, the democratic and progressive impact of the Internet in the U.S. is easily exaggerated. Left and other progressive online outlets lack anything close to the financial, technical, and organizational and human resources of the corporate news media, which has its own sophisticated Internet. There is nothing in Left other citizen online outlets that can begin to remotely challenge the "soft" ideological and propagandistic power of corporate "entertainment" media. The Internet's technical infrastructure is increasingly dominated by an "ISP cartel" led by a small number of giant corporations. As the leading left U.S. media analyst Robert McChesney notes:

    "By 2014, there are only a half-dozen or so major players that dominate provision of broadband Internet access and wireless Internet access. Three of them – Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast – dominate the field of telephony and Internet access, and have set up what is in effect a cartel. They no longer compete with each other in any meaningful sense. As a result, Americans pay far more for cellphone and broadband Internet access than most other advanced nations and get much lousier service These are not 'free market' companies in any sense of the term. Their business model, going back to pre-Internet days, has always been capturing government monopoly licenses for telephone and cable TV services. Their 'comparative advantage' has never been customer service; it has been world-class lobbying.' [16]

    Along the way, the notion of a great "democratizing," Wild West" and "free market" Internet has proved politically useful for the corporate media giants. The regularly trumpet the great Internet myth to claim that the U.S. public and regulators don't need to worry about corporate media power and to justify their demands for more government subsidy and protection. At the same time, finally, we know from the revelations of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and others that the nation's leading digital and Internet-based e-mail (Google and Yahoo), telephony (e.g. Verizon), and "social network" (Facebook above all) corporations have collaborated with the National Security Agency and with the nation's local, state, and federal police in the surveillance of U.S. citizens' and activists' private communications.[17]

    Solutions

    The fourth objection accuses Left media critics of being overly negative, "carping" critics who offer no serious alternatives to the nation's current corporate-owned corporate-managed commercial and for-profit media system. This is a transparently false and mean-spirited charge. Left U.S. media criticism is strongly linked to a smart and impressive U.S. media reform movement that advances numerous and interrelated proposals for the creation of a genuinely public and democratically run non-commercial and nonprofit U.S. media system. Some of the demand and proposals of this movement include public ownership and operation of the Internet as a public utility; the break-up of the leading media oligopolies; full public funding of public broadcasting; limits on advertising in commercial media; the abolition of political advertisements; the expansion of airwave and broadband access for alternative media outlets; publicly-funded nonprofit and non-commercial print journalism; the abolition of government and corporate surveillance, monitoring, and commercial data-mining of private communication and "social networks."[18] With regard to the media as with numerous other areas, we should recall Chomsky's sardonic response to the standard conservative claim that the Left offers criticisms but no solutions: "There is an accurate translation for that charge: 'they present solutions and I don't like them.'"[19]

    A False Paradox

    The propagandistic and power-serving mission and nature of dominant U.S, corporate mass media might seem ironic and even paradoxical in light of the United States' strong free speech and democratic traditions. In fact, as Carey and Chomsky have noted, the former makes perfect sense in light of the latter. In nations where popular expression and dissent is routinely crushed with violent repression, elites have little incentive to shape popular perceptions in accord with elite interests. The population is controlled primarily through physical coercion. In societies where it is not generally considered legitimate to put down popular expression with the iron heel of armed force and where dissenting opinion is granted a significant measure of freedom of expression, elites are heavily and dangerously incentivized to seek to manufacture mass popular consent and idiocy. The danger is deepened by the United States' status as the pioneer in the development of mass consumer capitalism, advertising, film, and television. Thanks to that history, corporate America has long stood in the global vanguard when it comes to developing the technologies, methods, art, and science of mass persuasion and thought control.[20]

    It is appropriate to place quotation marks around the phrase "mainstream media" when writing about dominant U.S. corporate media. During the Cold War era, U.S. officials and media never referred to the Soviet Union's state television and radio or its main state newspapers as "mainstream Russian media." American authorities referred to these Russian media outlets as "Soviet state media" and treated that media as means for the dissemination of Soviet "propaganda" and ideology. There is no reason to consider the United States' corporate and commercial media as any more "mainstream" than the leading Soviet media organs were back in their day. It is just as dedicated as the onetime Soviet state media to advancing the doctrinal perspectives of its host nation's reigning elite -- and far more effective.

    Its success is easily exaggerated, however. To everyday Americans' credit, corporate media has never been fully successful in stamping out popular resistance and winning over the hearts and minds of the U.S. populace. A recent Pew Research poll showed that U.S. "millennials" (young adults 18-29 years old) have a more favorable response to the word "socialism" than to "capitalism" – a remarkable finding on the limits of corporate media and other forms of elite ideological power in the U.S. The immigrant worker uprising of May 2006, the Chicago Republic Door and Window plant occupation of 2008, the University of California student uprisings of 2009 and 2010, the Wisconsin public worker rebellion in early 2011, the Occupy Movement of late 2011, and Fight for Fifteen (for a $15 an hour minimum wage) and Black Lives Matter movements of 2014 and 2015 show that U.S. corporate and imperial establishment has not manufactured anything like comprehensive and across the board mass consent and idiocy in the U,S. today. The U.S. elite is no more successful in its utopian (or dystopian) quest to control every American heart and mind than it is in its equally impossible ambition of managing events across a complex planet from the banks of the Potomac River in Washington D.C. The struggle for popular self-determination, democracy, justice, and equality lives on despite the influence of corporate media.

    [Aug 18, 2018] MoA - John Brennan Is No Match For Trump

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Most important was " Brennan's ringleader role in the so-far unsuccessful attempts to derail Trump , both before and after the 2016 election. As far as we can tell it was Brennan who concocted and launched the conspiracy to insinuate that Trump is connected with alleged Russian influence. Brennan bet that Hillary Clinton would win the election. He lost his bet and is now out in the cold. He fears that his role, especially his conspiring with British security services and with the Steele dossier, will come to light. ..."
    "... [R]unning against the deep state provides Trump a rhetorical crutch. It's a built-in excuse for failing to deliver on his 2016 campaign promises. Sitting presidents usually have to run as incumbents. Trump can try to run for re-election as an outsider. And is there a better poster boy for the alleged deep state than Brennan? ..."
    "... The idiots who express solidarity with Brennan by offering up their security clearances confirm, simply by doing so, that there IS a deep state cabal that is opposed to Trump. Attacking Brennan and them will help Trump to get reelected. ..."
    "... By colluding against me, the fake media proved once and for all, that they are in cahoots with the Democrats and have declared themselves to be my true political opposition ..."
    "... Trump is excellent in playing his domestic opponents. Brennan made a huge mistake in publicly opposing him. He is now standing in the limelight and people will only dig further into his role in the "Russian collusion" campaign. Yesterday Brennan authored a New York Times ..."
    "... Director Brennan's recent statements purport to know as fact that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power. If Director Brennan's statement is based on intelligence he received while still leading the CIA, why didn't he include it in the Intelligence Community Assessment released in 2017? If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed to the Special Counsel, not The New York Times . ..."
    "... It is doubtful that Trump will let go of the issue. Brennan is a too juicy target to stop shooting at it. Currently Brennan is still too valuable as an enemy for Trump to destroy him. But once that is over Brennan's day of judgment will come. Here are high hopes that Brennan will finally have to pay for at least one of his many crimes. ..."
    "... If the Democrats jump to defend Brennan, they will have fallen into another Trump Trap. They are assuredly tone-deaf and stupid enough to take the bait. ..."
    "... You are a Trump supporter because you supposedly believe Trump is an insurgent fighting the deep state for a democratic world order, or some such, perhaps more discreetly phrased. But this is nonsense ..."
    "... Trump, whatever maybe said against him, is a legitimately, constitutionally elected president. The people like Brennan working against him were not elected. I didn't vote for Trump. I voted for Jill Stein. But, if there is a civil war, I will have to fight for Trump's side. The oath that I swore as a naval officer was to the Constitution. ..."
    "... he's a nasty neocon that is of course protected by liberal MSM ..."
    "... Unfortunately, there is no limit on the numbers of despicable, warmongering, money-grubbing, craven, destructive, maniacal creatures in government. Brennan is one such specimen. Brennan belongs in prison for subverting the Constitution. ..."
    "... Look, Brennan has now had enough time, with his 'hit-team' to clear much of his record and trail of criminality, and he believes that he has enough backing to go after Trump. The key is obviously the Uranium1 scam, which Mueller and Sessions appear to be stalling on big-time. And then there's the Imran Awan / Debbie Washerwoman Shultz bonanza about to break big-time - and you're trying to tell me that Brennan being charged or sued would be 'quite extreme, and an evil precedent'? ..."
    "... Just my 2 cents worth. Trump's a stooge, and nearly 100% of what he does is solely and only to bully someone whom Trump perceives has having stood up to him (Trump). It's not so much about Trump taking on BigSpy, Inc, in any meaningful or substantive way. It's about Trump being a big-assed bully and throwing his considerable weight around... without accomplishing much other than smacking down Brennan - deservedly but with no real ongoing lasting useful effect. ..."
    "... Democrats are not collectively smart enough or politically astute enough to run away from Brennan. What fools they are! ..."
    "... Why did Trump nominated Gina Haspel as CIA Director? Her nomination was supported by former CIA directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Michael Morell, former Director of the NSA and CIA Michael Hayden, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. ..."
    "... Haspel was CIA chief of station in London in 2016, when the plot against Trump was hatched. She must have known what Steele et al. were up to. ..."
    "... Trumps connections with the Russian Mafia were certainly reason for concern. Too bad the DeepState Media downplayed this angle and some other angles , perhaps that would have prevented Trump from winning. ..."
    "... Post Brennan the Trump administration is not only expanding the use of drones, it is also obscuring the facts about how many drones are being used, how many people are being killed by them, and where. His CIA Director Gina Haspel is certainly just as evil as Brennan and even better versed in water boarding. ..."
    "... And we should not forget Brennan's role in the coup in Ukraine....does CIA still have an office on the 4th floor of SBU building in Kiev? ..."
    "... If the intelligence agencies are so hostile to him, then why nominate Haspel? How does Haspel who, is connected to torture, help MAGA? How is Trump "draining the swamp" when he nominates a swamp creature (the 'choice' of the Deep State) for CIA Director? ..."
    "... When "populist" Presidents (both Obama and Trump) serve the establishment instead of the people then we are, simply, being played. In fact, the American political system is organized to prevent a real popul ..."
    Aug 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    John Brennan Is No Match For Trump

    U.S President Trump revoked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan.

    Good. It is probably the best things Trump has ever done. Brennan is one of the most despicable former U.S. officials alive. He should rot in hell instead of making money off his former status.

    Besides that there is no sound reason why anyone who does not work for the government, directly or indirectly, should have a clearance and thereby access to state secrets. ACLU and others are wrong in this. Revoking or keeping a security clearance has nothing to do with free speech or first amendment rights.

    Abu Jihad Brennan was the CIA's station chief in Saudi Arabia when the Khobar Towers were bombed. Al-Qaeda did it , but Brennan was helpful in blaming the attack on Hizbullah and Iran. He was deputy executive director of the CIA on 9/11. That 9/11 happened was an intelligence failure or, as some have it, an incident arranged by the deep state. Brennan was CIA chief of staff while the agency concocted false stories about Iraqi WMD. He was within the command line that ran the CIA torture program. It was Brennan who conspired with the Gulf dictators to hire Jihadis to destroy Libya and to attempt the same in Syria. In short - the man was always ruthless, incompetent and dishonest.

    When Obama became president he wanted to make Brennan Director of the CIA. The Democrats in Congress were opposed to that. Obama then made him his high priest of targeted killings . After Obama's reelection, Brennan finally became director. He ordered the CIA to spy on the Congress committee investigating CIA torture. He lied to Congress under oath when he denied that it had happened. When it was proven that the CIA did what it did, he had to apologize.

    At that time a Washington Post editorial headlined Obama should fire John Brennan . Today the Post calls the revocation of a security clearance of a former official, who -it had opined- should have long been fired, a "political vendetta against a career intelligence officer". Hypocrites.

    Most important was " Brennan's ringleader role in the so-far unsuccessful attempts to derail Trump , both before and after the 2016 election. As far as we can tell it was Brennan who concocted and launched the conspiracy to insinuate that Trump is connected with alleged Russian influence. Brennan bet that Hillary Clinton would win the election. He lost his bet and is now out in the cold. He fears that his role, especially his conspiring with British security services and with the Steele dossier, will come to light.

    Since Trump became president Brennan publicly opposed him. That was a huge mistake. He is no match for Trump. Be revoking Brennan's clearance Trump is now elevating him to 'hero' of the so called 'resistance' against him which he connects to the deep state. This is the Trump playbook :

    [R]unning against the deep state provides Trump a rhetorical crutch. It's a built-in excuse for failing to deliver on his 2016 campaign promises. Sitting presidents usually have to run as incumbents. Trump can try to run for re-election as an outsider. And is there a better poster boy for the alleged deep state than Brennan?

    The idiots who express solidarity with Brennan by offering up their security clearances confirm, simply by doing so, that there IS a deep state cabal that is opposed to Trump. Attacking Brennan and them will help Trump to get reelected.

    Trump uses the same playbook when he attacks the "fake news media" for opposing him. He is right in that nearly all U.S. and international editors favored Hillery Clinton over Trump. This week 200 U.S. papers united to write editorials against Trump's attacks against the "freedom of the press". They fell for his trick :

    Most journalists agree that there's a great need for Trump rebuttals. I've written my share. But this [Boston] Globe -sponsored coordinated editorial response is sure to backfire: It will provide Trump with circumstantial evidence of the existence of a national press cabal that has been convened solely to oppose him. When the editorials roll off the press on Thursday, all singing from the same script, Trump will reap enough fresh material to whale on the media for at least a month. His forthcoming speeches almost write themselves: By colluding against me, the fake media proved once and for all, that they are in cahoots with the Democrats and have declared themselves to be my true political opposition ...

    Trump is excellent in playing his domestic opponents. Brennan made a huge mistake in publicly opposing him. He is now standing in the limelight and people will only dig further into his role in the "Russian collusion" campaign. Yesterday Brennan authored a New York Times Op Ed headlined President Trump's Claims of No Collusion Are Hogwash. It does not provide any evidence for the "hogwash" claim. Brennan can not show that there was a Trump campaign collusion with Russia or anyone else.

    Richard Burr, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, gave a somewhat salty and fitting response :

    "Director Brennan's recent statements purport to know as fact that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power. If Director Brennan's statement is based on intelligence he received while still leading the CIA, why didn't he include it in the Intelligence Community Assessment released in 2017? If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed to the Special Counsel, not The New York Times .

    "If, however, Director Brennan's statement is purely political and based on conjecture, the president has full authority to revoke his security clearance as head of the Executive Branch."

    In short: "Nut up or shut up."

    It is doubtful that Trump will let go of the issue. Brennan is a too juicy target to stop shooting at it. Currently Brennan is still too valuable as an enemy for Trump to destroy him. But once that is over Brennan's day of judgment will come. Here are high hopes that Brennan will finally have to pay for at least one of his many crimes.

    fastfreddy , Aug 17, 2018 3:30:26 PM | 1

    If the Democrats jump to defend Brennan, they will have fallen into another Trump Trap. They are assuredly tone-deaf and stupid enough to take the bait.
    steven t johnson , Aug 17, 2018 3:55:46 PM | 2
    Indeed, Brennan is scum

    That said, there is no deep state, there is just the state. There are factions in the ruling class, but arbitrarily deciding one is evil is just working for the other. You are a Trump supporter because you supposedly believe Trump is an insurgent fighting the deep state for a democratic world order, or some such, perhaps more discreetly phrased. But this is nonsense. The idea that people hate John Brennan so much they'll vote for Trumpery in the midterm and 2020 because Trump is kicking the ass of their enemy...did you actually read what you wrote here?

    As far as the free speech rights of Brennan are concerned, the question is whether any contacts with other security officials, and any other research for article, books and speeches can be deemed as pursuing information he is not cleared for. That he could be criminally charged or sued. This would be quite extreme, and an evil precedent when such repressive tactics are used even within the upper ranks. What they do to each other, they'll do to us, faster, harder and more often.

    howard in nyc , Aug 17, 2018 3:57:50 PM | 3
    b wrote, above:
    Good. It is one of the best things Trump has ever done. Brennan is one of the most despicable former U.S. officials alive. He should rot in hell.

    but, but, Nancy Pelosi said in a twit:

    Revoking the security clearance of an honorable patriot is a stunning abuse of power & a pathetic attempt to silence critics.

    Whom am I to believe? (um, trick question) Thank you for the brief summary of this horrible person's career lowlites. Now I can just point people to this piece when they ask me how can I speak against such an 'honorable patriot'. Jeesh, these times we live.

    lysias , Aug 17, 2018 4:35:05 PM | 4
    Trump, whatever maybe said against him, is a legitimately, constitutionally elected president. The people like Brennan working against him were not elected. I didn't vote for Trump. I voted for Jill Stein. But, if there is a civil war, I will have to fight for Trump's side. The oath that I swore as a naval officer was to the Constitution.
    Bardi , Aug 17, 2018 4:38:41 PM | 5
    "Brennan is one of the most despicable former U.S. officials alive. He should rot in hell." Neither of those are reasons to remove someone's security clearance. The reasons are documented. Try to stay on topic.
    Zanon , Aug 17, 2018 4:41:06 PM | 6
    " Brennan is one of the most despicable former U.S. officials alive. He should rot in hell."

    Great summary, he's a nasty neocon that is of course protected by liberal MSM.

    gogaijin , Aug 17, 2018 4:41:57 PM | 7
    I think this is the right move and it may indeed turn out to be a political win. But before giving Trump all the credit, it should be noted that Senator Rand Paul, a man who has consistently been critical of US foreign policy, publicly proposed the idea of canceling Brennan's security clearance last month.

    https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article216755630.html

    Zanon , Aug 17, 2018 4:46:21 PM | 8
    After clearance pull, Democrats rush to back Brennan – who spied on them https://www.rt.com/usa/436065-democrats-forget-brennan-spied/
    fastfreddy , Aug 17, 2018 4:46:39 PM | 9
    Unfortunately, there is no limit on the numbers of despicable, warmongering, money-grubbing, craven, destructive, maniacal creatures in government. Brennan is one such specimen. Brennan belongs in prison for subverting the Constitution.
    lysias , Aug 17, 2018 4:47:22 PM | 10
    Accusing Trump of treason for what he did in Helsinki is surely sufficient reason for losing a clearance.
    fredjc , Aug 17, 2018 4:49:16 PM | 11
    @2 steven

    "That said, there is no deep state, there is just the state. There are factions in the ruling class, but arbitrarily deciding one is evil is just working for the other. You are a Trump supporter because you supposedly believe Trump is an insurgent fighting the deep state for a democratic world order, or some such, perhaps more discreetly phrased. "

    What a strange opening gambit? There obviously is a deep state - who do you think Trump has been battling with if it is not 'hangers on' to political power and influence, the MIC, the Corporations, Wall St, the Fed and the Bankers (spelt with a 'W')?

    Look, Brennan has now had enough time, with his 'hit-team' to clear much of his record and trail of criminality, and he believes that he has enough backing to go after Trump. The key is obviously the Uranium1 scam, which Mueller and Sessions appear to be stalling on big-time. And then there's the Imran Awan / Debbie Washerwoman Shultz bonanza about to break big-time - and you're trying to tell me that Brennan being charged or sued would be 'quite extreme, and an evil precedent'?

    Jeez, what are they feeding the trolls with these days...

    RUKidding , Aug 17, 2018 4:57:57 PM | 12
    Brennan is disgusting scum. May he rot. I would prefer for all who are Ex-BigSpy,Inc to have their security clearances revoked as soon as they become "ex." Sadly, that's apparently not how it's done. I fully disagree with a policy of letting these "ex" types keep their security clearance as "a matter of courtesy." Perhaps this whole kerfuffle will lead to a review of this practice and a change but not holding my breath.

    Although I kinda personally "like" it that Trump revoked Brennan's clearance, I am also troubled by it. I don't think Trump followed proper channels, and the way it was done -- and for the reasons stated -- are questionable. IMO, it has at least a bit of a stink of Dictatorship about it.

    Ergo, I'm not all "down" with what Trump did. Yeah, yeah, he fired a shot across the bow of BigSpy, Inc. In some ways, that's a good thing. But as usual, Trump does this in such a stupidly dumb and ham-handed way that it pretty much negates the potential "good" this might do.

    Just my 2 cents worth. Trump's a stooge, and nearly 100% of what he does is solely and only to bully someone whom Trump perceives has having stood up to him (Trump). It's not so much about Trump taking on BigSpy, Inc, in any meaningful or substantive way. It's about Trump being a big-assed bully and throwing his considerable weight around... without accomplishing much other than smacking down Brennan - deservedly but with no real ongoing lasting useful effect.

    fastfreddy , Aug 17, 2018 4:58:38 PM | 13
    7

    Democrats are not collectively smart enough or politically astute enough to run away from Brennan. What fools they are!

    They abandoned their "working persons" base a long time ago. That, and Obama embraced (rescued) the Republican Party after it was nearly torn asunder by Dubya Bush. Recall that Republican affiliation was at an historic low. They needed a boot on their throats and instead they got a hand up. A seat at the table, and often, the head of the table.

    Completely revived, they (the R Party) now have carte blanche to destroy public institutions at will.

    Jackrabbit , Aug 17, 2018 4:59:17 PM | 14
    Why did Trump nominated Gina Haspel as CIA Director? Her nomination was supported by former CIA directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Michael Morell, former Director of the NSA and CIA Michael Hayden, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Draining the swamp? If Trump had taken on Brennan sooner, Haspel's nomination and confirmation might've been moot.

    Watch what they DO not what they SAY.

    lysias , Aug 17, 2018 5:08:45 PM | 15
    Haspel was CIA chief of station in London in 2016, when the plot against Trump was hatched. She must have known what Steele et al. were up to.
    Pft , Aug 17, 2018 5:12:59 PM | 19
    Trumps connections with the Russian Mafia were certainly reason for concern. Too bad the DeepState Media downplayed this angle and some other angles , perhaps that would have prevented Trump from winning.

    Post Brennan the Trump administration is not only expanding the use of drones, it is also obscuring the facts about how many drones are being used, how many people are being killed by them, and where. His CIA Director Gina Haspel is certainly just as evil as Brennan and even better versed in water boarding.

    Anyways, big whoop that Brennan lost his security clearance . I doubt he needs Food Stamps now.

    Mark2 , Aug 17, 2018 5:23:27 PM | 20
    Personally I hope this gets right out of control. Drone strikes and cruse missile style ! Freandly rebels, white helmets the whole deal. bring it on and pass the popcorn !!! Dirty scum.
    hopehely , Aug 17, 2018 7:04:33 PM | 31
    And we should not forget Brennan's role in the coup in Ukraine....does CIA still have an office on the 4th floor of SBU building in Kiev?
    Jackrabbit , Aug 17, 2018 7:59:19 PM | 39
    lysias @27: Trump was meant to win? Obviously not by the intelligence agencies...

    If the intelligence agencies are so hostile to him, then why nominate Haspel? How does Haspel who, is connected to torture, help MAGA? How is Trump "draining the swamp" when he nominates a swamp creature (the 'choice' of the Deep State) for CIA Director?

    When "populist" Presidents (both Obama and Trump) serve the establishment instead of the people then we are, simply, being played. In fact, the American political system is organized to prevent a real popul

    Rob , Aug 17, 2018 8:02:56 PM | 40
    As far as I am concerned, every CIA director, living or dead, is/was guilty of heinous crimes and deserves to rot in hell. Yet it is just plain nonsense to believe that Donald Trump can outsmart them...
    NemesisCalling , Aug 17, 2018 8:22:30 PM | 43
    @25 jackrabbit

    Trump is...

    "a deep state asset." How do you know that? It could be just as well that Trump is fighting this group by outsmarting them with the long game, a la Putin. (i.e. mixed signals and not acting too brashly in undoing the cabal)

    "a faux populist." Even if he was a faux populist, which he might exhibit shades of, how does this make him a bad president at this current juncture in US history? Would you accept that a good president could not be a populist? IMO, he appears to be scrambling the cohesive unity and appearance of America's FP and putting the pressure on the seams of NATO and the UN so that they may eventually tear. Whatever your opinion of the UN, one can not argue against its ineffectual weight in ongoing atrocity (Syria, Yemen), but one COULD argue that it has been an agent of or has at least been coopted by the NWO.

    I believe you are proceeding from these two points in your thinking that need to be reevaluated.

    In your prior post @13, you equate selecting Gina Haspel as director of the CIA as further proof of Trump's assured malfeasance. Have you considered that:

    1) she may be ineffectual and so on Trump's leash at the CIA
    2) in her prior years under the shadow of Brennan, her promotions might have been politically-motivated and so it is understandable that a globalist like Brennan would vote in lockstep their approval of Haspel because "GIRL POWER!" .
    3) it might not be as simple as that to say that just because one is brought up in Brennan's CIA and then ascends to its heights that she will do globalist/Brennan bidding as a sleeper-agent in her position.

    Circe , Aug 17, 2018 10:48:00 PM | 62
    I agree with everything expressed here about Brennan but while Trump is getting rid of one war criminal, he's bedding another; oligarch friend Erik Prince aka Blackwater ceo, aka exCIA operative who he wants to put in charge in Afghanistan. Trump could care less of your noble reasons for hating Brennan. Trump is no genius who gives a damn about human rights violations. Trump only cares about number one; HIMSELF.

    So what's the difference between Brennan and Prince? Only the size of their bank account. When Trump does something right as in Brennan's case you can always thank his big fat ego; self-promotion or self-preservation; SELF being the operative word. To compensate for that accidental right move he'll make a collosal dumb move as in North Korea vs Iran as in Brennan vs Erik Prince. I rest my case.

    jadan , Aug 17, 2018 11:15:05 PM | 67
    The enemy of my enemy is also an enemy in this case. It pains me to agree with Trump on any issue. Brennan is a thug. His physiognomy gives him away at a glance. To say he is no match for Trump is not correct. He is no match for the power of the presidency. Trump can't handle this power, either, which is why he is going down for laundering money for Russians and for colluding with them to win the election, which is not to say the Russians rigged the election. Nor is not to say the Russians are enemies, as Obama and the CIA have struggled to establish. This is to say that Trump is impulsive, ignorant, solipsistic, and corrupt to the bone.
    Jen , Aug 18, 2018 12:16:37 AM | 69
    I have heard rumour that while he was CIA Station Chief in Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s, John Brennan converted to Wahhabi Islam. Is anyone able to say if this is true?

    The only sources of information on this rumour are a former FBI counter-terrorism agent John Guandolo and a retired CIA senior official Brad Johnson (who has admitted that he has never heard Brennan say the shahada - the profession of faith, that the only God is Allah and Muhammad is his prophet - but knows people in the CIA who apparently have heard Brennan say the shahada in front of Saudi and US government officials).

    https://www.acunewsdaily.com/2017/06/29/cia-confirms-john-brennan-converted-to-islam/

    Cyril , Aug 18, 2018 1:08:08 AM | 71
    Brennan is one of the most despicable former U.S. officials alive.

    Indeed. It's possible that the misdeeds listed in the article have not begun to measure the man's wickedness.

    I think it's a good time to mention The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred McCoy. (I am not posting a link as the URL is too long.) As the title says, the book is about how deeply the CIA is involved in the global drug trade.

    What are the chances that former CIA Director Brennan is/was one of the gangsters causing the current opioid and heroin epidemic in the U.S.?

    Emily , Aug 18, 2018 6:15:28 AM | 78
    Why would he have a security clearance if he was no longer a member of the government?
    None of them should
    I cannot understand the logic of it all,
    Hillary Clinton for example - she has one I believe.
    Rather bizarre isn't it?
    Just asking.

    [Aug 18, 2018] Sanders behaviour during election is suspect, unless you assume he acted as sheep dog for hillary

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Why didn't Sanders complain about DNC-Hillary collusion (he knew about it well before she captured the nomination - MSM didn't publicize it until after she had won). ..."
    "... Why didn't Sanders make a big deal of Hillary's winning 6 of 6 coin tosses during the Iowa primaries. Character was an issue from the start of the race. Trump would later lambast "crooked Hillary". ..."
    Aug 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    Jackrabbit , Aug 17, 2018 8:59:57 PM | 48

    lysias @41

    There were only two populists in the race: Trump and Sanders. One on Hillary's left (sheep-dogging voters to Hillary) and one on Hillary's right (Trump).

    Why did any of the other 18 republicans turn populist? Why didn't they wait so long to complain about the coverage being provided to Trump?

    Why were Republicans so adamantly against Trump after he won the nomination? Many said that they prefered Hillary - whom they had claimed to hate so much only months before? Answer: Trump had to be an outsider. That's what makes the populist so compelling. He has to be seen as taking on the establishment.

    After such a contentious race, why did Trump quickly say that there would be no prosecution of Hillary? He has proven to be petty and vain yet he was so quick to forgive the Clintons?

    Why did Trump wait so long to fire Comey? It's almost like it was timed for Comey to hand the baton to a special prosecutor.

    <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

    Here's a few more questions (of many many other questions)

    dumbass , Aug 17, 2018 9:41:12 PM | 53

    >> Why did/didn't Sanders

    Good questions. Asking them sequentially leads even a dumbass like me to conclude Sanders is a fraud.

    Unfortunately, most Sanders supporters probably don't remember the issues long enough to reevaluate them collectively. Each issue appears to them during "the news cycle" as some one-off foible -- considered as misdemeanors and then forgotten before the next one occurs and thus never assembled mentally as evidence for a larger felony case.

    [Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Mueller, WE NEED TO FIND SOMETHING... Or this president might appoint a honest AG that looks into our HSBC and 911 whitewash!! ..."
    "... he can't stop digging and will eventually dig his own grave because this is out in the open, prying eyes like Sheryl Atkinson, internet sleuths and many others. ..."
    "... The Witch Hunt, Learn about the enemy, " Nevermind the CFR has this in hand..." https://www.cfr.org/about ~ Smart Cookies Kan! ..."
    "... Mueller's entire probe is to protect and cover up the crimes/FISA abuse of the Obama administration! ..."
    "... What is the premise for all this investigative crap? Where is the proof that Wikileaks had any contact with Russia to begin with? Why hasn't Mueller asked to talk to Julian Assange himself ??? The supposed agent of Russia??? WTF is going on here? What kind of BS investigation would omit to interview the very person at the nexus of the supposed "Russian interference in the 2016 election"? ..."
    "... Why hasn't muller subpoenaed the DNC's server to see how the information was downloaded or uploaded and to whom or by whom? That's the question. ..."
    "... The investigation is all cover for Obama, Brennan, Klapper, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarret, Comey, McCabe, both Ohrs, Stzrok, Liza Page and Mueller himself, plus all their little footsoldiers. ..."
    "... As the author notes if there was any collusion none of this makes sense....all of this is after the fact and these two are nothing but publicity seeking dogs...what a waste of time and space. ..."
    Aug 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    Kan Thu, 08/09/2018 - 22:23 Permalink

    Mueller, WE NEED TO FIND SOMETHING... Or this president might appoint a honest AG that looks into our HSBC and 911 whitewash!!

    Nevermind the CFR has this in hand...

    booboo -> Kan Thu, 08/09/2018 - 22:41 Permalink

    I think one of Mueller's deeply embedded character flaws is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed. Much like the awful dealings with Whitey Bulger, sending men to prison for crimes they did not commit, in federal custody where they could keep them quiet and under the threat of death if they were to talk.

    He did this to protect the corruption surrounding that case, he is Mr. Wolf, sent in to clean up the fucking mess. He has gotten away with this tact of ruthlessness for so long that he can't stop digging and will eventually dig his own grave because this is out in the open, prying eyes like Sheryl Atkinson, internet sleuths and many others.

    This will be his downfall, like Captain Ahab chasing Moby Dick the White whale, caught in the harpoon tethers and wrapped around the great whale as he takes him deep into the abyss.

    BankSurfyMan -> Kan Thu, 08/09/2018 - 22:52 Permalink

    The Witch Hunt, Learn about the enemy, " Nevermind the CFR has this in hand..." https://www.cfr.org/about ~ Smart Cookies Kan!

    lester1 Thu, 08/09/2018 - 22:36 Permalink

    Mueller hasn't even interviewed Don Jr yet. If he were going after Trump that would be a big deal. I tell this to my liberal friends this info and they're like wtf is Mueller even doing?

    Mueller's entire probe is to protect and cover up the crimes/FISA abuse of the Obama administration!

    Bernard_2011 Thu, 08/09/2018 - 23:32 Permalink

    What is the premise for all this investigative crap? Where is the proof that Wikileaks had any contact with Russia to begin with? Why hasn't Mueller asked to talk to Julian Assange himself ??? The supposed agent of Russia??? WTF is going on here? What kind of BS investigation would omit to interview the very person at the nexus of the supposed "Russian interference in the 2016 election"?

    Lord Raglan -> Bernard_2011 Fri, 08/10/2018 - 00:08 Permalink

    Why hasn't muller subpoenaed the DNC's server to see how the information was downloaded or uploaded and to whom or by whom? That's the question.

    The investigation is all cover for Obama, Brennan, Klapper, Susan Rice, Valerie Jarret, Comey, McCabe, both Ohrs, Stzrok, Liza Page and Mueller himself, plus all their little footsoldiers.

    Lord Raglan Fri, 08/10/2018 - 00:05 Permalink

    You wonder what Mueller and his team do with "exculpatory evidence" they discover. It must go in that deep, dark recess where Obama's birth cert and college and law school records go.......

    MuffDiver69 Fri, 08/10/2018 - 00:14 Permalink

    As the author notes if there was any collusion none of this makes sense....all of this is after the fact and these two are nothing but publicity seeking dogs...what a waste of time and space.

    [Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

    Highly recommended!
    This is an interesting analysis shedding some light on how the US intelligence services have gone rogue...
    Notable quotes:
    "... Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence. ..."
    "... the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough. ..."
    "... That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment. ..."
    "... He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail? ..."
    "... The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up." ..."
    "... The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on. ..."
    "... "What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task." ..."
    "... "The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact." ..."
    "... But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts. ..."
    "... Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria. ..."
    "... Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars. ..."
    Jul 28, 2018 | russia-insider.com
    In today's United States, the term "espionage" doesn't get too much use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage, but with regard to Americans' own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term "intelligence." This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you look at things.

    First of all, US "intelligence" is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.

    In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate negotiating future spy swaps.

    In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as "Al Qaeda." There was no such thing before US intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.

    Most recently, British "special services," which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence.

    There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their "secret" lab in Porton Down doesn't work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).

    There is another unwritten, commonsense rule about spying in general: whatever happens, it needs to be kept out of the courts, because the discovery process of any trial would force the prosecution to divulge sources and methods, making them part of the public record. An alternative is to hold secret tribunals, but since these cannot be independently verified to be following due process and rules of evidence, they don't add much value.

    A different standard applies to traitors; here, sending them through the courts is acceptable and serves a high moral purpose, since here the source is the person on trial and the method -- treason -- can be divulged without harm. But this logic does not apply to proper, professional spies who are simply doing their jobs, even if they turn out to be double agents. In fact, when counterintelligence discovers a spy, the professional thing to do is to try to recruit him as a double agent or, failing that, to try to use the spy as a channel for injecting disinformation.

    Americans have been doing their best to break this rule. Recently, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted a dozen Russian operatives working in Russia for hacking into the DNC mail server and sending the emails to Wikileaks. Meanwhile, said server is nowhere to be found (it's been misplaced) while the time stamps on the files that were published on Wikileaks show that they were obtained by copying to a thumb drive rather than sending them over the internet. Thus, this was a leak, not a hack, and couldn't have been done by anyone working remotely from Russia.

    Furthermore, it is an exercise in futility for a US official to indict Russian citizens in Russia. They will never stand trial in a US court because of the following clause in the Russian Constitution: "61.1 A citizen of the Russian Federation may not be deported out of Russia or extradited to another state."

    Mueller may summon a panel of constitutional scholars to interpret this sentence, or he can just read it and weep. Yes, the Americans are doing their best to break the unwritten rule against dragging spies through the courts, but their best is nowhere near good enough.

    That said, there is no reason to believe that the Russian spies couldn't have hacked into the DNC mail server. It was probably running Microsoft Windows, and that operating system has more holes in it than a building in downtown Raqqa, Syria after the Americans got done bombing that city to rubble, lots of civilians included. When questioned about this alleged hacking by Fox News, Putin (who had worked as a spy in his previous career) had trouble keeping a straight face and clearly enjoyed the moment.

    He pointed out that the hacked/leaked emails showed a clear pattern of wrongdoing: DNC officials conspired to steal the electoral victory in the Democratic Primary from Bernie Sanders, and after this information had been leaked they were forced to resign. If the Russian hack did happen, then it was the Russians working to save American democracy from itself. So, where's the gratitude? Where's the love? Oh, and why are the DNC perps not in jail?

    Since there exists an agreement between the US and Russia to cooperate on criminal investigations, Putin offered to question the spies indicted by Mueller. He even offered to have Mueller sit in on the proceedings. But in return he wanted to question US officials who may have aided and abetted a convicted felon by the name of William Browder, who is due to begin serving a nine-year sentence in Russia any time now and who, by the way, donated copious amounts of his ill-gotten money to the Hillary Clinton election campaign.

    In response, the US Senate passed a resolution to forbid Russians from questioning US officials. And instead of issuing a valid request to have the twelve Russian spies interviewed, at least one US official made the startlingly inane request to have them come to the US instead. Again, which part of 61.1 don't they understand?

    The logic of US officials may be hard to follow, but only if we adhere to the traditional definitions of espionage and counterespionage -- "intelligence" in US parlance -- which is to provide validated information for the purpose of making informed decisions on best ways of defending the country. But it all makes perfect sense if we disabuse ourselves of such quaint notions and accept the reality of what we can actually observe: the purpose of US "intelligence" is not to come up with or to work with facts but to simply "make shit up."

    The "intelligence" the US intelligence agencies provide can be anything but; in fact, the stupider it is the better, because its purpose is allow unintelligent people to make unintelligent decisions. In fact, they consider facts harmful -- be they about Syrian chemical weapons, or conspiring to steal the primary from Bernie Sanders, or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden -- because facts require accuracy and rigor while they prefer to dwell in the realm of pure fantasy and whimsy. In this, their actual objective is easily discernible.

    The objective of US intelligence is to suck all remaining wealth out of the US and its allies and pocket as much of it as possible while pretending to defend it from phantom aggressors by squandering nonexistent (borrowed) financial resources on ineffective and overpriced military operations and weapons systems. Where the aggressors are not phantom, they are specially organized for the purpose of having someone to fight: "moderate" terrorists and so on.

    One major advancement in their state of the art has been in moving from real false flag operations, à la 9/11, to fake false flag operations, à la fake East Gouta chemical attack in Syria (since fully discredited). The Russian election meddling story is perhaps the final step in this evolution: no New York skyscrapers or Syrian children were harmed in the process of concocting this fake narrative, and it can be kept alive seemingly forever purely through the furious effort of numerous flapping lips. It is now a pure confidence scam. If you are less then impressed with their invented narratives, then you are a conspiracy theorist or, in the latest revision, a traitor.

    Trump was recently questioned as to whether he trusted US intelligence. He waffled. A light-hearted answer would have been:

    "What sort of idiot are you to ask me such a stupid question? Of course they are lying! They were caught lying more than once, and therefore they can never be trusted again. In order to claim that they are not currently lying, you have to determine when it was that they stopped lying, and that they haven't lied since. And that, based on the information that is available, is an impossible task."

    A more serious, matter-of-fact answer would have been:

    "The US intelligence agencies made an outrageous claim: that I colluded with Russia to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The burden of proof is on them. They are yet to prove their case in a court of law, which is the only place where the matter can legitimately be settled, if it can be settled at all. Until that happens, we must treat their claim as conspiracy theory, not as fact."

    And a hardcore, deadpan answer would have been:

    "The US intelligence services swore an oath to uphold the US Constitution, according to which I am their Commander in Chief. They report to me, not I to them. They must be loyal to me, not I to them. If they are disloyal to me, then that is sufficient reason for their dismissal."

    But no such reality-based, down-to-earth dialogue seems possible. All that we hear are fake answers to fake questions, and the outcome is a series of faulty decisions. Based on fake intelligence, the US has spent almost all of this century embroiled in very expensive and ultimately futile conflicts.

    Thanks to their efforts, Iran, Iraq and Syria have now formed a continuous crescent of religiously and geopolitically aligned states friendly toward Russia while in Afghanistan the Taliban is resurgent and battling ISIS -- an organization that came together thanks to American efforts in Iraq and Syria.

    The total cost of wars so far this century for the US is reported to be $4,575,610,429,593. Divided by the 138,313,155 Americans who file tax returns (whether they actually pay any tax is too subtle a question), it works out to just over $33,000 per taxpayer. If you pay taxes in the US, that's your bill so far for the various US intelligence "oopsies."

    The 16 US intelligence agencies have a combined budget of $66.8 billion, and that seems like a lot until you realize how supremely efficient they are: their "mistakes" have cost the country close to 70 times their budget. At a staffing level of over 200,000 employees, each of them has cost the US taxpayer close to $23 million, on average. That number is totally out of the ballpark! The energy sector has the highest earnings per employee, at around $1.8 million per. Valero Energy stands out at $7.6 million per. At $23 million per, the US intelligence community has been doing three times better than Valero. Hats off! This makes the US intelligence community by far the best, most efficient collapse driver imaginable.

    There are two possible hypotheses for why this is so.

    First, we might venture to guess that these 200,000 people are grossly incompetent and that the fiascos they precipitate are accidental. But it is hard to imagine a situation where grossly incompetent people nevertheless manage to funnel $23 million apiece, on average, toward an assortment of futile undertakings of their choosing. It is even harder to imagine that such incompetents would be allowed to blunder along decade after decade without being called out for their mistakes.

    Another hypothesis, and a far more plausible one, is that the US intelligence community has been doing a wonderful job of bankrupting the country and driving it toward financial, economic and political collapse by forcing it to engage in an endless series of expensive and futile conflicts -- the largest single continuous act of grand larceny the world has ever known. How that can possibly be an intelligent thing to do to your own country, for any conceivable definition of "intelligence," I will leave for you to work out for yourself. While you are at it, you might also want to come up with an improved definition of "treason": something better than "a skeptical attitude toward preposterous, unproven claims made by those known to be perpetual liars."

    [Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou

    Highly recommended!
    Marxism provides one of the best analysis of capitalism; problems start when Marxists propose alternatives.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Such demand-compression occurs above all through the imposition of an income deflation on the petty producers, and on the working population in general, in the Third World. This was done in the colonial period through two means: one, "deindustrialization" or the displacement of local craft production by imports of manufactures from the capitalist sector; and two, the "drain of surplus" where a part of the taxes extracted from petty producers was simply taken away in the form of exported goods without any quid pro quo ..."
    "... I mean by the term "imperialism" the arrangement that the capitalist system sets up for imposing income deflation on the working population of the Third World for countering the threat of inflation that would otherwise erode the value of money in the metropolis and make the system unviable. "Imperialism" in this sense characterizes both the colonial and the contemporary periods. ..."
    "... The fact that the diffusion of capitalism to the Third World has proceeded by leaps and bounds of late, with its domestic corporate-financial oligarchy getting integrated into globalized finance capital, and the fact that workers in the metropolis have also been facing an income squeeze under globalization, are important new developments; but they do not negate the basic tendency of the system to impose income deflation upon the working population of the Third World, a tendency that remains at the very core of the system. ..."
    "... any state activism, other than for promoting its own exclusive and direct interest, is anathema for finance capital, which is why, not surprisingly, "sound finance" and "fiscal responsibility" are back in vogue today, when finance capital, now globalized, is in ascendancy. Imperialism is thus a specifically capitalist way of obtaining the commodities it requires for itself, but which are produced outside its own domain. ..."
    "... dirigiste regimes ..."
    "... With the reassertion of the dominance of finance, in the guise now of an international ..."
    "... Contemporary imperialism therefore is the imperialism of international finance capital which is served by nation-states (for any nation-state that defies the will of international finance capital runs the risk of capital flight from, and hence the insolvency of, its economy). The US, being the leading capitalist state, plays the leading role in promoting and protecting the interests of international finance capital. But talking about a specific US imperialism, or a German or British or French imperialism obscures this basic fact. ..."
    "... Indeed, a good deal of discussion about whether the world is heading toward multi-polarity or the persistence of US dominance misses the point that the chief actor in today's world is international or globalized finance capital, and not US or German or British finance capital. ..."
    "... US military intervention all over the world, in order to acquire a proper meaning has to be located within the broader setting of the imperialism of international finance capital. ..."
    "... absolute immiserization ..."
    Aug 13, 2018 | truthout.org

    C.J. Polychroniou: How do you define imperialism and what imperialist tendencies do you detect as inherent in the brutal expansion of the logic of capitalism in the neoliberal global era?

    Prabhat Patnaik: The capitalist sector of the world, which began by being located, and continues largely to be located, in the temperate region, requires as its raw materials and means of consumption a whole range of primary commodities which are not available or producible, either at all or in adequate quantities, within its own borders. These commodities have to be obtained from the tropical and sub-tropical region within which almost the whole of the Third World is located; and the bulk of them (leaving aside minerals) are produced by a set of petty producers (peasants). What is more, they are subject to "increasing supply price," in the sense that as demand for them increases in the capitalist sector, larger quantities of them can be obtained, if at all, only at higher prices, thanks to the fixed size of the tropical land mass.

    This means an ex ante tendency toward accelerating inflation as capital accumulation proceeds, undermining the value of money under capitalism and hence the viability of the system as a whole. To prevent this, the system requires that with an increase in demand from the capitalist sector, as capital accumulation proceeds, there must be a compression of demand elsewhere for these commodities, so that the net demand does not increase, and increasing supply price does not get a chance to manifest itself at all.

    Such demand-compression occurs above all through the imposition of an income deflation on the petty producers, and on the working population in general, in the Third World. This was done in the colonial period through two means: one, "deindustrialization" or the displacement of local craft production by imports of manufactures from the capitalist sector; and two, the "drain of surplus" where a part of the taxes extracted from petty producers was simply taken away in the form of exported goods without any quid pro quo . The income of the working population of the Third World, and hence its demand, was thus kept down; and metropolitan capitalism's demand for such commodities was met without any inflationary threat to the value of money. Exactly a similar process of income deflation is imposed now upon the working population of the Third World by the neoliberal policies of globalization.

    I mean by the term "imperialism" the arrangement that the capitalist system sets up for imposing income deflation on the working population of the Third World for countering the threat of inflation that would otherwise erode the value of money in the metropolis and make the system unviable. "Imperialism" in this sense characterizes both the colonial and the contemporary periods.

    We recognize the need for a reserve army of labor to ward off the threat to the value of money arising from wage demands of workers. Ironically, however, we do not recognize the parallel and even more pressing need of the system (owing to increasing supply price) for the imposition of income deflation on the working population of the Third World for warding off a similar threat.

    The fact that the diffusion of capitalism to the Third World has proceeded by leaps and bounds of late, with its domestic corporate-financial oligarchy getting integrated into globalized finance capital, and the fact that workers in the metropolis have also been facing an income squeeze under globalization, are important new developments; but they do not negate the basic tendency of the system to impose income deflation upon the working population of the Third World, a tendency that remains at the very core of the system.

    Those who argue that imperialism is no longer a relevant analytic construct point to the multifaceted aspects of today's global economic exchanges and to a highly complex process involved in the distribution of value which, simply put, cannot be reduced to imperialism. How do you respond to this line of thinking?

    Capitalism today is of course much more complex, with an enormous financial superstructure. But that paradoxically makes inflation even more threatening. The value of this vast array of financial assets would collapse in the event of inflation, bringing down this superstructure, which incidentally is the reason for the current policy obsession with "inflation targeting." This makes the imperialist arrangement even more essential. The more complex capitalism becomes, the more it needs its basic simple props.

    I should clarify here that if "land-augmenting" measures [such as irrigation, high-yielding seeds and better production practices] could be introduced in the Third World, then, notwithstanding the physical fixity of the tropical land mass, the threat of increasing supply price -- and with it, [the threat] of inflation -- could be warded off without any income deflation. Indeed, on the contrary, the working population of the Third World would be better off through such measures. But these measures require state support and state expenditure, a fact that Marx had recognized long ago. But any state activism, other than for promoting its own exclusive and direct interest, is anathema for finance capital, which is why, not surprisingly, "sound finance" and "fiscal responsibility" are back in vogue today, when finance capital, now globalized, is in ascendancy. Imperialism is thus a specifically capitalist way of obtaining the commodities it requires for itself, but which are produced outside its own domain.

    The post-decolonization dirigiste regimes [regimes directed by a central authority] in the Third World had actually undertaken land-augmentation measures. Because of this, even as exports of commodities to the metropolis had risen to sustain the biggest boom ever witnessed in the history of capitalism, per capita food grain availability had also increased in those countries. But I see that period as a period of retreat of metropolitan capitalism, enforced by the wound inflicted upon it by the Second World War. With the reassertion of the dominance of finance, in the guise now of an international finance capital, the Third World states have withdrawn from supporting petty producers, a process of income deflation is in full swing, and the imperialist arrangement is back in place, because of which we can see once more a tendency toward a secular decline in per capita food grain availability in the Third World as in the colonial period.

    There is a third way -- apart from a greater obsession with inflation aversion and a yoking of Third World states to promoting the interests of globalized finance rather than defending domestic petty producers -- in which contemporary capitalism strengthens the imperialist arrangement. It may be thought that the value of imports of Third World commodities into the capitalist metropolis is so small that we are exaggerating the inflation threat from that source to metropolitan currencies. This smallness itself, of course, is an expression of an acutely exploitative relationship. In addition, however, the threat to the Third World currencies themselves from a rise in the prices of these commodities becomes acute in a regime of free cross-border financial flows as now, which threatens the entire world trade and payments system and hence makes income deflation particularly urgent. Hence the need for the imperialist arrangement becomes even more acute.

    Not long ago, even liberals like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times were arguing that "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas" (that is, the US Air Force). Surely, this is a crude version of imperialism, but what about today's US imperialism? Isn't it still alive and kicking?

    The world that Lenin had written about consisted of nation-based, nation-state-supported financial oligarchies engaged in intense inter-imperialist rivalry for repartitioning the world through wars. When [Marxist theorist] Karl Kautsky had suggested the possibility of a truce among rival powers for a peaceful division of the world, Lenin had pointed to the fact that the phenomenon of uneven development under capitalism would necessarily subvert any such specific truce. The world we have today is characterized by the hegemony of international finance capital which is interested in preventing any partitioning of the world, so that it can move around freely across the globe.

    Contemporary imperialism therefore is the imperialism of international finance capital which is served by nation-states (for any nation-state that defies the will of international finance capital runs the risk of capital flight from, and hence the insolvency of, its economy). The US, being the leading capitalist state, plays the leading role in promoting and protecting the interests of international finance capital. But talking about a specific US imperialism, or a German or British or French imperialism obscures this basic fact.

    Indeed, a good deal of discussion about whether the world is heading toward multi-polarity or the persistence of US dominance misses the point that the chief actor in today's world is international or globalized finance capital, and not US or German or British finance capital. So, the concept of imperialism that [Utsa Patnaik and I] are talking about belongs to a different terrain of discourse from the concept of US imperialism per se . The latter, though it is, of course, empirically visible because of US military intervention all over the world, in order to acquire a proper meaning has to be located within the broader setting of the imperialism of international finance capital.

    Some incidentally have seen the muting of inter-imperialist rivalry in today's world as a vindication of Kautsky's position over that of Lenin. This, however, is incorrect, since both of them were talking about a world of national finance capitals which contemporary capitalism has gone beyond.

    ... ... ...

    One final question: How should radical movements and organizations, in both the core and the periphery of the world capitalist economy, be organizing to combat today's imperialism?

    Obviously, the issue of imperialism is important not for scholastic reasons, but because of the praxis that a recognition of its role engenders. From what I have been arguing, it is clear that since globalization involves income deflation for the peasantry and petty producers, and since their absorption into the ranks of the active army of labor under capitalism does not occur because of the paucity of jobs that are created even when rates of output growth are high, there is a tendency toward an absolute immiserization of the working population. For the petty producers, this tendency operates directly; and for others, it operates through the driving down of the "reservation wage" owing to the impoverishment of petty producers.

    Such immiserization is manifest above all in the decline in per capita food grain absorption, both directly and indirectly (the latter via processed foods and feed grains). An improvement in the conditions of living of the working population of the Third World then requires a delinking from globalization (mainly through capital controls, and also trade controls to the requisite extent) by an alternative state, based on a worker-peasant alliance, that pursues a different trajectory of development. Such a trajectory would emphasize peasant-agriculture-led growth, land redistribution (so as to limit the extent of differentiation within the peasantry) and the formation of voluntary cooperatives and collectives for carrying forward land-augmentation measures, and even undertaking value-addition activities, including industrialization.

    Small Third World countries would no doubt find it difficult to adopt such a program because of their limited resource base and narrow home market. But they will have to come together with other small countries to constitute larger, more viable units. But the basic point is that the question of "making globalization work" or "having globalization with a human face" simply does not arise.

    The problem with this praxis is that it is not only the bourgeoisie in the Third World countries, but even sections of the middle-class professionals who have been beneficiaries of globalization, who would oppose any such delinking. But the world capitalist crisis, which is a consequence of this finance-capital-led globalization itself, is causing disaffection among these middle-class beneficiaries. They, too, would now be more willing to support an alternative trajectory of development that breaks out of the straitjacket imposed by imperialism.

    [Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

    Highly recommended!
    The FAKE NEWS media (failing @ nytimes , @ NBCNews , @ ABC , @ CBS , @ CNN ) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! ~ Donald Trump
    On Thursday, Mr. Trump expressed his distaste for journalists in more populist terms, saying, "much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests."
    "The public doesn't believe you people anymore," Mr. Trump added. "Now, maybe I had something to do with that. I don't know. But they don't believe you."
    Notable quotes:
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC ..."
    Aug 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

    President Trump has denounced and exposed the repeated deceits and ongoing fabrications of the mass media. Never before has a President so forcefully identified the lies of the leading print and TV outlets. The NY Times , Washington Post , the Financial Times, NBC, CNN, ABC and CBS have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the larger public. They have lost legitimacy and trust. Where progressives have failed, a war monger billionaire has accomplished, speaking a truth to serve many injustices.

    [Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

    Highly recommended!
    Aug 08, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    Here are ten bombshell revelations and fascinating new details to lately come out of both Sy Hersh's new book, Reporter , as well as interviews he's given since publication...

    1) On a leaked Bush-era intelligence memo outlining the neocon plan to remake the Middle East

    (Note: though previously alluded to only anecdotally by General Wesley Clark in his memoir and in a 2007 speech , the below passage from Seymour Hersh is to our knowledge the first time this highly classified memo has been quoted . Hersh's account appears to corroborate now retired Gen. Clark's assertion that days after 9/11 a classified memo outlining plans to foster regime change in "7 countries in 5 years" was being circulated among intelligence officials.)

    From Reporter: A Memoir pg. 306 -- A few months after the invasion of Iraq, during an interview overseas with a general who was director of a foreign intelligence service, I was provided with a copy of a Republican neocon plan for American dominance in the Middle East. The general was an American ally, but one who was very rattled by the Bush/Cheney aggression. I was told that the document leaked to me initially had been obtained by someone in the local CIA station. There was reason to be rattled: The document declared that the war to reshape the Middle East had to begin "with the assault on Iraq. The fundamental reason for this... is that the war will start making the U.S. the hegemon of the Middle East. The correlative reason is to make the region feel in its bones, as it were, the seriousness of American intent and determination." Victory in Iraq would lead to an ultimatum to Damascus, the "defanging" of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, and other anti-Israeli groups. America's enemies must understand that "they are fighting for their life: Pax Americana is on its way, which implies their annihilation." I and the foreign general agreed that America's neocons were a menace to civilization.

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

    * * *

    2) On early regime change plans in Syria

    From Reporter: A Memoir pages 306-307 -- Donald Rumsfeld was also infected with neocon fantasy. Turkey had refused to permit America's Fourth Division to join the attack of Iraq from its territory, and the division, with its twenty-five thousand men and women, did not arrive in force inside Iraq until mid-April, when the initial fighting was essentially over. I learned then that Rumsfeld had asked the American military command in Stuttgart, Germany, which had responsibility for monitoring Europe, including Syria and Lebanon, to begin drawing up an operational plan for an invasion of Syria. A young general assigned to the task refused to do so, thereby winning applause from my friends on the inside and risking his career. The plan was seen by those I knew as especially bizarre because Bashar Assad, the ruler of secular Syria, had responded to 9/11 by sharing with the CIA hundreds of his country's most sensitive intelligence files on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamburg, where much of the planning for 9/11 was carried out... Rumsfeld eventually came to his senses and back down, I was told...

    3) On the Neocon deep state which seized power after 9/11

    From Reporter: A Memoir pages 305-306 -- I began to comprehend that eight or nine neoconservatives who were political outsiders in the Clinton years had essentially overthrown the government of the United States -- with ease . It was stunning to realize how fragile our Constitution was. The intellectual leaders of that group -- Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle -- had not hidden their ideology and their belief in the power of the executive but depicted themselves in public with a great calmness and a self-assurance that masked their radicalism . I had spent many hours after 9/11 in conversations with Perle that, luckily for me, helped me understand what was coming. (Perle and I had been chatting about policy since the early 1980s, but he broke off relations in 1993 over an article I did for The New Yorker linking him, a fervent supporter of Israel, to a series of meetings with Saudi businessmen in an attempt to land a multibillion-dollar contract from Saudi Arabia . Perle responded by publicly threatening to sue me and characterizing me as a newspaper terrorist. He did not sue.

    Meanwhile, Cheney had emerged as a leader of the neocon pack. From 9/11 on he did all he could to undermine congressional oversight. I learned a great deal from the inside about his primacy in the White House , but once again I was limited in what I would write for fear of betraying my sources...

    I came to understand that Cheney's goal was to run his most important military and intelligence operations with as little congressional knowledge, and interference, as possible. I was fascinating and important to learn what I did about Cheney's constant accumulation of power and authority as vice president , but it was impossible to even begin to verify the information without running the risk that Cheney would learn of my questioning and have a good idea from whom I was getting the information.

    4) On Russian meddling in the US election

    From the recent Independent interview based on his autobiography -- Hersh has vociferously strong opinions on the subject and smells a rat. He states that there is "a great deal of animosity towards Russia. All of that stuff about Russia hacking the election appears to be preposterous." He has been researching the subject but is not ready to go public yet.

    Hersh quips that the last time he heard the US defense establishment have high confidence, it was regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He points out that the NSA only has moderate confidence in Russian hacking. It is a point that has been made before; there has been no national intelligence estimate in which all 17 US intelligence agencies would have to sign off. "When the intel community wants to say something they say it High confidence effectively means that they don't know."

    5) On the Novichok poisoning

    From the recent Independent interview -- Hersh is also on the record as stating that the official version of the Skripal poisoning does not stand up to scrutiny. He tells me: "The story of novichok poisoning has not held up very well. He [Skripal] was most likely talking to British intelligence services about Russian organised crime." The unfortunate turn of events with the contamination of other victims is suggestive, according to Hersh, of organised crime elements rather than state-sponsored actions –though this files in the face of the UK government's position.

    Hersh modestly points out that these are just his opinions. Opinions or not, he is scathing on Obama – "a trimmer articulate [but] far from a radical a middleman". During his Goldsmiths talk, he remarks that liberal critics underestimate Trump at their peril.

    He ends the Goldsmiths talk with an anecdote about having lunch with his sources in the wake of 9/11 . He vents his anger at the agencies for not sharing information. One of his CIA sources fires back: "Sy you still don't get it after all these years – the FBI catches bank robbers, the CIA robs banks." It is a delicious, if cryptic aphorism.

    * * *

    6) On the Bush-era 'Redirection' policy of arming Sunni radicals to counter Shia Iran, which in a 2007 New Yorker article Hersh accurately predicted would set off war in Syria

    From the Independent interview : [Hersh] tells me it is "amazing how many times that story has been reprinted" . I ask about his argument that US policy was designed to neutralize the Shia sphere extending from Iran to Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon and hence redraw the Sykes-Picot boundaries for the 21st century.

    He goes on to say that Bush and Cheney "had it in for Iran", although he denies the idea that Iran was heavily involved in Iraq: "They were providing intel, collecting intel The US did many cross-border hunts to kill ops [with] much more aggression than Iran"...

    He believes that the Trump administration has no memory of this approach. I'm sure though that the military-industrial complex has a longer memory...

    I press him on the RAND and Stratfor reports including one authored by Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz in which they envisage deliberate ethno-sectarian partitioning of Iraq . Hersh ruefully states that: "The day after 9/11 we should have gone to Russia. We did the one thing that George Kennan warned us never to do – to expand NATO too far."

    * * *

    7) On the official 9/11 narrative

    From the Independent interview : We end up ruminating about 9/11, perhaps because it is another narrative ripe for deconstruction by sceptics. Polling shows that a significant proportion of the American public believes there is more to the truth. These doubts have been reinforced by the declassification of the suppressed 28 pages of the 9/11 commission report last year undermining the version that a group of terrorists acting independently managed to pull off the attacks. The implication is that they may well have been state-sponsored with the Saudis potentially involved.

    Hersh tells me: "I don't necessarily buy the story that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. We really don't have an ending to the story. I've known people in the [intelligence] community. We don't know anything empirical about who did what" . He continues: "The guy was living in a cave. He really didn't know much English. He was pretty bright and he had a lot of hatred for the US. We respond by attacking the Taliban. Eighteen years later How's it going guys?"

    8) On the media and the morality of the powerful

    From a recent The Intercept interview and book review -- If Hersh were a superhero, this would be his origin story. Two hundred and seventy-four pages after the Chicago anecdote, he describes his coverage of a massive slaughter of Iraqi troops and civilians by the U.S. in 1991 after a ceasefire had ended the Persian Gulf War. America's indifference to this massacre was, Hersh writes, "a reminder of the Vietnam War's MGR, for Mere Gook Rule: If it's a murdered or raped gook, there is no crime." It was also, he adds, a reminder of something else: "I had learned a domestic version of that rule decades earlier" in Chicago. "Reporter" demonstrates that Hersh has derived three simple lessons from that rule:

    1. The powerful prey mercilessly upon the powerless, up to and including mass murder.
    2. The powerful lie constantly about their predations.
    3. The natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with it.

    * * *

    ... ... ...

    [Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media. ..."
    Aug 05, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com
    paul malfara , a day ago
    I posted this one to my facebook page three or four days ago. It's brilliant. I have a few comments. First, I disagree with the analysis given by the fellow from the Duran in the introduction, something along the lines of "even Anderson Cooper was smirking because Cohen was demolishing Boot so badly".

    If you pay attention to the questions and statements, you find that Cooper is equally as unhinged as Boot is, first hammering on the point that nobody knows what was discussed in the meeting, then after Cohen rattles off a list, Cooper shifts to the "you're believing Vladimir Putin on this" tactic, a nail that Cohen wisely smashes with a hammering statement, "I don't want to shock you, but I believe Vladimir Putin on several things."

    Cooper continues to insist that the content of the meeting is unknown and unconfirmed, regardless of what Putin and Trump say. The sheer hubris of journalists today is unprecedented and outrageous.

    I do admit that Cooper shuts up after being schooled by Cohen a second and third time and after Boot makes the mistake of calling Cohen an apologist for Putin and Russia. This leads me to a second point.

    I'm somewhat puzzled why Trump and his people, when referring to the "fake news" and answering questions from hostile journalists, especially about the idea that the media are "enemies of the American people", fail to bring up the fact that the "fake news" and the "enemies of the people" are not the journalists themselves, but rather the management and ownership of the media.

    \This would accomplish two important things, both necessary, in my opinion. First, it would put the front line journalists into their correct place, telling them that they are really nothing but mouthpieces, and we know that the real decisions on content are not made by them.

    What a blow to their narcisstic self-esteem that would be!

    Second, it would give the American people more information on how their consent is engineered, how the media has owners who have an agenda, and that agenda is not related to improving the lives of the American people, or even keeping them informed with accurate information.

    [Aug 05, 2018] How identity politics makes the Left lose its collective identity by Tomasz Pierscionek

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... The identity politics phenomenon sweeping across the Western world is a divide and conquer strategy that prevents the emergence of a genuine resistance to the elites. ..."
    "... Each subgroup, increasingly alienated from all others, focuses on the shared identity and unique experiences of its members and prioritises its own empowerment. Anyone outside this subgroup is demoted to the rank of ally, at best. ..."
    "... Precious time is spent fighting against those deemed less oppressed and telling them to 'check their privilege' as the ever-changing pecking order of the 'Oppression Olympics' plays out. The rules to this sport are as fluid as the identities taking part. One of the latest dilemmas affecting the identity politics movement is the issue of whether men transitioning to women deserve recognition and acceptance or 'whether trans women aren't women and are apparently " raping ..."
    "... It is much easier to 'struggle' against an equally or slightly less oppressed group than to take the time and effort to unite with them against the common enemy - capitalism. ..."
    "... There is a carefully crafted misconception that identity politics derives from Marxist thought and the meaningless phrase 'cultural Marxism', which has more to do with liberal culture than Marxism, is used to sell this line of thinking. Not only does identity politics have nothing in common with Marxism, socialism or any other strand of traditional left-wing thought, it is anathema to the very concept. ..."
    "... 'An injury to one is an injury to all' has been replaced with something like 'An injury to me is all that matters'. No socialist country, whether in practice or in name only, promoted identity politics. Neither the African and Asian nations that liberated themselves from colonialist oppression nor the USSR and Eastern Bloc states nor the left-wing movements that sprung up across Latin America in the early 21st century had any time to play identity politics. ..."
    "... The idea that identity politics is part of traditional left-wing thought is promoted by the right who seek to demonise left wing-movements, liberals who seek to infiltrate, backstab and destroy said left-wing movements, and misguided young radicals who know nothing about political theory and have neither the patience nor discipline to learn. The last group seek a cheap thrill that makes them feel as if they have shaken the foundations of the establishment when in reality they strengthen it. ..."
    "... Identity politics is typically a modern middle-class led phenomenon that helps those in charge keep the masses divided and distracted. ..."
    "... Think your friends would be interested? Share this story! ..."
    "... Tomasz Pierscionek is a doctor specialising in psychiatry. He was previously on the board of the charity Medact, is editor of the London Progressive Journal and has appeared as a guest on RT's Sputnik and Al-Mayadeen's Kalima Horra. ..."
    Aug 05, 2018 | www.rt.com
    The identity politics phenomenon sweeping across the Western world is a divide and conquer strategy that prevents the emergence of a genuine resistance to the elites. A core principle of socialism is the idea of an overarching supra-national solidarity that unites the international working class and overrides any factor that might divide it, such as nation, race, or gender. Workers of all nations are partners, having equal worth and responsibility in a struggle against those who profit from their brain and muscle.

    Capitalism, especially in its most evolved, exploitative and heartless form - imperialism - has wronged certain groups of people more than others. Colonial empires tended to reserve their greatest brutality for subjugated peoples whilst the working class of these imperialist nations fared better in comparison, being closer to the crumbs that fell from the table of empire. The international class struggle aims to liberate all people everywhere from the drudgery of capitalism regardless of their past or present degree of oppression. The phrase 'an injury to one is an injury to all' encapsulates this mindset and conflicts with the idea of prioritising the interests of one faction of the working class over the entire collective.

    Since the latter part of the 20th century, a liberally-inspired tendency has taken root amongst the Left (in the West at least) that encourages departure from a single identity based on class in favour of multiple identities based upon one's gender, sexuality, race or any other dividing factor. Each subgroup, increasingly alienated from all others, focuses on the shared identity and unique experiences of its members and prioritises its own empowerment. Anyone outside this subgroup is demoted to the rank of ally, at best.

    At the time of writing there are apparently over 70 different gender options in the West, not to mention numerous sexualities - the traditional LGBT acronym has thus far grown to LGBTQQIP2SAA . Adding race to the mix results in an even greater number of possible permutations or identities. Each subgroup has its own ideology. Precious time is spent fighting against those deemed less oppressed and telling them to 'check their privilege' as the ever-changing pecking order of the 'Oppression Olympics' plays out. The rules to this sport are as fluid as the identities taking part. One of the latest dilemmas affecting the identity politics movement is the issue of whether men transitioning to women deserve recognition and acceptance or 'whether trans women aren't women and are apparently " raping " lesbians'.

    The ideology of identity politics asserts that the straight white male is at the apex of the privilege pyramid, responsible for the oppression of all other groups. His original sin condemns him to everlasting shame. While it is true that straight white men (as a group) have faced less obstacles than females, non-straight men or ethnic minorities, the majority of straight white men, past and present, also struggle to survive from paycheck to paycheck and are not personally involved in the oppression of any other group. While most of the world's wealthiest individuals are Caucasian males, millions of white men exist who are both poor and powerless. The idea of 'whiteness' is itself an ambiguous concept involving racial profiling. For example, the Irish, Slavs and Ashkenazi Jews may look white yet have suffered more than their fair share of famines, occupations and genocides throughout the centuries. The idea of tying an individual's privilege to their appearance is itself a form of racism dreamed up by woolly minded, liberal (some might say privileged) 'intellectuals' who would be superfluous in any socialist society.

    Is the middle-class ethnic minority lesbian living in Western Europe more oppressed than the whitish looking Syrian residing under ISIS occupation? Is the British white working class male really more privileged than a middle class woman from the same society? Stereotyping based on race, gender or any other factor only leads to alienation and animosity. How can there be unity amongst the Left if we are only loyal to ourselves and those most like us? Some 'white' men who feel the Left has nothing to offer them have decided to play the identity politics game in their search of salvation and have drifted towards supporting Trump (a billionaire with whom they have nothing in common) or far-right movements, resulting in further alienation, animosity and powerlessness which in turn only strengthens the position of the top 1%. People around the world are more divided by class than any other factor.

    It is much easier to 'struggle' against an equally or slightly less oppressed group than to take the time and effort to unite with them against the common enemy - capitalism. Fighting oppression through identity politics is at best a lazy, perverse and fetishistic form of the class struggle led by mostly liberal, middle class and tertiary-educated activists who understand little of left-wing political theory. At worst it is yet another tool used by the top 1% to divide the other 99% into 99 or 999 different competing groups who are too preoccupied with fighting their own little corner to challenge the status quo. It is ironic that one of the major donors to the faux-left identity politics movement is the privileged white cisgender male billionaire George Soros , whose NGOs helped orchestrate the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine that gave way to the emergence of far right and neo-nazi movements: the kind of people who believe in racial superiority and do not look kindly on diversity.

    There is a carefully crafted misconception that identity politics derives from Marxist thought and the meaningless phrase 'cultural Marxism', which has more to do with liberal culture than Marxism, is used to sell this line of thinking. Not only does identity politics have nothing in common with Marxism, socialism or any other strand of traditional left-wing thought, it is anathema to the very concept.

    'An injury to one is an injury to all' has been replaced with something like 'An injury to me is all that matters'. No socialist country, whether in practice or in name only, promoted identity politics. Neither the African and Asian nations that liberated themselves from colonialist oppression nor the USSR and Eastern Bloc states nor the left-wing movements that sprung up across Latin America in the early 21st century had any time to play identity politics.

    The idea that identity politics is part of traditional left-wing thought is promoted by the right who seek to demonise left wing-movements, liberals who seek to infiltrate, backstab and destroy said left-wing movements, and misguided young radicals who know nothing about political theory and have neither the patience nor discipline to learn. The last group seek a cheap thrill that makes them feel as if they have shaken the foundations of the establishment when in reality they strengthen it.

    Identity politics is typically a modern middle-class led phenomenon that helps those in charge keep the masses divided and distracted. In the West you are free to choose any gender or sexuality, transition between these at whim, or perhaps create your own, but you are not allowed to question the foundations of capitalism or liberalism. Identity politics is the new opiate of the masses and prevents organised resistance against the system. Segments of the Western Left even believe such aforementioned 'freedoms' are a bellwether of progress and an indicator of its cultural superiority, one that warrants export abroad be it softly via NGOs or more bluntly through colour revolutions and regime change.

    Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

    Tomasz Pierscionek is a doctor specialising in psychiatry. He was previously on the board of the charity Medact, is editor of the London Progressive Journal and has appeared as a guest on RT's Sputnik and Al-Mayadeen's Kalima Horra.

    The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. Read more

    [Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

    Highly recommended!
    Jul 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

    Nik , July 28, 2018 at 9:22 am

    Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?" http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/07/what-are-the-democrats-hiding-by-publius-tacitus.html

    For several years, a family of foreign nationals (and not only Wassermannn-Schultz) has been surfing the congressional computers while having no security clearance.

    Then there was a criminal negligence by H. Clinton who made her emails, filled with the highest-level classified information, available to Chinese (not the Russians). http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2018/07/httpstruepunditcomfbi-lisa-page-dimes-out-top-fbi-officials-during-classified-house-testimony-bureau-bos.html

    Both Debbie and Hillary should be in federal prison already. Clinton used to be fond of droning Assange for divulging the criminal and illegal activities of the state. What Debbie and Hillary did has been much more dangerous to the US national security.

    [Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Well, it comes down to the myths we've been sold. Myths that are ingrained in our social programming from birth, deeply entrenched, like an impacted wisdom tooth. These myths are accepted and basically never questioned. ..."
    "... Our media outlets are funded by weapons contractors, big pharma, big banks, big oil and big, fat hard-on pills. (Sorry to go hard on hard-on pills, but we can't get anything resembling hard news because it's funded by dicks.) The corporate media's jobs are to rally for war, cheer for Wall Street and froth at the mouth for consumerism. It's their mission to actually fortify belief in the myths I'm telling you about right now. Anybody who steps outside that paradigm is treated like they're standing on a playground wearing nothing but a trench coat. ..."
    "... The criminal justice system has become a weapon wielded by the corporate state. This is how bankers can foreclose on millions of homes illegally and see no jail time, but activists often serve jail time for nonviolent civil disobedience. Chris Hedges recently noted , "The most basic constitutional rights have been erased for many. Our judicial system, as Ralph Nader has pointed out, has legalized secret law, secret courts, secret evidence, secret budgets and secret prisons in the name of national security." ..."
    "... This myth (Buying will make you happy) is put forward mainly by the floods of advertising we take in but also by our social engineering. Most of us feel a tenacious emptiness, an alienation deep down behind our surface emotions (for a while I thought it was gas). That uneasiness is because most of us are flushing away our lives at jobs we hate before going home to seclusion boxes called houses or apartments. We then flip on the TV to watch reality shows about people who have it worse than we do (which we all find hilarious). ..."
    "... According to Deloitte's Shift Index survey : "80% of people are dissatisfied with their jobs" and "[t]he average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime." That's about one-seventh of your life -- and most of it is during your most productive years. ..."
    "... Try maintaining your privacy for a week without a single email, web search or location data set collected by the NSA and the telecoms. ..."
    Jul 27, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    Authored by Lee Camp via TruthDig.com,

    Our society should've collapsed by now. You know that, right?

    No society should function with this level of inequality (with the possible exception of one of those prison planets in a "Star Wars" movie). Sixty-three percent of Americans can't afford a $500 emergency . Yet Amazon head Jeff Bezos is now worth a record $141 billion . He could literally end world hunger for multiple years and still have more money left over than he could ever spend on himself.

    Worldwide, one in 10 people only make $2 a day. Do you know how long it would take one of those people to make the same amount as Jeff Bezos has? 193 million years . (If they only buy single-ply toilet paper.) Put simply, you cannot comprehend the level of inequality in our current world or even just our nation.

    So shouldn't there be riots in the streets every day? Shouldn't it all be collapsing? Look outside. The streets aren't on fire. No one is running naked and screaming (usually). Does it look like everyone's going to work at gunpoint? No. We're all choosing to continue on like this.

    Why?

    Well, it comes down to the myths we've been sold. Myths that are ingrained in our social programming from birth, deeply entrenched, like an impacted wisdom tooth. These myths are accepted and basically never questioned.

    I'm going to cover eight of them. There are more than eight. There are probably hundreds. But I'm going to cover eight because (A) no one reads a column titled "Hundreds of Myths of American Society," (B) these are the most important ones and (C) we all have other shit to do.

    Myth No. 8 -- We have a democracy.

    If you think we still have a democracy or a democratic republic, ask yourself this: When was the last time Congress did something that the people of America supported that did not align with corporate interests? You probably can't do it. It's like trying to think of something that rhymes with "orange." You feel like an answer exists but then slowly realize it doesn't. Even the Carter Center and former President Jimmy Carter believe that America has been transformed into an oligarchy : A small, corrupt elite control the country with almost no input from the people. The rulers need the myth that we're a democracy to give us the illusion of control.

    Myth No. 7 -- We have an accountable and legitimate voting system.

    Gerrymandering, voter purging, data mining, broken exit polling, push polling, superdelegates, electoral votes, black-box machines, voter ID suppression, provisional ballots, super PACs, dark money, third parties banished from the debates and two corporate parties that stand for the same goddamn pile of fetid crap!

    What part of this sounds like a legitimate election system?

    No, we have what a large Harvard study called the worst election system in the Western world . Have you ever seen where a parent has a toddler in a car seat, and the toddler has a tiny, brightly colored toy steering wheel so he can feel like he's driving the car? That's what our election system is -- a toy steering wheel. Not connected to anything. We all sit here like infants, excitedly shouting, "I'm steeeeering !"

    And I know it's counterintuitive, but that's why you have to vote. We have to vote in such numbers that we beat out what's stolen through our ridiculous rigged system.

    Myth No. 6 -- We have an independent media that keeps the rulers accountable.

    Our media outlets are funded by weapons contractors, big pharma, big banks, big oil and big, fat hard-on pills. (Sorry to go hard on hard-on pills, but we can't get anything resembling hard news because it's funded by dicks.) The corporate media's jobs are to rally for war, cheer for Wall Street and froth at the mouth for consumerism. It's their mission to actually fortify belief in the myths I'm telling you about right now. Anybody who steps outside that paradigm is treated like they're standing on a playground wearing nothing but a trench coat.

    Myth No. 5 -- We have an independent judiciary.

    The criminal justice system has become a weapon wielded by the corporate state. This is how bankers can foreclose on millions of homes illegally and see no jail time, but activists often serve jail time for nonviolent civil disobedience. Chris Hedges recently noted , "The most basic constitutional rights have been erased for many. Our judicial system, as Ralph Nader has pointed out, has legalized secret law, secret courts, secret evidence, secret budgets and secret prisons in the name of national security."

    If you're not part of the monied class, you're pressured into releasing what few rights you have left. According to The New York Times , "97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in plea bargains, with defendants pleading guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence."

    That's the name of the game. Pressure people of color and poor people to just take the plea deal because they don't have a million dollars to spend on a lawyer. (At least not one who doesn't advertise on beer coasters.)

    Myth No. 4 -- The police are here to protect you. They're your friends .

    That's funny. I don't recall my friend pressuring me into sex to get out of a speeding ticket. (Which is essentially still legal in 32 states .)

    The police in our country are primarily designed to do two things: protect the property of the rich and perpetrate the completely immoral war on drugs -- which by definition is a war on our own people .

    We lock up more people than any other country on earth . Meaning the land of the free is the largest prison state in the world. So all these droopy-faced politicians and rabid-talking heads telling you how awful China is on human rights or Iran or North Korea -- none of them match the numbers of people locked up right here under Lady Liberty's skirt.

    Myth No. 3 -- Buying will make you happy.

    This myth (Buying will make you happy) is put forward mainly by the floods of advertising we take in but also by our social engineering. Most of us feel a tenacious emptiness, an alienation deep down behind our surface emotions (for a while I thought it was gas). That uneasiness is because most of us are flushing away our lives at jobs we hate before going home to seclusion boxes called houses or apartments. We then flip on the TV to watch reality shows about people who have it worse than we do (which we all find hilarious).

    If we're lucky, we'll make enough money during the week to afford enough beer on the weekend to help it all make sense. (I find it takes at least four beers for everything to add up.) But that doesn't truly bring us fulfillment. So what now? Well, the ads say buying will do it. Try to smother the depression and desperation under a blanket of flat-screen TVs, purses and Jet Skis. Now does your life have meaning? No? Well, maybe you have to drive that Jet Ski a little faster! Crank it up until your bathing suit flies off and you'll feel alive !

    The dark truth is that we have to believe the myth that consuming is the answer or else we won't keep running around the wheel. And if we aren't running around the wheel, then we start thinking, start asking questions. Those questions are not good for the ruling elite, who enjoy a society based on the daily exploitation of 99 percent of us.

    Myth No. 2 -- If you work hard, things will get better.

    According to Deloitte's Shift Index survey : "80% of people are dissatisfied with their jobs" and "[t]he average person spends 90,000 hours at work over their lifetime." That's about one-seventh of your life -- and most of it is during your most productive years.

    Ask yourself what we're working for. To make money? For what? Almost none of us are doing jobs for survival anymore. Once upon a time, jobs boiled down to:

    I plant the food -- >I eat the food -- >If I don't plant food = I die.

    But nowadays, if you work at a café -- will someone die if they don't get their super-caf-mocha-frap-almond-piss-latte? I kinda doubt they'll keel over from a blueberry scone deficiency.

    If you work at Macy's, will customers perish if they don't get those boxer briefs with the sweat-absorbent-ass fabric? I doubt it. And if they do die from that, then their problems were far greater than you could've known. So that means we're all working to make other people rich because we have a society in which we have to work. Technological advancements can do most everything that truly must get done.

    So if we wanted to, we could get rid of most work and have tens of thousands of more hours to enjoy our lives. But we're not doing that at all. And no one's allowed to ask these questions -- not on your mainstream airwaves at least. Even a half-step like universal basic income is barely discussed because it doesn't compute with our cultural programming.

    Scientists say it's quite possible artificial intelligence will take away all human jobs in 120 years . I think they know that will happen because bots will take the jobs and then realize that 80 percent of them don't need to be done! The bots will take over and then say, "Stop it. Stop spending a seventh of your life folding shirts at Banana Republic."

    One day, we will build monuments to the bot that told us to enjoy our lives and leave the shirts wrinkly.

    And this leads me to the largest myth of our American society.

    Myth No. 1 -- You are free.

    ... ... ...

    Try sleeping in your car for more than a few hours without being harassed by police.

    Try maintaining your privacy for a week without a single email, web search or location data set collected by the NSA and the telecoms.

    Try signing up for the military because you need college money and then one day just walking off the base, going, "Yeah, I was bored. Thought I would just not do this anymore."

    Try explaining to Kentucky Fried Chicken that while you don't have the green pieces of paper they want in exchange for the mashed potatoes, you do have some pictures you've drawn on a napkin to give them instead.

    Try running for president as a third-party candidate. (Jill Stein was shackled and chained to a chair by police during one of the debates.)

    Try using the restroom at Starbucks without buying something while black.

    We are less free than a dog on a leash. We live in one of the hardest-working, most unequal societies on the planet with more billionaires than ever .

    Meanwhile, Americans supply 94 percent of the paid blood used worldwide. And it's almost exclusively coming from very poor people. This abusive vampire system is literally sucking the blood from the poor. Does that sound like a free decision they made? Or does that sound like something people do after immense economic force crushes down around them? (One could argue that sperm donation takes a little less convincing.)

    Point is, in order to enforce this illogical, immoral system, the corrupt rulers -- most of the time -- don't need guns and tear gas to keep the exploitation mechanisms humming along. All they need are some good, solid bullshit myths for us all to buy into, hook, line and sinker. Some fairy tales for adults.

    It's time to wake up.

    bobcatz -> powow Fri, 07/27/2018 - 16:43 Permalink

    Myth #9: America is not an Israeli colony

    DingleBarryObummer -> bobcatz Fri, 07/27/2018 - 16:49 Permalink

    #10: Muh 6 Gorillion

    #11: Building 7

    bfellow -> DingleBarryObummer Fri, 07/27/2018 - 16:55 Permalink

    815M people chronically malnourished according to the UN. Bezos is worth $141B.

    $141B / 815M people = $173 per person. That would definitely not feed them for "multiple years". And that's only if Bezos could fully liquidate the stock without it dropping a penny.

    Author lost me right there.

    Oldguy05 -> Oldguy05 Fri, 07/27/2018 - 22:25 Permalink

    " Point is, in order to enforce this illogical, immoral system, the corrupt rulers -- most of the time -- don't need guns and tear gas to keep the exploitation mechanisms humming along. All they need are some good, solid bullshit myths for us all to buy into, hook, line and sinker. Some fairy tales for adults. "

    Seems like there's tear gas in the air and guns are going to be used soon. The myths are dying on the tongues of the liars. Molon Labe!....and I'm usually a pacifist.

    BennyBoy -> Nunny Fri, 07/27/2018 - 18:51 Permalink

    "American Society Would Collapse If It Weren't For Invasions Of Foreign Countries, Murdering Their People, Stealing Their Oil Then Blaming Them For Making The US Do It."

    Oldguy05 -> Nunny Fri, 07/27/2018 - 22:43 Permalink

    Eisenhower's speeches were awesome and true. But he was right there doing the same shit. Was he feeling guilty in the end?

    Proofreder -> vato poco Fri, 07/27/2018 - 18:39 Permalink

    Freedom - just another word for nothing left to lose ...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7hk-hI0JKw&list=RDEMoIkwgyb6gDyuA-bFyR

    east of eden -> vato poco Fri, 07/27/2018 - 18:55 Permalink

    Well, in a world driven by oil, it is entirely bogus to suggest that citizens have to work their asses off. That was the whole point of the bill of goods that was sold to us in the late 70's and early 80'. More leisure time, more time for your family and personal interests.

    Except! It never happened. All they fucking did was reduce real wages and force everyone from the upper middle class down, into a shit hole.

    But, they will pay for their folly. Guaran-fucking-teed.

    TheEndIsNear -> HopefulCynical Fri, 07/27/2018 - 18:33 Permalink

    As one who has hoed many rows of cotton in 115F temperatures as well as picking cotton during my childhood and early adolescence during weekends and school holidays, I concur. It was a very powerful inducement to get a good education back when schools actually taught things and did not tolerate backtalk or guff from students instead of babysitting them. It worked, and I ended up writing computer software for spacecraft, which was much fun than working in the fields.

    [Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker. ..."
    "... The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets. ..."
    Jul 23, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

    ... ... ...

    The Helsinki hysteria shone a spotlight on the utter impotence of the establishment media and their Deep State controllers to make their delusions reality. Never before has there been such a gaping chasm visible between the media's "truth" and the facts on the ground. Pundits compared the summit to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 , with some even reaching for the brass ring of the Holocaust by likening it to Kristallnacht , while polls revealed the American people really didn't care .

    Worse, it laid bare the collusion between the media and their Deep State handlers – the central dissemination point for the headlines, down to the same phrases, that led to every outlet claiming Trump had "thrown the Intelligence Community under the bus" by refusing to embrace the Russia-hacked-our-democracy narrative during his press conference with Putin. Leaving aside the sudden ubiquity of "Intelligence Community" in our national discourse – as if this network of spies and murderous thugs is Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood – no one seriously believes every pundit came up with "throws under the bus" as the proper way of describing that press conference.

    The same central control was apparent in the unanimous condemnations of Putin – that he murders journalists , breaks international agreements , uses banned chemical weapons , kills women and children in Syria , and, of course, meddles in elections . For every single establishment pundit to exhibit such a breathtaking lack of insight into their own government's misdeeds is highly unlikely. Many of these same talking heads remarked in horror on Sinclair Broadcasting's Orwellian "prepared statement" issuing forth from the mouths of hundreds of stations' anchors at once. Et tu, Anderson Cooper?

    Helsinki – Trump and Putin – a Showdown for Summer Doldrums or a Genuine Attempt Towards Peace?

    The media frenzy was geared toward sparking a popular revolt, with tensions already running high from the previous media frenzy about family separation at the border (though only one MSNBC segment seemed to recall that they should still care about that, and belatedly included some footage of kids behind a fence wrapped in Mylar blankets). Rachel Maddow , armed with the crocodile tears that served her so well during the family-separation fracas, exhorted her faithful cultists to do something . Meanwhile, national-security neanderthal John Brennan all but called for a coup, condemning the president for the unspeakable "high crimes and misdemeanors" of seeking to improve relations with the world's second-largest nuclear power. He called on Pompeo and Bolton, the two biggest warmongers in a Trump administration bristling with warmongers, to resign in protest. This would have been a grand slam for world peace, but alas, it was not to be. Even those two realize what a has-been Brennan is.

    Congress wasted no time jumping on the Treason bandwagon, led by Chuck Schumer conjuring the spectre of the KGB, Marco Rubio as neocon point-man (one imagines Barbara Bush rolling in her grave at his usurpation of Jeb's rightful role) proposing locked-and-loaded sanctions in case of future "meddling," and John McCain , still desperate to take the rest of the world with him before he finally kicks a long-overdue bucket, condemning the "disgraceful" display of two heads of state trying to come to an agreement about matters of mutual interest. The Pentagon has invested a lot of time and money in positioning Russia as Public Enemy #1, and for Trump to put his foot in it by making nice with Putin might diminish the size of their weapons contracts – or the willingness of the American people to tolerate more than half of every tax dollar disappearing down an unaccountable hole . Peace? Eh, who needs it. Cash , motherfucker.

    Trump's grip on his long-elusive spine was only temporary, and he held another press conference upon returning home to reiterate his trust in the intelligence agencies that have made no secret of their utter loathing for him since day one. When the lights went out at the climactic moment, it became clear for anyone who still hadn't gotten the message who was running the show here (and Trump, to his credit, actually joked about it). The Intelligence Community believes it is God, and it hath smote Trump good. Smelling blood in the water, the media redoubled their shrieking for several days, and crickets. On to the Playmates .

    Sacha Baron Cohen 's latest series, "Who is America," targeted Ted Koppel for one segment. Koppel cut the interview short after smelling a rat and expressed his high-minded concern that Cohen's antics would hurt Americans' trust in reporters. But after a week of the entire media establishment screaming that the sky is falling while the heavens remain firmly in place, Cohen is clearly the least of their problems. At least he's funny.

    *

    Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. She covers politics, sociology, and other anthropological/cultural phenomena. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski .

    [Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... After the Creation of the "CIA" Unelected, Unconstitutional CIA Intelligence Agency Interfered In Foreign Presidential Elections At Least 81 Times In 54 Years. The US was found to have interfered in foreign elections at least 81 times in 31 countries between 1946 and 2000 – not counting Libya, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, The US-backed military coups or regime change efforts, Proxy-Wars. Just saying ..."
    "... Tucker Carlson has been analyzing policies/ideas on a deeper level this year. He is painting US a big picture for us to see. It's quite refreshing to see Fox News actually allow objective truth be aired on on occasion. ..."
    "... The Intelligence Agencies are the Praetorian Guard in the United States. ..."
    "... Party politics is a means of control. When you come to realize that we all have a tendency to agree that the major issues have no party loyalty, and we're all on the same side, you can look past minor differences and move forward to working for the greater good... ..."
    "... I just saw another Tucker Carlson news clip that Tony Podesta is offered immunity to testify against Paul Manafort? WTF? Why aren't Podestas charged?! ..."
    "... Neocons, military industrial complex and liberal leftists have penetrated deeply into the government intelligence communities, wall street banking, both houses of Us congress, mainstream media as well as Hollywood people, even in an academia. This country is deep sh*t. I am surprised liberal leftists have not crucified Tucker Carlson yet for speaking out. ..."
    "... Russiagate is DemoKKKrat horse cookies. Putin is correct. DemoKKKrats are bad losers. $1.2 billion gone, servers gone! ..."
    Jul 22, 2018 | www.youtube.com

    Jaime Tapia , 5 hours ago (edited)

    Guys Did you know: After the Creation of the "CIA" Unelected, Unconstitutional CIA Intelligence Agency Interfered In Foreign Presidential Elections At Least 81 Times In 54 Years. The US was found to have interfered in foreign elections at least 81 times in 31 countries between 1946 and 2000 – not counting Libya, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, The US-backed military coups or regime change efforts, Proxy-Wars. Just saying. ¯\_(^)_/¯

    Boycott israeli products , 5 hours ago

    Tucker Carlson is a special character. 95% of time i disagree with Tucker but 5% of time he's just exceptionally good. In April his 8 minute monologue was epic. I love Jimmy Dore's passion... specially when he pronounes "they're lying!!!" Jimmy clearly hates liars ;-) We love you Jimmy for your integrity and intelligence.

    Sooner Mac , 5 hours ago

    Weapons of mass destruction, 9/11, Bin Laden, Lybia, Gulf of Tonkin, Opium fields in Afghanistan, Operation Mockingbird, Operation Paperclip..... A few reasons not to trust your CIA and FBI. I am sure you guys can name some more.

    The Alienated TV , 5 hours ago

    I think Tucker Carlson and Jimmy are two of the most responsible journalists on the planet. Keep up the good work.

    Connor Phillip , 5 hours ago

    "Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex" FZappa

    Guillermo Rivas , 5 hours ago

    Tucker Carlson has been analyzing policies/ideas on a deeper level this year. He is painting US a big picture for us to see. It's quite refreshing to see Fox News actually allow objective truth be aired on on occasion.

    Kunal Sharma , 6 hours ago

    The Intelligence Agencies are the Praetorian Guard in the United States.

    Joe Boyko , 5 hours ago

    Pulling off the partisan blinders is the first step toward enlightenment... Party politics is a means of control. When you come to realize that we all have a tendency to agree that the major issues have no party loyalty, and we're all on the same side, you can look past minor differences and move forward to working for the greater good...

    Pisstrooper pan shaker , 5 hours ago

    THE CIA HAS BEEN OVERTHROWING GOVERMENTS FOR DECADES,and you wonder why Trump doesn't trust them? It's because he doesn't want war. He ain't no saint but at least we have an anti war President.

    Poseidon Cichlidon , 5 hours ago (edited)

    Morning Joe's panel said today that the Democrats need to run on this Russia conspiracy theory, and nothing else, in order to win the midterms. If they bring up free college or medicare for all it will "weaken their message and confuse the voters". Once again the corporate neoliberal warmonger Democrats and their rich TV puppets are setting us up for failure, no voter gives a damn about Russia, MSNBC wants our progressive candidates to lose instead of reform their corrupt party!

    SONIX , 7 minutes ago

    I just saw another Tucker Carlson news clip that Tony Podesta is offered immunity to testify against Paul Manafort? WTF? Why aren't Podestas charged?!

    Cynthia Johnson , 5 hours ago (edited)

    Yep, Bernie is pushing the Russiagate story and Tucker Carlson on Fox News nails it. The world isn't upside down, it's doing back flips.

    Vegan4ThePlanet , 4 hours ago (edited)

    "So this is the Hostage Tape" CLASSIC LINE, Great one, LMAO

    DlchMcV , 4 hours ago (edited)

    I think what has happened to the Liberals, is that for decades and decades they were the most progressive, tolerant party. They really did want to do more for the people and tried to introduce things that the right would instantly point to and call "socialist!!" Corporations started to look at these liberals as representatives they could pay off but without suspect, unlike Republicans, who were widely known to accept money from Corporations, Big Pharma and huge construction companies (Haliburton anyone?).

    Over time, Liberals saw the benefits of being chummy with these same big $$ companies and voted on bills, etc in the ways that would make these corps very happy and more profitable. No one wanted to believe that Liberals were doing the same thing as Republicans but now we know they are. It's not a secret anymore. Most politicians aren't in it to make their country, their state or their cities better; they're in it to make their bank accounts unbelievably huge and that's it. They're greedy people with no integrity, pretending to serve the people.

    Louis-Ferdinand Féline , 1 hour ago

    I'm a righty, and I'm so surprised to see a liberal agree with Tucker in all the things I care about! Imagine what we could accomplish if we put aside our differences for a time and work on what we agree on! No more immoral wars for Israel! TRY BUSH, CHENEY, AND ALL NEOCONS THAT LED US TO WAR WITH IRAQ FOR TREASON!!

    Dosh cratonin , 5 hours ago

    You are so right. Thank you for bringout the truth. Neocons, military industrial complex and liberal leftists have penetrated deeply into the government intelligence communities, wall street banking, both houses of Us congress, mainstream media as well as Hollywood people, even in an academia. This country is deep sh*t. I am surprised liberal leftists have not crucified Tucker Carlson yet for speaking out.

    swiSSy Schweizer , 6 hours ago

    Russiagate is DemoKKKrat horse cookies. Putin is correct. DemoKKKrats are bad losers. $1.2 billion gone, servers gone! DmoKKKrats cannot even prove climate change

    [Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

    Highly recommended!
    Intelligence community is a new Praetorian guard which since JFK murder can decide the fate of presidents.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Peter Strzok, the disgraced and disgraceful Federal Bureau of Investigation official, is the very definition of a slimy swamp creature. Strzok twitched, grimaced and ranted his way to infamy during a joint hearing of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, on July 12. ..."
    "... Strzok is the youthful face of the venerated "Intelligence Community," itself part of the sprawling political machine that makes up the D.C. comitatus ..."
    "... Smug, self-satisfied, cheating creature that he is, Strzok can't take responsibility for his own misconduct, and blames Russia for dividing America. In the largely progressive bureau, moreover, Agent Strzok is neither underling nor outlier, for that matter. ..."
    "... A "blind bootlicking faith in spooks" is certainly unwarranted and may even be foolish. What of odious individuals like former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and his predecessor, James Comey, now openly campaigning for the Democrats? Are these leaders outliers in the "Intelligence Community"? ..."
    "... Similarly, it's hard to think of a more partisan operator than John O. Brennan -- he ran the CIA under President Obama. True to type, he cast a vote for Communist Party USA, back in 1976, when the current Russia monomania would have been justified. Brennan has dubbed President Trump a traitor for having dared to doubt people like himself. ..."
    "... The very embodiment of the Surveillance State at its worst is Michael V. Hayden. Hayden has moved seamlessly from the National Security Agency and the CIA to CNN where he beats up on Trump. The former Bush employee hollered treason: "One of the most disgraceful performances of an American president in front of a Russian leader," Hayden inveighed. Not only had POTUS dared to explore the possibility of a truce with Russia, which is a formidable nuclear power; but the president had the temerity to express a smidgen of skepticism about a community littered with spooks like Mr. Hayden. ..."
    "... Pray tell, since when does the Deep State -- FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, DNI, (Director of National Intelligence), on and on -- represent, or stand for, the American People? The president, conversely, actually got the support of at least 60 million Americans. ..."
    "... Outside the Beltway, ordinary folks -- Deplorables, if you will -- have to sympathize with the president's initial and honest appraisal of the Intelligence Community's collective intelligence. This is the community that has sent us into quite a few recreational, hobby wars. ..."
    Jul 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

    Peter Strzok, the disgraced and disgraceful Federal Bureau of Investigation official, is the very definition of a slimy swamp creature. Strzok twitched, grimaced and ranted his way to infamy during a joint hearing of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, on July 12.

    In no way had he failed to discharge his professional unbiased obligation to the public, asserted Strzok. He had merely expressed the hope that "the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating such horrible, disgusting behavior."

    But we did not elect YOU, Mr. Strzok. We elected Mr. Trump.

    Strzok is the youthful face of the venerated "Intelligence Community," itself part of the sprawling political machine that makes up the D.C. comitatus , now writhing like a fire breathing mythical monster against President Donald Trump.

    Smug, self-satisfied, cheating creature that he is, Strzok can't take responsibility for his own misconduct, and blames Russia for dividing America. In the largely progressive bureau, moreover, Agent Strzok is neither underling nor outlier, for that matter. He's an overlord, having risen "to become the Deputy Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division, the second-highest position in that division."

    As Ann Coulter observed, the FBI is not the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover. Neither is the Intelligence Community Philip Haney's IC any longer. Haney was a heroic, soft-spoken, demure employee at the Department of Homeland Security. Agents like him are often fired if they don't get with the program. He didn't. Haney's method and the authentic intelligence he mined and developed might have stopped the likes of the San Bernardino mass murderers and many others. Instead, his higher-ups in the "Intelligence Community" made Haney and his data disappear.

    Post Haney, the FBI failed to adequately screen and stop Syed Farook and blushing bride Tashfeen Malik.

    A "blind bootlicking faith in spooks" is certainly unwarranted and may even be foolish. What of odious individuals like former FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and his predecessor, James Comey, now openly campaigning for the Democrats? Are these leaders outliers in the "Intelligence Community"?

    As Peter Strzok might say to his paramour in a private tweet, "Who ya gonna believe, the Intelligence Community or your own lying eyes?" The Bureau in particular and the IC cabal, in general, appear to be dominated by the likes of the dull-witted Mr. Strzok.

    Similarly, it's hard to think of a more partisan operator than John O. Brennan -- he ran the CIA under President Obama. True to type, he cast a vote for Communist Party USA, back in 1976, when the current Russia monomania would have been justified. Brennan has dubbed President Trump a traitor for having dared to doubt people like himself.

    The very embodiment of the Surveillance State at its worst is Michael V. Hayden. Hayden has moved seamlessly from the National Security Agency and the CIA to CNN where he beats up on Trump. The former Bush employee hollered treason: "One of the most disgraceful performances of an American president in front of a Russian leader," Hayden inveighed. Not only had POTUS dared to explore the possibility of a truce with Russia, which is a formidable nuclear power; but the president had the temerity to express a smidgen of skepticism about a community littered with spooks like Mr. Hayden.

    As one wag noted , not unreasonably, ours is "a highly-politicized intelligence community, infiltrated over decades by cadres of Deep State operatives and sleeper agents, whose goal is to bring down this presidency."

    The latest pillorying heaped upon the president by the permanent establishment has it that, "Trump chose to stand with Vladimir Putin, instead of the American People." Trump, to be precise, had the temerity to "openly question his own intelligence agencies' firm finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S."

    Pray tell, since when does the Deep State -- FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, DNI, (Director of National Intelligence), on and on -- represent, or stand for, the American People? The president, conversely, actually got the support of at least 60 million Americans.

    That's a LOT of support. Outside the Beltway, ordinary folks -- Deplorables, if you will -- have to sympathize with the president's initial and honest appraisal of the Intelligence Community's collective intelligence. This is the community that has sent us into quite a few recreational, hobby wars.

    And this is the community that regularly intercepts but fails to surveys and stop the likes of mass murderers Syed Farook and bride Tashfeen Malik. Or, Orlando nightclub killer Omar Mateen, whose father the Bureau saw fit to hire as an informant. The same "community" has invited the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Arab-American Institute to help shape FBI counterterrorism training.

    The FBI might not be very intelligent at all. About the quality of that intelligence, consider: On August 3, 2016, as the mad media were amping up their Russia monomania, a frenzied BuzzFeed -- it calls itself a news org -- reported that "the Russian foreign ministry had wired nearly $30,000 through a Kremlin-backed bank to its embassy in Washington, DC."

    Intercepted by American intelligence, the Russian wire stipulated that the funds were meant "to finance the election campaign of 2016." Was this not "meddling in our election" or what? Did we finally have irrefutable evidence of Kremlin culpability? The FBI certainly thought so. "Worse still, this was only one of 60 transfers that were being scrutinized by the FBI," wrote the Economist, in November of 2017. "Similar transfers were made to other countries." As it transpired, the money was wired from the Kremlin to embassies the world over. Its purpose? Russia was preparing to hold parliamentary elections in 2016 and had sent funds to Russian embassies "to organize the polling for expatriates."

    While it did update its Fake News factoids, Buzzfeed felt no compunction whatsoever to remove the erroneous item or publicly question their sources in the unimpeachable "Intelligence Community."

    Most news media are just not as inquisitive as President Trump.

    Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of " Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa " (2011) & " The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed " (June, 2016). She's on Twitter , Facebook , Gab & YouTube

    [Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

    Highly recommended!
    So Mueller was a CIA mole in FBI fromthe very beginning. Interesting...
    Notable quotes:
    "... You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding. ..."
    "... Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections. ..."
    "... Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated BCCI. ..."
    "... Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead, he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly "committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act. ..."
    "... Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest, the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist, the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along. ..."
    "... @detroitmechworks ..."
    "... Only thing missing for me was the tie in to Pappy Bush and the rest of the family. Mueller the consigliere of the CIA. Oh man how fucked are we? ..."
    "... Great history of how corrupt Mueller has always been and how he has covered up for so many crimes. I'm just stunned by the number of people who have decided that Mueller's history and the history of the CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies wasn't that bad after all just because they are going after Trump. This selective amnesia is simply amazing, isn't it? ..."
    "... Clinton's role in helping the CIA to smuggle drugs into Arkansas is never talked about either. Or if it is it's called "a right wing attempt to bring them down." ..."
    "... that explains why centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump -- a phenomenon we call "Trumpwashing." ..."
    "... Just like Mueller, Brennan is one more war criminal whose actions seem to have been forgotten. ..."
    "... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
    "... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
    "... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
    "... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
    "... The seas were calm and the skies were clear." ..."
    "... "The reason why the ship went down is because of the massive storm that came out of nowhere." ..."
    "... It would appear at first glance this is basically an effort at espionage only ..."
    "... as it appears they don't ..."
    "... I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges. ..."
    "... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
    "... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
    "... Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing. ..."
    "... Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump. ..."
    Jul 12, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

    In the 1950s, when the science fiction genre started making itself felt in movies, there was always the pivotal scene where the protagonist discovers the dark secret but no one will believe him: a flying saucer hidden under the sand in a field, truckloads of pod people to replace real people, or that the friendly aliens' book "To Serve Man" wasn't a guide to helping humans, but a cookbook. It's that moment of sudden realization that no one will believe the hero because it sounds too crazy to believe.

    Granted, to the uninitiated, coming to a realization so shocking and threatening to your current mental construction of the world can appear like paranoia. It becomes a question of the discoverer's knowledge and senses over what everyone else believes. Everyone else seems to be allowing him or herself to be absorbed into the great growing evil.

    Today many of us, certainly readers here at Caucus99, are finding ourselves in similar positions. Our political structure is a lie, the people who are supposed to represent us and our interests don't, our law enforcement protects the property of the rich, not our lives, and often are in cahoots with the criminals from whom we are supposed to be protected. I am sure that many of our old friends and acquaintances have been alienated from some of us here when we began talking about Hillary's track record during the Presidential campaign, for example. In our current pasteboard world, if you are a Republican or Democrat you must assume that your designated political party, maybe with a couple of exceptions, are there to look after you.

    And there that crazy friend goes, yelling about cookbooks.

    I suppose my introduction to the corruption of those in power, at thirteen, was the assassination of JFK. Not actually the assassination, but the murder of Oswald two days later, in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters. I had slept overnight at a friend's and we came back from shooting basketballs to watch the transfer of Oswald to another facility. That was the moment that I realized all wasn't what it seemed. But, like most kids my age, the Beatles came along in a month or so and I was swept into the world of rock and roll, which kept me occupied until I began noticing girls. Until 1968. I was still noticing girls and rock and roll, but I was also noticing the number of progressives being gunned down by "lone nuts". And I was noticing Vietnam.

    I'm not sharing this to explain to you how I became (that loathsome term) a "conspiracy theorist". I just want to explain to you that the democracy of the United States, and all the characters running across the stage in Washington, D.C., are the cookbook.

    I wrote an essay here back in April of 2017 explaining how the Russiagate scandal had been designed to give Hillary Clinton a casus belli for her future war against Russia, and that what we were seeing since she lost has been a recycling of it to get Trump in line with the goals of the Deep State. So far nothing much has happened that has moved me from that belief. Now that the Deep State seems to have persuaded our Dear Leader that he can go on being himself as long as he understands the actual hierarchy and doesn't get in the way the Deep State, everything seems to be back on track. At least until Donald's next tweet.

    But in order to understand the depth of criminality in our system one has to understand how things are done. After World War II a lot of social awareness began putting pressure on the old system that had driven the world into the Great Depression. FDR had demonstrated that the government could look out for the poor, could give them jobs when there were no other jobs to be had. The GI Bill sent millions of vets to college and helped to create the middle class we used to have. Unions had real power in negotiating wages and terms of service. Government could create a system to help the elderly. The African Americans, coming back home from fighting a war against fascism, refused go to the coloreds only water fountains. In short, the United States were in for some growing pains.

    What happened? As I mentioned above there was a rash of murders of progressive political candidates and leaders in the sixties. But in order for the forces behind a return to the old rules to keep a lid on any revolutions there had to be something better than shooting every progressive who raised his head above the lectern. Thus the wave of recruitment of agents and assets in the late sixties by the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Although I didn't know it directly at the time, arriving on campus in 1968 it was evident that there was a "presence" of people looking over the shoulders of student activists.

    Which brings me to another great revelation. It's not just politicians and political parties that are serving the Deep State. Any agency that can be corrupted by power will be, eventually.

    Which brings us to the courts.

    There are certain things that must be preserved for a ruling class to remain legitimate in the eyes of the public. Some people don't think much beyond the flag. But there are other things. The media is better than ever at keeping uncomfortable truths from the majority of Americans. But what happens where the criminality of the Deep State collides with our judicial system?

    Let me introduce you to the man of the hour in Washington, Robert Swann Mueller III. Robert was born into the upper crust in our American class system. At one point in his education in private schools John Kerry was a classmate. (Kerry was also a fellow Bonesman with the Bushes.) Mueller met his eventual bride, Ann Cabell Standish, at one of the dances they attended. They married in 1966, three years after John Kennedy's assassination. If you have read much about the JFK assassination you would recognize her middle name. Her grandfather, Charles Cabell, had been second in command at the CIA when John Kennedy was elected President. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired three men from leadership positions at the CIA: Director Allen Dulles, Cabell and Richard Bissell. Charles Cabell was Ann's grandfather. Her grand uncle, Earle Cabell, was the mayor of Dallas at the time of Kennedy's murder there. Recently declassified JFK documents revealed that Mayor Cabell was also an asset of the CIA at the time. Small world. You could say that Mueller married into the CIA, except that his great uncle was Richard Bissell. So between his family and his wife's family Mueller had two of the three people that Kennedy fired before he was assassinated by a "lone nut", as well as the mayor who hosted the assassination. The third man fired was Allen Dulles, who sat on the Warren Commission and managed to keep the CIA out of the investigation into JFK's murder. Perhaps Dulles was a guest at the wedding.

    Soon thereafter Mueller decided to go to Vietnam because, he said, a classmate had died there and patriotism and so forth. He became an officer and eventually ended up as an aide-de-camp for the 3rd Marine Division's commanding general, General William K. Jones. Something else was going on in Vietnam. The CIA had installed its Phoenix Program. I cannot do justice to the Phoenix Program and won't considering Doug Valentine's work on it is available for everyone, but the Phoenix Program was the CIA's attempt to totally control the Vietnamese population. Besides massacres of villages, the program assassinated suspected leaders and spies for the Vietcong, coerced others into being their agents, and kept up files on all the relevant Vietnamese down to the village level. Like in later wars, the CIA incorporated torture, murder and psychological techniques in order to control their targets. As an aide-de-camp to a commanding Marine general, there is no way that Mueller didn't know about the Phoenix Program. He probably saw daily briefings.

    When he came back to the US he studied law and quickly became a federal prosecutor.

    One of the things to mark his career was to deny a pardon to Patty Hearst for her part in the whole Symbionese Liberation Army's "terror" campaign. What did the SLA have to do with anything? A short history: Donald DeFreeze, a small-time criminal in Los Angeles agreed to become an informant for the LAPD in order to stay out of jail. After awhile he got tired of ratting out others and asked to get out of the program. Instead, DeFreeze was incarcerated at the Vacaville Medical Facility for criminally insane prisoners in the California penal system. There DeFreeze met Colston Westbrook who gave classes for the "Black Cultural Association", an experimental behavior modification unit inside the prison. Who was Westbrook? He was a CIA agent, trained in psychological warfare and part of the Phoenix Program. DeFreeze was modified by Westbrook and company for two years. Soon thereafter, he was transferred to Soledad Prison, from which he "escaped" and became the infamous "Cinque". Then came the Symbionese Liberation Army, a caricature of a black militant group filled with mostly white people with military backgrounds. The murder of Marcus Foster, a progressive black leader in the San Francisco East Bay, was done by white men in blackface, according to eyewitnesses. The SLA claimed credit for it. The SLA kidnapped Hearst, subjected her to torture, rape, sensory deprivation and mind control tactics, just like the CIA did in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Then came the bank robberies.

    I bring up the Patty Hearst case because, in 2000, decades after her prison sentence had been commuted, Mueller still opposed her pardon. Guess what he didn't notice when he rejected her pardon? This has been his pattern throughout his career. We'll return to Patty Hearst shortly.

    Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA. He prosecuted what was known in the San Francisco Bay Area as the "drug tug" case which had connections to an island in Panama. It was a drug smuggling case and had tentacles into things like bank frauds in Northern California. He prosecuted Manuel Noriega's drug-smuggling without noticing Oliver North's drug-smuggling, arms running and money laundering through Panama as a part of Iran-contra.

    Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections.

    For example, he prosecuted Pan Am 103. Initially, and then later confirmed by an insurance investigator's report, the bomb that brought down the airliner was believed to be placed onboard by baggage handlers working at the Frankfurt Airport. They were given the bomb by a terrorist cell who in turn got it from one Monzer al-Kassar, who was a very large heroin dealer, estimated at supplying twenty percent of the US's heroin at the time. A big operator. And, in fact, one of the passengers on the plane was a drug mule for al-Kassar. Al-Kassar also happened to be a part of the Iran-contra operation, supplying weapons for North's Enterprise. The operation was, according to the early reports, carried out by a cell of Palestinian terrorists based in Frankfurt, the Palestinian Liberation Front-General Command, who got the bomb from al-Kassar and put the bomb on that airline.

    Mueller, put in charge of the case, pursued an entirely different direction, accusing two Libyans of bombing the plane. At the time Libya and Khadafy were getting blamed for a lot of terrorist activity, but the case against the two was so weak as to hardly be circumstantial.

    There were other questions arising from Pan Am 103. A top official in the FBI, Oliver "Buck" Revell, rushed onto the tarmac in London to pull his son and daughter-in-law off of Pan Am 103 before it went on to explode over Lockerbie, Scotland. Also changing flight plans were South African President Pik Botha and his negotiating team. Apparently, someone that Revell and Pik Botha knew gave them the warning.

    There was one group that didn't get warned. That was the McKee Team, an assembled group of US intelligence agents tasked to investigate American hostages in Beruit. They allegedly discovered a link between the hostage takers, drug traffickers and the CIA. They were returning to the US, against orders, presumably to spill the beans. This was essentially a clean-up operation, tying up loose strings of the Iran-contra operation. So was Noriega's prosecution.

    That's why Mueller got the case. He knew where to look and where not to look.

    He also prosecuted ancillary Iran-contra cases. He prosecuted John Gotti for dealing cocaine in the New York City area. The cocaine he sold was part of the the Iran-contra (CIA) plan where Southern Air Transport flew weapons to Latin America for the contras (whom Congress had voted against aiding) and bringing back cocaine from Latin America on its return flights, to include Mena, Arkansas. One of the CIA's pilots, Barry Seal, bragged that he had a "get-out-of-jail" letter written for him by then-Governor Bill Clinton. At the time, Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor for that corner of Arkansas. He also didn't notice all that cocaine. Hutchson later served as George W. Bush's first "drug czar" before going into politics. How coincidental.

    Mueller, who had been appointed Assistant U.S. Prosecutor under GHW Bush, became FBI Director under George W. Bush just in time not to see the CIA fingerprints on 9/11, which should not be surprising considering whom he didn't see when he investigated BCCI. As head of our country's biggest law enforcement agency Mueller did not pursue the House of Saud's part in 9/11 even though fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and a number of them could be traced to Saudi intelligence, and the money chain could be traced to Saudis living in the US, some of whom flew out of the US while all other US flights were grounded. He did not investigate Mohammed Atta's time in Frankfort, Germany, where he was employed by a front company for the BND, West Germany's equivalent to the CIA. Nor did Mueller investigate Huffman Aviation where Mo Atta and another hijacker matriculated in flying planes into buildings. Huffman is interesting because while Mo was studying in Huffman's Venice, Florida aviation school a Huffman plane was busted in Orlando with 43 pounds of heroin. Curiously, the pilot walked away from the DEA without being charged and no one was prosecuted at Huffman.

    Ask Colleen Rowley about Mueller's leadership in the 9/11 investigation.

    Additionally, Mueller oversaw the anthrax letter case, never investigating Battelle Memorial Corporation, which had a building within a mile of the mailbox where the letters had been mailed. (Battelle Memorial's corporate motto is "It Can Be Done".) Instead, he centered FBI investigations on scientists in government labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, who had neither the expertise nor the equipment to make the weaponized military grade anthrax found in the letters. One scientist sued and won millions. The other allegedly "committed suicide". Battelle is noteworthy because it handles the US military's anthrax program. Mueller had no interest that two of the targets who received anthrax letters were at the time the most vociferous opponents of the Bush Administration's Patriot Act.

    Perhaps his greatest accomplishment aiding the Deep State as FBI Director was his shutting down of Operation Green Quest, the FBI's investigation into the funding behind 9/11 and the terrorist network behind it. Names began popping up like Grover Norquist, the Muslim Brotherhood, old Nazis and the royal family of Luxembourg. Nothing to see here. Move along.

    A closer examination of Robert Mueller would probably find a lot more of these cases and I encourage others to continue the search. For example, it's been alleged that Mueller sent innocent men to jail for crimes committed by Whitey Bulger for the benefit of someone or something within the government and that this allowed Bulger to continue his criminal activities for years.

    ***

    It's been seventy years since the CIA was created, fifty years since JFK was most likely murdered by them. In order to avoid any consequences for their crimes more and more institutions have had to be infiltrated and corrupted by them. Many of the heroes of the Left have turned out to be purveyors of "modified limited hangouts" which served the Deep State. Ramsey Clark, who was given the mantle of "good guy" by the media of the Left, was active as LBJ's Attorney General in blocking Jim Garrison's investigation into the JFK assassination and was named by Doug Valentine in his THE CIA AS ORGANIZED CRIME as a major proponent of the CIA's OPERATION CHAOS and the FBI's COINTELPRO. While the media spent a good deal of time talking about how great they were in releasing the Pentagon Papers to the public, the hero who exposed the military, Daniel Ellsberg, turns out to have been CIA, operating with CIA black ops in Vietnam. And while the Pentagon Papers exposed our military's great errors in Vietnam the CIA was generally spared. Again. Bob Woodward, our hero of Watergate, had been a courier for the Office of Naval Intelligence only a few years earlier. Thus, the CIA and Deep State, which had soured on Nixon, orchestrated that President's departure.

    I raise this because Robert Mueller's current task is the investigation of our sitting President. No matter how much you dislike Trump you can't help but notice that the "evidence" against him conspiring with Putin and Russia is thin gruel. And while Trump, like most politicians who ascend to the big seat, has a lot of questionable, even indictable business connections around him, the great dangers of a Putin-Trump conspiracy trumpeted by the media have been fading because, apparently, there was never a there there. Thus, as Mueller oversees this case, he will find people surrounding Trump who have lied to FBI agents, who have perhaps not registered as foreign agents, and other crimes that routinely happen out of the public spotlight and aren't prosecuted. What was obvious to me from the start, that this was a psyop that involved U.S. intelligence, Ukrainian intelligence, Clinton and the DNC, will not be obvious to Mueller. Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a means of pressure on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it.

    When one begins examining high-profile court cases in post-1963 America one sees a cast of people who keep popping up. Prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, coroners, witnesses, reporters, authors. This ensemble keeps reappearing in these show trials. We may not know what Mueller will find, but we know what he won't find.

    There was a review at Truthdig back in 2016 of Jeffrey Toobin's book on Patty Hearst, AMERICAN HEIRESS (Toobin himself worked as an associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh during the investigation Iran–Contra affair and Oliver North's criminal trial). In part it reads: "Toobin features the characters who populated the edges of Hearst's story. Robert Shapiro, who would later work with [F. Lee] Bailey on the O.J. Simpson case, makes a cameo appearance. Lance Ito, the judge in that case, briefly shared a shooting range with a machine-gun toting SLA member. Reverend Jim Jones offered to help with the food distribution effort; that enterprise also employed Sara Jane Moore, who served 32 years for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford during his 1975 visit to San Francisco. Congressman Leo Ryan, who represented Randy and Catherine Hearst's district, endorsed the commutation of Patty's sentence. "Off to Guyana," he wrote Patty in 1978. "See you when I return. Hang in there." Jim Jones' henchmen shot and killed Ryan before he could board his flight home. Robert Mueller, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco before taking over as FBI director, strenuously opposed Hearst's pardon, claiming that her attitude, born of wealth and social position, "has always been that she is a person above the law.""

    When Mueller wrote that line he must have laughed out loud.

    Wow! Where did you get all those facts about Mueller.

    That isn't connecting the dots. Its painting a bloody Mona Lisa.

    I had no idea how dirty this man was. He is the CIA version of Zelig or Forest Gump. He makes Bill Clinton look like an amateur.

    Beginning with the double CIA family ties and proceeding through whitewashing 911, this man is so central to our rotten government that its a wonder someone hasn't done what you just did a lot sooner.

    My hat is off to you. Someone should post this article on our blog.

    detroitmechworks on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 3:15pm
    It's almost become a parody of a dystopia...

    The one that keeps jumping to mind is the mid 80's game "Paranoia" which was a cartoonish comedy about the drugged citizens of a complex where the state oversaw everything, and the people were obsessed with celebrities and junk food and oh my goooooodd...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_ (role-playing_game)

    Seriously though, so much of this makes absolute sense if you just abandon the concept that democracy has any play whatsoever in our society.

    So with that in mind, a little music from the era, and a little self parody as well.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/LR4XNqrqxrU?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

    arendt on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 6:36pm
    In my hatred of role-playing games, I missed Paranoia

    @detroitmechworks

    Thanks for pointing to it. I got laughs just reading the wikipedia page.

    It sounds like Kafka meets that Russian guy who was simultaneously head of the secret police and leader of the resistance.

    LOL.

    The one that keeps jumping to mind is the mid 80's game "Paranoia" which was a cartoonish comedy about the drugged citizens of a complex where the state oversaw everything, and the people were obsessed with celebrities and junk food and oh my goooooodd...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_ (role-playing_game)

    Seriously though, so much of this makes absolute sense if you just abandon the concept that democracy has any play whatsoever in our society.

    So with that in mind, a little music from the era, and a little self parody as well.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/LR4XNqrqxrU?modestbranding=0&html5=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&wmode=opaque&loop=0&controls=1&autohide=0&showinfo=0&theme=dark&color=red&enablejsapi=0

    detroitmechworks on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 6:48pm
    West End Games had a lot of incredible hits...

    @arendt even considering they were working from licenses half the time. They ended up essentially creating the universe bibles for Ghostbusters and the Star Wars EU prior to the reboots.

    Unfortunately, that didn't translate into respect. However, I still to this day am amazed at the complexity of thought that went into many of the rules and the ability they had to match mechanics to maintaining the play feel.

    Paranoia in particular was hilarious. Kafka and Three Stooges, and even a little Joseph Heller. Later editions even managed to work in criticisms of late stage capitalism by having players ALWAYS broke and any unexpected expenses needing to be made up through crime... which was illegal, to avoid budget shortfalls... which was also illegal...

    #3

    Thanks for pointing to it. I got laughs just reading the wikipedia page.

    It sounds like Kafka meets that Russian guy who was simultaneously head of the secret police and leader of the resistance.

    LOL.

    Linda Wood on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 3:19pm
    Brilliant and wonderful essay!

    Bob, thank you. As detailed and extensive as it is, your essay is concise by making it clear exactly what's so wrong with Mueller:

    Mueller has presided over many cases where it's been important for the prosecutor to overlook the fingerprints of the CIA...

    Mueller would invariably land on cases with Deep State intelligence connections...

    Thus, as his career has shown, Mueller has been put in place not merely to prosecute those around Trump as a means of pressure on his administration, but to not see the CIA's hand in it...

    For me, the anthrax case is the most important. Biological weapons are no joke. I believe we learned, from whistle-blowing scientists, not from the FBI investigation, that the CIA had one of the many illegal biological weapons programs being run with our tax dollars leading up to the anthrax attack. So whether Battelle was one of the CIA's contractors or yet another cut out, the investigation by Mueller simply stated those entities, all of them, were eliminated from the investigation.

    arendt on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 4:48pm
    Some relevant quotes from Hannah Arendt

    The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect" and the "objective enemy". The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it. He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies" like a carrier of disease. Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler behaves like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.
    p423-4

    "From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime ...While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality, the totalitarian possible crime is based on the logical anticipation of objective developments.

    The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.

    "The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)

    ggersh on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:32pm
    And Mr. transparency was O himself

    @arendt

    "The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)

    The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police lies in the difference between the "suspect" and the "objective enemy". The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to overthrow it. He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies" like a carrier of disease. Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler behaves like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go and kill him in self-defense.
    p423-4

    "From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian replacement of the suspected offense by the possible crime ...While the suspect is arrested because he is thought to be capable of committing a crime that more or less fits his personality, the totalitarian possible crime is based on the logical anticipation of objective developments.

    The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.

    "The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry, and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful it will ultimately turn out to be...Real power begins where secrecy begins. (p403)

    on the cusp on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:13pm
    This is the most interesting essay I have read here.

    Bravo, Bob.

    ggersh on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:36pm
    Great story!!!

    Only thing missing for me was the tie in to Pappy Bush and the rest of the family. Mueller the consigliere of the CIA. Oh man how fucked are we?

    snoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:45pm
    Outstanding

    Great history of how corrupt Mueller has always been and how he has covered up for so many crimes. I'm just stunned by the number of people who have decided that Mueller's history and the history of the CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies wasn't that bad after all just because they are going after Trump. This selective amnesia is simply amazing, isn't it?

    Clinton's role in helping the CIA to smuggle drugs into Arkansas is never talked about either. Or if it is it's called "a right wing attempt to bring them down."

    Good to see you writing here again, Bob.

    Snode on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 5:52pm
    Wow!

    This awesome. I knew about Colleen Rowley, but the rest.....2 things, what about Comey? and Bush1 being in Dallas the day of the JFK assassination?

    CS in AZ on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 6:02pm
    Wow, thank you

    I almost skipped reading this one, assumed at first from the headline it was going to be about the Russia "investigation" which I've been steadfast in not paying any attention to.

    But wow, this is so much better than I'd expected, a fascinating tapestry. A lot to absorb. At this point I'm just feeling overwhelmed at how little "we the people" in this country have any say in, or even any knowledge about, what is going on.

    Thank you for this excellent history and synthesis.

    snoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 7:04pm
    Here's some history of another creep who has found redemption

    from those who believe the fairy tale of Russia Gate. John Brennan has also become a darling of the left. Greenwald wrote about him after Obama appointed him to his cabinet.

    Joe posted this link that explains why centrist and liberal media have a disturbing tendency to rehabilitate some of the most vile, reactionary forces on the American right simply because they say vaguely negative things about Donald Trump -- a phenomenon we call "Trumpwashing."

    Just like Mueller, Brennan is one more war criminal whose actions seem to have been forgotten.

    Wink on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 9:56pm
    It's relatively safe to

    conclude from this, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the Mueller investigation of "Russiagate" won't get anywhere near the Oval Office.
    Mostly becuz "Deep State" itself is up to its eyebrows in the affair. And also becuz Trump has very little to do with it. I'm sure they'd Love to bury Hillary in this, but it looks like that won't happen either. A shame.

    snoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:21pm
    Mueller doesn't want to show the Russians his evidence

    I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.

    Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court

    Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

    Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.

    The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.

    Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.

    The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

    Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.

    Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!

    Deja on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:46pm
    A Red list?

    @snoopydawg @snoopydawg
    What the hell? Do these people even know they're on this list, or part of this evidence? Or, are they not even real people, or are they maybe even govt employees needed to play a role? There's that cookbook again, maybe. Yikes!

    The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

    I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.

    Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court

    Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

    Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.

    The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.

    Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.

    The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

    Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.

    Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!

    snoopydawg on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 12:49am
    Who knows?

    @Deja

    It's obvious that the whole damn Russia Gate conspiracy was just made up. It started when Wikileaks said that they were going to release the emails between Hillary and Podesta that showed how they rigged the primary against Bernie. The reason why they did it was to keep people from talking about the contents of the emails. And it worked. The media didn't focus on their contents, but only on how Wikileaks obtained them.

    Another reason for the Russian propaganda crap is so people will give their permission for the upcoming war against Russia that had already been planned for over two years before the election. And they will. I've seen so many comments that says what Russia (Putin) did and is still doing was an act of war. Today on ToP one person said that "we need to assassinate Putin." Was that person HRd for promoting violence which is against the site rules? Nope. Those that believe Russia actually did interfere with the election also think that the republicans are also Putin's puppets and that is why they won't go against Trump. The front pagers have been pushing lies about Russia's actions it should be obvious to anyone with a working brain. I'll see a definitive statement like " The seas were calm and the skies were clear." But they will rewrite their statement to "The reason why the ship went down is because of the massive storm that came out of nowhere." Hopefully you get my drift on how they're blatantly lying in their statements.

    Hillary's BFF, Nuland and McCain were the ones that worked the hardest on overthrowing the Ukraine government. The USA wanted to put its own puppet government on Russia's border. Plus the USA and NATO have been installing troops into countries that surround Russia's borders.

    The original reason why the Mueller investigation was created was to find evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to win the election. None of the Mueller indictments have anything to do with that charge. This is why he was taken off guard when the Russian lawyers showed up to defend their clients. Hope that you read the entire article.

    #13 #13
    What the hell? Do these people even know they're on this list, or part of this evidence? Or, are they not even real people, or are they maybe even govt employees needed to play a role? There's that cookbook again, maybe. Yikes!

    The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

    snoopydawg on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 2:40am
    Heh. This is being spun differently over on ToP

    @snoopydawg

    This also proves my point above how information is selectively posted over there. Just certain parts of the articles are posted, but the parts of the articles that show the information in a different light are left out. This is from a comment..

    It would appear at first glance this is basically an effort at espionage only , but I'm not much more sure than you are.

    If they don't have a US presence ( as it appears they don't ), I can't understand why they even care that Mueller has charged them. As you point out, they won't be extradited, so none of this really matters. They could have their lawyers just play a DVD of them confessing followed by giving Mueller the double birds all around and it wouldn't make any difference, so the only logical answer for this is to try and pry state secrets out legally via the courts instead of through hacking and spying.

    Oops. From the article ..

    I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges.

    I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.

    Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court

    Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

    Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.

    The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.

    Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.

    The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

    Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.

    Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!

    Wink on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 6:08pm
    Well, it gets everyone

    off the hook.
    @snoopydawg
    Especially Mueller. Finding the 13 Russians guilty that is. Mueller can then claim, "See! The Russians did it," which gives Hillbots a warm fuzzy and reason to scold BernieBros with a "told ya so!!" AND, no reason to investigate further. Investigation over. Case closed! Everyone gets what they want. Alas... Their lawyer showed up.

    I think if you charge someone with a crime then they get to see the evidence against them. Mueller charged 3 Russian companies for their interference with the election, but I guess he didn't think that their lawyers would bother to show up. Oops, they did.

    Mueller Scrambles To Limit Evidence After Indicted Russians Actually Show Up In Court

    Special Counsel Robert Mueller is scrambling to limit pretrial evidence handed over to a Russian company he indicted in February over alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

    Mueller asked a Washington federal Judge for a protective order that would prevent the delivery of copious evidence to lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting, LLC, one of three Russian firms and 13 Russian nationals. The indictment accuses the firm of producing propaganda, pretending to be U.S. activists online and posting political content on social media in order to sow discord among American voters.

    The special counsel's office argues that the risk of the evidence leaking or falling into the hands of foreign intelligence services, especially Russia, would assist the Kremlin's active "interference operations" against the United States.

    Improper disclosure would tip foreign intelligence services about how the U.S. operates, which would "allow foreign actors to learn of those techniques and adjust their conduct, thus undermining ongoing and future national security operations," according to the filing.

    The evidence includes thousands of documents involving U.S. residents not charged with crimes who prosecutors say were unwittingly recruited by Russian defendants and co-conspirators to engage in political activity in the U.S., prosecutors

    Mueller also accused Concord of "knowingly and intentionally" conspiring to interfere with the election by using social media to disparage Hillary Clinton and support Donald Trump.

    Yep. Hillary spent $1-2 billion on her campaign, but it was the $100,000 worth of ads that a Russian advertising agency placed on Facebook that cost her the election. More than half of the ads were placed after the election though. But people still believe that the ads were what caused people not to vote for Herheinous!

    snoopydawg on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:30pm
    Well of course it was a PR stunt!
    As Powerline notes, Mueller probably didn't see that coming - and the indictment itself was perhaps nothing more than a PR stunt to bolster the Russian interference narrative.

    I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges. Rather, the Mueller prosecutors seem to have obtained the indictment to serve a public relations purpose, laying out the case for interference as understood by the government and lending a veneer of respectability to the Mueller Switch Project.

    One of the Russian corporate defendants nevertheless hired counsel to contest the charges. In April two Washington-area attorneys -- Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly of the Reed Smith firm -- filed appearances in court on behalf of Concord Management and Consulting. Josh Gerstein covered that turn of events for Politico here. -Powerline Blog

    Deja on Tue, 06/12/2018 - 11:49pm
    Now I want to see it too

    @snoopydawg
    Especially since it's supposed to contain all these names of stooges, duped into participating in US politics by the Kremlin. It's ridiculous.

    As Powerline notes, Mueller probably didn't see that coming - and the indictment itself was perhaps nothing more than a PR stunt to bolster the Russian interference narrative.

    I don't think anyone (including Mueller) anticipated that any of the defendants would appear in court to defend against the charges. Rather, the Mueller prosecutors seem to have obtained the indictment to serve a public relations purpose, laying out the case for interference as understood by the government and lending a veneer of respectability to the Mueller Switch Project.

    One of the Russian corporate defendants nevertheless hired counsel to contest the charges. In April two Washington-area attorneys -- Eric Dubelier and Kate Seikaly of the Reed Smith firm -- filed appearances in court on behalf of Concord Management and Consulting. Josh Gerstein covered that turn of events for Politico here. -Powerline Blog

    mimi on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 1:08am
    I need to print this out and hang it at my bedside

    because I believe it will be gone in its digital format in no time. Thank You for writing this out. You did good. Thank you.

    GreyWolf on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 12:57pm
    Bookmarked (with two separate archives)

    @mimi This page is also at:archive.org archive.is because I believe it will be gone in its digital format in no time.

    Thank You for writing this out. You did good. Thank you.

    gulfgal98 on Wed, 06/13/2018 - 7:16pm
    One of the best and most complete essays

    I have read here in a long time. While I linked ot our Twitter account last night, I did not have time to read it before I posted it. I am going to link this again because I think it is such an important essay for others to read.

    Thank you again for such an outstanding essay!

    [Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

    Highly recommended!
    Looks like another Steele dossier and it has Brennan fingertips all over. Looks like another exercise in creation of a parallel reality. The content of the document implies that malware was installed in GRU computers and those computers were monitored 24/7 by CIA. The documents describes both GNU officers and DNC employees as unsophisticated idiots. DNC employees who who should undergo some basic security training were easily deceived by fishing emails from a foreign country. And a good practice is to disable hotlinks in emails.
    I always suspected that Guccifer 2.0 was a false flag operation to hide the leak of DNC documents. If this is true this was really sophisticated false flag.
    BTW GRU is military intelligence unit, so to hack into civil computers is kind of out of their main sphere of activities. They also should be aware about NSA capabilities of intercepting the traffic.
    I especially like the following tidbit: "On or about June 1,2016, the Conspirators attempted to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program CCleaner." This is how third rate hackers (wannabes) behave.
    Link to the original document: https://www.scribd.com/document/383793520/Netyksho-Et-Al-Indictment#fullscreen&from_embed
    First of all the investigation of DNC was botched by hiring a private, connected to Democratic Party security company (Crowdstrike), so no data from it are acceptable in court. FBI did not have any access to the data.
    Which means that Mueller is a patsy of more powerful forces
    How about speed of download that proved to be excessive for Internet connection? Nothing is said about Dmitri Alperovitch role is all this investigation, which completely discredit all that results? See for example diuscusstion at Why Crowdstrike's Russian Hacking Story Fell Apart- Say Hello to Fancy Bear And, again, the question is: Was Guccifer 2.0 in itself a USA false flag operation ?
    Looks like Mueller is acting as an operative of Democratic Party. Could not dig up enough dirt on Trump, so he now saddled his beloved horse, trying to provoke Russia to respond.
    And this John Le Carre style details about individuals supposedly involved. Probably were provided by CIA ;-)
    Jul 13, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    ... ... ...

    4. By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators also hacked into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ("DCCC") and the Democratic National Committee ("DNC"). The Conspirators covertly monitored the computers of dozens of DCCC and DNC employees, implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code ("malware"), and stole emails and other documents from the DCCC and DNC.

    5. By in or around April 2016, the Conspirators began to plan the release of materials stolen from the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.

    6. Beginning in or around June 2016, the Conspirators staged and released tens of thousands of the stolen emails and documents. They did so using fictitious online personas, including "DCLeaks" and "Guccifer 2.0."

    7. The Conspirators also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release additional stolen documents through a website maintained by an organization ("Organization Iй), that had previously posted documents stolen from U.S. persons, entities, and the U.S. government The Conspirators continued their U.S. election-interference operations through in or around November 2016.

    8. To hide their connections to Russia and the Russian government, the Conspirators used false identities and made false statements about their identities. To further avoid detection, the Conspirators used a network of computers located across the world, including in the United States, and paid for this infrastructure using cryptocurrency.

    ... ... ...

    13. Defendant ALEKSEY VIKTOROVICH LUKASHEV (Лукашсв Алексей Викторович) was a Senior Lieutenant in the Russian military assigned to ANTONOV's department within Unit 26165. LUKASHEV used various online personas, including "Den Katenberg" and "Yuliana Martynova." In on around 2016, LUKASHEV sent spcarphisliing emails to members of the Clinton Campaign and affiliated individuals, including the chairman of the Clinton Campaign.

    14. Defendant SERGEY ALEKSANDROVICH MORGACHEV (Моргачев Сергей Александрович) was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Russian military assigned to Unit 26165. MORGACHEV oversaw a department within Unit 26165 dedicated to developing and managing malware, including a hacking tool used by the GRU known as "X-Agent." During the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks, MORGACHEV supervised the co-conspirators who developed and monitored the X-Agent malware implanted on those computers.

    15. Defendant NIKOLAY YURYEVICH KOZACHEK (Козачек Николай Юрьевич) was a Lieutenant Captain in the Russian military assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. KOZACHEK used a variety of monikers, including "kazak" and "blablablal234565 " KOZACHEK developed, customized, and monitored X-Agent malware used to hack the DCCC and DNC networks beginning in or around April 2016.

    16. Defendant PAVEL VYACHESLAVOVICH YERSHOV (Ершов Павел Вячеславович) was a Russian military officer assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. In or around 2016, YERSHOV assisted KOZACHEK and other co-conspirators in testing and customizing X-Agent malware before actual deployment and use.

    17. Defendant ARTEM ANDREYEVICH MALYSHEV (Малышев Арт е м Андреевич) was a Second Lieutenant in the Russian military assigned to MORGACHEV's department within Unit 26165. MALYSIIEV used a variety of monikers, including "djangomagicdev" and "realblatr." In or around 2016, MALYSHEV monitored X-Agent malware implanted on the DCCC and DNC networks.

    18. Defendant ALEKSANDR VLADIMIROVICH OSADCHUK (Осадчук Александр В ладимирович) was a Colonel in the Russian military and the commanding officer of Unit 74455. Unit 74455 was located at 22 Kirova Street, Khimki, Moscow, a building referred to within the GRU as the 'Tower." Unit 74455 assisted in the release of stolen documents through the DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0 personas, the promotion of those releases, and the publication of anti-Clinton content on social media accounts operated by the GRU.

    19. Defendant ALEKSEY ALEKSANDROVICH POTEMKIN (Потемкин Алексей Александрович) was an officer in the Russian military assigned to Unit 74455. POTEMKIN was a supervisor in a department within Unit 7445f responsible for the administration of computer infrastructure used in cyber operations. Infrastructure and social media accounts administered by POTEMKIN'S department were used, among other things, to assist in the release of stolen documents through the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2 0 personas.

    21, ANTONOV, BADIN, YKRMAKOV, LUKASHEV, and their co-conspiratore targeted victims using a technique known as spearphishing to steal victims' passwords or otherwise gain access to their computers. Beginning by at least March 2016, the Conspirators targeted over 300 individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, DCCC, and DNC.

    a. For example, on or about March 19, 2016, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators created and sent a spearphishing email to the chairman of the Clinton Campaign. LUKASHEV used the account "John356gh" at an online service that abbreviated lengthy website addresses (referred to as a "URL-shortcning service"). LIJKASHEV used the account to mask a link contained in the spearphishing email, which directed the recipient to a GRU-created website. LUKASHEV altered the a security notification from Google (a technique known as "spoofing"), instructing the user to change his password by clicking the embedded link. Those instructions wore followed. On or about March 21, 2016, LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and their co-conspirators stole the contents of the chairman's email account, which consisted of over 50,000 emails.

    Starting on or about March 19, 2016, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators sent spearphishing emails to the personal accounts of other individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, including its campaign manager and a senior foreign policy advisor. On or about March 25, 2016, LUKASHEV used the same john356gh account to mask additional links included in spearphishing emails sent to numerous individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign, including Victims 1 and 2. LUKASliEV sent these emails from the Russia-based email account [email protected] that he spoofed to appear to be from Google. On or about March 28,2016, YERMAKOV researched the names of Victims 1 and 2 and their association with Clinton on various social media sites. Through their spearphishing operations, LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and their co-conspirators successfully stole email credentials and thousands of emails from numerous individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign. Many of these stolen emails. Including those from Victims 1 and 2, were later released by the Conspirators through DCLeaks.

    On or about April 6, 2016, the Conspirators created an email account in the name (with a one-letter deviation from the actual spelling) of a known member of the Clinton Campaign. The Conspirators then used that account to send spearphishing emails to the work accounts of more than thirty different Clinton Campaign employees. In the spearphishipg emails, LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators embedded a link purporting to direct the recipient to a document titled "hillary-clinton-favorable-rating.xlsx " In fact, this link directed the recipients' computers to a GRU-crcatcd website.

    22. The Conspirators spearphished individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign throughout the summer of 2016. For example, on or about July 27, 2016, the Conspirators attempted after hours to spearphish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-
    party provider and used by Clinton's personal office. At or around the same time, they also targeted seventy-six email addresses at the domain for the Clinton Campaign.

    Hacking into the DCCC Network

    23. Beginning in or around March 2016, the Conspirators, in addition to their spearphishing efforts, researched the DCCC and DNC computer networks to identify technical specifications and vulnerabilities.

    1. For example, beginning on or about March 15,2016, YERMAKOV ran a technical query for the DNC's internet protocol configurations to identify connected devices.
    2. On or about the same day, YERMAKOV searched for opcn-source information about the DNC network, the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton.
    3. On or about April 7. 2016. YKRMAKOV ran я technical query for the DNC's internet protocol configurations to identify connected devices.

    24. By in or around April 2016, within days of YERMAKOV's searches regarding the DCCC, the Conspirators hacked into the DCCC computer network. Once they gained access, they installed and managed different types of malware to explore the DCCC network and steal data.

    a. On or about April 12,2016. the Conspirators used the stolen credentials of a I )CCC On or about April 12,2016, the Conspirators used the stolen credentials of a DCCC Employee ('"DCCC Employee 1") to access the DCCC network. DCCC Employee 1 had received a spearphishing email from the Conspirators on or about April 6,2016, and entered her password after clicking on the link.

    b. Between in or around April 2016 and June 2016, the Conspirators installed multiple versions of their X-Agent malware on at least ten DCCC computers, which allowed them to monitor individual employees' computer activity, steal passwords, and maintain access to the DCCC network.

    c. X-Agent malware implanted on the DCCC network transmitted information from the victims' computers to a GRU-leased server located in Arizona. The Conspirators referred to this server as their "AMS" panel. KOZACHEK, MALYSHEV, and their со-conspirators logged into the AMS panel to use X-Agent's keylog and screenshot functions in the course of monitoring and surveilling activity on the DCCC computers. 'Ibe keylog function allowed the Conspirators to capture keystrokes entered by DCCC employees. The screenshot function allowed the Conspirators to take pictures of the DCCC employees' computer screens.

    d. For example, on or about April 14, 2016, the Conspirators repeatedly activated X-Agent's keylog and screensiot functions to surveil DCCC Employee 1's computer activity over the course of eight hours. During that time, the Conspirators captured DCCC Employee 1 's communications with co-workers and the passwords she entered while working on fundraising and voter outreach projects. Similarly, on or about April 22, 2016, the Conspirators activated X-Agcnt's keylog and screenshot functions to capture the discussions of another DCCC Employee ("DCCC Employee 2") about the DCCC's finances, as well as her individual banking information and other personal topics.

    25. On or about April 19, 2016, KOZAC1IEK, YERSIIOV, and their co-conspirators remotely configured an overseas computer to relay communications between X-Agent malware and the AMS panel and then tested X-Agent's ability to connect to this computer. The Conspirators referred to this computer as a "middle server." The middle server acted as a proxy to obscure the connection between malware at the DCCC and the Conspirators' AMS panel. On or about April 20, 2016, the Conspirators directed X-Agent malware on the DCCC computers to connect to this middle server and receive directions from the Conspirators.

    Hacking into the DNC Network

    26. On or about April 18, 2016, the Conspirators hacked into the DNC's computers through their access to the DCCC network. The Conspirators then installed and managed different types of malware (as they did in the DCCC network) to explore the DNC network and steal documents, a. On or about April 18, 2016, the Conspirators activated X-Agent's keylog and screenshot functions to steal credentials of a DCCC employee who was authorized
    to access the DNC network. The Conspirators hacked into the DNC network from the DCCC network using stolen credentials. By in or around June 2016, they gained access to approximately thirty-three DNC computers.

    In or around April 2016, the Conspirators installed X Agent malware on tho DNC network, including the same versions installed on the DCCC network.
    MALYSHEV and his co-conspifators monitored the X-Agent malware from the AMS panel and captured data from the victim computers. The AMS panel collected thousands of keylog and screenshot results from the DCCC and DNC computers, such as a screenshot and keystroke capture of DCCC Employee 2 viewing the DCCC's online banking information.

    Theft of DCCC and DNC Documents

    27. The Conspirators searched for and identified computers within the DCCC and DNC networks that stored information related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, for example, on or about April 15, 2016, the Conspirators searched one hacked DCCC computer for terms that included "hillary," "cruz," and "trump." The Conspirators also copied select DCCC folders, including "Benghazi Investigations." The Conspirators targeted computers containing information such as opposition research and field operation plans for the 2016 elections.

    28. To enable them to steal a large number of documents at once without detection, the Conspirators used a publicly available tool to gather and compress multiple documents on the DCCC and DNC networks. The Conspirators then used other GRU malware, known as "X-Tunncl," to move the stolen documents cutside the DCCC and DNC networks through encrypted channels.

    a. For example, on or about April 22, 2016, the Conspirators compressed gigabytes of data from DNC computers, including opposition research. The Conspirators later moved the compressed DNC data using X-Tunnel to a GRU-leased computer located in Illinois.

    b. On or about April 28, 2016, the Conspirators connected to and tested the same computer located in Illinois. Later that day, the Conspirators used X-Tunnel to connect to that computer to steal additional documents from the DCCC network.

    29. Between on or about May 25, 2016 and June 1, 2016, the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server and stole thousands of emails from the work accounts of DNC employees. During that time, YERMAKOV researched PowerShell commands related to accessing and managing the Microsoft Exchange Server.

    30. On or about May 30, 2016, MALYSHEV accessed the AMS panel in order to upgrade custom AMS software on die server. That day, the AMS panel received updates from approximately thirteen different X-Agent malware implants on DCCC and DNC computers.

    31. During the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks, the Conspirators covered their tracks by Intentionally deleting logs and computer flies. For example, on or about May 13, 2016, the Conspirators cleared the event logs from a DNC computer. On or about June 20, 2016, the Conspirators deleted logs from the AMS panel that documented their activities on the panel, including the login history. Efforts to Remain on the X'CC and PNC Networks

    32. Despite the Conspirators' efforts to hide their activity, beginning in or around May 2016, both the DCCC and DNC became aware that they had been hacked and hired a security company ("Company 1") to identify the extent of the intrusions. By in or around June 2016, Company 1 took steps to exclude intruders from the networks. Despite these efforts, a Linux-based version of X-Agent, programmed to communicate with the GRU-registercd domain linuxkml.net, remained on the DNC network until in or around October 2016.

    33. In response to Company Ts efforts, the Conspirators took countermeasures to maintain access to the DCCC and DNC networks.

    a. Oil 01 about May 31, 2016, YERMAKOV searched for opcn-sourcc information about Company 1 and its reporting on X-Agent and X-Tunnel. On or about June 1,2016, the Conspirators attempted to delete traces of their presence on the DCCC network using the computer program CCleaner.
    b. On or about June 14, 2016, the Conspirators registered the domain actblues.com,
    which mimicked the domain of a political fundraising platform that included a
    DCCC donations page. Shortly thereafter, the Conspirators used stolen DCCC
    credentials to modify the DCCC website and redirect visitors to the actblucs.com

    On or about June 14, 2016, the Conspirators registered the domain actblues.com,
    which mimicked the domain of a political fundraising platform that included a
    DCCC donations page. Shortly thereafter, the Conspirators used stolen DCCC
    credentials to modify the DCCC website and redirect visitors to the actblucs.com
    domain.
    On or about June 20, 2016, after Company 1 had disabled X-Agent on the DCCC
    network, the Conspirators spent ever seven hours unsuccessfully trying to connect
    to X-Agent. The Conspirators also tried to access the DCCC network using
    previously stolen credentials.

    34. In or around September 2016, the Conspirators also successfully gained access to DNC
    computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service. These computers contained test
    applications related to the DNC's analytics. After conducting reconnaissance, the Conspirators
    gathered data by creating backups, or "snapshots," of the DNC's eloud-based systems using the
    cloud provider's own technology. The Conspirators then moved the snapshots to cloud-based
    accounts they had registered with the same service, thereby stealing the data from the DNC.
    Stolen Documents Released through DCLcaks

    35. More than a month before the release of any documents, the Conspirators constructed the online persona DCLeaks to release and publicize stolen election-related documents. On or about April 19, 2016, after attempting to register the domain clcctionleaks.com, the Conspirators registered the domain dcleaks.com through a service that anonymizcd the registrant. The funds used to pay for the dcleaks.com domain originated from an online cryptocutrrecy service that the Conspirators also used to fund the lease of a virtual private server registered with the operational email account [email protected]. The dirbinsaabol email account was also used to register the john356gh URL-shortening account used by LUKASHEV to spearphish the Clinton Campaign chairman and other campaign-related individuals.

    36. On or about June 8,2016, the Conspirators launched the public website dcleaks.com, which they used to release stolen emails. Before it shut down in or around March 2017, the site received over one million page views. The Conspirators falsely claimed on the site that DCLeaks was started by a group of "American hacktivists," when in fact it was started by the Conspirators.

    37. Starting in or around June 2016 and continuing through the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators used DCLeaks to release emails stolen from individuals affiliated with the Clinton Campaign. The Conspirators also released documents they had stolen in other spearphishing operations, including those they had conducted in 2015 that collected emails from individuals affiliated with the Republican Party.

    38. On or about June 8,2016, and at approximately the same time that the dcleaks.com website was launched, the Conspirators created a DCLeaks Facebook page using a preexisting social media account under the fictitious name "Alice Donovan." In addition to the DCLeaks Facebook page, the Conspirators used other social media accounts in the names of fictitious U.S. persons such as "Jason Scott" and "Richard Gingrey" to promote the DCLeaks website. The Conspirators accessed these accounts from computers managed by POTEMKFN and his co-conspirators.

    39. On or about June 8, 2016, the Conspirators created the Twitter account @dcleaks_. The Conspirators operated the @dclcaks_ Twitter account from the same computer used for other efforts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. For example, the Conspirators used the same computer to operate the Twitter account @BaltimorcIsWhr, through which they encouraged U.S. audiences to "[j]oin our flash mob" opposing Clinton and to post images with the hashtag #BlacksAgainstHillary.

    Stolen Documents Released through Guccifer 2.0

    40. On or about June 14, 2016, the DNC -- through Company 1 -- publicly announced that it had been hacked by Russian government actors. In response, the Conspirators created the online persona Guccifer 2.0 and falsely claimed to be a lone Romanian hacker to undermine the allegations of Russian responsibility for the intrusion.
    41. On or about June 15,2016, the Conspirators logged into a Moscow-based server used and managed by Unit 74455 and, between 4:19 PM and 4:56 PM Moscow Standard Time, searched for certain words and phrases, including:

    Search terms

    42. Later that day, at 7:02 PM Moscow Standard Time, the online persona Guccifer 2.0 published its first post on a blog site created through WordPress. Titled "DNC's servers hacked by a lone hacker," the post used numerous English words and phrases that the Conspirators had searched for earlier that day (bolded below):

    Worldwide known cyber security company [Company 1] announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by
    "sophisticated" hacker groups.

    I'm very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) [...]

    Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking
    into DNC's network. [...]

    Some hundred sheets! This's a serious case, isn't it? [...]

    I guess [Company 1] customers should think twice about company's competence.

    F[***J the Illuminati and their conspiracies! МШШ F[***]

    [Company 1] !!!!!!!!

    43. Between in or around June 2016 and October 2016, the Conspirators used Guccifer 2.0 to release documents through WordPrcss that they had stolen from the DCCC and DNC. The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also shared stolen documents with certain individuals.

    a. On or about August 15,2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress. The Conspirators responded using the Guccifer 2.0 persona and sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate's opponent. On or about August 22,2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, transferred approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DCCC to a then-registered state lobbyist and online source of political news. The stolen data included donor records and personal identifying information for more than 2,000 Democratic donors.

    On or about August 22, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent a reporter stolen documents pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement. The reporter responded by discussing when to release the documents and offering to write an article about their release.

    44. The Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, also communicated with U.S. persons about the release of stolen documents. On or about August 15, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, wrote to a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. TVump, "thank u for writing back... do u find anyt[h]ing interesting in the docs i posted?" On or about August 17, 2016, the Conspirators added, "please tell me if i can help u anyhow ... it would be a great pleasure to me." On or about September 9,2016, the Conspirators, again posing as Guccifer 2.0, referred to a stolen DCCC document posted online and asked the person, "what do u think of the info on the tunout model for the democrats entire presidential campaign." The person responded, "[p]retty standard."

    45. The Conspirators conducted operations as Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks using overlapping computer infrastructure and financing.

    a. For example, between on or about March 14, 2016 and April 28. 2016, the Conspirators used the same pool of bitcoin funds to purchase a virtual private network ("VPN") account and to lease a server in Malaysia. In or around June 2016, the Conspirators used the Malaysian server to host the dcleaks.com website.

    On or about July 6, 2016, the Conspirators used the VPN to log into the @Guccifcr_2 Twitter account. The Conspirators opened that VPN account from
    the same server that was also used to register malicious domains for the hacking of the DCCC and DNC networks.

    On or about June 27, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, contacted a U.S. reporter with an offer to provide stolen emails from "Hillary Clinton's staff." The Conspirators then sent the reporter the password to access a nonpublic, password-protected portion of dc.eaks.com containing emails stolen from Victim 1 bу LUKASHEV, YERMAKOV, and thier co-conspirators in or around March 2016.

    46. On or about January 12,2017, the Conspirators published a statement on the Guccifer 2.0 WordPrcss blog, falsely claiming that the intrusions and release of stolen documents had "totally no relation to the Russian government"

    Use of Organization 1

    47. In order to expand their interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the Conspirators transferred many of the documents they stole from the DNC and the chairman of the Clinton Campaign to Organization 1. The Conspirators posing as Guccifer 2.0, discussed the release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases with Organization 1 to heighten their impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

    a. On or about Juno 22, 2016, Organization 1 sent a private message to Guccifer 2.0 to "[s]end any new material [stolen from the DNC] here for us to review and it will have a much higher impact than what you are doing." On or about July 6, 2016, Organization 1 added, "if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after." The Conspirators responded, "ok... i see." Organization I explained, "we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary ... so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting "

    b After failed attempts to transfer the stolen documents starting in late June 2016, on or about July 14, 2016, the Conspirators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, sent Organization 1 an email with an attachment titled "wk dnc linkl.txt.gpg." The Conspirators explained to Organization 1 that the encrypted file contained Instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC documents. On or about July 18, 2016, Organization 1 confirmed it had "the 1Gb or so archive" and would make a release of the stolen documents "this week."

    48. On or about July 22, 2016, Organization 1 released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network by the Conspirators. This release occurred approximately three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention. Organization 1 did not disclose Guccifer 2.0's role in providing them. The latest-in-time email released through Organization 1 was dated on or about May 25,2016, approximately the same day the Conspirators hacked the DNC Microsoft Exchange Server.

    49. On or about October 7, 2016, Organization 1 released the first set of emails from the chairman of the Clinton Campaign that had been stolen by LUKASHEV and his co-conspirators. Between on or about October 7, 2016 and November 7, 2016, Organization 1 released approximately thirty-three tranches of documents mat had been stolen from the chairman of the Clinton Campaign. In total, over 50,000 stolen documents were released.

    ... ... ...

    [Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block " Siberian candidate " Trump. ..."
    "... The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The Washington Post , Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers" opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin." ..."
    "... Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down. When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst). ..."
    "... Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor . ..."
    "... Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd. ..."
    "... As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, argued that the Iraqi military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too. ..."
    "... Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult" hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine. ..."
    "... The New York Times ..."
    "... describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort. ..."
    "... But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK. ..."
    "... Stefan Halper then infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign. Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other. ..."
    "... The rightwing Federalist website speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating it." Clovis believes that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue after inauguration. ..."
    "... Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a "nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency with violating US election laws. ..."
    "... As The Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2 article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election Day. ..."
    "... Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not his government. ..."
    "... Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker ..."
    "... But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press." ..."
    "... It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice. ..."
    "... "Russiagate" continues to attract mounting blowback at Clinton, Obama and the Dems. Might well be they who end up charged with lawbreaking, though I'd be surprised if anyone in authority is ever really punished. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-02/fbi-spying-trump-started-london-earlier-thought-new-texts-implicate-obama-white ..."
    "... I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb, Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged "puppet." ..."
    "... The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what really happened. ..."
    "... I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump did. ..."
    "... Long-time CIA asset named as FBI's spy on Trump campaign By Bill Van Auken https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/21/poli-m21.html ..."
    "... What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was "in the lead". ..."
    "... Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House. Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal ideology for the most part. ..."
    "... The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White House. ..."
    "... It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its existence based on foreign enemies. ..."
    "... So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab. ..."
    May 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

    As the role of a well-connected group of British and U.S. intelligence agents begins to emerge, new suspicions are growing about what hand they may have had in weaving the Russia-gate story, as Daniel Lazare explains.

    Special to Consortium News

    With the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy named Stefan Halper infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus.

    It's looking more and more massive. The intelligence agencies initiated reports that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them and helped them grow, and then they spread the word to the press and key government officials. Reportedly, they even tried to use these reports to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration. Although the corporate press accuses Trump of conspiring with Russia to stop Hillary Clinton, the reverse now seems to be the case: the Obama administration intelligence agencies worked with Clinton to block " Siberian candidate " Trump.

    The template was provided by ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove , Halper's friend and business partner. Sitting in winged chairs in London's venerable Garrick Club, according to The Washington Post , Dearlove told fellow MI6 veteran Christopher Steele, author of the famous "golden showers" opposition research dossier, that Trump "reminded him of a predicament he had faced years earlier, when he was chief of station for British intelligence in Washington and alerted US authorities to British information that a vice presidential hopeful had once been in communication with the Kremlin."

    Apparently, one word from the Brits was enough to make the candidate in question step down. When that didn't work with Trump, Dearlove and his colleagues ratcheted up the pressure to make him see the light. A major scandal was thus born – or, rather, a very questionable scandal. Besides Dearlove, Steele, and Halper, a bon-vivant known as "The Walrus" for his impressive girth , other participants include: Robert Hannigan, former director Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, UK equivalent of the NSA. Alexander Downer, top Australian diplomat. Andrew Wood, ex-British ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Mifsud, Maltese academic. James Clapper, ex-US Director of National Intelligence. John Brennan, former CIA Director (and now NBC News analyst).

    In-Bred

    A few things stand out about this august group. One is its in-bred quality. After helping to run an annual confab known as the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself "The Cambridge Security Initiative." Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt's international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor .

    Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale . In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump's future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd.

    Halper: Infiltrated Trump campaign

    In December 2016, Halper and Dearlove both resigned from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar because they suspected that a company footing some of the costs was tied up with Russian intelligence – suspicions that Christopher Andrew, former chairman of the Cambridge history department and the seminar's founder, regards as " absurd " as well.

    As head of Britain's foreign Secret Intelligence Service, as MI6 is formally known, Dearlove played a major role in drumming up support for the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq even while confessing at a secret Downing Street meeting that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [regime-change] policy." When the search for weapons of mass destruction turned up dry, Clapper, as then head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, argued that the Iraqi military must have smuggled them into neighboring Syria, a charge with absolutely no basis in fact but which helped pave the way for US regime-change efforts in that country too.

    Brennan was meanwhile a high-level CIA official when the agency was fabricating evidence against Saddam Hussein and covering up Saudi Arabia's role in 9/11. Wood not only continues to defend the Iraqi invasion, but dismisses fears of a rising fascist tide in the Ukraine as nothing more than "a crude political insult" hurled by Vladimir Putin for his own political benefit. Such views now seem distressingly misguided in view of the alt-right torchlight parades and spiraling anti-Semitism that are now a regular feature of life in the Ukraine.

    The result is a diplo-espionage gang that is very bad at the facts but very good at public manipulation – and which therefore decided to use its skill set out to create a public furor over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

    It Started Late 2015

    The effort began in late 2015 when GCHQ, along with intelligence agencies in Poland, Estonia, and Germany, began monitoring what they said were " suspicious 'interactions' between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents."

    Since Trump was surging ahead in the polls and scaring the pants off the foreign-policy establishment by calling for a rapprochement with Moscow, the agencies figured that Russia was somehow behind it. The pace accelerated in March 2016 when a 30-year-old policy consultant named George Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as a foreign-policy adviser. Traveling in Italy a week later, he ran into Mifsud, the London-based Maltese academic, who reportedly set about cultivating him after learning of his position with Trump. Mifsud claimed to have "substantial connections with Russian government officials," according to prosecutors. Over breakfast at a London hotel, he told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from Moscow where he had learned that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails."

    This was the remark that supposedly triggered an FBI investigation. The New York Times describes Mifsud as "an enthusiastic promoter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia" and "a regular at meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, that Mr. Putin attends," which tried to suggest that he is a Kremlin agent of some sort.

    But WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange later tweeted photos of Mifsud with British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and a high-ranking British intelligence official named Claire Smith at a training session for Italian security agents in Rome. Since it's unlikely that British intelligence would rely on a Russian agent in such circumstances, Mifsud's intelligence ties are more likely with the UK.

    After Papadopoulos caused a minor political ruckus by telling a reporter that Prime Minister David Cameron should apologize for criticizing Trump's anti-Muslim pronouncements, a friend in the Israeli embassy put him in touch with a friend in the Australian embassy, who introduced him to Downer, her boss. Over drinks, Downer advised him to be more diplomatic. After Papadopoulos then passed along Misfud's tip about Clinton's emails, Downer informed his government, which, in late July, informed the FBI.

    Was Papadopoulos Set Up?

    Suspicions are unavoidable but evidence is lacking. Other pieces were meanwhile clicking into place. In late May or early June 2016, Fusion GPS, a private Washington intelligence firm employed by the Democratic National Committee, hired Steele to look into the Russian angle.

    On June 20, he turned in the first of eighteen memos that would eventually comprise the Steele dossier , in this instance a three-page document asserting that Putin "has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years" and that Russian intelligence possessed "kompromat" in the form of a video of prostitutes performing a "golden showers" show for his benefit at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. A week or two later, Steele briefed the FBI on his findings. Around the same time, Robert Hannigan flew to Washington to brief CIA Director John Brennan about additional material that had come GCHQ's way, material so sensitive that it could only be handled at "director level."

    One player was filling Papadopoulos's head with tales of Russian dirty tricks, another was telling the FBI, while a third was collecting more information and passing it on to the bureau as well.

    Page: Took Russia's side.

    On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in which he complained that " Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed " unease " that someone representing the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's side in a growing neo-Cold War.

    Stefan Halper then infiltrated the Trump campaign on behalf of the FBI as an informant in early July, weeks before the FBI launched its investigation. Halper had 36 years earlier infiltrated the Carter re-election campaign in 1980 using CIA agents to turn information over to the Reagan campaign. Now Halper began to court both Page and Papadopoulous, independently of each other.

    On July 11, Page showed up at a Cambridge symposium at which Halper and Dearlove both spoke. In early September, Halper sent Papadopoulos an email offering $3,000 and a paid trip to London to write a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean, his specialty. "George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?" Halper asked when he got there, but Papadopoulos said he knew nothing. Halper also sought out Sam Clovis, Trump's national campaign co-chairman, with whom he chatted about China for an hour or so over coffee in Washington.

    The rightwing Federalist website speculates that Halper was working with Steele to flesh out a Sept. 14 memo claiming that "Russians do have further 'kompromat' on CLINTON (e-mails) and [are] considering disseminating it." Clovis believes that Halper was trying "to create an audit trail back to those [Clinton] emails from someone in the campaign so they could develop a stronger case for probable cause to continue to issue warrants and to further an investigation." Reports that Halper apparently sought a permanent post in the new administration suggest that the effort was meant to continue after inauguration.

    Notwithstanding Clovis's nutty rightwing politics , his description of what Halper may have been up to makes sense as does his observation that Halper was trying " to build something that did not exist ." Despite countless hyper-ventilating headlines about mysterious Trump Tower meetings and the like, the sad truth is that Russiagate after all these months is shaping up as even more of a "nothing-burger" than Obama administration veteran Van Jones said it was back in mid-2017. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted Papadopoulos and others on procedural grounds, he has indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for corruption, and he has charged a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency with violating US election laws.

    But the corruption charges have nothing to do with Russian collusion and nothing in the indictment against IRA indicates that either the Kremlin or the Trump campaign were involved. Indeed, the activities that got IRA in trouble in the first place are so unimpressive – just $46,000 worth of Facebook ads that it purchased prior to election day, some pro-Trump, some anti, and some with no particular slant at all – that Mueller probably wouldn't even have bothered if he hadn't been under intense pressure to come up with anything at all.

    The same goes for the army of bots that Russia supposedly deployed on Twitter. As The Washington Post noted in an oddly, cool-headed Dec. 2 article , 2, 700 suspected Russian-linked accounts generated just 202,000 tweets in a six-year period ending in August 2017, a drop in a bucket compared to the one billion election-related tweets sent out during the fourteen months leading up to Election Day.

    The Steele dossier is also underwhelming. It declares on one page that the Kremlin sought to cultivate Trump by throwing "various lucrative real estate development business deals" his way but says on another that Trump's efforts to drum up business were unavailing and that he thus "had to settle for the use of extensive sexual services there from local prostitutes rather than business success."

    Why would Trump turn down business offers when he couldn't generate any on his own? The idea that Putin would spot a U.S. reality-TV star somewhere around 2011 and conclude that he was destined for the Oval Office five years later is ludicrous. The fact that the Democratic National Committee funded the dossier via its law firm Perkins Coie renders it less credible still, as does the fact that the world has heard nothing more about the alleged video despite the ongoing deterioration in US-Russian relations. What's the point of making a blackmail tape if you don't use it?

    Steele: Paid for political research, not intelligence.

    Even Steele is backing off. In a legal paper filed in response to a libel suit last May, he said the document "did not represent (and did not purport to represent) verified facts, but were raw intelligence which had identified a range of allegations that warranted investigation given their potential national security implications." The fact is that the "dossier" was opposition research, not an intelligence report. It was neither vetted by Steele nor anyone in an intelligence agency. Opposition research is intended to mix truths and fiction, to dig up plausible dirt to throw at your opponent, not to produce an intelligence assessment at taxpayer's expense to "protect" the country. And Steele was paid for it by the Democrats, not his government.

    Using it Anyway

    Nonetheless, the spooks have made the most of such pseudo-evidence. Dearlove and Wood both advised Steele to take his "findings" to the FBI, while, after the election, Wood pulled Sen. John McCain aside at a security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to let him know that the Russians might be blackmailing the president-elect. McCain dispatched long-time aide David J. Kramer to the UK to discuss the dossier with Steele directly.

    Although Kramer denies it, The New Yorker found a former national-security official who says he spoke with him at the time and that Kramer's goal was to have McCain confront Trump with the dossier in the hope that he would resign on the spot. When that didn't happen, Clapper and Brennan arranged for FBI Director James Comey to confront Trump instead. Comey later testified that he didn't want Trump to think he was creating "a J. Edgar Hoover-type situation – I didn't want him thinking I was briefing him on this to sort of hang it over him in some way."

    But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press."

    Since then, the Democrats have touted the dossier at every opportunity, The New Yorker continues to defend it , while Times columnist Michelle Goldberg cites it as well, saying it's a "rather obvious possibility that Trump is being blackmailed." CNN, for its part, suggested not long ago that the dossier may actually be Russian disinformation designed to throw everyone off base, Republicans and Democrats alike.

    It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree. But that's what the intelligence agencies are for, i.e. to spread fear and propaganda in order to stampede the public into supporting their imperial agenda. In this case, their efforts are so effective that they've gotten lost in a fog of their own making. If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice.

    Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique , and his articles about the Middle East, terrorism, Eastern Europe, and other topics appear regularly on such websites as Jacobin and The American Conservative.

    Vivian O'Blivion , June 4, 2018 at 6:36 am

    Interesting technical detail.

    https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/04/mueller-russia-troll-case-620653

    Mueller is trying to omit the normal burden of legal liability, "wilful intent" in his charges against the St Petersburg, social media operation. In a horrifically complex area such as tax, campaign contributions or lobbying, a foreign entity can be found guilty of breaking a law that they cannot reasonably have been expected to have knowledge of.

    But the omission or inclusion of "wilful intent" is applied on a selective basis depending on the advantage to the deep state. From a practical standpoint, omission of "wilful intent" makes it easier for Mueller to get a guilty verdict (in adsentia assuming this is legally valid in America). Once the "guilt" of the St Petersburg staff is established, any communication between an American and them becomes "collusion".

    This stinks.

    Realist , June 3, 2018 at 4:50 am

    "Russiagate" continues to attract mounting blowback at Clinton, Obama and the Dems. Might well be they who end up charged with lawbreaking, though I'd be surprised if anyone in authority is ever really punished. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-02/fbi-spying-trump-started-london-earlier-thought-new-texts-implicate-obama-white

    I've always thought that the great animus between Obama and Trump stemmed from Trump's persistent birtherist attacks on Obama followed by Obama's public ridicule of Trump at the White House Correspondants' Dinner. Without the latter, Trump probably would not have been motivated to run for the presidency. Without the former, Obama would probably not have gotten into the gutter to defeat and embarrass Trump at all costs. Clinton and Obama probably never recruit British spooks to sabotage and provide a pretense for spying on the campaigns of Jeb, Ted or Little Marco. Since these were all warmongers like Hillary and Obama, the issues would have been different, Russia would not have been a factor, and Putin would have had no alleged "puppet."

    The irony is that Clinton and Obama wanted Trump as her opponent. They cultivated his candidacy via liberal media bias throughout the primaries. (MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were always cutting away to another full length Trump victory speech and rally, including lots of jibber jabber with the faithful supporters.) Why? Because they thought he was the easiest to beat. The polls actually had Hillary losing against the other GOP candidates. The Dems beat themselves with their own choice of candidate and all the intrigue, false narratives and other questionable practices they employed in both the primaries and the general. That's what really happened.

    backwardsevolution , June 3, 2018 at 2:50 pm

    Realist – good post. I think what you say is true. Trump got too caught up in the birther crap, and Obama retaliated. But I think that Trump had been thinking about the presidency long before Obama came along. He sees the country differently than Obama and Clinton do. Trump would never have built up China to the point where all American technology has been given away for free, with millions of jobs lost and a huge trade deficit, and he would have probably left Russia alone, not ransacked it.

    I saw Obama as a somewhat reluctant globalist and Hillary as an eager globalist. They are both insiders. Trump is not. He's interested in what is best for the U.S., whereas the Clinton's and the Bush's were interested in what their corporate masters wanted. The multinationals have been selling the U.S. out, Trump is trying to put a stop to this, and it is going to be a fight to the death. Trump is playing hardball with China (who ARE U.S. multinationals), and it is working. Beginning July 1, 2018, China has agreed to reduce its tariffs:

    "Import tariffs for apparel, footwear and headgear, kitchen supplies and fitness products will be more than halved to an average of 7.1 percent from 15.9 percent, with those on washing machines and refrigerators slashed to just 8 percent, from 20.5 percent.

    Tariffs will also be cut on processed foods such as aquaculture and fishing products and mineral water, from 15.2 percent to 6.9 percent.

    Cosmetics, such as skin and hair products, and some medical and health products, will also benefit from a tariff cut to 2.9 percent from 8.4 percent.

    In particular, tariffs on drugs ranging from penicillin, cephalosporin to insulin will be slashed to zero from 6 percent before.

    In the meantime, temporary tariff rates on 210 imported products from most favored nations will be scrapped as they are no longer favorable compared with new rates."

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-tariffs/china-to-cut-import-tariffs-for-some-consumer-goods-from-most-favored-nations-idUSKCN1IW1PY

    Trade with China has been all one way. At least Trump is leveling the playing field. He at least is trying to bring back jobs, something the "insiders" could care less about.

    I agree that Hillary wanted Trump as an opponent, thought she could easily win. I've underestimated idiot opponents before, always to my detriment. Why is it that they are always the most formidable? The "insiders" are so used to voters rolling over, taking it on the chin. They gave away their jobs, replaced them with the service industry, killed their sons and daughters in wars abroad, and still the American people cast their ballots in their favor. This time was different. The insiders just did not see the sea change, not like Trump did.

    Abe , June 2, 2018 at 2:20 am

    "Pentagon documents indicate that the Department of Defense's shadowy intelligence arm, the Office of Net Assessment, paid Halper $282,000 in 2016 and $129,000 in 2017. According to reports, Halper sought to secure Papadopoulos's collaboration by offering him $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London, ostensibly to produce a research paper on energy issues in the eastern Mediterranean.

    "The choice of Halper for this spying operation has ominous implications. His deep ties to the US intelligence apparatus date back decades. His father-in-law was Ray Cline, who headed the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence at the height of the Cold War. Halper served as an aide to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Alexander Haig in the Nixon and Ford administrations.

    "In 1980, as the director of policy coordination for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, Halper oversaw an operation in which CIA officials gave the campaign confidential information on the Carter administration and its foreign policy. This intelligence was in turn utilized to further back-channel negotiations between Reagan's campaign manager and subsequent CIA director William Casey and representatives of Iran to delay the release of the American embassy hostages until after the election, in order to prevent Carter from scoring a foreign policy victory on the eve of the November vote.

    "Halper subsequently held posts as deputy assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs and senior adviser to the Pentagon and Justice Department. More recently, Halper has collaborated with Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, the British intelligence service, in directing the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSi), a security think tank that lists the US and UK governments as its principal clients.

    "Before the 2016 election, Halper had expressed his view – shared by predominant layers within the intelligence agencies – that Clinton's election would prove 'less disruptive' than Trump's.

    "The revelations of the role played by Halper point to an intervention in the 2016 elections by the US intelligence agencies that far eclipsed anything one could even imagine the Kremlin attempting."

    Long-time CIA asset named as FBI's spy on Trump campaign By Bill Van Auken https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/05/21/poli-m21.html

    CitizenOne , June 1, 2018 at 11:19 pm

    Sorry for not commenting on other posts as of yet. But I think I have a different perspective. Russia Gate is not about Hillary Clinton or Putin but it is about Donald Trump. Specifically an effort to get rid of him by the intelligence agencies and the MSM. The fact is the MSM created Trump and were chiefly responsible for his election. Trump is their brainchild starlet used to fleece all the republican campaigns like a huckster fleeces an audience. It all ties to key Supreme Court rulings eliminating campaign finance regulations which ushered in the age of dark money.

    When billionaires can donate unlimited amounts of money anonymously to the candidate of their choosing what ends up is a field of fourteen wannabes in a primary race each backed by their own investor(s). The only way these candidates can win is to convince us to vote. The only way they can do that is to spend on advertising.

    What the MSM dreamed of in a purely capitalistic way was a way to drain the wallets of every single one of the republican Super PACs. The mission was fraught with potential checkmates. Foe example, there could be an early leader who snatched up the needed delegates for the nomination early on which would have stopped the flow of advertising cash flowing to the MSM. Such possibilities worried the MSM and caused great angst since this might just be the biggest haul they ever took in during a primary season. How would they prevent a premature end of the money river. Like financial vampire bats, ticks and leeches they needed a way to keep the money flowing from the veins of the republican Super PACs until they were sucked dry.

    What the MSM really needed was a bait which they could use to lure more dollars just like a horse race where the track owners needed a fast underdog horse to clean up. I believe the term is to be "hustled". The con men of the media hustlers decided they needed a way to cause all of the candidates to squirm uneasily and to then react to the news that Donald Trump was "in the lead".

    It was a pure stroke of genius and it worked so well that Carl Rove is looking for a job and Donald Trump is sitting in the White House.

    Those clever media folks. What a gift the Supreme Court handed them. But there was one little (or big) problem. The problem was the result of the scam put Trump in the White House. Something that no conservative republican would ever sign onto. Trump had spent years as a democrat, hobnobbed with the Clinton's and was an avowed agnostic who favored the liberal ideology for the most part.

    What to do? Trump was now the Commander in Chief and was spouting nonsense that the establishment recoiled at such as Trumps plans to form economic ties with Russia rather than continue to wage a cold war spanning 65 years which the MIC used year after year to spook us all and guarantee their billions annual increase in funding. Trump directly attacked defense projects and called for de-funding major initiatives like F35 etc.

    The new guy in the White House with his crazy ideas of making friends with Vladimir Putin horrified a national arms industry funded with hundreds of billions of our tax dollars every year propped up by all the neocons with their paranoid beliefs and plans to make America the hegemon of the World. Our foreign allies who use the USA to fight their perceived enemies and entice our government to sell them weapons and who urge us to orchestrate the overthrow of governments were all alarmed by the "not a real republican" peace-nick occupying the White House.

    What to do? There was clearly a need to eliminate this bad guy since his avowed policies were in direct opposition to the game plan that had successfully compromised the former administration. They felt powerless to dissuade the Administration to continue the course and form strategies to eliminate Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya, Ukraine and other vulnerable targets swaying toward China and Russia. They faced a new threat with the Trump Administration which seemed hell bent to discontinue the wars in these regions robbing them of many dollars.

    It is probable that the casino and hotel owner in the White House posed an very threatening alternate strategy of forming economic ties with former enemies which scared the hell out of the arms industry which built its economy on scaring all of us and justifying its existence based on foreign enemies.

    So the MSM and the MIC created a new cold war with their friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post which published endless stories about the new Russian threat we faced. It had nothing to do with the 0.02% Twitter and Facebook "influence" that Russia actually had in the election. It was billed as the crime of the century. The real crime was that they committed the crime of the century that they mightily profited from by putting Trump in the White House in the first place with a plan to grab all the election cash they could grab.

    In the interim, they also forgot on purpose to tell anyone about the election campaign finance fraud that they were the chief beneficiaries of. They also of course forgot to tell anyone what the fight was about for the Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Twenty seven million dollars in dark money was donated by dark money donors enabled by the Supreme Court's decisions to eliminate campaign finance regulations which enabled these donors to buy out Congress and elect and confirm a Supreme Court Justice who would uphold the laws which eliminate all the election rules and campaign finance regulations dating back to the Tillman Act of 1907 which was an attempt to eliminate corporate contributions in political campaigns with associated meager fines as penalties. The law was weak then and has now been eliminated.

    In an era of dark money in politics protected by revisionist judges laying at the top of our federal judicial branch posing as strict constructionists while being funded by the corporatocracy that viciously fights over control of the highest court by a panicked republican party that seeks to tie up their domination in our Congress by any means including the abdication of the Constitutional authority granted to the citizens of the nation we now face a new internal enemy.

    That enemy is not some foreign nation but our own government which conspires to represent the wealthy and the powerful and which exalts them and which enacts laws to defend their control of our nation. Here is a quote:

    When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

    Frederic Bastiat – (1801-1850) in Economic Sophisms

    Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:32 am

    Different journalist covering much the same ground:

    http://www.unz.com/mwhitney/why-is-the-new-york-times-misleading-the-american-people-about-the-paid-informant-who-was-spying-on-the-trump-campaign/

    "Russiagate" is strictly a contrivance of the Deep State, American & British Spookery, and the corporate media propagandists. It clearly needs to be genuinely investigated (unlike the mockery being orchestrated by Herr Mueller from the Ministry of Truth), re-christened "Intellgate" (after the real perpetrators of crime), pursued until all the guilty traitors (including Mueller) who really tried to steal our democratic election are tried, convicted and incarcerated (including probably hundreds complicit from the media) and given its own lengthy chapter in all the history books about "The Election They Tried to Steal and Blame on Russia: How America Nearly Lost its Constitution." If not done, America will lose its constitution, or rather the incipient process will become totally irreversible.

    Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 6:25 am

    Your timing of events is confused.
    The deep state didn't try and steal the election because they were overly complacent that their woman would win. Remember, they didn't try to use the dodgy, Steele dossier before the election.
    What the deep state has done is reactively try to overcome the election outcome by launching an investigation into Trump. The egregious element of the investigation is giving it the title "investigation into collusion" when they in all probability knew that collusion was unlikely to have taken place. To achieve their aim (removing Trump) they included the line "and matters arising" in the brief to give them an open ended remit which allowed them to investigate Trump's business dealings of a Russian / Ukrainian nature (which may venture uncomfortably close to Semion Mogilevich).
    If as you state (and I concur) there was no Russian collusion, then barring fabrication of evidence by Mueller (and there is little evidence of that to date) you have nothing to worry about on the collusion front. Remember, to date, Mueller has stuck (almost exclusively) to meat and potatoes charges like tax evasion and money laundering. If however the investigation leads to credible evidence that Trump broke substantive laws in the past for financial gain, then it is not reasonable to cry foul.

    Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:02 am

    The Deep State assisted the DNC in knocking out Sanders. THAT was ground zero. Everything since then has been to cover this up and to discredit Trump (using him as the distraction). Consider that the Deep State never bothered to investigate the DNC servers/data; reason being is that they'd (Deep State) be implicated.

    Skip Scott , June 1, 2018 at 7:29 am

    Very true Seer. That is the real genesis of RussiaGate. It was a diversion tactic to keep people from looking at the DNC's behavior during the primaries. They are the reason Trump is president, not the evil Ruskies.

    Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:13 am

    We all seem agreed that the Russia collusion is an exercise in distraction. I can't say I know enough to comment with authority on whether the DNC would require assistance from the deep state to trash Bernie. From an outsider perspective it looked more like an application of massively disproportionate spending and standard, back room dirty tricks.
    There is a saying; don't attribute to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence. In this case, try replacing incompetence with MONEY.

    dikcheney , June 2, 2018 at 5:09 pm

    Totally agree with you Skip and the Mueller performance is there to keep up the intimidation and distraction by regularly finding turds to throw at Trump. Mueller doesnt need to find anything, he just needs to create vague intimations of 'guilty Trump' and suspicious associates so that no one will look at the DNC or the Clinton corruption or the smashing of the Sanders campaign.

    Their actual agenda is to smother analysis and clear thinking. Thankfully there is the forensicator piecing the jigsaw as well as consortium news.

    robjira , June 1, 2018 at 11:55 am

    Spot on, Seer.

    michael , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm

    Those servers probably had a lot more pay-to-play secrets from the Clinton Foundation and ring-kissing from foreign big donors than what was released by Wikileaks, which mostly was just screwing over Bernie, which the judge ruled was Hillary's prerogative. Some email chains were probably construed as National Security and were discreetly not leaked.
    The 30,000 emails Hillary had bit bleached from her private servers are likely in the hands of Russians and every other major country, all biding their time for leverage. This was the carrot the British (who undoubtedly have copies as well) dangled over idiot Popodopolous.

    Uncle Bob , June 1, 2018 at 10:33 pm

    Seth Rich

    anon , June 1, 2018 at 7:42 am

    Realist is likely referring to events before the election which involved people with secret agency connections, such as the opposition research (Steele dossier and Skripal affair).

    Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:32 am

    Realist responded but is being "moderated" as per usual.

    Realist , June 1, 2018 at 9:31 am

    Hillary herself was a prime force in cooking up the smear against Trump for being "Putin's puppet." This even before the Democratic convention. Then she used it big time during the debates. It wasn't something merely reactive after she lost. Certainly she and her collaborators inside the deep state and the intelligence agencies never imagined that she would lose and have to distract from what she and her people did by projecting the blame onto Trump. That part was reactive. The rest of the conspiracy was totally proactive on her part and that of the DNC, even during the primaries.

    Don't forget, the intel agencies led by Clapper, Brennan and Comey were all working for Obama at the time and were totally acquiescent in spying on the Trump campaign and "unmasking" the identities and actions of his would-be administration, including individuals like General Flynn. The cooked up Steele dossier was paid for by money from the Clinton campaign and used as a pretext for the intel agencies to spy on the Trump campaign. There is no issue on timing. The establishment was fully behind Clinton by hook or crook from the moment Trump had the delegates to win the GOP nomination. (OBTW, I am not a Trump supporter or even a Republican, so I KNOW that I "have nothing to worry about on the collusion front." I'm a registered Dem, though not a Hillary supporter.)

    Moreover, if you think that Mueller (and the other intel chiefs) have been on the impartial up-and-up, why did the FBI never seize and examine the DNC servers? Why simply accept the interpretation of events given by the private cybersecurity firm (Crowdstrike) that the Clinton campaign hired to very likely mastermind a cover-up? That is exceptional (nay, unheard of!) "professional courtesy." Why has Mueller to this day not deposed Julian Assange or former British Ambassador Craig Murray, both of whom admit to knowing precisely who provided the leaked (not hacked) Podesta and DNC emails to Wikileaks? Why has Mueller not pursued the potential role of the late Seth Rich in the leaking of said emails? Why has Mueller not pursued the robust theory, based on actual evidence, proposed by VIPS, and supported by computer experts like Bill Binney and John McAfee, that the emails were not, as the Dems and the intel agencies would have you believe on NO EVIDENCE, hacked (by the "Russians" or anyone else) but were downloaded to a flash drive directly from the DNC servers? Why has Mueller not deposed Binney or Ray McGovern who claim to have evidence to bear on this and have discussed it freely in the media (to the miniscule extent that the corporate media will give them an audience)? Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a kangaroo court he is running? Is the media really independent and impartial or are they part of a cover-up, perpetrating numerous sins of both commission and omission in their highly flawed reportage?

    I don't see clarity in what has been thus far been propounded by Mueller or any of Trump's other accusers, but I don't think I am the one who is confused here, Vivian. If you want to meet a thoroughly confused individual on what transpired leading up to this moment in American political history, just go read Hillary's book. Absolutely everyone under the sun shares in the blame but her for the fact that she does not presently reside in the White House.

    Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 1:48 pm

    You have presented your case with a great deal more detail and clarity than the original post that prompted my reply. You are also a great deal more knowledgeable than I on the details. I think we are 98% in agreement and I wouldn't like to say who's correct on the remaining 2%.
    For clarity, I didn't follow the debates and wouldn't do so now if they were repeated. Much heat very little light.
    The "pretext" that the intel agencies claim launched their actions against Trump was not the Steele dossier, at least that is what the intel agencies say. Either way your assertion that it was the dossier that set things off is just that, an assertion. I think this is a minor point.
    On the DNC servers and the FBI we are 100% singing from the same hymn book and it all sticks. Mueller's apparent disinterest in the question of hack or USB drive does rather taint his investigation and thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't thought of that angle. I still think Mueller will stick to tax and money laundering and stay well clear of "collusion", so yes he may be running a kangaroo court investigation but the charges will be real world.
    The MSM as a whole are a sick joke which is why we collectively find ourselves at CN, Craig Murray's blog, etc. I wouldn't like to attribute "collaboration" to any individual in the media. It was the reference to hundreds of journalists being sent to jail in your original post that set me off in the first place. When considering the "culpability" of any individual journalist you can have any position on a spectrum from; fully cognisant collaborator with a deep state conspiracy, to; a bit dim and running with the "sexy" story 'cause it's the biggest thing ever, the bosses can't get enough of it and the overtime is great. If American journalists are anything like their UK counterparts, 99% will fall into the latter category.
    Don't have any issue with your final point. Hillary on stage and on camera was phoney as rocking horse s**te and everyone outside her extremely highly remunerated team could see it.
    Sorry for any inconvenience, but your second post makes your points a hell of a lot clearer than the original.

    Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:26 pm

    My purpose for the first post in this thread was to direct readers to the article in Unz by Mike Whitney, not to compress a full-blown amateur expose' by myself into a three-sentence paragraph. You would have found much more in the way of facts, analysis and opinion in his article to which my terse comments did not even serve as an abstract.

    Quoting his last paragraph may give you the flavor of this piece, which is definitely not a one-off by him or other actual journalists who have delved into the issues:

    "Let's see if I got this right: Brennan gets his buddies in the UK to feed fake information on Russia to members of the Trump campaign, after which the FBI uses the suspicious communications about Russia as a pretext to unmask, wiretap, issue FISA warrants, and infiltrate the campaign, after which the incriminating evidence that was collected in the process of entrapping Trump campaign assistants is compiled in a legal case that is used to remove Trump from office. Is that how it's supposed to work?

    It certainly looks like it. But don't expect to read about it in the Times."

    backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm

    Vivian – 90% of all major media is owned by six corporations. There most definitely was and IS collusion between some of them to bring down the outsider, Trump.

    As far as individual journalists go, yeah, they're trying to pay their mortgage, I get it, and they're going to spin what their boss bloody well tells them to spin. But there is evidence coming out that "some" journalists did accept money from either Fusion GPS, Perkins Coie (sp) or Christopher Steele to leak information, which they did.

    Bill Clinton passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that enabled these six media conglomerates to dominate the news. Of course they're political. They need to be split up, like yesterday, into a thousand pieces (ditto for the banks). They have purposely and with intent been feeding lies to the American people. Yes, some SHOULD go to jail.

    As Peter Strzok of the FBI said re Trump colluding with Russia, "There was never any there, there." The collusion has come from the intelligence agencies, in cahoots with Hillary Clinton, perhaps even as high as Obama, to prevent Trump being elected. When that failed, they set out to get him impeached on whatever they could find. Of course Mueller is going to stick with tax and money laundering because he already KNOWS there was never any collusion with Russia.

    This is the Swamp versus the People.

    backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 1:52 pm

    Realist – another excellent post. "Is Mueller after the truth, or is this a kangaroo court he is running?" As you rightly point out, Mueller IS being very selective in what he examines and doesn't examine. He's not after the whole truth, just a particular kind of truth, one that gets him a very specific result – to take down or severely cripple the President.

    Evidence continues to trickle out. Former and active members of the FBI are now even begging to testify as they are disgusted with what is being purposely omitted from this so-called "impartial" investigation. This whole affair is "kangaroo" all the way.

    I'm not so much a fan of Trump as I am a fan of the truth. I don't like to see him – anyone – being railroaded. That bothers me more than anything. But he's right about what he calls "the Swamp". If these people are not uncovered and brought to justice, then the country is truly lost.

    Realist , June 1, 2018 at 4:38 pm

    Precisely. Destroy the man on false pretenses and you destroy our entire system, whether you like him and his questionable policies or not.

    Some people would say it's already gone, but we do what we can to get it back or hold onto to what's left of it. Besides, all the transparent lies and skullduggery in the service of politics rather than principles are just making our entire system look as corrupt as hell.

    michael , June 1, 2018 at 5:00 pm

    When Mueller arrested slimy Manafort for crimes committed in the Ukraine and gave a pass to the Podesta Brothers who worked closely with Manafort, it was clear that Russiagate was a partisan operation.

    backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 6:17 pm

    Michael – good point!

    KiwiAntz , June 1, 2018 at 1:00 am

    Its becoming abundantly clear now, that the whole Russiagate charade was had nothibg to do with Russia & is about a elaborate smokescreen & shellgame coverup designed to divert attention away from, firstly the Democratic Party's woeful defeat & its lousy Candidate choice in the corrupt Hillary Clinton? & also the DNC's sabotaging of Bernie Saunders campaign run! But the most henious & treacherous parts was Obama's, weaponising the intelligence agencies to spy (Halper) on the imaginary Mancharian Candidate Trump & to set him up as a Russia stooge? Obama & Hillary Clinton are complicent in this disgraceful & illegal activity to get dirt on Trump withe goal of ensuring Clinton's election win? This is bigger than Watergate & more scandalous? But despite the cheating & stacking of the card deck, she still lost out to the Donald? And this isn't just illegal its treasonous & willful actions deserving of a lengthy jail incarceration? HRC & her crooked Clinton foundation's funding of the fraudulent & discredited "Steele Dosier" was also used to implement Trump & Russia in a made up, pile of fictitious gargage that was pure offal? Obama & HRC along with their FBI & CIA spys need to be rounded up, convicted & thrown in jail? Perhaps if Trump could just shut his damn mouuth for once & get off twitter long enough to be able too get some Justice Dept officials looking into this, without being distracted by this Russiagate shellgame fakery, then perhaps the real criminal's like Halpert, Obama,HRC & these corrupt spooks & spies can be rounded up & held to account for this treasonous behaviour?

    Sean Ahern , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 pm

    Attention should be paid also to the role of so called progressive media outlets such as Mother Jones which served as an outlets for the disinformation campaign described in Lazare's article.
    Here from David Corn's Mother Jones 2016 article:

    "And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jones that in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump -- and that the FBI requested more information from him."
    https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump/

    Not only was Corn and Mother Jones selected by the spooks as an outlet, but these so called progressives lauded their 'expose' as a great investigative coup on their part and it paved the way for Corn's elevation on MSNBC for a while as a 'pundit.'

    Paul G. , May 31, 2018 at 8:46 pm

    In that vein did the spooks influence Rachel Maddow or is her $30,000. a day salary adequate to totally compromise her microscopic journalistic integrity.

    dikcheney , June 3, 2018 at 6:57 am

    Passing around references to Mother Jones is like passing round used toilet paper for another try. MJ is BS it is entirely controlled fake press.

    Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:23 pm

    Stefan Halper was being paid by the Clinton's foundation during the time he was spying on the Trump campaign. This is further evidence that Hillary Clinton's hands are all over getting Russia Gate started. Then there's the role that Obama's justice department played in setting up the spying on people who were working with the Trump campaign. This is worse than Watergate, IMO.

    Rumors are that a few ex FBI agents are going to testify to congress in Comey's role in covering up Hillary's crimes when she used her private email server to send classified information to people who did not have clearance to read it. Sydney Bluementhol was working for Hillary's foundation and sending her classified information that he stole from the NSA.

    Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills were concerned about Obama knowing that Hillary wasn't using her government email account after he told the press that he only found out about it at the same time they did. He had been sending and receiving emails from her Clintonone email address during her whole tenure as SOS.

    Obama was also aware of her using her foundation for pay to play which she was told by both congress and Obama to keep far away from her duties. Why did she use her private email server? So that Chelsea could know where Hillary was doing business so she could send Bill there to give his speeches to the same organizations, foreign governments and people who had just donated to their foundation.

    Has any previous Secretary of State in history used their position to enrich their spouses or their foundations? I think not.

    The secrets of how the FBI covered for Hillary are coming out. Whether she is charged for her crimes is a different matter.

    F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 7:48 pm

    If Hillary paid a political operative using Clinton Foundation funds – those are tax exempt charitable contributions – she would be guilty of tax fraud, charity fraud and campaign finance violations. Hillary may be evil, but she's not stupid. The U.S.Government paid Halper, which might be "waste, fraud and abuse", but it doesn't implicate Hillary at all. Not that she's innocent, mind you

    Rob , June 1, 2018 at 2:14 am

    I need some references to take any of your multitude of claims seriously. With all due respect, this sound like something taken from info wars and stylized in smartened up a little bit.

    chris m , May 31, 2018 at 2:52 pm

    the idea that Stefan Halper was some sort a of mastermind spy behind the so called "Russiagate" fiasco
    seems very implausible considering what he seems to have spent doing for the past 40 years
    going back to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1980 and his efforts then.

    i think he must have had a fairly peripheral role as to whatever or not was going on behind the scenes from 2016 election campaign, and the campaign to first stop Trump getting elected, and secondly, when that failed, to bring down his Presidency.

    of course, the moment his name was revealed in recent days, would have shocked or surprised those of in the general
    public, but not certainly amongst those in Government aka FBI/CIA/Military-industrial circles.

    backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 4:36 pm

    chris m – Halper is probably one of those people who hide behind their professor (or other legitimate) jobs, but are there at the ready to serve the Deep State. "I understand. You want me to set up some dupes in order to make it look like there was or could be actual Russian meddling. Gotcha." All you've got to do is make it "look like" something nefarious was going on. This facilitates a "reason" to have a phony investigation, and of course they make it as open-ended an investigation as possible, hoping to get the target on something, anything.

    Well, they've no doubt looked long and hard for almost two years now, but zip. However, in their zeal to get rid of their opponent, who they did not think would win the election, they left themselves open, left a trail of crimes. Whoops!

    This is the Swamp that Trump talked about during the election. He's probably not squeaky clean either, but he pales in comparison to what these guys have done. They have tried to take down a duly-elected President.

    F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 5:09 pm

    His role may have been peripheral, but I seem to recall that the Office of Net Assessments paid him roughly a million bucks to play it. That office, run from the Pentagon, is about as deep into the world of "black ops" spookdom as you can get. Hardly "peripheral", I'd say.

    backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:13 pm

    F. G. Sanford – yes, a million bucks implies something more than just a peripheral involvement, more like something essential to the plot, like the actual setting up of the plot. Risk of exposure costs money.

    ranney , May 31, 2018 at 6:17 pm

    Chris, I think the Halper inclusion in this complex tale is simply an example of how these things work in the ultra paranoid style of spy agencies. As Lazare explains, every one knew every one else – at least at the start of this, and it just kind of built from there, and Halper may have been the spark – but the spark landed on a highly combustible pile of paranoia that caught on fire right away. This is how our and the UK agencies function. There is an interesting companion piece to this story today at Common Dreams by Robert Kohler titled The American Way of War. It describes basically the same sort of mind set and action as this story. I'd link it for you if I knew how, but I'm not very adept at the computer. (Maybe another reader knows how?)

    We (that is the American people who are paying the salaries of these brain blocked, stiff necked idiots) need to start getting vocal and visible about the destructive path our politicians, banks and generals have rigidly put us on. Does any average working stiff still believe that all this hate, death and destruction is to "protect" us?

    backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:07 pm

    ranney – when you are on the page that you want to link to, take your cursor (the little arrow on your screen) to the top of the page to the address bar (for instance, the address for this article is:
    "https://consortiumnews.com/2018/05/31/spooks-spooking ")

    Once your cursor is over the address bar, right click on your mouse. A little menu will come up. Then position your cursor down to the word "copy" and then left click on your mouse. This will copy the link.

    Then proceed back to the blog (like Consortium) where you want to provide the link in your post. You might say, "Here is the link for the article I just described above." Then at this point you would right click on your mouse again, position your cursor over the word "paste", and then left click on your mouse. Voila, your link magically appears.

    If you don't have a mouse and are using a laptop pad, then someone else will have to help you. That's above my pay grade. Good luck, ranney.

    irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:13 pm

    If you are using a Mac, either laptop w/touch screen or with a mouse, the copy/paste function
    works similarly. Use either the mouse (no need to 'right click, left click') or the touch screen
    to highlight the address bar once you have the cursor flashing away on the left side of it.
    You may need to scroll right to highlight the whole address. Then go up to Edit (there's also
    a keyboard command you can use, but I don't) in your tool bar at the top of your screen.
    Click on 'copy'. Now your address is in memory. Then do the same as described above to
    get back to where you want to paste it. Put your cursor where you want it to be 'pasted'.
    Go back to 'edit' and click 'paste'. Voila !

    This is a very handy function and can be used to copy text, web addresses, whatever you want.
    Explore it a little bit. (Students definitely overuse the 'paste and match style' option, which allows
    a person to 'paste' text into for example an essay and 'match the style' so it looks seamless, although
    unless carefully edited it usually doesn't read seamlessly !)

    Remember that whatever is in 'copy' will remain there until you 'copy' something else. (Or your
    computer crashes . . . )

    ranney , June 1, 2018 at 3:39 pm

    Irina and Backwards Evolution – Thanks guys for the computer advice! I'll try it, but I think I need someone at my shoulder the first time I try it.

    backwardsevolution , June 1, 2018 at 8:53 pm

    ranney – you're welcome! Snag one of your kids or a friend, and then do it together. Sometimes I see people posting things like: "Testing. I'm trying to provide a link, bear with me." Throw caution to the wind, ranney. I don't worry about embarrassing myself anymore. I do it every day and the world still goes on.

    I heard a good bit of advice once, something I remind my kids: when you're young, you think everybody is watching you and so you're afraid to step out of line. When you're middle-aged, you think everybody is watching you, but you don't care. When you're older, you realize nobody is really watching you because they're more concerned about themselves.

    Good luck, ranney.

    irina , June 2, 2018 at 10:00 pm

    I find it helpful to write down the steps (on an old fashioned piece of paper, with old fashioned ink)
    when learning to use a new computer tool, because while I think I'll remember, it doesn't usually
    'stick' until after using it for quite a while. And yes, definitely recruit a member of the younger set
    or someone familiar with computers. My daughter showed me many years ago how to 'cut & paste'
    and to her credit she was very gracious about it. Remember that you need a place to 'paste' what-
    ever you copied -- either a comment board like this, or a document you are working on, or (this is
    handy) an email where you want to send someone a link to something. Lots of other possibilities too!

    mike , June 1, 2018 at 7:43 pm

    No one is presenting Halper as a mastermind spy. He was a tool of the deep state nothing more.

    Gary Weglarz , May 31, 2018 at 1:57 pm

    It seems a mistake to frame the "Russiagate" nonsense as a "Democrat vs Republican" affair, except at the most surface level of understanding in terms of our political realities. If one considers that the Bush family has been effectively the Republican Party's face of the CIA/deep state nexus for decades, as the Clinton/Obama's have been the Democratic Party's face for decades now, what comes into focus is Trump as a sort of unknown, unexpected wild card not appropriately tethered to the control structure. Simply noting that the U.S. and Russia need not be enemies is alone enough to require an operation to get Trump into line.
    This hardly means this is some sort of "partisan" issue as the involvement of McCain and others demonstrates.

    One of the true "you can't make this stuff up" ironies of the Bush/Clinton CIA/deep state nexus history is worth remembering if one still maintains any illusions about how the CIA vets potential presidents since they killed JFK. During Iran/Contra we had Bush, the former CIA director now vice president, running a drugs for arms operation out the White House through Ollie North, WHILE then unknown Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was busy squashing Arkansas State Police investigations into said narcotics trafficking. Clinton obviously proved his bona fides to the CIA/deep state with such service and was appropriately rewarded as an asset who could function as a reliable president. Here in one operation we had two future presidents in Bush and Clinton both engaged in THE SAME CIA drug running operation. You truly can't make this stuff up.

    Russiagate seems to be in the end all about keeping deep state policy moving in the "right direction" and "hating Russia" is the only entree on the menu at this time for the whole cadre of CIA/deep state, MIC, neocons, Zionists, and all their minions in the MSM. The Obama White House would have gladly supported Vlad the Impaler as the Republican candidate that beat Hillary if Vlad were to have the appropriate foaming at the mouth "hate-Russia" vibe going on.

    backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:18 pm

    Gary – great post.

    irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm

    Roger that. I would really like to see an inquiry re-opened into the
    teenage boys who died 'on the train tracks' in Arkansas during the
    early years of the Clinton-Bush trafficking. Many questions are still
    unanswered. Speculation is that they saw something they weren't
    supposed to see.

    Mark Thomason , May 31, 2018 at 1:12 pm

    This all grows out of the failure to clean up the mess revealed by the Iraq fiasco. Instead, those who did that remained, got away with it, and are doing more of the same.

    Babyl-on , May 31, 2018 at 12:46 pm

    So, here is my question – Who, ultimately does the permanent/bureaucratic/deep/Imperial* state finally answer to? Who's interests are they serving? How do they know what those interests are?

    It could be, and increasingly it looks as if, the answer is – no one in particular – but the Saud family, the Zionist cabal of billionaires, the German industrialist dynasties, the Japanese oligarchy and never forget the arms dealers, all of them once part of the Empire now fighting for themselves so we end up with the high level apparatchiks not knowing what to do or who to follow so they lie outright to Congress and go on TV and babble more lies for money.

    It's a great contradiction that the greatest armed force ever assembled with cutting edge robotics and AI yet at the same time so weak and pathetic it can not exercise hegemony over the Middle East as it seems to desire more than anything. Being defeated by forces with less than 20% of the US spend.

    Abby , May 31, 2018 at 6:36 pm

    You're right. They answer to no one because they are not just working in this country, but they think that the whole world is theirs.

    To these people there are no borders. They meet at places like the G20, Davos and wherever the Bilderberg group decides to meet every year. No leader of any country gets to be one unless they are acceptable to the Deep State. The council of foreign relations is one of the groups that run the world. How we take them down is a good question.

    Abe , May 31, 2018 at 12:43 pm

    Following the pattern of mainstream media, Daniel Lazare assiduously avoids mentioning Israel and pro-Israel Lobby interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the Israel-gate reality underlying all the Russia-gate fictions.

    For example, George Papadopoulos is directly connected to the pro-Israel Lobby, right wing Israeli political interests, and Israeli government efforts to control regional energy resources.

    Lazare mentions that Papadapoulos had "a friend in the Israeli embassy".

    But Lazare conspicuously neglects to mention numerous Israeli and pro-Israel Lobby players interested in "filling Papadopoulos's head" with "tales of Russian dirty tricks".

    Papadopoulos' LinkedIn page lists his association with the right wing Hudson Institute. The Washington, D.C.-based think tank part of pro-Israel Lobby web of militaristic security policy institutes that promote Israel-centric U.S. foreign policy.

    https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/hudson_institute/

    The Hudson Institute confirmed that Papadopoulos was an intern who left the pro-Israel neoconservative think tank in 2014.

    In 2014, Papadopoulos authored op-ed pieces in Israeli publications.

    In an op-ed published in Arutz Sheva, media organ of the right wing Religionist Zionist movement embraced by the Israeli "settler" movement, Papadopoulos argued that the U.S. should focus on its "stalwart allies" Israel, Greece, and Cyprus to "contain the newly emergent Russian fleet".

    In another op-ed published in Ha'aretz, Papadopoulos contended that Israel should exploit its natural gas resources in partnership with Cyprus and Greece rather than Turkey.

    In November 2015, Papadapalous participated in a conference in Tel Aviv, discussing the export of natural gas from Israel with a panel of current and past Israeli government officials including Ron Adam, a representative of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Eran Lerman, a former Israeli Deputy National Security Adviser.

    Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region.

    Israeli plans to develop energy resources and expand territorial holdings in the Syrian Golan are threatened by the Russian military presence in Syria. Russian diplomatic efforts, and the Russian military intervention that began in September 2015 after an official request by the Syrian government, have interfered with the Israeli-Saudi-U.S. Axis "dirty war" in Syria.

    Israeli activities and Israel-gate realities are predictably ignored by the mainstream media, which continues to salivate at every moldy scrap of Russia-gate fiction.

    Lazare need no be so circumspect, unless he has somehow been spooked.

    Herman , May 31, 2018 at 4:13 pm

    "Among Israel's numerous violations of United Nations Resolution 242 was its annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 1981. Recent Israeli threatened military threats against Lebanon and Syria have a lot to do with control of natural gas resources, both offshore from Gaza and on land in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights region."

    And water. Rating energy and water, what's at the top for Israel. Israel would probably say both but Israel shielded by the US will take what it wants. That is already true with the Palestinians.. The last figure I heard is that the Palestinians are allocated one fifth per capita what is allocated to Israel's

    mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:59 am

    A large swamp is actually an ancient and highly organized ecosystem. Only humans could create a lawless madness like Washington DC.

    irina , May 31, 2018 at 8:24 pm

    Yes that is a good description of a swamp. BUT, if it loses what sustains it --
    water, in the case of a 'real' swamp and money in the case of this swamp --
    it changes character very quickly and becomes first a bog, then a meadow.

    I am definitely ready for more meadowland ! But the only way to create it
    is to voluntarily redirect federal taxes into escrow accounts which stipulate
    that the funds are to be used for (fill in the blank) Public Services at the
    Local and Regional levels. Much more efficient than filtering them through
    the federal bureaucracy !

    Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:21 pm

    But how would one avoid prosecution for nonpayment of taxes?
    That seems a very quiet way to be rendered ineffective as a resister.

    irina , June 1, 2018 at 2:30 am

    The thing is, you don't 'nonpay' them. The way it used to work, through the
    Con$cience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account, was that you filed
    your taxes as usual. (This does require having less withholding than you owe).
    BUT instead of paying what is due to the IRS, you send it to the Escrow Account.
    You attach a letter to your tax return, explaining where the money is and why it
    is there. That is, you want it to be spent on _________________(fill in the blank)
    worthy public social service. Then you send your return to the IRS.

    When I used to do this, I stated that I wanted my tax dollars to be spent to develop
    public health clinics at neighborhood schools. Said clinics would be staffed by nurse
    practitioners, would be open 24-7 and nurses would be equipped with vans to make
    House Calls. Security would be provided.

    So you're not 'nonpaying' your taxes, you are (attempting) to redirect them. Eventually,
    after several rounds of letters back and forth, the IRS would seize the monies from the
    escrow account, which would only release them to the IRS upon being told to by the
    tax re-director. Unfortunately, not enough people participated to make it a going concern.
    But the potential is still there, and the template has been made and used. It's very scale-
    able, from local to international. And it would not take that many 're-directors' to shift the
    focus of tax liability from the collector to the payor. Because ultimately we are liable for
    how our funds are used !

    Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:19 pm

    this was done a lot during the Vietnam conflict, especially by Quakers. the first thing, if you are a wage earner, is to re-file a W2 with maximum withholdings-that has two effects: 1) it means you owe all your taxes in April. 2) it means the feds are deprived of the hidden tax in which they use or invest your withholding throughout the year before it's actually due(and un-owed taxes if you over over-withhold). Pretty sure that if a large number of people deprive the government of that hidden tax by under-withholding, they will begin to take notice.

    Abe , May 31, 2018 at 11:54 am

    Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence agency of the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom.

    In 2013, GCHQ received considerable media attention when the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency was in the process of collecting all online and telephone data in the UK. Snowden's revelations began a spate of ongoing disclosures of global surveillance and manipulation.

    For example, NSA files from the Snowden archive published by Glenn Greenwald reveal details about GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) unit, which uses "dirty trick" tactics to covertly manipulate and control online communities.

    JTRIG document: "The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations"
    https://edwardsnowden.com/docs/doc/the-art-of-deception-training-for-a-new.pdf

    In 2017, officials from the UK and Israel made an unprecedented confirmation of the close relationship between the GCHQ and Israeli intelligence services.

    Robert Hannigan, outgoing Director-General of the GCHQ, revealed for the first time that his organization has a "strong partnership with our Israeli counterparts in signals intelligence." He claimed the relationship "is protecting people from terrorism not only in the UK and Israel but in many other countries."

    Mark Regev, Israeli ambassador to the UK, commented on the close relationship between British and Israeli intelligence agencies. During remarks at a Conservative Friends of Israel reception, Regev opined: "I have no doubt the cooperation between our two democracies is saving British lives."

    Hannigan added that GCHQ was "building on an excellent cyber relationship with a range of Israeli bodies and the remarkable cyber industry in Be'er Sheva."

    The IDF's most important signal intelligence–gathering installation is the Urim SIGINT Base, a part of Unit 8200, located in the Negev desert approximately 30 km from Be'er Sheva.

    Snowden revealed how Unit 8200 receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens, as part of a secret agreement with the U.S. National Security Agency.

    After his departure from GCHQ, Hannigan joined BlueteamGlobal, a cybersecurity services firm, later re-named BlueVoyant.

    BlueVoyant's board of directors includes Nadav Zafrir, former Commander of the Israel Defense Forces' Unit 8200. The senior leadership team at BlueVoyant includes Ron Feler, formerly Deputy Commander of the IDF's Unit 8200, and Gad Goldstein, who served as a division head in the Israel Security Agency, Shin Bet, in the rank equivalent to Major General.

    In addition to their purported cybersecurity activities, Israeli. American, and British private companies have enormous access and potential to promote government and military deception operations.

    mike k , May 31, 2018 at 12:23 pm

    Thanks Abe. Sounds like a manual for slave owners and con men. What a tangled wed the rich bastards weave. The simple truth is their sworn enemy.

    Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:19 pm

    Interesting that a foreign power would be given all US communications data, which implies that the US has seized it all without a warrant and revealed it all in violation of the Constitution. If extensive, this use of information power amounts to information warfare against the US by its own secret agencies in collusion with a foreign power, an act of treason.

    Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:18 am

    This has been going on for a LONG time, it's nothing new. I seem to recall 60 Minutes covering it way back in the 70s(?). UK was allowed to do the snooping in the US (and, likely, vice versa) and then providing info to the US. This way the US govt could claim that it didn't spy/snoop on its citizens. Without a doubt Israel has been extensively intercepting communications in the US..

    Secrecy kills.

    Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:23 am

    Yes, but the act of allowing unregulated foreign agencies unwarranted access to US telecoms is federal crime, and it is treason when it goes so far as to allow them full access, and even direct US bulk traffic to their spy agencies. If this is so, these people should be prosecuted for treason.

    F. G. Sanford , May 31, 2018 at 11:36 am

    To listen to the media coverage of these events, it is tempting to believe that two entirely different planets are being discussed. Fox comes out and says Mueller was "owned" by Trump. Then, CNN comes out and says Trump was "owned" by Clapper. Clapper claims the evidence is "staggering", while video clips of his testimony reveal irrefutable perjury. Some of President Trump's policies are understandably abhorrent to Democrats, while Clinton's email server and charity frauds are indisputably violations of Federal statutes. Democrats are attempting to claim that a "spy" in the Trump campaign was perfectly reasonable to protect "national security", but evidence seems to indicate that the spy was placed BEFORE there was a legitimate national security concern. Some analysts note that, while Mueller's team appears to be Democratic partisan hacks, their native "skill set" is actually expertise in money laundering investigations. They claim that although Mr. Trump may not be compromised by the Russian government, he is involved with nefarious Russian organized crime figures. It follows, according to them, that given time, Mueller will reveal these illicit connections, and prosecution will become inevitable.

    Let's assume, for argument, that both sides are right. That means that our entire government is irretrievably corrupt. Republicans claim that it could " go all the way to Obama". Democrats, of course, play the "moral high ground" card, insinuating that the current administration is so base and immoral that somehow, the "ends justify the means". No matter how you slice it, the Clinton campaign has a lot more liability on its hands. The problem is, if prosecutions begin, people will "talk" to save their own skins. The puppet masters can't really afford that.

    "All the way to Obama", you say? I think it could go higher than that. Personally, I think it could go all the way to Dick Cheney, and the 'powers that be' are in no mood to let that happen.

    Vivian O'Blivion , May 31, 2018 at 12:19 pm

    The issue as I see it is that from the start everyone was calling the Mueller probe an investigation into collusion and not really grasping the catch all nature of his brief.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Counsel_investigation_(2017–present)

    It's the "any matters arising " that is the real kicker. So any dodgy dealing / possible criminal activity in the past is fair game. And this is exactly what in happening with Manafort.
    Morally you can apply the Nucky Johnson defence and state that everyone knew Trump was a crook when they voted for him, but legally this has no value.
    There is an unpleasant whiff of deep state interference with the will of the people (electoral college). Perhaps if most bodies hadn't written Trump's chances off in such an off hand manner, proper due diligence of his background would have uncovered any liabilities before the election.
    If there is actionable dirt, can't say I am overly sympathetic to Trump. Big prizes sometimes come with big risks.

    David G , May 31, 2018 at 5:14 pm

    My own feeling from the start has been that Mueller was never going to track down any "collusion" or "meddling" (at least not to any significant degree) because the whole, sprawling Russia-gate narrative – to the extent one can be discerned – is obviously phony.

    But at the same time, there's no way the completely lawless, unethical Trump, along with his scummy associates, would be able to escape that kind of scrutiny without criminal conduct being exposed.

    So far, on both scores, that still seems to me to be a likely outcome, and for my part I'm fine with it.

    Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 5:29 am

    My thoughts exactly. Collusion was never a viable proposition because the Russians aren't that stupid. Regardless of any personal opinion regarding the intelligence and mental stability of Donald Snr., the people he surrounds himself with are weapons grade stupid. I don't see the Russians touching the Trump campaign with a proverbial barge pole.

    Bill , June 2, 2018 at 3:26 pm

    it just happens that Trump appears to have been involved (wittingly or not), with the laundering a whole lot of Russian money and so many of his friends seem to be connected with wealthy Russian oligarchs as well plus they are so stupid, they keep appearing to (and probably are) obstructing justice. The Cohen thing doesn't get much attention here, but it's significant that they have all this stuff on a guy who is clearly Trump's bagman.

    Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:15 pm

    There is also quite an indication that the entire Mueller investigation is a complete smoke screen to be used as cannon fodder in the mainstream media.

    On the one hand, Mueller and his hacks have found nothing of import to link Trump to anything close to collusion with members of the Russian government. And I am by no means a Trump supporter by any stretch of the imagination, except as a foil to Clinton. However, even my minimalist expectations for Trump have not worked out either.

    In addition. the Mueller investigation has been spending what appears to be a majority of its time on ancillary matters that were not within the supposed scope and mandate of this investigation. Further, a number of indictments have come down against people involved with such ancillary matters.

    The result is that if Mueller is going beyond the scope of his investigatory mandate, this may come in as a technicality that will allow indicted persons to escape prosecution on appeal.

    Such a mandate, I would think, is the same thing as a police warrant, which can find only admissible evidence covered by the warrant. Anything else found to be criminally liable must be found to be as a result of a completely different investigation that has nothing to do with the original warrant.

    In other words, it appears that the Mueller investigation was allowed to commence under a Republican controlled Congress for the very reason that its intent is simply to go in circles long enough for Republicans to get their agendas through, which does not appear to be working all too well as a result of their high levels of internecine party conflicts.

    This entire affair is coming to show just how dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent the entirety of the US federal government has become. And to the chagrin of all sincere activists, no amount of organized protesting and political action will ever rid the country of this grotesque political quagmire that now engulfs the entirety of our political infrastructure.

    Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:48 pm

    Very true that the US federal government is now "dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent."
    What are your thoughts on forms of action to rid us this political quagmire?
    (other than ineffective "organized protesting and political action")
    Have you considered new forms of public debate and public information?

    Seer , June 1, 2018 at 7:34 am

    All of this is blackmail to hold Trump's feet to the fire of the Israel firsters (such actions pull in all the dark swampy things). By creating the Russia blackmail story they've effectively redirected away from themselves. The moment Trump balks the Deep State will reel in some more, airing innuendos to overwhelm Trump. Better believe that Trump has been fully "briefed" on all of this. John Bolton was able to push out a former OPCW head with threats (knew where his, the OPCW head's children were). And now John Bolton is sitting right next to Trump (whispering in his ear that he knows ways in which to oust Trump).

    What actual "ideas" were in Trump's head going in to all of this (POTUS run) is hard to say. But, anything that can be considered a threat to the Deep State has been effectively nullified now.

    Vivian O'Blivion , June 1, 2018 at 8:22 am

    Possible, but Manafort already tried to get his charges thrown out as being the outcome of investigations beyond the remit He failed.

    Brendan , May 31, 2018 at 10:26 am

    There's no doubt at all that Joseph Mifsud was closely connected with western intelligence, and with MI6 in particular. His contacts with Russia are insignificant compared with his long career working amongst the elite of western officials.
    Lee Smith of RealClearInvestigations lists some of the places where Mifsud worked, including two universities:

    "he taught at Link Campus University in Rome, ( ) whose lecturers and professors include senior Western diplomats and intelligence officials from a number of NATO countries, especially Italy and the United Kingdom.

    Mifsud also taught at the University of Stirling in Scotland, and the London Academy of Diplomacy, which trained diplomats and government officials, some of them sponsored by the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British Council, or by their own governments."

    Two former colleagues of Mifsud's, Roh and Pastor, recently interviewed him for a book they have written. Those authors could very well be biased, but one of them makes a valid point, similar to one that Daniel Lazare makes above:
    "Given the affiliations of Link's faculty and staff, as well as Mifsud's pedigree, Roh thinks it's impossible that the man he hired as a business development consultant is a Russian agent."

    Politically, Mifsud identifies with the Clintons more than anyone else, and claims to belong to the Clinton Foundation, which has often been accused of being just a way of funneling money into Hillary Clinton's campaign.

    As Lee Smith says, if Mifsud really is a Russian spy, "Western intelligence services are looking at one of the largest and most embarrassing breaches in a generation. But none of the governments or intelligence agencies potentially compromised is acting like there's anything wrong."

    From all that we know about Joseph Mifsud, it's safe to say that he was never a Russian spy. If not, then what was he doing when he was allegedly feeding stories to George Papadopoulos about Russians having 'dirt' on Clinton?

    https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/05/26/the_maltese_phantom_of_russiagate_.html

    David G , May 31, 2018 at 4:25 pm

    I read somewhere that Mifsud had disappeared. Was that true? If so, is he back, or still missing?

    Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 6:21 pm

    Here are some excerpts that will answer your question from an article by Lee Smith at Realclearinvestigations, "The Maltese Phantom of Russiagate".

    A new book by former colleagues of Mifsud's – Stephan Roh, a 50-year-old Swiss-German lawyer, and Thierry Pastor, a 35-year-old French political analyst – reports that he is alive and well. Their account includes a recent interview with him.

    Their self-published book, "The Faking of Russia-gate: The Papadopoulos Case, an Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with Mifsud in which he denies saying anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they write, stated "vehemently that he never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos." Mifsud asked rhetorically: "From where should I have this [information]?"

    Mifsud's account seems to be supported by Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat who alerted authorities about Papadopoulos. As reported in the Daily Caller, Downer said Papadopoulos never mentioned emails; he spoke, instead, about the Russians possessing material that could be damaging to Clinton. This new detail raises the possibility that Mifsud, Papadopoulos' alleged source for the information, never said anything about Clinton-related emails either.

    In interviews with RealClearInvestigations, Roh and Pastor said Mifsud is anything but a Russian spy. Rather, he is more likely a Western intelligence asset.

    According to the two authors, it was a former Italian intelligence official, Vincenzo Scotti, a colleague of Mifsud's and onetime interior minister, who told the professor to go into hiding. "I don't know who was hiding him," said Roh, "but I'm sure it was organized by someone. And I am sure it will be difficult to get to the bottom of it."

    Toby McCrossin , June 1, 2018 at 1:54 am

    " The Papadopoulos Case, an Investigative Analysis," includes a recent interview with Mifsud in which he denies saying anything about Clinton emails to Papadopoulos. Mifsud, they write, stated "vehemently that he never told anything like this to George Papadopoulos.""

    Thank you for providing that explosive piece of information. If true, and I suspect it is, that's one more nail in the Russiagate narrative. Who, then, is making the claim that Misfud mentioned emails? The only source for the statement I can find is "court documents".

    Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:20 am

    The election scams serve only to distract from the Israel-gate scandal and the oligarchy destruction of our former democracy. Mr. Lazare neglects to tell us about that. All of Hillary's top ten campaign bribers were zionists, and Trump let Goldman-Sachs take over the economy. KSA and big business also bribed heavily.

    We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for democracy is lost.

    We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious preference.

    Otherwise the United States is lost, and our lives have no historical meaning beyond slavery to oligarchy.

    Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 9:51 am

    You are right Sam. Israel does work the fence under the guise of the Breaking News. Joe

    Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:18 pm

    My response was that Israel massacres at the fence, ignored by the zionist US mass media.

    mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:48 am

    The extreme wealth and privileges of oligarchy depend on the poverty and slavery of others. Inequality of income is the root cause of most of our ills. Try to imagine what a world of economic equals would be like. No striving for more and more wealth at the expense of others. No wars. What would there be to fight over – everyone would be content with what they already had.

    If you automatically think such a world would be impossible, try to state why. You might discover that the only obstacle to such a world is the greedy bastards who are sitting on top of everybody, and will do anything to maintain their advantages.

    mike k , May 31, 2018 at 11:52 am

    How do the oligarchs ensure your slavery? With the little green tickets they have hoarded that the rest of us need just to eat and have a roof over our heads. The people sleeping in the streets tell us the penalty for not being good slaves.

    Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 12:50 pm

    Very true, Mike. Those who say that equality or fairness of income implies breaking the productivity incentive system are wrong. No matter how much or how little wage incentive we offer for making an effort in work, we need not have great disparities of income. Those who can work should have work, and we should all make an effort to do well in our work, but none of us need the fanciest cars or grand monuments to live in, just to do our best.

    Getting rid of oligarchy, and getting money out of mass media and elections, would be the greatest achievement of our times.

    Joe Tedesky , May 31, 2018 at 5:30 pm

    An old socialist friend of my dad's generation who claimed to have read the biography of Andrew Carnegie had told me over a few beers that Carnegie said, "that at a time when he was paying his workers $5 a week he 'could' have been paying them $50 a day, but then he could not figure out what kind of life they would lead with all that money". Think about it mike, if his workers would have had that kind of money it would not be long before Carnegie's workers became his competition and opened up next door to him the worst case scenario would be his former workers would sell their steel at a cheaper price, kind of, well no exactly like what Rockefeller did with oil, or as Carnegie did with steel innovation. How's that saying go, keep them down on the farm . well. Remember Carnegie was a low level stooge for the railroads at one time, and rose to the top .mike. Great point to make mike, because there could be more to go around. Joe

    Steve Naidamast , May 31, 2018 at 3:16 pm

    "We must restrict funding of elections and mass media to limited individual donations, for democracy is lost.

    We must eliminate zionist fascism from our political parties, federal government, and foreign policy. Obviously that has nothing to do with any ethnic or religious preference."

    Good luck with that!!!

    Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 8:19 pm

    Well, you are welcome to make suggestions on how to save the republic.

    john wilson , May 31, 2018 at 9:10 am

    The depths of the deep state has no limits, but as a UK citizen, I fail to see why the American "spooks" need any help from we Brits when it comes state criminal activity. Sure, we are masters at underhand dirty tricks, but the US has a basket full of tricks that 'Trump' (lol) anything we've got. It was the Russians wot done mantra has been going on for many decades and is ever good for another turn around the political mulberry tree of corruption and underhand dealings. Whether the Democrats or the Republicans win its all the same to the deep state as they are in control whoever is in the White House. Trump was an outsider and there for election colour and the "ho ho ho" look what a great democracy we are, anyone can be president. He is in fact the very essence of the 'wild card' and when he actually won there was total confusion, panic, disbelief and probably terror in the caves and dungeons of the deep state.

    Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:33 am

    I'm sure the result was so unexpected that the shadowy fixers, the IT mavens who could have "adjusted" the numbers, were totally caught off guard and unable to do "cleanly." Not that they didn't try to re-jigger the results in the four state recounts that were ordered, but it was simply too late to effectively cheat at that point, as there were already massive overvotes detected in key urban precincts. Such a thing will never happen again, I am sure.

    Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 9:36 am

    It appears that UK has long had a supply of anti-Russia fearmongers, presumably backed by its anti-socialist oligarchy as in the US. Perhaps the US oligarchy is the dumbest salesman, who believes that all customers are even dumber, so that UK can sell Russophobia here thirty years after the USSR.

    Bob Van Noy , May 31, 2018 at 8:49 am

    "But how could Trump think otherwise? As Consortium News founding editor Robert Parry observed a few days later, the maneuver "resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's playbook on government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you that I'd sure hate to see end up in the press."

    Perfect.
    Recently, while trying to justify my arguement that a new investigation into the RFK Killing was necessary, I was asked why I thought that, and my response was "Modus operandi," exactly what Robert Parry learned by experience, and that is the fundamental similarity to all of the institutionalized crime that takes place by the IC. Once one realizes the literary approach to disinformation that was fundamental to Alan Dulles, James Jesus Angleton, even Ian Fleming, one can easily see the Themes being applied. I suppose that the very feature of believability offered by propaganda, once recognized, becomes its undoing. That could be our current reality; the old Lines simply are beginning to appear to be ridiculous

    Thank you Daniel Lazar.

    Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 8:39 am

    The recognition of themes of propaganda as literary themes and modus operandi is helping to discredit propaganda. The similarities of the CW false-flag operations (Iraq, Syria, and UK), and the fake assassinations (Skripal and Babchenko) by the anti-Russia crowd help reveal and persuade on the falsehood of the Iraq WMD, Syria CW, and MH-17 propaganda ops. Just as the similarities of the JFK/MLK/RFK assassinations persuade us that commonalities exist long before we see evidence.

    Bob Van Noy , June 1, 2018 at 1:11 pm

    Many thanks Sam F for recognizing that. As we begin to achieve a resolution of the 60's Kllings, we can begin to see the general and specific themes utilized to direct the programs of Assassination. The other aspect is that real investigation Never followed; and that took Real Power.

    In a truly insightful book by author Sally Denton entitled "The Profiteers" she puts together a very cogent theory that it isn't the Mafia, it's the Syndicate, which means (for me at least) real, criminal power with somewhat divergent interests ok with one another, to the extent that they can maintain their Own Turf. I think that's a profound insight

    Too, in a similar vain, the Grand Deceptions of American Foreign Policy, "scenarios" are simply and only that, not a Real possible solution. Always resulting in failure

    Sam F , June 1, 2018 at 9:23 pm

    Yes, it is difficult to determine the structure of a subculture of gangsterism in power, which can have many specialized factions in loose cooperation, agreeing on some general policy points, like benefits for the rich, hatred of socialism, institutionalized bribery of politicians and judges, militarized policing, destruction of welfare and social security, deregulation of everything, essentially the neocon/neolib line of the DemReps. The party line of oligarchy in any form.

    Indeed the foreign policy of such gangsters is designed to "fail" because destruction of cultures, waste, and fragmentation most efficiently exploits the bribery structure available, and serves the anti-socialist oligarchy. Failure of the declared foreign policy is success, because that is only propaganda to cover the corruption.

    SocraticGadfly , May 31, 2018 at 8:48 am

    You know, not only Gay Trowdy but even Dracula Napolitano think people like Lazare , McGovern, etc. are overblown on this issue.

    backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 1:47 pm

    SocraticGadfly – Trey Gowdy hasn't even seen the documents yet, so he's hardly in a position to say anything. The House Intelligence Committee, under Chairman Nunes, are being stymied by the FBI and the Department of Justice who are refusing to hand over documents. Refusing! Refusing to disclose documents to the very people who, by law, have oversight. Nunes is threatening to hit them with Contempt of Congress.

    Let's see the documents. Then Trey Gowdy can open his mouth.

    Herman , May 31, 2018 at 8:32 am

    What I take from this head spinning article is the paragraph about Carter Page.

    "On July 7, 2016 Carter Page delivered a lecture on U.S.-Russian relations in Moscow in which he complained that "Washington and other western capitals have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption, and regime change." Washington hawks expressed "unease" that someone representing the presumptive Republican nominee would take Russia's side in a growing neo-Cold War

    Mr. Page hit the nail on the head. There is no greater sin to entrenched power than to spell out what is going on with Russia. It helps us understand why terms like dupe and naïve were stuck on Carter Page's back.. Truth to power is not always good for your health.

    Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:07 am

    The tyrant accuses of disloyalty, all who question the reality of his foreign monsters.
    And so do his monster-fighting agencies, whose budgets depend upon the fiction.

    backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:25 am

    Daniel Lazare – good report. "It sounds more like CIA paranoia raised to the nth degree." This wasn't a case of paranoia. This was a blatant attempt to bring down a rival opponent and, failing that, the President of the United States. This was intentional and required collusion between top officials of the government. They fabricated the phony Steele dossier (paid for by the Clinton campaign), exonerated Hillary Clinton, and then went to town on bringing down Trump.

    "Was George Popodopolous set up?" Of course he was. Set up a patsy in order to give you reason to carry out a phony investigation.

    "If the corporate press fails to point this out, it's because reporters are too befogged themselves to notice." They're not befogged; they're following orders (the major television and newspaper outfits). Without their 24/7 spin and lies, Russiagate would never have been kept alive.

    These guys got the biggest surprise of their life when Hillary Clinton lost the election. None of this would have come out had she won. During the campaign, as Trump gained in the polls, she was heard to say, "If they ever find out what we've done, we'll all hang."

    I hope they see jail time for what they've done.

    backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:38 am

    Apparently what has come out so far is just the tip of the iceberg. Some are saying this could lead all the way up to Obama. I hope not, but they have certainly done all they can to ruin the Trump Presidency.

    JohnM , May 31, 2018 at 9:58 am

    I'm adjusting my tinfoil hat right now. I'm wondering if Skripal had something to do with the Steel dossier. The iceberg may be even bigger than thought.

    Sam F , May 31, 2018 at 10:18 am

    It is known that Skripal's close friend living nearby was an employee of Steele's firm Orbis.

    Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 2:58 pm

    Exactly, his name is Pablo Miller and he is the MI6 agent who initially recruited Sergei Skripal. Miller worked for Orbis, Steele's company and listed that in his resume on LinkedIn but later deleted it. But once it's on the internet it can always be found and it was and it was published.

    robjira , May 31, 2018 at 2:13 pm

    John, both Moon Of Alabama and OffGuardian have had excellent coverage of the Skripal affair. Informed opinions wonder if Sergei Skripal was one of Steele's "Russian sources," and that he may have been poisoned for the purpose of either a) bolstering the whole "Russia = evil" narrative, or b) a warning not to ask for more than what he may have conceivably received for any contribution he may or may not have made to the "dossiere."

    mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:20 am

    Interesting details in this article, but we have known this whole Russiagate affair was a scam from the get go. It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over Hillary. The chagrined dems came together and concocted their sore loser alibi – the Russians did it. They scooped up a lot of pre-election dirt, rolled it into a ball and directed it at Trump. It is a testament to the media's determination to stick with their story, that in spite of not a single scrap of real evidence after over a year of digging by a huge team of democratic hit men and women, this ridiculous story still has supporters.

    David G , May 31, 2018 at 10:31 am

    "It all started the day after Trump's unexpected electoral win over Hillary."

    Not so.

    Daniel Lazare's first link in the above piece is to Paul Krugman's July 22, 2016 NY Times op-ed, "Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate". (Note how that headline doesn't even bother to employ a question mark.)

    I appreciate that that Krugman column gets pride of place here since I distinctly remember reading it in my copy of the Times that day, months before the election, and my immediate reaction to it: nonplussed that such a risible thesis was being aired so prominently, along with a deep realization that this was only the first shot in what would be a co-ordinated media disinformation campaign, à la Saddam's WMDs.

    Chet Roman , May 31, 2018 at 3:37 pm

    Actually, I think the intelligence agencies' (CIA/FBI/DNI) plan started shortly after Trump gave the names of Page and Papadopoulos to the Washington Post (CIA annex) in a meeting on March 21, 2016 outlining his foreign policy team.

    Carter Page (Naval Academy distinguished graduate and Naval intelligence officer) in 2013 worked as an "under-cover employee" of the FBI in a case that convicted Evgeny Buryakov and it was reported that he was still an UCE in March of 2016. The FBI never charged or even hinted that Page was anything but innocent and patriotic. However, in October 2016 the FBI told the FISA Court that he was a spy to support spying on him. Remember the FISA Court allows spying on him AND the persons he is in contact, which means almost everyone on the Trump transition team/administration.

    Here is an excerpt from an article by WSJ's Kimberley Strassel:

    In "late spring" of 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey briefed White House "National Security Council Principals" that the FBI had counterintelligence concerns about the Trump campaign. Carter Page was announced as a campaign adviser on March 21, and Paul Manafort joined the campaign March 29. The briefing likely referenced both men, since both had previously been on the radar of law enforcement. But here's what matters: With this briefing, Mr. Comey officially notified senior political operators on Team Obama that the bureau had eyes on Donald Trump and Russia. Imagine what might be done in these partisan times with such explosive information.

    And what do you know? Sometime in April, the law firm Perkins Coie (on behalf the Clinton campaign) hired Fusion GPS, and Fusion turned its attention to Trump-Russia connections.

    David G , May 31, 2018 at 4:56 pm

    Most interesting, Chet Roman. Thanks.

    My understanding is that Trump more or less pulled Page's name out of a hat to show the WashPost that he had a "foreign policy team", and thus that his campaign wasn't just a hollow sham, but that at that point he really had had no significant contact at all with Page – maybe hadn't even met him. It was just a name from his new political world that sprang to "mind" (or the Trumpian equivalent).

    Of course, the Trump campaign *was* just a sham, by conventional Beltway standards: a ramshackle road show with no actual "foreign policy team", or any other policy team.

    So maybe that random piece of B.S. from Trump has caused him a heap of trouble. This is part of why – no matter how bogus "Russia-gate" is – I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for old Cheeto Dust.

    backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 6:56 am

    Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal had some good advice:

    "Mr. Trump has an even quicker way to bring the hostility to an end.

    He can – and should – declassify everything possible, letting Congress and the public see the truth.

    That would put an end to the daily spin and conspiracy theories. It would puncture Democratic arguments that the administration is seeking to gain this information only for itself, to "undermine" an investigation.

    And it would end the Justice Department's campaign of secrecy, which has done such harm to its reputation with the public and with Congress."

    What do you bet he does?

    RickD , May 31, 2018 at 6:44 am

    I have serious doubts about the article's veracity. There seems to be a thread running through it indicating an attempt to whitewash any Russian efforts to get Trump elected. To dismiss all the evidence of such efforts, and , despite this author's words, there is enough such evidence, seems more than a bit partisan.

    Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , May 31, 2018 at 6:55 am

    What evidence? I've seen none so far. A lot of claims that there is such evidence but no one seems to ever say what it is.

    backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:06 am

    RickD – thanks for the good laugh before bedtime. I'm with Mr. Merrell and I actually want to see some evidence. Maybe it was Professor Halper in the kitchen with the paring knife.

    Realist , May 31, 2018 at 9:21 am

    Unfortunately, what this guy says is what most Americans still seem to believe. When I ask people what is the actual hard evidence for "Russiagate" (because I don't know of any that has been corroborated), I get a response that there have been massive examples of Russian hacks, Russian posts, tweets and internet adverts–all meant to sabotage Hillary's candidacy, and very effective, mind you. Putin has been an evil genius worthy of a comic book villain (to date myself, a regular Lex Luthor). Sez who, ask I? Sez the trustworthy American media that would never lie to the public, sez they. You know, professional paragons of virtue like Rachel Maddow and her merry band.

    Nobody seems aware of the recent findings about Halpern, none seem to have a realistic handle on the miniscule scope of the Russian "offenses" against American democracy. Rachel, the NY Times and WaPo have seen to that with their sins of both commission and omission. Even the Republican party is doing a half-hearted job of defending its own power base with rigorous and openly disseminated fact checking. It's like even many of the committee chairs with long seniority are reluctant to buck the conventional narrative peddled by the media. Many have chosen to retire rather than fight the media and the Deep State. What's a better interpretation of events? Or is one to believe that the silent voices, curious retirements and political heat generated by the Dems, the prosecutors and the media are all independent variables with no connections? These old pols recognise a good demonizing when they see it, especially when directed at them.

    Personally, I think that not only the GOPers should be fighting like the devil to expose the truth (which should benefit them in this circumstance) but so should the media and all the watchdog agencies (ngo's) out there because our democracy WAS hijacked, but it was NOT by the Russians. Worse than that, it was done by internal domestic enemies of the people who must be outed and punished to save the constitution and the republic, if it is not too late. All the misinformation by influential insiders and the purported purveyors of truth accompanied by the deliberate silence by those who should be chirping like birds suggests it may well be far too late.

    backwardsevolution , May 31, 2018 at 7:53 pm

    Realist – a most excellent post! Some poll result I read about the other day mentioned that well over half of the American public do NOT believe what they are being told by the media. That was good to hear. But you are right, there are still way too many who never question anything. If I ever get in trouble, I wouldn't want those types on my jury. They'd be wide awake during the prosecution's case and fast asleep during my defense.

    This is the Swamp at work on both sides of the aisle. Most of the Republicans are hanging Trump out to dry. They've probably got too much dirt they want to keep hidden themselves, so retirement looks like a good idea. Get out of Dodge while the going is good, before the real fighting begins! The Democrats are battling for all they're worth, and I've got to hand it to them – they're dirty little fighters.

    Yes, democracy has been hijacked. Hard to say how long this has been going on – maybe forever. If there is anything good about Trump's presidency, it's that the Deep State is being laid out and delivered up on a silver platter for all to see.

    There has never been a better chance to take back the country than this. If this opportunity passes, it will never come again. They will make sure of it.

    The greatest thing that Trump could do for the country would be to declassify all documents. Jeff Sessions is either part of the Deep State or he's been scared off. He's not going to act. Rosenstein is up to his eyeballs in this mess and he's not going to act. In fact, he's preventing Nunes from getting documents. It is up to Trump to act. I just hope he's not being surrounded by a bunch of bad apple lawyers who are giving him bad advice. He needs to go above the Department of Justice and declassify ALL documents. If he did that, a lot of these people would probably die of a heart attack within a minute.

    mike k , May 31, 2018 at 7:11 am

    You sure came out of the woodwork quickly to express your "serious doubts" RickD.

    Skip Scott , May 31, 2018 at 8:07 am

    Please provide "such evidence". I've yet to see any. The entire prosecution of RussiaGate has been one big Gish Gallop.

    strgr-tgther , May 31, 2018 at 9:39 pm

    RickD – Thank you for pointing that out! You were the only one!!! It is a very strange article leaving Putin and the Russians evidence out and also not a single word about Stromy Daniels witch is also very strange. I know Hillary would never have approved of any of this and they don't say that either.

    John , June 1, 2018 at 2:26 am

    What does Stormy Daniels have to do with RussiaGate?

    You know that someone who committed the ultimate war crime by lying us into war to destroy Libya and re-institute slavery there, and who laughed after watching video of a man that Nelson Mandela called "The Greatest Living Champion of Human Rights on the Planet" be sodomized to death with a knife, is somehow too "moral" to do such a thing? Really?

    It amazes me how utterly cultish those who support the Red Queen have shown themselves to be – without apparently realizing that they are obviously on par with the followers of Jim Jones!

    strgr-tgther , June 1, 2018 at 12:17 pm

    That is like saying what does income tax have to do with Al Capone. Who went to Alctraz because he did not pay income tax not for being a gangster. So we know Trump has sexual relations with Stormy Daniels, then afterward PAID her not to talk about it. So he paid Story Daniels for sex! That is Prostitution! Same thing. And that is inpeachable, using womens bodies as objects. If we don't prosecute Trump here then from now on all a John needs to say to the police is that he was not paying for sex but paying to keep quiet about it. And Cogress can get Trump for prostitution and disgracing the office of President. Without Russia investigations we would never have found out about this important fact, so that is what it has to do with Russia Gate.

    Paul E. Merrell, J.D. , May 31, 2018 at 4:53 am

    Guccifer 2.0's American Fingerprints Reveal An Operation Made In The USA: https://disobedientmedia.com/2018/05/guccifer-2-0s-american-fingerprints-reveal-an-operation-made-in-the-usa/

    [Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say. ..."
    "... The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack. ..."
    "... "No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.] ..."
    "... "Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since . ..."
    "... "More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi." ..."
    "... The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ] ..."
    "... Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies. MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers. ..."
    "... The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. ..."
    "... I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed out" propaganda. One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not. No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply." ..."
    "... There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths. ..."
    "... Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked" to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another ..."
    "... (FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and printed. ..."
    "... Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden. ..."
    "... Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their "investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again. ..."
    "... Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's activities are a complete sham. ..."
    "... Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely cause of the Russiagate scams. ..."
    "... Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." ..."
    "... For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic conspiracy. ..."
    "... Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB drive, it is not a known. ..."
    "... There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings. ..."
    "... Don't forget this Twitter post by Wikileaks on October 30, 2016: Podesta: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082#efmAGSAH- ..."
    "... Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face? ..."
    "... If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars. ..."
    "... My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody? ..."
    Jun 09, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

    If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny . It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.

    Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity -- including two "alumni" who were former National Security Agency technical directors -- have long since concluded that Julian Assange did not acquire what he called the "emails related to Hillary Clinton" via a "hack" by the Russians or anyone else. They found, rather, that he got them from someone with physical access to Democratic National Committee computers who copied the material onto an external storage device -- probably a thumb drive. In December 2016 VIPS explained this in some detail in an open Memorandum to President Barack Obama.

    On January 18, 2017 President Obama admitted that the "conclusions" of U.S. intelligence regarding how the alleged Russian hacking got to WikiLeaks were "inconclusive." Even the vapid FBI/CIA/NSA "Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections" of January 6, 2017, which tried to blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for election interference, contained no direct evidence of Russian involvement. That did not prevent the "handpicked" authors of that poor excuse for intelligence analysis from expressing "high confidence" that Russian intelligence "relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks." Handpicked analysts, of course, say what they are handpicked to say.

    Never mind. The FBI/CIA/NSA "assessment" became bible truth for partisans like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who was among the first off the blocks to blame Russia for interfering to help Trump. It simply could not have been that Hillary Clinton was quite capable of snatching defeat out of victory all by herself. No, it had to have been the Russians.

    Five days into the Trump presidency, I had a chance to challenge Schiff personally on the gaping disconnect between the Russians and WikiLeaks. Schiff still "can't share the evidence" with me or with anyone else, because it does not exist.

    WikiLeaks

    It was on June 12, 2016, just six weeks before the Democratic National Convention, that Assange announced the pending publication of "emails related to Hillary Clinton," throwing the Clinton campaign into panic mode, since the emails would document strong bias in favor of Clinton and successful attempts to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders. When the emails were published on July 22, just three days before the convention began, the campaign decided to create what I call a Magnificent Diversion, drawing attention away from the substance of the emails by blaming Russia for their release.

    Clinton's PR chief Jennifer Palmieri later admitted that she golf-carted around to various media outlets at the convention with instructions "to get the press to focus on something even we found difficult to process: the prospect that Russia had not only hacked and stolen emails from the DNC, but that it had done so to help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton." The diversion worked like a charm. Mainstream media kept shouting "The Russians did it," and gave little, if any, play to the DNC skullduggery revealed in the emails themselves. And like Brer' Fox, Bernie didn't say nothin'.

    Meanwhile, highly sophisticated technical experts, were hard at work fabricating "forensic facts" to "prove" the Russians did it. Here's how it played out:

    June 12, 2016: Assange announces that WikiLeaks is about to publish "emails related to Hillary Clinton."

    June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.

    June 15, 2016: "Guccifer 2.0" affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the "hack;" claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with "Russian fingerprints."

    The June 12, 14, & 15 timing was hardly coincidence. Rather, it was the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to "show" that it came from a Russian hack.

    Enter Independent Investigators

    A year ago independent cyber-investigators completed the kind of forensic work that, for reasons best known to then-FBI Director James Comey, neither he nor the "handpicked analysts" who wrote the Jan. 6, 2017 assessment bothered to do. The independent investigators found verifiable evidence from metadata found in the record of an alleged Russian hack of July 5, 2016 showing that the "hack" that day of the DNC by Guccifer 2.0 was not a hack, by Russia or anyone else.

    Rather it originated with a copy (onto an external storage device – a thumb drive, for example) by an insider -- the same process used by the DNC insider/leaker before June 12, 2016 for an altogether different purpose. (Once the metadata was found and the "fluid dynamics" principle of physics applied, this was not difficult to disprove the validity of the claim that Russia was responsible.)

    One of these independent investigators publishing under the name of The Forensicator on May 31 published new evidence that the Guccifer 2.0 persona uploaded a document from the West Coast of the United States, and not from Russia.

    In our July 24, 2017 Memorandum to President Donald Trump we stated , "We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI."

    Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, the disclosure described below may be related. Even if it is not, it is something we think you should be made aware of in this general connection. On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began to publish a trove of original CIA documents that WikiLeaks labeled 'Vault 7.' WikiLeaks said it got the trove from a current or former CIA contractor and described it as comparable in scale and significance to the information Edward Snowden gave to reporters in 2013.

    "No one has challenged the authenticity of the original documents of Vault 7, which disclosed a vast array of cyber warfare tools developed, probably with help from NSA, by CIA's Engineering Development Group. That Group was part of the sprawling CIA Directorate of Digital Innovation – a growth industry established by John Brennan in 2015. [ (VIPS warned President Obama of some of the dangers of that basic CIA reorganization at the time.]

    Marbled

    "Scarcely imaginable digital tools – that can take control of your car and make it race over 100 mph, for example, or can enable remote spying through a TV – were described and duly reported in the New York Times and other media throughout March. But the Vault 7, part 3 release on March 31 that exposed the "Marble Framework" program apparently was judged too delicate to qualify as 'news fit to print' and was kept out of the Times at the time, and has never been mentioned since .

    "The Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, it seems, 'did not get the memo' in time. Her March 31 article bore the catching (and accurate) headline: 'WikiLeaks' latest release of CIA cyber-tools could blow the cover on agency hacking operations.'

    "The WikiLeaks release indicated that Marble was designed for flexible and easy-to-use 'obfuscation,' and that Marble source code includes a "de-obfuscator" to reverse CIA text obfuscation.

    "More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report , Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi."

    A few weeks later William Binney, a former NSA technical, and I commented on Vault 7 Marble, and were able to get a shortened op-ed version published in The Baltimore Sun

    The CIA's reaction to the WikiLeaks disclosure of the Marble Framework tool was neuralgic. Then Director Mike Pompeo lashed out two weeks later, calling Assange and his associates "demons," and insisting; "It's time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia."Our July 24 Memorandum continued: "Mr. President, we do not know if CIA's Marble Framework, or tools like it, played some kind of role in the campaign to blame Russia for hacking the DNC. Nor do we know how candid the denizens of CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate have been with you and with Director Pompeo. These are areas that might profit from early White House review. [ President Trump then directed Pompeo to invite Binney, one of the authors of the July 24, 2017 VIPS Memorandum to the President, to discuss all this. Binney and Pompeo spent an hour together at CIA Headquarters on October 24, 2017, during which Binney briefed Pompeo with his customary straightforwardness. ]

    We also do not know if you have discussed cyber issues in any detail with President Putin. In his interview with NBC's Megyn Kelly he seemed quite willing – perhaps even eager – to address issues related to the kind of cyber tools revealed in the Vault 7 disclosures, if only to indicate he has been briefed on them. Putin pointed out that today's technology enables hacking to be 'masked and camouflaged to an extent that no one can understand the origin' [of the hack] And, vice versa, it is possible to set up any entity or any individual that everyone will think that they are the exact source of that attack.

    "'Hackers may be anywhere,' he said. 'There may be hackers, by the way, in the United States who very craftily and professionally passed the buck to Russia. Can't you imagine such a scenario? I can.'

    New attention has been drawn to these issues after I discussed them in a widely published 16-minute interview last Friday.

    In view of the highly politicized environment surrounding these issues, I believe I must append here the same notice that VIPS felt compelled to add to our key Memorandum of July 24, 2017:

    "Full Disclosure: Over recent decades the ethos of our intelligence profession has eroded in the public mind to the point that agenda-free analysis is deemed well nigh impossible. Thus, we add this disclaimer, which applies to everything we in VIPS say and do: We have no political agenda; our sole purpose is to spread truth around and, when necessary, hold to account our former intelligence colleagues.

    "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental." The fact we find it is necessary to include that reminder speaks volumes about these highly politicized times.

    Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner-city Washington. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer before serving as a CIA analyst for 27 years. His duties included preparing, and briefing one-on-one, the President's Daily Brief.

    ThomasGilroy , June 9, 2018 at 9:44 am

    "More important, the CIA reportedly used Marble during 2016. In her Washington Post report, Nakashima left that out, but did include another significant point made by WikiLeaks; namely, that the obfuscation tool could be used to conduct a 'forensic attribution double game' or false-flag operation because it included test samples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi."

    Another false flag operation? Suddenly false flag operations have become the weapon of choice. Interestingly enough, they are nefariously (always) committed by the US or US allies. MH17 was a false flag with an SU-25 Ukraine jet responsible for downing the passenger jet (to blame Russia). All of the chemical attacks in Syria were false flag operations with the supply of sarin/chlorine made in Turkey or directly given to the "rebels" by the CIA or US allies. The White Helmets were of course in on all of the details. Assad was just simply not capable of doing that to "his" people. Forget that the sarin had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply. Next it was the snipers who used a false flag operation during the Maidan revolution to shoot protesters and police to oust Yanukovych. Only the neo-Nazis could be capable of shooting the Maidan protesters so they could take power. And then Seth Rich was murdered so he couldn't reveal he was the "real" source of the leak. This was hinted by Assange when he offered a reward to find the killers.

    The author tosses out that the DNC hack was (potentially) a false flag operation by the CIA obviously to undermine Trump while victimizing Russia. It must be the Gulf of Tonkin all over again. While Crowdstrike might have a "dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest", their results were also confirmed by several other cyber-security firms (Wikipedia):

    cybersecurity experts and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant, SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and the editor for Ars Technica, have rejected the claims of "Guccifer 2.0" and have determined, on the basis of substantial evidence, that the cyberattacks were committed by two Russian state-sponsored groups (Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear).

    Then there was Papadopoulas who coincidentally was given the information that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Obviously, they were illegally obtained (unless this was another CIA false flag operation). This was before the release of the emails by WikiLeaks. This was followed by the Trump Tower meeting with Russians with connections to the Russian government and the release of the emails by WikiLeaks shortly thereafter. Additionally, Russia had the motive to defeat HRC and elect Trump. Yesterday, Trump pushed for the reinstatement of Russia at the G-7 summit. What a shock! All known evidence and motive points the finger directly at Russia.

    Calling everything a false flag operation is really the easy way out, but ultimately, it lets the responsible culprits off of the hook.

    anon , June 9, 2018 at 11:28 am

    I don't seen any cause to say that any false-flag theory you don't like is merely "tossed out" propaganda. One cannot tell in your comment where you think the accounts are credible and where not. No evidence that the Syria CW attacks "had the chemical signature of the Assad regime sarin supply."

    CitizenOne , June 8, 2018 at 11:40 pm

    There can be no doubt that counterintelligence tools would be pursued by our intelligence agencies as a means to create narratives and false evidence based on the production of false flags which support desired geopolitical outcomes. There would be a need to create false flags using technology to support the geopolitical agenda which would be hard or impossible to trace using the forensic tools used by cyber sleuths.

    In pre computer technology days there were also many false flags which were set up to create real world scenarios which suited the geopolitical agenda. Even today, there are many examples of tactical false flag operations either organized and orchestrated or utilized by the intelligence agencies to create the narrative which supports geopolitical objectives.

    Examples:

    The US loaded munitions in broad daylight visible to German spies onto the passenger ship Lusitania despite German warnings that they would torpedo any vessels suspected of carrying munitions. The Lusitania then proceeded to loiter unaccompanied by escorts in an area off the Ireland coast treading over the same waters until it was spotted by a German U-Boat and was torpedoed. This was not exactly a false flag since the German U-Boat pulled the trigger but it was required to gain public support for the entrance of the US into WWI. It worked.

    There is evidence that the US was deliberately caught "off guard" in the Pearl Harbor Attack. Numerous coded communication intercepts were made but somehow the advanced warning radar on the island of Hawaii was mysteriously turned off in the hours before and during the Japanese attack which guaranteed that the attack would be successful and also guaranteed that our population would instantly sign on to the war against Japan. It worked.

    There is evidence that the US deliberately ignored the intelligence reports that UBL was planning to conduct an attack on the US using planes as bombs. The terrorists who carried out the attacks on the twin towers were "allowed" to conduct them. The result was the war in Iraq which was sold based on a pack of lies about WMDs and which we used to go to war with Iraq.

    The Tonkin Gulf incident which historians doubt actually happened or believe if it did was greatly exaggerated by intelligence and military sources was used to justify the war in Vietnam.

    The Spanish American War was ginned up by William Randolph Hearst and his yellow journalism empire to justify attacking Cuba, Panama and the Philippines. The facts revealed by forensic analysis of the exploded USS Maine have shown that the cataclysm was caused by a boiler explosion not an enemy mine. At the time this was also widely believed to not be caused by a Spanish mine in the harbor but the news sold the story of Spanish treachery and war was waged.

    In each case of physical false flags created on purpose, or allowed to happen or just made up by fictions based on useful information that could be manipulated and distorted the US was led to war. Some of these wars were just wars and others were wars of choice but in every case a false flag was needed to bring the nation into a state where we believed we were under attack and under the circumstances flocked to war. I will not be the judge of history or justice here since each of these events had both negative and positive consequences for our nation. What I will state is that it is obvious that the willingness to allow or create or just capitalize on the events which have led to war are an essential ingredient. Without a publicly perceived and publicly supported cause for war there can be no widespread support for war. I can also say our leaders have always known this.

    Enter the age of technology and the computer age with the electronic contraptions which enable global communication and commerce.

    Is it such a stretch to imagine that the governments desire to shape world events based on military actions would result in a plan to use these modern technologies to once again create in our minds a cyber scenario in which we are once again as a result of the "cyber" false flag prepared for us to go to war? Would it be too much of a stretch to imagine that the government would use the new electronic frontier just as it used the old physical world events to justify military action?

    Again, I will not go on to condemn any action by our military but will focus on how did we get there and how did we arrive at a place where a majority favored war.

    Whether created by physical or cyberspace methods we can conclude that such false flags will happen for better or worse in any medium available.

    susan sunflower , June 8, 2018 at 7:52 pm

    I'd like "evidence" and I'd also like "context" since apparently international electoral "highjinks" and monkey-wrenching and rat-f*cking have a long tradition and history (before anyone draws a weapon, kills a candidate or sicc's death squads on the citizenry.

    The DNC e-mail publication "theft" I suspect represents very small small potatoes for so many reasons As Dixon at Black Agenda Report put it . Russia-gate is American Exceptionalism writ large which takes on a more sinister aspect as groups like BLM and others are "linked" to alleged "Russian funding"on one and and Soros funding on another

    https://www.blackagendareport.com/russia-gate-and-crisis-american-exceptionalism

    (FWIW, this is a new neoliberal phenomenon when the ultra-rich "liberals" can quietly fund marches on Washington and "grassroots" networking making those neophyte movements too easy targets with questionable robust foundation (color revolutions are possible when anyone is able to foot the cost of 1,000 or 2000 "free" signs or t-shirts -- impecccably designed and printed.

    Gary Weglarz , June 8, 2018 at 11:08 am

    Excellent post. Thanks also for reminding me I need to revisit the Vault 7 information as source material. These are incredibly important leaks that help connect the dots of criminal State intelligence activities designed to have remained forever hidden.

    Skip Scott , June 8, 2018 at 1:07 pm

    I can't think of any single piece of evidence that our MSM is under the very strict control of our so-called intelligence agencies than how fast and completely the Vault 7 releases got flushed down the memory hole. "Nothing to see here folks, move along."

    Realist , June 9, 2018 at 1:36 am

    http://www.unz.com/mwhitney/dems-put-finishing-touches-on-one-party-surveillance-superstate/

    Skip Scott , June 9, 2018 at 7:05 am

    Mbob-

    I don't think anyone can predict whether or not Sanders would have won as a 3rd party candidate. He ran a remarkable campaign, but when he caved to the Clinton machine he lost a lot of supporters, including me. If he had stood up at the convention and talked of the DNC skullduggery exposed by Wikileaks, and said "either I run as a democrat, or I run as a Green, but I'm running", he would have at least gotten 15 pct to make the TV debates, and who knows what could have happened after that. 40 pct of registered voters didn't vote. That alone tells you it is possible he might have won.

    Instead he expected us to follow him like he was the f'ing Pied Piper to elect another Wall St. loving warmonger. That's why he gets no "pass" from me. He (and the Queen of Chaos) gave us Trump. BTW, Obama doesn't get a "pass" either.

    willow , June 8, 2018 at 9:24 pm

    It's all about the money. A big motive for the DNC to conjure up Russia-gate was to keep donors from abandoning any future
    Good Ship Hillary or other Blue Dog Democrat campaigns: "Our brand/platform wasn't flawed. It was the Rooskies."

    Vivian O'Blivion , June 8, 2018 at 8:22 am

    An earlier time line.

    March 14th. Popadopoulos has first encounter with Mifsud.

    April 26th. Mifsud tells Popadopoulos that Russians have "dirt" on Clinton, including "thousands of e-mails".

    May 4th. Trump last man standing in Republican primary.

    May 10th. Popadopoulos gets drunk with London based Australian diplomat and talks about "dirt" but not specifically e-mails.

    June 9th. Don. Jr meets in Trump tower with Russians promising "dirt" but not specifically in form of e-mails.

    It all comes down to who Mifsud is, who he is working for and why he has been "off grid" to journalists (but not presumably Intelligence services) for > 6 months.

    Specific points.

    On March 14th Popadopoulos knew he was transferring from team Carson to team Trump but this was not announced to the (presumably underwhelmed) world 'till March 21st. Whoever put Mifsud onto Popadopoulos was very quick on their feet.
    The Australian diplomat broke chain of command by reporting the drunken conversation to the State Department as opposed to his domestic Intelligence service. If Mifsud was a western asset, Australian Intelligence would likely be aware of his status.
    If Mifsud was a Russian asset why would demonstrably genuine Russians be trying to dish up the dirt on Clinton in June?

    There are missing pieces to this jigsaw puzzle but it's starting to look like a deep state operation to dirty Trump in the unlikely event that he went on to win.

    Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:28 pm

    Ms. Clinton was personally trying to tar Trump with allusions to "Russia" and being "Putin's puppet" long before he won the presidency, in fact, quite conspicuously during the two conventions and most pointedly during the debates. She was willing to use that ruse long before her defeat at the ballot box. It was the straw that she clung to and was willing to use as a pretext for overturning the election after the unthinkable happened. But, you are right, smearing Trump through association with Russia was part of her long game going back to the early primaries, especially since her forces (both in politics and in the media) were trying mightily to get him the nomination under the assumption that he would be the easiest (more like the only) Republican candidate that she could defeat come November.

    Wcb , June 8, 2018 at 5:25 pm

    Steven Halper?

    Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:33 am

    I might add to this informative article that the reason why Julian Assange has been ostracized and isolated from any public appearance, denied a cell phone, internet and visitors is that he tells the truth, and TPTB don't want him to say yet again that the emails were leaked from the DNC. I've heard him say it several times. H. Clinton was so shocked and angry that she didn't become president as she so confidently expected that her, almost knee-jerk, reaction was to find a reason that was outside of herself on which to blame her defeat. It's always surprised me that no one talks about what was in those emails which covered her plans for Iran and Russia (disgusting).
    Trump is a sociopath, but the Russians had nothing to do with him becoming elected. I was please to read here that he or perhaps just Pompeo? met with Binney. That's a good thing, though Pompeo, too, is unstable and war hungry to follow Israel into bombing yet another innocent sovereign country. Thank, Mr. McGovern for another excellent coverage of this story.

    MLS , June 7, 2018 at 9:59 pm

    "no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team"

    Do tell, Ray: How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's investigation – with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks – has and has not done?

    strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:14 am

    MLS: Thank you! No one stands up for what is right any more. We have 17 Intelligency agencies that say are election was stolen. And just last week the Republicans Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnel and Trey Gowdy (who I detest) said the FBI and CIA and NSA were just doing there jobs the way ALL AMERICANS woudl want them to. And even Adam Schiff, do you think he will tell any reporter what evidence he does have? #1 It is probably classified and #2 he is probably saving it for the inpeachment. We did not find out about the Nixon missing 18 minutes until the end anyways. All of these articles sound like the writer just copied Sean Hannity and wrote everything down he said, and yesterday he told all suspects in the Mueller investigation to Smash and Bleach there mobile devices, witch is OBSTRUCTION of justice and witness TAMPERING. A great American there!

    Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:48 am

    strgr-tgther:

    Sean Hannity??? Ha, ha, ha.

    As Mr. McGoven wrote .."any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental."

    John , June 8, 2018 at 5:48 am

    Sorry I had to come back and point out the ultimate irony of ANYONE who supports the Butcher of Libya complaining about having an election stolen from them (after the blatant rigging of the primary that caused her to take the nomination away from the ONE PERSON who was polling ahead of Trump beyond the margin of error of the polls.)

    It is people like you who gave us Trump. The Pied Piper Candidate promoted by the DNC machine (as the emails that were LEAKED, not "hacked", as the metadata proves conclusively, show.)

    incontinent reader , June 8, 2018 at 7:14 am

    What is this baloney? Seventeen Intelligence agencies DID NOT conclude what you are alleging, And in fact, Brennan and his cabal avoided using a National intelligence Estimate, which would have shot down his cherry-picked 'assessment' before it got off the ground – and it would have been published for all to read.

    The NSA has everything on everybody, yet has never released anything remotely indicating Russian collusion. Do you think the NSA Director, who, as you may recall, did not give a strong endorsement to the Brennan-Comey assessment, would have held back from the Congress such information, if it had existed, when he was questioned? Furthermore, former technical directors of the NSA, Binney, Wiebe and Loomis- the very best of the best- have proven through forensics that the Wikileaks disclosures were not obtained by hacking the DNC computers, but by a leak, most likely to a thumb drive on the East Coast of the U.S. How many times does it have to be laid out for you before you are willing and able to absorb the facts?

    As for Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, (and Trey Gowdy, who was quite skilled on the Benghazi and the Clinton private email server investigations- investigations during which Schiff ran interference for Clinton- but has seemed unwilling to digest the Strozk, Page, McCabe, et al emails and demand a Bureau housecleaning), who cares what they think or say, what matters is the evidence.

    I suggest you familiarize yourself with the facts- and start by rereading Ray's articles, and the piece by Joe diGenova posted on Ray's website.

    Realist , June 8, 2018 at 4:12 pm

    The guy's got Schiff for brains. Everyone who cares about the truth has known since before Mueller started his charade that the "17 intelligence agency" claim was entirely a ruse, bald-faced confected propaganda to anger the public to support the coup attempted by Ms. Clinton and her zombie followers. People are NOT going to support the Democratic party now or in the future when its tactics include subverting our public institutions, including the electoral process under the constitution–whether you like the results or not! If the Democratic party is to be saved, those honest people still in it should endeavor to drain the septic tank that has become their party before we can all drain the swamp that is the federal government and its ex-officio manipulators (otherwise known as the "deep state") in Washington.

    Farmer Pete , June 8, 2018 at 7:30 am

    "We have 17 Intelligency agencies that say are election was stolen."

    You opened up with a talking point that is factually incorrect. The team of hand-picked spooks that slapped the "high confidence" report together came from 3 agencies. I know, 17 sounds like a lot and very convincing to us peasants. Regardless, it's important to practice a few ounces of skepticism when it comes to institutions with a long rap sheet of crime and deception. Taking their word for it as a substitute for actual observable evidence is naive to say the least. The rest of your hollow argument is filled with "probably(s)". If I were you, I'd turn off my TV and stop looking for scapegoats for an epically horrible presidential campaign and candidate.

    strgr-tgther , June 8, 2018 at 12:50 pm

    /horrible presidential campaign and candidate/ Say you. But we all went to sleep comfortable the night before the election where 97% of all poles said Clinton was going to be are next President. And that did not happen! So Robert Mueller is going to find out EXACTLY why. Stay tuned!!!

    irina , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm

    Not 'all'. I knew she was toast after reading that she had cancelled her election night fireworks
    celebration, early on the morning of Election Day. She must have known it also, too.

    And she was toast in my mind after seeing the ridiculous scene of her virtual image
    'breaking the glass ceiling' during the Democratic Convention. So expensively stupid.

    Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:50 pm

    Mueller is simply orchestrating a dramatic charade to distract you from the obvious reason why she lost: Trump garnered more electoral votes, even after the popular votes were counted and recounted. Any evidence of ballot box stuffing in the key states pointed to the Democrats, so they gave that up. She and her supporters like you have never stopped trying to hoodwink the public either before or after the election. Too many voters were on to you, that's why she lost.

    Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:57 pm

    Indeed, stop the nonsense which can't be changed short of a coup d'etat, and start focusing on opposing the bad policy which this administration has been pursuing. I don't see the Dems doing that even in their incipient campaigns leading up to the November elections. Fact is, they are not inclined to change the policies, which are the same ones that got them "shellacked" at the ballot box in 2016. (I think Obama must own lots of stock in the shellack trade.)

    Curious , June 8, 2018 at 6:27 pm

    Ignorance of th facts keep showing up in your posts for some unknown reason. Sentence two: "we have 17 intelligency (sic) agencies that say ". this statement was debunked a long time ago.

    Have you learned nothing yet regarding the hand-picked people out of three agencies after all this time? Given that set of lies it makes your post impossible to read.
    I would suggest a review of what really happened before you perpetuate more myths and this will benefit all.

    Also, a good reading of the Snowden Docs and vault 7 should scare you out of your shell since our "intelligeny" community can pretend to be Chinese, Russian, Iranian just for starters, and the blame game can start after hours instead of the needed weeks and/or months to determine the veracity of a hack and/or leak.

    It's past trying to win you over with the actual 'time lines' and truths. Mr McGovern has re-emphasized in this article the very things you should be reading.
    Start with Mr Binney and his technical evaluation of the forensics in the DNC docs and build out from there This is just a suggestion.

    What never ceases to amaze me in your posts is the 'issue' that many of the docs were bought and paid for by the Clinton team, and yet amnesia has taken over those aspects as well. Shouldn't you start with the Clintons paying for this dirt before it was ever attributed to Trump?

    Daniel , June 8, 2018 at 6:38 pm

    Actually, both Brennan and Hayden testified to Congress that only 3 agencies signed off on their claim. They also said that they'd "hand picked" a special team to run their "investigation," and no other people were involved. So, people known to be perjurers cherry picked "evidence" to make a claim. Let's invade Iraq again.

    More than 1/2 of their report was about RT, and even though that was all easily viewable public record, they got huge claims wrong. Basically, the best they had was that RT covered Occupy Wall Street and the NO DAPL and BLM protests, and horror of horrors, aired third party debates! In a democracy! How dare they?

    Why didn't FBI subpoena DNC's servers so they could run their own forensics on them? Why did they just accept the claims of a private company founded by an Atlantic Council board member? Did you know that CrowdStrike had to backpedal on the exact same claim they made about the DNC server when Ukraine showed they were completely wrong regarding Ukie artillery?

    Joe Lauria , June 8, 2018 at 2:12 am

    Until he went incommunicado Assange stated on several occasions that he was never questioned by Muellers team. Craig Murray has said the same. And Kim Dotcom has written to Mueller offering evidence about the source and he says they have never replied to him.

    Realist , June 8, 2018 at 3:40 pm

    Mueller is not interested in the truth. He can't handle the truth. His purpose is not to divulge the truth. He has no use for truthtellers including the critical possessors of the truth whom you mentioned. This aversion to the truth is the biggest clue that Mueller's activities are a complete sham.

    Miranda Keefe , June 8, 2018 at 3:28 pm

    MLS wrote, "How do you know what the GOP Congress appointed Special Prosecutor's investigation – with its unlimited budget, wide mandate, and notable paucity of leaks – has and has not done?"

    Robert Mueller is NOT a Special Prosecutor appointed by the Congress. He is a special counsel appointed by the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, and is part of the Department of Justice.

    I know no one who dislikes Trumps wants to hear it. But all Mueller's authority and power to act is derived from Donald J. Trump's executive authority because he won the 2016 presidential election. Mueller is down the chain of command in the Executive Department.

    That's why this is all nonsense. What we basically have is Trump investigating himself. The framers of the Constitution never intended this. They intended Congress to investigate the Executive and that's why they gave Congress the power to remove him or her via impeachment.

    As long as we continue with this folly of expecting the Justice Department to somehow investigate and prosecute a president we end up with two terrible possibilities. Either a corrupt president will exercise his legitimate authority to end the investigation like Nixon did -or- we have a Deep State beyond the reach of the elected president that can effectively investigate and prosecute a corrupt president, but also then has other powers with no democratic control.

    The solution to this dilemma? An empowered Congress elected by the People operating as the Constitution intended.

    As to the rest of your post? It is an example of the "will to believe." Me? I'll not act as if there is evidence of Russian interference until I'm shown evidence, not act as if it must be true, because I want to believe that, until it's fully proven that it didn't happen.

    F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 8:22 pm

    There must be some Trump-Russia ties.
    Or so claim those CIA spies-
    McCabe wants a deal, or else he won't squeal,
    He'll dissemble when he testifies!

    No one knows what's on Huma's computer.
    There's no jury and no prosecutor.
    Poor Adam Schiff hopes McCabe takes the fifth,
    Special council might someday recruit her!

    Assange is still embassy bound.
    Mueller's case hasn't quite come unwound.
    Wayne Madsen implies that there might be some ties,
    To Israelis they haven't yet found!

    Halper and Mifsud are players.
    John Brennan used cutouts in layers.
    If the scheme falls apart and the bureau is smart,
    They'll go after them all as betrayers!

    They needed historical fiction.
    A dossier with salacious depiction!
    Some urinous whores could get down on all fours,
    They'd accomplish some bed sheet emiction!

    Pablo Miller and Skripal were cited.
    Sidney Blumenthal might have been slighted.
    Christopher Steele offered Sidney a deal,
    But the dossier's not copyrighted!

    That story about Novichok,
    Smells a lot like a very large crock.
    But they can't be deposed or the story disclosed,
    The Skripals have toxic brain block!

    Papadopolis shot off his yap.
    He told Downer, that affable chap-
    There was dirt to report on the Clinton cohort,
    Mifsud hooked him with that honey trap!

    She was blond and a bombshell to boot.
    Papadopolis thought she was cute.
    She worked for Mifsud, a mysterious dude,
    Now poor Paps is in grave disrepute!

    But the trick was to tie it to Russians.
    The Clinton team had some discussions.
    Their big email scandal was easy to handle,
    They'd blame Vlad for the bad repercussions!

    There must have been Russian collusion.
    That explained all the vote count confusion.
    Guccifer Two made the Trump team come through,
    If he won, it was just an illusion!

    Lisa Page and Pete Strzok were disgusted
    They schemed and they plotted and lusted.
    If bald-headed Clapper appealed to Jake Tapper,
    Brennan's Tweets might get Donald Trump busted!

    There had to be cyber subversion.
    It would serve as the perfect perversion.
    They would claim it was missed if it didn't exist,
    It's a logically perfect diversion!

    Ray McGovern , June 8, 2018 at 1:03 am

    BRAVO, F.G. and thanks.
    Ray

    Rob Roy , June 8, 2018 at 1:41 am

    F.G., you've done it again, and I might add, topped even yourself! Thanks.

    KiwiAntz , June 7, 2018 at 7:30 pm

    What a joke, America, the most dishonest Country on Earth, has meddled, murdered & committed coups to overturn other Govts & interfered & continues to do so in just about every Country on Earth by using Trade sanctions, arming Terrorists & illegal invasions, has the barefaced cheek to puff out its chest & hypocritcally blame Russia for something that it does on a daily basis?? And the point with Mueller's investigation is not to find any Russian collusion evidence, who needs evidence when you can just make it up? The point is provide the US with a list of unfounded lies & excuses, FIRSTLY to slander & demonise RUSSIA for something they clearly didn't do! SECONDLY, was to provide a excuse for the Democrats dismal election loss result to the DONALD & his Trump Party which just happens to contain some Republicans? THIRDLY, to conduct a soft Coup by trying to get Trump impeached on "TRUMPED UP CHARGES OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION"? And FOURTLY to divert attention away from scrutiny & cover up Obama & Hillary Clinton's illegal, money grubbing activities & her treasonous behaviour with her private email server?? After two years of Russiagate nonsense with NOTHING to show for it, I think it's about time America owes Russia a public apology & compensation for its blatant lying & slander of a innocent Country for a crime they never committed?

    Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 7:11 pm

    Thanks, Ray, for revealing that the CIA's Digital Innovation Directorate is the likely cause of the Russiagate scams.

    I am sure that they manipulate the digital voting machines directly and indirectly. True elections are now impossible.

    Your disclaimer is hilarious: "We speak and write without fear or favor. Consequently, any resemblance between what we say and what presidents, politicians and pundits say is purely coincidental."

    Antiwar7 , June 7, 2018 at 6:23 pm

    Expecting the evil people running the show to respond to reason is futile, of course. All of these reports are really addressed to the peanut gallery, where true power lies, if only they could realize it.

    Thanks, Ray and VIPS, for keeping up the good fight.

    mike k , June 7, 2018 at 5:55 pm

    For whatever reason, Ray McGovern chose not to mention the murder of Seth Rich, which pretty clearly points to the real source of the leak being him, as hinted by Assange offering a reward for anyone uncovering his killer. The whole thing stinks of a democratic conspiracy.

    And BTW people have become shy about using the word conspiracy, for fear it will automatically brand one as a hoaxer. On the contrary, conspiracies are extremely common, the higher one climbs in the power hierarchy. Like monopolies, conspiracies are central to the way the oligarchs do business.

    John , June 8, 2018 at 5:42 am

    Ray, from what I have seen in following his writing for years, meticulously only deals in knowns. The Seth Rich issue is not a known, it is speculation still. Yes, it probably is involved, but unless Craig Murray states that Seth Rich was the one who handed him the USB drive, it is not a known.

    There is a possibility that Seth Rich was not the one who leaked the information, but that the DNC bigwigs THOUGHT he was, in which case, by neither confirming nor denying that Seth Rich was the leaker, it may be that letting the DNC continue to think it was him is being done in protection of the actual leaker. Seth Rich could also have been killed for unrelated reasons, perhaps Imran Awan thought he was on to his doings.

    Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 10:44 am

    Don't forget this Twitter post by Wikileaks on October 30, 2016: Podesta: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." https://www.wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/36082#efmAGSAH-

    Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 10:47 am

    " whether or not"?!! Wow. That's an imperialistic statement.

    Drew Hunkins , June 7, 2018 at 5:50 pm

    Mueller has nothing and he well knows it. He was willingly roped into this whole pathetic charade and he's left grasping for anything remotely tied to Trump campaign officials and Russians. Even the most tenuous connections and weak relationships are splashed across the mass media in breathless headlines. Meanwhile, NONE of the supposed skulduggery unearthed by Mueller has anything to do with the Kremlin "hacking" the election to favor Trump. Which was the entire raison d'etre behind Rosenstein and Mueller's crusade on behalf of the deplorable DNC and Washington militarist-imperialists. Sure be interesting to see how Mueller and his crew ultimately extricate themselves from this giant fraudulent edifice of deceit. Will they even be able to save the most rudimentary amount of face?

    So sickening to see the manner in which many DNC sycophants obsequiously genuflect to their godlike Mueller. A damn prosecutor who was arguably in bed with the Winter Hill Gang!

    jose , June 7, 2018 at 5:13 pm

    If they had had any evidence to inculpate Russia, we would have all seen it by now. They know that by stating that there is an investigation going on: they can blame Russia. The Democratic National Committee is integrated by a pack of liars.

    Jeff , June 7, 2018 at 4:35 pm

    Thanx, Ray. The sad news is that everybody now believes that Russia tried to "meddle" in our election and, since it's a belief, neither facts nor reality will dislodge it. Your disclaimer should also probably carry the warning – never believe a word a government official says especially if they are in the CIA, NSA, or FBI unless they provide proof. If they tell you that it's classified, that they can't divulge it, or anything of that sort, you know they are lying.

    john wilson , June 7, 2018 at 4:09 pm

    I suspect the real reason no evidence has been produced is because there isn't any. I know this is stating the obvious, but if you think about it, as long as the non extent evidence is supposedly being "investigated" the story remains alive. They know they aren't going to find anything even remotely plausible that would stand up to any kind of scrutiny, but as long as they are looking, it has the appearance that there might be something.

    Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 4:08 pm

    I first want to thank Ray and the VIPS for their continuing to follow through on this Russia-Gate story. And it is a story.

    My question is simple, when will we concentrate on reading Hillary's many emails? After all wasn't this the reason for the Russian interference mania? Until we do, take apart Hillary's correspondence with her lackeys, nothing will transpire of any worth. I should not be the one saying this, in as much as Bernie Sanders should be the one screaming it for justice from the highest roof tops, but he isn't. So what's up with that? Who all is involved in this scandalous coverup? What do the masters of corruption have on everybody?

    Now we have Sean Hannity making a strong case against the Clinton's and the FBI's careful handling of their crimes. What seems out of place, since this should be big news, is that CNN nor MSNBC seems to be covering this story in the same way Hannity is. I mean isn't this news, meant to be reported as news? Why avoid reporting on Hillary in such a manner? This must be that 'fake news' they all talk about boy am I smart.

    In the end I have decided to be merely an observer, because there are no good guys or gals in our nation's capital worth believing. In the end even Hannity's version of what took place leads back to a guilty Russia. So, the way I see it, the swamp is being drained only to make more room for more, and new swamp creatures to emerge. Talk about spinning our wheels. When will good people arrive to finally once and for all drain this freaking swamp, once and for all?

    Realist , June 7, 2018 at 5:25 pm

    Ha, ha! Don't you enjoy the magic show being put on by the insiders desperately trying to hang onto their power even after being voted out of office? Their attempt to distract your attention from reality whilst feeding you their false illusions is worthy of Penn & Teller, or David Copperfield (the magician). Who ya gonna believe? Them or your lying eyes?

    Joe Tedesky , June 7, 2018 at 10:00 pm

    Realist, You can bet they will investigate everything but what needs investigated, as our Politico class devolves into survivalist in fighting, the mechanism of war goes uninterrupted. Joe

    F. G. Sanford , June 7, 2018 at 5:34 pm

    Joe, speaking of draining the swamp, check out my comment under Ray's June 1 article about Freddy Fleitz!

    Sam F , June 7, 2018 at 6:59 pm

    That is just what I was reminded of; here is an antiseptic but less emphatic last line:
    "Swamp draining progresses apace.
    It's being accomplished with grace:
    They're taking great pains to clean out the drains,"
    New swamp creatures will need all that space!

    Unfettered Fire , June 8, 2018 at 11:00 am

    We must realize that to them, "the Swamp" refers to those in office who still abide by New Deal policy. Despite the thoroughly discredited neoliberal economic policy, the radical right are driving the world in the libertarian direction of privatization, austerity, private bank control of money creation, dismantling the nation-state, contempt for the Constitution, etc.

    [Jun 06, 2018] Neoliberal language allows to cut wages by packaging neoliberal oligarchy preferences as national interests

    Highly recommended!
    Neoliberals are a flavor of Trotskyites and they will reach any depths to hang on to power.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Just as conservative Christian theology provides an excuse for sexism and homophobia, neoliberal language allows powerful groups to package their personal preferences as national interests – systematically cutting spending on their enemies and giving money to their friends. ..."
    "... Nothing short of a grass roots campaign (such as that waged by GetUp!) will get rid for us of these modern let-them-eat-cake parasites who consider their divine duty to lord over us. ..."
    Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
    meticulousdoc , 3 Jun 2018 16:16

    Just as conservative Christian theology provides an excuse for sexism and homophobia, neoliberal language allows powerful groups to package their personal preferences as national interests – systematically cutting spending on their enemies and giving money to their friends.

    And when the conservative "Christians" form a neoliberal government, the results are toxic for all, except themselves and their coterie.

    Nothing short of a grass roots campaign (such as that waged by GetUp!) will get rid for us of these modern let-them-eat-cake parasites who consider their divine duty to lord over us.

    An excellent article, we need more of them.

    [May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... FUsion GPS arranged the meeting at trump tower. ..."
    "... IF Misfud told papaD that he had access to Hillary's emails, why did they not bother looking for him for 9 months and then let him walk free? Because he was a set up. ..."
    May 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

    Merasmus , May 21, 2018 at 12:36 am

    'Collusion' would mean actively conspiring with a foreign government. To this day there is no evidence that the Russian lawyer was working for the Russian government (I have seen some media simply assert that she has Kremlin 'connections', whatever that's supposed to mean). Also, why exactly would the Trump campaign have any need to meet with someone promising dirt if, as the Steele Dossier claims, Trump had been a Russian agent for 5 years? The Kremlin would surely have already been providing any possible dirt, and more besides.

    And is this really where we are now? Is this what we've come to? Russia is a country of 144 million people. Is simply being Russian, or talking to a Russian, now a crime? Because that's what our current atmosphere seems to think. It's shocking to see so many people, especially supposedly tolerant and multicultural liberals, ignore any distinction between a government and private citizens, and engage in what can only be called bigotry about 'Russians'. Replace 'Russian' with 'Jew', or a slur like 'Jap', and how incredibly ugly the atmosphere has become in the last 18 months or so becomes obvious.

    That Trump is comically corrupt is a given. But the two central claims of Russiagate were that a. Trump is a Russian agent (or at least being blackmailed by Russia), and that b. Russia in some way hacked or interfered in the election to get Trump elected. There is, to this day, exactly zero evidence for either.

    No, his son meeting with a Russian citizen promising political dirt (even if dirt had been exchanged, which it wasn't because she was lying and just wanted to get a meeting to lobby for some business interests), doesn't constitute 'collusion', or interference by a foreign government.

    Nor does some St. Petersburg company spending a paltry amount of money to run a clickbait ad revenue scheme on Facebook. Nor do Macedonian teenagers running troll accounts (Macedonia isn't even in Russia, and to this day I've never seen any evidence that any Russian, much less the Russian government, is behind their activities).

    The above two are especially damning, because they make it painfully obvious that Russiagate has exactly nothing. In the absence of any evidence that Russia hacked the election, proponents have been forced to venture far and wide to find something, anything, they can remotely pin on Russia. A few hundred thousand dollars spent on social media ads, including ads for Clinton and Sanders, many of which were seen by literally no one, and half of which didn't run until AFTER the election? Are you freaking kidding me?

    As for 'shady Russian money', maybe Trump has taken some. It certainly wouldn't surprise me that he's done something like launder money for Russian oligarchs. Now prove to me took money from the Russian government. Because, again, those are two very different prospects. And if you think the Kremlin and Russian oligarchs are interchangeable or in lockstep with each other, you clearly don't know much about recent Russian history.

    The Russiagate claim wasn't that Trump is skeevy and corrupt. Of course he is. The claim is that he is corrupt in very specific ways, ways that constitute treason.

    Vivian O'Blivion , May 21, 2018 at 6:30 am

    Marasmus.

    Difficult to argue with any of your points.

    Mueller has filed charges against some of the staff in the St Petersburg operation, if you can connect Trump to this entity then cooperation becomes criminal collusion. As charges have already been filed it matters not whether the St Petersburg staff are private or state employees.

    The fact that America has laws prohibiting foreign interference in its elections is I guess understandable, but hypocritical and exceptionalist in the extreme given the cart blanch attitude America takes to interfering in the internal affairs of other nations.

    The Donald Jr meeting with Russians is just a rats nest of conflicting stupidities. If as many others state (and I don't disagree) everyone tries to get dirt on the opposition and foreign sources of information are regularly tapped, then the secret is not to get caught. The Democrats have a plausible cut out (or two) in place between the Russian sources for the Steele dossier and themselves.

    As Steve Bannon has stated, meeting directly with the Russians was weapons grade stupid, but hey it's Don Jr. and Jared Kushner we're talking about.

    The really odd part is that the Russians would attend given that they must have known that their names would be logged by the Secret Service detail providing security for the Republican candidate. To me, this does not suggest an attempt to help Trump as "their man", but rather to dirty by association a candidate that could become President. This interpretation would concur with analysis of the activities of the St Petersburg operation, which was to sow chaos into American social and political discourse.

    andy--s , May 23, 2018 at 12:13 am

    Heres the problem with that.
    FUsion GPS arranged the meeting at trump tower. The Russians paid them to connect with the trump campaign in order to discuss the magnitsky act. They did not come to the meeting with any notion of DIRT. Trump Jr was told they had DIRT.

    THe problem the FBI has, is that they never investigated the Russian contacts to the extent that they investigated the Americans being contacted. Dig? :) IF Misfud told papaD that he had access to Hillary's emails, why did they not bother looking for him for 9 months and then let him walk free? Because he was a set up.

    PapaD got nailed for not being able to remember if the meeting was the tuesday prior or after joing the trump Campaign. It doesnt make sense unless the FBI was looking to spy

    Homer Jay , May 21, 2018 at 12:27 pm

    Let's all assume for one second that all the fantasies of Russia gate are true. That every Russian that Trump and his associates/family ever had any contact with are directed by Putin himself. Who believes for one second that this collusion has had more of a negative impact 2016 election then the collusion that occured between Clinton and the DNC to subvert Sanders, Clinton and the media to 1st subvert Sanders and then Trump (side note, why doesn't Clinton/MSM collusion against Trump balance with the Trump/Russian collusion for Trump?) How about the collusion between Wall Street and the DNC to such an extent that Citi Group was exposed as having picked Obama's cabinet. And then let's remember that the Trump collusion with Kremlin has alot of guilt by association through 6 degrees of separation and the Clinton/DNC/MSM/Wall Street collusion was proven in black and white through the publication of Clinton/DNC/Podesta emails in Wikileaks.

    That this point gets ignored by the MSM, is proof to me that they have lost all objectivity.

    andy--s , May 23, 2018 at 12:16 am

    MOre so.. Homer If Clintons personal server was a nothing burger not worthy of a single indictment, then why was it a national security issue when some stranger offered the emails to Papadopoulos? They didnt bother investigating the stranger. they investigated Papadopoulos!

    Nobody will touch that with a ten foot poll in the main stream media.

    [May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation. ..."
    "... Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma. ..."
    "... The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation. ..."
    "... Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them. ..."
    "... No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered. ..."
    "... Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation. ..."
    "... The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote." ..."
    "... Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?" ..."
    "... Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth. ..."
    "... 1984, anyone? ..."
    "... The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. ..."
    "... Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right. ..."
    "... Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. ..."
    "... One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; ..."
    "... while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned. ..."
    "... Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation. ..."
    "... Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™. ..."
    "... Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar. ..."
    "... And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus. ..."
    "... Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school. ..."
    "... In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting. ..."
    May 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    The Grauniad is slipping deeper into the disinformation business: Revealed: UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance is the headline of a page one piece which reveals exactly nothing. There is no secret lifted and no one was discomforted by a questioning journalist.

    Like other such pieces it uses disinformation to accuse Russia of spreading such.

    The main 'revelation' is stenographed from a British government official. Some quotes from the usual anti-Russian propagandists were added. Dubious or false 'western' government claims are held up as truth. That Russia does not endorse them is proof for Russian mischievousness and its 'disinformation'.

    The opener:

    The UK will use a series of international summits this year to call for a comprehensive strategy to combat Russian disinformation and urge a rethink over traditional diplomatic dialogue with Moscow, following the Kremlin's aggressive campaign of denials over the use of chemical weapons in the UK and Syria.
    ...
    "The foreign secretary regards Russia's response to Douma and Salisbury as a turning point and thinks there is international support to do more," a Whitehall official said. "The areas the UK are most likely to pursue are countering Russian disinformation and finding a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons."

    There is a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons. It is the Chemical Weapon Convention and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). It was the British government which at first rejected the use of these instruments during the Skripal incident:

    Early involvement of the OPCW, as demanded by Russia, was resisted by the British government. Only on March 14, ten days after the incident happened and two days after Prime Minister Theresa may had made accusations against Russia, did the British government invite the OPCW. Only on March 19, 15 days after the incident happen did the OPCW technical team arrive and took blood samples.

    Now back to the Guardian disinformation:

    In making its case to foreign ministries, the UK is arguing that Russian denials over Salisbury and Douma reveal a state uninterested in cooperating to reach a common understanding of the truth , but instead using both episodes to try systematically to divide western electorates and sow doubt.

    A 'common understanding of the truth' is an interesting term. What is the truth? Whatever the British government claims? It accused Russia of the Skripal incident a mere eight days after it happened. Now, two month later, it admits that it does not know who poisoned the Skripals:

    Police and intelligence agencies have failed so far to identify the individual or individuals who carried out the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the UK's national security adviser has disclosed.

    Do the Brits know where the alleged Novichok poison came from? Unless they produced it themselves they likely have no idea. The Czech Republic just admitted that it made small doses of a Novichok nerve agent for testing purposes. Others did too.

    Back to the Guardian :

    British politicians are not alone in claiming Russia's record of mendacity is not a personal trait of Putin's, but a government-wide strategy that makes traditional diplomacy ineffective.

    Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, famously came off one lengthy phone call with Putin – she had more than 40 in a year – to say he lived in a different world.

    No, Merkel never said that. An Obama administration flunky planted that in the New York Times :

    Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call said. "In another world," she said.

    When that claim was made in March 2014 we were immediately suspicious of it:

    This does not sound like typically Merkel but rather strange for her. I doubt that she said that the way the "people briefed on the call" told it to the Times stenographer. It is rather an attempt to discredit Merkel and to make it more difficult for her to find a solution with Russia outside of U.S. control.

    A day later the German government denied (ger) that Merkel ever said such (my translation):

    The chancellery is unhappy about the report in the New York Times. Merkel by no means meant to express that Putin behaved irrational. In fact she told Obama that Putin has a different perspective about the Crimea [than Obama has].

    A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation.

    That disinformation, spread by the Obama administration but immediately exposed as false, is now held up as proof by Patrick Wintour, the Diplomatic editor of the Guardian , that Russia uses disinformation and that Putin is a naughty man.

    The British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson wants journalists to enter the UK reserve forces to help with the creation of propaganda:

    He said army recruitment should be about "looking to different people who maybe think, as a journalist: 'What are my skills in terms of how are they relevant to the armed forces?'

    Patrick Wintour seems to be a qualified candidate.

    Or maybe he should join the NATO for Information Warfare the Atlantic Council wants to create to further disinform about those damned Russkies:

    What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation -- call it Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military counterpart.

    Like the Guardian piece above writer of the NATO propaganda lobby Atlantic Council makes claims of Russian disinformation that do not hold up to the slightest test:

    By pinning the Novichok nerve agent on Sweden or the Czech Republic, or blaming the UK for the nerve gas attack in Syria, the Kremlin sows confusion among our populations and makes us lose trust in our institutions.

    Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma.

    The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation.

    The bigger aim behind all these activities, demanding a myriad of new organizations to propagandize against Russia, is to introduce a strict control over information within 'western' societies.

    Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation.

    That scheme will be used against anyone who deviates from the ordered norm. You dislike that pipeline in your backyard? You must be falling for Russian trolls or maybe you yourself are an agent of a foreign power. Social Security? The Russians like that. It is a disinformation thing. You better forget about it.

    c1ue , May 4, 2018 2:27:27 PM | 1

    Excellent article, in an ongoing run of great journalism.
    I am curious - have you read this? https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/
    It purports to be a book by an American military man intimately familiar with the covert ops portion of the US government. The internal Kafka-esque dynamics described certainly feel true.
    Mike Maloney , May 4, 2018 2:44:12 PM | 3
    One of the reasons newspapers are getting worse is the economics. They aren't really viable anymore. Their future is as some form of government sanctioned oligopoly. Two national papers -- a "left" and a "right" -- and then a handful of regional papers. All spouting the same neoliberal, neoconservative chicanery.
    CD Waller , May 4, 2018 2:57:20 PM | 4
    Genuine journalist Matt Taibbi warned of this sort of branding of disparate views as enemy a month ago. He was also correct. Evil and insidious. The enemy of a free society.
    chet380 , May 4, 2018 2:58:22 PM | 5
    Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them.
    WJ , May 4, 2018 3:02:57 PM | 6
    The later history of the 20th century will one day be read as the triumph and normalization of the Nazi state through liberal democratic capitalism.
    Laguerre , May 4, 2018 3:07:19 PM | 7
    I agree that it's difficult to see how the drive to renew the Cold War is going to be stopped. I presume that, with the exception of certain NeoCon circles, there isn't a desire for Hot War. Certainly not in the British sources you quote. Britain wouldn't want Hot War with Russia. It's all a question of going to the limit for internal consumption. Do a 1984, in order to keep the population in-line.
    james , May 4, 2018 3:11:05 PM | 8
    thanks b... i can't understand how any intelligent thinking person would read the guardian, let alone something like the huff post, and etc. etc... why? the propaganda money that pays for the white helmets, certainly goes to these outlets as well..

    the uk have gone completely nuts! i guess it comes with reading the guardian, although, in fairness, all british media seems very skewed - sky news, bbc, and etc. etc.

    it does appear as though Patrick Wintour is on Gavin Williamson's propaganda bandwagon/payroll already... in reading the comments and articles at craig murrays site, i have become more familiar with just how crazy things are in the uk.. his latest article freedom no more sums it up well... throw the uk msm in the trash can... it is for all intensive purposes, done..

    mk , May 4, 2018 3:31:41 PM | 9
    Meanwhile, OPCW chief Uzumcu seems to have been pranked again, this time by his own staff (this is how I interpret it):

    He claimed that the amount of Novichok found was about 100 g and therefore more than research laboratories would produce, i.e. this was weaponized Novichok.

    http://www.startribune.com/large-dose-of-nerve-agent-was-used-in-spy-s-poisoning-watchdog-says/481687061/

    However, the story is being retracted right now because OPCW staff says it was only 100 mg .

    Uzumcu looks like a fool.

    b , May 4, 2018 3:49:03 PM | 10
    The Russian embassy in the UK must be reading MoA. It just now tweeted this press release: Embassy press officer comments on the Guardian article concerning a new British anti-Russian strategy
    Q: What is our reaction to the Guardian article on a "comprehensive strategy" to "deepen the alliance against Russia" to be pursued by the UK Government at international forums?

    A: Judging by the publication, the main current challenge for Whitehall is to preserve the anti-Russian coalition that the Conservatives tried to build after the Salisbury incident. This task is challenging indeed. The "fusion doctrine" promoted by the national security apparatus has led to the Western bloc taking hasty decisions that, as life has shown, were not based on any facts.

    No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered.

    Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation.

    karlof1 , May 4, 2018 3:52:31 PM | 11
    Hmmm... My reply to c1ue went sideways it seems. Yes, The late Mr. Prouty's book's the real deal and the website hosting his very rare book is a rare gem itself. Click the JFK at page top left to be transported to that sites archive of writings about his murder. The very important essay by Prouty's there too.
    WJ , May 4, 2018 3:53:30 PM | 12
    The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote."

    This one detail tells us so much about how propaganda works, and about how it can be defeated. Successful propaganda both depends upon and seeks to accelerate the erasure of historical memory. This is because its truths are always changing to suit the immediate needs of the state. None of its truths can be understood historically. b makes the connection between the documented but forgotten past "truth" of Merkel's quote and its present reincarnation in the Guardian, and this is really all he *needs* to do. What b points out is something quite simple; yet the ability to do this very simple thing is becoming increasingly rare and its exercise increasingly difficult to achieve. It is for me the virtue that makes b's analysis uniquely indispensable.

    Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?"

    Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth.

    Jose Garcia , May 4, 2018 3:56:03 PM | 13
    1984, anyone?
    john wilson , May 4, 2018 4:03:04 PM | 14
    The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. This implies that the Skripals both closed the door together and then went off on their day spreading the stuff everywhere, yet no one else was contaminated (apart from the fantasy policeman).

    Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right.

    ken , May 4, 2018 4:03:13 PM | 15
    The problem is,,, most know it's all BS but find it 'easier' to believe or at most ignore, as then there is no responsibility to 'do something'. Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. (Yes,,, I'm a PCR reader) :))
    karlof1 , May 4, 2018 4:05:15 PM | 16
    b @10--

    Did you catch the Lavrov interview I linked to on previous Yemen thread? As you might imagine, the verbiage used is quite similar. One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; and that while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned.

    I won't omit linking to Craig Murray's conclusion :

    "I cannot sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it is right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers, because it is questioning the government and establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead."

    Ort , May 4, 2018 4:22:35 PM | 17
    Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation.
    _______________________________________

    Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™.

    This isn't a new insight, but it's worth repeating. It struck me anew while I was listening to a couple of UK "journalists" hectoring OPCW Representative Shulgin, and directing scurrilous and provocative innuendo disguised as "questions" to Mr. Shulgin and the Syrian witnesses testifying during his presentation.

    It flashed upon me that there is no longer a reasonable expectation that the Perpetual Big Liars must eventually abandon, much less confess, their heinous mendacity. Just as B points out, there are no countervailing facts, evidence, rebuttals, theories, or explanations that can't be countered with further iterations of Big Lies, however offensively incredible and absurd.

    Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar.

    And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus.

    Even as the Big Liars reach a point of diminishing returns, they respond with more of the same. I wish I were more confident that this reprehensible practice will eventually fail due to the excess of malignant hubris; I'm not holding my breath.

    Passer by , May 4, 2018 4:24:44 PM | 18

    Is Putin capitulating? Pro US Alexei Kudrin could join new government to negotiate "end of sanctions" with the West.

    Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin will be brought back to "mend fences with the West" in order to revive Russia's economy. Kudrin has repeatedly said that unless Russia makes her political system more democratic and ends its confrontation with Europe and the United States, she will not be able to achieve economic growth. Russia's fifth-columnists were exalted: "If Kudrin joined the administration or government, it would indicate that they have agreed on a certain agenda of change, including in foreign policy, because without change in foreign policy, reforms are simply impossible in Russia," said Yevgeny Gontmakher . . . who works with a civil society organization set up by Mr. Kudrin. "It would be a powerful message, because Kudrin is the only one in the top echelons with whom they will talk in the west and towards whom there is a certain trust."

    Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school.

    It would mark Putin's de facto collapse as a leader. We shall know very soon. Either way, if anyone wondered what the approach to Russia would be from Bolton and Pompeo, we now know: they will play very hard ball with Putin, regardless of what he does (or doesn't do), and with carefree readiness to risk an eventual snap.

    https://archive.is/1Ynms#selection-1641.0-1641.66

    Formerly T-Bear , May 4, 2018 4:57:25 PM | 21
    @ 20 Laguerre

    Certainly looks like @ 18 is a fine example of what b is presenting.

    A good way to extract one's self from the propaganda is to refuse using whatever meme the disinformation uses, e.g. that Sergei Skripal was a double agent -- that is not a known, only a convenient suggestion.

    Military intelligence is far better described as military information needed for some project or mission. Not surreptitious cloak and dagger spying. This is not to say Sergei Scripal was a British spy for which he was convicted, stripped of rank and career and exiled through a spy swap. To continue using Sergei Scripal was a double agent only repeats and verifies the disinformation meme and all the framing that goes with it. Find some alternative to what MSM produces that does not embed truthiness to their efforts.

    Peter Schmidt , May 4, 2018 5:08:52 PM | 23
    In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting.
    Emily Dickinson , May 4, 2018 5:09:00 PM | 24
    @Michael Weddington 19

    I realize it's from one of the biggest propaganda organs in the world... take this New York Times report of the OPCW's retraction with a 100 grams -- 100mg? -- of salt:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/world/europe/opcw-skripal-attack.html

    karlof1 , May 4, 2018 5:12:57 PM | 25
    Passer by @18--

    This same narrative was put forth in 2016 and is just as false now as then. As I posted on Yemen thread earlier, Putin on 5 May is likely to announce the formation of a Stavka.

    Kudrin is a neoliberal and as such is an enemy of humanity and will never again be allowed to hold a position of power within Russia's government. Let him emigrate to the West like his fellow parasites and teach junk economics at some likeminded university.

    jalp , May 4, 2018 5:30:35 PM | 26
    Anyone seen this reported elsewhere? https://www.rt.com/news/425810-white-helmets-us-funding-freeze/

    [Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... World Socialist Web Site ..."
    "... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks ..."
    "... Washington Post ..."
    "... The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies. ..."
    "... the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies. ..."
    "... The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule. ..."
    "... But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils. ..."
    Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org
    by Patrick Martin

    In a three-part series published last week, the World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.

    ... ... ...

    The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks .

    In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while essentially ignoring Trump's attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice.

    This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.

    The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. A chorus of media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire editorial board of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip up support on alleged "human rights" grounds for an expansion of the US war in Syria.

    The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.

    The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.

    The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.

    The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.

    Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.

    Patrick Martin

    [Mar 23, 2018] Skripal Poisoning a Desperate British Attempt To Resurrect Their American Coup by Barbara Boyd

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... According to the British spy tale, a former Russian military intelligence colonel, Sergei Skripal, who spied for Great Britain in Russia from the early 1990s until 2004, was poisoned, along with his daughter, on March 4 in Salisbury, England, using a nerve agent "of a type developed by Russia." In 2010, Skripal had been exchanged in a spy swap between the United States and Russia. He had served six years in a Russian prison for spying for Britain. He had been living in the open in Britain for the last eight years. Skripal's MI6 recruiter and handler, Pablo Miller, listed himself as a consultant to Orbis Business Intelligence, Christopher Steele's British company, on his LinkedIn profile. When the London Daily Telegraph called attention to the Orbis reference, it was removed from the profile. Steele, who worked on the Trump dossier through his company Orbis, has denied that Miller worked directly on that dossier. ..."
    "... Rather than following the protocols of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which require that evidence of the alleged agent be presented to Russia, the eccentric and unpopular May instead delivered an ultimatum to Russia, and whipped up war fever throughout the UK. She now seeks to pull Donald Trump and NATO into ever more aggressive moves against Russia. ..."
    "... A short statement of the reasons why the British are now staging the Skripal provocation can be found in a March 14 London Daily Telegraph call to arms by Allister Heath, who rants: "We need a new world order to take on totalitarian capitalists in Russia and China. Such an alliance would dramatically shift the global balance of power, and allow the liberal democracies finally to fight back. It would endow the world with the sorts of robust institutions that are required to contain Russia and China. Britain needs a new role in the world; building such a network would be our perfect mission." Across the pond, as they say, a similar foundational statement was made by 68 former Obama Administration officials who have formed a group called National Security Action, aimed at securing Trump's impeachment and attacking Russia and China. ..."
    "... China's "Belt and Road Initiative" now encompasses more than 140 nations in the largest infrastructure-building project ever undertaken in human history. This project is a true economic engine for the future. At the same time, the neo-liberal economies of the trans-Atlantic region continue to see their productive potentials sucked dry by the massive piles of debt they have created since the 2008 financial collapse. ..."
    "... Just look at the events of February and March from this standpoint. It is no accident that Christopher Steele turns up, smack dab in the middle of the Skripal poisoning hoax. ..."
    "... None of the true facts about the actual motive for, and sponsors of, the DOJ applications involving Carter Page were revealed to the FISA Court in the filings made by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former FBI Director James Comey, or current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. ..."
    "... Since Steele has been discredited in the United States, a huge fawning publicity campaign has been undertaken on his behalf. The campaign involves journalists who have collaborated directly with Steele in his smear job against Trump. Books by Luke Harding and Michael Isikoff seek to rebuild Steele's reputation. ..."
    "... A fawning piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, as implausible as it is long, has been foisted on the public for the same reason. ..."
    "... Steele described his business to Luke Harding as primarily providing research and reports to competing and feuding Russian oligarchs, many of whom use London as a base of operations. This is obviously a perfect cover for intelligence operations. It is also a very violent theater of operations. The oligarchs intersect both Western intelligence operations and Russian organized crime. They engage in deadly gang warfare. ..."
    "... Steele and his partners are mentored by Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 and a critical player in the infamous "sexing up" and fabrication of the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, ..."
    "... Steele had been tasked to claim that Russia was interfering in Western elections during the entire post-Ukraine coup time-frame, when this black propaganda line began to be circulated widely. ..."
    "... The background to Porton Down's reluctance, is of course former Prime Minister Blair's phony dossier on Iraqi WMD, which Lyndon LaRouche fought, alongside the late British arms expert David Kelly, who exposed the "dodgy dossier," at the time. ..."
    "... Thus, after being disclosed by a dissident Russian chemist living in the United States, novichoks have been widely copied by other countries, according to the press accounts. ..."
    "... The insane McCarthyite reactions to Corbyn's simple statements of fact show that he hit the nail on the head. If you want to find Skripal's poisoners, then, like Edgar Allen Poe, you must take in the whole picture first. The field of play involves the British intelligence services and the anti-Putin Russian oligarchs, each of which services the other, acting on behalf of British strategic objectives. It is no accident that the coup against Donald Trump and the latest British intelligence fraud, putting the entire world in peril, absolutely intersect one another. ..."
    Mar 18, 2018 | www.larouchepub.com

    Skripal Poisoning a Desperate British Attempt To Resurrect Their American Coup

    by Barbara Boyd

    [ Print version of this article ]

    March 18 -- In this report, we will explore the strategic significance of major events in the world starting in February 2018. Our goal is to precisely situate British Prime Minister Theresa May's March 12-14 mad effort to manufacture a new "weapons of mass destruction" hoax based on the alleged Skripal poisoning, using the same people (the MI6 intelligence grouping around Sir Richard Dearlove) and script (an intelligence fraud concerning weapons of mass destruction) which were used to draw the United States into the disastrous Iraq War.

    The Skripal poisoning fraud also directly involves British agent Christopher Steele, the central figure in the ongoing coup against Donald Trump. This time the British information warfare operation is aimed at directly provoking Russia, while maintaining the targeting of the U.S. population and President Trump.

    As the fevered, war-like media coverage and hysteria surrounding the case make clear, a certain section of the British elite seems prepared to risk everything on behalf of its dying imperial system. Despite the hype, economic warfare and sanctions appear to be the British weapons of choice -- Vladimir Putin, as we shall see, recently called the West's nuclear bluff. With the British "Russiagate" coup against Donald Trump fizzling, exposing British agent Christopher Steele and a slew of his American friends to criminal prosecution, a new tool was desperately needed to back the President of the United States into the British geopolitical corner shared by most of the American establishment. The tool they are using to do this is an intelligence hoax, a tried-and-true British product.

    According to the British spy tale, a former Russian military intelligence colonel, Sergei Skripal, who spied for Great Britain in Russia from the early 1990s until 2004, was poisoned, along with his daughter, on March 4 in Salisbury, England, using a nerve agent "of a type developed by Russia." In 2010, Skripal had been exchanged in a spy swap between the United States and Russia. He had served six years in a Russian prison for spying for Britain. He had been living in the open in Britain for the last eight years. Skripal's MI6 recruiter and handler, Pablo Miller, listed himself as a consultant to Orbis Business Intelligence, Christopher Steele's British company, on his LinkedIn profile. When the London Daily Telegraph called attention to the Orbis reference, it was removed from the profile. Steele, who worked on the Trump dossier through his company Orbis, has denied that Miller worked directly on that dossier.

    Theresa May and her foreign minister, Boris Johnson, insist there is only one person who could be responsible for the poisoning -- described as an act of war -- and that person is Vladimir Putin. No evidence has been offered to support this claim. No plausible motive has been provided as to why Putin would order such a provocative murder now, ahead of the World Cup, when the Russiagate coup in the United States has lost all momentum.

    Rather than following the protocols of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which require that evidence of the alleged agent be presented to Russia, the eccentric and unpopular May instead delivered an ultimatum to Russia, and whipped up war fever throughout the UK. She now seeks to pull Donald Trump and NATO into ever more aggressive moves against Russia.

    Thus, as with Christopher Steele's dirty dossier against Donald Trump, the British claims against Putin are an evidence-free exercise of raw power. The Anglo-American establishment instructs us: "trust this, ignore the stinky factless content presented in this dossier -- just note that it is backed by very important intelligence agencies which could cook your goose if you object."

    A short statement of the reasons why the British are now staging the Skripal provocation can be found in a March 14 London Daily Telegraph call to arms by Allister Heath, who rants: "We need a new world order to take on totalitarian capitalists in Russia and China. Such an alliance would dramatically shift the global balance of power, and allow the liberal democracies finally to fight back. It would endow the world with the sorts of robust institutions that are required to contain Russia and China. Britain needs a new role in the world; building such a network would be our perfect mission." Across the pond, as they say, a similar foundational statement was made by 68 former Obama Administration officials who have formed a group called National Security Action, aimed at securing Trump's impeachment and attacking Russia and China.

    Russia and China have embarked on a massive infrastructure building project in Eurasia, the center of all British geopolitical fantasies since the time of Halford Mackinder. China's "Belt and Road Initiative" now encompasses more than 140 nations in the largest infrastructure-building project ever undertaken in human history. This project is a true economic engine for the future. At the same time, the neo-liberal economies of the trans-Atlantic region continue to see their productive potentials sucked dry by the massive piles of debt they have created since the 2008 financial collapse. This debt is now on a hair trigger for implosion. It is estimated by banking insiders that the City of London is sitting on a derivatives powderkeg of $700 trillion, with over-the-counter derivatives accounting for another $570 trillion. The City of London will bear the major impact of the coming derivatives collapse.

    In this strategic geometry, President Trump's support for peaceful collaboration with Russia during the campaign, and his personal friendship with China's President Xi Jinping, have marked him for the relentless coup-drive waged by the British and their U.S. friends.

    On top of that, President Putin delivered a mammoth strategic shock on March 1, showing new Russian weapons systems based on new physical principles, which render present U.S. ABM systems and much of current U.S. war-fighting doctrine obsolete, together with the vaunted first strike capacity with which NATO has surrounded Russia. Not only is the West sitting on a new financial collapse, its vaunted military superiority has just been flanked.

    It is very clear that a strategic choice now confronts the human race. In 1984, Lyndon LaRouche wrote a very profound document, " Draft Memorandum of Agreement Between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. " In it, he developed the concrete basis for peace between the two superpowers at the moment when the United States had adopted the LaRouche/Reagan doctrine of strategic defense. Both Reagan and LaRouche had proposed that the Russians and the United States cooperate in building and developing strategic defense against offensive nuclear weapons, based on new physical principles, thereby eliminating the threat of nuclear annihilation.

    According to the LaRouche Doctrine, "The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) the unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation states, and b) cooperation among sovereign states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all."

    Both China, in President Xi's October Address to the Party Congress, and Russia, in Putin's March 1 address to the Federal Assembly, have set a course to produce technological progress capable of being shared in by all. They both outline major infrastructure projects and dedicating massive funding to exploring the frontiers of science, technology, and space exploration. Donald Trump, in both his campaign and his presidency, has embraced similar views. The British and their American friends, however, are devotees of a completely different and failing economic system, a system soundly rejected in Brexit, in the election of Donald Trump, and most recently in the Italian elections.

    Just look at the events of February and March from this standpoint. It is no accident that Christopher Steele turns up, smack dab in the middle of the Skripal poisoning hoax.

    Exposure of British as U.S. Election Meddlers Weakens Anti-Trump Coup

    On Feb. 2, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a memo demonstrating that the Obama Justice Department and FBI committed an outright fraud on the FISA court in obtaining surveillance warrants on Carter Page, a volunteer for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The bogus warrant applications relied heavily on the dirty British dossier authored by MI6's "former" Russian intelligence chief, Christopher Steele, who had been paid by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee to paint Donald Trump as a Manchurian candidate -- as a pawn of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

    According to the House Intelligence memo and other aspects of its investigation, Steele confided to Bruce Ohr, a high official in the DOJ, that he, Steele, hated Trump with a passion and would do "anything" to prevent Trump's election. Steele was using the fact of an FBI investigation of his allegations as part of a "full spectrum" British information warfare campaign conducted against candidate Trump with the full complicity of Obama's intelligence chiefs. (See Peter Van Buren, " Christopher Steele: The Real Foreign Influence in the 2016 U.S. Election? " The American Conservative, February 15, 2018.) None of the true facts about the actual motive for, and sponsors of, the DOJ applications involving Carter Page were revealed to the FISA Court in the filings made by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former FBI Director James Comey, or current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

    The House Intelligence Committee memo was quickly followed by a declassified letter on Feb. 5, in which Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsay Graham referred Christopher Steele to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for criminal prosecution, based on false statements he made to the FBI about his contacts with the news media. No doubt the criminal referral sent chills down the spines not only of Christopher Steele and his British colleagues, but also of those former Obama officials conspiring against Trump.

    In the same week, House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes announced that he would be conducting investigations into the role of the Obama State Department and intelligence chiefs in the circulation and use of Christopher Steele's dirty dossier. These investigations have been widely reported to focus on John Brennan and James Clapper -- Brennan for widely promoting the dirty British work product, and Clapper for leaks associated with BuzzFeed's publication and legitimization of the dirty British work product. Remind yourself every time you hear media explosions against Trump by either Clapper (congressional perjurer and proponent of the theory that the Russians are genetically predisposed to screw the United States) or Brennan (gopher for George Tenet's perpetual war and torture regime and Grand Inquisitor for Barack Obama's serial
    assassinations by baseball card). They are next in the barrel, so to speak.

    The January 11, 2017 BuzzFeed publication of the Steele dossier was meant to permanently poison Trump's incoming administration, and is the subject of libel suits both in Florida and London. In the London case, the British are ready to invoke the Official Secrets Act to protect Christopher Steele. In the Florida case, Steele has been ordered to sit for deposition despite numerous delays and stalling tactics.

    The Congressional investigation of the State Department is focused on John Kerry, Kerry's aide Jonathan Winer, Victoria Nuland, and Clinton operative Cody Shearer. Nuland utilized Christopher Steele as a primary intelligence source while running the U.S. regime change operations in Ukraine in alliance with neo-Nazis. She greenlighted Steele's initial meetings with the FBI about Donald Trump. Winer deployed himself to vouch for Steele to various news publications collaborating with British agent Steele and his U.S. employer, Fusion GPS, in Steele's media warfare operations against Trump.

    Horowitz's report on the Clinton investigations -- which have already unearthed the texts between former Russiagate lead case agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, proclaiming their hatred of Donald Trump and the need for an "insurance policy" against his election -- is expected to be released very soon. According to the House Intelligence Committee, the Strzok/Page texts also reveal that Strzok was a close friend of U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras. Contreras sits on the FISA court, took Michael Flynn's guilty plea, and then promptly recused himself from Michael Flynn's case for reasons which remain undisclosed.

    Despite its exoneration of the President and thorough discrediting of the British Steele operation, the House Intelligence Committee dangerously accepts the myth that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the emails of Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta, and then provided the hacked information to WikiLeaks for publication. Its final report states, however, that Putin's intervention was not in support of Donald Trump, as previously claimed by Obama's intelligence chiefs. The Senators seeking a new Special Counsel also salute this dangerous fraud.

    As we have previously reported, the myth that Putin hacked the Democrats and provided the hacked emails to WikiLeaks, has been substantively refuted by the investigations of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). In summary, the evidence points to a leak rather than a hack in the case of the DNC. Further, the NSA would have the evidence of any such hack or hacks, according to former NSA technical director Bill Binney, and would have provided it, even if in a classified setting. It is clear that the NSA has no such evidence. It is also clear that the United States and the British have cyber warfare capabilities fully capable of creating "false flag" cyber war incidents.

    North Korea Talks Planned, While Russia and China Continue to Create the Conditions for a New Human Renaissance

    In addition to the fizzling of the coup, the Western elites suffered through February and March for additional reasons. To the shock of the entire, smug Davos crowd, Donald Trump, working with Russia, China, and South Korea, appears to have gotten Kim Jong-un to the negotiating table concerning denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. Substantive talks have been scheduled for May. The breakthrough was announced by President Trump and South Korea on March 8.

    On March 1, President Putin gave his historic two-hour address to the Russian Federal Assembly and the Russian people. Like President Xi's address to the Chinese Party Congress in October 2017, Putin focused on the goal of deeply reducing poverty in Russian society. Xi vowed in October to eliminate poverty from Chinese society altogether by 2020. In addition, Putin emphasized that Russia would undertake a huge city-building project across its vast rural frontiers and dramatically expand its modern infrastructure, including Russia's digital infrastructure. He put major emphasis on directing funds to basic scientific and technological progress. He emphasized that harnessing and stimulating the creative powers of individual human beings is the true driver of all economic progress.

    China's Belt and Road Initiative also continued to advance. Great infrastructure projects are popping up throughout the world, including most specifically in Africa, which had been consigned to be a permanent, primitive looting-ground for Western interests. Among the recent breakthroughs is the great project to refill Lake Chad, a project known as "Transaqua," involving the Italian engineering firm Bonifica, the Chinese engineering and construction firm PowerChina, and the Lake Chad Basin Commission, which represents the African countries directly benefiting from the project. But the biggest strategic news of the last six weeks was contained in the last part of President Putin's speech. He showed various weapons, developed by Russian scientists in the wake of the U.S. abrogation of the ABM treaty and the Anglo-American campaign of color revolutions and NATO base-building in the former Soviet bloc. These weapons, based on new physical principles, render U.S. ABM defenses obsolete, together with many U.S. utopian war-fighting doctrines developed under the reigns of Obama and Bush. Putin emphasized that the economic and "defense" aspects of his speech were not separate. Rather, the scientific breakthroughs were based on an in-depth economic mobilization of the physical economy. He stressed that Russia's survival was dependent upon marshalling continuous creative breakthroughs in basic science and the high-technology spinoffs which result, and their propagation through the entire population. He stressed that such breakthroughs are the product of providing an actually human existence to the entire society.

    Compare what Russia and China have set out to accomplish with respect to the physical economy of the Earth, with the second and third paragraphs of Lyndon LaRouche's prescription for a durable peace in the LaRouche Doctrine:

    The most crucial feature of present implementation of such a policy of durable peace is a profound change in the monetary, economic, and political relations between dominant powers and those relatively subordinated nations often classed as "developing nations." Unless the inequities lingering in the aftermath of modern colonialism are progressively remedied, there can be no durable peace on this planet.

    Insofar as the United States and the Soviet Union acknowledge the progress of the productive powers of labor throughout the planet to be in the vital strategic interests of each and both, the two powers are bound to that degree and in that way by a common interest. This is the kernel of the political and economic policies of practice indispensable to the fostering of a durable peace between those two powers.

    This is the perspective which has the British terrified and acting-out, insanely. Were Trump, Putin, and Xi to enter into negotiations based on the LaRouche Doctrine, a breakthrough will have occurred for all of mankind, a breakthrough to a permanent and durable peace. No neo-liberal, post-industrial, unipolar order can match this, no matter how much Allister Heath, Ms. May, or Boris Johnson rant and rave about it.

    Christopher Steele's British Playground

    As is well known by now, Christopher Steele was a long-time MI6 agent before "retiring" to form his own extremely lucrative private intelligence firm. The firm is said to have earned $200 million since its formation. Steele was an MI6 agent in Moscow around the time Skripal was recruited. He also later ran the MI6 Russia desk and would have known everything there was to know about Skripal. Pablo Miller, who recruited Skripal, worked for Steele's firm according to Miller's LinkedIn profile, and lived in the same town as Skripal.

    Since Steele has been discredited in the United States, a huge fawning publicity campaign has been undertaken on his behalf. The campaign involves journalists who have collaborated directly with Steele in his smear job against Trump. Books by Luke Harding and Michael Isikoff seek to rebuild Steele's reputation.

    A fawning piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, as implausible as it is long, has been foisted on the public for the same reason.

    There are some fascinating facts, however, in all this fawning prose:

    Leaving aside Sergei Skripal's relationship with the central figure in the British-led coup against Donald Trump, it is clear that the May government's claim that he and his daughter were poisoned by a "novichok" nerve-agent, even if it is true, by no means makes a case that Putin's government was responsible. (It is of interest that as we were going to press on March 19, the foreign ministers of the European Union, after a briefing by British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson that indicted Putin as responsible, issued a statement which condemned the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, but pointedly failed to blame Putin or Russia.)

    Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan who maintains contacts in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, wrote March 16 that Britain's chemical-warfare scientists at Porton Down, "are not able to identify the nerve agent as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation of a type developed by Russia, after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation. The Russians were allegedly researching, in the novichok program, a generation of nerve agents which could be produced from commercially available precursors such as insecticides and fertilizers. This substance is a novichok in that sense. It is of that type. Just as I am typing on a laptop of a type developed by the United States, though this one was made in China."

    The background to Porton Down's reluctance, is of course former Prime Minister Blair's phony dossier on Iraqi WMD, which Lyndon LaRouche fought, alongside the late British arms expert David Kelly, who exposed the "dodgy dossier," at the time.

    "To anybody with a Whitehall background this has been obvious for several days," Murray continues. "The government has never said the nerve agent was made in Russia, or that it can only be made in Russia. The exact formulation of a type developed by Russia was used by Theresa May in Parliament, used by the U.K. at the UN Security Council, used by Boris Johnson on the BBC yesterday and, most tellingly of all, 'of a type developed by Russia,' is the precise phrase used in the joint communique‚ issued by the U.K., U.S.A., France, and Germany yesterday."

    The main account of the chemical weapons cited by Theresa May was written by a Soviet dissident chemist named Vil Mirzayanov who now lives in the United States and published a book about his work at the Soviets' Uzbekistan chemical-warfare laboratory. In his much-publicized book, Mirzayanov sets out the formulas for the claimed substances. According to the March 16 Wall Street Journal, that publicity led to the novichoks' chemical structure being leaked, making them readily available for reproduction elsewhere. Ralf Trapp, a France-based consultant and expert on the control of chemical and biological weapons, told the Journal, "The chemical formula has been publicized and we know from publications from then-Czechoslovakia that they had worked on similar agents for defense in the 1980s. I'm sure other countries with developed programs would have as well."

    But it does not seem that those "other countries" include Russia. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the independent agency charged by treaty with investigating claims like those just made by the British government, certified in September 2017 that the Russian government had destroyed its entire chemical weapons program, inclusive of its nerve agent production capabilities. In addition to Trapp's account, Seamus Martin, writing in the March 14 Irish Times, posits, based on personal knowledge, that novichoks were widely expropriated by East Bloc oligarchs and criminal elements in the Russian economic chaos of the 1990s.

    Thus, after being disclosed by a dissident Russian chemist living in the United States, novichoks have been widely copied by other countries, according to the press accounts.

    Further trouble for May's attempted hoax is found in the condition of the Skripals and of a police officer who went to their home. All were made critically ill, although they are still alive. Yet the emergency personnel who treated the Skripals, allegedly the victims of a deadly and absolutely lethal nerve poison, suffered no ill effects whatsoever.

    The Skripal poisoning is being compared in the British press to the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. The former KGB and FSB officer was granted asylum in London and worked for the infamous anti-Putin British-intelligence-directed oligarch Boris Berezovsky in information warfare and other attacks on the Russian state, inclusive of McCarthyite accusations against any European politician seeking sane relations with Putin.

    Litvinenko's case officer was none other than Christopher Steele, and Christopher Steele conducted MI6's investigation of the case, which, of course, found Putin himself culpable. Berezovsky's use of the disgraced British PR firm Bell, Pottinger is also credited with a significant role in public acceptance of this result. Berezovsky was a prime suspect in organizing the murder of American journalist Paul Klebnikov. Many believe that Berezovsky arranged Litvinenko's demise. Berezovsky himself died in Britain in mysterious circumstances following the loss of a major court case to another Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich.

    In the parliamentary debate in which Theresa May issued her provocation, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn cautioned against a rush to judgment and pointed to the bloody playing field of Russian oligarchs and Russian organized crime as alternative areas for investigation. Had Corbyn added to that mix, "Western intelligence agencies," he would have been entirely on the right track. Corbyn also pointed out that these oligarchs had contributed millions to May's Conservative Party. The reaction by the British media, May's Conservatives, and Tony Blair's faction of the Labour Party was to paint Corbyn as a Putin dupe, including photoshopped images of the Labour leader in a Russian winter hat in front of the Kremlin.

    The insane McCarthyite reactions to Corbyn's simple statements of fact show that he hit the nail on the head. If you want to find Skripal's poisoners, then, like Edgar Allen Poe, you must take in the whole picture first. The field of play involves the British intelligence services and the anti-Putin Russian oligarchs, each of which services the other, acting on behalf of British strategic objectives. It is no accident that the coup against Donald Trump and the latest British intelligence fraud, putting the entire world in peril, absolutely intersect one another.

    [Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. ..."
    "... Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation, assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice. ..."
    "... The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD; ..."
    "... Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century. ..."
    "... The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated." ..."
    "... The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies glorifying American spies and assassins ..."
    "... The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks . ..."
    "... This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine. ..."
    "... The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. ..."
    "... The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments. ..."
    Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    In a three-part series published last week, the World Socialist Web Site documented an unprecedented influx of intelligence and military operatives into the Democratic Party. More than 50 such military-intelligence candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination in the 102 districts identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as its targets for 2018. These include both vacant seats and those with Republican incumbents considered vulnerable in the event of a significant swing to the Democrats.

    If on November 6 the Democratic Party makes the net gain of 24 seats needed to win control of the House of Representatives, former CIA agents, military commanders, and State Department officials will provide the margin of victory and hold the balance of power in Congress. The presence of so many representatives of the military-intelligence apparatus in the legislature is a situation without precedent in the history of the United States.

    Since its establishment in 1947 -- under the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman -- the CIA has been legally barred from carrying out within the United States the activities which were its mission overseas: spying, infiltration, political provocation, assassination. These prohibitions were given official lip service but ignored in practice.

    In the wake of the Watergate crisis and the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon, reporter Seymour Hersh published the first devastating exposure of the CIA domestic spying, in an investigative report for the New York Times on December 22, 1974. This report triggered the establishment of the Rockefeller Commission, a White House effort at damage control, and Senate and House select committees, named after their chairmen, Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis Pike, which conducted hearings and made serious attempts to investigate and expose the crimes of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency.

    The Church Committee in particular featured the exposure of CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, General Rene Schneider in Chile, and many others. More horrors were uncovered: MK-Ultra, in which the CIA secretly subjected unwitting victims to experimentation with drugs like LSD;

    Operation Mockingbird, in which the CIA recruited journalists to plant stories and smear opponents; Operation Chaos, an effort to spy on the antiwar movement and sow disruption; Operation Shamrock, under which the telecommunications companies shared traffic with the NSA for more than a quarter century.

    The Church and Pike committee exposures, despite their limitations, had a devastating political effect. The CIA and its allied intelligence organizations in the Pentagon and NSA became political lepers, reviled as the enemies of democratic rights. The CIA in particular was widely viewed as "Murder Incorporated."

    In that period, it would have been unthinkable either for dozens of "former" military-intelligence operatives to participate openly in electoral politics, or for them to be welcomed and even recruited by the two corporate-controlled parties. The Democrats and Republicans sought to distance themselves, at least for public relations purposes, from the spy apparatus, while the CIA publicly declared that it would no longer recruit or pay American journalists to publish material originating in Langley, Virginia. Even in the 1980s, the Iran-Contra scandal involved the exposure of the illegal operations of the Reagan administration's CIA director, William Casey.

    How times have changed. One of the main functions of the "war on terror," launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has been to rehabilitate the US spy apparatus and give it a public relations makeover as the supposed protector of the American people against terrorism.

    This meant disregarding the well-known connections between Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders and the CIA, which recruited them for the anti-Soviet guerrilla war in Afghanistan, waged from 1979 to 1989, as well as the still unexplained role of the US intelligence agencies in facilitating the 9/11 attacks themselves.

    The last 15 years have seen a massive expansion of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, backed by an avalanche of media propaganda, with endless television programs and movies glorifying American spies and assassins ( 24 , Homeland , Zero Dark Thirty , etc.)

    The American media has been directly recruited to this effort. Judith Miller of the New York Times , with her reports on "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, is only the most notorious of the stable of "plugged-in" intelligence-connected journalists at the Times , the Washington Post , and the major television networks. More recently, the Times has installed as its editorial page editor James Bennet, brother of a Democratic senator and son of the former administrator of the Agency for International Development, which has been accused of working as a front for the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.

    The media campaign alleging Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections has been based entirely on handouts from the CIA, NSA and FBI, transmitted by reporters who are either unwitting stooges or conscious agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This has been accompanied by the recruitment of a cadre of top CIA and military officials to serve as highly paid "experts" and "analysts" for the television networks .

    In centering its opposition to Trump on the bogus allegations of Russian interference, while essentially ignoring Trump's attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, his alignment with ultra-right and white supremacist groups, his attacks on social programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and his militarism and threats of nuclear war, the Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice.

    This process was well under way in the administration of Barack Obama, which endorsed and expanded the various operations of the intelligence agencies abroad and within the United States. Obama's endorsed successor, Hillary Clinton, ran openly as the chosen candidate of the Pentagon and CIA, touting her toughness as a future commander-in-chief and pledging to escalate the confrontation with Russia, both in Syria and Ukraine.

    The CIA has spearheaded the anti-Russia campaign against Trump in large part because of resentment over the disruption of its operations in Syria, and it has successfully used the campaign to force a shift in the policy of the Trump administration on that score. A chorus of media backers -- Nicholas Kristof and Roger Cohen of the New York Times , the entire editorial board of the Washington Post , most of the television networks -- are part of the campaign to pollute public opinion and whip up support on alleged "human rights" grounds for an expansion of the US war in Syria.

    The 2018 election campaign marks a new stage: for the first time, military-intelligence operatives are moving in large numbers to take over a political party and seize a major role in Congress. The dozens of CIA and military veterans running in the Democratic Party primaries are "former" agents of the military-intelligence apparatus. This "retired" status is, however, purely nominal. Joining the CIA or the Army Rangers or the Navy SEALs is like joining the Mafia: no one ever actually leaves; they just move on to new assignments.

    The CIA operation in 2018 is unlike its overseas activities in one major respect: it is not covert. On the contrary, the military-intelligence operatives running in the Democratic primaries boast of their careers as spies and special ops warriors. Those with combat experience invariably feature photographs of themselves in desert fatigues or other uniforms on their websites. And they are welcomed and given preferred positions, with Democratic Party officials frequently clearing the field for their candidacies.

    The working class is confronted with an extraordinary political situation. On the one hand, the Republican Trump administration has more military generals in top posts than any other previous government. On the other hand, the Democratic Party has opened its doors to a "friendly takeover" by the intelligence agencies.

    The incredible power of the military-intelligence agencies over the entire government is an expression of the breakdown of American democracy. The central cause of this breakdown is the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, whose interests the state apparatus and its "bodies of armed men" serve. Confronted by an angry and hostile working class, the ruling class is resorting to ever more overt forms of authoritarian rule.

    Millions of working people want to fight the Trump administration and its ultra-right policies. But it is impossible to carry out this fight through the "axis of evil" that connects the Democratic Party, the bulk of the corporate media, and the CIA. The influx of military-intelligence candidates puts paid to the longstanding myth, peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that the Democrats represent a "lesser evil." On the contrary, working people must confront the fact that within the framework of the corporate-controlled two-party system, they face two equally reactionary evils.

    Patrick Martin

    The author also recommends:

    Palace coup or class struggle: The political crisis in Washington and the strategy of the working class

    [Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

    Highly recommended!
    There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time.
    It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
    Notable quotes:
    "... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
    "... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
    "... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
    "... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
    "... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
    "... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
    "... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
    "... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
    "... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
    "... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
    "... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
    "... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
    "... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
    "... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
    "... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
    "... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
    "... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
    "... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
    "... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
    Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

    In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

    There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

    This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

    And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

    Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

    The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

    In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

    Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

    (See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

    Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

    The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

    Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

    What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

    All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

    (On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

    In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

    Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

    These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

    What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

    Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

    Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

    So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

    All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

    There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

    It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

    It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

    Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

    In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

    Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

    That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

    'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

    (For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

    What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

    For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

    What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

    In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

    According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

    As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

    In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

    A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

    Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

    Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink

    james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

    thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

    it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

    JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
    David,

    Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

    turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
    james

    It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

    Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
    I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
    The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
    catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
    That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

    Re: Levinson

    # Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

    # Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

    # And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

    I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

    Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
    DH,

    As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

    I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

    Be safe.

    Ishmael Zechariah

    Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
    Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

    The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
    ..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

    kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
    IZ
    My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
    kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
    "There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

    David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

    different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
    Ishmael Zechariah,

    ( reply to comment 6),

    I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

    It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

    And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

    So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

    Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
    David,

    Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

    In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

    Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

    Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

    SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
    So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

    Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

    Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
    They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
    kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
    You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
    catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
    ''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

    The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

    '1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

    In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

    'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

    State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

    aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
    David,

    About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

    Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
    Babak,

    "they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

    Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
    David,

    "There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

    Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

    Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
    "They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
    -- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
    turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
    Anna

    The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

    Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
    England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
    jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
    "unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
    Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
    Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
    Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
    Sir

    It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

    David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
    catherine,

    In response to comment 5.

    I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

    It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

    An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

    'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

    (See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

    Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

    Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

    'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

    (See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

    So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

    For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

    '"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [£1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

    'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

    (For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

    Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

    'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

    (For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

    When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

    (For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

    She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

    Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

    What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

    'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

    'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

    'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

    Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

    It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

    An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

    This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

    Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

    There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

    A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

    Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

    The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

    Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
    "They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

    No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

    SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
    - If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

    My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

    Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

    Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

    james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
    there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
    Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
    I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
    begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
    I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
    kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
    IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

    The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

    spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
    Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
    English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
    Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

    https://twitter.com/pat_lang

    - gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

    If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

    "Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

    The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

    In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

    jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
    Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
    Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

    So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

    Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
    All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
    Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
    Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

    The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

    Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

    Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
    Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
    begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
    jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
    FM
    What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
    Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
    Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
    Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
    The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
    "In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
    Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
    Colonel,

    This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

    Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
    Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

    And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

    Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

    Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

    Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

    Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
    http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

    blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
    Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

    "Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

    I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

    What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
    FM

    We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

    Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

    Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
    Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
    blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
    ...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

    Aye. Aye. Sir!

    +1

    That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

    Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
    I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
    English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
    Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

    David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

    The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

    The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

    So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

    I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

    kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
    Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
    EO

    Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

    English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
    Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

    Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

    English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
    Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

    I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

    So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

    Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

    But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

    David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
    Sid Finster,

    In response to comment 53.

    When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

    A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

    When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

    His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

    So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

    The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

    (This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

    The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

    'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

    Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

    '12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

    The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

    'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

    In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

    As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

    In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

    Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

    'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

    From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

    'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

    From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

    'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

    In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

    However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

    Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

    (I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

    And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

    Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

    The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

    Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
    Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
    Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
    David

    You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

    Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
    I know something of spectroscopy.

    The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation.

    The paragraph that you have quoted:

    "To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

    And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

    LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
    David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

    I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

    Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

    By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

    According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
    http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

    **********

    JAN RICHARD BÆRUG
    The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism.
    A Comparative Study of Newspapers and
    Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

    Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

    Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
    I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

    They clearly are not native speakers of German.

    LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
    why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

    Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

    Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those?

    The German link is different. How about the Iranian?

    or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

    LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
    correcting myself #94:

    another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

    I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

    [Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
    "... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
    "... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
    "... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
    "... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
    "... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
    "... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
    "... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
    "... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
    "... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
    "... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
    "... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
    "... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
    "... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
    "... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
    "... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
    "... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
    "... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
    "... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
    Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'

    In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background, which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.'

    There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.

    This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.

    And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area.

    Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.

    The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.

    In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry – the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.

    Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier, which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.

    (See http://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/what-really-happened-robert-levinson-cia-iran-454803.html .)

    Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio 4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets, backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.

    The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available – evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.

    Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.

    What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest a sale had been completed.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.

    All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder. For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.

    (On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews both with Mogilevich and Levinson at

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_06_12_99.txt )

    In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.

    Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions north of the Litani.

    These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.

    What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.

    Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking 'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.

    Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.

    So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.

    All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate Russia in supplying materials.

    There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)

    It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional, Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.

    It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here, a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.

    Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.

    In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.

    Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain, but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)

    That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:

    'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear limited life components and you can read for weeks).'

    (For this and other articles by Kaszeta, as also his bio, see http://strongpointsecurity.co.uk ')

    What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility, in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of ones which lasted longer.

    For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.

    What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.

    In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'

    According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?

    As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.

    In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties, and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another day.

    A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.

    Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.

    Posted at 03:42 PM in As The Borg Turns , Habakkuk , Russia , Russiagate | Permalink

    james , 03 February 2018 at 04:33 PM

    thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..

    it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..

    JohnB , 03 February 2018 at 05:17 PM
    David,

    Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.

    turcopolier , 03 February 2018 at 06:02 PM
    james

    It is the closest of all international intelligence relationships. It started in WW2. Before that the Brits were though of as a potential enemy. pl

    Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 03 February 2018 at 06:10 PM
    I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
    The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
    catherine , 03 February 2018 at 06:22 PM
    That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.

    Re: Levinson

    # Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.

    # Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson went to Jablonski with it.

    # And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson? The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing came of it.

    I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.

    Ishmael Zechariah , 03 February 2018 at 06:54 PM
    DH,

    As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.

    I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".

    Be safe.

    Ishmael Zechariah

    Rd , 03 February 2018 at 07:31 PM
    Babak Makkinejad said in reply to turcopolier...

    The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
    ..and US is the one who has been paying for it since 1979!!!

    kooshy said in reply to Ishmael Zechariah... , 03 February 2018 at 08:21 PM
    IZ
    My guess is, that he is unpredictable, instantaneous and therefore can't be consistent and reliable, useful idiot needs to be predictable.
    kooshy , 03 February 2018 at 08:43 PM
    "There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. "

    David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making. Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

    different clue , 03 February 2018 at 08:49 PM
    Ishmael Zechariah,

    ( reply to comment 6),

    I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.

    It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate.

    And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.

    So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.

    Jack , 03 February 2018 at 08:54 PM
    David,

    Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.

    In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.

    Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century endorsed her.

    Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in. Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling the Borg pundits.

    SmoothieX12 -> kooshy... , 03 February 2018 at 09:51 PM
    So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.

    Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.

    Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:10 PM
    They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.
    kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 03 February 2018 at 10:24 PM
    You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier on atlantic side.
    catherine said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:21 AM
    ''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''

    The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.

    '1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'

    In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241, 251 - 256]

    'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'

    State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union

    aleksandar , 04 February 2018 at 04:41 AM
    David,

    About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS.

    Fred said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 08:40 AM
    Babak,

    "they got US to bail them out during WWII" And how would things have worked out had we not done so?

    Fred , 04 February 2018 at 08:46 AM
    David,

    "There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time."

    Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.

    Anna said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 08:48 AM
    "They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
    -- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
    turcopolier , 04 February 2018 at 08:54 AM
    Anna

    The powerful are often remarkably ignorant. pl

    Babak Makkinejad -> Fred... , 04 February 2018 at 10:08 AM
    England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion, did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
    jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 04 February 2018 at 11:53 AM
    "unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental people. Just general impressions, mind you.
    Kooshy said in reply to catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
    Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting, even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such an escalation.
    Phodges said in reply to turcopolier ... , 04 February 2018 at 12:23 PM
    Sir

    It seems we are being defeated by Cicero's enemy within. Zion is achieving what no one could hope to achieve by force of arms.

    David Habakkuk -> catherine... , 04 February 2018 at 01:17 PM
    catherine,

    In response to comment 5.

    I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain more pointers.

    It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.

    An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian attempts to get hold of him. An extract:

    'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'

    (See http://defiancethebook.com/legal/habeas/petition.htm .)

    Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.

    Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:

    'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'

    (See http://konanykhin.com/news/the-konanykhine-case.html .)

    So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has changed.

    For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:

    '"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [£1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign passports for its "very, very special clients".

    'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".

    (For a 'Guardian report, see https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/sep/23/julianborger ; for the actual testimony, see http://archives-financialservices.house.gov/banking/92299ger.pdf .)

    Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter, Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:

    'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'

    (For the transcript presented in evidence to Owen's Inquiry, see http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/ )

    When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.

    (For the first part of the exchanges of comments, the second apparently having become unavailable, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/07/litvinenko_killing_had_state_i.html )

    She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator, David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.

    Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.

    What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary claim about Shvets:

    'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.

    'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.

    'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'

    Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling her as to the side for which he was working.

    It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.

    An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria' was actually credible.

    This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking, and for similar action against Syria.

    Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.

    There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.

    A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing. This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High') might be a start.

    Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')

    The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one feel as though one wanted to throw up.

    Thomas , 04 February 2018 at 01:24 PM
    "They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040.}

    No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.

    SmoothieX12 -> Anna... , 04 February 2018 at 01:39 PM
    - If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders." Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.

    My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.

    Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.

    Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.

    james said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 04 February 2018 at 03:01 PM
    there seems to be no shortage of money for these blatant propaganda exercises..
    Babak Makkinejad -> SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 04:14 PM
    I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914. Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
    begob , 04 February 2018 at 05:20 PM
    I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
    kooshy said in reply to SmoothieX12 ... , 04 February 2018 at 06:20 PM
    IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.

    The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.

    spy killer , 04 February 2018 at 06:55 PM
    Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
    English Outsider -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 07:23 AM
    Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google also allows searches with more than one term. This link -

    https://twitter.com/pat_lang

    - gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories" on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.

    If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.

    "Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.

    The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations" (hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many of the contributors know it from inside.

    In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible, but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.

    jonst said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 08:11 AM
    Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for the most part, Labor was Left.
    Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.

    So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.

    Babak Makkinejad -> jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 08:29 AM
    All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
    Sid Finster said in reply to Jack... , 05 February 2018 at 10:26 AM
    Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.

    The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.

    Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.

    Sid Finster said in reply to David Habakkuk ... , 05 February 2018 at 10:31 AM
    Explain Marshall Miller's role in this, please. He is someone I know quite well. I also know one of the Chalupas.
    begob said in reply to jonst... , 05 February 2018 at 10:56 AM
    jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat of the BEF.
    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 11:18 AM
    FM
    What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break - David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
    Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 11:19 AM
    Yes, I am Iranian. All "Babak"s are Iranians - except some obscure ones that are Rus - Babakov.
    Anna , 05 February 2018 at 02:07 PM
    The hard, blinding truth: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
    "In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
    Thomas said in reply to turcopolier ... , 05 February 2018 at 02:08 PM
    Colonel,

    This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.

    Richardstevenhack , 05 February 2018 at 02:36 PM
    Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.

    And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.

    Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."

    Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.

    Seriously, read this! The whole thing!

    Rampant abuse and possible contempt of Court: what you need to know about the GOP memo
    http://theduran.com/rampant-abuse-contempt-court-analysis-gop-memorandum/

    blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 03:25 PM
    Sen Grassley releases memo heavily redacted by DOJ/FBI.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-05/grassley-graham-blast-fbi-censoring-memo-calling-criminal-probe-trump-dossier

    "Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "

    I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI is lying.

    What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that are based on classified documents.

    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 04:38 PM
    FM

    We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status. You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

    Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are, in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you. You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl

    Kooshy said in reply to Babak Makkinejad... , 05 February 2018 at 04:46 PM
    Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on.
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from Northeestern
    blue peacock , 05 February 2018 at 04:55 PM
    ...would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.

    Aye. Aye. Sir!

    +1

    That is why some of us believe the Patriot Act and FISA are both unpatriotic and unconstitutional. SCOTUS disagrees with the few of us.

    Babak Makkinejad -> Fatima Manoubia... , 05 February 2018 at 05:03 PM
    I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist. I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians - they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
    English Outsider , 05 February 2018 at 06:31 PM
    Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.

    David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because of that.

    The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as "salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling around unsupervised?

    The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but for the general public, that bit more untenable.

    So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.

    I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?

    kooshy , 05 February 2018 at 07:49 PM
    Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type, they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
    turcopolier , 05 February 2018 at 07:59 PM
    EO

    Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to pay him until he left UK service. pl

    English Outsider , 06 February 2018 at 05:10 AM
    Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.

    Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK side.

    English Outsider -> Cortes... , 06 February 2018 at 05:53 AM
    Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about the "golden showers"? "

    I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.

    So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.

    Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.

    But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK get mixed up in it?

    David Habakkuk -> Sid Finster... , 06 February 2018 at 06:19 AM
    Sid Finster,

    In response to comment 53.

    When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.

    A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella.

    When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.

    His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques, and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.

    So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'

    The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.

    (This initial post by me, and later posts by me on that site, are at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:1857/diary. Three posts David Loepp and I produced jointly in December 2012, which have a lot on Scaramella and Shvets, are on his page there, at http://www.eurotrib.com/user/de%20Gondi/diary .)

    The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December 2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:

    'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic- Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'

    Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:

    '12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them [presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'

    The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':

    'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI. Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini. Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'

    In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography – which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella which had been described in the wiretap request.

    As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.

    In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.

    Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.

    'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with him.'

    From a fax dated 7 November 2005:

    'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re: Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'

    From a fax dated 5 December 2005:

    'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'

    In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be in a chaotic state.

    However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus justifications.

    Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.

    (I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)

    And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence in the Inquiry.

    (See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)

    Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.

    Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.

    The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')

    Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 09:40 AM
    Thank you David Habakkuk. Truly sordid and deplorable. WWIII to be initiated on basis of lies.
    Jack , 06 February 2018 at 12:06 PM
    David

    You may already know this but Steele was a no show in a UK court for a deposition on the libel suit.

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/02/05/christopher-steele-is-no-show-in-london-court-in-civil-case-over-dossier.amp.html

    Babak Makkinejad -> David Habakkuk ... , 06 February 2018 at 01:18 PM
    I know something of spectroscopy.

    The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis itself or its instrumentation.

    The paragraph that you have quoted:

    "To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."

    And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics - which did not and could not exist in this situation.

    LeaNder , 07 February 2018 at 09:16 AM
    David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there is to know?

    I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.

    Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.

    By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.

    According to Google search there are no other links then your articles here:
    http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf ">https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf">http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613093555/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/04/HMG000513wb.pdf

    **********

    JAN RICHARD BÆRUG
    The Collapsing Wall. Hybrid Journalism.
    A Comparative Study of Newspapers and
    Magazines in Eight Countries in Europe

    Available online. Haven't read it yet, but journalism as hidden public relations transfer belt would be one of my minor obsessions. ...

    Babak Makkinejad -> turcopolier ... , 07 February 2018 at 11:23 AM
    I wonder too; their command of the English idiom is very au currant - noticed "opt in/opt out" reference? Too American.

    They clearly are not native speakers of German.

    LeaNder said in reply to kooshy... , 07 February 2018 at 12:30 PM
    why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish_Island#Economy

    Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.

    Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those?

    The German link is different. How about the Iranian?

    or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?

    LeaNder said in reply to LeaNder... , 07 February 2018 at 01:14 PM
    correcting myself #94:

    another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s

    I see Sergei seems to share my interest in the literary genre:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Ivanov#Personal

    [Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC ..."
    "... Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence. ..."
    "... In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich. ..."
    Mar 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Richardstevenhack , 07 March 2018 at 06:23 PM

    Re this: " In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked."

    To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC .

    All three allegedly examined those images and concurred with CrowdStrike's analysis.

    Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence.

    In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich.

    The "assessment" that Putin ordered any of this is pure mind-reading and can be utterly dismissed absent any of the other evidence Publius points out as necessary.

    The same applies to any "estimate" that the Russian government preferred Trump or wished to denigrate Clinton. Based on what I read in pro-Russian news outlets, Russian officials took great pains to not pick sides and Putin's comments were similarly very restrained. The main quote from Putin about Trump that emerged was mistranslated as approval whereas it was more an observation of Trump's personality. At no time did Putin ever say he favored Trump over Clinton, even though that was a likely probability given Clinton's "Hitler" comparison.

    As an aside, I also recommend Scott Ritter's trashing of the ICA. Ritter is familiar with intelligence estimates and their reliability based on his previous service as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq and in Russia implementing arms control treaties.

    Exposing The Man Behind The Curtain
    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/exposing-the-man-behind-the-curtain_us_5877887be4b05b7a465df6a4

    Throwing a Curveball at 'Intelligence Community Consensus' on Russia
    http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/did-17-intelligence-agencies-really-come-to-consensus-on-russia/

    His analysis of the NSA document leaked by NSA contractor Reality Winner which supposedly supported the Russia theory is also relevant.

    Leaked NSA Report Is Short on Facts, Proves Little in 'Russiagate' Case
    https://www.truthdig.com/articles/leaked-nsa-report-is-short-on-facts-proves-little-in-russiagate-case/

    [Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

    Highly recommended!
    The sad but reasonable conclusion from all those Russiagate events is that an influential part of the US elite wants to balance on the edge of war with Russia to ensure profits and flow of taxpayer money. that part of the elite include top honchos on the US intelligence community and Pentagon (surprise, surprise)
    The other logical conclusion is that intelligence agencies now determine the US foreign policy and control all major political players (there were widespread suspicions that Clinton, Bush II and Obama were actually closely connected to CIA). Which neatly fits into hypotheses about the "deep state".
    This "can of worms" that the US political scene now represents is very dangerous for the future on mankind indeed.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Most objective observers would concede that the DNI has been a miserable failure and nothing more than a bureaucratic boondoggle. ..."
    "... "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow -- the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities." ..."
    "... More telling was the absence of any written document issued from the Office of the DNI that detailed the supposed intel backing up this judgment. Notice the weasel language in this release ..."
    "... If there was actual evidence/intelligence, such as an intercepted conversation between Vladimir Putin and a subordinate ordering them to hack the DNC or even a human source report claiming such an activity, then it would have and should have been referenced in the Clapper/Johnson document. It was not because such intel did not exist. ..."
    "... "We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election," Clinton said. "I find that deeply disturbing." ..."
    "... The basic job of an analyst is to collect as much relevant information as possible on the subject or topic that is their responsibility. There are analysts at the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and State INR that have the job of knowing about Russian cyber activity and capabilities. That is certain. But we are not talking about hundreds of people. ..."
    "... Let us move from the hypothetical to the actual. In January of 2017, DNI Jim Clapper release a report entitled, " Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections " (please see here ). In subsequent testimony before the Congress, Clapper claimed that he handpicked two dozen analysts to draft the document . That is not likely. There may have been as many as two dozen analysts who read the final document and commented on it, but there would never be that many involved in in drafting such a document. In any event, only analysts from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI were involved ..."
    "... This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies. ..."
    "... That is how the process is supposed to work. But the document produced in January 2017 was not a genuine work reflecting the views of the "Intelligence Community." It only represented the supposed thinking (and I use that term generously) of CIA, NSA and FBI analysts. In other words, only three of 16 agencies cleared on the document that presented four conclusions ..."
    "... Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations. ..."
    "... We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. ..."
    "... We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. ..."
    "... We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes. ..."
    "... It is genuinely shocking that DNI Jim Clapper, with the acquiescence of the CIA, the FBI and NSA, would produce a document devoid of any solid intelligence. There is a way to publicly release sensitive intelligence without comprising a the original source. But such sourcing is absent in this document. ..."
    "... The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged. ..."
    "... "The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.'" Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged. ..."
    "... Conjectural garbage appears first to have been washed through the FBI, headquarters no less, then probably it picked up a Triple A rating at the CIA, and then when the garbage got to Clapper, it was bombs away - we experts all agree. There were leaks, but they weren't sufficient to satisfy Steele so he just delivered the garbage whole to the Media in order to make it a sure thing. The garbage was placed securely out there in the public domain with a Triple A rating because the FBI wouldn't concern itself with garbage, would it? ..."
    "... Contrast this trajectory with what the Russian policy establishment did when it concluded that the US had done something in the Ukraine that Russia found significantly actionable: it released the taped evidence of Nuland and our Ambassador finishing off the coup. ..."
    "... To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC ..."
    "... Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence. ..."
    "... In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich. ..."
    "... My interpretation is: In 1990 +- Bush 41 sold us the 1st Iraq war using fudged intelligence, then Bush 43 sold us the second Iraq war using fabricated intelligence. And now the Obama Administration tried to sell us fake intelligence in regard to Russia in order to get Clinton elected ..."
    "... Mueller has had 18 months and has proceeded to reveal exactly nothing related to either Trump "collusion" with Russia nor Russia as a state actually doing anything remotely described as "meddling." ..."
    "... His expected indictment of some Russians for the DNC hack is going to be more of the same in all likelihood. I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 or that they had any direct connection with either the alleged DNC hack or Wikileaks or the Russian government. ..."
    "... It's a witch hunt, nothing more. People holding their breath for the "slam dunk" are going to pass out soon if they haven't already. ..."
    "... Mueller is investigating some aspects. But there is another aspect - the conspiracy inside law enforcement and the IC. That is also being investigated. There are Congressional committees in particular Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley. Then there is the DOJ IG. And today AG Sessions confirms there is a DOJ prosecutor outside Washington investigating. ..."
    "... But such evidence (corroborating the Steele dossier) was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified." ..."
    "... ... was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?" I would say yes and especially yes if the contact for this piece of data was conducted at the highest level within the context of the already tight liaison between the US IC and Mi-6/GCHQ ..."
    "... Was it Hitler or Stalin who said "show me the man and I will find his crime?" As I have said before, Trumps greatest vulnerability lies in his previous business life as an entrepreneurial hustler. ..."
    "... Re 'baby adoption' meeting between Trump, Jr. and Veselnitskaya, I recall a comment here linking to an article speculating the email initiating the meeting originated in Europe, was set up by the playboy son of a European diplomat, and contained words to trip data-gathering monitors which would have enabled a FISA request to have Trump, Jr. come under surveillance. ..."
    "... "We don't have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn't found it yet!" is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes without evidence (there's that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found. ..."
    "... The fact is Flynn has pled guilty to perjury. Nothing else like collusion with the Russians. ..."
    "... Manafort has been indicted for money laundering, wire fraud, etc for activities well before the election campaign. Sure, it is good that these corrupt individuals should be investigated and prosecuted. However, this corruption is widespread in DC. How come none of these cheering Mueller on to destroy Trump care about all the foreign money flowing to K Street? Why aren't they calling for investigations of the Clinton Foundation or the Podesta brothers where probable cause exist of foreign money and influence? What about Ben Cardin and all those recipients of foreign zionist money and influence? It would be nice if there were wide ranging investigations on all those engaged in foreign influence peddling. But it seems many just want a witch hunt to hobble Trump. It's going to be very difficult to get the Senate to convict him for obstruction of justice or tax evasion or some charge like that. ..."
    "... What does "hacking our elections" mean? Does it means breaking into voting systems and changing the outcome by altering votes? Or does it mean information operations to change US voters' minds about for whom they would vote? ..."
    "... As for McMasters, I am unimpressed with him. He displays all the symptoms of Russophobia. He has special information? Information can be interpreted many ways depending on one's purpose. pl ..."
    "... IMO the perpetrators in the Steel Memo case are and were merely hiding behind claims of sources and methods protection in order to protect themselve. ..."
    "... So now we are supposed to believe unquestioningly the word of torturers, perjurers and entrapment artists, all talking about alleged evidence that we are not allowed to see? Did you learn nothing from the "Iraqi WMD" fiasco or the "ZOMG! Assad gassed his own peoples ZOMG!" debacle? Funny how in each of these instances, the intelligence community's lies just happened to coincide with the agenda of empire. ..."
    Mar 07, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    The Intel Community Lie About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

    Americans tend to be a trusting lot. When they hear a high level government official, like former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, state that Russia's Vladimir ordered and monitored a Russian cyber attack on the 2016 Presidential election, those trusting souls believe him. For experienced intelligence professionals, who know how the process of gathering and analyzing intelligence works, they detect a troubling omission in Clapper's presentation and, upon examining the so-called "Intelligence Community Assessment," discover that document is a deceptive fraud. It lacks actual evidence that Putin and the Russians did what they are accused of doing. More troubling -- and this is inside baseball -- is the fact that two critical members of the Intelligence Community -- the DIA and State INR -- were not asked to coordinate/clear on the assessment.

    You should not feel stupid if you do not understand or appreciate the last point. That is something only people who actually have produced a Community Assessment would understand. I need to take you behind the scenes and ensure you understand what is intelligence and how analysts assess and process that intelligence. Once you understand that then you will be able to see the flaws and inadequacies in the report released by Jim Clapper in January 2017.

    The first thing you need to understand is the meaning of the term, the "Intelligence Community" aka IC. Comedians are not far off the mark in touting this phrase as the original oxymoron. On paper the IC currently is comprised of 17 agencies/departments:
    1. Air Force Intelligence,
    2. Army Intelligence,
    3. Central Intelligence Agency aka CIA,
    4. Coast Guard Intelligence,
    5. Defense Intelligence Agency aka DIA,
    6. Energy Department aka DOE,
    7. Homeland Security Department,
    8. State Department aka INR,
    9. Treasury Department,
    10. Drug Enforcement Administration aka DEA,
    11. Federal Bureau of Investigation aka FBI,
    12. Marine Corps Intelligence,
    13. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency aka NGIA or NGA,
    14. National Reconnaissance Office aka NRO,
    15. National Security Agency aka NSA,
    16. Navy Intelligence
    17. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

    But not all of these are "national security" agencies -- i.e., those that collect raw intelligence, which subsequently is packaged and distributed to other agencies on a need to know basis. Only six of these agencies take an active role in collecting raw foreign intelligence. The remainder are consumers of that intelligence product. In other words, the information does not originate with them. They are like a subscriber to the New York Times. They get the paper everyday and, based upon what they read, decide what is going on in their particular world. The gatherers of intelligence are:

    Nine of the other agencies/departments are consumers. They do not collect and package original info. They are the passive recipients. The analysts in those agencies will base their conclusions on information generated by other agencies, principally the CIA and the NSA.

    The astute among you, I am sure, will insist my list is deficient and will ask, "What about the FBI and DEA?" It is true that those two organizations produce a type of human intelligence -- i.e., they recruit informants and those informants provide those agencies with information that the average person understandably would categorize as "intelligence." But there is an important difference between human intelligence collected by the CIA and the human source intelligence gathered by the FBI or the DEA. The latter two are law enforcement agencies. No one from the CIA or the NSA has the power to arrest someone. The FBI and the DEA do.

    Their authority as law enforcement agents, however, comes with limitations, especially in collecting so-called intelligence. The FBI and the DEA face egal constraints on what information they can collect and store. The FBI cannot decide on its own that skinheads represent a threat and then start gathering information identifying skinhead leaders. There has to be an allegation of criminal activity. When such "human" information is being gathered under the umbrella of law enforcement authorities, it is being handled as potential evidence that may be used to prosecute someone. This means that such information cannot be shared with anyone else, especially intelligence agencies like the CIA and the NSA.

    The "17th" member of the IC is the Director of National Intelligence aka DNI. This agency was created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks for the ostensible purpose of coordinating the activities and products of the IC. In theory it is the organization that is supposed to coordinate what the IC collects and the products the IC produces. Most objective observers would concede that the DNI has been a miserable failure and nothing more than a bureaucratic boondoggle.

    An important, but little understood point, is that these agencies each have a different focus. They are not looking at the same things. In fact, most are highly specialized and narrowly focused. Take the Coast Guard, for instance. Their intelligence operations primarily hone in on maritime threats and activities in U.S. territorial waters, such as narcotic interdictions. They are not responsible for monitoring what the Russians are doing in the Black Sea and they have no significant expertise in the cyber activities of the Russian Army military intelligence organization aka the GRU.

    In looking back at the events of 2016 surrounding the U.S. Presidential campaign, most people will recall that Hillary Clinton, along with several high level Obama national security officials, pushed the lie that the U.S. Intelligence agreed that Russia had unleashed a cyber war on the United States. The initial lie came from DNI Jim Clapper and Homeland Security Chief, Jeb Johnson, who released the following memo to the press on 7 October 2016 :

    "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow -- the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."

    This was a deliberate deceptive message. It implied that the all 16 intelligence agencies agreed with the premise and "evidence of Russian meddling. Yet not a single bit of proof was offered. More telling was the absence of any written document issued from the Office of the DNI that detailed the supposed intel backing up this judgment. Notice the weasel language in this release:

    If there was actual evidence/intelligence, such as an intercepted conversation between Vladimir Putin and a subordinate ordering them to hack the DNC or even a human source report claiming such an activity, then it would have and should have been referenced in the Clapper/Johnson document. It was not because such intel did not exist.

    Hillary Clinton helped perpetuate this myth during the late October debate with Donald Trump, when she declared as fact that:

    "We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election," Clinton said. "I find that deeply disturbing."

    What is shocking is that there was so little pushback to this nonsense. Hardly anyone asked why would the DEA, Coast Guard, the Marines or DOE have any technical expertise to make a judgment about Russian hacking of U.S. election systems. And no one of any importance asked the obvious -- where was the written memo or National Intelligence Estimate laying out what the IC supposedly knew and believed? There was nothing.

    It is natural for the average American citizen to believe that something given the imprimatur of the Intelligence Community must reflect solid intelligence and real expertise. Expertise is supposed to be the cornerstone of intelligence analysis and the coordination that occurs within the IC. That means that only those analysts (and the agencies they represent) will be asked to contribute or comment on a particular intelligence issue. When it comes to the question of whether Russia had launched a full out cyber attack on the Democrats and the U.S. electoral system, only analysts from agencies with access to the intelligence and the expertise to analyze that intelligence would be asked to write or contribute to an intelligence memorandum.

    Who would that be? The answer is simple -- the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, State INR and the FBI. (One could make the case that there are some analysts within Homeland Security that might have expertise, but they would not necessarily have access to the classified information produced by the CIA or the NSA.) The task of figuring out what the Russians were doing and planned to do fell to five agencies and only three of the five (the CIA, the DIA and NSA) would have had the ability to collect intelligence that could inform the work of analysts.

    Before I can explain to you how an analyst work this issue it is essential for you to understand the type of intelligence that would be required to "prove" Russian meddling. There are four possible sources -- 1) a human source who had direct access to the Russians who directed the operation or carried it out; 2) a signal intercept of a conversation or cyber activity that was traced to Russian operatives; 3) a document that discloses the plan or activity observed; or 4) forensic evidence from the computer network that allegedly was attacked.

    Getting human source intel is primarily the job of CIA. It also is possible that the DIA or the FBI had human sources that could have contributed relevant intelligence.

    Signal intercepts are collected and analyzed by the NSA.

    Documentary evidence, which normally is obtained from a human source but can also be picked up by NSA intercepts or even an old-fashioned theft.

    Finally there is the forensic evidence . In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked.

    What Do Analysts Do?

    Whenever there is a "judgment" or "consensus" claimed on behalf to the IC, it means that one or more analysts have written a document that details the evidence and presents conclusions based on that evidence. On a daily basis the average analyst confronts a flood of classified information (normally referred to as "cables" or "messages"). When I was on the job in the 1980s I had to wade through more than 1200 messages -- i.e., human source reports from the CIA, State Department messages with embassies around the world, NSA intercepts, DIA reports from their officers based overseas (most in US embassies) and open source press reports. Today, thanks to the internet, the average analyst must scan through upwards of 3000 messages. It is humanly impossible.

    The basic job of an analyst is to collect as much relevant information as possible on the subject or topic that is their responsibility. There are analysts at the CIA, the NSA, the DIA and State INR that have the job of knowing about Russian cyber activity and capabilities. That is certain. But we are not talking about hundreds of people.

    Let us move from the hypothetical to the actual. In January of 2017, DNI Jim Clapper release a report entitled, " Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections " (please see here ). In subsequent testimony before the Congress, Clapper claimed that he handpicked two dozen analysts to draft the document . That is not likely. There may have been as many as two dozen analysts who read the final document and commented on it, but there would never be that many involved in in drafting such a document. In any event, only analysts from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI were involved :

    This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies.

    Limiting the drafting and clearance on this document to only the CIA, the NSA and the FBI is highly unusual because one of the key analytical conclusions in the document identifies the Russian military intelligence organization, the GRU, as one of the perpetrators of the cyber attack. DIA's analysts are experts on the GRU and there also are analysts in State Department's Bureau of INR who should have been consulted. Instead, they were excluded.

    Here is how the process should have worked in producing this document:

    1. One or more analysts are asked to do a preliminary draft. It is customary in such a document for the analyst to cite specific intelligence, using phrases such as: "According to a reliable source of proven access," when citing a CIA document or "According to an intercept of a conversation between knowledgeable sources with access," when referencing something collected by the NSA. The analyst does more than repeat what is claimed in the intel reports, he or she also has the job of explaining what these facts mean or do not mean.
    2. There always is an analyst leading the effort who has the job of integrating the contributions of the other analysts into a coherent document. Once the document is completed in draft it is handed over to Branch Chief and then Division Chief for editing. We do not know who had the lead, but it was either the FBI, the CIA or the NSA.
    3. At the same time the document is being edited at originating agency, it is supposed to be sent to the other clearing agencies, i.e. those agencies that either provided the intelligence cited in the draft (i.e., CIA, NSA, DIA, or State) or that have expertise on the subject. As noted previously, it is highly unusual to exclude the DIA and INR.
    4. Once all the relevant agencies clear on the content of the document, it is sent into the bowels of the DNI where it is put into final form.

    That is how the process is supposed to work. But the document produced in January 2017 was not a genuine work reflecting the views of the "Intelligence Community." It only represented the supposed thinking (and I use that term generously) of CIA, NSA and FBI analysts. In other words, only three of 16 agencies cleared on the document that presented four conclusions:

    Sounds pretty ominous, but the language used tells a different story. The conclusions are based on assumptions and judgments. There was nor is any actual evidence from intelligence sources showing that Vladimir Putin ordered up anything or that his government preferred Trump over Clinton.

    How do I know this? If such evidence existed -- either documentary or human source or signal intercept -- it would have been cited in this document. Not only that. Such evidence would have corroborated the claims presented in the Steele dossier. But such evidence was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified."

    It is genuinely shocking that DNI Jim Clapper, with the acquiescence of the CIA, the FBI and NSA, would produce a document devoid of any solid intelligence. There is a way to publicly release sensitive intelligence without comprising a the original source. But such sourcing is absent in this document.

    That simple fact should tell you all you need to know. The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.

    LeaNder , 07 March 2018 at 05:59 PM

    Good summary argument, PT. Thanks. Helpful reminder.

    But, makes me feel uncomfortable. Cynical scenario. I'd prefer them to be both drivers and driven, somehow stumbling into the chronology of events. They didn't hack the DNC, after all. Crowdstrike? Steele? ...

    ********
    But yes, all the 17 agencies Clinton alluded to in her 3rd encounter with Trump was a startling experience:

    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/19/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-blames-russia-putin-wikileaks-rele/

    turcopolier , 07 March 2018 at 06:10 PM
    LeaNder

    One other point on which Tacitus and I differ is the quality of the analysts in the "minors." The "bigs" often recruit analysts from the "minors" so they can't be all that bad. And the analysts in all these agencies receive much the same data feed electronically every day. There are exceptions to this but it is generally true. I, too, read hundreds of documents every day to keep up with the knowledge base of the analysts whom I interrogated continuously. "How do you know that?" would have been typical. pl

    Flavius , 07 March 2018 at 06:19 PM
    Well done.

    "The Intelligence Community was used as a tool to misinform the public and persuade them that Russia was guilty of something they did not do. That lie remains unchallenged.'" Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged.

    Conjectural garbage appears first to have been washed through the FBI, headquarters no less, then probably it picked up a Triple A rating at the CIA, and then when the garbage got to Clapper, it was bombs away - we experts all agree. There were leaks, but they weren't sufficient to satisfy Steele so he just delivered the garbage whole to the Media in order to make it a sure thing. The garbage was placed securely out there in the public domain with a Triple A rating because the FBI wouldn't concern itself with garbage, would it?

    Contrast this trajectory with what the Russian policy establishment did when it concluded that the US had done something in the Ukraine that Russia found significantly actionable: it released the taped evidence of Nuland and our Ambassador finishing off the coup.

    The whole sequence reminds me in some ways of the sub prime mortgage bond fiasco: garbage risk progressively bundled, repackaged, rebranded and resold by big name institutions that should have known better.

    I have only two questions: was it misfeasance, malfeasance, or some ugly combination of the two? And are they going to get away with it?

    Richardstevenhack , 07 March 2018 at 06:23 PM
    Re this: " In the case of Russian meddling there is no forensic evidence available to the IC because the Democratic National Committee did not permit the FBI to investigate and examine the computers and the network that was allegedly attacked."

    To be precise, CrowdStrike did provide the FBI with allegedly "certified true images" of the DNC servers allegedly involved in the alleged "hack." They also allegedly provided these images to FireEye and Mandiant, IIRC.

    All three allegedly examined those images and concurred with CrowdStrike's analysis.

    Of course, given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence.

    In addition, regardless of whether the images were true or not, the evidence allegedly contained therein is painfully inadequate to confirm that APT28 or APT29 were involved, nor that the Russian government was involved, or even that there was a real hack involved, and even less evidence that any emails that might have been exfiltrated were given to Wikileaks as opposed to another leak such as that alleged by Sy Hersh to have been done by Seth Rich.

    The "assessment" that Putin ordered any of this is pure mind-reading and can be utterly dismissed absent any of the other evidence Publius points out as necessary.

    The same applies to any "estimate" that the Russian government preferred Trump or wished to denigrate Clinton. Based on what I read in pro-Russian news outlets, Russian officials took great pains to not pick sides and Putin's comments were similarly very restrained. The main quote from Putin about Trump that emerged was mistranslated as approval whereas it was more an observation of Trump's personality. At no time did Putin ever say he favored Trump over Clinton, even though that was a likely probability given Clinton's "Hitler" comparison.

    As an aside, I also recommend Scott Ritter's trashing of the ICA. Ritter is familiar with intelligence estimates and their reliability based on his previous service as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq and in Russia implementing arms control treaties.

    ann , 07 March 2018 at 11:22 PM
    This is a wonderful explanation of the intelligence community. And I thank you for the explanation. My interpretation is: In 1990 +- Bush 41 sold us the 1st Iraq war using fudged intelligence, then Bush 43 sold us the second Iraq war using fabricated intelligence. And now the Obama Administration tried to sell us fake intelligence in regard to Russia in order to get Clinton elected. However inadequate my summary is it looks like the Democrats are less skilled in propaganda than the Repubs. And what else is the difference?
    Richardstevenhack , 08 March 2018 at 03:02 AM
    Mueller has had 18 months and has proceeded to reveal exactly nothing related to either Trump "collusion" with Russia nor Russia as a state actually doing anything remotely described as "meddling."

    His expected indictment of some Russians for the DNC hack is going to be more of the same in all likelihood. I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 or that they had any direct connection with either the alleged DNC hack or Wikileaks or the Russian government.

    It's a witch hunt, nothing more. People holding their breath for the "slam dunk" are going to pass out soon if they haven't already.

    blue peacock , 08 March 2018 at 04:12 AM
    GZC #12

    Mueller is investigating some aspects. But there is another aspect - the conspiracy inside law enforcement and the IC. That is also being investigated. There are Congressional committees in particular Nunes, Goodlatte and Grassley. Then there is the DOJ IG. And today AG Sessions confirms there is a DOJ prosecutor outside Washington investigating.

    IMO, the conspiracy is significantly larger in scale and scope than anything the Russians did.

    Yes, indeed we'll have to wait and see what facts Mueller reveals. But also what facts these other investigations reveal.

    English Outsider , 08 March 2018 at 05:57 AM
    Thank you for setting out the geography and workings of this complex world.

    Might I ask how liaison with other Intelligence Communities fits in? Is intelligence information from non-US sources such as UK intelligence sources subject to the same process of verification and evaluation?

    I ask because of the passage in your article -

    "But such evidence (corroborating the Steele dossier) was not forthcoming. If it had existed than Jim Comey could have claimed in his June 2017 testimony before Congress that the parts of the "Dossier" had been verified. He did not do so. Testifying under oath Comey described the "Dossier" as "salacious and unverified." "

    Does this leave room for the assertion that although the "Dossier" was unverified in the US it was accepted as good information because it had been verified by UK Intelligence or by persons warranted by the UK? In other words, was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?

    turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 07:53 AM
    EO,

    " ... was UK Intelligence, or an ex-UK intelligence officer, used to get material through the US evaluation process, material that would not have got through that US evaluation process had it originated within the US itself?" I would say yes and especially yes if the contact for this piece of data was conducted at the highest level within the context of the already tight liaison between the US IC and Mi-6/GCHQ. PT may think differently. pl

    turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 07:54 AM
    GZC

    A lot of smoke? Only if you wish to place a negative value on everything the Trump people did or were. pl

    jsn -> The Twisted Genius ... , 08 March 2018 at 08:20 AM
    The CIA appears to be trying to right the wrongs done them with the creation of the DNI:
    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/08/dems-m08.html
    turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 08:54 AM
    jsn

    The wrongs done them? I hope that was irony. pl

    turcopolier -> Green Zone Café ... , 08 March 2018 at 09:01 AM
    GZC

    Was it Hitler or Stalin who said "show me the man and I will find his crime?" As I have said before, Trumps greatest vulnerability lies in his previous business life as an entrepreneurial hustler. If he is anything like the many like him whom I observed in my ten business years, then he has cut corners legally somewhere in international business. they pretty much all do that. Kooshy, a successful businessman confirmed that here a while back. These other guys were all business hustlers including Flynn and their activities have made them vulnerable to Mueller. IMO you have to ask yourself how much you want to be governed by political hacks and how much by hustlers. pl

    turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 09:24 AM
    jsn

    hy this socialist pub would fing it surprising that former public servants seek elected office is a mystery to me. BTW, in re all the discussion here of the IC, there are many levels in these essentially hierarchical structures and one's knowledge of them is conditioned by the perspective from which you viewed them. pl

    DH , 08 March 2018 at 09:50 AM
    Re 'baby adoption' meeting between Trump, Jr. and Veselnitskaya, I recall a comment here linking to an article speculating the email initiating the meeting originated in Europe, was set up by the playboy son of a European diplomat, and contained words to trip data-gathering monitors which would have enabled a FISA request to have Trump, Jr. come under surveillance.

    Also, the Seymour Hersh tape certainly seems authentic as far as Seth Rich being implicated in the DNC dump.

    Publius Tacitus -> Green Zone Café ... , 08 March 2018 at 09:53 AM
    GZC,

    Are you really this obtuse?

    You insist (I guess you rely on MSNBC as your fact source) that Manafort, Page, etc. all "have connections to Russia or Assange." You are using smear and guilt by association. Flynn's so-called connection to Russia was that he accepted an invite to deliver a speech at an RT sponsored event and was paid. So what? Nothing wrong with that. Just ask Bill Clinton. Or perhaps you are referring to the fact that Flynn also spoke to the Russian Ambassador to the US after the election in his capacity as designated National Security Advisor. Zero justification for investigation.

    Stone? He left the campaign before there had even been a primary and only had text exchanges with Assange.

    Your blind hatred of Trump makes you incapable of thinking logically.

    jsn , 08 March 2018 at 10:15 AM
    Sir,

    The most sarcastic irony was intended. This is what the real left looks like, its very different from Clintonite Liberals, not that I agree with their ideological program, though I believe parts have their place.

    Liberals have, I believe, jumped the shark: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/03/07/progressive-journalists-jump-the-shark-on-russiagate/

    If the get their way with the new McCarthyism, the implications for dissent, left or right, seem to me to be about the same:
    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/federalist-68-the-electoral-college-and-faithless-electors.html#intelligence

    jsn , 08 March 2018 at 10:25 AM
    Sir,

    And to your second comment, yes I agree about the complexity of institutions and how situationally constrained individual experiences are, if that was the point.

    I'll also concede my brief comments generalize very broadly, but it's hard to frame things more specific comments without direct knowledge, such as the invaluable correspondents here. I try to avoid confirmation bias by reading broadly and try to provide outside perspectives. My apologies if they're too far outside.

    I suppose it would be interesting to see a side by side comparison of how many former IC self affiliated with which party in choosing to run. I'm just guessing but I'll bet there's more CIA in the D column and more DIA among the Rs.

    LeaNder said in reply to Flavius... , 08 March 2018 at 10:40 AM
    love this coinage Flavius: Yes it was and so remains the lie unchallenged

    a lie "circumstantial"? http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.de/2005/05/seven-degrees-of-lie.html

    Sid Finster , 08 March 2018 at 11:06 AM
    "We don't have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn't found it yet!" is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes without evidence (there's that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found.

    That said, I have no doubt that Mueller will find *something*, simply because an aggressive and determined prosecutor can always find *something*, especially if the target is engaged in higher level business or politics. A form unfiled, an irregularity in an official document, and overly optimistic tax position.

    If nothing else works, there's always the good old standby of asking question after question until the target makes a statement that can be construed as perjury or lying to investigators.

    Sarah B said in reply to turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 11:27 AM
    My perspective, after reading that linked article by the WSWS, is that both, the IC and the DoD, are trying to take over the whole US political spectrum, in fact, militarizing de facto the US political life....

    Now, tell me that this is not an intend by the MIC ( where all the former IC or DoD people finally end when they leave official positions )to take over the government ( if more was needed after what has happened with Trump´s ) to guarantee their profit rate in a moment where everything is crimbling....

    Btw, have you read the recently released paper, "WorldWide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community" by Daniel R. Coats ( DNI )? You smell fear from the four corners....do not you?

    Barbara Ann -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 11:35 AM
    Those immortal words are attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, Colonel and you are not the first to draw the comparison re Mueller's investigation. For those who do not know Beria was head of the NKVD under Stalin.
    Sarah B , 08 March 2018 at 11:38 AM
    Here is the paper in question I am mentioning above: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/2018-ATA---Unclassified-SSCI.pdf Some neutral analyst is saying that from 28 pages, 24 are dedicated to Russia and China, then Iran and NK, in this order...and that it is an official recognition of the new multipolar order....
    Peter VE said in reply to johnf... , 08 March 2018 at 11:55 AM
    The BBC reported this morning that a police officer who was amongst the earliest responders to the "nerve gas" poisoning of Col. Skripal is also being treated for symptoms. How was it that many "White Helmets" who were filmed where the sarin gas was dropped on Khan Sheikhoun last April suffered no symptoms?
    Jack -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 11:59 AM
    Sir

    That's a good way to present it political hacks vs hustlers. The fact is Flynn has pled guilty to perjury. Nothing else like collusion with the Russians. And his sentencing is on hold now as the judge has ordered Mueller to hand over any exculpatory evidence. Clearly something is going on his case for the judge to do that.

    Manafort has been indicted for money laundering, wire fraud, etc for activities well before the election campaign. Sure, it is good that these corrupt individuals should be investigated and prosecuted. However, this corruption is widespread in DC. How come none of these cheering Mueller on to destroy Trump care about all the foreign money flowing to K Street? Why aren't they calling for investigations of the Clinton Foundation or the Podesta brothers where probable cause exist of foreign money and influence? What about Ben Cardin and all those recipients of foreign zionist money and influence? It would be nice if there were wide ranging investigations on all those engaged in foreign influence peddling. But it seems many just want a witch hunt to hobble Trump. It's going to be very difficult to get the Senate to convict him for obstruction of justice or tax evasion or some charge like that.

    The Twisted Genius , 08 March 2018 at 12:59 PM
    The select group of several dozen analysts from CIA, NSA and FBI who produced the January 2017 ICA are very likely the same group of analysts assembled by Brenner in August 2016 to form a task force examining "L'Affaire Russe" at the same time Brennan brought that closely held report to Obama of Putin's specific instructions on an operation to damage Clinton and help Trump. I've seen these interagency task forces set up several times to address particular info ops or cyberattack issues. Access to the work of these task forces was usually heavily restricted. I don't know if this kind of thing has become more prevalent throughout the IC.

    I am also puzzled by the absence of DIA in the mix. When I was still working, there were a few DIA analysts who were acknowledged throughout the IC as subject matter experts and analytical leaders in this field. On the operational side, there was never great enthusiasm for things cyber or info ops. There were only a few lonely voices in the darkness. Meanwhile, CIA, FBI and NSA embraced the field wholeheartedly. Perhaps those DIA analytical experts retired or moved on to CYBERCOM, NSA or CIA's Information Operations Center.

    LeaNder said in reply to Richardstevenhack ... , 08 March 2018 at 01:01 PM
    I predict there will be next to zero evidence produced either that the Russians named are in fact members of APT28 or APT29 ...

    Richard, over here the type of software is categorized under Advanced Persistent Threat, and beyond that specifically labeled the "Sofacy Group". ... I seem to prefer the more neutral description 'Advanced Persistent Threat' by Kaspersky. Yes, they seem to be suspicious lately in the US. But I am a rather constant consumer, never mind the occasional troubles over the years.

    APT: Helps to not get confused by all the respective naming patterns in the economic field over national borders. APT 1 to 29 ...? Strictly, What's the precise history of the 'Bear' label and or the specific, I assume, group of APT? ...

    Kasperky pdf-file - whodunnit?
    https://tinyurl.com/APT-Avanced-Persitent-Treat

    Ever used a datebase checking a file online? Would have made you aware of the multitude of naming patterns.

    ******
    More ad-hoc concerning one item in your argument above. To what extend does a standard back-up system leave relevant forensic traces? Beyond the respective image in the present? Do you know?

    Admittedly, I have no knowledge about matters beyond purely private struggles. But yes, they seemed enough to get a vague glimpse of categories in the field of attribution. Regarding suspected state actors vs the larger cybercrime scene that is.

    LeaNder said in reply to Fred... , 08 March 2018 at 02:29 PM
    Even mentioning those is just further evidence that something really did happen.

    I appreciate you are riding our partially shared hobby horse, Fred. ;)

    But admittedly this reminds me of something that felt like a debate-shift, I may be no doubt misguided here. Nitwit! In other words I may well have some type of ideological-knot in the relevant section dealing with memory in my brain as long-term undisciplined observer of SST.

    But back on topic: the argument seemed to be that "important facts" were omitted. In other words vs earlier times were are now centrally dealing with omission as evidence. No?

    Dave -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 03:18 PM
    Ask National Security Advisor General McMaster.
    Even Trump now says Putin meddled.
    What more evidence do you need
    Dave -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 03:20 PM
    General McMaster has seen the evidence and says the fact of Russian meddling can no longer be credibly denied.
    That doesn't stop the right-wing extremists from spinning fairy tales.
    turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 03:34 PM
    Dave

    It is politically necessary for Trump to say that. Tell me, what is meant by "Russian meddling"in this statement by McMaster? pl

    Dave -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 03:50 PM
    Russian meddling is hacking our election systems.

    The right wing (re: Hannity and Limbaugh) have been trying mightily to discredit this investigation by smearing Mueller's reputation, even though he is a conservative republican.

    They are doing this so that if Mueller's report is damning, they can call it a "witch hunt."

    I would think that if Trump is innocent, he would cooperate with this investigation fully.

    You are insinuating that McMaster is a liar even though he has access to information that you don't.

    Publius Tacitus -> Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 04:02 PM
    Just because trump is stupid is not an excuse for you. You accept a lie without one shred of actual evidence. You are a lemming
    Fred -> LeaNder... , 08 March 2018 at 04:04 PM
    LeaNder,

    "omission as evidence. " Incorrect. Among the omissions was the fact that the dossier was paid for by a political campaign and that the wife of a senior DOJ lawyer's wife was working for Fusion GPS. Then there's the rest of the political motivations left out.

    Fred -> Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 04:07 PM
    Dave,

    Putin hired Facebook. That company seems to do well helping out foreign governments.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship-tool-china.html

    Linda , 08 March 2018 at 04:16 PM
    If you have seen the classified information that would be necessary to back up your conclusions, it should not be discussed in this forum. As you are well aware sources and methods cannot be made public so I fail to see how you believe this should have been publically done. Having said that, I pretty much agree with your conclusion except for the indication that the analysts lied.
    turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 04:26 PM
    Dave

    What does "hacking our elections" mean? Does it means breaking into voting systems and changing the outcome by altering votes? Or does it mean information operations to change US voters' minds about for whom they would vote?

    If the latter you must know that we (the US) have done this many times in foreign elections, including Russian elections, Israeli elections, Italian elections, German elections, etc., or perhaps you think that a different criterion should be applied to people who are not American.

    As for McMasters, I am unimpressed with him. He displays all the symptoms of Russophobia. He has special information? Information can be interpreted many ways depending on one's purpose. pl

    turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 04:36 PM
    Linda

    PT does not have access to the classified information underlying but your argument that "As you are well aware sources and methods cannot be made public so I fail to see how you believe this should have been publicly done." doesn't hold water for me since I have seen sources and methods disclosed by the government of the US many times when it felt that necessary. One example that I have mentioned before was that of the trial of Jeffrey Sterling (merlin) for which I was an expert witness and adviser to the federal court for four years.

    In that one the CIA and DoJ forced the court to allow them to de-classify the CIA DO's operational files on the case and read them into the record in open court. I had read all these files when they were classified at the SCI level. IMO the perpetrators in the Steel Memo case are and were merely hiding behind claims of sources and methods protection in order to protect themselve. pl

    JamesT -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 04:37 PM
    I continue to learn things around here that I could never learn anywhere else. It is a privilege to read the Colonel, TTG, and Publius Tacitus.
    turcopolier , 08 March 2018 at 04:47 PM
    Dave

    If you use denigrating language like "wild eyed" to attack your interlocutors you will not be welcome here. pl

    LeaNder said in reply to Flavius... , 08 March 2018 at 04:49 PM
    Mueller cleared his ridiculous indictment relating to the Russian troll farm, a requirement that at one time would have been SOP for any FBI Office or USAtty Office bringing an indictment of this kind.

    Not aware of this. Can you help me out?

    No doubt vaguely familiar with public lore, in limited ways. As always.

    Sid Finster said in reply to Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 05:09 PM
    So now we are supposed to believe unquestioningly the word of torturers, perjurers and entrapment artists, all talking about alleged evidence that we are not allowed to see? Did you learn nothing from the "Iraqi WMD" fiasco or the "ZOMG! Assad gassed his own peoples ZOMG!" debacle? Funny how in each of these instances, the intelligence community's lies just happened to coincide with the agenda of empire.
    LeaNder said in reply to Fred ... , 08 March 2018 at 05:10 PM
    Ok, true. I forgot 'Steele'* was used as 'evidence'. Strictly, Pat may have helped me out considering my 'felt' "debate-shift". Indirectly. I do recall, I hesitated to try to clarify matters for myself.

    * ...

    m -> turcopolier ... , 08 March 2018 at 06:29 PM
    Depends on what crime the "hack" committed. Fudging on taxes or cutting corners? Big whoop. Laundering $500 mil for a buddy of Vlad's? Now you got my attention and should have the voters' attention.

    This is a political process in the end game. Clinton lied about sex in the oval Office and was tried for it. Why don't we exercise patience in the process and see if this President should be tried?

    m -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 06:33 PM
    I ain't a lawyer but don't prosecutors hold their cards (evidence) close to their chests until the court has a criminal charge and sets a date for discovery?
    Publius Tacitus -> Linda ... , 08 March 2018 at 06:45 PM
    Linda,
    You betray your ignorance on this subject. You clearly have not understood nor comprehended what I have written. So i will put it in CAPS for you. Please read slowly.

    THIS TYPE OF DOCUMENT, IF IT HAD A SOURCE OR SOURCES BEHIND IT, WOULD REFERENCE THOSE SOURCES. AN ANALYST WOULD NOT WRITE "WE ASSESS." IF YOU HAVE A RELIABLE HUMAN SOURCE OR A RELIABLE PIECE OF SIGINT THE YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ASSESS. YOU SIMPLY STATE, ACCORDING TO A KNOWLEDGEABLE AND RELIABLE SOURCE.

    GOT IT. And don't come back with nonsense that the sources are so sensitive that they cannot be disclose. News flash genius--the very fact that Clapper put out this piece of dreck would have exposed the sources if they existed (but they do not). In any event, there would be reference to sources that provided the evidence that such activity took place at the direction of Putin.

    IT DOES NOT EXIST.

    J , 08 March 2018 at 07:08 PM
    Colonel,

    The granddaddy of them all is #16, and what have they contributed?

    Steve McIntyre -> David Habakkuk ... , 08 March 2018 at 07:41 PM
    I'm eagerly awaiting your thoughts on the Skripal poisoning. I'm sure I'm not alone in the hope that you will write on it.
    The Twisted Genius -> Publius Tacitus ... , 08 March 2018 at 07:59 PM
    Publius Tacitus,

    I notice other Intelligence Community Assessments also use the term "we assess" liberally. For example, the 2018 Worldwide Threat Assessment and the 2012 ICA on Global Water Security use the "we assess" phrase throughout the documents. I hazard to guess that is why they call these things assessments.

    The 2017 ICA on Russian Interference released to the public clearly states: "This report is a declassified version of a highly classified assessment. This document's conclusions are identical to the highly classified assessment, but this document does not include the full supporting information, including specific intelligence on key elements of the influence campaign. Given the redactions, we made minor edits purely for readability and flow."

    I would hazard another guess that those minor edits for readability and flow are the reason that specific intelligence reports and sources, which were left out of the unclassified ICA, are not cited in that ICA.

    The Twisted Genius -> Dave... , 08 March 2018 at 08:26 PM
    Dave,

    As far as I know, no one has reliably claimed that election systems, as in vote tallies, were ever breached. No votes were changed after they were cast. The integrity of our election system and the 2016 election itself was maintained. Having said that, there is plenty of evidence of Russian meddling as an influence op. I suggest you and others take a gander at the research of someone going by the handle of @UsHadrons and several others. They are compiling a collection of FaceBook, twitter and other media postings that emanated from the IRA and other Russian sources. The breadth of these postings is quite wide and supports the assessment that enhancing the divides that already existed in US society was a primary Russian goal.

    https://medium.com/@ushadrons

    I pointed this stuff out to Eric Newhill a while back in one of our conversations. He jokingly noted that he may have assisted in spreading a few of these memes. I bet a lot of people will recognize some of the stuff in this collection. That's nothing. Recently we all learned that Michael Moore did a lot more than unwittingly repost a Russian meme. He took part in a NYC protest march organized and pushed by Russians. This stuff is open source proof of Russian meddling.

    Publius Tacitus -> The Twisted Genius ... , 08 March 2018 at 08:55 PM
    TTG
    Nice try, but that is bullshit just because recent assessments come out with sloppy language is no excuse. Go back and look at the assessment was done for iraq to justify the war in 2003. Many sources cited because it was considered something Required to justify going to war. As we have been told by many in the media that the Russians meddling was worse or as bad as the attack on Pearl Harbor and 9-11. With something so serious do you want to argue that they would downplay the sourcing?

    [Feb 12, 2018] I am wondering why it is that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... How did Simpson know with such confidence what the "Intelligence Community" was "saying", and who were Simpson's and Steele's sources in the "Intelligence Community"? Rooney failed to inquire. Instead, he and Simpson exchanged question and answer regarding the approach Simpson and Steele made to the FBI when they delivered their dossier. In the details of that, Simpson repeated what he had already told the Senate Judiciary Committee. ..."
    "... Sources in London are divided on the question of where Steele's sources came from -- CIA, MI6, or elsewhere. What has been clear for the year in which the dossier's contents have been in public circulation is that the sources the dossier referred to as "Russian" were not. For details of the sourcing . The subsequent identification of the Maltese source Joseph Mifsud, and the Greek-American George Papadopoulos, corroborates their lack of direct Russian sources. Instead, the sources identified in the dossier were either Americans, Americans of Russian ethnic origin, or Russians with no direct knowledge repeating hearsay three or four times removed from source. ..."
    "... Another reported version of the FIFA contract is that Steele, Burrows and Orbis were hired by the British Football Association to collect materials on FIFA corruption, and provide them to the FBI and other US investigators, and then to the press. The scheme's objective was reportedly to advance the British bidding for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022 by discrediting the rival bids from Russia and Qatar. Click to read . Were MI6 and CIA sources mobilized by Orbis to feed the FBI with evidence the US investigators were unable to turn up, or was Orbis the conduit through which disinformation targeting Russia was fed to make it appear more credible to the FBI, and to the media? ..."
    "... US Congressional investigators have so far failed to notice the similarities between the FIFA and the Trump dossier operations. Early this month two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that they have called for a Justice Department and FBI investigation of Steele for providing false information to the FBI. The provision of the US code making lying a federal crime requires the falsehoods occur "within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States." Simpson has testified that when Steele briefed the FBI on the dossier, he did so at meetings in Rome, Italy. ..."
    "... With Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there is some evidence that Clinton and Co. actually wanted to run against Donald Trump, and tried to get their allies to manipulate the Republican primary in favor of a Trump victory (hence all the free corporate media coverage of the Donald). The dossier, fabricated or not, seems to have been one of many 'ace in the holes' that the Clinton campaign thought they could use to discredit Trump (including the Access Hollywood tape, etc.) in the general election. If so, this strategy really blew up in their face – they thought they could manipulate the process, so they could ignore the Rust Belt concerns, and that's what handed Trump the presidency. ..."
    "... If the Clintonites were to admit this, however, they'd have to step down from party leadership and let the Sanders Democrats take over, and that's what this is really all about now, their effort to prevent that outcome. ..."
    "... And I say "fed to him" when I'm in a generous mood, giving him the benefit of the doubt, because usually I am of the opinion that he's either a really crappy CIA agent posing as a journalist or just a garden variety rat f*!@er. A black job political operative, stitching together a few almost-believable "facts" and out-and-out fabrications with squishy words like "collusion" and "ties." ..."
    "... The London experts believe the Senate Committee transcript shows Simpson and Steele were hired for the black job of discrediting the target of their research, Trump; did a poor job; failed in 2016; and now are engaged in bitter recriminations against each other to avoid multi-million dollar court penalties. ..."
    "... A source at a London firm which is larger and better known than Steele's Orbis says "standard due diligence means getting to the truth. It's confidential to the client, and not leaked. There are also black jobs, white jobs, and red jobs. Black means the client wants you to dig up dirt on the target, and make it look credible for publishing in the press. White means the client wants you to clear him of the wrongdoing which he's being accused of in the media or the marketplace; it's also leaked to the press. A red job is where the client pays the due diligence firm to hire a journalist to find out what he knows and what he's likely to publish, in order to bribe or stop him. The Steele dossier on Trump is an obvious black job. Too obvious." ..."
    "... A bigger bombshell, which of course none of them mentioned, is that Simpson, with his client's consent, was secretly briefing Clinton-friendly reporters on information from Steele's memos, and they used it to write stories based on "unnamed sources." He even admitted that he didn't verify the information before feeding it to the media, said he didn't feel he needed to, because it came from a trustworthy source. Where have we heard that before? ..."
    "... I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. It's well-established that the State Department often acts as a cover for the CIA, and the agency under Secretary Clinton had a strong anti-Russia faction that's on the record as meddling in Ukraine's presidential election. And how much doubt could there be that both Clintons kept the CIA connections they made while in office? ..."
    "... Then there was the whole "Grizzly Steppe" report just before Trump's inauguration, presented as a consensus among "17 intelligence agencies" that the Russians "hacked the election" to help Trump win. ..."
    "... I'm not 100-percent convinced that U.S. intelligence was behind the dossier, but it's enough of a possibility that I'm not writing it off as some nutty "conspiracy theory." ..."
    "... Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. ..."
    "... In fact I am fairly certain that it is the case, although from what I understand the FBI and MI6 were also involved. ..."
    Feb 12, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    According to Simpson, "foreign intelligence services hacking American political operations is not that unusual, actually, and there's a lot of foreign intelligence services that play in American elections." He mentioned the Chinese and the Indians, not the Israelis. The Mossad, Simpson did tell the Committee, was his source for his belief that Russian intelligence has been operating through the Jewish Orthodox Chabad movement, and the Russian Orthodox Church. "The Orthodox church is also an arm of the Russian State now the Mossad guys used to tell me about how the Russians were laundering money through the Orthodox church in Israel, and that it was intelligence operations."

    There are just two references in the Committee transcript to the CIA. One was a passing remark to imply the Russians cannot "break[ing] into the CIA, [so instead] you are breaking into, you know, places where, you know, an open society leaves open."

    The second was a bombshell. It dropped during questioning by Congressman Thomas Rooney (right), a 3-term Republican representative from Florida with a career as an army lawyer. Rooney asked Simpson: "Do you or anyone else independently verify or corroborate any information in the dossier?"

    Simpson replied by saying, "Yes. Well, numerous things in the dossier have been verified. You know, I don't have access to the intelligence or law enforcement information that I see made reference to, but, you know, things like, you know, the Russian Government has been investigating Hillary Clinton and has a lot of information about her."

    Then Simpson contradicted himself, disclosing what he had just denied. "When the original memos came in saying that the Kremlin was mounting a specific operation to get Donald Trump elected President , that was not what the Intelligence Community was saying. The Intelligence Community was saying they are just seeking to disrupt our election and our political process, and that this is sort of kind of just a generally nihilistic, you know, trouble-making operation. And, you know, Chris turned out to be right, it was specifically designed to elect Donald Trump President."

    How did Simpson know with such confidence what the "Intelligence Community" was "saying", and who were Simpson's and Steele's sources in the "Intelligence Community"? Rooney failed to inquire. Instead, he and Simpson exchanged question and answer regarding the approach Simpson and Steele made to the FBI when they delivered their dossier. In the details of that, Simpson repeated what he had already told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

    Rooney then asked what contact had been made with the CIA or "any other intelligence officials". Simpson claimed he didn't understand the question at first, then he stumbled.

    Source: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00/20180118/106796/HMTG-115-IG00-20180118-SD002.pdf -- page 61 .

    What Simpson was concealing in the two pauses, reported in the transcript as hyphens, Rooney did not realize. Simpson was implying that none from Fusion GPS, his consulting company, had been in contact with the CIA, nor him personally. But Simpson left open that Steele had been in contact with the CIA. Rooney followed with a question about "anyone", but that was so imprecise, Simpson recovered his confidence to say "No". That was a cover-up -- and the House Intelligence Committee let it drop noiselessly.

    Intelligence community sources and colleagues who know Simpson and Steele say Simpson was notorious at the Wall Street Journal for coming up with conspiracy theories for which the evidence was missing or unreliable. He told the Committee that disbelief on the part of his editors and management had been one of his reasons for leaving the newspaper. "One of the reasons why I left the Wall Street Journal was because I wanted to write more stories about Russian influence in Washington, D.C., on both the Democrats and the Republicans eventually the Journal lost interest in that subject. And I was frustrated that was where I left my journalism career."

    When Simpson was asked "do you -- did you find anything to -- that you verified as false in the dossier, since or during?" Simpson replied: "I have not seen anything -- ". Note the hypthen, the stenographer's signal that Simpson was pausing.

    "[Question]. So everything in that dossier, as far as you're concerned, is true or could be true?"

    "MR. SIMPSON: I didn't say that. What I said was it was credible at the time it came in. We were able to corroborate various things that supported its credibility."

    Sources in London are divided on the question of where Steele's sources came from -- CIA, MI6, or elsewhere. What has been clear for the year in which the dossier's contents have been in public circulation is that the sources the dossier referred to as "Russian" were not. For details of the sourcing . The subsequent identification of the Maltese source Joseph Mifsud, and the Greek-American George Papadopoulos, corroborates their lack of direct Russian sources. Instead, the sources identified in the dossier were either Americans, Americans of Russian ethnic origin, or Russians with no direct knowledge repeating hearsay three or four times removed from source.

    So were the allegations of the dossier manufactured by a CIA disinformation unit, and fed back to the US through the British agent, Steele? Or were they a Simpson conspiracy theory of the type that failed to pass veracity testing when Simpson was at the Wall Street Journal? The House Intelligence Committee failed to inquire.

    One independent clue is what financial and other links Simpson and Steele and their consulting firms, Fusion GPS and Orbis Business Intelligence, have had with US Government agencies other than the FBI, and what US Government contracts they were paid for, before the Republican and Democratic Party organizations commissioned the anti-Trump job?

    The House Committee has subpoenaed business records from Fusion, but Simpson's lawyers say they will refuse to hand them over. The financial records of Steele's firm are openly accessible through the UK government company registry, Companies House. Click to read here .

    Because the Trump dossier work ran from the second half of 2015 to November 2016, the financial reports of Orbis for the financial years ending March 31, 2016, and March 31, 2017, are the primary sources. For FY 2016 and FY 2017, open this link to read.

    The papers reveal that Orbis was a small firm with no more than 7 employees. Steele's business partner and co-shareholder, Christopher Burrows, is another former MI6 spy. They had been hoping for MI6 support of their private business, but it failed to materialize, says an London intelligence source. "Chris Burrows is another from the same background. They all hope to be Hakluyt [a leading commercial intelligence operation in London] but didn't get the nod on departure."

    They do not report the Orbis income. Instead, for 2016 the company filings indicate £155,171 in cash at the bank, and income of £245,017 owed by clients and contractors. Offsetting that figure, Orbis owed £317,848 -- to whom and for what purposes is not reported. The unaudited accounts show Orbis's profit jumped from £121,046 in 2015 to £199,223 in 2016, and £441,089 in 2017.

    The financial data are complicated by the operation by Steele and Burrows of a second company, Orbis Business Intelligence International, a subsidiary they created in 2010, a year after the parent company was formed. Follow its affairs here .

    According to British press reports , Orbis and Steele were paid £200,000 for the dossier. Simpson told the House Intelligence Committee the sum was much less -- $160,000 (about £114,000). Simpson's firm, he also testified, was being paid at a rate of about $50,000 per month for a total of about $320,000. If the British sources are more accurate than Simpson's testimony, Steele's takings from the dossier represented roughly half the profit on the Orbis balance-sheet.

    British sources also report that a US Government agency paid for Orbis to work on evidence and allegations of corruption at the world soccer federation, Fédération Internationale de Football (FIFA). Indictments in this case were issued by the US Department of Justice in May 2015 , and the following December . What role the two-partner British consultancy played in the complex investigations by teams from the Justice Department, the FBI and also the Internal Revenue Service is unclear. That Steele, Burrows and Orbis depended on US government sources for their financial well-being appears to be certain.

    Another reported version of the FIFA contract is that Steele, Burrows and Orbis were hired by the British Football Association to collect materials on FIFA corruption, and provide them to the FBI and other US investigators, and then to the press. The scheme's objective was reportedly to advance the British bidding for the World Cup in 2018 or 2022 by discrediting the rival bids from Russia and Qatar. Click to read . Were MI6 and CIA sources mobilized by Orbis to feed the FBI with evidence the US investigators were unable to turn up, or was Orbis the conduit through which disinformation targeting Russia was fed to make it appear more credible to the FBI, and to the media?

    US Congressional investigators have so far failed to notice the similarities between the FIFA and the Trump dossier operations. Early this month two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that they have called for a Justice Department and FBI investigation of Steele for providing false information to the FBI. The provision of the US code making lying a federal crime requires the falsehoods occur "within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States." Simpson has testified that when Steele briefed the FBI on the dossier, he did so at meetings in Rome, Italy.

    Now then, Part I and this sequel of the Simpson-Steele story having been read and thoroughly mulled over, what can the meaning be?

    In the short run, this case was a black job assigned by Republican Party candidates for president, then the Democratic National Committee, for the purpose of discrediting Trump in favour of Hillary Clinton. It failed on Election Day in 2016; the Democrats are still trying.

    In the long run, the case is a measurement of the life, or the half-life, of truth. Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote once that nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily. On his clock, that was five minutes. He didn't know the United States, or shall we say the stretch from Washington through New York to the North End of Boston. There, truth has an even shorter life. Scarcely a second.

    nonsense factory , January 22, 2018 at 3:35 pm

    "The primary reason I generally don't believe in conspiracies is that they can usually be better explained as the result of sheer incompetence and hubris."

    I divide conspiracy notions into two categories: grand mal and petit mal . The former are generally implausible due to the large number of participants involved and while occassionally attempted, they are typically exposed pretty quickly. They may still have significant effects – for example, there was a large conspiracy to sell the Iraqi WMD story to the public, involving top levels of the British and American governments and a good section of the corporate media. That's the grand mal version.

    Petit mal is your typical small criminal conspiracy. The FBI, for example, almost always includes 'conspiracy to commit mail fraud' on the list of federal charges.

    With Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, there is some evidence that Clinton and Co. actually wanted to run against Donald Trump, and tried to get their allies to manipulate the Republican primary in favor of a Trump victory (hence all the free corporate media coverage of the Donald). The dossier, fabricated or not, seems to have been one of many 'ace in the holes' that the Clinton campaign thought they could use to discredit Trump (including the Access Hollywood tape, etc.) in the general election. If so, this strategy really blew up in their face – they thought they could manipulate the process, so they could ignore the Rust Belt concerns, and that's what handed Trump the presidency.

    If the Clintonites were to admit this, however, they'd have to step down from party leadership and let the Sanders Democrats take over, and that's what this is really all about now, their effort to prevent that outcome.

    Rhondda , January 22, 2018 at 3:57 pm

    I pay pretty close attention to this topic and I must say I sometimes wonder if the Russians haven't sold the rope to the American political elite. I read all 311 pages of Simpson's testimony. I was struck that much of what he was "fed" by Steele confirmed his "OMG Russia corruption" biases.

    And I say "fed to him" when I'm in a generous mood, giving him the benefit of the doubt, because usually I am of the opinion that he's either a really crappy CIA agent posing as a journalist or just a garden variety rat f*!@er. A black job political operative, stitching together a few almost-believable "facts" and out-and-out fabrications with squishy words like "collusion" and "ties."

    From the embedded link in Helmer's text above: http://johnhelmer.net/glenn-simpson-chases-his-shadow-into-a-black-hole/

    London due diligence firms say the record of Simpson's firm Fusion GPS and Steele's Orbis Business Intelligence operations in the US has discredited them in the due diligence market. The London experts believe the Senate Committee transcript shows Simpson and Steele were hired for the black job of discrediting the target of their research, Trump; did a poor job; failed in 2016; and now are engaged in bitter recriminations against each other to avoid multi-million dollar court penalties.

    A source at a London firm which is larger and better known than Steele's Orbis says "standard due diligence means getting to the truth. It's confidential to the client, and not leaked. There are also black jobs, white jobs, and red jobs. Black means the client wants you to dig up dirt on the target, and make it look credible for publishing in the press. White means the client wants you to clear him of the wrongdoing which he's being accused of in the media or the marketplace; it's also leaked to the press. A red job is where the client pays the due diligence firm to hire a journalist to find out what he knows and what he's likely to publish, in order to bribe or stop him. The Steele dossier on Trump is an obvious black job. Too obvious."

    Emphasis mine.

    3.14e-9 , January 22, 2018 at 6:49 pm

    Rhondaa writes:

    I read all 311 pages of Simpson's testimony. I was struck that much of what he was "fed" by Steele confirmed his "OMG Russia corruption" biases.

    Same here, but not just about what he was fed by Steele. Simpson claimed to have done some of his own research and said it was consistent with what he got from Steele.

    I'm about three-quarters of the way through the transcript of Simpson's interrogation by the House Intelligence Committee, and I've read all 312 pages of the Senate Judiciary Committee transcript, which bears little resemblance to what was reported in the major media – shocking, I know.

    Among the "bombshells" the mainstream reported was "proof" that it wasn't the dossier that launched the FBI's investigation of Trump, and therefore the dossier couldn't have been used as justification for a FISA warrant. A bigger bombshell, which of course none of them mentioned, is that Simpson, with his client's consent, was secretly briefing Clinton-friendly reporters on information from Steele's memos, and they used it to write stories based on "unnamed sources." He even admitted that he didn't verify the information before feeding it to the media, said he didn't feel he needed to, because it came from a trustworthy source. Where have we heard that before?

    Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing. It's well-established that the State Department often acts as a cover for the CIA, and the agency under Secretary Clinton had a strong anti-Russia faction that's on the record as meddling in Ukraine's presidential election. And how much doubt could there be that both Clintons kept the CIA connections they made while in office?

    Then there was the whole "Grizzly Steppe" report just before Trump's inauguration, presented as a consensus among "17 intelligence agencies" that the Russians "hacked the election" to help Trump win.

    I'm not 100-percent convinced that U.S. intelligence was behind the dossier, but it's enough of a possibility that I'm not writing it off as some nutty "conspiracy theory."

    integer , January 23, 2018 at 4:16 am

    Few in the NC commentariat, at least from what I saw, had any problem accepting that the DNC and the Clinton campaign funded the dossier, so I'm wondering why it's that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing.

    FWIW this NC commenter has never had any problem believing that this may be the case. In fact I am fairly certain that it is the case, although from what I understand the FBI and MI6 were also involved.

    Adding: Heh. I posted this before looking at Rev Kev's link to the Raimondo article, which comes to the same conclusions. Interesting times!

    Scott1 , January 22, 2018 at 4:37 pm

    I believe that Seth Abramson or someone put photographs to the Steele dossier showing people in the places & at the times delineated in the Steele dossier. From the very first Steele said he would not & could not reveal his sources. It was from the first indicated that it would be to the FBI & CIA to discover. He said he believed that his sources were credible.

    When I was studying Intelligence services the CIA was said to be the private army of the CIA. These days I don't know exactly who the CIA works for, or answers to. I certainly don't think well of the CIA believing they are wrapped up working for their Front businesses more than focusing on the mission of spying in the interests of the American people. Of private intelligence companies I get what I can from IHS Jane's. That the CIA lost 20 assets, human beings, in China for incompetent secret communications methods would lead professionals to withhold as much of identities as possible.

    For awhile there I believe Steele was worried about his own health.

    David Corn at Mother Jones was reticent to break the story. So now what I see to look for is what Steele said needed to be done, & that being what Mueller is doing at the behest of the DOJ.

    The US has been at war, albeit Hybrid war since the imposition of sanctions for their violations of international law as regarded the annexation of Crimea & the attack on the Ukraine. Sanctions are Economic Warfare.

    That the US feels the right to engage in warfare of any kind Economic or Hot over violations of International Law leads me to believe that the UN will fail to prevent the apocalyptic riot. But that as regards Trump becomes neither here nor there, correct?

    The Rev Kev , January 23, 2018 at 12:29 am

    Justin Raimondo has weighed in on this story at https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2018/01/22/russsia-gate-implodes/ and he does not sound like a happy camper.

    John Gilberts , January 24, 2018 at 12:25 am

    William Binney, former NSA technical official and whistleblower, comments on the FISA memo, that has apparently just been released. Obviously, a major development in 'Russia-gate'.

    William Binney Exposes Secret FISA Memo
    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48650.htm

    [Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised

    Highly recommended!
    People are really angry, judging from comments
    Notable quotes:
    "... Six U.S. agencies created a stealth task force, spearhead by CIA's Brennan, to run domestic surveillance on Trump associates and possibly Trump himself. ..."
    "... To feign ignorance and to seemingly operate within U.S. laws, the agencies freelanced the wiretapping of Trump associates to the British spy agency GCHQ. ..."
    "... GCHQ did not work from London or the UK. In fact the spy agency worked from NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, MD with direct NSA supervision and guidance to conduct sweeping surveillance on Trump associates. ..."
    "... Following the Trump Tower sit down, GCHQ began digitally wiretapping Manafort, Trump Jr., and Kushner. ..."
    "... OK Ron Johnson (R-WI), the author was Steven Boyd, Assistant for Legislative Affairs / DOJ - Hold him in contempt of congress. ..."
    Jan 22, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    SethPoor -> BennyBoy Jan 22, 2018 9:47 AM Permalink

    Jim in MN -> SethPoor Jan 22, 2018 9:52 AM Permalink

    Bottom Line:

    The party in power used the apparatus of the police state to spy on and damage an opposition candidate.

    There really isn't a higher crime in our supposed system.

    THEN there's the cover-up.....as in deleting files and pretending you never had them even though the IG already does.

    otschelnik Jan 22, 2018 8:55 AM Permalink

    OK Ron Johnson (R-WI), the author was Steven Boyd, Assistant for Legislative Affairs / DOJ - Hold him in contempt of congress. Have him arrested. During questioning, press him to the wall, get him to tell him who in the FBI told him 'they couldn't find them.' Then go arrest that guy too. Rinse and repeat. Look what these bastards did to Mike Flynn. Go get 'em. NOW!!!

    VideoEng_NC Jan 22, 2018 9:10 AM Permalink

    One of the silver linings in this mess is the clear view that the FBI is ridiculously compromised & has chucked its standard of non-political leanings right out the window. Shutting it down may have once seemed a long shot, now maybe not so much. If you haven't noticed, another Trump boomerang has happened to the Left with their favorite word starting with the letter S. This time I'm thinking Storm is what's about to follow instead of hole or house.

    stustd Jan 22, 2018 9:14 AM Permalink

    Business as usual continues: Comey to teach ethical leadership course at William & Mary:

    http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/369695-comey-to-teach-ethical-leadership-course-at-william-mary

    wcole225 Jan 22, 2018 9:21 AM Permalink

    If the republican leadership hiccup here on the release of the memo then it's things as usual and forget a full on war from them. I don't trust those bastards as far as I can throw them. Trump then needs to fire Sessions and Mueller and go full on attack mode with a press conference doing what he does and light the left's hair on fire like never before. This is war and it needs kicked off in grand fashion. The left's ability to guilt shame has been neutered and they know it and are scared to death.

    CatInTheHat -> wcole225 Jan 22, 2018 11:03 AM Permalink

    Why do people think Trump is going to do anything? When his actions say he is doing exactly what the WARMONGERING fuckers want??

    Trump is Barry is Clinton is Bush...

    the not so mig Jan 22, 2018 9:31 AM Permalink

    these FBI Stazi guys are no good, shutter down

    two hoots Jan 22, 2018 9:33 AM Permalink

    The Genius has lost control. Washington is oozing and dripping its corrupt, manipulating, narcissistic and deceiving bile. Just one thin mint is all it will take. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJZPzQESq_0

    wobblie Jan 22, 2018 9:50 AM Permalink

    Nothing like a colossal waste of time to distract the herd.

    https://therulingclassobserver.com/2018/01/07/unity-at-the-top-division

    azusgm Jan 22, 2018 10:10 AM Permalink

    At one point, Peter Strzok made reference to a phone that "could not be traced". He probably had a 2nd phone for a period. I'd be willing to bet it was a BlackBerry. While he had (if he had) that 2nd phone, he could have used that more secure phone for his communications with Lisa Page.

    The IG may have all of Strzok's text messages with Lisa Page from his official phone, but none from the 2nd phone.

    azusgm -> azusgm Jan 22, 2018 10:35 AM Permalink

    Here's an article that includes the reference to the 2nd phone.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/peter-strzok-lisa-page-texts-trump-idiot/

    The article says that it was Lisa Page who suggested using the 2nd phone. That message from her was in March 2016.

    "Also in March, Page seems to be concerned about whether the things they say about Mr. Trump can be found out. "So look, you say we can text on that phone when we talk about Hillary because it cant be traced," she wrote."

    Haven't read through the entire thread here, but the end date of the interval for the missing data is also the date that Mueller was appointed.

    Lostinfortwalton Jan 22, 2018 10:34 AM Permalink

    All of this shit is at the NSA Blufdale, Utah, facility. Why are the taxpayers spending umpteen billion dollars collecting and storing this stuff if the government is going to pretend it doesn't exist? You can bet this internet post, and anyone who replies to it, is archived there. We are supposed to be afraid of being surveiled by assholes like Clapper and Brennan. Guess what? We're not.

    enough of this Jan 22, 2018 10:34 AM Permalink

    If Horowitz now claims he really didn't receive all the text messages he requested, then he too is part of a massive cover-up and any report that is issued by the DOJ's Inspector General's office can't be believed by definition.

    insanelysane -> enough of this Jan 22, 2018 10:41 AM Permalink

    It's possible Horowitz lied then to placate the Congressional inquiry. I believe that the Deep State believes that they can get Trump impeached before the shit hits the fan with the Sedition by the FBI. There is always Plan B for the Deep State but 50 years after they rid the world of 2 Kennedys the general population isn't buying it.

    BendGuyhere Jan 22, 2018 10:37 AM Permalink

    The FACT PATTERN supports a RICO indictment and prosecution.

    RUDY GIULIANI for SPECIAL PROSECUTOR.

    Hang Comey, Lynch, Mueller, Clinton, TO MAKE SURE IT NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN!

    MrBoompi Jan 22, 2018 11:00 AM Permalink

    If I understand how US communication systems work, every network has a splitter which copies all transmissions to NSA, or related agencies, storage devices. I would be shocked if they didn't collect everything from FBI or DOJ employees, and I mean everything, from FBI devices or their private devices. If the files are sitting safe and secure on NSA storage devices, only the NSA could really "lose" them. And this would also be true for every one of Clinton's messages. Why don't we ever see Congress ask NSA for anything? Is that verboten?

    Arrow4Truth Jan 22, 2018 11:58 AM Permalink

    "This glaring contradiction suggests someone is lying or perhaps simply incompetent." Wrong! It's both.

    currency Jan 22, 2018 12:34 PM Permalink

    FBI and DOJ and the Weasel Liar Rosenstein are LIARS. They don't want the world and the American people know what Liars, corrupt, in the tank for Hilray to know what they did are still trying to due. Trump needs to clean house of the FBI and DOJ of all Clinton and Obama people.

    [Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

    Highly recommended!
    Essentially CIA dictates the US foreign policy. The tail is wagging the dog. The current Russophobia hysteria mean additional billions for CIA and FBI. As simple as that.
    The article contain some important observation about self-sustaining nature of the US militarism. It is able to create new threats and new insurgencies almost at will via CIA activities.
    The key problem is that wars are highly profitable for important part of the ruling elite, especially representing finance and military industrial complex. Also now part of the US ruling elite now consists of "colonial administrators" which are directly interested in maintaining and expanding the US empire. This is trap from which nation might not be able to escape.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies. ..."
    "... Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. ..."
    "... No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them. ..."
    "... The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination." ..."
    "... Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991. ..."
    "... Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. ..."
    "... Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States. ..."
    "... U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy. ..."
    "... The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war. ..."
    "... The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years. ..."
    "... Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out. ..."
    "... Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq. ..."
    "... But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant ..."
    "... The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective. ..."
    "... This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale. ..."
    "... China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business." ..."
    "... As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others. ..."
    "... But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike. ..."
    "... Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy. ..."
    "... In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. ..."
    "... The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction. ..."
    "... Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budge t of any president since World War Two. ..."
    "... Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction. ..."
    Oct 30, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

    The U.S. government may pretend to respect a "rules-based" global order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is "might makes right" -- and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and enforcer, writes Nicolas J.S. Davies.

    As the recent PBS documentary on the American War in Vietnam acknowledged, few American officials ever believed that the United States could win the war, neither those advising Johnson as he committed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, nor those advising Nixon as he escalated a brutal aerial bombardment that had already killed millions of people.

    As conversations tape-recorded in the White House reveal, and as other writers have documented, the reasons for wading into the Big Muddy, as Pete Seeger satirized it , and then pushing on regardless, all came down to "credibility": the domestic political credibility of the politicians involved and America's international credibility as a military power.

    Once the CIA went to work in Vietnam to undermine the 1954 Geneva Accords and the planned reunification of North and South through a free and fair election in 1956, the die was cast. The CIA's support for the repressive Diem regime and its successors ensured an ever-escalating war, as the South rose in rebellion, supported by the North. No U.S. president could extricate the U.S. from Vietnam without exposing the limits of what U.S. military force could achieve, betraying widely held national myths and the powerful interests that sustained and profited from them.

    The critical "lesson of Vietnam" was summed up by Richard Barnet in his 1972 book Roots of War . "At the very moment that the number one nation has perfected the science of killing," Barnet wrote, "It has become an impractical means of political domination."

    Even the senior officer corps of the U.S. military saw it that way, since many of them had survived the horrors of Vietnam as junior officers. The CIA could still wreak havoc in Latin America and elsewhere, but the full destructive force of the U.S. military was not unleashed again until the invasion of Panama in 1989 and the First Gulf War in 1991.

    Half a century after Vietnam, we have tragically come full circle. With the CIA's politicized intelligence running wild in Washington and its covert operations spreading violence and chaos across every continent, President Trump faces the same pressures to maintain his own and his country's credibility as Johnson and Nixon did. His predictable response has been to escalate ongoing wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and West Africa, and to threaten new ones against North Korea, Iran and Venezuela.

    Trump is facing these questions, not just in one country, Vietnam, but in dozens of countries across the world, and the interests perpetuating and fueling this cycle of crisis and war have only become more entrenched over time, as President Eisenhower warned that they would, despite the end of the Cold War and, until now, the lack of any actual military threat to the United States.

    Ironically but predictably, the U.S.'s aggressive and illegal war policy has finally provoked a real military threat to the U.S., albeit one that has emerged only in response to U.S. war plans. As I explained in a recent article , North Korea's discovery in 2016 of a U.S. plan to assassinate its president, Kim Jong Un, and launch a Second Korean War has triggered a crash program to develop long-range ballistic missiles that could give North Korea a viable nuclear deterrent and prevent a U.S. attack. But the North Koreans will not feel safe from attack until their leaders and ours are sure that their missiles can deliver a nuclear strike against the U.S. mainland.

    The CIA's Pretexts for War

    U.S. Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world. Fletcher Prouty's book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World , was suppressed when it was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But Prouty's book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy.

    Prouty surprisingly described the role of the CIA as a response by powerful people and interests to the abolition of the U.S. Department of War and the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. Once the role of the U.S. military was redefined as one of defense, in line with the United Nations Charter's prohibition against the threat or use of military force in 1945 and similar moves by other military powers, it would require some kind of crisis or threat to justify using military force in the future, both legally and politically. The main purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for war.

    The CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for war, and that is what they have done for 70 years.

    Prouty described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State Department, the National Security Council and other government institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs to carry them out.

    Many retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S. to invade and destroy Iraq.

    CIA in Syria and Africa

    But Fletcher Prouty was even more disturbed by the way that the CIA uses clandestine operations to trigger coups, wars and chaos. The civil and proxy war in Syria is a perfect example of what Prouty meant. In late 2011, after destroying Libya and aiding in the torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi, the CIA and its allies began flying fighters and weapons from Libya to Turkey and infiltrating them into Syria. Then, working with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Croatia and other allies, this operation poured thousands of tons of weapons across Syria's borders to ignite and fuel a full-scale civil war.

    Once these covert operations were under way, they ran wild until they had unleashed a savage Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria (Jabhat al-Nusra, now rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), spawned the even more savage "Islamic State," triggered the heaviest and probably the deadliest U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam and drawn Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Hezbollah, Kurdish militias and almost every state or armed group in the Middle East into the chaos of Syria's civil war.

    Meanwhile, as Al Qaeda and Islamic State have expanded their operations across Africa, the U.N. has published a report titled Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment , based on 500 interviews with African militants. This study has found that the kind of special operations and training missions the CIA and AFRICOM are conducting and supporting in Africa are in fact the critical "tipping point" that drives Africans to join militant groups like Al Qaeda, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram.

    The report found that government action, such as the killing or detention of friends or family, was the "tipping point" that drove 71 percent of African militants interviewed to join armed groups, and that this was a more important factor than religious ideology.

    The conclusions of Journey to Extremism in Africa confirm the findings of other similar studies. The Center for Civilians in Conflict interviewed 250 civilians who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya for its 2015 study, The People's Perspectives : Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict . The study found that the most common motivation for civilians to join armed groups was simply to protect themselves or their families.

    The role of U.S. "counterterrorism" operations in fueling armed resistance and terrorism, and the absence of any plan to reduce the asymmetric violence unleashed by the "global war on terror," would be no surprise to Fletcher Prouty. As he explained, such clandestine operations always take on a life of their own that is unrelated, and often counter-productive, to any rational U.S. policy objective.

    "The more intimate one becomes with this activity," Prouty wrote, "The more one begins to realize that such operations are rarely, if ever, initiated from an intent to become involved in pursuit of some national objective in the first place."

    The U.S. justifies the deployment of 6,000 U.S. special forces and military trainers to 53 of the 54 countries in Africa as a response to terrorism. But the U.N.'s Journey to Extremism in Africa study makes it clear that the U.S. militarization of Africa is in fact the "tipping point" that is driving Africans across the continent to join armed resistance groups in the first place.

    This is a textbook CIA operation on the same model as Vietnam in the late 1950s and early 60s. The CIA uses U.S. special forces and training missions to launch covert and proxy military operations that drive local populations into armed resistance groups, and then uses the presence of those armed resistance groups to justify ever-escalating U.S. military involvement. This is Vietnam redux on a continental scale.

    Taking on China

    What seems to really be driving the CIA's militarization of U.S. policy in Africa is China's growing influence on the continent. As Steve Bannon put it in an interview with the Economist in August, "Let's go screw up One Belt One Road."

    China is already too big and powerful for the U.S. to apply what is known as the Ledeen doctrine named for neoconservative theorist and intelligence operative Michael Ledeen who suggested that every 10 years or so, the United States "pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business."

    China is too powerful and armed with nuclear weapons. So, in this case, the CIA's job would be to spread violence and chaos to disrupt Chinese trade and investment, and to make African governments increasingly dependent on U.S. military aid to fight the militant groups spawned and endlessly regenerated by U.S.-led "counterterrorism" operations.

    Neither Ledeen nor Bannon pretend that such policies are designed to build more prosperous or viable societies in the Middle East or Africa, let alone to benefit their people. They both know very well what Richard Barnet already understood 45 years ago, that America's unprecedented investment in weapons, war and CIA covert operations are only good for one thing: to kill people and destroy infrastructure, reducing cities to rubble, societies to chaos and the desperate survivors to poverty and displacement.

    As long as the CIA and the U.S. military keep plunging the scapegoats for our failed policies into economic crisis, violence and chaos, the United States and the United Kingdom can remain the safe havens of the world's wealth, islands of privilege and excess amidst the storms they unleash on others.

    But if that is the only "significant national objective" driving these policies, it is surely about time for the 99 percent of Americans who reap no benefit from these murderous schemes to stop the CIA and its allies before they completely wreck the already damaged and fragile world in which we all must live, Americans and foreigners alike.

    Douglas Valentine has probably studied the CIA in more depth than any other American journalist, beginning with his book on The Phoenix Program in Vietnam. He has written a new book titled The CIA as Organized Crime : How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World, in which he brings Fletcher Prouty's analysis right up to the present day, describing the CIA's role in our current wars and the many ways it infiltrates, manipulates and controls U.S. policy.

    The Three Scapegoats

    In Trump's speech to the U.N. General Assembly, he named North Korea, Iran and Venezuela as his prime targets for destabilization, economic warfare and, ultimately, the overthrow of their governments, whether by coup d'etat or the mass destruction of their civilian population and infrastructure. But Trump's choice of scapegoats for America's failures was obviously not based on a rational reassessment of foreign policy priorities by the new administration. It was only a tired rehashing of the CIA's unfinished business with two-thirds of Bush's "axis of evil" and Bush White House official Elliott Abrams' failed 2002 coup in Caracas, now laced with explicit and illegal threats of aggression.

    How Trump and the CIA plan to sacrifice their three scapegoats for America's failures remains to be seen. This is not 2001, when the world stood silent at the U.S. bombardment and invasion of Afghanistan after September 11th. It is more like 2003, when the U.S. destruction of Iraq split the Atlantic alliance and alienated most of the world. It is certainly not 2011, after Obama's global charm offensive had rebuilt U.S. alliances and provided cover for French President Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Cameron, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Arab royals to destroy Libya, once ranked by the U.N. as the most developed country in Africa , now mired in intractable chaos.

    In 2017, a U.S. attack on any one of Trump's scapegoats would isolate the United States from many of its allies and undermine its standing in the world in far-reaching ways that might be more permanent and harder to repair than the invasion and destruction of Iraq.

    In Venezuela, the CIA and the right-wing opposition are following the same strategy that President Nixon ordered the CIA to inflict on Chile, to "make the economy scream" in preparation for the 1973 coup. But the solid victory of Venezuela's ruling Socialist Party in recent nationwide gubernatorial elections, despite a long and deep economic crisis, reveals little public support for the CIA's puppets in Venezuela.

    The CIA has successfully discredited the Venezuelan government through economic warfare, increasingly violent right-wing street protests and a global propaganda campaign. But the CIA has stupidly hitched its wagon to an extreme right-wing, upper-class opposition that has no credibility with most of the Venezuelan public, who still turn out for the Socialists at the polls. A CIA coup or U.S. military intervention would meet fierce public resistance and damage U.S. relations all over Latin America.

    Boxing In North Korea

    A U.S. aerial bombardment or "preemptive strike" on North Korea could quickly escalate into a war between the U.S. and China, which has reiterated its commitment to North Korea's defense if North Korea is attacked. We do not know exactly what was in the U.S. war plan discovered by North Korea, so neither can we know how North Korea and China could respond if the U.S. pressed ahead with it.

    Most analysts have long concluded that any U.S. attack on North Korea would be met with a North Korean artillery and missile barrage that would inflict unacceptable civilian casualties on Seoul, a metropolitan area of 26 million people, three times the population of New York City. Seoul is only 35 miles from the frontier with North Korea, placing it within range of a huge array of North Korean weapons. What was already a no-win calculus is now compounded by the possibility that North Korea could respond with nuclear weapons, turning any prospect of a U.S. attack into an even worse nightmare.

    U.S. mismanagement of its relations with North Korea should be an object lesson for its relations with Iran, graphically demonstrating the advantages of diplomacy, talks and agreements over threats of war. Under the Agreed Framework signed in 1994, North Korea stopped work on two much larger nuclear reactors than the small experimental one operating at Yongbyong since 1986, which only produces 6 kg of plutonium per year, enough for one nuclear bomb.

    The lesson of Bush's Iraq invasion in 2003 after Saddam Hussein had complied with demands that he destroy Iraq's stockpiles of chemical weapons and shut down a nascent nuclear program was not lost on North Korea. Not only did the invasion lay waste to large sections of Iraq with hundreds of thousands of dead but Hussein himself was hunted down and condemned to death by hanging.

    Still, after North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006, even its small experimental reactor was shut down as a result of the "Six Party Talks" in 2007, all the fuel rods were removed and placed under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the cooling tower of the reactor was demolished in 2008.

    But then, as relations deteriorated, North Korea conducted a second nuclear weapon test and again began reprocessing spent fuel rods to recover plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.

    North Korea has now conducted six nuclear weapons tests. The explosions in the first five tests increased gradually up to 15-25 kilotons, about the yield of the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but estimates for the yield of the 2017 test range from 110 to 250 kilotons , comparable to a small hydrogen bomb.

    The even greater danger in a new war in Korea is that the U.S. could unleash part of its arsenal of 4,000 more powerful weapons (100 to 1,200 kilotons), which could kill millions of people and devastate and poison the region, or even the world, for years to come.

    The U.S. willingness to scrap the Agreed Framework in 2003, the breakdown of the Six Party Talks in 2009 and the U.S. refusal to acknowledge that its own military actions and threats create legitimate defense concerns for North Korea have driven the North Koreans into a corner from which they see a credible nuclear deterrent as their only chance to avoid mass destruction.

    China has proposed a reasonable framework for diplomacy to address the concerns of both sides, but the U.S. insists on maintaining its propaganda narratives that all the fault lies with North Korea and that it has some kind of "military solution" to the crisis.

    This may be the most dangerous idea we have heard from U.S. policymakers since the end of the Cold War, but it is the logical culmination of a systematic normalization of deviant and illegal U.S. war-making that has already cost millions of lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in Century of War in 1994, "options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is possible in official circles."

    Demonizing Iran

    The idea that Iran has ever had a nuclear weapons program is seriously contested by the IAEA, which has examined every allegation presented by the CIA and other Western "intelligence" agencies as well as Israel. Former IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei revealed many details of this wild goose chase in his 2011 memoir, Age of Deception : Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times .

    When the CIA and its partners reluctantly acknowledged the IAEA's conclusions in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), ElBaradei issued a press release confirming that, "the agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran."

    Since 2007, the IAEA has resolved all its outstanding concerns with Iran. It has verified that dual-use technologies that Iran imported before 2003 were in fact used for other purposes, and it has exposed the mysterious "laptop documents" that appeared to show Iranian plans for a nuclear weapon as forgeries. Gareth Porter thoroughly explored all these questions and allegations and the history of mistrust that fueled them in his 2014 book, Manufactured Crisis : the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare , which I highly recommend.

    But, in the parallel Bizarro world of U.S. politics, hopelessly poisoned by the CIA's endless disinformation campaigns, Hillary Clinton could repeatedly take false credit for disarming Iran during her presidential campaign, and neither Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump nor any corporate media interviewer dared to challenge her claims.

    "When President Obama took office, Iran was racing toward a nuclear bomb," Clinton fantasized in a prominent foreign policy speech on June 2, 2016, claiming that her brutal sanctions policy "brought Iran to the table."

    In fact, as Trita Parsi documented in his 2012 book, A Single Roll of the Dice : Obama's Diplomacy With Iran , the Iranians were ready, not just to "come to the table," but to sign a comprehensive agreement based on a U.S. proposal brokered by Turkey and Brazil in 2010. But, in a classic case of "tail wags dog," the U.S. then rejected its own proposal because it would have undercut support for tighter sanctions in the U.N. Security Council. In other words, Clinton's sanctions policy did not "bring Iran to the table", but prevented the U.S. from coming to the table itself.

    As a senior State Department official told Trita Parsi, the real problem with U.S. diplomacy with Iran when Clinton was at the State Department was that the U.S. would not take "Yes" for an answer. Trump's ham-fisted decertification of Iran's compliance with the JCPOA is right out of Clinton's playbook, and it demonstrates that the CIA is still determined to use Iran as a scapegoat for America's failures in the Middle East.

    The spurious claim that Iran is the world's greatest sponsor of terrorism is another CIA canard reinforced by endless repetition. It is true that Iran supports and supplies weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas, which are both listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. But they are mainly defensive resistance groups that defend Lebanon and Gaza respectively against invasions and attacks by Israel.

    Shifting attention away from Al Qaeda, Islamic State, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and other groups that actually commit terrorist crimes around the world might just seem like a case of the CIA "taking its eyes off the ball," if it wasn't so transparently timed to frame Iran with new accusations now that the manufactured crisis of the nuclear scare has run its course.

    What the Future Holds

    Barack Obama's most consequential international achievement may have been the triumph of symbolism over substance behind which he expanded and escalated the so-called "war on terror," with a vast expansion of covert operations and proxy wars that eventually triggered the heaviest U.S. aerial bombardments since Vietnam in Iraq and Syria.

    Obama's charm offensive invigorated old and new military alliances with the U.K., France and the Arab monarchies, and he quietly ran up the most expensive military budget of any president since World War Two.

    But Obama's expansion of the "war on terror" under cover of his deceptive global public relations campaign created many more problems than it solved, and Trump and his advisers are woefully ill-equipped to solve any of them. Trump's expressed desire to place America first and to resist foreign entanglements is hopelessly at odds with his aggressive, bullying approach to every foreign policy problem.

    If the U.S. could threaten and fight its way to a resolution of any of its international problems, it would have done so already. That is exactly what it has been trying to do since the 1990s, behind both the swagger and bluster of Bush and Trump and the deceptive charm of Clinton and Obama: a "good cop – bad cop" routine that should no longer fool anyone anywhere.

    But as Lyndon Johnson found as he waded deeper and deeper into the Big Muddy in Vietnam, lying to the public about unwinnable wars does not make them any more winnable. It just gets more people killed and makes it harder and harder to ever tell the public the truth.

    In unwinnable wars based on lies, the "credibility" problem only gets more complicated, as new lies require new scapegoats and convoluted narratives to explain away graveyards filled by old lies. Obama's cynical global charm offensive bought the "war on terror" another eight years, but that only allowed the CIA to drag the U.S. into more trouble and spread its chaos to more places around the world.

    Meanwhile, Russian President Putin is winning hearts and minds in capitals around the world by calling for a recommitment to the rule of international law , which prohibits the threat or use of military force except in self-defense. Every new U.S. threat or act of aggression will only make Putin's case more persuasive, not least to important U.S. allies like South Korea, Germany and other members of the European Union, whose complicity in U.S. aggression has until now helped to give it a false veneer of political legitimacy.

    Throughout history, serial aggression has nearly always provoked increasingly united opposition, as peace-loving countries and people have reluctantly summoned the courage to stand up to an aggressor. France under Napoleon and Hitler's Germany also regarded themselves as exceptional, and in their own ways they were. But in the end, their belief in their exceptionalism led them on to defeat and destruction.

    Americans had better hope that we are not so exceptional, and that the world will find a diplomatic rather than a military "solution" to its American problem. Our chances of survival would improve a great deal if American officials and politicians would finally start to act like something other than putty in the hands of the CIA

    Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq . He also wrote the chapters on "Obama at War" in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader .

    [Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

    Highly recommended!
    What a pitiful pressitute this Like Harding is...
    The fact that he is employed by Guardia tells a lot how low Guardian fall. It's a yellow press (owned by intelligence agencies if we talk about their coverage of Russia).
    Notable quotes:
    "... In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy Scahill accurately described as "brutal". ..."
    "... Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the appearance of a legitimate argument. ..."
    "... That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season. Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument. ..."
    Dec 28, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com

    Have you ever wondered why mainstream media outlets, despite being so fond of dramatic panel debates on other hot-button issues, never have critics of the Russiagate narrative on to debate those who advance it? Well, in a recent Real News interview we received an extremely clear answer to that question, and it was so epic it deserves its own article.

    Real News host and producer Aaron Maté has recently emerged as one of the most articulate critics of the establishment Russia narrative and the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and has published in The Nation some of the clearest arguments against both that I've yet seen. Luke Harding is a journalist for The Guardian where he has been writing prolifically in promotion of the Russiagate narrative, and is the author of New York Times bestseller Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

    In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy Scahill accurately described as "brutal".

    The term Gish gallop , named after a Young Earth creationist who was notoriously fond of employing it, refers to a fallacious debate tactic in which a bunch of individually weak arguments are strung together in rapid-fire succession in order to create the illusion of a solid argument and overwhelm the opposition's ability to refute them all in the time allotted. Throughout the discussion the Gish gallop appeared to be the only tool that Luke Harding brought to the table, firing out a deluge of feeble and unsubstantiated arguments only to be stopped over and over again by Maté who kept pointing out when Harding was making a false or fallacious claim.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/9Ikf1uZli4g

    In this part here , for example, the following exchange takes place while Harding is already against the ropes on the back of a previous failed argument. I'm going to type this up so you can clearly see what's happening here:

    Harding: Look, I'm a journalist. I'm a storyteller. I'm not a kind of head of the CIA or the NSA. But what I can tell you is that there have been similar operations in France, most recently when President Macron was elected ? -

    Maté: Well actually Luke that's not true. That's straight up not true. After that election the French cyber-intelligence agency came out and said it could have been virtually anybody.

    Harding: Yeah. But, if you'll let me finish, there've been attacks on the German parliament ? -

    Maté: Okay, but wait Luke, do you concede that the France hack that you just claimed didn't happen?

    Harding: [pause] What? -- ?that it didn't happen? Sorry?

    Maté: Do you concede that the Russian hacking of the French election that you just claimed actually is not true?

    Harding: [pause] Well, I mean that it's not true? I mean, the French report was inconclusive, but you have to look at this kind of contextually. We've seen attacks on other European states as well from Russia, they have very kind of advanced cyber capabilities.

    Maté: Where else?

    Harding: Well, Estonia. Have you heard of Estonia? It's a state in the Baltics which was crippled by a massive cyber attack in 2008, which certainly all kind of western European and former eastern European states think was carried out by Moscow. I mean I was in Moscow at the time, when relations between the two countries were extremely bad. This is a kind of ongoing thing. Now you might say, quite legitimately, well the US does the same thing, the UK does the same thing, and I think to a certain extent that is certainly right. I think what was different last year was the attempt to kind of dump this stuff out into kind of US public space and try and influence public opinion there. That's unusual. And of course that's a matter of congressional inquiry and something Mueller is looking at too.

    Maté: Right. But again, my problem here is that the examples that are frequently presented to substantiate claims of this massive Russian hacking operation around the world prove out to be false. So France as I mentioned; you also mentioned Germany. There was a lot of worry about Russian hacking of the German elections, but it turned out? -- ?and there's plenty of articles since then that have acknowledged this? - ? that actually there was no Russian hack in Germany.

    In the above exchange, Maté derailed Harding's Gish gallop, and Harding actually admonished him for doing so, telling him "let me finish" and attempting to go on listing more flimsy examples to bolster his case as though he hadn't just begun his Gish gallop with a completely false example .

    That's really all Harding brought to the debate. A bunch of individually weak arguments, the fact that he speaks Russian and has lived in Moscow, and the occasional straw man where he tries to imply that Maté is claiming that Vladimir Putin is an innocent girl scout. Meanwhile Maté just kept patiently dragging the debate back on track over and over again in the most polite obliteration of a man that I have ever witnessed.

    The entire interview followed this basic script. Harding makes an unfounded claim, Maté holds him to the fact that it's unfounded, Harding sputters a bit and tries to zoom things out and point to a bigger-picture analysis of broader trends to distract from the fact that he'd just made an individual claim that was baseless, then winds up implying that Maté is only skeptical of the claims because he hasn't lived in Russia as Harding has.

    jeremy scahill 0
    @jeremyscahill
    This @aaronjmate interview is brutal. He makes mincemeat of Luke Harding, who can't seem to defend the thesis, much less the title, of his own book: Where's the 'Collusion' - YouTube
    11:03 AM-Dec 25, 2017
    Q 131 11597 C? 1,148

    The interview ended when Harding once again implied that Maté was only skeptical of the collusion narrative because he'd never been to Russia and seen what a right-wing oppressive government it is, after which the following exchange took place:

    Maté: I don't think I've countered anything you've said about the state of Vladimir Putin's Russia. The issue under discussion today has been whether there was collusion, the topic of your book.
    Harding: Yeah, but you're clearly a kind of collusion rejectionist, so I'm not sure what sort of evidence short of Trump and Putin in a sauna together would convince you. Clearly nothing would convince you. But anyway it's been a pleasure.

    At which point Harding abruptly logged off the video chat, leaving Maté to wrap up the show and promote Harding's book on his own.

    You should definitely watch this debate for yourself , and enjoy it, because I will be shocked if we ever see another like it. Harding's fate will serve as a cautionary tale for the establishment hacks who've built their careers advancing the Russiagate conspiracy theory , and it's highly unlikely that any of them will ever make the mistake of trying to debate anyone of Maté's caliber again.

    The reason Russiagaters speak so often in broad, sweeping terms? - saying there are too many suspicious things happening for there not to be a there there, that there's too much smoke for there not to be fire? - ? is because when you zoom in and focus on any individual part of their conspiracy theory, it falls apart under the slightest amount of critical thinking (or as Harding calls it, "collusion rejectionism"). Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the appearance of a legitimate argument.

    Well, Harding did say he's a storyteller.

    * * *

    Thanks for reading! My work here is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following me on Twitter , bookmarking my website , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . Our Hidden History 4 days ago (edited) That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence (something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.

    He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies.

    That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season. Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument.

    Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.

    [Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

    Highly recommended!
    If this is true, then this is definitely a sophisticated false flag operation. Was malware Alperovich people injected specifically designed to implicate Russians? In other words Crowdstrike=Fancy Bear
    Images removed. For full content please thee the original source
    One interesting corollary of this analysis is that installing Crowdstrike software is like inviting a wolf to guard your chicken. If they are so dishonest you take enormous risks. That might be true for some other heavily advertized "intrusion prevention" toolkits. So those criminals who use mistyped popular addresses or buy Google searches to drive lemmings to their site and then flash the screen that they detected a virus on your computer a, please call provided number and for a small amount of money your virus will be removed get a new more sinister life.
    I suspected many of such firms (for example ISS which was bought by IBM in 2006) to be scams long ago.
    Notable quotes:
    "... Disobedient Media outlines the DNC server cover-up evidenced in CrowdStrike malware infusion ..."
    "... In the article, they claim to have just been working on eliminating the last of the hackers from the DNC's network during the past weekend (conveniently coinciding with Assange's statement and being an indirect admission that their Falcon software had failed to achieve it's stated capabilities at that time , assuming their statements were accurate) . ..."
    "... To date, CrowdStrike has not been able to show how the malware had relayed any emails or accessed any mailboxes. They have also not responded to inquiries specifically asking for details about this. In fact, things have now been discovered that bring some of their malware discoveries into question. ..."
    "... there is a reason to think Fancy Bear didn't start some of its activity until CrowdStrike had arrived at the DNC. CrowdStrike, in the indiciators of compromise they reported, identified three pieces of malware relating to Fancy Bear: ..."
    "... They found that generally, in a lot of cases, malware developers didn't care to hide the compile times and that while implausible timestamps are used, it's rare that these use dates in the future. It's possible, but unlikely that one sample would have a postdated timestamp to coincide with their visit by mere chance but seems extremely unlikely to happen with two or more samples. Considering the dates of CrowdStrike's activities at the DNC coincide with the compile dates of two out of the three pieces of malware discovered and attributed to APT-28 (the other compiled approximately 2 weeks prior to their visit), the big question is: Did CrowdStrike plant some (or all) of the APT-28 malware? ..."
    "... The IP address, according to those articles, was disabled in June 2015, eleven months before the DNC emails were acquired – meaning those IP addresses, in reality, had no involvement in the alleged hacking of the DNC. ..."
    "... The fact that two out of three of the Fancy Bear malware samples identified were compiled on dates within the apparent five day period CrowdStrike were apparently at the DNC seems incredibly unlikely to have occurred by mere chance. ..."
    "... That all three malware samples were compiled within ten days either side of their visit – makes it clear just how questionable the Fancy Bear malware discoveries were. ..."
    Dec 28, 2017 | theduran.com

    Of course the DNC did not want to the FBI to investigate its "hacked servers". The plan was well underway to excuse Hillary's pathetic election defeat to Trump, and CrowdStrike would help out by planting evidence to pin on those evil "Russian hackers." Some would call this entire DNC server hack an "insurance policy."

    ... ... ...

    [Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

    Highly recommended!
    All signs of sophisticated false flag operation, which probably involved putting malware into DNC servers and then detecting and analyzing them
    Notable quotes:
    "... 6 May 2016 when CrowdStrike first detected what it assessed to be a Russian presence inside the DNC server. Follow me here. One week after realizing there had been a penetration, the DNC learns, courtesy of the computer security firm it hired, that the Russians are doing it. Okay. Does CrowdStrike shut down the penetration. Nope. The hacking apparently continues unabated. ..."
    "... The Smoking Gun ..."
    "... I introduce Seth Rich at this point because he represents an alternative hypothesis. Rich, who reportedly was a Bernie Sanders supporter, was in a position at the DNC that gave him access to the emails in question and the opportunity to download the emails and take them from the DNC headquarters. Worth noting that Julian Assange offered $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer or killers. 8. 22 July 2016. Wikileaks published the DNC emails starting on 22 July 2016. Bill Binney, a former senior official at NSA, insists that if such a hack and electronic transfer over the internet had occurred then the NSA has in it possession the intelligence data to prove that such activity had occurred. ..."
    "... Notwithstanding the claim by CrowdStrike not a single piece of evidence has been provided to the public to support the conclusion that the emails were hacked and physically transferred to a server under the control of a Russian intelligence operative. ..."
    "... Please do not try to post a comment stating that the "Intelligence Community" concluded as well that Russia was responsible. That claim is totally without one shred of actual forensic evidence. Also, Julian Assange insists that the emails did not come from a Russian source. ..."
    "... Wikileaks, the protector of the accountability of the top, has announced a reward for finding the murderers of Seth Rich. In comparison, the DNC has not offered any reward to help the investigation of the murder of the DNC staffer, but the DNC found a well-connected lawyer to protect Imran Awan who is guilty (along with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) in the greatest breach of national cybersecurity: http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/29/wasserman-schultz-seemingly-planned-to-pay-suspect-even-while-he-lived-in-pakistan/ ..."
    "... I'm afraid you're behind the times. Wheeler is no longer relevant now that Sy Hersh has revealed an FBI report that explicitly says Rich was in contact with Wikileaks offering to sell them DNC documents. ..."
    "... It's unfortunate for the Rich family, but now that the connection is pretty much confirmed, they're going to have to allow the truth to come out ..."
    "... Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of Jewish descent (and an emigre from Russia), has been an "expert" at the Atlantic Council, the same organization that cherishes and provides for Mr. Eliot Higgins. These two gentlemen - and the directorate of Atlantic Council - are exhibit one of opportunism and intellectual dishonesty (though it is hard to think about Mr. Higgins in terms of "intellect"). ..."
    "... Alperovitch is not just an incompetent "expert" in cybersecurity - he is a willing liar and war-mongering, for money. ..."
    "... One could of course start earlier. What is the exact timeline of the larger cyberwar post 9/11, or at least the bits and pieces that surfaced for the nitwits among us, like: Stuxnet? ..."
    "... Scott Ritter's article referenced in PT's post is terrific, covering a ton of issues related to CrowdStrike and the DNC hack. You need to read it, not just PT's timeline. In case you missed the link in PT's post: ..."
    "... His article echoes and reinforces what Carr and others have said about the difficulty of attribution of infosec breaches. Namely that the basic problem of both intelligence and infosec operations is that there is too much obfuscation, manipulation, and misdirection involved to be sure of who or what is going on. ..."
    "... The Seth Rich connection is pretty much a done deal, now that Sy Hersh has been caught on tape stating that he knows of an FBI report based on a forensic analysis of Rich's laptop that shows Rich was in direct contact with Wikileaks with an attempt to sell them DNC documents and that Wikileaks had access to Rich's DropBox account. Despite Hersh's subsequent denials - which everyone knows are his usual impatient deflections prior to putting out a sourced and organized article - it's pretty clear that Rich was at least one of the sources of the Wikileaks email dump and that there is zero connection to Russia. ..."
    "... None of this proves that Russian intelligence - or Russians of some stripe - or for that matter hackers from literally anywhere - couldn't or didn't ALSO do a hack of the DNC. But it does prove that the iron-clad attribution of the source of Wikileaks email release to Russia is at best flawed, and at worst a deliberate cover up of a leak. ..."
    Sep 05, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom that Russia hacked into the DNC computers, downloaded emails and a passed the stolen missives to Julian Assange's crew at Wikileaks, a careful examination of the timeline of events from 2016 shows that this story is simply not plausible.

    Let me take you through the known facts:

    1. 29 April 2016 , when the DNC became aware its servers had been penetrated (https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f). Note. They apparently did not know who was doing it. 2, 6 May 2016 when CrowdStrike first detected what it assessed to be a Russian presence inside the DNC server. Follow me here. One week after realizing there had been a penetration, the DNC learns, courtesy of the computer security firm it hired, that the Russians are doing it. Okay. Does CrowdStrike shut down the penetration. Nope. The hacking apparently continues unabated. 3. 25 May 2016. The messages published on Wikileaks from the DNC show that 26 May 2016 was the last date that emails were sent and received at the DNC. There are no emails in the public domain after that date. In other words, if the DNC emails were taken via a hacking operation, we can conclude from the fact that the last messages posted to Wikileaks show a date time group of 25 May 2016. Wikileaks has not reported nor posted any emails from the DNC after the 25th of May. I think it is reasonable to assume that was the day the dirty deed was done. 4. 12 June 2016, CrowdStrike purged the DNC server of all malware. Are you kidding me? 45 days after the DNC discovers that its serve has been penetrated the decision to purge the DNC server is finally made. What in the hell were they waiting for? But this also tells us that 18 days after the last email "taken" from the DNC, no additional emails were taken by this nasty malware. Here is what does not make sense to me. If the DNC emails were truly hacked and the malware was still in place on 11 June 2016 (it was not purged until the 12th) then why are there no emails from the DNC after 26 May 2016? an excellent analysis of Guccifer's role : Almost immediately after the one-two punch of the Washington Post article/CrowdStrike technical report went public, however, something totally unexpected happened -- someone came forward and took full responsibility for the DNC cyber attack. Moreover, this entity -- operating under the persona Guccifer 2.0 (ostensibly named after the original Guccifer , a Romanian hacker who stole the emails of a number of high-profile celebrities and who was arrested in 2014 and sentenced to 4 ½ years of prison in May 2016) -- did something no state actor has ever done before, publishing documents stolen from the DNC server as proof of his claims.
    Hi. This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee.

    With that simple email, sent to the on-line news magazine, The Smoking Gun , Guccifer 2.0 stole the limelight away from Alperovitch. Over the course of the next few days, through a series of emails, online posts and interviews , Guccifer 2.0 openly mocked CrowdStrike and its Russian attribution. Guccifer 2.0 released a number of documents, including a massive 200-plus-missive containing opposition research on Donald Trump.

    Guccifer 2.0 also directly contradicted the efforts on the part of the DNC to minimize the extent of the hacking, releasing the very donor lists the DNC specifically stated had not been stolen. More chilling, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be in possession of "about 100 Gb of data" which had been passed on to the online publisher, Wikileaks, who "will publish them soon." 7. Seth Rich died on 10 July 2016. I introduce Seth Rich at this point because he represents an alternative hypothesis. Rich, who reportedly was a Bernie Sanders supporter, was in a position at the DNC that gave him access to the emails in question and the opportunity to download the emails and take them from the DNC headquarters. Worth noting that Julian Assange offered $20,000 for information leading to the arrest of Rich's killer or killers. 8. 22 July 2016. Wikileaks published the DNC emails starting on 22 July 2016. Bill Binney, a former senior official at NSA, insists that if such a hack and electronic transfer over the internet had occurred then the NSA has in it possession the intelligence data to prove that such activity had occurred. Notwithstanding the claim by CrowdStrike not a single piece of evidence has been provided to the public to support the conclusion that the emails were hacked and physically transferred to a server under the control of a Russian intelligence operative. Please do not try to post a comment stating that the "Intelligence Community" concluded as well that Russia was responsible. That claim is totally without one shred of actual forensic evidence. Also, Julian Assange insists that the emails did not come from a Russian source.

    Fool , 05 September 2017 at 09:01 AM

    Where was it reported that Rich was a Sanders supporter?
    Publius Tacitus -> Fool... , 05 September 2017 at 09:15 AM
    This is one of the reports, http://heavy.com/news/2016/08/seth-rich-julian-assange-source-wikileaks-wiki-dnc-emails-death-murder-reward-video-interview-hillary-clinton-shawn-lucas/.
    Anna -> Publius Tacitus ... , 05 September 2017 at 10:56 AM
    Wikileaks, the protector of the accountability of the top, has announced a reward for finding the murderers of Seth Rich. In comparison, the DNC has not offered any reward to help the investigation of the murder of the DNC staffer, but the DNC found a well-connected lawyer to protect Imran Awan who is guilty (along with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) in the greatest breach of national cybersecurity: http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/29/wasserman-schultz-seemingly-planned-to-pay-suspect-even-while-he-lived-in-pakistan/
    Stephanie -> Publius Tacitus ... , 06 September 2017 at 12:12 PM
    Seth Rich's family have pleaded, and continue to plead, that the conspiracy theorists leave the death of their son alone and have said that those who continue to flog this nonsense around the internet are only serving to increase their pain. I suggest respectfully that some here may wish to consider their feelings. (Also, this stuff is nuts, you know.)

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-seth-richs-parents-stop-politicizing-our-sons-murder/2017/05/23/164cf4dc-3fee-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html?utm_term=.b20208de48d3

    "We also know that many people are angry at our government and want to see justice done in some way, somehow. We are asking you to please consider our feelings and words. There are people who are using our beloved Seth's memory and legacy for their own political goals, and they are using your outrage to perpetuate our nightmare."

    http://www.businessinsider.com/seth-rich-family-response-lawsuit-rod-wheeler-2017-8

    "Wheeler, a former Metropolitan Police Department officer, was a key figure in a series of debunked stories claiming that Rich had been in contact with Wikileaks before his death. Fox News, which reported the story online and on television, retracted it in June."

    Richardstevenhack -> Stephanie... , 07 September 2017 at 07:43 PM
    I'm afraid you're behind the times. Wheeler is no longer relevant now that Sy Hersh has revealed an FBI report that explicitly says Rich was in contact with Wikileaks offering to sell them DNC documents.

    It's unfortunate for the Rich family, but now that the connection is pretty much confirmed, they're going to have to allow the truth to come out.

    Anna , 05 September 2017 at 09:20 AM
    Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of Jewish descent (and an emigre from Russia), has been an "expert" at the Atlantic Council, the same organization that cherishes and provides for Mr. Eliot Higgins. These two gentlemen - and the directorate of Atlantic Council - are exhibit one of opportunism and intellectual dishonesty (though it is hard to think about Mr. Higgins in terms of "intellect").

    Here is an article by Alperovitch: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russian-cyber-attacks-in-the-united-states-will-intensify

    Take note how Alperovitch coded the names of the supposed hackers: "Russian intelligence services hacked the Democratic National Committee's computer network and accessed opposition research on Donald Trump, according to the Atlantic Council's Dmitri Alperovitch.

    Two Russian groups ! codenamed FancyBear and CozyBear ! have been identified as spearheading the DNC breach." Alperovitch is not just an incompetent "expert" in cybersecurity - he is a willing liar and war-mongering, for money.

    The DNC hacking story has never been about national security; Alperovitch (and his handlers) have no loyalty to the US.

    LeaNder , 05 September 2017 at 09:59 AM
    PT, I make a short exception. Actually decided to stop babbling for a while. But: Just finished something successfully.

    And since I usually need distraction by something far more interesting then matters at hand. I was close to your line of thought yesters.

    But really: Shouldn't the timeline start in 2015, since that's supposedly the time someone got into the DNC's system?

    One could of course start earlier. What is the exact timeline of the larger cyberwar post 9/11, or at least the bits and pieces that surfaced for the nitwits among us, like: Stuxnet?

    But nevermind. Don't forget developments and recent events around Eugene or Jewgeni Walentinowitsch Kasperski?

    LondonBob , 05 September 2017 at 03:27 PM
    The Russia thing certainly seems to have gone quiet.

    Bannon's chum says the issue with pursuing the Clinton email thing is that you would end up having to indict almost all of the last administration, including Obama, unseemly certainly. Still there might be a fall guy, maybe Comey, and obviously it serves Trump's purposes to keep this a live issue through the good work of Grassley and the occasional tweet.

    Would be amusing if Trump pardoned Obama. Still think Brennan should pay a price though, can't really be allowed to get away with it

    Richardstevenhack , 05 September 2017 at 06:23 PM
    Scott Ritter's article referenced in PT's post is terrific, covering a ton of issues related to CrowdStrike and the DNC hack. You need to read it, not just PT's timeline. In case you missed the link in PT's post:

    Dumbstruck: How CrowdStrike Conned America on the Hack of the DNC https://medium.com/homefront-rising/dumbstruck-how-crowdstrike-conned-america-on-the-hack-of-the-dnc-ecfa522ff44f

    The article by Jeffrey Carr on CrowdStrike referenced from back in 2012 is also worth reading: Where's the "Strike" in CrowdStrike? https://jeffreycarr.blogspot.com/2012/09/wheres-strike-in-crowdstrike.html

    Also, the article Carr references is very important for understanding the limits of malware analysis and "attribution". Written by Michael Tanji, whose credentials appear impressive: "spent nearly 20 years in the US intelligence community. Trained in both SIGINT and HUMINT disciplines he has worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. At various points in his career he served as an expert in information warfare, computer network operations, computer forensics, and indications and warning. A veteran of the US Army, Michael has served in both strategic and tactical assignments in the Pacific Theater, the Balkans, and the Middle East."

    Malware Analysis: The Danger of Connecting the Dots: https://www.oodaloop.com/technology/2012/09/11/malware-analysis-the-danger-of-connecting-the-dots/

    His article echoes and reinforces what Carr and others have said about the difficulty of attribution of infosec breaches. Namely that the basic problem of both intelligence and infosec operations is that there is too much obfuscation, manipulation, and misdirection involved to be sure of who or what is going on.

    The Seth Rich connection is pretty much a done deal, now that Sy Hersh has been caught on tape stating that he knows of an FBI report based on a forensic analysis of Rich's laptop that shows Rich was in direct contact with Wikileaks with an attempt to sell them DNC documents and that Wikileaks had access to Rich's DropBox account. Despite Hersh's subsequent denials - which everyone knows are his usual impatient deflections prior to putting out a sourced and organized article - it's pretty clear that Rich was at least one of the sources of the Wikileaks email dump and that there is zero connection to Russia.

    None of this proves that Russian intelligence - or Russians of some stripe - or for that matter hackers from literally anywhere - couldn't or didn't ALSO do a hack of the DNC. But it does prove that the iron-clad attribution of the source of Wikileaks email release to Russia is at best flawed, and at worst a deliberate cover up of a leak.

    And Russiagate depends primarily on BOTH alleged "facts" being true: 1) that Russia hacked the DNC, and 2) that Russia was the source of Wikileaks release. And if the latter is not true, then one has to question why Russia hacked the DNC in the first place, other than for "normal" espionage operations. "Influencing the election" then becomes a far less plausible theory.

    The general takeaway from an infosec point of view is that attribution by means of target identification, tools used, and "indicators of compromise" is a fatally flawed means of identifying, and thus being able to counter, the adversaries encountered in today's Internet world, as Tanji proves. Only HUMINT offers a way around this, just as it is really the only valid option in countering terrorism.

    [Sep 16, 2017] Virginia Scraps Electronic Voting Machines Hackers Destroyed At DefCon

    Highly recommended!
    Return to paper ballots is the only rational choice now...
    Notable quotes:
    "... the lack of a paper audit trail posed a significant risk of lost votes. ..."
    Sep 16, 2017 | it.slashdot.org

    (theregister.co.uk)

    Posted by BeauHD on Tuesday September 12, 2017 @03:00AM from the nick-of-time dept. Following the DefCon demonstration in July that showed how quickly Direct Recording Electronic voting equipment could be hacked, Virginia's State Board of Elections has decided it wants to replace their electronic voting machines in time for the gubernatorial election due on November 7th, 2017.

    According to The Register, "The decision was announced in the minutes of the Board's September 8th meeting: 'The Department of Elections officially recommends that the State Board of Elections decertify all Direct Recording Electronic (DRE or touchscreen) voting equipment."

    From the report: With the DefCon bods showing some machines shared a single hard-coded password, Virginia directed the Virginia Information Technology Agency (VITA) to audit the machines in use in the state (the Accuvote TSX, the Patriot, and the AVC Advantage).

    None passed the test. VITA told the board "each device analyzed exhibited material risks to the integrity or availability of the election process," and the lack of a paper audit trail posed a significant risk of lost votes.

    Local outlet The News Leader notes that many precincts had either replaced their machines already, or are in the process of doing so. The election board's decision will force a change-over on the 140 precincts that haven't replaced their machines, covering 190,000 of Virginia's ~8.4m population.

    [Aug 30, 2017] The President of Belgian Magistrates - Neoliberalism is a form of Fascism by Manuela Cadelli

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... By Manuela Cadelli, President of the Magistrates' Union of Belgium ..."
    "... Every totalitarianism starts as distortion of language, as in the novel by George Orwell. Neoliberalism has its Newspeak and strategies of communication that enable it to deform reality. In this spirit, every budgetary cut is represented as an instance of modernization of the sectors concerned. If some of the most deprived are no longer reimbursed for medical expenses and so stop visiting the dentist, this is modernization of social security in action! ..."
    "... translated from French by Wayne Hall ..."
    Aug 30, 2017 | www.defenddemocracy.press

    By Manuela Cadelli, President of the Magistrates' Union of Belgium

    The time for rhetorical reservations is over. Things have to be called by their name to make it possible for a co-ordinated democratic reaction to be initiated, above all in the public services.

    Liberalism was a doctrine derived from the philosophy of Enlightenment, at once political and economic, which aimed at imposing on the state the necessary distance for ensuring respect for liberties and the coming of democratic emancipation. It was the motor for the arrival, and the continuing progress, of Western democracies.

    Neoliberalism is a form of economism in our day that strikes at every moment at every sector of our community. It is a form of extremism.

    Fascism may be defined as the subordination of every part of the State to a totalitarian and nihilistic ideology.

    I argue that neoliberalism is a species of fascism because the economy has brought under subjection not only the government of democratic countries but also every aspect of our thought.

    The state is now at the disposal of the economy and of finance, which treat it as a subordinate and lord over it to an extent that puts the common good in jeopardy.

    The austerity that is demanded by the financial milieu has become a supreme value, replacing politics. Saving money precludes pursuing any other public objective. It is reaching the point where claims are being made that the principle of budgetary orthodoxy should be included in state constitutions. A mockery is being made of the notion of public service.

    The nihilism that results from this makes possible the dismissal of universalism and the most evident humanistic values: solidarity, fraternity, integration and respect for all and for differences.

    There is no place any more even for classical economic theory: work was formerly an element in demand, and to that extent there was respect for workers; international finance has made of it a mere adjustment variable.

    Every totalitarianism starts as distortion of language, as in the novel by George Orwell. Neoliberalism has its Newspeak and strategies of communication that enable it to deform reality. In this spirit, every budgetary cut is represented as an instance of modernization of the sectors concerned. If some of the most deprived are no longer reimbursed for medical expenses and so stop visiting the dentist, this is modernization of social security in action!

    Read also: The only real way to stop atrocities like the Manchester attack is to end the wars which allow extremism to grow

    Abstraction predominates in public discussion so as to occlude the implications for human beings.

    Thus, in relation to migrants, it is imperative that the need for hosting them does not lead to public appeals that our finances could not accommodate. Is it In the same way that other individuals qualify for assistance out of considerations of national solidarity?

    The cult of evaluation

    Social Darwinism predominates, assigning the most stringent performance requirements to everyone and everything: to be weak is to fail. The foundations of our culture are overturned: every humanist premise is disqualified or demonetized because neoliberalism has the monopoly of rationality and realism. Margaret Thatcher said it in 1985: "There is no alternative." Everything else is utopianism, unreason and regression. The virtue of debate and conflicting perspectives are discredited because history is ruled by necessity.

    This subculture harbours an existential threat of its own: shortcomings of performance condemn one to disappearance while at the same time everyone is charged with inefficiency and obliged to justify everything. Trust is broken. Evaluation reigns, and with it the bureaucracy which imposes definition and research of a plethora of targets, and indicators with which one must comply. Creativity and the critical spirit are stifled by management. And everyone is beating his breast about the wastage and inertia of which he is guilty.

    The neglect of justice

    The neoliberal ideology generates a normativity that competes with the laws of parliament. The democratic power of law is compromised. Given that they represent a concrete embodiment of liberty and emancipation, and given the potential to prevent abuse that they impose, laws and procedures have begun to look like obstacles.

    Read also: EU lies on Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal and Greece

    The power of the judiciary, which has the ability to oppose the will of the ruling circles, must also be checkmated. The Belgian judicial system is in any case underfunded. In 2015 it came last in a European ranking that included all states located between the Atlantic and the Urals. In two years the government has managed to take away the independence given to it under the Constitution so that it can play the counterbalancing role citizens expect of it. The aim of this undertaking is clearly that there should no longer be justice in Belgium.

    A caste above the Many

    But the dominant class doesn't prescribe for itself the same medicine it wants to see ordinary citizens taking: well-ordered austerity begins with others. The economist Thomas Piketty has perfectly described this in his study of inequality and capitalism in the twenty-first century (French edition, Seuil, 2013).

    In spite of the crisis of 2008 and the hand-wringing that followed, nothing was done to police the financial community and submit them to the requirements of the common good. Who paid? Ordinary people, you and me.

    And while the Belgian State consented to 7 billion-euro ten-year tax breaks for multinationals, ordinary litigants have seen surcharges imposed on access to justice (increased court fees, 21% taxation on legal fees). From now on, to obtain redress the victims of injustice are going to have to be rich.

    All this in a state where the number of public representatives breaks all international records. In this particular area, no evaluation and no costs studies are reporting profit. One example: thirty years after the introduction of the federal system, the provincial institutions survive. Nobody can say what purpose they serve. Streamlining and the managerial ideology have conveniently stopped at the gates of the political world.

    The security ideal

    Read also: DEMOCRATIC MENTAL HEALTH SOLIDARITY NETWORK

    Terrorism, this other nihilism that exposes our weakness in affirming our values, is likely to aggravate the process by soon making it possible for all violations of our liberties, all violations of our rights, to circumvent the powerless qualified judges, further reducing social protection for the poor, who will be sacrificed to "the security ideal".

    Salvation in commitment

    These developments certainly threaten the foundations of our democracy, but do they condemn us to discouragement and despair?

    Certainly not. 500 years ago, at the height of the defeats that brought down most Italian states with the imposition of foreign occupation for more than three centuries, Niccolo Machiavelli urged virtuous men to defy fate and stand up against the adversity of the times, to prefer action and daring to caution. The more tragic the situation, the more it necessitates action and the refusal to "give up" (The Prince, Chapters XXV and XXVI).

    This is a teaching that is clearly required today. The determination of citizens attached to the radical of democratic values is an invaluable resource which has not yet revealed, at least in Belgium, its driving potential and power to change what is presented as inevitable. Through social networking and the power of the written word, everyone can now become involved, particularly when it comes to public services, universities, the student world, the judiciary and the Bar, in bringing the common good and social justice into the heart of public debate and the administration of the state and the community.

    Neoliberalism is a species of fascism. It must be fought and humanism fully restored.

    Published in the Belgian daily Le Soir, 3.3.2016

    translated from French by Wayne Hall
     Le néolibéralisme est un fascisme, par Manuela Cadelli

    [Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

    Highly recommended!
    max Book is just anothe "Yascha about Russia" type, that Masha Gessen represents so vividly. The problem with him is that time of neocon prominance is solidly in the past and now unpleasant question about the cost from the US people of their reckless foreign policies get into some newspapers and managines. They cost the USA tremedous anount of money (as in trillions) and those money consititute a large portion of the national debt. Critiques so far were very weak and partially suppressed voices, but defeat of neocon warmonger Hillary signify some break with the past.
    Notable quotes:
    "... National Interest ..."
    "... Carlson's record suggests that he has been in the camp skeptical of U.S. foreign-policy intervention for some time now and, indeed, that it predates Donald Trump's rise to power. (Carlson has commented publicly that he was humiliated by his own public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) According to Carlson, "This is not about Trump. This is not about Trump. It's the one thing in American life that has nothing to do with Trump. My views on this are totally unrelated to my views on Donald Trump. This has been going since September 11, 2001. And it's a debate that we've never really had. And we need to have it." He adds, "I don't think the public has ever been for the ideas that undergird our policies." ..."
    "... National Interest ..."
    "... But the fight also seems to have a personal edge. Carlson says, "Max Boot is not impressive. . . . Max is a totally mediocre person." Carlson added that he felt guilty about not having, in his assessment, a superior guest to Boot on the show to defend hawkishness. "I wish I had had someone clear-thinking and smart on to represent their views. And there are a lot of them. I would love to have that debate," Carlson told me, periodically emphasizing that he is raring to go on this subject. ..."
    "... New York Observer ..."
    "... National Interest ..."
    "... Weekly Standard ..."
    "... Weekly Standard ..."
    "... Though he eschews labels, Carlson sounds like a foreign-policy realist on steroids: "You can debate what's in [the United States'] interest. That's a subjective category. But what you can't debate is that ought to be the basic question, the first, second and third question. Does it represent our interest? . . . I don't think that enters into the calculations of a lot of the people who make these decisions." Carlson's interests extend beyond foreign policy, and he says "there's a massive realignment going on ideologically that everybody is missing. It's dramatic. And everyone is missing it. . . . Nobody is paying attention to it, " ..."
    "... : Flickr/Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. ..."
    Jul 14, 2017 | nationalinterest.org

    This week's primetime knife fights with Max Boot and Ralph Peters are emblematic of the battle for the soul of the American Right.

    To be sure, Carlson rejects the term "neoconservatism," and implicitly, its corollary on the Democratic side, liberal internationalism. In 2016, "the reigning Republican foreign-policy view, you can call it neoconservatism, or interventionism, or whatever you want to call it" was rejected, he explained in a wide-ranging interview with the National Interest Friday.

    "But I don't like the term 'neoconservatism,'" he says, "because I don't even know what it means. I think it describes the people rather than their ideas, which is what I'm interested in. And to be perfectly honest . . . I have a lot of friends who have been described as neocons, people I really love, sincerely. And they are offended by it. So I don't use it," Carlson said.

    But Carlson's recent segments on foreign policy conducted with Lt. Col. Ralph Peters and the prominent neoconservative journalist and author Max Boot were acrimonious even by Carlsonian standards. In a discussion on Syria, Russia and Iran, a visibly upset Boot accused Carlson of being "immoral" and taking foreign-policy positions to curry favor with the White House, keep up his ratings , and by proxy, benefit financially. Boot says that Carlson "basically parrots whatever the pro-Trump line is that Fox viewers want to see. If Trump came out strongly against Putin tomorrow, I imagine Tucker would echo this as faithfully as the pro-Russia arguments he echoes today." But is this assessment fair?

    Carlson's record suggests that he has been in the camp skeptical of U.S. foreign-policy intervention for some time now and, indeed, that it predates Donald Trump's rise to power. (Carlson has commented publicly that he was humiliated by his own public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) According to Carlson, "This is not about Trump. This is not about Trump. It's the one thing in American life that has nothing to do with Trump. My views on this are totally unrelated to my views on Donald Trump. This has been going since September 11, 2001. And it's a debate that we've never really had. And we need to have it." He adds, "I don't think the public has ever been for the ideas that undergird our policies."

    Even if Carlson doesn't want to use the label neocon to describe some of those ideas, Boot is not so bashful. In 2005, Boot wrote an essay called "Neocons May Get the Last Laugh." Carlson "has become a Trump acolyte in pursuit of ratings," says Boot, also interviewed by the National Interest . "I bet if it were President Clinton accused of colluding with the Russians, Tucker would be outraged and calling for impeachment if not execution. But since it's Trump, then it's all a big joke to him," Boot says. Carlson vociferously dissents from such assessments: "This is what dumb people do. They can't assess the merits of an argument. . . . I'm not talking about Syria, and Russia, and Iran because of ratings. That's absurd. I can't imagine those were anywhere near the most highly-rated segments that night. That's not why I wanted to do it."

    But Carlson insists, "I have been saying the same thing for fifteen years. Now I have a T.V. show that people watch, so my views are better known. But it shouldn't be a surprise. I supported Trump to the extent he articulated beliefs that I agree with. . . . And I don't support Trump to the extent that his actions deviate from those beliefs," Carlson said. Boot on Fox said that Carlson is "too smart" for this kind of argument. But Carlson has bucked the Trump line, notably on Trump's April 7 strikes in Syria. "When the Trump administration threw a bunch of cruise missiles into Syria for no obvious reason, on the basis of a pretext that I question . . . I questioned [the decision] immediately. On T.V. I was on the air when that happened. I think, maybe seven minutes into my show. . . . I thought this was reckless."

    But the fight also seems to have a personal edge. Carlson says, "Max Boot is not impressive. . . . Max is a totally mediocre person." Carlson added that he felt guilty about not having, in his assessment, a superior guest to Boot on the show to defend hawkishness. "I wish I had had someone clear-thinking and smart on to represent their views. And there are a lot of them. I would love to have that debate," Carlson told me, periodically emphasizing that he is raring to go on this subject.

    Boot objects to what he sees as a cavalier attitude on the part of Carlson and others toward allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and also toward the deaths of citizens of other countries. "You are laughing about the fact that Russia is interfering in our election process. That to me is immoral," Boot told Carlson on his show. "This is the level of dumbness and McCarthyism in Washington right now," says Carlson. "I think it has the virtue of making Max Boot feel like a good person. Like he's on God's team, or something like that. But how does that serve the interest of the country? It doesn't." Carlson says that Donald Trump, Jr.'s emails aren't nearly as important as who is going to lead Syria, which he says Boot and others have no plan for successfully occupying. Boot, by contrast, sees the U.S. administration as dangerously flirting with working with Russia, Iran and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. "For whatever reason, Trump is pro-Putin, no one knows why, and he's taken a good chunk of the GOP along with him," Boot says.

    On Fox last Wednesday, Boot reminded Carlson that he originally supported the 2003 Iraq decision. "You supported the invasion of Iraq," Boot said, before repeating, "You supported the invasion of Iraq." Carlson conceded that, but it seems the invasion was a bona fide turning point. It's most important to parse whether Carlson has a long record of anti-interventionism, or if he's merely sniffing the throne of the president (who, dubiously, may have opposed the 2003 invasion). "I think it's a total nightmare and disaster, and I'm ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it," Carlson told the New York Observer in early 2004. "It's something I'll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who's smarter than I am, and I shouldn't have done that. . . . I'm enraged by it, actually." Carlson told the National Interest that he's felt this way since seeing Iraq for himself in December 2003.

    The evidence points heavily toward a sincere conversion on Carlson's part, or preexisting conviction that was briefly overcome by the beat of the war drums. Carlson did work for the Weekly Standard , perhaps the most prominent neoconservative magazine, in the 1990s and early 2000s. Carlson today speaks respectfully of William Kristol, its founding editor, but has concluded that he is all wet. On foreign policy, the people Carlson speaks most warmly about are genuine hard left-wingers: Glenn Greenwald, a vociferous critic of both economic neoliberalism and neoconservatism; the anti-establishment journalist Michael Tracey; Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the Nation ; and her husband, Stephen Cohen, the Russia expert and critic of U.S. foreign policy.

    "The only people in American public life who are raising these questions are on the traditional left: not lifestyle liberals, not the Williamsburg (Brooklyn) group, not liberals in D.C., not Nancy Pelosi." He calls the expertise of establishment sources on matters like Syria "more shallow than I even imagined." On his MSNBC show, which was canceled for poor ratings, he cavorted with noninterventionist stalwarts such as Ron Paul , the 2008 and 2012 antiwar GOP candidate, and Patrick J. Buchanan. "No one is smarter than Pat Buchanan," he said last year of the man whose ideas many say laid the groundwork for Trump's political success.

    Carlson has risen to the pinnacle of cable news, succeeding Bill O'Reilly. It wasn't always clear an antiwar take would vault someone to such prominence. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney could be president (Boot has advised the latter two). But here he is, and it's likely no coincidence that Carlson got a show after Trump's election, starting at the 7 p.m. slot, before swiftly moving to the 9 p.m. slot to replace Trump antagonist Megyn Kelly, and just as quickly replacing O'Reilly at the top slot, 8 p.m. Boot, on the other hand, declared in 2016 that the Republican Party was dead , before it went on to hold Congress and most state houses, and of course take the presidency. He's still at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for the New York Times (this seems to clearly annoy Carlson: "It tells you everything about the low standards of the American foreign-policy establishment").

    Boot wrote in 2003 in the Weekly Standard that the fall of Saddam Hussein's government "may turn out to be one of those hinge moments in history" comparable to "events like the storming of the Bastille or the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which everything is different." He continued, "If the occupation goes well (admittedly a big if ), it may mark the moment when the powerful antibiotic known as democracy was introduced into the diseased environment of the Middle East, and began to transform the region for the better."

    Though he eschews labels, Carlson sounds like a foreign-policy realist on steroids: "You can debate what's in [the United States'] interest. That's a subjective category. But what you can't debate is that ought to be the basic question, the first, second and third question. Does it represent our interest? . . . I don't think that enters into the calculations of a lot of the people who make these decisions." Carlson's interests extend beyond foreign policy, and he says "there's a massive realignment going on ideologically that everybody is missing. It's dramatic. And everyone is missing it. . . . Nobody is paying attention to it, "

    Carlson seems intent on pressing the issue. The previous night, in his debate with Peters, the retired lieutenant colonel said that Carlson sounded like Charles Lindbergh, who opposed U.S. intervention against Nazi Germany before 1941. "This particular strain of Republican foreign policy has almost no constituency. Nobody agrees with it. I mean there's not actually a large group of people outside of New York, Washington or L.A. who think any of this is a good idea," Carlson says. "All I am is an asker of obvious questions. And that's enough to reveal these people have no idea what they're talking about. None."

    Curt Mills is a foreign-affairs reporter at the National Interest . Follow him on Twitter: @CurtMills .

    Image : Flickr/Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.

    [Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Cohen's appearance on Carlson's show last night demonstrated again at what a blistering pace public opinion in the West about Putin and Russia is shifting, for the better. ..."
    "... Cohen is always good, but last night he nailed it, calling the media's coverage of Hamburg 'pornography'. ..."
    "... It was just a year ago, pre-Trump, that professor Cohen was banned from all the networks, from any major media outlet, and being relentlessly pilloried by the neocon media for being a naive fool for defending Putin and Russia. ..."
    "... "The first thing you notice is just how much the press is rooting for this meeting between our president and the Russian President to fail. It's a kind of pornography. Just as there's no love in pornography, there's no American national interest in this bashing of Trump and Putin. ..."
    "... Carlson tried to draw Cohen out about who exactly in Washington is so against Assad, and why, and Cohen deflected, demurring - 'I don't know - I'm not an expert'. Of course he knows, as does Carlson - it is an unholy alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia and their neocon friends in Washington and the media who are pushing this criminal policy, who support ISIS, deliberately. But they can't say so, because, ... well, because. Ask Rupert Murdoch. ..."
    Jul 12, 2017 | russia-insider.com
    Cohen's appearance on Carlson's show last night demonstrated again at what a blistering pace public opinion in the West about Putin and Russia is shifting, for the better.

    Cohen is always good, but last night he nailed it, calling the media's coverage of Hamburg 'pornography'.

    Ahh, the power of the apt phrase.

    It was just a year ago, pre-Trump, that professor Cohen was banned from all the networks, from any major media outlet, and being relentlessly pilloried by the neocon media for being a naive fool for defending Putin and Russia.

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/5L2F4ocEIZw

    Last night he was the featured guest on the most watched news show in the country, being cheered on by the host, who has him on as a regular. And Cohen isn't remotely a conservative. He is a contributing editor at the arch-liberal Nation magazine, of which his wife is the editor. It doesn't really get pinker than that.

    Some choice quotes here, but the whole thing is worth a listen:

    "The first thing you notice is just how much the press is rooting for this meeting between our president and the Russian President to fail. It's a kind of pornography. Just as there's no love in pornography, there's no American national interest in this bashing of Trump and Putin.

    As a historian let me tell you the headline I would write instead:

    "What we witnessed today in Hamburg was a potentially historic new detente. an anti-cold-war partnership begun by Trump and Putin but meanwhile attempts to sabotage it escalate." I've seen a lot of summits between American and Russian presidents, ... and I think what we saw today was potentially the most fateful meeting ... since the Cold War.

    The reason is, is that the relationship with Russia is so dangerous and we have a president who might have been crippled or cowed by these Russiagate attacks ... yet he was not. He was politically courageous. It went well. They got important things done. I think maybe today we witnessed president Trump emerging as an American statesman."

    Cohen goes on to say that the US should ally with Assad, Iran, and Russia to crush ISIS, with Carlson bobbing his head up and down in emphatic agreement.

    Carlson tried to draw Cohen out about who exactly in Washington is so against Assad, and why, and Cohen deflected, demurring - 'I don't know - I'm not an expert'. Of course he knows, as does Carlson - it is an unholy alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia and their neocon friends in Washington and the media who are pushing this criminal policy, who support ISIS, deliberately. But they can't say so, because, ... well, because. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

    Things are getting better in the US media, but we aren't quite able to call a spade a spade in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

    [Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... Many "never-Trumpers" of both parties see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as their best hope to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided. ..."
    "... As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a June 2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized factions within the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump initiatives, such as stepped-up drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans, and mass surveillance." ..."
    "... Corraborative evidence of Valentine's thesis is, perhaps surprisingly, provided by the CIA's own website where a number of redacted historical documents have been published. Presumably, they are documents first revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. A few however are copies of news articles once available to the public but now archived by the CIA which has blacked-out portions of the articles. ..."
    "... This led to an investigation by New Times in a day when there were still "investigative reporters," and not the government sycophants of today. Based on firsthand accounts, their investigation concluded that Operation Phoenix was the "only systematized kidnapping, torture and assassination program ever sponsored by the United States government. . . . Its victims were noncombatants." At least 40,000 were murdered, with "only" about 8,000 supposed Viet Cong political cadres targeted for execution, with the rest civilians (including women and children) killed and "later conveniently labeled VCI. Hundreds of thousands were jailed without trial, often after sadistic abuse." The article notes that Phoenix was conceived, financed, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency ..."
    "... But the article noted that one of the most persistent criticisms of Phoenix was that it resulted "in the arrest and imprisonment of many innocent civilians." These were called "Class C Communist offenders," some of whom may actually have been forced to commit such "belligerent acts" as digging trenches or carrying rice. It was those alleged as the "hard core, full-time cadre" who were deemed to make up the "shadow government" designated as Class A and B Viet Cong. ..."
    "... Ironically, by the Bush administration's broad definition of "unlawful combatants," CIA officers and their support structure also would fit the category. But the American public is generally forgiving of its own war criminals though most self-righteous and hypocritical in judging foreign war criminals. But perhaps given sufficient evidence, the American public could begin to see both the immorality of this behavior and its counterproductive consequences. ..."
    "... Talleyrand is credited with saying, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." Reportedly, that was borrowed from a 1796 letter by a French naval officer, which stated, in the original language: Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien appendre. In English: "Nobody has been corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn anything." That sums up the CIA leadership entirely. ..."
    Jun 24, 2017 | original.antiwar.com

    Douglas Valentine has once again added to the store of knowledge necessary for American citizens to understand how the U.S. government actually works today, in his most recent book entitled The CIA As Organized Crime . (Valentine previously wrote The Phoenix Program , which should be read with the current book.)

    The US "deep state" – of which the CIA is an integral part – is an open secret now and the Phoenix Program (assassinations, death squads, torture, mass detentions, exploitation of information) has been its means of controlling populations. Consequently, knowing the deep state's methods is the only hope of building a democratic opposition to the deep state and to restore as much as possible the Constitutional system we had in previous centuries, as imperfect as it was.

    Princeton University political theorist Sheldon Wolin described the US political system in place by 2003 as "inverted totalitarianism." He reaffirmed that in 2009 after seeing a year of the Obama administration. Correctly identifying the threat against constitutional governance is the first step to restore it, and as Wolin understood, substantive constitutional government ended long before Donald Trump campaigned. He's just taking unconstitutional governance to the next level in following the same path as his recent predecessors. However, even as some elements of the "deep state" seek to remove Trump, the President now has many "deep state" instruments in his own hands to be used at his unreviewable discretion.

    Many "never-Trumpers" of both parties see the deep state's national security bureaucracy as their best hope to destroy Trump and thus defend constitutional government, but those hopes are misguided. After all, the deep state's bureaucratic leadership has worked arduously for decades to subvert constitutional order.

    As Michael Glennon, author of National Security and Double Government, pointed out in a June 2017 Harper's essay, if "the president maintains his attack, splintered and demoralized factions within the bureaucracy could actually support - not oppose - many potential Trump initiatives, such as stepped-up drone strikes, cyberattacks, covert action, immigration bans, and mass surveillance."

    Glennon noted that the propensity of "security managers" to back policies which ratchet up levels of security "will play into Trump's hands, so that if and when he finally does declare victory, a revamped security directorate could emerge more menacing than ever, with him its devoted new ally." Before that happens, it is incumbent for Americans to understand what Valentine explains in his book of CIA methods of "population control" as first fully developed in the Vietnam War's Phoenix Program.

    Hating the US

    There also must be the realization that our "national security" apparatchiks - principally but not solely the CIA - have served to exponentially increase the numbers of those people who hate the US.

    Some of these people turn to terrorism as an expression of that hostility. Anyone who is at all familiar with the CIA and Al Qaeda knows that the CIA has been Al Qaeda's most important "combat multiplier" since 9/11, and the CIA can be said to have birthed ISIS as well with the mistreatment of incarcerated Iraqi men in US prisons in Iraq.

    Indeed, by following the model of the Phoenix Program, the CIA must be seen in the Twenty-first Century as a combination of the ultimate "Murder, Inc.," when judged by the CIA's methods such as drone warfare and its victims; and the Keystone Kops, when the multiple failures of CIA policies are considered. This is not to make light of what the CIA does, but the CIA's misguided policies and practices have served to generate wrath, hatred and violence against Americans, which we see manifested in cities such as San Bernardino, Orlando, New York and Boston.

    Pointing out the harm to Americans is not to dismiss the havoc that Americans under the influence of the CIA have perpetrated on foreign populations. But "morality" seems a lost virtue today in the US, which is under the influence of so much militaristic war propaganda that morality no longer enters into the equation in determining foreign policy.

    In addition to the harm the CIA has caused to people around the world, the CIA works tirelessly at subverting its own government at home, as was most visible in the spying on and subversion of the torture investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The subversion of democracy also includes the role the CIA plays in developing and disseminating war propaganda as "information warfare," upon the American people. This is what the Rand Corporation under the editorship of Zalmay Khalilzad has described as "conditioning the battlefield," which begins with the minds of the American population.

    Douglas Valentine discusses and documents the role of the CIA in disseminating pro-war propaganda and disinformation as complementary to the violent tactics of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Valentine explains that "before Phoenix was adopted as the model for policing the American empire, many US military commanders in Vietnam resisted the Phoenix strategy of targeting civilians with Einsatzgruppen-style 'special forces' and Gestapo-style secret police."

    Military Commanders considered that type of program a flagrant violation of the Law of War. "Their main job is to zap the in-betweeners – you know, the people who aren't all the way with the government and aren't all the way with the Viet Cong either. They figure if you zap enough in-betweeners, people will begin to get the idea," according to one quote from The Phoenix Program referring to the unit tasked with much of the Phoenix operations.

    Nazi Influences

    Comparing the Phoenix Program and its operatives to "Einsatzgruppen-style 'special forces' and Gestapo-style secret police" is not a distortion of the strategic understanding of each. Both programs were extreme forms of repression operating under martial law principles where the slightest form of dissent was deemed to represent the work of the "enemy." Hitler's Bandit Hunters: The SS and the Nazi Occupation of Europe by Philip W. Blood describes German "Security Warfare" as practiced in World War II, which can be seen as identical in form to the Phoenix Program as to how the enemy is defined as anyone who is "potentially" a threat, deemed either "partizans" or terrorists.

    That the Germans included entire racial categories in that does not change the underlying logic, which was, anyone deemed an internal enemy in a territory in which their military operated had to be "neutralized" by any means necessary. The US military and the South Vietnamese military governments operated under the same principles but not based on race, rather the perception that certain areas and villages were loyal to the Viet Cong.

    This repressive doctrine was also not unique to the Nazis in Europe and the US military in Vietnam. Similar though less sophisticated strategies were used against the American Indians and by the imperial powers of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, including by the US in its newly acquired territories of the Philippines and in the Caribbean. This "imperial policing," i.e., counterinsurgency, simply moved to more manipulative and, in ways, more violent levels.

    That the US drew upon German counterinsurgency doctrine, as brutal as it was, is well documented. This is shown explicitly in a 2011 article published in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies entitled German Counterinsurgency Revisited by Charles D. Melson. He wrote that in 1942, Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler named a deputy for "anti-bandit warfare," (Bevollmachtigter fur die Bandenkampfung im Osten), SS-General von dem Bach, whose responsibilities expanded in 1943 to head all SS and police anti-bandit units and operations. He was one of the architects of the Einsatzguppen "concept of anti-partisan warfare," a German predecessor to the "Phoenix Program."

    'Anti-Partisan' Lessons

    It wasn't a coincidence that this "anti-partisan" warfare concept should be adopted by US forces in Vietnam and retained to the present day. Melson pointed out that a "post-war German special forces officer described hunter or ranger units as 'men who knew every possible ruse and tactic of guerrilla warfare. They had gone through the hell of combat against the crafty partisans in the endless swamps and forests of Russia.'"

    Consequently, "The German special forces and reconnaissance school was a sought after posting for North Atlantic Treaty Organization special operations personnel," who presumably included members of the newly created US Army Special Forces soldiers, which was in part headquartered at Bad Tolz in Germany, as well as CIA paramilitary officers.

    Just as with the later Phoenix Program to the present-day US global counterinsurgency, Melson wrote that the "attitude of the [local] population and the amount of assistance it was willing to give guerilla units was of great concern to the Germans. Different treatment was supposed to be accorded to affected populations, bandit supporters, and bandits, while so-called population and resource control measures for each were noted (but were in practice, treated apparently one and the same). 'Action against enemy agitation' was the psychological or information operations of the Nazi period. The Nazis believed that, 'Because of the close relationship of guerilla warfare and politics, actions against enemy agitation are a task that is just as important as interdiction and combat actions. All means must be used to ward off enemy influence and waken and maintain a clear political will.'"

    This is typical of any totalitarian system – a movement or a government – whether the process is characterized as counterinsurgency or internal security. The idea of any civilian collaboration with the "enemy" is the basis for what the US government charges as "conspiracy" in the Guantanamo Military Commissions.

    Valentine explains the Phoenix program as having been developed by the CIA in 1967 to combine "existing counterinsurgency programs in a concerted effort to 'neutralize' the Vietcong infrastructure (VCI)." He explained further that "neutralize" meant "to kill, capture, or make to defect." "Infrastructure" meant civilians suspected of supporting North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers. Central to the Phoenix program was that its targets were civilians, making the operation a violation of the Geneva Conventions which guaranteed protection to civilians in time of war.

    "The Vietnam's War's Silver Lining: A Bureaucratic Model for Population Control Emerges" is the title of Chapter 3. Valentine writes that the "CIA's Phoenix program changed how America fights its wars and how the public views this new type of political and psychological warfare, in which civilian casualties are an explicit objective." The intent of the Phoenix program evolved from "neutralizing" enemy leaders into "a program of systematic repression for the political control of the South Vietnamese people. It sought to accomplish this through a highly bureaucratized system of disposing of people who could not be ideologically assimilated." The CIA claimed a legal basis for the program in "emergency decrees" and orders for "administrative detention."

    Lauding Petraeus

    Valentine refers to a paper by David Kilcullen entitled Countering Global Insurgency. Kilcullen is one of the so-called "counterinsurgency experts" whom General David Petraeus gathered together in a cell to promote and refine "counterinsurgency," or COIN, for the modern era. Fred Kaplan, who is considered a "liberal author and journalist" at Slate, wrote a panegyric to these cultists entitled, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War. The purpose of this cell was to change the practices of the US military into that of "imperial policing," or COIN, as they preferred to call it.

    But Kilcullen argued in his paper that "The 'War on Terrorism'" is actually a campaign to counter a global insurgency. Therefore, Kilcullen argued, "we need a new paradigm, capable of addressing globalised insurgency." His "disaggregation strategy" called for "actions to target the insurgent infrastructure that would resemble the unfairly maligned (but highly effective) Vietnam-era Phoenix program."

    He went on, "Contrary to popular mythology, this was largely a civilian aid and development program, supported by targeted military pacification operations and intelligence activity to disrupt the Viet Cong Infrastructure. A global Phoenix program (including the other key elements that formed part of the successful Vietnam CORDS system) would provide a useful start point to consider how Disaggregation would develop in practice."

    It is readily apparent that, in fact, a Phoenix-type program is now US global policy and - just like in Vietnam - it is applying "death squad" strategies that eliminate not only active combatants but also civilians who simply find themselves in the same vicinity, thus creating antagonisms that expand the number of fighters.

    Corraborative evidence of Valentine's thesis is, perhaps surprisingly, provided by the CIA's own website where a number of redacted historical documents have been published. Presumably, they are documents first revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. A few however are copies of news articles once available to the public but now archived by the CIA which has blacked-out portions of the articles.

    The Bloody Reality

    One "sanitized" article - approved for release in 2011 - is a partially redacted New Times article of Aug. 22, 1975, by Michael Drosnin. The article recounts a story of a US Army counterintelligence officer "who directed a small part of a secret war aimed not at the enemy's soldiers but at its civilian leaders." He describes how a CIA-directed Phoenix operative dumped a bag of "eleven bloody ears" as proof of six people killed.

    The officer, who recalled this incident in 1971, said, "It made me sick. I couldn't go on with what I was doing in Vietnam. . . . It was an assassination campaign . . . my job was to identify and eliminate VCI, the Viet Cong 'infrastructure' – the communist's shadow government. I worked directly with two Vietnamese units, very tough guys who didn't wear uniforms . . . In the beginning they brought back about 10 percent alive. By the end they had stopped taking prisoners.

    "How many VC they got I don't know. I saw a hell of a lot of dead bodies. We'd put a tag on saying VCI, but no one really knew – it was just some native in black pajamas with 16 bullet holes."

    This led to an investigation by New Times in a day when there were still "investigative reporters," and not the government sycophants of today. Based on firsthand accounts, their investigation concluded that Operation Phoenix was the "only systematized kidnapping, torture and assassination program ever sponsored by the United States government. . . . Its victims were noncombatants." At least 40,000 were murdered, with "only" about 8,000 supposed Viet Cong political cadres targeted for execution, with the rest civilians (including women and children) killed and "later conveniently labeled VCI. Hundreds of thousands were jailed without trial, often after sadistic abuse." The article notes that Phoenix was conceived, financed, and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, as Mr. Valentine writes.

    A second article archived by the CIA was by the Christian Science Monitor, dated Jan. 5, 1971, describing how the Saigon government was "taking steps that could help eliminate one of the most glaring abuses of its controversial Phoenix program, which is aimed against the Viet Cong political and administrative apparatus." Note how the Monitor shifted blame away from the CIA and onto the South Vietnamese government.

    But the article noted that one of the most persistent criticisms of Phoenix was that it resulted "in the arrest and imprisonment of many innocent civilians." These were called "Class C Communist offenders," some of whom may actually have been forced to commit such "belligerent acts" as digging trenches or carrying rice. It was those alleged as the "hard core, full-time cadre" who were deemed to make up the "shadow government" designated as Class A and B Viet Cong.

    Yet "security committees" throughout South Vietnam, under the direction of the CIA, sentenced at least 10,000 "Class C civilians" to prison each year, far more than Class A and B combined. The article stated, "Thousands of these prisoners are never brought to court trial, and thousands of other have never been sentenced." The latter statement would mean they were just held in "indefinite detention," like the prisoners held at Guantanamo and other US detention centers with high levels of CIA involvement.

    Not surprisingly to someone not affiliated with the CIA, the article found as well that "Individual case histories indicate that many who have gone to prison as active supporters of neither the government nor the Viet Cong come out as active backers of the Viet Cong and with an implacable hatred of the government." In other words, the CIA and the COIN enthusiasts are achieving the same results today with the prisons they set up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    CIA Crimes

    Valentine broadly covers the illegalities of the CIA over the years, including its well-documented role in facilitating the drug trade over the years. But, in this reviewer's opinion, his most valuable contribution is his description of the CIA's participation going back at least to the Vietnam War in the treatment of what the US government today calls "unlawful combatants."

    "Unlawful combatants" is a descriptive term made up by the Bush administration to remove people whom US officials alleged were "terrorists" from the legal protections of the Geneva Conventions and Human Rights Law and thus to justify their capture or killing in the so-called "Global War on Terror." Since the US government deems them "unlawful" – because they do not belong to an organized military structure and do not wear insignia – they are denied the "privilege" of belligerency that applies to traditional soldiers. But – unless they take a "direct part in hostilities" – they would still maintain their civilian status under the law of war and thus not lose the legal protection due to civilians even if they exhibit sympathy or support to one side in a conflict.

    Ironically, by the Bush administration's broad definition of "unlawful combatants," CIA officers and their support structure also would fit the category. But the American public is generally forgiving of its own war criminals though most self-righteous and hypocritical in judging foreign war criminals. But perhaps given sufficient evidence, the American public could begin to see both the immorality of this behavior and its counterproductive consequences.

    This is not to condemn all CIA officers, some of whom acted in good faith that they were actually defending the United States by acquiring information on a professed enemy in the tradition of Nathan Hale. But it is to harshly condemn those CIA officials and officers who betrayed the United States by subverting its Constitution, including waging secret wars against foreign countries without a declaration of war by Congress. And it decidedly condemns the CIA war criminals who acted as a law unto themselves in the torture and murder of foreign nationals, as Valentine's book describes.

    Talleyrand is credited with saying, "They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing." Reportedly, that was borrowed from a 1796 letter by a French naval officer, which stated, in the original language: Personne n'est corrigé; personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien appendre. In English: "Nobody has been corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn anything." That sums up the CIA leadership entirely.

    Douglas Valentine's book is a thorough documentation of that fact and it is essential reading for all Americans if we are to have any hope for salvaging a remnant of representative government.

    Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the US Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. This originally appeared at ConsortiumNews.com .

    Read more by Todd E. Pierce Inciting Wars the American Way – August 14th, 2016 Chicago Police Adopt Israeli Tactics – December 13th, 2015 US War Theories Target Dissenters – September 13th, 2015 Ron Paul and Lost Lessons of War – September 1st, 2015 Has the US Constitution Been Lost to Military Rule?– January 4th, 2015

    [May 23, 2017] CIA, the cornerstone of the deep state has agenda that is different from the US national interest and reflect agenda of the special interest groups such as Wall Street bankers and MIC

    Highly recommended!
    CIA is actually a state within the state as Church commission revealed and it has an immanent tendency to seek control over "surface state" and media. In other words large intelligence apparatus might well be incompatible with the democratic governance.
    Notable quotes:
    "... The CIA has a track record of acting out of self interest since its inception and should not be believed. That being said, the public is almost completely unaware of the agency's misdeeds. ..."
    May 23, 2017 | nakedcapitalism.com

    "In the long run, the CIA can't deceive the Chinese government without also deceiving, in some way, the American public. This leaves us with an obvious problem: Should we believe anything the CIA says?" [RealClearWorld]. "It's a tough question for a democracy to answer. Trust is built on the tacit agreement that the "bad things" an agency does are good for the country.

    If the public believes that that is no longer the case – if it believes the agency is acting out of self-interest and not national interest – then the agreement is broken. The intelligence agency is seen as an impediment of the right to national self-determination, a means for the ends of the few."

    Huey Long <

    RE: Hall of Mirrors/Believing the CIA

    The CIA has a track record of acting out of self interest since its inception and should not be believed. That being said, the public is almost completely unaware of the agency's misdeeds.

    I think the reason folks like Manning, Snowden and Assange are so reviled by the agency is because they are a threat to the CIA's reputation more than anything else.

    [Feb 19, 2017] The deep state is running scared!

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... ..."Multiple reports show that my former colleagues in the intelligence community have decided that they must leak or withhold classified information due to unsettling connections between President Trump and the Russian Government... ..."
    "... The deep state is running scared! I never+ attribute to coincidence that which is the FBI trampling the bill of rights. It is coincidence the deep state (fbi, nsa, various CIA and DoD spooks) tapped Russia spies who talk to private citizens who have no opportunity at espionage. Then the innuendo is leaked to the Clinton media! ..."
    "... Worse on Trump for calling them out for leaking rather than as a civil liberty trampling Gestapo. Ben Franklin was right, give the democrat run spooks the power to protect you and you lose liberty and protection! ..."
    Feb 19, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
    im1dc : February 18, 2017 at 05:32 PM
    This is running now on FoxNews.com, total fabrication especially the last sentence but Trumpers believe this Fake News. I think this is where ilsm gets his intell insights from, phoney former intell officers, they sound exactly like him - check it out for yourself

    http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/02/18/im-democrat-and-ex-cia-but-spies-plotting-against-trump-are-out-control.html

    "I'm a Democrat (and ex-CIA) but the spies plotting against Trump are out of control"

    By Bryan Dean Wright...February 18, 2017...Foxnews.com

    ..."Multiple reports show that my former colleagues in the intelligence community have decided that they must leak or withhold classified information due to unsettling connections between President Trump and the Russian Government...

    Days ago, they delivered their verdict. According to one intelligence official, the president "will die in jail."..."

    ilsm -> im1dc... , February 18, 2017 at 06:08 PM
    The deep state is running scared! I never+ attribute to coincidence that which is the FBI trampling the bill of rights. It is coincidence the deep state (fbi, nsa, various CIA and DoD spooks) tapped Russia spies who talk to private citizens who have no opportunity at espionage. Then the innuendo is leaked to the Clinton media!

    Worse on Trump for calling them out for leaking rather than as a civil liberty trampling Gestapo. Ben Franklin was right, give the democrat run spooks the power to protect you and you lose liberty and protection!

    +40 years around the puzzlers.

    [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

    Highly recommended!
    Notable quotes:
    "... In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this. ..."
    "... In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in. ..."
    "... Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran. ..."
    "... Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts ..."
    "... Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege ..."
    "... I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as he deserves ..."
    "... "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." ― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. ..."
    "... New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along." The Globe and Mail. ..."
    "... No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken. ..."
    "... The rise of the right wing in Europe is due to the fact that Social Democratic parties have completely sold out to neo-liberal agenda. ..."
    "... So Putin's plan to undermine U.S. voter confidence was to simply show what actually happens behind the scenes at the DNC, how diabolical! ..."
    "... Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote. ..."
    "... So it's true because the CIA said so. That's the gold standard for me. ..."
    "... "Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies" - Ron Paul ..."
    "... At least Tucker Carlson is able to see through the BS and asks searching question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkeGkCjdHg ..."
    "... President-elect Donald Trump's transition team said in a statement Friday afternoon that the same people who claim Russia interfered in the presidential election had previously claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. ..."
    "... The neoliberal corporate machine is wounded but not dead. They will use every trick, ploy and opportunity to try to regain power. The fight goes on. ..."
    "... Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime " US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis. ..."
    "... Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it! ..."
    Dec 09, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

    From: Barack Obama orders 'full review' of possible Russian hacking in US election Spncer Ackerman in New York and David Smith in Washington

    Geoff Smythe , 24m ago

    Well, if Rupert Mudroach, an American citizen, can influence the Australian elections, who gives a stuff about anyone else's involvement in US politics?

    The US loves demonising Russia, even supporting ISIS to fight against them.

    The United States of Amnesia just can't understand that they are run by the military machine.

    As Frank Zappa once correctly stated: The US government is just the entertainment unit of the Military.

    Nataliefreeman, 11 Dec 2016

    Altogether the only thing people are accusing the Russians of is the WikiLeaks scandal. And in hindsight of the enormous media bias toward Trump it really comes of as little more than leveling the playing field. Hardly the sort of democratic subversion that is being suggested.

    And of course there is another problem and that is in principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

    In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

    In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

    In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The US even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

    In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

    In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

    In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

    So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

    HollyOldDog -> Nataliefreeman, 11 Dec 2016 01:4
    Don't know about Russians, but in the early 2000's the Ukrainian hackers had some nasty viruses embedded in email attachments that could fuckup ARM based computers.
    smellycat -> waltercarl67, 11 Dec 2016 00:0
    Time to stop attempting regime change in other countries then, if you condemn it in your own. What goes around comes around.
    caveOfShadows , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
    European governments tried to elect Hillary Clinton. Latin American and Asian allies of the US tried to elect Clinton.

    Top leaders of France, the UK, Germany, all leaked to US newspapers, with dire warnings of how Trump's election would lead to bad outcomes.

    Many countries made as clear as possible, without coming out officially for a candidate, that they were for the election of Clinton.

    Mexico tried to get Clinton elected. Believe me, they did. Not officially, of course, but almost.

    But all we hear about is Russia.

    Wonder why???

    uyCybershy -> caveOfShadows , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
    Russia has an independent foreign policy and acts in what it perceives as it's own best interests. It has refused to become a vassal state of the West and is a threat to the Empire's full-spectrum dominance. Worst of all it has begun trading outside the $US in energy and other resources with China and Iran.
    imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:0
    Mainstream media are now busy repressing any news and any questioning about facts, as the last battle in their support to jidaists fighting the Syrian Army. This is the dark pit where our so called free press has fallen into.
    Flugler -> imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
    Yep had a chat with an army mate yesterday asked him what the fcuk the supposed head of MI6 was on about regarding Russian support for Syrian govt suggesting Russian actions made terrorism more likely here in UK. He shrugged his shoulders and said he hoped Putin wiped the terrorists out...
    smellycat -> imperfetto , 10 Dec 2016 23:4
    Western media are in full panic as Aleppo falls with all sorts of gruesome tales about the mistreatment of their favorite terrorists in Aleppo and a strange silence on the whereabouts of their '250K civilians' under siege

    Of course no news on the danger to the civilians of W,Aleppo, who have been bombarded indiscriminately for months by the 'moderates' in the east of the city or the danger to the civilians of Palmyra, Mosul or al Bab.

    Geoff Smythe -> smellycat , 11 Dec 2016 01:3
    Or the 50,000 that have been evacuated out of Aleppo by the Russian military. https://www.rt.com/news/369869-syria-evacuation-civilians-aleppo /
    Merseysidefella , 10 Dec 2016 21:5
    I cant believe the Fake News outlets are still making a big deal about this issue. Obomber is leaving in a cloud of failure as he deserves. I´ll still look for the Guardian articles on football which are excellent.
    Cheers!
    GuyCybershy -> confettifoot , 10 Dec 2016 21:0
    The Sanders movement inside the Democratic party did offer some hope but this was snuffed out by the DNC and the Clinton campaign in collusion with the media. This is what likely caused her defeat in November and not some Kremlin intrigue.
    dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
    "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." ― Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda.
    dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
    "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," Karl Rove.
    caveOfShadows -> dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 23:1
    Don't use quotes when you are doing a fake attribution.
    dopamineboy , 10 Dec 2016 20:4
    New Canadian documentary - All Governments Lie. "It lucidly argues that powerful interests have been creating supercharged fake stories for decades to advance their own nefarious interests. And the institutional media have too often blithely played along." The Globe and Mail.
    joinupthedots , 10 Dec 2016 20:4
    Fake news....No news.....None sense news?

    Uncle Sam has been doing it for years and the degree of incestuousness between MSM and the "Agencies" is all right here (just one example)

    http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmeyerM.htm

    smellycat -> joinupthedots , 10 Dec 2016 20:5
    That's some serious shit
    '"The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that killed John F. Kennedy."
    stoneshepherd , 10 Dec 2016 20:2
    No comments about Seth Rich the DNC staffer Assange hinted had leaked the Podesta emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently shot multiple times and died at 04:20 on a Washington DC street in a 'motiveless' crime in which none of his possessions were taken.

    Hmmm....

    Flugler -> stoneshepherd , 10 Dec 2016 20:3
    Distract the masses with bullsh*t , nothing new... Trump needs to double up on his personal security, he has doubled down on the CIA tonight bringing upmtheir bullsh*t on WMD. Thing are getting interesting...
    Liesandstats , 10 Dec 2016 19:2
    Meanwhile the good guys with their Smart bombs indulge in a spot of collateral damage. (Or war crimes as it's described when Russians do it).

    https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/breaking-90-iraqi-soldiers-killed-in-mosul-from-us-airstrikes/

    This article is jiberish, as are the ones trying to say that the Russians caused Brexit.

    GuyCybershy -> sunflowerxyz , 10 Dec 2016 19:3
    The rise of the right wing in Europe is due to the fact that Social Democratic parties have completely sold out to neo-liberal agenda.
    Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 19:1
    Spreading lies about the very real Podesta emails and their importance seems to be a fake news stock in trade. Since Hillary was responsible I'm not sure where Putin comes into the picture.
    https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/a-clinton-fan-manufactured-fake-news-that-msnbc-personalities-spread-to-discredit-wikileaks-docs /
    GuyCybershy , 10 Dec 2016 19:0
    So Putin's plan to undermine U.S. voter confidence was to simply show what actually happens behind the scenes at the DNC, how diabolical!
    Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 18:3
    "If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies. "
    R. D. Laing
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    US politicians and the MSM depend on sheer lies.....
    Powerspike -> KassandraTroy , 10 Dec 2016 18:5
    They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.
    R. D. Laing
    +++++++++++++++++++++++++
    I'm sick of jumping through their hoops - how about you?
    James7 , 10 Dec 2016 17:2
    "Tin Foil Hat" Hillary--
    "This is not about politics or partisanship," she went on. "Lives are at risk, lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days to do their jobs, contribute to their communities. It is a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly."

    We fail to see how Russian propaganda has put people's lives directly at risk. Unless, of course, Hillary is suggesting that the increasingly-bizarre #Pizzagate swarm journalism campaign (which apparently caused a man to shoot up a floor tile in a D.C. pizza shop) was conjured up by a bunch of Russian trolls.

    And this is about as absurd as saying Russian trolls were why Trump got elected.

    "It needs to be said," former counterintelligence agent John R. Schindler (who, by the way, believes Assange and Snowden are both Russian plants), writes in the Observer, "that nearly all of the liberals eagerly pontificating about how Putin put Trump in office know nothing about 21st century espionage, much less Russia's unique spy model and how it works. Indeed, some of the most ardent advocates of this Kremlin-did-it conspiracy theory were big fans of Snowden and Wikileaks -- right until clandestine Russian shenanigans started to hurt Democrats. Now, they're panicking."

    (Nonetheless, #Pizzagate and Trump, IMHO, are manifestations of a population which deeply deeply distrusts the handlers and gatekeepers of the status quo. Justified or not. And with or without Putin's shadowy fingers strumming its magic hypno-harp across the Land of the Free. This runs deeper than just Putin.)

    Fake news has always been around, from the fake news which led Americans to believe the Pearl Harbor attack was a surprise and completely unprovoked .

    To the fake news campaigns put out by Edward Bernays tricking women into believing cigarettes were empowering little phallics of feminism. (AKA "Torches of Freedom.")

    This War on Fake News has more to do with the elites finally realizing how little control they have over the minds of the unwashed masses. Rather, this is a war on the freaks, geeks and weirdos who've formed a decentralized and massively-influential media right under their noses.

    Laissez Faire Today

    James7 -> fedback , 10 Dec 2016 17:3
    and there may be some truth to that. An article says has delved into financial matters in Russia.

    Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
    Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.

    Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.

    Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.

    As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.

    chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars, including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."

    BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
    So it's true because the CIA said so. That's the gold standard for me.

    So let me be the first to thank Russia for providing us with their research.

    Instead of assassination, coup or invasion, they simply showed us our leaders' own words when written behind the public's backs.

    I'm no fan of Putin, but this was a useful bit of intelligence you've shared with us.
    Happy Christmas, Vlad.

    Next time why not provide us with the email of all our banks and fossil fuel companies; you can help us clean up both political parties with one fell swoop that way.

    GuyCybershy -> BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
    "Truth is Treason in the Empire of Lies" - Ron Paul
    greyford14 -> GuyCybershy , 10 Dec 2016 17:1
    Be careful there, Ron Paul is an FSB agent of Putin, according to the Washington Post.
    elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 17:0
    At least Tucker Carlson is able to see through the BS and asks searching question.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkeGkCjdHg
    GuyCybershy -> elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 17:1
    Dems are so out to lunch that they make FOX pundits seem sane. I would say the Democratic party is beyond hope of saving.
    sblejo , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
    The U.S. is getting what it deserves, IF Russia was even dumb enough to meddle. The government in this country has been meddling in other countries' affairs sixty years, in the Middle East, in South America and other places we don't even know about. The result is mayhem, all in the 'interests' of the U.S., as it is described.
    Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
    Note that most supporters of the Russian hacks never (and cannot) present rational arguments, just dubious talking points--AKA Fake News.

    But it is fun to spot the gaps in their logic, and the holes in their stories.

    Great sport--rather like hunting hares.

    GuyCybershy -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
    We need to trust the CIA, they'd never fix evidence to manipulate the American public.
    BaronVonAmericano -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 16:5
    Where's the gap in this logic:
    A) The American public has been offered ZERO proof of hacking by the Russian government to alter our election.
    B) Even if true, no one has disputed the authenticity of the emails hacked.
    C) Therefore, the WORST Russia could have done is show us who are own leader are when they don't think we're listening.
    D) Taken together, this article is pretty close to fake news, and gives us nothing that should outrage us much at this time -- unless we are trying to foment war with Russia or call for a military coup against the baboon about to take the oath of office.
    foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
    Hacking by unnamed individuals. No direct involvement of the Russian government, only implied, alleged, etc. Seems to me that if Hillary had obeyed the law and not schemed behind the scenes to sabotage Bernie S. there would have been nothing to leak! Really this is all about being caught with fer fingers in the cookie jar. Does it matter who leaked it? Did the US public not have a right to know what the people they were voting for had been up to? It's a bit like the governor of a province being filmed burgling someone's house and then complaining that someone had leaked the film to the media, just when he was trying to get re-elected!
    GuyCybershy -> foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
    The US public has a right to know what CNN, New York Times and the Washington Post want them to know.
    sblejo -> foolisholdman , 10 Dec 2016 16:4
    It is called passing the buck, and because of the underhanded undermining of Bernie Sanders, who was winning, we have Trump. Thank you Democratic party.
    aidanfahey , 10 Dec 2016 16:3
    I am disappointed that the Guardian gives so much prominence to such speculation which is almost totally irrelevant. Why would we necessarily (a) believe what the superspies tell us and (b) even if it is true why should we care?

    I am also very disappointed at the Guardians attitude to Putin, the elected leader of Russia, who was so badly treated by the US from the moment he took over from Yeltsin. I was in Russia as a visitor around that time and it was obvious that Putin restored some dignity to the Russian people after the disastrous Yeltsin term of office. If the US had been willing to deal with him with respect the world could be a much better place today. Instead the US insisted in trying to subvert his rule with the support of its supine NATO allies in order to satisfy its corporate rulers.

    GuyCybershy -> aidanfahey , 10 Dec 2016 16:5
    They expected Russia to fall apart like the USSR and then they could march in and pick up the pieces. Putin prevented this and this why they hate him.
    NickinHalifaxNS , 10 Dec 2016 16:2
    If this is true, the US can hardly complain. After all, the US has a long record of interfering in other countries' elections--including CIA overthrow of elected governments and their replacement with murderous, oppressive, right-wing dictatorships.

    If the worst that Russia did was reveal the truth about what Democratic Party figures were saying behind closed doors, I'd say it helped correct the unbalanced media focus on preventing Trump from becoming President. Call it the globalization of elections.

    BaronVonAmericano , 10 Dec 2016 15:5
    First, the government has yet to present any persuasive evidence that Russia hacked the DNC or anyone else. All we have is that there is Russian code (meaningless according to cyber-security experts) and seemingly baseless "conclusions" by "intelligence" officials. In other words, fake news at this point.

    Second, even if true, the allegation amounts to an argument that Russia presented us with facts that we shouldn't have seen. Think about that for a while. We are seeing demands that we self-censor ourselves from facts that seem unfair. What utter idiocy.

    This is particularly outrageous given that the U.S. directly intervenes in the governance of any number of nations all the time. We can support coups, arm insurgencies, or directly invade, but god forbid that someone present us with unsettling facts about our ruling class.

    This nation has jumped the shark. The fact that Trump is our president is merely confirmation of this long evident fact. That fighting REAL NEWS of emails whose content has not been disputed is part of our war on "fake news," and the top priority for some so-called liberals, promises only worse to come.

    elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 14:5
    >> Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said Russia had "succeeded" in "sow[ing] discord" in the election, and urged as much public disclosure as is possible.

    What utter bullshit. The DNC's own dirty tricks did that. Donna Brasille stealing debate questions and handing them to Hillary so that she could cheat did that. The FBIs investigation into Hillary did that. Podesta's emails did that. The totally one-sided press coverage (apart from Fox) of the election did that. But it seems the american people were smart enough to see through the BS and voted for trump. Good for them.

    And we're gonna need a lot more than the word of a few politicised so-called intelligence agencies to believe this russo-hacking story. These are the same people who lied about Iraqi WMDs so they are proven fakers/liars. These are also the same people who hack EVERYONE else so I, quite frankly, have no sympathy even of the story turns out to be true.

    MrIncredlous , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
    Obama is a disgrace to his office.

    Announce "consensus" (not unanimous) "conclusion" based in circumstantial evidence now, before the Electoral College vote, then write a report with actual details due by Jan 20.
    Put a proven liar in charge of writing the report on Russian hacking.
    Fail to mention that not one of the leaked DNC or Podesta emails has been shown to be inauthentic. So the supposed Russian hacking simply revealed truth about Hillary, DNC, and MSM collusion and corruption.
    Fail to mention that if hacking was done by or for US government to stop Hillary, blaming the Russians would be the most likely disinformation used by US agencies.
    Expect every pro-Hillary lapdog journalist - which is virtually all of them - in America will hyperventilate (Twitter is currently on fire) about this latest fact-free, anti-Trump political stunt for the next nine days.
    Or, as a reader put it, this is a soft coup attempt by leaders of Intel community and Obama Admin to influence the Electoral College vote, similar to the 1960s novel "Seven Days in May."

    DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
    When the Department Of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security release a joint statement it is not without very careful consideration to the wording.
    Therefore, to understand what is known by the US intelligence services one must analyse the language used.

    https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national

    This is very telling:
    "The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts."

    Alleged:
    adjective [attributive]
    said, without proof, to have taken place or to have a specified illegal or undesirable quality

    Consistent:
    adjective
    acting or done in the same way over time

    Method:
    noun
    a particular procedure for accomplishing or approaching something

    Motivation:
    noun
    a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way

    So, what exactly is known by the US intelligence services?

    Well what we can tell is:
    the alleged (without proof) hacks were consistent (done in the same way) with the methods (using a particular procedure) and motivations (and having reason for doing so) with Russian State actions.

    There is absolutely no certainty about this whatsoever.

    elias_ , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
    Thank God Obama will be out of office soon. He is the biggest disappointment ever. He has ordered the death of THOUSANDS via drone strikes in other people's countries and most of the deaths were innocent bystanders. If President Xi of China or Putin were to do that we would all be calling them tyrannical dictators and accusing them of a back door invasions. But somehow people are brainwashed into thinking its ok of the US president to do such things. Truly sickening.
    Flugler , 10 Dec 2016 14:4
    Says the CIA the organisation set up to destabilise governments all over the world. Lol.....
    Congratulations for keeping a straight face I hope Trump makes urgently needed personnel changes in the alphabet soup agencies working against humanity for very many years.
    Susanna246 , 10 Dec 2016 13:1
    Beware --

    This is an extremely dangerous game that Obama and the political elites are playing.

    The American political elites - including senetors, bankers, investors, multinationals et al, can feel power and control slipping away from them.

    This makes them very dangerous people indeed - as self-preservation and holding onto power is their number one priority.

    What they're aiming to do ( a child can see what's coming ), is to call into question the validity of Trump's victory and blame the Russians for it.

    The elites are looking to create chaos and insurrection, to have the result nullified and to vilify Putin and Russia.

    American and Russian troops are already lined up and facing each other along the Eastern European borders and all it takes is one small incident from either side.

    And all because those that have ruled the roost for so many decades ( in the White house, the 2 houses of Congress and Wall St ), simply cannot face losing their positions of power, wealth and political influence.

    They're out to get Trump, the populists and President Putin.

    God help us all.

    MacTavi5h , 10 Dec 2016 12:5
    This is starting to feel like an attempt to make the Trump presidency appear illegitimate. The problem is that it could actually make the democrats look like sore losers instead. We've had the recount, now it's foreign interference. This might harm them in 2020.

    I don't like that Trump won, but he did. The electoral college system is clearly in the constitution and all sides understood and agreed to it at the campaign commencement. Also some, by no means all, of commenters saying that the popular vote should win have also been on referendum BTL saying the result isn't a legitimate leave vote, make your minds up!

    I don't want Trump and I wanted to remain but, by the rules, my sides lost.

    alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 12:5
    Yet in August, Snowden warned that the recent hack of NSA tied cyber spies was not designed to expose Hillary Clinton, but rather a display of strength by the hackers, showing they could eventually unmask the NSA's own international cyber espionage and prove the U.S. meddles in elections around the world.

    http://yournewswire.com/snowden-claims-russia-can-expose-u-s-meddling-in-foreign-elections /

    nishville , 10 Dec 2016 12:3
    A reader's comment from the Independent:

    Will the CIA be providing evidence to support these allegations or is it a case of "just trust us guys"? In any event, hypocrisy is a national sport for the Yanks. According to a Reuters article 9 August 2016 "NSA operations have, for example, recently delved into elections in Mexico, targeting its last presidential campaign. According to a top-secret PowerPoint presentation leaked by former NSA contract employee Edward Snowden, the operation involved a "surge effort against one of Mexico's leading presidential candidates, Enrique Peña Nieto, and nine of his close associates." Peña won that election and is now Mexico's president.

    The NSA identified Peña's cellphone and those of his associates using advanced software that can filter out specific phones from the swarm around the candidate. These lines were then targeted. The technology, one NSA analyst noted, "might find a needle in a haystack." The analyst described it as "a repeatable and efficient" process.

    The eavesdroppers also succeeded in intercepting 85,489 text messages, a Der Spiegel article noted.

    Another NSA operation, begun in May 2010 and codenamed FLATLIQUID, targeted Pena's predecessor, President Felipe Calderon. The NSA, the documents revealed, was able "to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account."

    At the same time, members of a highly secret joint NSA/CIA organization, called the Special Collection Service, are based in the U.S. embassy in Mexico City and other U.S. embassies around the world. It targets local government communications, as well as foreign embassies nearby. For Mexico, additional eavesdropping, and much of the analysis, is conducted by NSA Texas, a large listening post in San Antonio that focuses on the Caribbean, Central America and South America."

    zulugroove -> nishville , 10 Dec 2016 13:4
    Fake news!! ...That would be a Clinton / Obama , reply!!
    CTG2016 , 10 Dec 2016 12:0
    Breaking news! CIA admits people in USA aren't smart enough to vote for the person right person. Why blame Russians now?
    Come on. Let's move on and enjoy the mess Trump will start. This is going to be worse than GWB.
    We should all just enjoy the political comedy programs.
    Gallicdweller , 10 Dec 2016 11:1
    The CIA accusing a foreign power of interfering in the election of a showman for president - it would take me all day top cite the times that this evil criminal organisation has interfered in the affairs of other countries, ordered assassinations, coups etc. etc. etc
    Dave Harries , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
    Yes like the "help" the CIA gave to the Taliban, Bin Laden and Co. when the Russians were in Afghanistan.
    Then these dimwits from the CIA who taught Bin Laden and Co guerrilla warfare totally "missed" 9/11 and Twin Towers with all their billions of funding.
    So basically this is a total load of crap and if you think we are going to believe any reports vs. Russia these fools at the CIA are going to publish then think again.
    fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
    During the election our media was exposed as in essence a propaganda tool for the Democrat campaign and they continue the unholy alliance after the election
    Liesandstats , 10 Dec 2016 10:4
    Instead of trying to blame the Russians how about reflecting on why the Democrats picked such a dreadful candidate.
    ana ruiz , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
    Pathetic move from an organisation that created ISIS and is single handling every single conflict in the world. Here we have a muppet president that for once wants to look after USA affairs internally and here we have a so alleged independent organisation that wants to keep bombing and destabilising the world. Didn't Trump said he wanted to shake the FBI and CIA ? Who is going to stop this machine of treachery ? : south America, middle east ...Asia ... they put their fingers on to create a problem- solution caveat wereas is to create weapons contracts /farma or construction and sovereign debt . But it never tricles down to the layperson ..
    Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
    "We are Not calling into question the election results"
    next White House sentence - "Just the integrity.. " WTF

    What more do you need to know - Bullshit Fake News.. propaganda, spoken by the youngest possible puppet boy White House Rep. who almost managed to have his tie done up..

    I am bookmarking this guy, for a laugh! White House Fake Newscaster ..:)

    Worth watching the sides of his mouth onto his attempt to engage you with the eyes, but blinking way too much before, during and after the word "Integrity".. FAKE!

    His hand signals.. lmfao, so measured, how sweet.. now sack the sycophants --

    fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:2
    People should know that these Breaking News stories we see in Western media on BBC, Guardian etc, about Russian interference are in fact from Wash Post and NY Times quoting mysterious sources within the CIA
    Of course we know that Wash Post and NY Times were completely objective during the election and didn't favor any party
    fedback , 10 Dec 2016 10:0
    Russia made Hillary run the most expensive campaign ever, spending 1.2 billion dollars.
    Russia stole Hillary's message to the working people and gave her lousy slogans
    Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
    My real comment is below, but work with me, for a moment.
    So, since 2008, eh? Barack has thought carefully, with a legal mind.

    Can't we somehow blame the Russians for the whole Economic collapse.. coming soon, Wall Street Cyber Crash, screwed up sKewed up systems of Ponzi virus spiraling out of control..

    blame the Russians , logic, the KGB held the FED at gunpoint and said "create $16.2 Trillion in 5 working days"
    jeez, blame anything and anybody except peace prize guy Obama, the Pope, Bankers & Israel..

    Now can we discuss the Security of the Pound against Cyber Attack.. what was it 6% in 2 minutes, early on Sunday morning, just over month ago.. whoosh!

    It seems more important than discussing an election where the result was always OBVIOUS!

    And we called it, just like Kellyanne Conway..

    Who is Huma Abedin? I wish to know and hear her talking to Kellyanne Conway, graciously in defeat.. is that so unreasonable?
    ********
    Obama wishes to distract from exceedingly poor judgement, at the very minimum....
    after his Greek Affair with Goldman Sachs.. surely.

    As for his other Foreign Policy: Eternal Shame, founded on Fake News!
    Obama the Fake News Founder to flounder over the Russians, who can prove that he, Obama supports & supported Terrorism!

    Thus this article exists, to create doubt over the veracity of evidence to be presented over NATO's involvement in SYRIA! Obama continues to resist, or loose face completely..

    Just ask Can Dundar.... what he knows now and ask Obama to secure the release of Can Dundar's wife's passport, held for no legitimate reason in Turkey! This outrageous stand off, from Erdogan & Obama to address their failures and arrogant disrespect of Woman and her Legal Human Rights is Criminal.. & a Sickness of Mind that promotes Dictatorship!

    Mainstream Media - Fake News.. for quite some time!
    & Obama is guilty!

    Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 09:4
    President-elect Donald Trump's transition team said in a statement Friday afternoon that the same people who claim Russia interfered in the presidential election had previously claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
    http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/09/trump-team-same-people-who-say-russia-meddled-in-election-said-iraq-had-wmds/#ixzz4SQWsDXpZ
    alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 09:1
    It's getting funny as Biden promised cyber attack on Russia weeks before Trump was elected .. due to Russian hackers?
    uptonogoode -> alexfoxy28 , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
    Link?
    alexfoxy28 -> uptonogoode , 10 Dec 2016 09:5
    http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/721851/russia-joe-biden-obama-cyber-attack-war-clinton-putin-US-moscow

    or just google about it.

    ArtherOhm , 10 Dec 2016 08:5
    Is the USA, as author of windows software, really unable to prevent foreign hacking?

    Do the CIA never do anything like this?

    Do we actually have any evidence rather than just a lot of allegations?

    Shotcricket -> Burnaby1000 , 10 Dec 2016 09:0
    'Russia like to surprise' ?

    The one certainty of the US/EU led drive to remove an elected leader just in their 2nd year after an election that saw them gain 47% of the popular vote was the Russki response, its borders were immediately at open 'threat' from any alliance. NATO or otherwise, the deep sea ports of eastern Ukraine which had always been accessed by the Russki fleets would lose guaranteed access etc....to believe the West was surprised by this action, would be to assume the US Generals were as stupid as the US administration, they knew exactly the response of the Russkis & would have made no difference if their leader had been named Putin or Uncle Tom Cobbly.

    In some ways the Russkis partitioning of the East of Ukraine could well minimise the possibility of a world conflict as the perceived threat is neutralised by the buffer.

    The Russkis cyber doodah is no different to our own the US etc, they're all 'at it' & all attempt to inveigle the others in terms of making life difficult.....not too sure Putin will be quite as comfortable with the Pres Elects 3 Trumpeteers though as the new Pressie looks likely to open channels of communications but those negotiations might well see a far tougher stance......still, in truth, all is never fair in love or war

    Powerspike , 10 Dec 2016 08:4
    .....that the CIA is not only suddenly involved, but suddenly at the forefront, may well reflect President-elect Trump's stated policy intentions being far removed from those that the CIA has endorsed, and might be done with an eye toward undermining Trump's position in those upcoming policy battles.
    At the center of those Trump vs. CIA battles is Syria, as the CIA has for years pushed to move away from the ISIS war and toward imposing regime change in Syria. Trump, by contrast, has said he intends to end the CIA-Saudi program arming the Syrian rebels, and focus on fighting ISIS. Trump was even said to be seeking to coordinate anti-ISIS operations with Russia.
    The CIA allegations could easily imperil that plan, as so long as the allegations remain part of the public discourse, evidence or not, anything Trump does with respect to Russia is going to have a black cloud hanging over it.
    http://news.antiwar.com/2016/12/09/cia-claims-russia-intervened-to-get-trump-elected /
    Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 08:3
    Oh dear Obama trolls? Food for your starved thoughts:

    Your degree of understanding IT is disturbing, especially given how dependent we are on it.

    This is all very simple. The process by which you find out if and how a machine was hacked was clearly documented in the Russian "Internet Audit", run by a group of Grey Hats.

    Grey Hats: People concerned about security who perform unauthorized hacks for relatively benign purposes, often just notifying people of how their system is flawed. IT staff have mixed reactions(!), the illegality is not disputed but the benefit of not being hit by a Black Hat first can be considerable at times. Differentiation is rare, especially as some hacktivist groups belong here, causing no damage beyond reputational by flagging activity that is not acceptable to the hacktivists.

    Black Hats: These are the guys to worry about. These include actually destructive hacktivists. These are the ones who steal data for malicious purposes, disrupt for malicious purposes and just generally act maliciously.

    Nothing in reports indicates if the DNC hack was Grey Hat or Black Hat, but it should be obvious that there is a difference.

    IP addresses and hangouts - worthless as evidence. Anyone can spoof the former, happens all the time (NMap used to provide the option, probably still does), Grey Hats and Black Hats alike have the latter and may break into other people's. It's all about knowing vulnerabilities.

    That voting machines were even on the Internet is disturbing. That they and the DNC server were improperly configured for such an environment is frightening - and possibly illegal.

    The standard sequence of events is thus:

    Network intrusion detector system identifies crafted packet attacking known vulnerability.
    In a good system, the firewall is set to block the attack at that instant.

    If the attacker scans the network, the only machine responding to such knocks should be a virtual machine running a honeypot on attractive-looking port numbers. The other machines in the zone should technically violate the RFCs by not responding to ICMP or generating recognized error codes on unused/blocked ports.

    The system logger picks up an event that creates a process that shouldn't be happening.
    In a good system, this either can't happen because the combination of permissions needed doesn't exist, or it doesn't matter because the process is root jailed and hasn't the privileges to actually do any harm.

    The file alteration logger (possibly Tripwire, though the Linux kernel can do this itself) detects that a process with escalated privileges is trying to create, delete or alter a file that it isn't supposed to be able to change.
    In a good system with mandatory access controls, this really is impossible. In a good system with logging file systems, it doesn't matter as you can instruct the filesystem to revert those specific alterations. Even in adequate but feeble systems, checkpoints will exist. No use in a voting system, but perfectly adequate for a campaign server. In all cases, the system logs will document what got damaged.

    The correct IT manager response is thus:
    Find out why the firewall wasn't defaulting to deny for all unknown sources and for unnecessary ports.
    Find out why the public-facing system wasn't isolated in the firewall's DMZ.
    Find out why NIDS didn't stop the attack.
    Non-public user mobility should be via IPSec using certificates. That deals with connecting from unknown IP addresses without exposing the innards of the system.
    Lock down misconfigured network systems.
    Backup files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt for forensic purposes.
    Revert files identified by file alteration detection as corrupt to last good version.
    Close permission loopholes. Everything should run with the fewest privileges necessary, OS included. On Linux, kernel permissions are controlled via capabilities.
    Establish from the logs if the intruder came through a public-facing application, an essential LAN service or a non-essential service.
    If it's a LAN service, block access to that service outside the LAN on the host firewall.
    Run network and host vulnerability scanners to detect potential attack vectors.
    Update any essential software that is detected as flawed, then rerun the scanners. Repeat until fixed.
    Now the system is locked down against general attacks, you examine the logs to find out exactly what failed and how. If that line of attack got fixed, good. If it didn't, then fix it.
    Password policy should prevent rainbow attacks, not users. Edit as necessary, lock accounts that aren't secure and set the password control system to ban bad passwords.

    It is impossible from system logs to track where an intruder came from, unsecured routers are common and that means a skilled attacker can divert packets to anywhere. You can't trust brags, in security nobody is honest. The sensible thing is to not allow such events in the first place, but when (not if) they happen, learn from them.

    GraemeHarrison , 10 Dec 2016 08:2
    If the USA is to investigate the effect of foreign governments 'corrupting' the free decisions of the American people in elections, perhaps they could look into the fact that for the past three decades every Republican candidate for president, after they have won the nomination of their party, has gone to just one foreign country to pledge their firm commitment/allegiance to that foreign power, for the purpose of shoring up large blocks of donors prior to the actual presidential election. The effect is probably more 'corrupting' than any leak of emails!
    SamSamson , 10 Dec 2016 08:2
    Obama should confess to creating ISIS, sustaining ISIS & utilising ISIS as a proxy army to have them do things that he knew US soldiers could never be caught doing!!!

    They then spoon fed you bullshit propaganda about who the bad guys were, without ever being to properly explain why the US armed forces were prevented from taking any hostile action against ISIS, until they were FORCED TO, that is, when Putin let the the cat out of the bag!!!

    LordTomnoddy , 10 Dec 2016 08:1
    Hilarious. One would've thought Obama of all presidents would be reluctant to delve too deeply into this particular midden. As the author of the weakest and most incompetent American foreign policy agenda since Carter's, it's much the likeliest that if China or Russia have been hacking US elections, then by far the biggest beneficiary will have been himself.
    Tim Jenkins , 10 Dec 2016 08:1
    Just another attempt to distract from realities, like:-

    From:[email protected] To: [email protected], [email protected] Date: 2015-05-28 12:12 Subject: Fwd: POLITICO Playbook

    cdm Begin forwarded message: > From: Lynn Forester de Rothschild <[email protected]> > Date: May 28, 2015 at 9:44:12 AM EDT > To: Nick Merrill <[email protected]>, "Cheryl Mills ([email protected])" <[email protected]> > Subject: FW: POLITICO Playbook > > Morning, > I am sure you are working on this, but clearly, the opposition is trying to undercut Hillary's reputation for honesty (the number one characteristic people look for in a President according to most polls) ..and also to benefit from an attack on wealth that Dems did the most to start I am sure we need to fight back against both of these attacks. > Xoxo > Lynn > > By Mike Allen (@mikeallen; [email protected]), and Daniel Lippman (@dlippman; [email protected]) > > > > QUINNIPIAC POLL, out at 6 a.m., "Rubio, Paul are only Republicans even close to Clinton": "In a general election, ... Clinton gets 46 percent of American voters to 42 percent for Paul and 45 percent of voters to 41 percent for Rubio." Clinton leads Christie 46-37 ... Huckabee 47-40 ... Jeb 47-37 ... Walker 46-38 ... Cruz 48-37 ... Trump 50-32. > > --"[V]oters say 53-39 percent that Clinton is NOT honest and trustworthy, but say 60-37 ... that she has strong leadership qualities. Voters are divided 48-47 ... over whether Clinton cares about their needs and problems." > > --RNC's new chart - "'Dead Broke' Clintons vs. Everyday Americans": "Check out the chart below to see how many households in each state it would take to equal the 'Dead Broke' Clintons." http://bit.ly/1Avg8iE

    Blind leading the Blind.. & Obama knows that very well after it was clear that Clinton was NEVER trusted by the Voters, which makes Debbie and the DNC look like a complete bunch of..

    Idiots?!?! STILL BLAMING The RUSSIANS.... instead of themselves!

    She was and always will be unelectable due to exceedingly poor judgement, across the board.

    Can we move on?

    Polly123456 , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
    Who is in charge of Internet security in the US government? Because it seems full of holes. Last time it was the Chinese and this time it's the Russians, yet not one piece of evidence to say where hacks have come from. How much are these world class Internet security people paid? And why do they still have a job? People sitting in their bedrooms on a pc from stores like staples have hacked their security regularly.
    AlexPeace , 10 Dec 2016 08:0

    In 2016, he said, the government did not detect any increased cyber activity on election day itself but the FBI made public specific acts in the summer and fall, tied to the highest levels of the Russian government. "This is going to put that activity in a greater context ... dating all the way back to 2008."

    Extremely vague. Seems like there is no evidence at all to suggest any Russian involvement, but they need to pretend otherwise. Blah, blah, blah, Weapons of mass destruction... Apollo mission, etc
    FMinus , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
    Ole, Russians exposed the DNC emails, we knew about that. I though this should investigate Russians vote rigging, but I guess not. I for once welcome anyone who hacks my government and exposes their skeletons, so I can see what kind of dirty garbage I had leading or potentially leading my country.

    Maybe the DNC should play fair and not dirty next time and put a candidate forward without skeletons that still reek of rotting flesh.

    Robert Stokes -> FMinus , 10 Dec 2016 08:3
    You rig electronic voting machines by reflashing the firmware or switching out the sd cards. Can't be done remotely.
    Baldrick Daacat , 10 Dec 2016 07:5
    And the CIA has never intervened in a foreign election?
    VibePit -> Baldrick Daacat , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
    Oh heaven forbid!! The Shah of Iran was democratically elected but of course. . .
    HeathCardwell , 10 Dec 2016 07:2
    Don't believe any of this at all.
    American has been thee most corrupt and disgusting western nation for decades, run by people who are now being shown for who they really are and they're shitting themselves big time. The stakes don't get higher than this.
    theonetruepainter , 10 Dec 2016 07:1
    What's the point of this?

    The American people don't want Clinton because she is a liar and a dangerous psychopath who also ignored the working people.

    If you want to change that, get her treatment. Don't try to undermine the election result.

    theonetruepainter , 10 Dec 2016 07:0
    How can you not respect Putin?

    He's spent the last few years making fools out of Clinton, Kerry and the obomber.

    If you didn't want him to let Crimea rejoin Russia, then you shouldn't have initiated the coup that broke up Ukraine.

    Peter Turner , 10 Dec 2016 07:0
    What a total load of double talk. There is zero integrity in anything CIA says or does since the weapons of mass destruction deal or before that it was the Iran Contra deal and before that it was the Bay of Pigs. Now we have this rigging os the election results based on zero evidence. The whole thing is just idiocy. What is Obama trying to achieve?The end game will be for Obama to go down in history as ... let's just say he is not the smartest tool in the shed when it comes to being a so called world leader. Well done Obama you have now completely trashed what is left of your legacy.
    LondonLungs , 10 Dec 2016 06:5

    "CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election – report "

    You might as well ask accountants to do a study on wether it's worthwhile to use an accountant. Part of the CIAs job is to influence elections around the world to get US-Corporation friendly gov'ts in to power. So yes of course they are going to say that a gov't can influence elections, if they said otherwise then they'd be admitting they're wasting money.

    Ted Reading Reading 10 Dec 2016 06:3
    So, it was the Russians! I knew it must've been them, they're so sneaky. All HFC had was the total backing of the entire establishment, including prominent Republican figures, the total fawning support of the entire main-stream media machine which carefully controlled the "she's got a comfortable 3 point lead maybe even double-digit lead" narrative and the "boo and hiss" pantomime slagging of her opponent. Plus the endless funds from the crooked foundation and murderous fanatics from the compliant Gulf states, and lost. But hey, do keep this going please, it'll help the Trumpster get a second term! Trump/Nugent 2020.
    righteousfist01 , 10 Dec 2016 06:2
    It's possible the Russians hacked and released the documents. However the report is not saying the Russians created them.

    So whatever was so deplorable about them was all Democrat

    Nataliefreeman -> righteousfist01 , 10 Dec 2016 06:3
    Good point. Add that the whole election was dogged is the most glaring media bias and suddenly Russia comes off as simply leveling the playing field a bit
    12inchPianist , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
    CIA finds Russia had covertly influenced election. CIA finds FBI had overtly influenced election. Fancy that!
    ashleigh2 , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
    The 'secret' enquiry reported to Congress that the CIA concludes etc, etc, etc. Then yet more revelations from 'anonymous sources' are quoted in the Washington Post and The New York Times reaching the same conclusions.....talk about paranoia, or are the Democrats guilty of news fakery of the highest order to deny the US voters....
    Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 05:5
    Ooh Obama...there's a little snag about this investigation.

    In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

    In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

    In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

    In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S. even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

    In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

    In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

    In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

    So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

    Bosula , 10 Dec 2016 05:5
    How about a Presidential review covering US interference in the elections of countries around the world?
    Paulare -> Bosula , 10 Dec 2016 06:2
    But where to start?

    UK, Australia, Chile, Nicoragua, Cuba, Philippines, Malaysia, Germany...?

    such choice..

    Bosula -> Paulare , 10 Dec 2016 08:0
    Yes. Maybe do it on a regional basis across the globe.
    Anarchy4theUK , 10 Dec 2016 05:4
    Of course the Americans would never interfere in other people's elections would they?...........I imagine the Russians wanted to avoid a nuclear war with war monger Hilary & who can blame them?
    Nataliefreeman -> Anarchy4theUK , 10 Dec 2016 06:1
    Y'know really all they seem to be looking possibly guilty of is the wikileaks scandal. Compare that to the enormous media bias regarding Trump and suddenly the Russians at worst come off as evening the playing field so as to help an election be less biased...
    Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 05:4
    When certain members of the public would believe one man over those who have more intelligence in a follicle than he will ever have floating in his cranium is when you realise that a place like Guantanamo should exist, exclusively for them.
    http://www.allgov.com/news/where-is-the-money-going/surprise-cost-of-ammo-for-us-navy-destroyers-new-guns-800000-a-shot-161114?news=859762
    Newmacfan , 10 Dec 2016 05:3
    Paranoia about Russia has arrived at the laughable, almost like the fable of the boy who cried wolf! Even the way the CIA statement is worded makes you smile. "silk purse sows ear"? Everyone is clutching at straws rather than looking down the barrel at the truth......that folks is what is missing from Western Politics......"The Truth" --
    StephenO , 10 Dec 2016 04:3

    Obama expected the review to be completed before he leaves office...

    Really?? Obama wants a "deep review" of internet activities surrounding the elections of 2008, 2012, and 2016; and he wants this done in less than 40 days? And it encompasses voting stations throughout the 50 states? That's the definition of political shenanigans.

    Dom Michaels -> pureist , 10 Dec 2016 04:3
    Seeing as how the CIA interfered with Ukraine before and during the overthrow of Yanukovich, and with Moscow protests a few years ago...... seems like everyone is always trying to interfere with each-other. Hypocrisy abounds
    MarkThomason , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
    This is not really a fight against Trump. That is lost. This is an intramural fight among Democrats.

    This is desperate efforts by the corporate Democrats to hang on to power after Hillary (again) lost.

    Excuses. Allegations without sources given, anonymous.

    Remember that the same people used the same media contacts to spread fake news that the Podesta leaks were faked, and tried to shift attention from what was revealed to who revealed it.

    GuyCybershy -> MarkThomason , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
    Agreed. Another reason why the Democratic party is not worth saving. 13 million voted for Sanders in the primary, that is enough to start a new party.
    Fabr1s , 10 Dec 2016 03:4
    if the Ruskies did it, there's something funny: they did it on Obama's watch and her protege, Hillary, lost it. The system is a real mess in this case.

    Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 03:4
    Read and research further...
    https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national
    GeoffP -> Kris Penny , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
    Interesting link. It raises a particularly salient question: assuming the Russians did indeed do it - and after the whole CIA yellow cake thing in Iraq, no one could possibly doubt national intelligence agencies any more - does it particularly matter?

    Did the Russians write the emails? The betrayal of Sanders, the poor protection on classified materials, the cynical, vicious nonsense spewed out by the HRC campaign, the media collusion with the DNC and HRC: did the Russians do these things too? Or was that Clinton and the DNC? Silly question, I'm sure.

    sejong -> jcadams , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
    Russia's competence with computer hacking and cyber espionage is a given

    So what? What about Chinese or Israeli competence in these areas?

    This is Fake News that exists only because Clinton lost.

    The real news is about in competence by HRC, DWS, and the DNC in foisting a sure loser on American voters.

    naomh -> sejong , 10 Dec 2016 03:5
    Thank you for speaking the truth!!!!
    GeoffP -> jcadams , 10 Dec 2016 04:0
    Well, chief, the Wisconsin recount is in and the results are staggering: after the recount, Clinton has gained on Trump by 3 votes... and Trump gained on Clinton by a heady six votes. One begins to wonder at the 'Manchurian candidate' claim.
    third_eye , 10 Dec 2016 03:3
    It is precisely charades like this that millions in the US and around the world have given up on the establishment. Business as usual or rather lying as usual will only alienate more not-so-stupid citizens. It speaks volumes about their desperation that they're are actually employing such obviously infantile tactics on the Russia even as they continue to paper over Hillary's tattered past. The result of the investigation is totally predictable..................Yes, the Russians were involved in hacking the elections, but..........for reasons of national security, details of the investigative process and evidence cannot be revealed.
    Longleveler , 10 Dec 2016 03:2
    If the Russians really wanted Trump to win that means they helped Hillary win the Democratic primaries because Bernie would have beat Trump.. There was a mess of hanky-panky going on to defeat Bernie, and deflecting the blame to a foreign actor should keep the demonstrators off the streets.
    If someone is gullible enough to believe the Russians did it they'd also believe that Elvis made Bigfoot hack the DNC. That's even more plausible since bigfoot is just a guy who spends so much time sitting at his computer he lost all interest in personal hygiene.
    Will D , 10 Dec 2016 03:1
    The Democrats are really desperate to find anything they can use to challenge the results of the election.

    Either way they look foolish - openly investigating the possibility of Russian hacking which acknowledges that their electoral systems aren't well secured, OR look really foolish if they find anything (whether real or faked).

    The big question now is if, and how much, they will fake the findings of the investigation so that they can declare the election results wrong, and put Clinton into the White House.

    Clearly, it is a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures. It is incredible that one man can make the largest Western nation look so ridiculous in the eyes of the world.

    madeiranlotuseater , 10 Dec 2016 02:4
    Pot calling the kettle black. Reveal fully what the CIA get up to all over the planet. The phoney intel America has used to go to war causing countries to implode. The selective way they release information to project the picture they want. I am not convinced that Russia is any better or any worse than the USA.
    onofabeach , 10 Dec 2016 02:3
    I can understand the Russians wanting Obama in 2008 and 2012 because he is a weak leader and totally incompetent.

    I can also understand Putin preferring DJT to HRC.

    It's about time the planet settled down a little bit, Trump and Putin will do more for world peace in the next year than Obama achieved in his 8 wasted years in charge.

    The Democrats have yet to realise the reason for their demise was not the racists, the homophobes, the KKK, the Deplorables, the misogynists, the xenophobes etc etc etc.

    It was Hillary Clinton.

    Get over it, move on, stop whining, get out of your safe room, put the puppy down, throw the play dough away, stop protesting, behave like an adult.

    As much as I am enjoying the monumental meltdown of the left, it is getting sad now and I am starting to feel very sorry for you.

    BoBiel , 10 Dec 2016 02:2
    Georgia Says Someone in U.S. Government Tried to Hack State's Computers Housing Voter Data

    http://www.wsj.com/articles/georgia-reports-attempt-to-hack-states-election-database-via-ip-address-linked-to-homeland-security-1481229960

    http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2016-12-08/georgia-accuses-us-of-trying-to-hack-its-election-systems

    123Akava , 10 Dec 2016 02:1
    What a sad bunch of clowns. But the time is ripe. You and your sort are done Obama, Hillary Clinton, Juncker, Merkel, Hollande, Mogherini, Kerry, Tusk, Nuland, Albright, Breedlove, SaManThe Power and the rest of the reptiles. With all respect - mwuahahaha! - you will soon sink into the darkness of the darkest places of history, but you won't be forgotten, no you won't!
    poppetmaster , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
    The Democrats still don't understand that the problem in American politics is everything that happened BEFORE election day.

    How can you worry about the ballot boxes when the entire process from beginning to end is utterly corrupt.

    CarlHansen , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
    As for the Podesta email. John Podesta was so stupid that he gave out his password in a simple email scam that any 8 year old kid could have conducted. I wouldn't be surprised if Assange did it himself. Assange will be celebrating at the demise of Hillary.
    phobeophobe , 10 Dec 2016 02:0
    Guys! Your side lost the election. Get over it & stop looking for excuses.

    I don't think it was the Russians, it was just a lot of people got sick of being told what to think & how to behave by your side of politics.

    It is because people who disagree with you are either ignored, shut-down or called names with weaponised words such as "racist, bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, islamophobe, you name it. You go out onto the streets chanting mindless slogans aimed at shutting down debate. You have infiltrated academia and no journalism graduate comes out of a western univerity without a 60 degree lean to the left. People of alternative views to what is now the dominant social paradigm are not permitted to speak at universities. Once they were the vanguard of dangerous ideas. Now they are just sheep pens.

    You have infiltrated the mainstream media so of course people need to go to Info Wars, Breitbart & Project Veritas to get the other side to your one-sided argument.

    Your side of politics has regulated the very words we speak so that we can't even express a thought anymore without being chanted down, or shut down, prosecuted or sued.

    There was once a time when it was the left who spoke up for freedom of speech. It was the left who demanded that a man be judged by the content of his character & not the color of his skin & it was once the right who used to be worried about the Russians taking over our institutions.

    Have a look at yourselves. Look at what you've become. You've stopped being the guardians of freedom & now you have become the very anti-freedom totalitarians you thought you were campaigning against.

    Bleating about the "popular vote" doesn't cut it either. That's like saying, the other side scored more goals than us but we had possession of the ball more times. It is sad for you but it is irrelevant.

    Trump won the election! Get over it!

    Let's see what sort of job he does before deciding what to do next.

    Nataliefreeman , 10 Dec 2016 01:5
    News flash for all the obamabots:

    In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that set up a NAT entry that made the connecting computer appear somewhere else, with the entry deleted afterwards. Typically, IP table modifications aren't logged, so this would not be detectable.

    In principle, the DNC server could have had malware in an e-mail that ran a SED script at a specific time that changed any occurrence of one IP address with another. Not sure anyone would bother with this, but it's why good system admins place so much emphasis on securing logs. However, it's obvious we're not talking about good admins.

    In principle, every router between the DNC server and Russia has the potential to be hacked, with a tunnel added to send the traffic somewhere else in the world with new source and destination addresses. This is known as router table poisoning. It is preventable but the mechanisms are rarely ever used because the security services want to be able to do this themselves. There are some nice logs of the NSA using this.

    In principle, someone along the way could tap into the fibre, spoofing IP addresses and injecting/sniffing packets. The U.S. even has a submarine designed for this, but optics aren't complex and any number of neo-phone phreaks could have the hardware.

    In principle, someone at an ISP or backbone service could have had a laptop plugged into a switch or router to do the same thing, or lit up a strand of dark fibre to let some uber-wealthy business do this. And there's no shortage of uber-wealthy businesses who aren't keen on Democrats. This technique is used for local and remote network diagnostics, no reason it can't be used nefarious, it's not like the hardware cares why a wire is plugged in.

    In principle, the supposed destination machine could have been hacked to relay the packets in encrypted form to the South Pole or a college campus in Texas. There are many examples of client machines being hacked to do this. It's basically what zombie machines are in botnets.

    In practice, it is flat-out guaranteed that none of the security agencies could distinguish this from a Russian attack. Nothing in the area monitored could tell the difference. We know, for a fact, that college kids spoofing a scan from China have fooled the DoD and NSA on previous occasions, it has caused international incidents.

    So we have known forms of attack that are known to exist, aren't complex and in some cases are already used for attacks. They are 100% untraceable.

    DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 01:3
    Joe Biden unwittingly gave the game up when he spoke to the press with indignation of the Russian hacks. The US would respond in kind with a covert cyber operation run by the CIA First of all it would be the NSA, not the CIA Secondly, it's not covert when you tell the press! Oh Joe, you really let the Obama administration down with that gaffe! Who would believe them now? A lot of people it would seem. Mainly those still reeling from an election they were so vested in
    fedback , 10 Dec 2016 01:2
    Unfortunately our media has lost all credibility.
    For years we were told it was necessary to remove the dictator Assad in Syria. The result, a country destroyed, migrant crisis that fuelled Brexit and brought EU to its knees.
    Now they are going to sell the 'foreign entities decided the US election'.
    It's just a sad situation
    GuyCybershy -> fedback , 10 Dec 2016 01:2
    Syria has been destroyed because Western client states in the Middle East wanted this to happen. Assad had a reasonably successful secular government and our medieval gulf state allies felt. threatened by his regime. there was the little business of a pipeline, but of course that would be called a "conspiracy theory".
    SomersetApples , 10 Dec 2016 01:1
    If Obama has resources to spend on investigations, he should be investigating why the US is providing guided missiles to the terrorist in Syria. We had such great hopes for him, and he has proved to be totally useless as a president. Rather than giving us leadership and guidance he is looking under his bed for spooks. Just another example of his incompetence at a time when we needed leadership.

    Looking for proof of espionage will be like trying to prove a negative and only result in a possible or at best a likely type of result for no purpose. It would just be another case of an unsupported accusation being thrown about.

    Facing up to the question of who is supplying weapons to terrorist would require the courage to take on the Military Industrial Complex and he hasn't got it. Trump will be different.

    ID3053875 , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
    If the russians did interfere in the USA elections perhaps is a bit of poetic justice.
    The USA has interfere in Latin America for over hundred years and they have given us Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Noriega, Pinochet, Duvaliers , military juntas in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Streener in Paraguay to name a few. They all were narcissists, racists and insecure. The american people love this type of leader now they got him in the white house may be from Russia with love. Empires get destroyed from within, look at Little Britain now, maybe the same will happen soon in the USA.
    Viva China , is far from Latin America
    nbk46zh , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
    So if the US managed to somehow get rid of Russia and China, what would they do then? How would it justify hundreds of billions in defense spending? Just remember, the US military industry desperately needs an external enemy to exist. Without it, there is no industry.
    ID5151903 , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
    No I disagree. I don't think it was a conpriscy. It was just decades of misinformation, lies, usually perpertrated by our esteemed foreign minister. The man is a buffoon , liar and incompetent. It is quite amusing to see how inept, Incompotent and totally unsuited this man child is to public office.
    PullingTheStrings , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
    Good to see alot of Americans on here back into Mccarthyism/Paranoia/scapegoating/Witch hunting/Propaganda.
    smellycat , 10 Dec 2016 01:0
    Clinton's 'Russia did it' cop-out
    https://off-guardian.org/2016/12/09/clintons-russia-did-it-cop-out /
    prairdog , 10 Dec 2016 00:4
    Why should we trust US intelligence which is essentially US propaganda?
    DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 00:3
    Another red herring that smacks of desperation. The final death throes of a failed administration. These carefully chosen words reveal a lot. The email leaks were "consistent with the methods and motivations" of Russian hackers. In layman's terms its the equivalent of saying "we haven't got a clue who it was but it's the kind of thing they would probably do". Don't expect a smoking gun because it doesn't exist, otherwise we would have known about it by now.
    PostTrotskyite -> DanielDee , 10 Dec 2016 00:3
    It's not just the US who has accused Putin of meddling in their domestic affairs. Germany and the UK have made the same allegations. Are they wrong too?
    DanielDee -> PostTrotskyite , 10 Dec 2016 00:5
    I think anyone with reasonable intelligence would take each accusation on a case by case basis. There is no doubt that Russia conducts cyber operations, as the US and UK and Germany does. There is also little doubt that significant Russophobia exists, particularly since the failed foreign attempt of regime change in Syria that was thwarted by Russia. On that last point many citizens of the West are coming to the realisation that a secular government in Syria is preferable to one run by jihadists installing crude sharia law (Libya was certainly a lesson). Furthermore, if Hillary Clinton had succeeded one dreads to think of the consequences of her no-fly-zone plans. Thankfully she didn't succeed, no doubt in part to wikileaks revelations, who for the record stated that did not result from Russian hacks
    sejong , 10 Dec 2016 00:2
    Fake News is mass gaslighting, removing any sense of what is real. Biggest psy-op ever.
    gondwanaboy , 10 Dec 2016 00:1
    Barack Obama orders 'full review' of possible Russian hacking in US election


    FAKE NEWS ALERT

    JCDavis -> gondwanaboy , 10 Dec 2016 00:2
    They already stated their conclusions, now they have to find evidence.
    Yodasyodel , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
    Hows the election recount going? You know the one this paper kept going on about a few weeks ago in Wisconsin that was supposed to be motivated by "Russian Hacking" in the election? Not very well but you have gone quiet. Also I see the Washington Post has been forced to backtrack for implying news outlets like Breitbart are Russian controlled on the advice of their own lawyers....after all calling someone a Russian agent without a shred of evidence is seriously libellous and they know it. Russian agents to blame yeah ok Obama no doubt the Easter Bunny will be next in your sights you fraud.
    Wilderloo , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
    Look no further than Hillarys private server. Classified information sent and received and Obam was part of it. Obama is a liar and a fraud who is now blaming the Russians for crooked Hillarys loss.
    SUNLITE , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
    Feed the flames of the war mongers that want Russia and Putin to be our bogeyman.Feed the military industrial complex more billions.The U.S. Defense budget is already 10 times that of Russia ,feed NATO already on Russia's boarder with tanks ,troops and heavy weapons.i did expect more from this pres,... The lies ,mis information and propaganda has worked so well since the end of WW2,upon a public who has been fed those lies {and is to busy with sports ,gadgets,games, alcohol and other drugs }for 70 yrs by a compliant,for profit lap dog media more interested in producing infotainment and profits than supplying information..If you don't think the "public" isn't very poorly informed and will believe anything ,..just look at who the next prez will be..
    GuyCybershy -> SUNLITE , 10 Dec 2016 00:0
    I don't think it's true that Trump voters were less informed than Clinton voters. The public knows that they all lie, they simply choose the one who's lies most appeal to them.
    Alexander Bach , 9 Dec 2016 23:5
    Did he also order to investigate the Clinton's deeds revealed by the 'hackers'?
    fedback , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
    Unfortunately Obama is not leaving office with dignity.
    This action is another attempt to delegitimize the election of Trump. We already have the recount farce going on.
    If Republicans had tried to delegitimize the election of Obama we know what the reaction from media would have been. An outcry against antidemocratic and racist behaviour
    USApatriot12 , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
    The corporate media is so predictable at this point. The news cranks up the anti-Russia hysteria while the guys over in entertainment roll out a slick fantasy about anti-Nazi resistance. It all adds up to a big steaming pile of crap but you hope it will push enough buttons to keep the citizens chained to their their desks for another quarter. Don't bet on it. As a great American said at another time of upheaval, you can't fool everyone forever...
    GuyCybershy -> USApatriot12 , 9 Dec 2016 23:3
    We're supposed to condemn "white nationalism" in The US and UK while supporting it in Ukraine.
    GeeDeeSea -> GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 23:4
    That's not all. We in US and UK are supposed to condemn jihadists in Iraq while supporting them Syria.
    James7 -> Eddy Cannella , 9 Dec 2016 23:2
    Hillary? Although I would lean to more "Grey."

    Kremlin Connection? The TRUTH About Hillary's Shady Ties To Russia REVEALED
    Find out why insiders say Clinton has some explaining to do.

    Americans have no idea just how closely Hillary Clinton is tied to the Kremlin! That's the shocking claim of a new report that alleges the Democratic nominee is secretly pals with Vladimir Putin and his countrymen.

    Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, has published a report that claims that that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was on the executive board of a foreign company that received $35 million from the Kremlin. "The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated - and for what - is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law," John Schindler of the Observer wrote.

    As Radar previously reported, when Clinton was secretary of state, she profited from the "Russian Reset," a failed attempt to improve relations between the U.S. and Russia.
    chweizer wrote, "Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process - on both the Russian and U.S. sides - had major financial ties to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars, including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties." Schweizer also details "Skolkovo," a Silicon Valley-like campus that both the U.S. and Russia worked on for developing biomed, space, nuclear and IT technologies. He told the New York Post that there was a "pattern that shows a high percentage of participants in Skolkovo who happen to be Clinton Foundation donors."

    raymondffoulkes , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
    So it's anti-Russia propaganda today again, all over the Guardian as well as everywhere else.

    I daresay they have a few things (perhaps a tad more important than football and athletics) to say about us as well..

    smellycat -> raymondffoulkes , 9 Dec 2016 23:2
    Sour grapes at the liberation of Aleppo and their loss of face.
    I'm surprised they haven't started asking about the missing 250K civilians,who must even now be languishing in Assad's dungeons.
    Keeping that one for tomorrow probably.
    nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
    When Cheney used the terror alert levels to keep the US population in the constant state of fear, the Democrats denounced it as fear mongering. Now they're embracing the same tactics in the constant demonization of Russia. Look, it's raining today! Russia must be trying to control the weather in the US! Get them! Utterly ridiculous.
    stegordon21 , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
    The US has been the most bloodthirsty, aggressive nation in my lifetime. Where the US goes we obediently follow. Yet as Obama (7 countries he's bombed in his presidency, not bad for a Nobel Prize Winner) continues to circle Russia with NATO on their borders. We're continually spun headline news that Russia is the aggressor and is continually meddling in foreign affairs. We are the aggressors, we are the danger to ourselves and it's we who are run by megalomaniac elites who pump us full of fear and propaganda.
    nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
    Malicious cyberactivity... has no place in international community... No? When West does it, then it's for democratic purposes? But invading countries on a humanitarian pretense does? So Democrats are still looking to blame Russia for everything not going their way I see. This rhetoric didn't work for Clinton in the election and it won't now. Stop with this nonsense
    GuyCybershy -> nbk46zh , 9 Dec 2016 23:1
    There wasn't a lot of outrage about the use of the "stuxnet" virus against Iran. You see, when we do it is always for a good cause.

    Paulare , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
    Take the long view folks.

    The Egyptian Empire lasted millenum,
    The Greek and Roman Empires a thousand years, give or take.
    The Holy Roman Empire centuries.
    The British and French circa 200 years.
    The USSR about 70, the USA 70 and counting

    This is just the cyclical death throes of empires played out at ever increasing speed before our very eyes.

    DexDex , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
    5 articles abut Russia, again. This is the Russia interference in the Guardian. Putin must be stopped.
    Earl_Grey -> DexDex , 9 Dec 2016 23:0
    NATO has bought a subscription to the Guardian
    TonyBlunt , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
    Is all this hoohaa the BBC and the Guardian trying to get some revenge for the Russian liberating East Aleppo?
    TheIPAResistance , 9 Dec 2016 22:5
    This is exactly why we should never move to electronic voting. Can you imagine the lengths the IPA would go to ensure their men security the power they need to roll out their neoliberal agenda? As a tax-free right wing think tank composed of rich like Rinehart, Murdoch, Forrest, et al. the sky's the limit.
    Anthony1152 , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
    The five stages of dealing with psychological trauma: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Hillary and the Democrats are still at stage one and two. Obama is only beginning stage one as events dawn on him.
    TheCharacteristicEquation 9 Dec 2016 22:4
    I really do feel the established media and its elite hierarchy are vexed by both the Trump victory and Brexit here in the UK. Now the media attention turns to a report on another of its perpetual campaigns, namely Russia, and corruption in sport.

    I'm not going to doubt the 'findings', but I know humans are corrupt ALL over the world, but it does strike me that no Western outlet, ever prints anything positive about Russia. I mean - nothing, zero!

    dallasdunlap , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
    If, indeed, the Russian government gathered the DNC and Podesta info released by Wikileaks, the Russians did the American people a favor by pulling back the curtain on behind the scenes scheming by Clinton campaign potentates.
    Of course, I don't believe the Democratic claim that Clinton lost the election because of the Russians and the FBI.
    GuyCybershy -> dallasdunlap , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
    Podesta's password was "p@ssword". Inexcusable carelessness.
    smellycat , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
    Nothing wrong with a bit of regime change now and then, so we've been told. No good crying when the Russians do it to you.
    sammy3110 , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
    It's instructive to see the Guardian drag up Reagan's "Evil Empire" spiel, but only after Hillary lost.
    GeeDeeSea , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
    US backed a coup, or set up a coup, to overthrow the democratically elected government in Ukraine which led to war. Putin's payback seems fully justified.
    theenko -> GeeDeeSea , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
    sweet fucking jesus

    Yanukovych is a disgrace to Ukrainian's everywhere and a traitor to his country. Fucking Putin puppet should be in jail.

    GeeDeeSea -> theenko , 9 Dec 2016 22:4
    sweet fucking jesus

    Porshenko is a disgrace to Ukrainian's everywhere and a traitor to his country. Fucking Obama puppet should be in jail.

    Earl_Grey , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
    Oh my, a foreign country may have had a tiny influence on a US Election.

    How about investigating the overthrow of the Democratically elected Govt in Ukraine, or the influence the US has had on the Syrian Govt, or even in Australia, where the Chinese Govt donates massive amounts of money to Political Parties (note, there's no link of course between Chinese Govt donations and Chinese Companies being able to buy most of Australia and employ Chinese Nationals in Australia on Chinese conditions and 500,000 Chinese Nationals being able to buy Real Estate in Sydney alone... none whatsoever).

    bcnteacher , 9 Dec 2016 22:3
    Good call! Something is fishy about the US electoral system.
    COReilly , 9 Dec 2016 22:2
    I'm not a policy or think tank wonk, but isn't Russia just a euphemism for China. Aren't their geopolitical interests linked. You just say Russia because China has us by the financial balls (I'm sure the Guardian would prefer to NOT be censored on the mainland) right? Package it that way and I'm on board. My love of Dostoevsky goes out the window. Albeit I still think Demons one of the best novels ever written. Woke me up.
    fedback , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
    Survivor of Bosnian sniper fire Hillary Clinton decries fake news in speech yesterday
    Aaron Aarons , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
    I'm all in favor of delegitimizing the incoming semi-fascist Trump/Pence regime, and find Obama's talk of a smooth transition disgusting. However, I reject the appeal to Russophobia or other Xenophobia.

    BTW, Obama and his collaborators like Diane Feinstein have done a lot to prepare the legal basis for fascistic repression under the new POtuS.

    Sund Fornuft , 9 Dec 2016 22:1
    I already know what the comission will find. They will find evidences that Iraq holds vast ammonúnt of weapons of mass destruction! Oh wait, that was already used.
    kalander , 9 Dec 2016 22:0
    Obama has been as useless as his predecessor young Bush. His policies generally are in tatters and the US neo cons evil fantasy of full spectrum dominance has met its death in Syria. Bravo.
    ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 22:0
    The neoliberal corporate machine is wounded but not dead. They will use every trick, ploy and opportunity to try to regain power.

    The fight goes on.

    fedback , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
    After an election cycle with proven collusion between the DNC/Hillary Clinton campaign and our media, our media has the nerve to come up with the term 'fake news'.
    Hypocrisy at its finest
    John Urquhart , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
    Nobody does paranoia like the yanks. To the rest of the world, the unedifying spectacle of the world's biggest bullies, snoops, warmongers, liars and hypocrites complaining about how unfair life is, is pretty nauseating. Most of America's problems are home-grown.
    ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
    Why fake the news when you can just strong the media companies into muzzling their criticism?

    http://nypost.com/2016/12/09/mika-brzezinski-says-clinton-camp-tried-to-pull-her-off-the-air /

    mjp3470 , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
    And the final report will conclude with something along the lines of:
    'After a thorough, exhaustive investigation of all relevant evidence concerning the potential of foreign interference in the United States electoral process, the results of the investigation have shown that, although there remain troubling questions about the integrity of U.S. cyber-security which should prompt immediate Congressional review, there has been uncovered no conclusive evidence to support the conjecture that cyber attacks originating with any foreign actor, state or individual had any significant effect on the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election, and that there is no cause or justification for the American People to question the fairness of or lose faith in the electoral process and laid out by and carried out according to the Constitution.'
    I do Holiday cards too.
    garenmel -> mjp3470 , 9 Dec 2016 22:2
    My hat off to you sir/madam. This was great!
    Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
    Georgia's Secretary of State is accusing someone at the Department of Homeland Security of illegally trying to hack its computer network, including the voter registration database.
    In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, copied to the full Georgia congressional delegation, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp alleges that a computer with a DHS internet address attempted to breach its systems.
    http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/309530-state-of-georgia-allegedly-accusing-homeland-security-of-attempted-hack

    Wake up and smell the BS, the hacking is being done by people a lot nearer home.....

    feliciafarrel , 9 Dec 2016 21:5
    Oh dear, the GOP seem to have forgotten what they were saying about Putin and the Kremlin a short while back:

    The continuing erosion of personal liberty and fundamental rights under the current officials in the Kremlin. Repressive at home and reckless abroad, their policies imperil the nations which regained their self-determination upon the collapse of the Soviet Union. We will meet the return of Russian belligerence with the same resolve that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We will not accept any territorial change in Eastern Europe imposed by force, in Ukraine, Georgia, or elsewhere, and will use all appropriate constitutional measures to bring to justice the practitioners of aggression and assassination.

    https://www.gop.com/platform/american-exceptionalism/

    Are they going to conveniently forget all decency and morality? Is the white supremacist agenda in the GOP finally in the ascendant?

    Russian Troll (Number 254) 9 Dec 2016 21:5
    I as a Russian Troll do not like this investigation and will do or say anything in order to change your mind. Putin is not a problem, the EU is.
    Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
    ..... prohibiting "fake" or "false" news would be a cure worse than the disease, i.e., censorship by other means. The government cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because it has ulterior motives. News the government dislikes would be conflated with fakery, and news the government approved would be conflated with truthfulness. Private businesses like Facebook cannot be trusted with distinguishing fake from genuine news because its overriding mission is to make money and to win popularity, not to spread truth. It would suppress news that risked injury to its reputation or profits but leave news that did the opposite undisturbed.
    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/5/reflections-fake-news /
    GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
    "The Anonymous Blacklist Promoted by the Washington Post Has Apparent Ties to Ukrainian Fascism and CIA Spying".

    http://www.alternet.org/media/anonymous-blacklist-promoted-washington-post-has-shocking-roots-ukrainian-fascism-eugenics-and

    GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
    Clinton lost even though she outspent Trump two to one. She was just a lousy candidate who ran a terrible campaign.
    fimbulvinter -> GuyCybershy , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
    Uh excuse me but that sort of introspection doesn't fly. She was flawless and the blame rests solely on Russia/alt-right/Sanders/Third Parties/Racism/Misogyny/Alignment of the stars/etc/etc
    emilyadam , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
    I thnk the idea that russia has world domination is quite laughable, what else they gonna be blamed for next, reduction of giraffe population!Lol
    I think a teeny wee paranoia is setting in, or outright deliberate propaganda, too obvious
    Jim Moodie , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
    Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around.

    The CIA hacks have been destabalisuping Government for a at least seventy years.

    One thing is pretty obvious paper ballots and a different ballot for each is much harder to rig.

    It is ironic it takes a despot life key Trump to bring the issue to a head AFTER unexpectedly won.

    freeandfair -> Jim Moodie , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
    "Is this worse than when the two CIA operatives were caught searching through files in the Offices of the British Labour Party about thirty years ago. What goes around comes around."

    The CIA were caught hacking into the US Congressional computers just 6 or so months ago. Nothing came out of it.

    guest88888 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3

    possible Russian hacking in US election

    Based on the fact that the US 2000 (and possibly 2004) election was outright stolen by George Bush Jr., perhaps the propagandists in the White House and media ought to be looking for a "Russian connection" in regards to our illustrious former president.

    Texas_Sotol , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
    I'm shocked--shocked--to hear that our close Russian allies have done anything to influence and undermine the stability of other countries. Preposterous accusation! And to try to become huge winners in the Western Hemisphere, by cheating? Vitriolic nonsense!

    Many posters here actually believe that Good Old Russia should just stick with what they do best. That's poison!

    Fencewalker -> Bluebird101 , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
    Rather like the Litvenenko inquiry...full of maybe's and possibilities, with not a shred of hard, factual proof shown - demonstrating that the order came from the Kremlin.
    It's just a total accident that Putin's most vocal opponents keep getting shot in the head, gunned down on bridges, suffering 'accidents' or strange miscarriages of (sometimes post-mortem) 'justice' and fall victim to radiological state-enacted terrorism in foreign countries. No pattern there, whatsoever.
    Informed17 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
    I am at a loss. On the one hand, I hear about Russian economy in tatters, gas station posing as a country, deep crisis, economy the size of Italy, rusty old military toys, aircraft carrier smoking out the whole Northern hemisphere, etc. On the other hand, I hear about Russian threat all the time, which must be countered by massive build up of the US and EU military, Russia successfully interfering in the elections in the beacon of democracy, the US, with 20 times greater economy, with powerful allies, the best armed forces in the world, etc. Are we talking about two different Russias, or is this schizophrenia, pure and simple?
    jamese07uk -> Informed17 , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
    It's always easy to find reasons to fear something, added to that the psychology of the unknown, and we have the makings of very powerful propaganda. Whatever Russia's level of corruption, and general society, I feel I cannot trust the Western media anymore 100%. There seems to be a equally sinister hidden agenda deep within Western Elites - accessing Russia's land, political and potential wealthly resources must surely be one of them!? The longterm Western agenda/mission?
    spiridonovich , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
    The Democratic Party's problem is Russia, which the President is rightly putting front and center. All Russians are the summit of eviality, and must be endlessly scapegoated in order for Democrats to regain power for the nation's greater good.

    Democrats' problems have nothing to do with corruption, glaring conflicts of interest, favoritism, ass-licking editors, crappy data, lacking enthusiasm, and horribly poor judgement.

    None of these issues need to be publicly addressed, being of no consequence to independent voters, and the President, Guardian, et al. must continue their silent -- and "independent" -- vigil on such silly topics, if Democrats are to have any hope of cultivating enough mindless, enraged, and abandoned sheep to bring them future victories.

    ImmortalTao , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
    I admire Trump, Putin & Farage. Don't agree with them but I have admiration for them. They show all the cunning, calculating, resourcefulness that put the European race on top. Liberals don't like that and want to see the own people fall to the bottom. Thankfuly the neoliberal elite are finishedm
    MJMaguire , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
    Absurd nonsense - the third anti-Russian story of the day. Very little of this has much traction because of the sheer volume of misinformation coming out about Russia. there are very good cogent reasons why the Democrats lost the US election - none of them have anything to do with Russia.
    slats7 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
    another pathetic attempt to delegitimize Trump. wanna know why he won? look in the mirror, Barry.
    oldsunshine -> slats7 , 9 Dec 2016 21:2
    Will Obama see Clinton if he looks in the mirror??
    Bluejil , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
    I can't see a thing wrong with reviewing the last three election cycles, if there is any doubt at all and to put speculation to bed, it should be done.
    CurtBrown -> Bluejil , 9 Dec 2016 21:1
    Why stop at the last three?
    Karl Marks -> CurtBrown , 9 Dec 2016 21:4
    Because the US is more concerned about money than democratic integrity.
    dicksonator , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
    So the US intelligence servies aren't doing similar operations?

    If they werent, heads would roll as they have a considerable budget. Did we learn nothing from Edward Snowden? Are Russia just better at this? I doubt it.

    I think both sides conduct themselves in a despicable manner so please dont call me a Putin apologist. Well, feel free actually, I could'nt care less.

    gray2016 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0

    Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election


    US interference:

    COUNTRY OR STATE Dates of intervention Comments
    VIETNAM l960-75 Fought South Vietnam revolt & North Vietnam; one million killed in longest U.S. war; atomic bomb threats in l968 and l969.
    CUBA l961 CIA-directed exile invasion fails.
    GERMANY l961 Alert during Berlin Wall crisis.
    LAOS 1962 Military buildup during guerrilla war.
    142 more rows

    Shall I go on with anoter 142? US lying scumbags

    yeCarumba -> gray2016 , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
    the vietnam fiasco alone is enough to disqualify america from any criticism about interference in internal affairs
    they practically destroyed the country
    KitKnightly , 9 Dec 2016 20:5
    The pathetic way the media are pushing this big-bad-Russians meme is a little depressing.

    This "hack" is totally fictional, the wikileaks e-mails were almost certainly that...leaks. As most o their output has been over the years. For 95% of the Wikileaks existence there have been absolutely zero connections with "the Kremlin", in fact they have leaked stuff damaging to Russia before now.

    The Russian's did not hack the DNC, or rig the election, this is yet another example of the political establishment hysterically pointing fingers and making up lies when their chosen side loses an election.

    freeandfair -> KitKnightly , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
    I remember how North Korea was blamed for Sony hack. I think they were even cut from the internet for a day and there was all this talk of punishing them. And then later it came out that very likely wasn't North Korea. Only the news cycle already moved on and nobody cared.
    mismeasure , 9 Dec 2016 20:5
    Traditionally, the best Cold Warriors have been right-wing liberals. In the absence of policies that concretely benefit the people they engage in threat inflation and demagoguery.
    SergeyL , 9 Dec 2016 20:4
    In 90s US set all figures in Russia - from president to news program anchor. Elections of 96 were ripped by American "advisors" so that Eltsyn with 3% rating "won" them. It's payback time.
    Shaemus Gruagain , 9 Dec 2016 20:4
    Oh how wonderful it is to watch them smart and the bonus? no more Obamas.
    uest88888 -> PeteCW , 9 Dec 2016 21:3
    And yet the so-called "Russian trolls" (which is apparently anyone who exercise a modicum of skepticism) seem to be winning here at CiF based on the number of likes per comment, which is likely why the NSA sponsored propagandists and clueless dopes are getting so increasingly shrill.
    Mattster101 , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
    If you take a wider view, this is all really about keeping the Dems in the game, trying to undo the Trump validity and give them another go in 4 or so years. Really, seems quite desperate that a man that allowed 270000 wild horses to be sold for horsemeat this year across the border to Mexico, brought HC in to his own cabinet having said 'she will say anything and do nothing', knowing what a nightmare that would make, and is going to watch his healthcare get ripped to shreds, needs more accomplishments in his last year, aka Obama, ergo, let's investigate the evil russians and their female athletes with male DNA ( you would think I am making this stuff up, but I am not ) ... Come on Grandma, where are you when we need you most
    nolongersilent , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
    we must somehow, subvert the despicable populace that elected trump. we must erase from history the conceding of president elect clinton - newpeak from the ministry of truth. we'll get her into the white house if it takes more cash, lies, and corruption. after all, who needs democracy in the democratic party when we have big brother. democracy just confuses the members. we'll send the despicables through the ministry of love to re-educate them, of course, this IS 1984 after all....we will vote for you, the intelligentsia of the left knows what is best for you.
    eldudeabides , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
    Should Hillary have been disqualified (and prosecuted) for having access to debate questions beforehand?
    Nete75 , 9 Dec 2016 20:3
    "Malicious cyber activity, specifically malicious cyber activity tied to our elections , has no place in the international community. Unfortunately this activity is not new to Moscow. We've seen them do this for years ... The president has made it clear to President Putin that this is unacceptable."

    Note how carefully it specifies that it is cyber activity tied to the american elections that is inappropriate. I presume that is simply to avoid openly saying that mass-surveillance by the US government of everyone's private email, and social network accounts doesn't come under that "no place in the international community" phrase. You know, one does wonder how these people's faces don't come off in shame when whinning about potential interference by foreign governemnts after a full 8 years or so of constant revelations of permanent spying and mass-surveillance by the US government of international leaders and ordinary citizens worldwide.

    Boghaunter , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
    So the DNC was hacked - so what. Hacking is so common these days as to be expected. A quick perusal of the internet provides some SIGNIFICANT hacks that deserved some consternation:

    9/4/07 The Chinese government hacked a noncritical Defense Department computer system in June, a Pentagon source told FOX News on Tuesday.

    Spring 2011 Foreign hackers broke into the Pentagon computer system this spring and stole 24,000 files - one of the biggest cyber-attacks ever on the U.S. military,

    On the 12th of July 2011, Booz Allen Hamilton the largest U.S. military defence contractor admitted that they had just suffered a very serious security breach, at the hands of hacktivist group AntiSec.

    5/28/13 The confidential version of a Defense Science Board report compiled earlier this year reportedly says Chinese hackers accessed designs for more than two dozen of the U.S. military's most important and expensive weapon systems.

    June 2014 The UK's National Crime Agency has arrested an unnamed young man over allegations that he breached the Department of Defense's network last June.


    1/12/15 The Twitter account for U.S. Central Command was suspended Monday after it was hacked by ISIS sympathizers (OK twitter accounts shouldn't be a big deal. Why does US CentCom even HAVE a twitter account???)

    5/6/15 OPM hack: China blamed for massive breach of US government data

    Omoikani , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
    And so the neocon propaganda machine trundles on, churning out this interesting material day after day. The elephant in the room is that if you get hacked you have no knowledge of this until your private stuff is all over the internet, and the chances of finding out who did it are zilch. Everyone in IT security knows this.
    johhnybgood , 9 Dec 2016 20:1
    Another "fake news" story. Does anybody with a pulse really believe that Russia hacked the DNC? The US Security Services admitted that it was NOT Russia; the likelihood is that the leaks were provided to Wikileaks by insiders within the US Administration - they wanted to ensure that Hillary did not win. None of the actual revelations were covered by the MSM, and "the Russians did it" was a convenient distraction.
    Omoikani -> johhnybgood , 9 Dec 2016 20:2
    All people that on earth do dwell have no clue who hacked the DNC to the amusing end that Podesta's e-mails ended up on the internet, but it suits a dangerous political narrative to demonise Russia until it becomes plain logical to attack them.
    peterward881 , 9 Dec 2016 20:0
    YES YES let attack Russia, YES YES YES, Russia Russia we should carry on attacking Russia. We the journalists are well paid by the man from Australia. YES YES we must to carry on attacking Russia and forget the shit happening in other countries. YES YES it is our duty.
    guest88888 , 9 Dec 2016 20:0

    Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference

    And I guess Obama has also ordered the Guardian to do a full court press of anti-Russian propaganda, just judging by the articles pumped out on today's rag alone.

    The US government is seemingly attempting the "Big Lie" tactic of Joseph Goebbels and instigating support in the public for war against Russia. By repeating the completely unsubstantiated allegations that Russia has somehow "interfered with the election" they hope, without any genuine basis, to strong arm the public into accepting a further ramping of tensions and starting yet another illegal war for profit.

    Chirographer , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
    There's nothing wrong with conducting the investigation, but shouldn't it have been done before accusing Russia?

    And aren't all the people cited in the article political appointees, Democrats or avowed Trump enemies, and then there's closing, " A spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to comment."

    Karega , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
    Surely of all the Orders Obama might issue during his last weeks in office, why does he choose to give a stupid Order that effectively makes US some sort of Banana Republic? This man was/is more hype than real! At a stroke of a pen he seriously undermines the integrity of the US Electoral System. Whatever credibility was left has now been eroded by these constant and silly claims that somehow Russians installed Trump as President. Doesn't that make Trump some sort of Russian Agent?
    Meanwhile MSM keeps on streaming some fake news and theories and then Obama Orders US intelligence to dig deeper. This is lunacy!
    alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
    Obama certainly understands that Russia is not the reason why Trump was elected. However, he wants to create new obstacles on the way of normalization of relations between the US and Russia and make it more difficult for Trump.

    However, Trump is not a weak man, not a skinny worm; and he can hit these opponents back so hard that international court for them (for invasions into sovereign countries) will lead to their life sentences.

    Ginen , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
    Only two weeks ago the Obama Administration publicly stated there was no evidence of cybersecurity breaches affecting the electoral process, as reported in the NYT :

    The administration, in its statement, confirmed reports from the Department of Homeland Security and intelligence officials that they did not see "any increased level of malicious cyberactivity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on Election Day."

    The administration said it remained "confident in the overall integrity of electoral infrastructure, a confidence that was borne out." It added: "As a result, we believe our elections were free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective."

    Was Obama lying then or is he lying now?
    imperfetto , 9 Dec 2016 19:5
    Is there any limit to the ridicolous, Mr. Obama? what is this? a tragicomic play of the inept?
    Here we are with the most childish fabrication that it must be the Russians' fault if Trump won the election. I'll be laughing for an entire cosmic era! And all this after US publically announced that they were going to launch a devastating acher attack against the badies: the Russians, which of course didn't work out. Come on, this is more comedy that a serious play.

    What probably is going on, the readers can gather by having a look at the numberless articles that are being published by maistream media against the Russians.
    Why this histeric insurgence of Russofobia? Couldn't it be that it is intolerable for the US and their allies to see the Russians winning in Aleppo, and most of all restoring peace and tollerance among the population returning to their abbandoned homes.

    brothersgrimm , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
    I think Hillary, in part, lost the election due to all the fake news being pumped out by the mainstream corporate media, doing her bidding. People are tired of it, along with all the corruption and lies that came to the surface through the likes of Wikileaks.
    Trump is a terrible alternative, but the only alternative people were given, so many went with it.
    Now we see fake news making out the Russians to be the bad guys again, pumping out story after story, trying to propagandize the population into sucking up these new memes. Russia has its problems, and will always act in its own self-interest, but it's nothing compared to the tactics the US uses, bullying countries around the world to pander to its own will, desperately trying to maintain its Empire.
    RoachAmerican , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
    Examine something real, Nuclear Hillary. It must be time for Spring Planting??
    http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/23/us/clinton-foundation-donations-uranium-investors.html?_r=0

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syEjkPyqRew
    Minutes 20 to 25
    Uranium One Wyoming
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html

    http://www.npr.org/2015/04/23/401781313/clinton-foundation-linked-to-russian-effort-to-buy-uranium-company
    https://youtu.be/jkfE10g8xbc
    at 25 minutes et seq
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfE10g8xbc&feature=youtu.be


    Below, first paragraphs are the most important
    http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/five-questions-about-the-clintons-and-a-uranium-company

    The 1 2 3 Step of Acquisition of Uranium One
    http://www.businessinsider.com/the-clintons-putin-and-uranium-2015-4

    Going Private Part Public Company Disappears
    http://www.wise-uranium.org/ucscr.html

    http://www.pravdareport.com/russia/economics/22-01-2013/123551-russia_nuclear_energy-0 /
    Coward Comey needs to go.

    Joelbanks , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
    The scripture tells us those who live by the sword will perish by it.

    America was in the interference of other countries' elections before its ugly 2016 presidential election. Remember Ukraine and Secretary Hillary Clinton's employee Victoria F****the EU Nuland in Ukraine. Now we have the makings of some kind of conflict with Russia over its alleged meddling in America's elections. More global tension= More cash flowing into the US equity market, money printing by another means.

    hardlyeverclever , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
    I'd be surprised if the Russians weren't trying to affect the outcome of the election. The Brits had a debate in Parliament on Trump, Obama made threats to the UK on the Brexit vote, so who knows what we're all doing in each others elections behind closed doors while we are clear to do so publically.

    The MSM's absolute refusal to address the leaks in a meaningful way (other than the stuff about recipes) suggests to be no one felt it a big deal at the time.

    alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:3
    Obama could realise that Hillary's viewes on Putin and Russia did not help her at all. People are not that stupid, they see well, use own brains and not so easily impressed by whatever CNN says to them.
    Alun Jones , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
    John McAfee said that any organization sophisticated enough to do these hacks is also sophisticated enough to make it look as though any country they want did it. So it could have been anyone.
    palindrome , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
    Obama earlier this year: Russia is not a world power, only a regional power.

    Obama now: Russia has the power to manipulate the USA election.

    Which one is it then?

    Of course it's all bull...Obama is another establishment puppet who cannot accept that people have figured out their modus operandi.

    diddoit , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
    It's reported today on Ars Technica : ThyssenKrupp suffered a "professional attack"

    The steelmaker, which makes military subs, says it was targeted from south-east Asia.

    ..the design of its plants were penetrated by a "massive," coordinated attack which made off with an unknown amount of "technological know-how and research."

    The internet and precious information...

    alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
    Neoliberals are just desperately losing ideological competition at home and abroad. They cannot convince people that they are right because it's not what's going on.

    It does not matter what some others say, it's what really goes on matters.

    alexfoxy28 -> imipak , 9 Dec 2016 21:0
    But there is innate, basic self-interest in all people (that does not depend on education, ethnicity, race) and people know it instinctively well. They will not go against it even if all around will tell otherwise.
    alexfoxy28 -> alexfoxy28 , 9 Dec 2016 21:1 0 1
    simulacra27 , 9 Dec 2016 19:2
    The fake news channel brought to you by Obama and co.
    p.s. I mean that people cannot be manipulated by others at this basic level when some higher level manipulative tools are used.
    Kasem3000 , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
    I love how this has now become solid fact. No confirmation, nothing official but it is no common fact that the Russians interfered. How many reports do we hear about US interference with foreign countries infastructure through covert means.
    ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-russia

    Meh. Seems like tampering happens all the time. How many elections in South America did the USA fix? How many in the middle east and Africa? I think this "russian's did it" rhetoric is counterproductive as it is stopping Democrats from doing the introspective needed to really understand why HRC lost the election.

    ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 19:1
    How can you on the one hand crusade against "fake news" and on the other promote this:

    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/dec/08/artist-alison-jackson-self-publishes-spoof-trump-photos-despite-fear-of-being-sued#comments

    Sutir Comed , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
    Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot and there was credible evidence that the Russians had rigged the election in favor of the Democrat. The right-wing echo chamber would be having seizures! These people are UTTER HYPOCRITES. And they would obviously rather win with the help of a hostile foreign power than try to preserve the integrity of our elections.
    MayorHoberMallow , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
    Russia may or may not have hacked the DNC. I'd like to find out. I hope the DNC aren't enough of doofusses to assume this wouldn't be in the realm of possibility.
    I presume that the U.S. has its own group of hackers doing the same Worldwide. This is not a criticism; I would expect the U.S. intelligence community to learn what our rivals, and even some of our friends, are up to.
    Timothy Everton , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
    This is getting to be pretty lame. I have doubts that "Russia" could interfere to any great extent with our elections any more than we could with theirs. Sure, individuals or organizations, and more than likely in THIS country, could do so. And they have, as we saw with the DNC and Sanders campaign (and vice versa). Let's not go into an almost inevitable nuclear war over what is quite possibly "fake news".
    dreylon , 9 Dec 2016 19:0
    Russia did this, Russia did that
    its getting very boring now, you have lost all credibility
    you have cried wolf to many times
    stop trying to manipulate us
    Johnny Kent , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
    When will the Democrats get it? It wasn't the Russians, who are blamed for everything, including the weather, by desperate Western failed leaders, but an unsuitable candidate in Clinton, which lost them the Election. Bernie Sanders would have walked it.
    Catonaboat , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
    Well Guardian I do believe you hit a nerve, I don't think I've ever seen a more one sided BTL. Me thinks some people do protest too much.
    Iaorana , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
    Regarding the notorious "fuck the EU " on the part of the US "diplomat" Victoria Nuland "the State Department and the White House suggested that an assistant to the deputy prime minister of Russia Dmitry Rogozin was the source of the leak, which he denied " Wiki

    Good occasion to substantiate the accusation which ,substantiated or not,will remind the "useful idiots" of the "change of regime " US policy and who started the Ukrainian crisis.

    Lafcadio1944 , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
    Boy, oh boy, fake news is everywhere just read this headline!

    Election hacking: Obama orders 'full review' of Russia interference

    Which states as fact there was interference by Russia and that the investigation is to determine how bad it was. NO EVIDENCE WHAT SO EVER has been offered by anyone that Russia interfered in any way. FAKE NEWS!!

    Mike5000 , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
    Voting machine hacking is a very serious problem but you generally need physical access to a voting machine to hack it. Anyone notice thousands of Russians hanging around in Detriot, Los Angeles, etc election HQs? How about Clinton drones?

    If the DNC hadn't rigged the primary we'd be celebrating president-elect Bernie. If they hadn't rigged the general Hillary would have lost by a landslide.

    ShoppingKingLouie , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
    We never investigated this tho did we Former President Obama?

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/08/vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-russia

    Time to put on your big girl pants, accept defeat and leave gracefully.

    Powerspike , 9 Dec 2016 18:5
    1000 Russian athletes were doping in the 2012 Olympics - but it's taken until now to realise it?!
    Russia influenced the 2016 US election?!
    Russia is presently "influencing" the German elections?!
    Russia is killing civilians and destroying hospitals with impunity in Syria?!
    etc
    Wow! Russia is taking over the world, it must be stopped, can anyone save us? Obama? Trump? NATO?
    Look out! Russian armies are massing on the border ready to sweep into Europe.......arrhhh!

    I love the smell of gibberish in the morning!

    geofffrey , 9 Dec 2016 18:4
    ***Newsflash***

    Reads:

    "..ex-prime minister Anthony Charles Lynton Blair of the United Kingdom, and Hillary Rodham Clinton of the United States of America, have formally announced a new transatlantic political party to be named: The Neoliberal Elite Party for bitter anti-Brexiters and sore anti-Trumpettes.

    dahsab , 9 Dec 2016 18:4
    Rather rich coming from my country which has interfered in elections around the world for decades. I suppose it's only cheating if the other team does it.

    Not that they'll find any evidence. Just another chapter in the sad saga of the Democrats unwillingness to admit they ran the worst candidate & the worst campaign in recent memory. It's not our fault! Them dirty Russkies did it!

    Continued

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    [Dec 04, 2019] DNC Russian Hackers Found! You Won't Believe Who They Really Work For by the Anonymous Patriots Published on Jan 01, 2017 | themillenniumreport.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] June 4th, 2017 Crowdstrike Was at the DNC Six Weeks by George Webb Published on Nov 27, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] Cyberanalyst George Eliason Claims that the "Fancy Bear" Who Hacked the DNC Server is Ukrainian Intelligence – In League with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike Published on Dec 04, 2018 | www.reddit.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] Fancy Bear - Conservapedia Published on Dec 04, 2019 | www.conservapedia.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams by George Webb Published on Nov 27, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] Atkinson role in Ukrainegate Published on Dec 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 30, 2019] CrowdStrike: a Conspiracy Wrapped in a Conspiracy Inside a Conspiracy by Oleg Atbashian Published on Nov 29, 2019 | www.frontpagemag.com

    [Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion Published on Dec 28, 2017 | www.youtube.com

    [Nov 28, 2019] WSJ story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton. Published on Nov 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 27, 2019] Obama Admits He Would Speak Up Only To Stop Bernie Sanders Nomination Published on Nov 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 27, 2019] Could your county use some extra money? Published on Nov 27, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 26, 2019] John Solomon Everything Changes In The Ukraine Scandal If Trump Releases These Documents Published on Nov 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 24, 2019] Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class - YouTube Published on Jan 04, 2011 | www.youtube.com

    [Nov 22, 2019] CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward because, it is not going away. Published on Nov 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests Published on Nov 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos Published on Nov 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 03, 2019] Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis Published on Nov 03, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy Published on Oct 06, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    [Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev Published on October 15, 2019 | viableopposition.blogspot.com

    [Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces Published on Nov 01, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    [Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Oct 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says Published on Oct 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Oct 24, 2019] Empire Interventionism Versus Republic Noninterventionism by Jacob Hornberger Published on Oct 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Jul 18, 2017 | medium.com

    [Oct 23, 2019] The Pathocracy Of The Deep State Tyranny At The Hands Of A Psychopathic Government Published on Oct 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Oct 20, 2019] Adam Schiff now the face of the neoliberal Dems for 2020. Published on Oct 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed Published on Oct 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Oct 19, 2019] Kunstler One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy Published on Oct 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice Published on Oct 09, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

    [Sep 30, 2019] Stephen Miller calls whistleblower a 'partisan hit job' in fiery interview Published on Sep 30, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Sep 26, 2019] Did Nancy Pelosi Just Make One Of The Biggest Political Mistakes In History Published on Sep 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact Published on Sep 23, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

    [Sep 22, 2019] More Americans Questioning Official 9-11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative by Whitney Webb Published on Sep 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Sep 22, 2019] The Snowden Conundrum by Yvonne Lorenzo Published on Sep 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Sep 17, 2019] The Spy Who Failed by Scott Ritter Published on Sep 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin Published on Sep 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Sep 17, 2019] The reincarnation of the idea of Soviet Nomenklatura on a new level in a different social system Published on Sep 17, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

    [Sep 15, 2019] Donald Trump as the DNC s nominee by Michael Hudson Published on Sep 15, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Sep 11, 2019] John Brennan's and Jim Clappers' Last Gasp by Larry C Johnson Published on Sep 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Sep 11, 2019] Video Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 The Bamboozle Has Captured Us Published on Sep 11, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

    [Sep 10, 2019] Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein by Larry C Johnsons Published on Sep 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Sep 10, 2019] Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik Published on Aug 25, 2019 | portside.org

    [Sep 10, 2019] How Deep Is the Rot in America s Institutions by Charles Hugh Smith Published on Sep 09, 2019 | www.oftwominds.com

    [Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda Published on Sep 02, 2019 | www.yahoo.com

    [Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party Published on Dec 28, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    [Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma Published on Dec 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Dec 22, 2019] So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks. That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born -- distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam Published on Dec 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Dec 20, 2019] The Tragedy of Donald Trump His Presidency Is Marred with Failure by Doug Bandow Published on Dec 18, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

    [Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson Published on Dec 20, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse Published on Dec 18, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    [Dec 20, 2019] Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone Published on Dec 20, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    [Dec 20, 2019] Letter from President Donald J. Trump to the Speaker of the House of Representatives Published on Dec 17, 2019 | www.whitehouse.gov

    [Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc Published on Dec 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels Published on Dec 19, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

    [Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine Published on Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny. Published on Dec 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars Published on Dec 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 17, 2019] Judge Denies Flynn's Requests For Exculpatory Information, Case Dismissal by Peter Svab Published on Dec 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Dec 17, 2019] History Doesn t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: Wilson in UK was subjected to the similar attack by rogue elements in MI5 as Trump in the USA Published on Dec 14, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Dec 14, 2019] Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation Published on Dec 14, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Dec 12, 2019] The FBI - Pushed By John Brennan - Lied To The Court Seven Times To Spy On The Trump Campaign Published on Dec 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected. Published on Dec 10, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

    [Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default. Published on Dec 07, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Dec 07, 2019] Impeachment does not require a crime. Published on Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

    [Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country Published on Dec 06, 2019 | theamericanconservative.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] The central question of Ukrainegate is whether CrowdStrike actions on DNC leak were a false flag operation designed to open Russiagate and what was the level of participation of Poroshenko government and Ukrainian Security services in this false flag operation by Factotum Published on Dec 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea Published on Dec 04, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] Common Funding Themes Link 'Whistleblower' Complaint and CrowdStrike Firm Certifying DNC Russia 'Hack' by Aaron Klein Published on Sep 28, 2019 | www.breitbart.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] DNC Russian Hackers Found! You Won't Believe Who They Really Work For by the Anonymous Patriots Published on Jan 01, 2017 | themillenniumreport.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] June 4th, 2017 Crowdstrike Was at the DNC Six Weeks by George Webb Published on Nov 27, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] Cyberanalyst George Eliason Claims that the "Fancy Bear" Who Hacked the DNC Server is Ukrainian Intelligence – In League with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike Published on Dec 04, 2018 | www.reddit.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] Fancy Bear - Conservapedia Published on Dec 04, 2019 | www.conservapedia.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams by George Webb Published on Nov 27, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Dec 04, 2019] Atkinson role in Ukrainegate Published on Dec 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jul 09, 2019] Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern Published on Jul 08, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar Published on Jul 03, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jul 05, 2019] Who Won the Debate? Tulsi Gabbard let the anti-war genie out of the bottle by Philip Giraldi Published on Jul 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jun 30, 2019] USG's Bizarre Change of Position in the Roger Stone Case by Larry C Johnson Published on Jun 30, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton Published on Jun 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jun 27, 2019] Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens Published on Jun 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jun 26, 2019] Opinion - NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication Published on Jun 26, 2019 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

    [Jun 03, 2020] The first rule of political hypocrisy: Justify your actions by the need to protect the weak and vulnerable Published on Jun 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jun 23, 2019] How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx by George Monbiot Published on Mar 05, 2012 | www.theguardian.com

    [Nov 30, 2019] CrowdStrike: a Conspiracy Wrapped in a Conspiracy Inside a Conspiracy by Oleg Atbashian Published on Nov 29, 2019 | www.frontpagemag.com

    [Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion Published on Dec 28, 2017 | www.youtube.com

    [Nov 28, 2019] WSJ story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton. Published on Nov 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 27, 2019] Obama Admits He Would Speak Up Only To Stop Bernie Sanders Nomination Published on Nov 27, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 27, 2019] Could your county use some extra money? Published on Nov 27, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 26, 2019] John Solomon Everything Changes In The Ukraine Scandal If Trump Releases These Documents Published on Nov 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 24, 2019] Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class - YouTube Published on Jan 04, 2011 | www.youtube.com

    [Nov 22, 2019] CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward because, it is not going away. Published on Nov 22, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests Published on Nov 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos Published on Nov 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 03, 2019] Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis Published on Nov 03, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy Published on Oct 06, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    [Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev Published on October 15, 2019 | viableopposition.blogspot.com

    [Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces Published on Nov 01, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    [Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Oct 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says Published on Oct 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Oct 24, 2019] Empire Interventionism Versus Republic Noninterventionism by Jacob Hornberger Published on Oct 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Jul 18, 2017 | medium.com

    [Oct 23, 2019] The Pathocracy Of The Deep State Tyranny At The Hands Of A Psychopathic Government Published on Oct 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed Published on Oct 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Oct 19, 2019] Kunstler One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy Published on Oct 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice Published on Oct 09, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

    [Sep 30, 2019] Stephen Miller calls whistleblower a 'partisan hit job' in fiery interview Published on Sep 30, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Sep 26, 2019] Did Nancy Pelosi Just Make One Of The Biggest Political Mistakes In History Published on Sep 26, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact Published on Sep 23, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

    [Sep 22, 2019] More Americans Questioning Official 9-11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative by Whitney Webb Published on Sep 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Sep 22, 2019] The Snowden Conundrum by Yvonne Lorenzo Published on Sep 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Sep 17, 2019] The Spy Who Failed by Scott Ritter Published on Sep 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin Published on Sep 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Sep 17, 2019] The reincarnation of the idea of Soviet Nomenklatura on a new level in a different social system Published on Sep 17, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

    [Sep 15, 2019] Demythologizing the Roots of the New Cold War by Ted Snider Published on Sep 09, 2019 | original.antiwar.com

    [Sep 15, 2019] Donald Trump as the DNC s nominee by Michael Hudson Published on Sep 15, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Sep 11, 2019] John Brennan's and Jim Clappers' Last Gasp by Larry C Johnson Published on Sep 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Sep 11, 2019] Video Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 The Bamboozle Has Captured Us Published on Sep 11, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

    [Sep 10, 2019] Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik Published on Aug 25, 2019 | portside.org

    [Sep 10, 2019] Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein by Larry C Johnsons Published on Sep 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Sep 10, 2019] How Deep Is the Rot in America s Institutions by Charles Hugh Smith Published on Sep 09, 2019 | www.oftwominds.com

    [Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda Published on Sep 02, 2019 | www.yahoo.com

    [Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations Published on Aug 24, 2019 | www.russiamatters.org

    [Aug 23, 2019] Spygate The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump by Jeff Carlson Published on Mar 28, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

    [Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed Published on Aug 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Aug 20, 2019] Trump Promised Massive Infrastructure Projects -- Instead We ve Gotten Nothing> Published on Jul 26, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Aug 20, 2019] Propagandists Freak Out Over Gabbard s Destruction of Harris by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Aug 02, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Aug 18, 2019] IV- MICHELS: THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY by Dr. Mustafa Delican Published on Aug 18, 2019 | dergipark.org.tr

    [Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen Published on Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS) Published on Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly Published on Aug 16, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    [Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury Published on Aug 16, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    [Aug 14, 2019] Charge of anti-Semitism as a sign of a bitter factional struggle in UK Labor Party between neoliberal and alternatives to neoliberalism wings Published on Aug 14, 2019 | averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com

    [Aug 14, 2019] The Citadels of America s Elites Fractured and At Odds with Each Other by Alastair Crooke Published on Aug 03, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

    [Aug 14, 2019] There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer Published on Apr 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Aug 12, 2019] New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called Epstein's death "way too convenient." Published on Aug 12, 2019 | www.rt.com

    [Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized Published on Aug 12, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Aug 11, 2019] One weak spot of the conspiracy theory that Epstein was killed: Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss Published on Aug 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations Published on Aug 24, 2019 | www.russiamatters.org

    [Aug 23, 2019] Spygate The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump by Jeff Carlson Published on Mar 28, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

    [Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed Published on Aug 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Aug 20, 2019] Trump Promised Massive Infrastructure Projects -- Instead We ve Gotten Nothing> Published on Jul 26, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Aug 20, 2019] Propagandists Freak Out Over Gabbard s Destruction of Harris by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Aug 02, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Aug 18, 2019] IV- MICHELS: THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY by Dr. Mustafa Delican Published on Aug 18, 2019 | dergipark.org.tr

    [Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS) Published on Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen Published on Aug 17, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly Published on Aug 16, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    [Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury Published on Aug 16, 2019 | off-guardian.org

    [Aug 14, 2019] Charge of anti-Semitism as a sign of a bitter factional struggle in UK Labor Party between neoliberal and alternatives to neoliberalism wings Published on Aug 14, 2019 | averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com

    [Aug 14, 2019] The Citadels of America s Elites Fractured and At Odds with Each Other by Alastair Crooke Published on Aug 03, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

    [Aug 14, 2019] There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer Published on Apr 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Aug 12, 2019] New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called Epstein's death "way too convenient." Published on Aug 12, 2019 | www.rt.com

    [Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized Published on Aug 12, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Aug 11, 2019] One weak spot of the conspiracy theory that Epstein was killed: Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss Published on Aug 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jul 30, 2019] The main task of Democratic Party is preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left and killing such social movements Published on Jul 30, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Jul 29, 2019] Looks like Epstein turned informant for Mueller s FBI in 2008. Likely earlier Published on Jul 11, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

    [Jul 29, 2019] American Ron Unz on Pizzagate Published on Jul 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jul 29, 2019] The hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy". Published on Jul 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Jul 28, 2019 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    [Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland Published on Jul 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians Published on Jul 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind! Published on Jul 27, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson Published on Jul 27, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened Published on Jul 26, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion Published on Jul 26, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Jul 25, 2019] The Epstein Case Is A Rare Opportunity To Focus On The Depraved Nature Of America s Elite Published on Jul 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon Published on Jul 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Jul 21, 2019] Breaking: Clinton Just Got Devastating News Published on Aug 12, 2016 | beforeitsnews.com

    [Jul 20, 2019] New US Pentagon Chief Vested Interest in War Conflict Published on Jul 20, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

    [Jul 15, 2019] Pete Buttigieg The made-to-order political "outsider" by Tom Hall Published on Jul 15, 2019 | www.wsws.org

    [Jul 14, 2019] MODELS OF POWER STRUCTURE IN THE UNITED STATES Political Issues We Concern Published on Sep 07, 2011 | politicalissues.blog.com

    [Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson Published on Jul 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand Published on Jul 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jul 09, 2019] Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern Published on Jul 08, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar Published on Jul 03, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jul 05, 2019] Who Won the Debate? Tulsi Gabbard let the anti-war genie out of the bottle by Philip Giraldi Published on Jul 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jun 30, 2019] USG's Bizarre Change of Position in the Roger Stone Case by Larry C Johnson Published on Jun 30, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton Published on Jun 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jun 27, 2019] Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens Published on Jun 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jun 26, 2019] Opinion - NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication Published on Jun 26, 2019 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

    [Jun 23, 2019] How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx by George Monbiot Published on Mar 05, 2012 | www.theguardian.com

    [Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow Published on Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jun 03, 2020] And this is a world superpower: There are an estimated 26.5 million of US adults at level 1 or reading proficency according to PIAAC -- those who can read and write at the most basic level but couldn't t read a newspaper, or would have trouble filling out forms at a doctor s office Published on Aug 03, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jul 30, 2019] The main task of Democratic Party is preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left and killing such social movements Published on Jul 30, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Jul 29, 2019] Looks like Epstein turned informant for Mueller s FBI in 2008. Likely earlier Published on Jul 11, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

    [Jul 29, 2019] American Ron Unz on Pizzagate Published on Jul 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jul 29, 2019] The hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy". Published on Jul 29, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Jul 28, 2019 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    [Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland Published on Jul 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians Published on Jul 28, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind! Published on Jul 27, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson Published on Jul 27, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion Published on Jul 26, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened Published on Jul 26, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed Published on Jul 25, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jul 25, 2019] The Epstein Case Is A Rare Opportunity To Focus On The Depraved Nature Of America s Elite Published on Jul 25, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon Published on Jul 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow Published on Jul 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jul 21, 2019] Breaking: Clinton Just Got Devastating News Published on Aug 12, 2016 | beforeitsnews.com

    [Jul 20, 2019] New US Pentagon Chief Vested Interest in War Conflict Published on Jul 20, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

    [Jul 15, 2019] Pete Buttigieg The made-to-order political "outsider" by Tom Hall Published on Jul 15, 2019 | www.wsws.org

    [Jul 14, 2019] MODELS OF POWER STRUCTURE IN THE UNITED STATES Political Issues We Concern Published on Sep 07, 2011 | politicalissues.blog.com

    [Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson Published on Jul 13, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand Published on Jul 09, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jun 22, 2019] Use of science by the US politicians: they uses science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination. Published on Jun 16, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh Published on Apr 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Jun 19, 2019] Bias bias the inclination to accuse people of bias by James Thompson Published on Jun 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow Published on Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jun 11, 2019] A Word From Joe the Angry Hawaiian Published on Jun 11, 2019 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

    [Jun 05, 2019] Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers. Published on Apr 27, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    [Jun 05, 2019] Do Spies Run the World by Israel Shamir Published on May 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jun 04, 2019] Attkisson 10 Questions I d Ask Robert Mueller (If I Were Allowed) Published on Jun 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jun 02, 2019] Somer highlights of Snowden spreach at Dalhousie University Published on Jun 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [May 30, 2019] Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth Published on May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [May 30, 2019] Everyone here at moa is saying much the same: the CIA is running the usa at this point.. Mueller is ex CIA... So, basically the mueller investigation a cover up and BS for the lemmings... It seems to have worked to a limited degree.. Published on May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine Published on May 28, 2019 | thegrayzone.com

    [May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read. Published on May 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite Published on Jun 14, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

    [Jun 11, 2019] A Word From Joe the Angry Hawaiian Published on Jun 11, 2019 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

    [Jun 05, 2019] Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers. Published on Apr 27, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

    [Jun 05, 2019] Do Spies Run the World by Israel Shamir Published on May 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jun 04, 2019] Attkisson 10 Questions I d Ask Robert Mueller (If I Were Allowed) Published on Jun 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jun 02, 2019] Somer highlights of Snowden spreach at Dalhousie University Published on Jun 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [May 30, 2019] Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth Published on May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [May 30, 2019] Everyone here at moa is saying much the same: the CIA is running the usa at this point.. Mueller is ex CIA... So, basically the mueller investigation a cover up and BS for the lemmings... It seems to have worked to a limited degree.. Published on May 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine Published on May 28, 2019 | thegrayzone.com

    [May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read. Published on May 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries Published on May 21, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them" Published on May 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling Published on May 19, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org

    [May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity Published on May 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 16, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard for President - Stephen Lendman Published on May 16, 2019 | stephenlendman.org

    [May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins Published on May 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring Published on May 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [May 15, 2019] Ron Paul on Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube Published on Apr 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics Published on Jun 01, 2016 | www.globalresearch.ca

    [May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review Published on May 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan Published on Apr 10, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

    [May 13, 2019] Not Just Ukraine; Biden May Have A Serious China Problem As Schweizer Exposes Hunter s $1bn Deal Published on May 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi Published on May 10, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    [May 12, 2019] Is rabid warmonger, neocon chickenhawk Bolton a swinger? That is a mental picture that s deeply disturbing yet funny at the same time Published on May 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond Published on May 10, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [May 11, 2019] Whitney Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan Published on May 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 11, 2019] Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson Published on May 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus Published on Aug 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross Published on Feb 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 10, 2019] Mueller Report - Expensive Estimations And Elusive Evidence by Adam Carter Published on May 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [May 10, 2019] Obama administration raced to obtain FICA warrant on Carter Page before Rogers investigation closes on them and that was definitely an obstruction of justice and interference with the ongoing investigation Published on May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

    [May 10, 2019] What was the meaning of the term "insurance policy" in Stzok messages to Lisa Page Published on May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

    [May 10, 2019] The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe Published on May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

    [May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson Published on May 08, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [May 07, 2019] Look! A whale! Published on May 07, 2019 | amp.theguardian.com

    [May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors Published on Apr 05, 2019 | dandelionsalad.wordpress.com

    [May 05, 2019] Did Mueller substituted Russia for Israel in his report Published on May 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [May 03, 2019] Former high-ranking FBI officials on Andrew McCabe's alarming admissions Published on Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [May 03, 2019] Andrew McCabe played the key role in the appointment of the special prosecutor Published on Mar 02, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [May 02, 2019] Checkmate - How President Trump s Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller by Will Chamberlain Published on May 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté Published on Mar 26, 2019 | outline.com

    [Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed Published on Apr 22, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Apr 28, 2019] Tit For Tat: Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook by Mike Whitney Published on Apr 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work! Published on Apr 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate Published on Apr 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi Published on Apr 25, 2019 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    [Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections Published on Apr 26, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda Published on Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany Published on Jul 24, 2018 | angrybearblog.com

    [Jun 22, 2019] Use of science by the US politicians: they uses science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination. Published on Jun 16, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow Published on Jun 18, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jun 03, 2020] The difference between old and new schools of jounalism: old-school journalism was like being assigned the task of finding out what "1+1 =?" and the task was to report the answer was "1." Now the task would be to report that "Some say it is 1, some say it is 2, some say it is 3." Published on Jun 20, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh Published on Apr 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Jun 19, 2019] Bias bias the inclination to accuse people of bias by James Thompson Published on Jun 19, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jun 03, 2020] Rule of law in Murrika is kaput Published on Jun 16, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite Published on Jun 14, 2019 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

    [May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries Published on May 21, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them" Published on May 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling Published on May 19, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org

    [May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity Published on May 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 16, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard for President - Stephen Lendman Published on May 16, 2019 | stephenlendman.org

    [May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins Published on May 16, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring Published on May 14, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [May 15, 2019] Ron Paul on Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube Published on Apr 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics Published on Jun 01, 2016 | www.globalresearch.ca

    [May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review Published on May 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan Published on Apr 10, 2019 | www.globalresearch.ca

    [May 13, 2019] Not Just Ukraine; Biden May Have A Serious China Problem As Schweizer Exposes Hunter s $1bn Deal Published on May 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi Published on May 10, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    [May 12, 2019] Is rabid warmonger, neocon chickenhawk Bolton a swinger? That is a mental picture that s deeply disturbing yet funny at the same time Published on May 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond Published on May 10, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [May 11, 2019] Whitney Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan Published on May 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 11, 2019] Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson Published on May 04, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus Published on Aug 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross Published on Feb 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [May 10, 2019] Mueller Report - Expensive Estimations And Elusive Evidence by Adam Carter Published on May 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [May 10, 2019] Obama administration raced to obtain FICA warrant on Carter Page before Rogers investigation closes on them and that was definitely an obstruction of justice and interference with the ongoing investigation Published on May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

    [May 10, 2019] What was the meaning of the term "insurance policy" in Stzok messages to Lisa Page Published on May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

    [May 10, 2019] The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe Published on May 03, 2019 | www.theepochtimes.com

    [May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson Published on May 08, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors Published on Apr 05, 2019 | dandelionsalad.wordpress.com

    [May 05, 2019] Did Mueller substituted Russia for Israel in his report Published on May 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [May 03, 2019] Former high-ranking FBI officials on Andrew McCabe's alarming admissions Published on Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [May 03, 2019] Andrew McCabe played the key role in the appointment of the special prosecutor Published on Mar 02, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [May 02, 2019] Checkmate - How President Trump s Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller by Will Chamberlain Published on May 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté Published on Mar 26, 2019 | outline.com

    [Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed Published on Apr 22, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Apr 28, 2019] Tit For Tat: Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook by Mike Whitney Published on Apr 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work! Published on Apr 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate Published on Apr 28, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi Published on Apr 25, 2019 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    [Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections Published on Apr 26, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda Published on Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany Published on Jul 24, 2018 | angrybearblog.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender Published on Apr 21, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Even if we got a candidate against the War Party the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump betayal his voters, surrounded himself with neocons, continues to do Bibi's bidding, and ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down? Published on Apr 21, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Muller report implicates Obama administration in total and utter incompetence, if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called criminal negligence in legal speak. Published on Apr 21, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond Published on Apr 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA Published on Oct 22, 2017 | www.unz.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares Published on Oct 28, 2017 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    [Apr 21, 2019] Special Counsel Mueller -- Disingenuous and Dishonest by Larry C Johnson Published on Apr 20, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Published on Apr 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer Published on Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse. Published on Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Apr 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard: People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars? Published on Apr 19, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Apr 17, 2019] Haspel is not the "underling". Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy. Published on Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status Published on Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 17, 2019] Six US Agencies Conspired ... Published on Apr 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 17, 2019] Deep State and the FBI Federal Blackmail Investigation Published on Feb 23, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

    [Apr 17, 2019] Did CIA Director William Casey really say, We ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false Published on Sep 01, 2013 | www.quora.com

    [Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran. Published on Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump Published on Apr 16, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning. Published on Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Apr 15, 2019] Do you need to be stupid to support Trump in 2020, even if you voted for him as lesser evil in 2016 Published on Apr 15, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc Published on Apr 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender Published on Apr 21, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Even if we got a candidate against the War Party the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump betayal his voters, surrounded himself with neocons, continues to do Bibi's bidding, and ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down? Published on Apr 21, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Muller report implicates Obama administration in total and utter incompetence, if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called criminal negligence in legal speak. Published on Apr 21, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond Published on Apr 21, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA Published on Oct 22, 2017 | www.unz.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares Published on Oct 28, 2017 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    [Apr 21, 2019] Special Counsel Mueller -- Disingenuous and Dishonest by Larry C Johnson Published on Apr 20, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Published on Apr 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer Published on Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse. Published on Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Apr 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard: People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars? Published on Apr 19, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Apr 17, 2019] Haspel is not the "underling". Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy. Published on Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status Published on Apr 17, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 17, 2019] Six US Agencies Conspired ... Published on Apr 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 17, 2019] Deep State and the FBI Federal Blackmail Investigation Published on Feb 23, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org

    [Apr 17, 2019] Did CIA Director William Casey really say, We ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false Published on Sep 01, 2013 | www.quora.com

    [Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran. Published on Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump Published on Apr 16, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning. Published on Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Apr 15, 2019] Do you need to be stupid to support Trump in 2020, even if you voted for him as lesser evil in 2016 Published on Apr 15, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc Published on Apr 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA Published on Apr 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times Published on Apr 08, 2019 | www.wsws.org

    [Apr 10, 2019] A demoralized white working and middle class was willing to believe in anything, deluding themselves into reading between the barren eruptions of his blowzy proclamations. They elevated him to messianic heights, ironically fashioning him into that which he publicly claims to despise: an Obama, a Barry in negative image, hope and change for the OxyContin and Breitbart set Published on Apr 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Apr 08, 2019] Aaron Maté Was Also Right About Russiagate Published on Mar 31, 2019 | scotthorton.org

    [Apr 07, 2019] Nunes The Russian Collusion Hoax Meets An Unbelievbable End Published on Apr 07, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES Published on Apr 06, 2019 | www.aseees.org

    [Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard Published on Apr 05, 2019 | www.rt.com

    [Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney Published on Apr 04, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Apr 04, 2019] Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader Published on Apr 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Apr 03, 2019] What We Can Learn From 1920s Germany by Brian E. Fogarty Published on Apr 03, 2019 | www.commondreams.org

    [Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry Published on Apr 11, 2016 | consortiumnews.com

    [Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books Published on Apr 01, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    [Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria? Published on Mar 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate Published on Mar 30, 2019 | www.thenation.com

    [Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population. Published on Mar 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 29, 2019] Trumps billionaire coup détat: Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history Published on Mar 22, 2017 | failedevolution.blogspot.gr

    [Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism by Jonathan Cook Published on Mar 25, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson Published on Oct 12, 2018 | www.theepochtimes.com

    [Mar 25, 2019] Another SIGINT compromise ... Published on Feb 28, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Mar 24, 2019] The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian. Published on Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report Published on Mar 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr. Published on Mar 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary Published on Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Mar 24, 2019] One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle. Published on Mar 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates. Published on Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed Published on Mar 23, 2019 | dailycaller.com

    [Mar 23, 2019] Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel. Published on Mar 23, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away Published on Mar 22, 2019 | twitter.com

    [Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies Published on Mar 03, 2006 | www.nytimes.com

    [Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19 Published on Mar 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq? Published on Oct 10, 2014 | The Guardian

    [Mar 17, 2019] Mueller uses the same old false flag scams, just different packaging of his forensics-free findings Published on Mar 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings Published on Mar 13, 2019 | Consortiumnews

    [Mar 11, 2019] Bruce Ohr, Liar or Moron by Larry C Johnson Published on Mar 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Mar 05, 2019] The Shadow Governments Destruction Of Democracy Published on Feb 19, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 27, 2019] Their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy Published on Feb 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Feb 26, 2019] Neoliberalism by Julie Wilson Published on Oct 09, 2017 | www.amazon.com

    [Feb 24, 2019] David Stockman on Peak Trump : Undrainable swamp (which is on Pentagon side of Potomac river) and fantasy of MAGA (which become MIGA -- make Israel great again) Published on Feb 04, 2019 | www.antiwar.com

    [Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions Published on Feb 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds Published on Feb 19, 2019 | www.veteranstoday.com

    [Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube Published on Feb 19, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Feb 18, 2019] Do You Believe in the Deep State Now by Robert W. Merry Published on Feb 18, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Feb 18, 2019] Joe Rogan Experience #1170 - Tulsi Gabbard Published on Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Feb 17, 2019] Was Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest? Published on Mar 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Feb 17, 2019] Trump is Russian asset memo is really neocon propaganda overkill Published on Jan 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives Published on Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Jan 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 16, 2019] Death Of Russiagate: Mueller Team Tied To Mifsud s Network Published on Jan 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished Published on Feb 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Feb 13, 2019] Making Globalism Great Again by C.J. Hopkins Published on Feb 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber Published on Feb 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed Published on Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Feb 08, 2019] To understand Steele and the five eyes involvement in the Russia hoax you need to go to the library Published on Feb 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back Published on Aug 09, 2017 | zeroanthropology.net

    [Jan 29, 2019] After hiring Abrams the next logical step for Trump would be hiring Hillary or Wolfowitz Published on Jan 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian Published on Dec 22, 2018 | off-guardian.org

    [Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal? Published on Jan 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald Published on Jan 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jan 19, 2019] According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks Published on Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jan 14, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard, A Rare Anti-War Democrat, Will Run For President Published on Jan 14, 2019 | shadowproof.com

    [Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke Published on Jan 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames Published on Jan 11, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer Published on Jan 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything Published on Jan 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International Published on Jan 08, 2019 | sputniknews.com

    [Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative Published on Jan 05, 2019 | www.defenddemocracy.press

    [Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman Published on Mar 30, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

    [Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. Published on Jan 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 21, 2019] George Papodopoulus was entrapped by individuals linked to British MI-6 and the CIA with offers to provide meetings with Russians and Putin. The Mueller account is a lie Published on Apr 20, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer Published on Apr 20, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning. Published on Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books Published on Apr 01, 2019 | www.amazon.com

    [Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria? Published on Mar 31, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate Published on Mar 30, 2019 | www.thenation.com

    [Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population. Published on Mar 30, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 29, 2019] Trumps billionaire coup détat: Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history Published on Mar 22, 2017 | failedevolution.blogspot.gr

    [Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism by Jonathan Cook Published on Mar 25, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson Published on Oct 12, 2018 | www.theepochtimes.com

    [Mar 25, 2019] Another SIGINT compromise ... Published on Feb 28, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Aug 14, 2019] There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer Published on Apr 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 24, 2019] The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian. Published on Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report Published on Mar 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr. Published on Mar 24, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary Published on Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Mar 24, 2019] One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle. Published on Mar 24, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates. Published on Mar 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed Published on Mar 23, 2019 | dailycaller.com

    [Mar 23, 2019] Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel. Published on Mar 23, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away Published on Mar 22, 2019 | twitter.com

    [Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies Published on Mar 03, 2006 | www.nytimes.com

    [Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19 Published on Mar 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq? Published on Oct 10, 2014 | The Guardian

    [Mar 17, 2019] Mueller uses the same old false flag scams, just different packaging of his forensics-free findings Published on Mar 17, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

    [Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings Published on Mar 13, 2019 | Consortiumnews

    [Mar 11, 2019] Bruce Ohr, Liar or Moron by Larry C Johnson Published on Mar 11, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Mar 05, 2019] The Shadow Governments Destruction Of Democracy Published on Feb 19, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 27, 2019] Their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy Published on Feb 27, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Feb 26, 2019] Neoliberalism by Julie Wilson Published on Oct 09, 2017 | www.amazon.com

    [Feb 24, 2019] David Stockman on Peak Trump : Undrainable swamp (which is on Pentagon side of Potomac river) and fantasy of MAGA (which become MIGA -- make Israel great again) Published on Feb 04, 2019 | www.antiwar.com

    [Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions Published on Feb 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds Published on Feb 19, 2019 | www.veteranstoday.com

    [Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube Published on Feb 19, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Feb 18, 2019] Do You Believe in the Deep State Now by Robert W. Merry Published on Feb 18, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Feb 18, 2019] Joe Rogan Experience #1170 - Tulsi Gabbard Published on Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

    [Feb 17, 2019] Was Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest? Published on Mar 23, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Feb 17, 2019] Trump is Russian asset memo is really neocon propaganda overkill Published on Jan 23, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives Published on Feb 17, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Jan 20, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 16, 2019] Death Of Russiagate: Mueller Team Tied To Mifsud s Network Published on Jan 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished Published on Feb 12, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Feb 13, 2019] Making Globalism Great Again by C.J. Hopkins Published on Feb 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber Published on Feb 12, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed Published on Feb 10, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Feb 08, 2019] To understand Steele and the five eyes involvement in the Russia hoax you need to go to the library Published on Feb 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Feb 05, 2019] The neocon s strategy Published on Dec 28, 2018 | www.rightweb.irc-online.org

    [Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back Published on Aug 09, 2017 | zeroanthropology.net

    [Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian Published on Dec 22, 2018 | off-guardian.org

    [Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal? Published on Jan 20, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald Published on Jan 21, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jan 19, 2019] According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks Published on Jan 19, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jan 14, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard, A Rare Anti-War Democrat, Will Run For President Published on Jan 14, 2019 | shadowproof.com

    [Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke Published on Jan 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames Published on Jan 11, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer Published on Jan 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

    [Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything Published on Jan 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International Published on Jan 08, 2019 | sputniknews.com

    [Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative Published on Jan 05, 2019 | www.defenddemocracy.press

    [Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman Published on Mar 30, 2017 | www.theguardian.com

    [Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. Published on Jan 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News Published on Feb 20, 2018J | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo Published on Jan 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ? Published on Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. Published on Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap Published on Dec 30, 2018 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

    [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme - Published on Dec 29, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon Published on May 06, 2014 | mondoweiss.net

    [Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray Published on Dec 13, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

    [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts Published on www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News Published on Feb 20, 2018J | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo Published on Jan 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ? Published on Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. Published on Jan 02, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap Published on Dec 30, 2018 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

    [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat Published on Dec 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 14, 2018] MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given Published on Dec 08, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Dec 14, 2018] Vetting NYT materials by CIA reflects full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the neoliberal MSM Published on Dec 01, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

    [Dec 14, 2018] The dirty propaganda games NYT play Published on Sep 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme - Published on Dec 29, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon Published on May 06, 2014 | mondoweiss.net

    [Dec 22, 2018] British Security Service Infiltration, the Integrity Initiative and the Institute for Statecraft by Craig Murray Published on Dec 13, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk

    [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts Published on www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat Published on Dec 15, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 14, 2018] MI6, along with elements of the CIA, was behind the Steele Dossier. Representatives of John Brennan met in London to discus before the go ahead was given Published on Dec 08, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Dec 14, 2018] Vetting NYT materials by CIA reflects full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the neoliberal MSM Published on Dec 01, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

    [Dec 14, 2018] The dirty propaganda games NYT play Published on Sep 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

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

    [Dec 09, 2018] Die Weltwoche Weltwoche Online – www.weltwoche.ch Tucker Carlson Trump is not capable Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 49-2018 Published on Dec 09, 2018 | www.weltwoche.ch

    [Dec 08, 2018] Internet as a perfect tool of inverted totalitarism: it stimulates atomizatin of individuals, creates authomatic 24x7 surveillance over population, suppresses solidarity by exceggerating non-essential differences and allow more insidious brainwashing of the population Published on Dec 08, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games Published on Dec 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 07, 2018] Brexit Theresa May Goes Greek! by Brett Redmayne Published on Dec 07, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi Published on Dec 05, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot Published on Dec 11, 2015 | Peak Prosperity

    [Dec 02, 2018] Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award by Ray McGovern Published on Nov 29, 2018 | www.antiwar.com

    [Dec 02, 2018] Muller investigation has all the appearance of an investigation looking for a crime Published on Dec 01, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 30, 2018] US Warlords now and at the tome Miill's Poer Elite was published Published on May-June 1 1999, | prospect.org

    [Nov 27, 2018] The political fraud of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" Published on Nov 27, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders Published on Nov 19, 2018 | www.rt.com

    [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi Published on Nov 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda Published on Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-) Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also. Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill Published on Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power Published on Nov 22, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power Published on Nov 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation graveyard of social protest movements, and for good reason Published on Nov 02, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Nov 12, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers Published on Nov 02, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore Published on Feb 20, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    [Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn Published on Nov 08, 2018 | www.sott.net

    [Nov 07, 2018] America's Vote of No Confidence in Trump by Daniel Larison Published on Nov 07, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Nov 05, 2018] Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power" warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner's sadistic leer Published on Nov 05, 2018 | www.truthdig.com

    [Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir Published on Oct 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Oct 16, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon Published on Oct 16, 2018 | www.theamericanconservative.com

    [Oct 10, 2018] A Decalogue of American Empire-Building A Dialogue by James Petras Published on Oct 10, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum Published on Oct 07, 2018 | freethoughtblogs.com

    [Oct 04, 2018] Brett Kavanaugh's 'revenge' theory spotlights past with Clintons by Lisa Mascaro Published on Oct 03, 2018 | www.chicagotribune.com

    [Oct 02, 2018] Recovered memory is a Freudian voodoo. Notice how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged Published on Oct 02, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh? Published on Oct 02, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Sep 29, 2018] The Schizophrenic Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease by Charles Hugh Smith Published on Jul 31, 2018 | russia-insider.com

    [Sep 29, 2018] Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy by Dan Sanchez Published on May 02, 2017 | original.antiwar.com

    [Sep 27, 2018] Hiding in Plain Sight Why We Cannot See the System Destroying Us Published on Sep 27, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Sep 27, 2018] The power elites goal is to change its appearance to look like something new and innovative to stay ahead of an electorate who are increasingly skeptical of the neoliberalism and globalism that enrich the elite at their expense. Published on Sep 27, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Sep 24, 2018] Given Trumps kneeling to the British Skripal poisoning 'hate russia' hoax I suspect there is no chance he will go after Christopher Steele or any of the senior demoncrat conspirers no matter how much he would love to sucker punch Theresa May and her nasty colleagues. Published on Sep 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone Published on Sep 21, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    [Sep 16, 2018] Looks like the key players in Steele dossier were CIA assets Published on Aug 23, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin Published on Aug 03, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal. Published on Sep 16, 2018 | crookedtimber.org

    [Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone Published on Sep 07, 2018 | ronpaulinstitute.org

    [Sep 03, 2018] www.informationclearinghouse.info/50168.htm In Memoriam by Paul Edwards Published on Sep 03, 2018 | www.informationclearinghouse.info

    [Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan Published on Aug 30, 2018 | www.voltairenet.org

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

    [Dec 09, 2018] Die Weltwoche Weltwoche Online – www.weltwoche.ch Tucker Carlson Trump is not capable Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 49-2018 Published on Dec 09, 2018 | www.weltwoche.ch

    [Dec 08, 2018] Internet as a perfect tool of inverted totalitarism: it stimulates atomizatin of individuals, creates authomatic 24x7 surveillance over population, suppresses solidarity by exceggerating non-essential differences and allow more insidious brainwashing of the population Published on Dec 08, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games Published on Dec 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Dec 07, 2018] Brexit Theresa May Goes Greek! by Brett Redmayne Published on Dec 07, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi Published on Dec 05, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot Published on Dec 11, 2015 | Peak Prosperity

    [Dec 02, 2018] Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award by Ray McGovern Published on Nov 29, 2018 | www.antiwar.com

    [Dec 02, 2018] Muller investigation has all the appearance of an investigation looking for a crime Published on Dec 01, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Nov 30, 2018] US Warlords now and at the tome Miill's Poer Elite was published Published on May-June 1 1999, | prospect.org

    [Nov 27, 2018] The political fraud of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" Published on Nov 27, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders Published on Nov 19, 2018 | www.rt.com

    [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi Published on Nov 27, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda Published on Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 24, 2018] British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Nov 24, 2018] Now we know created MH17 smear campaign, who financial Steele dossier and created Skripal affair ;-) Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also. Published on Nov 24, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill Published on Nov 23, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power Published on Nov 22, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power Published on Nov 21, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Aug 28, 2018] A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes Published on Mar 23, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com

    [Aug 24, 2018] The priorities of the deep state and its public face the MSM Published on Aug 24, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

    [Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts Published on Aug 18, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Aug 22, 2018] Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts - US Propaganda Stays Alive Published on Aug 22, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Aug 18, 2018] Corporate Media the Enemy of the People by Paul Street Published on Aug 18, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

    [Aug 18, 2018] MoA - John Brennan Is No Match For Trump Published on Aug 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Aug 18, 2018] Sanders behaviour during election is suspect, unless you assume he acted as sheep dog for hillary Published on Aug 18, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed Published on Aug 10, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov Published on Jul 28, 2018 | russia-insider.com

    [Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou Published on Aug 13, 2018 | truthout.org

    [Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement Published on Aug 11, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography Published on Aug 08, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake. Published on Aug 05, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Aug 05, 2018] How identity politics makes the Left lose its collective identity by Tomasz Pierscionek Published on Aug 05, 2018 | www.rt.com

    [Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community? Published on Jul 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp Published on Jul 27, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski Published on Jul 23, 2018 | www.globalresearch.ca

    [Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia Published on Jul 22, 2018 | www.youtube.com

    [Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer Published on Jul 20, 2018 | www.unz.com

    [Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland Published on Jul 12, 2018 | caucus99percent.com

    [Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team Published on Jul 13, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare Published on May 31, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern Published on Jun 09, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

    [Jun 06, 2018] Neoliberal language allows to cut wages by packaging neoliberal oligarchy preferences as national interests Published on Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com

    [May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence Published on May 24, 2018 | consortiumnews.com

    [May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b Published on May 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org

    [Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice Published on Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    [Mar 23, 2018] Skripal Poisoning a Desperate British Attempt To Resurrect Their American Coup by Barbara Boyd Published on Mar 18, 2018 | www.larouchepub.com

    [Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin Published on Mar 13, 2018 | www.wsws.org

    [Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death. Published on Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this Published on Mar 10, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence Published on Mar 08, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus Published on Mar 07, 2018 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Feb 12, 2018] I am wondering why it is that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing Published on Feb 12, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

    [Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised Published on Jan 22, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies Published on Oct 30, 2017 | consortiumnews.com

    [Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater Published on Dec 28, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com

    [Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou Published on Dec 28, 2017 | theduran.com

    [Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus Published on Sep 05, 2017 | turcopolier.typepad.com

    [Sep 16, 2017] Virginia Scraps Electronic Voting Machines Hackers Destroyed At DefCon Published on Sep 16, 2017 | it.slashdot.org

    [Aug 30, 2017] The President of Belgian Magistrates - Neoliberalism is a form of Fascism by Manuela Cadelli Published on Aug 30, 2017 | www.defenddemocracy.press

    [Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills Published on Jul 14, 2017 | nationalinterest.org

    [Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary Published on Jul 12, 2017 | russia-insider.com

    [Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce Published on Jun 24, 2017 | original.antiwar.com

    [May 23, 2017] CIA, the cornerstone of the deep state has agenda that is different from the US national interest and reflect agenda of the special interest groups such as Wall Street bankers and MIC Published on May 23, 2017 | nakedcapitalism.com

    [Feb 19, 2017] The deep state is running scared! Published on Feb 19, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com

    [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia Published on Dec 09, 2016 | www.theguardian.com

    [Feb 29, 2020] Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who s Really In Charge Of The US Military by Cynthia Chung Published on Jan 21, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

    Oldies But Goodies

    [Dec 19, 2017] Do not Underestimate the Power of Microfoundations

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

    [Oct 16, 2017] Governing is complicated as laws and policies affect a diverse spectrum of people and situations. The average person, in my experience, is not inclined to spend the time necessary to understand good laws/policy in a complex society. The one safety check on mob rule is that most people don't become politically active until their situation is relatively dire

    [Oct 11, 2017] Russia witch hunt is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working class

    [Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

    [Oct 16, 2017] Governing is complicated as laws and policies affect a diverse spectrum of people and situations. The average person, in my experience, is not inclined to spend the time necessary to understand good laws/policy in a complex society. The one safety check on mob rule is that most people don't become politically active until their situation is relatively dire

    [Oct 11, 2017] Russia witch hunt is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working class

    [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

    [Oct 12, 2016] NSA whistleblower says DNC hack was not done by Russia, but by US intelligence

    [Sep 14, 2016] The story of Chile s popular, and democratic rejection of government by oligarchs is today s must-read, and provides unsettling similarities to current events

    [Jul 11, 2016] 5 Reasons The Comey Hearing Was The Worst Education In Criminal Justice The American Public Has Ever Had by Seth Abramson

    [Jul 06, 2016] FBI Rewrites Federal Law to Let Hillary Off the Hook by Andrew C. McCarthy

    [Jan 09, 2016] Allen Dulles and modern neocons

    [Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

    [Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

    [Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

    [Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

    [Dec 28, 2017] The CIA as Organized Crime How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

    [Dec 28, 2017] Regime Change Comes Home: The CIA s Overt Threats against Trump by James Petras

    [Dec 28, 2017] From Snowden To Russia-gate - The CIA And The Media

    [Dec 28, 2017] On your surmise that Putin prefers Trump to Hillary and would thus have incentive to influence the election, I beg to differ. Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections.

    [Dec 27, 2017] Mueller investigation can be viewed as an attempt to avoid going after Clinton and hide the fact that a corrupted intelligence service worked to derail Sanders

    [Dec 27, 2017] Putin is one smart statesman; he knows very well it makes no difference which candidates gets elected in US elections. Any candidate that WOULD make a difference would NEVER see the daylight of nomination, especially at the presidential level. I myself believe all the talk of Russia interfering the 2016 Election is no more than a witch hunt

    [Dec 23, 2017] Russiagate as bait and switch maneuver

    [Dec 22, 2017] Beyond Cynicism America Fumbles Towards Kafka s Castle by James Howard Kunstler

    [Dec 22, 2017] Rosenstein knew that he is authorizing a fishing expedition against Trump, so he is a part of the cabal

    [Dec 21, 2017] The RussiaGate Witch-Hunt Stockman Names Names In The Deep State's Insurance Policy by David Stockman

    [Dec 19, 2017] Do not Underestimate the Power of Microfoundations

    [Dec 18, 2017] The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate by Stephen F. Cohen

    [Dec 16, 2017] The U.S. Is Not A Democracy, It Never Was by Gabriel Rockhill

    [Dec 13, 2017] All the signs in the Russia probe point to Jared Kushner. Who next?

    [Dec 11, 2017] How Russia-gate Met the Magnitsky Myth by Robert Parry

    [Dec 11, 2017] Strzok-Gate And The Mueller Cover-Up by Alexander Mercouris

    [Dec 10, 2017] blamePutin continues to be the media s dominant hashtag. Vladimir Putin finally confesses his entire responsibility for everything bad that has ever happened since the beginning of time

    [Dec 10, 2017] When Washington Cheered the Jihadists Consortiumnews

    [Dec 10, 2017] Russia-gate s Reach into Journalism by Dennis J Bernstein

    [Dec 09, 2017] Hyping the Russian Threat to Undermine Free Speech by Max Blumenthal

    [Dec 03, 2017] Islamic Mindset Akin to Bolshevism by Srdja Trifkovic

    [Dec 01, 2017] NSA hacks system administrators, new leak reveals

    [Dec 01, 2017] Neocon Chaos Promotion in the Mideast

    [Dec 01, 2017] JFK The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy by L. Fletcher Prouty, Oliver Stone, Jesse Ventura

    [Nov 30, 2017] Heritage Foundation + the War Industry What a Pair by Paul Gottfried

    [Nov 28, 2017] The Duplicitous Superpower by Ted Galen Carpenter

    [Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

    [Sep 16, 2017] Virginia Scraps Electronic Voting Machines Hackers Destroyed At DefCon

    [Aug 30, 2017] The President of Belgian Magistrates - Neoliberalism is a form of Fascism by Manuela Cadelli

    [Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

    [Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

    [Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

    [May 23, 2017] CIA, the cornerstone of the deep state has agenda that is different from the US national interest and reflect agenda of the special interest groups such as Wall Street bankers and MIC

    [Feb 19, 2017] The deep state is running scared!

    [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

    [Nov 08, 2017] The Plot to Scapegoat Russia How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Putin by Dan Kovalik

    [Nov 08, 2017] Learning to Love McCarthyism by Robert Parry

    [Nov 04, 2017] Who's Afraid of Corporate COINTELPRO by C. J. Hopkins

    [Oct 31, 2017] Above All - The Junta Expands Its Claim To Power

    [Oct 29, 2017] Whose Bright Idea Was RussiaGate by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Oct 25, 2017] Tomorrow Belongs to the Corporatocracy by C.J. Hopkins

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

    [Oct 17, 2017] The Victory of Perception Management by Robert Parry

    [Oct 16, 2017] Governing is complicated as laws and policies affect a diverse spectrum of people and situations. The average person, in my experience, is not inclined to spend the time necessary to understand good laws/policy in a complex society. The one safety check on mob rule is that most people don't become politically active until their situation is relatively dire

    [Oct 13, 2017] Sympathy for the Corporatocracy by C. J. Hopkins

    [Oct 11, 2017] Russia witch hunt is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working class

    [Jun 05, 2020] Antifa in Theory and in Practice

    [Oct 09, 2017] Dennis Kucinich We Must Challenge the Two-Party Duopoly Committed to War by Adam Dick

    [Oct 09, 2017] After Nine Months, Only Stale Crumbs in Russia Inquiry by Scott Ritter

    [Oct 09, 2017] Autopilot Wars by Andrew J. Bacevich

    [Oct 03, 2017] Russian Ads On Facebook A Click-Bait Campaign

    [Sep 30, 2017] Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet by Glenn Greenwald

    [Sep 27, 2017] Come You Masters of War by Matthew Harwood

    [Sep 26, 2017] Is Foreign Propaganda Even Effective by Leon Hadar

    [Sep 25, 2017] I am presently reading the book JFK and the Unspeakable by James W.Douglass and it is exactly why Kennedy was assassinated by the very same group that desperately wants to see Trump gone and the rapprochement with Russia squashed

    [Sep 24, 2017] How Sony, Obama, Seth Rogen and the CIA Secretly Planned to Force Regime Change in North Korea by Tim Shorrock

    [Sep 24, 2017] Mark Ames When Mother Jones Was Investigated for Spreading Kremlin Disinformation by Mark Ames

    [Sep 23, 2017] The Exit Strategy of Empire by Wendy McElro

    [Sep 23, 2017] Welcome to 1984 Big Brother Google Now Watching Your Every Political Move

    [Sep 20, 2017] The Politics of Military Ascendancy by James Petras

    [Sep 18, 2017] Google was seed funded by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The company now enjoys lavish partnerships with military contractors like SAIC, Northrop Grumman and Blackbird.

    [Sep 18, 2017] How The Military Defeated Trumps Insurgency

    [Sep 18, 2017] The NYT's Yellow Journalism on Russia by Rober Parry

    [Sep 17, 2017] Empire Idiots by Linh Dinh

    [Sep 16, 2017] Empire of Capital by George Monbiot

    [Sep 13, 2017] A despot in disguise: one mans mission to rip up democracy by George Monbiot

    [Sep 13, 2017] Neo-liberalism is intrinsically connected with technological advances such as Internet, smartphones by George Monbiot

    [Sep 05, 2017] Is the World Slouching Toward a Grave Systemic Crisis by Philip Zelikow

    [Aug 27, 2017] Manipulated minorities represent a major danger for democratic states>

    [Aug 25, 2017] Some analogies of current events in the USA and Mao cultural revolution: In China when the Mao mythology was threatened the Red Guard raised holy hell and lives were ruined

    [Aug 08, 2017] The Tale of the Brothers Awan by Philip Giraldi

    [Jul 30, 2017] the Ukrainingate emerging from the evidence on Hillary campaign sounds like a criminal conspiracy of foreign state against Trump

    [Jul 30, 2017] Fascism Is Possible Not in Spite of [neo]Liberal Capitalism, but Because of It by Earchiel Johnson

    [Jul 29, 2017] Ray McGovern The Deep State Assault on Elected Government Must Be Stopped

    [Jul 28, 2017] Perhaps Trump asked Sessions to fire Mueller and Sessions refused?

    [Jul 26, 2017] Regime Change Comes Home: The CIAs Overt Threats against Trump by James Petras

    [Jul 26, 2017] US Provocation and North Korea Pretext for War with China by James Petras

    [Jul 25, 2017] Oligarchs Succeed! Only the People Suffer! by James Petras

    [Jul 25, 2017] The Coup against Trump and His Military – Wall Street Defense by James Petras

    [Dec 31, 2017] Anti-Populism Ideology of the Ruling Class by James Petras

    [Jul 13, 2017] Progressive Democrats Resist and Submit, Retreat and Surrender by James Petras

    [Jul 01, 2017] MUST SEE video explains the entire 17 Intelligence Agencies Russian hacking lie

    [Jun 30, 2017] Elections Absenteeism, Boycotts and the Class Struggle by James Petras

    [Jun 26, 2017] The Soft Coup Under Way In Washington by David Stockman

    [Jun 17, 2017] The Collapsing Social Contract by Gaius Publius

    [Jun 15, 2017] Comeys Lies of Omission by Mike Whitney

    [May 23, 2017] Trumped-up claims against Trump by Ray McGovern

    [May 23, 2017] Are they really out to get Trump by Philip Girald

    [May 21, 2017] What Obsessing About Trump Causes Us To Miss by Andrew Bacevich

    [May 21, 2017] WhateverGate -- The Crazed Quest To Find Some Reason (Any Reason!) To Dump Trump by John Derbyshire

    [May 21, 2017] Speech of Lavrov at the Military Academy of the General Staff

    [May 20, 2017] Invasion of the Putin-Nazis by C.J. Hopkins

    [Dec 31, 2017] Truth-Killing as a Meta-Issue

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

    [Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

    [Jan 16, 2017] Gaius Publius Who is Blackmailing the President Why Arent Democrats Upset About It by Gaius Publius,

    [Mar 12, 2018] The USA has become completely an oligarchy run by a convoluted mix of intellignce agences and various lobbies with a fight going now on at the top (mafia 1 vs. mafia 2) for grabbing the leftovers of power, revenue, war spoils, etc

    [Mar 18, 2018] Powerful intelligence agencies are incompatible with any forms of democracy including the democracy for top one precent. The only possible form of government in this situation is inverted totalitarism

    [Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

    [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

    [Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

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

    [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

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

    [Dec 14, 2018] Vetting NYT materials by CIA reflects full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the neoliberal MSM

    [Dec 14, 2018] The dirty propaganda games NYT play

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

    [Dec 09, 2018] Die Weltwoche Weltwoche Online – www.weltwoche.ch Tucker Carlson Trump is not capable Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 49-2018

    [Dec 08, 2018] Internet as a perfect tool of inverted totalitarism: it stimulates atomizatin of individuals, creates authomatic 24x7 surveillance over population, suppresses solidarity by exceggerating non-essential differences and allow more insidious brainwashing of the population

    [Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

    [Dec 07, 2018] Brexit Theresa May Goes Greek! by Brett Redmayne

    [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

    [Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

    [Dec 02, 2018] Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award by Ray McGovern

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

    [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

    [Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

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

    [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

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

    [Dec 14, 2018] Vetting NYT materials by CIA reflects full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the neoliberal MSM

    [Dec 14, 2018] The dirty propaganda games NYT play

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

    [Dec 09, 2018] Die Weltwoche Weltwoche Online – www.weltwoche.ch Tucker Carlson Trump is not capable Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 49-2018

    [Dec 08, 2018] Internet as a perfect tool of inverted totalitarism: it stimulates atomizatin of individuals, creates authomatic 24x7 surveillance over population, suppresses solidarity by exceggerating non-essential differences and allow more insidious brainwashing of the population

    [Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

    [Dec 07, 2018] Brexit Theresa May Goes Greek! by Brett Redmayne

    [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

    [Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

    [Dec 02, 2018] Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award by Ray McGovern

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

    [Nov 30, 2018] US Warlords now and at the tome Miill's Poer Elite was published

    [Nov 27, 2018] The political fraud of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal"

    [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

    [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

    [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

    [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

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

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

    [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

    [Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation graveyard of social protest movements, and for good reason

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

    [Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

    [Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn

    [Nov 07, 2018] America's Vote of No Confidence in Trump by Daniel Larison

    [Nov 05, 2018] Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power" warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner's sadistic leer

    [Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

    [Oct 16, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon

    [Oct 10, 2018] A Decalogue of American Empire-Building A Dialogue by James Petras

    [Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

    [Oct 04, 2018] Brett Kavanaugh's 'revenge' theory spotlights past with Clintons by Lisa Mascaro

    [Oct 02, 2018] Recovered memory is a Freudian voodoo. Notice how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged

    [Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?

    [Sep 29, 2018] The Schizophrenic Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease by Charles Hugh Smith

    [Sep 29, 2018] Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy by Dan Sanchez

    [Sep 27, 2018] Hiding in Plain Sight Why We Cannot See the System Destroying Us

    [Sep 27, 2018] The power elites goal is to change its appearance to look like something new and innovative to stay ahead of an electorate who are increasingly skeptical of the neoliberalism and globalism that enrich the elite at their expense.

    [Sep 24, 2018] Given Trumps kneeling to the British Skripal poisoning 'hate russia' hoax I suspect there is no chance he will go after Christopher Steele or any of the senior demoncrat conspirers no matter how much he would love to sucker punch Theresa May and her nasty colleagues.

    [Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Sep 16, 2018] Looks like the key players in Steele dossier were CIA assets

    [Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

    [Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal.

    [Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

    [Sep 03, 2018] www.informationclearinghouse.info/50168.htm In Memoriam by Paul Edwards

    [Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

    [Aug 28, 2018] A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes

    [Aug 24, 2018] The priorities of the deep state and its public face the MSM

    [Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Aug 22, 2018] Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts - US Propaganda Stays Alive

    [Aug 18, 2018] Corporate Media the Enemy of the People by Paul Street

    [Aug 18, 2018] MoA - John Brennan Is No Match For Trump

    [Aug 18, 2018] Sanders behaviour during election is suspect, unless you assume he acted as sheep dog for hillary

    [Nov 30, 2018] US Warlords now and at the tome Miill's Poer Elite was published

    [Nov 27, 2018] The political fraud of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal"

    [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

    [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

    [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

    [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

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

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

    [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

    [Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation graveyard of social protest movements, and for good reason

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

    [Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

    [Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn

    [Nov 07, 2018] America's Vote of No Confidence in Trump by Daniel Larison

    [Nov 05, 2018] Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power" warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner's sadistic leer

    [Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

    [Oct 16, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon

    [Oct 10, 2018] A Decalogue of American Empire-Building A Dialogue by James Petras

    [Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

    [Oct 04, 2018] Brett Kavanaugh's 'revenge' theory spotlights past with Clintons by Lisa Mascaro

    [Oct 02, 2018] Recovered memory is a Freudian voodoo. Notice how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged

    [Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?

    [Sep 29, 2018] The Schizophrenic Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease by Charles Hugh Smith

    [Sep 29, 2018] Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy by Dan Sanchez

    [Sep 27, 2018] Hiding in Plain Sight Why We Cannot See the System Destroying Us

    [Sep 27, 2018] The power elites goal is to change its appearance to look like something new and innovative to stay ahead of an electorate who are increasingly skeptical of the neoliberalism and globalism that enrich the elite at their expense.

    [Sep 24, 2018] Given Trumps kneeling to the British Skripal poisoning 'hate russia' hoax I suspect there is no chance he will go after Christopher Steele or any of the senior demoncrat conspirers no matter how much he would love to sucker punch Theresa May and her nasty colleagues.

    [Sep 03, 2018] www.informationclearinghouse.info/50168.htm In Memoriam by Paul Edwards

    [Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Sep 16, 2018] Looks like the key players in Steele dossier were CIA assets

    [Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

    [Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal.

    [Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

    [Sep 03, 2018] www.informationclearinghouse.info/50168.htm In Memoriam by Paul Edwards

    [Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

    [Aug 28, 2018] A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes

    [Aug 24, 2018] The priorities of the deep state and its public face the MSM

    [Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Aug 22, 2018] Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts - US Propaganda Stays Alive

    [Aug 18, 2018] Corporate Media the Enemy of the People by Paul Street

    [Aug 18, 2018] MoA - John Brennan Is No Match For Trump

    [Aug 18, 2018] Sanders behaviour during election is suspect, unless you assume he acted as sheep dog for hillary

    [Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed

    [Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

    [Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou

    [Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

    [Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

    [Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

    [Aug 05, 2018] How identity politics makes the Left lose its collective identity by Tomasz Pierscionek

    [Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

    [Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp

    [Aug 17, 2018] What if Russiagate is the New WMDs

    [Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed

    [Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

    [Jul 23, 2018] The Prophecy of Orwell's 1984. Totalitarian Control and the Entertainment Culture that Takes Over by Edward Curtin

    [Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski

    [Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia

    [Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

    [Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

    [Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

    [Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

    [Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

    [Jun 06, 2018] Neoliberal language allows to cut wages by packaging neoliberal oligarchy preferences as national interests

    [May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence

    [May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

    [Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

    [Mar 23, 2018] Skripal Poisoning a Desperate British Attempt To Resurrect Their American Coup by Barbara Boyd

    [Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

    [Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

    [Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

    [Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou

    [Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

    [Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

    [May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

    [Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

    [Aug 05, 2018] How identity politics makes the Left lose its collective identity by Tomasz Pierscionek

    [Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

    [Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp

    [Jul 23, 2018] The Prophecy of Orwell's 1984. Totalitarian Control and the Entertainment Culture that Takes Over by Edward Curtin

    [Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski

    [Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia

    [Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

    [Jul 20, 2018] What exactly is fake news caucus99percent

    [Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

    [Jul 20, 2018] Is President Trump A Traitor Because He Wants Peace With Russia by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Jul 17, 2018] I think there is much more to the comment made by Putin regarding Bill Browder and his money flows into the DNC and Clinton campaign. That would explain why the DNC didn t hand the servers over to the FBI after being hacked.

    [Jul 16, 2018] Putin Claims U.S. Intelligence Agents Funneled $400K To Clinton Campaign Zero Hedge

    [Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

    [Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

    [Jul 15, 2018] Something Rotten About the DOJ Indictment of the GRU by Publius Tacitus

    [Jul 15, 2018] As if the Donald did not sanctioned to death the Russians on every possible level. How is this different from Mueller's and comp witch hunt against the Russians?

    [Jul 03, 2018] Russia has a lot of information about Lybia that could dig a political grave for Hillary. They did not release it

    [Jul 03, 2018] Musings II The "Intelligence Community," "Russian Interference," and Due Diligence

    [Jun 21, 2018] The neoliberal agenda is agreed and enacted by BOTH parties:

    [Jun 18, 2018] American Pravda The JFK Assassination, Part I - What Happened, by Ron Unz - The Unz Review

    [Jun 17, 2018] Mattis Putin Is Trying To Undermine America s Moral Authority by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Jun 17, 2018] the dominant political forces in EU are anti-Russia

    [Jun 13, 2018] How False Flag Operations Are Carried Out Today by Philip M. GIRALDI

    [Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

    [Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

    [Jun 06, 2018] Neoliberal language allows to cut wages by packaging neoliberal oligarchy preferences as national interests

    [May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence

    [May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

    [Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

    [Jun 12, 2018] The real reason for which 'information apocalypse' terrifies the mainstream media

    [Jun 10, 2018] Trump and National Neoliberalism by Sasha Breger Bush

    [Jun 10, 2018] Trump and National Neoliberalism, Revisited by Sasha Breger Bush

    [May 31, 2018] Journalists and academics expose UK's criminal actions in the Middle East by Julie Hyland

    [May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence

    [May 24, 2018] The diversion of Russia Gate is a continuation of former diversions such as the Tea Party which was invented by the banksters to turn public anger over the big banking collapse and the resulting recession into a movement to gain more deregulation for tax breaks for the wealthy

    [May 23, 2018] Mueller role as a hatchet man is now firmly established. Rosenstein key role in applointing Mueller without any evidence became also more clear with time. Was he coerced or did it voluntarily is unclear by Lambert Strether

    [May 23, 2018] If the Trump-Russia set up began in spring 2016 or earlier, presumably it was undertaken on the assumption that HRC would win the election. (I say "presumably" because you never can tell..) If so, then the operation would have been an MI6 / Ukrainian / CIA coordinated op intended to frame Putin, not Trump

    [May 22, 2018] Cat fight within the US elite getting more intense

    [Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

    [May 03, 2018] Alert The Clintonian empire is still here and tries to steal the popular vote throug

    [May 03, 2018] Mueller's questions to Trump more those of a prosecuting attorney than of an impartial investigator by Alexander Mercouris

    [May 03, 2018] Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it

    [Apr 30, 2018] Neoliberalization of the US Democratic Party is irreversible: It is still controlled by Clinton gang even after Hillary debacle

    [Apr 27, 2018] A Most Sordid Profession by Fred Reed

    [Apr 22, 2018] The American ruling class loves Identity Politics, because Identity Politics divides the people into hostile groups and prevents any resistance to the ruling elite

    [Apr 21, 2018] On the Criminal Referral of Comey, Clinton et al by Ray McGovern

    [Apr 17, 2018] Poor Alex

    [Apr 11, 2018] Female neocon warmongers from Fox look like plastered brick walls – heartless and brainless.

    [Apr 09, 2018] When Military Leaders Have Reckless Disregard for the Truth by Bruce Fein

    [Apr 02, 2018] Russophobia Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy by A. Tsygankov

    [Mar 23, 2018] Skripal Poisoning a Desperate British Attempt To Resurrect Their American Coup by Barbara Boyd

    [Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

    [Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

    [Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

    [Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

    [Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

    [Apr 01, 2018] Big American Money, Not Russia, Put Trump in the White House: Reflections on a Recent Report by Paul Street

    [Apr 01, 2018] Does the average user care if s/he is micro-targetted by political advertisements based on what they already believe?

    [Mar 31, 2018] FBI Director Mueller testified to Congress that Saddam Hussein was responsible for anthrax attack! That was Mueller's role in selling the "intelligence" to invade Iraq.

    [Mar 31, 2018] RFK and Nixon immediately understood the assassination was a CIA-led wet-works operation since they chaired the assassination committees themselves in the past

    [Mar 31, 2018] RFK and Nixon immediately understood the assassination was a CIA-led wet-works operation since they chaired the assassination committees themselves in the past

    [Mar 28, 2018] Deep State and False Flag Attacks

    [Mar 27, 2018] Let's Investigate John Brennan, by Philip Giraldi

    [Mar 25, 2018] Cambridge Analytica Scandal Rockets to Watergate Proportions and Beyond by Adam Garrie

    [Mar 24, 2018] Why the UK, the EU and the US Gang-Up on Russia by James Petras

    [Mar 24, 2018] Did Trump cut a deal on the collusion charge by Mike Whitney

    [Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

    [Feb 12, 2018] I am wondering why it is that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing

    [Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised

    [Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

    [Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

    [Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

    [Mar 22, 2018] I hope Brennan is running scared, along with Power. It's like the Irish Mafia.

    [Mar 21, 2018] Former CIA Chief Brennan Running Scared by Ray McGovern

    [Mar 21, 2018] Washington's Invasion of Iraq at Fifteen

    [Mar 21, 2018] Whataboutism Is A Nonsensical Propaganda Term Used To Defend The Failed Status Quo by Mike Krieger

    [Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

    [Mar 16, 2018] Corbyn Calls for Evidence in Escalating Poison Row

    [Mar 16, 2018] NATO to display common front in Skripal case

    [Mar 16, 2018] Are We Living Under a Military Coup ?

    [Mar 16, 2018] Will the State Department Become a Subsidiary of the CIA

    [Mar 14, 2018] UNSC holds urgent meeting over Salisbury attack

    [Mar 14, 2018] Jefferson Morley on the CIA and Mossad Tradeoffs in the Formation of the US-Israel Strategic Relationship

    [Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

    [Mar 11, 2018] Washington s Century-long War on Russia by Mike Whitney

    [Mar 11, 2018] Reality Check: The Guardian Restarts Push for Regime Change in Russia by Kit

    [Mar 11, 2018] I often think that, a the machinery of surveillance and repression becomes so well oiled and refined, the ruling oligarchs will soon stop even paying lip service to 'American workers', or the "American middle class" and go full authoritarian

    [Mar 10, 2018] Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in Obama policy and HRC campaign long before any Steele s Dossier. This was a program ofunleashing cold War II

    [Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

    [Mar 08, 2018] We don t have the evidence yet because Mueller hasn t found it yet! is a classic argument from ignorance, in that is assumes without evidence (there s that pesky word again!) that there is something to be found

    [Mar 08, 2018] Cue bono question in Scripal case?

    [Mar 08, 2018] In recent years, there has been ample evidence that US policy-makers and, equally important, mainstream media commentators do not bother to read what Putin says, or at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service reports.

    [Mar 08, 2018] A key piece of evidence pointing to 'Guccifer 2.0' being a fake personality created by the conspirators in their attempt to disguise the fact that the materials from the DNC published by 'WikiLeaks' were obtained by a leak rather than a hack had to do with the involvement of the former GCHQ person Matt Tait.

    [Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

    [Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

    [Sep 16, 2017] Virginia Scraps Electronic Voting Machines Hackers Destroyed At DefCon

    [Mar 06, 2018] The U.S. Returns to 'Great Power Competition,' With a Dangerous New Edge

    [Mar 06, 2018] The current anti-Russian sentiment in the West as hysterical. But this hysteria is concentrated at the top level of media elite and neocons. Behind it is no deep sense of unity or national resolve. In fact we see the reverse - most Western countries are deeply divided within themselves due to the crisis of neolineralism.

    [Feb 12, 2018] I am wondering why it is that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing

    [Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised

    [Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

    [Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

    [Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

    [Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

    [Sep 16, 2017] Virginia Scraps Electronic Voting Machines Hackers Destroyed At DefCon

    [Aug 30, 2017] The President of Belgian Magistrates - Neoliberalism is a form of Fascism by Manuela Cadelli

    [Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

    [Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

    [Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

    [May 23, 2017] CIA, the cornerstone of the deep state has agenda that is different from the US national interest and reflect agenda of the special interest groups such as Wall Street bankers and MIC

    [Mar 02, 2018] Contradictions In Seth Rich Murder Continue To Challenge Hacking Narrative

    [Feb 28, 2018] Perjury traps to manufacture indictments to pressure people to testify against others is a new tool of justice in a surveillance state

    [Feb 26, 2018] It looks like Christopher Steele's real role was laundering information which had been obtained through continued Inquiries of the NSA mega-file by our Ambassador to the UN

    [Feb 26, 2018] Democrat Memo Lays Egg by Publius Tacitus

    [Feb 25, 2018] Democracies are political systems in which the real ruling elites hide behind an utterly fake appearance of people power

    [Apr 17, 2019] Deep State and the FBI Federal Blackmail Investigation

    [Feb 23, 2018] NSA Genius Debunks Russiagate Once For All

    [Feb 22, 2018] Bill Binney explodes the rile of 17 agances security assessment memo in launching the Russia witch-hunt

    [Feb 20, 2018] For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia

    [Feb 20, 2018] Russophobia is a futile bid to conceal US, European demise by Finian Cunningham

    [Feb 19, 2018] Nunes FBI and DOJ Perps Could Be Put on Trial by Ray McGovern

    [Feb 19, 2018] The Russiagate Intelligence Wars What We Do and Don't Know

    [Feb 19, 2018] Russian Meddling Was a Drop in an Ocean of American-made Discord by AMANDA TAUB and MAX FISHER

    [Feb 18, 2018] This dangerous escalation of tensions with Russia is extremely lucrative for the war profiteers, the retired generals intelligence members who prostitute themselves as media pundits, the members of Congress who get $$$ from the war profiteers, and the corporate media which thrives on links to the war profiteers as well as on war reporting

    [Feb 16, 2018] The Deep Staters care first and foremost about themselves.

    [Feb 15, 2018] Trump's War on the Deep State by Conrad Black

    [Feb 14, 2018] Recused Judge in Flynn Prosecution Served on FISA Court

    [Feb 14, 2018] The Anti-Trump Coup by Michael S. Rozeff

    [Feb 14, 2018] The FBI and the President – Mutual Manipulation by James Petras

    [Feb 12, 2018] The Age of Lunacy: The Doomsday Machine

    [Feb 12, 2018] Ike's Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Is Alive and Very Well by William J. Astore

    [Feb 12, 2018] I am wondering why it is that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing

    [Feb 11, 2018] How Russiagate fiasco destroys Kremlin moderates, accelerating danger for a hot war

    [Feb 10, 2018] The generals are not Borgists. They are something worse ...

    [May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

    [Feb 10, 2018] More on neoliberal newspeak of US propaganda machine

    [Feb 08, 2018] Disinformation Warfare

    [Feb 08, 2018] Control of narrative means that creation of the simplistic picture in which the complexities of the world are elided in favor of 'good guys' vs. 'bad guys' dichotomy

    [Jan 28, 2018] Russiagate Isn t About Trump, And It Isn t Even Ultimately About Russia by Caitlyn Johnstone

    [Jan 27, 2018] As of January 2018 Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey, is starting to look like something Trump should have done sooner.

    [Jan 27, 2018] In a Trump Hunt, Beware the Perjury Trap by Pat Buchanan

    [Jan 26, 2018] Warns The Russiagate Stakes Are Extreme by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Jan 25, 2018] Russiagate as Kafka 2.0

    [Jan 24, 2018] Destroying, suppressing evidence is FBI standard procedure by James Bovard

    [Jan 24, 2018] The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate by Ray McGovern

    [Jan 24, 2018] Whistleblower Confirms Secret Society Meetings Between FBI And DOJ To Undermine Trump

    [Jan 24, 2018] Brazen Plot To Exonerate Hillary Clinton And Frame Trump Unraveling, Says Former Fed Prosecutor

    [Jan 22, 2018] Joe diGenova Brazen Plot to Frame Trump

    [Jan 22, 2018] If Trump is an authoritarian, why don t Democrats treat him like one? by Corey Robin

    [Jan 22, 2018] Clapper may have been the one behind using British intelligence to spy on Trump.

    [Jan 22, 2018] The Associated Press is reporting that the Department of Justice has given congressional investigators additional text messages between FBI investigator Peter Strzok and his girlfriend Lisa Page. The FBI also told investigators that five months worth of text messages, between December 2016 and May 2017, are unavailable because of a technical glitch

    [Jan 20, 2018] What Is The Democratic Party ? by Lambert Strether

    [Jan 19, 2018] #ReleaseTheMemo Extensive FISA abuse memo could destroy the entire Mueller Russia investigation by Alex Christoforou

    [Jan 16, 2018] The Russia Explainer

    [Jan 13, 2018] The FBI Hand Behind Russia-gate by Ray McGovern

    [Jan 12, 2018] The DOJ and FBI Worked With Fusion GPS on Operation Trump

    [Jan 08, 2018] Someone Spoofed Michael Wolff s Book About Trump And It s Comedy Gold

    [Jan 07, 2018] CONFIRMED: CLINTON OPERATIVES IN FBI MANUFACTURED RUSSIAGATE by Roger Stone

    [Jan 06, 2018] Russia-gate Breeds Establishment McCarthyism by Robert Parry

    [Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

    [Jan 02, 2018] The Still-Missing Evidence of Russia-gate by Dennis J. Bernstein

    [Jan 02, 2018] Neocon warmongers should be treated as rapists by Andrew J. Bacevich

    [Jan 02, 2018] What We Don t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking by Jackson Lears

    [Jan 02, 2018] Jill Stein in the Cross-hairs by Mike Whitney

    [Dec 31, 2017] Maybe Trump was the deep state candidate of choice? Maybe that s why they ran Clinton against him rather than the more electable Sanders? Maybe that s why Obama started ramping up tensions with Russia in the early fall of 2016 – to swing the election to Trump (by giving the disgruntled anti-war Sanders voters a false choice between Trump or war with Russia?

    [Dec 31, 2017] Brainwashing as a key component of the US social system by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

    [Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

    [Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

    [Feb 19, 2017] The deep state is running scared!

    [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

    [Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

    [Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

    [Apr 10, 2019] A demoralized white working and middle class was willing to believe in anything, deluding themselves into reading between the barren eruptions of his blowzy proclamations. They elevated him to messianic heights, ironically fashioning him into that which he publicly claims to despise: an Obama, a Barry in negative image, hope and change for the OxyContin and Breitbart set

    [Dec 21, 2019] The ruthless neo-colonialists of 21st century

    [Apr 08, 2019] Aaron Maté Was Also Right About Russiagate

    [Apr 07, 2019] Nunes The Russian Collusion Hoax Meets An Unbelievbable End

    [Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

    [Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

    [Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

    [Apr 04, 2019] Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader

    [Apr 03, 2019] What We Can Learn From 1920s Germany by Brian E. Fogarty

    [Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

    [Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma

    [Dec 22, 2019] So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks. That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born -- distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam

    [Dec 20, 2019] Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone

    [Dec 20, 2019] The Tragedy of Donald Trump His Presidency Is Marred with Failure by Doug Bandow

    [Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson

    [Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse

    [Dec 20, 2019] Letter from President Donald J. Trump to the Speaker of the House of Representatives

    [Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc

    [Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

    [Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

    [Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

    [Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

    [Dec 17, 2019] Judge Denies Flynn's Requests For Exculpatory Information, Case Dismissal by Peter Svab

    [Dec 17, 2019] History Doesn t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: Wilson in UK was subjected to the similar attack by rogue elements in MI5 as Trump in the USA

    [Dec 14, 2019] Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation

    [Dec 12, 2019] The FBI - Pushed By John Brennan - Lied To The Court Seven Times To Spy On The Trump Campaign

    [Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

    [Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

    [Dec 07, 2019] Impeachment does not require a crime.

    [Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country

    [Dec 04, 2019] The central question of Ukrainegate is whether CrowdStrike actions on DNC leak were a false flag operation designed to open Russiagate and what was the level of participation of Poroshenko government and Ukrainian Security services in this false flag operation by Factotum

    [Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

    [Dec 04, 2019] Common Funding Themes Link 'Whistleblower' Complaint and CrowdStrike Firm Certifying DNC Russia 'Hack' by Aaron Klein

    [Dec 04, 2019] DNC Russian Hackers Found! You Won't Believe Who They Really Work For by the Anonymous Patriots

    [Dec 04, 2019] June 4th, 2017 Crowdstrike Was at the DNC Six Weeks by George Webb

    [Dec 04, 2019] Cyberanalyst George Eliason Claims that the "Fancy Bear" Who Hacked the DNC Server is Ukrainian Intelligence – In League with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike

    [Dec 04, 2019] Fancy Bear - Conservapedia

    [Dec 04, 2019] June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams by George Webb

    [Dec 04, 2019] Atkinson role in Ukrainegate

    [Nov 30, 2019] CrowdStrike: a Conspiracy Wrapped in a Conspiracy Inside a Conspiracy by Oleg Atbashian

    [Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

    [Nov 28, 2019] WSJ story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton.

    [Nov 27, 2019] Obama Admits He Would Speak Up Only To Stop Bernie Sanders Nomination

    [Nov 27, 2019] Could your county use some extra money?

    [Nov 26, 2019] John Solomon Everything Changes In The Ukraine Scandal If Trump Releases These Documents

    [Nov 24, 2019] Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class - YouTube

    [Nov 22, 2019] CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward because, it is not going away.

    [Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

    [Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos

    [Nov 03, 2019] Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

    [Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy

    [Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev

    [Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces

    [Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says

    [Oct 24, 2019] Empire Interventionism Versus Republic Noninterventionism by Jacob Hornberger

    [Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Oct 23, 2019] The Pathocracy Of The Deep State Tyranny At The Hands Of A Psychopathic Government

    [Oct 20, 2019] Adam Schiff now the face of the neoliberal Dems for 2020.

    [Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed

    [Oct 19, 2019] Kunstler One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy

    [Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

    [Sep 30, 2019] Stephen Miller calls whistleblower a 'partisan hit job' in fiery interview

    [Sep 26, 2019] Did Nancy Pelosi Just Make One Of The Biggest Political Mistakes In History

    [Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact

    [Sep 22, 2019] More Americans Questioning Official 9-11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative by Whitney Webb

    [Sep 22, 2019] The Snowden Conundrum by Yvonne Lorenzo

    [Sep 17, 2019] The Spy Who Failed by Scott Ritter

    [Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

    [Sep 17, 2019] The reincarnation of the idea of Soviet Nomenklatura on a new level in a different social system

    [Sep 15, 2019] Donald Trump as the DNC s nominee by Michael Hudson

    [Sep 11, 2019] John Brennan's and Jim Clappers' Last Gasp by Larry C Johnson

    [Sep 11, 2019] Video Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 The Bamboozle Has Captured Us

    [Sep 10, 2019] Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein by Larry C Johnsons

    [Sep 10, 2019] Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik

    [Sep 10, 2019] How Deep Is the Rot in America s Institutions by Charles Hugh Smith

    [Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda

    [Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party

    [Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma

    [Dec 22, 2019] So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks. That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born -- distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam

    [Dec 20, 2019] The Tragedy of Donald Trump His Presidency Is Marred with Failure by Doug Bandow

    [Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson

    [Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse

    [Dec 20, 2019] Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone

    [Dec 20, 2019] Letter from President Donald J. Trump to the Speaker of the House of Representatives

    [Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc

    [Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

    [Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

    [Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

    [Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

    [Dec 17, 2019] Judge Denies Flynn's Requests For Exculpatory Information, Case Dismissal by Peter Svab

    [Dec 17, 2019] History Doesn t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: Wilson in UK was subjected to the similar attack by rogue elements in MI5 as Trump in the USA

    [Dec 14, 2019] Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation

    [Dec 12, 2019] The FBI - Pushed By John Brennan - Lied To The Court Seven Times To Spy On The Trump Campaign

    [Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

    [Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

    [Dec 07, 2019] Impeachment does not require a crime.

    [Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country

    [Dec 04, 2019] The central question of Ukrainegate is whether CrowdStrike actions on DNC leak were a false flag operation designed to open Russiagate and what was the level of participation of Poroshenko government and Ukrainian Security services in this false flag operation by Factotum

    [Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

    [Dec 04, 2019] Common Funding Themes Link 'Whistleblower' Complaint and CrowdStrike Firm Certifying DNC Russia 'Hack' by Aaron Klein

    [Dec 04, 2019] DNC Russian Hackers Found! You Won't Believe Who They Really Work For by the Anonymous Patriots

    [Dec 04, 2019] June 4th, 2017 Crowdstrike Was at the DNC Six Weeks by George Webb

    [Dec 04, 2019] Cyberanalyst George Eliason Claims that the "Fancy Bear" Who Hacked the DNC Server is Ukrainian Intelligence – In League with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike

    [Dec 04, 2019] Fancy Bear - Conservapedia

    [Dec 04, 2019] June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams by George Webb

    [Dec 04, 2019] Atkinson role in Ukrainegate

    [Jul 09, 2019] Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern

    [Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar

    [Jul 05, 2019] Who Won the Debate? Tulsi Gabbard let the anti-war genie out of the bottle by Philip Giraldi

    [Jun 30, 2019] Orwell s 1984 No Longer Reads Like Fiction It s The Reality Of Our Times by Robert Bridge

    [Jun 30, 2019] USG's Bizarre Change of Position in the Roger Stone Case by Larry C Johnson

    [Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton

    [Jun 27, 2019] Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens

    [Jun 26, 2019] Opinion - NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication

    [Jun 03, 2020] The first rule of political hypocrisy: Justify your actions by the need to protect the weak and vulnerable

    [Jun 23, 2019] How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx by George Monbiot

    [Nov 30, 2019] CrowdStrike: a Conspiracy Wrapped in a Conspiracy Inside a Conspiracy by Oleg Atbashian

    [Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

    [Nov 28, 2019] WSJ story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton.

    [Nov 27, 2019] Obama Admits He Would Speak Up Only To Stop Bernie Sanders Nomination

    [Nov 27, 2019] Could your county use some extra money?

    [Nov 26, 2019] John Solomon Everything Changes In The Ukraine Scandal If Trump Releases These Documents

    [Nov 24, 2019] Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class - YouTube

    [Nov 22, 2019] CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward because, it is not going away.

    [Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

    [Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos

    [Nov 03, 2019] Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

    [Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy

    [Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev

    [Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces

    [Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says

    [Oct 24, 2019] Empire Interventionism Versus Republic Noninterventionism by Jacob Hornberger

    [Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Oct 23, 2019] The Pathocracy Of The Deep State Tyranny At The Hands Of A Psychopathic Government

    [Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed

    [Oct 19, 2019] Kunstler One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy

    [Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

    [Sep 30, 2019] Stephen Miller calls whistleblower a 'partisan hit job' in fiery interview

    [Sep 26, 2019] Did Nancy Pelosi Just Make One Of The Biggest Political Mistakes In History

    [Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact

    [Sep 22, 2019] More Americans Questioning Official 9-11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative by Whitney Webb

    [Sep 22, 2019] The Snowden Conundrum by Yvonne Lorenzo

    [Sep 17, 2019] The Spy Who Failed by Scott Ritter

    [Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

    [Sep 17, 2019] The reincarnation of the idea of Soviet Nomenklatura on a new level in a different social system

    [Sep 15, 2019] Demythologizing the Roots of the New Cold War by Ted Snider

    [Sep 15, 2019] Donald Trump as the DNC s nominee by Michael Hudson

    [Sep 11, 2019] John Brennan's and Jim Clappers' Last Gasp by Larry C Johnson

    [Sep 11, 2019] Video Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 The Bamboozle Has Captured Us

    [Sep 10, 2019] Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik

    [Sep 10, 2019] Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein by Larry C Johnsons

    [Sep 10, 2019] How Deep Is the Rot in America s Institutions by Charles Hugh Smith

    [Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda

    [Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations

    [Aug 23, 2019] Spygate The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump by Jeff Carlson

    [Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed

    [Aug 20, 2019] Trump Promised Massive Infrastructure Projects -- Instead We ve Gotten Nothing>

    [Aug 20, 2019] Propagandists Freak Out Over Gabbard s Destruction of Harris by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Aug 18, 2019] IV- MICHELS: THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY by Dr. Mustafa Delican

    [Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

    [Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

    [Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly

    [Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury

    [Aug 14, 2019] Charge of anti-Semitism as a sign of a bitter factional struggle in UK Labor Party between neoliberal and alternatives to neoliberalism wings

    [Aug 14, 2019] The Citadels of America s Elites Fractured and At Odds with Each Other by Alastair Crooke

    [Aug 14, 2019] There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer

    [Aug 12, 2019] New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called Epstein's death "way too convenient."

    [Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized

    [Aug 11, 2019] One weak spot of the conspiracy theory that Epstein was killed: Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss

    [Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations

    [Aug 23, 2019] Spygate The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump by Jeff Carlson

    [Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed

    [Aug 20, 2019] Trump Promised Massive Infrastructure Projects -- Instead We ve Gotten Nothing>

    [Aug 20, 2019] Propagandists Freak Out Over Gabbard s Destruction of Harris by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Aug 18, 2019] IV- MICHELS: THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY by Dr. Mustafa Delican

    [Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

    [Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

    [Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly

    [Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury

    [Aug 14, 2019] Charge of anti-Semitism as a sign of a bitter factional struggle in UK Labor Party between neoliberal and alternatives to neoliberalism wings

    [Aug 14, 2019] The Citadels of America s Elites Fractured and At Odds with Each Other by Alastair Crooke

    [Aug 14, 2019] There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer

    [Aug 12, 2019] New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called Epstein's death "way too convenient."

    [Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized

    [Aug 11, 2019] One weak spot of the conspiracy theory that Epstein was killed: Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss

    [Jul 30, 2019] The main task of Democratic Party is preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left and killing such social movements

    [Jul 29, 2019] Looks like Epstein turned informant for Mueller s FBI in 2008. Likely earlier

    [Jul 29, 2019] American Ron Unz on Pizzagate

    [Jul 29, 2019] The hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy".

    [Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland

    [Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

    [Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!

    [Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson

    [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened

    [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion

    [Jul 25, 2019] The Epstein Case Is A Rare Opportunity To Focus On The Depraved Nature Of America s Elite

    [Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

    [Jul 21, 2019] Breaking: Clinton Just Got Devastating News

    [Jul 20, 2019] New US Pentagon Chief Vested Interest in War Conflict

    [Jul 15, 2019] Pete Buttigieg The made-to-order political "outsider" by Tom Hall

    [Jul 14, 2019] MODELS OF POWER STRUCTURE IN THE UNITED STATES Political Issues We Concern

    [Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

    [Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

    [Jul 09, 2019] Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern

    [Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar

    [Jul 05, 2019] Who Won the Debate? Tulsi Gabbard let the anti-war genie out of the bottle by Philip Giraldi

    [Jun 30, 2019] Orwell s 1984 No Longer Reads Like Fiction It s The Reality Of Our Times by Robert Bridge

    [Jun 30, 2019] USG's Bizarre Change of Position in the Roger Stone Case by Larry C Johnson

    [Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton

    [Jun 27, 2019] Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens

    [Jun 26, 2019] Opinion - NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication

    [Jun 23, 2019] How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx by George Monbiot

    [Jun 22, 2019] Why The Empire Is Failing The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine by Doug Bandow

    [Jun 03, 2020] And this is a world superpower: There are an estimated 26.5 million of US adults at level 1 or reading proficency according to PIAAC -- those who can read and write at the most basic level but couldn't t read a newspaper, or would have trouble filling out forms at a doctor s office

    [Jul 30, 2019] The main task of Democratic Party is preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left and killing such social movements

    [Jul 29, 2019] Looks like Epstein turned informant for Mueller s FBI in 2008. Likely earlier

    [Jul 29, 2019] American Ron Unz on Pizzagate

    [Jul 29, 2019] The hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy".

    [Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland

    [Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

    [Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!

    [Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson

    [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion

    [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened

    [Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed

    [Jul 25, 2019] The Epstein Case Is A Rare Opportunity To Focus On The Depraved Nature Of America s Elite

    [Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

    [Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow

    [Jul 21, 2019] Breaking: Clinton Just Got Devastating News

    [Jul 20, 2019] New US Pentagon Chief Vested Interest in War Conflict

    [Jul 15, 2019] Pete Buttigieg The made-to-order political "outsider" by Tom Hall

    [Jul 14, 2019] MODELS OF POWER STRUCTURE IN THE UNITED STATES Political Issues We Concern

    [Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

    [Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

    [Jun 22, 2019] Use of science by the US politicians: they uses science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.

    [Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh

    [Jun 19, 2019] Bias bias the inclination to accuse people of bias by James Thompson

    [Jun 11, 2019] The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction by John W. Whitehead

    [Jun 11, 2019] A Word From Joe the Angry Hawaiian

    [Jun 05, 2019] Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers.

    [Jun 05, 2019] Do Spies Run the World by Israel Shamir

    [Jun 04, 2019] Attkisson 10 Questions I d Ask Robert Mueller (If I Were Allowed)

    [Jun 02, 2019] Somer highlights of Snowden spreach at Dalhousie University

    [May 30, 2019] Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth

    [May 30, 2019] Everyone here at moa is saying much the same: the CIA is running the usa at this point.. Mueller is ex CIA... So, basically the mueller investigation a cover up and BS for the lemmings... It seems to have worked to a limited degree..

    [May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine

    [May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

    [Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite

    [Jun 11, 2019] The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction by John W. Whitehead

    [Jun 11, 2019] A Word From Joe the Angry Hawaiian

    [Jun 05, 2019] Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers.

    [Jun 05, 2019] Do Spies Run the World by Israel Shamir

    [Jun 04, 2019] Attkisson 10 Questions I d Ask Robert Mueller (If I Were Allowed)

    [Jun 02, 2019] Somer highlights of Snowden spreach at Dalhousie University

    [May 30, 2019] Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth

    [May 30, 2019] Everyone here at moa is saying much the same: the CIA is running the usa at this point.. Mueller is ex CIA... So, basically the mueller investigation a cover up and BS for the lemmings... It seems to have worked to a limited degree..

    [May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine

    [May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

    [May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

    [May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

    [May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling

    [May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

    [May 16, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard for President - Stephen Lendman

    [May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins

    [May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring

    [May 15, 2019] Ron Paul on Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube

    [May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics

    [May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review

    [May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

    [May 13, 2019] Not Just Ukraine; Biden May Have A Serious China Problem As Schweizer Exposes Hunter s $1bn Deal

    [May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

    [May 12, 2019] Is rabid warmonger, neocon chickenhawk Bolton a swinger? That is a mental picture that s deeply disturbing yet funny at the same time

    [May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

    [May 11, 2019] Whitney Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan

    [May 11, 2019] Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson

    [May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

    [May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

    [May 10, 2019] Mueller Report - Expensive Estimations And Elusive Evidence by Adam Carter

    [May 10, 2019] Obama administration raced to obtain FICA warrant on Carter Page before Rogers investigation closes on them and that was definitely an obstruction of justice and interference with the ongoing investigation

    [May 10, 2019] What was the meaning of the term "insurance policy" in Stzok messages to Lisa Page

    [May 10, 2019] The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe

    [May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

    [May 07, 2019] Look! A whale!

    [May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

    [May 05, 2019] Did Mueller substituted Russia for Israel in his report

    [May 03, 2019] Former high-ranking FBI officials on Andrew McCabe's alarming admissions

    [May 03, 2019] Andrew McCabe played the key role in the appointment of the special prosecutor

    [May 02, 2019] Checkmate - How President Trump s Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller by Will Chamberlain

    [Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

    [Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

    [Apr 28, 2019] Tit For Tat: Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook by Mike Whitney

    [Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!

    [Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate

    [Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

    [Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections

    [Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

    [Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

    [Jun 22, 2019] Use of science by the US politicians: they uses science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.

    [Jun 03, 2020] The difference between old and new schools of jounalism: old-school journalism was like being assigned the task of finding out what "1+1 =?" and the task was to report the answer was "1." Now the task would be to report that "Some say it is 1, some say it is 2, some say it is 3."

    [Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh

    [Jun 19, 2019] Bias bias the inclination to accuse people of bias by James Thompson

    [Jun 03, 2020] Rule of law in Murrika is kaput

    [Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite

    [May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

    [May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

    [May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling

    [May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

    [May 16, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard for President - Stephen Lendman

    [May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins

    [May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring

    [May 15, 2019] Ron Paul on Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube

    [May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics

    [May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review

    [May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

    [May 13, 2019] Not Just Ukraine; Biden May Have A Serious China Problem As Schweizer Exposes Hunter s $1bn Deal

    [May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

    [May 12, 2019] Is rabid warmonger, neocon chickenhawk Bolton a swinger? That is a mental picture that s deeply disturbing yet funny at the same time

    [May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

    [May 11, 2019] Whitney Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan

    [May 11, 2019] Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson

    [May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

    [May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

    [May 10, 2019] Mueller Report - Expensive Estimations And Elusive Evidence by Adam Carter

    [May 10, 2019] Obama administration raced to obtain FICA warrant on Carter Page before Rogers investigation closes on them and that was definitely an obstruction of justice and interference with the ongoing investigation

    [May 10, 2019] What was the meaning of the term "insurance policy" in Stzok messages to Lisa Page

    [May 10, 2019] The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe

    [May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

    [May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

    [May 05, 2019] Did Mueller substituted Russia for Israel in his report

    [May 03, 2019] Former high-ranking FBI officials on Andrew McCabe's alarming admissions

    [May 03, 2019] Andrew McCabe played the key role in the appointment of the special prosecutor

    [May 02, 2019] Checkmate - How President Trump s Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller by Will Chamberlain

    [Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

    [Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

    [Apr 28, 2019] Tit For Tat: Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook by Mike Whitney

    [Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!

    [Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate

    [Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

    [Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections

    [Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

    [Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

    [Apr 21, 2019] Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender

    [Apr 21, 2019] Even if we got a candidate against the War Party the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump betayal his voters, surrounded himself with neocons, continues to do Bibi's bidding, and ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down?

    [Apr 21, 2019] Muller report implicates Obama administration in total and utter incompetence, if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called criminal negligence in legal speak.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

    [Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

    [Apr 21, 2019] Special Counsel Mueller -- Disingenuous and Dishonest by Larry C Johnson

    [Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

    [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer

    [Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse.

    [Apr 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard: People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars?

    [Apr 17, 2019] Haspel is not the "underling". Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy.

    [Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status

    [Apr 17, 2019] Six US Agencies Conspired ...

    [Apr 17, 2019] Deep State and the FBI Federal Blackmail Investigation

    [Apr 17, 2019] Did CIA Director William Casey really say, We ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false

    [Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

    [Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

    [Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

    [Apr 15, 2019] Do you need to be stupid to support Trump in 2020, even if you voted for him as lesser evil in 2016

    [Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

    [Apr 21, 2019] Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender

    [Apr 21, 2019] Even if we got a candidate against the War Party the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump betayal his voters, surrounded himself with neocons, continues to do Bibi's bidding, and ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down?

    [Apr 21, 2019] Muller report implicates Obama administration in total and utter incompetence, if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called criminal negligence in legal speak.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

    [Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

    [Apr 21, 2019] Special Counsel Mueller -- Disingenuous and Dishonest by Larry C Johnson

    [Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

    [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer

    [Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse.

    [Apr 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard: People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars?

    [Apr 17, 2019] Haspel is not the "underling". Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy.

    [Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status

    [Apr 17, 2019] Six US Agencies Conspired ...

    [Apr 17, 2019] Deep State and the FBI Federal Blackmail Investigation

    [Apr 17, 2019] Did CIA Director William Casey really say, We ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false

    [Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

    [Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

    [Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

    [Apr 15, 2019] Do you need to be stupid to support Trump in 2020, even if you voted for him as lesser evil in 2016

    [Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

    [Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

    [Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

    [Apr 10, 2019] A demoralized white working and middle class was willing to believe in anything, deluding themselves into reading between the barren eruptions of his blowzy proclamations. They elevated him to messianic heights, ironically fashioning him into that which he publicly claims to despise: an Obama, a Barry in negative image, hope and change for the OxyContin and Breitbart set

    [Apr 08, 2019] Aaron Maté Was Also Right About Russiagate

    [Apr 07, 2019] Nunes The Russian Collusion Hoax Meets An Unbelievbable End

    [Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

    [Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

    [Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

    [Apr 04, 2019] Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader

    [Apr 03, 2019] What We Can Learn From 1920s Germany by Brian E. Fogarty

    [Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

    [Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

    [Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

    [Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

    [Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Trumps billionaire coup détat: Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history

    [Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism by Jonathan Cook

    [Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson

    [Mar 25, 2019] Another SIGINT compromise ...

    [Mar 24, 2019] The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.

    [Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

    [Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr.

    [Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary

    [Mar 24, 2019] One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.

    [Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates.

    [Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed

    [Mar 23, 2019] Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel.

    [Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away

    [Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

    [Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

    [Mar 18, 2019] Doublethink and Newspeak Do We Have a Choice by Greg Guma

    [Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

    [Mar 17, 2019] Mueller uses the same old false flag scams, just different packaging of his forensics-free findings

    [Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings

    [Mar 11, 2019] Bruce Ohr, Liar or Moron by Larry C Johnson

    [Mar 07, 2019] Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you by Dylan Curran

    [Mar 05, 2019] The Shadow Governments Destruction Of Democracy

    [Feb 27, 2019] Their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy

    [Feb 26, 2019] Neoliberalism by Julie Wilson

    [Feb 24, 2019] David Stockman on Peak Trump : Undrainable swamp (which is on Pentagon side of Potomac river) and fantasy of MAGA (which become MIGA -- make Israel great again)

    [Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions

    [Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

    [Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

    [Feb 18, 2019] Do You Believe in the Deep State Now by Robert W. Merry

    [Feb 18, 2019] Joe Rogan Experience #1170 - Tulsi Gabbard

    [Feb 17, 2019] Was Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest?

    [Feb 17, 2019] Trump is Russian asset memo is really neocon propaganda overkill

    [Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

    [Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Feb 16, 2019] Death Of Russiagate: Mueller Team Tied To Mifsud s Network

    [Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

    [Feb 13, 2019] Making Globalism Great Again by C.J. Hopkins

    [Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

    [Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

    [Feb 08, 2019] To understand Steele and the five eyes involvement in the Russia hoax you need to go to the library

    [Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

    [Jan 29, 2019] After hiring Abrams the next logical step for Trump would be hiring Hillary or Wolfowitz

    [Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian

    [Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal?

    [Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

    [Jan 19, 2019] According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks

    [Jan 14, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard, A Rare Anti-War Democrat, Will Run For President

    [Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

    [Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

    [Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer

    [Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

    [Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

    [Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

    [Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman

    [Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

    [Apr 21, 2019] George Papodopoulus was entrapped by individuals linked to British MI-6 and the CIA with offers to provide meetings with Russians and Putin. The Mueller account is a lie

    [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer

    [Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

    [Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

    [Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

    [Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

    [Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Trumps billionaire coup détat: Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history

    [Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism by Jonathan Cook

    [Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson

    [Mar 25, 2019] Another SIGINT compromise ...

    [Aug 14, 2019] There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer

    [Mar 24, 2019] The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.

    [Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

    [Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr.

    [Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary

    [Mar 24, 2019] One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.

    [Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates.

    [Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed

    [Mar 23, 2019] Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel.

    [Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away

    [Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

    [Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

    [Mar 18, 2019] Doublethink and Newspeak Do We Have a Choice by Greg Guma

    [Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

    [Mar 17, 2019] Mueller uses the same old false flag scams, just different packaging of his forensics-free findings

    [Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings

    [Mar 11, 2019] Bruce Ohr, Liar or Moron by Larry C Johnson

    [Mar 07, 2019] Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you by Dylan Curran

    [Mar 05, 2019] The Shadow Governments Destruction Of Democracy

    [Feb 27, 2019] Their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy

    [Feb 26, 2019] Neoliberalism by Julie Wilson

    [Feb 24, 2019] David Stockman on Peak Trump : Undrainable swamp (which is on Pentagon side of Potomac river) and fantasy of MAGA (which become MIGA -- make Israel great again)

    [Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions

    [Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

    [Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

    [Feb 18, 2019] Do You Believe in the Deep State Now by Robert W. Merry

    [Feb 18, 2019] Joe Rogan Experience #1170 - Tulsi Gabbard

    [Feb 17, 2019] Was Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest?

    [Feb 17, 2019] Trump is Russian asset memo is really neocon propaganda overkill

    [Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

    [Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Feb 16, 2019] Death Of Russiagate: Mueller Team Tied To Mifsud s Network

    [Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

    [Feb 13, 2019] Making Globalism Great Again by C.J. Hopkins

    [Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

    [Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

    [Feb 08, 2019] To understand Steele and the five eyes involvement in the Russia hoax you need to go to the library

    [Feb 05, 2019] The neocon s strategy

    [Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

    [Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian

    [Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal?

    [Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

    [Jan 19, 2019] According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks

    [Jan 14, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard, A Rare Anti-War Democrat, Will Run For President

    [Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

    [Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

    [Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer

    [Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

    [Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

    [Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

    [Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman

    [Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

    [Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

    [Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

    [Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies.

    [Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

    [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

    [Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

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

    [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

    [Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

    [Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

    [Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies.

    [Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

    [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

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

    [Dec 14, 2018] Vetting NYT materials by CIA reflects full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the neoliberal MSM

    [Dec 14, 2018] The dirty propaganda games NYT play

    [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

    [Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

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

    [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

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

    [Dec 14, 2018] Vetting NYT materials by CIA reflects full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the neoliberal MSM

    [Dec 14, 2018] The dirty propaganda games NYT play

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

    [Dec 09, 2018] Die Weltwoche Weltwoche Online – www.weltwoche.ch Tucker Carlson Trump is not capable Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 49-2018

    [Dec 08, 2018] Internet as a perfect tool of inverted totalitarism: it stimulates atomizatin of individuals, creates authomatic 24x7 surveillance over population, suppresses solidarity by exceggerating non-essential differences and allow more insidious brainwashing of the population

    [Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

    [Dec 07, 2018] Brexit Theresa May Goes Greek! by Brett Redmayne

    [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

    [Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

    [Dec 02, 2018] Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award by Ray McGovern

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

    [Nov 30, 2018] US Warlords now and at the tome Miill's Poer Elite was published

    [Nov 27, 2018] The political fraud of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal"

    [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

    [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

    [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

    [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

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

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

    [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

    [Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation graveyard of social protest movements, and for good reason

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

    [Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

    [Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn

    [Nov 07, 2018] America's Vote of No Confidence in Trump by Daniel Larison

    [Nov 05, 2018] Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power" warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner's sadistic leer

    [Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

    [Oct 16, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon

    [Oct 10, 2018] A Decalogue of American Empire-Building A Dialogue by James Petras

    [Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

    [Oct 04, 2018] Brett Kavanaugh's 'revenge' theory spotlights past with Clintons by Lisa Mascaro

    [Oct 02, 2018] Recovered memory is a Freudian voodoo. Notice how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged

    [Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?

    [Sep 29, 2018] The Schizophrenic Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease by Charles Hugh Smith

    [Sep 29, 2018] Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy by Dan Sanchez

    [Sep 27, 2018] Hiding in Plain Sight Why We Cannot See the System Destroying Us

    [Sep 27, 2018] The power elites goal is to change its appearance to look like something new and innovative to stay ahead of an electorate who are increasingly skeptical of the neoliberalism and globalism that enrich the elite at their expense.

    [Sep 24, 2018] Given Trumps kneeling to the British Skripal poisoning 'hate russia' hoax I suspect there is no chance he will go after Christopher Steele or any of the senior demoncrat conspirers no matter how much he would love to sucker punch Theresa May and her nasty colleagues.

    [Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Sep 16, 2018] Looks like the key players in Steele dossier were CIA assets

    [Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

    [Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal.

    [Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

    [Sep 03, 2018] www.informationclearinghouse.info/50168.htm In Memoriam by Paul Edwards

    [Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

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

    [Dec 09, 2018] Die Weltwoche Weltwoche Online – www.weltwoche.ch Tucker Carlson Trump is not capable Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 49-2018

    [Dec 08, 2018] Internet as a perfect tool of inverted totalitarism: it stimulates atomizatin of individuals, creates authomatic 24x7 surveillance over population, suppresses solidarity by exceggerating non-essential differences and allow more insidious brainwashing of the population

    [Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

    [Dec 07, 2018] Brexit Theresa May Goes Greek! by Brett Redmayne

    [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

    [Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

    [Dec 02, 2018] Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award by Ray McGovern

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

    [Nov 30, 2018] US Warlords now and at the tome Miill's Poer Elite was published

    [Nov 27, 2018] The political fraud of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal"

    [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

    [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

    [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

    [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

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

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

    [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

    [Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

    [Aug 28, 2018] A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes

    [Aug 24, 2018] The priorities of the deep state and its public face the MSM

    [Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Aug 22, 2018] Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts - US Propaganda Stays Alive

    [Aug 18, 2018] Corporate Media the Enemy of the People by Paul Street

    [Aug 18, 2018] MoA - John Brennan Is No Match For Trump

    [Aug 18, 2018] Sanders behaviour during election is suspect, unless you assume he acted as sheep dog for hillary

    [Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed

    [Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

    [Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou

    [Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

    [Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

    [Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

    [Aug 05, 2018] How identity politics makes the Left lose its collective identity by Tomasz Pierscionek

    [Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

    [Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp

    [Jul 23, 2018] The Prophecy of Orwell's 1984. Totalitarian Control and the Entertainment Culture that Takes Over by Edward Curtin

    [Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski

    [Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia

    [Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

    [Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

    [Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

    [Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

    [Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

    [Jun 06, 2018] Neoliberal language allows to cut wages by packaging neoliberal oligarchy preferences as national interests

    [May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence

    [May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

    [Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

    [Mar 23, 2018] Skripal Poisoning a Desperate British Attempt To Resurrect Their American Coup by Barbara Boyd

    [Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

    [Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

    [Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

    [Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

    [Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

    [Feb 12, 2018] I am wondering why it is that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing

    [Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised

    [Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

    [Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

    [Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

    [Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

    [Sep 16, 2017] Virginia Scraps Electronic Voting Machines Hackers Destroyed At DefCon

    [Aug 30, 2017] The President of Belgian Magistrates - Neoliberalism is a form of Fascism by Manuela Cadelli

    [Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

    [Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

    [Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

    [May 23, 2017] CIA, the cornerstone of the deep state has agenda that is different from the US national interest and reflect agenda of the special interest groups such as Wall Street bankers and MIC

    [Feb 19, 2017] The deep state is running scared!

    [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

    [Feb 29, 2020] Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who s Really In Charge Of The US Military by Cynthia Chung

    [Oct 23, 2020] KVBJHB.pdf

    [Oct 21, 2020] How Trump Got Played By The Military-Industrial Complex by Akbar Shahid Ahmed

    [Oct 21, 2020] This Is Not A Russian Hoax 'Nonpublic Information' Debunks Letter From '50 Former Intel Officials'

    [Oct 20, 2020] Tucker Carlson- The American Media Will Never Be The Same After Hunter Biden Story - Video - RealClearPolitics

    [Oct 20, 2020] Glenn Greenwald- Media and Intel Community Working Together To Manipulate The American People - Video - RealClearPolitics

    [Oct 19, 2020] The Emails Are Russian- Will Be The Narrative, Regardless Of Facts Or Evidence by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Oct 19, 2020] The neocon/NATO aggressive expansionism and anti-Russian hysteria has many purposes, but one is surely domestic repression: to gaslight and cause fear-the-foreign-bogeyman trauma among the American and British people

    [Oct 19, 2020] New report shows more than $1B from war industry and govt. going to top 50 think tanks

    [Oct 11, 2020] Putin on the US Presidential race and the myth that Trump, one of the most hostile to Russia presidents in history, is somehow a "Putin puppet"

    [Oct 01, 2020] 'Clueless' former FBI Director James Comey admits the agency's Trump-Russia probe was a ball of bungled confusion by David Haggith

    [Oct 01, 2020] Why say riot when you can be vague and sensitive instead, AP Stylebook urges in newest Orwellian guidelines by Nebojsa Malic

    [Sep 30, 2020] DNI Letter Supports Allegation That Hillary Clinton Created 'Russiagate' by b

    [Sep 28, 2020] No wonder Pompey and his friend Jeffries won't give up on Syria! No wonder

    [Sep 28, 2020] Ziocon Trump is a master of deception: has not delivered on any of his promises, hired neocons, assholes, and morons

    [Sep 26, 2020] What is predatory capitalism

    [Sep 25, 2020] US standard "negotiating" techniques

    [Sep 23, 2020] How fake media actually works: reporter are given the narrative and they should rehash their stories to fit it

    [Sep 23, 2020] Another sign of the crisis of legitimacy of neoliberal elite: FBI Agent Who Discovered Hillary's Emails On Weiner Laptop Claims He Was Told To Erase Computer

    [Sep 23, 2020] The deviousness of Russians is completly off the charts.

    [Sep 20, 2020] CJ Hopkins Exposes The Final Act In 'The War On Populism'

    [Sep 20, 2020] Darren Beattie Tucker Carlson Discuss Color Revolutions The Plot To Oust President Trump

    [Sep 20, 2020] Norm Eisen And The Colour Revolution Playbook!

    [Sep 20, 2020] THE TAKE-DOWN OF TRUMP ALA THE "COLOR REVOLUTION"- NORM EISEN'S REVOLUTIONARY PLAYBOOK A Deeply Embedded (Demster) Lawfare Operative; Regime Change Professionals More. What's Going On- Conservative Firing Line

    [Sep 09, 2020] Proof of collusion at last! - IRRUSSIANALITY

    [Sep 06, 2020] Polymerase test specificity and NYT articles

    [Sep 01, 2020] How Democrats and Republicans made deals to pass Magnitsky Act by Lucy Komisar

    [Aug 24, 2020] Announcement- Half a Pulitzer Prize to the Wall Street Journal by Ron Unz

    [Aug 23, 2020] Glitzy Convention Conceals Neoliberal Tyranny that both parties support by Mike Whitney

    [Aug 23, 2020] Catapulting Russian-Meddling Propaganda by Ray McGovern

    [Aug 23, 2020] Bright future lies ahead of NYT it can soon match and even exceed the caliber of jornalism of the "National Inquirer"

    [Aug 19, 2020] Some Shocking Facts on the Concentration of Ownership of the US Economy

    [Aug 19, 2020] Democrats are in bed with the deep state, take billions from the largest corporations, and conduct the most undemocratic nominating process ever seen in the US, but thank God they are not fascists!

    [Aug 17, 2020] Who's Afraid of QAnon- by Gregory Hood

    [Aug 16, 2020] CIA Behind Guccifer Russiagate A Plausible Scenario

    [Aug 09, 2020] Are the Democrats a Political Party or a CIA-backed Fifth Column by Mike Whitney

    [Aug 09, 2020] Remember When Liberals Despised the National Security State by Robert Merry

    [Aug 08, 2020] Russia Hoax- Are We All Being Played- Put Up Or Shut Up! - Zero Hedge

    [Aug 04, 2020] Russia never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend by The Saker

    [Aug 03, 2020] Natalie Wynn also refers to Jo Freeman's 1976 piece on "Trashing," in which she describes her experience of being ostracized by fellow feminists for alleged ideological deviation. The dynamic of cancellation predates the internet.

    [Aug 03, 2020] KEEPING YOUR MOUTH SHUT by James L. Gibson & Joseph L. Sutherland

    [Aug 03, 2020] Trump DID commit obstruction of justice... he refused to force HIS Dept of Justice to indict Hillary, Comey, Brennan and Clapper

    [Aug 02, 2020] Russiagate, Nazis, and the CIA by ROB URIE

    [Jul 30, 2020] One of the key problem with any polls is conformism of the respondents: answering the poll in a certain way does not necessary means that the person intends to vote this way.

    [Jul 23, 2020] Demorats defeat amedment ot cut Defence by 10%

    [Jul 23, 2020] This is a biggie: Egypt's parliament approves troop deployment to Libya

    [Jul 21, 2020] Why We Shouldn't Believe Polling About Trump by Lord Pettigrew

    [Jul 21, 2020] This Skripal thing smelled to high heaven from day 1. My opinion is that Sergei Skripal was involved (to what degree is open to speculation) with the Steele dossier.

    [Jul 20, 2020] The Real 'Russian Playbook' Is Written in English -- Strategic Culture

    [Jul 19, 2020] What the MSM cliche According to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the matter actually means

    [Jul 19, 2020] American Maidan is social revolution that is pushed forward by radical children of the bourgeoisie. Their leaders have nothing to say about poverty or unemployment. Their demands are centered on utopian ideals: diversity and racial justice ideals pursued with the fervor of regious converts

    [Jul 18, 2020] Divide We Fall -- America Has Been Blacklisted and McCarthyism Refashioned for a New Age

    [Jul 13, 2020] George Washington Tried To Warn Americans About Foreign Policy Today by Doug Bandow

    [Jul 08, 2020] Boomerang returns and hits NYT presstitutes hard (but money do not smell): CENTCOM Chief Is Latest To Deny NY Times Russian Bounties -- Bombshell

    [Jul 07, 2020] Mutiny on the Bounties by RAY McGOVERN

    [Jul 06, 2020] US claim of 'Russian Bounty' plot in Afghanistan is dubious and dangerous - The Grayzone

    [Jul 03, 2020] I don't think we can assume that even now Trump actually has control of the FBI; it is still in hands of Obama faction

    [Jul 01, 2020] Russiagate's Last Gasp by Ray McGovern

    [Jul 01, 2020] Three Glaring Problems with the Russian Taliban Bounty Story by Barbara Boland

    [Jun 28, 2020] Evidence Free Press Release Claims 'Russia Did Bad, Trump Did Not Respond' - NYT, WaPo Publish It

    [Jun 23, 2020] Identity politics is, first and foremost, a dirty and shrewd political strategy developed by the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ( soft neoliberals ) to counter the defection of trade union members from the party

    [Jun 23, 2020] CIA's massive 'Vault 7' leak resulted from 'woefully lax' security protocols within the agency's own network by Sonam Sheth

    [Jun 20, 2020] The American Press Is Destroying Itself by Matt Taibbi

    [Jun 19, 2020] The Police Weren t Created to Protect and Serve. They Were Created to Maintain Order. A Brief Look at the History of Police

    [Jun 18, 2020] Populism vs. inverted totalitarism and the illusion of choice in the US elections

    [Jun 17, 2020] We're in a sinister new era of totalitarianism, where PC combat units use social media to destroy anyone who disagrees with them by Konstantin Bogomolov

    [Jun 16, 2020] Meet Wikipedia's Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundation's regime-change operative CEO by Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal

    [Jun 15, 2020] Do Deep State Elements Operate within the Protest Movement? by Mike Whitney

    [Jun 15, 2020] Full Special Investigation - Donald Trump vs The Deep State

    [Jun 14, 2020] Jeane J. Kirkpatrick 30 Years Unheeded

    [Jun 13, 2020] How False Flag Operations are Carried Out Today by Philip M. Giraldi

    [Jun 13, 2020] Korea is just another distraction: false conflicts with China, North Korea, Russia and Iran are needed to keep support for MIC and Security State which cost 1.2 trillion a year

    [Jun 10, 2020] The Democratic Party and Authentic Change

    [Jun 05, 2020] Antifa in Theory and in Practice

    [Jun 03, 2020] Mueller investigation was never about Trump colluding with Russia. It was always about Trump obstructing the investigation of the collusion with Russia that the investigation was not about

    [Jun 03, 2020] And this is a world superpower: There are an estimated 26.5 million of US adults at level 1 or reading proficency according to PIAAC -- those who can read and write at the most basic level but couldn't t read a newspaper, or would have trouble filling out forms at a doctor s office

    [Jun 03, 2020] Dems ratpack of reparations freaks, weird sexual curiosities, and race hustlers is actually a fifth column for Trump re-election by Fred Reed

    [Jun 03, 2020] Not The Onion: NY Times Urges Trump To Establish Closer Ties With Moscow

    [Jun 03, 2020] The first rule of political hypocrisy: Justify your actions by the need to protect the weak and vulnerable

    [Jun 03, 2020] The difference between old and new schools of jounalism: old-school journalism was like being assigned the task of finding out what "1+1 =?" and the task was to report the answer was "1." Now the task would be to report that "Some say it is 1, some say it is 2, some say it is 3."

    [Jun 03, 2020] Rule of law in Murrika is kaput

    [Jun 03, 2020] Requiem to Russiagate: this was the largest and the most successful attempt to gaslight the whole US population ever attempted by CIA and Clinton wing of Dems by CJ Hopkins

    [Jun 02, 2020] Sheldon Wolin and Inverted Totalitarianism

    [Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson

    [Jun 01, 2020] More Evidence of the Fraud Against General Michael Flynn by Larry C Johnson

    [Jun 01, 2020] This is one war party -- war party, imperial party of militarism, conquest and killing of civilians

    [May 31, 2020] We Are Combat Vets, and We Want America to Reboot Memorial Day by Matthew Hoh and Danny Sjursen

    [May 29, 2020] You can;t have a Democracy at home and an empire aboard, the violence of empire will always turn against the very idea of democracy

    [May 24, 2020] Guccifer 2.0 was always John Brennan 1.0

    [May 24, 2020] Obamagate as the reaction of managerial class neoliberals on the crisis of neoliberalism

    [May 22, 2020] Time to Break up the FBI by William S. Smith

    [May 20, 2020] Newly Revealed Texts Show Strzok, Page Altered Flynn Interview Notes

    [May 20, 2020] McGovern Turn Out The Lights, Russiagate Is Over by Ray McGovern

    [May 19, 2020] Russophobia in the Age of Donald Trump

    [May 18, 2020] FBI under Comey as an uncontrolled political police operating without any oversight from Justice Department

    [May 17, 2020] General Flynn investigation 'has tarnished Obama's legacy' - YouTube

    [May 17, 2020] Apparently, the FBI, and not the CIA, are the real government.

    [May 16, 2020] Bought MSM experts typically are just MIC prostitutes: most are neocons and "Russiagaters"

    [May 16, 2020] Tucker Adam Schiff should resign

    [May 13, 2020] From RussiaGate To ObamaGate The End Of Boomerville by Tom Luongo

    [May 11, 2020] Lee Zeldin Adam Schiff 'should resign today' for role in Russia investigation by Dominick Mastrangelo

    [May 11, 2020] Twin Pillars of Russiagate Crumble by Ray McGovern

    [May 10, 2020] Did the FBI target Michael Flynn to protect Obama's policies, not national security by Kevin R. Brock

    [May 10, 2020] Does Obama now feels his potential liability for staging coup d' tat and gaslighting the whole nation?

    [May 08, 2020] Thiefs stole from a Russian fifth column critter: NY Times Accused Of Ripping Off Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stories From Russian Journalists For 2nd Time

    [May 07, 2020] Media Malpractice Is Criminalizing Better Relations With Russia by Stephen F. Cohen

    [May 07, 2020] There's No Question It's A Fraud Fmr Trump Attorney Says Mueller Badly Misled White House, Schiff Is Nancy's Liar Zero

    [May 05, 2020] Newly released FBI documents show Israel intervened in 2016 election to help Trump

    [May 05, 2020] UK government experince with the White Helmets and the Skripal affair definitly halps in anti-china propaganda.

    [May 03, 2020] Flynn told the investigators that he knew that the call was inevitably monitored and that a transcript existed. However, he did not recall discussing sanctions with Kislyak. There was no reason to hide such a discussion

    [Apr 29, 2020] Trump, despite pretty slick deception during his election campaign, is an typical imperialist and rabid militarist. His administration continuredand in some areas exceeded the hostility of Obama couse against Russia

    [Apr 17, 2020] The word socialism became just a neoliberal smear. We should talk about public sector vs private sector, not about socialism

    [Apr 17, 2020] Barr just said the Russia collusion probe was a travesty, had no basis and was intended to sabotage Trump.

    [Apr 16, 2020] Why would the CIA want blackmail material on top scientists and "experts"? Well, I guess that even though scientists will naturally feel obligation to their benefactors' empire, their tendency to prioritize truth might at times be inconvenient

    [Apr 14, 2020] The media has been largely taken over by a criminal gang (Operation Mockingbird), and the same gang has taken over the Democrat party

    [Apr 13, 2020] Chine social credit system vs Google and Facebook surveillance

    [Apr 02, 2020] Bloomberg spent north of $500 millions to become president with zero results, and you want me to believe that Russians spent 1% of that and got better results

    [Apr 02, 2020] We have two discredited old parties, incapable of dealing with the crises facing them, attempting to revive the only ideas that have ever galvanised the US public in their lifetimes: opposition to communism and the racism which underlay just about every US military adventure since 1945

    [Mar 28, 2020] Russians again were outsmarted by the US intelligence agencies

    [Mar 28, 2020] Why You Should Never Watch RT -- Ever!

    [Mar 28, 2020] NYT bad habit of falling for falling for frauds and making them famous

    [Mar 24, 2020] This weaponizing of random indignation is a classic tool of the Western propaganda

    [Mar 22, 2020] Intelligence agencies and the virus

    [Mar 21, 2020] Tulsi Gabbard says insider traders should be 'investigated prosecuted,' as Left and Right team up on profiteering senator

    [Mar 21, 2020] When reading any article concerning current events (ie. Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, or Coronavirus) consider how the The Seven Principles of Propaganda may apply

    [Mar 21, 2020] Tucker Senator Burr sold shares after virus briefing

    [Mar 21, 2020] Don't forget our congress critter Senator Kelly Loeffler

    [Mar 20, 2020] Such a nice Trojan Horse: How is it possible to morph from a Tulsi, to a Tulsigieg so fast??

    [Mar 17, 2020] DOJ drops charges against Russian trolls after they dared demand evidence in US court -- RT USA News

    [Mar 12, 2020] The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia by Bill Blum

    [Mar 12, 2020] The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia by Bill Blum

    [Mar 05, 2020] Intelligence Officials Sow Discord By Stoking Fear of Russian Election Meddling by Dave DeCamp

    [Mar 04, 2020] Russiagate should be viewed as classic, textbook case of gaslighting and projecting election interference

    [Mar 03, 2020] Russia isn't backing Sanders and Trump as much as hoping for chaos

    [Mar 03, 2020] "Predatory capitalism", which clearly describes what neoliberalism is.

    [Mar 01, 2020] Countering Nationalist Oligarchy by Ganesh Sitaraman

    [Feb 29, 2020] Secret Wars, Forgotten Betrayals, Global Tyranny. Who s Really In Charge Of The US Military by Cynthia Chung

    [Feb 28, 2020] Media s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

    [Feb 26, 2020] A serious US politician has to demonstrate a large capacity for betrayal.

    [Feb 25, 2020] The Economic Anxiety Hypothesis has Become Absurd(er)

    [Feb 24, 2020] Intelligence Sources All Candidates Are Russian Agents But Pete Buttigieg by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Feb 24, 2020] Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse by Van Badham

    [Feb 23, 2020] Welcome to the American Regime

    [Feb 23, 2020] Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler The Last General To Criticize US Imperialism by Danny Sjursen

    [Feb 22, 2020] The Red Thread A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy by Diana West

    [Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

    [Feb 19, 2020] During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d' tat) changed sides and betrayed the working class

    [Feb 19, 2020] On Michael Lind's "The New Class War" by Gregor Baszak

    [Feb 15, 2020] Clearly the establishment has long since caught on to the fact that "the masses" dislike it, hence why they concentrate on the appearance of being anti-establishment

    [Feb 14, 2020] The spooks choice Coup plotters and CIA agents fill Pete Buttigieg s list of national security endorsers by Samuel D. Finkelstein

    [Feb 08, 2020] Is Iraq About To Switch From US to Russia

    [Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

    [Feb 07, 2020] Sanders Called JPMorgan's CEO America's 'Biggest Corporate Socialist' Here's Why He Has a Point

    [Feb 04, 2020] The FBI is the secret police force of the authoritarian (aching to be totalitarian) govt hidden behind "Truth, Justice the American Way"

    [Feb 03, 2020] White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War

    [Feb 02, 2020] The most interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story

    [Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia

    [Jan 24, 2020] How Are Iran and the "Axis of the Resistance" Affected by the US Assassination of Soleimani by Elijah J. Magnier

    [Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie

    [Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment

    [Jan 24, 2020] Lawrence Wilkerson Lambasts 'the Beast of the National Security State' by Adam Dick

    [Jan 23, 2020] An incredible level of naivety of people who still think that a single individual, or even two, can change the direction of murderous US policies that are widely supported throughout the bureaucracy?

    [Jan 21, 2020] WaPo columnist endorses all twelve candidates

    [Jan 20, 2020] Fake Investigations... Designed To Fool by Bryce Buchanan

    [Jan 19, 2020] Not Just Hunter Widespread Biden Family Profiteering Exposed

    [Jan 19, 2020] The frantic attempt to deflect attention from US foreign wars and mainly derisive media coverage of Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project?

    [Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government

    [Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world

    [Jan 12, 2020] MIC along with Wall Street controls the government and the country

    [Jan 09, 2020] It looks like UK and the USA intelligences agencies run the contest to see who can come up with the most surreal anti-Russian propaganda psy-ops

    [Jan 04, 2020] Will Trump welcome the ejection of the US from Iraq - He should by Colonel Lang

    [Dec 28, 2019] Senior OPCW Official Busted Leaked Email Exposes Orders To Delete All Traces Of Dissent On Douma

    [Dec 22, 2019] So US intelligence tipped off the DNC that their emails were about to be leaked to Wikileaks. That's when the stratagem of attributing the impending Wikileaks release to a Russian hack was born -- distracting from the incriminating content of the emails, while vilifying the Deep State's favorite enemies, Assange and Russia, all in one neat scam

    [Dec 20, 2019] Intelligence community has become a self licking ice cream cone

    [Dec 20, 2019] The Tragedy of Donald Trump His Presidency Is Marred with Failure by Doug Bandow

    [Dec 20, 2019] Did John Brennan's CIA Create Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks by Larry C Johnson

    [Dec 20, 2019] NSA Whistleblower: "Mueller Report based on fabricated evidence" Former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says it looked like the CIA did this, and made it look like the Russians were doing the hack to implicate Russians by Eric Zuesse

    [Dec 20, 2019] Letter from President Donald J. Trump to the Speaker of the House of Representatives

    [Dec 20, 2019] The purpose of manufactured hysteria in the US is to obfuscate the issues important to the Deep State like destroying the first amendment, renewing the 'Patriot' act, extremely increasing the war/hegemony budget, etc

    [Dec 19, 2019] MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last refuge of scoundrels

    [Dec 19, 2019] A the core of color revolution against Trump is Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine

    [Dec 19, 2019] Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials, often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and incipient tyranny.

    [Dec 17, 2019] Neocons like car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking credibility because ther profession is to lie in order to sell weapons to the publin, much like used car saleme lie to sell cars

    [Dec 17, 2019] Judge Denies Flynn's Requests For Exculpatory Information, Case Dismissal by Peter Svab

    [Dec 17, 2019] History Doesn t Repeat, But It Often Rhymes: Wilson in UK was subjected to the similar attack by rogue elements in MI5 as Trump in the USA

    [Dec 14, 2019] Full Interview: Barr Criticizes Inspector General Report On The Russia Investigation

    [Dec 12, 2019] The FBI - Pushed By John Brennan - Lied To The Court Seven Times To Spy On The Trump Campaign

    [Dec 10, 2019] The level of Neo-McCarthyism and the number of lunitics this NYT forums is just astonishing: When it comes to Donald Trump and Russia, everything is connected.

    [Dec 07, 2019] Why the foreign policy establishment consensus is neocon by default.

    [Dec 07, 2019] Impeachment does not require a crime.

    [Dec 06, 2019] The USA is an occupied by neocon country

    [Dec 04, 2019] The central question of Ukrainegate is whether CrowdStrike actions on DNC leak were a false flag operation designed to open Russiagate and what was the level of participation of Poroshenko government and Ukrainian Security services in this false flag operation by Factotum

    [Dec 04, 2019] Ukrainegaters claim that Trump Reduced the USA empire 'Global Commitments' was fraudulent from the very beginning. Trump is yet another imperial president who favours the "Full spectrum Dominance; The problem is that the time when the USA can have it are in the past. Europe finally recovered from WWII losses and that alone dooms the idea

    [Dec 04, 2019] Common Funding Themes Link 'Whistleblower' Complaint and CrowdStrike Firm Certifying DNC Russia 'Hack' by Aaron Klein

    [Dec 04, 2019] DNC Russian Hackers Found! You Won't Believe Who They Really Work For by the Anonymous Patriots

    [Dec 04, 2019] June 4th, 2017 Crowdstrike Was at the DNC Six Weeks by George Webb

    [Dec 04, 2019] Cyberanalyst George Eliason Claims that the "Fancy Bear" Who Hacked the DNC Server is Ukrainian Intelligence – In League with the Atlantic Council and Crowdstrike

    [Dec 04, 2019] Fancy Bear - Conservapedia

    [Dec 04, 2019] June 2nd, 2018 Alperovich's DNC Cover Stories Soon To Match With His Hacking Teams by George Webb

    [Dec 04, 2019] Atkinson role in Ukrainegate

    [Nov 30, 2019] CrowdStrike: a Conspiracy Wrapped in a Conspiracy Inside a Conspiracy by Oleg Atbashian

    [Nov 29, 2019] Where s the Collusion

    [Nov 28, 2019] WSJ story reopens the claim Comey had a report there was an email exchange between Loretta Lynch and Clinton claiming Lynch promised her the DOJ would go easy on Clinton.

    [Nov 27, 2019] Obama Admits He Would Speak Up Only To Stop Bernie Sanders Nomination

    [Nov 27, 2019] Could your county use some extra money?

    [Nov 26, 2019] John Solomon Everything Changes In The Ukraine Scandal If Trump Releases These Documents

    [Nov 24, 2019] Chris Hedges on Death of the Liberal Class - YouTube

    [Nov 22, 2019] CROWDSTRIKE's role in the Democrat impeachment smokescreen needs to keep moving forward because, it is not going away.

    [Nov 21, 2019] The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters, the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests

    [Nov 07, 2019] Rigged Again Dems, Russia, The Delegitimization Of America s Democratic Process by Elizabeth Vos

    [Nov 03, 2019] Growing Indicators of Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force by Larry C Johnson - Sic Semper Tyrannis

    [Nov 02, 2019] WATCH Udo Ulfkotte – Bought Journalists by Terje Maloy

    [Nov 01, 2019] Viable Opposition The Legal Connection Between Washington and Kiev

    [Nov 01, 2019] Color revolution is a method of using a minority to render the country ungovernble, waving a simplistic banner against corruption and for (undefined) democracy, which leaves the masses unorganized and eschews even a platform, in favor of a secret coterie run by intelligence againces

    [Oct 28, 2019] Expert Panel Finds Gaping Plot-Holes In OPCW Report On Alleged Syrian Chemical Attack by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Oct 25, 2019] Trump-Haters, Not Trump, Are The Ones Wrecking America s Institutions, WSJ s Strassel Says

    [Oct 24, 2019] Empire Interventionism Versus Republic Noninterventionism by Jacob Hornberger

    [Oct 23, 2019] Neoconservatism Is An Omnicidal Death Cult, And It Must Be Stopped by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Oct 23, 2019] The Pathocracy Of The Deep State Tyranny At The Hands Of A Psychopathic Government

    [Oct 20, 2019] Adam Schiff now the face of the neoliberal Dems for 2020.

    [Oct 19, 2019] Russian agents under every bed

    [Oct 19, 2019] Kunstler One Big Reason Why America Is Driving Itself Bat$hit Crazy

    [Oct 10, 2019] There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect: he is a war criminal, who escaped justice

    [Sep 30, 2019] Stephen Miller calls whistleblower a 'partisan hit job' in fiery interview

    [Sep 26, 2019] Did Nancy Pelosi Just Make One Of The Biggest Political Mistakes In History

    [Sep 23, 2019] Apparently now that the notion Russia interfered in the US presidential election to tip the vote to Trump has become an article of faith that much of the world regards as established fact

    [Sep 22, 2019] More Americans Questioning Official 9-11 Story As New Evidence Contradicts Official Narrative by Whitney Webb

    [Sep 22, 2019] The Snowden Conundrum by Yvonne Lorenzo

    [Sep 17, 2019] The Spy Who Failed by Scott Ritter

    [Sep 17, 2019] The Devolution of US-Russia Relations by Tony Kevin

    [Sep 17, 2019] The reincarnation of the idea of Soviet Nomenklatura on a new level in a different social system

    [Sep 15, 2019] Donald Trump as the DNC s nominee by Michael Hudson

    [Sep 11, 2019] John Brennan's and Jim Clappers' Last Gasp by Larry C Johnson

    [Sep 11, 2019] Video Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 The Bamboozle Has Captured Us

    [Sep 10, 2019] Being called a narcissist by Jim Comey is akin to being accused of having sex with underage girls by the late Jeffrey Epstein by Larry C Johnsons

    [Sep 10, 2019] Neoliberal Capitalism at a Dead End by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik

    [Sep 10, 2019] How Deep Is the Rot in America s Institutions by Charles Hugh Smith

    [Sep 03, 2019] Russiagate as crocodile tears of western propaganda

    [Aug 24, 2019] George Kennan on Russia Insights and Recommendations

    [Aug 23, 2019] Spygate The Inside Story Behind the Alleged Plot to Take Down Trump by Jeff Carlson

    [Aug 21, 2019] Solomon If Trump Declassifies These 10 Documents, Democrats Are Doomed

    [Aug 20, 2019] Trump Promised Massive Infrastructure Projects -- Instead We ve Gotten Nothing>

    [Aug 20, 2019] Propagandists Freak Out Over Gabbard s Destruction of Harris by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Aug 18, 2019] IV- MICHELS: THE IRON LAW OF OLIGARCHY by Dr. Mustafa Delican

    [Aug 17, 2019] Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome (PTDS)

    [Aug 17, 2019] Debunking the Putin Panic by Stephen F. Cohen

    [Aug 16, 2019] Ministry of truth materialized in XXI century in a neoliberal way by Kit Knightly

    [Aug 16, 2019] Lapdogs for the Government and intelligence agencies by Greg Maybury

    [Aug 14, 2019] Charge of anti-Semitism as a sign of a bitter factional struggle in UK Labor Party between neoliberal and alternatives to neoliberalism wings

    [Aug 14, 2019] The Citadels of America s Elites Fractured and At Odds with Each Other by Alastair Crooke

    [Aug 14, 2019] There is little chance that Western elites will behave any differently than a street corner drug dealer

    [Aug 12, 2019] New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has called Epstein's death "way too convenient."

    [Aug 12, 2019] Russiagate is the idea around which varied interests can be organized

    [Aug 11, 2019] One weak spot of the conspiracy theory that Epstein was killed: Why not terminate him overseas before his return? No mess, no fuss

    [Jul 30, 2019] The main task of Democratic Party is preventing social movements from undertaking independent political activity to their left and killing such social movements

    [Jul 29, 2019] Looks like Epstein turned informant for Mueller s FBI in 2008. Likely earlier

    [Jul 29, 2019] American Ron Unz on Pizzagate

    [Jul 29, 2019] The hidden control mechanism of what the late Paul A. Samuelson called our "democratic oligarchy".

    [Jul 29, 2019] The Real Reason The Propagandists Have Been Promoting Russia Hysteria by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Jul 28, 2019] Mueller Crumbles Under Questioning by Barbara Boland

    [Jul 28, 2019] Antisemitism prejudices projection on Russians

    [Jul 27, 2019] Russia interfered on a massive scale ($3,684 was spends on ads on which $1932 on promoting Trump) and is doing it again as we sit here! Just how massive? They spent $100,000 on clickbait ads from a company owned by a man who was in a photo with the evil mastermind!

    [Jul 27, 2019] Understanding the Roots of the Obama Coup Against Trump by Larry C Johnson

    [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker: Democrats believed Mueller would save America. But he is A daft old man blinking in the sunlight once the curtain has been opened

    [Jul 26, 2019] Tucker What should happen to those who lied about Russian collusion

    [Jul 25, 2019] The Epstein Case Is A Rare Opportunity To Focus On The Depraved Nature Of America s Elite

    [Jul 23, 2019] John Helmer MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by Malaysia – FBI Attempt To Seize Black Boxes; Dutch Cover-Up of Forged Telephon

    [Jul 21, 2019] Breaking: Clinton Just Got Devastating News

    [Jul 20, 2019] New US Pentagon Chief Vested Interest in War Conflict

    [Jul 15, 2019] Pete Buttigieg The made-to-order political "outsider" by Tom Hall

    [Jul 14, 2019] MODELS OF POWER STRUCTURE IN THE UNITED STATES Political Issues We Concern

    [Jul 13, 2019] Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by Larry C Johnson

    [Jul 09, 2019] Epstein and the conversion of politicians into "corrupt and vulnerable" brand

    [Jul 09, 2019] Ex-FBI, CIA Officials Draw Withering Fire on Russiagate by Ray McGovern

    [Jul 06, 2019] Mueller Report Gets the Trump Tower Meeting Wrong; Promotes Browder Hoax by Lucy Komisar

    [Jul 05, 2019] Who Won the Debate? Tulsi Gabbard let the anti-war genie out of the bottle by Philip Giraldi

    [Jun 30, 2019] Orwell s 1984 No Longer Reads Like Fiction It s The Reality Of Our Times by Robert Bridge

    [Jun 30, 2019] USG's Bizarre Change of Position in the Roger Stone Case by Larry C Johnson

    [Jun 28, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard vs Bolton

    [Jun 27, 2019] Western News Agencies Mistranslate Iran's President Speech - It Is Not The First Time Such 'Error' Happens

    [Jun 26, 2019] Opinion - NY Times admits it sends stories to US government for approval before publication

    [Jun 23, 2019] How Ayn Rand became the new right's version of Marx by George Monbiot

    [Jun 22, 2019] Use of science by the US politicians: they uses science the way the drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.

    [Jun 19, 2019] Investigation Nation Mueller, Russiagate, and Fake Politics by Jim Kavanagh

    [Jun 19, 2019] Bias bias the inclination to accuse people of bias by James Thompson

    [Jun 14, 2019] Comments on Yasha Levin article: With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite

    [Jun 11, 2019] The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction by John W. Whitehead

    [Jun 11, 2019] A Word From Joe the Angry Hawaiian

    [Jun 05, 2019] Due to the nature of intelligence agencies work and the aura of secrecy control of intelligence agencies in democratic societies is a difficult undertaking as the entity you want to control is in many ways more politically powerful and more ruthless in keeping its privileges then controllers.

    [Jun 05, 2019] Do Spies Run the World by Israel Shamir

    [Jun 04, 2019] Attkisson 10 Questions I d Ask Robert Mueller (If I Were Allowed)

    [Jun 02, 2019] Somer highlights of Snowden spreach at Dalhousie University

    [May 30, 2019] Whatever you may think of Trump, the people who set out to 'get him' are the scum of the Earth

    [May 30, 2019] Everyone here at moa is saying much the same: the CIA is running the usa at this point.. Mueller is ex CIA... So, basically the mueller investigation a cover up and BS for the lemmings... It seems to have worked to a limited degree..

    [May 29, 2019] With Russiagate, we Soviet immigrants were finally forced to reckon with the bigotry of America's elite by Yasha Levine

    [May 28, 2019] Any time you read an article (or a comment) on Russia, substitute the word Jew for Russian and International Jewry for Russia and re-read.

    [May 22, 2019] NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries

    [May 20, 2019] "Us" Versus "Them"

    [May 19, 2019] How Russiagate replaced Analysis of the 2016 Election by Rick Sterling

    [May 19, 2019] Intel agencies of the UK and US are guilty of fabricating evidence, breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing fake analysis and operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity

    [May 16, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard for President - Stephen Lendman

    [May 16, 2019] The Disinformationists by C.J. Hopkins

    [May 15, 2019] Russia-gate s Monstrous Offspring

    [May 15, 2019] Ron Paul on Tulsi Gabbard - YouTube

    [May 14, 2019] The Propaganda Multiplier How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics

    [May 14, 2019] iJews and the Left-i by Philip Mendes A Review, by Brenton Sanderson - The Unz Review

    [May 14, 2019] Despite a $ 22 Trillion National Debt, America Is on a Military Spending Spree. 800 Overseas US Military Bases by Masud Wadan

    [May 13, 2019] Not Just Ukraine; Biden May Have A Serious China Problem As Schweizer Exposes Hunter s $1bn Deal

    [May 13, 2019] US Foreign Policy as Bellicose as Ever by Serge Halimi

    [May 12, 2019] Is rabid warmonger, neocon chickenhawk Bolton a swinger? That is a mental picture that s deeply disturbing yet funny at the same time

    [May 12, 2019] Charting a Progressive Foreign Policy for the Trump Era and Beyond

    [May 11, 2019] Whitney Judgment Day Looms For John Brennan

    [May 11, 2019] Intel and Law Enforcement Tried to Entrap Trump by Larry C Johnson

    [May 11, 2019] Christopher Steele, FBI s Confidential Human Source by Publius Tacitus

    [May 11, 2019] CIA Paid $100,000 To Shadowy Russian For Dirt on Trump, Including Sex Video by Chuck Ross

    [May 10, 2019] Mueller Report - Expensive Estimations And Elusive Evidence by Adam Carter

    [May 10, 2019] Obama administration raced to obtain FICA warrant on Carter Page before Rogers investigation closes on them and that was definitely an obstruction of justice and interference with the ongoing investigation

    [May 10, 2019] What was the meaning of the term "insurance policy" in Stzok messages to Lisa Page

    [May 10, 2019] The Battle Between Rosenstein and McCabe

    [May 08, 2019] Obama Spied on Other Republicans and Democrats As Well by Larry C Johnson

    [May 07, 2019] Look! A whale!

    [May 07, 2019] Chris Hedges: The Demonization of Russia is Driven by Defense Contractors

    [May 05, 2019] Did Mueller substituted Russia for Israel in his report

    [May 03, 2019] Former high-ranking FBI officials on Andrew McCabe's alarming admissions

    [May 03, 2019] Andrew McCabe played the key role in the appointment of the special prosecutor

    [May 02, 2019] Checkmate - How President Trump s Legal Team Outfoxed Mueller by Will Chamberlain

    [Apr 29, 2019] The Mueller Report Indicts the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory by Aaron Maté

    [Apr 28, 2019] The British Role in Russiagate Is About to Be Fully Exposed

    [Apr 28, 2019] Tit For Tat: Why Did Mueller Let Trump Off the Hook by Mike Whitney

    [Apr 28, 2019] Breath of fresh air--real journalism again! Have so much respect for Chris Hedges and Aaron Mate, great work!

    [Apr 28, 2019] On Contact Russiagate Mueller Report w- Aaron Mate

    [Apr 26, 2019] Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America's Real Foreign Agent by Philip Giraldi

    [Apr 26, 2019] Intelligence agencies meddling in elections

    [Apr 22, 2019] FBI top brass have been colluding with top brass of CIA and MI6 to pursue ambitious anti-Russian agenda

    [Apr 22, 2019] Current Neo-McCarthyism hysteria as a smoke screen of the UK and the USA intent to dominate European geopolitics and weaken Russia and Germany

    [Apr 21, 2019] Makes me wonder if this started out as a standard operation by the FBI to gain leverage over a presidential contender

    [Apr 21, 2019] Even if we got a candidate against the War Party the Party of Davos, would it matter? Trump betayal his voters, surrounded himself with neocons, continues to do Bibi's bidding, and ratcheting up tensions in Latin America, Middle East and with Russia. What's changed even with a candidate that the Swamp disliked and attempted to take down?

    [Apr 21, 2019] Muller report implicates Obama administration in total and utter incompetence, if not pandering to the foreign intervention into the USA elections. The latter is called criminal negligence in legal speak.

    [Apr 21, 2019] Psywar: Propaganda during Iraq war and beyond

    [Apr 21, 2019] John Brennan's Police State USA

    [Apr 21, 2019] Deciphering Trumps Foreign Policy by Oscar Silva-Valladares

    [Apr 21, 2019] Special Counsel Mueller -- Disingenuous and Dishonest by Larry C Johnson

    [Apr 21, 2019] Whenever someone inconveniences the neoliberal oligarchy, the entire neoliberal MSM mafia tells us 24 x7 how evil and disgusting that person is. It's true of the leader of every nation which rejects neoliberal globalization as well as for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

    [Apr 20, 2019] Trump has certainly made the world safer

    [Apr 20, 2019] Sure, blame those guys over there for Hillary fiasco and hire Mueller to get the goods . That s the ultimate the dog ate my homework excuse.

    [Apr 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard: People get into a lot of conversations about political strategies I might get in trouble for saying this, but what does it matter if we beat Donald Trump, if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies, corporate policies, and waging more of these costly wars?

    [Apr 17, 2019] Haspel is not the "underling". Trump is the underling. Sure, being that he is also an oligarch makes Trump's role in the show complicated, but Presidents are installed in order to serve the oligarchy, and the CIA are top level strategists/enforcers for the oligarchy.

    [Apr 17, 2019] The media's interest in the well-being of a foreign population is directly proportional to the West's interest in toppling its government, while editorial standards are inversely proportional to its enemy status

    [Apr 17, 2019] Six US Agencies Conspired ...

    [Apr 17, 2019] Deep State and the FBI Federal Blackmail Investigation

    [Apr 17, 2019] Did CIA Director William Casey really say, We ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false

    [Apr 16, 2019] The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and flourishing careers. Now they re angling for war with Iran.

    [Apr 16, 2019] CIA Director Used Fake Skripal Incident Photos To Manipulate Trump

    [Apr 15, 2019] War is the force that gives America its meaning.

    [Apr 15, 2019] Do you need to be stupid to support Trump in 2020, even if you voted for him as lesser evil in 2016

    [Apr 13, 2019] Russophobia, A WMD (Weapon Of Mass Deception) by Jean Ranc

    [Apr 12, 2019] Putin was KGB agent crowd forgets that Bush Sr was long time senior CIA operative and the director of CIA

    [Apr 10, 2019] Habakkuk on cockroaches and the New York Times

    [Apr 10, 2019] A demoralized white working and middle class was willing to believe in anything, deluding themselves into reading between the barren eruptions of his blowzy proclamations. They elevated him to messianic heights, ironically fashioning him into that which he publicly claims to despise: an Obama, a Barry in negative image, hope and change for the OxyContin and Breitbart set

    [Apr 08, 2019] Aaron Maté Was Also Right About Russiagate

    [Apr 07, 2019] Nunes The Russian Collusion Hoax Meets An Unbelievbable End

    [Apr 06, 2019] The Magnitsky Act-Behind the Scenes ASEEES

    [Apr 06, 2019] Trump is for socialism but only when it comes to funding US military industry Tulsi Gabbard

    [Apr 04, 2019] How Brzezinski's Chessboard degenerated into Brennan's Russophobia by Mike Whitney

    [Apr 04, 2019] Was John Brennan The Russia Lie Ringleader

    [Apr 03, 2019] What We Can Learn From 1920s Germany by Brian E. Fogarty

    [Apr 02, 2019] 'Yats' Is No Longer the Guy by Robert Parry

    [Apr 01, 2019] Amazon.com War with Russia From Putin Ukraine to Trump Russiagate (9781510745810) Stephen F. Cohen Books

    [Mar 31, 2019] What is the purpose of Russiagate hysteria?

    [Mar 30, 2019] The Real Costs of Russiagate

    [Mar 30, 2019] You don't like Trump? Bolton? Clinton? All of these people who are in or have passed through leadership positions in America are entirely valid representatives of Americans in general. You may imagine they are faking cluelessness to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their crimes, but the cluelessness is quite real and extends to the entire population.

    [Mar 29, 2019] Trumps billionaire coup détat: Donald Trump is about to break the record of withdrawing his promises faster than any other US president in history

    [Mar 25, 2019] Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism by Jonathan Cook

    [Mar 25, 2019] Spygate The True Story of Collusion (plus Infographic) by Jeff Carlson

    [Mar 25, 2019] Another SIGINT compromise ...

    [Mar 24, 2019] The manner in which Guccifer 2.0's English was broken, did not follow the typical errors one would expect if Guccifer 2.0's first language was Russian.

    [Mar 24, 2019] The accountability that must follow Mueller's report

    [Mar 24, 2019] "Russia Gate" investigation was a color revolution agaist Trump. But a strnge side effect was that Clintons have managed to raise a vicious, loud mouthed thug to the status of some kind of martyr.

    [Mar 24, 2019] With RussiaGate Over Where's Hillary

    [Mar 24, 2019] One could wish that DOJ IG Horowitz could investigate and sanction British Intelligence for its use of official and non-official officials in starting this debacle.

    [Mar 24, 2019] One thing left out is the ability of readers to call BS on a story i.e. a robust comment section for debates.

    [Mar 23, 2019] Brennan pipe dream obliterated. The color revolution against Trump failed

    [Mar 23, 2019] Mueller stopped following the money the moment he realized it was all leading back to Israel.

    [Mar 22, 2019] Glenn Greenwald on Twitter The Mueller investigation is complete and this is a simple fact that will never go away

    [Mar 18, 2019] Journalists who are spies

    [Mar 18, 2019] FULL CNN TOWN HALL WITH TULSI GABBARD 3-10-19

    [Mar 18, 2019] Doublethink and Newspeak Do We Have a Choice by Greg Guma

    [Mar 18, 2019] The Why are the media playing lapdog and not watchdog – again – on war in Iraq?

    [Mar 17, 2019] Mueller uses the same old false flag scams, just different packaging of his forensics-free findings

    [Mar 17, 2019] VIPS- Mueller's Forensics-Free Findings

    [Mar 11, 2019] Bruce Ohr, Liar or Moron by Larry C Johnson

    [Mar 07, 2019] Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you by Dylan Curran

    [Mar 05, 2019] The Shadow Governments Destruction Of Democracy

    [Feb 27, 2019] Their votes mean absolutely nothing, and that the entire American electoral system is just a simulation of democracy

    [Feb 26, 2019] Neoliberalism by Julie Wilson

    [Feb 24, 2019] David Stockman on Peak Trump : Undrainable swamp (which is on Pentagon side of Potomac river) and fantasy of MAGA (which become MIGA -- make Israel great again)

    [Feb 22, 2019] Neo-McCarthyism is used to defend the US imperial policies. Branding dissidents as Russian stooges is a loophole that allow to suppress dissident opinions

    [Feb 19, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard kills New World Order bloodbath in thirty seconds

    [Feb 19, 2019] Warmongers in their ivory towers - YouTube

    [Feb 18, 2019] Do You Believe in the Deep State Now by Robert W. Merry

    [Feb 18, 2019] Joe Rogan Experience #1170 - Tulsi Gabbard

    [Feb 17, 2019] Was Trump was a deep state man from day one, just like Obama, Bush, Clinton and all the rest?

    [Feb 17, 2019] Trump is Russian asset memo is really neocon propaganda overkill

    [Feb 17, 2019] The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives

    [Feb 16, 2019] MSM Begs For Trust After Buzzfeed Debacle by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Feb 16, 2019] Death Of Russiagate: Mueller Team Tied To Mifsud s Network

    [Feb 13, 2019] MoA - Russiagate Is Finished

    [Feb 13, 2019] Making Globalism Great Again by C.J. Hopkins

    [Feb 13, 2019] Stephen Cohen on War with Russia and Soviet-style Censorship in the US by Russell Mokhiber

    [Feb 10, 2019] Pussy John Bolton and His Codpiece Mustache by Fred Reed

    [Feb 08, 2019] To understand Steele and the five eyes involvement in the Russia hoax you need to go to the library

    [Feb 04, 2019] Trump s Revised and Rereleased Foreign Policy: The World Policeman is Back

    [Jan 29, 2019] After hiring Abrams the next logical step for Trump would be hiring Hillary or Wolfowitz

    [Jan 29, 2019] Guardian became Deep State Guardian

    [Jan 26, 2019] Can the current US neoliberal/neoconservative elite be considered suicidal?

    [Jan 21, 2019] Beyond BuzzFeed The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures On The Trump-Russia Story by Glenn Greenwald

    [Jan 19, 2019] According to Wolin, domestic and foreign affairs goals are each important and on parallel tracks

    [Jan 14, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard, A Rare Anti-War Democrat, Will Run For President

    [Jan 13, 2019] As FBI Ramped Up Witch Hunt When Trump Fired Comey, Strzok Admitted Collusion Investigation A Joke

    [Jan 11, 2019] New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics by Mark Ames

    [Jan 11, 2019] How President Trump Normalized Neoconservatism by Ilana Mercer

    [Jan 11, 2019] Facts does not matter in the current propoganda environment, the narrative is everything

    [Jan 08, 2019] Shock Files- What Role Did Integrity Initiative Play in Sergei Skripal Affair- - Sputnik International

    [Jan 08, 2019] Skripal spin doctors- Documents link UK govt-funded Integrity Initiative to anti-Russia narrative

    [Jan 08, 2019] No, wealth isn t created at the top. It is merely devoured there by Rutger Bregman

    [Jan 06, 2019] British elite fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.

    [Jan 02, 2019] Russian bots - How An Anti-Russian Lobby Creates Fake News

    [Jan 02, 2019] The Only Meddling "Russian Bots" Were Actually Democrat-Led "Experts" by Mac Slavo

    [Jan 02, 2019] Did Mueller Patched Together Much of His Indictment from 2015 Radio Free Europe Article ?

    [Jan 02, 2019] That madness of the US neocons comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of groupthink, and manipulating the language. Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies.

    [Dec 30, 2018] RussiaGate In Review with Aaron Mate - Unreasoned Fear is Neoliberalism's Response to the Credibility Gap

    [Dec 29, 2018] -Election Meddling- Enters Bizarro World As MSM Ignores Democrat-Linked -Russian Bot- Scheme -

    [Dec 24, 2018] Jewish neocons and the romance of nationalist armageddon

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

    [Dec 22, 2018] If Truth Cannot Prevail Over Material Agendas We Are Doomed by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Dec 16, 2018] The 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation, Disguised As Charity, To Create The Russian Threat

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

    [Dec 14, 2018] Vetting NYT materials by CIA reflects full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the neoliberal MSM

    [Dec 14, 2018] The dirty propaganda games NYT play

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

    [Dec 09, 2018] Die Weltwoche Weltwoche Online – www.weltwoche.ch Tucker Carlson Trump is not capable Die Weltwoche, Ausgabe 49-2018

    [Dec 08, 2018] Internet as a perfect tool of inverted totalitarism: it stimulates atomizatin of individuals, creates authomatic 24x7 surveillance over population, suppresses solidarity by exceggerating non-essential differences and allow more insidious brainwashing of the population

    [Dec 08, 2018] Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games

    [Dec 07, 2018] Brexit Theresa May Goes Greek! by Brett Redmayne

    [Dec 05, 2018] Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate by Philip Giraldi

    [Dec 05, 2018] Who are the Neocons by Guyenot

    [Dec 02, 2018] Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski Wins 2018 Sam Adams Award by Ray McGovern

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

    [Nov 30, 2018] US Warlords now and at the tome Miill's Poer Elite was published

    [Nov 27, 2018] The political fraud of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal"

    [Nov 27, 2018] 'Highly likely' that Magnitsky was poisoned by toxic chemicals on Bill Browder's orders

    [Nov 27, 2018] US Foreign Policy Has No Policy by Philip Giraldi

    [Nov 24, 2018] MI6 Scrambling To Stop Trump From Releasing Classified Docs In Russia Probe

    [Nov 24, 2018] Anonymous Exposes UK-Led Psyop To Battle Russian Propaganda

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

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

    [Nov 24, 2018] When you are paid a lot of money to come up with plots psyops, you tend to come up with plots for psyops . The word entrapment comes to mind. Probably self-serving also.

    [Nov 23, 2018] Sitting on corruption hill

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Jewish Political Power

    [Nov 22, 2018] Facing Up to the Gradual Demise of Zionist Political Power

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Democratic Party long ago earned the designation graveyard of social protest movements, and for good reason

    [Nov 12, 2018] The Best Way To Honor War Veterans Is To Stop Creating Them by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Nov 12, 2018] Obama s CIA Secretly Intercepted Congressional Communications About Whistleblowers

    [Nov 12, 2018] Protecting Americans from foreign influence, smells with COINTELPRO. Structural witch-hunt effect like during the McCarthy era is designed to supress decent to neoliberal oligarcy by Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

    [Nov 09, 2018] Globalism Vs Nationalism in Trump's America by Joe Quinn

    [Nov 07, 2018] America's Vote of No Confidence in Trump by Daniel Larison

    [Nov 05, 2018] Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in "Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power" warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner's sadistic leer

    [Oct 20, 2018] Cloak and Dagger by Israel Shamir

    [Oct 16, 2018] Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Goes Neocon

    [Oct 10, 2018] A Decalogue of American Empire-Building A Dialogue by James Petras

    [Oct 08, 2018] Hacking and Propaganda by Marcus Ranum

    [Oct 04, 2018] Brett Kavanaugh's 'revenge' theory spotlights past with Clintons by Lisa Mascaro

    [Oct 02, 2018] Recovered memory is a Freudian voodoo. Notice how carefully manicured these charges are such that they can never be falsified? This is the actual proof she is a liar and this whole thing is staged

    [Oct 02, 2018] I m puzzled why CIA is so against Kavanaugh?

    [Sep 29, 2018] The Schizophrenic Deep State is a Symptom, Not the Disease by Charles Hugh Smith

    [Sep 29, 2018] Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy by Dan Sanchez

    [Sep 27, 2018] Hiding in Plain Sight Why We Cannot See the System Destroying Us

    [Sep 27, 2018] The power elites goal is to change its appearance to look like something new and innovative to stay ahead of an electorate who are increasingly skeptical of the neoliberalism and globalism that enrich the elite at their expense.

    [Sep 24, 2018] Given Trumps kneeling to the British Skripal poisoning 'hate russia' hoax I suspect there is no chance he will go after Christopher Steele or any of the senior demoncrat conspirers no matter how much he would love to sucker punch Theresa May and her nasty colleagues.

    [Sep 21, 2018] One party state: Trump's 'Opposition' Supports All His Evil Agendas While Attacking Fake Nonsence by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Sep 16, 2018] Looks like the key players in Steele dossier were CIA assets

    [Sep 16, 2018] Perils of Ineptitude by Andrew Levin

    [Sep 16, 2018] I m delighted we can see the true face of American exceptionalism on display everyday. The last thing I want to see is back to normal.

    [Sep 07, 2018] New York Times Undermining Peace Efforts by Sowing Suspicion by Diana Johnstone

    [Sep 03, 2018] www.informationclearinghouse.info/50168.htm In Memoriam by Paul Edwards

    [Sep 02, 2018] Open letter to President Trump concerning the consequences of 11 September 2001 by Thierry Meyssan

    [Aug 28, 2018] A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes

    [Aug 24, 2018] The priorities of the deep state and its public face the MSM

    [Aug 22, 2018] The CIA Owns the US and European Media by Paul Craig Roberts

    [Aug 22, 2018] Facebook Kills "Inauthentic" Foreign News Accounts - US Propaganda Stays Alive

    [Aug 18, 2018] Corporate Media the Enemy of the People by Paul Street

    [Aug 18, 2018] MoA - John Brennan Is No Match For Trump

    [Aug 18, 2018] Sanders behaviour during election is suspect, unless you assume he acted as sheep dog for hillary

    [Aug 14, 2018] I think one of Mueller s deeply embedded character flaw is that once he decides on burying someone he becomes possessed

    [Aug 14, 2018] US Intelligence Community is Tearing the Country Apart from the Inside by Dmitry Orlov

    [Aug 13, 2018] Imperialism Is Alive and Kicking A Marxist Analysis of Neoliberal Capitalism by C.J. Polychroniou

    [Aug 11, 2018] President Trump the most important achivement

    [Aug 08, 2018] Ten Bombshell Revelations From Seymour Hersh's New Autobiography

    [Aug 05, 2018] Cooper was equally as unhinged as Boot: Neoliberal MSM is a real 1984 remake.

    [Aug 05, 2018] How identity politics makes the Left lose its collective identity by Tomasz Pierscionek

    [Jul 31, 2018] Is not the Awan affair a grave insult to the US "Intelligence Community?

    [Jul 28, 2018] American Society Would Collapse If It Were not For These 8 Myths by Lee Camp

    [Jul 23, 2018] The Prophecy of Orwell's 1984. Totalitarian Control and the Entertainment Culture that Takes Over by Edward Curtin

    [Jul 23, 2018] Chickens with Their Heads Cut Off, Coming Home to Roost. The "Treason Narrative" by Helen Buyniski

    [Jul 22, 2018] Tucker Carlson SLAMS Intelligence Community On Russia

    [Jul 20, 2018] Doubting The Intelligence Of The Intelligence Community by Ilana Mercer

    [Jul 15, 2018] What Mueller won t find by Bob In Portland

    [Jul 13, 2018] False flag operation covering DNC leaks now involves Mueller and his team

    [Jun 09, 2018] Spooks Spooking Themselves by Daniel Lazare

    [Jun 09, 2018] Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack by Ray McGovern

    [Jun 06, 2018] Neoliberal language allows to cut wages by packaging neoliberal oligarchy preferences as national interests

    [May 24, 2018] Most probably Veselnitskaya was a false flag operation to entrap Trump campaign played by British intelligence

    [May 04, 2018] Media Use Disinformation To Accuse Russia Of Spreading Such by b

    [Apr 24, 2018] The Democratic Party has embraced the agenda of the military-intelligence apparatus and sought to become its main political voice

    [Mar 23, 2018] Skripal Poisoning a Desperate British Attempt To Resurrect Their American Coup by Barbara Boyd

    [Mar 13, 2018] The CIA takeover of the Democratic Party by Patrick Martin

    [Mar 10, 2018] Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko s death.

    [Mar 10, 2018] There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this

    [Mar 08, 2018] Given the CrowdStrike itself is a massively compromised organization due to its founder and CEO, those "certified true images" are themselves tainted evidence

    [Mar 08, 2018] Mueller determines the US foreign policy toward Russia; The Intel Community Lies About Russian Meddling by Publius Tacitus

    [Feb 12, 2018] I am wondering why it is that much of a stretch to believe that the CIA might have engineered the whole thing

    [Jan 22, 2018] The Justice Department and FBI set up the meeting at Trump Tower between Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner with controversial Russian officials to make Trump's associates appear compromised

    [Dec 31, 2017] How America Spreads Global Chaos by Nicolas J.S. Davies

    [Dec 31, 2017] What Happens When A Russiagate Skeptic Debates A Professional Russiagater

    [Dec 28, 2017] How CrowdStrike placed malware in DNC hacked servers by Alex Christoforou

    [Sep 17, 2017] The So-called Russian Hack of the DNC Does Not Make Sense by Publius Tacitus

    [Sep 16, 2017] Virginia Scraps Electronic Voting Machines Hackers Destroyed At DefCon

    [Aug 30, 2017] The President of Belgian Magistrates - Neoliberalism is a form of Fascism by Manuela Cadelli

    [Jul 17, 2017] Tucker Carlson Goes to War Against the Neocons by Curt Mills

    [Jul 12, 2017] Stephen Cohens Remarks on Tucker Carlson Last Night Were Extraordinary

    [Jun 24, 2017] The Criminal Laws of Counterinsurgency by Todd E. Pierce

    [May 23, 2017] CIA, the cornerstone of the deep state has agenda that is different from the US national interest and reflect agenda of the special interest groups such as Wall Street bankers and MIC

    [Feb 19, 2017] The deep state is running scared!

    [Dec 10, 2016] Why the US elite loves so much to demonise Russia

    [Feb 28, 2020] Media s Deafening Silence On Latest WikiLeaks Drops Is Its Own Scandal by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Feb 28, 2020] Chas Freeman America in Distress The Challenges of Disadvantageous Change

    [Feb 25, 2020] The Economic Anxiety Hypothesis has Become Absurd(er)

    [Feb 24, 2020] Intelligence Sources All Candidates Are Russian Agents But Pete Buttigieg by Caitlin Johnstone

    [Feb 24, 2020] Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse by Van Badham

    [Feb 23, 2020] Welcome to the American Regime

    [Feb 23, 2020] Where Have You Gone, Smedley Butler The Last General To Criticize US Imperialism by Danny Sjursen

    [Feb 22, 2020] The Red Thread A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy by Diana West

    [Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

    [Feb 19, 2020] During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a "neoliberal revolution from above" was staged in the USA by "managerial elite" which like Soviet nomenklatura (which also staged a neoliberal coup d' tat) changed sides and betrayed the working class

    [Feb 19, 2020] On Michael Lind's "The New Class War" by Gregor Baszak

    [Feb 15, 2020] Clearly the establishment has long since caught on to the fact that "the masses" dislike it, hence why they concentrate on the appearance of being anti-establishment

    [Feb 14, 2020] The spooks choice Coup plotters and CIA agents fill Pete Buttigieg s list of national security endorsers by Samuel D. Finkelstein

    [Feb 08, 2020] Is Iraq About To Switch From US to Russia

    [Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

    [Feb 07, 2020] Sanders Called JPMorgan's CEO America's 'Biggest Corporate Socialist' Here's Why He Has a Point

    [Feb 04, 2020] The FBI is the secret police force of the authoritarian (aching to be totalitarian) govt hidden behind "Truth, Justice the American Way"

    [Feb 03, 2020] White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War

    [Feb 02, 2020] The most interesting issue is the role of NSC in this impeachment story

    [Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia

    [Jan 24, 2020] How Are Iran and the "Axis of the Resistance" Affected by the US Assassination of Soleimani by Elijah J. Magnier

    [Jan 24, 2020] Peter Hitchen to Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat: You're not in the ladies' lingerie trade now, sweetie

    [Jan 24, 2020] Crimes of the century truth, perception and punishment

    [Jan 24, 2020] Lawrence Wilkerson Lambasts 'the Beast of the National Security State' by Adam Dick

    [Jan 23, 2020] An incredible level of naivety of people who still think that a single individual, or even two, can change the direction of murderous US policies that are widely supported throughout the bureaucracy?

    [Jan 20, 2020] Fake Investigations... Designed To Fool by Bryce Buchanan

    [Jan 19, 2020] Not Just Hunter Widespread Biden Family Profiteering Exposed

    [Jan 19, 2020] The frantic attempt to deflect attention from US foreign wars and mainly derisive media coverage of Tulsi Gabbard is a case in point. Is she the harbinger of a growing political movement aiming to dismantle the military empire project?

    [Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world

    [Jan 12, 2020] MIC along with Wall Street controls the government and the country

    [Jan 09, 2020] It looks like UK and the USA intelligences agencies run the contest to see who can come up with the most surreal anti-Russian propaganda psy-ops

    [Jan 04, 2020] Will Trump welcome the ejection of the US from Iraq - He should by Colonel Lang

    Sites

    Etc

    Society

    Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

    Quotes

    War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

    Bulletin:

    Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

    History:

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    Classic books:

    The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

    Most popular humor pages:

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